ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND
Lewis Carroll
THE MILLENNIUM FULCRUM EDITION .
CHAPTER I
Down the RabbitHole
Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister
on the bank, and of having nothing to do once or twice she had
peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no
pictures or conversations in it, "and what is the use of a book,'
thought Alice "without pictures or conversation?'
So she was considering in her own mind as well as she could,
for the hot day made her feel very sleepy and stupid, whether
the pleasure of making a daisychain would be worth the trouble
of getting up and picking the daisies, when suddenly a White
Rabbit with pink eyes ran close by her.
There was nothing so VERY remarkable in that nor did Alice
think it so VERY much out of the way to hear the Rabbit say to
itself, "Oh dear Oh dear I shall be late' when she thought
it over afterwards, it occurred to her that she ought to have
wondered at this, but at the time it all seemed quite natural
but when the Rabbit actually TOOK A WATCH OUT OF ITS WAISTCOAT
POCKET, and looked at it, and then hurried on, Alice started to
her feet, for it flashed across her mind that she had never
before seen a rabbit with either a waistcoatpocket, or a watch to
take out of it, and burning with curiosity, she ran across the
field after it, and fortunately was just in time to see it pop
down a large rabbithole under the hedge.
In another moment down went Alice after it, never once
considering how in the world she was to get out again.
The rabbithole went straight on like a tunnel for some way,
and then dipped suddenly down, so suddenly that Alice had not a
moment to think about stopping herself before she found herself
falling down a very deep well.
Either the well was very deep, or she fell very slowly, for she
had plenty of time as she went down to look about her and to
wonder what was going to happen next. First, she tried to look
down and make out what she was coming to, but it was too dark to
see anything then she looked at the sides of the well, and
noticed that they were filled with cupboards and bookshelves
here and there she saw maps and pictures hung upon pegs. She
took down a jar from one of the shelves as she passed it was
labelled "ORANGE MARMALADE', but to her great disappointment it
was empty she did not like to drop the jar for fear of killing
somebody, so managed to put it into one of the cupboards as she
fell past it.
"Well' thought Alice to herself, "after such a fall as this, I
shall think nothing of tumbling down stairs How brave they'll
all think me at home Why, I wouldn't say anything about it,
even if I fell off the top of the house' Which was very likely
true.
Down, down, down. Would the fall NEVER come to an end "I
wonder how many miles I've fallen by this time?' she said aloud.
"I must be getting somewhere near the centre of the earth. Let
me see that would be four thousand miles down, I think' for,
you see, Alice had learnt several things of this sort in her
lessons in the schoolroom, and though this was not a VERY good
opportunity for showing off her knowledge, as there was no one to
listen to her, still it was good practice to say it over "yes,
that's about the right distancebut then I wonder what Latitude
or Longitude I've got to?' Alice had no idea what Latitude was,
or Longitude either, but thought they were nice grand words to
say.
Presently she began again. "I wonder if I shall fall right
THROUGH the earth How funny it'll seem to come out among the
people that walk with their heads downward The Antipathies, I
think' she was rather glad there WAS no one listening, this
time, as it didn't sound at all the right word "but I shall
have to ask them what the name of the country is, you know.
Please, Ma'am, is this New Zealand or Australia?' and she tried
to curtsey as she spokefancy CURTSEYING as you're falling
through the air Do you think you could manage it? "And what
an ignorant little girl she'll think me for asking No, it'll
never do to ask perhaps I shall see it written up somewhere.'
Down, down, down. There was nothing else to do, so Alice soon
began talking again. "Dinah'll miss me very much tonight, I
should think' Dinah was the cat. "I hope they'll remember
her saucer of milk at teatime. Dinah my dear I wish you were
down here with me There are no mice in the air, I'm afraid, but
you might catch a bat, and that's very like a mouse, you know.
But do cats eat bats, I wonder?' And here Alice began to get
rather sleepy, and went on saying to herself, in a dreamy sort of
way, "Do cats eat bats? Do cats eat bats?' and sometimes, "Do
bats eat cats?' for, you see, as she couldn't answer either
question, it didn't much matter which way she put it. She felt
that she was dozing off, and had just begun to dream that she
was walking hand in hand with Dinah, and saying to her very
earnestly, "Now, Dinah, tell me the truth did you ever eat a
bat?' when suddenly, thump thump down she came upon a heap of
sticks and dry leaves, and the fall was over.
Alice was not a bit hurt, and she jumped up on to her feet in a
moment she looked up, but it was all dark overhead before her
was another long passage, and the White Rabbit was still in
sight, hurrying down it. There was not a moment to be lost
away went Alice like the wind, and was just in time to hear it
say, as it turned a corner, "Oh my ears and whiskers, how late
it's getting' She was close behind it when she turned the
corner, but the Rabbit was no longer to be seen she found
herself in a long, low hall, which was lit up by a row of lamps
hanging from the roof.
There were doors all round the hall, but they were all locked
and when Alice had been all the way down one side and up the
other, trying every door, she walked sadly down the middle,
wondering how she was ever to get out again.
Suddenly she came upon a little threelegged table, all made of
solid glass there was nothing on it except a tiny golden key,
and Alice's first thought was that it might belong to one of the
doors of the hall but, alas either the locks were too large, or
the key was too small, but at any rate it would not open any of
them. However, on the second time round, she came upon a low
curtain she had not noticed before, and behind it was a little
door about fifteen inches high she tried the little golden key
in the lock, and to her great delight it fitted
Alice opened the door and found that it led into a small
passage, not much larger than a rathole she knelt down and
looked along the passage into the loveliest garden you ever saw.
How she longed to get out of that dark hall, and wander about
among those beds of bright flowers and those cool fountains, but
she could not even get her head though the doorway "and even if
my head would go through,' thought poor Alice, "it would be of
very little use without my shoulders. Oh, how I wish
I could shut up like a telescope I think I could, if I only
know how to begin.' For, you see, so many outoftheway things
had happened lately, that Alice had begun to think that very few
things indeed were really impossible.
There seemed to be no use in waiting by the little door, so she
went back to the table, half hoping she might find another key on
it, or at any rate a book of rules for shutting people up like
telescopes this time she found a little bottle on it, "which
certainly was not here before,' said Alice, and round the neck
of the bottle was a paper label, with the words "DRINK ME'
beautifully printed on it in large letters.
It was all very well to say "Drink me,' but the wise little
Alice was not going to do THAT in a hurry. "No, I'll look
first,' she said, "and see whether it's marked "poison" or not'
for she had read several nice little histories about children who
had got burnt, and eaten up by wild beasts and other unpleasant
things, all because they WOULD not remember the simple rules
their friends had taught them such as, that a redhot poker
will burn you if you hold it too long and that if you cut your
finger VERY deeply with a knife, it usually bleeds and she had
never forgotten that, if you drink much from a bottle marked
"poison,' it is almost certain to disagree with you, sooner or
later.
However, this bottle was NOT marked "poison,' so Alice ventured
to taste it, and finding it very nice, it had, in fact, a sort
of mixed flavour of cherrytart, custard, pineapple, roast
turkey, toffee, and hot buttered toast, she very soon finished
it off.
"What a curious feeling' said Alice "I must be shutting up
like a telescope.'
And so it was indeed she was now only ten inches high, and
her face brightened up at the thought that she was now the right
size for going through the little door into that lovely garden.
First, however, she waited for a few minutes to see if she was
going to shrink any further she felt a little nervous about
this "for it might end, you know,' said Alice to herself, "in my
going out altogether, like a candle. I wonder what I should be
like then?' And she tried to fancy what the flame of a candle is
like after the candle is blown out, for she could not remember
ever having seen such a thing.
After a while, finding that nothing more happened, she decided
on going into the garden at once but, alas for poor Alice
when she got to the door, she found she had forgotten the
little golden key, and when she went back to the table for it,
she found she could not possibly reach it she could see it
quite plainly through the glass, and she tried her best to climb
up one of the legs of the table, but it was too slippery
and when she had tired herself out with trying,
the poor little thing sat down and cried.
"Come, there's no use in crying like that' said Alice to
herself, rather sharply "I advise you to leave off this minute'
She generally gave herself very good advice, though she very
seldom followed it, and sometimes she scolded herself so
severely as to bring tears into her eyes and once she remembered
trying to box her own ears for having cheated herself in a game
of croquet she was playing against herself, for this curious
child was very fond of pretending to be two people. "But it's no
use now,' thought poor Alice, "to pretend to be two people Why,
there's hardly enough of me left to make ONE respectable
person'
Soon her eye fell on a little glass box that was lying under
the table she opened it, and found in it a very small cake, on
which the words "EAT ME' were beautifully marked in currants.
"Well, I'll eat it,' said Alice, "and if it makes me grow larger,
I can reach the key and if it makes me grow smaller, I can creep
under the door so either way I'll get into the garden, and I
don't care which happens'
She ate a little bit, and said anxiously to herself, "Which
way? Which way?', holding her hand on the top of her head to
feel which way it was growing, and she was quite surprised to
find that she remained the same size to be sure, this generally
happens when one eats cake, but Alice had got so much into the
way of expecting nothing but outoftheway things to happen,
that it seemed quite dull and stupid for life to go on in the
common way.
So she set to work, and very soon finished off the cake.
CHAPTER II
The Pool of Tears
"Curiouser and curiouser' cried Alice she was so much
surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good
English "now I'm opening out like the largest telescope that
ever was Goodbye, feet' for when she looked down at her
feet, they seemed to be almost out of sight, they were getting so
far off. "Oh, my poor little feet, I wonder who will put on
your shoes and stockings for you now, dears? I'm sure I shan't
be able I shall be a great deal too far off to trouble myself
about you you must manage the best way you can but I must be
kind to them,' thought Alice, "or perhaps they won't walk the
way I want to go Let me see I'll give them a new pair of
boots every Christmas.'
And she went on planning to herself how she would manage it.
"They must go by the carrier,' she thought "and how funny it'll
seem, sending presents to one's own feet And how odd the
directions will look
ALICE'S RIGHT FOOT, ESQ.
HEARTHRUG,
NEAR THE FENDER,
WITH ALICE'S LOVE.
Oh dear, what nonsense I'm talking'
Just then her head struck against the roof of the hall in
fact she was now more than nine feet high, and she at once took
up the little golden key and hurried off to the garden door.
Poor Alice It was as much as she could do, lying down on one
side, to look through into the garden with one eye but to get
through was more hopeless than ever she sat down and began to
cry again.
"You ought to be ashamed of yourself,' said Alice, "a great
girl like you,' she might well say this, "to go on crying in
this way Stop this moment, I tell you' But she went on all
the same, shedding gallons of tears, until there was a large pool
all round her, about four inches deep and reaching half down the
hall.
After a time she heard a little pattering of feet in the
distance, and she hastily dried her eyes to see what was coming.
It was the White Rabbit returning, splendidly dressed, with a
pair of white kid gloves in one hand and a large fan in the
other he came trotting along in a great hurry, muttering to
himself as he came, "Oh the Duchess, the Duchess Oh won't she
be savage if I've kept her waiting' Alice felt so desperate
that she was ready to ask help of any one so, when the Rabbit
came near her, she began, in a low, timid voice, "If you please,
sir' The Rabbit started violently, dropped the white kid
gloves and the fan, and skurried away into the darkness as hard
as he could go.
Alice took up the fan and gloves, and, as the hall was very
hot, she kept fanning herself all the time she went on talking
"Dear, dear How queer everything is today And yesterday
things went on just as usual. I wonder if I've been changed in
the night? Let me think was I the same when I got up this
morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little
different. But if I'm not the same, the next question is, Who in
the world am I? Ah, THAT'S the great puzzle' And she began
thinking over all the children she knew that were of the same age
as herself, to see if she could have been changed for any of
them.
"I'm sure I'm not Ada,' she said, "for her hair goes in such
long ringlets, and mine doesn't go in ringlets at all and I'm
sure I can't be Mabel, for I know all sorts of things, and she,
oh she knows such a very little Besides, SHE'S she, and I'm I,
andoh dear, how puzzling it all is I'll try if I know all the
things I used to know. Let me see four times five is twelve,
and four times six is thirteen, and four times seven isoh dear
I shall never get to twenty at that rate However, the
Multiplication Table doesn't signify let's try Geography.
London is the capital of Paris, and Paris is the capital of Rome,
and Romeno, THAT'S all wrong, I'm certain I must have been
changed for Mabel I'll try and say "How doth the little"'
and she crossed her hands on her lap as if she were saying lessons,
and began to repeat it, but her voice sounded hoarse and
strange, and the words did not come the same as they used to do
"How doth the little crocodile
Improve his shining tail,
And pour the waters of the Nile
On every golden scale
"How cheerfully he seems to grin,
How neatly spread his claws,
And welcome little fishes in
With gently smiling jaws'
"I'm sure those are not the right words,' said poor Alice, and
her eyes filled with tears again as she went on, "I must be Mabel
after all, and I shall have to go and live in that poky little
house, and have next to no toys to play with, and oh ever so
many lessons to learn No, I've made up my mind about it if I'm
Mabel, I'll stay down here It'll be no use their putting their
heads down and saying "Come up again, dear" I shall only look
up and say "Who am I then? Tell me that first, and then, if I
like being that person, I'll come up if not, I'll stay down
here till I'm somebody else"but, oh dear' cried Alice, with a
sudden burst of tears, "I do wish they WOULD put their heads
down I am so VERY tired of being all alone here'
As she said this she looked down at her hands, and was
surprised to see that she had put on one of the Rabbit's little
white kid gloves while she was talking. "How CAN I have done
that?' she thought. "I must be growing small again.' She got up
and went to the table to measure herself by it, and found that,
as nearly as she could guess, she was now about two feet high,
and was going on shrinking rapidly she soon found out that the
cause of this was the fan she was holding, and she dropped it
hastily, just in time to avoid shrinking away altogether.
"That WAS a narrow escape' said Alice, a good deal frightened at
the sudden change, but very glad to find herself still in
existence "and now for the garden' and she ran with all speed
back to the little door but, alas the little door was shut
again, and the little golden key was lying on the glass table as
before, "and things are worse than ever,' thought the poor child,
"for I never was so small as this before, never And I declare
it's too bad, that it is'
As she said these words her foot slipped, and in another
moment, splash she was up to her chin in salt water. Her first
idea was that she had somehow fallen into the sea, "and in that
case I can go back by railway,' she said to herself. Alice had
been to the seaside once in her life, and had come to the general
conclusion, that wherever you go to on the English coast you find
a number of bathing machines in the sea, some children digging in
the sand with wooden spades, then a row of lodging houses, and
behind them a railway station. However, she soon made out that
she was in the pool of tears which she had wept when she was nine
feet high.
"I wish I hadn't cried so much' said Alice, as she swam about,
trying to find her way out. "I shall be punished for it now, I
suppose, by being drowned in my own tears That WILL be a queer
thing, to be sure However, everything is queer today.'
Just then she heard something splashing about in the pool a
little way off, and she swam nearer to make out what it was at
first she thought it must be a walrus or hippopotamus, but then
she remembered how small she was now, and she soon made out that
it was only a mouse that had slipped in like herself.
"Would it be of any use, now,' thought Alice, "to speak to this
mouse? Everything is so outoftheway down here, that I should
think very likely it can talk at any rate, there's no harm in
trying.' So she began "O Mouse, do you know the way out of
this pool? I am very tired of swimming about here, O Mouse'
Alice thought this must be the right way of speaking to a mouse
she had never done such a thing before, but she remembered having
seen in her brother's Latin Grammar, "A mouseof a mouseto a
mousea mouseO mouse' The Mouse looked at her rather
inquisitively, and seemed to her to wink with one of its little
eyes, but it said nothing.
"Perhaps it doesn't understand English,' thought Alice "I
daresay it's a French mouse, come over with William the
Conqueror.' For, with all her knowledge of history, Alice had
no very clear notion how long ago anything had happened. So she
began again "Ou est ma chatte?' which was the first sentence in
her French lessonbook. The Mouse gave a sudden leap out of the
water, and seemed to quiver all over with fright. "Oh, I beg
your pardon' cried Alice hastily, afraid that she had hurt the
poor animal's feelings. "I quite forgot you didn't like cats.'
"Not like cats' cried the Mouse, in a shrill, passionate
voice. "Would YOU like cats if you were me?'
"Well, perhaps not,' said Alice in a soothing tone "don't be
angry about it. And yet I wish I could show you our cat Dinah
I think you'd take a fancy to cats if you could only see her.
She is such a dear quiet thing,' Alice went on, half to herself,
as she swam lazily about in the pool, "and she sits purring so
nicely by the fire, licking her paws and washing her faceand
she is such a nice soft thing to nurseand she's such a capital
one for catching miceoh, I beg your pardon' cried Alice again,
for this time the Mouse was bristling all over, and she felt
certain it must be really offended. "We won't talk about her any
more if you'd rather not.'
"We indeed' cried the Mouse, who was trembling down to the end
of his tail. "As if I would talk on such a subject Our family
always HATED cats nasty, low, vulgar things Don't let me hear
the name again'
"I won't indeed' said Alice, in a great hurry to change the
subject of conversation. "Are youare you fondofof dogs?'
The Mouse did not answer, so Alice went on eagerly "There is
such a nice little dog near our house I should like to show you
A little brighteyed terrier, you know, with oh, such long curly
brown hair And it'll fetch things when you throw them, and
it'll sit up and beg for its dinner, and all sorts of thingsI
can't remember half of themand it belongs to a farmer, you
know, and he says it's so useful, it's worth a hundred pounds
He says it kills all the rats andoh dear' cried Alice in a
sorrowful tone, "I'm afraid I've offended it again' For the
Mouse was swimming away from her as hard as it could go, and
making quite a commotion in the pool as it went.
So she called softly after it, "Mouse dear Do come back
again, and we won't talk about cats or dogs either, if you don't
like them' When the Mouse heard this, it turned round and swam
slowly back to her its face was quite pale with passion, Alice
thought, and it said in a low trembling voice, "Let us get to
the shore, and then I'll tell you my history, and you'll
understand why it is I hate cats and dogs.'
It was high time to go, for the pool was getting quite crowded
with the birds and animals that had fallen into it there were a
Duck and a Dodo, a Lory and an Eaglet, and several other curious
creatures. Alice led the way, and the whole party swam to the
shore.
CHAPTER III
A CaucusRace and a Long Tale
They were indeed a queerlooking party that assembled on the
bankthe birds with draggled feathers, the animals with their
fur clinging close to them, and all dripping wet, cross, and
uncomfortable.
The first question of course was, how to get dry again they
had a consultation about this, and after a few minutes it seemed
quite natural to Alice to find herself talking familiarly with
them, as if she had known them all her life. Indeed, she had
quite a long argument with the Lory, who at last turned sulky,
and would only say, "I am older than you, and must know better'
and this Alice would not allow without knowing how old it was,
and, as the Lory positively refused to tell its age, there was no
more to be said.
At last the Mouse, who seemed to be a person of authority among
them, called out, "Sit down, all of you, and listen to me I'LL
soon make you dry enough' They all sat down at once, in a large
ring, with the Mouse in the middle. Alice kept her eyes
anxiously fixed on it, for she felt sure she would catch a bad
cold if she did not get dry very soon.
"Ahem' said the Mouse with an important air, "are you all ready?
This is the driest thing I know. Silence all round, if you please
"William the Conqueror, whose cause was favoured by the pope, was
soon submitted to by the English, who wanted leaders, and had been
of late much accustomed to usurpation and conquest. Edwin and
Morcar, the earls of Mercia and Northumbria"'
"Ugh' said the Lory, with a shiver.
"I beg your pardon' said the Mouse, frowning, but very
politely "Did you speak?'
"Not I' said the Lory hastily.
"I thought you did,' said the Mouse. "I proceed. "Edwin and
Morcar, the earls of Mercia and Northumbria, declared for him
and even Stigand, the patriotic archbishop of Canterbury, found
it advisable"'
"Found WHAT?' said the Duck.
"Found IT,' the Mouse replied rather crossly "of course you
know what "it" means.'
"I know what "it" means well enough, when I find a thing,' said
the Duck "it's generally a frog or a worm. The question is,
what did the archbishop find?'
The Mouse did not notice this question, but hurriedly went on,
""found it advisable to go with Edgar Atheling to meet William
and offer him the crown. William's conduct at first was
moderate. But the insolence of his Normans" How are you
getting on now, my dear?' it continued, turning to Alice as it
spoke.
"As wet as ever,' said Alice in a melancholy tone "it doesn't
seem to dry me at all.'
"In that case,' said the Dodo solemnly, rising to its feet, "I
move that the meeting adjourn, for the immediate adoption of more
energetic remedies'
"Speak English' said the Eaglet. "I don't know the meaning of
half those long words, and, what's more, I don't believe you do
either' And the Eaglet bent down its head to hide a smile
some of the other birds tittered audibly.
"What I was going to say,' said the Dodo in an offended tone,
"was, that the best thing to get us dry would be a Caucusrace.'
"What IS a Caucusrace?' said Alice not that she wanted much
to know, but the Dodo had paused as if it thought that SOMEBODY
ought to speak, and no one else seemed inclined to say anything.
"Why,' said the Dodo, "the best way to explain it is to do it.'
And, as you might like to try the thing yourself, some winter
day, I will tell you how the Dodo managed it.
First it marked out a racecourse, in a sort of circle, "the
exact shape doesn't matter,' it said, and then all the party
were placed along the course, here and there. There was no "One,
two, three, and away,' but they began running when they liked,
and left off when they liked, so that it was not easy to know
when the race was over. However, when they had been running half
an hour or so, and were quite dry again, the Dodo suddenly called
out "The race is over' and they all crowded round it, panting,
and asking, "But who has won?'
This question the Dodo could not answer without a great deal of
thought, and it sat for a long time with one finger pressed upon
its forehead the position in which you usually see Shakespeare,
in the pictures of him, while the rest waited in silence. At
last the Dodo said, "EVERYBODY has won, and all must have
prizes.'
"But who is to give the prizes?' quite a chorus of voices
asked.
"Why, SHE, of course,' said the Dodo, pointing to Alice with
one finger and the whole party at once crowded round her,
calling out in a confused way, "Prizes Prizes'
Alice had no idea what to do, and in despair she put her hand
in her pocket, and pulled out a box of comfits, luckily the salt
water had not got into it, and handed them round as prizes.
There was exactly one apiece all round.
"But she must have a prize herself, you know,' said the Mouse.
"Of course,' the Dodo replied very gravely. "What else have
you got in your pocket?' he went on, turning to Alice.
"Only a thimble,' said Alice sadly.
"Hand it over here,' said the Dodo.
Then they all crowded round her once more, while the Dodo
solemnly presented the thimble, saying "We beg your acceptance of
this elegant thimble' and, when it had finished this short
speech, they all cheered.
Alice thought the whole thing very absurd, but they all looked
so grave that she did not dare to laugh and, as she could not
think of anything to say, she simply bowed, and took the thimble,
looking as solemn as she could.
The next thing was to eat the comfits this caused some noise
and confusion, as the large birds complained that they could not
taste theirs, and the small ones choked and had to be patted on
the back. However, it was over at last, and they sat down again
in a ring, and begged the Mouse to tell them something more.
"You promised to tell me your history, you know,' said Alice,
"and why it is you hateC and D,' she added in a whisper, half
afraid that it would be offended again.
"Mine is a long and a sad tale' said the Mouse, turning to
Alice, and sighing.
"It IS a long tail, certainly,' said Alice, looking down with
wonder at the Mouse's tail "but why do you call it sad?' And
she kept on puzzling about it while the Mouse was speaking, so
that her idea of the tale was something like this
"Fury said to a
mouse, That he
met in the
house,
"Let us
both go to
law I will
prosecute
YOU. Come,
I'll take no
denial We
must have a
trial For
really this
morning I've
nothing
to do."
Said the
mouse to the
cur, "Such
a trial,
dear Sir,
With
no jury
or judge,
would be
wasting
our
breath."
"I'll be
judge, I'll
be jury,"
Said
cunning
old Fury
"I'll
try the
whole
cause,
and
condemn
you
to
death."'
"You are not attending' said the Mouse to Alice severely.
"What are you thinking of?'
"I beg your pardon,' said Alice very humbly "you had got to
the fifth bend, I think?'
"I had NOT' cried the Mouse, sharply and very angrily.
"A knot' said Alice, always ready to make herself useful, and
looking anxiously about her. "Oh, do let me help to undo it'
"I shall do nothing of the sort,' said the Mouse, getting up
and walking away. "You insult me by talking such nonsense'
"I didn't mean it' pleaded poor Alice. "But you're so easily
offended, you know'
The Mouse only growled in reply.
"Please come back and finish your story' Alice called after
it and the others all joined in chorus, "Yes, please do' but
the Mouse only shook its head impatiently, and walked a little
quicker.
"What a pity it wouldn't stay' sighed the Lory, as soon as it
was quite out of sight and an old Crab took the opportunity of
saying to her daughter "Ah, my dear Let this be a lesson to you
never to lose YOUR temper' "Hold your tongue, Ma' said the
young Crab, a little snappishly. "You're enough to try the
patience of an oyster'
"I wish I had our Dinah here, I know I do' said Alice aloud,
addressing nobody in particular. "She'd soon fetch it back'
"And who is Dinah, if I might venture to ask the question?'
said the Lory.
Alice replied eagerly, for she was always ready to talk about
her pet "Dinah's our cat. And she's such a capital one for
catching mice you can't think And oh, I wish you could see her
after the birds Why, she'll eat a little bird as soon as look
at it'
This speech caused a remarkable sensation among the party.
Some of the birds hurried off at once one old Magpie began
wrapping itself up very carefully, remarking, "I really must be
getting home the nightair doesn't suit my throat' and a Canary
called out in a trembling voice to its children, "Come away, my
dears It's high time you were all in bed' On various pretexts
they all moved off, and Alice was soon left alone.
"I wish I hadn't mentioned Dinah' she said to herself in a
melancholy tone. "Nobody seems to like her, down here, and I'm
sure she's the best cat in the world Oh, my dear Dinah I
wonder if I shall ever see you any more' And here poor Alice
began to cry again, for she felt very lonely and lowspirited.
In a little while, however, she again heard a little pattering of
footsteps in the distance, and she looked up eagerly, half hoping
that the Mouse had changed his mind, and was coming back to
finish his story.
CHAPTER IV
The Rabbit Sends in a Little Bill
It was the White Rabbit, trotting slowly back again, and
looking anxiously about as it went, as if it had lost something
and she heard it muttering to itself "The Duchess The Duchess
Oh my dear paws Oh my fur and whiskers She'll get me
executed, as sure as ferrets are ferrets Where CAN I have
dropped them, I wonder?' Alice guessed in a moment that it was
looking for the fan and the pair of white kid gloves, and she
very goodnaturedly began hunting about for them, but they were
nowhere to be seeneverything seemed to have changed since her
swim in the pool, and the great hall, with the glass table and
the little door, had vanished completely.
Very soon the Rabbit noticed Alice, as she went hunting about,
and called out to her in an angry tone, "Why, Mary Ann, what ARE
you doing out here? Run home this moment, and fetch me a pair of
gloves and a fan Quick, now' And Alice was so much frightened
that she ran off at once in the direction it pointed to, without
trying to explain the mistake it had made.
"He took me for his housemaid,' she said to herself as she ran.
"How surprised he'll be when he finds out who I am But I'd
better take him his fan and glovesthat is, if I can find them.'
As she said this, she came upon a neat little house, on the door
of which was a bright brass plate with the name "W. RABBIT'
engraved upon it. She went in without knocking, and hurried
upstairs, in great fear lest she should meet the real Mary Ann,
and be turned out of the house before she had found the fan and
gloves.
"How queer it seems,' Alice said to herself, "to be going
messages for a rabbit I suppose Dinah'll be sending me on
messages next' And she began fancying the sort of thing that
would happen ""Miss Alice Come here directly, and get ready
for your walk" "Coming in a minute, nurse But I've got to see
that the mouse doesn't get out." Only I don't think,' Alice went
on, "that they'd let Dinah stop in the house if it began ordering
people about like that'
By this time she had found her way into a tidy little room with
a table in the window, and on it as she had hoped a fan and two
or three pairs of tiny white kid gloves she took up the fan and
a pair of the gloves, and was just going to leave the room, when
her eye fell upon a little bottle that stood near the looking
glass. There was no label this time with the words "DRINK ME,'
but nevertheless she uncorked it and put it to her lips. "I know
SOMETHING interesting is sure to happen,' she said to herself,
"whenever I eat or drink anything so I'll just see what this
bottle does. I do hope it'll make me grow large again, for
really I'm quite tired of being such a tiny little thing'
It did so indeed, and much sooner than she had expected
before she had drunk half the bottle, she found her head pressing
against the ceiling, and had to stoop to save her neck from being
broken. She hastily put down the bottle, saying to herself
"That's quite enoughI hope I shan't grow any moreAs it is, I
can't get out at the doorI do wish I hadn't drunk quite so
much'
Alas it was too late to wish that She went on growing, and
growing, and very soon had to kneel down on the floor in
another minute there was not even room for this, and she tried
the effect of lying down with one elbow against the door, and the
other arm curled round her head. Still she went on growing, and,
as a last resource, she put one arm out of the window, and one
foot up the chimney, and said to herself "Now I can do no more,
whatever happens. What WILL become of me?'
Luckily for Alice, the little magic bottle had now had its full
effect, and she grew no larger still it was very uncomfortable,
and, as there seemed to be no sort of chance of her ever getting
out of the room again, no wonder she felt unhappy.
"It was much pleasanter at home,' thought poor Alice, "when one
wasn't always growing larger and smaller, and being ordered about
by mice and rabbits. I almost wish I hadn't gone down that
rabbitholeand yetand yetit's rather curious, you know,
this sort of life I do wonder what CAN have happened to me
When I used to read fairytales, I fancied that kind of thing
never happened, and now here I am in the middle of one There
ought to be a book written about me, that there ought And when
I grow up, I'll write onebut I'm grown up now,' she added in a
sorrowful tone "at least there's no room to grow up any more
HERE.'
"But then,' thought Alice, "shall I NEVER get any older than I
am now? That'll be a comfort, one waynever to be an old woman
but thenalways to have lessons to learn Oh, I shouldn't like THAT'
"Oh, you foolish Alice' she answered herself. "How can you
learn lessons in here? Why, there's hardly room for YOU, and no
room at all for any lessonbooks'
And so she went on, taking first one side and then the other,
and making quite a conversation of it altogether but after a few
minutes she heard a voice outside, and stopped to listen.
"Mary Ann Mary Ann' said the voice. "Fetch me my gloves
this moment' Then came a little pattering of feet on the
stairs. Alice knew it was the Rabbit coming to look for her, and
she trembled till she shook the house, quite forgetting that she
was now about a thousand times as large as the Rabbit, and had no
reason to be afraid of it.
Presently the Rabbit came up to the door, and tried to open it
but, as the door opened inwards, and Alice's elbow was pressed
hard against it, that attempt proved a failure. Alice heard it
say to itself "Then I'll go round and get in at the window.'
"THAT you won't' thought Alice, and, after waiting till she
fancied she heard the Rabbit just under the window, she suddenly
spread out her hand, and made a snatch in the air. She did not
get hold of anything, but she heard a little shriek and a fall,
and a crash of broken glass, from which she concluded that it was
just possible it had fallen into a cucumberframe, or something
of the sort.
Next came an angry voicethe Rabbit's"Pat Pat Where are
you?' And then a voice she had never heard before, "Sure then
I'm here Digging for apples, yer honour'
"Digging for apples, indeed' said the Rabbit angrily. "Here
Come and help me out of THIS' Sounds of more broken glass.
"Now tell me, Pat, what's that in the window?'
"Sure, it's an arm, yer honour' He pronounced it "arrum.'
"An arm, you goose Who ever saw one that size? Why, it
fills the whole window'
"Sure, it does, yer honour but it's an arm for all that.'
"Well, it's got no business there, at any rate go and take it
away'
There was a long silence after this, and Alice could only hear
whispers now and then such as, "Sure, I don't like it, yer
honour, at all, at all' "Do as I tell you, you coward' and at
last she spread out her hand again, and made another snatch in
the air. This time there were TWO little shrieks, and more
sounds of broken glass. "What a number of cucumberframes there
must be' thought Alice. "I wonder what they'll do next As for
pulling me out of the window, I only wish they COULD I'm sure I
don't want to stay in here any longer'
She waited for some time without hearing anything more at
last came a rumbling of little cartwheels, and the sound of a
good many voices all talking together she made out the words
"Where's the other ladder?Why, I hadn't to bring but one
Bill's got the otherBill fetch it here, ladHere, put 'em up
at this cornerNo, tie 'em together firstthey don't reach half
high enough yetOh they'll do well enough don't be particular
Here, Bill catch hold of this ropeWill the roof bear?Mind
that loose slateOh, it's coming down Heads below' a loud
crash"Now, who did that?It was Bill, I fancyWho's to go
down the chimney?Nay, I shan't YOU do itThat I won't,
thenBill's to go downHere, Bill the master says you're to
go down the chimney'
"Oh So Bill's got to come down the chimney, has he?' said
Alice to herself. "Shy, they seem to put everything upon Bill
I wouldn't be in Bill's place for a good deal this fireplace is
narrow, to be sure but I THINK I can kick a little'
She drew her foot as far down the chimney as she could, and
waited till she heard a little animal she couldn't guess of what
sort it was scratching and scrambling about in the chimney close
above her then, saying to herself "This is Bill,' she gave one
sharp kick, and waited to see what would happen next.
The first thing she heard was a general chorus of "There goes
Bill' then the Rabbit's voice along"Catch him, you by the
hedge' then silence, and then another confusion of voices"Hold
up his headBrandy nowDon't choke himHow was it, old fellow?
What happened to you? Tell us all about it'
Last came a little feeble, squeaking voice, "That's Bill,'
thought Alice, "Well, I hardly knowNo more, thank ye I'm
better nowbut I'm a deal too flustered to tell youall I know
is, something comes at me like a Jackinthebox, and up I goes
like a skyrocket'
"So you did, old fellow' said the others.
"We must burn the house down' said the Rabbit's voice and
Alice called out as loud as she could, "If you do. I'll set
Dinah at you'
There was a dead silence instantly, and Alice thought to
herself, "I wonder what they WILL do next If they had any
sense, they'd take the roof off.' After a minute or two, they
began moving about again, and Alice heard the Rabbit say, "A
barrowful will do, to begin with.'
"A barrowful of WHAT?' thought Alice but she had not long to
doubt, for the next moment a shower of little pebbles came
rattling in at the window, and some of them hit her in the face.
"I'll put a stop to this,' she said to herself, and shouted out,
"You'd better not do that again' which produced another dead
silence.
Alice noticed with some surprise that the pebbles were all
turning into little cakes as they lay on the floor, and a bright
idea came into her head. "If I eat one of these cakes,' she
thought, "it's sure to make SOME change in my size and as it
can't possibly make me larger, it must make me smaller, I
suppose.'
So she swallowed one of the cakes, and was delighted to find
that she began shrinking directly. As soon as she was small
enough to get through the door, she ran out of the house, and
found quite a crowd of little animals and birds waiting outside.
The poor little Lizard, Bill, was in the middle, being held up by
two guineapigs, who were giving it something out of a bottle.
They all made a rush at Alice the moment she appeared but she
ran off as hard as she could, and soon found herself safe in a
thick wood.
"The first thing I've got to do,' said Alice to herself, as she
wandered about in the wood, "is to grow to my right size again
and the second thing is to find my way into that lovely garden.
I think that will be the best plan.'
It sounded an excellent plan, no doubt, and very neatly and
simply arranged the only difficulty was, that she had not the
smallest idea how to set about it and while she was peering
about anxiously among the trees, a little sharp bark just over
her head made her look up in a great hurry.
An enormous puppy was looking down at her with large round
eyes, and feebly stretching out one paw, trying to touch her.
"Poor little thing' said Alice, in a coaxing tone, and she tried
hard to whistle to it but she was terribly frightened all the
time at the thought that it might be hungry, in which case it
would be very likely to eat her up in spite of all her coaxing.
Hardly knowing what she did, she picked up a little bit of
stick, and held it out to the puppy whereupon the puppy jumped
into the air off all its feet at once, with a yelp of delight,
and rushed at the stick, and made believe to worry it then Alice
dodged behind a great thistle, to keep herself from being run
over and the moment she appeared on the other side, the puppy
made another rush at the stick, and tumbled head over heels in
its hurry to get hold of it then Alice, thinking it was very
like having a game of play with a carthorse, and expecting every
moment to be trampled under its feet, ran round the thistle
again then the puppy began a series of short charges at the
stick, running a very little way forwards each time and a long
way back, and barking hoarsely all the while, till at last it sat
down a good way off, panting, with its tongue hanging out of its
mouth, and its great eyes half shut.
This seemed to Alice a good opportunity for making her escape
so she set off at once, and ran till she was quite tired and out
of breath, and till the puppy's bark sounded quite faint in the
distance.
"And yet what a dear little puppy it was' said Alice, as she
leant against a buttercup to rest herself, and fanned herself
with one of the leaves "I should have liked teaching it tricks
very much, ifif I'd only been the right size to do it Oh
dear I'd nearly forgotten that I've got to grow up again Let
me seehow IS it to be managed? I suppose I ought to eat or
drink something or other but the great question is, what?'
The great question certainly was, what? Alice looked all round
her at the flowers and the blades of grass, but she did not see
anything that looked like the right thing to eat or drink under
the circumstances. There was a large mushroom growing near her,
about the same height as herself and when she had looked under
it, and on both sides of it, and behind it, it occurred to her
that she might as well look and see what was on the top of it.
She stretched herself up on tiptoe, and peeped over the edge of
the mushroom, and her eyes immediately met those of a large
caterpillar, that was sitting on the top with its arms folded,
quietly smoking a long hookah, and taking not the smallest notice
of her or of anything else.
CHAPTER V
Advice from a Caterpillar
The Caterpillar and Alice looked at each other for some time in
silence at last the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its
mouth, and addressed her in a languid, sleepy voice.
"Who are YOU?' said the Caterpillar.
This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice
replied, rather shyly, "II hardly know, sir, just at present
at least I know who I WAS when I got up this morning, but I think
I must have been changed several times since then.'
"What do you mean by that?' said the Caterpillar sternly.
"Explain yourself'
"I can't explain MYSELF, I'm afraid, sir' said Alice, "because
I'm not myself, you see.'
"I don't see,' said the Caterpillar.
"I'm afraid I can't put it more clearly,' Alice replied very
politely, "for I can't understand it myself to begin with and
being so many different sizes in a day is very confusing.'
"It isn't,' said the Caterpillar.
"Well, perhaps you haven't found it so yet,' said Alice "but
when you have to turn into a chrysalisyou will some day, you
knowand then after that into a butterfly, I should think you'll
feel it a little queer, won't you?'
"Not a bit,' said the Caterpillar.
"Well, perhaps your feelings may be different,' said Alice
"all I know is, it would feel very queer to ME.'
"You' said the Caterpillar contemptuously. "Who are YOU?'
Which brought them back again to the beginning of the
conversation. Alice felt a little irritated at the Caterpillar's
making such VERY short remarks, and she drew herself up and said,
very gravely, "I think, you ought to tell me who YOU are, first.'
"Why?' said the Caterpillar.
Here was another puzzling question and as Alice could not
think of any good reason, and as the Caterpillar seemed to be in
a VERY unpleasant state of mind, she turned away.
"Come back' the Caterpillar called after her. "I've something
important to say'
This sounded promising, certainly Alice turned and came back
again.
"Keep your temper,' said the Caterpillar.
"Is that all?' said Alice, swallowing down her anger as well as
she could.
"No,' said the Caterpillar.
Alice thought she might as well wait, as she had nothing else
to do, and perhaps after all it might tell her something worth
hearing. For some minutes it puffed away without speaking, but
at last it unfolded its arms, took the hookah out of its mouth
again, and said, "So you think you're changed, do you?'
"I'm afraid I am, sir,' said Alice "I can't remember things as
I usedand I don't keep the same size for ten minutes together'
"Can't remember WHAT things?' said the Caterpillar.
"Well, I've tried to say "HOW DOTH THE LITTLE BUSY BEE," but it
all came different' Alice replied in a very melancholy voice.
"Repeat, "YOU ARE OLD, FATHER WILLIAM,"' said the Caterpillar.
Alice folded her hands, and began
"You are old, Father William,' the young man said,
"And your hair has become very white
And yet you incessantly stand on your head
Do you think, at your age, it is right?'
"In my youth,' Father William replied to his son,
"I feared it might injure the brain
But, now that I'm perfectly sure I have none,
Why, I do it again and again.'
"You are old,' said the youth, "as I mentioned before,
And have grown most uncommonly fat
Yet you turned a backsomersault in at the door
Pray, what is the reason of that?'
"In my youth,' said the sage, as he shook his grey locks,
"I kept all my limbs very supple
By the use of this ointmentone shilling the box
Allow me to sell you a couple?'
"You are old,' said the youth, "and your jaws are too weak
For anything tougher than suet
Yet you finished the goose, with the bones and the beak
Pray how did you manage to do it?'
"In my youth,' said his father, "I took to the law,
And argued each case with my wife
And the muscular strength, which it gave to my jaw,
Has lasted the rest of my life.'
"You are old,' said the youth, "one would hardly suppose
That your eye was as steady as ever
Yet you balanced an eel on the end of your nose
What made you so awfully clever?'
"I have answered three questions, and that is enough,'
Said his father "don't give yourself airs
Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff?
Be off, or I'll kick you down stairs'
"That is not said right,' said the Caterpillar.
"Not QUITE right, I'm afraid,' said Alice, timidly "some of the
words have got altered.'
"It is wrong from beginning to end,' said the Caterpillar
decidedly, and there was silence for some minutes.
The Caterpillar was the first to speak.
"What size do you want to be?' it asked.
"Oh, I'm not particular as to size,' Alice hastily replied
"only one doesn't like changing so often, you know.'
"I DON'T know,' said the Caterpillar.
Alice said nothing she had never been so much contradicted in
her life before, and she felt that she was losing her temper.
"Are you content now?' said the Caterpillar.
"Well, I should like to be a LITTLE larger, sir, if you
wouldn't mind,' said Alice "three inches is such a wretched
height to be.'
"It is a very good height indeed' said the Caterpillar
angrily, rearing itself upright as it spoke it was exactly three
inches high.
"But I'm not used to it' pleaded poor Alice in a piteous tone.
And she thought of herself, "I wish the creatures wouldn't be so
easily offended'
"You'll get used to it in time,' said the Caterpillar and it
put the hookah into its mouth and began smoking again.
This time Alice waited patiently until it chose to speak again.
In a minute or two the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its
mouth and yawned once or twice, and shook itself. Then it got
down off the mushroom, and crawled away in the grass, merely
remarking as it went, "One side will make you grow taller, and
the other side will make you grow shorter.'
"One side of WHAT? The other side of WHAT?' thought Alice to
herself.
"Of the mushroom,' said the Caterpillar, just as if she had
asked it aloud and in another moment it was out of sight.
Alice remained looking thoughtfully at the mushroom for a
minute, trying to make out which were the two sides of it and as
it was perfectly round, she found this a very difficult question.
However, at last she stretched her arms round it as far as they
would go, and broke off a bit of the edge with each hand.
"And now which is which?' she said to herself, and nibbled a
little of the righthand bit to try the effect the next moment
she felt a violent blow underneath her chin it had struck her
foot
She was a good deal frightened by this very sudden change, but
she felt that there was no time to be lost, as she was shrinking
rapidly so she set to work at once to eat some of the other bit.
Her chin was pressed so closely against her foot, that there was
hardly room to open her mouth but she did it at last, and
managed to swallow a morsel of the lefthand bit.
"Come, my head's free at last' said Alice in a tone of
delight, which changed into alarm in another moment, when she
found that her shoulders were nowhere to be found all she could
see, when she looked down, was an immense length of neck, which
seemed to rise like a stalk out of a sea of green leaves that lay
far below her.
"What CAN all that green stuff be?' said Alice. "And where
HAVE my shoulders got to? And oh, my poor hands, how is it I
can't see you?' She was moving them about as she spoke, but no
result seemed to follow, except a little shaking among the
distant green leaves.
As there seemed to be no chance of getting her hands up to her
head, she tried to get her head down to them, and was delighted
to find that her neck would bend about easily in any direction,
like a serpent. She had just succeeded in curving it down into a
graceful zigzag, and was going to dive in among the leaves, which
she found to be nothing but the tops of the trees under which she
had been wandering, when a sharp hiss made her draw back in a
hurry a large pigeon had flown into her face, and was beating
her violently with its wings.
"Serpent' screamed the Pigeon.
"I'm NOT a serpent' said Alice indignantly. "Let me alone'
"Serpent, I say again' repeated the Pigeon, but in a more
subdued tone, and added with a kind of sob, "I've tried every
way, and nothing seems to suit them'
"I haven't the least idea what you're talking about,' said
Alice.
"I've tried the roots of trees, and I've tried banks, and I've
tried hedges,' the Pigeon went on, without attending to her "but
those serpents There's no pleasing them'
Alice was more and more puzzled, but she thought there was no
use in saying anything more till the Pigeon had finished.
"As if it wasn't trouble enough hatching the eggs,' said the
Pigeon "but I must be on the lookout for serpents night and
day Why, I haven't had a wink of sleep these three weeks'
"I'm very sorry you've been annoyed,' said Alice, who was
beginning to see its meaning.
"And just as I'd taken the highest tree in the wood,' continued
the Pigeon, raising its voice to a shriek, "and just as I was
thinking I should be free of them at last, they must needs come
wriggling down from the sky Ugh, Serpent'
"But I'm NOT a serpent, I tell you' said Alice. "I'm aI'm
a'
"Well WHAT are you?' said the Pigeon. "I can see you're
trying to invent something'
"II'm a little girl,' said Alice, rather doubtfully, as she
remembered the number of changes she had gone through that day.
"A likely story indeed' said the Pigeon in a tone of the
deepest contempt. "I've seen a good many little girls in my
time, but never ONE with such a neck as that No, no You're a
serpent and there's no use denying it. I suppose you'll be
telling me next that you never tasted an egg'
"I HAVE tasted eggs, certainly,' said Alice, who was a very
truthful child "but little girls eat eggs quite as much as
serpents do, you know.'
"I don't believe it,' said the Pigeon "but if they do, why
then they're a kind of serpent, that's all I can say.'
This was such a new idea to Alice, that she was quite silent
for a minute or two, which gave the Pigeon the opportunity of
adding, "You're looking for eggs, I know THAT well enough and
what does it matter to me whether you're a little girl or a
serpent?'
"It matters a good deal to ME,' said Alice hastily "but I'm
not looking for eggs, as it happens and if I was, I shouldn't
want YOURS I don't like them raw.'
"Well, be off, then' said the Pigeon in a sulky tone, as it
settled down again into its nest. Alice crouched down among the
trees as well as she could, for her neck kept getting entangled
among the branches, and every now and then she had to stop and
untwist it. After a while she remembered that she still held the
pieces of mushroom in her hands, and she set to work very
carefully, nibbling first at one and then at the other, and
growing sometimes taller and sometimes shorter, until she had
succeeded in bringing herself down to her usual height.
It was so long since she had been anything near the right size,
that it felt quite strange at first but she got used to it in a
few minutes, and began talking to herself, as usual. "Come,
there's half my plan done now How puzzling all these changes
are I'm never sure what I'm going to be, from one minute to
another However, I've got back to my right size the next
thing is, to get into that beautiful gardenhow IS that to be
done, I wonder?' As she said this, she came suddenly upon an
open place, with a little house in it about four feet high.
"Whoever lives there,' thought Alice, "it'll never do to come
upon them THIS size why, I should frighten them out of their
wits' So she began nibbling at the righthand bit again, and did
not venture to go near the house till she had brought herself
down to nine inches high.
CHAPTER VI
Pig and Pepper
For a minute or two she stood looking at the house, and
wondering what to do next, when suddenly a footman in livery came
running out of the woodshe considered him to be a footman
because he was in livery otherwise, judging by his face only,
she would have called him a fishand rapped loudly at the door
with his knuckles. It was opened by another footman in livery,
with a round face, and large eyes like a frog and both footmen,
Alice noticed, had powdered hair that curled all over their
heads. She felt very curious to know what it was all about, and
crept a little way out of the wood to listen.
The FishFootman began by producing from under his arm a great
letter, nearly as large as himself, and this he handed over to
the other, saying, in a solemn tone, "For the Duchess. An
invitation from the Queen to play croquet.' The FrogFootman
repeated, in the same solemn tone, only changing the order of the
words a little, "From the Queen. An invitation for the Duchess
to play croquet.'
Then they both bowed low, and their curls got entangled
together.
Alice laughed so much at this, that she had to run back into
the wood for fear of their hearing her and when she next peeped
out the FishFootman was gone, and the other was sitting on the
ground near the door, staring stupidly up into the sky.
Alice went timidly up to the door, and knocked.
"There's no sort of use in knocking,' said the Footman, "and
that for two reasons. First, because I'm on the same side of the
door as you are secondly, because they're making such a noise
inside, no one could possibly hear you.' And certainly there was
a most extraordinary noise going on withina constant howling
and sneezing, and every now and then a great crash, as if a dish
or kettle had been broken to pieces.
"Please, then,' said Alice, "how am I to get in?'
"There might be some sense in your knocking,' the Footman went
on without attending to her, "if we had the door between us. For
instance, if you were INSIDE, you might knock, and I could let
you out, you know.' He was looking up into the sky all the time
he was speaking, and this Alice thought decidedly uncivil. "But
perhaps he can't help it,' she said to herself "his eyes are so
VERY nearly at the top of his head. But at any rate he might
answer questions.How am I to get in?' she repeated, aloud.
"I shall sit here,' the Footman remarked, "till tomorrow'
At this moment the door of the house opened, and a large plate
came skimming out, straight at the Footman's head it just
grazed his nose, and broke to pieces against one of the trees
behind him.
"or next day, maybe,' the Footman continued in the same tone,
exactly as if nothing had happened.
"How am I to get in?' asked Alice again, in a louder tone.
"ARE you to get in at all?' said the Footman. "That's the
first question, you know.'
It was, no doubt only Alice did not like to be told so.
"It's really dreadful,' she muttered to herself, "the way all the
creatures argue. It's enough to drive one crazy'
The Footman seemed to think this a good opportunity for
repeating his remark, with variations. "I shall sit here,' he
said, "on and off, for days and days.'
"But what am I to do?' said Alice.
"Anything you like,' said the Footman, and began whistling.
"Oh, there's no use in talking to him,' said Alice desperately
"he's perfectly idiotic' And she opened the door and went in.
The door led right into a large kitchen, which was full of
smoke from one end to the other the Duchess was sitting on a
threelegged stool in the middle, nursing a baby the cook was
leaning over the fire, stirring a large cauldron which seemed to
be full of soup.
"There's certainly too much pepper in that soup' Alice said to
herself, as well as she could for sneezing.
There was certainly too much of it in the air. Even the
Duchess sneezed occasionally and as for the baby, it was
sneezing and howling alternately without a moment's pause. The
only things in the kitchen that did not sneeze, were the cook,
and a large cat which was sitting on the hearth and grinning from
ear to ear.
"Please would you tell me,' said Alice, a little timidly, for
she was not quite sure whether it was good manners for her to
speak first, "why your cat grins like that?'
"It's a Cheshire cat,' said the Duchess, "and that's why. Pig'
She said the last word with such sudden violence that Alice
quite jumped but she saw in another moment that it was addressed
to the baby, and not to her, so she took courage, and went on
again
"I didn't know that Cheshire cats always grinned in fact, I
didn't know that cats COULD grin.'
"They all can,' said the Duchess "and most of 'em do.'
"I don't know of any that do,' Alice said very politely,
feeling quite pleased to have got into a conversation.
"You don't know much,' said the Duchess "and that's a fact.'
Alice did not at all like the tone of this remark, and thought
it would be as well to introduce some other subject of
conversation. While she was trying to fix on one, the cook took
the cauldron of soup off the fire, and at once set to work
throwing everything within her reach at the Duchess and the baby
the fireirons came first then followed a shower of saucepans,
plates, and dishes. The Duchess took no notice of them even when
they hit her and the baby was howling so much already, that it
was quite impossible to say whether the blows hurt it or not.
"Oh, PLEASE mind what you're doing' cried Alice, jumping up
and down in an agony of terror. "Oh, there goes his PRECIOUS
nose' as an unusually large saucepan flew close by it, and very
nearly carried it off.
"If everybody minded their own business,' the Duchess said in a
hoarse growl, "the world would go round a deal faster than it
does.'
"Which would NOT be an advantage,' said Alice, who felt very
glad to get an opportunity of showing off a little of her
knowledge. "Just think of what work it would make with the day
and night You see the earth takes twentyfour hours to turn
round on its axis'
"Talking of axes,' said the Duchess, "chop off her head'
Alice glanced rather anxiously at the cook, to see if she meant
to take the hint but the cook was busily stirring the soup, and
seemed not to be listening, so she went on again "Twentyfour
hours, I THINK or is it twelve? I'
"Oh, don't bother ME,' said the Duchess "I never could abide
figures' And with that she began nursing her child again,
singing a sort of lullaby to it as she did so, and giving it a
violent shake at the end of every line
"Speak roughly to your little boy,
And beat him when he sneezes
He only does it to annoy,
Because he knows it teases.'
CHORUS.
In which the cook and the baby joined
"Wow wow wow'
While the Duchess sang the second verse of the song, she kept
tossing the baby violently up and down, and the poor little thing
howled so, that Alice could hardly hear the words
"I speak severely to my boy,
I beat him when he sneezes
For he can thoroughly enjoy
The pepper when he pleases'
CHORUS.
"Wow wow wow'
"Here you may nurse it a bit, if you like' the Duchess said
to Alice, flinging the baby at her as she spoke. "I must go and
get ready to play croquet with the Queen,' and she hurried out of
the room. The cook threw a fryingpan after her as she went out,
but it just missed her.
Alice caught the baby with some difficulty, as it was a queer
shaped little creature, and held out its arms and legs in all
directions, "just like a starfish,' thought Alice. The poor
little thing was snorting like a steamengine when she caught it,
and kept doubling itself up and straightening itself out again,
so that altogether, for the first minute or two, it was as much
as she could do to hold it.
As soon as she had made out the proper way of nursing it,
which was to twist it up into a sort of knot, and then keep
tight hold of its right ear and left foot, so as to prevent its
undoing itself, she carried it out into the open air. "IF I
don't take this child away with me,' thought Alice, "they're sure
to kill it in a day or two wouldn't it be murder to leave it
behind?' She said the last words out loud, and the little thing
grunted in reply it had left off sneezing by this time. "Don't
grunt,' said Alice "that's not at all a proper way of expressing
yourself.'
The baby grunted again, and Alice looked very anxiously into
its face to see what was the matter with it. There could be no
doubt that it had a VERY turnup nose, much more like a snout
than a real nose also its eyes were getting extremely small for
a baby altogether Alice did not like the look of the thing at
all. "But perhaps it was only sobbing,' she thought, and looked
into its eyes again, to see if there were any tears.
No, there were no tears. "If you're going to turn into a pig,
my dear,' said Alice, seriously, "I'll have nothing more to do
with you. Mind now' The poor little thing sobbed again or
grunted, it was impossible to say which, and they went on for
some while in silence.
Alice was just beginning to think to herself, "Now, what am I
to do with this creature when I get it home?' when it grunted
again, so violently, that she looked down into its face in some
alarm. This time there could be NO mistake about it it was
neither more nor less than a pig, and she felt that it would be
quite absurd for her to carry it further.
So she set the little creature down, and felt quite relieved to
see it trot away quietly into the wood. "If it had grown up,'
she said to herself, "it would have made a dreadfully ugly child
but it makes rather a handsome pig, I think.' And she began
thinking over other children she knew, who might do very well as
pigs, and was just saying to herself, "if one only knew the right
way to change them' when she was a little startled by seeing
the Cheshire Cat sitting on a bough of a tree a few yards off.
The Cat only grinned when it saw Alice. It looked good
natured, she thought still it had VERY long claws and a great
many teeth, so she felt that it ought to be treated with respect.
"Cheshire Puss,' she began, rather timidly, as she did not at
all know whether it would like the name however, it only
grinned a little wider. "Come, it's pleased so far,' thought
Alice, and she went on. "Would you tell me, please, which way I
ought to go from here?'
"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,' said
the Cat.
"I don't much care where' said Alice.
"Then it doesn't matter which way you go,' said the Cat.
"so long as I get SOMEWHERE,' Alice added as an explanation.
"Oh, you're sure to do that,' said the Cat, "if you only walk
long enough.'
Alice felt that this could not be denied, so she tried another
question. "What sort of people live about here?'
"In THAT direction,' the Cat said, waving its right paw round,
"lives a Hatter and in THAT direction,' waving the other paw,
"lives a March Hare. Visit either you like they're both mad.'
"But I don't want to go among mad people,' Alice remarked.
"Oh, you can't help that,' said the Cat "we're all mad here.
I'm mad. You're mad.'
"How do you know I'm mad?' said Alice.
"You must be,' said the Cat, "or you wouldn't have come here.'
Alice didn't think that proved it at all however, she went on
"And how do you know that you're mad?'
"To begin with,' said the Cat, "a dog's not mad. You grant
that?'
"I suppose so,' said Alice.
"Well, then,' the Cat went on, "you see, a dog growls when it's
angry, and wags its tail when it's pleased. Now I growl when I'm
pleased, and wag my tail when I'm angry. Therefore I'm mad.'
"I call it purring, not growling,' said Alice.
"Call it what you like,' said the Cat. "Do you play croquet
with the Queen today?'
"I should like it very much,' said Alice, "but I haven't been
invited yet.'
"You'll see me there,' said the Cat, and vanished.
Alice was not much surprised at this, she was getting so used
to queer things happening. While she was looking at the place
where it had been, it suddenly appeared again.
"Bythebye, what became of the baby?' said the Cat. "I'd
nearly forgotten to ask.'
"It turned into a pig,' Alice quietly said, just as if it had
come back in a natural way.
"I thought it would,' said the Cat, and vanished again.
Alice waited a little, half expecting to see it again, but it
did not appear, and after a minute or two she walked on in the
direction in which the March Hare was said to live. "I've seen
hatters before,' she said to herself "the March Hare will be
much the most interesting, and perhaps as this is May it won't be
raving madat least not so mad as it was in March.' As she said
this, she looked up, and there was the Cat again, sitting on a
branch of a tree.
"Did you say pig, or fig?' said the Cat.
"I said pig,' replied Alice "and I wish you wouldn't keep
appearing and vanishing so suddenly you make one quite giddy.'
"All right,' said the Cat and this time it vanished quite slowly,
beginning with the end of the tail, and ending with the grin,
which remained some time after the rest of it had gone.
"Well I've often seen a cat without a grin,' thought Alice
"but a grin without a cat It's the most curious thing I ever
saw in my life'
She had not gone much farther before she came in sight of the
house of the March Hare she thought it must be the right house,
because the chimneys were shaped like ears and the roof was
thatched with fur. It was so large a house, that she did not
like to go nearer till she had nibbled some more of the lefthand
bit of mushroom, and raised herself to about two feet high even
then she walked up towards it rather timidly, saying to herself
"Suppose it should be raving mad after all I almost wish I'd
gone to see the Hatter instead'
CHAPTER VII
A Mad TeaParty
There was a table set out under a tree in front of the house,
and the March Hare and the Hatter were having tea at it a
Dormouse was sitting between them, fast asleep, and the other two
were using it as a cushion, resting their elbows on it, and talking
over its head. "Very uncomfortable for the Dormouse,' thought Alice
"only, as it's asleep, I suppose it doesn't mind.'
The table was a large one, but the three were all crowded
together at one corner of it "No room No room' they cried
out when they saw Alice coming. "There's PLENTY of room' said
Alice indignantly, and she sat down in a large armchair at one
end of the table.
"Have some wine,' the March Hare said in an encouraging tone.
Alice looked all round the table, but there was nothing on it
but tea. "I don't see any wine,' she remarked.
"There isn't any,' said the March Hare.
"Then it wasn't very civil of you to offer it,' said Alice
angrily.
"It wasn't very civil of you to sit down without being
invited,' said the March Hare.
"I didn't know it was YOUR table,' said Alice "it's laid for a
great many more than three.'
"Your hair wants cutting,' said the Hatter. He had been
looking at Alice for some time with great curiosity, and this was
his first speech.
"You should learn not to make personal remarks,' Alice said
with some severity "it's very rude.'
The Hatter opened his eyes very wide on hearing this but all
he SAID was, "Why is a raven like a writingdesk?'
"Come, we shall have some fun now' thought Alice. "I'm glad
they've begun asking riddles.I believe I can guess that,' she
added aloud.
"Do you mean that you think you can find out the answer to it?'
said the March Hare.
"Exactly so,' said Alice.
"Then you should say what you mean,' the March Hare went on.
"I do,' Alice hastily replied "at leastat least I mean what
I saythat's the same thing, you know.'
"Not the same thing a bit' said the Hatter. "You might just
as well say that "I see what I eat" is the same thing as "I eat
what I see"'
"You might just as well say,' added the March Hare, "that "I
like what I get" is the same thing as "I get what I like"'
"You might just as well say,' added the Dormouse, who seemed to
be talking in his sleep, "that "I breathe when I sleep" is the
same thing as "I sleep when I breathe"'
"It IS the same thing with you,' said the Hatter, and here the
conversation dropped, and the party sat silent for a minute,
while Alice thought over all she could remember about ravens and
writingdesks, which wasn't much.
The Hatter was the first to break the silence. "What day of
the month is it?' he said, turning to Alice he had taken his
watch out of his pocket, and was looking at it uneasily, shaking
it every now and then, and holding it to his ear.
Alice considered a little, and then said "The fourth.'
"Two days wrong' sighed the Hatter. "I told you butter
wouldn't suit the works' he added looking angrily at the March
Hare.
"It was the BEST butter,' the March Hare meekly replied.
"Yes, but some crumbs must have got in as well,' the Hatter
grumbled "you shouldn't have put it in with the breadknife.'
The March Hare took the watch and looked at it gloomily then
he dipped it into his cup of tea, and looked at it again but he
could think of nothing better to say than his first remark, "It
was the BEST butter, you know.'
Alice had been looking over his shoulder with some curiosity.
"What a funny watch' she remarked. "It tells the day of the
month, and doesn't tell what o'clock it is'
"Why should it?' muttered the Hatter. "Does YOUR watch tell
you what year it is?'
"Of course not,' Alice replied very readily "but that's
because it stays the same year for such a long time together.'
"Which is just the case with MINE,' said the Hatter.
Alice felt dreadfully puzzled. The Hatter's remark seemed to
have no sort of meaning in it, and yet it was certainly English.
"I don't quite understand you,' she said, as politely as she
could.
"The Dormouse is asleep again,' said the Hatter, and he poured
a little hot tea upon its nose.
The Dormouse shook its head impatiently, and said, without
opening its eyes, "Of course, of course just what I was going to
remark myself.'
"Have you guessed the riddle yet?' the Hatter said, turning to
Alice again.
"No, I give it up,' Alice replied "what's the answer?'
"I haven't the slightest idea,' said the Hatter.
"Nor I,' said the March Hare.
Alice sighed wearily. "I think you might do something better
with the time,' she said, "than waste it in asking riddles that
have no answers.'
"If you knew Time as well as I do,' said the Hatter, "you
wouldn't talk about wasting IT. It's HIM.'
"I don't know what you mean,' said Alice.
"Of course you don't' the Hatter said, tossing his head
contemptuously. "I dare say you never even spoke to Time'
"Perhaps not,' Alice cautiously replied "but I know I have to
beat time when I learn music.'
"Ah that accounts for it,' said the Hatter. "He won't stand
beating. Now, if you only kept on good terms with him, he'd do
almost anything you liked with the clock. For instance, suppose
it were nine o'clock in the morning, just time to begin lessons
you'd only have to whisper a hint to Time, and round goes the
clock in a twinkling Halfpast one, time for dinner'
"I only wish it was,' the March Hare said to itself in a
whisper.
"That would be grand, certainly,' said Alice thoughtfully
"but thenI shouldn't be hungry for it, you know.'
"Not at first, perhaps,' said the Hatter "but you could keep
it to halfpast one as long as you liked.'
"Is that the way YOU manage?' Alice asked.
The Hatter shook his head mournfully. "Not I' he replied.
"We quarrelled last Marchjust before HE went mad, you know'
pointing with his tea spoon at the March Hare, "it was at the
great concert given by the Queen of Hearts, and I had to sing
"Twinkle, twinkle, little bat
How I wonder what you're at"
You know the song, perhaps?'
"I've heard something like it,' said Alice.
"It goes on, you know,' the Hatter continued, "in this way
"Up above the world you fly,
Like a teatray in the sky.
Twinkle, twinkle"'
Here the Dormouse shook itself, and began singing in its sleep
"Twinkle, twinkle, twinkle, twinkle' and went on so long that
they had to pinch it to make it stop.
"Well, I'd hardly finished the first verse,' said the Hatter,
"when the Queen jumped up and bawled out, "He's murdering the
time Off with his head"'
"How dreadfully savage' exclaimed Alice.
"And ever since that,' the Hatter went on in a mournful tone,
"he won't do a thing I ask It's always six o'clock now.'
A bright idea came into Alice's head. "Is that the reason so
many teathings are put out here?' she asked.
"Yes, that's it,' said the Hatter with a sigh "it's always
teatime, and we've no time to wash the things between whiles.'
"Then you keep moving round, I suppose?' said Alice.
"Exactly so,' said the Hatter "as the things get used up.'
"But what happens when you come to the beginning again?' Alice
ventured to ask.
"Suppose we change the subject,' the March Hare interrupted,
yawning. "I'm getting tired of this. I vote the young lady
tells us a story.'
"I'm afraid I don't know one,' said Alice, rather alarmed at
the proposal.
"Then the Dormouse shall' they both cried. "Wake up,
Dormouse' And they pinched it on both sides at once.
The Dormouse slowly opened his eyes. "I wasn't asleep,' he
said in a hoarse, feeble voice "I heard every word you fellows
were saying.'
"Tell us a story' said the March Hare.
"Yes, please do' pleaded Alice.
"And be quick about it,' added the Hatter, "or you'll be asleep
again before it's done.'
"Once upon a time there were three little sisters,' the
Dormouse began in a great hurry "and their names were Elsie,
Lacie, and Tillie and they lived at the bottom of a well'
"What did they live on?' said Alice, who always took a great
interest in questions of eating and drinking.
"They lived on treacle,' said the Dormouse, after thinking a
minute or two.
"They couldn't have done that, you know,' Alice gently
remarked "they'd have been ill.'
"So they were,' said the Dormouse "VERY ill.'
Alice tried to fancy to herself what such an extraordinary ways
of living would be like, but it puzzled her too much, so she went
on "But why did they live at the bottom of a well?'
"Take some more tea,' the March Hare said to Alice, very
earnestly.
"I've had nothing yet,' Alice replied in an offended tone, "so
I can't take more.'
"You mean you can't take LESS,' said the Hatter "it's very
easy to take MORE than nothing.'
"Nobody asked YOUR opinion,' said Alice.
"Who's making personal remarks now?' the Hatter asked
triumphantly.
Alice did not quite know what to say to this so she helped
herself to some tea and breadandbutter, and then turned to the
Dormouse, and repeated her question. "Why did they live at the
bottom of a well?'
The Dormouse again took a minute or two to think about it, and
then said, "It was a treaclewell.'
"There's no such thing' Alice was beginning very angrily, but
the Hatter and the March Hare went "Sh sh' and the Dormouse
sulkily remarked, "If you can't be civil, you'd better finish the
story for yourself.'
"No, please go on' Alice said very humbly "I won't interrupt
again. I dare say there may be ONE.'
"One, indeed' said the Dormouse indignantly. However, he
consented to go on. "And so these three little sistersthey
were learning to draw, you know'
"What did they draw?' said Alice, quite forgetting her promise.
"Treacle,' said the Dormouse, without considering at all this
time.
"I want a clean cup,' interrupted the Hatter "let's all move
one place on.'
He moved on as he spoke, and the Dormouse followed him the
March Hare moved into the Dormouse's place, and Alice rather
unwillingly took the place of the March Hare. The Hatter was the
only one who got any advantage from the change and Alice was a
good deal worse off than before, as the March Hare had just upset
the milkjug into his plate.
Alice did not wish to offend the Dormouse again, so she began
very cautiously "But I don't understand. Where did they draw
the treacle from?'
"You can draw water out of a waterwell,' said the Hatter "so
I should think you could draw treacle out of a treaclewelleh,
stupid?'
"But they were IN the well,' Alice said to the Dormouse, not
choosing to notice this last remark.
"Of course they were', said the Dormouse "well in.'
This answer so confused poor Alice, that she let the Dormouse
go on for some time without interrupting it.
"They were learning to draw,' the Dormouse went on, yawning and
rubbing its eyes, for it was getting very sleepy "and they drew
all manner of thingseverything that begins with an M'
"Why with an M?' said Alice.
"Why not?' said the March Hare.
Alice was silent.
The Dormouse had closed its eyes by this time, and was going
off into a doze but, on being pinched by the Hatter, it woke up
again with a little shriek, and went on "that begins with an
M, such as mousetraps, and the moon, and memory, and muchness
you know you say things are "much of a muchness"did you ever
see such a thing as a drawing of a muchness?'
"Really, now you ask me,' said Alice, very much confused, "I
don't think'
"Then you shouldn't talk,' said the Hatter.
This piece of rudeness was more than Alice could bear she got
up in great disgust, and walked off the Dormouse fell asleep
instantly, and neither of the others took the least notice of her
going, though she looked back once or twice, half hoping that
they would call after her the last time she saw them, they were
trying to put the Dormouse into the teapot.
"At any rate I'll never go THERE again' said Alice as she
picked her way through the wood. "It's the stupidest teaparty I
ever was at in all my life'
Just as she said this, she noticed that one of the trees had a
door leading right into it. "That's very curious' she thought.
"But everything's curious today. I think I may as well go in at once.'
And in she went.
Once more she found herself in the long hall, and close to the
little glass table. "Now, I'll manage better this time,'
she said to herself, and began by taking the little golden key,
and unlocking the door that led into the garden. Then she went
to work nibbling at the mushroom she had kept a piece of it
in her pocket till she was about a foot high then she walked down
the little passage and THENshe found herself at last in the
beautiful garden, among the bright flowerbeds and the cool fountains.
CHAPTER VIII
The Queen's CroquetGround
A large rosetree stood near the entrance of the garden the
roses growing on it were white, but there were three gardeners at
it, busily painting them red. Alice thought this a very curious
thing, and she went nearer to watch them, and just as she came up
to them she heard one of them say, "Look out now, Five Don't go
splashing paint over me like that'
"I couldn't help it,' said Five, in a sulky tone "Seven jogged
my elbow.'
On which Seven looked up and said, "That's right, Five Always
lay the blame on others'
"YOU'D better not talk' said Five. "I heard the Queen say only
yesterday you deserved to be beheaded'
"What for?' said the one who had spoken first.
"That's none of YOUR business, Two' said Seven.
"Yes, it IS his business' said Five, "and I'll tell himit
was for bringing the cook tuliproots instead of onions.'
Seven flung down his brush, and had just begun "Well, of all
the unjust things' when his eye chanced to fall upon Alice, as
she stood watching them, and he checked himself suddenly the
others looked round also, and all of them bowed low.
"Would you tell me,' said Alice, a little timidly, "why you are
painting those roses?'
Five and Seven said nothing, but looked at Two. Two began in a
low voice, "Why the fact is, you see, Miss, this here ought to
have been a RED rosetree, and we put a white one in by mistake
and if the Queen was to find it out, we should all have our heads
cut off, you know. So you see, Miss, we're doing our best, afore
she comes, to' At this moment Five, who had been anxiously
looking across the garden, called out "The Queen The Queen'
and the three gardeners instantly threw themselves flat upon
their faces. There was a sound of many footsteps, and Alice
looked round, eager to see the Queen.
First came ten soldiers carrying clubs these were all shaped
like the three gardeners, oblong and flat, with their hands and
feet at the corners next the ten courtiers these were
ornamented all over with diamonds, and walked two and two, as the
soldiers did. After these came the royal children there were
ten of them, and the little dears came jumping merrily along hand
in hand, in couples they were all ornamented with hearts. Next
came the guests, mostly Kings and Queens, and among them Alice
recognised the White Rabbit it was talking in a hurried nervous
manner, smiling at everything that was said, and went by without
noticing her. Then followed the Knave of Hearts, carrying the
King's crown on a crimson velvet cushion and, last of all this
grand procession, came THE KING AND QUEEN OF HEARTS.
Alice was rather doubtful whether she ought not to lie down on
her face like the three gardeners, but she could not remember
ever having heard of such a rule at processions "and besides,
what would be the use of a procession,' thought she, "if people
had all to lie down upon their faces, so that they couldn't see it?'
So she stood still where she was, and waited.
When the procession came opposite to Alice, they all stopped
and looked at her, and the Queen said severely "Who is this?'
She said it to the Knave of Hearts, who only bowed and smiled in reply.
"Idiot' said the Queen, tossing her head impatiently and,
turning to Alice, she went on, "What's your name, child?'
"My name is Alice, so please your Majesty,' said Alice very
politely but she added, to herself, "Why, they're only a pack of
cards, after all. I needn't be afraid of them'
"And who are THESE?' said the Queen, pointing to the three
gardeners who were lying round the rosetree for, you see, as
they were lying on their faces, and the pattern on their backs
was the same as the rest of the pack, she could not tell whether
they were gardeners, or soldiers, or courtiers, or three of her
own children.
"How should I know?' said Alice, surprised at her own courage.
"It's no business of MINE.'
The Queen turned crimson with fury, and, after glaring at her
for a moment like a wild beast, screamed "Off with her head
Off'
"Nonsense' said Alice, very loudly and decidedly, and the
Queen was silent.
The King laid his hand upon her arm, and timidly said
"Consider, my dear she is only a child'
The Queen turned angrily away from him, and said to the Knave
"Turn them over'
The Knave did so, very carefully, with one foot.
"Get up' said the Queen, in a shrill, loud voice, and the
three gardeners instantly jumped up, and began bowing to the
King, the Queen, the royal children, and everybody else.
"Leave off that' screamed the Queen. "You make me giddy.'
And then, turning to the rosetree, she went on, "What HAVE you
been doing here?'
"May it please your Majesty,' said Two, in a very humble tone,
going down on one knee as he spoke, "we were trying'
"I see' said the Queen, who had meanwhile been examining the
roses. "Off with their heads' and the procession moved on,
three of the soldiers remaining behind to execute the unfortunate
gardeners, who ran to Alice for protection.
"You shan't be beheaded' said Alice, and she put them into a
large flowerpot that stood near. The three soldiers wandered
about for a minute or two, looking for them, and then quietly
marched off after the others.
"Are their heads off?' shouted the Queen.
"Their heads are gone, if it please your Majesty' the soldiers
shouted in reply.
"That's right' shouted the Queen. "Can you play croquet?'
The soldiers were silent, and looked at Alice, as the question
was evidently meant for her.
"Yes' shouted Alice.
"Come on, then' roared the Queen, and Alice joined the
procession, wondering very much what would happen next.
"It'sit's a very fine day' said a timid voice at her side.
She was walking by the White Rabbit, who was peeping anxiously
into her face.
"Very,' said Alice "where's the Duchess?'
"Hush Hush' said the Rabbit in a low, hurried tone. He
looked anxiously over his shoulder as he spoke, and then raised
himself upon tiptoe, put his mouth close to her ear, and
whispered "She's under sentence of execution.'
"What for?' said Alice.
"Did you say "What a pity"?' the Rabbit asked.
"No, I didn't,' said Alice "I don't think it's at all a pity.
I said "What for?"'
"She boxed the Queen's ears' the Rabbit began. Alice gave a
little scream of laughter. "Oh, hush' the Rabbit whispered in a
frightened tone. "The Queen will hear you You see, she came
rather late, and the Queen said'
"Get to your places' shouted the Queen in a voice of thunder,
and people began running about in all directions, tumbling up
against each other however, they got settled down in a minute or
two, and the game began. Alice thought she had never seen such a
curious croquetground in her life it was all ridges and
furrows the balls were live hedgehogs, the mallets live
flamingoes, and the soldiers had to double themselves up and to
stand on their hands and feet, to make the arches.
The chief difficulty Alice found at first was in managing her
flamingo she succeeded in getting its body tucked away,
comfortably enough, under her arm, with its legs hanging down,
but generally, just as she had got its neck nicely straightened
out, and was going to give the hedgehog a blow with its head, it
WOULD twist itself round and look up in her face, with such a
puzzled expression that she could not help bursting out laughing
and when she had got its head down, and was going to begin again,
it was very provoking to find that the hedgehog had unrolled
itself, and was in the act of crawling away besides all this,
there was generally a ridge or furrow in the way wherever she
wanted to send the hedgehog to, and, as the doubledup soldiers
were always getting up and walking off to other parts of the
ground, Alice soon came to the conclusion that it was a very
difficult game indeed.
The players all played at once without waiting for turns,
quarrelling all the while, and fighting for the hedgehogs and in
a very short time the Queen was in a furious passion, and went
stamping about, and shouting "Off with his head' or "Off with
her head' about once in a minute.
Alice began to feel very uneasy to be sure, she had not as
yet had any dispute with the Queen, but she knew that it might
happen any minute, "and then,' thought she, "what would become of
me? They're dreadfully fond of beheading people here the great
wonder is, that there's any one left alive'
She was looking about for some way of escape, and wondering
whether she could get away without being seen, when she noticed a
curious appearance in the air it puzzled her very much at
first, but, after watching it a minute or two, she made it out to
be a grin, and she said to herself "It's the Cheshire Cat now I
shall have somebody to talk to.'
"How are you getting on?' said the Cat, as soon as there was
mouth enough for it to speak with.
Alice waited till the eyes appeared, and then nodded. "It's no
use speaking to it,' she thought, "till its ears have come, or at
least one of them.' In another minute the whole head appeared,
and then Alice put down her flamingo, and began an account of the
game, feeling very glad she had someone to listen to her. The
Cat seemed to think that there was enough of it now in sight, and
no more of it appeared.
"I don't think they play at all fairly,' Alice began, in rather
a complaining tone, "and they all quarrel so dreadfully one can't
hear oneself speakand they don't seem to have any rules in
particular at least, if there are, nobody attends to themand
you've no idea how confusing it is all the things being alive
for instance, there's the arch I've got to go through next
walking about at the other end of the groundand I should have
croqueted the Queen's hedgehog just now, only it ran away when it
saw mine coming'
"How do you like the Queen?' said the Cat in a low voice.
"Not at all,' said Alice "she's so extremely' Just then
she noticed that the Queen was close behind her, listening so
she went on, "likely to win, that it's hardly worth while
finishing the game.'
The Queen smiled and passed on.
"Who ARE you talking to?' said the King, going up to Alice, and
looking at the Cat's head with great curiosity.
"It's a friend of minea Cheshire Cat,' said Alice "allow me
to introduce it.'
"I don't like the look of it at all,' said the King
"however, it may kiss my hand if it likes.'
"I'd rather not,' the Cat remarked.
"Don't be impertinent,' said the King, "and don't look at me
like that' He got behind Alice as he spoke.
"A cat may look at a king,' said Alice. "I've read that in
some book, but I don't remember where.'
"Well, it must be removed,' said the King very decidedly, and
he called the Queen, who was passing at the moment, "My dear I
wish you would have this cat removed'
The Queen had only one way of settling all difficulties, great
or small. "Off with his head' she said, without even looking
round.
"I'll fetch the executioner myself,' said the King eagerly, and
he hurried off.
Alice thought she might as well go back, and see how the game
was going on, as she heard the Queen's voice in the distance,
screaming with passion. She had already heard her sentence three
of the players to be executed for having missed their turns, and
she did not like the look of things at all, as the game was in
such confusion that she never knew whether it was her turn or
not. So she went in search of her hedgehog.
The hedgehog was engaged in a fight with another hedgehog,
which seemed to Alice an excellent opportunity for croqueting one
of them with the other the only difficulty was, that her
flamingo was gone across to the other side of the garden, where
Alice could see it trying in a helpless sort of way to fly up
into a tree.
By the time she had caught the flamingo and brought it back,
the fight was over, and both the hedgehogs were out of sight
"but it doesn't matter much,' thought Alice, "as all the arches
are gone from this side of the ground.' So she tucked it away
under her arm, that it might not escape again, and went back for
a little more conversation with her friend.
When she got back to the Cheshire Cat, she was surprised to
find quite a large crowd collected round it there was a dispute
going on between the executioner, the King, and the Queen, who
were all talking at once, while all the rest were quite silent,
and looked very uncomfortable.
The moment Alice appeared, she was appealed to by all three to
settle the question, and they repeated their arguments to her,
though, as they all spoke at once, she found it very hard indeed
to make out exactly what they said.
The executioner's argument was, that you couldn't cut off a
head unless there was a body to cut it off from that he had
never had to do such a thing before, and he wasn't going to begin
at HIS time of life.
The King's argument was, that anything that had a head could be
beheaded, and that you weren't to talk nonsense.
The Queen's argument was, that if something wasn't done about
it in less than no time she'd have everybody executed, all round.
It was this last remark that had made the whole party look so
grave and anxious.
Alice could think of nothing else to say but "It belongs to the
Duchess you'd better ask HER about it.'
"She's in prison,' the Queen said to the executioner "fetch
her here.' And the executioner went off like an arrow.
The Cat's head began fading away the moment he was gone, and,
by the time he had come back with the Dutchess, it had entirely
disappeared so the King and the executioner ran wildly up and down
looking for it, while the rest of the party went back to the game.
CHAPTER IX
The Mock Turtle's Story
"You can't think how glad I am to see you again, you dear old
thing' said the Duchess, as she tucked her arm affectionately
into Alice's, and they walked off together.
Alice was very glad to find her in such a pleasant temper, and
thought to herself that perhaps it was only the pepper that had
made her so savage when they met in the kitchen.
"When I'M a Duchess,' she said to herself, not in a very
hopeful tone though, "I won't have any pepper in my kitchen AT
ALL. Soup does very well withoutMaybe it's always pepper that
makes people hottempered,' she went on, very much pleased at
having found out a new kind of rule, "and vinegar that makes them
sourand camomile that makes them bitterandand barleysugar
and such things that make children sweettempered. I only wish
people knew that then they wouldn't be so stingy about it, you
know'
She had quite forgotten the Duchess by this time, and was a
little startled when she heard her voice close to her ear.
"You're thinking about something, my dear, and that makes you
forget to talk. I can't tell you just now what the moral of that
is, but I shall remember it in a bit.'
"Perhaps it hasn't one,' Alice ventured to remark.
"Tut, tut, child' said the Duchess. "Everything's got a
moral, if only you can find it.' And she squeezed herself up
closer to Alice's side as she spoke.
Alice did not much like keeping so close to her first,
because the Duchess was VERY ugly and secondly, because she was
exactly the right height to rest her chin upon Alice's shoulder,
and it was an uncomfortably sharp chin. However, she did not
like to be rude, so she bore it as well as she could.
"The game's going on rather better now,' she said, by way of
keeping up the conversation a little.
"'Tis so,' said the Duchess "and the moral of that is"Oh,
'tis love, 'tis love, that makes the world go round"'
"Somebody said,' Alice whispered, "that it's done by everybody
minding their own business'
"Ah, well It means much the same thing,' said the Duchess,
digging her sharp little chin into Alice's shoulder as she added,
"and the moral of THAT is"Take care of the sense, and the
sounds will take care of themselves."'
"How fond she is of finding morals in things' Alice thought to
herself.
"I dare say you're wondering why I don't put my arm round your
waist,' the Duchess said after a pause "the reason is, that I'm
doubtful about the temper of your flamingo. Shall I try the
experiment?'
"HE might bite,' Alice cautiously replied, not feeling at all
anxious to have the experiment tried.
"Very true,' said the Duchess "flamingoes and mustard both
bite. And the moral of that is"Birds of a feather flock
together."'
"Only mustard isn't a bird,' Alice remarked.
"Right, as usual,' said the Duchess "what a clear way you
have of putting things'
"It's a mineral, I THINK,' said Alice.
"Of course it is,' said the Duchess, who seemed ready to agree
to everything that Alice said "there's a large mustardmine near
here. And the moral of that is"The more there is of mine, the
less there is of yours."'
"Oh, I know' exclaimed Alice, who had not attended to this
last remark, "it's a vegetable. It doesn't look like one, but it
is.'
"I quite agree with you,' said the Duchess "and the moral of
that is"Be what you would seem to be"or if you'd like it put
more simply"Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than
what it might appear to others that what you were or might have
been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared
to them to be otherwise."'
"I think I should understand that better,' Alice said very
politely, "if I had it written down but I can't quite follow it
as you say it.'
"That's nothing to what I could say if I chose,' the Duchess
replied, in a pleased tone.
"Pray don't trouble yourself to say it any longer than that,'
said Alice.
"Oh, don't talk about trouble' said the Duchess. "I make you
a present of everything I've said as yet.'
"A cheap sort of present' thought Alice. "I'm glad they don't
give birthday presents like that' But she did not venture to
say it out loud.
"Thinking again?' the Duchess asked, with another dig of her
sharp little chin.
"I've a right to think,' said Alice sharply, for she was
beginning to feel a little worried.
"Just about as much right,' said the Duchess, "as pigs have to fly
and the m'
But here, to Alice's great surprise, the Duchess's voice died
away, even in the middle of her favourite word "moral,' and the
arm that was linked into hers began to tremble. Alice looked up,
and there stood the Queen in front of them, with her arms folded,
frowning like a thunderstorm.
"A fine day, your Majesty' the Duchess began in a low, weak
voice.
"Now, I give you fair warning,' shouted the Queen, stamping on
the ground as she spoke "either you or your head must be off,
and that in about half no time Take your choice'
The Duchess took her choice, and was gone in a moment.
"Let's go on with the game,' the Queen said to Alice and Alice
was too much frightened to say a word, but slowly followed her
back to the croquetground.
The other guests had taken advantage of the Queen's absence,
and were resting in the shade however, the moment they saw her,
they hurried back to the game, the Queen merely remarking that a
moment's delay would cost them their lives.
All the time they were playing the Queen never left off
quarrelling with the other players, and shouting "Off with his
head' or "Off with her head' Those whom she sentenced were
taken into custody by the soldiers, who of course had to leave
off being arches to do this, so that by the end of half an hour
or so there were no arches left, and all the players, except the
King, the Queen, and Alice, were in custody and under sentence of
execution.
Then the Queen left off, quite out of breath, and said to
Alice, "Have you seen the Mock Turtle yet?'
"No,' said Alice. "I don't even know what a Mock Turtle is.'
"It's the thing Mock Turtle Soup is made from,' said the Queen.
"I never saw one, or heard of one,' said Alice.
"Come on, then,' said the Queen, "and he shall tell you his
history,'
As they walked off together, Alice heard the King say in a low
voice, to the company generally, "You are all pardoned.' "Come,
THAT'S a good thing' she said to herself, for she had felt quite
unhappy at the number of executions the Queen had ordered.
They very soon came upon a Gryphon, lying fast asleep in the
sun. IF you don't know what a Gryphon is, look at the picture.
"Up, lazy thing' said the Queen, "and take this young lady to
see the Mock Turtle, and to hear his history. I must go back and
see after some executions I have ordered' and she walked off,
leaving Alice alone with the Gryphon. Alice did not quite like
the look of the creature, but on the whole she thought it would
be quite as safe to stay with it as to go after that savage
Queen so she waited.
The Gryphon sat up and rubbed its eyes then it watched the
Queen till she was out of sight then it chuckled. "What fun'
said the Gryphon, half to itself, half to Alice.
"What IS the fun?' said Alice.
"Why, SHE,' said the Gryphon. "It's all her fancy, that they
never executes nobody, you know. Come on'
"Everybody says "come on" here,' thought Alice, as she went
slowly after it "I never was so ordered about in all my life,
never'
They had not gone far before they saw the Mock Turtle in the
distance, sitting sad and lonely on a little ledge of rock, and,
as they came nearer, Alice could hear him sighing as if his heart
would break. She pitied him deeply. "What is his sorrow?' she
asked the Gryphon, and the Gryphon answered, very nearly in the
same words as before, "It's all his fancy, that he hasn't got
no sorrow, you know. Come on'
So they went up to the Mock Turtle, who looked at them with
large eyes full of tears, but said nothing.
"This here young lady,' said the Gryphon, "she wants for to
know your history, she do.'
"I'll tell it her,' said the Mock Turtle in a deep, hollow
tone "sit down, both of you, and don't speak a word till I've
finished.'
So they sat down, and nobody spoke for some minutes. Alice
thought to herself, "I don't see how he can EVEN finish, if he
doesn't begin.' But she waited patiently.
"Once,' said the Mock Turtle at last, with a deep sigh, "I was
a real Turtle.'
These words were followed by a very long silence, broken only
by an occasional exclamation of "Hjckrrh' from the Gryphon, and
the constant heavy sobbing of the Mock Turtle. Alice was very
nearly getting up and saying, "Thank you, sir, for your
interesting story,' but she could not help thinking there MUST be
more to come, so she sat still and said nothing.
"When we were little,' the Mock Turtle went on at last, more
calmly, though still sobbing a little now and then, "we went to
school in the sea. The master was an old Turtlewe used to call
him Tortoise'
"Why did you call him Tortoise, if he wasn't one?' Alice asked.
"We called him Tortoise because he taught us,' said the Mock
Turtle angrily "really you are very dull'
"You ought to be ashamed of yourself for asking such a simple
question,' added the Gryphon and then they both sat silent and
looked at poor Alice, who felt ready to sink into the earth. At
last the Gryphon said to the Mock Turtle, "Drive on, old fellow
Don't be all day about it' and he went on in these words
"Yes, we went to school in the sea, though you mayn't believe
it'
"I never said I didn't' interrupted Alice.
"You did,' said the Mock Turtle.
"Hold your tongue' added the Gryphon, before Alice could speak
again. The Mock Turtle went on.
"We had the best of educationsin fact, we went to school
every day'
"I'VE been to a dayschool, too,' said Alice "you needn't be
so proud as all that.'
"With extras?' asked the Mock Turtle a little anxiously.
"Yes,' said Alice, "we learned French and music.'
"And washing?' said the Mock Turtle.
"Certainly not' said Alice indignantly.
"Ah then yours wasn't a really good school,' said the Mock
Turtle in a tone of great relief. "Now at OURS they had at the
end of the bill, "French, music, AND WASHINGextra."'
"You couldn't have wanted it much,' said Alice "living at the
bottom of the sea.'
"I couldn't afford to learn it.' said the Mock Turtle with a
sigh. "I only took the regular course.'
"What was that?' inquired Alice.
"Reeling and Writhing, of course, to begin with,' the Mock
Turtle replied "and then the different branches of Arithmetic
Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision.'
"I never heard of "Uglification,"' Alice ventured to say. "What is it?'
The Gryphon lifted up both its paws in surprise. "What Never
heard of uglifying' it exclaimed. "You know what to beautify is,
I suppose?'
"Yes,' said Alice doubtfully "it meanstomakeanythingprettier.'
"Well, then,' the Gryphon went on, "if you don't know what to
uglify is, you ARE a simpleton.'
Alice did not feel encouraged to ask any more questions about
it, so she turned to the Mock Turtle, and said "What else had you
to learn?'
"Well, there was Mystery,' the Mock Turtle replied, counting
off the subjects on his flappers, "Mystery, ancient and modern,
with Seaography then Drawlingthe Drawlingmaster was an old
congereel, that used to come once a week HE taught us
Drawling, Stretching, and Fainting in Coils.'
"What was THAT like?' said Alice.
"Well, I can't show it you myself,' the Mock Turtle said "I'm
too stiff. And the Gryphon never learnt it.'
"Hadn't time,' said the Gryphon "I went to the Classics
master, though. He was an old crab, HE was.'
"I never went to him,' the Mock Turtle said with a sigh "he
taught Laughing and Grief, they used to say.'
"So he did, so he did,' said the Gryphon, sighing in his turn
and both creatures hid their faces in their paws.
"And how many hours a day did you do lessons?' said Alice, in a
hurry to change the subject.
"Ten hours the first day,' said the Mock Turtle "nine the
next, and so on.'
"What a curious plan' exclaimed Alice.
"That's the reason they're called lessons,' the Gryphon
remarked "because they lessen from day to day.'
This was quite a new idea to Alice, and she thought it over a
little before she made her next remark. "Then the eleventh day
must have been a holiday?'
"Of course it was,' said the Mock Turtle.
"And how did you manage on the twelfth?' Alice went on eagerly.
"That's enough about lessons,' the Gryphon interrupted in a
very decided tone "tell her something about the games now.'
CHAPTER X
The Lobster Quadrille
The Mock Turtle sighed deeply, and drew the back of one flapper
across his eyes. He looked at Alice, and tried to speak, but for
a minute or two sobs choked his voice. "Same as if he had a bone
in his throat,' said the Gryphon and it set to work shaking him
and punching him in the back. At last the Mock Turtle recovered
his voice, and, with tears running down his cheeks, he went on
again
"You may not have lived much under the sea' "I haven't,' said Alice
"and perhaps you were never even introduced to a lobster'
Alice began to say "I once tasted' but checked herself hastily,
and said "No, never' "so you can have no idea what a delightful
thing a Lobster Quadrille is'
"No, indeed,' said Alice. "What sort of a dance is it?'
"Why,' said the Gryphon, "you first form into a line along the seashore'
"Two lines' cried the Mock Turtle. "Seals, turtles, salmon, and so on
then, when you've cleared all the jellyfish out of the way'
"THAT generally takes some time,' interrupted the Gryphon.
"you advance twice'
"Each with a lobster as a partner' cried the Gryphon.
"Of course,' the Mock Turtle said "advance twice, set to
partners'
"change lobsters, and retire in same order,' continued the
Gryphon.
"Then, you know,' the Mock Turtle went on, "you throw the'
"The lobsters' shouted the Gryphon, with a bound into the air.
"as far out to sea as you can'
"Swim after them' screamed the Gryphon.
"Turn a somersault in the sea' cried the Mock Turtle,
capering wildly about.
"Change lobster's again' yelled the Gryphon at the top of its voice.
"Back to land again, and that's all the first figure,' said the
Mock Turtle, suddenly dropping his voice and the two creatures,
who had been jumping about like mad things all this time, sat
down again very sadly and quietly, and looked at Alice.
"It must be a very pretty dance,' said Alice timidly.
"Would you like to see a little of it?' said the Mock Turtle.
"Very much indeed,' said Alice.
"Come, let's try the first figure' said the Mock Turtle to the
Gryphon. "We can do without lobsters, you know. Which shall
sing?'
"Oh, YOU sing,' said the Gryphon. "I've forgotten the words.'
So they began solemnly dancing round and round Alice, every now
and then treading on her toes when they passed too close, and
waving their forepaws to mark the time, while the Mock Turtle
sang this, very slowly and sadly
""Will you walk a little faster?" said a whiting to a snail.
"There's a porpoise close behind us, and he's treading on my
tail.
See how eagerly the lobsters and the turtles all advance
They are waiting on the shinglewill you come and join the
dance?
Will you, won't you, will you, won't you, will you join the
dance?
Will you, won't you, will you, won't you, won't you join the
dance?
"You can really have no notion how delightful it will be
When they take us up and throw us, with the lobsters, out to
sea"
But the snail replied "Too far, too far" and gave a look
askance
Said he thanked the whiting kindly, but he would not join the
dance.
Would not, could not, would not, could not, would not join
the dance.
Would not, could not, would not, could not, could not join
the dance.
""What matters it how far we go?" his scaly friend replied.
"There is another shore, you know, upon the other side.
The further off from England the nearer is to France
Then turn not pale, beloved snail, but come and join the dance.
Will you, won't you, will you, won't you, will you join the
dance?
Will you, won't you, will you, won't you, won't you join the
dance?"'
"Thank you, it's a very interesting dance to watch,' said
Alice, feeling very glad that it was over at last "and I do so
like that curious song about the whiting'
"Oh, as to the whiting,' said the Mock Turtle, "theyyou've
seen them, of course?'
"Yes,' said Alice, "I've often seen them at dinn' she
checked herself hastily.
"I don't know where Dinn may be,' said the Mock Turtle, "but
if you've seen them so often, of course you know what they're
like.'
"I believe so,' Alice replied thoughtfully. "They have their
tails in their mouthsand they're all over crumbs.'
"You're wrong about the crumbs,' said the Mock Turtle
"crumbs would all wash off in the sea. But they HAVE their tails
in their mouths and the reason is' here the Mock Turtle
yawned and shut his eyes."Tell her about the reason and all
that,' he said to the Gryphon.
"The reason is,' said the Gryphon, "that they WOULD go with
the lobsters to the dance. So they got thrown out to sea. So
they had to fall a long way. So they got their tails fast in
their mouths. So they couldn't get them out again. That's all.'
"Thank you,' said Alice, "it's very interesting. I never knew
so much about a whiting before.'
"I can tell you more than that, if you like,' said the
Gryphon. "Do you know why it's called a whiting?'
"I never thought about it,' said Alice. "Why?'
"IT DOES THE BOOTS AND SHOES.' the Gryphon replied very
solemnly.
Alice was thoroughly puzzled. "Does the boots and shoes' she
repeated in a wondering tone.
"Why, what are YOUR shoes done with?' said the Gryphon. "I
mean, what makes them so shiny?'
Alice looked down at them, and considered a little before she
gave her answer. "They're done with blacking, I believe.'
"Boots and shoes under the sea,' the Gryphon went on in a deep
voice, "are done with a whiting. Now you know.'
"And what are they made of?' Alice asked in a tone of great
curiosity.
"Soles and eels, of course,' the Gryphon replied rather
impatiently "any shrimp could have told you that.'
"If I'd been the whiting,' said Alice, whose thoughts were
still running on the song, "I'd have said to the porpoise, "Keep
back, please we don't want YOU with us"'
"They were obliged to have him with them,' the Mock Turtle
said "no wise fish would go anywhere without a porpoise.'
"Wouldn't it really?' said Alice in a tone of great surprise.
"Of course not,' said the Mock Turtle "why, if a fish came
to ME, and told me he was going a journey, I should say "With
what porpoise?"'
"Don't you mean "purpose"?' said Alice.
"I mean what I say,' the Mock Turtle replied in an offended
tone. And the Gryphon added "Come, let's hear some of YOUR
adventures.'
"I could tell you my adventuresbeginning from this morning,'
said Alice a little timidly "but it's no use going back to
yesterday, because I was a different person then.'
"Explain all that,' said the Mock Turtle.
"No, no The adventures first,' said the Gryphon in an
impatient tone "explanations take such a dreadful time.'
So Alice began telling them her adventures from the time when
she first saw the White Rabbit. She was a little nervous about
it just at first, the two creatures got so close to her, one on
each side, and opened their eyes and mouths so VERY wide, but she
gained courage as she went on. Her listeners were perfectly
quiet till she got to the part about her repeating "YOU ARE OLD,
FATHER WILLIAM,' to the Caterpillar, and the words all coming
different, and then the Mock Turtle drew a long breath, and said
"That's very curious.'
"It's all about as curious as it can be,' said the Gryphon.
"It all came different' the Mock Turtle repeated
thoughtfully. "I should like to hear her try and repeat
something now. Tell her to begin.' He looked at the Gryphon as
if he thought it had some kind of authority over Alice.
"Stand up and repeat "'TIS THE VOICE OF THE SLUGGARD,"' said
the Gryphon.
"How the creatures order one about, and make one repeat
lessons' thought Alice "I might as well be at school at once.'
However, she got up, and began to repeat it, but her head was so
full of the Lobster Quadrille, that she hardly knew what she was
saying, and the words came very queer indeed
"'Tis the voice of the Lobster I heard him declare,
"You have baked me too brown, I must sugar my hair."
As a duck with its eyelids, so he with his nose
Trims his belt and his buttons, and turns out his toes.'
[later editions continued as follows
When the sands are all dry, he is gay as a lark,
And will talk in contemptuous tones of the Shark,
But, when the tide rises and sharks are around,
His voice has a timid and tremulous sound.]
"That's different from what I used to say when I was a child,'
said the Gryphon.
"Well, I never heard it before,' said the Mock Turtle "but it
sounds uncommon nonsense.'
Alice said nothing she had sat down with her face in her
hands, wondering if anything would EVER happen in a natural way
again.
"I should like to have it explained,' said the Mock Turtle.
"She can't explain it,' said the Gryphon hastily. "Go on with
the next verse.'
"But about his toes?' the Mock Turtle persisted. "How COULD
he turn them out with his nose, you know?'
"It's the first position in dancing.' Alice said but was
dreadfully puzzled by the whole thing, and longed to change the
subject.
"Go on with the next verse,' the Gryphon repeated impatiently
"it begins "I passed by his garden."'
Alice did not dare to disobey, though she felt sure it would
all come wrong, and she went on in a trembling voice
"I passed by his garden, and marked, with one eye,
How the Owl and the Panther were sharing a pie'
[later editions continued as follows
The Panther took piecrust, and gravy, and meat,
While the Owl had the dish as its share of the treat.
When the pie was all finished, the Owl, as a boon,
Was kindly permitted to pocket the spoon
While the Panther received knife and fork with a growl,
And concluded the banquet]
"What IS the use of repeating all that stuff,' the Mock Turtle
interrupted, "if you don't explain it as you go on? It's by far
the most confusing thing I ever heard'
"Yes, I think you'd better leave off,' said the Gryphon and
Alice was only too glad to do so.
"Shall we try another figure of the Lobster Quadrille?' the
Gryphon went on. "Or would you like the Mock Turtle to sing you
a song?'
"Oh, a song, please, if the Mock Turtle would be so kind,'
Alice replied, so eagerly that the Gryphon said, in a rather
offended tone, "Hm No accounting for tastes Sing her
"Turtle Soup," will you, old fellow?'
The Mock Turtle sighed deeply, and began, in a voice sometimes
choked with sobs, to sing this
"Beautiful Soup, so rich and green,
Waiting in a hot tureen
Who for such dainties would not stoop?
Soup of the evening, beautiful Soup
Soup of the evening, beautiful Soup
Beauootiful Soooop
Beauootiful Soooop
Soooop of the eeevening,
Beautiful, beautiful Soup
"Beautiful Soup Who cares for fish,
Game, or any other dish?
Who would not give all else for two p
ennyworth only of beautiful Soup?
Pennyworth only of beautiful Soup?
Beauootiful Soooop
Beauootiful Soooop
Soooop of the eeevening,
Beautiful, beautiFUL SOUP'
"Chorus again' cried the Gryphon, and the Mock Turtle had
just begun to repeat it, when a cry of "The trial's beginning'
was heard in the distance.
"Come on' cried the Gryphon, and, taking Alice by the hand,
it hurried off, without waiting for the end of the song.
"What trial is it?' Alice panted as she ran but the Gryphon
only answered "Come on' and ran the faster, while more and more
faintly came, carried on the breeze that followed them, the
melancholy words
"Soooop of the eeevening,
Beautiful, beautiful Soup'
CHAPTER XI
Who Stole the Tarts?
The King and Queen of Hearts were seated on their throne when
they arrived, with a great crowd assembled about themall sorts
of little birds and beasts, as well as the whole pack of cards
the Knave was standing before them, in chains, with a soldier on
each side to guard him and near the King was the White Rabbit,
with a trumpet in one hand, and a scroll of parchment in the
other. In the very middle of the court was a table, with a large
dish of tarts upon it they looked so good, that it made Alice
quite hungry to look at them"I wish they'd get the trial done,'
she thought, "and hand round the refreshments' But there seemed
to be no chance of this, so she began looking at everything about
her, to pass away the time.
Alice had never been in a court of justice before, but she had
read about them in books, and she was quite pleased to find that
she knew the name of nearly everything there. "That's the
judge,' she said to herself, "because of his great wig.'
The judge, by the way, was the King and as he wore his crown
over the wig, look at the frontispiece if you want to see how he
did it, he did not look at all comfortable, and it was certainly
not becoming.
"And that's the jurybox,' thought Alice, "and those twelve
creatures,' she was obliged to say "creatures,' you see, because
some of them were animals, and some were birds, "I suppose they
are the jurors.' She said this last word two or three times over
to herself, being rather proud of it for she thought, and
rightly too, that very few little girls of her age knew the
meaning of it at all. However, "jurymen' would have done just
as well.
The twelve jurors were all writing very busily on slates.
"What are they doing?' Alice whispered to the Gryphon. "They
can't have anything to put down yet, before the trial's begun.'
"They're putting down their names,' the Gryphon whispered in
reply, "for fear they should forget them before the end of the
trial.'
"Stupid things' Alice began in a loud, indignant voice, but
she stopped hastily, for the White Rabbit cried out, "Silence in
the court' and the King put on his spectacles and looked
anxiously round, to make out who was talking.
Alice could see, as well as if she were looking over their
shoulders, that all the jurors were writing down "stupid things'
on their slates, and she could even make out that one of them
didn't know how to spell "stupid,' and that he had to ask his
neighbour to tell him. "A nice muddle their slates'll be in
before the trial's over' thought Alice.
One of the jurors had a pencil that squeaked. This of course,
Alice could not stand, and she went round the court and got
behind him, and very soon found an opportunity of taking it
away. She did it so quickly that the poor little juror it was
Bill, the Lizard could not make out at all what had become of
it so, after hunting all about for it, he was obliged to write
with one finger for the rest of the day and this was of very
little use, as it left no mark on the slate.
"Herald, read the accusation' said the King.
On this the White Rabbit blew three blasts on the trumpet, and
then unrolled the parchment scroll, and read as follows
"The Queen of Hearts, she made some tarts,
All on a summer day
The Knave of Hearts, he stole those tarts,
And took them quite away'
"Consider your verdict,' the King said to the jury.
"Not yet, not yet' the Rabbit hastily interrupted. "There's
a great deal to come before that'
"Call the first witness,' said the King and the White Rabbit
blew three blasts on the trumpet, and called out, "First
witness'
The first witness was the Hatter. He came in with a teacup in
one hand and a piece of breadandbutter in the other. "I beg
pardon, your Majesty,' he began, "for bringing these in but I
hadn't quite finished my tea when I was sent for.'
"You ought to have finished,' said the King. "When did you
begin?'
The Hatter looked at the March Hare, who had followed him into
the court, arminarm with the Dormouse. "Fourteenth of March, I
think it was,' he said.
"Fifteenth,' said the March Hare.
"Sixteenth,' added the Dormouse.
"Write that down,' the King said to the jury, and the jury
eagerly wrote down all three dates on their slates, and then
added them up, and reduced the answer to shillings and pence.
"Take off your hat,' the King said to the Hatter.
"It isn't mine,' said the Hatter.
"Stolen' the King exclaimed, turning to the jury, who
instantly made a memorandum of the fact.
"I keep them to sell,' the Hatter added as an explanation
"I've none of my own. I'm a hatter.'
Here the Queen put on her spectacles, and began staring at the
Hatter, who turned pale and fidgeted.
"Give your evidence,' said the King "and don't be nervous, or
I'll have you executed on the spot.'
This did not seem to encourage the witness at all he kept
shifting from one foot to the other, looking uneasily at the
Queen, and in his confusion he bit a large piece out of his
teacup instead of the breadandbutter.
Just at this moment Alice felt a very curious sensation, which
puzzled her a good deal until she made out what it was she was
beginning to grow larger again, and she thought at first she
would get up and leave the court but on second thoughts she
decided to remain where she was as long as there was room for
her.
"I wish you wouldn't squeeze so.' said the Dormouse, who was
sitting next to her. "I can hardly breathe.'
"I can't help it,' said Alice very meekly "I'm growing.'
"You've no right to grow here,' said the Dormouse.
"Don't talk nonsense,' said Alice more boldly "you know
you're growing too.'
"Yes, but I grow at a reasonable pace,' said the Dormouse
"not in that ridiculous fashion.' And he got up very sulkily
and crossed over to the other side of the court.
All this time the Queen had never left off staring at the
Hatter, and, just as the Dormouse crossed the court, she said to
one of the officers of the court, "Bring me the list of the
singers in the last concert' on which the wretched Hatter
trembled so, that he shook both his shoes off.
"Give your evidence,' the King repeated angrily, "or I'll have
you executed, whether you're nervous or not.'
"I'm a poor man, your Majesty,' the Hatter began, in a
trembling voice, "and I hadn't begun my teanot above a week
or soand what with the breadandbutter getting so thinand
the twinkling of the tea'
"The twinkling of the what?' said the King.
"It began with the tea,' the Hatter replied.
"Of course twinkling begins with a T' said the King sharply.
"Do you take me for a dunce? Go on'
"I'm a poor man,' the Hatter went on, "and most things
twinkled after thatonly the March Hare said'
"I didn't' the March Hare interrupted in a great hurry.
"You did' said the Hatter.
"I deny it' said the March Hare.
"He denies it,' said the King "leave out that part.'
"Well, at any rate, the Dormouse said' the Hatter went on,
looking anxiously round to see if he would deny it too but the
Dormouse denied nothing, being fast asleep.
"After that,' continued the Hatter, "I cut some more bread
andbutter'
"But what did the Dormouse say?' one of the jury asked.
"That I can't remember,' said the Hatter.
"You MUST remember,' remarked the King, "or I'll have you
executed.'
The miserable Hatter dropped his teacup and breadandbutter,
and went down on one knee. "I'm a poor man, your Majesty,' he
began.
"You're a very poor speaker,' said the King.
Here one of the guineapigs cheered, and was immediately
suppressed by the officers of the court. As that is rather a
hard word, I will just explain to you how it was done. They had
a large canvas bag, which tied up at the mouth with strings
into this they slipped the guineapig, head first, and then sat
upon it.
"I'm glad I've seen that done,' thought Alice. "I've so often
read in the newspapers, at the end of trials, "There was some
attempts at applause, which was immediately suppressed by the
officers of the court," and I never understood what it meant
till now.'
"If that's all you know about it, you may stand down,'
continued the King.
"I can't go no lower,' said the Hatter "I'm on the floor, as
it is.'
"Then you may SIT down,' the King replied.
Here the other guineapig cheered, and was suppressed.
"Come, that finished the guineapigs' thought Alice. "Now we
shall get on better.'
"I'd rather finish my tea,' said the Hatter, with an anxious
look at the Queen, who was reading the list of singers.
"You may go,' said the King, and the Hatter hurriedly left the
court, without even waiting to put his shoes on.
"and just take his head off outside,' the Queen added to one
of the officers but the Hatter was out of sight before the
officer could get to the door.
"Call the next witness' said the King.
The next witness was the Duchess's cook. She carried the
pepperbox in her hand, and Alice guessed who it was, even before
she got into the court, by the way the people near the door began
sneezing all at once.
"Give your evidence,' said the King.
"Shan't,' said the cook.
The King looked anxiously at the White Rabbit, who said in a
low voice, "Your Majesty must crossexamine THIS witness.'
"Well, if I must, I must,' the King said, with a melancholy
air, and, after folding his arms and frowning at the cook till
his eyes were nearly out of sight, he said in a deep voice, "What
are tarts made of?'
"Pepper, mostly,' said the cook.
"Treacle,' said a sleepy voice behind her.
"Collar that Dormouse,' the Queen shrieked out. "Behead that
Dormouse Turn that Dormouse out of court Suppress him Pinch
him Off with his whiskers'
For some minutes the whole court was in confusion, getting the
Dormouse turned out, and, by the time they had settled down
again, the cook had disappeared.
"Never mind' said the King, with an air of great relief.
"Call the next witness.' And he added in an undertone to the
Queen, "Really, my dear, YOU must crossexamine the next witness.
It quite makes my forehead ache'
Alice watched the White Rabbit as he fumbled over the list,
feeling very curious to see what the next witness would be like,
"for they haven't got much evidence YET,' she said to herself.
Imagine her surprise, when the White Rabbit read out, at the top
of his shrill little voice, the name "Alice'
CHAPTER XII
Alice's Evidence
"Here' cried Alice, quite forgetting in the flurry of the
moment how large she had grown in the last few minutes, and she
jumped up in such a hurry that she tipped over the jurybox with
the edge of her skirt, upsetting all the jurymen on to the heads
of the crowd below, and there they lay sprawling about, reminding
her very much of a globe of goldfish she had accidentally upset
the week before.
"Oh, I BEG your pardon' she exclaimed in a tone of great
dismay, and began picking them up again as quickly as she could,
for the accident of the goldfish kept running in her head, and
she had a vague sort of idea that they must be collected at once
and put back into the jurybox, or they would die.
"The trial cannot proceed,' said the King in a very grave
voice, "until all the jurymen are back in their proper places
ALL,' he repeated with great emphasis, looking hard at Alice as
he said do.
Alice looked at the jurybox, and saw that, in her haste, she
had put the Lizard in head downwards, and the poor little thing
was waving its tail about in a melancholy way, being quite unable
to move. She soon got it out again, and put it right "not that
it signifies much,' she said to herself "I should think it
would be QUITE as much use in the trial one way up as the other.'
As soon as the jury had a little recovered from the shock of
being upset, and their slates and pencils had been found and
handed back to them, they set to work very diligently to write
out a history of the accident, all except the Lizard, who seemed
too much overcome to do anything but sit with its mouth open,
gazing up into the roof of the court.
"What do you know about this business?' the King said to
Alice.
"Nothing,' said Alice.
"Nothing WHATEVER?' persisted the King.
"Nothing whatever,' said Alice.
"That's very important,' the King said, turning to the jury.
They were just beginning to write this down on their slates, when
the White Rabbit interrupted "UNimportant, your Majesty means,
of course,' he said in a very respectful tone, but frowning and
making faces at him as he spoke.
"UNimportant, of course, I meant,' the King hastily said, and
went on to himself in an undertone, "importantunimportant
unimportantimportant' as if he were trying which word
sounded best.
Some of the jury wrote it down "important,' and some
"unimportant.' Alice could see this, as she was near enough to
look over their slates "but it doesn't matter a bit,' she
thought to herself.
At this moment the King, who had been for some time busily
writing in his notebook, cackled out "Silence' and read out
from his book, "Rule Fortytwo. ALL PERSONS MORE THAN A MILE
HIGH TO LEAVE THE COURT.'
Everybody looked at Alice.
"I'M not a mile high,' said Alice.
"You are,' said the King.
"Nearly two miles high,' added the Queen.
"Well, I shan't go, at any rate,' said Alice "besides,
that's not a regular rule you invented it just now.'
"It's the oldest rule in the book,' said the King.
"Then it ought to be Number One,' said Alice.
The King turned pale, and shut his notebook hastily.
"Consider your verdict,' he said to the jury, in a low, trembling
voice.
"There's more evidence to come yet, please your Majesty,' said
the White Rabbit, jumping up in a great hurry "this paper has
just been picked up.'
"What's in it?' said the Queen.
"I haven't opened it yet,' said the White Rabbit, "but it seems
to be a letter, written by the prisoner toto somebody.'
"It must have been that,' said the King, "unless it was
written to nobody, which isn't usual, you know.'
"Who is it directed to?' said one of the jurymen.
"It isn't directed at all,' said the White Rabbit "in fact,
there's nothing written on the OUTSIDE.' He unfolded the paper
as he spoke, and added "It isn't a letter, after all it's a set
of verses.'
"Are they in the prisoner's handwriting?' asked another of
they jurymen.
"No, they're not,' said the White Rabbit, "and that's the
queerest thing about it.' The jury all looked puzzled.
"He must have imitated somebody else's hand,' said the King.
The jury all brightened up again.
"Please your Majesty,' said the Knave, "I didn't write it, and
they can't prove I did there's no name signed at the end.'
"If you didn't sign it,' said the King, "that only makes the
matter worse. You MUST have meant some mischief, or else you'd
have signed your name like an honest man.'
There was a general clapping of hands at this it was the
first really clever thing the King had said that day.
"That PROVES his guilt,' said the Queen.
"It proves nothing of the sort' said Alice. "Why, you don't
even know what they're about'
"Read them,' said the King.
The White Rabbit put on his spectacles. "Where shall I begin,
please your Majesty?' he asked.
"Begin at the beginning,' the King said gravely, "and go on
till you come to the end then stop.'
These were the verses the White Rabbit read
"They told me you had been to her,
And mentioned me to him
She gave me a good character,
But said I could not swim.
He sent them word I had not gone
We know it to be true
If she should push the matter on,
What would become of you?
I gave her one, they gave him two,
You gave us three or more
They all returned from him to you,
Though they were mine before.
If I or she should chance to be
Involved in this affair,
He trusts to you to set them free,
Exactly as we were.
My notion was that you had been
Before she had this fit
An obstacle that came between
Him, and ourselves, and it.
Don't let him know she liked them best,
For this must ever be
A secret, kept from all the rest,
Between yourself and me.'
"That's the most important piece of evidence we've heard yet,'
said the King, rubbing his hands "so now let the jury'
"If any one of them can explain it,' said Alice, she had
grown so large in the last few minutes that she wasn't a bit
afraid of interrupting him, "I'll give him sixpence. I don't
believe there's an atom of meaning in it.'
The jury all wrote down on their slates, "SHE doesn't believe
there's an atom of meaning in it,' but none of them attempted to
explain the paper.
"If there's no meaning in it,' said the King, "that saves a
world of trouble, you know, as we needn't try to find any. And
yet I don't know,' he went on, spreading out the verses on his
knee, and looking at them with one eye "I seem to see some
meaning in them, after all. "SAID I COULD NOT SWIM" you
can't swim, can you?' he added, turning to the Knave.
The Knave shook his head sadly. "Do I look like it?' he said.
Which he certainly did NOT, being made entirely of cardboard.
"All right, so far,' said the King, and he went on muttering
over the verses to himself ""WE KNOW IT TO BE TRUE" that's
the jury, of course "I GAVE HER ONE, THEY GAVE HIM TWO" why,
that must be what he did with the tarts, you know'
"But, it goes on "THEY ALL RETURNED FROM HIM TO YOU,"' said
Alice.
"Why, there they are' said the King triumphantly, pointing to
the tarts on the table. "Nothing can be clearer than THAT.
Then again"BEFORE SHE HAD THIS FIT" you never had fits, my
dear, I think?' he said to the Queen.
"Never' said the Queen furiously, throwing an inkstand at the
Lizard as she spoke. The unfortunate little Bill had left off
writing on his slate with one finger, as he found it made no
mark but he now hastily began again, using the ink, that was
trickling down his face, as long as it lasted.
"Then the words don't FIT you,' said the King, looking round
the court with a smile. There was a dead silence.
"It's a pun' the King added in an offended tone, and
everybody laughed, "Let the jury consider their verdict,' the
King said, for about the twentieth time that day.
"No, no' said the Queen. "Sentence firstverdict afterwards.'
"Stuff and nonsense' said Alice loudly. "The idea of having
the sentence first'
"Hold your tongue' said the Queen, turning purple.
"I won't' said Alice.
"Off with her head' the Queen shouted at the top of her voice.
Nobody moved.
"Who cares for you?' said Alice, she had grown to her full
size by this time. "You're nothing but a pack of cards'
At this the whole pack rose up into the air, and came flying
down upon her she gave a little scream, half of fright and half
of anger, and tried to beat them off, and found herself lying on
the bank, with her head in the lap of her sister, who was gently
brushing away some dead leaves that had fluttered down from the
trees upon her face.
"Wake up, Alice dear' said her sister "Why, what a long
sleep you've had'
"Oh, I've had such a curious dream' said Alice, and she told
her sister, as well as she could remember them, all these strange
Adventures of hers that you have just been reading about and
when she had finished, her sister kissed her, and said, "It WAS a
curious dream, dear, certainly but now run in to your tea it's
getting late.' So Alice got up and ran off, thinking while she
ran, as well she might, what a wonderful dream it had been.
But her sister sat still just as she left her, leaning her
head on her hand, watching the setting sun, and thinking of
little Alice and all her wonderful Adventures, till she too began
dreaming after a fashion, and this was her dream
First, she dreamed of little Alice herself, and once again the
tiny hands were clasped upon her knee, and the bright eager eyes
were looking up into hersshe could hear the very tones of her
voice, and see that queer little toss of her head to keep back
the wandering hair that WOULD always get into her eyesand
still as she listened, or seemed to listen, the whole place
around her became alive the strange creatures of her little
sister's dream.
The long grass rustled at her feet as the White Rabbit hurried
bythe frightened Mouse splashed his way through the
neighbouring poolshe could hear the rattle of the teacups as
the March Hare and his friends shared their neverending meal,
and the shrill voice of the Queen ordering off her unfortunate
guests to executiononce more the pigbaby was sneezing on the
Duchess's knee, while plates and dishes crashed around itonce
more the shriek of the Gryphon, the squeaking of the Lizard's
slatepencil, and the choking of the suppressed guineapigs,
filled the air, mixed up with the distant sobs of the miserable
Mock Turtle.
So she sat on, with closed eyes, and half believed herself in
Wonderland, though she knew she had but to open them again, and
all would change to dull realitythe grass would be only
rustling in the wind, and the pool rippling to the waving of the
reedsthe rattling teacups would change to tinkling sheep
bells, and the Queen's shrill cries to the voice of the shepherd
boyand the sneeze of the baby, the shriek of the Gryphon, and
all thy other queer noises, would change she knew to the
confused clamour of the busy farmyardwhile the lowing of the
cattle in the distance would take the place of the Mock Turtle's
heavy sobs.
Lastly, she pictured to herself how this same little sister of
hers would, in the aftertime, be herself a grown woman and how
she would keep, through all her riper years, the simple and
loving heart of her childhood and how she would gather about
her other little children, and make THEIR eyes bright and eager
with many a strange tale, perhaps even with the dream of
Wonderland of long ago and how she would feel with all their
simple sorrows, and find a pleasure in all their simple joys,
remembering her own childlife, and the happy summer days.
THE END
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by Oscar Wilde
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The Picture of Dorian Gray
by
Oscar Wilde
THE PREFACE
The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal
the artist is art's aim. The critic is he who can translate into another
manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.
The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography.
Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without
being charming. This is a fault.
Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated.
For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things
mean only beauty.
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.
Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.
The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban
seeing his own face in a glass.
The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of
Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass. The moral life of man
forms part of the subjectmatter of the artist, but the morality
of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium.
No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true
can be proved. No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical
sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.
No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything.
Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art.
Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art.
From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art
of the musician. From the point of view of feeling, the actor's
craft is the type. All art is at once surface and symbol.
Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.
Those who read the symbol do so at their peril.
It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.
Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work
is new, complex, and vital. When critics disagree,
the artist is in accord with himself. We can forgive a man
for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it.
The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one
admires it intensely.
All art is quite useless.
OSCAR WILDE
CHAPTER 
The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when
the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden,
there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac,
or the more delicate perfume of the pinkflowering thorn.
From the corner of the divan of Persian saddlebags on which
he was lying, smoking, as was his custom, innumerable cigarettes,
Lord Henry Wotton could just catch the gleam of the honeysweet and
honeycoloured blossoms of a laburnum, whose tremulous branches seemed
hardly able to bear the burden of a beauty so flamelike as theirs
and now and then the fantastic shadows of birds in flight flitted
across the long tussoresilk curtains that were stretched in front
of the huge window, producing a kind of momentary Japanese effect,
and making him think of those pallid, jadefaced painters of Tokyo who,
through the medium of an art that is necessarily immobile,
seek to convey the sense of swiftness and motion. The sullen murmur
of the bees shouldering their way through the long unmown grass,
or circling with monotonous insistence round the dusty gilt horns of
the straggling woodbine, seemed to make the stillness more oppressive.
The dim roar of London was like the bourdon note of a distant organ.
In the centre of the room, clamped to an upright easel, stood the fulllength
portrait of a young man of extraordinary personal beauty, and in front of it,
some little distance away, was sitting the artist himself, Basil Hallward,
whose sudden disappearance some years ago caused, at the time, such public
excitement and gave rise to so many strange conjectures.
As the painter looked at the gracious and comely form he had so skilfully
mirrored in his art, a smile of pleasure passed across his face, and seemed
about to linger there. But he suddenly started up, and closing his eyes,
placed his fingers upon the lids, as though he sought to imprison within his
brain some curious dream from which he feared he might awake.
"It is your best work, Basil, the best thing you have ever done,"
said Lord Henry languidly. "You must certainly send it next year
to the Grosvenor. The Academy is too large and too vulgar.
Whenever I have gone there, there have been either so many people that I
have not been able to see the pictures, which was dreadful, or so many
pictures that I have not been able to see the people, which was worse.
The Grosvenor is really the only place."
"I don't think I shall send it anywhere," he answered, tossing his head
back in that odd way that used to make his friends laugh at him at Oxford.
"No, I won't send it anywhere."
Lord Henry elevated his eyebrows and looked at him in amazement through
the thin blue wreaths of smoke that curled up in such fanciful whorls
from his heavy, opiumtainted cigarette. "Not send it anywhere?
My dear fellow, why? Have you any reason? What odd chaps you
painters are You do anything in the world to gain a reputation.
As soon as you have one, you seem to want to throw it away.
It is silly of you, for there is only one thing in the world worse
than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.
A portrait like this would set you far above all the young men in England,
and make the old men quite jealous, if old men are ever capable of
any emotion."
"I know you will laugh at me," he replied, "but I really can't exhibit it.
I have put too much of myself into it."
Lord Henry stretched himself out on the divan and laughed.
"Yes, I knew you would but it is quite true, all the same."
"Too much of yourself in it Upon my word, Basil,
I didn't know you were so vain and I really can't see any resemblance
between you, with your rugged strong face and your coalblack hair,
and this young Adonis, who looks as if he was made out of ivory
and roseleaves. Why, my dear Basil, he is a Narcissus, and you
well, of course you have an intellectual expression and all that.
But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins.
Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys
the harmony of any face. The moment one sits down to think,
one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid.
Look at the successful men in any of the learned professions.
How perfectly hideous they are Except, of course, in the Church.
But then in the Church they don't think. A bishop keeps on saying at
the age of eighty what he was told to say when he was a boy of eighteen,
and as a natural consequence he always looks absolutely delightful.
Your mysterious young friend, whose name you have never told me,
but whose picture really fascinates me, never thinks. I feel quite
sure of that. He is some brainless beautiful creature who should be
always here in winter when we have no flowers to look at, and always
here in summer when we want something to chill our intelligence.
Don't flatter yourself, Basil you are not in the least like
him."
"You don't understand me, Harry," answered the artist. "Of course I am
not like him. I know that perfectly well. Indeed, I should be sorry
to look like him. You shrug your shoulders? I am telling you the truth.
There is a fatality about all physical and intellectual distinction,
the sort of fatality that seems to dog through history the faltering
steps of kings. It is better not to be different from one's fellows.
The ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this world. They can sit
at their ease and gape at the play. If they know nothing of victory,
they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat. They live as we
all should liveundisturbed, indifferent, and without disquiet.
They neither bring ruin upon others, nor ever receive it from alien hands.
Your rank and wealth, Harry my brains, such as they aremy art, whatever it
may be worth Dorian Gray's good lookswe shall all suffer for what the gods
have given us, suffer terribly."
"Dorian Gray? Is that his name?" asked Lord Henry, walking across
the studio towards Basil Hallward.
"Yes, that is his name. I didn't intend to tell it to you."
"But why not?"
"Oh, I can't explain. When I like people immensely, I never tell
their names to any one. It is like surrendering a part of them.
I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing
that can make modern life mysterious or marvellous to us.
The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it.
When I leave town now I never tell my people where I am going.
If I did, I would lose all my pleasure. It is a silly habit,
I dare say, but somehow it seems to bring a great deal of romance
into one's life. I suppose you think me awfully foolish
about it?"
"Not at all," answered Lord Henry, "not at all, my dear Basil.
You seem to forget that I am married, and the one charm of marriage is
that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties.
I never know where my wife is, and my wife never knows what I am doing.
When we meetwe do meet occasionally, when we dine out together, or go
down to the Duke'swe tell each other the most absurd stories with the most
serious faces. My wife is very good at itmuch better, in fact, than I am.
She never gets confused over her dates, and I always do. But when she
does find me out, she makes no row at all. I sometimes wish she would
but she merely laughs at me."
"I hate the way you talk about your married life, Harry,"
said Basil Hallward, strolling towards the door that led into
the garden. "I believe that you are really a very good husband,
but that you are thoroughly ashamed of your own virtues.
You are an extraordinary fellow. You never say a moral thing,
and you never do a wrong thing. Your cynicism is simply
a pose."
"Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose I know,"
cried Lord Henry, laughing and the two young men went out into the garden
together and ensconced themselves on a long bamboo seat that stood in the
shade of a tall laurel bush. The sunlight slipped over the polished leaves.
In the grass, white daisies were tremulous.
After a pause, Lord Henry pulled out his watch. "I am afraid I
must be going, Basil," he murmured, "and before I go, I insist
on your answering a question I put to you some time ago."
"What is that?" said the painter, keeping his eyes fixed on the ground.
"You know quite well."
"I do not, Harry."
"Well, I will tell you what it is. I want you to explain to me why you
won't exhibit Dorian Gray's picture. I want the real reason."
"I told you the real reason."
"No, you did not. You said it was because there was too much
of yourself in it. Now, that is childish."
"Harry," said Basil Hallward, looking him straight in the face,
"every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist,
not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion.
It is not he who is revealed by the painter it is rather the painter who,
on the coloured canvas, reveals himself. The reason I will not exhibit
this picture is that I am afraid that I have shown in it the secret of my
own soul."
Lord Henry laughed. "And what is that?" he asked.
"I will tell you," said Hallward but an expression of perplexity
came over his face.
"I am all expectation, Basil," continued his companion,
glancing at him.
"Oh, there is really very little to tell, Harry," answered the painter
"and I am afraid you will hardly understand it. Perhaps you will hardly
believe it."
Lord Henry smiled, and leaning down, plucked a pinkpetalled daisy from
the grass and examined it. "I am quite sure I shall understand it,"
he replied, gazing intently at the little golden, whitefeathered disk,
"and as for believing things, I can believe anything, provided that it is
quite incredible."
The wind shook some blossoms from the trees, and the heavy lilacblooms,
with their clustering stars, moved to and fro in the languid air.
A grasshopper began to chirrup by the wall, and like a blue thread
a long thin dragonfly floated past on its brown gauze wings.
Lord Henry felt as if he could hear Basil Hallward's heart beating,
and wondered what was coming.
"The story is simply this," said the painter after some time.
"Two months ago I went to a crush at Lady Brandon's. You know
we poor artists have to show ourselves in society from time
to time, just to remind the public that we are not savages.
With an evening coat and a white tie, as you told me once, anybody,
even a stockbroker, can gain a reputation for being civilized.
Well, after I had been in the room about ten minutes,
talking to huge overdressed dowagers and tedious academicians,
I suddenly became conscious that some one was looking at me.
I turned halfway round and saw Dorian Gray for the first time.
When our eyes met, I felt that I was growing pale.
A curious sensation of terror came over me. I knew that I
had come face to face with some one whose mere personality
was so fascinating that, if I allowed it to do so, it would
absorb my whole nature, my whole soul, my very art itself.
I did not want any external influence in my life.
You know yourself, Harry, how independent I am by nature.
I have always been my own master had at least always been so,
till I met Dorian Gray. Thenbut I don't know how to explain
it to you. Something seemed to tell me that I was on the verge
of a terrible crisis in my life. I had a strange feeling that
fate had in store for me exquisite joys and exquisite sorrows.
I grew afraid and turned to quit the room. It was not conscience
that made me do so it was a sort of cowardice. I take no
credit to myself for trying to escape."
"Conscience and cowardice are really the same things, Basil.
Conscience is the tradename of the firm. That is all."
"I don't believe that, Harry, and I don't believe you do either.
However, whatever was my motiveand it may have been pride,
for I used to be very proudI certainly struggled to the door.
There, of course, I stumbled against Lady Brandon. 'You are not
going to run away so soon, Mr. Hallward?' she screamed out.
You know her curiously shrill voice?"
"Yes she is a peacock in everything but beauty," said Lord Henry,
pulling the daisy to bits with his long nervous fingers.
"I could not get rid of her. She brought me up to royalties,
and people with stars and garters, and elderly ladies with gigantic
tiaras and parrot noses. She spoke of me as her dearest friend.
I had only met her once before, but she took it into her head to lionize me.
I believe some picture of mine had made a great success at the time,
at least had been chattered about in the penny newspapers, which is
the nineteenthcentury standard of immortality. Suddenly I found myself
face to face with the young man whose personality had so strangely
stirred me. We were quite close, almost touching. Our eyes met again.
It was reckless of me, but I asked Lady Brandon to introduce me to him.
Perhaps it was not so reckless, after all. It was simply inevitable.
We would have spoken to each other without any introduction.
I am sure of that. Dorian told me so afterwards. He, too, felt that we
were destined to know each other."
"And how did Lady Brandon describe this wonderful young man?"
asked his companion. "I know she goes in for giving
a rapid precis of all her guests. I remember her bringing
me up to a truculent and redfaced old gentleman covered
all over with orders and ribbons, and hissing into my ear,
in a tragic whisper which must have been perfectly audible
to everybody in the room, the most astounding details.
I simply fled. I like to find out people for myself.
But Lady Brandon treats her guests exactly as an auctioneer
treats his goods. She either explains them entirely away,
or tells one everything about them except what one wants
to know."
"Poor Lady Brandon You are hard on her, Harry" said Hallward listlessly.
"My dear fellow, she tried to found a salon, and only succeeded
in opening a restaurant. How could I admire her? But tell me,
what did she say about Mr. Dorian Gray?"
"Oh, something like, 'Charming boypoor dear mother and I
absolutely inseparable. Quite forget what he doesafraid he
doesn't do anythingoh, yes, plays the pianoor is it
the violin, dear Mr. Gray?' Neither of us could help laughing,
and we became friends at once."
"Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship,
and it is far the best ending for one," said the young lord,
plucking another daisy.
Hallward shook his head. "You don't understand what friendship is, Harry,"
he murmured"or what enmity is, for that matter. You like every one
that is to say, you are indifferent to every one."
"How horribly unjust of you" cried Lord Henry, tilting his hat back
and looking up at the little clouds that, like ravelled skeins of glossy
white silk, were drifting across the hollowed turquoise of the summer sky.
"Yes horribly unjust of you. I make a great difference between people.
I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for
their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects.
A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies. I have not
got one who is a fool. They are all men of some intellectual power,
and consequently they all appreciate me. Is that very vain of me?
I think it is rather vain."
"I should think it was, Harry. But according to your category I
must be merely an acquaintance."
"My dear old Basil, you are much more than an acquaintance."
"And much less than a friend. A sort of brother, I suppose?"
"Oh, brothers I don't care for brothers. My elder brother won't die,
and my younger brothers seem never to do anything else."
"Harry" exclaimed Hallward, frowning.
"My dear fellow, I am not quite serious. But I can't help detesting
my relations. I suppose it comes from the fact that none of us
can stand other people having the same faults as ourselves.
I quite sympathize with the rage of the English democracy against
what they call the vices of the upper orders. The masses feel
that drunkenness, stupidity, and immorality should be their own
special property, and that if any one of us makes an ass of himself,
he is poaching on their preserves. When poor Southwark got
into the divorce court, their indignation was quite magnificent.
And yet I don't suppose that ten per cent of the proletariat
live correctly."
"I don't agree with a single word that you have said, and, what is more,
Harry, I feel sure you don't either."
Lord Henry stroked his pointed brown beard and tapped the toe
of his patentleather boot with a tasselled ebony cane.
"How English you are Basil That is the second time you
have made that observation. If one puts forward an idea
to a true Englishmanalways a rash thing to dohe never
dreams of considering whether the idea is right or wrong.
The only thing he considers of any importance is whether one
believes it oneself. Now, the value of an idea has nothing
whatsoever to do with the sincerity of the man who expresses it.
Indeed, the probabilities are that the more insincere
the man is, the more purely intellectual will the idea be,
as in that case it will not be coloured by either his wants,
his desires, or his prejudices. However, I don't propose
to discuss politics, sociology, or metaphysics with you.
I like persons better than principles, and I like persons
with no principles better than anything else in the world.
Tell me more about Mr. Dorian Gray. How often do you
see him?"
"Every day. I couldn't be happy if I didn't see him every day.
He is absolutely necessary to me."
"How extraordinary I thought you would never care for anything
but your art."
"He is all my art to me now," said the painter gravely.
"I sometimes think, Harry, that there are only two eras of any
importance in the world's history. The first is the appearance
of a new medium for art, and the second is the appearance
of a new personality for art also. What the invention
of oilpainting was to the Venetians, the face of Antinous
was to late Greek sculpture, and the face of Dorian Gray will
some day be to me. It is not merely that I paint from him,
draw from him, sketch from him. Of course, I have done all that.
But he is much more to me than a model or a sitter.
I won't tell you that I am dissatisfied with what I have done
of him, or that his beauty is such that art cannot express it.
There is nothing that art cannot express, and I know that
the work I have done, since I met Dorian Gray, is good work,
is the best work of my life. But in some curious wayI wonder
will you understand me?his personality has suggested to me
an entirely new manner in art, an entirely new mode of style.
I see things differently, I think of them differently.
I can now recreate life in a way that was hidden from me before.
'A dream of form in days of thought'who is it who says that?
I forget but it is what Dorian Gray has been to me.
The merely visible presence of this ladfor he seems to me
little more than a lad, though he is really over twenty
his merely visible presenceah I wonder can you realize
all that that means? Unconsciously he defines for me
the lines of a fresh school, a school that is to have in it
all the passion of the romantic spirit, all the perfection
of the spirit that is Greek. The harmony of soul and body
how much that is We in our madness have separated the two,
and have invented a realism that is vulgar, an ideality that
is void. Harry if you only knew what Dorian Gray is to me
You remember that landscape of mine, for which Agnew offered
me such a huge price but which I would not part with?
It is one of the best things I have ever done. And why
is it so? Because, while I was painting it, Dorian Gray sat
beside me. Some subtle influence passed from him to me,
and for the first time in my life I saw in the plain
woodland the wonder I had always looked for and always
missed."
"Basil, this is extraordinary I must see Dorian Gray."
Hallward got up from the seat and walked up and down the garden.
After some time he came back. "Harry," he said, "Dorian Gray
is to me simply a motive in art. You might see nothing in him.
I see everything in him. He is never more present in my work than
when no image of him is there. He is a suggestion, as I have said,
of a new manner. I find him in the curves of certain lines,
in the loveliness and subtleties of certain colours.
That is all."
"Then why won't you exhibit his portrait?" asked Lord Henry.
"Because, without intending it, I have put into it some expression
of all this curious artistic idolatry, of which, of course,
I have never cared to speak to him. He knows nothing about it.
He shall never know anything about it. But the world might guess it,
and I will not bare my soul to their shallow prying eyes.
My heart shall never be put under their microscope. There is too much
of myself in the thing, Harrytoo much of myself"
"Poets are not so scrupulous as you are. They know how useful passion
is for publication. Nowadays a broken heart will run to many editions."
"I hate them for it," cried Hallward. "An artist should create
beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them.
We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form
of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty.
Some day I will show the world what it is and for that reason the world
shall never see my portrait of Dorian Gray."
"I think you are wrong, Basil, but I won't argue with you.
It is only the intellectually lost who ever argue. Tell me,
is Dorian Gray very fond of you?"
The painter considered for a few moments. "He likes me,"
he answered after a pause "I know he likes me. Of course I
flatter him dreadfully. I find a strange pleasure in saying
things to him that I know I shall be sorry for having said.
As a rule, he is charming to me, and we sit in the studio and talk
of a thousand things. Now and then, however, he is horribly
thoughtless, and seems to take a real delight in giving me pain.
Then I feel, Harry, that I have given away my whole soul to some
one who treats it as if it were a flower to put in his coat,
a bit of decoration to charm his vanity, an ornament for a
summer's day."
"Days in summer, Basil, are apt to linger," murmured Lord Henry.
"Perhaps you will tire sooner than he will. It is a sad thing to think of,
but there is no doubt that genius lasts longer than beauty. That accounts
for the fact that we all take such pains to overeducate ourselves.
In the wild struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures,
and so we fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly hope of keeping
our place. The thoroughly wellinformed manthat is the modern ideal.
And the mind of the thoroughly wellinformed man is a dreadful thing.
It is like a bricabrac shop, all monsters and dust, with everything
priced above its proper value. I think you will tire first, all the same.
Some day you will look at your friend, and he will seem to you to be a little
out of drawing, or you won't like his tone of colour, or something. You will
bitterly reproach him in your own heart, and seriously think that he has
behaved very badly to you. The next time he calls, you will be perfectly
cold and indifferent. It will be a great pity, for it will alter you.
What you have told me is quite a romance, a romance of art one might call it,
and the worst of having a romance of any kind is that it leaves one
so unromantic."
"Harry, don't talk like that. As long as I live, the personality
of Dorian Gray will dominate me. You can't feel what I feel.
You change too often."
"Ah, my dear Basil, that is exactly why I can feel it.
Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love
it is the faithless who know love's tragedies." And Lord
Henry struck a light on a dainty silver case and began
to smoke a cigarette with a selfconscious and satisfied air,
as if he had summed up the world in a phrase. There was
a rustle of chirruping sparrows in the green lacquer leaves
of the ivy, and the blue cloudshadows chased themselves across
the grass like swallows. How pleasant it was in the garden
And how delightful other people's emotions were
much more delightful than their ideas, it seemed to him.
One's own soul, and the passions of one's friendsthose were
the fascinating things in life. He pictured to himself
with silent amusement the tedious luncheon that he had missed
by staying so long with Basil Hallward. Had he gone to his
aunt's, he would have been sure to have met Lord Goodbody there,
and the whole conversation would have been about the feeding
of the poor and the necessity for model lodginghouses. Each
class would have preached the importance of those virtues,
for whose exercise there was no necessity in their own lives.
The rich would have spoken on the value of thrift,
and the idle grown eloquent over the dignity of labour.
It was charming to have escaped all that As he thought of his aunt,
an idea seemed to strike him. He turned to Hallward and said,
"My dear fellow, I have just remembered."
"Remembered what, Harry?"
"Where I heard the name of Dorian Gray."
"Where was it?" asked Hallward, with a slight frown.
"Don't look so angry, Basil. It was at my aunt, Lady Agatha's.
She told me she had discovered a wonderful young man who was going
to help her in the East End, and that his name was Dorian Gray.
I am bound to state that she never told me he was goodlooking. Women
have no appreciation of good looks at least, good women have not.
She said that he was very earnest and had a beautiful nature.
I at once pictured to myself a creature with spectacles and lank hair,
horribly freckled, and tramping about on huge feet. I wish I had known it
was your friend."
"I am very glad you didn't, Harry."
"Why?"
"I don't want you to meet him."
"You don't want me to meet him?"
"No."
"Mr. Dorian Gray is in the studio, sir," said the butler,
coming into the garden.
"You must introduce me now," cried Lord Henry, laughing.
The painter turned to his servant, who stood blinking in the sunlight.
"Ask Mr. Gray to wait, Parker I shall be in in a few moments."
The man bowed and went up the walk.
Then he looked at Lord Henry. "Dorian Gray is my dearest friend,"
he said. "He has a simple and a beautiful nature. Your aunt
was quite right in what she said of him. Don't spoil him.
Don't try to influence him. Your influence would be bad.
The world is wide, and has many marvellous people in it.
Don't take away from me the one person who gives to my art
whatever charm it possesses my life as an artist depends
on him. Mind, Harry, I trust you." He spoke very slowly,
and the words seemed wrung out of him almost against
his will.
"What nonsense you talk" said Lord Henry, smiling, and taking Hallward
by the arm, he almost led him into the house.
CHAPTER 
As they entered they saw Dorian Gray. He was seated at the piano,
with his back to them, turning over the pages of a volume of Schumann's
"Forest Scenes." "You must lend me these, Basil," he cried.
"I want to learn them. They are perfectly charming."
"That entirely depends on how you sit today, Dorian."
"Oh, I am tired of sitting, and I don't want a lifesized portrait
of myself," answered the lad, swinging round on the musicstool
in a wilful, petulant manner. When he caught sight of Lord Henry,
a faint blush coloured his cheeks for a moment, and he started up.
"I beg your pardon, Basil, but I didn't know you had any one
with you."
"This is Lord Henry Wotton, Dorian, an old Oxford friend of mine.
I have just been telling him what a capital sitter you were,
and now you have spoiled everything."
"You have not spoiled my pleasure in meeting you, Mr. Gray,"
said Lord Henry, stepping forward and extending his hand.
"My aunt has often spoken to me about you. You are one of
her favourites, and, I am afraid, one of her victims also."
"I am in Lady Agatha's black books at present," answered Dorian
with a funny look of penitence. "I promised to go to a club in
Whitechapel with her last Tuesday, and I really forgot all about it.
We were to have played a duet togetherthree duets, I believe.
I don't know what she will say to me. I am far too frightened
to call."
"Oh, I will make your peace with my aunt. She is quite devoted to you.
And I don't think it really matters about your not being there. The audience
probably thought it was a duet. When Aunt Agatha sits down to the piano,
she makes quite enough noise for two people."
"That is very horrid to her, and not very nice to me,"
answered Dorian, laughing.
Lord Henry looked at him. Yes, he was certainly wonderfully handsome,
with his finely curved scarlet lips, his frank blue eyes, his crisp
gold hair. There was something in his face that made one trust him at once.
All the candour of youth was there, as well as all youth's passionate purity.
One felt that he had kept himself unspotted from the world. No wonder Basil
Hallward worshipped him.
"You are too charming to go in for philanthropy, Mr. Grayfar too charming."
And Lord Henry flung himself down on the divan and opened his cigarettecase.
The painter had been busy mixing his colours and getting his brushes ready.
He was looking worried, and when he heard Lord Henry's last remark, he glanced
at him, hesitated for a moment, and then said, "Harry, I want to finish this
picture today. Would you think it awfully rude of me if I asked you to
go away?"
Lord Henry smiled and looked at Dorian Gray. "Am I to go, Mr. Gray?"
he asked.
"Oh, please don't, Lord Henry. I see that Basil is in one of his sulky moods,
and I can't bear him when he sulks. Besides, I want you to tell me why I
should not go in for philanthropy."
"I don't know that I shall tell you that, Mr. Gray. It is so
tedious a subject that one would have to talk seriously about it.
But I certainly shall not run away, now that you have asked me to stop.
You don't really mind, Basil, do you? You have often told me that you
liked your sitters to have some one to chat to."
Hallward bit his lip. "If Dorian wishes it, of course you must stay.
Dorian's whims are laws to everybody, except himself."
Lord Henry took up his hat and gloves. "You are very pressing, Basil, but I
am afraid I must go. I have promised to meet a man at the Orleans.
Goodbye, Mr. Gray. Come and see me some afternoon in Curzon Street.
I am nearly always at home at five o'clock. Write to me when you are coming.
I should be sorry to miss you."
"Basil," cried Dorian Gray, "if Lord Henry Wotton goes, I shall go, too.
You never open your lips while you are painting, and it is horribly dull
standing on a platform and trying to look pleasant. Ask him to stay.
I insist upon it."
"Stay, Harry, to oblige Dorian, and to oblige me," said Hallward,
gazing intently at his picture. "It is quite true, I never talk
when I am working, and never listen either, and it must be dreadfully
tedious for my unfortunate sitters. I beg you to stay."
"But what about my man at the Orleans?"
The painter laughed. "I don't think there will be any difficulty about that.
Sit down again, Harry. And now, Dorian, get up on the platform, and don't
move about too much, or pay any attention to what Lord Henry says.
He has a very bad influence over all his friends, with the single exception
of myself."
Dorian Gray stepped up on the dais with the air of a young Greek martyr,
and made a little moue of discontent to Lord Henry, to whom he had rather
taken a fancy. He was so unlike Basil. They made a delightful contrast.
And he had such a beautiful voice. After a few moments he said to him,
"Have you really a very bad influence, Lord Henry? As bad as Basil says?"
"There is no such thing as a good influence, Mr. Gray.
All influence is immoralimmoral from the scientific point
of view."
"Why?"
"Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul.
He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions.
His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things
as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of some one else's music,
an actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life
is selfdevelopment. To realize one's nature perfectlythat is what
each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays.
They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes
to one's self. Of course, they are charitable. They feed the hungry
and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked.
Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it.
The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God,
which is the secret of religionthese are the two things that govern us.
And yet"
"Just turn your head a little more to the right, Dorian, like a good boy,"
said the painter, deep in his work and conscious only that a look had come
into the lad's face that he had never seen there before.
"And yet," continued Lord Henry, in his low, musical voice,
and with that graceful wave of the hand that was always so
characteristic of him, and that he had even in his Eton days,
"I believe that if one man were to live out his life fully
and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to
every thought, reality to every dreamI believe that the world
would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all
the maladies of mediaevalism, and return to the Hellenic ideal
to something finer, richer than the Hellenic ideal, it may be.
But the bravest man amongst us is afraid of himself.
The mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the
selfdenial that mars our lives. We are punished for our refusals.
Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind
and poisons us. The body sins once, and has done with its sin,
for action is a mode of purification. Nothing remains then
but the recollection of a pleasure, or the luxury of a regret.
The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.
Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things
it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous
laws have made monstrous and unlawful. It has been said
that the great events of the world take place in the brain.
It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins
of the world take place also. You, Mr. Gray, you yourself,
with your rosered youth and your rosewhite boyhood, you have had
passions that have made you afraid, thoughts that have filled you
with terror, daydreams and sleeping dreams whose mere memory might
stain your cheek with shame"
"Stop" faltered Dorian Gray, "stop you bewilder me.
I don't know what to say. There is some answer to you, but I
cannot find it. Don't speak. Let me think. Or, rather, let me
try not to think."
For nearly ten minutes he stood there, motionless, with parted
lips and eyes strangely bright. He was dimly conscious
that entirely fresh influences were at work within him.
Yet they seemed to him to have come really from himself.
The few words that Basil's friend had said to himwords spoken
by chance, no doubt, and with wilful paradox in them
had touched some secret chord that had never been touched before,
but that he felt was now vibrating and throbbing to
curious pulses.
Music had stirred him like that. Music had troubled him many times.
But music was not articulate. It was not a new world, but rather
another chaos, that it created in us. Words Mere words
How terrible they were How clear, and vivid, and cruel One could
not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them
They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things,
and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of lute.
Mere words Was there anything so real as words?
Yes there had been things in his boyhood that he had not understood.
He understood them now. Life suddenly became fierycoloured to him.
It seemed to him that he had been walking in fire. Why had he not
known it?
With his subtle smile, Lord Henry watched him. He knew the precise
psychological moment when to say nothing. He felt intensely interested.
He was amazed at the sudden impression that his words had produced,
and, remembering a book that he had read when he was sixteen,
a book which had revealed to him much that he had not known before,
he wondered whether Dorian Gray was passing through a similar experience.
He had merely shot an arrow into the air. Had it hit the mark?
How fascinating the lad was
Hallward painted away with that marvellous bold touch of his,
that had the true refinement and perfect delicacy that in art,
at any rate comes only from strength. He was unconscious of
the silence.
"Basil, I am tired of standing," cried Dorian Gray suddenly.
"I must go out and sit in the garden. The air is stifling here."
"My dear fellow, I am so sorry. When I am painting,
I can't think of anything else. But you never sat better.
You were perfectly still. And I have caught the effect I wanted
the halfparted lips and the bright look in the eyes.
I don't know what Harry has been saying to you, but he has
certainly made you have the most wonderful expression.
I suppose he has been paying you compliments. You mustn't believe
a word that he says."
"He has certainly not been paying me compliments. Perhaps that is the reason
that I don't believe anything he has told me."
"You know you believe it all," said Lord Henry, looking at him with
his dreamy languorous eyes. "I will go out to the garden with you.
It is horribly hot in the studio. Basil, let us have something iced
to drink, something with strawberries in it."
"Certainly, Harry. Just touch the bell, and when Parker comes I
will tell him what you want. I have got to work up this background,
so I will join you later on. Don't keep Dorian too long.
I have never been in better form for painting than I am today. This
is going to be my masterpiece. It is my masterpiece as it stands."
Lord Henry went out to the garden and found Dorian Gray burying his face in
the great cool lilacblossoms, feverishly drinking in their perfume as if it
had been wine. He came close to him and put his hand upon his shoulder.
"You are quite right to do that," he murmured. "Nothing can cure the soul
but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul."
The lad started and drew back. He was bareheaded, and the leaves
had tossed his rebellious curls and tangled all their gilded threads.
There was a look of fear in his eyes, such as people have when they
are suddenly awakened. His finely chiselled nostrils quivered,
and some hidden nerve shook the scarlet of his lips and left
them trembling.
"Yes," continued Lord Henry, "that is one of the great secrets of life
to cure the soul by means of the senses, and the senses by means of the soul.
You are a wonderful creation. You know more than you think you know, just as
you know less than you want to know."
Dorian Gray frowned and turned his head away. He could not help
liking the tall, graceful young man who was standing by him.
His romantic, olivecoloured face and worn expression interested him.
There was something in his low languid voice that was absolutely fascinating.
His cool, white, flowerlike hands, even, had a curious charm.
They moved, as he spoke, like music, and seemed to have a language
of their own. But he felt afraid of him, and ashamed of being afraid.
Why had it been left for a stranger to reveal him to himself?
He had known Basil Hallward for months, but the friendship between them
had never altered him. Suddenly there had come some one across his life
who seemed to have disclosed to him life's mystery. And, yet, what was
there to be afraid of? He was not a schoolboy or a girl. It was absurd to
be frightened.
"Let us go and sit in the shade," said Lord Henry. "Parker has
brought out the drinks, and if you stay any longer in this glare,
you will be quite spoiled, and Basil will never paint you again.
You really must not allow yourself to become sunburnt. It would
be unbecoming."
"What can it matter?" cried Dorian Gray, laughing, as he sat
down on the seat at the end of the garden.
"It should matter everything to you, Mr. Gray."
"Why?"
"Because you have the most marvellous youth, and youth is the one thing
worth having."
"I don't feel that, Lord Henry."
"No, you don't feel it now. Some day, when you are old
and wrinkled and ugly, when thought has seared your forehead
with its lines, and passion branded your lips with its
hideous fires, you will feel it, you will feel it terribly.
Now, wherever you go, you charm the world. Will it always
be so? . . . You have a wonderfully beautiful face, Mr. Gray.
Don't frown. You have. And beauty is a form of genius
is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation.
It is of the great facts of the world, like sunlight,
or springtime, or the reflection in dark waters of that silver
shell we call the moon. It cannot be questioned. It has its divine
right of sovereignty. It makes princes of those who have it.
You smile? Ah when you have lost it you won't smile.
. . . People say sometimes that beauty is only superficial.
That may be so, but at least it is not so superficial
as thought is. To me, beauty is the wonder of wonders.
It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.
The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.
. . . Yes, Mr. Gray, the gods have been good to you.
But what the gods give they quickly take away. You have only
a few years in which to live really, perfectly, and fully.
When your youth goes, your beauty will go with it, and then you
will suddenly discover that there are no triumphs left for you,
or have to content yourself with those mean triumphs that
the memory of your past will make more bitter than defeats.
Every month as it wanes brings you nearer to something dreadful.
Time is jealous of you, and wars against your lilies and your roses.
You will become sallow, and hollowcheeked, and dulleyed.
You will suffer horribly.... Ah realize your youth
while you have it. Don't squander the gold of your days,
listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless failure,
or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common,
and the vulgar. These are the sickly aims, the false ideals,
of our age. Live Live the wonderful life that is in you
Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for
new sensations. Be afraid of nothing. . . . A new Hedonism
that is what our century wants. You might be its visible symbol.
With your personality there is nothing you could not do.
The world belongs to you for a season. . . . The moment I met
you I saw that you were quite unconscious of what you really are,
of what you really might be. There was so much in you that
charmed me that I felt I must tell you something about yourself.
I thought how tragic it would be if you were wasted. For there is
such a little time that your youth will lastsuch a little time.
The common hillflowers wither, but they blossom again.
The laburnum will be as yellow next June as it is now.
In a month there will be purple stars on the clematis, and year
after year the green night of its leaves will hold its purple stars.
But we never get back our youth. The pulse of joy that beats in us
at twenty becomes sluggish. Our limbs fail, our senses rot.
We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory
of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the
exquisite temptations that we had not the courage to yield to.
Youth Youth There is absolutely nothing in the world but
youth"
Dorian Gray listened, openeyed and wondering. The spray
of lilac fell from his hand upon the gravel. A furry bee came
and buzzed round it for a moment. Then it began to scramble
all over the oval stellated globe of the tiny blossoms.
He watched it with that strange interest in trivial things
that we try to develop when things of high import make us afraid,
or when we are stirred by some new emotion for which we
cannot find expression, or when some thought that terrifies
us lays sudden siege to the brain and calls on us to yield.
After a time the bee flew away. He saw it creeping into the stained
trumpet of a Tyrian convolvulus. The flower seemed to quiver,
and then swayed gently to and fro.
Suddenly the painter appeared at the door of the studio and made staccato
signs for them to come in. They turned to each other and smiled.
"I am waiting," he cried. "Do come in. The light is quite perfect,
and you can bring your drinks."
They rose up and sauntered down the walk together. Two greenandwhite
butterflies fluttered past them, and in the peartree at the corner
of the garden a thrush began to sing.
"You are glad you have met me, Mr. Gray," said Lord Henry,
looking at him.
"Yes, I am glad now. I wonder shall I always be glad?"
"Always That is a dreadful word. It makes me shudder when I hear it.
Women are so fond of using it. They spoil every romance by trying to make
it last for ever. It is a meaningless word, too. The only difference
between a caprice and a lifelong passion is that the caprice lasts a
little longer."
As they entered the studio, Dorian Gray put his hand upon Lord Henry's arm.
"In that case, let our friendship be a caprice," he murmured, flushing at his
own boldness, then stepped up on the platform and resumed his pose.
Lord Henry flung himself into a large wicker armchair and watched him.
The sweep and dash of the brush on the canvas made the only sound
that broke the stillness, except when, now and then, Hallward stepped
back to look at his work from a distance. In the slanting beams
that streamed through the open doorway the dust danced and was golden.
The heavy scent of the roses seemed to brood over everything.
After about a quarter of an hour Hallward stopped painting,
looked for a long time at Dorian Gray, and then for a long
time at the picture, biting the end of one of his huge brushes
and frowning. "It is quite finished," he cried at last,
and stooping down he wrote his name in long vermilion letters on
the lefthand corner of the canvas.
Lord Henry came over and examined the picture. It was certainly
a wonderful work of art, and a wonderful likeness as well.
"My dear fellow, I congratulate you most warmly," he said.
"It is the finest portrait of modern times. Mr. Gray, come over
and look at yourself."
The lad started, as if awakened from some dream.
"Is it really finished?" he murmured, stepping down from the platform.
"Quite finished," said the painter. "And you have sat splendidly
today. I am awfully obliged to you."
"That is entirely due to me," broke in Lord Henry. "Isn't it,
Mr. Gray?"
Dorian made no answer, but passed listlessly in front of his
picture and turned towards it. When he saw it he drew back,
and his cheeks flushed for a moment with pleasure. A look of joy came
into his eyes, as if he had recognized himself for the first time.
He stood there motionless and in wonder, dimly conscious that Hallward
was speaking to him, but not catching the meaning of his words.
The sense of his own beauty came on him like a revelation.
He had never felt it before. Basil Hallward's compliments had seemed
to him to be merely the charming exaggeration of friendship.
He had listened to them, laughed at them, forgotten them.
They had not influenced his nature. Then had come Lord Henry
Wotton with his strange panegyric on youth, his terrible warning
of its brevity. That had stirred him at the time, and now,
as he stood gazing at the shadow of his own loveliness, the full
reality of the description flashed across him. Yes, there would
be a day when his face would be wrinkled and wizen, his eyes dim
and colourless, the grace of his figure broken and deformed.
The scarlet would pass away from his lips and the gold steal from
his hair. The life that was to make his soul would mar his body.
He would become dreadful, hideous, and uncouth.
As he thought of it, a sharp pang of pain struck through him
like a knife and made each delicate fibre of his nature quiver.
His eyes deepened into amethyst, and across them came a mist
of tears. He felt as if a hand of ice had been laid upon
his heart.
"Don't you like it?" cried Hallward at last, stung a little
by the lad's silence, not understanding what it meant.
"Of course he likes it," said Lord Henry. "Who wouldn't like it?
It is one of the greatest things in modern art. I will give you
anything you like to ask for it. I must have it."
"It is not my property, Harry."
"Whose property is it?"
"Dorian's, of course," answered the painter.
"He is a very lucky fellow."
"How sad it is" murmured Dorian Gray with his eyes still fixed upon
his own portrait. "How sad it is I shall grow old, and horrible,
and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young.
It will never be older than this particular day of June.
. . . If it were only the other way If it were I who was
to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old
For thatfor thatI would give everything Yes, there is
nothing in the whole world I would not give I would give my soul
for that"
"You would hardly care for such an arrangement, Basil," cried Lord
Henry, laughing. "It would be rather hard lines on your work."
"I should object very strongly, Harry," said Hallward.
Dorian Gray turned and looked at him. "I believe you would, Basil.
You like your art better than your friends. I am no more to you
than a green bronze figure. Hardly as much, I dare say."
The painter stared in amazement. It was so unlike Dorian to speak like that.
What had happened? He seemed quite angry. His face was flushed and his
cheeks burning.
"Yes," he continued, "I am less to you than your ivory Hermes or your
silver Faun. You will like them always. How long will you like me?
Till I have my first wrinkle, I suppose. I know, now, that when one
loses one's good looks, whatever they may be, one loses everything.
Your picture has taught me that. Lord Henry Wotton is perfectly right.
Youth is the only thing worth having. When I find that I am growing old, I
shall kill myself."
Hallward turned pale and caught his hand. "Dorian Dorian" he cried,
"don't talk like that. I have never had such a friend as you, and I shall
never have such another. You are not jealous of material things, are you?
you who are finer than any of them"
"I am jealous of everything whose beauty does not die.
I am jealous of the portrait you have painted of me.
Why should it keep what I must lose? Every moment that passes
takes something from me and gives something to it. Oh, if it
were only the other way If the picture could change,
and I could be always what I am now Why did you paint it?
It will mock me some daymock me horribly" The hot tears
welled into his eyes he tore his hand away and, flinging himself
on the divan, he buried his face in the cushions, as though he
was praying.
"This is your doing, Harry," said the painter bitterly.
Lord Henry shrugged his shoulders. "It is the real Dorian Gray
that is all."
"It is not."
"If it is not, what have I to do with it?"
"You should have gone away when I asked you," he muttered.
"I stayed when you asked me," was Lord Henry's answer.
"Harry, I can't quarrel with my two best friends at once,
but between you both you have made me hate the finest
piece of work I have ever done, and I will destroy it.
What is it but canvas and colour? I will not let it come across
our three lives and mar them."
Dorian Gray lifted his golden head from the pillow, and with pallid face and
tearstained eyes, looked at him as he walked over to the deal paintingtable
that was set beneath the high curtained window. What was he doing there?
His fingers were straying about among the litter of tin tubes and dry brushes,
seeking for something. Yes, it was for the long paletteknife, with its thin
blade of lithe steel. He had found it at last. He was going to rip up
the canvas.
With a stifled sob the lad leaped from the couch, and, rushing over
to Hallward, tore the knife out of his hand, and flung it to the end
of the studio. "Don't, Basil, don't" he cried. "It would be murder"
"I am glad you appreciate my work at last, Dorian," said the painter coldly
when he had recovered from his surprise. "I never thought you would."
"Appreciate it? I am in love with it, Basil. It is part of myself.
I feel that."
"Well, as soon as you are dry, you shall be varnished, and framed,
and sent home. Then you can do what you like with yourself."
And he walked across the room and rang the bell for tea.
"You will have tea, of course, Dorian? And so will you, Harry?
Or do you object to such simple pleasures?"
"I adore simple pleasures," said Lord Henry. "They are
the last refuge of the complex. But I don't like scenes,
except on the stage. What absurd fellows you are, both of you
I wonder who it was defined man as a rational animal.
It was the most premature definition ever given. Man is many things,
but he is not rational. I am glad he is not, after all
though I wish you chaps would not squabble over the picture.
You had much better let me have it, Basil. This silly boy doesn't
really want it, and I really do."
"If you let any one have it but me, Basil, I shall never forgive you"
cried Dorian Gray "and I don't allow people to call me a silly boy."
"You know the picture is yours, Dorian. I gave it to you before it existed."
"And you know you have been a little silly, Mr. Gray, and that you
don't really object to being reminded that you are extremely young."
"I should have objected very strongly this morning, Lord Henry."
"Ah this morning You have lived since then."
There came a knock at the door, and the butler entered with a
laden teatray and set it down upon a small Japanese table.
There was a rattle of cups and saucers and the hissing of a fluted
Georgian urn. Two globeshaped china dishes were brought
in by a page. Dorian Gray went over and poured out the tea.
The two men sauntered languidly to the table and examined what was
under the covers.
"Let us go to the theatre tonight," said Lord Henry.
"There is sure to be something on, somewhere. I have promised
to dine at White's, but it is only with an old friend,
so I can send him a wire to say that I am ill, or that I am
prevented from coming in consequence of a subsequent engagement.
I think that would be a rather nice excuse it would have all
the surprise of candour."
"It is such a bore putting on one's dressclothes," muttered Hallward.
"And, when one has them on, they are so horrid."
"Yes," answered Lord Henry dreamily, "the costume of the nineteenth
century is detestable. It is so sombre, so depressing. Sin is the only
real colourelement left in modern life."
"You really must not say things like that before Dorian, Harry."
"Before which Dorian? The one who is pouring out tea for us,
or the one in the picture?"
"Before either."
"I should like to come to the theatre with you, Lord Henry,"
said the lad.
"Then you shall come and you will come, too, Basil, won't you?"
"I can't, really. I would sooner not. I have a lot of work to do."
"Well, then, you and I will go alone, Mr. Gray."
"I should like that awfully."
The painter bit his lip and walked over, cup in hand, to the picture.
"I shall stay with the real Dorian," he said, sadly.
"Is it the real Dorian?" cried the original of the portrait,
strolling across to him. "Am I really like that?"
"Yes you are just like that."
"How wonderful, Basil"
"At least you are like it in appearance. But it will never alter,"
sighed Hallward. "That is something."
"What a fuss people make about fidelity" exclaimed Lord Henry.
"Why, even in love it is purely a question for physiology.
It has nothing to do with our own will. Young men want to
be faithful, and are not old men want to be faithless, and cannot
that is all one can say."
"Don't go to the theatre tonight, Dorian," said Hallward.
"Stop and dine with me."
"I can't, Basil."
"Why?"
"Because I have promised Lord Henry Wotton to go with him."
"He won't like you the better for keeping your promises.
He always breaks his own. I beg you not to go."
Dorian Gray laughed and shook his head.
"I entreat you."
The lad hesitated, and looked over at Lord Henry, who was watching
them from the teatable with an amused smile.
"I must go, Basil," he answered.
"Very well," said Hallward, and he went over and laid down his
cup on the tray. "It is rather late, and, as you have to dress,
you had better lose no time. Goodbye, Harry. Goodbye, Dorian.
Come and see me soon. Come tomorrow."
"Certainly."
"You won't forget?"
"No, of course not," cried Dorian.
"And ... Harry"
"Yes, Basil?"
"Remember what I asked you, when we were in the garden this morning."
"I have forgotten it."
"I trust you."
"I wish I could trust myself," said Lord Henry, laughing. "Come, Mr. Gray,
my hansom is outside, and I can drop you at your own place. Goodbye, Basil.
It has been a most interesting afternoon."
As the door closed behind them, the painter flung himself down on a sofa,
and a look of pain came into his face.
CHAPTER 
At halfpast twelve next day Lord Henry Wotton strolled from Curzon
Street over to the Albany to call on his uncle, Lord Fermor,
a genial if somewhat roughmannered old bachelor, whom the outside
world called selfish because it derived no particular benefit
from him, but who was considered generous by Society as he fed
the people who amused him. His father had been our ambassador
at Madrid when Isabella was young and Prim unthought of,
but had retired from the diplomatic service in a capricious
moment of annoyance on not being offered the Embassy at Paris,
a post to which he considered that he was fully entitled
by reason of his birth, his indolence, the good English
of his dispatches, and his inordinate passion for pleasure.
The son, who had been his father's secretary, had resigned along
with his chief, somewhat foolishly as was thought at the time,
and on succeeding some months later to the title, had set
himself to the serious study of the great aristocratic art
of doing absolutely nothing. He had two large town houses,
but preferred to live in chambers as it was less trouble,
and took most of his meals at his club. He paid some attention
to the management of his collieries in the Midland counties,
excusing himself for this taint of industry on the ground that
the one advantage of having coal was that it enabled a gentleman
to afford the decency of burning wood on his own hearth.
In politics he was a Tory, except when the Tories were in office,
during which period he roundly abused them for being a pack
of Radicals. He was a hero to his valet, who bullied him,
and a terror to most of his relations, whom he bullied in turn.
Only England could have produced him, and he always said
that the country was going to the dogs. His principles
were out of date, but there was a good deal to be said for
his prejudices.
When Lord Henry entered the room, he found his uncle sitting in a rough
shootingcoat, smoking a cheroot and grumbling over The Times.
"Well, Harry," said the old gentleman, "what brings you out so early?
I thought you dandies never got up till two, and were not visible
till five."
"Pure family affection, I assure you, Uncle George. I want to get
something out of you."
"Money, I suppose," said Lord Fermor, making a wry face.
"Well, sit down and tell me all about it. Young people,
nowadays, imagine that money is everything."
"Yes," murmured Lord Henry, settling his buttonhole in his coat
"and when they grow older they know it. But I don't want money.
It is only people who pay their bills who want that, Uncle George,
and I never pay mine. Credit is the capital of a younger son,
and one lives charmingly upon it. Besides, I always deal with
Dartmoor's tradesmen, and consequently they never bother me.
What I want is information not useful information, of course
useless information."
"Well, I can tell you anything that is in an English Blue Book,
Harry, although those fellows nowadays write a lot of nonsense.
When I was in the Diplomatic, things were much better.
But I hear they let them in now by examination. What can
you expect? Examinations, sir, are pure humbug from beginning
to end. If a man is a gentleman, he knows quite enough,
and if he is not a gentleman, whatever he knows is bad
for him."
"Mr. Dorian Gray does not belong to Blue Books, Uncle George,"
said Lord Henry languidly.
"Mr. Dorian Gray? Who is he?" asked Lord Fermor, knitting his bushy
white eyebrows.
"That is what I have come to learn, Uncle George. Or rather,
I know who he is. He is the last Lord Kelso's grandson.
His mother was a Devereux, Lady Margaret Devereaux.
I want you to tell me about his mother. What was she like?
Whom did she marry? You have known nearly everybody
in your time, so you might have known her. I am very much
interested in Mr. Gray at present. I have only just
met him."
"Kelso's grandson" echoed the old gentleman. "Kelso's grandson ... Of
course.... I knew his mother intimately. I believe I was at her christening.
She was an extraordinarily beautiful girl, Margaret Devereux, and made
all the men frantic by running away with a penniless young fellow
a mere nobody, sir, a subaltern in a foot regiment, or something
of that kind. Certainly. I remember the whole thing as if it
happened yesterday. The poor chap was killed in a duel at Spa a few
months after the marriage. There was an ugly story about it.
They said Kelso got some rascally adventurer, some Belgian brute,
to insult his soninlaw in publicpaid him, sir, to do it, paid him
and that the fellow spitted his man as if he had been a pigeon.
The thing was hushed up, but, egad, Kelso ate his chop alone at the club
for some time afterwards. He brought his daughter back with him, I was told,
and she never spoke to him again. Oh, yes it was a bad business.
The girl died, too, died within a year. So she left a son, did she?
I had forgotten that. What sort of boy is he? If he is like his mother,
he must be a goodlooking chap."
"He is very goodlooking," assented Lord Henry.
"I hope he will fall into proper hands," continued the old man.
"He should have a pot of money waiting for him if Kelso
did the right thing by him. His mother had money, too.
All the Selby property came to her, through her grandfather.
Her grandfather hated Kelso, thought him a mean dog.
He was, too. Came to Madrid once when I was there. Egad, I was
ashamed of him. The Queen used to ask me about the English noble
who was always quarrelling with the cabmen about their fares.
They made quite a story of it. I didn't dare show my face at Court
for a month. I hope he treated his grandson better than he did
the jarvies."
"I don't know," answered Lord Henry. "I fancy that the boy will be well off.
He is not of age yet. He has Selby, I know. He told me so. And . . . his
mother was very beautiful?"
"Margaret Devereux was one of the loveliest creatures I ever saw, Harry.
What on earth induced her to behave as she did, I never could understand.
She could have married anybody she chose. Carlington was mad after her.
She was romantic, though. All the women of that family were.
The men were a poor lot, but, egad the women were wonderful.
Carlington went on his knees to her. Told me so himself. She laughed at him,
and there wasn't a girl in London at the time who wasn't after him.
And by the way, Harry, talking about silly marriages, what is this humbug your
father tells me about Dartmoor wanting to marry an American? Ain't English
girls good enough for him?"
"It is rather fashionable to marry Americans just now, Uncle George."
"I'll back English women against the world, Harry," said Lord Fermor,
striking the table with his fist.
"The betting is on the Americans."
"They don't last, I am told," muttered his uncle.
"A long engagement exhausts them, but they are capital at a steeplechase.
They take things flying. I don't think Dartmoor has a chance."
"Who are her people?" grumbled the old gentleman. "Has she got any?"
Lord Henry shook his head. "American girls are as clever at concealing
their parents, as English women are at concealing their past," he said,
rising to go.
"They are porkpackers, I suppose?"
"I hope so, Uncle George, for Dartmoor's sake. I am told
that porkpacking is the most lucrative profession in America,
after politics."
"Is she pretty?"
"She behaves as if she was beautiful. Most American women do.
It is the secret of their charm."
"Why can't these American women stay in their own country?
They are always telling us that it is the paradise for women."
"It is. That is the reason why, like Eve, they are so excessively
anxious to get out of it," said Lord Henry. "Goodbye, Uncle George.
I shall be late for lunch, if I stop any longer. Thanks for giving me
the information I wanted. I always like to know everything about my
new friends, and nothing about my old ones."
"Where are you lunching, Harry?"
"At Aunt Agatha's. I have asked myself and Mr. Gray.
He is her latest protege."
"Humph tell your Aunt Agatha, Harry, not to bother me any more with
her charity appeals. I am sick of them. Why, the good woman thinks
that I have nothing to do but to write cheques for her silly fads."
"All right, Uncle George, I'll tell her, but it won't have any effect.
Philanthropic people lose all sense of humanity. It is their
distinguishing characteristic."
The old gentleman growled approvingly and rang the bell for his servant.
Lord Henry passed up the low arcade into Burlington Street and turned his
steps in the direction of Berkeley Square.
So that was the story of Dorian Gray's parentage.
Crudely as it had been told to him, it had yet stirred him
by its suggestion of a strange, almost modern romance.
A beautiful woman risking everything for a mad passion.
A few wild weeks of happiness cut short by a hideous,
treacherous crime. Months of voiceless agony, and then
a child born in pain. The mother snatched away by death,
the boy left to solitude and the tyranny of an old and
loveless man. Yes it was an interesting background.
It posed the lad, made him more perfect, as it were. Behind every
exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.
Worlds had to be in travail, that the meanest flower might blow.
. . . And how charming he had been at dinner the night before,
as with startled eyes and lips parted in frightened pleasure
he had sat opposite to him at the club, the red candleshades
staining to a richer rose the wakening wonder of his face.
Talking to him was like playing upon an exquisite violin.
He answered to every touch and thrill of the bow. . . . There
was something terribly enthralling in the exercise of influence.
No other activity was like it. To project one's soul into some
gracious form, and let it tarry there for a moment to hear one's
own intellectual views echoed back to one with all the added
music of passion and youth to convey one's temperament into
another as though it were a subtle fluid or a strange perfume
there was a real joy in thatperhaps the most satisfying
joy left to us in an age so limited and vulgar as our own,
an age grossly carnal in its pleasures, and grossly common
in its aims.... He was a marvellous type, too, this lad,
whom by so curious a chance he had met in Basil's studio,
or could be fashioned into a marvellous type, at any rate.
Grace was his, and the white purity of boyhood, and beauty such
as old Greek marbles kept for us. There was nothing that one
could not do with him. He could be made a Titan or a toy.
What a pity it was that such beauty was destined to fade
. . . And Basil? From a psychological point of view,
how interesting he was The new manner in art, the fresh
mode of looking at life, suggested so strangely by the merely
visible presence of one who was unconscious of it all
the silent spirit that dwelt in dim woodland, and walked unseen
in open field, suddenly showing herself, Dryadlike and not afraid,
because in his soul who sought for her there had been wakened
that wonderful vision to which alone are wonderful things revealed
the mere shapes and patterns of things becoming, as it were,
refined, and gaining a kind of symbolical value, as though
they were themselves patterns of some other and more perfect
form whose shadow they made real how strange it all was
He remembered something like it in history. Was it not Plato,
that artist in thought, who had first analyzed it?
Was it not Buonarotti who had carved it in the coloured marbles
of a sonnetsequence? But in our own century it was strange.
. . . Yes he would try to be to Dorian Gray what, without knowing it,
the lad was to the painter who had fashioned the wonderful portrait.
He would seek to dominate himhad already, indeed,
half done so. He would make that wonderful spirit his own.
There was something fascinating in this son of love and
death.
Suddenly he stopped and glanced up at the houses. He found that he had
passed his aunt's some distance, and, smiling to himself, turned back.
When he entered the somewhat sombre hall, the butler told him that they
had gone in to lunch. He gave one of the footmen his hat and stick
and passed into the diningroom.
"Late as usual, Harry," cried his aunt, shaking her head at him.
He invented a facile excuse, and having taken the vacant seat
next to her, looked round to see who was there. Dorian bowed
to him shyly from the end of the table, a flush of pleasure
stealing into his cheek. Opposite was the Duchess of Harley,
a lady of admirable goodnature and good temper, much liked
by every one who knew her, and of those ample architectural
proportions that in women who are not duchesses are described
by contemporary historians as stoutness. Next to her sat,
on her right, Sir Thomas Burdon, a Radical member of Parliament,
who followed his leader in public life and in private life
followed the best cooks, dining with the Tories and thinking
with the Liberals, in accordance with a wise and wellknown rule.
The post on her left was occupied by Mr. Erskine of Treadley,
an old gentleman of considerable charm and culture, who had fallen,
however, into bad habits of silence, having, as he explained
once to Lady Agatha, said everything that he had to say
before he was thirty. His own neighbour was Mrs. Vandeleur,
one of his aunt's oldest friends, a perfect saint amongst women,
but so dreadfully dowdy that she reminded one of a badly
bound hymnbook. Fortunately for him she had on the other
side Lord Faudel, a most intelligent middleaged mediocrity,
as bald as a ministerial statement in the House of Commons,
with whom she was conversing in that intensely earnest manner
which is the one unpardonable error, as he remarked once himself,
that all really good people fall into, and from which none of them
ever quite escape.
"We are talking about poor Dartmoor, Lord Henry," cried the duchess,
nodding pleasantly to him across the table. "Do you think he will really
marry this fascinating young person?"
"I believe she has made up her mind to propose to him, Duchess."
"How dreadful" exclaimed Lady Agatha. "Really, some one should interfere."
"I am told, on excellent authority, that her father keeps an American
drygoods store," said Sir Thomas Burdon, looking supercilious.
"My uncle has already suggested porkpacking Sir Thomas."
"Drygoods What are American drygoods?" asked the duchess,
raising her large hands in wonder and accentuating the verb.
"American novels," answered Lord Henry, helping himself to some quail.
The duchess looked puzzled.
"Don't mind him, my dear," whispered Lady Agatha. "He never means anything
that he says."
"When America was discovered," said the Radical member
and he began to give some wearisome facts. Like all people
who try to exhaust a subject, he exhausted his listeners.
The duchess sighed and exercised her privilege of interruption.
"I wish to goodness it never had been discovered at all"
she exclaimed. "Really, our girls have no chance nowadays. It is
most unfair."
"Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered,"
said Mr. Erskine "I myself would say that it had merely
been detected."
"Oh but I have seen specimens of the inhabitants," answered the
duchess vaguely. "I must confess that most of them are extremely pretty.
And they dress well, too. They get all their dresses in Paris.
I wish I could afford to do the same."
"They say that when good Americans die they go to Paris,"
chuckled Sir Thomas, who had a large wardrobe of Humour's
castoff clothes.
"Really And where do bad Americans go to when they die?"
inquired the duchess.
"They go to America," murmured Lord Henry.
Sir Thomas frowned. "I am afraid that your nephew is prejudiced against
that great country," he said to Lady Agatha. "I have travelled all over it
in cars provided by the directors, who, in such matters, are extremely civil.
I assure you that it is an education to visit it."
"But must we really see Chicago in order to be educated?"
asked Mr. Erskine plaintively. "I don't feel up to the journey."
Sir Thomas waved his hand. "Mr. Erskine of Treadley has the world on
his shelves. We practical men like to see things, not to read about
them. The Americans are an extremely interesting people. They are
absolutely reasonable. I think that is their distinguishing
characteristic. Yes, Mr. Erskine, an absolutely reasonable people. I
assure you there is no nonsense about the Americans."
"How dreadful" cried Lord Henry. "I can stand brute force, but brute
reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about its use.
It is hitting below the intellect."
"I do not understand you," said Sir Thomas, growing rather red.
"I do, Lord Henry," murmured Mr. Erskine, with a smile.
"Paradoxes are all very well in their way... ." rejoined the baronet.
"Was that a paradox?" asked Mr. Erskine. "I did not think so.
Perhaps it was. Well, the way of paradoxes is the way of truth.
To test reality we must see it on the tight rope. When the verities
become acrobats, we can judge them."
"Dear me" said Lady Agatha, "how you men argue I am sure I never can make
out what you are talking about. Oh Harry, I am quite vexed with you.
Why do you try to persuade our nice Mr. Dorian Gray to give up the East End?
I assure you he would be quite invaluable. They would love his playing."
"I want him to play to me," cried Lord Henry, smiling, and he looked
down the table and caught a bright answering glance.
"But they are so unhappy in Whitechapel," continued Lady Agatha.
"I can sympathize with everything except suffering,"
said Lord Henry, shrugging his shoulders. "I cannot sympathize
with that. It is too ugly, too horrible, too distressing.
There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy
with pain. One should sympathize with the colour, the beauty,
the joy of life. The less said about life's sores,
the better."
"Still, the East End is a very important problem," remarked Sir Thomas
with a grave shake of the head.
"Quite so," answered the young lord. "It is the problem of slavery,
and we try to solve it by amusing the slaves."
The politician looked at him keenly. "What change do you propose, then?"
he asked.
Lord Henry laughed. "I don't desire to change anything in England
except the weather," he answered. "I am quite content with
philosophic contemplation. But, as the nineteenth century has
gone bankrupt through an overexpenditure of sympathy, I would
suggest that we should appeal to science to put us straight.
The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray,
and the advantage of science is that it is not emotional."
"But we have such grave responsibilities," ventured Mrs. Vandeleur timidly.
"Terribly grave," echoed Lady Agatha.
Lord Henry looked over at Mr. Erskine. "Humanity takes itself too seriously.
It is the world's original sin. If the caveman had known how to laugh,
history would have been different."
"You are really very comforting," warbled the duchess.
"I have always felt rather guilty when I came to see your
dear aunt, for I take no interest at all in the East End.
For the future I shall be able to look her in the face without
a blush."
"A blush is very becoming, Duchess," remarked Lord Henry.
"Only when one is young," she answered. "When an old woman
like myself blushes, it is a very bad sign. Ah Lord Henry,
I wish you would tell me how to become young again."
He thought for a moment. "Can you remember any great error
that you committed in your early days, Duchess?" he asked,
looking at her across the table.
"A great many, I fear," she cried.
"Then commit them over again," he said gravely. "To get back one's youth,
one has merely to repeat one's follies."
"A delightful theory" she exclaimed. "I must put it into practice."
"A dangerous theory" came from Sir Thomas's tight lips.
Lady Agatha shook her head, but could not help being amused.
Mr. Erskine listened.
"Yes," he continued, "that is one of the great secrets of life.
Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense,
and discover when it is too late that the only things one never
regrets are one's mistakes."
A laugh ran round the table.
He played with the idea and grew wilful tossed it into
the air and transformed it let it escape and recaptured it
made it iridescent with fancy and winged it with paradox.
The praise of folly, as he went on, soared into a philosophy,
and philosophy herself became young, and catching the mad
music of pleasure, wearing, one might fancy, her winestained
robe and wreath of ivy, danced like a Bacchante over the hills
of life, and mocked the slow Silenus for being sober.
Facts fled before her like frightened forest things.
Her white feet trod the huge press at which wise Omar sits,
till the seething grapejuice rose round her bare limbs in waves
of purple bubbles, or crawled in red foam over the vat's black,
dripping, sloping sides. It was an extraordinary improvisation.
He felt that the eyes of Dorian Gray were fixed on him,
and the consciousness that amongst his audience there was
one whose temperament he wished to fascinate seemed to give
his wit keenness and to lend colour to his imagination.
He was brilliant, fantastic, irresponsible. He charmed
his listeners out of themselves, and they followed
his pipe, laughing. Dorian Gray never took his gaze
off him, but sat like one under a spell, smiles chasing
each other over his lips and wonder growing grave in his
darkening eyes.
At last, liveried in the costume of the age, reality entered the room in
the shape of a servant to tell the duchess that her carriage was waiting.
She wrung her hands in mock despair. "How annoying" she cried. "I must go.
I have to call for my husband at the club, to take him to some absurd meeting
at Willis's Rooms, where he is going to be in the chair. If I am late he is
sure to be furious, and I couldn't have a scene in this bonnet. It is far
too fragile. A harsh word would ruin it. No, I must go, dear Agatha.
Goodbye, Lord Henry, you are quite delightful and dreadfully demoralizing.
I am sure I don't know what to say about your views. You must come and dine
with us some night. Tuesday? Are you disengaged Tuesday?"
"For you I would throw over anybody, Duchess," said Lord Henry with a bow.
"Ah that is very nice, and very wrong of you," she cried "so mind you come"
and she swept out of the room, followed by Lady Agatha and the other ladies.
When Lord Henry had sat down again, Mr. Erskine moved round,
and taking a chair close to him, placed his hand upon his arm.
"You talk books away," he said "why don't you write one?"
"I am too fond of reading books to care to write them, Mr. Erskine.
I should like to write a novel certainly, a novel that would be as lovely
as a Persian carpet and as unreal. But there is no literary public
in England for anything except newspapers, primers, and encyclopaedias.
Of all people in the world the English have the least sense of the beauty
of literature."
"I fear you are right," answered Mr. Erskine. "I myself used
to have literary ambitions, but I gave them up long ago.
And now, my dear young friend, if you will allow me to call
you so, may I ask if you really meant all that you said to us
at lunch?"
"I quite forget what I said," smiled Lord Henry. "Was it all very bad?"
"Very bad indeed. In fact I consider you extremely dangerous,
and if anything happens to our good duchess, we shall all look on you
as being primarily responsible. But I should like to talk to you
about life. The generation into which I was born was tedious.
Some day, when you are tired of London, come down to Treadley and expound
to me your philosophy of pleasure over some admirable Burgundy I am
fortunate enough to possess."
"I shall be charmed. A visit to Treadley would be a great privilege.
It has a perfect host, and a perfect library."
"You will complete it," answered the old gentleman with a courteous bow.
"And now I must bid goodbye to your excellent aunt. I am due at
the Athenaeum. It is the hour when we sleep there."
"All of you, Mr. Erskine?"
"Forty of us, in forty armchairs. We are practising for an English Academy
of Letters."
Lord Henry laughed and rose. "I am going to the park,"
he cried.
As he was passing out of the door, Dorian Gray touched him on the arm.
"Let me come with you," he murmured.
"But I thought you had promised Basil Hallward to go and see him,"
answered Lord Henry.
"I would sooner come with you yes, I feel I must come with you.
Do let me. And you will promise to talk to me all the time?
No one talks so wonderfully as you do."
"Ah I have talked quite enough for today," said Lord Henry, smiling.
"All I want now is to look at life. You may come and look at it with me,
if you care to."
CHAPTER 
One afternoon, a month later, Dorian Gray was reclining in a luxurious
armchair, in the little library of Lord Henry's house in Mayfair.
It was, in its way, a very charming room, with its high panelled
wainscoting of olivestained oak, its creamcoloured frieze and ceiling
of raised plasterwork, and its brickdust felt carpet strewn with silk,
longfringed Persian rugs. On a tiny satinwood table stood a statuette
by Clodion, and beside it lay a copy of Les Cent Nouvelles, bound for
Margaret of Valois by Clovis Eve and powdered with the gilt daisies
that Queen had selected for her device. Some large blue china jars
and parrottulips were ranged on the mantelshelf, and through the small
leaded panes of the window streamed the apricotcoloured light of a summer
day in London.
Lord Henry had not yet come in. He was always late on principle,
his principle being that punctuality is the thief of time.
So the lad was looking rather sulky, as with listless fingers
he turned over the pages of an elaborately illustrated edition
of Manon Lescaut that he had found in one of the bookcases. The
formal monotonous ticking of the Louis Quatorze clock annoyed him.
Once or twice he thought of going away.
At last he heard a step outside, and the door opened.
"How late you are, Harry" he murmured.
"I am afraid it is not Harry, Mr. Gray," answered a shrill voice.
He glanced quickly round and rose to his feet. "I beg your pardon.
I thought"
"You thought it was my husband. It is only his wife.
You must let me introduce myself. I know you quite well
by your photographs. I think my husband has got seventeen
of them."
"Not seventeen, Lady Henry?"
"Well, eighteen, then. And I saw you with him the other
night at the opera." She laughed nervously as she spoke,
and watched him with her vague forgetmenot eyes.
She was a curious woman, whose dresses always looked as if
they had been designed in a rage and put on in a tempest.
She was usually in love with somebody, and, as her passion
was never returned, she had kept all her illusions.
She tried to look picturesque, but only succeeded in being untidy.
Her name was Victoria, and she had a perfect mania for going
to church.
"That was at Lohengrin, Lady Henry, I think?"
"Yes it was at dear Lohengrin. I like Wagner's music better than
anybody's. It is so loud that one can talk the whole time without
other people hearing what one says. That is a great advantage,
don't you think so, Mr. Gray?"
The same nervous staccato laugh broke from her thin lips,
and her fingers began to play with a long tortoiseshell
paperknife.
Dorian smiled and shook his head "I am afraid I don't think so,
Lady Henry. I never talk during musicat least, during good music.
If one hears bad music, it is one's duty to drown it in conversation."
"Ah that is one of Harry's views, isn't it, Mr. Gray?
I always hear Harry's views from his friends. It is the only
way I get to know of them. But you must not think I don't
like good music. I adore it, but I am afraid of it.
It makes me too romantic. I have simply worshipped pianists
two at a time, sometimes, Harry tells me. I don't know what it
is about them. Perhaps it is that they are foreigners.
They all are, ain't they? Even those that are born
in England become foreigners after a time, don't they?
It is so clever of them, and such a compliment to art.
Makes it quite cosmopolitan, doesn't it? You have never been
to any of my parties, have you, Mr. Gray? You must come.
I can't afford orchids, but I share no expense in foreigners.
They make one's rooms look so picturesque. But here is Harry
Harry, I came in to look for you, to ask you something
I forget what it wasand I found Mr. Gray here.
We have had such a pleasant chat about music. We have quite
the same ideas. No I think our ideas are quite different.
But he has been most pleasant. I am so glad I've seen
him."
"I am charmed, my love, quite charmed," said Lord Henry, elevating his dark,
crescentshaped eyebrows and looking at them both with an amused smile.
"So sorry I am late, Dorian. I went to look after a piece of old brocade
in Wardour Street and had to bargain for hours for it. Nowadays people know
the price of everything and the value of nothing."
"I am afraid I must be going," exclaimed Lady Henry,
breaking an awkward silence with her silly sudden laugh.
"I have promised to drive with the duchess. Goodbye, Mr. Gray.
Goodbye, Harry. You are dining out, I suppose? So am I. Perhaps I
shall see you at Lady Thornbury's."
"I dare say, my dear," said Lord Henry, shutting the door behind her as,
looking like a bird of paradise that had been out all night in the rain,
she flitted out of the room, leaving a faint odour of frangipanni.
Then he lit a cigarette and flung himself down on the sofa.
"Never marry a woman with strawcoloured hair, Dorian," he said
after a few puffs.
"Why, Harry?"
"Because they are so sentimental."
"But I like sentimental people."
"Never marry at all, Dorian. Men marry because they are tired
women, because they are curious both are disappointed."
"I don't think I am likely to marry, Harry. I am too much in love.
That is one of your aphorisms. I am putting it into practice,
as I do everything that you say."
"Who are you in love with?" asked Lord Henry after a pause.
"With an actress," said Dorian Gray, blushing.
Lord Henry shrugged his shoulders. "That is a rather commonplace debut."
"You would not say so if you saw her, Harry."
"Who is she?"
"Her name is Sibyl Vane."
"Never heard of her."
"No one has. People will some day, however. She is a genius."
"My dear boy, no woman is a genius. Women are a decorative sex.
They never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly.
Women represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as men
represent the triumph of mind over morals."
"Harry, how can you?"
"My dear Dorian, it is quite true. I am analysing women at present,
so I ought to know. The subject is not so abstruse as I thought it was.
I find that, ultimately, there are only two kinds of women,
the plain and the coloured. The plain women are very useful.
If you want to gain a reputation for respectability, you have merely
to take them down to supper. The other women are very charming.
They commit one mistake, however. They paint in order to try and look young.
Our grandmothers painted in order to try and talk brilliantly.
Rouge and esprit used to go together. That is all over now.
As long as a woman can look ten years younger than her own daughter,
she is perfectly satisfied. As for conversation, there are only five
women in London worth talking to, and two of these can't be admitted into
decent society. However, tell me about your genius. How long have you
known her?"
"Ah Harry, your views terrify me."
"Never mind that. How long have you known her?"
"About three weeks."
"And where did you come across her?"
"I will tell you, Harry, but you mustn't be unsympathetic about it.
After all, it never would have happened if I had not met you.
You filled me with a wild desire to know everything about life.
For days after I met you, something seemed to throb in my veins.
As I lounged in the park, or strolled down Piccadilly, I used
to look at every one who passed me and wonder, with a mad curiosity,
what sort of lives they led. Some of them fascinated me.
Others filled me with terror. There was an exquisite poison in the air.
I had a passion for sensations. . . . Well, one evening about seven
o'clock, I determined to go out in search of some adventure.
I felt that this grey monstrous London of ours, with its myriads of people,
its sordid sinners, and its splendid sins, as you once phrased it,
must have something in store for me. I fancied a thousand things.
The mere danger gave me a sense of delight. I remembered what you
had said to me on that wonderful evening when we first dined together,
about the search for beauty being the real secret of life.
I don't know what I expected, but I went out and wandered eastward,
soon losing my way in a labyrinth of grimy streets and black
grassless squares. About halfpast eight I passed by an absurd
little theatre, with great flaring gasjets and gaudy playbills.
A hideous Jew, in the most amazing waistcoat I ever beheld
in my life, was standing at the entrance, smoking a vile cigar.
He had greasy ringlets, and an enormous diamond blazed in the centre
of a soiled shirt. 'Have a box, my Lord?' he said, when he saw me,
and he took off his hat with an air of gorgeous servility.
There was something about him, Harry, that amused me.
He was such a monster. You will laugh at me, I know, but I
really went in and paid a whole guinea for the stagebox. To
the present day I can't make out why I did so and yet if I hadn't
my dear Harry, if I hadn'tI should have missed the greatest
romance of my life. I see you are laughing. It is horrid of
you"
"I am not laughing, Dorian at least I am not laughing at you.
But you should not say the greatest romance of your life.
You should say the first romance of your life. You will
always be loved, and you will always be in love with love.
A grande passion is the privilege of people who have nothing to do.
That is the one use of the idle classes of a country.
Don't be afraid. There are exquisite things in store for you.
This is merely the beginning."
"Do you think my nature so shallow?" cried Dorian Gray angrily.
"No I think your nature so deep."
"How do you mean?"
"My dear boy, the people who love only once in their lives are really
the shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity,
I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination.
Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life
of the intellectsimply a confession of failure. Faithfulness
I must analyse it some day. The passion for property is in it.
There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid
that others might pick them up. But I don't want to interrupt you.
Go on with your story."
"Well, I found myself seated in a horrid little private box,
with a vulgar dropscene staring me in the face.
I looked out from behind the curtain and surveyed the house.
It was a tawdry affair, all Cupids and cornucopias, like a
thirdrate weddingcake. The gallery and pit were fairly full,
but the two rows of dingy stalls were quite empty, and there was
hardly a person in what I suppose they called the dresscircle.
Women went about with oranges and gingerbeer, and there was a
terrible consumption of nuts going on."
"It must have been just like the palmy days of the British drama."
"Just like, I should fancy, and very depressing. I began to wonder
what on earth I should do when I caught sight of the playbill.
What do you think the play was, Harry?"
"I should think 'The Idiot Boy', or 'Dumb but Innocent'.
Our fathers used to like that sort of piece, I believe.
The longer I live, Dorian, the more keenly I feel that whatever
was good enough for our fathers is not good enough for us. In art,
as in politics, les grandperes ont toujours tort."
"This play was good enough for us, Harry. It was Romeo and Juliet.
I must admit that I was rather annoyed at the idea of seeing Shakespeare
done in such a wretched hole of a place. Still, I felt interested,
in a sort of way. At any rate, I determined to wait for the first act.
There was a dreadful orchestra, presided over by a young
Hebrew who sat at a cracked piano, that nearly drove me away,
but at last the dropscene was drawn up and the play began.
Romeo was a stout elderly gentleman, with corked eyebrows, a husky
tragedy voice, and a figure like a beerbarrel. Mercutio was almost
as bad. He was played by the lowcomedian, who had introduced
gags of his own and was on most friendly terms with the pit.
They were both as grotesque as the scenery, and that looked as if it
had come out of a countrybooth. But Juliet Harry, imagine a girl,
hardly seventeen years of age, with a little, flowerlike face,
a small Greek head with plaited coils of darkbrown hair, eyes that were
violet wells of passion, lips that were like the petals of a rose.
She was the loveliest thing I had ever seen in my life.
You said to me once that pathos left you unmoved, but that beauty,
mere beauty, could fill your eyes with tears. I tell you, Harry, I could
hardly see this girl for the mist of tears that came across me.
And her voiceI never heard such a voice. It was very low at first,
with deep mellow notes that seemed to fall singly upon one's ear.
Then it became a little louder, and sounded like a flute or a
distant hautboy. In the gardenscene it had all the tremulous ecstasy
that one hears just before dawn when nightingales are singing.
There were moments, later on, when it had the wild passion of violins.
You know how a voice can stir one. Your voice and the voice of
Sibyl Vane are two things that I shall never forget. When I close
my eyes, I hear them, and each of them says something different.
I don't know which to follow. Why should I not love her?
Harry, I do love her. She is everything to me in life.
Night after night I go to see her play. One evening she is Rosalind,
and the next evening she is Imogen. I have seen her die in the gloom
of an Italian tomb, sucking the poison from her lover's lips.
I have watched her wandering through the forest of Arden,
disguised as a pretty boy in hose and doublet and dainty cap.
She has been mad, and has come into the presence of a guilty king,
and given him rue to wear and bitter herbs to taste of.
She has been innocent, and the black hands of jealousy have
crushed her reedlike throat. I have seen her in every age and in
every costume. Ordinary women never appeal to one's imagination.
They are limited to their century. No glamour ever transfigures them.
One knows their minds as easily as one knows their bonnets.
One can always find them. There is no mystery in any of them. They ride
in the park in the morning and chatter at teaparties in the afternoon.
They have their stereotyped smile and their fashionable manner.
They are quite obvious. But an actress How different an actress is
Harry why didn't you tell me that the only thing worth loving is an
actress?"
"Because I have loved so many of them, Dorian."
"Oh, yes, horrid people with dyed hair and painted faces."
"Don't run down dyed hair and painted faces. There is an extraordinary
charm in them, sometimes," said Lord Henry.
"I wish now I had not told you about Sibyl Vane."
"You could not have helped telling me, Dorian. All through your life
you will tell me everything you do."
"Yes, Harry, I believe that is true. I cannot help telling you things.
You have a curious influence over me. If I ever did a crime, I would come
and confess it to you. You would understand me."
"People like youthe wilful sunbeams of lifedon't commit crimes, Dorian.
But I am much obliged for the compliment, all the same. And now tell me
reach me the matches, like a good boythankswhat are your actual relations
with Sibyl Vane?"
Dorian Gray leaped to his feet, with flushed cheeks and burning eyes.
"Harry Sibyl Vane is sacred"
"It is only the sacred things that are worth touching, Dorian,"
said Lord Henry, with a strange touch of pathos in his voice.
"But why should you be annoyed? I suppose she will belong
to you some day. When one is in love, one always begins by
deceiving one's self, and one always ends by deceiving others.
That is what the world calls a romance. You know her, at any rate,
I suppose?"
"Of course I know her. On the first night I was at the theatre,
the horrid old Jew came round to the box after the performance was over
and offered to take me behind the scenes and introduce me to her.
I was furious with him, and told him that Juliet had been dead
for hundreds of years and that her body was lying in a marble
tomb in Verona. I think, from his blank look of amazement,
that he was under the impression that I had taken too much champagne,
or something."
"I am not surprised."
"Then he asked me if I wrote for any of the newspapers.
I told him I never even read them. He seemed terribly disappointed
at that, and confided to me that all the dramatic critics
were in a conspiracy against him, and that they were every
one of them to be bought."
"I should not wonder if he was quite right there. But, on the other hand,
judging from their appearance, most of them cannot be at all expensive."
"Well, he seemed to think they were beyond his means,"
laughed Dorian. "By this time, however, the lights were being
put out in the theatre, and I had to go. He wanted me to try
some cigars that he strongly recommended. I declined.
The next night, of course, I arrived at the place again.
When he saw me, he made me a low bow and assured me that I
was a munificent patron of art. He was a most offensive brute,
though he had an extraordinary passion for Shakespeare.
He told me once, with an air of pride, that his five bankruptcies
were entirely due to 'The Bard,' as he insisted on calling him.
He seemed to think it a distinction."
"It was a distinction, my dear Doriana great distinction.
Most people become bankrupt through having invested too
heavily in the prose of life. To have ruined one's self over
poetry is an honour. But when did you first speak to Miss
Sibyl Vane?"
"The third night. She had been playing Rosalind.
I could not help going round. I had thrown her some flowers,
and she had looked at meat least I fancied that she had.
The old Jew was persistent. He seemed determined to take me behind,
so I consented. It was curious my not wanting to know her,
wasn't it?"
"No I don't think so."
"My dear Harry, why?"
"I will tell you some other time. Now I want to know about the girl."
"Sibyl? Oh, she was so shy and so gentle. There is something of a
child about her. Her eyes opened wide in exquisite wonder when I
told her what I thought of her performance, and she seemed quite
unconscious of her power. I think we were both rather nervous.
The old Jew stood grinning at the doorway of the dusty greenroom,
making elaborate speeches about us both, while we stood looking at
each other like children. He would insist on calling me 'My Lord,'
so I had to assure Sibyl that I was not anything of the kind.
She said quite simply to me, 'You look more like a prince.
I must call you Prince Charming.'"
"Upon my word, Dorian, Miss Sibyl knows how to pay compliments."
"You don't understand her, Harry. She regarded me merely as a person
in a play. She knows nothing of life. She lives with her mother,
a faded tired woman who played Lady Capulet in a sort of magenta
dressingwrapper on the first night, and looks as if she had seen
better days."
"I know that look. It depresses me," murmured Lord Henry,
examining his rings.
"The Jew wanted to tell me her history, but I said it did not interest me."
"You were quite right. There is always something infinitely mean
about other people's tragedies."
"Sibyl is the only thing I care about. What is it to me
where she came from? From her little head to her little feet,
she is absolutely and entirely divine. Every night of my life I
go to see her act, and every night she is more marvellous."
"That is the reason, I suppose, that you never dine with me now.
I thought you must have some curious romance on hand. You have
but it is not quite what I expected."
"My dear Harry, we either lunch or sup together every day,
and I have been to the opera with you several times," said Dorian,
opening his blue eyes in wonder.
"You always come dreadfully late."
"Well, I can't help going to see Sibyl play," he cried, "even if it is
only for a single act. I get hungry for her presence and when I think
of the wonderful soul that is hidden away in that little ivory body,
I am filled with awe."
"You can dine with me tonight, Dorian, can't you?"
He shook his head. "Tonight she is Imogen," he answered,
"and tomorrow night she will be Juliet."
"When is she Sibyl Vane?"
"Never."
"I congratulate you."
"How horrid you are She is all the great heroines of the world in one.
She is more than an individual. You laugh, but I tell you she
has genius. I love her, and I must make her love me. You, who know
all the secrets of life, tell me how to charm Sibyl Vane to love me
I want to make Romeo jealous. I want the dead lovers of the world
to hear our laughter and grow sad. I want a breath of our passion
to stir their dust into consciousness, to wake their ashes into pain.
My God, Harry, how I worship her" He was walking up and down the room
as he spoke. Hectic spots of red burned on his cheeks. He was
terribly excited.
Lord Henry watched him with a subtle sense of pleasure. How different
he was now from the shy frightened boy he had met in Basil Hallward's studio
His nature had developed like a flower, had borne blossoms of scarlet flame.
Out of its secret hidingplace had crept his soul, and desire had come to meet
it on the way.
"And what do you propose to do?" said Lord Henry at last.
"I want you and Basil to come with me some night and see her act.
I have not the slightest fear of the result. You are certain to
acknowledge her genius. Then we must get her out of the Jew's hands.
She is bound to him for three yearsat least for two years and eight months
from the present time. I shall have to pay him something, of course.
When all that is settled, I shall take a West End theatre and bring
her out properly. She will make the world as mad as she has
made me."
"That would be impossible, my dear boy."
"Yes, she will. She has not merely art, consummate artinstinct,
in her, but she has personality also and you have often told me
that it is personalities, not principles, that move the age."
"Well, what night shall we go?"
"Let me see. Today is Tuesday. Let us fix tomorrow. She plays
Juliet tomorrow."
"All right. The Bristol at eight o'clock and I will get Basil."
"Not eight, Harry, please. Halfpast six. We must be there
before the curtain rises. You must see her in the first act,
where she meets Romeo."
"Halfpast six What an hour It will be like having a meattea, or reading
an English novel. It must be seven. No gentleman dines before seven.
Shall you see Basil between this and then? Or shall I write to him?"
"Dear Basil I have not laid eyes on him for a week.
It is rather horrid of me, as he has sent me my portrait in
the most wonderful frame, specially designed by himself, and,
though I am a little jealous of the picture for being a whole
month younger than I am, I must admit that I delight in it.
Perhaps you had better write to him. I don't want to see him alone.
He says things that annoy me. He gives me good advice."
Lord Henry smiled. "People are very fond of giving away what they
need most themselves. It is what I call the depth of generosity."
"Oh, Basil is the best of fellows, but he seems to me to be just a bit
of a Philistine. Since I have known you, Harry, I have discovered that."
"Basil, my dear boy, puts everything that is charming in him
into his work. The consequence is that he has nothing left for
life but his prejudices, his principles, and his common sense.
The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful
are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make,
and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are.
A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of
all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating.
The worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look.
The mere fact of having published a book of secondrate sonnets
makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that
he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare
not realize."
"I wonder is that really so, Harry?" said Dorian Gray,
putting some perfume on his handkerchief out of a large,
goldtopped bottle that stood on the table. "It must be,
if you say it. And now I am off. Imogen is waiting for me.
Don't forget about tomorrow. Goodbye."
As he left the room, Lord Henry's heavy eyelids drooped, and he began
to think. Certainly few people had ever interested him so much
as Dorian Gray, and yet the lad's mad adoration of some one else
caused him not the slightest pang of annoyance or jealousy.
He was pleased by it. It made him a more interesting study.
He had been always enthralled by the methods of natural science,
but the ordinary subjectmatter of that science had seemed to him
trivial and of no import. And so he had begun by vivisecting himself,
as he had ended by vivisecting others. Human lifethat appeared
to him the one thing worth investigating. Compared to it there
was nothing else of any value. It was true that as one watched
life in its curious crucible of pain and pleasure, one could
not wear over one's face a mask of glass, nor keep the sulphurous
fumes from troubling the brain and making the imagination turbid
with monstrous fancies and misshapen dreams. There were poisons
so subtle that to know their properties one had to sicken of them.
There were maladies so strange that one had to pass through them
if one sought to understand their nature. And, yet, what a great
reward one received How wonderful the whole world became to one
To note the curious hard logic of passion, and the emotional
coloured life of the intellectto observe where they met,
and where they separated, at what point they were in unison,
and at what point they were at discordthere was a delight in that
What matter what the cost was? One could never pay too high a price for
any sensation.
He was consciousand the thought brought a gleam of pleasure into
his brown agate eyesthat it was through certain words of his,
musical words said with musical utterance, that Dorian Gray's soul
had turned to this white girl and bowed in worship before her.
To a large extent the lad was his own creation. He had made
him premature. That was something. Ordinary people waited till
life disclosed to them its secrets, but to the few, to the elect,
the mysteries of life were revealed before the veil was drawn away.
Sometimes this was the effect of art, and chiefly of the art of literature,
which dealt immediately with the passions and the intellect.
But now and then a complex personality took the place and assumed
the office of art, was indeed, in its way, a real work of art,
life having its elaborate masterpieces, just as poetry has, or sculpture,
or painting.
Yes, the lad was premature. He was gathering his harvest while it
was yet spring. The pulse and passion of youth were in him,
but he was becoming selfconscious. It was delightful to watch him.
With his beautiful face, and his beautiful soul, he was a thing to
wonder at. It was no matter how it all ended, or was destined to end.
He was like one of those gracious figures in a pageant or a play,
whose joys seem to be remote from one, but whose sorrows stir one's sense
of beauty, and whose wounds are like red roses.
Soul and body, body and soulhow mysterious they were There was
animalism in the soul, and the body had its moments of spirituality.
The senses could refine, and the intellect could degrade. Who could
say where the fleshly impulse ceased, or the psychical impulse began?
How shallow were the arbitrary definitions of ordinary psychologists
And yet how difficult to decide between the claims of the various schools
Was the soul a shadow seated in the house of sin? Or was the body
really in the soul, as Giordano Bruno thought? The separation of spirit
from matter was a mystery, and the union of spirit with matter was a
mystery also.
He began to wonder whether we could ever make psychology so absolute
a science that each little spring of life would be revealed to us.
As it was, we always misunderstood ourselves and rarely understood others.
Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to
their mistakes. Moralists had, as a rule, regarded it as a mode of warning,
had claimed for it a certain ethical efficacy in the formation of character,
had praised it as something that taught us what to follow and showed
us what to avoid. But there was no motive power in experience.
It was as little of an active cause as conscience itself. All that it
really demonstrated was that our future would be the same as our past,
and that the sin we had done once, and with loathing, we would do many times,
and with joy.
It was clear to him that the experimental method was the only
method by which one could arrive at any scientific analysis
of the passions and certainly Dorian Gray was a subject made
to his hand, and seemed to promise rich and fruitful results.
His sudden mad love for Sibyl Vane was a psychological phenomenon
of no small interest. There was no doubt that curiosity had much
to do with it, curiosity and the desire for new experiences,
yet it was not a simple, but rather a very complex passion.
What there was in it of the purely sensuous instinct of boyhood
had been transformed by the workings of the imagination,
changed into something that seemed to the lad himself to be remote
from sense, and was for that very reason all the more dangerous.
It was the passions about whose origin we deceived ourselves
that tyrannized most strongly over us. Our weakest motives
were those of whose nature we were conscious. It often happened
that when we thought we were experimenting on others we were
really experimenting on ourselves.
While Lord Henry sat dreaming on these things, a knock came to the door,
and his valet entered and reminded him it was time to dress for dinner.
He got up and looked out into the street. The sunset had smitten into
scarlet gold the upper windows of the houses opposite. The panes glowed
like plates of heated metal. The sky above was like a faded rose.
He thought of his friend's young fierycoloured life and wondered how it was
all going to end.
When he arrived home, about halfpast twelve o'clock, he saw a telegram
lying on the hall table. He opened it and found it was from Dorian Gray.
It was to tell him that he was engaged to be married to Sibyl Vane.
CHAPTER 
"Mother, Mother, I am so happy" whispered the girl, burying her
face in the lap of the faded, tiredlooking woman who,
with back turned to the shrill intrusive light, was sitting
in the one armchair that their dingy sittingroom contained.
"I am so happy" she repeated, "and you must be happy, too"
Mrs. Vane winced and put her thin, bismuthwhitened hands on her
daughter's head. "Happy" she echoed, "I am only happy, Sibyl, when I
see you act. You must not think of anything but your acting.
Mr. Isaacs has been very good to us, and we owe him money."
The girl looked up and pouted. "Money, Mother?" she cried,
"what does money matter? Love is more than money."
"Mr. Isaacs has advanced us fifty pounds to pay off our debts and to get
a proper outfit for James. You must not forget that, Sibyl. Fifty pounds
is a very large sum. Mr. Isaacs has been most considerate."
"He is not a gentleman, Mother, and I hate the way he talks to me,"
said the girl, rising to her feet and going over to the window.
"I don't know how we could manage without him," answered the elder
woman querulously.
Sibyl Vane tossed her head and laughed. "We don't want him
any more, Mother. Prince Charming rules life for us now."
Then she paused. A rose shook in her blood and shadowed
her cheeks. Quick breath parted the petals of her lips.
They trembled. Some southern wind of passion swept over her
and stirred the dainty folds of her dress. "I love him,"
she said simply.
"Foolish child foolish child" was the parrotphrase flung in answer.
The waving of crooked, falsejewelled fingers gave grotesqueness to
the words.
The girl laughed again. The joy of a caged bird was in her voice.
Her eyes caught the melody and echoed it in radiance, then closed
for a moment, as though to hide their secret. When they opened,
the mist of a dream had passed across them.
Thinlipped wisdom spoke at her from the worn chair,
hinted at prudence, quoted from that book of cowardice whose
author apes the name of common sense. She did not listen.
She was free in her prison of passion. Her prince, Prince Charming,
was with her. She had called on memory to remake him.
She had sent her soul to search for him, and it had brought him back.
His kiss burned again upon her mouth. Her eyelids were warm with
his breath.
Then wisdom altered its method and spoke of espial and discovery.
This young man might be rich. If so, marriage should be thought of.
Against the shell of her ear broke the waves of worldly cunning.
The arrows of craft shot by her. She saw the thin lips moving,
and smiled.
Suddenly she felt the need to speak. The wordy silence troubled her.
"Mother, Mother," she cried, "why does he love me so much? I know why I
love him. I love him because he is like what love himself should be.
But what does he see in me? I am not worthy of him. And yetwhy, I
cannot tellthough I feel so much beneath him, I don't feel humble.
I feel proud, terribly proud. Mother, did you love my father as I love
Prince Charming?"
The elder woman grew pale beneath the coarse powder that daubed
her cheeks, and her dry lips twitched with a spasm of pain.
Sybil rushed to her, flung her arms round her neck, and kissed her.
"Forgive me, Mother. I know it pains you to talk about our father.
But it only pains you because you loved him so much. Don't look so sad.
I am as happy today as you were twenty years ago. Ah let me be happy
for ever"
"My child, you are far too young to think of falling in love.
Besides, what do you know of this young man? You don't
even know his name. The whole thing is most inconvenient,
and really, when James is going away to Australia, and I have
so much to think of, I must say that you should have shown
more consideration. However, as I said before, if he is rich
"Ah Mother, Mother, let me be happy"
Mrs. Vane glanced at her, and with one of those false
theatrical gestures that so often become a mode of second
nature to a stageplayer, clasped her in her arms.
At this moment, the door opened and a young lad with rough
brown hair came into the room. He was thickset of figure,
and his hands and feet were large and somewhat clumsy in movement.
He was not so finely bred as his sister. One would hardly
have guessed the close relationship that existed between them.
Mrs. Vane fixed her eyes on him and intensified her smile.
She mentally elevated her son to the dignity of an audience.
She felt sure that the tableau was interesting.
"You might keep some of your kisses for me, Sibyl, I think,"
said the lad with a goodnatured grumble.
"Ah but you don't like being kissed, Jim," she cried.
"You are a dreadful old bear." And she ran across the room and
hugged him.
James Vane looked into his sister's face with tenderness.
"I want you to come out with me for a walk, Sibyl.
I don't suppose I shall ever see this horrid London again.
I am sure I don't want to."
"My son, don't say such dreadful things," murmured Mrs. Vane, taking up
a tawdry theatrical dress, with a sigh, and beginning to patch it.
She felt a little disappointed that he had not joined the group.
It would have increased the theatrical picturesqueness of the situation.
"Why not, Mother? I mean it."
"You pain me, my son. I trust you will return from Australia in a position
of affluence. I believe there is no society of any kind in the Colonies
nothing that I would call societyso when you have made your fortune,
you must come back and assert yourself in London."
"Society" muttered the lad. "I don't want to know anything about that.
I should like to make some money to take you and Sibyl off the stage.
I hate it."
"Oh, Jim" said Sibyl, laughing, "how unkind of you
But are you really going for a walk with me? That will be nice
I was afraid you were going to say goodbye to some of your friends
to Tom Hardy, who gave you that hideous pipe, or Ned Langton,
who makes fun of you for smoking it. It is very sweet of you
to let me have your last afternoon. Where shall we go?
Let us go to the park."
"I am too shabby," he answered, frowning. "Only swell people go to the park."
"Nonsense, Jim," she whispered, stroking the sleeve of his coat.
He hesitated for a moment. "Very well," he said at last,
"but don't be too long dressing." She danced out of the door.
One could hear her singing as she ran upstairs. Her little feet
pattered overhead.
He walked up and down the room two or three times. Then he turned
to the still figure in the chair. "Mother, are my things ready?"
he asked.
"Quite ready, James," she answered, keeping her eyes on
her work. For some months past she had felt ill at ease
when she was alone with this rough stern son of hers.
Her shallow secret nature was troubled when their eyes met.
She used to wonder if he suspected anything. The silence,
for he made no other observation, became intolerable to her.
She began to complain. Women defend themselves by attacking,
just as they attack by sudden and strange surrenders.
"I hope you will be contented, James, with your seafaring life,"
she said. "You must remember that it is your own choice.
You might have entered a solicitor's office. Solicitors are
a very respectable class, and in the country often dine with
the best families."
"I hate offices, and I hate clerks," he replied. "But you are quite right.
I have chosen my own life. All I say is, watch over Sibyl. Don't let her
come to any harm. Mother, you must watch over her."
"James, you really talk very strangely. Of course I watch over Sibyl."
"I hear a gentleman comes every night to the theatre and goes behind
to talk to her. Is that right? What about that?"
"You are speaking about things you don't understand, James. In the profession
we are accustomed to receive a great deal of most gratifying attention.
I myself used to receive many bouquets at one time. That was when acting
was really understood. As for Sibyl, I do not know at present whether
her attachment is serious or not. But there is no doubt that the young
man in question is a perfect gentleman. He is always most polite to me.
Besides, he has the appearance of being rich, and the flowers he sends
are lovely."
"You don't know his name, though," said the lad harshly.
"No," answered his mother with a placid expression in her face.
"He has not yet revealed his real name. I think it is quite romantic
of him. He is probably a member of the aristocracy."
James Vane bit his lip. "Watch over Sibyl, Mother," he cried,
"watch over her."
"My son, you distress me very much. Sibyl is always under my special care.
Of course, if this gentleman is wealthy, there is no reason why she should
not contract an alliance with him. I trust he is one of the aristocracy.
He has all the appearance of it, I must say. It might be a most brilliant
marriage for Sibyl. They would make a charming couple. His good looks are
really quite remarkable everybody notices them."
The lad muttered something to himself and drummed on the windowpane
with his coarse fingers. He had just turned round to say something
when the door opened and Sibyl ran in.
"How serious you both are" she cried. "What is the matter?"
"Nothing," he answered. "I suppose one must be serious sometimes.
Goodbye, Mother I will have my dinner at five o'clock. Everything
is packed, except my shirts, so you need not trouble."
"Goodbye, my son," she answered with a bow of strained stateliness.
She was extremely annoyed at the tone he had adopted with her,
and there was something in his look that had made her feel afraid.
"Kiss me, Mother," said the girl. Her flowerlike lips touched the withered
cheek and warmed its frost.
"My child my child" cried Mrs. Vane, looking up to the ceiling
in search of an imaginary gallery.
"Come, Sibyl," said her brother impatiently. He hated
his mother's affectations.
They went out into the flickering, windblown sunlight and strolled
down the dreary Euston Road. The passersby glanced in wonder
at the sullen heavy youth who, in coarse, illfitting clothes,
was in the company of such a graceful, refinedlooking girl.
He was like a common gardener walking with a rose.
Jim frowned from time to time when he caught the inquisitive
glance of some stranger. He had that dislike of being stared at,
which comes on geniuses late in life and never leaves the commonplace.
Sibyl, however, was quite unconscious of the effect she was producing.
Her love was trembling in laughter on her lips. She was thinking
of Prince Charming, and, that she might think of him all the more,
she did not talk of him, but prattled on about the ship in which
Jim was going to sail, about the gold he was certain to find,
about the wonderful heiress whose life he was to save from the wicked,
redshirted bushrangers. For he was not to remain a sailor,
or a supercargo, or whatever he was going to be. Oh, no A sailor's
existence was dreadful. Fancy being cooped up in a horrid ship,
with the hoarse, humpbacked waves trying to get in, and a black wind
blowing the masts down and tearing the sails into long screaming ribands
He was to leave the vessel at Melbourne, bid a polite goodbye
to the captain, and go off at once to the goldfields. Before
a week was over he was to come across a large nugget of pure gold,
the largest nugget that had ever been discovered, and bring it
down to the coast in a waggon guarded by six mounted policemen.
The bushrangers were to attack them three times, and be defeated
with immense slaughter. Or, no. He was not to go to the goldfields
at all. They were horrid places, where men got intoxicated,
and shot each other in barrooms, and used bad language. He was
to be a nice sheepfarmer, and one evening, as he was riding home,
he was to see the beautiful heiress being carried off by a robber
on a black horse, and give chase, and rescue her. Of course,
she would fall in love with him, and he with her, and they would
get married, and come home, and live in an immense house in London.
Yes, there were delightful things in store for him. But he must
be very good, and not lose his temper, or spend his money foolishly.
She was only a year older than he was, but she knew so much more
of life. He must be sure, also, to write to her by every mail,
and to say his prayers each night before he went to sleep.
God was very good, and would watch over him. She would pray
for him, too, and in a few years he would come back quite rich and
happy.
The lad listened sulkily to her and made no answer. He was heartsick
at leaving home.
Yet it was not this alone that made him gloomy and morose.
Inexperienced though he was, he had still a strong sense
of the danger of Sibyl's position. This young dandy who was
making love to her could mean her no good. He was a gentleman,
and he hated him for that, hated him through some curious
raceinstinct for which he could not account, and which for that
reason was all the more dominant within him. He was conscious
also of the shallowness and vanity of his mother's nature,
and in that saw infinite peril for Sibyl and Sibyl's happiness.
Children begin by loving their parents as they grow older they
judge them sometimes they forgive them.
His mother He had something on his mind to ask of her,
something that he had brooded on for many months of silence.
A chance phrase that he had heard at the theatre, a whispered
sneer that had reached his ears one night as he waited at
the stagedoor, had set loose a train of horrible thoughts.
He remembered it as if it had been the lash of a huntingcrop
across his face. His brows knit together into a wedgelike furrow,
and with a twitch of pain he bit his underlip.
"You are not listening to a word I am saying, Jim," cried Sibyl,
"and I am making the most delightful plans for your future.
Do say something."
"What do you want me to say?"
"Oh that you will be a good boy and not forget us," she answered,
smiling at him.
He shrugged his shoulders. "You are more likely to forget me than I am
to forget you, Sibyl."
She flushed. "What do you mean, Jim?" she asked.
"You have a new friend, I hear. Who is he? Why have you not told me
about him? He means you no good."
"Stop, Jim" she exclaimed. "You must not say anything against him.
I love him."
"Why, you don't even know his name," answered the lad. "Who is he?
I have a right to know."
"He is called Prince Charming. Don't you like the name.
Oh you silly boy you should never forget it. If you only saw him,
you would think him the most wonderful person in the world.
Some day you will meet himwhen you come back from Australia.
You will like him so much. Everybody likes him, and I ...
love him. I wish you could come to the theatre tonight. He
is going to be there, and I am to play Juliet. Oh how I
shall play it Fancy, Jim, to be in love and play Juliet
To have him sitting there To play for his delight
I am afraid I may frighten the company, frighten or enthrall them.
To be in love is to surpass one's self. Poor dreadful
Mr. Isaacs will be shouting 'genius' to his loafers at the bar.
He has preached me as a dogma tonight he will announce me
as a revelation. I feel it. And it is all his, his only,
Prince Charming, my wonderful lover, my god of graces.
But I am poor beside him. Poor? What does that matter?
When poverty creeps in at the door, love flies in through the window.
Our proverbs want rewriting. They were made in winter, and it is
summer now springtime for me, I think, a very dance of blossoms
in blue skies."
"He is a gentleman," said the lad sullenly.
"A prince" she cried musically. "What more do you want?"
"He wants to enslave you."
"I shudder at the thought of being free."
"I want you to beware of him."
"To see him is to worship him to know him is to trust him."
"Sibyl, you are mad about him."
She laughed and took his arm. "You dear old Jim, you talk as
if you were a hundred. Some day you will be in love yourself.
Then you will know what it is. Don't look so sulky.
Surely you should be glad to think that, though you are
going away, you leave me happier than I have ever been before.
Life has been hard for us both, terribly hard and difficult.
But it will be different now. You are going to a new world,
and I have found one. Here are two chairs let us sit down and see
the smart people go by."
They took their seats amidst a crowd of watchers. The tulipbeds
across the road flamed like throbbing rings of fire. A white dust
tremulous cloud of orrisroot it seemedhung in the panting air.
The brightly coloured parasols danced and dipped like monstrous butterflies.
She made her brother talk of himself, his hopes, his prospects.
He spoke slowly and with effort. They passed words to each other
as players at a game pass counters. Sibyl felt oppressed. She could
not communicate her joy. A faint smile curving that sullen mouth
was all the echo she could win. After some time she became silent.
Suddenly she caught a glimpse of golden hair and laughing lips,
and in an open carriage with two ladies Dorian Gray drove past.
She started to her feet. "There he is" she cried.
"Who?" said Jim Vane.
"Prince Charming," she answered, looking after the victoria.
He jumped up and seized her roughly by the arm. "Show him to me.
Which is he? Point him out. I must see him" he exclaimed
but at that moment the Duke of Berwick's fourinhand came between,
and when it had left the space clear, the carriage had swept out of
the park.
"He is gone," murmured Sibyl sadly. "I wish you had seen him."
"I wish I had, for as sure as there is a God in heaven,
if he ever does you any wrong, I shall kill him."
She looked at him in horror. He repeated his words.
They cut the air like a dagger. The people round began to gape.
A lady standing close to her tittered.
"Come away, Jim come away," she whispered. He followed her doggedly
as she passed through the crowd. He felt glad at what he had said.
When they reached the Achilles Statue, she turned round.
There was pity in her eyes that became laughter on her lips.
She shook her head at him. "You are foolish, Jim, utterly foolish
a badtempered boy, that is all. How can you say such
horrible things? You don't know what you are talking about.
You are simply jealous and unkind. Ah I wish you would
fall in love. Love makes people good, and what you said
was wicked."
"I am sixteen," he answered, "and I know what I am about.
Mother is no help to you. She doesn't understand how to look
after you. I wish now that I was not going to Australia at all.
I have a great mind to chuck the whole thing up. I would, if my
articles hadn't been signed."
"Oh, don't be so serious, Jim. You are like one of the heroes
of those silly melodramas Mother used to be so fond of acting in.
I am not going to quarrel with you. I have seen him, and oh to see
him is perfect happiness. We won't quarrel. I know you would never
harm any one I love, would you?"
"Not as long as you love him, I suppose," was the sullen answer.
"I shall love him for ever" she cried.
"And he?"
"For ever, too"
"He had better."
She shrank from him. Then she laughed and put her hand on his arm.
He was merely a boy.
At the Marble Arch they hailed an omnibus, which left them close
to their shabby home in the Euston Road. It was after five o'clock,
and Sibyl had to lie down for a couple of hours before acting.
Jim insisted that she should do so. He said that he would sooner
part with her when their mother was not present. She would be sure
to make a scene, and he detested scenes of every kind.
In Sybil's own room they parted. There was jealousy in the lad's heart,
and a fierce murderous hatred of the stranger who, as it seemed to him,
had come between them. Yet, when her arms were flung round his neck,
and her fingers strayed through his hair, he softened and kissed her with
real affection. There were tears in his eyes as he went downstairs.
His mother was waiting for him below. She grumbled at his unpunctuality,
as he entered. He made no answer, but sat down to his meagre meal.
The flies buzzed round the table and crawled over the stained cloth.
Through the rumble of omnibuses, and the clatter of streetcabs,
he could hear the droning voice devouring each minute that was left
to him.
After some time, he thrust away his plate and put his head in his hands.
He felt that he had a right to know. It should have been told to him before,
if it was as he suspected. Leaden with fear, his mother watched him.
Words dropped mechanically from her lips. A tattered lace handkerchief
twitched in her fingers. When the clock struck six, he got up and went
to the door. Then he turned back and looked at her. Their eyes met.
In hers he saw a wild appeal for mercy. It enraged him.
"Mother, I have something to ask you," he said. Her eyes wandered
vaguely about the room. She made no answer. "Tell me the truth.
I have a right to know. Were you married to my father?"
She heaved a deep sigh. It was a sigh of relief. The terrible moment,
the moment that night and day, for weeks and months, she had dreaded,
had come at last, and yet she felt no terror. Indeed, in some measure it
was a disappointment to her. The vulgar directness of the question called
for a direct answer. The situation had not been gradually led up to.
It was crude. It reminded her of a bad rehearsal.
"No," she answered, wondering at the harsh simplicity of life.
"My father was a scoundrel then" cried the lad, clenching his fists.
She shook her head. "I knew he was not free. We loved each other
very much. If he had lived, he would have made provision for us.
Don't speak against him, my son. He was your father, and a gentleman.
Indeed, he was highly connected."
An oath broke from his lips. "I don't care for myself,"
he exclaimed, "but don't let Sibyl. . . . It is a gentleman,
isn't it, who is in love with her, or says he is?
Highly connected, too, I suppose."
For a moment a hideous sense of humiliation came over the woman.
Her head drooped. She wiped her eyes with shaking hands.
"Sibyl has a mother," she murmured "I had none."
The lad was touched. He went towards her, and stooping down,
he kissed her. "I am sorry if I have pained you by asking about
my father," he said, "but I could not help it. I must go now.
Goodbye. Don't forget that you will have only one child now
to look after, and believe me that if this man wrongs my sister,
I will find out who he is, track him down, and kill him like a dog.
I swear it."
The exaggerated folly of the threat, the passionate gesture
that accompanied it, the mad melodramatic words, made life seem
more vivid to her. She was familiar with the atmosphere.
She breathed more freely, and for the first time for many months
she really admired her son. She would have liked to have continued
the scene on the same emotional scale, but he cut her short.
Trunks had to be carried down and mufflers looked for.
The lodginghouse drudge bustled in and out. There was the bargaining
with the cabman. The moment was lost in vulgar details.
It was with a renewed feeling of disappointment that she waved the
tattered lace handkerchief from the window, as her son drove away.
She was conscious that a great opportunity had been wasted.
She consoled herself by telling Sibyl how desolate she felt her
life would be, now that she had only one child to look after.
She remembered the phrase. It had pleased her. Of the threat
she said nothing. It was vividly and dramatically expressed.
She felt that they would all laugh at it some day.
CHAPTER 
"I suppose you have heard the news, Basil?" said Lord Henry
that evening as Hallward was shown into a little private room
at the Bristol where dinner had been laid for three.
"No, Harry," answered the artist, giving his hat and coat to
the bowing waiter. "What is it? Nothing about politics, I hope
They don't interest me. There is hardly a single person in the House
of Commons worth painting, though many of them would be the better
for a little whitewashing."
"Dorian Gray is engaged to be married," said Lord Henry,
watching him as he spoke.
Hallward started and then frowned. "Dorian engaged to be married"
he cried. "Impossible"
"It is perfectly true."
"To whom?"
"To some little actress or other."
"I can't believe it. Dorian is far too sensible."
"Dorian is far too wise not to do foolish things now and then,
my dear Basil."
"Marriage is hardly a thing that one can do now and then, Harry."
"Except in America," rejoined Lord Henry languidly. "But I
didn't say he was married. I said he was engaged to be married.
There is a great difference. I have a distinct remembrance of
being married, but I have no recollection at all of being engaged.
I am inclined to think that I never was engaged."
"But think of Dorian's birth, and position, and wealth.
It would be absurd for him to marry so much beneath him."
"If you want to make him marry this girl, tell him that, Basil. He is
sure to do it, then. Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing,
it is always from the noblest motives."
"I hope the girl is good, Harry. I don't want to see Dorian tied to some
vile creature, who might degrade his nature and ruin his intellect."
"Oh, she is better than goodshe is beautiful," murmured Lord Henry,
sipping a glass of vermouth and orangebitters. "Dorian says she
is beautiful, and he is not often wrong about things of that kind.
Your portrait of him has quickened his appreciation of the personal
appearance of other people. It has had that excellent effect,
amongst others. We are to see her tonight, if that boy doesn't forget
his appointment."
"Are you serious?"
"Quite serious, Basil. I should be miserable if I thought I
should ever be more serious than I am at the present moment."
"But do you approve of it, Harry?" asked the painter,
walking up and down the room and biting his lip. "You can't
approve of it, possibly. It is some silly infatuation."
"I never approve, or disapprove, of anything now. It is an absurd
attitude to take towards life. We are not sent into the world
to air our moral prejudices. I never take any notice of what common
people say, and I never interfere with what charming people do.
If a personality fascinates me, whatever mode of expression that
personality selects is absolutely delightful to me. Dorian Gray
falls in love with a beautiful girl who acts Juliet, and proposes
to marry her. Why not? If he wedded Messalina, he would be none
the less interesting. You know I am not a champion of marriage.
The real drawback to marriage is that it makes one unselfish.
And unselfish people are colourless. They lack individuality.
Still, there are certain temperaments that marriage makes more complex.
They retain their egotism, and add to it many other egos.
They are forced to have more than one life. They become more
highly organized, and to be highly organized is, I should fancy,
the object of man's existence. Besides, every experience
is of value, and whatever one may say against marriage,
it is certainly an experience. I hope that Dorian Gray will
make this girl his wife, passionately adore her for six months,
and then suddenly become fascinated by some one else. He would be a
wonderful study."
"You don't mean a single word of all that, Harry you know you don't. If
Dorian Gray's life were spoiled, no one would be sorrier than yourself.
You are much better than you pretend to be."
Lord Henry laughed. "The reason we all like to think
so well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves.
The basis of optimism is sheer terror. We think that we are
generous because we credit our neighbour with the possession
of those virtues that are likely to be a benefit to us.
We praise the banker that we may overdraw our account,
and find good qualities in the highwayman in the hope that
he may spare our pockets. I mean everything that I have said.
I have the greatest contempt for optimism. As for a spoiled life,
no life is spoiled but one whose growth is arrested.
If you want to mar a nature, you have merely to reform it.
As for marriage, of course that would be silly, but there are other
and more interesting bonds between men and women. I will certainly
encourage them. They have the charm of being fashionable.
But here is Dorian himself. He will tell you more than
I can."
"My dear Harry, my dear Basil, you must both congratulate me"
said the lad, throwing off his evening cape with its satinlined
wings and shaking each of his friends by the hand in turn.
"I have never been so happy. Of course, it is sudden
all really delightful things are. And yet it seems to me
to be the one thing I have been looking for all my life."
He was flushed with excitement and pleasure, and looked
extraordinarily handsome.
"I hope you will always be very happy, Dorian," said Hallward, "but I
don't quite forgive you for not having let me know of your engagement.
You let Harry know."
"And I don't forgive you for being late for dinner," broke in Lord Henry,
putting his hand on the lad's shoulder and smiling as he spoke.
"Come, let us sit down and try what the new chef here is like, and then you
will tell us how it all came about."
"There is really not much to tell," cried Dorian as they took their
seats at the small round table. "What happened was simply this.
After I left you yesterday evening, Harry, I dressed, had some
dinner at that little Italian restaurant in Rupert Street you
introduced me to, and went down at eight o'clock to the theatre.
Sibyl was playing Rosalind. Of course, the scenery was dreadful
and the Orlando absurd. But Sibyl You should have seen her
When she came on in her boy's clothes, she was perfectly wonderful.
She wore a mosscoloured velvet jerkin with cinnamon sleeves,
slim, brown, crossgartered hose, a dainty little green cap with a hawk's
feather caught in a jewel, and a hooded cloak lined with dull red.
She had never seemed to me more exquisite. She had all the delicate
grace of that Tanagra figurine that you have in your studio, Basil.
Her hair clustered round her face like dark leaves round a pale rose.
As for her actingwell, you shall see her tonight. She is simply
a born artist. I sat in the dingy box absolutely enthralled.
I forgot that I was in London and in the nineteenth century.
I was away with my love in a forest that no man had ever seen.
After the performance was over, I went behind and spoke to her.
As we were sitting together, suddenly there came into her eyes a look
that I had never seen there before. My lips moved towards hers.
We kissed each other. I can't describe to you what I felt at that moment.
It seemed to me that all my life had been narrowed to one perfect
point of rosecoloured joy. She trembled all over and shook
like a white narcissus. Then she flung herself on her knees
and kissed my hands. I feel that I should not tell you all this,
but I can't help it. Of course, our engagement is a dead secret.
She has not even told her own mother. I don't know what my guardians
will say. Lord Radley is sure to be furious. I don't care.
I shall be of age in less than a year, and then I can do what I like.
I have been right, Basil, haven't I, to take my love out of poetry
and to find my wife in Shakespeare's plays? Lips that Shakespeare
taught to speak have whispered their secret in my ear.
I have had the arms of Rosalind around me, and kissed Juliet on the
mouth."
"Yes, Dorian, I suppose you were right," said Hallward slowly.
"Have you seen her today?" asked Lord Henry.
Dorian Gray shook his head. "I left her in the forest of Arden
I shall find her in an orchard in Verona."
Lord Henry sipped his champagne in a meditative manner.
"At what particular point did you mention the word marriage, Dorian?
And what did she say in answer? Perhaps you forgot all about it."
"My dear Harry, I did not treat it as a business transaction,
and I did not make any formal proposal. I told her that I
loved her, and she said she was not worthy to be my wife.
Not worthy Why, the whole world is nothing to me compared
with her."
"Women are wonderfully practical," murmured Lord Henry,
"much more practical than we are. In situations of that kind
we often forget to say anything about marriage, and they always
remind us."
Hallward laid his hand upon his arm. "Don't, Harry.
You have annoyed Dorian. He is not like other men.
He would never bring misery upon any one. His nature is too fine
for that."
Lord Henry looked across the table. "Dorian is never annoyed with me,"
he answered. "I asked the question for the best reason possible,
for the only reason, indeed, that excuses one for asking any question
simple curiosity. I have a theory that it is always the women who
propose to us, and not we who propose to the women. Except, of course,
in middleclass life. But then the middle classes are not modern."
Dorian Gray laughed, and tossed his head. "You are quite
incorrigible, Harry but I don't mind. It is impossible to be angry
with you. When you see Sibyl Vane, you will feel that the man
who could wrong her would be a beast, a beast without a heart.
I cannot understand how any one can wish to shame the thing
he loves. I love Sibyl Vane. I want to place her on a pedestal
of gold and to see the world worship the woman who is mine.
What is marriage? An irrevocable vow. You mock at it for that.
Ah don't mock. It is an irrevocable vow that I want to take.
Her trust makes me faithful, her belief makes me good.
When I am with her, I regret all that you have taught me.
I become different from what you have known me to be.
I am changed, and the mere touch of Sibyl Vane's hand makes
me forget you and all your wrong, fascinating, poisonous,
delightful theories."
"And those are ... ?" asked Lord Henry, helping himself to some salad.
"Oh, your theories about life, your theories about love,
your theories about pleasure. All your theories, in fact, Harry."
"Pleasure is the only thing worth having a theory about,"
he answered in his slow melodious voice. "But I am afraid
I cannot claim my theory as my own. It belongs to Nature,
not to me. Pleasure is Nature's test, her sign of approval.
When we are happy, we are always good, but when we are good,
we are not always happy."
"Ah but what do you mean by good?" cried Basil Hallward.
"Yes," echoed Dorian, leaning back in his chair and looking at Lord
Henry over the heavy clusters of purplelipped irises that stood
in the centre of the table, "what do you mean by good, Harry?"
"To be good is to be in harmony with one's self," he replied,
touching the thin stem of his glass with his pale, finepointed fingers.
"Discord is to be forced to be in harmony with others.
One's own lifethat is the important thing. As for the lives
of one's neighbours, if one wishes to be a prig or a Puritan,
one can flaunt one's moral views about them, but they are not
one's concern. Besides, individualism has really the higher aim.
Modern morality consists in accepting the standard of one's age.
I consider that for any man of culture to accept the standard of his age is
a form of the grossest immorality."
"But, surely, if one lives merely for one's self, Harry, one pays
a terrible price for doing so?" suggested the painter.
"Yes, we are overcharged for everything nowadays. I should
fancy that the real tragedy of the poor is that they can afford
nothing but selfdenial. Beautiful sins, like beautiful things,
are the privilege of the rich."
"One has to pay in other ways but money."
"What sort of ways, Basil?"
"Oh I should fancy in remorse, in suffering, in . . . well,
in the consciousness of degradation."
Lord Henry shrugged his shoulders. "My dear fellow, mediaeval art
is charming, but mediaeval emotions are out of date. One can use
them in fiction, of course. But then the only things that one can
use in fiction are the things that one has ceased to use in fact.
Believe me, no civilized man ever regrets a pleasure, and no uncivilized
man ever knows what a pleasure is."
"I know what pleasure is," cried Dorian Gray. "It is to adore some one."
"That is certainly better than being adored," he answered,
toying with some fruits. "Being adored is a nuisance.
Women treat us just as humanity treats its gods.
They worship us, and are always bothering us to do something
for them."
"I should have said that whatever they ask for they had first given to us,"
murmured the lad gravely. "They create love in our natures. They have a
right to demand it back."
"That is quite true, Dorian," cried Hallward.
"Nothing is ever quite true," said Lord Henry.
"This is," interrupted Dorian. "You must admit, Harry, that women
give to men the very gold of their lives."
"Possibly," he sighed, "but they invariably want it back in such
very small change. That is the worry. Women, as some witty
Frenchman once put it, inspire us with the desire to do masterpieces
and always prevent us from carrying them out."
"Harry, you are dreadful I don't know why I like you so much."
"You will always like me, Dorian," he replied. "Will you have some coffee,
you fellows? Waiter, bring coffee, and finechampagne, and some cigarettes.
No, don't mind the cigarettesI have some. Basil, I can't allow you to
smoke cigars. You must have a cigarette. A cigarette is the perfect type
of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied.
What more can one want? Yes, Dorian, you will always be fond of me.
I represent to you all the sins you have never had the courage to commit."
"What nonsense you talk, Harry" cried the lad, taking a light from
a firebreathing silver dragon that the waiter had placed on the table.
"Let us go down to the theatre. When Sibyl comes on the stage you will
have a new ideal of life. She will represent something to you that you
have never known."
"I have known everything," said Lord Henry, with a tired
look in his eyes, "but I am always ready for a new emotion.
I am afraid, however, that, for me at any rate, there is
no such thing. Still, your wonderful girl may thrill me.
I love acting. It is so much more real than life. Let us go.
Dorian, you will come with me. I am so sorry, Basil, but there
is only room for two in the brougham. You must follow us in
a hansom."
They got up and put on their coats, sipping their coffee standing.
The painter was silent and preoccupied. There was a gloom over him.
He could not bear this marriage, and yet it seemed to him
to be better than many other things that might have happened.
After a few minutes, they all passed downstairs. He drove off by himself,
as had been arranged, and watched the flashing lights of the little
brougham in front of him. A strange sense of loss came over him.
He felt that Dorian Gray would never again be to him all that he had
been in the past. Life had come between them.... His eyes darkened,
and the crowded flaring streets became blurred to his eyes.
When the cab drew up at the theatre, it seemed to him that he had grown
years older.
CHAPTER 
For some reason or other, the house was crowded that night,
and the fat Jew manager who met them at the door was
beaming from ear to ear with an oily tremulous smile.
He escorted them to their box with a sort of pompous humility,
waving his fat jewelled hands and talking at the top of his voice.
Dorian Gray loathed him more than ever. He felt as if he had
come to look for Miranda and had been met by Caliban.
Lord Henry, upon the other hand, rather liked him.
At least he declared he did, and insisted on shaking him
by the hand and assuring him that he was proud to meet a man
who had discovered a real genius and gone bankrupt over a poet.
Hallward amused himself with watching the faces in the pit.
The heat was terribly oppressive, and the huge sunlight
flamed like a monstrous dahlia with petals of yellow fire.
The youths in the gallery had taken off their coats
and waistcoats and hung them over the side. They talked
to each other across the theatre and shared their oranges
with the tawdry girls who sat beside them. Some women
were laughing in the pit. Their voices were horribly shrill
and discordant. The sound of the popping of corks came from
the bar.
"What a place to find one's divinity in" said Lord Henry.
"Yes" answered Dorian Gray. "It was here I found her, and she is divine
beyond all living things. When she acts, you will forget everything.
These common rough people, with their coarse faces and brutal gestures,
become quite different when she is on the stage. They sit silently
and watch her. They weep and laugh as she wills them to do.
She makes them as responsive as a violin. She spiritualizes them,
and one feels that they are of the same flesh and blood as one's self."
"The same flesh and blood as one's self Oh, I hope not"
exclaimed Lord Henry, who was scanning the occupants of the gallery
through his operaglass.
"Don't pay any attention to him, Dorian," said the painter.
"I understand what you mean, and I believe in this girl.
Any one you love must be marvellous, and any girl
who has the effect you describe must be fine and noble.
To spiritualize one's agethat is something worth doing.
If this girl can give a soul to those who have lived without one,
if she can create the sense of beauty in people whose lives
have been sordid and ugly, if she can strip them of their
selfishness and lend them tears for sorrows that are not
their own, she is worthy of all your adoration, worthy of
the adoration of the world. This marriage is quite right.
I did not think so at first, but I admit it now.
The gods made Sibyl Vane for you. Without her you would have
been incomplete."
"Thanks, Basil," answered Dorian Gray, pressing his hand.
"I knew that you would understand me. Harry is so cynical,
he terrifies me. But here is the orchestra. It is
quite dreadful, but it only lasts for about five minutes.
Then the curtain rises, and you will see the girl to whom I
am going to give all my life, to whom I have given everything
that is good in me."
A quarter of an hour afterwards, amidst an extraordinary turmoil of applause,
Sibyl Vane stepped on to the stage. Yes, she was certainly lovely to look at
one of the loveliest creatures, Lord Henry thought, that he had ever seen.
There was something of the fawn in her shy grace and startled eyes.
A faint blush, like the shadow of a rose in a mirror of silver, came to her
cheeks as she glanced at the crowded enthusiastic house. She stepped back
a few paces and her lips seemed to tremble. Basil Hallward leaped to his feet
and began to applaud. Motionless, and as one in a dream, sat Dorian Gray,
gazing at her. Lord Henry peered through his glasses, murmuring,
"Charming charming"
The scene was the hall of Capulet's house, and Romeo in his pilgrim's
dress had entered with Mercutio and his other friends. The band,
such as it was, struck up a few bars of music, and the dance began.
Through the crowd of ungainly, shabbily dressed actors, Sibyl Vane
moved like a creature from a finer world. Her body swayed,
while she danced, as a plant sways in the water. The curves of her
throat were the curves of a white lily. Her hands seemed to be made
of cool ivory.
Yet she was curiously listless. She showed no sign of joy
when her eyes rested on Romeo. The few words she had to speak
Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,
Which mannerly devotion shows in this
For saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch,
And palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss
with the brief dialogue that follows, were spoken in a
thoroughly artificial manner. The voice was exquisite,
but from the point of view of tone it was absolutely false.
It was wrong in colour. It took away all the life from the verse.
It made the passion unreal.
Dorian Gray grew pale as he watched her. He was puzzled and anxious.
Neither of his friends dared to say anything to him. She seemed to them
to be absolutely incompetent. They were horribly disappointed.
Yet they felt that the true test of any Juliet is the balcony scene
of the second act. They waited for that. If she failed there,
there was nothing in her.
She looked charming as she came out in the moonlight.
That could not be denied. But the staginess of her acting
was unbearable, and grew worse as she went on. Her gestures
became absurdly artificial. She overemphasized everything
that she had to say. The beautiful passage
Thou knowest the mask of night is on my face,
Else would a maiden blush bepaint my cheek
For that which thou hast heard me speak tonight
was declaimed with the painful precision of a schoolgirl who has been
taught to recite by some secondrate professor of elocution. When she
leaned over the balcony and came to those wonderful lines
Although I joy in thee,
I have no joy of this contract tonight
It is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden
Too like the lightning, which doth cease to be
Ere one can say, "It lightens." Sweet, goodnight
This bud of love by summer's ripening breath
May prove a beauteous flower when next we meet
she spoke the words as though they conveyed no meaning to her. It was
not nervousness. Indeed, so far from being nervous, she was absolutely
selfcontained. It was simply bad art. She was a complete failure.
Even the common uneducated audience of the pit and gallery lost their
interest in the play. They got restless, and began to talk loudly and to
whistle. The Jew manager, who was standing at the back of the
dresscircle, stamped and swore with rage. The only person unmoved was
the girl herself.
When the second act was over, there came a storm of hisses,
and Lord Henry got up from his chair and put on his coat.
"She is quite beautiful, Dorian," he said, "but she can't act.
Let us go."
"I am going to see the play through," answered the lad,
in a hard bitter voice. "I am awfully sorry that I have made
you waste an evening, Harry. I apologize to you both."
"My dear Dorian, I should think Miss Vane was ill," interrupted Hallward.
"We will come some other night."
"I wish she were ill," he rejoined. "But she seems to me
to be simply callous and cold. She has entirely altered.
Last night she was a great artist. This evening she is merely a
commonplace mediocre actress."
"Don't talk like that about any one you love, Dorian. Love is a more
wonderful thing than art."
"They are both simply forms of imitation," remarked Lord Henry.
"But do let us go. Dorian, you must not stay here any longer.
It is not good for one's morals to see bad acting.
Besides, I don't suppose you will want your wife to act,
so what does it matter if she plays Juliet like a wooden doll?
She is very lovely, and if she knows as little about life
as she does about acting, she will be a delightful experience.
There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating
people who know absolutely everything, and people who know
absolutely nothing. Good heavens, my dear boy, don't look so tragic
The secret of remaining young is never to have an emotion
that is unbecoming. Come to the club with Basil and myself.
We will smoke cigarettes and drink to the beauty of Sibyl Vane.
She is beautiful. What more can you want?"
"Go away, Harry," cried the lad. "I want to be alone. Basil, you must go.
Ah can't you see that my heart is breaking?" The hot tears came
to his eyes. His lips trembled, and rushing to the back of the box,
he leaned up against the wall, hiding his face in his hands.
"Let us go, Basil," said Lord Henry with a strange tenderness in his voice,
and the two young men passed out together.
A few moments afterwards the footlights flared up and the curtain rose
on the third act. Dorian Gray went back to his seat. He looked pale,
and proud, and indifferent. The play dragged on, and seemed interminable.
Half of the audience went out, tramping in heavy boots and laughing.
The whole thing was a fiasco. The last act was played to almost
empty benches. The curtain went down on a titter and some groans.
As soon as it was over, Dorian Gray rushed behind the scenes into
the greenroom. The girl was standing there alone, with a look
of triumph on her face. Her eyes were lit with an exquisite fire.
There was a radiance about her. Her parted lips were smiling over
some secret of their own.
When he entered, she looked at him, and an expression of infinite joy
came over her. "How badly I acted tonight, Dorian" she cried.
"Horribly" he answered, gazing at her in amazement. "Horribly
It was dreadful. Are you ill? You have no idea what it was.
You have no idea what I suffered."
The girl smiled. "Dorian," she answered, lingering over
his name with longdrawn music in her voice, as though it
were sweeter than honey to the red petals of her mouth.
"Dorian, you should have understood. But you understand now,
don't you?"
"Understand what?" he asked, angrily.
"Why I was so bad tonight. Why I shall always be bad.
Why I shall never act well again."
He shrugged his shoulders. "You are ill, I suppose.
When you are ill you shouldn't act. You make yourself ridiculous.
My friends were bored. I was bored."
She seemed not to listen to him. She was transfigured with joy.
An ecstasy of happiness dominated her.
"Dorian, Dorian," she cried, "before I knew you, acting was the one
reality of my life. It was only in the theatre that I lived. I thought
that it was all true. I was Rosalind one night and Portia the other.
The joy of Beatrice was my joy, and the sorrows of Cordelia were mine also.
I believed in everything. The common people who acted with me seemed
to me to be godlike. The painted scenes were my world. I knew nothing
but shadows, and I thought them real. You cameoh, my beautiful love
and you freed my soul from prison. You taught me what reality really is.
Tonight, for the first time in my life, I saw through the hollowness,
the sham, the silliness of the empty pageant in which I had always played.
Tonight, for the first time, I became conscious that the Romeo was hideous,
and old, and painted, that the moonlight in the orchard was false,
that the scenery was vulgar, and that the words I had to speak were unreal,
were not my words, were not what I wanted to say. You had brought me
something higher, something of which all art is but a reflection.
You had made me understand what love really is. My love My love
Prince Charming Prince of life I have grown sick of shadows.
You are more to me than all art can ever be. What have I to do with
the puppets of a play? When I came on tonight, I could not understand
how it was that everything had gone from me. I thought that I was going
to be wonderful. I found that I could do nothing. Suddenly it dawned
on my soul what it all meant. The knowledge was exquisite to me. I heard
them hissing, and I smiled. What could they know of love such as ours?
Take me away, Doriantake me away with you, where we can be quite alone.
I hate the stage. I might mimic a passion that I do not feel,
but I cannot mimic one that burns me like fire. Oh, Dorian, Dorian,
you understand now what it signifies? Even if I could do it, it would
be profanation for me to play at being in love. You have made me see
that."
He flung himself down on the sofa and turned away his face.
"You have killed my love," he muttered.
She looked at him in wonder and laughed. He made no answer.
She came across to him, and with her little fingers stroked
his hair. She knelt down and pressed his hands to her lips.
He drew them away, and a shudder ran through him.
Then he leaped up and went to the door. "Yes," he cried,
"you have killed my love. You used to stir my imagination.
Now you don't even stir my curiosity. You simply produce no effect.
I loved you because you were marvellous, because you had genius
and intellect, because you realized the dreams of great
poets and gave shape and substance to the shadows of art.
You have thrown it all away. You are shallow and stupid.
My God how mad I was to love you What a fool I have been
You are nothing to me now. I will never see you again.
I will never think of you. I will never mention your name.
You don't know what you were to me, once. Why, once . . . Oh,
I can't bear to think of it I wish I had never laid
eyes upon you You have spoiled the romance of my life.
How little you can know of love, if you say it mars your art
Without your art, you are nothing. I would have made
you famous, splendid, magnificent. The world would
have worshipped you, and you would have borne my name.
What are you now? A thirdrate actress with a pretty
face."
The girl grew white, and trembled. She clenched her hands together,
and her voice seemed to catch in her throat. "You are not serious, Dorian?"
she murmured. "You are acting."
"Acting I leave that to you. You do it so well," he answered bitterly.
She rose from her knees and, with a piteous expression of pain
in her face, came across the room to him. She put her hand
upon his arm and looked into his eyes. He thrust her back.
"Don't touch me" he cried.
A low moan broke from her, and she flung herself at his feet
and lay there like a trampled flower. "Dorian, Dorian,
don't leave me" she whispered. "I am so sorry I didn't act well.
I was thinking of you all the time. But I will tryindeed, I
will try. It came so suddenly across me, my love for you.
I think I should never have known it if you had not kissed me
if we had not kissed each other. Kiss me again, my love.
Don't go away from me. I couldn't bear it. Oh don't go away
from me. My brother . . . No never mind. He didn't mean it.
He was in jest. . . . But you, oh can't you forgive me for
tonight? I will work so hard and try to improve. Don't be cruel
to me, because I love you better than anything in the world.
After all, it is only once that I have not pleased you.
But you are quite right, Dorian. I should have shown
myself more of an artist. It was foolish of me, and yet I
couldn't help it. Oh, don't leave me, don't leave me."
A fit of passionate sobbing choked her. She crouched on
the floor like a wounded thing, and Dorian Gray, with his
beautiful eyes, looked down at her, and his chiselled lips curled
in exquisite disdain. There is always something ridiculous
about the emotions of people whom one has ceased to love.
Sibyl Vane seemed to him to be absurdly melodramatic.
Her tears and sobs annoyed him.
"I am going," he said at last in his calm clear voice.
"I don't wish to be unkind, but I can't see you again.
You have disappointed me."
She wept silently, and made no answer, but crept nearer.
Her little hands stretched blindly out, and appeared to be
seeking for him. He turned on his heel and left the room.
In a few moments he was out of the theatre.
Where he went to he hardly knew. He remembered wandering through dimly
lit streets, past gaunt, blackshadowed archways and evillooking houses.
Women with hoarse voices and harsh laughter had called after him.
Drunkards had reeled by, cursing and chattering to themselves like
monstrous apes. He had seen grotesque children huddled upon doorsteps, and
heard shrieks and oaths from gloomy courts.
As the dawn was just breaking, he found himself close to Covent Garden.
The darkness lifted, and, flushed with faint fires, the sky hollowed itself
into a perfect pearl. Huge carts filled with nodding lilies rumbled slowly
down the polished empty street. The air was heavy with the perfume of
the flowers, and their beauty seemed to bring him an anodyne for his pain.
He followed into the market and watched the men unloading their waggons.
A whitesmocked carter offered him some cherries. He thanked him,
wondered why he refused to accept any money for them, and began to eat
them listlessly. They had been plucked at midnight, and the coldness
of the moon had entered into them. A long line of boys carrying crates
of striped tulips, and of yellow and red roses, defiled in front of him,
threading their way through the huge, jadegreen piles of vegetables.
Under the portico, with its grey, sunbleached pillars, loitered a troop
of draggled bareheaded girls, waiting for the auction to be over.
Others crowded round the swinging doors of the coffeehouse in the piazza.
The heavy carthorses slipped and stamped upon the rough stones,
shaking their bells and trappings. Some of the drivers were lying asleep
on a pile of sacks. Irisnecked and pinkfooted, the pigeons ran about
picking up seeds.
After a little while, he hailed a hansom and drove home.
For a few moments he loitered upon the doorstep, looking round
at the silent square, with its blank, closeshuttered windows
and its staring blinds. The sky was pure opal now,
and the roofs of the houses glistened like silver against it.
From some chimney opposite a thin wreath of smoke was rising.
It curled, a violet riband, through the nacrecoloured air.
In the huge gilt Venetian lantern, spoil of some Doge's barge,
that hung from the ceiling of the great, oakpanelled hall
of entrance, lights were still burning from three flickering jets
thin blue petals of flame they seemed, rimmed with white fire.
He turned them out and, having thrown his hat and cape on the table,
passed through the library towards the door of his bedroom,
a large octagonal chamber on the ground floor that, in his newborn
feeling for luxury, he had just had decorated for himself and hung
with some curious Renaissance tapestries that had been discovered
stored in a disused attic at Selby Royal. As he was turning
the handle of the door, his eye fell upon the portrait Basil
Hallward had painted of him. He started back as if in surprise.
Then he went on into his own room, looking somewhat puzzled.
After he had taken the buttonhole out of his coat, he seemed
to hesitate. Finally, he came back, went over to the picture,
and examined it. In the dim arrested light that struggled
through the creamcoloured silk blinds, the face appeared to him
to be a little changed. The expression looked different.
One would have said that there was a touch of cruelty in the mouth.
It was certainly strange.
He turned round and, walking to the window, drew up the blind.
The bright dawn flooded the room and swept the fantastic
shadows into dusky corners, where they lay shuddering.
But the strange expression that he had noticed in the face of
the portrait seemed to linger there, to be more intensified even.
The quivering ardent sunlight showed him the lines of cruelty round
the mouth as clearly as if he had been looking into a mirror after
he had done some dreadful thing.
He winced and, taking up from the table an oval glass framed
in ivory Cupids, one of Lord Henry's many presents to him,
glanced hurriedly into its polished depths. No line like that
warped his red lips. What did it mean?
He rubbed his eyes, and came close to the picture, and examined it again.
There were no signs of any change when he looked into the actual painting,
and yet there was no doubt that the whole expression had altered. It was not
a mere fancy of his own. The thing was horribly apparent.
He threw himself into a chair and began to think. Suddenly there flashed
across his mind what he had said in Basil Hallward's studio the day
the picture had been finished. Yes, he remembered it perfectly.
He had uttered a mad wish that he himself might remain young,
and the portrait grow old that his own beauty might be untarnished,
and the face on the canvas bear the burden of his passions and his sins
that the painted image might be seared with the lines of suffering
and thought, and that he might keep all the delicate bloom and loveliness
of his then just conscious boyhood. Surely his wish had not been fulfilled?
Such things were impossible. It seemed monstrous even to think of them.
And, yet, there was the picture before him, with the touch of cruelty in
the mouth.
Cruelty Had he been cruel? It was the girl's fault, not his.
He had dreamed of her as a great artist, had given his love to her
because he had thought her great. Then she had disappointed him.
She had been shallow and unworthy. And, yet, a feeling
of infinite regret came over him, as he thought of her lying
at his feet sobbing like a little child. He remembered with what
callousness he had watched her. Why had he been made like that?
Why had such a soul been given to him? But he had suffered also.
During the three terrible hours that the play had lasted,
he had lived centuries of pain, aeon upon aeon of torture.
His life was well worth hers. She had marred him for a moment,
if he had wounded her for an age. Besides, women were better
suited to bear sorrow than men. They lived on their emotions.
They only thought of their emotions. When they took lovers,
it was merely to have some one with whom they could have scenes.
Lord Henry had told him that, and Lord Henry knew what women were.
Why should he trouble about Sibyl Vane? She was nothing to him
now.
But the picture? What was he to say of that? It held the secret of his life,
and told his story. It had taught him to love his own beauty. Would it teach
him to loathe his own soul? Would he ever look at it again?
No it was merely an illusion wrought on the troubled senses.
The horrible night that he had passed had left phantoms behind it.
Suddenly there had fallen upon his brain that tiny scarlet speck
that makes men mad. The picture had not changed. It was folly to
think so.
Yet it was watching him, with its beautiful marred face and its cruel smile.
Its bright hair gleamed in the early sunlight. Its blue eyes met his own.
A sense of infinite pity, not for himself, but for the painted image
of himself, came over him. It had altered already, and would alter more.
Its gold would wither into grey. Its red and white roses would die.
For every sin that he committed, a stain would fleck and wreck its fairness.
But he would not sin. The picture, changed or unchanged, would be
to him the visible emblem of conscience. He would resist temptation.
He would not see Lord Henry any morewould not, at any rate,
listen to those subtle poisonous theories that in Basil Hallward's
garden had first stirred within him the passion for impossible things.
He would go back to Sibyl Vane, make her amends, marry her, try to love
her again. Yes, it was his duty to do so. She must have suffered
more than he had. Poor child He had been selfish and cruel to her.
The fascination that she had exercised over him would return.
They would be happy together. His life with her would be beautiful and
pure.
He got up from his chair and drew a large screen right in front
of the portrait, shuddering as he glanced at it. "How horrible"
he murmured to himself, and he walked across to the window and opened it.
When he stepped out on to the grass, he drew a deep breath.
The fresh morning air seemed to drive away all his sombre passions.
He thought only of Sibyl. A faint echo of his love came back to him.
He repeated her name over and over again. The birds that were
singing in the dewdrenched garden seemed to be telling the flowers
about her.
CHAPTER 
It was long past noon when he awoke. His valet had crept
several times on tiptoe into the room to see if he was stirring,
and had wondered what made his young master sleep so late.
Finally his bell sounded, and Victor came in softly with a cup
of tea, and a pile of letters, on a small tray of old Sevres china,
and drew back the olivesatin curtains, with their shimmering
blue lining, that hung in front of the three tall windows.
"Monsieur has well slept this morning," he said, smiling.
"What o'clock is it, Victor?" asked Dorian Gray drowsily.
"One hour and a quarter, Monsieur."
How late it was He sat up, and having sipped some tea,
turned over his letters. One of them was from Lord Henry, and had
been brought by hand that morning. He hesitated for a moment,
and then put it aside. The others he opened listlessly.
They contained the usual collection of cards, invitations to dinner,
tickets for private views, programmes of charity concerts,
and the like that are showered on fashionable young men every
morning during the season. There was a rather heavy bill
for a chased silver LouisQuinze toiletset that he had not
yet had the courage to send on to his guardians, who were
extremely oldfashioned people and did not realize that we live
in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities
and there were several very courteously worded communications
from Jermyn Street moneylenders offering to advance any sum
of money at a moment's notice and at the most reasonable rates
of interest.
After about ten minutes he got up, and throwing on an elaborate dressinggown
of silkembroidered cashmere wool, passed into the onyxpaved bathroom.
The cool water refreshed him after his long sleep. He seemed to have
forgotten all that he had gone through. A dim sense of having taken part
in some strange tragedy came to him once or twice, but there was the unreality
of a dream about it.
As soon as he was dressed, he went into the library and sat
down to a light French breakfast that had been laid out
for him on a small round table close to the open window.
It was an exquisite day. The warm air seemed laden with spices.
A bee flew in and buzzed round the bluedragon bowl that,
filled with sulphuryellow roses, stood before him. He felt
perfectly happy.
Suddenly his eye fell on the screen that he had placed in front
of the portrait, and he started.
"Too cold for Monsieur?" asked his valet, putting an omelette on the table.
"I shut the window?"
Dorian shook his head. "I am not cold," he murmured.
Was it all true? Had the portrait really changed?
Or had it been simply his own imagination that had made him
see a look of evil where there had been a look of joy?
Surely a painted canvas could not alter? The thing was absurd.
It would serve as a tale to tell Basil some day. It would make
him smile.
And, yet, how vivid was his recollection of the whole thing
First in the dim twilight, and then in the bright dawn,
he had seen the touch of cruelty round the warped lips.
He almost dreaded his valet leaving the room. He knew that
when he was alone he would have to examine the portrait.
He was afraid of certainty. When the coffee and cigarettes
had been brought and the man turned to go, he felt a wild desire
to tell him to remain. As the door was closing behind him,
he called him back. The man stood waiting for his orders.
Dorian looked at him for a moment. "I am not at home
to any one, Victor," he said with a sigh. The man bowed
and retired.
Then he rose from the table, lit a cigarette, and flung
himself down on a luxuriously cushioned couch that stood facing
the screen. The screen was an old one, of gilt Spanish leather,
stamped and wrought with a rather florid LouisQuatorze pattern.
He scanned it curiously, wondering if ever before it had concealed
the secret of a man's life.
Should he move it aside, after all? Why not let it stay there?
What was the use of knowing? If the thing was true,
it was terrible. If it was not true, why trouble about it?
But what if, by some fate or deadlier chance, eyes other than
his spied behind and saw the horrible change? What should he do
if Basil Hallward came and asked to look at his own picture?
Basil would be sure to do that. No the thing had to be examined,
and at once. Anything would be better than this dreadful state
of doubt.
He got up and locked both doors. At least he would be alone when he looked
upon the mask of his shame. Then he drew the screen aside and saw himself
face to face. It was perfectly true. The portrait had altered.
As he often remembered afterwards, and always with no small wonder,
he found himself at first gazing at the portrait with a feeling
of almost scientific interest. That such a change should have
taken place was incredible to him. And yet it was a fact.
Was there some subtle affinity between the chemical atoms that
shaped themselves into form and colour on the canvas and the soul
that was within him? Could it be that what that soul thought,
they realized?that what it dreamed, they made true?
Or was there some other, more terrible reason? He shuddered,
and felt afraid, and, going back to the couch, lay there,
gazing at the picture in sickened horror.
One thing, however, he felt that it had done for him.
It had made him conscious how unjust, how cruel, he had been
to Sibyl Vane. It was not too late to make reparation for that.
She could still be his wife. His unreal and selfish love
would yield to some higher influence, would be transformed
into some nobler passion, and the portrait that Basil Hallward
had painted of him would be a guide to him through life,
would be to him what holiness is to some, and conscience
to others, and the fear of God to us all. There were opiates
for remorse, drugs that could lull the moral sense to sleep.
But here was a visible symbol of the degradation of sin.
Here was an everpresent sign of the ruin men brought upon
their souls.
Three o'clock struck, and four, and the halfhour rang its double chime,
but Dorian Gray did not stir. He was trying to gather up the scarlet
threads of life and to weave them into a pattern to find his way through
the sanguine labyrinth of passion through which he was wandering.
He did not know what to do, or what to think. Finally, he went over
to the table and wrote a passionate letter to the girl he had loved,
imploring her forgiveness and accusing himself of madness. He covered
page after page with wild words of sorrow and wilder words of pain.
There is a luxury in selfreproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel that no
one else has a right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest,
that gives us absolution. When Dorian had finished the letter, he felt that
he had been forgiven.
Suddenly there came a knock to the door, and he heard Lord Henry's
voice outside. "My dear boy, I must see you. Let me in at once.
I can't bear your shutting yourself up like this."
He made no answer at first, but remained quite still.
The knocking still continued and grew louder. Yes, it was
better to let Lord Henry in, and to explain to him the new
life he was going to lead, to quarrel with him if it became
necessary to quarrel, to part if parting was inevitable.
He jumped up, drew the screen hastily across the picture,
and unlocked the door.
"I am so sorry for it all, Dorian," said Lord Henry as he entered.
"But you must not think too much about it."
"Do you mean about Sibyl Vane?" asked the lad.
"Yes, of course," answered Lord Henry, sinking into a chair
and slowly pulling off his yellow gloves. "It is dreadful,
from one point of view, but it was not your fault. Tell me,
did you go behind and see her, after the play was over?"
"Yes."
"I felt sure you had. Did you make a scene with her?"
"I was brutal, Harryperfectly brutal. But it is all right now.
I am not sorry for anything that has happened. It has taught me to know
myself better."
"Ah, Dorian, I am so glad you take it in that way I was afraid I
would find you plunged in remorse and tearing that nice curly hair
of yours."
"I have got through all that," said Dorian, shaking his head and smiling.
"I am perfectly happy now. I know what conscience is, to begin with.
It is not what you told me it was. It is the divinest thing in us.
Don't sneer at it, Harry, any moreat least not before me. I want to
be good. I can't bear the idea of my soul being hideous."
"A very charming artistic basis for ethics, Dorian I congratulate you
on it. But how are you going to begin?"
"By marrying Sibyl Vane."
"Marrying Sibyl Vane" cried Lord Henry, standing up and looking
at him in perplexed amazement. "But, my dear Dorian"
"Yes, Harry, I know what you are going to say. Something dreadful
about marriage. Don't say it. Don't ever say things of that
kind to me again. Two days ago I asked Sibyl to marry me.
I am not going to break my word to her. She is to be my wife."
"Your wife Dorian . . . Didn't you get my letter?
I wrote to you this morning, and sent the note down by my
own man."
"Your letter? Oh, yes, I remember. I have not read it yet, Harry.
I was afraid there might be something in it that I wouldn't like.
You cut life to pieces with your epigrams."
"You know nothing then?"
"What do you mean?"
Lord Henry walked across the room, and sitting down by Dorian Gray,
took both his hands in his own and held them tightly. "Dorian," he said,
"my letterdon't be frightenedwas to tell you that Sibyl Vane
is dead."
A cry of pain broke from the lad's lips, and he leaped to his feet,
tearing his hands away from Lord Henry's grasp. "Dead Sibyl dead
It is not true It is a horrible lie How dare you say it?"
"It is quite true, Dorian," said Lord Henry, gravely. "It is in
all the morning papers. I wrote down to you to ask you not to see
any one till I came. There will have to be an inquest, of course,
and you must not be mixed up in it. Things like that make a man
fashionable in Paris. But in London people are so prejudiced.
Here, one should never make one's debut with a scandal.
One should reserve that to give an interest to one's old age.
I suppose they don't know your name at the theatre? If they don't,
it is all right. Did any one see you going round to her room?
That is an important point."
Dorian did not answer for a few moments. He was dazed with horror.
Finally he stammered, in a stifled voice, "Harry, did you say an inquest?
What did you mean by that? Did Sibyl? Oh, Harry, I can't bear it
But be quick. Tell me everything at once."
"I have no doubt it was not an accident, Dorian, though it
must be put in that way to the public. It seems that as she
was leaving the theatre with her mother, about halfpast
twelve or so, she said she had forgotten something upstairs.
They waited some time for her, but she did not come down again.
They ultimately found her lying dead on the floor of her
dressingroom. She had swallowed something by mistake,
some dreadful thing they use at theatres. I don't know what
it was, but it had either prussic acid or white lead in it.
I should fancy it was prussic acid, as she seems to have
died instantaneously."
"Harry, Harry, it is terrible" cried the lad.
"Yes it is very tragic, of course, but you must not get yourself
mixed up in it. I see by The Standard that she was seventeen.
I should have thought she was almost younger than that.
She looked such a child, and seemed to know so little about acting.
Dorian, you mustn't let this thing get on your nerves.
You must come and dine with me, and afterwards we will look in at
the opera. It is a Patti night, and everybody will be there.
You can come to my sister's box. She has got some smart women
with her."
"So I have murdered Sibyl Vane," said Dorian Gray, half to himself,
"murdered her as surely as if I had cut her little throat
with a knife. Yet the roses are not less lovely for all that.
The birds sing just as happily in my garden. And tonight I am
to dine with you, and then go on to the opera, and sup somewhere,
I suppose, afterwards. How extraordinarily dramatic life is
If I had read all this in a book, Harry, I think I would have
wept over it. Somehow, now that it has happened actually,
and to me, it seems far too wonderful for tears.
Here is the first passionate loveletter I have ever written
in my life. Strange, that my first passionate loveletter should
have been addressed to a dead girl. Can they feel, I wonder,
those white silent people we call the dead? Sibyl Can she feel,
or know, or listen? Oh, Harry, how I loved her once
It seems years ago to me now. She was everything to me.
Then came that dreadful nightwas it really only last night?
when she played so badly, and my heart almost broke.
She explained it all to me. It was terribly pathetic.
But I was not moved a bit. I thought her shallow.
Suddenly something happened that made me afraid.
I can't tell you what it was, but it was terrible.
I said I would go back to her. I felt I had done wrong.
And now she is dead. My God My God Harry, what shall I do?
You don't know the danger I am in, and there is nothing
to keep me straight. She would have done that for me.
She had no right to kill herself. It was selfish of
her."
"My dear Dorian," answered Lord Henry, taking a cigarette
from his case and producing a goldlatten matchbox,
"the only way a woman can ever reform a man is by boring him
so completely that he loses all possible interest in life.
If you had married this girl, you would have been wretched.
Of course, you would have treated her kindly. One can always
be kind to people about whom one cares nothing. But she would
have soon found out that you were absolutely indifferent
to her. And when a woman finds that out about her husband,
she either becomes dreadfully dowdy, or wears very smart
bonnets that some other woman's husband has to pay for.
I say nothing about the social mistake, which would have
been abjectwhich, of course, I would not have allowed
but I assure you that in any case the whole thing would have been an
absolute failure."
"I suppose it would," muttered the lad, walking up and down the room
and looking horribly pale. "But I thought it was my duty.
It is not my fault that this terrible tragedy has prevented my doing
what was right. I remember your saying once that there is a fatality
about good resolutionsthat they are always made too late.
Mine certainly were."
"Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere
with scientific laws. Their origin is pure vanity.
Their result is absolutely nil. They give us, now and then,
some of those luxurious sterile emotions that have a certain
charm for the weak. That is all that can be said for them.
They are simply cheques that men draw on a bank where they have
no account."
"Harry," cried Dorian Gray, coming over and sitting down beside him,
"why is it that I cannot feel this tragedy as much as I want to?
I don't think I am heartless. Do you?"
"You have done too many foolish things during the last fortnight
to be entitled to give yourself that name, Dorian," answered Lord
Henry with his sweet melancholy smile.
The lad frowned. "I don't like that explanation, Harry," he rejoined,
"but I am glad you don't think I am heartless. I am nothing of the kind.
I know I am not. And yet I must admit that this thing that has happened
does not affect me as it should. It seems to me to be simply like a
wonderful ending to a wonderful play. It has all the terrible beauty
of a Greek tragedy, a tragedy in which I took a great part, but by which I
have not been wounded."
"It is an interesting question," said Lord Henry, who found
an exquisite pleasure in playing on the lad's unconscious egotism,
"an extremely interesting question. I fancy that the true
explanation is this It often happens that the real tragedies
of life occur in such an inartistic manner that they hurt
us by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence,
their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style.
They affect us just as vulgarity affects us. They give us
an impression of sheer brute force, and we revolt against that.
Sometimes, however, a tragedy that possesses artistic elements
of beauty crosses our lives. If these elements of beauty are real,
the whole thing simply appeals to our sense of dramatic effect.
Suddenly we find that we are no longer the actors,
but the spectators of the play. Or rather we are both.
We watch ourselves, and the mere wonder of the spectacle
enthralls us. In the present case, what is it that has
really happened? Some one has killed herself for love of you.
I wish that I had ever had such an experience. It would
have made me in love with love for the rest of my life.
The people who have adored methere have not been very many,
but there have been somehave always insisted on living on,
long after I had ceased to care for them, or they to care for me.
They have become stout and tedious, and when I meet them,
they go in at once for reminiscences. That awful memory of woman
What a fearful thing it is And what an utter intellectual
stagnation it reveals One should absorb the colour of life,
but one should never remember its details. Details are always
vulgar."
"I must sow poppies in my garden," sighed Dorian.
"There is no necessity," rejoined his companion. "Life has always
poppies in her hands. Of course, now and then things linger.
I once wore nothing but violets all through one season,
as a form of artistic mourning for a romance that would not die.
Ultimately, however, it did die. I forget what killed it.
I think it was her proposing to sacrifice the whole world for me.
That is always a dreadful moment. It fills one with the terror
of eternity. Wellwould you believe it?a week ago,
at Lady Hampshire's, I found myself seated at dinner next
the lady in question, and she insisted on going over the whole
thing again, and digging up the past, and raking up the future.
I had buried my romance in a bed of asphodel. She dragged
it out again and assured me that I had spoiled her life.
I am bound to state that she ate an enormous dinner, so I did
not feel any anxiety. But what a lack of taste she showed
The one charm of the past is that it is the past.
But women never know when the curtain has fallen.
They always want a sixth act, and as soon as the interest
of the play is entirely over, they propose to continue it.
If they were allowed their own way, every comedy would have
a tragic ending, and every tragedy would culminate in a farce.
They are charmingly artificial, but they have no sense of art.
You are more fortunate than I am. I assure you, Dorian, that not
one of the women I have known would have done for me what Sibyl
Vane did for you. Ordinary women always console themselves.
Some of them do it by going in for sentimental colours.
Never trust a woman who wears mauve, whatever her age may be,
or a woman over thirtyfive who is fond of pink ribbons.
It always means that they have a history. Others find
a great consolation in suddenly discovering the good qualities
of their husbands. They flaunt their conjugal felicity
in one's face, as if it were the most fascinating of sins.
Religion consoles some. Its mysteries have all the charm
of a flirtation, a woman once told me, and I can quite
understand it. Besides, nothing makes one so vain as being told
that one is a sinner. Conscience makes egotists of us all.
Yes there is really no end to the consolations that women find
in modern life. Indeed, I have not mentioned the most important
one."
"What is that, Harry?" said the lad listlessly.
"Oh, the obvious consolation. Taking some one else's admirer when one
loses one's own. In good society that always whitewashes a woman.
But really, Dorian, how different Sibyl Vane must have been from all the women
one meets There is something to me quite beautiful about her death.
I am glad I am living in a century when such wonders happen.
They make one believe in the reality of the things we all play with,
such as romance, passion, and love."
"I was terribly cruel to her. You forget that."
"I am afraid that women appreciate cruelty, downright cruelty,
more than anything else. They have wonderfully primitive instincts.
We have emancipated them, but they remain slaves looking for their masters,
all the same. They love being dominated. I am sure you were splendid.
I have never seen you really and absolutely angry, but I can fancy how
delightful you looked. And, after all, you said something to me the day
before yesterday that seemed to me at the time to be merely fanciful,
but that I see now was absolutely true, and it holds the key
to everything."
"What was that, Harry?"
"You said to me that Sibyl Vane represented to you all the heroines
of romancethat she was Desdemona one night, and Ophelia the other
that if she died as Juliet, she came to life as Imogen."
"She will never come to life again now," muttered the lad,
burying his face in his hands.
"No, she will never come to life. She has played her last part.
But you must think of that lonely death in the tawdry dressingroom
simply as a strange lurid fragment from some Jacobean tragedy,
as a wonderful scene from Webster, or Ford, or Cyril Tourneur.
The girl never really lived, and so she has never really died.
To you at least she was always a dream, a phantom that flitted
through Shakespeare's plays and left them lovelier for its presence,
a reed through which Shakespeare's music sounded richer and more
full of joy. The moment she touched actual life, she marred it,
and it marred her, and so she passed away. Mourn for Ophelia,
if you like. Put ashes on your head because Cordelia was strangled.
Cry out against Heaven because the daughter of Brabantio died.
But don't waste your tears over Sibyl Vane. She was less real than they
are."
There was a silence. The evening darkened in the room.
Noiselessly, and with silver feet, the shadows crept in from
the garden. The colours faded wearily out of things.
After some time Dorian Gray looked up. "You have explained me
to myself, Harry," he murmured with something of a sigh of relief.
"I felt all that you have said, but somehow I was afraid of it,
and I could not express it to myself. How well you know me
But we will not talk again of what has happened. It has been
a marvellous experience. That is all. I wonder if life has still
in store for me anything as marvellous."
"Life has everything in store for you, Dorian. There is nothing that you,
with your extraordinary good looks, will not be able to do."
"But suppose, Harry, I became haggard, and old, and wrinkled?
What then?"
"Ah, then," said Lord Henry, rising to go, "then, my dear Dorian,
you would have to fight for your victories. As it is,
they are brought to you. No, you must keep your good looks.
We live in an age that reads too much to be wise, and that
thinks too much to be beautiful. We cannot spare you.
And now you had better dress and drive down to the club.
We are rather late, as it is."
"I think I shall join you at the opera, Harry. I feel too tired
to eat anything. What is the number of your sister's box?"
"Twentyseven, I believe. It is on the grand tier.
You will see her name on the door. But I am sorry you won't
come and dine."
"I don't feel up to it," said Dorian listlessly. "But I am
awfully obliged to you for all that you have said to me.
You are certainly my best friend. No one has ever understood me
as you have."
"We are only at the beginning of our friendship, Dorian," answered Lord Henry,
shaking him by the hand. "Goodbye. I shall see you before ninethirty,
I hope. Remember, Patti is singing."
As he closed the door behind him, Dorian Gray touched the bell,
and in a few minutes Victor appeared with the lamps and drew
the blinds down. He waited impatiently for him to go.
The man seemed to take an interminable time over everything.
As soon as he had left, he rushed to the screen and drew it back.
No there was no further change in the picture. It had received
the news of Sibyl Vane's death before he had known of it himself.
It was conscious of the events of life as they occurred.
The vicious cruelty that marred the fine lines of the mouth had,
no doubt, appeared at the very moment that the girl had drunk
the poison, whatever it was. Or was it indifferent to results?
Did it merely take cognizance of what passed within the soul?
He wondered, and hoped that some day he would see the change taking place
before his very eyes, shuddering as he hoped it.
Poor Sibyl What a romance it had all been She had often mimicked
death on the stage. Then Death himself had touched her and taken
her with him. How had she played that dreadful last scene?
Had she cursed him, as she died? No she had died for love of him,
and love would always be a sacrament to him now. She had atoned
for everything by the sacrifice she had made of her life.
He would not think any more of what she had made him go through,
on that horrible night at the theatre. When he thought of her,
it would be as a wonderful tragic figure sent on to the world's stage
to show the supreme reality of love. A wonderful tragic figure?
Tears came to his eyes as he remembered her childlike look, and winsome
fanciful ways, and shy tremulous grace. He brushed them away hastily and
looked again at the picture.
He felt that the time had really come for making his choice.
Or had his choice already been made? Yes, life had decided
that for himlife, and his own infinite curiosity about life.
Eternal youth, infinite passion, pleasures subtle and secret,
wild joys and wilder sinshe was to have all these things.
The portrait was to bear the burden of his shame
that was all.
A feeling of pain crept over him as he thought of the desecration
that was in store for the fair face on the canvas. Once, in boyish
mockery of Narcissus, he had kissed, or feigned to kiss,
those painted lips that now smiled so cruelly at him.
Morning after morning he had sat before the portrait wondering at
its beauty, almost enamoured of it, as it seemed to him at times.
Was it to alter now with every mood to which he yielded?
Was it to become a monstrous and loathsome thing, to be hidden
away in a locked room, to be shut out from the sunlight that had
so often touched to brighter gold the waving wonder of its hair?
The pity of it the pity of it
For a moment, he thought of praying that the horrible sympathy
that existed between him and the picture might cease.
It had changed in answer to a prayer perhaps in answer to a prayer
it might remain unchanged. And yet, who, that knew anything
about life, would surrender the chance of remaining always young,
however fantastic that chance might be, or with what fateful consequences
it might be fraught? Besides, was it really under his control?
Had it indeed been prayer that had produced the substitution?
Might there not be some curious scientific reason for it all?
If thought could exercise its influence upon a living organism,
might not thought exercise an influence upon dead and inorganic things?
Nay, without thought or conscious desire, might not things external
to ourselves vibrate in unison with our moods and passions,
atom calling to atom in secret love or strange affinity?
But the reason was of no importance. He would never again tempt
by a prayer any terrible power. If the picture was to alter,
it was to alter. That was all. Why inquire too closely
into it?
For there would be a real pleasure in watching it.
He would be able to follow his mind into its secret places.
This portrait would be to him the most magical of mirrors.
As it had revealed to him his own body, so it would reveal
to him his own soul. And when winter came upon it, he would
still be standing where spring trembles on the verge of summer.
When the blood crept from its face, and left behind a pallid mask
of chalk with leaden eyes, he would keep the glamour of boyhood.
Not one blossom of his loveliness would ever fade. Not one pulse
of his life would ever weaken. Like the gods of the Greeks,
he would be strong, and fleet, and joyous. What did it matter what
happened to the coloured image on the canvas? He would be safe.
That was everything.
He drew the screen back into its former place in front of the picture,
smiling as he did so, and passed into his bedroom, where his valet was
already waiting for him. An hour later he was at the opera, and Lord
Henry was leaning over his chair.
CHAPTER 
As he was sitting at breakfast next morning, Basil Hallward was shown
into the room.
"I am so glad I have found you, Dorian," he said gravely.
"I called last night, and they told me you were at the opera.
Of course, I knew that was impossible. But I wish you had left
word where you had really gone to. I passed a dreadful evening,
half afraid that one tragedy might be followed by another.
I think you might have telegraphed for me when you heard of it first.
I read of it quite by chance in a late edition of The Globe
that I picked up at the club. I came here at once and was
miserable at not finding you. I can't tell you how heartbroken
I am about the whole thing. I know what you must suffer.
But where were you? Did you go down and see the girl's mother?
For a moment I thought of following you there. They gave
the address in the paper. Somewhere in the Euston Road, isn't it?
But I was afraid of intruding upon a sorrow that I could
not lighten. Poor woman What a state she must be in
And her only child, too What did she say about it
all?"
"My dear Basil, how do I know?" murmured Dorian Gray, sipping some
paleyellow wine from a delicate, goldbeaded bubble of Venetian
glass and looking dreadfully bored. "I was at the opera.
You should have come on there. I met Lady Gwendolen, Harry's sister,
for the first time. We were in her box. She is perfectly charming
and Patti sang divinely. Don't talk about horrid subjects.
If one doesn't talk about a thing, it has never happened.
It is simply expression, as Harry says, that gives reality to things.
I may mention that she was not the woman's only child. There is
a son, a charming fellow, I believe. But he is not on the stage.
He is a sailor, or something. And now, tell me about yourself and what you
are painting."
"You went to the opera?" said Hallward, speaking very slowly
and with a strained touch of pain in his voice. "You went to
the opera while Sibyl Vane was lying dead in some sordid lodging?
You can talk to me of other women being charming, and of Patti
singing divinely, before the girl you loved has even the quiet
of a grave to sleep in? Why, man, there are horrors in store
for that little white body of hers"
"Stop, Basil I won't hear it" cried Dorian, leaping to his feet.
"You must not tell me about things. What is done is done.
What is past is past."
"You call yesterday the past?"
"What has the actual lapse of time got to do with it? It is
only shallow people who require years to get rid of an emotion.
A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can
invent a pleasure. I don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions.
I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them."
"Dorian, this is horrible Something has changed you completely.
You look exactly the same wonderful boy who, day after day,
used to come down to my studio to sit for his picture.
But you were simple, natural, and affectionate then.
You were the most unspoiled creature in the whole world.
Now, I don't know what has come over you. You talk as if you
had no heart, no pity in you. It is all Harry's influence.
I see that."
The lad flushed up and, going to the window, looked out for
a few moments on the green, flickering, sunlashed garden.
"I owe a great deal to Harry, Basil," he said at last,
"more than I owe to you. You only taught me to be vain."
"Well, I am punished for that, Dorianor shall be some day."
"I don't know what you mean, Basil," he exclaimed, turning round.
"I don't know what you want. What do you want?"
"I want the Dorian Gray I used to paint," said the artist sadly.
"Basil," said the lad, going over to him and putting his hand
on his shoulder, "you have come too late. Yesterday, when I
heard that Sibyl Vane had killed herself"
"Killed herself Good heavens is there no doubt about that?"
cried Hallward, looking up at him with an expression of horror.
"My dear Basil Surely you don't think it was a vulgar accident?
Of course she killed herself."
The elder man buried his face in his hands. "How fearful,"
he muttered, and a shudder ran through him.
"No," said Dorian Gray, "there is nothing fearful about it.
It is one of the great romantic tragedies of the age.
As a rule, people who act lead the most commonplace lives.
They are good husbands, or faithful wives, or something tedious.
You know what I meanmiddleclass virtue and all that kind of thing.
How different Sibyl was She lived her finest tragedy.
She was always a heroine. The last night she played
the night you saw hershe acted badly because she had known
the reality of love. When she knew its unreality, she died,
as Juliet might have died. She passed again into the sphere of art.
There is something of the martyr about her. Her death has all
the pathetic uselessness of martyrdom, all its wasted beauty.
But, as I was saying, you must not think I have not suffered.
If you had come in yesterday at a particular moment
about halfpast five, perhaps, or a quarter to six
you would have found me in tears. Even Harry, who was here,
who brought me the news, in fact, had no idea what I was
going through. I suffered immensely. Then it passed away.
I cannot repeat an emotion. No one can, except sentimentalists.
And you are awfully unjust, Basil. You come down here to console me.
That is charming of you. You find me consoled, and you are furious.
How like a sympathetic person You remind me of a story
Harry told me about a certain philanthropist who spent twenty
years of his life in trying to get some grievance redressed,
or some unjust law alteredI forget exactly what it was.
Finally he succeeded, and nothing could exceed his disappointment.
He had absolutely nothing to do, almost died of ennui, and became
a confirmed misanthrope. And besides, my dear old Basil,
if you really want to console me, teach me rather to forget what
has happened, or to see it from a proper artistic point of view.
Was it not Gautier who used to write about la consolation des arts?
I remember picking up a little vellumcovered book in your
studio one day and chancing on that delightful phrase.
Well, I am not like that young man you told me of when we
were down at Marlow together, the young man who used to say
that yellow satin could console one for all the miseries of life.
I love beautiful things that one can touch and handle.
Old brocades, green bronzes, lacquerwork, carved ivories,
exquisite surroundings, luxury, pompthere is much to be got
from all these. But the artistic temperament that they create,
or at any rate reveal, is still more to me. To become
the spectator of one's own life, as Harry says, is to escape
the suffering of life. I know you are surprised at my talking
to you like this. You have not realized how I have developed.
I was a schoolboy when you knew me. I am a man now.
I have new passions, new thoughts, new ideas. I am different,
but you must not like me less. I am changed, but you must
always be my friend. Of course, I am very fond of Harry.
But I know that you are better than he is. You are not stronger
you are too much afraid of lifebut you are better. And how
happy we used to be together Don't leave me, Basil, and don't
quarrel with me. I am what I am. There is nothing more to be
said."
The painter felt strangely moved. The lad was infinitely dear to him,
and his personality had been the great turning point in his art.
He could not bear the idea of reproaching him any more. After all,
his indifference was probably merely a mood that would pass away.
There was so much in him that was good, so much in him that
was noble.
"Well, Dorian," he said at length, with a sad smile, "I
won't speak to you again about this horrible thing, after today.
I only trust your name won't be mentioned in connection with it.
The inquest is to take place this afternoon. Have they summoned you?"
Dorian shook his head, and a look of annoyance passed over his face
at the mention of the word "inquest." There was something so crude
and vulgar about everything of the kind. "They don't know my name,"
he answered.
"But surely she did?"
"Only my Christian name, and that I am quite sure she never mentioned
to any one. She told me once that they were all rather curious to learn
who I was, and that she invariably told them my name was Prince Charming.
It was pretty of her. You must do me a drawing of Sibyl, Basil.
I should like to have something more of her than the memory of a few kisses
and some broken pathetic words."
"I will try and do something, Dorian, if it would please you.
But you must come and sit to me yourself again. I can't get on
without you."
"I can never sit to you again, Basil. It is impossible"
he exclaimed, starting back.
The painter stared at him. "My dear boy, what nonsense"
he cried. "Do you mean to say you don't like what I did of you?
Where is it? Why have you pulled the screen in front of it?
Let me look at it. It is the best thing I have ever done.
Do take the screen away, Dorian. It is simply disgraceful
of your servant hiding my work like that. I felt the room looked
different as I came in."
"My servant has nothing to do with it, Basil. You don't imagine I let
him arrange my room for me? He settles my flowers for me sometimes
that is all. No I did it myself. The light was too strong on
the portrait."
"Too strong Surely not, my dear fellow? It is an admirable place for it.
Let me see it." And Hallward walked towards the corner of the room.
A cry of terror broke from Dorian Gray's lips, and he rushed
between the painter and the screen. "Basil," he said,
looking very pale, "you must not look at it. I don't wish
you to."
"Not look at my own work You are not serious. Why shouldn't I look at it?"
exclaimed Hallward, laughing.
"If you try to look at it, Basil, on my word of honour I will
never speak to you again as long as I live. I am quite serious.
I don't offer any explanation, and you are not to ask for any.
But, remember, if you touch this screen, everything is over
between us."
Hallward was thunderstruck. He looked at Dorian Gray in
absolute amazement. He had never seen him like this before.
The lad was actually pallid with rage. His hands were clenched,
and the pupils of his eyes were like disks of blue fire.
He was trembling all over.
"Dorian"
"Don't speak"
"But what is the matter? Of course I won't look at it if you don't want
me to," he said, rather coldly, turning on his heel and going over towards
the window. "But, really, it seems rather absurd that I shouldn't see my
own work, especially as I am going to exhibit it in Paris in the autumn.
I shall probably have to give it another coat of varnish before that, so I
must see it some day, and why not today?"
"To exhibit it You want to exhibit it?" exclaimed Dorian Gray,
a strange sense of terror creeping over him. Was the world going to be
shown his secret? Were people to gape at the mystery of his life?
That was impossible. Somethinghe did not know whathad to be done
at once.
"Yes I don't suppose you will object to that. Georges Petit
is going to collect all my best pictures for a special exhibition
in the Rue de Seze, which will open the first week in October.
The portrait will only be away a month. I should think you could easily
spare it for that time. In fact, you are sure to be out of town.
And if you keep it always behind a screen, you can't care much
about it."
Dorian Gray passed his hand over his forehead. There were beads of
perspiration there. He felt that he was on the brink of a horrible danger.
"You told me a month ago that you would never exhibit it," he cried.
"Why have you changed your mind? You people who go in for being consistent
have just as many moods as others have. The only difference is that
your moods are rather meaningless. You can't have forgotten that you
assured me most solemnly that nothing in the world would induce you
to send it to any exhibition. You told Harry exactly the same thing."
He stopped suddenly, and a gleam of light came into his eyes. He remembered
that Lord Henry had said to him once, half seriously and half in jest,
"If you want to have a strange quarter of an hour, get Basil to tell you
why he won't exhibit your picture. He told me why he wouldn't, and it
was a revelation to me." Yes, perhaps Basil, too, had his secret.
He would ask him and try.
"Basil," he said, coming over quite close and looking him straight
in the face, "we have each of us a secret. Let me know yours,
and I shall tell you mine. What was your reason for refusing
to exhibit my picture?"
The painter shuddered in spite of himself. "Dorian, if I told you,
you might like me less than you do, and you would certainly laugh
at me. I could not bear your doing either of those two things.
If you wish me never to look at your picture again, I am content.
I have always you to look at. If you wish the best work I have ever done
to be hidden from the world, I am satisfied. Your friendship is dearer
to me than any fame or reputation."
"No, Basil, you must tell me," insisted Dorian Gray.
"I think I have a right to know." His feeling of terror
had passed away, and curiosity had taken its place.
He was determined to find out Basil Hallward's mystery.
"Let us sit down, Dorian," said the painter, looking troubled.
"Let us sit down. And just answer me one question.
Have you noticed in the picture something curious?something that
probably at first did not strike you, but that revealed itself
to you suddenly?"
"Basil" cried the lad, clutching the arms of his chair with trembling
hands and gazing at him with wild startled eyes.
"I see you did. Don't speak. Wait till you hear what I have to say.
Dorian, from the moment I met you, your personality had the most
extraordinary influence over me. I was dominated, soul, brain, and power,
by you. You became to me the visible incarnation of that unseen
ideal whose memory haunts us artists like an exquisite dream.
I worshipped you. I grew jealous of every one to whom you spoke.
I wanted to have you all to myself. I was only happy when I
was with you. When you were away from me, you were still present
in my art.... Of course, I never let you know anything about this.
It would have been impossible. You would not have understood it.
I hardly understood it myself. I only knew that I had seen perfection
face to face, and that the world had become wonderful to my eyes
too wonderful, perhaps, for in such mad worships there is peril,
the peril of losing them, no less than the peril of keeping them....
Weeks and weeks went on, and I grew more and more absorbed in you.
Then came a new development. I had drawn you as Paris in
dainty armour, and as Adonis with huntsman's cloak and polished
boarspear. Crowned with heavy lotusblossoms you had sat on
the prow of Adrian's barge, gazing across the green turbid Nile.
You had leaned over the still pool of some Greek woodland and seen
in the water's silent silver the marvel of your own face.
And it had all been what art should beunconscious, ideal, and remote.
One day, a fatal day I sometimes think, I determined to paint
a wonderful portrait of you as you actually are, not in the costume
of dead ages, but in your own dress and in your own time.
Whether it was the realism of the method, or the mere wonder
of your own personality, thus directly presented to me without
mist or veil, I cannot tell. But I know that as I worked at it,
every flake and film of colour seemed to me to reveal my secret.
I grew afraid that others would know of my idolatry. I felt, Dorian,
that I had told too much, that I had put too much of myself into it.
Then it was that I resolved never to allow the picture to be exhibited.
You were a little annoyed but then you did not realize all that it
meant to me. Harry, to whom I talked about it, laughed at me.
But I did not mind that. When the picture was finished, and I sat
alone with it, I felt that I was right.... Well, after a few days
the thing left my studio, and as soon as I had got rid of the intolerable
fascination of its presence, it seemed to me that I had been foolish
in imagining that I had seen anything in it, more than that you
were extremely goodlooking and that I could paint. Even now I
cannot help feeling that it is a mistake to think that the passion
one feels in creation is ever really shown in the work one creates.
Art is always more abstract than we fancy. Form and colour tell
us of form and colourthat is all. It often seems to me that art
conceals the artist far more completely than it ever reveals him.
And so when I got this offer from Paris, I determined to make your
portrait the principal thing in my exhibition. It never occurred
to me that you would refuse. I see now that you were right.
The picture cannot be shown. You must not be angry with me, Dorian,
for what I have told you. As I said to Harry, once, you are made to be
worshipped."
Dorian Gray drew a long breath. The colour came back to his cheeks,
and a smile played about his lips. The peril was over.
He was safe for the time. Yet he could not help feeling
infinite pity for the painter who had just made this strange
confession to him, and wondered if he himself would ever
be so dominated by the personality of a friend. Lord Henry
had the charm of being very dangerous. But that was all.
He was too clever and too cynical to be really fond of.
Would there ever be some one who would fill him with a
strange idolatry? Was that one of the things that life had
in store?
"It is extraordinary to me, Dorian," said Hallward, "that you
should have seen this in the portrait. Did you really see it?"
"I saw something in it," he answered, "something that seemed
to me very curious."
"Well, you don't mind my looking at the thing now?"
Dorian shook his head. "You must not ask me that, Basil.
I could not possibly let you stand in front of that picture."
"You will some day, surely?"
"Never."
"Well, perhaps you are right. And now goodbye, Dorian.
You have been the one person in my life who has really influenced
my art. Whatever I have done that is good, I owe to you.
Ah you don't know what it cost me to tell you all that I have
told you."
"My dear Basil," said Dorian, "what have you told me?
Simply that you felt that you admired me too much.
That is not even a compliment."
"It was not intended as a compliment. It was a confession.
Now that I have made it, something seems to have gone out of me.
Perhaps one should never put one's worship into words."
"It was a very disappointing confession."
"Why, what did you expect, Dorian? You didn't see anything else
in the picture, did you? There was nothing else to see?"
"No there was nothing else to see. Why do you ask?
But you mustn't talk about worship. It is foolish. You and I
are friends, Basil, and we must always remain so."
"You have got Harry," said the painter sadly.
"Oh, Harry" cried the lad, with a ripple of laughter. "Harry spends
his days in saying what is incredible and his evenings in doing
what is improbable. Just the sort of life I would like to lead.
But still I don't think I would go to Harry if I were in trouble.
I would sooner go to you, Basil."
"You will sit to me again?"
"Impossible"
"You spoil my life as an artist by refusing, Dorian. No man
comes across two ideal things. Few come across one."
"I can't explain it to you, Basil, but I must never sit to you again.
There is something fatal about a portrait. It has a life of its own.
I will come and have tea with you. That will be just as pleasant."
"Pleasanter for you, I am afraid," murmured Hallward regretfully.
"And now goodbye. I am sorry you won't let me look at the picture
once again. But that can't be helped. I quite understand what you feel
about it."
As he left the room, Dorian Gray smiled to himself. Poor Basil
How little he knew of the true reason And how strange it
was that, instead of having been forced to reveal his own secret,
he had succeeded, almost by chance, in wresting a secret from
his friend How much that strange confession explained to him
The painter's absurd fits of jealousy, his wild devotion,
his extravagant panegyrics, his curious reticences
he understood them all now, and he felt sorry. There seemed
to him to be something tragic in a friendship so coloured
by romance.
He sighed and touched the bell. The portrait must be hidden away
at all costs. He could not run such a risk of discovery again.
It had been mad of him to have allowed the thing to remain,
even for an hour, in a room to which any of his friends
had access.
CHAPTER 
When his servant entered, he looked at him steadfastly
and wondered if he had thought of peering behind the screen.
The man was quite impassive and waited for his orders. Dorian lit
a cigarette and walked over to the glass and glanced into it.
He could see the reflection of Victor's face perfectly.
It was like a placid mask of servility. There was nothing
to be afraid of, there. Yet he thought it best to be on
his guard.
Speaking very slowly, he told him to tell the housekeeper that he wanted
to see her, and then to go to the framemaker and ask him to send two of his
men round at once. It seemed to him that as the man left the room his eyes
wandered in the direction of the screen. Or was that merely his own fancy?
After a few moments, in her black silk dress, with oldfashioned thread
mittens on her wrinkled hands, Mrs. Leaf bustled into the library.
He asked her for the key of the schoolroom.
"The old schoolroom, Mr. Dorian?" she exclaimed. "Why, it is full of dust.
I must get it arranged and put straight before you go into it. It is not fit
for you to see, sir. It is not, indeed."
"I don't want it put straight, Leaf. I only want the key."
"Well, sir, you'll be covered with cobwebs if you go into it. Why, it hasn't
been opened for nearly five yearsnot since his lordship died."
He winced at the mention of his grandfather. He had hateful memories of him.
"That does not matter," he answered. "I simply want to see the place
that is all. Give me the key."
"And here is the key, sir," said the old lady, going over
the contents of her bunch with tremulously uncertain hands.
"Here is the key. I'll have it off the bunch in a moment.
But you don't think of living up there, sir, and you so
comfortable here?"
"No, no," he cried petulantly. "Thank you, Leaf. That will do."
She lingered for a few moments, and was garrulous over some detail
of the household. He sighed and told her to manage things as she
thought best. She left the room, wreathed in smiles.
As the door closed, Dorian put the key in his pocket and looked round
the room. His eye fell on a large, purple satin coverlet heavily
embroidered with gold, a splendid piece of late seventeenthcentury
Venetian work that his grandfather had found in a convent near Bologna.
Yes, that would serve to wrap the dreadful thing in. It had perhaps
served often as a pall for the dead. Now it was to hide something that
had a corruption of its own, worse than the corruption of death itself
something that would breed horrors and yet would never die. What the worm
was to the corpse, his sins would be to the painted image on the canvas.
They would mar its beauty and eat away its grace. They would defile
it and make it shameful. And yet the thing would still live on.
It would be always alive.
He shuddered, and for a moment he regretted that he had not told
Basil the true reason why he had wished to hide the picture away.
Basil would have helped him to resist Lord Henry's influence,
and the still more poisonous influences that came from his
own temperament. The love that he bore himfor it was really love
had nothing in it that was not noble and intellectual.
It was not that mere physical admiration of beauty that is born
of the senses and that dies when the senses tire. It was such
love as Michelangelo had known, and Montaigne, and Winckelmann,
and Shakespeare himself. Yes, Basil could have saved him.
But it was too late now. The past could always be annihilated.
Regret, denial, or forgetfulness could do that. But the future
was inevitable. There were passions in him that would find
their terrible outlet, dreams that would make the shadow of their
evil real.
He took up from the couch the great purpleandgold texture that
covered it, and, holding it in his hands, passed behind the screen.
Was the face on the canvas viler than before? It seemed to him
that it was unchanged, and yet his loathing of it was intensified.
Gold hair, blue eyes, and rosered lipsthey all were there.
It was simply the expression that had altered. That was horrible
in its cruelty. Compared to what he saw in it of censure or rebuke,
how shallow Basil's reproaches about Sibyl Vane had been
how shallow, and of what little account His own soul was looking
out at him from the canvas and calling him to judgement. A look
of pain came across him, and he flung the rich pall over the picture.
As he did so, a knock came to the door. He passed out as his
servant entered.
"The persons are here, Monsieur."
He felt that the man must be got rid of at once. He must
not be allowed to know where the picture was being taken to.
There was something sly about him, and he had thoughtful,
treacherous eyes. Sitting down at the writingtable he scribbled
a note to Lord Henry, asking him to send him round something
to read and reminding him that they were to meet at eightfifteen
that evening.
"Wait for an answer," he said, handing it to him, "and show the men in here."
In two or three minutes there was another knock, and Mr. Hubbard himself,
the celebrated framemaker of South Audley Street, came in with a
somewhat roughlooking young assistant. Mr. Hubbard was a florid,
redwhiskered little man, whose admiration for art was considerably tempered
by the inveterate impecuniosity of most of the artists who dealt with him.
As a rule, he never left his shop. He waited for people to come to him.
But he always made an exception in favour of Dorian Gray. There was
something about Dorian that charmed everybody. It was a pleasure even to
see him.
"What can I do for you, Mr. Gray?" he said, rubbing his fat freckled hands.
"I thought I would do myself the honour of coming round in person. I have
just got a beauty of a frame, sir. Picked it up at a sale. Old Florentine.
Came from Fonthill, I believe. Admirably suited for a religious subject,
Mr. Gray."
"I am so sorry you have given yourself the trouble of coming round,
Mr. Hubbard. I shall certainly drop in and look at the frame
though I don't go in much at present for religious artbut today
I only want a picture carried to the top of the house for me.
It is rather heavy, so I thought I would ask you to lend me a couple of
your men."
"No trouble at all, Mr. Gray. I am delighted to be of any service to you.
Which is the work of art, sir?"
"This," replied Dorian, moving the screen back. "Can you move it,
covering and all, just as it is? I don't want it to get scratched
going upstairs."
"There will be no difficulty, sir," said the genial framemaker, beginning,
with the aid of his assistant, to unhook the picture from the long brass
chains by which it was suspended. "And, now, where shall we carry it to,
Mr. Gray?"
"I will show you the way, Mr. Hubbard, if you will kindly follow me.
Or perhaps you had better go in front. I am afraid it is right at
the top of the house. We will go up by the front staircase, as it
is wider."
He held the door open for them, and they passed out into the hall and began
the ascent. The elaborate character of the frame had made the picture
extremely bulky, and now and then, in spite of the obsequious protests
of Mr. Hubbard, who had the true tradesman's spirited dislike of seeing a
gentleman doing anything useful, Dorian put his hand to it so as to help them.
"Something of a load to carry, sir," gasped the little man when they
reached the top landing. And he wiped his shiny forehead.
"I am afraid it is rather heavy," murmured Dorian as he unlocked the door
that opened into the room that was to keep for him the curious secret of his
life and hide his soul from the eyes of men.
He had not entered the place for more than four yearsnot, indeed,
since he had used it first as a playroom when he was a child,
and then as a study when he grew somewhat older. It was a large,
wellproportioned room, which had been specially built by the last
Lord Kelso for the use of the little grandson whom, for his strange
likeness to his mother, and also for other reasons, he had always
hated and desired to keep at a distance. It appeared to Dorian
to have but little changed. There was the huge Italian cassone,
with its fantastically painted panels and its tarnished
gilt mouldings, in which he had so often hidden himself as a boy.
There the satinwood bookcase filled with his dogeared schoolbooks.
On the wall behind it was hanging the same ragged Flemish tapestry
where a faded king and queen were playing chess in a garden,
while a company of hawkers rode by, carrying hooded birds on their
gauntleted wrists. How well he remembered it all Every moment
of his lonely childhood came back to him as he looked round.
He recalled the stainless purity of his boyish life, and it seemed horrible
to him that it was here the fatal portrait was to be hidden away.
How little he had thought, in those dead days, of all that was in store
for him
But there was no other place in the house so secure from prying eyes as this.
He had the key, and no one else could enter it. Beneath its purple pall,
the face painted on the canvas could grow bestial, sodden, and unclean.
What did it matter? No one could see it. He himself would not see it.
Why should he watch the hideous corruption of his soul? He kept his youth
that was enough. And, besides, might not his nature grow finer, after all?
There was no reason that the future should be so full of shame.
Some love might come across his life, and purify him, and shield him
from those sins that seemed to be already stirring in spirit and in flesh
those curious unpictured sins whose very mystery lent them their subtlety and
their charm. Perhaps, some day, the cruel look would have passed away from
the scarlet sensitive mouth, and he might show to the world Basil Hallward's
masterpiece.
No that was impossible. Hour by hour, and week by week, the thing
upon the canvas was growing old. It might escape the hideousness
of sin, but the hideousness of age was in store for it.
The cheeks would become hollow or flaccid. Yellow crow's feet
would creep round the fading eyes and make them horrible.
The hair would lose its brightness, the mouth would gape or droop,
would be foolish or gross, as the mouths of old men are.
There would be the wrinkled throat, the cold, blueveined hands,
the twisted body, that he remembered in the grandfather who had been
so stern to him in his boyhood. The picture had to be concealed.
There was no help for it.
"Bring it in, Mr. Hubbard, please," he said, wearily, turning round.
"I am sorry I kept you so long. I was thinking of something else."
"Always glad to have a rest, Mr. Gray," answered the framemaker,
who was still gasping for breath. "Where shall we put it, sir?"
"Oh, anywhere. Here this will do. I don't want to have it hung up.
Just lean it against the wall. Thanks."
"Might one look at the work of art, sir?"
Dorian started. "It would not interest you, Mr. Hubbard,"
he said, keeping his eye on the man. He felt ready to leap
upon him and fling him to the ground if he dared to lift
the gorgeous hanging that concealed the secret of his life.
"I shan't trouble you any more now. I am much obliged for your
kindness in coming round."
"Not at all, not at all, Mr. Gray. Ever ready to do anything for you, sir."
And Mr. Hubbard tramped downstairs, followed by the assistant, who glanced
back at Dorian with a look of shy wonder in his rough uncomely face.
He had never seen any one so marvellous.
When the sound of their footsteps had died away, Dorian locked
the door and put the key in his pocket. He felt safe now.
No one would ever look upon the horrible thing. No eye but his
would ever see his shame.
On reaching the library, he found that it was just after
five o'clock and that the tea had been already brought up.
On a little table of dark perfumed wood thickly incrusted with nacre,
a present from Lady Radley, his guardian's wife, a pretty
professional invalid who had spent the preceding winter in Cairo,
was lying a note from Lord Henry, and beside it was a book bound
in yellow paper, the cover slightly torn and the edges soiled.
A copy of the third edition of The St. James's Gazette had been
placed on the teatray. It was evident that Victor had returned.
He wondered if he had met the men in the hall as they were leaving
the house and had wormed out of them what they had been doing.
He would be sure to miss the picturehad no doubt missed
it already, while he had been laying the teathings. The screen
had not been set back, and a blank space was visible on the wall.
Perhaps some night he might find him creeping upstairs and trying
to force the door of the room. It was a horrible thing to have
a spy in one's house. He had heard of rich men who had been
blackmailed all their lives by some servant who had read a letter,
or overheard a conversation, or picked up a card with an address,
or found beneath a pillow a withered flower or a shred of
crumpled lace.
He sighed, and having poured himself out some tea, opened Lord Henry's note.
It was simply to say that he sent him round the evening paper, and a book
that might interest him, and that he would be at the club at eightfifteen. He
opened The St. James's languidly, and looked through it. A red pencilmark on
the fifth page caught his eye. It drew attention to the following paragraph
INQUEST ON AN ACTRESS.An inquest was held this morning at the Bell Tavern,
Hoxton Road, by Mr. Danby, the District Coroner, on the body of Sibyl Vane,
a young actress recently engaged at the Royal Theatre, Holborn. A verdict
of death by misadventure was returned. Considerable sympathy was expressed
for the mother of the deceased, who was greatly affected during the giving
of her own evidence, and that of Dr. Birrell, who had made the postmortem
examination of the deceased.
He frowned, and tearing the paper in two, went across
the room and flung the pieces away. How ugly it all was
And how horribly real ugliness made things He felt a little
annoyed with Lord Henry for having sent him the report.
And it was certainly stupid of him to have marked it with red pencil.
Victor might have read it. The man knew more than enough English
for that.
Perhaps he had read it and had begun to suspect something.
And, yet, what did it matter? What had Dorian Gray to do
with Sibyl Vane's death? There was nothing to fear.
Dorian Gray had not killed her.
His eye fell on the yellow book that Lord Henry had sent him.
What was it, he wondered. He went towards the little,
pearlcoloured octagonal stand that had always looked to him
like the work of some strange Egyptian bees that wrought in silver,
and taking up the volume, flung himself into an armchair and began
to turn over the leaves. After a few minutes he became absorbed.
It was the strangest book that he had ever read. It seemed to him
that in exquisite raiment, and to the delicate sound of flutes,
the sins of the world were passing in dumb show before him.
Things that he had dimly dreamed of were suddenly made
real to him. Things of which he had never dreamed were
gradually revealed.
It was a novel without a plot and with only one character, being, indeed,
simply a psychological study of a certain young Parisian who spent his life
trying to realize in the nineteenth century all the passions and modes
of thought that belonged to every century except his own, and to sum up,
as it were, in himself the various moods through which the worldspirit had
ever passed, loving for their mere artificiality those renunciations that men
have unwisely called virtue, as much as those natural rebellions that wise
men still call sin. The style in which it was written was that curious
jewelled style, vivid and obscure at once, full of argot and of archaisms,
of technical expressions and of elaborate paraphrases, that characterizes
the work of some of the finest artists of the French school of Symbolistes.
There were in it metaphors as monstrous as orchids and as subtle in colour.
The life of the senses was described in the terms of mystical philosophy.
One hardly knew at times whether one was reading the spiritual ecstasies
of some mediaeval saint or the morbid confessions of a modern sinner.
It was a poisonous book. The heavy odour of incense seemed to cling about its
pages and to trouble the brain. The mere cadence of the sentences, the subtle
monotony of their music, so full as it was of complex refrains and movements
elaborately repeated, produced in the mind of the lad, as he passed from
chapter to chapter, a form of reverie, a malady of dreaming, that made him
unconscious of the falling day and creeping shadows.
Cloudless, and pierced by one solitary star, a coppergreen
sky gleamed through the windows. He read on by its wan light
till he could read no more. Then, after his valet had reminded
him several times of the lateness of the hour, he got up,
and going into the next room, placed the book on the little
Florentine table that always stood at his bedside and began
to dress for dinner.
It was almost nine o'clock before he reached the club, where he found
Lord Henry sitting alone, in the morningroom, looking very much bored.
"I am so sorry, Harry," he cried, "but really it is entirely your fault.
That book you sent me so fascinated me that I forgot how the time
was going."
"Yes, I thought you would like it," replied his host, rising from his chair.
"I didn't say I liked it, Harry. I said it fascinated me.
There is a great difference."
"Ah, you have discovered that?" murmured Lord Henry.
And they passed into the diningroom.
CHAPTER 
For years, Dorian Gray could not free himself from the influence
of this book. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say
that he never sought to free himself from it. He procured from
Paris no less than nine largepaper copies of the first edition,
and had them bound in different colours, so that they might suit
his various moods and the changing fancies of a nature over
which he seemed, at times, to have almost entirely lost control.
The hero, the wonderful young Parisian in whom the romantic
and the scientific temperaments were so strangely blended,
became to him a kind of prefiguring type of himself.
And, indeed, the whole book seemed to him to contain the story
of his own life, written before he had lived it.
In one point he was more fortunate than the novel's fantastic hero.
He never knewnever, indeed, had any cause to knowthat somewhat
grotesque dread of mirrors, and polished metal surfaces, and still
water which came upon the young Parisian so early in his life,
and was occasioned by the sudden decay of a beau that had once,
apparently, been so remarkable. It was with an almost cruel joy
and perhaps in nearly every joy, as certainly in every pleasure,
cruelty has its placethat he used to read the latter part of the book,
with its really tragic, if somewhat overemphasized, account of the sorrow
and despair of one who had himself lost what in others, and the world,
he had most dearly valued.
For the wonderful beauty that had so fascinated Basil Hallward,
and many others besides him, seemed never to leave him.
Even those who had heard the most evil things against him
and from time to time strange rumours about his mode of life
crept through London and became the chatter of the clubs
could not believe anything to his dishonour when they saw him.
He had always the look of one who had kept himself unspotted
from the world. Men who talked grossly became silent when Dorian
Gray entered the room. There was something in the purity of his
face that rebuked them. His mere presence seemed to recall
to them the memory of the innocence that they had tarnished.
They wondered how one so charming and graceful as he was could
have escaped the stain of an age that was at once sordid
and sensual.
Often, on returning home from one of those mysterious and
prolonged absences that gave rise to such strange conjecture
among those who were his friends, or thought that they were so,
he himself would creep upstairs to the locked room, open the door
with the key that never left him now, and stand, with a mirror,
in front of the portrait that Basil Hallward had painted of him,
looking now at the evil and aging face on the canvas, and now at
the fair young face that laughed back at him from the polished glass.
The very sharpness of the contrast used to quicken his sense
of pleasure. He grew more and more enamoured of his own beauty,
more and more interested in the corruption of his own soul.
He would examine with minute care, and sometimes with a monstrous
and terrible delight, the hideous lines that seared the wrinkling
forehead or crawled around the heavy sensual mouth, wondering sometimes
which were the more horrible, the signs of sin or the signs of age.
He would place his white hands beside the coarse bloated hands
of the picture, and smile. He mocked the misshapen body and the
failing limbs.
There were moments, indeed, at night, when, lying sleepless
in his own delicately scented chamber, or in the sordid
room of the little illfamed tavern near the docks which,
under an assumed name and in disguise, it was his habit
to frequent, he would think of the ruin he had brought upon
his soul with a pity that was all the more poignant because it
was purely selfish. But moments such as these were rare.
That curiosity about life which Lord Henry had first stirred
in him, as they sat together in the garden of their friend,
seemed to increase with gratification. The more he knew,
the more he desired to know. He had mad hungers that grew more
ravenous as he fed them.
Yet he was not really reckless, at any rate in his relations to society.
Once or twice every month during the winter, and on each Wednesday
evening while the season lasted, he would throw open to the world
his beautiful house and have the most celebrated musicians of the day
to charm his guests with the wonders of their art. His little dinners,
in the settling of which Lord Henry always assisted him, were noted
as much for the careful selection and placing of those invited,
as for the exquisite taste shown in the decoration of the table,
with its subtle symphonic arrangements of exotic flowers,
and embroidered cloths, and antique plate of gold and silver.
Indeed, there were many, especially among the very young men, who saw,
or fancied that they saw, in Dorian Gray the true realization
of a type of which they had often dreamed in Eton or Oxford days,
a type that was to combine something of the real culture of the scholar
with all the grace and distinction and perfect manner of a citizen
of the world. To them he seemed to be of the company of those whom
Dante describes as having sought to "make themselves perfect
by the worship of beauty." Like Gautier, he was one for whom "the
visible world existed."
And, certainly, to him life itself was the first, the greatest,
of the arts, and for it all the other arts seemed to be but
a preparation. Fashion, by which what is really fantastic
becomes for a moment universal, and dandyism, which, in its
own way, is an attempt to assert the absolute modernity
of beauty, had, of course, their fascination for him.
His mode of dressing, and the particular styles that from time
to time he affected, had their marked influence on the young
exquisites of the Mayfair balls and Pall Mall club windows,
who copied him in everything that he did, and tried to reproduce
the accidental charm of his graceful, though to him only
halfserious, fopperies.
For, while he was but too ready to accept the position that
was almost immediately offered to him on his coming of age,
and found, indeed, a subtle pleasure in the thought that he might
really become to the London of his own day what to imperial
Neronian Rome the author of the Satyricon once had been,
yet in his inmost heart he desired to be something more than a mere
arbiter elegantiarum, to be consulted on the wearing of a jewel,
or the knotting of a necktie, or the conduct of a cane.
He sought to elaborate some new scheme of life that would have
its reasoned philosophy and its ordered principles, and find
in the spiritualizing of the senses its highest realization.
The worship of the senses has often, and with much justice,
been decried, men feeling a natural instinct of terror about
passions and sensations that seem stronger than themselves,
and that they are conscious of sharing with the less highly
organized forms of existence. But it appeared to Dorian Gray
that the true nature of the senses had never been understood,
and that they had remained savage and animal merely because
the world had sought to starve them into submission or to kill
them by pain, instead of aiming at making them elements
of a new spirituality, of which a fine instinct for beauty was
to be the dominant characteristic. As he looked back upon man
moving through history, he was haunted by a feeling of loss.
So much had been surrendered and to such little purpose
There had been mad wilful rejections, monstrous forms
of selftorture and selfdenial, whose origin was fear
and whose result was a degradation infinitely more terrible
than that fancied degradation from which, in their ignorance,
they had sought to escape Nature, in her wonderful irony,
driving out the anchorite to feed with the wild animals of
the desert and giving to the hermit the beasts of the field as
his companions.
Yes there was to be, as Lord Henry had prophesied, a new Hedonism
that was to recreate life and to save it from that harsh uncomely
puritanism that is having, in our own day, its curious revival.
It was to have its service of the intellect, certainly, yet it was
never to accept any theory or system that would involve the sacrifice
of any mode of passionate experience. Its aim, indeed, was to be
experience itself, and not the fruits of experience, sweet or bitter
as they might be. Of the asceticism that deadens the senses,
as of the vulgar profligacy that dulls them, it was to know nothing.
But it was to teach man to concentrate himself upon the moments of a life
that is itself but a moment.
There are few of us who have not sometimes wakened before dawn,
either after one of those dreamless nights that make us almost
enamoured of death, or one of those nights of horror and misshapen joy,
when through the chambers of the brain sweep phantoms more terrible
than reality itself, and instinct with that vivid life that lurks
in all grotesques, and that lends to Gothic art its enduring vitality,
this art being, one might fancy, especially the art of those whose
minds have been troubled with the malady of reverie. Gradually white
fingers creep through the curtains, and they appear to tremble.
In black fantastic shapes, dumb shadows crawl into the corners
of the room and crouch there. Outside, there is the stirring
of birds among the leaves, or the sound of men going forth
to their work, or the sigh and sob of the wind coming down from
the hills and wandering round the silent house, as though it feared
to wake the sleepers and yet must needs call forth sleep from
her purple cave. Veil after veil of thin dusky gauze is lifted,
and by degrees the forms and colours of things are restored to them,
and we watch the dawn remaking the world in its antique pattern.
The wan mirrors get back their mimic life. The flameless tapers
stand where we had left them, and beside them lies the halfcut book
that we had been studying, or the wired flower that we had worn at
the ball, or the letter that we had been afraid to read, or that we
had read too often. Nothing seems to us changed. Out of the unreal
shadows of the night comes back the real life that we had known.
We have to resume it where we had left off, and there steals over us
a terrible sense of the necessity for the continuance of energy
in the same wearisome round of stereotyped habits, or a wild longing,
it may be, that our eyelids might open some morning upon a world
that had been refashioned anew in the darkness for our pleasure,
a world in which things would have fresh shapes and colours,
and be changed, or have other secrets, a world in which the past
would have little or no place, or survive, at any rate,
in no conscious form of obligation or regret, the remembrance
even of joy having its bitterness and the memories of pleasure
their pain.
It was the creation of such worlds as these that seemed to Dorian
Gray to be the true object, or amongst the true objects, of life
and in his search for sensations that would be at once new and delightful,
and possess that element of strangeness that is so essential to romance,
he would often adopt certain modes of thought that he knew to be really
alien to his nature, abandon himself to their subtle influences,
and then, having, as it were, caught their colour and satisfied his
intellectual curiosity, leave them with that curious indifference
that is not incompatible with a real ardour of temperament, and that,
indeed, according to certain modern psychologists, is often a condition
of it.
It was rumoured of him once that he was about to join the Roman
Catholic communion, and certainly the Roman ritual had always
a great attraction for him. The daily sacrifice, more awful
really than all the sacrifices of the antique world, stirred him
as much by its superb rejection of the evidence of the senses
as by the primitive simplicity of its elements and the eternal
pathos of the human tragedy that it sought to symbolize. He loved
to kneel down on the cold marble pavement and watch the priest,
in his stiff flowered dalmatic, slowly and with white hands moving
aside the veil of the tabernacle, or raising aloft the jewelled,
lanternshaped monstrance with that pallid wafer that at times,
one would fain think, is indeed the "panis caelestis," the bread
of angels, or, robed in the garments of the Passion of Christ,
breaking the Host into the chalice and smiting his breast for his sins.
The fuming censers that the grave boys, in their lace and scarlet,
tossed into the air like great gilt flowers had their subtle
fascination for him. As he passed out, he used to look with wonder
at the black confessionals and long to sit in the dim shadow of one
of them and listen to men and women whispering through the worn
grating the true story of their lives.
But he never fell into the error of arresting his intellectual development
by any formal acceptance of creed or system, or of mistaking, for a house
in which to live, an inn that is but suitable for the sojourn of a night,
or for a few hours of a night in which there are no stars and the moon is
in travail. Mysticism, with its marvellous power of making common things
strange to us, and the subtle antinomianism that always seems to accompany it,
moved him for a season and for a season he inclined to the materialistic
doctrines of the Darwinismus movement in Germany, and found a curious pleasure
in tracing the thoughts and passions of men to some pearly cell in the brain,
or some white nerve in the body, delighting in the conception of the absolute
dependence of the spirit on certain physical conditions, morbid or healthy,
normal or diseased. Yet, as has been said of him before, no theory of life
seemed to him to be of any importance compared with life itself. He felt
keenly conscious of how barren all intellectual speculation is when separated
from action and experiment. He knew that the senses, no less than the soul,
have their spiritual mysteries to reveal.
And so he would now study perfumes and the secrets of their manufacture,
distilling heavily scented oils and burning odorous gums from the East.
He saw that there was no mood of the mind that had not its counterpart
in the sensuous life, and set himself to discover their true relations,
wondering what there was in frankincense that made one mystical,
and in ambergris that stirred one's passions, and in violets that woke
the memory of dead romances, and in musk that troubled the brain,
and in champak that stained the imagination and seeking often to elaborate
a real psychology of perfumes, and to estimate the several influences
of sweetsmelling roots and scented, pollenladen flowers of aromatic balms
and of dark and fragrant woods of spikenard, that sickens of hovenia,
that makes men mad and of aloes, that are said to be able to expel melancholy
from the soul.
At another time he devoted himself entirely to music, and in a long
latticed room, with a vermilionandgold ceiling and walls of olivegreen
lacquer, he used to give curious concerts in which mad gipsies tore wild
music from little zithers, or grave, yellowshawled Tunisians plucked
at the strained strings of monstrous lutes, while grinning Negroes
beat monotonously upon copper drums and, crouching upon scarlet mats,
slim turbaned Indians blew through long pipes of reed or brass and charmed
or feigned to charmgreat hooded snakes and horrible horned adders.
The harsh intervals and shrill discords of barbaric music stirred
him at times when Schubert's grace, and Chopin's beautiful sorrows,
and the mighty harmonies of Beethoven himself, fell unheeded on his ear.
He collected together from all parts of the world the strangest instruments
that could be found, either in the tombs of dead nations or among the few
savage tribes that have survived contact with Western civilizations,
and loved to touch and try them. He had the mysterious juruparis of the Rio
Negro Indians, that women are not allowed to look at and that even youths
may not see till they have been subjected to fasting and scourging,
and the earthen jars of the Peruvians that have the shrill cries of birds,
and flutes of human bones such as Alfonso de Ovalle heard in Chile,
and the sonorous green jaspers that are found near Cuzco and give forth
a note of singular sweetness. He had painted gourds filled with pebbles
that rattled when they were shaken the long clarin of the Mexicans,
into which the performer does not blow, but through which he inhales
the air the harsh ture of the Amazon tribes, that is sounded by
the sentinels who sit all day long in high trees, and can be heard,
it is said, at a distance of three leagues the teponaztli, that has
two vibrating tongues of wood and is beaten with sticks that are
smeared with an elastic gum obtained from the milky juice of plants
the yotlbells of the Aztecs, that are hung in clusters like grapes
and a huge cylindrical drum, covered with the skins of great serpents,
like the one that Bernal Diaz saw when he went with Cortes into the Mexican
temple, and of whose doleful sound he has left us so vivid a description.
The fantastic character of these instruments fascinated him, and he felt
a curious delight in the thought that art, like Nature, has her monsters,
things of bestial shape and with hideous voices. Yet, after some time,
he wearied of them, and would sit in his box at the opera, either alone
or with Lord Henry, listening in rapt pleasure to "Tannhauser" and seeing
in the prelude to that great work of art a presentation of the tragedy of
his own soul.
On one occasion he took up the study of jewels, and appeared
at a costume ball as Anne de Joyeuse, Admiral of France,
in a dress covered with five hundred and sixty pearls.
This taste enthralled him for years, and, indeed, may be said
never to have left him. He would often spend a whole day
settling and resettling in their cases the various stones that he
had collected, such as the olivegreen chrysoberyl that turns red
by lamplight, the cymophane with its wirelike line of silver,
the pistachiocoloured peridot, rosepink and wineyellow topazes,
carbuncles of fiery scarlet with tremulous, fourrayed stars,
flamered cinnamonstones, orange and violet spinels,
and amethysts with their alternate layers of ruby and sapphire.
He loved the red gold of the sunstone, and the moonstone's
pearly whiteness, and the broken rainbow of the milky opal.
He procured from Amsterdam three emeralds of extraordinary size and
richness of colour, and had a turquoise de la vieille roche that was
the envy of all the connoisseurs.
He discovered wonderful stories, also, about jewels.
In Alphonso's Clericalis Disciplina a serpent was mentioned with
eyes of real jacinth, and in the romantic history of Alexander,
the Conqueror of Emathia was said to have found in the vale of Jordan
snakes "with collars of real emeralds growing on their backs."
There was a gem in the brain of the dragon, Philostratus told us,
and "by the exhibition of golden letters and a scarlet robe"
the monster could be thrown into a magical sleep and slain.
According to the great alchemist, Pierre de Boniface, the diamond
rendered a man invisible, and the agate of India made him eloquent.
The cornelian appeased anger, and the hyacinth provoked sleep,
and the amethyst drove away the fumes of wine. The garnet cast
out demons, and the hydropicus deprived the moon of her colour.
The selenite waxed and waned with the moon, and the meloceus,
that discovers thieves, could be affected only by the blood of kids.
Leonardus Camillus had seen a white stone taken from the brain of a newly
killed toad, that was a certain antidote against poison. The bezoar,
that was found in the heart of the Arabian deer, was a charm that could
cure the plague. In the nests of Arabian birds was the aspilates,
that, according to Democritus, kept the wearer from any danger
by fire.
The King of Ceilan rode through his city with a large ruby in his hand,
as the ceremony of his coronation. The gates of the palace of John
the Priest were "made of sardius, with the horn of the horned
snake inwrought, so that no man might bring poison within."
Over the gable were "two golden apples, in which were two carbuncles,"
so that the gold might shine by day and the carbuncles by night.
In Lodge's strange romance 'A Margarite of America', it was stated
that in the chamber of the queen one could behold "all the chaste
ladies of the world, inchased out of silver, looking through fair
mirrours of chrysolites, carbuncles, sapphires, and greene emeraults."
Marco Polo had seen the inhabitants of Zipangu place rosecoloured
pearls in the mouths of the dead. A seamonster had been
enamoured of the pearl that the diver brought to King Perozes,
and had slain the thief, and mourned for seven moons over its loss.
When the Huns lured the king into the great pit, he flung it away
Procopius tells the storynor was it ever found again,
though the Emperor Anastasius offered five hundredweight of gold
pieces for it. The King of Malabar had shown to a certain Venetian
a rosary of three hundred and four pearls, one for every god that
he worshipped.
When the Duke de Valentinois, son of Alexander VI, visited Louis XII
of France, his horse was loaded with gold leaves, according to Brantome,
and his cap had double rows of rubies that threw out a great light.
Charles of England had ridden in stirrups hung with four hundred and
twentyone diamonds. Richard II had a coat, valued at thirty thousand marks,
which was covered with balas rubies. Hall described Henry VIII,
on his way to the Tower previous to his coronation, as wearing "a
jacket of raised gold, the placard embroidered with diamonds and other
rich stones, and a great bauderike about his neck of large balasses."
The favourites of James I wore earrings of emeralds set in gold filigrane.
Edward II gave to Piers Gaveston a suit of redgold armour studded
with jacinths, a collar of gold roses set with turquoisestones, and a
skullcap parseme with pearls. Henry II wore jewelled gloves reaching
to the elbow, and had a hawkglove sewn with twelve rubies and fiftytwo
great orients. The ducal hat of Charles the Rash, the last Duke
of Burgundy of his race, was hung with pearshaped pearls and studded
with sapphires.
How exquisite life had once been How gorgeous in its pomp and decoration
Even to read of the luxury of the dead was wonderful.
Then he turned his attention to embroideries and to the tapestries
that performed the office of frescoes in the chill rooms of
the northern nations of Europe. As he investigated the subject
and he always had an extraordinary faculty of becoming absolutely
absorbed for the moment in whatever he took uphe was almost
saddened by the reflection of the ruin that time brought on
beautiful and wonderful things. He, at any rate, had escaped that.
Summer followed summer, and the yellow jonquils bloomed and died
many times, and nights of horror repeated the story of their shame,
but he was unchanged. No winter marred his face or stained his
flowerlike bloom. How different it was with material things
Where had they passed to? Where was the great crocuscoloured robe,
on which the gods fought against the giants, that had been worked
by brown girls for the pleasure of Athena? Where the huge
velarium that Nero had stretched across the Colosseum at Rome,
that Titan sail of purple on which was represented the starry sky,
and Apollo driving a chariot drawn by white, giltreined steeds?
He longed to see the curious tablenapkins wrought for the Priest
of the Sun, on which were displayed all the dainties and viands that
could be wanted for a feast the mortuary cloth of King Chilperic,
with its three hundred golden bees the fantastic robes that excited
the indignation of the Bishop of Pontus and were figured with
"lions, panthers, bears, dogs, forests, rocks, huntersall, in fact,
that a painter can copy from nature" and the coat that Charles
of Orleans once wore, on the sleeves of which were embroidered
the verses of a song beginning "Madame, je suis tout joyeux,"
the musical accompaniment of the words being wrought in gold thread,
and each note, of square shape in those days, formed with four pearls.
He read of the room that was prepared at the palace at Rheims for
the use of Queen Joan of Burgundy and was decorated with "thirteen
hundred and twentyone parrots, made in broidery, and blazoned
with the king's arms, and five hundred and sixtyone butterflies,
whose wings were similarly ornamented with the arms of the queen,
the whole worked in gold." Catherine de Medicis had a mourningbed
made for her of black velvet powdered with crescents and suns.
Its curtains were of damask, with leafy wreaths and garlands,
figured upon a gold and silver ground, and fringed along the edges
with broideries of pearls, and it stood in a room hung with rows
of the queen's devices in cut black velvet upon cloth of silver.
Louis XIV had gold embroidered caryatides fifteen feet high
in his apartment. The state bed of Sobieski, King of Poland,
was made of Smyrna gold brocade embroidered in turquoises with verses
from the Koran. Its supports were of silver gilt, beautifully chased,
and profusely set with enamelled and jewelled medallions.
It had been taken from the Turkish camp before Vienna, and the
standard of Mohammed had stood beneath the tremulous gilt of its
canopy.
And so, for a whole year, he sought to accumulate the most exquisite
specimens that he could find of textile and embroidered work,
getting the dainty Delhi muslins, finely wrought with goldthread palmates
and stitched over with iridescent beetles' wings the Dacca gauzes,
that from their transparency are known in the East as "woven air,"
and "running water," and "evening dew" strange figured cloths from Java
elaborate yellow Chinese hangings books bound in tawny satins or fair blue
silks and wrought with fleursdelis, birds and images veils of lacis
worked in Hungary point Sicilian brocades and stiff Spanish velvets
Georgian work, with its gilt coins, and Japanese Foukousas, with their
greentoned golds and their marvellously plumaged birds.
He had a special passion, also, for ecclesiastical vestments,
as indeed he had for everything connected with the service
of the Church. In the long cedar chests that lined the west
gallery of his house, he had stored away many rare and beautiful
specimens of what is really the raiment of the Bride of Christ,
who must wear purple and jewels and fine linen that she may
hide the pallid macerated body that is worn by the suffering
that she seeks for and wounded by selfinflicted pain.
He possessed a gorgeous cope of crimson silk and goldthread damask,
figured with a repeating pattern of golden pomegranates set
in sixpetalled formal blossoms, beyond which on either side
was the pineapple device wrought in seedpearls. The orphreys
were divided into panels representing scenes from the life
of the Virgin, and the coronation of the Virgin was figured
in coloured silks upon the hood. This was Italian work
of the fifteenth century. Another cope was of green velvet,
embroidered with heartshaped groups of acanthusleaves, from
which spread longstemmed white blossoms, the details of which
were picked out with silver thread and coloured crystals.
The morse bore a seraph's head in goldthread raised work.
The orphreys were woven in a diaper of red and gold silk,
and were starred with medallions of many saints and martyrs,
among whom was St. Sebastian. He had chasubles, also,
of ambercoloured silk, and blue silk and gold brocade,
and yellow silk damask and cloth of gold, figured with
representations of the Passion and Crucifixion of Christ,
and embroidered with lions and peacocks and other emblems
dalmatics of white satin and pink silk damask, decorated with
tulips and dolphins and fleursdelis altar frontals
of crimson velvet and blue linen and many corporals,
chaliceveils, and sudaria. In the mystic offices to which
such things were put, there was something that quickened
his imagination.
For these treasures, and everything that he collected in his lovely house,
were to be to him means of forgetfulness, modes by which he could escape,
for a season, from the fear that seemed to him at times to be almost too
great to be borne. Upon the walls of the lonely locked room where he had
spent so much of his boyhood, he had hung with his own hands the terrible
portrait whose changing features showed him the real degradation of his life,
and in front of it had draped the purpleandgold pall as a curtain.
For weeks he would not go there, would forget the hideous painted thing,
and get back his light heart, his wonderful joyousness, his passionate
absorption in mere existence. Then, suddenly, some night he would creep
out of the house, go down to dreadful places near Blue Gate Fields,
and stay there, day after day, until he was driven away. On his return
he would sit in front of the her times, with that pride of individualism
that is half the fascination of sin, and smiling with secret pleasure
at the misshapen shadow that had to bear the burden that should have been
his own.
After a few years he could not endure to be long out of England,
and gave up the villa that he had shared at Trouville with Lord Henry,
as well as the little white walledin house at Algiers where they
had more than once spent the winter. He hated to be separated from
the picture that was such a part of his life, and was also afraid
that during his absence some one might gain access to the room,
in spite of the elaborate bars that he had caused to be placed upon
the door.
He was quite conscious that this would tell them nothing.
It was true that the portrait still preserved, under all
the foulness and ugliness of the face, its marked likeness
to himself but what could they learn from that? He would laugh
at any one who tried to taunt him. He had not painted it.
What was it to him how vile and full of shame it looked?
Even if he told them, would they believe it?
Yet he was afraid. Sometimes when he was down at his great house
in Nottinghamshire, entertaining the fashionable young men of his
own rank who were his chief companions, and astounding the county
by the wanton luxury and gorgeous splendour of his mode of life,
he would suddenly leave his guests and rush back to town to see
that the door had not been tampered with and that the picture was
still there. What if it should be stolen? The mere thought made
him cold with horror. Surely the world would know his secret then.
Perhaps the world already suspected it.
For, while he fascinated many, there were not a few who distrusted him.
He was very nearly blackballed at a West End club of which his birth
and social position fully entitled him to become a member, and it
was said that on one occasion, when he was brought by a friend into
the smokingroom of the Churchill, the Duke of Berwick and another
gentleman got up in a marked manner and went out. Curious stories
became current about him after he had passed his twentyfifth year.
It was rumoured that he had been seen brawling with foreign sailors
in a low den in the distant parts of Whitechapel, and that he consorted
with thieves and coiners and knew the mysteries of their trade.
His extraordinary absences became notorious, and, when he used to reappear
again in society, men would whisper to each other in corners, or pass him
with a sneer, or look at him with cold searching eyes, as though they
were determined to discover his secret.
Of such insolences and attempted slights he, of course,
took no notice, and in the opinion of most people his frank
debonair manner, his charming boyish smile, and the infinite
grace of that wonderful youth that seemed never to leave him,
were in themselves a sufficient answer to the calumnies,
for so they termed them, that were circulated about him.
It was remarked, however, that some of those who had been
most intimate with him appeared, after a time, to shun him.
Women who had wildly adored him, and for his sake had braved
all social censure and set convention at defiance, were seen
to grow pallid with shame or horror if Dorian Gray entered
the room.
Yet these whispered scandals only increased in the eyes of many
his strange and dangerous charm. His great wealth was a certain
element of security. Societycivilized society, at least
is never very ready to believe anything to the detriment of those
who are both rich and fascinating. It feels instinctively that
manners are of more importance than morals, and, in its opinion,
the highest respectability is of much less value than the possession
of a good chef. And, after all, it is a very poor consolation
to be told that the man who has given one a bad dinner,
or poor wine, is irreproachable in his private life.
Even the cardinal virtues cannot atone for halfcold entrees,
as Lord Henry remarked once, in a discussion on the subject,
and there is possibly a good deal to be said for his view.
For the canons of good society are, or should be, the same
as the canons of art. Form is absolutely essential to it.
It should have the dignity of a ceremony, as well as
its unreality, and should combine the insincere character
of a romantic play with the wit and beauty that make such plays
delightful to us. Is insincerity such a terrible thing?
I think not. It is merely a method by which we can multiply
our personalities.
Such, at any rate, was Dorian Gray's opinion. He used to wonder
at the shallow psychology of those who conceive the ego in man
as a thing simple, permanent, reliable, and of one essence.
To him, man was a being with myriad lives and myriad sensations,
a complex multiform creature that bore within itself strange
legacies of thought and passion, and whose very flesh was tainted
with the monstrous maladies of the dead. He loved to stroll
through the gaunt cold picturegallery of his country house and look
at the various portraits of those whose blood flowed in his veins.
Here was Philip Herbert, described by Francis Osborne,
in his Memoires on the Reigns of Queen Elizabeth and King James,
as one who was "caressed by the Court for his handsome face,
which kept him not long company." Was it young Herbert's
life that he sometimes led? Had some strange poisonous
germ crept from body to body till it had reached his own?
Was it some dim sense of that ruined grace that had made
him so suddenly, and almost without cause, give utterance,
in Basil Hallward's studio, to the mad prayer that had so changed
his life? Here, in goldembroidered red doublet, jewelled surcoat,
and giltedged ruff and wristbands, stood Sir Anthony Sherard,
with his silverandblack armour piled at his feet.
What had this man's legacy been? Had the lover of Giovanna
of Naples bequeathed him some inheritance of sin and shame?
Were his own actions merely the dreams that the dead man
had not dared to realize? Here, from the fading canvas,
smiled Lady Elizabeth Devereux, in her gauze hood, pearl stomacher,
and pink slashed sleeves. A flower was in her right hand,
and her left clasped an enamelled collar of white and damask roses.
On a table by her side lay a mandolin and an apple.
There were large green rosettes upon her little pointed shoes.
He knew her life, and the strange stories that were told about
her lovers. Had he something of her temperament in him? These oval,
heavylidded eyes seemed to look curiously at him. What of
George Willoughby, with his powdered hair and fantastic patches?
How evil he looked The face was saturnine and swarthy,
and the sensual lips seemed to be twisted with disdain.
Delicate lace ruffles fell over the lean yellow hands that
were so overladen with rings. He had been a macaroni of the
eighteenth century, and the friend, in his youth, of Lord Ferrars.
What of the second Lord Beckenham, the companion of the Prince
Regent in his wildest days, and one of the witnesses at
the secret marriage with Mrs. Fitzherbert? How proud and
handsome he was, with his chestnut curls and insolent pose
What passions had he bequeathed? The world had looked upon
him as infamous. He had led the orgies at Carlton House.
The star of the Garter glittered upon his breast. Beside him hung
the portrait of his wife, a pallid, thinlipped woman in black.
Her blood, also, stirred within him. How curious it all seemed
And his mother with her Lady Hamilton face and her moist,
winedashed lipshe knew what he had got from her.
He had got from her his beauty, and his passion for the beauty
of others. She laughed at him in her loose Bacchante dress.
There were vine leaves in her hair. The purple spilled
from the cup she was holding. The carnations of the painting
had withered, but the eyes were still wonderful in their depth
and brilliancy of colour. They seemed to follow him wherever he
went.
Yet one had ancestors in literature as well as in one's own race,
nearer perhaps in type and temperament, many of them, and certainly
with an influence of which one was more absolutely conscious.
There were times when it appeared to Dorian Gray that the whole
of history was merely the record of his own life, not as he had lived
it in act and circumstance, but as his imagination had created
it for him, as it had been in his brain and in his passions.
He felt that he had known them all, those strange terrible figures
that had passed across the stage of the world and made sin so marvellous
and evil so full of subtlety. It seemed to him that in some mysterious
way their lives had been his own.
The hero of the wonderful novel that had so influenced his life had
himself known this curious fancy. In the seventh chapter he tells how,
crowned with laurel, lest lightning might strike him, he had sat,
as Tiberius, in a garden at Capri, reading the shameful books
of Elephantis, while dwarfs and peacocks strutted round him and
the fluteplayer mocked the swinger of the censer and, as Caligula,
had caroused with the greenshirted jockeys in their stables and supped
in an ivory manger with a jewelfrontleted horse and, as Domitian,
had wandered through a corridor lined with marble mirrors,
looking round with haggard eyes for the reflection of the dagger
that was to end his days, and sick with that ennui, that terrible
taedium vitae, that comes on those to whom life denies nothing
and had peered through a clear emerald at the red shambles of the circus
and then, in a litter of pearl and purple drawn by silvershod mules,
been carried through the Street of Pomegranates to a House of Gold
and heard men cry on Nero Caesar as he passed by and, as Elagabalus,
had painted his face with colours, and plied the distaff among the women,
and brought the Moon from Carthage and given her in mystic marriage
to the Sun.
Over and over again Dorian used to read this fantastic chapter,
and the two chapters immediately following, in which, as in some
curious tapestries or cunningly wrought enamels, were pictured
the awful and beautiful forms of those whom vice and blood
and weariness had made monstrous or mad Filippo, Duke of Milan,
who slew his wife and painted her lips with a scarlet poison
that her lover might suck death from the dead thing he fondled
Pietro Barbi, the Venetian, known as Paul the Second,
who sought in his vanity to assume the title of Formosus,
and whose tiara, valued at two hundred thousand florins,
was bought at the price of a terrible sin Gian Maria Visconti,
who used hounds to chase living men and whose murdered
body was covered with roses by a harlot who had loved him
the Borgia on his white horse, with Fratricide riding beside
him and his mantle stained with the blood of Perotto
Pietro Riario, the young Cardinal Archbishop of Florence,
child and minion of Sixtus IV, whose beauty was equalled only by
his debauchery, and who received Leonora of Aragon in a pavilion
of white and crimson silk, filled with nymphs and centaurs,
and gilded a boy that he might serve at the feast as Ganymede
or Hylas Ezzelin, whose melancholy could be cured only by
the spectacle of death, and who had a passion for red blood,
as other men have for red winethe son of the Fiend,
as was reported, and one who had cheated his father at dice
when gambling with him for his own soul Giambattista Cibo,
who in mockery took the name of Innocent and into whose torpid
veins the blood of three lads was infused by a Jewish doctor
Sigismondo Malatesta, the lover of Isotta and the lord of Rimini,
whose effigy was burned at Rome as the enemy of God and man,
who strangled Polyssena with a napkin, and gave poison
to Ginevra d'Este in a cup of emerald, and in honour of a
shameful passion built a pagan church for Christian worship
Charles VI, who had so wildly adored his brother's wife that a
leper had warned him of the insanity that was coming on him,
and who, when his brain had sickened and grown strange,
could only be soothed by Saracen cards painted with the images
of love and death and madness and, in his trimmed jerkin
and jewelled cap and acanthuslike curls, Grifonetto Baglioni,
who slew Astorre with his bride, and Simonetto with his page,
and whose comeliness was such that, as he lay dying
in the yellow piazza of Perugia, those who had hated him
could not choose but weep, and Atalanta, who had cursed him,
blessed him.
There was a horrible fascination in them all. He saw them
at night, and they troubled his imagination in the day.
The Renaissance knew of strange manners of poisoning
poisoning by a helmet and a lighted torch, by an embroidered glove
and a jewelled fan, by a gilded pomander and by an amber chain.
Dorian Gray had been poisoned by a book. There were moments when
he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realize
his conception of the beautiful.
CHAPTER 
It was on the ninth of November, the eve of his own thirtyeighth birthday,
as he often remembered afterwards.
He was walking home about eleven o'clock from Lord Henry's, where he had
been dining, and was wrapped in heavy furs, as the night was cold and foggy.
At the corner of Grosvenor Square and South Audley Street, a man passed him in
the mist, walking very fast and with the collar of his grey ulster turned up.
He had a bag in his hand. Dorian recognized him. It was Basil Hallward.
A strange sense of fear, for which he could not account, came over him.
He made no sign of recognition and went on quickly in the direction of his
own house.
But Hallward had seen him. Dorian heard him first stopping
on the pavement and then hurrying after him. In a few moments,
his hand was on his arm.
"Dorian What an extraordinary piece of luck I have been
waiting for you in your library ever since nine o'clock. Finally
I took pity on your tired servant and told him to go to bed,
as he let me out. I am off to Paris by the midnight train,
and I particularly wanted to see you before I left.
I thought it was you, or rather your fur coat, as you passed me.
But I wasn't quite sure. Didn't you recognize me?"
"In this fog, my dear Basil? Why, I can't even recognize Grosvenor Square.
I believe my house is somewhere about here, but I don't feel at all certain
about it. I am sorry you are going away, as I have not seen you for ages.
But I suppose you will be back soon?"
"No I am going to be out of England for six months.
I intend to take a studio in Paris and shut myself up till I have
finished a great picture I have in my head. However, it wasn't
about myself I wanted to talk. Here we are at your door.
Let me come in for a moment. I have something to say
to you."
"I shall be charmed. But won't you miss your train?" said Dorian Gray
languidly as he passed up the steps and opened the door with his latchkey.
The lamplight struggled out through the fog, and Hallward looked
at his watch. "I have heaps of time," he answered. "The train
doesn't go till twelvefifteen, and it is only just eleven.
In fact, I was on my way to the club to look for you, when I met you.
You see, I shan't have any delay about luggage, as I have sent on my
heavy things. All I have with me is in this bag, and I can easily
get to Victoria in twenty minutes."
Dorian looked at him and smiled. "What a way for a fashionable
painter to travel A Gladstone bag and an ulster Come in,
or the fog will get into the house. And mind you don't
talk about anything serious. Nothing is serious nowadays.
At least nothing should be."
Hallward shook his head, as he entered, and followed Dorian into the library.
There was a bright wood fire blazing in the large open hearth. The lamps
were lit, and an open Dutch silver spiritcase stood, with some siphons of
sodawater and large cutglass tumblers, on a little marqueterie table.
"You see your servant made me quite at home, Dorian. He gave me
everything I wanted, including your best goldtipped cigarettes.
He is a most hospitable creature. I like him much better than
the Frenchman you used to have. What has become of the Frenchman,
by the bye?"
Dorian shrugged his shoulders. "I believe he married Lady Radley's maid,
and has established her in Paris as an English dressmaker. Anglomania is
very fashionable over there now, I hear. It seems silly of the French,
doesn't it? Butdo you know?he was not at all a bad servant.
I never liked him, but I had nothing to complain about. One often
imagines things that are quite absurd. He was really very devoted to me
and seemed quite sorry when he went away. Have another brandyandsoda? Or
would you like hockandseltzer? I always take hockandseltzer myself.
There is sure to be some in the next room."
"Thanks, I won't have anything more," said the painter,
taking his cap and coat off and throwing them on the bag
that he had placed in the corner. "And now, my dear fellow,
I want to speak to you seriously. Don't frown like that.
You make it so much more difficult for me."
"What is it all about?" cried Dorian in his petulant way,
flinging himself down on the sofa. "I hope it is not about myself.
I am tired of myself tonight. I should like to be somebody else."
"It is about yourself," answered Hallward in his grave deep voice,
"and I must say it to you. I shall only keep you half an hour."
Dorian sighed and lit a cigarette. "Half an hour" he murmured.
"It is not much to ask of you, Dorian, and it is entirely for your own sake
that I am speaking. I think it right that you should know that the most
dreadful things are being said against you in London."
"I don't wish to know anything about them. I love scandals
about other people, but scandals about myself don't interest me.
They have not got the charm of novelty."
"They must interest you, Dorian. Every gentleman is interested
in his good name. You don't want people to talk of you as
something vile and degraded. Of course, you have your position,
and your wealth, and all that kind of thing. But position
and wealth are not everything. Mind you, I don't believe these
rumours at all. At least, I can't believe them when I see you.
Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man's face.
It cannot be concealed. People talk sometimes of secret vices.
There are no such things. If a wretched man has a vice, it shows
itself in the lines of his mouth, the droop of his eyelids,
the moulding of his hands even. SomebodyI won't mention his name,
but you know himcame to me last year to have his portrait done.
I had never seen him before, and had never heard anything
about him at the time, though I have heard a good deal since.
He offered an extravagant price. I refused him.
There was something in the shape of his fingers that I hated.
I know now that I was quite right in what I fancied about him.
His life is dreadful. But you, Dorian, with your pure,
bright, innocent face, and your marvellous untroubled youth
I can't believe anything against you. And yet I see you
very seldom, and you never come down to the studio now,
and when I am away from you, and I hear all these hideous things
that people are whispering about you, I don't know what to say.
Why is it, Dorian, that a man like the Duke of Berwick leaves
the room of a club when you enter it? Why is it that so many
gentlemen in London will neither go to your house or invite
you to theirs? You used to be a friend of Lord Staveley.
I met him at dinner last week. Your name happened to come up
in conversation, in connection with the miniatures you have lent
to the exhibition at the Dudley. Staveley curled his lip and said
that you might have the most artistic tastes, but that you
were a man whom no pureminded girl should be allowed to know,
and whom no chaste woman should sit in the same room with.
I reminded him that I was a friend of yours, and asked him what
he meant. He told me. He told me right out before everybody.
It was horrible Why is your friendship so fatal to young men?
There was that wretched boy in the Guards who committed suicide.
You were his great friend. There was Sir Henry Ashton,
who had to leave England with a tarnished name. You and
he were inseparable. What about Adrian Singleton and his
dreadful end? What about Lord Kent's only son and his career?
I met his father yesterday in St. James's Street. He seemed broken
with shame and sorrow. What about the young Duke of Perth?
What sort of life has he got now? What gentleman would associate with
him?"
"Stop, Basil. You are talking about things of which you know nothing,"
said Dorian Gray, biting his lip, and with a note of infinite contempt
in his voice. "You ask me why Berwick leaves a room when I enter it.
It is because I know everything about his life, not because he knows
anything about mine. With such blood as he has in his veins, how could
his record be clean? You ask me about Henry Ashton and young Perth.
Did I teach the one his vices, and the other his debauchery?
If Kent's silly son takes his wife from the streets, what is that to me?
If Adrian Singleton writes his friend's name across a bill, am I his keeper?
I know how people chatter in England. The middle classes air their moral
prejudices over their gross dinnertables, and whisper about what they
call the profligacies of their betters in order to try and pretend
that they are in smart society and on intimate terms with the people
they slander. In this country, it is enough for a man to have
distinction and brains for every common tongue to wag against him.
And what sort of lives do these people, who pose as being moral,
lead themselves? My dear fellow, you forget that we are in the native land
of the hypocrite."
"Dorian," cried Hallward, "that is not the question.
England is bad enough I know, and English society is all wrong.
That is the reason why I want you to be fine. You have not
been fine. One has a right to judge of a man by the effect
he has over his friends. Yours seem to lose all sense of honour,
of goodness, of purity. You have filled them with a madness
for pleasure. They have gone down into the depths.
You led them there. Yes you led them there, and yet you
can smile, as you are smiling now. And there is worse behind.
I know you and Harry are inseparable. Surely for that reason,
if for none other, you should not have made his sister's name
a byword."
"Take care, Basil. You go too far."
"I must speak, and you must listen. You shall listen.
When you met Lady Gwendolen, not a breath of scandal had ever
touched her. Is there a single decent woman in London now
who would drive with her in the park? Why, even her children
are not allowed to live with her. Then there are other stories
stories that you have been seen creeping at dawn out of dreadful
houses and slinking in disguise into the foulest dens in London.
Are they true? Can they be true? When I first heard them,
I laughed. I hear them now, and they make me shudder.
What about your countryhouse and the life that is
led there? Dorian, you don't know what is said about you.
I won't tell you that I don't want to preach to you.
I remember Harry saying once that every man who turned himself
into an amateur curate for the moment always began by saying that,
and then proceeded to break his word. I do want to preach to you.
I want you to lead such a life as will make the world respect you.
I want you to have a clean name and a fair record.
I want you to get rid of the dreadful people you associate with.
Don't shrug your shoulders like that. Don't be so indifferent.
You have a wonderful influence. Let it be for good, not for evil.
They say that you corrupt every one with whom you become intimate,
and that it is quite sufficient for you to enter a house
for shame of some kind to follow after. I don't know whether
it is so or not. How should I know? But it is said of you.
I am told things that it seems impossible to doubt.
Lord Gloucester was one of my greatest friends at Oxford.
He showed me a letter that his wife had written to him when she
was dying alone in her villa at Mentone. Your name was implicated
in the most terrible confession I ever read. I told him that it
was absurdthat I knew you thoroughly and that you were incapable
of anything of the kind. Know you? I wonder do I know you?
Before I could answer that, I should have to see your
soul."
"To see my soul" muttered Dorian Gray, starting up from the sofa
and turning almost white from fear.
"Yes," answered Hallward gravely, and with deeptoned sorrow in his voice,
"to see your soul. But only God can do that."
A bitter laugh of mockery broke from the lips of the younger man.
"You shall see it yourself, tonight" he cried, seizing a
lamp from the table. "Come it is your own handiwork.
Why shouldn't you look at it? You can tell the world all about
it afterwards, if you choose. Nobody would believe you.
If they did believe you, they would like me all the better for it.
I know the age better than you do, though you will prate
about it so tediously. Come, I tell you. You have chattered
enough about corruption. Now you shall look on it face
to face."
There was the madness of pride in every word he uttered.
He stamped his foot upon the ground in his boyish insolent manner.
He felt a terrible joy at the thought that some one else
was to share his secret, and that the man who had painted
the portrait that was the origin of all his shame was to be
burdened for the rest of his life with the hideous memory of what
he had done.
"Yes," he continued, coming closer to him and looking steadfastly
into his stern eyes, "I shall show you my soul. You shall see
the thing that you fancy only God can see."
Hallward started back. "This is blasphemy, Dorian" he cried.
"You must not say things like that. They are horrible, and they
don't mean anything."
"You think so?" He laughed again.
"I know so. As for what I said to you tonight, I said it for your good.
You know I have been always a stanch friend to you."
"Don't touch me. Finish what you have to say."
A twisted flash of pain shot across the painter's face.
He paused for a moment, and a wild feeling of pity came over him.
After all, what right had he to pry into the life of Dorian Gray?
If he had done a tithe of what was rumoured about him,
how much he must have suffered Then he straightened himself up,
and walked over to the fireplace, and stood there, looking at
the burning logs with their frostlike ashes and their throbbing cores
of flame.
"I am waiting, Basil," said the young man in a hard clear voice.
He turned round. "What I have to say is this," he cried. "You must give
me some answer to these horrible charges that are made against you.
If you tell me that they are absolutely untrue from beginning to end,
I shall believe you. Deny them, Dorian, deny them Can't you see what I
am going through? My God don't tell me that you are bad, and corrupt,
and shameful."
Dorian Gray smiled. There was a curl of contempt in his lips.
"Come upstairs, Basil," he said quietly. "I keep a diary of my life
from day to day, and it never leaves the room in which it is written.
I shall show it to you if you come with me."
"I shall come with you, Dorian, if you wish it. I see I have missed
my train. That makes no matter. I can go tomorrow. But don't ask me
to read anything tonight. All I want is a plain answer to my question."
"That shall be given to you upstairs. I could not give it here.
You will not have to read long."
CHAPTER 
He passed out of the room and began the ascent, Basil Hallward following
close behind. They walked softly, as men do instinctively at night.
The lamp cast fantastic shadows on the wall and staircase. A rising wind
made some of the windows rattle.
When they reached the top landing, Dorian set the lamp down
on the floor, and taking out the key, turned it in the lock.
"You insist on knowing, Basil?" he asked in a low voice.
"Yes."
"I am delighted," he answered, smiling. Then he added,
somewhat harshly, "You are the one man in the world who is
entitled to know everything about me. You have had more
to do with my life than you think" and, taking up the lamp,
he opened the door and went in. A cold current of air passed them,
and the light shot up for a moment in a flame of murky orange.
He shuddered. "Shut the door behind you," he whispered,
as he placed the lamp on the table.
Hallward glanced round him with a puzzled expression.
The room looked as if it had not been lived in for years.
A faded Flemish tapestry, a curtained picture, an old
Italian cassone, and an almost empty bookcasethat was all
that it seemed to contain, besides a chair and a table.
As Dorian Gray was lighting a halfburned candle that was
standing on the mantelshelf, he saw that the whole place
was covered with dust and that the carpet was in holes.
A mouse ran scuffling behind the wainscoting. There was a damp odour
of mildew.
"So you think that it is only God who sees the soul, Basil?
Draw that curtain back, and you will see mine."
The voice that spoke was cold and cruel. "You are mad, Dorian, or playing
a part," muttered Hallward, frowning.
"You won't? Then I must do it myself," said the young man,
and he tore the curtain from its rod and flung it on the ground.
An exclamation of horror broke from the painter's lips as he saw
in the dim light the hideous face on the canvas grinning at him.
There was something in its expression that filled him with disgust
and loathing. Good heavens it was Dorian Gray's own face
that he was looking at The horror, whatever it was, had not yet
entirely spoiled that marvellous beauty. There was still some
gold in the thinning hair and some scarlet on the sensual mouth.
The sodden eyes had kept something of the loveliness of their blue,
the noble curves had not yet completely passed away from chiselled
nostrils and from plastic throat. Yes, it was Dorian himself.
But who had done it? He seemed to recognize his own brushwork,
and the frame was his own design. The idea was monstrous, yet he
felt afraid. He seized the lighted candle, and held it to the picture.
In the lefthand corner was his own name, traced in long letters of
bright vermilion.
It was some foul parody, some infamous ignoble satire.
He had never done that. Still, it was his own picture.
He knew it, and he felt as if his blood had changed
in a moment from fire to sluggish ice. His own picture
What did it mean? Why had it altered? He turned and looked
at Dorian Gray with the eyes of a sick man. His mouth twitched,
and his parched tongue seemed unable to articulate.
He passed his hand across his forehead. It was dank with
clammy sweat.
The young man was leaning against the mantelshelf, watching him
with that strange expression that one sees on the faces of those
who are absorbed in a play when some great artist is acting.
There was neither real sorrow in it nor real joy. There was
simply the passion of the spectator, with perhaps a flicker
of triumph in his eyes. He had taken the flower out of his coat,
and was smelling it, or pretending to do so.
"What does this mean?" cried Hallward, at last. His own voice sounded
shrill and curious in his ears.
"Years ago, when I was a boy," said Dorian Gray, crushing the flower
in his hand, "you met me, flattered me, and taught me to be vain
of my good looks. One day you introduced me to a friend of yours,
who explained to me the wonder of youth, and you finished
a portrait of me that revealed to me the wonder of beauty.
In a mad moment that, even now, I don't know whether I regret
or not, I made a wish, perhaps you would call it a prayer.
"I remember it Oh, how well I remember it No the thing is impossible.
The room is damp. Mildew has got into the canvas. The paints I used had some
wretched mineral poison in them. I tell you the thing is impossible."
"Ah, what is impossible?" murmured the young man, going over to the window
and leaning his forehead against the cold, miststained glass.
"You told me you had destroyed it."
"I was wrong. It has destroyed me."
"I don't believe it is my picture."
"Can't you see your ideal in it?" said Dorian bitterly.
"My ideal, as you call it. . ."
"As you called it."
"There was nothing evil in it, nothing shameful. You were to me such
an ideal as I shall never meet again. This is the face of a satyr."
"It is the face of my soul."
"Christ what a thing I must have worshipped It has the eyes of a devil."
"Each of us has heaven and hell in him, Basil," cried Dorian
with a wild gesture of despair.
Hallward turned again to the portrait and gazed at it.
"My God If it is true," he exclaimed, "and this is
what you have done with your life, why, you must be worse
even than those who talk against you fancy you to be"
He held the light up again to the canvas and examined it.
The surface seemed to be quite undisturbed and as he had left it.
It was from within, apparently, that the foulness and horror
had come. Through some strange quickening of inner life
the leprosies of sin were slowly eating the thing away.
The rotting of a corpse in a watery grave was not
so fearful.
His hand shook, and the candle fell from its socket on the floor
and lay there sputtering. He placed his foot on it and put it out.
Then he flung himself into the rickety chair that was standing by
the table and buried his face in his hands.
"Good God, Dorian, what a lesson What an awful lesson"
There was no answer, but he could hear the young man
sobbing at the window. "Pray, Dorian, pray," he murmured.
"What is it that one was taught to say in one's boyhood?
'Lead us not into temptation. Forgive us our sins.
Wash away our iniquities.' Let us say that together.
The prayer of your pride has been answered. The prayer of your
repentance will be answered also. I worshipped you too much.
I am punished for it. You worshipped yourself too much. We are
both punished."
Dorian Gray turned slowly around and looked at him with teardimmed eyes.
"It is too late, Basil," he faltered.
"It is never too late, Dorian. Let us kneel down and try if we
cannot remember a prayer. Isn't there a verse somewhere,
'Though your sins be as scarlet, yet I will make them as white
as snow'?"
"Those words mean nothing to me now."
"Hush Don't say that. You have done enough evil in your life.
My God Don't you see that accursed thing leering at us?"
Dorian Gray glanced at the picture, and suddenly an uncontrollable
feeling of hatred for Basil Hallward came over him, as though
it had been suggested to him by the image on the canvas,
whispered into his ear by those grinning lips. The mad
passions of a hunted animal stirred within him, and he loathed
the man who was seated at the table, more than in his whole
life he had ever loathed anything. He glanced wildly around.
Something glimmered on the top of the painted chest that
faced him. His eye fell on it. He knew what it was.
It was a knife that he had brought up, some days before,
to cut a piece of cord, and had forgotten to take away with him.
He moved slowly towards it, passing Hallward as he did so.
As soon as he got behind him, he seized it and turned round.
Hallward stirred in his chair as if he was going to rise.
He rushed at him and dug the knife into the great vein that is behind
the ear, crushing the man's head down on the table and stabbing again
and again.
There was a stifled groan and the horrible sound of some one choking
with blood. Three times the outstretched arms shot up convulsively,
waving grotesque, stifffingered hands in the air. He stabbed him twice more,
but the man did not move. Something began to trickle on the floor.
He waited for a moment, still pressing the head down. Then he threw
the knife on the table, and listened.
He could hear nothing, but the drip, drip on the threadbare carpet.
He opened the door and went out on the landing. The house was
absolutely quiet. No one was about. For a few seconds he stood
bending over the balustrade and peering down into the black seething
well of darkness. Then he took out the key and returned to the room,
locking himself in as he did so.
The thing was still seated in the chair, straining over the table
with bowed head, and humped back, and long fantastic arms.
Had it not been for the red jagged tear in the neck and the clotted
black pool that was slowly widening on the table, one would have said
that the man was simply asleep.
How quickly it had all been done He felt strangely calm, and walking
over to the window, opened it and stepped out on the balcony.
The wind had blown the fog away, and the sky was like a monstrous
peacock's tail, starred with myriads of golden eyes. He looked
down and saw the policeman going his rounds and flashing the long
beam of his lantern on the doors of the silent houses. The crimson
spot of a prowling hansom gleamed at the corner and then vanished.
A woman in a fluttering shawl was creeping slowly by the railings,
staggering as she went. Now and then she stopped and peered back.
Once, she began to sing in a hoarse voice. The policeman strolled
over and said something to her. She stumbled away, laughing.
A bitter blast swept across the square. The gaslamps flickered
and became blue, and the leafless trees shook their black iron
branches to and fro. He shivered and went back, closing the window
behind him.
Having reached the door, he turned the key and opened it.
He did not even glance at the murdered man. He felt that
the secret of the whole thing was not to realize the situation.
The friend who had painted the fatal portrait to which
all his misery had been due had gone out of his life.
That was enough.
Then he remembered the lamp. It was a rather curious one of
Moorish workmanship, made of dull silver inlaid with arabesques
of burnished steel, and studded with coarse turquoises.
Perhaps it might be missed by his servant, and questions would
be asked. He hesitated for a moment, then he turned back and took
it from the table. He could not help seeing the dead thing.
How still it was How horribly white the long hands looked
It was like a dreadful wax image.
Having locked the door behind him, he crept quietly downstairs.
The woodwork creaked and seemed to cry out as if in pain.
He stopped several times and waited. No everything was still.
It was merely the sound of his own footsteps.
When he reached the library, he saw the bag and coat in the corner.
They must be hidden away somewhere. He unlocked a secret press that was
in the wainscoting, a press in which he kept his own curious disguises,
and put them into it. He could easily burn them afterwards. Then he pulled
out his watch. It was twenty minutes to two.
He sat down and began to think. Every yearevery month, almost
men were strangled in England for what he had done. There had been
a madness of murder in the air. Some red star had come too close
to the earth. . . . And yet, what evidence was there against him?
Basil Hallward had left the house at eleven. No one had seen
him come in again. Most of the servants were at Selby Royal.
His valet had gone to bed.... Paris Yes. It was to Paris that
Basil had gone, and by the midnight train, as he had intended.
With his curious reserved habits, it would be months before any
suspicions would be roused. Months Everything could be destroyed long
before then.
A sudden thought struck him. He put on his fur coat and hat
and went out into the hall. There he paused, hearing the slow
heavy tread of the policeman on the pavement outside and
seeing the flash of the bull'seye reflected in the window.
He waited and held his breath.
After a few moments he drew back the latch and slipped out,
shutting the door very gently behind him. Then he began
ringing the bell. In about five minutes his valet appeared,
halfdressed and looking very drowsy.
"I am sorry to have had to wake you up, Francis," he said, stepping in
"but I had forgotten my latchkey. What time is it?"
"Ten minutes past two, sir," answered the man, looking at the clock
and blinking.
"Ten minutes past two? How horribly late You must wake me
at nine tomorrow. I have some work to do."
"All right, sir."
"Did any one call this evening?"
"Mr. Hallward, sir. He stayed here till eleven, and then he went
away to catch his train."
"Oh I am sorry I didn't see him. Did he leave any message?"
"No, sir, except that he would write to you from Paris,
if he did not find you at the club."
"That will do, Francis. Don't forget to call me at nine tomorrow."
"No, sir."
The man shambled down the passage in his slippers.
Dorian Gray threw his hat and coat upon the table and passed
into the library. For a quarter of an hour he walked up and down
the room, biting his lip and thinking. Then he took down the Blue
Book from one of the shelves and began to turn over the leaves.
"Alan Campbell, , Hertford Street, Mayfair." Yes that was the man
he wanted.
CHAPTER 
At nine o'clock the next morning his servant came in with a cup of chocolate
on a tray and opened the shutters. Dorian was sleeping quite peacefully,
lying on his right side, with one hand underneath his cheek. He looked
like a boy who had been tired out with play, or study.
The man had to touch him twice on the shoulder before he woke,
and as he opened his eyes a faint smile passed across his lips,
as though he had been lost in some delightful dream. Yet he had
not dreamed at all. His night had been untroubled by any images
of pleasure or of pain. But youth smiles without any reason.
It is one of its chiefest charms.
He turned round, and leaning upon his elbow, began to sip his chocolate.
The mellow November sun came streaming into the room. The sky was bright,
and there was a genial warmth in the air. It was almost like a morning
in May.
Gradually the events of the preceding night crept with silent,
bloodstained feet into his brain and reconstructed themselves
there with terrible distinctness. He winced at the memory of all
that he had suffered, and for a moment the same curious feeling
of loathing for Basil Hallward that had made him kill him as he sat
in the chair came back to him, and he grew cold with passion.
The dead man was still sitting there, too, and in the sunlight now.
How horrible that was Such hideous things were for the darkness,
not for the day.
He felt that if he brooded on what he had gone through he would sicken
or grow mad. There were sins whose fascination was more in the memory
than in the doing of them, strange triumphs that gratified the pride more
than the passions, and gave to the intellect a quickened sense of joy,
greater than any joy they brought, or could ever bring, to the senses.
But this was not one of them. It was a thing to be driven out of the mind,
to be drugged with poppies, to be strangled lest it might strangle
one itself.
When the halfhour struck, he passed his hand across his forehead,
and then got up hastily and dressed himself with even more than his
usual care, giving a good deal of attention to the choice of his necktie
and scarfpin and changing his rings more than once. He spent a long
time also over breakfast, tasting the various dishes, talking to his
valet about some new liveries that he was thinking of getting made
for the servants at Selby, and going through his correspondence.
At some of the letters, he smiled. Three of them bored him.
One he read several times over and then tore up with a slight look
of annoyance in his face. "That awful thing, a woman's memory"
as Lord Henry had once said.
After he had drunk his cup of black coffee, he wiped his
lips slowly with a napkin, motioned to his servant to wait,
and going over to the table, sat down and wrote two letters.
One he put in his pocket, the other he handed to the valet.
"Take this round to , Hertford Street, Francis, and if Mr. Campbell
is out of town, get his address."
As soon as he was alone, he lit a cigarette and began sketching upon
a piece of paper, drawing first flowers and bits of architecture,
and then human faces. Suddenly he remarked that every face that
he drew seemed to have a fantastic likeness to Basil Hallward.
He frowned, and getting up, went over to the bookcase and took
out a volume at hazard. He was determined that he would not think
about what had happened until it became absolutely necessary that
he should do so.
When he had stretched himself on the sofa, he looked at
the titlepage of the book. It was Gautier's Emaux et Camees,
Charpentier's Japanesepaper edition, with the Jacquemart etching.
The binding was of citrongreen leather, with a design of gilt
trelliswork and dotted pomegranates. It had been given
to him by Adrian Singleton. As he turned over the pages,
his eye fell on the poem about the hand of Lacenaire,
the cold yellow hand "du supplice encore mal lavee,"
with its downy red hairs and its "doigts de faune." He glanced
at his own white taper fingers, shuddering slightly in spite
of himself, and passed on, till he came to those lovely stanzas
upon Venice
Sur une gamme chromatique,
Le sein de peries ruisselant,
La Venus de l'Adriatique
Sort de l'eau son corps rose et blanc.
Les domes, sur l'azur des ondes
Suivant la phrase au pur contour,
S'enflent comme des gorges rondes
Que souleve un soupir d'amour.
L'esquif aborde et me depose,
Jetant son amarre au pilier,
Devant une facade rose,
Sur le marbre d'un escalier.
How exquisite they were As one read them, one seemed to be
floating down the green waterways of the pink and pearl city,
seated in a black gondola with silver prow and trailing curtains.
The mere lines looked to him like those straight lines of
turquoiseblue that follow one as one pushes out to the Lido.
The sudden flashes of colour reminded him of the gleam of
the opalandiristhroated birds that flutter round the tall
honeycombed Campanile, or stalk, with such stately grace,
through the dim, duststained arcades. Leaning back with
halfclosed eyes, he kept saying over and over to himself
"Devant une facade rose,
Sur le marbre d'un escalier."
The whole of Venice was in those two lines. He remembered the autumn
that he had passed there, and a wonderful love that had stirred
him to mad delightful follies. There was romance in every place.
But Venice, like Oxford, had kept the background for romance, and,
to the true romantic, background was everything, or almost everything.
Basil had been with him part of the time, and had gone wild over Tintoret.
Poor Basil What a horrible way for a man to die
He sighed, and took up the volume again, and tried to forget.
He read of the swallows that fly in and out of the little
cafe at Smyrna where the Hadjis sit counting their amber
beads and the turbaned merchants smoke their long tasselled
pipes and talk gravely to each other he read of the Obelisk
in the Place de la Concorde that weeps tears of granite
in its lonely sunless exile and longs to be back by the hot,
lotuscovered Nile, where there are Sphinxes, and rosered ibises,
and white vultures with gilded claws, and crocodiles with
small beryl eyes that crawl over the green steaming mud
he began to brood over those verses which, drawing music
from kissstained marble, tell of that curious statue that
Gautier compares to a contralto voice, the "monstre charmant"
that couches in the porphyryroom of the Louvre. But after a time
the book fell from his hand. He grew nervous, and a horrible
fit of terror came over him. What if Alan Campbell should be
out of England? Days would elapse before he could come back.
Perhaps he might refuse to come. What could he do then?
Every moment was of vital importance.
They had been great friends once, five years before
almost inseparable, indeed. Then the intimacy had come suddenly
to an end. When they met in society now, it was only Dorian
Gray who smiled Alan Campbell never did.
He was an extremely clever young man, though he had no real
appreciation of the visible arts, and whatever little sense
of the beauty of poetry he possessed he had gained entirely
from Dorian. His dominant intellectual passion was for science.
At Cambridge he had spent a great deal of his time working
in the laboratory, and had taken a good class in the Natural
Science Tripos of his year. Indeed, he was still devoted
to the study of chemistry, and had a laboratory of his
own in which he used to shut himself up all day long,
greatly to the annoyance of his mother, who had set her
heart on his standing for Parliament and had a vague idea
that a chemist was a person who made up prescriptions.
He was an excellent musician, however, as well, and played
both the violin and the piano better than most amateurs.
In fact, it was music that had first brought him and Dorian
Gray togethermusic and that indefinable attraction that
Dorian seemed to be able to exercise whenever he wished
and, indeed, exercised often without being conscious of it.
They had met at Lady Berkshire's the night that Rubinstein
played there, and after that used to be always seen together
at the opera and wherever good music was going on.
For eighteen months their intimacy lasted. Campbell was
always either at Selby Royal or in Grosvenor Square.
To him, as to many others, Dorian Gray was the type
of everything that is wonderful and fascinating in life.
Whether or not a quarrel had taken place between them no one
ever knew. But suddenly people remarked that they scarcely
spoke when they met and that Campbell seemed always to go
away early from any party at which Dorian Gray was present.
He had changed, toowas strangely melancholy at times, appeared
almost to dislike hearing music, and would never himself play,
giving as his excuse, when he was called upon, that he was so
absorbed in science that he had no time left in which to practise.
And this was certainly true. Every day he seemed to become
more interested in biology, and his name appeared once or twice
in some of the scientific reviews in connection with certain
curious experiments.
This was the man Dorian Gray was waiting for. Every second
he kept glancing at the clock. As the minutes went by he became
horribly agitated. At last he got up and began to pace up
and down the room, looking like a beautiful caged thing.
He took long stealthy strides. His hands were curiously cold.
The suspense became unbearable. Time seemed to him to be crawling
with feet of lead, while he by monstrous winds was being swept towards
the jagged edge of some black cleft of precipice. He knew what was
waiting for him there saw it, indeed, and, shuddering, crushed with dank
hands his burning lids as though he would have robbed the very brain
of sight and driven the eyeballs back into their cave. It was useless.
The brain had its own food on which it battened, and the imagination,
made grotesque by terror, twisted and distorted as a living thing by pain,
danced like some foul puppet on a stand and grinned through moving masks.
Then, suddenly, time stopped for him. Yes that blind, slowbreathing thing
crawled no more, and horrible thoughts, time being dead, raced nimbly on
in front, and dragged a hideous future from its grave, and showed it to him.
He stared at it. Its very horror made him stone.
At last the door opened and his servant entered. He turned
glazed eyes upon him.
"Mr. Campbell, sir," said the man.
A sigh of relief broke from his parched lips, and the colour came
back to his cheeks.
"Ask him to come in at once, Francis." He felt that he was himself again.
His mood of cowardice had passed away.
The man bowed and retired. In a few moments, Alan Campbell walked in,
looking very stern and rather pale, his pallor being intensified by his
coalblack hair and dark eyebrows.
"Alan This is kind of you. I thank you for coming."
"I had intended never to enter your house again, Gray. But you said
it was a matter of life and death." His voice was hard and cold.
He spoke with slow deliberation. There was a look of contempt
in the steady searching gaze that he turned on Dorian.
He kept his hands in the pockets of his Astrakhan coat, and seemed
not to have noticed the gesture with which he had been greeted.
"Yes it is a matter of life and death, Alan, and to more than one person.
Sit down."
Campbell took a chair by the table, and Dorian sat opposite to him.
The two men's eyes met. In Dorian's there was infinite pity.
He knew that what he was going to do was dreadful.
After a strained moment of silence, he leaned across and said,
very quietly, but watching the effect of each word upon the face
of him he had sent for, "Alan, in a locked room at the top
of this house, a room to which nobody but myself has access,
a dead man is seated at a table. He has been dead ten hours now.
Don't stir, and don't look at me like that. Who the man is,
why he died, how he died, are matters that do not concern you.
What you have to do is this"
"Stop, Gray. I don't want to know anything further.
Whether what you have told me is true or not true doesn't
concern me. I entirely decline to be mixed up in your life.
Keep your horrible secrets to yourself. They don't interest me
any more."
"Alan, they will have to interest you. This one will have to interest you.
I am awfully sorry for you, Alan. But I can't help myself.
You are the one man who is able to save me. I am forced to bring
you into the matter. I have no option. Alan, you are scientific.
You know about chemistry and things of that kind. You have made experiments.
What you have got to do is to destroy the thing that is upstairs
to destroy it so that not a vestige of it will be left. Nobody saw this
person come into the house. Indeed, at the present moment he is supposed
to be in Paris. He will not be missed for months. When he is missed,
there must be no trace of him found here. You, Alan, you must change him,
and everything that belongs to him, into a handful of ashes that I may
scatter in the air."
"You are mad, Dorian."
"Ah I was waiting for you to call me Dorian."
"You are mad, I tell youmad to imagine that I would raise
a finger to help you, mad to make this monstrous confession.
I will have nothing to do with this matter, whatever it is.
Do you think I am going to peril my reputation for you? What is it
to me what devil's work you are up to?"
"It was suicide, Alan."
"I am glad of that. But who drove him to it? You, I should fancy."
"Do you still refuse to do this for me?"
"Of course I refuse. I will have absolutely nothing to do with it.
I don't care what shame comes on you. You deserve it all.
I should not be sorry to see you disgraced, publicly disgraced.
How dare you ask me, of all men in the world, to mix myself
up in this horror? I should have thought you knew more about
people's characters. Your friend Lord Henry Wotton can't have
taught you much about psychology, whatever else he has taught you.
Nothing will induce me to stir a step to help you. You have
come to the wrong man. Go to some of your friends. Don't come
to me."
"Alan, it was murder. I killed him. You don't know what he had made
me suffer. Whatever my life is, he had more to do with the making or
the marring of it than poor Harry has had. He may not have intended it,
the result was the same."
"Murder Good God, Dorian, is that what you have come to?
I shall not inform upon you. It is not my business. Besides, without
my stirring in the matter, you are certain to be arrested.
Nobody ever commits a crime without doing something stupid.
But I will have nothing to do with it."
"You must have something to do with it. Wait, wait a moment
listen to me. Only listen, Alan. All I ask of you is to perform
a certain scientific experiment. You go to hospitals and
deadhouses, and the horrors that you do there don't affect you.
If in some hideous dissectingroom or fetid laboratory you
found this man lying on a leaden table with red gutters scooped
out in it for the blood to flow through, you would simply look
upon him as an admirable subject. You would not turn a hair.
You would not believe that you were doing anything wrong.
On the contrary, you would probably feel that you were benefiting
the human race, or increasing the sum of knowledge in the world,
or gratifying intellectual curiosity, or something of that kind.
What I want you to do is merely what you have often done before.
Indeed, to destroy a body must be far less horrible than
what you are accustomed to work at. And, remember, it is
the only piece of evidence against me. If it is discovered,
I am lost and it is sure to be discovered unless you
help me."
"I have no desire to help you. You forget that. I am simply
indifferent to the whole thing. It has nothing to do with me."
"Alan, I entreat you. Think of the position I am in.
Just before you came I almost fainted with terror.
You may know terror yourself some day. No don't think of that.
Look at the matter purely from the scientific point of view.
You don't inquire where the dead things on which you
experiment come from. Don't inquire now. I have told you
too much as it is. But I beg of you to do this. We were
friends once, Alan."
"Don't speak about those days, Dorianthey are dead."
"The dead linger sometimes. The man upstairs will not go away.
He is sitting at the table with bowed head and outstretched arms.
Alan Alan If you don't come to my assistance, I am ruined.
Why, they will hang me, Alan Don't you understand? They will hang
me for what I have done."
"There is no good in prolonging this scene. I absolutely refuse
to do anything in the matter. It is insane of you to ask me."
"You refuse?"
"Yes."
"I entreat you, Alan."
"It is useless."
The same look of pity came into Dorian Gray's eyes. Then he stretched
out his hand, took a piece of paper, and wrote something on it.
He read it over twice, folded it carefully, and pushed it across the table.
Having done this, he got up and went over to the window.
Campbell looked at him in surprise, and then took up the paper,
and opened it. As he read it, his face became ghastly pale and he fell
back in his chair. A horrible sense of sickness came over him.
He felt as if his heart was beating itself to death in some
empty hollow.
After two or three minutes of terrible silence, Dorian turned round and came
and stood behind him, putting his hand upon his shoulder.
"I am so sorry for you, Alan," he murmured, "but you leave me
no alternative. I have a letter written already. Here it is.
You see the address. If you don't help me, I must send it.
If you don't help me, I will send it. You know what the result will be.
But you are going to help me. It is impossible for you to refuse now.
I tried to spare you. You will do me the justice to admit that.
You were stern, harsh, offensive. You treated me as no man has ever
dared to treat meno living man, at any rate. I bore it all.
Now it is for me to dictate terms."
Campbell buried his face in his hands, and a shudder passed through him.
"Yes, it is my turn to dictate terms, Alan. You know what they are.
The thing is quite simple. Come, don't work yourself into this fever.
The thing has to be done. Face it, and do it."
A groan broke from Campbell's lips and he shivered all over.
The ticking of the clock on the mantelpiece seemed to him to be
dividing time into separate atoms of agony, each of which was
too terrible to be borne. He felt as if an iron ring was
being slowly tightened round his forehead, as if the disgrace
with which he was threatened had already come upon him.
The hand upon his shoulder weighed like a hand of lead.
It was intolerable. It seemed to crush him.
"Come, Alan, you must decide at once."
"I cannot do it," he said, mechanically, as though words could alter things.
"You must. You have no choice. Don't delay."
He hesitated a moment. "Is there a fire in the room upstairs?"
"Yes, there is a gasfire with asbestos."
"I shall have to go home and get some things from the laboratory."
"No, Alan, you must not leave the house. Write out on a sheet
of notepaper what you want and my servant will take a cab
and bring the things back to you."
Campbell scrawled a few lines, blotted them, and addressed an envelope
to his assistant. Dorian took the note up and read it carefully.
Then he rang the bell and gave it to his valet, with orders to return
as soon as possible and to bring the things with him.
As the hall door shut, Campbell started nervously, and having got up
from the chair, went over to the chimneypiece. He was shivering with
a kind of ague. For nearly twenty minutes, neither of the men spoke.
A fly buzzed noisily about the room, and the ticking of the clock was
like the beat of a hammer.
As the chime struck one, Campbell turned round, and looking at Dorian Gray,
saw that his eyes were filled with tears. There was something in the purity
and refinement of that sad face that seemed to enrage him. "You are infamous,
absolutely infamous" he muttered.
"Hush, Alan. You have saved my life," said Dorian.
"Your life? Good heavens what a life that is You have gone from
corruption to corruption, and now you have culminated in crime.
In doing what I am going to dowhat you force me to do
it is not of your life that I am thinking."
"Ah, Alan," murmured Dorian with a sigh, "I wish you had
a thousandth part of the pity for me that I have for you."
He turned away as he spoke and stood looking out at the garden.
Campbell made no answer.
After about ten minutes a knock came to the door, and the servant entered,
carrying a large mahogany chest of chemicals, with a long coil of steel and
platinum wire and two rather curiously shaped iron clamps.
"Shall I leave the things here, sir?" he asked Campbell.
"Yes," said Dorian. "And I am afraid, Francis, that I have another
errand for you. What is the name of the man at Richmond who supplies
Selby with orchids?"
"Harden, sir."
"YesHarden. You must go down to Richmond at once, see Harden personally,
and tell him to send twice as many orchids as I ordered, and to have
as few white ones as possible. In fact, I don't want any white ones.
It is a lovely day, Francis, and Richmond is a very pretty place
otherwise I wouldn't bother you about it."
"No trouble, sir. At what time shall I be back?"
Dorian looked at Campbell. "How long will your experiment take, Alan?"
he said in a calm indifferent voice. The presence of a third person
in the room seemed to give him extraordinary courage.
Campbell frowned and bit his lip. "It will take about five hours,"
he answered.
"It will be time enough, then, if you are back at halfpast seven, Francis.
Or stay just leave my things out for dressing. You can have the evening
to yourself. I am not dining at home, so I shall not want you."
"Thank you, sir," said the man, leaving the room.
"Now, Alan, there is not a moment to be lost. How heavy this chest is
I'll take it for you. You bring the other things." He spoke rapidly
and in an authoritative manner. Campbell felt dominated by him.
They left the room together.
When they reached the top landing, Dorian took out the key and turned it
in the lock. Then he stopped, and a troubled look came into his eyes.
He shuddered. "I don't think I can go in, Alan," he murmured.
"It is nothing to me. I don't require you," said Campbell coldly.
Dorian half opened the door. As he did so, he saw the face
of his portrait leering in the sunlight. On the floor in front
of it the torn curtain was lying. He remembered that the night
before he had forgotten, for the first time in his life,
to hide the fatal canvas, and was about to rush forward,
when he drew back with a shudder.
What was that loathsome red dew that gleamed, wet and glistening,
on one of the hands, as though the canvas had sweated blood?
How horrible it wasmore horrible, it seemed to him for the moment,
than the silent thing that he knew was stretched across the table,
the thing whose grotesque misshapen shadow on the spotted carpet
showed him that it had not stirred, but was still there, as he had
left it.
He heaved a deep breath, opened the door a little wider,
and with halfclosed eyes and averted head, walked quickly in,
determined that he would not look even once upon the dead man.
Then, stooping down and taking up the goldandpurple hanging,
he flung it right over the picture.
There he stopped, feeling afraid to turn round, and his eyes
fixed themselves on the intricacies of the pattern before him.
He heard Campbell bringing in the heavy chest, and the irons,
and the other things that he had required for his dreadful work.
He began to wonder if he and Basil Hallward had ever met, and, if so,
what they had thought of each other.
"Leave me now," said a stern voice behind him.
He turned and hurried out, just conscious that the dead man
had been thrust back into the chair and that Campbell was gazing
into a glistening yellow face. As he was going downstairs,
he heard the key being turned in the lock.
It was long after seven when Campbell came back into the library.
He was pale, but absolutely calm. "I have done what you asked
me to do," he muttered "And now, goodbye. Let us never see each
other again."
"You have saved me from ruin, Alan. I cannot forget that,"
said Dorian simply.
As soon as Campbell had left, he went upstairs. There was a horrible
smell of nitric acid in the room. But the thing that had been sitting
at the table was gone.
CHAPTER 
That evening, at eightthirty, exquisitely dressed and wearing a large
buttonhole of Parma violets, Dorian Gray was ushered into Lady
Narborough's drawingroom by bowing servants. His forehead was throbbing
with maddened nerves, and he felt wildly excited, but his manner
as he bent over his hostess's hand was as easy and graceful as ever.
Perhaps one never seems so much at one's ease as when one has to play a part.
Certainly no one looking at Dorian Gray that night could have believed
that he had passed through a tragedy as horrible as any tragedy of our age.
Those finely shaped fingers could never have clutched a knife for sin,
nor those smiling lips have cried out on God and goodness. He himself
could not help wondering at the calm of his demeanour, and for a moment
felt keenly the terrible pleasure of a double life.
It was a small party, got up rather in a hurry by Lady Narborough,
who was a very clever woman with what Lord Henry used to describe
as the remains of really remarkable ugliness. She had proved
an excellent wife to one of our most tedious ambassadors, and having
buried her husband properly in a marble mausoleum, which she
had herself designed, and married off her daughters to some rich,
rather elderly men, she devoted herself now to the pleasures
of French fiction, French cookery, and French esprit when she could
get it.
Dorian was one of her especial favourites, and she always told him
that she was extremely glad she had not met him in early life.
"I know, my dear, I should have fallen madly in love with you,"
she used to say, "and thrown my bonnet right over the mills for your sake.
It is most fortunate that you were not thought of at the time.
As it was, our bonnets were so unbecoming, and the mills were
so occupied in trying to raise the wind, that I never had even a
flirtation with anybody. However, that was all Narborough's fault.
He was dreadfully shortsighted, and there is no pleasure in taking
in a husband who never sees anything."
Her guests this evening were rather tedious. The fact was,
as she explained to Dorian, behind a very shabby fan,
one of her married daughters had come up quite suddenly to stay
with her, and, to make matters worse, had actually brought her
husband with her. "I think it is most unkind of her, my dear,"
she whispered. "Of course I go and stay with them every summer
after I come from Homburg, but then an old woman like me must
have fresh air sometimes, and besides, I really wake them up.
You don't know what an existence they lead down there.
It is pure unadulterated country life. They get up early,
because they have so much to do, and go to bed early,
because they have so little to think about. There has not been
a scandal in the neighbourhood since the time of Queen Elizabeth,
and consequently they all fall asleep after dinner.
You shan't sit next either of them. You shall sit by me and
amuse me."
Dorian murmured a graceful compliment and looked round
the room. Yes it was certainly a tedious party.
Two of the people he had never seen before, and the others
consisted of Ernest Harrowden, one of those middleaged
mediocrities so common in London clubs who have no enemies,
but are thoroughly disliked by their friends Lady Ruxton,
an overdressed woman of fortyseven, with a hooked nose,
who was always trying to get herself compromised, but was
so peculiarly plain that to her great disappointment no
one would ever believe anything against her Mrs. Erlynne,
a pushing nobody, with a delightful lisp and Venetianred hair
Lady Alice Chapman, his hostess's daughter, a dowdy dull girl,
with one of those characteristic British faces that, once seen,
are never remembered and her husband, a redcheeked,
whitewhiskered creature who, like so many of his class,
was under the impression that inordinate joviality can atone for
an entire lack of ideas.
He was rather sorry he had come, till Lady Narborough,
looking at the great ormolu gilt clock that sprawled in gaudy
curves on the mauvedraped mantelshelf, exclaimed "How horrid
of Henry Wotton to be so late I sent round to him this morning
on chance and he promised faithfully not to disappoint me."
It was some consolation that Harry was to be there, and when the door opened
and he heard his slow musical voice lending charm to some insincere apology,
he ceased to feel bored.
But at dinner he could not eat anything. Plate after plate went
away untasted. Lady Narborough kept scolding him for what she
called "an insult to poor Adolphe, who invented the menu
specially for you," and now and then Lord Henry looked across
at him, wondering at his silence and abstracted manner.
From time to time the butler filled his glass with champagne.
He drank eagerly, and his thirst seemed to increase.
"Dorian," said Lord Henry at last, as the chaudfroid was being handed round,
"what is the matter with you tonight? You are quite out of sorts."
"I believe he is in love," cried Lady Narborough, "and that he is
afraid to tell me for fear I should be jealous. He is quite right.
I certainly should."
"Dear Lady Narborough," murmured Dorian, smiling, "I have not been in love
for a whole weeknot, in fact, since Madame de Ferrol left town."
"How you men can fall in love with that woman" exclaimed the old lady.
"I really cannot understand it."
"It is simply because she remembers you when you were a little girl,
Lady Narborough," said Lord Henry. "She is the one link between us
and your short frocks."
"She does not remember my short frocks at all, Lord Henry.
But I remember her very well at Vienna thirty years ago,
and how decolletee she was then."
"She is still decolletee," he answered, taking an olive in his long fingers
"and when she is in a very smart gown she looks like an edition de luxe
of a bad French novel. She is really wonderful, and full of surprises.
Her capacity for family affection is extraordinary. When her third husband
died, her hair turned quite gold from grief."
"How can you, Harry" cried Dorian.
"It is a most romantic explanation," laughed the hostess.
"But her third husband, Lord Henry You don't mean to say Ferrol
is the fourth?"
"Certainly, Lady Narborough."
"I don't believe a word of it."
"Well, ask Mr. Gray. He is one of her most intimate friends."
"Is it true, Mr. Gray?"
"She assures me so, Lady Narborough," said Dorian. "I asked her whether,
like Marguerite de Navarre, she had their hearts embalmed and hung at
her girdle. She told me she didn't, because none of them had had any
hearts at all."
"Four husbands Upon my word that is trop de zele."
"Trop d'audace, I tell her," said Dorian.
"Oh she is audacious enough for anything, my dear. And what is Ferrol like?
I don't know him."
"The husbands of very beautiful women belong to the criminal classes,"
said Lord Henry, sipping his wine.
Lady Narborough hit him with her fan. "Lord Henry, I am not at all surprised
that the world says that you are extremely wicked."
"But what world says that?" asked Lord Henry, elevating his eyebrows.
"It can only be the next world. This world and I are on excellent terms."
"Everybody I know says you are very wicked," cried the old lady,
shaking her head.
Lord Henry looked serious for some moments. "It is perfectly monstrous,"
he said, at last, "the way people go about nowadays saying things against one
behind one's back that are absolutely and entirely true."
"Isn't he incorrigible?" cried Dorian, leaning forward in his chair.
"I hope so," said his hostess, laughing. "But really,
if you all worship Madame de Ferrol in this ridiculous way,
I shall have to marry again so as to be in the fashion."
"You will never marry again, Lady Narborough," broke in Lord Henry.
"You were far too happy. When a woman marries again, it is
because she detested her first husband. When a man marries again,
it is because he adored his first wife. Women try their luck
men risk theirs."
"Narborough wasn't perfect," cried the old lady.
"If he had been, you would not have loved him, my dear lady,"
was the rejoinder. "Women love us for our defects.
If we have enough of them, they will forgive us everything,
even our intellects. You will never ask me to dinner again
after saying this, I am afraid, Lady Narborough, but it is
quite true."
"Of course it is true, Lord Henry. If we women did not love you for
your defects, where would you all be? Not one of you would ever be married.
You would be a set of unfortunate bachelors. Not, however, that that
would alter you much. Nowadays all the married men live like bachelors,
and all the bachelors like married men."
"Fin de siecle," murmured Lord Henry.
"Fin du globe," answered his hostess.
"I wish it were fin du globe," said Dorian with a sigh.
"Life is a great disappointment."
"Ah, my dear," cried Lady Narborough, putting on her gloves,
"don't tell me that you have exhausted life. When a man says that
one knows that life has exhausted him. Lord Henry is very wicked,
and I sometimes wish that I had been but you are made to be good
you look so good. I must find you a nice wife. Lord Henry, don't you
think that Mr. Gray should get married?"
"I am always telling him so, Lady Narborough," said Lord Henry with a bow.
"Well, we must look out for a suitable match for him.
I shall go through Debrett carefully tonight and draw out a list
of all the eligible young ladies."
"With their ages, Lady Narborough?" asked Dorian.
"Of course, with their ages, slightly edited. But nothing must be done
in a hurry. I want it to be what The Morning Post calls a suitable alliance,
and I want you both to be happy."
"What nonsense people talk about happy marriages" exclaimed Lord Henry.
"A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her."
"Ah what a cynic you are" cried the old lady, pushing back her chair
and nodding to Lady Ruxton. "You must come and dine with me soon again.
You are really an admirable tonic, much better than what Sir Andrew prescribes
for me. You must tell me what people you would like to meet, though. I want
it to be a delightful gathering."
"I like men who have a future and women who have a past," he answered.
"Or do you think that would make it a petticoat party?"
"I fear so," she said, laughing, as she stood up. "A thousand pardons,
my dear Lady Ruxton," she added, "I didn't see you hadn't finished
your cigarette."
"Never mind, Lady Narborough. I smoke a great deal too much.
I am going to limit myself, for the future."
"Pray don't, Lady Ruxton," said Lord Henry. "Moderation is a fatal thing.
Enough is as bad as a meal. More than enough is as good as a feast."
Lady Ruxton glanced at him curiously. "You must come and explain that to me
some afternoon, Lord Henry. It sounds a fascinating theory," she murmured,
as she swept out of the room.
"Now, mind you don't stay too long over your politics and scandal,"
cried Lady Narborough from the door. "If you do, we are sure to
squabble upstairs."
The men laughed, and Mr. Chapman got up solemnly
from the foot of the table and came up to the top.
Dorian Gray changed his seat and went and sat by Lord Henry.
Mr. Chapman began to talk in a loud voice about the situation
in the House of Commons. He guffawed at his adversaries.
The word doctrinaireword full of terror to the British mind
reappeared from time to time between his explosions.
An alliterative prefix served as an ornament of oratory.
He hoisted the Union Jack on the pinnacles of thought.
The inherited stupidity of the racesound English common sense
he jovially termed itwas shown to be the proper bulwark
for society.
A smile curved Lord Henry's lips, and he turned round and looked at Dorian.
"Are you better, my dear fellow?" he asked. "You seemed rather
out of sorts at dinner."
"I am quite well, Harry. I am tired. That is all."
"You were charming last night. The little duchess is quite devoted to you.
She tells me she is going down to Selby."
"She has promised to come on the twentieth."
"Is Monmouth to be there, too?"
"Oh, yes, Harry."
"He bores me dreadfully, almost as much as he bores her. She is very clever,
too clever for a woman. She lacks the indefinable charm of weakness.
It is the feet of clay that make the gold of the image precious. Her feet
are very pretty, but they are not feet of clay. White porcelain feet,
if you like. They have been through the fire, and what fire does not destroy,
it hardens. She has had experiences."
"How long has she been married?" asked Dorian.
"An eternity, she tells me. I believe, according to the peerage,
it is ten years, but ten years with Monmouth must have been like eternity,
with time thrown in. Who else is coming?"
"Oh, the Willoughbys, Lord Rugby and his wife, our hostess,
Geoffrey Clouston, the usual set. I have asked Lord Grotrian."
"I like him," said Lord Henry. "A great many people don't, but I find
him charming. He atones for being occasionally somewhat overdressed
by being always absolutely overeducated. He is a very modern type."
"I don't know if he will be able to come, Harry. He may have to go to Monte
Carlo with his father."
"Ah what a nuisance people's people are Try and make him come.
By the way, Dorian, you ran off very early last night.
You left before eleven. What did you do afterwards? Did you go
straight home?"
Dorian glanced at him hurriedly and frowned.
"No, Harry," he said at last, "I did not get home till nearly three."
"Did you go to the club?"
"Yes," he answered. Then he bit his lip. "No, I don't mean that.
I didn't go to the club. I walked about. I forget what I did.
. . . How inquisitive you are, Harry You always want to know what
one has been doing. I always want to forget what I have been doing.
I came in at halfpast two, if you wish to know the exact time.
I had left my latchkey at home, and my servant had to let me in.
If you want any corroborative evidence on the subject, you can ask
him."
Lord Henry shrugged his shoulders. "My dear fellow, as if I cared
Let us go up to the drawingroom. No sherry, thank you, Mr. Chapman.
Something has happened to you, Dorian. Tell me what it is.
You are not yourself tonight."
"Don't mind me, Harry. I am irritable, and out of temper.
I shall come round and see you tomorrow, or next day.
Make my excuses to Lady Narborough. I shan't go upstairs.
I shall go home. I must go home."
"All right, Dorian. I dare say I shall see you tomorrow at teatime.
The duchess is coming."
"I will try to be there, Harry," he said, leaving the room.
As he drove back to his own house, he was conscious that the sense
of terror he thought he had strangled had come back to him.
Lord Henry's casual questioning had made him lose his
nerves for the moment, and he wanted his nerve still.
Things that were dangerous had to be destroyed. He winced.
He hated the idea of even touching them.
Yet it had to be done. He realized that, and when he had
locked the door of his library, he opened the secret press
into which he had thrust Basil Hallward's coat and bag.
A huge fire was blazing. He piled another log on it.
The smell of the singeing clothes and burning leather was horrible.
It took him threequarters of an hour to consume everything.
At the end he felt faint and sick, and having lit some Algerian
pastilles in a pierced copper brazier, he bathed his hands and
forehead with a cool muskscented vinegar.
Suddenly he started. His eyes grew strangely bright, and he gnawed
nervously at his underlip. Between two of the windows stood a large
Florentine cabinet, made out of ebony and inlaid with ivory and blue lapis.
He watched it as though it were a thing that could fascinate and make afraid,
as though it held something that he longed for and yet almost loathed.
His breath quickened. A mad craving came over him. He lit a cigarette
and then threw it away. His eyelids drooped till the long fringed
lashes almost touched his cheek. But he still watched the cabinet.
At last he got up from the sofa on which he had been lying,
went over to it, and having unlocked it, touched some hidden spring.
A triangular drawer passed slowly out. His fingers moved instinctively
towards it, dipped in, and closed on something. It was a small
Chinese box of black and golddust lacquer, elaborately wrought,
the sides patterned with curved waves, and the silken cords hung with
round crystals and tasselled in plaited metal threads. He opened it.
Inside was a green paste, waxy in lustre, the odour curiously heavy
and persistent.
He hesitated for some moments, with a strangely immobile smile upon his face.
Then shivering, though the atmosphere of the room was terribly hot, he drew
himself up and glanced at the clock. It was twenty minutes to twelve.
He put the box back, shutting the cabinet doors as he did so, and went into
his bedroom.
As midnight was striking bronze blows upon the dusky air, Dorian Gray,
dressed commonly, and with a muffler wrapped round his throat,
crept quietly out of his house. In Bond Street he found a hansom
with a good horse. He hailed it and in a low voice gave the driver
an address.
The man shook his head. "It is too far for me," he muttered.
"Here is a sovereign for you," said Dorian. "You shall have another if you
drive fast."
"All right, sir," answered the man, "you will be there in an hour,"
and after his fare had got in he turned his horse round and drove
rapidly towards the river.
CHAPTER 
A cold rain began to fall, and the blurred streetlamps looked ghastly
in the dripping mist. The publichouses were just closing, and dim
men and women were clustering in broken groups round their doors.
From some of the bars came the sound of horrible laughter. In others,
drunkards brawled and screamed.
Lying back in the hansom, with his hat pulled over his forehead,
Dorian Gray watched with listless eyes the sordid shame
of the great city, and now and then he repeated to himself
the words that Lord Henry had said to him on the first day
they had met, "To cure the soul by means of the senses,
and the senses by means of the soul." Yes, that was the secret.
He had often tried it, and would try it again now.
There were opium dens where one could buy oblivion, dens of horror
where the memory of old sins could be destroyed by the madness
of sins that were new.
The moon hung low in the sky like a yellow skull. From time to time
a huge misshapen cloud stretched a long arm across and hid it.
The gaslamps grew fewer, and the streets more narrow and gloomy.
Once the man lost his way and had to drive back half a mile.
A steam rose from the horse as it splashed up the puddles.
The sidewindows of the hansom were clogged with a greyflannel mist.
"To cure the soul by means of the senses, and the senses
by means of the soul" How the words rang in his ears
His soul, certainly, was sick to death. Was it true that
the senses could cure it? Innocent blood had been spilled.
What could atone for that? Ah for that there was no atonement
but though forgiveness was impossible, forgetfulness was
possible still, and he was determined to forget, to stamp
the thing out, to crush it as one would crush the adder that
had stung one. Indeed, what right had Basil to have spoken
to him as he had done? Who had made him a judge over others?
He had said things that were dreadful, horrible, not to
be endured.
On and on plodded the hansom, going slower, it seemed to him,
at each step. He thrust up the trap and called to the man
to drive faster. The hideous hunger for opium began to gnaw
at him. His throat burned and his delicate hands twitched
nervously together. He struck at the horse madly with his stick.
The driver laughed and whipped up. He laughed in answer,
and the man was silent.
The way seemed interminable, and the streets like the black
web of some sprawling spider. The monotony became unbearable,
and as the mist thickened, he felt afraid.
Then they passed by lonely brickfields. The fog was lighter here,
and he could see the strange, bottleshaped kilns with their orange,
fanlike tongues of fire. A dog barked as they went by,
and far away in the darkness some wandering seagull screamed.
The horse stumbled in a rut, then swerved aside and broke into
a gallop.
After some time they left the clay road and rattled again
over roughpaven streets. Most of the windows were dark,
but now and then fantastic shadows were silhouetted against
some lamplit blind. He watched them curiously. They moved
like monstrous marionettes and made gestures like live things.
He hated them. A dull rage was in his heart. As they turned
a corner, a woman yelled something at them from an open door,
and two men ran after the hansom for about a hundred yards.
The driver beat at them with his whip.
It is said that passion makes one think in a circle.
Certainly with hideous iteration the bitten lips of Dorian Gray
shaped and reshaped those subtle words that dealt with soul
and sense, till he had found in them the full expression,
as it were, of his mood, and justified, by intellectual approval,
passions that without such justification would still have
dominated his temper. From cell to cell of his brain crept
the one thought and the wild desire to live, most terrible
of all man's appetites, quickened into force each trembling
nerve and fibre. Ugliness that had once been hateful
to him because it made things real, became dear to him
now for that very reason. Ugliness was the one reality.
The coarse brawl, the loathsome den, the crude violence
of disordered life, the very vileness of thief and outcast,
were more vivid, in their intense actuality of impression,
than all the gracious shapes of art, the dreamy shadows of song.
They were what he needed for forgetfulness. In three days he would
be free.
Suddenly the man drew up with a jerk at the top of a dark lane.
Over the low roofs and jagged chimneystacks of the houses rose
the black masts of ships. Wreaths of white mist clung like ghostly
sails to the yards.
"Somewhere about here, sir, ain't it?" he asked huskily through the trap.
Dorian started and peered round. "This will do," he answered,
and having got out hastily and given the driver the extra fare
he had promised him, he walked quickly in the direction of the quay.
Here and there a lantern gleamed at the stern of some huge merchantman.
The light shook and splintered in the puddles. A red glare came from
an outwardbound steamer that was coaling. The slimy pavement looked
like a wet mackintosh.
He hurried on towards the left, glancing back now and then to see
if he was being followed. In about seven or eight minutes he reached
a small shabby house that was wedged in between two gaunt factories.
In one of the topwindows stood a lamp. He stopped and gave a
peculiar knock.
After a little time he heard steps in the passage and the chain
being unhooked. The door opened quietly, and he went in without
saying a word to the squat misshapen figure that flattened
itself into the shadow as he passed. At the end of the hall
hung a tattered green curtain that swayed and shook in
the gusty wind which had followed him in from the street.
He dragged it aside and entered a long low room which looked
as if it had once been a thirdrate dancingsaloon. Shrill
flaring gasjets, dulled and distorted in the flyblown mirrors
that faced them, were ranged round the walls. Greasy reflectors
of ribbed tin backed them, making quivering disks of light.
The floor was covered with ochrecoloured sawdust, trampled here
and there into mud, and stained with dark rings of spilled liquor.
Some Malays were crouching by a little charcoal stove, playing with
bone counters and showing their white teeth as they chattered.
In one corner, with his head buried in his arms, a sailor sprawled
over a table, and by the tawdrily painted bar that ran across one
complete side stood two haggard women, mocking an old man who was
brushing the sleeves of his coat with an expression of disgust.
"He thinks he's got red ants on him," laughed one of them,
as Dorian passed by. The man looked at her in terror and began
to whimper.
At the end of the room there was a little staircase,
leading to a darkened chamber. As Dorian hurried up its
three rickety steps, the heavy odour of opium met him.
He heaved a deep breath, and his nostrils quivered with pleasure.
When he entered, a young man with smooth yellow hair, who was
bending over a lamp lighting a long thin pipe, looked up at him
and nodded in a hesitating manner.
"You here, Adrian?" muttered Dorian.
"Where else should I be?" he answered, listlessly. "None of the chaps
will speak to me now."
"I thought you had left England."
"Darlington is not going to do anything. My brother paid the bill at last.
George doesn't speak to me either. . . . I don't care," he added
with a sigh. "As long as one has this stuff, one doesn't want friends.
I think I have had too many friends."
Dorian winced and looked round at the grotesque things that
lay in such fantastic postures on the ragged mattresses.
The twisted limbs, the gaping mouths, the staring lustreless eyes,
fascinated him. He knew in what strange heavens they were suffering,
and what dull hells were teaching them the secret of some new joy.
They were better off than he was. He was prisoned in thought.
Memory, like a horrible malady, was eating his soul away. From time
to time he seemed to see the eyes of Basil Hallward looking at him.
Yet he felt he could not stay. The presence of Adrian Singleton
troubled him. He wanted to be where no one would know who he was.
He wanted to escape from himself.
"I am going on to the other place," he said after a pause.
"On the wharf?"
"Yes."
"That madcat is sure to be there. They won't have her in this place now."
Dorian shrugged his shoulders. "I am sick of women who love one.
Women who hate one are much more interesting. Besides, the stuff
is better."
"Much the same."
"I like it better. Come and have something to drink.
I must have something."
"I don't want anything," murmured the young man.
"Never mind."
Adrian Singleton rose up wearily and followed Dorian to the bar.
A halfcaste, in a ragged turban and a shabby ulster, grinned a
hideous greeting as he thrust a bottle of brandy and two tumblers
in front of them. The women sidled up and began to chatter.
Dorian turned his back on them and said something in a low voice to
Adrian Singleton.
A crooked smile, like a Malay crease, writhed across the face of one
of the women. "We are very proud tonight," she sneered.
"For God's sake don't talk to me," cried Dorian, stamping his
foot on the ground. "What do you want? Money? Here it is.
Don't ever talk to me again."
Two red sparks flashed for a moment in the woman's sodden eyes,
then flickered out and left them dull and glazed. She tossed
her head and raked the coins off the counter with greedy fingers.
Her companion watched her enviously.
"It's no use," sighed Adrian Singleton. "I don't care to go back.
What does it matter? I am quite happy here."
"You will write to me if you want anything, won't you?" said Dorian,
after a pause.
"Perhaps."
"Good night, then."
"Good night," answered the young man, passing up the steps and wiping
his parched mouth with a handkerchief.
Dorian walked to the door with a look of pain in his face.
As he drew the curtain aside, a hideous laugh broke from
the painted lips of the woman who had taken his money.
"There goes the devil's bargain" she hiccoughed, in a
hoarse voice.
"Curse you" he answered, "don't call me that."
She snapped her fingers. "Prince Charming is what you like to be called,
ain't it?" she yelled after him.
The drowsy sailor leaped to his feet as she spoke, and looked wildly round.
The sound of the shutting of the hall door fell on his ear. He rushed out as
if in pursuit.
Dorian Gray hurried along the quay through the drizzling rain.
His meeting with Adrian Singleton had strangely moved him, and he wondered
if the ruin of that young life was really to be laid at his door,
as Basil Hallward had said to him with such infamy of insult.
He bit his lip, and for a few seconds his eyes grew sad.
Yet, after all, what did it matter to him? One's days were too
brief to take the burden of another's errors on one's shoulders.
Each man lived his own life and paid his own price for living it.
The only pity was one had to pay so often for a single fault.
One had to pay over and over again, indeed. In her dealings with man,
destiny never closed her accounts.
There are moments, psychologists tell us, when the passion for sin, or for
what the world calls sin, so dominates a nature that every fibre of the body,
as every cell of the brain, seems to be instinct with fearful impulses.
Men and women at such moments lose the freedom of their will. They move
to their terrible end as automatons move. Choice is taken from them,
and conscience is either killed, or, if it lives at all, lives but to give
rebellion its fascination and disobedience its charm. For all sins,
as theologians weary not of reminding us, are sins of disobedience.
When that high spirit, that morning star of evil, fell from heaven, it was
as a rebel that he fell.
Callous, concentrated on evil, with stained mind, and soul
hungry for rebellion, Dorian Gray hastened on, quickening his
step as he went, but as he darted aside into a dim archway,
that had served him often as a short cut to the illfamed place
where he was going, he felt himself suddenly seized from behind,
and before he had time to defend himself, he was thrust back
against the wall, with a brutal hand round his throat.
He struggled madly for life, and by a terrible effort wrenched
the tightening fingers away. In a second he heard the click
of a revolver, and saw the gleam of a polished barrel,
pointing straight at his head, and the dusky form of a short,
thickset man facing him.
"What do you want?" he gasped.
"Keep quiet," said the man. "If you stir, I shoot you."
"You are mad. What have I done to you?"
"You wrecked the life of Sibyl Vane," was the answer,
"and Sibyl Vane was my sister. She killed herself. I know it.
Her death is at your door. I swore I would kill you in return.
For years I have sought you. I had no clue, no trace.
The two people who could have described you were dead.
I knew nothing of you but the pet name she used to call you.
I heard it tonight by chance. Make your peace with God,
for tonight you are going to die."
Dorian Gray grew sick with fear. "I never knew her," he stammered.
"I never heard of her. You are mad."
"You had better confess your sin, for as sure as I am James Vane,
you are going to die." There was a horrible moment. Dorian did
not know what to say or do. "Down on your knees" growled the man.
"I give you one minute to make your peaceno more. I go on board
tonight for India, and I must do my job first. One minute.
That's all."
Dorian's arms fell to his side. Paralysed with terror, he did not
know what to do. Suddenly a wild hope flashed across his brain.
"Stop," he cried. "How long ago is it since your sister died?
Quick, tell me"
"Eighteen years," said the man. "Why do you ask me?
What do years matter?"
"Eighteen years," laughed Dorian Gray, with a touch of triumph in his voice.
"Eighteen years Set me under the lamp and look at my face"
James Vane hesitated for a moment, not understanding what was meant.
Then he seized Dorian Gray and dragged him from the archway.
Dim and wavering as was the windblown light, yet it served to show
him the hideous error, as it seemed, into which he had fallen,
for the face of the man he had sought to kill had all the bloom
of boyhood, all the unstained purity of youth. He seemed little more
than a lad of twenty summers, hardly older, if older indeed at all,
than his sister had been when they had parted so many years ago.
It was obvious that this was not the man who had destroyed
her life.
He loosened his hold and reeled back. "My God my God"
he cried, "and I would have murdered you"
Dorian Gray drew a long breath. "You have been on the brink of
committing a terrible crime, my man," he said, looking at him sternly.
"Let this be a warning to you not to take vengeance into your
own hands."
"Forgive me, sir," muttered James Vane. "I was deceived.
A chance word I heard in that damned den set me on the wrong track."
"You had better go home and put that pistol away, or you may get
into trouble," said Dorian, turning on his heel and going slowly
down the street.
James Vane stood on the pavement in horror. He was trembling
from head to foot. After a little while, a black shadow
that had been creeping along the dripping wall moved out into
the light and came close to him with stealthy footsteps.
He felt a hand laid on his arm and looked round with a start.
It was one of the women who had been drinking at the bar.
"Why didn't you kill him?" she hissed out, putting haggard face
quite close to his. "I knew you were following him when you
rushed out from Daly's. You fool You should have killed him.
He has lots of money, and he's as bad as bad."
"He is not the man I am looking for," he answered, "and I want
no man's money. I want a man's life. The man whose life I want
must be nearly forty now. This one is little more than a boy.
Thank God, I have not got his blood upon my hands."
The woman gave a bitter laugh. "Little more than a boy" she sneered.
"Why, man, it's nigh on eighteen years since Prince Charming made me what
I am."
"You lie" cried James Vane.
She raised her hand up to heaven. "Before God I am telling the truth,"
she cried.
"Before God?"
"Strike me dumb if it ain't so. He is the worst one that comes here.
They say he has sold himself to the devil for a pretty face. It's nigh
on eighteen years since I met him. He hasn't changed much since then.
I have, though," she added, with a sickly leer.
"You swear this?"
"I swear it," came in hoarse echo from her flat mouth.
"But don't give me away to him," she whined "I am afraid of him.
Let me have some money for my night's lodging."
He broke from her with an oath and rushed to the corner of the street,
but Dorian Gray had disappeared. When he looked back, the woman had
vanished also.
CHAPTER 
A week later Dorian Gray was sitting in the conservatory at Selby Royal,
talking to the pretty Duchess of Monmouth, who with her husband,
a jadedlooking man of sixty, was amongst his guests.
It was teatime, and the mellow light of the huge, lacecovered lamp
that stood on the table lit up the delicate china and hammered
silver of the service at which the duchess was presiding.
Her white hands were moving daintily among the cups, and her full red
lips were smiling at something that Dorian had whispered to her.
Lord Henry was lying back in a silkdraped wicker chair, looking at them.
On a peachcoloured divan sat Lady Narborough, pretending to listen
to the duke's description of the last Brazilian beetle that he had
added to his collection. Three young men in elaborate smokingsuits
were handing teacakes to some of the women. The houseparty
consisted of twelve people, and there were more expected to arrive on
the next day.
"What are you two talking about?" said Lord Henry, strolling over to
the table and putting his cup down. "I hope Dorian has told you about
my plan for rechristening everything, Gladys. It is a delightful idea."
"But I don't want to be rechristened, Harry," rejoined the duchess,
looking up at him with her wonderful eyes. "I am quite satisfied
with my own name, and I am sure Mr. Gray should be satisfied
with his."
"My dear Gladys, I would not alter either name for the world.
They are both perfect. I was thinking chiefly of flowers.
Yesterday I cut an orchid, for my buttonhole. It was a marvellous
spotted thing, as effective as the seven deadly sins.
In a thoughtless moment I asked one of the gardeners what it
was called. He told me it was a fine specimen of Robinsoniana,
or something dreadful of that kind. It is a sad truth,
but we have lost the faculty of giving lovely names to things.
Names are everything. I never quarrel with actions.
My one quarrel is with words. That is the reason I hate vulgar
realism in literature. The man who could call a spade a spade
should be compelled to use one. It is the only thing he is fit
for."
"Then what should we call you, Harry?" she asked.
"His name is Prince Paradox," said Dorian.
"I recognize him in a flash," exclaimed the duchess.
"I won't hear of it," laughed Lord Henry, sinking into a chair.
"From a label there is no escape I refuse the title."
"Royalties may not abdicate," fell as a warning from pretty lips.
"You wish me to defend my throne, then?"
"Yes."
"I give the truths of tomorrow."
"I prefer the mistakes of today," she answered.
"You disarm me, Gladys," he cried, catching the wilfulness of her mood.
"Of your shield, Harry, not of your spear."
"I never tilt against beauty," he said, with a wave of his hand.
"That is your error, Harry, believe me. You value beauty far too much."
"How can you say that? I admit that I think that it is better
to be beautiful than to be good. But on the other hand,
no one is more ready than I am to acknowledge that it is better
to be good than to be ugly."
"Ugliness is one of the seven deadly sins, then?" cried the duchess.
"What becomes of your simile about the orchid?"
"Ugliness is one of the seven deadly virtues, Gladys. You, as a good Tory,
must not underrate them. Beer, the Bible, and the seven deadly virtues have
made our England what she is."
"You don't like your country, then?" she asked.
"I live in it."
"That you may censure it the better."
"Would you have me take the verdict of Europe on it?" he inquired.
"What do they say of us?"
"That Tartuffe has emigrated to England and opened a shop."
"Is that yours, Harry?"
"I give it to you."
"I could not use it. It is too true."
"You need not be afraid. Our countrymen never recognize a description."
"They are practical."
"They are more cunning than practical. When they make up their ledger,
they balance stupidity by wealth, and vice by hypocrisy."
"Still, we have done great things."
"Great things have been thrust on us, Gladys."
"We have carried their burden."
"Only as far as the Stock Exchange."
She shook her head. "I believe in the race," she cried.
"It represents the survival of the pushing."
"It has development."
"Decay fascinates me more."
"What of art?" she asked.
"It is a malady."
"Love?"
"An illusion."
"Religion?"
"The fashionable substitute for belief."
"You are a sceptic."
"Never Scepticism is the beginning of faith."
"What are you?"
"To define is to limit."
"Give me a clue."
"Threads snap. You would lose your way in the labyrinth."
"You bewilder me. Let us talk of some one else."
"Our host is a delightful topic. Years ago he was christened
Prince Charming."
"Ah don't remind me of that," cried Dorian Gray.
"Our host is rather horrid this evening," answered the duchess, colouring.
"I believe he thinks that Monmouth married me on purely scientific principles
as the best specimen he could find of a modern butterfly."
"Well, I hope he won't stick pins into you, Duchess," laughed Dorian.
"Oh my maid does that already, Mr. Gray, when she is annoyed with me."
"And what does she get annoyed with you about, Duchess?"
"For the most trivial things, Mr. Gray, I assure you.
Usually because I come in at ten minutes to nine and tell her
that I must be dressed by halfpast eight."
"How unreasonable of her You should give her warning."
"I daren't, Mr. Gray. Why, she invents hats for me.
You remember the one I wore at Lady Hilstone's gardenparty?
You don't, but it is nice of you to pretend that you do.
Well, she made if out of nothing. All good hats are made out
of nothing."
"Like all good reputations, Gladys," interrupted Lord Henry.
"Every effect that one produces gives one an enemy.
To be popular one must be a mediocrity."
"Not with women," said the duchess, shaking her head "and women
rule the world. I assure you we can't bear mediocrities.
We women, as some one says, love with our ears, just as you men
love with your eyes, if you ever love at all."
"It seems to me that we never do anything else," murmured Dorian.
"Ah then, you never really love, Mr. Gray," answered the duchess
with mock sadness.
"My dear Gladys" cried Lord Henry. "How can you say that?
Romance lives by repetition, and repetition converts an
appetite into an art. Besides, each time that one loves is
the only time one has ever loved. Difference of object does
not alter singleness of passion. It merely intensifies it.
We can have in life but one great experience at best,
and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often
as possible."
"Even when one has been wounded by it, Harry?" asked the duchess
after a pause.
"Especially when one has been wounded by it," answered Lord Henry.
The duchess turned and looked at Dorian Gray with a curious
expression in her eyes. "What do you say to that, Mr. Gray?"
she inquired.
Dorian hesitated for a moment. Then he threw his head back and laughed.
"I always agree with Harry, Duchess."
"Even when he is wrong?"
"Harry is never wrong, Duchess."
"And does his philosophy make you happy?"
"I have never searched for happiness. Who wants happiness?
I have searched for pleasure."
"And found it, Mr. Gray?"
"Often. Too often."
The duchess sighed. "I am searching for peace," she said,
"and if I don't go and dress, I shall have none this evening."
"Let me get you some orchids, Duchess," cried Dorian, starting to his feet
and walking down the conservatory.
"You are flirting disgracefully with him," said Lord Henry to his cousin.
"You had better take care. He is very fascinating."
"If he were not, there would be no battle."
"Greek meets Greek, then?"
"I am on the side of the Trojans. They fought for a woman."
"They were defeated."
"There are worse things than capture," she answered.
"You gallop with a loose rein."
"Pace gives life," was the riposte.
"I shall write it in my diary tonight."
"What?"
"That a burnt child loves the fire."
"I am not even singed. My wings are untouched."
"You use them for everything, except flight."
"Courage has passed from men to women. It is a new experience for us."
"You have a rival."
"Who?"
He laughed. "Lady Narborough," he whispered. "She perfectly adores him."
"You fill me with apprehension. The appeal to antiquity is fatal
to us who are romanticists."
"Romanticists You have all the methods of science."
"Men have educated us."
"But not explained you."
"Describe us as a sex," was her challenge.
"Sphinxes without secrets."
She looked at him, smiling. "How long Mr. Gray is" she said.
"Let us go and help him. I have not yet told him the colour of
my frock."
"Ah you must suit your frock to his flowers, Gladys."
"That would be a premature surrender."
"Romantic art begins with its climax."
"I must keep an opportunity for retreat."
"In the Parthian manner?"
"They found safety in the desert. I could not do that."
"Women are not always allowed a choice," he answered, but hardly had
he finished the sentence before from the far end of the conservatory
came a stifled groan, followed by the dull sound of a heavy fall.
Everybody started up. The duchess stood motionless in horror.
And with fear in his eyes, Lord Henry rushed through the flapping
palms to find Dorian Gray lying face downwards on the tiled floor in a
deathlike swoon.
He was carried at once into the blue drawingroom and laid
upon one of the sofas. After a short time, he came to himself
and looked round with a dazed expression.
"What has happened?" he asked. "Oh I remember. Am I safe here, Harry?"
He began to tremble.
"My dear Dorian," answered Lord Henry, "you merely fainted. That was all.
You must have overtired yourself. You had better not come down to dinner.
I will take your place."
"No, I will come down," he said, struggling to his feet.
"I would rather come down. I must not be alone."
He went to his room and dressed. There was a wild recklessness
of gaiety in his manner as he sat at table, but now and then
a thrill of terror ran through him when he remembered that,
pressed against the window of the conservatory, like a
white handkerchief, he had seen the face of James Vane watching him.
CHAPTER 
The next day he did not leave the house, and, indeed, spent most
of the time in his own room, sick with a wild terror of dying,
and yet indifferent to life itself. The consciousness of
being hunted, snared, tracked down, had begun to dominate him.
If the tapestry did but tremble in the wind, he shook.
The dead leaves that were blown against the leaded panes seemed
to him like his own wasted resolutions and wild regrets.
When he closed his eyes, he saw again the sailor's face peering
through the miststained glass, and horror seemed once more to lay its
hand upon his heart.
But perhaps it had been only his fancy that had called vengeance out
of the night and set the hideous shapes of punishment before him.
Actual life was chaos, but there was something terribly logical
in the imagination. It was the imagination that set remorse
to dog the feet of sin. It was the imagination that made
each crime bear its misshapen brood. In the common world
of fact the wicked were not punished, nor the good rewarded.
Success was given to the strong, failure thrust upon the weak.
That was all. Besides, had any stranger been prowling round
the house, he would have been seen by the servants or the keepers.
Had any footmarks been found on the flowerbeds, the gardeners
would have reported it. Yes, it had been merely fancy.
Sibyl Vane's brother had not come back to kill him.
He had sailed away in his ship to founder in some winter sea.
From him, at any rate, he was safe. Why, the man did not know
who he was, could not know who he was. The mask of youth had
saved him.
And yet if it had been merely an illusion, how terrible it
was to think that conscience could raise such fearful phantoms,
and give them visible form, and make them move before one
What sort of life would his be if, day and night,
shadows of his crime were to peer at him from silent corners,
to mock him from secret places, to whisper in his ear as he sat
at the feast, to wake him with icy fingers as he lay asleep
As the thought crept through his brain, he grew pale with terror,
and the air seemed to him to have become suddenly colder.
Oh in what a wild hour of madness he had killed his friend
How ghastly the mere memory of the scene He saw it all again.
Each hideous detail came back to him with added horror.
Out of the black cave of time, terrible and swathed in scarlet,
rose the image of his sin. When Lord Henry came in at
six o'clock, he found him crying as one whose heart will
break.
It was not till the third day that he ventured to go out.
There was something in the clear, pinescented air of that
winter morning that seemed to bring him back his joyousness
and his ardour for life. But it was not merely the physical
conditions of environment that had caused the change.
His own nature had revolted against the excess of anguish
that had sought to maim and mar the perfection of its calm.
With subtle and finely wrought temperaments it is always so.
Their strong passions must either bruise or bend. They either
slay the man, or themselves die. Shallow sorrows and shallow
loves live on. The loves and sorrows that are great are destroyed
by their own plenitude. Besides, he had convinced himself that
he had been the victim of a terrorstricken imagination, and looked
back now on his fears with something of pity and not a little
of contempt.
After breakfast, he walked with the duchess for an hour in the garden
and then drove across the park to join the shootingparty. The crisp frost
lay like salt upon the grass. The sky was an inverted cup of blue metal.
A thin film of ice bordered the flat, reedgrown lake.
At the corner of the pinewood he caught sight of Sir Geoffrey Clouston,
the duchess's brother, jerking two spent cartridges out of his gun.
He jumped from the cart, and having told the groom to take the mare home,
made his way towards his guest through the withered bracken and
rough undergrowth.
"Have you had good sport, Geoffrey?" he asked.
"Not very good, Dorian. I think most of the birds have gone to the open.
I dare say it will be better after lunch, when we get to new ground."
Dorian strolled along by his side. The keen aromatic air,
the brown and red lights that glimmered in the wood,
the hoarse cries of the beaters ringing out from time to time,
and the sharp snaps of the guns that followed, fascinated him
and filled him with a sense of delightful freedom.
He was dominated by the carelessness of happiness, by the high
indifference of joy.
Suddenly from a lumpy tussock of old grass some twenty yards in front
of them, with blacktipped ears erect and long hinder limbs throwing
it forward, started a hare. It bolted for a thicket of alders.
Sir Geoffrey put his gun to his shoulder, but there was something
in the animal's grace of movement that strangely charmed Dorian Gray,
and he cried out at once, "Don't shoot it, Geoffrey. Let it live."
"What nonsense, Dorian" laughed his companion, and as the hare
bounded into the thicket, he fired. There were two cries heard,
the cry of a hare in pain, which is dreadful, the cry of a man in agony,
which is worse.
"Good heavens I have hit a beater" exclaimed Sir Geoffrey.
"What an ass the man was to get in front of the guns
Stop shooting there" he called out at the top of his voice.
"A man is hurt."
The headkeeper came running up with a stick in his hand.
"Where, sir? Where is he?" he shouted. At the same time,
the firing ceased along the line.
"Here," answered Sir Geoffrey angrily, hurrying towards the thicket.
"Why on earth don't you keep your men back? Spoiled my shooting for
the day."
Dorian watched them as they plunged into the alderclump,
brushing the lithe swinging branches aside. In a few moments
they emerged, dragging a body after them into the sunlight.
He turned away in horror. It seemed to him that misfortune
followed wherever he went. He heard Sir Geoffrey ask if the man
was really dead, and the affirmative answer of the keeper.
The wood seemed to him to have become suddenly alive with faces.
There was the trampling of myriad feet and the low buzz of voices.
A great copperbreasted pheasant came beating through the
boughs overhead.
After a few momentsthat were to him, in his perturbed state,
like endless hours of painhe felt a hand laid on his shoulder.
He started and looked round.
"Dorian," said Lord Henry, "I had better tell them that the shooting
is stopped for today. It would not look well to go on."
"I wish it were stopped for ever, Harry," he answered bitterly.
"The whole thing is hideous and cruel. Is the man ... ?"
He could not finish the sentence.
"I am afraid so," rejoined Lord Henry. "He got the whole charge of shot
in his chest. He must have died almost instantaneously. Come let us
go home."
They walked side by side in the direction of the avenue for nearly fifty
yards without speaking. Then Dorian looked at Lord Henry and said,
with a heavy sigh, "It is a bad omen, Harry, a very bad omen."
"What is?" asked Lord Henry. "Oh this accident, I suppose.
My dear fellow, it can't be helped. It was the man's own fault.
Why did he get in front of the guns? Besides, it is nothing to us.
It is rather awkward for Geoffrey, of course. It does not do to
pepper beaters. It makes people think that one is a wild shot.
And Geoffrey is not he shoots very straight. But there is no use talking
about the matter."
Dorian shook his head. "It is a bad omen, Harry. I feel
as if something horrible were going to happen to some of us.
To myself, perhaps," he added, passing his hand over his eyes,
with a gesture of pain.
The elder man laughed. "The only horrible thing in the world
is ennui, Dorian. That is the one sin for which there is
no forgiveness. But we are not likely to suffer from it unless
these fellows keep chattering about this thing at dinner.
I must tell them that the subject is to be tabooed.
As for omens, there is no such thing as an omen.
Destiny does not send us heralds. She is too wise or too cruel
for that. Besides, what on earth could happen to you, Dorian?
You have everything in the world that a man can want.
There is no one who would not be delighted to change places
with you."
"There is no one with whom I would not change places, Harry.
Don't laugh like that. I am telling you the truth. The wretched
peasant who has just died is better off than I am. I have no
terror of death. It is the coming of death that terrifies me.
Its monstrous wings seem to wheel in the leaden air around me.
Good heavens don't you see a man moving behind the trees there,
watching me, waiting for me?"
Lord Henry looked in the direction in which the trembling gloved hand
was pointing. "Yes," he said, smiling, "I see the gardener waiting for you.
I suppose he wants to ask you what flowers you wish to have on the table
tonight. How absurdly nervous you are, my dear fellow You must come
and see my doctor, when we get back to town."
Dorian heaved a sigh of relief as he saw the gardener approaching.
The man touched his hat, glanced for a moment at Lord Henry in a
hesitating manner, and then produced a letter, which he handed
to his master. "Her Grace told me to wait for an answer,"
he murmured.
Dorian put the letter into his pocket. "Tell her Grace that I am coming in,"
he said, coldly. The man turned round and went rapidly in the direction of
the house.
"How fond women are of doing dangerous things" laughed Lord Henry.
"It is one of the qualities in them that I admire most. A woman
will flirt with anybody in the world as long as other people are
looking on."
"How fond you are of saying dangerous things, Harry In the present instance,
you are quite astray. I like the duchess very much, but I don't love her."
"And the duchess loves you very much, but she likes you less,
so you are excellently matched."
"You are talking scandal, Harry, and there is never any basis for scandal."
"The basis of every scandal is an immoral certainty," said Lord Henry,
lighting a cigarette.
"You would sacrifice anybody, Harry, for the sake of an epigram."
"The world goes to the altar of its own accord," was the answer.
"I wish I could love," cried Dorian Gray with a deep note
of pathos in his voice. "But I seem to have lost the passion
and forgotten the desire. I am too much concentrated on myself.
My own personality has become a burden to me. I want to escape,
to go away, to forget. It was silly of me to come down here at all.
I think I shall send a wire to Harvey to have the yacht got ready.
On a yacht one is safe."
"Safe from what, Dorian? You are in some trouble. Why not tell
me what it is? You know I would help you."
"I can't tell you, Harry," he answered sadly. "And I dare say it
is only a fancy of mine. This unfortunate accident has upset me.
I have a horrible presentiment that something of the kind may happen
to me."
"What nonsense"
"I hope it is, but I can't help feeling it. Ah here is
the duchess, looking like Artemis in a tailormade gown.
You see we have come back, Duchess."
"I have heard all about it, Mr. Gray," she answered. "Poor Geoffrey is
terribly upset. And it seems that you asked him not to shoot the hare.
How curious"
"Yes, it was very curious. I don't know what made me say it.
Some whim, I suppose. It looked the loveliest of little
live things. But I am sorry they told you about the man.
It is a hideous subject."
"It is an annoying subject," broke in Lord Henry. "It has no psychological
value at all. Now if Geoffrey had done the thing on purpose, how interesting
he would be I should like to know some one who had committed a real murder."
"How horrid of you, Harry" cried the duchess. "Isn't it,
Mr. Gray? Harry, Mr. Gray is ill again. He is going to faint."
Dorian drew himself up with an effort and smiled. "It is nothing, Duchess,"
he murmured "my nerves are dreadfully out of order. That is all.
I am afraid I walked too far this morning. I didn't hear what Harry said.
Was it very bad? You must tell me some other time. I think I must go and
lie down. You will excuse me, won't you?"
They had reached the great flight of steps that led from the conservatory
on to the terrace. As the glass door closed behind Dorian, Lord Henry turned
and looked at the duchess with his slumberous eyes. "Are you very much
in love with him?" he asked.
She did not answer for some time, but stood gazing at the landscape.
"I wish I knew," she said at last.
He shook his head. "Knowledge would be fatal. It is the uncertainty
that charms one. A mist makes things wonderful."
"One may lose one's way."
"All ways end at the same point, my dear Gladys."
"What is that?"
"Disillusion."
"It was my debut in life," she sighed.
"It came to you crowned."
"I am tired of strawberry leaves."
"They become you."
"Only in public."
"You would miss them," said Lord Henry.
"I will not part with a petal."
"Monmouth has ears."
"Old age is dull of hearing."
"Has he never been jealous?"
"I wish he had been."
He glanced about as if in search of something. "What are you looking for?"
she inquired.
"The button from your foil," he answered. "You have dropped it."
She laughed. "I have still the mask."
"It makes your eyes lovelier," was his reply.
She laughed again. Her teeth showed like white seeds in a scarlet fruit.
Upstairs, in his own room, Dorian Gray was lying on a sofa,
with terror in every tingling fibre of his body. Life had suddenly
become too hideous a burden for him to bear. The dreadful death
of the unlucky beater, shot in the thicket like a wild animal,
had seemed to him to prefigure death for himself also.
He had nearly swooned at what Lord Henry had said in a chance mood
of cynical jesting.
At five o'clock he rang his bell for his servant and gave
him orders to pack his things for the nightexpress to town,
and to have the brougham at the door by eightthirty. He
was determined not to sleep another night at Selby Royal.
It was an illomened place. Death walked there in the sunlight.
The grass of the forest had been spotted with blood.
Then he wrote a note to Lord Henry, telling him that he was going up to town
to consult his doctor and asking him to entertain his guests in his absence.
As he was putting it into the envelope, a knock came to the door, and his
valet informed him that the headkeeper wished to see him. He frowned and bit
his lip. "Send him in," he muttered, after some moments' hesitation.
As soon as the man entered, Dorian pulled his chequebook out of a drawer
and spread it out before him.
"I suppose you have come about the unfortunate accident
of this morning, Thornton?" he said, taking up a pen.
"Yes, sir," answered the gamekeeper.
"Was the poor fellow married? Had he any people dependent on him?"
asked Dorian, looking bored. "If so, I should not like them to be left
in want, and will send them any sum of money you may think necessary."
"We don't know who he is, sir. That is what I took the liberty
of coming to you about."
"Don't know who he is?" said Dorian, listlessly. "What do you mean?
Wasn't he one of your men?"
"No, sir. Never saw him before. Seems like a sailor, sir."
The pen dropped from Dorian Gray's hand, and he felt as if his
heart had suddenly stopped beating. "A sailor?" he cried out.
"Did you say a sailor?"
"Yes, sir. He looks as if he had been a sort of sailor
tattooed on both arms, and that kind of thing."
"Was there anything found on him?" said Dorian, leaning forward and looking
at the man with startled eyes. "Anything that would tell his name?"
"Some money, sirnot much, and a sixshooter. There was no name of any kind.
A decentlooking man, sir, but roughlike. A sort of sailor we think."
Dorian started to his feet. A terrible hope fluttered past him.
He clutched at it madly. "Where is the body?" he exclaimed.
"Quick I must see it at once."
"It is in an empty stable in the Home Farm, sir. The folk
don't like to have that sort of thing in their houses.
They say a corpse brings bad luck."
"The Home Farm Go there at once and meet me. Tell one of the grooms
to bring my horse round. No. Never mind. I'll go to the stables myself.
It will save time."
In less than a quarter of an hour, Dorian Gray was galloping down the long
avenue as hard as he could go. The trees seemed to sweep past him in
spectral procession, and wild shadows to fling themselves across his path.
Once the mare swerved at a white gatepost and nearly threw him. He lashed
her across the neck with his crop. She cleft the dusky air like an arrow.
The stones flew from her hoofs.
At last he reached the Home Farm. Two men were loitering in the yard.
He leaped from the saddle and threw the reins to one of them.
In the farthest stable a light was glimmering. Something seemed
to tell him that the body was there, and he hurried to the door
and put his hand upon the latch.
There he paused for a moment, feeling that he was on the brink
of a discovery that would either make or mar his life.
Then he thrust the door open and entered.
On a heap of sacking in the far corner was lying the dead body
of a man dressed in a coarse shirt and a pair of blue trousers.
A spotted handkerchief had been placed over the face.
A coarse candle, stuck in a bottle, sputtered beside it.
Dorian Gray shuddered. He felt that his could not be the hand to take
the handkerchief away, and called out to one of the farmservants to come
to him.
"Take that thing off the face. I wish to see it," he said,
clutching at the doorpost for support.
When the farmservant had done so, he stepped forward.
A cry of joy broke from his lips. The man who had been shot in
the thicket was James Vane.
He stood there for some minutes looking at the dead body.
As he rode home, his eyes were full of tears, for he knew
he was safe.
CHAPTER 
"There is no use your telling me that you are going to be good,"
cried Lord Henry, dipping his white fingers into a red copper bowl
filled with rosewater. "You are quite perfect. Pray, don't change."
Dorian Gray shook his head. "No, Harry, I have done too many
dreadful things in my life. I am not going to do any more.
I began my good actions yesterday."
"Where were you yesterday?"
"In the country, Harry. I was staying at a little inn by myself."
"My dear boy," said Lord Henry, smiling, "anybody can be good in the country.
There are no temptations there. That is the reason why people who live out
of town are so absolutely uncivilized. Civilization is not by any means an
easy thing to attain to. There are only two ways by which man can reach it.
One is by being cultured, the other by being corrupt. Country people have no
opportunity of being either, so they stagnate."
"Culture and corruption," echoed Dorian. "I have known something of both.
It seems terrible to me now that they should ever be found together.
For I have a new ideal, Harry. I am going to alter. I think I
have altered."
"You have not yet told me what your good action was.
Or did you say you had done more than one?" asked his companion
as he spilled into his plate a little crimson pyramid of seeded
strawberries and, through a perforated, shellshaped spoon,
snowed white sugar upon them.
"I can tell you, Harry. It is not a story I could tell to any one else.
I spared somebody. It sounds vain, but you understand what I mean.
She was quite beautiful and wonderfully like Sibyl Vane. I think it was
that which first attracted me to her. You remember Sibyl, don't you?
How long ago that seems Well, Hetty was not one of our own class,
of course. She was simply a girl in a village. But I really loved her.
I am quite sure that I loved her. All during this wonderful May that we
have been having, I used to run down and see her two or three times a week.
Yesterday she met me in a little orchard. The appleblossoms kept tumbling
down on her hair, and she was laughing. We were to have gone away together
this morning at dawn. Suddenly I determined to leave her as flowerlike as I
had found her."
"I should think the novelty of the emotion must have given you
a thrill of real pleasure, Dorian," interrupted Lord Henry.
"But I can finish your idyll for you. You gave her good advice
and broke her heart. That was the beginning of your reformation."
"Harry, you are horrible You mustn't say these dreadful things.
Hetty's heart is not broken. Of course, she cried and all that.
But there is no disgrace upon her. She can live, like Perdita, in her
garden of mint and marigold."
"And weep over a faithless Florizel," said Lord Henry,
laughing, as he leaned back in his chair. "My dear Dorian,
you have the most curiously boyish moods. Do you think this girl
will ever be really content now with any one of her own rank?
I suppose she will be married some day to a rough carter
or a grinning ploughman. Well, the fact of having met you,
and loved you, will teach her to despise her husband,
and she will be wretched. From a moral point of view,
I cannot say that I think much of your great renunciation.
Even as a beginning, it is poor. Besides, how do you know
that Hetty isn't floating at the present moment in some
starlit millpond, with lovely waterlilies round her,
like Ophelia?"
"I can't bear this, Harry You mock at everything, and then
suggest the most serious tragedies. I am sorry I told you now.
I don't care what you say to me. I know I was right in acting
as I did. Poor Hetty As I rode past the farm this morning,
I saw her white face at the window, like a spray of jasmine.
Don't let us talk about it any more, and don't try to persuade
me that the first good action I have done for years,
the first little bit of selfsacrifice I have ever known,
is really a sort of sin. I want to be better.
I am going to be better. Tell me something about yourself.
What is going on in town? I have not been to the club
for days."
"The people are still discussing poor Basil's disappearance."
"I should have thought they had got tired of that by this time,"
said Dorian, pouring himself out some wine and frowning slightly.
"My dear boy, they have only been talking about it for six weeks,
and the British public are really not equal to the mental
strain of having more than one topic every three months.
They have been very fortunate lately, however. They have
had my own divorcecase and Alan Campbell's suicide.
Now they have got the mysterious disappearance of an artist.
Scotland Yard still insists that the man in the grey ulster
who left for Paris by the midnight train on the ninth of November
was poor Basil, and the French police declare that Basil never
arrived in Paris at all. I suppose in about a fortnight we shall
be told that he has been seen in San Francisco. It is an odd thing,
but every one who disappears is said to be seen at San Francisco.
It must be a delightful city, and possess all the attractions
of the next world."
"What do you think has happened to Basil?" asked Dorian,
holding up his Burgundy against the light and wondering how it
was that he could discuss the matter so calmly.
"I have not the slightest idea. If Basil chooses to hide himself,
it is no business of mine. If he is dead, I don't want to think
about him. Death is the only thing that ever terrifies me.
I hate it."
"Why?" said the younger man wearily.
"Because," said Lord Henry, passing beneath his nostrils the gilt trellis
of an open vinaigrette box, "one can survive everything nowadays except that.
Death and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one
cannot explain away. Let us have our coffee in the musicroom, Dorian.
You must play Chopin to me. The man with whom my wife ran away played
Chopin exquisitely. Poor Victoria I was very fond of her. The house
is rather lonely without her. Of course, married life is merely a habit,
a bad habit. But then one regrets the loss even of one's worst habits.
Perhaps one regrets them the most. They are such an essential part of
one's personality."
Dorian said nothing, but rose from the table, and passing into the next room,
sat down to the piano and let his fingers stray across the white and black
ivory of the keys. After the coffee had been brought in, he stopped,
and looking over at Lord Henry, said, "Harry, did it ever occur to you that
Basil was murdered?"
Lord Henry yawned. "Basil was very popular, and always
wore a Waterbury watch. Why should he have been murdered?
He was not clever enough to have enemies. Of course,
he had a wonderful genius for painting. But a man can
paint like Velasquez and yet be as dull as possible.
Basil was really rather dull. He only interested me once,
and that was when he told me, years ago, that he had a wild
adoration for you and that you were the dominant motive of
his art."
"I was very fond of Basil," said Dorian with a note of sadness in his voice.
"But don't people say that he was murdered?"
"Oh, some of the papers do. It does not seem to me to be at all probable.
I know there are dreadful places in Paris, but Basil was not the sort of man
to have gone to them. He had no curiosity. It was his chief defect."
"What would you say, Harry, if I told you that I had murdered Basil?"
said the younger man. He watched him intently after he had spoken.
"I would say, my dear fellow, that you were posing for a character
that doesn't suit you. All crime is vulgar, just as all vulgarity
is crime. It is not in you, Dorian, to commit a murder.
I am sorry if I hurt your vanity by saying so, but I assure you
it is true. Crime belongs exclusively to the lower orders.
I don't blame them in the smallest degree. I should fancy that
crime was to them what art is to us, simply a method of procuring
extraordinary sensations."
"A method of procuring sensations? Do you think, then, that a man
who has once committed a murder could possibly do the same crime again?
Don't tell me that."
"Oh anything becomes a pleasure if one does it too often,"
cried Lord Henry, laughing. "That is one of the most important secrets
of life. I should fancy, however, that murder is always a mistake.
One should never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner.
But let us pass from poor Basil. I wish I could believe that he had
come to such a really romantic end as you suggest, but I can't. I
dare say he fell into the Seine off an omnibus and that the conductor
hushed up the scandal. Yes I should fancy that was his end.
I see him lying now on his back under those dullgreen waters,
with the heavy barges floating over him and long weeds catching
in his hair. Do you know, I don't think he would have done much
more good work. During the last ten years his painting had gone off
very much."
Dorian heaved a sigh, and Lord Henry strolled across the room
and began to stroke the head of a curious Java parrot, a large,
greyplumaged bird with pink crest and tail, that was balancing
itself upon a bamboo perch. As his pointed fingers touched it,
it dropped the white scurf of crinkled lids over black,
glasslike eyes and began to sway backwards and forwards.
"Yes," he continued, turning round and taking his handkerchief
out of his pocket "his painting had quite gone off.
It seemed to me to have lost something. It had lost an ideal.
When you and he ceased to be great friends, he ceased to be a
great artist. What was it separated you? I suppose he bored you.
If so, he never forgave you. It's a habit bores have.
By the way, what has become of that wonderful portrait
he did of you? I don't think I have ever seen it since
he finished it. Oh I remember your telling me years ago
that you had sent it down to Selby, and that it had got mislaid
or stolen on the way. You never got it back? What a pity
it was really a masterpiece. I remember I wanted to buy it.
I wish I had now. It belonged to Basil's best period.
Since then, his work was that curious mixture of bad painting
and good intentions that always entitles a man to be called
a representative British artist. Did you advertise for it?
You should."
"I forget," said Dorian. "I suppose I did. But I never really liked it.
I am sorry I sat for it. The memory of the thing is hateful to me.
Why do you talk of it? It used to remind me of those curious lines
in some playHamlet, I thinkhow do they run?
"Like the painting of a sorrow,
A face without a heart."
Yes that is what it was like."
Lord Henry laughed. "If a man treats life artistically,
his brain is his heart," he answered, sinking into an armchair.
Dorian Gray shook his head and struck some soft chords on the piano.
"'Like the painting of a sorrow,'" he repeated, "'a face without
a heart.'"
The elder man lay back and looked at him with halfclosed eyes.
"By the way, Dorian," he said after a pause, "'what does it profit
a man if he gain the whole world and losehow does the quotation run?
his own soul'?"
The music jarred, and Dorian Gray started and stared at his friend.
"Why do you ask me that, Harry?"
"My dear fellow," said Lord Henry, elevating his eyebrows in surprise,
"I asked you because I thought you might be able to give me an answer.
That is all. I was going through the park last Sunday, and close by the
Marble Arch there stood a little crowd of shabbylooking people listening
to some vulgar streetpreacher. As I passed by, I heard the man yelling
out that question to his audience. It struck me as being rather dramatic.
London is very rich in curious effects of that kind. A wet Sunday,
an uncouth Christian in a mackintosh, a ring of sickly white faces under
a broken roof of dripping umbrellas, and a wonderful phrase flung into
the air by shrill hysterical lipsit was really very good in its way,
quite a suggestion. I thought of telling the prophet that art had
a soul, but that man had not. I am afraid, however, he would not have
understood me."
"Don't, Harry. The soul is a terrible reality. It can be bought,
and sold, and bartered away. It can be poisoned, or made perfect.
There is a soul in each one of us. I know it."
"Do you feel quite sure of that, Dorian?"
"Quite sure."
"Ah then it must be an illusion. The things one feels
absolutely certain about are never true. That is the fatality
of faith, and the lesson of romance. How grave you are
Don't be so serious. What have you or I to do with the superstitions
of our age? No we have given up our belief in the soul.
Play me something. Play me a nocturne, Dorian, and, as you play,
tell me, in a low voice, how you have kept your youth.
You must have some secret. I am only ten years older than
you are, and I am wrinkled, and worn, and yellow. You are
really wonderful, Dorian. You have never looked more charming
than you do tonight. You remind me of the day I saw you first.
You were rather cheeky, very shy, and absolutely extraordinary.
You have changed, of course, but not in appearance.
I wish you would tell me your secret. To get back my youth
I would do anything in the world, except take exercise,
get up early, or be respectable. Youth There is nothing
like it. It's absurd to talk of the ignorance of youth.
The only people to whose opinions I listen now with any respect
are people much younger than myself. They seem in front of me.
Life has revealed to them her latest wonder. As for the aged,
I always contradict the aged. I do it on principle.
If you ask them their opinion on something that happened yesterday,
they solemnly give you the opinions current in ,
when people wore high stocks, believed in everything, and knew
absolutely nothing. How lovely that thing you are playing is
I wonder, did Chopin write it at Majorca, with the sea weeping
round the villa and the salt spray dashing against the panes?
It is marvellously romantic. What a blessing it is
that there is one art left to us that is not imitative
Don't stop. I want music tonight. It seems to me that you
are the young Apollo and that I am Marsyas listening to you.
I have sorrows, Dorian, of my own, that even you know nothing of.
The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one
is young. I am amazed sometimes at my own sincerity.
Ah, Dorian, how happy you are What an exquisite life
you have had You have drunk deeply of everything.
You have crushed the grapes against your palate. Nothing has
been hidden from you. And it has all been to you no more than
the sound of music. It has not marred you. You are still the
same."
"I am not the same, Harry."
"Yes, you are the same. I wonder what the rest of your life will be.
Don't spoil it by renunciations. At present you are a perfect type.
Don't make yourself incomplete. You are quite flawless now.
You need not shake your head you know you are. Besides, Dorian,
don't deceive yourself. Life is not governed by will or intention.
Life is a question of nerves, and fibres, and slowly builtup
cells in which thought hides itself and passion has its dreams.
You may fancy yourself safe and think yourself strong. But a chance
tone of colour in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume
that you had once loved and that brings subtle memories with it,
a line from a forgotten poem that you had come across again,
a cadence from a piece of music that you had ceased to play
I tell you, Dorian, that it is on things like these that our lives depend.
Browning writes about that somewhere but our own senses will imagine
them for us. There are moments when the odour of lilas blanc passes
suddenly across me, and I have to live the strangest month of my life
over again. I wish I could change places with you, Dorian. The world
has cried out against us both, but it has always worshipped you.
It always will worship you. You are the type of what the age
is searching for, and what it is afraid it has found. I am
so glad that you have never done anything, never carved a statue,
or painted a picture, or produced anything outside of yourself
Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are
your sonnets."
Dorian rose up from the piano and passed his hand through his hair.
"Yes, life has been exquisite," he murmured, "but I am not going
to have the same life, Harry. And you must not say these
extravagant things to me. You don't know everything about me.
I think that if you did, even you would turn from me. You laugh.
Don't laugh."
"Why have you stopped playing, Dorian? Go back and give me
the nocturne over again. Look at that great, honeycoloured moon
that hangs in the dusky air. She is waiting for you to charm her,
and if you play she will come closer to the earth. You won't?
Let us go to the club, then. It has been a charming evening,
and we must end it charmingly. There is some one at White's who wants
immensely to know youyoung Lord Poole, Bournemouth's eldest son.
He has already copied your neckties, and has begged me to introduce
him to you. He is quite delightful and rather reminds me of you."
"I hope not," said Dorian with a sad look in his eyes.
"But I am tired tonight, Harry. I shan't go to the club.
It is nearly eleven, and I want to go to bed early."
"Do stay. You have never played so well as tonight. There was something
in your touch that was wonderful. It had more expression than I had ever
heard from it before."
"It is because I am going to be good," he answered, smiling.
"I am a little changed already."
"You cannot change to me, Dorian," said Lord Henry. "You and I will always
be friends."
"Yet you poisoned me with a book once. I should not forgive that.
Harry, promise me that you will never lend that book to any one.
It does harm."
"My dear boy, you are really beginning to moralize. You will
soon be going about like the converted, and the revivalist,
warning people against all the sins of which you have grown tired.
You are much too delightful to do that. Besides, it is no use.
You and I are what we are, and will be what we will be.
As for being poisoned by a book, there is no such thing as that.
Art has no influence upon action. It annihilates the desire
to act. It is superbly sterile. The books that the world
calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.
That is all. But we won't discuss literature. Come round
tomorrow. I am going to ride at eleven. We might go together,
and I will take you to lunch afterwards with Lady Branksome.
She is a charming woman, and wants to consult you about some
tapestries she is thinking of buying. Mind you come. Or shall we
lunch with our little duchess? She says she never sees you now.
Perhaps you are tired of Gladys? I thought you would be.
Her clever tongue gets on one's nerves. Well, in any case, be here at
eleven."
"Must I really come, Harry?"
"Certainly. The park is quite lovely now. I don't think there
have been such lilacs since the year I met you."
"Very well. I shall be here at eleven," said Dorian.
"Good night, Harry." As he reached the door, he hesitated
for a moment, as if he had something more to say. Then he sighed
and went out.
CHAPTER 
It was a lovely night, so warm that he threw his coat over his arm and did
not even put his silk scarf round his throat. As he strolled home,
smoking his cigarette, two young men in evening dress passed him.
He heard one of them whisper to the other, "That is Dorian Gray."
He remembered how pleased he used to be when he was pointed out,
or stared at, or talked about. He was tired of hearing his own name now.
Half the charm of the little village where he had been so often lately
was that no one knew who he was. He had often told the girl whom
he had lured to love him that he was poor, and she had believed him.
He had told her once that he was wicked, and she had laughed at him
and answered that wicked people were always very old and very ugly.
What a laugh she hadjust like a thrush singing. And how pretty she had
been in her cotton dresses and her large hats She knew nothing, but she had
everything that he had lost.
When he reached home, he found his servant waiting up for him.
He sent him to bed, and threw himself down on the sofa in the library,
and began to think over some of the things that Lord Henry had said
to him.
Was it really true that one could never change? He felt
a wild longing for the unstained purity of his boyhood
his rosewhite boyhood, as Lord Henry had once called it.
He knew that he had tarnished himself, filled his mind with
corruption and given horror to his fancy that he had been
an evil influence to others, and had experienced a terrible joy
in being so and that of the lives that had crossed his own,
it had been the fairest and the most full of promise that
he had brought to shame. But was it all irretrievable?
Was there no hope for him?
Ah in what a monstrous moment of pride and passion he had
prayed that the portrait should bear the burden of his days,
and he keep the unsullied splendour of eternal youth
All his failure had been due to that. Better for him that each sin
of his life had brought its sure swift penalty along with it.
There was purification in punishment. Not "Forgive us our sins"
but "Smite us for our iniquities" should be the prayer of man to a
most just God.
The curiously carved mirror that Lord Henry had given
to him, so many years ago now, was standing on the table,
and the whitelimbed Cupids laughed round it as of old.
He took it up, as he had done on that night of horror
when he had first noted the change in the fatal picture,
and with wild, teardimmed eyes looked into its polished shield.
Once, some one who had terribly loved him had written
to him a mad letter, ending with these idolatrous words
"The world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold.
The curves of your lips rewrite history." The phrases came back
to his memory, and he repeated them over and over to himself.
Then he loathed his own beauty, and flinging the mirror on
the floor, crushed it into silver splinters beneath his heel.
It was his beauty that had ruined him, his beauty and the youth
that he had prayed for. But for those two things, his life
might have been free from stain. His beauty had been to him
but a mask, his youth but a mockery. What was youth at best?
A green, an unripe time, a time of shallow moods,
and sickly thoughts. Why had he worn its livery? Youth had
spoiled him.
It was better not to think of the past. Nothing could alter that.
It was of himself, and of his own future, that he had to think.
James Vane was hidden in a nameless grave in Selby churchyard.
Alan Campbell had shot himself one night in his laboratory,
but had not revealed the secret that he had been forced to know.
The excitement, such as it was, over Basil Hallward's
disappearance would soon pass away. It was already waning.
He was perfectly safe there. Nor, indeed, was it the death
of Basil Hallward that weighed most upon his mind.
It was the living death of his own soul that troubled him.
Basil had painted the portrait that had marred his life.
He could not forgive him that. It was the portrait that had
done everything. Basil had said things to him that were unbearable,
and that he had yet borne with patience. The murder had
been simply the madness of a moment. As for Alan Campbell,
his suicide had been his own act. He had chosen to do it.
It was nothing to him.
A new life That was what he wanted. That was what he was waiting for.
Surely he had begun it already. He had spared one innocent thing,
at any rate. He would never again tempt innocence. He would be good.
As he thought of Hetty Merton, he began to wonder if the portrait in the
locked room had changed. Surely it was not still so horrible as it had been?
Perhaps if his life became pure, he would be able to expel every sign of evil
passion from the face. Perhaps the signs of evil had already gone away.
He would go and look.
He took the lamp from the table and crept upstairs. As he unbarred the door,
a smile of joy flitted across his strangely younglooking face and lingered
for a moment about his lips. Yes, he would be good, and the hideous thing
that he had hidden away would no longer be a terror to him. He felt as if
the load had been lifted from him already.
He went in quietly, locking the door behind him, as was
his custom, and dragged the purple hanging from the portrait.
A cry of pain and indignation broke from him. He could see
no change, save that in the eyes there was a look of cunning
and in the mouth the curved wrinkle of the hypocrite.
The thing was still loathsomemore loathsome, if possible,
than beforeand the scarlet dew that spotted the hand
seemed brighter, and more like blood newly spilled.
Then he trembled. Had it been merely vanity that had made
him do his one good deed? Or the desire for a new sensation,
as Lord Henry had hinted, with his mocking laugh?
Or that passion to act a part that sometimes makes us do
things finer than we are ourselves? Or, perhaps, all these?
And why was the red stain larger than it had been? It seemed
to have crept like a horrible disease over the wrinkled fingers.
There was blood on the painted feet, as though the thing
had drippedblood even on the hand that had not held
the knife. Confess? Did it mean that he was to confess?
To give himself up and be put to death? He laughed.
He felt that the idea was monstrous. Besides, even if
he did confess, who would believe him? There was no trace
of the murdered man anywhere. Everything belonging to him
had been destroyed. He himself had burned what had been
belowstairs. The world would simply say that he was mad.
They would shut him up if he persisted in his story.
. . . Yet it was his duty to confess, to suffer public shame,
and to make public atonement. There was a God who called
upon men to tell their sins to earth as well as to heaven.
Nothing that he could do would cleanse him till he had
told his own sin. His sin? He shrugged his shoulders.
The death of Basil Hallward seemed very little to him.
He was thinking of Hetty Merton. For it was an unjust mirror,
this mirror of his soul that he was looking at.
Vanity? Curiosity? Hypocrisy? Had there been nothing more
in his renunciation than that? There had been something more.
At least he thought so. But who could tell? . . . No. There
had been nothing more. Through vanity he had spared her.
In hypocrisy he had worn the mask of goodness. For curiosity's
sake he had tried the denial of self. He recognized that
now.
But this murderwas it to dog him all his life? Was he always to be
burdened by his past? Was he really to confess? Never. There was
only one bit of evidence left against him. The picture itself
that was evidence. He would destroy it. Why had he kept it so long?
Once it had given him pleasure to watch it changing and growing old.
Of late he had felt no such pleasure. It had kept him awake at night.
When he had been away, he had been filled with terror lest other eyes
should look upon it. It had brought melancholy across his passions.
Its mere memory had marred many moments of joy. It had been
like conscience to him. Yes, it had been conscience. He would
destroy it.
He looked round and saw the knife that had stabbed Basil Hallward.
He had cleaned it many times, till there was no stain left upon it.
It was bright, and glistened. As it had killed the painter,
so it would kill the painter's work, and all that that meant.
It would kill the past, and when that was dead, he would be free.
It would kill this monstrous soullife, and without its hideous warnings,
he would be at peace. He seized the thing, and stabbed the picture
with it.
There was a cry heard, and a crash. The cry was so horrible
in its agony that the frightened servants woke and crept
out of their rooms. Two gentlemen, who were passing in
the square below, stopped and looked up at the great house.
They walked on till they met a policeman and brought him back.
The man rang the bell several times, but there was no answer.
Except for a light in one of the top windows, the house was all dark.
After a time, he went away and stood in an adjoining portico
and watched.
"Whose house is that, Constable?" asked the elder of the two gentlemen.
"Mr. Dorian Gray's, sir," answered the policeman.
They looked at each other, as they walked away, and sneered.
One of them was Sir Henry Ashton's uncle.
Inside, in the servants' part of the house, the halfclad
domestics were talking in low whispers to each other.
Old Mrs. Leaf was crying and wringing her hands. Francis was
as pale as death.
After about a quarter of an hour, he got the coachman and one of the footmen
and crept upstairs. They knocked, but there was no reply. They called out.
Everything was still. Finally, after vainly trying to force the door,
they got on the roof and dropped down on to the balcony. The windows
yielded easilytheir bolts were old.
When they entered, they found hanging upon the wall a splendid
portrait of their master as they had last seen him, in all
the wonder of his exquisite youth and beauty. Lying on the floor
was a dead man, in evening dress, with a knife in his heart.
He was withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage.
It was not till they had examined the rings that they
recognized who it was.
End of the Project Gutenberg Etext of Dorian Gray
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Title Dracula
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DRACULA
by
Bram Stoker
 edition
CHAPTER 
Jonathan Harker's Journal
 May. Bistritz.Left Munich at  P.M., on st May, arriving at
Vienna early next morning should have arrived at , but train was
an hour late. BudaPesth seems a wonderful place, from the glimpse
which I got of it from the train and the little I could walk through
the streets. I feared to go very far from the station, as we had
arrived late and would start as near the correct time as possible.
The impression I had was that we were leaving the West and entering the
East the most western of splendid bridges over the Danube, which is
here of noble width and depth, took us among the traditions of Turkish
rule.
We left in pretty good time, and came after nightfall to Klausenburgh.
Here I stopped for the night at the Hotel Royale. I had for dinner,
or rather supper, a chicken done up some way with red pepper, which
was very good but thirsty. Mem. get recipe for Mina. I asked the
waiter, and he said it was called "paprika hendl," and that, as it was
a national dish, I should be able to get it anywhere along the
Carpathians.
I found my smattering of German very useful here, indeed, I don't know
how I should be able to get on without it.
Having had some time at my disposal when in London, I had visited the
British Museum, and made search among the books and maps in the
library regarding Transylvania it had struck me that some
foreknowledge of the country could hardly fail to have some importance
in dealing with a nobleman of that country.
I find that the district he named is in the extreme east of the
country, just on the borders of three states, Transylvania, Moldavia,
and Bukovina, in the midst of the Carpathian mountains one of the
wildest and least known portions of Europe.
I was not able to light on any map or work giving the exact locality
of the Castle Dracula, as there are no maps of this country as yet to
compare with our own Ordance Survey Maps but I found that Bistritz,
the post town named by Count Dracula, is a fairly wellknown place. I
shall enter here some of my notes, as they may refresh my memory when
I talk over my travels with Mina.
In the population of Transylvania there are four distinct
nationalities Saxons in the South, and mixed with them the Wallachs,
who are the descendants of the Dacians Magyars in the West, and
Szekelys in the East and North. I am going among the latter, who
claim to be descended from Attila and the Huns. This may be so, for
when the Magyars conquered the country in the eleventh century they
found the Huns settled in it.
I read that every known superstition in the world is gathered into the
horseshoe of the Carpathians, as if it were the centre of some sort of
imaginative whirlpool if so my stay may be very interesting. Mem.,
I must ask the Count all about them.
I did not sleep well, though my bed was comfortable enough, for I had
all sorts of queer dreams. There was a dog howling all night under my
window, which may have had something to do with it or it may have
been the paprika, for I had to drink up all the water in my carafe,
and was still thirsty. Towards morning I slept and was wakened by the
continuous knocking at my door, so I guess I must have been sleeping
soundly then.
I had for breakfast more paprika, and a sort of porridge of maize
flour which they said was "mamaliga", and eggplant stuffed with
forcemeat, a very excellent dish, which they call "impletata". Mem.,
get recipe for this also.
I had to hurry breakfast, for the train started a little before eight,
or rather it ought to have done so, for after rushing to the station
at  I had to sit in the carriage for more than an hour before we
began to move.
It seems to me that the further east you go the more unpunctual are
the trains. What ought they to be in China?
All day long we seemed to dawdle through a country which was full of
beauty of every kind. Sometimes we saw little towns or castles on the
top of steep hills such as we see in old missals sometimes we ran by
rivers and streams which seemed from the wide stony margin on each
side of them to be subject to great floods. It takes a lot of water,
and running strong, to sweep the outside edge of a river clear.
At every station there were groups of people, sometimes crowds, and in
all sorts of attire. Some of them were just like the peasants at home
or those I saw coming through France and Germany, with short jackets,
and round hats, and homemade trousers but others were very
picturesque.
The women looked pretty, except when you got near them, but they were
very clumsy about the waist. They had all full white sleeves of some
kind or other, and most of them had big belts with a lot of strips of
something fluttering from them like the dresses in a ballet, but of
course there were petticoats under them.
The strangest figures we saw were the Slovaks, who were more barbarian
than the rest, with their big cowboy hats, great baggy dirtywhite
trousers, white linen shirts, and enormous heavy leather belts, nearly
a foot wide, all studded over with brass nails. They wore high boots,
with their trousers tucked into them, and had long black hair and
heavy black moustaches. They are very picturesque, but do not look
prepossessing. On the stage they would be set down at once as some
old Oriental band of brigands. They are, however, I am told, very
harmless and rather wanting in natural selfassertion.
It was on the dark side of twilight when we got to Bistritz, which is
a very interesting old place. Being practically on the frontierfor
the Borgo Pass leads from it into Bukovinait has had a very stormy
existence, and it certainly shows marks of it. Fifty years ago a
series of great fires took place, which made terrible havoc on five
separate occasions. At the very beginning of the seventeenth century
it underwent a siege of three weeks and lost , people, the
casualties of war proper being assisted by famine and disease.
Count Dracula had directed me to go to the Golden Krone Hotel, which I
found, to my great delight, to be thoroughly oldfashioned, for of
course I wanted to see all I could of the ways of the country.
I was evidently expected, for when I got near the door I faced a
cheerylooking elderly woman in the usual peasant dresswhite
undergarment with a long double apron, front, and back, of coloured
stuff fitting almost too tight for modesty. When I came close she
bowed and said, "The Herr Englishman?"
"Yes," I said, "Jonathan Harker."
She smiled, and gave some message to an elderly man in white
shirtsleeves, who had followed her to the door.
He went, but immediately returned with a letter
"My friend.Welcome to the Carpathians. I am anxiously expecting
you. Sleep well tonight. At three tomorrow the diligence will
start for Bukovina a place on it is kept for you. At the Borgo
Pass my carriage will await you and will bring you to me. I trust
that your journey from London has been a happy one, and that you
will enjoy your stay in my beautiful land.Your friend, Dracula."
 MayI found that my landlord had got a letter from the Count,
directing him to secure the best place on the coach for me but on
making inquiries as to details he seemed somewhat reticent, and
pretended that he could not understand my German.
This could not be true, because up to then he had understood it
perfectly at least, he answered my questions exactly as if he did.
He and his wife, the old lady who had received me, looked at each
other in a frightened sort of way. He mumbled out that the money had
been sent in a letter, and that was all he knew. When I asked him if
he knew Count Dracula, and could tell me anything of his castle, both
he and his wife crossed themselves, and, saying that they knew nothing
at all, simply refused to speak further. It was so near the time of
starting that I had no time to ask anyone else, for it was all very
mysterious and not by any means comforting.
Just before I was leaving, the old lady came up to my room and said in
a hysterical way "Must you go? Oh Young Herr, must you go?" She
was in such an excited state that she seemed to have lost her grip of
what German she knew, and mixed it all up with some other language
which I did not know at all. I was just able to follow her by asking
many questions. When I told her that I must go at once, and that I
was engaged on important business, she asked again
"Do you know what day it is?" I answered that it was the fourth of
May. She shook her head as she said again
"Oh, yes I know that I know that, but do you know what day it is?"
On my saying that I did not understand, she went on
"It is the eve of St. George's Day. Do you not know that tonight,
when the clock strikes midnight, all the evil things in the world will
have full sway? Do you know where you are going, and what you are
going to?" She was in such evident distress that I tried to comfort
her, but without effect. Finally, she went down on her knees and
implored me not to go at least to wait a day or two before starting.
It was all very ridiculous but I did not feel comfortable. However,
there was business to be done, and I could allow nothing to interfere
with it.
I tried to raise her up, and said, as gravely as I could, that I
thanked her, but my duty was imperative, and that I must go.
She then rose and dried her eyes, and taking a crucifix from her neck
offered it to me.
I did not know what to do, for, as an English Churchman, I have been
taught to regard such things as in some measure idolatrous, and yet it
seemed so ungracious to refuse an old lady meaning so well and in such
a state of mind.
She saw, I suppose, the doubt in my face, for she put the rosary round
my neck and said, "For your mother's sake," and went out of the room.
I am writing up this part of the diary whilst I am waiting for the
coach, which is, of course, late and the crucifix is still round my
neck.
Whether it is the old lady's fear, or the many ghostly traditions of
this place, or the crucifix itself, I do not know, but I am not
feeling nearly as easy in my mind as usual.
If this book should ever reach Mina before I do, let it bring my
goodbye. Here comes the coach
 May. The Castle.The gray of the morning has passed, and the sun
is high over the distant horizon, which seems jagged, whether with
trees or hills I know not, for it is so far off that big things and
little are mixed.
I am not sleepy, and, as I am not to be called till I awake, naturally
I write till sleep comes.
There are many odd things to put down, and, lest who reads them may
fancy that I dined too well before I left Bistritz, let me put down my
dinner exactly.
I dined on what they called "robber steak"bits of bacon, onion, and
beef, seasoned with red pepper, and strung on sticks, and roasted over
the fire, in simple style of the London cat's meat
The wine was Golden Mediasch, which produces a queer sting on the
tongue, which is, however, not disagreeable.
I had only a couple of glasses of this, and nothing else.
When I got on the coach, the driver had not taken his seat, and I saw
him talking to the landlady.
They were evidently talking of me, for every now and then they looked
at me, and some of the people who were sitting on the bench outside
the doorcame and listened, and then looked at me, most of them
pityingly. I could hear a lot of words often repeated, queer words,
for there were many nationalities in the crowd, so I quietly got my
polyglot dictionary from my bag and looked them out.
I must say they were not cheering to me, for amongst them were
"Ordog"Satan, "Pokol"hell, "stregoica"witch, "vrolok" and
"vlkoslak"both mean the same thing, one being Slovak and the other
Servian for something that is either werewolf or vampire. Mem., I
must ask the Count about these superstitions.
When we started, the crowd round the inn door, which had by this time
swelled to a considerable size, all made the sign of the cross and
pointed two fingers towards me.
With some difficulty, I got a fellow passenger to tell me what they
meant. He would not answer at first, but on learning that I was
English, he explained that it was a charm or guard against the evil
eye.
This was not very pleasant for me, just starting for an unknown place
to meet an unknown man. But everyone seemed so kindhearted, and so
sorrowful, and so sympathetic that I could not but be touched.
I shall never forget the last glimpse which I had of the inn yard and
its crowd of picturesque figures, all crossing themselves, as they
stood round the wide archway, with its background of rich foliage of
oleander and orange trees in green tubs clustered in the centre of the
yard.
Then our driver, whose wide linen drawers covered the whole front of
the boxseat,"gotza" they call themcracked his big whip over his
four small horses, which ran abreast, and we set off on our journey.
I soon lost sight and recollection of ghostly fears in the beauty of
the scene as we drove along, although had I known the language, or
rather languages, which my fellowpassengers were speaking, I might
not have been able to throw them off so easily. Before us lay a green
sloping land full of forests and woods, with here and there steep
hills, crowned with clumps of trees or with farmhouses, the blank
gable end to the road. There was everywhere a bewildering mass of
fruit blossomapple, plum, pear, cherry. And as we drove by I could
see the green grass under the trees spangled with the fallen petals.
In and out amongst these green hills of what they call here the
"Mittel Land" ran the road, losing itself as it swept round the grassy
curve, or was shut out by the straggling ends of pine woods, which
here and there ran down the hillsides like tongues of flame. The road
was rugged, but still we seemed to fly over it with a feverish haste.
I could not understand then what the haste meant, but the driver was
evidently bent on losing no time in reaching Borgo Prund. I was told
that this road is in summertime excellent, but that it had not yet
been put in order after the winter snows. In this respect it is
different from the general run of roads in the Carpathians, for it is
an old tradition that they are not to be kept in too good order. Of
old the Hospadars would not repair them, lest the Turk should think
that they were preparing to bring in foreign troops, and so hasten the
war which was always really at loading point.
Beyond the green swelling hills of the Mittel Land rose mighty slopes
of forest up to the lofty steeps of the Carpathians themselves. Right
and left of us they towered, with the afternoon sun falling full upon
them and bringing out all the glorious colours of this beautiful
range, deep blue and purple in the shadows of the peaks, green and
brown where grass and rock mingled, and an endless perspective of
jagged rock and pointed crags, till these were themselves lost in the
distance, where the snowy peaks rose grandly. Here and there seemed
mighty rifts in the mountains, through which, as the sun began to
sink, we saw now and again the white gleam of falling water. One of
my companions touched my arm as we swept round the base of a hill and
opened up the lofty, snowcovered peak of a mountain, which seemed, as
we wound on our serpentine way, to be right before us.
"Look Isten szek""God's seat"and he crossed himself reverently.
As we wound on our endless way, and the sun sank lower and lower
behind us, the shadows of the evening began to creep round us. This
was emphasized by the fact that the snowy mountaintop still held the
sunset, and seemed to glow out with a delicate cool pink. Here and
there we passed Cszeks and slovaks, all in picturesque attire, but I
noticed that goitre was painfully prevalent. By the roadside were
many crosses, and as we swept by, my companions all crossed
themselves. Here and there was a peasant man or woman kneeling before
a shrine, who did not even turn round as we approached, but seemed in
the selfsurrender of devotion to have neither eyes nor ears for the
outer world. There were many things new to me. For instance,
hayricks in the trees, and here and there very beautiful masses of
weeping birch, their white stems shining like silver through the
delicate green of the leaves.
Now and again we passed a leiterwagonthe ordinary peasants's
cartwith its long, snakelike vertebra, calculated to suit the
inequalities of the road. On this were sure to be seated quite a
group of homecoming peasants, the Cszeks with their white, and the
Slovaks with their coloured sheepskins, the latter carrying
lancefashion their long staves, with axe at end. As the evening fell
it began to get very cold, and the growing twilight seemed to merge
into one dark mistiness the gloom of the trees, oak, beech, and pine,
though in the valleys which ran deep between the spurs of the hills,
as we ascended through the Pass, the dark firs stood out here and
there against the background of latelying snow. Sometimes, as the
road was cut through the pine woods that seemed in the darkness to be
closing down upon us, great masses of greyness which here and there
bestrewed the trees, produced a peculiarly weird and solemn effect,
which carried on the thoughts and grim fancies engendered earlier in
the evening, when the falling sunset threw into strange relief the
ghostlike clouds which amongst the Carpathians seem to wind
ceaselessly through the valleys. Sometimes the hills were so steep
that, despite our driver's haste, the horses could only go slowly. I
wished to get down and walk up them, as we do at home, but the driver
would not hear of it. "No, no," he said. "You must not walk here.
The dogs are too fierce." And then he added, with what he evidently
meant for grim pleasantryfor he looked round to catch the approving
smile of the rest"And you may have enough of such matters before you
go to sleep." The only stop he would make was a moment's pause to
light his lamps.
When it grew dark there seemed to be some excitement amongst the
passengers, and they kept speaking to him, one after the other, as
though urging him to further speed. He lashed the horses unmercifully
with his long whip, and with wild cries of encouragement urged them on
to further exertions. Then through the darkness I could see a sort of
patch of grey light ahead of us, as though there were a cleft in the
hills. The excitement of the passengers grew greater. The crazy
coach rocked on its great leather springs, and swayed like a boat
tossed on a stormy sea. I had to hold on. The road grew more level,
and we appeared to fly along. Then the mountains seemed to come
nearer to us on each side and to frown down upon us. We were entering
on the Borgo Pass. One by one several of the passengers offered me
gifts, which they pressed upon me with an earnestness which would take
no denial. These were certainly of an odd and varied kind, but each
was given in simple good faith, with a kindly word, and a blessing,
and that same strange mixture of fearmeaning movements which I had
seen outside the hotel at Bistritzthe sign of the cross and the
guard against the evil eye. Then, as we flew along, the driver leaned
forward, and on each side the passengers, craning over the edge of the
coach, peered eagerly into the darkness. It was evident that
something very exciting was either happening or expected, but though I
asked each passenger, no one would give me the slightest explanation.
This state of excitement kept on for some little time. And at last we
saw before us the Pass opening out on the eastern side. There were
dark, rolling clouds overhead, and in the air the heavy, oppressive
sense of thunder. It seemed as though the mountain range had
separated two atmospheres, and that now we had got into the thunderous
one. I was now myself looking out for the conveyance which was to
take me to the Count. Each moment I expected to see the glare of
lamps through the blackness, but all was dark. The only light was the
flickering rays of our own lamps, in which the steam from our
harddriven horses rose in a white cloud. We could see now the sandy
road lying white before us, but there was on it no sign of a vehicle.
The passengers drew back with a sigh of gladness, which seemed to mock
my own disappointment. I was already thinking what I had best do,
when the driver, looking at his watch, said to the others something
which I could hardly hear, it was spoken so quietly and in so low a
tone, I thought it was "An hour less than the time." Then turning to
me, he spoke in German worse than my own.
"There is no carriage here. The Herr is not expected after all. He
will now come on to Bukovina, and return tomorrow or the next day,
better the next day." Whilst he was speaking the horses began to
neigh and snort and plunge wildly, so that the driver had to hold them
up. Then, amongst a chorus of screams from the peasants and a
universal crossing of themselves, a caleche, with four horses, drove
up behind us, overtook us, and drew up beside the coach. I could see
from the flash of our lamps as the rays fell on them, that the horses
were coalblack and splendid animals. They were driven by a tall man,
with a long brown beard and a great black hat, which seemed to hide
his face from us. I could only see the gleam of a pair of very bright
eyes, which seemed red in the lamplight, as he turned to us.
He said to the driver, "You are early tonight, my friend."
The man stammered in reply, "The English Herr was in a hurry."
To which the stranger replied, "That is why, I suppose, you wished him
to go on to Bukovina. You cannot deceive me, my friend. I know too
much, and my horses are swift."
As he spoke he smiled, and the lamplight fell on a hardlooking mouth,
with very red lips and sharplooking teeth, as white as ivory. One of
my companions whispered to another the line from Burger's "Lenore".
"Denn die Todten reiten Schnell." "For the dead travel fast."
The strange driver evidently heard the words, for he looked up with a
gleaming smile. The passenger turned his face away, at the same time
putting out his two fingers and crossing himself. "Give me the Herr's
luggage," said the driver, and with exceeding alacrity my bags were
handed out and put in the caleche. Then I descended from the side of
the coach, as the caleche was close alongside, the driver helping me
with a hand which caught my arm in a grip of steel. His strength must
have been prodigious.
Without a word he shook his reins, the horses turned, and we swept
into the darkness of the pass. As I looked back I saw the steam from
the horses of the coach by the light of the lamps, and projected
against it the figures of my late companions crossing themselves.
Then the driver cracked his whip and called to his horses, and off
they swept on their way to Bukovina. As they sank into the darkness I
felt a strange chill, and a lonely feeling come over me. But a cloak
was thrown over my shoulders, and a rug across my knees, and the
driver said in excellent German"The night is chill, mein Herr, and
my master the Count bade me take all care of you. There is a flask of
slivovitz the plum brandy of the country underneath the seat, if you
should require it."
I did not take any, but it was a comfort to know it was there all the
same. I felt a little strangely, and not a little frightened. I
think had there been any alternative I should have taken it, instead
of prosecuting that unknown night journey. The carriage went at a
hard pace straight along, then we made a complete turn and went along
another straight road. It seemed to me that we were simply going over
and over the same ground again, and so I took note of some salient
point, and found that this was so. I would have liked to have asked
the driver what this all meant, but I really feared to do so, for I
thought that, placed as I was, any protest would have had no effect in
case there had been an intention to delay.
Byandby, however, as I was curious to know how time was passing, I
struck a match, and by its flame looked at my watch. It was within a
few minutes of midnight. This gave me a sort of shock, for I suppose
the general superstition about midnight was increased by my recent
experiences. I waited with a sick feeling of suspense.
Then a dog began to howl somewhere in a farmhouse far down the road, a
long, agonized wailing, as if from fear. The sound was taken up by
another dog, and then another and another, till, borne on the wind
which now sighed softly through the Pass, a wild howling began, which
seemed to come from all over the country, as far as the imagination
could grasp it through the gloom of the night.
At the first howl the horses began to strain and rear, but the driver
spoke to them soothingly, and they quieted down, but shivered and
sweated as though after a runaway from sudden fright. Then, far off
in the distance, from the mountains on each side of us began a louder
and a sharper howling, that of wolves, which affected both the horses
and myself in the same way. For I was minded to jump from the caleche
and run, whilst they reared again and plunged madly, so that the
driver had to use all his great strength to keep them from bolting.
In a few minutes, however, my own ears got accustomed to the sound,
and the horses so far became quiet that the driver was able to descend
and to stand before them.
He petted and soothed them, and whispered something in their ears, as
I have heard of horsetamers doing, and with extraordinary effect, for
under his caresses they became quite manageable again, though they
still trembled. The driver again took his seat, and shaking his
reins, started off at a great pace. This time, after going to the far
side of the Pass, he suddenly turned down a narrow roadway which ran
sharply to the right.
Soon we were hemmed in with trees, which in places arched right over
the roadway till we passed as through a tunnel. And again great
frowning rocks guarded us boldly on either side. Though we were in
shelter, we could hear the rising wind, for it moaned and whistled
through the rocks, and the branches of the trees crashed together as
we swept along. It grew colder and colder still, and fine, powdery
snow began to fall, so that soon we and all around us were covered
with a white blanket. The keen wind still carried the howling of the
dogs, though this grew fainter as we went on our way. The baying of
the wolves sounded nearer and nearer, as though they were closing
round on us from every side. I grew dreadfully afraid, and the horses
shared my fear. The driver, however, was not in the least disturbed.
He kept turning his head to left and right, but I could not see
anything through the darkness.
Suddenly, away on our left I saw a faint flickering blue flame. The
driver saw it at the same moment. He at once checked the horses, and,
jumping to the ground, disappeared into the darkness. I did not know
what to do, the less as the howling of the wolves grew closer. But
while I wondered, the driver suddenly appeared again, and without a
word took his seat, and we resumed our journey. I think I must have
fallen asleep and kept dreaming of the incident, for it seemed to be
repeated endlessly, and now looking back, it is like a sort of awful
nightmare. Once the flame appeared so near the road, that even in the
darkness around us I could watch the driver's motions. He went
rapidly to where the blue flame arose, it must have been very faint,
for it did not seem to illumine the place around it at all, and
gathering a few stones, formed them into some device.
Once there appeared a strange optical effect. When he stood between
me and the flame he did not obstruct it, for I could see its ghostly
flicker all the same. This startled me, but as the effect was only
momentary, I took it that my eyes deceived me straining through the
darkness. Then for a time there were no blue flames, and we sped
onwards through the gloom, with the howling of the wolves around us,
as though they were following in a moving circle.
At last there came a time when the driver went further afield than he
had yet gone, and during his absence, the horses began to tremble
worse than ever and to snort and scream with fright. I could not see
any cause for it, for the howling of the wolves had ceased altogether.
But just then the moon, sailing through the black clouds, appeared
behind the jagged crest of a beetling, pineclad rock, and by its
light I saw around us a ring of wolves, with white teeth and lolling
red tongues, with long, sinewy limbs and shaggy hair. They were a
hundred times more terrible in the grim silence which held them than
even when they howled. For myself, I felt a sort of paralysis of
fear. It is only when a man feels himself face to face with such
horrors that he can understand their true import.
All at once the wolves began to howl as though the moonlight had had
some peculiar effect on them. The horses jumped about and reared, and
looked helplessly round with eyes that rolled in a way painful to
see. But the living ring of terror encompassed them on every side,
and they had perforce to remain within it. I called to the coachman
to come, for it seemed to me that our only chance was to try to break
out through the ring and to aid his approach, I shouted and beat the
side of the caleche, hoping by the noise to scare the wolves from the
side, so as to give him a chance of reaching the trap. How he came
there, I know not, but I heard his voice raised in a tone of imperious
command, and looking towards the sound, saw him stand in the roadway.
As he swept his long arms, as though brushing aside some impalpable
obstacle, the wolves fell back and back further still. Just then a
heavy cloud passed across the face of the moon, so that we were again
in darkness.
When I could see again the driver was climbing into the caleche, and
the wolves disappeared. This was all so strange and uncanny that a
dreadful fear came upon me, and I was afraid to speak or move. The
time seemed interminable as we swept on our way, now in almost
complete darkness, for the rolling clouds obscured the moon.
We kept on ascending, with occasional periods of quick descent, but in
the main always ascending. Suddenly, I became conscious of the fact
that the driver was in the act of pulling up the horses in the
courtyard of a vast ruined castle, from whose tall black windows came
no ray of light, and whose broken battlements showed a jagged line
against the sky.
CHAPTER 
Jonathan Harker's Journal Continued
 May.I must have been asleep, for certainly if I had been fully
awake I must have noticed the approach of such a remarkable place. In
the gloom the courtyard looked of considerable size, and as several
dark ways led from it under great round arches, it perhaps seemed
bigger than it really is. I have not yet been able to see it by
daylight.
When the caleche stopped, the driver jumped down and held out his hand
to assist me to alight. Again I could not but notice his prodigious
strength. His hand actually seemed like a steel vice that could have
crushed mine if he had chosen. Then he took my traps, and placed them
on the ground beside me as I stood close to a great door, old and
studded with large iron nails, and set in a projecting doorway of
massive stone. I could see even in the dim light that the stone was
massively carved, but that the carving had been much worn by time and
weather. As I stood, the driver jumped again into his seat and shook
the reins. The horses started forward, and trap and all disappeared
down one of the dark openings.
I stood in silence where I was, for I did not know what to do. Of
bell or knocker there was no sign. Through these frowning walls and
dark window openings it was not likely that my voice could penetrate.
The time I waited seemed endless, and I felt doubts and fears crowding
upon me. What sort of place had I come to, and among what kind of
people? What sort of grim adventure was it on which I had embarked?
Was this a customary incident in the life of a solicitor's clerk sent
out to explain the purchase of a London estate to a foreigner?
Solicitor's clerk Mina would not like that. Solicitor, for just
before leaving London I got word that my examination was successful,
and I am now a fullblown solicitor I began to rub my eyes and pinch
myself to see if I were awake. It all seemed like a horrible
nightmare to me, and I expected that I should suddenly awake, and find
myself at home, with the dawn struggling in through the windows, as I
had now and again felt in the morning after a day of overwork. But my
flesh answered the pinching test, and my eyes were not to be
deceived. I was indeed awake and among the Carpathians. All I could
do now was to be patient, and to wait the coming of morning.
Just as I had come to this conclusion I heard a heavy step approaching
behind the great door, and saw through the chinks the gleam of a
coming light. Then there was the sound of rattling chains and the
clanking of massive bolts drawn back. A key was turned with the loud
grating noise of long disuse, and the great door swung back.
Within, stood a tall old man, clean shaven save for a long white
moustache, and clad in black from head to foot, without a single speck
of colour about him anywhere. He held in his hand an antique silver
lamp, in which the flame burned without a chimney or globe of any
kind, throwing long quivering shadows as it flickered in the draught
of the open door. The old man motioned me in with his right hand with
a courtly gesture, saying in excellent English, but with a strange
intonation.
"Welcome to my house Enter freely and of your own free will" He
made no motion of stepping to meet me, but stood like a statue, as
though his gesture of welcome had fixed him into stone. The instant,
however, that I had stepped over the threshold, he moved impulsively
forward, and holding out his hand grasped mine with a strength which
made me wince, an effect which was not lessened by the fact that it
seemed cold as ice, more like the hand of a dead than a living man.
Again he said,
"Welcome to my house Enter freely. Go safely, and leave something
of the happiness you bring" The strength of the handshake was so
much akin to that which I had noticed in the driver, whose face I had
not seen, that for a moment I doubted if it were not the same person
to whom I was speaking. So to make sure, I said interrogatively,
"Count Dracula?"
He bowed in a courtly way as he replied, "I am Dracula, and I bid you
welcome, Mr. Harker, to my house. Come in, the night air is chill,
and you must need to eat and rest." As he was speaking, he put the lamp
on a bracket on the wall, and stepping out, took my luggage. He had
carried it in before I could forestall him. I protested, but he
insisted.
"Nay, sir, you are my guest. It is late, and my people are not
available. Let me see to your comfort myself." He insisted on carrying
my traps along the passage, and then up a great winding stair, and
along another great passage, on whose stone floor our steps rang
heavily. At the end of this he threw open a heavy door, and I
rejoiced to see within a welllit room in which a table was spread for
supper, and on whose mighty hearth a great fire of logs, freshly
replenished, flamed and flared.
The Count halted, putting down my bags, closed the door, and crossing
the room, opened another door, which led into a small octagonal room
lit by a single lamp, and seemingly without a window of any sort.
Passing through this, he opened another door, and motioned me to
enter. It was a welcome sight. For here was a great bedroom well
lighted and warmed with another log fire, also added to but lately,
for the top logs were fresh, which sent a hollow roar up the wide
chimney. The Count himself left my luggage inside and withdrew,
saying, before he closed the door.
"You will need, after your journey, to refresh yourself by making your
toilet. I trust you will find all you wish. When you are ready, come
into the other room, where you will find your supper prepared."
The light and warmth and the Count's courteous welcome seemed to have
dissipated all my doubts and fears. Having then reached my normal
state, I discovered that I was half famished with hunger. So making a
hasty toilet, I went into the other room.
I found supper already laid out. My host, who stood on one side of
the great fireplace, leaning against the stonework, made a graceful
wave of his hand to the table, and said,
"I pray you, be seated and sup how you please. You will I trust,
excuse me that I do not join you, but I have dined already, and I do
not sup."
I handed to him the sealed letter which Mr. Hawkins had entrusted to
me. He opened it and read it gravely. Then, with a charming smile,
he handed it to me to read. One passage of it, at least, gave me a
thrill of pleasure.
"I must regret that an attack of gout, from which malady I am a
constant sufferer, forbids absolutely any travelling on my part for
some time to come. But I am happy to say I can send a sufficient
substitute, one in whom I have every possible confidence. He is a
young man, full of energy and talent in his own way, and of a very
faithful disposition. He is discreet and silent, and has grown into
manhood in my service. He shall be ready to attend on you when you
will during his stay, and shall take your instructions in all
matters."
The count himself came forward and took off the cover of a dish, and I
fell to at once on an excellent roast chicken. This, with some cheese
and a salad and a bottle of old tokay, of which I had two glasses, was
my supper. During the time I was eating it the Count asked me many
questions as to my journey, and I told him by degrees all I had
experienced.
By this time I had finished my supper, and by my host's desire had
drawn up a chair by the fire and begun to smoke a cigar which he
offered me, at the same time excusing himself that he did not smoke.
I had now an opportunity of observing him, and found him of a very
marked physiognomy.
His face was a strong, a very strong, aquiline, with high bridge of
the thin nose and peculiarly arched nostrils, with lofty domed
forehead, and hair growing scantily round the temples but profusely
elsewhere. His eyebrows were very massive, almost meeting over the
nose, and with bushy hair that seemed to curl in its own profusion.
The mouth, so far as I could see it under the heavy moustache, was
fixed and rather cruellooking, with peculiarly sharp white teeth.
These protruded over the lips, whose remarkable ruddiness showed
astonishing vitality in a man of his years. For the rest, his ears
were pale, and at the tops extremely pointed. The chin was broad and
strong, and the cheeks firm though thin. The general effect was one
of extraordinary pallor.
Hitherto I had noticed the backs of his hands as they lay on his knees
in the firelight, and they had seemed rather white and fine. But
seeing them now close to me, I could not but notice that they were
rather coarse, broad, with squat fingers. Strange to say, there were
hairs in the centre of the palm. The nails were long and fine, and
cut to a sharp point. As the Count leaned over me and his hands
touched me, I could not repress a shudder. It may have been that his
breath was rank, but a horrible feeling of nausea came over me, which,
do what I would, I could not conceal.
The Count, evidently noticing it, drew back. And with a grim sort of
smile, which showed more than he had yet done his protruberant teeth,
sat himself down again on his own side of the fireplace. We were both
silent for a while, and as I looked towards the window I saw the first
dim streak of the coming dawn. There seemed a strange stillness over
everything. But as I listened, I heard as if from down below in the
valley the howling of many wolves. The Count's eyes gleamed, and he
said.
"Listen to them, the children of the night. What music they make"
Seeing, I suppose, some expression in my face strange to him, he
added, "Ah, sir, you dwellers in the city cannot enter into the
feelings of the hunter." Then he rose and said.
"But you must be tired. Your bedroom is all ready, and tomorrow you
shall sleep as late as you will. I have to be away till the
afternoon, so sleep well and dream well" With a courteous bow, he
opened for me himself the door to the octagonal room, and I entered my
bedroom.
I am all in a sea of wonders. I doubt. I fear. I think strange
things, which I dare not confess to my own soul. God keep me, if only
for the sake of those dear to me
 May.It is again early morning, but I have rested and enjoyed the
last twentyfour hours. I slept till late in the day, and awoke of my
own accord. When I had dressed myself I went into the room where we
had supped, and found a cold breakfast laid out, with coffee kept hot
by the pot being placed on the hearth. There was a card on the table,
on which was written"I have to be absent for a while. Do not wait
for me. D." I set to and enjoyed a hearty meal. When I had done, I
looked for a bell, so that I might let the servants know I had
finished, but I could not find one. There are certainly odd
deficiencies in the house, considering the extraordinary evidences of
wealth which are round me. The table service is of gold, and so
beautifully wrought that it must be of immense value. The curtains
and upholstery of the chairs and sofas and the hangings of my bed are
of the costliest and most beautiful fabrics, and must have been of
fabulous value when they were made, for they are centuries old, though
in excellent order. I saw something like them in Hampton Court, but
they were worn and frayed and motheaten. But still in none of the
rooms is there a mirror. There is not even a toilet glass on my
table, and I had to get the little shaving glass from my bag before I
could either shave or brush my hair. I have not yet seen a servant
anywhere, or heard a sound near the castle except the howling of
wolves. Some time after I had finished my meal, I do not know whether
to call it breakfast or dinner, for it was between five and six
o'clock when I had it, I looked about for something to read, for I did
not like to go about the castle until I had asked the Count's
permission. There was absolutely nothing in the room, book,
newspaper, or even writing materials, so I opened another door in the
room and found a sort of library. The door opposite mine I tried, but
found locked.
In the library I found, to my great delight, a vast number of English
books, whole shelves full of them, and bound volumes of magazines and
newspapers. A table in the centre was littered with English magazines
and newspapers, though none of them were of very recent date. The
books were of the most varied kind, history, geography, politics,
political economy, botany, geology, law, all relating to England and
English life and customs and manners. There were even such books of
reference as the London Directory, the "Red" and "Blue" books,
Whitaker's Almanac, the Army and Navy Lists, and it somehow gladdened
my heart to see it, the Law List.
Whilst I was looking at the books, the door opened, and the Count
entered. He saluted me in a hearty way, and hoped that I had had a
good night's rest. Then he went on.
"I am glad you found your way in here, for I am sure there is much
that will interest you. These companions," and he laid his hand on
some of the books, "have been good friends to me, and for some years
past, ever since I had the idea of going to London, have given me
many, many hours of pleasure. Through them I have come to know your
great England, and to know her is to love her. I long to go through
the crowded streets of your mighty London, to be in the midst of the
whirl and rush of humanity, to share its life, its change, its death,
and all that makes it what it is. But alas As yet I only know your
tongue through books. To you, my friend, I look that I know it to
speak."
"But, Count," I said, "You know and speak English thoroughly" He
bowed gravely.
"I thank you, my friend, for your all tooflattering estimate, but yet
I fear that I am but a little way on the road I would travel. True, I
know the grammar and the words, but yet I know not how to speak them."
"Indeed," I said, "You speak excellently."
"Not so," he answered. "Well, I know that, did I move and speak in
your London, none there are who would not know me for a stranger. That
is not enough for me. Here I am noble. I am a Boyar. The common
people know me, and I am master. But a stranger in a strange land, he
is no one. Men know him not, and to know not is to care not for. I
am content if I am like the rest, so that no man stops if he sees me,
or pauses in his speaking if he hears my words, 'Ha, ha A stranger'
I have been so long master that I would be master still, or at least
that none other should be master of me. You come to me not alone as
agent of my friend Peter Hawkins, of Exeter, to tell me all about my
new estate in London. You shall, I trust, rest here with me a while,
so that by our talking I may learn the English intonation. And I
would that you tell me when I make error, even of the smallest, in my
speaking. I am sorry that I had to be away so long today, but you
will, I know forgive one who has so many important affairs in hand."
Of course I said all I could about being willing, and asked if I might
come into that room when I chose. He answered, "Yes, certainly," and
added.
"You may go anywhere you wish in the castle, except where the doors
are locked, where of course you will not wish to go. There is reason
that all things are as they are, and did you see with my eyes and know
with my knowledge, you would perhaps better understand." I said I was
sure of this, and then he went on.
"We are in Transylvania, and Transylvania is not England. Our ways
are not your ways, and there shall be to you many strange things. Nay,
from what you have told me of your experiences already, you know
something of what strange things there may be."
This led to much conversation, and as it was evident that he wanted to
talk, if only for talking's sake, I asked him many questions regarding
things that had already happened to me or come within my notice.
Sometimes he sheered off the subject, or turned the conversation by
pretending not to understand, but generally he answered all I asked
most frankly. Then as time went on, and I had got somewhat bolder, I
asked him of some of the strange things of the preceding night, as for
instance, why the coachman went to the places where he had seen the
blue flames. He then explained to me that it was commonly believed
that on a certain night of the year, last night, in fact, when all
evil spirits are supposed to have unchecked sway, a blue flame is seen
over any place where treasure has been concealed.
"That treasure has been hidden," he went on, "in the region through
which you came last night, there can be but little doubt. For it was
the ground fought over for centuries by the Wallachian, the Saxon, and
the Turk. Why, there is hardly a foot of soil in all this region that
has not been enriched by the blood of men, patriots or invaders. In
the old days there were stirring times, when the Austrian and the
Hungarian came up in hordes, and the patriots went out to meet them,
men and women, the aged and the children too, and waited their coming
on the rocks above the passes, that they might sweep destruction on
them with their artificial avalanches. When the invader was
triumphant he found but little, for whatever there was had been
sheltered in the friendly soil."
"But how," said I, "can it have remained so long undiscovered, when
there is a sure index to it if men will but take the trouble to look?"
The Count smiled, and as his lips ran back over his gums, the long,
sharp, canine teeth showed out strangely. He answered
"Because your peasant is at heart a coward and a fool Those flames
only appear on one night, and on that night no man of this land will,
if he can help it, stir without his doors. And, dear sir, even if he
did he would not know what to do. Why, even the peasant that you tell
me of who marked the place of the flame would not know where to look
in daylight even for his own work. Even you would not, I dare be
sworn, be able to find these places again?"
"There you are right," I said. "I know no more than the dead where
even to look for them." Then we drifted into other matters.
"Come," he said at last, "tell me of London and of the house which you
have procured for me." With an apology for my remissness, I went into
my own room to get the papers from my bag. Whilst I was placing them
in order I heard a rattling of china and silver in the next room, and
as I passed through, noticed that the table had been cleared and the
lamp lit, for it was by this time deep into the dark. The lamps were
also lit in the study or library, and I found the Count lying on the
sofa, reading, of all things in the world, an English Bradshaw's
Guide. When I came in he cleared the books and papers from the table,
and with him I went into plans and deeds and figures of all sorts. He
was interested in everything, and asked me a myriad questions about
the place and its surroundings. He clearly had studied beforehand all
he could get on the subject of the neighbourhood, for he evidently at
the end knew very much more than I did. When I remarked this, he
answered.
"Well, but, my friend, is it not needful that I should? When I go
there I shall be all alone, and my friend Harker Jonathan, nay, pardon
me. I fall into my country's habit of putting your patronymic first,
my friend Jonathan Harker will not be by my side to correct and aid
me. He will be in Exeter, miles away, probably working at papers of
the law with my other friend, Peter Hawkins. So"
We went thoroughly into the business of the purchase of the estate at
Purfleet. When I had told him the facts and got his signature to the
necessary papers, and had written a letter with them ready to post to
Mr. Hawkins, he began to ask me how I had come across so suitable a
place. I read to him the notes which I had made at the time, and
which I inscribe here.
"At Purfleet, on a byroad, I came across just such a place as seemed
to be required, and where was displayed a dilapidated notice that the
place was for sale. It was surrounded by a high wall, of ancient
structure, built of heavy stones, and has not been repaired for a
large number of years. The closed gates are of heavy old oak and
iron, all eaten with rust.
"The estate is called Carfax, no doubt a corruption of the old Quatre
Face, as the house is four sided, agreeing with the cardinal points of
the compass. It contains in all some twenty acres, quite surrounded
by the solid stone wall above mentioned. There are many trees on it,
which make it in places gloomy, and there is a deep, darklooking pond
or small lake, evidently fed by some springs, as the water is clear
and flows away in a fairsized stream. The house is very large and of
all periods back, I should say, to mediaeval times, for one part is of
stone immensely thick, with only a few windows high up and heavily
barred with iron. It looks like part of a keep, and is close to an
old chapel or church. I could not enter it, as I had not the key of
the door leading to it from the house, but I have taken with my Kodak
views of it from various points. The house had been added to, but in
a very straggling way, and I can only guess at the amount of ground it
covers, which must be very great. There are but few houses close at
hand, one being a very large house only recently added to and formed
into a private lunatic asylum. It is not, however, visible from the
grounds."
When I had finished, he said, "I am glad that it is old and big. I
myself am of an old family, and to live in a new house would kill me.
A house cannot be made habitable in a day, and after all, how few days
go to make up a century. I rejoice also that there is a chapel of old
times. We Transylvanian nobles love not to think that our bones may
lie amongst the common dead. I seek not gaiety nor mirth, not the
bright voluptuousness of much sunshine and sparkling waters which
please the young and gay. I am no longer young, and my heart, through
weary years of mourning over the dead, is not attuned to mirth. Moreover,
the walls of my castle are broken. The shadows are many, and the wind
breathes cold through the broken battlements and casements. I love
the shade and the shadow, and would be alone with my thoughts when I
may." Somehow his words and his look did not seem to accord, or else
it was that his cast of face made his smile look malignant and
saturnine.
Presently, with an excuse, he left me, asking me to pull my papers
together. He was some little time away, and I began to look at some
of the books around me. One was an atlas, which I found opened
naturally to England, as if that map had been much used. On looking
at it I found in certain places little rings marked, and on examining
these I noticed that one was near London on the east side, manifestly
where his new estate was situated. The other two were Exeter, and
Whitby on the Yorkshire coast.
It was the better part of an hour when the Count returned. "Aha" he
said. "Still at your books? Good But you must not work always.
Come I am informed that your supper is ready." He took my arm, and
we went into the next room, where I found an excellent supper ready on
the table. The Count again excused himself, as he had dined out on
his being away from home. But he sat as on the previous night, and
chatted whilst I ate. After supper I smoked, as on the last evening,
and the Count stayed with me, chatting and asking questions on every
conceivable subject, hour after hour. I felt that it was getting very
late indeed, but I did not say anything, for I felt under obligation
to meet my host's wishes in every way. I was not sleepy, as the long
sleep yesterday had fortified me, but I could not help experiencing
that chill which comes over one at the coming of the dawn, which is
like, in its way, the turn of the tide. They say that people who are
near death die generally at the change to dawn or at the turn of the
tide. Anyone who has when tired, and tied as it were to his post,
experienced this change in the atmosphere can well believe it. All at
once we heard the crow of the cock coming up with preternatural
shrillness through the clear morning air.
Count Dracula, jumping to his feet, said, "Why there is the morning
again How remiss I am to let you stay up so long. You must make
your conversation regarding my dear new country of England less
interesting, so that I may not forget how time flies by us," and with
a courtly bow, he quickly left me.
I went into my room and drew the curtains, but there was little to
notice. My window opened into the courtyard, all I could see was the
warm grey of quickening sky. So I pulled the curtains again, and have
written of this day.
 May.I began to fear as I wrote in this book that I was getting too
diffuse. But now I am glad that I went into detail from the first,
for there is something so strange about this place and all in it that
I cannot but feel uneasy. I wish I were safe out of it, or that I had
never come. It may be that this strange night existence is telling on
me, but would that that were all If there were any one to talk to I
could bear it, but there is no one. I have only the Count to speak
with, and heI fear I am myself the only living soul within the
place. Let me be prosaic so far as facts can be. It will help me to
bear up, and imagination must not run riot with me. If it does I am
lost. Let me say at once how I stand, or seem to.
I only slept a few hours when I went to bed, and feeling that I could
not sleep any more, got up. I had hung my shaving glass by the
window, and was just beginning to shave. Suddenly I felt a hand on my
shoulder, and heard the Count's voice saying to me, "Good morning." I
started, for it amazed me that I had not seen him, since the
reflection of the glass covered the whole room behind me. In starting
I had cut myself slightly, but did not notice it at the moment. Having
answered the Count's salutation, I turned to the glass again to see
how I had been mistaken. This time there could be no error, for the
man was close to me, and I could see him over my shoulder. But there
was no reflection of him in the mirror The whole room behind me was
displayed, but there was no sign of a man in it, except myself.
This was startling, and coming on the top of so many strange things,
was beginning to increase that vague feeling of uneasiness which I
always have when the Count is near. But at the instant I saw that the
cut had bled a little, and the blood was trickling over my chin. I
laid down the razor, turning as I did so half round to look for some
sticking plaster. When the Count saw my face, his eyes blazed with a
sort of demoniac fury, and he suddenly made a grab at my throat. I
drew away and his hand touched the string of beads which held the
crucifix. It made an instant change in him, for the fury passed so
quickly that I could hardly believe that it was ever there.
"Take care," he said, "take care how you cut yourself. It is more
dangerous that you think in this country." Then seizing the shaving
glass, he went on, "And this is the wretched thing that has done the
mischief. It is a foul bauble of man's vanity. Away with it" And
opening the window with one wrench of his terrible hand, he flung out
the glass, which was shattered into a thousand pieces on the stones of
the courtyard far below. Then he withdrew without a word. It is very
annoying, for I do not see how I am to shave, unless in my watchcase
or the bottom of the shaving pot, which is fortunately of metal.
When I went into the dining room, breakfast was prepared, but I could
not find the Count anywhere. So I breakfasted alone. It is strange
that as yet I have not seen the Count eat or drink. He must be a very
peculiar man After breakfast I did a little exploring in the
castle. I went out on the stairs, and found a room looking towards
the South.
The view was magnificent, and from where I stood there was every
opportunity of seeing it. The castle is on the very edge of a
terrific precipice. A stone falling from the window would fall a
thousand feet without touching anything As far as the eye can reach
is a sea of green tree tops, with occasionally a deep rift where there
is a chasm. Here and there are silver threads where the rivers wind
in deep gorges through the forests.
But I am not in heart to describe beauty, for when I had seen the view
I explored further. Doors, doors, doors everywhere, and all locked
and bolted. In no place save from the windows in the castle walls is
there an available exit. The castle is a veritable prison, and I am a
prisoner
CHAPTER 
Jonathan Harker's Journal Continued
When I found that I was a prisoner a sort of wild feeling came over
me. I rushed up and down the stairs, trying every door and peering
out of every window I could find, but after a little the conviction of
my helplessness overpowered all other feelings. When I look back
after a few hours I think I must have been mad for the time, for I
behaved much as a rat does in a trap. When, however, the conviction
had come to me that I was helpless I sat down quietly, as quietly as I
have ever done anything in my life, and began to think over what was
best to be done. I am thinking still, and as yet have come to no
definite conclusion. Of one thing only am I certain. That it is no
use making my ideas known to the Count. He knows well that I am
imprisoned, and as he has done it himself, and has doubtless his own
motives for it, he would only deceive me if I trusted him fully with
the facts. So far as I can see, my only plan will be to keep my
knowledge and my fears to myself, and my eyes open. I am, I know,
either being deceived, like a baby, by my own fears, or else I am in
desperate straits, and if the latter be so, I need, and shall need,
all my brains to get through.
I had hardly come to this conclusion when I heard the great door below
shut, and knew that the Count had returned. He did not come at once
into the library, so I went cautiously to my own room and found him
making the bed. This was odd, but only confirmed what I had all along
thought, that there are no servants in the house. When later I saw
him through the chink of the hinges of the door laying the table in
the dining room, I was assured of it. For if he does himself all
these menial offices, surely it is proof that there is no one else in
the castle, it must have been the Count himself who was the driver of
the coach that brought me here. This is a terrible thought, for if
so, what does it mean that he could control the wolves, as he did, by
only holding up his hand for silence? How was it that all the people
at Bistritz and on the coach had some terrible fear for me? What
meant the giving of the crucifix, of the garlic, of the wild rose, of
the mountain ash?
Bless that good, good woman who hung the crucifix round my neck For
it is a comfort and a strength to me whenever I touch it. It is odd
that a thing which I have been taught to regard with disfavour and as
idolatrous should in a time of loneliness and trouble be of help. Is
it that there is something in the essence of the thing itself, or that
it is a medium, a tangible help, in conveying memories of sympathy and
comfort? Some time, if it may be, I must examine this matter and try
to make up my mind about it. In the meantime I must find out all I
can about Count Dracula, as it may help me to understand. Tonight he
may talk of himself, if I turn the conversation that way. I must be
very careful, however, not to awake his suspicion.
Midnight.I have had a long talk with the Count. I asked him a few
questions on Transylvania history, and he warmed up to the subject
wonderfully. In his speaking of things and people, and especially of
battles, he spoke as if he had been present at them all. This he
afterwards explained by saying that to a Boyar the pride of his house
and name is his own pride, that their glory is his glory, that their
fate is his fate. Whenever he spoke of his house he always said "we",
and spoke almost in the plural, like a king speaking. I wish I could
put down all he said exactly as he said it, for to me it was most
fascinating. It seemed to have in it a whole history of the country.
He grew excited as he spoke, and walked about the room pulling his
great white moustache and grasping anything on which he laid his hands
as though he would crush it by main strength. One thing he said which
I shall put down as nearly as I can, for it tells in its way the story
of his race.
"We Szekelys have a right to be proud, for in our veins flows the
blood of many brave races who fought as the lion fights, for lordship.
Here, in the whirlpool of European races, the Ugric tribe bore down
from Iceland the fighting spirit which Thor and Wodin gave them, which
their Berserkers displayed to such fell intent on the seaboards of
Europe, aye, and of Asia and Africa too, till the peoples thought that
the werewolves themselves had come. Here, too, when they came, they
found the Huns, whose warlike fury had swept the earth like a living
flame, till the dying peoples held that in their veins ran the blood
of those old witches, who, expelled from Scythia had mated with the
devils in the desert. Fools, fools What devil or what witch was
ever so great as Attila, whose blood is in these veins?" He held up
his arms. "Is it a wonder that we were a conquering race, that we
were proud, that when the Magyar, the Lombard, the Avar, the Bulgar,
or the Turk poured his thousands on our frontiers, we drove them back?
Is it strange that when Arpad and his legions swept through the
Hungarian fatherland he found us here when he reached the frontier,
that the Honfoglalas was completed there? And when the Hungarian
flood swept eastward, the Szekelys were claimed as kindred by the
victorious Magyars, and to us for centuries was trusted the guarding
of the frontier of Turkeyland. Aye, and more than that, endless duty
of the frontier guard, for as the Turks say, 'water sleeps, and the
enemy is sleepless.' Who more gladly than we throughout the Four
Nations received the 'bloody sword,' or at its warlike call flocked
quicker to the standard of the King? When was redeemed that great
shame of my nation, the shame of Cassova, when the flags of the
Wallach and the Magyar went down beneath the Crescent? Who was it but
one of my own race who as Voivode crossed the Danube and beat the Turk
on his own ground? This was a Dracula indeed Woe was it that his
own unworthy brother, when he had fallen, sold his people to the Turk
and brought the shame of slavery on them Was it not this Dracula,
indeed, who inspired that other of his race who in a later age again
and again brought his forces over the great river into Turkeyland,
who, when he was beaten back, came again, and again, though he had to
come alone from the bloody field where his troops were being
slaughtered, since he knew that he alone could ultimately triumph
They said that he thought only of himself. Bah What good are
peasants without a leader? Where ends the war without a brain and
heart to conduct it? Again, when, after the battle of Mohacs, we
threw off the Hungarian yoke, we of the Dracula blood were amongst
their leaders, for our spirit would not brook that we were not free.
Ah, young sir, the Szekelys, and the Dracula as their heart's blood,
their brains, and their swords, can boast a record that mushroom
growths like the Hapsburgs and the Romanoffs can never reach. The
warlike days are over. Blood is too precious a thing in these days of
dishonourable peace, and the glories of the great races are as a tale
that is told."
It was by this time close on morning, and we went to bed. Mem., this
diary seems horribly like the beginning of the "Arabian Nights," for
everything has to break off at cockcrow, or like the ghost of Hamlet's
father.
 May.Let me begin with facts, bare, meager facts, verified by
books and figures, and of which there can be no doubt. I must not
confuse them with experiences which will have to rest on my own
observation, or my memory of them. Last evening when the Count came
from his room he began by asking me questions on legal matters and on
the doing of certain kinds of business. I had spent the day wearily
over books, and, simply to keep my mind occupied, went over some of
the matters I had been examined in at Lincoln's Inn. There was a
certain method in the Count's inquiries, so I shall try to put them
down in sequence. The knowledge may somehow or some time be useful to
me.
First, he asked if a man in England might have two solicitors or more.
I told him he might have a dozen if he wished, but that it would not
be wise to have more than one solicitor engaged in one transaction, as
only one could act at a time, and that to change would be certain to
militate against his interest. He seemed thoroughly to understand,
and went on to ask if there would be any practical difficulty in having
one man to attend, say, to banking, and another to look after
shipping, in case local help were needed in a place far from the home
of the banking solicitor. I asked to explain more fully, so that I
might not by any chance mislead him, so he said,
"I shall illustrate. Your friend and mine, Mr. Peter Hawkins, from
under the shadow of your beautiful cathedral at Exeter, which is far
from London, buys for me through your good self my place at London.
Good Now here let me say frankly, lest you should think it strange
that I have sought the services of one so far off from London instead
of some one resident there, that my motive was that no local interest
might be served save my wish only, and as one of London residence
might, perhaps, have some purpose of himself or friend to serve, I
went thus afield to seek my agent, whose labours should be only to my
interest. Now, suppose I, who have much of affairs, wish to ship
goods, say, to Newcastle, or Durham, or Harwich, or Dover, might it
not be that it could with more ease be done by consigning to one in
these ports?"
I answered that certainly it would be most easy, but that we
solicitors had a system of agency one for the other, so that local
work could be done locally on instruction from any solicitor, so that
the client, simply placing himself in the hands of one man, could have
his wishes carried out by him without further trouble.
"But," said he, "I could be at liberty to direct myself. Is it not
so?"
"Of course," I replied, and "Such is often done by men of business,
who do not like the whole of their affairs to be known by any one
person."
"Good" he said, and then went on to ask about the means of making
consignments and the forms to be gone through, and of all sorts of
difficulties which might arise, but by forethought could be guarded
against. I explained all these things to him to the best of my
ability, and he certainly left me under the impression that he would
have made a wonderful solicitor, for there was nothing that he did not
think of or foresee. For a man who was never in the country, and who
did not evidently do much in the way of business, his knowledge and
acumen were wonderful. When he had satisfied himself on these points
of which he had spoken, and I had verified all as well as I could by
the books available, he suddenly stood up and said, "Have you written
since your first letter to our friend Mr. Peter Hawkins, or to any
other?"
It was with some bitterness in my heart that I answered that I had
not, that as yet I had not seen any opportunity of sending letters to
anybody.
"Then write now, my young friend," he said, laying a heavy hand on my
shoulder, "write to our friend and to any other, and say, if it will
please you, that you shall stay with me until a month from now."
"Do you wish me to stay so long?" I asked, for my heart grew cold at
the thought.
"I desire it much, nay I will take no refusal. When your master,
employer, what you will, engaged that someone should come on his
behalf, it was understood that my needs only were to be consulted. I
have not stinted. Is it not so?"
What could I do but bow acceptance? It was Mr. Hawkins' interest, not
mine, and I had to think of him, not myself, and besides, while Count
Dracula was speaking, there was that in his eyes and in his bearing
which made me remember that I was a prisoner, and that if I wished it
I could have no choice. The Count saw his victory in my bow, and his
mastery in the trouble of my face, for he began at once to use them,
but in his own smooth, resistless way.
"I pray you, my good young friend, that you will not discourse of
things other than business in your letters. It will doubtless please
your friends to know that you are well, and that you look forward to
getting home to them. Is it not so?" As he spoke he handed me three
sheets of note paper and three envelopes. They were all of the
thinnest foreign post, and looking at them, then at him, and noticing
his quiet smile, with the sharp, canine teeth lying over the red
underlip, I understood as well as if he had spoken that I should be
more careful what I wrote, for he would be able to read it. So I
determined to write only formal notes now, but to write fully to Mr.
Hawkins in secret, and also to Mina, for to her I could write
shorthand, which would puzzle the Count, if he did see it. When I had
written my two letters I sat quiet, reading a book whilst the Count
wrote several notes, referring as he wrote them to some books on his
table. Then he took up my two and placed them with his own, and put
by his writing materials, after which, the instant the door had closed
behind him, I leaned over and looked at the letters, which were face
down on the table. I felt no compunction in doing so for under the
circumstances I felt that I should protect myself in every way I
could.
One of the letters was directed to Samuel F. Billington, No. , The
Crescent, Whitby, another to Herr Leutner, Varna. The third was to
Coutts  Co., London, and the fourth to Herren Klopstock  Billreuth,
bankers, Buda Pesth. The second and fourth were unsealed. I was just
about to look at them when I saw the door handle move. I sank back in
my seat, having just had time to resume my book before the Count,
holding still another letter in his hand, entered the room. He took
up the letters on the table and stamped them carefully, and then
turning to me, said,
"I trust you will forgive me, but I have much work to do in private
this evening. You will, I hope, find all things as you wish." At the
door he turned, and after a moment's pause said, "Let me advise you,
my dear young friend. Nay, let me warn you with all seriousness, that
should you leave these rooms you will not by any chance go to sleep in
any other part of the castle. It is old, and has many memories, and
there are bad dreams for those who sleep unwisely. Be warned Should
sleep now or ever overcome you, or be like to do, then haste to your
own chamber or to these rooms, for your rest will then be safe. But
if you be not careful in this respect, then," He finished his speech
in a gruesome way, for he motioned with his hands as if he were washing
them. I quite understood. My only doubt was as to whether any dream
could be more terrible than the unnatural, horrible net of gloom and
mystery which seemed closing around me.
Later.I endorse the last words written, but this time there is no
doubt in question. I shall not fear to sleep in any place where he is
not. I have placed the crucifix over the head of my bed, I imagine
that my rest is thus freer from dreams, and there it shall remain.
When he left me I went to my room. After a little while, not hearing
any sound, I came out and went up the stone stair to where I could
look out towards the South. There was some sense of freedom in the
vast expanse, inaccessible though it was to me, as compared with the
narrow darkness of the courtyard. Looking out on this, I felt that I
was indeed in prison, and I seemed to want a breath of fresh air,
though it were of the night. I am beginning to feel this nocturnal
existence tell on me. It is destroying my nerve. I start at my own
shadow, and am full of all sorts of horrible imaginings. God knows
that there is ground for my terrible fear in this accursed place I
looked out over the beautiful expanse, bathed in soft yellow moonlight
till it was almost as light as day. In the soft light the distant
hills became melted, and the shadows in the valleys and gorges of
velvety blackness. The mere beauty seemed to cheer me. There was
peace and comfort in every breath I drew. As I leaned from the window
my eye was caught by something moving a storey below me, and somewhat
to my left, where I imagined, from the order of the rooms, that the
windows of the Count's own room would look out. The window at which I
stood was tall and deep, stonemullioned, and though weatherworn, was
still complete. But it was evidently many a day since the case had
been there. I drew back behind the stonework, and looked carefully
out.
What I saw was the Count's head coming out from the window. I did not
see the face, but I knew the man by the neck and the movement of his
back and arms. In any case I could not mistake the hands which I had
had some many opportunities of studying. I was at first interested
and somewhat amused, for it is wonderful how small a matter will
interest and amuse a man when he is a prisoner. But my very feelings
changed to repulsion and terror when I saw the whole man slowly emerge
from the window and begin to crawl down the castle wall over the
dreadful abyss, face down with his cloak spreading out around him like
great wings. At first I could not believe my eyes. I thought it was
some trick of the moonlight, some weird effect of shadow, but I kept
looking, and it could be no delusion. I saw the fingers and toes
grasp the corners of the stones, worn clear of the mortar by the
stress of years, and by thus using every projection and inequality
move downwards with considerable speed, just as a lizard moves along a
wall.
What manner of man is this, or what manner of creature, is it in the
semblance of man? I feel the dread of this horrible place
overpowering me. I am in fear, in awful fear, and there is no escape
for me. I am encompassed about with terrors that I dare not think of.
 May.Once more I have seen the count go out in his lizard fashion.
He moved downwards in a sidelong way, some hundred feet down, and a
good deal to the left. He vanished into some hole or window. When
his head had disappeared, I leaned out to try and see more, but
without avail. The distance was too great to allow a proper angle of
sight. I knew he had left the castle now, and thought to use the
opportunity to explore more than I had dared to do as yet. I went
back to the room, and taking a lamp, tried all the doors. They were
all locked, as I had expected, and the locks were comparatively new.
But I went down the stone stairs to the hall where I had entered
originally. I found I could pull back the bolts easily enough and
unhook the great chains. But the door was locked, and the key was
gone That key must be in the Count's room. I must watch should his
door be unlocked, so that I may get it and escape. I went on to make
a thorough examination of the various stairs and passages, and to try
the doors that opened from them. One or two small rooms near the hall
were open, but there was nothing to see in them except old furniture,
dusty with age and motheaten. At last, however, I found one door at
the top of the stairway which, though it seemed locked, gave a little
under pressure. I tried it harder, and found that it was not really
locked, but that the resistance came from the fact that the hinges had
fallen somewhat, and the heavy door rested on the floor. Here was an
opportunity which I might not have again, so I exerted myself, and
with many efforts forced it back so that I could enter. I was now in
a wing of the castle further to the right than the rooms I knew and a
storey lower down. From the windows I could see that the suite of
rooms lay along to the south of the castle, the windows of the end
room looking out both west and south. On the latter side, as well as
to the former, there was a great precipice. The castle was built on
the corner of a great rock, so that on three sides it was quite
impregnable, and great windows were placed here where sling, or bow,
or culverin could not reach, and consequently light and comfort,
impossible to a position which had to be guarded, were secured. To
the west was a great valley, and then, rising far away, great jagged
mountain fastnesses, rising peak on peak, the sheer rock studded with
mountain ash and thorn, whose roots clung in cracks and crevices and
crannies of the stone. This was evidently the portion of the castle
occupied by the ladies in bygone days, for the furniture had more an
air of comfort than any I had seen.
The windows were curtainless, and the yellow moonlight, flooding in
through the diamond panes, enabled one to see even colours, whilst it
softened the wealth of dust which lay over all and disguised in some
measure the ravages of time and moth. My lamp seemed to be of little
effect in the brilliant moonlight, but I was glad to have it with me,
for there was a dread loneliness in the place which chilled my heart
and made my nerves tremble. Still, it was better than living alone in
the rooms which I had come to hate from the presence of the Count, and
after trying a little to school my nerves, I found a soft quietude
come over me. Here I am, sitting at a little oak table where in old
times possibly some fair lady sat to pen, with much thought and many
blushes, her illspelt love letter, and writing in my diary in
shorthand all that has happened since I closed it last. It is the
nineteenth century uptodate with a vengeance. And yet, unless my
senses deceive me, the old centuries had, and have, powers of their
own which mere "modernity" cannot kill.
Later The morning of  May.God preserve my sanity, for to this I
am reduced. Safety and the assurance of safety are things of the
past. Whilst I live on here there is but one thing to hope for, that
I may not go mad, if, indeed, I be not mad already. If I be sane,
then surely it is maddening to think that of all the foul things that
lurk in this hateful place the Count is the least dreadful to me, that
to him alone I can look for safety, even though this be only whilst I
can serve his purpose. Great God Merciful God, let me be calm, for
out of that way lies madness indeed. I begin to get new lights on
certain things which have puzzled me. Up to now I never quite knew
what Shakespeare meant when he made Hamlet say, "My tablets Quick,
my tablets 'tis meet that I put it down," etc., For now, feeling as
though my own brain were unhinged or as if the shock had come which
must end in its undoing, I turn to my diary for repose. The habit of
entering accurately must help to soothe me.
The Count's mysterious warning frightened me at the time. It frightens
me more not when I think of it, for in the future he has a fearful
hold upon me. I shall fear to doubt what he may say
When I had written in my diary and had fortunately replaced the book
and pen in my pocket I felt sleepy. The Count's warning came into my
mind, but I took pleasure in disobeying it. The sense of sleep was
upon me, and with it the obstinacy which sleep brings as outrider. The
soft moonlight soothed, and the wide expanse without gave a sense of
freedom which refreshed me. I determined not to return tonight to the
gloomhaunted rooms, but to sleep here, where, of old, ladies had sat
and sung and lived sweet lives whilst their gentle breasts were sad
for their menfolk away in the midst of remorseless wars. I drew a
great couch out of its place near the corner, so that as I lay, I
could look at the lovely view to east and south, and unthinking of and
uncaring for the dust, composed myself for sleep. I suppose I must
have fallen asleep. I hope so, but I fear, for all that followed was
startlingly real, so real that now sitting here in the broad, full
sunlight of the morning, I cannot in the least believe that it was all
sleep.
I was not alone. The room was the same, unchanged in any way since I
came into it. I could see along the floor, in the brilliant
moonlight, my own footsteps marked where I had disturbed the long
accumulation of dust. In the moonlight opposite me were three young
women, ladies by their dress and manner. I thought at the time that I
must be dreaming when I saw them, they threw no shadow on the floor.
They came close to me, and looked at me for some time, and then
whispered together. Two were dark, and had high aquiline noses, like
the Count, and great dark, piercing eyes, that seemed to be almost red
when contrasted with the pale yellow moon. The other was fair, as
fair as can be, with great masses of golden hair and eyes like pale
sapphires. I seemed somehow to know her face, and to know it in
connection with some dreamy fear, but I could not recollect at the
moment how or where. All three had brilliant white teeth that shone
like pearls against the ruby of their voluptuous lips. There was
something about them that made me uneasy, some longing and at the same
time some deadly fear. I felt in my heart a wicked, burning desire
that they would kiss me with those red lips. It is not good to note
this down, lest some day it should meet Mina's eyes and cause her
pain, but it is the truth. They whispered together, and then they all
three laughed, such a silvery, musical laugh, but as hard as though
the sound never could have come through the softness of human lips.
It was like the intolerable, tingling sweetness of waterglasses when
played on by a cunning hand. The fair girl shook her head
coquettishly, and the other two urged her on.
One said, "Go on You are first, and we shall follow. Yours is the
right to begin."
The other added, "He is young and strong. There are kisses for us
all."
I lay quiet, looking out from under my eyelashes in an agony of
delightful anticipation. The fair girl advanced and bent over me till
I could feel the movement of her breath upon me. Sweet it was in one
sense, honeysweet, and sent the same tingling through the nerves as
her voice, but with a bitter underlying the sweet, a bitter
offensiveness, as one smells in blood.
I was afraid to raise my eyelids, but looked out and saw perfectly
under the lashes. The girl went on her knees, and bent over me,
simply gloating. There was a deliberate voluptuousness which was both
thrilling and repulsive, and as she arched her neck she actually
licked her lips like an animal, till I could see in the moonlight the
moisture shining on the scarlet lips and on the red tongue as it
lapped the white sharp teeth. Lower and lower went her head as the
lips went below the range of my mouth and chin and seemed to fasten on
my throat. Then she paused, and I could hear the churning sound of
her tongue as it licked her teeth and lips, and I could feel the hot
breath on my neck. Then the skin of my throat began to tingle as
one's flesh does when the hand that is to tickle it approaches nearer,
nearer. I could feel the soft, shivering touch of the lips on the
super sensitive skin of my throat, and the hard dents of two sharp
teeth, just touching and pausing there. I closed my eyes in
languorous ecstasy and waited, waited with beating heart.
But at that instant, another sensation swept through me as quick as
lightning. I was conscious of the presence of the Count, and of his
being as if lapped in a storm of fury. As my eyes opened
involuntarily I saw his strong hand grasp the slender neck of the fair
woman and with giant's power draw it back, the blue eyes transformed
with fury, the white teeth champing with rage, and the fair cheeks
blazing red with passion. But the Count Never did I imagine such
wrath and fury, even to the demons of the pit. His eyes were
positively blazing. The red light in them was lurid, as if the flames
of hell fire blazed behind them. His face was deathly pale, and the
lines of it were hard like drawn wires. The thick eyebrows that met
over the nose now seemed like a heaving bar of whitehot metal. With
a fierce sweep of his arm, he hurled the woman from him, and then
motioned to the others, as though he were beating them back. It was
the same imperious gesture that I had seen used to the wolves. In a
voice which, though low and almost in a whisper seemed to cut through
the air and then ring in the room he said,
"How dare you touch him, any of you? How dare you cast eyes on him
when I had forbidden it? Back, I tell you all This man belongs to
me Beware how you meddle with him, or you'll have to deal with me."
The fair girl, with a laugh of ribald coquetry, turned to answer him.
"You yourself never loved. You never love" On this the other women
joined, and such a mirthless, hard, soulless laughter rang through the
room that it almost made me faint to hear. It seemed like the
pleasure of fiends.
Then the Count turned, after looking at my face attentively, and said
in a soft whisper, "Yes, I too can love. You yourselves can tell it
from the past. Is it not so? Well, now I promise you that when I am
done with him you shall kiss him at your will. Now go Go I must
awaken him, for there is work to be done."
"Are we to have nothing tonight?" said one of them, with a low laugh,
as she pointed to the bag which he had thrown upon the floor, and
which moved as though there were some living thing within it. For
answer he nodded his head. One of the women jumped forward and opened
it. If my ears did not deceive me there was a gasp and a low wail, as
of a half smothered child. The women closed round, whilst I was
aghast with horror. But as I looked, they disappeared, and with them
the dreadful bag. There was no door near them, and they could not
have passed me without my noticing. They simply seemed to fade into
the rays of the moonlight and pass out through the window, for I could
see outside the dim, shadowy forms for a moment before they entirely
faded away.
Then the horror overcame me, and I sank down unconscious.
CHAPTER 
Jonathan Harker's Journal Continued
I awoke in my own bed. If it be that I had not dreamt, the Count must
have carried me here. I tried to satisfy myself on the subject, but
could not arrive at any unquestionable result. To be sure, there were
certain small evidences, such as that my clothes were folded and laid
by in a manner which was not my habit. My watch was still unwound,
and I am rigorously accustomed to wind it the last thing before going
to bed, and many such details. But these things are no proof, for
they may have been evidences that my mind was not as usual, and, for
some cause or another, I had certainly been much upset. I must watch
for proof. Of one thing I am glad. If it was that the Count carried
me here and undressed me, he must have been hurried in his task, for
my pockets are intact. I am sure this diary would have been a mystery
to him which he would not have brooked. He would have taken or
destroyed it. As I look round this room, although it has been to me
so full of fear, it is now a sort of sanctuary, for nothing can be
more dreadful than those awful women, who were, who are, waiting to
suck my blood.
 May.I have been down to look at that room again in daylight, for
I must know the truth. When I got to the doorway at the top of the
stairs I found it closed. It had been so forcibly driven against the
jamb that part of the woodwork was splintered. I could see that the
bolt of the lock had not been shot, but the door is fastened from the
inside. I fear it was no dream, and must act on this surmise.
 May.I am surely in the toils. Last night the Count asked me in
the suavest tones to write three letters, one saying that my work here
was nearly done, and that I should start for home within a few days,
another that I was starting on the next morning from the time of the
letter, and the third that I had left the castle and arrived at
Bistritz. I would fain have rebelled, but felt that in the present
state of things it would be madness to quarrel openly with the Count
whilst I am so absolutely in his power. And to refuse would be to
excite his suspicion and to arouse his anger. He knows that I know
too much, and that I must not live, lest I be dangerous to him. My
only chance is to prolong my opportunities. Something may occur which
will give me a chance to escape. I saw in his eyes something of that
gathering wrath which was manifest when he hurled that fair woman from
him. He explained to me that posts were few and uncertain, and that
my writing now would ensure ease of mind to my friends. And he
assured me with so much impressiveness that he would countermand the
later letters, which would be held over at Bistritz until due time in
case chance would admit of my prolonging my stay, that to oppose him
would have been to create new suspicion. I therefore pretended to
fall in with his views, and asked him what dates I should put on the
letters.
He calculated a minute, and then said, "The first should be June ,
the second June , and the third June ."
I know now the span of my life. God help me
 May.There is a chance of escape, or at any rate of being able to
send word home. A band of Szgany have come to the castle, and are
encamped in the courtyard. These are gipsies. I have notes of them
in my book. They are peculiar to this part of the world, though
allied to the ordinary gipsies all the world over. There are
thousands of them in Hungary and Transylvania, who are almost outside
all law. They attach themselves as a rule to some great noble or
boyar, and call themselves by his name. They are fearless and without
religion, save superstition, and they talk only their own varieties of
the Romany tongue.
I shall write some letters home, and shall try to get them to have
them posted. I have already spoken to them through my window to begin
acquaintanceship. They took their hats off and made obeisance and
many signs, which however, I could not understand any more than I
could their spoken language . . .
I have written the letters. Mina's is in shorthand, and I simply ask
Mr. Hawkins to communicate with her. To her I have explained my
situation, but without the horrors which I may only surmise. It would
shock and frighten her to death were I to expose my heart to her.
Should the letters not carry, then the Count shall not yet know my
secret or the extent of my knowledge. . . .
I have given the letters. I threw them through the bars of my window
with a gold piece, and made what signs I could to have them posted.
The man who took them pressed them to his heart and bowed, and then
put them in his cap. I could do no more. I stole back to the study,
and began to read. As the Count did not come in, I have written
here . . .
The Count has come. He sat down beside me, and said in his smoothest
voice as he opened two letters, "The Szgany has given me these, of
which, though I know not whence they come, I shall, of course, take
care. See"He must have looked at it."One is from you, and to my
friend Peter Hawkins. The other,"here he caught sight of the
strange symbols as he opened the envelope, and the dark look came into
his face, and his eyes blazed wickedly,"The other is a vile thing,
an outrage upon friendship and hospitality It is not signed. Well
So it cannot matter to us." And he calmly held letter and envelope in
the flame of the lamp till they were consumed.
Then he went on, "The letter to Hawkins, that I shall, of course send
on, since it is yours. Your letters are sacred to me. Your pardon,
my friend, that unknowingly I did break the seal. Will you not cover
it again?" He held out the letter to me, and with a courteous bow
handed me a clean envelope.
I could only redirect it and hand it to him in silence. When he went
out of the room I could hear the key turn softly. A minute later I
went over and tried it, and the door was locked.
When, an hour or two after, the Count came quietly into the room, his
coming awakened me, for I had gone to sleep on the sofa. He was very
courteous and very cheery in his manner, and seeing that I had been
sleeping, he said, "So, my friend, you are tired? Get to bed. There
is the surest rest. I may not have the pleasure of talk tonight,
since there are many labours to me, but you will sleep, I pray."
I passed to my room and went to bed, and, strange to say, slept
without dreaming. Despair has its own calms.
 May.This morning when I woke I thought I would provide myself
with some papers and envelopes from my bag and keep them in my pocket,
so that I might write in case I should get an opportunity, but again a
surprise, again a shock
Every scrap of paper was gone, and with it all my notes, my memoranda,
relating to railways and travel, my letter of credit, in fact all that
might be useful to me were I once outside the castle. I sat and
pondered awhile, and then some thought occurred to me, and I made
search of my portmanteau and in the wardrobe where I had placed my
clothes.
The suit in which I had travelled was gone, and also my overcoat and
rug. I could find no trace of them anywhere. This looked like some
new scheme of villainy . . .
 June.This morning, as I was sitting on the edge of my bed
cudgelling my brains, I heard without a crackling of whips and
pounding and scraping of horses' feet up the rocky path beyond the
courtyard. With joy I hurried to the window, and saw drive into the
yard two great leiterwagons, each drawn by eight sturdy horses, and
at the head of each pair a Slovak, with his wide hat, great
nailstudded belt, dirty sheepskin, and high boots. They had also
their long staves in hand. I ran to the door, intending to descend
and try and join them through the main hall, as I thought that way
might be opened for them. Again a shock, my door was fastened on the
outside.
Then I ran to the window and cried to them. They looked up at me
stupidly and pointed, but just then the "hetman" of the Szgany came
out, and seeing them pointing to my window, said something, at which
they laughed.
Henceforth no effort of mine, no piteous cry or agonized entreaty,
would make them even look at me. They resolutely turned away. The
leiterwagons contained great, square boxes, with handles of thick
rope. These were evidently empty by the ease with which the Slovaks
handled them, and by their resonance as they were roughly moved.
When they were all unloaded and packed in a great heap in one corner
of the yard, the Slovaks were given some money by the Szgany, and
spitting on it for luck, lazily went each to his horse's head.
Shortly afterwards, I heard the crackling of their whips die away in
the distance.
 June.Last night the Count left me early, and locked himself into
his own room. As soon as I dared I ran up the winding stair, and
looked out of the window, which opened South. I thought I would watch
for the Count, for there is something going on. The Szgany are
quartered somewhere in the castle and are doing work of some kind. I
know it, for now and then, I hear a faraway muffled sound as of
mattock and spade, and, whatever it is, it must be the end of some
ruthless villainy.
I had been at the window somewhat less than half an hour, when I saw
something coming out of the Count's window. I drew back and watched
carefully, and saw the whole man emerge. It was a new shock to me to
find that he had on the suit of clothes which I had worn whilst
travelling here, and slung over his shoulder the terrible bag which I
had seen the women take away. There could be no doubt as to his
quest, and in my garb, too This, then, is his new scheme of evil,
that he will allow others to see me, as they think, so that he may
both leave evidence that I have been seen in the towns or villages
posting my own letters, and that any wickedness which he may do shall
by the local people be attributed to me.
It makes me rage to think that this can go on, and whilst I am shut up
here, a veritable prisoner, but without that protection of the law
which is even a criminal's right and consolation.
I thought I would watch for the Count's return, and for a long time
sat doggedly at the window. Then I began to notice that there were
some quaint little specks floating in the rays of the moonlight. They
were like the tiniest grains of dust, and they whirled round and
gathered in clusters in a nebulous sort of way. I watched them with a
sense of soothing, and a sort of calm stole over me. I leaned back in
the embrasure in a more comfortable position, so that I could enjoy
more fully the aerial gambolling.
Something made me start up, a low, piteous howling of dogs somewhere
far below in the valley, which was hidden from my sight. Louder it
seemed to ring in my ears, and the floating moats of dust to take new
shapes to the sound as they danced in the moonlight. I felt myself
struggling to awake to some call of my instincts. Nay, my very soul
was struggling, and my halfremembered sensibilities were striving to
answer the call. I was becoming hypnotised
Quicker and quicker danced the dust. The moonbeams seemed to quiver
as they went by me into the mass of gloom beyond. More and more they
gathered till they seemed to take dim phantom shapes. And then I
started, broad awake and in full possession of my senses, and ran
screaming from the place.
The phantom shapes, which were becoming gradually materialised from
the moonbeams, were those three ghostly women to whom I was doomed.
I fled, and felt somewhat safer in my own room, where there was no
moonlight, and where the lamp was burning brightly.
When a couple of hours had passed I heard something stirring in the
Count's room, something like a sharp wail quickly suppressed. And
then there was silence, deep, awful silence, which chilled me. With a
beating heart, I tried the door, but I was locked in my prison, and
could do nothing. I sat down and simply cried.
As I sat I heard a sound in the courtyard without, the agonised cry of
a woman. I rushed to the window, and throwing it up, peered between
the bars.
There, indeed, was a woman with dishevelled hair, holding her hands
over her heart as one distressed with running. She was leaning
against the corner of the gateway. When she saw my face at the window
she threw herself forward, and shouted in a voice laden with menace,
"Monster, give me my child"
She threw herself on her knees, and raising up her hands, cried the
same words in tones which wrung my heart. Then she tore her hair and
beat her breast, and abandoned herself to all the violences of
extravagant emotion. Finally, she threw herself forward, and though I
could not see her, I could hear the beating of her naked hands against
the door.
Somewhere high overhead, probably on the tower, I heard the voice of
the Count calling in his harsh, metallic whisper. His call seemed to
be answered from far and wide by the howling of wolves. Before many
minutes had passed a pack of them poured, like a pentup dam when
liberated, through the wide entrance into the courtyard.
There was no cry from the woman, and the howling of the wolves was but
short. Before long they streamed away singly, licking their lips.
I could not pity her, for I knew now what had become of her child, and
she was better dead.
What shall I do? What can I do? How can I escape from this dreadful
thing of night, gloom, and fear?
 June.No man knows till he has suffered from the night how sweet
and dear to his heart and eye the morning can be. When the sun grew
so high this morning that it struck the top of the great gateway
opposite my window, the high spot which it touched seemed to me as if
the dove from the ark had lighted there. My fear fell from me as if
it had been a vaporous garment which dissolved in the warmth.
I must take action of some sort whilst the courage of the day is upon
me. Last night one of my postdated letters went to post, the first
of that fatal series which is to blot out the very traces of my
existence from the earth.
Let me not think of it. Action
It has always been at nighttime that I have been molested or
threatened, or in some way in danger or in fear. I have not yet seen
the Count in the daylight. Can it be that he sleeps when others wake,
that he may be awake whilst they sleep? If I could only get into his
room But there is no possible way. The door is always locked, no
way for me.
Yes, there is a way, if one dares to take it. Where his body has gone
why may not another body go? I have seen him myself crawl from his
window. Why should not I imitate him, and go in by his window? The
chances are desperate, but my need is more desperate still. I shall
risk it. At the worst it can only be death, and a man's death is not
a calf's, and the dreaded Hereafter may still be open to me. God help
me in my task Goodbye, Mina, if I fail. Goodbye, my faithful friend
and second father. Goodbye, all, and last of all Mina
Same day, later.I have made the effort, and God helping me, have
come safely back to this room. I must put down every detail in order.
I went whilst my courage was fresh straight to the window on the south
side, and at once got outside on this side. The stones are big and
roughly cut, and the mortar has by process of time been washed away
between them. I took off my boots, and ventured out on the desperate
way. I looked down once, so as to make sure that a sudden glimpse of
the awful depth would not overcome me, but after that kept my eyes
away from it. I know pretty well the direction and distance of the
Count's window, and made for it as well as I could, having regard to
the opportunities available. I did not feel dizzy, I suppose I was
too excited, and the time seemed ridiculously short till I found
myself standing on the window sill and trying to raise up the sash. I
was filled with agitation, however, when I bent down and slid feet
foremost in through the window. Then I looked around for the Count,
but with surprise and gladness, made a discovery. The room was
empty It was barely furnished with odd things, which seemed to have
never been used.
The furniture was something the same style as that in the south rooms,
and was covered with dust. I looked for the key, but it was not in
the lock, and I could not find it anywhere. The only thing I found
was a great heap of gold in one corner, gold of all kinds, Roman, and
British, and Austrian, and Hungarian, and Greek and Turkish money,
covered with a film of dust, as though it had lain long in the ground.
None of it that I noticed was less than three hundred years old.
There were also chains and ornaments, some jewelled, but all of them
old and stained.
At one corner of the room was a heavy door. I tried it, for, since I
could not find the key of the room or the key of the outer door, which
was the main object of my search, I must make further examination, or
all my efforts would be in vain. It was open, and led through a stone
passage to a circular stairway, which went steeply down.
I descended, minding carefully where I went for the stairs were dark,
being only lit by loopholes in the heavy masonry. At the bottom there
was a dark, tunnellike passage, through which came a deathly, sickly
odour, the odour of old earth newly turned. As I went through the
passage the smell grew closer and heavier. At last I pulled open a
heavy door which stood ajar, and found myself in an old ruined chapel,
which had evidently been used as a graveyard. The roof was broken,
and in two places were steps leading to vaults, but the ground had
recently been dug over, and the earth placed in great wooden boxes,
manifestly those which had been brought by the Slovaks.
There was nobody about, and I made a search over every inch of the
ground, so as not to lose a chance. I went down even into the vaults,
where the dim light struggled, although to do so was a dread to my
very soul. Into two of these I went, but saw nothing except fragments
of old coffins and piles of dust. In the third, however, I made a
discovery.
There, in one of the great boxes, of which there were fifty in all, on
a pile of newly dug earth, lay the Count He was either dead or
asleep. I could not say which, for eyes were open and stony, but
without the glassiness of death, and the cheeks had the warmth of life
through all their pallor. The lips were as red as ever. But there
was no sign of movement, no pulse, no breath, no beating of the heart.
I bent over him, and tried to find any sign of life, but in vain. He
could not have lain there long, for the earthy smell would have passed
away in a few hours. By the side of the box was its cover, pierced
with holes here and there. I thought he might have the keys on him,
but when I went to search I saw the dead eyes, and in them dead though
they were, such a look of hate, though unconscious of me or my
presence, that I fled from the place, and leaving the Count's room by
the window, crawled again up the castle wall. Regaining my room, I
threw myself panting upon the bed and tried to think.
 June.Today is the date of my last letter, and the Count has taken
steps to prove that it was genuine, for again I saw him leave the
castle by the same window, and in my clothes. As he went down the
wall, lizard fashion, I wished I had a gun or some lethal weapon, that
I might destroy him. But I fear that no weapon wrought along by man's
hand would have any effect on him. I dared not wait to see him
return, for I feared to see those weird sisters. I came back to the
library, and read there till I fell asleep.
I was awakened by the Count, who looked at me as grimly as a man could
look as he said, "Tomorrow, my friend, we must part. You return to
your beautiful England, I to some work which may have such an end that
we may never meet. Your letter home has been despatched. Tomorrow I
shall not be here, but all shall be ready for your journey. In the
morning come the Szgany, who have some labours of their own here, and
also come some Slovaks. When they have gone, my carriage shall come
for you, and shall bear you to the Borgo Pass to meet the diligence
from Bukovina to Bistritz. But I am in hopes that I shall see more of
you at Castle Dracula."
I suspected him, and determined to test his sincerity. Sincerity It
seems like a profanation of the word to write it in connection with
such a monster, so I asked him pointblank, "Why may I not go
tonight?"
"Because, dear sir, my coachman and horses are away on a mission."
"But I would walk with pleasure. I want to get away at once."
He smiled, such a soft, smooth, diabolical smile that I knew there was
some trick behind his smoothness. He said, "And your baggage?"
"I do not care about it. I can send for it some other time."
The Count stood up, and said, with a sweet courtesy which made me rub
my eyes, it seemed so real, "You English have a saying which is close
to my heart, for its spirit is that which rules our boyars, 'Welcome
the coming, speed the parting guest.' Come with me, my dear young
friend. Not an hour shall you wait in my house against your will,
though sad am I at your going, and that you so suddenly desire it.
Come" With a stately gravity, he, with the lamp, preceded me down
the stairs and along the hall. Suddenly he stopped. "Hark"
Close at hand came the howling of many wolves. It was almost as if
the sound sprang up at the rising of his hand, just as the music of a
great orchestra seems to leap under the baton of the conductor. After
a pause of a moment, he proceeded, in his stately way, to the door,
drew back the ponderous bolts, unhooked the heavy chains, and began to
draw it open.
To my intense astonishment I saw that it was unlocked. Suspiciously,
I looked all round, but could see no key of any kind.
As the door began to open, the howling of the wolves without grew
louder and angrier. Their red jaws, with champing teeth, and their
bluntclawed feet as they leaped, came in through the opening door. I
knew than that to struggle at the moment against the Count was
useless. With such allies as these at his command, I could do
nothing.
But still the door continued slowly to open, and only the Count's body
stood in the gap. Suddenly it struck me that this might be the moment
and means of my doom. I was to be given to the wolves, and at my own
instigation. There was a diabolical wickedness in the idea great
enough for the Count, and as the last chance I cried out, "Shut the
door I shall wait till morning." And I covered my face with my
hands to hide my tears of bitter disappointment.
With one sweep of his powerful arm, the Count threw the door shut, and
the great bolts clanged and echoed through the hall as they shot back
into their places.
In silence we returned to the library, and after a minute or two I went
to my own room. The last I saw of Count Dracula was his kissing his
hand to me, with a red light of triumph in his eyes, and with a smile
that Judas in hell might be proud of.
When I was in my room and about to lie down, I thought I heard a
whispering at my door. I went to it softly and listened. Unless my
ears deceived me, I heard the voice of the Count.
"Back Back to your own place Your time is not yet come. Wait
Have patience Tonight is mine. Tomorrow night is yours"
There was a low, sweet ripple of laughter, and in a rage I threw open
the door, and saw without the three terrible women licking their lips.
As I appeared, they all joined in a horrible laugh, and ran away.
I came back to my room and threw myself on my knees. It is then so
near the end? Tomorrow Tomorrow Lord, help me, and those to whom
I am dear
 June.These may be the last words I ever write in this diary. I
slept till just before the dawn, and when I woke threw myself on my
knees, for I determined that if Death came he should find me ready.
At last I felt that subtle change in the air, and knew that the
morning had come. Then came the welcome cockcrow, and I felt that I
was safe. With a glad heart, I opened the door and ran down the hall.
I had seen that the door was unlocked, and now escape was before me.
With hands that trembled with eagerness, I unhooked the chains and
threw back the massive bolts.
But the door would not move. Despair seized me. I pulled and pulled
at the door, and shook it till, massive as it was, it rattled in its
casement. I could see the bolt shot. It had been locked after I left
the Count.
Then a wild desire took me to obtain the key at any risk, and I
determined then and there to scale the wall again, and gain the
Count's room. He might kill me, but death now seemed the happier
choice of evils. Without a pause I rushed up to the east window, and
scrambled down the wall, as before, into the Count's room. It was
empty, but that was as I expected. I could not see a key anywhere,
but the heap of gold remained. I went through the door in the corner
and down the winding stair and along the dark passage to the old
chapel. I knew now well enough where to find the monster I sought.
The great box was in the same place, close against the wall, but the
lid was laid on it, not fastened down, but with the nails ready in
their places to be hammered home.
I knew I must reach the body for the key, so I raised the lid, and
laid it back against the wall. And then I saw something which filled
my very soul with horror. There lay the Count, but looking as if his
youth had been half restored. For the white hair and moustache were
changed to dark irongrey. The cheeks were fuller, and the white skin
seemed rubyred underneath. The mouth was redder than ever, for on
the lips were gouts of fresh blood, which trickled from the corners of
the mouth and ran down over the chin and neck. Even the deep, burning
eyes seemed set amongst swollen flesh, for the lids and pouches
underneath were bloated. It seemed as if the whole awful creature
were simply gorged with blood. He lay like a filthy leech, exhausted
with his repletion.
I shuddered as I bent over to touch him, and every sense in me
revolted at the contact, but I had to search, or I was lost. The
coming night might see my own body a banquet in a similar war to those
horrid three. I felt all over the body, but no sign could I find of
the key. Then I stopped and looked at the Count. There was a mocking
smile on the bloated face which seemed to drive me mad. This was the
being I was helping to transfer to London, where, perhaps, for
centuries to come he might, amongst its teeming millions, satiate his
lust for blood, and create a new and everwidening circle of
semidemons to batten on the helpless.
The very thought drove me mad. A terrible desire came upon me to rid
the world of such a monster. There was no lethal weapon at hand, but
I seized a shovel which the workmen had been using to fill the cases,
and lifting it high, struck, with the edge downward, at the hateful
face. But as I did so the head turned, and the eyes fell upon me,
with all their blaze of basilisk horror. The sight seemed to paralyze
me, and the shovel turned in my hand and glanced from the face, merely
making a deep gash above the forehead. The shovel fell from my hand
across the box, and as I pulled it away the flange of the blade caught
the edge of the lid which fell over again, and hid the horrid thing
from my sight. The last glimpse I had was of the bloated face,
bloodstained and fixed with a grin of malice which would have held
its own in the nethermost hell.
I thought and thought what should be my next move, but my brain seemed
on fire, and I waited with a despairing feeling growing over me. As I
waited I heard in the distance a gipsy song sung by merry voices
coming closer, and through their song the rolling of heavy wheels and
the cracking of whips. The Szgany and the Slovaks of whom the Count
had spoken were coming. With a last look around and at the box which
contained the vile body, I ran from the place and gained the Count's
room, determined to rush out at the moment the door should be opened.
With strained ears, I listened, and heard downstairs the grinding of
the key in the great lock and the falling back of the heavy door.
There must have been some other means of entry, or some one had a key
for one of the locked doors.
Then there came the sound of many feet tramping and dying away in some
passage which sent up a clanging echo. I turned to run down again
towards the vault, where I might find the new entrance, but at the
moment there seemed to come a violent puff of wind, and the door to
the winding stair blew to with a shock that set the dust from the
lintels flying. When I ran to push it open, I found that it was
hopelessly fast. I was again a prisoner, and the net of doom was
closing round me more closely.
As I write there is in the passage below a sound of many tramping feet
and the crash of weights being set down heavily, doubtless the boxes,
with their freight of earth. There was a sound of hammering. It is
the box being nailed down. Now I can hear the heavy feet tramping
again along the hall, with with many other idle feet coming behind
them.
The door is shut, the chains rattle. There is a grinding of the key
in the lock. I can hear the key withdrawn, then another door opens
and shuts. I hear the creaking of lock and bolt.
Hark In the courtyard and down the rocky way the roll of heavy
wheels, the crack of whips, and the chorus of the Szgany as they pass
into the distance.
I am alone in the castle with those horrible women. Faugh Mina is a
woman, and there is nought in common. They are devils of the Pit
I shall not remain alone with them. I shall try to scale the castle
wall farther than I have yet attempted. I shall take some of the gold
with me, lest I want it later. I may find a way from this dreadful
place.
And then away for home Away to the quickest and nearest train Away
from the cursed spot, from this cursed land, where the devil and his
children still walk with earthly feet
At least God's mercy is better than that of those monsters, and the
precipice is steep and high. At its foot a man may sleep, as a man.
Goodbye, all. Mina
CHAPTER 
LETTER FROM MISS MINA MURRAY TO MISS LUCY WESTENRA
 May.
My dearest Lucy,
Forgive my long delay in writing, but I have been simply overwhelmed
with work. The life of an assistant schoolmistress is sometimes
trying. I am longing to be with you, and by the sea, where we can
talk together freely and build our castles in the air. I have been
working very hard lately, because I want to keep up with Jonathan's
studies, and I have been practicing shorthand very assiduously.
When we are married I shall be able to be useful to Jonathan, and if
I can stenograph well enough I can take down what he wants to say in
this way and write it out for him on the typewriter, at which also I
am practicing very hard.
He and I sometimes write letters in shorthand, and he is
keeping a stenographic journal of his travels abroad. When
I am with you I shall keep a diary in the same way. I don't
mean one of those twopagestotheweekwithSundaysqueezed
inacorner diaries, but a sort of journal which I can write
in whenever I feel inclined.
I do not suppose there will be much of interest to other people, but
it is not intended for them. I may show it to Jonathan some day if
there is in it anything worth sharing, but it is really an exercise
book. I shall try to do what I see lady journalists do,
interviewing and writing descriptions and trying to remember
conversations. I am told that, with a little practice, one can
remember all that goes on or that one hears said during a day.
However, we shall see. I will tell you of my little plans when we
meet. I have just had a few hurried lines from Jonathan from
Transylvania. He is well, and will be returning in about a week. I
am longing to hear all his news. It must be nice to see strange
countries. I wonder if we, I mean Jonathan and I, shall ever see
them together. There is the ten o'clock bell ringing. Goodbye.
Your loving
Mina
Tell me all the news when you write. You have not told me
anything for a long time. I hear rumours, and especially
of a tall, handsome, curlyhaired man???
LETTER, LUCY WESTENRA TO MINA MURRAY
, Chatham Street
Wednesday
My dearest Mina,
I must say you tax me very unfairly with being a bad correspondent.
I wrote you twice since we parted, and your last letter was only
your second. Besides, I have nothing to tell you. There is really
nothing to interest you.
Town is very pleasant just now, and we go a great deal to
picturegalleries and for walks and rides in the park. As
to the tall, curlyhaired man, I suppose it was the one who
was with me at the last Pop. Someone has evidently been
telling tales.
That was Mr. Holmwood. He often comes to see us, and he and
Mamma get on very well together, they have so many things
to talk about in common.
We met some time ago a man that would just do for you, if you were
not already engaged to Jonathan. He is an excellent parti, being
handsome, well off, and of good birth. He is a doctor and really
clever. Just fancy He is only nineand twenty, and he has an
immense lunatic asylum all under his own care. Mr. Holmwood
introduced him to me, and he called here to see us, and often comes
now. I think he is one of the most resolute men I ever saw, and yet
the most calm. He seems absolutely imperturbable. I can fancy what
a wonderful power he must have over his patients. He has a curious
habit of looking one straight in the face, as if trying to read
one's thoughts. He tries this on very much with me, but I flatter
myself he has got a tough nut to crack. I know that from my glass.
Do you ever try to read your own face? I do, and I can
tell you it is not a bad study, and gives you more trouble
than you can well fancy if you have never tried it.
He says that I afford him a curious psychological study, and
I humbly think I do. I do not, as you know, take sufficient
interest in dress to be able to describe the new fashions.
Dress is a bore. That is slang again, but never mind. Arthur
says that every day.
There, it is all out, Mina, we have told all our secrets to
each other since we were children. We have slept together
and eaten together, and laughed and cried together, and
now, though I have spoken, I would like to speak more. Oh,
Mina, couldn't you guess? I love him. I am blushing as I
write, for although I think he loves me, he has not told me
so in words. But, oh, Mina, I love him. I love him There,
that does me good.
I wish I were with you, dear, sitting by the fire undressing, as we
used to sit, and I would try to tell you what I feel. I do not know
how I am writing this even to you. I am afraid to stop, or I should
tear up the letter, and I don't want to stop, for I do so want to
tell you all. Let me hear from you at once, and tell me all that you
think about it. Mina, pray for my happiness.
Lucy
P.S.I need not tell you this is a secret.
Goodnight again. L.
LETTER, LUCY WESTENRA TO MINA MURRAY
 May
My dearest Mina,
Thanks, and thanks, and thanks again for your sweet letter. It
was so nice to be able to tell you and to have your sympathy.
My dear, it never rains but it pours. How true the old proverbs
are. Here am I, who shall be twenty in September, and yet I never
had a proposal till today, not a real proposal, and today I had
three. Just fancy Three proposals in one day Isn't it awful I
feel sorry, really and truly sorry, for two of the poor fellows.
Oh, Mina, I am so happy that I don't know what to do with myself.
And three proposals But, for goodness' sake, don't tell any of the
girls, or they would be getting all sorts of extravagant ideas, and
imagining themselves injured and slighted if in their very first day
at home they did not get six at least. Some girls are so vain You
and I, Mina dear, who are engaged and are going to settle down soon
soberly into old married women, can despise vanity. Well, I must
tell you about the three, but you must keep it a secret, dear, from
every one except, of course, Jonathan. You will tell him, because I
would, if I were in your place, certainly tell Arthur. A woman
ought to tell her husband everything. Don't you think so, dear? And
I must be fair. Men like women, certainly their wives, to be quite
as fair as they are. And women, I am afraid, are not always quite
as fair as they should be.
Well, my dear, number One came just before lunch. I told you of
him, Dr. John Seward, the lunatic asylum man, with the strong jaw
and the good forehead. He was very cool outwardly, but was nervous
all the same. He had evidently been schooling himself as to all
sorts of little things, and remembered them, but he almost managed
to sit down on his silk hat, which men don't generally do when they
are cool, and then when he wanted to appear at ease he kept playing
with a lancet in a way that made me nearly scream. He spoke to me,
Mina, very straightforwardly. He told me how dear I was to him,
though he had known me so little, and what his life would be with me
to help and cheer him. He was going to tell me how unhappy he would
be if I did not care for him, but when he saw me cry he said he was
a brute and would not add to my present trouble. Then he broke off
and asked if I could love him in time, and when I shook my head his
hands trembled, and then with some hesitation he asked me if I cared
already for any one else. He put it very nicely, saying that he did
not want to wring my confidence from me, but only to know, because
if a woman's heart was free a man might have hope. And then, Mina,
I felt a sort of duty to tell him that there was some one. I only
told him that much, and then he stood up, and he looked very strong
and very grave as he took both my hands in his and said he hoped I
would be happy, and that If I ever wanted a friend I must count him
one of my best.
Oh, Mina dear, I can't help crying, and you must excuse this letter
being all blotted. Being proposed to is all very nice and all that
sort of thing, but it isn't at all a happy thing when you have to
see a poor fellow, whom you know loves you honestly, going away and
looking all broken hearted, and to know that, no matter what he may
say at the moment, you are passing out of his life. My dear, I must
stop here at present, I feel so miserable, though I am so happy.
Evening.
Arthur has just gone, and I feel in better spirits than when I
left off, so I can go on telling you about the day.
Well, my dear, number Two came after lunch. He is such a nice
fellow, an American from Texas, and he looks so young and so fresh
that it seems almost impossible that he has been to so many places
and has such adventures. I sympathize with poor Desdemona when she
had such a stream poured in her ear, even by a black man. I suppose
that we women are such cowards that we think a man will save us from
fears, and we marry him. I know now what I would do if I were a man
and wanted to make a girl love me. No, I don't, for there was Mr.
Morris telling us his stories, and Arthur never told any, and
yet . . .
My dear, I am somewhat previous. Mr. Quincy P. Morris found me
alone. It seems that a man always does find a girl alone. No, he
doesn't, for Arthur tried twice to make a chance, and I helping him
all I could, I am not ashamed to say it now. I must tell you
beforehand that Mr. Morris doesn't always speak slang, that is to
say, he never does so to strangers or before them, for he is really
well educated and has exquisite manners, but he found out that it
amused me to hear him talk American slang, and whenever I was
present, and there was no one to be shocked, he said such funny
things. I am afraid, my dear, he has to invent it all, for it fits
exactly into whatever else he has to say. But this is a way slang
has. I do not know myself if I shall ever speak slang. I do not
know if Arthur likes it, as I have never heard him use any as yet.
Well, Mr. Morris sat down beside me and looked as happy and jolly as
he could, but I could see all the same that he was very nervous. He
took my hand in his, and said ever so sweetly . . .
"Miss Lucy, I know I ain't good enough to regulate the fixin's of
your little shoes, but I guess if you wait till you find a man that
is you will go join them seven young women with the lamps when you
quit. Won't you just hitch up alongside of me and let us go down
the long road together, driving in double harness?"
Well, he did look so good humoured and so jolly that it didn't seem
half so hard to refuse him as it did poor Dr. Seward. So I said, as
lightly as I could, that I did not know anything of hitching, and
that I wasn't broken to harness at all yet. Then he said that he
had spoken in a light manner, and he hoped that if he had made a
mistake in doing so on so grave, so momentous, and occasion for him,
I would forgive him. He really did look serious when he was saying
it, and I couldn't help feeling a sort of exultation that he was
number Two in one day. And then, my dear, before I could say a word
he began pouring out a perfect torrent of lovemaking, laying his
very heart and soul at my feet. He looked so earnest over it that I
shall never again think that a man must be playful always, and never
earnest, because he is merry at times. I suppose he saw something
in my face which checked him, for he suddenly stopped, and said with
a sort of manly fervour that I could have loved him for if I had
been free . . .
"Lucy, you are an honest hearted girl, I know. I should not be here
speaking to you as I am now if I did not believe you clean grit,
right through to the very depths of your soul. Tell me, like one
good fellow to another, is there any one else that you care for?
And if there is I'll never trouble you a hair's breadth again, but
will be, if you will let me, a very faithful friend."
My dear Mina, why are men so noble when we women are so little
worthy of them? Here was I almost making fun of this great hearted,
true gentleman. I burst into tears, I am afraid, my dear, you will
think this a very sloppy letter in more ways than one, and I really
felt very badly.
Why can't they let a girl marry three men, or as many as
want her, and save all this trouble? But this is heresy,
and I must not say it. I am glad to say that, though I was
crying, I was able to look into Mr. Morris' brave eyes, and
I told him out straight . . .
"Yes, there is some one I love, though he has not told me
yet that he even loves me." I was right to speak to him so
frankly, for quite a light came into his face, and he put
out both his hands and took mine, I think I put them into
his, and said in a hearty way . . .
"That's my brave girl. It's better worth being late for a chance of
winning you than being in time for any other girl in the world.
Don't cry, my dear. If it's for me, I'm a hard nut to crack, and I
take it standing up. If that other fellow doesn't know his
happiness, well, he'd better look for it soon, or he'll have to deal
with me. Little girl, your honesty and pluck have made me a friend,
and that's rarer than a lover, it's more selfish anyhow. My dear,
I'm going to have a pretty lonely walk between this and Kingdom
Come. Won't you give me one kiss? It'll be something to keep off
the darkness now and then. You can, you know, if you like, for that
other good fellow, or you could not love him, hasn't spoken yet."
That quite won me, Mina, for it was brave and sweet of him,
and noble too, to a rival, wasn't it? And he so sad, so I
leant over and kissed him.
He stood up with my two hands in his, and as he looked down into my
face, I am afraid I was blushing very much, he said, "Little girl, I
hold your hand, and you've kissed me, and if these things don't make
us friends nothing ever will. Thank you for your sweet honesty to
me, and goodbye."
He wrung my hand, and taking up his hat, went straight out of the
room without looking back, without a tear or a quiver or a pause,
and I am crying like a baby.
Oh, why must a man like that be made unhappy when there are lots of
girls about who would worship the very ground he trod on? I know I
would if I were free, only I don't want to be free. My dear, this
quite upset me, and I feel I cannot write of happiness just at once,
after telling you of it, and I don't wish to tell of the number
Three until it can be all happy. Ever your loving . . .
Lucy
P.S.Oh, about number Three, I needn't tell you of number
Three, need I? Besides, it was all so confused. It seemed
only a moment from his coming into the room till both his
arms were round me, and he was kissing me. I am very, very
happy, and I don't know what I have done to deserve it. I
must only try in the future to show that I am not ungrateful
to God for all His goodness to me in sending to me such a
lover, such a husband, and such a friend.
Goodbye.
DR. SEWARD'S DIARY Kept in phonograph
 May.Ebb tide in appetite today. Cannot eat, cannot rest, so
diary instead. Since my rebuff of yesterday I have a sort of empty
feeling. Nothing in the world seems of sufficient importance to be
worth the doing. As I knew that the only cure for this sort of thing
was work, I went amongst the patients. I picked out one who has
afforded me a study of much interest. He is so quaint that I am
determined to understand him as well as I can. Today I seemed to get
nearer than ever before to the heart of his mystery.
I questioned him more fully than I had ever done, with a view to
making myself master of the facts of his hallucination. In my manner
of doing it there was, I now see, something of cruelty. I seemed to
wish to keep him to the point of his madness, a thing which I avoid
with the patients as I would the mouth of hell.
Mem., Under what circumstances would I not avoid the pit of hell?
Omnia Romae venalia sunt. Hell has its price If there be anything
behind this instinct it will be valuable to trace it afterwards
accurately, so I had better commence to do so, therefore . . .
R. M, Renfield, age . Sanguine temperament, great physical
strength, morbidly excitable, periods of gloom, ending in some fixed
idea which I cannot make out. I presume that the sanguine temperament
itself and the disturbing influence end in a mentallyaccomplished
finish, a possibly dangerous man, probably dangerous if unselfish. In
selfish men caution is as secure an armour for their foes as for
themselves. What I think of on this point is, when self is the fixed
point the centripetal force is balanced with the centrifugal. When
duty, a cause, etc., is the fixed point, the latter force is
paramount, and only accident or a series of accidents can balance it.
LETTER, QUINCEY P. MORRIS TO HON. ARTHUR HOLMOOD
 May.
My dear Art,
We've told yarns by the campfire in the prairies, and dressed one
another's wounds after trying a landing at the Marquesas, and drunk
healths on the shore of Titicaca. There are more yarns to be told,
and other wounds to be healed, and another health to be drunk.
Won't you let this be at my campfire tomorrow night? I have no
hesitation in asking you, as I know a certain lady is engaged to a
certain dinner party, and that you are free. There will only be one
other, our old pal at the Korea, Jack Seward. He's coming, too, and
we both want to mingle our weeps over the wine cup, and to drink a
health with all our hearts to the happiest man in all the wide
world, who has won the noblest heart that God has made and best
worth winning. We promise you a hearty welcome, and a loving
greeting, and a health as true as your own right hand. We shall
both swear to leave you at home if you drink too deep to a certain
pair of eyes. Come
Yours, as ever and always,
Quincey P. Morris
TELEGRAM FROM ARTHUR HOLMWOOD TO QUINCEY P. MORRIS
 May
Count me in every time. I bear messages which will make both
your ears tingle.
Art
CHAPTER 
MINA MURRAY'S JOURNAL
 July. Whitby.Lucy met me at the station, looking sweeter and
lovelier than ever, and we drove up to the house at the Crescent in
which they have rooms. This is a lovely place. The little river, the
Esk, runs through a deep valley, which broadens out as it comes near
the harbour. A great viaduct runs across, with high piers, through
which the view seems somehow further away than it really is. The
valley is beautifully green, and it is so steep that when you are on
the high land on either side you look right across it, unless you are
near enough to see down. The houses of the old townthe side away
from us, are all redroofed, and seem piled up one over the other
anyhow, like the pictures we see of Nuremberg. Right over the town is
the ruin of Whitby Abbey, which was sacked by the Danes, and which is
the scene of part of "Marmion," where the girl was built up in the
wall. It is a most noble ruin, of immense size, and full of beautiful
and romantic bits. There is a legend that a white lady is seen in one
of the windows. Between it and the town there is another church, the
parish one, round which is a big graveyard, all full of tombstones.
This is to my mind the nicest spot in Whitby, for it lies right over
the town, and has a full view of the harbour and all up the bay to
where the headland called Kettleness stretches out into the sea. It
descends so steeply over the harbour that part of the bank has fallen
away, and some of the graves have been destroyed.
In one place part of the stonework of the graves stretches out over
the sandy pathway far below. There are walks, with seats beside them,
through the churchyard, and people go and sit there all day long
looking at the beautiful view and enjoying the breeze.
I shall come and sit here often myself and work. Indeed, I am writing
now, with my book on my knee, and listening to the talk of three old
men who are sitting beside me. They seem to do nothing all day but
sit here and talk.
The harbour lies below me, with, on the far side, one long granite
wall stretching out into the sea, with a curve outwards at the end of
it, in the middle of which is a lighthouse. A heavy seawall runs
along outside of it. On the near side, the seawall makes an elbow
crooked inversely, and its end too has a lighthouse. Between the two
piers there is a narrow opening into the harbour, which then suddenly
widens.
It is nice at high water, but when the tide is out it shoals away to
nothing, and there is merely the stream of the Esk, running between
banks of sand, with rocks here and there. Outside the harbour on this
side there rises for about half a mile a great reef, the sharp of
which runs straight out from behind the south lighthouse. At the end
of it is a buoy with a bell, which swings in bad weather, and sends in
a mournful sound on the wind.
They have a legend here that when a ship is lost bells are heard out at
sea. I must ask the old man about this. He is coming this way . . .
He is a funny old man. He must be awfully old, for his face is
gnarled and twisted like the bark of a tree. He tells me that he is
nearly a hundred, and that he was a sailor in the Greenland fishing
fleet when Waterloo was fought. He is, I am afraid, a very sceptical
person, for when I asked him about the bells at sea and the White Lady
at the abbey he said very brusquely,
"I wouldn't fash masel' about them, miss. Them things be all wore
out. Mind, I don't say that they never was, but I do say that they
wasn't in my time. They be all very well for comers and trippers, an'
the like, but not for a nice young lady like you. Them feetfolks
from York and Leeds that be always eatin' cured herrin's and drinkin'
tea an' lookin' out to buy cheap jet would creed aught. I wonder
masel' who'd be bothered tellin' lies to them, even the newspapers,
which is full of fooltalk."
I thought he would be a good person to learn interesting things from,
so I asked him if he would mind telling me something about the whale
fishing in the old days. He was just settling himself to begin when
the clock struck six, whereupon he laboured to get up, and said,
"I must gang ageeanwards home now, miss. My granddaughter doesn't
like to be kept waitin' when the tea is ready, for it takes me time to
crammle aboon the grees, for there be a many of 'em, and miss, I lack
bellytimber sairly by the clock."
He hobbled away, and I could see him hurrying, as well as he could,
down the steps. The steps are a great feature on the place. They
lead from the town to the church, there are hundreds of them, I do not
know how many, and they wind up in a delicate curve. The slope is so
gentle that a horse could easily walk up and down them.
I think they must originally have had something to do with the abbey.
I shall go home too. Lucy went out, visiting with her mother, and as
they were only duty calls, I did not go.
 August.I came up here an hour ago with Lucy, and we had a most
interesting talk with my old friend and the two others who always come
and join him. He is evidently the Sir Oracle of them, and I should
think must have been in his time a most dictatorial person.
He will not admit anything, and down faces everybody. If he can't
outargue them he bullies them, and then takes their silence for
agreement with his views.
Lucy was looking sweetly pretty in her white lawn frock. She has got
a beautiful colour since she has been here.
I noticed that the old men did not lose any time in coming and sitting
near her when we sat down. She is so sweet with old people, I think
they all fell in love with her on the spot. Even my old man succumbed
and did not contradict her, but gave me double share instead. I got
him on the subject of the legends, and he went off at once into a sort
of sermon. I must try to remember it and put it down.
"It be all fooltalk, lock, stock, and barrel, that's what it be and
nowt else. These bans an' wafts an' bohghosts an' barguests an'
bogles an' all anent them is only fit to set bairns an' dizzy women
a'belderin'. They be nowt but airblebs. They, an' all grims an' signs
an' warnin's, be all invented by parsons an' illsome berkbodies an'
railway touters to skeer an' scunner hafflin's, an' to get folks to do
somethin' that they don't other incline to. It makes me ireful to
think o' them. Why, it's them that, not content with printin' lies on
paper an' preachin' them out of pulpits, does want to be cuttin' them
on the tombstones. Look here all around you in what airt ye will. All
them steans, holdin' up their heads as well as they can out of their
pride, is acant, simply tumblin' down with the weight o' the lies
wrote on them, 'Here lies the body' or 'Sacred to the memory' wrote on
all of them, an' yet in nigh half of them there bean't no bodies at
all, an' the memories of them bean't cared a pinch of snuff about,
much less sacred. Lies all of them, nothin' but lies of one kind or
another My gog, but it'll be a quare scowderment at the Day of
Judgment when they come tumblin' up in their deathsarks, all jouped
together an' trying' to drag their tombsteans with them to prove how
good they was, some of them trimmlin' an' dithering, with their hands
that dozzened an' slippery from lyin' in the sea that they can't even
keep their gurp o' them."
I could see from the old fellow's selfsatisfied air and the way in
which he looked round for the approval of his cronies that he was
"showing off," so I put in a word to keep him going.
"Oh, Mr. Swales, you can't be serious. Surely these tombstones are
not all wrong?"
"Yabblins There may be a poorish few not wrong, savin' where they
make out the people too good, for there be folk that do think a
balmbowl be like the sea, if only it be their own. The whole thing
be only lies. Now look you here. You come here a stranger, an' you
see this kirkgarth."
I nodded, for I thought it better to assent, though I did not quite
understand his dialect. I knew it had something to do with the
church.
He went on, "And you consate that all these steans be aboon folk that
be haped here, snod an' snog?" I assented again. "Then that be just
where the lie comes in. Why, there be scores of these laybeds that be
toom as old Dun's 'baccabox on Friday night."
He nudged one of his companions, and they all laughed. "And, my gog
How could they be otherwise? Look at that one, the aftest abaft the
bierbank, read it"
I went over and read, "Edward Spencelagh, master mariner, murdered by
pirates off the coast of Andres, April, , age ." When I came
back Mr. Swales went on,
"Who brought him home, I wonder, to hap him here? Murdered off the
coast of Andres An' you consated his body lay under Why, I could
name ye a dozen whose bones lie in the Greenland seas above," he
pointed northwards, "or where the currants may have drifted them.
There be the steans around ye. Ye can, with your young eyes, read the
small print of the lies from here. This Braithwaite Lowery, I knew
his father, lost in the Lively off Greenland in ', or Andrew
Woodhouse, drowned in the same seas in , or John Paxton, drowned
off Cape Farewell a year later, or old John Rawlings, whose
grandfather sailed with me, drowned in the Gulf of Finland in '. Do
ye think that all these men will have to make a rush to Whitby when
the trumpet sounds? I have me antherums aboot it I tell ye that
when they got here they'd be jommlin' and jostlin' one another that
way that it 'ud be like a fight up on the ice in the old days, when
we'd be at one another from daylight to dark, an' tryin' to tie up our
cuts by the aurora borealis." This was evidently local pleasantry, for
the old man cackled over it, and his cronies joined in with gusto.
"But," I said, "surely you are not quite correct, for you start on the
assumption that all the poor people, or their spirits, will have to
take their tombstones with them on the Day of Judgment. Do you think
that will be really necessary?"
"Well, what else be they tombstones for? Answer me that, miss"
"To please their relatives, I suppose."
"To please their relatives, you suppose" This he said with intense
scorn. "How will it pleasure their relatives to know that lies is
wrote over them, and that everybody in the place knows that they be
lies?"
He pointed to a stone at our feet which had been laid down as a slab,
on which the seat was rested, close to the edge of the cliff. "Read
the lies on that thruffstone," he said.
The letters were upside down to me from where I sat, but Lucy was more
opposite to them, so she leant over and read, "Sacred to the memory of
George Canon, who died, in the hope of a glorious resurrection, on
July ,, falling from the rocks at Kettleness. This tomb was
erected by his sorrowing mother to her dearly beloved son. 'He was the
only son of his mother, and she was a widow.' Really, Mr. Swales, I
don't see anything very funny in that" She spoke her comment very
gravely and somewhat severely.
"Ye don't see aught funny Haha But that's because ye don't gawm
the sorrowin' mother was a hellcat that hated him because he was
acrewk'd, a regular lamiter he was, an' he hated her so that he
committed suicide in order that she mightn't get an insurance she put
on his life. He blew nigh the top of his head off with an old musket
that they had for scarin' crows with. 'Twarn't for crows then, for it
brought the clegs and the dowps to him. That's the way he fell off
the rocks. And, as to hopes of a glorious resurrection, I've often
heard him say masel' that he hoped he'd go to hell, for his mother was
so pious that she'd be sure to go to heaven, an' he didn't want to
addle where she was. Now isn't that stean at any rate," he hammered
it with his stick as he spoke, "a pack of lies? And won't it make
Gabriel keckle when Geordie comes pantin' ut the grees with the
tompstean balanced on his hump, and asks to be took as evidence"
I did not know what to say, but Lucy turned the conversation as she
said, rising up, "Oh, why did you tell us of this? It is my favourite
seat, and I cannot leave it, and now I find I must go on sitting over
the grave of a suicide."
"That won't harm ye, my pretty, an' it may make poor Geordie gladsome
to have so trim a lass sittin' on his lap. That won't hurt ye. Why,
I've sat here off an' on for nigh twenty years past, an' it hasn't
done me no harm. Don't ye fash about them as lies under ye, or that
doesn' lie there either It'll be time for ye to be getting scart
when ye see the tombsteans all run away with, and the place as bare as
a stubblefield. There's the clock, and I must gang. My service to
ye, ladies" And off he hobbled.
Lucy and I sat awhile, and it was all so beautiful before us that we
took hands as we sat, and she told me all over again about Arthur and
their coming marriage. That made me just a little heartsick, for I
haven't heard from Jonathan for a whole month.
The same day. I came up here alone, for I am very sad. There was no
letter for me. I hope there cannot be anything the matter with
Jonathan. The clock has just struck nine. I see the lights scattered
all over the town, sometimes in rows where the streets are, and
sometimes singly. They run right up the Esk and die away in the curve
of the valley. To my left the view is cut off by a black line of roof
of the old house next to the abbey. The sheep and lambs are bleating
in the fields away behind me, and there is a clatter of donkeys' hoofs
up the paved road below. The band on the pier is playing a harsh
waltz in good time, and further along the quay there is a Salvation
Army meeting in a back street. Neither of the bands hears the other,
but up here I hear and see them both. I wonder where Jonathan is and
if he is thinking of me I wish he were here.
DR. SEWARD'S DIARY
 June.The case of Renfield grows more interesting the more I get to
understand the man. He has certain qualities very largely developed,
selfishness, secrecy, and purpose.
I wish I could get at what is the object of the latter. He seems to
have some settled scheme of his own, but what it is I do not know.
His redeeming quality is a love of animals, though, indeed, he has
such curious turns in it that I sometimes imagine he is only
abnormally cruel. His pets are of odd sorts.
Just now his hobby is catching flies. He has at present such a
quantity that I have had myself to expostulate. To my astonishment,
he did not break out into a fury, as I expected, but took the matter
in simple seriousness. He thought for a moment, and then said, "May I
have three days? I shall clear them away." Of course, I said that
would do. I must watch him.
 June.He has turned his mind now to spiders, and has got several
very big fellows in a box. He keeps feeding them his flies, and the
number of the latter is becoming sensibly diminished, although he has
used half his food in attracting more flies from outside to his room.
 July.His spiders are now becoming as great a nuisance as his
flies, and today I told him that he must get rid of them.
He looked very sad at this, so I said that he must some of them, at
all events. He cheerfully acquiesced in this, and I gave him the same
time as before for reduction.
He disgusted me much while with him, for when a horrid blowfly,
bloated with some carrion food, buzzed into the room, he caught it,
held it exultantly for a few moments between his finger and thumb, and
before I knew what he was going to do, put it in his mouth and ate it.
I scolded him for it, but he argued quietly that it was very good and
very wholesome, that it was life, strong life, and gave life to him.
This gave me an idea, or the rudiment of one. I must watch how he
gets rid of his spiders.
He has evidently some deep problem in his mind, for he keeps a little
notebook in which he is always jotting down something. Whole pages of
it are filled with masses of figures, generally single numbers added
up in batches, and then the totals added in batches again, as though
he were focussing some account, as the auditors put it.
 July.There is a method in his madness, and the rudimentary idea in
my mind is growing. It will be a whole idea soon, and then, oh,
unconscious cerebration, you will have to give the wall to your
conscious brother.
I kept away from my friend for a few days, so that I might notice if
there were any change. Things remain as they were except that he has
parted with some of his pets and got a new one.
He has managed to get a sparrow, and has already partially tamed it.
His means of taming is simple, for already the spiders have
diminished. Those that do remain, however, are well fed, for he still
brings in the flies by tempting them with his food.
 JulyWe are progressing. My friend has now a whole colony of
sparrows, and his flies and spiders are almost obliterated. When I
came in he ran to me and said he wanted to ask me a great favour, a
very, very great favour. And as he spoke, he fawned on me like a dog.
I asked him what it was, and he said, with a sort of rapture in his
voice and bearing, "A kitten, a nice, little, sleek playful kitten,
that I can play with, and teach, and feed, and feed, and feed"
I was not unprepared for this request, for I had noticed how his pets
went on increasing in size and vivacity, but I did not care that his
pretty family of tame sparrows should be wiped out in the same manner
as the flies and spiders. So I said I would see about it, and asked
him if he would not rather have a cat than a kitten.
His eagerness betrayed him as he answered, "Oh, yes, I would like a
cat I only asked for a kitten lest you should refuse me a cat. No
one would refuse me a kitten, would they?"
I shook my head, and said that at present I feared it would not be
possible, but that I would see about it. His face fell, and I could
see a warning of danger in it, for there was a sudden fierce, sidelong
look which meant killing. The man is an undeveloped homicidal
maniac. I shall test him with his present craving and see how it will
work out, then I shall know more.
 pm.I have visited him again and found him sitting in a corner
brooding. When I came in he threw himself on his knees before me and
implored me to let him have a cat, that his salvation depended upon
it.
I was firm, however, and told him that he could not have it, whereupon
he went without a word, and sat down, gnawing his fingers, in the
corner where I had found him. I shall see him in the morning early.
 July.Visited Renfield very early, before attendant went his
rounds. Found him up and humming a tune. He was spreading out his
sugar, which he had saved, in the window, and was manifestly beginning
his fly catching again, and beginning it cheerfully and with a good
grace.
I looked around for his birds, and not seeing them, asked him where
they were. He replied, without turning round, that they had all flown
away. There were a few feathers about the room and on his pillow a
drop of blood. I said nothing, but went and told the keeper to report
to me if there were anything odd about him during the day.
 am.The attendant has just been to see me to say that Renfield has
been very sick and has disgorged a whole lot of feathers. "My belief
is, doctor," he said, "that he has eaten his birds, and that he just
took and ate them raw"
 pm.I gave Renfield a strong opiate tonight, enough to make even
him sleep, and took away his pocketbook to look at it. The thought
that has been buzzing about my brain lately is complete, and the
theory proved.
My homicidal maniac is of a peculiar kind. I shall have to invent a
new classification for him, and call him a zoophagous lifeeating
maniac. What he desires is to absorb as many lives as he can, and he
has laid himself out to achieve it in a cumulative way. He gave many
flies to one spider and many spiders to one bird, and then wanted a
cat to eat the many birds. What would have been his later steps?
It would almost be worth while to complete the experiment. It might
be done if there were only a sufficient cause. Men sneered at
vivisection, and yet look at its results today Why not advance
science in its most difficult and vital aspect, the knowledge of the
brain?
Had I even the secret of one such mind, did I hold the key to the
fancy of even one lunatic, I might advance my own branch of science to
a pitch compared with which BurdonSanderson's physiology or Ferrier's
brain knowledge would be as nothing. If only there were a sufficient
cause I must not think too much of this, or I may be tempted. A
good cause might turn the scale with me, for may not I too be of an
exceptional brain, congenitally?
How well the man reasoned. Lunatics always do within their own scope.
I wonder at how many lives he values a man, or if at only one. He has
closed the account most accurately, and today begun a new record. How
many of us begin a new record with each day of our lives?
To me it seems only yesterday that my whole life ended with my new
hope, and that truly I began a new record. So it shall be until the
Great Recorder sums me up and closes my ledger account with a balance
to profit or loss.
Oh, Lucy, Lucy, I cannot be angry with you, nor can I be angry with my
friend whose happiness is yours, but I must only wait on hopeless and
work. Work Work
If I could have as strong a cause as my poor mad friend there, a good,
unselfish cause to make me work, that would be indeed happiness.
MINA MURRAY'S JOURNAL
 July.I am anxious, and it soothes me to express myself here. It
is like whispering to one's self and listening at the same time. And
there is also something about the shorthand symbols that makes it
different from writing. I am unhappy about Lucy and about Jonathan.
I had not heard from Jonathan for some time, and was very concerned,
but yesterday dear Mr. Hawkins, who is always so kind, sent me a
letter from him. I had written asking him if he had heard, and he
said the enclosed had just been received. It is only a line dated
from Castle Dracula, and says that he is just starting for home. That
is not like Jonathan. I do not understand it, and it makes me uneasy.
Then, too, Lucy, although she is so well, has lately taken to her old
habit of walking in her sleep. Her mother has spoken to me about it,
and we have decided that I am to lock the door of our room every
night.
Mrs. Westenra has got an idea that sleepwalkers always go out on
roofs of houses and along the edges of cliffs and then get suddenly
wakened and fall over with a despairing cry that echoes all over the
place.
Poor dear, she is naturally anxious about Lucy, and she tells me that
her husband, Lucy's father, had the same habit, that he would get up
in the night and dress himself and go out, if he were not stopped.
Lucy is to be married in the autumn, and she is already planning out
her dresses and how her house is to be arranged. I sympathise with
her, for I do the same, only Jonathan and I will start in life in a
very simple way, and shall have to try to make both ends meet.
Mr. Holmwood, he is the Hon. Arthur Holmwood, only son of Lord
Godalming, is coming up here very shortly, as soon as he can leave
town, for his father is not very well, and I think dear Lucy is
counting the moments till he comes.
She wants to take him up in the seat on the churchyard cliff and show
him the beauty of Whitby. I daresay it is the waiting which disturbs
her. She will be all right when he arrives.
 July.No news from Jonathan. I am getting quite uneasy about him,
though why I should I do not know, but I do wish that he would write,
if it were only a single line.
Lucy walks more than ever, and each night I am awakened by her moving
about the room. Fortunately, the weather is so hot that she cannot
get cold. But still, the anxiety and the perpetually being awakened
is beginning to tell on me, and I am getting nervous and wakeful
myself. Thank God, Lucy's health keeps up. Mr. Holmwood has been
suddenly called to Ring to see his father, who has been taken
seriously ill. Lucy frets at the postponement of seeing him, but it
does not touch her looks. She is a trifle stouter, and her cheeks are
a lovely rosepink. She has lost the anemic look which she had. I
pray it will all last.
 August.Another week gone by, and no news from Jonathan, not even
to Mr. Hawkins, from whom I have heard. Oh, I do hope he is not ill.
He surely would have written. I look at that last letter of his, but
somehow it does not satisfy me. It does not read like him, and yet it
is his writing. There is no mistake of that.
Lucy has not walked much in her sleep the last week, but there is an
odd concentration about her which I do not understand, even in her
sleep she seems to be watching me. She tries the door, and finding it
locked, goes about the room searching for the key.
 August.Another three days, and no news. This suspense is getting
dreadful. If I only knew where to write to or where to go to, I
should feel easier. But no one has heard a word of Jonathan since
that last letter. I must only pray to God for patience.
Lucy is more excitable than ever, but is otherwise well. Last night
was very threatening, and the fishermen say that we are in for a
storm. I must try to watch it and learn the weather signs.
Today is a gray day, and the sun as I write is hidden in thick clouds,
high over Kettleness. Everything is gray except the green grass,
which seems like emerald amongst it, gray earthy rock, gray clouds,
tinged with the sunburst at the far edge, hang over the gray sea, into
which the sandpoints stretch like gray figures. The sea is tumbling
in over the shallows and the sandy flats with a roar, muffled in the
seamists drifting inland. The horizon is lost in a gray mist. All
vastness, the clouds are piled up like giant rocks, and there is a
'brool' over the sea that sounds like some passage of doom. Dark
figures are on the beach here and there, sometimes half shrouded in
the mist, and seem 'men like trees walking'. The fishing boats are
racing for home, and rise and dip in the ground swell as they sweep
into the harbour, bending to the scuppers. Here comes old Mr. Swales.
He is making straight for me, and I can see, by the way he lifts his
hat, that he wants to talk.
I have been quite touched by the change in the poor old man. When he
sat down beside me, he said in a very gentle way, "I want to say
something to you, miss."
I could see he was not at ease, so I took his poor old wrinkled hand in
mine and asked him to speak fully.
So he said, leaving his hand in mine, "I'm afraid, my deary, that I
must have shocked you by all the wicked things I've been sayin' about
the dead, and such like, for weeks past, but I didn't mean them, and I
want ye to remember that when I'm gone. We aud folks that be daffled,
and with one foot abaft the krokhooal, don't altogether like to think
of it, and we don't want to feel scart of it, and that's why I've took
to makin' light of it, so that I'd cheer up my own heart a bit. But,
Lord love ye, miss, I ain't afraid of dyin', not a bit, only I don't
want to die if I can help it. My time must be nigh at hand now, for I
be aud, and a hundred years is too much for any man to expect. And
I'm so nigh it that the Aud Man is already whettin' his scythe. Ye
see, I can't get out o' the habit of caffin' about it all at once.
The chafts will wag as they be used to. Some day soon the Angel of
Death will sound his trumpet for me. But don't ye dooal an' greet, my
deary"for he saw that I was crying"if he should come this very
night I'd not refuse to answer his call. For life be, after all, only
a waitin' for somethin' else than what we're doin', and death be all
that we can rightly depend on. But I'm content, for it's comin' to
me, my deary, and comin' quick. It may be comin' while we be lookin'
and wonderin'. Maybe it's in that wind out over the sea that's
bringin' with it loss and wreck, and sore distress, and sad hearts.
Look Look" he cried suddenly. "There's something in that wind and
in the hoast beyont that sounds, and looks, and tastes, and smells
like death. It's in the air. I feel it comin'. Lord, make me answer
cheerful, when my call comes" He held up his arms devoutly, and
raised his hat. His mouth moved as though he were praying. After a
few minutes' silence, he got up, shook hands with me, and blessed me,
and said goodbye, and hobbled off. It all touched me, and upset me
very much.
I was glad when the coastguard came along, with his spyglass under his
arm. He stopped to talk with me, as he always does, but all the time
kept looking at a strange ship.
"I can't make her out," he said. "She's a Russian, by the look of
her. But she's knocking about in the queerest way. She doesn't know
her mind a bit. She seems to see the storm coming, but can't decide
whether to run up north in the open, or to put in here. Look there
again She is steered mighty strangely, for she doesn't mind the hand
on the wheel, changes about with every puff of wind. We'll hear more
of her before this time tomorrow."
CHAPTER 
CUTTING FROM "THE DAILYGRAPH",  AUGUST
PASTED IN MINA MURRAY'S JOURNAL
From a correspondent.
Whitby.
One of the greatest and suddenest storms on record has just been
experienced here, with results both strange and unique. The weather
had been somewhat sultry, but not to any degree uncommon in the
month of August. Saturday evening was as fine as was ever known,
and the great body of holidaymakers laid out yesterday for visits
to Mulgrave Woods, Robin Hood's Bay, Rig Mill, Runswick, Staithes,
and the various trips in the neighborhood of Whitby. The steamers
Emma and Scarborough made trips up and down the coast, and there was
an unusual amount of 'tripping' both to and from Whitby. The day
was unusually fine till the afternoon, when some of the gossips who
frequent the East Cliff churchyard, and from the commanding eminence
watch the wide sweep of sea visible to the north and east, called
attention to a sudden show of 'mares tails' high in the sky to the
northwest. The wind was then blowing from the southwest in the
mild degree which in barometrical language is ranked 'No. , light
breeze.'
The coastguard on duty at once made report, and one old fisherman,
who for more than half a century has kept watch on weather signs
from the East Cliff, foretold in an emphatic manner the coming of a
sudden storm. The approach of sunset was so very beautiful, so
grand in its masses of splendidly coloured clouds, that there was
quite an assemblage on the walk along the cliff in the old
churchyard to enjoy the beauty. Before the sun dipped below the
black mass of Kettleness, standing boldly athwart the western sky,
its downward way was marked by myriad clouds of every sunset colour,
flame, purple, pink, green, violet, and all the tints of gold, with
here and there masses not large, but of seemingly absolute
blackness, in all sorts of shapes, as well outlined as colossal
silhouettes. The experience was not lost on the painters, and
doubtless some of the sketches of the 'Prelude to the Great Storm'
will grace the R. A and R. I. walls in May next.
More than one captain made up his mind then and there that his
'cobble' or his 'mule', as they term the different classes of boats,
would remain in the harbour till the storm had passed. The wind
fell away entirely during the evening, and at midnight there was a
dead calm, a sultry heat, and that prevailing intensity which, on
the approach of thunder, affects persons of a sensitive nature.
There were but few lights in sight at sea, for even the coasting
steamers, which usually hug the shore so closely, kept well to
seaward, and but few fishing boats were in sight. The only sail
noticeable was a foreign schooner with all sails set, which was
seemingly going westwards. The foolhardiness or ignorance of her
officers was a prolific theme for comment whilst she remained in
sight, and efforts were made to signal her to reduce sail in the
face of her danger. Before the night shut down she was seen with
sails idly flapping as she gently rolled on the undulating swell of
the sea.
"As idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean."
Shortly before ten o'clock the stillness of the air grew quite
oppressive, and the silence was so marked that the bleating of a
sheep inland or the barking of a dog in the town was distinctly
heard, and the band on the pier, with its lively French air, was
like a dischord in the great harmony of nature's silence. A little
after midnight came a strange sound from over the sea, and high
overhead the air began to carry a strange, faint, hollow booming.
Then without warning the tempest broke. With a rapidity which, at
the time, seemed incredible, and even afterwards is impossible to
realize, the whole aspect of nature at once became convulsed. The
waves rose in growing fury, each overtopping its fellow, till in a
very few minutes the lately glassy sea was like a roaring and
devouring monster. Whitecrested waves beat madly on the level
sands and rushed up the shelving cliffs. Others broke over the
piers, and with their spume swept the lanthorns of the lighthouses
which rise from the end of either pier of Whitby Harbour.
The wind roared like thunder, and blew with such force that it was
with difficulty that even strong men kept their feet, or clung with
grim clasp to the iron stanchions. It was found necessary to clear
the entire pier from the mass of onlookers, or else the fatalities
of the night would have increased manifold. To add to the
difficulties and dangers of the time, masses of seafog came
drifting inland. White, wet clouds, which swept by in ghostly
fashion, so dank and damp and cold that it needed but little effort
of imagination to think that the spirits of those lost at sea were
touching their living brethren with the clammy hands of death, and
many a one shuddered as the wreaths of seamist swept by.
At times the mist cleared, and the sea for some distance could be
seen in the glare of the lightning, which came thick and fast,
followed by such peals of thunder that the whole sky overhead seemed
trembling under the shock of the footsteps of the storm.
Some of the scenes thus revealed were of immeasurable grandeur and
of absorbing interest. The sea, running mountains high, threw
skywards with each wave mighty masses of white foam, which the
tempest seemed to snatch at and whirl away into space. Here and
there a fishing boat, with a rag of sail, running madly for shelter
before the blast, now and again the white wings of a stormtossed
seabird. On the summit of the East Cliff the new searchlight was
ready for experiment, but had not yet been tried. The officers in
charge of it got it into working order, and in the pauses of
onrushing mist swept with it the surface of the sea. Once or twice
its service was most effective, as when a fishing boat, with gunwale
under water, rushed into the harbour, able, by the guidance of the
sheltering light, to avoid the danger of dashing against the piers.
As each boat achieved the safety of the port there was a shout of
joy from the mass of people on the shore, a shout which for a moment
seemed to cleave the gale and was then swept away in its rush.
Before long the searchlight discovered some distance away a schooner
with all sails set, apparently the same vessel which had been
noticed earlier in the evening. The wind had by this time backed to
the east, and there was a shudder amongst the watchers on the cliff
as they realized the terrible danger in which she now was.
Between her and the port lay the great flat reef on which so many
good ships have from time to time suffered, and, with the wind
blowing from its present quarter, it would be quite impossible that
she should fetch the entrance of the harbour.
It was now nearly the hour of high tide, but the waves were so great
that in their troughs the shallows of the shore were almost visible,
and the schooner, with all sails set, was rushing with such speed
that, in the words of one old salt, "she must fetch up somewhere, if
it was only in hell". Then came another rush of seafog, greater
than any hitherto, a mass of dank mist, which seemed to close on all
things like a gray pall, and left available to men only the organ of
hearing, for the roar of the tempest, and the crash of the thunder,
and the booming of the mighty billows came through the damp oblivion
even louder than before. The rays of the searchlight were kept fixed
on the harbour mouth across the East Pier, where the shock was
expected, and men waited breathless.
The wind suddenly shifted to the northeast, and the remnant of the
sea fog melted in the blast. And then, mirabile dictu, between the
piers, leaping from wave to wave as it rushed at headlong speed,
swept the strange schooner before the blast, with all sail set, and
gained the safety of the harbour. The searchlight followed her, and
a shudder ran through all who saw her, for lashed to the helm was a
corpse, with drooping head, which swung horribly to and fro at each
motion of the ship. No other form could be seen on the deck at all.
A great awe came on all as they realised that the ship, as if by a
miracle, had found the harbour, unsteered save by the hand of a dead
man However, all took place more quickly than it takes to write
these words. The schooner paused not, but rushing across the
harbour, pitched herself on that accumulation of sand and gravel
washed by many tides and many storms into the southeast corner of
the pier jutting under the East Cliff, known locally as Tate Hill
Pier.
There was of course a considerable concussion as the vessel drove up
on the sand heap. Every spar, rope, and stay was strained, and some
of the 'tophammer' came crashing down. But, strangest of all, the
very instant the shore was touched, an immense dog sprang up on deck
from below, as if shot up by the concussion, and running forward,
jumped from the bow on the sand.
Making straight for the steep cliff, where the churchyard hangs over
the laneway to the East Pier so steeply that some of the flat
tombstones, thruffsteans or throughstones, as they call them in
Whitby vernacular, actually project over where the sustaining cliff
has fallen away, it disappeared in the darkness, which seemed
intensified just beyond the focus of the searchlight.
It so happened that there was no one at the moment on Tate Hill
Pier, as all those whose houses are in close proximity were either
in bed or were out on the heights above. Thus the coastguard on
duty on the eastern side of the harbour, who at once ran down to the
little pier, was the first to climb aboard. The men working the
searchlight, after scouring the entrance of the harbour without
seeing anything, then turned the light on the derelict and kept it
there. The coastguard ran aft, and when he came beside the wheel,
bent over to examine it, and recoiled at once as though under some
sudden emotion. This seemed to pique general curiosity, and quite a
number of people began to run.
It is a good way round from the West Cliff by the Drawbridge to
Tate Hill Pier, but your correspondent is a fairly good runner, and
came well ahead of the crowd. When I arrived, however, I found
already assembled on the pier a crowd, whom the coastguard and
police refused to allow to come on board. By the courtesy of the
chief boatman, I was, as your correspondent, permitted to climb on
deck, and was one of a small group who saw the dead seaman whilst
actually lashed to the wheel.
It was no wonder that the coastguard was surprised, or even awed,
for not often can such a sight have been seen. The man was simply
fastened by his hands, tied one over the other, to a spoke of the
wheel. Between the inner hand and the wood was a crucifix, the set
of beads on which it was fastened being around both wrists and
wheel, and all kept fast by the binding cords. The poor fellow may
have been seated at one time, but the flapping and buffeting of the
sails had worked through the rudder of the wheel and had dragged him
to and fro, so that the cords with which he was tied had cut the
flesh to the bone.
Accurate note was made of the state of things, and a doctor, Surgeon
J. M. Caffyn, of , East Elliot Place, who came immediately after
me, declared, after making examination, that the man must have been
dead for quite two days.
In his pocket was a bottle, carefully corked, empty save for
a little roll of paper, which proved to be the addendum to
the log.
The coastguard said the man must have tied up his own hands,
fastening the knots with his teeth. The fact that a coastguard was
the first on board may save some complications later on, in the
Admiralty Court, for coastguards cannot claim the salvage which is
the right of the first civilian entering on a derelict. Already,
however, the legal tongues are wagging, and one young law student is
loudly asserting that the rights of the owner are already completely
sacrificed, his property being held in contravention of the statues
of mortmain, since the tiller, as emblemship, if not proof, of
delegated possession, is held in a dead hand.
It is needless to say that the dead steersman has been reverently
removed from the place where he held his honourable watch and ward
till death, a steadfastness as noble as that of the young
Casabianca, and placed in the mortuary to await inquest.
Already the sudden storm is passing, and its fierceness is
abating. Crowds are scattering backward, and the sky is
beginning to redden over the Yorkshire wolds.
I shall send, in time for your next issue, further details
of the derelict ship which found her way so miraculously
into harbour in the storm.
 August.The sequel to the strange arrival of the derelict in the
storm last night is almost more startling than the thing itself. It
turns out that the schooner is Russian from Varna, and is called the
Demeter. She is almost entirely in ballast of silver sand, with
only a small amount of cargo, a number of great wooden boxes filled
with mould.
This cargo was consigned to a Whitby solicitor, Mr. S.F. Billington,
of , The Crescent, who this morning went aboard and took formal
possession of the goods consigned to him.
The Russian consul, too, acting for the charterparty, took formal
possession of the ship, and paid all harbour dues, etc.
Nothing is talked about here today except the strange coincidence.
The officials of the Board of Trade have been most exacting in
seeing that every compliance has been made with existing
regulations. As the matter is to be a 'nine days wonder', they are
evidently determined that there shall be no cause of other
complaint.
A good deal of interest was abroad concerning the dog which landed
when the ship struck, and more than a few of the members of the
S.P.C.A., which is very strong in Whitby, have tried to befriend the
animal. To the general disappointment, however, it was not to be
found. It seems to have disappeared entirely from the town. It may
be that it was frightened and made its way on to the moors, where it
is still hiding in terror.
There are some who look with dread on such a possibility, lest later
on it should in itself become a danger, for it is evidently a fierce
brute. Early this morning a large dog, a halfbred mastiff
belonging to a coal merchant close to Tate Hill Pier, was found dead
in the roadway opposite its master's yard. It had been fighting,
and manifestly had had a savage opponent, for its throat was torn
away, and its belly was slit open as if with a savage claw.
Later.By the kindness of the Board of Trade inspector, I have been
permitted to look over the log book of the Demeter, which was in
order up to within three days, but contained nothing of special
interest except as to facts of missing men. The greatest interest,
however, is with regard to the paper found in the bottle, which was
today produced at the inquest. And a more strange narrative than
the two between them unfold it has not been my lot to come across.
As there is no motive for concealment, I am permitted to use them,
and accordingly send you a transcript, simply omitting technical
details of seamanship and supercargo. It almost seems as though the
captain had been seized with some kind of mania before he had got
well into blue water, and that this had developed persistently
throughout the voyage. Of course my statement must be taken cum
grano, since I am writing from the dictation of a clerk of the
Russian consul, who kindly translated for me, time being short.
LOG OF THE "DEMETER" Varna to Whitby
Written  July, things so strange happening, that I shall
keep accurate note henceforth till we land.
On  July we finished taking in cargo, silver sand and boxes
of earth. At noon set sail. East wind, fresh. Crew, five
hands . . . two mates, cook, and myself, captain.
On  July at dawn entered Bosphorus. Boarded by Turkish
Customs officers. Backsheesh. All correct. Under way at
 p.m.
On  July through Dardanelles. More Customs officers and
flagboat of guarding squadron. Backsheesh again. Work of
officers thorough, but quick. Want us off soon. At dark
passed into Archipelago.
On  July passed Cape Matapan. Crew dissatisfied about
something. Seemed scared, but would not speak out.
On  July was somewhat anxious about crew. Men all steady
fellows, who sailed with me before. Mate could not make out what
was wrong. They only told him there was SOMETHING, and crossed
themselves. Mate lost temper with one of them that day and struck
him. Expected fierce quarrel, but all was quiet.
On  July mate reported in the morning that one of the
crew, Petrofsky, was missing. Could not account for it.
Took larboard watch eight bells last night, was relieved by
Amramoff, but did not go to bunk. Men more downcast than
ever. All said they expected something of the kind, but
would not say more than there was SOMETHING aboard. Mate
getting very impatient with them. Feared some trouble
ahead.
On  July, yesterday, one of the men, Olgaren, came to my cabin,
and in an awestruck way confided to me that he thought there was a
strange man aboard the ship. He said that in his watch he had
been sheltering behind the deckhouse, as there was a rain storm,
when he saw a tall, thin man, who was not like any of the crew,
come up the companionway, and go along the deck forward and
disappear. He followed cautiously, but when he got to bows found
no one, and the hatchways were all closed. He was in a panic of
superstitious fear, and I am afraid the panic may spread. To
allay it, I shall today search the entire ship carefully from stem
to stern.
Later in the day I got together the whole crew, and told them, as
they evidently thought there was some one in the ship, we would
search from stem to stern. First mate angry, said it was folly,
and to yield to such foolish ideas would demoralise the men, said
he would engage to keep them out of trouble with the handspike. I
let him take the helm, while the rest began a thorough search, all
keeping abreast, with lanterns. We left no corner unsearched. As
there were only the big wooden boxes, there were no odd corners
where a man could hide. Men much relieved when search over, and
went back to work cheerfully. First mate scowled, but said
nothing.
 July.Rough weather last three days, and all hands busy
with sails, no time to be frightened. Men seem to have
forgotten their dread. Mate cheerful again, and all on
good terms. Praised men for work in bad weather. Passed
Gibraltar and out through Straits. All well.
 July.There seems some doom over this ship. Already a hand
short, and entering the Bay of Biscay with wild weather ahead, and
yet last night another man lost, disappeared. Like the first, he
came off his watch and was not seen again. Men all in a panic of
fear, sent a round robin, asking to have double watch, as they
fear to be alone. Mate angry. Fear there will be some trouble,
as either he or the men will do some violence.
 July.Four days in hell, knocking about in a sort of
maelstrom, and the wind a tempest. No sleep for any one.
Men all worn out. Hardly know how to set a watch, since no
one fit to go on. Second mate volunteered to steer and
watch, and let men snatch a few hours sleep. Wind abating,
seas still terrific, but feel them less, as ship is
steadier.
 July.Another tragedy. Had single watch tonight, as crew too
tired to double. When morning watch came on deck could find no
one except steersman. Raised outcry, and all came on deck.
Thorough search, but no one found. Are now without second mate,
and crew in a panic. Mate and I agreed to go armed henceforth and
wait for any sign of cause.
 July.Last night. Rejoiced we are nearing England. Weather
fine, all sails set. Retired worn out, slept soundly, awakened by
mate telling me that both man of watch and steersman missing.
Only self and mate and two hands left to work ship.
 August.Two days of fog, and not a sail sighted. Had hoped
when in the English Channel to be able to signal for help or get
in somewhere. Not having power to work sails, have to run before
wind. Dare not lower, as could not raise them again. We seem to
be drifting to some terrible doom. Mate now more demoralised than
either of men. His stronger nature seems to have worked inwardly
against himself. Men are beyond fear, working stolidly and
patiently, with minds made up to worst. They are Russian, he
Roumanian.
 August, midnight.Woke up from few minutes sleep by hearing a
cry, seemingly outside my port. Could see nothing in fog. Rushed
on deck, and ran against mate. Tells me he heard cry and ran, but
no sign of man on watch. One more gone. Lord, help us Mate
says we must be past Straits of Dover, as in a moment of fog
lifting he saw North Foreland, just as he heard the man cry out.
If so we are now off in the North Sea, and only God can guide us
in the fog, which seems to move with us, and God seems to have
deserted us.
 August.At midnight I went to relieve the man at the
wheel and when I got to it found no one there. The wind
was steady, and as we ran before it there was no yawing. I
dared not leave it, so shouted for the mate. After a few
seconds, he rushed up on deck in his flannels. He looked
wildeyed and haggard, and I greatly fear his reason has
given way. He came close to me and whispered hoarsely,
with his mouth to my ear, as though fearing the very air
might hear. "It is here. I know it now. On the watch
last night I saw It, like a man, tall and thin, and ghastly
pale. It was in the bows, and looking out. I crept behind
It, and gave it my knife, but the knife went through It,
empty as the air." And as he spoke he took the knife and
drove it savagely into space. Then he went on, "But It is
here, and I'll find It. It is in the hold, perhaps in one
of those boxes. I'll unscrew them one by one and see. You
work the helm." And with a warning look and his finger on
his lip, he went below. There was springing up a choppy
wind, and I could not leave the helm. I saw him come out
on deck again with a tool chest and lantern, and go down
the forward hatchway. He is mad, stark, raving mad, and
it's no use my trying to stop him. He can't hurt those big
boxes, they are invoiced as clay, and to pull them about is
as harmless a thing as he can do. So here I stay and mind
the helm, and write these notes. I can only trust in God
and wait till the fog clears. Then, if I can't steer to
any harbour with the wind that is, I shall cut down sails,
and lie by, and signal for help . . .
It is nearly all over now. Just as I was beginning to hope
that the mate would come out calmer, for I heard him
knocking away at something in the hold, and work is good
for him, there came up the hatchway a sudden, startled
scream, which made my blood run cold, and up on the deck he
came as if shot from a gun, a raging madman, with his eyes
rolling and his face convulsed with fear. "Save me Save
me" he cried, and then looked round on the blanket of fog.
His horror turned to despair, and in a steady voice he
said, "You had better come too, captain, before it is too
late. He is there I know the secret now. The sea will
save me from Him, and it is all that is left" Before I
could say a word, or move forward to seize him, he sprang
on the bulwark and deliberately threw himself into the sea.
I suppose I know the secret too, now. It was this madman
who had got rid of the men one by one, and now he has
followed them himself. God help me How am I to account
for all these horrors when I get to port? When I get to
port Will that ever be?
 August.Still fog, which the sunrise cannot pierce, I
know there is sunrise because I am a sailor, why else I
know not. I dared not go below, I dared not leave the
helm, so here all night I stayed, and in the dimness of the
night I saw it, Him God, forgive me, but the mate was
right to jump overboard. It was better to die like a man.
To die like a sailor in blue water, no man can object. But
I am captain, and I must not leave my ship. But I shall
baffle this fiend or monster, for I shall tie my hands to
the wheel when my strength begins to fail, and along with
them I shall tie that which He, It, dare not touch. And
then, come good wind or foul, I shall save my soul, and my
honour as a captain. I am growing weaker, and the night is
coming on. If He can look me in the face again, I may not
have time to act. . . If we are wrecked, mayhap this bottle
may be found, and those who find it may understand. If
not . . . well, then all men shall know that I have been
true to my trust. God and the Blessed Virgin and the
Saints help a poor ignorant soul trying to do his duty . . .
Of course the verdict was an open one. There is no evidence
to adduce, and whether or not the man himself committed the
murders there is now none to say. The folk here hold almost
universally that the captain is simply a hero, and he is to be
given a public funeral. Already it is arranged that his body
is to be taken with a train of boats up the Esk for a piece
and then brought back to Tate Hill Pier and up the abbey steps,
for he is to be buried in the churchyard on the cliff. The
owners of more than a hundred boats have already given in their
names as wishing to follow him to the grave.
No trace has ever been found of the great dog, at which there is
much mourning, for, with public opinion in its present state, he
would, I believe, be adopted by the town. Tomorrow will see the
funeral, and so will end this one more 'mystery of the sea'.
MINA MURRAY'S JOURNAL
 August.Lucy was very restless all night, and I too, could not
sleep. The storm was fearful, and as it boomed loudly among the
chimney pots, it made me shudder. When a sharp puff came it seemed to
be like a distant gun. Strangely enough, Lucy did not wake, but she
got up twice and dressed herself. Fortunately, each time I awoke in
time and managed to undress her without waking her, and got her back to
bed. It is a very strange thing, this sleepwalking, for as soon as
her will is thwarted in any physical way, her intention, if there be
any, disappears, and she yields herself almost exactly to the routine
of her life.
Early in the morning we both got up and went down to the harbour to see
if anything had happened in the night. There were very few people
about, and though the sun was bright, and the air clear and fresh, the
big, grimlooking waves, that seemed dark themselves because the foam
that topped them was like snow, forced themselves in through the mouth
of the harbour, like a bullying man going through a crowd. Somehow I
felt glad that Jonathan was not on the sea last night, but on land.
But, oh, is he on land or sea? Where is he, and how? I am getting
fearfully anxious about him. If I only knew what to do, and could do
anything
 August.The funeral of the poor sea captain today was most
touching. Every boat in the harbour seemed to be there, and the coffin
was carried by captains all the way from Tate Hill Pier up to the
churchyard. Lucy came with me, and we went early to our old seat,
whilst the cortege of boats went up the river to the Viaduct and came
down again. We had a lovely view, and saw the procession nearly all
the way. The poor fellow was laid to rest near our seat so that we
stood on it, when the time came and saw everything.
Poor Lucy seemed much upset. She was restless and uneasy all the time,
and I cannot but think that her dreaming at night is telling on her.
She is quite odd in one thing. She will not admit to me that there is
any cause for restlessness, or if there be, she does not understand it
herself.
There is an additional cause in that poor Mr. Swales was found dead
this morning on our seat, his neck being broken. He had evidently, as
the doctor said, fallen back in the seat in some sort of fright, for
there was a look of fear and horror on his face that the men said made
them shudder. Poor dear old man
Lucy is so sweet and sensitive that she feels influences more acutely
than other people do. Just now she was quite upset by a little thing
which I did not much heed, though I am myself very fond of animals.
One of the men who came up here often to look for the boats was
followed by his dog. The dog is always with him. They are both quiet
persons, and I never saw the man angry, nor heard the dog bark. During
the service the dog would not come to its master, who was on the seat
with us, but kept a few yards off, barking and howling. Its master
spoke to it gently, and then harshly, and then angrily. But it would
neither come nor cease to make a noise. It was in a fury, with its
eyes savage, and all its hair bristling out like a cat's tail when puss
is on the war path.
Finally the man too got angry, and jumped down and kicked the dog, and
then took it by the scruff of the neck and half dragged and half threw
it on the tombstone on which the seat is fixed. The moment it touched
the stone the poor thing began to tremble. It did not try to get away,
but crouched down, quivering and cowering, and was in such a pitiable
state of terror that I tried, though without effect, to comfort it.
Lucy was full of pity, too, but she did not attempt to touch the dog,
but looked at it in an agonised sort of way. I greatly fear that she
is of too super sensitive a nature to go through the world without
trouble. She will be dreaming of this tonight, I am sure. The whole
agglomeration of things, the ship steered into port by a dead man, his
attitude, tied to the wheel with a crucifix and beads, the touching
funeral, the dog, now furious and now in terror, will all afford
material for her dreams.
I think it will be best for her to go to bed tired out physically, so I
shall take her for a long walk by the cliffs to Robin Hood's Bay and
back. She ought not to have much inclination for sleepwalking then.
CHAPTER 
MINA MURRAY'S JOURNAL
Same day,  o'clock P.M.Oh, but I am tired If it were not that I
had made my diary a duty I should not open it tonight. We had a lovely
walk. Lucy, after a while, was in gay spirits, owing, I think, to some
dear cows who came nosing towards us in a field close to the
lighthouse, and frightened the wits out of us. I believe we forgot
everything, except of course, personal fear, and it seemed to wipe the
slate clean and give us a fresh start. We had a capital 'severe tea'
at Robin Hood's Bay in a sweet little oldfashioned inn, with a bow
window right over the seaweedcovered rocks of the strand. I believe
we should have shocked the 'New Woman' with our appetites. Men are
more tolerant, bless them Then we walked home with some, or rather
many, stoppages to rest, and with our hearts full of a constant dread
of wild bulls.
Lucy was really tired, and we intended to creep off to bed as soon as
we could. The young curate came in, however, and Mrs. Westenra asked
him to stay for supper. Lucy and I had both a fight for it with the
dusty miller. I know it was a hard fight on my part, and I am quite
heroic. I think that some day the bishops must get together and see
about breeding up a new class of curates, who don't take supper, no
matter how hard they may be pressed to, and who will know when girls
are tired.
Lucy is asleep and breathing softly. She has more colour in her cheeks
than usual, and looks, oh so sweet. If Mr. Holmwood fell in love with
her seeing her only in the drawing room, I wonder what he would say if
he saw her now. Some of the 'New Women' writers will some day start an
idea that men and women should be allowed to see each other asleep
before proposing or accepting. But I suppose the 'New Woman' won't
condescend in future to accept. She will do the proposing herself. And
a nice job she will make of it too There's some consolation in that.
I am so happy tonight, because dear Lucy seems better. I really
believe she has turned the corner, and that we are over her troubles
with dreaming. I should be quite happy if I only knew if Jonathan . . .
God bless and keep him.
 August.Diary again. No sleep now, so I may as well write. I am
too agitated to sleep. We have had such an adventure, such an
agonizing experience. I fell asleep as soon as I had closed my diary.
. . . Suddenly I became broad awake, and sat up, with a horrible sense
of fear upon me, and of some feeling of emptiness around me. The room
was dark, so I could not see Lucy's bed. I stole across and felt for
her. The bed was empty. I lit a match and found that she was not in
the room. The door was shut, but not locked, as I had left it. I feared
to wake her mother, who has been more than usually ill lately, so threw
on some clothes and got ready to look for her. As I was leaving the
room it struck me that the clothes she wore might give me some clue to
her dreaming intention. Dressinggown would mean house, dress outside.
Dressinggown and dress were both in their places. "Thank God," I said
to myself, "she cannot be far, as she is only in her nightdress."
I ran downstairs and looked in the sitting room. Not there Then I
looked in all the other rooms of the house, with an evergrowing fear
chilling my heart. Finally, I came to the hall door and found it open.
It was not wide open, but the catch of the lock had not caught. The
people of the house are careful to lock the door every night, so I
feared that Lucy must have gone out as she was. There was no time to
think of what might happen. A vague overmastering fear obscured all
details.
I took a big, heavy shawl and ran out. The clock was striking one as I
was in the Crescent, and there was not a soul in sight. I ran along
the North Terrace, but could see no sign of the white figure which I
expected. At the edge of the West Cliff above the pier I looked across
the harbour to the East Cliff, in the hope or fear, I don't know which,
of seeing Lucy in our favourite seat.
There was a bright full moon, with heavy black, driving clouds, which
threw the whole scene into a fleeting diorama of light and shade as
they sailed across. For a moment or two I could see nothing, as the
shadow of a cloud obscured St. Mary's Church and all around it. Then
as the cloud passed I could see the ruins of the abbey coming into
view, and as the edge of a narrow band of light as sharp as a swordcut
moved along, the church and churchyard became gradually visible.
Whatever my expectation was, it was not disappointed, for there, on our
favourite seat, the silver light of the moon struck a halfreclining
figure, snowy white. The coming of the cloud was too quick for me to
see much, for shadow shut down on light almost immediately, but it
seemed to me as though something dark stood behind the seat where the
white figure shone, and bent over it. What it was, whether man or
beast, I could not tell.
I did not wait to catch another glance, but flew down the steep steps
to the pier and along by the fishmarket to the bridge, which was the
only way to reach the East Cliff. The town seemed as dead, for not a
soul did I see. I rejoiced that it was so, for I wanted no witness of
poor Lucy's condition. The time and distance seemed endless, and my
knees trembled and my breath came laboured as I toiled up the endless
steps to the abbey. I must have gone fast, and yet it seemed to me as
if my feet were weighted with lead, and as though every joint in my
body were rusty.
When I got almost to the top I could see the seat and the white figure,
for I was now close enough to distinguish it even through the spells of
shadow. There was undoubtedly something, long and black, bending over
the halfreclining white figure. I called in fright, "Lucy Lucy"
and something raised a head, and from where I was I could see a white
face and red, gleaming eyes.
Lucy did not answer, and I ran on to the entrance of the churchyard.
As I entered, the church was between me and the seat, and for a minute
or so I lost sight of her. When I came in view again the cloud had
passed, and the moonlight struck so brilliantly that I could see Lucy
half reclining with her head lying over the back of the seat. She was
quite alone, and there was not a sign of any living thing about.
When I bent over her I could see that she was still asleep. Her lips
were parted, and she was breathing, not softly as usual with her, but
in long, heavy gasps, as though striving to get her lungs full at every
breath. As I came close, she put up her hand in her sleep and pulled
the collar of her nightdress close around her, as though she felt the
cold. I flung the warm shawl over her, and drew the edges tight around
her neck, for I dreaded lest she should get some deadly chill from the
night air, unclad as she was. I feared to wake her all at once, so, in
order to have my hands free to help her, I fastened the shawl at her
throat with a big safety pin. But I must have been clumsy in my
anxiety and pinched or pricked her with it, for byandby, when her
breathing became quieter, she put her hand to her throat again and
moaned. When I had her carefully wrapped up I put my shoes on her
feet, and then began very gently to wake her.
At first she did not respond, but gradually she became more and more
uneasy in her sleep, moaning and sighing occasionally. At last, as
time was passing fast, and for many other reasons, I wished to get her
home at once, I shook her forcibly, till finally she opened her eyes
and awoke. She did not seem surprised to see me, as, of course, she
did not realize all at once where she was.
Lucy always wakes prettily, and even at such a time, when her body must
have been chilled with cold, and her mind somewhat appalled at waking
unclad in a churchyard at night, she did not lose her grace. She
trembled a little, and clung to me. When I told her to come at once
with me home, she rose without a word, with the obedience of a child.
As we passed along, the gravel hurt my feet, and Lucy noticed me wince.
She stopped and wanted to insist upon my taking my shoes, but I would
not. However, when we got to the pathway outside the chruchyard, where
there was a puddle of water, remaining from the storm, I daubed my feet
with mud, using each foot in turn on the other, so that as we went
home, no one, in case we should meet any one, should notice my bare
feet.
Fortune favoured us, and we got home without meeting a soul. Once we
saw a man, who seemed not quite sober, passing along a street in front
of us. But we hid in a door till he had disappeared up an opening such
as there are here, steep little closes, or 'wynds', as they call them
in Scotland. My heart beat so loud all the time sometimes I thought I
should faint. I was filled with anxiety about Lucy, not only for her
health, lest she should suffer from the exposure, but for her
reputation in case the story should get wind. When we got in, and had
washed our feet, and had said a prayer of thankfulness together, I
tucked her into bed. Before falling asleep she asked, even implored,
me not to say a word to any one, even her mother, about her
sleepwalking adventure.
I hesitated at first, to promise, but on thinking of the state of her
mother's health, and how the knowledge of such a thing would fret her,
and think too, of how such a story might become distorted, nay,
infallibly would, in case it should leak out, I thought it wiser to do
so. I hope I did right. I have locked the door, and the key is tied
to my wrist, so perhaps I shall not be again disturbed. Lucy is
sleeping soundly. The reflex of the dawn is high and far over the
sea . . .
Same day, noon.All goes well. Lucy slept till I woke her and seemed
not to have even changed her side. The adventure of the night does not
seem to have harmed her, on the contrary, it has benefited her, for she
looks better this morning than she has done for weeks. I was sorry to
notice that my clumsiness with the safetypin hurt her. Indeed, it
might have been serious, for the skin of her throat was pierced. I
must have pinched up a piece of loose skin and have transfixed it, for
there are two little red points like pinpricks, and on the band of her
nightdress was a drop of blood. When I apologised and was concerned
about it, she laughed and petted me, and said she did not even feel it.
Fortunately it cannot leave a scar, as it is so tiny.
Same day, night.We passed a happy day. The air was clear, and the
sun bright, and there was a cool breeze. We took our lunch to Mulgrave
Woods, Mrs. Westenra driving by the road and Lucy and I walking by the
cliffpath and joining her at the gate. I felt a little sad myself,
for I could not but feel how absolutely happy it would have been had
Jonathan been with me. But there I must only be patient. In the
evening we strolled in the Casino Terrace, and heard some good music by
Spohr and Mackenzie, and went to bed early. Lucy seems more restful
than she has been for some time, and fell asleep at once. I shall lock
the door and secure the key the same as before, though I do not expect
any trouble tonight.
 August.My expectations were wrong, for twice during the night I
was wakened by Lucy trying to get out. She seemed, even in her sleep,
to be a little impatient at finding the door shut, and went back to bed
under a sort of protest. I woke with the dawn, and heard the birds
chirping outside of the window. Lucy woke, too, and I was glad to see,
was even better than on the previous morning. All her old gaiety of
manner seemed to have come back, and she came and snuggled in beside me
and told me all about Arthur. I told her how anxious I was about
Jonathan, and then she tried to comfort me. Well, she succeeded
somewhat, for, though sympathy can't alter facts, it can make them more
bearable.
 August.Another quiet day, and to bed with the key on my wrist as
before. Again I awoke in the night, and found Lucy sitting up in bed,
still asleep, pointing to the window. I got up quietly, and pulling
aside the blind, looked out. It was brilliant moonlight, and the soft
effect of the light over the sea and sky, merged together in one great
silent mystery, was beautiful beyond words. Between me and the
moonlight flitted a great bat, coming and going in great whirling
circles. Once or twice it came quite close, but was, I suppose,
frightened at seeing me, and flitted away across the harbour towards
the abbey. When I came back from the window Lucy had lain down again,
and was sleeping peacefully. She did not stir again all night.
 August.On the East Cliff, reading and writing all day. Lucy seems
to have become as much in love with the spot as I am, and it is hard to
get her away from it when it is time to come home for lunch or tea or
dinner. This afternoon she made a funny remark. We were coming home
for dinner, and had come to the top of the steps up from the West Pier
and stopped to look at the view, as we generally do. The setting sun,
low down in the sky, was just dropping behind Kettleness. The red
light was thrown over on the East Cliff and the old abbey, and seemed
to bathe everything in a beautiful rosy glow. We were silent for a
while, and suddenly Lucy murmured as if to herself . . .
"His red eyes again They are just the same." It was such an odd
expression, coming apropos of nothing, that it quite startled me. I
slewed round a little, so as to see Lucy well without seeming to stare
at her, and saw that she was in a half dreamy state, with an odd look
on her face that I could not quite make out, so I said nothing, but
followed her eyes. She appeared to be looking over at our own seat,
whereon was a dark figure seated alone. I was quite a little startled
myself, for it seemed for an instant as if the stranger had great eyes
like burning flames, but a second look dispelled the illusion. The red
sunlight was shining on the windows of St. Mary's Church behind our
seat, and as the sun dipped there was just sufficient change in the
refraction and reflection to make it appear as if the light moved. I
called Lucy's attention to the peculiar effect, and she became herself
with a start, but she looked sad all the same. It may have been that
she was thinking of that terrible night up there. We never refer to
it, so I said nothing, and we went home to dinner. Lucy had a headache
and went early to bed. I saw her asleep, and went out for a little
stroll myself.
I walked along the cliffs to the westward, and was full of sweet
sadness, for I was thinking of Jonathan. When coming home, it was then
bright moonlight, so bright that, though the front of our part of the
Crescent was in shadow, everything could be well seen, I threw a glance
up at our window, and saw Lucy's head leaning out. I opened my
handkerchief and waved it. She did not notice or make any movement
whatever. Just then, the moonlight crept round an angle of the
building, and the light fell on the window. There distinctly was Lucy
with her head lying up against the side of the window sill and her eyes
shut. She was fast asleep, and by her, seated on the window sill, was
something that looked like a goodsized bird. I was afraid she might
get a chill, so I ran upstairs, but as I came into the room she was
moving back to her bed, fast asleep, and breathing heavily. She was
holding her hand to her throat, as though to protect if from the cold.
I did not wake her, but tucked her up warmly. I have taken care that
the door is locked and the window securely fastened.
She looks so sweet as she sleeps, but she is paler than is her wont,
and there is a drawn, haggard look under her eyes which I do not like.
I fear she is fretting about something. I wish I could find out what it
is.
 August.Rose later than usual. Lucy was languid and tired, and
slept on after we had been called. We had a happy surprise at
breakfast. Arthur's father is better, and wants the marriage to come
off soon. Lucy is full of quiet joy, and her mother is glad and sorry
at once. Later on in the day she told me the cause. She is grieved to
lose Lucy as her very own, but she is rejoiced that she is soon to have
some one to protect her. Poor dear, sweet lady She confided to me
that she has got her death warrant. She has not told Lucy, and made me
promise secrecy. Her doctor told her that within a few months, at
most, she must die, for her heart is weakening. At any time, even now,
a sudden shock would be almost sure to kill her. Ah, we were wise to
keep from her the affair of the dreadful night of Lucy's sleepwalking.
 August.No diary for two whole days. I have not had the heart to
write. Some sort of shadowy pall seems to be coming over our
happiness. No news from Jonathan, and Lucy seems to be growing weaker,
whilst her mother's hours are numbering to a close. I do not
understand Lucy's fading away as she is doing. She eats well and
sleeps well, and enjoys the fresh air, but all the time the roses in
her cheeks are fading, and she gets weaker and more languid day by day.
At night I hear her gasping as if for air.
I keep the key of our door always fastened to my wrist at night, but
she gets up and walks about the room, and sits at the open window.
Last night I found her leaning out when I woke up, and when I tried to
wake her I could not.
She was in a faint. When I managed to restore her, she was weak as
water, and cried silently between long, painful struggles for breath.
When I asked her how she came to be at the window she shook her head
and turned away.
I trust her feeling ill may not be from that unlucky prick of the
safetypin. I looked at her throat just now as she lay asleep, and the
tiny wounds seem not to have healed. They are still open, and, if
anything, larger than before, and the edges of them are faintly white.
They are like little white dots with red centres. Unless they heal
within a day or two, I shall insist on the doctor seeing about them.
LETTER, SAMUEL F. BILLINGTON  SON, SOLICITORS WHITBY,
TO MESSRS. CARTER, PATERSON  CO., LONDON.
 August
"Dear Sirs,Herewith please receive invoice of goods sent by Great
Northern Railway. Same are to be delivered at Carfax, near
Purfleet, immediately on receipt at goods station King's Cross. The
house is at present empty, but enclosed please find keys, all of
which are labelled.
"You will please deposit the boxes, fifty in number, which form the
consignment, in the partially ruined building forming part of the
house and marked 'A' on rough diagrams enclosed. Your agent will
easily recognize the locality, as it is the ancient chapel of the
mansion. The goods leave by the train at  tonight, and will be
due at King's Cross at  tomorrow afternoon. As our client
wishes the delivery made as soon as possible, we shall be obliged by
your having teams ready at King's Cross at the time named and
forthwith conveying the goods to destination. In order to obviate
any delays possible through any routine requirements as to payment
in your departments, we enclose cheque herewith for ten pounds,
receipt of which please acknowledge. Should the charge be less than
this amount, you can return balance, if greater, we shall at once
send cheque for difference on hearing from you. You are to leave
the keys on coming away in the main hall of the house, where the
proprietor may get them on his entering the house by means of his
duplicate key.
"Pray do not take us as exceeding the bounds of business courtesy
in pressing you in all ways to use the utmost expedition.
"We are, dear Sirs,
Faithfully yours,
SAMUEL F. BILLINGTON  SON"
LETTER, MESSRS. CARTER, PATERSON  CO., LONDON,
TO MESSRS. BILLINGTON  SON, WHITBY.
 August.
"Dear Sirs,We beg to acknowledge  pounds received and to return
cheque of  pound, s, d, amount of overplus, as shown in
receipted account herewith. Goods are delivered in exact accordance
with instructions, and keys left in parcel in main hall, as
directed.
"We are, dear Sirs,
Yours respectfully,
Pro CARTER, PATERSON  CO."
MINA MURRAY'S JOURNAL.
 August.I am happy today, and write sitting on the seat in the
churchyard. Lucy is ever so much better. Last night she slept well
all night, and did not disturb me once.
The roses seem coming back already to her cheeks, though she is still
sadly pale and wanlooking. If she were in any way anemic I could
understand it, but she is not. She is in gay spirits and full of life
and cheerfulness. All the morbid reticence seems to have passed from
her, and she has just reminded me, as if I needed any reminding, of
that night, and that it was here, on this very seat, I found her
asleep.
As she told me she tapped playfully with the heel of her boot on the
stone slab and said,
"My poor little feet didn't make much noise then I daresay poor old
Mr. Swales would have told me that it was because I didn't want to wake
up Geordie."
As she was in such a communicative humour, I asked her if she had
dreamed at all that night.
Before she answered, that sweet, puckered look came into her forehead,
which Arthur, I call him Arthur from her habit, says he loves, and
indeed, I don't wonder that he does. Then she went on in a
halfdreaming kind of way, as if trying to recall it to herself.
"I didn't quite dream, but it all seemed to be real. I only wanted to
be here in this spot. I don't know why, for I was afraid of something,
I don't know what. I remember, though I suppose I was asleep, passing
through the streets and over the bridge. A fish leaped as I went by,
and I leaned over to look at it, and I heard a lot of dogs howling. The
whole town seemed as if it must be full of dogs all howling at once, as
I went up the steps. Then I had a vague memory of something long and
dark with red eyes, just as we saw in the sunset, and something very
sweet and very bitter all around me at once. And then I seemed sinking
into deep green water, and there was a singing in my ears, as I have
heard there is to drowning men, and then everything seemed passing away
from me. My soul seemed to go out from my body and float about the
air. I seem to remember that once the West Lighthouse was right under
me, and then there was a sort of agonizing feeling, as if I were in an
earthquake, and I came back and found you shaking my body. I saw you
do it before I felt you."
Then she began to laugh. It seemed a little uncanny to me, and I
listened to her breathlessly. I did not quite like it, and thought it
better not to keep her mind on the subject, so we drifted on to another
subject, and Lucy was like her old self again. When we got home the
fresh breeze had braced her up, and her pale cheeks were really more
rosy. Her mother rejoiced when she saw her, and we all spent a very
happy evening together.
 August.Joy, joy, joy Although not all joy. At last, news of
Jonathan. The dear fellow has been ill, that is why he did not write.
I am not afraid to think it or to say it, now that I know. Mr. Hawkins
sent me on the letter, and wrote himself, oh so kindly. I am to leave
in the morning and go over to Jonathan, and to help to nurse him if
necessary, and to bring him home. Mr. Hawkins says it would not be a
bad thing if we were to be married out there. I have cried over the
good Sister's letter till I can feel it wet against my bosom, where it
lies. It is of Jonathan, and must be near my heart, for he is in my
heart. My journey is all mapped out, and my luggage ready. I am only
taking one change of dress. Lucy will bring my trunk to London and
keep it till I send for it, for it may be that . . . I must write no
more. I must keep it to say to Jonathan, my husband. The letter that
he has seen and touched must comfort me till we meet.
LETTER, SISTER AGATHA, HOSPITAL OF ST. JOSEPH AND
STE. MARY BUDAPESTH, TO MISS WILLHELMINA MURRAY
 August,
"Dear Madam.
"I write by desire of Mr. Jonathan Harker, who is himself not strong
enough to write, though progressing well, thanks to God and St.
Joseph and Ste. Mary. He has been under our care for nearly six
weeks, suffering from a violent brain fever. He wishes me to convey
his love, and to say that by this post I write for him to Mr. Peter
Hawkins, Exeter, to say, with his dutiful respects, that he is sorry
for his delay, and that all of his work is completed. He will
require some few weeks' rest in our sanatorium in the hills, but
will then return. He wishes me to say that he has not sufficient
money with him, and that he would like to pay for his staying here,
so that others who need shall not be wanting for help.
"Believe me,
"Yours, with sympathy
and all blessings.
Sister Agatha
"P.S.My patient being asleep, I open this to let you know
something more. He has told me all about you, and that you are
shortly to be his wife. All blessings to you both He has had some
fearful shock, so says our doctor, and in his delirium his ravings
have been dreadful, of wolves and poison and blood, of ghosts and
demons, and I fear to say of what. Be careful of him always that
there may be nothing to excite him of this kind for a long time to
come. The traces of such an illness as his do not lightly die away.
We should have written long ago, but we knew nothing of his friends,
and there was nothing on him, nothing that anyone could understand.
He came in the train from Klausenburg, and the guard was told by the
station master there that he rushed into the station shouting for a
ticket for home. Seeing from his violent demeanour that he was
English, they gave him a ticket for the furthest station on the way
thither that the train reached.
"Be assured that he is well cared for. He has won all hearts by his
sweetness and gentleness. He is truly getting on well, and I have
no doubt will in a few weeks be all himself. But be careful of him
for safety's sake. There are, I pray God and St. Joseph and Ste.
Mary, many, many, happy years for you both."
DR. SEWARD'S DIARY
 August.Strange and sudden change in Renfield last night. About
eight o'clock he began to get excited and sniff about as a dog does
when setting. The attendant was struck by his manner, and knowing my
interest in him, encouraged him to talk. He is usually respectful to
the attendant and at times servile, but tonight, the man tells me, he
was quite haughty. Would not condescend to talk with him at all.
All he would say was, "I don't want to talk to you. You don't count
now. The master is at hand."
The attendant thinks it is some sudden form of religious mania which
has seized him. If so, we must look out for squalls, for a strong man
with homicidal and religious mania at once might be dangerous. The
combination is a dreadful one.
At nine o'clock I visited him myself. His attitude to me was the same
as that to the attendant. In his sublime selffeeling the difference
between myself and the attendant seemed to him as nothing. It looks
like religious mania, and he will soon think that he himself is God.
These infinitesimal distinctions between man and man are too paltry for
an Omnipotent Being. How these madmen give themselves away The real
God taketh heed lest a sparrow fall. But the God created from human
vanity sees no difference between an eagle and a sparrow. Oh, if men
only knew
For half an hour or more Renfield kept getting excited in greater and
greater degree. I did not pretend to be watching him, but I kept
strict observation all the same. All at once that shifty look came
into his eyes which we always see when a madman has seized an idea, and
with it the shifty movement of the head and back which asylum
attendants come to know so well. He became quite quiet, and went and
sat on the edge of his bed resignedly, and looked into space with
lackluster eyes.
I thought I would find out if his apathy were real or only assumed, and
tried to lead him to talk of his pets, a theme which had never failed
to excite his attention.
At first he made no reply, but at length said testily, "Bother them
all I don't care a pin about them."
"What?" I said. "You don't mean to tell me you don't care about
spiders?" Spiders at present are his hobby and the notebook is filling
up with columns of small figures.
To this he answered enigmatically, "The Bride maidens rejoice the eyes
that wait the coming of the bride. But when the bride draweth nigh,
then the maidens shine not to the eyes that are filled."
He would not explain himself, but remained obstinately seated on his
bed all the time I remained with him.
I am weary tonight and low in spirits. I cannot but think of Lucy, and
how different things might have been. If I don't sleep at once,
chloral, the modern Morpheus I must be careful not to let it grow
into a habit. No, I shall take none tonight I have thought of Lucy,
and I shall not dishonour her by mixing the two. If need be, tonight
shall be sleepless.
Later.Glad I made the resolution, gladder that I kept to it. I had
lain tossing about, and had heard the clock strike only twice, when the
night watchman came to me, sent up from the ward, to say that Renfield
had escaped. I threw on my clothes and ran down at once. My patient
is too dangerous a person to be roaming about. Those ideas of his
might work out dangerously with strangers.
The attendant was waiting for me. He said he had seen him not ten
minutes before, seemingly asleep in his bed, when he had looked through
the observation trap in the door. His attention was called by the
sound of the window being wrenched out. He ran back and saw his feet
disappear through the window, and had at once sent up for me. He was
only in his night gear, and cannot be far off.
The attendant thought it would be more useful to watch where he should
go than to follow him, as he might lose sight of him whilst getting out
of the building by the door. He is a bulky man, and couldn't get
through the window.
I am thin, so, with his aid, I got out, but feet foremost, and as we
were only a few feet above ground landed unhurt.
The attendant told me the patient had gone to the left, and had taken a
straight line, so I ran as quickly as I could. As I got through the
belt of trees I saw a white figure scale the high wall which separates
our grounds from those of the deserted house.
I ran back at once, told the watchman to get three or four men
immediately and follow me into the grounds of Carfax, in case our
friend might be dangerous. I got a ladder myself, and crossing the
wall, dropped down on the other side. I could see Renfield's figure
just disappearing behind the angle of the house, so I ran after him. On
the far side of the house I found him pressed close against the old
ironbound oak door of the chapel.
He was talking, apparently to some one, but I was afraid to go near
enough to hear what he was saying, lest I might frighten him, and he
should run off.
Chasing an errant swarm of bees is nothing to following a naked
lunatic, when the fit of escaping is upon him After a few minutes,
however, I could see that he did not take note of anything around him,
and so ventured to draw nearer to him, the more so as my men had now
crossed the wall and were closing him in. I heard him say . . .
"I am here to do your bidding, Master. I am your slave, and you will
reward me, for I shall be faithful. I have worshipped you long and afar
off. Now that you are near, I await your commands, and you will not
pass me by, will you, dear Master, in your distribution of good
things?"
He is a selfish old beggar anyhow. He thinks of the loaves and fishes
even when he believes his is in a real Presence. His manias make a
startling combination. When we closed in on him he fought like a
tiger. He is immensely strong, for he was more like a wild beast than
a man.
I never saw a lunatic in such a paroxysm of rage before, and I hope I
shall not again. It is a mercy that we have found out his strength and
his danger in good time. With strength and determination like his, he
might have done wild work before he was caged.
He is safe now, at any rate. Jack Sheppard himself couldn't get free
from the strait waistcoat that keeps him restrained, and he's chained
to the wall in the padded room.
His cries are at times awful, but the silences that follow are more
deadly still, for he means murder in every turn and movement.
Just now he spoke coherent words for the first time. "I shall be
patient, Master. It is coming, coming, coming"
So I took the hint, and came too. I was too excited to sleep, but this
diary has quieted me, and I feel I shall get some sleep tonight.
CHAPTER 
LETTER, MINA HARKER TO LUCY WESTENRA
BudaPesth,  August.
"My dearest Lucy,
"I know you will be anxious to hear all that has happened
since we parted at the railway station at Whitby.
"Well, my dear, I got to Hull all right, and caught the boat to
Hamburg, and then the train on here. I feel that I can hardly
recall anything of the journey, except that I knew I was coming to
Jonathan, and that as I should have to do some nursing, I had better
get all the sleep I could. I found my dear one, oh, so thin and
pale and weaklooking. All the resolution has gone out of his dear
eyes, and that quiet dignity which I told you was in his face has
vanished. He is only a wreck of himself, and he does not remember
anything that has happened to him for a long time past. At least,
he wants me to believe so, and I shall never ask.
"He has had some terrible shock, and I fear it might tax his poor
brain if he were to try to recall it. Sister Agatha, who is a good
creature and a born nurse, tells me that he wanted her to tell me
what they were, but she would only cross herself, and say she would
never tell. That the ravings of the sick were the secrets of God,
and that if a nurse through her vocation should hear them, she
should respect her trust.
"She is a sweet, good soul, and the next day, when she saw I was
troubled, she opened up the subject my poor dear raved about, added,
'I can tell you this much, my dear. That it was not about anything
which he has done wrong himself, and you, as his wife to be, have no
cause to be concerned. He has not forgotten you or what he owes to
you. His fear was of great and terrible things, which no mortal can
treat of.'
"I do believe the dear soul thought I might be jealous lest my poor
dear should have fallen in love with any other girl. The idea of my
being jealous about Jonathan And yet, my dear, let me whisper, I
felt a thrill of joy through me when I knew that no other woman was
a cause for trouble. I am now sitting by his bedside, where I can
see his face while he sleeps. He is waking
"When he woke he asked me for his coat, as he wanted to get
something from the pocket. I asked Sister Agatha, and she brought
all his things. I saw amongst them was his notebook, and was
going to ask him to let me look at it, for I knew that I might find
some clue to his trouble, but I suppose he must have seen my wish in
my eyes, for he sent me over to the window, saying he wanted to be
quite alone for a moment.
"Then he called me back, and he said to me very solemnly,
'Wilhelmina', I knew then that he was in deadly earnest, for he has
never called me by that name since he asked me to marry him, 'You
know, dear, my ideas of the trust between husband and wife. There
should be no secret, no concealment. I have had a great shock, and
when I try to think of what it is I feel my head spin round, and I
do not know if it was real of the dreaming of a madman. You know I
had brain fever, and that is to be mad. The secret is here, and I
do not want to know it. I want to take up my life here, with our
marriage.' For, my dear, we had decided to be married as soon as
the formalities are complete. 'Are you willing, Wilhelmina, to
share my ignorance? Here is the book. Take it and keep it, read it
if you will, but never let me know unless, indeed, some solemn duty
should come upon me to go back to the bitter hours, asleep or awake,
sane or mad, recorded here.' He fell back exhausted, and I put the
book under his pillow, and kissed him. I have asked Sister Agatha
to beg the Superior to let our wedding be this afternoon, and am
waiting her reply . . ."
"She has come and told me that the Chaplain of the English mission
church has been sent for. We are to be married in an hour, or as
soon after as Jonathan awakes."
"Lucy, the time has come and gone. I feel very solemn, but very,
very happy. Jonathan woke a little after the hour, and all was
ready, and he sat up in bed, propped up with pillows. He answered
his 'I will' firmly and strong. I could hardly speak. My heart was
so full that even those words seemed to choke me.
"The dear sisters were so kind. Please, God, I shall never, never
forget them, nor the grave and sweet responsibilities I have taken
upon me. I must tell you of my wedding present. When the chaplain
and the sisters had left me alone with my husbandoh, Lucy, it is
the first time I have written the words 'my husband'left me alone
with my husband, I took the book from under his pillow, and wrapped
it up in white paper, and tied it with a little bit of pale blue
ribbon which was round my neck, and sealed it over the knot with
sealing wax, and for my seal I used my wedding ring. Then I kissed
it and showed it to my husband, and told him that I would keep it
so, and then it would be an outward and visible sign for us all our
lives that we trusted each other, that I would never open it unless
it were for his own dear sake or for the sake of some stern duty.
Then he took my hand in his, and oh, Lucy, it was the first time he
took his wife's hand, and said that it was the dearest thing in all
the wide world, and that he would go through all the past again to
win it, if need be. The poor dear meant to have said a part of the
past, but he cannot think of time yet, and I shall not wonder if at
first he mixes up not only the month, but the year.
"Well, my dear, what could I say? I could only tell him that I was
the happiest woman in all the wide world, and that I had nothing to
give him except myself, my life, and my trust, and that with these
went my love and duty for all the days of my life. And, my dear,
when he kissed me, and drew me to him with his poor weak hands, it
was like a solemn pledge between us.
"Lucy dear, do you know why I tell you all this? It is not only
because it is all sweet to me, but because you have been, and are,
very dear to me. It was my privilege to be your friend and guide
when you came from the schoolroom to prepare for the world of life.
I want you to see now, and with the eyes of a very happy wife,
whither duty has led me, so that in your own married life you too
may be all happy, as I am. My dear, please Almighty God, your life
may be all it promises, a long day of sunshine, with no harsh wind,
no forgetting duty, no distrust. I must not wish you no pain, for
that can never be, but I do hope you will be always as happy as I am
now. Goodbye, my dear. I shall post this at once, and perhaps,
write you very soon again. I must stop, for Jonathan is waking. I
must attend my husband
"Your everloving
Mina Harker."
LETTER, LUCY WESTENRA TO MINA HARKER.
Whitby,  August.
"My dearest Mina,
"Oceans of love and millions of kisses, and may you soon be in your
own home with your husband. I wish you were coming home soon enough
to stay with us here. The strong air would soon restore Jonathan.
It has quite restored me. I have an appetite like a cormorant, am
full of life, and sleep well. You will be glad to know that I have
quite given up walking in my sleep. I think I have not stirred out
of my bed for a week, that is when I once got into it at night.
Arthur says I am getting fat. By the way, I forgot to tell you that
Arthur is here. We have such walks and drives, and rides, and
rowing, and tennis, and fishing together, and I love him more than
ever. He tells me that he loves me more, but I doubt that, for at
first he told me that he couldn't love me more than he did then.
But this is nonsense. There he is, calling to me. So no more just
at present from your loving,
"Lucy.
"P.S.Mother sends her love. She seems better, poor dear.
"P.P.S.We are to be married on  September."
DR. SEWARDS DIARY
 August.The case of Renfield grows even more interesting. He has
now so far quieted that there are spells of cessation from his
passion. For the first week after his attack he was perpetually
violent. Then one night, just as the moon rose, he grew quiet, and
kept murmuring to himself. "Now I can wait. Now I can wait."
The attendant came to tell me, so I ran down at once to have a look at
him. He was still in the strait waistcoat and in the padded room, but
the suffused look had gone from his face, and his eyes had something
of their old pleading. I might almost say, cringing, softness. I was
satisfied with his present condition, and directed him to be relieved.
The attendants hesitated, but finally carried out my wishes without
protest.
It was a strange thing that the patient had humour enough to see their
distrust, for, coming close to me, he said in a whisper, all the while
looking furtively at them, "They think I could hurt you Fancy me
hurting you The fools"
It was soothing, somehow, to the feelings to find myself disassociated
even in the mind of this poor madman from the others, but all the same
I do not follow his thought. Am I to take it that I have anything in
common with him, so that we are, as it were, to stand together. Or
has he to gain from me some good so stupendous that my well being is
needful to Him? I must find out later on. Tonight he will not speak.
Even the offer of a kitten or even a fullgrown cat will not tempt
him.
He will only say, "I don't take any stock in cats. I have more to
think of now, and I can wait. I can wait."
After a while I left him. The attendant tells me that he was quiet
until just before dawn, and that then he began to get uneasy, and at
length violent, until at last he fell into a paroxysm which exhausted
him so that he swooned into a sort of coma.
. . . Three nights has the same thing happened, violent all day then
quiet from moonrise to sunrise. I wish I could get some clue to the
cause. It would almost seem as if there was some influence which came
and went. Happy thought We shall tonight play sane wits against mad
ones. He escaped before without our help. Tonight he shall escape
with it. We shall give him a chance, and have the men ready to follow
in case they are required.
 August."The expected always happens." How well Disraeli knew
life. Our bird when he found the cage open would not fly, so all our
subtle arrangements were for nought. At any rate, we have proved one
thing, that the spells of quietness last a reasonable time. We shall
in future be able to ease his bonds for a few hours each day. I have
given orders to the night attendant merely to shut him in the padded
room, when once he is quiet, until the hour before sunrise. The poor
soul's body will enjoy the relief even if his mind cannot appreciate
it. Hark The unexpected again I am called. The patient has once
more escaped.
Later.Another night adventure. Renfield artfully waited until the
attendant was entering the room to inspect. Then he dashed out past
him and flew down the passage. I sent word for the attendants to
follow. Again he went into the grounds of the deserted house, and we
found him in the same place, pressed against the old chapel door.
When he saw me he became furious, and had not the attendants seized
him in time, he would have tried to kill me. As we were holding him a
strange thing happened. He suddenly redoubled his efforts, and then
as suddenly grew calm. I looked round instinctively, but could see
nothing. Then I caught the patient's eye and followed it, but could
trace nothing as it looked into the moonlight sky, except a big bat,
which was flapping its silent and ghostly way to the west. Bats
usually wheel about, but this one seemed to go straight on, as if it
knew where it was bound for or had some intention of its own.
The patient grew calmer every instant, and presently said, "You
needn't tie me. I shall go quietly" Without trouble, we came back
to the house. I feel there is something ominous in his calm, and
shall not forget this night.
LUCY WESTENRA'S DIARY
Hillingham,  August.I must imitate Mina, and keep writing things
down. Then we can have long talks when we do meet. I wonder when it
will be. I wish she were with me again, for I feel so unhappy. Last
night I seemed to be dreaming again just as I was at Whitby. Perhaps
it is the change of air, or getting home again. It is all dark and
horrid to me, for I can remember nothing. But I am full of vague
fear, and I feel so weak and worn out. When Arthur came to lunch he
looked quite grieved when he saw me, and I hadn't the spirit to try to
be cheerful. I wonder if I could sleep in mother's room tonight. I
shall make an excuse to try.
 August.Another bad night. Mother did not seem to take to my
proposal. She seems not too well herself, and doubtless she fears to
worry me. I tried to keep awake, and succeeded for a while, but when
the clock struck twelve it waked me from a doze, so I must have been
falling asleep. There was a sort of scratching or flapping at the
window, but I did not mind it, and as I remember no more, I suppose I
must have fallen asleep. More bad dreams. I wish I could remember
them. This morning I am horribly weak. My face is ghastly pale, and
my throat pains me. It must be something wrong with my lungs, for I
don't seem to be getting air enough. I shall try to cheer up when
Arthur comes, or else I know he will be miserable to see me so.
LETTER, ARTHUR TO DR. SEWARD
"Albemarle Hotel,  August
"My dear Jack,
"I want you to do me a favour. Lucy is ill, that is she has no
special disease, but she looks awful, and is getting worse every
day. I have asked her if there is any cause, I not dare to ask her
mother, for to disturb the poor lady's mind about her daughter in
her present state of health would be fatal. Mrs. Westenra has
confided to me that her doom is spoken, disease of the heart, though
poor Lucy does not know it yet. I am sure that there is something
preying on my dear girl's mind. I am almost distracted when I think
of her. To look at her gives me a pang. I told her I should ask
you to see her, and though she demurred at first, I know why, old
fellow, she finally consented. It will be a painful task for you, I
know, old friend, but it is for her sake, and I must not hesitate to
ask, or you to act. You are to come to lunch at Hillingham
tomorrow, two o'clock, so as not to arouse any suspicion in Mrs.
Westenra, and after lunch Lucy will take an opportunity of being
alone with you. I am filled with anxiety, and want to consult with
you alone as soon as I can after you have seen her. Do not fail
"Arthur."
TELEGRAM, ARTHUR HOLMWOOD TO SEWARD
 September
"Am summoned to see my father, who is worse. Am writing. Write
me fully by tonight's post to Ring. Wire me if necessary."
LETTER FROM DR. SEWARD TO ARTHUR HOLMWOOD
 September
"My dear old fellow,
"With regard to Miss Westenra's health I hasten to let you know at
once that in my opinion there is not any functional disturbance or
any malady that I know of. At the same time, I am not by any means
satisfied with her appearance. She is woefully different from what
she was when I saw her last. Of course you must bear in mind that I
did not have full opportunity of examination such as I should wish.
Our very friendship makes a little difficulty which not even medical
science or custom can bridge over. I had better tell you exactly
what happened, leaving you to draw, in a measure, your own
conclusions. I shall then say what I have done and propose doing.
"I found Miss Westenra in seemingly gay spirits. Her mother was
present, and in a few seconds I made up my mind that she was trying
all she knew to mislead her mother and prevent her from being
anxious. I have no doubt she guesses, if she does not know, what
need of caution there is.
"We lunched alone, and as we all exerted ourselves to be cheerful,
we got, as some kind of reward for our labours, some real
cheerfulness amongst us. Then Mrs. Westenra went to lie down, and
Lucy was left with me. We went into her boudoir, and till we got
there her gaiety remained, for the servants were coming and going.
"As soon as the door was closed, however, the mask fell from her
face, and she sank down into a chair with a great sigh, and hid her
eyes with her hand. When I saw that her high spirits had failed, I
at once took advantage of her reaction to make a diagnosis.
"She said to me very sweetly, 'I cannot tell you how I loathe
talking about myself.' I reminded her that a doctor's confidence
was sacred, but that you were grievously anxious about her. She
caught on to my meaning at once, and settled that matter in a word.
'Tell Arthur everything you choose. I do not care for myself, but
for him' So I am quite free.
"I could easily see that she was somewhat bloodless, but I could not
see the usual anemic signs, and by the chance, I was able to test
the actual quality of her blood, for in opening a window which was
stiff a cord gave way, and she cut her hand slightly with broken
glass. It was a slight matter in itself, but it gave me an evident
chance, and I secured a few drops of the blood and have analysed
them.
"The qualitative analysis give a quite normal condition, and shows,
I should infer, in itself a vigorous state of health. In other
physical matters I was quite satisfied that there is no need for
anxiety, but as there must be a cause somewhere, I have come to the
conclusion that it must be something mental.
"She complains of difficulty breathing satisfactorily at times, and
of heavy, lethargic sleep, with dreams that frighten her, but
regarding which she can remember nothing. She says that as a child,
she used to walk in her sleep, and that when in Whitby the habit
came back, and that once she walked out in the night and went to
East Cliff, where Miss Murray found her. But she assures me that of
late the habit has not returned.
"I am in doubt, and so have done the best thing I know of. I have
written to my old friend and master, Professor Van Helsing, of
Amsterdam, who knows as much about obscure diseases as any one in
the world. I have asked him to come over, and as you told me that
all things were to be at your charge, I have mentioned to him who
you are and your relations to Miss Westenra. This, my dear fellow,
is in obedience to your wishes, for I am only too proud and happy to
do anything I can for her.
"Van Helsing would, I know, do anything for me for a personal
reason, so no matter on what ground he comes, we must accept his
wishes. He is a seemingly arbitrary man, this is because he knows
what he is talking about better than any one else. He is a
philosopher and a metaphysician, and one of the most advanced
scientists of his day, and he has, I believe, an absolutely open
mind. This, with an iron nerve, a temper of the icebrook, and
indomitable resolution, selfcommand, and toleration exalted from
virtues to blessings, and the kindliest and truest heart that beats,
these form his equipment for the noble work that he is doing for
mankind, work both in theory and practice, for his views are as wide
as his allembracing sympathy. I tell you these facts that you may
know why I have such confidence in him. I have asked him to come at
once. I shall see Miss Westenra tomorrow again. She is to meet me
at the Stores, so that I may not alarm her mother by too early a
repetition of my call.
"Yours always."
John Seward
LETTER, ABRAHAM VAN HELSING, MD, DPh, D. Lit, ETC, ETC, TO DR. SEWARD
 September.
"My good Friend,
"When I received your letter I am already coming to you. By good
fortune I can leave just at once, without wrong to any of those who
have trusted me. Were fortune other, then it were bad for those who
have trusted, for I come to my friend when he call me to aid those
he holds dear. Tell your friend that when that time you suck from
my wound so swiftly the poison of the gangrene from that knife that
our other friend, too nervous, let slip, you did more for him when
he wants my aids and you call for them than all his great fortune
could do. But it is pleasure added to do for him, your friend, it
is to you that I come. Have near at hand, and please it so arrange
that we may see the young lady not too late on tomorrow, for it is
likely that I may have to return here that night. But if need be I
shall come again in three days, and stay longer if it must. Till
then goodbye, my friend John.
"Van Helsing."
LETTER, DR. SEWARD TO HON. ARTHUR HOLMWOOD
 September
"My dear Art,
"Van Helsing has come and gone. He came on with me to Hillingham,
and found that, by Lucy's discretion, her mother was lunching out,
so that we were alone with her.
"Van Helsing made a very careful examination of the patient. He is
to report to me, and I shall advise you, for of course I was not
present all the time. He is, I fear, much concerned, but says he
must think. When I told him of our friendship and how you trust to
me in the matter, he said, 'You must tell him all you think. Tell
him what I think, if you can guess it, if you will. Nay, I am
not jesting. This is no jest, but life and death, perhaps more.' I
asked what he meant by that, for he was very serious. This was when
we had come back to town, and he was having a cup of tea before
starting on his return to Amsterdam. He would not give me any
further clue. You must not be angry with me, Art, because his very
reticence means that all his brains are working for her good. He
will speak plainly enough when the time comes, be sure. So I told
him I would simply write an account of our visit, just as if I were
doing a descriptive special article for THE DAILY TELEGRAPH. He
seemed not to notice, but remarked that the smuts of London were not
quite so bad as they used to be when he was a student here. I am to
get his report tomorrow if he can possibly make it. In any case I
am to have a letter.
"Well, as to the visit, Lucy was more cheerful than on the day I
first saw her, and certainly looked better. She had lost something
of the ghastly look that so upset you, and her breathing was normal.
She was very sweet to the Professor as she always is, and tried to
make him feel at ease, though I could see the poor girl was making a
hard struggle for it.
"I believe Van Helsing saw it, too, for I saw the quick look
under his bushy brows that I knew of old. Then he began to
chat of all things except ourselves and diseases and with
such an infinite geniality that I could see poor Lucy's
pretense of animation merge into reality. Then, without
any seeming change, he brought the conversation gently round
to his visit, and suavely said,
"'My dear young miss, I have the so great pleasure because you are
so much beloved. That is much, my dear, even were there that which
I do not see. They told me you were down in the spirit, and that
you were of a ghastly pale. To them I say "Pouf"' And he snapped
his fingers at me and went on. 'But you and I shall show them how
wrong they are. How can he,' and he pointed at me with the same
look and gesture as that with which he pointed me out in his class,
on, or rather after, a particular occasion which he never fails to
remind me of, 'know anything of a young ladies? He has his madmen
to play with, and to bring them back to happiness, and to those that
love them. It is much to do, and, oh, but there are rewards in that
we can bestow such happiness. But the young ladies He has no wife
nor daughter, and the young do not tell themselves to the young, but
to the old, like me, who have known so many sorrows and the causes
of them. So, my dear, we will send him away to smoke the cigarette
in the garden, whiles you and I have little talk all to ourselves.'
I took the hint, and strolled about, and presently the professor
came to the window and called me in. He looked grave, but said, 'I
have made careful examination, but there is no functional cause.
With you I agree that there has been much blood lost, it has been
but is not. But the conditions of her are in no way anemic. I have
asked her to send me her maid, that I may ask just one or two
questions, that so I may not chance to miss nothing. I know well
what she will say. And yet there is cause. There is always cause
for everything. I must go back home and think. You must send me
the telegram every day, and if there be cause I shall come again.
The disease, for not to be well is a disease, interest me, and the
sweet, young dear, she interest me too. She charm me, and for her,
if not for you or disease, I come.'
"As I tell you, he would not say a word more, even when we were
alone. And so now, Art, you know all I know. I shall keep stern
watch. I trust your poor father is rallying. It must be a terrible
thing to you, my dear old fellow, to be placed in such a position
between two people who are both so dear to you. I know your idea of
duty to your father, and you are right to stick to it. But if need
be, I shall send you word to come at once to Lucy, so do not be
overanxious unless you hear from me."
DR. SEWARD'S DIARY
 September.Zoophagous patient still keeps up our interest in him.
He had only one outburst and that was yesterday at an unusual time.
Just before the stroke of noon he began to grow restless. The
attendant knew the symptoms, and at once summoned aid. Fortunately
the men came at a run, and were just in time, for at the stroke of
noon he became so violent that it took all their strength to hold him.
In about five minutes, however, he began to get more quiet, and
finally sank into a sort of melancholy, in which state he has remained
up to now. The attendant tells me that his screams whilst in the
paroxysm were really appalling. I found my hands full when I got in,
attending to some of the other patients who were frightened by him.
Indeed, I can quite understand the effect, for the sounds disturbed
even me, though I was some distance away. It is now after the dinner
hour of the asylum, and as yet my patient sits in a corner brooding,
with a dull, sullen, woebegone look in his face, which seems rather
to indicate than to show something directly. I cannot quite
understand it.
Later.Another change in my patient. At five o'clock I looked in on
him, and found him seemingly as happy and contented as he used to be.
He was catching flies and eating them, and was keeping note of his
capture by making nailmarks on the edge of the door between the ridges
of padding. When he saw me, he came over and apologized for his bad
conduct, and asked me in a very humble, cringing way to be led back to
his own room, and to have his notebook again. I thought it well to
humour him, so he is back in his room with the window open. He has
the sugar of his tea spread out on the window sill, and is reaping
quite a harvest of flies. He is not now eating them, but putting them
into a box, as of old, and is already examining the corners of his
room to find a spider. I tried to get him to talk about the past few
days, for any clue to his thoughts would be of immense help to me, but
he would not rise. For a moment or two he looked very sad, and said
in a sort of far away voice, as though saying it rather to himself
than to me.
"All over All over He has deserted me. No hope for me now unless
I do it myself" Then suddenly turning to me in a resolute way, he
said, "Doctor, won't you be very good to me and let me have a little
more sugar? I think it would be very good for me."
"And the flies?" I said.
"Yes The flies like it, too, and I like the flies, therefore I like
it." And there are people who know so little as to think that madmen do
not argue. I procured him a double supply, and left him as happy a
man as, I suppose, any in the world. I wish I could fathom his mind.
Midnight.Another change in him. I had been to see Miss Westenra,
whom I found much better, and had just returned, and was standing at
our own gate looking at the sunset, when once more I heard him
yelling. As his room is on this side of the house, I could hear it
better than in the morning. It was a shock to me to turn from the
wonderful smoky beauty of a sunset over London, with its lurid lights
and inky shadows and all the marvellous tints that come on foul clouds
even as on foul water, and to realize all the grim sternness of my own
cold stone building, with its wealth of breathing misery, and my own
desolate heart to endure it all. I reached him just as the sun was
going down, and from his window saw the red disc sink. As it sank he
became less and less frenzied, and just as it dipped he slid from the
hands that held him, an inert mass, on the floor. It is wonderful,
however, what intellectual recuperative power lunatics have, for
within a few minutes he stood up quite calmly and looked around him. I
signalled to the attendants not to hold him, for I was anxious to see
what he would do. He went straight over to the window and brushed out
the crumbs of sugar. Then he took his fly box, and emptied it
outside, and threw away the box. Then he shut the window, and
crossing over, sat down on his bed. All this surprised me, so I asked
him, "Are you going to keep flies any more?"
"No," said he. "I am sick of all that rubbish" He certainly is a
wonderfully interesting study. I wish I could get some glimpse of his
mind or of the cause of his sudden passion. Stop. There may be a
clue after all, if we can find why today his paroxysms came on at high
noon and at sunset. Can it be that there is a malign influence of the
sun at periods which affects certain natures, as at times the moon
does others? We shall see.
TELEGRAM. SEWARD, LONDON, TO VAN HELSING, AMSTERDAM
" September.Patient still better today."
TELEGRAM, SEWARD, LONDON, TO VAN HELSING, AMSTERDAM
" September.Patient greatly improved. Good appetite, sleeps
naturally, good spirits, colour coming back."
TELEGRAM, SEWARD, LONDON, TO VAN HELSING, AMSTERDAM
" September.Terrible change for the worse. Come at once.
Do not lose an hour. I hold over telegram to Holmwood till
have seen you."
CHAPTER 
LETTER, DR. SEWARD TO HON. ARTHUR HOLMWOOD
 September
"My dear Art,
"My news today is not so good. Lucy this morning had gone back a
bit. There is, however, one good thing which has arisen from it.
Mrs. Westenra was naturally anxious concerning Lucy, and has
consulted me professionally about her. I took advantage of the
opportunity, and told her that my old master, Van Helsing, the great
specialist, was coming to stay with me, and that I would put her in
his charge conjointly with myself. So now we can come and go
without alarming her unduly, for a shock to her would mean sudden
death, and this, in Lucy's weak condition, might be disastrous to
her. We are hedged in with difficulties, all of us, my poor fellow,
but, please God, we shall come through them all right. If any need
I shall write, so that, if you do not hear from me, take it for
granted that I am simply waiting for news, In haste,
"Yours ever,"
John Seward
DR. SEWARD'S DIARY
 September.The first thing Van Helsing said to me when we met at
Liverpool Street was, "Have you said anything to our young friend, to
lover of her?"
"No," I said. "I waited till I had seen you, as I said in my
telegram. I wrote him a letter simply telling him that you were
coming, as Miss Westenra was not so well, and that I should let him
know if need be."
"Right, my friend," he said. "Quite right Better he not know as
yet. Perhaps he will never know. I pray so, but if it be needed,
then he shall know all. And, my good friend John, let me caution you.
You deal with the madmen. All men are mad in some way or the other,
and inasmuch as you deal discreetly with your madmen, so deal with
God's madmen too, the rest of the world. You tell not your madmen
what you do nor why you do it. You tell them not what you think. So
you shall keep knowledge in its place, where it may rest, where it may
gather its kind around it and breed. You and I shall keep as yet what
we know here, and here." He touched me on the heart and on the
forehead, and then touched himself the same way. "I have for myself
thoughts at the present. Later I shall unfold to you."
"Why not now?" I asked. "It may do some good. We may arrive at some
decision." He looked at me and said, "My friend John, when the corn is
grown, even before it has ripened, while the milk of its mother earth
is in him, and the sunshine has not yet begun to paint him with his
gold, the husbandman he pull the ear and rub him between his rough
hands, and blow away the green chaff, and say to you, 'Look He's
good corn, he will make a good crop when the time comes.'"
I did not see the application and told him so. For reply he reached
over and took my ear in his hand and pulled it playfully, as he used
long ago to do at lectures, and said, "The good husbandman tell you so
then because he knows, but not till then. But you do not find the
good husbandman dig up his planted corn to see if he grow. That is
for the children who play at husbandry, and not for those who take it
as of the work of their life. See you now, friend John? I have sown
my corn, and Nature has her work to do in making it sprout, if he
sprout at all, there's some promise, and I wait till the ear begins to
swell." He broke off, for he evidently saw that I understood. Then he
went on gravely, "You were always a careful student, and your case
book was ever more full than the rest. And I trust that good habit
have not fail. Remember, my friend, that knowledge is stronger than
memory, and we should not trust the weaker. Even if you have not kept
the good practice, let me tell you that this case of our dear miss is
one that may be, mind, I say may be, of such interest to us and others
that all the rest may not make him kick the beam, as your people say.
Take then good note of it. Nothing is too small. I counsel you, put
down in record even your doubts and surmises. Hereafter it may be of
interest to you to see how true you guess. We learn from failure, not
from success"
When I described Lucy's symptoms, the same as before, but infinitely
more marked, he looked very grave, but said nothing. He took with him
a bag in which were many instruments and drugs, "the ghastly
paraphernalia of our beneficial trade," as he once called, in one of
his lectures, the equipment of a professor of the healing craft.
When we were shown in, Mrs. Westenra met us. She was alarmed, but not
nearly so much as I expected to find her. Nature in one of her
beneficient moods has ordained that even death has some antidote to
its own terrors. Here, in a case where any shock may prove fatal,
matters are so ordered that, from some cause or other, the things not
personal, even the terrible change in her daughter to whom she is so
attached, do not seem to reach her. It is something like the way dame
Nature gathers round a foreign body an envelope of some insensitive
tissue which can protect from evil that which it would otherwise harm
by contact. If this be an ordered selfishness, then we should pause
before we condemn any one for the vice of egoism, for there may be
deeper root for its causes than we have knowledge of.
I used my knowledge of this phase of spiritual pathology, and set down
a rule that she should not be present with Lucy, or think of her
illness more than was absolutely required. She assented readily, so
readily that I saw again the hand of Nature fighting for life. Van
Helsing and I were shown up to Lucy's room. If I was shocked when I
saw her yesterday, I was horrified when I saw her today.
She was ghastly, chalkily pale. The red seemed to have gone even from
her lips and gums, and the bones of her face stood out prominently.
Her breathing was painful to see or hear. Van Helsing's face grew set
as marble, and his eyebrows converged till they almost touched over his
nose. Lucy lay motionless, and did not seem to have strength to
speak, so for a while we were all silent. Then Van Helsing beckoned
to me, and we went gently out of the room. The instant we had closed
the door he stepped quickly along the passage to the next door, which
was open. Then he pulled me quickly in with him and closed the door.
"My god" he said. "This is dreadful. There is not time to be lost.
She will die for sheer want of blood to keep the heart's action as it
should be. There must be a transfusion of blood at once. Is it you
or me?"
"I am younger and stronger, Professor. It must be me."
"Then get ready at once. I will bring up my bag. I am prepared."
I went downstairs with him, and as we were going there was a knock at
the hall door. When we reached the hall, the maid had just opened the
door, and Arthur was stepping quickly in. He rushed up to me, saying
in an eager whisper,
"Jack, I was so anxious. I read between the lines of your letter, and
have been in an agony. The dad was better, so I ran down here to see
for myself. Is not that gentleman Dr. Van Helsing? I am so thankful
to you, sir, for coming."
When first the Professor's eye had lit upon him, he had been angry at
his interruption at such a time, but now, as he took in his stalwart
proportions and recognized the strong young manhood which seemed to
emanate from him, his eyes gleamed. Without a pause he said to him as
he held out his hand,
"Sir, you have come in time. You are the lover of our dear miss. She
is bad, very, very bad. Nay, my child, do not go like that." For he
suddenly grew pale and sat down in a chair almost fainting. "You are
to help her. You can do more than any that live, and your courage is
your best help."
"What can I do?" asked Arthur hoarsely. "Tell me, and I shall do it.
My life is hers, and I would give the last drop of blood in my body for
her."
The Professor has a strongly humorous side, and I could from old
knowledge detect a trace of its origin in his answer.
"My young sir, I do not ask so much as that, not the last"
"What shall I do?" There was fire in his eyes, and his open nostrils
quivered with intent. Van Helsing slapped him on the shoulder.
"Come" he said. "You are a man, and it is a man we want. You are
better than me, better than my friend John." Arthur looked bewildered,
and the Professor went on by explaining in a kindly way.
"Young miss is bad, very bad. She wants blood, and blood she must
have or die. My friend John and I have consulted, and we are about to
perform what we call transfusion of blood, to transfer from full veins
of one to the empty veins which pine for him. John was to give his
blood, as he is the more young and strong than me."Here Arthur took
my hand and wrung it hard in silence."But now you are here, you are
more good than us, old or young, who toil much in the world of
thought. Our nerves are not so calm and our blood so bright than
yours"
Arthur turned to him and said, "If you only knew how gladly I would
die for her you would understand . . ." He stopped with a sort of
choke in his voice.
"Good boy" said Van Helsing. "In the notsofaroff you will be
happy that you have done all for her you love. Come now and be
silent. You shall kiss her once before it is done, but then you must
go, and you must leave at my sign. Say no word to Madame. You know
how it is with her. There must be no shock, any knowledge of this
would be one. Come"
We all went up to Lucy's room. Arthur by direction remained outside.
Lucy turned her head and looked at us, but said nothing. She was not
asleep, but she was simply too weak to make the effort. Her eyes
spoke to us, that was all.
Van Helsing took some things from his bag and laid them on a little
table out of sight. Then he mixed a narcotic, and coming over to the
bed, said cheerily, "Now, little miss, here is your medicine. Drink
it off, like a good child. See, I lift you so that to swallow is
easy. Yes." She had made the effort with success.
It astonished me how long the drug took to act. This, in fact, marked
the extent of her weakness. The time seemed endless until sleep began
to flicker in her eyelids. At last, however, the narcotic began to
manifest its potency, and she fell into a deep sleep. When the
Professor was satisfied, he called Arthur into the room, and bade him
strip off his coat. Then he added, "You may take that one little kiss
whiles I bring over the table. Friend John, help to me" So neither
of us looked whilst he bent over her.
Van Helsing, turning to me, said, "He is so young and strong, and of
blood so pure that we need not defibrinate it."
Then with swiftness, but with absolute method, Van Helsing performed
the operation. As the transfusion went on, something like life seemed
to come back to poor Lucy's cheeks, and through Arthur's growing
pallor the joy of his face seemed absolutely to shine. After a bit I
began to grow anxious, for the loss of blood was telling on Arthur,
strong man as he was. It gave me an idea of what a terrible strain
Lucy's system must have undergone that what weakened Arthur only
partially restored her.
But the Professor's face was set, and he stood watch in hand, and with
his eyes fixed now on the patient and now on Arthur. I could hear my
own heart beat. Presently, he said in a soft voice, "Do not stir an
instant. It is enough. You attend him. I will look to her."
When all was over, I could see how much Arthur was weakened. I
dressed the wound and took his arm to bring him away, when Van Helsing
spoke without turning round, the man seems to have eyes in the back of
his head, "The brave lover, I think, deserve another kiss, which he
shall have presently." And as he had now finished his operation, he
adjusted the pillow to the patient's head. As he did so the narrow
black velvet band which she seems always to wear round her throat,
buckled with an old diamond buckle which her lover had given her, was
dragged a little up, and showed a red mark on her throat.
Arthur did not notice it, but I could hear the deep hiss of indrawn
breath which is one of Van Helsing's ways of betraying emotion. He
said nothing at the moment, but turned to me, saying, "Now take down
our brave young lover, give him of the port wine, and let him lie down
a while. He must then go home and rest, sleep much and eat much, that
he may be recruited of what he has so given to his love. He must not
stay here. Hold a moment I may take it, sir, that you are anxious
of result. Then bring it with you, that in all ways the operation is
successful. You have saved her life this time, and you can go home
and rest easy in mind that all that can be is. I shall tell her all
when she is well. She shall love you none the less for what you have
done. Goodbye."
When Arthur had gone I went back to the room. Lucy was sleeping
gently, but her breathing was stronger. I could see the counterpane
move as her breast heaved. By the bedside sat Van Helsing, looking at
her intently. The velvet band again covered the red mark. I asked
the Professor in a whisper, "What do you make of that mark on her
throat?"
"What do you make of it?"
"I have not examined it yet," I answered, and then and there proceeded
to loose the band. Just over the external jugular vein there were two
punctures, not large, but not wholesome looking. There was no sign of
disease, but the edges were white and worn looking, as if by some
trituration. It at once occurred to me that that this wound, or
whatever it was, might be the means of that manifest loss of blood.
But I abandoned the idea as soon as it formed, for such a thing could
not be. The whole bed would have been drenched to a scarlet with the
blood which the girl must have lost to leave such a pallor as she had
before the transfusion.
"Well?" said Van Helsing.
"Well," said I. "I can make nothing of it."
The Professor stood up. "I must go back to Amsterdam tonight," he
said "There are books and things there which I want. You must remain
here all night, and you must not let your sight pass from her."
"Shall I have a nurse?" I asked.
"We are the best nurses, you and I. You keep watch all night. See
that she is well fed, and that nothing disturbs her. You must not
sleep all the night. Later on we can sleep, you and I. I shall be
back as soon as possible. And then we may begin."
"May begin?" I said. "What on earth do you mean?"
"We shall see" he answered, as he hurried out. He came back a moment
later and put his head inside the door and said with a warning finger
held up, "Remember, she is your charge. If you leave her, and harm
befall, you shall not sleep easy hereafter"
DR. SEWARD'S DIARYCONTINUED
 September.I sat up all night with Lucy. The opiate worked itself
off towards dusk, and she waked naturally. She looked a different
being from what she had been before the operation. Her spirits even
were good, and she was full of a happy vivacity, but I could see
evidences of the absolute prostration which she had undergone. When I
told Mrs. Westenra that Dr. Van Helsing had directed that I should sit
up with her, she almost poohpoohed the idea, pointing out her
daughter's renewed strength and excellent spirits. I was firm,
however, and made preparations for my long vigil. When her maid had
prepared her for the night I came in, having in the meantime had
supper, and took a seat by the bedside.
She did not in any way make objection, but looked at me gratefully
whenever I caught her eye. After a long spell she seemed sinking off
to sleep, but with an effort seemed to pull herself together and shook
it off. It was apparent that she did not want to sleep, so I tackled
the subject at once.
"You do not want to sleep?"
"No. I am afraid."
"Afraid to go to sleep Why so? It is the boon we all crave for."
"Ah, not if you were like me, if sleep was to you a presage of
horror"
"A presage of horror What on earth do you mean?"
"I don't know. Oh, I don't know. And that is what is so terrible.
All this weakness comes to me in sleep, until I dread the very
thought."
"But, my dear girl, you may sleep tonight. I am here watching you,
and I can promise that nothing will happen."
"Ah, I can trust you" she said.
I seized the opportunity, and said, "I promise that if I see any
evidence of bad dreams I will wake you at once."
"You will? Oh, will you really? How good you are to me. Then I will
sleep" And almost at the word she gave a deep sigh of relief, and
sank back, asleep.
All night long I watched by her. She never stirred, but slept on and
on in a deep, tranquil, lifegiving, healthgiving sleep. Her lips
were slightly parted, and her breast rose and fell with the regularity
of a pendulum. There was a smile on her face, and it was evident that
no bad dreams had come to disturb her peace of mind.
In the early morning her maid came, and I left her in her care and took
myself back home, for I was anxious about many things. I sent a short
wire to Van Helsing and to Arthur, telling them of the excellent
result of the operation. My own work, with its manifold arrears, took
me all day to clear off. It was dark when I was able to inquire about
my zoophagous patient. The report was good. He had been quite quiet
for the past day and night. A telegram came from Van Helsing at
Amsterdam whilst I was at dinner, suggesting that I should be at
Hillingham tonight, as it might be well to be at hand, and stating
that he was leaving by the night mail and would join me early in the
morning.
 September.I was pretty tired and worn out when I got to
Hillingham. For two nights I had hardly had a wink of sleep, and my
brain was beginning to feel that numbness which marks cerebral
exhaustion. Lucy was up and in cheerful spirits. When she shook
hands with me she looked sharply in my face and said,
"No sitting up tonight for you. You are worn out. I am quite well
again. Indeed, I am, and if there is to be any sitting up, it is I
who will sit up with you."
I would not argue the point, but went and had my supper. Lucy came
with me, and, enlivened by her charming presence, I made an excellent
meal, and had a couple of glasses of the more than excellent port.
Then Lucy took me upstairs, and showed me a room next her own, where a
cozy fire was burning.
"Now," she said. "You must stay here. I shall leave this door open
and my door too. You can lie on the sofa for I know that nothing
would induce any of you doctors to go to bed whilst there is a patient
above the horizon. If I want anything I shall call out, and you can
come to me at once."
I could not but acquiesce, for I was dog tired, and could not have sat
up had I tried. So, on her renewing her promise to call me if she
should want anything, I lay on the sofa, and forgot all about
everything.
LUCY WESTENRA'S DIARY
 September.I feel so happy tonight. I have been so miserably weak,
that to be able to think and move about is like feeling sunshine after
a long spell of east wind out of a steel sky. Somehow Arthur feels
very, very close to me. I seem to feel his presence warm about me. I
suppose it is that sickness and weakness are selfish things and turn
our inner eyes and sympathy on ourselves, whilst health and strength
give love rein, and in thought and feeling he can wander where he
wills. I know where my thoughts are. If only Arthur knew My dear,
my dear, your ears must tingle as you sleep, as mine do waking. Oh,
the blissful rest of last night How I slept, with that dear, good
Dr. Seward watching me. And tonight I shall not fear to sleep, since
he is close at hand and within call. Thank everybody for being so
good to me. Thank God Goodnight Arthur.
DR. SEWARD'S DIARY
 September.I was conscious of the Professor's hand on my head, and
started awake all in a second. That is one of the things that we
learn in an asylum, at any rate.
"And how is our patient?"
"Well, when I left her, or rather when she left me," I answered.
"Come, let us see," he said. And together we went into the room.
The blind was down, and I went over to raise it gently, whilst Van
Helsing stepped, with his soft, catlike tread, over to the bed.
As I raised the blind, and the morning sunlight flooded the room, I
heard the Professor's low hiss of inspiration, and knowing its rarity,
a deadly fear shot through my heart. As I passed over he moved back,
and his exclamation of horror, "Gott in Himmel" needed no enforcement
from his agonized face. He raised his hand and pointed to the bed,
and his iron face was drawn and ashen white. I felt my knees begin to
tremble.
There on the bed, seemingly in a swoon, lay poor Lucy, more horribly
white and wanlooking than ever. Even the lips were white, and the
gums seemed to have shrunken back from the teeth, as we sometimes see
in a corpse after a prolonged illness.
Van Helsing raised his foot to stamp in anger, but the instinct of his
life and all the long years of habit stood to him, and he put it down
again softly.
"Quick" he said. "Bring the brandy."
I flew to the dining room, and returned with the decanter. He wetted
the poor white lips with it, and together we rubbed palm and wrist and
heart. He felt her heart, and after a few moments of agonizing
suspense said,
"It is not too late. It beats, though but feebly. All our work is
undone. We must begin again. There is no young Arthur here now. I
have to call on you yourself this time, friend John." As he spoke, he
was dipping into his bag, and producing the instruments of
transfusion. I had taken off my coat and rolled up my shirt sleeve.
There was no possibility of an opiate just at present, and no need of
one and so, without a moment's delay, we began the operation.
After a time, it did not seem a short time either, for the draining
away of one's blood, no matter how willingly it be given, is a
terrible feeling, Van Helsing held up a warning finger. "Do not
stir," he said. "But I fear that with growing strength she may wake,
and that would make danger, oh, so much danger. But I shall
precaution take. I shall give hypodermic injection of morphia." He
proceeded then, swiftly and deftly, to carry out his intent.
The effect on Lucy was not bad, for the faint seemed to merge subtly
into the narcotic sleep. It was with a feeling of personal pride that
I could see a faint tinge of colour steal back into the pallid cheeks
and lips. No man knows, till he experiences it, what it is to feel
his own lifeblood drawn away into the veins of the woman he loves.
The Professor watched me critically. "That will do," he said.
"Already?" I remonstrated. "You took a great deal more from Art." To
which he smiled a sad sort of smile as he replied,
"He is her lover, her fiance. You have work, much work to do for her
and for others, and the present will suffice."
When we stopped the operation, he attended to Lucy, whilst I applied
digital pressure to my own incision. I laid down, while I waited his
leisure to attend to me, for I felt faint and a little sick. By and
by he bound up my wound, and sent me downstairs to get a glass of wine
for myself. As I was leaving the room, he came after me, and half
whispered.
"Mind, nothing must be said of this. If our young lover should turn
up unexpected, as before, no word to him. It would at once frighten
him and enjealous him, too. There must be none. So"
When I came back he looked at me carefully, and then said, "You are
not much the worse. Go into the room, and lie on your sofa, and rest
awhile, then have much breakfast and come here to me."
I followed out his orders, for I knew how right and wise they were. I
had done my part, and now my next duty was to keep up my strength. I
felt very weak, and in the weakness lost something of the amazement at
what had occurred. I fell asleep on the sofa, however, wondering over
and over again how Lucy had made such a retrograde movement, and how
she could have been drained of so much blood with no sign any where to
show for it. I think I must have continued my wonder in my dreams,
for, sleeping and waking my thoughts always came back to the little
punctures in her throat and the ragged, exhausted appearance of their
edges, tiny though they were.
Lucy slept well into the day, and when she woke she was fairly well
and strong, though not nearly so much so as the day before. When Van
Helsing had seen her, he went out for a walk, leaving me in charge,
with strict injunctions that I was not to leave her for a moment. I
could hear his voice in the hall, asking the way to the nearest
telegraph office.
Lucy chatted with me freely, and seemed quite unconscious that
anything had happened. I tried to keep her amused and interested.
When her mother came up to see her, she did not seem to notice any
change whatever, but said to me gratefully,
"We owe you so much, Dr. Seward, for all you have done, but you really
must now take care not to overwork yourself. You are looking pale
yourself. You want a wife to nurse and look after you a bit, that you
do" As she spoke, Lucy turned crimson, though it was only
momentarily, for her poor wasted veins could not stand for long an
unwonted drain to the head. The reaction came in excessive pallor as
she turned imploring eyes on me. I smiled and nodded, and laid my
finger on my lips. With a sigh, she sank back amid her pillows.
Van Helsing returned in a couple of hours, and presently said to me
"Now you go home, and eat much and drink enough. Make yourself
strong. I stay here tonight, and I shall sit up with little miss
myself. You and I must watch the case, and we must have none other to
know. I have grave reasons. No, do not ask me. Think what you will.
Do not fear to think even the most notimprobable. Goodnight."
In the hall two of the maids came to me, and asked if they or either
of them might not sit up with Miss Lucy. They implored me to let
them, and when I said it was Dr. Van Helsing's wish that either he or
I should sit up, they asked me quite piteously to intercede with
the 'foreign gentleman'. I was much touched by their kindness. Perhaps
it is because I am weak at present, and perhaps because it was on
Lucy's account, that their devotion was manifested. For over and over
again have I seen similar instances of woman's kindness. I got back
here in time for a late dinner, went my rounds, all well, and set this
down whilst waiting for sleep. It is coming.
 September.This afternoon I went over to Hillingham. Found Van
Helsing in excellent spirits, and Lucy much better. Shortly after I
had arrived, a big parcel from abroad came for the Professor. He
opened it with much impressment, assumed, of course, and showed a
great bundle of white flowers.
"These are for you, Miss Lucy," he said.
"For me? Oh, Dr. Van Helsing"
"Yes, my dear, but not for you to play with. These are medicines."
Here Lucy made a wry face. "Nay, but they are not to take in a
decoction or in nauseous form, so you need not snub that so charming
nose, or I shall point out to my friend Arthur what woes he may have
to endure in seeing so much beauty that he so loves so much distort.
Aha, my pretty miss, that bring the so nice nose all straight again.
This is medicinal, but you do not know how. I put him in your window,
I make pretty wreath, and hang him round your neck, so you sleep well.
Oh, yes They, like the lotus flower, make your trouble forgotten.
It smell so like the waters of Lethe, and of that fountain of youth
that the Conquistadores sought for in the Floridas, and find him all
too late."
Whilst he was speaking, Lucy had been examining the flowers and
smelling them. Now she threw them down saying, with half laughter,
and half disgust,
"Oh, Professor, I believe you are only putting up a joke on me. Why,
these flowers are only common garlic."
To my surprise, Van Helsing rose up and said with all his sternness,
his iron jaw set and his bushy eyebrows meeting,
"No trifling with me I never jest There is grim purpose in what I
do, and I warn you that you do not thwart me. Take care, for the sake
of others if not for your own." Then seeing poor Lucy scared, as she
might well be, he went on more gently, "Oh, little miss, my dear, do
not fear me. I only do for your good, but there is much virtue to you
in those so common flowers. See, I place them myself in your room. I
make myself the wreath that you are to wear. But hush No telling to
others that make so inquisitive questions. We must obey, and silence
is a part of obedience, and obedience is to bring you strong and well
into loving arms that wait for you. Now sit still a while. Come with
me, friend John, and you shall help me deck the room with my garlic,
which is all the way from Haarlem, where my friend Vanderpool raise
herb in his glass houses all the year. I had to telegraph yesterday,
or they would not have been here."
We went into the room, taking the flowers with us. The Professor's
actions were certainly odd and not to be found in any pharmacopeia
that I ever heard of. First he fastened up the windows and latched
them securely. Next, taking a handful of the flowers, he rubbed them
all over the sashes, as though to ensure that every whiff of air that
might get in would be laden with the garlic smell. Then with the wisp
he rubbed all over the jamb of the door, above, below, and at each
side, and round the fireplace in the same way. It all seemed
grotesque to me, and presently I said, "Well, Professor, I know you
always have a reason for what you do, but this certainly puzzles me.
It is well we have no sceptic here, or he would say that you were
working some spell to keep out an evil spirit."
"Perhaps I am" he answered quietly as he began to make the wreath
which Lucy was to wear round her neck.
We then waited whilst Lucy made her toilet for the night, and when she
was in bed he came and himself fixed the wreath of garlic round her
neck. The last words he said to her were,
"Take care you do not disturb it, and even if the room feel close, do
not tonight open the window or the door."
"I promise," said Lucy. "And thank you both a thousand times for all
your kindness to me Oh, what have I done to be blessed with such
friends?"
As we left the house in my fly, which was waiting, Van Helsing said,
"Tonight I can sleep in peace, and sleep I want, two nights of travel,
much reading in the day between, and much anxiety on the day to
follow, and a night to sit up, without to wink. Tomorrow in the
morning early you call for me, and we come together to see our pretty
miss, so much more strong for my 'spell' which I have work. Ho, ho"
He seemed so confident that I, remembering my own confidence two
nights before and with the baneful result, felt awe and vague terror.
It must have been my weakness that made me hesitate to tell it to my
friend, but I felt it all the more, like unshed tears.
CHAPTER 
LUCY WESTENRA'S DIARY
 September.How good they all are to me. I quite love that dear
Dr. Van Helsing. I wonder why he was so anxious about these flowers.
He positively frightened me, he was so fierce. And yet he must have
been right, for I feel comfort from them already. Somehow, I do not
dread being alone tonight, and I can go to sleep without fear. I
shall not mind any flapping outside the window. Oh, the terrible
struggle that I have had against sleep so often of late, the pain of
sleeplessness, or the pain of the fear of sleep, and with such unknown
horrors as it has for me How blessed are some people, whose lives
have no fears, no dreads, to whom sleep is a blessing that comes
nightly, and brings nothing but sweet dreams. Well, here I am
tonight, hoping for sleep, and lying like Ophelia in the play, with
'virgin crants and maiden strewments.' I never liked garlic before,
but tonight it is delightful There is peace in its smell. I feel
sleep coming already. Goodnight, everybody.
DR. SEWARD'S DIARY
 September.Called at the Berkeley and found Van Helsing, as usual,
up to time. The carriage ordered from the hotel was waiting. The
Professor took his bag, which he always brings with him now.
Let all be put down exactly. Van Helsing and I arrived at Hillingham
at eight o'clock. It was a lovely morning. The bright sunshine and
all the fresh feeling of early autumn seemed like the completion of
nature's annual work. The leaves were turning to all kinds of
beautiful colours, but had not yet begun to drop from the trees. When
we entered we met Mrs. Westenra coming out of the morning room. She
is always an early riser. She greeted us warmly and said,
"You will be glad to know that Lucy is better. The dear child is
still asleep. I looked into her room and saw her, but did not go in,
lest I should disturb her." The Professor smiled, and looked quite
jubilant. He rubbed his hands together, and said, "Aha I thought I
had diagnosed the case. My treatment is working."
To which she replied, "You must not take all the credit to yourself,
doctor. Lucy's state this morning is due in part to me."
"How do you mean, ma'am?" asked the Professor.
"Well, I was anxious about the dear child in the night, and went into
her room. She was sleeping soundly, so soundly that even my coming
did not wake her. But the room was awfully stuffy. There were a lot
of those horrible, strongsmelling flowers about everywhere, and she
had actually a bunch of them round her neck. I feared that the heavy
odour would be too much for the dear child in her weak state, so I took
them all away and opened a bit of the window to let in a little fresh
air. You will be pleased with her, I am sure."
She moved off into her boudoir, where she usually breakfasted early.
As she had spoken, I watched the Professor's face, and saw it turn
ashen gray. He had been able to retain his selfcommand whilst the
poor lady was present, for he knew her state and how mischievous a
shock would be. He actually smiled on her as he held open the door
for her to pass into her room. But the instant she had disappeared he
pulled me, suddenly and forcibly, into the dining room and closed the
door.
Then, for the first time in my life, I saw Van Helsing break down. He
raised his hands over his head in a sort of mute despair, and then
beat his palms together in a helpless way. Finally he sat down on a
chair, and putting his hands before his face, began to sob, with loud,
dry sobs that seemed to come from the very racking of his heart.
Then he raised his arms again, as though appealing to the whole
universe. "God God God" he said. "What have we done, what has
this poor thing done, that we are so sore beset? Is there fate
amongst us still, send down from the pagan world of old, that such
things must be, and in such way? This poor mother, all unknowing, and
all for the best as she think, does such thing as lose her daughter
body and soul, and we must not tell her, we must not even warn her, or
she die, then both die. Oh, how we are beset How are all the powers
of the devils against us"
Suddenly he jumped to his feet. "Come," he said, "come, we must see and
act. Devils or no devils, or all the devils at once, it matters not.
We must fight him all the same." He went to the hall door for his
bag, and together we went up to Lucy's room.
Once again I drew up the blind, whilst Van Helsing went towards the
bed. This time he did not start as he looked on the poor face with
the same awful, waxen pallor as before. He wore a look of stern
sadness and infinite pity.
"As I expected," he murmured, with that hissing inspiration of his
which meant so much. Without a word he went and locked the door, and
then began to set out on the little table the instruments for yet
another operation of transfusion of blood. I had long ago recognized
the necessity, and begun to take off my coat, but he stopped me with a
warning hand. "No" he said. "Today you must operate. I shall
provide. You are weakened already." As he spoke he took off his coat
and rolled up his shirtsleeve.
Again the operation. Again the narcotic. Again some return of colour
to the ashy cheeks, and the regular breathing of healthy sleep. This
time I watched whilst Van Helsing recruited himself and rested.
Presently he took an opportunity of telling Mrs. Westenra that she
must not remove anything from Lucy's room without consulting him.
That the flowers were of medicinal value, and that the breathing of
their odour was a part of the system of cure. Then he took over the
care of the case himself, saying that he would watch this night and
the next, and would send me word when to come.
After another hour Lucy waked from her sleep, fresh and bright and
seemingly not much the worse for her terrible ordeal.
What does it all mean? I am beginning to wonder if my long habit of
life amongst the insane is beginning to tell upon my own brain.
LUCY WESTENRA'S DIARY
 September.Four days and nights of peace. I am getting so strong
again that I hardly know myself. It is as if I had passed through
some long nightmare, and had just awakened to see the beautiful
sunshine and feel the fresh air of the morning around me. I have a
dim half remembrance of long, anxious times of waiting and fearing,
darkness in which there was not even the pain of hope to make present
distress more poignant. And then long spells of oblivion, and the
rising back to life as a diver coming up through a great press of
water. Since, however, Dr. Van Helsing has been with me, all this bad
dreaming seems to have passed away. The noises that used to frighten
me out of my wits, the flapping against the windows, the distant
voices which seemed so close to me, the harsh sounds that came from I
know not where and commanded me to do I know not what, have all
ceased. I go to bed now without any fear of sleep. I do not even try
to keep awake. I have grown quite fond of the garlic, and a boxful
arrives for me every day from Haarlem. Tonight Dr. Van Helsing is
going away, as he has to be for a day in Amsterdam. But I need not be
watched. I am well enough to be left alone.
Thank God for Mother's sake, and dear Arthur's, and for all our
friends who have been so kind I shall not even feel the change, for
last night Dr. Van Helsing slept in his chair a lot of the time. I
found him asleep twice when I awoke. But I did not fear to go to
sleep again, although the boughs or bats or something flapped almost
angrily against the window panes.
THE PALL MALL GAZETTE  September.
THE ESCAPED WOLF PERILOUS ADVENTURE OF OUR INTERVIEWER
INTERVIEW WITH THE KEEPER IN THE ZOOLOGICAL GARDENS
After many inquiries and almost as many refusals, and perpetually
using the words 'PALL MALL GAZETTE' as a sort of talisman, I managed
to find the keeper of the section of the Zoological Gardens in which
the wolf department is included. Thomas Bilder lives in one of the
cottages in the enclosure behind the elephant house, and was just
sitting down to his tea when I found him. Thomas and his wife are
hospitable folk, elderly, and without children, and if the specimen
I enjoyed of their hospitality be of the average kind, their lives
must be pretty comfortable. The keeper would not enter on what he
called business until the supper was over, and we were all
satisfied. Then when the table was cleared, and he had lit his
pipe, he said,
"Now, Sir, you can go on and arsk me what you want. You'll excoose
me refoosin' to talk of perfeshunal subjucts afore meals. I gives
the wolves and the jackals and the hyenas in all our section their
tea afore I begins to arsk them questions."
"How do you mean, ask them questions?" I queried, wishful to get him
into a talkative humor.
"'Ittin' of them over the 'ead with a pole is one way. Scratchin' of
their ears in another, when gents as is flush wants a bit of a show
orf to their gals. I don't so much mind the fust, the 'ittin of the
pole part afore I chucks in their dinner, but I waits till they've
'ad their sherry and kawffee, so to speak, afore I tries on with the
ear scratchin'. Mind you," he added philosophically, "there's a
deal of the same nature in us as in them theer animiles. Here's you
acomin' and arskin' of me questions about my business, and I that
grumplike that only for your bloomin' 'arfquid I'd 'a' seen you
blowed fust 'fore I'd answer. Not even when you arsked me sarcastic
like if I'd like you to arsk the Superintendent if you might arsk me
questions. Without offence did I tell yer to go to 'ell?"
"You did."
"An' when you said you'd report me for usin' obscene language that
was 'ittin' me over the 'ead. But the 'arfquid made that all
right. I weren't agoin' to fight, so I waited for the food, and
did with my 'owl as the wolves and lions and tigers does. But, lor'
love yer 'art, now that the old 'ooman has stuck a chunk of her tea
cake in me, an' rinsed me out with her bloomin' old teapot, and I've
lit hup, you may scratch my ears for all you're worth, and won't
even get a growl out of me. Drive along with your questions. I
know what yer acomin' at, that 'ere escaped wolf."
"Exactly. I want you to give me your view of it. Just tell me how
it happened, and when I know the facts I'll get you to say what you
consider was the cause of it, and how you think the whole affair
will end."
"All right, guv'nor. This 'ere is about the 'ole story.
That 'ere wolf what we called Bersicker was one of three gray
ones that came from Norway to Jamrach's, which we bought
off him four years ago. He was a nice wellbehaved wolf,
that never gave no trouble to talk of. I'm more surprised
at 'im for wantin' to get out nor any other animile in the
place. But, there, you can't trust wolves no more nor women."
"Don't you mind him, Sir" broke in Mrs. Tom, with a cheery
laugh. "'E's got mindin' the animiles so long that blest
if he ain't like a old wolf 'isself But there ain't no
'arm in 'im."
"Well, Sir, it was about two hours after feedin' yesterday when I
first hear my disturbance. I was makin' up a litter in the monkey
house for a young puma which is ill. But when I heard the yelpin'
and 'owlin' I kem away straight. There was Bersicker atearin' like
a mad thing at the bars as if he wanted to get out. There wasn't
much people about that day, and close at hand was only one man, a
tall, thin chap, with a 'ook nose and a pointed beard, with a few
white hairs runnin' through it. He had a 'ard, cold look and red
eyes, and I took a sort of mislike to him, for it seemed as if it
was 'im as they was hirritated at. He 'ad white kid gloves on 'is
'ands, and he pointed out the animiles to me and says, 'Keeper,
these wolves seem upset at something.'
"'Maybe it's you,' says I, for I did not like the airs as he
give 'isself. He didn't get angry, as I 'oped he would, but
he smiled a kind of insolent smile, with a mouth full of white,
sharp teeth. 'Oh no, they wouldn't like me,' 'e says.
"'Ow yes, they would,' says I, aimitatin' of him. 'They
always like a bone or two to clean their teeth on about tea
time, which you 'as a bagful.'
"Well, it was a odd thing, but when the animiles see us
atalkin' they lay down, and when I went over to Bersicker
he let me stroke his ears same as ever. That there man kem
over, and blessed but if he didn't put in his hand and stroke
the old wolf's ears too
"'Tyke care,' says I. 'Bersicker is quick.'
"'Never mind,' he says. I'm used to 'em'
"'Are you in the business yourself?' I says, tyking off my
'at, for a man what trades in wolves, anceterer, is a good
friend to keepers.
"'Nom,' says he, 'not exactly in the business, but I 'ave made pets
of several.' And with that he lifts his 'at as perlite as a lord,
and walks away. Old Bersicker kep' alookin' arter 'im till 'e was
out of sight, and then went and lay down in a corner and wouldn't
come hout the 'ole hevening. Well, larst night, so soon as the moon
was hup, the wolves here all began a'owling. There warn't nothing
for them to 'owl at. There warn't no one near, except some one that
was evidently acallin' a dog somewheres out back of the gardings in
the Park road. Once or twice I went out to see that all was right,
and it was, and then the 'owling stopped. Just before twelve
o'clock I just took a look round afore turnin' in, an', bust me, but
when I kem opposite to old Bersicker's cage I see the rails broken
and twisted about and the cage empty. And that's all I know for
certing."
"Did any one else see anything?"
"One of our gard'ners was acomin' 'ome about that time from a
'armony, when he sees a big gray dog comin' out through the garding
'edges. At least, so he says, but I don't give much for it myself,
for if he did 'e never said a word about it to his missis when 'e
got 'ome, and it was only after the escape of the wolf was made
known, and we had been up all night ahuntin' of the Park for
Bersicker, that he remembered seein' anything. My own belief was
that the 'armony 'ad got into his 'ead."
"Now, Mr. Bilder, can you account in any way for the escape
of the wolf?"
"Well, Sir," he said, with a suspicious sort of modesty, "I think I
can, but I don't know as 'ow you'd be satisfied with the theory."
"Certainly I shall. If a man like you, who knows the animals from
experience, can't hazard a good guess at any rate, who is even to
try?"
"Well then, Sir, I accounts for it this way. It seems to me that
'ere wolf escapedsimply because he wanted to get out."
From the hearty way that both Thomas and his wife laughed at the
joke I could see that it had done service before, and that the whole
explanation was simply an elaborate sell. I couldn't cope in
badinage with the worthy Thomas, but I thought I knew a surer way to
his heart, so I said, "Now, Mr. Bilder, we'll consider that first
halfsovereign worked off, and this brother of his is waiting to be
claimed when you've told me what you think will happen."
"Right y'are, Sir," he said briskly. "Ye'll excoose me, I
know, for achaffin' of ye, but the old woman here winked at
me, which was as much as telling me to go on."
"Well, I never" said the old lady.
"My opinion is this that 'ere wolf is a'idin' of, somewheres. The
gard'ner wot didn't remember said he was agallopin' northward
faster than a horse could go, but I don't believe him, for, yer see,
Sir, wolves don't gallop no more nor dogs does, they not bein' built
that way. Wolves is fine things in a storybook, and I dessay when
they gets in packs and does be chivyin' somethin' that's more
afeared than they is they can make a devil of a noise and chop it
up, whatever it is. But, Lor' bless you, in real life a wolf is
only a low creature, not half so clever or bold as a good dog, and
not half a quarter so much fight in 'im. This one ain't been used
to fightin' or even to providin' for hisself, and more like he's
somewhere round the Park a'hidin' an' a'shiverin' of, and if he
thinks at all, wonderin' where he is to get his breakfast from. Or
maybe he's got down some area and is in a coal cellar. My eye,
won't some cook get a rum start when she sees his green eyes
ashinin' at her out of the dark If he can't get food he's bound to
look for it, and mayhap he may chance to light on a butcher's shop
in time. If he doesn't, and some nursemaid goes out walkin' or orf
with a soldier, leavin' of the hinfant in the perambulatorwell,
then I shouldn't be surprised if the census is one babby the less.
That's all."
I was handing him the halfsovereign, when something came bobbing up
against the window, and Mr. Bilder's face doubled its natural length
with surprise.
"God bless me" he said. "If there ain't old Bersicker come back by
'isself"
He went to the door and opened it, a most unnecessary proceeding it
seemed to me. I have always thought that a wild animal never looks
so well as when some obstacle of pronounced durability is between
us. A personal experience has intensified rather than diminished
that idea.
After all, however, there is nothing like custom, for neither Bilder
nor his wife thought any more of the wolf than I should of a dog.
The animal itself was a peaceful and wellbehaved as that father of
all picturewolves, Red Riding Hood's quondam friend, whilst moving
her confidence in masquerade.
The whole scene was a unutterable mixture of comedy and
pathos. The wicked wolf that for a half a day had
paralyzed London and set all the children in town shivering
in their shoes, was there in a sort of penitent mood, and
was received and petted like a sort of vulpine prodigal
son. Old Bilder examined him all over with most tender
solicitude, and when he had finished with his penitent
said,
"There, I knew the poor old chap would get into some kind of
trouble. Didn't I say it all along? Here's his head all
cut and full of broken glass. 'E's been agettin' over
some bloomin' wall or other. It's a shyme that people are
allowed to top their walls with broken bottles. This 'ere's
what comes of it. Come along, Bersicker."
He took the wolf and locked him up in a cage, with a piece
of meat that satisfied, in quantity at any rate, the elementary
conditions of the fatted calf, and went off to report.
I came off too, to report the only exclusive information
that is given today regarding the strange escapade at the
Zoo.
DR. SEWARD'S DIARY
 September.I was engaged after dinner in my study posting up my
books, which, through press of other work and the many visits to Lucy,
had fallen sadly into arrear. Suddenly the door was burst open, and
in rushed my patient, with his face distorted with passion. I was
thunderstruck, for such a thing as a patient getting of his own accord
into the Superintendent's study is almost unknown.
Without an instant's notice he made straight at me. He had a dinner
knife in his hand, and as I saw he was dangerous, I tried to keep the
table between us. He was too quick and too strong for me, however,
for before I could get my balance he had struck at me and cut my left
wrist rather severely.
Before he could strike again, however, I got in my right hand and he
was sprawling on his back on the floor. My wrist bled freely, and
quite a little pool trickled on to the carpet. I saw that my friend
was not intent on further effort, and occupied myself binding up my
wrist, keeping a wary eye on the prostrate figure all the time. When
the attendants rushed in, and we turned our attention to him, his
employment positively sickened me. He was lying on his belly on the
floor licking up, like a dog, the blood which had fallen from my
wounded wrist. He was easily secured, and to my surprise, went with
the attendants quite placidly, simply repeating over and over again,
"The blood is the life The blood is the life"
I cannot afford to lose blood just at present. I have lost too much
of late for my physical good, and then the prolonged strain of Lucy's
illness and its horrible phases is telling on me. I am over excited
and weary, and I need rest, rest, rest. Happily Van Helsing has not
summoned me, so I need not forego my sleep. Tonight I could not well
do without it.
TELEGRAM, VAN HELSING, ANTWERP, TO SEWARD, CARFAX
Sent to Carfax, Sussex, as no county given, delivered late
by twentytwo hours.
 September.Do not fail to be at Hilllingham tonight.
If not watching all the time, frequently visit and see that
flowers are as placed, very important, do not fail. Shall
be with you as soon as possible after arrival.
DR. SEWARD'S DIARY
 September.Just off train to London. The arrival of Van
Helsing's telegram filled me with dismay. A whole night lost,
and I know by bitter experience what may happen in a night.
Of course it is possible that all may be well, but what may
have happened? Surely there is some horrible doom hanging over us
that every possible accident should thwart us in all we try to do.
I shall take this cylinder with me, and then I can complete
my entry on Lucy's phonograph.
MEMORANDUM LEFT BY LUCY WESTENRA
 September, Night.I write this and leave it to be seen,
so that no one may by any chance get into trouble through
me. This is an exact record of what took place tonight. I
feel I am dying of weakness, and have barely strength to
write, but it must be done if I die in the doing.
I went to bed as usual, taking care that the flowers were
placed as Dr. Van Helsing directed, and soon fell asleep.
I was waked by the flapping at the window, which had begun after
that sleepwalking on the cliff at Whitby when Mina saved me, and
which now I know so well. I was not afraid, but I did wish that
Dr. Seward was in the next room, as Dr. Van Helsing said he would
be, so that I might have called him. I tried to sleep, but I
could not. Then there came to me the old fear of sleep, and I
determined to keep awake. Perversely sleep would try to come then
when I did not want it. So, as I feared to be alone, I opened my
door and called out, "Is there anybody there?" There was no
answer. I was afraid to wake mother, and so closed my door
again. Then outside in the shrubbery I heard a sort of howl like
a dog's, but more fierce and deeper. I went to the window and
looked out, but could see nothing, except a big bat, which had
evidently been buffeting its wings against the window. So I went
back to bed again, but determined not to go to sleep. Presently
the door opened, and mother looked in. Seeing by my moving that
I was not asleep, she came in and sat by me. She said to me even
more sweetly and softly than her wont,
"I was uneasy about you, darling, and came in to see that
you were all right."
I feared she might catch cold sitting there, and asked her
to come in and sleep with me, so she came into bed, and lay
down beside me. She did not take off her dressing gown,
for she said she would only stay a while and then go back
to her own bed. As she lay there in my arms, and I in hers
the flapping and buffeting came to the window again. She
was startled and a little frightened, and cried out, "What
is that?"
I tried to pacify her, and at last succeeded, and she lay
quiet. But I could hear her poor dear heart still beating
terribly. After a while there was the howl again out in
the shrubbery, and shortly after there was a crash at the
window, and a lot of broken glass was hurled on the floor.
The window blind blew back with the wind that rushed in,
and in the aperture of the broken panes there was the head
of a great, gaunt gray wolf.
Mother cried out in a fright, and struggled up into a
sitting posture, and clutched wildly at anything that would
help her. Amongst other things, she clutched the wreath of
flowers that Dr. Van Helsing insisted on my wearing round
my neck, and tore it away from me. For a second or two she
sat up, pointing at the wolf, and there was a strange and
horrible gurgling in her throat. Then she fell over, as if
struck with lightning, and her head hit my forehead and
made me dizzy for a moment or two.
The room and all round seemed to spin round. I kept my eyes
fixed on the window, but the wolf drew his head back, and a whole
myriad of little specks seems to come blowing in through the
broken window, and wheeling and circling round like the pillar of
dust that travellers describe when there is a simoon in the
desert. I tried to stir, but there was some spell upon me, and
dear Mother's poor body, which seemed to grow cold already, for
her dear heart had ceased to beat, weighed me down, and I
remembered no more for a while.
The time did not seem long, but very, very awful, till I
recovered consciousness again. Somewhere near, a passing
bell was tolling. The dogs all round the neighbourhood were
howling, and in our shrubbery, seemingly just outside, a
nightingale was singing. I was dazed and stupid with pain
and terror and weakness, but the sound of the nightingale
seemed like the voice of my dead mother come back to comfort me.
The sounds seemed to have awakened the maids, too, for I could
hear their bare feet pattering outside my door. I called to
them, and they came in, and when they saw what had happened, and
what it was that lay over me on the bed, they screamed out. The
wind rushed in through the broken window, and the door slammed
to. They lifted off the body of my dear mother, and laid her,
covered up with a sheet, on the bed after I had got up. They
were all so frightened and nervous that I directed them to go to
the dining room and each have a glass of wine. The door flew
open for an instant and closed again. The maids shrieked, and
then went in a body to the dining room, and I laid what flowers I
had on my dear mother's breast. When they were there I
remembered what Dr. Van Helsing had told me, but I didn't like to
remove them, and besides, I would have some of the servants to
sit up with me now. I was surprised that the maids did not come
back. I called them, but got no answer, so I went to the dining
room to look for them.
My heart sank when I saw what had happened. They all four
lay helpless on the floor, breathing heavily. The decanter
of sherry was on the table half full, but there was a queer,
acrid smell about. I was suspicious, and examined the decanter.
It smelt of laudanum, and looking on the sideboard, I found that
the bottle which Mother's doctor uses for heroh did usewas
empty. What am I to do? What am I to do? I am back in the room
with Mother. I cannot leave her, and I am alone, save for the
sleeping servants, whom some one has drugged. Alone with the
dead I dare not go out, for I can hear the low howl of the wolf
through the broken window.
The air seems full of specks, floating and circling in the
draught from the window, and the lights burn blue and dim.
What am I to do? God shield me from harm this night I
shall hide this paper in my breast, where they shall find
it when they come to lay me out. My dear mother gone It
is time that I go too. Goodbye, dear Arthur, if I should
not survive this night. God keep you, dear, and God help
me
CHAPTER 
DR. SEWARD'S DIARY
 September.I drove at once to Hillingham and arrived early.
Keeping my cab at the gate, I went up the avenue alone. I knocked
gently and rang as quietly as possible, for I feared to disturb Lucy
or her mother, and hoped to only bring a servant to the door. After a
while, finding no response, I knocked and rang again, still no
answer. I cursed the laziness of the servants that they should lie
abed at such an hour, for it was now ten o'clock, and so rang and
knocked again, but more impatiently, but still without response.
Hitherto I had blamed only the servants, but now a terrible fear began
to assail me. Was this desolation but another link in the chain of
doom which seemed drawing tight round us? Was it indeed a house of
death to which I had come, too late? I know that minutes, even
seconds of delay, might mean hours of danger to Lucy, if she had had
again one of those frightful relapses, and I went round the house to
try if I could find by chance an entry anywhere.
I could find no means of ingress. Every window and door was fastened
and locked, and I returned baffled to the porch. As I did so, I heard
the rapid pitpat of a swiftly driven horse's feet. They stopped at
the gate, and a few seconds later I met Van Helsing running up the
avenue. When he saw me, he gasped out, "Then it was you, and just
arrived. How is she? Are we too late? Did you not get my telegram?"
I answered as quickly and coherently as I could that I had only got
his telegram early in the morning, and had not a minute in coming
here, and that I could not make any one in the house hear me. He
paused and raised his hat as he said solemnly, "Then I fear we are too
late. God's will be done"
With his usual recuperative energy, he went on, "Come. If there be no
way open to get in, we must make one. Time is all in all to us now."
We went round to the back of the house, where there was a kitchen
window. The Professor took a small surgical saw from his case, and
handing it to me, pointed to the iron bars which guarded the window.
I attacked them at once and had very soon cut through three of them.
Then with a long, thin knife we pushed back the fastening of the
sashes and opened the window. I helped the Professor in, and followed
him. There was no one in the kitchen or in the servants' rooms, which
were close at hand. We tried all the rooms as we went along, and in
the dining room, dimly lit by rays of light through the shutters,
found four servant women lying on the floor. There was no need to
think them dead, for their stertorous breathing and the acrid smell of
laudanum in the room left no doubt as to their condition.
Van Helsing and I looked at each other, and as we moved away he said,
"We can attend to them later." Then we ascended to Lucy's room. For an
instant or two we paused at the door to listen, but there was no sound
that we could hear. With white faces and trembling hands, we opened
the door gently, and entered the room.
How shall I describe what we saw? On the bed lay two women, Lucy and
her mother. The latter lay farthest in, and she was covered with a
white sheet, the edge of which had been blown back by the drought
through the broken window, showing the drawn, white, face, with a look
of terror fixed upon it. By her side lay Lucy, with face white and
still more drawn. The flowers which had been round her neck we found
upon her mother's bosom, and her throat was bare, showing the two
little wounds which we had noticed before, but looking horribly white
and mangled. Without a word the Professor bent over the bed, his head
almost touching poor Lucy's breast. Then he gave a quick turn of his
head, as of one who listens, and leaping to his feet, he cried out to
me, "It is not yet too late Quick Quick Bring the brandy"
I flew downstairs and returned with it, taking care to smell and taste
it, lest it, too, were drugged like the decanter of sherry which I
found on the table. The maids were still breathing, but more
restlessly, and I fancied that the narcotic was wearing off. I did
not stay to make sure, but returned to Van Helsing. He rubbed the
brandy, as on another occasion, on her lips and gums and on her wrists
and the palms of her hands. He said to me, "I can do this, all that
can be at the present. You go wake those maids. Flick them in the
face with a wet towel, and flick them hard. Make them get heat and
fire and a warm bath. This poor soul is nearly as cold as that beside
her. She will need be heated before we can do anything more."
I went at once, and found little difficulty in waking three of the
women. The fourth was only a young girl, and the drug had evidently
affected her more strongly so I lifted her on the sofa and let her
sleep.
The others were dazed at first, but as remembrance came back to them
they cried and sobbed in a hysterical manner. I was stern with them,
however, and would not let them talk. I told them that one life was
bad enough to lose, and if they delayed they would sacrifice Miss
Lucy. So, sobbing and crying they went about their way, half clad as
they were, and prepared fire and water. Fortunately, the kitchen and
boiler fires were still alive, and there was no lack of hot water. We
got a bath and carried Lucy out as she was and placed her in it.
Whilst we were busy chafing her limbs there was a knock at the hall
door. One of the maids ran off, hurried on some more clothes, and
opened it. Then she returned and whispered to us that there was a
gentleman who had come with a message from Mr. Holmwood. I bade her
simply tell him that he must wait, for we could see no one now. She
went away with the message, and, engrossed with our work, I clean
forgot all about him.
I never saw in all my experience the Professor work in such deadly
earnest. I knew, as he knew, that it was a standup fight with death,
and in a pause told him so. He answered me in a way that I did not
understand, but with the sternest look that his face could wear.
"If that were all, I would stop here where we are now, and let her
fade away into peace, for I see no light in life over her horizon." He
went on with his work with, if possible, renewed and more frenzied
vigour.
Presently we both began to be conscious that the heat was beginning to
be of some effect. Lucy's heart beat a trifle more audibly to the
stethoscope, and her lungs had a perceptible movement. Van Helsing's
face almost beamed, and as we lifted her from the bath and rolled her
in a hot sheet to dry her he said to me, "The first gain is ours
Check to the King"
We took Lucy into another room, which had by now been prepared, and
laid her in bed and forced a few drops of brandy down her throat. I
noticed that Van Helsing tied a soft silk handkerchief round her
throat. She was still unconscious, and was quite as bad as, if not
worse than, we had ever seen her.
Van Helsing called in one of the women, and told her to stay with her
and not to take her eyes off her till we returned, and then beckoned
me out of the room.
"We must consult as to what is to be done," he said as we descended
the stairs. In the hall he opened the dining room door, and we passed
in, he closing the door carefully behind him. The shutters had been
opened, but the blinds were already down, with that obedience to the
etiquette of death which the British woman of the lower classes always
rigidly observes. The room was, therefore, dimly dark. It was,
however, light enough for our purposes. Van Helsing's sternness was
somewhat relieved by a look of perplexity. He was evidently torturing
his mind about something, so I waited for an instant, and he spoke.
"What are we to do now? Where are we to turn for help? We must have
another transfusion of blood, and that soon, or that poor girl's life
won't be worth an hour's purchase. You are exhausted already. I am
exhausted too. I fear to trust those women, even if they would have
courage to submit. What are we to do for some one who will open his
veins for her?"
"What's the matter with me, anyhow?"
The voice came from the sofa across the room, and its tones brought
relief and joy to my heart, for they were those of Quincey Morris.
Van Helsing started angrily at the first sound, but his face softened
and a glad look came into his eyes as I cried out, "Quincey Morris"
and rushed towards him with outstretched hands.
"What brought you here?" I cried as our hands met.
"I guess Art is the cause."
He handed me a telegram.'Have not heard from Seward for three days,
and am terribly anxious. Cannot leave. Father still in same
condition. Send me word how Lucy is. Do not delay.Holmwood.'
"I think I came just in the nick of time. You know you have only to
tell me what to do."
Van Helsing strode forward, and took his hand, looking him straight in
the eyes as he said, "A brave man's blood is the best thing on this
earth when a woman is in trouble. You're a man and no mistake. Well,
the devil may work against us for all he's worth, but God sends us men
when we want them."
Once again we went through that ghastly operation. I have not the
heart to go through with the details. Lucy had got a terrible shock
and it told on her more than before, for though plenty of blood went
into her veins, her body did not respond to the treatment as well as
on the other occasions. Her struggle back into life was something
frightful to see and hear. However, the action of both heart and
lungs improved, and Van Helsing made a subcutaneous injection of
morphia, as before, and with good effect. Her faint became a profound
slumber. The Professor watched whilst I went downstairs with Quincey
Morris, and sent one of the maids to pay off one of the cabmen who
were waiting.
I left Quincey lying down after having a glass of wine, and told the
cook to get ready a good breakfast. Then a thought struck me, and I
went back to the room where Lucy now was. When I came softly in, I
found Van Helsing with a sheet or two of note paper in his hand. He
had evidently read it, and was thinking it over as he sat with his
hand to his brow. There was a look of grim satisfaction in his face,
as of one who has had a doubt solved. He handed me the paper saying
only, "It dropped from Lucy's breast when we carried her to the bath."
When I had read it, I stood looking at the Professor, and after a
pause asked him, "In God's name, what does it all mean? Was she, or
is she, mad, or what sort of horrible danger is it?" I was so
bewildered that I did not know what to say more. Van Helsing put out
his hand and took the paper, saying,
"Do not trouble about it now. Forget it for the present. You shall
know and understand it all in good time, but it will be later. And
now what is it that you came to me to say?" This brought me back to
fact, and I was all myself again.
"I came to speak about the certificate of death. If we do not act
properly and wisely, there may be an inquest, and that paper would
have to be produced. I am in hopes that we need have no inquest, for
if we had it would surely kill poor Lucy, if nothing else did. I
know, and you know, and the other doctor who attended her knows, that
Mrs. Westenra had disease of the heart, and we can certify that she
died of it. Let us fill up the certificate at once, and I shall take
it myself to the registrar and go on to the undertaker."
"Good, oh my friend John Well thought of Truly Miss Lucy, if she
be sad in the foes that beset her, is at least happy in the friends
that love her. One, two, three, all open their veins for her, besides
one old man. Ah, yes, I know, friend John. I am not blind I love
you all the more for it Now go."
In the hall I met Quincey Morris, with a telegram for Arthur telling
him that Mrs. Westenra was dead, that Lucy also had been ill, but was
now going on better, and that Van Helsing and I were with her. I told
him where I was going, and he hurried me out, but as I was going said,
"When you come back, Jack, may I have two words with you all to
ourselves?" I nodded in reply and went out. I found no difficulty
about the registration, and arranged with the local undertaker to come
up in the evening to measure for the coffin and to make arrangements.
When I got back Quincey was waiting for me. I told him I would see
him as soon as I knew about Lucy, and went up to her room. She was
still sleeping, and the Professor seemingly had not moved from his
seat at her side. From his putting his finger to his lips, I gathered
that he expected her to wake before long and was afraid of
forestalling nature. So I went down to Quincey and took him into the
breakfast room, where the blinds were not drawn down, and which was a
little more cheerful, or rather less cheerless, than the other rooms.
When we were alone, he said to me, "Jack Seward, I don't want to shove
myself in anywhere where I've no right to be, but this is no ordinary
case. You know I loved that girl and wanted to marry her, but
although that's all past and gone, I can't help feeling anxious about
her all the same. What is it that's wrong with her? The Dutchman,
and a fine old fellow he is, I can see that, said that time you two
came into the room, that you must have another transfusion of blood,
and that both you and he were exhausted. Now I know well that you
medical men speak in camera, and that a man must not expect to know
what they consult about in private. But this is no common matter, and
whatever it is, I have done my part. Is not that so?"
"That's so," I said, and he went on.
"I take it that both you and Van Helsing had done already what I did
today. Is not that so?"
"That's so."
"And I guess Art was in it too. When I saw him four days ago down at
his own place he looked queer. I have not seen anything pulled down
so quick since I was on the Pampas and had a mare that I was fond of
go to grass all in a night. One of those big bats that they call
vampires had got at her in the night, and what with his gorge and the
vein left open, there wasn't enough blood in her to let her stand up,
and I had to put a bullet through her as she lay. Jack, if you may
tell me without betraying confidence, Arthur was the first, is not
that so?"
As he spoke the poor fellow looked terribly anxious. He was in a
torture of suspense regarding the woman he loved, and his utter
ignorance of the terrible mystery which seemed to surround her
intensified his pain. His very heart was bleeding, and it took all
the manhood of him, and there was a royal lot of it, too, to keep him
from breaking down. I paused before answering, for I felt that I must
not betray anything which the Professor wished kept secret, but
already he knew so much, and guessed so much, that there could be no
reason for not answering, so I answered in the same phrase.
"That's so."
"And how long has this been going on?"
"About ten days."
"Ten days Then I guess, Jack Seward, that that poor pretty creature
that we all love has had put into her veins within that time the blood
of four strong men. Man alive, her whole body wouldn't hold it." Then
coming close to me, he spoke in a fierce halfwhisper. "What took it
out?"
I shook my head. "That," I said, "is the crux. Van Helsing is simply
frantic about it, and I am at my wits' end. I can't even hazard a
guess. There has been a series of little circumstances which have
thrown out all our calculations as to Lucy being properly watched.
But these shall not occur again. Here we stay until all be well, or
ill."
Quincey held out his hand. "Count me in," he said. "You and the
Dutchman will tell me what to do, and I'll do it."
When she woke late in the afternoon, Lucy's first movement was to feel
in her breast, and to my surprise, produced the paper which Van
Helsing had given me to read. The careful Professor had replaced it
where it had come from, lest on waking she should be alarmed. Her
eyes then lit on Van Helsing and on me too, and gladdened. Then she
looked round the room, and seeing where she was, shuddered. She gave
a loud cry, and put her poor thin hands before her pale face.
We both understood what was meant, that she had realized to the full
her mother's death. So we tried what we could to comfort her.
Doubtless sympathy eased her somewhat, but she was very low in thought
and spirit, and wept silently and weakly for a long time. We told her
that either or both of us would now remain with her all the time, and
that seemed to comfort her. Towards dusk she fell into a doze. Here
a very odd thing occurred. Whilst still asleep she took the paper
from her breast and tore it in two. Van Helsing stepped over and took
the pieces from her. All the same, however, she went on with the
action of tearing, as though the material were still in her hands.
Finally she lifted her hands and opened them as though scattering the
fragments. Van Helsing seemed surprised, and his brows gathered as if
in thought, but he said nothing.
 September.All last night she slept fitfully, being always afraid
to sleep, and something weaker when she woke from it. The Professor
and I took in turns to watch, and we never left her for a moment
unattended. Quincey Morris said nothing about his intention, but I
knew that all night long he patrolled round and round the house.
When the day came, its searching light showed the ravages in poor
Lucy's strength. She was hardly able to turn her head, and the little
nourishment which she could take seemed to do her no good. At times
she slept, and both Van Helsing and I noticed the difference in her,
between sleeping and waking. Whilst asleep she looked stronger,
although more haggard, and her breathing was softer. Her open mouth
showed the pale gums drawn back from the teeth, which looked
positively longer and sharper than usual. When she woke the softness
of her eyes evidently changed the expression, for she looked her own
self, although a dying one. In the afternoon she asked for Arthur,
and we telegraphed for him. Quincey went off to meet him at the
station.
When he arrived it was nearly six o'clock, and the sun was setting
full and warm, and the red light streamed in through the window and
gave more colour to the pale cheeks. When he saw her, Arthur was
simply choking with emotion, and none of us could speak. In the hours
that had passed, the fits of sleep, or the comatose condition that
passed for it, had grown more frequent, so that the pauses when
conversation was possible were shortened. Arthur's presence, however,
seemed to act as a stimulant. She rallied a little, and spoke to him
more brightly than she had done since we arrived. He too pulled
himself together, and spoke as cheerily as he could, so that the best
was made of everything.
It is now nearly one o'clock, and he and Van Helsing are sitting with
her. I am to relieve them in a quarter of an hour, and I am entering
this on Lucy's phonograph. Until six o'clock they are to try to rest.
I fear that tomorrow will end our watching, for the shock has been too
great. The poor child cannot rally. God help us all.
LETTER MINA HARKER TO LUCY WESTENRA
Unopened by her
 September
My dearest Lucy,
"It seems an age since I heard from you, or indeed since I
wrote. You will pardon me, I know, for all my faults when
you have read all my budget of news. Well, I got my husband back
all right. When we arrived at Exeter there was a carriage
waiting for us, and in it, though he had an attack of gout, Mr.
Hawkins. He took us to his house, where there were rooms for us
all nice and comfortable, and we dined together. After dinner
Mr. Hawkins said,
"'My dears, I want to drink your health and prosperity, and
may every blessing attend you both. I know you both from
children, and have, with love and pride, seen you grow up.
Now I want you to make your home here with me. I have left
to me neither chick nor child. All are gone, and in my
will I have left you everything.' I cried, Lucy dear, as
Jonathan and the old man clasped hands. Our evening was a
very, very happy one.
"So here we are, installed in this beautiful old house, and
from both my bedroom and the drawing room I can see the
great elms of the cathedral close, with their great black
stems standing out against the old yellow stone of the cathedral,
and I can hear the rooks overhead cawing and cawing and
chattering and chattering and gossiping all day, after the manner
of rooksand humans. I am busy, I need not tell you, arranging
things and housekeeping. Jonathan and Mr. Hawkins are busy all
day, for now that Jonathan is a partner, Mr. Hawkins wants to
tell him all about the clients.
"How is your dear mother getting on? I wish I could run up
to town for a day or two to see you, dear, but I dare not
go yet, with so much on my shoulders, and Jonathan wants
looking after still. He is beginning to put some flesh on
his bones again, but he was terribly weakened by the long
illness. Even now he sometimes starts out of his sleep in
a sudden way and awakes all trembling until I can coax him
back to his usual placidity. However, thank God, these
occasions grow less frequent as the days go on, and they
will in time pass away altogether, I trust. And now I have
told you my news, let me ask yours. When are you to be
married, and where, and who is to perform the ceremony, and
what are you to wear, and is it to be a public or private
wedding? Tell me all about it, dear, tell me all about
everything, for there is nothing which interests you which
will not be dear to me. Jonathan asks me to send his 'respectful
duty', but I do not think that is good enough from the junior
partner of the important firm Hawkins  Harker. And so, as you
love me, and he loves me, and I love you with all the moods and
tenses of the verb, I send you simply his 'love' instead.
Goodbye, my dearest Lucy, and blessings on you.
"Yours,
"Mina Harker"
REPORT FROM PATRICK HENNESSEY, MD, MRCSLK, QCPI, ETC, ETC,
TO JOHN SEWARD, MD
 September
My dear Sir
"In accordance with your wishes, I enclose report of the
conditions of everything left in my charge. With regard to
patient, Renfield, there is more to say. He has had another
outbreak, which might have had a dreadful ending, but which, as
it fortunately happened, was unattended with any unhappy results.
This afternoon a carrier's cart with two men made a call at the
empty house whose grounds abut on ours, the house to which, you
will remember, the patient twice ran away. The men stopped at
our gate to ask the porter their way, as they were strangers.
"I was myself looking out of the study window, having a
smoke after dinner, and saw one of them come up to the
house. As he passed the window of Renfield's room, the
patient began to rate him from within, and called him all
the foul names he could lay his tongue to. The man, who
seemed a decent fellow enough, contented himself by telling
him to 'shut up for a foulmouthed beggar', whereon our man
accused him of robbing him and wanting to murder him and
said that he would hinder him if he were to swing for it.
I opened the window and signed to the man not to notice, so
he contented himself after looking the place over and making up
his mind as to what kind of place he had got to by saying, 'Lor'
bless yer, sir, I wouldn't mind what was said to me in a bloomin'
madhouse. I pity ye and the guv'nor for havin' to live in the
house with a wild beast like that.'
"Then he asked his way civilly enough, and I told him where
the gate of the empty house was. He went away followed by
threats and curses and revilings from our man. I went down
to see if I could make out any cause for his anger, since
he is usually such a wellbehaved man, and except his violent
fits nothing of the kind had ever occurred. I found him, to my
astonishment, quite composed and most genial in his manner. I
tried to get him to talk of the incident, but he blandly asked me
questions as to what I meant, and led me to believe that he was
completely oblivious of the affair. It was, I am sorry to say,
however, only another instance of his cunning, for within half an
hour I heard of him again. This time he had broken out through
the window of his room, and was running down the avenue. I
called to the attendants to follow me, and ran after him, for I
feared he was intent on some mischief. My fear was justified
when I saw the same cart which had passed before coming down the
road, having on it some great wooden boxes. The men were wiping
their foreheads, and were flushed in the face, as if with violent
exercise. Before I could get up to him, the patient rushed at
them, and pulling one of them off the cart, began to knock his
head against the ground. If I had not seized him just at the
moment, I believe he would have killed the man there and then.
The other fellow jumped down and struck him over the head with
the butt end of his heavy whip. It was a horrible blow, but he
did not seem to mind it, but seized him also, and struggled with
the three of us, pulling us to and fro as if we were kittens.
You know I am no lightweight, and the others were both burly men.
At first he was silent in his fighting, but as we began to master
him, and the attendants were putting a strait waistcoat on him,
he began to shout, 'I'll frustrate them They shan't rob me
They shan't murder me by inches I'll fight for my Lord and
Master' and all sorts of similar incoherent ravings. It was
with very considerable difficulty that they got him back to the
house and put him in the padded room. One of the attendants,
Hardy, had a finger broken. However, I set it all right, and he
is going on well.
"The two carriers were at first loud in their threats of
actions for damages, and promised to rain all the penalties
of the law on us. Their threats were, however, mingled
with some sort of indirect apology for the defeat of the
two of them by a feeble madman. They said that if it had
not been for the way their strength had been spent in carrying
and raising the heavy boxes to the cart they would have made
short work of him. They gave as another reason for their defeat
the extraordinary state of drouth to which they had been reduced
by the dusty nature of their occupation and the reprehensible
distance from the scene of their labors of any place of public
entertainment. I quite understood their drift, and after a stiff
glass of strong grog, or rather more of the same, and with each a
sovereign in hand, they made light of the attack, and swore that
they would encounter a worse madman any day for the pleasure of
meeting so 'bloomin' good a bloke' as your correspondent. I took
their names and addresses, in case they might be needed. They
are as follows Jack Smollet, of Dudding's Rents, King George's
Road, Great Walworth, and Thomas Snelling, Peter Farley's Row,
Guide Court, Bethnal Green. They are both in the employment of
Harris  Sons, Moving and Shipment Company, Orange Master's Yard,
Soho.
"I shall report to you any matter of interest occurring here, and
shall wire you at once if there is anything of importance.
"Believe me, dear Sir,
"Yours faithfully,
"Patrick Hennessey."
LETTER, MINA HARKER TO LUCY WESTENRA Unopened by her
 September
"My dearest Lucy,
"Such a sad blow has befallen us. Mr. Hawkins has died very
suddenly. Some may not think it so sad for us, but we had
both come to so love him that it really seems as though we
had lost a father. I never knew either father or mother,
so that the dear old man's death is a real blow to me. Jonathan
is greatly distressed. It is not only that he feels sorrow, deep
sorrow, for the dear, good man who has befriended him all his
life, and now at the end has treated him like his own son and
left him a fortune which to people of our modest bringing up is
wealth beyond the dream of avarice, but Jonathan feels it on
another account. He says the amount of responsibility which it
puts upon him makes him nervous. He begins to doubt himself. I
try to cheer him up, and my belief in him helps him to have a
belief in himself. But it is here that the grave shock that he
experienced tells upon him the most. Oh, it is too hard that a
sweet, simple, noble, strong nature such as his, a nature which
enabled him by our dear, good friend's aid to rise from clerk to
master in a few years, should be so injured that the very essence
of its strength is gone. Forgive me, dear, if I worry you with my
troubles in the midst of your own happiness, but Lucy dear, I
must tell someone, for the strain of keeping up a brave and
cheerful appearance to Jonathan tries me, and I have no one here
that I can confide in. I dread coming up to London, as we must
do that day after tomorrow, for poor Mr. Hawkins left in his will
that he was to be buried in the grave with his father. As there
are no relations at all, Jonathan will have to be chief mourner.
I shall try to run over to see you, dearest, if only for a few
minutes. Forgive me for troubling you. With all blessings,
"Your loving
"Mina Harker"
DR. SEWARD'S DIARY
 September.Only resolution and habit can let me make an entry
tonight. I am too miserable, too low spirited, too sick of the world
and all in it, including life itself, that I would not care if I heard
this moment the flapping of the wings of the angel of death. And he
has been flapping those grim wings to some purpose of late, Lucy's
mother and Arthur's father, and now . . . Let me get on with my work.
I duly relieved Van Helsing in his watch over Lucy. We wanted Arthur
to go to rest also, but he refused at first. It was only when I told
him that we should want him to help us during the day, and that we
must not all break down for want of rest, lest Lucy should suffer,
that he agreed to go.
Van Helsing was very kind to him. "Come, my child," he said. "Come
with me. You are sick and weak, and have had much sorrow and much
mental pain, as well as that tax on your strength that we know of.
You must not be alone, for to be alone is to be full of fears and
alarms. Come to the drawing room, where there is a big fire, and
there are two sofas. You shall lie on one, and I on the other, and
our sympathy will be comfort to each other, even though we do not
speak, and even if we sleep."
Arthur went off with him, casting back a longing look on Lucy's face,
which lay in her pillow, almost whiter than the lawn. She lay quite
still, and I looked around the room to see that all was as it should
be. I could see that the Professor had carried out in this room, as
in the other, his purpose of using the garlic. The whole of the
window sashes reeked with it, and round Lucy's neck, over the silk
handkerchief which Van Helsing made her keep on, was a rough chaplet
of the same odorous flowers.
Lucy was breathing somewhat stertorously, and her face was at its
worst, for the open mouth showed the pale gums. Her teeth, in the
dim, uncertain light, seemed longer and sharper than they had been in
the morning. In particular, by some trick of the light, the canine
teeth looked longer and sharper than the rest.
I sat down beside her, and presently she moved uneasily. At the same
moment there came a sort of dull flapping or buffeting at the window.
I went over to it softly, and peeped out by the corner of the blind.
There was a full moonlight, and I could see that the noise was made by
a great bat, which wheeled around, doubtless attracted by the light,
although so dim, and every now and again struck the window with its
wings. When I came back to my seat, I found that Lucy had moved
slightly, and had torn away the garlic flowers from her throat. I
replaced them as well as I could, and sat watching her.
Presently she woke, and I gave her food, as Van Helsing had
prescribed. She took but a little, and that languidly. There did not
seem to be with her now the unconscious struggle for life and strength
that had hitherto so marked her illness. It struck me as curious that
the moment she became conscious she pressed the garlic flowers close
to her. It was certainly odd that whenever she got into that
lethargic state, with the stertorous breathing, she put the flowers
from her, but that when she waked she clutched them close, There was
no possibility of making any mistake about this, for in the long hours
that followed, she had many spells of sleeping and waking and repeated
both actions many times.
At six o'clock Van Helsing came to relieve me. Arthur had then fallen
into a doze, and he mercifully let him sleep on. When he saw Lucy's
face I could hear the hissing indraw of breath, and he said to me in a
sharp whisper. "Draw up the blind. I want light" Then he bent down,
and, with his face almost touching Lucy's, examined her carefully. He
removed the flowers and lifted the silk handkerchief from her throat.
As he did so he started back and I could hear his ejaculation, "Mein
Gott" as it was smothered in his throat. I bent over and looked,
too, and as I noticed some queer chill came over me. The wounds on
the throat had absolutely disappeared.
For fully five minutes Van Helsing stood looking at her, with his face
at its sternest. Then he turned to me and said calmly, "She is
dying. It will not be long now. It will be much difference, mark me,
whether she dies conscious or in her sleep. Wake that poor boy, and
let him come and see the last. He trusts us, and we have promised
him."
I went to the dining room and waked him. He was dazed for a moment,
but when he saw the sunlight streaming in through the edges of the
shutters he thought he was late, and expressed his fear. I assured
him that Lucy was still asleep, but told him as gently as I could that
both Van Helsing and I feared that the end was near. He covered his
face with his hands, and slid down on his knees by the sofa, where he
remained, perhaps a minute, with his head buried, praying, whilst his
shoulders shook with grief. I took him by the hand and raised him up.
"Come," I said, "my dear old fellow, summon all your fortitude. It
will be best and easiest for her."
When we came into Lucy's room I could see that Van Helsing had, with
his usual forethought, been putting matters straight and making
everything look as pleasing as possible. He had even brushed Lucy's
hair, so that it lay on the pillow in its usual sunny ripples. When
we came into the room she opened her eyes, and seeing him, whispered
softly, "Arthur Oh, my love, I am so glad you have come"
He was stooping to kiss her, when Van Helsing motioned him back.
"No," he whispered, "not yet Hold her hand, it will comfort her
more."
So Arthur took her hand and knelt beside her, and she looked her best,
with all the soft lines matching the angelic beauty of her eyes. Then
gradually her eyes closed, and she sank to sleep. For a little bit
her breast heaved softly, and her breath came and went like a tired
child's.
And then insensibly there came the strange change which I had noticed
in the night. Her breathing grew stertorous, the mouth opened, and
the pale gums, drawn back, made the teeth look longer and sharper than
ever. In a sort of sleepwaking, vague, unconscious way she opened
her eyes, which were now dull and hard at once, and said in a soft,
voluptuous voice, such as I had never heard from her lips, "Arthur
Oh, my love, I am so glad you have come Kiss me"
Arthur bent eagerly over to kiss her, but at that instant Van Helsing,
who, like me, had been startled by her voice, swooped upon him, and
catching him by the neck with both hands, dragged him back with a fury
of strength which I never thought he could have possessed, and
actually hurled him almost across the room.
"Not on your life" he said, "not for your living soul and hers" And
he stood between them like a lion at bay.
Arthur was so taken aback that he did not for a moment know what to do
or say, and before any impulse of violence could seize him he realized
the place and the occasion, and stood silent, waiting.
I kept my eyes fixed on Lucy, as did Van Helsing, and we saw a spasm
as of rage flit like a shadow over her face. The sharp teeth clamped
together. Then her eyes closed, and she breathed heavily.
Very shortly after she opened her eyes in all their softness, and
putting out her poor, pale, thin hand, took Van Helsing's great brown
one, drawing it close to her, she kissed it. "My true friend," she
said, in a faint voice, but with untellable pathos, "My true friend,
and his Oh, guard him, and give me peace"
"I swear it" he said solemnly, kneeling beside her and holding up his
hand, as one who registers an oath. Then he turned to Arthur, and
said to him, "Come, my child, take her hand in yours, and kiss her on
the forehead, and only once."
Their eyes met instead of their lips, and so they parted. Lucy's eyes
closed, and Van Helsing, who had been watching closely, took Arthur's
arm, and drew him away.
And then Lucy's breathing became stertorous again, and all at once it
ceased.
"It is all over," said Van Helsing. "She is dead"
I took Arthur by the arm, and led him away to the drawing room, where
he sat down, and covered his face with his hands, sobbing in a way
that nearly broke me down to see.
I went back to the room, and found Van Helsing looking at poor Lucy,
and his face was sterner than ever. Some change had come over her
body. Death had given back part of her beauty, for her brow and
cheeks had recovered some of their flowing lines. Even the lips had
lost their deadly pallor. It was as if the blood, no longer needed
for the working of the heart, had gone to make the harshness of death
as little rude as might be.
"We thought her dying whilst she slept, And sleeping when she died."
I stood beside Van Helsing, and said, "Ah well, poor girl, there is
peace for her at last. It is the end"
He turned to me, and said with grave solemnity, "Not so, alas Not
so. It is only the beginning"
When I asked him what he meant, he only shook his head and answered,
"We can do nothing as yet. Wait and see."
CHAPTER 
DR. SEWARD'S DIARYcont.
The funeral was arranged for the next succeeding day, so that Lucy and
her mother might be buried together. I attended to all the ghastly
formalities, and the urbane undertaker proved that his staff was
afflicted, or blessed, with something of his own obsequious suavity.
Even the woman who performed the last offices for the dead remarked to
me, in a confidential, brotherprofessional way, when she had come out
from the death chamber,
"She makes a very beautiful corpse, sir. It's quite a privilege to
attend on her. It's not too much to say that she will do credit to
our establishment"
I noticed that Van Helsing never kept far away. This was possible
from the disordered state of things in the household. There were no
relatives at hand, and as Arthur had to be back the next day to attend
at his father's funeral, we were unable to notify any one who should
have been bidden. Under the circumstances, Van Helsing and I took it
upon ourselves to examine papers, etc. He insisted upon looking over
Lucy's papers himself. I asked him why, for I feared that he, being a
foreigner, might not be quite aware of English legal requirements, and
so might in ignorance make some unnecessary trouble.
He answered me, "I know, I know. You forget that I am a lawyer as
well as a doctor. But this is not altogether for the law. You knew
that, when you avoided the coroner. I have more than him to avoid.
There may be papers more, such as this."
As he spoke he took from his pocket book the memorandum which had been
in Lucy's breast, and which she had torn in her sleep.
"When you find anything of the solicitor who is for the late Mrs.
Westenra, seal all her papers, and write him tonight. For me, I watch
here in the room and in Miss Lucy's old room all night, and I myself
search for what may be. It is not well that her very thoughts go into
the hands of strangers."
I went on with my part of the work, and in another half hour had found
the name and address of Mrs. Westenra's solicitor and had written to
him. All the poor lady's papers were in order. Explicit directions
regarding the place of burial were given. I had hardly sealed the
letter, when, to my surprise, Van Helsing walked into the room,
saying,
"Can I help you friend John? I am free, and if I may, my service is
to you."
"Have you got what you looked for?" I asked.
To which he replied, "I did not look for any specific thing. I only
hoped to find, and find I have, all that there was, only some letters
and a few memoranda, and a diary new begun. But I have them here, and
we shall for the present say nothing of them. I shall see that poor
lad tomorrow evening, and, with his sanction, I shall use some."
When we had finished the work in hand, he said to me, "And now, friend
John, I think we may to bed. We want sleep, both you and I, and rest
to recuperate. Tomorrow we shall have much to do, but for the tonight
there is no need of us. Alas"
Before turning in we went to look at poor Lucy. The undertaker had
certainly done his work well, for the room was turned into a small
chapelle ardente. There was a wilderness of beautiful white flowers,
and death was made as little repulsive as might be. The end of the
winding sheet was laid over the face. When the Professor bent over
and turned it gently back, we both started at the beauty before us.
The tall wax candles showing a sufficient light to note it well. All
Lucy's loveliness had come back to her in death, and the hours that
had passed, instead of leaving traces of 'decay's effacing fingers',
had but restored the beauty of life, till positively I could not
believe my eyes that I was looking at a corpse.
The Professor looked sternly grave. He had not loved her as I had,
and there was no need for tears in his eyes. He said to me, "Remain
till I return," and left the room. He came back with a handful of
wild garlic from the box waiting in the hall, but which had not been
opened, and placed the flowers amongst the others on and around the
bed. Then he took from his neck, inside his collar, a little gold
crucifix, and placed it over the mouth. He restored the sheet to its
place, and we came away.
I was undressing in my own room, when, with a premonitory tap at the
door, he entered, and at once began to speak.
"Tomorrow I want you to bring me, before night, a set of postmortem
knives."
"Must we make an autopsy?" I asked.
"Yes and no. I want to operate, but not what you think. Let me tell
you now, but not a word to another. I want to cut off her head and
take out her heart. Ah You a surgeon, and so shocked You, whom I
have seen with no tremble of hand or heart, do operations of life and
death that make the rest shudder. Oh, but I must not forget, my dear
friend John, that you loved her, and I have not forgotten it for is I
that shall operate, and you must not help. I would like to do it
tonight, but for Arthur I must not. He will be free after his
father's funeral tomorrow, and he will want to see her, to see it.
Then, when she is coffined ready for the next day, you and I shall
come when all sleep. We shall unscrew the coffin lid, and shall do
our operation, and then replace all, so that none know, save we
alone."
"But why do it at all? The girl is dead. Why mutilate her poor body
without need? And if there is no necessity for a postmortem and
nothing to gain by it, no good to her, to us, to science, to human
knowledge, why do it? Without such it is monstrous."
For answer he put his hand on my shoulder, and said, with infinite
tenderness, "Friend John, I pity your poor bleeding heart, and I love
you the more because it does so bleed. If I could, I would take on
myself the burden that you do bear. But there are things that you
know not, but that you shall know, and bless me for knowing, though
they are not pleasant things. John, my child, you have been my friend
now many years, and yet did you ever know me to do any without good
cause? I may err, I am but man, but I believe in all I do. Was it
not for these causes that you send for me when the great trouble
came? Yes Were you not amazed, nay horrified, when I would not let
Arthur kiss his love, though she was dying, and snatched him away by
all my strength? Yes And yet you saw how she thanked me, with her
so beautiful dying eyes, her voice, too, so weak, and she kiss my
rough old hand and bless me? Yes And did you not hear me swear
promise to her, that so she closed her eyes grateful? Yes
"Well, I have good reason now for all I want to do. You have for many
years trust me. You have believe me weeks past, when there be things
so strange that you might have well doubt. Believe me yet a little,
friend John. If you trust me not, then I must tell what I think, and
that is not perhaps well. And if I work, as work I shall, no matter
trust or no trust, without my friend trust in me, I work with heavy
heart and feel oh so lonely when I want all help and courage that may
be" He paused a moment and went on solemnly, "Friend John, there are
strange and terrible days before us. Let us not be two, but one, that
so we work to a good end. Will you not have faith in me?"
I took his hand, and promised him. I held my door open as he went
away, and watched him go to his room and close the door. As I stood
without moving, I saw one of the maids pass silently along the
passage, she had her back to me, so did not see me, and go into the
room where Lucy lay. The sight touched me. Devotion is so rare, and
we are so grateful to those who show it unasked to those we love. Here
was a poor girl putting aside the terrors which she naturally had of
death to go watch alone by the bier of the mistress whom she loved, so
that the poor clay might not be lonely till laid to eternal rest.
I must have slept long and soundly, for it was broad daylight when Van
Helsing waked me by coming into my room. He came over to my bedside
and said, "You need not trouble about the knives. We shall not do
it."
"Why not?" I asked. For his solemnity of the night before had
greatly impressed me.
"Because," he said sternly, "it is too late, or too early. See"
Here he held up the little golden crucifix.
"This was stolen in the night."
"How stolen," I asked in wonder, "since you have it now?"
"Because I get it back from the worthless wretch who stole it, from
the woman who robbed the dead and the living. Her punishment will
surely come, but not through me. She knew not altogether what she
did, and thus unknowing, she only stole. Now we must wait." He went
away on the word, leaving me with a new mystery to think of, a new
puzzle to grapple with.
The forenoon was a dreary time, but at noon the solicitor came, Mr.
Marquand, of Wholeman, Sons, Marquand  Lidderdale. He was very
genial and very appreciative of what we had done, and took off our
hands all cares as to details. During lunch he told us that Mrs.
Westenra had for some time expected sudden death from her heart, and
had put her affairs in absolute order. He informed us that, with the
exception of a certain entailed property of Lucy's father which now,
in default of direct issue, went back to a distant branch of the
family, the whole estate, real and personal, was left absolutely to
Arthur Holmwood. When he had told us so much he went on,
"Frankly we did our best to prevent such a testamentary disposition,
and pointed out certain contingencies that might leave her daughter
either penniless or not so free as she should be to act regarding a
matrimonial alliance. Indeed, we pressed the matter so far that we
almost came into collision, for she asked us if we were or were not
prepared to carry out her wishes. Of course, we had then no
alternative but to accept. We were right in principle, and
ninetynine times out of a hundred we should have proved, by the logic
of events, the accuracy of our judgment.
"Frankly, however, I must admit that in this case any other form of
disposition would have rendered impossible the carrying out of her
wishes. For by her predeceasing her daughter the latter would have
come into possession of the property, and, even had she only survived
her mother by five minutes, her property would, in case there were no
will, and a will was a practical impossibility in such a case, have
been treated at her decease as under intestacy. In which case Lord
Godalming, though so dear a friend, would have had no claim in the
world. And the inheritors, being remote, would not be likely to
abandon their just rights, for sentimental reasons regarding an entire
stranger. I assure you, my dear sirs, I am rejoiced at the result,
perfectly rejoiced."
He was a good fellow, but his rejoicing at the one little part, in
which he was officially interested, of so great a tragedy, was an
objectlesson in the limitations of sympathetic understanding.
He did not remain long, but said he would look in later in the day and
see Lord Godalming. His coming, however, had been a certain comfort
to us, since it assured us that we should not have to dread hostile
criticism as to any of our acts. Arthur was expected at five o'clock,
so a little before that time we visited the death chamber. It was so
in very truth, for now both mother and daughter lay in it. The
undertaker, true to his craft, had made the best display he could of
his goods, and there was a mortuary air about the place that lowered
our spirits at once.
Van Helsing ordered the former arrangement to be adhered to,
explaining that, as Lord Godalming was coming very soon, it would be
less harrowing to his feelings to see all that was left of his fiancee
quite alone.
The undertaker seemed shocked at his own stupidity and exerted himself
to restore things to the condition in which we left them the night
before, so that when Arthur came such shocks to his feelings as we
could avoid were saved.
Poor fellow He looked desperately sad and broken. Even his stalwart
manhood seemed to have shrunk somewhat under the strain of his
muchtried emotions. He had, I knew, been very genuinely and
devotedly attached to his father, and to lose him, and at such a time,
was a bitter blow to him. With me he was warm as ever, and to Van
Helsing he was sweetly courteous. But I could not help seeing that
there was some constraint with him. The professor noticed it too, and
motioned me to bring him upstairs. I did so, and left him at the door
of the room, as I felt he would like to be quite alone with her, but
he took my arm and led me in, saying huskily,
"You loved her too, old fellow. She told me all about it, and there
was no friend had a closer place in her heart than you. I don't know
how to thank you for all you have done for her. I can't think
yet . . ."
Here he suddenly broke down, and threw his arms round my shoulders and
laid his head on my breast, crying, "Oh, Jack Jack What shall I
do? The whole of life seems gone from me all at once, and there is
nothing in the wide world for me to live for."
I comforted him as well as I could. In such cases men do not need
much expression. A grip of the hand, the tightening of an arm over
the shoulder, a sob in unison, are expressions of sympathy dear to a
man's heart. I stood still and silent till his sobs died away, and
then I said softly to him, "Come and look at her."
Together we moved over to the bed, and I lifted the lawn from her
face. God How beautiful she was. Every hour seemed to be enhancing
her loveliness. It frightened and amazed me somewhat. And as for
Arthur, he fell to trembling, and finally was shaken with doubt as
with an ague. At last, after a long pause, he said to me in a faint
whisper, "Jack, is she really dead?"
I assured him sadly that it was so, and went on to suggest, for I felt
that such a horrible doubt should not have life for a moment longer
than I could help, that it often happened that after death faces
become softened and even resolved into their youthful beauty, that
this was especially so when death had been preceded by any acute or
prolonged suffering. I seemed to quite do away with any doubt, and
after kneeling beside the couch for a while and looking at her
lovingly and long, he turned aside. I told him that that must be
goodbye, as the coffin had to be prepared, so he went back and took
her dead hand in his and kissed it, and bent over and kissed her
forehead. He came away, fondly looking back over his shoulder at her
as he came.
I left him in the drawing room, and told Van Helsing that he had said
goodbye, so the latter went to the kitchen to tell the undertaker's
men to proceed with the preparations and to screw up the coffin. When
he came out of the room again I told him of Arthur's question, and he
replied, "I am not surprised. Just now I doubted for a moment
myself"
We all dined together, and I could see that poor Art was trying to
make the best of things. Van Helsing had been silent all dinner time,
but when we had lit our cigars he said, "Lord . . ." but Arthur
interrupted him.
"No, no, not that, for God's sake Not yet at any rate. Forgive me,
sir. I did not mean to speak offensively. It is only because my loss
is so recent."
The Professor answered very sweetly, "I only used that name because I
was in doubt. I must not call you 'Mr.' and I have grown to love you,
yes, my dear boy, to love you, as Arthur."
Arthur held out his hand, and took the old man's warmly. "Call me
what you will," he said. "I hope I may always have the title of a
friend. And let me say that I am at a loss for words to thank you for
your goodness to my poor dear." He paused a moment, and went on, "I
know that she understood your goodness even better than I do. And if
I was rude or in any way wanting at that time you acted so, you
remember"the Professor nodded"you must forgive me."
He answered with a grave kindness, "I know it was hard for you to
quite trust me then, for to trust such violence needs to understand,
and I take it that you do not, that you cannot, trust me now, for you
do not yet understand. And there may be more times when I shall want
you to trust when you cannot, and may not, and must not yet
understand. But the time will come when your trust shall be whole and
complete in me, and when you shall understand as though the sunlight
himself shone through. Then you shall bless me from first to last for
your own sake, and for the sake of others, and for her dear sake to
whom I swore to protect."
"And indeed, indeed, sir," said Arthur warmly. "I shall in all ways
trust you. I know and believe you have a very noble heart, and you
are Jack's friend, and you were hers. You shall do what you like."
The Professor cleared his throat a couple of times, as though about to
speak, and finally said, "May I ask you something now?"
"Certainly."
"You know that Mrs. Westenra left you all her property?"
"No, poor dear. I never thought of it."
"And as it is all yours, you have a right to deal with it as you will.
I want you to give me permission to read all Miss Lucy's papers and
letters. Believe me, it is no idle curiosity. I have a motive of
which, be sure, she would have approved. I have them all here. I
took them before we knew that all was yours, so that no strange hand
might touch them, no strange eye look through words into her soul. I
shall keep them, if I may. Even you may not see them yet, but I shall
keep them safe. No word shall be lost, and in the good time I shall
give them back to you. It is a hard thing that I ask, but you will do
it, will you not, for Lucy's sake?"
Arthur spoke out heartily, like his old self, "Dr. Van Helsing, you
may do what you will. I feel that in saying this I am doing what my
dear one would have approved. I shall not trouble you with questions
till the time comes."
The old Professor stood up as he said solemnly, "And you are right.
There will be pain for us all, but it will not be all pain, nor will
this pain be the last. We and you too, you most of all, dear boy,
will have to pass through the bitter water before we reach the sweet.
But we must be brave of heart and unselfish, and do our duty, and all
will be well"
I slept on a sofa in Arthur's room that night. Van Helsing did not go
to bed at all. He went to and fro, as if patroling the house, and was
never out of sight of the room where Lucy lay in her coffin, strewn
with the wild garlic flowers, which sent through the odour of lily and
rose, a heavy, overpowering smell into the night.
MINA HARKER'S JOURNAL
 September.In the train to Exeter. Jonathan sleeping. It seems
only yesterday that the last entry was made, and yet how much between
then, in Whitby and all the world before me, Jonathan away and no news
of him, and now, married to Jonathan, Jonathan a solicitor, a partner,
rich, master of his business, Mr. Hawkins dead and buried, and
Jonathan with another attack that may harm him. Some day he may ask
me about it. Down it all goes. I am rusty in my shorthand, see what
unexpected prosperity does for us, so it may be as well to freshen it
up again with an exercise anyhow.
The service was very simple and very solemn. There were only
ourselves and the servants there, one or two old friends of his from
Exeter, his London agent, and a gentleman representing Sir John
Paxton, the President of the Incorporated Law Society. Jonathan and I
stood hand in hand, and we felt that our best and dearest friend was
gone from us.
We came back to town quietly, taking a bus to Hyde Park Corner.
Jonathan thought it would interest me to go into the Row for a while,
so we sat down. But there were very few people there, and it was
sadlooking and desolate to see so many empty chairs. It made us
think of the empty chair at home. So we got up and walked down
Piccadilly. Jonathan was holding me by the arm, the way he used to in
the old days before I went to school. I felt it very improper, for
you can't go on for some years teaching etiquette and decorum to other
girls without the pedantry of it biting into yourself a bit. But it
was Jonathan, and he was my husband, and we didn't know anybody who
saw us, and we didn't care if they did, so on we walked. I was
looking at a very beautiful girl, in a big cartwheel hat, sitting in
a victoria outside Guiliano's, when I felt Jonathan clutch my arm so
tight that he hurt me, and he said under his breath, "My God"
I am always anxious about Jonathan, for I fear that some nervous fit
may upset him again. So I turned to him quickly, and asked him what
it was that disturbed him.
He was very pale, and his eyes seemed bulging out as, half in terror
and half in amazement, he gazed at a tall, thin man, with a beaky nose
and black moustache and pointed beard, who was also observing the
pretty girl. He was looking at her so hard that he did not see either
of us, and so I had a good view of him. His face was not a good
face. It was hard, and cruel, and sensual, and big white teeth, that
looked all the whiter because his lips were so red, were pointed like
an animal's. Jonathan kept staring at him, till I was afraid he would
notice. I feared he might take it ill, he looked so fierce and nasty.
I asked Jonathan why he was disturbed, and he answered, evidently
thinking that I knew as much about it as he did, "Do you see who it
is?"
"No, dear," I said. "I don't know him, who is it?" His answer seemed
to shock and thrill me, for it was said as if he did not know that it
was me, Mina, to whom he was speaking. "It is the man himself"
The poor dear was evidently terrified at something, very greatly
terrified. I do believe that if he had not had me to lean on and to
support him he would have sunk down. He kept staring. A man came out
of the shop with a small parcel, and gave it to the lady, who then
drove off. The dark man kept his eyes fixed on her, and when the
carriage moved up Piccadilly he followed in the same direction, and
hailed a hansom. Jonathan kept looking after him, and said, as if to
himself,
"I believe it is the Count, but he has grown young. My God, if this
be so Oh, my God My God If only I knew If only I knew" He was
distressing himself so much that I feared to keep his mind on the
subject by asking him any questions, so I remained silent. I drew
away quietly, and he, holding my arm, came easily. We walked a little
further, and then went in and sat for a while in the Green Park. It
was a hot day for autumn, and there was a comfortable seat in a shady
place. After a few minutes' staring at nothing, Jonathan's eyes
closed, and he went quickly into a sleep, with his head on my
shoulder. I thought it was the best thing for him, so did not disturb
him. In about twenty minutes he woke up, and said to me quite
cheerfully,
"Why, Mina, have I been asleep Oh, do forgive me for being so rude.
Come, and we'll have a cup of tea somewhere."
He had evidently forgotten all about the dark stranger, as in his
illness he had forgotten all that this episode had reminded him of. I
don't like this lapsing into forgetfulness. It may make or continue
some injury to the brain. I must not ask him, for fear I shall do
more harm than good, but I must somehow learn the facts of his journey
abroad. The time is come, I fear, when I must open the parcel, and
know what is written. Oh, Jonathan, you will, I know, forgive me if I
do wrong, but it is for your own dear sake.
Later.A sad homecoming in every way, the house empty of the dear
soul who was so good to us. Jonathan still pale and dizzy under a
slight relapse of his malady, and now a telegram from Van Helsing,
whoever he may be. "You will be grieved to hear that Mrs. Westenra
died five days ago, and that Lucy died the day before yesterday. They
were both buried today."
Oh, what a wealth of sorrow in a few words Poor Mrs. Westenra Poor
Lucy Gone, gone, never to return to us And poor, poor Arthur, to
have lost such a sweetness out of his life God help us all to bear
our troubles.
DR. SEWARD'S DIARYCONT.
 September.It is all over. Arthur has gone back to Ring, and has
taken Quincey Morris with him. What a fine fellow is Quincey I
believe in my heart of hearts that he suffered as much about Lucy's
death as any of us, but he bore himself through it like a moral
Viking. If America can go on breeding men like that, she will be a
power in the world indeed. Van Helsing is lying down, having a rest
preparatory to his journey. He goes to Amsterdam tonight, but says he
returns tomorrow night, that he only wants to make some arrangements
which can only be made personally. He is to stop with me then, if he
can. He says he has work to do in London which may take him some
time. Poor old fellow I fear that the strain of the past week has
broken down even his iron strength. All the time of the burial he
was, I could see, putting some terrible restraint on himself. When it
was all over, we were standing beside Arthur, who, poor fellow, was
speaking of his part in the operation where his blood had been
transfused to his Lucy's veins. I could see Van Helsing's face grow
white and purple by turns. Arthur was saying that he felt since then
as if they two had been really married, and that she was his wife in
the sight of God. None of us said a word of the other operations, and
none of us ever shall. Arthur and Quincey went away together to the
station, and Van Helsing and I came on here. The moment we were alone
in the carriage he gave way to a regular fit of hysterics. He has
denied to me since that it was hysterics, and insisted that it was
only his sense of humor asserting itself under very terrible
conditions. He laughed till he cried, and I had to draw down the
blinds lest any one should see us and misjudge. And then he cried,
till he laughed again, and laughed and cried together, just as a woman
does. I tried to be stern with him, as one is to a woman under the
circumstances, but it had no effect. Men and women are so different
in manifestations of nervous strength or weakness Then when his face
grew grave and stern again I asked him why his mirth, and why at such
a time. His reply was in a way characteristic of him, for it was
logical and forceful and mysterious. He said,
"Ah, you don't comprehend, friend John. Do not think that I am not
sad, though I laugh. See, I have cried even when the laugh did choke
me. But no more think that I am all sorry when I cry, for the laugh
he come just the same. Keep it always with you that laughter who
knock at your door and say, 'May I come in?' is not true laughter.
No He is a king, and he come when and how he like. He ask no
person, he choose no time of suitability. He say, 'I am here.'
Behold, in example I grieve my heart out for that so sweet young
girl. I give my blood for her, though I am old and worn. I give my
time, my skill, my sleep. I let my other sufferers want that she may
have all. And yet I can laugh at her very grave, laugh when the clay
from the spade of the sexton drop upon her coffin and say 'Thud,
thud' to my heart, till it send back the blood from my cheek. My
heart bleed for that poor boy, that dear boy, so of the age of mine
own boy had I been so blessed that he live, and with his hair and eyes
the same.
"There, you know now why I love him so. And yet when he say things
that touch my husbandheart to the quick, and make my fatherheart
yearn to him as to no other man, not even you, friend John, for we are
more level in experiences than father and son, yet even at such a
moment King Laugh he come to me and shout and bellow in my ear, 'Here I
am Here I am' till the blood come dance back and bring some of the
sunshine that he carry with him to my cheek. Oh, friend John, it is a
strange world, a sad world, a world full of miseries, and woes, and
troubles. And yet when King Laugh come, he make them all dance to the
tune he play. Bleeding hearts, and dry bones of the churchyard, and
tears that burn as they fall, all dance together to the music that he
make with that smileless mouth of him. And believe me, friend John,
that he is good to come, and kind. Ah, we men and women are like
ropes drawn tight with strain that pull us different ways. Then tears
come, and like the rain on the ropes, they brace us up, until perhaps
the strain become too great, and we break. But King Laugh he come
like the sunshine, and he ease off the strain again, and we bear to go
on with our labor, what it may be."
I did not like to wound him by pretending not to see his idea, but as
I did not yet understand the cause of his laughter, I asked him. As
he answered me his face grew stern, and he said in quite a different
tone,
"Oh, it was the grim irony of it all, this so lovely lady garlanded
with flowers, that looked so fair as life, till one by one we wondered
if she were truly dead, she laid in that so fine marble house in that
lonely churchyard, where rest so many of her kin, laid there with the
mother who loved her, and whom she loved, and that sacred bell going
'Toll Toll Toll' so sad and slow, and those holy men, with the
white garments of the angel, pretending to read books, and yet all the
time their eyes never on the page, and all of us with the bowed head.
And all for what? She is dead, so Is it not?"
"Well, for the life of me, Professor," I said, "I can't see anything
to laugh at in all that. Why, your expression makes it a harder
puzzle than before. But even if the burial service was comic, what
about poor Art and his trouble? Why his heart was simply breaking."
"Just so. Said he not that the transfusion of his blood to her veins
had made her truly his bride?"
"Yes, and it was a sweet and comforting idea for him."
"Quite so. But there was a difficulty, friend John. If so that, then
what about the others? Ho, ho Then this so sweet maid is a
polyandrist, and me, with my poor wife dead to me, but alive by
Church's law, though no wits, all gone, even I, who am faithful
husband to this nownowife, am bigamist."
"I don't see where the joke comes in there either" I said, and I did
not feel particularly pleased with him for saying such things. He
laid his hand on my arm, and said,
"Friend John, forgive me if I pain. I showed not my feeling to others
when it would wound, but only to you, my old friend, whom I can trust.
If you could have looked into my heart then when I want to laugh, if
you could have done so when the laugh arrived, if you could do so now,
when King Laugh have pack up his crown, and all that is to him, for he
go far, far away from me, and for a long, long time, maybe you would
perhaps pity me the most of all."
I was touched by the tenderness of his tone, and asked why.
"Because I know"
And now we are all scattered, and for many a long day loneliness will
sit over our roofs with brooding wings. Lucy lies in the tomb of her
kin, a lordly death house in a lonely churchyard, away from teeming
London, where the air is fresh, and the sun rises over Hampstead Hill,
and where wild flowers grow of their own accord.
So I can finish this diary, and God only knows if I shall ever begin
another. If I do, or if I even open this again, it will be to deal
with different people and different themes, for here at the end, where
the romance of my life is told, ere I go back to take up the thread of
my lifework, I say sadly and without hope, "FINIS".
THE WESTMINSTER GAZETTE,  SEPTEMBER A HAMPSTEAD MYSTERY
The neighborhood of Hampstead is just at present exercised
with a series of events which seem to run on lines parallel
to those of what was known to the writers of headlines as
"The Kensington Horror," or "The Stabbing Woman," or "The
Woman in Black." During the past two or three days several
cases have occurred of young children straying from home or
neglecting to return from their playing on the Heath. In
all these cases the children were too young to give any
properly intelligible account of themselves, but the
consensus of their excuses is that they had been with a
"bloofer lady." It has always been late in the evening when
they have been missed, and on two occasions the children
have not been found until early in the following morning.
It is generally supposed in the neighborhood that, as the
first child missed gave as his reason for being away that a
"bloofer lady" had asked him to come for a walk, the others
had picked up the phrase and used it as occasion served. This
is the more natural as the favourite game of the little ones
at present is luring each other away by wiles. A correspondent
writes us that to see some of the tiny tots pretending to be the
"bloofer lady" is supremely funny. Some of our caricaturists
might, he says, take a lesson in the irony of grotesque by
comparing the reality and the picture. It is only in accordance
with general principles of human nature that the "bloofer lady"
should be the popular role at these al fresco performances. Our
correspondent naively says that even Ellen Terry could not be so
winningly attractive as some of these grubbyfaced little
children pretend, and even imagine themselves, to be.
There is, however, possibly a serious side to the question,
for some of the children, indeed all who have been missed
at night, have been slightly torn or wounded in the throat.
The wounds seem such as might be made by a rat or a small
dog, and although of not much importance individually, would tend
to show that whatever animal inflicts them has a system or method
of its own. The police of the division have been instructed to
keep a sharp lookout for straying children, especially when very
young, in and around Hampstead Heath, and for any stray dog which
may be about.
THE WESTMINSTER GAZETTE,  SEPTEMBER EXTRA SPECIAL
THE HAMPSTEAD HORROR
ANOTHER CHILD INJURED
THE "BLOOFER LADY"
We have just received intelligence that another child,
missed last night, was only discovered late in the morning
under a furze bush at the Shooter's Hill side of Hampstead
Heath, which is perhaps, less frequented than the other
parts. It has the same tiny wound in the throat as has
been noticed in other cases. It was terribly weak, and
looked quite emaciated. It too, when partially restored,
had the common story to tell of being lured away by the
"bloofer lady".
CHAPTER 
MINA HARKER'S JOURNAL
 September.Jonathan is better after a bad night. I am so glad
that he has plenty of work to do, for that keeps his mind off the
terrible things, and oh, I am rejoiced that he is not now weighed down
with the responsibility of his new position. I knew he would be true
to himself, and now how proud I am to see my Jonathan rising to the
height of his advancement and keeping pace in all ways with the duties
that come upon him. He will be away all day till late, for he said he
could not lunch at home. My household work is done, so I shall take
his foreign journal, and lock myself up in my room and read it.
 September.I hadn't the heart to write last night, that terrible
record of Jonathan's upset me so. Poor dear How he must have
suffered, whether it be true or only imagination. I wonder if there
is any truth in it at all. Did he get his brain fever, and then write
all those terrible things, or had he some cause for it all? I suppose
I shall never know, for I dare not open the subject to him. And yet
that man we saw yesterday He seemed quite certain of him, poor
fellow I suppose it was the funeral upset him and sent his mind back
on some train of thought.
He believes it all himself. I remember how on our wedding day he said
"Unless some solemn duty come upon me to go back to the bitter hours,
asleep or awake, mad or sane . . ." There seems to be through it all
some thread of continuity. That fearful Count was coming to London.
If it should be, and he came to London, with its teeming millions . . .
There may be a solemn duty, and if it come we must not shrink from
it. I shall be prepared. I shall get my typewriter this very hour
and begin transcribing. Then we shall be ready for other eyes if
required. And if it be wanted, then, perhaps, if I am ready, poor
Jonathan may not be upset, for I can speak for him and never let him
be troubled or worried with it at all. If ever Jonathan quite gets
over the nervousness he may want to tell me of it all, and I can ask
him questions and find out things, and see how I may comfort him.
LETTER, VAN HELSING TO MRS. HARKER
 September
Confidence
"Dear Madam,
"I pray you to pardon my writing, in that I am so far
friend as that I sent to you sad news of Miss Lucy
Westenra's death. By the kindness of Lord Godalming, I am
empowered to read her letters and papers, for I am deeply
concerned about certain matters vitally important. In them
I find some letters from you, which show how great friends
you were and how you love her. Oh, Madam Mina, by that
love, I implore you, help me. It is for others' good that
I ask, to redress great wrong, and to lift much and terrible
troubles, that may be more great than you can know. May it be
that I see you? You can trust me. I am friend of Dr. John
Seward and of Lord Godalming that was Arthur of Miss Lucy. I
must keep it private for the present from all. I should come to
Exeter to see you at once if you tell me I am privilege to come,
and where and when. I implore your pardon, Madam. I have read
your letters to poor Lucy, and know how good you are and how your
husband suffer. So I pray you, if it may be, enlighten him not,
least it may harm. Again your pardon, and forgive me.
"VAN HELSING"
TELEGRAM, MRS. HARKER TO VAN HELSING
 September.Come today by quarter past ten train if you
can catch it. Can see you any time you call.
"WILHELMINA HARKER"
MINA HARKER'S JOURNAL
 September.I cannot help feeling terribly excited as the time
draws near for the visit of Dr. Van Helsing, for somehow I expect that
it will throw some light upon Jonathan's sad experience, and as he
attended poor dear Lucy in her last illness, he can tell me all about
her. That is the reason of his coming. It is concerning Lucy and her
sleepwalking, and not about Jonathan. Then I shall never know the
real truth now How silly I am. That awful journal gets hold of my
imagination and tinges everything with something of its own colour. Of
course it is about Lucy. That habit came back to the poor dear, and
that awful night on the cliff must have made her ill. I had almost
forgotten in my own affairs how ill she was afterwards. She must have
told him of her sleepwalking adventure on the cliff, and that I knew
all about it, and now he wants me to tell him what I know, so that he
may understand. I hope I did right in not saying anything of it to
Mrs. Westenra. I should never forgive myself if any act of mine, were
it even a negative one, brought harm on poor dear Lucy. I hope too,
Dr. Van Helsing will not blame me. I have had so much trouble and
anxiety of late that I feel I cannot bear more just at present.
I suppose a cry does us all good at times, clears the air as other
rain does. Perhaps it was reading the journal yesterday that upset
me, and then Jonathan went away this morning to stay away from me a
whole day and night, the first time we have been parted since our
marriage. I do hope the dear fellow will take care of himself, and
that nothing will occur to upset him. It is two o'clock, and the
doctor will be here soon now. I shall say nothing of Jonathan's
journal unless he asks me. I am so glad I have typewritten out my own
journal, so that, in case he asks about Lucy, I can hand it to him.
It will save much questioning.
Later.He has come and gone. Oh, what a strange meeting, and how it
all makes my head whirl round. I feel like one in a dream. Can it be
all possible, or even a part of it? If I had not read Jonathan's
journal first, I should never have accepted even a possibility. Poor,
poor, dear Jonathan How he must have suffered. Please the good God,
all this may not upset him again. I shall try to save him from it.
But it may be even a consolation and a help to him, terrible though it
be and awful in its consequences, to know for certain that his eyes
and ears and brain did not deceive him, and that it is all true. It
may be that it is the doubt which haunts him, that when the doubt is
removed, no matter which, waking or dreaming, may prove the truth, he
will be more satisfied and better able to bear the shock. Dr. Van
Helsing must be a good man as well as a clever one if he is Arthur's
friend and Dr. Seward's, and if they brought him all the way from
Holland to look after Lucy. I feel from having seen him that he is
good and kind and of a noble nature. When he comes tomorrow I shall
ask him about Jonathan. And then, please God, all this sorrow and
anxiety may lead to a good end. I used to think I would like to
practice interviewing. Jonathan's friend on "The Exeter News" told
him that memory is everything in such work, that you must be able to
put down exactly almost every word spoken, even if you had to refine
some of it afterwards. Here was a rare interview. I shall try to
record it verbatim.
It was halfpast two o'clock when the knock came. I took my courage a
deux mains and waited. In a few minutes Mary opened the door, and
announced "Dr. Van Helsing".
I rose and bowed, and he came towards me, a man of medium weight,
strongly built, with his shoulders set back over a broad, deep chest
and a neck well balanced on the trunk as the head is on the neck. The
poise of the head strikes me at once as indicative of thought and
power. The head is noble, wellsized, broad, and large behind the
ears. The face, cleanshaven, shows a hard, square chin, a large
resolute, mobile mouth, a goodsized nose, rather straight, but with
quick, sensitive nostrils, that seem to broaden as the big bushy brows
come down and the mouth tightens. The forehead is broad and fine,
rising at first almost straight and then sloping back above two bumps
or ridges wide apart, such a forehead that the reddish hair cannot
possibly tumble over it, but falls naturally back and to the sides.
Big, dark blue eyes are set widely apart, and are quick and tender or
stern with the man's moods. He said to me,
"Mrs. Harker, is it not?" I bowed assent.
"That was Miss Mina Murray?" Again I assented.
"It is Mina Murray that I came to see that was friend of that poor dear
child Lucy Westenra. Madam Mina, it is on account of the dead that I
come."
"Sir," I said, "you could have no better claim on me than that you
were a friend and helper of Lucy Westenra." And I held out my hand.
He took it and said tenderly,
"Oh, Madam Mina, I know that the friend of that poor little girl must
be good, but I had yet to learn . . ." He finished his speech with a
courtly bow. I asked him what it was that he wanted to see me about,
so he at once began.
"I have read your letters to Miss Lucy. Forgive me, but I had to
begin to inquire somewhere, and there was none to ask. I know that
you were with her at Whitby. She sometimes kept a diary, you need not
look surprised, Madam Mina. It was begun after you had left, and was
an imitation of you, and in that diary she traces by inference certain
things to a sleepwalking in which she puts down that you saved her.
In great perplexity then I come to you, and ask you out of your so
much kindness to tell me all of it that you can remember."
"I can tell you, I think, Dr. Van Helsing, all about it."
"Ah, then you have good memory for facts, for details? It is not
always so with young ladies."
"No, doctor, but I wrote it all down at the time. I can show it to
you if you like."
"Oh, Madam Mina, I well be grateful. You will do me much favour."
I could not resist the temptation of mystifying him a bit, I suppose
it is some taste of the original apple that remains still in our
mouths, so I handed him the shorthand diary. He took it with a
grateful bow, and said, "May I read it?"
"If you wish," I answered as demurely as I could. He opened it, and
for an instant his face fell. Then he stood up and bowed.
"Oh, you so clever woman" he said. "I knew long that Mr. Jonathan
was a man of much thankfulness, but see, his wife have all the good
things. And will you not so much honour me and so help me as to read
it for me? Alas I know not the shorthand."
By this time my little joke was over, and I was almost ashamed. So I
took the typewritten copy from my work basket and handed it to him.
"Forgive me," I said. "I could not help it, but I had been thinking
that it was of dear Lucy that you wished to ask, and so that you might
not have time to wait, not on my account, but because I know your time
must be precious, I have written it out on the typewriter for you."
He took it and his eyes glistened. "You are so good," he said. "And
may I read it now? I may want to ask you some things when I have
read."
"By all means," I said, "read it over whilst I order lunch, and then
you can ask me questions whilst we eat."
He bowed and settled himself in a chair with his back to the light,
and became so absorbed in the papers, whilst I went to see after lunch
chiefly in order that he might not be disturbed. When I came back, I
found him walking hurriedly up and down the room, his face all ablaze
with excitement. He rushed up to me and took me by both hands.
"Oh, Madam Mina," he said, "how can I say what I owe to you? This
paper is as sunshine. It opens the gate to me. I am dazed, I am
dazzled, with so much light, and yet clouds roll in behind the light
every time. But that you do not, cannot comprehend. Oh, but I am
grateful to you, you so clever woman. Madame," he said this very
solemnly, "if ever Abraham Van Helsing can do anything for you or
yours, I trust you will let me know. It will be pleasure and delight
if I may serve you as a friend, as a friend, but all I have ever
learned, all I can ever do, shall be for you and those you love. There
are darknesses in life, and there are lights. You are one of the
lights. You will have a happy life and a good life, and your husband
will be blessed in you."
"But, doctor, you praise me too much, and you do not know me."
"Not know you, I, who am old, and who have studied all my life men and
women, I who have made my specialty the brain and all that belongs to
him and all that follow from him And I have read your diary that you
have so goodly written for me, and which breathes out truth in every
line. I, who have read your so sweet letter to poor Lucy of your
marriage and your trust, not know you Oh, Madam Mina, good women
tell all their lives, and by day and by hour and by minute, such
things that angels can read. And we men who wish to know have in us
something of angels' eyes. Your husband is noble nature, and you are
noble too, for you trust, and trust cannot be where there is mean
nature. And your husband, tell me of him. Is he quite well? Is all
that fever gone, and is he strong and hearty?"
I saw here an opening to ask him about Jonathan, so I said, "He was
almost recovered, but he has been greatly upset by Mr. Hawkins death."
He interrupted, "Oh, yes. I know. I know. I have read your last two
letters."
I went on, "I suppose this upset him, for when we were in town on
Thursday last he had a sort of shock."
"A shock, and after brain fever so soon That is not good. What kind
of shock was it?"
"He thought he saw some one who recalled something terrible, something
which led to his brain fever." And here the whole thing seemed to
overwhelm me in a rush. The pity for Jonathan, the horror which he
experienced, the whole fearful mystery of his diary, and the fear that
has been brooding over me ever since, all came in a tumult. I suppose
I was hysterical, for I threw myself on my knees and held up my hands
to him, and implored him to make my husband well again. He took my
hands and raised me up, and made me sit on the sofa, and sat by me. He
held my hand in his, and said to me with, oh, such infinite sweetness,
"My life is a barren and lonely one, and so full of work that I have
not had much time for friendships, but since I have been summoned to
here by my friend John Seward I have known so many good people and
seen such nobility that I feel more than ever, and it has grown with
my advancing years, the loneliness of my life. Believe me, then, that
I come here full of respect for you, and you have given me hope, hope,
not in what I am seeking of, but that there are good women still left
to make life happy, good women, whose lives and whose truths may make
good lesson for the children that are to be. I am glad, glad, that I
may here be of some use to you. For if your husband suffer, he suffer
within the range of my study and experience. I promise you that I
will gladly do all for him that I can, all to make his life strong and
manly, and your life a happy one. Now you must eat. You are
overwrought and perhaps overanxious. Husband Jonathan would not like
to see you so pale, and what he like not where he love, is not to his
good. Therefore for his sake you must eat and smile. You have told
me about Lucy, and so now we shall not speak of it, lest it distress.
I shall stay in Exeter tonight, for I want to think much over what you
have told me, and when I have thought I will ask you questions, if I
may. And then too, you will tell me of husband Jonathan's trouble so
far as you can, but not yet. You must eat now, afterwards you shall
tell me all."
After lunch, when we went back to the drawing room, he said to me,
"And now tell me all about him."
When it came to speaking to this great learned man, I began to fear
that he would think me a weak fool, and Jonathan a madman, that
journal is all so strange, and I hesitated to go on. But he was so
sweet and kind, and he had promised to help, and I trusted him, so I
said,
"Dr. Van Helsing, what I have to tell you is so queer that you must
not laugh at me or at my husband. I have been since yesterday in a
sort of fever of doubt. You must be kind to me, and not think me
foolish that I have even half believed some very strange things."
He reassured me by his manner as well as his words when he said, "Oh,
my dear, if you only know how strange is the matter regarding which I
am here, it is you who would laugh. I have learned not to think
little of any one's belief, no matter how strange it may be. I have
tried to keep an open mind, and it is not the ordinary things of life
that could close it, but the strange things, the extraordinary things,
the things that make one doubt if they be mad or sane."
"Thank you, thank you a thousand times You have taken a weight off my
mind. If you will let me, I shall give you a paper to read. It is
long, but I have typewritten it out. It will tell you my trouble and
Jonathan's. It is the copy of his journal when abroad, and all that
happened. I dare not say anything of it. You will read for yourself
and judge. And then when I see you, perhaps, you will be very kind
and tell me what you think."
"I promise," he said as I gave him the papers. "I shall in the
morning, as soon as I can, come to see you and your husband, if I
may."
"Jonathan will be here at halfpast eleven, and you must come to lunch
with us and see him then. You could catch the quick  train, which
will leave you at Paddington before eight." He was surprised at my
knowledge of the trains offhand, but he does not know that I have made
up all the trains to and from Exeter, so that I may help Jonathan in
case he is in a hurry.
So he took the papers with him and went away, and I sit here thinking,
thinking I don't know what.
LETTER by hand, VAN HELSING TO MRS. HARKER
 September,  o'clock
"Dear Madam Mina,
"I have read your husband's so wonderful diary. You may
sleep without doubt. Strange and terrible as it is, it is
true I will pledge my life on it. It may be worse for
others, but for him and you there is no dread. He is a
noble fellow, and let me tell you from experience of men,
that one who would do as he did in going down that wall and
to that room, aye, and going a second time, is not one to
be injured in permanence by a shock. His brain and his
heart are all right, this I swear, before I have even seen
him, so be at rest. I shall have much to ask him of other
things. I am blessed that today I come to see you, for I
have learn all at once so much that again I am dazzled,
dazzled more than ever, and I must think.
"Yours the most faithful,
"Abraham Van Helsing."
LETTER, MRS. HARKER TO VAN HELSING
 September,  P.M.
"My dear Dr. Van Helsing,
"A thousand thanks for your kind letter, which has taken a
great weight off my mind. And yet, if it be true, what
terrible things there are in the world, and what an awful
thing if that man, that monster, be really in London I
fear to think. I have this moment, whilst writing, had a
wire from Jonathan, saying that he leaves by the  tonight
from Launceston and will be here at , so that I shall have
no fear tonight. Will you, therefore, instead of lunching with
us, please come to breakfast at eight o'clock, if this be not too
early for you? You can get away, if you are in a hurry, by the
 train, which will bring you to Paddington by . Do not
answer this, as I shall take it that, if I do not hear, you will
come to breakfast.
"Believe me,
"Your faithful and grateful friend,
"Mina Harker."
JONATHAN HARKER'S JOURNAL
 September.I thought never to write in this diary again, but the
time has come. When I got home last night Mina had supper ready, and
when we had supped she told me of Van Helsing's visit, and of her
having given him the two diaries copied out, and of how anxious she
has been about me. She showed me in the doctor's letter that all I
wrote down was true. It seems to have made a new man of me. It was
the doubt as to the reality of the whole thing that knocked me over.
I felt impotent, and in the dark, and distrustful. But, now that I
know, I am not afraid, even of the Count. He has succeeded after all,
then, in his design in getting to London, and it was he I saw. He has
got younger, and how? Van Helsing is the man to unmask him and hunt
him out, if he is anything like what Mina says. We sat late, and
talked it over. Mina is dressing, and I shall call at the hotel in a
few minutes and bring him over.
He was, I think, surprised to see me. When I came into the room where
he was, and introduced myself, he took me by the shoulder, and turned
my face round to the light, and said, after a sharp scrutiny,
"But Madam Mina told me you were ill, that you had had a shock."
It was so funny to hear my wife called 'Madam Mina' by this kindly,
strongfaced old man. I smiled, and said, "I was ill, I have had a
shock, but you have cured me already."
"And how?"
"By your letter to Mina last night. I was in doubt, and then
everything took a hue of unreality, and I did not know what to trust,
even the evidence of my own senses. Not knowing what to trust, I did
not know what to do, and so had only to keep on working in what had
hitherto been the groove of my life. The groove ceased to avail me,
and I mistrusted myself. Doctor, you don't know what it is to doubt
everything, even yourself. No, you don't, you couldn't with eyebrows
like yours."
He seemed pleased, and laughed as he said, "So You are a
physiognomist. I learn more here with each hour. I am with so much
pleasure coming to you to breakfast, and, oh, sir, you will pardon
praise from an old man, but you are blessed in your wife."
I would listen to him go on praising Mina for a day, so I simply
nodded and stood silent.
"She is one of God's women, fashioned by His own hand to show us men
and other women that there is a heaven where we can enter, and that
its light can be here on earth. So true, so sweet, so noble, so
little an egoist, and that, let me tell you, is much in this age, so
sceptical and selfish. And you, sir . . . I have read all the letters
to poor Miss Lucy, and some of them speak of you, so I know you since
some days from the knowing of others, but I have seen your true self
since last night. You will give me your hand, will you not? And let
us be friends for all our lives."
We shook hands, and he was so earnest and so kind that it made me
quite choky.
"And now," he said, "may I ask you for some more help? I have a great
task to do, and at the beginning it is to know. You can help me
here. Can you tell me what went before your going to Transylvania?
Later on I may ask more help, and of a different kind, but at first
this will do."
"Look here, Sir," I said, "does what you have to do concern the
Count?"
"It does," he said solemnly.
"Then I am with you heart and soul. As you go by the  train, you
will not have time to read them, but I shall get the bundle of papers.
You can take them with you and read them in the train."
After breakfast I saw him to the station. When we were parting he
said, "Perhaps you will come to town if I send for you, and take Madam
Mina too."
"We shall both come when you will," I said.
I had got him the morning papers and the London papers of the previous
night, and while we were talking at the carriage window, waiting for
the train to start, he was turning them over. His eyes suddenly
seemed to catch something in one of them, "The Westminster Gazette", I
knew it by the colour, and he grew quite white. He read something
intently, groaning to himself, "Mein Gott Mein Gott So soon So
soon" I do not think he remembered me at the moment. Just then the
whistle blew, and the train moved off. This recalled him to himself,
and he leaned out of the window and waved his hand, calling out, "Love
to Madam Mina. I shall write so soon as ever I can."
DR. SEWARD'S DIARY
 September.Truly there is no such thing as finality. Not a week
since I said "Finis," and yet here I am starting fresh again, or
rather going on with the record. Until this afternoon I had no cause
to think of what is done. Renfield had become, to all intents, as
sane as he ever was. He was already well ahead with his fly business,
and he had just started in the spider line also, so he had not been of
any trouble to me. I had a letter from Arthur, written on Sunday, and
from it I gather that he is bearing up wonderfully well. Quincey
Morris is with him, and that is much of a help, for he himself is a
bubbling well of good spirits. Quincey wrote me a line too, and from
him I hear that Arthur is beginning to recover something of his old
buoyancy, so as to them all my mind is at rest. As for myself, I was
settling down to my work with the enthusiasm which I used to have for
it, so that I might fairly have said that the wound which poor Lucy
left on me was becoming cicatrised.
Everything is, however, now reopened, and what is to be the end God
only knows. I have an idea that Van Helsing thinks he knows, too, but
he will only let out enough at a time to whet curiosity. He went to
Exeter yesterday, and stayed there all night. Today he came back, and
almost bounded into the room at about halfpast five o'clock, and
thrust last night's "Westminster Gazette" into my hand.
"What do you think of that?" he asked as he stood back and folded his
arms.
I looked over the paper, for I really did not know what he meant, but
he took it from me and pointed out a paragraph about children being
decoyed away at Hampstead. It did not convey much to me, until I
reached a passage where it described small puncture wounds on their
throats. An idea struck me, and I looked up.
"Well?" he said.
"It is like poor Lucy's."
"And what do you make of it?"
"Simply that there is some cause in common. Whatever it was that
injured her has injured them." I did not quite understand his answer.
"That is true indirectly, but not directly."
"How do you mean, Professor?" I asked. I was a little inclined to
take his seriousness lightly, for, after all, four days of rest and
freedom from burning, harrowing, anxiety does help to restore one's
spirits, but when I saw his face, it sobered me. Never, even in the
midst of our despair about poor Lucy, had he looked more stern.
"Tell me" I said. "I can hazard no opinion. I do not know what to
think, and I have no data on which to found a conjecture."
"Do you mean to tell me, friend John, that you have no suspicion as to
what poor Lucy died of, not after all the hints given, not only by
events, but by me?"
"Of nervous prostration following a great loss or waste of blood."
"And how was the blood lost or wasted?" I shook my head.
He stepped over and sat down beside me, and went on, "You are a clever
man, friend John. You reason well, and your wit is bold, but you are
too prejudiced. You do not let your eyes see nor your ears hear, and
that which is outside your daily life is not of account to you. Do
you not think that there are things which you cannot understand, and
yet which are, that some people see things that others cannot? But
there are things old and new which must not be contemplated by men's
eyes, because they know, or think they know, some things which other
men have told them. Ah, it is the fault of our science that it wants
to explain all, and if it explain not, then it says there is nothing
to explain. But yet we see around us every day the growth of new
beliefs, which think themselves new, and which are yet but the old,
which pretend to be young, like the fine ladies at the opera. I
suppose now you do not believe in corporeal transference. No? Nor in
materialization. No? Nor in astral bodies. No? Nor in the reading
of thought. No? Nor in hypnotism . . ."
"Yes," I said. "Charcot has proved that pretty well."
He smiled as he went on, "Then you are satisfied as to it. Yes? And
of course then you understand how it act, and can follow the mind of
the great Charcot, alas that he is no more, into the very soul of the
patient that he influence. No? Then, friend John, am I to take it
that you simply accept fact, and are satisfied to let from premise to
conclusion be a blank? No? Then tell me, for I am a student of the
brain, how you accept hypnotism and reject the thought reading. Let
me tell you, my friend, that there are things done today in electrical
science which would have been deemed unholy by the very man who
discovered electricity, who would themselves not so long before been
burned as wizards. There are always mysteries in life. Why was it
that Methuselah lived nine hundred years, and 'Old Parr' one hundred
and sixtynine, and yet that poor Lucy, with four men's blood in her
poor veins, could not live even one day? For, had she live one more
day, we could save her. Do you know all the mystery of life and
death? Do you know the altogether of comparative anatomy and can say
wherefore the qualities of brutes are in some men, and not in others?
Can you tell me why, when other spiders die small and soon, that one
great spider lived for centuries in the tower of the old Spanish
church and grew and grew, till, on descending, he could drink the oil
of all the church lamps? Can you tell me why in the Pampas, ay and
elsewhere, there are bats that come out at night and open the veins of
cattle and horses and suck dry their veins, how in some islands of the
Western seas there are bats which hang on the trees all day, and those
who have seen describe as like giant nuts or pods, and that when the
sailors sleep on the deck, because that it is hot, flit down on them
and then, and then in the morning are found dead men, white as even
Miss Lucy was?"
"Good God, Professor" I said, starting up. "Do you mean to tell me
that Lucy was bitten by such a bat, and that such a thing is here in
London in the nineteenth century?"
He waved his hand for silence, and went on, "Can you tell me why the
tortoise lives more long than generations of men, why the elephant
goes on and on till he have sees dynasties, and why the parrot never
die only of bite of cat of dog or other complaint? Can you tell me
why men believe in all ages and places that there are men and women
who cannot die? We all know, because science has vouched for the
fact, that there have been toads shut up in rocks for thousands of
years, shut in one so small hole that only hold him since the youth of
the world. Can you tell me how the Indian fakir can make himself to
die and have been buried, and his grave sealed and corn sowed on it,
and the corn reaped and be cut and sown and reaped and cut again, and
then men come and take away the unbroken seal and that there lie the
Indian fakir, not dead, but that rise up and walk amongst them as
before?"
Here I interrupted him. I was getting bewildered. He so crowded on
my mind his list of nature's eccentricities and possible
impossibilities that my imagination was getting fired. I had a dim
idea that he was teaching me some lesson, as long ago he used to do in
his study at Amsterdam. But he used them to tell me the thing, so
that I could have the object of thought in mind all the time. But now
I was without his help, yet I wanted to follow him, so I said,
"Professor, let me be your pet student again. Tell me the thesis, so
that I may apply your knowledge as you go on. At present I am going
in my mind from point to point as a madman, and not a sane one,
follows an idea. I feel like a novice lumbering through a bog in a
midst, jumping from one tussock to another in the mere blind effort to
move on without knowing where I am going."
"That is a good image," he said. "Well, I shall tell you. My thesis
is this, I want you to believe."
"To believe what?"
"To believe in things that you cannot. Let me illustrate. I heard
once of an American who so defined faith, 'that faculty which enables
us to believe things which we know to be untrue.' For one, I follow
that man. He meant that we shall have an open mind, and not let a
little bit of truth check the rush of the big truth, like a small rock
does a railway truck. We get the small truth first. Good We keep
him, and we value him, but all the same we must not let him think
himself all the truth in the universe."
"Then you want me not to let some previous conviction inure the
receptivity of my mind with regard to some strange matter. Do I read
your lesson aright?"
"Ah, you are my favourite pupil still. It is worth to teach you. Now
that you are willing to understand, you have taken the first step to
understand. You think then that those so small holes in the
children's throats were made by the same that made the holes in Miss
Lucy?"
"I suppose so."
He stood up and said solemnly, "Then you are wrong. Oh, would it were
so But alas No. It is worse, far, far worse."
"In God's name, Professor Van Helsing, what do you mean?" I cried.
He threw himself with a despairing gesture into a chair, and placed
his elbows on the table, covering his face with his hands as he spoke.
"They were made by Miss Lucy"
CHAPTER 
DR. SEWARD'S DIARYcont.
For a while sheer anger mastered me. It was as if he had during her
life struck Lucy on the face. I smote the table hard and rose up as I
said to him, "Dr. Van Helsing, are you mad?"
He raised his head and looked at me, and somehow the tenderness of his
face calmed me at once. "Would I were" he said. "Madness were easy
to bear compared with truth like this. Oh, my friend, why, think
you, did I go so far round, why take so long to tell so simple a
thing? Was it because I hate you and have hated you all my life? Was
it because I wished to give you pain? Was it that I wanted, now so
late, revenge for that time when you saved my life, and from a fearful
death? Ah no"
"Forgive me," said I.
He went on, "My friend, it was because I wished to be gentle in the
breaking to you, for I know you have loved that so sweet lady. But
even yet I do not expect you to believe. It is so hard to accept at
once any abstract truth, that we may doubt such to be possible when we
have always believed the 'no' of it. It is more hard still to accept
so sad a concrete truth, and of such a one as Miss Lucy. Tonight I go
to prove it. Dare you come with me?"
This staggered me. A man does not like to prove such a truth, Byron
excepted from the category, jealousy.
"And prove the very truth he most abhorred."
He saw my hesitation, and spoke, "The logic is simple, no madman's
logic this time, jumping from tussock to tussock in a misty bog. If
it not be true, then proof will be relief. At worst it will not harm.
If it be true Ah, there is the dread. Yet every dread should help my
cause, for in it is some need of belief. Come, I tell you what I
propose. First, that we go off now and see that child in the
hospital. Dr. Vincent, of the North Hospital, where the papers say
the child is, is a friend of mine, and I think of yours since you were
in class at Amsterdam. He will let two scientists see his case, if he
will not let two friends. We shall tell him nothing, but only that we
wish to learn. And then . . ."
"And then?"
He took a key from his pocket and held it up. "And then we spend the
night, you and I, in the churchyard where Lucy lies. This is the key
that lock the tomb. I had it from the coffin man to give to Arthur."
My heart sank within me, for I felt that there was some fearful ordeal
before us. I could do nothing, however, so I plucked up what heart I
could and said that we had better hasten, as the afternoon was
passing.
We found the child awake. It had had a sleep and taken some food, and
altogether was going on well. Dr. Vincent took the bandage from its
throat, and showed us the punctures. There was no mistaking the
similarity to those which had been on Lucy's throat. They were
smaller, and the edges looked fresher, that was all. We asked Vincent
to what he attributed them, and he replied that it must have been a
bite of some animal, perhaps a rat, but for his own part, he was
inclined to think it was one of the bats which are so numerous on the
northern heights of London. "Out of so many harmless ones," he said,
"there may be some wild specimen from the South of a more malignant
species. Some sailor may have brought one home, and it managed to
escape, or even from the Zoological Gardens a young one may have got
loose, or one be bred there from a vampire. These things do occur,
you, know. Only ten days ago a wolf got out, and was, I believe,
traced up in this direction. For a week after, the children were
playing nothing but Red Riding Hood on the Heath and in every alley in
the place until this 'bloofer lady' scare came along, since then it
has been quite a gala time with them. Even this poor little mite,
when he woke up today, asked the nurse if he might go away. When she
asked him why he wanted to go, he said he wanted to play with the
'bloofer lady'."
"I hope," said Van Helsing, "that when you are sending the child home
you will caution its parents to keep strict watch over it. These
fancies to stray are most dangerous, and if the child were to remain
out another night, it would probably be fatal. But in any case I
suppose you will not let it away for some days?"
"Certainly not, not for a week at least, longer if the wound is not
healed."
Our visit to the hospital took more time than we had reckoned on, and
the sun had dipped before we came out. When Van Helsing saw how dark
it was, he said,
"There is not hurry. It is more late than I thought. Come, let us
seek somewhere that we may eat, and then we shall go on our way."
We dined at 'Jack Straw's Castle' along with a little crowd of
bicyclists and others who were genially noisy. About ten o'clock we
started from the inn. It was then very dark, and the scattered lamps
made the darkness greater when we were once outside their individual
radius. The Professor had evidently noted the road we were to go, for
he went on unhesitatingly, but, as for me, I was in quite a mixup as
to locality. As we went further, we met fewer and fewer people, till
at last we were somewhat surprised when we met even the patrol of
horse police going their usual suburban round. At last we reached the
wall of the churchyard, which we climbed over. With some little
difficulty, for it was very dark, and the whole place seemed so
strange to us, we found the Westenra tomb. The Professor took the
key, opened the creaky door, and standing back, politely, but quite
unconsciously, motioned me to precede him. There was a delicious
irony in the offer, in the courtliness of giving preference on such a
ghastly occasion. My companion followed me quickly, and cautiously
drew the door to, after carefully ascertaining that the lock was a
falling, and not a spring one. In the latter case we should have been
in a bad plight. Then he fumbled in his bag, and taking out a
matchbox and a piece of candle, proceeded to make a light. The tomb
in the daytime, and when wreathed with fresh flowers, had looked grim
and gruesome enough, but now, some days afterwards, when the flowers
hung lank and dead, their whites turning to rust and their greens to
browns, when the spider and the beetle had resumed their accustomed
dominance, when the timediscoloured stone, and dustencrusted mortar,
and rusty, dank iron, and tarnished brass, and clouded silverplating
gave back the feeble glimmer of a candle, the effect was more
miserable and sordid than could have been imagined. It conveyed
irresistibly the idea that life, animal life, was not the only thing
which could pass away.
Van Helsing went about his work systematically. Holding his candle so
that he could read the coffin plates, and so holding it that the sperm
dropped in white patches which congealed as they touched the metal, he
made assurance of Lucy's coffin. Another search in his bag, and he
took out a turnscrew.
"What are you going to do?" I asked.
"To open the coffin. You shall yet be convinced."
Straightway he began taking out the screws, and finally lifted off the
lid, showing the casing of lead beneath. The sight was almost too
much for me. It seemed to be as much an affront to the dead as it
would have been to have stripped off her clothing in her sleep whilst
living. I actually took hold of his hand to stop him.
He only said, "You shall see," and again fumbling in his bag took out
a tiny fret saw. Striking the turnscrew through the lead with a swift
downward stab, which made me wince, he made a small hole, which was,
however, big enough to admit the point of the saw. I had expected a
rush of gas from the weekold corpse. We doctors, who have had to
study our dangers, have to become accustomed to such things, and I
drew back towards the door. But the Professor never stopped for a
moment. He sawed down a couple of feet along one side of the lead
coffin, and then across, and down the other side. Taking the edge of
the loose flange, he bent it back towards the foot of the coffin, and
holding up the candle into the aperture, motioned to me to look.
I drew near and looked. The coffin was empty. It was certainly a
surprise to me, and gave me a considerable shock, but Van Helsing was
unmoved. He was now more sure than ever of his ground, and so
emboldened to proceed in his task. "Are you satisfied now, friend
John?" he asked.
I felt all the dogged argumentativeness of my nature awake within me as
I answered him, "I am satisfied that Lucy's body is not in that
coffin, but that only proves one thing."
"And what is that, friend John?"
"That it is not there."
"That is good logic," he said, "so far as it goes. But how do you,
how can you, account for it not being there?"
"Perhaps a bodysnatcher," I suggested. "Some of the undertaker's
people may have stolen it." I felt that I was speaking folly, and yet
it was the only real cause which I could suggest.
The Professor sighed. "Ah well" he said, "we must have more proof.
Come with me."
He put on the coffin lid again, gathered up all his things and placed
them in the bag, blew out the light, and placed the candle also in the
bag. We opened the door, and went out. Behind us he closed the door
and locked it. He handed me the key, saying, "Will you keep it? You
had better be assured."
I laughed, it was not a very cheerful laugh, I am bound to say, as I
motioned him to keep it. "A key is nothing," I said, "there are many
duplicates, and anyhow it is not difficult to pick a lock of this
kind."
He said nothing, but put the key in his pocket. Then he told me to
watch at one side of the churchyard whilst he would watch at the
other.
I took up my place behind a yew tree, and I saw his dark figure move
until the intervening headstones and trees hid it from my sight.
It was a lonely vigil. Just after I had taken my place I heard a
distant clock strike twelve, and in time came one and two. I was
chilled and unnerved, and angry with the Professor for taking me on
such an errand and with myself for coming. I was too cold and too
sleepy to be keenly observant, and not sleepy enough to betray my
trust, so altogether I had a dreary, miserable time.
Suddenly, as I turned round, I thought I saw something like a white
streak, moving between two dark yew trees at the side of the
churchyard farthest from the tomb. At the same time a dark mass moved
from the Professor's side of the ground, and hurriedly went towards
it. Then I too moved, but I had to go round headstones and railedoff
tombs, and I stumbled over graves. The sky was overcast, and
somewhere far off an early cock crew. A little ways off, beyond a
line of scattered juniper trees, which marked the pathway to the
church, a white dim figure flitted in the direction of the tomb. The
tomb itself was hidden by trees, and I could not see where the figure
had disappeared. I heard the rustle of actual movement where I had
first seen the white figure, and coming over, found the Professor
holding in his arms a tiny child. When he saw me he held it out to
me, and said, "Are you satisfied now?"
"No," I said, in a way that I felt was aggressive.
"Do you not see the child?"
"Yes, it is a child, but who brought it here? And is it wounded?"
"We shall see," said the Professor, and with one impulse we took our
way out of the churchyard, he carrying the sleeping child.
When we had got some little distance away, we went into a clump of
trees, and struck a match, and looked at the child's throat. It was
without a scratch or scar of any kind.
"Was I right?" I asked triumphantly.
"We were just in time," said the Professor thankfully.
We had now to decide what we were to do with the child, and so
consulted about it. If we were to take it to a police station we
should have to give some account of our movements during the night.
At least, we should have had to make some statement as to how we had
come to find the child. So finally we decided that we would take it
to the Heath, and when we heard a policeman coming, would leave it
where he could not fail to find it. We would then seek our way home
as quickly as we could. All fell out well. At the edge of Hampstead
Heath we heard a policeman's heavy tramp, and laying the child on the
pathway, we waited and watched until he saw it as he flashed his
lantern to and fro. We heard his exclamation of astonishment, and
then we went away silently. By good chance we got a cab near the
'Spainiards,' and drove to town.
I cannot sleep, so I make this entry. But I must try to get a few
hours' sleep, as Van Helsing is to call for me at noon. He insists
that I go with him on another expedition.
 September.It was two o'clock before we found a suitable
opportunity for our attempt. The funeral held at noon was all
completed, and the last stragglers of the mourners had taken
themselves lazily away, when, looking carefully from behind a clump of
alder trees, we saw the sexton lock the gate after him. We knew that
we were safe till morning did we desire it, but the Professor told me
that we should not want more than an hour at most. Again I felt that
horrid sense of the reality of things, in which any effort of
imagination seemed out of place, and I realized distinctly the perils
of the law which we were incurring in our unhallowed work. Besides, I
felt it was all so useless. Outrageous as it was to open a leaden
coffin, to see if a woman dead nearly a week were really dead, it now
seemed the height of folly to open the tomb again, when we knew, from
the evidence of our own eyesight, that the coffin was empty. I
shrugged my shoulders, however, and rested silent, for Van Helsing had
a way of going on his own road, no matter who remonstrated. He took
the key, opened the vault, and again courteously motioned me to
precede. The place was not so gruesome as last night, but oh, how
unutterably mean looking when the sunshine streamed in. Van Helsing
walked over to Lucy's coffin, and I followed. He bent over and again
forced back the leaden flange, and a shock of surprise and dismay shot
through me.
There lay Lucy, seemingly just as we had seen her the night before her
funeral. She was, if possible, more radiantly beautiful than ever,
and I could not believe that she was dead. The lips were red, nay
redder than before, and on the cheeks was a delicate bloom.
"Is this a juggle?" I said to him.
"Are you convinced now?" said the Professor, in response, and as he
spoke he put over his hand, and in a way that made me shudder, pulled
back the dead lips and showed the white teeth. "See," he went on,
"they are even sharper than before. With this and this," and he
touched one of the canine teeth and that below it, "the little
children can be bitten. Are you of belief now, friend John?"
Once more argumentative hostility woke within me. I could not accept
such an overwhelming idea as he suggested. So, with an attempt to
argue of which I was even at the moment ashamed, I said, "She may have
been placed here since last night."
"Indeed? That is so, and by whom?"
"I do not know. Someone has done it."
"And yet she has been dead one week. Most peoples in that time would
not look so."
I had no answer for this, so was silent. Van Helsing did not seem to
notice my silence. At any rate, he showed neither chagrin nor
triumph. He was looking intently at the face of the dead woman,
raising the eyelids and looking at the eyes, and once more opening the
lips and examining the teeth. Then he turned to me and said,
"Here, there is one thing which is different from all recorded. Here
is some dual life that is not as the common. She was bitten by the
vampire when she was in a trance, sleepwalking, oh, you start. You
do not know that, friend John, but you shall know it later, and in
trance could he best come to take more blood. In trance she dies, and
in trance she is UnDead, too. So it is that she differ from all
other. Usually when the UnDead sleep at home," as he spoke he made a
comprehensive sweep of his arm to designate what to a vampire was
'home', "their face show what they are, but this so sweet that was
when she not UnDead she go back to the nothings of the common dead.
There is no malign there, see, and so it make hard that I must kill
her in her sleep."
This turned my blood cold, and it began to dawn upon me that I was
accepting Van Helsing's theories. But if she were really dead, what
was there of terror in the idea of killing her?
He looked up at me, and evidently saw the change in my face, for he
said almost joyously, "Ah, you believe now?"
I answered, "Do not press me too hard all at once. I am willing to
accept. How will you do this bloody work?"
"I shall cut off her head and fill her mouth with garlic, and I shall
drive a stake through her body."
It made me shudder to think of so mutilating the body of the woman
whom I had loved. And yet the feeling was not so strong as I had
expected. I was, in fact, beginning to shudder at the presence of
this being, this UnDead, as Van Helsing called it, and to loathe it.
Is it possible that love is all subjective, or all objective?
I waited a considerable time for Van Helsing to begin, but he stood as
if wrapped in thought. Presently he closed the catch of his bag with
a snap, and said,
"I have been thinking, and have made up my mind as to what is best.
If I did simply follow my inclining I would do now, at this moment,
what is to be done. But there are other things to follow, and things
that are thousand times more difficult in that them we do not know.
This is simple. She have yet no life taken, though that is of time,
and to act now would be to take danger from her forever. But then we
may have to want Arthur, and how shall we tell him of this? If you,
who saw the wounds on Lucy's throat, and saw the wounds so similar on
the child's at the hospital, if you, who saw the coffin empty last
night and full today with a woman who have not change only to be more
rose and more beautiful in a whole week, after she die, if you know of
this and know of the white figure last night that brought the child to
the churchyard, and yet of your own senses you did not believe, how
then, can I expect Arthur, who know none of those things, to believe?
"He doubted me when I took him from her kiss when she was dying. I
know he has forgiven me because in some mistaken idea I have done
things that prevent him say goodbye as he ought, and he may think that
in some more mistaken idea this woman was buried alive, and that in
most mistake of all we have killed her. He will then argue back that
it is we, mistaken ones, that have killed her by our ideas, and so he
will be much unhappy always. Yet he never can be sure, and that is
the worst of all. And he will sometimes think that she he loved was
buried alive, and that will paint his dreams with horrors of what she
must have suffered, and again, he will think that we may be right, and
that his so beloved was, after all, an UnDead. No I told him once,
and since then I learn much. Now, since I know it is all true, a
hundred thousand times more do I know that he must pass through the
bitter waters to reach the sweet. He, poor fellow, must have one hour
that will make the very face of heaven grow black to him, then we can
act for good all round and send him peace. My mind is made up. Let
us go. You return home for tonight to your asylum, and see that all
be well. As for me, I shall spend the night here in this churchyard
in my own way. Tomorrow night you will come to me to the Berkeley
Hotel at ten of the clock. I shall send for Arthur to come too, and
also that so fine young man of America that gave his blood. Later we
shall all have work to do. I come with you so far as Piccadilly and
there dine, for I must be back here before the sun set."
So we locked the tomb and came away, and got over the wall of the
churchyard, which was not much of a task, and drove back to
Piccadilly.
NOTE LEFT BY VAN HELSING IN HIS PORTMANTEAU, BERKELEY HOTEL DIRECTED TO
JOHN SEWARD, M. D. Not Delivered
 September
"Friend John,
"I write this in case anything should happen. I go alone to
watch in that churchyard. It pleases me that the UnDead,
Miss Lucy, shall not leave tonight, that so on the morrow
night she may be more eager. Therefore I shall fix some
things she like not, garlic and a crucifix, and so seal up
the door of the tomb. She is young as UnDead, and will
heed. Moreover, these are only to prevent her coming out.
They may not prevail on her wanting to get in, for then the
UnDead is desperate, and must find the line of least resistance,
whatsoever it may be. I shall be at hand all the night from
sunset till after sunrise, and if there be aught that may be
learned I shall learn it. For Miss Lucy or from her, I have no
fear, but that other to whom is there that she is UnDead, he have
not the power to seek her tomb and find shelter. He is cunning,
as I know from Mr. Jonathan and from the way that all along he
have fooled us when he played with us for Miss Lucy's life, and
we lost, and in many ways the UnDead are strong. He have always
the strength in his hand of twenty men, even we four who gave our
strength to Miss Lucy it also is all to him. Besides, he can
summon his wolf and I know not what. So if it be that he came
thither on this night he shall find me. But none other shall,
until it be too late. But it may be that he will not attempt the
place. There is no reason why he should. His hunting ground is
more full of game than the churchyard where the UnDead woman
sleeps, and the one old man watch.
"Therefore I write this in case . . . Take the papers that
are with this, the diaries of Harker and the rest, and read
them, and then find this great UnDead, and cut off his head
and burn his heart or drive a stake through it, so that the
world may rest from him.
"If it be so, farewell.
"VAN HELSING."
DR. SEWARD'S DIARY
 September.It is wonderful what a good night's sleep will do for
one. Yesterday I was almost willing to accept Van Helsing's monstrous
ideas, but now they seem to start out lurid before me as outrages on
common sense. I have no doubt that he believes it all. I wonder if
his mind can have become in any way unhinged. Surely there must be
some rational explanation of all these mysterious things. Is it
possible that the Professor can have done it himself? He is so
abnormally clever that if he went off his head he would carry out his
intent with regard to some fixed idea in a wonderful way. I am loathe
to think it, and indeed it would be almost as great a marvel as the
other to find that Van Helsing was mad, but anyhow I shall watch him
carefully. I may get some light on the mystery.
 September.Last night, at a little before ten o'clock, Arthur and
Quincey came into Van Helsing's room. He told us all what he wanted
us to do, but especially addressing himself to Arthur, as if all our
wills were centred in his. He began by saying that he hoped we would
all come with him too, "for," he said, "there is a grave duty to be
done there. You were doubtless surprised at my letter?" This query
was directly addressed to Lord Godalming.
"I was. It rather upset me for a bit. There has been so much trouble
around my house of late that I could do without any more. I have been
curious, too, as to what you mean.
"Quincey and I talked it over, but the more we talked, the more
puzzled we got, till now I can say for myself that I'm about up a tree
as to any meaning about anything."
"Me too," said Quincey Morris laconically.
"Oh," said the Professor, "then you are nearer the beginning, both of
you, than friend John here, who has to go a long way back before he
can even get so far as to begin."
It was evident that he recognized my return to my old doubting frame
of mind without my saying a word. Then, turning to the other two, he
said with intense gravity,
"I want your permission to do what I think good this night. It is, I
know, much to ask, and when you know what it is I propose to do you
will know, and only then how much. Therefore may I ask that you
promise me in the dark, so that afterwards, though you may be angry
with me for a time, I must not disguise from myself the possibility
that such may be, you shall not blame yourselves for anything."
"That's frank anyhow," broke in Quincey. "I'll answer for the
Professor. I don't quite see his drift, but I swear he's honest, and
that's good enough for me."
"I thank you, Sir," said Van Helsing proudly. "I have done myself the
honour of counting you one trusting friend, and such endorsement is
dear to me." He held out a hand, which Quincey took.
Then Arthur spoke out, "Dr. Van Helsing, I don't quite like to 'buy a
pig in a poke', as they say in Scotland, and if it be anything in
which my honour as a gentleman or my faith as a Christian is
concerned, I cannot make such a promise. If you can assure me that
what you intend does not violate either of these two, then I give my
consent at once, though for the life of me, I cannot understand what
you are driving at."
"I accept your limitation," said Van Helsing, "and all I ask of you is
that if you feel it necessary to condemn any act of mine, you will
first consider it well and be satisfied that it does not violate your
reservations."
"Agreed" said Arthur. "That is only fair. And now that the
pourparlers are over, may I ask what it is we are to do?"
"I want you to come with me, and to come in secret, to the churchyard
at Kingstead."
Arthur's face fell as he said in an amazed sort of way,
"Where poor Lucy is buried?"
The Professor bowed.
Arthur went on, "And when there?"
"To enter the tomb"
Arthur stood up. "Professor, are you in earnest, or is it some
monstrous joke? Pardon me, I see that you are in earnest." He sat
down again, but I could see that he sat firmly and proudly, as one who
is on his dignity. There was silence until he asked again, "And when
in the tomb?"
"To open the coffin."
"This is too much" he said, angrily rising again. "I am willing to
be patient in all things that are reasonable, but in this, this
desecration of the grave, of one who . . ." He fairly choked with
indignation.
The Professor looked pityingly at him. "If I could spare you one pang,
my poor friend," he said, "God knows I would. But this night our feet
must tread in thorny paths, or later, and for ever, the feet you love
must walk in paths of flame"
Arthur looked up with set white face and said, "Take care, sir, take
care"
"Would it not be well to hear what I have to say?" said Van Helsing.
"And then you will at least know the limit of my purpose. Shall I go
on?"
"That's fair enough," broke in Morris.
After a pause Van Helsing went on, evidently with an effort, "Miss
Lucy is dead, is it not so? Yes Then there can be no wrong to her.
But if she be not dead . . ."
Arthur jumped to his feet, "Good God" he cried. "What do you mean?
Has there been any mistake, has she been buried alive?" He groaned in
anguish that not even hope could soften.
"I did not say she was alive, my child. I did not think it. I go no
further than to say that she might be UnDead."
"UnDead Not alive What do you mean? Is this all a nightmare, or
what is it?"
"There are mysteries which men can only guess at, which age by age
they may solve only in part. Believe me, we are now on the verge of
one. But I have not done. May I cut off the head of dead Miss Lucy?"
"Heavens and earth, no" cried Arthur in a storm of passion. "Not for
the wide world will I consent to any mutilation of her dead body. Dr.
Van Helsing, you try me too far. What have I done to you that you
should torture me so? What did that poor, sweet girl do that you
should want to cast such dishonour on her grave? Are you mad, that you
speak of such things, or am I mad to listen to them? Don't dare think
more of such a desecration. I shall not give my consent to anything
you do. I have a duty to do in protecting her grave from outrage, and
by God, I shall do it"
Van Helsing rose up from where he had all the time been seated, and
said, gravely and sternly, "My Lord Godalming, I too, have a duty to
do, a duty to others, a duty to you, a duty to the dead, and by God, I
shall do it All I ask you now is that you come with me, that you
look and listen, and if when later I make the same request you do not
be more eager for its fulfillment even than I am, then, I shall do my
duty, whatever it may seem to me. And then, to follow your Lordship's
wishes I shall hold myself at your disposal to render an account to
you, when and where you will." His voice broke a little, and he went
on with a voice full of pity.
"But I beseech you, do not go forth in anger with me. In a long life
of acts which were often not pleasant to do, and which sometimes did
wring my heart, I have never had so heavy a task as now. Believe me
that if the time comes for you to change your mind towards me, one
look from you will wipe away all this so sad hour, for I would do what
a man can to save you from sorrow. Just think. For why should I give
myself so much labor and so much of sorrow? I have come here from my
own land to do what I can of good, at the first to please my friend
John, and then to help a sweet young lady, whom too, I come to love.
For her, I am ashamed to say so much, but I say it in kindness, I gave
what you gave, the blood of my veins. I gave it, I who was not, like
you, her lover, but only her physician and her friend. I gave her my
nights and days, before death, after death, and if my death can do her
good even now, when she is the dead UnDead, she shall have it freely."
He said this with a very grave, sweet pride, and Arthur was much
affected by it.
He took the old man's hand and said in a broken voice, "Oh, it is hard
to think of it, and I cannot understand, but at least I shall go with
you and wait."
CHAPTER 
DR SEWARD'S DIARYcont.
It was just a quarter before twelve o'clock when we got into the
churchyard over the low wall. The night was dark with occasional
gleams of moonlight between the dents of the heavy clouds that scudded
across the sky. We all kept somehow close together, with Van Helsing
slightly in front as he led the way. When we had come close to the
tomb I looked well at Arthur, for I feared the proximity to a place
laden with so sorrowful a memory would upset him, but he bore himself
well. I took it that the very mystery of the proceeding was in some
way a counteractant to his grief. The Professor unlocked the door,
and seeing a natural hesitation amongst us for various reasons, solved
the difficulty by entering first himself. The rest of us followed,
and he closed the door. He then lit a dark lantern and pointed to a
coffin. Arthur stepped forward hesitatingly. Van Helsing said to me,
"You were with me here yesterday. Was the body of Miss Lucy in that
coffin?"
"It was."
The Professor turned to the rest saying, "You hear, and yet there is
no one who does not believe with me."
He took his screwdriver and again took off the lid of the coffin.
Arthur looked on, very pale but silent. When the lid was removed he
stepped forward. He evidently did not know that there was a leaden
coffin, or at any rate, had not thought of it. When he saw the rent
in the lead, the blood rushed to his face for an instant, but as
quickly fell away again, so that he remained of a ghastly whiteness.
He was still silent. Van Helsing forced back the leaden flange, and
we all looked in and recoiled.
The coffin was empty
For several minutes no one spoke a word. The silence was broken by
Quincey Morris, "Professor, I answered for you. Your word is all I
want. I wouldn't ask such a thing ordinarily, I wouldn't so dishonour
you as to imply a doubt, but this is a mystery that goes beyond any
honour or dishonour. Is this your doing?"
"I swear to you by all that I hold sacred that I have not removed or
touched her. What happened was this. Two nights ago my friend Seward
and I came here, with good purpose, believe me. I opened that coffin,
which was then sealed up, and we found it as now, empty. We then
waited, and saw something white come through the trees. The next day
we came here in daytime and she lay there. Did she not, friend John?
"Yes."
"That night we were just in time. One more so small child was
missing, and we find it, thank God, unharmed amongst the graves.
Yesterday I came here before sundown, for at sundown the UnDead can
move. I waited here all night till the sun rose, but I saw nothing.
It was most probable that it was because I had laid over the clamps of
those doors garlic, which the UnDead cannot bear, and other things
which they shun. Last night there was no exodus, so tonight before
the sundown I took away my garlic and other things. And so it is we
find this coffin empty. But bear with me. So far there is much that
is strange. Wait you with me outside, unseen and unheard, and things
much stranger are yet to be. So," here he shut the dark slide of his
lantern, "now to the outside." He opened the door, and we filed out,
he coming last and locking the door behind him.
Oh But it seemed fresh and pure in the night air after the terror of
that vault. How sweet it was to see the clouds race by, and the
passing gleams of the moonlight between the scudding clouds crossing
and passing, like the gladness and sorrow of a man's life. How sweet
it was to breathe the fresh air, that had no taint of death and decay.
How humanizing to see the red lighting of the sky beyond the hill, and
to hear far away the muffled roar that marks the life of a great
city. Each in his own way was solemn and overcome. Arthur was
silent, and was, I could see, striving to grasp the purpose and the
inner meaning of the mystery. I was myself tolerably patient, and
half inclined again to throw aside doubt and to accept Van Helsing's
conclusions. Quincey Morris was phlegmatic in the way of a man who
accepts all things, and accepts them in the spirit of cool bravery,
with hazard of all he has at stake. Not being able to smoke, he cut
himself a goodsized plug of tobacco and began to chew. As to Van
Helsing, he was employed in a definite way. First he took from his
bag a mass of what looked like thin, waferlike biscuit, which was
carefully rolled up in a white napkin. Next he took out a double
handful of some whitish stuff, like dough or putty. He crumbled the
wafer up fine and worked it into the mass between his hands. This he
then took, and rolling it into thin strips, began to lay them into the
crevices between the door and its setting in the tomb. I was somewhat
puzzled at this, and being close, asked him what it was that he was
doing. Arthur and Quincey drew near also, as they too were curious.
He answered, "I am closing the tomb so that the UnDead may not enter."
"And is that stuff you have there going to do it?"
"It is."
"What is that which you are using?" This time the question was by
Arthur. Van Helsing reverently lifted his hat as he answered.
"The Host. I brought it from Amsterdam. I have an Indulgence."
It was an answer that appalled the most sceptical of us, and we felt
individually that in the presence of such earnest purpose as the
Professor's, a purpose which could thus use the to him most sacred of
things, it was impossible to distrust. In respectful silence we took
the places assigned to us close round the tomb, but hidden from the
sight of any one approaching. I pitied the others, especially Arthur.
I had myself been apprenticed by my former visits to this watching
horror, and yet I, who had up to an hour ago repudiated the proofs,
felt my heart sink within me. Never did tombs look so ghastly white.
Never did cypress, or yew, or juniper so seem the embodiment of
funeral gloom. Never did tree or grass wave or rustle so ominously.
Never did bough creak so mysteriously, and never did the faraway
howling of dogs send such a woeful presage through the night.
There was a long spell of silence, big, aching, void, and then from
the Professor a keen "Ssss" He pointed, and far down the avenue of
yews we saw a white figure advance, a dim white figure, which held
something dark at its breast. The figure stopped, and at the moment a
ray of moonlight fell upon the masses of driving clouds, and showed in
startling prominence a darkhaired woman, dressed in the cerements of
the grave. We could not see the face, for it was bent down over what
we saw to be a fairhaired child. There was a pause and a sharp
little cry, such as a child gives in sleep, or a dog as it lies before
the fire and dreams. We were starting forward, but the Professor's
warning hand, seen by us as he stood behind a yew tree, kept us back.
And then as we looked the white figure moved forwards again. It was
now near enough for us to see clearly, and the moonlight still held.
My own heart grew cold as ice, and I could hear the gasp of Arthur, as
we recognized the features of Lucy Westenra. Lucy Westenra, but yet
how changed. The sweetness was turned to adamantine, heartless
cruelty, and the purity to voluptuous wantonness.
Van Helsing stepped out, and obedient to his gesture, we all advanced
too. The four of us ranged in a line before the door of the tomb. Van
Helsing raised his lantern and drew the slide. By the concentrated
light that fell on Lucy's face we could see that the lips were crimson
with fresh blood, and that the stream had trickled over her chin and
stained the purity of her lawn deathrobe.
We shuddered with horror. I could see by the tremulous light that
even Van Helsing's iron nerve had failed. Arthur was next to me, and
if I had not seized his arm and held him up, he would have fallen.
When Lucy, I call the thing that was before us Lucy because it bore
her shape, saw us she drew back with an angry snarl, such as a cat
gives when taken unawares, then her eyes ranged over us. Lucy's eyes
in form and colour, but Lucy's eyes unclean and full of hell fire,
instead of the pure, gentle orbs we knew. At that moment the remnant
of my love passed into hate and loathing. Had she then to be killed,
I could have done it with savage delight. As she looked, her eyes
blazed with unholy light, and the face became wreathed with a
voluptuous smile. Oh, God, how it made me shudder to see it With a
careless motion, she flung to the ground, callous as a devil, the
child that up to now she had clutched strenuously to her breast,
growling over it as a dog growls over a bone. The child gave a sharp
cry, and lay there moaning. There was a coldbloodedness in the act
which wrung a groan from Arthur. When she advanced to him with
outstretched arms and a wanton smile he fell back and hid his face in
his hands.
She still advanced, however, and with a languorous, voluptuous grace,
said, "Come to me, Arthur. Leave these others and come to me. My
arms are hungry for you. Come, and we can rest together. Come, my
husband, come"
There was something diabolically sweet in her tones, something of the
tinkling of glass when struck, which rang through the brains even of
us who heard the words addressed to another.
As for Arthur, he seemed under a spell, moving his hands from his
face, he opened wide his arms. She was leaping for them, when Van
Helsing sprang forward and held between them his little golden
crucifix. She recoiled from it, and, with a suddenly distorted face,
full of rage, dashed past him as if to enter the tomb.
When within a foot or two of the door, however, she stopped, as if
arrested by some irresistible force. Then she turned, and her face
was shown in the clear burst of moonlight and by the lamp, which had
now no quiver from Van Helsing's nerves. Never did I see such baffled
malice on a face, and never, I trust, shall such ever be seen again by
mortal eyes. The beautiful colour became livid, the eyes seemed to
throw out sparks of hell fire, the brows were wrinkled as though the
folds of flesh were the coils of Medusa's snakes, and the lovely,
bloodstained mouth grew to an open square, as in the passion masks of
the Greeks and Japanese. If ever a face meant death, if looks could
kill, we saw it at that moment.
And so for full half a minute, which seemed an eternity, she remained
between the lifted crucifix and the sacred closing of her means of
entry.
Van Helsing broke the silence by asking Arthur, "Answer me, oh my
friend Am I to proceed in my work?"
"Do as you will, friend. Do as you will. There can be no horror like
this ever any more." And he groaned in spirit.
Quincey and I simultaneously moved towards him, and took his arms. We
could hear the click of the closing lantern as Van Helsing held it
down. Coming close to the tomb, he began to remove from the chinks
some of the sacred emblem which he had placed there. We all looked on
with horrified amazement as we saw, when he stood back, the woman,
with a corporeal body as real at that moment as our own, pass through
the interstice where scarce a knife blade could have gone. We all
felt a glad sense of relief when we saw the Professor calmly restoring
the strings of putty to the edges of the door.
When this was done, he lifted the child and said, "Come now, my
friends. We can do no more till tomorrow. There is a funeral at
noon, so here we shall all come before long after that. The friends
of the dead will all be gone by two, and when the sexton locks the
gate we shall remain. Then there is more to do, but not like this of
tonight. As for this little one, he is not much harmed, and by
tomorrow night he shall be well. We shall leave him where the police
will find him, as on the other night, and then to home."
Coming close to Arthur, he said, "My friend Arthur, you have had a sore
trial, but after, when you look back, you will see how it was
necessary. You are now in the bitter waters, my child. By this time
tomorrow you will, please God, have passed them, and have drunk of the
sweet waters. So do not mourn overmuch. Till then I shall not ask
you to forgive me."
Arthur and Quincey came home with me, and we tried to cheer each other
on the way. We had left behind the child in safety, and were tired.
So we all slept with more or less reality of sleep.
 September, night.A little before twelve o'clock we three, Arthur,
Quincey Morris, and myself, called for the Professor. It was odd to
notice that by common consent we had all put on black clothes. Of
course, Arthur wore black, for he was in deep mourning, but the rest
of us wore it by instinct. We got to the graveyard by halfpast one,
and strolled about, keeping out of official observation, so that when
the gravediggers had completed their task and the sexton, under the
belief that every one had gone, had locked the gate, we had the place
all to ourselves. Van Helsing, instead of his little black bag, had
with him a long leather one, something like a cricketing bag. It was
manifestly of fair weight.
When we were alone and had heard the last of the footsteps die out up
the road, we silently, and as if by ordered intention, followed the
Professor to the tomb. He unlocked the door, and we entered, closing
it behind us. Then he took from his bag the lantern, which he lit,
and also two wax candles, which, when lighted, he stuck by melting
their own ends, on other coffins, so that they might give light
sufficient to work by. When he again lifted the lid off Lucy's coffin
we all looked, Arthur trembling like an aspen, and saw that the corpse
lay there in all its death beauty. But there was no love in my own
heart, nothing but loathing for the foul Thing which had taken Lucy's
shape without her soul. I could see even Arthur's face grow hard as
he looked. Presently he said to Van Helsing, "Is this really Lucy's
body, or only a demon in her shape?"
"It is her body, and yet not it. But wait a while, and you shall see
her as she was, and is."
She seemed like a nightmare of Lucy as she lay there, the pointed
teeth, the blood stained, voluptuous mouth, which made one shudder to
see, the whole carnal and unspirited appearance, seeming like a
devilish mockery of Lucy's sweet purity. Van Helsing, with his usual
methodicalness, began taking the various contents from his bag and
placing them ready for use. First he took out a soldering iron and
some plumbing solder, and then small oil lamp, which gave out, when
lit in a corner of the tomb, gas which burned at a fierce heat with a
blue flame, then his operating knives, which he placed to hand, and
last a round wooden stake, some two and a half or three inches thick
and about three feet long. One end of it was hardened by charring in
the fire, and was sharpened to a fine point. With this stake came a
heavy hammer, such as in households is used in the coal cellar for
breaking the lumps. To me, a doctor's preparations for work of any
kind are stimulating and bracing, but the effect of these things on
both Arthur and Quincey was to cause them a sort of consternation.
They both, however, kept their courage, and remained silent and quiet.
When all was ready, Van Helsing said, "Before we do anything, let me
tell you this. It is out of the lore and experience of the ancients
and of all those who have studied the powers of the UnDead. When they
become such, there comes with the change the curse of immortality.
They cannot die, but must go on age after age adding new victims and
multiplying the evils of the world. For all that die from the preying
of the Undead become themselves Undead, and prey on their kind. And
so the circle goes on ever widening, like as the ripples from a stone
thrown in the water. Friend Arthur, if you had met that kiss which
you know of before poor Lucy die, or again, last night when you open
your arms to her, you would in time, when you had died, have become
nosferatu, as they call it in Eastern Europe, and would for all time
make more of those UnDeads that so have filled us with horror. The
career of this so unhappy dear lady is but just begun. Those children
whose blood she sucked are not as yet so much the worse, but if she
lives on, UnDead, more and more they lose their blood and by her power
over them they come to her, and so she draw their blood with that so
wicked mouth. But if she die in truth, then all cease. The tiny
wounds of the throats disappear, and they go back to their play
unknowing ever of what has been. But of the most blessed of all, when
this now UnDead be made to rest as true dead, then the soul of the
poor lady whom we love shall again be free. Instead of working
wickedness by night and growing more debased in the assimilating of it
by day, she shall take her place with the other Angels. So that, my
friend, it will be a blessed hand for her that shall strike the blow
that sets her free. To this I am willing, but is there none amongst
us who has a better right? Will it be no joy to think of hereafter in
the silence of the night when sleep is not, 'It was my hand that sent
her to the stars. It was the hand of him that loved her best, the
hand that of all she would herself have chosen, had it been to her to
choose?' Tell me if there be such a one amongst us?"
We all looked at Arthur. He saw too, what we all did, the infinite
kindness which suggested that his should be the hand which would
restore Lucy to us as a holy, and not an unholy, memory. He stepped
forward and said bravely, though his hand trembled, and his face was
as pale as snow, "My true friend, from the bottom of my broken heart I
thank you. Tell me what I am to do, and I shall not falter"
Van Helsing laid a hand on his shoulder, and said, "Brave lad A
moment's courage, and it is done. This stake must be driven through
her. It well be a fearful ordeal, be not deceived in that, but it
will be only a short time, and you will then rejoice more than your
pain was great. From this grim tomb you will emerge as though you
tread on air. But you must not falter when once you have begun. Only
think that we, your true friends, are round you, and that we pray for
you all the time."
"Go on," said Arthur hoarsely. "Tell me what I am to do."
"Take this stake in your left hand, ready to place to the point over
the heart, and the hammer in your right. Then when we begin our
prayer for the dead, I shall read him, I have here the book, and the
others shall follow, strike in God's name, that so all may be well
with the dead that we love and that the UnDead pass away."
Arthur took the stake and the hammer, and when once his mind was set
on action his hands never trembled nor even quivered. Van Helsing
opened his missal and began to read, and Quincey and I followed as
well as we could.
Arthur placed the point over the heart, and as I looked I could see its
dint in the white flesh. Then he struck with all his might.
The thing in the coffin writhed, and a hideous, bloodcurdling screech
came from the opened red lips. The body shook and quivered and
twisted in wild contortions. The sharp white teeth champed together till
the lips were cut, and the mouth was smeared with a crimson foam. But
Arthur never faltered. He looked like a figure of Thor as his
untrembling arm rose and fell, driving deeper and deeper the
mercybearing stake, whilst the blood from the pierced heart welled
and spurted up around it. His face was set, and high duty seemed to
shine through it. The sight of it gave us courage so that our voices
seemed to ring through the little vault.
And then the writhing and quivering of the body became less, and the
teeth seemed to champ, and the face to quiver. Finally it lay still.
The terrible task was over.
The hammer fell from Arthur's hand. He reeled and would have fallen
had we not caught him. The great drops of sweat sprang from his
forehead, and his breath came in broken gasps. It had indeed been an
awful strain on him, and had he not been forced to his task by more
than human considerations he could never have gone through with it.
For a few minutes we were so taken up with him that we did not look
towards the coffin. When we did, however, a murmur of startled
surprise ran from one to the other of us. We gazed so eagerly that
Arthur rose, for he had been seated on the ground, and came and looked
too, and then a glad strange light broke over his face and dispelled
altogether the gloom of horror that lay upon it.
There, in the coffin lay no longer the foul Thing that we had so
dreaded and grown to hate that the work of her destruction was yielded
as a privilege to the one best entitled to it, but Lucy as we had seen
her in life, with her face of unequalled sweetness and purity. True
that there were there, as we had seen them in life, the traces of care
and pain and waste. But these were all dear to us, for they marked
her truth to what we knew. One and all we felt that the holy calm
that lay like sunshine over the wasted face and form was only an
earthly token and symbol of the calm that was to reign for ever.
Van Helsing came and laid his hand on Arthur's shoulder, and said to
him, "And now, Arthur my friend, dear lad, am I not forgiven?"
The reaction of the terrible strain came as he took the old man's hand
in his, and raising it to his lips, pressed it, and said, "Forgiven
God bless you that you have given my dear one her soul again, and me
peace." He put his hands on the Professor's shoulder, and laying his
head on his breast, cried for a while silently, whilst we stood
unmoving.
When he raised his head Van Helsing said to him, "And now, my child,
you may kiss her. Kiss her dead lips if you will, as she would have
you to, if for her to choose. For she is not a grinning devil now,
not any more a foul Thing for all eternity. No longer she is the
devil's UnDead. She is God's true dead, whose soul is with Him"
Arthur bent and kissed her, and then we sent him and Quincey out of the
tomb. The Professor and I sawed the top off the stake, leaving the
point of it in the body. Then we cut off the head and filled the
mouth with garlic. We soldered up the leaden coffin, screwed on the
coffin lid, and gathering up our belongings, came away. When the
Professor locked the door he gave the key to Arthur.
Outside the air was sweet, the sun shone, and the birds sang, and it
seemed as if all nature were tuned to a different pitch. There was
gladness and mirth and peace everywhere, for we were at rest ourselves
on one account, and we were glad, though it was with a tempered joy.
Before we moved away Van Helsing said, "Now, my friends, one step of
our work is done, one the most harrowing to ourselves. But there
remains a greater task to find out the author of all this our sorrow
and to stamp him out. I have clues which we can follow, but it is a
long task, and a difficult one, and there is danger in it, and pain.
Shall you not all help me? We have learned to believe, all of us, is
it not so? And since so, do we not see our duty? Yes And do we not
promise to go on to the bitter end?"
Each in turn, we took his hand, and the promise was made. Then said
the Professor as we moved off, "Two nights hence you shall meet with
me and dine together at seven of the clock with friend John. I shall
entreat two others, two that you know not as yet, and I shall be ready
to all our work show and our plans unfold. Friend John, you come with
me home, for I have much to consult you about, and you can help me.
Tonight I leave for Amsterdam, but shall return tomorrow night. And
then begins our great quest. But first I shall have much to say, so
that you may know what to do and to dread. Then our promise shall be
made to each other anew. For there is a terrible task before us, and
once our feet are on the ploughshare we must not draw back."
CHAPTER 
DR. SEWARD'S DIARYcont.
When we arrived at the Berkely Hotel, Van Helsing found a telegram
waiting for him.
"Am coming up by train. Jonathan at Whitby. Important news. Mina
Harker."
The Professor was delighted. "Ah, that wonderful Madam Mina," he
said, "pearl among women She arrive, but I cannot stay. She must go
to your house, friend John. You must meet her at the station.
Telegraph her en route so that she may be prepared."
When the wire was dispatched he had a cup of tea. Over it he told me
of a diary kept by Jonathan Harker when abroad, and gave me a
typewritten copy of it, as also of Mrs. Harker's diary at Whitby.
"Take these," he said, "and study them well. When I have returned you
will be master of all the facts, and we can then better enter on our
inquisition. Keep them safe, for there is in them much of treasure.
You will need all your faith, even you who have had such an experience
as that of today. What is here told," he laid his hand heavily and
gravely on the packet of papers as he spoke, "may be the beginning of
the end to you and me and many another, or it may sound the knell of
the UnDead who walk the earth. Read all, I pray you, with the open
mind, and if you can add in any way to the story here told do so, for
it is all important. You have kept a diary of all these so strange
things, is it not so? Yes Then we shall go through all these
together when we meet." He then made ready for his departure and
shortly drove off to Liverpool Street. I took my way to Paddington,
where I arrived about fifteen minutes before the train came in.
The crowd melted away, after the bustling fashion common to arrival
platforms, and I was beginning to feel uneasy, lest I might miss my
guest, when a sweetfaced, dainty looking girl stepped up to me, and
after a quick glance said, "Dr. Seward, is it not?"
"And you are Mrs. Harker" I answered at once, whereupon she held out
her hand.
"I knew you from the description of poor dear Lucy, but . . ." She
stopped suddenly, and a quick blush overspread her face.
The blush that rose to my own cheeks somehow set us both at ease, for
it was a tacit answer to her own. I got her luggage, which included a
typewriter, and we took the Underground to Fenchurch Street, after I
had sent a wire to my housekeeper to have a sitting room and a bedroom
prepared at once for Mrs. Harker.
In due time we arrived. She knew, of course, that the place was a
lunatic asylum, but I could see that she was unable to repress a
shudder when we entered.
She told me that, if she might, she would come presently to my study,
as she had much to say. So here I am finishing my entry in my
phonograph diary whilst I await her. As yet I have not had the chance
of looking at the papers which Van Helsing left with me, though they
lie open before me. I must get her interested in something, so that I
may have an opportunity of reading them. She does not know how
precious time is, or what a task we have in hand. I must be careful
not to frighten her. Here she is
MINA HARKER'S JOURNAL
 September.After I had tidied myself, I went down to Dr. Seward's
study. At the door I paused a moment, for I thought I heard him
talking with some one. As, however, he had pressed me to be quick, I
knocked at the door, and on his calling out, "Come in," I entered.
To my intense surprise, there was no one with him. He was quite
alone, and on the table opposite him was what I knew at once from the
description to be a phonograph. I had never seen one, and was much
interested.
"I hope I did not keep you waiting," I said, "but I stayed at the door
as I heard you talking, and thought there was someone with you."
"Oh," he replied with a smile, "I was only entering my diary."
"Your diary?" I asked him in surprise.
"Yes," he answered. "I keep it in this." As he spoke he laid his
hand on the phonograph. I felt quite excited over it, and blurted
out, "Why, this beats even shorthand May I hear it say something?"
"Certainly," he replied with alacrity, and stood up to put it in train
for speaking. Then he paused, and a troubled look overspread his
face.
"The fact is," he began awkwardly, "I only keep my diary in it, and as
it is entirely, almost entirely, about my cases it may be awkward,
that is, I mean . . ." He stopped, and I tried to help him out of his
embarrassment.
"You helped to attend dear Lucy at the end. Let me hear how she died,
for all that I know of her, I shall be very grateful. She was very,
very dear to me."
To my surprise, he answered, with a horrorstruck look in his face,
"Tell you of her death? Not for the wide world"
"Why not?" I asked, for some grave, terrible feeling was coming over me.
Again he paused, and I could see that he was trying to invent an
excuse. At length, he stammered out, "You see, I do not know how to
pick out any particular part of the diary."
Even while he was speaking an idea dawned upon him, and he said with
unconscious simplicity, in a different voice, and with the naivete of
a child, "that's quite true, upon my honour. Honest Indian"
I could not but smile, at which he grimaced. "I gave myself away that
time" he said. "But do you know that, although I have kept the diary
for months past, it never once struck me how I was going to find any
particular part of it in case I wanted to look it up?"
By this time my mind was made up that the diary of a doctor who
attended Lucy might have something to add to the sum of our knowledge
of that terrible Being, and I said boldly, "Then, Dr. Seward, you had
better let me copy it out for you on my typewriter."
He grew to a positively deathly pallor as he said, "No No No For
all the world. I wouldn't let you know that terrible story"
Then it was terrible. My intuition was right For a moment, I
thought, and as my eyes ranged the room, unconsciously looking for
something or some opportunity to aid me, they lit on a great batch of
typewriting on the table. His eyes caught the look in mine, and
without his thinking, followed their direction. As they saw the
parcel he realized my meaning.
"You do not know me," I said. "When you have read those papers, my
own diary and my husband's also, which I have typed, you will know me
better. I have not faltered in giving every thought of my own heart
in this cause. But, of course, you do not know me, yet, and I must
not expect you to trust me so far."
He is certainly a man of noble nature. Poor dear Lucy was right about
him. He stood up and opened a large drawer, in which were arranged in
order a number of hollow cylinders of metal covered with dark wax, and
said,
"You are quite right. I did not trust you because I did not know
you. But I know you now, and let me say that I should have known you
long ago. I know that Lucy told you of me. She told me of you too.
May I make the only atonement in my power? Take the cylinders and
hear them. The first halfdozen of them are personal to me, and they
will not horrify you. Then you will know me better. Dinner will by
then be ready. In the meantime I shall read over some of these
documents, and shall be better able to understand certain things."
He carried the phonograph himself up to my sitting room and adjusted
it for me. Now I shall learn something pleasant, I am sure. For it
will tell me the other side of a true love episode of which I know one
side already.
DR. SEWARD'S DIARY
 September.I was so absorbed in that wonderful diary of Jonathan
Harker and that other of his wife that I let the time run on without
thinking. Mrs. Harker was not down when the maid came to announce
dinner, so I said, "She is possibly tired. Let dinner wait an hour,"
and I went on with my work. I had just finished Mrs. Harker's diary,
when she came in. She looked sweetly pretty, but very sad, and her
eyes were flushed with crying. This somehow moved me much. Of late I
have had cause for tears, God knows But the relief of them was
denied me, and now the sight of those sweet eyes, brightened by recent
tears, went straight to my heart. So I said as gently as I could, "I
greatly fear I have distressed you."
"Oh, no, not distressed me," she replied. "But I have been more
touched than I can say by your grief. That is a wonderful machine,
but it is cruelly true. It told me, in its very tones, the anguish of
your heart. It was like a soul crying out to Almighty God. No one
must hear them spoken ever again See, I have tried to be useful. I
have copied out the words on my typewriter, and none other need now
hear your heart beat, as I did."
"No one need ever know, shall ever know," I said in a low voice. She
laid her hand on mine and said very gravely, "Ah, but they must"
"Must But why?" I asked.
"Because it is a part of the terrible story, a part of poor Lucy's
death and all that led to it. Because in the struggle which we have
before us to rid the earth of this terrible monster we must have all
the knowledge and all the help which we can get. I think that the
cylinders which you gave me contained more than you intended me to
know. But I can see that there are in your record many lights to this
dark mystery. You will let me help, will you not? I know all up to a
certain point, and I see already, though your diary only took me to 
September, how poor Lucy was beset, and how her terrible doom was
being wrought out. Jonathan and I have been working day and night
since Professor Van Helsing saw us. He is gone to Whitby to get more
information, and he will be here tomorrow to help us. We need have no
secrets amongst us. Working together and with absolute trust, we can
surely be stronger than if some of us were in the dark."
She looked at me so appealingly, and at the same time manifested such
courage and resolution in her bearing, that I gave in at once to her
wishes. "You shall," I said, "do as you like in the matter. God
forgive me if I do wrong There are terrible things yet to learn of,
but if you have so far traveled on the road to poor Lucy's death, you
will not be content, I know, to remain in the dark. Nay, the end, the
very end, may give you a gleam of peace. Come, there is dinner. We
must keep one another strong for what is before us. We have a cruel
and dreadful task. When you have eaten you shall learn the rest, and
I shall answer any questions you ask, if there be anything which you
do not understand, though it was apparent to us who were present."
MINA HARKER'S JOURNAL
 September.After dinner I came with Dr. Seward to his study. He
brought back the phonograph from my room, and I took a chair, and
arranged the phonograph so that I could touch it without getting up,
and showed me how to stop it in case I should want to pause. Then he
very thoughtfully took a chair, with his back to me, so that I might
be as free as possible, and began to read. I put the forked metal to
my ears and listened.
When the terrible story of Lucy's death, and all that followed, was
done, I lay back in my chair powerless. Fortunately I am not of a
fainting disposition. When Dr. Seward saw me he jumped up with a
horrified exclamation, and hurriedly taking a case bottle from the
cupboard, gave me some brandy, which in a few minutes somewhat
restored me. My brain was all in a whirl, and only that there came
through all the multitude of horrors, the holy ray of light that my
dear Lucy was at last at peace, I do not think I could have borne it
without making a scene. It is all so wild and mysterious, and strange
that if I had not known Jonathan's experience in Transylvania I could
not have believed. As it was, I didn't know what to believe, and so
got out of my difficulty by attending to something else. I took the
cover off my typewriter, and said to Dr. Seward,
"Let me write this all out now. We must be ready for Dr. Van Helsing
when he comes. I have sent a telegram to Jonathan to come on here
when he arrives in London from Whitby. In this matter dates are
everything, and I think that if we get all of our material ready, and
have every item put in chronological order, we shall have done much.
"You tell me that Lord Godalming and Mr. Morris are coming too. Let
us be able to tell them when they come."
He accordingly set the phonograph at a slow pace, and I began to
typewrite from the beginning of the seventeenth cylinder. I used
manifold, and so took three copies of the diary, just as I had done
with the rest. It was late when I got through, but Dr. Seward went
about his work of going his round of the patients. When he had
finished he came back and sat near me, reading, so that I did not feel
too lonely whilst I worked. How good and thoughtful he is. The world
seems full of good men, even if there are monsters in it.
Before I left him I remembered what Jonathan put in his diary of the
Professor's perturbation at reading something in an evening paper at
the station at Exeter, so, seeing that Dr. Seward keeps his
newspapers, I borrowed the files of 'The Westminster Gazette' and 'The
Pall Mall Gazette' and took them to my room. I remember how much the
'Dailygraph' and 'The Whitby Gazette', of which I had made cuttings,
had helped us to understand the terrible events at Whitby when Count
Dracula landed, so I shall look through the evening papers since then,
and perhaps I shall get some new light. I am not sleepy, and the work
will help to keep me quiet.
DR. SEWARD'S DIARY
 September.Mr. Harker arrived at nine o'clock. He got his wife's
wire just before starting. He is uncommonly clever, if one can judge
from his face, and full of energy. If this journal be true, and
judging by one's own wonderful experiences, it must be, he is also a
man of great nerve. That going down to the vault a second time was a
remarkable piece of daring. After reading his account of it I was
prepared to meet a good specimen of manhood, but hardly the quiet,
businesslike gentleman who came here today.
LATER.After lunch Harker and his wife went back to their own room,
and as I passed a while ago I heard the click of the typewriter. They
are hard at it. Mrs. Harker says that they are knitting together in
chronological order every scrap of evidence they have. Harker has got
the letters between the consignee of the boxes at Whitby and the
carriers in London who took charge of them. He is now reading his
wife's transcript of my diary. I wonder what they make out of it.
Here it is . . .
Strange that it never struck me that the very next house might be the
Count's hiding place Goodness knows that we had enough clues from
the conduct of the patient Renfield The bundle of letters relating
to the purchase of the house were with the transcript. Oh, if we had
only had them earlier we might have saved poor Lucy Stop That way
madness lies Harker has gone back, and is again collecting material.
He says that by dinner time they will be able to show a whole
connected narrative. He thinks that in the meantime I should see
Renfield, as hitherto he has been a sort of index to the coming and
going of the Count. I hardly see this yet, but when I get at the
dates I suppose I shall. What a good thing that Mrs. Harker put my
cylinders into type We never could have found the dates otherwise.
I found Renfield sitting placidly in his room with his hands folded,
smiling benignly. At the moment he seemed as sane as any one I ever
saw. I sat down and talked with him on a lot of subjects, all of
which he treated naturally. He then, of his own accord, spoke of
going home, a subject he has never mentioned to my knowledge during
his sojourn here. In fact, he spoke quite confidently of getting his
discharge at once. I believe that, had I not had the chat with Harker
and read the letters and the dates of his outbursts, I should have
been prepared to sign for him after a brief time of observation. As
it is, I am darkly suspicious. All those outbreaks were in some way
linked with the proximity of the Count. What then does this absolute
content mean? Can it be that his instinct is satisfied as to the
vampire's ultimate triumph? Stay. He is himself zoophagous, and in
his wild ravings outside the chapel door of the deserted house he
always spoke of 'master'. This all seems confirmation of our idea.
However, after a while I came away. My friend is just a little too
sane at present to make it safe to probe him too deep with questions.
He might begin to think, and then . . . So I came away. I mistrust
these quiet moods of of his, so I have given the attendant a hint to
look closely after him, and to have a strait waistcoat ready in case
of need.
JOHNATHAN HARKER'S JOURNAL
 September, in train to London.When I received Mr. Billington's
courteous message that he would give me any information in his power I
thought it best to go down to Whitby and make, on the spot, such
inquiries as I wanted. It was now my object to trace that horrid
cargo of the Count's to its place in London. Later, we may be able to
deal with it. Billington junior, a nice lad, met me at the station,
and brought me to his father's house, where they had decided that I
must spend the night. They are hospitable, with true Yorkshire
hospitality, give a guest everything and leave him to do as he likes.
They all knew that I was busy, and that my stay was short, and Mr.
Billington had ready in his office all the papers concerning the
consignment of boxes. It gave me almost a turn to see again one of
the letters which I had seen on the Count's table before I knew of his
diabolical plans. Everything had been carefully thought out, and done
systematically and with precision. He seemed to have been prepared
for every obstacle which might be placed by accident in the way of his
intentions being carried out. To use an Americanism, he had 'taken no
chances', and the absolute accuracy with which his instructions were
fulfilled was simply the logical result of his care. I saw the
invoice, and took note of it. 'Fifty cases of common earth, to be used
for experimental purposes'. Also the copy of the letter to Carter
Paterson, and their reply. Of both these I got copies. This was all
the information Mr. Billington could give me, so I went down to the
port and saw the coastguards, the Customs Officers and the harbour
master, who kindly put me in communication with the men who had
actually received the boxes. Their tally was exact with the list, and
they had nothing to add to the simple description 'fifty cases of
common earth', except that the boxes were 'main and mortal heavy', and
that shifting them was dry work. One of them added that it was hard
lines that there wasn't any gentleman 'such like as like yourself,
squire', to show some sort of appreciation of their efforts in a
liquid form. Another put in a rider that the thirst then generated
was such that even the time which had elapsed had not completely
allayed it. Needless to add, I took care before leaving to lift,
forever and adequately, this source of reproach.
 September.The station master was good enough to give me a line to
his old companion the station master at King's Cross, so that when I
arrived there in the morning I was able to ask him about the arrival
of the boxes. He, too put me at once in communication with the proper
officials, and I saw that their tally was correct with the original
invoice. The opportunities of acquiring an abnormal thirst had been
here limited. A noble use of them had, however, been made, and again
I was compelled to deal with the result in ex post facto manner.
From thence I went to Carter Paterson's central office, where I met
with the utmost courtesy. They looked up the transaction in their day
book and letter book, and at once telephoned to their King's Cross
office for more details. By good fortune, the men who did the teaming
were waiting for work, and the official at once sent them over,
sending also by one of them the waybill and all the papers connected
with the delivery of the boxes at Carfax. Here again I found the
tally agreeing exactly. The carriers' men were able to supplement the
paucity of the written words with a few more details. These were, I
shortly found, connected almost solely with the dusty nature of the
job, and the consequent thirst engendered in the operators. On my
affording an opportunity, through the medium of the currency of the
realm, of the allaying, at a later period, this beneficial evil, one
of the men remarked,
"That 'ere 'ouse, guv'nor, is the rummiest I ever was in. Blyme But
it ain't been touched sence a hundred years. There was dust that
thick in the place that you might have slep' on it without 'urtin' of
yer bones. An' the place was that neglected that yer might 'ave
smelled ole Jerusalem in it. But the old chapel, that took the cike,
that did Me and my mate, we thort we wouldn't never git out quick
enough. Lor', I wouldn't take less nor a quid a moment to stay there
arter dark."
Having been in the house, I could well believe him, but if he knew
what I know, he would, I think have raised his terms.
Of one thing I am now satisfied. That all those boxes which arrived at
Whitby from Varna in the Demeter were safely deposited in the old
chapel at Carfax. There should be fifty of them there, unless any
have since been removed, as from Dr. Seward's diary I fear.
Later.Mina and I have worked all day, and we have put all the papers
into order.
MINA HARKER'S JOURNAL
 September.I am so glad that I hardly know how to contain myself.
It is, I suppose, the reaction from the haunting fear which I have
had, that this terrible affair and the reopening of his old wound
might act detrimentally on Jonathan. I saw him leave for Whitby with
as brave a face as could, but I was sick with apprehension. The
effort has, however, done him good. He was never so resolute, never
so strong, never so full of volcanic energy, as at present. It is
just as that dear, good Professor Van Helsing said, he is true grit,
and he improves under strain that would kill a weaker nature. He came
back full of life and hope and determination. We have got everything
in order for tonight. I feel myself quite wild with excitement. I
suppose one ought to pity anything so hunted as the Count. That is
just it. This thing is not human, not even a beast. To read Dr.
Seward's account of poor Lucy's death, and what followed, is enough to
dry up the springs of pity in one's heart.
Later.Lord Godalming and Mr. Morris arrived earlier than we
expected. Dr. Seward was out on business, and had taken Jonathan with
him, so I had to see them. It was to me a painful meeting, for it
brought back all poor dear Lucy's hopes of only a few months ago. Of
course they had heard Lucy speak of me, and it seemed that Dr. Van
Helsing, too, had been quite 'blowing my trumpet', as Mr. Morris
expressed it. Poor fellows, neither of them is aware that I know all
about the proposals they made to Lucy. They did not quite know what
to say or do, as they were ignorant of the amount of my knowledge. So
they had to keep on neutral subjects. However, I thought the matter
over, and came to the conclusion that the best thing I could do would
be to post them on affairs right up to date. I knew from Dr. Seward's
diary that they had been at Lucy's death, her real death, and that I
need not fear to betray any secret before the time. So I told them,
as well as I could, that I had read all the papers and diaries, and
that my husband and I, having typewritten them, had just finished
putting them in order. I gave them each a copy to read in the
library. When Lord Godalming got his and turned it over, it does make
a pretty good pile, he said, "Did you write all this, Mrs. Harker?"
I nodded, and he went on.
"I don't quite see the drift of it, but you people are all so good and
kind, and have been working so earnestly and so energetically, that
all I can do is to accept your ideas blindfold and try to help you. I
have had one lesson already in accepting facts that should make a man
humble to the last hour of his life. Besides, I know you loved my
Lucy . . ."
Here he turned away and covered his face with his hands. I could hear
the tears in his voice. Mr. Morris, with instinctive delicacy, just
laid a hand for a moment on his shoulder, and then walked quietly out
of the room. I suppose there is something in a woman's nature that
makes a man free to break down before her and express his feelings on
the tender or emotional side without feeling it derogatory to his
manhood. For when Lord Godalming found himself alone with me he sat
down on the sofa and gave way utterly and openly. I sat down beside
him and took his hand. I hope he didn't think it forward of me, and
that if he ever thinks of it afterwards he never will have such a
thought. There I wrong him. I know he never will. He is too true a
gentleman. I said to him, for I could see that his heart was
breaking, "I loved dear Lucy, and I know what she was to you, and what
you were to her. She and I were like sisters, and now she is gone,
will you not let me be like a sister to you in your trouble? I know
what sorrows you have had, though I cannot measure the depth of them.
If sympathy and pity can help in your affliction, won't you let me be
of some little service, for Lucy's sake?"
In an instant the poor dear fellow was overwhelmed with grief. It
seemed to me that all that he had of late been suffering in silence
found a vent at once. He grew quite hysterical, and raising his open
hands, beat his palms together in a perfect agony of grief. He stood
up and then sat down again, and the tears rained down his cheeks. I
felt an infinite pity for him, and opened my arms unthinkingly. With
a sob he laid his head on my shoulder and cried like a wearied child,
whilst he shook with emotion.
We women have something of the mother in us that makes us rise above
smaller matters when the mother spirit is invoked. I felt this big
sorrowing man's head resting on me, as though it were that of a baby
that some day may lie on my bosom, and I stroked his hair as though he
were my own child. I never thought at the time how strange it all
was.
After a little bit his sobs ceased, and he raised himself with an
apology, though he made no disguise of his emotion. He told me that
for days and nights past, weary days and sleepless nights, he had been
unable to speak with any one, as a man must speak in his time of
sorrow. There was no woman whose sympathy could be given to him, or
with whom, owing to the terrible circumstance with which his sorrow
was surrounded, he could speak freely.
"I know now how I suffered," he said, as he dried his eyes, "but I do
not know even yet, and none other can ever know, how much your sweet
sympathy has been to me today. I shall know better in time, and
believe me that, though I am not ungrateful now, my gratitude will
grow with my understanding. You will let me be like a brother, will
you not, for all our lives, for dear Lucy's sake?"
"For dear Lucy's sake," I said as we clasped hands. "Ay, and for your
own sake," he added, "for if a man's esteem and gratitude are ever
worth the winning, you have won mine today. If ever the future should
bring to you a time when you need a man's help, believe me, you will
not call in vain. God grant that no such time may ever come to you to
break the sunshine of your life, but if it should ever come, promise
me that you will let me know."
He was so earnest, and his sorrow was so fresh, that I felt it would
comfort him, so I said, "I promise."
As I came along the corridor I saw Mr. Morris looking out of a window.
He turned as he heard my footsteps. "How is Art?" he said. Then
noticing my red eyes, he went on, "Ah, I see you have been comforting
him. Poor old fellow He needs it. No one but a woman can help a
man when he is in trouble of the heart, and he had no one to comfort
him."
He bore his own trouble so bravely that my heart bled for him. I saw
the manuscript in his hand, and I knew that when he read it he would
realize how much I knew, so I said to him, "I wish I could comfort all
who suffer from the heart. Will you let me be your friend, and will
you come to me for comfort if you need it? You will know later why I
speak."
He saw that I was in earnest, and stooping, took my hand, and raising
it to his lips, kissed it. It seemed but poor comfort to so brave and
unselfish a soul, and impulsively I bent over and kissed him. The
tears rose in his eyes, and there was a momentary choking in his
throat. He said quite calmly, "Little girl, you will never forget
that true hearted kindness, so long as ever you live" Then he went
into the study to his friend.
"Little girl" The very words he had used to Lucy, and, oh, but he
proved himself a friend.
CHAPTER 
DR. SEWARD'S DIARY
 September.I got home at five o'clock, and found that Godalming
and Morris had not only arrived, but had already studied the
transcript of the various diaries and letters which Harker had not yet
returned from his visit to the carriers' men, of whom Dr. Hennessey
had written to me. Mrs. Harker gave us a cup of tea, and I can
honestly say that, for the first time since I have lived in it, this
old house seemed like home. When we had finished, Mrs. Harker said,
"Dr. Seward, may I ask a favour? I want to see your patient, Mr.
Renfield. Do let me see him. What you have said of him in your diary
interests me so much"
She looked so appealing and so pretty that I could not refuse her, and
there was no possible reason why I should, so I took her with me.
When I went into the room, I told the man that a lady would like to see
him, to which he simply answered, "Why?"
"She is going through the house, and wants to see every one in it," I
answered.
"Oh, very well," he said, "let her come in, by all means, but just
wait a minute till I tidy up the place."
His method of tidying was peculiar, he simply swallowed all the flies
and spiders in the boxes before I could stop him. It was quite
evident that he feared, or was jealous of, some interference. When he
had got through his disgusting task, he said cheerfully, "Let the lady
come in," and sat down on the edge of his bed with his head down, but
with his eyelids raised so that he could see her as she entered. For
a moment I thought that he might have some homicidal intent. I
remembered how quiet he had been just before he attacked me in my own
study, and I took care to stand where I could seize him at once if he
attempted to make a spring at her.
She came into the room with an easy gracefulness which would at once
command the respect of any lunatic, for easiness is one of the
qualities mad people most respect. She walked over to him, smiling
pleasantly, and held out her hand.
"Good evening, Mr. Renfield," said she. "You see, I know you, for Dr.
Seward has told me of you." He made no immediate reply, but eyed her
all over intently with a set frown on his face. This look gave way to
one of wonder, which merged in doubt, then to my intense astonishment
he said, "You're not the girl the doctor wanted to marry, are you? You
can't be, you know, for she's dead."
Mrs. Harker smiled sweetly as she replied, "Oh no I have a husband
of my own, to whom I was married before I ever saw Dr. Seward, or he
me. I am Mrs. Harker."
"Then what are you doing here?"
"My husband and I are staying on a visit with Dr. Seward."
"Then don't stay."
"But why not?"
I thought that this style of conversation might not be pleasant to
Mrs. Harker, any more than it was to me, so I joined in, "How did you
know I wanted to marry anyone?"
His reply was simply contemptuous, given in a pause in which he turned
his eyes from Mrs. Harker to me, instantly turning them back again,
"What an asinine question"
"I don't see that at all, Mr. Renfield," said Mrs. Harker, at once
championing me.
He replied to her with as much courtesy and respect as he had shown
contempt to me, "You will, of course, understand, Mrs. Harker, that
when a man is so loved and honoured as our host is, everything
regarding him is of interest in our little community. Dr. Seward is
loved not only by his household and his friends, but even by his
patients, who, being some of them hardly in mental equilibrium, are
apt to distort causes and effects. Since I myself have been an inmate
of a lunatic asylum, I cannot but notice that the sophistic tendencies
of some of its inmates lean towards the errors of non causa and
ignoratio elenche."
I positively opened my eyes at this new development. Here was my own
pet lunatic, the most pronounced of his type that I had ever met with,
talking elemental philosophy, and with the manner of a polished
gentleman. I wonder if it was Mrs. Harker's presence which had
touched some chord in his memory. If this new phase was spontaneous,
or in any way due to her unconscious influence, she must have some
rare gift or power.
We continued to talk for some time, and seeing that he was seemingly
quite reasonable, she ventured, looking at me questioningly as she
began, to lead him to his favourite topic. I was again astonished,
for he addressed himself to the question with the impartiality of
the completest sanity. He even took himself as an example when he
mentioned certain things.
"Why, I myself am an instance of a man who had a strange belief.
Indeed, it was no wonder that my friends were alarmed, and insisted on
my being put under control. I used to fancy that life was a positive
and perpetual entity, and that by consuming a multitude of live
things, no matter how low in the scale of creation, one might
indefinitely prolong life. At times I held the belief so strongly
that I actually tried to take human life. The doctor here will bear
me out that on one occasion I tried to kill him for the purpose of
strengthening my vital powers by the assimilation with my own body of
his life through the medium of his blood, relying of course, upon the
Scriptural phrase, 'For the blood is the life.' Though, indeed, the
vendor of a certain nostrum has vulgarized the truism to the very
point of contempt. Isn't that true, doctor?"
I nodded assent, for I was so amazed that I hardly knew what to either
think or say, it was hard to imagine that I had seen him eat up his
spiders and flies not five minutes before. Looking at my watch, I saw
that I should go to the station to meet Van Helsing, so I told Mrs.
Harker that it was time to leave.
She came at once, after saying pleasantly to Mr. Renfield, "Goodbye,
and I hope I may see you often, under auspices pleasanter to
yourself."
To which, to my astonishment, he replied, "Goodbye, my dear. I pray
God I may never see your sweet face again. May He bless and keep
you"
When I went to the station to meet Van Helsing I left the boys behind
me. Poor Art seemed more cheerful than he has been since Lucy first
took ill, and Quincey is more like his own bright self than he has
been for many a long day.
Van Helsing stepped from the carriage with the eager nimbleness of a
boy. He saw me at once, and rushed up to me, saying, "Ah, friend
John, how goes all? Well? So I have been busy, for I come here to
stay if need be. All affairs are settled with me, and I have much to
tell. Madam Mina is with you? Yes. And her so fine husband? And
Arthur and my friend Quincey, they are with you, too? Good"
As I drove to the house I told him of what had passed, and of how my
own diary had come to be of some use through Mrs. Harker's suggestion,
at which the Professor interrupted me.
"Ah, that wonderful Madam Mina She has man's brain, a brain that a
man should have were he much gifted, and a woman's heart. The good
God fashioned her for a purpose, believe me, when He made that so good
combination. Friend John, up to now fortune has made that woman of
help to us, after tonight she must not have to do with this so
terrible affair. It is not good that she run a risk so great. We men
are determined, nay, are we not pledged, to destroy this monster? But
it is no part for a woman. Even if she be not harmed, her heart may
fail her in so much and so many horrors and hereafter she may suffer,
both in waking, from her nerves, and in sleep, from her dreams. And,
besides, she is young woman and not so long married, there may be
other things to think of some time, if not now. You tell me she has
wrote all, then she must consult with us, but tomorrow she say goodbye
to this work, and we go alone."
I agreed heartily with him, and then I told him what we had found in
his absence, that the house which Dracula had bought was the very next
one to my own. He was amazed, and a great concern seemed to come on
him.
"Oh that we had known it before" he said, "for then we might have
reached him in time to save poor Lucy. However, 'the milk that is
spilt cries not out afterwards,' as you say. We shall not think of
that, but go on our way to the end." Then he fell into a silence that
lasted till we entered my own gateway. Before we went to prepare for
dinner he said to Mrs. Harker, "I am told, Madam Mina, by my friend
John that you and your husband have put up in exact order all things
that have been, up to this moment."
"Not up to this moment, Professor," she said impulsively, "but up to
this morning."
"But why not up to now? We have seen hitherto how good light all the
little things have made. We have told our secrets, and yet no one who
has told is the worse for it."
Mrs. Harker began to blush, and taking a paper from her pockets, she
said, "Dr. Van Helsing, will you read this, and tell me if it must go
in. It is my record of today. I too have seen the need of putting
down at present everything, however trivial, but there is little in
this except what is personal. Must it go in?"
The Professor read it over gravely, and handed it back, saying, "It
need not go in if you do not wish it, but I pray that it may. It can
but make your husband love you the more, and all us, your friends,
more honour you, as well as more esteem and love." She took it back
with another blush and a bright smile.
And so now, up to this very hour, all the records we have are complete
and in order. The Professor took away one copy to study after dinner,
and before our meeting, which is fixed for nine o'clock. The rest of
us have already read everything, so when we meet in the study we shall
all be informed as to facts, and can arrange our plan of battle with
this terrible and mysterious enemy.
MINA HARKER'S JOURNAL
 September.When we met in Dr. Seward's study two hours after
dinner, which had been at six o'clock, we unconsciously formed a sort
of board or committee. Professor Van Helsing took the head of the
table, to which Dr. Seward motioned him as he came into the room. He
made me sit next to him on his right, and asked me to act as
secretary. Jonathan sat next to me. Opposite us were Lord Godalming,
Dr. Seward, and Mr. Morris, Lord Godalming being next the Professor,
and Dr. Seward in the centre.
The Professor said, "I may, I suppose, take it that we are all
acquainted with the facts that are in these papers." We all expressed
assent, and he went on, "Then it were, I think, good that I tell you
something of the kind of enemy with which we have to deal. I shall
then make known to you something of the history of this man, which has
been ascertained for me. So we then can discuss how we shall act, and
can take our measure according.
"There are such beings as vampires, some of us have evidence that they
exist. Even had we not the proof of our own unhappy experience, the
teachings and the records of the past give proof enough for sane
peoples. I admit that at the first I was sceptic. Were it not that
through long years I have trained myself to keep an open mind, I could
not have believed until such time as that fact thunder on my ear. 'See
See I prove, I prove.' Alas Had I known at first what now I know,
nay, had I even guess at him, one so precious life had been spared to
many of us who did love her. But that is gone, and we must so work,
that other poor souls perish not, whilst we can save. The nosferatu
do not die like the bee when he sting once. He is only stronger, and
being stronger, have yet more power to work evil. This vampire which
is amongst us is of himself so strong in person as twenty men, he is
of cunning more than mortal, for his cunning be the growth of ages, he
have still the aids of necromancy, which is, as his etymology imply,
the divination by the dead, and all the dead that he can come nigh to
are for him at command he is brute, and more than brute he is devil
in callous, and the heart of him is not he can, within his range,
direct the elements, the storm, the fog, the thunder he can command
all the meaner things, the rat, and the owl, and the bat, the moth,
and the fox, and the wolf, he can grow and become small and he can at
times vanish and come unknown. How then are we to begin our strike to
destroy him? How shall we find his where, and having found it, how
can we destroy? My friends, this is much, it is a terrible task that
we undertake, and there may be consequence to make the brave shudder.
For if we fail in this our fight he must surely win, and then where
end we? Life is nothings, I heed him not. But to fail here, is not
mere life or death. It is that we become as him, that we henceforward
become foul things of the night like him, without heart or conscience,
preying on the bodies and the souls of those we love best. To us
forever are the gates of heaven shut, for who shall open them to us
again? We go on for all time abhorred by all, a blot on the face of
God's sunshine, an arrow in the side of Him who died for man. But we
are face to face with duty, and in such case must we shrink? For me,
I say no, but then I am old, and life, with his sunshine, his fair
places, his song of birds, his music and his love, lie far behind. You
others are young. Some have seen sorrow, but there are fair days yet
in store. What say you?"
Whilst he was speaking, Jonathan had taken my hand. I feared, oh so
much, that the appalling nature of our danger was overcoming him when
I saw his hand stretch out, but it was life to me to feel its touch,
so strong, so self reliant, so resolute. A brave man's hand can speak
for itself, it does not even need a woman's love to hear its music.
When the Professor had done speaking my husband looked in my eyes, and
I in his, there was no need for speaking between us.
"I answer for Mina and myself," he said.
"Count me in, Professor," said Mr. Quincey Morris, laconically as
usual.
"I am with you," said Lord Godalming, "for Lucy's sake, if for no
other reason."
Dr. Seward simply nodded.
The Professor stood up and, after laying his golden crucifix on the
table, held out his hand on either side. I took his right hand, and
Lord Godalming his left, Jonathan held my right with his left and
stretched across to Mr. Morris. So as we all took hands our solemn
compact was made. I felt my heart icy cold, but it did not even occur
to me to draw back. We resumed our places, and Dr. Van Helsing went
on with a sort of cheerfulness which showed that the serious work had
begun. It was to be taken as gravely, and in as businesslike a way,
as any other transaction of life.
"Well, you know what we have to contend against, but we too, are not
without strength. We have on our side power of combination, a power
denied to the vampire kind, we have sources of science, we are free to
act and think, and the hours of the day and the night are ours
equally. In fact, so far as our powers extend, they are unfettered,
and we are free to use them. We have self devotion in a cause and an
end to achieve which is not a selfish one. These things are much.
"Now let us see how far the general powers arrayed against us are
restrict, and how the individual cannot. In fine, let us consider the
limitations of the vampire in general, and of this one in particular.
"All we have to go upon are traditions and superstitions. These do
not at the first appear much, when the matter is one of life and
death, nay of more than either life or death. Yet must we be
satisfied, in the first place because we have to be, no other means is
at our control, and secondly, because, after all these things,
tradition and superstition, are everything. Does not the belief in
vampires rest for others, though not, alas for us, on them? A year
ago which of us would have received such a possibility, in the midst
of our scientific, sceptical, matteroffact nineteenth century? We
even scouted a belief that we saw justified under our very eyes. Take
it, then, that the vampire, and the belief in his limitations and his
cure, rest for the moment on the same base. For, let me tell you, he
is known everywhere that men have been. In old Greece, in old Rome,
he flourish in Germany all over, in France, in India, even in the
Chermosese, and in China, so far from us in all ways, there even is
he, and the peoples for him at this day. He have follow the wake of
the berserker Icelander, the devilbegotten Hun, the Slav, the Saxon,
the Magyar.
"So far, then, we have all we may act upon, and let me tell you that
very much of the beliefs are justified by what we have seen in our own
so unhappy experience. The vampire live on, and cannot die by mere
passing of the time, he can flourish when that he can fatten on the
blood of the living. Even more, we have seen amongst us that he can
even grow younger, that his vital faculties grow strenuous, and seem
as though they refresh themselves when his special pabulum is plenty.
"But he cannot flourish without this diet, he eat not as others. Even
friend Jonathan, who lived with him for weeks, did never see him eat,
never He throws no shadow, he make in the mirror no reflect, as
again Jonathan observe. He has the strength of many of his hand,
witness again Jonathan when he shut the door against the wolves, and
when he help him from the diligence too. He can transform himself to
wolf, as we gather from the ship arrival in Whitby, when he tear open
the dog, he can be as bat, as Madam Mina saw him on the window at
Whitby, and as friend John saw him fly from this so near house, and as
my friend Quincey saw him at the window of Miss Lucy.
"He can come in mist which he create, that noble ship's captain proved
him of this, but, from what we know, the distance he can make this
mist is limited, and it can only be round himself.
"He come on moonlight rays as elemental dust, as again Jonathan saw
those sisters in the castle of Dracula. He become so small, we
ourselves saw Miss Lucy, ere she was at peace, slip through a
hairbreadth space at the tomb door. He can, when once he find his
way, come out from anything or into anything, no matter how close it
be bound or even fused up with fire, solder you call it. He can see
in the dark, no small power this, in a world which is one half shut
from the light. Ah, but hear me through.
"He can do all these things, yet he is not free. Nay, he is even more
prisoner than the slave of the galley, than the madman in his cell.
He cannot go where he lists, he who is not of nature has yet to obey
some of nature's laws, why we know not. He may not enter anywhere at
the first, unless there be some one of the household who bid him to
come, though afterwards he can come as he please. His power ceases,
as does that of all evil things, at the coming of the day.
"Only at certain times can he have limited freedom. If he be not at
the place whither he is bound, he can only change himself at noon or
at exact sunrise or sunset. These things we are told, and in this
record of ours we have proof by inference. Thus, whereas he can do as
he will within his limit, when he have his earthhome, his
coffinhome, his hellhome, the place unhallowed, as we saw when he
went to the grave of the suicide at Whitby, still at other time he can
only change when the time come. It is said, too, that he can only
pass running water at the slack or the flood of the tide. Then there
are things which so afflict him that he has no power, as the garlic
that we know of, and as for things sacred, as this symbol, my
crucifix, that was amongst us even now when we resolve, to them he is
nothing, but in their presence he take his place far off and silent
with respect. There are others, too, which I shall tell you of, lest
in our seeking we may need them.
"The branch of wild rose on his coffin keep him that he move not from
it, a sacred bullet fired into the coffin kill him so that he be true
dead, and as for the stake through him, we know already of its peace,
or the cut off head that giveth rest. We have seen it with our eyes.
"Thus when we find the habitation of this manthatwas, we can confine
him to his coffin and destroy him, if we obey what we know. But he is
clever. I have asked my friend Arminius, of BudaPesth University, to
make his record, and from all the means that are, he tell me of what
he has been. He must, indeed, have been that Voivode Dracula who won
his name against the Turk, over the great river on the very frontier
of Turkeyland. If it be so, then was he no common man, for in that
time, and for centuries after, he was spoken of as the cleverest and
the most cunning, as well as the bravest of the sons of the 'land
beyond the forest.' That mighty brain and that iron resolution went
with him to his grave, and are even now arrayed against us. The
Draculas were, says Arminius, a great and noble race, though now and
again were scions who were held by their coevals to have had dealings
with the Evil One. They learned his secrets in the Scholomance,
amongst the mountains over Lake Hermanstadt, where the devil claims
the tenth scholar as his due. In the records are such words as
'stregoica' witch, 'ordog' and 'pokol' Satan and hell, and in one
manuscript this very Dracula is spoken of as 'wampyr,' which we all
understand too well. There have been from the loins of this very one
great men and good women, and their graves make sacred the earth where
alone this foulness can dwell. For it is not the least of its terrors
that this evil thing is rooted deep in all good, in soil barren of
holy memories it cannot rest."
Whilst they were talking Mr. Morris was looking steadily at the
window, and he now got up quietly, and went out of the room. There
was a little pause, and then the Professor went on.
"And now we must settle what we do. We have here much data, and we
must proceed to lay out our campaign. We know from the inquiry of
Jonathan that from the castle to Whitby came fifty boxes of earth, all
of which were delivered at Carfax, we also know that at least some of
these boxes have been removed. It seems to me, that our first step
should be to ascertain whether all the rest remain in the house beyond
that wall where we look today, or whether any more have been removed.
If the latter, we must trace . . ."
Here we were interrupted in a very startling way. Outside the house
came the sound of a pistol shot, the glass of the window was shattered
with a bullet, which ricochetting from the top of the embrasure,
struck the far wall of the room. I am afraid I am at heart a coward,
for I shrieked out. The men all jumped to their feet, Lord Godalming
flew over to the window and threw up the sash. As he did so we heard
Mr. Morris' voice without, "Sorry I fear I have alarmed you. I
shall come in and tell you about it."
A minute later he came in and said, "It was an idiotic thing of me to
do, and I ask your pardon, Mrs. Harker, most sincerely, I fear I must
have frightened you terribly. But the fact is that whilst the
Professor was talking there came a big bat and sat on the window sill.
I have got such a horror of the damned brutes from recent events that
I cannot stand them, and I went out to have a shot, as I have been
doing of late of evenings, whenever I have seen one. You used to
laugh at me for it then, Art."
"Did you hit it?" asked Dr. Van Helsing.
"I don't know, I fancy not, for it flew away into the wood." Without
saying any more he took his seat, and the Professor began to resume
his statement.
"We must trace each of these boxes, and when we are ready, we must
either capture or kill this monster in his lair, or we must, so to
speak, sterilize the earth, so that no more he can seek safety in it.
Thus in the end we may find him in his form of man between the hours
of noon and sunset, and so engage with him when he is at his most
weak.
"And now for you, Madam Mina, this night is the end until all be well.
You are too precious to us to have such risk. When we part tonight,
you no more must question. We shall tell you all in good time. We
are men and are able to bear, but you must be our star and our hope,
and we shall act all the more free that you are not in the danger,
such as we are."
All the men, even Jonathan, seemed relieved, but it did not seem to me
good that they should brave danger and, perhaps lessen their safety,
strength being the best safety, through care of me, but their minds
were made up, and though it was a bitter pill for me to swallow, I
could say nothing, save to accept their chivalrous care of me.
Mr. Morris resumed the discussion, "As there is no time to lose, I
vote we have a look at his house right now. Time is everything with
him, and swift action on our part may save another victim."
I own that my heart began to fail me when the time for action came so
close, but I did not say anything, for I had a greater fear that if I
appeared as a drag or a hindrance to their work, they might even leave
me out of their counsels altogether. They have now gone off to
Carfax, with means to get into the house.
Manlike, they had told me to go to bed and sleep, as if a woman can
sleep when those she loves are in danger I shall lie down, and
pretend to sleep, lest Jonathan have added anxiety about me when he
returns.
DR. SEWARD'S DIARY
 October,  A.M.Just as we were about to leave the house, an urgent
message was brought to me from Renfield to know if I would see him at
once, as he had something of the utmost importance to say to me. I
told the messenger to say that I would attend to his wishes in the
morning, I was busy just at the moment.
The attendant added, "He seems very importunate, sir. I have never
seen him so eager. I don't know but what, if you don't see him soon,
he will have one of his violent fits." I knew the man would not have
said this without some cause, so I said, "All right, I'll go now," and
I asked the others to wait a few minutes for me, as I had to go and
see my patient.
"Take me with you, friend John," said the Professor. "His case in your
diary interest me much, and it had bearing, too, now and again on our
case. I should much like to see him, and especial when his mind is
disturbed."
"May I come also?" asked Lord Godalming.
"Me too?" said Quincey Morris. "May I come?" said Harker. I nodded,
and we all went down the passage together.
We found him in a state of considerable excitement, but far more
rational in his speech and manner than I had ever seen him. There was
an unusual understanding of himself, which was unlike anything I had
ever met with in a lunatic, and he took it for granted that his
reasons would prevail with others entirely sane. We all five went
into the room, but none of the others at first said anything. His
request was that I would at once release him from the asylum and send
him home. This he backed up with arguments regarding his complete
recovery, and adduced his own existing sanity.
"I appeal to your friends," he said, "they will, perhaps, not mind
sitting in judgement on my case. By the way, you have not introduced
me."
I was so much astonished, that the oddness of introducing a madman in
an asylum did not strike me at the moment, and besides, there was a
certain dignity in the man's manner, so much of the habit of equality,
that I at once made the introduction, "Lord Godalming, Professor Van
Helsing, Mr. Quincey Morris, of Texas, Mr. Jonathan Harker, Mr.
Renfield."
He shook hands with each of them, saying in turn, "Lord Godalming, I
had the honour of seconding your father at the Windham I grieve to
know, by your holding the title, that he is no more. He was a man
loved and honoured by all who knew him, and in his youth was, I have
heard, the inventor of a burnt rum punch, much patronized on Derby
night. Mr. Morris, you should be proud of your great state. Its
reception into the Union was a precedent which may have farreaching
effects hereafter, when the Pole and the Tropics may hold alliance to
the Stars and Stripes. The power of Treaty may yet prove a vast
engine of enlargement, when the Monroe doctrine takes its true place
as a political fable. What shall any man say of his pleasure at
meeting Van Helsing? Sir, I make no apology for dropping all forms of
conventional prefix. When an individual has revolutionized
therapeutics by his discovery of the continuous evolution of brain
matter, conventional forms are unfitting, since they would seem to
limit him to one of a class. You, gentlemen, who by nationality, by
heredity, or by the possession of natural gifts, are fitted to hold
your respective places in the moving world, I take to witness that I
am as sane as at least the majority of men who are in full possession
of their liberties. And I am sure that you, Dr. Seward, humanitarian
and medicojurist as well as scientist, will deem it a moral duty to
deal with me as one to be considered as under exceptional
circumstances." He made this last appeal with a courtly air of
conviction which was not without its own charm.
I think we were all staggered. For my own part, I was under the
conviction, despite my knowledge of the man's character and history,
that his reason had been restored, and I felt under a strong impulse
to tell him that I was satisfied as to his sanity, and would see about
the necessary formalities for his release in the morning. I thought
it better to wait, however, before making so grave a statement, for of
old I knew the sudden changes to which this particular patient was
liable. So I contented myself with making a general statement that he
appeared to be improving very rapidly, that I would have a longer chat
with him in the morning, and would then see what I could do in the
direction of meeting his wishes.
This did not at all satisfy him, for he said quickly, "But I fear, Dr.
Seward, that you hardly apprehend my wish. I desire to go at once,
here, now, this very hour, this very moment, if I may. Time presses,
and in our implied agreement with the old scytheman it is of the
essence of the contract. I am sure it is only necessary to put before
so admirable a practitioner as Dr. Seward so simple, yet so momentous
a wish, to ensure its fulfilment."
He looked at me keenly, and seeing the negative in my face, turned to
the others, and scrutinized them closely. Not meeting any sufficient
response, he went on, "Is it possible that I have erred in my
supposition?"
"You have," I said frankly, but at the same time, as I felt, brutally.
There was a considerable pause, and then he said slowly, "Then I
suppose I must only shift my ground of request. Let me ask for this
concession, boon, privilege, what you will. I am content to implore
in such a case, not on personal grounds, but for the sake of others. I
am not at liberty to give you the whole of my reasons, but you may, I
assure you, take it from me that they are good ones, sound and
unselfish, and spring from the highest sense of duty.
"Could you look, sir, into my heart, you would approve to the full the
sentiments which animate me. Nay, more, you would count me amongst
the best and truest of your friends."
Again he looked at us all keenly. I had a growing conviction that
this sudden change of his entire intellectual method was but yet
another phase of his madness, and so determined to let him go on a
little longer, knowing from experience that he would, like all
lunatics, give himself away in the end. Van Helsing was gazing at him
with a look of utmost intensity, his bushy eyebrows almost meeting
with the fixed concentration of his look. He said to Renfield in a
tone which did not surprise me at the time, but only when I thought of
it afterwards, for it was as of one addressing an equal, "Can you not
tell frankly your real reason for wishing to be free tonight? I will
undertake that if you will satisfy even me, a stranger, without
prejudice, and with the habit of keeping an open mind, Dr. Seward will
give you, at his own risk and on his own responsibility, the privilege
you seek."
He shook his head sadly, and with a look of poignant regret on his
face. The Professor went on, "Come, sir, bethink yourself. You claim
the privilege of reason in the highest degree, since you seek to
impress us with your complete reasonableness. You do this, whose
sanity we have reason to doubt, since you are not yet released from
medical treatment for this very defect. If you will not help us in
our effort to choose the wisest course, how can we perform the duty
which you yourself put upon us? Be wise, and help us, and if we can
we shall aid you to achieve your wish."
He still shook his head as he said, "Dr. Van Helsing, I have nothing to
say. Your argument is complete, and if I were free to speak I should
not hesitate a moment, but I am not my own master in the matter. I
can only ask you to trust me. If I am refused, the responsibility
does not rest with me."
I thought it was now time to end the scene, which was becoming too
comically grave, so I went towards the door, simply saying, "Come, my
friends, we have work to do. Goodnight."
As, however, I got near the door, a new change came over the patient.
He moved towards me so quickly that for the moment I feared that he
was about to make another homicidal attack. My fears, however, were
groundless, for he held up his two hands imploringly, and made his
petition in a moving manner. As he saw that the very excess of his
emotion was militating against him, by restoring us more to our old
relations, he became still more demonstrative. I glanced at Van
Helsing, and saw my conviction reflected in his eyes, so I became a
little more fixed in my manner, if not more stern, and motioned to him
that his efforts were unavailing. I had previously seen something of
the same constantly growing excitement in him when he had to make some
request of which at the time he had thought much, such for instance,
as when he wanted a cat, and I was prepared to see the collapse into
the same sullen acquiescence on this occasion.
My expectation was not realized, for when he found that his appeal
would not be successful, he got into quite a frantic condition. He
threw himself on his knees, and held up his hands, wringing them in
plaintive supplication, and poured forth a torrent of entreaty, with
the tears rolling down his cheeks, and his whole face and form
expressive of the deepest emotion.
"Let me entreat you, Dr. Seward, oh, let me implore you, to let me out
of this house at once. Send me away how you will and where you will,
send keepers with me with whips and chains, let them take me in a
strait waistcoat, manacled and legironed, even to gaol, but let me go
out of this. You don't know what you do by keeping me here. I am
speaking from the depths of my heart, of my very soul. You don't know
whom you wrong, or how, and I may not tell. Woe is me I may not
tell. By all you hold sacred, by all you hold dear, by your love that
is lost, by your hope that lives, for the sake of the Almighty, take
me out of this and save my soul from guilt Can't you hear me, man?
Can't you understand? Will you never learn? Don't you know that I am
sane and earnest now, that I am no lunatic in a mad fit, but a sane
man fighting for his soul? Oh, hear me Hear me Let me go, let me
go, let me go"
I thought that the longer this went on the wilder he would get, and so
would bring on a fit, so I took him by the hand and raised him up.
"Come," I said sternly, "no more of this, we have had quite enough
already. Get to your bed and try to behave more discreetly."
He suddenly stopped and looked at me intently for several moments.
Then, without a word, he rose and moving over, sat down on the side of
the bed. The collapse had come, as on former occasions, just as I had
expected.
When I was leaving the room, last of our party, he said to me in a
quiet, wellbred voice, "You will, I trust, Dr. Seward, do me the
justice to bear in mind, later on, that I did what I could to convince
you tonight."
CHAPTER 
JONATHAN HARKER'S JOURNAL
 October,  A.M.I went with the party to the search with an easy
mind, for I think I never saw Mina so absolutely strong and well. I
am so glad that she consented to hold back and let us men do the work.
Somehow, it was a dread to me that she was in this fearful business at
all, but now that her work is done, and that it is due to her energy
and brains and foresight that the whole story is put together in such
a way that every point tells, she may well feel that her part is
finished, and that she can henceforth leave the rest to us. We were,
I think, all a little upset by the scene with Mr. Renfield. When we
came away from his room we were silent till we got back to the study.
Then Mr. Morris said to Dr. Seward, "Say, Jack, if that man wasn't
attempting a bluff, he is about the sanest lunatic I ever saw. I'm
not sure, but I believe that he had some serious purpose, and if he
had, it was pretty rough on him not to get a chance."
Lord Godalming and I were silent, but Dr. Van Helsing added, "Friend
John, you know more lunatics than I do, and I'm glad of it, for I fear
that if it had been to me to decide I would before that last
hysterical outburst have given him free. But we live and learn, and
in our present task we must take no chance, as my friend Quincey would
say. All is best as they are."
Dr. Seward seemed to answer them both in a dreamy kind of way, "I
don't know but that I agree with you. If that man had been an
ordinary lunatic I would have taken my chance of trusting him, but he
seems so mixed up with the Count in an indexy kind of way that I am
afraid of doing anything wrong by helping his fads. I can't forget
how he prayed with almost equal fervor for a cat, and then tried to
tear my throat out with his teeth. Besides, he called the Count 'lord
and master', and he may want to get out to help him in some diabolical
way. That horrid thing has the wolves and the rats and his own kind
to help him, so I suppose he isn't above trying to use a respectable
lunatic. He certainly did seem earnest, though. I only hope we have
done what is best. These things, in conjunction with the wild work we
have in hand, help to unnerve a man."
The Professor stepped over, and laying his hand on his shoulder, said
in his grave, kindly way, "Friend John, have no fear. We are trying
to do our duty in a very sad and terrible case, we can only do as we
deem best. What else have we to hope for, except the pity of the good
God?"
Lord Godalming had slipped away for a few minutes, but now he
returned. He held up a little silver whistle as he remarked, "That
old place may be full of rats, and if so, I've got an antidote on
call."
Having passed the wall, we took our way to the house, taking care to
keep in the shadows of the trees on the lawn when the moonlight shone
out. When we got to the porch the Professor opened his bag and took
out a lot of things, which he laid on the step, sorting them into four
little groups, evidently one for each. Then he spoke.
"My friends, we are going into a terrible danger, and we need arms of
many kinds. Our enemy is not merely spiritual. Remember that he has
the strength of twenty men, and that, though our necks or our
windpipes are of the common kind, and therefore breakable or
crushable, his are not amenable to mere strength. A stronger man, or
a body of men more strong in all than him, can at certain times hold
him, but they cannot hurt him as we can be hurt by him. We must,
therefore, guard ourselves from his touch. Keep this near your
heart." As he spoke he lifted a little silver crucifix and held it
out to me, I being nearest to him, "put these flowers round your
neck," here he handed to me a wreath of withered garlic blossoms, "for
other enemies more mundane, this revolver and this knife, and for aid
in all, these so small electric lamps, which you can fasten to your
breast, and for all, and above all at the last, this, which we must
not desecrate needless."
This was a portion of Sacred Wafer, which he put in an envelope and
handed to me. Each of the others was similarly equipped.
"Now," he said, "friend John, where are the skeleton keys? If so that
we can open the door, we need not break house by the window, as before
at Miss Lucy's."
Dr. Seward tried one or two skeleton keys, his mechanical dexterity as
a surgeon standing him in good stead. Presently he got one to suit,
after a little play back and forward the bolt yielded, and with a
rusty clang, shot back. We pressed on the door, the rusty hinges
creaked, and it slowly opened. It was startlingly like the image
conveyed to me in Dr. Seward's diary of the opening of Miss Westenra's
tomb, I fancy that the same idea seemed to strike the others, for with
one accord they shrank back. The Professor was the first to move
forward, and stepped into the open door.
"In manus tuas, Domine" he said, crossing himself as he passed over
the threshold. We closed the door behind us, lest when we should have
lit our lamps we should possibly attract attention from the road. The
Professor carefully tried the lock, lest we might not be able to open
it from within should we be in a hurry making our exit. Then we all
lit our lamps and proceeded on our search.
The light from the tiny lamps fell in all sorts of odd forms, as the
rays crossed each other, or the opacity of our bodies threw great
shadows. I could not for my life get away from the feeling that there
was someone else amongst us. I suppose it was the recollection, so
powerfully brought home to me by the grim surroundings, of that
terrible experience in Transylvania. I think the feeling was common
to us all, for I noticed that the others kept looking over their
shoulders at every sound and every new shadow, just as I felt myself
doing.
The whole place was thick with dust. The floor was seemingly inches
deep, except where there were recent footsteps, in which on holding
down my lamp I could see marks of hobnails where the dust was cracked.
The walls were fluffy and heavy with dust, and in the corners were
masses of spider's webs, whereon the dust had gathered till they
looked like old tattered rags as the weight had torn them partly down.
On a table in the hall was a great bunch of keys, with a timeyellowed
label on each. They had been used several times, for on the table
were several similar rents in the blanket of dust, similar to that
exposed when the Professor lifted them.
He turned to me and said, "You know this place, Jonathan. You have
copied maps of it, and you know it at least more than we do. Which is
the way to the chapel?"
I had an idea of its direction, though on my former visit I had not
been able to get admission to it, so I led the way, and after a few
wrong turnings found myself opposite a low, arched oaken door, ribbed
with iron bands.
"This is the spot," said the Professor as he turned his lamp on a
small map of the house, copied from the file of my original
correspondence regarding the purchase. With a little trouble we found
the key on the bunch and opened the door. We were prepared for some
unpleasantness, for as we were opening the door a faint, malodorous
air seemed to exhale through the gaps, but none of us ever expected
such an odour as we encountered. None of the others had met the Count
at all at close quarters, and when I had seen him he was either in the
fasting stage of his existence in his rooms or, when he was bloated
with fresh blood, in a ruined building open to the air, but here the
place was small and close, and the long disuse had made the air
stagnant and foul. There was an earthy smell, as of some dry miasma,
which came through the fouler air. But as to the odour itself, how
shall I describe it? It was not alone that it was composed of all the
ills of mortality and with the pungent, acrid smell of blood, but it
seemed as though corruption had become itself corrupt. Faugh It
sickens me to think of it. Every breath exhaled by that monster
seemed to have clung to the place and intensified its loathsomeness.
Under ordinary circumstances such a stench would have brought our
enterprise to an end, but this was no ordinary case, and the high and
terrible purpose in which we were involved gave us a strength which
rose above merely physical considerations. After the involuntary
shrinking consequent on the first nauseous whiff, we one and all set
about our work as though that loathsome place were a garden of roses.
We made an accurate examination of the place, the Professor saying as
we began, "The first thing is to see how many of the boxes are left,
we must then examine every hole and corner and cranny and see if we
cannot get some clue as to what has become of the rest."
A glance was sufficient to show how many remained, for the great earth
chests were bulky, and there was no mistaking them.
There were only twentynine left out of the fifty Once I got a
fright, for, seeing Lord Godalming suddenly turn and look out of the
vaulted door into the dark passage beyond, I looked too, and for an
instant my heart stood still. Somewhere, looking out from the shadow,
I seemed to see the high lights of the Count's evil face, the ridge of
the nose, the red eyes, the red lips, the awful pallor. It was only
for a moment, for, as Lord Godalming said, "I thought I saw a face,
but it was only the shadows," and resumed his inquiry, I turned my
lamp in the direction, and stepped into the passage. There was no
sign of anyone, and as there were no corners, no doors, no aperture of
any kind, but only the solid walls of the passage, there could be no
hiding place even for him. I took it that fear had helped
imagination, and said nothing.
A few minutes later I saw Morris step suddenly back from a corner,
which he was examining. We all followed his movements with our eyes,
for undoubtedly some nervousness was growing on us, and we saw a whole
mass of phosphorescence, which twinkled like stars. We all
instinctively drew back. The whole place was becoming alive with
rats.
For a moment or two we stood appalled, all save Lord Godalming, who
was seemingly prepared for such an emergency. Rushing over to the
great ironbound oaken door, which Dr. Seward had described from the
outside, and which I had seen myself, he turned the key in the lock,
drew the huge bolts, and swung the door open. Then, taking his little
silver whistle from his pocket, he blew a low, shrill call. It was
answered from behind Dr. Seward's house by the yelping of dogs, and
after about a minute three terriers came dashing round the corner of
the house. Unconsciously we had all moved towards the door, and as we
moved I noticed that the dust had been much disturbed. The boxes
which had been taken out had been brought this way. But even in the
minute that had elapsed the number of the rats had vastly increased.
They seemed to swarm over the place all at once, till the lamplight,
shining on their moving dark bodies and glittering, baleful eyes, made
the place look like a bank of earth set with fireflies. The dogs
dashed on, but at the threshold suddenly stopped and snarled, and
then, simultaneously lifting their noses, began to howl in most
lugubrious fashion. The rats were multiplying in thousands, and we
moved out.
Lord Godalming lifted one of the dogs, and carrying him in, placed him
on the floor. The instant his feet touched the ground he seemed to
recover his courage, and rushed at his natural enemies. They fled
before him so fast that before he had shaken the life out of a score,
the other dogs, who had by now been lifted in the same manner, had but
small prey ere the whole mass had vanished.
With their going it seemed as if some evil presence had departed, for
the dogs frisked about and barked merrily as they made sudden darts at
their prostrate foes, and turned them over and over and tossed them in
the air with vicious shakes. We all seemed to find our spirits rise.
Whether it was the purifying of the deadly atmosphere by the opening
of the chapel door, or the relief which we experienced by finding
ourselves in the open I know not, but most certainly the shadow of
dread seemed to slip from us like a robe, and the occasion of our
coming lost something of its grim significance, though we did not
slacken a whit in our resolution. We closed the outer door and barred
and locked it, and bringing the dogs with us, began our search of the
house. We found nothing throughout except dust in extraordinary
proportions, and all untouched save for my own footsteps when I had
made my first visit. Never once did the dogs exhibit any symptom of
uneasiness, and even when we returned to the chapel they frisked about
as though they had been rabbit hunting in a summer wood.
The morning was quickening in the east when we emerged from the front.
Dr. Van Helsing had taken the key of the hall door from the bunch, and
locked the door in orthodox fashion, putting the key into his pocket
when he had done.
"So far," he said, "our night has been eminently successful. No harm
has come to us such as I feared might be and yet we have ascertained
how many boxes are missing. More than all do I rejoice that this, our
first, and perhaps our most difficult and dangerous, step has been
accomplished without the bringing thereinto our most sweet Madam Mina
or troubling her waking or sleeping thoughts with sights and sounds
and smells of horror which she might never forget. One lesson, too,
we have learned, if it be allowable to argue a particulari, that the
brute beasts which are to the Count's command are yet themselves not
amenable to his spiritual power, for look, these rats that would come
to his call, just as from his castle top he summon the wolves to your
going and to that poor mother's cry, though they come to him, they run
pellmell from the so little dogs of my friend Arthur. We have other
matters before us, other dangers, other fears, and that monster . . .
He has not used his power over the brute world for the only or the
last time tonight. So be it that he has gone elsewhere. Good It
has given us opportunity to cry 'check' in some ways in this chess
game, which we play for the stake of human souls. And now let us go
home. The dawn is close at hand, and we have reason to be content
with our first night's work. It may be ordained that we have many
nights and days to follow, if full of peril, but we must go on, and
from no danger shall we shrink."
The house was silent when we got back, save for some poor creature who
was screaming away in one of the distant wards, and a low, moaning
sound from Renfield's room. The poor wretch was doubtless torturing
himself, after the manner of the insane, with needless thoughts of
pain.
I came tiptoe into our own room, and found Mina asleep, breathing so
softly that I had to put my ear down to hear it. She looks paler than
usual. I hope the meeting tonight has not upset her. I am truly
thankful that she is to be left out of our future work, and even of
our deliberations. It is too great a strain for a woman to bear. I
did not think so at first, but I know better now. Therefore I am glad
that it is settled. There may be things which would frighten her to
hear, and yet to conceal them from her might be worse than to tell her
if once she suspected that there was any concealment. Henceforth our
work is to be a sealed book to her, till at least such time as we can
tell her that all is finished, and the earth free from a monster of
the nether world. I daresay it will be difficult to begin to keep
silence after such confidence as ours, but I must be resolute, and
tomorrow I shall keep dark over tonight's doings, and shall refuse to
speak of anything that has happened. I rest on the sofa, so as not to
disturb her.
 October, later.I suppose it was natural that we should have all
overslept ourselves, for the day was a busy one, and the night had no
rest at all. Even Mina must have felt its exhaustion, for though I
slept till the sun was high, I was awake before her, and had to call
two or three times before she awoke. Indeed, she was so sound asleep
that for a few seconds she did not recognize me, but looked at me with
a sort of blank terror, as one looks who has been waked out of a bad
dream. She complained a little of being tired, and I let her rest
till later in the day. We now know of twentyone boxes having been
removed, and if it be that several were taken in any of these removals
we may be able to trace them all. Such will, of course, immensely
simplify our labor, and the sooner the matter is attended to the
better. I shall look up Thomas Snelling today.
DR. SEWARD'S DIARY
 October.It was towards noon when I was awakened by the Professor
walking into my room. He was more jolly and cheerful than usual, and
it is quite evident that last night's work has helped to take some of
the brooding weight off his mind.
After going over the adventure of the night he suddenly said, "Your
patient interests me much. May it be that with you I visit him this
morning? Or if that you are too occupy, I can go alone if it may be.
It is a new experience to me to find a lunatic who talk philosophy,
and reason so sound."
I had some work to do which pressed, so I told him that if he would go
alone I would be glad, as then I should not have to keep him waiting,
so I called an attendant and gave him the necessary instructions.
Before the Professor left the room I cautioned him against getting any
false impression from my patient.
"But," he answered, "I want him to talk of himself and of his delusion
as to consuming live things. He said to Madam Mina, as I see in your
diary of yesterday, that he had once had such a belief. Why do you
smile, friend John?"
"Excuse me," I said, "but the answer is here." I laid my hand on the
typewritten matter. "When our sane and learned lunatic made that very
statement of how he used to consume life, his mouth was actually
nauseous with the flies and spiders which he had eaten just before
Mrs. Harker entered the room."
Van Helsing smiled in turn. "Good" he said. "Your memory is true,
friend John. I should have remembered. And yet it is this very
obliquity of thought and memory which makes mental disease such a
fascinating study. Perhaps I may gain more knowledge out of the folly
of this madman than I shall from the teaching of the most wise. Who
knows?"
I went on with my work, and before long was through that in hand. It
seemed that the time had been very short indeed, but there was Van
Helsing back in the study.
"Do I interrupt?" he asked politely as he stood at the door.
"Not at all," I answered. "Come in. My work is finished, and I am
free. I can go with you now, if you like."
"It is needless, I have seen him"
"Well?"
"I fear that he does not appraise me at much. Our interview was
short. When I entered his room he was sitting on a stool in the
centre, with his elbows on his knees, and his face was the picture of
sullen discontent. I spoke to him as cheerfully as I could, and with
such a measure of respect as I could assume. He made no reply
whatever. 'Don't you know me?' I asked. His answer was not
reassuring 'I know you well enough you are the old fool Van
Helsing. I wish you would take yourself and your idiotic brain
theories somewhere else. Damn all thickheaded Dutchmen' Not a word
more would he say, but sat in his implacable sullenness as indifferent
to me as though I had not been in the room at all. Thus departed for
this time my chance of much learning from this so clever lunatic, so I
shall go, if I may, and cheer myself with a few happy words with that
sweet soul Madam Mina. Friend John, it does rejoice me unspeakable
that she is no more to be pained, no more to be worried with our
terrible things. Though we shall much miss her help, it is better
so."
"I agree with you with all my heart," I answered earnestly, for I did
not want him to weaken in this matter. "Mrs. Harker is better out of
it. Things are quite bad enough for us, all men of the world, and who
have been in many tight places in our time, but it is no place for a
woman, and if she had remained in touch with the affair, it would in
time infallibly have wrecked her."
So Van Helsing has gone to confer with Mrs. Harker and Harker, Quincey
and Art are all out following up the clues as to the earth boxes. I
shall finish my round of work and we shall meet tonight.
MINA HARKER'S JOURNAL
 October.It is strange to me to be kept in the dark as I am today,
after Jonathan's full confidence for so many years, to see him
manifestly avoid certain matters, and those the most vital of all.
This morning I slept late after the fatigues of yesterday, and though
Jonathan was late too, he was the earlier. He spoke to me before he
went out, never more sweetly or tenderly, but he never mentioned a
word of what had happened in the visit to the Count's house. And yet
he must have known how terribly anxious I was. Poor dear fellow I
suppose it must have distressed him even more than it did me. They
all agreed that it was best that I should not be drawn further into
this awful work, and I acquiesced. But to think that he keeps
anything from me And now I am crying like a silly fool, when I know
it comes from my husband's great love and from the good, good wishes
of those other strong men.
That has done me good. Well, some day Jonathan will tell me all. And
lest it should ever be that he should think for a moment that I kept
anything from him, I still keep my journal as usual. Then if he has
feared of my trust I shall show it to him, with every thought of my
heart put down for his dear eyes to read. I feel strangely sad and
lowspirited today. I suppose it is the reaction from the terrible
excitement.
Last night I went to bed when the men had gone, simply because they
told me to. I didn't feel sleepy, and I did feel full of devouring
anxiety. I kept thinking over everything that has been ever since
Jonathan came to see me in London, and it all seems like a horrible
tragedy, with fate pressing on relentlessly to some destined end.
Everything that one does seems, no matter how right it may be, to bring
on the very thing which is most to be deplored. If I hadn't gone to
Whitby, perhaps poor dear Lucy would be with us now. She hadn't taken
to visiting the churchyard till I came, and if she hadn't come there
in the day time with me she wouldn't have walked in her sleep. And if
she hadn't gone there at night and asleep, that monster couldn't have
destroyed her as he did. Oh, why did I ever go to Whitby? There now,
crying again I wonder what has come over me today. I must hide it
from Jonathan, for if he knew that I had been crying twice in one
morning . . . I, who never cried on my own account, and whom he has
never caused to shed a tear, the dear fellow would fret his heart out.
I shall put a bold face on, and if I do feel weepy, he shall never see
it. I suppose it is just one of the lessons that we poor women have
to learn . . .
I can't quite remember how I fell asleep last night. I remember
hearing the sudden barking of the dogs and a lot of queer sounds, like
praying on a very tumultuous scale, from Mr. Renfield's room, which is
somewhere under this. And then there was silence over everything,
silence so profound that it startled me, and I got up and looked out
of the window. All was dark and silent, the black shadows thrown by
the moonlight seeming full of a silent mystery of their own. Not a
thing seemed to be stirring, but all to be grim and fixed as death or
fate, so that a thin streak of white mist, that crept with almost
imperceptible slowness across the grass towards the house, seemed to
have a sentience and a vitality of its own. I think that the
digression of my thoughts must have done me good, for when I got back
to bed I found a lethargy creeping over me. I lay a while, but could
not quite sleep, so I got out and looked out of the window again. The
mist was spreading, and was now close up to the house, so that I could
see it lying thick against the wall, as though it were stealing up to
the windows. The poor man was more loud than ever, and though I could
not distinguish a word he said, I could in some way recognize in his
tones some passionate entreaty on his part. Then there was the sound
of a struggle, and I knew that the attendants were dealing with him.
I was so frightened that I crept into bed, and pulled the clothes over
my head, putting my fingers in my ears. I was not then a bit sleepy,
at least so I thought, but I must have fallen asleep, for except
dreams, I do not remember anything until the morning, when Jonathan
woke me. I think that it took me an effort and a little time to
realize where I was, and that it was Jonathan who was bending over me.
My dream was very peculiar, and was almost typical of the way that
waking thoughts become merged in, or continued in, dreams.
I thought that I was asleep, and waiting for Jonathan to come back. I
was very anxious about him, and I was powerless to act, my feet, and
my hands, and my brain were weighted, so that nothing could proceed at
the usual pace. And so I slept uneasily and thought. Then it began
to dawn upon me that the air was heavy, and dank, and cold. I put
back the clothes from my face, and found, to my surprise, that all was
dim around. The gaslight which I had left lit for Jonathan, but
turned down, came only like a tiny red spark through the fog, which
had evidently grown thicker and poured into the room. Then it
occurred to me that I had shut the window before I had come to bed. I
would have got out to make certain on the point, but some leaden
lethargy seemed to chain my limbs and even my will. I lay still and
endured, that was all. I closed my eyes, but could still see through
my eyelids. It is wonderful what tricks our dreams play us, and how
conveniently we can imagine. The mist grew thicker and thicker and I
could see now how it came in, for I could see it like smoke, or with
the white energy of boiling water, pouring in, not through the window,
but through the joinings of the door. It got thicker and thicker,
till it seemed as if it became concentrated into a sort of pillar of
cloud in the room, through the top of which I could see the light of
the gas shining like a red eye. Things began to whirl through my
brain just as the cloudy column was now whirling in the room, and
through it all came the scriptural words "a pillar of cloud by day and
of fire by night." Was it indeed such spiritual guidance that was
coming to me in my sleep? But the pillar was composed of both the day
and the night guiding, for the fire was in the red eye, which at the
thought got a new fascination for me, till, as I looked, the fire
divided, and seemed to shine on me through the fog like two red eyes,
such as Lucy told me of in her momentary mental wandering when, on the
cliff, the dying sunlight struck the windows of St. Mary's Church.
Suddenly the horror burst upon me that it was thus that Jonathan had
seen those awful women growing into reality through the whirling mist
in the moonlight, and in my dream I must have fainted, for all became
black darkness. The last conscious effort which imagination made was
to show me a livid white face bending over me out of the mist.
I must be careful of such dreams, for they would unseat one's reason if
there were too much of them. I would get Dr. Van Helsing or Dr.
Seward to prescribe something for me which would make me sleep, only
that I fear to alarm them. Such a dream at the present time would
become woven into their fears for me. Tonight I shall strive hard to
sleep naturally. If I do not, I shall tomorrow night get them to give
me a dose of chloral, that cannot hurt me for once, and it will give
me a good night's sleep. Last night tired me more than if I had not
slept at all.
 October  P.M.Last night I slept, but did not dream. I must have
slept soundly, for I was not waked by Jonathan coming to bed, but the
sleep has not refreshed me, for today I feel terribly weak and
spiritless. I spent all yesterday trying to read, or lying down
dozing. In the afternoon, Mr. Renfield asked if he might see me. Poor
man, he was very gentle, and when I came away he kissed my hand and
bade God bless me. Some way it affected me much. I am crying when I
think of him. This is a new weakness, of which I must be careful.
Jonathan would be miserable if he knew I had been crying. He and the
others were out till dinner time, and they all came in tired. I did
what I could to brighten them up, and I suppose that the effort did me
good, for I forgot how tired I was. After dinner they sent me to bed,
and all went off to smoke together, as they said, but I knew that they
wanted to tell each other of what had occurred to each during the day.
I could see from Jonathan's manner that he had something important to
communicate. I was not so sleepy as I should have been, so before
they went I asked Dr. Seward to give me a little opiate of some kind,
as I had not slept well the night before. He very kindly made me up a
sleeping draught, which he gave to me, telling me that it would do me
no harm, as it was very mild . . . I have taken it, and am waiting for
sleep, which still keeps aloof. I hope I have not done wrong, for as
sleep begins to flirt with me, a new fear comes that I may have been
foolish in thus depriving myself of the power of waking. I might want
it. Here comes sleep. Goodnight.
CHAPTER 
JONATHAN HARKER'S JOURNAL
 October, evening.I found Thomas Snelling in his house at Bethnal
Green, but unhappily he was not in a condition to remember anything.
The very prospect of beer which my expected coming had opened to him
had proved too much, and he had begun too early on his expected
debauch. I learned, however, from his wife, who seemed a decent, poor
soul, that he was only the assistant of Smollet, who of the two mates
was the responsible person. So off I drove to Walworth, and found Mr.
Joseph Smollet at home and in his shirtsleeves, taking a late tea out
of a saucer. He is a decent, intelligent fellow, distinctly a good,
reliable type of workman, and with a headpiece of his own. He
remembered all about the incident of the boxes, and from a wonderful
dogeared notebook, which he produced from some mysterious receptacle
about the seat of his trousers, and which had hieroglyphical entries
in thick, halfobliterated pencil, he gave me the destinations of the
boxes. There were, he said, six in the cartload which he took from
Carfax and left at  Chicksand Street, Mile End New Town, and
another six which he deposited at Jamaica Lane, Bermondsey. If then
the Count meant to scatter these ghastly refuges of his over London,
these places were chosen as the first of delivery, so that later he
might distribute more fully. The systematic manner in which this was
done made me think that he could not mean to confine himself to two
sides of London. He was now fixed on the far east on the northern
shore, on the east of the southern shore, and on the south. The north
and west were surely never meant to be left out of his diabolical
scheme, let alone the City itself and the very heart of fashionable
London in the southwest and west. I went back to Smollet, and asked
him if he could tell us if any other boxes had been taken from Carfax.
He replied, "Well guv'nor, you've treated me very 'an'some", I had
given him half a sovereign, "an I'll tell yer all I know. I heard a
man by the name of Bloxam say four nights ago in the 'Are an' 'Ounds,
in Pincher's Alley, as 'ow he an' his mate 'ad 'ad a rare dusty job in
a old 'ouse at Purfleet. There ain't a many such jobs as this 'ere,
an' I'm thinkin' that maybe Sam Bloxam could tell ye summut."
I asked if he could tell me where to find him. I told him that if he
could get me the address it would be worth another half sovereign to
him. So he gulped down the rest of his tea and stood up, saying that
he was going to begin the search then and there.
At the door he stopped, and said, "Look 'ere, guv'nor, there ain't no
sense in me a keepin' you 'ere. I may find Sam soon, or I mayn't, but
anyhow he ain't like to be in a way to tell ye much tonight. Sam is a
rare one when he starts on the booze. If you can give me a envelope
with a stamp on it, and put yer address on it, I'll find out where Sam
is to be found and post it ye tonight. But ye'd better be up arter
'im soon in the mornin', never mind the booze the night afore."
This was all practical, so one of the children went off with a penny
to buy an envelope and a sheet of paper, and to keep the change. When
she came back, I addressed the envelope and stamped it, and when
Smollet had again faithfully promised to post the address when found,
I took my way to home. We're on the track anyhow. I am tired
tonight, and I want to sleep. Mina is fast asleep, and looks a little
too pale. Her eyes look as though she had been crying. Poor dear,
I've no doubt it frets her to be kept in the dark, and it may make her
doubly anxious about me and the others. But it is best as it is. It
is better to be disappointed and worried in such a way now than to
have her nerve broken. The doctors were quite right to insist on her
being kept out of this dreadful business. I must be firm, for on me
this particular burden of silence must rest. I shall not ever enter
on the subject with her under any circumstances. Indeed, It may not
be a hard task, after all, for she herself has become reticent on the
subject, and has not spoken of the Count or his doings ever since we
told her of our decision.
 October, eveningA long and trying and exciting day. By the first
post I got my directed envelope with a dirty scrap of paper enclosed,
on which was written with a carpenter's pencil in a sprawling hand,
"Sam Bloxam, Korkrans,  Poters Cort, Bartel Street, Walworth. Arsk
for the depite."
I got the letter in bed, and rose without waking Mina. She looked
heavy and sleepy and pale, and far from well. I determined not to
wake her, but that when I should return from this new search, I would
arrange for her going back to Exeter. I think she would be happier in
our own home, with her daily tasks to interest her, than in being here
amongst us and in ignorance. I only saw Dr. Seward for a moment, and
told him where I was off to, promising to come back and tell the rest
so soon as I should have found out anything. I drove to Walworth and
found, with some difficulty, Potter's Court. Mr. Smollet's spelling
misled me, as I asked for Poter's Court instead of Potter's Court.
However, when I had found the court, I had no difficulty in
discovering Corcoran's lodging house.
When I asked the man who came to the door for the "depite," he shook
his head, and said, "I dunno 'im. There ain't no such a person 'ere.
I never 'eard of 'im in all my bloomin' days. Don't believe there
ain't nobody of that kind livin' 'ere or anywheres."
I took out Smollet's letter, and as I read it it seemed to me that the
lesson of the spelling of the name of the court might guide me. "What
are you?" I asked.
"I'm the depity," he answered.
I saw at once that I was on the right track. Phonetic spelling had
again misled me. A half crown tip put the deputy's knowledge at my
disposal, and I learned that Mr. Bloxam, who had slept off the remains
of his beer on the previous night at Corcoran's, had left for his work
at Poplar at five o'clock that morning. He could not tell me where
the place of work was situated, but he had a vague idea that it was
some kind of a "newfangled ware'us," and with this slender clue I had
to start for Poplar. It was twelve o'clock before I got any
satisfactory hint of such a building, and this I got at a coffee shop,
where some workmen were having their dinner. One of them suggested
that there was being erected at Cross Angel Street a new "cold
storage" building, and as this suited the condition of a "newfangled
ware'us," I at once drove to it. An interview with a surly gatekeeper
and a surlier foreman, both of whom were appeased with the coin of the
realm, put me on the track of Bloxam. He was sent for on my
suggestion that I was willing to pay his days wages to his foreman for
the privilege of asking him a few questions on a private matter. He
was a smart enough fellow, though rough of speech and bearing. When I
had promised to pay for his information and given him an earnest, he
told me that he had made two journeys between Carfax and a house in
Piccadilly, and had taken from this house to the latter nine great
boxes, "main heavy ones," with a horse and cart hired by him for this
purpose.
I asked him if he could tell me the number of the house in Piccadilly,
to which he replied, "Well, guv'nor, I forgits the number, but it was
only a few door from a big white church, or somethink of the kind, not
long built. It was a dusty old 'ouse, too, though nothin' to the
dustiness of the 'ouse we tooked the bloomin' boxes from."
"How did you get in if both houses were empty?"
"There was the old party what engaged me a waitin' in the 'ouse at
Purfleet. He 'elped me to lift the boxes and put them in the dray.
Curse me, but he was the strongest chap I ever struck, an' him a old
feller, with a white moustache, one that thin you would think he
couldn't throw a shadder."
How this phrase thrilled through me
"Why, 'e took up 'is end o' the boxes like they was pounds of tea, and
me a puffin' an' a blowin' afore I could upend mine anyhow, an' I'm no
chicken, neither."
"How did you get into the house in Piccadilly?" I asked.
"He was there too. He must 'a started off and got there afore me, for
when I rung of the bell he kem an' opened the door 'isself an' 'elped
me carry the boxes into the 'all."
"The whole nine?" I asked.
"Yus, there was five in the first load an' four in the second. It was
main dry work, an' I don't so well remember 'ow I got 'ome."
I interrupted him, "Were the boxes left in the hall?"
"Yus, it was a big 'all, an' there was nothin' else in it."
I made one more attempt to further matters. "You didn't have any
key?"
"Never used no key nor nothink. The old gent, he opened the door
'isself an' shut it again when I druv off. I don't remember the last
time, but that was the beer."
"And you can't remember the number of the house?"
"No, sir. But ye needn't have no difficulty about that. It's a 'igh
'un with a stone front with a bow on it, an' 'igh steps up to the
door. I know them steps, 'avin' 'ad to carry the boxes up with three
loafers what come round to earn a copper. The old gent give them
shillin's, an' they seein' they got so much, they wanted more. But 'e
took one of them by the shoulder and was like to throw 'im down the
steps, till the lot of them went away cussin'."
I thought that with this description I could find the house, so having
paid my friend for his information, I started off for Piccadilly. I
had gained a new painful experience. The Count could, it was evident,
handle the earth boxes himself. If so, time was precious, for now
that he had achieved a certain amount of distribution, he could, by
choosing his own time, complete the task unobserved. At Piccadilly
Circus I discharged my cab, and walked westward. Beyond the Junior
Constitutional I came across the house described and was satisfied
that this was the next of the lairs arranged by Dracula. The house
looked as though it had been long untenanted. The windows were
encrusted with dust, and the shutters were up. All the framework was
black with time, and from the iron the paint had mostly scaled away.
It was evident that up to lately there had been a large notice board
in front of the balcony. It had, however, been roughly torn away, the
uprights which had supported it still remaining. Behind the rails of
the balcony I saw there were some loose boards, whose raw edges looked
white. I would have given a good deal to have been able to see the
notice board intact, as it would, perhaps, have given some clue to the
ownership of the house. I remembered my experience of the investigation
and purchase of Carfax, and I could not but feel that if I could find
the former owner there might be some means discovered of gaining access
to the house.
There was at present nothing to be learned from the Piccadilly side,
and nothing could be done, so I went around to the back to see if
anything could be gathered from this quarter. The mews were active,
the Piccadilly houses being mostly in occupation. I asked one or two
of the grooms and helpers whom I saw around if they could tell me
anything about the empty house. One of them said that he heard it had
lately been taken, but he couldn't say from whom. He told me,
however, that up to very lately there had been a notice board of "For
Sale" up, and that perhaps Mitchell, Sons,  Candy the house agents
could tell me something, as he thought he remembered seeing the name
of that firm on the board. I did not wish to seem too eager, or to
let my informant know or guess too much, so thanking him in the usual
manner, I strolled away. It was now growing dusk, and the autumn
night was closing in, so I did not lose any time. Having learned the
address of Mitchell, Sons,  Candy from a directory at the Berkeley, I
was soon at their office in Sackville Street.
The gentleman who saw me was particularly suave in manner, but
uncommunicative in equal proportion. Having once told me that the
Piccadilly house, which throughout our interview he called a
"mansion," was sold, he considered my business as concluded. When I
asked who had purchased it, he opened his eyes a thought wider, and
paused a few seconds before replying, "It is sold, sir."
"Pardon me," I said, with equal politeness, "but I have a special
reason for wishing to know who purchased it."
Again he paused longer, and raised his eyebrows still more. "It is
sold, sir," was again his laconic reply.
"Surely," I said, "you do not mind letting me know so much."
"But I do mind," he answered. "The affairs of their clients are
absolutely safe in the hands of Mitchell, Sons,  Candy."
This was manifestly a prig of the first water, and there was no use
arguing with him. I thought I had best meet him on his own ground, so
I said, "Your clients, sir, are happy in having so resolute a guardian
of their confidence. I am myself a professional man."
Here I handed him my card. "In this instance I am not prompted by
curiosity, I act on the part of Lord Godalming, who wishes to know
something of the property which was, he understood, lately for sale."
These words put a different complexion on affairs. He said, "I would
like to oblige you if I could, Mr. Harker, and especially would I like
to oblige his lordship. We once carried out a small matter of renting
some chambers for him when he was the honourable Arthur Holmwood. If
you will let me have his lordship's address I will consult the House
on the subject, and will, in any case, communicate with his lordship
by tonight's post. It will be a pleasure if we can so far deviate
from our rules as to give the required information to his lordship."
I wanted to secure a friend, and not to make an enemy, so I thanked
him, gave the address at Dr. Seward's and came away. It was now dark,
and I was tired and hungry. I got a cup of tea at the Aerated Bread
Company and came down to Purfleet by the next train.
I found all the others at home. Mina was looking tired and pale, but
she made a gallant effort to be bright and cheerful. It wrung my
heart to think that I had had to keep anything from her and so caused
her inquietude. Thank God, this will be the last night of her looking
on at our conferences, and feeling the sting of our not showing our
confidence. It took all my courage to hold to the wise resolution of
keeping her out of our grim task. She seems somehow more reconciled,
or else the very subject seems to have become repugnant to her, for
when any accidental allusion is made she actually shudders. I am glad
we made our resolution in time, as with such a feeling as this, our
growing knowledge would be torture to her.
I could not tell the others of the day's discovery till we were alone,
so after dinner, followed by a little music to save appearances even
amongst ourselves, I took Mina to her room and left her to go to bed.
The dear girl was more affectionate with me than ever, and clung to me
as though she would detain me, but there was much to be talked of and
I came away. Thank God, the ceasing of telling things has made no
difference between us.
When I came down again I found the others all gathered round the fire
in the study. In the train I had written my diary so far, and simply
read it off to them as the best means of letting them get abreast of
my own information.
When I had finished Van Helsing said, "This has been a great day's
work, friend Jonathan. Doubtless we are on the track of the missing
boxes. If we find them all in that house, then our work is near the
end. But if there be some missing, we must search until we find them.
Then shall we make our final coup, and hunt the wretch to his real
death."
We all sat silent awhile and all at once Mr. Morris spoke, "Say How
are we going to get into that house?"
"We got into the other," answered Lord Godalming quickly.
"But, Art, this is different. We broke house at Carfax, but we had
night and a walled park to protect us. It will be a mighty different
thing to commit burglary in Piccadilly, either by day or night. I
confess I don't see how we are going to get in unless that agency duck
can find us a key of some sort."
Lord Godalming's brows contracted, and he stood up and walked about the
room. Byandby he stopped and said, turning from one to another of
us, "Quincey's head is level. This burglary business is getting
serious. We got off once all right, but we have now a rare job on
hand. Unless we can find the Count's key basket."
As nothing could well be done before morning, and as it would be at
least advisable to wait till Lord Godalming should hear from
Mitchell's, we decided not to take any active step before breakfast
time. For a good while we sat and smoked, discussing the matter in
its various lights and bearings. I took the opportunity of bringing
this diary right up to the moment. I am very sleepy and shall go to
bed . . .
Just a line. Mina sleeps soundly and her breathing is regular. Her
forehead is puckered up into little wrinkles, as though she thinks
even in her sleep. She is still too pale, but does not look so
haggard as she did this morning. Tomorrow will, I hope, mend all
this. She will be herself at home in Exeter. Oh, but I am sleepy
DR. SEWARD'S DIARY
 October.I am puzzled afresh about Renfield. His moods change so
rapidly that I find it difficult to keep touch of them, and as they
always mean something more than his own wellbeing, they form a more
than interesting study. This morning, when I went to see him after
his repulse of Van Helsing, his manner was that of a man commanding
destiny. He was, in fact, commanding destiny, subjectively. He did
not really care for any of the things of mere earth, he was in the
clouds and looked down on all the weaknesses and wants of us poor
mortals.
I thought I would improve the occasion and learn something, so I asked
him, "What about the flies these times?"
He smiled on me in quite a superior sort of way, such a smile as would
have become the face of Malvolio, as he answered me, "The fly, my dear
sir, has one striking feature. It's wings are typical of the aerial
powers of the psychic faculties. The ancients did well when they
typified the soul as a butterfly"
I thought I would push his analogy to its utmost logically, so I said
quickly, "Oh, it is a soul you are after now, is it?"
His madness foiled his reason, and a puzzled look spread over his face
as, shaking his head with a decision which I had but seldom seen in
him.
He said, "Oh, no, oh no I want no souls. Life is all I want." Here
he brightened up. "I am pretty indifferent about it at present. Life
is all right. I have all I want. You must get a new patient, doctor,
if you wish to study zoophagy"
This puzzled me a little, so I drew him on. "Then you command life.
You are a god, I suppose?"
He smiled with an ineffably benign superiority. "Oh no Far be it
from me to arrogate to myself the attributes of the Deity. I am not
even concerned in His especially spiritual doings. If I may state my
intellectual position I am, so far as concerns things purely
terrestrial, somewhat in the position which Enoch occupied
spiritually"
This was a poser to me. I could not at the moment recall Enoch's
appositeness, so I had to ask a simple question, though I felt that by
so doing I was lowering myself in the eyes of the lunatic. "And why
with Enoch?"
"Because he walked with God."
I could not see the analogy, but did not like to admit it, so I harked
back to what he had denied. "So you don't care about life and you
don't want souls. Why not?" I put my question quickly and somewhat
sternly, on purpose to disconcert him.
The effort succeeded, for an instant he unconsciously relapsed into
his old servile manner, bent low before me, and actually fawned upon
me as he replied. "I don't want any souls, indeed, indeed I don't.
I couldn't use them if I had them. They would be no manner of use to
me. I couldn't eat them or . . ."
He suddenly stopped and the old cunning look spread over his face,
like a wind sweep on the surface of the water.
"And doctor, as to life, what is it after all? When you've got all
you require, and you know that you will never want, that is all. I
have friends, good friends, like you, Dr. Seward." This was said with
a leer of inexpressible cunning. "I know that I shall never lack the
means of life"
I think that through the cloudiness of his insanity he saw some
antagonism in me, for he at once fell back on the last refuge of such
as he, a dogged silence. After a short time I saw that for the
present it was useless to speak to him. He was sulky, and so I came
away.
Later in the day he sent for me. Ordinarily I would not have come
without special reason, but just at present I am so interested in him
that I would gladly make an effort. Besides, I am glad to have
anything to help pass the time. Harker is out, following up clues,
and so are Lord Godalming and Quincey. Van Helsing sits in my study
poring over the record prepared by the Harkers. He seems to think
that by accurate knowledge of all details he will light up on some
clue. He does not wish to be disturbed in the work, without cause. I
would have taken him with me to see the patient, only I thought that
after his last repulse he might not care to go again. There was also
another reason. Renfield might not speak so freely before a third
person as when he and I were alone.
I found him sitting in the middle of the floor on his stool, a pose
which is generally indicative of some mental energy on his part. When
I came in, he said at once, as though the question had been waiting on
his lips. "What about souls?"
It was evident then that my surmise had been correct. Unconscious
cerebration was doing its work, even with the lunatic. I determined
to have the matter out.
"What about them yourself?" I asked.
He did not reply for a moment but looked all around him, and up and
down, as though he expected to find some inspiration for an answer.
"I don't want any souls" he said in a feeble, apologetic way. The
matter seemed preying on his mind, and so I determined to use it, to
"be cruel only to be kind." So I said, "You like life, and you want
life?"
"Oh yes But that is all right. You needn't worry about that"
"But," I asked, "how are we to get the life without getting the soul
also?"
This seemed to puzzle him, so I followed it up, "A nice time you'll
have some time when you're flying out here, with the souls of
thousands of flies and spiders and birds and cats buzzing and
twittering and moaning all around you. You've got their lives, you
know, and you must put up with their souls"
Something seemed to affect his imagination, for he put his fingers to
his ears and shut his eyes, screwing them up tightly just as a small
boy does when his face is being soaped. There was something pathetic
in it that touched me. It also gave me a lesson, for it seemed that
before me was a child, only a child, though the features were worn,
and the stubble on the jaws was white. It was evident that he was
undergoing some process of mental disturbance, and knowing how his
past moods had interpreted things seemingly foreign to himself, I
thought I would enter into his mind as well as I could and go with him.
The first step was to restore confidence, so I asked him, speaking
pretty loud so that he would hear me through his closed ears, "Would
you like some sugar to get your flies around again?"
He seemed to wake up all at once, and shook his head. With a laugh he
replied, "Not much Flies are poor things, after all" After a pause
he added, "But I don't want their souls buzzing round me, all the
same."
"Or spiders?" I went on.
"Blow spiders What's the use of spiders? There isn't anything in
them to eat or . . ." He stopped suddenly as though reminded of a
forbidden topic.
"So, so" I thought to myself, "this is the second time he has
suddenly stopped at the word 'drink'. What does it mean?"
Renfield seemed himself aware of having made a lapse, for he hurried
on, as though to distract my attention from it, "I don't take any
stock at all in such matters. 'Rats and mice and such small deer,' as
Shakespeare has it, 'chicken feed of the larder' they might be called.
I'm past all that sort of nonsense. You might as well ask a man to
eat molecules with a pair of chopsticks, as to try to interest me
about the less carnivora, when I know of what is before me."
"I see," I said. "You want big things that you can make your teeth
meet in? How would you like to breakfast on an elephant?"
"What ridiculous nonsense you are talking?" He was getting too wide
awake, so I thought I would press him hard.
"I wonder," I said reflectively, "what an elephant's soul is like"
The effect I desired was obtained, for he at once fell from his
highhorse and became a child again.
"I don't want an elephant's soul, or any soul at all" he said. For a
few moments he sat despondently. Suddenly he jumped to his feet, with
his eyes blazing and all the signs of intense cerebral excitement.
"To hell with you and your souls" he shouted. "Why do you plague me
about souls? Haven't I got enough to worry, and pain, to distract me
already, without thinking of souls?"
He looked so hostile that I thought he was in for another homicidal
fit, so I blew my whistle.
The instant, however, that I did so he became calm, and said
apologetically, "Forgive me, Doctor. I forgot myself. You do not
need any help. I am so worried in my mind that I am apt to be
irritable. If you only knew the problem I have to face, and that I am
working out, you would pity, and tolerate, and pardon me. Pray do not
put me in a strait waistcoat. I want to think and I cannot think
freely when my body is confined. I am sure you will understand"
He had evidently selfcontrol, so when the attendants came I told them
not to mind, and they withdrew. Renfield watched them go. When the
door was closed he said with considerable dignity and sweetness, "Dr.
Seward, you have been very considerate towards me. Believe me that I
am very, very grateful to you"
I thought it well to leave him in this mood, and so I came away.
There is certainly something to ponder over in this man's state.
Several points seem to make what the American interviewer calls "a
story," if one could only get them in proper order. Here they are
Will not mention "drinking."
Fears the thought of being burdened with the "soul" of anything.
Has no dread of wanting "life" in the future.
Despises the meaner forms of life altogether, though he dreads
being haunted by their souls.
Logically all these things point one way He has assurance of
some kind that he will acquire some higher life.
He dreads the consequence, the burden of a soul. Then it is a
human life he looks to
And the assurance . . .?
Merciful God The Count has been to him, and there is some new scheme
of terror afoot
Later.I went after my round to Van Helsing and told him my
suspicion. He grew very grave, and after thinking the matter over for
a while asked me to take him to Renfield. I did so. As we came to
the door we heard the lunatic within singing gaily, as he used to do
in the time which now seems so long ago.
When we entered we saw with amazement that he had spread out his sugar
as of old. The flies, lethargic with the autumn, were beginning to
buzz into the room. We tried to make him talk of the subject of our
previous conversation, but he would not attend. He went on with his
singing, just as though we had not been present. He had got a scrap
of paper and was folding it into a notebook. We had to come away as
ignorant as we went in.
His is a curious case indeed. We must watch him tonight.
LETTER, MITCHELL, SONS  CANDY TO LORD GODALMING.
" October.
"My Lord,
"We are at all times only too happy to meet your wishes. We beg,
with regard to the desire of your Lordship, expressed by Mr.
Harker on your behalf, to supply the following information
concerning the sale and purchase of No. , Piccadilly. The
original vendors are the executors of the late Mr. Archibald
WinterSuffield. The purchaser is a foreign nobleman, Count de
Ville, who effected the purchase himself paying the purchase
money in notes 'over the counter,' if your Lordship will pardon
us using so vulgar an expression. Beyond this we know nothing
whatever of him.
"We are, my Lord,
"Your Lordship's humble servants,
"MITCHELL, SONS  CANDY."
DR. SEWARD'S DIARY
 October.I placed a man in the corridor last night, and told him to
make an accurate note of any sound he might hear from Renfield's room,
and gave him instructions that if there should be anything strange he
was to call me. After dinner, when we had all gathered round the fire
in the study, Mrs. Harker having gone to bed, we discussed the
attempts and discoveries of the day. Harker was the only one who had
any result, and we are in great hopes that his clue may be an
important one.
Before going to bed I went round to the patient's room and looked in
through the observation trap. He was sleeping soundly, his heart rose
and fell with regular respiration.
This morning the man on duty reported to me that a little after
midnight he was restless and kept saying his prayers somewhat loudly.
I asked him if that was all. He replied that it was all he heard.
There was something about his manner, so suspicious that I asked him
point blank if he had been asleep. He denied sleep, but admitted to
having "dozed" for a while. It is too bad that men cannot be trusted
unless they are watched.
Today Harker is out following up his clue, and Art and Quincey are
looking after horses. Godalming thinks that it will be well to have
horses always in readiness, for when we get the information which we
seek there will be no time to lose. We must sterilize all the
imported earth between sunrise and sunset. We shall thus catch the
Count at his weakest, and without a refuge to fly to. Van Helsing is
off to the British Museum looking up some authorities on ancient
medicine. The old physicians took account of things which their
followers do not accept, and the Professor is searching for witch and
demon cures which may be useful to us later.
I sometimes think we must be all mad and that we shall wake to sanity
in strait waistcoats.
Later.We have met again. We seem at last to be on the track, and
our work of tomorrow may be the beginning of the end. I wonder if
Renfield's quiet has anything to do with this. His moods have so
followed the doings of the Count, that the coming destruction of the
monster may be carried to him some subtle way. If we could only get
some hint as to what passed in his mind, between the time of my
argument with him today and his resumption of flycatching, it might
afford us a valuable clue. He is now seemingly quiet for a spell . . .
Is he? That wild yell seemed to come from his room . . .
The attendant came bursting into my room and told me that Renfield had
somehow met with some accident. He had heard him yell, and when he
went to him found him lying on his face on the floor, all covered with
blood. I must go at once . . .
CHAPTER 
DR. SEWARD'S DIARY
 October.Let me put down with exactness all that happened, as well
as I can remember, since last I made an entry. Not a detail that I
can recall must be forgotten. In all calmness I must proceed.
When I came to Renfield's room I found him lying on the floor on his
left side in a glittering pool of blood. When I went to move him, it
became at once apparent that he had received some terrible injuries.
There seemed none of the unity of purpose between the parts of the
body which marks even lethargic sanity. As the face was exposed I
could see that it was horribly bruised, as though it had been beaten
against the floor. Indeed it was from the face wounds that the pool
of blood originated.
The attendant who was kneeling beside the body said to me as we turned
him over, "I think, sir, his back is broken. See, both his right arm
and leg and the whole side of his face are paralysed." How such a
thing could have happened puzzled the attendant beyond measure. He
seemed quite bewildered, and his brows were gathered in as he said, "I
can't understand the two things. He could mark his face like that by
beating his own head on the floor. I saw a young woman do it once at
the Eversfield Asylum before anyone could lay hands on her. And I
suppose he might have broken his neck by falling out of bed, if he got
in an awkward kink. But for the life of me I can't imagine how the
two things occurred. If his back was broke, he couldn't beat his
head, and if his face was like that before the fall out of bed, there
would be marks of it."
I said to him, "Go to Dr. Van Helsing, and ask him to kindly come here
at once. I want him without an instant's delay."
The man ran off, and within a few minutes the Professor, in his
dressing gown and slippers, appeared. When he saw Renfield on the
ground, he looked keenly at him a moment, and then turned to me. I
think he recognized my thought in my eyes, for he said very quietly,
manifestly for the ears of the attendant, "Ah, a sad accident He
will need very careful watching, and much attention. I shall stay
with you myself, but I shall first dress myself. If you will remain I
shall in a few minutes join you."
The patient was now breathing stertorously and it was easy to see that
he had suffered some terrible injury.
Van Helsing returned with extraordinary celerity, bearing with him a
surgical case. He had evidently been thinking and had his mind made
up, for almost before he looked at the patient, he whispered to me,
"Send the attendant away. We must be alone with him when he becomes
conscious, after the operation."
I said, "I think that will do now, Simmons. We have done all that we
can at present. You had better go your round, and Dr. Van Helsing
will operate. Let me know instantly if there be anything unusual
anywhere."
The man withdrew, and we went into a strict examination of the
patient. The wounds of the face were superficial. The real injury
was a depressed fracture of the skull, extending right up through the
motor area.
The Professor thought a moment and said, "We must reduce the pressure
and get back to normal conditions, as far as can be. The rapidity of
the suffusion shows the terrible nature of his injury. The whole
motor area seems affected. The suffusion of the brain will increase
quickly, so we must trephine at once or it may be too late."
As he was speaking there was a soft tapping at the door. I went over
and opened it and found in the corridor without, Arthur and Quincey in
pajamas and slippers the former spoke, "I heard your man call up Dr.
Van Helsing and tell him of an accident. So I woke Quincey or rather
called for him as he was not asleep. Things are moving too quickly
and too strangely for sound sleep for any of us these times. I've
been thinking that tomorrow night will not see things as they have
been. We'll have to look back, and forward a little more than we have
done. May we come in?"
I nodded, and held the door open till they had entered, then I closed
it again. When Quincey saw the attitude and state of the patient, and
noted the horrible pool on the floor, he said softly, "My God What
has happened to him? Poor, poor devil"
I told him briefly, and added that we expected he would recover
consciousness after the operation, for a short time, at all events.
He went at once and sat down on the edge of the bed, with Godalming
beside him. We all watched in patience.
"We shall wait," said Van Helsing, "just long enough to fix the best
spot for trephining, so that we may most quickly and perfectly remove
the blood clot, for it is evident that the haemorrhage is increasing."
The minutes during which we waited passed with fearful slowness. I
had a horrible sinking in my heart, and from Van Helsing's face I
gathered that he felt some fear or apprehension as to what was to
come. I dreaded the words Renfield might speak. I was positively
afraid to think. But the conviction of what was coming was on me, as
I have read of men who have heard the death watch. The poor man's
breathing came in uncertain gasps. Each instant he seemed as though
he would open his eyes and speak, but then would follow a prolonged
stertorous breath, and he would relapse into a more fixed
insensibility. Inured as I was to sick beds and death, this suspense
grew and grew upon me. I could almost hear the beating of my own
heart, and the blood surging through my temples sounded like blows
from a hammer. The silence finally became agonizing. I looked at my
companions, one after another, and saw from their flushed faces and
damp brows that they were enduring equal torture. There was a nervous
suspense over us all, as though overhead some dread bell would peal
out powerfully when we should least expect it.
At last there came a time when it was evident that the patient was
sinking fast. He might die at any moment. I looked up at the
Professor and caught his eyes fixed on mine. His face was sternly set
as he spoke, "There is no time to lose. His words may be worth many
lives. I have been thinking so, as I stood here. It may be there is
a soul at stake We shall operate just above the ear."
Without another word he made the operation. For a few moments the
breathing continued to be stertorous. Then there came a breath so
prolonged that it seemed as though it would tear open his chest.
Suddenly his eyes opened, and became fixed in a wild, helpless stare.
This was continued for a few moments, then it was softened into a glad
surprise, and from his lips came a sigh of relief. He moved
convulsively, and as he did so, said, "I'll be quiet, Doctor. Tell
them to take off the strait waistcoat. I have had a terrible dream,
and it has left me so weak that I cannot move. What's wrong with my
face? It feels all swollen, and it smarts dreadfully."
He tried to turn his head, but even with the effort his eyes seemed to
grow glassy again so I gently put it back. Then Van Helsing said in a
quiet grave tone, "Tell us your dream, Mr. Renfield."
As he heard the voice his face brightened, through its mutilation, and
he said, "That is Dr. Van Helsing. How good it is of you to be here.
Give me some water, my lips are dry, and I shall try to tell you. I
dreamed . . ."
He stopped and seemed fainting. I called quietly to Quincey, "The
brandy, it is in my study, quick" He flew and returned with a glass,
the decanter of brandy and a carafe of water. We moistened the
parched lips, and the patient quickly revived.
It seemed, however, that his poor injured brain had been working in
the interval, for when he was quite conscious, he looked at me
piercingly with an agonized confusion which I shall never forget, and
said, "I must not deceive myself. It was no dream, but all a grim
reality." Then his eyes roved round the room. As they caught sight
of the two figures sitting patiently on the edge of the bed he went
on, "If I were not sure already, I would know from them."
For an instant his eyes closed, not with pain or sleep but
voluntarily, as though he were bringing all his faculties to bear.
When he opened them he said, hurriedly, and with more energy than he
had yet displayed, "Quick, Doctor, quick, I am dying I feel that I
have but a few minutes, and then I must go back to death, or worse
Wet my lips with brandy again. I have something that I must say
before I die. Or before my poor crushed brain dies anyhow. Thank
you It was that night after you left me, when I implored you to let
me go away. I couldn't speak then, for I felt my tongue was tied.
But I was as sane then, except in that way, as I am now. I was in an
agony of despair for a long time after you left me, it seemed hours.
Then there came a sudden peace to me. My brain seemed to become cool
again, and I realized where I was. I heard the dogs bark behind our
house, but not where He was"
As he spoke, Van Helsing's eyes never blinked, but his hand came out
and met mine and gripped it hard. He did not, however, betray
himself. He nodded slightly and said, "Go on," in a low voice.
Renfield proceeded. "He came up to the window in the mist, as I had
seen him often before, but he was solid then, not a ghost, and his
eyes were fierce like a man's when angry. He was laughing with his
red mouth, the sharp white teeth glinted in the moonlight when he
turned to look back over the belt of trees, to where the dogs were
barking. I wouldn't ask him to come in at first, though I knew he
wanted to, just as he had wanted all along. Then he began promising
me things, not in words but by doing them."
He was interrupted by a word from the Professor, "How?"
"By making them happen. Just as he used to send in the flies when the
sun was shining. Great big fat ones with steel and sapphire on their
wings. And big moths, in the night, with skull and crossbones on
their backs."
Van Helsing nodded to him as he whispered to me unconsciously, "The
Acherontia Atropos of the Sphinges, what you call the 'Death'shead
Moth'?"
The patient went on without stopping, "Then he began to whisper. 'Rats,
rats, rats Hundreds, thousands, millions of them, and every one a
life. And dogs to eat them, and cats too. All lives All red blood,
with years of life in it, and not merely buzzing flies' I laughed at
him, for I wanted to see what he could do. Then the dogs howled, away
beyond the dark trees in His house. He beckoned me to the window. I
got up and looked out, and He raised his hands, and seemed to call out
without using any words. A dark mass spread over the grass, coming on
like the shape of a flame of fire. And then He moved the mist to the
right and left, and I could see that there were thousands of rats with
their eyes blazing red, like His only smaller. He held up his hand,
and they all stopped, and I thought he seemed to be saying, 'All these
lives will I give you, ay, and many more and greater, through
countless ages, if you will fall down and worship me' And then a red
cloud, like the colour of blood, seemed to close over my eyes, and
before I knew what I was doing, I found myself opening the sash and
saying to Him, 'Come in, Lord and Master' The rats were all gone, but
He slid into the room through the sash, though it was only open an
inch wide, just as the Moon herself has often come in through the
tiniest crack and has stood before me in all her size and splendour."
His voice was weaker, so I moistened his lips with the brandy again,
and he continued, but it seemed as though his memory had gone on
working in the interval for his story was further advanced. I was
about to call him back to the point, but Van Helsing whispered to me,
"Let him go on. Do not interrupt him. He cannot go back, and maybe
could not proceed at all if once he lost the thread of his thought."
He proceeded, "All day I waited to hear from him, but he did not send
me anything, not even a blowfly, and when the moon got up I was pretty
angry with him. When he did slide in through the window, though it
was shut, and did not even knock, I got mad with him. He sneered at
me, and his white face looked out of the mist with his red eyes
gleaming, and he went on as though he owned the whole place, and I was
no one. He didn't even smell the same as he went by me. I couldn't
hold him. I thought that, somehow, Mrs. Harker had come into the
room."
The two men sitting on the bed stood up and came over, standing behind
him so that he could not see them, but where they could hear better.
They were both silent, but the Professor started and quivered. His
face, however, grew grimmer and sterner still. Renfield went on
without noticing, "When Mrs. Harker came in to see me this afternoon
she wasn't the same. It was like tea after the teapot has been
watered." Here we all moved, but no one said a word.
He went on, "I didn't know that she was here till she spoke, and she
didn't look the same. I don't care for the pale people. I like them
with lots of blood in them, and hers all seemed to have run out. I
didn't think of it at the time, but when she went away I began to
think, and it made me mad to know that He had been taking the life out
of her." I could feel that the rest quivered, as I did but we
remained otherwise still. "So when He came tonight I was ready for
Him. I saw the mist stealing in, and I grabbed it tight. I had heard
that madmen have unnatural strength. And as I knew I was a madman, at
times anyhow, I resolved to use my power. Ay, and He felt it too, for
He had to come out of the mist to struggle with me. I held tight, and
I thought I was going to win, for I didn't mean Him to take any more
of her life, till I saw His eyes. They burned into me, and my
strength became like water. He slipped through it, and when I tried
to cling to Him, He raised me up and flung me down. There was a red
cloud before me, and a noise like thunder, and the mist seemed to
steal away under the door."
His voice was becoming fainter and his breath more stertorous. Van
Helsing stood up instinctively.
"We know the worst now," he said. "He is here, and we know his
purpose. It may not be too late. Let us be armed, the same as we
were the other night, but lose no time, there is not an instant to
spare."
There was no need to put our fear, nay our conviction, into words, we
shared them in common. We all hurried and took from our rooms the
same things that we had when we entered the Count's house. The
Professor had his ready, and as we met in the corridor he pointed to
them significantly as he said, "They never leave me, and they shall
not till this unhappy business is over. Be wise also, my friends. It
is no common enemy that we deal with Alas Alas That dear Madam
Mina should suffer" He stopped, his voice was breaking, and I do not
know if rage or terror predominated in my own heart.
Outside the Harkers' door we paused. Art and Quincey held back, and
the latter said, "Should we disturb her?"
"We must," said Van Helsing grimly. "If the door be locked, I shall
break it in."
"May it not frighten her terribly? It is unusual to break into a
lady's room"
Van Helsing said solemnly, "You are always right. But this is life
and death. All chambers are alike to the doctor. And even were they
not they are all as one to me tonight. Friend John, when I turn the
handle, if the door does not open, do you put your shoulder down and
shove and you too, my friends. Now"
He turned the handle as he spoke, but the door did not yield. We
threw ourselves against it. With a crash it burst open, and we almost
fell headlong into the room. The Professor did actually fall, and I
saw across him as he gathered himself up from hands and knees. What I
saw appalled me. I felt my hair rise like bristles on the back of my
neck, and my heart seemed to stand still.
The moonlight was so bright that through the thick yellow blind the
room was light enough to see. On the bed beside the window lay
Jonathan Harker, his face flushed and breathing heavily as though in a
stupor. Kneeling on the near edge of the bed facing outwards was the
whiteclad figure of his wife. By her side stood a tall, thin man,
clad in black. His face was turned from us, but the instant we saw we
all recognized the Count, in every way, even to the scar on his
forehead. With his left hand he held both Mrs. Harker's hands,
keeping them away with her arms at full tension. His right hand
gripped her by the back of the neck, forcing her face down on his
bosom. Her white nightdress was smeared with blood, and a thin stream
trickled down the man's bare chest which was shown by his tornopen
dress. The attitude of the two had a terrible resemblance to a child
forcing a kitten's nose into a saucer of milk to compel it to drink.
As we burst into the room, the Count turned his face, and the hellish
look that I had heard described seemed to leap into it. His eyes
flamed red with devilish passion. The great nostrils of the white
aquiline nose opened wide and quivered at the edge, and the white
sharp teeth, behind the full lips of the blood dripping mouth, clamped
together like those of a wild beast. With a wrench, which threw his
victim back upon the bed as though hurled from a height, he turned and
sprang at us. But by this time the Professor had gained his feet, and
was holding towards him the envelope which contained the Sacred Wafer.
The Count suddenly stopped, just as poor Lucy had done outside the
tomb, and cowered back. Further and further back he cowered, as we,
lifting our crucifixes, advanced. The moonlight suddenly failed, as a
great black cloud sailed across the sky. And when the gaslight sprang
up under Quincey's match, we saw nothing but a faint vapour. This, as
we looked, trailed under the door, which with the recoil from its
bursting open, had swung back to its old position. Van Helsing, Art,
and I moved forward to Mrs. Harker, who by this time had drawn her
breath and with it had given a scream so wild, so earpiercing, so
despairing that it seems to me now that it will ring in my ears till
my dying day. For a few seconds she lay in her helpless attitude and
disarray. Her face was ghastly, with a pallor which was accentuated
by the blood which smeared her lips and cheeks and chin. From her
throat trickled a thin stream of blood. Her eyes were mad with
terror. Then she put before her face her poor crushed hands, which
bore on their whiteness the red mark of the Count's terrible grip, and
from behind them came a low desolate wail which made the terrible
scream seem only the quick expression of an endless grief. Van
Helsing stepped forward and drew the coverlet gently over her body,
whilst Art, after looking at her face for an instant despairingly, ran
out of the room.
Van Helsing whispered to me, "Jonathan is in a stupor such as we know
the Vampire can produce. We can do nothing with poor Madam Mina for a
few moments till she recovers herself. I must wake him"
He dipped the end of a towel in cold water and with it began to flick
him on the face, his wife all the while holding her face between her
hands and sobbing in a way that was heart breaking to hear. I raised
the blind, and looked out of the window. There was much moonshine,
and as I looked I could see Quincey Morris run across the lawn and
hide himself in the shadow of a great yew tree. It puzzled me to
think why he was doing this. But at the instant I heard Harker's
quick exclamation as he woke to partial consciousness, and turned to
the bed. On his face, as there might well be, was a look of wild
amazement. He seemed dazed for a few seconds, and then full
consciousness seemed to burst upon him all at once, and he started up.
His wife was aroused by the quick movement, and turned to him with her
arms stretched out, as though to embrace him. Instantly, however, she
drew them in again, and putting her elbows together, held her hands
before her face, and shuddered till the bed beneath her shook.
"In God's name what does this mean?" Harker cried out. "Dr. Seward,
Dr. Van Helsing, what is it? What has happened? What is wrong? Mina,
dear what is it? What does that blood mean? My God, my God Has it
come to this" And, raising himself to his knees, he beat his hands
wildly together. "Good God help us Help her Oh, help her"
With a quick movement he jumped from bed, and began to pull on his
clothes, all the man in him awake at the need for instant exertion.
"What has happened? Tell me all about it" he cried without pausing.
"Dr. Van Helsing, you love Mina, I know. Oh, do something to save her.
It cannot have gone too far yet. Guard her while I look for him"
His wife, through her terror and horror and distress, saw some sure
danger to him. Instantly forgetting her own grief, she seized hold of
him and cried out.
"No No Jonathan, you must not leave me. I have suffered enough
tonight, God knows, without the dread of his harming you. You must
stay with me. Stay with these friends who will watch over you" Her
expression became frantic as she spoke. And, he yielding to her, she
pulled him down sitting on the bedside, and clung to him fiercely.
Van Helsing and I tried to calm them both. The Professor held up his
golden crucifix, and said with wonderful calmness, "Do not fear, my
dear. We are here, and whilst this is close to you no foul thing can
approach. You are safe for tonight, and we must be calm and take
counsel together."
She shuddered and was silent, holding down her head on her husband's
breast. When she raised it, his white nightrobe was stained with
blood where her lips had touched, and where the thin open wound in the
neck had sent forth drops. The instant she saw it she drew back, with
a low wail, and whispered, amidst choking sobs.
"Unclean, unclean I must touch him or kiss him no more. Oh, that it
should be that it is I who am now his worst enemy, and whom he may
have most cause to fear."
To this he spoke out resolutely, "Nonsense, Mina. It is a shame to me
to hear such a word. I would not hear it of you. And I shall not
hear it from you. May God judge me by my deserts, and punish me with
more bitter suffering than even this hour, if by any act or will of
mine anything ever come between us"
He put out his arms and folded her to his breast. And for a while she
lay there sobbing. He looked at us over her bowed head, with eyes
that blinked damply above his quivering nostrils. His mouth was set
as steel.
After a while her sobs became less frequent and more faint, and then
he said to me, speaking with a studied calmness which I felt tried his
nervous power to the utmost.
"And now, Dr. Seward, tell me all about it. Too well I know the broad
fact. Tell me all that has been."
I told him exactly what had happened and he listened with seeming
impassiveness, but his nostrils twitched and his eyes blazed as I told
how the ruthless hands of the Count had held his wife in that terrible
and horrid position, with her mouth to the open wound in his breast.
It interested me, even at that moment, to see that whilst the face of
white set passion worked convulsively over the bowed head, the hands
tenderly and lovingly stroked the ruffled hair. Just as I had
finished, Quincey and Godalming knocked at the door. They entered in
obedience to our summons. Van Helsing looked at me questioningly. I
understood him to mean if we were to take advantage of their coming to
divert if possible the thoughts of the unhappy husband and wife from
each other and from themselves. So on nodding acquiescence to him he
asked them what they had seen or done. To which Lord Godalming
answered.
"I could not see him anywhere in the passage, or in any of our rooms.
I looked in the study but, though he had been there, he had gone. He
had, however . . ." He stopped suddenly, looking at the poor drooping
figure on the bed.
Van Helsing said gravely, "Go on, friend Arthur. We want here no more
concealments. Our hope now is in knowing all. Tell freely"
So Art went on, "He had been there, and though it could only have been
for a few seconds, he made rare hay of the place. All the manuscript
had been burned, and the blue flames were flickering amongst the white
ashes. The cylinders of your phonograph too were thrown on the fire,
and the wax had helped the flames."
Here I interrupted. "Thank God there is the other copy in the safe"
His face lit for a moment, but fell again as he went on. "I ran
downstairs then, but could see no sign of him. I looked into
Renfield's room, but there was no trace there except . . ." Again he
paused.
"Go on," said Harker hoarsely. So he bowed his head and moistening his
lips with his tongue, added, "except that the poor fellow is dead."
Mrs. Harker raised her head, looking from one to the other of us she
said solemnly, "God's will be done"
I could not but feel that Art was keeping back something. But, as I
took it that it was with a purpose, I said nothing.
Van Helsing turned to Morris and asked, "And you, friend Quincey, have
you any to tell?"
"A little," he answered. "It may be much eventually, but at present I
can't say. I thought it well to know if possible where the Count
would go when he left the house. I did not see him, but I saw a bat
rise from Renfield's window, and flap westward. I expected to see him
in some shape go back to Carfax, but he evidently sought some other
lair. He will not be back tonight, for the sky is reddening in the
east, and the dawn is close. We must work tomorrow"
He said the latter words through his shut teeth. For a space of
perhaps a couple of minutes there was silence, and I could fancy that
I could hear the sound of our hearts beating.
Then Van Helsing said, placing his hand tenderly on Mrs. Harker's
head, "And now, Madam Mina, poor dear, dear, Madam Mina, tell us
exactly what happened. God knows that I do not want that you be
pained, but it is need that we know all. For now more than ever has
all work to be done quick and sharp, and in deadly earnest. The day
is close to us that must end all, if it may be so, and now is the
chance that we may live and learn."
The poor dear lady shivered, and I could see the tension of her nerves
as she clasped her husband closer to her and bent her head lower and
lower still on his breast. Then she raised her head proudly, and held
out one hand to Van Helsing who took it in his, and after stooping and
kissing it reverently, held it fast. The other hand was locked in
that of her husband, who held his other arm thrown round her
protectingly. After a pause in which she was evidently ordering her
thoughts, she began.
"I took the sleeping draught which you had so kindly given me, but for
a long time it did not act. I seemed to become more wakeful, and
myriads of horrible fancies began to crowd in upon my mind. All of
them connected with death, and vampires, with blood, and pain, and
trouble." Her husband involuntarily groaned as she turned to him and
said lovingly, "Do not fret, dear. You must be brave and strong, and
help me through the horrible task. If you only knew what an effort it
is to me to tell of this fearful thing at all, you would understand
how much I need your help. Well, I saw I must try to help the
medicine to its work with my will, if it was to do me any good, so I
resolutely set myself to sleep. Sure enough sleep must soon have come
to me, for I remember no more. Jonathan coming in had not waked me,
for he lay by my side when next I remember. There was in the room the
same thin white mist that I had before noticed. But I forget now if
you know of this. You will find it in my diary which I shall show you
later. I felt the same vague terror which had come to me before and
the same sense of some presence. I turned to wake Jonathan, but found
that he slept so soundly that it seemed as if it was he who had taken
the sleeping draught, and not I. I tried, but I could not wake him.
This caused me a great fear, and I looked around terrified. Then
indeed, my heart sank within me. Beside the bed, as if he had stepped
out of the mist, or rather as if the mist had turned into his figure,
for it had entirely disappeared, stood a tall, thin man, all in
black. I knew him at once from the description of the others. The
waxen face, the high aquiline nose, on which the light fell in a thin
white line, the parted red lips, with the sharp white teeth showing
between, and the red eyes that I had seemed to see in the sunset on
the windows of St. Mary's Church at Whitby. I knew, too, the red scar
on his forehead where Jonathan had struck him. For an instant my
heart stood still, and I would have screamed out, only that I was
paralyzed. In the pause he spoke in a sort of keen, cutting whisper,
pointing as he spoke to Jonathan.
"'Silence If you make a sound I shall take him and dash his brains
out before your very eyes.' I was appalled and was too bewildered to
do or say anything. With a mocking smile, he placed one hand upon my
shoulder and, holding me tight, bared my throat with the other, saying
as he did so, 'First, a little refreshment to reward my exertions.
You may as well be quiet. It is not the first time, or the second,
that your veins have appeased my thirst' I was bewildered, and
strangely enough, I did not want to hinder him. I suppose it is a
part of the horrible curse that such is, when his touch is on his
victim. And oh, my God, my God, pity me He placed his reeking lips
upon my throat" Her husband groaned again. She clasped his hand
harder, and looked at him pityingly, as if he were the injured one,
and went on.
"I felt my strength fading away, and I was in a half swoon. How long
this horrible thing lasted I know not, but it seemed that a long time
must have passed before he took his foul, awful, sneering mouth away.
I saw it drip with the fresh blood" The remembrance seemed for a while
to overpower her, and she drooped and would have sunk down but for her
husband's sustaining arm. With a great effort she recovered herself
and went on.
"Then he spoke to me mockingly, 'And so you, like the others, would
play your brains against mine. You would help these men to hunt me
and frustrate me in my design You know now, and they know in part
already, and will know in full before long, what it is to cross my
path. They should have kept their energies for use closer to home.
Whilst they played wits against me, against me who commanded nations,
and intrigued for them, and fought for them, hundreds of years before
they were born, I was countermining them. And you, their best beloved
one, are now to me, flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood, kin of my
kin, my bountiful winepress for a while, and shall be later on my
companion and my helper. You shall be avenged in turn, for not one of
them but shall minister to your needs. But as yet you are to be
punished for what you have done. You have aided in thwarting me. Now
you shall come to my call. When my brain says "Come" to you, you
shall cross land or sea to do my bidding. And to that end this'
"With that he pulled open his shirt, and with his long sharp nails
opened a vein in his breast. When the blood began to spurt out, he
took my hands in one of his, holding them tight, and with the other
seized my neck and pressed my mouth to the wound, so that I must
either suffocate or swallow some to the . . . Oh, my God My God
What have I done? What have I done to deserve such a fate, I who have
tried to walk in meekness and righteousness all my days. God pity
me Look down on a poor soul in worse than mortal peril. And in
mercy pity those to whom she is dear" Then she began to rub her lips
as though to cleanse them from pollution.
As she was telling her terrible story, the eastern sky began to
quicken, and everything became more and more clear. Harker was still
and quiet but over his face, as the awful narrative went on, came a
grey look which deepened and deepened in the morning light, till when
the first red streak of the coming dawn shot up, the flesh stood
darkly out against the whitening hair.
We have arranged that one of us is to stay within call of the unhappy
pair till we can meet together and arrange about taking action.
Of this I am sure. The sun rises today on no more miserable house in
all the great round of its daily course.
CHAPTER 
JONATHAN HARKER'S JOURNAL
 October.As I must do something or go mad, I write this diary. It
is now six o'clock, and we are to meet in the study in half an hour
and take something to eat, for Dr. Van Helsing and Dr. Seward are
agreed that if we do not eat we cannot work our best. Our best will
be, God knows, required today. I must keep writing at every chance,
for I dare not stop to think. All, big and little, must go down.
Perhaps at the end the little things may teach us most. The teaching,
big or little, could not have landed Mina or me anywhere worse than we
are today. However, we must trust and hope. Poor Mina told me just
now, with the tears running down her dear cheeks, that it is in
trouble and trial that our faith is tested. That we must keep on
trusting, and that God will aid us up to the end. The end Oh my
God What end? . . . To work To work
When Dr. Van Helsing and Dr. Seward had come back from seeing poor
Renfield, we went gravely into what was to be done. First, Dr. Seward
told us that when he and Dr. Van Helsing had gone down to the room
below they had found Renfield lying on the floor, all in a heap. His
face was all bruised and crushed in, and the bones of the neck were
broken.
Dr. Seward asked the attendant who was on duty in the passage if he
had heard anything. He said that he had been sitting down, he
confessed to half dozing, when he heard loud voices in the room, and
then Renfield had called out loudly several times, "God God God"
After that there was a sound of falling, and when he entered the room
he found him lying on the floor, face down, just as the doctors had
seen him. Van Helsing asked if he had heard "voices" or "a voice,"
and he said he could not say. That at first it had seemed to him as
if there were two, but as there was no one in the room it could have
been only one. He could swear to it, if required, that the word "God"
was spoken by the patient.
Dr. Seward said to us, when we were alone, that he did not wish to go
into the matter. The question of an inquest had to be considered, and
it would never do to put forward the truth, as no one would believe
it. As it was, he thought that on the attendant's evidence he could
give a certificate of death by misadventure in falling from bed. In
case the coroner should demand it, there would be a formal inquest,
necessarily to the same result.
When the question began to be discussed as to what should be our next
step, the very first thing we decided was that Mina should be in full
confidence. That nothing of any sort, no matter how painful, should
be kept from her. She herself agreed as to its wisdom, and it was
pitiful to see her so brave and yet so sorrowful, and in such a depth
of despair.
"There must be no concealment," she said. "Alas We have had too
much already. And besides there is nothing in all the world that can
give me more pain than I have already endured, than I suffer now
Whatever may happen, it must be of new hope or of new courage to me"
Van Helsing was looking at her fixedly as she spoke, and said,
suddenly but quietly, "But dear Madam Mina, are you not afraid. Not
for yourself, but for others from yourself, after what has happened?"
Her face grew set in its lines, but her eyes shone with the devotion
of a martyr as she answered, "Ah no For my mind is made up"
"To what?" he asked gently, whilst we were all very still, for each in
our own way we had a sort of vague idea of what she meant.
Her answer came with direct simplicity, as though she was simply
stating a fact, "Because if I find in myself, and I shall watch keenly
for it, a sign of harm to any that I love, I shall die"
"You would not kill yourself?" he asked, hoarsely.
"I would. If there were no friend who loved me, who would save me
such a pain, and so desperate an effort" She looked at him meaningly
as she spoke.
He was sitting down, but now he rose and came close to her and put his
hand on her head as he said solemnly. "My child, there is such an one
if it were for your good. For myself I could hold it in my account
with God to find such an euthanasia for you, even at this moment if it
were best. Nay, were it safe But my child . . ."
For a moment he seemed choked, and a great sob rose in his throat. He
gulped it down and went on, "There are here some who would stand
between you and death. You must not die. You must not die by any
hand, but least of all your own. Until the other, who has fouled your
sweet life, is true dead you must not die. For if he is still with
the quick Undead, your death would make you even as he is. No, you
must live You must struggle and strive to live, though death would
seem a boon unspeakable. You must fight Death himself, though he come
to you in pain or in joy. By the day, or the night, in safety or in
peril On your living soul I charge you that you do not die. Nay,
nor think of death, till this great evil be past."
The poor dear grew white as death, and shook and shivered, as I have
seen a quicksand shake and shiver at the incoming of the tide. We
were all silent. We could do nothing. At length she grew more calm
and turning to him said sweetly, but oh so sorrowfully, as she held
out her hand, "I promise you, my dear friend, that if God will let me
live, I shall strive to do so. Till, if it may be in His good time,
this horror may have passed away from me."
She was so good and brave that we all felt that our hearts were
strengthened to work and endure for her, and we began to discuss what
we were to do. I told her that she was to have all the papers in the
safe, and all the papers or diaries and phonographs we might hereafter
use, and was to keep the record as she had done before. She was
pleased with the prospect of anything to do, if "pleased" could be
used in connection with so grim an interest.
As usual Van Helsing had thought ahead of everyone else, and was
prepared with an exact ordering of our work.
"It is perhaps well," he said, "that at our meeting after our visit to
Carfax we decided not to do anything with the earth boxes that lay
there. Had we done so, the Count must have guessed our purpose, and
would doubtless have taken measures in advance to frustrate such an
effort with regard to the others. But now he does not know our
intentions. Nay, more, in all probability, he does not know that such
a power exists to us as can sterilize his lairs, so that he cannot use
them as of old.
"We are now so much further advanced in our knowledge as to their
disposition that, when we have examined the house in Piccadilly, we may
track the very last of them. Today then, is ours, and in it rests our
hope. The sun that rose on our sorrow this morning guards us in its
course. Until it sets tonight, that monster must retain whatever form
he now has. He is confined within the limitations of his earthly
envelope. He cannot melt into thin air nor disappear through cracks
or chinks or crannies. If he go through a doorway, he must open the
door like a mortal. And so we have this day to hunt out all his lairs
and sterilize them. So we shall, if we have not yet catch him and
destroy him, drive him to bay in some place where the catching and the
destroying shall be, in time, sure."
Here I started up for I could not contain myself at the thought that
the minutes and seconds so preciously laden with Mina's life and
happiness were flying from us, since whilst we talked action was
impossible. But Van Helsing held up his hand warningly.
"Nay, friend Jonathan," he said, "in this, the quickest way home is
the longest way, so your proverb say. We shall all act and act with
desperate quick, when the time has come. But think, in all probable
the key of the situation is in that house in Piccadilly. The Count
may have many houses which he has bought. Of them he will have deeds
of purchase, keys and other things. He will have paper that he write
on. He will have his book of cheques. There are many belongings that
he must have somewhere. Why not in this place so central, so quiet,
where he come and go by the front or the back at all hours, when in
the very vast of the traffic there is none to notice. We shall go
there and search that house. And when we learn what it holds, then we
do what our friend Arthur call, in his phrases of hunt 'stop the
earths' and so we run down our old fox, so? Is it not?"
"Then let us come at once," I cried, "we are wasting the precious,
precious time"
The Professor did not move, but simply said, "And how are we to get
into that house in Piccadilly?"
"Any way" I cried. "We shall break in if need be."
"And your police? Where will they be, and what will they say?"
I was staggered, but I knew that if he wished to delay he had a good
reason for it. So I said, as quietly as I could, "Don't wait more
than need be. You know, I am sure, what torture I am in."
"Ah, my child, that I do. And indeed there is no wish of me to add to
your anguish. But just think, what can we do, until all the world be
at movement. Then will come our time. I have thought and thought,
and it seems to me that the simplest way is the best of all. Now we
wish to get into the house, but we have no key. Is it not so?" I
nodded.
"Now suppose that you were, in truth, the owner of that house, and
could not still get in. And think there was to you no conscience of
the housebreaker, what would you do?"
"I should get a respectable locksmith, and set him to work to pick the
lock for me."
"And your police, they would interfere, would they not?"
"Oh no Not if they knew the man was properly employed."
"Then," he looked at me as keenly as he spoke, "all that is in doubt
is the conscience of the employer, and the belief of your policemen as
to whether or not that employer has a good conscience or a bad one.
Your police must indeed be zealous men and clever, oh so clever, in
reading the heart, that they trouble themselves in such matter. No,
no, my friend Jonathan, you go take the lock off a hundred empty
houses in this your London, or of any city in the world, and if you do
it as such things are rightly done, and at the time such things are
rightly done, no one will interfere. I have read of a gentleman who
owned a so fine house in London, and when he went for months of summer
to Switzerland and lock up his house, some burglar come and broke
window at back and got in. Then he went and made open the shutters in
front and walk out and in through the door, before the very eyes of
the police. Then he have an auction in that house, and advertise it,
and put up big notice. And when the day come he sell off by a great
auctioneer all the goods of that other man who own them. Then he go
to a builder, and he sell him that house, making an agreement that he
pull it down and take all away within a certain time. And your police
and other authority help him all they can. And when that owner come
back from his holiday in Switzerland he find only an empty hole where
his house had been. This was all done en regle, and in our work we
shall be en regle too. We shall not go so early that the policemen
who have then little to think of, shall deem it strange. But we shall
go after ten o'clock, when there are many about, and such things would
be done were we indeed owners of the house."
I could not but see how right he was and the terrible despair of
Mina's face became relaxed in thought. There was hope in such good
counsel.
Van Helsing went on, "When once within that house we may find more
clues. At any rate some of us can remain there whilst the rest find
the other places where there be more earth boxes, at Bermondsey and
Mile End."
Lord Godalming stood up. "I can be of some use here," he said. "I
shall wire to my people to have horses and carriages where they will
be most convenient."
"Look here, old fellow," said Morris, "it is a capital idea to have
all ready in case we want to go horse backing, but don't you think
that one of your snappy carriages with its heraldic adornments in a
byway of Walworth or Mile End would attract too much attention for our
purpose? It seems to me that we ought to take cabs when we go south
or east. And even leave them somewhere near the neighbourhood we are
going to."
"Friend Quincey is right" said the Professor. "His head is what you
call in plane with the horizon. It is a difficult thing that we go to
do, and we do not want no peoples to watch us if so it may."
Mina took a growing interest in everything and I was rejoiced to see
that the exigency of affairs was helping her to forget for a time the
terrible experience of the night. She was very, very pale, almost
ghastly, and so thin that her lips were drawn away, showing her teeth
in somewhat of prominence. I did not mention this last, lest it
should give her needless pain, but it made my blood run cold in my
veins to think of what had occurred with poor Lucy when the Count had
sucked her blood. As yet there was no sign of the teeth growing
sharper, but the time as yet was short, and there was time for fear.
When we came to the discussion of the sequence of our efforts and of
the disposition of our forces, there were new sources of doubt. It
was finally agreed that before starting for Piccadilly we should
destroy the Count's lair close at hand. In case he should find it out
too soon, we should thus be still ahead of him in our work of
destruction. And his presence in his purely material shape, and at
his weakest, might give us some new clue.
As to the disposal of forces, it was suggested by the Professor that,
after our visit to Carfax, we should all enter the house in
Piccadilly. That the two doctors and I should remain there, whilst
Lord Godalming and Quincey found the lairs at Walworth and Mile End
and destroyed them. It was possible, if not likely, the Professor
urged, that the Count might appear in Piccadilly during the day, and
that if so we might be able to cope with him then and there. At any
rate, we might be able to follow him in force. To this plan I
strenuously objected, and so far as my going was concerned, for I said
that I intended to stay and protect Mina. I thought that my mind was
made up on the subject, but Mina would not listen to my objection. She
said that there might be some law matter in which I could be useful.
That amongst the Count's papers might be some clue which I could
understand out of my experience in Transylvania. And that, as it was,
all the strength we could muster was required to cope with the Count's
extraordinary power. I had to give in, for Mina's resolution was
fixed. She said that it was the last hope for her that we should all
work together.
"As for me," she said, "I have no fear. Things have been as bad as
they can be. And whatever may happen must have in it some element of
hope or comfort. Go, my husband God can, if He wishes it, guard me
as well alone as with any one present."
So I started up crying out, "Then in God's name let us come at once,
for we are losing time. The Count may come to Piccadilly earlier than
we think."
"Not so" said Van Helsing, holding up his hand.
"But why?" I asked.
"Do you forget," he said, with actually a smile, "that last night he
banqueted heavily, and will sleep late?"
Did I forget Shall I ever . . . can I ever Can any of us ever
forget that terrible scene Mina struggled hard to keep her brave
countenance, but the pain overmastered her and she put her hands
before her face, and shuddered whilst she moaned. Van Helsing had not
intended to recall her frightful experience. He had simply lost sight
of her and her part in the affair in his intellectual effort.
When it struck him what he said, he was horrified at his
thoughtlessness and tried to comfort her.
"Oh, Madam Mina," he said, "dear, dear, Madam Mina, alas That I of
all who so reverence you should have said anything so forgetful. These
stupid old lips of mine and this stupid old head do not deserve so,
but you will forget it, will you not?" He bent low beside her as he
spoke.
She took his hand, and looking at him through her tears, said
hoarsely, "No, I shall not forget, for it is well that I remember.
And with it I have so much in memory of you that is sweet, that I take
it all together. Now, you must all be going soon. Breakfast is
ready, and we must all eat that we may be strong."
Breakfast was a strange meal to us all. We tried to be cheerful and
encourage each other, and Mina was the brightest and most cheerful of
us. When it was over, Van Helsing stood up and said, "Now, my dear
friends, we go forth to our terrible enterprise. Are we all armed, as
we were on that night when first we visited our enemy's lair. Armed
against ghostly as well as carnal attack?"
We all assured him.
"Then it is well. Now, Madam Mina, you are in any case quite safe
here until the sunset. And before then we shall return . . . if . . .
We shall return But before we go let me see you armed against personal
attack. I have myself, since you came down, prepared your chamber by
the placing of things of which we know, so that He may not enter. Now
let me guard yourself. On your forehead I touch this piece of Sacred
Wafer in the name of the Father, the Son, and . . ."
There was a fearful scream which almost froze our hearts to hear. As
he had placed the Wafer on Mina's forehead, it had seared it . . . had
burned into the flesh as though it had been a piece of whitehot metal.
My poor darling's brain had told her the significance of the fact as
quickly as her nerves received the pain of it, and the two so
overwhelmed her that her overwrought nature had its voice in that
dreadful scream.
But the words to her thought came quickly. The echo of the scream had
not ceased to ring on the air when there came the reaction, and she
sank on her knees on the floor in an agony of abasement. Pulling her
beautiful hair over her face, as the leper of old his mantle, she
wailed out.
"Unclean Unclean Even the Almighty shuns my polluted flesh I
must bear this mark of shame upon my forehead until the Judgement
Day."
They all paused. I had thrown myself beside her in an agony of
helpless grief, and putting my arms around held her tight. For a few
minutes our sorrowful hearts beat together, whilst the friends around
us turned away their eyes that ran tears silently. Then Van Helsing
turned and said gravely. So gravely that I could not help feeling
that he was in some way inspired, and was stating things outside
himself.
"It may be that you may have to bear that mark till God himself see
fit, as He most surely shall, on the Judgement Day, to redress all
wrongs of the earth and of His children that He has placed thereon.
And oh, Madam Mina, my dear, my dear, may we who love you be there to
see, when that red scar, the sign of God's knowledge of what has been,
shall pass away, and leave your forehead as pure as the heart we know.
For so surely as we live, that scar shall pass away when God sees
right to lift the burden that is hard upon us. Till then we bear our
Cross, as His Son did in obedience to His Will. It may be that we are
chosen instruments of His good pleasure, and that we ascend to His
bidding as that other through stripes and shame. Through tears and
blood. Through doubts and fear, and all that makes the difference
between God and man."
There was hope in his words, and comfort. And they made for
resignation. Mina and I both felt so, and simultaneously we each took
one of the old man's hands and bent over and kissed it. Then without
a word we all knelt down together, and all holding hands, swore to be
true to each other. We men pledged ourselves to raise the veil of
sorrow from the head of her whom, each in his own way, we loved. And
we prayed for help and guidance in the terrible task which lay before
us. It was then time to start. So I said farewell to Mina, a parting
which neither of us shall forget to our dying day, and we set out.
To one thing I have made up my mind. If we find out that Mina must be
a vampire in the end, then she shall not go into that unknown and
terrible land alone. I suppose it is thus that in old times one
vampire meant many. Just as their hideous bodies could only rest in
sacred earth, so the holiest love was the recruiting sergeant for
their ghastly ranks.
We entered Carfax without trouble and found all things the same as on
the first occasion. It was hard to believe that amongst so prosaic
surroundings of neglect and dust and decay there was any ground for
such fear as already we knew. Had not our minds been made up, and had
there not been terrible memories to spur us on, we could hardly have
proceeded with our task. We found no papers, or any sign of use in
the house. And in the old chapel the great boxes looked just as we
had seen them last.
Dr. Van Helsing said to us solemnly as we stood before him, "And now,
my friends, we have a duty here to do. We must sterilize this earth,
so sacred of holy memories, that he has brought from a far distant
land for such fell use. He has chosen this earth because it has been
holy. Thus we defeat him with his own weapon, for we make it more
holy still. It was sanctified to such use of man, now we sanctify it
to God."
As he spoke he took from his bag a screwdriver and a wrench, and very
soon the top of one of the cases was thrown open. The earth smelled
musty and close, but we did not somehow seem to mind, for our
attention was concentrated on the Professor. Taking from his box a
piece of the Sacred Wafer he laid it reverently on the earth, and then
shutting down the lid began to screw it home, we aiding him as he
worked.
One by one we treated in the same way each of the great boxes, and
left them as we had found them to all appearance. But in each was a
portion of the Host. When we closed the door behind us, the Professor
said solemnly, "So much is already done. It may be that with all the
others we can be so successful, then the sunset of this evening may
shine of Madam Mina's forehead all white as ivory and with no stain"
As we passed across the lawn on our way to the station to catch our
train we could see the front of the asylum. I looked eagerly, and in
the window of my own room saw Mina. I waved my hand to her, and
nodded to tell that our work there was successfully accomplished. She
nodded in reply to show that she understood. The last I saw, she was
waving her hand in farewell. It was with a heavy heart that we sought
the station and just caught the train, which was steaming in as we
reached the platform. I have written this in the train.
Piccadilly,  o'clock.Just before we reached Fenchurch Street
Lord Godalming said to me, "Quincey and I will find a locksmith. You
had better not come with us in case there should be any difficulty.
For under the circumstances it wouldn't seem so bad for us to break
into an empty house. But you are a solicitor and the Incorporated Law
Society might tell you that you should have known better."
I demurred as to my not sharing any danger even of odium, but he went
on, "Besides, it will attract less attention if there are not too many
of us. My title will make it all right with the locksmith, and with
any policeman that may come along. You had better go with Jack and
the Professor and stay in the Green Park. Somewhere in sight of the
house, and when you see the door opened and the smith has gone away,
do you all come across. We shall be on the lookout for you, and shall
let you in."
"The advice is good" said Van Helsing, so we said no more. Godalming
and Morris hurried off in a cab, we following in another. At the
corner of Arlington Street our contingent got out and strolled into
the Green Park. My heart beat as I saw the house on which so much of
our hope was centred, looming up grim and silent in its deserted
condition amongst its more lively and sprucelooking neighbours. We
sat down on a bench within good view, and began to smoke cigars so as
to attract as little attention as possible. The minutes seemed to
pass with leaden feet as we waited for the coming of the others.
At length we saw a fourwheeler drive up. Out of it, in leisurely
fashion, got Lord Godalming and Morris. And down from the box
descended a thickset working man with his rushwoven basket of tools.
Morris paid the cabman, who touched his hat and drove away. Together
the two ascended the steps, and Lord Godalming pointed out what he
wanted done. The workman took off his coat leisurely and hung it on
one of the spikes of the rail, saying something to a policeman who
just then sauntered along. The policeman nodded acquiescence, and the
man kneeling down placed his bag beside him. After searching through
it, he took out a selection of tools which he proceeded to lay beside
him in orderly fashion. Then he stood up, looked in the keyhole, blew
into it, and turning to his employers, made some remark. Lord
Godalming smiled, and the man lifted a good sized bunch of keys.
Selecting one of them, he began to probe the lock, as if feeling his
way with it. After fumbling about for a bit he tried a second, and
then a third. All at once the door opened under a slight push from
him, and he and the two others entered the hall. We sat still. My
own cigar burnt furiously, but Van Helsing's went cold altogether. We
waited patiently as we saw the workman come out and bring his bag.
Then he held the door partly open, steadying it with his knees, whilst
he fitted a key to the lock. This he finally handed to Lord
Godalming, who took out his purse and gave him something. The man
touched his hat, took his bag, put on his coat and departed. Not a
soul took the slightest notice of the whole transaction.
When the man had fairly gone, we three crossed the street and knocked
at the door. It was immediately opened by Quincey Morris, beside whom
stood Lord Godalming lighting a cigar.
"The place smells so vilely," said the latter as we came in. It did
indeed smell vilely. Like the old chapel at Carfax. And with our
previous experience it was plain to us that the Count had been using
the place pretty freely. We moved to explore the house, all keeping
together in case of attack, for we knew we had a strong and wily enemy
to deal with, and as yet we did not know whether the Count might not
be in the house.
In the dining room, which lay at the back of the hall, we found eight
boxes of earth. Eight boxes only out of the nine which we sought
Our work was not over, and would never be until we should have found
the missing box.
First we opened the shutters of the window which looked out across a
narrow stone flagged yard at the blank face of a stable, pointed to
look like the front of a miniature house. There were no windows in
it, so we were not afraid of being overlooked. We did not lose any
time in examining the chests. With the tools which we had brought
with us we opened them, one by one, and treated them as we had treated
those others in the old chapel. It was evident to us that the Count
was not at present in the house, and we proceeded to search for any of
his effects.
After a cursory glance at the rest of the rooms, from basement to
attic, we came to the conclusion that the dining room contained any
effects which might belong to the Count. And so we proceeded to
minutely examine them. They lay in a sort of orderly disorder on the
great dining room table.
There were title deeds of the Piccadilly house in a great bundle,
deeds of the purchase of the houses at Mile End and Bermondsey,
notepaper, envelopes, and pens and ink. All were covered up in thin
wrapping paper to keep them from the dust. There were also a clothes
brush, a brush and comb, and a jug and basin. The latter containing
dirty water which was reddened as if with blood. Last of all was a
little heap of keys of all sorts and sizes, probably those belonging
to the other houses.
When we had examined this last find, Lord Godalming and Quincey Morris
taking accurate notes of the various addresses of the houses in the
East and the South, took with them the keys in a great bunch, and set
out to destroy the boxes in these places. The rest of us are, with
what patience we can, waiting their return, or the coming of the
Count.
CHAPTER 
DR. SEWARD'S DIARY
 October.The time seemed terribly long whilst we were waiting for
the coming of Godalming and Quincey Morris. The Professor tried to
keep our minds active by using them all the time. I could see his
beneficent purpose, by the side glances which he threw from time to
time at Harker. The poor fellow is overwhelmed in a misery that is
appalling to see. Last night he was a frank, happylooking man, with
strong, youthful face, full of energy, and with dark brown hair.
Today he is a drawn, haggard old man, whose white hair matches well
with the hollow burning eyes and griefwritten lines of his face. His
energy is still intact. In fact, he is like a living flame. This may
yet be his salvation, for if all go well, it will tide him over the
despairing period. He will then, in a kind of way, wake again to the
realities of life. Poor fellow, I thought my own trouble was bad
enough, but his . . . 
The Professor knows this well enough, and is doing his best to keep
his mind active. What he has been saying was, under the
circumstances, of absorbing interest. So well as I can remember, here
it is
"I have studied, over and over again since they came into my hands,
all the papers relating to this monster, and the more I have studied,
the greater seems the necessity to utterly stamp him out. All through
there are signs of his advance. Not only of his power, but of his
knowledge of it. As I learned from the researches of my friend
Arminius of BudaPesth, he was in life a most wonderful man. Soldier,
statesman, and alchemistwhich latter was the highest development of
the science knowledge of his time. He had a mighty brain, a learning
beyond compare, and a heart that knew no fear and no remorse. He
dared even to attend the Scholomance, and there was no branch of
knowledge of his time that he did not essay.
"Well, in him the brain powers survived the physical death. Though it
would seem that memory was not all complete. In some faculties of
mind he has been, and is, only a child. But he is growing, and some
things that were childish at the first are now of man's stature. He
is experimenting, and doing it well. And if it had not been that we
have crossed his path he would be yet, he may be yet if we fail, the
father or furtherer of a new order of beings, whose road must lead
through Death, not Life."
Harker groaned and said, "And this is all arrayed against my darling
But how is he experimenting? The knowledge may help us to defeat
him"
"He has all along, since his coming, been trying his power, slowly but
surely. That big childbrain of his is working. Well for us, it is
as yet a childbrain. For had he dared, at the first, to attempt
certain things he would long ago have been beyond our power. However,
he means to succeed, and a man who has centuries before him can afford
to wait and to go slow. Festina lente may well be his motto."
"I fail to understand," said Harker wearily. "Oh, do be more plain to
me Perhaps grief and trouble are dulling my brain."
The Professor laid his hand tenderly on his shoulder as he spoke, "Ah,
my child, I will be plain. Do you not see how, of late, this monster
has been creeping into knowledge experimentally. How he has been
making use of the zoophagous patient to effect his entry into friend
John's home. For your Vampire, though in all afterwards he can come
when and how he will, must at the first make entry only when asked
thereto by an inmate. But these are not his most important
experiments. Do we not see how at the first all these so great boxes
were moved by others. He knew not then but that must be so. But all
the time that so great childbrain of his was growing, and he began to
consider whether he might not himself move the box. So he began to
help. And then, when he found that this be all right, he try to move
them all alone. And so he progress, and he scatter these graves of
him. And none but he know where they are hidden.
"He may have intend to bury them deep in the ground. So that only he
use them in the night, or at such time as he can change his form, they
do him equal well, and none may know these are his hiding place But,
my child, do not despair, this knowledge came to him just too late
Already all of his lairs but one be sterilize as for him. And before
the sunset this shall be so. Then he have no place where he can move
and hide. I delayed this morning that so we might be sure. Is there
not more at stake for us than for him? Then why not be more careful
than him? By my clock it is one hour and already, if all be well,
friend Arthur and Quincey are on their way to us. Today is our day,
and we must go sure, if slow, and lose no chance. See There are
five of us when those absent ones return."
Whilst we were speaking we were startled by a knock at the hall door,
the double postman's knock of the telegraph boy. We all moved out to
the hall with one impulse, and Van Helsing, holding up his hand to us
to keep silence, stepped to the door and opened it. The boy handed in
a dispatch. The Professor closed the door again, and after looking at
the direction, opened it and read aloud.
"Look out for D. He has just now, , come from Carfax
hurriedly and hastened towards the South. He seems to be
going the round and may want to see you Mina."
There was a pause, broken by Jonathan Harker's voice, "Now, God be
thanked, we shall soon meet"
Van Helsing turned to him quickly and said, "God will act in His own
way and time. Do not fear, and do not rejoice as yet. For what we
wish for at the moment may be our own undoings."
"I care for nothing now," he answered hotly, "except to wipe out this
brute from the face of creation. I would sell my soul to do it"
"Oh, hush, hush, my child" said Van Helsing. "God does not purchase
souls in this wise, and the Devil, though he may purchase, does not
keep faith. But God is merciful and just, and knows your pain and
your devotion to that dear Madam Mina. Think you, how her pain would
be doubled, did she but hear your wild words. Do not fear any of us,
we are all devoted to this cause, and today shall see the end. The
time is coming for action. Today this Vampire is limit to the powers
of man, and till sunset he may not change. It will take him time to
arrive here, see it is twenty minutes past one, and there are yet some
times before he can hither come, be he never so quick. What we must
hope for is that my Lord Arthur and Quincey arrive first."
About half an hour after we had received Mrs. Harker's telegram, there
came a quiet, resolute knock at the hall door. It was just an
ordinary knock, such as is given hourly by thousands of gentlemen, but
it made the Professor's heart and mine beat loudly. We looked at each
other, and together moved out into the hall. We each held ready to
use our various armaments, the spiritual in the left hand, the mortal
in the right. Van Helsing pulled back the latch, and holding the door
half open, stood back, having both hands ready for action. The
gladness of our hearts must have shown upon our faces when on the
step, close to the door, we saw Lord Godalming and Quincey Morris.
They came quickly in and closed the door behind them, the former
saying, as they moved along the hall
"It is all right. We found both places. Six boxes in each and we
destroyed them all."
"Destroyed?" asked the Professor.
"For him" We were silent for a minute, and then Quincey said,
"There's nothing to do but to wait here. If, however, he doesn't turn
up by five o'clock, we must start off. For it won't do to leave Mrs.
Harker alone after sunset."
"He will be here before long now," said Van Helsing, who had been
consulting his pocketbook. "Nota bene, in Madam's telegram he went
south from Carfax. That means he went to cross the river, and he
could only do so at slack of tide, which should be something before
one o'clock. That he went south has a meaning for us. He is as yet
only suspicious, and he went from Carfax first to the place where he
would suspect interference least. You must have been at Bermondsey
only a short time before him. That he is not here already shows that
he went to Mile End next. This took him some time, for he would then
have to be carried over the river in some way. Believe me, my
friends, we shall not have long to wait now. We should have ready
some plan of attack, so that we may throw away no chance. Hush, there
is no time now. Have all your arms Be ready" He held up a warning
hand as he spoke, for we all could hear a key softly inserted in the
lock of the hall door.
I could not but admire, even at such a moment, the way in which a
dominant spirit asserted itself. In all our hunting parties and
adventures in different parts of the world, Quincey Morris had always
been the one to arrange the plan of action, and Arthur and I had been
accustomed to obey him implicitly. Now, the old habit seemed to be
renewed instinctively. With a swift glance around the room, he at
once laid out our plan of attack, and without speaking a word, with a
gesture, placed us each in position. Van Helsing, Harker, and I were
just behind the door, so that when it was opened the Professor could
guard it whilst we two stepped between the incomer and the door.
Godalming behind and Quincey in front stood just out of sight ready to
move in front of the window. We waited in a suspense that made the
seconds pass with nightmare slowness. The slow, careful steps came
along the hall. The Count was evidently prepared for some surprise,
at least he feared it.
Suddenly with a single bound he leaped into the room. Winning a way
past us before any of us could raise a hand to stay him. There was
something so pantherlike in the movement, something so unhuman, that
it seemed to sober us all from the shock of his coming. The first to
act was Harker, who with a quick movement, threw himself before the
door leading into the room in the front of the house. As the Count
saw us, a horrible sort of snarl passed over his face, showing the
eyeteeth long and pointed. But the evil smile as quickly passed into
a cold stare of lionlike disdain. His expression again changed as,
with a single impulse, we all advanced upon him. It was a pity that
we had not some better organized plan of attack, for even at the
moment I wondered what we were to do. I did not myself know whether
our lethal weapons would avail us anything.
Harker evidently meant to try the matter, for he had ready his great
Kukri knife and made a fierce and sudden cut at him. The blow was a
powerful one only the diabolical quickness of the Count's leap back
saved him. A second less and the trenchant blade had shorn through
his heart. As it was, the point just cut the cloth of his coat,
making a wide gap whence a bundle of bank notes and a stream
of gold fell out. The expression of the Count's face was so hellish,
that for a moment I feared for Harker, though I saw him throw the
terrible knife aloft again for another stroke. Instinctively I moved
forward with a protective impulse, holding the Crucifix and Wafer in
my left hand. I felt a mighty power fly along my arm, and it was
without surprise that I saw the monster cower back before a similar
movement made spontaneously by each one of us. It would be impossible
to describe the expression of hate and baffled malignity, of anger and
hellish rage, which came over the Count's face. His waxen hue became
greenishyellow by the contrast of his burning eyes, and the red scar
on the forehead showed on the pallid skin like a palpitating wound.
The next instant, with a sinuous dive he swept under Harker's arm, ere
his blow could fall, and grasping a handful of the money from the
floor, dashed across the room, threw himself at the window. Amid the
crash and glitter of the falling glass, he tumbled into the flagged
area below. Through the sound of the shivering glass I could hear the
"ting" of the gold, as some of the sovereigns fell on the flagging.
We ran over and saw him spring unhurt from the ground. He, rushing up
the steps, crossed the flagged yard, and pushed open the stable door.
There he turned and spoke to us.
"You think to baffle me, you with your pale faces all in a row, like
sheep in a butcher's. You shall be sorry yet, each one of you You
think you have left me without a place to rest, but I have more. My
revenge is just begun I spread it over centuries, and time is on my
side. Your girls that you all love are mine already. And through
them you and others shall yet be mine, my creatures, to do my bidding
and to be my jackals when I want to feed. Bah"
With a contemptuous sneer, he passed quickly through the door, and we
heard the rusty bolt creak as he fastened it behind him. A door
beyond opened and shut. The first of us to speak was the Professor.
Realizing the difficulty of following him through the stable, we moved
toward the hall.
"We have learnt something . . . much Notwithstanding his brave words,
he fears us. He fears time, he fears want For if not, why he hurry
so? His very tone betray him, or my ears deceive. Why take that
money? You follow quick. You are hunters of the wild beast, and
understand it so. For me, I make sure that nothing here may be of use
to him, if so that he returns."
As he spoke he put the money remaining in his pocket, took the title
deeds in the bundle as Harker had left them, and swept the remaining
things into the open fireplace, where he set fire to them with a
match.
Godalming and Morris had rushed out into the yard, and Harker had
lowered himself from the window to follow the Count. He had, however,
bolted the stable door, and by the time they had forced it open there
was no sign of him. Van Helsing and I tried to make inquiry at the
back of the house. But the mews was deserted and no one had seen him
depart.
It was now late in the afternoon, and sunset was not far off. We had
to recognize that our game was up. With heavy hearts we agreed with
the Professor when he said, "Let us go back to Madam Mina. Poor, poor
dear Madam Mina. All we can do just now is done, and we can there, at
least, protect her. But we need not despair. There is but one more
earth box, and we must try to find it. When that is done all may yet
be well."
I could see that he spoke as bravely as he could to comfort Harker.
The poor fellow was quite broken down, now and again he gave a low
groan which he could not suppress. He was thinking of his wife.
With sad hearts we came back to my house, where we found Mrs. Harker
waiting us, with an appearance of cheerfulness which did honour to her
bravery and unselfishness. When she saw our faces, her own became as
pale as death. For a second or two her eyes were closed as if she
were in secret prayer.
And then she said cheerfully, "I can never thank you all enough. Oh,
my poor darling"
As she spoke, she took her husband's grey head in her hands and kissed
it.
"Lay your poor head here and rest it. All will yet be well, dear God
will protect us if He so will it in His good intent." The poor fellow
groaned. There was no place for words in his sublime misery.
We had a sort of perfunctory supper together, and I think it cheered
us all up somewhat. It was, perhaps, the mere animal heat of food to
hungry people, for none of us had eaten anything since breakfast, or
the sense of companionship may have helped us, but anyhow we were all
less miserable, and saw the morrow as not altogether without hope.
True to our promise, we told Mrs. Harker everything which had passed.
And although she grew snowy white at times when danger had seemed to
threaten her husband, and red at others when his devotion to her was
manifested, she listened bravely and with calmness. When we came to
the part where Harker had rushed at the Count so recklessly, she clung
to her husband's arm, and held it tight as though her clinging could
protect him from any harm that might come. She said nothing, however,
till the narration was all done, and matters had been brought up to
the present time.
Then without letting go her husband's hand she stood up amongst us and
spoke. Oh, that I could give any idea of the scene. Of that sweet,
sweet, good, good woman in all the radiant beauty of her youth and
animation, with the red scar on her forehead, of which she was
conscious, and which we saw with grinding of our teeth, remembering
whence and how it came. Her loving kindness against our grim hate.
Her tender faith against all our fears and doubting. And we, knowing
that so far as symbols went, she with all her goodness and purity and
faith, was outcast from God.
"Jonathan," she said, and the word sounded like music on her lips it
was so full of love and tenderness, "Jonathan dear, and you all my
true, true friends, I want you to bear something in mind through all
this dreadful time. I know that you must fight. That you must
destroy even as you destroyed the false Lucy so that the true Lucy
might live hereafter. But it is not a work of hate. That poor soul
who has wrought all this misery is the saddest case of all. Just
think what will be his joy when he, too, is destroyed in his worser
part that his better part may have spiritual immortality. You must be
pitiful to him, too, though it may not hold your hands from his
destruction."
As she spoke I could see her husband's face darken and draw together,
as though the passion in him were shriveling his being to its core.
Instinctively the clasp on his wife's hand grew closer, till his
knuckles looked white. She did not flinch from the pain which I knew
she must have suffered, but looked at him with eyes that were more
appealing than ever.
As she stopped speaking he leaped to his feet, almost tearing his hand
from hers as he spoke.
"May God give him into my hand just for long enough to destroy that
earthly life of him which we are aiming at. If beyond it I could send
his soul forever and ever to burning hell I would do it"
"Oh, hush Oh, hush in the name of the good God. Don't say such
things, Jonathan, my husband, or you will crush me with fear and
horror. Just think, my dear . . . I have been thinking all this long,
long day of it . . . that . . . perhaps . . . some day . . . I, too, may
need such pity, and that some other like you, and with equal cause for
anger, may deny it to me Oh, my husband My husband, indeed I would
have spared you such a thought had there been another way. But I pray
that God may not have treasured your wild words, except as the
heartbroken wail of a very loving and sorely stricken man. Oh, God,
let these poor white hairs go in evidence of what he has suffered, who
all his life has done no wrong, and on whom so many sorrows have
come."
We men were all in tears now. There was no resisting them, and we
wept openly. She wept, too, to see that her sweeter counsels had
prevailed. Her husband flung himself on his knees beside her, and
putting his arms round her, hid his face in the folds of her dress.
Van Helsing beckoned to us and we stole out of the room, leaving the
two loving hearts alone with their God.
Before they retired the Professor fixed up the room against any coming
of the Vampire, and assured Mrs. Harker that she might rest in peace.
She tried to school herself to the belief, and manifestly for her
husband's sake, tried to seem content. It was a brave struggle, and
was, I think and believe, not without its reward. Van Helsing had
placed at hand a bell which either of them was to sound in case of any
emergency. When they had retired, Quincey, Godalming, and I arranged
that we should sit up, dividing the night between us, and watch over
the safety of the poor stricken lady. The first watch falls to
Quincey, so the rest of us shall be off to bed as soon as we can.
Godalming has already turned in, for his is the second watch. Now
that my work is done I, too, shall go to bed.
JONATHAN HARKER'S JOURNAL
 October, close to midnight.I thought yesterday would never end.
There was over me a yearning for sleep, in some sort of blind belief
that to wake would be to find things changed, and that any change must
now be for the better. Before we parted, we discussed what our next
step was to be, but we could arrive at no result. All we knew was
that one earth box remained, and that the Count alone knew where it
was. If he chooses to lie hidden, he may baffle us for years. And in
the meantime, the thought is too horrible, I dare not think of it even
now. This I know, that if ever there was a woman who was all
perfection, that one is my poor wronged darling. I loved her a
thousand times more for her sweet pity of last night, a pity that made
my own hate of the monster seem despicable. Surely God will not
permit the world to be the poorer by the loss of such a creature. This
is hope to me. We are all drifting reefwards now, and faith is our
only anchor. Thank God Mina is sleeping, and sleeping without
dreams. I fear what her dreams might be like, with such terrible
memories to ground them in. She has not been so calm, within my
seeing, since the sunset. Then, for a while, there came over her face
a repose which was like spring after the blasts of March. I thought
at the time that it was the softness of the red sunset on her face,
but somehow now I think it has a deeper meaning. I am not sleepy
myself, though I am weary . . . weary to death. However, I must try
to sleep. For there is tomorrow to think of, and there is no rest for
me until . . .
LaterI must have fallen asleep, for I was awakened by Mina, who was
sitting up in bed, with a startled look on her face. I could see
easily, for we did not leave the room in darkness. She had placed a
warning hand over my mouth, and now she whispered in my ear, "Hush
There is someone in the corridor" I got up softly, and crossing the
room, gently opened the door.
Just outside, stretched on a mattress, lay Mr. Morris, wide awake. He
raised a warning hand for silence as he whispered to me, "Hush Go
back to bed. It is all right. One of us will be here all night. We
don't mean to take any chances"
His look and gesture forbade discussion, so I came back and told Mina.
She sighed and positively a shadow of a smile stole over her poor,
pale face as she put her arms round me and said softly, "Oh, thank God
for good brave men" With a sigh she sank back again to sleep. I
write this now as I am not sleepy, though I must try again.
 October, morning.Once again during the night I was wakened by
Mina. This time we had all had a good sleep, for the grey of the
coming dawn was making the windows into sharp oblongs, and the gas
flame was like a speck rather than a disc of light.
She said to me hurriedly, "Go, call the Professor. I want to see him
at once."
"Why?" I asked.
"I have an idea. I suppose it must have come in the night, and
matured without my knowing it. He must hypnotize me before the dawn,
and then I shall be able to speak. Go quick, dearest, the time is
getting close."
I went to the door. Dr. Seward was resting on the mattress, and
seeing me, he sprang to his feet.
"Is anything wrong?" he asked, in alarm.
"No," I replied. "But Mina wants to see Dr. Van Helsing at once."
"I will go," he said, and hurried into the Professor's room.
Two or three minutes later Van Helsing was in the room in his dressing
gown, and Mr. Morris and Lord Godalming were with Dr. Seward at the
door asking questions. When the Professor saw Mina a smile, a
positive smile ousted the anxiety of his face.
He rubbed his hands as he said, "Oh, my dear Madam Mina, this is
indeed a change. See Friend Jonathan, we have got our dear Madam
Mina, as of old, back to us today" Then turning to her, he said
cheerfully, "And what am I to do for you? For at this hour you do not
want me for nothing."
"I want you to hypnotize me" she said. "Do it before the dawn, for I
feel that then I can speak, and speak freely. Be quick, for the time
is short" Without a word he motioned her to sit up in bed.
Looking fixedly at her, he commenced to make passes in front of her,
from over the top of her head downward, with each hand in turn. Mina
gazed at him fixedly for a few minutes, during which my own heart beat
like a trip hammer, for I felt that some crisis was at hand.
Gradually her eyes closed, and she sat, stock still. Only by the
gentle heaving of her bosom could one know that she was alive. The
Professor made a few more passes and then stopped, and I could see
that his forehead was covered with great beads of perspiration. Mina
opened her eyes, but she did not seem the same woman. There was a
faraway look in her eyes, and her voice had a sad dreaminess which
was new to me. Raising his hand to impose silence, the Professor
motioned to me to bring the others in. They came on tiptoe, closing
the door behind them, and stood at the foot of the bed, looking on.
Mina appeared not to see them. The stillness was broken by Van
Helsing's voice speaking in a low level tone which would not break the
current of her thoughts.
"Where are you?" The answer came in a neutral way.
"I do not know. Sleep has no place it can call its own." For several
minutes there was silence. Mina sat rigid, and the Professor stood
staring at her fixedly.
The rest of us hardly dared to breathe. The room was growing lighter.
Without taking his eyes from Mina's face, Dr. Van Helsing motioned me
to pull up the blind. I did so, and the day seemed just upon us. A
red streak shot up, and a rosy light seemed to diffuse itself through
the room. On the instant the Professor spoke again.
"Where are you now?"
The answer came dreamily, but with intention. It were as though she
were interpreting something. I have heard her use the same tone when
reading her shorthand notes.
"I do not know. It is all strange to me"
"What do you see?"
"I can see nothing. It is all dark."
"What do you hear?" I could detect the strain in the Professor's
patient voice.
"The lapping of water. It is gurgling by, and little waves leap. I
can hear them on the outside."
"Then you are on a ship?'"
We all looked at each other, trying to glean something each from the
other. We were afraid to think.
The answer came quick, "Oh, yes"
"What else do you hear?"
"The sound of men stamping overhead as they run about. There is the
creaking of a chain, and the loud tinkle as the check of the capstan
falls into the ratchet."
"What are you doing?"
"I am still, oh so still. It is like death" The voice faded away
into a deep breath as of one sleeping, and the open eyes closed again.
By this time the sun had risen, and we were all in the full light of
day. Dr. Van Helsing placed his hands on Mina's shoulders, and laid
her head down softly on her pillow. She lay like a sleeping child for
a few moments, and then, with a long sigh, awoke and stared in wonder
to see us all around her.
"Have I been talking in my sleep?" was all she said. She seemed,
however, to know the situation without telling, though she was eager
to know what she had told. The Professor repeated the conversation,
and she said, "Then there is not a moment to lose. It may not be yet
too late"
Mr. Morris and Lord Godalming started for the door but the Professor's
calm voice called them back.
"Stay, my friends. That ship, wherever it was, was weighing anchor at
the moment in your so great Port of London. Which of them is it that
you seek? God be thanked that we have once again a clue, though
whither it may lead us we know not. We have been blind somewhat.
Blind after the manner of men, since we can look back we see what we
might have seen looking forward if we had been able to see what we
might have seen Alas, but that sentence is a puddle, is it not? We
can know now what was in the Count's mind, when he seize that money,
though Jonathan's so fierce knife put him in the danger that even he
dread. He meant escape. Hear me, ESCAPE He saw that with but one
earth box left, and a pack of men following like dogs after a fox,
this London was no place for him. He have take his last earth box on
board a ship, and he leave the land. He think to escape, but no We
follow him. Tally Ho As friend Arthur would say when he put on his
red frock Our old fox is wily. Oh So wily, and we must follow
with wile. I, too, am wily and I think his mind in a little while.
In meantime we may rest and in peace, for there are between us which
he do not want to pass, and which he could not if he would. Unless
the ship were to touch the land, and then only at full or slack tide.
See, and the sun is just rose, and all day to sunset is us. Let us
take bath, and dress, and have breakfast which we all need, and which
we can eat comfortably since he be not in the same land with us."
Mina looked at him appealingly as she asked, "But why need we seek him
further, when he is gone away from us?"
He took her hand and patted it as he replied, "Ask me nothing as yet.
When we have breakfast, then I answer all questions." He would say no
more, and we separated to dress.
After breakfast Mina repeated her question. He looked at her gravely
for a minute and then said sorrowfully, "Because my dear, dear Madam
Mina, now more than ever must we find him even if we have to follow
him to the jaws of Hell"
She grew paler as she asked faintly, "Why?"
"Because," he answered solemnly, "he can live for centuries, and you
are but mortal woman. Time is now to be dreaded, since once he put
that mark upon your throat."
I was just in time to catch her as she fell forward in a faint.
CHAPTER 
DR. SEWARD'S PHONOGRAPH DIARY
SPOKEN BY VAN HELSING
This to Jonathan Harker.
You are to stay with your dear Madam Mina. We shall go to make our
search, if I can call it so, for it is not search but knowing, and we
seek confirmation only. But do you stay and take care of her today.
This is your best and most holiest office. This day nothing can find
him here.
Let me tell you that so you will know what we four know already, for I
have tell them. He, our enemy, have gone away. He have gone back to
his Castle in Transylvania. I know it so well, as if a great hand of
fire wrote it on the wall. He have prepare for this in some way, and
that last earth box was ready to ship somewheres. For this he took
the money. For this he hurry at the last, lest we catch him before
the sun go down. It was his last hope, save that he might hide in the
tomb that he think poor Miss Lucy, being as he thought like him, keep
open to him. But there was not of time. When that fail he make
straight for his last resource, his last earthwork I might say did I
wish double entente. He is clever, oh so clever He know that his
game here was finish. And so he decide he go back home. He find ship
going by the route he came, and he go in it.
We go off now to find what ship, and whither bound. When we have
discover that, we come back and tell you all. Then we will comfort
you and poor Madam Mina with new hope. For it will be hope when you
think it over, that all is not lost. This very creature that we
pursue, he take hundreds of years to get so far as London. And yet in
one day, when we know of the disposal of him we drive him out. He is
finite, though he is powerful to do much harm and suffers not as we
do. But we are strong, each in our purpose, and we are all more
strong together. Take heart afresh, dear husband of Madam Mina. This
battle is but begun and in the end we shall win. So sure as that God
sits on high to watch over His children. Therefore be of much comfort
till we return.
VAN HELSING.
JONATHAN HARKER'S JOURNAL
 October.When I read to Mina, Van Helsing's message in the
phonograph, the poor girl brightened up considerably. Already the
certainty that the Count is out of the country has given her comfort.
And comfort is strength to her. For my own part, now that his
horrible danger is not face to face with us, it seems almost
impossible to believe in it. Even my own terrible experiences in
Castle Dracula seem like a long forgotten dream. Here in the crisp
autumn air in the bright sunlight.
Alas How can I disbelieve In the midst of my thought my eye fell
on the red scar on my poor darling's white forehead. Whilst that
lasts, there can be no disbelief. Mina and I fear to be idle, so we
have been over all the diaries again and again. Somehow, although the
reality seem greater each time, the pain and the fear seem less. There
is something of a guiding purpose manifest throughout, which is
comforting. Mina says that perhaps we are the instruments of ultimate
good. It may be I shall try to think as she does. We have never
spoken to each other yet of the future. It is better to wait till we
see the Professor and the others after their investigations.
The day is running by more quickly than I ever thought a day could run
for me again. It is now three o'clock.
MINA HARKER'S JOURNAL
 October,  P.M.Our meeting for report. Present Professor Van
Helsing, Lord Godalming, Dr. Seward, Mr. Quincey Morris, Jonathan
Harker, Mina Harker.
Dr. Van Helsing described what steps were taken during the day to
discover on what boat and whither bound Count Dracula made his escape.
"As I knew that he wanted to get back to Transylvania, I felt sure
that he must go by the Danube mouth, or by somewhere in the Black Sea,
since by that way he come. It was a dreary blank that was before us.
Omme ignotum pro magnifico, and so with heavy hearts we start to find
what ships leave for the Black Sea last night. He was in sailing
ship, since Madam Mina tell of sails being set. These not so
important as to go in your list of the shipping in the Times, and so
we go, by suggestion of Lord Godalming, to your Lloyd's, where are
note of all ships that sail, however so small. There we find that
only one Black Sea bound ship go out with the tide. She is the
Czarina Catherine, and she sail from Doolittle's Wharf for Varna, and
thence to other ports and up the Danube. 'So' said I, 'this is the
ship whereon is the Count.' So off we go to Doolittle's Wharf, and
there we find a man in an office. From him we inquire of the goings
of the Czarina Catherine. He swear much, and he red face and loud of
voice, but he good fellow all the same. And when Quincey give him
something from his pocket which crackle as he roll it up, and put it
in a so small bag which he have hid deep in his clothing, he still
better fellow and humble servant to us. He come with us, and ask many
men who are rough and hot. These be better fellows too when they have
been no more thirsty. They say much of blood and bloom, and of others
which I comprehend not, though I guess what they mean. But
nevertheless they tell us all things which we want to know.
"They make known to us among them, how last afternoon at about five
o'clock comes a man so hurry. A tall man, thin and pale, with high
nose and teeth so white, and eyes that seem to be burning. That he be
all in black, except that he have a hat of straw which suit not him or
the time. That he scatter his money in making quick inquiry as to
what ship sails for the Black Sea and for where. Some took him to the
office and then to the ship, where he will not go aboard but halt at
shore end of gangplank, and ask that the captain come to him. The
captain come, when told that he will be pay well, and though he swear
much at the first he agree to term. Then the thin man go and some one
tell him where horse and cart can be hired. He go there and soon he
come again, himself driving cart on which a great box. This he
himself lift down, though it take several to put it on truck for the
ship. He give much talk to captain as to how and where his box is to
be place. But the captain like it not and swear at him in many
tongues, and tell him that if he like he can come and see where it
shall be. But he say 'no,' that he come not yet, for that he have
much to do. Whereupon the captain tell him that he had better be
quick, with blood, for that his ship will leave the place, of blood,
before the turn of the tide, with blood. Then the thin man smile and
say that of course he must go when he think fit, but he will be
surprise if he go quite so soon. The captain swear again, polyglot,
and the thin man make him bow, and thank him, and say that he will so
far intrude on his kindness as to come aboard before the sailing.
Final the captain, more red than ever, and in more tongues, tell him
that he doesn't want no Frenchmen, with bloom upon them and also with
blood, in his ship, with blood on her also. And so, after asking
where he might purchase ship forms, he departed.
"No one knew where he went 'or bloomin' well cared' as they said, for
they had something else to think of, well with blood again. For it
soon became apparent to all that the Czarina Catherine would not sail
as was expected. A thin mist began to creep up from the river, and it
grew, and grew. Till soon a dense fog enveloped the ship and all
around her. The captain swore polyglot, very polyglot, polyglot with
bloom and blood, but he could do nothing. The water rose and rose,
and he began to fear that he would lose the tide altogether. He was
in no friendly mood, when just at full tide, the thin man came up the
gangplank again and asked to see where his box had been stowed. Then
the captain replied that he wished that he and his box, old and with
much bloom and blood, were in hell. But the thin man did not be
offend, and went down with the mate and saw where it was place, and
came up and stood awhile on deck in fog. He must have come off by
himself, for none notice him. Indeed they thought not of him, for
soon the fog begin to melt away, and all was clear again. My friends
of the thirst and the language that was of bloom and blood laughed, as
they told how the captain's swears exceeded even his usual polyglot,
and was more than ever full of picturesque, when on questioning other
mariners who were on movement up and down the river that hour, he
found that few of them had seen any of fog at all, except where it lay
round the wharf. However, the ship went out on the ebb tide, and was
doubtless by morning far down the river mouth. She was then, when
they told us, well out to sea.
"And so, my dear Madam Mina, it is that we have to rest for a time,
for our enemy is on the sea, with the fog at his command, on his way
to the Danube mouth. To sail a ship takes time, go she never so
quick. And when we start to go on land more quick, and we meet him
there. Our best hope is to come on him when in the box between
sunrise and sunset. For then he can make no struggle, and we may deal
with him as we should. There are days for us, in which we can make
ready our plan. We know all about where he go. For we have seen the
owner of the ship, who have shown us invoices and all papers that can
be. The box we seek is to be landed in Varna, and to be given to an
agent, one Ristics who will there present his credentials. And so our
merchant friend will have done his part. When he ask if there be any
wrong, for that so, he can telegraph and have inquiry made at Varna,
we say 'no,' for what is to be done is not for police or of the
customs. It must be done by us alone and in our own way."
When Dr. Van Helsing had done speaking, I asked him if he were certain
that the Count had remained on board the ship. He replied, "We have
the best proof of that, your own evidence, when in the hypnotic trance
this morning."
I asked him again if it were really necessary that they should pursue
the Count, for oh I dread Jonathan leaving me, and I know that he
would surely go if the others went. He answered in growing passion,
at first quietly. As he went on, however, he grew more angry and more
forceful, till in the end we could not but see wherein was at least
some of that personal dominance which made him so long a master
amongst men.
"Yes, it is necessary, necessary, necessary For your sake in the
first, and then for the sake of humanity. This monster has done much
harm already, in the narrow scope where he find himself, and in the
short time when as yet he was only as a body groping his so small
measure in darkness and not knowing. All this have I told these
others. You, my dear Madam Mina, will learn it in the phonograph of
my friend John, or in that of your husband. I have told them how the
measure of leaving his own barren land, barren of peoples, and coming
to a new land where life of man teems till they are like the multitude
of standing corn, was the work of centuries. Were another of the
Undead, like him, to try to do what he has done, perhaps not all the
centuries of the world that have been, or that will be, could aid him.
With this one, all the forces of nature that are occult and deep and
strong must have worked together in some wonderous way. The very
place, where he have been alive, Undead for all these centuries, is
full of strangeness of the geologic and chemical world. There are
deep caverns and fissures that reach none know whither. There have
been volcanoes, some of whose openings still send out waters of
strange properties, and gases that kill or make to vivify. Doubtless,
there is something magnetic or electric in some of these combinations
of occult forces which work for physical life in strange way, and in
himself were from the first some great qualities. In a hard and
warlike time he was celebrate that he have more iron nerve, more
subtle brain, more braver heart, than any man. In him some vital
principle have in strange way found their utmost. And as his body
keep strong and grow and thrive, so his brain grow too. All this
without that diabolic aid which is surely to him. For it have to
yield to the powers that come from, and are, symbolic of good. And
now this is what he is to us. He have infect you, oh forgive me, my
dear, that I must say such, but it is for good of you that I speak. He
infect you in such wise, that even if he do no more, you have only to
live, to live in your own old, sweet way, and so in time, death, which
is of man's common lot and with God's sanction, shall make you like to
him. This must not be We have sworn together that it must not.
Thus are we ministers of God's own wish. That the world, and men for
whom His Son die, will not be given over to monsters, whose very
existence would defame Him. He have allowed us to redeem one soul
already, and we go out as the old knights of the Cross to redeem
more. Like them we shall travel towards the sunrise. And like them,
if we fall, we fall in good cause."
He paused and I said, "But will not the Count take his rebuff wisely?
Since he has been driven from England, will he not avoid it, as a
tiger does the village from which he has been hunted?"
"Aha" he said, "your simile of the tiger good, for me, and I shall
adopt him. Your maneater, as they of India call the tiger who has
once tasted blood of the human, care no more for the other prey, but
prowl unceasing till he get him. This that we hunt from our village
is a tiger, too, a maneater, and he never cease to prowl. Nay, in
himself he is not one to retire and stay afar. In his life, his
living life, he go over the Turkey frontier and attack his enemy on
his own ground. He be beaten back, but did he stay? No He come
again, and again, and again. Look at his persistence and endurance.
With the childbrain that was to him he have long since conceive the
idea of coming to a great city. What does he do? He find out the
place of all the world most of promise for him. Then he deliberately
set himself down to prepare for the task. He find in patience just
how is his strength, and what are his powers. He study new tongues.
He learn new social life, new environment of old ways, the politics,
the law, the finance, the science, the habit of a new land and a new
people who have come to be since he was. His glimpse that he have
had, whet his appetite only and enkeen his desire. Nay, it help him
to grow as to his brain. For it all prove to him how right he was at
the first in his surmises. He have done this alone, all alone From
a ruin tomb in a forgotten land. What more may he not do when the
greater world of thought is open to him. He that can smile at death,
as we know him. Who can flourish in the midst of diseases that kill
off whole peoples. Oh If such an one was to come from God, and not
the Devil, what a force for good might he not be in this old world of
ours. But we are pledged to set the world free. Our toil must be in
silence, and our efforts all in secret. For in this enlightened age,
when men believe not even what they see, the doubting of wise men
would be his greatest strength. It would be at once his sheath and
his armor, and his weapons to destroy us, his enemies, who are willing
to peril even our own souls for the safety of one we love. For the
good of mankind, and for the honour and glory of God."
After a general discussion it was determined that for tonight nothing
be definitely settled. That we should all sleep on the facts, and try
to think out the proper conclusions. Tomorrow, at breakfast, we are
to meet again, and after making our conclusions known to one another,
we shall decide on some definite cause of action . . .
I feel a wonderful peace and rest tonight. It is as if some haunting
presence were removed from me. Perhaps . . .
My surmise was not finished, could not be, for I caught sight in the
mirror of the red mark upon my forehead, and I knew that I was still
unclean.
DR. SEWARD'S DIARY
 October.We all arose early, and I think that sleep did much for
each and all of us. When we met at early breakfast there was more
general cheerfulness than any of us had ever expected to experience
again.
It is really wonderful how much resilience there is in human nature.
Let any obstructing cause, no matter what, be removed in any way, even
by death, and we fly back to first principles of hope and enjoyment.
More than once as we sat around the table, my eyes opened in wonder
whether the whole of the past days had not been a dream. It was only
when I caught sight of the red blotch on Mrs. Harker's forehead that I
was brought back to reality. Even now, when I am gravely revolving
the matter, it is almost impossible to realize that the cause of all
our trouble is still existent. Even Mrs. Harker seems to lose sight
of her trouble for whole spells. It is only now and again, when
something recalls it to her mind, that she thinks of her terrible
scar. We are to meet here in my study in half an hour and decide on
our course of action. I see only one immediate difficulty, I know it
by instinct rather than reason. We shall all have to speak frankly.
And yet I fear that in some mysterious way poor Mrs. Harker's tongue
is tied. I know that she forms conclusions of her own, and from all
that has been I can guess how brilliant and how true they must be.
But she will not, or cannot, give them utterance. I have mentioned
this to Van Helsing, and he and I are to talk it over when we are
alone. I suppose it is some of that horrid poison which has got into
her veins beginning to work. The Count had his own purposes when he
gave her what Van Helsing called "the Vampire's baptism of blood."
Well, there may be a poison that distills itself out of good things.
In an age when the existence of ptomaines is a mystery we should not
wonder at anything One thing I know, that if my instinct be true
regarding poor Mrs. Harker's silences, then there is a terrible
difficulty, an unknown danger, in the work before us. The same power
that compels her silence may compel her speech. I dare not think
further, for so I should in my thoughts dishonour a noble woman
Later.When the Professor came in, we talked over the state of
things. I could see that he had something on his mind, which he
wanted to say, but felt some hesitancy about broaching the subject.
After beating about the bush a little, he said, "Friend John, there is
something that you and I must talk of alone, just at the first at any
rate. Later, we may have to take the others into our confidence."
Then he stopped, so I waited. He went on, "Madam Mina, our poor, dear
Madam Mina is changing."
A cold shiver ran through me to find my worst fears thus endorsed.
Van Helsing continued.
"With the sad experience of Miss Lucy, we must this time be warned
before things go too far. Our task is now in reality more difficult
than ever, and this new trouble makes every hour of the direst
importance. I can see the characteristics of the vampire coming in
her face. It is now but very, very slight. But it is to be seen if
we have eyes to notice without prejudge. Her teeth are sharper, and
at times her eyes are more hard. But these are not all, there is to
her the silence now often, as so it was with Miss Lucy. She did not
speak, even when she wrote that which she wished to be known later.
Now my fear is this. If it be that she can, by our hypnotic trance,
tell what the Count see and hear, is it not more true that he who have
hypnotize her first, and who have drink of her very blood and make her
drink of his, should if he will, compel her mind to disclose to him
that which she know?"
I nodded acquiescence. He went on, "Then, what we must do is to
prevent this. We must keep her ignorant of our intent, and so she
cannot tell what she know not. This is a painful task Oh, so
painful that it heartbreak me to think of it, but it must be. When
today we meet, I must tell her that for reason which we will not to
speak she must not more be of our council, but be simply guarded by
us."
He wiped his forehead, which had broken out in profuse perspiration at
the thought of the pain which he might have to inflict upon the poor
soul already so tortured. I knew that it would be some sort of
comfort to him if I told him that I also had come to the same
conclusion. For at any rate it would take away the pain of doubt. I
told him, and the effect was as I expected.
It is now close to the time of our general gathering. Van Helsing has
gone away to prepare for the meeting, and his painful part of it. I
really believe his purpose is to be able to pray alone.
Later.At the very outset of our meeting a great personal relief was
experienced by both Van Helsing and myself. Mrs. Harker had sent a
message by her husband to say that she would not join us at present,
as she thought it better that we should be free to discuss our
movements without her presence to embarrass us. The Professor and I
looked at each other for an instant, and somehow we both seemed
relieved. For my own part, I thought that if Mrs. Harker realized the
danger herself, it was much pain as well as much danger averted.
Under the circumstances we agreed, by a questioning look and answer,
with finger on lip, to preserve silence in our suspicions, until we
should have been able to confer alone again. We went at once into our
Plan of Campaign.
Van Helsing roughly put the facts before us first, "The Czarina
Catherine left the Thames yesterday morning. It will take her at the
quickest speed she has ever made at least three weeks to reach Varna.
But we can travel overland to the same place in three days. Now, if
we allow for two days less for the ship's voyage, owing to such
weather influences as we know that the Count can bring to bear, and if
we allow a whole day and night for any delays which may occur to us,
then we have a margin of nearly two weeks.
"Thus, in order to be quite safe, we must leave here on th at
latest. Then we shall at any rate be in Varna a day before the ship
arrives, and able to make such preparations as may be necessary. Of
course we shall all go armed, armed against evil things, spiritual as
well as physical."
Here Quincey Morris added, "I understand that the Count comes from a
wolf country, and it may be that he shall get there before us. I
propose that we add Winchesters to our armament. I have a kind of
belief in a Winchester when there is any trouble of that sort around.
Do you remember, Art, when we had the pack after us at Tobolsk? What
wouldn't we have given then for a repeater apiece"
"Good" said Van Helsing, "Winchesters it shall be. Quincey's head is
level at times, but most so when there is to hunt, metaphor be more
dishonour to science than wolves be of danger to man. In the meantime
we can do nothing here. And as I think that Varna is not familiar to
any of us, why not go there more soon? It is as long to wait here as
there. Tonight and tomorrow we can get ready, and then if all be
well, we four can set out on our journey."
"We four?" said Harker interrogatively, looking from one to another of
us.
"Of course" answered the Professor quickly. "You must remain to take
care of your so sweet wife"
Harker was silent for awhile and then said in a hollow voice, "Let us
talk of that part of it in the morning. I want to consult with Mina."
I thought that now was the time for Van Helsing to warn him not to
disclose our plan to her, but he took no notice. I looked at him
significantly and coughed. For answer he put his finger to his lips
and turned away.
JONATHAN HARKER'S JOURNAL
 October, afternoon.For some time after our meeting this morning I
could not think. The new phases of things leave my mind in a state of
wonder which allows no room for active thought. Mina's determination
not to take any part in the discussion set me thinking. And as I
could not argue the matter with her, I could only guess. I am as far
as ever from a solution now. The way the others received it, too
puzzled me. The last time we talked of the subject we agreed that
there was to be no more concealment of anything amongst us. Mina is
sleeping now, calmly and sweetly like a little child. Her lips are
curved and her face beams with happiness. Thank God, there are such
moments still for her.
Later.How strange it all is. I sat watching Mina's happy sleep, and
I came as near to being happy myself as I suppose I shall ever be. As
the evening drew on, and the earth took its shadows from the sun
sinking lower, the silence of the room grew more and more solemn to
me.
All at once Mina opened her eyes, and looking at me tenderly said,
"Jonathan, I want you to promise me something on your word of honour.
A promise made to me, but made holily in God's hearing, and not to be
broken though I should go down on my knees and implore you with bitter
tears. Quick, you must make it to me at once."
"Mina," I said, "a promise like that, I cannot make at once. I may
have no right to make it."
"But, dear one," she said, with such spiritual intensity that her eyes
were like pole stars, "it is I who wish it. And it is not for myself.
You can ask Dr. Van Helsing if I am not right. If he disagrees you
may do as you will. Nay, more if you all agree, later you are
absolved from the promise."
"I promise" I said, and for a moment she looked supremely happy.
Though to me all happiness for her was denied by the red scar on her
forehead.
She said, "Promise me that you will not tell me anything of the plans
formed for the campaign against the Count. Not by word, or inference,
or implication, not at any time whilst this remains to me" And she
solemnly pointed to the scar. I saw that she was in earnest, and said
solemnly, "I promise" and as I said it I felt that from that instant
a door had been shut between us.
Later, midnight.Mina has been bright and cheerful all the evening.
So much so that all the rest seemed to take courage, as if infected
somewhat with her gaiety. As a result even I myself felt as if the
pall of gloom which weighs us down were somewhat lifted. We all
retired early. Mina is now sleeping like a little child. It is
wonderful thing that her faculty of sleep remains to her in the midst
of her terrible trouble. Thank God for it, for then at least she can
forget her care. Perhaps her example may affect me as her gaiety did
tonight. I shall try it. Oh For a dreamless sleep.
 October, morning.Another surprise. Mina woke me early, about the
same time as yesterday, and asked me to bring Dr. Van Helsing. I
thought that it was another occasion for hypnotism, and without
question went for the Professor. He had evidently expected some such
call, for I found him dressed in his room. His door was ajar, so that
he could hear the opening of the door of our room. He came at once.
As he passed into the room, he asked Mina if the others might come,
too.
"No," she said quite simply, "it will not be necessary. You can tell
them just as well. I must go with you on your journey."
Dr. Van Helsing was as startled as I was. After a moment's pause he
asked, "But why?"
"You must take me with you. I am safer with you, and you shall be
safer, too."
"But why, dear Madam Mina? You know that your safety is our solemnest
duty. We go into danger, to which you are, or may be, more liable
than any of us from . . . from circumstances . . . things that have
been." He paused embarrassed.
As she replied, she raised her finger and pointed to her forehead. "I
know. That is why I must go. I can tell you now, whilst the sun is
coming up. I may not be able again. I know that when the Count wills
me I must go. I know that if he tells me to come in secret, I must by
wile. By any device to hoodwink, even Jonathan." God saw the look
that she turned on me as she spoke, and if there be indeed a Recording
Angel that look is noted to her everlasting honour. I could only
clasp her hand. I could not speak. My emotion was too great for even
the relief of tears.
She went on. "You men are brave and strong. You are strong in your
numbers, for you can defy that which would break down the human
endurance of one who had to guard alone. Besides, I may be of
service, since you can hypnotize me and so learn that which even I
myself do not know."
Dr. Van Helsing said gravely, "Madam Mina, you are, as always, most
wise. You shall with us come. And together we shall do that which we
go forth to achieve."
When he had spoken, Mina's long spell of silence made me look at her.
She had fallen back on her pillow asleep. She did not even wake when
I had pulled up the blind and let in the sunlight which flooded the
room. Van Helsing motioned to me to come with him quietly. We went
to his room, and within a minute Lord Godalming, Dr. Seward, and Mr.
Morris were with us also.
He told them what Mina had said, and went on. "In the morning we
shall leave for Varna. We have now to deal with a new factor, Madam
Mina. Oh, but her soul is true. It is to her an agony to tell us so
much as she has done. But it is most right, and we are warned in
time. There must be no chance lost, and in Varna we must be ready to
act the instant when that ship arrives."
"What shall we do exactly?" asked Mr. Morris laconically.
The Professor paused before replying, "We shall at the first board
that ship. Then, when we have identified the box, we shall place a
branch of the wild rose on it. This we shall fasten, for when it is
there none can emerge, so that at least says the superstition. And to
superstition must we trust at the first. It was man's faith in the
early, and it have its root in faith still. Then, when we get the
opportunity that we seek, when none are near to see, we shall open the
box, and . . . and all will be well."
"I shall not wait for any opportunity," said Morris. "When I see the
box I shall open it and destroy the monster, though there were a
thousand men looking on, and if I am to be wiped out for it the next
moment" I grasped his hand instinctively and found it as firm as a
piece of steel. I think he understood my look. I hope he did.
"Good boy," said Dr. Van Helsing. "Brave boy. Quincey is all man.
God bless him for it. My child, believe me none of us shall lag
behind or pause from any fear. I do but say what we may do . . . what
we must do. But, indeed, indeed we cannot say what we may do. There
are so many things which may happen, and their ways and their ends are
so various that until the moment we may not say. We shall all be
armed, in all ways. And when the time for the end has come, our
effort shall not be lack. Now let us today put all our affairs in
order. Let all things which touch on others dear to us, and who on us
depend, be complete. For none of us can tell what, or when, or how,
the end may be. As for me, my own affairs are regulate, and as I have
nothing else to do, I shall go make arrangements for the travel. I
shall have all tickets and so forth for our journey."
There was nothing further to be said, and we parted. I shall now
settle up all my affairs of earth, and be ready for whatever may come.
Later.It is done. My will is made, and all complete. Mina if she
survive is my sole heir. If it should not be so, then the others who
have been so good to us shall have remainder.
It is now drawing towards the sunset. Mina's uneasiness calls my
attention to it. I am sure that there is something on her mind which
the time of exact sunset will reveal. These occasions are becoming
harrowing times for us all. For each sunrise and sunset opens up some
new danger, some new pain, which however, may in God's will be means
to a good end. I write all these things in the diary since my darling
must not hear them now. But if it may be that she can see them again,
they shall be ready. She is calling to me.
CHAPTER 
DR SEWARD'S DIARY
 October, Evening.Jonathan Harker has asked me to note this, as he
says he is hardly equal to the task, and he wants an exact record
kept.
I think that none of us were surprised when we were asked to see Mrs.
Harker a little before the time of sunset. We have of late come to
understand that sunrise and sunset are to her times of peculiar
freedom. When her old self can be manifest without any controlling
force subduing or restraining her, or inciting her to action. This
mood or condition begins some half hour or more before actual sunrise
or sunset, and lasts till either the sun is high, or whilst the clouds
are still aglow with the rays streaming above the horizon. At first
there is a sort of negative condition, as if some tie were loosened,
and then the absolute freedom quickly follows. When, however, the
freedom ceases the change back or relapse comes quickly, preceded
only by a spell of warning silence.
Tonight, when we met, she was somewhat constrained, and bore all the
signs of an internal struggle. I put it down myself to her making a
violent effort at the earliest instant she could do so.
A very few minutes, however, gave her complete control of herself.
Then, motioning her husband to sit beside her on the sofa where she
was half reclining, she made the rest of us bring chairs up close.
Taking her husband's hand in hers, she began, "We are all here
together in freedom, for perhaps the last time I know that you will
always be with me to the end." This was to her husband whose hand had,
as we could see, tightened upon her. "In the morning we go out upon
our task, and God alone knows what may be in store for any of us. You
are going to be so good to me to take me with you. I know that all
that brave earnest men can do for a poor weak woman, whose soul
perhaps is lost, no, no, not yet, but is at any rate at stake, you
will do. But you must remember that I am not as you are. There is a
poison in my blood, in my soul, which may destroy me, which must
destroy me, unless some relief comes to us. Oh, my friends, you know
as well as I do, that my soul is at stake. And though I know there is
one way out for me, you must not and I must not take it" She looked
appealingly to us all in turn, beginning and ending with her husband.
"What is that way?" asked Van Helsing in a hoarse voice. "What is
that way, which we must not, may not, take?"
"That I may die now, either by my own hand or that of another, before
the greater evil is entirely wrought. I know, and you know, that were
I once dead you could and would set free my immortal spirit, even as
you did my poor Lucy's. Were death, or the fear of death, the only
thing that stood in the way I would not shrink to die here now, amidst
the friends who love me. But death is not all. I cannot believe that
to die in such a case, when there is hope before us and a bitter task
to be done, is God's will. Therefore, I on my part, give up here the
certainty of eternal rest, and go out into the dark where may be the
blackest things that the world or the nether world holds"
We were all silent, for we knew instinctively that this was only a
prelude. The faces of the others were set, and Harker's grew ashen
grey. Perhaps, he guessed better than any of us what was coming.
She continued, "This is what I can give into the hotchpot." I could
not but note the quaint legal phrase which she used in such a place,
and with all seriousness. "What will each of you give? Your lives I
know," she went on quickly, "that is easy for brave men. Your lives
are God's, and you can give them back to Him, but what will you give
to me?" She looked again questioningly, but this time avoided her
husband's face. Quincey seemed to understand, he nodded, and her face
lit up. "Then I shall tell you plainly what I want, for there must be
no doubtful matter in this connection between us now. You must
promise me, one and all, even you, my beloved husband, that should the
time come, you will kill me."
"What is that time?" The voice was Quincey's, but it was low and
strained.
"When you shall be convinced that I am so changed that it is better
that I die that I may live. When I am thus dead in the flesh, then
you will, without a moment's delay, drive a stake through me and cut
off my head, or do whatever else may be wanting to give me rest"
Quincey was the first to rise after the pause. He knelt down before
her and taking her hand in his said solemnly, "I'm only a rough
fellow, who hasn't, perhaps, lived as a man should to win such a
distinction, but I swear to you by all that I hold sacred and dear
that, should the time ever come, I shall not flinch from the duty that
you have set us. And I promise you, too, that I shall make all
certain, for if I am only doubtful I shall take it that the time has
come"
"My true friend" was all she could say amid her fastfalling tears,
as bending over, she kissed his hand.
"I swear the same, my dear Madam Mina" said Van Helsing. "And I"
said Lord Godalming, each of them in turn kneeling to her to take the
oath. I followed, myself.
Then her husband turned to her waneyed and with a greenish pallor
which subdued the snowy whiteness of his hair, and asked, "And must I,
too, make such a promise, oh, my wife?"
"You too, my dearest," she said, with infinite yearning of pity in her
voice and eyes. "You must not shrink. You are nearest and dearest
and all the world to me. Our souls are knit into one, for all life
and all time. Think, dear, that there have been times when brave men
have killed their wives and their womenkind, to keep them from falling
into the hands of the enemy. Their hands did not falter any the more
because those that they loved implored them to slay them. It is men's
duty towards those whom they love, in such times of sore trial And
oh, my dear, if it is to be that I must meet death at any hand, let it
be at the hand of him that loves me best. Dr. Van Helsing, I have not
forgotten your mercy in poor Lucy's case to him who loved." She
stopped with a flying blush, and changed her phrase, "to him who had
best right to give her peace. If that time shall come again, I look
to you to make it a happy memory of my husband's life that it was his
loving hand which set me free from the awful thrall upon me."
"Again I swear" came the Professor's resonant voice.
Mrs. Harker smiled, positively smiled, as with a sigh of relief she
leaned back and said, "And now one word of warning, a warning which
you must never forget. This time, if it ever come, may come quickly
and unexpectedly, and in such case you must lose no time in using your
opportunity. At such a time I myself might be . . . nay If the time
ever come, shall be, leagued with your enemy against you.
"One more request," she became very solemn as she said this, "it is
not vital and necessary like the other, but I want you to do one thing
for me, if you will."
We all acquiesced, but no one spoke. There was no need to speak.
"I want you to read the Burial Service." She was interrupted by a
deep groan from her husband. Taking his hand in hers, she held it
over her heart, and continued. "You must read it over me some day.
Whatever may be the issue of all this fearful state of things, it will
be a sweet thought to all or some of us. You, my dearest, will I hope
read it, for then it will be in your voice in my memory forever, come
what may"
"But oh, my dear one," he pleaded, "death is afar off from you."
"Nay," she said, holding up a warning hand. "I am deeper in death at
this moment than if the weight of an earthly grave lay heavy upon me"
"Oh, my wife, must I read it?" he said, before he began.
"It would comfort me, my husband" was all she said, and he began to
read when she had got the book ready.
How can I, how could anyone, tell of that strange scene, its
solemnity, its gloom, its sadness, its horror, and withal, its
sweetness. Even a sceptic, who can see nothing but a travesty of
bitter truth in anything holy or emotional, would have been melted to
the heart had he seen that little group of loving and devoted friends
kneeling round that stricken and sorrowing lady or heard the tender
passion of her husband's voice, as in tones so broken and emotional
that often he had to pause, he read the simple and beautiful service
from the Burial of the Dead. I cannot go on . . . words . . . and
vvoices . . . ffail mme
She was right in her instinct. Strange as it was, bizarre as it may
hereafter seem even to us who felt its potent influence at the time,
it comforted us much. And the silence, which showed Mrs. Harker's
coming relapse from her freedom of soul, did not seem so full of
despair to any of us as we had dreaded.
JONATHAN HARKER'S JOURNAL
 October, Varna.We left Charing Cross on the morning of the th,
got to Paris the same night, and took the places secured for us in the
Orient Express. We traveled night and day, arriving here at about
five o'clock. Lord Godalming went to the Consulate to see if any
telegram had arrived for him, whilst the rest of us came on to this
hotel, "the Odessus." The journey may have had incidents. I was,
however, too eager to get on, to care for them. Until the Czarina
Catherine comes into port there will be no interest for me in anything
in the wide world. Thank God Mina is well, and looks to be getting
stronger. Her colour is coming back. She sleeps a great deal.
Throughout the journey she slept nearly all the time. Before sunrise
and sunset, however, she is very wakeful and alert. And it has become
a habit for Van Helsing to hypnotize her at such times. At first,
some effort was needed, and he had to make many passes. But now, she
seems to yield at once, as if by habit, and scarcely any action is
needed. He seems to have power at these particular moments to simply
will, and her thoughts obey him. He always asks her what she can see
and hear.
She answers to the first, "Nothing, all is dark."
And to the second, "I can hear the waves lapping against the ship, and
the water rushing by. Canvas and cordage strain and masts and yards
creak. The wind is high . . . I can hear it in the shrouds, and the
bow throws back the foam."
It is evident that the Czarina Catherine is still at sea, hastening on
her way to Varna. Lord Godalming has just returned. He had four
telegrams, one each day since we started, and all to the same effect.
That the Czarina Catherine had not been reported to Lloyd's from
anywhere. He had arranged before leaving London that his agent should
send him every day a telegram saying if the ship had been reported.
He was to have a message even if she were not reported, so that he
might be sure that there was a watch being kept at the other end of
the wire.
We had dinner and went to bed early. Tomorrow we are to see the Vice
Consul, and to arrange, if we can, about getting on board the ship as
soon as she arrives. Van Helsing says that our chance will be to get
on the boat between sunrise and sunset. The Count, even if he takes
the form of a bat, cannot cross the running water of his own volition,
and so cannot leave the ship. As he dare not change to man's form
without suspicion, which he evidently wishes to avoid, he must remain
in the box. If, then, we can come on board after sunrise, he is at
our mercy, for we can open the box and make sure of him, as we did of
poor Lucy, before he wakes. What mercy he shall get from us all will
not count for much. We think that we shall not have much trouble with
officials or the seamen. Thank God This is the country where
bribery can do anything, and we are well supplied with money. We have
only to make sure that the ship cannot come into port between sunset
and sunrise without our being warned, and we shall be safe. Judge
Moneybag will settle this case, I think
 October.Mina's report still the same. Lapping waves and rushing
water, darkness and favouring winds. We are evidently in good time,
and when we hear of the Czarina Catherine we shall be ready. As she
must pass the Dardanelles we are sure to have some report.
 October.Everything is pretty well fixed now, I think, to welcome
the Count on his return from his tour. Godalming told the shippers
that he fancied that the box sent aboard might contain something
stolen from a friend of his, and got a half consent that he might open
it at his own risk. The owner gave him a paper telling the Captain to
give him every facility in doing whatever he chose on board the ship,
and also a similar authorization to his agent at Varna. We have seen
the agent, who was much impressed with Godalming's kindly manner to
him, and we are all satisfied that whatever he can do to aid our
wishes will be done.
We have already arranged what to do in case we get the box open. If
the Count is there, Van Helsing and Seward will cut off his head at
once and drive a stake through his heart. Morris and Godalming and I
shall prevent interference, even if we have to use the arms which we
shall have ready. The Professor says that if we can so treat the
Count's body, it will soon after fall into dust. In such case there
would be no evidence against us, in case any suspicion of murder were
aroused. But even if it were not, we should stand or fall by our act,
and perhaps some day this very script may be evidence to come between
some of us and a rope. For myself, I should take the chance only too
thankfully if it were to come. We mean to leave no stone unturned to
carry out our intent. We have arranged with certain officials that
the instant the Czarina Catherine is seen, we are to be informed by a
special messenger.
 October.A whole week of waiting. Daily telegrams to Godalming,
but only the same story. "Not yet reported." Mina's morning and
evening hypnotic answer is unvaried. Lapping waves, rushing water,
and creaking masts.
TELEGRAM, OCTOBER TH RUFUS SMITH, LLOYD'S, LONDON,
TO LORD GODALMING, CARE OF H. B. M. VICE CONSUL, VARNA
"Czarina Catherine reported this morning from Dardanelles."
DR. SEWARD'S DIARY
 October.How I miss my phonograph To write a diary with a pen is
irksome to me But Van Helsing says I must. We were all wild with
excitement yesterday when Godalming got his telegram from Lloyd's. I
know now what men feel in battle when the call to action is heard.
Mrs. Harker, alone of our party, did not show any signs of emotion.
After all, it is not strange that she did not, for we took special
care not to let her know anything about it, and we all tried not to
show any excitement when we were in her presence. In old days she
would, I am sure, have noticed, no matter how we might have tried to
conceal it. But in this way she is greatly changed during the past
three weeks. The lethargy grows upon her, and though she seems strong
and well, and is getting back some of her colour, Van Helsing and I are
not satisfied. We talk of her often. We have not, however, said a
word to the others. It would break poor Harker's heart, certainly his
nerve, if he knew that we had even a suspicion on the subject. Van
Helsing examines, he tells me, her teeth very carefully, whilst she is
in the hypnotic condition, for he says that so long as they do not
begin to sharpen there is no active danger of a change in her. If
this change should come, it would be necessary to take steps We both
know what those steps would have to be, though we do not mention our
thoughts to each other. We should neither of us shrink from the task,
awful though it be to contemplate. "Euthanasia" is an excellent and a
comforting word I am grateful to whoever invented it.
It is only about  hours' sail from the Dardanelles to here, at the
rate the Czarina Catherine has come from London. She should therefore
arrive some time in the morning, but as she cannot possibly get in
before noon, we are all about to retire early. We shall get up at one
o'clock, so as to be ready.
 October, Noon.No news yet of the ship's arrival. Mrs. Harker's
hypnotic report this morning was the same as usual, so it is possible
that we may get news at any moment. We men are all in a fever of
excitement, except Harker, who is calm. His hands are cold as ice,
and an hour ago I found him whetting the edge of the great Ghoorka
knife which he now always carries with him. It will be a bad lookout
for the Count if the edge of that "Kukri" ever touches his throat,
driven by that stern, icecold hand
Van Helsing and I were a little alarmed about Mrs. Harker today.
About noon she got into a sort of lethargy which we did not like.
Although we kept silence to the others, we were neither of us happy
about it. She had been restless all the morning, so that we were at
first glad to know that she was sleeping. When, however, her husband
mentioned casually that she was sleeping so soundly that he could not
wake her, we went to her room to see for ourselves. She was breathing
naturally and looked so well and peaceful that we agreed that the
sleep was better for her than anything else. Poor girl, she has so
much to forget that it is no wonder that sleep, if it brings oblivion
to her, does her good.
Later.Our opinion was justified, for when after a refreshing sleep
of some hours she woke up, she seemed brighter and better than she had
been for days. At sunset she made the usual hypnotic report.
Wherever he may be in the Black Sea, the Count is hurrying to his
destination. To his doom, I trust
 October.Another day and no tidings of the Czarina Catherine. She
ought to be here by now. That she is still journeying somewhere is
apparent, for Mrs. Harker's hypnotic report at sunrise was still the
same. It is possible that the vessel may be lying by, at times, for
fog. Some of the steamers which came in last evening reported patches
of fog both to north and south of the port. We must continue our
watching, as the ship may now be signalled any moment.
 October, Noon.Most strange. No news yet of the ship we wait for.
Mrs. Harker reported last night and this morning as usual. "Lapping
waves and rushing water," though she added that "the waves were very
faint." The telegrams from London have been the same, "no further
report." Van Helsing is terribly anxious, and told me just now that he
fears the Count is escaping us.
He added significantly, "I did not like that lethargy of Madam Mina's.
Souls and memories can do strange things during trance." I was about
to ask him more, but Harker just then came in, and he held up a
warning hand. We must try tonight at sunset to make her speak more
fully when in her hypnotic state.
 October.Telegram. Rufus Smith, London, to Lord Godalming, care
H. B. M. Vice Consul, Varna
"Czarina Catherine reported entering Galatz at one o'clock today."
DR. SEWARD'S DIARY
 October.When the telegram came announcing the arrival in Galatz I
do not think it was such a shock to any of us as might have been
expected. True, we did not know whence, or how, or when, the bolt
would come. But I think we all expected that something strange would
happen. The day of arrival at Varna made us individually satisfied
that things would not be just as we had expected. We only waited to
learn where the change would occur. None the less, however, it was a
surprise. I suppose that nature works on such a hopeful basis that we
believe against ourselves that things will be as they ought to be, not
as we should know that they will be. Transcendentalism is a beacon to
the angels, even if it be a willo'thewisp to man. Van Helsing
raised his hand over his head for a moment, as though in remonstrance
with the Almighty. But he said not a word, and in a few seconds stood
up with his face sternly set.
Lord Godalming grew very pale, and sat breathing heavily. I was
myself half stunned and looked in wonder at one after another.
Quincey Morris tightened his belt with that quick movement which I
knew so well. In our old wandering days it meant "action." Mrs.
Harker grew ghastly white, so that the scar on her forehead seemed to
burn, but she folded her hands meekly and looked up in prayer. Harker
smiled, actually smiled, the dark, bitter smile of one who is without
hope, but at the same time his action belied his words, for his hands
instinctively sought the hilt of the great Kukri knife and rested
there.
"When does the next train start for Galatz?" said Van Helsing to us
generally.
"At  tomorrow morning" We all started, for the answer came from
Mrs. Harker.
"How on earth do you know?" said Art.
"You forget, or perhaps you do not know, though Jonathan does and so
does Dr. Van Helsing, that I am the train fiend. At home in Exeter I
always used to make up the time tables, so as to be helpful to my
husband. I found it so useful sometimes, that I always make a study
of the time tables now. I knew that if anything were to take us to
Castle Dracula we should go by Galatz, or at any rate through
Bucharest, so I learned the times very carefully. Unhappily there are
not many to learn, as the only train tomorrow leaves as I say."
"Wonderful woman" murmured the Professor.
"Can't we get a special?" asked Lord Godalming.
Van Helsing shook his head, "I fear not. This land is very different
from yours or mine. Even if we did have a special, it would probably
not arrive as soon as our regular train. Moreover, we have something
to prepare. We must think. Now let us organize. You, friend Arthur,
go to the train and get the tickets and arrange that all be ready for
us to go in the morning. Do you, friend Jonathan, go to the agent of
the ship and get from him letters to the agent in Galatz, with
authority to make a search of the ship just as it was here. Quincey
Morris, you see the Vice Consul, and get his aid with his fellow in
Galatz and all he can do to make our way smooth, so that no times be
lost when over the Danube. John will stay with Madam Mina and me, and
we shall consult. For so if time be long you may be delayed. And it
will not matter when the sun set, since I am here with Madam to make
report."
"And I," said Mrs. Harker brightly, and more like her old self than
she had been for many a long day, "shall try to be of use in all ways,
and shall think and write for you as I used to do. Something is
shifting from me in some strange way, and I feel freer than I have
been of late"
The three younger men looked happier at the moment as they seemed to
realize the significance of her words. But Van Helsing and I, turning
to each other, met each a grave and troubled glance. We said nothing
at the time, however.
When the three men had gone out to their tasks Van Helsing asked Mrs.
Harker to look up the copy of the diaries and find him the part of
Harker's journal at the Castle. She went away to get it.
When the door was shut upon her he said to me, "We mean the same
Speak out"
"Here is some change. It is a hope that makes me sick, for it may
deceive us."
"Quite so. Do you know why I asked her to get the manuscript?"
"No" said I, "unless it was to get an opportunity of seeing me
alone."
"You are in part right, friend John, but only in part. I want to tell
you something. And oh, my friend, I am taking a great, a terrible,
risk. But I believe it is right. In the moment when Madam Mina said
those words that arrest both our understanding, an inspiration came to
me. In the trance of three days ago the Count sent her his spirit to
read her mind. Or more like he took her to see him in his earth box
in the ship with water rushing, just as it go free at rise and set of
sun. He learn then that we are here, for she have more to tell in her
open life with eyes to see ears to hear than he, shut as he is, in his
coffin box. Now he make his most effort to escape us. At present he
want her not.
"He is sure with his so great knowledge that she will come at his
call. But he cut her off, take her, as he can do, out of his own
power, that so she come not to him. Ah There I have hope that our
man brains that have been of man so long and that have not lost the
grace of God, will come higher than his childbrain that lie in his
tomb for centuries, that grow not yet to our stature, and that do only
work selfish and therefore small. Here comes Madam Mina. Not a word
to her of her trance She knows it not, and it would overwhelm her
and make despair just when we want all her hope, all her courage, when
most we want all her great brain which is trained like man's brain,
but is of sweet woman and have a special power which the Count give
her, and which he may not take away altogether, though he think not
so. Hush Let me speak, and you shall learn. Oh, John, my friend,
we are in awful straits. I fear, as I never feared before. We can
only trust the good God. Silence Here she comes"
I thought that the Professor was going to break down and have
hysterics, just as he had when Lucy died, but with a great effort he
controlled himself and was at perfect nervous poise when Mrs. Harker
tripped into the room, bright and happy looking and, in the doing of
work, seemingly forgetful of her misery. As she came in, she handed a
number of sheets of typewriting to Van Helsing. He looked over them
gravely, his face brightening up as he read.
Then holding the pages between his finger and thumb he said, "Friend
John, to you with so much experience already, and you too, dear Madam
Mina, that are young, here is a lesson. Do not fear ever to think. A
half thought has been buzzing often in my brain, but I fear to let him
loose his wings. Here now, with more knowledge, I go back to where
that half thought come from and I find that he be no half thought at
all. That be a whole thought, though so young that he is not yet
strong to use his little wings. Nay, like the 'Ugly Duck' of my
friend Hans Andersen, he be no duck thought at all, but a big swan
thought that sail nobly on big wings, when the time come for him to
try them. See I read here what Jonathan have written.
"That other of his race who, in a later age, again and again, brought
his forces over The Great River into Turkey Land, who when he was
beaten back, came again, and again, and again, though he had to come
alone from the bloody field where his troops were being slaughtered,
since he knew that he alone could ultimately triumph.
"What does this tell us? Not much? No The Count's child thought
see nothing, therefore he speak so free. Your man thought see
nothing. My man thought see nothing, till just now. No But there
comes another word from some one who speak without thought because
she, too, know not what it mean, what it might mean. Just as there
are elements which rest, yet when in nature's course they move on
their way and they touch, the pouf And there comes a flash of light,
heaven wide, that blind and kill and destroy some. But that show up
all earth below for leagues and leagues. Is it not so? Well, I shall
explain. To begin, have you ever study the philosophy of crime?
'Yes' and 'No.' You, John, yes, for it is a study of insanity. You,
no, Madam Mina, for crime touch you not, not but once. Still, your
mind works true, and argues not a particulari ad universale. There is
this peculiarity in criminals. It is so constant, in all countries
and at all times, that even police, who know not much from philosophy,
come to know it empirically, that it is. That is to be empiric. The
criminal always work at one crime, that is the true criminal who seems
predestinate to crime, and who will of none other. This criminal has
not full man brain. He is clever and cunning and resourceful, but he
be not of man stature as to brain. He be of child brain in much. Now
this criminal of ours is predestinate to crime also. He, too, have
child brain, and it is of the child to do what he have done. The
little bird, the little fish, the little animal learn not by
principle, but empirically. And when he learn to do, then there is to
him the ground to start from to do more. 'Dos pou sto,' said
Archimedes. 'Give me a fulcrum, and I shall move the world' To do
once, is the fulcrum whereby child brain become man brain. And until
he have the purpose to do more, he continue to do the same again every
time, just as he have done before Oh, my dear, I see that your eyes
are opened, and that to you the lightning flash show all the leagues,"
for Mrs. Harker began to clap her hands and her eyes sparkled.
He went on, "Now you shall speak. Tell us two dry men of science what
you see with those so bright eyes." He took her hand and held it
whilst he spoke. His finger and thumb closed on her pulse, as I
thought instinctively and unconsciously, as she spoke.
"The Count is a criminal and of criminal type. Nordau and Lombroso
would so classify him, and qua criminal he is of an imperfectly formed
mind. Thus, in a difficulty he has to seek resource in habit. His
past is a clue, and the one page of it that we know, and that from his
own lips, tells that once before, when in what Mr. Morris would call
a 'tight place,' he went back to his own country from the land he had
tried to invade, and thence, without losing purpose, prepared himself
for a new effort. He came again better equipped for his work, and
won. So he came to London to invade a new land. He was beaten, and
when all hope of success was lost, and his existence in danger, he
fled back over the sea to his home. Just as formerly he had fled back
over the Danube from Turkey Land."
"Good, good Oh, you so clever lady" said Van Helsing,
enthusiastically, as he stooped and kissed her hand. A moment later
he said to me, as calmly as though we had been having a sick room
consultation, "Seventytwo only, and in all this excitement. I have
hope."
Turning to her again, he said with keen expectation, "But go on. Go
on There is more to tell if you will. Be not afraid. John and I
know. I do in any case, and shall tell you if you are right. Speak,
without fear"
"I will try to. But you will forgive me if I seem too egotistical."
"Nay Fear not, you must be egotist, for it is of you that we think."
"Then, as he is criminal he is selfish. And as his intellect is small
and his action is based on selfishness, he confines himself to one
purpose. That purpose is remorseless. As he fled back over the
Danube, leaving his forces to be cut to pieces, so now he is intent on
being safe, careless of all. So his own selfishness frees my soul
somewhat from the terrible power which he acquired over me on that
dreadful night. I felt it Oh, I felt it Thank God, for His great
mercy My soul is freer than it has been since that awful hour. And
all that haunts me is a fear lest in some trance or dream he may have
used my knowledge for his ends."
The Professor stood up, "He has so used your mind, and by it he has
left us here in Varna, whilst the ship that carried him rushed through
enveloping fog up to Galatz, where, doubtless, he had made preparation
for escaping from us. But his child mind only saw so far. And it may
be that as ever is in God's Providence, the very thing that the evil
doer most reckoned on for his selfish good, turns out to be his
chiefest harm. The hunter is taken in his own snare, as the great
Psalmist says. For now that he think he is free from every trace of
us all, and that he has escaped us with so many hours to him, then his
selfish child brain will whisper him to sleep. He think, too, that as
he cut himself off from knowing your mind, there can be no knowledge
of him to you. There is where he fail That terrible baptism of
blood which he give you makes you free to go to him in spirit, as you
have as yet done in your times of freedom, when the sun rise and set.
At such times you go by my volition and not by his. And this power to
good of you and others, you have won from your suffering at his hands.
This is now all more precious that he know it not, and to guard
himself have even cut himself off from his knowledge of our where.
We, however, are not selfish, and we believe that God is with us
through all this blackness, and these many dark hours. We shall
follow him, and we shall not flinch, even if we peril ourselves that
we become like him. Friend John, this has been a great hour, and it
have done much to advance us on our way. You must be scribe and write
him all down, so that when the others return from their work you can
give it to them, then they shall know as we do."
And so I have written it whilst we wait their return, and Mrs. Harker
has written with the typewriter all since she brought the MS to us.
CHAPTER 
DR. SEWARD'S DIARY
 October.This is written in the train from Varna to Galatz. Last
night we all assembled a little before the time of sunset. Each of us
had done his work as well as he could, so far as thought, and
endeavour, and opportunity go, we are prepared for the whole of our
journey, and for our work when we get to Galatz. When the usual time
came round Mrs. Harker prepared herself for her hypnotic effort, and
after a longer and more serious effort on the part of Van Helsing than
has been usually necessary, she sank into the trance. Usually she
speaks on a hint, but this time the Professor had to ask her
questions, and to ask them pretty resolutely, before we could learn
anything. At last her answer came.
"I can see nothing. We are still. There are no waves lapping, but
only a steady swirl of water softly running against the hawser. I can
hear men's voices calling, near and far, and the roll and creak of
oars in the rowlocks. A gun is fired somewhere, the echo of it seems
far away. There is tramping of feet overhead, and ropes and chains
are dragged along. What is this? There is a gleam of light. I can
feel the air blowing upon me."
Here she stopped. She had risen, as if impulsively, from where she
lay on the sofa, and raised both her hands, palms upwards, as if
lifting a weight. Van Helsing and I looked at each other with
understanding. Quincey raised his eyebrows slightly and looked at her
intently, whilst Harker's hand instinctively closed round the hilt of
his Kukri. There was a long pause. We all knew that the time when
she could speak was passing, but we felt that it was useless to say
anything.
Suddenly she sat up, and as she opened her eyes said sweetly, "Would
none of you like a cup of tea? You must all be so tired"
We could only make her happy, and so acqueisced. She bustled off to
get tea. When she had gone Van Helsing said, "You see, my friends. He
is close to land. He has left his earth chest. But he has yet to get
on shore. In the night he may lie hidden somewhere, but if he be not
carried on shore, or if the ship do not touch it, he cannot achieve
the land. In such case he can, if it be in the night, change his form
and jump or fly on shore, then, unless he be carried he cannot escape.
And if he be carried, then the customs men may discover what the box
contain. Thus, in fine, if he escape not on shore tonight, or before
dawn, there will be the whole day lost to him. We may then arrive in
time. For if he escape not at night we shall come on him in daytime,
boxed up and at our mercy. For he dare not be his true self, awake
and visible, lest he be discovered."
There was no more to be said, so we waited in patience until the dawn,
at which time we might learn more from Mrs. Harker.
Early this morning we listened, with breathless anxiety, for her
response in her trance. The hypnotic stage was even longer in coming
than before, and when it came the time remaining until full sunrise
was so short that we began to despair. Van Helsing seemed to throw
his whole soul into the effort. At last, in obedience to his will she
made reply.
"All is dark. I hear lapping water, level with me, and some creaking
as of wood on wood." She paused, and the red sun shot up. We must
wait till tonight.
And so it is that we are travelling towards Galatz in an agony of
expectation. We are due to arrive between two and three in the
morning. But already, at Bucharest, we are three hours late, so we
cannot possibly get in till well after sunup. Thus we shall have two
more hypnotic messages from Mrs. Harker Either or both may possibly
throw more light on what is happening.
Later.Sunset has come and gone. Fortunately it came at a time when
there was no distraction. For had it occurred whilst we were at a
station, we might not have secured the necessary calm and isolation.
Mrs. Harker yielded to the hypnotic influence even less readily than
this morning. I am in fear that her power of reading the Count's
sensations may die away, just when we want it most. It seems to me
that her imagination is beginning to work. Whilst she has been in the
trance hitherto she has confined herself to the simplest of facts. If
this goes on it may ultimately mislead us. If I thought that the
Count's power over her would die away equally with her power of
knowledge it would be a happy thought. But I am afraid that it may
not be so.
When she did speak, her words were enigmatical, "Something is going
out. I can feel it pass me like a cold wind. I can hear, far off,
confused sounds, as of men talking in strange tongues, fierce falling
water, and the howling of wolves." She stopped and a shudder ran
through her, increasing in intensity for a few seconds, till at the
end, she shook as though in a palsy. She said no more, even in answer
to the Professor's imperative questioning. When she woke from the
trance, she was cold, and exhausted, and languid, but her mind was all
alert. She could not remember anything, but asked what she had said.
When she was told, she pondered over it deeply for a long time and in
silence.
 October,  A.M.We are near Galatz now, and I may not have time to
write later. Sunrise this morning was anxiously looked for by us all.
Knowing of the increasing difficulty of procuring the hypnotic trance,
Van Helsing began his passes earlier than usual. They produced no
effect, however, until the regular time, when she yielded with a still
greater difficulty, only a minute before the sun rose. The Professor
lost no time in his questioning.
Her answer came with equal quickness, "All is dark. I hear water
swirling by, level with my ears, and the creaking of wood on wood.
Cattle low far off. There is another sound, a queer one like . . ."
She stopped and grew white, and whiter still.
"Go on, go on Speak, I command you" said Van Helsing in an agonized
voice. At the same time there was despair in his eyes, for the risen
sun was reddening even Mrs. Harker's pale face. She opened her eyes,
and we all started as she said, sweetly and seemingly with the utmost
unconcern.
"Oh, Professor, why ask me to do what you know I can't? I don't
remember anything." Then, seeing the look of amazement on our faces,
she said, turning from one to the other with a troubled look, "What
have I said? What have I done? I know nothing, only that I was lying
here, half asleep, and heard you say 'go on speak, I command you' It
seemed so funny to hear you order me about, as if I were a bad child"
"Oh, Madam Mina," he said, sadly, "it is proof, if proof be needed, of
how I love and honour you, when a word for your good, spoken more
earnest than ever, can seem so strange because it is to order her whom
I am proud to obey"
The whistles are sounding. We are nearing Galatz. We are on fire
with anxiety and eagerness.
MINA HARKER'S JOURNAL
 October.Mr. Morris took me to the hotel where our rooms had been
ordered by telegraph, he being the one who could best be spared, since
he does not speak any foreign language. The forces were distributed
much as they had been at Varna, except that Lord Godalming went to the
Vice Consul, as his rank might serve as an immediate guarantee of some
sort to the official, we being in extreme hurry. Jonathan and the two
doctors went to the shipping agent to learn particulars of the arrival
of the Czarina Catherine.
Later.Lord Godalming has returned. The Consul is away, and the Vice
Consul sick. So the routine work has been attended to by a clerk. He
was very obliging, and offered to do anything in his power.
JONATHAN HARKER'S JOURNAL
 October.At nine o'clock Dr. Van Helsing, Dr. Seward, and I called
on Messrs. Mackenzie  Steinkoff, the agents of the London firm of
Hapgood. They had received a wire from London, in answer to Lord
Godalming's telegraphed request, asking them to show us any civility
in their power. They were more than kind and courteous, and took us
at once on board the Czarina Catherine, which lay at anchor out in the
river harbor. There we saw the Captain, Donelson by name, who told us
of his voyage. He said that in all his life he had never had so
favourable a run.
"Man" he said, "but it made us afeard, for we expect it that we
should have to pay for it wi' some rare piece o' ill luck, so as to
keep up the average. It's no canny to run frae London to the Black
Sea wi' a wind ahint ye, as though the Deil himself were blawin' on
yer sail for his ain purpose. An' a' the time we could no speer a
thing. Gin we were nigh a ship, or a port, or a headland, a fog fell
on us and travelled wi' us, till when after it had lifted and we
looked out, the deil a thing could we see. We ran by Gibraltar wi'
oot bein' able to signal. An' til we came to the Dardanelles and had
to wait to get our permit to pass, we never were within hail o'
aught. At first I inclined to slack off sail and beat about till the
fog was lifted. But whiles, I thocht that if the Deil was minded to
get us into the Black Sea quick, he was like to do it whether we would
or no. If we had a quick voyage it would be no to our miscredit
wi' the owners, or no hurt to our traffic, an' the Old Mon who had
served his ain purpose wad be decently grateful to us for no hinderin'
him."
This mixture of simplicity and cunning, of superstition and commercial
reasoning, aroused Van Helsing, who said, "Mine friend, that Devil is
more clever than he is thought by some, and he know when he meet his
match"
The skipper was not displeased with the compliment, and went on, "When
we got past the Bosphorus the men began to grumble. Some o' them, the
Roumanians, came and asked me to heave overboard a big box which had
been put on board by a queer lookin' old man just before we had
started frae London. I had seen them speer at the fellow, and put out
their twa fingers when they saw him, to guard them against the evil
eye. Man but the supersteetion of foreigners is pairfectly
rideeculous I sent them aboot their business pretty quick, but as
just after a fog closed in on us I felt a wee bit as they did anent
something, though I wouldn't say it was again the big box. Well, on
we went, and as the fog didn't let up for five days I joost let the
wind carry us, for if the Deil wanted to get somewheres, well, he
would fetch it up a'reet. An' if he didn't, well, we'd keep a sharp
lookout anyhow. Sure eneuch, we had a fair way and deep water all the
time. And two days ago, when the mornin' sun came through the fog, we
found ourselves just in the river opposite Galatz. The Roumanians
were wild, and wanted me right or wrong to take out the box and fling
it in the river. I had to argy wi' them aboot it wi' a handspike. An'
when the last o' them rose off the deck wi' his head in his hand, I
had convinced them that, evil eye or no evil eye, the property and the
trust of my owners were better in my hands than in the river Danube.
They had, mind ye, taken the box on the deck ready to fling in, and as
it was marked Galatz via Varna, I thocht I'd let it lie till we
discharged in the port an' get rid o't althegither. We didn't do much
clearin' that day, an' had to remain the nicht at anchor. But in the
mornin', braw an' airly, an hour before sunup, a man came aboard wi'
an order, written to him from England, to receive a box marked for one
Count Dracula. Sure eneuch the matter was one ready to his hand. He
had his papers a' reet, an' glad I was to be rid o' the dam' thing,
for I was beginnin' masel' to feel uneasy at it. If the Deil did have
any luggage aboord the ship, I'm thinkin' it was nane ither than that
same"
"What was the name of the man who took it?" asked Dr. Van Helsing with
restrained eagerness.
"I'll be tellin' ye quick" he answered, and stepping down to his
cabin, produced a receipt signed "Immanuel Hildesheim." Burgenstrasse
 was the address. We found out that this was all the Captain knew,
so with thanks we came away.
We found Hildesheim in his office, a Hebrew of rather the Adelphi
Theatre type, with a nose like a sheep, and a fez. His arguments were
pointed with specie, we doing the punctuation, and with a little
bargaining he told us what he knew. This turned out to be simple but
important. He had received a letter from Mr. de Ville of London,
telling him to receive, if possible before sunrise so as to avoid
customs, a box which would arrive at Galatz in the Czarina Catherine.
This he was to give in charge to a certain Petrof Skinsky, who dealt
with the Slovaks who traded down the river to the port. He had been
paid for his work by an English bank note, which had been duly cashed
for gold at the Danube International Bank. When Skinsky had come to
him, he had taken him to the ship and handed over the box, so as to
save porterage. That was all he knew.
We then sought for Skinsky, but were unable to find him. One of his
neighbors, who did not seem to bear him any affection, said that he
had gone away two days before, no one knew whither. This was
corroborated by his landlord, who had received by messenger the key of
the house together with the rent due, in English money. This had been
between ten and eleven o'clock last night. We were at a standstill
again.
Whilst we were talking one came running and breathlessly gasped out
that the body of Skinsky had been found inside the wall of the
churchyard of St. Peter, and that the throat had been torn open as if
by some wild animal. Those we had been speaking with ran off to see
the horror, the women crying out. "This is the work of a Slovak" We
hurried away lest we should have been in some way drawn into the
affair, and so detained.
As we came home we could arrive at no definite conclusion. We were
all convinced that the box was on its way, by water, to somewhere, but
where that might be we would have to discover. With heavy hearts we
came home to the hotel to Mina.
When we met together, the first thing was to consult as to taking Mina
again into our confidence. Things are getting desperate, and it is at
least a chance, though a hazardous one. As a preliminary step, I was
released from my promise to her.
MINA HARKER'S JOURNAL
 October, evening.They were so tired and worn out and dispirited
that there was nothing to be done till they had some rest, so I asked
them all to lie down for half an hour whilst I should enter everything
up to the moment. I feel so grateful to the man who invented the
"Traveller's" typewriter, and to Mr. Morris for getting this one for
me. I should have felt quite astray doing the work if I had to write
with a pen . . .
It is all done. Poor dear, dear Jonathan, what he must have suffered,
what he must be suffering now. He lies on the sofa hardly seeming to
breathe, and his whole body appears in collapse. His brows are knit.
His face is drawn with pain. Poor fellow, maybe he is thinking, and I
can see his face all wrinkled up with the concentration of his
thoughts. Oh if I could only help at all. I shall do what I can.
I have asked Dr. Van Helsing, and he has got me all the papers that I
have not yet seen. Whilst they are resting, I shall go over all
carefully, and perhaps I may arrive at some conclusion. I shall try
to follow the Professor's example, and think without prejudice on the
facts before me . . .
I do believe that under God's providence I have made a discovery. I
shall get the maps and look over them.
I am more than ever sure that I am right. My new conclusion is ready,
so I shall get our party together and read it. They can judge it. It
is well to be accurate, and every minute is precious.
MINA HARKER'S MEMORANDUM
ENTERED IN HER JOURNAL
Ground of inquiry.Count Dracula's problem is to get back
to his own place.
a He must be brought back by some one. This is evident
for had he power to move himself as he wished he could go
either as man, or wolf, or bat, or in some other way. He
evidently fears discovery or interference, in the state of
helplessness in which he must be, confined as he is between
dawn and sunset in his wooden box.
b How is he to be taken?Here a process of exclusions may
help us. By road, by rail, by water?
. By Road.There are endless difficulties, especially in
leaving the city.
x There are people. And people are curious, and
investigate. A hint, a surmise, a doubt as to what might
be in the box, would destroy him.
y There are, or there may be, customs and octroi officers
to pass.
z His pursuers might follow. This is his highest fear.
And in order to prevent his being betrayed he has repelled,
so far as he can, even his victim, me
. By Rail.There is no one in charge of the box. It
would have to take its chance of being delayed, and delay
would be fatal, with enemies on the track. True, he might
escape at night. But what would he be, if left in a strange
place with no refuge that he could fly to? This is not what he
intends, and he does not mean to risk it.
. By Water.Here is the safest way, in one respect, but
with most danger in another. On the water he is powerless
except at night. Even then he can only summon fog and storm and
snow and his wolves. But were he wrecked, the living water would
engulf him, helpless, and he would indeed be lost. He could have
the vessel drive to land, but if it were unfriendly land, wherein
he was not free to move, his position would still be desperate.
We know from the record that he was on the water, so what
we have to do is to ascertain what water.
The first thing is to realize exactly what he has done as
yet. We may, then, get a light on what his task is to be.
Firstly.We must differentiate between what he did in
London as part of his general plan of action, when he was
pressed for moments and had to arrange as best he could.
Secondly.We must see, as well as we can surmise it from the
facts we know of, what he has done here.
As to the first, he evidently intended to arrive at Galatz,
and sent invoice to Varna to deceive us lest we should ascertain
his means of exit from England. His immediate and sole purpose
then was to escape. The proof of this, is the letter of
instructions sent to Immanuel Hildesheim to clear and take away
the box before sunrise. There is also the instruction to Petrof
Skinsky. These we must only guess at, but there must have been
some letter or message, since Skinsky came to Hildesheim.
That, so far, his plans were successful we know. The Czarina
Catherine made a phenomenally quick journey. So much so that
Captain Donelson's suspicions were aroused. But his superstition
united with his canniness played the Count's game for him, and he
ran with his favouring wind through fogs and all till he brought
up blindfold at Galatz. That the Count's arrangements were well
made, has been proved. Hildesheim cleared the box, took it off,
and gave it to Skinsky. Skinsky took it, and here we lose the
trail. We only know that the box is somewhere on the water,
moving along. The customs and the octroi, if there be any, have
been avoided.
Now we come to what the Count must have done after his
arrival, on land, at Galatz.
The box was given to Skinsky before sunrise. At sunrise
the Count could appear in his own form. Here, we ask why
Skinsky was chosen at all to aid in the work? In my husband's
diary, Skinsky is mentioned as dealing with the Slovaks who trade
down the river to the port. And the man's remark, that the
murder was the work of a Slovak, showed the general feeling
against his class. The Count wanted isolation.
My surmise is this, that in London the Count decided to get
back to his castle by water, as the most safe and secret
way. He was brought from the castle by Szgany, and probably they
delivered their cargo to Slovaks who took the boxes to Varna, for
there they were shipped to London. Thus the Count had knowledge
of the persons who could arrange this service. When the box was
on land, before sunrise or after sunset, he came out from his
box, met Skinsky and instructed him what to do as to arranging
the carriage of the box up some river. When this was done, and
he knew that all was in train, he blotted out his traces, as he
thought, by murdering his agent.
I have examined the map and find that the river most
suitable for the Slovaks to have ascended is either the
Pruth or the Sereth. I read in the typescript that in my
trance I heard cows low and water swirling level with my
ears and the creaking of wood. The Count in his box, then,
was on a river in an open boat, propelled probably either
by oars or poles, for the banks are near and it is working
against stream. There would be no such if floating down
stream.
Of course it may not be either the Sereth or the Pruth, but
we may possibly investigate further. Now of these two, the
Pruth is the more easily navigated, but the Sereth is, at
Fundu, joined by the Bistritza which runs up round the Borgo
Pass. The loop it makes is manifestly as close to Dracula's
castle as can be got by water.
MINA HARKER'S JOURNALCONTINUED
When I had done reading, Jonathan took me in his arms and kissed me.
The others kept shaking me by both hands, and Dr. Van Helsing said,
"Our dear Madam Mina is once more our teacher. Her eyes have been
where we were blinded. Now we are on the track once again, and this
time we may succeed. Our enemy is at his most helpless. And if we
can come on him by day, on the water, our task will be over. He has a
start, but he is powerless to hasten, as he may not leave this box
lest those who carry him may suspect. For them to suspect would be to
prompt them to throw him in the stream where he perish. This he
knows, and will not. Now men, to our Council of War, for here and
now, we must plan what each and all shall do."
"I shall get a steam launch and follow him," said Lord Godalming.
"And I, horses to follow on the bank lest by chance he land," said Mr.
Morris.
"Good" said the Professor, "both good. But neither must go alone.
There must be force to overcome force if need be. The Slovak is
strong and rough, and he carries rude arms." All the men smiled, for
amongst them they carried a small arsenal.
Said Mr. Morris, "I have brought some Winchesters. They are pretty
handy in a crowd, and there may be wolves. The Count, if you
remember, took some other precautions. He made some requisitions on
others that Mrs. Harker could not quite hear or understand. We must
be ready at all points."
Dr. Seward said, "I think I had better go with Quincey. We have been
accustomed to hunt together, and we two, well armed, will be a match
for whatever may come along. You must not be alone, Art. It may be
necessary to fight the Slovaks, and a chance thrust, for I don't
suppose these fellows carry guns, would undo all our plans. There
must be no chances, this time. We shall not rest until the Count's
head and body have been separated, and we are sure that he cannot
reincarnate."
He looked at Jonathan as he spoke, and Jonathan looked at me. I could
see that the poor dear was torn about in his mind. Of course he
wanted to be with me. But then the boat service would, most likely,
be the one which would destroy the . . . the . . . Vampire. Why did
I hesitate to write the word?
He was silent awhile, and during his silence Dr. Van Helsing spoke,
"Friend Jonathan, this is to you for twice reasons. First, because
you are young and brave and can fight, and all energies may be needed
at the last. And again that it is your right to destroy him. That,
which has wrought such woe to you and yours. Be not afraid for Madam
Mina. She will be my care, if I may. I am old. My legs are not so
quick to run as once. And I am not used to ride so long or to pursue
as need be, or to fight with lethal weapons. But I can be of other
service. I can fight in other way. And I can die, if need be, as
well as younger men. Now let me say that what I would is this. While
you, my Lord Godalming and friend Jonathan go in your so swift little
steamboat up the river, and whilst John and Quincey guard the bank
where perchance he might be landed, I will take Madam Mina right into
the heart of the enemy's country. Whilst the old fox is tied in his
box, floating on the running stream whence he cannot escape to land,
where he dares not raise the lid of his coffin box lest his Slovak
carriers should in fear leave him to perish, we shall go in the track
where Jonathan went, from Bistritz over the Borgo, and find our way to
the Castle of Dracula. Here, Madam Mina's hypnotic power will surely
help, and we shall find our way, all dark and unknown otherwise, after
the first sunrise when we are near that fateful place. There is much
to be done, and other places to be made sanctify, so that that nest of
vipers be obliterated."
Here Jonathan interrupted him hotly, "Do you mean to say, Professor
Van Helsing, that you would bring Mina, in her sad case and tainted as
she is with that devil's illness, right into the jaws of his
deathtrap? Not for the world Not for Heaven or Hell"
He became almost speechless for a minute, and then went on, "Do you
know what the place is? Have you seen that awful den of hellish
infamy, with the very moonlight alive with grisly shapes, and every
speck of dust that whirls in the wind a devouring monster in embryo?
Have you felt the Vampire's lips upon your throat?"
Here he turned to me, and as his eyes lit on my forehead he threw up
his arms with a cry, "Oh, my God, what have we done to have this
terror upon us?" and he sank down on the sofa in a collapse of misery.
The Professor's voice, as he spoke in clear, sweet tones, which seemed
to vibrate in the air, calmed us all.
"Oh, my friend, it is because I would save Madam Mina from that awful
place that I would go. God forbid that I should take her into that
place. There is work, wild work, to be done before that place can be
purify. Remember that we are in terrible straits. If the Count
escape us this time, and he is strong and subtle and cunning, he may
choose to sleep him for a century, and then in time our dear one," he
took my hand, "would come to him to keep him company, and would be as
those others that you, Jonathan, saw. You have told us of their
gloating lips. You heard their ribald laugh as they clutched the
moving bag that the Count threw to them. You shudder, and well may it
be. Forgive me that I make you so much pain, but it is necessary. My
friend, is it not a dire need for that which I am giving, possibly my
life? If it were that any one went into that place to stay, it is I
who would have to go to keep them company."
"Do as you will," said Jonathan, with a sob that shook him all over,
"we are in the hands of God"
Later.Oh, it did me good to see the way that these brave men worked.
How can women help loving men when they are so earnest, and so true,
and so brave And, too, it made me think of the wonderful power of
money What can it not do when basely used. I felt so thankful that
Lord Godalming is rich, and both he and Mr. Morris, who also has
plenty of money, are willing to spend it so freely. For if they did
not, our little expedition could not start, either so promptly or so
well equipped, as it will within another hour. It is not three hours
since it was arranged what part each of us was to do. And now Lord
Godalming and Jonathan have a lovely steam launch, with steam up ready
to start at a moment's notice. Dr. Seward and Mr. Morris have half a
dozen good horses, well appointed. We have all the maps and
appliances of various kinds that can be had. Professor Van Helsing
and I are to leave by the  train tonight for Veresti, where we
are to get a carriage to drive to the Borgo Pass. We are bringing a
good deal of ready money, as we are to buy a carriage and horses. We
shall drive ourselves, for we have no one whom we can trust in the
matter. The Professor knows something of a great many languages, so
we shall get on all right. We have all got arms, even for me a large
bore revolver. Jonathan would not be happy unless I was armed like
the rest. Alas I cannot carry one arm that the rest do, the scar on
my forehead forbids that. Dear Dr. Van Helsing comforts me by telling
me that I am fully armed as there may be wolves. The weather is
getting colder every hour, and there are snow flurries which come and
go as warnings.
Later.It took all my courage to say goodbye to my darling. We may
never meet again. Courage, Mina The Professor is looking at you
keenly. His look is a warning. There must be no tears now, unless it
may be that God will let them fall in gladness.
JONATHAN HARKER'S JOURNAL
 October, night.I am writing this in the light from the furnace
door of the steam launch. Lord Godalming is firing up. He is an
experienced hand at the work, as he has had for years a launch of his
own on the Thames, and another on the Norfolk Broads. Regarding our
plans, we finally decided that Mina's guess was correct, and that if
any waterway was chosen for the Count's escape back to his Castle, the
Sereth and then the Bistritza at its junction, would be the one. We
took it, that somewhere about the th degree, north latitude, would
be the place chosen for crossing the country between the river and the
Carpathians. We have no fear in running at good speed up the river at
night. There is plenty of water, and the banks are wide enough apart
to make steaming, even in the dark, easy enough. Lord Godalming tells
me to sleep for a while, as it is enough for the present for one to be
on watch. But I cannot sleep, how can I with the terrible danger
hanging over my darling, and her going out into that awful place . . .
My only comfort is that we are in the hands of God. Only for that
faith it would be easier to die than to live, and so be quit of all
the trouble. Mr. Morris and Dr. Seward were off on their long ride
before we started. They are to keep up the right bank, far enough off
to get on higher lands where they can see a good stretch of river and
avoid the following of its curves. They have, for the first stages,
two men to ride and lead their spare horses, four in all, so as not to
excite curiosity. When they dismiss the men, which shall be shortly,
they shall themselves look after the horses. It may be necessary for
us to join forces. If so they can mount our whole party. One of the
saddles has a moveable horn, and can be easily adapted for Mina, if
required.
It is a wild adventure we are on. Here, as we are rushing along
through the darkness, with the cold from the river seeming to rise up
and strike us, with all the mysterious voices of the night around us,
it all comes home. We seem to be drifting into unknown places and
unknown ways. Into a whole world of dark and dreadful things.
Godalming is shutting the furnace door . . .
 October.Still hurrying along. The day has come, and Godalming is
sleeping. I am on watch. The morning is bitterly cold, the furnace
heat is grateful, though we have heavy fur coats. As yet we have
passed only a few open boats, but none of them had on board any box or
package of anything like the size of the one we seek. The men were
scared every time we turned our electric lamp on them, and fell on
their knees and prayed.
 November, evening.No news all day. We have found nothing of the
kind we seek. We have now passed into the Bistritza, and if we are
wrong in our surmise our chance is gone. We have overhauled every
boat, big and little. Early this morning, one crew took us for a
Government boat, and treated us accordingly. We saw in this a way of
smoothing matters, so at Fundu, where the Bistritza runs into the
Sereth, we got a Roumanian flag which we now fly conspicuously. With
every boat which we have overhauled since then this trick has
succeeded. We have had every deference shown to us, and not once any
objection to whatever we chose to ask or do. Some of the Slovaks tell
us that a big boat passed them, going at more than usual speed as she
had a double crew on board. This was before they came to Fundu, so
they could not tell us whether the boat turned into the Bistritza or
continued on up the Sereth. At Fundu we could not hear of any such
boat, so she must have passed there in the night. I am feeling very
sleepy. The cold is perhaps beginning to tell upon me, and nature
must have rest some time. Godalming insists that he shall keep the
first watch. God bless him for all his goodness to poor dear Mina and
me.
 November, morning.It is broad daylight. That good fellow would
not wake me. He says it would have been a sin to, for I slept
peacefully and was forgetting my trouble. It seems brutally selfish
to me to have slept so long, and let him watch all night, but he was
quite right. I am a new man this morning. And, as I sit here and
watch him sleeping, I can do all that is necessary both as to minding
the engine, steering, and keeping watch. I can feel that my strength
and energy are coming back to me. I wonder where Mina is now, and Van
Helsing. They should have got to Veresti about noon on Wednesday. It
would take them some time to get the carriage and horses. So if they
had started and travelled hard, they would be about now at the Borgo
Pass. God guide and help them I am afraid to think what may
happen. If we could only go faster. But we cannot. The engines are
throbbing and doing their utmost. I wonder how Dr. Seward and Mr.
Morris are getting on. There seem to be endless streams running down
the mountains into this river, but as none of them are very large, at
present, at all events, though they are doubtless terrible in winter
and when the snow melts, the horsemen may not have met much
obstruction. I hope that before we get to Strasba we may see them.
For if by that time we have not overtaken the Count, it may be
necessary to take counsel together what to do next.
DR. SEWARD'S DIARY
 November.Three days on the road. No news, and no time to write it
if there had been, for every moment is precious. We have had only the
rest needful for the horses. But we are both bearing it wonderfully.
Those adventurous days of ours are turning up useful. We must push
on. We shall never feel happy till we get the launch in sight again.
 November.We heard at Fundu that the launch had gone up the
Bistritza. I wish it wasn't so cold. There are signs of snow coming.
And if it falls heavy it will stop us. In such case we must get a
sledge and go on, Russian fashion.
 November.Today we heard of the launch having been detained by an
accident when trying to force a way up the rapids. The Slovak boats
get up all right, by aid of a rope and steering with knowledge. Some
went up only a few hours before. Godalming is an amateur fitter
himself, and evidently it was he who put the launch in trim again.
Finally, they got up the rapids all right, with local help, and are off
on the chase afresh. I fear that the boat is not any better for the
accident, the peasantry tell us that after she got upon smooth water
again, she kept stopping every now and again so long as she was in
sight. We must push on harder than ever. Our help may be wanted
soon.
MINA HARKER'S JOURNAL
 October.Arrived at Veresti at noon. The Professor tells me that
this morning at dawn he could hardly hypnotize me at all, and that all
I could say was, "dark and quiet." He is off now buying a carriage
and horses. He says that he will later on try to buy additional
horses, so that we may be able to change them on the way. We have
something more than  miles before us. The country is lovely, and
most interesting. If only we were under different conditions, how
delightful it would be to see it all. If Jonathan and I were driving
through it alone what a pleasure it would be. To stop and see people,
and learn something of their life, and to fill our minds and memories
with all the colour and picturesqueness of the whole wild, beautiful
country and the quaint people But, alas
Later.Dr. Van Helsing has returned. He has got the carriage and
horses. We are to have some dinner, and to start in an hour. The
landlady is putting us up a huge basket of provisions. It seems
enough for a company of soldiers. The Professor encourages her, and
whispers to me that it may be a week before we can get any food again.
He has been shopping too, and has sent home such a wonderful lot of
fur coats and wraps, and all sorts of warm things. There will not be
any chance of our being cold.
We shall soon be off. I am afraid to think what may happen to us. We
are truly in the hands of God. He alone knows what may be, and I pray
Him, with all the strength of my sad and humble soul, that He will
watch over my beloved husband. That whatever may happen, Jonathan may
know that I loved him and honoured him more than I can say, and that my
latest and truest thought will be always for him.
CHAPTER 
MINA HARKER'S JOURNAL
 November.All day long we have travelled, and at a good speed. The
horses seem to know that they are being kindly treated, for they go
willingly their full stage at best speed. We have now had so many
changes and find the same thing so constantly that we are encouraged
to think that the journey will be an easy one. Dr. Van Helsing is
laconic, he tells the farmers that he is hurrying to Bistritz, and
pays them well to make the exchange of horses. We get hot soup, or
coffee, or tea, and off we go. It is a lovely country. Full of
beauties of all imaginable kinds, and the people are brave, and
strong, and simple, and seem full of nice qualities. They are very,
very superstitious. In the first house where we stopped, when the
woman who served us saw the scar on my forehead, she crossed herself
and put out two fingers towards me, to keep off the evil eye. I
believe they went to the trouble of putting an extra amount of garlic
into our food, and I can't abide garlic. Ever since then I have taken
care not to take off my hat or veil, and so have escaped their
suspicions. We are travelling fast, and as we have no driver with us
to carry tales, we go ahead of scandal. But I daresay that fear of
the evil eye will follow hard behind us all the way. The Professor
seems tireless. All day he would not take any rest, though he made me
sleep for a long spell. At sunset time he hypnotized me, and he says
I answered as usual, "darkness, lapping water and creaking wood." So
our enemy is still on the river. I am afraid to think of Jonathan,
but somehow I have now no fear for him, or for myself. I write this
whilst we wait in a farmhouse for the horses to be ready. Dr. Van
Helsing is sleeping. Poor dear, he looks very tired and old and grey,
but his mouth is set as firmly as a conqueror's. Even in his sleep he
is intense with resolution. When we have well started I must make him
rest whilst I drive. I shall tell him that we have days before us,
and he must not break down when most of all his strength will be
needed . . . All is ready. We are off shortly.
 November, morning.I was successful, and we took turns driving all
night. Now the day is on us, bright though cold. There is a strange
heaviness in the air. I say heaviness for want of a better word. I
mean that it oppresses us both. It is very cold, and only our warm
furs keep us comfortable. At dawn Van Helsing hypnotized me. He says
I answered "darkness, creaking wood and roaring water," so the river
is changing as they ascend. I do hope that my darling will not run
any chance of danger, more than need be, but we are in God's hands.
 November, night.All day long driving. The country gets wilder as
we go, and the great spurs of the Carpathians, which at Veresti seemed
so far from us and so low on the horizon, now seem to gather round us
and tower in front. We both seem in good spirits. I think we make an
effort each to cheer the other, in the doing so we cheer ourselves.
Dr. Van Helsing says that by morning we shall reach the Borgo Pass.
The houses are very few here now, and the Professor says that the last
horse we got will have to go on with us, as we may not be able to
change. He got two in addition to the two we changed, so that now we
have a rude fourinhand. The dear horses are patient and good, and
they give us no trouble. We are not worried with other travellers,
and so even I can drive. We shall get to the Pass in daylight. We do
not want to arrive before. So we take it easy, and have each a long
rest in turn. Oh, what will tomorrow bring to us? We go to seek the
place where my poor darling suffered so much. God grant that we may
be guided aright, and that He will deign to watch over my husband and
those dear to us both, and who are in such deadly peril. As for me, I
am not worthy in His sight. Alas I am unclean to His eyes, and
shall be until He may deign to let me stand forth in His sight as one
of those who have not incurred His wrath.
MEMORANDUM BY ABRAHAM VAN HELSING
 November.This to my old and true friend John Seward, M.D.,
of Purfleet, London, in case I may not see him. It may
explain. It is morning, and I write by a fire which all
the night I have kept alive, Madam Mina aiding me. It is
cold, cold. So cold that the grey heavy sky is full of
snow, which when it falls will settle for all winter as the
ground is hardening to receive it. It seems to have affected
Madam Mina. She has been so heavy of head all day that she was
not like herself. She sleeps, and sleeps, and sleeps She who
is usual so alert, have done literally nothing all the day. She
even have lost her appetite. She make no entry into her little
diary, she who write so faithful at every pause. Something
whisper to me that all is not well. However, tonight she is more
/vif/. Her long sleep all day have refresh and restore her, for
now she is all sweet and bright as ever. At sunset I try to
hypnotize her, but alas with no effect. The power has grown
less and less with each day, and tonight it fail me altogether.
Well, God's will be done, whatever it may be, and whithersoever
it may lead
Now to the historical, for as Madam Mina write not in her
stenography, I must, in my cumbrous old fashion, that so
each day of us may not go unrecorded.
We got to the Borgo Pass just after sunrise yesterday
morning. When I saw the signs of the dawn I got ready for
the hypnotism. We stopped our carriage, and got down so
that there might be no disturbance. I made a couch with
furs, and Madam Mina, lying down, yield herself as usual,
but more slow and more short time than ever, to the hypnotic
sleep. As before, came the answer, "darkness and the swirling of
water." Then she woke, bright and radiant and we go on our way
and soon reach the Pass. At this time and place, she become all
on fire with zeal. Some new guiding power be in her manifested,
for she point to a road and say, "This is the way."
"How know you it?" I ask.
"Of course I know it," she answer, and with a pause, add,
"Have not my Jonathan travelled it and wrote of his travel?"
At first I think somewhat strange, but soon I see that there be
only one such byroad. It is used but little, and very different
from the coach road from the Bukovina to Bistritz, which is more
wide and hard, and more of use.
So we came down this road. When we meet other ways, not
always were we sure that they were roads at all, for they
be neglect and light snow have fallen, the horses know and
they only. I give rein to them, and they go on so patient. By
and by we find all the things which Jonathan have note in that
wonderful diary of him. Then we go on for long, long hours and
hours. At the first, I tell Madam Mina to sleep. She try, and
she succeed. She sleep all the time, till at the last, I feel
myself to suspicious grow, and attempt to wake her. But she
sleep on, and I may not wake her though I try. I do not wish to
try too hard lest I harm her. For I know that she have suffer
much, and sleep at times be allinall to her. I think I drowse
myself, for all of sudden I feel guilt, as though I have done
something. I find myself bolt up, with the reins in my hand, and
the good horses go along jog, jog, just as ever. I look down and
find Madam Mina still asleep. It is now not far off sunset time,
and over the snow the light of the sun flow in big yellow flood,
so that we throw great long shadow on where the mountain rise so
steep. For we are going up, and up, and all is oh so wild and
rocky, as though it were the end of the world.
Then I arouse Madam Mina. This time she wake with not much
trouble, and then I try to put her to hypnotic sleep. But
she sleep not, being as though I were not. Still I try and
try, till all at once I find her and myself in dark, so I
look round, and find that the sun have gone down. Madam
Mina laugh, and I turn and look at her. She is now quite
awake, and look so well as I never saw her since that night
at Carfax when we first enter the Count's house. I am amaze, and
not at ease then. But she is so bright and tender and thoughtful
for me that I forget all fear. I light a fire, for we have
brought supply of wood with us, and she prepare food while I undo
the horses and set them, tethered in shelter, to feed. Then when
I return to the fire she have my supper ready. I go to help her,
but she smile, and tell me that she have eat already. That she
was so hungry that she would not wait. I like it not, and I have
grave doubts. But I fear to affright her, and so I am silent of
it. She help me and I eat alone, and then we wrap in fur and lie
beside the fire, and I tell her to sleep while I watch. But
presently I forget all of watching. And when I sudden remember
that I watch, I find her lying quiet, but awake, and looking at
me with so bright eyes. Once, twice more the same occur, and I
get much sleep till before morning. When I wake I try to
hypnotize her, but alas though she shut her eyes obedient, she
may not sleep. The sun rise up, and up, and up, and then sleep
come to her too late, but so heavy that she will not wake. I
have to lift her up, and place her sleeping in the carriage when
I have harnessed the horses and made all ready. Madam still
sleep, and she look in her sleep more healthy and more redder
than before. And I like it not. And I am afraid, afraid,
afraid I am afraid of all things, even to think but I must go
on my way. The stake we play for is life and death, or more than
these, and we must not flinch.
 November, morning.Let me be accurate in everything, for
though you and I have seen some strange things together,
you may at the first think that I, Van Helsing, am mad.
That the many horrors and the so long strain on nerves has
at the last turn my brain.
All yesterday we travel, always getting closer to the
mountains, and moving into a more and more wild and desert
land. There are great, frowning precipices and much falling
water, and Nature seem to have held sometime her carnival. Madam
Mina still sleep and sleep. And though I did have hunger and
appeased it, I could not waken her, even for food. I began to
fear that the fatal spell of the place was upon her, tainted as
she is with that Vampire baptism. "Well," said I to myself, "if
it be that she sleep all the day, it shall also be that I do not
sleep at night." As we travel on the rough road, for a road of
an ancient and imperfect kind there was, I held down my head and
slept.
Again I waked with a sense of guilt and of time passed, and
found Madam Mina still sleeping, and the sun low down. But
all was indeed changed. The frowning mountains seemed further
away, and we were near the top of a steep rising hill, on summit
of which was such a castle as Jonathan tell of in his diary. At
once I exulted and feared. For now, for good or ill, the end was
near.
I woke Madam Mina, and again tried to hypnotize her, but
alas unavailing till too late. Then, ere the great dark
came upon us, for even after down sun the heavens reflected
the gone sun on the snow, and all was for a time in a great
twilight. I took out the horses and fed them in what shelter I
could. Then I make a fire, and near it I make Madam Mina, now
awake and more charming than ever, sit comfortable amid her rugs.
I got ready food, but she would not eat, simply saying that she
had not hunger. I did not press her, knowing her unavailingness.
But I myself eat, for I must needs now be strong for all. Then,
with the fear on me of what might be, I drew a ring so big for
her comfort, round where Madam Mina sat. And over the ring I
passed some of the wafer, and I broke it fine so that all was
well guarded. She sat still all the time, so still as one dead.
And she grew whiter and even whiter till the snow was not more
pale, and no word she said. But when I drew near, she clung to
me, and I could know that the poor soul shook her from head to
feet with a tremor that was pain to feel.
I said to her presently, when she had grown more quiet,
"Will you not come over to the fire?" for I wished to make
a test of what she could. She rose obedient, but when she
have made a step she stopped, and stood as one stricken.
"Why not go on?" I asked. She shook her head, and coming
back, sat down in her place. Then, looking at me with open
eyes, as of one waked from sleep, she said simply, "I cannot"
and remained silent. I rejoiced, for I knew that what she could
not, none of those that we dreaded could. Though there might be
danger to her body, yet her soul was safe
Presently the horses began to scream, and tore at their
tethers till I came to them and quieted them. When they
did feel my hands on them, they whinnied low as in joy, and
licked at my hands and were quiet for a time. Many times
through the night did I come to them, till it arrive to the
cold hour when all nature is at lowest, and every time my
coming was with quiet of them. In the cold hour the fire
began to die, and I was about stepping forth to replenish
it, for now the snow came in flying sweeps and with it a
chill mist. Even in the dark there was a light of some
kind, as there ever is over snow, and it seemed as though
the snow flurries and the wreaths of mist took shape as of
women with trailing garments. All was in dead, grim silence only
that the horses whinnied and cowered, as if in terror of the
worst. I began to fear, horrible fears. But then came to me the
sense of safety in that ring wherein I stood. I began too, to
think that my imaginings were of the night, and the gloom, and
the unrest that I have gone through, and all the terrible
anxiety. It was as though my memories of all Jonathan's horrid
experience were befooling me. For the snow flakes and the mist
began to wheel and circle round, till I could get as though a
shadowy glimpse of those women that would have kissed him. And
then the horses cowered lower and lower, and moaned in terror as
men do in pain. Even the madness of fright was not to them, so
that they could break away. I feared for my dear Madam Mina when
these weird figures drew near and circled round. I looked at her,
but she sat calm, and smiled at me. When I would have stepped to
the fire to replenish it, she caught me and held me back, and
whispered, like a voice that one hears in a dream, so low it was.
"No No Do not go without. Here you are safe"
I turned to her, and looking in her eyes said, "But you?
It is for you that I fear"
Whereat she laughed, a laugh low and unreal, and said, "Fear
for me Why fear for me? None safer in all the world from
them than I am," and as I wondered at the meaning of her
words, a puff of wind made the flame leap up, and I see the
red scar on her forehead. Then, alas I knew. Did I not,
I would soon have learned, for the wheeling figures of mist
and snow came closer, but keeping ever without the Holy
circle. Then they began to materialize till, if God have
not taken away my reason, for I saw it through my eyes.
There were before me in actual flesh the same three women
that Jonathan saw in the room, when they would have kissed
his throat. I knew the swaying round forms, the bright
hard eyes, the white teeth, the ruddy colour, the voluptuous
lips. They smiled ever at poor dear Madam Mina. And as
their laugh came through the silence of the night, they
twined their arms and pointed to her, and said in those so
sweet tingling tones that Jonathan said were of the intolerable
sweetness of the water glasses, "Come, sister. Come to us.
Come"
In fear I turned to my poor Madam Mina, and my heart with
gladness leapt like flame. For oh the terror in her sweet
eyes, the repulsion, the horror, told a story to my heart
that was all of hope. God be thanked she was not, yet, of
them. I seized some of the firewood which was by me, and
holding out some of the Wafer, advanced on them towards the
fire. They drew back before me, and laughed their low horrid
laugh. I fed the fire, and feared them not. For I knew that we
were safe within the ring, which she could not leave no more than
they could enter. The horses had ceased to moan, and lay still
on the ground. The snow fell on them softly, and they grew
whiter. I knew that there was for the poor beasts no more of
terror.
And so we remained till the red of the dawn began to fall
through the snow gloom. I was desolate and afraid, and
full of woe and terror. But when that beautiful sun began
to climb the horizon life was to me again. At the first
coming of the dawn the horrid figures melted in the whirling
mist and snow. The wreaths of transparent gloom moved away
towards the castle, and were lost.
Instinctively, with the dawn coming, I turned to Madam Mina,
intending to hypnotize her. But she lay in a deep and sudden
sleep, from which I could not wake her. I tried to hypnotize
through her sleep, but she made no response, none at all, and the
day broke. I fear yet to stir. I have made my fire and have
seen the horses, they are all dead. Today I have much to do here,
and I keep waiting till the sun is up high. For there may be
places where I must go, where that sunlight, though snow and mist
obscure it, will be to me a safety.
I will strengthen me with breakfast, and then I will do my
terrible work. Madam Mina still sleeps, and God be thanked She
is calm in her sleep . . .
JONATHAN HARKER'S JOURNAL
 November, evening.The accident to the launch has been a terrible
thing for us. Only for it we should have overtaken the boat long ago,
and by now my dear Mina would have been free. I fear to think of her,
off on the wolds near that horrid place. We have got horses, and we
follow on the track. I note this whilst Godalming is getting ready.
We have our arms. The Szgany must look out if they mean to fight. Oh,
if only Morris and Seward were with us. We must only hope If I
write no more Goodby Mina God bless and keep you.
DR. SEWARD'S DIARY
 November.With the dawn we saw the body of Szgany before us dashing
away from the river with their leiter wagon. They surrounded it in a
cluster, and hurried along as though beset. The snow is falling
lightly and there is a strange excitement in the air. It may be our
own feelings, but the depression is strange. Far off I hear the
howling of wolves. The snow brings them down from the mountains, and
there are dangers to all of us, and from all sides. The horses are
nearly ready, and we are soon off. We ride to death of some one. God
alone knows who, or where, or what, or when, or how it may be . . .
DR. VAN HELSING'S MEMORANDUM
 November, afternoon.I am at least sane. Thank God for
that mercy at all events, though the proving it has been
dreadful. When I left Madam Mina sleeping within the Holy
circle, I took my way to the castle. The blacksmith hammer
which I took in the carriage from Veresti was useful, though the
doors were all open I broke them off the rusty hinges, lest some
ill intent or ill chance should close them, so that being entered
I might not get out. Jonathan's bitter experience served me
here. By memory of his diary I found my way to the old chapel,
for I knew that here my work lay. The air was oppressive. It
seemed as if there was some sulphurous fume, which at times made
me dizzy. Either there was a roaring in my ears or I heard afar
off the howl of wolves. Then I bethought me of my dear Madam
Mina, and I was in terrible plight. The dilemma had me between
his horns.
Her, I had not dare to take into this place, but left safe
from the Vampire in that Holy circle. And yet even there
would be the wolf I resolve me that my work lay here, and
that as to the wolves we must submit, if it were God's will. At
any rate it was only death and freedom beyond. So did I choose
for her. Had it but been for myself the choice had been easy,
the maw of the wolf were better to rest in than the grave of the
Vampire So I make my choice to go on with my work.
I knew that there were at least three graves to find, graves
that are inhabit. So I search, and search, and I find one
of them. She lay in her Vampire sleep, so full of life and
voluptuous beauty that I shudder as though I have come to
do murder. Ah, I doubt not that in the old time, when such
things were, many a man who set forth to do such a task as
mine, found at the last his heart fail him, and then his
nerve. So he delay, and delay, and delay, till the mere
beauty and the fascination of the wanton Undead have hypnotize
him. And he remain on and on, till sunset come, and the Vampire
sleep be over. Then the beautiful eyes of the fair woman open
and look love, and the voluptuous mouth present to a kiss, and
the man is weak. And there remain one more victim in the
Vampire fold. One more to swell the grim and grisly ranks
of the Undead . . .
There is some fascination, surely, when I am moved by the
mere presence of such an one, even lying as she lay in a
tomb fretted with age and heavy with the dust of centuries,
though there be that horrid odour such as the lairs of the
Count have had. Yes, I was moved. I, Van Helsing, with
all my purpose and with my motive for hate. I was moved to
a yearning for delay which seemed to paralyze my faculties
and to clog my very soul. It may have been that the need
of natural sleep, and the strange oppression of the air
were beginning to overcome me. Certain it was that I was
lapsing into sleep, the open eyed sleep of one who yields
to a sweet fascination, when there came through the snowstilled
air a long, low wail, so full of woe and pity that it woke me
like the sound of a clarion. For it was the voice of my dear
Madam Mina that I heard.
Then I braced myself again to my horrid task, and found by
wrenching away tomb tops one other of the sisters, the other dark
one. I dared not pause to look on her as I had on her sister,
lest once more I should begin to be enthrall. But I go on
searching until, presently, I find in a high great tomb as if
made to one much beloved that other fair sister which, like
Jonathan I had seen to gather herself out of the atoms of the
mist. She was so fair to look on, so radiantly beautiful, so
exquisitely voluptuous, that the very instinct of man in me,
which calls some of my sex to love and to protect one of hers,
made my head whirl with new emotion. But God be thanked, that
soul wail of my dear Madam Mina had not died out of my ears.
And, before the spell could be wrought further upon me, I had
nerved myself to my wild work. By this time I had searched all
the tombs in the chapel, so far as I could tell. And as there
had been only three of these Undead phantoms around us in the
night, I took it that there were no more of active Undead
existent. There was one great tomb more lordly than all the
rest. Huge it was, and nobly proportioned. On it was but one
word.
DRACULA
This then was the Undead home of the King Vampire, to whom
so many more were due. Its emptiness spoke eloquent to
make certain what I knew. Before I began to restore these
women to their dead selves through my awful work, I laid in
Dracula's tomb some of the Wafer, and so banished him from
it, Undead, for ever.
Then began my terrible task, and I dreaded it. Had it been
but one, it had been easy, comparative. But three To
begin twice more after I had been through a deed of horror.
For it was terrible with the sweet Miss Lucy, what would it
not be with these strange ones who had survived through
centuries, and who had been strengthened by the passing of
the years. Who would, if they could, have fought for their
foul lives . . .
Oh, my friend John, but it was butcher work. Had I not
been nerved by thoughts of other dead, and of the living
over whom hung such a pall of fear, I could not have gone
on. I tremble and tremble even yet, though till all was
over, God be thanked, my nerve did stand. Had I not seen
the repose in the first place, and the gladness that stole
over it just ere the final dissolution came, as realization
that the soul had been won, I could not have gone further
with my butchery. I could not have endured the horrid screeching
as the stake drove home, the plunging of writhing form, and lips
of bloody foam. I should have fled in terror and left my work
undone. But it is over And the poor souls, I can pity them now
and weep, as I think of them placid each in her full sleep of
death for a short moment ere fading. For, friend John, hardly
had my knife severed the head of each, before the whole body
began to melt away and crumble into its native dust, as though
the death that should have come centuries ago had at last assert
himself and say at once and loud, "I am here"
Before I left the castle I so fixed its entrances that never
more can the Count enter there Undead.
When I stepped into the circle where Madam Mina slept, she
woke from her sleep and, seeing me, cried out in pain that
I had endured too much.
"Come" she said, "come away from this awful place Let us
go to meet my husband who is, I know, coming towards us."
She was looking thin and pale and weak. But her eyes were
pure and glowed with fervour. I was glad to see her paleness and
her illness, for my mind was full of the fresh horror of that
ruddy vampire sleep.
And so with trust and hope, and yet full of fear, we go
eastward to meet our friends, and him, whom Madam Mina tell
me that she know are coming to meet us.
MINA HARKER'S JOURNAL
 November.It was late in the afternoon when the Professor and I
took our way towards the east whence I knew Jonathan was coming. We
did not go fast, though the way was steeply downhill, for we had to
take heavy rugs and wraps with us. We dared not face the possibility
of being left without warmth in the cold and the snow. We had to take
some of our provisions too, for we were in a perfect desolation, and
so far as we could see through the snowfall, there was not even the
sign of habitation. When we had gone about a mile, I was tired with
the heavy walking and sat down to rest. Then we looked back and saw
where the clear line of Dracula's castle cut the sky. For we were so
deep under the hill whereon it was set that the angle of perspective
of the Carpathian mountains was far below it. We saw it in all its
grandeur, perched a thousand feet on the summit of a sheer precipice,
and with seemingly a great gap between it and the steep of the
adjacent mountain on any side. There was something wild and uncanny
about the place. We could hear the distant howling of wolves. They
were far off, but the sound, even though coming muffled through the
deadening snowfall, was full of terror. I knew from the way Dr. Van
Helsing was searching about that he was trying to seek some strategic
point, where we would be less exposed in case of attack. The rough
roadway still led downwards. We could trace it through the drifted
snow.
In a little while the Professor signalled to me, so I got up and
joined him. He had found a wonderful spot, a sort of natural hollow
in a rock, with an entrance like a doorway between two boulders. He
took me by the hand and drew me in.
"See" he said, "here you will be in shelter. And if the wolves do
come I can meet them one by one."
He brought in our furs, and made a snug nest for me, and got out some
provisions and forced them upon me. But I could not eat, to even try
to do so was repulsive to me, and much as I would have liked to please
him, I could not bring myself to the attempt. He looked very sad, but
did not reproach me. Taking his field glasses from the case, he stood
on the top of the rock, and began to search the horizon.
Suddenly he called out, "Look Madam Mina, look Look"
I sprang up and stood beside him on the rock. He handed me his
glasses and pointed. The snow was now falling more heavily, and
swirled about fiercely, for a high wind was beginning to blow.
However, there were times when there were pauses between the snow
flurries and I could see a long way round. From the height where we
were it was possible to see a great distance. And far off, beyond the
white waste of snow, I could see the river lying like a black ribbon
in kinks and curls as it wound its way. Straight in front of us and
not far off, in fact so near that I wondered we had not noticed
before, came a group of mounted men hurrying along. In the midst of
them was a cart, a long leiter wagon which swept from side to side,
like a dog's tail wagging, with each stern inequality of the road.
Outlined against the snow as they were, I could see from the men's
clothes that they were peasants or gypsies of some kind.
On the cart was a great square chest. My heart leaped as I saw it, for
I felt that the end was coming. The evening was now drawing close,
and well I knew that at sunset the Thing, which was till then
imprisoned there, would take new freedom and could in any of many
forms elude pursuit. In fear I turned to the Professor. To my
consternation, however, he was not there. An instant later, I saw him
below me. Round the rock he had drawn a circle, such as we had found
shelter in last night.
When he had completed it he stood beside me again saying, "At least
you shall be safe here from him" He took the glasses from me, and at
the next lull of the snow swept the whole space below us. "See," he
said, "they come quickly. They are flogging the horses, and galloping
as hard as they can."
He paused and went on in a hollow voice, "They are racing for the
sunset. We may be too late. God's will be done" Down came another
blinding rush of driving snow, and the whole landscape was blotted
out. It soon passed, however, and once more his glasses were fixed on
the plain.
Then came a sudden cry, "Look Look Look See, two horsemen follow
fast, coming up from the south. It must be Quincey and John. Take
the glass. Look before the snow blots it all out" I took it and
looked. The two men might be Dr. Seward and Mr. Morris. I knew at
all events that neither of them was Jonathan. At the same time I knew
that Jonathan was not far off. Looking around I saw on the north side
of the coming party two other men, riding at breakneck speed. One of
them I knew was Jonathan, and the other I took, of course, to be Lord
Godalming. They too, were pursuing the party with the cart. When I
told the Professor he shouted in glee like a schoolboy, and after
looking intently till a snow fall made sight impossible, he laid his
Winchester rifle ready for use against the boulder at the opening of
our shelter.
"They are all converging," he said. "When the time comes we shall have
gypsies on all sides." I got out my revolver ready to hand, for
whilst we were speaking the howling of wolves came louder and closer.
When the snow storm abated a moment we looked again. It was strange
to see the snow falling in such heavy flakes close to us, and beyond,
the sun shining more and more brightly as it sank down towards the far
mountain tops. Sweeping the glass all around us I could see here and
there dots moving singly and in twos and threes and larger numbers.
The wolves were gathering for their prey.
Every instant seemed an age whilst we waited. The wind came now in
fierce bursts, and the snow was driven with fury as it swept upon us
in circling eddies. At times we could not see an arm's length before
us. But at others, as the hollow sounding wind swept by us, it seemed
to clear the air space around us so that we could see afar off. We
had of late been so accustomed to watch for sunrise and sunset, that
we knew with fair accuracy when it would be. And we knew that before
long the sun would set. It was hard to believe that by our watches it
was less than an hour that we waited in that rocky shelter before the
various bodies began to converge close upon us. The wind came now
with fiercer and more bitter sweeps, and more steadily from the
north. It seemingly had driven the snow clouds from us, for with only
occasional bursts, the snow fell. We could distinguish clearly the
individuals of each party, the pursued and the pursuers. Strangely
enough those pursued did not seem to realize, or at least to care,
that they were pursued. They seemed, however, to hasten with
redoubled speed as the sun dropped lower and lower on the mountain
tops.
Closer and closer they drew. The Professor and I crouched down behind
our rock, and held our weapons ready. I could see that he was
determined that they should not pass. One and all were quite unaware
of our presence.
All at once two voices shouted out to "Halt" One was my Jonathan's,
raised in a high key of passion. The other Mr. Morris' strong
resolute tone of quiet command. The gypsies may not have known the
language, but there was no mistaking the tone, in whatever tongue the
words were spoken. Instinctively they reined in, and at the instant
Lord Godalming and Jonathan dashed up at one side and Dr. Seward and
Mr. Morris on the other. The leader of the gypsies, a splendid
looking fellow who sat his horse like a centaur, waved them back, and
in a fierce voice gave to his companions some word to proceed. They
lashed the horses which sprang forward. But the four men raised their
Winchester rifles, and in an unmistakable way commanded them to stop.
At the same moment Dr. Van Helsing and I rose behind the rock and
pointed our weapons at them. Seeing that they were surrounded the men
tightened their reins and drew up. The leader turned to them and gave
a word at which every man of the gypsy party drew what weapon he
carried, knife or pistol, and held himself in readiness to attack.
Issue was joined in an instant.
The leader, with a quick movement of his rein, threw his horse out in
front, and pointed first to the sun, now close down on the hill tops,
and then to the castle, said something which I did not understand.
For answer, all four men of our party threw themselves from their
horses and dashed towards the cart. I should have felt terrible fear
at seeing Jonathan in such danger, but that the ardor of battle must
have been upon me as well as the rest of them. I felt no fear, but
only a wild, surging desire to do something. Seeing the quick
movement of our parties, the leader of the gypsies gave a command. His
men instantly formed round the cart in a sort of undisciplined
endeavour, each one shouldering and pushing the other in his eagerness
to carry out the order.
In the midst of this I could see that Jonathan on one side of the ring
of men, and Quincey on the other, were forcing a way to the cart. It
was evident that they were bent on finishing their task before the sun
should set. Nothing seemed to stop or even to hinder them. Neither
the levelled weapons nor the flashing knives of the gypsies in front,
nor the howling of the wolves behind, appeared to even attract their
attention. Jonathan's impetuosity, and the manifest singleness of his
purpose, seemed to overawe those in front of him. Instinctively they
cowered aside and let him pass. In an instant he had jumped upon the
cart, and with a strength which seemed incredible, raised the great
box, and flung it over the wheel to the ground. In the meantime, Mr.
Morris had had to use force to pass through his side of the ring of
Szgany. All the time I had been breathlessly watching Jonathan I had,
with the tail of my eye, seen him pressing desperately forward, and
had seen the knives of the gypsies flash as he won a way through them,
and they cut at him. He had parried with his great bowie knife, and
at first I thought that he too had come through in safety. But as he
sprang beside Jonathan, who had by now jumped from the cart, I could
see that with his left hand he was clutching at his side, and that the
blood was spurting through his fingers. He did not delay
notwithstanding this, for as Jonathan, with desperate energy, attacked
one end of the chest, attempting to prize off the lid with his great
Kukri knife, he attacked the other frantically with his bowie. Under
the efforts of both men the lid began to yield. The nails drew with a
screeching sound, and the top of the box was thrown back.
By this time the gypsies, seeing themselves covered by the
Winchesters, and at the mercy of Lord Godalming and Dr. Seward, had
given in and made no further resistance. The sun was almost down on
the mountain tops, and the shadows of the whole group fell upon the
snow. I saw the Count lying within the box upon the earth, some of
which the rude falling from the cart had scattered over him. He was
deathly pale, just like a waxen image, and the red eyes glared with
the horrible vindictive look which I knew so well.
As I looked, the eyes saw the sinking sun, and the look of hate in
them turned to triumph.
But, on the instant, came the sweep and flash of Jonathan's great
knife. I shrieked as I saw it shear through the throat. Whilst at
the same moment Mr. Morris's bowie knife plunged into the heart.
It was like a miracle, but before our very eyes, and almost in the
drawing of a breath, the whole body crumbled into dust and passed from
our sight.
I shall be glad as long as I live that even in that moment of final
dissolution, there was in the face a look of peace, such as I never
could have imagined might have rested there.
The Castle of Dracula now stood out against the red sky, and every
stone of its broken battlements was articulated against the light of
the setting sun.
The gypsies, taking us as in some way the cause of the extraordinary
disappearance of the dead man, turned, without a word, and rode away
as if for their lives. Those who were unmounted jumped upon the
leiter wagon and shouted to the horsemen not to desert them. The
wolves, which had withdrawn to a safe distance, followed in their
wake, leaving us alone.
Mr. Morris, who had sunk to the ground, leaned on his elbow, holding
his hand pressed to his side. The blood still gushed through his
fingers. I flew to him, for the Holy circle did not now keep me back
so did the two doctors. Jonathan knelt behind him and the wounded man
laid back his head on his shoulder. With a sigh he took, with a
feeble effort, my hand in that of his own which was unstained.
He must have seen the anguish of my heart in my face, for he smiled at
me and said, "I am only too happy to have been of service Oh, God"
he cried suddenly, struggling to a sitting posture and pointing to me.
"It was worth for this to die Look Look"
The sun was now right down upon the mountain top, and the red gleams
fell upon my face, so that it was bathed in rosy light. With one
impulse the men sank on their knees and a deep and earnest "Amen"
broke from all as their eyes followed the pointing of his finger.
The dying man spoke, "Now God be thanked that all has not been in
vain See The snow is not more stainless than her forehead The
curse has passed away"
And, to our bitter grief, with a smile and in silence, he died, a
gallant gentleman.
NOTE
Seven years ago we all went through the flames. And the happiness of
some of us since then is, we think, well worth the pain we endured.
It is an added joy to Mina and to me that our boy's birthday is the
same day as that on which Quincey Morris died. His mother holds, I
know, the secret belief that some of our brave friend's spirit has
passed into him. His bundle of names links all our little band of men
together. But we call him Quincey.
In the summer of this year we made a journey to Transylvania, and went
over the old ground which was, and is, to us so full of vivid and
terrible memories. It was almost impossible to believe that the
things which we had seen with our own eyes and heard with our own ears
were living truths. Every trace of all that had been was blotted
out. The castle stood as before, reared high above a waste of
desolation.
When we got home we were talking of the old time, which we could all
look back on without despair, for Godalming and Seward are both
happily married. I took the papers from the safe where they had been
ever since our return so long ago. We were struck with the fact, that
in all the mass of material of which the record is composed, there is
hardly one authentic document. Nothing but a mass of typewriting,
except the later notebooks of Mina and Seward and myself, and Van
Helsing's memorandum. We could hardly ask any one, even did we wish
to, to accept these as proofs of so wild a story. Van Helsing summed
it all up as he said, with our boy on his knee.
"We want no proofs. We ask none to believe us This boy will some
day know what a brave and gallant woman his mother is. Already he
knows her sweetness and loving care. Later on he will understand how
some men so loved her, that they did dare much for her sake."
JONATHAN HARKER
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GREAT EXPECTATIONS
by
Charles Dickens
Chapter 
My father's family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip,
my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more
explicit than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called
Pip.
I give Pirrip as my father's family name, on the authority of his
tombstone and my sister  Mrs. Joe Gargery, who married the
blacksmith. As I never saw my father or my mother, and never saw
any likeness of either of them for their days were long before the
days of photographs, my first fancies regarding what they were
like, were unreasonably derived from their tombstones. The shape of
the letters on my father's, gave me an odd idea that he was a
square, stout, dark man, with curly black hair. From the character
and turn of the inscription, "Also Georgiana Wife of the Above," I
drew a childish conclusion that my mother was freckled and sickly.
To five little stone lozenges, each about a foot and a half long,
which were arranged in a neat row beside their grave, and were
sacred to the memory of five little brothers of mine  who gave up
trying to get a living, exceedingly early in that universal
struggle  I am indebted for a belief I religiously entertained
that they had all been born on their backs with their hands in
their trouserspockets, and had never taken them out in this state
of existence.
Ours was the marsh country, down by the river, within, as the river
wound, twenty miles of the sea. My first most vivid and broad
impression of the identity of things, seems to me to have been
gained on a memorable raw afternoon towards evening. At such a time
I found out for certain, that this bleak place overgrown with
nettles was the churchyard and that Philip Pirrip, late of this
parish, and also Georgiana wife of the above, were dead and buried
and that Alexander, Bartholomew, Abraham, Tobias, and Roger, infant
children of the aforesaid, were also dead and buried and that the
dark flat wilderness beyond the churchyard, intersected with dykes
and mounds and gates, with scattered cattle feeding on it, was the
marshes and that the low leaden line beyond, was the river and
that the distant savage lair from which the wind was rushing, was
the sea and that the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it
all and beginning to cry, was Pip.
"Hold your noise" cried a terrible voice, as a man started up from
among the graves at the side of the church porch. "Keep still, you
little devil, or I'll cut your throat"
A fearful man, all in coarse grey, with a great iron on his leg. A
man with no hat, and with broken shoes, and with an old rag tied
round his head. A man who had been soaked in water, and smothered
in mud, and lamed by stones, and cut by flints, and stung by
nettles, and torn by briars who limped, and shivered, and glared
and growled and whose teeth chattered in his head as he seized me
by the chin.
"O Don't cut my throat, sir," I pleaded in terror. "Pray don't do
it, sir."
"Tell us your name" said the man. "Quick"
"Pip, sir."
"Once more," said the man, staring at me. "Give it mouth"
"Pip. Pip, sir."
"Show us where you live," said the man. "Pint out the place"
I pointed to where our village lay, on the flat inshore among the
aldertrees and pollards, a mile or more from the church.
The man, after looking at me for a moment, turned me upside down,
and emptied my pockets. There was nothing in them but a piece of
bread. When the church came to itself  for he was so sudden and
strong that he made it go head over heels before me, and I saw the
steeple under my feet  when the church came to itself, I say, I
was seated on a high tombstone, trembling, while he ate the bread
ravenously.
"You young dog," said the man, licking his lips, "what fat cheeks
you ha' got."
I believe they were fat, though I was at that time undersized for
my years, and not strong.
"Darn me if I couldn't eat em," said the man, with a threatening
shake of his head, "and if I han't half a mind to't"
I earnestly expressed my hope that he wouldn't, and held tighter to
the tombstone on which he had put me partly, to keep myself upon
it partly, to keep myself from crying.
"Now lookee here" said the man. "Where's your mother?"
"There, sir" said I.
He started, made a short run, and stopped and looked over his
shoulder.
"There, sir" I timidly explained. "Also Georgiana. That's my
mother."
"Oh" said he, coming back. "And is that your father alonger your
mother?"
"Yes, sir," said I "him too late of this parish."
"Ha" he muttered then, considering. "Who d'ye live with 
supposin' you're kindly let to live, which I han't made up my mind
about?"
"My sister, sir  Mrs. Joe Gargery  wife of Joe Gargery, the
blacksmith, sir."
"Blacksmith, eh?" said he. And looked down at his leg.
After darkly looking at his leg and me several times, he came
closer to my tombstone, took me by both arms, and tilted me back as
far as he could hold me so that his eyes looked most powerfully
down into mine, and mine looked most helplessly up into his.
"Now lookee here," he said, "the question being whether you're to
be let to live. You know what a file is?"
"Yes, sir."
"And you know what wittles is?"
"Yes, sir."
After each question he tilted me over a little more, so as to give
me a greater sense of helplessness and danger.
"You get me a file." He tilted me again. "And you get me wittles."
He tilted me again. "You bring 'em both to me." He tilted me again.
"Or I'll have your heart and liver out." He tilted me again.
I was dreadfully frightened, and so giddy that I clung to him with
both hands, and said, "If you would kindly please to let me keep
upright, sir, perhaps I shouldn't be sick, and perhaps I could
attend more."
He gave me a most tremendous dip and roll, so that the church
jumped over its own weathercock. Then, he held me by the arms, in
an upright position on the top of the stone, and went on in these
fearful terms
"You bring me, tomorrow morning early, that file and them wittles.
You bring the lot to me, at that old Battery over yonder. You do
it, and you never dare to say a word or dare to make a sign
concerning your having seen such a person as me, or any person
sumever, and you shall be let to live. You fail, or you go from my
words in any partickler, no matter how small it is, and your heart
and your liver shall be tore out, roasted and ate. Now, I ain't
alone, as you may think I am. There's a young man hid with me, in
comparison with which young man I am a Angel. That young man hears
the words I speak. That young man has a secret way pecooliar to
himself, of getting at a boy, and at his heart, and at his liver.
It is in wain for a boy to attempt to hide himself from that young
man. A boy may lock his door, may be warm in bed, may tuck himself
up, may draw the clothes over his head, may think himself
comfortable and safe, but that young man will softly creep and
creep his way to him and tear him open. I am akeeping that young
man from harming of you at the present moment, with great
difficulty. I find it wery hard to hold that young man off of your
inside. Now, what do you say?"
I said that I would get him the file, and I would get him what
broken bits of food I could, and I would come to him at the
Battery, early in the morning.
"Say Lord strike you dead if you don't" said the man.
I said so, and he took me down.
"Now," he pursued, "you remember what you've undertook, and you
remember that young man, and you get home"
"Googood night, sir," I faltered.
"Much of that" said he, glancing about him over the cold wet flat.
"I wish I was a frog. Or a eel"
At the same time, he hugged his shuddering body in both his arms 
clasping himself, as if to hold himself together  and limped
towards the low church wall. As I saw him go, picking his way among
the nettles, and among the brambles that bound the green mounds, he
looked in my young eyes as if he were eluding the hands of the dead
people, stretching up cautiously out of their graves, to get a
twist upon his ankle and pull him in.
When he came to the low church wall, he got over it, like a man
whose legs were numbed and stiff, and then turned round to look for
me. When I saw him turning, I set my face towards home, and made
the best use of my legs. But presently I looked over my shoulder,
and saw him going on again towards the river, still hugging himself
in both arms, and picking his way with his sore feet among the
great stones dropped into the marshes here and there, for
steppingplaces when the rains were heavy, or the tide was in.
The marshes were just a long black horizontal line then, as I
stopped to look after him and the river was just another
horizontal line, not nearly so broad nor yet so black and the sky
was just a row of long angry red lines and dense black lines
intermixed. On the edge of the river I could faintly make out the
only two black things in all the prospect that seemed to be
standing upright one of these was the beacon by which the sailors
steered  like an unhooped cask upon a pole  an ugly thing when
you were near it the other a gibbet, with some chains hanging to
it which had once held a pirate. The man was limping on towards
this latter, as if he were the pirate come to life, and come down,
and going back to hook himself up again. It gave me a terrible turn
when I thought so and as I saw the cattle lifting their heads to
gaze after him, I wondered whether they thought so too. I looked
all round for the horrible young man, and could see no signs of
him. But, now I was frightened again, and ran home without
stopping.
Chapter 
My sister, Mrs. Joe Gargery, was more than twenty years older than
I, and had established a great reputation with herself and the
neighbours because she had brought me up "by hand." Having at that
time to find out for myself what the expression meant, and knowing
her to have a hard and heavy hand, and to be much in the habit of
laying it upon her husband as well as upon me, I supposed that Joe
Gargery and I were both brought up by hand.
She was not a goodlooking woman, my sister and I had a general
impression that she must have made Joe Gargery marry her by hand.
Joe was a fair man, with curls of flaxen hair on each side of his
smooth face, and with eyes of such a very undecided blue that they
seemed to have somehow got mixed with their own whites. He was a
mild, goodnatured, sweettempered, easygoing, foolish, dear
fellow  a sort of Hercules in strength, and also in weakness.
My sister, Mrs. Joe, with black hair and eyes, had such a prevailing
redness of skin that I sometimes used to wonder whether it was
possible she washed herself with a nutmeggrater instead of soap.
She was tall and bony, and almost always wore a coarse apron,
fastened over her figure behind with two loops, and having a square
impregnable bib in front, that was stuck full of pins and needles.
She made it a powerful merit in herself, and a strong reproach
against Joe, that she wore this apron so much. Though I really see
no reason why she should have worn it at all or why, if she did
wear it at all, she should not have taken it off, every day of her
life.
Joe's forge adjoined our house, which was a wooden house, as many
of the dwellings in our country were  most of them, at that time.
When I ran home from the churchyard, the forge was shut up, and Joe
was sitting alone in the kitchen. Joe and I being fellowsufferers,
and having confidences as such, Joe imparted a confidence to me,
the moment I raised the latch of the door and peeped in at him
opposite to it, sitting in the chimney corner.
"Mrs. Joe has been out a dozen times, looking for you, Pip. And
she's out now, making it a baker's dozen."
"Is she?"
"Yes, Pip," said Joe "and what's worse, she's got Tickler with
her."
At this dismal intelligence, I twisted the only button on my
waistcoat round and round, and looked in great depression at the
fire. Tickler was a waxended piece of cane, worn smooth by
collision with my tickled frame.
"She sot down," said Joe, "and she got up, and she made a grab at
Tickler, and she Rampaged out. That's what she did," said Joe,
slowly clearing the fire between the lower bars with the poker, and
looking at it "she Rampaged out, Pip."
"Has she been gone long, Joe?" I always treated him as a larger
species of child, and as no more than my equal.
"Well," said Joe, glancing up at the Dutch clock, "she's been on
the Rampage, this last spell, about five minutes, Pip. She's a
coming Get behind the door, old chap, and have the jacktowel
betwixt you."
I took the advice. My sister, Mrs. Joe, throwing the door wide open,
and finding an obstruction behind it, immediately divined the
cause, and applied Tickler to its further investigation. She
concluded by throwing me  I often served as a connubial missile 
at Joe, who, glad to get hold of me on any terms, passed me on into
the chimney and quietly fenced me up there with his great leg.
"Where have you been, you young monkey?" said Mrs. Joe, stamping her
foot. "Tell me directly what you've been doing to wear me away with
fret and fright and worrit, or I'd have you out of that corner if
you was fifty Pips, and he was five hundred Gargerys."
"I have only been to the churchyard," said I, from my stool, crying
and rubbing myself.
"Churchyard" repeated my sister. "If it warn't for me you'd have
been to the churchyard long ago, and stayed there. Who brought you
up by hand?"
"You did," said I.
"And why did I do it, I should like to know?" exclaimed my sister.
I whimpered, "I don't know."
"I don't" said my sister. "I'd never do it again I know that. I
may truly say I've never had this apron of mine off, since born you
were. It's bad enough to be a blacksmith's wife and him a Gargery
without being your mother."
My thoughts strayed from that question as I looked disconsolately
at the fire. For, the fugitive out on the marshes with the ironed
leg, the mysterious young man, the file, the food, and the dreadful
pledge I was under to commit a larceny on those sheltering
premises, rose before me in the avenging coals.
"Hah" said Mrs. Joe, restoring Tickler to his station. "Churchyard,
indeed You may well say churchyard, you two." One of us,
bythebye, had not said it at all. "You'll drive me to the
churchyard betwixt you, one of these days, and oh, a prrrecious
pair you'd be without me"
As she applied herself to set the teathings, Joe peeped down at me
over his leg, as if he were mentally casting me and himself up, and
calculating what kind of pair we practically should make, under the
grievous circumstances foreshadowed. After that, he sat feeling his
rightside flaxen curls and whisker, and following Mrs. Joe about
with his blue eyes, as his manner always was at squally times.
My sister had a trenchant way of cutting our breadandbutter for
us, that never varied. First, with her left hand she jammed the
loaf hard and fast against her bib  where it sometimes got a pin
into it, and sometimes a needle, which we afterwards got into our
mouths. Then she took some butter not too much on a knife and
spread it on the loaf, in an apothecary kind of way, as if she were
making a plaister  using both sides of the knife with a slapping
dexterity, and trimming and moulding the butter off round the
crust. Then, she gave the knife a final smart wipe on the edge of
the plaister, and then sawed a very thick round off the loaf which
she finally, before separating from the loaf, hewed into two
halves, of which Joe got one, and I the other.
On the present occasion, though I was hungry, I dared not eat my
slice. I felt that I must have something in reserve for my dreadful
acquaintance, and his ally the still more dreadful young man. I
knew Mrs. Joe's housekeeping to be of the strictest kind, and that
my larcenous researches might find nothing available in the safe.
Therefore I resolved to put my hunk of breadandbutter down the
leg of my trousers.
The effort of resolution necessary to the achievement of this
purpose, I found to be quite awful. It was as if I had to make up
my mind to leap from the top of a high house, or plunge into a
great depth of water. And it was made the more difficult by the
unconscious Joe. In our alreadymentioned freemasonry as
fellowsufferers, and in his goodnatured companionship with me, it
was our evening habit to compare the way we bit through our slices,
by silently holding them up to each other's admiration now and then
which stimulated us to new exertions. Tonight, Joe several times
invited me, by the display of his fastdiminishing slice, to enter
upon our usual friendly competition but he found me, each time,
with my yellow mug of tea on one knee, and my untouched
breadandbutter on the other. At last, I desperately considered
that the thing I contemplated must be done, and that it had best be
done in the least improbable manner consistent with the
circumstances. I took advantage of a moment when Joe had just
looked at me, and got my breadandbutter down my leg.
Joe was evidently made uncomfortable by what he supposed to be my
loss of appetite, and took a thoughtful bite out of his slice,
which he didn't seem to enjoy. He turned it about in his mouth much
longer than usual, pondering over it a good deal, and after all
gulped it down like a pill. He was about to take another bite, and
had just got his head on one side for a good purchase on it, when
his eye fell on me, and he saw that my breadandbutter was gone.
The wonder and consternation with which Joe stopped on the
threshold of his bite and stared at me, were too evident to escape
my sister's observation.
"What's the matter now?" said she, smartly, as she put down her
cup.
"I say, you know" muttered Joe, shaking his head at me in very
serious remonstrance. "Pip, old chap You'll do yourself a
mischief. It'll stick somewhere. You can't have chawed it, Pip."
"What's the matter now?" repeated my sister, more sharply than
before.
"If you can cough any trifle on it up, Pip, I'd recommend you to do
it," said Joe, all aghast. "Manners is manners, but still your
elth's your elth."
By this time, my sister was quite desperate, so she pounced on Joe,
and, taking him by the two whiskers, knocked his head for a little
while against the wall behind him while I sat in the corner,
looking guiltily on.
"Now, perhaps you'll mention what's the matter," said my sister,
out of breath, "you staring great stuck pig."
Joe looked at her in a helpless way then took a helpless bite, and
looked at me again.
"You know, Pip," said Joe, solemnly, with his last bite in his
cheek and speaking in a confidential voice, as if we two were quite
alone, "you and me is always friends, and I'd be the last to tell
upon you, any time. But such a" he moved his chair and looked
about the floor between us, and then again at me  "such a most
oncommon Bolt as that"
"Been bolting his food, has he?" cried my sister.
"You know, old chap," said Joe, looking at me, and not at Mrs. Joe,
with his bite still in his cheek, "I Bolted, myself, when I was
your age  frequent  and as a boy I've been among a many Bolters
but I never see your Bolting equal yet, Pip, and it's a mercy you
ain't Bolted dead."
My sister made a dive at me, and fished me up by the hair saying
nothing more than the awful words, "You come along and be dosed."
Some medical beast had revived Tarwater in those days as a fine
medicine, and Mrs. Joe always kept a supply of it in the cupboard
having a belief in its virtues correspondent to its nastiness. At
the best of times, so much of this elixir was administered to me as
a choice restorative, that I was conscious of going about, smelling
like a new fence. On this particular evening the urgency of my case
demanded a pint of this mixture, which was poured down my throat,
for my greater comfort, while Mrs. Joe held my head under her arm,
as a boot would be held in a bootjack. Joe got off with half a
pint but was made to swallow that much to his disturbance, as he
sat slowly munching and meditating before the fire, "because he had
had a turn." Judging from myself, I should say he certainly had a
turn afterwards, if he had had none before.
Conscience is a dreadful thing when it accuses man or boy but
when, in the case of a boy, that secret burden cooperates with
another secret burden down the leg of his trousers, it is as I can
testify a great punishment. The guilty knowledge that I was going
to rob Mrs. Joe  I never thought I was going to rob Joe, for I
never thought of any of the housekeeping property as his  united
to the necessity of always keeping one hand on my breadandbutter
as I sat, or when I was ordered about the kitchen on any small
errand, almost drove me out of my mind. Then, as the marsh winds
made the fire glow and flare, I thought I heard the voice outside,
of the man with the iron on his leg who had sworn me to secrecy,
declaring that he couldn't and wouldn't starve until tomorrow, but
must be fed now. At other times, I thought, What if the young man
who was with so much difficulty restrained from imbruing his hands
in me, should yield to a constitutional impatience, or should
mistake the time, and should think himself accredited to my heart
and liver tonight, instead of tomorrow If ever anybody's hair
stood on end with terror, mine must have done so then. But,
perhaps, nobody's ever did?
It was Christmas Eve, and I had to stir the pudding for next day,
with a copperstick, from seven to eight by the Dutch clock. I
tried it with the load upon my leg and that made me think afresh
of the man with the load on his leg, and found the tendency of
exercise to bring the breadandbutter out at my ankle, quite
unmanageable. Happily, I slipped away, and deposited that part of
my conscience in my garret bedroom.
"Hark" said I, when I had done my stirring, and was taking a final
warm in the chimney corner before being sent up to bed "was that
great guns, Joe?"
"Ah" said Joe. "There's another conwict off."
"What does that mean, Joe?" said I.
Mrs. Joe, who always took explanations upon herself, said,
snappishly, "Escaped. Escaped." Administering the definition like
Tarwater.
While Mrs. Joe sat with her head bending over her needlework, I put
my mouth into the forms of saying to Joe, "What's a convict?" Joe
put his mouth into the forms of returning such a highly elaborate
answer, that I could make out nothing of it but the single word
"Pip."
"There was a conwict off last night," said Joe, aloud, "after
sunsetgun. And they fired warning of him. And now, it appears
they're firing warning of another."
"Who's firing?" said I.
"Drat that boy," interposed my sister, frowning at me over her
work, "what a questioner he is. Ask no questions, and you'll be
told no lies."
It was not very polite to herself, I thought, to imply that I should
be told lies by her, even if I did ask questions. But she never was
polite, unless there was company.
At this point, Joe greatly augmented my curiosity by taking the
utmost pains to open his mouth very wide, and to put it into the
form of a word that looked to me like "sulks." Therefore, I
naturally pointed to Mrs. Joe, and put my mouth into the form of
saying "her?" But Joe wouldn't hear of that, at all, and again
opened his mouth very wide, and shook the form of a most emphatic
word out of it. But I could make nothing of the word.
"Mrs. Joe," said I, as a last resort, "I should like to know  if
you wouldn't much mind  where the firing comes from?"
"Lord bless the boy" exclaimed my sister, as if she didn't quite
mean that, but rather the contrary. "From the Hulks"
"Ohh" said I, looking at Joe. "Hulks"
Joe gave a reproachful cough, as much as to say, "Well, I told you
so."
"And please what's Hulks?" said I.
"That's the way with this boy" exclaimed my sister, pointing me
out with her needle and thread, and shaking her head at me. "Answer
him one question, and he'll ask you a dozen directly. Hulks are
prisonships, right 'cross th' meshes." We always used that name
for marshes, in our country.
"I wonder who's put into prisonships, and why they're put there?"
said I, in a general way, and with quiet desperation.
It was too much for Mrs. Joe, who immediately rose. "I tell you
what, young fellow," said she, "I didn't bring you up by hand to
badger people's lives out. It would be blame to me, and not praise,
if I had. People are put in the Hulks because they murder, and
because they rob, and forge, and do all sorts of bad and they
always begin by asking questions. Now, you get along to bed"
I was never allowed a candle to light me to bed, and, as I went
upstairs in the dark, with my head tingling  from Mrs. Joe's
thimble having played the tambourine upon it, to accompany her last
words  I felt fearfully sensible of the great convenience that the
Hulks were handy for me. I was clearly on my way there. I had begun
by asking questions, and I was going to rob Mrs. Joe.
Since that time, which is far enough away now, I have often thought
that few people know what secrecy there is in the young, under
terror. No matter how unreasonable the terror, so that it be
terror. I was in mortal terror of the young man who wanted my heart
and liver I was in mortal terror of my interlocutor with the
ironed leg I was in mortal terror of myself, from whom an awful
promise had been extracted I had no hope of deliverance through my
allpowerful sister, who repulsed me at every turn I am afraid to
think of what I might have done, on requirement, in the secrecy of
my terror.
If I slept at all that night, it was only to imagine myself
drifting down the river on a strong springtide, to the Hulks a
ghostly pirate calling out to me through a speakingtrumpet, as I
passed the gibbetstation, that I had better come ashore and be
hanged there at once, and not put it off. I was afraid to sleep,
even if I had been inclined, for I knew that at the first faint
dawn of morning I must rob the pantry. There was no doing it in the
night, for there was no getting a light by easy friction then to
have got one, I must have struck it out of flint and steel, and
have made a noise like the very pirate himself rattling his chains.
As soon as the great black velvet pall outside my little window was
shot with grey, I got up and went down stairs every board upon the
way, and every crack in every board, calling after me, "Stop
thief" and "Get up, Mrs. Joe" In the pantry, which was far more
abundantly supplied than usual, owing to the season, I was very
much alarmed, by a hare hanging up by the heels, whom I rather
thought I caught, when my back was half turned, winking. I had no
time for verification, no time for selection, no time for anything,
for I had no time to spare. I stole some bread, some rind of
cheese, about half a jar of mincemeat which I tied up in my
pockethandkerchief with my last night's slice, some brandy from a
stone bottle which I decanted into a glass bottle I had secretly
used for making that intoxicating fluid, Spanishliquoricewater,
up in my room diluting the stone bottle from a jug in the kitchen
cupboard, a meat bone with very little on it, and a beautiful
round compact pork pie. I was nearly going away without the pie,
but I was tempted to mount upon a shelf, to look what it was that
was put away so carefully in a covered earthen ware dish in a
corner, and I found it was the pie, and I took it, in the hope that
it was not intended for early use, and would not be missed for some
time.
There was a door in the kitchen, communicating with the forge I
unlocked and unbolted that door, and got a file from among Joe's
tools. Then, I put the fastenings as I had found them, opened the
door at which I had entered when I ran home last night, shut it,
and ran for the misty marshes.
Chapter 
It was a rimy morning, and very damp. I had seen the damp lying on
the outside of my little window, as if some goblin had been crying
there all night, and using the window for a pockethandkerchief.
Now, I saw the damp lying on the bare hedges and spare grass, like
a coarser sort of spiders' webs hanging itself from twig to twig
and blade to blade. On every rail and gate, wet lay clammy and the
marshmist was so thick, that the wooden finger on the post
directing people to our village  a direction which they never
accepted, for they never came there  was invisible to me until I
was quite close under it. Then, as I looked up at it, while it
dripped, it seemed to my oppressed conscience like a phantom
devoting me to the Hulks.
The mist was heavier yet when I got out upon the marshes, so that
instead of my running at everything, everything seemed to run at
me. This was very disagreeable to a guilty mind. The gates and
dykes and banks came bursting at me through the mist, as if they
cried as plainly as could be, "A boy with Somebodyelse's pork pie
Stop him" The cattle came upon me with like suddenness, staring
out of their eyes, and steaming out of their nostrils, "Holloa,
young thief" One black ox, with a white cravat on  who even had
to my awakened conscience something of a clerical air  fixed me so
obstinately with his eyes, and moved his blunt head round in such
an accusatory manner as I moved round, that I blubbered out to him,
"I couldn't help it, sir It wasn't for myself I took it" Upon
which he put down his head, blew a cloud of smoke out of his nose,
and vanished with a kickup of his hindlegs and a flourish of his
tail.
All this time, I was getting on towards the river but however fast
I went, I couldn't warm my feet, to which the damp cold seemed
riveted, as the iron was riveted to the leg of the man I was
running to meet. I knew my way to the Battery, pretty straight, for
I had been down there on a Sunday with Joe, and Joe, sitting on an
old gun, had told me that when I was 'prentice to him regularly
bound, we would have such Larks there However, in the confusion of
the mist, I found myself at last too far to the right, and
consequently had to try back along the riverside, on the bank of
loose stones above the mud and the stakes that staked the tide out.
Making my way along here with all despatch, I had just crossed a
ditch which I knew to be very near the Battery, and had just
scrambled up the mound beyond the ditch, when I saw the man sitting
before me. His back was towards me, and he had his arms folded, and
was nodding forward, heavy with sleep.
I thought he would be more glad if I came upon him with his
breakfast, in that unexpected manner, so I went forward softly and
touched him on the shoulder. He instantly jumped up, and it was not
the same man, but another man
And yet this man was dressed in coarse grey, too, and had a great
iron on his leg, and was lame, and hoarse, and cold, and was
everything that the other man was except that he had not the same
face, and had a flat broadbrimmed lowcrowned felt that on. All
this, I saw in a moment, for I had only a moment to see it in he
swore an oath at me, made a hit at me  it was a round weak blow
that missed me and almost knocked himself down, for it made him
stumble  and then he ran into the mist, stumbling twice as he went,
and I lost him.
"It's the young man" I thought, feeling my heart shoot as I
identified him. I dare say I should have felt a pain in my liver,
too, if I had known where it was.
I was soon at the Battery, after that, and there was the right
manhugging himself and limping to and fro, as if he had never all
night left off hugging and limping  waiting for me. He was awfully
cold, to be sure. I half expected to see him drop down before my
face and die of deadly cold. His eyes looked so awfully hungry,
too, that when I handed him the file and he laid it down on the
grass, it occurred to me he would have tried to eat it, if he had
not seen my bundle. He did not turn me upside down, this time, to
get at what I had, but left me right side upwards while I opened
the bundle and emptied my pockets.
"What's in the bottle, boy?" said he.
"Brandy," said I.
He was already handing mincemeat down his throat in the most
curious manner  more like a man who was putting it away somewhere
in a violent hurry, than a man who was eating it  but he left off
to take some of the liquor. He shivered all the while, so
violently, that it was quite as much as he could do to keep the
neck of the bottle between his teeth, without biting it off.
"I think you have got the ague," said I.
"I'm much of your opinion, boy," said he.
"It's bad about here," I told him. "You've been lying out on the
meshes, and they're dreadful aguish. Rheumatic too."
"I'll eat my breakfast afore they're the death of me," said he.
"I'd do that, if I was going to be strung up to that there gallows
as there is over there, directly afterwards. I'll beat the shivers
so far, I'll bet you."
He was gobbling mincemeat, meatbone, bread, cheese, and pork pie,
all at once staring distrustfully while he did so at the mist all
round us, and often stopping  even stopping his jaws  to listen.
Some real or fancied sound, some clink upon the river or breathing
of beast upon the marsh, now gave him a start, and he said,
suddenly
"You're not a deceiving imp? You brought no one with you?"
"No, sir No"
"Nor giv' no one the office to follow you?"
"No"
"Well," said he, "I believe you. You'd be but a fierce young hound
indeed, if at your time of life you could help to hunt a wretched
warmint, hunted as near death and dunghill as this poor wretched
warmint is"
Something clicked in his throat, as if he had works in him like a
clock, and was going to strike. And he smeared his ragged rough
sleeve over his eyes.
Pitying his desolation, and watching him as he gradually settled
down upon the pie, I made bold to say, "I am glad you enjoy it."
"Did you speak?"
"I said I was glad you enjoyed it."
"Thankee, my boy. I do."
I had often watched a large dog of ours eating his food and I now
noticed a decided similarity between the dog's way of eating, and
the man's. The man took strong sharp sudden bites, just like the
dog. He swallowed, or rather snapped up, every mouthful, too soon
and too fast and he looked sideways here and there while he ate,
as if he thought there was danger in every direction, of somebody's
coming to take the pie away. He was altogether too unsettled in his
mind over it, to appreciate it comfortably, I thought, or to have
anybody to dine with him, without making a chop with his jaws at
the visitor. In all of which particulars he was very like the dog.
"I am afraid you won't leave any of it for him," said I, timidly
after a silence during which I had hesitated as to the politeness
of making the remark. "There's no more to be got where that came
from." It was the certainty of this fact that impelled me to offer
the hint.
"Leave any for him? Who's him?" said my friend, stopping in his
crunching of piecrust.
"The young man. That you spoke of. That was hid with you."
"Oh ah" he returned, with something like a gruff laugh. "Him? Yes,
yes He don't want no wittles."
"I thought he looked as if he did," said I.
The man stopped eating, and regarded me with the keenest scrutiny
and the greatest surprise.
"Looked? When?"
"Just now."
"Where?"
"Yonder," said I, pointing "over there, where I found him nodding
asleep, and thought it was you."
He held me by the collar and stared at me so, that I began to think
his first idea about cutting my throat had revived.
"Dressed like you, you know, only with a hat," I explained,
trembling "and  and"  I was very anxious to put this delicately
"and with  the same reason for wanting to borrow a file. Didn't
you hear the cannon last night?"
"Then, there was firing" he said to himself.
"I wonder you shouldn't have been sure of that," I returned, "for
we heard it up at home, and that's further away, and we were shut
in besides."
"Why, see now" said he. "When a man's alone on these flats, with a
light head and a light stomach, perishing of cold and want, he
hears nothin' all night, but guns firing, and voices calling.
Hears? He sees the soldiers, with their red coats lighted up by the
torches carried afore, closing in round him. Hears his number
called, hears himself challenged, hears the rattle of the muskets,
hears the orders 'Make ready Present Cover him steady, men' and
is laid hands on  and there's nothin' Why, if I see one pursuing
party last night  coming up in order, Damn 'em, with their tramp,
tramp  I see a hundred. And as to firing Why, I see the mist
shake with the cannon, arter it was broad day  But this man" he
had said all the rest, as if he had forgotten my being there "did
you notice anything in him?"
"He had a badly bruised face," said I, recalling what I hardly knew
I knew.
"Not here?" exclaimed the man, striking his left cheek mercilessly,
with the flat of his hand.
"Yes, there"
"Where is he?" He crammed what little food was left, into the
breast of his grey jacket. "Show me the way he went. I'll pull him
down, like a bloodhound. Curse this iron on my sore leg Give us
hold of the file, boy."
I indicated in what direction the mist had shrouded the other man,
and he looked up at it for an instant. But he was down on the rank
wet grass, filing at his iron like a madman, and not minding me or
minding his own leg, which had an old chafe upon it and was bloody,
but which he handled as roughly as if it had no more feeling in it
than the file. I was very much afraid of him again, now that he had
worked himself into this fierce hurry, and I was likewise very much
afraid of keeping away from home any longer. I told him I must go,
but he took no notice, so I thought the best thing I could do was
to slip off. The last I saw of him, his head was bent over his knee
and he was working hard at his fetter, muttering impatient
imprecations at it and at his leg. The last I heard of him, I
stopped in the mist to listen, and the file was still going.
Chapter 
I fully expected to find a Constable in the kitchen, waiting to
take me up. But not only was there no Constable there, but no
discovery had yet been made of the robbery. Mrs. Joe was
prodigiously busy in getting the house ready for the festivities of
the day, and Joe had been put upon the kitchen doorstep to keep
him out of the dustpan  an article into which his destiny always
led him sooner or later, when my sister was vigorously reaping the
floors of her establishment.
"And where the deuce ha' you been?" was Mrs. Joe's Christmas
salutation, when I and my conscience showed ourselves.
I said I had been down to hear the Carols. "Ah well" observed Mrs.
Joe. "You might ha' done worse." Not a doubt of that, I thought.
"Perhaps if I warn't a blacksmith's wife, and what's the same
thing a slave with her apron never off, I should have been to hear
the Carols," said Mrs. Joe. "I'm rather partial to Carols, myself,
and that's the best of reasons for my never hearing any."
Joe, who had ventured into the kitchen after me as the dustpan had
retired before us, drew the back of his hand across his nose with a
conciliatory air when Mrs. Joe darted a look at him, and, when her
eyes were withdrawn, secretly crossed his two forefingers, and
exhibited them to me, as our token that Mrs. Joe was in a cross
temper. This was so much her normal state, that Joe and I would
often, for weeks together, be, as to our fingers, like monumental
Crusaders as to their legs.
We were to have a superb dinner, consisting of a leg of pickled
pork and greens, and a pair of roast stuffed fowls. A handsome
mincepie had been made yesterday morning which accounted for the
mincemeat not being missed, and the pudding was already on the
boil. These extensive arrangements occasioned us to be cut off
unceremoniously in respect of breakfast "for I an't," said Mrs.
Joe, "I an't agoing to have no formal cramming and busting and
washing up now, with what I've got before me, I promise you"
So, we had our slices served out, as if we were two thousand troops
on a forced march instead of a man and boy at home and we took
gulps of milk and water, with apologetic countenances, from a jug
on the dresser. In the meantime, Mrs. Joe put clean white curtains
up, and tacked a new floweredflounce across the wide chimney to
replace the old one, and uncovered the little state parlour across
the passage, which was never uncovered at any other time, but
passed the rest of the year in a cool haze of silver paper, which
even extended to the four little white crockery poodles on the
mantelshelf, each with a black nose and a basket of flowers in his
mouth, and each the counterpart of the other. Mrs. Joe was a very
clean housekeeper, but had an exquisite art of making her
cleanliness more uncomfortable and unacceptable than dirt itself.
Cleanliness is next to Godliness, and some people do the same by
their religion.
My sister having so much to do, was going to church vicariously
that is to say, Joe and I were going. In his working clothes, Joe
was a wellknit characteristiclooking blacksmith in his holiday
clothes, he was more like a scarecrow in good circumstances, than
anything else. Nothing that he wore then, fitted him or seemed to
belong to him and everything that he wore then, grazed him. On the
present festive occasion he emerged from his room, when the blithe
bells were going, the picture of misery, in a full suit of Sunday
penitentials. As to me, I think my sister must have had some
general idea that I was a young offender whom an Accoucheur
Policemen had taken up on my birthday and delivered over to her,
to be dealt with according to the outraged majesty of the law. I
was always treated as if I had insisted on being born, in
opposition to the dictates of reason, religion, and morality, and
against the dissuading arguments of my best friends. Even when I
was taken to have a new suit of clothes, the tailor had orders to
make them like a kind of Reformatory, and on no account to let me
have the free use of my limbs.
Joe and I going to church, therefore, must have been a moving
spectacle for compassionate minds. Yet, what I suffered outside,
was nothing to what I underwent within. The terrors that had
assailed me whenever Mrs. Joe had gone near the pantry, or out of
the room, were only to be equalled by the remorse with which my
mind dwelt on what my hands had done. Under the weight of my wicked
secret, I pondered whether the Church would be powerful enough to
shield me from the vengeance of the terrible young man, if I
divulged to that establishment. I conceived the idea that the time
when the banns were read and when the clergyman said, "Ye are now
to declare it" would be the time for me to rise and propose a
private conference in the vestry. I am far from being sure that I
might not have astonished our small congregation by resorting to
this extreme measure, but for its being Christmas Day and no
Sunday.
Mr. Wopsle, the clerk at church, was to dine with us and Mr. Hubble
the wheelwright and Mrs. Hubble and Uncle Pumblechook Joe's uncle,
but Mrs. Joe appropriated him, who was a welltodo cornchandler
in the nearest town, and drove his own chaisecart. The dinner hour
was halfpast one. When Joe and I got home, we found the table
laid, and Mrs. Joe dressed, and the dinner dressing, and the front
door unlocked it never was at any other time for the company to
enter by, and everything most splendid. And still, not a word of
the robbery.
The time came, without bringing with it any relief to my feelings,
and the company came. Mr. Wopsle, united to a Roman nose and a
large shining bald forehead, had a deep voice which he was
uncommonly proud of indeed it was understood among his
acquaintance that if you could only give him his head, he would
read the clergyman into fits he himself confessed that if the
Church was "thrown open," meaning to competition, he would not
despair of making his mark in it. The Church not being "thrown
open," he was, as I have said, our clerk. But he punished the
Amens tremendously and when he gave out the psalm  always giving
the whole verse  he looked all round the congregation first, as
much as to say, "You have heard my friend overhead oblige me with
your opinion of this style"
I opened the door to the company  making believe that it was a
habit of ours to open that door  and I opened it first to Mr.
Wopsle, next to Mr. and Mrs. Hubble, and last of all to Uncle
Pumblechook. N.B., I was not allowed to call him uncle, under the
severest penalties.
"Mrs. Joe," said Uncle Pumblechook a large hardbreathing
middleaged slow man, with a mouth like a fish, dull staring eyes,
and sandy hair standing upright on his head, so that he looked as
if he had just been all but choked, and had that moment come to
"I have brought you, as the compliments of the season  I have
brought you, Mum, a bottle of sherry wine  and I have brought you,
Mum, a bottle of port wine."
Every Christmas Day he presented himself, as a profound novelty,
with exactly the same words, and carrying the two bottles like
dumbbells. Every Christmas Day, Mrs. Joe replied, as she now
replied, "Oh, Un  cle Pum  ble  chook This IS kind" Every
Christmas Day, he retorted, as he now retorted, "It's no more than
your merits. And now are you all bobbish, and how's Sixpennorth of
halfpence?" meaning me.
We dined on these occasions in the kitchen, and adjourned, for the
nuts and oranges and apples, to the parlour which was a change
very like Joe's change from his working clothes to his Sunday
dress. My sister was uncommonly lively on the present occasion, and
indeed was generally more gracious in the society of Mrs. Hubble
than in other company. I remember Mrs. Hubble as a little curly
sharpedged person in skyblue, who held a conventionally juvenile
position, because she had married Mr. Hubble  I don't know at what
remote period  when she was much younger than he. I remember Mr
Hubble as a tough highshouldered stooping old man, of a sawdusty
fragrance, with his legs extraordinarily wide apart so that in my
short days I always saw some miles of open country between them
when I met him coming up the lane.
Among this good company I should have felt myself, even if I hadn't
robbed the pantry, in a false position. Not because I was squeezed
in at an acute angle of the tablecloth, with the table in my
chest, and the Pumblechookian elbow in my eye, nor because I was
not allowed to speak I didn't want to speak, nor because I was
regaled with the scaly tips of the drumsticks of the fowls, and
with those obscure corners of pork of which the pig, when living,
had had the least reason to be vain. No I should not have minded
that, if they would only have left me alone. But they wouldn't
leave me alone. They seemed to think the opportunity lost, if they
failed to point the conversation at me, every now and then, and
stick the point into me. I might have been an unfortunate little
bull in a Spanish arena, I got so smartingly touched up by these
moral goads.
It began the moment we sat down to dinner. Mr. Wopsle said grace
with theatrical declamation  as it now appears to me, something
like a religious cross of the Ghost in Hamlet with Richard the
Third  and ended with the very proper aspiration that we might be
truly grateful. Upon which my sister fixed me with her eye, and
said, in a low reproachful voice, "Do you hear that? Be grateful."
"Especially," said Mr. Pumblechook, "be grateful, boy, to them which
brought you up by hand."
Mrs. Hubble shook her head, and contemplating me with a mournful
presentiment that I should come to no good, asked, "Why is it that
the young are never grateful?" This moral mystery seemed too much
for the company until Mr. Hubble tersely solved it by saying,
"Naterally wicious." Everybody then murmured "True" and looked at
me in a particularly unpleasant and personal manner.
Joe's station and influence were something feebler if possible
when there was company, than when there was none. But he always
aided and comforted me when he could, in some way of his own, and
he always did so at dinnertime by giving me gravy, if there were
any. There being plenty of gravy today, Joe spooned into my plate,
at this point, about half a pint.
A little later on in the dinner, Mr. Wopsle reviewed the sermon with
some severity, and intimated  in the usual hypothetical case of
the Church being "thrown open"  what kind of sermon he would have
given them. After favouring them with some heads of that discourse,
he remarked that he considered the subject of the day's homily,
illchosen which was the less excusable, he added, when there were
so many subjects "going about."
"True again," said Uncle Pumblechook. "You've hit it, sir Plenty of
subjects going about, for them that know how to put salt upon their
tails. That's what's wanted. A man needn't go far to find a
subject, if he's ready with his saltbox." Mr. Pumblechook added,
after a short interval of reflection, "Look at Pork alone. There's
a subject If you want a subject, look at Pork"
"True, sir. Many a moral for the young," returned Mr. Wopsle and I
knew he was going to lug me in, before he said it "might be
deduced from that text."
"You listen to this," said my sister to me, in a severe
parenthesis.
Joe gave me some more gravy.
"Swine," pursued Mr. Wopsle, in his deepest voice, and pointing his
fork at my blushes, as if he were mentioning my Christian name
"Swine were the companions of the prodigal. The gluttony of Swine
is put before us, as an example to the young." I thought this
pretty well in him who had been praising up the pork for being so
plump and juicy. "What is detestable in a pig, is more detestable
in a boy."
"Or girl," suggested Mr. Hubble.
"Of course, or girl, Mr. Hubble," assented Mr. Wopsle, rather
irritably, "but there is no girl present."
"Besides," said Mr. Pumblechook, turning sharp on me, "think what
you've got to be grateful for. If you'd been born a Squeaker"
"He was, if ever a child was," said my sister, most emphatically.
Joe gave me some more gravy.
"Well, but I mean a fourfooted Squeaker," said Mr. Pumblechook. "If
you had been born such, would you have been here now? Not you"
"Unless in that form," said Mr. Wopsle, nodding towards the dish.
"But I don't mean in that form, sir," returned Mr. Pumblechook, who
had an objection to being interrupted "I mean, enjoying himself
with his elders and betters, and improving himself with their
conversation, and rolling in the lap of luxury. Would he have been
doing that? No, he wouldn't. And what would have been your
destination?" turning on me again. "You would have been disposed of
for so many shillings according to the market price of the article,
and Dunstable the butcher would have come up to you as you lay in
your straw, and he would have whipped you under his left arm, and
with his right he would have tucked up his frock to get a penknife
from out of his waistcoatpocket, and he would have shed your
blood and had your life. No bringing up by hand then. Not a bit of
it"
Joe offered me more gravy, which I was afraid to take.
"He was a world of trouble to you, ma'am," said Mrs. Hubble,
commiserating my sister.
"Trouble?" echoed my sister "trouble?" and then entered on a
fearful catalogue of all the illnesses I had been guilty of, and
all the acts of sleeplessness I had committed, and all the high
places I had tumbled from, and all the low places I had tumbled
into, and all the injuries I had done myself, and all the times she
had wished me in my grave, and I had contumaciously refused to go
there.
I think the Romans must have aggravated one another very much, with
their noses. Perhaps, they became the restless people they were, in
consequence. Anyhow, Mr. Wopsle's Roman nose so aggravated me,
during the recital of my misdemeanours, that I should have liked to
pull it until he howled. But, all I had endured up to this time,
was nothing in comparison with the awful feelings that took
possession of me when the pause was broken which ensued upon my
sister's recital, and in which pause everybody had looked at me as
I felt painfully conscious with indignation and abhorrence.
"Yet," said Mr. Pumblechook, leading the company gently back to the
theme from which they had strayed, "Pork  regarded as biled  is
rich, too ain't it?"
"Have a little brandy, uncle," said my sister.
O Heavens, it had come at last He would find it was weak, he would
say it was weak, and I was lost I held tight to the leg of the
table under the cloth, with both hands, and awaited my fate.
My sister went for the stone bottle, came back with the stone
bottle, and poured his brandy out no one else taking any. The
wretched man trifled with his glass  took it up, looked at it
through the light, put it down  prolonged my misery. All this
time, Mrs. Joe and Joe were briskly clearing the table for the pie
and pudding.
I couldn't keep my eyes off him. Always holding tight by the leg of
the table with my hands and feet, I saw the miserable creature
finger his glass playfully, take it up, smile, throw his head back,
and drink the brandy off. Instantly afterwards, the company were
seized with unspeakable consternation, owing to his springing to
his feet, turning round several times in an appalling spasmodic
whoopingcough dance, and rushing out at the door he then became
visible through the window, violently plunging and expectorating,
making the most hideous faces, and apparently out of his mind.
I held on tight, while Mrs. Joe and Joe ran to him. I didn't know
how I had done it, but I had no doubt I had murdered him somehow.
In my dreadful situation, it was a relief when he was brought back,
and, surveying the company all round as if they had disagreed with
him, sank down into his chair with the one significant gasp, "Tar"
I had filled up the bottle from the tarwater jug. I knew he would
be worse byandby. I moved the table, like a Medium of the present
day, by the vigour of my unseen hold upon it.
"Tar" cried my sister, in amazement. "Why, how ever could Tar come
there?"
But, Uncle Pumblechook, who was omnipotent in that kitchen,
wouldn't hear the word, wouldn't hear of the subject, imperiously
waved it all away with his hand, and asked for hot ginandwater.
My sister, who had begun to be alarmingly meditative, had to employ
herself actively in getting the gin, the hot water, the sugar, and
the lemonpeel, and mixing them. For the time being at least, I was
saved. I still held on to the leg of the table, but clutched it now
with the fervour of gratitude.
By degrees, I became calm enough to release my grasp and partake of
pudding. Mr. Pumblechook partook of pudding. All partook of pudding.
The course terminated, and Mr. Pumblechook had begun to beam under
the genial influence of ginandwater. I began to think I should
get over the day, when my sister said to Joe, "Clean plates 
cold."
I clutched the leg of the table again immediately, and pressed it
to my bosom as if it had been the companion of my youth and friend
of my soul. I foresaw what was coming, and I felt that this time I
really was gone.
"You must taste," said my sister, addressing the guests with her
best grace, "You must taste, to finish with, such a delightful and
delicious present of Uncle Pumblechook's"
Must they Let them not hope to taste it
"You must know," said my sister, rising, "it's a pie a savoury
pork pie."
The company murmured their compliments. Uncle Pumblechook, sensible
of having deserved well of his fellowcreatures, said  quite
vivaciously, all things considered  "Well, Mrs. Joe, we'll do our
best endeavours let us have a cut at this same pie."
My sister went out to get it. I heard her steps proceed to the
pantry. I saw Mr. Pumblechook balance his knife. I saw reawakening
appetite in the Roman nostrils of Mr. Wopsle. I heard Mr. Hubble
remark that "a bit of savoury pork pie would lay atop of anything
you could mention, and do no harm," and I heard Joe say, "You shall
have some, Pip." I have never been absolutely certain whether I
uttered a shrill yell of terror, merely in spirit, or in the bodily
hearing of the company. I felt that I could bear no more, and that
I must run away. I released the leg of the table, and ran for my
life.
But, I ran no further than the house door, for there I ran head
foremost into a party of soldiers with their muskets one of whom
held out a pair of handcuffs to me, saying, "Here you are, look
sharp, come on"
Chapter 
The apparition of a file of soldiers ringing down the buttends of
their loaded muskets on our doorstep, caused the dinnerparty to
rise from table in confusion, and caused Mrs. Joe reentering the
kitchen emptyhanded, to stop short and stare, in her wondering
lament of "Gracious goodness gracious me, what's gone  with the 
pie"
The sergeant and I were in the kitchen when Mrs. Joe stood staring
at which crisis I partially recovered the use of my senses. It was
the sergeant who had spoken to me, and he was now looking round at
the company, with his handcuffs invitingly extended towards them in
his right hand, and his left on my shoulder.
"Excuse me, ladies and gentleman," said the sergeant, "but as I
have mentioned at the door to this smart young shaver" which he
hadn't, "I am on a chase in the name of the king, and I want the
blacksmith."
"And pray what might you want with him?" retorted my sister, quick
to resent his being wanted at all.
"Missis," returned the gallant sergeant, "speaking for myself, I
should reply, the honour and pleasure of his fine wife's
acquaintance speaking for the king, I answer, a little job done."
This was received as rather neat in the sergeant insomuch that Mr
Pumblechook cried audibly, "Good again"
"You see, blacksmith," said the sergeant, who had by this time
picked out Joe with his eye, "we have had an accident with these,
and I find the lock of one of 'em goes wrong, and the coupling
don't act pretty. As they are wanted for immediate service, will
you throw your eye over them?"
Joe threw his eye over them, and pronounced that the job would
necessitate the lighting of his forge fire, and would take nearer
two hours than one, "Will it? Then will you set about it at once,
blacksmith?" said the offhand sergeant, "as it's on his Majesty's
service. And if my men can beat a hand anywhere, they'll make
themselves useful." With that, he called to his men, who came
trooping into the kitchen one after another, and piled their arms
in a corner. And then they stood about, as soldiers do now, with
their hands loosely clasped before them now, resting a knee or a
shoulder now, easing a belt or a pouch now, opening the door to
spit stiffly over their high stocks, out into the yard.
All these things I saw without then knowing that I saw them, for I
was in an agony of apprehension. But, beginning to perceive that
the handcuffs were not for me, and that the military had so far got
the better of the pie as to put it in the background, I collected a
little more of my scattered wits.
"Would you give me the Time?" said the sergeant, addressing himself
to Mr. Pumblechook, as to a man whose appreciative powers justified
the inference that he was equal to the time.
"It's just gone halfpast two."
"That's not so bad," said the sergeant, reflecting "even if I was
forced to halt here nigh two hours, that'll do. How far might you
call yourselves from the marshes, hereabouts? Not above a mile, I
reckon?"
"Just a mile," said Mrs. Joe.
"That'll do. We begin to close in upon 'em about dusk. A little
before dusk, my orders are. That'll do."
"Convicts, sergeant?" asked Mr. Wopsle, in a matterofcourse way.
"Ay" returned the sergeant, "two. They're pretty well known to be
out on the marshes still, and they won't try to get clear of 'em
before dusk. Anybody here seen anything of any such game?"
Everybody, myself excepted, said no, with confidence. Nobody
thought of me.
"Well" said the sergeant, "they'll find themselves trapped in a
circle, I expect, sooner than they count on. Now, blacksmith If
you're ready, his Majesty the King is."
Joe had got his coat and waistcoat and cravat off, and his leather
apron on, and passed into the forge. One of the soldiers opened its
wooden windows, another lighted the fire, another turned to at
the bellows, the rest stood round the blaze, which was soon
roaring. Then Joe began to hammer and clink, hammer and clink, and
we all looked on.
The interest of the impending pursuit not only absorbed the general
attention, but even made my sister liberal. She drew a pitcher of
beer from the cask, for the soldiers, and invited the sergeant to
take a glass of brandy. But Mr. Pumblechook said, sharply, "Give him
wine, Mum. I'll engage there's no Tar in that" so, the sergeant
thanked him and said that as he preferred his drink without tar, he
would take wine, if it was equally convenient. When it was given
him, he drank his Majesty's health and Compliments of the Season,
and took it all at a mouthful and smacked his lips.
"Good stuff, eh, sergeant?" said Mr. Pumblechook.
"I'll tell you something," returned the sergeant "I suspect that
stuff's of your providing."
Mr. Pumblechook, with a fat sort of laugh, said, "Ay, ay? Why?"
"Because," returned the sergeant, clapping him on the shoulder,
"you're a man that knows what's what."
"D'ye think so?" said Mr. Pumblechook, with his former laugh. "Have
another glass"
"With you. Hob and nob," returned the sergeant. "The top of mine to
the foot of yours  the foot of yours to the top of mine  Ring
once, ring twice  the best tune on the Musical Glasses Your
health. May you live a thousand years, and never be a worse judge
of the right sort than you are at the present moment of your life"
The sergeant tossed off his glass again and seemed quite ready for
another glass. I noticed that Mr. Pumblechook in his hospitality
appeared to forget that he had made a present of the wine, but took
the bottle from Mrs. Joe and had all the credit of handing it about
in a gush of joviality. Even I got some. And he was so very free of
the wine that he even called for the other bottle, and handed that
about with the same liberality, when the first was gone.
As I watched them while they all stood clustering about the forge,
enjoying themselves so much, I thought what terrible good sauce for
a dinner my fugitive friend on the marshes was. They had not
enjoyed themselves a quarter so much, before the entertainment was
brightened with the excitement he furnished. And now, when they
were all in lively anticipation of "the two villains" being taken,
and when the bellows seemed to roar for the fugitives, the fire to
flare for them, the smoke to hurry away in pursuit of them, Joe to
hammer and clink for them, and all the murky shadows on the wall to
shake at them in menace as the blaze rose and sank and the redhot
sparks dropped and died, the pale afternoon outside, almost seemed
in my pitying young fancy to have turned pale on their account,
poor wretches.
At last, Joe's job was done, and the ringing and roaring stopped.
As Joe got on his coat, he mustered courage to propose that some of
us should go down with the soldiers and see what came of the hunt.
Mr. Pumblechook and Mr. Hubble declined, on the plea of a pipe and
ladies' society but Mr. Wopsle said he would go, if Joe would. Joe
said he was agreeable, and would take me, if Mrs. Joe approved. We
never should have got leave to go, I am sure, but for Mrs. Joe's
curiosity to know all about it and how it ended. As it was, she
merely stipulated, "If you bring the boy back with his head blown
to bits by a musket, don't look to me to put it together again."
The sergeant took a polite leave of the ladies, and parted from Mr.
Pumblechook as from a comrade though I doubt if he were quite as
fully sensible of that gentleman's merits under arid conditions, as
when something moist was going. His men resumed their muskets and
fell in. Mr. Wopsle, Joe, and I, received strict charge to keep in
the rear, and to speak no word after we reached the marshes. When
we were all out in the raw air and were steadily moving towards our
business, I treasonably whispered to Joe, "I hope, Joe, we shan't
find them." and Joe whispered to me, "I'd give a shilling if they
had cut and run, Pip."
We were joined by no stragglers from the village, for the weather
was cold and threatening, the way dreary, the footing bad, darkness
coming on, and the people had good fires indoors and were keeping
the day. A few faces hurried to glowing windows and looked after
us, but none came out. We passed the fingerpost, and held straight
on to the churchyard. There, we were stopped a few minutes by a
signal from the sergeant's hand, while two or three of his men
dispersed themselves among the graves, and also examined the porch.
They came in again without finding anything, and then we struck out
on the open marshes, through the gate at the side of the
churchyard. A bitter sleet came rattling against us here on the
east wind, and Joe took me on his back.
Now that we were out upon the dismal wilderness where they little
thought I had been within eight or nine hours and had seen both men
hiding, I considered for the first time, with great dread, if we
should come upon them, would my particular convict suppose that it
was I who had brought the soldiers there? He had asked me if I was
a deceiving imp, and he had said I should be a fierce young hound
if I joined the hunt against him. Would he believe that I was both
imp and hound in treacherous earnest, and had betrayed him?
It was of no use asking myself this question now. There I was, on
Joe's back, and there was Joe beneath me, charging at the ditches
like a hunter, and stimulating Mr. Wopsle not to tumble on his Roman
nose, and to keep up with us. The soldiers were in front of us,
extending into a pretty wide line with an interval between man and
man. We were taking the course I had begun with, and from which I
had diverged in the mist. Either the mist was not out again yet, or
the wind had dispelled it. Under the low red glare of sunset, the
beacon, and the gibbet, and the mound of the Battery, and the
opposite shore of the river, were plain, though all of a watery
lead colour.
With my heart thumping like a blacksmith at Joe's broad shoulder, I
looked all about for any sign of the convicts. I could see none, I
could hear none. Mr. Wopsle had greatly alarmed me more than once,
by his blowing and hard breathing but I knew the sounds by this
time, and could dissociate them from the object of pursuit. I got a
dreadful start, when I thought I heard the file still going but it
was only a sheep bell. The sheep stopped in their eating and looked
timidly at us and the cattle, their heads turned from the wind and
sleet, stared angrily as if they held us responsible for both
annoyances but, except these things, and the shudder of the dying
day in every blade of grass, there was no break in the bleak
stillness of the marshes.
The soldiers were moving on in the direction of the old Battery,
and we were moving on a little way behind them, when, all of a
sudden, we all stopped. For, there had reached us on the wings of
the wind and rain, a long shout. It was repeated. It was at a
distance towards the east, but it was long and loud. Nay, there
seemed to be two or more shouts raised together  if one might
judge from a confusion in the sound.
To this effect the sergeant and the nearest men were speaking under
their breath, when Joe and I came up. After another moment's
listening, Joe who was a good judge agreed, and Mr. Wopsle who
was a bad judge agreed. The sergeant, a decisive man, ordered that
the sound should not be answered, but that the course should be
changed, and that his men should make towards it "at the double."
So we slanted to the right where the East was, and Joe pounded
away so wonderfully, that I had to hold on tight to keep my seat.
It was a run indeed now, and what Joe called, in the only two words
he spoke all the time, "a Winder." Down banks and up banks, and
over gates, and splashing into dykes, and breaking among coarse
rushes no man cared where he went. As we came nearer to the
shouting, it became more and more apparent that it was made by more
than one voice. Sometimes, it seemed to stop altogether, and then
the soldiers stopped. When it broke out again, the soldiers made
for it at a greater rate than ever, and we after them. After a
while, we had so run it down, that we could hear one voice calling
"Murder" and another voice, "Convicts Runaways Guard This way
for the runaway convicts" Then both voices would seem to be
stifled in a struggle, and then would break out again. And when it
had come to this, the soldiers ran like deer, and Joe too.
The sergeant ran in first, when we had run the noise quite down,
and two of his men ran in close upon him. Their pieces were cocked
and levelled when we all ran in.
"Here are both men" panted the sergeant, struggling at the bottom
of a ditch. "Surrender, you two and confound you for two wild
beasts Come asunder"
Water was splashing, and mud was flying, and oaths were being
sworn, and blows were being struck, when some more men went down
into the ditch to help the sergeant, and dragged out, separately,
my convict and the other one. Both were bleeding and panting and
execrating and struggling but of course I knew them both directly.
"Mind" said my convict, wiping blood from his face with his ragged
sleeves, and shaking torn hair from his fingers "I took him I give
him up to you Mind that"
"It's not much to be particular about," said the sergeant "it'll do
you small good, my man, being in the same plight yourself.
Handcuffs there"
"I don't expect it to do me any good. I don't want it to do me more
good than it does now," said my convict, with a greedy laugh. "I
took him. He knows it. That's enough for me."
The other convict was livid to look at, and, in addition to the old
bruised left side of his face, seemed to be bruised and torn all
over. He could not so much as get his breath to speak, until they
were both separately handcuffed, but leaned upon a soldier to keep
himself from falling.
"Take notice, guard  he tried to murder me," were his first words.
"Tried to murder him?" said my convict, disdainfully. "Try, and not
do it? I took him, and giv' him up that's what I done. I not only
prevented him getting off the marshes, but I dragged him here 
dragged him this far on his way back. He's a gentleman, if you
please, this villain. Now, the Hulks has got its gentleman again,
through me. Murder him? Worth my while, too, to murder him, when I
could do worse and drag him back"
The other one still gasped, "He tried  he tried  to  murder me.
Bear  bear witness."
"Lookee here" said my convict to the sergeant. "Singlehanded I
got clear of the prisonship I made a dash and I done it. I could
ha' got clear of these deathcold flats likewise  look at my leg
you won't find much iron on it  if I hadn't made the discovery that
he was here. Let him go free? Let him profit by the means as I found
out? Let him make a tool of me afresh and again? Once more? No, no,
no. If I had died at the bottom there" and he made an emphatic
swing at the ditch with his manacled hands "I'd have held to him
with that grip, that you should have been safe to find him in my
hold."
The other fugitive, who was evidently in extreme horror of his
companion, repeated, "He tried to murder me. I should have been a
dead man if you had not come up."
"He lies" said my convict, with fierce energy. "He's a liar born,
and he'll die a liar. Look at his face ain't it written there? Let
him turn those eyes of his on me. I defy him to do it."
The other, with an effort at a scornful smile  which could not,
however, collect the nervous working of his mouth into any set
expression  looked at the soldiers, and looked about at the
marshes and at the sky, but certainly did not look at the speaker.
"Do you see him?" pursued my convict. "Do you see what a villain he
is? Do you see those grovelling and wandering eyes? That's how he
looked when we were tried together. He never looked at me."
The other, always working and working his dry lips and turning his
eyes restlessly about him far and near, did at last turn them for a
moment on the speaker, with the words, "You are not much to look
at," and with a halftaunting glance at the bound hands. At that
point, my convict became so frantically exasperated, that he would
have rushed upon him but for the interposition of the soldiers.
"Didn't I tell you," said the other convict then, "that he would
murder me, if he could?" And any one could see that he shook with
fear, and that there broke out upon his lips, curious white flakes,
like thin snow.
"Enough of this parley," said the sergeant. "Light those torches."
As one of the soldiers, who carried a basket in lieu of a gun, went
down on his knee to open it, my convict looked round him for the
first time, and saw me. I had alighted from Joe's back on the brink
of the ditch when we came up, and had not moved since. I looked at
him eagerly when he looked at me, and slightly moved my hands and
shook my head. I had been waiting for him to see me, that I might
try to assure him of my innocence. It was not at all expressed to
me that he even comprehended my intention, for he gave me a look
that I did not understand, and it all passed in a moment. But if he
had looked at me for an hour or for a day, I could not have
remembered his face ever afterwards, as having been more attentive.
The soldier with the basket soon got a light, and lighted three or
four torches, and took one himself and distributed the others. It
had been almost dark before, but now it seemed quite dark, and soon
afterwards very dark. Before we departed from that spot, four
soldiers standing in a ring, fired twice into the air. Presently we
saw other torches kindled at some distance behind us, and others on
the marshes on the opposite bank of the river. "All right," said
the sergeant. "March."
We had not gone far when three cannon were fired ahead of us with a
sound that seemed to burst something inside my ear. "You are
expected on board," said the sergeant to my convict "they know you
are coming. Don't straggle, my man. Close up here."
The two were kept apart, and each walked surrounded by a separate
guard. I had hold of Joe's hand now, and Joe carried one of the
torches. Mr. Wopsle had been for going back, but Joe was resolved to
see it out, so we went on with the party. There was a reasonably
good path now, mostly on the edge of the river, with a divergence
here and there where a dyke came, with a miniature windmill on it
and a muddy sluicegate. When I looked round, I could see the other
lights coming in after us. The torches we carried, dropped great
blotches of fire upon the track, and I could see those, too, lying
smoking and flaring. I could see nothing else but black darkness.
Our lights warmed the air about us with their pitchy blaze, and the
two prisoners seemed rather to like that, as they limped along in
the midst of the muskets. We could not go fast, because of their
lameness and they were so spent, that two or three times we had to
halt while they rested.
After an hour or so of this travelling, we came to a rough wooden
hut and a landingplace. There was a guard in the hut, and they
challenged, and the sergeant answered. Then, we went into the hut
where there was a smell of tobacco and whitewash, and a bright
fire, and a lamp, and a stand of muskets, and a drum, and a low
wooden bedstead, like an overgrown mangle without the machinery,
capable of holding about a dozen soldiers all at once. Three or
four soldiers who lay upon it in their greatcoats, were not much
interested in us, but just lifted their heads and took a sleepy
stare, and then lay down again. The sergeant made some kind of
report, and some entry in a book, and then the convict whom I call
the other convict was drafted off with his guard, to go on board
first.
My convict never looked at me, except that once. While we stood in
the hut, he stood before the fire looking thoughtfully at it, or
putting up his feet by turns upon the hob, and looking thoughtfully
at them as if he pitied them for their recent adventures. Suddenly,
he turned to the sergeant, and remarked
"I wish to say something respecting this escape. It may prevent
some persons laying under suspicion alonger me."
"You can say what you like," returned the sergeant, standing coolly
looking at him with his arms folded, "but you have no call to say
it here. You'll have opportunity enough to say about it, and hear
about it, before it's done with, you know."
"I know, but this is another pint, a separate matter. A man can't
starve at least I can't. I took some wittles, up at the willage
over yonder  where the church stands a'most out on the marshes."
"You mean stole," said the sergeant.
"And I'll tell you where from. From the blacksmith's."
"Halloa" said the sergeant, staring at Joe.
"Halloa, Pip" said Joe, staring at me.
"It was some broken wittles  that's what it was  and a dram of
liquor, and a pie."
"Have you happened to miss such an article as a pie, blacksmith?"
asked the sergeant, confidentially.
"My wife did, at the very moment when you came in. Don't you know,
Pip?"
"So," said my convict, turning his eyes on Joe in a moody manner,
and without the least glance at me "so you're the blacksmith, are
you? Than I'm sorry to say, I've eat your pie."
"God knows you're welcome to it  so far as it was ever mine,"
returned Joe, with a saving remembrance of Mrs. Joe. "We don't know
what you have done, but we wouldn't have you starved to death for
it, poor miserable fellowcreatur.  Would us, Pip?"
The something that I had noticed before, clicked in the man's
throat again, and he turned his back. The boat had returned, and
his guard were ready, so we followed him to the landingplace made
of rough stakes and stones, and saw him put into the boat, which
was rowed by a crew of convicts like himself. No one seemed
surprised to see him, or interested in seeing him, or glad to see
him, or sorry to see him, or spoke a word, except that somebody in
the boat growled as if to dogs, "Give way, you" which was the
signal for the dip of the oars. By the light of the torches, we saw
the black Hulk lying out a little way from the mud of the shore, like
a wicked Noah's ark. Cribbed and barred and moored by massive rusty
chains, the prisonship seemed in my young eyes to be ironed like
the prisoners. We saw the boat go alongside, and we saw him taken
up the side and disappear. Then, the ends of the torches were flung
hissing into the water, and went out, as if it were all over with
him.
Chapter 
My state of mind regarding the pilfering from which I had been so
unexpectedly exonerated, did not impel me to frank disclosure but
I hope it had some dregs of good at the bottom of it.
I do not recall that I felt any tenderness of conscience in
reference to Mrs. Joe, when the fear of being found out was lifted
off me. But I loved Joe  perhaps for no better reason in those
early days than because the dear fellow let me love him  and, as
to him, my inner self was not so easily composed. It was much upon
my mind particularly when I first saw him looking about for his
file that I ought to tell Joe the whole truth. Yet I did not, and
for the reason that I mistrusted that if I did, he would think me
worse than I was. The fear of losing Joe's confidence, and of
thenceforth sitting in the chimneycorner at night staring drearily
at my for ever lost companion and friend, tied up my tongue. I
morbidly represented to myself that if Joe knew it, I never
afterwards could see him at the fireside feeling his fair whisker,
without thinking that he was meditating on it. That, if Joe knew
it, I never afterwards could see him glance, however casually, at
yesterday's meat or pudding when it came on today's table, without
thinking that he was debating whether I had been in the pantry.
That, if Joe knew it, and at any subsequent period of our joint
domestic life remarked that his beer was flat or thick, the
conviction that he suspected Tar in it, would bring a rush of blood
to my face. In a word, I was too cowardly to do what I knew to be
right, as I had been too cowardly to avoid doing what I knew to be
wrong. I had had no intercourse with the world at that time, and I
imitated none of its many inhabitants who act in this manner. Quite
an untaught genius, I made the discovery of the line of action for
myself.
As I was sleepy before we were far away from the prisonship, Joe
took me on his back again and carried me home. He must have had a
tiresome journey of it, for Mr. Wopsle, being knocked up, was in
such a very bad temper that if the Church had been thrown open, he
would probably have excommunicated the whole expedition, beginning
with Joe and myself. In his lay capacity, he persisted in sitting
down in the damp to such an insane extent, that when his coat was
taken off to be dried at the kitchen fire, the circumstantial
evidence on his trousers would have hanged him if it had been a
capital offence.
By that time, I was staggering on the kitchen floor like a little
drunkard, through having been newly set upon my feet, and through
having been fast asleep, and through waking in the heat and lights
and noise of tongues. As I came to myself with the aid of a heavy
thump between the shoulders, and the restorative exclamation "Yah
Was there ever such a boy as this" from my sister, I found Joe
telling them about the convict's confession, and all the visitors
suggesting different ways by which he had got into the pantry. Mr.
Pumblechook made out, after carefully surveying the premises, that
he had first got upon the roof of the forge, and had then got upon
the roof of the house, and had then let himself down the kitchen
chimney by a rope made of his bedding cut into strips and as Mr.
Pumblechook was very positive and drove his own chaisecart  over
everybody  it was agreed that it must be so. Mr. Wopsle, indeed,
wildly cried out "No" with the feeble malice of a tired man but,
as he had no theory, and no coat on, he was unanimously set at
nought  not to mention his smoking hard behind, as he stood with
his back to the kitchen fire to draw the damp out which was not
calculated to inspire confidence.
This was all I heard that night before my sister clutched me, as a
slumberous offence to the company's eyesight, and assisted me up to
bed with such a strong hand that I seemed to have fifty boots on,
and to be dangling them all against the edges of the stairs. My
state of mind, as I have described it, began before I was up in the
morning, and lasted long after the subject had died out, and had
ceased to be mentioned saving on exceptional occasions.
Chapter 
At the time when I stood in the churchyard, reading the family
tombstones, I had just enough learning to be able to spell them
out. My construction even of their simple meaning was not very
correct, for I read "wife of the Above" as a complimentary
reference to my father's exaltation to a better world and if any
one of my deceased relations had been referred to as "Below," I
have no doubt I should have formed the worst opinions of that
member of the family. Neither, were my notions of the theological
positions to which my Catechism bound me, at all accurate for, I
have a lively remembrance that I supposed my declaration that I was
to "walk in the same all the days of my life," laid me under an
obligation always to go through the village from our house in one
particular direction, and never to vary it by turning down by the
wheelwright's or up by the mill.
When I was old enough, I was to be apprenticed to Joe, and until I
could assume that dignity I was not to be what Mrs. Joe called
"Pompeyed," or as I render it pampered. Therefore, I was not only
oddboy about the forge, but if any neighbour happened to want an
extra boy to frighten birds, or pick up stones, or do any such job,
I was favoured with the employment. In order, however, that our
superior position might not be compromised thereby, a moneybox was
kept on the kitchen mantelshelf, in to which it was publicly made
known that all my earnings were dropped. I have an impression that
they were to be contributed eventually towards the liquidation of
the National Debt, but I know I had no hope of any personal
participation in the treasure.
Mr. Wopsle's greataunt kept an evening school in the village that
is to say, she was a ridiculous old woman of limited means and
unlimited infirmity, who used to go to sleep from six to seven
every evening, in the society of youth who paid twopence per week
each, for the improving opportunity of seeing her do it. She rented
a small cottage, and Mr. Wopsle had the room upstairs, where we
students used to overhear him reading aloud in a most dignified and
terrific manner, and occasionally bumping on the ceiling. There was
a fiction that Mr. Wopsle "examined" the scholars, once a quarter.
What he did on those occasions was to turn up his cuffs, stick up
his hair, and give us Mark Antony's oration over the body of
Caesar. This was always followed by Collins's Ode on the Passions,
wherein I particularly venerated Mr. Wopsle as Revenge, throwing his
bloodstained sword in thunder down, and taking the Wardenouncing
trumpet with a withering look. It was not with me then, as it was
in later life, when I fell into the society of the Passions, and
compared them with Collins and Wopsle, rather to the disadvantage
of both gentlemen.
Mr. Wopsle's greataunt, besides keeping this Educational
Institution, kept  in the same room  a little general shop. She
had no idea what stock she had, or what the price of anything in it
was but there was a little greasy memorandumbook kept in a
drawer, which served as a Catalogue of Prices, and by this oracle
Biddy arranged all the shop transaction. Biddy was Mr. Wopsle's
greataunt's granddaughter I confess myself quiet unequal to the
working out of the problem, what relation she was to Mr. Wopsle. She
was an orphan like myself like me, too, had been brought up by
hand. She was most noticeable, I thought, in respect of her
extremities for, her hair always wanted brushing, her hands always
wanted washing, and her shoes always wanted mending and pulling up
at heel. This description must be received with a weekday
limitation. On Sundays, she went to church elaborated.
Much of my unassisted self, and more by the help of Biddy than of
Mr. Wopsle's greataunt, I struggled through the alphabet as if it
had been a bramblebush getting considerably worried and scratched
by every letter. After that, I fell among those thieves, the nine
figures, who seemed every evening to do something new to disguise
themselves and baffle recognition. But, at last I began, in a
purblind groping way, to read, write, and cipher, on the very
smallest scale.
One night, I was sitting in the chimneycorner with my slate,
expending great efforts on the production of a letter to Joe. I
think it must have been a fully year after our hunt upon the
marshes, for it was a long time after, and it was winter and a hard
frost. With an alphabet on the hearth at my feet for reference, I
contrived in an hour or two to print and smear this epistle
"MI DEER JO i OPE U R KR WITE WELL i OPE i SHAL SON B HABELL  
TEEDGE U JO AN THEN WE SHORL B SO GLODD AN WEN i M PRENGTD  U JO
WOT LARX AN BLEVE ME INF XN PIP."
There was no indispensable necessity for my communicating with Joe
by letter, inasmuch as he sat beside me and we were alone. But, I
delivered this written communication slate and all with my own
hand, and Joe received it as a miracle of erudition.
"I say, Pip, old chap" cried Joe, opening his blue eyes wide,
"what a scholar you are An't you?"
"I should like to be," said I, glancing at the slate as he held it
with a misgiving that the writing was rather hilly.
"Why, here's a J," said Joe, "and a O equal to anythink Here's a J
and a O, Pip, and a JO, Joe."
I had never heard Joe read aloud to any greater extent than this
monosyllable, and I had observed at church last Sunday when I
accidentally held our PrayerBook upside down, that it seemed to
suit his convenience quite as well as if it had been all right.
Wishing to embrace the present occasion of finding out whether in
teaching Joe, I should have to begin quite at the beginning, I
said, "Ah But read the rest, Jo."
"The rest, eh, Pip?" said Joe, looking at it with a slowly
searching eye, "One, two, three. Why, here's three Js, and three
Os, and three JO, Joes in it, Pip"
I leaned over Joe, and, with the aid of my forefinger, read him the
whole letter.
"Astonishing" said Joe, when I had finished. "You ARE a scholar."
"How do you spell Gargery, Joe?" I asked him, with a modest
patronage.
"I don't spell it at all," said Joe.
"But supposing you did?"
"It can't be supposed," said Joe. "Tho' I'm oncommon fond of
reading, too."
"Are you, Joe?"
"Oncommon. Give me," said Joe, "a good book, or a good newspaper,
and sit me down afore a good fire, and I ask no better. Lord" he
continued, after rubbing his knees a little, "when you do come to a
J and a O, and says you, "Here, at last, is a JO, Joe," how
interesting reading is"
I derived from this last, that Joe's education, like Steam, was yet
in its infancy, Pursuing the subject, I inquired
"Didn't you ever go to school, Joe, when you were as little as me?"
"No, Pip."
"Why didn't you ever go to school, Joe, when you were as little as
me?"
"Well, Pip," said Joe, taking up the poker, and settling himself to
his usual occupation when he was thoughtful, of slowly raking the
fire between the lower bars "I'll tell you. My father, Pip, he
were given to drink, and when he were overtook with drink, he
hammered away at my mother, most onmerciful. It were a'most the
only hammering he did, indeed, 'xcepting at myself. And he hammered
at me with a wigour only to be equalled by the wigour with which he
didn't hammer at his anwil.  You're alistening and understanding,
Pip?"
"Yes, Joe."
"'Consequence, my mother and me we ran away from my father,
several times and then my mother she'd go out to work, and she'd
say, "Joe," she'd say, "now, please God, you shall have some
schooling, child," and she'd put me to school. But my father were
that good in his hart that he couldn't abear to be without us. So,
he'd come with a most tremenjous crowd and make such a row at the
doors of the houses where we was, that they used to be obligated to
have no more to do with us and to give us up to him. And then he
took us home and hammered us. Which, you see, Pip," said Joe,
pausing in his meditative raking of the fire, and looking at me,
"were a drawback on my learning."
"Certainly, poor Joe"
"Though mind you, Pip," said Joe, with a judicial touch or two of
the poker on the top bar, "rendering unto all their doo, and
maintaining equal justice betwixt man and man, my father were that
good in his hart, don't you see?"
I didn't see but I didn't say so.
"Well" Joe pursued, "somebody must keep the pot a biling, Pip, or
the pot won't bile, don't you know?"
I saw that, and said so.
"'Consequence, my father didn't make objections to my going to
work so I went to work to work at my present calling, which were
his too, if he would have followed it, and I worked tolerable hard,
I assure you, Pip. In time I were able to keep him, and I kept him
till he went off in a purple leptic fit. And it were my intentions
to have had put upon his tombstone that Whatsume'er the failings on
his part, Remember reader he were that good in his hart."
Joe recited this couplet with such manifest pride and careful
perspicuity, that I asked him if he had made it himself.
"I made it," said Joe, "my own self. I made it in a moment. It was
like striking out a horseshoe complete, in a single blow. I never
was so much surprised in all my life  couldn't credit my own ed 
to tell you the truth, hardly believed it were my own ed. As I was
saying, Pip, it were my intentions to have had it cut over him but
poetry costs money, cut it how you will, small or large, and it
were not done. Not to mention bearers, all the money that could be
spared were wanted for my mother. She were in poor elth, and quite
broke. She weren't long of following, poor soul, and her share of
peace come round at last."
Joe's blue eyes turned a little watery he rubbed, first one of
them, and then the other, in a most uncongenial and uncomfortable
manner, with the round knob on the top of the poker.
"It were but lonesome then," said Joe, "living here alone, and I
got acquainted with your sister. Now, Pip" Joe looked firmly at
me, as if he knew I was not going to agree with him "your sister
is a fine figure of a woman."
I could not help looking at the fire, in an obvious state of doubt.
"Whatever family opinions, or whatever the world's opinions, on
that subject may be, Pip, your sister is," Joe tapped the top bar
with the poker after every word following, "a  fine  figure  of
a  woman"
I could think of nothing better to say than "I am glad you think
so, Joe."
"So am I," returned Joe, catching me up. "I am glad I think so,
Pip. A little redness or a little matter of Bone, here or there,
what does it signify to Me?"
I sagaciously observed, if it didn't signify to him, to whom did it
signify?
"Certainly" assented Joe. "That's it. You're right, old chap When
I got acquainted with your sister, it were the talk how she was
bringing you up by hand. Very kind of her too, all the folks said,
and I said, along with all the folks. As to you," Joe pursued with
a countenance expressive of seeing something very nasty indeed "if
you could have been aware how small and flabby and mean you was,
dear me, you'd have formed the most contemptible opinion of
yourself"
Not exactly relishing this, I said, "Never mind me, Joe."
"But I did mind you, Pip," he returned with tender simplicity.
"When I offered to your sister to keep company, and to be asked in
church at such times as she was willing and ready to come to the
forge, I said to her, 'And bring the poor little child. God bless
the poor little child,' I said to your sister, 'there's room for
him at the forge'"
I broke out crying and begging pardon, and hugged Joe round the
neck who dropped the poker to hug me, and to say, "Ever the best
of friends an't us, Pip? Don't cry, old chap"
When this little interruption was over, Joe resumed
"Well, you see, Pip, and here we are That's about where it lights
here we are Now, when you take me in hand in my learning, Pip and
I tell you beforehand I am awful dull, most awful dull, Mrs. Joe
mustn't see too much of what we're up to. It must be done, as I may
say, on the sly. And why on the sly? I'll tell you why, Pip."
He had taken up the poker again without which, I doubt if he could
have proceeded in his demonstration.
"Your sister is given to government."
"Given to government, Joe?" I was startled, for I had some shadowy
idea and I am afraid I must add, hope that Joe had divorced her
in a favour of the Lords of the Admiralty, or Treasury.
"Given to government," said Joe. "Which I meantersay the government
of you and myself."
"Oh"
"And she an't over partial to having scholars on the premises," Joe
continued, "and in partickler would not be over partial to my being
a scholar, for fear as I might rise. Like a sort or rebel, don't
you see?"
I was going to retort with an inquiry, and had got as far as
"Why" when Joe stopped me.
"Stay a bit. I know what you're agoing to say, Pip stay a bit I
don't deny that your sister comes the Mogul over us, now and
again. I don't deny that she do throw us backfalls, and that she
do drop down upon us heavy. At such times as when your sister is on
the Rampage, Pip," Joe sank his voice to a whisper and glanced at
the door, "candour compels fur to admit that she is a Buster."
Joe pronounced this word, as if it began with at least twelve
capital Bs.
"Why don't I rise? That were your observation when I broke it off,
Pip?"
"Yes, Joe."
"Well," said Joe, passing the poker into his left hand, that he
might feel his whisker and I had no hope of him whenever he took
to that placid occupation "your sister's a mastermind. A
mastermind."
"What's that?" I asked, in some hope of bringing him to a stand.
But, Joe was readier with his definition than I had expected, and
completely stopped me by arguing circularly, and answering with a
fixed look, "Her."
"And I an't a mastermind," Joe resumed, when he had unfixed his
look, and got back to his whisker. "And last of all, Pip  and this
I want to say very serious to you, old chap  I see so much in my
poor mother, of a woman drudging and slaving and breaking her
honest hart and never getting no peace in her mortal days, that I'm
dead afeerd of going wrong in the way of not doing what's right by
a woman, and I'd fur rather of the two go wrong the t'other way,
and be a little illconwenienced myself. I wish it was only me that
got put out, Pip I wish there warn't no Tickler for you, old chap
I wish I could take it all on myself but this is the
upanddownandstraight on it, Pip, and I hope you'll overlook
shortcomings."
Young as I was, I believe that I dated a new admiration of Joe from
that night. We were equals afterwards, as we had been before but,
afterwards at quiet times when I sat looking at Joe and thinking
about him, I had a new sensation of feeling conscious that I was
looking up to Joe in my heart.
"However," said Joe, rising to replenish the fire "here's the
Dutchclock a working himself up to being equal to strike Eight of
'em, and she's not come home yet I hope Uncle Pumblechook's mare
mayn't have set a forefoot on a piece o' ice, and gone down."
Mrs. Joe made occasional trips with Uncle Pumblechook on
marketdays, to assist him in buying such household stuffs and
goods as required a woman's judgment Uncle Pumblechook being a
bachelor and reposing no confidences in his domestic servant. This
was marketday, and Mrs. Joe was out on one of these expeditions.
Joe made the fire and swept the hearth, and then we went to the
door to listen for the chaisecart. It was a dry cold night, and
the wind blew keenly, and the frost was white and hard. A man would
die tonight of lying out on the marshes, I thought. And then I
looked at the stars, and considered how awful if would be for a man
to turn his face up to them as he froze to death, and see no help
or pity in all the glittering multitude.
"Here comes the mare," said Joe, "ringing like a peal of bells"
The sound of her iron shoes upon the hard road was quite musical,
as she came along at a much brisker trot than usual. We got a chair
out, ready for Mrs. Joe's alighting, and stirred up the fire that
they might see a bright window, and took a final survey of the
kitchen that nothing might be out of its place. When we had
completed these preparations, they drove up, wrapped to the eyes.
Mrs. Joe was soon landed, and Uncle Pumblechook was soon down too,
covering the mare with a cloth, and we were soon all in the
kitchen, carrying so much cold air in with us that it seemed to
drive all the heat out of the fire.
"Now," said Mrs. Joe, unwrapping herself with haste and excitement,
and throwing her bonnet back on her shoulders where it hung by the
strings "if this boy an't grateful this night, he never will be"
I looked as grateful as any boy possibly could, who was wholly
uninformed why he ought to assume that expression.
"It's only to be hoped," said my sister, "that he won't be
Pompeyed. But I have my fears."
"She an't in that line, Mum," said Mr. Pumblechook. "She knows
better."
She? I looked at Joe, making the motion with my lips and eyebrows,
"She?" Joe looked at me, making the motion with his lips and
eyebrows, "She?" My sister catching him in the act, he drew the
back of his hand across his nose with his usual conciliatory air on
such occasions, and looked at her.
"Well?" said my sister, in her snappish way. "What are you staring
at? Is the house afire?"
"  Which some individual," Joe politely hinted, "mentioned  she."
"And she is a she, I suppose?" said my sister. "Unless you call
Miss Havisham a he. And I doubt if even you'll go so far as that."
"Miss Havisham, up town?" said Joe.
"Is there any Miss Havisham down town?" returned my sister.
"She wants this boy to go and play there. And of course he's going.
And he had better play there," said my sister, shaking her head at
me as an encouragement to be extremely light and sportive, "or I'll
work him."
I had heard of Miss Havisham up town  everybody for miles round,
had heard of Miss Havisham up town  as an immensely rich and grim
lady who lived in a large and dismal house barricaded against
robbers, and who led a life of seclusion.
"Well to be sure" said Joe, astounded. "I wonder how she come to
know Pip"
"Noodle" cried my sister. "Who said she knew him?"
"  Which some individual," Joe again politely hinted, "mentioned
that she wanted him to go and play there."
"And couldn't she ask Uncle Pumblechook if he knew of a boy to go
and play there? Isn't it just barely possible that Uncle
Pumblechook may be a tenant of hers, and that he may sometimes  we
won't say quarterly or halfyearly, for that would be requiring too
much of you  but sometimes  go there to pay his rent? And
couldn't she then ask Uncle Pumblechook if he knew of a boy to go
and play there? And couldn't Uncle Pumblechook, being always
considerate and thoughtful for us  though you may not think it,
Joseph," in a tone of the deepest reproach, as if he were the most
callous of nephews, "then mention this boy, standing Prancing here"
which I solemnly declare I was not doing  "that I have for ever
been a willing slave to?"
"Good again" cried Uncle Pumblechook. "Well put Prettily pointed
Good indeed Now Joseph, you know the case."
"No, Joseph," said my sister, still in a reproachful manner, while
Joe apologetically drew the back of his hand across and across his
nose, "you do not yet  though you may not think it  know the
case. You may consider that you do, but you do not, Joseph. For you
do not know that Uncle Pumblechook, being sensible that for
anything we can tell, this boy's fortune may be made by his going
to Miss Havisham's, has offered to take him into town tonight in
his own chaisecart, and to keep him tonight, and to take him with
his own hands to Miss Havisham's tomorrow morning. And Loramussy
me" cried my sister, casting off her bonnet in sudden desperation,
"here I stand talking to mere Mooncalfs, with Uncle Pumblechook
waiting, and the mare catching cold at the door, and the boy grimed
with crock and dirt from the hair of his head to the sole of his
foot"
With that, she pounced upon me, like an eagle on a lamb, and my
face was squeezed into wooden bowls in sinks, and my head was put
under taps of waterbutts, and I was soaped, and kneaded, and
towelled, and thumped, and harrowed, and rasped, until I really was
quite beside myself. I may here remark that I suppose myself to be
better acquainted than any living authority, with the ridgy effect
of a weddingring, passing unsympathetically over the human
countenance.
When my ablutions were completed, I was put into clean linen of the
stiffest character, like a young penitent into sackcloth, and was
trussed up in my tightest and fearfullest suit. I was then
delivered over to Mr. Pumblechook, who formally received me as if he
were the Sheriff, and who let off upon me the speech that I knew he
had been dying to make all along "Boy, be for ever grateful to all
friends, but especially unto them which brought you up by hand"
"Goodbye, Joe"
"God bless you, Pip, old chap"
I had never parted from him before, and what with my feelings and
what with soapsuds, I could at first see no stars from the
chaisecart. But they twinkled out one by one, without throwing any
light on the questions why on earth I was going to play at Miss
Havisham's, and what on earth I was expected to play at.
Chapter 
Mr. Pumblechook's premises in the Highstreet of the market town,
were of a peppercorny and farinaceous character, as the premises of
a cornchandler and seedsman should be. It appeared to me that he
must be a very happy man indeed, to have so many little drawers in
his shop and I wondered when I peeped into one or two on the lower
tiers, and saw the tiedup brown paper packets inside, whether the
flowerseeds and bulbs ever wanted of a fine day to break out of
those jails, and bloom.
It was in the early morning after my arrival that I entertained
this speculation. On the previous night, I had been sent straight
to bed in an attic with a sloping roof, which was so low in the
corner where the bedstead was, that I calculated the tiles as being
within a foot of my eyebrows. In the same early morning, I
discovered a singular affinity between seeds and corduroys. Mr.
Pumblechook wore corduroys, and so did his shopman and somehow,
there was a general air and flavour about the corduroys, so much in
the nature of seeds, and a general air and flavour about the seeds,
so much in the nature of corduroys, that I hardly knew which was
which. The same opportunity served me for noticing that Mr.
Pumblechook appeared to conduct his business by looking across the
street at the saddler, who appeared to transact his business by
keeping his eye on the coachmaker, who appeared to get on in life
by putting his hands in his pockets and contemplating the baker,
who in his turn folded his arms and stared at the grocer, who stood
at his door and yawned at the chemist. The watchmaker, always
poring over a little desk with a magnifying glass at his eye, and
always inspected by a group of smockfrocks poring over him through
the glass of his shopwindow, seemed to be about the only person in
the Highstreet whose trade engaged his attention.
Mr. Pumblechook and I breakfasted at eight o'clock in the parlour
behind the shop, while the shopman took his mug of tea and hunch of
breadandbutter on a sack of peas in the front premises. I
considered Mr. Pumblechook wretched company. Besides being possessed
by my sister's idea that a mortifying and penitential character
ought to be imparted to my diet  besides giving me as much crumb
as possible in combination with as little butter, and putting such
a quantity of warm water into my milk that it would have been more
candid to have left the milk out altogether  his conversation
consisted of nothing but arithmetic. On my politely bidding him
Good morning, he said, pompously, "Seven times nine, boy?" And how
should I be able to answer, dodged in that way, in a strange place,
on an empty stomach I was hungry, but before I had swallowed a
morsel, he began a running sum that lasted all through the
breakfast. "Seven?" "And four?" "And eight?" "And six?" "And two?"
"And ten?" And so on. And after each figure was disposed of, it was
as much as I could do to get a bite or a sup, before the next came
while he sat at his ease guessing nothing, and eating bacon and hot
roll, in if I may be allowed the expression a gorging and
gormandising manner.
For such reasons I was very glad when ten o'clock came and we
started for Miss Havisham's though I was not at all at my ease
regarding the manner in which I should acquit myself under that
lady's roof. Within a quarter of an hour we came to Miss Havisham's
house, which was of old brick, and dismal, and had a great many
iron bars to it. Some of the windows had been walled up of those
that remained, all the lower were rustily barred. There was a
courtyard in front, and that was barred so, we had to wait, after
ringing the bell, until some one should come to open it. While we
waited at the gate, I peeped in even then Mr. Pumblechook said,
"And fourteen?" but I pretended not to hear him, and saw that at
the side of the house there was a large brewery. No brewing was going
on in it, and none seemed to have gone on for a long long time.
A window was raised, and a clear voice demanded "What name?" To
which my conductor replied, "Pumblechook." The voice returned,
"Quite right," and the window was shut again, and a young lady came
across the courtyard, with keys in her hand.
"This," said Mr. Pumblechook, "is Pip."
"This is Pip, is it?" returned the young lady, who was very pretty
and seemed very proud "come in, Pip."
Mr. Pumblechook was coming in also, when she stopped him with the
gate.
"Oh" she said. "Did you wish to see Miss Havisham?"
"If Miss Havisham wished to see me," returned Mr. Pumblechook,
discomfited.
"Ah" said the girl "but you see she don't."
She said it so finally, and in such an undiscussible way, that Mr.
Pumblechook, though in a condition of ruffled dignity, could not
protest. But he eyed me severely  as if I had done anything to
him  and departed with the words reproachfully delivered "Boy
Let your behaviour here be a credit unto them which brought you up
by hand" I was not free from apprehension that he would come back
to propound through the gate, "And sixteen?" But he didn't.
My young conductress locked the gate, and we went across the
courtyard. It was paved and clean, but grass was growing in every
crevice. The brewery buildings had a little lane of communication
with it, and the wooden gates of that lane stood open, and all the
brewery beyond, stood open, away to the high enclosing wall and
all was empty and disused. The cold wind seemed to blow colder
there, than outside the gate and it made a shrill noise in howling
in and out at the open sides of the brewery, like the noise of wind
in the rigging of a ship at sea.
She saw me looking at it, and she said, "You could drink without
hurt all the strong beer that's brewed there now, boy."
"I should think I could, miss," said I, in a shy way.
"Better not try to brew beer there now, or it would turn out sour,
boy don't you think so?"
"It looks like it, miss."
"Not that anybody means to try," she added, "for that's all done
with, and the place will stand as idle as it is, till it falls. As
to strong beer, there's enough of it in the cellars already, to
drown the Manor House."
"Is that the name of this house, miss?"
"One of its names, boy."
"It has more than one, then, miss?"
"One more. Its other name was Satis which is Greek, or Latin, or
Hebrew, or all three  or all one to me  for enough."
"Enough House," said I "that's a curious name, miss."
"Yes," she replied "but it meant more than it said. It meant, when
it was given, that whoever had this house, could want nothing else.
They must have been easily satisfied in those days, I should think.
But don't loiter, boy."
Though she called me "boy" so often, and with a carelessness that
was far from complimentary, she was of about my own age. She seemed
much older than I, of course, being a girl, and beautiful and
selfpossessed and she was as scornful of me as if she had been
oneandtwenty, and a queen.
We went into the house by a side door  the great front entrance
had two chains across it outside  and the first thing I noticed
was, that the passages were all dark, and that she had left a
candle burning there. She took it up, and we went through more
passages and up a staircase, and still it was all dark, and only
the candle lighted us.
At last we came to the door of a room, and she said, "Go in."
I answered, more in shyness than politeness, "After you, miss."
To this, she returned "Don't be ridiculous, boy I am not going
in." And scornfully walked away, and  what was worse  took the
candle with her.
This was very uncomfortable, and I was half afraid. However, the
only thing to be done being to knock at the door, I knocked, and
was told from within to enter. I entered, therefore, and found
myself in a pretty large room, well lighted with wax candles. No
glimpse of daylight was to be seen in it. It was a dressingroom,
as I supposed from the furniture, though much of it was of forms
and uses then quite unknown to me. But prominent in it was a draped
table with a gilded lookingglass, and that I made out at first
sight to be a fine lady's dressingtable.
Whether I should have made out this object so soon, if there had
been no fine lady sitting at it, I cannot say. In an armchair,
with an elbow resting on the table and her head leaning on that
hand, sat the strangest lady I have ever seen, or shall ever see.
She was dressed in rich materials  satins, and lace, and silks 
all of white. Her shoes were white. And she had a long white veil
dependent from her hair, and she had bridal flowers in her hair,
but her hair was white. Some bright jewels sparkled on her neck and
on her hands, and some other jewels lay sparkling on the table.
Dresses, less splendid than the dress she wore, and halfpacked
trunks, were scattered about. She had not quite finished dressing,
for she had but one shoe on  the other was on the table near her
hand  her veil was but half arranged, her watch and chain were not
put on, and some lace for her bosom lay with those trinkets, and
with her handkerchief, and gloves, and some flowers, and a
prayerbook, all confusedly heaped about the lookingglass.
It was not in the first few moments that I saw all these things,
though I saw more of them in the first moments than might be
supposed. But, I saw that everything within my view which ought to
be white, had been white long ago, and had lost its lustre, and was
faded and yellow. I saw that the bride within the bridal dress had
withered like the dress, and like the flowers, and had no
brightness left but the brightness of her sunken eyes. I saw that
the dress had been put upon the rounded figure of a young woman,
and that the figure upon which it now hung loose, had shrunk to
skin and bone. Once, I had been taken to see some ghastly waxwork
at the Fair, representing I know not what impossible personage
lying in state. Once, I had been taken to one of our old marsh
churches to see a skeleton in the ashes of a rich dress, that had
been dug out of a vault under the church pavement. Now, waxwork and
skeleton seemed to have dark eyes that moved and looked at me. I
should have cried out, if I could.
"Who is it?" said the lady at the table.
"Pip, ma'am."
"Pip?"
"Mr. Pumblechook's boy, ma'am. Come  to play."
"Come nearer let me look at you. Come close."
It was when I stood before her, avoiding her eyes, that I took note
of the surrounding objects in detail, and saw that her watch had
stopped at twenty minutes to nine, and that a clock in the room had
stopped at twenty minutes to nine.
"Look at me," said Miss Havisham. "You are not afraid of a woman
who has never seen the sun since you were born?"
I regret to state that I was not afraid of telling the enormous lie
comprehended in the answer "No."
"Do you know what I touch here?" she said, laying her hands, one
upon the other, on her left side.
"Yes, ma'am." It made me think of the young man.
"What do I touch?"
"Your heart."
"Broken"
She uttered the word with an eager look, and with strong emphasis,
and with a weird smile that had a kind of boast in it. Afterwards,
she kept her hands there for a little while, and slowly took them
away as if they were heavy.
"I am tired," said Miss Havisham. "I want diversion, and I have
done with men and women. Play."
I think it will be conceded by my most disputatious reader, that
she could hardly have directed an unfortunate boy to do anything in
the wide world more difficult to be done under the circumstances.
"I sometimes have sick fancies," she went on, "and I have a sick
fancy that I want to see some play. There there" with an impatient
movement of the fingers of her right hand "play, play, play"
For a moment, with the fear of my sister's working me before my
eyes, I had a desperate idea of starting round the room in the
assumed character of Mr. Pumblechook's chaisecart. But, I felt
myself so unequal to the performance that I gave it up, and stood
looking at Miss Havisham in what I suppose she took for a dogged
manner, inasmuch as she said, when we had taken a good look at each
other
"Are you sullen and obstinate?"
"No, ma'am, I am very sorry for you, and very sorry I can't play
just now. If you complain of me I shall get into trouble with my
sister, so I would do it if I could but it's so new here, and so
strange, and so fine  and melancholy." I stopped, fearing I might
say too much, or had already said it, and we took another look at
each other.
Before she spoke again, she turned her eyes from me, and looked at
the dress she wore, and at the dressingtable, and finally at
herself in the lookingglass.
"So new to him," she muttered, "so old to me so strange to him, so
familiar to me so melancholy to both of us Call Estella."
As she was still looking at the reflection of herself, I thought
she was still talking to herself, and kept quiet.
"Call Estella," she repeated, flashing a look at me. "You can do
that. Call Estella. At the door."
To stand in the dark in a mysterious passage of an unknown house,
bawling Estella to a scornful young lady neither visible nor
responsive, and feeling it a dreadful liberty so to roar out her
name, was almost as bad as playing to order. But, she answered at
last, and her light came along the dark passage like a star.
Miss Havisham beckoned her to come close, and took up a jewel from
the table, and tried its effect upon her fair young bosom and
against her pretty brown hair. "Your own, one day, my dear, and you
will use it well. Let me see you play cards with this boy."
"With this boy? Why, he is a common labouringboy"
I thought I overheard Miss Havisham answer  only it seemed so
unlikely  "Well? You can break his heart."
"What do you play, boy?" asked Estella of myself, with the greatest
disdain.
"Nothing but beggar my neighbour, miss."
"Beggar him," said Miss Havisham to Estella. So we sat down to
cards.
It was then I began to understand that everything in the room had
stopped, like the watch and the clock, a long time ago. I noticed
that Miss Havisham put down the jewel exactly on the spot from
which she had taken it up. As Estella dealt the cards, I glanced at
the dressingtable again, and saw that the shoe upon it, once
white, now yellow, had never been worn. I glanced down at the foot
from which the shoe was absent, and saw that the silk stocking on
it, once white, now yellow, had been trodden ragged. Without this
arrest of everything, this standing still of all the pale decayed
objects, not even the withered bridal dress on the collapsed from
could have looked so like graveclothes, or the long veil so like a
shroud.
So she sat, corpselike, as we played at cards the frillings and
trimmings on her bridal dress, looking like earthy paper. I knew
nothing then, of the discoveries that are occasionally made of
bodies buried in ancient times, which fall to powder in the moment
of being distinctly seen but, I have often thought since, that she
must have looked as if the admission of the natural light of day
would have struck her to dust.
"He calls the knaves, Jacks, this boy" said Estella with disdain,
before our first game was out. "And what coarse hands he has And
what thick boots"
I had never thought of being ashamed of my hands before but I
began to consider them a very indifferent pair. Her contempt for me
was so strong, that it became infectious, and I caught it.
She won the game, and I dealt. I misdealt, as was only natural,
when I knew she was lying in wait for me to do wrong and she
denounced me for a stupid, clumsy labouringboy.
"You say nothing of her," remarked Miss Havisham to me, as she
looked on. "She says many hard things of you, but you say nothing
of her. What do you think of her?"
"I don't like to say," I stammered.
"Tell me in my ear," said Miss Havisham, bending down.
"I think she is very proud," I replied, in a whisper.
"Anything else?"
"I think she is very pretty."
"Anything else?"
"I think she is very insulting." She was looking at me then with a
look of supreme aversion.
"Anything else?"
"I think I should like to go home."
"And never see her again, though she is so pretty?"
"I am not sure that I shouldn't like to see her again, but I should
like to go home now."
"You shall go soon," said Miss Havisham, aloud. "Play the game
out."
Saving for the one weird smile at first, I should have felt almost
sure that Miss Havisham's face could not smile. It had dropped into
a watchful and brooding expression  most likely when all the
things about her had become transfixed  and it looked as if
nothing could ever lift it up again. Her chest had dropped, so that
she stooped and her voice had dropped, so that she spoke low, and
with a dead lull upon her altogether, she had the appearance of
having dropped, body and soul, within and without, under the weight
of a crushing blow.
I played the game to an end with Estella, and she beggared me. She
threw the cards down on the table when she had won them all, as if
she despised them for having been won of me.
"When shall I have you here again?" said miss Havisham. "Let me
think."
I was beginning to remind her that today was Wednesday, when she
checked me with her former impatient movement of the fingers of her
right hand.
"There, there I know nothing of days of the week I know nothing
of weeks of the year. Come again after six days. You hear?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"Estella, take him down. Let him have something to eat, and let him
roam and look about him while he eats. Go, Pip."
I followed the candle down, as I had followed the candle up, and
she stood it in the place where we had found it. Until she opened
the side entrance, I had fancied, without thinking about it, that
it must necessarily be nighttime. The rush of the daylight quite
confounded me, and made me feel as if I had been in the candlelight
of the strange room many hours.
"You are to wait here, you boy," said Estella and disappeared and
closed the door.
I took the opportunity of being alone in the courtyard, to look at
my coarse hands and my common boots. My opinion of those
accessories was not favourable. They had never troubled me before,
but they troubled me now, as vulgar appendages. I determined to ask
Joe why he had ever taught me to call those picturecards, Jacks,
which ought to be called knaves. I wished Joe had been rather more
genteelly brought up, and then I should have been so too.
She came back, with some bread and meat and a little mug of beer.
She put the mug down on the stones of the yard, and gave me the
bread and meat without looking at me, as insolently as if I were a
dog in disgrace. I was so humiliated, hurt, spurned, offended,
angry, sorry  I cannot hit upon the right name for the smart  God
knows what its name was  that tears started to my eyes. The moment
they sprang there, the girl looked at me with a quick delight in
having been the cause of them. This gave me power to keep them back
and to look at her so, she gave a contemptuous toss  but with a
sense, I thought, of having made too sure that I was so wounded 
and left me.
But, when she was gone, I looked about me for a place to hide my
face in, and got behind one of the gates in the brewerylane, and
leaned my sleeve against the wall there, and leaned my forehead on
it and cried. As I cried, I kicked the wall, and took a hard twist
at my hair so bitter were my feelings, and so sharp was the smart
without a name, that needed counteraction.
My sister's bringing up had made me sensitive. In the little world
in which children have their existence whosoever brings them up,
there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt, as
injustice. It may be only small injustice that the child can be
exposed to but the child is small, and its world is small, and its
rockinghorse stands as many hands high, according to scale, as a
bigboned Irish hunter. Within myself, I had sustained, from my
babyhood, a perpetual conflict with injustice. I had known, from
the time when I could speak, that my sister, in her capricious and
violent coercion, was unjust to me. I had cherished a profound
conviction that her bringing me up by hand, gave her no right to
bring me up by jerks. Through all my punishments, disgraces, fasts
and vigils, and other penitential performances, I had nursed this
assurance and to my communing so much with it, in a solitary and
unprotected way, I in great part refer the fact that I was morally
timid and very sensitive.
I got rid of my injured feelings for the time, by kicking them into
the brewery wall, and twisting them out of my hair, and then I
smoothed my face with my sleeve, and came from behind the gate. The
bread and meat were acceptable, and the beer was warming and
tingling, and I was soon in spirits to look about me.
To be sure, it was a deserted place, down to the pigeonhouse in
the breweryyard, which had been blown crooked on its pole by some
high wind, and would have made the pigeons think themselves at sea,
if there had been any pigeons there to be rocked by it. But, there
were no pigeons in the dovecot, no horses in the stable, no pigs
in the sty, no malt in the storehouse, no smells of grains and
beer in the copper or the vat. All the uses and scents of the
brewery might have evaporated with its last reek of smoke. In a
byyard, there was a wilderness of empty casks, which had a certain
sour remembrance of better days lingering about them but it was
too sour to be accepted as a sample of the beer that was gone  and
in this respect I remember those recluses as being like most
others.
Behind the furthest end of the brewery, was a rank garden with an
old wall not so high but that I could struggle up and hold on long
enough to look over it, and see that the rank garden was the garden
of the house, and that it was overgrown with tangled weeds, but
that there was a track upon the green and yellow paths, as if some
one sometimes walked there, and that Estella was walking away from
me even then. But she seemed to be everywhere. For, when I yielded
to the temptation presented by the casks, and began to walk on
them. I saw her walking on them at the end of the yard of casks.
She had her back towards me, and held her pretty brown hair spread
out in her two hands, and never looked round, and passed out of my
view directly. So, in the brewery itself  by which I mean the
large paved lofty place in which they used to make the beer, and
where the brewing utensils still were. When I first went into it,
and, rather oppressed by its gloom, stood near the door looking
about me, I saw her pass among the extinguished fires, and ascend
some light iron stairs, and go out by a gallery high overhead, as
if she were going out into the sky.
It was in this place, and at this moment, that a strange thing
happened to my fancy. I thought it a strange thing then, and I
thought it a stranger thing long afterwards. I turned my eyes  a
little dimmed by looking up at the frosty light  towards a great
wooden beam in a low nook of the building near me on my right hand,
and I saw a figure hanging there by the neck. A figure all in
yellow white, with but one shoe to the feet and it hung so, that I
could see that the faded trimmings of the dress were like earthy
paper, and that the face was Miss Havisham's, with a movement going
over the whole countenance as if she were trying to call to me. In
the terror of seeing the figure, and in the terror of being certain
that it had not been there a moment before, I at first ran from it,
and then ran towards it. And my terror was greatest of all, when I
found no figure there.
Nothing less than the frosty light of the cheerful sky, the sight
of people passing beyond the bars of the courtyard gate, and the
reviving influence of the rest of the bread and meat and beer,
would have brought me round. Even with those aids, I might not have
come to myself as soon as I did, but that I saw Estella approaching
with the keys, to let me out. She would have some fair reason for
looking down upon me, I thought, if she saw me frightened and she
would have no fair reason.
She gave me a triumphant glance in passing me, as if she rejoiced
that my hands were so coarse and my boots were so thick, and she
opened the gate, and stood holding it. I was passing out without
looking at her, when she touched me with a taunting hand.
"Why don't you cry?"
"Because I don't want to."
"You do," said she. "You have been crying till you are half blind,
and you are near crying again now."
She laughed contemptuously, pushed me out, and locked the gate upon
me. I went straight to Mr. Pumblechook's, and was immensely relieved
to find him not at home. So, leaving word with the shopman on what
day I was wanted at Miss Havisham's again, I set off on the
fourmile walk to our forge pondering, as I went along, on all I
had seen, and deeply revolving that I was a common labouringboy
that my hands were coarse that my boots were thick that I had
fallen into a despicable habit of calling knaves Jacks that I was
much more ignorant than I had considered myself last night, and
generally that I was in a lowlived bad way.
Chapter 
When I reached home, my sister was very curious to know all about
Miss Havisham's, and asked a number of questions. And I soon found
myself getting heavily bumped from behind in the nape of the neck
and the small of the back, and having my face ignominiously shoved
against the kitchen wall, because I did not answer those questions
at sufficient length.
If a dread of not being understood be hidden in the breasts of
other young people to anything like the extent to which it used to
be hidden in mine  which I consider probable, as I have no
particular reason to suspect myself of having been a monstrosity 
it is the key to many reservations. I felt convinced that if I
described Miss Havisham's as my eyes had seen it, I should not be
understood. Not only that, but I felt convinced that Miss Havisham
too would not be understood and although she was perfectly
incomprehensible to me, I entertained an impression that there
would be something coarse and treacherous in my dragging her as she
really was to say nothing of Miss Estella before the
contemplation of Mrs. Joe. Consequently, I said as little as I
could, and had my face shoved against the kitchen wall.
The worst of it was that that bullying old Pumblechook, preyed upon
by a devouring curiosity to be informed of all I had seen and
heard, came gaping over in his chaisecart at teatime, to have the
details divulged to him. And the mere sight of the torment, with
his fishy eyes and mouth open, his sandy hair inquisitively on end,
and his waistcoat heaving with windy arithmetic, made me vicious in
my reticence.
"Well, boy," Uncle Pumblechook began, as soon as he was seated in
the chair of honour by the fire. "How did you get on up town?"
I answered, "Pretty well, sir," and my sister shook her fist at me.
"Pretty well?" Mr. Pumblechook repeated. "Pretty well is no answer.
Tell us what you mean by pretty well, boy?"
Whitewash on the forehead hardens the brain into a state of
obstinacy perhaps. Anyhow, with whitewash from the wall on my
forehead, my obstinacy was adamantine. I reflected for some time,
and then answered as if I had discovered a new idea, "I mean pretty
well."
My sister with an exclamation of impatience was going to fly at me
I had no shadow of defence, for Joe was busy in the forge when Mr.
Pumblechook interposed with "No Don't lose your temper. Leave this
lad to me, ma'am leave this lad to me." Mr. Pumblechook then turned
me towards him, as if he were going to cut my hair, and said
"First to get our thoughts in order Fortythree pence?"
I calculated the consequences of replying "Four Hundred Pound," and
finding them against me, went as near the answer as I could  which
was somewhere about eightpence off. Mr. Pumblechook then put me
through my pencetable from "twelve pence make one shilling," up to
"forty pence make three and fourpence," and then triumphantly
demanded, as if he had done for me, "Now How much is fortythree
pence?" To which I replied, after a long interval of reflection, "I
don't know." And I was so aggravated that I almost doubt if I did
know.
Mr. Pumblechook worked his head like a screw to screw it out of me,
and said, "Is fortythree pence seven and sixpence three fardens,
for instance?"
"Yes" said I. And although my sister instantly boxed my ears, it
was highly gratifying to me to see that the answer spoilt his joke,
and brought him to a dead stop.
"Boy What like is Miss Havisham?" Mr. Pumblechook began again when
he had recovered folding his arms tight on his chest and applying
the screw.
"Very tall and dark," I told him.
"Is she, uncle?" asked my sister.
Mr. Pumblechook winked assent from which I at once inferred that he
had never seen Miss Havisham, for she was nothing of the kind.
"Good" said Mr. Pumblechook conceitedly. "This is the way to have
him We are beginning to hold our own, I think, Mum?"
"I am sure, uncle," returned Mrs. Joe, "I wish you had him always
you know so well how to deal with him."
"Now, boy What was she adoing of, when you went in today?" asked
Mr. Pumblechook.
"She was sitting," I answered, "in a black velvet coach."
Mr. Pumblechook and Mrs. Joe stared at one another  as they well
might  and both repeated, "In a black velvet coach?"
"Yes," said I. "And Miss Estella  that's her niece, I think 
handed her in cake and wine at the coachwindow, on a gold plate.
And we all had cake and wine on gold plates. And I got up behind
the coach to eat mine, because she told me to."
"Was anybody else there?" asked Mr. Pumblechook.
"Four dogs," said I.
"Large or small?"
"Immense," said I. "And they fought for veal cutlets out of a
silver basket."
Mr. Pumblechook and Mrs. Joe stared at one another again, in utter
amazement. I was perfectly frantic  a reckless witness under the
torture  and would have told them anything.
"Where was this coach, in the name of gracious?" asked my sister.
"In Miss Havisham's room." They stared again. "But there weren't
any horses to it." I added this saving clause, in the moment of
rejecting four richly caparisoned coursers which I had had wild
thoughts of harnessing.
"Can this be possible, uncle?" asked Mrs. Joe. "What can the boy
mean?"
"I'll tell you, Mum," said Mr. Pumblechook. "My opinion is, it's a
sedanchair. She's flighty, you know  very flighty  quite flighty
enough to pass her days in a sedanchair."
"Did you ever see her in it, uncle?" asked Mrs. Joe.
"How could I," he returned, forced to the admission, "when I never
see her in my life? Never clapped eyes upon her"
"Goodness, uncle And yet you have spoken to her?"
"Why, don't you know," said Mr. Pumblechook, testily, "that when I
have been there, I have been took up to the outside of her door,
and the door has stood ajar, and she has spoke to me that way.
Don't say you don't know that, Mum. Howsever, the boy went there to
play. What did you play at, boy?"
"We played with flags," I said. I beg to observe that I think of
myself with amazement, when I recall the lies I told on this
occasion.
"Flags" echoed my sister.
"Yes," said I. "Estella waved a blue flag, and I waved a red one,
and Miss Havisham waved one sprinkled all over with little gold
stars, out at the coachwindow. And then we all waved our swords
and hurrahed."
"Swords" repeated my sister. "Where did you get swords from?"
"Out of a cupboard," said I. "And I saw pistols in it  and jam 
and pills. And there was no daylight in the room, but it was all
lighted up with candles."
"That's true, Mum," said Mr. Pumblechook, with a grave nod. "That's
the state of the case, for that much I've seen myself." And then
they both stared at me, and I, with an obtrusive show of
artlessness on my countenance, stared at them, and plaited the
right leg of my trousers with my right hand.
If they had asked me any more questions I should undoubtedly have
betrayed myself, for I was even then on the point of mentioning
that there was a balloon in the yard, and should have hazarded the
statement but for my invention being divided between that
phenomenon and a bear in the brewery. They were so much occupied,
however, in discussing the marvels I had already presented for
their consideration, that I escaped. The subject still held them
when Joe came in from his work to have a cup of tea. To whom my
sister, more for the relief of her own mind than for the
gratification of his, related my pretended experiences.
Now, when I saw Joe open his blue eyes and roll them all round the
kitchen in helpless amazement, I was overtaken by penitence but
only as regarded him  not in the least as regarded the other two.
Towards Joe, and Joe only, I considered myself a young monster,
while they sat debating what results would come to me from Miss
Havisham's acquaintance and favour. They had no doubt that Miss
Havisham would "do something" for me their doubts related to the
form that something would take. My sister stood out for "property."
Mr. Pumblechook was in favour of a handsome premium for binding me
apprentice to some genteel trade  say, the corn and seed trade,
for instance. Joe fell into the deepest disgrace with both, for
offering the bright suggestion that I might only be presented with
one of the dogs who had fought for the vealcutlets. "If a fool's
head can't express better opinions than that," said my sister, "and
you have got any work to do, you had better go and do it." So he
went.
After Mr. Pumblechook had driven off, and when my sister was washing
up, I stole into the forge to Joe, and remained by him until he had
done for the night. Then I said, "Before the fire goes out, Joe, I
should like to tell you something."
"Should you, Pip?" said Joe, drawing his shoeingstool near the
forge. "Then tell us. What is it, Pip?"
"Joe," said I, taking hold of his rolledup shirt sleeve, and
twisting it between my finger and thumb, "you remember all that
about Miss Havisham's?"
"Remember?" said Joe. "I believe you Wonderful"
"It's a terrible thing, Joe it ain't true."
"What are you telling of, Pip?" cried Joe, falling back in the
greatest amazement. "You don't mean to say it's"
"Yes I do it's lies, Joe."
"But not all of it? Why sure you don't mean to say, Pip, that there
was no black welwet coach?" For, I stood shaking my head. "But at
least there was dogs, Pip? Come, Pip," said Joe, persuasively, "if
there warn't no wealcutlets, at least there was dogs?"
"No, Joe."
"A dog?" said Joe. "A puppy? Come?"
"No, Joe, there was nothing at all of the kind."
As I fixed my eyes hopelessly on Joe, Joe contemplated me in
dismay. "Pip, old chap This won't do, old fellow I say Where do
you expect to go to?"
"It's terrible, Joe an't it?"
"Terrible?" cried Joe. "Awful What possessed you?"
"I don't know what possessed me, Joe," I replied, letting his shirt
sleeve go, and sitting down in the ashes at his feet, hanging my
head "but I wish you hadn't taught me to call Knaves at cards,
Jacks and I wish my boots weren't so thick nor my hands so
coarse."
And then I told Joe that I felt very miserable, and that I hadn't
been able to explain myself to Mrs. Joe and Pumblechook who were so
rude to me, and that there had been a beautiful young lady at Miss
Havisham's who was dreadfully proud, and that she had said I was
common, and that I knew I was common, and that I wished I was not
common, and that the lies had come of it somehow, though I didn't
know how.
This was a case of metaphysics, at least as difficult for Joe to
deal with, as for me. But Joe took the case altogether out of the
region of metaphysics, and by that means vanquished it.
"There's one thing you may be sure of, Pip," said Joe, after some
rumination, "namely, that lies is lies. Howsever they come, they
didn't ought to come, and they come from the father of lies, and
work round to the same. Don't you tell no more of 'em, Pip. That
ain't the way to get out of being common, old chap. And as to being
common, I don't make it out at all clear. You are oncommon in some
things. You're oncommon small. Likewise you're a oncommon scholar."
"No, I am ignorant and backward, Joe."
"Why, see what a letter you wrote last night Wrote in print even
I've seen letters  Ah and from gentlefolks  that I'll swear
weren't wrote in print," said Joe.
"I have learnt next to nothing, Joe. You think much of me. It's
only that."
"Well, Pip," said Joe, "be it so or be it son't, you must be a
common scholar afore you can be a oncommon one, I should hope The
king upon his throne, with his crown upon his 'ed, can't sit and
write his acts of Parliament in print, without having begun, when
he were a unpromoted Prince, with the alphabet  Ah" added Joe,
with a shake of the head that was full of meaning, "and begun at A
too, and worked his way to Z. And I know what that is to do, though
I can't say I've exactly done it."
There was some hope in this piece of wisdom, and it rather
encouraged me.
"Whether common ones as to callings and earnings," pursued Joe,
reflectively, "mightn't be the better of continuing for a keep
company with common ones, instead of going out to play with
oncommon ones  which reminds me to hope that there were a flag,
perhaps?"
"No, Joe."
"I'm sorry there weren't a flag, Pip. Whether that might be, or
mightn't be, is a thing as can't be looked into now, without
putting your sister on the Rampage and that's a thing not to be
thought of, as being done intentional. Lookee here, Pip, at what is
said to you by a true friend. Which this to you the true friend
say. If you can't get to be oncommon through going straight, you'll
never get to do it through going crooked. So don't tell no more on
'em, Pip, and live well and die happy."
"You are not angry with me, Joe?"
"No, old chap. But bearing in mind that them were which I
meantersay of a stunning and outdacious sort  alluding to them
which bordered on wealcutlets and dogfighting  a sincere
wellwisher would adwise, Pip, their being dropped into your
meditations, when you go upstairs to bed. That's all, old chap,
and don't never do it no more."
When I got up to my little room and said my prayers, I did not
forget Joe's recommendation, and yet my young mind was in that
disturbed and unthankful state, that I thought long after I laid me
down, how common Estella would consider Joe, a mere blacksmith how
thick his boots, and how coarse his hands. I thought how Joe and my
sister were then sitting in the kitchen, and how I had come up to
bed from the kitchen, and how Miss Havisham and Estella never sat
in a kitchen, but were far above the level of such common doings. I
fell asleep recalling what I "used to do" when I was at Miss
Havisham's as though I had been there weeks or months, instead of
hours and as though it were quite an old subject of remembrance,
instead of one that had arisen only that day.
That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me.
But, it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck
out of it, and think how different its course would have been.
Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain
of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound
you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.
Chapter 
The felicitous idea occurred to me a morning or two later when I
woke, that the best step I could take towards making myself
uncommon was to get out of Biddy everything she knew. In pursuance
of this luminous conception I mentioned to Biddy when I went to Mr.
Wopsle's greataunt's at night, that I had a particular reason for
wishing to get on in life, and that I should feel very much obliged
to her if she would impart all her learning to me. Biddy, who was
the most obliging of girls, immediately said she would, and indeed
began to carry out her promise within five minutes.
The Educational scheme or Course established by Mr. Wopsle's
greataunt may be resolved into the following synopsis. The pupils
ate apples and put straws down one another's backs, until Mr
Wopsle's greataunt collected her energies, and made an
indiscriminate totter at them with a birchrod. After receiving the
charge with every mark of derision, the pupils formed in line and
buzzingly passed a ragged book from hand to hand. The book had an
alphabet in it, some figures and tables, and a little spelling 
that is to say, it had had once. As soon as this volume began to
circulate, Mr. Wopsle's greataunt fell into a state of coma
arising either from sleep or a rheumatic paroxysm. The pupils then
entered among themselves upon a competitive examination on the
subject of Boots, with the view of ascertaining who could tread the
hardest upon whose toes. This mental exercise lasted until Biddy
made a rush at them and distributed three defaced Bibles shaped as
if they had been unskilfully cut off the chumpend of something,
more illegibly printed at the best than any curiosities of
literature I have since met with, speckled all over with ironmould,
and having various specimens of the insect world smashed between
their leaves. This part of the Course was usually lightened by
several single combats between Biddy and refractory students. When
the fights were over, Biddy gave out the number of a page, and then
we all read aloud what we could  or what we couldn't  in a
frightful chorus Biddy leading with a high shrill monotonous
voice, and none of us having the least notion of, or reverence for,
what we were reading about. When this horrible din had lasted a
certain time, it mechanically awoke Mr. Wopsle's greataunt, who
staggered at a boy fortuitously, and pulled his ears. This was
understood to terminate the Course for the evening, and we emerged
into the air with shrieks of intellectual victory. It is fair to
remark that there was no prohibition against any pupil's
entertaining himself with a slate or even with the ink when there
was any, but that it was not easy to pursue that branch of study
in the winter season, on account of the little general shop in
which the classes were holden  and which was also Mr. Wopsle's
greataunt's sittingroom and bedchamber  being but faintly
illuminated through the agency of one lowspirited dipcandle and
no snuffers.
It appeared to me that it would take time, to become uncommon under
these circumstances nevertheless, I resolved to try it, and that
very evening Biddy entered on our special agreement, by imparting
some information from her little catalogue of Prices, under the
head of moist sugar, and lending me, to copy at home, a large old
English D which she had imitated from the heading of some
newspaper, and which I supposed, until she told me what it was, to
be a design for a buckle.
Of course there was a publichouse in the village, and of course
Joe liked sometimes to smoke his pipe there. I had received strict
orders from my sister to call for him at the Three Jolly Bargemen,
that evening, on my way from school, and bring him home at my
peril. To the Three Jolly Bargemen, therefore, I directed my steps.
There was a bar at the Jolly Bargemen, with some alarmingly long
chalk scores in it on the wall at the side of the door, which
seemed to me to be never paid off. They had been there ever since I
could remember, and had grown more than I had. But there was a
quantity of chalk about our country, and perhaps the people
neglected no opportunity of turning it to account.
It being Saturday night, I found the landlord looking rather grimly
at these records, but as my business was with Joe and not with him,
I merely wished him good evening, and passed into the common room
at the end of the passage, where there was a bright large kitchen
fire, and where Joe was smoking his pipe in company with Mr. Wopsle
and a stranger. Joe greeted me as usual with "Halloa, Pip, old
chap" and the moment he said that, the stranger turned his head
and looked at me.
He was a secretlooking man whom I had never seen before. His head
was all on one side, and one of his eyes was half shut up, as if he
were taking aim at something with an invisible gun. He had a pipe
in his mouth, and he took it out, and, after slowly blowing all his
smoke away and looking hard at me all the time, nodded. So, I
nodded, and then he nodded again, and made room on the settle
beside him that I might sit down there.
But, as I was used to sit beside Joe whenever I entered that place
of resort, I said "No, thank you, sir," and fell into the space Joe
made for me on the opposite settle. The strange man, after glancing
at Joe, and seeing that his attention was otherwise engaged, nodded
to me again when I had taken my seat, and then rubbed his leg  in
a very odd way, as it struck me.
"You was saying," said the strange man, turning to Joe, "that you
was a blacksmith."
"Yes. I said it, you know," said Joe.
"What'll you drink, Mr.  ? You didn't mention your name,
bythebye."
Joe mentioned it now, and the strange man called him by it.
"What'll you drink, Mr. Gargery? At my expense? To top up with?"
"Well," said Joe, "to tell you the truth, I ain't much in the habit
of drinking at anybody's expense but my own."
"Habit? No," returned the stranger, "but once and away, and on a
Saturday night too. Come Put a name to it, Mr. Gargery."
"I wouldn't wish to be stiff company," said Joe. "Rum."
"Rum," repeated the stranger. "And will the other gentleman
originate a sentiment."
"Rum," said Mr. Wopsle.
"Three Rums" cried the stranger, calling to the landlord. "Glasses
round"
"This other gentleman," observed Joe, by way of introducing Mr.
Wopsle, "is a gentleman that you would like to hear give it out.
Our clerk at church."
"Aha" said the stranger, quickly, and cocking his eye at me. "The
lonely church, right out on the marshes, with graves round it"
"That's it," said Joe.
The stranger, with a comfortable kind of grunt over his pipe, put
his legs up on the settle that he had to himself. He wore a
flapping broadbrimmed traveller's hat, and under it a handkerchief
tied over his head in the manner of a cap so that he showed no
hair. As he looked at the fire, I thought I saw a cunning
expression, followed by a halflaugh, come into his face.
"I am not acquainted with this country, gentlemen, but it seems a
solitary country towards the river."
"Most marshes is solitary," said Joe.
"No doubt, no doubt. Do you find any gipsies, now, or tramps, or
vagrants of any sort, out there?"
"No," said Joe "none but a runaway convict now and then. And we
don't find them, easy. Eh, Mr. Wopsle?"
Mr. Wopsle, with a majestic remembrance of old discomfiture,
assented but not warmly.
"Seems you have been out after such?" asked the stranger.
"Once," returned Joe. "Not that we wanted to take them, you
understand we went out as lookers on me, and Mr. Wopsle, and Pip.
Didn't us, Pip?"
"Yes, Joe."
The stranger looked at me again  still cocking his eye, as if he
were expressly taking aim at me with his invisible gun  and said,
"He's a likely young parcel of bones that. What is it you call
him?"
"Pip," said Joe.
"Christened Pip?"
"No, not christened Pip."
"Surname Pip?"
"No," said Joe, "it's a kind of family name what he gave himself
when a infant, and is called by."
"Son of yours?"
"Well," said Joe, meditatively  not, of course, that it could be
in anywise necessary to consider about it, but because it was the
way at the Jolly Bargemen to seem to consider deeply about
everything that was discussed over pipes "well  no. No, he
ain't."
"Nevvy?" said the strange man.
"Well," said Joe, with the same appearance of profound cogitation,
"he is not  no, not to deceive you, he is not  my nevvy."
"What the Blue Blazes is he?" asked the stranger. Which appeared to
me to be an inquiry of unnecessary strength.
Mr. Wopsle struck in upon that as one who knew all about
relationships, having professional occasion to bear in mind what
female relations a man might not marry and expounded the ties
between me and Joe. Having his hand in, Mr. Wopsle finished off with
a most terrifically snarling passage from Richard the Third, and
seemed to think he had done quite enough to account for it when he
added,  "as the poet says."
And here I may remark that when Mr. Wopsle referred to me, he
considered it a necessary part of such reference to rumple my hair
and poke it into my eyes. I cannot conceive why everybody of his
standing who visited at our house should always have put me through
the same inflammatory process under similar circumstances. Yet I do
not call to mind that I was ever in my earlier youth the subject of
remark in our social family circle, but some largehanded person
took some such ophthalmic steps to patronize me.
All this while, the strange man looked at nobody but me, and looked
at me as if he were determined to have a shot at me at last, and
bring me down. But he said nothing after offering his Blue Blazes
observation, until the glasses of rumandwater were brought and
then he made his shot, and a most extraordinary shot it was.
It was not a verbal remark, but a proceeding in dump show, and was
pointedly addressed to me. He stirred his rumandwater pointedly
at me, and he tasted his rumandwater pointedly at me. And he
stirred it and he tasted it not with a spoon that was brought to
him, but with a file.
He did this so that nobody but I saw the file and when he had done
it he wiped the file and put it in a breastpocket. I knew it to be
Joe's file, and I knew that he knew my convict, the moment I saw
the instrument. I sat gazing at him, spellbound. But he now
reclined on his settle, taking very little notice of me, and
talking principally about turnips.
There was a delicious sense of cleaningup and making a quiet pause
before going on in life afresh, in our village on Saturday nights,
which stimulated Joe to dare to stay out half an hour longer on
Saturdays than at other times. The half hour and the rumandwater
running out together, Joe got up to go, and took me by the hand.
"Stop half a moment, Mr. Gargery," said the strange man. "I think
I've got a bright new shilling somewhere in my pocket, and if I
have, the boy shall have it."
He looked it out from a handful of small change, folded it in some
crumpled paper, and gave it to me. "Yours" said he. "Mind Your
own."
I thanked him, staring at him far beyond the bounds of good
manners, and holding tight to Joe. He gave Joe goodnight, and he
gave Mr. Wopsle goodnight who went out with us, and he gave me
only a look with his aiming eye  no, not a look, for he shut it
up, but wonders may be done with an eye by hiding it.
On the way home, if I had been in a humour for talking, the talk
must have been all on my side, for Mr. Wopsle parted from us at the
door of the Jolly Bargemen, and Joe went all the way home with his
mouth wide open, to rinse the rum out with as much air as possible.
But I was in a manner stupefied by this turning up of my old
misdeed and old acquaintance, and could think of nothing else.
My sister was not in a very bad temper when we presented ourselves
in the kitchen, and Joe was encouraged by that unusual circumstance
to tell her about the bright shilling. "A bad un, I'll be bound,"
said Mrs. Joe triumphantly, "or he wouldn't have given it to the
boy Let's look at it."
I took it out of the paper, and it proved to be a good one. "But
what's this?" said Mrs. Joe, throwing down the shilling and catching
up the paper. "Two OnePound notes?"
Nothing less than two fat sweltering onepound notes that seemed to
have been on terms of the warmest intimacy with all the cattle
markets in the county. Joe caught up his hat again, and ran with
them to the Jolly Bargemen to restore them to their owner. While he
was gone, I sat down on my usual stool and looked vacantly at my
sister, feeling pretty sure that the man would not be there.
Presently, Joe came back, saying that the man was gone, but that
he, Joe, had left word at the Three Jolly Bargemen concerning the
notes. Then my sister sealed them up in a piece of paper, and put
them under some dried roseleaves in an ornamental teapot on the
top of a press in the state parlour. There they remained, a
nightmare to me, many and many a night and day.
I had sadly broken sleep when I got to bed, through thinking of the
strange man taking aim at me with his invisible gun, and of the
guiltily coarse and common thing it was, to be on secret terms of
conspiracy with convicts  a feature in my low career that I had
previously forgotten. I was haunted by the file too. A dread
possessed me that when I least expected it, the file would
reappear. I coaxed myself to sleep by thinking of Miss Havisham's,
next Wednesday and in my sleep I saw the file coming at me out of
a door, without seeing who held it, and I screamed myself awake.
Chapter 
At the appointed time I returned to Miss Havisham's, and my
hesitating ring at the gate brought out Estella. She locked it
after admitting me, as she had done before, and again preceded me
into the dark passage where her candle stood. She took no notice of
me until she had the candle in her hand, when she looked over her
shoulder, superciliously saying, "You are to come this way today,"
and took me to quite another part of the house.
The passage was a long one, and seemed to pervade the whole square
basement of the Manor House. We traversed but one side of the
square, however, and at the end of it she stopped, and put her
candle down and opened a door. Here, the daylight reappeared, and I
found myself in a small paved courtyard, the opposite side of
which was formed by a detached dwellinghouse, that looked as if it
had once belonged to the manager or head clerk of the extinct
brewery. There was a clock in the outer wall of this house. Like
the clock in Miss Havisham's room, and like Miss Havisham's watch,
it had stopped at twenty minutes to nine.
We went in at the door, which stood open, and into a gloomy room
with a low ceiling, on the ground floor at the back. There was some
company in the room, and Estella said to me as she joined it, "You
are to go and stand there, boy, till you are wanted." "There",
being the window, I crossed to it, and stood "there," in a very
uncomfortable state of mind, looking out.
It opened to the ground, and looked into a most miserable corner of
the neglected garden, upon a rank ruin of cabbagestalks, and one
box tree that had been clipped round long ago, like a pudding, and
had a new growth at the top of it, out of shape and of a different
colour, as if that part of the pudding had stuck to the saucepan
and got burnt. This was my homely thought, as I contemplated the
boxtree. There had been some light snow, overnight, and it lay
nowhere else to my knowledge but, it had not quite melted from the
cold shadow of this bit of garden, and the wind caught it up in
little eddies and threw it at the window, as if it pelted me for
coming there.
I divined that my coming had stopped conversation in the room, and
that its other occupants were looking at me. I could see nothing of
the room except the shining of the fire in the window glass, but I
stiffened in all my joints with the consciousness that I was under
close inspection.
There were three ladies in the room and one gentleman. Before I had
been standing at the window five minutes, they somehow conveyed to
me that they were all toadies and humbugs, but that each of them
pretended not to know that the others were toadies and humbugs
because the admission that he or she did know it, would have made
him or her out to be a toady and humbug.
They all had a listless and dreary air of waiting somebody's
pleasure, and the most talkative of the ladies had to speak quite
rigidly to repress a yawn. This lady, whose name was Camilla, very
much reminded me of my sister, with the difference that she was
older, and as I found when I caught sight of her of a blunter
cast of features. Indeed, when I knew her better I began to think
it was a Mercy she had any features at all, so very blank and high
was the dead wall of her face.
"Poor dear soul" said this lady, with an abruptness of manner
quite my sister's. "Nobody's enemy but his own"
"It would be much more commendable to be somebody else's enemy,"
said the gentleman "far more natural."
"Cousin Raymond," observed another lady, "we are to love our
neighbour."
"Sarah Pocket," returned Cousin Raymond, "if a man is not his own
neighbour, who is?"
Miss Pocket laughed, and Camilla laughed and said checking a
yawn, "The idea" But I thought they seemed to think it rather a
good idea too. The other lady, who had not spoken yet, said gravely
and emphatically, "Very true"
"Poor soul" Camilla presently went on I knew they had all been
looking at me in the mean time, "he is so very strange Would
anyone believe that when Tom's wife died, he actually could not be
induced to see the importance of the children's having the deepest
of trimmings to their mourning? 'Good Lord' says he, 'Camilla,
what can it signify so long as the poor bereaved little things are
in black?' So like Matthew The idea"
"Good points in him, good points in him," said Cousin Raymond
"Heaven forbid I should deny good points in him but he never had,
and he never will have, any sense of the proprieties."
"You know I was obliged," said Camilla, "I was obliged to be firm.
I said, 'It WILL NOT DO, for the credit of the family.' I told him
that, without deep trimmings, the family was disgraced. I cried
about it from breakfast till dinner. I injured my digestion. And at
last he flung out in his violent way, and said, with a D, 'Then do
as you like.' Thank Goodness it will always be a consolation to me
to know that I instantly went out in a pouring rain and bought the
things."
"He paid for them, did he not?" asked Estella.
"It's not the question, my dear child, who paid for them," returned
Camilla. "I bought them. And I shall often think of that with
peace, when I wake up in the night."
The ringing of a distant bell, combined with the echoing of some
cry or call along the passage by which I had come, interrupted the
conversation and caused Estella to say to me, "Now, boy" On my
turning round, they all looked at me with the utmost contempt, and,
as I went out, I heard Sarah Pocket say, "Well I am sure What
next" and Camilla add, with indignation, "Was there ever such a
fancy The idea"
As we were going with our candle along the dark passage, Estella
stopped all of a sudden, and, facing round, said in her taunting
manner with her face quite close to mine
"Well?"
"Well, miss?" I answered, almost falling over her and checking
myself.
She stood looking at me, and, of course, I stood looking at her.
"Am I pretty?"
"Yes I think you are very pretty."
"Am I insulting?"
"Not so much so as you were last time," said I.
"Not so much so?"
"No."
She fired when she asked the last question, and she slapped my face
with such force as she had, when I answered it.
"Now?" said she. "You little coarse monster, what do you think of
me now?"
"I shall not tell you."
"Because you are going to tell, upstairs. Is that it?"
"No," said I, "that's not it."
"Why don't you cry again, you little wretch?"
"Because I'll never cry for you again," said I. Which was, I
suppose, as false a declaration as ever was made for I was
inwardly crying for her then, and I know what I know of the pain
she cost me afterwards.
We went on our way upstairs after this episode and, as we were
going up, we met a gentleman groping his way down.
"Whom have we here?" asked the gentleman, stopping and looking at
me.
"A boy," said Estella.
He was a burly man of an exceedingly dark complexion, with an
exceedingly large head and a corresponding large hand. He took my
chin in his large hand and turned up my face to have a look at me
by the light of the candle. He was prematurely bald on the top of
his head, and had bushy black eyebrows that wouldn't lie down but
stood up bristling. His eyes were set very deep in his head, and
were disagreeably sharp and suspicious. He had a large watchchain,
and strong black dots where his beard and whiskers would have been
if he had let them. He was nothing to me, and I could have had no
foresight then, that he ever would be anything to me, but it
happened that I had this opportunity of observing him well.
"Boy of the neighbourhood? Hey?" said he.
"Yes, sir," said I.
"How do you come here?"
"Miss Havisham sent for me, sir," I explained.
"Well Behave yourself. I have a pretty large experience of boys,
and you're a bad set of fellows. Now mind" said he, biting the
side of his great forefinger as he frowned at me, "you behave
yourself"
With those words, he released me  which I was glad of, for his
hand smelt of scented soap  and went his way downstairs. I
wondered whether he could be a doctor but no, I thought he
couldn't be a doctor, or he would have a quieter and more
persuasive manner. There was not much time to consider the subject,
for we were soon in Miss Havisham's room, where she and everything
else were just as I had left them. Estella left me standing near
the door, and I stood there until Miss Havisham cast her eyes upon
me from the dressingtable.
"So" she said, without being startled or surprised "the days have
worn away, have they?"
"Yes, ma'am. Today is"
"There, there, there" with the impatient movement of her fingers.
"I don't want to know. Are you ready to play?"
I was obliged to answer in some confusion, "I don't think I am,
ma'am."
"Not at cards again?" she demanded, with a searching look.
"Yes, ma'am I could do that, if I was wanted."
"Since this house strikes you old and grave, boy," said Miss
Havisham, impatiently, "and you are unwilling to play, are you
willing to work?"
I could answer this inquiry with a better heart than I had been
able to find for the other question, and I said I was quite
willing.
"Then go into that opposite room," said she, pointing at the door
behind me with her withered hand, "and wait there till I come."
I crossed the staircase landing, and entered the room she
indicated. From that room, too, the daylight was completely
excluded, and it had an airless smell that was oppressive. A fire
had been lately kindled in the damp oldfashioned grate, and it was
more disposed to go out than to burn up, and the reluctant smoke
which hung in the room seemed colder than the clearer air  like
our own marsh mist. Certain wintry branches of candles on the high
chimneypiece faintly lighted the chamber or, it would be more
expressive to say, faintly troubled its darkness. It was spacious,
and I dare say had once been handsome, but every discernible thing
in it was covered with dust and mould, and dropping to pieces. The
most prominent object was a long table with a tablecloth spread on
it, as if a feast had been in preparation when the house and the
clocks all stopped together. An epergne or centrepiece of some kind
was in the middle of this cloth it was so heavily overhung with
cobwebs that its form was quite undistinguishable and, as I looked
along the yellow expanse out of which I remember its seeming to
grow, like a black fungus, I saw speckledlegged spiders with
blotchy bodies running home to it, and running out from it, as if
some circumstances of the greatest public importance had just
transpired in the spider community.
I heard the mice too, rattling behind the panels, as if the same
occurrence were important to their interests. But, the blackbeetles
took no notice of the agitation, and groped about the hearth in a
ponderous elderly way, as if they were shortsighted and hard of
hearing, and not on terms with one another.
These crawling things had fascinated my attention and I was
watching them from a distance, when Miss Havisham laid a hand upon
my shoulder. In her other hand she had a crutchheaded stick on
which she leaned, and she looked like the Witch of the place.
"This," said she, pointing to the long table with her stick, "is
where I will be laid when I am dead. They shall come and look at me
here."
With some vague misgiving that she might get upon the table then
and there and die at once, the complete realization of the ghastly
waxwork at the Fair, I shrank under her touch.
"What do you think that is?" she asked me, again pointing with her
stick "that, where those cobwebs are?"
"I can't guess what it is, ma'am."
"It's a great cake. A bridecake. Mine"
She looked all round the room in a glaring manner, and then said,
leaning on me while her hand twitched my shoulder, "Come, come,
come Walk me, walk me"
I made out from this, that the work I had to do, was to walk Miss
Havisham round and round the room. Accordingly, I started at once,
and she leaned upon my shoulder, and we went away at a pace that
might have been an imitation founded on my first impulse under
that roof of Mr. Pumblechook's chaisecart.
She was not physically strong, and after a little time said,
"Slower" Still, we went at an impatient fitful speed, and as we
went, she twitched the hand upon my shoulder, and worked her mouth,
and led me to believe that we were going fast because her thoughts
went fast. After a while she said, "Call Estella" so I went out on
the landing and roared that name as I had done on the previous
occasion. When her light appeared, I returned to Miss Havisham, and
we started away again round and round the room.
If only Estella had come to be a spectator of our proceedings, I
should have felt sufficiently discontented but, as she brought
with her the three ladies and the gentleman whom I had seen below,
I didn't know what to do. In my politeness, I would have stopped
but, Miss Havisham twitched my shoulder, and we posted on  with a
shamefaced consciousness on my part that they would think it was
all my doing.
"Dear Miss Havisham," said Miss Sarah Pocket. "How well you look"
"I do not," returned Miss Havisham. "I am yellow skin and bone."
Camilla brightened when Miss Pocket met with this rebuff and she
murmured, as she plaintively contemplated Miss Havisham, "Poor dear
soul Certainly not to be expected to look well, poor thing. The
idea"
"And how are you?" said Miss Havisham to Camilla. As we were close
to Camilla then, I would have stopped as a matter of course, only
Miss Havisham wouldn't stop. We swept on, and I felt that I was
highly obnoxious to Camilla.
"Thank you, Miss Havisham," she returned, "I am as well as can be
expected."
"Why, what's the matter with you?" asked Miss Havisham, with
exceeding sharpness.
"Nothing worth mentioning," replied Camilla. "I don't wish to make
a display of my feelings, but I have habitually thought of you more
in the night than I am quite equal to."
"Then don't think of me," retorted Miss Havisham.
"Very easily said" remarked Camilla, amiably repressing a sob,
while a hitch came into her upper lip, and her tears overflowed.
"Raymond is a witness what ginger and sal volatile I am obliged to
take in the night. Raymond is a witness what nervous jerkings I
have in my legs. Chokings and nervous jerkings, however, are
nothing new to me when I think with anxiety of those I love. If I
could be less affectionate and sensitive, I should have a better
digestion and an iron set of nerves. I am sure I wish it could be
so. But as to not thinking of you in the night  The idea" Here, a
burst of tears.
The Raymond referred to, I understood to be the gentleman present,
and him I understood to be Mr. Camilla. He came to the rescue at
this point, and said in a consolatory and complimentary voice,
"Camilla, my dear, it is well known that your family feelings are
gradually undermining you to the extent of making one of your legs
shorter than the other."
"I am not aware," observed the grave lady whose voice I had heard
but once, "that to think of any person is to make a great claim
upon that person, my dear."
Miss Sarah Pocket, whom I now saw to be a little dry brown
corrugated old woman, with a small face that might have been made
of walnut shells, and a large mouth like a cat's without the
whiskers, supported this position by saying, "No, indeed, my dear.
Hem"
"Thinking is easy enough," said the grave lady.
"What is easier, you know?" assented Miss Sarah Pocket.
"Oh, yes, yes" cried Camilla, whose fermenting feelings appeared
to rise from her legs to her bosom. "It's all very true It's a
weakness to be so affectionate, but I can't help it. No doubt my
health would be much better if it was otherwise, still I wouldn't
change my disposition if I could. It's the cause of much suffering,
but it's a consolation to know I posses it, when I wake up in the
night." Here another burst of feeling.
Miss Havisham and I had never stopped all this time, but kept going
round and round the room now, brushing against the skirts of the
visitors now, giving them the whole length of the dismal chamber.
"There's Matthew" said Camilla. "Never mixing with any natural
ties, never coming here to see how Miss Havisham is I have taken
to the sofa with my staylace cut, and have lain there hours,
insensible, with my head over the side, and my hair all down, and
my feet I don't know where"
"Much higher than your head, my love," said Mr. Camilla.
"I have gone off into that state, hours and hours, on account of
Matthew's strange and inexplicable conduct, and nobody has thanked
me."
"Really I must say I should think not" interposed the grave lady.
"You see, my dear," added Miss Sarah Pocket a blandly vicious
personage, "the question to put to yourself is, who did you expect
to thank you, my love?"
"Without expecting any thanks, or anything of the sort," resumed
Camilla, "I have remained in that state, hours and hours, and
Raymond is a witness of the extent to which I have choked, and what
the total inefficacy of ginger has been, and I have been heard at
the pianofortetuner's across the street, where the poor mistaken
children have even supposed it to be pigeons cooing at a
distanceand now to be told." Here Camilla put her hand to her
throat, and began to be quite chemical as to the formation of new
combinations there.
When this same Matthew was mentioned, Miss Havisham stopped me and
herself, and stood looking at the speaker. This change had a great
influence in bringing Camilla's chemistry to a sudden end.
"Matthew will come and see me at last," said Miss Havisham,
sternly, "when I am laid on that table. That will be his place 
there," striking the table with her stick, "at my head And yours
will be there And your husband's there And Sarah Pocket's there
And Georgiana's there Now you all know where to take your stations
when you come to feast upon me. And now go"
At the mention of each name, she had struck the table with her
stick in a new place. She now said, "Walk me, walk me" and we went
on again.
"I suppose there's nothing to be done," exclaimed Camilla, "but
comply and depart. It's something to have seen the object of one's
love and duty, for even so short a time. I shall think of it with a
melancholy satisfaction when I wake up in the night. I wish Matthew
could have that comfort, but he sets it at defiance. I am
determined not to make a display of my feelings, but it's very hard
to be told one wants to feast on one's relations  as if one was a
Giant  and to be told to go. The bare idea"
Mr. Camilla interposing, as Mrs. Camilla laid her hand upon her
heaving bosom, that lady assumed an unnatural fortitude of manner
which I supposed to be expressive of an intention to drop and choke
when out of view, and kissing her hand to Miss Havisham, was
escorted forth. Sarah Pocket and Georgiana contended who should
remain last but, Sarah was too knowing to be outdone, and ambled
round Georgiana with that artful slipperiness, that the latter was
obliged to take precedence. Sarah Pocket then made her separate
effect of departing with "Bless you, Miss Havisham dear" and with
a smile of forgiving pity on her walnutshell countenance for the
weaknesses of the rest.
While Estella was away lighting them down, Miss Havisham still
walked with her hand on my shoulder, but more and more slowly. At
last she stopped before the fire, and said, after muttering and
looking at it some seconds
"This is my birthday, Pip."
I was going to wish her many happy returns, when she lifted her
stick.
"I don't suffer it to be spoken of. I don't suffer those who were
here just now, or any one, to speak of it. They come here on the
day, but they dare not refer to it."
Of course I made no further effort to refer to it.
"On this day of the year, long before you were born, this heap of
decay," stabbing with her crutched stick at the pile of cobwebs on
the table but not touching it, "was brought here. It and I have
worn away together. The mice have gnawed at it, and sharper teeth
than teeth of mice have gnawed at me."
She held the head of her stick against her heart as she stood
looking at the table she in her once white dress, all yellow and
withered the once white cloth all yellow and withered everything
around, in a state to crumble under a touch.
"When the ruin is complete," said she, with a ghastly look, "and
when they lay me dead, in my bride's dress on the bride's table 
which shall be done, and which will be the finished curse upon him
so much the better if it is done on this day"
She stood looking at the table as if she stood looking at her own
figure lying there. I remained quiet. Estella returned, and she too
remained quiet. It seemed to me that we continued thus for a long
time. In the heavy air of the room, and the heavy darkness that
brooded in its remoter corners, I even had an alarming fancy that
Estella and I might presently begin to decay.
At length, not coming out of her distraught state by degrees, but
in an instant, Miss Havisham said, "Let me see you two play cards
why have you not begun?" With that, we returned to her room, and
sat down as before I was beggared, as before and again, as
before, Miss Havisham watched us all the time, directed my
attention to Estella's beauty, and made me notice it the more by
trying her jewels on Estella's breast and hair.
Estella, for her part, likewise treated me as before except that
she did not condescend to speak. When we had played some halfdozen
games, a day was appointed for my return, and I was taken down into
the yard to be fed in the former doglike manner. There, too, I was
again left to wander about as I liked.
It is not much to the purpose whether a gate in that garden wall
which I had scrambled up to peep over on the last occasion was, on
that last occasion, open or shut. Enough that I saw no gate then,
and that I saw one now. As it stood open, and as I knew that
Estella had let the visitors out  for, she had returned with the
keys in her hand  I strolled into the garden and strolled all over
it. It was quite a wilderness, and there were old melonframes and
cucumberframes in it, which seemed in their decline to have
produced a spontaneous growth of weak attempts at pieces of old
hats and boots, with now and then a weedy offshoot into the
likeness of a battered saucepan.
When I had exhausted the garden, and a greenhouse with nothing in
it but a fallendown grapevine and some bottles, I found myself in
the dismal corner upon which I had looked out of the window. Never
questioning for a moment that the house was now empty, I looked in
at another window, and found myself, to my great surprise,
exchanging a broad stare with a pale young gentleman with red
eyelids and light hair.
This pale young gentleman quickly disappeared, and reappeared
beside me. He had been at his books when I had found myself staring
at him, and I now saw that he was inky.
"Halloa" said he, "young fellow"
Halloa being a general observation which I had usually observed to
be best answered by itself, I said, "Halloa" politely omitting
young fellow.
"Who let you in?" said he.
"Miss Estella."
"Who gave you leave to prowl about?"
"Miss Estella."
"Come and fight," said the pale young gentleman.
What could I do but follow him? I have often asked myself the
question since but, what else could I do? His manner was so final
and I was so astonished, that I followed where he led, as if I had
been under a spell.
"Stop a minute, though," he said, wheeling round before we had gone
many paces. "I ought to give you a reason for fighting, too. There
it is" In a most irritating manner he instantly slapped his hands
against one another, daintily flung one of his legs up behind him,
pulled my hair, slapped his hands again, dipped his head, and
butted it into my stomach.
The bulllike proceeding last mentioned, besides that it was
unquestionably to be regarded in the light of a liberty, was
particularly disagreeable just after bread and meat. I therefore
hit out at him and was going to hit out again, when he said,
"Aha Would you?" and began dancing backwards and forwards in a
manner quite unparalleled within my limited experience.
"Laws of the game" said he. Here, he skipped from his left leg on
to his right. "Regular rules" Here, he skipped from his right leg
on to his left. "Come to the ground, and go through the
preliminaries" Here, he dodged backwards and forwards, and did all
sorts of things while I looked helplessly at him.
I was secretly afraid of him when I saw him so dexterous but, I
felt morally and physically convinced that his light head of hair
could have had no business in the pit of my stomach, and that I had
a right to consider it irrelevant when so obtruded on my attention.
Therefore, I followed him without a word, to a retired nook of the
garden, formed by the junction of two walls and screened by some
rubbish. On his asking me if I was satisfied with the ground, and
on my replying Yes, he begged my leave to absent himself for a
moment, and quickly returned with a bottle of water and a sponge
dipped in vinegar. "Available for both," he said, placing these
against the wall. And then fell to pulling off, not only his jacket
and waistcoat, but his shirt too, in a manner at once
lighthearted, businesslike, and bloodthirsty.
Although he did not look very healthy  having pimples on his face,
and a breaking out at his mouth  these dreadful preparations quite
appalled me. I judged him to be about my own age, but he was much
taller, and he had a way of spinning himself about that was full of
appearance. For the rest, he was a young gentleman in a grey suit
when not denuded for battle, with his elbows, knees, wrists, and
heels, considerably in advance of the rest of him as to
development.
My heart failed me when I saw him squaring at me with every
demonstration of mechanical nicety, and eyeing my anatomy as if he
were minutely choosing his bone. I never have been so surprised in
my life, as I was when I let out the first blow, and saw him lying
on his back, looking up at me with a bloody nose and his face
exceedingly foreshortened.
But, he was on his feet directly, and after sponging himself with a
great show of dexterity began squaring again. The second greatest
surprise I have ever had in my life was seeing him on his back
again, looking up at me out of a black eye.
His spirit inspired me with great respect. He seemed to have no
strength, and he never once hit me hard, and he was always knocked
down but, he would be up again in a moment, sponging himself or
drinking out of the waterbottle, with the greatest satisfaction in
seconding himself according to form, and then came at me with an
air and a show that made me believe he really was going to do for
me at last. He got heavily bruised, for I am sorry to record that
the more I hit him, the harder I hit him but, he came up again and
again and again, until at last he got a bad fall with the back of
his head against the wall. Even after that crisis in our affairs,
he got up and turned round and round confusedly a few times, not
knowing where I was but finally went on his knees to his sponge
and threw it up at the same time panting out, "That means you have
won."
He seemed so brave and innocent, that although I had not proposed
the contest I felt but a gloomy satisfaction in my victory. Indeed,
I go so far as to hope that I regarded myself while dressing, as a
species of savage young wolf, or other wild beast. However, I got
dressed, darkly wiping my sanguinary face at intervals, and I said,
"Can I help you?" and he said "No thankee," and I said "Good
afternoon," and he said "Same to you."
When I got into the courtyard, I found Estella waiting with the
keys. But, she neither asked me where I had been, nor why I had
kept her waiting and there was a bright flush upon her face, as
though something had happened to delight her. Instead of going
straight to the gate, too, she stepped back into the passage, and
beckoned me.
"Come here You may kiss me, if you like."
I kissed her cheek as she turned it to me. I think I would have
gone through a great deal to kiss her cheek. But, I felt that the
kiss was given to the coarse common boy as a piece of money might
have been, and that it was worth nothing.
What with the birthday visitors, and what with the cards, and what
with the fight, my stay had lasted so long, that when I neared home
the light on the spit of sand off the point on the marshes was
gleaming against a black nightsky, and Joe's furnace was flinging
a path of fire across the road.
Chapter 
My mind grew very uneasy on the subject of the pale young
gentleman. The more I thought of the fight, and recalled the pale
young gentleman on his back in various stages of puffy and
incrimsoned countenance, the more certain it appeared that
something would be done to me. I felt that the pale young
gentleman's blood was on my head, and that the Law would avenge it.
Without having any definite idea of the penalties I had incurred,
it was clear to me that village boys could not go stalking about
the country, ravaging the houses of gentlefolks and pitching into
the studious youth of England, without laying themselves open to
severe punishment. For some days, I even kept close at home, and
looked out at the kitchen door with the greatest caution and
trepidation before going on an errand, lest the officers of the
County Jail should pounce upon me. The pale young gentleman's nose
had stained my trousers, and I tried to wash out that evidence of
my guilt in the dead of night. I had cut my knuckles against the
pale young gentleman's teeth, and I twisted my imagination into a
thousand tangles, as I devised incredible ways of accounting for
that damnatory circumstance when I should be haled before the
Judges.
When the day came round for my return to the scene of the deed of
violence, my terrors reached their height. Whether myrmidons of
Justice, specially sent down from London, would be lying in ambush
behind the gate? Whether Miss Havisham, preferring to take personal
vengeance for an outrage done to her house, might rise in those
graveclothes of hers, draw a pistol, and shoot me dead? Whether
suborned boys  a numerous band of mercenaries  might be engaged
to fall upon me in the brewery, and cuff me until I was no more? It
was high testimony to my confidence in the spirit of the pale young
gentleman, that I never imagined him accessory to these
retaliations they always came into my mind as the acts of
injudicious relatives of his, goaded on by the state of his visage
and an indignant sympathy with the family features.
However, go to Miss Havisham's I must, and go I did. And behold
nothing came of the late struggle. It was not alluded to in any
way, and no pale young gentleman was to be discovered on the
premises. I found the same gate open, and I explored the garden,
and even looked in at the windows of the detached house but, my
view was suddenly stopped by the closed shutters within, and all
was lifeless. Only in the corner where the combat had taken place,
could I detect any evidence of the young gentleman's existence.
There were traces of his gore in that spot, and I covered them with
gardenmould from the eye of man.
On the broad landing between Miss Havisham's own room and that
other room in which the long table was laid out, I saw a
gardenchair  a light chair on wheels, that you pushed from
behind. It had been placed there since my last visit, and I
entered, that same day, on a regular occupation of pushing Miss
Havisham in this chair when she was tired of walking with her hand
upon my shoulder round her own room, and across the landing, and
round the other room. Over and over and over again, we would make
these journeys, and sometimes they would last as long as three
hours at a stretch. I insensibly fall into a general mention of
these journeys as numerous, because it was at once settled that I
should return every alternate day at noon for these purposes, and
because I am now going to sum up a period of at least eight or ten
months.
As we began to be more used to one another, Miss Havisham talked
more to me, and asked me such questions as what had I learnt and
what was I going to be? I told her I was going to be apprenticed to
Joe, I believed and I enlarged upon my knowing nothing and wanting
to know everything, in the hope that she might offer some help
towards that desirable end. But, she did not on the contrary, she
seemed to prefer my being ignorant. Neither did she ever give me
any money  or anything but my daily dinner  nor ever stipulate
that I should be paid for my services.
Estella was always about, and always let me in and out, but never
told me I might kiss her again. Sometimes, she would coldly
tolerate me sometimes, she would condescend to me sometimes, she
would be quite familiar with me sometimes, she would tell me
energetically that she hated me. Miss Havisham would often ask me
in a whisper, or when we were alone, "Does she grow prettier and
prettier, Pip?" And when I said yes for indeed she did, would
seem to enjoy it greedily. Also, when we played at cards Miss
Havisham would look on, with a miserly relish of Estella's moods,
whatever they were. And sometimes, when her moods were so many and
so contradictory of one another that I was puzzled what to say or
do, Miss Havisham would embrace her with lavish fondness, murmuring
something in her ear that sounded like "Break their hearts my pride
and hope, break their hearts and have no mercy"
There was a song Joe used to hum fragments of at the forge, of
which the burden was Old Clem. This was not a very ceremonious way
of rendering homage to a patron saint but, I believe Old Clem
stood in that relation towards smiths. It was a song that imitated
the measure of beating upon iron, and was a mere lyrical excuse for
the introduction of Old Clem's respected name. Thus, you were to
hammer boys round  Old Clem With a thump and a sound  Old Clem
Beat it out, beat it out  Old Clem With a clink for the stout 
Old Clem Blow the fire, blow the fire  Old Clem Roaring dryer,
soaring higher  Old Clem One day soon after the appearance of the
chair, Miss Havisham suddenly saying to me, with the impatient
movement of her fingers, "There, there, there Sing" I was
surprised into crooning this ditty as I pushed her over the floor.
It happened so to catch her fancy, that she took it up in a low
brooding voice as if she were singing in her sleep. After that, it
became customary with us to have it as we moved about, and Estella
would often join in though the whole strain was so subdued, even
when there were three of us, that it made less noise in the grim
old house than the lightest breath of wind.
What could I become with these surroundings? How could my character
fail to be influenced by them? Is it to be wondered at if my
thoughts were dazed, as my eyes were, when I came out into the
natural light from the misty yellow rooms?
Perhaps, I might have told Joe about the pale young gentleman, if I
had not previously been betrayed into those enormous inventions to
which I had confessed. Under the circumstances, I felt that Joe
could hardly fail to discern in the pale young gentleman, an
appropriate passenger to be put into the black velvet coach
therefore, I said nothing of him. Besides that shrinking from
having Miss Havisham and Estella discussed, which had come upon me
in the beginning, grew much more potent as time went on. I reposed
complete confidence in no one but Biddy but, I told poor Biddy
everything. Why it came natural to me to do so, and why Biddy had a
deep concern in everything I told her, I did not know then, though
I think I know now.
Meanwhile, councils went on in the kitchen at home, fraught with
almost insupportable aggravation to my exasperated spirit. That
ass, Pumblechook, used often to come over of a night for the purpose
of discussing my prospects with my sister and I really do believe
to this hour with less penitence than I ought to feel, that if
these hands could have taken a linchpin out of his chaisecart,
they would have done it. The miserable man was a man of that
confined stolidity of mind, that he could not discuss my prospects
without having me before him  as it were, to operate upon  and he
would drag me up from my stool usually by the collar where I was
quiet in a corner, and, putting me before the fire as if I were
going to be cooked, would begin by saying, "Now, Mum, here is this
boy Here is this boy which you brought up by hand. Hold up your
head, boy, and be for ever grateful unto them which so did do. Now,
Mum, with respections to this boy" And then he would rumple my
hair the wrong way  which from my earliest remembrance, as already
hinted, I have in my soul denied the right of any fellowcreature
to do  and would hold me before him by the sleeve a spectacle of
imbecility only to be equalled by himself.
Then, he and my sister would pair off in such nonsensical
speculations about Miss Havisham, and about what she would do with
me and for me, that I used to want  quite painfully  to burst
into spiteful tears, fly at Pumblechook, and pummel him all over.
In these dialogues, my sister spoke to me as if she were morally
wrenching one of my teeth out at every reference while Pumblechook
himself, selfconstituted my patron, would sit supervising me with
a depreciatory eye, like the architect of my fortunes who thought
himself engaged on a very unremunerative job.
In these discussions, Joe bore no part. But he was often talked at,
while they were in progress, by reason of Mrs. Joe's perceiving that
he was not favourable to my being taken from the forge. I was fully
old enough now, to be apprenticed to Joe and when Joe sat with the
poker on his knees thoughtfully raking out the ashes between the
lower bars, my sister would so distinctly construe that innocent
action into opposition on his part, that she would dive at him,
take the poker out of his hands, shake him, and put it away. There
was a most irritating end to every one of these debates. All in a
moment, with nothing to lead up to it, my sister would stop herself
in a yawn, and catching sight of me as it were incidentally, would
swoop upon me with, "Come there's enough of you You get along to
bed you've given trouble enough for one night, I hope" As if I
had besought them as a favour to bother my life out.
We went on in this way for a long time, and it seemed likely that
we should continue to go on in this way for a long time, when, one
day, Miss Havisham stopped short as she and I were walking, she
leaning on my shoulder and said with some displeasure
"You are growing tall, Pip"
I thought it best to hint, through the medium of a meditative look,
that this might be occasioned by circumstances over which I had no
control.
She said no more at the time but, she presently stopped and looked
at me again and presently again and after that, looked frowning
and moody. On the next day of my attendance when our usual exercise
was over, and I had landed her at her dressingtable, she stayed me
with a movement of her impatient fingers
"Tell me the name again of that blacksmith of yours."
"Joe Gargery, ma'am."
"Meaning the master you were to be apprenticed to?"
"Yes, Miss Havisham."
"You had better be apprenticed at once. Would Gargery come here
with you, and bring your indentures, do you think?"
I signified that I had no doubt he would take it as an honour to be
asked.
"Then let him come."
"At any particular time, Miss Havisham?"
"There, there I know nothing about times. Let him come soon, and
come along with you."
When I got home at night, and delivered this message for Joe, my
sister "went on the Rampage," in a more alarming degree than at any
previous period. She asked me and Joe whether we supposed she was
doormats under our feet, and how we dared to use her so, and what
company we graciously thought she was fit for? When she had
exhausted a torrent of such inquiries, she threw a candlestick at
Joe, burst into a loud sobbing, got out the dustpan  which was
always a very bad sign  put on her coarse apron, and began
cleaning up to a terrible extent. Not satisfied with a dry
cleaning, she took to a pail and scrubbingbrush, and cleaned us
out of house and home, so that we stood shivering in the backyard.
It was ten o'clock at night before we ventured to creep in again,
and then she asked Joe why he hadn't married a Negress Slave at
once? Joe offered no answer, poor fellow, but stood feeling his
whisker and looking dejectedly at me, as if he thought it really
might have been a better speculation.
Chapter 
It was a trial to my feelings, on the next day but one, to see Joe
arraying himself in his Sunday clothes to accompany me to Miss
Havisham's. However, as he thought his courtsuit necessary to the
occasion, it was not for me tell him that he looked far better in
his working dress the rather, because I knew he made himself so
dreadfully uncomfortable, entirely on my account, and that it was
for me he pulled up his shirtcollar so very high behind, that it
made the hair on the crown of his head stand up like a tuft of
feathers.
At breakfast time my sister declared her intention of going to town
with us, and being left at Uncle Pumblechook's and called for "when
we had done with our fine ladies"  a way of putting the case, from
which Joe appeared inclined to augur the worst. The forge was shut
up for the day, and Joe inscribed in chalk upon the door as it was
his custom to do on the very rare occasions when he was not at
work the monosyllable HOUT, accompanied by a sketch of an arrow
supposed to be flying in the direction he had taken.
We walked to town, my sister leading the way in a very large beaver
bonnet, and carrying a basket like the Great Seal of England in
plaited straw, a pair of pattens, a spare shawl, and an umbrella,
though it was a fine bright day. I am not quite clear whether these
articles were carried penitentially or ostentatiously but, I
rather think they were displayed as articles of property  much as
Cleopatra or any other sovereign lady on the Rampage might exhibit
her wealth in a pageant or procession.
When we came to Pumblechook's, my sister bounced in and left us. As
it was almost noon, Joe and I held straight on to Miss Havisham's
house. Estella opened the gate as usual, and, the moment she
appeared, Joe took his hat off and stood weighing it by the brim in
both his hands as if he had some urgent reason in his mind for
being particular to half a quarter of an ounce.
Estella took no notice of either of us, but led us the way that I
knew so well. I followed next to her, and Joe came last. When I
looked back at Joe in the long passage, he was still weighing his
hat with the greatest care, and was coming after us in long strides
on the tips of his toes.
Estella told me we were both to go in, so I took Joe by the
coatcuff and conducted him into Miss Havisham's presence. She was
seated at her dressingtable, and looked round at us immediately.
"Oh" said she to Joe. "You are the husband of the sister of this
boy?"
I could hardly have imagined dear old Joe looking so unlike himself
or so like some extraordinary bird standing, as he did,
speechless, with his tuft of feathers ruffled, and his mouth open,
as if he wanted a worm.
"You are the husband," repeated Miss Havisham, "of the sister of
this boy?"
It was very aggravating but, throughout the interview Joe
persisted in addressing Me instead of Miss Havisham.
"Which I meantersay, Pip," Joe now observed in a manner that was at
once expressive of forcible argumentation, strict confidence, and
great politeness, "as I hup and married your sister, and I were at
the time what you might call if you was anyways inclined a single
man."
"Well" said Miss Havisham. "And you have reared the boy, with the
intention of taking him for your apprentice is that so, Mr.
Gargery?"
"You know, Pip," replied Joe, "as you and me were ever friends, and
it were looked for'ard to betwixt us, as being calc'lated to lead
to larks. Not but what, Pip, if you had ever made objections to the
business  such as its being open to black and sut, or suchlike 
not but what they would have been attended to, don't you see?"
"Has the boy," said Miss Havisham, "ever made any objection? Does
he like the trade?"
"Which it is well beknown to yourself, Pip," returned Joe,
strengthening his former mixture of argumentation, confidence, and
politeness, "that it were the wish of your own hart." I saw the
idea suddenly break upon him that he would adapt his epitaph to the
occasion, before he went on to say "And there weren't no objection
on your part, and Pip it were the great wish of your heart"
It was quite in vain for me to endeavour to make him sensible that
he ought to speak to Miss Havisham. The more I made faces and
gestures to him to do it, the more confidential, argumentative, and
polite, he persisted in being to Me.
"Have you brought his indentures with you?" asked Miss Havisham.
"Well, Pip, you know," replied Joe, as if that were a little
unreasonable, "you yourself see me put 'em in my 'at, and therefore
you know as they are here." With which he took them out, and gave
them, not to Miss Havisham, but to me. I am afraid I was ashamed of
the dear good fellow  I know I was ashamed of him  when I saw
that Estella stood at the back of Miss Havisham's chair, and that
her eyes laughed mischievously. I took the indentures out of his
hand and gave them to Miss Havisham.
"You expected," said Miss Havisham, as she looked them over, "no
premium with the boy?"
"Joe" I remonstrated for he made no reply at all. "Why don't you
answer"
"Pip," returned Joe, cutting me short as if he were hurt, "which I
meantersay that were not a question requiring a answer betwixt
yourself and me, and which you know the answer to be full well No.
You know it to be No, Pip, and wherefore should I say it?"
Miss Havisham glanced at him as if she understood what he really
was, better than I had thought possible, seeing what he was there
and took up a little bag from the table beside her.
"Pip has earned a premium here," she said, "and here it is. There
are fiveandtwenty guineas in this bag. Give it to your master,
Pip."
As if he were absolutely out of his mind with the wonder awakened
in him by her strange figure and the strange room, Joe, even at
this pass, persisted in addressing me.
"This is wery liberal on your part, Pip," said Joe, "and it is as
such received and grateful welcome, though never looked for, far
nor near nor nowheres. And now, old chap," said Joe, conveying to
me a sensation, first of burning and then of freezing, for I felt
as if that familiar expression were applied to Miss Havisham "and
now, old chap, may we do our duty May you and me do our duty, both
on us by one and another, and by them which your liberal present 
have  conweyed  to be  for the satisfaction of mind  of  them
as never" here Joe showed that he felt he had fallen into
frightful difficulties, until he triumphantly rescued himself with
the words, "and from myself far be it" These words had such a
round and convincing sound for him that he said them twice.
"Goodbye, Pip" said Miss Havisham. "Let them out, Estella."
"Am I to come again, Miss Havisham?" I asked.
"No. Gargery is your master now. Gargery One word"
Thus calling him back as I went out of the door, I heard her say to
Joe, in a distinct emphatic voice, "The boy has been a good boy
here, and that is his reward. Of course, as an honest man, you will
expect no other and no more."
How Joe got out of the room, I have never been able to determine
but, I know that when he did get out he was steadily proceeding
upstairs instead of coming down, and was deaf to all remonstrances
until I went after him and laid hold of him. In another minute we
were outside the gate, and it was locked, and Estella was gone.
When we stood in the daylight alone again, Joe backed up against a
wall, and said to me, "Astonishing" And there he remained so long,
saying "Astonishing" at intervals, so often, that I began to think
his senses were never coming back. At length he prolonged his
remark into "Pip, I do assure you this is asTONishing" and so, by
degrees, became conversational and able to walk away.
I have reason to think that Joe's intellects were brightened by the
encounter they had passed through, and that on our way to
Pumblechook's he invented a subtle and deep design. My reason is to
be found in what took place in Mr. Pumblechook's parlour where, on
our presenting ourselves, my sister sat in conference with that
detested seedsman.
"Well?" cried my sister, addressing us both at once. "And what's
happened to you? I wonder you condescend to come back to such poor
society as this, I am sure I do"
"Miss Havisham," said Joe, with a fixed look at me, like an effort
of remembrance, "made it wery partick'ler that we should give her 
were it compliments or respects, Pip?"
"Compliments," I said.
"Which that were my own belief," answered Joe  "her compliments to
Mrs. J. Gargery"
"Much good they'll do me" observed my sister but rather gratified
too.
"And wishing," pursued Joe, with another fixed look at me, like
another effort of remembrance, "that the state of Miss Havisham's
elth were sitch as would have  allowed, were it, Pip?"
"Of her having the pleasure," I added.
"Of ladies' company," said Joe. And drew a long breath.
"Well" cried my sister, with a mollified glance at Mr. Pumblechook.
"She might have had the politeness to send that message at first,
but it's better late than never. And what did she give young
Rantipole here?"
"She giv' him," said Joe, "nothing."
Mrs. Joe was going to break out, but Joe went on.
"What she giv'," said Joe, "she giv' to his friends. 'And by his
friends,' were her explanation, 'I mean into the hands of his
sister Mrs. J. Gargery.' Them were her words 'Mrs. J. Gargery.' She
mayn't have know'd," added Joe, with an appearance of reflection,
"whether it were Joe, or Jorge."
My sister looked at Pumblechook who smoothed the elbows of his
wooden armchair, and nodded at her and at the fire, as if he had
known all about it beforehand.
"And how much have you got?" asked my sister, laughing. Positively,
laughing
"What would present company say to ten pound?" demanded Joe.
"They'd say," returned my sister, curtly, "pretty well. Not too
much, but pretty well."
"It's more than that, then," said Joe.
That fearful Impostor, Pumblechook, immediately nodded, and said,
as he rubbed the arms of his chair "It's more than that, Mum."
"Why, you don't mean to say" began my sister.
"Yes I do, Mum," said Pumblechook "but wait a bit. Go on, Joseph.
Good in you Go on"
"What would present company say," proceeded Joe, "to twenty pound?"
"Handsome would be the word," returned my sister.
"Well, then," said Joe, "It's more than twenty pound."
That abject hypocrite, Pumblechook, nodded again, and said, with a
patronizing laugh, "It's more than that, Mum. Good again Follow her
up, Joseph"
"Then to make an end of it," said Joe, delightedly handing the bag
to my sister "it's fiveandtwenty pound."
"It's fiveandtwenty pound, Mum," echoed that basest of swindlers,
Pumblechook, rising to shake hands with her "and it's no more than
your merits as I said when my opinion was asked, and I wish you
joy of the money"
If the villain had stopped here, his case would have been
sufficiently awful, but he blackened his guilt by proceeding to
take me into custody, with a right of patronage that left all his
former criminality far behind.
"Now you see, Joseph and wife," said Pumblechook, as he took me by
the arm above the elbow, "I am one of them that always go right
through with what they've begun. This boy must be bound, out of
hand. That's my way. Bound out of hand."
"Goodness knows, Uncle Pumblechook," said my sister grasping the
money, "we're deeply beholden to you."
"Never mind me, Mum," returned that diabolical cornchandler. "A
pleasure's a pleasure, all the world over. But this boy, you know
we must have him bound. I said I'd see to it  to tell you the
truth."
The Justices were sitting in the Town Hall near at hand, and we at
once went over to have me bound apprentice to Joe in the
Magisterial presence. I say, we went over, but I was pushed over by
Pumblechook, exactly as if I had that moment picked a pocket or
fired a rick indeed, it was the general impression in Court that I
had been taken redhanded, for, as Pumblechook shoved me before him
through the crowd, I heard some people say, "What's he done?" and
others, "He's a young 'un, too, but looks bad, don't he?" One person
of mild and benevolent aspect even gave me a tract ornamented with
a woodcut of a malevolent young man fitted up with a perfect
sausageshop of fetters, and entitled, TO BE READ IN MY CELL.
The Hall was a queer place, I thought, with higher pews in it than
a church  and with people hanging over the pews looking on  and
with mighty Justices one with a powdered head leaning back in
chairs, with folded arms, or taking snuff, or going to sleep, or
writing, or reading the newspapers  and with some shining black
portraits on the walls, which my unartistic eye regarded as a
composition of hardbake and stickingplaister. Here, in a corner,
my indentures were duly signed and attested, and I was "bound" Mr.
Pumblechook holding me all the while as if we had looked in on our
way to the scaffold, to have those little preliminaries disposed
of.
When we had come out again, and had got rid of the boys who had
been put into great spirits by the expectation of seeing me
publicly tortured, and who were much disappointed to find that my
friends were merely rallying round me, we went back to
Pumblechook's. And there my sister became so excited by the
twentyfive guineas, that nothing would serve her but we must have
a dinner out of that windfall, at the Blue Boar, and that
Pumblechook must go over in his chaisecart, and bring the Hubbles
and Mr. Wopsle.
It was agreed to be done and a most melancholy day I passed. For,
it inscrutably appeared to stand to reason, in the minds of the
whole company, that I was an excrescence on the entertainment. And
to make it worse, they all asked me from time to time  in short,
whenever they had nothing else to do  why I didn't enjoy myself.
And what could I possibly do then, but say I was enjoying myself 
when I wasn't?
However, they were grown up and had their own way, and they made
the most of it. That swindling Pumblechook, exalted into the
beneficent contriver of the whole occasion, actually took the top
of the table and, when he addressed them on the subject of my
being bound, and had fiendishly congratulated them on my being
liable to imprisonment if I played at cards, drank strong liquors,
kept late hours or bad company, or indulged in other vagaries which
the form of my indentures appeared to contemplate as next to
inevitable, he placed me standing on a chair beside him, to
illustrate his remarks.
My only other remembrances of the great festival are, That they
wouldn't let me go to sleep, but whenever they saw me dropping off,
woke me up and told me to enjoy myself. That, rather late in the
evening Mr. Wopsle gave us Collins's ode, and threw his bloodstain'd
sword in thunder down, with such effect, that a waiter came in and
said, "The Commercials underneath sent up their compliments, and it
wasn't the Tumblers' Arms." That, they were all in excellent
spirits on the road home, and sang O Lady Fair Mr. Wopsle taking
the bass, and asserting with a tremendously strong voice in reply
to the inquisitive bore who leads that piece of music in a most
impertinent manner, by wanting to know all about everybody's
private affairs that he was the man with his white locks flowing,
and that he was upon the whole the weakest pilgrim going.
Finally, I remember that when I got into my little bedroom I was
truly wretched, and had a strong conviction on me that I should
never like Joe's trade. I had liked it once, but once was not now.
Chapter 
It is a most miserable thing to feel ashamed of home. There may be
black ingratitude in the thing, and the punishment may be
retributive and well deserved but, that it is a miserable thing, I
can testify.
Home had never been a very pleasant place to me, because of my
sister's temper. But, Joe had sanctified it, and I had believed in
it. I had believed in the best parlour as a most elegant saloon I
had believed in the front door, as a mysterious portal of the
Temple of State whose solemn opening was attended with a sacrifice
of roast fowls I had believed in the kitchen as a chaste though
not magnificent apartment I had believed in the forge as the
glowing road to manhood and independence. Within a single year, all
this was changed. Now, it was all coarse and common, and I would
not have had Miss Havisham and Estella see it on any account.
How much of my ungracious condition of mind may have been my own
fault, how much Miss Havisham's, how much my sister's, is now of no
moment to me or to any one. The change was made in me the thing
was done. Well or ill done, excusably or inexcusably, it was done.
Once, it had seemed to me that when I should at last roll up my
shirtsleeves and go into the forge, Joe's 'prentice, I should be
distinguished and happy. Now the reality was in my hold, I only
felt that I was dusty with the dust of small coal, and that I had a
weight upon my daily remembrance to which the anvil was a feather.
There have been occasions in my later life I suppose as in most
lives when I have felt for a time as if a thick curtain had fallen
on all its interest and romance, to shut me out from anything save
dull endurance any more. Never has that curtain dropped so heavy
and blank, as when my way in life lay stretched out straight before
me through the newlyentered road of apprenticeship to Joe.
I remember that at a later period of my "time," I used to stand
about the churchyard on Sunday evenings when night was falling,
comparing my own perspective with the windy marsh view, and making
out some likeness between them by thinking how flat and low both
were, and how on both there came an unknown way and a dark mist and
then the sea. I was quite as dejected on the first workingday of
my apprenticeship as in that aftertime but I am glad to know that
I never breathed a murmur to Joe while my indentures lasted. It is
about the only thing I am glad to know of myself in that
connection.
For, though it includes what I proceed to add, all the merit of
what I proceed to add was Joe's. It was not because I was faithful,
but because Joe was faithful, that I never ran away and went for a
soldier or a sailor. It was not because I had a strong sense of the
virtue of industry, but because Joe had a strong sense of the
virtue of industry, that I worked with tolerable zeal against the
grain. It is not possible to know how far the influence of any
amiable honesthearted dutydoing man flies out into the world but
it is very possible to know how it has touched one's self in going
by, and I know right well, that any good that intermixed itself
with my apprenticeship came of plain contented Joe, and not of
restlessly aspiring discontented me.
What I wanted, who can say? How can I say, when I never knew? What
I dreaded was, that in some unlucky hour I, being at my grimiest
and commonest, should lift up my eyes and see Estella looking in at
one of the wooden windows of the forge. I was haunted by the fear
that she would, sooner or later, find me out, with a black face and
hands, doing the coarsest part of my work, and would exult over me
and despise me. Often after dark, when I was pulling the bellows
for Joe, and we were singing Old Clem, and when the thought how we
used to sing it at Miss Havisham's would seem to show me Estella's
face in the fire, with her pretty hair fluttering in the wind and
her eyes scorning me,  often at such a time I would look towards
those panels of black night in the wall which the wooden windows
then were, and would fancy that I saw her just drawing her face
away, and would believe that she had come at last.
After that, when we went in to supper, the place and the meal would
have a more homely look than ever, and I would feel more ashamed of
home than ever, in my own ungracious breast.
Chapter 
As I was getting too big for Mr. Wopsle's greataunt's room, my
education under that preposterous female terminated. Not, however,
until Biddy had imparted to me everything she knew, from the little
catalogue of prices, to a comic song she had once bought for a
halfpenny. Although the only coherent part of the latter piece of
literature were the opening lines,
When I went to Lunnon town sirs, Too rul loo rul Too rul loo rul
Wasn't I done very brown sirs? Too rul loo rul Too rul loo rul
still, in my desire to be wiser, I got this composition by heart
with the utmost gravity nor do I recollect that I questioned its
merit, except that I thought as I still do the amount of Too rul
somewhat in excess of the poetry. In my hunger for information, I
made proposals to Mr. Wopsle to bestow some intellectual crumbs upon
me with which he kindly complied. As it turned out, however, that
he only wanted me for a dramatic layfigure, to be contradicted and
embraced and wept over and bullied and clutched and stabbed and
knocked about in a variety of ways, I soon declined that course of
instruction though not until Mr. Wopsle in his poetic fury had
severely mauled me.
Whatever I acquired, I tried to impart to Joe. This statement
sounds so well, that I cannot in my conscience let it pass
unexplained. I wanted to make Joe less ignorant and common, that he
might be worthier of my society and less open to Estella's
reproach.
The old Battery out on the marshes was our place of study, and a
broken slate and a short piece of slate pencil were our educational
implements to which Joe always added a pipe of tobacco. I never
knew Joe to remember anything from one Sunday to another, or to
acquire, under my tuition, any piece of information whatever. Yet
he would smoke his pipe at the Battery with a far more sagacious
air than anywhere else  even with a learned air  as if he
considered himself to be advancing immensely. Dear fellow, I hope
he did.
It was pleasant and quiet, out there with the sails on the river
passing beyond the earthwork, and sometimes, when the tide was low,
looking as if they belonged to sunken ships that were still sailing
on at the bottom of the water. Whenever I watched the vessels
standing out to sea with their white sails spread, I somehow
thought of Miss Havisham and Estella and whenever the light struck
aslant, afar off, upon a cloud or sail or green hillside or
waterline, it was just the same.  Miss Havisham and Estella and
the strange house and the strange life appeared to have something
to do with everything that was picturesque.
One Sunday when Joe, greatly enjoying his pipe, had so plumed
himself on being "most awful dull," that I had given him up for the
day, I lay on the earthwork for some time with my chin on my hand,
descrying traces of Miss Havisham and Estella all over the
prospect, in the sky and in the water, until at last I resolved to
mention a thought concerning them that had been much in my head.
"Joe," said I "don't you think I ought to make Miss Havisham a
visit?"
"Well, Pip," returned Joe, slowly considering. "What for?"
"What for, Joe? What is any visit made for?"
"There is some wisits, p'r'aps," said Joe, "as for ever remains
open to the question, Pip. But in regard to wisiting Miss Havisham.
She might think you wanted something  expected something of her."
"Don't you think I might say that I did not, Joe?"
"You might, old chap," said Joe. "And she might credit it.
Similarly she mightn't."
Joe felt, as I did, that he had made a point there, and he pulled
hard at his pipe to keep himself from weakening it by repetition.
"You see, Pip," Joe pursued, as soon as he was past that danger,
"Miss Havisham done the handsome thing by you. When Miss Havisham
done the handsome thing by you, she called me back to say to me as
that were all."
"Yes, Joe. I heard her."
"ALL," Joe repeated, very emphatically.
"Yes, Joe. I tell you, I heard her."
"Which I meantersay, Pip, it might be that her meaning were  Make
a end on it  As you was  Me to the North, and you to the South
Keep in sunders"
I had thought of that too, and it was very far from comforting to
me to find that he had thought of it for it seemed to render it
more probable.
"But, Joe."
"Yes, old chap."
"Here am I, getting on in the first year of my time, and, since the
day of my being bound, I have never thanked Miss Havisham, or asked
after her, or shown that I remember her."
"That's true, Pip and unless you was to turn her out a set of
shoes all four round  and which I meantersay as even a set of
shoes all four round might not be acceptable as a present, in a
total wacancy of hoofs"
"I don't mean that sort of remembrance, Joe I don't mean a
present."
But Joe had got the idea of a present in his head and must harp
upon it. "Or even," said he, "if you was helped to knocking her up
a new chain for the front door  or say a gross or two of
sharkheaded screws for general use  or some light fancy article,
such as a toastingfork when she took her muffins  or a gridiron
when she took a sprat or such like"
"I don't mean any present at all, Joe," I interposed.
"Well," said Joe, still harping on it as though I had particularly
pressed it, "if I was yourself, Pip, I wouldn't. No, I would not.
For what's a doorchain when she's got one always up? And
sharkheaders is open to misrepresentations. And if it was a
toastingfork, you'd go into brass and do yourself no credit. And
the oncommonest workman can't show himself oncommon in a gridiron 
for a gridiron IS a gridiron," said Joe, steadfastly impressing it
upon me, as if he were endeavouring to rouse me from a fixed
delusion, "and you may haim at what you like, but a gridiron it
will come out, either by your leave or again your leave, and you
can't help yourself"
"My dear Joe," I cried, in desperation, taking hold of his coat,
"don't go on in that way. I never thought of making Miss Havisham
any present."
"No, Pip," Joe assented, as if he had been contending for that, all
along "and what I say to you is, you are right, Pip."
"Yes, Joe but what I wanted to say, was, that as we are rather
slack just now, if you would give me a halfholiday tomorrow, I
think I would go uptown and make a call on Miss Est  Havisham."
"Which her name," said Joe, gravely, "ain't Estavisham, Pip, unless
she have been rechris'ened."
"I know, Joe, I know. It was a slip of mine. What do you think of
it, Joe?"
In brief, Joe thought that if I thought well of it, he thought well
of it. But, he was particular in stipulating that if I were not
received with cordiality, or if I were not encouraged to repeat my
visit as a visit which had no ulterior object but was simply one of
gratitude for a favour received, then this experimental trip should
have no successor. By these conditions I promised to abide.
Now, Joe kept a journeyman at weekly wages whose name was Orlick.
He pretended that his Christian name was Dolge  a clear
impossibility  but he was a fellow of that obstinate disposition
that I believe him to have been the prey of no delusion in this
particular, but wilfully to have imposed that name upon the village
as an affront to its understanding. He was a broadshouldered
looselimbed swarthy fellow of great strength, never in a hurry,
and always slouching. He never even seemed to come to his work on
purpose, but would slouch in as if by mere accident and when he
went to the Jolly Bargemen to eat his dinner, or went away at
night, he would slouch out, like Cain or the Wandering Jew, as if
he had no idea where he was going and no intention of ever coming
back. He lodged at a sluicekeeper's out on the marshes, and on
working days would come slouching from his hermitage, with his
hands in his pockets and his dinner loosely tied in a bundle round
his neck and dangling on his back. On Sundays he mostly lay all day
on the sluicegates, or stood against ricks and barns. He always
slouched, locomotively, with his eyes on the ground and, when
accosted or otherwise required to raise them, he looked up in a
half resentful, half puzzled way, as though the only thought he
ever had, was, that it was rather an odd and injurious fact that he
should never be thinking.
This morose journeyman had no liking for me. When I was very small
and timid, he gave me to understand that the Devil lived in a black
corner of the forge, and that he knew the fiend very well also
that it was necessary to make up the fire, once in seven years,
with a live boy, and that I might consider myself fuel. When I
became Joe's 'prentice, Orlick was perhaps confirmed in some
suspicion that I should displace him howbeit, he liked me still
less. Not that he ever said anything, or did anything, openly
importing hostility I only noticed that he always beat his sparks
in my direction, and that whenever I sang Old Clem, he came in out
of time.
Dolge Orlick was at work and present, next day, when I reminded Joe
of my halfholiday. He said nothing at the moment, for he and Joe
had just got a piece of hot iron between them, and I was at the
bellows but byandby he said, leaning on his hammer
"Now, master Sure you're not agoing to favour only one of us. If
Young Pip has a halfholiday, do as much for Old Orlick." I suppose
he was about fiveandtwenty, but he usually spoke of himself as an
ancient person.
"Why, what'll you do with a halfholiday, if you get it?" said Joe.
"What'll I do with it What'll he do with it? I'll do as much with
it as him," said Orlick.
"As to Pip, he's going uptown," said Joe.
"Well then, as to Old Orlick, he's agoing uptown," retorted that
worthy. "Two can go uptown. Tan't only one wot can go uptown.
"Don't lose your temper," said Joe.
"Shall if I like," growled Orlick. "Some and their uptowning Now,
master Come. No favouring in this shop. Be a man"
The master refusing to entertain the subject until the journeyman
was in a better temper, Orlick plunged at the furnace, drew out a
redhot bar, made at me with it as if he were going to run it
through my body, whisked it round my head, laid it on the anvil,
hammered it out  as if it were I, I thought, and the sparks were
my spirting blood  and finally said, when he had hammered himself
hot and the iron cold, and he again leaned on his hammer
"Now, master"
"Are you all right now?" demanded Joe.
"Ah I am all right," said gruff Old Orlick.
"Then, as in general you stick to your work as well as most men,"
said Joe, "let it be a halfholiday for all."
My sister had been standing silent in the yard, within hearing 
she was a most unscrupulous spy and listener  and she instantly
looked in at one of the windows.
"Like you, you fool" said she to Joe, "giving holidays to great
idle hulkers like that. You are a rich man, upon my life, to waste
wages in that way. I wish I was his master"
"You'd be everybody's master, if you durst," retorted Orlick, with
an illfavoured grin.
"Let her alone," said Joe.
"I'd be a match for all noodles and all rogues," returned my
sister, beginning to work herself into a mighty rage. "And I
couldn't be a match for the noodles, without being a match for your
master, who's the dunderheaded king of the noodles. And I couldn't
be a match for the rogues, without being a match for you, who are
the blackestlooking and the worst rogue between this and France.
Now"
"You're a foul shrew, Mother Gargery," growled the journeyman.
"If that makes a judge of rogues, you ought to be a good'un."
"Let her alone, will you?" said Joe.
"What did you say?" cried my sister, beginning to scream. "What did
you say? What did that fellow Orlick say to me, Pip? What did he
call me, with my husband standing by? O O O" Each of these
exclamations was a shriek and I must remark of my sister, what is
equally true of all the violent women I have ever seen, that
passion was no excuse for her, because it is undeniable that
instead of lapsing into passion, she consciously and deliberately
took extraordinary pains to force herself into it, and became
blindly furious by regular stages "what was the name he gave me
before the base man who swore to defend me? O Hold me O"
"Ahhh" growled the journeyman, between his teeth, "I'd hold you,
if you was my wife. I'd hold you under the pump, and choke it out
of you."
"I tell you, let her alone," said Joe.
"Oh To hear him" cried my sister, with a clap of her hands and a
scream together  which was her next stage. "To hear the names he's
giving me That Orlick In my own house Me, a married woman With
my husband standing by O O" Here my sister, after a fit of
clappings and screamings, beat her hands upon her bosom and upon
her knees, and threw her cap off, and pulled her hair down  which
were the last stages on her road to frenzy. Being by this time a
perfect Fury and a complete success, she made a dash at the door,
which I had fortunately locked.
What could the wretched Joe do now, after his disregarded
parenthetical interruptions, but stand up to his journeyman, and
ask him what he meant by interfering betwixt himself and Mrs. Joe
and further whether he was man enough to come on? Old Orlick felt
that the situation admitted of nothing less than coming on, and was
on his defence straightway so, without so much as pulling off
their singed and burnt aprons, they went at one another, like two
giants. But, if any man in that neighbourhood could stand up long
against Joe, I never saw the man. Orlick, as if he had been of no
more account than the pale young gentleman, was very soon among the
coaldust, and in no hurry to come out of it. Then, Joe unlocked
the door and picked up my sister, who had dropped insensible at the
window but who had seen the fight first, I think, and who was
carried into the house and laid down, and who was recommended to
revive, and would do nothing but struggle and clench her hands in
Joe's hair. Then, came that singular calm and silence which succeed
all uproars and then, with the vague sensation which I have always
connected with such a lull  namely, that it was Sunday, and
somebody was dead  I went upstairs to dress myself.
When I came down again, I found Joe and Orlick sweeping up, without
any other traces of discomposure than a slit in one of Orlick's
nostrils, which was neither expressive nor ornamental. A pot of
beer had appeared from the Jolly Bargemen, and they were sharing it
by turns in a peaceable manner. The lull had a sedative and
philosophical influence on Joe, who followed me out into the road
to say, as a parting observation that might do me good, "On the
Rampage, Pip, and off the Rampage, Pip  such is Life"
With what absurd emotions for, we think the feelings that are very
serious in a man quite comical in a boy I found myself again going
to Miss Havisham's, matters little here. Nor, how I passed and
repassed the gate many times before I could make up my mind to
ring. Nor, how I debated whether I should go away without ringing
nor, how I should undoubtedly have gone, if my time had been my
own, to come back.
Miss Sarah Pocket came to the gate. No Estella.
"How, then? You here again?" said Miss Pocket. "What do you want?"
When I said that I only came to see how Miss Havisham was, Sarah
evidently deliberated whether or no she should send me about my
business. But, unwilling to hazard the responsibility, she let me
in, and presently brought the sharp message that I was to "come
up."
Everything was unchanged, and Miss Havisham was alone.
"Well?" said she, fixing her eyes upon me. "I hope you want
nothing? You'll get nothing."
"No, indeed, Miss Havisham. I only wanted you to know that I am
doing very well in my apprenticeship, and am always much obliged to
you."
"There, there" with the old restless fingers. "Come now and then
come on your birthday.  Ay" she cried suddenly, turning herself
and her chair towards me, "You are looking round for Estella? Hey?"
I had been looking round  in fact, for Estella  and I stammered
that I hoped she was well.
"Abroad," said Miss Havisham "educating for a lady far out of
reach prettier than ever admired by all who see her. Do you feel
that you have lost her?"
There was such a malignant enjoyment in her utterance of the last
words, and she broke into such a disagreeable laugh, that I was at
a loss what to say. She spared me the trouble of considering, by
dismissing me. When the gate was closed upon me by Sarah of the
walnutshell countenance, I felt more than ever dissatisfied with
my home and with my trade and with everything and that was all I
took by that motion.
As I was loitering along the Highstreet, looking in disconsolately
at the shop windows, and thinking what I would buy if I were a
gentleman, who should come out of the bookshop but Mr. Wopsle. Mr
Wopsle had in his hand the affecting tragedy of George Barnwell, in
which he had that moment invested sixpence, with the view of
heaping every word of it on the head of Pumblechook, with whom he
was going to drink tea. No sooner did he see me, than he appeared
to consider that a special Providence had put a 'prentice in his
way to be read at and he laid hold of me, and insisted on my
accompanying him to the Pumblechookian parlour. As I knew it would
be miserable at home, and as the nights were dark and the way was
dreary, and almost any companionship on the road was better than
none, I made no great resistance consequently, we turned into
Pumblechook's just as the street and the shops were lighting up.
As I never assisted at any other representation of George Barnwell,
I don't know how long it may usually take but I know very well
that it took until halfpast nine o' clock that night, and that
when Mr. Wopsle got into Newgate, I thought he never would go to the
scaffold, he became so much slower than at any former period of his
disgraceful career. I thought it a little too much that he should
complain of being cut short in his flower after all, as if he had
not been running to seed, leaf after leaf, ever since his course
began. This, however, was a mere question of length and
wearisomeness. What stung me, was the identification of the whole
affair with my unoffending self. When Barnwell began to go wrong, I
declare that I felt positively apologetic, Pumblechook's indignant
stare so taxed me with it. Wopsle, too, took pains to present me in
the worst light. At once ferocious and maudlin, I was made to
murder my uncle with no extenuating circumstances whatever
Millwood put me down in argument, on every occasion it became
sheer monomania in my master's daughter to care a button for me
and all I can say for my gasping and procrastinating conduct on the
fatal morning, is, that it was worthy of the general feebleness of
my character. Even after I was happily hanged and Wopsle had closed
the book, Pumblechook sat staring at me, and shaking his head, and
saying, "Take warning, boy, take warning" as if it were a
wellknown fact that I contemplated murdering a near relation,
provided I could only induce one to have the weakness to become my
benefactor.
It was a very dark night when it was all over, and when I set out
with Mr. Wopsle on the walk home. Beyond town, we found a heavy
mist out, and it fell wet and thick. The turnpike lamp was a blur,
quite out of the lamp's usual place apparently, and its rays looked
solid substance on the fog. We were noticing this, and saying how
that the mist rose with a change of wind from a certain quarter of
our marshes, when we came upon a man, slouching under the lee of
the turnpike house.
"Halloa" we said, stopping. "Orlick, there?"
"Ah" he answered, slouching out. "I was standing by, a minute, on
the chance of company."
"You are late," I remarked.
Orlick not unnaturally answered, "Well? And you're late."
"We have been," said Mr. Wopsle, exalted with his late performance,
"we have been indulging, Mr. Orlick, in an intellectual evening."
Old Orlick growled, as if he had nothing to say about that, and we
all went on together. I asked him presently whether he had been
spending his halfholiday up and down town?
"Yes," said he, "all of it. I come in behind yourself. I didn't see
you, but I must have been pretty close behind you. Bythebye, the
guns is going again."
"At the Hulks?" said I.
"Ay There's some of the birds flown from the cages. The guns have
been going since dark, about. You'll hear one presently."
In effect, we had not walked many yards further, when the
wellremembered boom came towards us, deadened by the mist, and
heavily rolled away along the low grounds by the river, as if it
were pursuing and threatening the fugitives.
"A good night for cutting off in," said Orlick. "We'd be puzzled
how to bring down a jailbird on the wing, tonight."
The subject was a suggestive one to me, and I thought about it in
silence. Mr. Wopsle, as the illrequited uncle of the evening's
tragedy, fell to meditating aloud in his garden at Camberwell.
Orlick, with his hands in his pockets, slouched heavily at my side.
It was very dark, very wet, very muddy, and so we splashed along.
Now and then, the sound of the signal cannon broke upon us again,
and again rolled sulkily along the course of the river. I kept
myself to myself and my thoughts. Mr. Wopsle died amiably at
Camberwell, and exceedingly game on Bosworth Field, and in the
greatest agonies at Glastonbury. Orlick sometimes growled, "Beat it
out, beat it out  Old Clem With a clink for the stout  Old
Clem" I thought he had been drinking, but he was not drunk.
Thus, we came to the village. The way by which we approached it,
took us past the Three Jolly Bargemen, which we were surprised to
find  it being eleven o'clock  in a state of commotion, with the
door wide open, and unwonted lights that had been hastily caught up
and put down, scattered about. Mr. Wopsle dropped in to ask what was
the matter surmising that a convict had been taken, but came
running out in a great hurry.
"There's something wrong," said he, without stopping, "up at your
place, Pip. Run all"
"What is it?" I asked, keeping up with him. So did Orlick, at my
side.
"I can't quite understand. The house seems to have been violently
entered when Joe Gargery was out. Supposed by convicts. Somebody
has been attacked and hurt."
We were running too fast to admit of more being said, and we made
no stop until we got into our kitchen. It was full of people the
whole village was there, or in the yard and there was a surgeon,
and there was Joe, and there was a group of women, all on the floor
in the midst of the kitchen. The unemployed bystanders drew back
when they saw me, and so I became aware of my sister  lying
without sense or movement on the bare boards where she had been
knocked down by a tremendous blow on the back of the head, dealt by
some unknown hand when her face was turned towards the fire 
destined never to be on the Rampage again, while she was the wife
of Joe.
Chapter 
With my head full of George Barnwell, I was at first disposed to
believe that I must have had some hand in the attack upon my
sister, or at all events that as her near relation, popularly known
to be under obligations to her, I was a more legitimate object of
suspicion than any one else. But when, in the clearer light of next
morning, I began to reconsider the matter and to hear it discussed
around me on all sides, I took another view of the case, which was
more reasonable.
Joe had been at the Three Jolly Bargemen, smoking his pipe, from a
quarter after eight o'clock to a quarter before ten. While he was
there, my sister had been seen standing at the kitchen door, and
had exchanged Good Night with a farmlabourer going home. The man
could not be more particular as to the time at which he saw her he
got into dense confusion when he tried to be, than that it must
have been before nine. When Joe went home at five minutes before
ten, he found her struck down on the floor, and promptly called in
assistance. The fire had not then burnt unusually low, nor was the
snuff of the candle very long the candle, however, had been blown
out.
Nothing had been taken away from any part of the house. Neither,
beyond the blowing out of the candle  which stood on a table
between the door and my sister, and was behind her when she stood
facing the fire and was struck  was there any disarrangement of
the kitchen, excepting such as she herself had made, in falling and
bleeding. But, there was one remarkable piece of evidence on the
spot. She had been struck with something blunt and heavy, on the
head and spine after the blows were dealt, something heavy had
been thrown down at her with considerable violence, as she lay on
her face. And on the ground beside her, when Joe picked her up, was
a convict's legiron which had been filed asunder.
Now, Joe, examining this iron with a smith's eye, declared it to
have been filed asunder some time ago. The hue and cry going off to
the Hulks, and people coming thence to examine the iron, Joe's
opinion was corroborated. They did not undertake to say when it had
left the prisonships to which it undoubtedly had once belonged
but they claimed to know for certain that that particular manacle
had not been worn by either of the two convicts who had escaped last
night. Further, one of those two was already retaken, and had not
freed himself of his iron.
Knowing what I knew, I set up an inference of my own here. I
believed the iron to be my convict's iron  the iron I had seen and
heard him filing at, on the marshes  but my mind did not accuse
him of having put it to its latest use. For, I believed one of two
other persons to have become possessed of it, and to have turned it
to this cruel account. Either Orlick, or the strange man who had
shown me the file.
Now, as to Orlick he had gone to town exactly as he told us when
we picked him up at the turnpike, he had been seen about town all
the evening, he had been in divers companies in several
publichouses, and he had come back with myself and Mr. Wopsle.
There was nothing against him, save the quarrel and my sister had
quarrelled with him, and with everybody else about her, ten
thousand times. As to the strange man if he had come back for his
two banknotes there could have been no dispute about them, because
my sister was fully prepared to restore them. Besides, there had
been no altercation the assailant had come in so silently and
suddenly, that she had been felled before she could look round.
It was horrible to think that I had provided the weapon, however
undesignedly, but I could hardly think otherwise. I suffered
unspeakable trouble while I considered and reconsidered whether I
should at last dissolve that spell of my childhood, and tell Joe
all the story. For months afterwards, I every day settled the
question finally in the negative, and reopened and reargued it next
morning. The contention came, after all, to this  the secret was
such an old one now, had so grown into me and become a part of
myself, that I could not tear it away. In addition to the dread
that, having led up to so much mischief, it would be now more
likely than ever to alienate Joe from me if he believed it, I had a
further restraining dread that he would not believe it, but would
assort it with the fabulous dogs and vealcutlets as a monstrous
invention. However, I temporized with myself, of course  for, was
I not wavering between right and wrong, when the thing is always
done?  and resolved to make a full disclosure if I should see any
such new occasion as a new chance of helping in the discovery of
the assailant.
The Constables, and the Bow Street men from London  for, this
happened in the days of the extinct redwaistcoated police  were
about the house for a week or two, and did pretty much what I have
heard and read of like authorities doing in other such cases. They
took up several obviously wrong people, and they ran their heads
very hard against wrong ideas, and persisted in trying to fit the
circumstances to the ideas, instead of trying to extract ideas from
the circumstances. Also, they stood about the door of the Jolly
Bargemen, with knowing and reserved looks that filled the whole
neighbourhood with admiration and they had a mysterious manner of
taking their drink, that was almost as good as taking the culprit.
But not quite, for they never did it.
Long after these constitutional powers had dispersed, my sister lay
very ill in bed. Her sight was disturbed, so that she saw objects
multiplied, and grasped at visionary teacups and wineglasses
instead of the realities her hearing was greatly impaired her
memory also and her speech was unintelligible. When, at last, she
came round so far as to be helped downstairs, it was still
necessary to keep my slate always by her, that she might indicate
in writing what she could not indicate in speech. As she was very
bad handwriting apart a more than indifferent speller, and as Joe
was a more than indifferent reader, extraordinary complications
arose between them, which I was always called in to solve. The
administration of mutton instead of medicine, the substitution of
Tea for Joe, and the baker for bacon, were among the mildest of my
own mistakes.
However, her temper was greatly improved, and she was patient. A
tremulous uncertainty of the action of all her limbs soon became a
part of her regular state, and afterwards, at intervals of two or
three months, she would often put her hands to her head, and would
then remain for about a week at a time in some gloomy aberration of
mind. We were at a loss to find a suitable attendant for her, until
a circumstance happened conveniently to relieve us. Mr. Wopsle's
greataunt conquered a confirmed habit of living into which she had
fallen, and Biddy became a part of our establishment.
It may have been about a month after my sister's reappearance in
the kitchen, when Biddy came to us with a small speckled box
containing the whole of her worldly effects, and became a blessing
to the household. Above all, she was a blessing to Joe, for the
dear old fellow was sadly cut up by the constant contemplation of
the wreck of his wife, and had been accustomed, while attending on
her of an evening, to turn to me every now and then and say, with
his blue eyes moistened, "Such a fine figure of a woman as she once
were, Pip" Biddy instantly taking the cleverest charge of her as
though she had studied her from infancy, Joe became able in some
sort to appreciate the greater quiet of his life, and to get down
to the Jolly Bargemen now and then for a change that did him good.
It was characteristic of the police people that they had all more
or less suspected poor Joe though he never knew it, and that they
had to a man concurred in regarding him as one of the deepest
spirits they had ever encountered.
Biddy's first triumph in her new office, was to solve a difficulty
that had completely vanquished me. I had tried hard at it, but had
made nothing of it. Thus it was
Again and again and again, my sister had traced upon the slate, a
character that looked like a curious T, and then with the utmost
eagerness had called our attention to it as something she
particularly wanted. I had in vain tried everything producible that
began with a T, from tar to toast and tub. At length it had come
into my head that the sign looked like a hammer, and on my lustily
calling that word in my sister's ear, she had begun to hammer on
the table and had expressed a qualified assent. Thereupon, I had
brought in all our hammers, one after another, but without avail.
Then I bethought me of a crutch, the shape being much the same, and
I borrowed one in the village, and displayed it to my sister with
considerable confidence. But she shook her head to that extent when
she was shown it, that we were terrified lest in her weak and
shattered state she should dislocate her neck.
When my sister found that Biddy was very quick to understand her,
this mysterious sign reappeared on the slate. Biddy looked
thoughtfully at it, heard my explanation, looked thoughtfully at my
sister, looked thoughtfully at Joe who was always represented on
the slate by his initial letter, and ran into the forge, followed
by Joe and me.
"Why, of course" cried Biddy, with an exultant face. "Don't you
see? It's him"
Orlick, without a doubt She had lost his name, and could only
signify him by his hammer. We told him why we wanted him to come
into the kitchen, and he slowly laid down his hammer, wiped his
brow with his arm, took another wipe at it with his apron, and came
slouching out, with a curious loose vagabond bend in the knees that
strongly distinguished him.
I confess that I expected to see my sister denounce him, and that I
was disappointed by the different result. She manifested the
greatest anxiety to be on good terms with him, was evidently much
pleased by his being at length produced, and motioned that she
would have him given something to drink. She watched his
countenance as if she were particularly wishful to be assured that
he took kindly to his reception, she showed every possible desire
to conciliate him, and there was an air of humble propitiation in
all she did, such as I have seen pervade the bearing of a child
towards a hard master. After that day, a day rarely passed without
her drawing the hammer on her slate, and without Orlick's slouching
in and standing doggedly before her, as if he knew no more than I
did what to make of it.
Chapter 
I now fell into a regular routine of apprenticeship life, which was
varied, beyond the limits of the village and the marshes, by no
more remarkable circumstance than the arrival of my birthday and my
paying another visit to Miss Havisham. I found Miss Sarah Pocket
still on duty at the gate, I found Miss Havisham just as I had left
her, and she spoke of Estella in the very same way, if not in the
very same words. The interview lasted but a few minutes, and she
gave me a guinea when I was going, and told me to come again on my
next birthday. I may mention at once that this became an annual
custom. I tried to decline taking the guinea on the first occasion,
but with no better effect than causing her to ask me very angrily,
if I expected more? Then, and after that, I took it.
So unchanging was the dull old house, the yellow light in the
darkened room, the faded spectre in the chair by the dressingtable
glass, that I felt as if the stopping of the clocks had stopped
Time in that mysterious place, and, while I and everything else
outside it grew older, it stood still. Daylight never entered the
house as to my thoughts and remembrances of it, any more than as to
the actual fact. It bewildered me, and under its influence I
continued at heart to hate my trade and to be ashamed of home.
Imperceptibly I became conscious of a change in Biddy, however. Her
shoes came up at the heel, her hair grew bright and neat, her hands
were always clean. She was not beautiful  she was common, and
could not be like Estella  but she was pleasant and wholesome and
sweettempered. She had not been with us more than a year I
remember her being newly out of mourning at the time it struck me,
when I observed to myself one evening that she had curiously
thoughtful and attentive eyes eyes that were very pretty and very
good.
It came of my lifting up my own eyes from a task I was poring at 
writing some passages from a book, to improve myself in two ways at
once by a sort of stratagem  and seeing Biddy observant of what I
was about. I laid down my pen, and Biddy stopped in her needlework
without laying it down.
"Biddy," said I, "how do you manage it? Either I am very stupid, or
you are very clever."
"What is it that I manage? I don't know," returned Biddy, smiling.
She managed our whole domestic life, and wonderfully too but I did
not mean that, though that made what I did mean, more surprising.
"How do you manage, Biddy," said I, "to learn everything that I
learn, and always to keep up with me?" I was beginning to be rather
vain of my knowledge, for I spent my birthday guineas on it, and
set aside the greater part of my pocketmoney for similar
investment though I have no doubt, now, that the little I knew was
extremely dear at the price.
"I might as well ask you," said Biddy, "how you manage?"
"No because when I come in from the forge of a night, any one can
see me turning to at it. But you never turn to at it, Biddy."
"I suppose I must catch it  like a cough," said Biddy, quietly
and went on with her sewing.
Pursuing my idea as I leaned back in my wooden chair and looked at
Biddy sewing away with her head on one side, I began to think her
rather an extraordinary girl. For, I called to mind now, that she
was equally accomplished in the terms of our trade, and the names
of our different sorts of work, and our various tools. In short,
whatever I knew, Biddy knew. Theoretically, she was already as good
a blacksmith as I, or better.
"You are one of those, Biddy," said I, "who make the most of every
chance. You never had a chance before you came here, and see how
improved you are"
Biddy looked at me for an instant, and went on with her sewing. "I
was your first teacher though wasn't I?" said she, as she sewed.
"Biddy" I exclaimed, in amazement. "Why, you are crying"
"No I am not," said Biddy, looking up and laughing. "What put that
in your head?"
What could have put it in my head, but the glistening of a tear as
it dropped on her work? I sat silent, recalling what a drudge she
had been until Mr. Wopsle's greataunt successfully overcame that
bad habit of living, so highly desirable to be got rid of by some
people. I recalled the hopeless circumstances by which she had been
surrounded in the miserable little shop and the miserable little
noisy evening school, with that miserable old bundle of
incompetence always to be dragged and shouldered. I reflected that
even in those untoward times there must have been latent in Biddy
what was now developing, for, in my first uneasiness and discontent
I had turned to her for help, as a matter of course. Biddy sat
quietly sewing, shedding no more tears, and while I looked at her
and thought about it all, it occurred to me that perhaps I had not
been sufficiently grateful to Biddy. I might have been too
reserved, and should have patronized her more though I did not use
that precise word in my meditations, with my confidence.
"Yes, Biddy," I observed, when I had done turning it over, "you
were my first teacher, and that at a time when we little thought of
ever being together like this, in this kitchen."
"Ah, poor thing" replied Biddy. It was like her
selfforgetfulness, to transfer the remark to my sister, and to get
up and be busy about her, making her more comfortable "that's
sadly true"
"Well" said I, "we must talk together a little more, as we used to
do. And I must consult you a little more, as I used to do. Let us
have a quiet walk on the marshes next Sunday, Biddy, and a long
chat."
My sister was never left alone now but Joe more than readily
undertook the care of her on that Sunday afternoon, and Biddy and I
went out together. It was summertime, and lovely weather. When we
had passed the village and the church and the churchyard, and were
out on the marshes and began to see the sails of the ships as they
sailed on, I began to combine Miss Havisham and Estella with the
prospect, in my usual way. When we came to the riverside and sat
down on the bank, with the water rippling at our feet, making it
all more quiet than it would have been without that sound, I
resolved that it was a good time and place for the admission of
Biddy into my inner confidence.
"Biddy," said I, after binding her to secrecy, "I want to be a
gentleman."
"Oh, I wouldn't, if I was you" she returned. "I don't think it
would answer."
"Biddy," said I, with some severity, "I have particular reasons for
wanting to be a gentleman."
"You know best, Pip but don't you think you are happier as you
are?"
"Biddy," I exclaimed, impatiently, "I am not at all happy as I am.
I am disgusted with my calling and with my life. I have never taken
to either, since I was bound. Don't be absurd."
"Was I absurd?" said Biddy, quietly raising her eyebrows "I am
sorry for that I didn't mean to be. I only want you to do well,
and to be comfortable."
"Well then, understand once for all that I never shall or can be
comfortable  or anything but miserable  there, Biddy  unless I
can lead a very different sort of life from the life I lead now."
"That's a pity" said Biddy, shaking her head with a sorrowful air.
Now, I too had so often thought it a pity, that, in the singular
kind of quarrel with myself which I was always carrying on, I was
half inclined to shed tears of vexation and distress when Biddy
gave utterance to her sentiment and my own. I told her she was
right, and I knew it was much to be regretted, but still it was not
to be helped.
"If I could have settled down," I said to Biddy, plucking up the
short grass within reach, much as I had once upon a time pulled my
feelings out of my hair and kicked them into the brewery wall "if
I could have settled down and been but half as fond of the forge as
I was when I was little, I know it would have been much better for
me. You and I and Joe would have wanted nothing then, and Joe and I
would perhaps have gone partners when I was out of my time, and I
might even have grown up to keep company with you, and we might
have sat on this very bank on a fine Sunday, quite different
people. I should have been good enough for you shouldn't I,
Biddy?"
Biddy sighed as she looked at the ships sailing on, and returned
for answer, "Yes I am not overparticular." It scarcely sounded
flattering, but I knew she meant well.
"Instead of that," said I, plucking up more grass and chewing a
blade or two, "see how I am going on. Dissatisfied, and
uncomfortable, and  what would it signify to me, being coarse and
common, if nobody had told me so"
Biddy turned her face suddenly towards mine, and looked far more
attentively at me than she had looked at the sailing ships.
"It was neither a very true nor a very polite thing to say," she
remarked, directing her eyes to the ships again. "Who said it?"
I was disconcerted, for I had broken away without quite seeing
where I was going to. It was not to be shuffled off now, however,
and I answered, "The beautiful young lady at Miss Havisham's, and
she's more beautiful than anybody ever was, and I admire her
dreadfully, and I want to be a gentleman on her account." Having
made this lunatic confession, I began to throw my tornup grass
into the river, as if I had some thoughts of following it.
"Do you want to be a gentleman, to spite her or to gain her over?"
Biddy quietly asked me, after a pause.
"I don't know," I moodily answered.
"Because, if it is to spite her," Biddy pursued, "I should think 
but you know best  that might be better and more independently
done by caring nothing for her words. And if it is to gain her
over, I should think  but you know best  she was not worth
gaining over."
Exactly what I myself had thought, many times. Exactly what was
perfectly manifest to me at the moment. But how could I, a poor
dazed village lad, avoid that wonderful inconsistency into which
the best and wisest of men fall every day?
"It may be all quite true," said I to Biddy, "but I admire her
dreadfully."
In short, I turned over on my face when I came to that, and got a
good grasp on the hair on each side of my head, and wrenched it
well. All the while knowing the madness of my heart to be so very
mad and misplaced, that I was quite conscious it would have served
my face right, if I had lifted it up by my hair, and knocked it
against the pebbles as a punishment for belonging to such an idiot.
Biddy was the wisest of girls, and she tried to reason no more with
me. She put her hand, which was a comfortable hand though roughened
by work, upon my hands, one after another, and gently took them out
of my hair. Then she softly patted my shoulder in a soothing way,
while with my face upon my sleeve I cried a little  exactly as I
had done in the brewery yard  and felt vaguely convinced that I
was very much illused by somebody, or by everybody I can't say
which.
"I am glad of one thing," said Biddy, "and that is, that you have
felt you could give me your confidence, Pip. And I am glad of
another thing, and that is, that of course you know you may depend
upon my keeping it and always so far deserving it. If your first
teacher dear such a poor one, and so much in need of being taught
herself had been your teacher at the present time, she thinks she
knows what lesson she would set. But It would be a hard one to
learn, and you have got beyond her, and it's of no use now." So,
with a quiet sigh for me, Biddy rose from the bank, and said, with
a fresh and pleasant change of voice, "Shall we walk a little
further, or go home?"
"Biddy," I cried, getting up, putting my arm round her neck, and
giving her a kiss, "I shall always tell you everything."
"Till you're a gentleman," said Biddy.
"You know I never shall be, so that's always. Not that I have any
occasion to tell you anything, for you know everything I know  as
I told you at home the other night."
"Ah" said Biddy, quite in a whisper, as she looked away at the
ships. And then repeated, with her former pleasant change "shall
we walk a little further, or go home?"
I said to Biddy we would walk a little further, and we did so, and
the summer afternoon toned down into the summer evening, and it was
very beautiful. I began to consider whether I was not more
naturally and wholesomely situated, after all, in these
circumstances, than playing beggar my neighbour by candlelight in
the room with the stopped clocks, and being despised by Estella. I
thought it would be very good for me if I could get her out of my
head, with all the rest of those remembrances and fancies, and
could go to work determined to relish what I had to do, and stick
to it, and make the best of it. I asked myself the question whether
I did not surely know that if Estella were beside me at that moment
instead of Biddy, she would make me miserable? I was obliged to
admit that I did know it for a certainty, and I said to myself,
"Pip, what a fool you are"
We talked a good deal as we walked, and all that Biddy said seemed
right. Biddy was never insulting, or capricious, or Biddy today
and somebody else tomorrow she would have derived only pain, and
no pleasure, from giving me pain she would far rather have wounded
her own breast than mine. How could it be, then, that I did not
like her much the better of the two?
"Biddy," said I, when we were walking homeward, "I wish you could
put me right."
"I wish I could" said Biddy.
"If I could only get myself to fall in love with you  you don't
mind my speaking so openly to such an old acquaintance?"
"Oh dear, not at all" said Biddy. "Don't mind me."
"If I could only get myself to do it, that would be the thing for
me."
"But you never will, you see," said Biddy.
It did not appear quite so unlikely to me that evening, as it would
have done if we had discussed it a few hours before. I therefore
observed I was not quite sure of that. But Biddy said she was, and
she said it decisively. In my heart I believed her to be right and
yet I took it rather ill, too, that she should be so positive on
the point.
When we came near the churchyard, we had to cross an embankment,
and get over a stile near a sluice gate. There started up, from the
gate, or from the rushes, or from the ooze which was quite in his
stagnant way, Old Orlick.
"Halloa" he growled, "where are you two going?"
"Where should we be going, but home?"
"Well then," said he, "I'm jiggered if I don't see you home"
This penalty of being jiggered was a favourite supposititious case
of his. He attached no definite meaning to the word that I am aware
of, but used it, like his own pretended Christian name, to affront
mankind, and convey an idea of something savagely damaging. When I
was younger, I had had a general belief that if he had jiggered me
personally, he would have done it with a sharp and twisted hook.
Biddy was much against his going with us, and said to me in a
whisper, "Don't let him come I don't like him." As I did not like
him either, I took the liberty of saying that we thanked him, but
we didn't want seeing home. He received that piece of information
with a yell of laughter, and dropped back, but came slouching after
us at a little distance.
Curious to know whether Biddy suspected him of having had a hand in
that murderous attack of which my sister had never been able to
give any account, I asked her why she did not like him.
"Oh" she replied, glancing over her shoulder as he slouched after
us, "because I  I am afraid he likes me."
"Did he ever tell you he liked you?" I asked, indignantly.
"No," said Biddy, glancing over her shoulder again, "he never told
me so but he dances at me, whenever he can catch my eye."
However novel and peculiar this testimony of attachment, I did not
doubt the accuracy of the interpretation. I was very hot indeed
upon Old Orlick's daring to admire her as hot as if it were an
outrage on myself.
"But it makes no difference to you, you know," said Biddy, calmly.
"No, Biddy, it makes no difference to me only I don't like it I
don't approve of it."
"Nor I neither," said Biddy. "Though that makes no difference to
you."
"Exactly," said I "but I must tell you I should have no opinion of
you, Biddy, if he danced at you with your own consent."
I kept an eye on Orlick after that night, and, whenever
circumstances were favourable to his dancing at Biddy, got before
him, to obscure that demonstration. He had struck root in Joe's
establishment, by reason of my sister's sudden fancy for him, or I
should have tried to get him dismissed. He quite understood and
reciprocated my good intentions, as I had reason to know
thereafter.
And now, because my mind was not confused enough before, I
complicated its confusion fifty thousandfold, by having states and
seasons when I was clear that Biddy was immeasurably better than
Estella, and that the plain honest working life to which I was
born, had nothing in it to be ashamed of, but offered me sufficient
means of selfrespect and happiness. At those times, I would decide
conclusively that my disaffection to dear old Joe and the forge,
was gone, and that I was growing up in a fair way to be partners
with Joe and to keep company with Biddy  when all in a moment some
confounding remembrance of the Havisham days would fall upon me,
like a destructive missile, and scatter my wits again. Scattered
wits take a long time picking up and often, before I had got them
well together, they would be dispersed in all directions by one
stray thought, that perhaps after all Miss Havisham was going to
make my fortune when my time was out.
If my time had run out, it would have left me still at the height
of my perplexities, I dare say. It never did run out, however, but
was brought to a premature end, as I proceed to relate.
Chapter 
It was in the fourth year of my apprenticeship to Joe, and it was a
Saturday night. There was a group assembled round the fire at the
Three Jolly Bargemen, attentive to Mr. Wopsle as he read the
newspaper aloud. Of that group I was one.
A highly popular murder had been committed, and Mr. Wopsle was
imbrued in blood to the eyebrows. He gloated over every abhorrent
adjective in the description, and identified himself with every
witness at the Inquest. He faintly moaned, "I am done for," as the
victim, and he barbarously bellowed, "I'll serve you out," as the
murderer. He gave the medical testimony, in pointed imitation of
our local practitioner and he piped and shook, as the aged
turnpikekeeper who had heard blows, to an extent so very paralytic
as to suggest a doubt regarding the mental competency of that
witness. The coroner, in Mr. Wopsle's hands, became Timon of Athens
the beadle, Coriolanus. He enjoyed himself thoroughly, and we all
enjoyed ourselves, and were delightfully comfortable. In this cozy
state of mind we came to the verdict Wilful Murder.
Then, and not sooner, I became aware of a strange gentleman leaning
over the back of the settle opposite me, looking on. There was an
expression of contempt on his face, and he bit the side of a great
forefinger as he watched the group of faces.
"Well" said the stranger to Mr. Wopsle, when the reading was done,
"you have settled it all to your own satisfaction, I have no
doubt?"
Everybody started and looked up, as if it were the murderer. He
looked at everybody coldly and sarcastically.
"Guilty, of course?" said he. "Out with it. Come"
"Sir," returned Mr. Wopsle, "without having the honour of your
acquaintance, I do say Guilty." Upon this, we all took courage to
unite in a confirmatory murmur.
"I know you do," said the stranger "I knew you would. I told you
so. But now I'll ask you a question. Do you know, or do you not
know, that the law of England supposes every man to be innocent,
until he is proved  proved  to be guilty?"
"Sir," Mr. Wopsle began to reply, "as an Englishman myself, I"
"Come" said the stranger, biting his forefinger at him. "Don't
evade the question. Either you know it, or you don't know it. Which
is it to be?"
He stood with his head on one side and himself on one side, in a
bullying interrogative manner, and he threw his forefinger at Mr.
Wopsle  as it were to mark him out  before biting it again.
"Now" said he. "Do you know it, or don't you know it?"
"Certainly I know it," replied Mr. Wopsle.
"Certainly you know it. Then why didn't you say so at first? Now,
I'll ask you another question" taking possession of Mr. Wopsle, as
if he had a right to him. "Do you know that none of these witnesses
have yet been crossexamined?"
Mr. Wopsle was beginning, "I can only say" when the stranger
stopped him.
"What? You won't answer the question, yes or no? Now, I'll try you
again." Throwing his finger at him again. "Attend to me. Are you
aware, or are you not aware, that none of these witnesses have yet
been crossexamined? Come, I only want one word from you. Yes, or
no?"
Mr. Wopsle hesitated, and we all began to conceive rather a poor
opinion of him.
"Come" said the stranger, "I'll help you. You don't deserve help,
but I'll help you. Look at that paper you hold in your hand. What
is it?"
"What is it?" repeated Mr. Wopsle, eyeing it, much at a loss.
"Is it," pursued the stranger in his most sarcastic and suspicious
manner, "the printed paper you have just been reading from?"
"Undoubtedly."
"Undoubtedly. Now, turn to that paper, and tell me whether it
distinctly states that the prisoner expressly said that his legal
advisers instructed him altogether to reserve his defence?"
"I read that just now," Mr. Wopsle pleaded.
"Never mind what you read just now, sir I don't ask you what you
read just now. You may read the Lord's Prayer backwards, if you
like  and, perhaps, have done it before today. Turn to the paper.
No, no, no my friend not to the top of the column you know better
than that to the bottom, to the bottom." We all began to think Mr.
Wopsle full of subterfuge. "Well? Have you found it?"
"Here it is," said Mr. Wopsle.
"Now, follow that passage with your eye, and tell me whether it
distinctly states that the prisoner expressly said that he was
instructed by his legal advisers wholly to reserve his defence?
Come Do you make that of it?"
Mr. Wopsle answered, "Those are not the exact words."
"Not the exact words" repeated the gentleman, bitterly. "Is that
the exact substance?"
"Yes," said Mr. Wopsle.
"Yes," repeated the stranger, looking round at the rest of the
company with his right hand extended towards the witness, Wopsle.
"And now I ask you what you say to the conscience of that man who,
with that passage before his eyes, can lay his head upon his pillow
after having pronounced a fellowcreature guilty, unheard?"
We all began to suspect that Mr. Wopsle was not the man we had
thought him, and that he was beginning to be found out.
"And that same man, remember," pursued the gentleman, throwing his
finger at Mr. Wopsle heavily "that same man might be summoned as a
juryman upon this very trial, and, having thus deeply committed
himself, might return to the bosom of his family and lay his head
upon his pillow, after deliberately swearing that he would well and
truly try the issue joined between Our Sovereign Lord the King and
the prisoner at the bar, and would a true verdict give according to
the evidence, so help him God"
We were all deeply persuaded that the unfortunate Wopsle had gone
too far, and had better stop in his reckless career while there was
yet time.
The strange gentleman, with an air of authority not to be disputed,
and with a manner expressive of knowing something secret about
every one of us that would effectually do for each individual if he
chose to disclose it, left the back of the settle, and came into
the space between the two settles, in front of the fire, where he
remained standing his left hand in his pocket, and he biting the
forefinger of his right.
"From information I have received," said he, looking round at us as
we all quailed before him, "I have reason to believe there is a
blacksmith among you, by name Joseph  or Joe  Gargery. Which is
the man?"
"Here is the man," said Joe.
The strange gentleman beckoned him out of his place, and Joe went.
"You have an apprentice," pursued the stranger, "commonly known as
Pip? Is he here?"
"I am here" I cried.
The stranger did not recognize me, but I recognized him as the
gentleman I had met on the stairs, on the occasion of my second
visit to Miss Havisham. I had known him the moment I saw him
looking over the settle, and now that I stood confronting him with
his hand upon my shoulder, I checked off again in detail, his large
head, his dark complexion, his deepset eyes, his bushy black
eyebrows, his large watchchain, his strong black dots of beard and
whisker, and even the smell of scented soap on his great hand.
"I wish to have a private conference with you two," said he, when
he had surveyed me at his leisure. "It will take a little time.
Perhaps we had better go to your place of residence. I prefer not
to anticipate my communication here you will impart as much or as
little of it as you please to your friends afterwards I have
nothing to do with that."
Amidst a wondering silence, we three walked out of the Jolly
Bargemen, and in a wondering silence walked home. While going
along, the strange gentleman occasionally looked at me, and
occasionally bit the side of his finger. As we neared home, Joe
vaguely acknowledging the occasion as an impressive and ceremonious
one, went on ahead to open the front door. Our conference was held
in the state parlour, which was feebly lighted by one candle.
It began with the strange gentleman's sitting down at the table,
drawing the candle to him, and looking over some entries in his
pocketbook. He then put up the pocketbook and set the candle a
little aside after peering round it into the darkness at Joe and
me, to ascertain which was which.
"My name," he said, "is Jaggers, and I am a lawyer in London. I am
pretty well known. I have unusual business to transact with you,
and I commence by explaining that it is not of my originating. If
my advice had been asked, I should not have been here. It was not
asked, and you see me here. What I have to do as the confidential
agent of another, I do. No less, no more."
Finding that he could not see us very well from where he sat, he
got up, and threw one leg over the back of a chair and leaned upon
it thus having one foot on the seat of the chair, and one foot on
the ground.
"Now, Joseph Gargery, I am the bearer of an offer to relieve you of
this young fellow your apprentice. You would not object to cancel
his indentures, at his request and for his good? You would want
nothing for so doing?"
"Lord forbid that I should want anything for not standing in Pip's
way," said Joe, staring.
"Lord forbidding is pious, but not to the purpose," returned Mr
Jaggers. "The question is, Would you want anything? Do you want
anything?"
"The answer is," returned Joe, sternly, "No."
I thought Mr. Jaggers glanced at Joe, as if he considered him a fool
for his disinterestedness. But I was too much bewildered between
breathless curiosity and surprise, to be sure of it.
"Very well," said Mr. Jaggers. "Recollect the admission you have
made, and don't try to go from it presently."
"Who's agoing to try?" retorted Joe.
"I don't say anybody is. Do you keep a dog?"
"Yes, I do keep a dog."
"Bear in mind then, that Brag is a good dog, but Holdfast is a
better. Bear that in mind, will you?" repeated Mr. Jaggers, shutting
his eyes and nodding his head at Joe, as if he were forgiving him
something. "Now, I return to this young fellow. And the
communication I have got to make is, that he has great
expectations."
Joe and I gasped, and looked at one another.
"I am instructed to communicate to him," said Mr. Jaggers, throwing
his finger at me sideways, "that he will come into a handsome
property. Further, that it is the desire of the present possessor
of that property, that he be immediately removed from his present
sphere of life and from this place, and be brought up as a
gentleman  in a word, as a young fellow of great expectations."
My dream was out my wild fancy was surpassed by sober reality
Miss Havisham was going to make my fortune on a grand scale.
"Now, Mr. Pip," pursued the lawyer, "I address the rest of what I
have to say, to you. You are to understand, first, that it is the
request of the person from whom I take my instructions, that you
always bear the name of Pip. You will have no objection, I dare
say, to your great expectations being encumbered with that easy
condition. But if you have any objection, this is the time to
mention it."
My heart was beating so fast, and there was such a singing in my
ears, that I could scarcely stammer I had no objection.
"I should think not Now you are to understand, secondly, Mr. Pip,
that the name of the person who is your liberal benefactor remains
a profound secret, until the person chooses to reveal it. I am
empowered to mention that it is the intention of the person to
reveal it at first hand by word of mouth to yourself. When or where
that intention may be carried out, I cannot say no one can say. It
may be years hence. Now, you are distinctly to understand that you
are most positively prohibited from making any inquiry on this
head, or any allusion or reference, however distant, to any
individual whomsoever as the individual, in all the communications
you may have with me. If you have a suspicion in your own breast,
keep that suspicion in your own breast. It is not the least to the
purpose what the reasons of this prohibition are they may be the
strongest and gravest reasons, or they may be mere whim. This is
not for you to inquire into. The condition is laid down. Your
acceptance of it, and your observance of it as binding, is the only
remaining condition that I am charged with, by the person from whom
I take my instructions, and for whom I am not otherwise
responsible. That person is the person from whom you derive your
expectations, and the secret is solely held by that person and by
me. Again, not a very difficult condition with which to encumber
such a rise in fortune but if you have any objection to it, this
is the time to mention it. Speak out."
Once more, I stammered with difficulty that I had no objection.
"I should think not Now, Mr. Pip, I have done with stipulations."
Though he called me Mr. Pip, and began rather to make up to me, he
still could not get rid of a certain air of bullying suspicion and
even now he occasionally shut his eyes and threw his finger at me
while he spoke, as much as to express that he knew all kinds of
things to my disparagement, if he only chose to mention them. "We
come next, to mere details of arrangement. You must know that,
although I have used the term "expectations" more than once, you
are not endowed with expectations only. There is already lodged in
my hands, a sum of money amply sufficient for your suitable
education and maintenance. You will please consider me your
guardian. Oh" for I was going to thank him, "I tell you at once, I
am paid for my services, or I shouldn't render them. It is
considered that you must be better educated, in accordance with
your altered position, and that you will be alive to the importance
and necessity of at once entering on that advantage."
I said I had always longed for it.
"Never mind what you have always longed for, Mr. Pip," he retorted
"keep to the record. If you long for it now, that's enough. Am I
answered that you are ready to be placed at once, under some proper
tutor? Is that it?"
I stammered yes, that was it.
"Good. Now, your inclinations are to be consulted. I don't think
that wise, mind, but it's my trust. Have you ever heard of any
tutor whom you would prefer to another?"
I had never heard of any tutor but Biddy and Mr. Wopsle's greataunt
so, I replied in the negative.
"There is a certain tutor, of whom I have some knowledge, who I
think might suit the purpose," said Mr. Jaggers. "I don't recommend
him, observe because I never recommend anybody. The gentleman I
speak of, is one Mr. Matthew Pocket."
Ah I caught at the name directly. Miss Havisham's relation. The
Matthew whom Mr. and Mrs. Camilla had spoken of. The Matthew whose
place was to be at Miss Havisham's head, when she lay dead, in her
bride's dress on the bride's table.
"You know the name?" said Mr. Jaggers, looking shrewdly at me, and
then shutting up his eyes while he waited for my answer.
My answer was, that I had heard of the name.
"Oh" said he. "You have heard of the name. But the question is,
what do you say of it?"
I said, or tried to say, that I was much obliged to him for his
recommendation
"No, my young friend" he interrupted, shaking his great head very
slowly. "Recollect yourself"
Not recollecting myself, I began again that I was much obliged to
him for his recommendation
"No, my young friend," he interrupted, shaking his head and
frowning and smiling both at once "no, no, no it's very well
done, but it won't do you are too young to fix me with it.
Recommendation is not the word, Mr. Pip. Try another."
Correcting myself, I said that I was much obliged to him for his
mention of Mr. Matthew Pocket
"That's more like it" cried Mr. Jaggers.
And I added, I would gladly try that gentleman.
"Good. You had better try him in his own house. The way shall be
prepared for you, and you can see his son first, who is in London.
When will you come to London?"
I said glancing at Joe, who stood looking on, motionless, that I
supposed I could come directly.
"First," said Mr. Jaggers, "you should have some new clothes to come
in, and they should not be working clothes. Say this day week.
You'll want some money. Shall I leave you twenty guineas?"
He produced a long purse, with the greatest coolness, and counted
them out on the table and pushed them over to me. This was the
first time he had taken his leg from the chair. He sat astride of
the chair when he had pushed the money over, and sat swinging his
purse and eyeing Joe.
"Well, Joseph Gargery? You look dumbfoundered?"
"I am" said Joe, in a very decided manner.
"It was understood that you wanted nothing for yourself, remember?"
"It were understood," said Joe. "And it are understood. And it ever
will be similar according."
"But what," said Mr. Jaggers, swinging his purse, "what if it was in
my instructions to make you a present, as compensation?"
"As compensation what for?" Joe demanded.
"For the loss of his services."
Joe laid his hand upon my shoulder with the touch of a woman. I
have often thought him since, like the steamhammer, that can crush
a man or pat an eggshell, in his combination of strength with
gentleness. "Pip is that hearty welcome," said Joe, "to go free
with his services, to honour and fortun', as no words can tell him.
But if you think as Money can make compensation to me for the loss
of the little child  what come to the forge  and ever the best of
friends"
O dear good Joe, whom I was so ready to leave and so unthankful to,
I see you again, with your muscular blacksmith's arm before your
eyes, and your broad chest heaving, and your voice dying away. O
dear good faithful tender Joe, I feel the loving tremble of your
hand upon my arm, as solemnly this day as if it had been the rustle
of an angel's wing
But I encouraged Joe at the time. I was lost in the mazes of my
future fortunes, and could not retrace the bypaths we had trodden
together. I begged Joe to be comforted, for as he said we had
ever been the best of friends, and as I said we ever would be so.
Joe scooped his eyes with his disengaged wrist, as if he were bent
on gouging himself, but said not another word.
Mr. Jaggers had looked on at this, as one who recognized in Joe the
village idiot, and in me his keeper. When it was over, he said,
weighing in his hand the purse he had ceased to swing
"Now, Joseph Gargery, I warn you this is your last chance. No half
measures with me. If you mean to take a present that I have it in
charge to make you, speak out, and you shall have it. If on the
contrary you mean to say" Here, to his great amazement, he was
stopped by Joe's suddenly working round him with every
demonstration of a fell pugilistic purpose.
"Which I meantersay," cried Joe, "that if you come into my place
bullbaiting and badgering me, come out Which I meantersay as sech
if you're a man, come on Which I meantersay that what I say, I
meantersay and stand or fall by"
I drew Joe away, and he immediately became placable merely stating
to me, in an obliging manner and as a polite expostulatory notice
to any one whom it might happen to concern, that he were not a
going to be bullbaited and badgered in his own place. Mr. Jaggers
had risen when Joe demonstrated, and had backed near the door.
Without evincing any inclination to come in again, he there
delivered his valedictory remarks. They were these
"Well, Mr. Pip, I think the sooner you leave here  as you are to be
a gentleman  the better. Let it stand for this day week, and you
shall receive my printed address in the meantime. You can take a
hackneycoach at the stagecoach office in London, and come
straight to me. Understand, that I express no opinion, one way or
other, on the trust I undertake. I am paid for undertaking it, and
I do so. Now, understand that, finally. Understand that"
He was throwing his finger at both of us, and I think would have
gone on, but for his seeming to think Joe dangerous, and going off.
Something came into my head which induced me to run after him, as
he was going down to the Jolly Bargemen where he had left a hired
carriage.
"I beg your pardon, Mr. Jaggers."
"Halloa" said he, facing round, "what's the matter?"
"I wish to be quite right, Mr. Jaggers, and to keep to your
directions so I thought I had better ask. Would there be any
objection to my taking leave of any one I know, about here, before
I go away?"
"No," said he, looking as if he hardly understood me.
"I don't mean in the village only, but uptown?"
"No," said he. "No objection."
I thanked him and ran home again, and there I found that Joe had
already locked the front door and vacated the state parlour, and
was seated by the kitchen fire with a hand on each knee, gazing
intently at the burning coals. I too sat down before the fire and
gazed at the coals, and nothing was said for a long time.
My sister was in her cushioned chair in her corner, and Biddy sat
at her needlework before the fire, and Joe sat next Biddy, and I
sat next Joe in the corner opposite my sister. The more I looked
into the glowing coals, the more incapable I became of looking at
Joe the longer the silence lasted, the more unable I felt to
speak.
At length I got out, "Joe, have you told Biddy?"
"No, Pip," returned Joe, still looking at the fire, and holding his
knees tight, as if he had private information that they intended to
make off somewhere, "which I left it to yourself, Pip."
"I would rather you told, Joe."
"Pip's a gentleman of fortun' then," said Joe, "and God bless him
in it"
Biddy dropped her work, and looked at me. Joe held his knees and
looked at me. I looked at both of them. After a pause, they both
heartily congratulated me but there was a certain touch of sadness
in their congratulations, that I rather resented.
I took it upon myself to impress Biddy and through Biddy, Joe
with the grave obligation I considered my friends under, to know
nothing and say nothing about the maker of my fortune. It would all
come out in good time, I observed, and in the meanwhile nothing was
to be said, save that I had come into great expectations from a
mysterious patron. Biddy nodded her head thoughtfully at the fire
as she took up her work again, and said she would be very
particular and Joe, still detaining his knees, said, "Ay, ay, I'll
be ekervally partickler, Pip" and then they congratulated me
again, and went on to express so much wonder at the notion of my
being a gentleman, that I didn't half like it.
Infinite pains were then taken by Biddy to convey to my sister some
idea of what had happened. To the best of my belief, those efforts
entirely failed. She laughed and nodded her head a great many
times, and even repeated after Biddy, the words "Pip" and
"Property." But I doubt if they had more meaning in them than an
election cry, and I cannot suggest a darker picture of her state of
mind.
I never could have believed it without experience, but as Joe and
Biddy became more at their cheerful ease again, I became quite
gloomy. Dissatisfied with my fortune, of course I could not be but
it is possible that I may have been, without quite knowing it,
dissatisfied with myself.
Anyhow, I sat with my elbow on my knee and my face upon my hand,
looking into the fire, as those two talked about my going away, and
about what they should do without me, and all that. And whenever I
caught one of them looking at me, though never so pleasantly and
they often looked at me  particularly Biddy, I felt offended as
if they were expressing some mistrust of me. Though Heaven knows
they never did by word or sign.
At those times I would get up and look out at the door for, our
kitchen door opened at once upon the night, and stood open on
summer evenings to air the room. The very stars to which I then
raised my eyes, I am afraid I took to be but poor and humble stars
for glittering on the rustic objects among which I had passed my
life.
"Saturday night," said I, when we sat at our supper of
breadandcheese and beer. "Five more days, and then the day before
the day They'll soon go."
"Yes, Pip," observed Joe, whose voice sounded hollow in his beer
mug. "They'll soon go."
"Soon, soon go," said Biddy.
"I have been thinking, Joe, that when I go down town on Monday, and
order my new clothes, I shall tell the tailor that I'll come and
put them on there, or that I'll have them sent to Mr. Pumblechook's.
It would be very disagreeable to be stared at by all the people
here."
"Mr. and Mrs. Hubble might like to see you in your new genteel figure
too, Pip," said Joe, industriously cutting his bread, with his
cheese on it, in the palm of his left hand, and glancing at my
untasted supper as if he thought of the time when we used to
compare slices. "So might Wopsle. And the Jolly Bargemen might take
it as a compliment."
"That's just what I don't want, Joe. They would make such a
business of it  such a coarse and common business  that I
couldn't bear myself."
"Ah, that indeed, Pip" said Joe. "If you couldn't abear
yourself"
Biddy asked me here, as she sat holding my sister's plate, "Have
you thought about when you'll show yourself to Mr. Gargery, and your
sister, and me? You will show yourself to us won't you?"
"Biddy," I returned with some resentment, "you are so exceedingly
quick that it's difficult to keep up with you."
"She always were quick," observed Joe.
"If you had waited another moment, Biddy, you would have heard me
say that I shall bring my clothes here in a bundle one evening 
most likely on the evening before I go away."
Biddy said no more. Handsomely forgiving her, I soon exchanged an
affectionate goodnight with her and Joe, and went up to bed. When
I got into my little room, I sat down and took a long look at it,
as a mean little room that I should soon be parted from and raised
above, for ever, It was furnished with fresh young remembrances
too, and even at the same moment I fell into much the same confused
division of mind between it and the better rooms to which I was
going, as I had been in so often between the forge and Miss
Havisham's, and Biddy and Estella.
The sun had been shining brightly all day on the roof of my attic,
and the room was warm. As I put the window open and stood looking
out, I saw Joe come slowly forth at the dark door below, and take a
turn or two in the air and then I saw Biddy come, and bring him a
pipe and light it for him. He never smoked so late, and it seemed
to hint to me that he wanted comforting, for some reason or other.
He presently stood at the door immediately beneath me, smoking his
pipe, and Biddy stood there too, quietly talking to him, and I knew
that they talked of me, for I heard my name mentioned in an
endearing tone by both of them more than once. I would not have
listened for more, if I could have heard more so, I drew away from
the window, and sat down in my one chair by the bedside, feeling it
very sorrowful and strange that this first night of my bright
fortunes should be the loneliest I had ever known.
Looking towards the open window, I saw light wreaths from Joe's
pipe floating there, and I fancied it was like a blessing from Joe
not obtruded on me or paraded before me, but pervading the air we
shared together. I put my light out, and crept into bed and it was
an uneasy bed now, and I never slept the old sound sleep in it any
more.
Chapter 
Morning made a considerable difference in my general prospect of
Life, and brightened it so much that it scarcely seemed the same.
What lay heaviest on my mind, was, the consideration that six days
intervened between me and the day of departure for, I could not
divest myself of a misgiving that something might happen to London
in the meanwhile, and that, when I got there, it would be either
greatly deteriorated or clean gone.
Joe and Biddy were very sympathetic and pleasant when I spoke of
our approaching separation but they only referred to it when I
did. After breakfast, Joe brought out my indentures from the press
in the best parlour, and we put them in the fire, and I felt that I
was free. With all the novelty of my emancipation on me, I went to
church with Joe, and thought, perhaps the clergyman wouldn't have
read that about the rich man and the kingdom of Heaven, if he had
known all.
After our early dinner I strolled out alone, purposing to finish
off the marshes at once, and get them done with. As I passed the
church, I felt as I had felt during service in the morning a
sublime compassion for the poor creatures who were destined to go
there, Sunday after Sunday, all their lives through, and to lie
obscurely at last among the low green mounds. I promised myself
that I would do something for them one of these days, and formed a
plan in outline for bestowing a dinner of roastbeef and
plumpudding, a pint of ale, and a gallon of condescension, upon
everybody in the village.
If I had often thought before, with something allied to shame, of
my companionship with the fugitive whom I had once seen limping
among those graves, what were my thoughts on this Sunday, when the
place recalled the wretch, ragged and shivering, with his felon
iron and badge My comfort was, that it happened a long time ago,
and that he had doubtless been transported a long way off, and that
he was dead to me, and might be veritably dead into the bargain.
No more low wet grounds, no more dykes and sluices, no more of
these grazing cattle  though they seemed, in their dull manner, to
wear a more respectful air now, and to face round, in order that
they might stare as long as possible at the possessor of such great
expectations  farewell, monotonous acquaintances of my childhood,
henceforth I was for London and greatness not for smith's work in
general and for you I made my exultant way to the old Battery,
and, lying down there to consider the question whether Miss
Havisham intended me for Estella, fell asleep.
When I awoke, I was much surprised to find Joe sitting beside me,
smoking his pipe. He greeted me with a cheerful smile on my opening
my eyes, and said
"As being the last time, Pip, I thought I'd foller."
"And Joe, I am very glad you did so."
"Thankee, Pip."
"You may be sure, dear Joe," I went on, after we had shaken hands,
"that I shall never forget you."
"No, no, Pip" said Joe, in a comfortable tone, "I'm sure of that.
Ay, ay, old chap Bless you, it were only necessary to get it well
round in a man's mind, to be certain on it. But it took a bit of
time to get it well round, the change come so oncommon plump
didn't it?"
Somehow, I was not best pleased with Joe's being so mightily secure
of me. I should have liked him to have betrayed emotion, or to have
said, "It does you credit, Pip," or something of that sort.
Therefore, I made no remark on Joe's first head merely saying as
to his second, that the tidings had indeed come suddenly, but that
I had always wanted to be a gentleman, and had often and often
speculated on what I would do, if I were one.
"Have you though?" said Joe. "Astonishing"
"It's a pity now, Joe," said I, "that you did not get on a little
more, when we had our lessons here isn't it?"
"Well, I don't know," returned Joe. "I'm so awful dull. I'm only
master of my own trade. It were always a pity as I was so awful
dull but it's no more of a pity now, than it was  this day
twelvemonth  don't you see?"
What I had meant was, that when I came into my property and was
able to do something for Joe, it would have been much more
agreeable if he had been better qualified for a rise in station. He
was so perfectly innocent of my meaning, however, that I thought I
would mention it to Biddy in preference.
So, when we had walked home and had had tea, I took Biddy into our
little garden by the side of the lane, and, after throwing out in a
general way for the elevation of her spirits, that I should never
forget her, said I had a favour to ask of her.
"And it is, Biddy," said I, "that you will not omit any opportunity
of helping Joe on, a little."
"How helping him on?" asked Biddy, with a steady sort of glance.
"Well Joe is a dear good fellow  in fact, I think he is the
dearest fellow that ever lived  but he is rather backward in some
things. For instance, Biddy, in his learning and his manners."
Although I was looking at Biddy as I spoke, and although she opened
her eyes very wide when I had spoken, she did not look at me.
"Oh, his manners won't his manners do, then?" asked Biddy,
plucking a blackcurrant leaf.
"My dear Biddy, they do very well here"
"Oh they do very well here?" interrupted Biddy, looking closely at
the leaf in her hand.
"Hear me out  but if I were to remove Joe into a higher sphere, as
I shall hope to remove him when I fully come into my property, they
would hardly do him justice."
"And don't you think he knows that?" asked Biddy.
It was such a very provoking question for it had never in the most
distant manner occurred to me, that I said, snappishly, "Biddy,
what do you mean?"
Biddy having rubbed the leaf to pieces between her hands  and the
smell of a blackcurrant bush has ever since recalled to me that
evening in the little garden by the side of the lane  said, "Have
you never considered that he may be proud?"
"Proud?" I repeated, with disdainful emphasis.
"Oh there are many kinds of pride," said Biddy, looking full at me
and shaking her head "pride is not all of one kind"
"Well? What are you stopping for?" said I.
"Not all of one kind," resumed Biddy. "He may be too proud to let
any one take him out of a place that he is competent to fill, and
fills well and with respect. To tell you the truth, I think he is
though it sounds bold in me to say so, for you must know him far
better than I do."
"Now, Biddy," said I, "I am very sorry to see this in you. I did
not expect to see this in you. You are envious, Biddy, and
grudging. You are dissatisfied on account of my rise in fortune,
and you can't help showing it."
"If you have the heart to think so," returned Biddy, "say so. Say
so over and over again, if you have the heart to think so."
"If you have the heart to be so, you mean, Biddy," said I, in a
virtuous and superior tone "don't put it off upon me. I am very
sorry to see it, and it's a  it's a bad side of human nature. I
did intend to ask you to use any little opportunities you might
have after I was gone, of improving dear Joe. But after this, I ask
you nothing. I am extremely sorry to see this in you, Biddy," I
repeated. "It's a  it's a bad side of human nature."
"Whether you scold me or approve of me," returned poor Biddy, "you
may equally depend upon my trying to do all that lies in my power,
here, at all times. And whatever opinion you take away of me, shall
make no difference in my remembrance of you. Yet a gentleman should
not be unjust neither," said Biddy, turning away her head.
I again warmly repeated that it was a bad side of human nature in
which sentiment, waiving its application, I have since seen reason
to think I was right, and I walked down the little path away from
Biddy, and Biddy went into the house, and I went out at the garden
gate and took a dejected stroll until suppertime again feeling it
very sorrowful and strange that this, the second night of my bright
fortunes, should be as lonely and unsatisfactory as the first.
But, morning once more brightened my view, and I extended my
clemency to Biddy, and we dropped the subject. Putting on the best
clothes I had, I went into town as early as I could hope to find
the shops open, and presented myself before Mr. Trabb, the tailor
who was having his breakfast in the parlour behind his shop, and
who did not think it worth his while to come out to me, but called
me in to him.
"Well" said Mr. Trabb, in a hailfellowwellmet kind of way. "How
are you, and what can I do for you?"
Mr. Trabb had sliced his hot roll into three feather beds, and was
slipping butter in between the blankets, and covering it up. He was
a prosperous old bachelor, and his open window looked into a
prosperous little garden and orchard, and there was a prosperous
iron safe let into the wall at the side of his fireplace, and I did
not doubt that heaps of his prosperity were put away in it in bags.
"Mr. Trabb," said I, "it's an unpleasant thing to have to mention,
because it looks like boasting but I have come into a handsome
property."
A change passed over Mr. Trabb. He forgot the butter in bed, got up
from the bedside, and wiped his fingers on the tablecloth,
exclaiming, "Lord bless my soul"
"I am going up to my guardian in London," said I, casually drawing
some guineas out of my pocket and looking at them "and I want a
fashionable suit of clothes to go in. I wish to pay for them," I
added  otherwise I thought he might only pretend to make them 
"with ready money."
"My dear sir," said Mr. Trabb, as he respectfully bent his body,
opened his arms, and took the liberty of touching me on the outside
of each elbow, "don't hurt me by mentioning that. May I venture to
congratulate you? Would you do me the favour of stepping into the
shop?"
Mr. Trabb's boy was the most audacious boy in all that countryside.
When I had entered he was sweeping the shop, and he had sweetened
his labours by sweeping over me. He was still sweeping when I came
out into the shop with Mr. Trabb, and he knocked the broom against
all possible corners and obstacles, to express as I understood it
equality with any blacksmith, alive or dead.
"Hold that noise," said Mr. Trabb, with the greatest sternness, "or
I'll knock your head off Do me the favour to be seated, sir. Now,
this," said Mr. Trabb, taking down a roll of cloth, and tiding it
out in a flowing manner over the counter, preparatory to getting
his hand under it to show the gloss, "is a very sweet article. I
can recommend it for your purpose, sir, because it really is extra
super. But you shall see some others. Give me Number Four, you"
To the boy, and with a dreadfully severe stare foreseeing the
danger of that miscreant's brushing me with it, or making some
other sign of familiarity.
Mr. Trabb never removed his stern eye from the boy until he had
deposited number four on the counter and was at a safe distance
again. Then, he commanded him to bring number five, and number
eight. "And let me have none of your tricks here," said Mr. Trabb,
"or you shall repent it, you young scoundrel, the longest day you
have to live."
Mr. Trabb then bent over number four, and in a sort of deferential
confidence recommended it to me as a light article for summer wear,
an article much in vogue among the nobility and gentry, an article
that it would ever be an honour to him to reflect upon a
distinguished fellowtownsman's if he might claim me for a
fellowtownsman having worn. "Are you bringing numbers five and
eight, you vagabond," said Mr. Trabb to the boy after that, "or
shall I kick you out of the shop and bring them myself?"
I selected the materials for a suit, with the assistance of Mr.
Trabb's judgment, and reentered the parlour to be measured. For,
although Mr. Trabb had my measure already, and had previously been
quite contented with it, he said apologetically that it "wouldn't
do under existing circumstances, sir  wouldn't do at all." So, Mr.
Trabb measured and calculated me, in the parlour, as if I were an
estate and he the finest species of surveyor, and gave himself such
a world of trouble that I felt that no suit of clothes could
possibly remunerate him for his pains. When he had at last done and
had appointed to send the articles to Mr. Pumblechook's on the
Thursday evening, he said, with his hand upon the parlour lock, "I
know, sir, that London gentlemen cannot be expected to patronize
local work, as a rule but if you would give me a turn now and then
in the quality of a townsman, I should greatly esteem it. Good
morning, sir, much obliged.  Door"
The last word was flung at the boy, who had not the least notion
what it meant. But I saw him collapse as his master rubbed me out
with his hands, and my first decided experience of the stupendous
power of money, was, that it had morally laid upon his back,
Trabb's boy.
After this memorable event, I went to the hatter's, and the
bootmaker's, and the hosier's, and felt rather like Mother
Hubbard's dog whose outfit required the services of so many trades.
I also went to the coachoffice and took my place for seven o'clock
on Saturday morning. It was not necessary to explain everywhere
that I had come into a handsome property but whenever I said
anything to that effect, it followed that the officiating tradesman
ceased to have his attention diverted through the window by the
Highstreet, and concentrated his mind upon me. When I had ordered
everything I wanted, I directed my steps towards Pumblechook's,
and, as I approached that gentleman's place of business, I saw him
standing at his door.
He was waiting for me with great impatience. He had been out early
in the chaisecart, and had called at the forge and heard the
news. He had prepared a collation for me in the Barnwell parlour,
and he too ordered his shopman to "come out of the gangway" as my
sacred person passed.
"My dear friend," said Mr. Pumblechook, taking me by both hands,
when he and I and the collation were alone, "I give you joy of your
good fortune. Well deserved, well deserved"
This was coming to the point, and I thought it a sensible way of
expressing himself.
"To think," said Mr. Pumblechook, after snorting admiration at me
for some moments, "that I should have been the humble instrument of
leading up to this, is a proud reward."
I begged Mr. Pumblechook to remember that nothing was to be ever
said or hinted, on that point.
"My dear young friend," said Mr. Pumblechook, "if you will allow me
to call you so"
I murmured "Certainly," and Mr. Pumblechook took me by both hands
again, and communicated a movement to his waistcoat, which had an
emotional appearance, though it was rather low down, "My dear young
friend, rely upon my doing my little all in your absence, by
keeping the fact before the mind of Joseph.  Joseph" said Mr.
Pumblechook, in the way of a compassionate adjuration. "Joseph
Joseph" Thereupon he shook his head and tapped it, expressing
his sense of deficiency in Joseph.
"But my dear young friend," said Mr. Pumblechook, "you must be
hungry, you must be exhausted. Be seated. Here is a chicken had
round from the Boar, here is a tongue had round from the Boar,
here's one or two little things had round from the Boar, that I
hope you may not despise. But do I," said Mr. Pumblechook, getting
up again the moment after he had sat down, "see afore me, him as I
ever sported with in his times of happy infancy? And may I  may
I  ?"
This May I, meant might he shake hands? I consented, and he was
fervent, and then sat down again.
"Here is wine," said Mr. Pumblechook. "Let us drink, Thanks to
Fortune, and may she ever pick out her favourites with equal
judgment And yet I cannot," said Mr. Pumblechook, getting up again,
"see afore me One  and likewise drink to One  without again
expressing  May I  may I  ?"
I said he might, and he shook hands with me again, and emptied his
glass and turned it upside down. I did the same and if I had
turned myself upside down before drinking, the wine could not have
gone more direct to my head.
Mr. Pumblechook helped me to the liver wing, and to the best slice
of tongue none of those outoftheway No Thoroughfares of Pork
now, and took, comparatively speaking, no care of himself at all.
"Ah poultry, poultry You little thought," said Mr. Pumblechook,
apostrophizing the fowl in the dish, "when you was a young
fledgling, what was in store for you. You little thought you was to
be refreshment beneath this humble roof for one as  Call it a
weakness, if you will," said Mr. Pumblechook, getting up again, "but
may I? may I  ?"
It began to be unnecessary to repeat the form of saying he might,
so he did it at once. How he ever did it so often without wounding
himself with my knife, I don't know.
"And your sister," he resumed, after a little steady eating, "which
had the honour of bringing you up by hand It's a sad picter, to
reflect that she's no longer equal to fully understanding the
honour. May"
I saw he was about to come at me again, and I stopped him.
"We'll drink her health," said I.
"Ah" cried Mr. Pumblechook, leaning back in his chair, quite
flaccid with admiration, "that's the way you know 'em, sir" I
don't know who Sir was, but he certainly was not I, and there was
no third person present "that's the way you know the nobleminded,
sir Ever forgiving and ever affable. It might," said the servile
Pumblechook, putting down his untasted glass in a hurry and getting
up again, "to a common person, have the appearance of repeating 
but may I  ?"
When he had done it, he resumed his seat and drank to my sister.
"Let us never be blind," said Mr. Pumblechook, "to her faults of
temper, but it is to be hoped she meant well."
At about this time, I began to observe that he was getting flushed
in the face as to myself, I felt all face, steeped in wine and
smarting.
I mentioned to Mr. Pumblechook that I wished to have my new clothes
sent to his house, and he was ecstatic on my so distinguishing him.
I mentioned my reason for desiring to avoid observation in the
village, and he lauded it to the skies. There was nobody but
himself, he intimated, worthy of my confidence, and  in short,
might he? Then he asked me tenderly if I remembered our boyish
games at sums, and how we had gone together to have me bound
apprentice, and, in effect, how he had ever been my favourite fancy
and my chosen friend? If I had taken ten times as many glasses of
wine as I had, I should have known that he never had stood in that
relation towards me, and should in my heart of hearts have
repudiated the idea. Yet for all that, I remember feeling convinced
that I had been much mistaken in him, and that he was a sensible
practical goodhearted prime fellow.
By degrees he fell to reposing such great confidence in me, as to
ask my advice in reference to his own affairs. He mentioned that
there was an opportunity for a great amalgamation and monopoly of
the corn and seed trade on those premises, if enlarged, such as had
never occurred before in that, or any other neighbourhood. What
alone was wanting to the realization of a vast fortune, he
considered to be More Capital. Those were the two little words,
more capital. Now it appeared to him Pumblechook that if that
capital were got into the business, through a sleeping partner, sir
which sleeping partner would have nothing to do but walk in, by
self or deputy, whenever he pleased, and examine the books  and
walk in twice a year and take his profits away in his pocket, to
the tune of fifty per cent.  it appeared to him that that might be
an opening for a young gentleman of spirit combined with property,
which would be worthy of his attention. But what did I think? He
had great confidence in my opinion, and what did I think? I gave it
as my opinion. "Wait a bit" The united vastness and distinctness
of this view so struck him, that he no longer asked if he might
shake hands with me, but said he really must  and did.
We drank all the wine, and Mr. Pumblechook pledged himself over and
over again to keep Joseph up to the mark I don't know what mark,
and to render me efficient and constant service I don't know what
service. He also made known to me for the first time in my life,
and certainly after having kept his secret wonderfully well, that
he had always said of me, "That boy is no common boy, and mark me,
his fortun' will be no common fortun'." He said with a tearful
smile that it was a singular thing to think of now, and I said so
too. Finally, I went out into the air, with a dim perception that
there was something unwonted in the conduct of the sunshine, and
found that I had slumberously got to the turnpike without having
taken any account of the road.
There, I was roused by Mr. Pumblechook's hailing me. He was a long
way down the sunny street, and was making expressive gestures for
me to stop. I stopped, and he came up breathless.
"No, my dear friend," said he, when he had recovered wind for
speech. "Not if I can help it. This occasion shall not entirely
pass without that affability on your part.  May I, as an old
friend and wellwisher? May I?"
We shook hands for the hundredth time at least, and he ordered a
young carter out of my way with the greatest indignation. Then, he
blessed me and stood waving his hand to me until I had passed the
crook in the road and then I turned into a field and had a long
nap under a hedge before I pursued my way home.
I had scant luggage to take with me to London, for little of the
little I possessed was adapted to my new station. But, I began
packing that same afternoon, and wildly packed up things that I
knew I should want next morning, in a fiction that there was not a
moment to be lost.
So, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, passed and on Friday morning
I went to Mr. Pumblechook's, to put on my new clothes and pay my
visit to Miss Havisham. Mr. Pumblechook's own room was given up to
me to dress in, and was decorated with clean towels expressly for
the event. My clothes were rather a disappointment, of course.
Probably every new and eagerly expected garment ever put on since
clothes came in, fell a trifle short of the wearer's expectation.
But after I had had my new suit on, some half an hour, and had gone
through an immensity of posturing with Mr. Pumblechook's very
limited dressingglass, in the futile endeavour to see my legs, it
seemed to fit me better. It being market morning at a neighbouring
town some ten miles off, Mr. Pumblechook was not at home. I had not
told him exactly when I meant to leave, and was not likely to shake
hands with him again before departing. This was all as it should
be, and I went out in my new array fearfully ashamed of having to
pass the shopman, and suspicious after all that I was at a personal
disadvantage, something like Joe's in his Sunday suit.
I went circuitously to Miss Havisham's by all the back ways, and
rang at the bell constrainedly, on account of the stiff long
fingers of my gloves. Sarah Pocket came to the gate, and positively
reeled back when she saw me so changed her walnutshell
countenance likewise, turned from brown to green and yellow.
"You?" said she. "You, good gracious What do you want?"
"I am going to London, Miss Pocket," said I, "and want to say
goodbye to Miss Havisham."
I was not expected, for she left me locked in the yard, while she
went to ask if I were to be admitted. After a very short delay, she
returned and took me up, staring at me all the way.
Miss Havisham was taking exercise in the room with the long spread
table, leaning on her crutch stick. The room was lighted as of
yore, and at the sound of our entrance, she stopped and turned. She
was then just abreast of the rotted bridecake.
"Don't go, Sarah," she said. "Well, Pip?"
"I start for London, Miss Havisham, tomorrow," I was exceedingly
careful what I said, "and I thought you would kindly not mind my
taking leave of you."
"This is a gay figure, Pip," said she, making her crutch stick play
round me, as if she, the fairy godmother who had changed me, were
bestowing the finishing gift.
"I have come into such good fortune since I saw you last, Miss
Havisham," I murmured. "And I am so grateful for it, Miss
Havisham"
"Ay, ay" said she, looking at the discomfited and envious Sarah,
with delight. "I have seen Mr. Jaggers. I have heard about it, Pip.
So you go tomorrow?"
"Yes, Miss Havisham."
"And you are adopted by a rich person?"
"Yes, Miss Havisham."
"Not named?"
"No, Miss Havisham."
"And Mr. Jaggers is made your guardian?"
"Yes, Miss Havisham."
She quite gloated on these questions and answers, so keen was her
enjoyment of Sarah Pocket's jealous dismay. "Well" she went on
"you have a promising career before you. Be good  deserve it  and
abide by Mr. Jaggers's instructions." She looked at me, and looked
at Sarah, and Sarah's countenance wrung out of her watchful face a
cruel smile. "Goodbye, Pip  you will always keep the name of
Pip, you know."
"Yes, Miss Havisham."
"Goodbye, Pip"
She stretched out her hand, and I went down on my knee and put it
to my lips. I had not considered how I should take leave of her it
came naturally to me at the moment, to do this. She looked at Sarah
Pocket with triumph in her weird eyes, and so I left my fairy
godmother, with both her hands on her crutch stick, standing in the
midst of the dimly lighted room beside the rotten bridecake that
was hidden in cobwebs.
Sarah Pocket conducted me down, as if I were a ghost who must be
seen out. She could not get over my appearance, and was in the last
degree confounded. I said "Goodbye, Miss Pocket" but she merely
stared, and did not seem collected enough to know that I had
spoken. Clear of the house, I made the best of my way back to
Pumblechook's, took off my new clothes, made them into a bundle,
and went back home in my older dress, carrying it  to speak the
truth  much more at my ease too, though I had the bundle to carry.
And now, those six days which were to have run out so slowly, had
run out fast and were gone, and tomorrow looked me in the face
more steadily than I could look at it. As the six evenings had
dwindled away, to five, to four, to three, to two, I had become
more and more appreciative of the society of Joe and Biddy. On this
last evening, I dressed my self out in my new clothes, for their
delight, and sat in my splendour until bedtime. We had a hot supper
on the occasion, graced by the inevitable roast fowl, and we had
some flip to finish with. We were all very low, and none the higher
for pretending to be in spirits.
I was to leave our village at five in the morning, carrying my
little handportmanteau, and I had told Joe that I wished to walk
away all alone. I am afraid  sore afraid  that this purpose
originated in my sense of the contrast there would be between me
and Joe, if we went to the coach together. I had pretended with
myself that there was nothing of this taint in the arrangement but
when I went up to my little room on this last night, I felt
compelled to admit that it might be so, and had an impulse upon me
to go down again and entreat Joe to walk with me in the morning. I
did not.
All night there were coaches in my broken sleep, going to wrong
places instead of to London, and having in the traces, now dogs,
now cats, now pigs, now men  never horses. Fantastic failures of
journeys occupied me until the day dawned and the birds were
singing. Then, I got up and partly dressed, and sat at the window
to take a last look out, and in taking it fell asleep.
Biddy was astir so early to get my breakfast, that, although I did
not sleep at the window an hour, I smelt the smoke of the kitchen
fire when I started up with a terrible idea that it must be late in
the afternoon. But long after that, and long after I had heard the
clinking of the teacups and was quite ready, I wanted the
resolution to go down stairs. After all, I remained up there,
repeatedly unlocking and unstrapping my small portmanteau and
locking and strapping it up again, until Biddy called to me that I
was late.
It was a hurried breakfast with no taste in it. I got up from the
meal, saying with a sort of briskness, as if it had only just
occurred to me, "Well I suppose I must be off" and then I kissed
my sister who was laughing and nodding and shaking in her usual
chair, and kissed Biddy, and threw my arms around Joe's neck. Then
I took up my little portmanteau and walked out. The last I saw of
them was, when I presently heard a scuffle behind me, and looking
back, saw Joe throwing an old shoe after me and Biddy throwing
another old shoe. I stopped then, to wave my hat, and dear old Joe
waved his strong right arm above his head, crying huskily
"Hooroar" and Biddy put her apron to her face.
I walked away at a good pace, thinking it was easier to go than I
had supposed it would be, and reflecting that it would never have
done to have had an old shoe thrown after the coach, in sight of
all the Highstreet. I whistled and made nothing of going. But the
village was very peaceful and quiet, and the light mists were
solemnly rising, as if to show me the world, and I had been so
innocent and little there, and all beyond was so unknown and great,
that in a moment with a strong heave and sob I broke into tears. It
was by the fingerpost at the end of the village, and I laid my
hand upon it, and said, "Goodbye O my dear, dear friend"
Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are
rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts. I
was better after I had cried, than before  more sorry, more aware
of my own ingratitude, more gentle. If I had cried before, I should
have had Joe with me then.
So subdued I was by those tears, and by their breaking out again in
the course of the quiet walk, that when I was on the coach, and it
was clear of the town, I deliberated with an aching heart whether I
would not get down when we changed horses and walk back, and have
another evening at home, and a better parting. We changed, and I
had not made up my mind, and still reflected for my comfort that it
would be quite practicable to get down and walk back, when we
changed again. And while I was occupied with these deliberations, I
would fancy an exact resemblance to Joe in some man coming along
the road towards us, and my heart would beat high.  As if he could
possibly be there
We changed again, and yet again, and it was now too late and too
far to go back, and I went on. And the mists had all solemnly risen
now, and the world lay spread before me.
THIS IS THE END OF THE FIRST STAGE OF PIP'S EXPECTATIONS.
Chapter 
The journey from our town to the metropolis, was a journey of about
five hours. It was a little past midday when the fourhorse
stagecoach by which I was a passenger, got into the ravel of
traffic frayed out about the Cross Keys, Woodstreet, Cheapside,
London.
We Britons had at that time particularly settled that it was
treasonable to doubt our having and our being the best of
everything otherwise, while I was scared by the immensity of
London, I think I might have had some faint doubts whether it was
not rather ugly, crooked, narrow, and dirty.
Mr. Jaggers had duly sent me his address it was, Little Britain,
and he had written after it on his card, "just out of Smithfield,
and close by the coachoffice." Nevertheless, a hackneycoachman,
who seemed to have as many capes to his greasy greatcoat as he was
years old, packed me up in his coach and hemmed me in with a
folding and jingling barrier of steps, as if he were going to take
me fifty miles. His getting on his box, which I remember to have
been decorated with an old weatherstained peagreen hammercloth
motheaten into rags, was quite a work of time. It was a wonderful
equipage, with six great coronets outside, and ragged things behind
for I don't know how many footmen to hold on by, and a harrow below
them, to prevent amateur footmen from yielding to the temptation.
I had scarcely had time to enjoy the coach and to think how like a
strawyard it was, and yet how like a ragshop, and to wonder why
the horses' nosebags were kept inside, when I observed the
coachman beginning to get down, as if we were going to stop
presently. And stop we presently did, in a gloomy street, at
certain offices with an open door, whereon was painted MR. JAGGERS.
"How much?" I asked the coachman.
The coachman answered, "A shilling  unless you wish to make it
more."
I naturally said I had no wish to make it more.
"Then it must be a shilling," observed the coachman. "I don't want
to get into trouble. I know him" He darkly closed an eye at Mr
Jaggers's name, and shook his head.
When he had got his shilling, and had in course of time completed
the ascent to his box, and had got away which appeared to relieve
his mind, I went into the front office with my little portmanteau
in my hand and asked, Was Mr. Jaggers at home?
"He is not," returned the clerk. "He is in Court at present. Am I
addressing Mr. Pip?"
I signified that he was addressing Mr. Pip.
"Mr. Jaggers left word would you wait in his room. He couldn't say
how long he might be, having a case on. But it stands to reason,
his time being valuable, that he won't be longer than he can help."
With those words, the clerk opened a door, and ushered me into an
inner chamber at the back. Here, we found a gentleman with one eye,
in a velveteen suit and kneebreeches, who wiped his nose with his
sleeve on being interrupted in the perusal of the newspaper.
"Go and wait outside, Mike," said the clerk.
I began to say that I hoped I was not interrupting  when the clerk
shoved this gentleman out with as little ceremony as I ever saw
used, and tossing his fur cap out after him, left me alone.
Mr. Jaggers's room was lighted by a skylight only, and was a most
dismal place the skylight, eccentrically pitched like a broken
head, and the distorted adjoining houses looking as if they had
twisted themselves to peep down at me through it. There were not so
many papers about, as I should have expected to see and there were
some odd objects about, that I should not have expected to see 
such as an old rusty pistol, a sword in a scabbard, several
strangelooking boxes and packages, and two dreadful casts on a
shelf, of faces peculiarly swollen, and twitchy about the nose. Mr.
Jaggers's own highbacked chair was of deadly black horsehair,
with rows of brass nails round it, like a coffin and I fancied I
could see how he leaned back in it, and bit his forefinger at the
clients. The room was but small, and the clients seemed to have had
a habit of backing up against the wall the wall, especially
opposite to Mr. Jaggers's chair, being greasy with shoulders. I
recalled, too, that the oneeyed gentleman had shuffled forth
against the wall when I was the innocent cause of his being turned
out.
I sat down in the cliental chair placed over against Mr. Jaggers's
chair, and became fascinated by the dismal atmosphere of the place.
I called to mind that the clerk had the same air of knowing
something to everybody else's disadvantage, as his master had. I
wondered how many other clerks there were upstairs, and whether
they all claimed to have the same detrimental mastery of their
fellowcreatures. I wondered what was the history of all the odd
litter about the room, and how it came there. I wondered whether
the two swollen faces were of Mr. Jaggers's family, and, if he were
so unfortunate as to have had a pair of such illlooking relations,
why he stuck them on that dusty perch for the blacks and flies to
settle on, instead of giving them a place at home. Of course I had
no experience of a London summer day, and my spirits may have been
oppressed by the hot exhausted air, and by the dust and grit that
lay thick on everything. But I sat wondering and waiting in Mr.
Jaggers's close room, until I really could not bear the two casts
on the shelf above Mr. Jaggers's chair, and got up and went out.
When I told the clerk that I would take a turn in the air while I
waited, he advised me to go round the corner and I should come into
Smithfield. So, I came into Smithfield and the shameful place,
being all asmear with filth and fat and blood and foam, seemed to
stick to me. So, I rubbed it off with all possible speed by turning
into a street where I saw the great black dome of Saint Paul's
bulging at me from behind a grim stone building which a bystander
said was Newgate Prison. Following the wall of the jail, I found
the roadway covered with straw to deaden the noise of passing
vehicles and from this, and from the quantity of people standing
about, smelling strongly of spirits and beer, I inferred that the
trials were on.
While I looked about me here, an exceedingly dirty and partially
drunk minister of justice asked me if I would like to step in and
hear a trial or so informing me that he could give me a front
place for halfacrown, whence I should command a full view of the
Lord Chief Justice in his wig and robes  mentioning that awful
personage like waxwork, and presently offering him at the reduced
price of eighteenpence. As I declined the proposal on the plea of
an appointment, he was so good as to take me into a yard and show
me where the gallows was kept, and also where people were publicly
whipped, and then he showed me the Debtors' Door, out of which
culprits came to be hanged heightening the interest of that
dreadful portal by giving me to understand that "four on 'em" would
come out at that door the day after tomorrow at eight in the
morning, to be killed in a row. This was horrible, and gave me a
sickening idea of London the more so as the Lord Chief Justice's
proprietor wore from his hat down to his boots and up again to his
pockethandkerchief inclusive mildewed clothes, which had
evidently not belonged to him originally, and which, I took it into
my head, he had bought cheap of the executioner. Under these
circumstances I thought myself well rid of him for a shilling.
I dropped into the office to ask if Mr. Jaggers had come in yet, and
I found he had not, and I strolled out again. This time, I made the
tour of Little Britain, and turned into Bartholomew Close and now
I became aware that other people were waiting about for Mr. Jaggers,
as well as I. There were two men of secret appearance lounging in
Bartholomew Close, and thoughtfully fitting their feet into the
cracks of the pavement as they talked together, one of whom said to
the other when they first passed me, that "Jaggers would do it if
it was to be done." There was a knot of three men and two women
standing at a corner, and one of the women was crying on her dirty
shawl, and the other comforted her by saying, as she pulled her own
shawl over her shoulders, "Jaggers is for him, 'Melia, and what
more could you have?" There was a redeyed little Jew who came into
the Close while I was loitering there, in company with a second
little Jew whom he sent upon an errand and while the messenger was
gone, I remarked this Jew, who was of a highly excitable
temperament, performing a jig of anxiety under a lamppost and
accompanying himself, in a kind of frenzy, with the words, "Oh
Jaggerth, Jaggerth, Jaggerth all otherth ith CagMaggerth, give me
Jaggerth" These testimonies to the popularity of my guardian made
a deep impression on me, and I admired and wondered more than ever.
At length, as I was looking out at the iron gate of Bartholomew
Close into Little Britain, I saw Mr. Jaggers coming across the road
towards me. All the others who were waiting, saw him at the same
time, and there was quite a rush at him. Mr. Jaggers, putting a hand
on my shoulder and walking me on at his side without saying
anything to me, addressed himself to his followers.
First, he took the two secret men.
"Now, I have nothing to say to you," said Mr. Jaggers, throwing his
finger at them. "I want to know no more than I know. As to the
result, it's a tossup. I told you from the first it was a tossup.
Have you paid Wemmick?"
"We made the money up this morning, sir," said one of the men,
submissively, while the other perused Mr. Jaggers's face.
"I don't ask you when you made it up, or where, or whether you made
it up at all. Has Wemmick got it?"
"Yes, sir," said both the men together.
"Very well then you may go. Now, I won't have it" said Mr
Jaggers, waving his hand at them to put them behind him. "If you
say a word to me, I'll throw up the case."
"We thought, Mr. Jaggers" one of the men began, pulling off his
hat.
"That's what I told you not to do," said Mr. Jaggers. "You thought
I think for you that's enough for you. If I want you, I know where
to find you I don't want you to find me. Now I won't have it. I
won't hear a word."
The two men looked at one another as Mr. Jaggers waved them behind
again, and humbly fell back and were heard no more.
"And now you" said Mr. Jaggers, suddenly stopping, and turning on
the two women with the shawls, from whom the three men had meekly
separated.  "Oh Amelia, is it?"
"Yes, Mr. Jaggers."
"And do you remember," retorted Mr. Jaggers, "that but for me you
wouldn't be here and couldn't be here?"
"Oh yes, sir" exclaimed both women together. "Lord bless you, sir,
well we knows that"
"Then why," said Mr. Jaggers, "do you come here?"
"My Bill, sir" the crying woman pleaded.
"Now, I tell you what" said Mr. Jaggers. "Once for all. If you
don't know that your Bill's in good hands, I know it. And if you
come here, bothering about your Bill, I'll make an example of both
your Bill and you, and let him slip through my fingers. Have you
paid Wemmick?"
"Oh yes, sir Every farden."
"Very well. Then you have done all you have got to do. Say another
word  one single word  and Wemmick shall give you your money
back."
This terrible threat caused the two women to fall off immediately.
No one remained now but the excitable Jew, who had already raised
the skirts of Mr. Jaggers's coat to his lips several times.
"I don't know this man" said Mr. Jaggers, in the same devastating
strain "What does this fellow want?"
"Ma thear Mithter Jaggerth. Hown brother to Habraham Latharuth?"
"Who's he?" said Mr. Jaggers. "Let go of my coat."
The suitor, kissing the hem of the garment again before
relinquishing it, replied, "Habraham Latharuth, on thuthpithion of
plate."
"You're too late," said Mr. Jaggers. "I am over the way."
"Holy father, Mithter Jaggerth" cried my excitable acquaintance,
turning white, "don't thay you're again Habraham Latharuth"
"I am," said Mr. Jaggers, "and there's an end of it. Get out of the
way."
"Mithter Jaggerth Half a moment My hown cuthen'th gone to Mithter
Wemmick at thith prethent minute, to hoffer him hany termth.
Mithter Jaggerth Half a quarter of a moment If you'd have the
condethenthun to be bought off from the t'other thide  at hany
thuperior prithe  money no object  Mithter Jaggerth  Mithter  "
My guardian threw his supplicant off with supreme indifference, and
left him dancing on the pavement as if it were redhot. Without
further interruption, we reached the front office, where we found
the clerk and the man in velveteen with the fur cap.
"Here's Mike," said the clerk, getting down from his stool, and
approaching Mr. Jaggers confidentially.
"Oh" said Mr. Jaggers, turning to the man, who was pulling a lock
of hair in the middle of his forehead, like the Bull in Cock Robin
pulling at the bellrope "your man comes on this afternoon. Well?"
"Well, Mas'r Jaggers," returned Mike, in the voice of a sufferer
from a constitutional cold "arter a deal o' trouble, I've found
one, sir, as might do."
"What is he prepared to swear?"
"Well, Mas'r Jaggers," said Mike, wiping his nose on his fur cap
this time "in a general way, anythink."
Mr. Jaggers suddenly became most irate. "Now, I warned you before,"
said he, throwing his forefinger at the terrified client, "that if
you ever presumed to talk in that way here, I'd make an example of
you. You infernal scoundrel, how dare you tell ME that?"
The client looked scared, but bewildered too, as if he were
unconscious what he had done.
"Spooney" said the clerk, in a low voice, giving him a stir with
his elbow. "Soft Head Need you say it face to face?"
"Now, I ask you, you blundering booby," said my guardian, very
sternly, "once more and for the last time, what the man you have
brought here is prepared to swear?"
Mike looked hard at my guardian, as if he were trying to learn a
lesson from his face, and slowly replied, "Ayther to character, or
to having been in his company and never left him all the night in
question."
"Now, be careful. In what station of life is this man?"
Mike looked at his cap, and looked at the floor, and looked at the
ceiling, and looked at the clerk, and even looked at me, before
beginning to reply in a nervous manner, "We've dressed him up
like" when my guardian blustered out
"What? You WILL, will you?"
"Spooney" added the clerk again, with another stir.
After some helpless casting about, Mike brightened and began again
"He is dressed like a 'spectable pieman. A sort of a pastrycook."
"Is he here?" asked my guardian.
"I left him," said Mike, "a settin on some doorsteps round the
corner."
"Take him past that window, and let me see him."
The window indicated, was the office window. We all three went to
it, behind the wire blind, and presently saw the client go by in an
accidental manner, with a murderouslooking tall individual, in a
short suit of white linen and a paper cap. This guileless
confectioner was not by any means sober, and had a black eye in the
green stage of recovery, which was painted over.
"Tell him to take his witness away directly," said my guardian to
the clerk, in extreme disgust, "and ask him what he means by
bringing such a fellow as that."
My guardian then took me into his own room, and while he lunched,
standing, from a sandwichbox and a pocket flask of sherry he
seemed to bully his very sandwich as he ate it, informed me what
arrangements he had made for me. I was to go to "Barnard's Inn," to
young Mr. Pocket's rooms, where a bed had been sent in for my
accommodation I was to remain with young Mr. Pocket until Monday
on Monday I was to go with him to his father's house on a visit,
that I might try how I liked it. Also, I was told what my allowance
was to be  it was a very liberal one  and had handed to me from
one of my guardian's drawers, the cards of certain tradesmen with
whom I was to deal for all kinds of clothes, and such other things
as I could in reason want. "You will find your credit good, Mr.
Pip," said my guardian, whose flask of sherry smelt like a whole
caskfull, as he hastily refreshed himself, "but I shall by this
means be able to check your bills, and to pull you up if I find you
outrunning the constable. Of course you'll go wrong somehow, but
that's no fault of mine."
After I had pondered a little over this encouraging sentiment, I
asked Mr. Jaggers if I could send for a coach? He said it was not
worth while, I was so near my destination Wemmick should walk
round with me, if I pleased.
I then found that Wemmick was the clerk in the next room. Another
clerk was rung down from upstairs to take his place while he was
out, and I accompanied him into the street, after shaking hands
with my guardian. We found a new set of people lingering outside,
but Wemmick made a way among them by saying coolly yet decisively,
"I tell you it's no use he won't have a word to say to one of
you" and we soon got clear of them, and went on side by side.
Chapter 
Casting my eyes on Mr. Wemmick as we went along, to see what he was
like in the light of day, I found him to be a dry man, rather short
in stature, with a square wooden face, whose expression seemed to
have been imperfectly chipped out with a dulledged chisel. There
were some marks in it that might have been dimples, if the material
had been softer and the instrument finer, but which, as it was,
were only dints. The chisel had made three or four of these
attempts at embellishment over his nose, but had given them up
without an effort to smooth them off. I judged him to be a bachelor
from the frayed condition of his linen, and he appeared to have
sustained a good many bereavements for, he wore at least four
mourning rings, besides a brooch representing a lady and a weeping
willow at a tomb with an urn on it. I noticed, too, that several
rings and seals hung at his watch chain, as if he were quite laden
with remembrances of departed friends. He had glittering eyes 
small, keen, and black  and thin wide mottled lips. He had had
them, to the best of my belief, from forty to fifty years.
"So you were never in London before?" said Mr. Wemmick to me.
"No," said I.
"I was new here once," said Mr. Wemmick. "Rum to think of now"
"You are well acquainted with it now?"
"Why, yes," said Mr. Wemmick. "I know the moves of it."
"Is it a very wicked place?" I asked, more for the sake of saying
something than for information.
"You may get cheated, robbed, and murdered, in London. But there
are plenty of people anywhere, who'll do that for you."
"If there is bad blood between you and them," said I, to soften it
off a little.
"Oh I don't know about bad blood," returned Mr. Wemmick "there's
not much bad blood about. They'll do it, if there's anything to be
got by it."
"That makes it worse."
"You think so?" returned Mr. Wemmick. "Much about the same, I should
say."
He wore his hat on the back of his head, and looked straight before
him walking in a selfcontained way as if there were nothing in
the streets to claim his attention. His mouth was such a postoffice
of a mouth that he had a mechanical appearance of smiling. We had
got to the top of Holborn Hill before I knew that it was merely a
mechanical appearance, and that he was not smiling at all.
"Do you know where Mr. Matthew Pocket lives?" I asked Mr. Wemmick.
"Yes," said he, nodding in the direction. "At Hammersmith, west of
London."
"Is that far?"
"Well Say five miles."
"Do you know him?"
"Why, you're a regular crossexaminer" said Mr. Wemmick, looking at
me with an approving air. "Yes, I know him. I know him"
There was an air of toleration or depreciation about his utterance
of these words, that rather depressed me and I was still looking
sideways at his block of a face in search of any encouraging note
to the text, when he said here we were at Barnard's Inn. My
depression was not alleviated by the announcement, for, I had
supposed that establishment to be an hotel kept by Mr. Barnard, to
which the Blue Boar in our town was a mere publichouse. Whereas I
now found Barnard to be a disembodied spirit, or a fiction, and his
inn the dingiest collection of shabby buildings ever squeezed
together in a rank corner as a club for Tomcats.
We entered this haven through a wicketgate, and were disgorged by
an introductory passage into a melancholy little square that looked
to me like a flat buryingground. I thought it had the most dismal
trees in it, and the most dismal sparrows, and the most dismal
cats, and the most dismal houses in number half a dozen or so,
that I had ever seen. I thought the windows of the sets of chambers
into which those houses were divided, were in every stage of
dilapidated blind and curtain, crippled flowerpot, cracked glass,
dusty decay, and miserable makeshift while To Let To Let To Let,
glared at me from empty rooms, as if no new wretches ever came
there, and the vengeance of the soul of Barnard were being slowly
appeased by the gradual suicide of the present occupants and their
unholy interment under the gravel. A frouzy mourning of soot and
smoke attired this forlorn creation of Barnard, and it had strewn
ashes on its head, and was undergoing penance and humiliation as a
mere dusthole. Thus far my sense of sight while dry rot and wet
rot and all the silent rots that rot in neglected roof and cellar 
rot of rat and mouse and bug and coachingstables near at hand
besides  addressed themselves faintly to my sense of smell, and
moaned, "Try Barnard's Mixture."
So imperfect was this realization of the first of my great
expectations, that I looked in dismay at Mr. Wemmick. "Ah" said he,
mistaking me "the retirement reminds you of the country. So it
does me."
He led me into a corner and conducted me up a flight of stairs 
which appeared to me to be slowly collapsing into sawdust, so that
one of those days the upper lodgers would look out at their doors
and find themselves without the means of coming down  to a set of
chambers on the top floor. MR. POCKET, JUN., was painted on the
door, and there was a label on the letterbox, "Return shortly."
"He hardly thought you'd come so soon," Mr. Wemmick explained. "You
don't want me any more?"
"No, thank you," said I.
"As I keep the cash," Mr. Wemmick observed, "we shall most likely
meet pretty often. Good day."
"Good day."
I put out my hand, and Mr. Wemmick at first looked at it as if he
thought I wanted something. Then he looked at me, and said,
correcting himself,
"To be sure Yes. You're in the habit of shaking hands?"
I was rather confused, thinking it must be out of the London
fashion, but said yes.
"I have got so out of it" said Mr. Wemmick  "except at last. Very
glad, I'm sure, to make your acquaintance. Good day"
When we had shaken hands and he was gone, I opened the staircase
window and had nearly beheaded myself, for, the lines had rotted
away, and it came down like the guillotine. Happily it was so quick
that I had not put my head out. After this escape, I was content to
take a foggy view of the Inn through the window's encrusting dirt,
and to stand dolefully looking out, saying to myself that London
was decidedly overrated.
Mr. Pocket, Junior's, idea of Shortly was not mine, for I had nearly
maddened myself with looking out for half an hour, and had written
my name with my finger several times in the dirt of every pane in
the window, before I heard footsteps on the stairs. Gradually there
arose before me the hat, head, neckcloth, waistcoat, trousers,
boots, of a member of society of about my own standing. He had a
paperbag under each arm and a pottle of strawberries in one hand,
and was out of breath.
"Mr. Pip?" said he.
"Mr. Pocket?" said I.
"Dear me" he exclaimed. "I am extremely sorry but I knew there
was a coach from your part of the country at midday, and I thought
you would come by that one. The fact is, I have been out on your
account  not that that is any excuse  for I thought, coming from
the country, you might like a little fruit after dinner, and I went
to Covent Garden Market to get it good."
For a reason that I had, I felt as if my eyes would start out of my
head. I acknowledged his attention incoherently, and began to think
this was a dream.
"Dear me" said Mr. Pocket, Junior. "This door sticks so"
As he was fast making jam of his fruit by wrestling with the door
while the paperbags were under his arms, I begged him to allow me
to hold them. He relinquished them with an agreeable smile, and
combated with the door as if it were a wild beast. It yielded so
suddenly at last, that he staggered back upon me, and I staggered
back upon the opposite door, and we both laughed. But still I felt
as if my eyes must start out of my head, and as if this must be a
dream.
"Pray come in," said Mr. Pocket, Junior. "Allow me to lead the way.
I am rather bare here, but I hope you'll be able to make out
tolerably well till Monday. My father thought you would get on more
agreeably through tomorrow with me than with him, and might like
to take a walk about London. I am sure I shall be very happy to
show London to you. As to our table, you won't find that bad, I
hope, for it will be supplied from our coffeehouse here, and it
is only right I should add at your expense, such being Mr.
Jaggers's directions. As to our lodging, it's not by any means
splendid, because I have my own bread to earn, and my father hasn't
anything to give me, and I shouldn't be willing to take it, if he
had. This is our sittingroom  just such chairs and tables and
carpet and so forth, you see, as they could spare from home. You
mustn't give me credit for the tablecloth and spoons and castors,
because they come for you from the coffeehouse. This is my little
bedroom rather musty, but Barnard's is musty. This is your
bedroom the furniture's hired for the occasion, but I trust it
will answer the purpose if you should want anything, I'll go and
fetch it. The chambers are retired, and we shall be alone together,
but we shan't fight, I dare say. But, dear me, I beg your pardon,
you're holding the fruit all this time. Pray let me take these bags
from you. I am quite ashamed."
As I stood opposite to Mr. Pocket, Junior, delivering him the bags,
One, Two, I saw the starting appearance come into his own eyes that
I knew to be in mine, and he said, falling back
"Lord bless me, you're the prowling boy"
"And you," said I, "are the pale young gentleman"
Chapter 
The pale young gentleman and I stood contemplating one another in
Barnard's Inn, until we both burst out laughing. "The idea of its
being you" said he. "The idea of its being you" said I. And then
we contemplated one another afresh, and laughed again. "Well" said
the pale young gentleman, reaching out his hand goodhumouredly,
"it's all over now, I hope, and it will be magnanimous in you if
you'll forgive me for having knocked you about so."
I derived from this speech that Mr. Herbert Pocket for Herbert was
the pale young gentleman's name still rather confounded his
intention with his execution. But I made a modest reply, and we
shook hands warmly.
"You hadn't come into your good fortune at that time?" said Herbert
Pocket.
"No," said I.
"No," he acquiesced "I heard it had happened very lately. I was
rather on the lookout for goodfortune then."
"Indeed?"
"Yes. Miss Havisham had sent for me, to see if she could take a
fancy to me. But she couldn't  at all events, she didn't."
I thought it polite to remark that I was surprised to hear that.
"Bad taste," said Herbert, laughing, "but a fact. Yes, she had sent
for me on a trial visit, and if I had come out of it successfully,
I suppose I should have been provided for perhaps I should have
been whatyoumaycalled it to Estella."
"What's that?" I asked, with sudden gravity.
He was arranging his fruit in plates while we talked, which divided
his attention, and was the cause of his having made this lapse of a
word. "Affianced," he explained, still busy with the fruit.
"Betrothed. Engaged. What'shisnamed. Any word of that sort."
"How did you bear your disappointment?" I asked.
"Pooh" said he, "I didn't care much for it. She's a Tartar."
"Miss Havisham?"
"I don't say no to that, but I meant Estella. That girl's hard and
haughty and capricious to the last degree, and has been brought up
by Miss Havisham to wreak revenge on all the male sex."
"What relation is she to Miss Havisham?"
"None," said he. "Only adopted."
"Why should she wreak revenge on all the male sex? What revenge?"
"Lord, Mr. Pip" said he. "Don't you know?"
"No," said I.
"Dear me It's quite a story, and shall be saved till dinnertime.
And now let me take the liberty of asking you a question. How did
you come there, that day?"
I told him, and he was attentive until I had finished, and then
burst out laughing again, and asked me if I was sore afterwards? I
didn't ask him if he was, for my conviction on that point was
perfectly established.
"Mr. Jaggers is your guardian, I understand?" he went on.
"Yes."
"You know he is Miss Havisham's man of business and solicitor, and
has her confidence when nobody else has?"
This was bringing me I felt towards dangerous ground. I answered
with a constraint I made no attempt to disguise, that I had seen Mr.
Jaggers in Miss Havisham's house on the very day of our combat, but
never at any other time, and that I believed he had no recollection
of having ever seen me there.
"He was so obliging as to suggest my father for your tutor, and he
called on my father to propose it. Of course he knew about my
father from his connexion with Miss Havisham. My father is Miss
Havisham's cousin not that that implies familiar intercourse
between them, for he is a bad courtier and will not propitiate
her."
Herbert Pocket had a frank and easy way with him that was very
taking. I had never seen any one then, and I have never seen any
one since, who more strongly expressed to me, in every look and
tone, a natural incapacity to do anything secret and mean. There
was something wonderfully hopeful about his general air, and
something that at the same time whispered to me he would never be
very successful or rich. I don't know how this was. I became imbued
with the notion on that first occasion before we sat down to
dinner, but I cannot define by what means.
He was still a pale young gentleman, and had a certain conquered
languor about him in the midst of his spirits and briskness, that
did not seem indicative of natural strength. He had not a handsome
face, but it was better than handsome being extremely amiable and
cheerful. His figure was a little ungainly, as in the days when my
knuckles had taken such liberties with it, but it looked as if it
would always be light and young. Whether Mr. Trabb's local work
would have sat more gracefully on him than on me, may be a
question but I am conscious that he carried off his rather old
clothes, much better than I carried off my new suit.
As he was so communicative, I felt that reserve on my part would be
a bad return unsuited to our years. I therefore told him my small
story, and laid stress on my being forbidden to inquire who my
benefactor was. I further mentioned that as I had been brought up a
blacksmith in a country place, and knew very little of the ways of
politeness, I would take it as a great kindness in him if he would
give me a hint whenever he saw me at a loss or going wrong.
"With pleasure," said he, "though I venture to prophesy that you'll
want very few hints. I dare say we shall be often together, and I
should like to banish any needless restraint between us. Will you
do me the favour to begin at once to call me by my Christian name,
Herbert?"
I thanked him, and said I would. I informed him in exchange that my
Christian name was Philip.
"I don't take to Philip," said he, smiling, "for it sounds like a
moral boy out of the spellingbook, who was so lazy that he fell
into a pond, or so fat that he couldn't see out of his eyes, or so
avaricious that he locked up his cake till the mice ate it, or so
determined to go a bird'snesting that he got himself eaten by
bears who lived handy in the neighbourhood. I tell you what I
should like. We are so harmonious, and you have been a blacksmith 
would you mind it?"
"I shouldn't mind anything that you propose," I answered, "but I
don't understand you."
"Would you mind Handel for a familiar name? There's a charming
piece of music by Handel, called the Harmonious Blacksmith."
"I should like it very much."
"Then, my dear Handel," said he, turning round as the door opened,
"here is the dinner, and I must beg of you to take the top of the
table, because the dinner is of your providing."
This I would not hear of, so he took the top, and I faced him. It
was a nice little dinner  seemed to me then, a very Lord Mayor's
Feast  and it acquired additional relish from being eaten under
those independent circumstances, with no old people by, and with
London all around us. This again was heightened by a certain gipsy
character that set the banquet off for, while the table was, as Mr.
Pumblechook might have said, the lap of luxury  being entirely
furnished forth from the coffeehouse  the circumjacent region of
sittingroom was of a comparatively pastureless and shifty
character imposing on the waiter the wandering habits of putting
the covers on the floor where he fell over them, the melted
butter in the armchair, the bread on the bookshelves, the cheese in
the coalscuttle, and the boiled fowl into my bed in the next room 
where I found much of its parsley and butter in a state of
congelation when I retired for the night. All this made the feast
delightful, and when the waiter was not there to watch me, my
pleasure was without alloy.
We had made some progress in the dinner, when I reminded Herbert of
his promise to tell me about Miss Havisham.
"True," he replied. "I'll redeem it at once. Let me introduce the
topic, Handel, by mentioning that in London it is not the custom to
put the knife in the mouth  for fear of accidents  and that while
the fork is reserved for that use, it is not put further in than
necessary. It is scarcely worth mentioning, only it's as well to do
as other people do. Also, the spoon is not generally used
overhand, but under. This has two advantages. You get at your
mouth better which after all is the object, and you save a good
deal of the attitude of opening oysters, on the part of the right
elbow."
He offered these friendly suggestions in such a lively way, that we
both laughed and I scarcely blushed.
"Now," he pursued, "concerning Miss Havisham. Miss Havisham, you
must know, was a spoilt child. Her mother died when she was a baby,
and her father denied her nothing. Her father was a country
gentleman down in your part of the world, and was a brewer. I don't
know why it should be a crack thing to be a brewer but it is
indisputable that while you cannot possibly be genteel and bake,
you may be as genteel as never was and brew. You see it every day."
"Yet a gentleman may not keep a publichouse may he?" said I.
"Not on any account," returned Herbert "but a publichouse may
keep a gentleman. Well Mr. Havisham was very rich and very proud.
So was his daughter."
"Miss Havisham was an only child?" I hazarded.
"Stop a moment, I am coming to that. No, she was not an only child
she had a halfbrother. Her father privately married again  his
cook, I rather think."
"I thought he was proud," said I.
"My good Handel, so he was. He married his second wife privately,
because he was proud, and in course of time she died. When she was
dead, I apprehend he first told his daughter what he had done, and
then the son became a part of the family, residing in the house you
are acquainted with. As the son grew a young man, he turned out
riotous, extravagant, undutiful  altogether bad. At last his
father disinherited him but he softened when he was dying, and
left him well off, though not nearly so well off as Miss Havisham.
Take another glass of wine, and excuse my mentioning that society
as a body does not expect one to be so strictly conscientious in
emptying one's glass, as to turn it bottom upwards with the rim on
one's nose."
I had been doing this, in an excess of attention to his recital. I
thanked him, and apologized. He said, "Not at all," and resumed.
"Miss Havisham was now an heiress, and you may suppose was looked
after as a great match. Her halfbrother had now ample means again,
but what with debts and what with new madness wasted them most
fearfully again. There were stronger differences between him and
her, than there had been between him and his father, and it is
suspected that he cherished a deep and mortal grudge against her,
as having influenced the father's anger. Now, I come to the cruel
part of the story  merely breaking off, my dear Handel, to remark
that a dinnernapkin will not go into a tumbler."
Why I was trying to pack mine into my tumbler, I am wholly unable
to say. I only know that I found myself, with a perseverance worthy
of a much better cause, making the most strenuous exertions to
compress it within those limits. Again I thanked him and
apologized, and again he said in the cheerfullest manner, "Not at
all, I am sure" and resumed.
"There appeared upon the scene  say at the races, or the public
balls, or anywhere else you like  a certain man, who made love to
Miss Havisham. I never saw him, for this happened fiveandtwenty
years ago before you and I were, Handel, but I have heard my
father mention that he was a showyman, and the kind of man for the
purpose. But that he was not to be, without ignorance or prejudice,
mistaken for a gentleman, my father most strongly asseverates
because it is a principle of his that no man who was not a true
gentleman at heart, ever was, since the world began, a true
gentleman in manner. He says, no varnish can hide the grain of the
wood and that the more varnish you put on, the more the grain will
express itself. Well This man pursued Miss Havisham closely, and
professed to be devoted to her. I believe she had not shown much
susceptibility up to that time but all the susceptibility she
possessed, certainly came out then, and she passionately loved him.
There is no doubt that she perfectly idolized him. He practised on
her affection in that systematic way, that he got great sums of
money from her, and he induced her to buy her brother out of a
share in the brewery which had been weakly left him by his father
at an immense price, on the plea that when he was her husband he
must hold and manage it all. Your guardian was not at that time in
Miss Havisham's councils, and she was too haughty and too much in
love, to be advised by any one. Her relations were poor and
scheming, with the exception of my father he was poor enough, but
not timeserving or jealous. The only independent one among them,
he warned her that she was doing too much for this man, and was
placing herself too unreservedly in his power. She took the first
opportunity of angrily ordering my father out of the house, in his
presence, and my father has never seen her since."
I thought of her having said, "Matthew will come and see me at last
when I am laid dead upon that table" and I asked Herbert whether
his father was so inveterate against her?
"It's not that," said he, "but she charged him, in the presence of
her intended husband, with being disappointed in the hope of
fawning upon her for his own advancement, and, if he were to go to
her now, it would look true  even to him  and even to her. To
return to the man and make an end of him. The marriage day was
fixed, the wedding dresses were bought, the wedding tour was
planned out, the wedding guests were invited. The day came, but not
the bridegroom. He wrote her a letter"
"Which she received," I struck in, "when she was dressing for her
marriage? At twenty minutes to nine?"
"At the hour and minute," said Herbert, nodding, "at which she
afterwards stopped all the clocks. What was in it, further than
that it most heartlessly broke the marriage off, I can't tell you,
because I don't know. When she recovered from a bad illness that
she had, she laid the whole place waste, as you have seen it, and
she has never since looked upon the light of day."
"Is that all the story?" I asked, after considering it.
"All I know of it and indeed I only know so much, through piecing
it out for myself for my father always avoids it, and, even when
Miss Havisham invited me to go there, told me no more of it than it
was absolutely requisite I should understand. But I have forgotten
one thing. It has been supposed that the man to whom she gave her
misplaced confidence, acted throughout in concert with her
halfbrother that it was a conspiracy between them and that they
shared the profits."
"I wonder he didn't marry her and get all the property," said I.
"He may have been married already, and her cruel mortification may
have been a part of her halfbrother's scheme," said Herbert.
"Mind I don't know that."
"What became of the two men?" I asked, after again considering the
subject.
"They fell into deeper shame and degradation  if there can be
deeper  and ruin."
"Are they alive now?"
"I don't know."
"You said just now, that Estella was not related to Miss Havisham,
but adopted. When adopted?"
Herbert shrugged his shoulders. "There has always been an Estella,
since I have heard of a Miss Havisham. I know no more. And now,
Handel," said he, finally throwing off the story as it were, "there
is a perfectly open understanding between us. All that I know about
Miss Havisham, you know."
"And all that I know," I retorted, "you know."
"I fully believe it. So there can be no competition or perplexity
between you and me. And as to the condition on which you hold your
advancement in life  namely, that you are not to inquire or
discuss to whom you owe it  you may be very sure that it will
never be encroached upon, or even approached, by me, or by any one
belonging to me."
In truth, he said this with so much delicacy, that I felt the
subject done with, even though I should be under his father's roof
for years and years to come. Yet he said it with so much meaning,
too, that I felt he as perfectly understood Miss Havisham to be my
benefactress, as I understood the fact myself.
It had not occurred to me before, that he had led up to the theme
for the purpose of clearing it out of our way but we were so much
the lighter and easier for having broached it, that I now perceived
this to be the case. We were very gay and sociable, and I asked
him, in the course of conversation, what he was? He replied, "A
capitalist  an Insurer of Ships." I suppose he saw me glancing
about the room in search of some tokens of Shipping, or capital,
for he added, "In the City."
I had grand ideas of the wealth and importance of Insurers of Ships
in the City, and I began to think with awe, of having laid a young
Insurer on his back, blackened his enterprising eye, and cut his
responsible head open. But, again, there came upon me, for my
relief, that odd impression that Herbert Pocket would never be very
successful or rich.
"I shall not rest satisfied with merely employing my capital in
insuring ships. I shall buy up some good Life Assurance shares, and
cut into the Direction. I shall also do a little in the mining way.
None of these things will interfere with my chartering a few
thousand tons on my own account. I think I shall trade," said he,
leaning back in his chair, "to the East Indies, for silks, shawls,
spices, dyes, drugs, and precious woods. It's an interesting
trade."
"And the profits are large?" said I.
"Tremendous" said he.
I wavered again, and began to think here were greater expectations
than my own.
"I think I shall trade, also," said he, putting his thumbs in his
waistcoat pockets, "to the West Indies, for sugar, tobacco, and
rum. Also to Ceylon, specially for elephants' tusks."
"You will want a good many ships," said I.
"A perfect fleet," said he.
Quite overpowered by the magnificence of these transactions, I
asked him where the ships he insured mostly traded to at present?
"I haven't begun insuring yet," he replied. "I am looking about
me."
Somehow, that pursuit seemed more in keeping with Barnard's Inn. I
said in a tone of conviction, "Ahh"
"Yes. I am in a countinghouse, and looking about me."
"Is a countinghouse profitable?" I asked.
"To  do you mean to the young fellow who's in it?" he asked, in
reply.
"Yes to you."
"Why, nno not to me." He said this with the air of one carefully
reckoning up and striking a balance. "Not directly profitable. That
is, it doesn't pay me anything, and I have to  keep myself."
This certainly had not a profitable appearance, and I shook my head
as if I would imply that it would be difficult to lay by much
accumulative capital from such a source of income.
"But the thing is," said Herbert Pocket, "that you look about you.
That's the grand thing. You are in a countinghouse, you know, and
you look about you."
It struck me as a singular implication that you couldn't be out of
a countinghouse, you know, and look about you but I silently
deferred to his experience.
"Then the time comes," said Herbert, "when you see your opening.
And you go in, and you swoop upon it and you make your capital, and
then there you are When you have once made your capital, you have
nothing to do but employ it."
This was very like his way of conducting that encounter in the
garden very like. His manner of bearing his poverty, too, exactly
corresponded to his manner of bearing that defeat. It seemed to me
that he took all blows and buffets now, with just the same air as
he had taken mine then. It was evident that he had nothing around
him but the simplest necessaries, for everything that I remarked
upon turned out to have been sent in on my account from the
coffeehouse or somewhere else.
Yet, having already made his fortune in his own mind, he was so
unassuming with it that I felt quite grateful to him for not being
puffed up. It was a pleasant addition to his naturally pleasant
ways, and we got on famously. In the evening we went out for a walk
in the streets, and went halfprice to the Theatre and next day we
went to church at Westminster Abbey, and in the afternoon we walked
in the Parks and I wondered who shod all the horses there, and
wished Joe did.
On a moderate computation, it was many months, that Sunday, since I
had left Joe and Biddy. The space interposed between myself and
them, partook of that expansion, and our marshes were any distance
off. That I could have been at our old church in my old
churchgoing clothes, on the very last Sunday that ever was, seemed
a combination of impossibilities, geographical and social, solar
and lunar. Yet in the London streets, so crowded with people and so
brilliantly lighted in the dusk of evening, there were depressing
hints of reproaches for that I had put the poor old kitchen at home
so far away and in the dead of night, the footsteps of some
incapable impostor of a porter mooning about Barnard's Inn, under
pretence of watching it, fell hollow on my heart.
On the Monday morning at a quarter before nine, Herbert went to the
countinghouse to report himself  to look about him, too, I
suppose  and I bore him company. He was to come away in an hour or
two to attend me to Hammersmith, and I was to wait about for him.
It appeared to me that the eggs from which young Insurers were
hatched, were incubated in dust and heat, like the eggs of
ostriches, judging from the places to which those incipient giants
repaired on a Monday morning. Nor did the countinghouse where
Herbert assisted, show in my eyes as at all a good Observatory
being a back second floor up a yard, of a grimy presence in all
particulars, and with a look into another back second floor, rather
than a look out.
I waited about until it was noon, and I went upon 'Change, and I
saw fluey men sitting there under the bills about shipping, whom I
took to be great merchants, though I couldn't understand why they
should all be out of spirits. When Herbert came, we went and had
lunch at a celebrated house which I then quite venerated, but now
believe to have been the most abject superstition in Europe, and
where I could not help noticing, even then, that there was much
more gravy on the tablecloths and knives and waiters' clothes, than
in the steaks. This collation disposed of at a moderate price
considering the grease which was not charged for, we went back
to Barnard's Inn and got my little portmanteau, and then took coach
for Hammersmith. We arrived there at two or three o'clock in the
afternoon, and had very little way to walk to Mr. Pocket's house.
Lifting the latch of a gate, we passed direct into a little garden
overlooking the river, where Mr. Pocket's children were playing
about. And unless I deceive myself on a point where my interests or
prepossessions are certainly not concerned, I saw that Mr. and Mrs.
Pocket's children were not growing up or being brought up, but were
tumbling up.
Mrs. Pocket was sitting on a garden chair under a tree, reading,
with her legs upon another garden chair and Mrs. Pocket's two
nursemaids were looking about them while the children played.
"Mamma," said Herbert, "this is young Mr. Pip." Upon which Mrs.
Pocket received me with an appearance of amiable dignity.
"Master Alick and Miss Jane," cried one of the nurses to two of the
children, "if you go abouncing up against them bushes you'll fall
over into the river and be drownded, and what'll your pa say then?"
At the same time this nurse picked up Mrs. Pocket's handkerchief,
and said, "If that don't make six times you've dropped it, Mum"
Upon which Mrs. Pocket laughed and said, "Thank you, Flopson," and
settling herself in one chair only, resumed her book. Her
countenance immediately assumed a knitted and intent expression as
if she had been reading for a week, but before she could have read
half a dozen lines, she fixed her eyes upon me, and said, "I hope
your mamma is quite well?" This unexpected inquiry put me into such
a difficulty that I began saying in the absurdest way that if there
had been any such person I had no doubt she would have been quite
well and would have been very much obliged and would have sent her
compliments, when the nurse came to my rescue.
"Well" she cried, picking up the pocket handkerchief, "if that
don't make seven times What ARE you adoing of this afternoon,
Mum" Mrs. Pocket received her property, at first with a look of
unutterable surprise as if she had never seen it before, and then
with a laugh of recognition, and said, "Thank you, Flopson," and
forgot me, and went on reading.
I found, now I had leisure to count them, that there were no fewer
than six little Pockets present, in various stages of tumbling up.
I had scarcely arrived at the total when a seventh was heard, as in
the region of air, wailing dolefully.
"If there ain't Baby" said Flopson, appearing to think it most
surprising. "Make haste up, Millers."
Millers, who was the other nurse, retired into the house, and by
degrees the child's wailing was hushed and stopped, as if it were a
young ventriloquist with something in its mouth. Mrs. Pocket read
all the time, and I was curious to know what the book could be.
We were waiting, I supposed, for Mr. Pocket to come out to us at
any rate we waited there, and so I had an opportunity of observing
the remarkable family phenomenon that whenever any of the children
strayed near Mrs. Pocket in their play, they always tripped
themselves up and tumbled over her  always very much to her
momentary astonishment, and their own more enduring lamentation. I
was at a loss to account for this surprising circumstance, and
could not help giving my mind to speculations about it, until
byandby Millers came down with the baby, which baby was handed to
Flopson, which Flopson was handing it to Mrs. Pocket, when she too
went fairly head foremost over Mrs. Pocket, baby and all, and was
caught by Herbert and myself.
"Gracious me, Flopson" said Mrs. Pocket, looking off her book for a
moment, "everybody's tumbling"
"Gracious you, indeed, Mum" returned Flopson, very red in the
face "what have you got there?"
"I got here, Flopson?" asked Mrs. Pocket.
"Why, if it ain't your footstool" cried Flopson. "And if you keep
it under your skirts like that, who's to help tumbling? Here Take
the baby, Mum, and give me your book."
Mrs. Pocket acted on the advice, and inexpertly danced the infant a
little in her lap, while the other children played about it. This
had lasted but a very short time, when Mrs. Pocket issued summary
orders that they were all to be taken into the house for a nap.
Thus I made the second discovery on that first occasion, that the
nurture of the little Pockets consisted of alternately tumbling up
and lying down.
Under these circumstances, when Flopson and Millers had got the
children into the house, like a little flock of sheep, and Mr.
Pocket came out of it to make my acquaintance, I was not much
surprised to find that Mr. Pocket was a gentleman with a rather
perplexed expression of face, and with his very grey hair
disordered on his head, as if he didn't quite see his way to
putting anything straight.
Chapter 
Mr. Pocket said he was glad to see me, and he hoped I was not sorry
to see him. "For, I really am not," he added, with his son's smile,
"an alarming personage." He was a younglooking man, in spite of
his perplexities and his very grey hair, and his manner seemed
quite natural. I use the word natural, in the sense of its being
unaffected there was something comic in his distraught way, as
though it would have been downright ludicrous but for his own
perception that it was very near being so. When he had talked with
me a little, he said to Mrs. Pocket, with a rather anxious
contraction of his eyebrows, which were black and handsome,
"Belinda, I hope you have welcomed Mr. Pip?" And she looked up from
her book, and said, "Yes." She then smiled upon me in an absent
state of mind, and asked me if I liked the taste of orangeflower
water? As the question had no bearing, near or remote, on any
foregone or subsequent transaction, I consider it to have been
thrown out, like her previous approaches, in general conversational
condescension.
I found out within a few hours, and may mention at once, that Mrs.
Pocket was the only daughter of a certain quite accidental deceased
Knight, who had invented for himself a conviction that his deceased
father would have been made a Baronet but for somebody's determined
opposition arising out of entirely personal motives  I forget
whose, if I ever knew  the Sovereign's, the Prime Minister's, the
Lord Chancellor's, the Archbishop of Canterbury's, anybody's  and
had tacked himself on to the nobles of the earth in right of this
quite supposititious fact. I believe he had been knighted himself
for storming the English grammar at the point of the pen, in a
desperate address engrossed on vellum, on the occasion of the
laying of the first stone of some building or other, and for
handing some Royal Personage either the trowel or the mortar. Be
that as it may, he had directed Mrs. Pocket to be brought up from
her cradle as one who in the nature of things must marry a title,
and who was to be guarded from the acquisition of plebeian domestic
knowledge.
So successful a watch and ward had been established over the young
lady by this judicious parent, that she had grown up highly
ornamental, but perfectly helpless and useless. With her character
thus happily formed, in the first bloom of her youth she had
encountered Mr. Pocket who was also in the first bloom of youth,
and not quite decided whether to mount to the Woolsack, or to roof
himself in with a mitre. As his doing the one or the other was a
mere question of time, he and Mrs. Pocket had taken Time by the
forelock when, to judge from its length, it would seem to have
wanted cutting, and had married without the knowledge of the
judicious parent. The judicious parent, having nothing to bestow or
withhold but his blessing, had handsomely settled that dower upon
them after a short struggle, and had informed Mr. Pocket that his
wife was "a treasure for a Prince." Mr. Pocket had invested the
Prince's treasure in the ways of the world ever since, and it was
supposed to have brought him in but indifferent interest. Still,
Mrs. Pocket was in general the object of a queer sort of respectful
pity, because she had not married a title while Mr. Pocket was the
object of a queer sort of forgiving reproach, because he had never
got one.
Mr. Pocket took me into the house and showed me my room which was a
pleasant one, and so furnished as that I could use it with comfort
for my own private sittingroom. He then knocked at the doors of
two other similar rooms, and introduced me to their occupants, by
name Drummle and Startop. Drummle, an oldlooking young man of a
heavy order of architecture, was whistling. Startop, younger in
years and appearance, was reading and holding his head, as if he
thought himself in danger of exploding it with too strong a charge
of knowledge.
Both Mr. and Mrs. Pocket had such a noticeable air of being in
somebody else's hands, that I wondered who really was in possession
of the house and let them live there, until I found this unknown
power to be the servants. It was a smooth way of going on, perhaps,
in respect of saving trouble but it had the appearance of being
expensive, for the servants felt it a duty they owed to themselves
to be nice in their eating and drinking, and to keep a deal of
company down stairs. They allowed a very liberal table to Mr. and
Mrs. Pocket, yet it always appeared to me that by far the best part
of the house to have boarded in, would have been the kitchen 
always supposing the boarder capable of selfdefence, for, before I
had been there a week, a neighbouring lady with whom the family
were personally unacquainted, wrote in to say that she had seen
Millers slapping the baby. This greatly distressed Mrs. Pocket, who
burst into tears on receiving the note, and said that it was an
extraordinary thing that the neighbours couldn't mind their own
business.
By degrees I learnt, and chiefly from Herbert, that Mr. Pocket had
been educated at Harrow and at Cambridge, where he had
distinguished himself but that when he had had the happiness of
marrying Mrs. Pocket very early in life, he had impaired his
prospects and taken up the calling of a Grinder. After grinding a
number of dull blades  of whom it was remarkable that their
fathers, when influential, were always going to help him to
preferment, but always forgot to do it when the blades had left the
Grindstone  he had wearied of that poor work and had come to
London. Here, after gradually failing in loftier hopes, he had
"read" with divers who had lacked opportunities or neglected them,
and had refurbished divers others for special occasions, and had
turned his acquirements to the account of literary compilation and
correction, and on such means, added to some very moderate private
resources, still maintained the house I saw.
Mr. and Mrs. Pocket had a toady neighbour a widow lady of that
highly sympathetic nature that she agreed with everybody, blessed
everybody, and shed smiles and tears on everybody, according to
circumstances. This lady's name was Mrs. Coiler, and I had the
honour of taking her down to dinner on the day of my installation.
She gave me to understand on the stairs, that it was a blow to dear
Mrs. Pocket that dear Mr. Pocket should be under the necessity of
receiving gentlemen to read with him. That did not extend to me,
she told me in a gush of love and confidence at that time, I had
known her something less than five minutes if they were all like
Me, it would be quite another thing.
"But dear Mrs. Pocket," said Mrs. Coiler, "after her early
disappointment not that dear Mr. Pocket was to blame in that,
requires so much luxury and elegance"
"Yes, ma'am," I said, to stop her, for I was afraid she was going
to cry.
"And she is of so aristocratic a disposition"
"Yes, ma'am," I said again, with the same object as before.
"  that it is hard," said Mrs. Coiler, "to have dear Mr. Pocket's
time and attention diverted from dear Mrs. Pocket."
I could not help thinking that it might be harder if the butcher's
time and attention were diverted from dear Mrs. Pocket but I said
nothing, and indeed had enough to do in keeping a bashful watch
upon my companymanners.
It came to my knowledge, through what passed between Mrs. Pocket and
Drummle while I was attentive to my knife and fork, spoon, glasses,
and other instruments of selfdestruction, that Drummle, whose
Christian name was Bentley, was actually the next heir but one to a
baronetcy. It further appeared that the book I had seen Mrs. Pocket
reading in the garden, was all about titles, and that she knew the
exact date at which her grandpapa would have come into the book, if
he ever had come at all. Drummle didn't say much, but in his
limited way he struck me as a sulky kind of fellow he spoke as
one of the elect, and recognized Mrs. Pocket as a woman and a
sister. No one but themselves and Mrs. Coiler the toady neighbour
showed any interest in this part of the conversation, and it
appeared to me that it was painful to Herbert but it promised to
last a long time, when the page came in with the announcement of a
domestic affliction. It was, in effect, that the cook had mislaid
the beef. To my unutterable amazement, I now, for the first time,
saw Mr. Pocket relieve his mind by going through a performance that
struck me as very extraordinary, but which made no impression on
anybody else, and with which I soon became as familiar as the rest.
He laid down the carvingknife and fork  being engaged in carving,
at the moment  put his two hands into his disturbed hair, and
appeared to make an extraordinary effort to lift himself up by it.
When he had done this, and had not lifted himself up at all, he
quietly went on with what he was about.
Mrs. Coiler then changed the subject, and began to flatter me. I
liked it for a few moments, but she flattered me so very grossly
that the pleasure was soon over. She had a serpentine way of coming
close at me when she pretended to be vitally interested in the
friends and localities I had left, which was altogether snaky and
forktongued and when she made an occasional bounce upon Startop
who said very little to her, or upon Drummle who said less, I
rather envied them for being on the opposite side of the table.
After dinner the children were introduced, and Mrs. Coiler made
admiring comments on their eyes, noses, and legs  a sagacious way
of improving their minds. There were four little girls, and two
little boys, besides the baby who might have been either, and the
baby's next successor who was as yet neither. They were brought in
by Flopson and Millers, much as though those two noncommissioned
officers had been recruiting somewhere for children and had
enlisted these while Mrs. Pocket looked at the young Nobles that
ought to have been, as if she rather thought she had had the
pleasure of inspecting them before, but didn't quite know what to
make of them.
"Here Give me your fork, Mum, and take the baby," said Flopson.
"Don't take it that way, or you'll get its head under the table."
Thus advised, Mrs. Pocket took it the other way, and got its head
upon the table which was announced to all present by a prodigious
concussion.
"Dear, dear Give it me back, Mum," said Flopson "and Miss Jane,
come and dance to baby, do"
One of the little girls, a mere mite who seemed to have prematurely
taken upon herself some charge of the others, stepped out of her
place by me, and danced to and from the baby until it left off
crying, and laughed. Then, all the children laughed, and Mr. Pocket
who in the meantime had twice endeavoured to lift himself up by
the hair laughed, and we all laughed and were glad.
Flopson, by dint of doubling the baby at the joints like a Dutch
doll, then got it safely into Mrs. Pocket's lap, and gave it the
nutcrackers to play with at the same time recommending Mrs. Pocket
to take notice that the handles of that instrument were not likely
to agree with its eyes, and sharply charging Miss Jane to look
after the same. Then, the two nurses left the room, and had a
lively scuffle on the staircase with a dissipated page who had
waited at dinner, and who had clearly lost half his buttons at the
gamingtable.
I was made very uneasy in my mind by Mrs. Pocket's falling into a
discussion with Drummle respecting two baronetcies, while she ate a
sliced orange steeped in sugar and wine, and forgetting all about
the baby on her lap who did most appalling things with the
nutcrackers. At length, little Jane perceiving its young brains to
be imperilled, softly left her place, and with many small artifices
coaxed the dangerous weapon away. Mrs. Pocket finishing her orange
at about the same time, and not approving of this, said to Jane
"You naughty child, how dare you? Go and sit down this instant"
"Mamma dear," lisped the little girl, "baby ood have put hith eyeth
out."
"How dare you tell me so?" retorted Mrs. Pocket. "Go and sit down in
your chair this moment"
Mrs. Pocket's dignity was so crushing, that I felt quite abashed as
if I myself had done something to rouse it.
"Belinda," remonstrated Mr. Pocket, from the other end of the table,
"how can you be so unreasonable? Jane only interfered for the
protection of baby."
"I will not allow anybody to interfere," said Mrs. Pocket. "I am
surprised, Matthew, that you should expose me to the affront of
interference."
"Good God" cried Mr. Pocket, in an outbreak of desolate
desperation. "Are infants to be nutcrackered into their tombs, and
is nobody to save them?"
"I will not be interfered with by Jane," said Mrs. Pocket, with a
majestic glance at that innocent little offender. "I hope I know my
poor grandpapa's position. Jane, indeed"
Mr. Pocket got his hands in his hair again, and this time really did
lift himself some inches out of his chair. "Hear this" he
helplessly exclaimed to the elements. "Babies are to be
nutcrackered dead, for people's poor grandpapa's positions" Then
he let himself down again, and became silent.
We all looked awkwardly at the tablecloth while this was going on.
A pause succeeded, during which the honest and irrepressible baby
made a series of leaps and crows at little Jane, who appeared to me
to be the only member of the family irrespective of servants with
whom it had any decided acquaintance.
"Mr. Drummle," said Mrs. Pocket, "will you ring for Flopson? Jane,
you undutiful little thing, go and lie down. Now, baby darling,
come with ma"
The baby was the soul of honour, and protested with all its might.
It doubled itself up the wrong way over Mrs. Pocket's arm, exhibited
a pair of knitted shoes and dimpled ankles to the company in lieu
of its soft face, and was carried out in the highest state of
mutiny. And it gained its point after all, for I saw it through the
window within a few minutes, being nursed by little Jane.
It happened that the other five children were left behind at the
dinnertable, through Flopson's having some private engagement, and
their not being anybody else's business. I thus became aware of the
mutual relations between them and Mr. Pocket, which were exemplified
in the following manner. Mr. Pocket, with the normal perplexity of
his face heightened and his hair rumpled, looked at them for some
minutes, as if he couldn't make out how they came to be boarding
and lodging in that establishment, and why they hadn't been
billeted by Nature on somebody else. Then, in a distant, Missionary
way he asked them certain questions  as why little Joe had that
hole in his frill who said, Pa, Flopson was going to mend it when
she had time  and how little Fanny came by that whitlow who said,
Pa, Millers was going to poultice it when she didn't forget. Then,
he melted into parental tenderness, and gave them a shilling apiece
and told them to go and play and then as they went out, with one
very strong effort to lift himself up by the hair he dismissed the
hopeless subject.
In the evening there was rowing on the river. As Drummle and
Startop had each a boat, I resolved to set up mine, and to cut them
both out. I was pretty good at most exercises in which countryboys
are adepts, but, as I was conscious of wanting elegance of style
for the Thames  not to say for other waters  I at once engaged to
place myself under the tuition of the winner of a prizewherry who
plied at our stairs, and to whom I was introduced by my new allies.
This practical authority confused me very much, by saying I had the
arm of a blacksmith. If he could have known how nearly the
compliment lost him his pupil, I doubt if he would have paid it.
There was a suppertray after we got home at night, and I think we
should all have enjoyed ourselves, but for a rather disagreeable
domestic occurrence. Mr. Pocket was in good spirits, when a
housemaid came in, and said, "If you please, sir, I should wish to
speak to you."
"Speak to your master?" said Mrs. Pocket, whose dignity was roused
again. "How can you think of such a thing? Go and speak to Flopson.
Or speak to me  at some other time."
"Begging your pardon, ma'am," returned the housemaid, "I should
wish to speak at once, and to speak to master."
Hereupon, Mr. Pocket went out of the room, and we made the best of
ourselves until he came back.
"This is a pretty thing, Belinda" said Mr. Pocket, returning with a
countenance expressive of grief and despair. "Here's the cook lying
insensibly drunk on the kitchen floor, with a large bundle of fresh
butter made up in the cupboard ready to sell for grease"
Mrs. Pocket instantly showed much amiable emotion, and said, "This
is that odious Sophia's doing"
"What do you mean, Belinda?" demanded Mr. Pocket.
"Sophia has told you," said Mrs. Pocket. "Did I not see her with my
own eyes and hear her with my own ears, come into the room just now
and ask to speak to you?"
"But has she not taken me down stairs, Belinda," returned Mr.
Pocket, "and shown me the woman, and the bundle too?"
"And do you defend her, Matthew," said Mrs. Pocket, "for making
mischief?"
Mr. Pocket uttered a dismal groan.
"Am I, grandpapa's granddaughter, to be nothing in the house?" said
Mrs. Pocket. "Besides, the cook has always been a very nice
respectful woman, and said in the most natural manner when she came
to look after the situation, that she felt I was born to be a
Duchess."
There was a sofa where Mr. Pocket stood, and he dropped upon it in
the attitude of the Dying Gladiator. Still in that attitude he
said, with a hollow voice, "Good night, Mr. Pip," when I deemed it
advisable to go to bed and leave him.
Chapter 
After two or three days, when I had established myself in my room
and had gone backwards and forwards to London several times, and
had ordered all I wanted of my tradesmen, Mr. Pocket and I had a
long talk together. He knew more of my intended career than I knew
myself, for he referred to his having been told by Mr. Jaggers that
I was not designed for any profession, and that I should be well
enough educated for my destiny if I could "hold my own" with the
average of young men in prosperous circumstances. I acquiesced, of
course, knowing nothing to the contrary.
He advised my attending certain places in London, for the
acquisition of such mere rudiments as I wanted, and my investing
him with the functions of explainer and director of all my studies.
He hoped that with intelligent assistance I should meet with little
to discourage me, and should soon be able to dispense with any aid
but his. Through his way of saying this, and much more to similar
purpose, he placed himself on confidential terms with me in an
admirable manner and I may state at once that he was always so
zealous and honourable in fulfilling his compact with me, that he
made me zealous and honourable in fulfilling mine with him. If he
had shown indifference as a master, I have no doubt I should have
returned the compliment as a pupil he gave me no such excuse, and
each of us did the other justice. Nor, did I ever regard him as
having anything ludicrous about him  or anything but what was
serious, honest, and good  in his tutor communication with me.
When these points were settled, and so far carried out as that I
had begun to work in earnest, it occurred to me that if I could
retain my bedroom in Barnard's Inn, my life would be agreeably
varied, while my manners would be none the worse for Herbert's
society. Mr. Pocket did not object to this arrangement, but urged
that before any step could possibly be taken in it, it must be
submitted to my guardian. I felt that this delicacy arose out of
the consideration that the plan would save Herbert some expense, so
I went off to Little Britain and imparted my wish to Mr. Jaggers.
"If I could buy the furniture now hired for me," said I, "and one
or two other little things, I should be quite at home there."
"Go it" said Mr. Jaggers, with a short laugh. "I told you you'd get
on. Well How much do you want?"
I said I didn't know how much.
"Come" retorted Mr. Jaggers. "How much? Fifty pounds?"
"Oh, not nearly so much."
"Five pounds?" said Mr. Jaggers.
This was such a great fall, that I said in discomfiture, "Oh more
than that."
"More than that, eh" retorted Mr. Jaggers, lying in wait for me,
with his hands in his pockets, his head on one side, and his eyes
on the wall behind me "how much more?"
"It is so difficult to fix a sum," said I, hesitating.
"Come" said Mr. Jaggers. "Let's get at it. Twice five will that
do? Three times five will that do? Four times five will that do?"
I said I thought that would do handsomely.
"Four times five will do handsomely, will it?" said Mr. Jaggers,
knitting his brows. "Now, what do you make of four times five?"
"What do I make of it?"
"Ah" said Mr. Jaggers "how much?"
"I suppose you make it twenty pounds," said I, smiling.
"Never mind what I make it, my friend," observed Mr. Jaggers, with a
knowing and contradictory toss of his head. "I want to know what
you make it."
"Twenty pounds, of course."
"Wemmick" said Mr. Jaggers, opening his office door. "Take Mr. Pip's
written order, and pay him twenty pounds."
This strongly marked way of doing business made a strongly marked
impression on me, and that not of an agreeable kind. Mr. Jaggers
never laughed but he wore great bright creaking boots, and, in
poising himself on these boots, with his large head bent down and
his eyebrows joined together, awaiting an answer, he sometimes
caused the boots to creak, as if they laughed in a dry and
suspicious way. As he happened to go out now, and as Wemmick was
brisk and talkative, I said to Wemmick that I hardly knew what to
make of Mr. Jaggers's manner.
"Tell him that, and he'll take it as a compliment," answered
Wemmick "he don't mean that you should know what to make of it. 
Oh" for I looked surprised, "it's not personal it's professional
only professional."
Wemmick was at his desk, lunching  and crunching  on a dry hard
biscuit pieces of which he threw from time to time into his slit
of a mouth, as if he were posting them.
"Always seems to me," said Wemmick, "as if he had set a mantrap and
was watching it. Suddenly  click  you're caught"
Without remarking that mantraps were not among the amenities of
life, I said I supposed he was very skilful?
"Deep," said Wemmick, "as Australia." Pointing with his pen at the
office floor, to express that Australia was understood, for the
purposes of the figure, to be symmetrically on the opposite spot of
the globe. "If there was anything deeper," added Wemmick, bringing
his pen to paper, "he'd be it."
Then, I said I supposed he had a fine business, and Wemmick said,
"Capital" Then I asked if there were many clerks? to which he
replied
"We don't run much into clerks, because there's only one Jaggers,
and people won't have him at secondhand. There are only four of
us. Would you like to see 'em? You are one of us, as I may say."
I accepted the offer. When Mr. Wemmick had put all the biscuit into
the post, and had paid me my money from a cashbox in a safe, the
key of which safe he kept somewhere down his back and produced from
his coatcollar like an iron pigtail, we went upstairs. The house
was dark and shabby, and the greasy shoulders that had left their
mark in Mr. Jaggers's room, seemed to have been shuffling up and
down the staircase for years. In the front first floor, a clerk who
looked something between a publican and a ratcatcher  a large
pale puffed swollen man  was attentively engaged with three or
four people of shabby appearance, whom he treated as
unceremoniously as everybody seemed to be treated who contributed
to Mr. Jaggers's coffers. "Getting evidence together," said Mr.
Wemmick, as we came out, "for the Bailey."
In the room over that, a little flabby terrier of a clerk with
dangling hair his cropping seemed to have been forgotten when he
was a puppy was similarly engaged with a man with weak eyes, whom
Mr. Wemmick presented to me as a smelter who kept his pot always
boiling, and who would melt me anything I pleased  and who was in
an excessive whiteperspiration, as if he had been trying his art on
himself. In a back room, a highshouldered man with a faceache tied
up in dirty flannel, who was dressed in old black clothes that bore
the appearance of having been waxed, was stooping over his work of
making fair copies of the notes of the other two gentlemen, for Mr.
Jaggers's own use.
This was all the establishment. When we went downstairs again,
Wemmick led me into my guardian's room, and said, "This you've seen
already."
"Pray," said I, as the two odious casts with the twitchy leer upon
them caught my sight again, "whose likenesses are those?"
"These?" said Wemmick, getting upon a chair, and blowing the dust
off the horrible heads before bringing them down. "These are two
celebrated ones. Famous clients of ours that got us a world of
credit. This chap why you must have come down in the night and
been peeping into the inkstand, to get this blot upon your eyebrow,
you old rascal murdered his master, and, considering that he
wasn't brought up to evidence, didn't plan it badly."
"Is it like him?" I asked, recoiling from the brute, as Wemmick
spat upon his eyebrow and gave it a rub with his sleeve.
"Like him? It's himself, you know. The cast was made in Newgate,
directly after he was taken down. You had a particular fancy for
me, hadn't you, Old Artful?" said Wemmick. He then explained this
affectionate apostrophe, by touching his brooch representing the
lady and the weeping willow at the tomb with the urn upon it, and
saying, "Had it made for me, express"
"Is the lady anybody?" said I.
"No," returned Wemmick. "Only his game. You liked your bit of
game, didn't you? No deuce a bit of a lady in the case, Mr. Pip,
except one  and she wasn't of this slender ladylike sort, and you
wouldn't have caught her looking after this urn  unless there was
something to drink in it." Wemmick's attention being thus directed
to his brooch, he put down the cast, and polished the brooch with
his pockethandkerchief.
"Did that other creature come to the same end?" I asked. "He has
the same look."
"You're right," said Wemmick "it's the genuine look. Much as if
one nostril was caught up with a horsehair and a little fishhook.
Yes, he came to the same end quite the natural end here, I assure
you. He forged wills, this blade did, if he didn't also put the
supposed testators to sleep too. You were a gentlemanly Cove,
though" Mr. Wemmick was again apostrophizing, "and you said you
could write Greek. Yah, Bounceable What a liar you were I never
met such a liar as you" Before putting his late friend on his
shelf again, Wemmick touched the largest of his mourning rings and
said, "Sent out to buy it for me, only the day before."
While he was putting up the other cast and coming down from the
chair, the thought crossed my mind that all his personal jewellery
was derived from like sources. As he had shown no diffidence on the
subject, I ventured on the liberty of asking him the question, when
he stood before me, dusting his hands.
"Oh yes," he returned, "these are all gifts of that kind. One
brings another, you see that's the way of it. I always take 'em.
They're curiosities. And they're property. They may not be worth
much, but, after all, they're property and portable. It don't
signify to you with your brilliant lookout, but as to myself, my
guidingstar always is, "Get hold of portable property"."
When I had rendered homage to this light, he went on to say, in a
friendly manner
"If at any odd time when you have nothing better to do, you
wouldn't mind coming over to see me at Walworth, I could offer you
a bed, and I should consider it an honour. I have not much to show
you but such two or three curiosities as I have got, you might
like to look over and I am fond of a bit of garden and a
summerhouse."
I said I should be delighted to accept his hospitality.
"Thankee," said he "then we'll consider that it's to come off,
when convenient to you. Have you dined with Mr. Jaggers yet?"
"Not yet."
"Well," said Wemmick, "he'll give you wine, and good wine. I'll
give you punch, and not bad punch. And now I'll tell you something.
When you go to dine with Mr. Jaggers, look at his housekeeper."
"Shall I see something very uncommon?"
"Well," said Wemmick, "you'll see a wild beast tamed. Not so very
uncommon, you'll tell me. I reply, that depends on the original
wildness of the beast, and the amount of taming. It won't lower
your opinion of Mr. Jaggers's powers. Keep your eye on it."
I told him I would do so, with all the interest and curiosity that
his preparation awakened. As I was taking my departure, he asked me
if I would like to devote five minutes to seeing Mr. Jaggers "at
it?"
For several reasons, and not least because I didn't clearly know
what Mr. Jaggers would be found to be "at," I replied in the
affirmative. We dived into the City, and came up in a crowded
policecourt, where a bloodrelation in the murderous sense of the
deceased with the fanciful taste in brooches, was standing at the
bar, uncomfortably chewing something while my guardian had a woman
under examination or crossexamination  I don't know which  and
was striking her, and the bench, and everybody present, with awe.
If anybody, of whatsoever degree, said a word that he didn't
approve of, he instantly required to have it "taken down." If
anybody wouldn't make an admission, he said, "I'll have it out of
you" and if anybody made an admission, he said, "Now I have got
you" the magistrates shivered under a single bite of his finger.
Thieves and thieftakers hung in dread rapture on his words, and
shrank when a hair of his eyebrows turned in their direction. Which
side he was on, I couldn't make out, for he seemed to me to be
grinding the whole place in a mill I only know that when I stole
out on tiptoe, he was not on the side of the bench for, he was
making the legs of the old gentleman who presided, quite convulsive
under the table, by his denunciations of his conduct as the
representative of British law and justice in that chair that day.
Chapter 
Bentley Drummle, who was so sulky a fellow that he even took up a
book as if its writer had done him an injury, did not take up an
acquaintance in a more agreeable spirit. Heavy in figure, movement,
and comprehension  in the sluggish complexion of his face, and in
the large awkward tongue that seemed to loll about in his mouth as
he himself lolled about in a room  he was idle, proud, niggardly,
reserved, and suspicious. He came of rich people down in
Somersetshire, who had nursed this combination of qualities until
they made the discovery that it was just of age and a blockhead.
Thus, Bentley Drummle had come to Mr. Pocket when he was a head
taller than that gentleman, and half a dozen heads thicker than
most gentlemen.
Startop had been spoilt by a weak mother and kept at home when he
ought to have been at school, but he was devotedly attached to her,
and admired her beyond measure. He had a woman's delicacy of
feature, and was  "as you may see, though you never saw her," said
Herbert to me  exactly like his mother. It was but natural that I
should take to him much more kindly than to Drummle, and that, even
in the earliest evenings of our boating, he and I should pull
homeward abreast of one another, conversing from boat to boat,
while Bentley Drummle came up in our wake alone, under the
overhanging banks and among the rushes. He would always creep
inshore like some uncomfortable amphibious creature, even when the
tide would have sent him fast upon his way and I always think of
him as coming after us in the dark or by the backwater, when our
own two boats were breaking the sunset or the moonlight in
midstream.
Herbert was my intimate companion and friend. I presented him with
a halfshare in my boat, which was the occasion of his often coming
down to Hammersmith and my possession of a halfshare in his
chambers often took me up to London. We used to walk between the
two places at all hours. I have an affection for the road yet
though it is not so pleasant a road as it was then, formed in the
impressibility of untried youth and hope.
When I had been in Mr. Pocket's family a month or two, Mr. and Mrs.
Camilla turned up. Camilla was Mr. Pocket's sister. Georgiana, whom
I had seen at Miss Havisham's on the same occasion, also turned up.
she was a cousin  an indigestive single woman, who called her
rigidity religion, and her liver love. These people hated me with
the hatred of cupidity and disappointment. As a matter of course,
they fawned upon me in my prosperity with the basest meanness.
Towards Mr. Pocket, as a grownup infant with no notion of his own
interests, they showed the complacent forbearance I had heard them
express. Mrs. Pocket they held in contempt but they allowed the
poor soul to have been heavily disappointed in life, because that
shed a feeble reflected light upon themselves.
These were the surroundings among which I settled down, and applied
myself to my education. I soon contracted expensive habits, and
began to spend an amount of money that within a few short months I
should have thought almost fabulous but through good and evil I
stuck to my books. There was no other merit in this, than my having
sense enough to feel my deficiencies. Between Mr. Pocket and Herbert
I got on fast and, with one or the other always at my elbow to
give me the start I wanted, and clear obstructions out of my road,
I must have been as great a dolt as Drummle if I had done less.
I had not seen Mr. Wemmick for some weeks, when I thought I would
write him a note and propose to go home with him on a certain
evening. He replied that it would give him much pleasure, and that
he would expect me at the office at six o'clock. Thither I went,
and there I found him, putting the key of his safe down his back as
the clock struck.
"Did you think of walking down to Walworth?" said he.
"Certainly," said I, "if you approve."
"Very much," was Wemmick's reply, "for I have had my legs under the
desk all day, and shall be glad to stretch them. Now, I'll tell you
what I have got for supper, Mr. Pip. I have got a stewed steak 
which is of home preparation  and a cold roast fowl  which is
from the cook'sshop. I think it's tender, because the master of
the shop was a Juryman in some cases of ours the other day, and we
let him down easy. I reminded him of it when I bought the fowl, and
I said, "Pick us out a good one, old Briton, because if we had
chosen to keep you in the box another day or two, we could easily
have done it." He said to that, "Let me make you a present of the
best fowl in the shop." I let him, of course. As far as it goes,
it's property and portable. You don't object to an aged parent, I
hope?"
I really thought he was still speaking of the fowl, until he added,
"Because I have got an aged parent at my place." I then said what
politeness required.
"So, you haven't dined with Mr. Jaggers yet?" he pursued, as we
walked along.
"Not yet."
"He told me so this afternoon when he heard you were coming. I
expect you'll have an invitation tomorrow. He's going to ask your
pals, too. Three of 'em ain't there?"
Although I was not in the habit of counting Drummle as one of my
intimate associates, I answered, "Yes."
"Well, he's going to ask the whole gang" I hardly felt
complimented by the word "and whatever he gives you, he'll give
you good. Don't look forward to variety, but you'll have
excellence. And there'sa nother rum thing in his house," proceeded
Wemmick, after a moment's pause, as if the remark followed on the
housekeeper understood "he never lets a door or window be fastened
at night."
"Is he never robbed?"
"That's it" returned Wemmick. "He says, and gives it out publicly,
"I want to see the man who'll rob me." Lord bless you, I have heard
him, a hundred times if I have heard him once, say to regular
cracksmen in our front office, "You know where I live now, no bolt
is ever drawn there why don't you do a stroke of business with me?
Come can't I tempt you?" Not a man of them, sir, would be bold
enough to try it on, for love or money."
"They dread him so much?" said I.
"Dread him," said Wemmick. "I believe you they dread him. Not but
what he's artful, even in his defiance of them. No silver, sir.
Britannia metal, every spoon."
"So they wouldn't have much," I observed, "even if they"
"Ah But he would have much," said Wemmick, cutting me short, "and
they know it. He'd have their lives, and the lives of scores of
'em. He'd have all he could get. And it's impossible to say what he
couldn't get, if he gave his mind to it."
I was falling into meditation on my guardian's greatness, when
Wemmick remarked
"As to the absence of plate, that's only his natural depth, you
know. A river's its natural depth, and he's his natural depth. Look
at his watchchain. That's real enough."
"It's very massive," said I.
"Massive?" repeated Wemmick. "I think so. And his watch is a gold
repeater, and worth a hundred pound if it's worth a penny. Mr. Pip,
there are about seven hundred thieves in this town who know all
about that watch there's not a man, a woman, or a child, among
them, who wouldn't identify the smallest link in that chain, and
drop it as if it was redhot, if inveigled into touching it."
At first with such discourse, and afterwards with conversation of a
more general nature, did Mr. Wemmick and I beguile the time and the
road, until he gave me to understand that we had arrived in the
district of Walworth.
It appeared to be a collection of back lanes, ditches, and little
gardens, and to present the aspect of a rather dull retirement.
Wemmick's house was a little wooden cottage in the midst of plots
of garden, and the top of it was cut out and painted like a battery
mounted with guns.
"My own doing," said Wemmick. "Looks pretty don't it?"
I highly commended it, I think it was the smallest house I ever
saw with the queerest gothic windows by far the greater part of
them sham, and a gothic door, almost too small to get in at.
"That's a real flagstaff, you see," said Wemmick, "and on Sundays I
run up a real flag. Then look here. After I have crossed this
bridge, I hoist it up  so  and cut off the communication."
The bridge was a plank, and it crossed a chasm about four feet wide
and two deep. But it was very pleasant to see the pride with which
he hoisted it up and made it fast smiling as he did so, with a
relish and not merely mechanically.
"At nine o'clock every night, Greenwich time," said Wemmick, "the
gun fires. There he is, you see And when you hear him go, I think
you'll say he's a Stinger."
The piece of ordnance referred to, was mounted in a separate
fortress, constructed of latticework. It was protected from the
weather by an ingenious little tarpaulin contrivance in the nature
of an umbrella.
"Then, at the back," said Wemmick, "out of sight, so as not to
impede the idea of fortifications  for it's a principle with me,
if you have an idea, carry it out and keep it up  I don't know
whether that's your opinion"
I said, decidedly.
"  At the back, there's a pig, and there are fowls and rabbits
then, I knock together my own little frame, you see, and grow
cucumbers and you'll judge at supper what sort of a salad I can
raise. So, sir," said Wemmick, smiling again, but seriously too, as
he shook his head, "if you can suppose the little place besieged,
it would hold out a devil of a time in point of provisions."
Then, he conducted me to a bower about a dozen yards off, but which
was approached by such ingenious twists of path that it took quite
a long time to get at and in this retreat our glasses were already
set forth. Our punch was cooling in an ornamental lake, on whose
margin the bower was raised. This piece of water with an island in
the middle which might have been the salad for supper was of a
circular form, and he had constructed a fountain in it, which, when
you set a little mill going and took a cork out of a pipe, played
to that powerful extent that it made the back of your hand quite
wet.
"I am my own engineer, and my own carpenter, and my own plumber,
and my own gardener, and my own Jack of all Trades," said Wemmick,
in acknowledging my compliments. "Well it's a good thing, you
know. It brushes the Newgate cobwebs away, and pleases the Aged.
You wouldn't mind being at once introduced to the Aged, would you?
It wouldn't put you out?"
I expressed the readiness I felt, and we went into the castle.
There, we found, sitting by a fire, a very old man in a flannel
coat clean, cheerful, comfortable, and well cared for, but
intensely deaf.
"Well aged parent," said Wemmick, shaking hands with him in a
cordial and jocose way, "how am you?"
"All right, John all right" replied the old man.
"Here's Mr. Pip, aged parent," said Wemmick, "and I wish you could
hear his name. Nod away at him, Mr. Pip that's what he likes. Nod
away at him, if you please, like winking"
"This is a fine place of my son's, sir," cried the old man, while I
nodded as hard as I possibly could. "This is a pretty
pleasureground, sir. This spot and these beautiful works upon it
ought to be kept together by the Nation, after my son's time, for
the people's enjoyment."
"You're as proud of it as Punch ain't you, Aged?" said Wemmick,
contemplating the old man, with his hard face really softened
"there's a nod for you" giving him a tremendous one "there's
another for you" giving him a still more tremendous one "you like
that, don't you? If you're not tired, Mr. Pip  though I know it's
tiring to strangers  will you tip him one more? You can't think
how it pleases him."
I tipped him several more, and he was in great spirits. We left him
bestirring himself to feed the fowls, and we sat down to our punch
in the arbour where Wemmick told me as he smoked a pipe that it
had taken him a good many years to bring the property up to its
present pitch of perfection.
"Is it your own, Mr. Wemmick?"
"O yes," said Wemmick, "I have got hold of it, a bit at a time.
It's a freehold, by George"
"Is it, indeed? I hope Mr. Jaggers admires it?"
"Never seen it," said Wemmick. "Never heard of it. Never seen the
Aged. Never heard of him. No the office is one thing, and private
life is another. When I go into the office, I leave the Castle
behind me, and when I come into the Castle, I leave the office
behind me. If it's not in any way disagreeable to you, you'll
oblige me by doing the same. I don't wish it professionally spoken
about."
Of course I felt my good faith involved in the observance of his
request. The punch being very nice, we sat there drinking it and
talking, until it was almost nine o'clock. "Getting near gunfire,"
said Wemmick then, as he laid down his pipe "it's the Aged's
treat."
Proceeding into the Castle again, we found the Aged heating the
poker, with expectant eyes, as a preliminary to the performance of
this great nightly ceremony. Wemmick stood with his watch in his
hand, until the moment was come for him to take the redhot poker
from the Aged, and repair to the battery. He took it, and went out,
and presently the Stinger went off with a Bang that shook the crazy
little box of a cottage as if it must fall to pieces, and made
every glass and teacup in it ring. Upon this, the Aged  who I
believe would have been blown out of his armchair but for holding
on by the elbows  cried out exultingly, "He's fired I heerd him"
and I nodded at the old gentleman until it is no figure of speech
to declare that I absolutely could not see him.
The interval between that time and supper, Wemmick devoted to
showing me his collection of curiosities. They were mostly of a
felonious character comprising the pen with which a celebrated
forgery had been committed, a distinguished razor or two, some
locks of hair, and several manuscript confessions written under
condemnation  upon which Mr. Wemmick set particular value as being,
to use his own words, "every one of 'em Lies, sir." These were
agreeably dispersed among small specimens of china and glass,
various neat trifles made by the proprietor of the museum, and some
tobaccostoppers carved by the Aged. They were all displayed in
that chamber of the Castle into which I had been first inducted,
and which served, not only as the general sittingroom but as the
kitchen too, if I might judge from a saucepan on the hob, and a
brazen bijou over the fireplace designed for the suspension of a
roastingjack.
There was a neat little girl in attendance, who looked after the
Aged in the day. When she had laid the suppercloth, the bridge was
lowered to give her means of egress, and she withdrew for the
night. The supper was excellent and though the Castle was rather
subject to dryrot insomuch that it tasted like a bad nut, and
though the pig might have been farther off, I was heartily pleased
with my whole entertainment. Nor was there any drawback on my
little turret bedroom, beyond there being such a very thin ceiling
between me and the flagstaff, that when I lay down on my back in
bed, it seemed as if I had to balance that pole on my forehead all
night.
Wemmick was up early in the morning, and I am afraid I heard him
cleaning my boots. After that, he fell to gardening, and I saw him
from my gothic window pretending to employ the Aged, and nodding at
him in a most devoted manner. Our breakfast was as good as the
supper, and at halfpast eight precisely we started for Little
Britain. By degrees, Wemmick got dryer and harder as we went along,
and his mouth tightened into a postoffice again. At last, when we
got to his place of business and he pulled out his key from his
coatcollar, he looked as unconscious of his Walworth property as
if the Castle and the drawbridge and the arbour and the lake and
the fountain and the Aged, had all been blown into space together
by the last discharge of the Stinger.
Chapter 
It fell out as Wemmick had told me it would, that I had an early
opportunity of comparing my guardian's establishment with that of
his cashier and clerk. My guardian was in his room, washing his
hands with his scented soap, when I went into the office from
Walworth and he called me to him, and gave me the invitation for
myself and friends which Wemmick had prepared me to receive. "No
ceremony," he stipulated, "and no dinner dress, and say tomorrow."
I asked him where we should come to for I had no idea where he
lived, and I believe it was in his general objection to make
anything like an admission, that he replied, "Come here, and I'll
take you home with me." I embrace this opportunity of remarking
that he washed his clients off, as if he were a surgeon or a
dentist. He had a closet in his room, fitted up for the purpose,
which smelt of the scented soap like a perfumer's shop. It had an
unusually large jacktowel on a roller inside the door, and he
would wash his hands, and wipe them and dry them all over this
towel, whenever he came in from a policecourt or dismissed a
client from his room. When I and my friends repaired to him at six
o'clock next day, he seemed to have been engaged on a case of a
darker complexion than usual, for, we found him with his head
butted into this closet, not only washing his hands, but laving his
face and gargling his throat. And even when he had done all that,
and had gone all round the jacktowel, he took out his penknife and
scraped the case out of his nails before he put his coat on.
There were some people slinking about as usual when we passed out
into the street, who were evidently anxious to speak with him but
there was something so conclusive in the halo of scented soap which
encircled his presence, that they gave it up for that day. As we
walked along westward, he was recognized ever and again by some
face in the crowd of the streets, and whenever that happened he
talked louder to me but he never otherwise recognized anybody, or
took notice that anybody recognized him.
He conducted us to Gerrardstreet, Soho, to a house on the south
side of that street. Rather a stately house of its kind, but
dolefully in want of painting, and with dirty windows. He took out
his key and opened the door, and we all went into a stone hall,
bare, gloomy, and little used. So, up a dark brown staircase into a
series of three dark brown rooms on the first floor. There were
carved garlands on the panelled walls, and as he stood among them
giving us welcome, I know what kind of loops I thought they looked
like.
Dinner was laid in the best of these rooms the second was his
dressingroom the third, his bedroom. He told us that he held the
whole house, but rarely used more of it than we saw. The table was
comfortably laid  no silver in the service, of course  and at the
side of his chair was a capacious dumbwaiter, with a variety of
bottles and decanters on it, and four dishes of fruit for dessert.
I noticed throughout, that he kept everything under his own hand,
and distributed everything himself.
There was a bookcase in the room I saw, from the backs of the
books, that they were about evidence, criminal law, criminal
biography, trials, acts of parliament, and such things. The
furniture was all very solid and good, like his watchchain. It had
an official look, however, and there was nothing merely ornamental
to be seen. In a corner, was a little table of papers with a shaded
lamp so that he seemed to bring the office home with him in that
respect too, and to wheel it out of an evening and fall to work.
As he had scarcely seen my three companions until now  for, he and
I had walked together  he stood on the hearthrug, after ringing
the bell, and took a searching look at them. To my surprise, he
seemed at once to be principally if not solely interested in
Drummle.
"Pip," said he, putting his large hand on my shoulder and moving me
to the window, "I don't know one from the other. Who's the Spider?"
"The spider?" said I.
"The blotchy, sprawly, sulky fellow."
"That's Bentley Drummle," I replied "the one with the delicate
face is Startop."
Not making the least account of "the one with the delicate face,"
he returned, "Bentley Drummle is his name, is it? I like the look
of that fellow."
He immediately began to talk to Drummle not at all deterred by his
replying in his heavy reticent way, but apparently led on by it to
screw discourse out of him. I was looking at the two, when there
came between me and them, the housekeeper, with the first dish for
the table.
She was a woman of about forty, I supposed  but I may have thought
her younger than she was. Rather tall, of a lithe nimble figure,
extremely pale, with large faded eyes, and a quantity of streaming
hair. I cannot say whether any diseased affection of the heart
caused her lips to be parted as if she were panting, and her face
to bear a curious expression of suddenness and flutter but I know
that I had been to see Macbeth at the theatre, a night or two
before, and that her face looked to me as if it were all disturbed
by fiery air, like the faces I had seen rise out of the Witches'
caldron.
She set the dish on, touched my guardian quietly on the arm with a
finger to notify that dinner was ready, and vanished. We took our
seats at the round table, and my guardian kept Drummle on one side
of him, while Startop sat on the other. It was a noble dish of fish
that the housekeeper had put on table, and we had a joint of
equally choice mutton afterwards, and then an equally choice bird.
Sauces, wines, all the accessories we wanted, and all of the best,
were given out by our host from his dumbwaiter and when they had
made the circuit of the table, he always put them back again.
Similarly, he dealt us clean plates and knives and forks, for each
course, and dropped those just disused into two baskets on the
ground by his chair. No other attendant than the housekeeper
appeared. She set on every dish and I always saw in her face, a
face rising out of the caldron. Years afterwards, I made a dreadful
likeness of that woman, by causing a face that had no other natural
resemblance to it than it derived from flowing hair, to pass behind
a bowl of flaming spirits in a dark room.
Induced to take particular notice of the housekeeper, both by her
own striking appearance and by Wemmick's preparation, I observed
that whenever she was in the room, she kept her eyes attentively on
my guardian, and that she would remove her hands from any dish she
put before him, hesitatingly, as if she dreaded his calling her
back, and wanted him to speak when she was nigh, if he had anything
to say. I fancied that I could detect in his manner a consciousness
of this, and a purpose of always holding her in suspense.
Dinner went off gaily, and, although my guardian seemed to follow
rather than originate subjects, I knew that he wrenched the weakest
part of our dispositions out of us. For myself, I found that I was
expressing my tendency to lavish expenditure, and to patronize
Herbert, and to boast of my great prospects, before I quite knew
that I had opened my lips. It was so with all of us, but with no
one more than Drummle the development of whose inclination to gird
in a grudging and suspicious way at the rest, was screwed out of
him before the fish was taken off.
It was not then, but when we had got to the cheese, that our
conversation turned upon our rowing feats, and that Drummle was
rallied for coming up behind of a night in that slow amphibious way
of his. Drummle upon this, informed our host that he much preferred
our room to our company, and that as to skill he was more than our
master, and that as to strength he could scatter us like chaff. By
some invisible agency, my guardian wound him up to a pitch little
short of ferocity about this trifle and he fell to baring and
spanning his arm to show how muscular it was, and we all fell to
baring and spanning our arms in a ridiculous manner.
Now, the housekeeper was at that time clearing the table my
guardian, taking no heed of her, but with the side of his face
turned from her, was leaning back in his chair biting the side of
his forefinger and showing an interest in Drummle, that, to me, was
quite inexplicable. Suddenly, he clapped his large hand on the
housekeeper's, like a trap, as she stretched it across the table.
So suddenly and smartly did he do this, that we all stopped in our
foolish contention.
"If you talk of strength," said Mr. Jaggers, "I'll show you a wrist.
Molly, let them see your wrist."
Her entrapped hand was on the table, but she had already put her
other hand behind her waist. "Master," she said, in a low voice,
with her eyes attentively and entreatingly fixed upon him. "Don't."
"I'll show you a wrist," repeated Mr. Jaggers, with an immovable
determination to show it. "Molly, let them see your wrist."
"Master," she again murmured. "Please"
"Molly," said Mr. Jaggers, not looking at her, but obstinately
looking at the opposite side of the room, "let them see both your
wrists. Show them. Come"
He took his hand from hers, and turned that wrist up on the table.
She brought her other hand from behind her, and held the two out
side by side. The last wrist was much disfigured  deeply scarred
and scarred across and across. When she held her hands out, she
took her eyes from Mr. Jaggers, and turned them watchfully on every
one of the rest of us in succession.
"There's power here," said Mr. Jaggers, coolly tracing out the
sinews with his forefinger. "Very few men have the power of wrist
that this woman has. It's remarkable what mere force of grip there
is in these hands. I have had occasion to notice many hands but I
never saw stronger in that respect, man's or woman's, than these."
While he said these words in a leisurely critical style, she
continued to look at every one of us in regular succession as we
sat. The moment he ceased, she looked at him again. "That'll do,
Molly," said Mr. Jaggers, giving her a slight nod "you have been
admired, and can go." She withdrew her hands and went out of the
room, and Mr. Jaggers, putting the decanters on from his dumbwaiter,
filled his glass and passed round the wine.
"At halfpast nine, gentlemen," said he, "we must break up. Pray
make the best use of your time. I am glad to see you all. Mr.
Drummle, I drink to you."
If his object in singling out Drummle were to bring him out still
more, it perfectly succeeded. In a sulky triumph, Drummle showed
his morose depreciation of the rest of us, in a more and more
offensive degree until he became downright intolerable. Through all
his stages, Mr. Jaggers followed him with the same strange interest.
He actually seemed to serve as a zest to Mr. Jaggers's wine.
In our boyish want of discretion I dare say we took too much to
drink, and I know we talked too much. We became particularly hot
upon some boorish sneer of Drummle's, to the effect that we were
too free with our money. It led to my remarking, with more zeal
than discretion, that it came with a bad grace from him, to whom
Startop had lent money in my presence but a week or so before.
"Well," retorted Drummle "he'll be paid."
"I don't mean to imply that he won't," said I, "but it might make
you hold your tongue about us and our money, I should think."
"You should think" retorted Drummle. "Oh Lord"
"I dare say," I went on, meaning to be very severe, "that you
wouldn't lend money to any of us, if we wanted it."
"You are right," said Drummle. "I wouldn't lend one of you a
sixpence. I wouldn't lend anybody a sixpence."
"Rather mean to borrow under those circumstances, I should say."
"You should say," repeated Drummle. "Oh Lord"
This was so very aggravating  the more especially as I found
myself making no way against his surly obtuseness  that I said,
disregarding Herbert's efforts to check me
"Come, Mr. Drummle, since we are on the subject, I'll tell you what
passed between Herbert here and me, when you borrowed that money."
"I don't want to know what passed between Herbert there and you,"
growled Drummle. And I think he added in a lower growl, that we
might both go to the devil and shake ourselves.
"I'll tell you, however," said I, "whether you want to know or not.
We said that as you put it in your pocket very glad to get it, you
seemed to be immensely amused at his being so weak as to lend it."
Drummle laughed outright, and sat laughing in our faces, with his
hands in his pockets and his round shoulders raised plainly
signifying that it was quite true, and that he despised us, as
asses all.
Hereupon Startop took him in hand, though with a much better grace
than I had shown, and exhorted him to be a little more agreeable.
Startop, being a lively bright young fellow, and Drummle being the
exact opposite, the latter was always disposed to resent him as a
direct personal affront. He now retorted in a coarse lumpish way,
and Startop tried to turn the discussion aside with some small
pleasantry that made us all laugh. Resenting this little success
more than anything, Drummle, without any threat or warning, pulled
his hands out of his pockets, dropped his round shoulders, swore,
took up a large glass, and would have flung it at his adversary's
head, but for our entertainer's dexterously seizing it at the
instant when it was raised for that purpose.
"Gentlemen," said Mr. Jaggers, deliberately putting down the glass,
and hauling out his gold repeater by its massive chain, "I am
exceedingly sorry to announce that it's halfpast nine."
On this hint we all rose to depart. Before we got to the street
door, Startop was cheerily calling Drummle "old boy," as if nothing
had happened. But the old boy was so far from responding, that he
would not even walk to Hammersmith on the same side of the way so,
Herbert and I, who remained in town, saw them going down the street
on opposite sides Startop leading, and Drummle lagging behind in
the shadow of the houses, much as he was wont to follow in his
boat.
As the door was not yet shut, I thought I would leave Herbert there
for a moment, and run upstairs again to say a word to my guardian.
I found him in his dressingroom surrounded by his stock of boots,
already hard at it, washing his hands of us.
I told him I had come up again to say how sorry I was that anything
disagreeable should have occurred, and that I hoped he would not
blame me much.
"Pooh" said he, sluicing his face, and speaking through the
waterdrops "it's nothing, Pip. I like that Spider though."
He had turned towards me now, and was shaking his head, and
blowing, and towelling himself.
"I am glad you like him, sir," said I  "but I don't."
"No, no," my guardian assented "don't have too much to do with
him. Keep as clear of him as you can. But I like the fellow, Pip
he is one of the true sort. Why, if I was a fortuneteller"
Looking out of the towel, he caught my eye.
"But I am not a fortuneteller," he said, letting his head drop
into a festoon of towel, and towelling away at his two ears. "You
know what I am, don't you? Goodnight, Pip."
"Goodnight, sir."
In about a month after that, the Spider's time with Mr. Pocket was
up for good, and, to the great relief of all the house but Mrs.
Pocket, he went home to the family hole.
Chapter 
"MY DEAR MR PIP,
"I write this by request of Mr. Gargery, for to let you know that he
is going to London in company with Mr. Wopsle and would be glad if
agreeable to be allowed to see you. He would call at Barnard's
Hotel Tuesday morning  o'clock, when if not agreeable please
leave word. Your poor sister is much the same as when you left. We
talk of you in the kitchen every night, and wonder what you are
saying and doing. If now considered in the light of a liberty,
excuse it for the love of poor old days. No more, dear Mr. Pip, from
"Your ever obliged, and affectionate servant,
"BIDDY."
"P.S. He wishes me most particular to write what larks. He says you
will understand. I hope and do not doubt it will be agreeable to
see him even though a gentleman, for you had ever a good heart, and
he is a worthy worthy man. I have read him all excepting only the
last little sentence, and he wishes me most particular to write
again what larks."
I received this letter by the post on Monday morning, and therefore
its appointment was for next day. Let me confess exactly, with what
feelings I looked forward to Joe's coming.
Not with pleasure, though I was bound to him by so many ties no
with considerable disturbance, some mortification, and a keen sense
of incongruity. If I could have kept him away by paying money, I
certainly would have paid money. My greatest reassurance was, that
he was coming to Barnard's Inn, not to Hammersmith, and
consequently would not fall in Bentley Drummle's way. I had little
objection to his being seen by Herbert or his father, for both of
whom I had a respect but I had the sharpest sensitiveness as to
his being seen by Drummle, whom I held in contempt. So, throughout
life, our worst weaknesses and meannesses are usually committed for
the sake of the people whom we most despise.
I had begun to be always decorating the chambers in some quite
unnecessary and inappropriate way or other, and very expensive
those wrestles with Barnard proved to be. By this time, the rooms
were vastly different from what I had found them, and I enjoyed the
honour of occupying a few prominent pages in the books of a
neighbouring upholsterer. I had got on so fast of late, that I had
even started a boy in boots  top boots  in bondage and slavery to
whom I might have been said to pass my days. For, after I had made
the monster out of the refuse of my washerwoman's family and had
clothed him with a blue coat, canary waistcoat, white cravat,
creamy breeches, and the boots already mentioned, I had to find him
a little to do and a great deal to eat and with both of those
horrible requirements he haunted my existence.
This avenging phantom was ordered to be on duty at eight on Tuesday
morning in the hall it was two feet square, as charged for
floorcloth, and Herbert suggested certain things for breakfast
that he thought Joe would like. While I felt sincerely obliged to
him for being so interested and considerate, I had an odd
halfprovoked sense of suspicion upon me, that if Joe had been
coming to see him, he wouldn't have been quite so brisk about it.
However, I came into town on the Monday night to be ready for Joe,
and I got up early in the morning, and caused the sittingroom and
breakfasttable to assume their most splendid appearance.
Unfortunately the morning was drizzly, and an angel could not have
concealed the fact that Barnard was shedding sooty tears outside the
window, like some weak giant of a Sweep.
As the time approached I should have liked to run away, but the
Avenger pursuant to orders was in the hall, and presently I heard
Joe on the staircase. I knew it was Joe, by his clumsy manner of
coming upstairs  his state boots being always too big for him 
and by the time it took him to read the names on the other floors
in the course of his ascent. When at last he stopped outside our
door, I could hear his finger tracing over the painted letters of
my name, and I afterwards distinctly heard him breathing in at the
keyhole. Finally he gave a faint single rap, and Pepper  such was
the compromising name of the avenging boy  announced "Mr. Gargery"
I thought he never would have done wiping his feet, and that I must
have gone out to lift him off the mat, but at last he came in.
"Joe, how are you, Joe?"
"Pip, how AIR you, Pip?"
With his good honest face all glowing and shining, and his hat put
down on the floor between us, he caught both my hands and worked
them straight up and down, as if I had been the lastpatented Pump.
"I am glad to see you, Joe. Give me your hat."
But Joe, taking it up carefully with both hands, like a bird'snest
with eggs in it, wouldn't hear of parting with that piece of
property, and persisted in standing talking over it in a most
uncomfortable way.
"Which you have that growed," said Joe, "and that swelled, and that
gentlefolked" Joe considered a little before he discovered this
word "as to be sure you are a honour to your king and country."
"And you, Joe, look wonderfully well."
"Thank God," said Joe, "I'm ekerval to most. And your sister, she's
no worse than she were. And Biddy, she's ever right and ready. And
all friends is no backerder, if not no forarder. 'Ceptin Wopsle
he's had a drop."
All this time still with both hands taking great care of the
bird'snest, Joe was rolling his eyes round and round the room,
and round and round the flowered pattern of my dressinggown.
"Had a drop, Joe?"
"Why yes," said Joe, lowering his voice, "he's left the Church, and
went into the playacting. Which the playacting have likeways
brought him to London along with me. And his wish were," said Joe,
getting the bird'snest under his left arm for the moment and
groping in it for an egg with his right "if no offence, as I would
'and you that."
I took what Joe gave me, and found it to be the crumpled playbill
of a small metropolitan theatre, announcing the first appearance,
in that very week, of "the celebrated Provincial Amateur of Roscian
renown, whose unique performance in the highest tragic walk of our
National Bard has lately occasioned so great a sensation in local
dramatic circles."
"Were you at his performance, Joe?" I inquired.
"I were," said Joe, with emphasis and solemnity.
"Was there a great sensation?"
"Why," said Joe, "yes, there certainly were a peck of orangepeel.
Partickler, when he see the ghost. Though I put it to yourself,
sir, whether it were calc'lated to keep a man up to his work with a
good hart, to be continiwally cutting in betwixt him and the Ghost
with "Amen" A man may have had a misfortun' and been in the
Church," said Joe, lowering his voice to an argumentative and
feeling tone, "but that is no reason why you should put him out at
such a time. Which I meantersay, if the ghost of a man's own father
cannot be allowed to claim his attention, what can, Sir? Still
more, when his mourning 'at is unfortunately made so small as that
the weight of the black feathers brings it off, try to keep it on
how you may."
A ghostseeing effect in Joe's own countenance informed me that
Herbert had entered the room. So, I presented Joe to Herbert, who
held out his hand but Joe backed from it, and held on by the
bird'snest.
"Your servant, Sir," said Joe, "which I hope as you and Pip"  here
his eye fell on the Avenger, who was putting some toast on table,
and so plainly denoted an intention to make that young gentleman
one of the family, that I frowned it down and confused him more 
"I meantersay, you two gentlemen  which I hope as you get your
elths in this close spot? For the present may be a werry good inn,
according to London opinions," said Joe, confidentially, "and I
believe its character do stand i but I wouldn't keep a pig in it
myself  not in the case that I wished him to fatten wholesome and
to eat with a meller flavour on him."
Having borne this flattering testimony to the merits of our
dwellingplace, and having incidentally shown this tendency to call
me "sir," Joe, being invited to sit down to table, looked all round
the room for a suitable spot on which to deposit his hat  as if it
were only on some very few rare substances in nature that it could
find a resting place  and ultimately stood it on an extreme corner
of the chimneypiece, from which it ever afterwards fell off at
intervals.
"Do you take tea, or coffee, Mr. Gargery?" asked Herbert, who always
presided of a morning.
"Thankee, Sir," said Joe, stiff from head to foot, "I'll take
whichever is most agreeable to yourself."
"What do you say to coffee?"
"Thankee, Sir," returned Joe, evidently dispirited by the proposal,
"since you are so kind as make chice of coffee, I will not run
contrairy to your own opinions. But don't you never find it a
little 'eating?"
"Say tea then," said Herbert, pouring it out.
Here Joe's hat tumbled off the mantelpiece, and he started out of
his chair and picked it up, and fitted it to the same exact spot.
As if it were an absolute point of good breeding that it should
tumble off again soon.
"When did you come to town, Mr. Gargery?"
"Were it yesterday afternoon?" said Joe, after coughing behind his
hand, as if he had had time to catch the whoopingcough since he
came. "No it were not. Yes it were. Yes. It were yesterday
afternoon" with an appearance of mingled wisdom, relief, and
strict impartiality.
"Have you seen anything of London, yet?"
"Why, yes, Sir," said Joe, "me and Wopsle went off straight to look
at the Blacking Ware'us. But we didn't find that it come up to its
likeness in the red bills at the shop doors which I meantersay,"
added Joe, in an explanatory manner, "as it is there drawd too
architectooralooral."
I really believe Joe would have prolonged this word mightily
expressive to my mind of some architecture that I know into a
perfect Chorus, but for his attention being providentially
attracted by his hat, which was toppling. Indeed, it demanded from
him a constant attention, and a quickness of eye and hand, very
like that exacted by wicketkeeping. He made extraordinary play
with it, and showed the greatest skill now, rushing at it and
catching it neatly as it dropped now, merely stopping it midway,
beating it up, and humouring it in various parts of the room and
against a good deal of the pattern of the paper on the wall, before
he felt it safe to close with it finally, splashing it into the
slopbasin, where I took the liberty of laying hands upon it.
As to his shirtcollar, and his coatcollar, they were perplexing
to reflect upon  insoluble mysteries both. Why should a man scrape
himself to that extent, before he could consider himself full
dressed? Why should he suppose it necessary to be purified by
suffering for his holiday clothes? Then he fell into such
unaccountable fits of meditation, with his fork midway between his
plate and his mouth had his eyes attracted in such strange
directions was afflicted with such remarkable coughs sat so far
from the table, and dropped so much more than he ate, and pretended
that he hadn't dropped it that I was heartily glad when Herbert
left us for the city.
I had neither the good sense nor the good feeling to know that this
was all my fault, and that if I had been easier with Joe, Joe would
have been easier with me. I felt impatient of him and out of temper
with him in which condition he heaped coals of fire on my head.
"Us two being now alone, Sir,"  began Joe.
"Joe," I interrupted, pettishly, "how can you call me, Sir?"
Joe looked at me for a single instant with something faintly like
reproach. Utterly preposterous as his cravat was, and as his
collars were, I was conscious of a sort of dignity in the look.
"Us two being now alone," resumed Joe, "and me having the
intentions and abilities to stay not many minutes more, I will now
conclude  leastways begin  to mention what have led to my having
had the present honour. For was it not," said Joe, with his old air
of lucid exposition, "that my only wish were to be useful to you, I
should not have had the honour of breaking wittles in the company
and abode of gentlemen."
I was so unwilling to see the look again, that I made no
remonstrance against this tone.
"Well, Sir," pursued Joe, "this is how it were. I were at the
Bargemen t'other night, Pip" whenever he subsided into affection,
he called me Pip, and whenever he relapsed into politeness he
called me Sir "when there come up in his shaycart, Pumblechook.
Which that same identical," said Joe, going down a new track, "do
comb my 'air the wrong way sometimes, awful, by giving out up and
down town as it were him which ever had your infant companionation
and were looked upon as a playfellow by yourself."
"Nonsense. It was you, Joe."
"Which I fully believed it were, Pip," said Joe, slightly tossing
his head, "though it signify little now, Sir. Well, Pip this same
identical, which his manners is given to blusterous, come to me at
the Bargemen wot a pipe and a pint of beer do give refreshment to
the workingman, Sir, and do not over stimilate, and his word
were, 'Joseph, Miss Havisham she wish to speak to you.'"
"Miss Havisham, Joe?"
"'She wish,' were Pumblechook's word, 'to speak to you.'" Joe sat
and rolled his eyes at the ceiling.
"Yes, Joe? Go on, please."
"Next day, Sir," said Joe, looking at me as if I were a long way
off, "having cleaned myself, I go and I see Miss A."
"Miss A., Joe? Miss Havisham?"
"Which I say, Sir," replied Joe, with an air of legal formality, as
if he were making his will, "Miss A., or otherways Havisham. Her
expression air then as follering 'Mr. Gargery. You air in
correspondence with Mr. Pip?' Having had a letter from you, I were
able to say 'I am.' When I married your sister, Sir, I said 'I
will' and when I answered your friend, Pip, I said 'I am.' 'Would
you tell him, then,' said she, 'that which Estella has come home
and would be glad to see him.'"
I felt my face fire up as I looked at Joe. I hope one remote cause
of its firing, may have been my consciousness that if I had known
his errand, I should have given him more encouragement.
"Biddy," pursued Joe, "when I got home and asked her fur to write
the message to you, a little hung back. Biddy says, 'I know he will
be very glad to have it by word of mouth, it is holidaytime, you
want to see him, go' I have now concluded, Sir," said Joe, rising
from his chair, "and, Pip, I wish you ever well and ever prospering
to a greater and a greater heighth."
"But you are not going now, Joe?"
"Yes I am," said Joe.
"But you are coming back to dinner, Joe?"
"No I am not," said Joe.
Our eyes met, and all the "Sir" melted out of that manly heart as
he gave me his hand.
"Pip, dear old chap, life is made of ever so many partings welded
together, as I may say, and one man's a blacksmith, and one's a
whitesmith, and one's a goldsmith, and one's a coppersmith.
Diwisions among such must come, and must be met as they come. If
there's been any fault at all today, it's mine. You and me is not
two figures to be together in London nor yet anywheres else but
what is private, and beknown, and understood among friends. It
ain't that I am proud, but that I want to be right, as you shall
never see me no more in these clothes. I'm wrong in these clothes.
I'm wrong out of the forge, the kitchen, or off th' meshes. You
won't find half so much fault in me if you think of me in my forge
dress, with my hammer in my hand, or even my pipe. You won't find
half so much fault in me if, supposing as you should ever wish to
see me, you come and put your head in at the forge window and see
Joe the blacksmith, there, at the old anvil, in the old burnt
apron, sticking to the old work. I'm awful dull, but I hope I've
beat out something nigh the rights of this at last. And so GOD
bless you, dear old Pip, old chap, GOD bless you"
I had not been mistaken in my fancy that there was a simple dignity
in him. The fashion of his dress could no more come in its way when
he spoke these words, than it could come in its way in Heaven. He
touched me gently on the forehead, and went out. As soon as I could
recover myself sufficiently, I hurried out after him and looked for
him in the neighbouring streets but he was gone.
Chapter 
It was clear that I must repair to our town next day, and in the
first flow of my repentance it was equally clear that I must stay
at Joe's. But, when I had secured my boxplace by tomorrow's coach
and had been down to Mr. Pocket's and back, I was not by any means
convinced on the last point, and began to invent reasons and make
excuses for putting up at the Blue Boar. I should be an
inconvenience at Joe's I was not expected, and my bed would not be
ready I should be too far from Miss Havisham's, and she was
exacting and mightn't like it. All other swindlers upon earth are
nothing to the selfswindlers, and with such pretences did I cheat
myself. Surely a curious thing. That I should innocently take a bad
halfcrown of somebody else's manufacture, is reasonable enough
but that I should knowingly reckon the spurious coin of my own
make, as good money An obliging stranger, under pretence of
compactly folding up my banknotes for security's sake, abstracts
the notes and gives me nutshells but what is his sleight of hand
to mine, when I fold up my own nutshells and pass them on myself as
notes
Having settled that I must go to the Blue Boar, my mind was much
disturbed by indecision whether or not to take the Avenger. It was
tempting to think of that expensive Mercenary publicly airing his
boots in the archway of the Blue Boar's postingyard it was almost
solemn to imagine him casually produced in the tailor's shop and
confounding the disrespectful senses of Trabb's boy. On the other
hand, Trabb's boy might worm himself into his intimacy and tell him
things or, reckless and desperate wretch as I knew he could be,
might hoot him in the Highstreet, My patroness, too, might hear of
him, and not approve. On the whole, I resolved to leave the Avenger
behind.
It was the afternoon coach by which I had taken my place, and, as
winter had now come round, I should not arrive at my destination
until two or three hours after dark. Our time of starting from the
Cross Keys was two o'clock. I arrived on the ground with a quarter
of an hour to spare, attended by the Avenger  if I may connect
that expression with one who never attended on me if he could
possibly help it.
At that time it was customary to carry Convicts down to the
dockyards by stagecoach. As I had often heard of them in the
capacity of outside passengers, and had more than once seen them on
the high road dangling their ironed legs over the coach roof, I had
no cause to be surprised when Herbert, meeting me in the yard, came
up and told me there were two convicts going down with me. But I
had a reason that was an old reason now, for constitutionally
faltering whenever I heard the word convict.
"You don't mind them, Handel?" said Herbert.
"Oh no"
"I thought you seemed as if you didn't like them?"
"I can't pretend that I do like them, and I suppose you don't
particularly. But I don't mind them."
"See There they are," said Herbert, "coming out of the Tap. What a
degraded and vile sight it is"
They had been treating their guard, I suppose, for they had a
gaoler with them, and all three came out wiping their mouths on
their hands. The two convicts were handcuffed together, and had
irons on their legs  irons of a pattern that I knew well. They
wore the dress that I likewise knew well. Their keeper had a brace
of pistols, and carried a thickknobbed bludgeon under his arm but
he was on terms of good understanding with them, and stood, with
them beside him, looking on at the puttingto of the horses, rather
with an air as if the convicts were an interesting Exhibition not
formally open at the moment, and he the Curator. One was a taller
and stouter man than the other, and appeared as a matter of course,
according to the mysterious ways of the world both convict and
free, to have had allotted to him the smaller suit of clothes. His
arms and legs were like great pincushions of those shapes, and his
attire disguised him absurdly but I knew his halfclosed eye at
one glance. There stood the man whom I had seen on the settle at
the Three Jolly Bargemen on a Saturday night, and who had brought
me down with his invisible gun
It was easy to make sure that as yet he knew me no more than if he
had never seen me in his life. He looked across at me, and his eye
appraised my watchchain, and then he incidentally spat and said
something to the other convict, and they laughed and slued
themselves round with a clink of their coupling manacle, and looked
at something else. The great numbers on their backs, as if they
were street doors their coarse mangy ungainly outer surface, as if
they were lower animals their ironed legs, apologetically
garlanded with pockethandkerchiefs and the way in which all
present looked at them and kept from them made them as Herbert
had said a most disagreeable and degraded spectacle.
But this was not the worst of it. It came out that the whole of the
back of the coach had been taken by a family removing from London,
and that there were no places for the two prisoners but on the seat
in front, behind the coachman. Hereupon, a choleric gentleman, who
had taken the fourth place on that seat, flew into a most violent
passion, and said that it was a breach of contract to mix him up
with such villainous company, and that it was poisonous and
pernicious and infamous and shameful, and I don't know what else.
At this time the coach was ready and the coachman impatient, and we
were all preparing to get up, and the prisoners had come over with
their keeper  bringing with them that curious flavour of
breadpoultice, baize, ropeyarn, and hearthstone, which attends
the convict presence.
"Don't take it so much amiss, sir," pleaded the keeper to the angry
passenger "I'll sit next you myself. I'll put 'em on the outside
of the row. They won't interfere with you, sir. You needn't know
they're there."
"And don't blame me," growled the convict I had recognized. "I
don't want to go. I am quite ready to stay behind. As fur as I am
concerned any one's welcome to my place."
"Or mine," said the other, gruffly. "I wouldn't have incommoded
none of you, if I'd had my way." Then, they both laughed, and began
cracking nuts, and spitting the shells about.  As I really think I
should have liked to do myself, if I had been in their place and so
despised.
At length, it was voted that there was no help for the angry
gentleman, and that he must either go in his chance company or
remain behind. So, he got into his place, still making complaints,
and the keeper got into the place next him, and the convicts hauled
themselves up as well as they could, and the convict I had
recognized sat behind me with his breath on the hair of my head.
"Goodbye, Handel" Herbert called out as we started. I thought
what a blessed fortune it was, that he had found another name for
me than Pip.
It is impossible to express with what acuteness I felt the
convict's breathing, not only on the back of my head, but all along
my spine. The sensation was like being touched in the marrow with
some pungent and searching acid, it set my very teeth on edge. He
seemed to have more breathing business to do than another man, and
to make more noise in doing it and I was conscious of growing
highshoulderd on one side, in my shrinking endeavours to fend him
off.
The weather was miserably raw, and the two cursed the cold. It made
us all lethargic before we had gone far, and when we had left the
Halfway House behind, we habitually dozed and shivered and were
silent. I dozed off, myself, in considering the question whether I
ought to restore a couple of pounds sterling to this creature
before losing sight of him, and how it could best be done. In the
act of dipping forward as if I were going to bathe among the
horses, I woke in a fright and took the question up again.
But I must have lost it longer than I had thought, since, although
I could recognize nothing in the darkness and the fitful lights and
shadows of our lamps, I traced marsh country in the cold damp wind
that blew at us. Cowering forward for warmth and to make me a
screen against the wind, the convicts were closer to me than
before. They very first words I heard them interchange as I became
conscious were the words of my own thought, "Two One Pound notes."
"How did he get 'em?" said the convict I had never seen.
"How should I know?" returned the other. "He had 'em stowed away
somehows. Giv him by friends, I expect."
"I wish," said the other, with a bitter curse upon the cold, "that
I had 'em here."
"Two one pound notes, or friends?"
"Two one pound notes. I'd sell all the friends I ever had, for one,
and think it a blessed good bargain. Well? So he says  ?"
"So he says," resumed the convict I had recognized  "it was all
said and done in half a minute, behind a pile of timber in the
Dockyard  'You're agoing to be discharged?' Yes, I was. Would I
find out that boy that had fed him and kep his secret, and give him
them two one pound notes? Yes, I would. And I did."
"More fool you," growled the other. "I'd have spent 'em on a Man,
in wittles and drink. He must have been a green one. Mean to say he
knowed nothing of you?"
"Not a ha'porth. Different gangs and different ships. He was tried
again for prison breaking, and got made a Lifer."
"And was that  Honour  the only time you worked out, in this
part of the country?"
"The only time."
"What might have been your opinion of the place?"
"A most beastly place. Mudbank, mist, swamp, and work work, swamp,
mist, and mudbank."
They both execrated the place in very strong language, and
gradually growled themselves out, and had nothing left to say.
After overhearing this dialogue, I should assuredly have got down
and been left in the solitude and darkness of the highway, but for
feeling certain that the man had no suspicion of my identity.
Indeed, I was not only so changed in the course of nature, but so
differently dressed and so differently circumstanced, that it was
not at all likely he could have known me without accidental help.
Still, the coincidence of our being together on the coach, was
sufficiently strange to fill me with a dread that some other
coincidence might at any moment connect me, in his hearing, with my
name. For this reason, I resolved to alight as soon as we touched
the town, and put myself out of his hearing. This device I executed
successfully. My little portmanteau was in the boot under my feet
I had but to turn a hinge to get it out I threw it down before me,
got down after it, and was left at the first lamp on the first
stones of the town pavement. As to the convicts, they went their
way with the coach, and I knew at what point they would be spirited
off to the river. In my fancy, I saw the boat with its convict crew
waiting for them at the slimewashed stairs,  again heard the
gruff "Give way, you" like and order to dogs  again saw the
wicked Noah's Ark lying out on the black water.
I could not have said what I was afraid of, for my fear was
altogether undefined and vague, but there was great fear upon me.
As I walked on to the hotel, I felt that a dread, much exceeding
the mere apprehension of a painful or disagreeable recognition,
made me tremble. I am confident that it took no distinctness of
shape, and that it was the revival for a few minutes of the terror
of childhood.
The coffeeroom at the Blue Boar was empty, and I had not only
ordered my dinner there, but had sat down to it, before the waiter
knew me. As soon as he had apologized for the remissness of his
memory, he asked me if he should send Boots for Mr. Pumblechook?
"No," said I, "certainly not."
The waiter it was he who had brought up the Great Remonstrance
from the Commercials, on the day when I was bound appeared
surprised, and took the earliest opportunity of putting a dirty old
copy of a local newspaper so directly in my way, that I took it up
and read this paragraph
Our readers will learn, not altogether without interest, in
reference to the recent romantic rise in fortune of a young
artificer in iron of this neighbourhood what a theme, by the way,
for the magic pen of our as yet not universally acknowledged
townsman TOOBY, the poet of our columns that the youth's earliest
patron, companion, and friend, was a highlyrespected individual
not entirely unconnected with the corn and seed trade, and whose
eminently convenient and commodious business premises are situate
within a hundred miles of the Highstreet. It is not wholly
irrespective of our personal feelings that we record HIM as the
Mentor of our young Telemachus, for it is good to know that our
town produced the founder of the latter's fortunes. Does the
thoughtcontracted brow of the local Sage or the lustrous eye of
local Beauty inquire whose fortunes? We believe that Quintin Matsys
was the BLACKSMITH of Antwerp. VERB. SAP.
I entertain a conviction, based upon large experience, that if in
the days of my prosperity I had gone to the North Pole, I should
have met somebody there, wandering Esquimaux or civilized man, who
would have told me that Pumblechook was my earliest patron and the
founder of my fortunes.
Chapter 
Betimes in the morning I was up and out. It was too early yet to go
to Miss Havisham's, so I loitered into the country on Miss
Havisham's side of town  which was not Joe's side I could go
there tomorrow  thinking about my patroness, and painting
brilliant pictures of her plans for me.
She had adopted Estella, she had as good as adopted me, and it
could not fail to be her intention to bring us together. She
reserved it for me to restore the desolate house, admit the
sunshine into the dark rooms, set the clocks agoing and the cold
hearths ablazing, tear down the cobwebs, destroy the vermin  in
short, do all the shining deeds of the young Knight of romance, and
marry the Princess. I had stopped to look at the house as I passed
and its seared red brick walls, blocked windows, and strong green
ivy clasping even the stacks of chimneys with its twigs and
tendons, as if with sinewy old arms, had made up a rich attractive
mystery, of which I was the hero. Estella was the inspiration of
it, and the heart of it, of course. But, though she had taken such
strong possession of me, though my fancy and my hope were so set
upon her, though her influence on my boyish life and character had
been allpowerful, I did not, even that romantic morning, invest
her with any attributes save those she possessed. I mention this in
this place, of a fixed purpose, because it is the clue by which I
am to be followed into my poor labyrinth. According to my
experience, the conventional notion of a lover cannot be always
true. The unqualified truth is, that when I loved Estella with the
love of a man, I loved her simply because I found her irresistible.
Once for all I knew to my sorrow, often and often, if not always,
that I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace,
against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that
could be. Once for all I loved her none the less because I knew
it, and it had no more influence in restraining me, than if I had
devoutly believed her to be human perfection.
I so shaped out my walk as to arrive at the gate at my old time.
When I had rung at the bell with an unsteady hand, I turned my back
upon the gate, while I tried to get my breath and keep the beating
of my heart moderately quiet. I heard the side door open, and steps
come across the courtyard but I pretended not to hear, even when
the gate swung on its rusty hinges.
Being at last touched on the shoulder, I started and turned. I
started much more naturally then, to find myself confronted by a
man in a sober grey dress. The last man I should have expected to
see in that place of porter at Miss Havisham's door.
"Orlick"
"Ah, young master, there's more changes than yours. But come in,
come in. It's opposed to my orders to hold the gate open."
I entered and he swung it, and locked it, and took the key out.
"Yes" said he, facing round, after doggedly preceding me a few
steps towards the house. "Here I am"
"How did you come here?"
"I come her," he retorted, "on my legs. I had my box brought
alongside me in a barrow."
"Are you here for good?"
"I ain't her for harm, young master, I suppose?"
I was not so sure of that. I had leisure to entertain the retort in
my mind, while he slowly lifted his heavy glance from the pavement,
up my legs and arms, to my face.
"Then you have left the forge?" I said.
"Do this look like a forge?" replied Orlick, sending his glance all
round him with an air of injury. "Now, do it look like it?"
I asked him how long he had left Gargery's forge?
"One day is so like another here," he replied, "that I don't know
without casting it up. However, I come her some time since you
left."
"I could have told you that, Orlick."
"Ah" said he, drily. "But then you've got to be a scholar."
By this time we had come to the house, where I found his room to be
one just within the side door, with a little window in it looking
on the courtyard. In its small proportions, it was not unlike the
kind of place usually assigned to a gateporter in Paris. Certain
keys were hanging on the wall, to which he now added the gatekey
and his patchworkcovered bed was in a little inner division or
recess. The whole had a slovenly confined and sleepy look, like a
cage for a human dormouse while he, looming dark and heavy in the
shadow of a corner by the window, looked like the human dormouse
for whom it was fitted up  as indeed he was.
"I never saw this room before," I remarked "but there used to be
no Porter here."
"No," said he "not till it got about that there was no protection
on the premises, and it come to be considered dangerous, with
convicts and Tag and Rag and Bobtail going up and down. And then I
was recommended to the place as a man who could give another man as
good as he brought, and I took it. It's easier than bellowsing and
hammering.  That's loaded, that is."
My eye had been caught by a gun with a brass bound stock over the
chimneypiece, and his eye had followed mine.
"Well," said I, not desirous of more conversation, "shall I go up
to Miss Havisham?"
"Burn me, if I know" he retorted, first stretching himself and
then shaking himself "my orders ends here, young master. I give
this here bell a rap with this here hammer, and you go on along the
passage till you meet somebody."
"I am expected, I believe?"
"Burn me twice over, if I can say" said he.
Upon that, I turned down the long passage which I had first trodden
in my thick boots, and he made his bell sound. At the end of the
passage, while the bell was still reverberating, I found Sarah
Pocket who appeared to have now become constitutionally green and
yellow by reason of me.
"Oh" said she. "You, is it, Mr. Pip?"
"It is, Miss Pocket. I am glad to tell you that Mr. Pocket and
family are all well."
"Are they any wiser?" said Sarah, with a dismal shake of the head
"they had better be wiser, than well. Ah, Matthew, Matthew You know
your way, sir?"
Tolerably, for I had gone up the staircase in the dark, many a
time. I ascended it now, in lighter boots than of yore, and tapped
in my old way at the door of Miss Havisham's room. "Pip's rap," I
heard her say, immediately "come in, Pip."
She was in her chair near the old table, in the old dress, with her
two hands crossed on her stick, her chin resting on them, and her
eyes on the fire. Sitting near her, with the white shoe that had
never been worn, in her hand, and her head bent as she looked at
it, was an elegant lady whom I had never seen.
"Come in, Pip," Miss Havisham continued to mutter, without looking
round or up "come in, Pip, how do you do, Pip? so you kiss my hand
as if I were a queen, eh?  Well?"
She looked up at me suddenly, only moving her eyes, and repeated in
a grimly playful manner,
"Well?"
"I heard, Miss Havisham," said I, rather at a loss, "that you were
so kind as to wish me to come and see you, and I came directly."
"Well?"
The lady whom I had never seen before, lifted up her eyes and
looked archly at me, and then I saw that the eyes were Estella's
eyes. But she was so much changed, was so much more beautiful, so
much more womanly, in all things winning admiration had made such
wonderful advance, that I seemed to have made none. I fancied, as I
looked at her, that I slipped hopelessly back into the coarse and
common boy again. O the sense of distance and disparity that came
upon me, and the inaccessibility that came about her
She gave me her hand. I stammered something about the pleasure I
felt in seeing her again, and about my having looked forward to it
for a long, long time.
"Do you find her much changed, Pip?" asked Miss Havisham, with her
greedy look, and striking her stick upon a chair that stood between
them, as a sign to me to sit down there.
"When I came in, Miss Havisham, I thought there was nothing of
Estella in the face or figure but now it all settles down so
curiously into the old"
"What? You are not going to say into the old Estella?" Miss
Havisham interrupted. "She was proud and insulting, and you wanted
to go away from her. Don't you remember?"
I said confusedly that that was long ago, and that I knew no better
then, and the like. Estella smiled with perfect composure, and said
she had no doubt of my having been quite right, and of her having
been very disagreeable.
"Is he changed?" Miss Havisham asked her.
"Very much," said Estella, looking at me.
"Less coarse and common?" said Miss Havisham, playing with
Estella's hair.
Estella laughed, and looked at the shoe in her hand, and laughed
again, and looked at me, and put the shoe down. She treated me as a
boy still, but she lured me on.
We sat in the dreamy room among the old strange influences which
had so wrought upon me, and I learnt that she had but just come
home from France, and that she was going to London. Proud and
wilful as of old, she had brought those qualities into such
subjection to her beauty that it was impossible and out of nature 
or I thought so  to separate them from her beauty. Truly it was
impossible to dissociate her presence from all those wretched
hankerings after money and gentility that had disturbed my boyhood
from all those illregulated aspirations that had first made me
ashamed of home and Joe  from all those visions that had raised
her face in the glowing fire, struck it out of the iron on the
anvil, extracted it from the darkness of night to look in at the
wooden window of the forge and flit away. In a word, it was
impossible for me to separate her, in the past or in the present,
from the innermost life of my life.
It was settled that I should stay there all the rest of the day,
and return to the hotel at night, and to London tomorrow. When we
had conversed for a while, Miss Havisham sent us two out to walk in
the neglected garden on our coming in byandby, she said, I
should wheel her about a little as in times of yore.
So, Estella and I went out into the garden by the gate through
which I had strayed to my encounter with the pale young gentleman,
now Herbert I, trembling in spirit and worshipping the very hem of
her dress she, quite composed and most decidedly not worshipping
the hem of mine. As we drew near to the place of encounter, she
stopped and said
"I must have been a singular little creature to hide and see that
fight that day but I did, and I enjoyed it very much."
"You rewarded me very much."
"Did I?" she replied, in an incidental and forgetful way. "I
remember I entertained a great objection to your adversary, because
I took it ill that he should be brought here to pester me with his
company."
"He and I are great friends now."
"Are you? I think I recollect though, that you read with his
father?"
"Yes."
I made the admission with reluctance, for it seemed to have a
boyish look, and she already treated me more than enough like a
boy.
"Since your change of fortune and prospects, you have changed your
companions," said Estella.
"Naturally," said I.
"And necessarily," she added, in a haughty tone "what was fit
company for you once, would be quite unfit company for you now."
In my conscience, I doubt very much whether I had any lingering
intention left, of going to see Joe but if I had, this observation
put it to flight.
"You had no idea of your impending good fortune, in those times?"
said Estella, with a slight wave of her hand, signifying in the
fighting times.
"Not the least."
The air of completeness and superiority with which she walked at my
side, and the air of youthfulness and submission with which I
walked at hers, made a contrast that I strongly felt. It would have
rankled in me more than it did, if I had not regarded myself as
eliciting it by being so set apart for her and assigned to her.
The garden was too overgrown and rank for walking in with ease, and
after we had made the round of it twice or thrice, we came out
again into the brewery yard. I showed her to a nicety where I had
seen her walking on the casks, that first old day, and she said,
with a cold and careless look in that direction, "Did I?" I
reminded her where she had come out of the house and given me my
meat and drink, and she said, "I don't remember." "Not remember
that you made me cry?" said I. "No," said she, and shook her head
and looked about her. I verily believe that her not remembering and
not minding in the least, made me cry again, inwardly  and that is
the sharpest crying of all.
"You must know," said Estella, condescending to me as a brilliant
and beautiful woman might, "that I have no heart  if that has
anything to do with my memory."
I got through some jargon to the effect that I took the liberty of
doubting that. That I knew better. That there could be no such
beauty without it.
"Oh I have a heart to be stabbed in or shot in, I have no doubt,"
said Estella, "and, of course, if it ceased to beat I should cease
to be. But you know what I mean. I have no softness there, no 
sympathy  sentiment  nonsense."
What was it that was borne in upon my mind when she stood still and
looked attentively at me? Anything that I had seen in Miss
Havisham? No. In some of her looks and gestures there was that
tinge of resemblance to Miss Havisham which may often be noticed to
have been acquired by children, from grown person with whom they
have been much associated and secluded, and which, when childhood
is passed, will produce a remarkable occasional likeness of
expression between faces that are otherwise quite different. And
yet I could not trace this to Miss Havisham. I looked again, and
though she was still looking at me, the suggestion was gone.
What was it?
"I am serious," said Estella, not so much with a frown for her
brow was smooth as with a darkening of her face "if we are to be
thrown much together, you had better believe it at once. No"
imperiously stopping me as I opened my lips. "I have not bestowed
my tenderness anywhere. I have never had any such thing."
In another moment we were in the brewery so long disused, and she
pointed to the high gallery where I had seen her going out on that
same first day, and told me she remembered to have been up there,
and to have seen me standing scared below. As my eyes followed her
white hand, again the same dim suggestion that I could not possibly
grasp, crossed me. My involuntary start occasioned her to lay her
hand upon my arm. Instantly the ghost passed once more, and was
gone.
What was it?
"What is the matter?" asked Estella. "Are you scared again?"
"I should be, if I believed what you said just now," I replied, to
turn it off.
"Then you don't? Very well. It is said, at any rate. Miss Havisham
will soon be expecting you at your old post, though I think that
might be laid aside now, with other old belongings. Let us make one
more round of the garden, and then go in. Come You shall not shed
tears for my cruelty today you shall be my Page, and give me your
shoulder."
Her handsome dress had trailed upon the ground. She held it in one
hand now, and with the other lightly touched my shoulder as we
walked. We walked round the ruined garden twice or thrice more, and
it was all in bloom for me. If the green and yellow growth of weed
in the chinks of the old wall had been the most precious flowers
that ever blew, it could not have been more cherished in my
remembrance.
There was no discrepancy of years between us, to remove her far
from me we were of nearly the same age, though of course the age
told for more in her case than in mine but the air of
inaccessibility which her beauty and her manner gave her, tormented
me in the midst of my delight, and at the height of the assurance I
felt that our patroness had chosen us for one another. Wretched
boy
At last we went back into the house, and there I heard, with
surprise, that my guardian had come down to see Miss Havisham on
business, and would come back to dinner. The old wintry branches of
chandeliers in the room where the mouldering table was spread, had
been lighted while we were out, and Miss Havisham was in her chair
and waiting for me.
It was like pushing the chair itself back into the past, when we
began the old slow circuit round about the ashes of the bridal
feast. But, in the funereal room, with that figure of the grave
fallen back in the chair fixing its eyes upon her, Estella looked
more bright and beautiful than before, and I was under stronger
enchantment.
The time so melted away, that our early dinnerhour drew close at
hand, and Estella left us to prepare herself. We had stopped near
the centre of the long table, and Miss Havisham, with one of her
withered arms stretched out of the chair, rested that clenched hand
upon the yellow cloth. As Estella looked back over her shoulder
before going out at the door, Miss Havisham kissed that hand to
her, with a ravenous intensity that was of its kind quite dreadful.
Then, Estella being gone and we two left alone, she turned to me,
and said in a whisper
"Is she beautiful, graceful, wellgrown? Do you admire her?"
"Everybody must who sees her, Miss Havisham."
She drew an arm round my neck, and drew my head close down to hers
as she sat in the chair. "Love her, love her, love her How does
she use you?"
Before I could answer if I could have answered so difficult a
question at all, she repeated, "Love her, love her, love her If
she favours you, love her. If she wounds you, love her. If she
tears your heart to pieces  and as it gets older and stronger, it
will tear deeper  love her, love her, love her"
Never had I seen such passionate eagerness as was joined to her
utterance of these words. I could feel the muscles of the thin arm
round my neck, swell with the vehemence that possessed her.
"Hear me, Pip I adopted her to be loved. I bred her and educated
her, to be loved. I developed her into what she is, that she might
be loved. Love her"
She said the word often enough, and there could be no doubt that
she meant to say it but if the often repeated word had been hate
instead of love  despair  revenge  dire death  it could not
have sounded from her lips more like a curse.
"I'll tell you," said she, in the same hurried passionate whisper,
"what real love is. It is blind devotion, unquestioning
selfhumiliation, utter submission, trust and belief against
yourself and against the whole world, giving up your whole heart
and soul to the smiter  as I did"
When she came to that, and to a wild cry that followed that, I
caught her round the waist. For she rose up in the chair, in her
shroud of a dress, and struck at the air as if she would as soon
have struck herself against the wall and fallen dead.
All this passed in a few seconds. As I drew her down into her
chair, I was conscious of a scent that I knew, and turning, saw my
guardian in the room.
He always carried I have not yet mentioned it, I think a
pockethandkerchief of rich silk and of imposing proportions, which
was of great value to him in his profession. I have seen him so
terrify a client or a witness by ceremoniously unfolding this
pockethandkerchief as if he were immediately going to blow his
nose, and then pausing, as if he knew he should not have time to do
it before such client or witness committed himself, that the
selfcommittal has followed directly, quite as a matter of course.
When I saw him in the room, he had this expressive
pockethandkerchief in both hands, and was looking at us. On meeting
my eye, he said plainly, by a momentary and silent pause in that
attitude, "Indeed? Singular" and then put the handkerchief to its
right use with wonderful effect.
Miss Havisham had seen him as soon as I, and was like everybody
else afraid of him. She made a strong attempt to compose herself,
and stammered that he was as punctual as ever.
"As punctual as ever," he repeated, coming up to us. "How do you
do, Pip? Shall I give you a ride, Miss Havisham? Once round?
And so you are here, Pip?"
I told him when I had arrived, and how Miss Havisham had wished me
to come and see Estella. To which he replied, "Ah Very fine young
lady" Then he pushed Miss Havisham in her chair before him, with
one of his large hands, and put the other in his trouserspocket as
if the pocket were full of secrets.
"Well, Pip How often have you seen Miss Estella before?" said he,
when he came to a stop.
"How often?"
"Ah How many times? Ten thousand times?"
"Oh Certainly not so many."
"Twice?"
"Jaggers," interposed Miss Havisham, much to my relief "leave my
Pip alone, and go with him to your dinner."
He complied, and we groped our way down the dark stairs together.
While we were still on our way to those detached apartments across
the paved yard at the back, he asked me how often I had seen Miss
Havisham eat and drink offering me a breadth of choice, as usual,
between a hundred times and once.
I considered, and said, "Never."
"And never will, Pip," he retorted, with a frowning smile. "She has
never allowed herself to be seen doing either, since she lived this
present life of hers. She wanders about in the night, and then lays
hands on such food as she takes."
"Pray, sir," said I, "may I ask you a question?"
"You may," said he, "and I may decline to answer it. Put your
question."
"Estella's name. Is it Havisham or  ?" I had nothing to add.
"Or what?" said he.
"Is it Havisham?"
"It is Havisham."
This brought us to the dinnertable, where she and Sarah Pocket
awaited us. Mr. Jaggers presided, Estella sat opposite to him, I
faced my green and yellow friend. We dined very well, and were
waited on by a maidservant whom I had never seen in all my comings
and goings, but who, for anything I know, had been in that
mysterious house the whole time. After dinner, a bottle of choice
old port was placed before my guardian he was evidently well
acquainted with the vintage, and the two ladies left us.
Anything to equal the determined reticence of Mr. Jaggers under that
roof, I never saw elsewhere, even in him. He kept his very looks to
himself, and scarcely directed his eyes to Estella's face once
during dinner. When she spoke to him, he listened, and in due
course answered, but never looked at her, that I could see. On the
other hand, she often looked at him, with interest and curiosity,
if not distrust, but his face never, showed the least
consciousness. Throughout dinner he took a dry delight in making
Sarah Pocket greener and yellower, by often referring in
conversation with me to my expectations but here, again, he showed
no consciousness, and even made it appear that he extorted  and
even did extort, though I don't know how  those references out of
my innocent self.
And when he and I were left alone together, he sat with an air upon
him of general lying by in consequence of information he possessed,
that really was too much for me. He crossexamined his very wine
when he had nothing else in hand. He held it between himself and
the candle, tasted the port, rolled it in his mouth, swallowed it,
looked at his glass again, smelt the port, tried it, drank it,
filled again, and crossexamined the glass again, until I was as
nervous as if I had known the wine to be telling him something to
my disadvantage. Three or four times I feebly thought I would start
conversation but whenever he saw me going to ask him anything, he
looked at me with his glass in his hand, and rolling his wine about
in his mouth, as if requesting me to take notice that it was of no
use, for he couldn't answer.
I think Miss Pocket was conscious that the sight of me involved her
in the danger of being goaded to madness, and perhaps tearing off
her cap  which was a very hideous one, in the nature of a muslin
mop  and strewing the ground with her hair  which assuredly had
never grown on her head. She did not appear when we afterwards went
up to Miss Havisham's room, and we four played at whist. In the
interval, Miss Havisham, in a fantastic way, had put some of the
most beautiful jewels from her dressingtable into Estella's hair,
and about her bosom and arms and I saw even my guardian look at
her from under his thick eyebrows, and raise them a little, when
her loveliness was before him, with those rich flushes of glitter
and colour in it.
Of the manner and extent to which he took our trumps into custody,
and came out with mean little cards at the ends of hands, before
which the glory of our Kings and Queens was utterly abased, I say
nothing nor, of the feeling that I had, respecting his looking
upon us personally in the light of three very obvious and poor
riddles that he had found out long ago. What I suffered from, was
the incompatibility between his cold presence and my feelings
towards Estella. It was not that I knew I could never bear to speak
to him about her, that I knew I could never bear to hear him creak
his boots at her, that I knew I could never bear to see him wash
his hands of her it was, that my admiration should be within a
foot or two of him  it was, that my feelings should be in the same
place with him  that, was the agonizing circumstance.
We played until nine o'clock, and then it was arranged that when
Estella came to London I should be forewarned of her coming and
should meet her at the coach and then I took leave of her, and
touched her and left her.
My guardian lay at the Boar in the next room to mine. Far into the
night, Miss Havisham's words, "Love her, love her, love her"
sounded in my ears. I adapted them for my own repetition, and said
to my pillow, "I love her, I love her, I love her" hundreds of
times. Then, a burst of gratitude came upon me, that she should be
destined for me, once the blacksmith's boy. Then, I thought if she
were, as I feared, by no means rapturously grateful for that
destiny yet, when would she begin to be interested in me? When
should I awaken the heart within her, that was mute and sleeping
now?
Ah me I thought those were high and great emotions. But I never
thought there was anything low and small in my keeping away from
Joe, because I knew she would be contemptuous of him. It was but a
day gone, and Joe had brought the tears into my eyes they had soon
dried, God forgive me soon dried.
Chapter 
After well considering the matter while I was dressing at the Blue
Boar in the morning, I resolved to tell my guardian that I doubted
Orlick's being the right sort of man to fill a post of trust at
Miss Havisham's. "Why, of course he is not the right sort of man,
Pip," said my guardian, comfortably satisfied beforehand on the
general head, "because the man who fills the post of trust never is
the right sort of man." It seemed quite to put him into spirits, to
find that this particular post was not exceptionally held by the
right sort of man, and he listened in a satisfied manner while I
told him what knowledge I had of Orlick. "Very good, Pip," he
observed, when I had concluded, "I'll go round presently, and pay
our friend off." Rather alarmed by this summary action, I was for a
little delay, and even hinted that our friend himself might be
difficult to deal with. "Oh no he won't," said my guardian, making
his pockethandkerchiefpoint, with perfect confidence "I should
like to see him argue the question with me."
As we were going back together to London by the midday coach, and
as I breakfasted under such terrors of Pumblechook that I could
scarcely hold my cup, this gave me an opportunity of saying that I
wanted a walk, and that I would go on along the Londonroad while
Mr. Jaggers was occupied, if he would let the coachman know that I
would get into my place when overtaken. I was thus enabled to fly
from the Blue Boar immediately after breakfast. By then making a
loop of about a couple of miles into the open country at the back
of Pumblechook's premises, I got round into the Highstreet again,
a little beyond that pitfall, and felt myself in comparative
security.
It was interesting to be in the quiet old town once more, and it
was not disagreeable to be here and there suddenly recognized and
stared after. One or two of the tradespeople even darted out of
their shops and went a little way down the street before me, that
they might turn, as if they had forgotten something, and pass me
face to face  on which occasions I don't know whether they or I
made the worse pretence they of not doing it, or I of not seeing
it. Still my position was a distinguished one, and I was not at all
dissatisfied with it, until Fate threw me in the way of that
unlimited miscreant, Trabb's boy.
Casting my eyes along the street at a certain point of my progress,
I beheld Trabb's boy approaching, lashing himself with an empty
blue bag. Deeming that a serene and unconscious contemplation of
him would best beseem me, and would be most likely to quell his
evil mind, I advanced with that expression of countenance, and was
rather congratulating myself on my success, when suddenly the knees
of Trabb's boy smote together, his hair uprose, his cap fell off,
he trembled violently in every limb, staggered out into the road,
and crying to the populace, "Hold me I'm so frightened" feigned to
be in a paroxysm of terror and contrition, occasioned by the
dignity of my appearance. As I passed him, his teeth loudly
chattered in his head, and with every mark of extreme humiliation,
he prostrated himself in the dust.
This was a hard thing to bear, but this was nothing. I had not
advanced another two hundred yards, when, to my inexpressible
terror, amazement, and indignation, I again beheld Trabb's boy
approaching. He was coming round a narrow corner. His blue bag was
slung over his shoulder, honest industry beamed in his eyes, a
determination to proceed to Trabb's with cheerful briskness was
indicated in his gait. With a shock he became aware of me, and was
severely visited as before but this time his motion was rotatory,
and he staggered round and round me with knees more afflicted, and
with uplifted hands as if beseeching for mercy. His sufferings were
hailed with the greatest joy by a knot of spectators, and I felt
utterly confounded.
I had not got as much further down the street as the postoffice,
when I again beheld Trabb's boy shooting round by a back way. This
time, he was entirely changed. He wore the blue bag in the manner
of my greatcoat, and was strutting along the pavement towards me
on the opposite side of the street, attended by a company of
delighted young friends to whom he from time to time exclaimed,
with a wave of his hand, "Don't know yah" Words cannot state the
amount of aggravation and injury wreaked upon me by Trabb's boy,
when, passing abreast of me, he pulled up his shirtcollar, twined
his sidehair, stuck an arm akimbo, and smirked extravagantly by,
wriggling his elbows and body, and drawling to his attendants,
"Don't know yah, don't know yah, pon my soul don't know yah" The
disgrace attendant on his immediately afterwards taking to crowing
and pursuing me across the bridge with crows, as from an
exceedingly dejected fowl who had known me when I was a blacksmith,
culminated the disgrace with which I left the town, and was, so to
speak, ejected by it into the open country.
But unless I had taken the life of Trabb's boy on that occasion, I
really do not even now see what I could have done save endure. To
have struggled with him in the street, or to have exacted any lower
recompense from him than his heart's best blood, would have been
futile and degrading. Moreover, he was a boy whom no man could
hurt an invulnerable and dodging serpent who, when chased into a
corner, flew out again between his captor's legs, scornfully
yelping. I wrote, however, to Mr. Trabb by next day's post, to say
that Mr. Pip must decline to deal further with one who could so far
forget what he owed to the best interests of society, as to employ
a boy who excited Loathing in every respectable mind.
The coach, with Mr. Jaggers inside, came up in due time, and I took
my boxseat again, and arrived in London safe  but not sound, for
my heart was gone. As soon as I arrived, I sent a penitential
codfish and barrel of oysters to Joe as reparation for not having
gone myself, and then went on to Barnard's Inn.
I found Herbert dining on cold meat, and delighted to welcome me
back. Having despatched The Avenger to the coffeehouse for an
addition to the dinner, I felt that I must open my breast that very
evening to my friend and chum. As confidence was out of the
question with The Avenger in the hall, which could merely be
regarded in the light of an antechamber to the keyhole, I sent him
to the Play. A better proof of the severity of my bondage to that
taskmaster could scarcely be afforded, than the degrading shifts to
which I was constantly driven to find him employment. So mean is
extremity, that I sometimes sent him to Hyde Park Corner to see
what o'clock it was.
Dinner done and we sitting with our feet upon the fender, I said to
Herbert, "My dear Herbert, I have something very particular to tell
you."
"My dear Handel," he returned, "I shall esteem and respect your
confidence."
"It concerns myself, Herbert," said I, "and one other person."
Herbert crossed his feet, looked at the fire with his head on one
side, and having looked at it in vain for some time, looked at me
because I didn't go on.
"Herbert," said I, laying my hand upon his knee, "I love  I adore
Estella."
Instead of being transfixed, Herbert replied in an easy
matterofcourse way, "Exactly. Well?"
"Well, Herbert? Is that all you say? Well?"
"What next, I mean?" said Herbert. "Of course I know that."
"How do you know it?" said I.
"How do I know it, Handel? Why, from you."
"I never told you."
"Told me You have never told me when you have got your hair cut,
but I have had senses to perceive it. You have always adored her,
ever since I have known you. You brought your adoration and your
portmanteau here, together. Told me Why, you have always told me
all day long. When you told me your own story, you told me plainly
that you began adoring her the first time you saw her, when you
were very young indeed."
"Very well, then," said I, to whom this was a new and not unwelcome
light, "I have never left off adoring her. And she has come back, a
most beautiful and most elegant creature. And I saw her yesterday.
And if I adored her before, I now doubly adore her."
"Lucky for you then, Handel," said Herbert, "that you are picked
out for her and allotted to her. Without encroaching on forbidden
ground, we may venture to say that there can be no doubt between
ourselves of that fact. Have you any idea yet, of Estella's views
on the adoration question?"
I shook my head gloomily. "Oh She is thousands of miles away, from
me," said I.
"Patience, my dear Handel time enough, time enough. But you have
something more to say?"
"I am ashamed to say it," I returned, "and yet it's no worse to say
it than to think it. You call me a lucky fellow. Of course, I am. I
was a blacksmith's boy but yesterday I am  what shall I say I am
today?"
"Say, a good fellow, if you want a phrase," returned Herbert,
smiling, and clapping his hand on the back of mine, "a good fellow,
with impetuosity and hesitation, boldness and diffidence, action
and dreaming, curiously mixed in him."
I stopped for a moment to consider whether there really was this
mixture in my character. On the whole, I by no means recognized the
analysis, but thought it not worth disputing.
"When I ask what I am to call myself today, Herbert," I went on,
"I suggest what I have in my thoughts. You say I am lucky. I know I
have done nothing to raise myself in life, and that Fortune alone
has raised me that is being very lucky. And yet, when I think of
Estella"
"And when don't you, you know?" Herbert threw in, with his eyes on
the fire which I thought kind and sympathetic of him.
"  Then, my dear Herbert, I cannot tell you how dependent and
uncertain I feel, and how exposed to hundreds of chances. Avoiding
forbidden ground, as you did just now, I may still say that on the
constancy of one person naming no person all my expectations
depend. And at the best, how indefinite and unsatisfactory, only to
know so vaguely what they are" In saying this, I relieved my mind
of what had always been there, more or less, though no doubt most
since yesterday.
"Now, Handel," Herbert replied, in his gay hopeful way, "it seems
to me that in the despondency of the tender passion, we are looking
into our gifthorse's mouth with a magnifyingglass. Likewise, it
seems to me that, concentrating our attention on the examination,
we altogether overlook one of the best points of the animal. Didn't
you tell me that your guardian, Mr. Jaggers, told you in the
beginning, that you were not endowed with expectations only? And
even if he had not told you so  though that is a very large If, I
grant  could you believe that of all men in London, Mr. Jaggers is
the man to hold his present relations towards you unless he were
sure of his ground?"
I said I could not deny that this was a strong point. I said it
people often do so, in such cases like a rather reluctant
concession to truth and justice  as if I wanted to deny it
"I should think it was a strong point," said Herbert, "and I should
think you would be puzzled to imagine a stronger as to the rest,
you must bide your guardian's time, and he must bide his client's
time. You'll be oneandtwenty before you know where you are, and
then perhaps you'll get some further enlightenment. At all events,
you'll be nearer getting it, for it must come at last."
"What a hopeful disposition you have" said I, gratefully admiring
his cheery ways.
"I ought to have," said Herbert, "for I have not much else. I must
acknowledge, bythebye, that the good sense of what I have just
said is not my own, but my father's. The only remark I ever heard
him make on your story, was the final one "The thing is settled
and done, or Mr. Jaggers would not be in it." And now before I say
anything more about my father, or my father's son, and repay
confidence with confidence, I want to make myself seriously
disagreeable to you for a moment  positively repulsive."
"You won't succeed," said I.
"Oh yes I shall" said he. "One, two, three, and now I am in for
it. Handel, my good fellow" though he spoke in this light tone, he
was very much in earnest "I have been thinking since we have been
talking with our feet on this fender, that Estella surely cannot be
a condition of your inheritance, if she was never referred to by
your guardian. Am I right in so understanding what you have told
me, as that he never referred to her, directly or indirectly, in
any way? Never even hinted, for instance, that your patron might
have views as to your marriage ultimately?"
"Never."
"Now, Handel, I am quite free from the flavour of sour grapes, upon
my soul and honour Not being bound to her, can you not detach
yourself from her?  I told you I should be disagreeable."
I turned my head aside, for, with a rush and a sweep, like the old
marsh winds coming up from the sea, a feeling like that which had
subdued me on the morning when I left the forge, when the mists
were solemnly rising, and when I laid my hand upon the village
fingerpost, smote upon my heart again. There was silence between
us for a little while.
"Yes but my dear Handel," Herbert went on, as if we had been
talking instead of silent, "its having been so strongly rooted in
the breast of a boy whom nature and circumstances made so romantic,
renders it very serious. Think of her bringingup, and think of
Miss Havisham. Think of what she is herself now I am repulsive and
you abominate me. This may lead to miserable things."
"I know it, Herbert," said I, with my head still turned away, "but
I can't help it."
"You can't detach yourself?"
"No. Impossible"
"You can't try, Handel?"
"No. Impossible"
"Well" said Herbert, getting up with a lively shake as if he had
been asleep, and stirring the fire "now I'll endeavour to make
myself agreeable again"
So he went round the room and shook the curtains out, put the
chairs in their places, tidied the books and so forth that were
lying about, looked into the hall, peeped into the letterbox, shut
the door, and came back to his chair by the fire where he sat
down, nursing his left leg in both arms.
"I was going to say a word or two, Handel, concerning my father and
my father's son. I am afraid it is scarcely necessary for my
father's son to remark that my father's establishment is not
particularly brilliant in its housekeeping."
"There is always plenty, Herbert," said I to say something
encouraging.
"Oh yes and so the dustman says, I believe, with the strongest
approval, and so does the marinestore shop in the back street.
Gravely, Handel, for the subject is grave enough, you know how it
is, as well as I do. I suppose there was a time once when my father
had not given matters up but if ever there was, the time is gone.
May I ask you if you have ever had an opportunity of remarking,
down in your part of the country, that the children of not exactly
suitable marriages, are always most particularly anxious to be
married?"
This was such a singular question, that I asked him in return, "Is
it so?"
"I don't know," said Herbert, "that's what I want to know. Because
it is decidedly the case with us. My poor sister Charlotte who was
next me and died before she was fourteen, was a striking example.
Little Jane is the same. In her desire to be matrimonially
established, you might suppose her to have passed her short
existence in the perpetual contemplation of domestic bliss. Little
Alick in a frock has already made arrangements for his union with a
suitable young person at Kew. And indeed, I think we are all
engaged, except the baby."
"Then you are?" said I.
"I am," said Herbert "but it's a secret."
I assured him of my keeping the secret, and begged to be favoured
with further particulars. He had spoken so sensibly and feelingly
of my weakness that I wanted to know something about his strength.
"May I ask the name?" I said.
"Name of Clara," said Herbert.
"Live in London?"
"Yes. Perhaps I ought to mention," said Herbert, who had become
curiously crestfallen and meek, since we entered on the interesting
theme, "that she is rather below my mother's nonsensical family
notions. Her father had to do with the victualling of
passengerships. I think he was a species of purser."
"What is he now?" said I.
"He's an invalid now," replied Herbert.
"Living on  ?"
"On the first floor," said Herbert. Which was not at all what I
meant, for I had intended my question to apply to his means. "I
have never seen him, for he has always kept his room overhead,
since I have known Clara. But I have heard him constantly. He makes
tremendous rows  roars, and pegs at the floor with some frightful
instrument." In looking at me and then laughing heartily, Herbert
for the time recovered his usual lively manner.
"Don't you expect to see him?" said I.
"Oh yes, I constantly expect to see him," returned Herbert,
"because I never hear him, without expecting him to come tumbling
through the ceiling. But I don't know how long the rafters may
hold."
When he had once more laughed heartily, he became meek again, and
told me that the moment he began to realize Capital, it was his
intention to marry this young lady. He added as a selfevident
proposition, engendering low spirits, "But you can't marry, you
know, while you're looking about you."
As we contemplated the fire, and as I thought what a difficult
vision to realize this same Capital sometimes was, I put my hands
in my pockets. A folded piece of paper in one of them attracting my
attention, I opened it and found it to be the playbill I had
received from Joe, relative to the celebrated provincial amateur of
Roscian renown. "And bless my heart," I involuntarily added aloud,
"it's tonight"
This changed the subject in an instant, and made us hurriedly
resolve to go to the play. So, when I had pledged myself to comfort
and abet Herbert in the affair of his heart by all practicable and
impracticable means, and when Herbert had told me that his
affianced already knew me by reputation and that I should be
presented to her, and when we had warmly shaken hands upon our
mutual confidence, we blew out our candles, made up our fire,
locked our door, and issued forth in quest of Mr. Wopsle and
Denmark.
Chapter 
On our arrival in Denmark, we found the king and queen of that
country elevated in two armchairs on a kitchentable, holding a
Court. The whole of the Danish nobility were in attendance
consisting of a noble boy in the washleather boots of a gigantic
ancestor, a venerable Peer with a dirty face who seemed to have
risen from the people late in life, and the Danish chivalry with a
comb in its hair and a pair of white silk legs, and presenting on
the whole a feminine appearance. My gifted townsman stood gloomily
apart, with folded arms, and I could have wished that his curls and
forehead had been more probable.
Several curious little circumstances transpired as the action
proceeded. The late king of the country not only appeared to have
been troubled with a cough at the time of his decease, but to have
taken it with him to the tomb, and to have brought it back. The
royal phantom also carried a ghostly manuscript round its
truncheon, to which it had the appearance of occasionally
referring, and that, too, with an air of anxiety and a tendency to
lose the place of reference which were suggestive of a state of
mortality. It was this, I conceive, which led to the Shade's being
advised by the gallery to "turn over"  a recommendation which it
took extremely ill. It was likewise to be noted of this majestic
spirit that whereas it always appeared with an air of having been
out a long time and walked an immense distance, it perceptibly came
from a closely contiguous wall. This occasioned its terrors to be
received derisively. The Queen of Denmark, a very buxom lady,
though no doubt historically brazen, was considered by the public
to have too much brass about her her chin being attached to her
diadem by a broad band of that metal as if she had a gorgeous
toothache, her waist being encircled by another, and each of her
arms by another, so that she was openly mentioned as "the
kettledrum." The noble boy in the ancestral boots, was
inconsistent representing himself, as it were in one breath, as an
able seaman, a strolling actor, a gravedigger, a clergyman, and a
person of the utmost importance at a Court fencingmatch, on the
authority of whose practised eye and nice discrimination the finest
strokes were judged. This gradually led to a want of toleration for
him, and even  on his being detected in holy orders, and declining
to perform the funeral service  to the general indignation taking
the form of nuts. Lastly, Ophelia was a prey to such slow musical
madness, that when, in course of time, she had taken off her white
muslin scarf, folded it up, and buried it, a sulky man who had been
long cooling his impatient nose against an iron bar in the front
row of the gallery, growled, "Now the baby's put to bed let's have
supper" Which, to say the least of it, was out of keeping.
Upon my unfortunate townsman all these incidents accumulated with
playful effect. Whenever that undecided Prince had to ask a
question or state a doubt, the public helped him out with it. As
for example on the question whether 'twas nobler in the mind to
suffer, some roared yes, and some no, and some inclining to both
opinions said "toss up for it" and quite a Debating Society arose.
When he asked what should such fellows as he do crawling between
earth and heaven, he was encouraged with loud cries of "Hear,
hear" When he appeared with his stocking disordered its disorder
expressed, according to usage, by one very neat fold in the top,
which I suppose to be always got up with a flat iron, a
conversation took place in the gallery respecting the paleness of
his leg, and whether it was occasioned by the turn the ghost had
given him. On his taking the recorders  very like a little black
flute that had just been played in the orchestra and handed out at
the door  he was called upon unanimously for Rule Britannia. When
he recommended the player not to saw the air thus, the sulky man
said, "And don't you do it, neither you're a deal worse than him"
And I grieve to add that peals of laughter greeted Mr. Wopsle on
every one of these occasions.
But his greatest trials were in the churchyard which had the
appearance of a primeval forest, with a kind of small
ecclesiastical washhouse on one side, and a turnpike gate on the
other. Mr. Wopsle in a comprehensive black cloak, being descried
entering at the turnpike, the gravedigger was admonished in a
friendly way, "Look out Here's the undertaker acoming, to see how
you're agetting on with your work" I believe it is well known in
a constitutional country that Mr. Wopsle could not possibly have
returned the skull, after moralizing over it, without dusting his
fingers on a white napkin taken from his breast but even that
innocent and indispensable action did not pass without the comment
"Waiter" The arrival of the body for interment in an empty black
box with the lid tumbling open, was the signal for a general joy
which was much enhanced by the discovery, among the bearers, of an
individual obnoxious to identification. The joy attended Mr. Wopsle
through his struggle with Laertes on the brink of the orchestra and
the grave, and slackened no more until he had tumbled the king off
the kitchentable, and had died by inches from the ankles upward.
We had made some pale efforts in the beginning to applaud Mr.
Wopsle but they were too hopeless to be persisted in. Therefore we
had sat, feeling keenly for him, but laughing, nevertheless, from
ear to ear. I laughed in spite of myself all the time, the whole
thing was so droll and yet I had a latent impression that there
was something decidedly fine in Mr. Wopsle's elocution  not for old
associations' sake, I am afraid, but because it was very slow, very
dreary, very uphill and downhill, and very unlike any way in
which any man in any natural circumstances of life or death ever
expressed himself about anything. When the tragedy was over, and he
had been called for and hooted, I said to Herbert, "Let us go at
once, or perhaps we shall meet him."
We made all the haste we could downstairs, but we were not quick
enough either. Standing at the door was a Jewish man with an
unnatural heavy smear of eyebrow, who caught my eyes as we
advanced, and said, when we came up with him
"Mr. Pip and friend?"
Identity of Mr. Pip and friend confessed.
"Mr. Waldengarver," said the man, "would be glad to have the
honour."
"Waldengarver?" I repeated  when Herbert murmured in my ear,
"Probably Wopsle."
"Oh" said I. "Yes. Shall we follow you?"
"A few steps, please." When we were in a side alley, he turned and
asked, "How did you think he looked?  I dressed him."
I don't know what he had looked like, except a funeral with the
addition of a large Danish sun or star hanging round his neck by a
blue ribbon, that had given him the appearance of being insured in
some extraordinary Fire Office. But I said he had looked very nice.
"When he come to the grave," said our conductor, "he showed his
cloak beautiful. But, judging from the wing, it looked to me that
when he see the ghost in the queen's apartment, he might have made
more of his stockings."
I modestly assented, and we all fell through a little dirty swing
door, into a sort of hot packingcase immediately behind it. Here
Mr. Wopsle was divesting himself of his Danish garments, and here
there was just room for us to look at him over one another's
shoulders, by keeping the packingcase door, or lid, wide open.
"Gentlemen," said Mr. Wopsle, "I am proud to see you. I hope, Mr.
Pip, you will excuse my sending round. I had the happiness to know
you in former times, and the Drama has ever had a claim which has
ever been acknowledged, on the noble and the affluent."
Meanwhile, Mr. Waldengarver, in a frightful perspiration, was trying
to get himself out of his princely sables.
"Skin the stockings off, Mr. Waldengarver," said the owner of that
property, "or you'll bust 'em. Bust 'em, and you'll bust
fiveandthirty shillings. Shakspeare never was complimented with a
finer pair. Keep quiet in your chair now, and leave 'em to me."
With that, he went upon his knees, and began to flay his victim
who, on the first stocking coming off, would certainly have fallen
over backward with his chair, but for there being no room to fall
anyhow.
I had been afraid until then to say a word about the play. But
then, Mr. Waldengarver looked up at us complacently, and said
"Gentlemen, how did it seem to you, to go, in front?"
Herbert said from behind at the same time poking me, "capitally."
So I said "capitally."
"How did you like my reading of the character, gentlemen?" said Mr.
Waldengarver, almost, if not quite, with patronage.
Herbert said from behind again poking me, "massive and concrete."
So I said boldly, as if I had originated it, and must beg to insist
upon it, "massive and concrete."
"I am glad to have your approbation, gentlemen," said Mr.
Waldengarver, with an air of dignity, in spite of his being ground
against the wall at the time, and holding on by the seat of the
chair.
"But I'll tell you one thing, Mr. Waldengarver," said the man who
was on his knees, "in which you're out in your reading. Now mind I
don't care who says contrairy I tell you so. You're out in your
reading of Hamlet when you get your legs in profile. The last
Hamlet as I dressed, made the same mistakes in his reading at
rehearsal, till I got him to put a large red wafer on each of his
shins, and then at that rehearsal which was the last I went in
front, sir, to the back of the pit, and whenever his reading
brought him into profile, I called out "I don't see no wafers" And
at night his reading was lovely."
Mr. Waldengarver smiled at me, as much as to say "a faithful
dependent  I overlook his folly" and then said aloud, "My view is
a little classic and thoughtful for them here but they will
improve, they will improve."
Herbert and I said together, Oh, no doubt they would improve.
"Did you observe, gentlemen," said Mr. Waldengarver, "that there was
a man in the gallery who endeavoured to cast derision on the
service  I mean, the representation?"
We basely replied that we rather thought we had noticed such a man.
I added, "He was drunk, no doubt."
"Oh dear no, sir," said Mr. Wopsle, "not drunk. His employer would
see to that, sir. His employer would not allow him to be drunk."
"You know his employer?" said I.
Mr. Wopsle shut his eyes, and opened them again performing both
ceremonies very slowly. "You must have observed, gentlemen," said
he, "an ignorant and a blatant ass, with a rasping throat and a
countenance expressive of low malignity, who went through  I will
not say sustained  the role if I may use a French expression of
Claudius King of Denmark. That is his employer, gentlemen. Such is
the profession"
Without distinctly knowing whether I should have been more sorry
for Mr. Wopsle if he had been in despair, I was so sorry for him as
it was, that I took the opportunity of his turning round to have
his braces put on  which jostled us out at the doorway  to ask
Herbert what he thought of having him home to supper? Herbert said
he thought it would be kind to do so therefore I invited him, and
he went to Barnard's with us, wrapped up to the eyes, and we did
our best for him, and he sat until two o'clock in the morning,
reviewing his success and developing his plans. I forget in detail
what they were, but I have a general recollection that he was to
begin with reviving the Drama, and to end with crushing it
inasmuch as his decease would leave it utterly bereft and without a
chance or hope.
Miserably I went to bed after all, and miserably thought of
Estella, and miserably dreamed that my expectations were all
cancelled, and that I had to give my hand in marriage to Herbert's
Clara, or play Hamlet to Miss Havisham's Ghost, before twenty
thousand people, without knowing twenty words of it.
Chapter 
One day when I was busy with my books and Mr. Pocket, I received a
note by the post, the mere outside of which threw me into a great
flutter for, though I had never seen the handwriting in which it
was addressed, I divined whose hand it was. It had no set
beginning, as Dear Mr. Pip, or Dear Pip, or Dear Sir, or Dear
Anything, but ran thus
"I am to come to London the day after tomorrow by the midday
coach. I believe it was settled you should meet me? At all events
Miss Havisham has that impression, and I write in obedience to it.
She sends you her regard.
Yours, ESTELLA."
If there had been time, I should probably have ordered several
suits of clothes for this occasion but as there was not, I was
fain to be content with those I had. My appetite vanished
instantly, and I knew no peace or rest until the day arrived. Not
that its arrival brought me either for, then I was worse than ever,
and began haunting the coachoffice in woodstreet, Cheapside,
before the coach had left the Blue Boar in our town. For all that I
knew this perfectly well, I still felt as if it were not safe to
let the coachoffice be out of my sight longer than five minutes at
a time and in this condition of unreason I had performed the first
halfhour of a watch of four or five hours, when Wemmick ran
against me.
"Halloa, Mr. Pip," said he "how do you do? I should hardly have
thought this was your beat."
I explained that I was waiting to meet somebody who was coming up
by coach, and I inquired after the Castle and the Aged.
"Both flourishing thankye," said Wemmick, "and particularly the
Aged. He's in wonderful feather. He'll be eightytwo next birthday.
I have a notion of firing eightytwo times, if the neighbourhood
shouldn't complain, and that cannon of mine should prove equal to
the pressure. However, this is not London talk. Where do you think
I am going to?"
"To the office?" said I, for he was tending in that direction.
"Next thing to it," returned Wemmick, "I am going to Newgate. We
are in a banker'sparcel case just at present, and I have been down
the road taking as squint at the scene of action, and thereupon
must have a word or two with our client."
"Did your client commit the robbery?" I asked.
"Bless your soul and body, no," answered Wemmick, very drily. "But
he is accused of it. So might you or I be. Either of us might be
accused of it, you know."
"Only neither of us is," I remarked.
"Yah" said Wemmick, touching me on the breast with his forefinger
"you're a deep one, Mr. Pip Would you like to have a look at
Newgate? Have you time to spare?"
I had so much time to spare, that the proposal came as a relief,
notwithstanding its irreconcilability with my latent desire to keep
my eye on the coachoffice. Muttering that I would make the inquiry
whether I had time to walk with him, I went into the office, and
ascertained from the clerk with the nicest precision and much to
the trying of his temper, the earliest moment at which the coach
could be expected  which I knew beforehand, quite as well as he. I
then rejoined Mr. Wemmick, and affecting to consult my watch and to
be surprised by the information I had received, accepted his offer.
We were at Newgate in a few minutes, and we passed through the
lodge where some fetters were hanging up on the bare walls among
the prison rules, into the interior of the jail. At that time,
jails were much neglected, and the period of exaggerated reaction
consequent on all public wrongdoing  and which is always its
heaviest and longest punishment  was still far off. So, felons
were not lodged and fed better than soldiers to say nothing of
paupers, and seldom set fire to their prisons with the excusable
object of improving the flavour of their soup. It was visiting time
when Wemmick took me in and a potman was going his rounds with
beer and the prisoners, behind bars in yards, were buying beer,
and talking to friends and a frouzy, ugly, disorderly, depressing
scene it was.
It struck me that Wemmick walked among the prisoners, much as a
gardener might walk among his plants. This was first put into my
head by his seeing a shoot that had come up in the night, and
saying, "What, Captain Tom? Are you there? Ah, indeed" and also,
"Is that Black Bill behind the cistern? Why I didn't look for you
these two months how do you find yourself?" Equally in his
stopping at the bars and attending to anxious whisperers  always
singly  Wemmick with his postoffice in an immovable state, looked
at them while in conference, as if he were taking particular notice
of the advance they had made, since last observed, towards coming
out in full blow at their trial.
He was highly popular, and I found that he took the familiar
department of Mr. Jaggers's business though something of the state
of Mr. Jaggers hung about him too, forbidding approach beyond
certain limits. His personal recognition of each successive client
was comprised in a nod, and in his settling his hat a little easier
on his head with both hands, and then tightening the postoffice,
and putting his hands in his pockets. In one or two instances,
there was a difficulty respecting the raising of fees, and then Mr.
Wemmick, backing as far as possible from the insufficient money
produced, said, "it's no use, my boy. I'm only a subordinate. I
can't take it. Don't go on in that way with a subordinate. If you
are unable to make up your quantum, my boy, you had better address
yourself to a principal there are plenty of principals in the
profession, you know, and what is not worth the while of one, may
be worth the while of another that's my recommendation to you,
speaking as a subordinate. Don't try on useless measures. Why
should you? Now, who's next?"
Thus, we walked through Wemmick's greenhouse, until he turned to me
and said, "Notice the man I shall shake hands with." I should have
done so, without the preparation, as he had shaken hands with no
one yet.
Almost as soon as he had spoken, a portly upright man whom I can
see now, as I write in a wellworn olivecoloured frockcoat, with
a peculiar pallor overspreading the red in his complexion, and
eyes that went wandering about when he tried to fix them, came up
to a corner of the bars, and put his hand to his hat  which had a
greasy and fatty surface like cold broth  with a halfserious and
halfjocose military salute.
"Colonel, to you" said Wemmick "how are you, Colonel?"
"All right, Mr. Wemmick."
"Everything was done that could be done, but the evidence was too
strong for us, Colonel."
"Yes, it was too strong, sir  but I don't care."
"No, no," said Wemmick, coolly, "you don't care." Then, turning to
me, "Served His Majesty this man. Was a soldier in the line and
bought his discharge."
I said, "Indeed?" and the man's eyes looked at me, and then looked
over my head, and then looked all round me, and then he drew his
hand across his lips and laughed.
"I think I shall be out of this on Monday, sir," he said to
Wemmick.
"Perhaps," returned my friend, "but there's no knowing."
"I am glad to have the chance of bidding you goodbye, Mr. Wemmick,"
said the man, stretching out his hand between two bars.
"Thankye," said Wemmick, shaking hands with him. "Same to you,
Colonel."
"If what I had upon me when taken, had been real, Mr. Wemmick," said
the man, unwilling to let his hand go, "I should have asked the
favour of your wearing another ring  in acknowledgment of your
attentions."
"I'll accept the will for the deed," said Wemmick. "Bythebye you
were quite a pigeonfancier." The man looked up at the sky. "I am
told you had a remarkable breed of tumblers. could you commission
any friend of yours to bring me a pair, of you've no further use
for 'em?"
"It shall be done, sir?"
"All right," said Wemmick, "they shall be taken care of. Good
afternoon, Colonel. Goodbye" They shook hands again, and as we
walked away Wemmick said to me, "A Coiner, a very good workman. The
Recorder's report is made today, and he is sure to be executed on
Monday. Still you see, as far as it goes, a pair of pigeons are
portable property, all the same." With that, he looked back, and
nodded at this dead plant, and then cast his eyes about him in
walking out of the yard, as if he were considering what other pot
would go best in its place.
As we came out of the prison through the lodge, I found that the
great importance of my guardian was appreciated by the turnkeys, no
less than by those whom they held in charge. "Well, Mr. Wemmick,"
said the turnkey, who kept us between the two studded and spiked
lodge gates, and who carefully locked one before he unlocked the
other, "what's Mr. Jaggers going to do with that waterside murder?
Is he going to make it manslaughter, or what's he going to make of
it?"
"Why don't you ask him?" returned Wemmick.
"Oh yes, I dare say" said the turnkey.
"Now, that's the way with them here. Mr. Pip," remarked Wemmick,
turning to me with his postoffice elongated. "They don't mind what
they ask of me, the subordinate but you'll never catch 'em asking
any questions of my principal."
"Is this young gentleman one of the 'prentices or articled ones of
your office?" asked the turnkey, with a grin at Mr. Wemmick's
humour.
"There he goes again, you see" cried Wemmick, "I told you so Asks
another question of the subordinate before his first is dry Well,
supposing Mr. Pip is one of them?"
"Why then," said the turnkey, grinning again, "he knows what Mr.
Jaggers is."
"Yah" cried Wemmick, suddenly hitting out at the turnkey in a
facetious way, "you're dumb as one of your own keys when you have
to do with my principal, you know you are. Let us out, you old fox,
or I'll get him to bring an action against you for false
imprisonment."
The turnkey laughed, and gave us good day, and stood laughing at us
over the spikes of the wicket when we descended the steps into the
street.
"Mind you, Mr. Pip," said Wemmick, gravely in my ear, as he took my
arm to be more confidential "I don't know that Mr. Jaggers does a
better thing than the way in which he keeps himself so high. He's
always so high. His constant height is of a piece with his immense
abilities. That Colonel durst no more take leave of him, than that
turnkey durst ask him his intentions respecting a case. Then,
between his height and them, he slips in his subordinate  don't
you see?  and so he has 'em, soul and body."
I was very much impressed, and not for the first time, by my
guardian's subtlety. To confess the truth, I very heartily wished,
and not for the first time, that I had had some other guardian of
minor abilities.
Mr. Wemmick and I parted at the office in Little Britain, where
suppliants for Mr. Jaggers's notice were lingering about as usual,
and I returned to my watch in the street of the coachoffice, with
some three hours on hand. I consumed the whole time in thinking how
strange it was that I should be encompassed by all this taint of
prison and crime that, in my childhood out on our lonely marshes
on a winter evening I should have first encountered it that, it
should have reappeared on two occasions, starting out like a stain
that was faded but not gone that, it should in this new way
pervade my fortune and advancement. While my mind was thus engaged,
I thought of the beautiful young Estella, proud and refined, coming
towards me, and I thought with absolute abhorrence of the contrast
between the jail and her. I wished that Wemmick had not met me, or
that I had not yielded to him and gone with him, so that, of all
days in the year on this day, I might not have had Newgate in my
breath and on my clothes. I beat the prison dust off my feet as I
sauntered to and fro, and I shook it out of my dress, and I exhaled
its air from my lungs. So contaminated did I feel, remembering who
was coming, that the coach came quickly after all, and I was not
yet free from the soiling consciousness of Mr. Wemmick's
conservatory, when I saw her face at the coach window and her hand
waving to me.
What was the nameless shadow which again in that one instant had
passed?
Chapter 
In her furred travellingdress, Estella seemed more delicately
beautiful than she had ever seemed yet, even in my eyes. Her manner
was more winning than she had cared to let it be to me before, and
I thought I saw Miss Havisham's influence in the change.
We stood in the Inn Yard while she pointed out her luggage to me,
and when it was all collected I remembered  having forgotten
everything but herself in the meanwhile  that I knew nothing of
her destination.
"I am going to Richmond," she told me. "Our lesson is, that there
are two Richmonds, one in Surrey and one in Yorkshire, and that mine
is the Surrey Richmond. The distance is ten miles. I am to have a
carriage, and you are to take me. This is my purse, and you are to
pay my charges out of it. Oh, you must take the purse We have no
choice, you and I, but to obey our instructions. We are not free to
follow our own devices, you and I."
As she looked at me in giving me the purse, I hoped there was an
inner meaning in her words. She said them slightingly, but not with
displeasure.
"A carriage will have to be sent for, Estella. Will you rest here a
little?"
"Yes, I am to rest here a little, and I am to drink some tea, and
you are to take care of me the while."
She drew her arm through mine, as if it must be done, and I
requested a waiter who had been staring at the coach like a man who
had never seen such a thing in his life, to show us a private
sittingroom. Upon that, he pulled out a napkin, as if it were a
magic clue without which he couldn't find the way upstairs, and
led us to the black hole of the establishment fitted up with a
diminishing mirror quite a superfluous article considering the
hole's proportions, an anchovy saucecruet, and somebody's
pattens. On my objecting to this retreat, he took us into another
room with a dinnertable for thirty, and in the grate a scorched
leaf of a copybook under a bushel of coaldust. Having looked at
this extinct conflagration and shaken his head, he took my order
which, proving to be merely "Some tea for the lady," sent him out
of the room in a very low state of mind.
I was, and I am, sensible that the air of this chamber, in its
strong combination of stable with soupstock, might have led one to
infer that the coaching department was not doing well, and that the
enterprising proprietor was boiling down the horses for the
refreshment department. Yet the room was all in all to me, Estella
being in it. I thought that with her I could have been happy there
for life. I was not at all happy there at the time, observe, and I
knew it well.
"Where are you going to, at Richmond?" I asked Estella.
"I am going to live," said she, "at a great expense, with a lady
there, who has the power  or says she has  of taking me about,
and introducing me, and showing people to me and showing me to
people."
"I suppose you will be glad of variety and admiration?"
"Yes, I suppose so."
She answered so carelessly, that I said, "You speak of yourself as
if you were some one else."
"Where did you learn how I speak of others? Come, come," said
Estella, smiling delightfully, "you must not expect me to go to
school to you I must talk in my own way. How do you thrive with
Mr. Pocket?"
"I live quite pleasantly there at least" It appeared to me that
I was losing a chance.
"At least?" repeated Estella.
"As pleasantly as I could anywhere, away from you."
"You silly boy," said Estella, quite composedly, "how can you talk
such nonsense? Your friend Mr. Matthew, I believe, is superior to
the rest of his family?"
"Very superior indeed. He is nobody's enemy"
"Don't add but his own," interposed Estella, "for I hate that class
of man. But he really is disinterested, and above small jealousy
and spite, I have heard?"
"I am sure I have every reason to say so."
"You have not every reason to say so of the rest of his people,"
said Estella, nodding at me with an expression of face that was at
once grave and rallying, "for they beset Miss Havisham with reports
and insinuations to your disadvantage. They watch you, misrepresent
you, write letters about you anonymous sometimes, and you are the
torment and the occupation of their lives. You can scarcely realize
to yourself the hatred those people feel for you."
"They do me no harm, I hope?"
Instead of answering, Estella burst out laughing. This was very
singular to me, and I looked at her in considerable perplexity.
When she left off  and she had not laughed languidly, but with
real enjoyment  I said, in my diffident way with her
"I hope I may suppose that you would not be amused if they did me
any harm."
"No, no you may be sure of that," said Estella. "You may be certain
that I laugh because they fail. Oh, those people with Miss
Havisham, and the tortures they undergo" She laughed again, and
even now when she had told me why, her laughter was very singular
to me, for I could not doubt its being genuine, and yet it seemed
too much for the occasion. I thought there must really be something
more here than I knew she saw the thought in my mind, and answered
it.
"It is not easy for even you." said Estella, "to know what
satisfaction it gives me to see those people thwarted, or what an
enjoyable sense of the ridiculous I have when they are made
ridiculous. For you were not brought up in that strange house from
a mere baby.  I was. You had not your little wits sharpened by
their intriguing against you, suppressed and defenceless, under the
mask of sympathy and pity and what not that is soft and soothing. 
I had. You did not gradually open your round childish eyes wider
and wider to the discovery of that impostor of a woman who
calculates her stores of peace of mind for when she wakes up in the
night.  I did."
It was no laughing matter with Estella now, nor was she summoning
these remembrances from any shallow place. I would not have been
the cause of that look of hers, for all my expectations in a heap.
"Two things I can tell you," said Estella. "First, notwithstanding
the proverb that constant dropping will wear away a stone, you may
set your mind at rest that these people never will  never would,
in hundred years  impair your ground with Miss Havisham, in any
particular, great or small. Second, I am beholden to you as the
cause of their being so busy and so mean in vain, and there is my
hand upon it."
As she gave it me playfully  for her darker mood had been but
momentary  I held it and put it to my lips. "You ridiculous boy,"
said Estella, "will you never take warning? Or do you kiss my hand
in the same spirit in which I once let you kiss my cheek?"
"What spirit was that?" said I.
"I must think a moment A spirit of contempt for the fawners and
plotters."
"If I say yes, may I kiss the cheek again?"
"You should have asked before you touched the hand. But, yes, if
you like."
I leaned down, and her calm face was like a statue's. "Now," said
Estella, gliding away the instant I touched her cheek, "you are to
take care that I have some tea, and you are to take me to
Richmond."
Her reverting to this tone as if our association were forced upon
us and we were mere puppets, gave me pain but everything in our
intercourse did give me pain. Whatever her tone with me happened to
be, I could put no trust in it, and build no hope on it and yet I
went on against trust and against hope. Why repeat it a thousand
times? So it always was.
I rang for the tea, and the waiter, reappearing with his magic
clue, brought in by degrees some fifty adjuncts to that refreshment
but of tea not a glimpse. A teaboard, cups and saucers, plates,
knives and forks including carvers, spoons various,
saltcellars, a meek little muffin confined with the utmost
precaution under a strong iron cover, Moses in the bullrushes
typified by a soft bit of butter in a quantity of parsley, a pale
loaf with a powdered head, two proof impressions of the bars of the
kitchen fireplace on triangular bits of bread, and ultimately a
fat family urn which the waiter staggered in with, expressing in
his countenance burden and suffering. After a prolonged absence at
this stage of the entertainment, he at length came back with a
casket of precious appearance containing twigs. These I steeped in
hot water, and so from the whole of these appliances extracted one
cup of I don't know what, for Estella.
The bill paid, and the waiter remembered, and the ostler not
forgotten, and the chambermaid taken into consideration  in a
word, the whole house bribed into a state of contempt and
animosity, and Estella's purse much lightened  we got into our
postcoach and drove away. Turning into Cheapside and rattling up
Newgatestreet, we were soon under the walls of which I was so
ashamed.
"What place is that?" Estella asked me.
I made a foolish pretence of not at first recognizing it, and then
told her. As she looked at it, and drew in her head again,
murmuring "Wretches" I would not have confessed to my visit for
any consideration.
"Mr. Jaggers," said I, by way of putting it neatly on somebody else,
"has the reputation of being more in the secrets of that dismal
place than any man in London."
"He is more in the secrets of every place, I think," said Estella,
in a low voice.
"You have been accustomed to see him often, I suppose?"
"I have been accustomed to see him at uncertain intervals, ever
since I can remember. But I know him no better now, than I did
before I could speak plainly. What is your own experience of him?
Do you advance with him?"
"Once habituated to his distrustful manner," said I, "I have done
very well."
"Are you intimate?"
"I have dined with him at his private house."
"I fancy," said Estella, shrinking "that must be a curious place."
"It is a curious place."
I should have been chary of discussing my guardian too freely even
with her but I should have gone on with the subject so far as to
describe the dinner in Gerrardstreet, if we had not then come into
a sudden glare of gas. It seemed, while it lasted, to be all alight
and alive with that inexplicable feeling I had had before and when
we were out of it, I was as much dazed for a few moments as if I
had been in Lightning.
So, we fell into other talk, and it was principally about the way
by which we were travelling, and about what parts of London lay on
this side of it, and what on that. The great city was almost new to
her, she told me, for she had never left Miss Havisham's
neighbourhood until she had gone to France, and she had merely
passed through London then in going and returning. I asked her if
my guardian had any charge of her while she remained here? To that
she emphatically said "God forbid" and no more.
It was impossible for me to avoid seeing that she cared to attract
me that she made herself winning and would have won me even if
the task had needed pains. Yet this made me none the happier, for,
even if she had not taken that tone of our being disposed of by
others, I should have felt that she held my heart in her hand
because she wilfully chose to do it, and not because it would have
wrung any tenderness in her, to crush it and throw it away.
When we passed through Hammersmith, I showed her where Mr. Matthew
Pocket lived, and said it was no great way from Richmond, and that
I hoped I should see her sometimes.
"Oh yes, you are to see me you are to come when you think proper
you are to be mentioned to the family indeed you are already
mentioned."
I inquired was it a large household she was going to be a member
of?
"No there are only two mother and daughter. The mother is a lady
of some station, though not averse to increasing her income."
"I wonder Miss Havisham could part with you again so soon."
"It is a part of Miss Havisham's plans for me, Pip," said Estella,
with a sigh, as if she were tired "I am to write to her constantly
and see her regularly and report how I go on  I and the jewels 
for they are nearly all mine now."
It was the first time she had ever called me by my name. Of course
she did so, purposely, and knew that I should treasure it up.
We came to Richmond all too soon, and our destination there, was a
house by the Green a staid old house, where hoops and powder and
patches, embroidered coats rolled stockings ruffles and swords, had
had their court days many a time. Some ancient trees before the
house were still cut into fashions as formal and unnatural as the
hoops and wigs and stiff skirts but their own allotted places in
the great procession of the dead were not far off, and they would
soon drop into them and go the silent way of the rest.
A bell with an old voice  which I dare say in its time had often
said to the house, Here is the green farthingale, Here is the
diamondhilted sword, Here are the shoes with red heels and the blue
solitaire,  sounded gravely in the moonlight, and two
cherrycoloured maids came fluttering out to receive Estella. The
doorway soon absorbed her boxes, and she gave me her hand and a
smile, and said good night, and was absorbed likewise. And still I
stood looking at the house, thinking how happy I should be if I
lived there with her, and knowing that I never was happy with her,
but always miserable.
I got into the carriage to be taken back to Hammersmith, and I got
in with a bad heartache, and I got out with a worse heartache. At
our own door, I found little Jane Pocket coming home from a little
party escorted by her little lover and I envied her little lover,
in spite of his being subject to Flopson.
Mr. Pocket was out lecturing for, he was a most delightful lecturer
on domestic economy, and his treatises on the management of
children and servants were considered the very best textbooks on
those themes. But, Mrs. Pocket was at home, and was in a little
difficulty, on account of the baby's having been accommodated with
a needlecase to keep him quiet during the unaccountable absence
with a relative in the Foot Guards of Millers. And more needles
were missing, than it could be regarded as quite wholesome for a
patient of such tender years either to apply externally or to take
as a tonic.
Mr. Pocket being justly celebrated for giving most excellent
practical advice, and for having a clear and sound perception of
things and a highly judicious mind, I had some notion in my
heartache of begging him to accept my confidence. But, happening to
look up at Mrs. Pocket as she sat reading her book of dignities
after prescribing Bed as a sovereign remedy for baby, I thought 
Well  No, I wouldn't.
Chapter 
As I had grown accustomed to my expectations, I had insensibly
begun to notice their effect upon myself and those around me. Their
influence on my own character, I disguised from my recognition as
much as possible, but I knew very well that it was not all good. I
lived in a state of chronic uneasiness respecting my behaviour to
Joe. My conscience was not by any means comfortable about Biddy.
When I woke up in the night  like Camilla  I used to think, with
a weariness on my spirits, that I should have been happier and
better if I had never seen Miss Havisham's face, and had risen to
manhood content to be partners with Joe in the honest old forge.
Many a time of an evening, when I sat alone looking at the fire, I
thought, after all, there was no fire like the forge fire and the
kitchen fire at home.
Yet Estella was so inseparable from all my restlessness and
disquiet of mind, that I really fell into confusion as to the
limits of my own part in its production. That is to say, supposing
I had had no expectations, and yet had had Estella to think of, I
could not make out to my satisfaction that I should have done much
better. Now, concerning the influence of my position on others, I
was in no such difficulty, and so I perceived  though dimly enough
perhaps  that it was not beneficial to anybody, and, above all,
that it was not beneficial to Herbert. My lavish habits led his
easy nature into expenses that he could not afford, corrupted the
simplicity of his life, and disturbed his peace with anxieties and
regrets. I was not at all remorseful for having unwittingly set
those other branches of the Pocket family to the poor arts they
practised because such littlenesses were their natural bent, and
would have been evoked by anybody else, if I had left them
slumbering. But Herbert's was a very different case, and it often
caused me a twinge to think that I had done him evil service in
crowding his sparelyfurnished chambers with incongruous upholstery
work, and placing the canarybreasted Avenger at his disposal.
So now, as an infallible way of making little ease great ease, I
began to contract a quantity of debt. I could hardly begin but
Herbert must begin too, so he soon followed. At Startop's
suggestion, we put ourselves down for election into a club called
The Finches of the Grove the object of which institution I have
never divined, if it were not that the members should dine
expensively once a fortnight, to quarrel among themselves as much
as possible after dinner, and to cause six waiters to get drunk on
the stairs. I Know that these gratifying social ends were so
invariably accomplished, that Herbert and I understood nothing else
to be referred to in the first standing toast of the society which
ran "Gentlemen, may the present promotion of good feeling ever
reign predominant among the Finches of the Grove."
The Finches spent their money foolishly the Hotel we dined at was
in Coventgarden, and the first Finch I saw, when I had the honour
of joining the Grove, was Bentley Drummle at that time floundering
about town in a cab of his own, and doing a great deal of damage to
the posts at the street corners. Occasionally, he shot himself out
of his equipage headforemost over the apron and I saw him on one
occasion deliver himself at the door of the Grove in this
unintentional way  like coals. But here I anticipate a little for
I was not a Finch, and could not be, according to the sacred laws
of the society, until I came of age.
In my confidence in my own resources, I would willingly have taken
Herbert's expenses on myself but Herbert was proud, and I could
make no such proposal to him. So, he got into difficulties in every
direction, and continued to look about him. When we gradually fell
into keeping late hours and late company, I noticed that he looked
about him with a desponding eye at breakfasttime that he began to
look about him more hopefully about midday that he drooped when
he came into dinner that he seemed to descry Capital in the
distance rather clearly, after dinner that he all but realized
Capital towards midnight and that at about two o'clock in the
morning, he became so deeply despondent again as to talk of buying
a rifle and going to America, with a general purpose of compelling
buffaloes to make his fortune.
I was usually at Hammersmith about half the week, and when I was at
Hammersmith I haunted Richmond whereof separately byandby.
Herbert would often come to Hammersmith when I was there, and I
think at those seasons his father would occasionally have some
passing perception that the opening he was looking for, had not
appeared yet. But in the general tumbling up of the family, his
tumbling out in life somewhere, was a thing to transact itself
somehow. In the meantime Mr. Pocket grew greyer, and tried oftener
to lift himself out of his perplexities by the hair. While Mrs.
Pocket tripped up the family with her footstool, read her book of
dignities, lost her pockethandkerchief, told us about her
grandpapa, and taught the young idea how to shoot, by shooting it
into bed whenever it attracted her notice.
As I am now generalizing a period of my life with the object of
clearing my way before me, I can scarcely do so better than by at
once completing the description of our usual manners and customs at
Barnard's Inn.
We spent as much money as we could, and got as little for it as
people could make up their minds to give us. We were always more or
less miserable, and most of our acquaintance were in the same
condition. There was a gay fiction among us that we were constantly
enjoying ourselves, and a skeleton truth that we never did. To the
best of my belief, our case was in the last aspect a rather common
one.
Every morning, with an air ever new, Herbert went into the City to
look about him. I often paid him a visit in the dark backroom in
which he consorted with an inkjar, a hatpeg, a coalbox, a
stringbox, an almanack, a desk and stool, and a ruler and I do
not remember that I ever saw him do anything else but look about
him. If we all did what we undertake to do, as faithfully as
Herbert did, we might live in a Republic of the Virtues. He had
nothing else to do, poor fellow, except at a certain hour of every
afternoon to "go to Lloyd's"  in observance of a ceremony of
seeing his principal, I think. He never did anything else in
connexion with Lloyd's that I could find out, except come back
again. When he felt his case unusually serious, and that he
positively must find an opening, he would go on 'Change at a busy
time, and walk in and out, in a kind of gloomy country dance
figure, among the assembled magnates. "For," says Herbert to me,
coming home to dinner on one of those special occasions, "I find
the truth to be, Handel, that an opening won't come to one, but one
must go to it  so I have been."
If we had been less attached to one another, I think we must have
hated one another regularly every morning. I detested the chambers
beyond expression at that period of repentance, and could not
endure the sight of the Avenger's livery which had a more
expensive and a less remunerative appearance then, than at any
other time in the fourandtwenty hours. As we got more and more
into debt breakfast became a hollower and hollower form, and, being
on one occasion at breakfasttime threatened by letter with legal
proceedings, "not unwholly unconnected," as my local paper might
put it, "with jewellery," I went so far as to seize the Avenger by
his blue collar and shake him off his feet  so that he was
actually in the air, like a booted Cupid  for presuming to suppose
that we wanted a roll.
At certain times  meaning at uncertain times, for they depended on
our humour  I would say to Herbert, as if it were a remarkable
discovery
"My dear Herbert, we are getting on badly."
"My dear Handel," Herbert would say to me, in all sincerity, if you
will believe me, those very words were on my lips, by a strange
coincidence."
"Then, Herbert," I would respond, "let us look into out affairs."
We always derived profound satisfaction from making an appointment
for this purpose. I always thought this was business, this was the
way to confront the thing, this was the way to take the foe by the
throat. And I know Herbert thought so too.
We ordered something rather special for dinner, with a bottle of
something similarly out of the common way, in order that our minds
might be fortified for the occasion, and we might come well up to
the mark. Dinner over, we produced a bundle of pens, a copious
supply of ink, and a goodly show of writing and blotting paper.
For, there was something very comfortable in having plenty of
stationery.
I would then take a sheet of paper, and write across the top of it,
in a neat hand, the heading, "Memorandum of Pip's debts" with
Barnard's Inn and the date very carefully added. Herbert would also
take a sheet of paper, and write across it with similar
formalities, "Memorandum of Herbert's debts."
Each of us would then refer to a confused heap of papers at his
side, which had been thrown into drawers, worn into holes in
Pockets, halfburnt in lighting candles, stuck for weeks into the
lookingglass, and otherwise damaged. The sound of our pens going,
refreshed us exceedingly, insomuch that I sometimes found it
difficult to distinguish between this edifying business proceeding
and actually paying the money. In point of meritorious character,
the two things seemed about equal.
When we had written a little while, I would ask Herbert how he got
on? Herbert probably would have been scratching his head in a most
rueful manner at the sight of his accumulating figures.
"They are mounting up, Handel," Herbert would say "upon my life,
they are mounting up."
"Be firm, Herbert," I would retort, plying my own pen with great
assiduity. "Look the thing in the face. Look into your affairs.
Stare them out of countenance."
"So I would, Handel, only they are staring me out of countenance."
However, my determined manner would have its effect, and Herbert
would fall to work again. After a time he would give up once more,
on the plea that he had not got Cobbs's bill, or Lobbs's, or
Nobbs's, as the case might be.
"Then, Herbert, estimate estimate it in round numbers, and put it
down."
"What a fellow of resource you are" my friend would reply, with
admiration. "Really your business powers are very remarkable."
I thought so too. I established with myself on these occasions, the
reputation of a firstrate man of business  prompt, decisive,
energetic, clear, coolheaded. When I had got all my
responsibilities down upon my list, I compared each with the bill,
and ticked it off. My selfapproval when I ticked an entry was
quite a luxurious sensation. When I had no more ticks to make, I
folded all my bills up uniformly, docketed each on the back, and
tied the whole into a symmetrical bundle. Then I did the same for
Herbert who modestly said he had not my administrative genius,
and felt that I had brought his affairs into a focus for him.
My business habits had one other bright feature, which i called
"leaving a Margin." For example supposing Herbert's debts to be
one hundred and sixtyfour pounds fourandtwopence, I would say,
"Leave a margin, and put them down at two hundred." Or, supposing
my own to be four times as much, I would leave a margin, and put
them down at seven hundred. I had the highest opinion of the wisdom
of this same Margin, but I am bound to acknowledge that on looking
back, I deem it to have been an expensive device. For, we always
ran into new debt immediately, to the full extent of the margin,
and sometimes, in the sense of freedom and solvency it imparted,
got pretty far on into another margin.
But there was a calm, a rest, a virtuous hush, consequent on these
examinations of our affairs that gave me, for the time, an
admirable opinion of myself. Soothed by my exertions, my method,
and Herbert's compliments, I would sit with his symmetrical bundle
and my own on the table before me among the stationary, and feel
like a Bank of some sort, rather than a private individual.
We shut our outer door on these solemn occasions, in order that we
might not be interrupted. I had fallen into my serene state one
evening, when we heard a letter dropped through the slit in the
said door, and fall on the ground. "It's for you, Handel," said
Herbert, going out and coming back with it, "and I hope there is
nothing the matter." This was in allusion to its heavy black seal
and border.
The letter was signed TRABB  CO., and its contents were simply,
that I was an honoured sir, and that they begged to inform me that
Mrs. J. Gargery had departed this life on Monday last, at twenty
minutes past six in the evening, and that my attendance was
requested at the interment on Monday next at three o'clock in the
afternoon.
Chapter 
It was the first time that a grave had opened in my road of life,
and the gap it made in the smooth ground was wonderful. The figure
of my sister in her chair by the kitchen fire, haunted me night and
day. That the place could possibly be, without her, was something
my mind seemed unable to compass and whereas she had seldom or
never been in my thoughts of late, I had now the strangest ideas
that she was coming towards me in the street, or that she would
presently knock at the door. In my rooms too, with which she had
never been at all associated, there was at once the blankness of
death and a perpetual suggestion of the sound of her voice or the
turn of her face or figure, as if she were still alive and had been
often there.
Whatever my fortunes might have been, I could scarcely have
recalled my sister with much tenderness. But I suppose there is a
shock of regret which may exist without much tenderness. Under its
influence and perhaps to make up for the want of the softer
feeling I was seized with a violent indignation against the
assailant from whom she had suffered so much and I felt that on
sufficient proof I could have revengefully pursued Orlick, or any
one else, to the last extremity.
Having written to Joe, to offer consolation, and to assure him that
I should come to the funeral, I passed the intermediate days in the
curious state of mind I have glanced at. I went down early in the
morning, and alighted at the Blue Boar in good time to walk over to
the forge.
It was fine summer weather again, and, as I walked along, the times
when I was a little helpless creature, and my sister did not spare
me, vividly returned. But they returned with a gentle tone upon
them that softened even the edge of Tickler. For now, the very
breath of the beans and clover whispered to my heart that the day
must come when it would be well for my memory that others walking
in the sunshine should be softened as they thought of me.
At last I came within sight of the house, and saw that Trabb and
Co. had put in a funereal execution and taken possession. Two
dismally absurd persons, each ostentatiously exhibiting a crutch
done up in a black bandage  as if that instrument could possibly
communicate any comfort to anybody  were posted at the front door
and in one of them I recognized a postboy discharged from the Boar
for turning a young couple into a sawpit on their bridal morning,
in consequence of intoxication rendering it necessary for him to
ride his horse clasped round the neck with both arms. All the
children of the village, and most of the women, were admiring these
sable warders and the closed windows of the house and forge and as
I came up, one of the two warders the postboy knocked at the door
implying that I was far too much exhausted by grief, to have
strength remaining to knock for myself.
Another sable warder a carpenter, who had once eaten two geese for
a wager opened the door, and showed me into the best parlour.
Here, Mr. Trabb had taken unto himself the best table, and had got
all the leaves up, and was holding a kind of black Bazaar, with the
aid of a quantity of black pins. At the moment of my arrival, he
had just finished putting somebody's hat into black longclothes,
like an African baby so he held out his hand for mine. But I,
misled by the action, and confused by the occasion, shook hands
with him with every testimony of warm affection.
Poor dear Joe, entangled in a little black cloak tied in a large
bow under his chin, was seated apart at the upper end of the room
where, as chief mourner, he had evidently been stationed by Trabb.
When I bent down and said to him, "Dear Joe, how are you?" he said,
"Pip, old chap, you knowed her when she were a fine figure of a"
and clasped my hand and said no more.
Biddy, looking very neat and modest in her black dress, went
quietly here and there, and was very helpful. When I had spoken to
Biddy, as I thought it not a time for talking I went and sat down
near Joe, and there began to wonder in what part of the house it 
she  my sister  was. The air of the parlour being faint with the
smell of sweet cake, I looked about for the table of refreshments
it was scarcely visible until one had got accustomed to the gloom,
but there was a cutup plumcake upon it, and there were cutup
oranges, and sandwiches, and biscuits, and two decanters that I
knew very well as ornaments, but had never seen used in all my
life one full of port, and one of sherry. Standing at this table,
I became conscious of the servile Pumblechook in a black cloak and
several yards of hatband, who was alternately stuffing himself, and
making obsequious movements to catch my attention. The moment he
succeeded, he came over to me breathing sherry and crumbs, and
said in a subdued voice, "May I, dear sir?" and did. I then
descried Mr. and Mrs. Hubble the lastnamed in a decent speechless
paroxysm in a corner. We were all going to "follow," and were all
in course of being tied up separately by Trabb into ridiculous
bundles.
"Which I meantersay, Pip," Joe whispered me, as we were being what
Mr. Trabb called "formed" in the parlour, two and two  and it was
dreadfully like a preparation for some grim kind of dance "which I
meantersay, sir, as I would in preference have carried her to the
church myself, along with three or four friendly ones wot come to
it with willing harts and arms, but it were considered wot the
neighbours would look down on such and would be of opinions as it
were wanting in respect."
"Pockethandkerchiefs out, all" cried Mr. Trabb at this point, in a
depressed businesslike voice. "Pockethandkerchiefs out We are
ready"
So, we all put our pockethandkerchiefs to our faces, as if our
noses were bleeding, and filed out two and two Joe and I Biddy
and Pumblechook Mr. and Mrs. Hubble. The remains of my poor sister
had been brought round by the kitchen door, and, it being a point
of Undertaking ceremony that the six bearers must be stifled and
blinded under a horrible black velvet housing with a white border,
the whole looked like a blind monster with twelve human legs,
shuffling and blundering along, under the guidance of two keepers 
the postboy and his comrade.
The neighbourhood, however, highly approved of these arrangements,
and we were much admired as we went through the village the more
youthful and vigorous part of the community making dashes now and
then to cut us off, and lying in wait to intercept us at points of
vantage. At such times the more exuberant among them called out in
an excited manner on our emergence round some corner of expectancy,
"Here they come" "Here they are" and we were all but cheered. In
this progress I was much annoyed by the abject Pumblechook, who,
being behind me, persisted all the way as a delicate attention in
arranging my streaming hatband, and smoothing my cloak. My thoughts
were further distracted by the excessive pride of Mr. and Mrs.
Hubble, who were surpassingly conceited and vainglorious in being
members of so distinguished a procession.
And now, the range of marshes lay clear before us, with the sails
of the ships on the river growing out of it and we went into the
churchyard, close to the graves of my unknown parents, Philip
Pirrip, late of this parish, and Also Georgiana, Wife of the Above.
And there, my sister was laid quietly in the earth while the larks
sang high above it, and the light wind strewed it with beautiful
shadows of clouds and trees.
Of the conduct of the worldlyminded Pumblechook while this was
doing, I desire to say no more than it was all addressed to me and
that even when those noble passages were read which remind humanity
how it brought nothing into the world and can take nothing out, and
how it fleeth like a shadow and never continueth long in one stay,
I heard him cough a reservation of the case of a young gentleman
who came unexpectedly into large property. When we got back, he had
the hardihood to tell me that he wished my sister could have known
I had done her so much honour, and to hint that she would have
considered it reasonably purchased at the price of her death. After
that, he drank all the rest of the sherry, and Mr. Hubble drank the
port, and the two talked which I have since observed to be
customary in such cases as if they were of quite another race from
the deceased, and were notoriously immortal. Finally, he went away
with Mr. and Mrs. Hubble  to make an evening of it, I felt sure, and
to tell the Jolly Bargemen that he was the founder of my fortunes
and my earliest benefactor.
When they were all gone, and when Trabb and his men  but not his
boy I looked for him  had crammed their mummery into bags, and
were gone too, the house felt wholesomer. Soon afterwards, Biddy,
Joe, and I, had a cold dinner together but we dined in the best
parlour, not in the old kitchen, and Joe was so exceedingly
particular what he did with his knife and fork and the saltcellar
and what not, that there was great restraint upon us. But after
dinner, when I made him take his pipe, and when I had loitered with
him about the forge, and when we sat down together on the great
block of stone outside it, we got on better. I noticed that after
the funeral Joe changed his clothes so far, as to make a compromise
between his Sunday dress and working dress in which the dear
fellow looked natural, and like the Man he was.
He was very much pleased by my asking if I might sleep in my own
little room, and I was pleased too for, I felt that I had done
rather a great thing in making the request. When the shadows of
evening were closing in, I took an opportunity of getting into the
garden with Biddy for a little talk.
"Biddy," said I, "I think you might have written to me about these
sad matters."
"Do you, Mr. Pip?" said Biddy. "I should have written if I had
thought that."
"Don't suppose that I mean to be unkind, Biddy, when I say I
consider that you ought to have thought that."
"Do you, Mr. Pip?"
She was so quiet, and had such an orderly, good, and pretty way
with her, that I did not like the thought of making her cry again.
After looking a little at her downcast eyes as she walked beside
me, I gave up that point.
"I suppose it will be difficult for you to remain here now, Biddy
dear?"
"Oh I can't do so, Mr. Pip," said Biddy, in a tone of regret, but
still of quiet conviction. "I have been speaking to Mrs. Hubble, and
I am going to her tomorrow. I hope we shall be able to take some
care of Mr. Gargery, together, until he settles down."
"How are you going to live, Biddy? If you want any mo"
"How am I going to live?" repeated Biddy, striking in, with a
momentary flush upon her face. "I'll tell you, Mr. Pip. I am going
to try to get the place of mistress in the new school nearly
finished here. I can be well recommended by all the neighbours, and
I hope I can be industrious and patient, and teach myself while I
teach others. You know, Mr. Pip," pursued Biddy, with a smile, as
she raised her eyes to my face, "the new schools are not like the
old, but I learnt a good deal from you after that time, and have
had time since then to improve."
"I think you would always improve, Biddy, under any circumstances."
"Ah Except in my bad side of human nature," murmured Biddy.
It was not so much a reproach, as an irresistible thinking aloud.
Well I thought I would give up that point too. So, I walked a
little further with Biddy, looking silently at her downcast eyes.
"I have not heard the particulars of my sister's death, Biddy."
"They are very slight, poor thing. She had been in one of her bad
states  though they had got better of late, rather than worse 
for four days, when she came out of it in the evening, just at
teatime, and said quite plainly, 'Joe.' As she had never said any
word for a long while, I ran and fetched in Mr. Gargery from the
forge. She made signs to me that she wanted him to sit down close
to her, and wanted me to put her arms round his neck. So I put them
round his neck, and she laid her head down on his shoulder quite
content and satisfied. And so she presently said 'Joe' again, and
once 'Pardon,' and once 'Pip.' And so she never lifted her head up
any more, and it was just an hour later when we laid it down on her
own bed, because we found she was gone."
Biddy cried the darkening garden, and the lane, and the stars that
were coming out, were blurred in my own sight.
"Nothing was ever discovered, Biddy?"
"Nothing."
"Do you know what is become of Orlick?"
"I should think from the colour of his clothes that he is working
in the quarries."
"Of course you have seen him then?  Why are you looking at that
dark tree in the lane?"
"I saw him there, on the night she died."
"That was not the last time either, Biddy?"
"No I have seen him there, since we have been walking here.  It
is of no use," said Biddy, laying her hand upon my arm, as I was
for running out, "you know I would not deceive you he was not
there a minute, and he is gone."
It revived my utmost indignation to find that she was still pursued
by this fellow, and I felt inveterate against him. I told her so,
and told her that I would spend any money or take any pains to
drive him out of that country. By degrees she led me into more
temperate talk, and she told me how Joe loved me, and how Joe never
complained of anything  she didn't say, of me she had no need I
knew what she meant  but ever did his duty in his way of life,
with a strong hand, a quiet tongue, and a gentle heart.
"Indeed, it would be hard to say too much for him," said I "and
Biddy, we must often speak of these things, for of course I shall
be often down here now. I am not going to leave poor Joe alone."
Biddy said never a single word.
"Biddy, don't you hear me?"
"Yes, Mr. Pip."
"Not to mention your calling me Mr. Pip  which appears to me to be
in bad taste, Biddy  what do you mean?"
"What do I mean?" asked Biddy, timidly.
"Biddy," said I, in a virtuously selfasserting manner, "I must
request to know what you mean by this?"
"By this?" said Biddy.
"Now, don't echo," I retorted. "You used not to echo, Biddy."
"Used not" said Biddy. "O Mr. Pip Used"
Well I rather thought I would give up that point too. After
another silent turn in the garden, I fell back on the main
position.
"Biddy," said I, "I made a remark respecting my coming down here
often, to see Joe, which you received with a marked silence. Have
the goodness, Biddy, to tell me why."
"Are you quite sure, then, that you WILL come to see him often?"
asked Biddy, stopping in the narrow garden walk, and looking at me
under the stars with a clear and honest eye.
"Oh dear me" said I, as if I found myself compelled to give up
Biddy in despair. "This really is a very bad side of human
nature Don't say any more, if you please, Biddy. This shocks me
very much."
For which cogent reason I kept Biddy at a distance during supper,
and, when I went up to my own old little room, took as stately a
leave of her as I could, in my murmuring soul, deem reconcilable
with the churchyard and the event of the day. As often as I was
restless in the night, and that was every quarter of an hour, I
reflected what an unkindness, what an injury, what an injustice,
Biddy had done me.
Early in the morning, I was to go. Early in the morning, I was out,
and looking in, unseen, at one of the wooden windows of the forge.
There I stood, for minutes, looking at Joe, already at work with a
glow of health and strength upon his face that made it show as if
the bright sun of the life in store for him were shining on it.
"Goodbye, dear Joe  No, don't wipe it off  for God's sake, give
me your blackened hand  I shall be down soon, and often."
"Never too soon, sir," said Joe, "and never too often, Pip"
Biddy was waiting for me at the kitchen door, with a mug of new
milk and a crust of bread. "Biddy," said I, when I gave her my hand
at parting, "I am not angry, but I am hurt."
"No, don't be hurt," she pleaded quite pathetically "let only me
be hurt, if I have been ungenerous."
Once more, the mists were rising as I walked away. If they
disclosed to me, as I suspect they did, that I should not come
back, and that Biddy was quite right, all I can say is  they were
quite right too.
Chapter 
Herbert and I went on from bad to worse, in the way of increasing
our debts, looking into our affairs, leaving Margins, and the like
exemplary transactions and Time went on, whether or no, as he has
a way of doing and I came of age  in fulfilment of Herbert's
prediction, that I should do so before I knew where I was.
Herbert himself had come of age, eight months before me. As he had
nothing else than his majority to come into, the event did not make
a profound sensation in Barnard's Inn. But we had looked forward to
my oneandtwentieth birthday, with a crowd of speculations and
anticipations, for we had both considered that my guardian could
hardly help saying something definite on that occasion.
I had taken care to have it well understood in Little Britain, when
my birthday was. On the day before it, I received an official note
from Wemmick, informing me that Mr. Jaggers would be glad if I would
call upon him at five in the afternoon of the auspicious day. This
convinced us that something great was to happen, and threw me into
an unusual flutter when I repaired to my guardian's office, a model
of punctuality.
In the outer office Wemmick offered me his congratulations, and
incidentally rubbed the side of his nose with a folded piece of
tissuepaper that I liked the look of. But he said nothing
respecting it, and motioned me with a nod into my guardian's room.
It was November, and my guardian was standing before his fire
leaning his back against the chimneypiece, with his hands under
his coattails.
"Well, Pip," said he, "I must call you Mr. Pip today.
Congratulations, Mr. Pip."
We shook hands  he was always a remarkably short shaker  and I
thanked him.
"Take a chair, Mr. Pip," said my guardian.
As I sat down, and he preserved his attitude and bent his brows at
his boots, I felt at a disadvantage, which reminded me of that old
time when I had been put upon a tombstone. The two ghastly casts on
the shelf were not far from him, and their expression was as if
they were making a stupid apoplectic attempt to attend to the
conversation.
"Now my young friend," my guardian began, as if I were a witness in
the box, "I am going to have a word or two with you."
"If you please, sir."
"What do you suppose," said Mr. Jaggers, bending forward to look at
the ground, and then throwing his head back to look at the ceiling,
"what do you suppose you are living at the rate of?"
"At the rate of, sir?"
"At," repeated Mr. Jaggers, still looking at the ceiling, "the 
rate  of?" And then looked all round the room, and paused with his
pockethandkerchief in his hand, half way to his nose.
I had looked into my affairs so often, that I had thoroughly
destroyed any slight notion I might ever have had of their
bearings. Reluctantly, I confessed myself quite unable to answer
the question. This reply seemed agreeable to Mr. Jaggers, who said,
"I thought so" and blew his nose with an air of satisfaction.
"Now, I have asked you a question, my friend," said Mr. Jaggers.
"Have you anything to ask me?"
"Of course it would be a great relief to me to ask you several
questions, sir but I remember your prohibition."
"Ask one," said Mr. Jaggers.
"Is my benefactor to be made known to me today?"
"No. Ask another."
"Is that confidence to be imparted to me soon?"
"Waive that, a moment," said Mr. Jaggers, "and ask another."
I looked about me, but there appeared to be now no possible escape
from the inquiry, "Have  I  anything to receive, sir?" On that,
Mr. Jaggers said, triumphantly, "I thought we should come to it"
and called to Wemmick to give him that piece of paper. Wemmick
appeared, handed it in, and disappeared.
"Now, Mr. Pip," said Mr. Jaggers, "attend, if you please. You have
been drawing pretty freely here your name occurs pretty often in
Wemmick's cashbook but you are in debt, of course?"
"I am afraid I must say yes, sir."
"You know you must say yes don't you?" said Mr. Jaggers.
"Yes, sir."
"I don't ask you what you owe, because you don't know and if you
did know, you wouldn't tell me you would say less. Yes, yes, my
friend," cried Mr. Jaggers, waving his forefinger to stop me, as I
made a show of protesting "it's likely enough that you think you
wouldn't, but you would. You'll excuse me, but I know better than
you. Now, take this piece of paper in your hand. You have got it?
Very good. Now, unfold it and tell me what it is."
"This is a banknote," said I, "for five hundred pounds."
"That is a banknote," repeated Mr. Jaggers, "for five hundred
pounds. And a very handsome sum of money too, I think. You consider
it so?"
"How could I do otherwise"
"Ah But answer the question," said Mr. Jaggers.
"Undoubtedly."
"You consider it, undoubtedly, a handsome sum of money. Now, that
handsome sum of money, Pip, is your own. It is a present to you on
this day, in earnest of your expectations. And at the rate of that
handsome sum of money per annum, and at no higher rate, you are to
live until the donor of the whole appears. That is to say, you will
now take your money affairs entirely into your own hands, and you
will draw from Wemmick one hundred and twentyfive pounds per
quarter, until you are in communication with the fountainhead, and
no longer with the mere agent. As I have told you before, I am the
mere agent. I execute my instructions, and I am paid for doing so.
I think them injudicious, but I am not paid for giving any opinion
on their merits."
I was beginning to express my gratitude to my benefactor for the
great liberality with which I was treated, when Mr. Jaggers stopped
me. "I am not paid, Pip," said he, coolly, "to carry your words to
any one" and then gathered up his coattails, as he had gathered
up the subject, and stood frowning at his boots as if he suspected
them of designs against him.
After a pause, I hinted
"There was a question just now, Mr. Jaggers, which you desired me to
waive for a moment. I hope I am doing nothing wrong in asking it
again?"
"What is it?" said he.
I might have known that he would never help me out but it took me
aback to have to shape the question afresh, as if it were quite
new. "Is it likely," I said, after hesitating, "that my patron, the
fountainhead you have spoken of, Mr. Jaggers, will soon" there I
delicately stopped.
"Will soon what?" asked Mr. Jaggers. "That's no question as it
stands, you know."
"Will soon come to London," said I, after casting about for a
precise form of words, "or summon me anywhere else?"
"Now here," replied Mr. Jaggers, fixing me for the first time with
his dark deepset eyes, "we must revert to the evening when we
first encountered one another in your village. What did I tell you
then, Pip?"
"You told me, Mr. Jaggers, that it might be years hence when that
person appeared."
"Just so," said Mr. Jaggers "that's my answer."
As we looked full at one another, I felt my breath come quicker in
my strong desire to get something out of him. And as I felt that it
came quicker, and as I felt that he saw that it came quicker, I
felt that I had less chance than ever of getting anything out of
him.
"Do you suppose it will still be years hence, Mr. Jaggers?"
Mr. Jaggers shook his head  not in negativing the question, but in
altogether negativing the notion that he could anyhow be got to
answer it  and the two horrible casts of the twitched faces
looked, when my eyes strayed up to them, as if they had come to a
crisis in their suspended attention, and were going to sneeze.
"Come" said Mr. Jaggers, warming the backs of his legs with the
backs of his warmed hands, "I'll be plain with you, my friend Pip.
That's a question I must not be asked. You'll understand that,
better, when I tell you it's a question that might compromise me.
Come I'll go a little further with you I'll say something more."
He bent down so low to frown at his boots, that he was able to rub
the calves of his legs in the pause he made.
"When that person discloses," said Mr. Jaggers, straightening
himself, "you and that person will settle your own affairs. When
that person discloses, my part in this business will cease and
determine. When that person discloses, it will not be necessary for
me to know anything about it. And that's all I have got to say."
We looked at one another until I withdrew my eyes, and looked
thoughtfully at the floor. From this last speech I derived the
notion that Miss Havisham, for some reason or no reason, had not
taken him into her confidence as to her designing me for Estella
that he resented this, and felt a jealousy about it or that he
really did object to that scheme, and would have nothing to do with
it. When I raised my eyes again, I found that he had been shrewdly
looking at me all the time, and was doing so still.
"If that is all you have to say, sir," I remarked, "there can be
nothing left for me to say."
He nodded assent, and pulled out his thiefdreaded watch, and asked
me where I was going to dine? I replied at my own chambers, with
Herbert. As a necessary sequence, I asked him if he would favour us
with his company, and he promptly accepted the invitation. But he
insisted on walking home with me, in order that I might make no
extra preparation for him, and first he had a letter or two to
write, and of course had his hands to wash. So, I said I would go
into the outer office and talk to Wemmick.
The fact was, that when the five hundred pounds had come into my
pocket, a thought had come into my head which had been often there
before and it appeared to me that Wemmick was a good person to
advise with, concerning such thought.
He had already locked up his safe, and made preparations for going
home. He had left his desk, brought out his two greasy office
candlesticks and stood them in line with the snuffers on a slab
near the door, ready to be extinguished he had raked his fire low,
put his hat and greatcoat ready, and was beating himself all over
the chest with his safekey, as an athletic exercise after
business.
"Mr. Wemmick," said I, "I want to ask your opinion. I am very
desirous to serve a friend."
Wemmick tightened his postoffice and shook his head, as if his
opinion were dead against any fatal weakness of that sort.
"This friend," I pursued, "is trying to get on in commercial life,
but has no money, and finds it difficult and disheartening to make
a beginning. Now, I want somehow to help him to a beginning."
"With money down?" said Wemmick, in a tone drier than any sawdust.
"With some money down," I replied, for an uneasy remembrance shot
across me of that symmetrical bundle of papers at home "with some
money down, and perhaps some anticipation of my expectations."
"Mr. Pip," said Wemmick, "I should like just to run over with you on
my fingers, if you please, the names of the various bridges up as
high as Chelsea Reach. Let's see there's London, one Southwark,
two Blackfriars, three Waterloo, four Westminster, five
Vauxhall, six." He had checked off each bridge in its turn, with
the handle of his safekey on the palm of his hand. "There's as
many as six, you see, to choose from."
"I don't understand you," said I.
"Choose your bridge, Mr. Pip," returned Wemmick, "and take a walk
upon your bridge, and pitch your money into the Thames over the
centre arch of your bridge, and you know the end of it. Serve a
friend with it, and you may know the end of it too  but it's a
less pleasant and profitable end."
I could have posted a newspaper in his mouth, he made it so wide
after saying this.
"This is very discouraging," said I.
"Meant to be so," said Wemmick.
"Then is it your opinion," I inquired, with some little
indignation, "that a man should never"
"  Invest portable property in a friend?" said Wemmick. "Certainly
he should not. Unless he wants to get rid of the friend  and then
it becomes a question how much portable property it may be worth to
get rid of him."
"And that," said I, "is your deliberate opinion, Mr. Wemmick?"
"That," he returned, "is my deliberate opinion in this office."
"Ah" said I, pressing him, for I thought I saw him near a loophole
here "but would that be your opinion at Walworth?"
"Mr. Pip," he replied, with gravity, "Walworth is one place, and
this office is another. Much as the Aged is one person, and Mr.
Jaggers is another. They must not be confounded together. My
Walworth sentiments must be taken at Walworth none but my official
sentiments can be taken in this office."
"Very well," said I, much relieved, "then I shall look you up at
Walworth, you may depend upon it."
"Mr. Pip," he returned, "you will be welcome there, in a private and
personal capacity."
We had held this conversation in a low voice, well knowing my
guardian's ears to be the sharpest of the sharp. As he now appeared
in his doorway, towelling his hands, Wemmick got on his greatcoat
and stood by to snuff out the candles. We all three went into the
street together, and from the doorstep Wemmick turned his way, and
Mr. Jaggers and I turned ours.
I could not help wishing more than once that evening, that Mr.
Jaggers had had an Aged in Gerrardstreet, or a Stinger, or a
Something, or a Somebody, to unbend his brows a little. It was an
uncomfortable consideration on a twentyfirst birthday, that coming
of age at all seemed hardly worth while in such a guarded and
suspicious world as he made of it. He was a thousand times better
informed and cleverer than Wemmick, and yet I would a thousand
times rather have had Wemmick to dinner. And Mr. Jaggers made not me
alone intensely melancholy, because, after he was gone, Herbert
said of himself, with his eyes fixed on the fire, that he thought
he must have committed a felony and forgotten the details of it, he
felt so dejected and guilty.
Chapter 
Deeming Sunday the best day for taking Mr. Wemmick's Walworth
sentiments, I devoted the next ensuing Sunday afternoon to a
pilgrimage to the Castle. On arriving before the battlements, I
found the Union Jack flying and the drawbridge up but undeterred
by this show of defiance and resistance, I rang at the gate, and
was admitted in a most pacific manner by the Aged.
"My son, sir," said the old man, after securing the drawbridge,
"rather had it in his mind that you might happen to drop in, and he
left word that he would soon be home from his afternoon's walk. He
is very regular in his walks, is my son. Very regular in
everything, is my son."
I nodded at the old gentleman as Wemmick himself might have nodded,
and we went in and sat down by the fireside.
"You made acquaintance with my son, sir," said the old man, in his
chirping way, while he warmed his hands at the blaze, "at his
office, I expect?" I nodded. "Hah I have heerd that my son is a
wonderful hand at his business, sir?" I nodded hard. "Yes so they
tell me. His business is the Law?" I nodded harder. "Which makes it
more surprising in my son," said the old man, "for he was not
brought up to the Law, but to the WineCoopering."
Curious to know how the old gentleman stood informed concerning the
reputation of Mr. Jaggers, I roared that name at him. He threw me
into the greatest confusion by laughing heartily and replying in a
very sprightly manner, "No, to be sure you're right." And to this
hour I have not the faintest notion what he meant, or what joke he
thought I had made.
As I could not sit there nodding at him perpetually, without making
some other attempt to interest him, I shouted at inquiry whether
his own calling in life had been "the WineCoopering." By dint of
straining that term out of myself several times and tapping the old
gentleman on the chest to associate it with him, I at last
succeeded in making my meaning understood.
"No," said the old gentleman "the warehousing, the warehousing.
First, over yonder" he appeared to mean up the chimney, but I
believe he intended to refer me to Liverpool "and then in the City
of London here. However, having an infirmity  for I am hard of
hearing, sir"
I expressed in pantomime the greatest astonishment.
"  Yes, hard of hearing having that infirmity coming upon me, my
son he went into the Law, and he took charge of me, and he by
little and little made out this elegant and beautiful property. But
returning to what you said, you know," pursued the old man, again
laughing heartily, "what I say is, No to be sure you're right."
I was modestly wondering whether my utmost ingenuity would have
enabled me to say anything that would have amused him half as much
as this imaginary pleasantry, when I was startled by a sudden click
in the wall on one side of the chimney, and the ghostly tumbling
open of a little wooden flap with "JOHN" upon it. The old man,
following my eyes, cried with great triumph, "My son's come home"
and we both went out to the drawbridge.
It was worth any money to see Wemmick waving a salute to me from
the other side of the moat, when we might have shaken hands across
it with the greatest ease. The Aged was so delighted to work the
drawbridge, that I made no offer to assist him, but stood quiet
until Wemmick had come across, and had presented me to Miss
Skiffins a lady by whom he was accompanied.
Miss Skiffins was of a wooden appearance, and was, like her escort,
in the postoffice branch of the service. She might have been some
two or three years younger than Wemmick, and I judged her to stand
possessed of portable property. The cut of her dress from the waist
upward, both before and behind, made her figure very like a boy's
kite and I might have pronounced her gown a little too decidedly
orange, and her gloves a little too intensely green. But she seemed
to be a good sort of fellow, and showed a high regard for the Aged.
I was not long in discovering that she was a frequent visitor at
the Castle for, on our going in, and my complimenting Wemmick on
his ingenious contrivance for announcing himself to the Aged, he
begged me to give my attention for a moment to the other side of
the chimney, and disappeared. Presently another click came, and
another little door tumbled open with "Miss Skiffins" on it then
Miss Skiffins shut up and John tumbled open then Miss Skiffins and
John both tumbled open together, and finally shut up together. On
Wemmick's return from working these mechanical appliances, I
expressed the great admiration with which I regarded them, and he
said, "Well, you know, they're both pleasant and useful to the
Aged. And by George, sir, it's a thing worth mentioning, that of
all the people who come to this gate, the secret of those pulls is
only known to the Aged, Miss Skiffins, and me"
"And Mr. Wemmick made them," added Miss Skiffins, "with his own
hands out of his own head."
While Miss Skiffins was taking off her bonnet she retained her
green gloves during the evening as an outward and visible sign that
there was company, Wemmick invited me to take a walk with him
round the property, and see how the island looked in wintertime.
Thinking that he did this to give me an opportunity of taking his
Walworth sentiments, I seized the opportunity as soon as we were
out of the Castle.
Having thought of the matter with care, I approached my subject as
if I had never hinted at it before. I informed Wemmick that I was
anxious in behalf of Herbert Pocket, and I told him how we had
first met, and how we had fought. I glanced at Herbert's home, and
at his character, and at his having no means but such as he was
dependent on his father for those, uncertain and unpunctual.
I alluded to the advantages I had derived in my first rawness and
ignorance from his society, and I confessed that I feared I had but
ill repaid them, and that he might have done better without me and
my expectations. Keeping Miss Havisham in the background at a great
distance, I still hinted at the possibility of my having competed
with him in his prospects, and at the certainty of his possessing a
generous soul, and being far above any mean distrusts,
retaliations, or designs. For all these reasons I told Wemmick,
and because he was my young companion and friend, and I had a great
affection for him, I wished my own good fortune to reflect some
rays upon him, and therefore I sought advice from Wemmick's
experience and knowledge of men and affairs, how I could best try
with my resources to help Herbert to some present income  say of a
hundred a year, to keep him in good hope and heart  and gradually
to buy him on to some small partnership. I begged Wemmick, in
conclusion, to understand that my help must always be rendered
without Herbert's knowledge or suspicion, and that there was no one
else in the world with whom I could advise. I wound up by laying my
hand upon his shoulder, and saying, "I can't help confiding in you,
though I know it must be troublesome to you but that is your
fault, in having ever brought me here."
Wemmick was silent for a little while, and then said with a kind of
start, "Well you know, Mr. Pip, I must tell you one thing. This is
devilish good of you."
"Say you'll help me to be good then," said I.
"Ecod," replied Wemmick, shaking his head, "that's not my trade."
"Nor is this your tradingplace," said I.
"You are right," he returned. "You hit the nail on the head. Mr.
Pip, I'll put on my consideringcap, and I think all you want to
do, may be done by degrees. Skiffins that's her brother is an
accountant and agent. I'll look him up and go to work for you."
"I thank you ten thousand times."
"On the contrary," said he, "I thank you, for though we are
strictly in our private and personal capacity, still it may be
mentioned that there are Newgate cobwebs about, and it brushes them
away."
After a little further conversation to the same effect, we returned
into the Castle where we found Miss Skiffins preparing tea. The
responsible duty of making the toast was delegated to the Aged, and
that excellent old gentleman was so intent upon it that he seemed
to me in some danger of melting his eyes. It was no nominal meal
that we were going to make, but a vigorous reality. The Aged
prepared such a haystack of buttered toast, that I could scarcely
see him over it as it simmered on an iron stand hooked on to the
topbar while Miss Skiffins brewed such a jorum of tea, that the
pig in the back premises became strongly excited, and repeatedly
expressed his desire to participate in the entertainment.
The flag had been struck, and the gun had been fired, at the right
moment of time, and I felt as snugly cut off from the rest of
Walworth as if the moat were thirty feet wide by as many deep.
Nothing disturbed the tranquillity of the Castle, but the
occasional tumbling open of John and Miss Skiffins which little
doors were a prey to some spasmodic infirmity that made me
sympathetically uncomfortable until I got used to it. I inferred
from the methodical nature of Miss Skiffins's arrangements that she
made tea there every Sunday night and I rather suspected that a
classic brooch she wore, representing the profile of an undesirable
female with a very straight nose and a very new moon, was a piece
of portable property that had been given her by Wemmick.
We ate the whole of the toast, and drank tea in proportion, and it
was delightful to see how warm and greasy we all got after it. The
Aged especially, might have passed for some clean old chief of a
savage tribe, just oiled. After a short pause for repose, Miss
Skiffins  in the absence of the little servant who, it seemed,
retired to the bosom of her family on Sunday afternoons  washed up
the teathings, in a trifling ladylike amateur manner that
compromised none of us. Then, she put on her gloves again, and we
drew round the fire, and Wemmick said, "Now Aged Parent, tip us the
paper."
Wemmick explained to me while the Aged got his spectacles out, that
this was according to custom, and that it gave the old gentleman
infinite satisfaction to read the news aloud. "I won't offer an
apology," said Wemmick, "for he isn't capable of many pleasures 
are you, Aged P.?"
"All right, John, all right," returned the old man, seeing himself
spoken to.
"Only tip him a nod every now and then when he looks off his
paper," said Wemmick, "and he'll be as happy as a king. We are all
attention, Aged One."
"All right, John, all right" returned the cheerful old man so
busy and so pleased, that it really was quite charming.
The Aged's reading reminded me of the classes at Mr. Wopsle's
greataunt's, with the pleasanter peculiarity that it seemed to
come through a keyhole. As he wanted the candles close to him, and
as he was always on the verge of putting either his head or the
newspaper into them, he required as much watching as a powdermill.
But Wemmick was equally untiring and gentle in his vigilance, and
the Aged read on, quite unconscious of his many rescues. Whenever
he looked at us, we all expressed the greatest interest and
amazement, and nodded until he resumed again.
As Wemmick and Miss Skiffins sat side by side, and as I sat in a
shadowy corner, I observed a slow and gradual elongation of Mr.
Wemmick's mouth, powerfully suggestive of his slowly and gradually
stealing his arm round Miss Skiffins's waist. In course of time I
saw his hand appear on the other side of Miss Skiffins but at that
moment Miss Skiffins neatly stopped him with the green glove,
unwound his arm again as if it were an article of dress, and with
the greatest deliberation laid it on the table before her. Miss
Skiffins's composure while she did this was one of the most
remarkable sights I have ever seen, and if I could have thought the
act consistent with abstraction of mind, I should have deemed that
Miss Skiffins performed it mechanically.
Byandby, I noticed Wemmick's arm beginning to disappear again,
and gradually fading out of view. Shortly afterwards, his mouth
began to widen again. After an interval of suspense on my part that
was quite enthralling and almost painful, I saw his hand appear on
the other side of Miss Skiffins. Instantly, Miss Skiffins stopped
it with the neatness of a placid boxer, took off that girdle or
cestus as before, and laid it on the table. Taking the table to
represent the path of virtue, I am justified in stating that during
the whole time of the Aged's reading, Wemmick's arm was straying
from the path of virtue and being recalled to it by Miss Skiffins.
At last, the Aged read himself into a light slumber. This was the
time for Wemmick to produce a little kettle, a tray of glasses, and
a black bottle with a porcelaintopped cork, representing some
clerical dignitary of a rubicund and social aspect. With the aid of
these appliances we all had something warm to drink including the
Aged, who was soon awake again. Miss Skiffins mixed, and I observed
that she and Wemmick drank out of one glass. Of course I knew
better than to offer to see Miss Skiffins home, and under the
circumstances I thought I had best go first which I did, taking a
cordial leave of the Aged, and having passed a pleasant evening.
Before a week was out, I received a note from Wemmick, dated
Walworth, stating that he hoped he had made some advance in that
matter appertaining to our private and personal capacities, and
that he would be glad if I could come and see him again upon it.
So, I went out to Walworth again, and yet again, and yet again, and
I saw him by appointment in the City several times, but never held
any communication with him on the subject in or near Little
Britain. The upshot was, that we found a worthy young merchant or
shippingbroker, not long established in business, who wanted
intelligent help, and who wanted capital, and who in due course of
time and receipt would want a partner. Between him and me, secret
articles were signed of which Herbert was the subject, and I paid
him half of my five hundred pounds down, and engaged for sundry
other payments some, to fall due at certain dates out of my
income some, contingent on my coming into my property. Miss
Skiffins's brother conducted the negotiation. Wemmick pervaded it
throughout, but never appeared in it.
The whole business was so cleverly managed, that Herbert had not
the least suspicion of my hand being in it. I never shall forget
the radiant face with which he came home one afternoon, and told
me, as a mighty piece of news, of his having fallen in with one
Clarriker the young merchant's name, and of Clarriker's having
shown an extraordinary inclination towards him, and of his belief
that the opening had come at last. Day by day as his hopes grew
stronger and his face brighter, he must have thought me a more and
more affectionate friend, for I had the greatest difficulty in
restraining my tears of triumph when I saw him so happy. At length,
the thing being done, and he having that day entered Clarriker's
House, and he having talked to me for a whole evening in a flush of
pleasure and success, I did really cry in good earnest when I went
to bed, to think that my expectations had done some good to
somebody.
A great event in my life, the turning point of my life, now opens
on my view. But, before I proceed to narrate it, and before I pass
on to all the changes it involved, I must give one chapter to
Estella. It is not much to give to the theme that so long filled
my heart.
Chapter 
If that staid old house near the Green at Richmond should ever come
to be haunted when I am dead, it will be haunted, surely, by my
ghost. O the many, many nights and days through which the unquiet
spirit within me haunted that house when Estella lived there Let
my body be where it would, my spirit was always wandering,
wandering, wandering, about that house.
The lady with whom Estella was placed, Mrs. Brandley by name, was a
widow, with one daughter several years older than Estella. The
mother looked young, and the daughter looked old the mother's
complexion was pink, and the daughter's was yellow the mother set
up for frivolity, and the daughter for theology. They were in what
is called a good position, and visited, and were visited by,
numbers of people. Little, if any, community of feeling subsisted
between them and Estella, but the understanding was established
that they were necessary to her, and that she was necessary to
them. Mrs. Brandley had been a friend of Miss Havisham's before the
time of her seclusion.
In Mrs. Brandley's house and out of Mrs. Brandley's house, I suffered
every kind and degree of torture that Estella could cause me. The
nature of my relations with her, which placed me on terms of
familiarity without placing me on terms of favour, conduced to my
distraction. She made use of me to tease other admirers, and she
turned the very familiarity between herself and me, to the account
of putting a constant slight on my devotion to her. If I had been
her secretary, steward, halfbrother, poor relation  if I had been
a younger brother of her appointed husband  I could not have
seemed to myself, further from my hopes when I was nearest to her.
The privilege of calling her by her name and hearing her call me by
mine, became under the circumstances an aggravation of my trials
and while I think it likely that it almost maddened her other
lovers, I know too certainly that it almost maddened me.
She had admirers without end. No doubt my jealousy made an admirer
of every one who went near her but there were more than enough of
them without that.
I saw her often at Richmond, I heard of her often in town, and I
used often to take her and the Brandleys on the water there were
picnics, fete days, plays, operas, concerts, parties, all sorts of
pleasures, through which I pursued her  and they were all miseries
to me. I never had one hour's happiness in her society, and yet my
mind all round the fourandtwenty hours was harping on the
happiness of having her with me unto death.
Throughout this part of our intercourse  and it lasted, as will
presently be seen, for what I then thought a long time  she
habitually reverted to that tone which expressed that our
association was forced upon us. There were other times when she
would come to a sudden check in this tone and in all her many
tones, and would seem to pity me.
"Pip, Pip," she said one evening, coming to such a check, when we
sat apart at a darkening window of the house in Richmond "will you
never take warning?"
"Of what?"
"Of me."
"Warning not to be attracted by you, do you mean, Estella?"
"Do I mean If you don't know what I mean, you are blind."
I should have replied that Love was commonly reputed blind, but for
the reason that I always was restrained  and this was not the
least of my miseries  by a feeling that it was ungenerous to press
myself upon her, when she knew that she could not choose but obey
Miss Havisham. My dread always was, that this knowledge on her part
laid me under a heavy disadvantage with her pride, and made me the
subject of a rebellious struggle in her bosom.
"At any rate," said I, "I have no warning given me just now, for
you wrote to me to come to you, this time."
"That's true," said Estella, with a cold careless smile that always
chilled me.
After looking at the twilight without, for a little while, she went
on to say
"The time has come round when Miss Havisham wishes to have me for a
day at Satis. You are to take me there, and bring me back, if you
will. She would rather I did not travel alone, and objects to
receiving my maid, for she has a sensitive horror of being talked
of by such people. Can you take me?"
"Can I take you, Estella"
"You can then? The day after tomorrow, if you please. You are to
pay all charges out of my purse, You hear the condition of your
going?"
"And must obey," said I.
This was all the preparation I received for that visit, or for
others like it Miss Havisham never wrote to me, nor had I ever so
much as seen her handwriting. We went down on the next day but one,
and we found her in the room where I had first beheld her, and it
is needless to add that there was no change in Satis House.
She was even more dreadfully fond of Estella than she had been when
I last saw them together I repeat the word advisedly, for there
was something positively dreadful in the energy of her looks and
embraces. She hung upon Estella's beauty, hung upon her words, hung
upon her gestures, and sat mumbling her own trembling fingers while
she looked at her, as though she were devouring the beautiful
creature she had reared.
From Estella she looked at me, with a searching glance that seemed
to pry into my heart and probe its wounds. "How does she use you,
Pip how does she use you?" she asked me again, with her witchlike
eagerness, even in Estella's hearing. But, when we sat by her
flickering fire at night, she was most weird for then, keeping
Estella's hand drawn through her arm and clutched in her own hand,
she extorted from her, by dint of referring back to what Estella
had told her in her regular letters, the names and conditions of
the men whom she had fascinated and as Miss Havisham dwelt upon
this roll, with the intensity of a mind mortally hurt and diseased,
she sat with her other hand on her crutch stick, and her chin on
that, and her wan bright eyes glaring at me, a very spectre.
I saw in this, wretched though it made me, and bitter the sense of
dependence and even of degradation that it awakened  I saw in
this, that Estella was set to wreak Miss Havisham's revenge on men,
and that she was not to be given to me until she had gratified it
for a term. I saw in this, a reason for her being beforehand
assigned to me. Sending her out to attract and torment and do
mischief, Miss Havisham sent her with the malicious assurance that
she was beyond the reach of all admirers, and that all who staked
upon that cast were secured to lose. I saw in this, that I, too,
was tormented by a perversion of ingenuity, even while the prize
was reserved for me. I saw in this, the reason for my being staved
off so long, and the reason for my late guardian's declining to
commit himself to the formal knowledge of such a scheme. In a word,
I saw in this, Miss Havisham as I had her then and there before my
eyes, and always had had her before my eyes and I saw in this, the
distinct shadow of the darkened and unhealthy house in which her
life was hidden from the sun.
The candles that lighted that room of hers were placed in sconces
on the wall. They were high from the ground, and they burnt with
the steady dulness of artificial light in air that is seldom
renewed. As I looked round at them, and at the pale gloom they
made, and at the stopped clock, and at the withered articles of
bridal dress upon the table and the ground, and at her own awful
figure with its ghostly reflection thrown large by the fire upon
the ceiling and the wall, I saw in everything the construction that
my mind had come to, repeated and thrown back to me. My thoughts
passed into the great room across the landing where the table was
spread, and I saw it written, as it were, in the falls of the
cobwebs from the centrepiece, in the crawlings of the spiders on
the cloth, in the tracks of the mice as they betook their little
quickened hearts behind the panels, and in the gropings and
pausings of the beetles on the floor.
It happened on the occasion of this visit that some sharp words
arose between Estella and Miss Havisham. It was the first time I
had ever seen them opposed.
We were seated by the fire, as just now described, and Miss
Havisham still had Estella's arm drawn through her own, and still
clutched Estella's hand in hers, when Estella gradually began to
detach herself. She had shown a proud impatience more than once
before, and had rather endured that fierce affection than accepted
or returned it.
"What" said Miss Havisham, flashing her eyes upon her, "are you
tired of me?"
"Only a little tired of myself," replied Estella, disengaging her
arm, and moving to the great chimneypiece, where she stood looking
down at the fire.
"Speak the truth, you ingrate" cried Miss Havisham, passionately
striking her stick upon the floor "you are tired of me."
Estella looked at her with perfect composure, and again looked down
at the fire. Her graceful figure and her beautiful face expressed a
selfpossessed indifference to the wild heat of the other, that was
almost cruel.
"You stock and stone" exclaimed Miss Havisham. "You cold, cold
heart"
"What?" said Estella, preserving her attitude of indifference as
she leaned against the great chimneypiece and only moving her
eyes "do you reproach me for being cold? You?"
"Are you not?" was the fierce retort.
"You should know," said Estella. "I am what you have made me. Take
all the praise, take all the blame take all the success, take all
the failure in short, take me."
"O, look at her, look at her" cried Miss Havisham, bitterly "Look
at her, so hard and thankless, on the hearth where she was reared
Where I took her into this wretched breast when it was first
bleeding from its stabs, and where I have lavished years of
tenderness upon her"
"At least I was no party to the compact," said Estella, "for if I
could walk and speak, when it was made, it was as much as I could
do. But what would you have? You have been very good to me, and I
owe everything to you. What would you have?"
"Love," replied the other.
"You have it."
"I have not," said Miss Havisham.
"Mother by adoption," retorted Estella, never departing from the
easy grace of her attitude, never raising her voice as the other
did, never yielding either to anger or tenderness, "Mother by
adoption, I have said that I owe everything to you. All I possess
is freely yours. All that you have given me, is at your command to
have again. Beyond that, I have nothing. And if you ask me to give
you what you never gave me, my gratitude and duty cannot do
impossibilities."
"Did I never give her love" cried Miss Havisham, turning wildly to
me. "Did I never give her a burning love, inseparable from jealousy
at all times, and from sharp pain, while she speaks thus to me Let
her call me mad, let her call me mad"
"Why should I call you mad," returned Estella, "I, of all people?
Does any one live, who knows what set purposes you have, half as
well as I do? Does any one live, who knows what a steady memory you
have, half as well as I do? I who have sat on this same hearth on
the little stool that is even now beside you there, learning your
lessons and looking up into your face, when your face was strange
and frightened me"
"Soon forgotten" moaned Miss Havisham. "Times soon forgotten"
"No, not forgotten," retorted Estella. "Not forgotten, but
treasured up in my memory. When have you found me false to your
teaching? When have you found me unmindful of your lessons? When
have you found me giving admission here," she touched her bosom
with her hand, "to anything that you excluded? Be just to me."
"So proud, so proud" moaned Miss Havisham, pushing away her grey
hair with both her hands.
"Who taught me to be proud?" returned Estella. "Who praised me when
I learnt my lesson?"
"So hard, so hard" moaned Miss Havisham, with her former action.
"Who taught me to be hard?" returned Estella. "Who praised me when
I learnt my lesson?"
"But to be proud and hard to me" Miss Havisham quite shrieked, as
she stretched out her arms. "Estella, Estella, Estella, to be proud
and hard to me"
Estella looked at her for a moment with a kind of calm wonder, but
was not otherwise disturbed when the moment was past, she looked
down at the fire again.
"I cannot think," said Estella, raising her eyes after a silence
"why you should be so unreasonable when I come to see you after a
separation. I have never forgotten your wrongs and their causes. I
have never been unfaithful to you or your schooling. I have never
shown any weakness that I can charge myself with."
"Would it be weakness to return my love?" exclaimed Miss Havisham.
"But yes, yes, she would call it so"
"I begin to think," said Estella, in a musing way, after another
moment of calm wonder, "that I almost understand how this comes
about. If you had brought up your adopted daughter wholly in the
dark confinement of these rooms, and had never let her know that
there was such a thing as the daylight by which she had never once
seen your face  if you had done that, and then, for a purpose had
wanted her to understand the daylight and know all about it, you
would have been disappointed and angry?"
Miss Havisham, with her head in her hands, sat making a low
moaning, and swaying herself on her chair, but gave no answer.
"Or," said Estella, "  which is a nearer case  if you had taught
her, from the dawn of her intelligence, with your utmost energy and
might, that there was such a thing as daylight, but that it was
made to be her enemy and destroyer, and she must always turn
against it, for it had blighted you and would else blight her  if
you had done this, and then, for a purpose, had wanted her to take
naturally to the daylight and she could not do it, you would have
been disappointed and angry?"
Miss Havisham sat listening or it seemed so, for I could not see
her face, but still made no answer.
"So," said Estella, "I must be taken as I have been made. The
success is not mine, the failure is not mine, but the two together
make me."
Miss Havisham had settled down, I hardly knew how, upon the floor,
among the faded bridal relics with which it was strewn. I took
advantage of the moment  I had sought one from the first  to
leave the room, after beseeching Estella's attention to her, with a
movement of my hand. When I left, Estella was yet standing by the
great chimneypiece, just as she had stood throughout. Miss
Havisham's grey hair was all adrift upon the ground, among the
other bridal wrecks, and was a miserable sight to see.
It was with a depressed heart that I walked in the starlight for an
hour and more, about the courtyard, and about the brewery, and
about the ruined garden. When I at last took courage to return to
the room, I found Estella sitting at Miss Havisham's knee, taking
up some stitches in one of those old articles of dress that were
dropping to pieces, and of which I have often been reminded since
by the faded tatters of old banners that I have seen hanging up in
cathedrals. Afterwards, Estella and I played at cards, as of yore 
only we were skilful now, and played French games  and so the
evening wore away, and I went to bed.
I lay in that separate building across the courtyard. It was the
first time I had ever lain down to rest in Satis House, and sleep
refused to come near me. A thousand Miss Havishams haunted me. She
was on this side of my pillow, on that, at the head of the bed, at
the foot, behind the halfopened door of the dressingroom, in the
dressingroom, in the room overhead, in the room beneath 
everywhere. At last, when the night was slow to creep on towards
two o'clock, I felt that I absolutely could no longer bear the
place as a place to lie down in, and that I must get up. I
therefore got up and put on my clothes, and went out across the
yard into the long stone passage, designing to gain the outer
courtyard and walk there for the relief of my mind. But, I was no
sooner in the passage than I extinguished my candle for, I saw
Miss Havisham going along it in a ghostly manner, making a low cry.
I followed her at a distance, and saw her go up the staircase. She
carried a bare candle in her hand, which she had probably taken
from one of the sconces in her own room, and was a most unearthly
object by its light. Standing at the bottom of the staircase, I
felt the mildewed air of the feastchamber, without seeing her open
the door, and I heard her walking there, and so across into her own
room, and so across again into that, never ceasing the low cry.
After a time, I tried in the dark both to get out, and to go back,
but I could do neither until some streaks of day strayed in and
showed me where to lay my hands. During the whole interval,
whenever I went to the bottom of the staircase, I heard her
footstep, saw her light pass above, and heard her ceaseless low
cry.
Before we left next day, there was no revival of the difference
between her and Estella, nor was it ever revived on any similar
occasion and there were four similar occasions, to the best of my
remembrance. Nor, did Miss Havisham's manner towards Estella in
anywise change, except that I believed it to have something like
fear infused among its former characteristics.
It is impossible to turn this leaf of my life, without putting
Bentley Drummle's name upon it or I would, very gladly.
On a certain occasion when the Finches were assembled in force, and
when good feeling was being promoted in the usual manner by
nobody's agreeing with anybody else, the presiding Finch called the
Grove to order, forasmuch as Mr. Drummle had not yet toasted a lady
which, according to the solemn constitution of the society, it was
the brute's turn to do that day. I thought I saw him leer in an
ugly way at me while the decanters were going round, but as there
was no love lost between us, that might easily be. What was my
indignant surprise when he called upon the company to pledge him to
"Estella"
"Estella who?" said I.
"Never you mind," retorted Drummle.
"Estella of where?" said I. "You are bound to say of where." Which
he was, as a Finch.
"Of Richmond, gentlemen," said Drummle, putting me out of the
question, "and a peerless beauty."
Much he knew about peerless beauties, a mean miserable idiot I
whispered Herbert.
"I know that lady," said Herbert, across the table, when the toast
had been honoured.
"Do you?" said Drummle.
"And so do I," I added, with a scarlet face.
"Do you?" said Drummle. "Oh, Lord"
This was the only retort  except glass or crockery  that the
heavy creature was capable of making but, I became as highly
incensed by it as if it had been barbed with wit, and I immediately
rose in my place and said that I could not but regard it as being
like the honourable Finch's impudence to come down to that Grove 
we always talked about coming down to that Grove, as a neat
Parliamentary turn of expression  down to that Grove, proposing a
lady of whom he knew nothing. Mr. Drummle upon this, starting up,
demanded what I meant by that? Whereupon, I made him the extreme
reply that I believed he knew where I was to be found.
Whether it was possible in a Christian country to get on without
blood, after this, was a question on which the Finches were
divided. The debate upon it grew so lively, indeed, that at least
six more honourable members told six more, during the discussion,
that they believed they knew where they were to be found. However,
it was decided at last the Grove being a Court of Honour that if
Mr. Drummle would bring never so slight a certificate from the lady,
importing that he had the honour of her acquaintance, Mr. Pip must
express his regret, as a gentleman and a Finch, for "having been
betrayed into a warmth which." Next day was appointed for the
production lest our honour should take cold from delay, and next
day Drummle appeared with a polite little avowal in Estella's hand,
that she had had the honour of dancing with him several times. This
left me no course but to regret that I had been "betrayed into a
warmth which," and on the whole to repudiate, as untenable, the
idea that I was to be found anywhere. Drummle and I then sat
snorting at one another for an hour, while the Grove engaged in
indiscriminate contradiction, and finally the promotion of good
feeling was declared to have gone ahead at an amazing rate.
I tell this lightly, but it was no light thing to me. For, I cannot
adequately express what pain it gave me to think that Estella
should show any favour to a contemptible, clumsy, sulky booby, so
very far below the average. To the present moment, I believe it to
have been referable to some pure fire of generosity and
disinterestedness in my love for her, that I could not endure the
thought of her stooping to that hound. No doubt I should have been
miserable whomsoever she had favoured but a worthier object would
have caused me a different kind and degree of distress.
It was easy for me to find out, and I did soon find out, that
Drummle had begun to follow her closely, and that she allowed him
to do it. A little while, and he was always in pursuit of her, and
he and I crossed one another every day. He held on, in a dull
persistent way, and Estella held him on now with encouragement,
now with discouragement, now almost flattering him, now openly
despising him, now knowing him very well, now scarcely remembering
who he was.
The Spider, as Mr. Jaggers had called him, was used to lying in
wait, however, and had the patience of his tribe. Added to that, he
had a blockhead confidence in his money and in his family
greatness, which sometimes did him good service  almost taking the
place of concentration and determined purpose. So, the Spider,
doggedly watching Estella, outwatched many brighter insects, and
would often uncoil himself and drop at the right nick of time.
At a certain Assembly Ball at Richmond there used to be Assembly
Balls at most places then, where Estella had outshone all other
beauties, this blundering Drummle so hung about her, and with so
much toleration on her part, that I resolved to speak to her
concerning him. I took the next opportunity which was when she was
waiting for Mrs. Brandley to take her home, and was sitting apart
among some flowers, ready to go. I was with her, for I almost
always accompanied them to and from such places.
"Are you tired, Estella?"
"Rather, Pip."
"You should be."
"Say rather, I should not be for I have my letter to Satis House
to write, before I go to sleep."
"Recounting tonight's triumph?" said I. "Surely a very poor one,
Estella."
"What do you mean? I didn't know there had been any."
"Estella," said I, "do look at that fellow in the corner yonder,
who is looking over here at us."
"Why should I look at him?" returned Estella, with her eyes on me
instead. "What is there in that fellow in the corner yonder  to
use your words  that I need look at?"
"Indeed, that is the very question I want to ask you," said I. "For
he has been hovering about you all night."
"Moths, and all sorts of ugly creatures," replied Estella, with a
glance towards him, "hover about a lighted candle. Can the candle
help it?"
"No," I returned "but cannot the Estella help it?"
"Well" said she, laughing, after a moment, "perhaps. Yes. Anything
you like."
"But, Estella, do hear me speak. It makes me wretched that you
should encourage a man so generally despised as Drummle. You know
he is despised."
"Well?" said she.
"You know he is as ungainly within, as without. A deficient,
illtempered, lowering, stupid fellow."
"Well?" said she.
"You know he has nothing to recommend him but money, and a
ridiculous roll of addleheaded predecessors now, don't you?"
"Well?" said she again and each time she said it, she opened her
lovely eyes the wider.
To overcome the difficulty of getting past that monosyllable, I
took it from her, and said, repeating it with emphasis, "Well Then,
that is why it makes me wretched."
Now, if I could have believed that she favoured Drummle with any
idea of making me  me  wretched, I should have been in better
heart about it but in that habitual way of hers, she put me so
entirely out of the question, that I could believe nothing of the
kind.
"Pip," said Estella, casting her glance over the room, "don't be
foolish about its effect on you. It may have its effect on others,
and may be meant to have. It's not worth discussing."
"Yes it is," said I, "because I cannot bear that people should say,
'she throws away her graces and attractions on a mere boor, the
lowest in the crowd.'"
"I can bear it," said Estella.
"Oh don't be so proud, Estella, and so inflexible."
"Calls me proud and inflexible in this breath" said Estella,
opening her hands. "And in his last breath reproached me for
stooping to a boor"
"There is no doubt you do," said I, something hurriedly, "for I
have seen you give him looks and smiles this very night, such as
you never give to  me."
"Do you want me then," said Estella, turning suddenly with a fixed
and serious, if not angry, look, "to deceive and entrap you?"
"Do you deceive and entrap him, Estella?"
"Yes, and many others  all of them but you. Here is Mrs. Brandley.
I'll say no more."
And now that I have given the one chapter to the theme that so
filled my heart, and so often made it ache and ache again, I pass
on, unhindered, to the event that had impended over me longer yet
the event that had begun to be prepared for, before I knew that the
world held Estella, and in the days when her baby intelligence was
receiving its first distortions from Miss Havisham's wasting hands.
In the Eastern story, the heavy slab that was to fall on the bed of
state in the flush of conquest was slowly wrought out of the
quarry, the tunnel for the rope to hold it in its place was slowly
carried through the leagues of rock, the slab was slowly raised and
fitted in the roof, the rope was rove to it and slowly taken
through the miles of hollow to the great iron ring. All being made
ready with much labour, and the hour come, the sultan was aroused
in the dead of the night, and the sharpened axe that was to sever
the rope from the great iron ring was put into his hand, and he
struck with it, and the rope parted and rushed away, and the
ceiling fell. So, in my case all the work, near and afar, that
tended to the end, had been accomplished and in an instant the
blow was struck, and the roof of my stronghold dropped upon me.
Chapter 
I was threeandtwenty years of age. Not another word had I heard
to enlighten me on the subject of my expectations, and my
twentythird birthday was a week gone. We had left Barnard's Inn
more than a year, and lived in the Temple. Our chambers were in
Gardencourt, down by the river.
Mr. Pocket and I had for some time parted company as to our original
relations, though we continued on the best terms. Notwithstanding my
inability to settle to anything  which I hope arose out of the
restless and incomplete tenure on which I held my means  I had a
taste for reading, and read regularly so many hours a day. That
matter of Herbert's was still progressing, and everything with me
was as I have brought it down to the close of the last preceding
chapter.
Business had taken Herbert on a journey to Marseilles. I was alone,
and had a dull sense of being alone. Dispirited and anxious, long
hoping that tomorrow or next week would clear my way, and long
disappointed, I sadly missed the cheerful face and ready response
of my friend.
It was wretched weather stormy and wet, stormy and wet and mud,
mud, mud, deep in all the streets. Day after day, a vast heavy veil
had been driving over London from the East, and it drove still, as
if in the East there were an Eternity of cloud and wind. So furious
had been the gusts, that high buildings in town had had the lead
stripped off their roofs and in the country, trees had been torn
up, and sails of windmills carried away and gloomy accounts had
come in from the coast, of shipwreck and death. Violent blasts of
rain had accompanied these rages of wind, and the day just closed
as I sat down to read had been the worst of all.
Alterations have been made in that part of the Temple since that
time, and it has not now so lonely a character as it had then, nor
is it so exposed to the river. We lived at the top of the last
house, and the wind rushing up the river shook the house that
night, like discharges of cannon, or breakings of a sea. When the
rain came with it and dashed against the windows, I thought,
raising my eyes to them as they rocked, that I might have fancied
myself in a stormbeaten lighthouse. Occasionally, the smoke came
rolling down the chimney as though it could not bear to go out into
such a night and when I set the doors open and looked down the
staircase, the staircase lamps were blown out and when I shaded my
face with my hands and looked through the black windows opening
them ever so little, was out of the question in the teeth of such
wind and rain I saw that the lamps in the court were blown out,
and that the lamps on the bridges and the shore were shuddering,
and that the coal fires in barges on the river were being carried
away before the wind like redhot splashes in the rain.
I read with my watch upon the table, purposing to close my book at
eleven o'clock. As I shut it, Saint Paul's, and all the many
churchclocks in the City  some leading, some accompanying, some
following  struck that hour. The sound was curiously flawed by the
wind and I was listening, and thinking how the wind assailed and
tore it, when I heard a footstep on the stair.
What nervous folly made me start, and awfully connect it with the
footstep of my dead sister, matters not. It was past in a moment,
and I listened again, and heard the footstep stumble in coming on.
Remembering then, that the staircaselights were blown out, I took
up my readinglamp and went out to the stairhead. Whoever was
below had stopped on seeing my lamp, for all was quiet.
"There is some one down there, is there not?" I called out, looking
down.
"Yes," said a voice from the darkness beneath.
"What floor do you want?"
"The top. Mr. Pip."
"That is my name.  There is nothing the matter?"
"Nothing the matter," returned the voice. And the man came on.
I stood with my lamp held out over the stairrail, and he came
slowly within its light. It was a shaded lamp, to shine upon a
book, and its circle of light was very contracted so that he was
in it for a mere instant, and then out of it. In the instant, I had
seen a face that was strange to me, looking up with an
incomprehensible air of being touched and pleased by the sight of
me.
Moving the lamp as the man moved, I made out that he was
substantially dressed, but roughly like a voyager by sea. That he
had long irongrey hair. That his age was about sixty. That he was
a muscular man, strong on his legs, and that he was browned and
hardened by exposure to weather. As he ascended the last stair or
two, and the light of my lamp included us both, I saw, with a
stupid kind of amazement, that he was holding out both his hands to
me.
"Pray what is your business?" I asked him.
"My business?" he repeated, pausing. "Ah Yes. I will explain my
business, by your leave."
"Do you wish to come in?"
"Yes," he replied "I wish to come in, Master."
I had asked him the question inhospitably enough, for I resented
the sort of bright and gratified recognition that still shone in
his face. I resented it, because it seemed to imply that he
expected me to respond to it. But, I took him into the room I had
just left, and, having set the lamp on the table, asked him as
civilly as I could, to explain himself.
He looked about him with the strangest air  an air of wondering
pleasure, as if he had some part in the things he admired  and he
pulled off a rough outer coat, and his hat. Then, I saw that his
head was furrowed and bald, and that the long irongrey hair grew
only on its sides. But, I saw nothing that in the least explained
him. On the contrary, I saw him next moment, once more holding out
both his hands to me.
"What do you mean?" said I, half suspecting him to be mad.
He stopped in his looking at me, and slowly rubbed his right hand
over his head. "It's disapinting to a man," he said, in a coarse
broken voice, "arter having looked for'ard so distant, and come so
fur but you're not to blame for that  neither on us is to blame
for that. I'll speak in half a minute. Give me half a minute,
please."
He sat down on a chair that stood before the fire, and covered his
forehead with his large brown veinous hands. I looked at him
attentively then, and recoiled a little from him but I did not
know him.
"There's no one nigh," said he, looking over his shoulder "is
there?"
"Why do you, a stranger coming into my rooms at this time of the
night, ask that question?" said I.
"You're a game one," he returned, shaking his head at me with a
deliberate affection, at once most unintelligible and most
exasperating "I'm glad you've grow'd up, a game one But don't
catch hold of me. You'd be sorry arterwards to have done it."
I relinquished the intention he had detected, for I knew him Even
yet, I could not recall a single feature, but I knew him If the
wind and the rain had driven away the intervening years, had
scattered all the intervening objects, had swept us to the
churchyard where we first stood face to face on such different
levels, I could not have known my convict more distinctly than I
knew him now as he sat in the chair before the fire. No need to
take a file from his pocket and show it to me no need to take the
handkerchief from his neck and twist it round his head no need to
hug himself with both his arms, and take a shivering turn across
the room, looking back at me for recognition. I knew him before he
gave me one of those aids, though, a moment before, I had not been
conscious of remotely suspecting his identity.
He came back to where I stood, and again held out both his hands.
Not knowing what to do  for, in my astonishment I had lost my
selfpossession  I reluctantly gave him my hands. He grasped them
heartily, raised them to his lips, kissed them, and still held
them.
"You acted noble, my boy," said he. "Noble, Pip And I have never
forgot it"
At a change in his manner as if he were even going to embrace me, I
laid a hand upon his breast and put him away.
"Stay" said I. "Keep off If you are grateful to me for what I did
when I was a little child, I hope you have shown your gratitude by
mending your way of life. If you have come here to thank me, it was
not necessary. Still, however you have found me out, there must be
something good in the feeling that has brought you here, and I will
not repulse you but surely you must understand that  I"
My attention was so attracted by the singularity of his fixed look
at me, that the words died away on my tongue.
"You was a saying," he observed, when we had confronted one another
in silence, "that surely I must understand. What, surely must I
understand?"
"That I cannot wish to renew that chance intercourse with you of
long ago, under these different circumstances. I am glad to believe
you have repented and recovered yourself. I am glad to tell you so.
I am glad that, thinking I deserve to be thanked, you have come to
thank me. But our ways are different ways, none the less. You are
wet, and you look weary. Will you drink something before you go?"
He had replaced his neckerchief loosely, and had stood, keenly
observant of me, biting a long end of it. "I think," he answered,
still with the end at his mouth and still observant of me, "that I
will drink I thank you afore I go."
There was a tray ready on a sidetable. I brought it to the table
near the fire, and asked him what he would have? He touched one of
the bottles without looking at it or speaking, and I made him some
hot rumandwater. I tried to keep my hand steady while I did so,
but his look at me as he leaned back in his chair with the long
draggled end of his neckerchief between his teeth  evidently
forgotten  made my hand very difficult to master. When at last I
put the glass to him, I saw with amazement that his eyes were full
of tears.
Up to this time I had remained standing, not to disguise that I
wished him gone. But I was softened by the softened aspect of the
man, and felt a touch of reproach. "I hope," said I, hurriedly
putting something into a glass for myself, and drawing a chair to
the table, "that you will not think I spoke harshly to you just
now. I had no intention of doing it, and I am sorry for it if I
did. I wish you well, and happy"
As I put my glass to my lips, he glanced with surprise at the end
of his neckerchief, dropping from his mouth when he opened it, and
stretched out his hand. I gave him mine, and then he drank, and
drew his sleeve across his eyes and forehead.
"How are you living?" I asked him.
"I've been a sheepfarmer, stockbreeder, other trades besides,
away in the new world," said he "many a thousand mile of stormy
water off from this."
"I hope you have done well?"
"I've done wonderfully well. There's others went out alonger me as
has done well too, but no man has done nigh as well as me. I'm
famous for it."
"I am glad to hear it."
"I hope to hear you say so, my dear boy."
Without stopping to try to understand those words or the tone in
which they were spoken, I turned off to a point that had just come
into my mind.
"Have you ever seen a messenger you once sent to me," I inquired,
"since he undertook that trust?"
"Never set eyes upon him. I warn't likely to it."
"He came faithfully, and he brought me the two onepound notes. I
was a poor boy then, as you know, and to a poor boy they were a
little fortune. But, like you, I have done well since, and you must
let me pay them back. You can put them to some other poor boy's
use." I took out my purse.
He watched me as I laid my purse upon the table and opened it, and
he watched me as I separated two onepound notes from its contents.
They were clean and new, and I spread them out and handed them over
to him. Still watching me, he laid them one upon the other, folded
them longwise, gave them a twist, set fire to them at the lamp,
and dropped the ashes into the tray.
"May I make so bold," he said then, with a smile that was like a
frown, and with a frown that was like a smile, "as ask you how you
have done well, since you and me was out on them lone shivering
marshes?"
"How?"
"Ah"
He emptied his glass, got up, and stood at the side of the fire,
with his heavy brown hand on the mantelshelf. He put a foot up to
the bars, to dry and warm it, and the wet boot began to steam but,
he neither looked at it, nor at the fire, but steadily looked at
me. It was only now that I began to tremble.
When my lips had parted, and had shaped some words that were
without sound, I forced myself to tell him though I could not do
it distinctly, that I had been chosen to succeed to some property.
"Might a mere warmint ask what property?" said he.
I faltered, "I don't know."
"Might a mere warmint ask whose property?" said he.
I faltered again, "I don't know."
"Could I make a guess, I wonder," said the Convict, "at your income
since you come of age As to the first figure now. Five?"
With my heart beating like a heavy hammer of disordered action, I
rose out of my chair, and stood with my hand upon the back of it,
looking wildly at him.
"Concerning a guardian," he went on. "There ought to have been some
guardian, or suchlike, whiles you was a minor. Some lawyer, maybe.
As to the first letter of that lawyer's name now. Would it be J?"
All the truth of my position came flashing on me and its
disappointments, dangers, disgraces, consequences of all kinds,
rushed in in such a multitude that I was borne down by them and had
to struggle for every breath I drew.
"Put it," he resumed, "as the employer of that lawyer whose name
begun with a J, and might be Jaggers  put it as he had come over
sea to Portsmouth, and had landed there, and had wanted to come on
to you. 'However, you have found me out,' you says just now. Well
However, did I find you out? Why, I wrote from Portsmouth to a
person in London, for particulars of your address. That person's
name? Why, Wemmick."
I could not have spoken one word, though it had been to save my
life. I stood, with a hand on the chairback and a hand on my
breast, where I seemed to be suffocating  I stood so, looking
wildly at him, until I grasped at the chair, when the room began to
surge and turn. He caught me, drew me to the sofa, put me up
against the cushions, and bent on one knee before me bringing the
face that I now well remembered, and that I shuddered at, very near
to mine.
"Yes, Pip, dear boy, I've made a gentleman on you It's me wot has
done it I swore that time, sure as ever I earned a guinea, that
guinea should go to you. I swore arterwards, sure as ever I
spec'lated and got rich, you should get rich. I lived rough, that
you should live smooth I worked hard, that you should be above
work. What odds, dear boy? Do I tell it, fur you to feel a
obligation? Not a bit. I tell it, fur you to know as that there
hunted dunghill dog wot you kep life in, got his head so high that
he could make a gentleman  and, Pip, you're him"
The abhorrence in which I held the man, the dread I had of him, the
repugnance with which I shrank from him, could not have been
exceeded if he had been some terrible beast.
"Look'ee here, Pip. I'm your second father. You're my son  more to
me nor any son. I've put away money, only for you to spend. When I
was a hiredout shepherd in a solitary hut, not seeing no faces but
faces of sheep till I half forgot wot men's and women's faces wos
like, I see yourn. I drops my knife many a time in that hut when I
was aeating my dinner or my supper, and I says, 'Here's the boy
again, alooking at me whiles I eats and drinks' I see you there a
many times, as plain as ever I see you on them misty marshes. 'Lord
strike me dead' I says each time  and I goes out in the air to
say it under the open heavens  'but wot, if I gets liberty and
money, I'll make that boy a gentleman' And I done it. Why, look at
you, dear boy Look at these here lodgings o'yourn, fit for a lord
A lord? Ah You shall show money with lords for wagers, and beat
'em"
In his heat and triumph, and in his knowledge that I had been
nearly fainting, he did not remark on my reception of all this. It
was the one grain of relief I had.
"Look'ee here" he went on, taking my watch out of my pocket, and
turning towards him a ring on my finger, while I recoiled from his
touch as if he had been a snake, "a gold 'un and a beauty that's a
gentleman's, I hope A diamond all set round with rubies that's a
gentleman's, I hope Look at your linen fine and beautiful Look
at your clothes better ain't to be got And your books too,"
turning his eyes round the room, "mounting up, on their shelves, by
hundreds And you read 'em don't you? I see you'd been a reading
of 'em when I come in. Ha, ha, ha You shall read 'em to me, dear
boy And if they're in foreign languages wot I don't understand, I
shall be just as proud as if I did."
Again he took both my hands and put them to his lips, while my
blood ran cold within me.
"Don't you mind talking, Pip," said he, after again drawing his
sleeve over his eyes and forehead, as the click came in his throat
which I well remembered  and he was all the more horrible to me
that he was so much in earnest "you can't do better nor keep
quiet, dear boy. You ain't looked slowly forward to this as I have
you wosn't prepared for this, as I wos. But didn't you never think
it might be me?"
"O no, no, no," I returned, "Never, never"
"Well, you see it wos me, and singlehanded. Never a soul in it but
my own self and Mr. Jaggers."
"Was there no one else?" I asked.
"No," said he, with a glance of surprise "who else should there
be? And, dear boy, how good looking you have growed There's bright
eyes somewheres  eh? Isn't there bright eyes somewheres, wot you
love the thoughts on?"
O Estella, Estella
"They shall be yourn, dear boy, if money can buy 'em. Not that a
gentleman like you, so well set up as you, can't win 'em off of his
own game but money shall back you Let me finish wot I was a
telling you, dear boy. From that there hut and that there
hiringout, I got money left me by my master which died, and had
been the same as me, and got my liberty and went for myself. In
every single thing I went for, I went for you. 'Lord strike a
blight upon it,' I says, wotever it was I went for, 'if it ain't
for him' It all prospered wonderful. As I giv' you to understand
just now, I'm famous for it. It was the money left me, and the
gains of the first few year wot I sent home to Mr. Jaggers  all for
you  when he first come arter you, agreeable to my letter."
O, that he had never come That he had left me at the forge  far
from contented, yet, by comparison happy
"And then, dear boy, it was a recompense to me, look'ee here, to
know in secret that I was making a gentleman. The blood horses of
them colonists might fling up the dust over me as I was walking
what do I say? I says to myself, 'I'm making a better gentleman nor
ever you'll be' When one of 'em says to another, 'He was a
convict, a few year ago, and is a ignorant common fellow now, for
all he's lucky,' what do I say? I says to myself, 'If I ain't a
gentleman, nor yet ain't got no learning, I'm the owner of such.
All on you owns stock and land which on you owns a broughtup
London gentleman?' This way I kep myself agoing. And this way I
held steady afore my mind that I would for certain come one day and
see my boy, and make myself known to him, on his own ground."
He laid his hand on my shoulder. I shuddered at the thought that
for anything I knew, his hand might be stained with blood.
"It warn't easy, Pip, for me to leave them parts, nor yet it warn't
safe. But I held to it, and the harder it was, the stronger I held,
for I was determined, and my mind firm made up. At last I done it.
Dear boy, I done it"
I tried to collect my thoughts, but I was stunned. Throughout, I
had seemed to myself to attend more to the wind and the rain than
to him even now, I could not separate his voice from those voices,
though those were loud and his was silent.
"Where will you put me?" he asked, presently. "I must be put
somewheres, dear boy."
"To sleep?" said I.
"Yes. And to sleep long and sound," he answered "for I've been
seatossed and seawashed, months and months."
"My friend and companion," said I, rising from the sofa, "is
absent you must have his room."
"He won't come back tomorrow will he?"
"No," said I, answering almost mechanically, in spite of my utmost
efforts "not tomorrow."
"Because, look'ee here, dear boy," he said, dropping his voice, and
laying a long finger on my breast in an impressive manner, "caution
is necessary."
"How do you mean? Caution?"
"By G  , it's Death"
"What's death?"
"I was sent for life. It's death to come back. There's been
overmuch coming back of late years, and I should of a certainty be
hanged if took."
Nothing was needed but this the wretched man, after loading
wretched me with his gold and silver chains for years, had risked
his life to come to me, and I held it there in my keeping If I had
loved him instead of abhorring him if I had been attracted to him
by the strongest admiration and affection, instead of shrinking
from him with the strongest repugnance it could have been no
worse. On the contrary, it would have been better, for his
preservation would then have naturally and tenderly addressed my
heart.
My first care was to close the shutters, so that no light might be
seen from without, and then to close and make fast the doors. While
I did so, he stood at the table drinking rum and eating biscuit
and when I saw him thus engaged, I saw my convict on the marshes at
his meal again. It almost seemed to me as if he must stoop down
presently, to file at his leg.
When I had gone into Herbert's room, and had shut off any other
communication between it and the staircase than through the room in
which our conversation had been held, I asked him if he would go to
bed? He said yes, but asked me for some of my "gentleman's linen"
to put on in the morning. I brought it out, and laid it ready for
him, and my blood again ran cold when he again took me by both
hands to give me good night.
I got away from him, without knowing how I did it, and mended the
fire in the room where we had been together, and sat down by it,
afraid to go to bed. For an hour or more, I remained too stunned to
think and it was not until I began to think, that I began fully to
know how wrecked I was, and how the ship in which I had sailed was
gone to pieces.
Miss Havisham's intentions towards me, all a mere dream Estella
not designed for me I only suffered in Satis House as a
convenience, a sting for the greedy relations, a model with a
mechanical heart to practise on when no other practice was at hand
those were the first smarts I had. But, sharpest and deepest pain
of all  it was for the convict, guilty of I knew not what crimes,
and liable to be taken out of those rooms where I sat thinking, and
hanged at the Old Bailey door, that I had deserted Joe.
I would not have gone back to Joe now, I would not have gone back
to Biddy now, for any consideration simply, I suppose, because my
sense of my own worthless conduct to them was greater than every
consideration. No wisdom on earth could have given me the comfort
that I should have derived from their simplicity and fidelity but
I could never, never, undo what I had done.
In every rage of wind and rush of rain, I heard pursuers. Twice, I
could have sworn there was a knocking and whispering at the outer
door. With these fears upon me, I began either to imagine or recall
that I had had mysterious warnings of this man's approach. That,
for weeks gone by, I had passed faces in the streets which I had
thought like his. That, these likenesses had grown more numerous,
as he, coming over the sea, had drawn nearer. That, his wicked
spirit had somehow sent these messengers to mine, and that now on
this stormy night he was as good as his word, and with me.
Crowding up with these reflections came the reflection that I had
seen him with my childish eyes to be a desperately violent man
that I had heard that other convict reiterate that he had tried to
murder him that I had seen him down in the ditch tearing and
fighting like a wild beast. Out of such remembrances I brought into
the light of the fire, a halfformed terror that it might not be
safe to be shut up there with him in the dead of the wild solitary
night. This dilated until it filled the room, and impelled me to
take a candle and go in and look at my dreadful burden.
He had rolled a handkerchief round his head, and his face was set
and lowering in his sleep. But he was asleep, and quietly too,
though he had a pistol lying on the pillow. Assured of this, I
softly removed the key to the outside of his door, and turned it on
him before I again sat down by the fire. Gradually I slipped from
the chair and lay on the floor. When I awoke, without having parted
in my sleep with the perception of my wretchedness, the clocks of
the Eastward churches were striking five, the candles were wasted
out, the fire was dead, and the wind and rain intensified the thick
black darkness.
THIS IS THE END OF THE SECOND STAGE OF PIP'S EXPECTATIONS.
Chapter 
It was fortunate for me that I had to take precautions to ensure
so far as I could the safety of my dreaded visitor for, this
thought pressing on me when I awoke, held other thoughts in a
confused concourse at a distance.
The impossibility of keeping him concealed in the chambers was
selfevident. It could not be done, and the attempt to do it would
inevitably engender suspicion. True, I had no Avenger in my service
now, but I was looked after by an inflammatory old female, assisted
by an animated ragbag whom she called her niece, and to keep a
room secret from them would be to invite curiosity and
exaggeration. They both had weak eyes, which I had long attributed
to their chronically looking in at keyholes, and they were always
at hand when not wanted indeed that was their only reliable
quality besides larceny. Not to get up a mystery with these people,
I resolved to announce in the morning that my uncle had
unexpectedly come from the country.
This course I decided on while I was yet groping about in the
darkness for the means of getting a light. Not stumbling on the
means after all, I was fain to go out to the adjacent Lodge and get
the watchman there to come with his lantern. Now, in groping my way
down the black staircase I fell over something, and that something
was a man crouching in a corner.
As the man made no answer when I asked him what he did there, but
eluded my touch in silence, I ran to the Lodge and urged the
watchman to come quickly telling him of the incident on the way
back. The wind being as fierce as ever, we did not care to endanger
the light in the lantern by rekindling the extinguished lamps on
the staircase, but we examined the staircase from the bottom to the
top and found no one there. It then occurred to me as possible that
the man might have slipped into my rooms so, lighting my candle at
the watchman's, and leaving him standing at the door, I examined
them carefully, including the room in which my dreaded guest lay
asleep. All was quiet, and assuredly no other man was in those
chambers.
It troubled me that there should have been a lurker on the stairs,
on that night of all nights in the year, and I asked the watchman,
on the chance of eliciting some hopeful explanation as I handed him
a dram at the door, whether he had admitted at his gate any
gentleman who had perceptibly been dining out? Yes, he said at
different times of the night, three. One lived in Fountain Court,
and the other two lived in the Lane, and he had seen them all go
home. Again, the only other man who dwelt in the house of which my
chambers formed a part, had been in the country for some weeks and
he certainly had not returned in the night, because we had seen his
door with his seal on it as we came upstairs.
"The night being so bad, sir," said the watchman, as he gave me
back my glass, "uncommon few have come in at my gate. Besides them
three gentlemen that I have named, I don't call to mind another
since about eleven o'clock, when a stranger asked for you."
"My uncle," I muttered. "Yes."
"You saw him, sir?"
"Yes. Oh yes."
"Likewise the person with him?"
"Person with him" I repeated.
"I judged the person to be with him," returned the watchman. "The
person stopped, when he stopped to make inquiry of me, and the
person took this way when he took this way."
"What sort of person?"
The watchman had not particularly noticed he should say a working
person to the best of his belief, he had a dustcoloured kind of
clothes on, under a dark coat. The watchman made more light of the
matter than I did, and naturally not having my reason for
attaching weight to it.
When I had got rid of him, which I thought it well to do without
prolonging explanations, my mind was much troubled by these two
circumstances taken together. Whereas they were easy of innocent
solution apart  as, for instance, some dinerout or dinerathome,
who had not gone near this watchman's gate, might have strayed to
my staircase and dropped asleep there  and my nameless visitor
might have brought some one with him to show him the way  still,
joined, they had an ugly look to one as prone to distrust and fear
as the changes of a few hours had made me.
I lighted my fire, which burnt with a raw pale flare at that time
of the morning, and fell into a doze before it. I seemed to have
been dozing a whole night when the clocks struck six. As there was
full an hour and a half between me and daylight, I dozed again
now, waking up uneasily, with prolix conversations about nothing,
in my ears now, making thunder of the wind in the chimney at
length, falling off into a profound sleep from which the daylight
woke me with a start.
All this time I had never been able to consider my own situation,
nor could I do so yet. I had not the power to attend to it. I was
greatly dejected and distressed, but in an incoherent wholesale
sort of way. As to forming any plan for the future, I could as soon
have formed an elephant. When I opened the shutters and looked out
at the wet wild morning, all of a leaden hue when I walked from
room to room when I sat down again shivering, before the fire,
waiting for my laundress to appear I thought how miserable I was,
but hardly knew why, or how long I had been so, or on what day of
the week I made the reflection, or even who I was that made it.
At last, the old woman and the niece came in  the latter with a
head not easily distinguishable from her dusty broom  and
testified surprise at sight of me and the fire. To whom I imparted
how my uncle had come in the night and was then asleep, and how the
breakfast preparations were to be modified accordingly. Then, I
washed and dressed while they knocked the furniture about and made
a dust and so, in a sort of dream or sleepwaking, I found myself
sitting by the fire again, waiting for  Him  to come to
breakfast.
Byandby, his door opened and he came out. I could not bring
myself to bear the sight of him, and I thought he had a worse look
by daylight.
"I do not even know," said I, speaking low as he took his seat at
the table, "by what name to call you. I have given out that you are
my uncle."
"That's it, dear boy Call me uncle."
"You assumed some name, I suppose, on board ship?"
"Yes, dear boy. I took the name of Provis."
"Do you mean to keep that name?"
"Why, yes, dear boy, it's as good as another  unless you'd like
another."
"What is your real name?" I asked him in a whisper.
"Magwitch," he answered, in the same tone "chrisen'd Abel."
"What were you brought up to be?"
"A warmint, dear boy."
He answered quite seriously, and used the word as if it denoted
some profession.
"When you came into the Temple last night" said I, pausing to
wonder whether that could really have been last night, which seemed
so long ago.
"Yes, dear boy?"
"When you came in at the gate and asked the watchman the way here,
had you any one with you?"
"With me? No, dear boy."
"But there was some one there?"
"I didn't take particular notice," he said, dubiously, "not knowing
the ways of the place. But I think there was a person, too, come in
alonger me."
"Are you known in London?"
"I hope not" said he, giving his neck a jerk with his forefinger
that made me turn hot and sick.
"Were you known in London, once?"
"Not over and above, dear boy. I was in the provinces mostly."
"Were you  tried  in London?"
"Which time?" said he, with a sharp look.
"The last time."
He nodded. "First knowed Mr. Jaggers that way. Jaggers was for me."
It was on my lips to ask him what he was tried for, but he took up
a knife, gave it a flourish, and with the words, "And what I done
is worked out and paid for" fell to at his breakfast.
He ate in a ravenous way that was very disagreeable, and all his
actions were uncouth, noisy, and greedy. Some of his teeth had
failed him since I saw him eat on the marshes, and as he turned his
food in his mouth, and turned his head sideways to bring his
strongest fangs to bear upon it, he looked terribly like a hungry old
dog. If I had begun with any appetite, he would have taken it away,
and I should have sat much as I did  repelled from him by an
insurmountable aversion, and gloomily looking at the cloth.
"I'm a heavy grubber, dear boy," he said, as a polite kind of
apology when he made an end of his meal, "but I always was. If it
had been in my constitution to be a lighter grubber, I might ha'
got into lighter trouble. Similarly, I must have my smoke. When I
was first hired out as shepherd t'other side the world, it's my
belief I should ha' turned into a molloncollymad sheep myself, if
I hadn't a had my smoke."
As he said so, he got up from the table, and putting his hand into the
breast of the peacoat he wore, brought out a short black pipe, and
a handful of loose tobacco of the kind that is called Negrohead.
Having filled his pipe, he put the surplus tobacco back again, as
if his pocket were a drawer. Then, he took a live coal from the
fire with the tongs, and lighted his pipe at it, and then turned
round on the hearthrug with his back to the fire, and went through
his favourite action of holding out both his hands for mine.
"And this," said he, dandling my hands up and down in his, as he
puffed at his pipe "and this is the gentleman what I made The
real genuine One It does me good fur to look at you, Pip. All I
stip'late, is, to stand by and look at you, dear boy"
I released my hands as soon as I could, and found that I was
beginning slowly to settle down to the contemplation of my
condition. What I was chained to, and how heavily, became
intelligible to me, as I heard his hoarse voice, and sat looking up
at his furrowed bald head with its iron grey hair at the sides.
"I mustn't see my gentleman a footing it in the mire of the
streets there mustn't be no mud on his boots. My gentleman must
have horses, Pip Horses to ride, and horses to drive, and horses
for his servant to ride and drive as well. Shall colonists have
their horses and blood 'uns, if you please, good Lord and not my
London gentleman? No, no. We'll show 'em another pair of shoes than
that, Pip won't us?"
He took out of his pocket a great thick pocketbook, bursting with
papers, and tossed it on the table.
"There's something worth spending in that there book, dear boy.
It's yourn. All I've got ain't mine it's yourn. Don't you be
afeerd on it. There's more where that come from. I've come to the
old country fur to see my gentleman spend his money like a
gentleman. That'll be my pleasure. My pleasure 'ull be fur to see
him do it. And blast you all" he wound up, looking round the room
and snapping his fingers once with a loud snap, "blast you every
one, from the judge in his wig, to the colonist a stirring up the
dust, I'll show a better gentleman than the whole kit on you put
together"
"Stop" said I, almost in a frenzy of fear and dislike, "I want to
speak to you. I want to know what is to be done. I want to know how
you are to be kept out of danger, how long you are going to stay,
what projects you have."
"Look'ee here, Pip," said he, laying his hand on my arm in a
suddenly altered and subdued manner "first of all, look'ee here. I
forgot myself half a minute ago. What I said was low that's what
it was low. Look'ee here, Pip. Look over it. I ain't agoing to be
low."
"First," I resumed, halfgroaning, "what precautions can be taken
against your being recognized and seized?"
"No, dear boy," he said, in the same tone as before, "that don't go
first. Lowness goes first. I ain't took so many years to make a
gentleman, not without knowing what's due to him. Look'ee here,
Pip. I was low that's what I was low. Look over it, dear boy."
Some sense of the grimlyludicrous moved me to a fretful laugh, as
I replied, "I have looked over it. In Heaven's name, don't harp
upon it"
"Yes, but look'ee here," he persisted. "Dear boy, I ain't come so
fur, not fur to be low. Now, go on, dear boy. You was asaying"
"How are you to be guarded from the danger you have incurred?"
"Well, dear boy, the danger ain't so great. Without I was informed
agen, the danger ain't so much to signify. There's Jaggers, and
there's Wemmick, and there's you. Who else is there to inform?"
"Is there no chance person who might identify you in the street?"
said I.
"Well," he returned, "there ain't many. Nor yet I don't intend to
advertise myself in the newspapers by the name of A. M. come back
from Botany Bay and years have rolled away, and who's to gain by
it? Still, look'ee here, Pip. If the danger had been fifty times as
great, I should ha' come to see you, mind you, just the same."
"And how long do you remain?"
"How long?" said he, taking his black pipe from his mouth, and
dropping his jaw as he stared at me. "I'm not agoing back. I've
come for good."
"Where are you to live?" said I. "What is to be done with you?
Where will you be safe?"
"Dear boy," he returned, "there's disguising wigs can be bought for
money, and there's hair powder, and spectacles, and black clothes 
shorts and what not. Others has done it safe afore, and what others
has done afore, others can do agen. As to the where and how of
living, dear boy, give me your own opinions on it."
"You take it smoothly now," said I, "but you were very serious last
night, when you swore it was Death."
"And so I swear it is Death," said he, putting his pipe back in his
mouth, "and Death by the rope, in the open street not fur from
this, and it's serious that you should fully understand it to be
so. What then, when that's once done? Here I am. To go back now,
'ud be as bad as to stand ground  worse. Besides, Pip, I'm here,
because I've meant it by you, years and years. As to what I dare,
I'm a old bird now, as has dared all manner of traps since first he
was fledged, and I'm not afeerd to perch upon a scarecrow. If
there's Death hid inside of it, there is, and let him come out, and
I'll face him, and then I'll believe in him and not afore. And now
let me have a look at my gentleman agen."
Once more, he took me by both hands and surveyed me with an air of
admiring proprietorship smoking with great complacency all the
while.
It appeared to me that I could do no better than secure him some
quiet lodging hard by, of which he might take possession when
Herbert returned whom I expected in two or three days. That the
secret must be confided to Herbert as a matter of unavoidable
necessity, even if I could have put the immense relief I should
derive from sharing it with him out of the question, was plain to
me. But it was by no means so plain to Mr. Provis I resolved to
call him by that name, who reserved his consent to Herbert's
participation until he should have seen him and formed a favourable
judgment of his physiognomy. "And even then, dear boy," said he,
pulling a greasy little clasped black Testament out of his pocket,
"we'll have him on his oath."
To state that my terrible patron carried this little black book
about the world solely to swear people on in cases of emergency,
would be to state what I never quite established  but this I can
say, that I never knew him put it to any other use. The book itself
had the appearance of having been stolen from some court of
justice, and perhaps his knowledge of its antecedents, combined
with his own experience in that wise, gave him a reliance on its
powers as a sort of legal spell or charm. On this first occasion of
his producing it, I recalled how he had made me swear fidelity in
the churchyard long ago, and how he had described himself last
night as always swearing to his resolutions in his solitude.
As he was at present dressed in a seafaring slop suit, in which he
looked as if he had some parrots and cigars to dispose of, I next
discussed with him what dress he should wear. He cherished an
extraordinary belief in the virtues of "shorts" as a disguise, and
had in his own mind sketched a dress for himself that would have
made him something between a dean and a dentist. It was with
considerable difficulty that I won him over to the assumption of a
dress more like a prosperous farmer's and we arranged that he
should cut his hair close, and wear a little powder. Lastly, as he
had not yet been seen by the laundress or her niece, he was to keep
himself out of their view until his change of dress was made.
It would seem a simple matter to decide on these precautions but
in my dazed, not to say distracted, state, it took so long, that I
did not get out to further them, until two or three in the
afternoon. He was to remain shut up in the chambers while I was
gone, and was on no account to open the door.
There being to my knowledge a respectable lodginghouse in
Essexstreet, the back of which looked into the Temple, and was
almost within hail of my windows, I first of all repaired to that
house, and was so fortunate as to secure the second floor for my
uncle, Mr. Provis. I then went from shop to shop, making such
purchases as were necessary to the change in his appearance. This
business transacted, I turned my face, on my own account, to Little
Britain. Mr. Jaggers was at his desk, but, seeing me enter, got up
immediately and stood before his fire.
"Now, Pip," said he, "be careful."
"I will, sir," I returned. For, coming along I had thought well of
what I was going to say.
"Don't commit yourself," said Mr. Jaggers, "and don't commit any
one. You understand  any one. Don't tell me anything I don't want
to know anything I am not curious."
Of course I saw that he knew the man was come.
"I merely want, Mr. Jaggers," said I, "to assure myself that what I
have been told, is true. I have no hope of its being untrue, but at
least I may verify it."
Mr. Jaggers nodded. "But did you say 'told' or 'informed'?" he asked
me, with his head on one side, and not looking at me, but looking
in a listening way at the floor. "Told would seem to imply verbal
communication. You can't have verbal communication with a man in
New South Wales, you know."
"I will say, informed, Mr. Jaggers."
"Good."
"I have been informed by a person named Abel Magwitch, that he is
the benefactor so long unknown to me."
"That is the man," said Mr. Jaggers, "  in New South Wales."
"And only he?" said I.
"And only he," said Mr. Jaggers.
"I am not so unreasonable, sir, as to think you at all responsible
for my mistakes and wrong conclusions but I always supposed it was
Miss Havisham."
"As you say, Pip," returned Mr. Jaggers, turning his eyes upon me
coolly, and taking a bite at his forefinger, "I am not at all
responsible for that."
"And yet it looked so like it, sir," I pleaded with a downcast
heart.
"Not a particle of evidence, Pip," said Mr. Jaggers, shaking his
head and gathering up his skirts. "Take nothing on its looks take
everything on evidence. There's no better rule."
"I have no more to say," said I, with a sigh, after standing silent
for a little while. "I have verified my information, and there's an
end."
"And Magwitch  in New South Wales  having at last disclosed
himself," said Mr. Jaggers, "you will comprehend, Pip, how rigidly
throughout my communication with you, I have always adhered to the
strict line of fact. There has never been the least departure from
the strict line of fact. You are quite aware of that?"
"Quite, sir."
"I communicated to Magwitch  in New South Wales  when he first
wrote to me  from New South Wales  the caution that he must not
expect me ever to deviate from the strict line of fact. I also
communicated to him another caution. He appeared to me to have
obscurely hinted in his letter at some distant idea he had of
seeing you in England here. I cautioned him that I must hear no
more of that that he was not at all likely to obtain a pardon
that he was expatriated for the term of his natural life and that
his presenting himself in this country would be an act of felony,
rendering him liable to the extreme penalty of the law. I gave
Magwitch that caution," said Mr. Jaggers, looking hard at me "I
wrote it to New South Wales. He guided himself by it, no doubt."
"No doubt," said I.
"I have been informed by Wemmick," pursued Mr. Jaggers, still
looking hard at me, "that he has received a letter, under date
Portsmouth, from a colonist of the name of Purvis, or"
"Or Provis," I suggested.
"Or Provis  thank you, Pip. Perhaps it is Provis? Perhaps you know
it's Provis?"
"Yes," said I.
"You know it's Provis. A letter, under date Portsmouth, from a
colonist of the name of Provis, asking for the particulars of your
address, on behalf of Magwitch. Wemmick sent him the particulars, I
understand, by return of post. Probably it is through Provis that
you have received the explanation of Magwitch  in New South
Wales?"
"It came through Provis," I replied.
"Good day, Pip," said Mr. Jaggers, offering his hand "glad to have
seen you. In writing by post to Magwitch  in New South Wales  or
in communicating with him through Provis, have the goodness to
mention that the particulars and vouchers of our long account shall
be sent to you, together with the balance for there is still a
balance remaining. Good day, Pip"
We shook hands, and he looked hard at me as long as he could see
me. I turned at the door, and he was still looking hard at me,
while the two vile casts on the shelf seemed to be trying to get
their eyelids open, and to force out of their swollen throats, "O,
what a man he is"
Wemmick was out, and though he had been at his desk he could have
done nothing for me. I went straight back to the Temple, where I
found the terrible Provis drinking rumandwater and smoking
negrohead, in safety.
Next day the clothes I had ordered, all came home, and he put them
on. Whatever he put on, became him less it dismally seemed to me
than what he had worn before. To my thinking, there was something
in him that made it hopeless to attempt to disguise him. The more I
dressed him and the better I dressed him, the more he looked like
the slouching fugitive on the marshes. This effect on my anxious
fancy was partly referable, no doubt, to his old face and manner
growing more familiar to me but I believe too that he dragged one
of his legs as if there were still a weight of iron on it, and that
from head to foot there was Convict in the very grain of the man.
The influences of his solitary hutlife were upon him besides, and
gave him a savage air that no dress could tame added to these,
were the influences of his subsequent branded life among men, and,
crowning all, his consciousness that he was dodging and hiding now.
In all his ways of sitting and standing, and eating and drinking 
of brooding about, in a highshouldered reluctant style  of taking
out his great hornhandled jackknife and wiping it on his legs and
cutting his food  of lifting light glasses and cups to his lips,
as if they were clumsy pannikins  of chopping a wedge off his
bread, and soaking up with it the last fragments of gravy round and
round his plate, as if to make the most of an allowance, and then
drying his fingerends on it, and then swallowing it  in these
ways and a thousand other small nameless instances arising every
minute in the day, there was Prisoner, Felon, Bondsman, plain as
plain could be.
It had been his own idea to wear that touch of powder, and I had
conceded the powder after overcoming the shorts. But I can compare
the effect of it, when on, to nothing but the probable effect of
rouge upon the dead so awful was the manner in which everything in
him that it was most desirable to repress, started through that
thin layer of pretence, and seemed to come blazing out at the crown
of his head. It was abandoned as soon as tried, and he wore his
grizzled hair cut short.
Words cannot tell what a sense I had, at the same time, of the
dreadful mystery that he was to me. When he fell asleep of an
evening, with his knotted hands clenching the sides of the
easychair, and his bald head tattooed with deep wrinkles falling
forward on his breast, I would sit and look at him, wondering what
he had done, and loading him with all the crimes in the Calendar,
until the impulse was powerful on me to start up and fly from him.
Every hour so increased my abhorrence of him, that I even think I
might have yielded to this impulse in the first agonies of being so
haunted, notwithstanding all he had done for me, and the risk he
ran, but for the knowledge that Herbert must soon come back. Once,
I actually did start out of bed in the night, and begin to dress
myself in my worst clothes, hurriedly intending to leave him there
with everything else I possessed, and enlist for India as a private
soldier.
I doubt if a ghost could have been more terrible to me, up in those
lonely rooms in the long evenings and long nights, with the wind
and the rain always rushing by. A ghost could not have been taken
and hanged on my account, and the consideration that he could be,
and the dread that he would be, were no small addition to my
horrors. When he was not asleep, or playing a complicated kind of
patience with a ragged pack of cards of his own  a game that I
never saw before or since, and in which he recorded his winnings by
sticking his jackknife into the table  when he was not engaged in
either of these pursuits, he would ask me to read to him  "Foreign
language, dear boy" While I complied, he, not comprehending a
single word, would stand before the fire surveying me with the air
of an Exhibitor, and I would see him, between the fingers of the
hand with which I shaded my face, appealing in dumb show to the
furniture to take notice of my proficiency. The imaginary student
pursued by the misshapen creature he had impiously made, was not
more wretched than I, pursued by the creature who had made me, and
recoiling from him with a stronger repulsion, the more he admired
me and the fonder he was of me.
This is written of, I am sensible, as if it had lasted a year. It
lasted about five days. Expecting Herbert all the time, I dared not
go out, except when I took Provis for an airing after dark. At
length, one evening when dinner was over and I had dropped into a
slumber quite worn out  for my nights had been agitated and my
rest broken by fearful dreams  I was roused by the welcome
footstep on the staircase. Provis, who had been asleep too,
staggered up at the noise I made, and in an instant I saw his
jackknife shining in his hand.
"Quiet It's Herbert" I said and Herbert came bursting in, with
the airy freshness of six hundred miles of France upon him.
"Handel, my dear fellow, how are you, and again how are you, and
again how are you? I seem to have been gone a twelvemonth Why, so I
must have been, for you have grown quite thin and pale Handel, my 
Halloa I beg your pardon."
He was stopped in his running on and in his shaking hands with me,
by seeing Provis. Provis, regarding him with a fixed attention, was
slowly putting up his jackknife, and groping in another pocket for
something else.
"Herbert, my dear friend," said I, shutting the double doors, while
Herbert stood staring and wondering, "something very strange has
happened. This is  a visitor of mine."
"It's all right, dear boy" said Provis coming forward, with his
little clasped black book, and then addressing himself to Herbert.
"Take it in your right hand. Lord strike you dead on the spot, if
ever you split in any way sumever Kiss it"
"Do so, as he wishes it," I said to Herbert. So, Herbert, looking
at me with a friendly uneasiness and amazement, complied, and
Provis immediately shaking hands with him, said, "Now you're on
your oath, you know. And never believe me on mine, if Pip shan't
make a gentleman on you"
Chapter 
In vain should I attempt to describe the astonishment and disquiet
of Herbert, when he and I and Provis sat down before the fire, and
I recounted the whole of the secret. Enough, that I saw my own
feelings reflected in Herbert's face, and, not least among them, my
repugnance towards the man who had done so much for me.
What would alone have set a division between that man and us, if
there had been no other dividing circumstance, was his triumph in
my story. Saving his troublesome sense of having been "low' on one
occasion since his return  on which point he began to hold forth
to Herbert, the moment my revelation was finished  he had no
perception of the possibility of my finding any fault with my good
fortune. His boast that he had made me a gentleman, and that he had
come to see me support the character on his ample resources, was
made for me quite as much as for himself and that it was a highly
agreeable boast to both of us, and that we must both be very proud
of it, was a conclusion quite established in his own mind.
"Though, look'ee here, Pip's comrade," he said to Herbert, after
having discoursed for some time, "I know very well that once since
I come back  for half a minute  I've been low. I said to Pip, I
knowed as I had been low. But don't you fret yourself on that
score. I ain't made Pip a gentleman, and Pip ain't agoing to make
you a gentleman, not fur me not to know what's due to ye both. Dear
boy, and Pip's comrade, you two may count upon me always having a
genteel muzzle on. Muzzled I have been since that half a minute
when I was betrayed into lowness, muzzled I am at the present time,
muzzled I ever will be."
Herbert said, "Certainly," but looked as if there were no specific
consolation in this, and remained perplexed and dismayed. We were
anxious for the time when he would go to his lodging, and leave us
together, but he was evidently jealous of leaving us together, and
sat late. It was midnight before I took him round to Essexstreet,
and saw him safely in at his own dark door. When it closed upon
him, I experienced the first moment of relief I had known since the
night of his arrival.
Never quite free from an uneasy remembrance of the man on the
stairs, I had always looked about me in taking my guest out after
dark, and in bringing him back and I looked about me now.
Difficult as it is in a large city to avoid the suspicion of being
watched, when the mind is conscious of danger in that regard, I
could not persuade myself that any of the people within sight cared
about my movements. The few who were passing, passed on their
several ways, and the street was empty when I turned back into the
Temple. Nobody had come out at the gate with us, nobody went in at
the gate with me. As I crossed by the fountain, I saw his lighted
back windows looking bright and quiet, and, when I stood for a few
moments in the doorway of the building where I lived, before going
up the stairs, Gardencourt was as still and lifeless as the
staircase was when I ascended it.
Herbert received me with open arms, and I had never felt before, so
blessedly, what it is to have a friend. When he had spoken some
sound words of sympathy and encouragement, we sat down to consider
the question, What was to be done?
The chair that Provis had occupied still remaining where it had
stood  for he had a barrack way with him of hanging about one
spot, in one unsettled manner, and going through one round of
observances with his pipe and his negrohead and his jackknife and
his pack of cards, and what not, as if it were all put down for him
on a slate  I say, his chair remaining where it had stood, Herbert
unconsciously took it, but next moment started out of it, pushed it
away, and took another. He had no occasion to say, after that, that
he had conceived an aversion for my patron, neither had I occasion
to confess my own. We interchanged that confidence without shaping
a syllable.
"What," said I to Herbert, when he was safe in another chair, "what
is to be done?"
"My poor dear Handel," he replied, holding his head, "I am too
stunned to think."
"So was I, Herbert, when the blow first fell. Still, something must
be done. He is intent upon various new expenses  horses, and
carriages, and lavish appearances of all kinds. He must be stopped
somehow."
"You mean that you can't accept"
"How can I?" I interposed, as Herbert paused. "Think of him Look at
him"
An involuntary shudder passed over both of us.
"Yet I am afraid the dreadful truth is, Herbert, that he is
attached to me, strongly attached to me. Was there ever such a
fate"
"My poor dear Handel," Herbert repeated.
"Then," said I, "after all, stopping short here, never taking
another penny from him, think what I owe him already Then again I
am heavily in debt  very heavily for me, who have now no
expectations  and I have been bred to no calling, and I am fit for
nothing."
"Well, well, well" Herbert remonstrated. "Don't say fit for
nothing."
"What am I fit for? I know only one thing that I am fit for, and
that is, to go for a soldier. And I might have gone, my dear
Herbert, but for the prospect of taking counsel with your
friendship and affection."
Of course I broke down there and of course Herbert, beyond seizing
a warm grip of my hand, pretended not to know it.
"Anyhow, my dear Handel," said he presently, "soldiering won't do.
If you were to renounce this patronage and these favours, I suppose
you would do so with some faint hope of one day repaying what you
have already had. Not very strong, that hope, if you went
soldiering Besides, it's absurd. You would be infinitely better in
Clarriker's house, small as it is. I am working up towards a
partnership, you know."
Poor fellow He little suspected with whose money.
"But there is another question," said Herbert. "This is an ignorant
determined man, who has long had one fixed idea. More than that, he
seems to me I may misjudge him to be a man of a desperate and
fierce character."
"I know he is," I returned. "Let me tell you what evidence I have
seen of it." And I told him what I had not mentioned in my
narrative of that encounter with the other convict.
"See, then," said Herbert "think of this He comes here at the
peril of his life, for the realization of his fixed idea. In the
moment of realization, after all his toil and waiting, you cut the
ground from under his feet, destroy his idea, and make his gains
worthless to him. Do you see nothing that he might do, under the
disappointment?"
"I have seen it, Herbert, and dreamed of it, ever since the fatal
night of his arrival. Nothing has been in my thoughts so
distinctly, as his putting himself in the way of being taken."
"Then you may rely upon it," said Herbert, "that there would be
great danger of his doing it. That is his power over you as long as
he remains in England, and that would be his reckless course if you
forsook him."
I was so struck by the horror of this idea, which had weighed upon
me from the first, and the working out of which would make me
regard myself, in some sort, as his murderer, that I could not rest
in my chair but began pacing to and fro. I said to Herbert,
meanwhile, that even if Provis were recognized and taken, in spite
of himself, I should be wretched as the cause, however innocently.
Yes even though I was so wretched in having him at large and near
me, and even though I would far far rather have worked at the forge
all the days of my life than I would ever have come to this
But there was no staving off the question, What was to be done?
"The first and the main thing to be done," said Herbert, "is to get
him out of England. You will have to go with him, and then he may
be induced to go."
"But get him where I will, could I prevent his coming back?"
"My good Handel, is it not obvious that with Newgate in the next
street, there must be far greater hazard in your breaking your mind
to him and making him reckless, here, than elsewhere. If a pretext
to get him away could be made out of that other convict, or out of
anything else in his life, now."
"There, again" said I, stopping before Herbert, with my open hands
held out, as if they contained the desperation of the case. "I know
nothing of his life. It has almost made me mad to sit here of a
night and see him before me, so bound up with my fortunes and
misfortunes, and yet so unknown to me, except as the miserable
wretch who terrified me two days in my childhood"
Herbert got up, and linked his arm in mine, and we slowly walked to
and fro together, studying the carpet.
"Handel," said Herbert, stopping, "you feel convinced that you can
take no further benefits from him do you?"
"Fully. Surely you would, too, if you were in my place?"
"And you feel convinced that you must break with him?"
"Herbert, can you ask me?"
"And you have, and are bound to have, that tenderness for the life
he has risked on your account, that you must save him, if possible,
from throwing it away. Then you must get him out of England before
you stir a finger to extricate yourself. That done, extricate
yourself, in Heaven's name, and we'll see it out together, dear old
boy."
It was a comfort to shake hands upon it, and walk up and down
again, with only that done.
"Now, Herbert," said I, "with reference to gaining some knowledge
of his history. There is but one way that I know of. I must ask him
pointblank."
"Yes. Ask him," said Herbert, "when we sit at breakfast in the
morning." For, he had said, on taking leave of Herbert, that he
would come to breakfast with us.
With this project formed, we went to bed. I had the wildest dreams
concerning him, and woke unrefreshed I woke, too, to recover the
fear which I had lost in the night, of his being found out as a
returned transport. Waking, I never lost that fear.
He came round at the appointed time, took out his jackknife, and
sat down to his meal. He was full of plans "for his gentleman's
coming out strong, and like a gentleman," and urged me to begin
speedily upon the pocketbook, which he had left in my possession.
He considered the chambers and his own lodging as temporary
residences, and advised me to look out at once for a "fashionable
crib" near Hyde Park, in which he could have "a shakedown". When
he had made an end of his breakfast, and was wiping his knife on
his leg, I said to him, without a word of preface
"After you were gone last night, I told my friend of the struggle
that the soldiers found you engaged in on the marshes, when we came
up. You remember?"
"Remember" said he. "I think so"
"We want to know something about that man  and about you. It is
strange to know no more about either, and particularly you, than I
was able to tell last night. Is not this as good a time as another
for our knowing more?"
"Well" he said, after consideration. "You're on your oath, you
know, Pip's comrade?"
"Assuredly," replied Herbert.
"As to anything I say, you know," he insisted. "The oath applies to
all."
"I understand it to do so."
"And look'ee here Wotever I done, is worked out and paid for," he
insisted again.
"So be it."
He took out his black pipe and was going to fill it with negrohead,
when, looking at the tangle of tobacco in his hand, he seemed to
think it might perplex the thread of his narrative. He put it back
again, stuck his pipe in a buttonhole of his coat, spread a hand
on each knee, and, after turning an angry eye on the fire for a few
silent moments, looked round at us and said what follows.
Chapter 
"Dear boy and Pip's comrade. I am not agoing fur to tell you my
life, like a song or a storybook. But to give it you short and
handy, I'll put it at once into a mouthful of English. In jail and
out of jail, in jail and out of jail, in jail and out of jail.
There, you got it. That's my life pretty much, down to such times
as I got shipped off, arter Pip stood my friend.
"I've been done everything to, pretty well  except hanged. I've
been locked up, as much as a silver teakettle. I've been carted
here and carted there, and put out of this town and put out of that
town, and stuck in the stocks, and whipped and worried and drove.
I've no more notion where I was born, than you have  if so much. I
first become aware of myself, down in Essex, a thieving turnips for
my living. Summun had run away from me  a man  a tinker  and
he'd took the fire with him, and left me wery cold.
"I know'd my name to be Magwitch, chrisen'd Abel. How did I know
it? Much as I know'd the birds' names in the hedges to be
chaffinch, sparrer, thrush. I might have thought it was all lies
together, only as the birds' names come out true, I supposed mine
did.
"So fur as I could find, there warn't a soul that see young Abel
Magwitch, with us little on him as in him, but wot caught fright at
him, and either drove him off, or took him up. I was took up, took
up, took up, to that extent that I reg'larly grow'd up took up.
"This is the way it was, that when I was a ragged little creetur as
much to be pitied as ever I see not that I looked in the glass,
for there warn't many insides of furnished houses known to me, I
got the name of being hardened. "This is a terrible hardened one,"
they says to prison wisitors, picking out me. "May be said to live
in jails, this boy. "Then they looked at me, and I looked at them,
and they measured my head, some on 'em  they had better ameasured
my stomach  and others on 'em giv me tracts what I couldn't read,
and made me speeches what I couldn't understand. They always went
on agen me about the Devil. But what the Devil was I to do? I must
put something into my stomach, mustn't I?  Howsomever, I'm a
getting low, and I know what's due. Dear boy and Pip's comrade,
don't you be afeerd of me being low.
"Tramping, begging, thieving, working sometimes when I could 
though that warn't as often as you may think, till you put the
question whether you would ha' been overready to give me work
yourselves  a bit of a poacher, a bit of a labourer, a bit of a
waggoner, a bit of a haymaker, a bit of a hawker, a bit of most
things that don't pay and lead to trouble, I got to be a man. A
deserting soldier in a Traveller's Rest, what lay hid up to the
chin under a lot of taturs, learnt me to read and a travelling
Giant what signed his name at a penny a time learnt me to write. I
warn't locked up as often now as formerly, but I wore out my good
share of keymetal still.
"At Epsom races, a matter of over twenty years ago, I got
acquainted wi' a man whose skull I'd crack wi' this poker, like the
claw of a lobster, if I'd got it on this hob. His right name was
Compeyson and that's the man, dear boy, what you see me apounding
in the ditch, according to what you truly told your comrade arter I
was gone last night.
"He set up fur a gentleman, this Compeyson, and he'd been to a
public boardingschool and had learning. He was a smooth one to
talk, and was a dab at the ways of gentlefolks. He was
goodlooking too. It was the night afore the great race, when I
found him on the heath, in a booth that I know'd on. Him and some
more was a sitting among the tables when I went in, and the
landlord which had a knowledge of me, and was a sporting one
called him out, and said, 'I think this is a man that might suit
you'  meaning I was.
"Compeyson, he looks at me very noticing, and I look at him. He has
a watch and a chain and a ring and a breastpin and a handsome suit
of clothes.
"'To judge from appearances, you're out of luck,' says Compeyson to
me.
"'Yes, master, and I've never been in it much.' I had come out of
Kingston Jail last on a vagrancy committal. Not but what it might
have been for something else but it warn't.
"'Luck changes,' says Compeyson 'perhaps yours is going to change.'
"I says, 'I hope it may be so. There's room.'
"'What can you do?' says Compeyson.
"'Eat and drink,' I says 'if you'll find the materials.'
"Compeyson laughed, looked at me again very noticing, giv me five
shillings, and appointed me for next night. Same place.
"I went to Compeyson next night, same place, and Compeyson took me
on to be his man and pardner. And what was Compeyson's business in
which we was to go pardners? Compeyson's business was the
swindling, handwriting forging, stolen banknote passing, and
suchlike. All sorts of traps as Compeyson could set with his head,
and keep his own legs out of and get the profits from and let
another man in for, was Compeyson's business. He'd no more heart
than a iron file, he was as cold as death, and he had the head of
the Devil afore mentioned.
"There was another in with Compeyson, as was called Arthur  not as
being so chrisen'd, but as a surname. He was in a Decline, and was
a shadow to look at. Him and Compeyson had been in a bad thing with
a rich lady some years afore, and they'd made a pot of money by it
but Compeyson betted and gamed, and he'd have run through the
king's taxes. So, Arthur was adying, and adying poor and with the
horrors on him, and Compeyson's wife which Compeyson kicked
mostly was ahaving pity on him when she could, and Compeyson was
ahaving pity on nothing and nobody.
"I might atook warning by Arthur, but I didn't and I won't
pretend I was partick'ler  for where 'ud be the good on it, dear
boy and comrade? So I begun wi' Compeyson, and a poor tool I was in
his hands. Arthur lived at the top of Compeyson's house over nigh
Brentford it was, and Compeyson kept a careful account agen him
for board and lodging, in case he should ever get better to work it
out. But Arthur soon settled the account. The second or third time
as ever I see him, he come atearing down into Compeyson's parlour
late at night, in only a flannel gown, with his hair all in a
sweat, and he says to Compeyson's wife, 'Sally, she really is
upstairs alonger me, now, and I can't get rid of her. She's all in
white,' he says, 'wi' white flowers in her hair, and she's awful
mad, and she's got a shroud hanging over her arm, and she says
she'll put it on me at five in the morning.'
"Says Compeyson 'Why, you fool, don't you know she's got a living
body? And how should she be up there, without coming through the
door, or in at the window, and up the stairs?'
"'I don't know how she's there,' says Arthur, shivering dreadful
with the horrors, 'but she's standing in the corner at the foot of
the bed, awful mad. And over where her heart's brook  you broke
it  there's drops of blood.'
"Compeyson spoke hardy, but he was always a coward. 'Go up alonger
this drivelling sick man,' he says to his wife, 'and Magwitch, lend
her a hand, will you?' But he never come nigh himself.
"Compeyson's wife and me took him up to bed agen, and he raved most
dreadful. 'Why look at her' he cries out. 'She's ashaking the
shroud at me Don't you see her? Look at her eyes Ain't it awful to
see her so mad?' Next, he cries, 'She'll put it on me, and then I'm
done for Take it away from her, take it away' And then he catched
hold of us, and kep on atalking to her, and answering of her, till
I half believed I see her myself.
"Compeyson's wife, being used to him, giv him some liquor to get
the horrors off, and byandby he quieted. 'Oh, she's gone Has her
keeper been for her?' he says. 'Yes,' says Compeyson's wife. 'Did
you tell him to lock her and bar her in?' 'Yes.' 'And to take that
ugly thing away from her?' 'Yes, yes, all right.' 'You're a good
creetur,' he says, 'don't leave me, whatever you do, and thank
you'
"He rested pretty quiet till it might want a few minutes of five,
and then he starts up with a scream, and screams out, 'Here she
is She's got the shroud again. She's unfolding it. She's coming out
of the corner. She's coming to the bed. Hold me, both on you  one
of each side  don't let her touch me with it. Hah she missed me
that time. Don't let her throw it over my shoulders. Don't let her
lift me up to get it round me. She's lifting me up. Keep me down'
Then he lifted himself up hard, and was dead.
"Compeyson took it easy as a good riddance for both sides. Him and
me was soon busy, and first he swore me being ever artful on my
own book  this here little black book, dear boy, what I swore your
comrade on.
"Not to go into the things that Compeyson planned, and I done 
which 'ud take a week  I'll simply say to you, dear boy, and Pip's
comrade, that that man got me into such nets as made me his black
slave. I was always in debt to him, always under his thumb, always
aworking, always agetting into danger. He was younger than me,
but he'd got craft, and he'd got learning, and he overmatched me
five hundred times told and no mercy. My Missis as I had the hard
time wi'  Stop though I ain't brought her in"
He looked about him in a confused way, as if he had lost his place
in the book of his remembrance and he turned his face to the fire,
and spread his hands broader on his knees, and lifted them off and
put them on again.
"There ain't no need to go into it," he said, looking round once
more. "The time wi' Compeyson was a'most as hard a time as ever I
had that said, all's said. Did I tell you as I was tried, alone,
for misdemeanour, while with Compeyson?"
I answered, No.
"Well" he said, "I was, and got convicted. As to took up on
suspicion, that was twice or three times in the four or five year
that it lasted but evidence was wanting. At last, me and Compeyson
was both committed for felony  on a charge of putting stolen notes
in circulation  and there was other charges behind. Compeyson says
to me, 'Separate defences, no communication,' and that was all. And
I was so miserable poor, that I sold all the clothes I had, except
what hung on my back, afore I could get Jaggers.
"When we was put in the dock, I noticed first of all what a
gentleman Compeyson looked, wi' his curly hair and his black
clothes and his white pockethandkercher, and what a common sort of
a wretch I looked. When the prosecution opened and the evidence was
put short, aforehand, I noticed how heavy it all bore on me, and
how light on him. When the evidence was giv in the box, I noticed
how it was always me that had come for'ard, and could be swore to,
how it was always me that the money had been paid to, how it was
always me that had seemed to work the thing and get the profit.
But, when the defence come on, then I see the plan plainer for,
says the counsellor for Compeyson, 'My lord and gentlemen, here you
has afore you, side by side, two persons as your eyes can separate
wide one, the younger, well brought up, who will be spoke to as
such one, the elder, ill brought up, who will be spoke to as such
one, the younger, seldom if ever seen in these here transactions,
and only suspected t'other, the elder, always seen in 'em and
always wi'his guilt brought home. Can you doubt, if there is but
one in it, which is the one, and, if there is two in it, which is
much the worst one?' And suchlike. And when it come to character,
warn't it Compeyson as had been to the school, and warn't it his
schoolfellows as was in this position and in that, and warn't it
him as had been know'd by witnesses in such clubs and societies,
and nowt to his disadvantage? And warn't it me as had been tried
afore, and as had been know'd up hill and down dale in Bridewells
and LockUps? And when it come to speechmaking, warn't it
Compeyson as could speak to 'em wi' his face dropping every now and
then into his white pockethandkercher  ah and wi' verses in his
speech, too  and warn't it me as could only say, 'Gentlemen, this
man at my side is a most precious rascal'? And when the verdict
come, warn't it Compeyson as was recommended to mercy on account of
good character and bad company, and giving up all the information
he could agen me, and warn't it me as got never a word but Guilty?
And when I says to Compeyson, 'Once out of this court, I'll smash
that face of yourn' ain't it Compeyson as prays the Judge to be
protected, and gets two turnkeys stood betwixt us? And when we're
sentenced, ain't it him as gets seven year, and me fourteen, and
ain't it him as the Judge is sorry for, because he might a done so
well, and ain't it me as the Judge perceives to be a old offender
of wiolent passion, likely to come to worse?"
He had worked himself into a state of great excitement, but he
checked it, took two or three short breaths, swallowed as often,
and stretching out his hand towards me said, in a reassuring
manner, "I ain't agoing to be low, dear boy"
He had so heated himself that he took out his handkerchief and
wiped his face and head and neck and hands, before he could go on.
"I had said to Compeyson that I'd smash that face of his, and I
swore Lord smash mine to do it. We was in the same prisonship,
but I couldn't get at him for long, though I tried. At last I come
behind him and hit him on the cheek to turn him round and get a
smashing one at him, when I was seen and seized. The blackhole of
that ship warn't a strong one, to a judge of blackholes that could
swim and dive. I escaped to the shore, and I was a hiding among the
graves there, envying them as was in 'em and all over, when I first
see my boy"
He regarded me with a look of affection that made him almost
abhorrent to me again, though I had felt great pity for him.
"By my boy, I was giv to understand as Compeyson was out on them
marshes too. Upon my soul, I half believe he escaped in his terror,
to get quit of me, not knowing it was me as had got ashore. I
hunted him down. I smashed his face. 'And now,' says I 'as the
worst thing I can do, caring nothing for myself, I'll drag you
back.' And I'd have swum off, towing him by the hair, if it had
come to that, and I'd a got him aboard without the soldiers.
"Of course he'd much the best of it to the last  his character was
so good. He had escaped when he was made halfwild by me and my
murderous intentions and his punishment was light. I was put in
irons, brought to trial again, and sent for life. I didn't stop for
life, dear boy and Pip's comrade, being here."
"He wiped himself again, as he had done before, and then slowly
took his tangle of tobacco from his pocket, and plucked his pipe
from his buttonhole, and slowly filled it, and began to smoke.
"Is he dead?" I asked, after a silence.
"Is who dead, dear boy?"
"Compeyson."
"He hopes I am, if he's alive, you may be sure," with a fierce
look. "I never heerd no more of him."
Herbert had been writing with his pencil in the cover of a book. He
softly pushed the book over to me, as Provis stood smoking with his
eyes on the fire, and I read in it
"Young Havisham's name was Arthur. Compeyson is the man who
professed to be Miss Havisham's lover."
I shut the book and nodded slightly to Herbert, and put the book
by but we neither of us said anything, and both looked at Provis
as he stood smoking by the fire.
Chapter 
Why should I pause to ask how much of my shrinking from Provis
might be traced to Estella? Why should I loiter on my road, to
compare the state of mind in which I had tried to rid myself of the
stain of the prison before meeting her at the coachoffice, with
the state of mind in which I now reflected on the abyss between
Estella in her pride and beauty, and the returned transport whom I
harboured? The road would be none the smoother for it, the end
would be none the better for it, he would not be helped, nor I
extenuated.
A new fear had been engendered in my mind by his narrative or
rather, his narrative had given form and purpose to the fear that
was already there. If Compeyson were alive and should discover his
return, I could hardly doubt the consequence. That, Compeyson stood
in mortal fear of him, neither of the two could know much better
than I and that, any such man as that man had been described to
be, would hesitate to release himself for good from a dreaded enemy
by the safe means of becoming an informer, was scarcely to be
imagined.
Never had I breathed, and never would I breathe  or so I resolved
a word of Estella to Provis. But, I said to Herbert that before I
could go abroad, I must see both Estella and Miss Havisham. This
was when we were left alone on the night of the day when Provis
told us his story. I resolved to go out to Richmond next day, and I
went.
On my presenting myself at Mrs. Brandley's, Estella's maid was
called to tell that Estella had gone into the country. Where? To
Satis House, as usual. Not as usual, I said, for she had never yet
gone there without me when was she coming back? There was an air
of reservation in the answer which increased my perplexity, and the
answer was, that her maid believed she was only coming back at all
for a little while. I could make nothing of this, except that it
was meant that I should make nothing of it, and I went home again
in complete discomfiture.
Another nightconsultation with Herbert after Provis was gone home
I always took him home, and always looked well about me, led us
to the conclusion that nothing should be said about going abroad
until I came back from Miss Havisham's. In the meantime, Herbert
and I were to consider separately what it would be best to say
whether we should devise any pretence of being afraid that he was
under suspicious observation or whether I, who had never yet been
abroad, should propose an expedition. We both knew that I had but
to propose anything, and he would consent. We agreed that his
remaining many days in his present hazard was not to be thought of.
Next day, I had the meanness to feign that I was under a binding
promise to go down to Joe but I was capable of almost any meanness
towards Joe or his name. Provis was to be strictly careful while I
was gone, and Herbert was to take the charge of him that I had
taken. I was to be absent only one night, and, on my return, the
gratification of his impatience for my starting as a gentleman on a
greater scale, was to be begun. It occurred to me then, and as I
afterwards found to Herbert also, that he might be best got away
across the water, on that pretence  as, to make purchases, or the
like.
Having thus cleared the way for my expedition to Miss Havisham's, I
set off by the early morning coach before it was yet light, and was
out on the open countryroad when the day came creeping on, halting
and whimpering and shivering, and wrapped in patches of cloud and
rags of mist, like a beggar. When we drove up to the Blue Boar
after a drizzly ride, whom should I see come out under the gateway,
toothpick in hand, to look at the coach, but Bentley Drummle
As he pretended not to see me, I pretended not to see him. It was a
very lame pretence on both sides the lamer, because we both went
into the coffeeroom, where he had just finished his breakfast, and
where I ordered mine. It was poisonous to me to see him in the
town, for I very well knew why he had come there.
Pretending to read a smeary newspaper long out of date, which had
nothing half so legible in its local news, as the foreign matter of
coffee, pickles, fishsauces, gravy, melted butter, and wine, with
which it was sprinkled all over, as if it had taken the measles in
a highly irregular form, I sat at my table while he stood before
the fire. By degrees it became an enormous injury to me that he
stood before the fire, and I got up, determined to have my share of
it. I had to put my hand behind his legs for the poker when I went
up to the fireplace to stir the fire, but still pretended not to
know him.
"Is this a cut?" said Mr. Drummle.
"Oh" said I, poker in hand "it's you, is it? How do you do? I was
wondering who it was, who kept the fire off."
With that, I poked tremendously, and having done so, planted myself
side by side with Mr. Drummle, my shoulders squared and my back to
the fire.
"You have just come down?" said Mr. Drummle, edging me a little away
with his shoulder.
"Yes," said I, edging him a little away with my shoulder.
"Beastly place," said Drummle.  "Your part of the country, I
think?"
"Yes," I assented. "I am told it's very like your Shropshire."
"Not in the least like it," said Drummle.
Here Mr. Drummle looked at his boots, and I looked at mine, and then
Mr. Drummle looked at my boots, and I looked at his.
"Have you been here long?" I asked, determined not to yield an inch
of the fire.
"Long enough to be tired of it," returned Drummle, pretending to
yawn, but equally determined.
"Do you stay here long?"
"Can't say," answered Mr. Drummle. "Do you?"
"Can't say," said I.
I felt here, through a tingling in my blood, that if Mr. Drummle's
shoulder had claimed another hair's breadth of room, I should have
jerked him into the window equally, that if my own shoulder had
urged a similar claim, Mr. Drummle would have jerked me into the
nearest box. He whistled a little. So did I.
"Large tract of marshes about here, I believe?" said Drummle.
"Yes. What of that?" said I.
Mr. Drummle looked at me, and then at my boots, and then said, "Oh"
and laughed.
"Are you amused, Mr. Drummle?"
"No," said he, "not particularly. I am going out for a ride in the
saddle. I mean to explore those marshes for amusement.
Outoftheway villages there, they tell me. Curious little
publichouses  and smithies  and that. Waiter"
"Yes, sir."
"Is that horse of mine ready?"
"Brought round to the door, sir."
"I say. Look here, you sir. The lady won't ride today the weather
won't do."
"Very good, sir."
"And I don't dine, because I'm going to dine at the lady's."
"Very good, sir."
Then, Drummle glanced at me, with an insolent triumph on his
greatjowled face that cut me to the heart, dull as he was, and so
exasperated me, that I felt inclined to take him in my arms as the
robber in the storybook is said to have taken the old lady, and
seat him on the fire.
One thing was manifest to both of us, and that was, that until
relief came, neither of us could relinquish the fire. There we
stood, well squared up before it, shoulder to shoulder and foot to
foot, with our hands behind us, not budging an inch. The horse was
visible outside in the drizzle at the door, my breakfast was put on
the table, Drummle's was cleared away, the waiter invited me to
begin, I nodded, we both stood our ground.
"Have you been to the Grove since?" said Drummle.
"No," said I, "I had quite enough of the Finches the last time I
was there."
"Was that when we had a difference of opinion?"
"Yes," I replied, very shortly.
"Come, come They let you off easily enough," sneered Drummle. "You
shouldn't have lost your temper."
"Mr. Drummle," said I, "you are not competent to give advice on that
subject. When I lose my temper not that I admit having done so on
that occasion, I don't throw glasses."
"I do," said Drummle.
After glancing at him once or twice, in an increased state of
smouldering ferocity, I said
"Mr. Drummle, I did not seek this conversation, and I don't think it
an agreeable one."
"I am sure it's not," said he, superciliously over his shoulder "I
don't think anything about it."
"And therefore," I went on, "with your leave, I will suggest that
we hold no kind of communication in future."
"Quite my opinion," said Drummle, "and what I should have suggested
myself, or done  more likely  without suggesting. But don't lose
your temper. Haven't you lost enough without that?"
"What do you mean, sir?"
"Waiter" said Drummle, by way of answering me.
The waiter reappeared.
"Look here, you sir. You quite understand that the young lady don't
ride today, and that I dine at the young lady's?"
"Quite so, sir"
When the waiter had felt my fast cooling teapot with the palm of
his hand, and had looked imploringly at me, and had gone out,
Drummle, careful not to move the shoulder next me, took a cigar
from his pocket and bit the end off, but showed no sign of
stirring. Choking and boiling as I was, I felt that we could not go
a word further, without introducing Estella's name, which I could
not endure to hear him utter and therefore I looked stonily at the
opposite wall, as if there were no one present, and forced myself
to silence. How long we might have remained in this ridiculous
position it is impossible to say, but for the incursion of three
thriving farmers  led on by the waiter, I think  who came into
the coffeeroom unbuttoning their greatcoats and rubbing their
hands, and before whom, as they charged at the fire, we were
obliged to give way.
I saw him through the window, seizing his horse's mane, and
mounting in his blundering brutal manner, and sidling and backing
away. I thought he was gone, when he came back, calling for a light
for the cigar in his mouth, which he had forgotten. A man in a
dustcoloured dress appeared with what was wanted  I could not have
said from where whether from the inn yard, or the street, or where
not  and as Drummle leaned down from the saddle and lighted his
cigar and laughed, with a jerk of his head towards the coffeeroom
windows, the slouching shoulders and ragged hair of this man, whose
back was towards me, reminded me of Orlick.
Too heavily out of sorts to care much at the time whether it were
he or no, or after all to touch the breakfast, I washed the weather
and the journey from my face and hands, and went out to the
memorable old house that it would have been so much the better for
me never to have entered, never to have seen.
Chapter 
In the room where the dressingtable stood, and where the wax
candles burnt on the wall, I found Miss Havisham and Estella Miss
Havisham seated on a settee near the fire, and Estella on a cushion
at her feet. Estella was knitting, and Miss Havisham was looking
on. They both raised their eyes as I went in, and both saw an
alteration in me. I derived that, from the look they interchanged.
"And what wind," said Miss Havisham, "blows you here, Pip?"
Though she looked steadily at me, I saw that she was rather
confused. Estella, pausing a moment in her knitting with her eyes
upon me, and then going on, I fancied that I read in the action of
her fingers, as plainly as if she had told me in the dumb alphabet,
that she perceived I had discovered my real benefactor.
"Miss Havisham," said I, "I went to Richmond yesterday, to speak to
Estella and finding that some wind had blown her here, I
followed."
Miss Havisham motioning to me for the third or fourth time to sit
down, I took the chair by the dressingtable, which I had often
seen her occupy. With all that ruin at my feet and about me, it
seemed a natural place for me, that day.
"What I had to say to Estella, Miss Havisham, I will say before
you, presently  in a few moments. It will not surprise you, it
will not displease you. I am as unhappy as you can ever have meant
me to be."
Miss Havisham continued to look steadily at me. I could see in the
action of Estella's fingers as they worked, that she attended to
what I said but she did not look up.
"I have found out who my patron is. It is not a fortunate
discovery, and is not likely ever to enrich me in reputation,
station, fortune, anything. There are reasons why I must say no
more of that. It is not my secret, but another's."
As I was silent for a while, looking at Estella and considering how
to go on, Miss Havisham repeated, "It is not your secret, but
another's. Well?"
"When you first caused me to be brought here, Miss Havisham when I
belonged to the village over yonder, that I wish I had never left
I suppose I did really come here, as any other chance boy might
have come  as a kind of servant, to gratify a want or a whim, and
to be paid for it?"
"Ay, Pip," replied Miss Havisham, steadily nodding her head "you
did."
"And that Mr. Jaggers"
"Mr. Jaggers," said Miss Havisham, taking me up in a firm tone, "had
nothing to do with it, and knew nothing of it. His being my lawyer,
and his being the lawyer of your patron, is a coincidence. He holds
the same relation towards numbers of people, and it might easily
arise. Be that as it may, it did arise, and was not brought about
by any one."
Any one might have seen in her haggard face that there was no
suppression or evasion so far.
"But when I fell into the mistake I have so long remained in, at
least you led me on?" said I.
"Yes," she returned, again nodding, steadily, "I let you go on."
"Was that kind?"
"Who am I," cried Miss Havisham, striking her stick upon the floor
and flashing into wrath so suddenly that Estella glanced up at her
in surprise, "who am I, for God's sake, that I should be kind?"
It was a weak complaint to have made, and I had not meant to make
it. I told her so, as she sat brooding after this outburst.
"Well, well, well" she said. "What else?"
"I was liberally paid for my old attendance here," I said, to
soothe her, "in being apprenticed, and I have asked these questions
only for my own information. What follows has another and I hope
more disinterested purpose. In humouring my mistake, Miss
Havisham, you punished  practised on  perhaps you will supply
whatever term expresses your intention, without offence  your
selfseeking relations?"
"I did. Why, they would have it so So would you. What has been my
history, that I should be at the pains of entreating either them,
or you, not to have it so You made your own snares. I never made
them."
Waiting until she was quiet again  for this, too, flashed out of
her in a wild and sudden way  I went on.
"I have been thrown among one family of your relations, Miss
Havisham, and have been constantly among them since I went to
London. I know them to have been as honestly under my delusion as I
myself. And I should be false and base if I did not tell you,
whether it is acceptable to you or no, and whether you are inclined
to give credence to it or no, that you deeply wrong both Mr. Matthew
Pocket and his son Herbert, if you suppose them to be otherwise
than generous, upright, open, and incapable of anything designing
or mean."
"They are your friends," said Miss Havisham.
"They made themselves my friends," said I, "when they supposed me
to have superseded them and when Sarah Pocket, Miss Georgiana, and
Mistress Camilla, were not my friends, I think."
This contrasting of them with the rest seemed, I was glad to see,
to do them good with her. She looked at me keenly for a little
while, and then said quietly
"What do you want for them?"
"Only," said I, "that you would not confound them with the others.
They may be of the same blood, but, believe me, they are not of the
same nature."
Still looking at me keenly, Miss Havisham repeated
"What do you want for them?"
"I am not so cunning, you see," I said, in answer, conscious that I
reddened a little, "as that I could hide from you, even if I
desired, that I do want something. Miss Havisham, if you would
spare the money to do my friend Herbert a lasting service in life,
but which from the nature of the case must be done without his
knowledge, I could show you how."
"Why must it be done without his knowledge?" she asked, settling
her hands upon her stick, that she might regard me the more
attentively.
"Because," said I, "I began the service myself, more than two years
ago, without his knowledge, and I don't want to be betrayed. Why I
fail in my ability to finish it, I cannot explain. It is a part of
the secret which is another person's and not mine."
She gradually withdrew her eyes from me, and turned them on the
fire. After watching it for what appeared in the silence and by the
light of the slowly wasting candles to be a long time, she was
roused by the collapse of some of the red coals, and looked towards
me again  at first, vacantly  then, with a gradually
concentrating attention. All this time, Estella knitted on. When
Miss Havisham had fixed her attention on me, she said, speaking as
if there had been no lapse in our dialogue
"What else?"
"Estella," said I, turning to her now, and trying to command my
trembling voice, "you know I love you. You know that I have loved
you long and dearly."
She raised her eyes to my face, on being thus addressed, and her
fingers plied their work, and she looked at me with an unmoved
countenance. I saw that Miss Havisham glanced from me to her, and
from her to me.
"I should have said this sooner, but for my long mistake. It
induced me to hope that Miss Havisham meant us for one another.
While I thought you could not help yourself, as it were, I
refrained from saying it. But I must say it now."
Preserving her unmoved countenance, and with her fingers still
going, Estella shook her head.
"I know," said I, in answer to that action "I know. I have no hope
that I shall ever call you mine, Estella. I am ignorant what may
become of me very soon, how poor I may be, or where I may go.
Still, I love you. I have loved you ever since I first saw you in
this house."
Looking at me perfectly unmoved and with her fingers busy, she
shook her head again.
"It would have been cruel in Miss Havisham, horribly cruel, to
practise on the susceptibility of a poor boy, and to torture me
through all these years with a vain hope and an idle pursuit, if
she had reflected on the gravity of what she did. But I think she
did not. I think that in the endurance of her own trial, she forgot
mine, Estella."
I saw Miss Havisham put her hand to her heart and hold it there, as
she sat looking by turns at Estella and at me.
"It seems," said Estella, very calmly, "that there are sentiments,
fancies  I don't know how to call them  which I am not able to
comprehend. When you say you love me, I know what you mean, as a
form of words but nothing more. You address nothing in my breast,
you touch nothing there. I don't care for what you say at all. I
have tried to warn you of this now, have I not?"
I said in a miserable manner, "Yes."
"Yes. But you would not be warned, for you thought I did not mean
it. Now, did you not think so?"
"I thought and hoped you could not mean it. You, so young, untried,
and beautiful, Estella Surely it is not in Nature."
"It is in my nature," she returned. And then she added, with a
stress upon the words, "It is in the nature formed within me. I
make a great difference between you and all other people when I say
so much. I can do no more."
"Is it not true," said I, "that Bentley Drummle is in town here,
and pursuing you?"
"It is quite true," she replied, referring to him with the
indifference of utter contempt.
"That you encourage him, and ride out with him, and that he dines
with you this very day?"
She seemed a little surprised that I should know it, but again
replied, "Quite true."
"You cannot love him, Estella"
Her fingers stopped for the first time, as she retorted rather
angrily, "What have I told you? Do you still think, in spite of it,
that I do not mean what I say?"
"You would never marry him, Estella?"
She looked towards Miss Havisham, and considered for a moment with
her work in her hands. Then she said, "Why not tell you the truth?
I am going to be married to him."
I dropped my face into my hands, but was able to control myself
better than I could have expected, considering what agony it gave
me to hear her say those words. When I raised my face again, there
was such a ghastly look upon Miss Havisham's, that it impressed me,
even in my passionate hurry and grief.
"Estella, dearest dearest Estella, do not let Miss Havisham lead
you into this fatal step. Put me aside for ever  you have done so,
I well know  but bestow yourself on some worthier person than
Drummle. Miss Havisham gives you to him, as the greatest slight and
injury that could be done to the many far better men who admire
you, and to the few who truly love you. Among those few, there may
be one who loves you even as dearly, though he has not loved you as
long, as I. Take him, and I can bear it better, for your sake"
My earnestness awoke a wonder in her that seemed as if it would
have been touched with compassion, if she could have rendered me at
all intelligible to her own mind.
"I am going," she said again, in a gentler voice, "to be married to
him. The preparations for my marriage are making, and I shall be
married soon. Why do you injuriously introduce the name of my
mother by adoption? It is my own act."
"Your own act, Estella, to fling yourself away upon a brute?"
"On whom should I fling myself away?" she retorted, with a smile.
"Should I fling myself away upon the man who would the soonest feel
if people do feel such things that I took nothing to him? There
It is done. I shall do well enough, and so will my husband. As to
leading me into what you call this fatal step, Miss Havisham would
have had me wait, and not marry yet but I am tired of the life I
have led, which has very few charms for me, and I am willing enough
to change it. Say no more. We shall never understand each other."
"Such a mean brute, such a stupid brute" I urged in despair.
"Don't be afraid of my being a blessing to him," said Estella "I
shall not be that. Come Here is my hand. Do we part on this, you
visionary boy  or man?"
"O Estella" I answered, as my bitter tears fell fast on her hand,
do what I would to restrain them "even if I remained in England
and could hold my head up with the rest, how could I see you
Drummle's wife?"
"Nonsense," she returned, "nonsense. This will pass in no time."
"Never, Estella"
"You will get me out of your thoughts in a week."
"Out of my thoughts You are part of my existence, part of myself.
You have been in every line I have ever read, since I first came
here, the rough common boy whose poor heart you wounded even then.
You have been in every prospect I have ever seen since  on the
river, on the sails of the ships, on the marshes, in the clouds, in
the light, in the darkness, in the wind, in the woods, in the sea,
in the streets. You have been the embodiment of every graceful
fancy that my mind has ever become acquainted with. The stones of
which the strongest London buildings are made, are not more real,
or more impossible to be displaced by your hands, than your
presence and influence have been to me, there and everywhere, and
will be. Estella, to the last hour of my life, you cannot choose
but remain part of my character, part of the little good in me,
part of the evil. But, in this separation I associate you only with
the good, and I will faithfully hold you to that always, for you
must have done me far more good than harm, let me feel now what
sharp distress I may. O God bless you, God forgive you"
In what ecstasy of unhappiness I got these broken words out of
myself, I don't know. The rhapsody welled up within me, like blood
from an inward wound, and gushed out. I held her hand to my lips
some lingering moments, and so I left her. But ever afterwards, I
remembered  and soon afterwards with stronger reason  that while
Estella looked at me merely with incredulous wonder, the spectral
figure of Miss Havisham, her hand still covering her heart, seemed
all resolved into a ghastly stare of pity and remorse.
All done, all gone So much was done and gone, that when I went out
at the gate, the light of the day seemed of a darker colour than
when I went in. For a while, I hid myself among some lanes and
bypaths, and then struck off to walk all the way to London. For, I
had by that time come to myself so far, as to consider that I could
not go back to the inn and see Drummle there that I could not bear
to sit upon the coach and be spoken to that I could do nothing
half so good for myself as tire myself out.
It was past midnight when I crossed London Bridge. Pursuing the
narrow intricacies of the streets which at that time tended
westward near the Middlesex shore of the river, my readiest access
to the Temple was close by the riverside, through Whitefriars. I
was not expected till tomorrow, but I had my keys, and, if Herbert
were gone to bed, could get to bed myself without disturbing him.
As it seldom happened that I came in at that Whitefriars gate after
the Temple was closed, and as I was very muddy and weary, I did not
take it ill that the nightporter examined me with much attention
as he held the gate a little way open for me to pass in. To help
his memory I mentioned my name.
"I was not quite sure, sir, but I thought so. Here's a note, sir.
The messenger that brought it, said would you be so good as read it
by my lantern?"
Much surprised by the request, I took the note. It was directed to
Philip Pip, Esquire, and on the top of the superscription were the
words, "PLEASE READ THIS, HERE." I opened it, the watchman holding
up his light, and read inside, in Wemmick's writing
"DON'T GO HOME."
Chapter 
Turning from the Temple gate as soon as I had read the warning, I
made the best of my way to Fleetstreet, and there got a late
hackney chariot and drove to the Hummums in Covent Garden. In those
times a bed was always to be got there at any hour of the night,
and the chamberlain, letting me in at his ready wicket, lighted the
candle next in order on his shelf, and showed me straight into the
bedroom next in order on his list. It was a sort of vault on the
ground floor at the back, with a despotic monster of a fourpost
bedstead in it, straddling over the whole place, putting one of his
arbitrary legs into the fireplace and another into the doorway,
and squeezing the wretched little washingstand in quite a Divinely
Righteous manner.
As I had asked for a nightlight, the chamberlain had brought me
in, before he left me, the good old constitutional rushlight of
those virtuous days  an object like the ghost of a walkingcane,
which instantly broke its back if it were touched, which nothing
could ever be lighted at, and which was placed in solitary
confinement at the bottom of a high tin tower, perforated with
round holes that made a staringly wideawake pattern on the walls.
When I had got into bed, and lay there footsore, weary, and
wretched, I found that I could no more close my own eyes than I
could close the eyes of this foolish Argus. And thus, in the gloom
and death of the night, we stared at one another.
What a doleful night How anxious, how dismal, how long There was
an inhospitable smell in the room, of cold soot and hot dust and,
as I looked up into the corners of the tester over my head, I
thought what a number of bluebottle flies from the butchers', and
earwigs from the market, and grubs from the country, must be
holding on up there, lying by for next summer. This led me to
speculate whether any of them ever tumbled down, and then I fancied
that I felt light falls on my face  a disagreeable turn of thought,
suggesting other and more objectionable approaches up my back. When
I had lain awake a little while, those extraordinary voices with
which silence teems, began to make themselves audible. The closet
whispered, the fireplace sighed, the little washingstand ticked,
and one guitarstring played occasionally in the chest of drawers.
At about the same time, the eyes on the wall acquired a new
expression, and in every one of those staring rounds I saw
written, DON'T GO HOME.
Whatever nightfancies and nightnoises crowded on me, they never
warded off this DON'T GO HOME. It plaited itself into whatever I
thought of, as a bodily pain would have done. Not long before, I
had read in the newspapers, how a gentleman unknown had come to the
Hummums in the night, and had gone to bed, and had destroyed
himself, and had been found in the morning weltering in blood. It
came into my head that he must have occupied this very vault of
mine, and I got out of bed to assure myself that there were no red
marks about then opened the door to look out into the passages,
and cheer myself with the companionship of a distant light, near
which I knew the chamberlain to be dozing. But all this time, why I
was not to go home, and what had happened at home, and when I
should go home, and whether Provis was safe at home, were questions
occupying my mind so busily, that one might have supposed there
could be no more room in it for any other theme. Even when I
thought of Estella, and how we had parted that day for ever, and
when I recalled all the circumstances of our parting, and all her
looks and tones, and the action of her fingers while she knitted 
even then I was pursuing, here and there and everywhere, the
caution Don't go home. When at last I dozed, in sheer exhaustion of
mind and body, it became a vast shadowy verb which I had to
conjugate. Imperative mood, present tense Do not thou go home, let
him not go home, let us not go home, do not ye or you go home, let
not them go home. Then, potentially I may not and I cannot go
home and I might not, could not, would not, and should not go
home until I felt that I was going distracted, and rolled over on
the pillow, and looked at the staring rounds upon the wall again.
I had left directions that I was to be called at seven for it was
plain that I must see Wemmick before seeing any one else, and
equally plain that this was a case in which his Walworth
sentiments, only, could be taken. It was a relief to get out of the
room where the night had been so miserable, and I needed no second
knocking at the door to startle me from my uneasy bed.
The Castle battlements arose upon my view at eight o'clock. The
little servant happening to be entering the fortress with two hot
rolls, I passed through the postern and crossed the drawbridge, in
her company, and so came without announcement into the presence of
Wemmick as he was making tea for himself and the Aged. An open door
afforded a perspective view of the Aged in bed.
"Halloa, Mr. Pip" said Wemmick. "You did come home, then?"
"Yes," I returned "but I didn't go home."
"That's all right," said he, rubbing his hands. "I left a note for
you at each of the Temple gates, on the chance. Which gate did you
come to?"
I told him.
"I'll go round to the others in the course of the day and destroy
the notes," said Wemmick "it's a good rule never to leave
documentary evidence if you can help it, because you don't know
when it may be put in. I'm going to take a liberty with you. 
Would you mind toasting this sausage for the Aged P.?"
I said I should be delighted to do it.
"Then you can go about your work, Mary Anne," said Wemmick to the
little servant "which leaves us to ourselves, don't you see, Mr.
Pip?" he added, winking, as she disappeared.
I thanked him for his friendship and caution, and our discourse
proceeded in a low tone, while I toasted the Aged's sausage and he
buttered the crumb of the Aged's roll.
"Now, Mr. Pip, you know," said Wemmick, "you and I understand one
another. We are in our private and personal capacities, and we have
been engaged in a confidential transaction before today. Official
sentiments are one thing. We are extra official."
I cordially assented. I was so very nervous, that I had already
lighted the Aged's sausage like a torch, and been obliged to blow
it out.
"I accidentally heard, yesterday morning," said Wemmick, "being in
a certain place where I once took you  even between you and me,
it's as well not to mention names when avoidable"
"Much better not," said I. "I understand you."
"I heard there by chance, yesterday morning," said Wemmick, "that a
certain person not altogether of uncolonial pursuits, and not
unpossessed of portable property  I don't know who it may really
be  we won't name this person"
"Not necessary," said I.
"  had made some little stir in a certain part of the world where
a good many people go, not always in gratification of their own
inclinations, and not quite irrespective of the government
expense"
In watching his face, I made quite a firework of the Aged's
sausage, and greatly discomposed both my own attention and
Wemmick's for which I apologized.
"  by disappearing from such place, and being no more heard of
thereabouts. From which," said Wemmick, "conjectures had been
raised and theories formed. I also heard that you at your chambers
in Garden Court, Temple, had been watched, and might be watched
again."
"By whom?" said I.
"I wouldn't go into that," said Wemmick, evasively, "it might clash
with official responsibilities. I heard it, as I have in my time
heard other curious things in the same place. I don't tell it you
on information received. I heard it."
He took the toastingfork and sausage from me as he spoke, and set
forth the Aged's breakfast neatly on a little tray. Previous to
placing it before him, he went into the Aged's room with a clean
white cloth, and tied the same under the old gentleman's chin, and
propped him up, and put his nightcap on one side, and gave him
quite a rakish air. Then, he placed his breakfast before him with
great care, and said, "All right, ain't you, Aged P.?" To which the
cheerful Aged replied, "All right, John, my boy, all right" As
there seemed to be a tacit understanding that the Aged was not in a
presentable state, and was therefore to be considered invisible, I
made a pretence of being in complete ignorance of these
proceedings.
"This watching of me at my chambers which I have once had reason
to suspect," I said to Wemmick when he came back, "is inseparable
from the person to whom you have adverted is it?"
Wemmick looked very serious. "I couldn't undertake to say that, of
my own knowledge. I mean, I couldn't undertake to say it was at
first. But it either is, or it will be, or it's in great danger of
being."
As I saw that he was restrained by fealty to Little Britain from
saying as much as he could, and as I knew with thankfulness to him
how far out of his way he went to say what he did, I could not
press him. But I told him, after a little meditation over the fire,
that I would like to ask him a question, subject to his answering
or not answering, as he deemed right, and sure that his course
would be right. He paused in his breakfast, and crossing his arms,
and pinching his shirtsleeves his notion of indoor comfort was to
sit without any coat, he nodded to me once, to put my question.
"You have heard of a man of bad character, whose true name is
Compeyson?"
He answered with one other nod.
"Is he living?"
One other nod.
"Is he in London?"
He gave me one other nod, compressed the postoffice exceedingly,
gave me one last nod, and went on with his breakfast.
"Now," said Wemmick, "questioning being over" which he emphasized
and repeated for my guidance "I come to what I did, after hearing
what I heard. I went to Garden Court to find you not finding you,
I went to Clarriker's to find Mr. Herbert."
"And him you found?" said I, with great anxiety.
"And him I found. Without mentioning any names or going into any
details, I gave him to understand that if he was aware of anybody 
Tom, Jack, or Richard  being about the chambers, or about the
immediate neighbourhood, he had better get Tom, Jack, or Richard,
out of the way while you were out of the way."
"He would be greatly puzzled what to do?"
"He was puzzled what to do not the less, because I gave him my
opinion that it was not safe to try to get Tom, Jack, or Richard,
too far out of the way at present. Mr. Pip, I'll tell you something.
Under existing circumstances there is no place like a great city
when you are once in it. Don't break cover too soon. Lie close.
Wait till things slacken, before you try the open, even for foreign
air."
I thanked him for his valuable advice, and asked him what Herbert
had done?
"Mr. Herbert," said Wemmick, "after being all of a heap for half an
hour, struck out a plan. He mentioned to me as a secret, that he is
courting a young lady who has, as no doubt you are aware, a
bedridden Pa. Which Pa, having been in the Purser line of life,
lies abed in a bowwindow where he can see the ships sail up and
down the river. You are acquainted with the young lady, most
probably?"
"Not personally," said I.
The truth was, that she had objected to me as an expensive
companion who did Herbert no good, and that, when Herbert had first
proposed to present me to her, she had received the proposal with
such very moderate warmth, that Herbert had felt himself obliged to
confide the state of the case to me, with a view to the lapse of a
little time before I made her acquaintance. When I had begun to
advance Herbert's prospects by Stealth, I had been able to bear
this with cheerful philosophy he and his affianced, for their
part, had naturally not been very anxious to introduce a third
person into their interviews and thus, although I was assured that
I had risen in Clara's esteem, and although the young lady and I
had long regularly interchanged messages and remembrances by
Herbert, I had never seen her. However, I did not trouble Wemmick
with these particulars.
"The house with the bowwindow," said Wemmick, "being by the
riverside, down the Pool there between Limehouse and Greenwich,
and being kept, it seems, by a very respectable widow who has a
furnished upper floor to let, Mr. Herbert put it to me, what did I
think of that as a temporary tenement for Tom, Jack, or Richard?
Now, I thought very well of it, for three reasons I'll give you.
That is to say. Firstly. It's altogether out of all your beats, and
is well away from the usual heap of streets great and small.
Secondly. Without going near it yourself, you could always hear of
the safety of Tom, Jack, or Richard, through Mr. Herbert. Thirdly.
After a while and when it might be prudent, if you should want to
slip Tom, Jack, or Richard, on board a foreign packetboat, there
he is  ready."
Much comforted by these considerations, I thanked Wemmick again and
again, and begged him to proceed.
"Well, sir Mr. Herbert threw himself into the business with a will,
and by nine o'clock last night he housed Tom, Jack, or Richard 
whichever it may be  you and I don't want to know  quite
successfully. At the old lodgings it was understood that he was
summoned to Dover, and in fact he was taken down the Dover road and
cornered out of it. Now, another great advantage of all this, is,
that it was done without you, and when, if any one was concerning
himself about your movements, you must be known to be ever so many
miles off and quite otherwise engaged. This diverts suspicion and
confuses it and for the same reason I recommended that even if you
came back last night, you should not go home. It brings in more
confusion, and you want confusion."
Wemmick, having finished his breakfast, here looked at his watch,
and began to get his coat on.
"And now, Mr. Pip," said he, with his hands still in the sleeves, "I
have probably done the most I can do but if I can ever do more 
from a Walworth point of view, and in a strictly private and
personal capacity  I shall be glad to do it. Here's the address.
There can be no harm in your going here tonight and seeing for
yourself that all is well with Tom, Jack, or Richard, before you go
home  which is another reason for your not going home last night.
But after you have gone home, don't go back here. You are very
welcome, I am sure, Mr. Pip" his hands were now out of his sleeves,
and I was shaking them "and let me finally impress one important
point upon you." He laid his hands upon my shoulders, and added in
a solemn whisper "Avail yourself of this evening to lay hold of
his portable property. You don't know what may happen to him. Don't
let anything happen to the portable property."
Quite despairing of making my mind clear to Wemmick on this point,
I forbore to try.
"Time's up," said Wemmick, "and I must be off. If you had nothing
more pressing to do than to keep here till dark, that's what I
should advise. You look very much worried, and it would do you good
to have a perfectly quiet day with the Aged  he'll be up presently
and a little bit of  you remember the pig?"
"Of course," said I.
"Well and a little bit of him. That sausage you toasted was his,
and he was in all respects a firstrater. Do try him, if it is only
for old acquaintance sake. Goodbye, Aged Parent" in a cheery
shout.
"All right, John all right, my boy" piped the old man from
within.
I soon fell asleep before Wemmick's fire, and the Aged and I
enjoyed one another's society by falling asleep before it more or
less all day. We had loin of pork for dinner, and greens grown on
the estate, and I nodded at the Aged with a good intention whenever
I failed to do it drowsily. When it was quite dark, I left the Aged
preparing the fire for toast and I inferred from the number of
teacups, as well as from his glances at the two little doors in the
wall, that Miss Skiffins was expected.
Chapter 
Eight o'clock had struck before I got into the air that was
scented, not disagreeably, by the chips and shavings of the
longshore boatbuilders, and mast oar and block makers. All that
waterside region of the upper and lower Pool below Bridge, was
unknown ground to me, and when I struck down by the river, I found
that the spot I wanted was not where I had supposed it to be, and
was anything but easy to find. It was called Mill Pond Bank,
Chinks's Basin and I had no other guide to Chinks's Basin than the
Old Green Copper RopeWalk.
It matters not what stranded ships repairing in dry docks I lost
myself among, what old hulls of ships in course of being knocked to
pieces, what ooze and slime and other dregs of tide, what yards of
shipbuilders and shipbreakers, what rusty anchors blindly biting
into the ground though for years off duty, what mountainous country
of accumulated casks and timber, how many ropewalks that were not
the Old Green Copper. After several times falling short of my
destination and as often overshooting it, I came unexpectedly
round a corner, upon Mill Pond Bank. It was a fresh kind of place,
all circumstances considered, where the wind from the river had
room to turn itself round and there were two or three trees in it,
and there was the stump of a ruined windmill, and there was the Old
Green Copper RopeWalk  whose long and narrow vista I could trace
in the moonlight, along a series of wooden frames set in the
ground, that looked like superannuated haymakingrakes which had
grown old and lost most of their teeth.
Selecting from the few queer houses upon Mill Pond Bank, a house
with a wooden front and three stories of bowwindow not
baywindow, which is another thing, I looked at the plate upon the
door, and read there, Mrs. Whimple. That being the name I wanted, I
knocked, and an elderly woman of a pleasant and thriving appearance
responded. She was immediately deposed, however, by Herbert, who
silently led me into the parlour and shut the door. It was an odd
sensation to see his very familiar face established quite at home
in that very unfamiliar room and region and I found myself looking
at him, much as I looked at the cornercupboard with the glass and
china, the shells upon the chimneypiece, and the coloured
engravings on the wall, representing the death of Captain Cook, a
shiplaunch, and his Majesty King George the Third in a
statecoachman's wig, leatherbreeches, and topboots, on the
terrace at Windsor.
"All is well, Handel," said Herbert, "and he is quite satisfied,
though eager to see you. My dear girl is with her father and if
you'll wait till she comes down, I'll make you known to her, and
then we'll go upstairs.  That's her father."
I had become aware of an alarming growling overhead, and had
probably expressed the fact in my countenance.
"I am afraid he is a sad old rascal," said Herbert, smiling, "but I
have never seen him. Don't you smell rum? He is always at it."
"At rum?" said I.
"Yes," returned Herbert, "and you may suppose how mild it makes his
gout. He persists, too, in keeping all the provisions upstairs in
his room, and serving them out. He keeps them on shelves over his
head, and will weigh them all. His room must be like a chandler's
shop."
While he thus spoke, the growling noise became a prolonged roar,
and then died away.
"What else can be the consequence," said Herbert, in explanation,
"if he will cut the cheese? A man with the gout in his right hand 
and everywhere else  can't expect to get through a Double
Gloucester without hurting himself."
He seemed to have hurt himself very much, for he gave another
furious roar.
"To have Provis for an upper lodger is quite a godsend to Mrs.
Whimple," said Herbert, "for of course people in general won't
stand that noise. A curious place, Handel isn't it?"
It was a curious place, indeed but remarkably well kept and clean.
"Mrs. Whimple," said Herbert, when I told him so, "is the best of
housewives, and I really do not know what my Clara would do without
her motherly help. For, Clara has no mother of her own, Handel, and
no relation in the world but old Gruffandgrim."
"Surely that's not his name, Herbert?"
"No, no," said Herbert, "that's my name for him. His name is Mr.
Barley. But what a blessing it is for the son of my father and
mother, to love a girl who has no relations, and who can never
bother herself, or anybody else, about her family"
Herbert had told me on former occasions, and now reminded me, that
he first knew Miss Clara Barley when she was completing her
education at an establishment at Hammersmith, and that on her being
recalled home to nurse her father, he and she had confided their
affection to the motherly Mrs. Whimple, by whom it had been fostered
and regulated with equal kindness and discretion, ever since. It
was understood that nothing of a tender nature could possibly be
confided to old Barley, by reason of his being totally unequal to
the consideration of any subject more psychological than Gout, Rum,
and Purser's stores.
As we were thus conversing in a low tone while Old Barley's
sustained growl vibrated in the beam that crossed the ceiling, the
room door opened, and a very pretty slight darkeyed girl of twenty
or so, came in with a basket in her hand whom Herbert tenderly
relieved of the basket, and presented blushing, as "Clara." She
really was a most charming girl, and might have passed for a
captive fairy, whom that truculent Ogre, Old Barley, had pressed
into his service.
"Look here," said Herbert, showing me the basket, with a
compassionate and tender smile after we had talked a little
"here's poor Clara's supper, served out every night. Here's her
allowance of bread, and here's her slice of cheese, and here's her
rum  which I drink. This is Mr. Barley's breakfast for tomorrow,
served out to be cooked. Two mutton chops, three potatoes, some
split peas, a little flour, two ounces of butter, a pinch of salt,
and all this black pepper. It's stewed up together, and taken hot,
and it's a nice thing for the gout, I should think"
There was something so natural and winning in Clara's resigned way
of looking at these stores in detail, as Herbert pointed them out,
and something so confiding, loving, and innocent, in her modest
manner of yielding herself to Herbert's embracing arm  and
something so gentle in her, so much needing protection on Mill Pond
Bank, by Chinks's Basin, and the Old Green Copper RopeWalk, with
Old Barley growling in the beam  that I would not have undone the
engagement between her and Herbert, for all the money in the
pocketbook I had never opened.
I was looking at her with pleasure and admiration, when suddenly
the growl swelled into a roar again, and a frightful bumping noise
was heard above, as if a giant with a wooden leg were trying to
bore it through the ceiling to come to us. Upon this Clara said to
Herbert, "Papa wants me, darling" and ran away.
"There is an unconscionable old shark for you" said Herbert. "What
do you suppose he wants now, Handel?"
"I don't know," said I. "Something to drink?"
"That's it" cried Herbert, as if I had made a guess of
extraordinary merit. "He keeps his grog readymixed in a little tub
on the table. Wait a moment, and you'll hear Clara lift him up to
take some.  There he goes" Another roar, with a prolonged shake
at the end. "Now," said Herbert, as it was succeeded by silence,
"he's drinking. Now," said Herbert, as the growl resounded in the
beam once more, "he's down again on his back"
Clara returned soon afterwards, and Herbert accompanied me
upstairs to see our charge. As we passed Mr. Barley's door, he was
heard hoarsely muttering within, in a strain that rose and fell
like wind, the following Refrain in which I substitute good wishes
for something quite the reverse.
"Ahoy Bless your eyes, here's old Bill Barley. Here's old Bill
Barley, bless your eyes. Here's old Bill Barley on the flat of his
back, by the Lord. Lying on the flat of his back, like a drifting
old dead flounder, here's your old Bill Barley, bless your eyes.
Ahoy Bless you."
In this strain of consolation, Herbert informed me the invisible
Barley would commune with himself by the day and night together
often while it was light, having, at the same time, one eye at a
telescope which was fitted on his bed for the convenience of
sweeping the river.
In his two cabin rooms at the top of the house, which were fresh
and airy, and in which Mr. Barley was less audible than below, I
found Provis comfortably settled. He expressed no alarm, and seemed
to feel none that was worth mentioning but it struck me that he
was softened  indefinably, for I could not have said how, and could
never afterwards recall how when I tried but certainly.
The opportunity that the day's rest had given me for reflection,
had resulted in my fully determining to say nothing to him
respecting Compeyson. For anything I knew, his animosity towards
the man might otherwise lead to his seeking him out and rushing on
his own destruction. Therefore, when Herbert and I sat down with
him by his fire, I asked him first of all whether he relied on
Wemmick's judgment and sources of information?
"Ay, ay, dear boy" he answered, with a grave nod, "Jaggers knows."
"Then, I have talked with Wemmick," said I, "and have come to tell
you what caution he gave me and what advice."
This I did accurately, with the reservation just mentioned and I
told him how Wemmick had heard, in Newgate prison whether from
officers or prisoners I could not say, that he was under some
suspicion, and that my chambers had been watched how Wemmick had
recommended his keeping close for a time, and my keeping away from
him and what Wemmick had said about getting him abroad. I added,
that of course, when the time came, I should go with him, or should
follow close upon him, as might be safest in Wemmick's judgment.
What was to follow that, I did not touch upon neither indeed was I
at all clear or comfortable about it in my own mind, now that I saw
him in that softer condition, and in declared peril for my sake. As
to altering my way of living, by enlarging my expenses, I put it to
him whether in our present unsettled and difficult circumstances,
it would not be simply ridiculous, if it were no worse?
He could not deny this, and indeed was very reasonable throughout.
His coming back was a venture, he said, and he had always known it
to be a venture. He would do nothing to make it a desperate
venture, and he had very little fear of his safety with such good
help.
Herbert, who had been looking at the fire and pondering, here said
that something had come into his thoughts arising out of Wemmick's
suggestion, which it might be worth while to pursue. "We are both
good watermen, Handel, and could take him down the river ourselves
when the right time comes. No boat would then be hired for the
purpose, and no boatmen that would save at least a chance of
suspicion, and any chance is worth saving. Never mind the season
don't you think it might be a good thing if you began at once to
keep a boat at the Temple stairs, and were in the habit of rowing
up and down the river? You fall into that habit, and then who
notices or minds? Do it twenty or fifty times, and there is nothing
special in your doing it the twentyfirst or fiftyfirst."
I liked this scheme, and Provis was quite elated by it. We agreed
that it should be carried into execution, and that Provis should
never recognize us if we came below Bridge and rowed past Mill Pond
Bank. But, we further agreed that he should pull down the blind in
that part of his window which gave upon the east, whenever he saw
us and all was right.
Our conference being now ended, and everything arranged, I rose to
go remarking to Herbert that he and I had better not go home
together, and that I would take half an hour's start of him. "I
don't like to leave you here," I said to Provis, "though I cannot
doubt your being safer here than near me. Goodbye"
"Dear boy," he answered, clasping my hands, "I don't know when we
may meet again, and I don't like Goodbye. Say Good Night"
"Good night Herbert will go regularly between us, and when the
time comes you may be certain I shall be ready. Good night, Good
night"
We thought it best that he should stay in his own rooms, and we
left him on the landing outside his door, holding a light over the
stairrail to light us down stairs. Looking back at him, I thought
of the first night of his return when our positions were reversed,
and when I little supposed my heart could ever be as heavy and
anxious at parting from him as it was now.
Old Barley was growling and swearing when we repassed his door,
with no appearance of having ceased or of meaning to cease. When we
got to the foot of the stairs, I asked Herbert whether he had
preserved the name of Provis. He replied, certainly not, and that
the lodger was Mr. Campbell. He also explained that the utmost known
of Mr. Campbell there, was, that he Herbert had Mr. Campbell
consigned to him, and felt a strong personal interest in his being
well cared for, and living a secluded life. So, when we went into
the parlour where Mrs. Whimple and Clara were seated at work, I said
nothing of my own interest in Mr. Campbell, but kept it to myself.
When I had taken leave of the pretty gentle darkeyed girl, and of
the motherly woman who had not outlived her honest sympathy with a
little affair of true love, I felt as if the Old Green Copper
RopeWalk had grown quite a different place. Old Barley might be as
old as the hills, and might swear like a whole field of troopers,
but there were redeeming youth and trust and hope enough in
Chinks's Basin to fill it to overflowing. And then I thought of
Estella, and of our parting, and went home very sadly.
All things were as quiet in the Temple as ever I had seen them. The
windows of the rooms on that side, lately occupied by Provis, were
dark and still, and there was no lounger in Garden Court. I walked
past the fountain twice or thrice before I descended the steps that
were between me and my rooms, but I was quite alone. Herbert coming
to my bedside when he came in  for I went straight to bed,
dispirited and fatigued  made the same report. Opening one of the
windows after that, he looked out into the moonlight, and told me
that the pavement was a solemnly empty as the pavement of any
Cathedral at that same hour.
Next day, I set myself to get the boat. It was soon done, and the
boat was brought round to the Temple stairs, and lay where I could
reach her within a minute or two. Then, I began to go out as for
training and practice sometimes alone, sometimes with Herbert. I
was often out in cold, rain, and sleet, but nobody took much note
of me after I had been out a few times. At first, I kept above
Blackfriars Bridge but as the hours of the tide changed, I took
towards London Bridge. It was Old London Bridge in those days, and
at certain states of the tide there was a race and fall of water
there which gave it a bad reputation. But I knew well enough how to
"shoot" the bridge after seeing it done, and so began to row about
among the shipping in the Pool, and down to Erith. The first time I
passed Mill Pond Bank, Herbert and I were pulling a pair of oars
and, both in going and returning, we saw the blind towards the east
come down. Herbert was rarely there less frequently than three
times in a week, and he never brought me a single word of
intelligence that was at all alarming. Still, I knew that there was
cause for alarm, and I could not get rid of the notion of being
watched. Once received, it is a haunting idea how many undesigning
persons I suspected of watching me, it would be hard to calculate.
In short, I was always full of fears for the rash man who was in
hiding. Herbert had sometimes said to me that he found it pleasant
to stand at one of our windows after dark, when the tide was
running down, and to think that it was flowing, with everything it
bore, towards Clara. But I thought with dread that it was flowing
towards Magwitch, and that any black mark on its surface might be
his pursuers, going swiftly, silently, and surely, to take him.
Chapter 
Some weeks passed without bringing any change. We waited for
Wemmick, and he made no sign. If I had never known him out of
Little Britain, and had never enjoyed the privilege of being on a
familiar footing at the Castle, I might have doubted him not so
for a moment, knowing him as I did.
My worldly affairs began to wear a gloomy appearance, and I was
pressed for money by more than one creditor. Even I myself began to
know the want of money I mean of ready money in my own pocket,
and to relieve it by converting some easily spared articles of
jewellery into cash. But I had quite determined that it would be a
heartless fraud to take more money from my patron in the existing
state of my uncertain thoughts and plans. Therefore, I had sent him
the unopened pocketbook by Herbert, to hold in his own keeping,
and I felt a kind of satisfaction  whether it was a false kind or
a true, I hardly know  in not having profited by his generosity
since his revelation of himself.
As the time wore on, an impression settled heavily upon me that
Estella was married. Fearful of having it confirmed, though it was
all but a conviction, I avoided the newspapers, and begged Herbert
to whom I had confided the circumstances of our last interview
never to speak of her to me. Why I hoarded up this last wretched
little rag of the robe of hope that was rent and given to the
winds, how do I know Why did you who read this, commit that not
dissimilar inconsistency of your own, last year, last month, last
week?
It was an unhappy life that I lived, and its one dominant anxiety,
towering over all its other anxieties like a high mountain above a
range of mountains, never disappeared from my view. Still, no new
cause for fear arose. Let me start from my bed as I would, with the
terror fresh upon me that he was discovered let me sit listening
as I would, with dread, for Herbert's returning step at night, lest
it should be fleeter than ordinary, and winged with evil news for
all that, and much more to like purpose, the round of things went
on. Condemned to inaction and a state of constant restlessness and
suspense, I rowed about in my boat, and waited, waited, waited, as
I best could.
There were states of the tide when, having been down the river, I
could not get back through the eddychafed arches and starlings of
old London Bridge then, I left my boat at a wharf near the Custom
House, to be brought up afterwards to the Temple stairs. I was not
averse to doing this, as it served to make me and my boat a
commoner incident among the waterside people there. From this
slight occasion, sprang two meetings that I have now to tell of.
One afternoon, late in the month of February, I came ashore at the
wharf at dusk. I had pulled down as far as Greenwich with the ebb
tide, and had turned with the tide. It had been a fine bright day,
but had become foggy as the sun dropped, and I had had to feel my
way back among the shipping, pretty carefully. Both in going and
returning, I had seen the signal in his window, All well.
As it was a raw evening and I was cold, I thought I would comfort
myself with dinner at once and as I had hours of dejection and
solitude before me if I went home to the Temple, I thought I would
afterwards go to the play. The theatre where Mr. Wopsle had achieved
his questionable triumph, was in that waterside neighbourhood it
is nowhere now, and to that theatre I resolved to go. I was aware
that Mr. Wopsle had not succeeded in reviving the Drama, but, on the
contrary, had rather partaken of its decline. He had been ominously
heard of, through the playbills, as a faithful Black, in connexion
with a little girl of noble birth, and a monkey. And Herbert had
seen him as a predatory Tartar of comic propensities, with a face
like a red brick, and an outrageous hat all over bells.
I dined at what Herbert and I used to call a Geographical
chophouse  where there were maps of the world in porterpot rims
on every halfyard of the tablecloths, and charts of gravy on
every one of the knives  to this day there is scarcely a single
chophouse within the Lord Mayor's dominions which is not
Geographical  and wore out the time in dozing over crumbs, staring
at gas, and baking in a hot blast of dinners. Byandby, I roused
myself and went to the play.
There, I found a virtuous boatswain in his Majesty's service  a
most excellent man, though I could have wished his trousers not
quite so tight in some places and not quite so loose in others 
who knocked all the little men's hats over their eyes, though he
was very generous and brave, and who wouldn't hear of anybody's
paying taxes, though he was very patriotic. He had a bag of money
in his pocket, like a pudding in the cloth, and on that property
married a young person in bedfurniture, with great rejoicings the
whole population of Portsmouth nine in number at the last Census
turning out on the beach, to rub their own hands and shake
everybody else's, and sing "Fill, fill" A certain
darkcomplexioned Swab, however, who wouldn't fill, or do anything
else that was proposed to him, and whose heart was openly stated
by the boatswain to be as black as his figurehead, proposed to
two other Swabs to get all mankind into difficulties which was so
effectually done the Swab family having considerable political
influence that it took half the evening to set things right, and
then it was only brought about through an honest little grocer with
a white hat, black gaiters, and red nose, getting into a clock,
with a gridiron, and listening, and coming out, and knocking
everybody down from behind with the gridiron whom he couldn't
confute with what he had overheard. This led to Mr. Wopsle's who
had never been heard of before coming in with a star and garter
on, as a plenipotentiary of great power direct from the Admiralty,
to say that the Swabs were all to go to prison on the spot, and
that he had brought the boatswain down the Union Jack, as a slight
acknowledgment of his public services. The boatswain, unmanned for
the first time, respectfully dried his eyes on the Jack, and then
cheering up and addressing Mr. Wopsle as Your Honour, solicited
permission to take him by the fin. Mr. Wopsle conceding his fin with
a gracious dignity, was immediately shoved into a dusty corner
while everybody danced a hornpipe and from that corner, surveying
the public with a discontented eye, became aware of me.
The second piece was the last new grand comic Christmas pantomime,
in the first scene of which, it pained me to suspect that I
detected Mr. Wopsle with red worsted legs under a highly magnified
phosphoric countenance and a shock of red curtainfringe for his
hair, engaged in the manufacture of thunderbolts in a mine, and
displaying great cowardice when his gigantic master came home very
hoarse to dinner. But he presently presented himself under
worthier circumstances for, the Genius of Youthful Love being in
want of assistance  on account of the parental brutality of an
ignorant farmer who opposed the choice of his daughter's heart, by
purposely falling upon the object, in a flour sack, out of the
firstfloor window  summoned a sententious Enchanter and he,
coming up from the antipodes rather unsteadily, after an apparently
violent journey, proved to be Mr. Wopsle in a highcrowned hat, with
a necromantic work in one volume under his arm. The business of
this enchanter on earth, being principally to be talked at, sung
at, butted at, danced at, and flashed at with fires of various
colours, he had a good deal of time on his hands. And I observed
with great surprise, that he devoted it to staring in my direction
as if he were lost in amazement.
There was something so remarkable in the increasing glare of Mr.
Wopsle's eye, and he seemed to be turning so many things over in
his mind and to grow so confused, that I could not make it out. I
sat thinking of it, long after he had ascended to the clouds in a
large watchcase, and still I could not make it out. I was still
thinking of it when I came out of the theatre an hour afterwards,
and found him waiting for me near the door.
"How do you do?" said I, shaking hands with him as we turned down
the street together. "I saw that you saw me."
"Saw you, Mr. Pip" he returned. "Yes, of course I saw you. But who
else was there?"
"Who else?"
"It is the strangest thing," said Mr. Wopsle, drifting into his lost
look again "and yet I could swear to him."
Becoming alarmed, I entreated Mr. Wopsle to explain his meaning.
"Whether I should have noticed him at first but for your being
there," said Mr. Wopsle, going on in the same lost way, "I can't be
positive yet I think I should."
Involuntarily I looked round me, as I was accustomed to look round
me when I went home for, these mysterious words gave me a chill.
"Oh He can't be in sight," said Mr. Wopsle. "He went out, before I
went off, I saw him go."
Having the reason that I had, for being suspicious, I even
suspected this poor actor. I mistrusted a design to entrap me into
some admission. Therefore, I glanced at him as we walked on
together, but said nothing.
"I had a ridiculous fancy that he must be with you, Mr. Pip, till I
saw that you were quite unconscious of him, sitting behind you
there, like a ghost."
My former chill crept over me again, but I was resolved not to
speak yet, for it was quite consistent with his words that he might
be set on to induce me to connect these references with Provis. Of
course, I was perfectly sure and safe that Provis had not been
there.
"I dare say you wonder at me, Mr. Pip indeed I see you do. But it
is so very strange You'll hardly believe what I am going to tell
you. I could hardly believe it myself, if you told me."
"Indeed?" said I.
"No, indeed. Mr. Pip, you remember in old times a certain Christmas
Day, when you were quite a child, and I dined at Gargery's, and
some soldiers came to the door to get a pair of handcuffs mended?"
"I remember it very well."
"And you remember that there was a chase after two convicts, and
that we joined in it, and that Gargery took you on his back, and
that I took the lead and you kept up with me as well as you could?"
"I remember it all very well." Better than he thought  except the
last clause.
"And you remember that we came up with the two in a ditch, and that
there was a scuffle between them, and that one of them had been
severely handled and much mauled about the face, by the other?"
"I see it all before me."
"And that the soldiers lighted torches, and put the two in the
centre, and that we went on to see the last of them, over the black
marshes, with the torchlight shining on their faces  I am
particular about that with the torchlight shining on their faces,
when there was an outer ring of dark night all about us?"
"Yes," said I. "I remember all that."
"Then, Mr. Pip, one of those two prisoners sat behind you tonight. I
saw him over your shoulder."
"Steady" I thought. I asked him then, "Which of the two do you
suppose you saw?"
"The one who had been mauled," he answered readily, "and I'll swear
I saw him The more I think of him, the more certain I am of him."
"This is very curious" said I, with the best assumption I could
put on, of its being nothing more to me. "Very curious indeed"
I cannot exaggerate the enhanced disquiet into which this
conversation threw me, or the special and peculiar terror I felt at
Compeyson's having been behind me "like a ghost." For, if he had
ever been out of my thoughts for a few moments together since the
hiding had begun, it was in those very moments when he was closest
to me and to think that I should be so unconscious and off my
guard after all my care, was as if I had shut an avenue of a
hundred doors to keep him out, and then had found him at my elbow.
I could not doubt either that he was there, because I was there,
and that however slight an appearance of danger there might be
about us, danger was always near and active.
I put such questions to Mr. Wopsle as, When did the man come in? He
could not tell me that he saw me, and over my shoulder he saw the
man. It was not until he had seen him for some time that he began
to identify him but he had from the first vaguely associated him
with me, and known him as somehow belonging to me in the old
village time. How was he dressed? Prosperously, but not noticeably
otherwise he thought, in black. Was his face at all disfigured?
No, he believed not. I believed not, too, for, although in my
brooding state I had taken no especial notice of the people behind
me, I thought it likely that a face at all disfigured would have
attracted my attention.
When Mr. Wopsle had imparted to me all that he could recall or I
extract, and when I had treated him to a little appropriate
refreshment after the fatigues of the evening, we parted. It was
between twelve and one o'clock when I reached the Temple, and the
gates were shut. No one was near me when I went in and went home.
Herbert had come in, and we held a very serious council by the
fire. But there was nothing to be done, saving to communicate to
Wemmick what I had that night found out, and to remind him that we
waited for his hint. As I thought that I might compromise him if I
went too often to the Castle, I made this communication by letter.
I wrote it before I went to bed, and went out and posted it and
again no one was near me. Herbert and I agreed that we could do
nothing else but be very cautious. And we were very cautious indeed
more cautious than before, if that were possible  and I for my
part never went near Chinks's Basin, except when I rowed by, and
then I only looked at Mill Pond Bank as I looked at anything else.
Chapter 
The second of the two meetings referred to in the last chapter,
occurred about a week after the first. I had again left my boat at
the wharf below Bridge the time was an hour earlier in the
afternoon and, undecided where to dine, I had strolled up into
Cheapside, and was strolling along it, surely the most unsettled
person in all the busy concourse, when a large hand was laid upon
my shoulder, by some one overtaking me. It was Mr. Jaggers's hand,
and he passed it through my arm.
"As we are going in the same direction, Pip, we may walk together.
Where are you bound for?"
"For the Temple, I think," said I.
"Don't you know?" said Mr. Jaggers.
"Well," I returned, glad for once to get the better of him in
crossexamination, "I do not know, for I have not made up my mind."
"You are going to dine?" said Mr. Jaggers. "You don't mind admitting
that, I suppose?"
"No," I returned, "I don't mind admitting that."
"And are not engaged?"
"I don't mind admitting also, that I am not engaged."
"Then," said Mr. Jaggers, "come and dine with me."
I was going to excuse myself, when he added, "Wemmick's coming."
So, I changed my excuse into an acceptance  the few words I had
uttered, serving for the beginning of either  and we went along
Cheapside and slanted off to Little Britain, while the lights were
springing up brilliantly in the shop windows, and the street
lamplighters, scarcely finding ground enough to plant their
ladders on in the midst of the afternoon's bustle, were skipping up
and down and running in and out, opening more red eyes in the
gathering fog than my rushlight tower at the Hummums had opened
white eyes in the ghostly wall.
At the office in Little Britain there was the usual letterwriting,
handwashing, candlesnuffing, and safelocking, that closed the
business of the day. As I stood idle by Mr. Jaggers's fire, its
rising and falling flame made the two casts on the shelf look as if
they were playing a diabolical game at bopeep with me while the
pair of coarse fat office candles that dimly lighted Mr. Jaggers as
he wrote in a corner, were decorated with dirty windingsheets, as
if in remembrance of a host of hanged clients.
We went to Gerrardstreet, all three together, in a hackney coach
and as soon as we got there, dinner was served. Although I should
not have thought of making, in that place, the most distant
reference by so much as a look to Wemmick's Walworth sentiments,
yet I should have had no objection to catching his eye now and then
in a friendly way. But it was not to be done. He turned his eyes on
Mr. Jaggers whenever he raised them from the table, and was as dry
and distant to me as if there were twin Wemmicks and this was the
wrong one.
"Did you send that note of Miss Havisham's to Mr. Pip, Wemmick?" Mr.
Jaggers asked, soon after we began dinner.
"No, sir," returned Wemmick "it was going by post, when you
brought Mr. Pip into the office. Here it is." He handed it to his
principal, instead of to me.
"It's a note of two lines, Pip," said Mr. Jaggers, handing it on,
"sent up to me by Miss Havisham, on account of her not being sure
of your address. She tells me that she wants to see you on a little
matter of business you mentioned to her. You'll go down?"
"Yes," said I, casting my eyes over the note, which was exactly in
those terms.
"When do you think of going down?"
"I have an impending engagement," said I, glancing at Wemmick, who
was putting fish into the postoffice, "that renders me rather
uncertain of my time. At once, I think."
"If Mr. Pip has the intention of going at once," said Wemmick to Mr.
Jaggers, "he needn't write an answer, you know."
Receiving this as an intimation that it was best not to delay, I
settled that I would go tomorrow, and said so. Wemmick drank a
glass of wine and looked with a grimly satisfied air at Mr. Jaggers,
but not at me.
"So, Pip Our friend the Spider," said Mr. Jaggers, "has played his
cards. He has won the pool."
It was as much as I could do to assent.
"Hah He is a promising fellow  in his way  but he may not have
it all his own way. The stronger will win in the end, but the
stronger has to be found out first. If he should turn to, and beat
her"
"Surely," I interrupted, with a burning face and heart, "you do not
seriously think that he is scoundrel enough for that, Mr. Jaggers?"
"I didn't say so, Pip. I am putting a case. If he should turn to
and beat her, he may possibly get the strength on his side if it
should be a question of intellect, he certainly will not. It would
be chance work to give an opinion how a fellow of that sort will
turn out in such circumstances, because it's a tossup between two
results."
"May I ask what they are?"
"A fellow like our friend the Spider," answered Mr. Jaggers, "either
beats, or cringes. He may cringe and growl, or cringe and not
growl but he either beats or cringes. Ask Wemmick his opinion."
"Either beats or cringes," said Wemmick, not at all addressing
himself to me.
"So, here's to Mrs. Bentley Drummle," said Mr. Jaggers, taking a
decanter of choicer wine from his dumbwaiter, and filling for each
of us and for himself, "and may the question of supremacy be
settled to the lady's satisfaction To the satisfaction of the lady
and the gentleman, it never will be. Now, Molly, Molly, Molly,
Molly, how slow you are today"
She was at his elbow when he addressed her, putting a dish upon the
table. As she withdrew her hands from it, she fell back a step or
two, nervously muttering some excuse. And a certain action of her
fingers as she spoke arrested my attention.
"What's the matter?" said Mr. Jaggers.
"Nothing. Only the subject we were speaking of," said I, "was
rather painful to me."
The action of her fingers was like the action of knitting. She
stood looking at her master, not understanding whether she was free
to go, or whether he had more to say to her and would call her back
if she did go. Her look was very intent. Surely, I had seen exactly
such eyes and such hands, on a memorable occasion very lately
He dismissed her, and she glided out of the room. But she remained
before me, as plainly as if she were still there. I looked at those
hands, I looked at those eyes, I looked at that flowing hair and I
compared them with other hands, other eyes, other hair, that I knew
of, and with what those might be after twenty years of a brutal
husband and a stormy life. I looked again at those hands and eyes
of the housekeeper, and thought of the inexplicable feeling that
had come over me when I last walked  not alone  in the ruined
garden, and through the deserted brewery. I thought how the same
feeling had come back when I saw a face looking at me, and a hand
waving to me, from a stagecoach window and how it had come back
again and had flashed about me like Lightning, when I had passed in
a carriage  not alone  through a sudden glare of light in a dark
street. I thought how one link of association had helped that
identification in the theatre, and how such a link, wanting before,
had been riveted for me now, when I had passed by a chance swift
from Estella's name to the fingers with their knitting action, and
the attentive eyes. And I felt absolutely certain that this woman
was Estella's mother.
Mr. Jaggers had seen me with Estella, and was not likely to have
missed the sentiments I had been at no pains to conceal. He nodded
when I said the subject was painful to me, clapped me on the back,
put round the wine again, and went on with his dinner.
Only twice more, did the housekeeper reappear, and then her stay in
the room was very short, and Mr. Jaggers was sharp with her. But her
hands were Estella's hands, and her eyes were Estella's eyes, and
if she had reappeared a hundred times I could have been neither
more sure nor less sure that my conviction was the truth.
It was a dull evening, for Wemmick drew his wine when it came
round, quite as a matter of business  just as he might have drawn
his salary when that came round  and with his eyes on his chief,
sat in a state of perpetual readiness for crossexamination. As to
the quantity of wine, his postoffice was as indifferent and ready
as any other postoffice for its quantity of letters. From my point
of view, he was the wrong twin all the time, and only externally
like the Wemmick of Walworth.
We took our leave early, and left together. Even when we were
groping among Mr. Jaggers's stock of boots for our hats, I felt that
the right twin was on his way back and we had not gone half a
dozen yards down Gerrardstreet in the Walworth direction before I
found that I was walking arminarm with the right twin, and that
the wrong twin had evaporated into the evening air.
"Well" said Wemmick, "that's over He's a wonderful man, without
his living likeness but I feel that I have to screw myself up when
I dine with him  and I dine more comfortably unscrewed."
I felt that this was a good statement of the case, and told him so.
"Wouldn't say it to anybody but yourself," he answered. "I know
that what is said between you and me, goes no further."
I asked him if he had ever seen Miss Havisham's adopted daughter,
Mrs. Bentley Drummle? He said no. To avoid being too abrupt, I then
spoke of the Aged, and of Miss Skiffins. He looked rather sly when
I mentioned Miss Skiffins, and stopped in the street to blow his
nose, with a roll of the head and a flourish not quite free from
latent boastfulness.
"Wemmick," said I, "do you remember telling me before I first went
to Mr. Jaggers's private house, to notice that housekeeper?"
"Did I?" he replied. "Ah, I dare say I did. Deuce take me," he
added, suddenly, "I know I did. I find I am not quite unscrewed
yet."
"A wild beast tamed, you called her."
"And what do you call her?"
"The same. How did Mr. Jaggers tame her, Wemmick?"
"That's his secret. She has been with him many a long year."
"I wish you would tell me her story. I feel a particular interest
in being acquainted with it. You know that what is said between you
and me goes no further."
"Well" Wemmick replied, "I don't know her story  that is, I don't
know all of it. But what I do know, I'll tell you. We are in our
private and personal capacities, of course."
"Of course."
"A score or so of years ago, that woman was tried at the Old Bailey
for murder, and was acquitted. She was a very handsome young woman,
and I believe had some gipsy blood in her. Anyhow, it was hot enough
when it was up, as you may suppose."
"But she was acquitted."
"Mr. Jaggers was for her," pursued Wemmick, with a look full of
meaning, "and worked the case in a way quite astonishing. It was a
desperate case, and it was comparatively early days with him then,
and he worked it to general admiration in fact, it may almost be
said to have made him. He worked it himself at the policeoffice,
day after day for many days, contending against even a committal
and at the trial where he couldn't work it himself, sat under
Counsel, and  every one knew  put in all the salt and pepper. The
murdered person was a woman a woman, a good ten years older, very
much larger, and very much stronger. It was a case of jealousy.
They both led tramping lives, and this woman in Gerrardstreet here
had been married very young, over the broomstick as we say, to a
tramping man, and was a perfect fury in point of jealousy. The
murdered woman  more a match for the man, certainly, in point of
years  was found dead in a barn near Hounslow Heath. There had
been a violent struggle, perhaps a fight. She was bruised and
scratched and torn, and had been held by the throat at last and
choked. Now, there was no reasonable evidence to implicate any
person but this woman, and, on the improbabilities of her having
been able to do it, Mr. Jaggers principally rested his case. You may
be sure," said Wemmick, touching me on the sleeve, "that he never
dwelt upon the strength of her hands then, though he sometimes does
now."
I had told Wemmick of his showing us her wrists, that day of the
dinner party.
"Well, sir" Wemmick went on "it happened  happened, don't you
see?  that this woman was so very artfully dressed from the time
of her apprehension, that she looked much slighter than she really
was in particular, her sleeves are always remembered to have been
so skilfully contrived that her arms had quite a delicate look. She
had only a bruise or two about her  nothing for a tramp  but the
backs of her hands were lacerated, and the question was, was it
with fingernails? Now, Mr. Jaggers showed that she had struggled
through a great lot of brambles which were not as high as her face
but which she could not have got through and kept her hands out of
and bits of those brambles were actually found in her skin and put
in evidence, as well as the fact that the brambles in question were
found on examination to have been broken through, and to have
little shreds of her dress and little spots of blood upon them here
and there. But the boldest point he made, was this. It was
attempted to be set up in proof of her jealousy, that she was under
strong suspicion of having, at about the time of the murder,
frantically destroyed her child by this man  some three years old
to revenge herself upon him. Mr. Jaggers worked that, in this way.
"We say these are not marks of fingernails, but marks of brambles,
and we show you the brambles. You say they are marks of
fingernails, and you set up the hypothesis that she destroyed her
child. You must accept all consequences of that hypothesis. For
anything we know, she may have destroyed her child, and the child
in clinging to her may have scratched her hands. What then? You are
not trying her for the murder of her child why don't you? As to
this case, if you will have scratches, we say that, for anything we
know, you may have accounted for them, assuming for the sake of
argument that you have not invented them" To sum up, sir," said
Wemmick, "Mr. Jaggers was altogether too many for the Jury, and they
gave in."
"Has she been in his service ever since?"
"Yes but not only that," said Wemmick. "She went into his service
immediately after her acquittal, tamed as she is now. She has since
been taught one thing and another in the way of her duties, but she
was tamed from the beginning."
"Do you remember the sex of the child?"
"Said to have been a girl."
"You have nothing more to say to me tonight?"
"Nothing. I got your letter and destroyed it. Nothing."
We exchanged a cordial Good Night, and I went home, with new matter
for my thoughts, though with no relief from the old.
Chapter 
Putting Miss Havisham's note in my pocket, that it might serve as
my credentials for so soon reappearing at Satis House, in case her
waywardness should lead her to express any surprise at seeing me, I
went down again by the coach next day. But I alighted at the
Halfway House, and breakfasted there, and walked the rest of the
distance for, I sought to get into the town quietly by the
unfrequented ways, and to leave it in the same manner.
The best light of the day was gone when I passed along the quiet
echoing courts behind the Highstreet. The nooks of ruin where the
old monks had once had their refectories and gardens, and where the
strong walls were now pressed into the service of humble sheds and
stables, were almost as silent as the old monks in their graves.
The cathedral chimes had at once a sadder and a more remote sound
to me, as I hurried on avoiding observation, than they had ever had
before so, the swell of the old organ was borne to my ears like
funeral music and the rooks, as they hovered about the grey tower
and swung in the bare high trees of the priorygarden, seemed to
call to me that the place was changed, and that Estella was gone
out of it for ever.
An elderly woman whom I had seen before as one of the servants who
lived in the supplementary house across the back courtyard, opened
the gate. The lighted candle stood in the dark passage within, as
of old, and I took it up and ascended the staircase alone. Miss
Havisham was not in her own room, but was in the larger room across
the landing. Looking in at the door, after knocking in vain, I saw
her sitting on the hearth in a ragged chair, close before, and lost
in the contemplation of, the ashy fire.
Doing as I had often done, I went in, and stood, touching the old
chimneypiece, where she could see me when she raised her eyes.
There was an air or utter loneliness upon her, that would have
moved me to pity though she had wilfully done me a deeper injury
than I could charge her with. As I stood compassionating her, and
thinking how in the progress of time I too had come to be a part of
the wrecked fortunes of that house, her eyes rested on me. She
stared, and said in a low voice, "Is it real?"
"It is I, Pip. Mr. Jaggers gave me your note yesterday, and I have
lost no time."
"Thank you. Thank you."
As I brought another of the ragged chairs to the hearth and sat
down, I remarked a new expression on her face, as if she were
afraid of me.
"I want," she said, "to pursue that subject you mentioned to me
when you were last here, and to show you that I am not all stone.
But perhaps you can never believe, now, that there is anything
human in my heart?"
When I said some reassuring words, she stretched out her tremulous
right hand, as though she was going to touch me but she recalled
it again before I understood the action, or knew how to receive it.
"You said, speaking for your friend, that you could tell me how to
do something useful and good. Something that you would like done,
is it not?"
"Something that I would like done very much."
"What is it?"
I began explaining to her that secret history of the partnership. I
had not got far into it, when I judged from her looks that she was
thinking in a discursive way of me, rather than of what I said. It
seemed to be so, for, when I stopped speaking, many moments passed
before she showed that she was conscious of the fact.
"Do you break off," she asked then, with her former air of being
afraid of me, "because you hate me too much to bear to speak to
me?"
"No, no," I answered, "how can you think so, Miss Havisham I
stopped because I thought you were not following what I said."
"Perhaps I was not," she answered, putting a hand to her head.
"Begin again, and let me look at something else. Stay Now tell
me."
She set her hand upon her stick, in the resolute way that sometimes
was habitual to her, and looked at the fire with a strong
expression of forcing herself to attend. I went on with my
explanation, and told her how I had hoped to complete the
transaction out of my means, but how in this I was disappointed.
That part of the subject I reminded her involved matters which
could form no part of my explanation, for they were the weighty
secrets of another.
"So" said she, assenting with her head, but not looking at me.
"And how much money is wanting to complete the purchase?"
I was rather afraid of stating it, for it sounded a large sum.
"Nine hundred pounds."
"If I give you the money for this purpose, will you keep my secret
as you have kept your own?"
"Quite as faithfully."
"And your mind will be more at rest?"
"Much more at rest."
"Are you very unhappy now?"
She asked this question, still without looking at me, but in an
unwonted tone of sympathy. I could not reply at the moment, for my
voice failed me. She put her left arm across the head of her stick,
and softly laid her forehead on it.
"I am far from happy, Miss Havisham but I have other causes of
disquiet than any you know of. They are the secrets I have
mentioned."
After a little while, she raised her head and looked at the fire
again.
"It is noble in you to tell me that you have other causes of
unhappiness, Is it true?"
"Too true."
"Can I only serve you, Pip, by serving your friend? Regarding that
as done, is there nothing I can do for you yourself?"
"Nothing. I thank you for the question. I thank you even more for
the tone of the question. But, there is nothing."
She presently rose from her seat, and looked about the blighted
room for the means of writing. There were non there, and she took
from her pocket a yellow set of ivory tablets, mounted in tarnished
gold, and wrote upon them with a pencil in a case of tarnished gold
that hung from her neck.
"You are still on friendly terms with Mr. Jaggers?"
"Quite. I dined with him yesterday."
"This is an authority to him to pay you that money, to lay out at
your irresponsible discretion for your friend. I keep no money
here but if you would rather Mr. Jaggers knew nothing of the
matter, I will send it to you."
"Thank you, Miss Havisham I have not the least objection to
receiving it from him."
She read me what she had written, and it was direct and clear, and
evidently intended to absolve me from any suspicion of profiting by
the receipt of the money. I took the tablets from her hand, and it
trembled again, and it trembled more as she took off the chain to
which the pencil was attached, and put it in mine. All this she
did, without looking at me.
"My name is on the first leaf. If you can ever write under my name,
"I forgive her," though ever so long after my broken heart is dust
pray do it"
"O Miss Havisham," said I, "I can do it now. There have been sore
mistakes and my life has been a blind and thankless one and I
want forgiveness and direction far too much, to be bitter with
you."
She turned her face to me for the first time since she had averted
it, and, to my amazement, I may even add to my terror, dropped on
her knees at my feet with her folded hands raised to me in the
manner in which, when her poor heart was young and fresh and whole,
they must often have been raised to heaven from her mother's side.
To see her with her white hair and her worn face kneeling at my
feet, gave me a shock through all my frame. I entreated her to
rise, and got my arms about her to help her up but she only
pressed that hand of mine which was nearest to her grasp, and hung
her head over it and wept. I had never seen her shed a tear before,
and, in the hope that the relief might do her good, I bent over her
without speaking. She was not kneeling now, but was down upon the
ground.
"O" she cried, despairingly. "What have I done What have I done"
"If you mean, Miss Havisham, what have you done to injure me, let
me answer. Very little. I should have loved her under any
circumstances.  Is she married?"
"Yes."
It was a needless question, for a new desolation in the desolate
house had told me so.
"What have I done What have I done" She wrung her hands, and
crushed her white hair, and returned to this cry over and over
again. "What have I done"
I knew not how to answer, or how to comfort her. That she had done
a grievous thing in taking an impressionable child to mould into
the form that her wild resentment, spurned affection, and wounded
pride, found vengeance in, I knew full well. But that, in shutting
out the light of day, she had shut out infinitely more that, in
seclusion, she had secluded herself from a thousand natural and
healing influences that, her mind, brooding solitary, had grown
diseased, as all minds do and must and will that reverse the
appointed order of their Maker I knew equally well. And could I
look upon her without compassion, seeing her punishment in the ruin
she was, in her profound unfitness for this earth on which she was
placed, in the vanity of sorrow which had become a master mania,
like the vanity of penitence, the vanity of remorse, the vanity of
unworthiness, and other monstrous vanities that have been curses in
this world?
"Until you spoke to her the other day, and until I saw in you a
lookingglass that showed me what I once felt myself, I did not
know what I had done. What have I done What have I done" And so
again, twenty, fifty times over, What had she done
"Miss Havisham," I said, when her cry had died away, "you may
dismiss me from your mind and conscience. But Estella is a
different case, and if you can ever undo any scrap of what you have
done amiss in keeping a part of her right nature away from her, it
will be better to do that, than to bemoan the past through a
hundred years."
"Yes, yes, I know it. But, Pip  my Dear" There was an earnest
womanly compassion for me in her new affection. "My Dear Believe
this when she first came to me, I meant to save her from misery
like my own. At first I meant no more."
"Well, well" said I. "I hope so."
"But as she grew, and promised to be very beautiful, I gradually
did worse, and with my praises, and with my jewels, and with my
teachings, and with this figure of myself always before her a
warning to back and point my lessons, I stole her heart away and
put ice in its place."
"Better," I could not help saying, "to have left her a natural
heart, even to be bruised or broken."
With that, Miss Havisham looked distractedly at me for a while, and
then burst out again, What had she done
"If you knew all my story," she pleaded, "you would have some
compassion for me and a better understanding of me."
"Miss Havisham," I answered, as delicately as I could, "I believe I
may say that I do know your story, and have known it ever since I
first left this neighbourhood. It has inspired me with great
commiseration, and I hope I understand it and its influences. Does
what has passed between us give me any excuse for asking you a
question relative to Estella? Not as she is, but as she was when
she first came here?"
She was seated on the ground, with her arms on the ragged chair,
and her head leaning on them. She looked full at me when I said
this, and replied, "Go on."
"Whose child was Estella?"
She shook her head.
"You don't know?"
She shook her head again.
"But Mr. Jaggers brought her here, or sent her here?"
"Brought her here."
"Will you tell me how that came about?"
She answered in a low whisper and with caution "I had been shut up
in these rooms a long time I don't know how long you know what
time the clocks keep here, when I told him that I wanted a little
girl to rear and love, and save from my fate. I had first seen him
when I sent for him to lay this place waste for me having read of
him in the newspapers, before I and the world parted. He told me
that he would look about him for such an orphan child. One night he
brought her here asleep, and I called her Estella."
"Might I ask her age then?"
"Two or three. She herself knows nothing, but that she was left an
orphan and I adopted her."
So convinced I was of that woman's being her mother, that I wanted
no evidence to establish the fact in my own mind. But, to any mind,
I thought, the connection here was clear and straight.
What more could I hope to do by prolonging the interview? I had
succeeded on behalf of Herbert, Miss Havisham had told me all she
knew of Estella, I had said and done what I could to ease her mind.
No matter with what other words we parted we parted.
Twilight was closing in when I went down stairs into the natural
air. I called to the woman who had opened the gate when I entered,
that I would not trouble her just yet, but would walk round the
place before leaving. For, I had a presentiment that I should never
be there again, and I felt that the dying light was suited to my
last view of it.
By the wilderness of casks that I had walked on long ago, and on
which the rain of years had fallen since, rotting them in many
places, and leaving miniature swamps and pools of water upon those
that stood on end, I made my way to the ruined garden. I went all
round it round by the corner where Herbert and I had fought our
battle round by the paths where Estella and I had walked. So cold,
so lonely, so dreary all
Taking the brewery on my way back, I raised the rusty latch of a
little door at the garden end of it, and walked through. I was
going out at the opposite door  not easy to open now, for the damp
wood had started and swelled, and the hinges were yielding, and the
threshold was encumbered with a growth of fungus  when I turned my
head to look back. A childish association revived with wonderful
force in the moment of the slight action, and I fancied that I saw
Miss Havisham hanging to the beam. So strong was the impression,
that I stood under the beam shuddering from head to foot before I
knew it was a fancy  though to be sure I was there in an instant.
The mournfulness of the place and time, and the great terror of
this illusion, though it was but momentary, caused me to feel an
indescribable awe as I came out between the open wooden gates where
I had once wrung my hair after Estella had wrung my heart. Passing
on into the front courtyard, I hesitated whether to call the woman
to let me out at the locked gate of which she had the key, or first
to go upstairs and assure myself that Miss Havisham was as safe
and well as I had left her. I took the latter course and went up.
I looked into the room where I had left her, and I saw her seated
in the ragged chair upon the hearth close to the fire, with her
back towards me. In the moment when I was withdrawing my head to go
quietly away, I saw a great flaming light spring up. In the same
moment, I saw her running at me, shrieking, with a whirl of fire
blazing all about her, and soaring at least as many feet above her
head as she was high.
I had a doublecaped greatcoat on, and over my arm another thick
coat. That I got them off, closed with her, threw her down, and got
them over her that I dragged the great cloth from the table for
the same purpose, and with it dragged down the heap of rottenness
in the midst, and all the ugly things that sheltered there that we
were on the ground struggling like desperate enemies, and that the
closer I covered her, the more wildly she shrieked and tried to
free herself that this occurred I knew through the result, but not
through anything I felt, or thought, or knew I did. I knew nothing
until I knew that we were on the floor by the great table, and that
patches of tinder yet alight were floating in the smoky air, which,
a moment ago, had been her faded bridal dress.
Then, I looked round and saw the disturbed beetles and spiders
running away over the floor, and the servants coming in with
breathless cries at the door. I still held her forcibly down with
all my strength, like a prisoner who might escape and I doubt if I
even knew who she was, or why we had struggled, or that she had
been in flames, or that the flames were out, until I saw the
patches of tinder that had been her garments, no longer alight but
falling in a black shower around us.
She was insensible, and I was afraid to have her moved, or even
touched. Assistance was sent for and I held her until it came, as
if I unreasonably fancied I think I did that if I let her go, the
fire would break out again and consume her. When I got up, on the
surgeon's coming to her with other aid, I was astonished to see
that both my hands were burnt for, I had no knowledge of it
through the sense of feeling.
On examination it was pronounced that she had received serious
hurts, but that they of themselves were far from hopeless the
danger lay mainly in the nervous shock. By the surgeon's
directions, her bed was carried into that room and laid upon the
great table which happened to be well suited to the dressing of
her injuries. When I saw her again, an hour afterwards, she lay
indeed where I had seen her strike her stick, and had heard her say
that she would lie one day.
Though every vestige of her dress was burnt, as they told me, she
still had something of her old ghastly bridal appearance for, they
had covered her to the throat with white cottonwool, and as she
lay with a white sheet loosely overlying that, the phantom air of
something that had been and was changed, was still upon her.
I found, on questioning the servants, that Estella was in Paris,
and I got a promise from the surgeon that he would write to her by
the next post. Miss Havisham's family I took upon myself intending
to communicate with Mr. Matthew Pocket only, and leave him to do as
he liked about informing the rest. This I did next day, through
Herbert, as soon as I returned to town.
There was a stage, that evening, when she spoke collectedly of what
had happened, though with a certain terrible vivacity. Towards
midnight she began to wander in her speech, and after that it
gradually set in that she said innumerable times in a low solemn
voice, "What have I done" And then, "When she first came, I meant
to save her from misery like mine." And then, "Take the pencil and
write under my name, 'I forgive her'" She never changed the order
of these three sentences, but she sometimes left out a word in one
or other of them never putting in another word, but always leaving
a blank and going on to the next word.
As I could do no service there, and as I had, nearer home, that
pressing reason for anxiety and fear which even her wanderings
could not drive out of my mind, I decided in the course of the
night that I would return by the early morning coach walking on a
mile or so, and being taken up clear of the town. At about six
o'clock of the morning, therefore, I leaned over her and touched
her lips with mine, just as they said, not stopping for being
touched, "Take the pencil and write under my name, 'I forgive
her.'"
Chapter 
My hands had been dressed twice or thrice in the night, and again
in the morning. My left arm was a good deal burned to the elbow,
and, less severely, as high as the shoulder it was very painful,
but the flames had set in that direction, and I felt thankful it
was no worse. My right hand was not so badly burnt but that I could
move the fingers. It was bandaged, of course, but much less
inconveniently than my left hand and arm those I carried in a
sling and I could only wear my coat like a cloak, loose over my
shoulders and fastened at the neck. My hair had been caught by the
fire, but not my head or face.
When Herbert had been down to Hammersmith and seen his father, he
came back to me at our chambers, and devoted the day to attending on
me. He was the kindest of nurses, and at stated times took off the
bandages, and steeped them in the cooling liquid that was kept
ready, and put them on again, with a patient tenderness that I was
deeply grateful for.
At first, as I lay quiet on the sofa, I found it painfully
difficult, I might say impossible, to get rid of the impression of
the glare of the flames, their hurry and noise, and the fierce
burning smell. If I dozed for a minute, I was awakened by Miss
Havisham's cries, and by her running at me with all that height of
fire above her head. This pain of the mind was much harder to
strive against than any bodily pain I suffered and Herbert, seeing
that, did his utmost to hold my attention engaged.
Neither of us spoke of the boat, but we both thought of it. That
was made apparent by our avoidance of the subject, and by our
agreeing  without agreement  to make my recovery of the use of my
hands, a question of so many hours, not of so many weeks.
My first question when I saw Herbert had been of course, whether
all was well down the river? As he replied in the affirmative, with
perfect confidence and cheerfulness, we did not resume the subject
until the day was wearing away. But then, as Herbert changed the
bandages, more by the light of the fire than by the outer light, he
went back to it spontaneously.
"I sat with Provis last night, Handel, two good hours."
"Where was Clara?"
"Dear little thing" said Herbert. "She was up and down with
Gruffandgrim all the evening. He was perpetually pegging at the
floor, the moment she left his sight. I doubt if he can hold out
long though. What with rum and pepper  and pepper and rum  I
should think his pegging must be nearly over."
"And then you will be married, Herbert?"
"How can I take care of the dear child otherwise?  Lay your arm
out upon the back of the sofa, my dear boy, and I'll sit down here,
and get the bandage off so gradually that you shall not know when
it comes. I was speaking of Provis. Do you know, Handel, he
improves?"
"I said to you I thought he was softened when I last saw him."
"So you did. And so he is. He was very communicative last night,
and told me more of his life. You remember his breaking off here
about some woman that he had had great trouble with.  Did I hurt
you?"
I had started, but not under his touch. His words had given me a
start.
"I had forgotten that, Herbert, but I remember it now you speak of
it."
"Well He went into that part of his life, and a dark wild part it
is. Shall I tell you? Or would it worry you just now?"
"Tell me by all means. Every word."
Herbert bent forward to look at me more nearly, as if my reply had
been rather more hurried or more eager than he could quite account
for. "Your head is cool?" he said, touching it.
"Quite," said I. "Tell me what Provis said, my dear Herbert."
"It seems," said Herbert, "  there's a bandage off most
charmingly, and now comes the cool one  makes you shrink at first,
my poor dear fellow, don't it? but it will be comfortable presently
it seems that the woman was a young woman, and a jealous woman,
and a revengeful woman revengeful, Handel, to the last degree."
"To what last degree?"
"Murder.  Does it strike too cold on that sensitive place?"
"I don't feel it. How did she murder? Whom did she murder?" "Why,
the deed may not have merited quite so terrible a name," said
Herbert, "but, she was tried for it, and Mr. Jaggers defended her,
and the reputation of that defence first made his name known to
Provis. It was another and a stronger woman who was the victim, and
there had been a struggle  in a barn. Who began it, or how fair it
was, or how unfair, may be doubtful but how it ended, is certainly
not doubtful, for the victim was found throttled."
"Was the woman brought in guilty?"
"No she was acquitted.  My poor Handel, I hurt you"
"It is impossible to be gentler, Herbert. Yes? What else?"
"This acquitted young woman and Provis had a little child a little
child of whom Provis was exceedingly fond. On the evening of the
very night when the object of her jealousy was strangled as I tell
you, the young woman presented herself before Provis for one
moment, and swore that she would destroy the child which was in
her possession, and he should never see it again then, she
vanished.  There's the worst arm comfortably in the sling once
more, and now there remains but the right hand, which is a far
easier job. I can do it better by this light than by a stronger,
for my hand is steadiest when I don't see the poor blistered
patches too distinctly.  You don't think your breathing is
affected, my dear boy? You seem to breathe quickly."
"Perhaps I do, Herbert. Did the woman keep her oath?"
"There comes the darkest part of Provis's life. She did."
"That is, he says she did."
"Why, of course, my dear boy," returned Herbert, in a tone of
surprise, and again bending forward to get a nearer look at me. "He
says it all. I have no other information."
"No, to be sure."
"Now, whether," pursued Herbert, "he had used the child's mother
ill, or whether he had used the child's mother well, Provis doesn't
say but, she had shared some four or five years of the wretched
life he described to us at this fireside, and he seems to have felt
pity for her, and forbearance towards her. Therefore, fearing he
should be called upon to depose about this destroyed child, and so
be the cause of her death, he hid himself much as he grieved for
the child, kept himself dark, as he says, out of the way and out
of the trial, and was only vaguely talked of as a certain man
called Abel, out of whom the jealousy arose. After the acquittal
she disappeared, and thus he lost the child and the child's
mother."
"I want to ask"
"A moment, my dear boy, and I have done. That evil genius,
Compeyson, the worst of scoundrels among many scoundrels, knowing
of his keeping out of the way at that time, and of his reasons for
doing so, of course afterwards held the knowledge over his head as
a means of keeping him poorer, and working him harder. It was clear
last night that this barbed the point of Provis's animosity."
"I want to know," said I, "and particularly, Herbert, whether he
told you when this happened?"
"Particularly? Let me remember, then, what he said as to that. His
expression was, 'a round score o' year ago, and a'most directly
after I took up wi' Compeyson.' How old were you when you came upon
him in the little churchyard?"
"I think in my seventh year."
"Ay. It had happened some three or four years then, he said, and
you brought into his mind the little girl so tragically lost, who
would have been about your age."
"Herbert," said I, after a short silence, in a hurried way, "can
you see me best by the light of the window, or the light of the
fire?"
"By the firelight," answered Herbert, coming close again.
"Look at me."
"I do look at you, my dear boy."
"Touch me."
"I do touch you, my dear boy."
"You are not afraid that I am in any fever, or that my head is much
disordered by the accident of last night?"
"Nno, my dear boy," said Herbert, after taking time to examine me.
"You are rather excited, but you are quite yourself."
"I know I am quite myself. And the man we have in hiding down the
river, is Estella's Father."
Chapter 
What purpose I had in view when I was hot on tracing out and
proving Estella's parentage, I cannot say. It will presently be
seen that the question was not before me in a distinct shape, until
it was put before me by a wiser head than my own.
But, when Herbert and I had held our momentous conversation, I was
seized with a feverish conviction that I ought to hunt the matter
down  that I ought not to let it rest, but that I ought to see Mr.
Jaggers, and come at the bare truth. I really do not know whether I
felt that I did this for Estella's sake, or whether I was glad to
transfer to the man in whose preservation I was so much concerned,
some rays of the romantic interest that had so long surrounded her.
Perhaps the latter possibility may be the nearer to the truth.
Any way, I could scarcely be withheld from going out to
Gerrardstreet that night. Herbert's representations that if I did,
I should probably be laid up and stricken useless, when our
fugitive's safety would depend upon me, alone restrained my
impatience. On the understanding, again and again reiterated, that
come what would, I was to go to Mr. Jaggers tomorrow, I at length
submitted to keep quiet, and to have my hurts looked after, and to
stay at home. Early next morning we went out together, and at the
corner of Giltspurstreet by Smithfield, I left Herbert to go his
way into the City, and took my way to Little Britain.
There were periodical occasions when Mr. Jaggers and Wemmick went
over the office accounts, and checked off the vouchers, and put all
things straight. On these occasions Wemmick took his books and
papers into Mr. Jaggers's room, and one of the upstairs clerks came
down into the outer office. Finding such clerk on Wemmick's post
that morning, I knew what was going on but, I was not sorry to
have Mr. Jaggers and Wemmick together, as Wemmick would then hear
for himself that I said nothing to compromise him.
My appearance with my arm bandaged and my coat loose over my
shoulders, favoured my object. Although I had sent Mr. Jaggers a
brief account of the accident as soon as I had arrived in town, yet
I had to give him all the details now and the speciality of the
occasion caused our talk to be less dry and hard, and less strictly
regulated by the rules of evidence, than it had been before. While
I described the disaster, Mr. Jaggers stood, according to his wont,
before the fire. Wemmick leaned back in his chair, staring at me,
with his hands in the pockets of his trousers, and his pen put
horizontally into the post. The two brutal casts, always
inseparable in my mind from the official proceedings, seemed to be
congestively considering whether they didn't smell fire at the
present moment.
My narrative finished, and their questions exhausted, I then
produced Miss Havisham's authority to receive the nine hundred
pounds for Herbert. Mr. Jaggers's eyes retired a little deeper into
his head when I handed him the tablets, but he presently handed
them over to Wemmick, with instructions to draw the cheque for his
signature. While that was in course of being done, I looked on at
Wemmick as he wrote, and Mr. Jaggers, poising and swaying himself on
his wellpolished boots, looked on at me. "I am sorry, Pip," said
he, as I put the cheque in my pocket, when he had signed it, "that
we do nothing for you."
"Miss Havisham was good enough to ask me," I returned, "whether she
could do nothing for me, and I told her No."
"Everybody should know his own business," said Mr. Jaggers. And I
saw Wemmick's lips form the words "portable property."
"I should not have told her No, if I had been you," said Mr
Jaggers "but every man ought to know his own business best."
"Every man's business," said Wemmick, rather reproachfully towards
me, "is portable property."
As I thought the time was now come for pursuing the theme I had at
heart, I said, turning on Mr. Jaggers
"I did ask something of Miss Havisham, however, sir. I asked her to
give me some information relative to her adopted daughter, and she
gave me all she possessed."
"Did she?" said Mr. Jaggers, bending forward to look at his boots
and then straightening himself. "Hah I don't think I should have
done so, if I had been Miss Havisham. But she ought to know her own
business best."
"I know more of the history of Miss Havisham's adopted child, than
Miss Havisham herself does, sir. I know her mother."
Mr. Jaggers looked at me inquiringly, and repeated "Mother?"
"I have seen her mother within these three days."
"Yes?" said Mr. Jaggers.
"And so have you, sir. And you have seen her still more recently."
"Yes?" said Mr. Jaggers.
"Perhaps I know more of Estella's history than even you do," said
I. "I know her father too."
A certain stop that Mr. Jaggers came to in his manner  he was too
selfpossessed to change his manner, but he could not help its
being brought to an indefinably attentive stop  assured me that he
did not know who her father was. This I had strongly suspected from
Provis's account as Herbert had repeated it of his having kept
himself dark which I pieced on to the fact that he himself was not
Mr. Jaggers's client until some four years later, and when he could
have no reason for claiming his identity. But, I could not be sure
of this unconsciousness on Mr. Jaggers's part before, though I was
quite sure of it now.
"So You know the young lady's father, Pip?" said Mr. Jaggers.
"Yes," I replied, "and his name is Provis  from New South Wales."
Even Mr. Jaggers started when I said those words. It was the
slightest start that could escape a man, the most carefully
repressed and the soonest checked, but he did start, though he made
it a part of the action of taking out his pockethandkerchief. How
Wemmick received the announcement I am unable to say, for I was
afraid to look at him just then, lest Mr. Jaggers's sharpness should
detect that there had been some communication unknown to him
between us.
"And on what evidence, Pip," asked Mr. Jaggers, very coolly, as he
paused with his handkerchief half way to his nose, "does Provis
make this claim?"
"He does not make it," said I, "and has never made it, and has no
knowledge or belief that his daughter is in existence."
For once, the powerful pockethandkerchief failed. My reply was so
unexpected that Mr. Jaggers put the handkerchief back into his
pocket without completing the usual performance, folded his arms,
and looked with stern attention at me, though with an immovable
face.
Then I told him all I knew, and how I knew it with the one
reservation that I left him to infer that I knew from Miss Havisham
what I in fact knew from Wemmick. I was very careful indeed as to
that. Nor, did I look towards Wemmick until I had finished all I
had to tell, and had been for some time silently meeting Mr.
Jaggers's look. When I did at last turn my eyes in Wemmick's
direction, I found that he had unposted his pen, and was intent
upon the table before him.
"Hah" said Mr. Jaggers at last, as he moved towards the papers on
the table, "  What item was it you were at, Wemmick, when Mr. Pip
came in?"
But I could not submit to be thrown off in that way, and I made a
passionate, almost an indignant, appeal to him to be more frank and
manly with me. I reminded him of the false hopes into which I had
lapsed, the length of time they had lasted, and the discovery I had
made and I hinted at the danger that weighed upon my spirits. I
represented myself as being surely worthy of some little confidence
from him, in return for the confidence I had just now imparted. I
said that I did not blame him, or suspect him, or mistrust him, but
I wanted assurance of the truth from him. And if he asked me why I
wanted it and why I thought I had any right to it, I would tell
him, little as he cared for such poor dreams, that I had loved
Estella dearly and long, and that, although I had lost her and must
live a bereaved life, whatever concerned her was still nearer and
dearer to me than anything else in the world. And seeing that Mr.
Jaggers stood quite still and silent, and apparently quite
obdurate, under this appeal, I turned to Wemmick, and said,
"Wemmick, I know you to be a man with a gentle heart. I have seen
your pleasant home, and your old father, and all the innocent
cheerful playful ways with which you refresh your business life.
And I entreat you to say a word for me to Mr. Jaggers, and to
represent to him that, all circumstances considered, he ought to be
more open with me"
I have never seen two men look more oddly at one another than Mr.
Jaggers and Wemmick did after this apostrophe. At first, a
misgiving crossed me that Wemmick would be instantly dismissed from
his employment but, it melted as I saw Mr. Jaggers relax into
something like a smile, and Wemmick become bolder.
"What's all this?" said Mr. Jaggers. "You with an old father, and
you with pleasant and playful ways?"
"Well" returned Wemmick. "If I don't bring 'em here, what does it
matter?"
"Pip," said Mr. Jaggers, laying his hand upon my arm, and smiling
openly, "this man must be the most cunning impostor in all London."
"Not a bit of it," returned Wemmick, growing bolder and bolder. "I
think you're another."
Again they exchanged their former odd looks, each apparently still
distrustful that the other was taking him in.
"You with a pleasant home?" said Mr. Jaggers.
"Since it don't interfere with business," returned Wemmick, "let it
be so. Now, I look at you, sir, I shouldn't wonder if you might be
planning and contriving to have a pleasant home of your own, one of
these days, when you're tired of all this work."
Mr. Jaggers nodded his head retrospectively two or three times, and
actually drew a sigh. "Pip," said he, "we won't talk about 'poor
dreams' you know more about such things than I, having much
fresher experience of that kind. But now, about this other matter.
I'll put a case to you. Mind I admit nothing."
He waited for me to declare that I quite understood that he
expressly said that he admitted nothing.
"Now, Pip," said Mr. Jaggers, "put this case. Put the case that a
woman, under such circumstances as you have mentioned, held her
child concealed, and was obliged to communicate the fact to her
legal adviser, on his representing to her that he must know, with
an eye to the latitude of his defence, how the fact stood about
that child. Put the case that at the same time he held a trust to
find a child for an eccentric rich lady to adopt and bring up."
"I follow you, sir."
"Put the case that he lived in an atmosphere of evil, and that all
he saw of children, was, their being generated in great numbers for
certain destruction. Put the case that he often saw children
solemnly tried at a criminal bar, where they were held up to be
seen put the case that he habitually knew of their being
imprisoned, whipped, transported, neglected, cast out, qualified in
all ways for the hangman, and growing up to be hanged. Put the case
that pretty nigh all the children he saw in his daily business
life, he had reason to look upon as so much spawn, to develop into
the fish that were to come to his net  to be prosecuted, defended,
forsworn, made orphans, bedevilled somehow."
"I follow you, sir."
"Put the case, Pip, that here was one pretty little child out of
the heap, who could be saved whom the father believed dead, and
dared make no stir about as to whom, over the mother, the legal
adviser had this power "I know what you did, and how you did it.
You came so and so, this was your manner of attack and this the
manner of resistance, you went so and so, you did such and such
things to divert suspicion. I have tracked you through it all, and
I tell it you all. Part with the child, unless it should be
necessary to produce it to clear you, and then it shall be
produced. Give the child into my hands, and I will do my best to
bring you off. If you are saved, your child is saved too if you
are lost, your child is still saved." Put the case that this was
done, and that the woman was cleared."
"I understand you perfectly."
"But that I make no admissions?"
"That you make no admissions." And Wemmick repeated, "No
admissions."
"Put the case, Pip, that passion and the terror of death had a
little shaken the woman's intellect, and that when she was set at
liberty, she was scared out of the ways of the world and went to
him to be sheltered. Put the case that he took her in, and that he
kept down the old wild violent nature whenever he saw an inkling of
its breaking out, by asserting his power over her in the old way.
Do you comprehend the imaginary case?"
"Quite."
"Put the case that the child grew up, and was married for money.
That the mother was still living. That the father was still living.
That the mother and father unknown to one another, were dwelling
within so many miles, furlongs, yards if you like, of one another.
That the secret was still a secret, except that you had got wind of
it. Put that last case to yourself very carefully."
"I do."
"I ask Wemmick to put it to himself very carefully."
And Wemmick said, "I do."
"For whose sake would you reveal the secret? For the father's? I
think he would not be much the better for the mother. For the
mother's? I think if she had done such a deed she would be safer
where she was. For the daughter's? I think it would hardly serve
her, to establish her parentage for the information of her husband,
and to drag her back to disgrace, after an escape of twenty years,
pretty secure to last for life. But, add the case that you had
loved her, Pip, and had made her the subject of those 'poor dreams'
which have, at one time or another, been in the heads of more men
than you think likely, then I tell you that you had better  and
would much sooner when you had thought well of it  chop off that
bandaged left hand of yours with your bandaged right hand, and then
pass the chopper on to Wemmick there, to cut that off, too."
I looked at Wemmick, whose face was very grave. He gravely touched
his lips with his forefinger. I did the same. Mr. Jaggers did the
same. "Now, Wemmick," said the latter then, resuming his usual
manner, "what item was it you were at, when Mr. Pip came in?"
Standing by for a little, while they were at work, I observed that
the odd looks they had cast at one another were repeated several
times with this difference now, that each of them seemed
suspicious, not to say conscious, of having shown himself in a weak
and unprofessional light to the other. For this reason, I suppose,
they were now inflexible with one another Mr. Jaggers being highly
dictatorial, and Wemmick obstinately justifying himself whenever
there was the smallest point in abeyance for a moment. I had never
seen them on such ill terms for generally they got on very well
indeed together.
But, they were both happily relieved by the opportune appearance of
Mike, the client with the fur cap and the habit of wiping his nose
on his sleeve, whom I had seen on the very first day of my
appearance within those walls. This individual, who, either in his
own person or in that of some member of his family, seemed to be
always in trouble which in that place meant Newgate, called to
announce that his eldest daughter was taken up on suspicion of
shoplifting. As he imparted this melancholy circumstance to
Wemmick, Mr. Jaggers standing magisterially before the fire and
taking no share in the proceedings, Mike's eye happened to twinkle
with a tear.
"What are you about?" demanded Wemmick, with the utmost
indignation. "What do you come snivelling here for?"
"I didn't go to do it, Mr. Wemmick."
"You did," said Wemmick. "How dare you? You're not in a fit state
to come here, if you can't come here without spluttering like a bad
pen. What do you mean by it?"
"A man can't help his feelings, Mr. Wemmick," pleaded Mike.
"His what?" demanded Wemmick, quite savagely. "Say that again"
"Now, look here my man," said Mr. Jaggers, advancing a step, and
pointing to the door. "Get out of this office. I'll have no
feelings here. Get out."
"It serves you right," said Wemmick, "Get out."
So the unfortunate Mike very humbly withdrew, and Mr. Jaggers and
Wemmick appeared to have reestablished their good understanding,
and went to work again with an air of refreshment upon them as if
they had just had lunch.
Chapter 
From Little Britain, I went, with my cheque in my pocket, to Miss
Skiffins's brother, the accountant and Miss Skiffins's brother,
the accountant, going straight to Clarriker's and bringing
Clarriker to me, I had the great satisfaction of concluding that
arrangement. It was the only good thing I had done, and the only
completed thing I had done, since I was first apprised of my great
expectations.
Clarriker informing me on that occasion that the affairs of the
House were steadily progressing, that he would now be able to
establish a small branchhouse in the East which was much wanted
for the extension of the business, and that Herbert in his new
partnership capacity would go out and take charge of it, I found
that I must have prepared for a separation from my friend, even
though my own affairs had been more settled. And now indeed I felt
as if my last anchor were loosening its hold, and I should soon be
driving with the winds and waves.
But, there was recompense in the joy with which Herbert would come
home of a night and tell me of these changes, little imagining that
he told me no news, and would sketch airy pictures of himself
conducting Clara Barley to the land of the Arabian Nights, and of
me going out to join them with a caravan of camels, I believe,
and of our all going up the Nile and seeing wonders. Without being
sanguine as to my own part in these bright plans, I felt that
Herbert's way was clearing fast, and that old Bill Barley had but
to stick to his pepper and rum, and his daughter would soon be
happily provided for.
We had now got into the month of March. My left arm, though it
presented no bad symptoms, took in the natural course so long to
heal that I was still unable to get a coat on. My right arm was
tolerably restored  disfigured, but fairly serviceable.
On a Monday morning, when Herbert and I were at breakfast, I
received the following letter from Wemmick by the post.
"Walworth. Burn this as soon as read. Early in the week, or say
Wednesday, you might do what you know of, if you felt disposed to
try it. Now burn."
When I had shown this to Herbert and had put it in the fire  but
not before we had both got it by heart  we considered what to do.
For, of course my being disabled could now be no longer kept out of
view.
"I have thought it over, again and again," said Herbert, "and I
think I know a better course than taking a Thames waterman. Take
Startop. A good fellow, a skilled hand, fond of us, and
enthusiastic and honourable."
I had thought of him, more than once.
"But how much would you tell him, Herbert?"
"It is necessary to tell him very little. Let him suppose it a mere
freak, but a secret one, until the morning comes then let him know
that there is urgent reason for your getting Provis aboard and
away. You go with him?"
"No doubt."
"Where?"
It had seemed to me, in the many anxious considerations I had given
the point, almost indifferent what port we made for  Hamburg,
Rotterdam, Antwerp  the place signified little, so that he was got
out of England. Any foreign steamer that fell in our way and would
take us up, would do. I had always proposed to myself to get him
well down the river in the boat certainly well beyond Gravesend,
which was a critical place for search or inquiry if suspicion were
afoot. As foreign steamers would leave London at about the time of
highwater, our plan would be to get down the river by a previous
ebbtide, and lie by in some quiet spot until we could pull off to
one. The time when one would be due where we lay, wherever that
might be, could be calculated pretty nearly, if we made inquiries
beforehand.
Herbert assented to all this, and we went out immediately after
breakfast to pursue our investigations. We found that a steamer for
Hamburg was likely to suit our purpose best, and we directed our
thoughts chiefly to that vessel. But we noted down what other
foreign steamers would leave London with the same tide, and we
satisfied ourselves that we knew the build and colour of each. We
then separated for a few hours I, to get at once such passports as
were necessary Herbert, to see Startop at his lodgings. We both
did what we had to do without any hindrance, and when we met again
at one o'clock reported it done. I, for my part, was prepared with
passports Herbert had seen Startop, and he was more than ready to
join.
Those two should pull a pair of oars, we settled, and I would
steer our charge would be sitter, and keep quiet as speed was not
our object, we should make way enough. We arranged that Herbert
should not come home to dinner before going to Mill Pond Bank that
evening that he should not go there at all, tomorrow evening,
Tuesday that he should prepare Provis to come down to some Stairs
hard by the house, on Wednesday, when he saw us approach, and not
sooner that all the arrangements with him should be concluded that
Monday night and that he should be communicated with no more in
any way, until we took him on board.
These precautions well understood by both of us, I went home.
On opening the outer door of our chambers with my key, I found a
letter in the box, directed to me a very dirty letter, though not
illwritten. It had been delivered by hand of course since I left
home, and its contents were these
"If you are not afraid to come to the old marshes tonight or
tomorrow night at Nine, and to come to the little sluicehouse by
the limekiln, you had better come. If you want information
regarding your uncle Provis, you had much better come and tell no
one and lose no time. You must come alone. Bring this with you."
I had had load enough upon my mind before the receipt of this
strange letter. What to do now, I could not tell. And the worst
was, that I must decide quickly, or I should miss the afternoon
coach, which would take me down in time for tonight. Tomorrow
night I could not think of going, for it would be too close upon
the time of the flight. And again, for anything I knew, the
proffered information might have some important bearing on the
flight itself.
If I had had ample time for consideration, I believe I should still
have gone. Having hardly any time for consideration  my watch
showing me that the coach started within half an hour  I resolved
to go. I should certainly not have gone, but for the reference to
my Uncle Provis that, coming on Wemmick's letter and the morning's
busy preparation, turned the scale.
It is so difficult to become clearly possessed of the contents of
almost any letter, in a violent hurry, that I had to read this
mysterious epistle again, twice, before its injunction to me to be
secret got mechanically into my mind. Yielding to it in the same
mechanical kind of way, I left a note in pencil for Herbert,
telling him that as I should be so soon going away, I knew not for
how long, I had decided to hurry down and back, to ascertain for
myself how Miss Havisham was faring. I had then barely time to get
my greatcoat, lock up the chambers, and make for the coachoffice
by the short byways. If I had taken a hackneychariot and gone by
the streets, I should have missed my aim going as I did, I caught
the coach just as it came out of the yard. I was the only inside
passenger, jolting away kneedeep in straw, when I came to myself.
For, I really had not been myself since the receipt of the letter
it had so bewildered me ensuing on the hurry of the morning. The
morning hurry and flutter had been great, for, long and anxiously
as I had waited for Wemmick, his hint had come like a surprise at
last. And now, I began to wonder at myself for being in the coach,
and to doubt whether I had sufficient reason for being there, and
to consider whether I should get out presently and go back, and to
argue against ever heeding an anonymous communication, and, in
short, to pass through all those phases of contradiction and
indecision to which I suppose very few hurried people are
strangers. Still, the reference to Provis by name, mastered
everything. I reasoned as I had reasoned already without knowing it
if that be reasoning  in case any harm should befall him through
my not going, how could I ever forgive myself
It was dark before we got down, and the journey seemed long and
dreary to me who could see little of it inside, and who could not
go outside in my disabled state. Avoiding the Blue Boar, I put up
at an inn of minor reputation down the town, and ordered some
dinner. While it was preparing, I went to Satis House and inquired
for Miss Havisham she was still very ill, though considered
something better.
My inn had once been a part of an ancient ecclesiastical house, and
I dined in a little octagonal commonroom, like a font. As I was
not able to cut my dinner, the old landlord with a shining bald
head did it for me. This bringing us into conversation, he was so
good as to entertain me with my own story  of course with the
popular feature that Pumblechook was my earliest benefactor and the
founder of my fortunes.
"Do you know the young man?" said I.
"Know him" repeated the landlord. "Ever since he was  no height
at all."
"Does he ever come back to this neighbourhood?"
"Ay, he comes back," said the landlord, "to his great friends, now
and again, and gives the cold shoulder to the man that made him."
"What man is that?"
"Him that I speak of," said the landlord. "Mr. Pumblechook."
"Is he ungrateful to no one else?"
"No doubt he would be, if he could," returned the landlord, "but he
can't. And why? Because Pumblechook done everything for him."
"Does Pumblechook say so?"
"Say so" replied the landlord. "He han't no call to say so."
"But does he say so?"
"It would turn a man's blood to white wine winegar to hear him tell
of it, sir," said the landlord.
I thought, "Yet Joe, dear Joe, you never tell of it. Longsuffering
and loving Joe, you never complain. Nor you, sweettempered Biddy"
"Your appetite's been touched like, by your accident," said the
landlord, glancing at the bandaged arm under my coat. "Try a
tenderer bit."
"No thank you," I replied, turning from the table to brood over the
fire. "I can eat no more. Please take it away."
I had never been struck at so keenly, for my thanklessness to Joe,
as through the brazen impostor Pumblechook. The falser he, the
truer Joe the meaner he, the nobler Joe.
My heart was deeply and most deservedly humbled as I mused over the
fire for an hour or more. The striking of the clock aroused me, but
not from my dejection or remorse, and I got up and had my coat
fastened round my neck, and went out. I had previously sought in my
pockets for the letter, that I might refer to it again, but I could
not find it, and was uneasy to think that it must have been dropped
in the straw of the coach. I knew very well, however, that the
appointed place was the little sluicehouse by the limekiln on the
marshes, and the hour nine. Towards the marshes I now went
straight, having no time to spare.
Chapter 
It was a dark night, though the full moon rose as I left the
enclosed lands, and passed out upon the marshes. Beyond their dark
line there was a ribbon of clear sky, hardly broad enough to hold
the red large moon. In a few minutes she had ascended out of that
clear field, in among the piled mountains of cloud.
There was a melancholy wind, and the marshes were very dismal. A
stranger would have found them insupportable, and even to me they
were so oppressive that I hesitated, half inclined to go back. But,
I knew them well, and could have found my way on a far darker
night, and had no excuse for returning, being there. So, having
come there against my inclination, I went on against it.
The direction that I took, was not that in which my old home lay,
nor that in which we had pursued the convicts. My back was turned
towards the distant Hulks as I walked on, and, though I could see
the old lights away on the spits of sand, I saw them over my
shoulder. I knew the limekiln as well as I knew the old Battery,
but they were miles apart so that if a light had been burning at
each point that night, there would have been a long strip of the
blank horizon between the two bright specks.
At first, I had to shut some gates after me, and now and then to
stand still while the cattle that were lying in the bankedup
pathway, arose and blundered down among the grass and reeds. But
after a little while, I seemed to have the whole flats to myself.
It was another halfhour before I drew near to the kiln. The lime
was burning with a sluggish stifling smell, but the fires were made
up and left, and no workmen were visible. Hard by, was a small
stonequarry. It lay directly in my way, and had been worked that
day, as I saw by the tools and barrows that were lying about.
Coming up again to the marsh level out of this excavation  for the
rude path lay through it  I saw a light in the old sluicehouse. I
quickened my pace, and knocked at the door with my hand. Waiting
for some reply, I looked about me, noticing how the sluice was
abandoned and broken, and how the house  of wood with a tiled roof
would not be proof against the weather much longer, if it were so
even now, and how the mud and ooze were coated with lime, and how
the choking vapour of the kiln crept in a ghostly way towards me.
Still there was no answer, and I knocked again. No answer still,
and I tried the latch.
It rose under my hand, and the door yielded. Looking in, I saw a
lighted candle on a table, a bench, and a mattress on a truckle
bedstead. As there was a loft above, I called, "Is there any one
here?" but no voice answered. Then, I looked at my watch, and,
finding that it was past nine, called again, "Is there any one
here?" There being still no answer, I went out at the door,
irresolute what to do.
It was beginning to rain fast. Seeing nothing save what I had seen
already, I turned back into the house, and stood just within the
shelter of the doorway, looking out into the night. While I was
considering that some one must have been there lately and must soon
be coming back, or the candle would not be burning, it came into my
head to look if the wick were long. I turned round to do so, and
had taken up the candle in my hand, when it was extinguished by
some violent shock, and the next thing I comprehended, was, that I
had been caught in a strong running noose, thrown over my head from
behind.
"Now," said a suppressed voice with an oath, "I've got you"
"What is this?" I cried, struggling. "Who is it? Help, help, help"
Not only were my arms pulled close to my sides, but the pressure on
my bad arm caused me exquisite pain. Sometimes, a strong man's
hand, sometimes a strong man's breast, was set against my mouth to
deaden my cries, and with a hot breath always close to me, I
struggled ineffectually in the dark, while I was fastened tight to
the wall. "And now," said the suppressed voice with another oath,
"call out again, and I'll make short work of you"
Faint and sick with the pain of my injured arm, bewildered by the
surprise, and yet conscious how easily this threat could be put in
execution, I desisted, and tried to ease my arm were it ever so
little. But, it was bound too tight for that. I felt as if, having
been burnt before, it were now being boiled.
The sudden exclusion of the night and the substitution of black
darkness in its place, warned me that the man had closed a shutter.
After groping about for a little, he found the flint and steel he
wanted, and began to strike a light. I strained my sight upon the
sparks that fell among the tinder, and upon which he breathed and
breathed, match in hand, but I could only see his lips, and the
blue point of the match even those, but fitfully. The tinder was
damp  no wonder there  and one after another the sparks died out.
The man was in no hurry, and struck again with the flint and steel.
As the sparks fell thick and bright about him, I could see his
hands, and touches of his face, and could make out that he was
seated and bending over the table but nothing more. Presently I
saw his blue lips again, breathing on the tinder, and then a flare
of light flashed up, and showed me Orlick.
Whom I had looked for, I don't know. I had not looked for him.
Seeing him, I felt that I was in a dangerous strait indeed, and I
kept my eyes upon him.
He lighted the candle from the flaring match with great
deliberation, and dropped the match, and trod it out. Then, he put
the candle away from him on the table, so that he could see me, and
sat with his arms folded on the table and looked at me. I made out
that I was fastened to a stout perpendicular ladder a few inches
from the wall  a fixture there  the means of ascent to the loft
above.
"Now," said he, when we had surveyed one another for some time,
"I've got you."
"Unbind me. Let me go"
"Ah" he returned, "I'll let you go. I'll let you go to the moon,
I'll let you go to the stars. All in good time."
"Why have you lured me here?"
"Don't you know?" said he, with a deadly look
"Why have you set upon me in the dark?"
"Because I mean to do it all myself. One keeps a secret better than
two. Oh you enemy, you enemy"
His enjoyment of the spectacle I furnished, as he sat with his arms
folded on the table, shaking his head at me and hugging himself,
had a malignity in it that made me tremble. As I watched him in
silence, he put his hand into the corner at his side, and took up a
gun with a brassbound stock.
"Do you know this?" said he, making as if he would take aim at me.
"Do you know where you saw it afore? Speak, wolf"
"Yes," I answered.
"You cost me that place. You did. Speak"
"What else could I do?"
"You did that, and that would be enough, without more. How dared
you to come betwixt me and a young woman I liked?"
"When did I?"
"When didn't you? It was you as always give Old Orlick a bad name
to her."
"You gave it to yourself you gained it for yourself. I could have
done you no harm, if you had done yourself none."
"You're a liar. And you'll take any pains, and spend any money, to
drive me out of this country, will you?" said he, repeating my
words to Biddy in the last interview I had with her. "Now, I'll
tell you a piece of information. It was never so well worth your
while to get me out of this country as it is tonight. Ah If it
was all your money twenty times told, to the last brass farden" As
he shook his heavy hand at me, with his mouth snarling like a
tiger's, I felt that it was true.
"What are you going to do to me?"
"I'm agoing," said he, bringing his fist down upon the table with a
heavy blow, and rising as the blow fell, to give it greater force,
"I'm agoing to have your life"
He leaned forward staring at me, slowly unclenched his hand and
drew it across his mouth as if his mouth watered for me, and sat
down again.
"You was always in Old Orlick's way since ever you was a child. You
goes out of his way, this present night. He'll have no more on you.
You're dead."
I felt that I had come to the brink of my grave. For a moment I
looked wildly round my trap for any chance of escape but there was
none.
"More than that," said he, folding his arms on the table again, "I
won't have a rag of you, I won't have a bone of you, left on earth.
I'll put your body in the kiln  I'd carry two such to it, on my
shoulders  and, let people suppose what they may of you, they
shall never know nothing."
My mind, with inconceivable rapidity, followed out all the
consequences of such a death. Estella's father would believe I had
deserted him, would be taken, would die accusing me even Herbert
would doubt me, when he compared the letter I had left for him,
with the fact that I had called at Miss Havisham's gate for only a
moment Joe and Biddy would never know how sorry I had been that
night none would ever know what I had suffered, how true I had
meant to be, what an agony I had passed through. The death close
before me was terrible, but far more terrible than death was the
dread of being misremembered after death. And so quick were my
thoughts, that I saw myself despised by unborn generations 
Estella's children, and their children  while the wretch's words
were yet on his lips.
"Now, wolf," said he, "afore I kill you like any other beast 
which is wot I mean to do and wot I have tied you up for  I'll
have a good look at you and a good goad at you. Oh, you enemy"
It had passed through my thoughts to cry out for help again though
few could know better than I, the solitary nature of the spot, and
the hopelessness of aid. But as he sat gloating over me, I was
supported by a scornful detestation of him that sealed my lips.
Above all things, I resolved that I would not entreat him, and that
I would die making some last poor resistance to him. Softened as my
thoughts of all the rest of men were in that dire extremity humbly
beseeching pardon, as I did, of Heaven melted at heart, as I was,
by the thought that I had taken no farewell, and never never now
could take farewell, of those who were dear to me, or could explain
myself to them, or ask for their compassion on my miserable errors
still, if I could have killed him, even in dying, I would have done
it.
He had been drinking, and his eyes were red and bloodshot. Around
his neck was slung a tin bottle, as I had often seen his meat and
drink slung about him in other days. He brought the bottle to his
lips, and took a fiery drink from it and I smelt the strong
spirits that I saw flash into his face.
"Wolf" said he, folding his arms again, "Old Orlick's agoing to
tell you somethink. It was you as did for your shrew sister."
Again my mind, with its former inconceivable rapidity, had
exhausted the whole subject of the attack upon my sister, her
illness, and her death, before his slow and hesitating speech had
formed these words.
"It was you, villain," said I.
"I tell you it was your doing  I tell you it was done through
you," he retorted, catching up the gun, and making a blow with the
stock at the vacant air between us. "I come upon her from behind,
as I come upon you tonight. I giv' it her I left her for dead,
and if there had been a limekiln as nigh her as there is now nigh
you, she shouldn't have come to life again. But it warn't Old
Orlick as did it it was you. You was favoured, and he was bullied
and beat. Old Orlick bullied and beat, eh? Now you pays for it. You
done it now you pays for it."
He drank again, and became more ferocious. I saw by his tilting of
the bottle that there was no great quantity left in it. I
distinctly understood that he was working himself up with its
contents, to make an end of me. I knew that every drop it held, was
a drop of my life. I knew that when I was changed into a part of
the vapour that had crept towards me but a little while before,
like my own warning ghost, he would do as he had done in my
sister's case  make all haste to the town, and be seen slouching
about there, drinking at the alehouses. My rapid mind pursued him
to the town, made a picture of the street with him in it, and
contrasted its lights and life with the lonely marsh and the white
vapour creeping over it, into which I should have dissolved.
It was not only that I could have summed up years and years and
years while he said a dozen words, but that what he did say
presented pictures to me, and not mere words. In the excited and
exalted state of my brain, I could not think of a place without
seeing it, or of persons without seeing them. It is impossible to
overstate the vividness of these images, and yet I was so intent,
all the time, upon him himself  who would not be intent on the
tiger crouching to spring  that I knew of the slightest action of
his fingers.
When he had drunk this second time, he rose from the bench on which
he sat, and pushed the table aside. Then, he took up the candle,
and shading it with his murderous hand so as to throw its light on
me, stood before me, looking at me and enjoying the sight.
"Wolf, I'll tell you something more. It was Old Orlick as you
tumbled over on your stairs that night."
I saw the staircase with its extinguished lamps. I saw the shadows
of the heavy stairrails, thrown by the watchman's lantern on the
wall. I saw the rooms that I was never to see again here, a door
half open there, a door closed all the articles of furniture
around.
"And why was Old Orlick there? I'll tell you something more, wolf.
You and her have pretty well hunted me out of this country, so far
as getting a easy living in it goes, and I've took up with new
companions, and new masters. Some of 'em writes my letters when I
wants 'em wrote  do you mind?  writes my letters, wolf They
writes fifty hands they're not like sneaking you, as writes but
one. I've had a firm mind and a firm will to have your life, since
you was down here at your sister's burying. I han't seen a way to
get you safe, and I've looked arter you to know your ins and outs.
For, says Old Orlick to himself, 'Somehow or another I'll have
him' What When I looks for you, I finds your uncle Provis, eh?"
Mill Pond Bank, and Chinks's Basin, and the Old Green Copper
RopeWalk, all so clear and plain Provis in his rooms, the signal
whose use was over, pretty Clara, the good motherly woman, old Bill
Barley on his back, all drifting by, as on the swift stream of my
life fast running out to sea
"You with a uncle too Why, I know'd you at Gargery's when you was
so small a wolf that I could have took your weazen betwixt this
finger and thumb and chucked you away dead as I'd thoughts o'
doing, odd times, when I see you loitering amongst the pollards on
a Sunday, and you hadn't found no uncles then. No, not you But
when Old Orlick come for to hear that your uncle Provis had
mostlike wore the legiron wot Old Orlick had picked up, filed
asunder, on these meshes ever so many year ago, and wot he kep by
him till he dropped your sister with it, like a bullock, as he
means to drop you  hey?  when he come for to hear that  hey?"
In his savage taunting, he flared the candle so close at me, that I
turned my face aside, to save it from the flame.
"Ah" he cried, laughing, after doing it again, "the burnt child
dreads the fire Old Orlick knowed you was burnt, Old Orlick knowed
you was smuggling your uncle Provis away, Old Orlick's a match for
you and know'd you'd come tonight Now I'll tell you something
more, wolf, and this ends it. There's them that's as good a match
for your uncle Provis as Old Orlick has been for you. Let him 'ware
them, when he's lost his nevvy Let him 'ware them, when no man
can't find a rag of his dear relation's clothes, nor yet a bone of
his body. There's them that can't and that won't have Magwitch 
yes, I know the name  alive in the same land with them, and
that's had such sure information of him when he was alive in
another land, as that he couldn't and shouldn't leave it unbeknown
and put them in danger. P'raps it's them that writes fifty hands,
and that's not like sneaking you as writes but one. 'Ware
Compeyson, Magwitch, and the gallows"
He flared the candle at me again, smoking my face and hair, and for
an instant blinding me, and turned his powerful back as he replaced
the light on the table. I had thought a prayer, and had been with
Joe and Biddy and Herbert, before he turned towards me again.
There was a clear space of a few feet between the table and the
opposite wall. Within this space, he now slouched backwards and
forwards. His great strength seemed to sit stronger upon him than
ever before, as he did this with his hands hanging loose and heavy
at his sides, and with his eyes scowling at me. I had no grain of
hope left. Wild as my inward hurry was, and wonderful the force of
the pictures that rushed by me instead of thoughts, I could yet
clearly understand that unless he had resolved that I was within a
few moments of surely perishing out of all human knowledge, he
would never have told me what he had told.
Of a sudden, he stopped, took the cork out of his bottle, and
tossed it away. Light as it was, I heard it fall like a plummet. He
swallowed slowly, tilting up the bottle by little and little, and
now he looked at me no more. The last few drops of liquor he poured
into the palm of his hand, and licked up. Then, with a sudden hurry
of violence and swearing horribly, he threw the bottle from him,
and stooped and I saw in his hand a stonehammer with a long heavy
handle.
The resolution I had made did not desert me, for, without uttering
one vain word of appeal to him, I shouted out with all my might,
and struggled with all my might. It was only my head and my legs
that I could move, but to that extent I struggled with all the
force, until then unknown, that was within me. In the same instant
I heard responsive shouts, saw figures and a gleam of light dash in
at the door, heard voices and tumult, and saw Orlick emerge from a
struggle of men, as if it were tumbling water, clear the table at a
leap, and fly out into the night.
After a blank, I found that I was lying unbound, on the floor, in
the same place, with my head on some one's knee. My eyes were fixed
on the ladder against the wall, when I came to myself  had opened
on it before my mind saw it  and thus as I recovered
consciousness, I knew that I was in the place where I had lost it.
Too indifferent at first, even to look round and ascertain who
supported me, I was lying looking at the ladder, when there came
between me and it, a face. The face of Trabb's boy
"I think he's all right" said Trabb's boy, in a sober voice "but
ain't he just pale though"
At these words, the face of him who supported me looked over into
mine, and I saw my supporter to be
"Herbert Great Heaven"
"Softly," said Herbert. "Gently, Handel. Don't be too eager."
"And our old comrade, Startop" I cried, as he too bent over me.
"Remember what he is going to assist us in," said Herbert, "and be
calm."
The allusion made me spring up though I dropped again from the
pain in my arm. "The time has not gone by, Herbert, has it? What
night is tonight? How long have I been here?" For, I had a strange
and strong misgiving that I had been lying there a long time  a
day and a night  two days and nights  more.
"The time has not gone by. It is still Monday night."
"Thank God"
"And you have all tomorrow, Tuesday, to rest in," said Herbert.
"But you can't help groaning, my dear Handel. What hurt have you
got? Can you stand?"
"Yes, yes," said I, "I can walk. I have no hurt but in this
throbbing arm."
They laid it bare, and did what they could. It was violently
swollen and inflamed, and I could scarcely endure to have it
touched. But, they tore up their handkerchiefs to make fresh
bandages, and carefully replaced it in the sling, until we could
get to the town and obtain some cooling lotion to put upon it. In a
little while we had shut the door of the dark and empty
sluicehouse, and were passing through the quarry on our way back.
Trabb's boy  Trabb's overgrown young man now  went before us with
a lantern, which was the light I had seen come in at the door. But,
the moon was a good two hours higher than when I had last seen the
sky, and the night though rainy was much lighter. The white vapour
of the kiln was passing from us as we went by, and, as I had
thought a prayer before, I thought a thanksgiving now.
Entreating Herbert to tell me how he had come to my rescue  which
at first he had flatly refused to do, but had insisted on my
remaining quiet  I learnt that I had in my hurry dropped the
letter, open, in our chambers, where he, coming home to bring with
him Startop whom he had met in the street on his way to me, found
it, very soon after I was gone. Its tone made him uneasy, and the
more so because of the inconsistency between it and the hasty
letter I had left for him. His uneasiness increasing instead of
subsiding after a quarter of an hour's consideration, he set off
for the coachoffice, with Startop, who volunteered his company, to
make inquiry when the next coach went down. Finding that the
afternoon coach was gone, and finding that his uneasiness grew into
positive alarm, as obstacles came in his way, he resolved to follow
in a postchaise. So, he and Startop arrived at the Blue Boar,
fully expecting there to find me, or tidings of me but, finding
neither, went on to Miss Havisham's, where they lost me. Hereupon
they went back to the hotel doubtless at about the time when I was
hearing the popular local version of my own story, to refresh
themselves and to get some one to guide them out upon the marshes.
Among the loungers under the Boar's archway, happened to be Trabb's
boy  true to his ancient habit of happening to be everywhere where
he had no business  and Trabb's boy had seen me passing from Miss
Havisham's in the direction of my diningplace. Thus, Trabb's boy
became their guide, and with him they went out to the sluicehouse
though by the town way to the marshes, which I had avoided. Now, as
they went along, Herbert reflected, that I might, after all, have
been brought there on some genuine and serviceable errand tending
to Provis's safety, and, bethinking himself that in that case
interruption must be mischievous, left his guide and Startop on the
edge of the quarry, and went on by himself, and stole round the
house two or three times, endeavouring to ascertain whether all was
right within. As he could hear nothing but indistinct sounds of one
deep rough voice this was while my mind was so busy, he even at
last began to doubt whether I was there, when suddenly I cried out
loudly, and he answered the cries, and rushed in, closely followed
by the other two.
When I told Herbert what had passed within the house, he was for
our immediately going before a magistrate in the town, late at
night as it was, and getting out a warrant. But, I had already
considered that such a course, by detaining us there, or binding us
to come back, might be fatal to Provis. There was no gainsaying
this difficulty, and we relinquished all thoughts of pursuing
Orlick at that time. For the present, under the circumstances, we
deemed it prudent to make rather light of the matter to Trabb's
boy who I am convinced would have been much affected by
disappointment, if he had known that his intervention saved me from
the limekiln. Not that Trabb's boy was of a malignant nature, but
that he had too much spare vivacity, and that it was in his
constitution to want variety and excitement at anybody's expense.
When we parted, I presented him with two guineas which seemed to
meet his views, and told him that I was sorry ever to have had an
ill opinion of him which made no impression on him at all.
Wednesday being so close upon us, we determined to go back to
London that night, three in the postchaise the rather, as we
should then be clear away, before the night's adventure began to be
talked of. Herbert got a large bottle of stuff for my arm, and by
dint of having this stuff dropped over it all the night through, I
was just able to bear its pain on the journey. It was daylight when
we reached the Temple, and I went at once to bed, and lay in bed
all day.
My terror, as I lay there, of falling ill and being unfitted for
tomorrow, was so besetting, that I wonder it did not disable me of
itself. It would have done so, pretty surely, in conjunction with
the mental wear and tear I had suffered, but for the unnatural
strain upon me that tomorrow was. So anxiously looked forward to,
charged with such consequences, its results so impenetrably hidden
though so near.
No precaution could have been more obvious than our refraining from
communication with him that day yet this again increased my
restlessness. I started at every footstep and every sound,
believing that he was discovered and taken, and this was the
messenger to tell me so. I persuaded myself that I knew he was
taken that there was something more upon my mind than a fear or a
presentiment that the fact had occurred, and I had a mysterious
knowledge of it. As the day wore on and no ill news came, as the
day closed in and darkness fell, my overshadowing dread of being
disabled by illness before tomorrow morning, altogether mastered
me. My burning arm throbbed, and my burning head throbbed, and I
fancied I was beginning to wander. I counted up to high numbers, to
make sure of myself, and repeated passages that I knew in prose and
verse. It happened sometimes that in the mere escape of a fatigued
mind, I dozed for some moments or forgot then I would say to
myself with a start, "Now it has come, and I am turning delirious"
They kept me very quiet all day, and kept my arm constantly
dressed, and gave me cooling drinks. Whenever I fell asleep, I
awoke with the notion I had had in the sluicehouse, that a long
time had elapsed and the opportunity to save him was gone. About
midnight I got out of bed and went to Herbert, with the conviction
that I had been asleep for fourandtwenty hours, and that
Wednesday was past. It was the last selfexhausting effort of my
fretfulness, for, after that, I slept soundly.
Wednesday morning was dawning when I looked out of window. The
winking lights upon the bridges were already pale, the coming sun
was like a marsh of fire on the horizon. The river, still dark and
mysterious, was spanned by bridges that were turning coldly grey,
with here and there at top a warm touch from the burning in the
sky. As I looked along the clustered roofs, with Church towers and
spires shooting into the unusually clear air, the sun rose up, and
a veil seemed to be drawn from the river, and millions of sparkles
burst out upon its waters. From me too, a veil seemed to be drawn,
and I felt strong and well.
Herbert lay asleep in his bed, and our old fellowstudent lay
asleep on the sofa. I could not dress myself without help, but I
made up the fire, which was still burning, and got some coffee
ready for them. In good time they too started up strong and well,
and we admitted the sharp morning air at the windows, and looked at
the tide that was still flowing towards us.
"When it turns at nine o'clock," said Herbert, cheerfully, "look
out for us, and stand ready, you over there at Mill Pond Bank"
Chapter 
It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind
blows cold when it is summer in the light, and winter in the
shade. We had out peacoats with us, and I took a bag. Of all my
worldly possessions I took no more than the few necessaries that
filled the bag. Where I might go, what I might do, or when I might
return, were questions utterly unknown to me nor did I vex my mind
with them, for it was wholly set on Provis's safety. I only
wondered for the passing moment, as I stopped at the door and
looked back, under what altered circumstances I should next see
those rooms, if ever.
We loitered down to the Temple stairs, and stood loitering there,
as if we were not quite decided to go upon the water at all. Of
course I had taken care that the boat should be ready and
everything in order. After a little show of indecision, which there
were none to see but the two or three amphibious creatures
belonging to our Temple stairs, we went on board and cast off
Herbert in the bow, I steering. It was then about highwater 
halfpast eight.
Our plan was this. The tide, beginning to run down at nine, and
being with us until three, we intended still to creep on after it
had turned, and row against it until dark. We should then be well
in those long reaches below Gravesend, between Kent and Essex,
where the river is broad and solitary, where the waterside
inhabitants are very few, and where lone publichouses are
scattered here and there, of which we could choose one for a
restingplace. There, we meant to lie by, all night. The steamer
for Hamburg, and the steamer for Rotterdam, would start from London
at about nine on Thursday morning. We should know at what time to
expect them, according to where we were, and would hail the first
so that if by any accident we were not taken abroad, we should have
another chance. We knew the distinguishing marks of each vessel.
The relief of being at last engaged in the execution of the
purpose, was so great to me that I felt it difficult to realize the
condition in which I had been a few hours before. The crisp air,
the sunlight, the movement on the river, and the moving river
itself  the road that ran with us, seeming to sympathize with us,
animate us, and encourage us on  freshened me with new hope. I
felt mortified to be of so little use in the boat but, there were
few better oarsmen than my two friends, and they rowed with a
steady stroke that was to last all day.
At that time, the steamtraffic on the Thames was far below its
present extent, and watermen's boats were far more numerous. Of
barges, sailing colliers, and coasting traders, there were perhaps
as many as now but, of steamships, great and small, not a tithe
or a twentieth part so many. Early as it was, there were plenty of
scullers going here and there that morning, and plenty of barges
dropping down with the tide the navigation of the river between
bridges, in an open boat, was a much easier and commoner matter in
those days than it is in these and we went ahead among many skiffs
and wherries, briskly.
Old London Bridge was soon passed, and old Billingsgate market with
its oysterboats and Dutchmen, and the White Tower and Traitor's
Gate, and we were in among the tiers of shipping. Here, were the
Leith, Aberdeen, and Glasgow steamers, loading and unloading goods,
and looking immensely high out of the water as we passed alongside
here, were colliers by the score and score, with the coalwhippers
plunging off stages on deck, as counterweights to measures of coal
swinging up, which were then rattled over the side into barges
here, at her moorings was tomorrow's steamer for Rotterdam, of
which we took good notice and here tomorrow's for Hamburg, under
whose bowsprit we crossed. And now I, sitting in the stern, could
see with a faster beating heart, Mill Pond Bank and Mill Pond
stairs.
"Is he there?" said Herbert.
"Not yet."
"Right He was not to come down till he saw us. Can you see his
signal?"
"Not well from here but I think I see it.  Now, I see him Pull
both. Easy, Herbert. Oars"
We touched the stairs lightly for a single moment, and he was on
board and we were off again. He had a boatcloak with him, and a
black canvas bag, and he looked as like a riverpilot as my heart
could have wished. "Dear boy" he said, putting his arm on my
shoulder as he took his seat. "Faithful dear boy, well done.
Thankye, thankye"
Again among the tiers of shipping, in and out, avoiding rusty
chaincables frayed hempen hawsers and bobbing buoys, sinking for
the moment floating broken baskets, scattering floating chips of
wood and shaving, cleaving floating scum of coal, in and out, under
the figurehead of the John of Sunderland making a speech to the
winds as is done by many Johns, and the Betsy of Yarmouth with a
firm formality of bosom and her nobby eyes starting two inches out
of her head, in and out, hammers going in shipbuilders'yards, saws
going at timber, clashing engines going at things unknown, pumps
going in leaky ships, capstans going, ships going out to sea, and
unintelligible seacreatures roaring curses over the bulwarks at
respondent lightermen, in and out  out at last upon the clearer
river, where the ships' boys might take their fenders in, no longer
fishing in troubled waters with them over the side, and where the
festooned sails might fly out to the wind.
At the Stairs where we had taken him abroad, and ever since, I had
looked warily for any token of our being suspected. I had seen
none. We certainly had not been, and at that time as certainly we
were not, either attended or followed by any boat. If we had been
waited on by any boat, I should have run in to shore, and have
obliged her to go on, or to make her purpose evident. But, we held
our own, without any appearance of molestation.
He had his boatcloak on him, and looked, as I have said, a natural
part of the scene. It was remarkable but perhaps the wretched life
he had led, accounted for it, that he was the least anxious of any
of us. He was not indifferent, for he told me that he hoped to live
to see his gentleman one of the best of gentlemen in a foreign
country he was not disposed to be passive or resigned, as I
understood it but he had no notion of meeting danger half way.
When it came upon him, he confronted it, but it must come before he
troubled himself.
"If you knowed, dear boy," he said to me, "what it is to sit here
alonger my dear boy and have my smoke, arter having been day by day
betwixt four walls, you'd envy me. But you don't know what it is."
"I think I know the delights of freedom," I answered.
"Ah," said he, shaking his head gravely. "But you don't know it
equal to me. You must have been under lock and key, dear boy, to
know it equal to me  but I ain't agoing to be low."
It occurred to me as inconsistent, that for any mastering idea, he
should have endangered his freedom and even his life. But I
reflected that perhaps freedom without danger was too much apart
from all the habit of his existence to be to him what it would be
to another man. I was not far out, since he said, after smoking a
little
"You see, dear boy, when I was over yonder, t'other side the world,
I was always alooking to this side and it come flat to be there,
for all I was agrowing rich. Everybody knowed Magwitch, and
Magwitch could come, and Magwitch could go, and nobody's head would
be troubled about him. They ain't so easy concerning me here, dear
boy  wouldn't be, leastwise, if they knowed where I was."
"If all goes well," said I, "you will be perfectly free and safe
again, within a few hours."
"Well," he returned, drawing a long breath, "I hope so."
"And think so?"
He dipped his hand in the water over the boat's gunwale, and said,
smiling with that softened air upon him which was not new to me
"Ay, I s'pose I think so, dear boy. We'd be puzzled to be more
quiet and easygoing than we are at present. But  it's aflowing
so soft and pleasant through the water, p'raps, as makes me think
it  I was athinking through my smoke just then, that we can no
more see to the bottom of the next few hours, than we can see to
the bottom of this river what I catches hold of. Nor yet we can't
no more hold their tide than I can hold this. And it's run through
my fingers and gone, you see" holding up his dripping hand.
"But for your face, I should think you were a little despondent,"
said I.
"Not a bit on it, dear boy It comes of flowing on so quiet, and of
that there rippling at the boat's head making a sort of a Sunday
tune. Maybe I'm agrowing a trifle old besides."
He put his pipe back in his mouth with an undisturbed expression of
face, and sat as composed and contented as if we were already out
of England. Yet he was as submissive to a word of advice as if he
had been in constant terror, for, when we ran ashore to get some
bottles of beer into the boat, and he was stepping out, I hinted
that I thought he would be safest where he was, and he said. "Do
you, dear boy?" and quietly sat down again.
The air felt cold upon the river, but it was a bright day, and the
sunshine was very cheering. The tide ran strong, I took care to
lose none of it, and our steady stroke carried us on thoroughly
well. By imperceptible degrees, as the tide ran out, we lost more
and more of the nearer woods and hills, and dropped lower and lower
between the muddy banks, but the tide was yet with us when we were
off Gravesend. As our charge was wrapped in his cloak, I purposely
passed within a boat or two's length of the floating Custom House,
and so out to catch the stream, alongside of two emigrant ships,
and under the bows of a large transport with troops on the
forecastle looking down at us. And soon the tide began to slacken,
and the craft lying at anchor to swing, and presently they had all
swung round, and the ships that were taking advantage of the new
tide to get up to the Pool, began to crowd upon us in a fleet, and
we kept under the shore, as much out of the strength of the tide
now as we could, standing carefully off from low shallows and
mudbanks.
Our oarsmen were so fresh, by dint of having occasionally let her
drive with the tide for a minute or two, that a quarter of an
hour's rest proved full as much as they wanted. We got ashore among
some slippery stones while we ate and drank what we had with us,
and looked about. It was like my own marsh country, flat and
monotonous, and with a dim horizon while the winding river turned
and turned, and the great floating buoys upon it turned and turned,
and everything else seemed stranded and still. For, now, the last
of the fleet of ships was round the last low point we had headed
and the last green barge, strawladen, with a brown sail, had
followed and some ballastlighters, shaped like a child's first
rude imitation of a boat, lay low in the mud and a little squat
shoallighthouse on open piles, stood crippled in the mud on stilts
and crutches and slimy stakes stuck out of the mud, and slimy
stones stuck out of the mud, and red landmarks and tidemarks stuck
out of the mud, and an old landingstage and an old roofless building
slipped into the mud, and all about us was stagnation and mud.
We pushed off again, and made what way we could. It was much harder
work now, but Herbert and Startop persevered, and rowed, and rowed,
and rowed, until the sun went down. By that time the river had
lifted us a little, so that we could see above the bank. There was
the red sun, on the low level of the shore, in a purple haze, fast
deepening into black and there was the solitary flat marsh and
far away there were the rising grounds, between which and us there
seemed to be no life, save here and there in the foreground a
melancholy gull.
As the night was fast falling, and as the moon, being past the
full, would not rise early, we held a little council a short one,
for clearly our course was to lie by at the first lonely tavern we
could find. So, they plied their oars once more, and I looked out
for anything like a house. Thus we held on, speaking little, for
four or five dull miles. It was very cold, and, a collier coming by
us, with her galleyfire smoking and flaring, looked like a
comfortable home. The night was as dark by this time as it would be
until morning and what light we had, seemed to come more from the
river than the sky, as the oars in their dipping struck at a few
reflected stars.
At this dismal time we were evidently all possessed by the idea that
we were followed. As the tide made, it flapped heavily at irregular
intervals against the shore and whenever such a sound came, one or
other of us was sure to start and look in that direction. Here and
there, the set of the current had worn down the bank into a little
creek, and we were all suspicious of such places, and eyed them
nervously. Sometimes, "What was that ripple?" one of us would say
in a low voice. Or another, "Is that a boat yonder?" And
afterwards, we would fall into a dead silence, and I would sit
impatiently thinking with what an unusual amount of noise the oars
worked in the thowels.
At length we descried a light and a roof, and presently afterwards
ran alongside a little causeway made of stones that had been picked
up hard by. Leaving the rest in the boat, I stepped ashore, and
found the light to be in a window of a publichouse. It was a dirty
place enough, and I dare say not unknown to smuggling adventurers
but there was a good fire in the kitchen, and there were eggs and
bacon to eat, and various liquors to drink. Also, there were two
doublebedded rooms  "such as they were," the landlord said. No
other company was in the house than the landlord, his wife, and a
grizzled male creature, the "Jack" of the little causeway, who was
as slimy and smeary as if he had been lowwater mark too.
With this assistant, I went down to the boat again, and we all came
ashore, and brought out the oars, and rudder, and boathook, and
all else, and hauled her up for the night. We made a very good meal
by the kitchen fire, and then apportioned the bedrooms Herbert and
Startop were to occupy one I and our charge the other. We found
the air as carefully excluded from both, as if air were fatal to
life and there were more dirty clothes and bandboxes under the
beds than I should have thought the family possessed. But, we
considered ourselves well off, notwithstanding, for a more solitary
place we could not have found.
While we were comforting ourselves by the fire after our meal, the
Jack  who was sitting in a corner, and who had a bloated pair of
shoes on, which he had exhibited while we were eating our eggs and
bacon, as interesting relics that he had taken a few days ago from
the feet of a drowned seaman washed ashore  asked me if we had
seen a fouroared galley going up with the tide? When I told him
No, he said she must have gone down then, and yet she "took up
too," when she left there.
"They must ha' thought better on't for some reason or another,"
said the Jack, "and gone down."
"A fouroared galley, did you say?" said I.
"A four," said the Jack, "and two sitters."
"Did they come ashore here?"
"They put in with a stone twogallon jar, for some beer. I'd
ha'been glad to pison the beer myself," said the Jack, "or put some
rattling physic in it."
"Why?"
"I know why," said the Jack. He spoke in a slushy voice, as if much
mud had washed into his throat.
"He thinks," said the landlord a weakly meditative man with a pale
eye, who seemed to rely greatly on his Jack "he thinks they was,
what they wasn't."
"I knows what I thinks," observed the Jack.
"You thinks Custum 'Us, Jack?" said the landlord.
"I do," said the Jack.
"Then you're wrong, Jack."
"Am I"
In the infinite meaning of his reply and his boundless confidence
in his views, the Jack took one of his bloated shoes off, looked
into it, knocked a few stones out of it on the kitchen floor, and
put it on again. He did this with the air of a Jack who was so
right that he could afford to do anything.
"Why, what do you make out that they done with their buttons then,
Jack?" asked the landlord, vacillating weakly.
"Done with their buttons?" returned the Jack. "Chucked 'em
overboard. Swallered 'em. Sowed 'em, to come up small salad. Done
with their buttons"
"Don't be cheeky, Jack," remonstrated the landlord, in a melancholy
and pathetic way.
"A Custum 'Us officer knows what to do with his Buttons," said the
Jack, repeating the obnoxious word with the greatest contempt,
"when they comes betwixt him and his own light. A Four and two
sitters don't go hanging and hovering, up with one tide and down
with another, and both with and against another, without there
being Custum 'Us at the bottom of it." Saying which he went out in
disdain and the landlord, having no one to reply upon, found it
impracticable to pursue the subject.
This dialogue made us all uneasy, and me very uneasy. The dismal
wind was muttering round the house, the tide was flapping at the
shore, and I had a feeling that we were caged and threatened. A
fouroared galley hovering about in so unusual a way as to attract
this notice, was an ugly circumstance that I could not get rid of.
When I had induced Provis to go up to bed, I went outside with my
two companions Startop by this time knew the state of the case,
and held another council. Whether we should remain at the house
until near the steamer's time, which would be about one in the
afternoon or whether we should put off early in the morning was
the question we discussed. On the whole we deemed it the better
course to lie where we were, until within an hour or so of the
steamer's time, and then to get out in her track, and drift easily
with the tide. Having settled to do this, we returned into the
house and went to bed.
I lay down with the greater part of my clothes on, and slept well
for a few hours. When I awoke, the wind had risen, and the sign of
the house the Ship was creaking and banging about, with noises
that startled me. Rising softly, for my charge lay fast asleep, I
looked out of the window. It commanded the causeway where we had
hauled up our boat, and, as my eyes adapted themselves to the light
of the clouded moon, I saw two men looking into her. They passed by
under the window, looking at nothing else, and they did not go down
to the landingplace which I could discern to be empty, but struck
across the marsh in the direction of the Nore.
My first impulse was to call up Herbert, and show him the two men
going away. But, reflecting before I got into his room, which was
at the back of the house and adjoined mine, that he and Startop had
had a harder day than I, and were fatigued, I forbore. Going back
to my window, I could see the two men moving over the marsh. In
that light, however, I soon lost them, and feeling very cold, lay
down to think of the matter, and fell asleep again.
We were up early. As we walked to and fro, all four together,
before breakfast, I deemed it right to recount what I had seen.
Again our charge was the least anxious of the party. It was very
likely that the men belonged to the Custom House, he said quietly,
and that they had no thought of us. I tried to persuade myself that
it was so  as, indeed, it might easily be. However, I proposed
that he and I should walk away together to a distant point we could
see, and that the boat should take us aboard there, or as near
there as might prove feasible, at about noon. This being considered
a good precaution, soon after breakfast he and I set forth, without
saying anything at the tavern.
He smoked his pipe as we went along, and sometimes stopped to clap
me on the shoulder. One would have supposed that it was I who was
in danger, not he, and that he was reassuring me. We spoke very
little. As we approached the point, I begged him to remain in a
sheltered place, while I went on to reconnoitre for, it was
towards it that the men had passed in the night. He complied, and I
went on alone. There was no boat off the point, nor any boat drawn
up anywhere near it, nor were there any signs of the men having
embarked there. But, to be sure the tide was high, and there might
have been some footprints under water.
When he looked out from his shelter in the distance, and saw that I
waved my hat to him to come up, he rejoined me, and there we
waited sometimes lying on the bank wrapped in our coats, and
sometimes moving about to warm ourselves until we saw our boat
coming round. We got aboard easily, and rowed out into the track of
the steamer. By that time it wanted but ten minutes of one o'clock,
and we began to look out for her smoke.
But, it was halfpast one before we saw her smoke, and soon
afterwards we saw behind it the smoke of another steamer. As they
were coming on at full speed, we got the two bags ready, and took
that opportunity of saying goodbye to Herbert and Startop. We had
all shaken hands cordially, and neither Herbert's eyes nor mine
were quite dry, when I saw a fouroared galley shoot out from under
the bank but a little way ahead of us, and row out into the same
track.
A stretch of shore had been as yet between us and the steamer's
smoke, by reason of the bend and wind of the river but now she was
visible, coming head on. I called to Herbert and Startop to keep
before the tide, that she might see us lying by for her, and I
adjured Provis to sit quite still, wrapped in his cloak. He
answered cheerily, "Trust to me, dear boy," and sat like a statue.
Meantime the galley, which was very skilfully handled, had crossed
us, let us come up with her, and fallen alongside. Leaving just
room enough for the play of the oars, she kept alongside, drifting
when we drifted, and pulling a stroke or two when we pulled. Of the
two sitters one held the rudder lines, and looked at us attentively
as did all the rowers the other sitter was wrapped up, much as
Provis was, and seemed to shrink, and whisper some instruction to
the steerer as he looked at us. Not a word was spoken in either
boat.
Startop could make out, after a few minutes, which steamer was
first, and gave me the word "Hamburg," in a low voice as we sat
face to face. She was nearing us very fast, and the beating of her
peddles grew louder and louder. I felt as if her shadow were
absolutely upon us, when the galley hailed us. I answered.
"You have a returned Transport there," said the man who held the
lines. "That's the man, wrapped in the cloak. His name is Abel
Magwitch, otherwise Provis. I apprehend that man, and call upon him
to surrender, and you to assist."
At the same moment, without giving any audible direction to his
crew, he ran the galley abroad of us. They had pulled one sudden
stroke ahead, had got their oars in, had run athwart us, and were
holding on to our gunwale, before we knew what they were doing.
This caused great confusion on board the steamer, and I heard them
calling to us, and heard the order given to stop the paddles, and
heard them stop, but felt her driving down upon us irresistibly. In
the same moment, I saw the steersman of the galley lay his hand on
his prisoner's shoulder, and saw that both boats were swinging
round with the force of the tide, and saw that all hands on board
the steamer were running forward quite frantically. Still in the
same moment, I saw the prisoner start up, lean across his captor,
and pull the cloak from the neck of the shrinking sitter in the
galley. Still in the same moment, I saw that the face disclosed,
was the face of the other convict of long ago. Still in the same
moment, I saw the face tilt backward with a white terror on it that
I shall never forget, and heard a great cry on board the steamer
and a loud splash in the water, and felt the boat sink from under
me.
It was but for an instant that I seemed to struggle with a thousand
millweirs and a thousand flashes of light that instant past, I
was taken on board the galley. Herbert was there, and Startop was
there but our boat was gone, and the two convicts were gone.
What with the cries aboard the steamer, and the furious blowing off
of her steam, and her driving on, and our driving on, I could not
at first distinguish sky from water or shore from shore but, the
crew of the galley righted her with great speed, and, pulling
certain swift strong strokes ahead, lay upon their oars, every man
looking silently and eagerly at the water astern. Presently a dark
object was seen in it, bearing towards us on the tide. No man
spoke, but the steersman held up his hand, and all softly backed
water, and kept the boat straight and true before it. As it came
nearer, I saw it to be Magwitch, swimming, but not swimming freely.
He was taken on board, and instantly manacled at the wrists and
ankles.
The galley was kept steady, and the silent eager lookout at the
water was resumed. But, the Rotterdam steamer now came up, and
apparently not understanding what had happened, came on at speed.
By the time she had been hailed and stopped, both steamers were
drifting away from us, and we were rising and falling in a troubled
wake of water. The lookout was kept, long after all was still
again and the two steamers were gone but, everybody knew that it
was hopeless now.
At length we gave it up, and pulled under the shore towards the
tavern we had lately left, where we were received with no little
surprise. Here, I was able to get some comforts for Magwitch 
Provis no longer  who had received some very severe injury in the
chest and a deep cut in the head.
He told me that he believed himself to have gone under the keel of
the steamer, and to have been struck on the head in rising. The
injury to his chest which rendered his breathing extremely
painful he thought he had received against the side of the galley.
He added that he did not pretend to say what he might or might not
have done to Compeyson, but, that in the moment of his laying his
hand on his cloak to identify him, that villain had staggered up
and staggered back, and they had both gone overboard together when
the sudden wrenching of him Magwitch out of our boat, and the
endeavour of his captor to keep him in it, had capsized us. He told
me in a whisper that they had gone down, fiercely locked in each
other's arms, and that there had been a struggle under water, and
that he had disengaged himself, struck out, and swum away.
I never had any reason to doubt the exact truth of what he thus
told me. The officer who steered the galley gave the same account
of their going overboard.
When I asked this officer's permission to change the prisoner's wet
clothes by purchasing any spare garments I could get at the
publichouse, he gave it readily merely observing that he must
take charge of everything his prisoner had about him. So the
pocketbook which had once been in my hands, passed into the
officer's. He further gave me leave to accompany the prisoner to
London but, declined to accord that grace to my two friends.
The Jack at the Ship was instructed where the drowned man had gone
down, and undertook to search for the body in the places where it
was likeliest to come ashore. His interest in its recovery seemed
to me to be much heightened when he heard that it had stockings on.
Probably, it took about a dozen drowned men to fit him out
completely and that may have been the reason why the different
articles of his dress were in various stages of decay.
We remained at the publichouse until the tide turned, and then
Magwitch was carried down to the galley and put on board. Herbert
and Startop were to get to London by land, as soon as they could.
We had a doleful parting, and when I took my place by Magwitch's
side, I felt that that was my place henceforth while he lived.
For now, my repugnance to him had all melted away, and in the
hunted wounded shackled creature who held my hand in his, I only
saw a man who had meant to be my benefactor, and who had felt
affectionately, gratefully, and generously, towards me with great
constancy through a series of years. I only saw in him a much
better man than I had been to Joe.
His breathing became more difficult and painful as the night drew
on, and often he could not repress a groan. I tried to rest him on
the arm I could use, in any easy position but, it was dreadful to
think that I could not be sorry at heart for his being badly hurt,
since it was unquestionably best that he should die. That there
were, still living, people enough who were able and willing to
identify him, I could not doubt. That he would be leniently
treated, I could not hope. He who had been presented in the worst
light at his trial, who had since broken prison and had been tried
again, who had returned from transportation under a life sentence,
and who had occasioned the death of the man who was the cause of
his arrest.
As we returned towards the setting sun we had yesterday left behind
us, and as the stream of our hopes seemed all running back, I told
him how grieved I was to think that he had come home for my sake.
"Dear boy," he answered, "I'm quite content to take my chance. I've
seen my boy, and he can be a gentleman without me."
No. I had thought about that, while we had been there side by side.
No. Apart from any inclinations of my own, I understood Wemmick's
hint now. I foresaw that, being convicted, his possessions would be
forfeited to the Crown.
"Lookee here, dear boy," said he "It's best as a gentleman should
not be knowed to belong to me now. Only come to see me as if you
come by chance alonger Wemmick. Sit where I can see you when I am
swore to, for the last o' many times, and I don't ask no more."
"I will never stir from your side," said I, "when I am suffered to
be near you. Please God, I will be as true to you, as you have been
to me"
I felt his hand tremble as it held mine, and he turned his face
away as he lay in the bottom of the boat, and I heard that old
sound in his throat  softened now, like all the rest of him. It
was a good thing that he had touched this point, for it put into my
mind what I might not otherwise have thought of until too late
That he need never know how his hopes of enriching me had perished.
Chapter 
He was taken to the Police Court next day, and would have been
immediately committed for trial, but that it was necessary to send
down for an old officer of the prisonship from which he had once
escaped, to speak to his identity. Nobody doubted it but,
Compeyson, who had meant to depose to it, was tumbling on the
tides, dead, and it happened that there was not at that time any
prison officer in London who could give the required evidence. I
had gone direct to Mr. Jaggers at his private house, on my arrival
over night, to retain his assistance, and Mr. Jaggers on the
prisoner's behalf would admit nothing. It was the sole resource,
for he told me that the case must be over in five minutes when the
witness was there, and that no power on earth could prevent its
going against us.
I imparted to Mr. Jaggers my design of keeping him in ignorance of
the fate of his wealth. Mr. Jaggers was querulous and angry with me
for having "let it slip through my fingers," and said we must
memorialize byandby, and try at all events for some of it. But,
he did not conceal from me that although there might be many cases
in which the forfeiture would not be exacted, there were no
circumstances in this case to make it one of them. I understood
that, very well. I was not related to the outlaw, or connected with
him by any recognizable tie he had put his hand to no writing or
settlement in my favour before his apprehension, and to do so now
would be idle. I had no claim, and I finally resolved, and ever
afterwards abided by the resolution, that my heart should never be
sickened with the hopeless task of attempting to establish one.
There appeared to be reason for supposing that the drowned informer
had hoped for a reward out of this forfeiture, and had obtained
some accurate knowledge of Magwitch's affairs. When his body was
found, many miles from the scene of his death, and so horribly
disfigured that he was only recognizable by the contents of his
pockets, notes were still legible, folded in a case he carried.
Among these, were the name of a bankinghouse in New South Wales
where a sum of money was, and the designation of certain lands of
considerable value. Both these heads of information were in a list
that Magwitch, while in prison, gave to Mr. Jaggers, of the
possessions he supposed I should inherit. His ignorance, poor
fellow, at last served him he never mistrusted but that my
inheritance was quite safe, with Mr. Jaggers's aid.
After three days' delay, during which the crown prosecution stood
over for the production of the witness from the prisonship, the
witness came, and completed the easy case. He was committed to take
his trial at the next Sessions, which would come on in a month.
It was at this dark time of my life that Herbert returned home one
evening, a good deal cast down, and said
"My dear Handel, I fear I shall soon have to leave you."
His partner having prepared me for that, I was less surprised than
he thought.
"We shall lose a fine opportunity if I put off going to Cairo, and
I am very much afraid I must go, Handel, when you most need me."
"Herbert, I shall always need you, because I shall always love you
but my need is no greater now, than at another time."
"You will be so lonely."
"I have not leisure to think of that," said I. "You know that I am
always with him to the full extent of the time allowed, and that I
should be with him all day long, if I could. And when I come away
from him, you know that my thoughts are with him."
The dreadful condition to which he was brought, was so appalling to
both of us, that we could not refer to it in plainer words.
"My dear fellow," said Herbert, "let the near prospect of our
separation  for, it is very near  be my justification for
troubling you about yourself. Have you thought of your future?"
"No, for I have been afraid to think of any future."
"But yours cannot be dismissed indeed, my dear dear Handel, it
must not be dismissed. I wish you would enter on it now, as far as
a few friendly words go, with me."
"I will," said I.
"In this branch house of ours, Handel, we must have a"
I saw that his delicacy was avoiding the right word, so I said, "A
clerk."
"A clerk. And I hope it is not at all unlikely that he may expand
as a clerk of your acquaintance has expanded into a partner. Now,
Handel  in short, my dear boy, will you come to me?"
There was something charmingly cordial and engaging in the manner
in which after saying "Now, Handel," as if it were the grave
beginning of a portentous business exordium, he had suddenly given
up that tone, stretched out his honest hand, and spoken like a
schoolboy.
"Clara and I have talked about it again and again," Herbert
pursued, "and the dear little thing begged me only this evening,
with tears in her eyes, to say to you that if you will live with us
when we come together, she will do her best to make you happy, and
to convince her husband's friend that he is her friend too. We
should get on so well, Handel"
I thanked her heartily, and I thanked him heartily, but said I
could not yet make sure of joining him as he so kindly offered.
Firstly, my mind was too preoccupied to be able to take in the
subject clearly. Secondly  Yes Secondly, there was a vague
something lingering in my thoughts that will come out very near the
end of this slight narrative.
"But if you thought, Herbert, that you could, without doing any
injury to your business, leave the question open for a little
while"
"For any while," cried Herbert. "Six months, a year"
"Not so long as that," said I. "Two or three months at most."
Herbert was highly delighted when we shook hands on this
arrangement, and said he could now take courage to tell me that he
believed he must go away at the end of the week.
"And Clara?" said I.
"The dear little thing," returned Herbert, "holds dutifully to her
father as long as he lasts but he won't last long. Mrs. Whimple
confides to me that he is certainly going."
"Not to say an unfeeling thing," said I, "he cannot do better than
go."
"I am afraid that must be admitted," said Herbert "and then I
shall come back for the dear little thing, and the dear little
thing and I will walk quietly into the nearest church. Remember
The blessed darling comes of no family, my dear Handel, and never
looked into the red book, and hasn't a notion about her grandpapa.
What a fortune for the son of my mother"
On the Saturday in that same week, I took my leave of Herbert 
full of bright hope, but sad and sorry to leave me  as he sat on
one of the seaport mail coaches. I went into a coffeehouse to
write a little note to Clara, telling her he had gone off, sending
his love to her over and over again, and then went to my lonely
home  if it deserved the name, for it was now no home to me, and I
had no home anywhere.
On the stairs I encountered Wemmick, who was coming down, after an
unsuccessful application of his knuckles to my door. I had not seen
him alone, since the disastrous issue of the attempted flight and
he had come, in his private and personal capacity, to say a few
words of explanation in reference to that failure.
"The late Compeyson," said Wemmick, "had by little and little got
at the bottom of half of the regular business now transacted, and
it was from the talk of some of his people in trouble some of his
people being always in trouble that I heard what I did. I kept my
ears open, seeming to have them shut, until I heard that he was
absent, and I thought that would be the best time for making the
attempt. I can only suppose now, that it was a part of his policy,
as a very clever man, habitually to deceive his own instruments.
You don't blame me, I hope, Mr. Pip? I am sure I tried to serve you,
with all my heart."
"I am as sure of that, Wemmick, as you can be, and I thank you most
earnestly for all your interest and friendship."
"Thank you, thank you very much. It's a bad job," said Wemmick,
scratching his head, "and I assure you I haven't been so cut up for
a long time. What I look at, is the sacrifice of so much portable
property. Dear me"
"What I think of, Wemmick, is the poor owner of the property."
"Yes, to be sure," said Wemmick. "Of course there can be no
objection to your being sorry for him, and I'd put down a
fivepound note myself to get him out of it. But what I look at, is
this. The late Compeyson having been beforehand with him in
intelligence of his return, and being so determined to bring him to
book, I do not think he could have been saved. Whereas, the
portable property certainly could have been saved. That's the
difference between the property and the owner, don't you see?"
I invited Wemmick to come upstairs, and refresh himself with a
glass of grog before walking to Walworth. He accepted the
invitation. While he was drinking his moderate allowance, he said,
with nothing to lead up to it, and after having appeared rather
fidgety
"What do you think of my meaning to take a holiday on Monday, Mr.
Pip?"
"Why, I suppose you have not done such a thing these twelve
months."
"These twelve years, more likely," said Wemmick. "Yes. I'm going to
take a holiday. More than that I'm going to take a walk. More than
that I'm going to ask you to take a walk with me."
I was about to excuse myself, as being but a bad companion just
then, when Wemmick anticipated me.
"I know your engagements," said he, "and I know you are out of
sorts, Mr. Pip. But if you could oblige me, I should take it as a
kindness. It ain't a long walk, and it's an early one. Say it might
occupy you including breakfast on the walk from eight to twelve.
Couldn't you stretch a point and manage it?"
He had done so much for me at various times, that this was very
little to do for him. I said I could manage it  would manage it 
and he was so very much pleased by my acquiescence, that I was
pleased too. At his particular request, I appointed to call for him
at the Castle at halfpast eight on Monday morning, and so we
parted for the time.
Punctual to my appointment, I rang at the Castle gate on the Monday
morning, and was received by Wemmick himself who struck me as
looking tighter than usual, and having a sleeker hat on. Within,
there were two glasses of rumandmilk prepared, and two biscuits.
The Aged must have been stirring with the lark, for, glancing into
the perspective of his bedroom, I observed that his bed was empty.
When we had fortified ourselves with the rumandmilk and biscuits,
and were going out for the walk with that training preparation on
us, I was considerably surprised to see Wemmick take up a
fishingrod, and put it over his shoulder. "Why, we are not going
fishing" said I. "No," returned Wemmick, "but I like to walk with
one."
I thought this odd however, I said nothing, and we set off. We
went towards Camberwell Green, and when we were thereabouts,
Wemmick said suddenly
"Halloa Here's a church"
There was nothing very surprising in that but a gain, I was rather
surprised, when he said, as if he were animated by a brilliant
idea
"Let's go in"
We went in, Wemmick leaving his fishingrod in the porch, and
looked all round. In the mean time, Wemmick was diving into his
coatpockets, and getting something out of paper there.
"Halloa" said he. "Here's a couple of pair of gloves Let's put
'em on"
As the gloves were white kid gloves, and as the postoffice was
widened to its utmost extent, I now began to have my strong
suspicions. They were strengthened into certainty when I beheld the
Aged enter at a side door, escorting a lady.
"Halloa" said Wemmick. "Here's Miss Skiffins Let's have a
wedding."
That discreet damsel was attired as usual, except that she was now
engaged in substituting for her green kid gloves, a pair of white.
The Aged was likewise occupied in preparing a similar sacrifice for
the altar of Hymen. The old gentleman, however, experienced so much
difficulty in getting his gloves on, that Wemmick found it
necessary to put him with his back against a pillar, and then to
get behind the pillar himself and pull away at them, while I for my
part held the old gentleman round the waist, that he might present
and equal and safe resistance. By dint of this ingenious Scheme,
his gloves were got on to perfection.
The clerk and clergyman then appearing, we were ranged in order at
those fatal rails. True to his notion of seeming to do it all
without preparation, I heard Wemmick say to himself as he took
something out of his waistcoatpocket before the service began,
"Halloa Here's a ring"
I acted in the capacity of backer, or bestman, to the bridegroom
while a little limp pew opener in a soft bonnet like a baby's, made
a feint of being the bosom friend of Miss Skiffins. The
responsibility of giving the lady away, devolved upon the Aged,
which led to the clergyman's being unintentionally scandalized, and
it happened thus. When he said, "Who giveth this woman to be
married to this man?" the old gentlemen, not in the least knowing
what point of the ceremony we had arrived at, stood most amiably
beaming at the ten commandments. Upon which, the clergyman said
again, "WHO giveth this woman to be married to this man?" The old
gentleman being still in a state of most estimable unconsciousness,
the bridegroom cried out in his accustomed voice, "Now Aged P. you
know who giveth?" To which the Aged replied with great briskness,
before saying that he gave, "All right, John, all right, my boy"
And the clergyman came to so gloomy a pause upon it, that I had
doubts for the moment whether we should get completely married that
day.
It was completely done, however, and when we were going out of
church, Wemmick took the cover off the font, and put his white
gloves in it, and put the cover on again. Mrs. Wemmick, more heedful
of the future, put her white gloves in her pocket and assumed her
green. "Now, Mr. Pip," said Wemmick, triumphantly shouldering the
fishingrod as we came out, "let me ask you whether anybody would
suppose this to be a weddingparty"
Breakfast had been ordered at a pleasant little tavern, a mile or
so away upon the rising ground beyond the Green, and there was a
bagatelle board in the room, in case we should desire to unbend our
minds after the solemnity. It was pleasant to observe that Mrs.
Wemmick no longer unwound Wemmick's arm when it adapted itself to
her figure, but sat in a highbacked chair against the wall, like a
violoncello in its case, and submitted to be embraced as that
melodious instrument might have done.
We had an excellent breakfast, and when any one declined anything
on table, Wemmick said, "Provided by contract, you know don't be
afraid of it" I drank to the new couple, drank to the Aged, drank
to the Castle, saluted the bride at parting, and made myself as
agreeable as I could.
Wemmick came down to the door with me, and I again shook hands with
him, and wished him joy.
"Thankee" said Wemmick, rubbing his hands. "She's such a manager
of fowls, you have no idea. You shall have some eggs, and judge for
yourself. I say, Mr. Pip" calling me back, and speaking low. "This
is altogether a Walworth sentiment, please."
"I understand. Not to be mentioned in Little Britain," said I.
Wemmick nodded. "After what you let out the other day, Mr. Jaggers
may as well not know of it. He might think my brain was softening,
or something of the kind."
Chapter 
He lay in prison very ill, during the whole interval between his
committal for trial, and the coming round of the Sessions. He had
broken two ribs, they had wounded one of his lungs, and he breathed
with great pain and difficulty, which increased daily. It was a
consequence of his hurt, that he spoke so low as to be scarcely
audible therefore, he spoke very little. But, he was ever ready to
listen to me, and it became the first duty of my life to say to
him, and read to him, what I knew he ought to hear.
Being far too ill to remain in the common prison, he was removed,
after the first day or so, into the infirmary. This gave me
opportunities of being with him that I could not otherwise have
had. And but for his illness he would have been put in irons, for
he was regarded as a determined prisonbreaker, and I know not what
else.
Although I saw him every day, it was for only a short time hence,
the regularly recurring spaces of our separation were long enough
to record on his face any slight changes that occurred in his
physical state. I do not recollect that I once saw any change in it
for the better he wasted, and became slowly weaker and worse, day
by day, from the day when the prison door closed upon him.
The kind of submission or resignation that he showed, was that of a
man who was tired out. I sometimes derived an impression, from his
manner or from a whispered word or two which escaped him, that he
pondered over the question whether he might have been a better man
under better circumstances. But, he never justified himself by a
hint tending that way, or tried to bend the past out of its eternal
shape.
It happened on two or three occasions in my presence, that his
desperate reputation was alluded to by one or other of the people
in attendance on him. A smile crossed his face then, and he turned
his eyes on me with a trustful look, as if he were confident that I
had seen some small redeeming touch in him, even so long ago as when
I was a little child. As to all the rest, he was humble and
contrite, and I never knew him complain.
When the Sessions came round, Mr. Jaggers caused an application to
be made for the postponement of his trial until the following
Sessions. It was obviously made with the assurance that he could
not live so long, and was refused. The trial came on at once, and,
when he was put to the bar, he was seated in a chair. No objection
was made to my getting close to the dock, on the outside of it, and
holding the hand that he stretched forth to me.
The trial was very short and very clear. Such things as could be
said for him, were said  how he had taken to industrious habits,
and had thriven lawfully and reputably. But, nothing could unsay
the fact that he had returned, and was there in presence of the
Judge and Jury. It was impossible to try him for that, and do
otherwise than find him guilty.
At that time, it was the custom as I learnt from my terrible
experience of that Sessions to devote a concluding day to the
passing of Sentences, and to make a finishing effect with the
Sentence of Death. But for the indelible picture that my
remembrance now holds before me, I could scarcely believe, even as
I write these words, that I saw twoandthirty men and women put
before the Judge to receive that sentence together. Foremost among
the twoandthirty, was he seated, that he might get breath enough
to keep life in him.
The whole scene starts out again in the vivid colours of the
moment, down to the drops of April rain on the windows of the
court, glittering in the rays of April sun. Penned in the dock, as
I again stood outside it at the corner with his hand in mine, were
the twoandthirty men and women some defiant, some stricken with
terror, some sobbing and weeping, some covering their faces, some
staring gloomily about. There had been shrieks from among the women
convicts, but they had been stilled, a hush had succeeded. The
sheriffs with their great chains and nosegays, other civic gewgaws
and monsters, criers, ushers, a great gallery full of people  a
large theatrical audience  looked on, as the twoandthirty and
the Judge were solemnly confronted. Then, the Judge addressed them.
Among the wretched creatures before him whom he must single out for
special address, was one who almost from his infancy had been an
offender against the laws who, after repeated imprisonments and
punishments, had been at length sentenced to exile for a term of
years and who, under circumstances of great violence and daring
had made his escape and been resentenced to exile for life. That
miserable man would seem for a time to have become convinced of his
errors, when far removed from the scenes of his old offences, and
to have lived a peaceable and honest life. But in a fatal moment,
yielding to those propensities and passions, the indulgence of
which had so long rendered him a scourge to society, he had quitted
his haven of rest and repentance, and had come back to the country
where he was proscribed. Being here presently denounced, he had for
a time succeeded in evading the officers of Justice, but being at
length seized while in the act of flight, he had resisted them, and
had  he best knew whether by express design, or in the blindness
of his hardihood  caused the death of his denouncer, to whom his
whole career was known. The appointed punishment for his return to
the land that had cast him out, being Death, and his case being
this aggravated case, he must prepare himself to Die.
The sun was striking in at the great windows of the court, through
the glittering drops of rain upon the glass, and it made a broad
shaft of light between the twoandthirty and the Judge, linking
both together, and perhaps reminding some among the audience, how
both were passing on, with absolute equality, to the greater
Judgment that knoweth all things and cannot err. Rising for a
moment, a distinct speck of face in this way of light, the prisoner
said, "My Lord, I have received my sentence of Death from the
Almighty, but I bow to yours," and sat down again. There was some
hushing, and the Judge went on with what he had to say to the rest.
Then, they were all formally doomed, and some of them were
supported out, and some of them sauntered out with a haggard look
of bravery, and a few nodded to the gallery, and two or three shook
hands, and others went out chewing the fragments of herb they had
taken from the sweet herbs lying about. He went last of all,
because of having to be helped from his chair and to go very
slowly and he held my hand while all the others were removed, and
while the audience got up putting their dresses right, as they
might at church or elsewhere and pointed down at this criminal or
at that, and most of all at him and me.
I earnestly hoped and prayed that he might die before the
Recorder's Report was made, but, in the dread of his lingering on,
I began that night to write out a petition to the Home Secretary of
State, setting forth my knowledge of him, and how it was that he
had come back for my sake. I wrote it as fervently and pathetically
as I could, and when I had finished it and sent it in, I wrote out
other petitions to such men in authority as I hoped were the most
merciful, and drew up one to the Crown itself. For several days and
nights after he was sentenced I took no rest except when I fell
asleep in my chair, but was wholly absorbed in these appeals. And
after I had sent them in, I could not keep away from the places
where they were, but felt as if they were more hopeful and less
desperate when I was near them. In this unreasonable restlessness
and pain of mind, I would roam the streets of an evening, wandering
by those offices and houses where I had left the petitions. To the
present hour, the weary western streets of London on a cold dusty
spring night, with their ranges of stern shutup mansions and their
long rows of lamps, are melancholy to me from this association.
The daily visits I could make him were shortened now, and he was
more strictly kept. Seeing, or fancying, that I was suspected of an
intention of carrying poison to him, I asked to be searched before
I sat down at his bedside, and told the officer who was always
there, that I was willing to do anything that would assure him of
the singleness of my designs. Nobody was hard with him, or with me.
There was duty to be done, and it was done, but not harshly. The
officer always gave me the assurance that he was worse, and some
other sick prisoners in the room, and some other prisoners who
attended on them as sick nurses malefactors, but not incapable of
kindness, God be thanked, always joined in the same report.
As the days went on, I noticed more and more that he would lie
placidly looking at the white ceiling, with an absence of light in
his face, until some word of mine brightened it for an instant, and
then it would subside again. Sometimes he was almost, or quite,
unable to speak then, he would answer me with slight pressures on
my hand, and I grew to understand his meaning very well.
The number of the days had risen to ten, when I saw a greater
change in him than I had seen yet. His eyes were turned towards the
door, and lighted up as I entered.
"Dear boy," he said, as I sat down by his bed "I thought you was
late. But I knowed you couldn't be that."
"It is just the time," said I. "I waited for it at the gate."
"You always waits at the gate don't you, dear boy?"
"Yes. Not to lose a moment of the time."
"Thank'ee dear boy, thank'ee. God bless you You've never deserted
me, dear boy."
I pressed his hand in silence, for I could not forget that I had
once meant to desert him.
"And what's the best of all," he said, "you've been more
comfortable alonger me, since I was under a dark cloud, than when
the sun shone. That's best of all."
He lay on his back, breathing with great difficulty. Do what he
would, and love me though he did, the light left his face ever and
again, and a film came over the placid look at the white ceiling.
"Are you in much pain today?"
"I don't complain of none, dear boy."
"You never do complain."
He had spoken his last words. He smiled, and I understood his touch
to mean that he wished to lift my hand, and lay it on his breast. I
laid it there, and he smiled again, and put both his hands upon it.
The allotted time ran out, while we were thus but, looking round,
I found the governor of the prison standing near me, and he
whispered, "You needn't go yet." I thanked him gratefully, and
asked, "Might I speak to him, if he can hear me?"
The governor stepped aside, and beckoned the officer away. The
change, though it was made without noise, drew back the film from
the placid look at the white ceiling, and he looked most
affectionately at me.
"Dear Magwitch, I must tell you, now at last. You understand what I
say?"
A gentle pressure on my hand.
"You had a child once, whom you loved and lost."
A stronger pressure on my hand.
"She lived and found powerful friends. She is living now. She is a
lady and very beautiful. And I love her"
With a last faint effort, which would have been powerless but for
my yielding to it and assisting it, he raised my hand to his lips.
Then, he gently let it sink upon his breast again, with his own
hands lying on it. The placid look at the white ceiling came back,
and passed away, and his head dropped quietly on his breast.
Mindful, then, of what we had read together, I thought of the two
men who went up into the Temple to pray, and I knew there were no
better words that I could say beside his bed, than "O Lord, be
merciful to him, a sinner"
Chapter 
Now that I was left wholly to myself, I gave notice of my intention
to quit the chambers in the Temple as soon as my tenancy could
legally determine, and in the meanwhile to underlet them. At once I
put bills up in the windows for, I was in debt, and had scarcely
any money, and began to be seriously alarmed by the state of my
affairs. I ought rather to write that I should have been alarmed if
I had had energy and concentration enough to help me to the clear
perception of any truth beyond the fact that I was falling very
ill. The late stress upon me had enabled me to put off illness, but
not to put it away I knew that it was coming on me now, and I knew
very little else, and was even careless as to that.
For a day or two, I lay on the sofa, or on the floor  anywhere,
according as I happened to sink down  with a heavy head and aching
limbs, and no purpose, and no power. Then there came one night
which appeared of great duration, and which teemed with anxiety and
horror and when in the morning I tried to sit up in my bed and
think of it, I found I could not do so.
Whether I really had been down in Garden Court in the dead of the
night, groping about for the boat that I supposed to be there
whether I had two or three times come to myself on the staircase
with great terror, not knowing how I had got out of bed whether I
had found myself lighting the lamp, possessed by the idea that he
was coming up the stairs, and that the lights were blown out
whether I had been inexpressibly harassed by the distracted
talking, laughing, and groaning, of some one, and had half
suspected those sounds to be of my own making whether there had
been a closed iron furnace in a dark corner of the room, and a
voice had called out over and over again that Miss Havisham was
consuming within it these were things that I tried to settle with
myself and get into some order, as I lay that morning on my bed.
But, the vapour of a limekiln would come between me and them,
disordering them all, and it was through the vapour at last that I
saw two men looking at me.
"What do you want?" I asked, starting "I don't know you."
"Well, sir," returned one of them, bending down and touching me on
the shoulder, "this is a matter that you'll soon arrange, I dare
say, but you're arrested."
"What is the debt?"
"Hundred and twentythree pound, fifteen, six. Jeweller's account,
I think."
"What is to be done?"
"You had better come to my house," said the man. "I keep a very
nice house."
I made some attempt to get up and dress myself. When I next
attended to them, they were standing a little off from the bed,
looking at me. I still lay there.
"You see my state," said I. "I would come with you if I could but
indeed I am quite unable. If you take me from here, I think I shall
die by the way."
Perhaps they replied, or argued the point, or tried to encourage me
to believe that I was better than I thought. Forasmuch as they hang
in my memory by only this one slender thread, I don't know what
they did, except that they forbore to remove me.
That I had a fever and was avoided, that I suffered greatly, that I
often lost my reason, that the time seemed interminable, that I
confounded impossible existences with my own identity that I was a
brick in the house wall, and yet entreating to be released from the
giddy place where the builders had set me that I was a steel beam
of a vast engine, clashing and whirling over a gulf, and yet that I
implored in my own person to have the engine stopped, and my part
in it hammered off that I passed through these phases of disease,
I know of my own remembrance, and did in some sort know at the
time. That I sometimes struggled with real people, in the belief
that they were murderers, and that I would all at once comprehend
that they meant to do me good, and would then sink exhausted in
their arms, and suffer them to lay me down, I also knew at the
time. But, above all, I knew that there was a constant tendency in
all these people  who, when I was very ill, would present all
kinds of extraordinary transformations of the human face, and would
be much dilated in size  above all, I say, I knew that there was
an extraordinary tendency in all these people, sooner or later to
settle down into the likeness of Joe.
After I had turned the worst point of my illness, I began to notice
that while all its other features changed, this one consistent
feature did not change. Whoever came about me, still settled down
into Joe. I opened my eyes in the night, and I saw in the great
chair at the bedside, Joe. I opened my eyes in the day, and,
sitting on the windowseat, smoking his pipe in the shaded open
window, still I saw Joe. I asked for cooling drink, and the dear
hand that gave it me was Joe's. I sank back on my pillow after
drinking, and the face that looked so hopefully and tenderly upon
me was the face of Joe.
At last, one day, I took courage, and said, "Is it Joe?"
And the dear old homevoice answered, "Which it air, old chap."
"O Joe, you break my heart Look angry at me, Joe. Strike me, Joe.
Tell me of my ingratitude. Don't be so good to me"
For, Joe had actually laid his head down on the pillow at my side
and put his arm round my neck, in his joy that I knew him.
"Which dear old Pip, old chap," said Joe, "you and me was ever
friends. And when you're well enough to go out for a ride  what
larks"
After which, Joe withdrew to the window, and stood with his back
towards me, wiping his eyes. And as my extreme weakness prevented
me from getting up and going to him, I lay there, penitently
whispering, "O God bless him O God bless this gentle Christian
man"
Joe's eyes were red when I next found him beside me but, I was
holding his hand, and we both felt happy.
"How long, dear Joe?"
"Which you meantersay, Pip, how long have your illness lasted, dear
old chap?"
"Yes, Joe."
"It's the end of May, Pip. Tomorrow is the first of June."
"And have you been here all that time, dear Joe?"
"Pretty nigh, old chap. For, as I says to Biddy when the news of
your being ill were brought by letter, which it were brought by the
post and being formerly single he is now married though underpaid
for a deal of walking and shoeleather, but wealth were not a
object on his part, and marriage were the great wish of his hart"
"It is so delightful to hear you, Joe But I interrupt you in what
you said to Biddy."
"Which it were," said Joe, "that how you might be amongst
strangers, and that how you and me having been ever friends, a
wisit at such a moment might not prove unacceptabobble. And Biddy,
her word were, 'Go to him, without loss of time.' That," said Joe,
summing up with his judicial air, "were the word of Biddy. 'Go to
him,' Biddy say, 'without loss of time.' In short, I shouldn't
greatly deceive you," Joe added, after a little grave reflection,
"if I represented to you that the word of that young woman were,
'without a minute's loss of time.'"
There Joe cut himself short, and informed me that I was to be
talked to in great moderation, and that I was to take a little
nourishment at stated frequent times, whether I felt inclined for
it or not, and that I was to submit myself to all his orders. So, I
kissed his hand, and lay quiet, while he proceeded to indite a note
to Biddy, with my love in it.
Evidently, Biddy had taught Joe to write. As I lay in bed looking
at him, it made me, in my weak state, cry again with pleasure to
see the pride with which he set about his letter. My bedstead,
divested of its curtains, had been removed, with me upon it, into
the sittingroom, as the airiest and largest, and the carpet had
been taken away, and the room kept always fresh and wholesome night
and day. At my own writingtable, pushed into a corner and cumbered
with little bottles, Joe now sat down to his great work, first
choosing a pen from the pentray as if it were a chest of large
tools, and tucking up his sleeves as if he were going to wield a
crowbar or sledgehammer. It was necessary for Joe to hold on
heavily to the table with his left elbow, and to get his right leg
well out behind him, before he could begin, and when he did begin,
he made every downstroke so slowly that it might have been six
feet long, while at every upstroke I could hear his pen
spluttering extensively. He had a curious idea that the inkstand
was on the side of him where it was not, and constantly dipped his
pen into space, and seemed quite satisfied with the result.
Occasionally, he was tripped up by some orthographical
stumblingblock, but on the whole he got on very well indeed, and
when he had signed his name, and had removed a finishing blot from
the paper to the crown of his head with his two forefingers, he got
up and hovered about the table, trying the effect of his
performance from various points of view as it lay there, with
unbounded satisfaction.
Not to make Joe uneasy by talking too much, even if I had been able
to talk much, I deferred asking him about Miss Havisham until next
day. He shook his head when I then asked him if she had recovered.
"Is she dead, Joe?"
"Why you see, old chap," said Joe, in a tone of remonstrance, and
by way of getting at it by degrees, "I wouldn't go so far as to say
that, for that's a deal to say but she ain't"
"Living, Joe?"
"That's nigher where it is," said Joe "she ain't living."
"Did she linger long, Joe?"
"Arter you was took ill, pretty much about what you might call if
you was put to it a week," said Joe still determined, on my
account, to come at everything by degrees.
"Dear Joe, have you heard what becomes of her property?"
"Well, old chap," said Joe, "it do appear that she had settled the
most of it, which I meantersay tied it up, on Miss Estella. But she
had wrote out a little coddleshell in her own hand a day or two
afore the accident, leaving a cool four thousand to Mr. Matthew
Pocket. And why, do you suppose, above all things, Pip, she left
that cool four thousand unto him? 'Because of Pip's account of him
the said Matthew.' I am told by Biddy, that air the writing," said
Joe, repeating the legal turn as if it did him infinite good,
"'account of him the said Matthew.' And a cool four thousand, Pip"
I never discovered from whom Joe derived the conventional
temperature of the four thousand pounds, but it appeared to make
the sum of money more to him, and he had a manifest relish in
insisting on its being cool.
This account gave me great joy, as it perfected the only good thing
I had done. I asked Joe whether he had heard if any of the other
relations had any legacies?
"Miss Sarah," said Joe, "she have twentyfive pound perannium fur
to buy pills, on account of being bilious. Miss Georgiana, she have
twenty pound down. Mrs.  what's the name of them wild beasts with
humps, old chap?"
"Camels?" said I, wondering why he could possibly want to know.
Joe nodded. "Mrs. Camels," by which I presently understood he meant
Camilla, "she have five pound fur to buy rushlights to put her in
spirits when she wake up in the night."
The accuracy of these recitals was sufficiently obvious to me, to
give me great confidence in Joe's information. "And now," said Joe,
"you ain't that strong yet, old chap, that you can take in more nor
one additional shovelfull today. Old Orlick he's been a
bustin' open a dwellingouse."
"Whose?" said I.
"Not, I grant, you, but what his manners is given to blusterous,"
said Joe, apologetically "still, a Englishman's ouse is his
Castle, and castles must not be busted 'cept when done in war time.
And wotsume'er the failings on his part, he were a corn and
seedsman in his hart."
"Is it Pumblechook's house that has been broken into, then?"
"That's it, Pip," said Joe "and they took his till, and they took
his cashbox, and they drinked his wine, and they partook of his
wittles, and they slapped his face, and they pulled his nose, and
they tied him up to his bedpust, and they giv' him a dozen, and
they stuffed his mouth full of flowering annuals to prewent his
crying out. But he knowed Orlick, and Orlick's in the county
jail."
By these approaches we arrived at unrestricted conversation. I was
slow to gain strength, but I did slowly and surely become less
weak, and Joe stayed with me, and I fancied I was little Pip again.
For, the tenderness of Joe was so beautifully proportioned to my
need, that I was like a child in his hands. He would sit and talk
to me in the old confidence, and with the old simplicity, and in
the old unassertive protecting way, so that I would half believe
that all my life since the days of the old kitchen was one of the
mental troubles of the fever that was gone. He did everything for
me except the household work, for which he had engaged a very
decent woman, after paying off the laundress on his first arrival.
"Which I do assure you, Pip," he would often say, in explanation of
that liberty "I found her a tapping the spare bed, like a cask of
beer, and drawing off the feathers in a bucket, for sale. Which she
would have tapped yourn next, and draw'd it off with you a laying
on it, and was then a carrying away the coals gradiwally in the
souptureen and wegetabledishes, and the wine and spirits in your
Wellington boots."
We looked forward to the day when I should go out for a ride, as we
had once looked forward to the day of my apprenticeship. And when
the day came, and an open carriage was got into the Lane, Joe
wrapped me up, took me in his arms, carried me down to it, and put
me in, as if I were still the small helpless creature to whom he
had so abundantly given of the wealth of his great nature.
And Joe got in beside me, and we drove away together into the
country, where the rich summer growth was already on the trees and
on the grass, and sweet summer scents filled all the air. The day
happened to be Sunday, and when I looked on the loveliness around
me, and thought how it had grown and changed, and how the little
wild flowers had been forming, and the voices of the birds had been
strengthening, by day and by night, under the sun and under the
stars, while poor I lay burning and tossing on my bed, the mere
remembrance of having burned and tossed there, came like a check
upon my peace. But, when I heard the Sunday bells, and looked
around a little more upon the outspread beauty, I felt that I was
not nearly thankful enough  that I was too weak yet, to be even
that  and I laid my head on Joe's shoulder, as I had laid it long
ago when he had taken me to the Fair or where not, and it was too
much for my young senses.
More composure came to me after a while, and we talked as we used
to talk, lying on the grass at the old Battery. There was no change
whatever in Joe. Exactly what he had been in my eyes then, he was
in my eyes still just as simply faithful, and as simply right.
When we got back again and he lifted me out, and carried me  so
easily  across the court and up the stairs, I thought of that
eventful Christmas Day when he had carried me over the marshes. We
had not yet made any allusion to my change of fortune, nor did I
know how much of my late history he was acquainted with. I was so
doubtful of myself now, and put so much trust in him, that I could
not satisfy myself whether I ought to refer to it when he did not.
"Have you heard, Joe," I asked him that evening, upon further
consideration, as he smoked his pipe at the window, "who my patron
was?"
"I heerd," returned Joe, "as it were not Miss Havisham, old chap."
"Did you hear who it was, Joe?"
"Well I heerd as it were a person what sent the person what
giv' you the banknotes at the Jolly Bargemen, Pip."
"So it was."
"Astonishing" said Joe, in the placidest way.
"Did you hear that he was dead, Joe?" I presently asked, with
increasing diffidence.
"Which? Him as sent the banknotes, Pip?"
"Yes."
"I think," said Joe, after meditating a long time, and looking
rather evasively at the windowseat, "as I did hear tell that how
he were something or another in a general way in that direction."
"Did you hear anything of his circumstances, Joe?"
"Not partickler, Pip."
"If you would like to hear, Joe" I was beginning, when Joe got up
and came to my sofa.
"Lookee here, old chap," said Joe, bending over me. "Ever the best
of friends ain't us, Pip?"
I was ashamed to answer him.
"Wery good, then," said Joe, as if I had answered "that's all
right, that's agreed upon. Then why go into subjects, old chap,
which as betwixt two sech must be for ever onnecessary? There's
subjects enough as betwixt two sech, without onnecessary ones.
Lord To think of your poor sister and her Rampages And don't you
remember Tickler?"
"I do indeed, Joe."
"Lookee here, old chap," said Joe. "I done what I could to keep you
and Tickler in sunders, but my power were not always fully equal to
my inclinations. For when your poor sister had a mind to drop into
you, it were not so much," said Joe, in his favourite argumentative
way, "that she dropped into me too, if I put myself in opposition
to her but that she dropped into you always heavier for it. I
noticed that. It ain't a grab at a man's whisker, not yet a shake
or two of a man to which your sister was quite welcome, that 'ud
put a man off from getting a little child out of punishment. But
when that little child is dropped into, heavier, for that grab of
whisker or shaking, then that man naterally up and says to himself,
'Where is the good as you are adoing? I grant you I see the 'arm,'
says the man, 'but I don't see the good. I call upon you, sir,
therefore, to pint out the good.'"
"The man says?" I observed, as Joe waited for me to speak.
"The man says," Joe assented. "Is he right, that man?"
"Dear Joe, he is always right."
"Well, old chap," said Joe, "then abide by your words. If he's
always right which in general he's more likely wrong, he's right
when he says this  Supposing ever you kep any little matter to
yourself, when you was a little child, you kep it mostly because
you know'd as J. Gargery's power to part you and Tickler in
sunders, were not fully equal to his inclinations. Therefore, think
no more of it as betwixt two sech, and do not let us pass remarks
upon onnecessary subjects. Biddy giv' herself a deal o' trouble
with me afore I left for I am almost awful dull, as I should view
it in this light, and, viewing it in this light, as I should so put
it. Both of which," said Joe, quite charmed with his logical
arrangement, "being done, now this to you a true friend, say.
Namely. You mustn't go aoverdoing on it, but you must have your
supper and your wineandwater, and you must be put betwixt the
sheets."
The delicacy with which Joe dismissed this theme, and the sweet
tact and kindness with which Biddy  who with her woman's wit had
found me out so soon  had prepared him for it, made a deep
impression on my mind. But whether Joe knew how poor I was, and how
my great expectations had all dissolved, like our own marsh mists
before the sun, I could not understand.
Another thing in Joe that I could not understand when it first
began to develop itself, but which I soon arrived at a sorrowful
comprehension of, was this As I became stronger and better, Joe
became a little less easy with me. In my weakness and entire
dependence on him, the dear fellow had fallen into the old tone,
and called me by the old names, the dear "old Pip, old chap," that
now were music in my ears. I too had fallen into the old ways, only
happy and thankful that he let me. But, imperceptibly, though I
held by them fast, Joe's hold upon them began to slacken and
whereas I wondered at this, at first, I soon began to understand
that the cause of it was in me, and that the fault of it was all
mine.
Ah Had I given Joe no reason to doubt my constancy, and to think
that in prosperity I should grow cold to him and cast him off? Had
I given Joe's innocent heart no cause to feel instinctively that as
I got stronger, his hold upon me would be weaker, and that he had
better loosen it in time and let me go, before I plucked myself
away?
It was on the third or fourth occasion of my going out walking in
the Temple Gardens leaning on Joe's arm, that I saw this change in
him very plainly. We had been sitting in the bright warm sunlight,
looking at the river, and I chanced to say as we got up
"See, Joe I can walk quite strongly. Now, you shall see me walk
back by myself."
"Which do not overdo it, Pip," said Joe "but I shall be happy fur
to see you able, sir."
The last word grated on me but how could I remonstrate I walked
no further than the gate of the gardens, and then pretended to be
weaker than I was, and asked Joe for his arm. Joe gave it me, but
was thoughtful.
I, for my part, was thoughtful too for, how best to check this
growing change in Joe, was a great perplexity to my remorseful
thoughts. That I was ashamed to tell him exactly how I was placed,
and what I had come down to, I do not seek to conceal but, I hope
my reluctance was not quite an unworthy one. He would want to help
me out of his little savings, I knew, and I knew that he ought not
to help me, and that I must not suffer him to do it.
It was a thoughtful evening with both of us. But, before we went to
bed, I had resolved that I would wait over tomorrow, tomorrow
being Sunday, and would begin my new course with the new week. On
Monday morning I would speak to Joe about this change, I would lay
aside this last vestige of reserve, I would tell him what I had in
my thoughts that Secondly, not yet arrived at, and why I had not
decided to go out to Herbert, and then the change would be
conquered for ever. As I cleared, Joe cleared, and it seemed as
though he had sympathetically arrived at a resolution too.
We had a quiet day on the Sunday, and we rode out into the country,
and then walked in the fields.
"I feel thankful that I have been ill, Joe," I said.
"Dear old Pip, old chap, you're a'most come round, sir."
"It has been a memorable time for me, Joe."
"Likeways for myself, sir," Joe returned.
"We have had a time together, Joe, that I can never forget. There
were days once, I know, that I did for a while forget but I never
shall forget these."
"Pip," said Joe, appearing a little hurried and troubled, "there
has been larks, And, dear sir, what have been betwixt us  have
been."
At night, when I had gone to bed, Joe came into my room, as he had
done all through my recovery. He asked me if I felt sure that I was
as well as in the morning?
"Yes, dear Joe, quite."
"And are always agetting stronger, old chap?"
"Yes, dear Joe, steadily."
Joe patted the coverlet on my shoulder with his great good hand,
and said, in what I thought a husky voice, "Good night"
When I got up in the morning, refreshed and stronger yet, I was
full of my resolution to tell Joe all, without delay. I would tell
him before breakfast. I would dress at once and go to his room and
surprise him for, it was the first day I had been up early. I went
to his room, and he was not there. Not only was he not there, but
his box was gone.
I hurried then to the breakfasttable, and on it found a letter.
These were its brief contents.
"Not wishful to intrude I have departured fur you are well again
dear Pip and will do better without JO.
"P.S. Ever the best of friends."
Enclosed in the letter, was a receipt for the debt and costs on
which I had been arrested. Down to that moment I had vainly
supposed that my creditor had withdrawn or suspended proceedings
until I should be quite recovered. I had never dreamed of Joe's
having paid the money but, Joe had paid it, and the receipt was in
his name.
What remained for me now, but to follow him to the dear old forge,
and there to have out my disclosure to him, and my penitent
remonstrance with him, and there to relieve my mind and heart of
that reserved Secondly, which had begun as a vague something
lingering in my thoughts, and had formed into a settled purpose?
The purpose was, that I would go to Biddy, that I would show her
how humbled and repentant I came back, that I would tell her how I
had lost all I once hoped for, that I would remind her of our old
confidences in my first unhappy time. Then, I would say to her,
"Biddy, I think you once liked me very well, when my errant heart,
even while it strayed away from you, was quieter and better with
you than it ever has been since. If you can like me only half as
well once more, if you can take me with all my faults and
disappointments on my head, if you can receive me like a forgiven
child and indeed I am as sorry, Biddy, and have as much need of a
hushing voice and a soothing hand, I hope I am a little worthier
of you that I was  not much, but a little. And, Biddy, it shall
rest with you to say whether I shall work at the forge with Joe, or
whether I shall try for any different occupation down in this
country, or whether we shall go away to a distant place where an
opportunity awaits me, which I set aside when it was offered, until
I knew your answer. And now, dear Biddy, if you can tell me that
you will go through the world with me, you will surely make it a
better world for me, and me a better man for it, and I will try
hard to make it a better world for you."
Such was my purpose. After three days more of recovery, I went down
to the old place, to put it in execution and how I sped in it, is
all I have left to tell.
Chapter 
The tidings of my high fortunes having had a heavy fall, had got
down to my native place and its neighbourhood, before I got there.
I found the Blue Boar in possession of the intelligence, and I
found that it made a great change in the Boar's demeanour. Whereas
the Boar had cultivated my good opinion with warm assiduity when I
was coming into property, the Boar was exceedingly cool on the
subject now that I was going out of property.
It was evening when I arrived, much fatigued by the journey I had
so often made so easily. The Boar could not put me into my usual
bedroom, which was engaged probably by some one who had
expectations, and could only assign me a very indifferent chamber
among the pigeons and postchaises up the yard. But, I had as sound
a sleep in that lodging as in the most superior accommodation the
Boar could have given me, and the quality of my dreams was about
the same as in the best bedroom.
Early in the morning while my breakfast was getting ready, I
strolled round by Satis House. There were printed bills on the
gate, and on bits of carpet hanging out of the windows, announcing
a sale by auction of the Household Furniture and Effects, next
week. The House itself was to be sold as old building materials and
pulled down. LOT  was marked in whitewashed knockknee letters on
the brew house LOT  on that part of the main building which had
been so long shut up. Other lots were marked off on other parts of
the structure, and the ivy had been torn down to make room for the
inscriptions, and much of it trailed low in the dust and was
withered already. Stepping in for a moment at the open gate and
looking around me with the uncomfortable air of a stranger who had
no business there, I saw the auctioneer's clerk walking on the
casks and telling them off for the information of a catalogue
compiler, pen in hand, who made a temporary desk of the wheeled
chair I had so often pushed along to the tune of Old Clem.
When I got back to my breakfast in the Boar's coffeeroom, I found
Mr. Pumblechook conversing with the landlord. Mr. Pumblechook not
improved in appearance by his late nocturnal adventure was waiting
for me, and addressed me in the following terms.
"Young man, I am sorry to see you brought low. But what else could
be expected What else could be expected"
As he extended his hand with a magnificently forgiving air, and as
I was broken by illness and unfit to quarrel, I took it.
"William," said Mr. Pumblechook to the waiter, "put a muffin on
table. And has it come to this Has it come to this"
I frowningly sat down to my breakfast. Mr. Pumblechook stood over me
and poured out my tea  before I could touch the teapot  with the
air of a benefactor who was resolved to be true to the last.
"William," said Mr. Pumblechook, mournfully, "put the salt on. In
happier times," addressing me, "I think you took sugar. And did you
take milk? You did. Sugar and milk. William, bring a watercress."
"Thank you," said I, shortly, "but I don't eat watercresses."
"You don't eat 'em," returned Mr. Pumblechook, sighing and nodding
his head several times, as if he might have expected that, and as
if abstinence from watercresses were consistent with my downfall.
"True. The simple fruits of the earth. No. You needn't bring any,
William."
I went on with my breakfast, and Mr. Pumblechook continued to stand
over me, staring fishily and breathing noisily, as he always did.
"Little more than skin and bone" mused Mr. Pumblechook, aloud. "And
yet when he went from here I may say with my blessing, and I
spread afore him my humble store, like the Bee, he was as plump as
a Peach"
This reminded me of the wonderful difference between the servile
manner in which he had offered his hand in my new prosperity,
saying, "May I?" and the ostentatious clemency with which he had
just now exhibited the same fat five fingers.
"Hah" he went on, handing me the breadandbutter. "And air you
agoing to Joseph?"
"In heaven's name," said I, firing in spite of myself, "what does
it matter to you where I am going? Leave that teapot alone."
It was the worst course I could have taken, because it gave
Pumblechook the opportunity he wanted.
"Yes, young man," said he, releasing the handle of the article in
question, retiring a step or two from my table, and speaking for
the behoof of the landlord and waiter at the door, "I will leave
that teapot alone. You are right, young man. For once, you are
right. I forgit myself when I take such an interest in your
breakfast, as to wish your frame, exhausted by the debilitating
effects of prodigygality, to be stimilated by the 'olesome
nourishment of your forefathers. And yet," said Pumblechook,
turning to the landlord and waiter, and pointing me out at arm's
length, "this is him as I ever sported with in his days of happy
infancy Tell me not it cannot be I tell you this is him"
A low murmur from the two replied. The waiter appeared to be
particularly affected.
"This is him," said Pumblechook, "as I have rode in my shaycart.
This is him as I have seen brought up by hand. This is him untoe
the sister of which I was uncle by marriage, as her name was
Georgiana M'ria from her own mother, let him deny it if he can"
The waiter seemed convinced that I could not deny it, and that it
gave the case a black look.
"Young man," said Pumblechook, screwing his head at me in the old
fashion, "you air agoing to Joseph. What does it matter to me, you
ask me, where you air agoing? I say to you, Sir, you air agoing
to Joseph."
The waiter coughed, as if he modestly invited me to get over that.
"Now," said Pumblechook, and all this with a most exasperating air
of saying in the cause of virtue what was perfectly convincing and
conclusive, "I will tell you what to say to Joseph. Here is Squires
of the Boar present, known and respected in this town, and here is
William, which his father's name was Potkins if I do not deceive
myself."
"You do not, sir," said William.
"In their presence," pursued Pumblechook, "I will tell you, young
man, what to say to Joseph. Says you, "Joseph, I have this day seen
my earliest benefactor and the founder of my fortun's. I will name
no names, Joseph, but so they are pleased to call him uptown, and
I have seen that man."
"I swear I don't see him here," said I.
"Say that likewise," retorted Pumblechook. "Say you said that, and
even Joseph will probably betray surprise."
"There you quite mistake him," said I. "I know better."
"Says you," Pumblechook went on, "'Joseph, I have seen that man, and
that man bears you no malice and bears me no malice. He knows your
character, Joseph, and is well acquainted with your pigheadedness
and ignorance and he knows my character, Joseph, and he knows my
want of gratitoode. Yes, Joseph,' says you," here Pumblechook shook
his head and hand at me, "'he knows my total deficiency of common
human gratitoode. He knows it, Joseph, as none can. You do not know
it, Joseph, having no call to know it, but that man do.'"
Windy donkey as he was, it really amazed me that he could have the
face to talk thus to mine.
"Says you, 'Joseph, he gave me a little message, which I will now
repeat. It was, that in my being brought low, he saw the finger of
Providence. He knowed that finger when he saw it, Joseph, and he
saw it plain. It pinted out this writing, Joseph. Reward of
ingratitoode to his earliest benefactor, and founder of fortun's.
But that man said he did not repent of what he had done, Joseph.
Not at all. It was right to do it, it was kind to do it, it was
benevolent to do it, and he would do it again.'"
"It's pity," said I, scornfully, as I finished my interrupted
breakfast, "that the man did not say what he had done and would do
again."
"Squires of the Boar" Pumblechook was now addressing the landlord,
"and William I have no objections to your mentioning, either
uptown or downtown, if such should be your wishes, that it was
right to do it, kind to do it, benevolent to do it, and that I
would do it again."
With those words the Impostor shook them both by the hand, with an
air, and left the house leaving me much more astonished than
delighted by the virtues of that same indefinite "it." I was not
long after him in leaving the house too, and when I went down the
Highstreet I saw him holding forth no doubt to the same effect
at his shop door to a select group, who honoured me with very
unfavourable glances as I passed on the opposite side of the way.
But, it was only the pleasanter to turn to Biddy and to Joe, whose
great forbearance shone more brightly than before, if that could
be, contrasted with this brazen pretender. I went towards them
slowly, for my limbs were weak, but with a sense of increasing
relief as I drew nearer to them, and a sense of leaving arrogance
and untruthfulness further and further behind.
The June weather was delicious. The sky was blue, the larks were
soaring high over the green corn, I thought all that countryside
more beautiful and peaceful by far than I had ever known it to be
yet. Many pleasant pictures of the life that I would lead there,
and of the change for the better that would come over my character
when I had a guiding spirit at my side whose simple faith and clear
homewisdom I had proved, beguiled my way. They awakened a tender
emotion in me for, my heart was softened by my return, and such a
change had come to pass, that I felt like one who was toiling home
barefoot from distant travel, and whose wanderings had lasted many
years.
The schoolhouse where Biddy was mistress, I had never seen but,
the little roundabout lane by which I entered the village for
quietness' sake, took me past it. I was disappointed to find that
the day was a holiday no children were there, and Biddy's house
was closed. Some hopeful notion of seeing her busily engaged in her
daily duties, before she saw me, had been in my mind and was
defeated.
But, the forge was a very short distance off, and I went towards it
under the sweet green limes, listening for the clink of Joe's
hammer. Long after I ought to have heard it, and long after I had
fancied I heard it and found it but a fancy, all was still. The
limes were there, and the white thorns were there, and the
chestnuttrees were there, and their leaves rustled harmoniously
when I stopped to listen but, the clink of Joe's hammer was not in
the midsummer wind.
Almost fearing, without knowing why, to come in view of the forge,
I saw it at last, and saw that it was closed. No gleam of fire, no
glittering shower of sparks, no roar of bellows all shut up, and
still.
But, the house was not deserted, and the best parlour seemed to be
in use, for there were white curtains fluttering in its window, and
the window was open and gay with flowers. I went softly towards it,
meaning to peep over the flowers, when Joe and Biddy stood before
me, arm in arm.
At first Biddy gave a cry, as if she thought it was my apparition,
but in another moment she was in my embrace. I wept to see her, and
she wept to see me I, because she looked so fresh and pleasant
she, because I looked so worn and white.
"But dear Biddy, how smart you are"
"Yes, dear Pip."
"And Joe, how smart you are"
"Yes, dear old Pip, old chap."
I looked at both of them, from one to the other, and then
"It's my weddingday," cried Biddy, in a burst of happiness, "and I
am married to Joe"
They had taken me into the kitchen, and I had laid my head down on
the old deal table. Biddy held one of my hands to her lips, and
Joe's restoring touch was on my shoulder. "Which he warn't strong
enough, my dear, fur to be surprised," said Joe. And Biddy said, "I
ought to have thought of it, dear Joe, but I was too happy." They
were both so overjoyed to see me, so proud to see me, so touched by
my coming to them, so delighted that I should have come by accident
to make their day complete
My first thought was one of great thankfulness that I had never
breathed this last baffled hope to Joe. How often, while he was
with me in my illness, had it risen to my lips. How irrevocable
would have been his knowledge of it, if he had remained with me but
another hour
"Dear Biddy," said I, "you have the best husband in the whole
world, and if you could have seen him by my bed you would have 
But no, you couldn't love him better than you do."
"No, I couldn't indeed," said Biddy.
"And, dear Joe, you have the best wife in the whole world, and she
will make you as happy as even you deserve to be, you dear, good,
noble Joe"
Joe looked at me with a quivering lip, and fairly put his sleeve
before his eyes.
"And Joe and Biddy both, as you have been to church today, and are
in charity and love with all mankind, receive my humble thanks for
all you have done for me and all I have so ill repaid And when I
say that I am going away within the hour, for I am soon going
abroad, and that I shall never rest until I have worked for the
money with which you have kept me out of prison, and have sent it
to you, don't think, dear Joe and Biddy, that if I could repay it a
thousand times over, I suppose I could cancel a farthing of the
debt I owe you, or that I would do so if I could"
They were both melted by these words, and both entreated me to say
no more.
"But I must say more. Dear Joe, I hope you will have children to
love, and that some little fellow will sit in this chimney corner
of a winter night, who may remind you of another little fellow gone
out of it for ever. Don't tell him, Joe, that I was thankless
don't tell him, Biddy, that I was ungenerous and unjust only tell
him that I honoured you both, because you were both so good and
true, and that, as your child, I said it would be natural to him to
grow up a much better man than I did."
"I ain't agoing," said Joe, from behind his sleeve, "to tell him
nothink o' that natur, Pip. Nor Biddy ain't. Nor yet no one ain't."
"And now, though I know you have already done it in your own kind
hearts, pray tell me, both, that you forgive me Pray let me hear
you say the words, that I may carry the sound of them away with me,
and then I shall be able to believe that you can trust me, and
think better of me, in the time to come"
"O dear old Pip, old chap," said Joe. "God knows as I forgive you,
if I have anythink to forgive"
"Amen And God knows I do" echoed Biddy.
"Now let me go up and look at my old little room, and rest there a
few minutes by myself, and then when I have eaten and drunk with you,
go with me as far as the fingerpost, dear Joe and Biddy, before we
say goodbye"
I sold all I had, and put aside as much as I could, for a
composition with my creditors  who gave me ample time to pay them
in full  and I went out and joined Herbert. Within a month, I had
quitted England, and within two months I was clerk to Clarriker and
Co., and within four months I assumed my first undivided
responsibility. For, the beam across the parlour ceiling at Mill
Pond Bank, had then ceased to tremble under old Bill Barley's
growls and was at peace, and Herbert had gone away to marry Clara,
and I was left in sole charge of the Eastern Branch until he
brought her back.
Many a year went round, before I was a partner in the House but,
I lived happily with Herbert and his wife, and lived frugally, and
paid my debts, and maintained a constant correspondence with Biddy
and Joe. It was not until I became third in the Firm, that
Clarriker betrayed me to Herbert but, he then declared that the
secret of Herbert's partnership had been long enough upon his
conscience, and he must tell it. So, he told it, and Herbert was as
much moved as amazed, and the dear fellow and I were not the worse
friends for the long concealment. I must not leave it to be
supposed that we were ever a great house, or that we made mints of
money. We were not in a grand way of business, but we had a good
name, and worked for our profits, and did very well. We owed so
much to Herbert's ever cheerful industry and readiness, that I
often wondered how I had conceived that old idea of his inaptitude,
until I was one day enlightened by the reflection, that perhaps the
inaptitude had never been in him at all, but had been in me.
Chapter 
For eleven years, I had not seen Joe nor Biddy with my bodily
eyesthough they had both been often before my fancy in the
Eastwhen, upon an evening in December, an hour or two after dark,
I laid my hand softly on the latch of the old kitchen door. I
touched it so softly that I was not heard, and looked in unseen.
There, smoking his pipe in the old place by the kitchen firelight,
as hale and as strong as ever though a little grey, sat Joe and
there, fenced into the corner with Joe's leg, and sitting on my own
little stool looking at the fire, was  I again
"We giv' him the name of Pip for your sake, dear old chap," said
Joe, delighted when I took another stool by the child's side but I
did not rumple his hair, "and we hoped he might grow a little bit
like you, and we think he do."
I thought so too, and I took him out for a walk next morning, and
we talked immensely, understanding one another to perfection. And I
took him down to the churchyard, and set him on a certain tombstone
there, and he showed me from that elevation which stone was sacred
to the memory of Philip Pirrip, late of this Parish, and Also
Georgiana, Wife of the Above.
"Biddy," said I, when I talked with her after dinner, as her little
girl lay sleeping in her lap, "you must give Pip to me, one of
these days or lend him, at all events."
"No, no," said Biddy, gently. "You must marry."
"So Herbert and Clara say, but I don't think I shall, Biddy. I have
so settled down in their home, that it's not at all likely. I am
already quite an old bachelor."
Biddy looked down at her child, and put its little hand to her
lips, and then put the good matronly hand with which she had
touched it, into mine. There was something in the action and in the
light pressure of Biddy's weddingring, that had a very pretty
eloquence in it.
"Dear Pip," said Biddy, "you are sure you don't fret for her?"
"O no  I think not, Biddy."
"Tell me as an old, old friend. Have you quite forgotten her?
"My dear Biddy, I have forgotten nothing in my life that ever had a
foremost place there, and little that ever had any place there. But
that poor dream, as I once used to call it, has all gone by, Biddy,
all gone by"
Nevertheless, I knew while I said those words, that I secretly
intended to revisit the site of the old house that evening, alone,
for her sake. Yes even so. For Estella's sake.
I had heard of her as leading a most unhappy life, and as being
separated from her husband, who had used her with great cruelty,
and who had become quite renowned as a compound of pride, avarice,
brutality, and meanness. And I had heard of the death of her
husband, from an accident consequent on his illtreatment of a
horse. This release had befallen her some two years before for
anything I knew, she was married again.
The early dinnerhour at Joe's, left me abundance of time, without
hurrying my talk with Biddy, to walk over to the old spot before
dark. But, what with loitering on the way, to look at old objects
and to think of old times, the day had quite declined when I came
to the place.
There was no house now, no brewery, no building whatever left, but
the wall of the old garden. The cleared space had been enclosed
with a rough fence, and, looking over it, I saw that some of the
old ivy had struck root anew, and was growing green on low quiet
mounds of ruin. A gate in the fence standing ajar, I pushed it
open, and went in.
A cold silvery mist had veiled the afternoon, and the moon was not
yet up to scatter it. But, the stars were shining beyond the mist,
and the moon was coming, and the evening was not dark. I could
trace out where every part of the old house had been, and where the
brewery had been, and where the gate, and where the casks. I had
done so, and was looking along the desolate gardenwalk, when I
beheld a solitary figure in it.
The figure showed itself aware of me, as I advanced. It had been
moving towards me, but it stood still. As I drew nearer, I saw it
to be the figure of a woman. As I drew nearer yet, it was about to
turn away, when it stopped, and let me come up with it. Then, it
faltered as if much surprised, and uttered my name, and I cried
out
"Estella"
"I am greatly changed. I wonder you know me."
The freshness of her beauty was indeed gone, but its indescribable
majesty and its indescribable charm remained. Those attractions in
it, I had seen before what I had never seen before, was the
saddened softened light of the once proud eyes what I had never
felt before, was the friendly touch of the once insensible hand.
We sat down on a bench that was near, and I said, "After so many
years, it is strange that we should thus meet again, Estella, here
where our first meeting was Do you often come back?"
"I have never been here since."
"Nor I."
The moon began to rise, and I thought of the placid look at the
white ceiling, which had passed away. The moon began to rise, and I
thought of the pressure on my hand when I had spoken the last words
he had heard on earth.
Estella was the next to break the silence that ensued between us.
"I have very often hoped and intended to come back, but have been
prevented by many circumstances. Poor, poor old place"
The silvery mist was touched with the first rays of the moonlight,
and the same rays touched the tears that dropped from her eyes. Not
knowing that I saw them, and setting herself to get the better of
them, she said quietly
"Were you wondering, as you walked along, how it came to be left in
this condition?"
"Yes, Estella."
"The ground belongs to me. It is the only possession I have not
relinquished. Everything else has gone from me, little by little,
but I have kept this. It was the subject of the only determined
resistance I made in all the wretched years."
"Is it to be built on?"
"At last it is. I came here to take leave of it before its change.
And you," she said, in a voice of touching interest to a wanderer,
"you live abroad still?"
"Still."
"And do well, I am sure?"
"I work pretty hard for a sufficient living, and therefore  Yes, I
do well."
"I have often thought of you," said Estella.
"Have you?"
"Of late, very often. There was a long hard time when I kept far
from me, the remembrance, of what I had thrown away when I was
quite ignorant of its worth. But, since my duty has not been
incompatible with the admission of that remembrance, I have given
it a place in my heart."
"You have always held your place in my heart," I answered.
And we were silent again, until she spoke.
"I little thought," said Estella, "that I should take leave of you
in taking leave of this spot. I am very glad to do so."
"Glad to part again, Estella? To me, parting is a painful thing. To
me, the remembrance of our last parting has been ever mournful and
painful."
"But you said to me," returned Estella, very earnestly, "'God bless
you, God forgive you' And if you could say that to me then, you
will not hesitate to say that to me now  now, when suffering has
been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to
understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken,
but  I hope  into a better shape. Be as considerate and good to
me as you were, and tell me we are friends."
"We are friends," said I, rising and bending over her, as she rose
from the bench.
"And will continue friends apart," said Estella.
I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place and,
as the morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the
forge, so, the evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad
expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw no shadow of
another parting from her.
End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of Great Expectations, by Dickens
The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Complete
by Mark Twain Samuel Clemens
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Title The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Complete
Author Mark Twain Samuel Clemens
Release Date August ,  [EBook ]
Language English
Character set encoding ASCII
 START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HUCKLEBERRY FINN 
Produced by David Widger. Previous editions produced by Ron Burkey
and Internet Wiretap
HUCKLEBERRY FINN
By Mark Twain
NOTICE
PERSONS attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted
persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished persons
attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.
BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR, Per G.G., Chief of Ordnance.
EXPLANATORY
IN this book a number of dialects are used, to wit the Missouri negro
dialect the extremest form of the backwoods Southwestern dialect the
ordinary "Pike County" dialect and four modified varieties of this last.
The shadings have not been done in a haphazard fashion, or by guesswork
but painstakingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of
personal familiarity with these several forms of speech.
I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would
suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not
succeeding.
THE AUTHOR.
HUCKLEBERRY FINN
Scene The Mississippi Valley Time Forty to fifty years ago
CHAPTER I.
YOU don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The
Adventures of Tom Sawyer but that ain't no matter. That book was made
by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which
he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. That is nothing. I never
seen anybody but lied one time or another, without it was Aunt Polly, or
the widow, or maybe Mary. Aunt PollyTom's Aunt Polly, she isand
Mary, and the Widow Douglas is all told about in that book, which is
mostly a true book, with some stretchers, as I said before.
Now the way that the book winds up is this Tom and me found the money
that the robbers hid in the cave, and it made us rich. We got six
thousand dollars apieceall gold. It was an awful sight of money when
it was piled up. Well, Judge Thatcher he took it and put it out at
interest, and it fetched us a dollar a day apiece all the year round
more than a body could tell what to do with. The Widow Douglas she took
me for her son, and allowed she would sivilize me but it was rough
living in the house all the time, considering how dismal regular and
decent the widow was in all her ways and so when I couldn't stand it no
longer I lit out. I got into my old rags and my sugarhogshead again,
and was free and satisfied. But Tom Sawyer he hunted me up and said he
was going to start a band of robbers, and I might join if I would go back
to the widow and be respectable. So I went back.
The widow she cried over me, and called me a poor lost lamb, and she
called me a lot of other names, too, but she never meant no harm by it.
She put me in them new clothes again, and I couldn't do nothing but sweat
and sweat, and feel all cramped up. Well, then, the old thing commenced
again. The widow rung a bell for supper, and you had to come to time.
When you got to the table you couldn't go right to eating, but you had to
wait for the widow to tuck down her head and grumble a little over the
victuals, though there warn't really anything the matter with them,that
is, nothing only everything was cooked by itself. In a barrel of odds
and ends it is different things get mixed up, and the juice kind of
swaps around, and the things go better.
After supper she got out her book and learned me about Moses and the
Bulrushers, and I was in a sweat to find out all about him but by and by
she let it out that Moses had been dead a considerable long time so then
I didn't care no more about him, because I don't take no stock in dead
people.
Pretty soon I wanted to smoke, and asked the widow to let me. But she
wouldn't. She said it was a mean practice and wasn't clean, and I must
try to not do it any more. That is just the way with some people. They
get down on a thing when they don't know nothing about it. Here she was
abothering about Moses, which was no kin to her, and no use to anybody,
being gone, you see, yet finding a power of fault with me for doing a
thing that had some good in it. And she took snuff, too of course that
was all right, because she done it herself.
Her sister, Miss Watson, a tolerable slim old maid, with goggles on,
had just come to live with her, and took a set at me now with a
spellingbook. She worked me middling hard for about an hour, and then
the widow made her ease up. I couldn't stood it much longer. Then for
an hour it was deadly dull, and I was fidgety. Miss Watson would say,
"Don't put your feet up there, Huckleberry" and "Don't scrunch up like
that, Huckleberryset up straight" and pretty soon she would say,
"Don't gap and stretch like that, Huckleberrywhy don't you try to
behave?" Then she told me all about the bad place, and I said I wished I
was there. She got mad then, but I didn't mean no harm. All I wanted was
to go somewheres all I wanted was a change, I warn't particular. She
said it was wicked to say what I said said she wouldn't say it for the
whole world she was going to live so as to go to the good place. Well,
I couldn't see no advantage in going where she was going, so I made up my
mind I wouldn't try for it. But I never said so, because it would only
make trouble, and wouldn't do no good.
Now she had got a start, and she went on and told me all about the good
place. She said all a body would have to do there was to go around all
day long with a harp and sing, forever and ever. So I didn't think much
of it. But I never said so. I asked her if she reckoned Tom Sawyer would
go there, and she said not by a considerable sight. I was glad about
that, because I wanted him and me to be together.
Miss Watson she kept pecking at me, and it got tiresome and lonesome. By
and by they fetched the niggers in and had prayers, and then everybody
was off to bed. I went up to my room with a piece of candle, and put it
on the table. Then I set down in a chair by the window and tried to
think of something cheerful, but it warn't no use. I felt so lonesome I
most wished I was dead. The stars were shining, and the leaves rustled
in the woods ever so mournful and I heard an owl, away off, whowhooing
about somebody that was dead, and a whippowill and a dog crying about
somebody that was going to die and the wind was trying to whisper
something to me, and I couldn't make out what it was, and so it made the
cold shivers run over me. Then away out in the woods I heard that kind of
a sound that a ghost makes when it wants to tell about something that's
on its mind and can't make itself understood, and so can't rest easy in
its grave, and has to go about that way every night grieving. I got so
downhearted and scared I did wish I had some company. Pretty soon a
spider went crawling up my shoulder, and I flipped it off and it lit in
the candle and before I could budge it was all shriveled up. I didn't
need anybody to tell me that that was an awful bad sign and would fetch
me some bad luck, so I was scared and most shook the clothes off of me.
I got up and turned around in my tracks three times and crossed my breast
every time and then I tied up a little lock of my hair with a thread to
keep witches away. But I hadn't no confidence. You do that when you've
lost a horseshoe that you've found, instead of nailing it up over the
door, but I hadn't ever heard anybody say it was any way to keep off bad
luck when you'd killed a spider.
I set down again, ashaking all over, and got out my pipe for a smoke
for the house was all as still as death now, and so the widow wouldn't
know. Well, after a long time I heard the clock away off in the town go
boomboomboomtwelve licks and all still againstiller than ever.
Pretty soon I heard a twig snap down in the dark amongst the trees
something was a stirring. I set still and listened. Directly I could
just barely hear a "meyow meyow" down there. That was good Says I,
"meyow meyow" as soft as I could, and then I put out the light and
scrambled out of the window on to the shed. Then I slipped down to the
ground and crawled in among the trees, and, sure enough, there was Tom
Sawyer waiting for me.
CHAPTER II.
WE went tiptoeing along a path amongst the trees back towards the end of
the widow's garden, stooping down so as the branches wouldn't scrape our
heads. When we was passing by the kitchen I fell over a root and made a
noise. We scrouched down and laid still. Miss Watson's big nigger,
named Jim, was setting in the kitchen door we could see him pretty
clear, because there was a light behind him. He got up and stretched his
neck out about a minute, listening. Then he says
"Who dah?"
He listened some more then he come tiptoeing down and stood right
between us we could a touched him, nearly. Well, likely it was minutes
and minutes that there warn't a sound, and we all there so close
together. There was a place on my ankle that got to itching, but I
dasn't scratch it and then my ear begun to itch and next my back, right
between my shoulders. Seemed like I'd die if I couldn't scratch. Well,
I've noticed that thing plenty times since. If you are with the quality,
or at a funeral, or trying to go to sleep when you ain't sleepyif you
are anywheres where it won't do for you to scratch, why you will itch all
over in upwards of a thousand places. Pretty soon Jim says
"Say, who is you? Whar is you? Dog my cats ef I didn' hear sumf'n.
Well, I know what I's gwyne to do I's gwyne to set down here and listen
tell I hears it agin."
So he set down on the ground betwixt me and Tom. He leaned his back up
against a tree, and stretched his legs out till one of them most touched
one of mine. My nose begun to itch. It itched till the tears come into
my eyes. But I dasn't scratch. Then it begun to itch on the inside.
Next I got to itching underneath. I didn't know how I was going to set
still. This miserableness went on as much as six or seven minutes but it
seemed a sight longer than that. I was itching in eleven different
places now. I reckoned I couldn't stand it more'n a minute longer, but I
set my teeth hard and got ready to try. Just then Jim begun to breathe
heavy next he begun to snoreand then I was pretty soon comfortable
again.
Tom he made a sign to mekind of a little noise with his mouthand we
went creeping away on our hands and knees. When we was ten foot off Tom
whispered to me, and wanted to tie Jim to the tree for fun. But I said
no he might wake and make a disturbance, and then they'd find out I
warn't in. Then Tom said he hadn't got candles enough, and he would slip
in the kitchen and get some more. I didn't want him to try. I said Jim
might wake up and come. But Tom wanted to resk it so we slid in there
and got three candles, and Tom laid five cents on the table for pay.
Then we got out, and I was in a sweat to get away but nothing would do
Tom but he must crawl to where Jim was, on his hands and knees, and play
something on him. I waited, and it seemed a good while, everything was
so still and lonesome.
As soon as Tom was back we cut along the path, around the garden fence,
and by and by fetched up on the steep top of the hill the other side of
the house. Tom said he slipped Jim's hat off of his head and hung it on
a limb right over him, and Jim stirred a little, but he didn't wake.
Afterwards Jim said the witches be witched him and put him in a trance,
and rode him all over the State, and then set him under the trees again,
and hung his hat on a limb to show who done it. And next time Jim told
it he said they rode him down to New Orleans and, after that, every time
he told it he spread it more and more, till by and by he said they rode
him all over the world, and tired him most to death, and his back was all
over saddleboils. Jim was monstrous proud about it, and he got so he
wouldn't hardly notice the other niggers. Niggers would come miles to
hear Jim tell about it, and he was more looked up to than any nigger in
that country. Strange niggers would stand with their mouths open and
look him all over, same as if he was a wonder. Niggers is always talking
about witches in the dark by the kitchen fire but whenever one was
talking and letting on to know all about such things, Jim would happen in
and say, "Hm What you know 'bout witches?" and that nigger was corked
up and had to take a back seat. Jim always kept that fivecenter piece
round his neck with a string, and said it was a charm the devil give to
him with his own hands, and told him he could cure anybody with it and
fetch witches whenever he wanted to just by saying something to it but
he never told what it was he said to it. Niggers would come from all
around there and give Jim anything they had, just for a sight of that
fivecenter piece but they wouldn't touch it, because the devil had had
his hands on it. Jim was most ruined for a servant, because he got stuck
up on account of having seen the devil and been rode by witches.
Well, when Tom and me got to the edge of the hilltop we looked away down
into the village and could see three or four lights twinkling, where
there was sick folks, maybe and the stars over us was sparkling ever so
fine and down by the village was the river, a whole mile broad, and
awful still and grand. We went down the hill and found Jo Harper and Ben
Rogers, and two or three more of the boys, hid in the old tanyard. So we
unhitched a skiff and pulled down the river two mile and a half, to the
big scar on the hillside, and went ashore.
We went to a clump of bushes, and Tom made everybody swear to keep the
secret, and then showed them a hole in the hill, right in the thickest
part of the bushes. Then we lit the candles, and crawled in on our hands
and knees. We went about two hundred yards, and then the cave opened up.
Tom poked about amongst the passages, and pretty soon ducked under a wall
where you wouldn't a noticed that there was a hole. We went along a
narrow place and got into a kind of room, all damp and sweaty and cold,
and there we stopped. Tom says
"Now, we'll start this band of robbers and call it Tom Sawyer's Gang.
Everybody that wants to join has got to take an oath, and write his name
in blood."
Everybody was willing. So Tom got out a sheet of paper that he had wrote
the oath on, and read it. It swore every boy to stick to the band, and
never tell any of the secrets and if anybody done anything to any boy in
the band, whichever boy was ordered to kill that person and his family
must do it, and he mustn't eat and he mustn't sleep till he had killed
them and hacked a cross in their breasts, which was the sign of the band.
And nobody that didn't belong to the band could use that mark, and if he
did he must be sued and if he done it again he must be killed. And if
anybody that belonged to the band told the secrets, he must have his
throat cut, and then have his carcass burnt up and the ashes scattered
all around, and his name blotted off of the list with blood and never
mentioned again by the gang, but have a curse put on it and be forgot
forever.
Everybody said it was a real beautiful oath, and asked Tom if he got it
out of his own head. He said, some of it, but the rest was out of
piratebooks and robberbooks, and every gang that was hightoned had it.
Some thought it would be good to kill the FAMILIES of boys that told the
secrets. Tom said it was a good idea, so he took a pencil and wrote it
in. Then Ben Rogers says
"Here's Huck Finn, he hain't got no family what you going to do 'bout
him?"
"Well, hain't he got a father?" says Tom Sawyer.
"Yes, he's got a father, but you can't never find him these days. He
used to lay drunk with the hogs in the tanyard, but he hain't been seen
in these parts for a year or more."
They talked it over, and they was going to rule me out, because they said
every boy must have a family or somebody to kill, or else it wouldn't be
fair and square for the others. Well, nobody could think of anything to
doeverybody was stumped, and set still. I was most ready to cry but
all at once I thought of a way, and so I offered them Miss Watsonthey
could kill her. Everybody said
"Oh, she'll do. That's all right. Huck can come in."
Then they all stuck a pin in their fingers to get blood to sign with, and
I made my mark on the paper.
"Now," says Ben Rogers, "what's the line of business of this Gang?"
"Nothing only robbery and murder," Tom said.
"But who are we going to rob?houses, or cattle, or"
"Stuff stealing cattle and such things ain't robbery it's burglary,"
says Tom Sawyer. "We ain't burglars. That ain't no sort of style. We
are highwaymen. We stop stages and carriages on the road, with masks on,
and kill the people and take their watches and money."
"Must we always kill the people?"
"Oh, certainly. It's best. Some authorities think different, but mostly
it's considered best to kill themexcept some that you bring to the cave
here, and keep them till they're ransomed."
"Ransomed? What's that?"
"I don't know. But that's what they do. I've seen it in books and so
of course that's what we've got to do."
"But how can we do it if we don't know what it is?"
"Why, blame it all, we've GOT to do it. Don't I tell you it's in the
books? Do you want to go to doing different from what's in the books,
and get things all muddled up?"
"Oh, that's all very fine to SAY, Tom Sawyer, but how in the nation are
these fellows going to be ransomed if we don't know how to do it to them?
that's the thing I want to get at. Now, what do you reckon it is?"
"Well, I don't know. But per'aps if we keep them till they're ransomed,
it means that we keep them till they're dead."
"Now, that's something LIKE. That'll answer. Why couldn't you said that
before? We'll keep them till they're ransomed to death and a bothersome
lot they'll be, tooeating up everything, and always trying to get
loose."
"How you talk, Ben Rogers. How can they get loose when there's a guard
over them, ready to shoot them down if they move a peg?"
"A guard Well, that IS good. So somebody's got to set up all night and
never get any sleep, just so as to watch them. I think that's
foolishness. Why can't a body take a club and ransom them as soon as they
get here?"
"Because it ain't in the books sothat's why. Now, Ben Rogers, do you
want to do things regular, or don't you?that's the idea. Don't you
reckon that the people that made the books knows what's the correct thing
to do? Do you reckon YOU can learn 'em anything? Not by a good deal.
No, sir, we'll just go on and ransom them in the regular way."
"All right. I don't mind but I say it's a fool way, anyhow. Say, do we
kill the women, too?"
"Well, Ben Rogers, if I was as ignorant as you I wouldn't let on. Kill
the women? No nobody ever saw anything in the books like that. You
fetch them to the cave, and you're always as polite as pie to them and
by and by they fall in love with you, and never want to go home any
more."
"Well, if that's the way I'm agreed, but I don't take no stock in it.
Mighty soon we'll have the cave so cluttered up with women, and fellows
waiting to be ransomed, that there won't be no place for the robbers.
But go ahead, I ain't got nothing to say."
Little Tommy Barnes was asleep now, and when they waked him up he was
scared, and cried, and said he wanted to go home to his ma, and didn't
want to be a robber any more.
So they all made fun of him, and called him crybaby, and that made him
mad, and he said he would go straight and tell all the secrets. But Tom
give him five cents to keep quiet, and said we would all go home and meet
next week, and rob somebody and kill some people.
Ben Rogers said he couldn't get out much, only Sundays, and so he wanted
to begin next Sunday but all the boys said it would be wicked to do it
on Sunday, and that settled the thing. They agreed to get together and
fix a day as soon as they could, and then we elected Tom Sawyer first
captain and Jo Harper second captain of the Gang, and so started home.
I clumb up the shed and crept into my window just before day was
breaking. My new clothes was all greased up and clayey, and I was
dogtired.
CHAPTER III.
WELL, I got a good goingover in the morning from old Miss Watson on
account of my clothes but the widow she didn't scold, but only cleaned
off the grease and clay, and looked so sorry that I thought I would
behave awhile if I could. Then Miss Watson she took me in the closet and
prayed, but nothing come of it. She told me to pray every day, and
whatever I asked for I would get it. But it warn't so. I tried it.
Once I got a fishline, but no hooks. It warn't any good to me without
hooks. I tried for the hooks three or four times, but somehow I couldn't
make it work. By and by, one day, I asked Miss Watson to try for me, but
she said I was a fool. She never told me why, and I couldn't make it out
no way.
I set down one time back in the woods, and had a long think about it. I
says to myself, if a body can get anything they pray for, why don't
Deacon Winn get back the money he lost on pork? Why can't the widow get
back her silver snuffbox that was stole? Why can't Miss Watson fat up?
No, says I to my self, there ain't nothing in it. I went and told the
widow about it, and she said the thing a body could get by praying for it
was "spiritual gifts." This was too many for me, but she told me what
she meantI must help other people, and do everything I could for other
people, and look out for them all the time, and never think about myself.
This was including Miss Watson, as I took it. I went out in the woods
and turned it over in my mind a long time, but I couldn't see no
advantage about itexcept for the other people so at last I reckoned I
wouldn't worry about it any more, but just let it go. Sometimes the
widow would take me one side and talk about Providence in a way to make a
body's mouth water but maybe next day Miss Watson would take hold and
knock it all down again. I judged I could see that there was two
Providences, and a poor chap would stand considerable show with the
widow's Providence, but if Miss Watson's got him there warn't no help for
him any more. I thought it all out, and reckoned I would belong to the
widow's if he wanted me, though I couldn't make out how he was agoing to
be any better off then than what he was before, seeing I was so ignorant,
and so kind of lowdown and ornery.
Pap he hadn't been seen for more than a year, and that was comfortable
for me I didn't want to see him no more. He used to always whale me
when he was sober and could get his hands on me though I used to take to
the woods most of the time when he was around. Well, about this time he
was found in the river drownded, about twelve mile above town, so people
said. They judged it was him, anyway said this drownded man was just
his size, and was ragged, and had uncommon long hair, which was all like
pap but they couldn't make nothing out of the face, because it had been
in the water so long it warn't much like a face at all. They said he was
floating on his back in the water. They took him and buried him on the
bank. But I warn't comfortable long, because I happened to think of
something. I knowed mighty well that a drownded man don't float on his
back, but on his face. So I knowed, then, that this warn't pap, but a
woman dressed up in a man's clothes. So I was uncomfortable again. I
judged the old man would turn up again by and by, though I wished he
wouldn't.
We played robber now and then about a month, and then I resigned. All
the boys did. We hadn't robbed nobody, hadn't killed any people, but
only just pretended. We used to hop out of the woods and go charging
down on hogdrivers and women in carts taking garden stuff to market, but
we never hived any of them. Tom Sawyer called the hogs "ingots," and he
called the turnips and stuff "julery," and we would go to the cave and
powwow over what we had done, and how many people we had killed and
marked. But I couldn't see no profit in it. One time Tom sent a boy to
run about town with a blazing stick, which he called a slogan which was
the sign for the Gang to get together, and then he said he had got
secret news by his spies that next day a whole parcel of Spanish
merchants and rich Arabs was going to camp in Cave Hollow with two
hundred elephants, and six hundred camels, and over a thousand "sumter"
mules, all loaded down with di'monds, and they didn't have only a guard
of four hundred soldiers, and so we would lay in ambuscade, as he called
it, and kill the lot and scoop the things. He said we must slick up our
swords and guns, and get ready. He never could go after even a
turnipcart but he must have the swords and guns all scoured up for it,
though they was only lath and broomsticks, and you might scour at them
till you rotted, and then they warn't worth a mouthful of ashes more than
what they was before. I didn't believe we could lick such a crowd of
Spaniards and Arabs, but I wanted to see the camels and elephants, so I
was on hand next day, Saturday, in the ambuscade and when we got the
word we rushed out of the woods and down the hill. But there warn't no
Spaniards and Arabs, and there warn't no camels nor no elephants. It
warn't anything but a Sundayschool picnic, and only a primerclass at
that. We busted it up, and chased the children up the hollow but we
never got anything but some doughnuts and jam, though Ben Rogers got a
rag doll, and Jo Harper got a hymnbook and a tract and then the teacher
charged in, and made us drop everything and cut. I didn't see no
di'monds, and I told Tom Sawyer so. He said there was loads of them
there, anyway and he said there was Arabs there, too, and elephants and
things. I said, why couldn't we see them, then? He said if I warn't so
ignorant, but had read a book called Don Quixote, I would know without
asking. He said it was all done by enchantment. He said there was
hundreds of soldiers there, and elephants and treasure, and so on, but we
had enemies which he called magicians and they had turned the whole
thing into an infant Sundayschool, just out of spite. I said, all
right then the thing for us to do was to go for the magicians. Tom
Sawyer said I was a numskull.
"Why," said he, "a magician could call up a lot of genies, and they would
hash you up like nothing before you could say Jack Robinson. They are as
tall as a tree and as big around as a church."
"Well," I says, "s'pose we got some genies to help UScan't we lick the
other crowd then?"
"How you going to get them?"
"I don't know. How do THEY get them?"
"Why, they rub an old tin lamp or an iron ring, and then the genies come
tearing in, with the thunder and lightning aripping around and the smoke
arolling, and everything they're told to do they up and do it. They
don't think nothing of pulling a shottower up by the roots, and belting
a Sundayschool superintendent over the head with itor any other man."
"Who makes them tear around so?"
"Why, whoever rubs the lamp or the ring. They belong to whoever rubs the
lamp or the ring, and they've got to do whatever he says. If he tells
them to build a palace forty miles long out of di'monds, and fill it full
of chewinggum, or whatever you want, and fetch an emperor's daughter
from China for you to marry, they've got to do itand they've got to do
it before sunup next morning, too. And more they've got to waltz that
palace around over the country wherever you want it, you understand."
"Well," says I, "I think they are a pack of flatheads for not keeping
the palace themselves 'stead of fooling them away like that. And what's
moreif I was one of them I would see a man in Jericho before I would
drop my business and come to him for the rubbing of an old tin lamp."
"How you talk, Huck Finn. Why, you'd HAVE to come when he rubbed it,
whether you wanted to or not."
"What and I as high as a tree and as big as a church? All right, then
I WOULD come but I lay I'd make that man climb the highest tree there
was in the country."
"Shucks, it ain't no use to talk to you, Huck Finn. You don't seem to
know anything, somehowperfect saphead."
I thought all this over for two or three days, and then I reckoned I
would see if there was anything in it. I got an old tin lamp and an iron
ring, and went out in the woods and rubbed and rubbed till I sweat like
an Injun, calculating to build a palace and sell it but it warn't no
use, none of the genies come. So then I judged that all that stuff was
only just one of Tom Sawyer's lies. I reckoned he believed in the Arabs
and the elephants, but as for me I think different. It had all the marks
of a Sundayschool.
CHAPTER IV.
WELL, three or four months run along, and it was well into the winter
now. I had been to school most all the time and could spell and read and
write just a little, and could say the multiplication table up to six
times seven is thirtyfive, and I don't reckon I could ever get any
further than that if I was to live forever. I don't take no stock in
mathematics, anyway.
At first I hated the school, but by and by I got so I could stand it.
Whenever I got uncommon tired I played hookey, and the hiding I got next
day done me good and cheered me up. So the longer I went to school the
easier it got to be. I was getting sort of used to the widow's ways,
too, and they warn't so raspy on me. Living in a house and sleeping in a
bed pulled on me pretty tight mostly, but before the cold weather I used
to slide out and sleep in the woods sometimes, and so that was a rest to
me. I liked the old ways best, but I was getting so I liked the new
ones, too, a little bit. The widow said I was coming along slow but sure,
and doing very satisfactory. She said she warn't ashamed of me.
One morning I happened to turn over the saltcellar at breakfast. I
reached for some of it as quick as I could to throw over my left shoulder
and keep off the bad luck, but Miss Watson was in ahead of me, and
crossed me off. She says, "Take your hands away, Huckleberry what a mess
you are always making" The widow put in a good word for me, but that
warn't going to keep off the bad luck, I knowed that well enough. I
started out, after breakfast, feeling worried and shaky, and wondering
where it was going to fall on me, and what it was going to be. There is
ways to keep off some kinds of bad luck, but this wasn't one of them
kind so I never tried to do anything, but just poked along lowspirited
and on the watchout.
I went down to the front garden and clumb over the stile where you go
through the high board fence. There was an inch of new snow on the
ground, and I seen somebody's tracks. They had come up from the quarry
and stood around the stile a while, and then went on around the garden
fence. It was funny they hadn't come in, after standing around so. I
couldn't make it out. It was very curious, somehow. I was going to
follow around, but I stooped down to look at the tracks first. I didn't
notice anything at first, but next I did. There was a cross in the left
bootheel made with big nails, to keep off the devil.
I was up in a second and shinning down the hill. I looked over my
shoulder every now and then, but I didn't see nobody. I was at Judge
Thatcher's as quick as I could get there. He said
"Why, my boy, you are all out of breath. Did you come for your
interest?"
"No, sir," I says "is there some for me?"
"Oh, yes, a halfyearly is in last nightover a hundred and fifty
dollars. Quite a fortune for you. You had better let me invest it along
with your six thousand, because if you take it you'll spend it."
"No, sir," I says, "I don't want to spend it. I don't want it at all
nor the six thousand, nuther. I want you to take it I want to give it
to youthe six thousand and all."
He looked surprised. He couldn't seem to make it out. He says
"Why, what can you mean, my boy?"
I says, "Don't you ask me no questions about it, please. You'll take it
won't you?"
He says
"Well, I'm puzzled. Is something the matter?"
"Please take it," says I, "and don't ask me nothingthen I won't have to
tell no lies."
He studied a while, and then he says
"Ohoo I think I see. You want to SELL all your property to menot
give it. That's the correct idea."
Then he wrote something on a paper and read it over, and says
"There you see it says 'for a consideration.' That means I have bought
it of you and paid you for it. Here's a dollar for you. Now you sign
it."
So I signed it, and left.
Miss Watson's nigger, Jim, had a hairball as big as your fist, which had
been took out of the fourth stomach of an ox, and he used to do magic
with it. He said there was a spirit inside of it, and it knowed
everything. So I went to him that night and told him pap was here again,
for I found his tracks in the snow. What I wanted to know was, what he
was going to do, and was he going to stay? Jim got out his hairball and
said something over it, and then he held it up and dropped it on the
floor. It fell pretty solid, and only rolled about an inch. Jim tried
it again, and then another time, and it acted just the same. Jim got
down on his knees, and put his ear against it and listened. But it
warn't no use he said it wouldn't talk. He said sometimes it wouldn't
talk without money. I told him I had an old slick counterfeit quarter
that warn't no good because the brass showed through the silver a little,
and it wouldn't pass nohow, even if the brass didn't show, because it was
so slick it felt greasy, and so that would tell on it every time. I
reckoned I wouldn't say nothing about the dollar I got from the judge. I
said it was pretty bad money, but maybe the hairball would take it,
because maybe it wouldn't know the difference. Jim smelt it and bit it
and rubbed it, and said he would manage so the hairball would think it
was good. He said he would split open a raw Irish potato and stick the
quarter in between and keep it there all night, and next morning you
couldn't see no brass, and it wouldn't feel greasy no more, and so
anybody in town would take it in a minute, let alone a hairball. Well,
I knowed a potato would do that before, but I had forgot it.
Jim put the quarter under the hairball, and got down and listened again.
This time he said the hairball was all right. He said it would tell my
whole fortune if I wanted it to. I says, go on. So the hairball talked
to Jim, and Jim told it to me. He says
"Yo' ole father doan' know yit what he's agwyne to do. Sometimes he
spec he'll go 'way, en den agin he spec he'll stay. De bes' way is to
res' easy en let de ole man take his own way. Dey's two angels hoverin'
roun' 'bout him. One uv 'em is white en shiny, en t'other one is black.
De white one gits him to go right a little while, den de black one sail
in en bust it all up. A body can't tell yit which one gwyne to fetch him
at de las'. But you is all right. You gwyne to have considable trouble
in yo' life, en considable joy. Sometimes you gwyne to git hurt, en
sometimes you gwyne to git sick but every time you's gwyne to git well
agin. Dey's two gals flyin' 'bout you in yo' life. One uv 'em's light
en t'other one is dark. One is rich en t'other is po'. You's gwyne to
marry de po' one fust en de rich one by en by. You wants to keep 'way
fum de water as much as you kin, en don't run no resk, 'kase it's down in
de bills dat you's gwyne to git hung."
When I lit my candle and went up to my room that night there sat paphis
own self
CHAPTER V.
I HAD shut the door to. Then I turned around and there he was. I used
to be scared of him all the time, he tanned me so much. I reckoned I was
scared now, too but in a minute I see I was mistakenthat is, after the
first jolt, as you may say, when my breath sort of hitched, he being so
unexpected but right away after I see I warn't scared of him worth
bothring about.
He was most fifty, and he looked it. His hair was long and tangled and
greasy, and hung down, and you could see his eyes shining through like he
was behind vines. It was all black, no gray so was his long, mixedup
whiskers. There warn't no color in his face, where his face showed it
was white not like another man's white, but a white to make a body sick,
a white to make a body's flesh crawla treetoad white, a fishbelly
white. As for his clothesjust rags, that was all. He had one ankle
resting on t'other knee the boot on that foot was busted, and two of his
toes stuck through, and he worked them now and then. His hat was laying
on the flooran old black slouch with the top caved in, like a lid.
I stood alooking at him he set there alooking at me, with his chair
tilted back a little. I set the candle down. I noticed the window was
up so he had clumb in by the shed. He kept alooking me all over. By
and by he says
"Starchy clothesvery. You think you're a good deal of a bigbug, DON'T
you?"
"Maybe I am, maybe I ain't," I says.
"Don't you give me none o' your lip," says he. "You've put on
considerable many frills since I been away. I'll take you down a peg
before I get done with you. You're educated, too, they saycan read and
write. You think you're better'n your father, now, don't you, because he
can't? I'LL take it out of you. Who told you you might meddle with such
hifalut'n foolishness, hey?who told you you could?"
"The widow. She told me."
"The widow, hey?and who told the widow she could put in her shovel
about a thing that ain't none of her business?"
"Nobody never told her."
"Well, I'll learn her how to meddle. And looky hereyou drop that
school, you hear? I'll learn people to bring up a boy to put on airs
over his own father and let on to be better'n what HE is. You lemme
catch you fooling around that school again, you hear? Your mother
couldn't read, and she couldn't write, nuther, before she died. None of
the family couldn't before THEY died. I can't and here you're
aswelling yourself up like this. I ain't the man to stand ityou hear?
Say, lemme hear you read."
I took up a book and begun something about General Washington and the
wars. When I'd read about a half a minute, he fetched the book a whack
with his hand and knocked it across the house. He says
"It's so. You can do it. I had my doubts when you told me. Now looky
here you stop that putting on frills. I won't have it. I'll lay for
you, my smarty and if I catch you about that school I'll tan you good.
First you know you'll get religion, too. I never see such a son."
He took up a little blue and yaller picture of some cows and a boy, and
says
"What's this?"
"It's something they give me for learning my lessons good."
He tore it up, and says
"I'll give you something betterI'll give you a cowhide."
He set there amumbling and agrowling a minute, and then he says
"AIN'T you a sweetscented dandy, though? A bed and bedclothes and a
look'n'glass and a piece of carpet on the floorand your own father
got to sleep with the hogs in the tanyard. I never see such a son. I
bet I'll take some o' these frills out o' you before I'm done with you.
Why, there ain't no end to your airsthey say you're rich. Hey?how's
that?"
"They liethat's how."
"Looky heremind how you talk to me I'm astanding about all I can
stand nowso don't gimme no sass. I've been in town two days, and I
hain't heard nothing but about you bein' rich. I heard about it away
down the river, too. That's why I come. You git me that money
tomorrowI want it."
"I hain't got no money."
"It's a lie. Judge Thatcher's got it. You git it. I want it."
"I hain't got no money, I tell you. You ask Judge Thatcher he'll tell
you the same."
"All right. I'll ask him and I'll make him pungle, too, or I'll know
the reason why. Say, how much you got in your pocket? I want it."
"I hain't got only a dollar, and I want that to"
"It don't make no difference what you want it foryou just shell it
out."
He took it and bit it to see if it was good, and then he said he was
going down town to get some whisky said he hadn't had a drink all day.
When he had got out on the shed he put his head in again, and cussed me
for putting on frills and trying to be better than him and when I
reckoned he was gone he come back and put his head in again, and told me
to mind about that school, because he was going to lay for me and lick me
if I didn't drop that.
Next day he was drunk, and he went to Judge Thatcher's and bullyragged
him, and tried to make him give up the money but he couldn't, and then
he swore he'd make the law force him.
The judge and the widow went to law to get the court to take me away from
him and let one of them be my guardian but it was a new judge that had
just come, and he didn't know the old man so he said courts mustn't
interfere and separate families if they could help it said he'd druther
not take a child away from its father. So Judge Thatcher and the widow
had to quit on the business.
That pleased the old man till he couldn't rest. He said he'd cowhide me
till I was black and blue if I didn't raise some money for him. I
borrowed three dollars from Judge Thatcher, and pap took it and got
drunk, and went ablowing around and cussing and whooping and carrying
on and he kept it up all over town, with a tin pan, till most midnight
then they jailed him, and next day they had him before court, and jailed
him again for a week. But he said HE was satisfied said he was boss of
his son, and he'd make it warm for HIM.
When he got out the new judge said he was agoing to make a man of him.
So he took him to his own house, and dressed him up clean and nice, and
had him to breakfast and dinner and supper with the family, and was just
old pie to him, so to speak. And after supper he talked to him about
temperance and such things till the old man cried, and said he'd been a
fool, and fooled away his life but now he was agoing to turn over a new
leaf and be a man nobody wouldn't be ashamed of, and he hoped the judge
would help him and not look down on him. The judge said he could hug him
for them words so he cried, and his wife she cried again pap said he'd
been a man that had always been misunderstood before, and the judge said
he believed it. The old man said that what a man wanted that was down
was sympathy, and the judge said it was so so they cried again. And
when it was bedtime the old man rose up and held out his hand, and says
"Look at it, gentlemen and ladies all take ahold of it shake it.
There's a hand that was the hand of a hog but it ain't so no more it's
the hand of a man that's started in on a new life, and'll die before
he'll go back. You mark them wordsdon't forget I said them. It's a
clean hand now shake itdon't be afeard."
So they shook it, one after the other, all around, and cried. The
judge's wife she kissed it. Then the old man he signed a pledgemade
his mark. The judge said it was the holiest time on record, or something
like that. Then they tucked the old man into a beautiful room, which was
the spare room, and in the night some time he got powerful thirsty and
clumb out on to the porchroof and slid down a stanchion and traded his
new coat for a jug of fortyrod, and clumb back again and had a good old
time and towards daylight he crawled out again, drunk as a fiddler, and
rolled off the porch and broke his left arm in two places, and was most
froze to death when somebody found him after sunup. And when they come
to look at that spare room they had to take soundings before they could
navigate it.
The judge he felt kind of sore. He said he reckoned a body could reform
the old man with a shotgun, maybe, but he didn't know no other way.
CHAPTER VI.
WELL, pretty soon the old man was up and around again, and then he went
for Judge Thatcher in the courts to make him give up that money, and he
went for me, too, for not stopping school. He catched me a couple of
times and thrashed me, but I went to school just the same, and dodged him
or outrun him most of the time. I didn't want to go to school much
before, but I reckoned I'd go now to spite pap. That law trial was a
slow businessappeared like they warn't ever going to get started on
it so every now and then I'd borrow two or three dollars off of the
judge for him, to keep from getting a cowhiding. Every time he got money
he got drunk and every time he got drunk he raised Cain around town and
every time he raised Cain he got jailed. He was just suitedthis kind
of thing was right in his line.
He got to hanging around the widow's too much and so she told him at last
that if he didn't quit using around there she would make trouble for him.
Well, WASN'T he mad? He said he would show who was Huck Finn's boss. So
he watched out for me one day in the spring, and catched me, and took me
up the river about three mile in a skiff, and crossed over to the
Illinois shore where it was woody and there warn't no houses but an old
log hut in a place where the timber was so thick you couldn't find it if
you didn't know where it was.
He kept me with him all the time, and I never got a chance to run off.
We lived in that old cabin, and he always locked the door and put the key
under his head nights. He had a gun which he had stole, I reckon, and we
fished and hunted, and that was what we lived on. Every little while he
locked me in and went down to the store, three miles, to the ferry, and
traded fish and game for whisky, and fetched it home and got drunk and
had a good time, and licked me. The widow she found out where I was by
and by, and she sent a man over to try to get hold of me but pap drove
him off with the gun, and it warn't long after that till I was used to
being where I was, and liked itall but the cowhide part.
It was kind of lazy and jolly, laying off comfortable all day, smoking
and fishing, and no books nor study. Two months or more run along, and
my clothes got to be all rags and dirt, and I didn't see how I'd ever got
to like it so well at the widow's, where you had to wash, and eat on a
plate, and comb up, and go to bed and get up regular, and be forever
bothering over a book, and have old Miss Watson pecking at you all the
time. I didn't want to go back no more. I had stopped cussing, because
the widow didn't like it but now I took to it again because pap hadn't
no objections. It was pretty good times up in the woods there, take it
all around.
But by and by pap got too handy with his hick'ry, and I couldn't stand
it. I was all over welts. He got to going away so much, too, and locking
me in. Once he locked me in and was gone three days. It was dreadful
lonesome. I judged he had got drowned, and I wasn't ever going to get
out any more. I was scared. I made up my mind I would fix up some way
to leave there. I had tried to get out of that cabin many a time, but I
couldn't find no way. There warn't a window to it big enough for a dog
to get through. I couldn't get up the chimbly it was too narrow. The
door was thick, solid oak slabs. Pap was pretty careful not to leave a
knife or anything in the cabin when he was away I reckon I had hunted
the place over as much as a hundred times well, I was most all the time
at it, because it was about the only way to put in the time. But this
time I found something at last I found an old rusty woodsaw without any
handle it was laid in between a rafter and the clapboards of the roof.
I greased it up and went to work. There was an old horseblanket nailed
against the logs at the far end of the cabin behind the table, to keep
the wind from blowing through the chinks and putting the candle out. I
got under the table and raised the blanket, and went to work to saw a
section of the big bottom log outbig enough to let me through. Well,
it was a good long job, but I was getting towards the end of it when I
heard pap's gun in the woods. I got rid of the signs of my work, and
dropped the blanket and hid my saw, and pretty soon pap come in.
Pap warn't in a good humorso he was his natural self. He said he was
down town, and everything was going wrong. His lawyer said he reckoned
he would win his lawsuit and get the money if they ever got started on
the trial but then there was ways to put it off a long time, and Judge
Thatcher knowed how to do it. And he said people allowed there'd be
another trial to get me away from him and give me to the widow for my
guardian, and they guessed it would win this time. This shook me up
considerable, because I didn't want to go back to the widow's any more
and be so cramped up and sivilized, as they called it. Then the old man
got to cussing, and cussed everything and everybody he could think of,
and then cussed them all over again to make sure he hadn't skipped any,
and after that he polished off with a kind of a general cuss all round,
including a considerable parcel of people which he didn't know the names
of, and so called them what'shisname when he got to them, and went
right along with his cussing.
He said he would like to see the widow get me. He said he would watch
out, and if they tried to come any such game on him he knowed of a place
six or seven mile off to stow me in, where they might hunt till they
dropped and they couldn't find me. That made me pretty uneasy again, but
only for a minute I reckoned I wouldn't stay on hand till he got that
chance.
The old man made me go to the skiff and fetch the things he had got.
There was a fiftypound sack of corn meal, and a side of bacon,
ammunition, and a fourgallon jug of whisky, and an old book and two
newspapers for wadding, besides some tow. I toted up a load, and went
back and set down on the bow of the skiff to rest. I thought it all
over, and I reckoned I would walk off with the gun and some lines, and
take to the woods when I run away. I guessed I wouldn't stay in one
place, but just tramp right across the country, mostly night times, and
hunt and fish to keep alive, and so get so far away that the old man nor
the widow couldn't ever find me any more. I judged I would saw out and
leave that night if pap got drunk enough, and I reckoned he would. I got
so full of it I didn't notice how long I was staying till the old man
hollered and asked me whether I was asleep or drownded.
I got the things all up to the cabin, and then it was about dark. While
I was cooking supper the old man took a swig or two and got sort of
warmed up, and went to ripping again. He had been drunk over in town,
and laid in the gutter all night, and he was a sight to look at. A body
would a thought he was Adamhe was just all mud. Whenever his liquor
begun to work he most always went for the govment, this time he says
"Call this a govment why, just look at it and see what it's like.
Here's the law astanding ready to take a man's son away from hima
man's own son, which he has had all the trouble and all the anxiety and
all the expense of raising. Yes, just as that man has got that son
raised at last, and ready to go to work and begin to do suthin' for HIM
and give him a rest, the law up and goes for him. And they call THAT
govment That ain't all, nuther. The law backs that old Judge Thatcher
up and helps him to keep me out o' my property. Here's what the law
does The law takes a man worth six thousand dollars and up'ards, and
jams him into an old trap of a cabin like this, and lets him go round in
clothes that ain't fitten for a hog. They call that govment A man can't
get his rights in a govment like this. Sometimes I've a mighty notion to
just leave the country for good and all. Yes, and I TOLD 'em so I told
old Thatcher so to his face. Lots of 'em heard me, and can tell what I
said. Says I, for two cents I'd leave the blamed country and never come
anear it agin. Them's the very words. I says look at my hatif you
call it a hatbut the lid raises up and the rest of it goes down till
it's below my chin, and then it ain't rightly a hat at all, but more like
my head was shoved up through a jint o' stovepipe. Look at it, says I
such a hat for me to wearone of the wealthiest men in this town if I
could git my rights.
"Oh, yes, this is a wonderful govment, wonderful. Why, looky here.
There was a free nigger there from Ohioa mulatter, most as white as a
white man. He had the whitest shirt on you ever see, too, and the
shiniest hat and there ain't a man in that town that's got as fine
clothes as what he had and he had a gold watch and chain, and a
silverheaded canethe awfulest old grayheaded nabob in the State. And
what do you think? They said he was a p'fessor in a college, and could
talk all kinds of languages, and knowed everything. And that ain't the
wust. They said he could VOTE when he was at home. Well, that let me
out. Thinks I, what is the country acoming to? It was 'lection day, and
I was just about to go and vote myself if I warn't too drunk to get
there but when they told me there was a State in this country where
they'd let that nigger vote, I drawed out. I says I'll never vote agin.
Them's the very words I said they all heard me and the country may rot
for all meI'll never vote agin as long as I live. And to see the cool
way of that niggerwhy, he wouldn't a give me the road if I hadn't
shoved him out o' the way. I says to the people, why ain't this nigger
put up at auction and sold?that's what I want to know. And what do you
reckon they said? Why, they said he couldn't be sold till he'd been in
the State six months, and he hadn't been there that long yet. There,
nowthat's a specimen. They call that a govment that can't sell a free
nigger till he's been in the State six months. Here's a govment that
calls itself a govment, and lets on to be a govment, and thinks it is a
govment, and yet's got to set stockstill for six whole months before it
can take a hold of a prowling, thieving, infernal, whiteshirted free
nigger, and"
Pap was agoing on so he never noticed where his old limber legs was
taking him to, so he went head over heels over the tub of salt pork and
barked both shins, and the rest of his speech was all the hottest kind of
languagemostly hove at the nigger and the govment, though he give the
tub some, too, all along, here and there. He hopped around the cabin
considerable, first on one leg and then on the other, holding first one
shin and then the other one, and at last he let out with his left foot
all of a sudden and fetched the tub a rattling kick. But it warn't good
judgment, because that was the boot that had a couple of his toes leaking
out of the front end of it so now he raised a howl that fairly made a
body's hair raise, and down he went in the dirt, and rolled there, and
held his toes and the cussing he done then laid over anything he had
ever done previous. He said so his own self afterwards. He had heard
old Sowberry Hagan in his best days, and he said it laid over him, too
but I reckon that was sort of piling it on, maybe.
After supper pap took the jug, and said he had enough whisky there for
two drunks and one delirium tremens. That was always his word. I judged
he would be blind drunk in about an hour, and then I would steal the key,
or saw myself out, one or t'other. He drank and drank, and tumbled down
on his blankets by and by but luck didn't run my way. He didn't go
sound asleep, but was uneasy. He groaned and moaned and thrashed around
this way and that for a long time. At last I got so sleepy I couldn't
keep my eyes open all I could do, and so before I knowed what I was about
I was sound asleep, and the candle burning.
I don't know how long I was asleep, but all of a sudden there was an
awful scream and I was up. There was pap looking wild, and skipping
around every which way and yelling about snakes. He said they was
crawling up his legs and then he would give a jump and scream, and say
one had bit him on the cheekbut I couldn't see no snakes. He started
and run round and round the cabin, hollering "Take him off take him off
he's biting me on the neck" I never see a man look so wild in the eyes.
Pretty soon he was all fagged out, and fell down panting then he rolled
over and over wonderful fast, kicking things every which way, and
striking and grabbing at the air with his hands, and screaming and saying
there was devils ahold of him. He wore out by and by, and laid still a
while, moaning. Then he laid stiller, and didn't make a sound. I could
hear the owls and the wolves away off in the woods, and it seemed
terrible still. He was laying over by the corner. By and by he raised up
part way and listened, with his head to one side. He says, very low
"Tramptramptramp that's the dead tramptramptramp they're
coming after me but I won't go. Oh, they're here don't touch me
don't hands offthey're cold let go. Oh, let a poor devil alone"
Then he went down on all fours and crawled off, begging them to let him
alone, and he rolled himself up in his blanket and wallowed in under the
old pine table, still abegging and then he went to crying. I could
hear him through the blanket.
By and by he rolled out and jumped up on his feet looking wild, and he
see me and went for me. He chased me round and round the place with a
claspknife, calling me the Angel of Death, and saying he would kill me,
and then I couldn't come for him no more. I begged, and told him I was
only Huck but he laughed SUCH a screechy laugh, and roared and cussed,
and kept on chasing me up. Once when I turned short and dodged under his
arm he made a grab and got me by the jacket between my shoulders, and I
thought I was gone but I slid out of the jacket quick as lightning, and
saved myself. Pretty soon he was all tired out, and dropped down with his
back against the door, and said he would rest a minute and then kill me.
He put his knife under him, and said he would sleep and get strong, and
then he would see who was who.
So he dozed off pretty soon. By and by I got the old splitbottom chair
and clumb up as easy as I could, not to make any noise, and got down the
gun. I slipped the ramrod down it to make sure it was loaded, then I
laid it across the turnip barrel, pointing towards pap, and set down
behind it to wait for him to stir. And how slow and still the time did
drag along.
CHAPTER VII.
"GIT up What you 'bout?"
I opened my eyes and looked around, trying to make out where I was. It
was after sunup, and I had been sound asleep. Pap was standing over me
looking sour and sick, too. He says
"What you doin' with this gun?"
I judged he didn't know nothing about what he had been doing, so I says
"Somebody tried to get in, so I was laying for him."
"Why didn't you roust me out?"
"Well, I tried to, but I couldn't I couldn't budge you."
"Well, all right. Don't stand there palavering all day, but out with you
and see if there's a fish on the lines for breakfast. I'll be along in a
minute."
He unlocked the door, and I cleared out up the riverbank. I noticed
some pieces of limbs and such things floating down, and a sprinkling of
bark so I knowed the river had begun to rise. I reckoned I would have
great times now if I was over at the town. The June rise used to be
always luck for me because as soon as that rise begins here comes
cordwood floating down, and pieces of log raftssometimes a dozen logs
together so all you have to do is to catch them and sell them to the
woodyards and the sawmill.
I went along up the bank with one eye out for pap and t'other one out for
what the rise might fetch along. Well, all at once here comes a canoe
just a beauty, too, about thirteen or fourteen foot long, riding high
like a duck. I shot headfirst off of the bank like a frog, clothes and
all on, and struck out for the canoe. I just expected there'd be
somebody laying down in it, because people often done that to fool folks,
and when a chap had pulled a skiff out most to it they'd raise up and
laugh at him. But it warn't so this time. It was a driftcanoe sure
enough, and I clumb in and paddled her ashore. Thinks I, the old man
will be glad when he sees thisshe's worth ten dollars. But when I
got to shore pap wasn't in sight yet, and as I was running her into a
little creek like a gully, all hung over with vines and willows, I struck
another idea I judged I'd hide her good, and then, 'stead of taking to
the woods when I run off, I'd go down the river about fifty mile and camp
in one place for good, and not have such a rough time tramping on foot.
It was pretty close to the shanty, and I thought I heard the old man
coming all the time but I got her hid and then I out and looked around
a bunch of willows, and there was the old man down the path a piece just
drawing a bead on a bird with his gun. So he hadn't seen anything.
When he got along I was hard at it taking up a "trot" line. He abused me
a little for being so slow but I told him I fell in the river, and that
was what made me so long. I knowed he would see I was wet, and then he
would be asking questions. We got five catfish off the lines and went
home.
While we laid off after breakfast to sleep up, both of us being about
wore out, I got to thinking that if I could fix up some way to keep pap
and the widow from trying to follow me, it would be a certainer thing
than trusting to luck to get far enough off before they missed me you
see, all kinds of things might happen. Well, I didn't see no way for a
while, but by and by pap raised up a minute to drink another barrel of
water, and he says
"Another time a man comes aprowling round here you roust me out, you
hear? That man warn't here for no good. I'd a shot him. Next time you
roust me out, you hear?"
Then he dropped down and went to sleep again but what he had been saying
give me the very idea I wanted. I says to myself, I can fix it now so
nobody won't think of following me.
About twelve o'clock we turned out and went along up the bank. The river
was coming up pretty fast, and lots of driftwood going by on the rise.
By and by along comes part of a log raftnine logs fast together. We
went out with the skiff and towed it ashore. Then we had dinner.
Anybody but pap would a waited and seen the day through, so as to catch
more stuff but that warn't pap's style. Nine logs was enough for one
time he must shove right over to town and sell. So he locked me in and
took the skiff, and started off towing the raft about halfpast three. I
judged he wouldn't come back that night. I waited till I reckoned he had
got a good start then I out with my saw, and went to work on that log
again. Before he was t'other side of the river I was out of the hole
him and his raft was just a speck on the water away off yonder.
I took the sack of corn meal and took it to where the canoe was hid, and
shoved the vines and branches apart and put it in then I done the same
with the side of bacon then the whiskyjug. I took all the coffee and
sugar there was, and all the ammunition I took the wadding I took the
bucket and gourd I took a dipper and a tin cup, and my old saw and two
blankets, and the skillet and the coffeepot. I took fishlines and
matches and other thingseverything that was worth a cent. I cleaned
out the place. I wanted an axe, but there wasn't any, only the one out
at the woodpile, and I knowed why I was going to leave that. I fetched
out the gun, and now I was done.
I had wore the ground a good deal crawling out of the hole and dragging
out so many things. So I fixed that as good as I could from the outside
by scattering dust on the place, which covered up the smoothness and the
sawdust. Then I fixed the piece of log back into its place, and put two
rocks under it and one against it to hold it there, for it was bent up at
that place and didn't quite touch ground. If you stood four or five foot
away and didn't know it was sawed, you wouldn't never notice it and
besides, this was the back of the cabin, and it warn't likely anybody
would go fooling around there.
It was all grass clear to the canoe, so I hadn't left a track. I
followed around to see. I stood on the bank and looked out over the
river. All safe. So I took the gun and went up a piece into the woods,
and was hunting around for some birds when I see a wild pig hogs soon
went wild in them bottoms after they had got away from the prairie farms.
I shot this fellow and took him into camp.
I took the axe and smashed in the door. I beat it and hacked it
considerable adoing it. I fetched the pig in, and took him back nearly
to the table and hacked into his throat with the axe, and laid him down
on the ground to bleed I say ground because it was groundhard packed,
and no boards. Well, next I took an old sack and put a lot of big rocks
in itall I could dragand I started it from the pig, and dragged it
to the door and through the woods down to the river and dumped it in, and
down it sunk, out of sight. You could easy see that something had been
dragged over the ground. I did wish Tom Sawyer was there I knowed he
would take an interest in this kind of business, and throw in the fancy
touches. Nobody could spread himself like Tom Sawyer in such a thing as
that.
Well, last I pulled out some of my hair, and blooded the axe good, and
stuck it on the back side, and slung the axe in the corner. Then I took
up the pig and held him to my breast with my jacket so he couldn't drip
till I got a good piece below the house and then dumped him into the
river. Now I thought of something else. So I went and got the bag of
meal and my old saw out of the canoe, and fetched them to the house. I
took the bag to where it used to stand, and ripped a hole in the bottom
of it with the saw, for there warn't no knives and forks on the place
pap done everything with his claspknife about the cooking. Then I
carried the sack about a hundred yards across the grass and through the
willows east of the house, to a shallow lake that was five mile wide and
full of rushesand ducks too, you might say, in the season. There was a
slough or a creek leading out of it on the other side that went miles
away, I don't know where, but it didn't go to the river. The meal sifted
out and made a little track all the way to the lake. I dropped pap's
whetstone there too, so as to look like it had been done by accident.
Then I tied up the rip in the meal sack with a string, so it wouldn't
leak no more, and took it and my saw to the canoe again.
It was about dark now so I dropped the canoe down the river under some
willows that hung over the bank, and waited for the moon to rise. I made
fast to a willow then I took a bite to eat, and by and by laid down in
the canoe to smoke a pipe and lay out a plan. I says to myself, they'll
follow the track of that sackful of rocks to the shore and then drag the
river for me. And they'll follow that meal track to the lake and go
browsing down the creek that leads out of it to find the robbers that
killed me and took the things. They won't ever hunt the river for
anything but my dead carcass. They'll soon get tired of that, and won't
bother no more about me. All right I can stop anywhere I want to.
Jackson's Island is good enough for me I know that island pretty well,
and nobody ever comes there. And then I can paddle over to town nights,
and slink around and pick up things I want. Jackson's Island's the place.
I was pretty tired, and the first thing I knowed I was asleep. When I
woke up I didn't know where I was for a minute. I set up and looked
around, a little scared. Then I remembered. The river looked miles and
miles across. The moon was so bright I could a counted the drift logs
that went aslipping along, black and still, hundreds of yards out from
shore. Everything was dead quiet, and it looked late, and SMELT late.
You know what I meanI don't know the words to put it in.
I took a good gap and a stretch, and was just going to unhitch and start
when I heard a sound away over the water. I listened. Pretty soon I
made it out. It was that dull kind of a regular sound that comes from
oars working in rowlocks when it's a still night. I peeped out through
the willow branches, and there it wasa skiff, away across the water. I
couldn't tell how many was in it. It kept acoming, and when it was
abreast of me I see there warn't but one man in it. Think's I, maybe
it's pap, though I warn't expecting him. He dropped below me with the
current, and by and by he came aswinging up shore in the easy water, and
he went by so close I could a reached out the gun and touched him. Well,
it WAS pap, sure enoughand sober, too, by the way he laid his oars.
I didn't lose no time. The next minute I was aspinning down stream soft
but quick in the shade of the bank. I made two mile and a half, and then
struck out a quarter of a mile or more towards the middle of the river,
because pretty soon I would be passing the ferry landing, and people
might see me and hail me. I got out amongst the driftwood, and then laid
down in the bottom of the canoe and let her float. I laid there, and had
a good rest and a smoke out of my pipe, looking away into the sky not a
cloud in it. The sky looks ever so deep when you lay down on your back
in the moonshine I never knowed it before. And how far a body can hear
on the water such nights I heard people talking at the ferry landing.
I heard what they said, tooevery word of it. One man said it was
getting towards the long days and the short nights now. T'other one said
THIS warn't one of the short ones, he reckonedand then they laughed,
and he said it over again, and they laughed again then they waked up
another fellow and told him, and laughed, but he didn't laugh he ripped
out something brisk, and said let him alone. The first fellow said he
'lowed to tell it to his old womanshe would think it was pretty good
but he said that warn't nothing to some things he had said in his time.
I heard one man say it was nearly three o'clock, and he hoped daylight
wouldn't wait more than about a week longer. After that the talk got
further and further away, and I couldn't make out the words any more but
I could hear the mumble, and now and then a laugh, too, but it seemed a
long ways off.
I was away below the ferry now. I rose up, and there was Jackson's
Island, about two mile and a half down stream, heavy timbered and
standing up out of the middle of the river, big and dark and solid, like
a steamboat without any lights. There warn't any signs of the bar at the
headit was all under water now.
It didn't take me long to get there. I shot past the head at a ripping
rate, the current was so swift, and then I got into the dead water and
landed on the side towards the Illinois shore. I run the canoe into a
deep dent in the bank that I knowed about I had to part the willow
branches to get in and when I made fast nobody could a seen the canoe
from the outside.
I went up and set down on a log at the head of the island, and looked out
on the big river and the black driftwood and away over to the town, three
mile away, where there was three or four lights twinkling. A monstrous
big lumberraft was about a mile up stream, coming along down, with a
lantern in the middle of it. I watched it come creeping down, and when
it was most abreast of where I stood I heard a man say, "Stern oars,
there heave her head to stabboard" I heard that just as plain as if
the man was by my side.
There was a little gray in the sky now so I stepped into the woods, and
laid down for a nap before breakfast.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE sun was up so high when I waked that I judged it was after eight
o'clock. I laid there in the grass and the cool shade thinking about
things, and feeling rested and ruther comfortable and satisfied. I could
see the sun out at one or two holes, but mostly it was big trees all
about, and gloomy in there amongst them. There was freckled places on
the ground where the light sifted down through the leaves, and the
freckled places swapped about a little, showing there was a little breeze
up there. A couple of squirrels set on a limb and jabbered at me very
friendly.
I was powerful lazy and comfortabledidn't want to get up and cook
breakfast. Well, I was dozing off again when I thinks I hears a deep
sound of "boom" away up the river. I rouses up, and rests on my elbow
and listens pretty soon I hears it again. I hopped up, and went and
looked out at a hole in the leaves, and I see a bunch of smoke laying on
the water a long ways upabout abreast the ferry. And there was the
ferryboat full of people floating along down. I knowed what was the
matter now. "Boom" I see the white smoke squirt out of the ferryboat's
side. You see, they was firing cannon over the water, trying to make my
carcass come to the top.
I was pretty hungry, but it warn't going to do for me to start a fire,
because they might see the smoke. So I set there and watched the
cannonsmoke and listened to the boom. The river was a mile wide there,
and it always looks pretty on a summer morningso I was having a good
enough time seeing them hunt for my remainders if I only had a bite to
eat. Well, then I happened to think how they always put quicksilver in
loaves of bread and float them off, because they always go right to the
drownded carcass and stop there. So, says I, I'll keep a lookout, and if
any of them's floating around after me I'll give them a show. I changed
to the Illinois edge of the island to see what luck I could have, and I
warn't disappointed. A big double loaf come along, and I most got it
with a long stick, but my foot slipped and she floated out further. Of
course I was where the current set in the closest to the shoreI knowed
enough for that. But by and by along comes another one, and this time I
won. I took out the plug and shook out the little dab of quicksilver,
and set my teeth in. It was "baker's bread"what the quality eat none
of your lowdown cornpone.
I got a good place amongst the leaves, and set there on a log, munching
the bread and watching the ferryboat, and very well satisfied. And then
something struck me. I says, now I reckon the widow or the parson or
somebody prayed that this bread would find me, and here it has gone and
done it. So there ain't no doubt but there is something in that thing
that is, there's something in it when a body like the widow or the parson
prays, but it don't work for me, and I reckon it don't work for only just
the right kind.
I lit a pipe and had a good long smoke, and went on watching. The
ferryboat was floating with the current, and I allowed I'd have a chance
to see who was aboard when she come along, because she would come in
close, where the bread did. When she'd got pretty well along down
towards me, I put out my pipe and went to where I fished out the bread,
and laid down behind a log on the bank in a little open place. Where the
log forked I could peep through.
By and by she come along, and she drifted in so close that they could a
run out a plank and walked ashore. Most everybody was on the boat. Pap,
and Judge Thatcher, and Bessie Thatcher, and Jo Harper, and Tom Sawyer,
and his old Aunt Polly, and Sid and Mary, and plenty more. Everybody was
talking about the murder, but the captain broke in and says
"Look sharp, now the current sets in the closest here, and maybe he's
washed ashore and got tangled amongst the brush at the water's edge. I
hope so, anyway."
"I didn't hope so. They all crowded up and leaned over the rails, nearly
in my face, and kept still, watching with all their might. I could see
them firstrate, but they couldn't see me. Then the captain sung out
"Stand away" and the cannon let off such a blast right before me that it
made me deef with the noise and pretty near blind with the smoke, and I
judged I was gone. If they'd a had some bullets in, I reckon they'd a
got the corpse they was after. Well, I see I warn't hurt, thanks to
goodness. The boat floated on and went out of sight around the shoulder
of the island. I could hear the booming now and then, further and
further off, and by and by, after an hour, I didn't hear it no more. The
island was three mile long. I judged they had got to the foot, and was
giving it up. But they didn't yet a while. They turned around the foot
of the island and started up the channel on the Missouri side, under
steam, and booming once in a while as they went. I crossed over to that
side and watched them. When they got abreast the head of the island they
quit shooting and dropped over to the Missouri shore and went home to the
town.
I knowed I was all right now. Nobody else would come ahunting after me.
I got my traps out of the canoe and made me a nice camp in the thick
woods. I made a kind of a tent out of my blankets to put my things under
so the rain couldn't get at them. I catched a catfish and haggled him
open with my saw, and towards sundown I started my camp fire and had
supper. Then I set out a line to catch some fish for breakfast.
When it was dark I set by my camp fire smoking, and feeling pretty well
satisfied but by and by it got sort of lonesome, and so I went and set
on the bank and listened to the current swashing along, and counted the
stars and drift logs and rafts that come down, and then went to bed
there ain't no better way to put in time when you are lonesome you can't
stay so, you soon get over it.
And so for three days and nights. No differencejust the same thing.
But the next day I went exploring around down through the island. I was
boss of it it all belonged to me, so to say, and I wanted to know all
about it but mainly I wanted to put in the time. I found plenty
strawberries, ripe and prime and green summer grapes, and green
razberries and the green blackberries was just beginning to show. They
would all come handy by and by, I judged.
Well, I went fooling along in the deep woods till I judged I warn't far
from the foot of the island. I had my gun along, but I hadn't shot
nothing it was for protection thought I would kill some game nigh home.
About this time I mighty near stepped on a goodsized snake, and it went
sliding off through the grass and flowers, and I after it, trying to get
a shot at it. I clipped along, and all of a sudden I bounded right on to
the ashes of a camp fire that was still smoking.
My heart jumped up amongst my lungs. I never waited for to look further,
but uncocked my gun and went sneaking back on my tiptoes as fast as ever
I could. Every now and then I stopped a second amongst the thick leaves
and listened, but my breath come so hard I couldn't hear nothing else. I
slunk along another piece further, then listened again and so on, and so
on. If I see a stump, I took it for a man if I trod on a stick and
broke it, it made me feel like a person had cut one of my breaths in two
and I only got half, and the short half, too.
When I got to camp I warn't feeling very brash, there warn't much sand in
my craw but I says, this ain't no time to be fooling around. So I got
all my traps into my canoe again so as to have them out of sight, and I
put out the fire and scattered the ashes around to look like an old last
year's camp, and then clumb a tree.
I reckon I was up in the tree two hours but I didn't see nothing, I
didn't hear nothingI only THOUGHT I heard and seen as much as a
thousand things. Well, I couldn't stay up there forever so at last I
got down, but I kept in the thick woods and on the lookout all the time.
All I could get to eat was berries and what was left over from breakfast.
By the time it was night I was pretty hungry. So when it was good and
dark I slid out from shore before moonrise and paddled over to the
Illinois bankabout a quarter of a mile. I went out in the woods and
cooked a supper, and I had about made up my mind I would stay there all
night when I hear a PLUNKETYPLUNK, PLUNKETYPLUNK, and says to myself,
horses coming and next I hear people's voices. I got everything into
the canoe as quick as I could, and then went creeping through the woods
to see what I could find out. I hadn't got far when I hear a man say
"We better camp here if we can find a good place the horses is about
beat out. Let's look around."
I didn't wait, but shoved out and paddled away easy. I tied up in the
old place, and reckoned I would sleep in the canoe.
I didn't sleep much. I couldn't, somehow, for thinking. And every time
I waked up I thought somebody had me by the neck. So the sleep didn't do
me no good. By and by I says to myself, I can't live this way I'm
agoing to find out who it is that's here on the island with me I'll
find it out or bust. Well, I felt better right off.
So I took my paddle and slid out from shore just a step or two, and then
let the canoe drop along down amongst the shadows. The moon was shining,
and outside of the shadows it made it most as light as day. I poked
along well on to an hour, everything still as rocks and sound asleep.
Well, by this time I was most down to the foot of the island. A little
ripply, cool breeze begun to blow, and that was as good as saying the
night was about done. I give her a turn with the paddle and brung her
nose to shore then I got my gun and slipped out and into the edge of the
woods. I sat down there on a log, and looked out through the leaves. I
see the moon go off watch, and the darkness begin to blanket the river.
But in a little while I see a pale streak over the treetops, and knowed
the day was coming. So I took my gun and slipped off towards where I had
run across that camp fire, stopping every minute or two to listen. But I
hadn't no luck somehow I couldn't seem to find the place. But by and
by, sure enough, I catched a glimpse of fire away through the trees. I
went for it, cautious and slow. By and by I was close enough to have a
look, and there laid a man on the ground. It most give me the fantods.
He had a blanket around his head, and his head was nearly in the fire. I
set there behind a clump of bushes in about six foot of him, and kept my
eyes on him steady. It was getting gray daylight now. Pretty soon he
gapped and stretched himself and hove off the blanket, and it was Miss
Watson's Jim I bet I was glad to see him. I says
"Hello, Jim" and skipped out.
He bounced up and stared at me wild. Then he drops down on his knees,
and puts his hands together and says
"Doan' hurt medon't I hain't ever done no harm to a ghos'. I alwuz
liked dead people, en done all I could for 'em. You go en git in de
river agin, whah you b'longs, en doan' do nuffn to Ole Jim, 'at 'uz awluz
yo' fren'."
Well, I warn't long making him understand I warn't dead. I was ever so
glad to see Jim. I warn't lonesome now. I told him I warn't afraid of
HIM telling the people where I was. I talked along, but he only set
there and looked at me never said nothing. Then I says
"It's good daylight. Le's get breakfast. Make up your camp fire good."
"What's de use er makin' up de camp fire to cook strawbries en sich
truck? But you got a gun, hain't you? Den we kin git sumfn better den
strawbries."
"Strawberries and such truck," I says. "Is that what you live on?"
"I couldn' git nuffn else," he says.
"Why, how long you been on the island, Jim?"
"I come heah de night arter you's killed."
"What, all that time?"
"Yesindeedy."
"And ain't you had nothing but that kind of rubbage to eat?"
"No, sahnuffn else."
"Well, you must be most starved, ain't you?"
"I reck'n I could eat a hoss. I think I could. How long you ben on de
islan'?"
"Since the night I got killed."
"No W'y, what has you lived on? But you got a gun. Oh, yes, you got a
gun. Dat's good. Now you kill sumfn en I'll make up de fire."
So we went over to where the canoe was, and while he built a fire in a
grassy open place amongst the trees, I fetched meal and bacon and coffee,
and coffeepot and fryingpan, and sugar and tin cups, and the nigger was
set back considerable, because he reckoned it was all done with
witchcraft. I catched a good big catfish, too, and Jim cleaned him with
his knife, and fried him.
When breakfast was ready we lolled on the grass and eat it smoking hot.
Jim laid it in with all his might, for he was most about starved. Then
when we had got pretty well stuffed, we laid off and lazied. By and by
Jim says
"But looky here, Huck, who wuz it dat 'uz killed in dat shanty ef it
warn't you?"
Then I told him the whole thing, and he said it was smart. He said Tom
Sawyer couldn't get up no better plan than what I had. Then I says
"How do you come to be here, Jim, and how'd you get here?"
He looked pretty uneasy, and didn't say nothing for a minute. Then he
says
"Maybe I better not tell."
"Why, Jim?"
"Well, dey's reasons. But you wouldn' tell on me ef I uz to tell you,
would you, Huck?"
"Blamed if I would, Jim."
"Well, I b'lieve you, Huck. II RUN OFF."
"Jim"
"But mind, you said you wouldn' tellyou know you said you wouldn' tell,
Huck."
"Well, I did. I said I wouldn't, and I'll stick to it. Honest INJUN, I
will. People would call me a lowdown Abolitionist and despise me for
keeping mumbut that don't make no difference. I ain't agoing to tell,
and I ain't agoing back there, anyways. So, now, le's know all about
it."
"Well, you see, it 'uz dis way. Ole missusdat's Miss Watsonshe pecks
on me all de time, en treats me pooty rough, but she awluz said she
wouldn' sell me down to Orleans. But I noticed dey wuz a nigger trader
roun' de place considable lately, en I begin to git oneasy. Well, one
night I creeps to de do' pooty late, en de do' warn't quite shet, en I
hear old missus tell de widder she gwyne to sell me down to Orleans, but
she didn' want to, but she could git eight hund'd dollars for me, en it
'uz sich a big stack o' money she couldn' resis'. De widder she try to
git her to say she wouldn' do it, but I never waited to hear de res'. I
lit out mighty quick, I tell you.
"I tuck out en shin down de hill, en 'spec to steal a skift 'long de sho'
som'ers 'bove de town, but dey wuz people astirring yit, so I hid in de
ole tumbledown coopershop on de bank to wait for everybody to go 'way.
Well, I wuz dah all night. Dey wuz somebody roun' all de time. 'Long
'bout six in de mawnin' skifts begin to go by, en 'bout eight er nine
every skift dat went 'long wuz talkin' 'bout how yo' pap come over to de
town en say you's killed. Dese las' skifts wuz full o' ladies en genlmen
agoin' over for to see de place. Sometimes dey'd pull up at de sho' en
take a res' b'fo' dey started acrost, so by de talk I got to know all
'bout de killin'. I 'uz powerful sorry you's killed, Huck, but I ain't
no mo' now.
"I laid dah under de shavin's all day. I 'uz hungry, but I warn't
afeard bekase I knowed ole missus en de widder wuz goin' to start to de
campmeet'n' right arter breakfas' en be gone all day, en dey knows I
goes off wid de cattle 'bout daylight, so dey wouldn' 'spec to see me
roun' de place, en so dey wouldn' miss me tell arter dark in de evenin'.
De yuther servants wouldn' miss me, kase dey'd shin out en take holiday
soon as de ole folks 'uz out'n de way.
"Well, when it come dark I tuck out up de river road, en went 'bout two
mile er more to whah dey warn't no houses. I'd made up my mine 'bout
what I's agwyne to do. You see, ef I kep' on tryin' to git away afoot,
de dogs 'ud track me ef I stole a skift to cross over, dey'd miss dat
skift, you see, en dey'd know 'bout whah I'd lan' on de yuther side, en
whah to pick up my track. So I says, a raff is what I's arter it doan'
MAKE no track.
"I see a light acomin' roun' de p'int bymeby, so I wade' in en shove' a
log ahead o' me en swum more'n half way acrost de river, en got in
'mongst de driftwood, en kep' my head down low, en kinder swum agin de
current tell de raff come along. Den I swum to de stern uv it en tuck
aholt. It clouded up en 'uz pooty dark for a little while. So I clumb
up en laid down on de planks. De men 'uz all 'way yonder in de middle,
whah de lantern wuz. De river wuz arisin', en dey wuz a good current
so I reck'n'd 'at by fo' in de mawnin' I'd be twentyfive mile down de
river, en den I'd slip in jis b'fo' daylight en swim asho', en take to
de woods on de Illinois side.
"But I didn' have no luck. When we 'uz mos' down to de head er de islan'
a man begin to come aft wid de lantern, I see it warn't no use fer to
wait, so I slid overboard en struck out fer de islan'. Well, I had a
notion I could lan' mos' anywhers, but I couldn'tbank too bluff. I 'uz
mos' to de foot er de islan' b'fo' I found' a good place. I went into de
woods en jedged I wouldn' fool wid raffs no mo', long as dey move de
lantern roun' so. I had my pipe en a plug er dogleg, en some matches in
my cap, en dey warn't wet, so I 'uz all right."
"And so you ain't had no meat nor bread to eat all this time? Why didn't
you get mudturkles?"
"How you gwyne to git 'm? You can't slip up on um en grab um en how's a
body gwyne to hit um wid a rock? How could a body do it in de night? En
I warn't gwyne to show mysef on de bank in de daytime."
"Well, that's so. You've had to keep in the woods all the time, of
course. Did you hear 'em shooting the cannon?"
"Oh, yes. I knowed dey was arter you. I see um go by heahwatched um
thoo de bushes."
Some young birds come along, flying a yard or two at a time and lighting.
Jim said it was a sign it was going to rain. He said it was a sign when
young chickens flew that way, and so he reckoned it was the same way when
young birds done it. I was going to catch some of them, but Jim wouldn't
let me. He said it was death. He said his father laid mighty sick once,
and some of them catched a bird, and his old granny said his father would
die, and he did.
And Jim said you mustn't count the things you are going to cook for
dinner, because that would bring bad luck. The same if you shook the
tablecloth after sundown. And he said if a man owned a beehive and that
man died, the bees must be told about it before sunup next morning, or
else the bees would all weaken down and quit work and die. Jim said bees
wouldn't sting idiots but I didn't believe that, because I had tried
them lots of times myself, and they wouldn't sting me.
I had heard about some of these things before, but not all of them. Jim
knowed all kinds of signs. He said he knowed most everything. I said it
looked to me like all the signs was about bad luck, and so I asked him if
there warn't any goodluck signs. He says
"Mighty fewan' DEY ain't no use to a body. What you want to know when
good luck's acomin' for? Want to keep it off?" And he said "Ef you's
got hairy arms en a hairy breas', it's a sign dat you's agwyne to be
rich. Well, dey's some use in a sign like dat, 'kase it's so fur ahead.
You see, maybe you's got to be po' a long time fust, en so you might git
discourage' en kill yo'sef 'f you didn' know by de sign dat you gwyne to
be rich bymeby."
"Have you got hairy arms and a hairy breast, Jim?"
"What's de use to ax dat question? Don't you see I has?"
"Well, are you rich?"
"No, but I ben rich wunst, and gwyne to be rich agin. Wunst I had foteen
dollars, but I tuck to specalat'n', en got busted out."
"What did you speculate in, Jim?"
"Well, fust I tackled stock."
"What kind of stock?"
"Why, live stockcattle, you know. I put ten dollars in a cow. But I
ain' gwyne to resk no mo' money in stock. De cow up 'n' died on my
han's."
"So you lost the ten dollars."
"No, I didn't lose it all. I on'y los' 'bout nine of it. I sole de hide
en taller for a dollar en ten cents."
"You had five dollars and ten cents left. Did you speculate any more?"
"Yes. You know that onelaigged nigger dat b'longs to old Misto Bradish?
Well, he sot up a bank, en say anybody dat put in a dollar would git fo'
dollars mo' at de en' er de year. Well, all de niggers went in, but dey
didn't have much. I wuz de on'y one dat had much. So I stuck out for
mo' dan fo' dollars, en I said 'f I didn' git it I'd start a bank mysef.
Well, o' course dat nigger want' to keep me out er de business, bekase he
says dey warn't business 'nough for two banks, so he say I could put in
my five dollars en he pay me thirtyfive at de en' er de year.
"So I done it. Den I reck'n'd I'd inves' de thirtyfive dollars right
off en keep things amovin'. Dey wuz a nigger name' Bob, dat had ketched
a woodflat, en his marster didn' know it en I bought it off'n him en
told him to take de thirtyfive dollars when de en' er de year come but
somebody stole de woodflat dat night, en nex day de onelaigged nigger
say de bank's busted. So dey didn' none uv us git no money."
"What did you do with the ten cents, Jim?"
"Well, I 'uz gwyne to spen' it, but I had a dream, en de dream tole me to
give it to a nigger name' BalumBalum's Ass dey call him for short he's
one er dem chuckleheads, you know. But he's lucky, dey say, en I see I
warn't lucky. De dream say let Balum inves' de ten cents en he'd make a
raise for me. Well, Balum he tuck de money, en when he wuz in church he
hear de preacher say dat whoever give to de po' len' to de Lord, en boun'
to git his money back a hund'd times. So Balum he tuck en give de ten
cents to de po', en laid low to see what wuz gwyne to come of it."
"Well, what did come of it, Jim?"
"Nuffn never come of it. I couldn' manage to k'leck dat money no way en
Balum he couldn'. I ain' gwyne to len' no mo' money 'dout I see de
security. Boun' to git yo' money back a hund'd times, de preacher says
Ef I could git de ten CENTS back, I'd call it squah, en be glad er de
chanst."
"Well, it's all right anyway, Jim, long as you're going to be rich again
some time or other."
"Yes en I's rich now, come to look at it. I owns mysef, en I's wuth
eight hund'd dollars. I wisht I had de money, I wouldn' want no mo'."
CHAPTER IX.
I WANTED to go and look at a place right about the middle of the island
that I'd found when I was exploring so we started and soon got to it,
because the island was only three miles long and a quarter of a mile
wide.
This place was a tolerable long, steep hill or ridge about forty foot
high. We had a rough time getting to the top, the sides was so steep and
the bushes so thick. We tramped and clumb around all over it, and by and
by found a good big cavern in the rock, most up to the top on the side
towards Illinois. The cavern was as big as two or three rooms bunched
together, and Jim could stand up straight in it. It was cool in there.
Jim was for putting our traps in there right away, but I said we didn't
want to be climbing up and down there all the time.
Jim said if we had the canoe hid in a good place, and had all the traps
in the cavern, we could rush there if anybody was to come to the island,
and they would never find us without dogs. And, besides, he said them
little birds had said it was going to rain, and did I want the things to
get wet?
So we went back and got the canoe, and paddled up abreast the cavern, and
lugged all the traps up there. Then we hunted up a place close by to
hide the canoe in, amongst the thick willows. We took some fish off of
the lines and set them again, and begun to get ready for dinner.
The door of the cavern was big enough to roll a hogshead in, and on one
side of the door the floor stuck out a little bit, and was flat and a
good place to build a fire on. So we built it there and cooked dinner.
We spread the blankets inside for a carpet, and eat our dinner in there.
We put all the other things handy at the back of the cavern. Pretty soon
it darkened up, and begun to thunder and lighten so the birds was right
about it. Directly it begun to rain, and it rained like all fury, too,
and I never see the wind blow so. It was one of these regular summer
storms. It would get so dark that it looked all blueblack outside, and
lovely and the rain would thrash along by so thick that the trees off a
little ways looked dim and spiderwebby and here would come a blast of
wind that would bend the trees down and turn up the pale underside of the
leaves and then a perfect ripper of a gust would follow along and set
the branches to tossing their arms as if they was just wild and next,
when it was just about the bluest and blackestFST it was as bright as
glory, and you'd have a little glimpse of treetops aplunging about away
off yonder in the storm, hundreds of yards further than you could see
before dark as sin again in a second, and now you'd hear the thunder let
go with an awful crash, and then go rumbling, grumbling, tumbling, down
the sky towards the under side of the world, like rolling empty barrels
down stairswhere it's long stairs and they bounce a good deal, you
know.
"Jim, this is nice," I says. "I wouldn't want to be nowhere else but
here. Pass me along another hunk of fish and some hot cornbread."
"Well, you wouldn't a ben here 'f it hadn't a ben for Jim. You'd a ben
down dah in de woods widout any dinner, en gittn' mos' drownded, too dat
you would, honey. Chickens knows when it's gwyne to rain, en so do de
birds, chile."
The river went on raising and raising for ten or twelve days, till at
last it was over the banks. The water was three or four foot deep on the
island in the low places and on the Illinois bottom. On that side it was
a good many miles wide, but on the Missouri side it was the same old
distance acrossa half a milebecause the Missouri shore was just a
wall of high bluffs.
Daytimes we paddled all over the island in the canoe, It was mighty cool
and shady in the deep woods, even if the sun was blazing outside. We
went winding in and out amongst the trees, and sometimes the vines hung
so thick we had to back away and go some other way. Well, on every old
brokendown tree you could see rabbits and snakes and such things and
when the island had been overflowed a day or two they got so tame, on
account of being hungry, that you could paddle right up and put your hand
on them if you wanted to but not the snakes and turtlesthey would
slide off in the water. The ridge our cavern was in was full of them.
We could a had pets enough if we'd wanted them.
One night we catched a little section of a lumber raftnice pine planks.
It was twelve foot wide and about fifteen or sixteen foot long, and the
top stood above water six or seven inchesa solid, level floor. We
could see sawlogs go by in the daylight sometimes, but we let them go
we didn't show ourselves in daylight.
Another night when we was up at the head of the island, just before
daylight, here comes a framehouse down, on the west side. She was a
twostory, and tilted over considerable. We paddled out and got aboard
clumb in at an upstairs window. But it was too dark to see yet, so we
made the canoe fast and set in her to wait for daylight.
The light begun to come before we got to the foot of the island. Then we
looked in at the window. We could make out a bed, and a table, and two
old chairs, and lots of things around about on the floor, and there was
clothes hanging against the wall. There was something laying on the
floor in the far corner that looked like a man. So Jim says
"Hello, you"
But it didn't budge. So I hollered again, and then Jim says
"De man ain't asleephe's dead. You hold stillI'll go en see."
He went, and bent down and looked, and says
"It's a dead man. Yes, indeedy naked, too. He's ben shot in de back.
I reck'n he's ben dead two er three days. Come in, Huck, but doan' look
at his faceit's too gashly."
I didn't look at him at all. Jim throwed some old rags over him, but he
needn't done it I didn't want to see him. There was heaps of old greasy
cards scattered around over the floor, and old whisky bottles, and a
couple of masks made out of black cloth and all over the walls was the
ignorantest kind of words and pictures made with charcoal. There was two
old dirty calico dresses, and a sunbonnet, and some women's underclothes
hanging against the wall, and some men's clothing, too. We put the lot
into the canoeit might come good. There was a boy's old speckled straw
hat on the floor I took that, too. And there was a bottle that had had
milk in it, and it had a rag stopper for a baby to suck. We would a took
the bottle, but it was broke. There was a seedy old chest, and an old
hair trunk with the hinges broke. They stood open, but there warn't
nothing left in them that was any account. The way things was scattered
about we reckoned the people left in a hurry, and warn't fixed so as to
carry off most of their stuff.
We got an old tin lantern, and a butcherknife without any handle, and a
brannew Barlow knife worth two bits in any store, and a lot of tallow
candles, and a tin candlestick, and a gourd, and a tin cup, and a ratty
old bedquilt off the bed, and a reticule with needles and pins and
beeswax and buttons and thread and all such truck in it, and a hatchet
and some nails, and a fishline as thick as my little finger with some
monstrous hooks on it, and a roll of buckskin, and a leather dogcollar,
and a horseshoe, and some vials of medicine that didn't have no label on
them and just as we was leaving I found a tolerable good currycomb, and
Jim he found a ratty old fiddlebow, and a wooden leg. The straps was
broke off of it, but, barring that, it was a good enough leg, though it
was too long for me and not long enough for Jim, and we couldn't find the
other one, though we hunted all around.
And so, take it all around, we made a good haul. When we was ready to
shove off we was a quarter of a mile below the island, and it was pretty
broad day so I made Jim lay down in the canoe and cover up with the
quilt, because if he set up people could tell he was a nigger a good ways
off. I paddled over to the Illinois shore, and drifted down most a half
a mile doing it. I crept up the dead water under the bank, and hadn't no
accidents and didn't see nobody. We got home all safe.
CHAPTER X.
AFTER breakfast I wanted to talk about the dead man and guess out how he
come to be killed, but Jim didn't want to. He said it would fetch bad
luck and besides, he said, he might come and ha'nt us he said a man
that warn't buried was more likely to go aha'nting around than one that
was planted and comfortable. That sounded pretty reasonable, so I didn't
say no more but I couldn't keep from studying over it and wishing I
knowed who shot the man, and what they done it for.
We rummaged the clothes we'd got, and found eight dollars in silver sewed
up in the lining of an old blanket overcoat. Jim said he reckoned the
people in that house stole the coat, because if they'd a knowed the money
was there they wouldn't a left it. I said I reckoned they killed him,
too but Jim didn't want to talk about that. I says
"Now you think it's bad luck but what did you say when I fetched in the
snakeskin that I found on the top of the ridge day before yesterday?
You said it was the worst bad luck in the world to touch a snakeskin
with my hands. Well, here's your bad luck We've raked in all this
truck and eight dollars besides. I wish we could have some bad luck like
this every day, Jim."
"Never you mind, honey, never you mind. Don't you git too peart. It's
acomin'. Mind I tell you, it's acomin'."
It did come, too. It was a Tuesday that we had that talk. Well, after
dinner Friday we was laying around in the grass at the upper end of the
ridge, and got out of tobacco. I went to the cavern to get some, and
found a rattlesnake in there. I killed him, and curled him up on the
foot of Jim's blanket, ever so natural, thinking there'd be some fun when
Jim found him there. Well, by night I forgot all about the snake, and
when Jim flung himself down on the blanket while I struck a light the
snake's mate was there, and bit him.
He jumped up yelling, and the first thing the light showed was the
varmint curled up and ready for another spring. I laid him out in a
second with a stick, and Jim grabbed pap's whiskyjug and begun to pour
it down.
He was barefooted, and the snake bit him right on the heel. That all
comes of my being such a fool as to not remember that wherever you leave
a dead snake its mate always comes there and curls around it. Jim told
me to chop off the snake's head and throw it away, and then skin the body
and roast a piece of it. I done it, and he eat it and said it would help
cure him. He made me take off the rattles and tie them around his wrist,
too. He said that that would help. Then I slid out quiet and throwed
the snakes clear away amongst the bushes for I warn't going to let Jim
find out it was all my fault, not if I could help it.
Jim sucked and sucked at the jug, and now and then he got out of his head
and pitched around and yelled but every time he come to himself he went
to sucking at the jug again. His foot swelled up pretty big, and so did
his leg but by and by the drunk begun to come, and so I judged he was
all right but I'd druther been bit with a snake than pap's whisky.
Jim was laid up for four days and nights. Then the swelling was all gone
and he was around again. I made up my mind I wouldn't ever take aholt
of a snakeskin again with my hands, now that I see what had come of it.
Jim said he reckoned I would believe him next time. And he said that
handling a snakeskin was such awful bad luck that maybe we hadn't got to
the end of it yet. He said he druther see the new moon over his left
shoulder as much as a thousand times than take up a snakeskin in his
hand. Well, I was getting to feel that way myself, though I've always
reckoned that looking at the new moon over your left shoulder is one of
the carelessest and foolishest things a body can do. Old Hank Bunker
done it once, and bragged about it and in less than two years he got
drunk and fell off of the shottower, and spread himself out so that he
was just a kind of a layer, as you may say and they slid him edgeways
between two barn doors for a coffin, and buried him so, so they say, but
I didn't see it. Pap told me. But anyway it all come of looking at the
moon that way, like a fool.
Well, the days went along, and the river went down between its banks
again and about the first thing we done was to bait one of the big hooks
with a skinned rabbit and set it and catch a catfish that was as big as a
man, being six foot two inches long, and weighed over two hundred pounds.
We couldn't handle him, of course he would a flung us into Illinois. We
just set there and watched him rip and tear around till he drownded. We
found a brass button in his stomach and a round ball, and lots of
rubbage. We split the ball open with the hatchet, and there was a spool
in it. Jim said he'd had it there a long time, to coat it over so and
make a ball of it. It was as big a fish as was ever catched in the
Mississippi, I reckon. Jim said he hadn't ever seen a bigger one. He
would a been worth a good deal over at the village. They peddle out such
a fish as that by the pound in the markethouse there everybody buys
some of him his meat's as white as snow and makes a good fry.
Next morning I said it was getting slow and dull, and I wanted to get a
stirring up some way. I said I reckoned I would slip over the river and
find out what was going on. Jim liked that notion but he said I must go
in the dark and look sharp. Then he studied it over and said, couldn't I
put on some of them old things and dress up like a girl? That was a good
notion, too. So we shortened up one of the calico gowns, and I turned up
my trouserlegs to my knees and got into it. Jim hitched it behind with
the hooks, and it was a fair fit. I put on the sunbonnet and tied it
under my chin, and then for a body to look in and see my face was like
looking down a joint of stovepipe. Jim said nobody would know me, even
in the daytime, hardly. I practiced around all day to get the hang of
the things, and by and by I could do pretty well in them, only Jim said I
didn't walk like a girl and he said I must quit pulling up my gown to
get at my britchespocket. I took notice, and done better.
I started up the Illinois shore in the canoe just after dark.
I started across to the town from a little below the ferrylanding, and
the drift of the current fetched me in at the bottom of the town. I tied
up and started along the bank. There was a light burning in a little
shanty that hadn't been lived in for a long time, and I wondered who had
took up quarters there. I slipped up and peeped in at the window. There
was a woman about forty year old in there knitting by a candle that was
on a pine table. I didn't know her face she was a stranger, for you
couldn't start a face in that town that I didn't know. Now this was
lucky, because I was weakening I was getting afraid I had come people
might know my voice and find me out. But if this woman had been in such
a little town two days she could tell me all I wanted to know so I
knocked at the door, and made up my mind I wouldn't forget I was a girl.
CHAPTER XI.
"COME in," says the woman, and I did. She says "Take a cheer."
I done it. She looked me all over with her little shiny eyes, and says
"What might your name be?"
"Sarah Williams."
"Where 'bouts do you live? In this neighborhood?'
"No'm. In Hookerville, seven mile below. I've walked all the way and
I'm all tired out."
"Hungry, too, I reckon. I'll find you something."
"No'm, I ain't hungry. I was so hungry I had to stop two miles below
here at a farm so I ain't hungry no more. It's what makes me so late.
My mother's down sick, and out of money and everything, and I come to
tell my uncle Abner Moore. He lives at the upper end of the town, she
says. I hain't ever been here before. Do you know him?"
"No but I don't know everybody yet. I haven't lived here quite two
weeks. It's a considerable ways to the upper end of the town. You better
stay here all night. Take off your bonnet."
"No," I says "I'll rest a while, I reckon, and go on. I ain't afeared
of the dark."
She said she wouldn't let me go by myself, but her husband would be in by
and by, maybe in a hour and a half, and she'd send him along with me.
Then she got to talking about her husband, and about her relations up the
river, and her relations down the river, and about how much better off
they used to was, and how they didn't know but they'd made a mistake
coming to our town, instead of letting well aloneand so on and so on,
till I was afeard I had made a mistake coming to her to find out what was
going on in the town but by and by she dropped on to pap and the murder,
and then I was pretty willing to let her clatter right along. She told
about me and Tom Sawyer finding the six thousand dollars only she got it
ten and all about pap and what a hard lot he was, and what a hard lot I
was, and at last she got down to where I was murdered. I says
"Who done it? We've heard considerable about these goings on down in
Hookerville, but we don't know who 'twas that killed Huck Finn."
"Well, I reckon there's a right smart chance of people HERE that'd like
to know who killed him. Some think old Finn done it himself."
"Nois that so?"
"Most everybody thought it at first. He'll never know how nigh he come
to getting lynched. But before night they changed around and judged it
was done by a runaway nigger named Jim."
"Why HE"
I stopped. I reckoned I better keep still. She run on, and never
noticed I had put in at all
"The nigger run off the very night Huck Finn was killed. So there's a
reward out for himthree hundred dollars. And there's a reward out for
old Finn, tootwo hundred dollars. You see, he come to town the morning
after the murder, and told about it, and was out with 'em on the
ferryboat hunt, and right away after he up and left. Before night they
wanted to lynch him, but he was gone, you see. Well, next day they found
out the nigger was gone they found out he hadn't ben seen sence ten
o'clock the night the murder was done. So then they put it on him, you
see and while they was full of it, next day, back comes old Finn, and
went boohooing to Judge Thatcher to get money to hunt for the nigger all
over Illinois with. The judge gave him some, and that evening he got
drunk, and was around till after midnight with a couple of mighty
hardlooking strangers, and then went off with them. Well, he hain't
come back sence, and they ain't looking for him back till this thing
blows over a little, for people thinks now that he killed his boy and
fixed things so folks would think robbers done it, and then he'd get
Huck's money without having to bother a long time with a lawsuit. People
do say he warn't any too good to do it. Oh, he's sly, I reckon. If he
don't come back for a year he'll be all right. You can't prove anything
on him, you know everything will be quieted down then, and he'll walk in
Huck's money as easy as nothing."
"Yes, I reckon so, 'm. I don't see nothing in the way of it. Has
everybody quit thinking the nigger done it?"
"Oh, no, not everybody. A good many thinks he done it. But they'll get
the nigger pretty soon now, and maybe they can scare it out of him."
"Why, are they after him yet?"
"Well, you're innocent, ain't you Does three hundred dollars lay around
every day for people to pick up? Some folks think the nigger ain't far
from here. I'm one of thembut I hain't talked it around. A few days
ago I was talking with an old couple that lives next door in the log
shanty, and they happened to say hardly anybody ever goes to that island
over yonder that they call Jackson's Island. Don't anybody live there?
says I. No, nobody, says they. I didn't say any more, but I done some
thinking. I was pretty near certain I'd seen smoke over there, about the
head of the island, a day or two before that, so I says to myself, like
as not that nigger's hiding over there anyway, says I, it's worth the
trouble to give the place a hunt. I hain't seen any smoke sence, so I
reckon maybe he's gone, if it was him but husband's going over to see
him and another man. He was gone up the river but he got back today,
and I told him as soon as he got here two hours ago."
I had got so uneasy I couldn't set still. I had to do something with my
hands so I took up a needle off of the table and went to threading it.
My hands shook, and I was making a bad job of it. When the woman stopped
talking I looked up, and she was looking at me pretty curious and smiling
a little. I put down the needle and thread, and let on to be interested
and I was, tooand says
"Three hundred dollars is a power of money. I wish my mother could get
it. Is your husband going over there tonight?"
"Oh, yes. He went uptown with the man I was telling you of, to get a
boat and see if they could borrow another gun. They'll go over after
midnight."
"Couldn't they see better if they was to wait till daytime?"
"Yes. And couldn't the nigger see better, too? After midnight he'll
likely be asleep, and they can slip around through the woods and hunt up
his camp fire all the better for the dark, if he's got one."
"I didn't think of that."
The woman kept looking at me pretty curious, and I didn't feel a bit
comfortable. Pretty soon she says,
"What did you say your name was, honey?"
"MMary Williams."
Somehow it didn't seem to me that I said it was Mary before, so I didn't
look upseemed to me I said it was Sarah so I felt sort of cornered,
and was afeared maybe I was looking it, too. I wished the woman would
say something more the longer she set still the uneasier I was. But now
she says
"Honey, I thought you said it was Sarah when you first come in?"
"Oh, yes'm, I did. Sarah Mary Williams. Sarah's my first name. Some
calls me Sarah, some calls me Mary."
"Oh, that's the way of it?"
"Yes'm."
I was feeling better then, but I wished I was out of there, anyway. I
couldn't look up yet.
Well, the woman fell to talking about how hard times was, and how poor
they had to live, and how the rats was as free as if they owned the
place, and so forth and so on, and then I got easy again. She was right
about the rats. You'd see one stick his nose out of a hole in the corner
every little while. She said she had to have things handy to throw at
them when she was alone, or they wouldn't give her no peace. She showed
me a bar of lead twisted up into a knot, and said she was a good shot
with it generly, but she'd wrenched her arm a day or two ago, and didn't
know whether she could throw true now. But she watched for a chance, and
directly banged away at a rat but she missed him wide, and said "Ouch"
it hurt her arm so. Then she told me to try for the next one. I wanted
to be getting away before the old man got back, but of course I didn't
let on. I got the thing, and the first rat that showed his nose I let
drive, and if he'd a stayed where he was he'd a been a tolerable sick
rat. She said that was firstrate, and she reckoned I would hive the
next one. She went and got the lump of lead and fetched it back, and
brought along a hank of yarn which she wanted me to help her with. I
held up my two hands and she put the hank over them, and went on talking
about her and her husband's matters. But she broke off to say
"Keep your eye on the rats. You better have the lead in your lap,
handy."
So she dropped the lump into my lap just at that moment, and I clapped my
legs together on it and she went on talking. But only about a minute.
Then she took off the hank and looked me straight in the face, and very
pleasant, and says
"Come, now, what's your real name?"
"Whwhat, mum?"
"What's your real name? Is it Bill, or Tom, or Bob?or what is it?"
I reckon I shook like a leaf, and I didn't know hardly what to do. But I
says
"Please to don't poke fun at a poor girl like me, mum. If I'm in the way
here, I'll"
"No, you won't. Set down and stay where you are. I ain't going to hurt
you, and I ain't going to tell on you, nuther. You just tell me your
secret, and trust me. I'll keep it and, what's more, I'll help you.
So'll my old man if you want him to. You see, you're a runaway
'prentice, that's all. It ain't anything. There ain't no harm in it.
You've been treated bad, and you made up your mind to cut. Bless you,
child, I wouldn't tell on you. Tell me all about it now, that's a good
boy."
So I said it wouldn't be no use to try to play it any longer, and I would
just make a clean breast and tell her everything, but she musn't go back
on her promise. Then I told her my father and mother was dead, and the
law had bound me out to a mean old farmer in the country thirty mile back
from the river, and he treated me so bad I couldn't stand it no longer
he went away to be gone a couple of days, and so I took my chance and
stole some of his daughter's old clothes and cleared out, and I had been
three nights coming the thirty miles. I traveled nights, and hid
daytimes and slept, and the bag of bread and meat I carried from home
lasted me all the way, and I had aplenty. I said I believed my uncle
Abner Moore would take care of me, and so that was why I struck out for
this town of Goshen.
"Goshen, child? This ain't Goshen. This is St. Petersburg. Goshen's
ten mile further up the river. Who told you this was Goshen?"
"Why, a man I met at daybreak this morning, just as I was going to turn
into the woods for my regular sleep. He told me when the roads forked I
must take the right hand, and five mile would fetch me to Goshen."
"He was drunk, I reckon. He told you just exactly wrong."
"Well, he did act like he was drunk, but it ain't no matter now. I got
to be moving along. I'll fetch Goshen before daylight."
"Hold on a minute. I'll put you up a snack to eat. You might want it."
So she put me up a snack, and says
"Say, when a cow's laying down, which end of her gets up first? Answer
up prompt nowdon't stop to study over it. Which end gets up first?"
"The hind end, mum."
"Well, then, a horse?"
"The for'rard end, mum."
"Which side of a tree does the moss grow on?"
"North side."
"If fifteen cows is browsing on a hillside, how many of them eats with
their heads pointed the same direction?"
"The whole fifteen, mum."
"Well, I reckon you HAVE lived in the country. I thought maybe you was
trying to hocus me again. What's your real name, now?"
"George Peters, mum."
"Well, try to remember it, George. Don't forget and tell me it's
Elexander before you go, and then get out by saying it's George Elexander
when I catch you. And don't go about women in that old calico. You do a
girl tolerable poor, but you might fool men, maybe. Bless you, child,
when you set out to thread a needle don't hold the thread still and fetch
the needle up to it hold the needle still and poke the thread at it
that's the way a woman most always does, but a man always does t'other
way. And when you throw at a rat or anything, hitch yourself up a tiptoe
and fetch your hand up over your head as awkward as you can, and miss
your rat about six or seven foot. Throw stiffarmed from the shoulder,
like there was a pivot there for it to turn on, like a girl not from the
wrist and elbow, with your arm out to one side, like a boy. And, mind
you, when a girl tries to catch anything in her lap she throws her knees
apart she don't clap them together, the way you did when you catched the
lump of lead. Why, I spotted you for a boy when you was threading the
needle and I contrived the other things just to make certain. Now trot
along to your uncle, Sarah Mary Williams George Elexander Peters, and if
you get into trouble you send word to Mrs. Judith Loftus, which is me,
and I'll do what I can to get you out of it. Keep the river road all the
way, and next time you tramp take shoes and socks with you. The river
road's a rocky one, and your feet'll be in a condition when you get to
Goshen, I reckon."
I went up the bank about fifty yards, and then I doubled on my tracks and
slipped back to where my canoe was, a good piece below the house. I
jumped in, and was off in a hurry. I went upstream far enough to make
the head of the island, and then started across. I took off the
sunbonnet, for I didn't want no blinders on then. When I was about the
middle I heard the clock begin to strike, so I stops and listens the
sound come faint over the water but cleareleven. When I struck the
head of the island I never waited to blow, though I was most winded, but
I shoved right into the timber where my old camp used to be, and started
a good fire there on a high and dry spot.
Then I jumped in the canoe and dug out for our place, a mile and a half
below, as hard as I could go. I landed, and slopped through the timber
and up the ridge and into the cavern. There Jim laid, sound asleep on
the ground. I roused him out and says
"Git up and hump yourself, Jim There ain't a minute to lose. They're
after us"
Jim never asked no questions, he never said a word but the way he worked
for the next half an hour showed about how he was scared. By that time
everything we had in the world was on our raft, and she was ready to be
shoved out from the willow cove where she was hid. We put out the camp
fire at the cavern the first thing, and didn't show a candle outside
after that.
I took the canoe out from the shore a little piece, and took a look but
if there was a boat around I couldn't see it, for stars and shadows ain't
good to see by. Then we got out the raft and slipped along down in the
shade, past the foot of the island dead stillnever saying a word.
CHAPTER XII.
IT must a been close on to one o'clock when we got below the island at
last, and the raft did seem to go mighty slow. If a boat was to come
along we was going to take to the canoe and break for the Illinois shore
and it was well a boat didn't come, for we hadn't ever thought to put the
gun in the canoe, or a fishingline, or anything to eat. We was in
ruther too much of a sweat to think of so many things. It warn't good
judgment to put EVERYTHING on the raft.
If the men went to the island I just expect they found the camp fire I
built, and watched it all night for Jim to come. Anyways, they stayed
away from us, and if my building the fire never fooled them it warn't no
fault of mine. I played it as low down on them as I could.
When the first streak of day began to show we tied up to a towhead in a
big bend on the Illinois side, and hacked off cottonwood branches with
the hatchet, and covered up the raft with them so she looked like there
had been a cavein in the bank there. A towhead is a sandbar that has
cottonwoods on it as thick as harrowteeth.
We had mountains on the Missouri shore and heavy timber on the Illinois
side, and the channel was down the Missouri shore at that place, so we
warn't afraid of anybody running across us. We laid there all day, and
watched the rafts and steamboats spin down the Missouri shore, and
upbound steamboats fight the big river in the middle. I told Jim all
about the time I had jabbering with that woman and Jim said she was a
smart one, and if she was to start after us herself she wouldn't set down
and watch a camp fireno, sir, she'd fetch a dog. Well, then, I said,
why couldn't she tell her husband to fetch a dog? Jim said he bet she
did think of it by the time the men was ready to start, and he believed
they must a gone uptown to get a dog and so they lost all that time, or
else we wouldn't be here on a towhead sixteen or seventeen mile below the
villageno, indeedy, we would be in that same old town again. So I said
I didn't care what was the reason they didn't get us as long as they
didn't.
When it was beginning to come on dark we poked our heads out of the
cottonwood thicket, and looked up and down and across nothing in sight
so Jim took up some of the top planks of the raft and built a snug wigwam
to get under in blazing weather and rainy, and to keep the things dry.
Jim made a floor for the wigwam, and raised it a foot or more above the
level of the raft, so now the blankets and all the traps was out of reach
of steamboat waves. Right in the middle of the wigwam we made a layer of
dirt about five or six inches deep with a frame around it for to hold it
to its place this was to build a fire on in sloppy weather or chilly
the wigwam would keep it from being seen. We made an extra steeringoar,
too, because one of the others might get broke on a snag or something.
We fixed up a short forked stick to hang the old lantern on, because we
must always light the lantern whenever we see a steamboat coming
downstream, to keep from getting run over but we wouldn't have to light
it for upstream boats unless we see we was in what they call a
"crossing" for the river was pretty high yet, very low banks being still
a little under water so upbound boats didn't always run the channel,
but hunted easy water.
This second night we run between seven and eight hours, with a current
that was making over four mile an hour. We catched fish and talked, and
we took a swim now and then to keep off sleepiness. It was kind of
solemn, drifting down the big, still river, laying on our backs looking
up at the stars, and we didn't ever feel like talking loud, and it warn't
often that we laughedonly a little kind of a low chuckle. We had
mighty good weather as a general thing, and nothing ever happened to us
at allthat night, nor the next, nor the next.
Every night we passed towns, some of them away up on black hillsides,
nothing but just a shiny bed of lights not a house could you see. The
fifth night we passed St. Louis, and it was like the whole world lit up.
In St. Petersburg they used to say there was twenty or thirty thousand
people in St. Louis, but I never believed it till I see that wonderful
spread of lights at two o'clock that still night. There warn't a sound
there everybody was asleep.
Every night now I used to slip ashore towards ten o'clock at some little
village, and buy ten or fifteen cents' worth of meal or bacon or other
stuff to eat and sometimes I lifted a chicken that warn't roosting
comfortable, and took him along. Pap always said, take a chicken when
you get a chance, because if you don't want him yourself you can easy
find somebody that does, and a good deed ain't ever forgot. I never see
pap when he didn't want the chicken himself, but that is what he used to
say, anyway.
Mornings before daylight I slipped into cornfields and borrowed a
watermelon, or a mushmelon, or a punkin, or some new corn, or things of
that kind. Pap always said it warn't no harm to borrow things if you was
meaning to pay them back some time but the widow said it warn't anything
but a soft name for stealing, and no decent body would do it. Jim said
he reckoned the widow was partly right and pap was partly right so the
best way would be for us to pick out two or three things from the list
and say we wouldn't borrow them any morethen he reckoned it wouldn't be
no harm to borrow the others. So we talked it over all one night,
drifting along down the river, trying to make up our minds whether to
drop the watermelons, or the cantelopes, or the mushmelons, or what. But
towards daylight we got it all settled satisfactory, and concluded to
drop crabapples and p'simmons. We warn't feeling just right before that,
but it was all comfortable now. I was glad the way it come out, too,
because crabapples ain't ever good, and the p'simmons wouldn't be ripe
for two or three months yet.
We shot a waterfowl now and then that got up too early in the morning or
didn't go to bed early enough in the evening. Take it all round, we
lived pretty high.
The fifth night below St. Louis we had a big storm after midnight, with a
power of thunder and lightning, and the rain poured down in a solid
sheet. We stayed in the wigwam and let the raft take care of itself.
When the lightning glared out we could see a big straight river ahead,
and high, rocky bluffs on both sides. By and by says I, "HelLO, Jim,
looky yonder" It was a steamboat that had killed herself on a rock. We
was drifting straight down for her. The lightning showed her very
distinct. She was leaning over, with part of her upper deck above water,
and you could see every little chimblyguy clean and clear, and a chair
by the big bell, with an old slouch hat hanging on the back of it, when
the flashes come.
Well, it being away in the night and stormy, and all so mysteriouslike,
I felt just the way any other boy would a felt when I see that wreck
laying there so mournful and lonesome in the middle of the river. I
wanted to get aboard of her and slink around a little, and see what there
was there. So I says
"Le's land on her, Jim."
But Jim was dead against it at first. He says
"I doan' want to go fool'n 'long er no wrack. We's doin' blame' well, en
we better let blame' well alone, as de good book says. Like as not dey's
a watchman on dat wrack."
"Watchman your grandmother," I says "there ain't nothing to watch but
the texas and the pilothouse and do you reckon anybody's going to resk
his life for a texas and a pilothouse such a night as this, when it's
likely to break up and wash off down the river any minute?" Jim couldn't
say nothing to that, so he didn't try. "And besides," I says, "we might
borrow something worth having out of the captain's stateroom. Seegars, I
bet youand cost five cents apiece, solid cash. Steamboat captains is
always rich, and get sixty dollars a month, and THEY don't care a cent
what a thing costs, you know, long as they want it. Stick a candle in
your pocket I can't rest, Jim, till we give her a rummaging. Do you
reckon Tom Sawyer would ever go by this thing? Not for pie, he wouldn't.
He'd call it an adventurethat's what he'd call it and he'd land on
that wreck if it was his last act. And wouldn't he throw style into it?
wouldn't he spread himself, nor nothing? Why, you'd think it was
Christopher C'lumbus discovering KingdomCome. I wish Tom Sawyer WAS
here."
Jim he grumbled a little, but give in. He said we mustn't talk any more
than we could help, and then talk mighty low. The lightning showed us
the wreck again just in time, and we fetched the stabboard derrick, and
made fast there.
The deck was high out here. We went sneaking down the slope of it to
labboard, in the dark, towards the texas, feeling our way slow with our
feet, and spreading our hands out to fend off the guys, for it was so
dark we couldn't see no sign of them. Pretty soon we struck the forward
end of the skylight, and clumb on to it and the next step fetched us in
front of the captain's door, which was open, and by Jimminy, away down
through the texashall we see a light and all in the same second we seem
to hear low voices in yonder
Jim whispered and said he was feeling powerful sick, and told me to come
along. I says, all right, and was going to start for the raft but just
then I heard a voice wail out and say
"Oh, please don't, boys I swear I won't ever tell"
Another voice said, pretty loud
"It's a lie, Jim Turner. You've acted this way before. You always want
more'n your share of the truck, and you've always got it, too, because
you've swore 't if you didn't you'd tell. But this time you've said it
jest one time too many. You're the meanest, treacherousest hound in this
country."
By this time Jim was gone for the raft. I was just abiling with
curiosity and I says to myself, Tom Sawyer wouldn't back out now, and so
I won't either I'm agoing to see what's going on here. So I dropped on
my hands and knees in the little passage, and crept aft in the dark till
there warn't but one stateroom betwixt me and the crosshall of the
texas. Then in there I see a man stretched on the floor and tied hand
and foot, and two men standing over him, and one of them had a dim
lantern in his hand, and the other one had a pistol. This one kept
pointing the pistol at the man's head on the floor, and saying
"I'd LIKE to And I orter, tooa mean skunk"
The man on the floor would shrivel up and say, "Oh, please don't, Bill I
hain't ever goin' to tell."
And every time he said that the man with the lantern would laugh and say
"'Deed you AIN'T You never said no truer thing 'n that, you bet you."
And once he said "Hear him beg and yit if we hadn't got the best of
him and tied him he'd a killed us both. And what FOR? Jist for noth'n.
Jist because we stood on our RIGHTSthat's what for. But I lay you
ain't agoin' to threaten nobody any more, Jim Turner. Put UP that
pistol, Bill."
Bill says
"I don't want to, Jake Packard. I'm for killin' himand didn't he kill
old Hatfield jist the same wayand don't he deserve it?"
"But I don't WANT him killed, and I've got my reasons for it."
"Bless yo' heart for them words, Jake Packard I'll never forgit you
long's I live" says the man on the floor, sort of blubbering.
Packard didn't take no notice of that, but hung up his lantern on a nail
and started towards where I was there in the dark, and motioned Bill to
come. I crawfished as fast as I could about two yards, but the boat
slanted so that I couldn't make very good time so to keep from getting
run over and catched I crawled into a stateroom on the upper side. The
man came apawing along in the dark, and when Packard got to my
stateroom, he says
"Herecome in here."
And in he come, and Bill after him. But before they got in I was up in
the upper berth, cornered, and sorry I come. Then they stood there, with
their hands on the ledge of the berth, and talked. I couldn't see them,
but I could tell where they was by the whisky they'd been having. I was
glad I didn't drink whisky but it wouldn't made much difference anyway,
because most of the time they couldn't a treed me because I didn't
breathe. I was too scared. And, besides, a body COULDN'T breathe and
hear such talk. They talked low and earnest. Bill wanted to kill
Turner. He says
"He's said he'll tell, and he will. If we was to give both our shares to
him NOW it wouldn't make no difference after the row and the way we've
served him. Shore's you're born, he'll turn State's evidence now you
hear ME. I'm for putting him out of his troubles."
"So'm I," says Packard, very quiet.
"Blame it, I'd sorter begun to think you wasn't. Well, then, that's all
right. Le's go and do it."
"Hold on a minute I hain't had my say yit. You listen to me.
Shooting's good, but there's quieter ways if the thing's GOT to be done.
But what I say is this it ain't good sense to go court'n around after a
halter if you can git at what you're up to in some way that's jist as
good and at the same time don't bring you into no resks. Ain't that so?"
"You bet it is. But how you goin' to manage it this time?"
"Well, my idea is this we'll rustle around and gather up whatever
pickins we've overlooked in the staterooms, and shove for shore and hide
the truck. Then we'll wait. Now I say it ain't agoin' to be more'n two
hours befo' this wrack breaks up and washes off down the river. See?
He'll be drownded, and won't have nobody to blame for it but his own
self. I reckon that's a considerble sight better 'n killin' of him. I'm
unfavorable to killin' a man as long as you can git aroun' it it ain't
good sense, it ain't good morals. Ain't I right?"
"Yes, I reck'n you are. But s'pose she DON'T break up and wash off?"
"Well, we can wait the two hours anyway and see, can't we?"
"All right, then come along."
So they started, and I lit out, all in a cold sweat, and scrambled
forward. It was dark as pitch there but I said, in a kind of a coarse
whisper, "Jim" and he answered up, right at my elbow, with a sort of a
moan, and I says
"Quick, Jim, it ain't no time for fooling around and moaning there's a
gang of murderers in yonder, and if we don't hunt up their boat and set
her drifting down the river so these fellows can't get away from the
wreck there's one of 'em going to be in a bad fix. But if we find their
boat we can put ALL of 'em in a bad fixfor the sheriff 'll get 'em.
Quickhurry I'll hunt the labboard side, you hunt the stabboard.
You start at the raft, and"
"Oh, my lordy, lordy RAF'? Dey ain' no raf' no mo' she done broke
loose en gone Ien here we is"
CHAPTER XIII.
WELL, I catched my breath and most fainted. Shut up on a wreck with such
a gang as that But it warn't no time to be sentimentering. We'd GOT to
find that boat nowhad to have it for ourselves. So we went aquaking
and shaking down the stabboard side, and slow work it was, tooseemed a
week before we got to the stern. No sign of a boat. Jim said he didn't
believe he could go any furtherso scared he hadn't hardly any strength
left, he said. But I said, come on, if we get left on this wreck we are
in a fix, sure. So on we prowled again. We struck for the stern of the
texas, and found it, and then scrabbled along forwards on the skylight,
hanging on from shutter to shutter, for the edge of the skylight was in
the water. When we got pretty close to the crosshall door there was the
skiff, sure enough I could just barely see her. I felt ever so
thankful. In another second I would a been aboard of her, but just then
the door opened. One of the men stuck his head out only about a couple
of foot from me, and I thought I was gone but he jerked it in again, and
says
"Heave that blame lantern out o' sight, Bill"
He flung a bag of something into the boat, and then got in himself and
set down. It was Packard. Then Bill HE come out and got in. Packard
says, in a low voice
"All readyshove off"
I couldn't hardly hang on to the shutters, I was so weak. But Bill says
"Hold on'd you go through him?"
"No. Didn't you?"
"No. So he's got his share o' the cash yet."
"Well, then, come along no use to take truck and leave money."
"Say, won't he suspicion what we're up to?"
"Maybe he won't. But we got to have it anyway. Come along."
So they got out and went in.
The door slammed to because it was on the careened side and in a half
second I was in the boat, and Jim come tumbling after me. I out with my
knife and cut the rope, and away we went
We didn't touch an oar, and we didn't speak nor whisper, nor hardly even
breathe. We went gliding swift along, dead silent, past the tip of the
paddlebox, and past the stern then in a second or two more we was a
hundred yards below the wreck, and the darkness soaked her up, every last
sign of her, and we was safe, and knowed it.
When we was three or four hundred yards downstream we see the lantern
show like a little spark at the texas door for a second, and we knowed by
that that the rascals had missed their boat, and was beginning to
understand that they was in just as much trouble now as Jim Turner was.
Then Jim manned the oars, and we took out after our raft. Now was the
first time that I begun to worry about the menI reckon I hadn't had
time to before. I begun to think how dreadful it was, even for
murderers, to be in such a fix. I says to myself, there ain't no telling
but I might come to be a murderer myself yet, and then how would I like
it? So says I to Jim
"The first light we see we'll land a hundred yards below it or above it,
in a place where it's a good hidingplace for you and the skiff, and then
I'll go and fix up some kind of a yarn, and get somebody to go for that
gang and get them out of their scrape, so they can be hung when their
time comes."
But that idea was a failure for pretty soon it begun to storm again, and
this time worse than ever. The rain poured down, and never a light
showed everybody in bed, I reckon. We boomed along down the river,
watching for lights and watching for our raft. After a long time the
rain let up, but the clouds stayed, and the lightning kept whimpering,
and by and by a flash showed us a black thing ahead, floating, and we
made for it.
It was the raft, and mighty glad was we to get aboard of it again. We
seen a light now away down to the right, on shore. So I said I would go
for it. The skiff was half full of plunder which that gang had stole
there on the wreck. We hustled it on to the raft in a pile, and I told
Jim to float along down, and show a light when he judged he had gone
about two mile, and keep it burning till I come then I manned my oars
and shoved for the light. As I got down towards it three or four more
showedup on a hillside. It was a village. I closed in above the shore
light, and laid on my oars and floated. As I went by I see it was a
lantern hanging on the jackstaff of a doublehull ferryboat. I skimmed
around for the watchman, awondering whereabouts he slept and by and by
I found him roosting on the bitts forward, with his head down between his
knees. I gave his shoulder two or three little shoves, and begun to cry.
He stirred up in a kind of a startlish way but when he see it was only
me he took a good gap and stretch, and then he says
"Hello, what's up? Don't cry, bub. What's the trouble?"
I says
"Pap, and mam, and sis, and"
Then I broke down. He says
"Oh, dang it now, DON'T take on so we all has to have our troubles, and
this 'n 'll come out all right. What's the matter with 'em?"
"They'rethey'reare you the watchman of the boat?"
"Yes," he says, kind of prettywellsatisfied like. "I'm the captain and
the owner and the mate and the pilot and watchman and head deckhand and
sometimes I'm the freight and passengers. I ain't as rich as old Jim
Hornback, and I can't be so blame' generous and good to Tom, Dick, and
Harry as what he is, and slam around money the way he does but I've told
him a many a time 't I wouldn't trade places with him for, says I, a
sailor's life's the life for me, and I'm derned if I'D live two mile out
o' town, where there ain't nothing ever goin' on, not for all his
spondulicks and as much more on top of it. Says I"
I broke in and says
"They're in an awful peck of trouble, and"
"WHO is?"
"Why, pap and mam and sis and Miss Hooker and if you'd take your
ferryboat and go up there"
"Up where? Where are they?"
"On the wreck."
"What wreck?"
"Why, there ain't but one."
"What, you don't mean the Walter Scott?"
"Yes."
"Good land what are they doin' THERE, for gracious sakes?"
"Well, they didn't go there apurpose."
"I bet they didn't Why, great goodness, there ain't no chance for 'em
if they don't git off mighty quick Why, how in the nation did they ever
git into such a scrape?"
"Easy enough. Miss Hooker was avisiting up there to the town"
"Yes, Booth's Landinggo on."
"She was avisiting there at Booth's Landing, and just in the edge of the
evening she started over with her nigger woman in the horseferry to stay
all night at her friend's house, Miss Whatyoumaycallher I disremember
her nameand they lost their steeringoar, and swung around and went
afloating down, stern first, about two mile, and saddlebaggsed on the
wreck, and the ferryman and the nigger woman and the horses was all lost,
but Miss Hooker she made a grab and got aboard the wreck. Well, about an
hour after dark we come along down in our tradingscow, and it was so
dark we didn't notice the wreck till we was right on it and so WE
saddlebaggsed but all of us was saved but Bill Whippleand oh, he WAS
the best creturI most wish 't it had been me, I do."
"My George It's the beatenest thing I ever struck. And THEN what did
you all do?"
"Well, we hollered and took on, but it's so wide there we couldn't make
nobody hear. So pap said somebody got to get ashore and get help
somehow. I was the only one that could swim, so I made a dash for it, and
Miss Hooker she said if I didn't strike help sooner, come here and hunt
up her uncle, and he'd fix the thing. I made the land about a mile
below, and been fooling along ever since, trying to get people to do
something, but they said, 'What, in such a night and such a current?
There ain't no sense in it go for the steam ferry.' Now if you'll go
and"
"By Jackson, I'd LIKE to, and, blame it, I don't know but I will but who
in the dingnation's agoing' to PAY for it? Do you reckon your pap"
"Why THAT'S all right. Miss Hooker she tole me, PARTICULAR, that her
uncle Hornback"
"Great guns is HE her uncle? Looky here, you break for that light over
yonderway, and turn out west when you git there, and about a quarter of
a mile out you'll come to the tavern tell 'em to dart you out to Jim
Hornback's, and he'll foot the bill. And don't you fool around any,
because he'll want to know the news. Tell him I'll have his niece all
safe before he can get to town. Hump yourself, now I'm agoing up
around the corner here to roust out my engineer."
I struck for the light, but as soon as he turned the corner I went back
and got into my skiff and bailed her out, and then pulled up shore in the
easy water about six hundred yards, and tucked myself in among some
woodboats for I couldn't rest easy till I could see the ferryboat start.
But take it all around, I was feeling ruther comfortable on accounts of
taking all this trouble for that gang, for not many would a done it. I
wished the widow knowed about it. I judged she would be proud of me for
helping these rapscallions, because rapscallions and dead beats is the
kind the widow and good people takes the most interest in.
Well, before long here comes the wreck, dim and dusky, sliding along
down A kind of cold shiver went through me, and then I struck out for
her. She was very deep, and I see in a minute there warn't much chance
for anybody being alive in her. I pulled all around her and hollered a
little, but there wasn't any answer all dead still. I felt a little bit
heavyhearted about the gang, but not much, for I reckoned if they could
stand it I could.
Then here comes the ferryboat so I shoved for the middle of the river on
a long downstream slant and when I judged I was out of eyereach I laid
on my oars, and looked back and see her go and smell around the wreck for
Miss Hooker's remainders, because the captain would know her uncle
Hornback would want them and then pretty soon the ferryboat give it up
and went for the shore, and I laid into my work and went abooming down
the river.
It did seem a powerful long time before Jim's light showed up and when
it did show it looked like it was a thousand mile off. By the time I got
there the sky was beginning to get a little gray in the east so we
struck for an island, and hid the raft, and sunk the skiff, and turned in
and slept like dead people.
CHAPTER XIV.
BY and by, when we got up, we turned over the truck the gang had stole
off of the wreck, and found boots, and blankets, and clothes, and all
sorts of other things, and a lot of books, and a spyglass, and three
boxes of seegars. We hadn't ever been this rich before in neither of our
lives. The seegars was prime. We laid off all the afternoon in the
woods talking, and me reading the books, and having a general good time.
I told Jim all about what happened inside the wreck and at the ferryboat,
and I said these kinds of things was adventures but he said he didn't
want no more adventures. He said that when I went in the texas and he
crawled back to get on the raft and found her gone he nearly died,
because he judged it was all up with HIM anyway it could be fixed for if
he didn't get saved he would get drownded and if he did get saved,
whoever saved him would send him back home so as to get the reward, and
then Miss Watson would sell him South, sure. Well, he was right he was
most always right he had an uncommon level head for a nigger.
I read considerable to Jim about kings and dukes and earls and such, and
how gaudy they dressed, and how much style they put on, and called each
other your majesty, and your grace, and your lordship, and so on, 'stead
of mister and Jim's eyes bugged out, and he was interested. He says
"I didn' know dey was so many un um. I hain't hearn 'bout none un um,
skasely, but ole King Sollermun, onless you counts dem kings dat's in a
pack er k'yards. How much do a king git?"
"Get?" I says "why, they get a thousand dollars a month if they want
it they can have just as much as they want everything belongs to them."
"AIN' dat gay? En what dey got to do, Huck?"
"THEY don't do nothing Why, how you talk They just set around."
"No is dat so?"
"Of course it is. They just set aroundexcept, maybe, when there's a
war then they go to the war. But other times they just lazy around or
go hawkingjust hawking and spShd' you hear a noise?"
We skipped out and looked but it warn't nothing but the flutter of a
steamboat's wheel away down, coming around the point so we come back.
"Yes," says I, "and other times, when things is dull, they fuss with the
parlyment and if everybody don't go just so he whacks their heads off.
But mostly they hang round the harem."
"Roun' de which?"
"Harem."
"What's de harem?"
"The place where he keeps his wives. Don't you know about the harem?
Solomon had one he had about a million wives."
"Why, yes, dat's so II'd done forgot it. A harem's a bo'd'nhouse, I
reck'n. Mos' likely dey has rackety times in de nussery. En I reck'n de
wives quarrels considable en dat 'crease de racket. Yit dey say
Sollermun de wises' man dat ever live'. I doan' take no stock in dat.
Bekase why would a wise man want to live in de mids' er sich a
blimblammin' all de time? No'deed he wouldn't. A wise man 'ud take
en buil' a bilerfactry en den he could shet DOWN de bilerfactry when
he want to res'."
"Well, but he WAS the wisest man, anyway because the widow she told me
so, her own self."
"I doan k'yer what de widder say, he WARN'T no wise man nuther. He had
some er de dadfetchedes' ways I ever see. Does you know 'bout dat chile
dat he 'uz gwyne to chop in two?"
"Yes, the widow told me all about it."
"WELL, den Warn' dat de beatenes' notion in de worl'? You jes' take en
look at it a minute. Dah's de stump, dahdat's one er de women heah's
youdat's de yuther one I's Sollermun en dish yer dollar bill's de
chile. Bofe un you claims it. What does I do? Does I shin aroun'
mongs' de neighbors en fine out which un you de bill DO b'long to, en
han' it over to de right one, all safe en soun', de way dat anybody dat
had any gumption would? No I take en whack de bill in TWO, en give half
un it to you, en de yuther half to de yuther woman. Dat's de way
Sollermun was gwyne to do wid de chile. Now I want to ast you what's
de use er dat half a bill?can't buy noth'n wid it. En what use is a
half a chile? I wouldn' give a dern for a million un um."
"But hang it, Jim, you've clean missed the pointblame it, you've missed
it a thousand mile."
"Who? Me? Go 'long. Doan' talk to me 'bout yo' pints. I reck'n I
knows sense when I sees it en dey ain' no sense in sich doin's as dat.
De 'spute warn't 'bout a half a chile, de 'spute was 'bout a whole chile
en de man dat think he kin settle a 'spute 'bout a whole chile wid a half
a chile doan' know enough to come in out'n de rain. Doan' talk to me
'bout Sollermun, Huck, I knows him by de back."
"But I tell you you don't get the point."
"Blame de point I reck'n I knows what I knows. En mine you, de REAL
pint is down furderit's down deeper. It lays in de way Sollermun was
raised. You take a man dat's got on'y one or two chillen is dat man
gwyne to be waseful o' chillen? No, he ain't he can't 'ford it. HE
know how to value 'em. But you take a man dat's got 'bout five million
chillen runnin' roun' de house, en it's diffunt. HE as soon chop a chile
in two as a cat. Dey's plenty mo'. A chile er two, mo' er less, warn't
no consekens to Sollermun, dad fatch him"
I never see such a nigger. If he got a notion in his head once, there
warn't no getting it out again. He was the most down on Solomon of any
nigger I ever see. So I went to talking about other kings, and let
Solomon slide. I told about Louis Sixteenth that got his head cut off in
France long time ago and about his little boy the dolphin, that would a
been a king, but they took and shut him up in jail, and some say he died
there.
"Po' little chap."
"But some says he got out and got away, and come to America."
"Dat's good But he'll be pooty lonesomedey ain' no kings here, is
dey, Huck?"
"No."
"Den he cain't git no situation. What he gwyne to do?"
"Well, I don't know. Some of them gets on the police, and some of them
learns people how to talk French."
"Why, Huck, doan' de French people talk de same way we does?"
"NO, Jim you couldn't understand a word they saidnot a single word."
"Well, now, I be dingbusted How do dat come?"
"I don't know but it's so. I got some of their jabber out of a book.
S'pose a man was to come to you and say Pollyvoofranzywhat would you
think?"
"I wouldn' think nuff'n I'd take en bust him over de headdat is, if he
warn't white. I wouldn't 'low no nigger to call me dat."
"Shucks, it ain't calling you anything. It's only saying, do you know
how to talk French?"
"Well, den, why couldn't he SAY it?"
"Why, he IS asaying it. That's a Frenchman's WAY of saying it."
"Well, it's a blame ridicklous way, en I doan' want to hear no mo' 'bout
it. Dey ain' no sense in it."
"Looky here, Jim does a cat talk like we do?"
"No, a cat don't."
"Well, does a cow?"
"No, a cow don't, nuther."
"Does a cat talk like a cow, or a cow talk like a cat?"
"No, dey don't."
"It's natural and right for 'em to talk different from each other, ain't
it?"
"Course."
"And ain't it natural and right for a cat and a cow to talk different
from US?"
"Why, mos' sholy it is."
"Well, then, why ain't it natural and right for a FRENCHMAN to talk
different from us? You answer me that."
"Is a cat a man, Huck?"
"No."
"Well, den, dey ain't no sense in a cat talkin' like a man. Is a cow a
man?er is a cow a cat?"
"No, she ain't either of them."
"Well, den, she ain't got no business to talk like either one er the
yuther of 'em. Is a Frenchman a man?"
"Yes."
"WELL, den Dad blame it, why doan' he TALK like a man? You answer me
DAT"
I see it warn't no use wasting wordsyou can't learn a nigger to argue.
So I quit.
CHAPTER XV.
WE judged that three nights more would fetch us to Cairo, at the bottom
of Illinois, where the Ohio River comes in, and that was what we was
after. We would sell the raft and get on a steamboat and go way up the
Ohio amongst the free States, and then be out of trouble.
Well, the second night a fog begun to come on, and we made for a towhead
to tie to, for it wouldn't do to try to run in a fog but when I paddled
ahead in the canoe, with the line to make fast, there warn't anything but
little saplings to tie to. I passed the line around one of them right on
the edge of the cut bank, but there was a stiff current, and the raft
come booming down so lively she tore it out by the roots and away she
went. I see the fog closing down, and it made me so sick and scared I
couldn't budge for most a half a minute it seemed to meand then there
warn't no raft in sight you couldn't see twenty yards. I jumped into
the canoe and run back to the stern, and grabbed the paddle and set her
back a stroke. But she didn't come. I was in such a hurry I hadn't
untied her. I got up and tried to untie her, but I was so excited my
hands shook so I couldn't hardly do anything with them.
As soon as I got started I took out after the raft, hot and heavy, right
down the towhead. That was all right as far as it went, but the towhead
warn't sixty yards long, and the minute I flew by the foot of it I shot
out into the solid white fog, and hadn't no more idea which way I was
going than a dead man.
Thinks I, it won't do to paddle first I know I'll run into the bank or a
towhead or something I got to set still and float, and yet it's mighty
fidgety business to have to hold your hands still at such a time. I
whooped and listened. Away down there somewheres I hears a small whoop,
and up comes my spirits. I went tearing after it, listening sharp to
hear it again. The next time it come I see I warn't heading for it, but
heading away to the right of it. And the next time I was heading away to
the left of itand not gaining on it much either, for I was flying
around, this way and that and t'other, but it was going straight ahead
all the time.
I did wish the fool would think to beat a tin pan, and beat it all the
time, but he never did, and it was the still places between the whoops
that was making the trouble for me. Well, I fought along, and directly I
hears the whoop BEHIND me. I was tangled good now. That was somebody
else's whoop, or else I was turned around.
I throwed the paddle down. I heard the whoop again it was behind me
yet, but in a different place it kept coming, and kept changing its
place, and I kept answering, till by and by it was in front of me again,
and I knowed the current had swung the canoe's head downstream, and I
was all right if that was Jim and not some other raftsman hollering. I
couldn't tell nothing about voices in a fog, for nothing don't look
natural nor sound natural in a fog.
The whooping went on, and in about a minute I come abooming down on a
cut bank with smoky ghosts of big trees on it, and the current throwed me
off to the left and shot by, amongst a lot of snags that fairly roared,
the currrent was tearing by them so swift.
In another second or two it was solid white and still again. I set
perfectly still then, listening to my heart thump, and I reckon I didn't
draw a breath while it thumped a hundred.
I just give up then. I knowed what the matter was. That cut bank was an
island, and Jim had gone down t'other side of it. It warn't no towhead
that you could float by in ten minutes. It had the big timber of a
regular island it might be five or six miles long and more than half a
mile wide.
I kept quiet, with my ears cocked, about fifteen minutes, I reckon. I
was floating along, of course, four or five miles an hour but you don't
ever think of that. No, you FEEL like you are laying dead still on the
water and if a little glimpse of a snag slips by you don't think to
yourself how fast YOU'RE going, but you catch your breath and think, my
how that snag's tearing along. If you think it ain't dismal and lonesome
out in a fog that way by yourself in the night, you try it onceyou'll
see.
Next, for about a half an hour, I whoops now and then at last I hears
the answer a long ways off, and tries to follow it, but I couldn't do it,
and directly I judged I'd got into a nest of towheads, for I had little
dim glimpses of them on both sides of mesometimes just a narrow channel
between, and some that I couldn't see I knowed was there because I'd hear
the wash of the current against the old dead brush and trash that hung
over the banks. Well, I warn't long loosing the whoops down amongst the
towheads and I only tried to chase them a little while, anyway, because
it was worse than chasing a Jacko'lantern. You never knowed a sound
dodge around so, and swap places so quick and so much.
I had to claw away from the bank pretty lively four or five times, to
keep from knocking the islands out of the river and so I judged the raft
must be butting into the bank every now and then, or else it would get
further ahead and clear out of hearingit was floating a little faster
than what I was.
Well, I seemed to be in the open river again by and by, but I couldn't
hear no sign of a whoop nowheres. I reckoned Jim had fetched up on a
snag, maybe, and it was all up with him. I was good and tired, so I laid
down in the canoe and said I wouldn't bother no more. I didn't want to
go to sleep, of course but I was so sleepy I couldn't help it so I
thought I would take jest one little catnap.
But I reckon it was more than a catnap, for when I waked up the stars
was shining bright, the fog was all gone, and I was spinning down a big
bend stern first. First I didn't know where I was I thought I was
dreaming and when things began to come back to me they seemed to come up
dim out of last week.
It was a monstrous big river here, with the tallest and the thickest kind
of timber on both banks just a solid wall, as well as I could see by the
stars. I looked away downstream, and seen a black speck on the water.
I took after it but when I got to it it warn't nothing but a couple of
sawlogs made fast together. Then I see another speck, and chased that
then another, and this time I was right. It was the raft.
When I got to it Jim was setting there with his head down between his
knees, asleep, with his right arm hanging over the steeringoar. The
other oar was smashed off, and the raft was littered up with leaves and
branches and dirt. So she'd had a rough time.
I made fast and laid down under Jim's nose on the raft, and began to gap,
and stretch my fists out against Jim, and says
"Hello, Jim, have I been asleep? Why didn't you stir me up?"
"Goodness gracious, is dat you, Huck? En you ain' deadyou ain'
drowndedyou's back agin? It's too good for true, honey, it's too
good for true. Lemme look at you chile, lemme feel o' you. No, you ain'
dead you's back agin, 'live en soun', jis de same ole Huckde same ole
Huck, thanks to goodness"
"What's the matter with you, Jim? You been adrinking?"
"Drinkin'? Has I ben adrinkin'? Has I had a chance to be adrinkin'?"
"Well, then, what makes you talk so wild?"
"How does I talk wild?"
"HOW? Why, hain't you been talking about my coming back, and all that
stuff, as if I'd been gone away?"
"HuckHuck Finn, you look me in de eye look me in de eye. HAIN'T you
ben gone away?"
"Gone away? Why, what in the nation do you mean? I hain't been gone
anywheres. Where would I go to?"
"Well, looky here, boss, dey's sumf'n wrong, dey is. Is I ME, or who IS
I? Is I heah, or whah IS I? Now dat's what I wants to know."
"Well, I think you're here, plain enough, but I think you're a
tangleheaded old fool, Jim."
"I is, is I? Well, you answer me dis Didn't you tote out de line in de
canoe fer to make fas' to de towhead?"
"No, I didn't. What towhead? I hain't see no towhead."
"You hain't seen no towhead? Looky here, didn't de line pull loose en de
raf' go ahummin' down de river, en leave you en de canoe behine in de
fog?"
"What fog?"
"Why, de fogde fog dat's been aroun' all night. En didn't you whoop,
en didn't I whoop, tell we got mix' up in de islands en one un us got
los' en t'other one was jis' as good as los', 'kase he didn' know whah he
wuz? En didn't I bust up agin a lot er dem islands en have a turrible
time en mos' git drownded? Now ain' dat so, bossain't it so? You
answer me dat."
"Well, this is too many for me, Jim. I hain't seen no fog, nor no
islands, nor no troubles, nor nothing. I been setting here talking with
you all night till you went to sleep about ten minutes ago, and I reckon
I done the same. You couldn't a got drunk in that time, so of course
you've been dreaming."
"Dad fetch it, how is I gwyne to dream all dat in ten minutes?"
"Well, hang it all, you did dream it, because there didn't any of it
happen."
"But, Huck, it's all jis' as plain to me as"
"It don't make no difference how plain it is there ain't nothing in it.
I know, because I've been here all the time."
Jim didn't say nothing for about five minutes, but set there studying
over it. Then he says
"Well, den, I reck'n I did dream it, Huck but dog my cats ef it ain't de
powerfullest dream I ever see. En I hain't ever had no dream b'fo' dat's
tired me like dis one."
"Oh, well, that's all right, because a dream does tire a body like
everything sometimes. But this one was a staving dream tell me all
about it, Jim."
So Jim went to work and told me the whole thing right through, just as it
happened, only he painted it up considerable. Then he said he must start
in and "'terpret" it, because it was sent for a warning. He said the
first towhead stood for a man that would try to do us some good, but the
current was another man that would get us away from him. The whoops was
warnings that would come to us every now and then, and if we didn't try
hard to make out to understand them they'd just take us into bad luck,
'stead of keeping us out of it. The lot of towheads was troubles we was
going to get into with quarrelsome people and all kinds of mean folks,
but if we minded our business and didn't talk back and aggravate them, we
would pull through and get out of the fog and into the big clear river,
which was the free States, and wouldn't have no more trouble.
It had clouded up pretty dark just after I got on to the raft, but it was
clearing up again now.
"Oh, well, that's all interpreted well enough as far as it goes, Jim," I
says "but what does THESE things stand for?"
It was the leaves and rubbish on the raft and the smashed oar. You could
see them firstrate now.
Jim looked at the trash, and then looked at me, and back at the trash
again. He had got the dream fixed so strong in his head that he couldn't
seem to shake it loose and get the facts back into its place again right
away. But when he did get the thing straightened around he looked at me
steady without ever smiling, and says
"What do dey stan' for? I'se gwyne to tell you. When I got all wore out
wid work, en wid de callin' for you, en went to sleep, my heart wuz mos'
broke bekase you wuz los', en I didn' k'yer no' mo' what become er me en
de raf'. En when I wake up en fine you back agin, all safe en soun', de
tears come, en I could a got down on my knees en kiss yo' foot, I's so
thankful. En all you wuz thinkin' 'bout wuz how you could make a fool uv
ole Jim wid a lie. Dat truck dah is TRASH en trash is what people is
dat puts dirt on de head er dey fren's en makes 'em ashamed."
Then he got up slow and walked to the wigwam, and went in there without
saying anything but that. But that was enough. It made me feel so mean
I could almost kissed HIS foot to get him to take it back.
It was fifteen minutes before I could work myself up to go and humble
myself to a nigger but I done it, and I warn't ever sorry for it
afterwards, neither. I didn't do him no more mean tricks, and I wouldn't
done that one if I'd a knowed it would make him feel that way.
CHAPTER XVI.
WE slept most all day, and started out at night, a little ways behind a
monstrous long raft that was as long going by as a procession. She had
four long sweeps at each end, so we judged she carried as many as thirty
men, likely. She had five big wigwams aboard, wide apart, and an open
camp fire in the middle, and a tall flagpole at each end. There was a
power of style about her. It AMOUNTED to something being a raftsman on
such a craft as that.
We went drifting down into a big bend, and the night clouded up and got
hot. The river was very wide, and was walled with solid timber on both
sides you couldn't see a break in it hardly ever, or a light. We talked
about Cairo, and wondered whether we would know it when we got to it. I
said likely we wouldn't, because I had heard say there warn't but about a
dozen houses there, and if they didn't happen to have them lit up, how
was we going to know we was passing a town? Jim said if the two big
rivers joined together there, that would show. But I said maybe we might
think we was passing the foot of an island and coming into the same old
river again. That disturbed Jimand me too. So the question was, what
to do? I said, paddle ashore the first time a light showed, and tell
them pap was behind, coming along with a tradingscow, and was a green
hand at the business, and wanted to know how far it was to Cairo. Jim
thought it was a good idea, so we took a smoke on it and waited.
There warn't nothing to do now but to look out sharp for the town, and
not pass it without seeing it. He said he'd be mighty sure to see it,
because he'd be a free man the minute he seen it, but if he missed it
he'd be in a slave country again and no more show for freedom. Every
little while he jumps up and says
"Dah she is?"
But it warn't. It was Jacko'lanterns, or lightning bugs so he set
down again, and went to watching, same as before. Jim said it made him
all over trembly and feverish to be so close to freedom. Well, I can
tell you it made me all over trembly and feverish, too, to hear him,
because I begun to get it through my head that he WAS most freeand who
was to blame for it? Why, ME. I couldn't get that out of my conscience,
no how nor no way. It got to troubling me so I couldn't rest I couldn't
stay still in one place. It hadn't ever come home to me before, what
this thing was that I was doing. But now it did and it stayed with me,
and scorched me more and more. I tried to make out to myself that I
warn't to blame, because I didn't run Jim off from his rightful owner
but it warn't no use, conscience up and says, every time, "But you knowed
he was running for his freedom, and you could a paddled ashore and told
somebody." That was soI couldn't get around that noway. That was
where it pinched. Conscience says to me, "What had poor Miss Watson done
to you that you could see her nigger go off right under your eyes and
never say one single word? What did that poor old woman do to you that
you could treat her so mean? Why, she tried to learn you your book, she
tried to learn you your manners, she tried to be good to you every way
she knowed how. THAT'S what she done."
I got to feeling so mean and so miserable I most wished I was dead. I
fidgeted up and down the raft, abusing myself to myself, and Jim was
fidgeting up and down past me. We neither of us could keep still. Every
time he danced around and says, "Dah's Cairo" it went through me like a
shot, and I thought if it WAS Cairo I reckoned I would die of
miserableness.
Jim talked out loud all the time while I was talking to myself. He was
saying how the first thing he would do when he got to a free State he
would go to saving up money and never spend a single cent, and when he
got enough he would buy his wife, which was owned on a farm close to
where Miss Watson lived and then they would both work to buy the two
children, and if their master wouldn't sell them, they'd get an
Ab'litionist to go and steal them.
It most froze me to hear such talk. He wouldn't ever dared to talk such
talk in his life before. Just see what a difference it made in him the
minute he judged he was about free. It was according to the old saying,
"Give a nigger an inch and he'll take an ell." Thinks I, this is what
comes of my not thinking. Here was this nigger, which I had as good as
helped to run away, coming right out flatfooted and saying he would
steal his childrenchildren that belonged to a man I didn't even know a
man that hadn't ever done me no harm.
I was sorry to hear Jim say that, it was such a lowering of him. My
conscience got to stirring me up hotter than ever, until at last I says
to it, "Let up on meit ain't too late yetI'll paddle ashore at the
first light and tell." I felt easy and happy and light as a feather
right off. All my troubles was gone. I went to looking out sharp for a
light, and sort of singing to myself. By and by one showed. Jim sings
out
"We's safe, Huck, we's safe Jump up and crack yo' heels Dat's de good
ole Cairo at las', I jis knows it"
I says
"I'll take the canoe and go and see, Jim. It mightn't be, you know."
He jumped and got the canoe ready, and put his old coat in the bottom for
me to set on, and give me the paddle and as I shoved off, he says
"Pooty soon I'll be ashout'n' for joy, en I'll say, it's all on accounts
o' Huck I's a free man, en I couldn't ever ben free ef it hadn' ben for
Huck Huck done it. Jim won't ever forgit you, Huck you's de bes' fren'
Jim's ever had en you's de ONLY fren' ole Jim's got now."
I was paddling off, all in a sweat to tell on him but when he says this,
it seemed to kind of take the tuck all out of me. I went along slow
then, and I warn't right down certain whether I was glad I started or
whether I warn't. When I was fifty yards off, Jim says
"Dah you goes, de ole true Huck de on'y white genlman dat ever kep' his
promise to ole Jim."
Well, I just felt sick. But I says, I GOT to do itI can't get OUT of
it. Right then along comes a skiff with two men in it with guns, and
they stopped and I stopped. One of them says
"What's that yonder?"
"A piece of a raft," I says.
"Do you belong on it?"
"Yes, sir."
"Any men on it?"
"Only one, sir."
"Well, there's five niggers run off tonight up yonder, above the head of
the bend. Is your man white or black?"
I didn't answer up prompt. I tried to, but the words wouldn't come. I
tried for a second or two to brace up and out with it, but I warn't man
enoughhadn't the spunk of a rabbit. I see I was weakening so I just
give up trying, and up and says
"He's white."
"I reckon we'll go and see for ourselves."
"I wish you would," says I, "because it's pap that's there, and maybe
you'd help me tow the raft ashore where the light is. He's sickand so
is mam and Mary Ann."
"Oh, the devil we're in a hurry, boy. But I s'pose we've got to. Come,
buckle to your paddle, and let's get along."
I buckled to my paddle and they laid to their oars. When we had made a
stroke or two, I says
"Pap'll be mighty much obleeged to you, I can tell you. Everybody goes
away when I want them to help me tow the raft ashore, and I can't do it
by myself."
"Well, that's infernal mean. Odd, too. Say, boy, what's the matter with
your father?"
"It's theathewell, it ain't anything much."
They stopped pulling. It warn't but a mighty little ways to the raft
now. One says
"Boy, that's a lie. What IS the matter with your pap? Answer up square
now, and it'll be the better for you."
"I will, sir, I will, honestbut don't leave us, please. It's thethe
Gentlemen, if you'll only pull ahead, and let me heave you the
headline, you won't have to come anear the raftplease do."
"Set her back, John, set her back" says one. They backed water. "Keep
away, boykeep to looard. Confound it, I just expect the wind has
blowed it to us. Your pap's got the smallpox, and you know it precious
well. Why didn't you come out and say so? Do you want to spread it all
over?"
"Well," says I, ablubbering, "I've told everybody before, and they just
went away and left us."
"Poor devil, there's something in that. We are right down sorry for you,
but wewell, hang it, we don't want the smallpox, you see. Look here,
I'll tell you what to do. Don't you try to land by yourself, or you'll
smash everything to pieces. You float along down about twenty miles, and
you'll come to a town on the lefthand side of the river. It will be
long after sunup then, and when you ask for help you tell them your
folks are all down with chills and fever. Don't be a fool again, and let
people guess what is the matter. Now we're trying to do you a kindness
so you just put twenty miles between us, that's a good boy. It wouldn't
do any good to land yonder where the light isit's only a woodyard.
Say, I reckon your father's poor, and I'm bound to say he's in pretty
hard luck. Here, I'll put a twentydollar gold piece on this board, and
you get it when it floats by. I feel mighty mean to leave you but my
kingdom it won't do to fool with smallpox, don't you see?"
"Hold on, Parker," says the other man, "here's a twenty to put on the
board for me. Goodbye, boy you do as Mr. Parker told you, and you'll
be all right."
"That's so, my boygoodbye, goodbye. If you see any runaway niggers
you get help and nab them, and you can make some money by it."
"Goodbye, sir," says I "I won't let no runaway niggers get by me if I
can help it."
They went off and I got aboard the raft, feeling bad and low, because I
knowed very well I had done wrong, and I see it warn't no use for me to
try to learn to do right a body that don't get STARTED right when he's
little ain't got no showwhen the pinch comes there ain't nothing to
back him up and keep him to his work, and so he gets beat. Then I
thought a minute, and says to myself, hold on s'pose you'd a done right
and give Jim up, would you felt better than what you do now? No, says I,
I'd feel badI'd feel just the same way I do now. Well, then, says I,
what's the use you learning to do right when it's troublesome to do right
and ain't no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same? I was
stuck. I couldn't answer that. So I reckoned I wouldn't bother no more
about it, but after this always do whichever come handiest at the time.
I went into the wigwam Jim warn't there. I looked all around he warn't
anywhere. I says
"Jim"
"Here I is, Huck. Is dey out o' sight yit? Don't talk loud."
He was in the river under the stern oar, with just his nose out. I told
him they were out of sight, so he come aboard. He says
"I was alistenin' to all de talk, en I slips into de river en was gwyne
to shove for sho' if dey come aboard. Den I was gwyne to swim to de raf'
agin when dey was gone. But lawsy, how you did fool 'em, Huck Dat WUZ
de smartes' dodge I tell you, chile, I'spec it save' ole Jimole Jim
ain't going to forgit you for dat, honey."
Then we talked about the money. It was a pretty good raisetwenty
dollars apiece. Jim said we could take deck passage on a steamboat now,
and the money would last us as far as we wanted to go in the free States.
He said twenty mile more warn't far for the raft to go, but he wished we
was already there.
Towards daybreak we tied up, and Jim was mighty particular about hiding
the raft good. Then he worked all day fixing things in bundles, and
getting all ready to quit rafting.
That night about ten we hove in sight of the lights of a town away down
in a lefthand bend.
I went off in the canoe to ask about it. Pretty soon I found a man out
in the river with a skiff, setting a trotline. I ranged up and says
"Mister, is that town Cairo?"
"Cairo? no. You must be a blame' fool."
"What town is it, mister?"
"If you want to know, go and find out. If you stay here botherin' around
me for about a half a minute longer you'll get something you won't want."
I paddled to the raft. Jim was awful disappointed, but I said never
mind, Cairo would be the next place, I reckoned.
We passed another town before daylight, and I was going out again but it
was high ground, so I didn't go. No high ground about Cairo, Jim said.
I had forgot it. We laid up for the day on a towhead tolerable close to
the lefthand bank. I begun to suspicion something. So did Jim. I
says
"Maybe we went by Cairo in the fog that night."
He says
"Doan' le's talk about it, Huck. Po' niggers can't have no luck. I
awluz 'spected dat rattlesnakeskin warn't done wid its work."
"I wish I'd never seen that snakeskin, JimI do wish I'd never laid
eyes on it."
"It ain't yo' fault, Huck you didn' know. Don't you blame yo'self 'bout
it."
When it was daylight, here was the clear Ohio water inshore, sure enough,
and outside was the old regular Muddy So it was all up with Cairo.
We talked it all over. It wouldn't do to take to the shore we couldn't
take the raft up the stream, of course. There warn't no way but to wait
for dark, and start back in the canoe and take the chances. So we slept
all day amongst the cottonwood thicket, so as to be fresh for the work,
and when we went back to the raft about dark the canoe was gone
We didn't say a word for a good while. There warn't anything to say. We
both knowed well enough it was some more work of the rattlesnakeskin so
what was the use to talk about it? It would only look like we was
finding fault, and that would be bound to fetch more bad luckand keep
on fetching it, too, till we knowed enough to keep still.
By and by we talked about what we better do, and found there warn't no
way but just to go along down with the raft till we got a chance to buy a
canoe to go back in. We warn't going to borrow it when there warn't
anybody around, the way pap would do, for that might set people after us.
So we shoved out after dark on the raft.
Anybody that don't believe yet that it's foolishness to handle a
snakeskin, after all that that snakeskin done for us, will believe
it now if they read on and see what more it done for us.
The place to buy canoes is off of rafts laying up at shore. But we
didn't see no rafts laying up so we went along during three hours and
more. Well, the night got gray and ruther thick, which is the next
meanest thing to fog. You can't tell the shape of the river, and you
can't see no distance. It got to be very late and still, and then along
comes a steamboat up the river. We lit the lantern, and judged she would
see it. Upstream boats didn't generly come close to us they go out and
follow the bars and hunt for easy water under the reefs but nights like
this they bull right up the channel against the whole river.
We could hear her pounding along, but we didn't see her good till she was
close. She aimed right for us. Often they do that and try to see how
close they can come without touching sometimes the wheel bites off a
sweep, and then the pilot sticks his head out and laughs, and thinks he's
mighty smart. Well, here she comes, and we said she was going to try and
shave us but she didn't seem to be sheering off a bit. She was a big
one, and she was coming in a hurry, too, looking like a black cloud with
rows of glowworms around it but all of a sudden she bulged out, big and
scary, with a long row of wideopen furnace doors shining like redhot
teeth, and her monstrous bows and guards hanging right over us. There
was a yell at us, and a jingling of bells to stop the engines, a powwow
of cussing, and whistling of steamand as Jim went overboard on one side
and I on the other, she come smashing straight through the raft.
I divedand I aimed to find the bottom, too, for a thirtyfoot wheel had
got to go over me, and I wanted it to have plenty of room. I could
always stay under water a minute this time I reckon I stayed under a
minute and a half. Then I bounced for the top in a hurry, for I was
nearly busting. I popped out to my armpits and blowed the water out of
my nose, and puffed a bit. Of course there was a booming current and of
course that boat started her engines again ten seconds after she stopped
them, for they never cared much for raftsmen so now she was churning
along up the river, out of sight in the thick weather, though I could
hear her.
I sung out for Jim about a dozen times, but I didn't get any answer so I
grabbed a plank that touched me while I was "treading water," and struck
out for shore, shoving it ahead of me. But I made out to see that the
drift of the current was towards the lefthand shore, which meant that I
was in a crossing so I changed off and went that way.
It was one of these long, slanting, twomile crossings so I was a good
long time in getting over. I made a safe landing, and clumb up the bank.
I couldn't see but a little ways, but I went poking along over rough
ground for a quarter of a mile or more, and then I run across a big
oldfashioned double loghouse before I noticed it. I was going to rush
by and get away, but a lot of dogs jumped out and went to howling and
barking at me, and I knowed better than to move another peg.
CHAPTER XVII.
IN about a minute somebody spoke out of a window without putting his head
out, and says
"Be done, boys Who's there?"
I says
"It's me."
"Who's me?"
"George Jackson, sir."
"What do you want?"
"I don't want nothing, sir. I only want to go along by, but the dogs
won't let me."
"What are you prowling around here this time of night forhey?"
"I warn't prowling around, sir, I fell overboard off of the steamboat."
"Oh, you did, did you? Strike a light there, somebody. What did you say
your name was?"
"George Jackson, sir. I'm only a boy."
"Look here, if you're telling the truth you needn't be afraidnobody'll
hurt you. But don't try to budge stand right where you are. Rouse out
Bob and Tom, some of you, and fetch the guns. George Jackson, is there
anybody with you?"
"No, sir, nobody."
I heard the people stirring around in the house now, and see a light.
The man sung out
"Snatch that light away, Betsy, you old foolain't you got any sense?
Put it on the floor behind the front door. Bob, if you and Tom are
ready, take your places."
"All ready."
"Now, George Jackson, do you know the Shepherdsons?"
"No, sir I never heard of them."
"Well, that may be so, and it mayn't. Now, all ready. Step forward,
George Jackson. And mind, don't you hurrycome mighty slow. If there's
anybody with you, let him keep backif he shows himself he'll be shot.
Come along now. Come slow push the door open yourselfjust enough to
squeeze in, d' you hear?"
I didn't hurry I couldn't if I'd a wanted to. I took one slow step at a
time and there warn't a sound, only I thought I could hear my heart. The
dogs were as still as the humans, but they followed a little behind me.
When I got to the three log doorsteps I heard them unlocking and
unbarring and unbolting. I put my hand on the door and pushed it a
little and a little more till somebody said, "There, that's enoughput
your head in." I done it, but I judged they would take it off.
The candle was on the floor, and there they all was, looking at me, and
me at them, for about a quarter of a minute Three big men with guns
pointed at me, which made me wince, I tell you the oldest, gray and
about sixty, the other two thirty or moreall of them fine and handsome
and the sweetest old grayheaded lady, and back of her two young women
which I couldn't see right well. The old gentleman says
"There I reckon it's all right. Come in."
As soon as I was in the old gentleman he locked the door and barred it
and bolted it, and told the young men to come in with their guns, and
they all went in a big parlor that had a new rag carpet on the floor, and
got together in a corner that was out of the range of the front windows
there warn't none on the side. They held the candle, and took a good
look at me, and all said, "Why, HE ain't a Shepherdsonno, there ain't
any Shepherdson about him." Then the old man said he hoped I wouldn't
mind being searched for arms, because he didn't mean no harm by itit
was only to make sure. So he didn't pry into my pockets, but only felt
outside with his hands, and said it was all right. He told me to make
myself easy and at home, and tell all about myself but the old lady
says
"Why, bless you, Saul, the poor thing's as wet as he can be and don't
you reckon it may be he's hungry?"
"True for you, RachelI forgot."
So the old lady says
"Betsy" this was a nigger woman, "you fly around and get him something
to eat as quick as you can, poor thing and one of you girls go and wake
up Buck and tell himoh, here he is himself. Buck, take this little
stranger and get the wet clothes off from him and dress him up in some of
yours that's dry."
Buck looked about as old as methirteen or fourteen or along there,
though he was a little bigger than me. He hadn't on anything but a
shirt, and he was very frowzyheaded. He came in gaping and digging one
fist into his eyes, and he was dragging a gun along with the other one.
He says
"Ain't they no Shepherdsons around?"
They said, no, 'twas a false alarm.
"Well," he says, "if they'd a ben some, I reckon I'd a got one."
They all laughed, and Bob says
"Why, Buck, they might have scalped us all, you've been so slow in
coming."
"Well, nobody come after me, and it ain't right I'm always kept down I
don't get no show."
"Never mind, Buck, my boy," says the old man, "you'll have show enough,
all in good time, don't you fret about that. Go 'long with you now, and
do as your mother told you."
When we got upstairs to his room he got me a coarse shirt and a
roundabout and pants of his, and I put them on. While I was at it he
asked me what my name was, but before I could tell him he started to tell
me about a bluejay and a young rabbit he had catched in the woods day
before yesterday, and he asked me where Moses was when the candle went
out. I said I didn't know I hadn't heard about it before, no way.
"Well, guess," he says.
"How'm I going to guess," says I, "when I never heard tell of it before?"
"But you can guess, can't you? It's just as easy."
"WHICH candle?" I says.
"Why, any candle," he says.
"I don't know where he was," says I "where was he?"
"Why, he was in the DARK That's where he was"
"Well, if you knowed where he was, what did you ask me for?"
"Why, blame it, it's a riddle, don't you see? Say, how long are you
going to stay here? You got to stay always. We can just have booming
timesthey don't have no school now. Do you own a dog? I've got a
dogand he'll go in the river and bring out chips that you throw in. Do
you like to comb up Sundays, and all that kind of foolishness? You bet I
don't, but ma she makes me. Confound these ole britches I reckon I'd
better put 'em on, but I'd ruther not, it's so warm. Are you all ready?
All right. Come along, old hoss."
Cold cornpone, cold cornbeef, butter and buttermilkthat is what they
had for me down there, and there ain't nothing better that ever I've come
across yet. Buck and his ma and all of them smoked cob pipes, except the
nigger woman, which was gone, and the two young women. They all smoked
and talked, and I eat and talked. The young women had quilts around
them, and their hair down their backs. They all asked me questions, and
I told them how pap and me and all the family was living on a little farm
down at the bottom of Arkansaw, and my sister Mary Ann run off and got
married and never was heard of no more, and Bill went to hunt them and he
warn't heard of no more, and Tom and Mort died, and then there warn't
nobody but just me and pap left, and he was just trimmed down to nothing,
on account of his troubles so when he died I took what there was left,
because the farm didn't belong to us, and started up the river, deck
passage, and fell overboard and that was how I come to be here. So they
said I could have a home there as long as I wanted it. Then it was most
daylight and everybody went to bed, and I went to bed with Buck, and when
I waked up in the morning, drat it all, I had forgot what my name was.
So I laid there about an hour trying to think, and when Buck waked up I
says
"Can you spell, Buck?"
"Yes," he says.
"I bet you can't spell my name," says I.
"I bet you what you dare I can," says he.
"All right," says I, "go ahead."
"George Jaxonthere now," he says.
"Well," says I, "you done it, but I didn't think you could. It ain't no
slouch of a name to spellright off without studying."
I set it down, private, because somebody might want ME to spell it next,
and so I wanted to be handy with it and rattle it off like I was used to
it.
It was a mighty nice family, and a mighty nice house, too. I hadn't seen
no house out in the country before that was so nice and had so much
style. It didn't have an iron latch on the front door, nor a wooden one
with a buckskin string, but a brass knob to turn, the same as houses in
town. There warn't no bed in the parlor, nor a sign of a bed but heaps
of parlors in towns has beds in them. There was a big fireplace that was
bricked on the bottom, and the bricks was kept clean and red by pouring
water on them and scrubbing them with another brick sometimes they wash
them over with red waterpaint that they call Spanishbrown, same as they
do in town. They had big brass dogirons that could hold up a sawlog.
There was a clock on the middle of the mantelpiece, with a picture of a
town painted on the bottom half of the glass front, and a round place in
the middle of it for the sun, and you could see the pendulum swinging
behind it. It was beautiful to hear that clock tick and sometimes when
one of these peddlers had been along and scoured her up and got her in
good shape, she would start in and strike a hundred and fifty before she
got tuckered out. They wouldn't took any money for her.
Well, there was a big outlandish parrot on each side of the clock, made
out of something like chalk, and painted up gaudy. By one of the parrots
was a cat made of crockery, and a crockery dog by the other and when you
pressed down on them they squeaked, but didn't open their mouths nor look
different nor interested. They squeaked through underneath. There was a
couple of big wildturkeywing fans spread out behind those things. On
the table in the middle of the room was a kind of a lovely crockery
basket that had apples and oranges and peaches and grapes piled up in it,
which was much redder and yellower and prettier than real ones is, but
they warn't real because you could see where pieces had got chipped off
and showed the white chalk, or whatever it was, underneath.
This table had a cover made out of beautiful oilcloth, with a red and
blue spreadeagle painted on it, and a painted border all around. It
come all the way from Philadelphia, they said. There was some books,
too, piled up perfectly exact, on each corner of the table. One was a
big family Bible full of pictures. One was Pilgrim's Progress, about a
man that left his family, it didn't say why. I read considerable in it
now and then. The statements was interesting, but tough. Another was
Friendship's Offering, full of beautiful stuff and poetry but I didn't
read the poetry. Another was Henry Clay's Speeches, and another was Dr.
Gunn's Family Medicine, which told you all about what to do if a body was
sick or dead. There was a hymn book, and a lot of other books. And
there was nice splitbottom chairs, and perfectly sound, toonot bagged
down in the middle and busted, like an old basket.
They had pictures hung on the wallsmainly Washingtons and Lafayettes,
and battles, and Highland Marys, and one called "Signing the
Declaration." There was some that they called crayons, which one of the
daughters which was dead made her own self when she was only fifteen
years old. They was different from any pictures I ever see before
blacker, mostly, than is common. One was a woman in a slim black dress,
belted small under the armpits, with bulges like a cabbage in the middle
of the sleeves, and a large black scoopshovel bonnet with a black veil,
and white slim ankles crossed about with black tape, and very wee black
slippers, like a chisel, and she was leaning pensive on a tombstone on
her right elbow, under a weeping willow, and her other hand hanging down
her side holding a white handkerchief and a reticule, and underneath the
picture it said "Shall I Never See Thee More Alas." Another one was a
young lady with her hair all combed up straight to the top of her head,
and knotted there in front of a comb like a chairback, and she was
crying into a handkerchief and had a dead bird laying on its back in her
other hand with its heels up, and underneath the picture it said "I Shall
Never Hear Thy Sweet Chirrup More Alas." There was one where a young
lady was at a window looking up at the moon, and tears running down her
cheeks and she had an open letter in one hand with black sealing wax
showing on one edge of it, and she was mashing a locket with a chain to
it against her mouth, and underneath the picture it said "And Art Thou
Gone Yes Thou Art Gone Alas." These was all nice pictures, I reckon, but
I didn't somehow seem to take to them, because if ever I was down a
little they always give me the fantods. Everybody was sorry she died,
because she had laid out a lot more of these pictures to do, and a body
could see by what she had done what they had lost. But I reckoned that
with her disposition she was having a better time in the graveyard. She
was at work on what they said was her greatest picture when she took
sick, and every day and every night it was her prayer to be allowed to
live till she got it done, but she never got the chance. It was a
picture of a young woman in a long white gown, standing on the rail of a
bridge all ready to jump off, with her hair all down her back, and
looking up to the moon, with the tears running down her face, and she had
two arms folded across her breast, and two arms stretched out in front,
and two more reaching up towards the moonand the idea was to see which
pair would look best, and then scratch out all the other arms but, as I
was saying, she died before she got her mind made up, and now they kept
this picture over the head of the bed in her room, and every time her
birthday come they hung flowers on it. Other times it was hid with a
little curtain. The young woman in the picture had a kind of a nice
sweet face, but there was so many arms it made her look too spidery,
seemed to me.
This young girl kept a scrapbook when she was alive, and used to paste
obituaries and accidents and cases of patient suffering in it out of the
Presbyterian Observer, and write poetry after them out of her own head.
It was very good poetry. This is what she wrote about a boy by the name
of Stephen Dowling Bots that fell down a well and was drownded
ODE TO STEPHEN DOWLING BOTS, DEC'D
And did young Stephen sicken, And did young Stephen die? And did the sad
hearts thicken, And did the mourners cry?
No such was not the fate of Young Stephen Dowling Bots Though sad
hearts round him thickened, 'Twas not from sickness' shots.
No whoopingcough did rack his frame, Nor measles drear with spots Not
these impaired the sacred name Of Stephen Dowling Bots.
Despised love struck not with woe That head of curly knots, Nor stomach
troubles laid him low, Young Stephen Dowling Bots.
O no. Then list with tearful eye, Whilst I his fate do tell. His soul
did from this cold world fly By falling down a well.
They got him out and emptied him Alas it was too late His spirit was
gone for to sport aloft In the realms of the good and great.
If Emmeline Grangerford could make poetry like that before she was
fourteen, there ain't no telling what she could a done by and by. Buck
said she could rattle off poetry like nothing. She didn't ever have to
stop to think. He said she would slap down a line, and if she couldn't
find anything to rhyme with it would just scratch it out and slap down
another one, and go ahead. She warn't particular she could write about
anything you choose to give her to write about just so it was sadful.
Every time a man died, or a woman died, or a child died, she would be on
hand with her "tribute" before he was cold. She called them tributes.
The neighbors said it was the doctor first, then Emmeline, then the
undertakerthe undertaker never got in ahead of Emmeline but once, and
then she hung fire on a rhyme for the dead person's name, which was
Whistler. She warn't ever the same after that she never complained, but
she kinder pined away and did not live long. Poor thing, many's the time
I made myself go up to the little room that used to be hers and get out
her poor old scrapbook and read in it when her pictures had been
aggravating me and I had soured on her a little. I liked all that
family, dead ones and all, and warn't going to let anything come between
us. Poor Emmeline made poetry about all the dead people when she was
alive, and it didn't seem right that there warn't nobody to make some
about her now she was gone so I tried to sweat out a verse or two
myself, but I couldn't seem to make it go somehow. They kept Emmeline's
room trim and nice, and all the things fixed in it just the way she liked
to have them when she was alive, and nobody ever slept there. The old
lady took care of the room herself, though there was plenty of niggers,
and she sewed there a good deal and read her Bible there mostly.
Well, as I was saying about the parlor, there was beautiful curtains on
the windows white, with pictures painted on them of castles with vines
all down the walls, and cattle coming down to drink. There was a little
old piano, too, that had tin pans in it, I reckon, and nothing was ever
so lovely as to hear the young ladies sing "The Last Link is Broken" and
play "The Battle of Prague" on it. The walls of all the rooms was
plastered, and most had carpets on the floors, and the whole house was
whitewashed on the outside.
It was a double house, and the big open place betwixt them was roofed and
floored, and sometimes the table was set there in the middle of the day,
and it was a cool, comfortable place. Nothing couldn't be better. And
warn't the cooking good, and just bushels of it too
CHAPTER XVIII.
COL. GRANGERFORD was a gentleman, you see. He was a gentleman all over
and so was his family. He was well born, as the saying is, and that's
worth as much in a man as it is in a horse, so the Widow Douglas said,
and nobody ever denied that she was of the first aristocracy in our town
and pap he always said it, too, though he warn't no more quality than a
mudcat himself. Col. Grangerford was very tall and very slim, and had a
darkishpaly complexion, not a sign of red in it anywheres he was clean
shaved every morning all over his thin face, and he had the thinnest kind
of lips, and the thinnest kind of nostrils, and a high nose, and heavy
eyebrows, and the blackest kind of eyes, sunk so deep back that they
seemed like they was looking out of caverns at you, as you may say. His
forehead was high, and his hair was black and straight and hung to his
shoulders. His hands was long and thin, and every day of his life he put
on a clean shirt and a full suit from head to foot made out of linen so
white it hurt your eyes to look at it and on Sundays he wore a blue
tailcoat with brass buttons on it. He carried a mahogany cane with a
silver head to it. There warn't no frivolishness about him, not a bit,
and he warn't ever loud. He was as kind as he could beyou could feel
that, you know, and so you had confidence. Sometimes he smiled, and it
was good to see but when he straightened himself up like a libertypole,
and the lightning begun to flicker out from under his eyebrows, you
wanted to climb a tree first, and find out what the matter was
afterwards. He didn't ever have to tell anybody to mind their manners
everybody was always goodmannered where he was. Everybody loved to have
him around, too he was sunshine most alwaysI mean he made it seem
like good weather. When he turned into a cloudbank it was awful dark for
half a minute, and that was enough there wouldn't nothing go wrong again
for a week.
When him and the old lady come down in the morning all the family got up
out of their chairs and give them goodday, and didn't set down again
till they had set down. Then Tom and Bob went to the sideboard where the
decanter was, and mixed a glass of bitters and handed it to him, and he
held it in his hand and waited till Tom's and Bob's was mixed, and then
they bowed and said, "Our duty to you, sir, and madam" and THEY bowed
the least bit in the world and said thank you, and so they drank, all
three, and Bob and Tom poured a spoonful of water on the sugar and the
mite of whisky or apple brandy in the bottom of their tumblers, and give
it to me and Buck, and we drank to the old people too.
Bob was the oldest and Tom nexttall, beautiful men with very broad
shoulders and brown faces, and long black hair and black eyes. They
dressed in white linen from head to foot, like the old gentleman, and
wore broad Panama hats.
Then there was Miss Charlotte she was twentyfive, and tall and proud
and grand, but as good as she could be when she warn't stirred up but
when she was she had a look that would make you wilt in your tracks, like
her father. She was beautiful.
So was her sister, Miss Sophia, but it was a different kind. She was
gentle and sweet like a dove, and she was only twenty.
Each person had their own nigger to wait on themBuck too. My nigger
had a monstrous easy time, because I warn't used to having anybody do
anything for me, but Buck's was on the jump most of the time.
This was all there was of the family now, but there used to be more
three sons they got killed and Emmeline that died.
The old gentleman owned a lot of farms and over a hundred niggers.
Sometimes a stack of people would come there, horseback, from ten or
fifteen mile around, and stay five or six days, and have such junketings
round about and on the river, and dances and picnics in the woods
daytimes, and balls at the house nights. These people was mostly
kinfolks of the family. The men brought their guns with them. It was a
handsome lot of quality, I tell you.
There was another clan of aristocracy around therefive or six families
mostly of the name of Shepherdson. They was as hightoned and well
born and rich and grand as the tribe of Grangerfords. The Shepherdsons
and Grangerfords used the same steamboat landing, which was about two
mile above our house so sometimes when I went up there with a lot of our
folks I used to see a lot of the Shepherdsons there on their fine horses.
One day Buck and me was away out in the woods hunting, and heard a horse
coming. We was crossing the road. Buck says
"Quick Jump for the woods"
We done it, and then peeped down the woods through the leaves. Pretty
soon a splendid young man come galloping down the road, setting his horse
easy and looking like a soldier. He had his gun across his pommel. I
had seen him before. It was young Harney Shepherdson. I heard Buck's
gun go off at my ear, and Harney's hat tumbled off from his head. He
grabbed his gun and rode straight to the place where we was hid. But we
didn't wait. We started through the woods on a run. The woods warn't
thick, so I looked over my shoulder to dodge the bullet, and twice I seen
Harney cover Buck with his gun and then he rode away the way he cometo
get his hat, I reckon, but I couldn't see. We never stopped running till
we got home. The old gentleman's eyes blazed a minute'twas pleasure,
mainly, I judgedthen his face sort of smoothed down, and he says,
kind of gentle
"I don't like that shooting from behind a bush. Why didn't you step into
the road, my boy?"
"The Shepherdsons don't, father. They always take advantage."
Miss Charlotte she held her head up like a queen while Buck was telling
his tale, and her nostrils spread and her eyes snapped. The two young
men looked dark, but never said nothing. Miss Sophia she turned pale,
but the color come back when she found the man warn't hurt.
Soon as I could get Buck down by the corncribs under the trees by
ourselves, I says
"Did you want to kill him, Buck?"
"Well, I bet I did."
"What did he do to you?"
"Him? He never done nothing to me."
"Well, then, what did you want to kill him for?"
"Why, nothingonly it's on account of the feud."
"What's a feud?"
"Why, where was you raised? Don't you know what a feud is?"
"Never heard of it beforetell me about it."
"Well," says Buck, "a feud is this way A man has a quarrel with another
man, and kills him then that other man's brother kills HIM then the
other brothers, on both sides, goes for one another then the COUSINS
chip inand by and by everybody's killed off, and there ain't no more
feud. But it's kind of slow, and takes a long time."
"Has this one been going on long, Buck?"
"Well, I should RECKON It started thirty year ago, or som'ers along
there. There was trouble 'bout something, and then a lawsuit to settle
it and the suit went agin one of the men, and so he up and shot the man
that won the suitwhich he would naturally do, of course. Anybody
would."
"What was the trouble about, Buck?land?"
"I reckon maybeI don't know."
"Well, who done the shooting? Was it a Grangerford or a Shepherdson?"
"Laws, how do I know? It was so long ago."
"Don't anybody know?"
"Oh, yes, pa knows, I reckon, and some of the other old people but they
don't know now what the row was about in the first place."
"Has there been many killed, Buck?"
"Yes right smart chance of funerals. But they don't always kill. Pa's
got a few buckshot in him but he don't mind it 'cuz he don't weigh much,
anyway. Bob's been carved up some with a bowie, and Tom's been hurt once
or twice."
"Has anybody been killed this year, Buck?"
"Yes we got one and they got one. 'Bout three months ago my cousin Bud,
fourteen year old, was riding through the woods on t'other side of the
river, and didn't have no weapon with him, which was blame' foolishness,
and in a lonesome place he hears a horse acoming behind him, and sees
old Baldy Shepherdson alinkin' after him with his gun in his hand and
his white hair aflying in the wind and 'stead of jumping off and taking
to the brush, Bud 'lowed he could outrun him so they had it, nip and
tuck, for five mile or more, the old man againing all the time so at
last Bud seen it warn't any use, so he stopped and faced around so as to
have the bullet holes in front, you know, and the old man he rode up and
shot him down. But he didn't git much chance to enjoy his luck, for
inside of a week our folks laid HIM out."
"I reckon that old man was a coward, Buck."
"I reckon he WARN'T a coward. Not by a blame' sight. There ain't a
coward amongst them Shepherdsonsnot a one. And there ain't no cowards
amongst the Grangerfords either. Why, that old man kep' up his end in a
fight one day for half an hour against three Grangerfords, and come out
winner. They was all ahorseback he lit off of his horse and got behind
a little woodpile, and kep' his horse before him to stop the bullets but
the Grangerfords stayed on their horses and capered around the old man,
and peppered away at him, and he peppered away at them. Him and his
horse both went home pretty leaky and crippled, but the Grangerfords had
to be FETCHED homeand one of 'em was dead, and another died the next
day. No, sir if a body's out hunting for cowards he don't want to fool
away any time amongst them Shepherdsons, becuz they don't breed any of
that KIND."
Next Sunday we all went to church, about three mile, everybody
ahorseback. The men took their guns along, so did Buck, and kept them
between their knees or stood them handy against the wall. The
Shepherdsons done the same. It was pretty ornery preachingall about
brotherly love, and suchlike tiresomeness but everybody said it was a
good sermon, and they all talked it over going home, and had such a
powerful lot to say about faith and good works and free grace and
preforeordestination, and I don't know what all, that it did seem to me
to be one of the roughest Sundays I had run across yet.
About an hour after dinner everybody was dozing around, some in their
chairs and some in their rooms, and it got to be pretty dull. Buck and a
dog was stretched out on the grass in the sun sound asleep. I went up to
our room, and judged I would take a nap myself. I found that sweet Miss
Sophia standing in her door, which was next to ours, and she took me in
her room and shut the door very soft, and asked me if I liked her, and I
said I did and she asked me if I would do something for her and not tell
anybody, and I said I would. Then she said she'd forgot her Testament,
and left it in the seat at church between two other books, and would I
slip out quiet and go there and fetch it to her, and not say nothing to
nobody. I said I would. So I slid out and slipped off up the road, and
there warn't anybody at the church, except maybe a hog or two, for there
warn't any lock on the door, and hogs likes a puncheon floor in
summertime because it's cool. If you notice, most folks don't go
to church only when they've got to but a hog is different.
Says I to myself, something's up it ain't natural for a girl to be in
such a sweat about a Testament. So I give it a shake, and out drops a
little piece of paper with "HALFPAST TWO" wrote on it with a pencil. I
ransacked it, but couldn't find anything else. I couldn't make anything
out of that, so I put the paper in the book again, and when I got home
and upstairs there was Miss Sophia in her door waiting for me. She
pulled me in and shut the door then she looked in the Testament till she
found the paper, and as soon as she read it she looked glad and before a
body could think she grabbed me and give me a squeeze, and said I was the
best boy in the world, and not to tell anybody. She was mighty red in
the face for a minute, and her eyes lighted up, and it made her powerful
pretty. I was a good deal astonished, but when I got my breath I asked
her what the paper was about, and she asked me if I had read it, and I
said no, and she asked me if I could read writing, and I told her "no,
only coarsehand," and then she said the paper warn't anything but a
bookmark to keep her place, and I might go and play now.
I went off down to the river, studying over this thing, and pretty soon I
noticed that my nigger was following along behind. When we was out of
sight of the house he looked back and around a second, and then comes
arunning, and says
"Mars Jawge, if you'll come down into de swamp I'll show you a whole
stack o' watermoccasins."
Thinks I, that's mighty curious he said that yesterday. He oughter know
a body don't love watermoccasins enough to go around hunting for them.
What is he up to, anyway? So I says
"All right trot ahead."
I followed a half a mile then he struck out over the swamp, and waded
ankle deep as much as another halfmile. We come to a little flat piece
of land which was dry and very thick with trees and bushes and vines, and
he says
"You shove right in dah jist a few steps, Mars Jawge dah's whah dey is.
I's seed 'm befo' I don't k'yer to see 'em no mo'."
Then he slopped right along and went away, and pretty soon the trees hid
him. I poked into the place aways and come to a little open patch as
big as a bedroom all hung around with vines, and found a man laying there
asleepand, by jings, it was my old Jim
I waked him up, and I reckoned it was going to be a grand surprise to him
to see me again, but it warn't. He nearly cried he was so glad, but he
warn't surprised. Said he swum along behind me that night, and heard me
yell every time, but dasn't answer, because he didn't want nobody to pick
HIM up and take him into slavery again. Says he
"I got hurt a little, en couldn't swim fas', so I wuz a considable ways
behine you towards de las' when you landed I reck'ned I could ketch up
wid you on de lan' 'dout havin' to shout at you, but when I see dat house
I begin to go slow. I 'uz off too fur to hear what dey say to youI wuz
'fraid o' de dogs but when it 'uz all quiet agin I knowed you's in de
house, so I struck out for de woods to wait for day. Early in de mawnin'
some er de niggers come along, gwyne to de fields, en dey tuk me en
showed me dis place, whah de dogs can't track me on accounts o' de water,
en dey brings me truck to eat every night, en tells me how you's agitt'n
along."
"Why didn't you tell my Jack to fetch me here sooner, Jim?"
"Well, 'twarn't no use to 'sturb you, Huck, tell we could do sumfnbut
we's all right now. I ben abuyin' pots en pans en vittles, as I got a
chanst, en apatchin' up de raf' nights when"
"WHAT raft, Jim?"
"Our ole raf'."
"You mean to say our old raft warn't smashed all to flinders?"
"No, she warn't. She was tore up a good dealone en' of her was but
dey warn't no great harm done, on'y our traps was mos' all los'. Ef we
hadn' dive' so deep en swum so fur under water, en de night hadn' ben so
dark, en we warn't so sk'yerd, en ben sich punkinheads, as de sayin' is,
we'd a seed de raf'. But it's jis' as well we didn't, 'kase now she's
all fixed up agin mos' as good as new, en we's got a new lot o' stuff, in
de place o' what 'uz los'."
"Why, how did you get hold of the raft again, Jimdid you catch her?"
"How I gwyne to ketch her en I out in de woods? No some er de niggers
foun' her ketched on a snag along heah in de ben', en dey hid her in a
crick 'mongst de willows, en dey wuz so much jawin' 'bout which un 'um
she b'long to de mos' dat I come to heah 'bout it pooty soon, so I ups en
settles de trouble by tellin' 'um she don't b'long to none uv um, but to
you en me en I ast 'm if dey gwyne to grab a young white genlman's
propaty, en git a hid'n for it? Den I gin 'm ten cents apiece, en dey
'uz mighty well satisfied, en wisht some mo' raf's 'ud come along en make
'm rich agin. Dey's mighty good to me, dese niggers is, en whatever I
wants 'm to do fur me I doan' have to ast 'm twice, honey. Dat Jack's a
good nigger, en pooty smart."
"Yes, he is. He ain't ever told me you was here told me to come, and
he'd show me a lot of watermoccasins. If anything happens HE ain't
mixed up in it. He can say he never seen us together, and it 'll be the
truth."
I don't want to talk much about the next day. I reckon I'll cut it
pretty short. I waked up about dawn, and was agoing to turn over and go
to sleep again when I noticed how still it wasdidn't seem to be anybody
stirring. That warn't usual. Next I noticed that Buck was up and gone.
Well, I gets up, awondering, and goes down stairsnobody around
everything as still as a mouse. Just the same outside. Thinks I, what
does it mean? Down by the woodpile I comes across my Jack, and says
"What's it all about?"
Says he
"Don't you know, Mars Jawge?"
"No," says I, "I don't."
"Well, den, Miss Sophia's run off 'deed she has. She run off in de
night some timenobody don't know jis' when run off to get married to
dat young Harney Shepherdson, you knowleastways, so dey 'spec. De
fambly foun' it out 'bout half an hour agomaybe a little mo'en' I
TELL you dey warn't no time los'. Sich another hurryin' up guns en
hosses YOU never see De women folks has gone for to stir up de
relations, en ole Mars Saul en de boys tuck dey guns en rode up de river
road for to try to ketch dat young man en kill him 'fo' he kin git acrost
de river wid Miss Sophia. I reck'n dey's gwyne to be mighty rough
times."
"Buck went off 'thout waking me up."
"Well, I reck'n he DID Dey warn't gwyne to mix you up in it. Mars Buck
he loaded up his gun en 'lowed he's gwyne to fetch home a Shepherdson or
bust. Well, dey'll be plenty un 'm dah, I reck'n, en you bet you he'll
fetch one ef he gits a chanst."
I took up the river road as hard as I could put. By and by I begin to
hear guns a good ways off. When I came in sight of the log store and the
woodpile where the steamboats lands I worked along under the trees and
brush till I got to a good place, and then I clumb up into the forks of a
cottonwood that was out of reach, and watched. There was a woodrank
four foot high a little ways in front of the tree, and first I was going
to hide behind that but maybe it was luckier I didn't.
There was four or five men cavorting around on their horses in the open
place before the log store, cussing and yelling, and trying to get at a
couple of young chaps that was behind the woodrank alongside of the
steamboat landing but they couldn't come it. Every time one of them
showed himself on the river side of the woodpile he got shot at. The two
boys was squatting back to back behind the pile, so they could watch both
ways.
By and by the men stopped cavorting around and yelling. They started
riding towards the store then up gets one of the boys, draws a steady
bead over the woodrank, and drops one of them out of his saddle. All
the men jumped off of their horses and grabbed the hurt one and started
to carry him to the store and that minute the two boys started on the
run. They got half way to the tree I was in before the men noticed.
Then the men see them, and jumped on their horses and took out after
them. They gained on the boys, but it didn't do no good, the boys had
too good a start they got to the woodpile that was in front of my tree,
and slipped in behind it, and so they had the bulge on the men again.
One of the boys was Buck, and the other was a slim young chap about
nineteen years old.
The men ripped around awhile, and then rode away. As soon as they was
out of sight I sung out to Buck and told him. He didn't know what to
make of my voice coming out of the tree at first. He was awful
surprised. He told me to watch out sharp and let him know when the men
come in sight again said they was up to some devilment or other
wouldn't be gone long. I wished I was out of that tree, but I dasn't
come down. Buck begun to cry and rip, and 'lowed that him and his cousin
Joe that was the other young chap would make up for this day yet. He
said his father and his two brothers was killed, and two or three of the
enemy. Said the Shepherdsons laid for them in ambush. Buck said his
father and brothers ought to waited for their relationsthe Shepherdsons
was too strong for them. I asked him what was become of young Harney and
Miss Sophia. He said they'd got across the river and was safe. I was
glad of that but the way Buck did take on because he didn't manage to
kill Harney that day he shot at himI hain't ever heard anything like
it.
All of a sudden, bang bang bang goes three or four gunsthe men had
slipped around through the woods and come in from behind without their
horses The boys jumped for the riverboth of them hurtand as they
swum down the current the men run along the bank shooting at them and
singing out, "Kill them, kill them" It made me so sick I most fell out
of the tree. I ain't agoing to tell ALL that happenedit would make me
sick again if I was to do that. I wished I hadn't ever come ashore that
night to see such things. I ain't ever going to get shut of themlots
of times I dream about them.
I stayed in the tree till it begun to get dark, afraid to come down.
Sometimes I heard guns away off in the woods and twice I seen little
gangs of men gallop past the log store with guns so I reckoned the
trouble was still agoing on. I was mighty downhearted so I made up my
mind I wouldn't ever go anear that house again, because I reckoned I was
to blame, somehow. I judged that that piece of paper meant that Miss
Sophia was to meet Harney somewheres at halfpast two and run off and I
judged I ought to told her father about that paper and the curious way
she acted, and then maybe he would a locked her up, and this awful mess
wouldn't ever happened.
When I got down out of the tree I crept along down the river bank a
piece, and found the two bodies laying in the edge of the water, and
tugged at them till I got them ashore then I covered up their faces, and
got away as quick as I could. I cried a little when I was covering up
Buck's face, for he was mighty good to me.
It was just dark now. I never went near the house, but struck through
the woods and made for the swamp. Jim warn't on his island, so I tramped
off in a hurry for the crick, and crowded through the willows, redhot to
jump aboard and get out of that awful country. The raft was gone My
souls, but I was scared I couldn't get my breath for most a minute.
Then I raised a yell. A voice not twentyfive foot from me says
"Good lan' is dat you, honey? Doan' make no noise."
It was Jim's voicenothing ever sounded so good before. I run along the
bank a piece and got aboard, and Jim he grabbed me and hugged me, he was
so glad to see me. He says
"Laws bless you, chile, I 'uz right down sho' you's dead agin. Jack's
been heah he say he reck'n you's ben shot, kase you didn' come home no
mo' so I's jes' dis minute a startin' de raf' down towards de mouf er de
crick, so's to be all ready for to shove out en leave soon as Jack comes
agin en tells me for certain you IS dead. Lawsy, I's mighty glad to git
you back again, honey."
I says
"All rightthat's mighty good they won't find me, and they'll think
I've been killed, and floated down the riverthere's something up there
that 'll help them think soso don't you lose no time, Jim, but just
shove off for the big water as fast as ever you can."
I never felt easy till the raft was two mile below there and out in the
middle of the Mississippi. Then we hung up our signal lantern, and
judged that we was free and safe once more. I hadn't had a bite to eat
since yesterday, so Jim he got out some corndodgers and buttermilk, and
pork and cabbage and greensthere ain't nothing in the world so good
when it's cooked rightand whilst I eat my supper we talked and had a
good time. I was powerful glad to get away from the feuds, and so was
Jim to get away from the swamp. We said there warn't no home like a
raft, after all. Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a
raft don't. You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft.
CHAPTER XIX.
TWO or three days and nights went by I reckon I might say they swum by,
they slid along so quiet and smooth and lovely. Here is the way we put
in the time. It was a monstrous big river down theresometimes a mile
and a half wide we run nights, and laid up and hid daytimes soon as
night was most gone we stopped navigating and tied upnearly always in
the dead water under a towhead and then cut young cottonwoods and
willows, and hid the raft with them. Then we set out the lines. Next we
slid into the river and had a swim, so as to freshen up and cool off
then we set down on the sandy bottom where the water was about knee deep,
and watched the daylight come. Not a sound anywheresperfectly still
just like the whole world was asleep, only sometimes the bullfrogs
acluttering, maybe. The first thing to see, looking away over the water,
was a kind of dull linethat was the woods on t'other side you couldn't
make nothing else out then a pale place in the sky then more paleness
spreading around then the river softened up away off, and warn't black
any more, but gray you could see little dark spots drifting along ever
so far awaytrading scows, and such things and long black streaks
rafts sometimes you could hear a sweep screaking or jumbled up voices,
it was so still, and sounds come so far and by and by you could see a
streak on the water which you know by the look of the streak that there's
a snag there in a swift current which breaks on it and makes that streak
look that way and you see the mist curl up off of the water, and the
east reddens up, and the river, and you make out a logcabin in the edge
of the woods, away on the bank on t'other side of the river, being a
woodyard, likely, and piled by them cheats so you can throw a dog through
it anywheres then the nice breeze springs up, and comes fanning you from
over there, so cool and fresh and sweet to smell on account of the woods
and the flowers but sometimes not that way, because they've left dead
fish laying around, gars and such, and they do get pretty rank and next
you've got the full day, and everything smiling in the sun, and the
songbirds just going it
A little smoke couldn't be noticed now, so we would take some fish off of
the lines and cook up a hot breakfast. And afterwards we would watch the
lonesomeness of the river, and kind of lazy along, and by and by lazy off
to sleep. Wake up by and by, and look to see what done it, and maybe see
a steamboat coughing along upstream, so far off towards the other side
you couldn't tell nothing about her only whether she was a sternwheel or
sidewheel then for about an hour there wouldn't be nothing to hear nor
nothing to seejust solid lonesomeness. Next you'd see a raft sliding
by, away off yonder, and maybe a galoot on it chopping, because they're
most always doing it on a raft you'd see the axe flash and come down
you don't hear nothing you see that axe go up again, and by the time
it's above the man's head then you hear the K'CHUNKit had took all
that time to come over the water. So we would put in the day, lazying
around, listening to the stillness. Once there was a thick fog, and the
rafts and things that went by was beating tin pans so the steamboats
wouldn't run over them. A scow or a raft went by so close we could hear
them talking and cussing and laughingheard them plain but we couldn't
see no sign of them it made you feel crawly it was like spirits
carrying on that way in the air. Jim said he believed it was spirits
but I says
"No spirits wouldn't say, 'Dern the dern fog.'"
Soon as it was night out we shoved when we got her out to about the
middle we let her alone, and let her float wherever the current wanted
her to then we lit the pipes, and dangled our legs in the water, and
talked about all kinds of thingswe was always naked, day and night,
whenever the mosquitoes would let usthe new clothes Buck's folks made
for me was too good to be comfortable, and besides I didn't go much on
clothes, nohow.
Sometimes we'd have that whole river all to ourselves for the longest
time. Yonder was the banks and the islands, across the water and maybe a
sparkwhich was a candle in a cabin window and sometimes on the water
you could see a spark or twoon a raft or a scow, you know and maybe
you could hear a fiddle or a song coming over from one of them crafts.
It's lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky up there, all speckled
with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and
discuss about whether they was made or only just happened. Jim he
allowed they was made, but I allowed they happened I judged it would
have took too long to MAKE so many. Jim said the moon could a LAID them
well, that looked kind of reasonable, so I didn't say nothing against it,
because I've seen a frog lay most as many, so of course it could be done.
We used to watch the stars that fell, too, and see them streak down. Jim
allowed they'd got spoiled and was hove out of the nest.
Once or twice of a night we would see a steamboat slipping along in the
dark, and now and then she would belch a whole world of sparks up out of
her chimbleys, and they would rain down in the river and look awful
pretty then she would turn a corner and her lights would wink out and
her powwow shut off and leave the river still again and by and by her
waves would get to us, a long time after she was gone, and joggle the
raft a bit, and after that you wouldn't hear nothing for you couldn't
tell how long, except maybe frogs or something.
After midnight the people on shore went to bed, and then for two or three
hours the shores was blackno more sparks in the cabin windows. These
sparks was our clockthe first one that showed again meant morning was
coming, so we hunted a place to hide and tie up right away.
One morning about daybreak I found a canoe and crossed over a chute to
the main shoreit was only two hundred yardsand paddled about a mile
up a crick amongst the cypress woods, to see if I couldn't get some
berries. Just as I was passing a place where a kind of a cowpath crossed
the crick, here comes a couple of men tearing up the path as tight as
they could foot it. I thought I was a goner, for whenever anybody was
after anybody I judged it was MEor maybe Jim. I was about to dig out
from there in a hurry, but they was pretty close to me then, and sung out
and begged me to save their livessaid they hadn't been doing nothing,
and was being chased for itsaid there was men and dogs acoming. They
wanted to jump right in, but I says
"Don't you do it. I don't hear the dogs and horses yet you've got time
to crowd through the brush and get up the crick a little ways then you
take to the water and wade down to me and get inthat'll throw the dogs
off the scent."
They done it, and soon as they was aboard I lit out for our towhead, and
in about five or ten minutes we heard the dogs and the men away off,
shouting. We heard them come along towards the crick, but couldn't see
them they seemed to stop and fool around a while then, as we got
further and further away all the time, we couldn't hardly hear them at
all by the time we had left a mile of woods behind us and struck the
river, everything was quiet, and we paddled over to the towhead and hid
in the cottonwoods and was safe.
One of these fellows was about seventy or upwards, and had a bald head
and very gray whiskers. He had an old batteredup slouch hat on, and a
greasy blue woollen shirt, and ragged old blue jeans britches stuffed
into his boottops, and homeknit gallusesno, he only had one. He had
an old longtailed blue jeans coat with slick brass buttons flung over
his arm, and both of them had big, fat, rattylooking carpetbags.
The other fellow was about thirty, and dressed about as ornery. After
breakfast we all laid off and talked, and the first thing that come out
was that these chaps didn't know one another.
"What got you into trouble?" says the baldhead to t'other chap.
"Well, I'd been selling an article to take the tartar off the teethand
it does take it off, too, and generly the enamel along with itbut I
stayed about one night longer than I ought to, and was just in the act of
sliding out when I ran across you on the trail this side of town, and you
told me they were coming, and begged me to help you to get off. So I
told you I was expecting trouble myself, and would scatter out WITH you.
That's the whole yarnwhat's yourn?
"Well, I'd ben arunning' a little temperance revival thar 'bout a week,
and was the pet of the women folks, big and little, for I was makin' it
mighty warm for the rummies, I TELL you, and takin' as much as five or
six dollars a nightten cents a head, children and niggers freeand
business agrowin' all the time, when somehow or another a little report
got around last night that I had a way of puttin' in my time with a
private jug on the sly. A nigger rousted me out this mornin', and told
me the people was getherin' on the quiet with their dogs and horses, and
they'd be along pretty soon and give me 'bout half an hour's start, and
then run me down if they could and if they got me they'd tar and feather
me and ride me on a rail, sure. I didn't wait for no breakfastI warn't
hungry."
"Old man," said the young one, "I reckon we might doubleteam it
together what do you think?"
"I ain't undisposed. What's your linemainly?"
"Jour printer by trade do a little in patent medicines theateractor
tragedy, you know take a turn to mesmerism and phrenology when there's a
chance teach singinggeography school for a change sling a lecture
sometimesoh, I do lots of thingsmost anything that comes handy, so it
ain't work. What's your lay?"
"I've done considerble in the doctoring way in my time. Layin' on o'
hands is my best holtfor cancer and paralysis, and sich things and I
k'n tell a fortune pretty good when I've got somebody along to find out
the facts for me. Preachin's my line, too, and workin' campmeetin's,
and missionaryin' around."
Nobody never said anything for a while then the young man hove a sigh
and says
"Alas"
"What 're you alassin' about?" says the baldhead.
"To think I should have lived to be leading such a life, and be degraded
down into such company." And he begun to wipe the corner of his eye with
a rag.
"Dern your skin, ain't the company good enough for you?" says the
baldhead, pretty pert and uppish.
"Yes, it IS good enough for me it's as good as I deserve for who
fetched me so low when I was so high? I did myself. I don't blame YOU,
gentlemenfar from it I don't blame anybody. I deserve it all. Let
the cold world do its worst one thing I knowthere's a grave somewhere
for me. The world may go on just as it's always done, and take everything
from meloved ones, property, everything but it can't take that.
Some day I'll lie down in it and forget it all, and my poor broken heart
will be at rest." He went on awiping.
"Drot your pore broken heart," says the baldhead "what are you heaving
your pore broken heart at US f'r? WE hain't done nothing."
"No, I know you haven't. I ain't blaming you, gentlemen. I brought
myself downyes, I did it myself. It's right I should sufferperfectly
rightI don't make any moan."
"Brought you down from whar? Whar was you brought down from?"
"Ah, you would not believe me the world never believeslet it pass
'tis no matter. The secret of my birth"
"The secret of your birth Do you mean to say"
"Gentlemen," says the young man, very solemn, "I will reveal it to you,
for I feel I may have confidence in you. By rights I am a duke"
Jim's eyes bugged out when he heard that and I reckon mine did, too.
Then the baldhead says "No you can't mean it?"
"Yes. My greatgrandfather, eldest son of the Duke of Bridgewater, fled
to this country about the end of the last century, to breathe the pure
air of freedom married here, and died, leaving a son, his own father
dying about the same time. The second son of the late duke seized the
titles and estatesthe infant real duke was ignored. I am the lineal
descendant of that infantI am the rightful Duke of Bridgewater and
here am I, forlorn, torn from my high estate, hunted of men, despised by
the cold world, ragged, worn, heartbroken, and degraded to the
companionship of felons on a raft"
Jim pitied him ever so much, and so did I. We tried to comfort him, but
he said it warn't much use, he couldn't be much comforted said if we was
a mind to acknowledge him, that would do him more good than most anything
else so we said we would, if he would tell us how. He said we ought to
bow when we spoke to him, and say "Your Grace," or "My Lord," or "Your
Lordship"and he wouldn't mind it if we called him plain
"Bridgewater," which, he said, was a title anyway, and not a name and
one of us ought to wait on him at dinner, and do any little thing for him
he wanted done.
Well, that was all easy, so we done it. All through dinner Jim stood
around and waited on him, and says, "Will yo' Grace have some o' dis or
some o' dat?" and so on, and a body could see it was mighty pleasing to
him.
But the old man got pretty silent by and bydidn't have much to say, and
didn't look pretty comfortable over all that petting that was going on
around that duke. He seemed to have something on his mind. So, along in
the afternoon, he says
"Looky here, Bilgewater," he says, "I'm nation sorry for you, but you
ain't the only person that's had troubles like that."
"No?"
"No you ain't. You ain't the only person that's ben snaked down
wrongfully out'n a high place."
"Alas"
"No, you ain't the only person that's had a secret of his birth." And,
by jings, HE begins to cry.
"Hold What do you mean?"
"Bilgewater, kin I trust you?" says the old man, still sort of sobbing.
"To the bitter death" He took the old man by the hand and squeezed it,
and says, "That secret of your being speak"
"Bilgewater, I am the late Dauphin"
You bet you, Jim and me stared this time. Then the duke says
"You are what?"
"Yes, my friend, it is too trueyour eyes is lookin' at this very moment
on the pore disappeared Dauphin, Looy the Seventeen, son of Looy the
Sixteen and Marry Antonette."
"You At your age No You mean you're the late Charlemagne you must
be six or seven hundred years old, at the very least."
"Trouble has done it, Bilgewater, trouble has done it trouble has brung
these gray hairs and this premature balditude. Yes, gentlemen, you see
before you, in blue jeans and misery, the wanderin', exiled, trampledon,
and sufferin' rightful King of France."
Well, he cried and took on so that me and Jim didn't know hardly what to
do, we was so sorryand so glad and proud we'd got him with us, too. So
we set in, like we done before with the duke, and tried to comfort HIM.
But he said it warn't no use, nothing but to be dead and done with it all
could do him any good though he said it often made him feel easier and
better for a while if people treated him according to his rights, and got
down on one knee to speak to him, and always called him "Your Majesty,"
and waited on him first at meals, and didn't set down in his presence
till he asked them. So Jim and me set to majestying him, and doing this
and that and t'other for him, and standing up till he told us we might
set down. This done him heaps of good, and so he got cheerful and
comfortable. But the duke kind of soured on him, and didn't look a bit
satisfied with the way things was going still, the king acted real
friendly towards him, and said the duke's greatgrandfather and all the
other Dukes of Bilgewater was a good deal thought of by HIS father, and
was allowed to come to the palace considerable but the duke stayed huffy
a good while, till by and by the king says
"Like as not we got to be together a blamed long time on this hyer raft,
Bilgewater, and so what's the use o' your bein' sour? It 'll only make
things oncomfortable. It ain't my fault I warn't born a duke, it ain't
your fault you warn't born a kingso what's the use to worry? Make the
best o' things the way you find 'em, says Ithat's my motto. This ain't
no bad thing that we've struck hereplenty grub and an easy lifecome,
give us your hand, duke, and le's all be friends."
The duke done it, and Jim and me was pretty glad to see it. It took away
all the uncomfortableness and we felt mighty good over it, because it
would a been a miserable business to have any unfriendliness on the raft
for what you want, above all things, on a raft, is for everybody to be
satisfied, and feel right and kind towards the others.
It didn't take me long to make up my mind that these liars warn't no
kings nor dukes at all, but just lowdown humbugs and frauds. But I
never said nothing, never let on kept it to myself it's the best way
then you don't have no quarrels, and don't get into no trouble. If they
wanted us to call them kings and dukes, I hadn't no objections, 'long as
it would keep peace in the family and it warn't no use to tell Jim, so I
didn't tell him. If I never learnt nothing else out of pap, I learnt
that the best way to get along with his kind of people is to let them
have their own way.
CHAPTER XX.
THEY asked us considerable many questions wanted to know what we covered
up the raft that way for, and laid by in the daytime instead of running
was Jim a runaway nigger? Says I
"Goodness sakes would a runaway nigger run SOUTH?"
No, they allowed he wouldn't. I had to account for things some way, so I
says
"My folks was living in Pike County, in Missouri, where I was born, and
they all died off but me and pa and my brother Ike. Pa, he 'lowed he'd
break up and go down and live with Uncle Ben, who's got a little
onehorse place on the river, fortyfour mile below Orleans. Pa was
pretty poor, and had some debts so when he'd squared up there warn't
nothing left but sixteen dollars and our nigger, Jim. That warn't enough
to take us fourteen hundred mile, deck passage nor no other way. Well,
when the river rose pa had a streak of luck one day he ketched this
piece of a raft so we reckoned we'd go down to Orleans on it. Pa's luck
didn't hold out a steamboat run over the forrard corner of the raft one
night, and we all went overboard and dove under the wheel Jim and me
come up all right, but pa was drunk, and Ike was only four years old, so
they never come up no more. Well, for the next day or two we had
considerable trouble, because people was always coming out in skiffs and
trying to take Jim away from me, saying they believed he was a runaway
nigger. We don't run daytimes no more now nights they don't bother us."
The duke says
"Leave me alone to cipher out a way so we can run in the daytime if we
want to. I'll think the thing overI'll invent a plan that'll fix it.
We'll let it alone for today, because of course we don't want to go by
that town yonder in daylightit mightn't be healthy."
Towards night it begun to darken up and look like rain the heat
lightning was squirting around low down in the sky, and the leaves was
beginning to shiverit was going to be pretty ugly, it was easy to see
that. So the duke and the king went to overhauling our wigwam, to see
what the beds was like. My bed was a straw tick better than Jim's, which
was a cornshuck tick there's always cobs around about in a shuck tick,
and they poke into you and hurt and when you roll over the dry shucks
sound like you was rolling over in a pile of dead leaves it makes such a
rustling that you wake up. Well, the duke allowed he would take my bed
but the king allowed he wouldn't. He says
"I should a reckoned the difference in rank would a sejested to you that
a cornshuck bed warn't just fitten for me to sleep on. Your Grace 'll
take the shuck bed yourself."
Jim and me was in a sweat again for a minute, being afraid there was
going to be some more trouble amongst them so we was pretty glad when
the duke says
"'Tis my fate to be always ground into the mire under the iron heel of
oppression. Misfortune has broken my once haughty spirit I yield, I
submit 'tis my fate. I am alone in the worldlet me suffer can bear
it."
We got away as soon as it was good and dark. The king told us to stand
well out towards the middle of the river, and not show a light till we
got a long ways below the town. We come in sight of the little bunch of
lights by and bythat was the town, you knowand slid by, about a half
a mile out, all right. When we was threequarters of a mile below we
hoisted up our signal lantern and about ten o'clock it come on to rain
and blow and thunder and lighten like everything so the king told us to
both stay on watch till the weather got better then him and the duke
crawled into the wigwam and turned in for the night. It was my watch
below till twelve, but I wouldn't a turned in anyway if I'd had a bed,
because a body don't see such a storm as that every day in the week, not
by a long sight. My souls, how the wind did scream along And every
second or two there'd come a glare that lit up the whitecaps for a half
a mile around, and you'd see the islands looking dusty through the rain,
and the trees thrashing around in the wind then comes a HWHACKbum
bum bumbleumbleumbumbumbumbumand the thunder would go rumbling
and grumbling away, and quitand then RIP comes another flash and
another sockdolager. The waves most washed me off the raft sometimes,
but I hadn't any clothes on, and didn't mind. We didn't have no trouble
about snags the lightning was glaring and flittering around so constant
that we could see them plenty soon enough to throw her head this way or
that and miss them.
I had the middle watch, you know, but I was pretty sleepy by that time,
so Jim he said he would stand the first half of it for me he was always
mighty good that way, Jim was. I crawled into the wigwam, but the king
and the duke had their legs sprawled around so there warn't no show for
me so I laid outsideI didn't mind the rain, because it was warm, and
the waves warn't running so high now. About two they come up again,
though, and Jim was going to call me but he changed his mind, because he
reckoned they warn't high enough yet to do any harm but he was mistaken
about that, for pretty soon all of a sudden along comes a regular ripper
and washed me overboard. It most killed Jim alaughing. He was the
easiest nigger to laugh that ever was, anyway.
I took the watch, and Jim he laid down and snored away and by and by the
storm let up for good and all and the first cabinlight that showed I
rousted him out, and we slid the raft into hiding quarters for the day.
The king got out an old ratty deck of cards after breakfast, and him and
the duke played sevenup a while, five cents a game. Then they got tired
of it, and allowed they would "lay out a campaign," as they called it.
The duke went down into his carpetbag, and fetched up a lot of little
printed bills and read them out loud. One bill said, "The celebrated Dr.
Armand de Montalban, of Paris," would "lecture on the Science of
Phrenology" at such and such a place, on the blank day of blank, at ten
cents admission, and "furnish charts of character at twentyfive cents
apiece." The duke said that was HIM. In another bill he was the
"worldrenowned Shakespearian tragedian, Garrick the Younger, of Drury
Lane, London." In other bills he had a lot of other names and done other
wonderful things, like finding water and gold with a "diviningrod,"
"dissipating witch spells," and so on. By and by he says
"But the histrionic muse is the darling. Have you ever trod the boards,
Royalty?"
"No," says the king.
"You shall, then, before you're three days older, Fallen Grandeur," says
the duke. "The first good town we come to we'll hire a hall and do the
sword fight in Richard III. and the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet.
How does that strike you?"
"I'm in, up to the hub, for anything that will pay, Bilgewater but, you
see, I don't know nothing about playactin', and hain't ever seen much of
it. I was too small when pap used to have 'em at the palace. Do you
reckon you can learn me?"
"Easy"
"All right. I'm jist afreezn' for something fresh, anyway. Le's
commence right away."
So the duke he told him all about who Romeo was and who Juliet was, and
said he was used to being Romeo, so the king could be Juliet.
"But if Juliet's such a young gal, duke, my peeled head and my white
whiskers is goin' to look oncommon odd on her, maybe."
"No, don't you worry these country jakes won't ever think of that.
Besides, you know, you'll be in costume, and that makes all the
difference in the world Juliet's in a balcony, enjoying the moonlight
before she goes to bed, and she's got on her nightgown and her ruffled
nightcap. Here are the costumes for the parts."
He got out two or three curtaincalico suits, which he said was meedyevil
armor for Richard III. and t'other chap, and a long white cotton
nightshirt and a ruffled nightcap to match. The king was satisfied so
the duke got out his book and read the parts over in the most splendid
spreadeagle way, prancing around and acting at the same time, to show
how it had got to be done then he give the book to the king and told him
to get his part by heart.
There was a little onehorse town about three mile down the bend, and
after dinner the duke said he had ciphered out his idea about how to run
in daylight without it being dangersome for Jim so he allowed he would
go down to the town and fix that thing. The king allowed he would go,
too, and see if he couldn't strike something. We was out of coffee, so
Jim said I better go along with them in the canoe and get some.
When we got there there warn't nobody stirring streets empty, and
perfectly dead and still, like Sunday. We found a sick nigger sunning
himself in a back yard, and he said everybody that warn't too young or
too sick or too old was gone to campmeeting, about two mile back in the
woods. The king got the directions, and allowed he'd go and work that
campmeeting for all it was worth, and I might go, too.
The duke said what he was after was a printingoffice. We found it a
little bit of a concern, up over a carpenter shopcarpenters and
printers all gone to the meeting, and no doors locked. It was a dirty,
litteredup place, and had ink marks, and handbills with pictures of
horses and runaway niggers on them, all over the walls. The duke shed
his coat and said he was all right now. So me and the king lit out for
the campmeeting.
We got there in about a half an hour fairly dripping, for it was a most
awful hot day. There was as much as a thousand people there from twenty
mile around. The woods was full of teams and wagons, hitched
everywheres, feeding out of the wagontroughs and stomping to keep off
the flies. There was sheds made out of poles and roofed over with
branches, where they had lemonade and gingerbread to sell, and piles of
watermelons and green corn and suchlike truck.
The preaching was going on under the same kinds of sheds, only they was
bigger and held crowds of people. The benches was made out of outside
slabs of logs, with holes bored in the round side to drive sticks into
for legs. They didn't have no backs. The preachers had high platforms to
stand on at one end of the sheds. The women had on sunbonnets and some
had linseywoolsey frocks, some gingham ones, and a few of the young ones
had on calico. Some of the young men was barefooted, and some of the
children didn't have on any clothes but just a towlinen shirt. Some of
the old women was knitting, and some of the young folks was courting on
the sly.
The first shed we come to the preacher was lining out a hymn. He lined
out two lines, everybody sung it, and it was kind of grand to hear it,
there was so many of them and they done it in such a rousing way then he
lined out two more for them to singand so on. The people woke up more
and more, and sung louder and louder and towards the end some begun to
groan, and some begun to shout. Then the preacher begun to preach, and
begun in earnest, too and went weaving first to one side of the platform
and then the other, and then aleaning down over the front of it, with
his arms and his body going all the time, and shouting his words out with
all his might and every now and then he would hold up his Bible and
spread it open, and kind of pass it around this way and that, shouting,
"It's the brazen serpent in the wilderness Look upon it and live" And
people would shout out, "GloryAaMEN" And so he went on, and the
people groaning and crying and saying amen
"Oh, come to the mourners' bench come, black with sin AMEN come,
sick and sore AMEN come, lame and halt and blind AMEN come, pore
and needy, sunk in shame AAMEN come, all that's worn and soiled and
sufferingcome with a broken spirit come with a contrite heart come
in your rags and sin and dirt the waters that cleanse is free, the door
of heaven stands openoh, enter in and be at rest" AAMEN GLORY,
GLORY HALLELUJAH
And so on. You couldn't make out what the preacher said any more, on
account of the shouting and crying. Folks got up everywheres in the
crowd, and worked their way just by main strength to the mourners' bench,
with the tears running down their faces and when all the mourners had
got up there to the front benches in a crowd, they sung and shouted and
flung themselves down on the straw, just crazy and wild.
Well, the first I knowed the king got agoing, and you could hear him
over everybody and next he went acharging up on to the platform, and
the preacher he begged him to speak to the people, and he done it. He
told them he was a piratebeen a pirate for thirty years out in the
Indian Oceanand his crew was thinned out considerable last spring in
a fight, and he was home now to take out some fresh men, and thanks to
goodness he'd been robbed last night and put ashore off of a steamboat
without a cent, and he was glad of it it was the blessedest thing that
ever happened to him, because he was a changed man now, and happy for the
first time in his life and, poor as he was, he was going to start right
off and work his way back to the Indian Ocean, and put in the rest of his
life trying to turn the pirates into the true path for he could do it
better than anybody else, being acquainted with all pirate crews in that
ocean and though it would take him a long time to get there without
money, he would get there anyway, and every time he convinced a pirate he
would say to him, "Don't you thank me, don't you give me no credit it
all belongs to them dear people in Pokeville campmeeting, natural
brothers and benefactors of the race, and that dear preacher there, the
truest friend a pirate ever had"
And then he busted into tears, and so did everybody. Then somebody sings
out, "Take up a collection for him, take up a collection" Well, a half
a dozen made a jump to do it, but somebody sings out, "Let HIM pass the
hat around" Then everybody said it, the preacher too.
So the king went all through the crowd with his hat swabbing his eyes,
and blessing the people and praising them and thanking them for being so
good to the poor pirates away off there and every little while the
prettiest kind of girls, with the tears running down their cheeks, would
up and ask him would he let them kiss him for to remember him by and he
always done it and some of them he hugged and kissed as many as five or
six timesand he was invited to stay a week and everybody wanted him to
live in their houses, and said they'd think it was an honor but he said
as this was the last day of the campmeeting he couldn't do no good, and
besides he was in a sweat to get to the Indian Ocean right off and go to
work on the pirates.
When we got back to the raft and he come to count up he found he had
collected eightyseven dollars and seventyfive cents. And then he had
fetched away a threegallon jug of whisky, too, that he found under a
wagon when he was starting home through the woods. The king said, take
it all around, it laid over any day he'd ever put in in the missionarying
line. He said it warn't no use talking, heathens don't amount to shucks
alongside of pirates to work a campmeeting with.
The duke was thinking HE'D been doing pretty well till the king come to
show up, but after that he didn't think so so much. He had set up and
printed off two little jobs for farmers in that printingofficehorse
billsand took the money, four dollars. And he had got in ten
dollars' worth of advertisements for the paper, which he said he would
put in for four dollars if they would pay in advanceso they done it.
The price of the paper was two dollars a year, but he took in three
subscriptions for half a dollar apiece on condition of them paying him in
advance they were going to pay in cordwood and onions as usual, but he
said he had just bought the concern and knocked down the price as low as
he could afford it, and was going to run it for cash. He set up a little
piece of poetry, which he made, himself, out of his own headthree
verseskind of sweet and saddishthe name of it was, "Yes, crush, cold
world, this breaking heart"and he left that all set up and ready to
print in the paper, and didn't charge nothing for it. Well, he took in
nine dollars and a half, and said he'd done a pretty square day's work
for it.
Then he showed us another little job he'd printed and hadn't charged for,
because it was for us. It had a picture of a runaway nigger with a
bundle on a stick over his shoulder, and " reward" under it. The
reading was all about Jim, and just described him to a dot. It said he
run away from St. Jacques' plantation, forty mile below New Orleans, last
winter, and likely went north, and whoever would catch him and send him
back he could have the reward and expenses.
"Now," says the duke, "after tonight we can run in the daytime if we
want to. Whenever we see anybody coming we can tie Jim hand and foot
with a rope, and lay him in the wigwam and show this handbill and say we
captured him up the river, and were too poor to travel on a steamboat, so
we got this little raft on credit from our friends and are going down to
get the reward. Handcuffs and chains would look still better on Jim, but
it wouldn't go well with the story of us being so poor. Too much like
jewelry. Ropes are the correct thingwe must preserve the unities, as
we say on the boards."
We all said the duke was pretty smart, and there couldn't be no trouble
about running daytimes. We judged we could make miles enough that night
to get out of the reach of the powwow we reckoned the duke's work in the
printing office was going to make in that little town then we could boom
right along if we wanted to.
We laid low and kept still, and never shoved out till nearly ten o'clock
then we slid by, pretty wide away from the town, and didn't hoist our
lantern till we was clear out of sight of it.
When Jim called me to take the watch at four in the morning, he says
"Huck, does you reck'n we gwyne to run acrost any mo' kings on dis trip?"
"No," I says, "I reckon not."
"Well," says he, "dat's all right, den. I doan' mine one er two kings,
but dat's enough. Dis one's powerful drunk, en de duke ain' much
better."
I found Jim had been trying to get him to talk French, so he could hear
what it was like but he said he had been in this country so long, and
had so much trouble, he'd forgot it.
CHAPTER XXI.
IT was after sunup now, but we went right on and didn't tie up. The
king and the duke turned out by and by looking pretty rusty but after
they'd jumped overboard and took a swim it chippered them up a good deal.
After breakfast the king he took a seat on the corner of the raft, and
pulled off his boots and rolled up his britches, and let his legs dangle
in the water, so as to be comfortable, and lit his pipe, and went to
getting his Romeo and Juliet by heart. When he had got it pretty good
him and the duke begun to practice it together. The duke had to learn
him over and over again how to say every speech and he made him sigh,
and put his hand on his heart, and after a while he said he done it
pretty well "only," he says, "you mustn't bellow out ROMEO that way,
like a bullyou must say it soft and sick and languishy, soRoomeo
that is the idea for Juliet's a dear sweet mere child of a girl, you
know, and she doesn't bray like a jackass."
Well, next they got out a couple of long swords that the duke made out of
oak laths, and begun to practice the sword fightthe duke called himself
Richard III. and the way they laid on and pranced around the raft was
grand to see. But by and by the king tripped and fell overboard, and
after that they took a rest, and had a talk about all kinds of adventures
they'd had in other times along the river.
After dinner the duke says
"Well, Capet, we'll want to make this a firstclass show, you know, so I
guess we'll add a little more to it. We want a little something to
answer encores with, anyway."
"What's onkores, Bilgewater?"
The duke told him, and then says
"I'll answer by doing the Highland fling or the sailor's hornpipe and
youwell, let me seeoh, I've got ityou can do Hamlet's soliloquy."
"Hamlet's which?"
"Hamlet's soliloquy, you know the most celebrated thing in Shakespeare.
Ah, it's sublime, sublime Always fetches the house. I haven't got it
in the bookI've only got one volumebut I reckon I can piece it out
from memory. I'll just walk up and down a minute, and see if I can call
it back from recollection's vaults."
So he went to marching up and down, thinking, and frowning horrible every
now and then then he would hoist up his eyebrows next he would squeeze
his hand on his forehead and stagger back and kind of moan next he would
sigh, and next he'd let on to drop a tear. It was beautiful to see him.
By and by he got it. He told us to give attention. Then he strikes a
most noble attitude, with one leg shoved forwards, and his arms stretched
away up, and his head tilted back, looking up at the sky and then he
begins to rip and rave and grit his teeth and after that, all through
his speech, he howled, and spread around, and swelled up his chest, and
just knocked the spots out of any acting ever I see before. This is the
speechI learned it, easy enough, while he was learning it to the king
To be, or not to be that is the bare bodkin That makes calamity of so
long life For who would fardels bear, till Birnam Wood do come to
Dunsinane, But that the fear of something after death Murders the
innocent sleep, Great nature's second course, And makes us rather sling
the arrows of outrageous fortune Than fly to others that we know not of.
There's the respect must give us pause Wake Duncan with thy knocking I
would thou couldst For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, The
oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely, The law's delay, and the
quietus which his pangs might take, In the dead waste and middle of the
night, when churchyards yawn In customary suits of solemn black, But that
the undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns, Breathes
forth contagion on the world, And thus the native hue of resolution, like
the poor cat i' the adage, Is sicklied o'er with care, And all the clouds
that lowered o'er our housetops, With this regard their currents turn
awry, And lose the name of action. 'Tis a consummation devoutly to be
wished. But soft you, the fair Ophelia Ope not thy ponderous and marble
jaws, But get thee to a nunnerygo
Well, the old man he liked that speech, and he mighty soon got it so he
could do it firstrate. It seemed like he was just born for it and when
he had his hand in and was excited, it was perfectly lovely the way he
would rip and tear and rair up behind when he was getting it off.
The first chance we got the duke he had some showbills printed and after
that, for two or three days as we floated along, the raft was a most
uncommon lively place, for there warn't nothing but sword fighting and
rehearsingas the duke called itgoing on all the time. One morning,
when we was pretty well down the State of Arkansaw, we come in sight of a
little onehorse town in a big bend so we tied up about threequarters
of a mile above it, in the mouth of a crick which was shut in like a
tunnel by the cypress trees, and all of us but Jim took the canoe and
went down there to see if there was any chance in that place for our
show.
We struck it mighty lucky there was going to be a circus there that
afternoon, and the country people was already beginning to come in, in
all kinds of old shackly wagons, and on horses. The circus would leave
before night, so our show would have a pretty good chance. The duke he
hired the courthouse, and we went around and stuck up our bills. They
read like this
Shaksperean Revival   
Wonderful Attraction
For One Night Only
The world renowned tragedians, David Garrick the Younger, of Drury Lane
Theatre London, and Edmund Kean the elder, of the Royal Haymarket
Theatre, Whitechapel, Pudding Lane, Piccadilly, London, and the Royal
Continental Theatres, in their sublime Shaksperean Spectacle entitled
The Balcony Scene in Romeo and Juliet   
Romeo...................Mr. Garrick
Juliet..................Mr. Kean
Assisted by the whole strength of the company
New costumes, new scenes, new appointments
Also The thrilling, masterly, and bloodcurdling
Broadsword conflict In Richard III.   
Richard III.............Mr. Garrick
Richmond................Mr. Kean
Also by special request Hamlet's Immortal Soliloquy  
By The Illustrious Kean Done by him  consecutive nights in Paris
For One Night Only, On account of imperative European engagements
Admission  cents children and servants,  cents.
Then we went loafing around town. The stores and houses was most all
old, shackly, dried up frame concerns that hadn't ever been painted they
was set up three or four foot above ground on stilts, so as to be out of
reach of the water when the river was overflowed. The houses had little
gardens around them, but they didn't seem to raise hardly anything in
them but jimpsonweeds, and sunflowers, and ash piles, and old curledup
boots and shoes, and pieces of bottles, and rags, and playedout tinware.
The fences was made of different kinds of boards, nailed on at different
times and they leaned every which way, and had gates that didn't generly
have but one hingea leather one. Some of the fences had been
whitewashed some time or another, but the duke said it was in Clumbus'
time, like enough. There was generly hogs in the garden, and people
driving them out.
All the stores was along one street. They had white domestic awnings in
front, and the country people hitched their horses to the awningposts.
There was empty drygoods boxes under the awnings, and loafers roosting on
them all day long, whittling them with their Barlow knives and chawing
tobacco, and gaping and yawning and stretchinga mighty ornery lot.
They generly had on yellow straw hats most as wide as an umbrella, but
didn't wear no coats nor waistcoats, they called one another Bill, and
Buck, and Hank, and Joe, and Andy, and talked lazy and drawly, and used
considerable many cuss words. There was as many as one loafer leaning up
against every awningpost, and he most always had his hands in his
britchespockets, except when he fetched them out to lend a chaw of
tobacco or scratch. What a body was hearing amongst them all the time
was
"Gimme a chaw 'v tobacker, Hank."
"Cain't I hain't got but one chaw left. Ask Bill."
Maybe Bill he gives him a chaw maybe he lies and says he ain't got none.
Some of them kinds of loafers never has a cent in the world, nor a chaw
of tobacco of their own. They get all their chawing by borrowing they
say to a fellow, "I wisht you'd len' me a chaw, Jack, I jist this minute
give Ben Thompson the last chaw I had"which is a lie pretty much
everytime it don't fool nobody but a stranger but Jack ain't no
stranger, so he says
"YOU give him a chaw, did you? So did your sister's cat's grandmother.
You pay me back the chaws you've awready borry'd off'n me, Lafe Buckner,
then I'll loan you one or two ton of it, and won't charge you no back
intrust, nuther."
"Well, I DID pay you back some of it wunst."
"Yes, you did'bout six chaws. You borry'd store tobacker and paid back
niggerhead."
Store tobacco is flat black plug, but these fellows mostly chaws the
natural leaf twisted. When they borrow a chaw they don't generly cut it
off with a knife, but set the plug in between their teeth, and gnaw with
their teeth and tug at the plug with their hands till they get it in two
then sometimes the one that owns the tobacco looks mournful at it when
it's handed back, and says, sarcastic
"Here, gimme the CHAW, and you take the PLUG."
All the streets and lanes was just mud they warn't nothing else BUT mud
mud as black as tar and nigh about a foot deep in some places, and two
or three inches deep in ALL the places. The hogs loafed and grunted
around everywheres. You'd see a muddy sow and a litter of pigs come
lazying along the street and whollop herself right down in the way, where
folks had to walk around her, and she'd stretch out and shut her eyes and
wave her ears whilst the pigs was milking her, and look as happy as if
she was on salary. And pretty soon you'd hear a loafer sing out, "Hi SO
boy sick him, Tige" and away the sow would go, squealing most horrible,
with a dog or two swinging to each ear, and three or four dozen more
acoming and then you would see all the loafers get up and watch the thing
out of sight, and laugh at the fun and look grateful for the noise. Then
they'd settle back again till there was a dog fight. There couldn't
anything wake them up all over, and make them happy all over, like a dog
fightunless it might be putting turpentine on a stray dog and setting
fire to him, or tying a tin pan to his tail and see him run himself to
death.
On the river front some of the houses was sticking out over the bank, and
they was bowed and bent, and about ready to tumble in, The people had
moved out of them. The bank was caved away under one corner of some
others, and that corner was hanging over. People lived in them yet, but
it was dangersome, because sometimes a strip of land as wide as a house
caves in at a time. Sometimes a belt of land a quarter of a mile deep
will start in and cave along and cave along till it all caves into the
river in one summer. Such a town as that has to be always moving back,
and back, and back, because the river's always gnawing at it.
The nearer it got to noon that day the thicker and thicker was the wagons
and horses in the streets, and more coming all the time. Families
fetched their dinners with them from the country, and eat them in the
wagons. There was considerable whisky drinking going on, and I seen
three fights. By and by somebody sings out
"Here comes old Boggsin from the country for his little old monthly
drunk here he comes, boys"
All the loafers looked glad I reckoned they was used to having fun out
of Boggs. One of them says
"Wonder who he's agwyne to chaw up this time. If he'd achawed up all
the men he's ben agwyne to chaw up in the last twenty year he'd have
considerable ruputation now."
Another one says, "I wisht old Boggs 'd threaten me, 'cuz then I'd know I
warn't gwyne to die for a thousan' year."
Boggs comes atearing along on his horse, whooping and yelling like an
Injun, and singing out
"Cler the track, thar. I'm on the wawpath, and the price uv coffins is
agwyne to raise."
He was drunk, and weaving about in his saddle he was over fifty year
old, and had a very red face. Everybody yelled at him and laughed at him
and sassed him, and he sassed back, and said he'd attend to them and lay
them out in their regular turns, but he couldn't wait now because he'd
come to town to kill old Colonel Sherburn, and his motto was, "Meat
first, and spoon vittles to top off on."
He see me, and rode up and says
"Whar'd you come f'm, boy? You prepared to die?"
Then he rode on. I was scared, but a man says
"He don't mean nothing he's always acarryin' on like that when he's
drunk. He's the best naturedest old fool in Arkansawnever hurt nobody,
drunk nor sober."
Boggs rode up before the biggest store in town, and bent his head down so
he could see under the curtain of the awning and yells
"Come out here, Sherburn Come out and meet the man you've swindled.
You're the houn' I'm after, and I'm agwyne to have you, too"
And so he went on, calling Sherburn everything he could lay his tongue
to, and the whole street packed with people listening and laughing and
going on. By and by a proudlooking man about fiftyfiveand he was a
heap the best dressed man in that town, toosteps out of the store, and
the crowd drops back on each side to let him come. He says to Boggs,
mighty ca'm and slowhe says
"I'm tired of this, but I'll endure it till one o'clock. Till one
o'clock, mindno longer. If you open your mouth against me only once
after that time you can't travel so far but I will find you."
Then he turns and goes in. The crowd looked mighty sober nobody
stirred, and there warn't no more laughing. Boggs rode off blackguarding
Sherburn as loud as he could yell, all down the street and pretty soon
back he comes and stops before the store, still keeping it up. Some men
crowded around him and tried to get him to shut up, but he wouldn't they
told him it would be one o'clock in about fifteen minutes, and so he MUST
go homehe must go right away. But it didn't do no good. He cussed
away with all his might, and throwed his hat down in the mud and rode
over it, and pretty soon away he went araging down the street again,
with his gray hair aflying. Everybody that could get a chance at him
tried their best to coax him off of his horse so they could lock him up
and get him sober but it warn't no useup the street he would tear
again, and give Sherburn another cussing. By and by somebody says
"Go for his daughterquick, go for his daughter sometimes he'll listen
to her. If anybody can persuade him, she can."
So somebody started on a run. I walked down street a ways and stopped.
In about five or ten minutes here comes Boggs again, but not on his
horse. He was areeling across the street towards me, bareheaded, with
a friend on both sides of him aholt of his arms and hurrying him along.
He was quiet, and looked uneasy and he warn't hanging back any, but was
doing some of the hurrying himself. Somebody sings out
"Boggs"
I looked over there to see who said it, and it was that Colonel Sherburn.
He was standing perfectly still in the street, and had a pistol raised in
his right handnot aiming it, but holding it out with the barrel tilted
up towards the sky. The same second I see a young girl coming on the
run, and two men with her. Boggs and the men turned round to see who
called him, and when they see the pistol the men jumped to one side, and
the pistolbarrel come down slow and steady to a levelboth barrels
cocked. Boggs throws up both of his hands and says, "O Lord, don't
shoot" Bang goes the first shot, and he staggers back, clawing at the
airbang goes the second one, and he tumbles backwards on to the
ground, heavy and solid, with his arms spread out. That young girl
screamed out and comes rushing, and down she throws herself on her
father, crying, and saying, "Oh, he's killed him, he's killed him" The
crowd closed up around them, and shouldered and jammed one another, with
their necks stretched, trying to see, and people on the inside trying to
shove them back and shouting, "Back, back give him air, give him air"
Colonel Sherburn he tossed his pistol on to the ground, and turned around
on his heels and walked off.
They took Boggs to a little drug store, the crowd pressing around just
the same, and the whole town following, and I rushed and got a good place
at the window, where I was close to him and could see in. They laid him
on the floor and put one large Bible under his head, and opened another
one and spread it on his breast but they tore open his shirt first, and
I seen where one of the bullets went in. He made about a dozen long
gasps, his breast lifting the Bible up when he drawed in his breath, and
letting it down again when he breathed it outand after that he laid
still he was dead. Then they pulled his daughter away from him,
screaming and crying, and took her off. She was about sixteen, and very
sweet and gentle looking, but awful pale and scared.
Well, pretty soon the whole town was there, squirming and scrouging and
pushing and shoving to get at the window and have a look, but people that
had the places wouldn't give them up, and folks behind them was saying
all the time, "Say, now, you've looked enough, you fellows 'tain't right
and 'tain't fair for you to stay thar all the time, and never give nobody
a chance other folks has their rights as well as you."
There was considerable jawing back, so I slid out, thinking maybe there
was going to be trouble. The streets was full, and everybody was
excited. Everybody that seen the shooting was telling how it happened,
and there was a big crowd packed around each one of these fellows,
stretching their necks and listening. One long, lanky man, with long
hair and a big white fur stovepipe hat on the back of his head, and a
crookedhandled cane, marked out the places on the ground where Boggs
stood and where Sherburn stood, and the people following him around from
one place to t'other and watching everything he done, and bobbing their
heads to show they understood, and stooping a little and resting their
hands on their thighs to watch him mark the places on the ground with his
cane and then he stood up straight and stiff where Sherburn had stood,
frowning and having his hatbrim down over his eyes, and sung out,
"Boggs" and then fetched his cane down slow to a level, and says "Bang"
staggered backwards, says "Bang" again, and fell down flat on his back.
The people that had seen the thing said he done it perfect said it was
just exactly the way it all happened. Then as much as a dozen people got
out their bottles and treated him.
Well, by and by somebody said Sherburn ought to be lynched. In about a
minute everybody was saying it so away they went, mad and yelling, and
snatching down every clothesline they come to to do the hanging with.
CHAPTER XXII.
THEY swarmed up towards Sherburn's house, awhooping and raging like
Injuns, and everything had to clear the way or get run over and tromped
to mush, and it was awful to see. Children was heeling it ahead of the
mob, screaming and trying to get out of the way and every window along
the road was full of women's heads, and there was nigger boys in every
tree, and bucks and wenches looking over every fence and as soon as the
mob would get nearly to them they would break and skaddle back out of
reach. Lots of the women and girls was crying and taking on, scared most
to death.
They swarmed up in front of Sherburn's palings as thick as they could jam
together, and you couldn't hear yourself think for the noise. It was a
little twentyfoot yard. Some sung out "Tear down the fence tear down
the fence" Then there was a racket of ripping and tearing and smashing,
and down she goes, and the front wall of the crowd begins to roll in like
a wave.
Just then Sherburn steps out on to the roof of his little front porch,
with a doublebarrel gun in his hand, and takes his stand, perfectly ca'm
and deliberate, not saying a word. The racket stopped, and the wave
sucked back.
Sherburn never said a wordjust stood there, looking down. The
stillness was awful creepy and uncomfortable. Sherburn run his eye slow
along the crowd and wherever it struck the people tried a little to
outgaze him, but they couldn't they dropped their eyes and looked sneaky.
Then pretty soon Sherburn sort of laughed not the pleasant kind, but the
kind that makes you feel like when you are eating bread that's got sand
in it.
Then he says, slow and scornful
"The idea of YOU lynching anybody It's amusing. The idea of you
thinking you had pluck enough to lynch a MAN Because you're brave
enough to tar and feather poor friendless castout women that come along
here, did that make you think you had grit enough to lay your hands on a
MAN? Why, a MAN'S safe in the hands of ten thousand of your kindas
long as it's daytime and you're not behind him.
"Do I know you? I know you clear through was born and raised in the
South, and I've lived in the North so I know the average all around.
The average man's a coward. In the North he lets anybody walk over him
that wants to, and goes home and prays for a humble spirit to bear it.
In the South one man all by himself, has stopped a stage full of men in
the daytime, and robbed the lot. Your newspapers call you a brave people
so much that you think you are braver than any other peoplewhereas
you're just AS brave, and no braver. Why don't your juries hang
murderers? Because they're afraid the man's friends will shoot them in
the back, in the darkand it's just what they WOULD do.
"So they always acquit and then a MAN goes in the night, with a hundred
masked cowards at his back and lynches the rascal. Your mistake is, that
you didn't bring a man with you that's one mistake, and the other is
that you didn't come in the dark and fetch your masks. You brought PART
of a manBuck Harkness, thereand if you hadn't had him to start you,
you'd a taken it out in blowing.
"You didn't want to come. The average man don't like trouble and danger.
YOU don't like trouble and danger. But if only HALF a manlike Buck
Harkness, thereshouts 'Lynch him lynch him' you're afraid to back
downafraid you'll be found out to be what you areCOWARDSand so
you raise a yell, and hang yourselves on to that halfaman's coattail,
and come raging up here, swearing what big things you're going to do.
The pitifulest thing out is a mob that's what an army isa mob they
don't fight with courage that's born in them, but with courage that's
borrowed from their mass, and from their officers. But a mob without any
MAN at the head of it is BENEATH pitifulness. Now the thing for YOU to
do is to droop your tails and go home and crawl in a hole. If any real
lynching's going to be done it will be done in the dark, Southern
fashion and when they come they'll bring their masks, and fetch a MAN
along. Now LEAVEand take your halfaman with you"tossing his gun up
across his left arm and cocking it when he says this.
The crowd washed back sudden, and then broke all apart, and went tearing
off every which way, and Buck Harkness he heeled it after them, looking
tolerable cheap. I could a stayed if I wanted to, but I didn't want to.
I went to the circus and loafed around the back side till the watchman
went by, and then dived in under the tent. I had my twentydollar gold
piece and some other money, but I reckoned I better save it, because
there ain't no telling how soon you are going to need it, away from home
and amongst strangers that way. You can't be too careful. I ain't
opposed to spending money on circuses when there ain't no other way, but
there ain't no use in WASTING it on them.
It was a real bully circus. It was the splendidest sight that ever was
when they all come riding in, two and two, a gentleman and lady, side by
side, the men just in their drawers and undershirts, and no shoes nor
stirrups, and resting their hands on their thighs easy and comfortable
there must a been twenty of themand every lady with a lovely
complexion, and perfectly beautiful, and looking just like a gang of real
sureenough queens, and dressed in clothes that cost millions of dollars,
and just littered with diamonds. It was a powerful fine sight I never
see anything so lovely. And then one by one they got up and stood, and
went aweaving around the ring so gentle and wavy and graceful, the men
looking ever so tall and airy and straight, with their heads bobbing and
skimming along, away up there under the tentroof, and every lady's
roseleafy dress flapping soft and silky around her hips, and she looking
like the most loveliest parasol.
And then faster and faster they went, all of them dancing, first one foot
out in the air and then the other, the horses leaning more and more, and
the ringmaster going round and round the centerpole, cracking his whip
and shouting "Hihi" and the clown cracking jokes behind him and by
and by all hands dropped the reins, and every lady put her knuckles on
her hips and every gentleman folded his arms, and then how the horses did
lean over and hump themselves And so one after the other they all
skipped off into the ring, and made the sweetest bow I ever see, and then
scampered out, and everybody clapped their hands and went just about
wild.
Well, all through the circus they done the most astonishing things and
all the time that clown carried on so it most killed the people. The
ringmaster couldn't ever say a word to him but he was back at him quick
as a wink with the funniest things a body ever said and how he ever
COULD think of so many of them, and so sudden and so pat, was what I
couldn't noway understand. Why, I couldn't a thought of them in a year.
And by and by a drunk man tried to get into the ringsaid he wanted to
ride said he could ride as well as anybody that ever was. They argued
and tried to keep him out, but he wouldn't listen, and the whole show
come to a standstill. Then the people begun to holler at him and make
fun of him, and that made him mad, and he begun to rip and tear so that
stirred up the people, and a lot of men begun to pile down off of the
benches and swarm towards the ring, saying, "Knock him down throw him
out" and one or two women begun to scream. So, then, the ringmaster he
made a little speech, and said he hoped there wouldn't be no disturbance,
and if the man would promise he wouldn't make no more trouble he would
let him ride if he thought he could stay on the horse. So everybody
laughed and said all right, and the man got on. The minute he was on, the
horse begun to rip and tear and jump and cavort around, with two circus
men hanging on to his bridle trying to hold him, and the drunk man
hanging on to his neck, and his heels flying in the air every jump, and
the whole crowd of people standing up shouting and laughing till tears
rolled down. And at last, sure enough, all the circus men could do, the
horse broke loose, and away he went like the very nation, round and round
the ring, with that sot laying down on him and hanging to his neck, with
first one leg hanging most to the ground on one side, and then t'other
one on t'other side, and the people just crazy. It warn't funny to me,
though I was all of a tremble to see his danger. But pretty soon he
struggled up astraddle and grabbed the bridle, areeling this way and
that and the next minute he sprung up and dropped the bridle and stood
and the horse agoing like a house afire too. He just stood up there,
asailing around as easy and comfortable as if he warn't ever drunk in his
lifeand then he begun to pull off his clothes and sling them. He shed
them so thick they kind of clogged up the air, and altogether he shed
seventeen suits. And, then, there he was, slim and handsome, and dressed
the gaudiest and prettiest you ever saw, and he lit into that horse with
his whip and made him fairly humand finally skipped off, and made his
bow and danced off to the dressingroom, and everybody just ahowling
with pleasure and astonishment.
Then the ringmaster he see how he had been fooled, and he WAS the sickest
ringmaster you ever see, I reckon. Why, it was one of his own men He
had got up that joke all out of his own head, and never let on to nobody.
Well, I felt sheepish enough to be took in so, but I wouldn't a been in
that ringmaster's place, not for a thousand dollars. I don't know there
may be bullier circuses than what that one was, but I never struck them
yet. Anyways, it was plenty good enough for ME and wherever I run across
it, it can have all of MY custom every time.
Well, that night we had OUR show but there warn't only about twelve
people therejust enough to pay expenses. And they laughed all the
time, and that made the duke mad and everybody left, anyway, before the
show was over, but one boy which was asleep. So the duke said these
Arkansaw lunkheads couldn't come up to Shakespeare what they wanted was
low comedyand maybe something ruther worse than low comedy, he
reckoned. He said he could size their style. So next morning he got
some big sheets of wrapping paper and some black paint, and drawed off
some handbills, and stuck them up all over the village. The bills said
AT THE COURT HOUSE FOR  NIGHTS ONLY
The WorldRenowned Tragedians
DAVID GARRICK THE YOUNGER
AND EDMUND KEAN THE ELDER
Of the London and
Continental Theatres,
In their Thrilling Tragedy of
THE KING'S CAMELEOPARD,
OR THE ROYAL NONESUCH   
Admission  cents.
Then at the bottom was the biggest line of all, which said
LADIES AND CHILDREN NOT ADMITTED.
"There," says he, "if that line don't fetch them, I don't know Arkansaw"
CHAPTER XXIII.
WELL, all day him and the king was hard at it, rigging up a stage and a
curtain and a row of candles for footlights and that night the house was
jam full of men in no time. When the place couldn't hold no more, the
duke he quit tending door and went around the back way and come on to the
stage and stood up before the curtain and made a little speech, and
praised up this tragedy, and said it was the most thrillingest one that
ever was and so he went on abragging about the tragedy, and about
Edmund Kean the Elder, which was to play the main principal part in it
and at last when he'd got everybody's expectations up high enough, he
rolled up the curtain, and the next minute the king come aprancing out
on all fours, naked and he was painted all over, ringstreakedand
striped, all sorts of colors, as splendid as a rainbow. Andbut never
mind the rest of his outfit it was just wild, but it was awful funny.
The people most killed themselves laughing and when the king got done
capering and capered off behind the scenes, they roared and clapped and
stormed and hawhawed till he come back and done it over again, and after
that they made him do it another time. Well, it would make a cow laugh to
see the shines that old idiot cut.
Then the duke he lets the curtain down, and bows to the people, and says
the great tragedy will be performed only two nights more, on accounts of
pressing London engagements, where the seats is all sold already for it
in Drury Lane and then he makes them another bow, and says if he has
succeeded in pleasing them and instructing them, he will be deeply
obleeged if they will mention it to their friends and get them to come
and see it.
Twenty people sings out
"What, is it over? Is that ALL?"
The duke says yes. Then there was a fine time. Everybody sings out,
"Sold" and rose up mad, and was agoing for that stage and them
tragedians. But a big, fine looking man jumps up on a bench and shouts
"Hold on Just a word, gentlemen." They stopped to listen. "We are
soldmighty badly sold. But we don't want to be the laughing stock of
this whole town, I reckon, and never hear the last of this thing as long
as we live. NO. What we want is to go out of here quiet, and talk this
show up, and sell the REST of the town Then we'll all be in the same
boat. Ain't that sensible?" "You bet it isthe jedge is right"
everybody sings out. "All right, thennot a word about any sell. Go
along home, and advise everybody to come and see the tragedy."
Next day you couldn't hear nothing around that town but how splendid that
show was. House was jammed again that night, and we sold this crowd the
same way. When me and the king and the duke got home to the raft we all
had a supper and by and by, about midnight, they made Jim and me back
her out and float her down the middle of the river, and fetch her in and
hide her about two mile below town.
The third night the house was crammed againand they warn't newcomers
this time, but people that was at the show the other two nights. I stood
by the duke at the door, and I see that every man that went in had his
pockets bulging, or something muffled up under his coatand I see it
warn't no perfumery, neither, not by a long sight. I smelt sickly eggs
by the barrel, and rotten cabbages, and such things and if I know the
signs of a dead cat being around, and I bet I do, there was sixtyfour of
them went in. I shoved in there for a minute, but it was too various for
me I couldn't stand it. Well, when the place couldn't hold no more
people the duke he give a fellow a quarter and told him to tend door for
him a minute, and then he started around for the stage door, I after him
but the minute we turned the corner and was in the dark he says
"Walk fast now till you get away from the houses, and then shin for the
raft like the dickens was after you"
I done it, and he done the same. We struck the raft at the same time,
and in less than two seconds we was gliding down stream, all dark and
still, and edging towards the middle of the river, nobody saying a word.
I reckoned the poor king was in for a gaudy time of it with the audience,
but nothing of the sort pretty soon he crawls out from under the wigwam,
and says
"Well, how'd the old thing pan out this time, duke?" He hadn't been
uptown at all.
We never showed a light till we was about ten mile below the village.
Then we lit up and had a supper, and the king and the duke fairly laughed
their bones loose over the way they'd served them people. The duke says
"Greenhorns, flatheads I knew the first house would keep mum and let
the rest of the town get roped in and I knew they'd lay for us the third
night, and consider it was THEIR turn now. Well, it IS their turn, and
I'd give something to know how much they'd take for it. I WOULD just
like to know how they're putting in their opportunity. They can turn it
into a picnic if they want tothey brought plenty provisions."
Them rapscallions took in four hundred and sixtyfive dollars in that
three nights. I never see money hauled in by the wagonload like that
before. By and by, when they was asleep and snoring, Jim says
"Don't it s'prise you de way dem kings carries on, Huck?"
"No," I says, "it don't."
"Why don't it, Huck?"
"Well, it don't, because it's in the breed. I reckon they're all alike,"
"But, Huck, dese kings o' ourn is reglar rapscallions dat's jist what
dey is dey's reglar rapscallions."
"Well, that's what I'm asaying all kings is mostly rapscallions, as fur
as I can make out."
"Is dat so?"
"You read about them onceyou'll see. Look at Henry the Eight this 'n
's a Sundayschool Superintendent to HIM. And look at Charles Second,
and Louis Fourteen, and Louis Fifteen, and James Second, and Edward
Second, and Richard Third, and forty more besides all them Saxon
heptarchies that used to rip around so in old times and raise Cain. My,
you ought to seen old Henry the Eight when he was in bloom. He WAS a
blossom. He used to marry a new wife every day, and chop off her head
next morning. And he would do it just as indifferent as if he was
ordering up eggs. 'Fetch up Nell Gwynn,' he says. They fetch her up.
Next morning, 'Chop off her head' And they chop it off. 'Fetch up Jane
Shore,' he says and up she comes, Next morning, 'Chop off her head'and
they chop it off. 'Ring up Fair Rosamun.' Fair Rosamun answers the
bell. Next morning, 'Chop off her head.' And he made every one of them
tell him a tale every night and he kept that up till he had hogged a
thousand and one tales that way, and then he put them all in a book, and
called it Domesday Bookwhich was a good name and stated the case. You
don't know kings, Jim, but I know them and this old rip of ourn is one
of the cleanest I've struck in history. Well, Henry he takes a notion he
wants to get up some trouble with this country. How does he go at it
give notice?give the country a show? No. All of a sudden he heaves
all the tea in Boston Harbor overboard, and whacks out a declaration of
independence, and dares them to come on. That was HIS stylehe never
give anybody a chance. He had suspicions of his father, the Duke of
Wellington. Well, what did he do? Ask him to show up? Nodrownded
him in a butt of mamsey, like a cat. S'pose people left money laying
around where he waswhat did he do? He collared it. S'pose he
contracted to do a thing, and you paid him, and didn't set down there and
see that he done itwhat did he do? He always done the other thing.
S'pose he opened his mouthwhat then? If he didn't shut it up powerful
quick he'd lose a lie every time. That's the kind of a bug Henry was
and if we'd a had him along 'stead of our kings he'd a fooled that town a
heap worse than ourn done. I don't say that ourn is lambs, because they
ain't, when you come right down to the cold facts but they ain't nothing
to THAT old ram, anyway. All I say is, kings is kings, and you got to
make allowances. Take them all around, they're a mighty ornery lot.
It's the way they're raised."
"But dis one do SMELL so like de nation, Huck."
"Well, they all do, Jim. We can't help the way a king smells history
don't tell no way."
"Now de duke, he's a tolerble likely man in some ways."
"Yes, a duke's different. But not very different. This one's a middling
hard lot for a duke. When he's drunk there ain't no nearsighted man
could tell him from a king."
"Well, anyways, I doan' hanker for no mo' un um, Huck. Dese is all I kin
stan'."
"It's the way I feel, too, Jim. But we've got them on our hands, and we
got to remember what they are, and make allowances. Sometimes I wish we
could hear of a country that's out of kings."
What was the use to tell Jim these warn't real kings and dukes? It
wouldn't a done no good and, besides, it was just as I said you
couldn't tell them from the real kind.
I went to sleep, and Jim didn't call me when it was my turn. He often
done that. When I waked up just at daybreak he was sitting there with
his head down betwixt his knees, moaning and mourning to himself. I
didn't take notice nor let on. I knowed what it was about. He was
thinking about his wife and his children, away up yonder, and he was low
and homesick because he hadn't ever been away from home before in his
life and I do believe he cared just as much for his people as white
folks does for their'n. It don't seem natural, but I reckon it's so. He
was often moaning and mourning that way nights, when he judged I was
asleep, and saying, "Po' little 'Lizabeth po' little Johnny it's mighty
hard I spec' I ain't ever gwyne to see you no mo', no mo'" He was a
mighty good nigger, Jim was.
But this time I somehow got to talking to him about his wife and young
ones and by and by he says
"What makes me feel so bad dis time 'uz bekase I hear sumpn over yonder
on de bank like a whack, er a slam, while ago, en it mine me er de time I
treat my little 'Lizabeth so ornery. She warn't on'y 'bout fo' year ole,
en she tuck de sk'yarlet fever, en had a powful rough spell but she got
well, en one day she was astannin' aroun', en I says to her, I says
"'Shet de do'.'
"She never done it jis' stood dah, kiner smilin' up at me. It make me
mad en I says agin, mighty loud, I says
"'Doan' you hear me? Shet de do''
"She jis stood de same way, kiner smilin' up. I was abilin' I says
"'I lay I MAKE you mine'
"En wid dat I fetch' her a slap side de head dat sont her asprawlin'.
Den I went into de yuther room, en 'uz gone 'bout ten minutes en when I
come back dah was dat do' astannin' open YIT, en dat chile stannin' mos'
right in it, alookin' down and mournin', en de tears runnin' down. My,
but I WUZ mad I was agwyne for de chile, but jis' denit was a do'
dat open innerdsjis' den, 'long come de wind en slam it to, behine de
chile, kerBLAMen my lan', de chile never move' My breff mos' hop
outer me en I feel sosoI doan' know HOW I feel. I crope out, all
atremblin', en crope aroun' en open de do' easy en slow, en poke my head
in behine de chile, sof' en still, en all uv a sudden I says POW jis' as
loud as I could yell. SHE NEVER BUDGE Oh, Huck, I bust out acryin' en
grab her up in my arms, en say, 'Oh, de po' little thing De Lord God
Amighty fogive po' ole Jim, kaze he never gwyne to fogive hisself as
long's he live' Oh, she was plumb deef en dumb, Huck, plumb deef en
dumben I'd ben atreat'n her so"
CHAPTER XXIV.
NEXT day, towards night, we laid up under a little willow towhead out in
the middle, where there was a village on each side of the river, and the
duke and the king begun to lay out a plan for working them towns. Jim he
spoke to the duke, and said he hoped it wouldn't take but a few hours,
because it got mighty heavy and tiresome to him when he had to lay all
day in the wigwam tied with the rope. You see, when we left him all
alone we had to tie him, because if anybody happened on to him all by
himself and not tied it wouldn't look much like he was a runaway nigger,
you know. So the duke said it WAS kind of hard to have to lay roped all
day, and he'd cipher out some way to get around it.
He was uncommon bright, the duke was, and he soon struck it. He dressed
Jim up in King Lear's outfitit was a long curtaincalico gown, and a
white horsehair wig and whiskers and then he took his theater paint and
painted Jim's face and hands and ears and neck all over a dead, dull,
solid blue, like a man that's been drownded nine days. Blamed if he
warn't the horriblest looking outrage I ever see. Then the duke took and
wrote out a sign on a shingle so
Sick Arabbut harmless when not out of his head.
And he nailed that shingle to a lath, and stood the lath up four or five
foot in front of the wigwam. Jim was satisfied. He said it was a sight
better than lying tied a couple of years every day, and trembling all
over every time there was a sound. The duke told him to make himself
free and easy, and if anybody ever come meddling around, he must hop out
of the wigwam, and carry on a little, and fetch a howl or two like a wild
beast, and he reckoned they would light out and leave him alone. Which
was sound enough judgment but you take the average man, and he wouldn't
wait for him to howl. Why, he didn't only look like he was dead, he
looked considerable more than that.
These rapscallions wanted to try the Nonesuch again, because there was so
much money in it, but they judged it wouldn't be safe, because maybe the
news might a worked along down by this time. They couldn't hit no
project that suited exactly so at last the duke said he reckoned he'd
lay off and work his brains an hour or two and see if he couldn't put up
something on the Arkansaw village and the king he allowed he would drop
over to t'other village without any plan, but just trust in Providence to
lead him the profitable waymeaning the devil, I reckon. We had all
bought store clothes where we stopped last and now the king put his'n
on, and he told me to put mine on. I done it, of course. The king's
duds was all black, and he did look real swell and starchy. I never
knowed how clothes could change a body before. Why, before, he looked
like the orneriest old rip that ever was but now, when he'd take off his
new white beaver and make a bow and do a smile, he looked that grand and
good and pious that you'd say he had walked right out of the ark, and
maybe was old Leviticus himself. Jim cleaned up the canoe, and I got my
paddle ready. There was a big steamboat laying at the shore away up
under the point, about three mile above the townbeen there a couple
of hours, taking on freight. Says the king
"Seein' how I'm dressed, I reckon maybe I better arrive down from St.
Louis or Cincinnati, or some other big place. Go for the steamboat,
Huckleberry we'll come down to the village on her."
I didn't have to be ordered twice to go and take a steamboat ride. I
fetched the shore a half a mile above the village, and then went scooting
along the bluff bank in the easy water. Pretty soon we come to a nice
innocentlooking young country jake setting on a log swabbing the sweat
off of his face, for it was powerful warm weather and he had a couple of
big carpetbags by him.
"Run her nose in shore," says the king. I done it. "Wher' you bound
for, young man?"
"For the steamboat going to Orleans."
"Git aboard," says the king. "Hold on a minute, my servant 'll he'p you
with them bags. Jump out and he'p the gentleman, Adolphus"meaning me,
I see.
I done so, and then we all three started on again. The young chap was
mighty thankful said it was tough work toting his baggage such weather.
He asked the king where he was going, and the king told him he'd come
down the river and landed at the other village this morning, and now he
was going up a few mile to see an old friend on a farm up there. The
young fellow says
"When I first see you I says to myself, 'It's Mr. Wilks, sure, and he
come mighty near getting here in time.' But then I says again, 'No, I
reckon it ain't him, or else he wouldn't be paddling up the river.' You
AIN'T him, are you?"
"No, my name's BlodgettElexander BlodgettREVEREND Elexander Blodgett,
I s'pose I must say, as I'm one o' the Lord's poor servants. But still
I'm jist as able to be sorry for Mr. Wilks for not arriving in time, all
the same, if he's missed anything by itwhich I hope he hasn't."
"Well, he don't miss any property by it, because he'll get that all
right but he's missed seeing his brother Peter diewhich he mayn't
mind, nobody can tell as to thatbut his brother would a give anything
in this world to see HIM before he died never talked about nothing else
all these three weeks hadn't seen him since they was boys togetherand
hadn't ever seen his brother William at allthat's the deef and dumb
oneWilliam ain't more than thirty or thirtyfive. Peter and George
were the only ones that come out here George was the married brother
him and his wife both died last year. Harvey and William's the only ones
that's left now and, as I was saying, they haven't got here in time."
"Did anybody send 'em word?"
"Oh, yes a month or two ago, when Peter was first took because Peter
said then that he sorter felt like he warn't going to get well this time.
You see, he was pretty old, and George's g'yirls was too young to be much
company for him, except Mary Jane, the redheaded one and so he was
kinder lonesome after George and his wife died, and didn't seem to care
much to live. He most desperately wanted to see Harveyand William,
too, for that matterbecause he was one of them kind that can't bear to
make a will. He left a letter behind for Harvey, and said he'd told in
it where his money was hid, and how he wanted the rest of the property
divided up so George's g'yirls would be all rightfor George didn't
leave nothing. And that letter was all they could get him to put a pen
to."
"Why do you reckon Harvey don't come? Wher' does he live?"
"Oh, he lives in EnglandSheffieldpreaches therehasn't ever been in
this country. He hasn't had any too much timeand besides he mightn't a
got the letter at all, you know."
"Too bad, too bad he couldn't a lived to see his brothers, poor soul.
You going to Orleans, you say?"
"Yes, but that ain't only a part of it. I'm going in a ship, next
Wednesday, for Ryo Janeero, where my uncle lives."
"It's a pretty long journey. But it'll be lovely wisht I was agoing.
Is Mary Jane the oldest? How old is the others?"
"Mary Jane's nineteen, Susan's fifteen, and Joanna's about fourteen
that's the one that gives herself to good works and has a harelip."
"Poor things to be left alone in the cold world so."
"Well, they could be worse off. Old Peter had friends, and they ain't
going to let them come to no harm. There's Hobson, the Babtis' preacher
and Deacon Lot Hovey, and Ben Rucker, and Abner Shackleford, and Levi
Bell, the lawyer and Dr. Robinson, and their wives, and the widow
Bartley, andwell, there's a lot of them but these are the ones that
Peter was thickest with, and used to write about sometimes, when he wrote
home so Harvey 'll know where to look for friends when he gets here."
Well, the old man went on asking questions till he just fairly emptied
that young fellow. Blamed if he didn't inquire about everybody and
everything in that blessed town, and all about the Wilkses and about
Peter's businesswhich was a tanner and about George'swhich was a
carpenter and about Harvey'swhich was a dissentering minister and so
on, and so on. Then he says
"What did you want to walk all the way up to the steamboat for?"
"Because she's a big Orleans boat, and I was afeard she mightn't stop
there. When they're deep they won't stop for a hail. A Cincinnati boat
will, but this is a St. Louis one."
"Was Peter Wilks well off?"
"Oh, yes, pretty well off. He had houses and land, and it's reckoned he
left three or four thousand in cash hid up som'ers."
"When did you say he died?"
"I didn't say, but it was last night."
"Funeral tomorrow, likely?"
"Yes, 'bout the middle of the day."
"Well, it's all terrible sad but we've all got to go, one time or
another. So what we want to do is to be prepared then we're all right."
"Yes, sir, it's the best way. Ma used to always say that."
When we struck the boat she was about done loading, and pretty soon she
got off. The king never said nothing about going aboard, so I lost my
ride, after all. When the boat was gone the king made me paddle up
another mile to a lonesome place, and then he got ashore and says
"Now hustle back, right off, and fetch the duke up here, and the new
carpetbags. And if he's gone over to t'other side, go over there and
git him. And tell him to git himself up regardless. Shove along, now."
I see what HE was up to but I never said nothing, of course. When I got
back with the duke we hid the canoe, and then they set down on a log, and
the king told him everything, just like the young fellow had said it
every last word of it. And all the time he was adoing it he tried to
talk like an Englishman and he done it pretty well, too, for a slouch.
I can't imitate him, and so I ain't agoing to try to but he really done
it pretty good. Then he says
"How are you on the deef and dumb, Bilgewater?"
The duke said, leave him alone for that said he had played a deef and
dumb person on the histronic boards. So then they waited for a
steamboat.
About the middle of the afternoon a couple of little boats come along,
but they didn't come from high enough up the river but at last there was
a big one, and they hailed her. She sent out her yawl, and we went
aboard, and she was from Cincinnati and when they found we only wanted
to go four or five mile they was booming mad, and gave us a cussing, and
said they wouldn't land us. But the king was ca'm. He says
"If gentlemen kin afford to pay a dollar a mile apiece to be took on and
put off in a yawl, a steamboat kin afford to carry 'em, can't it?"
So they softened down and said it was all right and when we got to the
village they yawled us ashore. About two dozen men flocked down when
they see the yawl acoming, and when the king says
"Kin any of you gentlemen tell me wher' Mr. Peter Wilks lives?" they give
a glance at one another, and nodded their heads, as much as to say, "What
d' I tell you?" Then one of them says, kind of soft and gentle
"I'm sorry sir, but the best we can do is to tell you where he DID live
yesterday evening."
Sudden as winking the ornery old cretur went an to smash, and fell up
against the man, and put his chin on his shoulder, and cried down his
back, and says
"Alas, alas, our poor brothergone, and we never got to see him oh,
it's too, too hard"
Then he turns around, blubbering, and makes a lot of idiotic signs to the
duke on his hands, and blamed if he didn't drop a carpetbag and bust out
acrying. If they warn't the beatenest lot, them two frauds, that ever I
struck.
Well, the men gathered around and sympathized with them, and said all
sorts of kind things to them, and carried their carpetbags up the hill
for them, and let them lean on them and cry, and told the king all about
his brother's last moments, and the king he told it all over again on his
hands to the duke, and both of them took on about that dead tanner like
they'd lost the twelve disciples. Well, if ever I struck anything like
it, I'm a nigger. It was enough to make a body ashamed of the human race.
CHAPTER XXV.
THE news was all over town in two minutes, and you could see the people
tearing down on the run from every which way, some of them putting on
their coats as they come. Pretty soon we was in the middle of a crowd,
and the noise of the tramping was like a soldier march. The windows and
dooryards was full and every minute somebody would say, over a fence
"Is it THEM?"
And somebody trotting along with the gang would answer back and say
"You bet it is."
When we got to the house the street in front of it was packed, and the
three girls was standing in the door. Mary Jane WAS redheaded, but that
don't make no difference, she was most awful beautiful, and her face and
her eyes was all lit up like glory, she was so glad her uncles was come.
The king he spread his arms, and Mary Jane she jumped for them, and the
harelip jumped for the duke, and there they HAD it Everybody most,
leastways women, cried for joy to see them meet again at last and have
such good times.
Then the king he hunched the duke privateI see him do itand then he
looked around and see the coffin, over in the corner on two chairs so
then him and the duke, with a hand across each other's shoulder, and
t'other hand to their eyes, walked slow and solemn over there, everybody
dropping back to give them room, and all the talk and noise stopping,
people saying "Sh" and all the men taking their hats off and drooping
their heads, so you could a heard a pin fall. And when they got there
they bent over and looked in the coffin, and took one sight, and then
they bust out acrying so you could a heard them to Orleans, most and
then they put their arms around each other's necks, and hung their chins
over each other's shoulders and then for three minutes, or maybe four, I
never see two men leak the way they done. And, mind you, everybody was
doing the same and the place was that damp I never see anything like it.
Then one of them got on one side of the coffin, and t'other on t'other
side, and they kneeled down and rested their foreheads on the coffin, and
let on to pray all to themselves. Well, when it come to that it worked
the crowd like you never see anything like it, and everybody broke down
and went to sobbing right out loudthe poor girls, too and every woman,
nearly, went up to the girls, without saying a word, and kissed them,
solemn, on the forehead, and then put their hand on their head, and
looked up towards the sky, with the tears running down, and then busted
out and went off sobbing and swabbing, and give the next woman a show. I
never see anything so disgusting.
Well, by and by the king he gets up and comes forward a little, and works
himself up and slobbers out a speech, all full of tears and flapdoodle
about its being a sore trial for him and his poor brother to lose the
diseased, and to miss seeing diseased alive after the long journey of
four thousand mile, but it's a trial that's sweetened and sanctified to
us by this dear sympathy and these holy tears, and so he thanks them out
of his heart and out of his brother's heart, because out of their mouths
they can't, words being too weak and cold, and all that kind of rot and
slush, till it was just sickening and then he blubbers out a pious
goodygoody Amen, and turns himself loose and goes to crying fit to bust.
And the minute the words were out of his mouth somebody over in the crowd
struck up the doxolojer, and everybody joined in with all their might,
and it just warmed you up and made you feel as good as church letting
out. Music is a good thing and after all that soulbutter and hogwash I
never see it freshen up things so, and sound so honest and bully.
Then the king begins to work his jaw again, and says how him and his
nieces would be glad if a few of the main principal friends of the family
would take supper here with them this evening, and help set up with the
ashes of the diseased and says if his poor brother laying yonder could
speak he knows who he would name, for they was names that was very dear
to him, and mentioned often in his letters and so he will name the same,
to wit, as follows, vizz.Rev. Mr. Hobson, and Deacon Lot Hovey, and
Mr. Ben Rucker, and Abner Shackleford, and Levi Bell, and Dr. Robinson,
and their wives, and the widow Bartley.
Rev. Hobson and Dr. Robinson was down to the end of the town ahunting
togetherthat is, I mean the doctor was shipping a sick man to t'other
world, and the preacher was pinting him right. Lawyer Bell was away up
to Louisville on business. But the rest was on hand, and so they all
come and shook hands with the king and thanked him and talked to him and
then they shook hands with the duke and didn't say nothing, but just kept
asmiling and bobbing their heads like a passel of sapheads whilst he
made all sorts of signs with his hands and said "Googoogoogoogoo"
all the time, like a baby that can't talk.
So the king he blattered along, and managed to inquire about pretty much
everybody and dog in town, by his name, and mentioned all sorts of little
things that happened one time or another in the town, or to George's
family, or to Peter. And he always let on that Peter wrote him the
things but that was a lie he got every blessed one of them out of that
young flathead that we canoed up to the steamboat.
Then Mary Jane she fetched the letter her father left behind, and the
king he read it out loud and cried over it. It give the dwellinghouse
and three thousand dollars, gold, to the girls and it give the tanyard
which was doing a good business, along with some other houses and land
worth about seven thousand, and three thousand dollars in gold to
Harvey and William, and told where the six thousand cash was hid down
cellar. So these two frauds said they'd go and fetch it up, and have
everything square and aboveboard and told me to come with a candle. We
shut the cellar door behind us, and when they found the bag they spilt it
out on the floor, and it was a lovely sight, all them yallerboys. My,
the way the king's eyes did shine He slaps the duke on the shoulder and
says
"Oh, THIS ain't bully nor noth'n Oh, no, I reckon not Why, Billy, it
beats the Nonesuch, DON'T it?"
The duke allowed it did. They pawed the yallerboys, and sifted them
through their fingers and let them jingle down on the floor and the king
says
"It ain't no use talkin' bein' brothers to a rich dead man and
representatives of furrin heirs that's got left is the line for you and
me, Bilge. Thish yer comes of trust'n to Providence. It's the best way,
in the long run. I've tried 'em all, and ther' ain't no better way."
Most everybody would a been satisfied with the pile, and took it on
trust but no, they must count it. So they counts it, and it comes out
four hundred and fifteen dollars short. Says the king
"Dern him, I wonder what he done with that four hundred and fifteen
dollars?"
They worried over that awhile, and ransacked all around for it. Then the
duke says
"Well, he was a pretty sick man, and likely he made a mistakeI reckon
that's the way of it. The best way's to let it go, and keep still about
it. We can spare it."
"Oh, shucks, yes, we can SPARE it. I don't k'yer noth'n 'bout thatit's
the COUNT I'm thinkin' about. We want to be awful square and open and
aboveboard here, you know. We want to lug this hyer money up stairs
and count it before everybodythen ther' ain't noth'n suspicious. But
when the dead man says ther's six thous'n dollars, you know, we don't
want to"
"Hold on," says the duke. "Le's make up the deffisit," and he begun to
haul out yallerboys out of his pocket.
"It's a most amaz'n' good idea, dukeyou HAVE got a rattlin' clever head
on you," says the king. "Blest if the old Nonesuch ain't a heppin' us
out agin," and HE begun to haul out yallerjackets and stack them up.
It most busted them, but they made up the six thousand clean and clear.
"Say," says the duke, "I got another idea. Le's go up stairs and count
this money, and then take and GIVE IT TO THE GIRLS."
"Good land, duke, lemme hug you It's the most dazzling idea 'at ever a
man struck. You have cert'nly got the most astonishin' head I ever see.
Oh, this is the boss dodge, ther' ain't no mistake 'bout it. Let 'em
fetch along their suspicions now if they want tothis 'll lay 'em out."
When we got upstairs everybody gethered around the table, and the king
he counted it and stacked it up, three hundred dollars in a piletwenty
elegant little piles. Everybody looked hungry at it, and licked their
chops. Then they raked it into the bag again, and I see the king begin
to swell himself up for another speech. He says
"Friends all, my poor brother that lays yonder has done generous by them
that's left behind in the vale of sorrers. He has done generous by these
yer poor little lambs that he loved and sheltered, and that's left
fatherless and motherless. Yes, and we that knowed him knows that he
would a done MORE generous by 'em if he hadn't ben afeard o' woundin' his
dear William and me. Now, WOULDN'T he? Ther' ain't no question 'bout it
in MY mind. Well, then, what kind o' brothers would it be that 'd stand
in his way at sech a time? And what kind o' uncles would it be that 'd
robyes, ROBsech poor sweet lambs as these 'at he loved so at sech a
time? If I know Williamand I THINK I dohewell, I'll jest ask him."
He turns around and begins to make a lot of signs to the duke with his
hands, and the duke he looks at him stupid and leatherheaded a while
then all of a sudden he seems to catch his meaning, and jumps for the
king, googooing with all his might for joy, and hugs him about fifteen
times before he lets up. Then the king says, "I knowed it I reckon THAT
'll convince anybody the way HE feels about it. Here, Mary Jane, Susan,
Joanner, take the moneytake it ALL. It's the gift of him that lays
yonder, cold but joyful."
Mary Jane she went for him, Susan and the harelip went for the duke, and
then such another hugging and kissing I never see yet. And everybody
crowded up with the tears in their eyes, and most shook the hands off of
them frauds, saying all the time
"You DEAR good soulshow LOVELYhow COULD you"
Well, then, pretty soon all hands got to talking about the diseased
again, and how good he was, and what a loss he was, and all that and
before long a big ironjawed man worked himself in there from outside,
and stood alistening and looking, and not saying anything and nobody
saying anything to him either, because the king was talking and they was
all busy listening. The king was sayingin the middle of something he'd
started in on
"they bein' partickler friends o' the diseased. That's why they're
invited here this evenin' but tomorrow we want ALL to comeeverybody
for he respected everybody, he liked everybody, and so it's fitten that
his funeral orgies sh'd be public."
And so he went amooning on and on, liking to hear himself talk, and
every little while he fetched in his funeral orgies again, till the duke
he couldn't stand it no more so he writes on a little scrap of paper,
"OBSEQUIES, you old fool," and folds it up, and goes to googooing and
reaching it over people's heads to him. The king he reads it and puts it
in his pocket, and says
"Poor William, afflicted as he is, his HEART'S aluz right. Asks me to
invite everybody to come to the funeralwants me to make 'em all
welcome. But he needn't a worriedit was jest what I was at."
Then he weaves along again, perfectly ca'm, and goes to dropping in his
funeral orgies again every now and then, just like he done before. And
when he done it the third time he says
"I say orgies, not because it's the common term, because it ain't
obsequies bein' the common termbut because orgies is the right term.
Obsequies ain't used in England no more nowit's gone out. We say
orgies now in England. Orgies is better, because it means the thing
you're after more exact. It's a word that's made up out'n the Greek
ORGO, outside, open, abroad and the Hebrew JEESUM, to plant, cover up
hence inTER. So, you see, funeral orgies is an open er public funeral."
He was the WORST I ever struck. Well, the ironjawed man he laughed
right in his face. Everybody was shocked. Everybody says, "Why,
DOCTOR" and Abner Shackleford says
"Why, Robinson, hain't you heard the news? This is Harvey Wilks."
The king he smiled eager, and shoved out his flapper, and says
"Is it my poor brother's dear good friend and physician? I"
"Keep your hands off of me" says the doctor. "YOU talk like an
Englishman, DON'T you? It's the worst imitation I ever heard. YOU Peter
Wilks's brother You're a fraud, that's what you are"
Well, how they all took on They crowded around the doctor and tried to
quiet him down, and tried to explain to him and tell him how Harvey 'd
showed in forty ways that he WAS Harvey, and knowed everybody by name,
and the names of the very dogs, and begged and BEGGED him not to hurt
Harvey's feelings and the poor girl's feelings, and all that. But it
warn't no use he stormed right along, and said any man that pretended to
be an Englishman and couldn't imitate the lingo no better than what he
did was a fraud and a liar. The poor girls was hanging to the king and
crying and all of a sudden the doctor ups and turns on THEM. He says
"I was your father's friend, and I'm your friend and I warn you as a
friend, and an honest one that wants to protect you and keep you out of
harm and trouble, to turn your backs on that scoundrel and have nothing
to do with him, the ignorant tramp, with his idiotic Greek and Hebrew, as
he calls it. He is the thinnest kind of an impostorhas come here with
a lot of empty names and facts which he picked up somewheres, and you
take them for PROOFS, and are helped to fool yourselves by these foolish
friends here, who ought to know better. Mary Jane Wilks, you know me for
your friend, and for your unselfish friend, too. Now listen to me turn
this pitiful rascal outI BEG you to do it. Will you?"
Mary Jane straightened herself up, and my, but she was handsome She
says
"HERE is my answer." She hove up the bag of money and put it in the
king's hands, and says, "Take this six thousand dollars, and invest for
me and my sisters any way you want to, and don't give us no receipt for
it."
Then she put her arm around the king on one side, and Susan and the
harelip done the same on the other. Everybody clapped their hands and
stomped on the floor like a perfect storm, whilst the king held up his
head and smiled proud. The doctor says
"All right I wash MY hands of the matter. But I warn you all that a
time 's coming when you're going to feel sick whenever you think of this
day." And away he went.
"All right, doctor," says the king, kinder mocking him "we'll try and
get 'em to send for you" which made them all laugh, and they said it was
a prime good hit.
CHAPTER XXVI.
WELL, when they was all gone the king he asks Mary Jane how they was off
for spare rooms, and she said she had one spare room, which would do for
Uncle William, and she'd give her own room to Uncle Harvey, which was a
little bigger, and she would turn into the room with her sisters and
sleep on a cot and up garret was a little cubby, with a pallet in it.
The king said the cubby would do for his valleymeaning me.
So Mary Jane took us up, and she showed them their rooms, which was plain
but nice. She said she'd have her frocks and a lot of other traps took
out of her room if they was in Uncle Harvey's way, but he said they
warn't. The frocks was hung along the wall, and before them was a
curtain made out of calico that hung down to the floor. There was an old
hair trunk in one corner, and a guitarbox in another, and all sorts of
little knickknacks and jimcracks around, like girls brisken up a room
with. The king said it was all the more homely and more pleasanter for
these fixings, and so don't disturb them. The duke's room was pretty
small, but plenty good enough, and so was my cubby.
That night they had a big supper, and all them men and women was there,
and I stood behind the king and the duke's chairs and waited on them, and
the niggers waited on the rest. Mary Jane she set at the head of the
table, with Susan alongside of her, and said how bad the biscuits was,
and how mean the preserves was, and how ornery and tough the fried
chickens wasand all that kind of rot, the way women always do for to
force out compliments and the people all knowed everything was tiptop,
and said sosaid "How DO you get biscuits to brown so nice?" and "Where,
for the land's sake, DID you get these amaz'n pickles?" and all that kind
of humbug talkytalk, just the way people always does at a supper, you
know.
And when it was all done me and the harelip had supper in the kitchen
off of the leavings, whilst the others was helping the niggers clean up
the things. The harelip she got to pumping me about England, and blest
if I didn't think the ice was getting mighty thin sometimes. She says
"Did you ever see the king?"
"Who? William Fourth? Well, I bet I havehe goes to our church." I
knowed he was dead years ago, but I never let on. So when I says he goes
to our church, she says
"Whatregular?"
"Yesregular. His pew's right over opposite ournon t'other side the
pulpit."
"I thought he lived in London?"
"Well, he does. Where WOULD he live?"
"But I thought YOU lived in Sheffield?"
I see I was up a stump. I had to let on to get choked with a chicken
bone, so as to get time to think how to get down again. Then I says
"I mean he goes to our church regular when he's in Sheffield. That's
only in the summer time, when he comes there to take the sea baths."
"Why, how you talkSheffield ain't on the sea."
"Well, who said it was?"
"Why, you did."
"I DIDN'T nuther."
"You did"
"I didn't."
"You did."
"I never said nothing of the kind."
"Well, what DID you say, then?"
"Said he come to take the sea BATHSthat's what I said."
"Well, then, how's he going to take the sea baths if it ain't on the
sea?"
"Looky here," I says "did you ever see any Congresswater?"
"Yes."
"Well, did you have to go to Congress to get it?"
"Why, no."
"Well, neither does William Fourth have to go to the sea to get a sea
bath."
"How does he get it, then?"
"Gets it the way people down here gets Congresswaterin barrels. There
in the palace at Sheffield they've got furnaces, and he wants his water
hot. They can't bile that amount of water away off there at the sea.
They haven't got no conveniences for it."
"Oh, I see, now. You might a said that in the first place and saved
time."
When she said that I see I was out of the woods again, and so I was
comfortable and glad. Next, she says
"Do you go to church, too?"
"Yesregular."
"Where do you set?"
"Why, in our pew."
"WHOSE pew?"
"Why, OURNyour Uncle Harvey's."
"His'n? What does HE want with a pew?"
"Wants it to set in. What did you RECKON he wanted with it?"
"Why, I thought he'd be in the pulpit."
Rot him, I forgot he was a preacher. I see I was up a stump again, so I
played another chicken bone and got another think. Then I says
"Blame it, do you suppose there ain't but one preacher to a church?"
"Why, what do they want with more?"
"Whatto preach before a king? I never did see such a girl as you.
They don't have no less than seventeen."
"Seventeen My land Why, I wouldn't set out such a string as that, not
if I NEVER got to glory. It must take 'em a week."
"Shucks, they don't ALL of 'em preach the same dayonly ONE of 'em."
"Well, then, what does the rest of 'em do?"
"Oh, nothing much. Loll around, pass the plateand one thing or
another. But mainly they don't do nothing."
"Well, then, what are they FOR?"
"Why, they're for STYLE. Don't you know nothing?"
"Well, I don't WANT to know no such foolishness as that. How is servants
treated in England? Do they treat 'em better 'n we treat our niggers?"
"NO A servant ain't nobody there. They treat them worse than dogs."
"Don't they give 'em holidays, the way we do, Christmas and New Year's
week, and Fourth of July?"
"Oh, just listen A body could tell YOU hain't ever been to England by
that. Why, Harelwhy, Joanna, they never see a holiday from year's end
to year's end never go to the circus, nor theater, nor nigger shows, nor
nowheres."
"Nor church?"
"Nor church."
"But YOU always went to church."
Well, I was gone up again. I forgot I was the old man's servant. But
next minute I whirled in on a kind of an explanation how a valley was
different from a common servant and HAD to go to church whether he wanted
to or not, and set with the family, on account of its being the law. But
I didn't do it pretty good, and when I got done I see she warn't
satisfied. She says
"Honest injun, now, hain't you been telling me a lot of lies?"
"Honest injun," says I.
"None of it at all?"
"None of it at all. Not a lie in it," says I.
"Lay your hand on this book and say it."
I see it warn't nothing but a dictionary, so I laid my hand on it and
said it. So then she looked a little better satisfied, and says
"Well, then, I'll believe some of it but I hope to gracious if I'll
believe the rest."
"What is it you won't believe, Joe?" says Mary Jane, stepping in with
Susan behind her. "It ain't right nor kind for you to talk so to him,
and him a stranger and so far from his people. How would you like to be
treated so?"
"That's always your way, Maimalways sailing in to help somebody before
they're hurt. I hain't done nothing to him. He's told some stretchers,
I reckon, and I said I wouldn't swallow it all and that's every bit and
grain I DID say. I reckon he can stand a little thing like that, can't
he?"
"I don't care whether 'twas little or whether 'twas big he's here in our
house and a stranger, and it wasn't good of you to say it. If you was in
his place it would make you feel ashamed and so you oughtn't to say a
thing to another person that will make THEM feel ashamed."
"Why, Maim, he said"
"It don't make no difference what he SAIDthat ain't the thing. The
thing is for you to treat him KIND, and not be saying things to make him
remember he ain't in his own country and amongst his own folks."
I says to myself, THIS is a girl that I'm letting that old reptle rob her
of her money
Then Susan SHE waltzed in and if you'll believe me, she did give
Harelip hark from the tomb
Says I to myself, and this is ANOTHER one that I'm letting him rob her of
her money
Then Mary Jane she took another inning, and went in sweet and lovely
againwhich was her way but when she got done there warn't hardly
anything left o' poor Harelip. So she hollered.
"All right, then," says the other girls "you just ask his pardon."
She done it, too and she done it beautiful. She done it so beautiful it
was good to hear and I wished I could tell her a thousand lies, so she
could do it again.
I says to myself, this is ANOTHER one that I'm letting him rob her of her
money. And when she got through they all jest laid theirselves out to
make me feel at home and know I was amongst friends. I felt so ornery
and low down and mean that I says to myself, my mind's made up I'll hive
that money for them or bust.
So then I lit outfor bed, I said, meaning some time or another. When I
got by myself I went to thinking the thing over. I says to myself, shall
I go to that doctor, private, and blow on these frauds? Nothat won't
do. He might tell who told him then the king and the duke would make it
warm for me. Shall I go, private, and tell Mary Jane? NoI dasn't do
it. Her face would give them a hint, sure they've got the money, and
they'd slide right out and get away with it. If she was to fetch in help
I'd get mixed up in the business before it was done with, I judge. No
there ain't no good way but one. I got to steal that money, somehow and
I got to steal it some way that they won't suspicion that I done it.
They've got a good thing here, and they ain't agoing to leave till
they've played this family and this town for all they're worth, so I'll
find a chance time enough. I'll steal it and hide it and by and by, when
I'm away down the river, I'll write a letter and tell Mary Jane where
it's hid. But I better hive it tonight if I can, because the doctor
maybe hasn't let up as much as he lets on he has he might scare them out
of here yet.
So, thinks I, I'll go and search them rooms. Upstairs the hall was dark,
but I found the duke's room, and started to paw around it with my hands
but I recollected it wouldn't be much like the king to let anybody else
take care of that money but his own self so then I went to his room and
begun to paw around there. But I see I couldn't do nothing without a
candle, and I dasn't light one, of course. So I judged I'd got to do the
other thinglay for them and eavesdrop. About that time I hears their
footsteps coming, and was going to skip under the bed I reached for it,
but it wasn't where I thought it would be but I touched the curtain that
hid Mary Jane's frocks, so I jumped in behind that and snuggled in
amongst the gowns, and stood there perfectly still.
They come in and shut the door and the first thing the duke done was to
get down and look under the bed. Then I was glad I hadn't found the bed
when I wanted it. And yet, you know, it's kind of natural to hide under
the bed when you are up to anything private. They sets down then, and
the king says
"Well, what is it? And cut it middlin' short, because it's better for us
to be down there awhoopin' up the mournin' than up here givin' 'em a
chance to talk us over."
"Well, this is it, Capet. I ain't easy I ain't comfortable. That
doctor lays on my mind. I wanted to know your plans. I've got a notion,
and I think it's a sound one."
"What is it, duke?"
"That we better glide out of this before three in the morning, and clip
it down the river with what we've got. Specially, seeing we got it so
easyGIVEN back to us, flung at our heads, as you may say, when of
course we allowed to have to steal it back. I'm for knocking off and
lighting out."
That made me feel pretty bad. About an hour or two ago it would a been a
little different, but now it made me feel bad and disappointed, The king
rips out and says
"What And not sell out the rest o' the property? March off like a
passel of fools and leave eight or nine thous'n' dollars' worth o'
property layin' around jest sufferin' to be scooped in?and all good,
salable stuff, too."
The duke he grumbled said the bag of gold was enough, and he didn't want
to go no deeperdidn't want to rob a lot of orphans of EVERYTHING they
had.
"Why, how you talk" says the king. "We sha'n't rob 'em of nothing at
all but jest this money. The people that BUYS the property is the
suff'rers because as soon 's it's found out 'at we didn't own itwhich
won't be long after we've slidthe sale won't be valid, and it 'll all
go back to the estate. These yer orphans 'll git their house back agin,
and that's enough for THEM they're young and spry, and k'n easy earn a
livin'. THEY ain't agoin to suffer. Why, jest thinkthere's thous'n's
and thous'n's that ain't nigh so well off. Bless you, THEY ain't got
noth'n' to complain of."
Well, the king he talked him blind so at last he give in, and said all
right, but said he believed it was blamed foolishness to stay, and that
doctor hanging over them. But the king says
"Cuss the doctor What do we k'yer for HIM? Hain't we got all the fools
in town on our side? And ain't that a big enough majority in any town?"
So they got ready to go down stairs again. The duke says
"I don't think we put that money in a good place."
That cheered me up. I'd begun to think I warn't going to get a hint of
no kind to help me. The king says
"Why?"
"Because Mary Jane 'll be in mourning from this out and first you know
the nigger that does up the rooms will get an order to box these duds up
and put 'em away and do you reckon a nigger can run across money and not
borrow some of it?"
"Your head's level agin, duke," says the king and he comes afumbling
under the curtain two or three foot from where I was. I stuck tight to
the wall and kept mighty still, though quivery and I wondered what them
fellows would say to me if they catched me and I tried to think what I'd
better do if they did catch me. But the king he got the bag before I
could think more than about a half a thought, and he never suspicioned I
was around. They took and shoved the bag through a rip in the straw tick
that was under the featherbed, and crammed it in a foot or two amongst
the straw and said it was all right now, because a nigger only makes up
the featherbed, and don't turn over the straw tick only about twice a
year, and so it warn't in no danger of getting stole now.
But I knowed better. I had it out of there before they was halfway down
stairs. I groped along up to my cubby, and hid it there till I could get
a chance to do better. I judged I better hide it outside of the house
somewheres, because if they missed it they would give the house a good
ransacking I knowed that very well. Then I turned in, with my clothes
all on but I couldn't a gone to sleep if I'd a wanted to, I was in such
a sweat to get through with the business. By and by I heard the king and
the duke come up so I rolled off my pallet and laid with my chin at the
top of my ladder, and waited to see if anything was going to happen. But
nothing did.
So I held on till all the late sounds had quit and the early ones hadn't
begun yet and then I slipped down the ladder.
CHAPTER XXVII.
I CREPT to their doors and listened they was snoring. So I tiptoed
along, and got down stairs all right. There warn't a sound anywheres. I
peeped through a crack of the diningroom door, and see the men that was
watching the corpse all sound asleep on their chairs. The door was open
into the parlor, where the corpse was laying, and there was a candle in
both rooms. I passed along, and the parlor door was open but I see there
warn't nobody in there but the remainders of Peter so I shoved on by
but the front door was locked, and the key wasn't there. Just then I
heard somebody coming down the stairs, back behind me. I run in the
parlor and took a swift look around, and the only place I see to hide the
bag was in the coffin. The lid was shoved along about a foot, showing
the dead man's face down in there, with a wet cloth over it, and his
shroud on. I tucked the moneybag in under the lid, just down beyond
where his hands was crossed, which made me creep, they was so cold, and
then I run back across the room and in behind the door.
The person coming was Mary Jane. She went to the coffin, very soft, and
kneeled down and looked in then she put up her handkerchief, and I see
she begun to cry, though I couldn't hear her, and her back was to me. I
slid out, and as I passed the diningroom I thought I'd make sure them
watchers hadn't seen me so I looked through the crack, and everything
was all right. They hadn't stirred.
I slipped up to bed, feeling ruther blue, on accounts of the thing
playing out that way after I had took so much trouble and run so much
resk about it. Says I, if it could stay where it is, all right because
when we get down the river a hundred mile or two I could write back to
Mary Jane, and she could dig him up again and get it but that ain't the
thing that's going to happen the thing that's going to happen is, the
money 'll be found when they come to screw on the lid. Then the king 'll
get it again, and it 'll be a long day before he gives anybody another
chance to smouch it from him. Of course I WANTED to slide down and get it
out of there, but I dasn't try it. Every minute it was getting earlier
now, and pretty soon some of them watchers would begin to stir, and I
might get catchedcatched with six thousand dollars in my hands that
nobody hadn't hired me to take care of. I don't wish to be mixed up in
no such business as that, I says to myself.
When I got down stairs in the morning the parlor was shut up, and the
watchers was gone. There warn't nobody around but the family and the
widow Bartley and our tribe. I watched their faces to see if anything
had been happening, but I couldn't tell.
Towards the middle of the day the undertaker come with his man, and they
set the coffin in the middle of the room on a couple of chairs, and then
set all our chairs in rows, and borrowed more from the neighbors till the
hall and the parlor and the diningroom was full. I see the coffin lid
was the way it was before, but I dasn't go to look in under it, with
folks around.
Then the people begun to flock in, and the beats and the girls took seats
in the front row at the head of the coffin, and for a half an hour the
people filed around slow, in single rank, and looked down at the dead
man's face a minute, and some dropped in a tear, and it was all very
still and solemn, only the girls and the beats holding handkerchiefs to
their eyes and keeping their heads bent, and sobbing a little. There
warn't no other sound but the scraping of the feet on the floor and
blowing nosesbecause people always blows them more at a funeral than
they do at other places except church.
When the place was packed full the undertaker he slid around in his black
gloves with his softy soothering ways, putting on the last touches, and
getting people and things all shipshape and comfortable, and making no
more sound than a cat. He never spoke he moved people around, he
squeezed in late ones, he opened up passageways, and done it with nods,
and signs with his hands. Then he took his place over against the wall.
He was the softest, glidingest, stealthiest man I ever see and there
warn't no more smile to him than there is to a ham.
They had borrowed a melodeuma sick one and when everything was ready a
young woman set down and worked it, and it was pretty skreeky and
colicky, and everybody joined in and sung, and Peter was the only one
that had a good thing, according to my notion. Then the Reverend Hobson
opened up, slow and solemn, and begun to talk and straight off the most
outrageous row busted out in the cellar a body ever heard it was only
one dog, but he made a most powerful racket, and he kept it up right
along the parson he had to stand there, over the coffin, and waityou
couldn't hear yourself think. It was right down awkward, and nobody
didn't seem to know what to do. But pretty soon they see that
longlegged undertaker make a sign to the preacher as much as to say,
"Don't you worryjust depend on me." Then he stooped down and begun to
glide along the wall, just his shoulders showing over the people's heads.
So he glided along, and the powwow and racket getting more and more
outrageous all the time and at last, when he had gone around two sides
of the room, he disappears down cellar. Then in about two seconds we
heard a whack, and the dog he finished up with a most amazing howl or
two, and then everything was dead still, and the parson begun his solemn
talk where he left off. In a minute or two here comes this undertaker's
back and shoulders gliding along the wall again and so he glided and
glided around three sides of the room, and then rose up, and shaded his
mouth with his hands, and stretched his neck out towards the preacher,
over the people's heads, and says, in a kind of a coarse whisper, "HE HAD
A RAT" Then he drooped down and glided along the wall again to his
place. You could see it was a great satisfaction to the people, because
naturally they wanted to know. A little thing like that don't cost
nothing, and it's just the little things that makes a man to be looked up
to and liked. There warn't no more popular man in town than what that
undertaker was.
Well, the funeral sermon was very good, but pison long and tiresome and
then the king he shoved in and got off some of his usual rubbage, and at
last the job was through, and the undertaker begun to sneak up on the
coffin with his screwdriver. I was in a sweat then, and watched him
pretty keen. But he never meddled at all just slid the lid along as soft
as mush, and screwed it down tight and fast. So there I was I didn't
know whether the money was in there or not. So, says I, s'pose somebody
has hogged that bag on the sly?now how do I know whether to write to
Mary Jane or not? S'pose she dug him up and didn't find nothing, what
would she think of me? Blame it, I says, I might get hunted up and
jailed I'd better lay low and keep dark, and not write at all the
thing's awful mixed now trying to better it, I've worsened it a hundred
times, and I wish to goodness I'd just let it alone, dad fetch the whole
business
They buried him, and we come back home, and I went to watching faces
againI couldn't help it, and I couldn't rest easy. But nothing come
of it the faces didn't tell me nothing.
The king he visited around in the evening, and sweetened everybody up,
and made himself ever so friendly and he give out the idea that his
congregation over in England would be in a sweat about him, so he must
hurry and settle up the estate right away and leave for home. He was
very sorry he was so pushed, and so was everybody they wished he could
stay longer, but they said they could see it couldn't be done. And he
said of course him and William would take the girls home with them and
that pleased everybody too, because then the girls would be well fixed
and amongst their own relations and it pleased the girls, tootickled
them so they clean forgot they ever had a trouble in the world and told
him to sell out as quick as he wanted to, they would be ready. Them poor
things was that glad and happy it made my heart ache to see them getting
fooled and lied to so, but I didn't see no safe way for me to chip in and
change the general tune.
Well, blamed if the king didn't bill the house and the niggers and all
the property for auction straight offsale two days after the funeral
but anybody could buy private beforehand if they wanted to.
So the next day after the funeral, along about noontime, the girls' joy
got the first jolt. A couple of nigger traders come along, and the king
sold them the niggers reasonable, for threeday drafts as they called it,
and away they went, the two sons up the river to Memphis, and their
mother down the river to Orleans. I thought them poor girls and them
niggers would break their hearts for grief they cried around each other,
and took on so it most made me down sick to see it. The girls said they
hadn't ever dreamed of seeing the family separated or sold away from the
town. I can't ever get it out of my memory, the sight of them poor
miserable girls and niggers hanging around each other's necks and crying
and I reckon I couldn't a stood it all, but would a had to bust out and
tell on our gang if I hadn't knowed the sale warn't no account and the
niggers would be back home in a week or two.
The thing made a big stir in the town, too, and a good many come out
flatfooted and said it was scandalous to separate the mother and the
children that way. It injured the frauds some but the old fool he
bulled right along, spite of all the duke could say or do, and I tell you
the duke was powerful uneasy.
Next day was auction day. About broad day in the morning the king and
the duke come up in the garret and woke me up, and I see by their look
that there was trouble. The king says
"Was you in my room night before last?"
"No, your majesty"which was the way I always called him when nobody but
our gang warn't around.
"Was you in there yisterday er last night?"
"No, your majesty."
"Honor bright, nowno lies."
"Honor bright, your majesty, I'm telling you the truth. I hain't been
anear your room since Miss Mary Jane took you and the duke and showed it
to you."
The duke says
"Have you seen anybody else go in there?"
"No, your grace, not as I remember, I believe."
"Stop and think."
I studied awhile and see my chance then I says
"Well, I see the niggers go in there several times."
Both of them gave a little jump, and looked like they hadn't ever
expected it, and then like they HAD. Then the duke says
"What, all of them?"
"Noleastways, not all at oncethat is, I don't think I ever see them
all come OUT at once but just one time."
"Hello When was that?"
"It was the day we had the funeral. In the morning. It warn't early,
because I overslept. I was just starting down the ladder, and I see
them."
"Well, go on, GO on What did they do? How'd they act?"
"They didn't do nothing. And they didn't act anyway much, as fur as I
see. They tiptoed away so I seen, easy enough, that they'd shoved in
there to do up your majesty's room, or something, s'posing you was up
and found you WARN'T up, and so they was hoping to slide out of the way
of trouble without waking you up, if they hadn't already waked you up."
"Great guns, THIS is a go" says the king and both of them looked pretty
sick and tolerable silly. They stood there athinking and scratching
their heads a minute, and the duke he bust into a kind of a little raspy
chuckle, and says
"It does beat all how neat the niggers played their hand. They let on to
be SORRY they was going out of this region And I believed they WAS
sorry, and so did you, and so did everybody. Don't ever tell ME any more
that a nigger ain't got any histrionic talent. Why, the way they played
that thing it would fool ANYBODY. In my opinion, there's a fortune in
'em. If I had capital and a theater, I wouldn't want a better layout
than thatand here we've gone and sold 'em for a song. Yes, and ain't
privileged to sing the song yet. Say, where IS that songthat draft?"
"In the bank for to be collected. Where WOULD it be?"
"Well, THAT'S all right then, thank goodness."
Says I, kind of timidlike
"Is something gone wrong?"
The king whirls on me and rips out
"None o' your business You keep your head shet, and mind y'r own
affairsif you got any. Long as you're in this town don't you forgit
THATyou hear?" Then he says to the duke, "We got to jest swaller it
and say noth'n' mum's the word for US."
As they was starting down the ladder the duke he chuckles again, and
says
"Quick sales AND small profits It's a good businessyes."
The king snarls around on him and says
"I was trying to do for the best in sellin' 'em out so quick. If the
profits has turned out to be none, lackin' considable, and none to carry,
is it my fault any more'n it's yourn?"
"Well, THEY'D be in this house yet and we WOULDN'T if I could a got my
advice listened to."
The king sassed back as much as was safe for him, and then swapped around
and lit into ME again. He give me down the banks for not coming and
TELLING him I see the niggers come out of his room acting that waysaid
any fool would a KNOWED something was up. And then waltzed in and cussed
HIMSELF awhile, and said it all come of him not laying late and taking
his natural rest that morning, and he'd be blamed if he'd ever do it
again. So they went off ajawing and I felt dreadful glad I'd worked it
all off on to the niggers, and yet hadn't done the niggers no harm by it.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
BY and by it was gettingup time. So I come down the ladder and started
for downstairs but as I come to the girls' room the door was open, and
I see Mary Jane setting by her old hair trunk, which was open and she'd
been packing things in itgetting ready to go to England. But she had
stopped now with a folded gown in her lap, and had her face in her hands,
crying. I felt awful bad to see it of course anybody would. I went in
there and says
"Miss Mary Jane, you can't abear to see people in trouble, and I can't
most always. Tell me about it."
So she done it. And it was the niggersI just expected it. She said
the beautiful trip to England was most about spoiled for her she didn't
know HOW she was ever going to be happy there, knowing the mother and the
children warn't ever going to see each other no moreand then busted out
bitterer than ever, and flung up her hands, and says
"Oh, dear, dear, to think they ain't EVER going to see each other any
more"
"But they WILLand inside of two weeksand I KNOW it" says I.
Laws, it was out before I could think And before I could budge she
throws her arms around my neck and told me to say it AGAIN, say it AGAIN,
say it AGAIN
I see I had spoke too sudden and said too much, and was in a close place.
I asked her to let me think a minute and she set there, very impatient
and excited and handsome, but looking kind of happy and easedup, like a
person that's had a tooth pulled out. So I went to studying it out. I
says to myself, I reckon a body that ups and tells the truth when he is
in a tight place is taking considerable many resks, though I ain't had no
experience, and can't say for certain but it looks so to me, anyway and
yet here's a case where I'm blest if it don't look to me like the truth
is better and actuly SAFER than a lie. I must lay it by in my mind, and
think it over some time or other, it's so kind of strange and unregular.
I never see nothing like it. Well, I says to myself at last, I'm agoing
to chance it I'll up and tell the truth this time, though it does seem
most like setting down on a kag of powder and touching it off just to see
where you'll go to. Then I says
"Miss Mary Jane, is there any place out of town a little ways where you
could go and stay three or four days?"
"Yes Mr. Lothrop's. Why?"
"Never mind why yet. If I'll tell you how I know the niggers will see
each other again inside of two weekshere in this houseand PROVE how I
know itwill you go to Mr. Lothrop's and stay four days?"
"Four days" she says "I'll stay a year"
"All right," I says, "I don't want nothing more out of YOU than just your
wordI druther have it than another man's kisstheBible." She smiled
and reddened up very sweet, and I says, "If you don't mind it, I'll shut
the doorand bolt it."
Then I come back and set down again, and says
"Don't you holler. Just set still and take it like a man. I got to tell
the truth, and you want to brace up, Miss Mary, because it's a bad kind,
and going to be hard to take, but there ain't no help for it. These
uncles of yourn ain't no uncles at all they're a couple of frauds
regular deadbeats. There, now we're over the worst of it, you can stand
the rest middling easy."
It jolted her up like everything, of course but I was over the shoal
water now, so I went right along, her eyes ablazing higher and higher
all the time, and told her every blame thing, from where we first struck
that young fool going up to the steamboat, clear through to where she
flung herself on to the king's breast at the front door and he kissed her
sixteen or seventeen timesand then up she jumps, with her face afire
like sunset, and says
"The brute Come, don't waste a minutenot a SECONDwe'll have them
tarred and feathered, and flung in the river"
Says I
"Cert'nly. But do you mean BEFORE you go to Mr. Lothrop's, or"
"Oh," she says, "what am I THINKING about" she says, and set right down
again. "Don't mind what I saidplease don'tyou WON'T, now, WILL you?"
Laying her silky hand on mine in that kind of a way that I said I would
die first. "I never thought, I was so stirred up," she says "now go on,
and I won't do so any more. You tell me what to do, and whatever you say
I'll do it."
"Well," I says, "it's a rough gang, them two frauds, and I'm fixed so I
got to travel with them a while longer, whether I want to or notI
druther not tell you why and if you was to blow on them this town would
get me out of their claws, and I'd be all right but there'd be another
person that you don't know about who'd be in big trouble. Well, we got
to save HIM, hain't we? Of course. Well, then, we won't blow on them."
Saying them words put a good idea in my head. I see how maybe I could
get me and Jim rid of the frauds get them jailed here, and then leave.
But I didn't want to run the raft in the daytime without anybody aboard
to answer questions but me so I didn't want the plan to begin working
till pretty late tonight. I says
"Miss Mary Jane, I'll tell you what we'll do, and you won't have to stay
at Mr. Lothrop's so long, nuther. How fur is it?"
"A little short of four milesright out in the country, back here."
"Well, that 'll answer. Now you go along out there, and lay low till
nine or halfpast tonight, and then get them to fetch you home again
tell them you've thought of something. If you get here before eleven put
a candle in this window, and if I don't turn up wait TILL eleven, and
THEN if I don't turn up it means I'm gone, and out of the way, and safe.
Then you come out and spread the news around, and get these beats
jailed."
"Good," she says, "I'll do it."
"And if it just happens so that I don't get away, but get took up along
with them, you must up and say I told you the whole thing beforehand, and
you must stand by me all you can."
"Stand by you indeed I will. They sha'n't touch a hair of your head"
she says, and I see her nostrils spread and her eyes snap when she said
it, too.
"If I get away I sha'n't be here," I says, "to prove these rapscallions
ain't your uncles, and I couldn't do it if I WAS here. I could swear
they was beats and bummers, that's all, though that's worth something.
Well, there's others can do that better than what I can, and they're
people that ain't going to be doubted as quick as I'd be. I'll tell you
how to find them. Gimme a pencil and a piece of paper. There'Royal
Nonesuch, Bricksville.' Put it away, and don't lose it. When the court
wants to find out something about these two, let them send up to
Bricksville and say they've got the men that played the Royal Nonesuch,
and ask for some witnesseswhy, you'll have that entire town down here
before you can hardly wink, Miss Mary. And they'll come abiling, too."
I judged we had got everything fixed about right now. So I says
"Just let the auction go right along, and don't worry. Nobody don't have
to pay for the things they buy till a whole day after the auction on
accounts of the short notice, and they ain't going out of this till they
get that money and the way we've fixed it the sale ain't going to count,
and they ain't going to get no money. It's just like the way it was with
the niggersit warn't no sale, and the niggers will be back before
long. Why, they can't collect the money for the NIGGERS yetthey're in
the worst kind of a fix, Miss Mary."
"Well," she says, "I'll run down to breakfast now, and then I'll start
straight for Mr. Lothrop's."
"'Deed, THAT ain't the ticket, Miss Mary Jane," I says, "by no manner of
means go BEFORE breakfast."
"Why?"
"What did you reckon I wanted you to go at all for, Miss Mary?"
"Well, I never thoughtand come to think, I don't know. What was it?"
"Why, it's because you ain't one of these leatherface people. I don't
want no better book than what your face is. A body can set down and read
it off like coarse print. Do you reckon you can go and face your uncles
when they come to kiss you goodmorning, and never"
"There, there, don't Yes, I'll go before breakfastI'll be glad to.
And leave my sisters with them?"
"Yes never mind about them. They've got to stand it yet a while. They
might suspicion something if all of you was to go. I don't want you to
see them, nor your sisters, nor nobody in this town if a neighbor was to
ask how is your uncles this morning your face would tell something. No,
you go right along, Miss Mary Jane, and I'll fix it with all of them.
I'll tell Miss Susan to give your love to your uncles and say you've went
away for a few hours for to get a little rest and change, or to see a
friend, and you'll be back tonight or early in the morning."
"Gone to see a friend is all right, but I won't have my love given to
them."
"Well, then, it sha'n't be." It was well enough to tell HER sono harm
in it. It was only a little thing to do, and no trouble and it's the
little things that smooths people's roads the most, down here below it
would make Mary Jane comfortable, and it wouldn't cost nothing. Then I
says "There's one more thingthat bag of money."
"Well, they've got that and it makes me feel pretty silly to think HOW
they got it."
"No, you're out, there. They hain't got it."
"Why, who's got it?"
"I wish I knowed, but I don't. I HAD it, because I stole it from them
and I stole it to give to you and I know where I hid it, but I'm afraid
it ain't there no more. I'm awful sorry, Miss Mary Jane, I'm just as
sorry as I can be but I done the best I could I did honest. I come
nigh getting caught, and I had to shove it into the first place I come
to, and runand it warn't a good place."
"Oh, stop blaming yourselfit's too bad to do it, and I won't allow it
you couldn't help it it wasn't your fault. Where did you hide it?"
I didn't want to set her to thinking about her troubles again and I
couldn't seem to get my mouth to tell her what would make her see that
corpse laying in the coffin with that bag of money on his stomach. So
for a minute I didn't say nothing then I says
"I'd ruther not TELL you where I put it, Miss Mary Jane, if you don't
mind letting me off but I'll write it for you on a piece of paper, and
you can read it along the road to Mr. Lothrop's, if you want to. Do you
reckon that 'll do?"
"Oh, yes."
So I wrote "I put it in the coffin. It was in there when you was
crying there, away in the night. I was behind the door, and I was mighty
sorry for you, Miss Mary Jane."
It made my eyes water a little to remember her crying there all by
herself in the night, and them devils laying there right under her own
roof, shaming her and robbing her and when I folded it up and give it to
her I see the water come into her eyes, too and she shook me by the
hand, hard, and says
"GOODbye. I'm going to do everything just as you've told me and if I
don't ever see you again, I sha'n't ever forget you and I'll think of
you a many and a many a time, and I'll PRAY for you, too"and she was
gone.
Pray for me I reckoned if she knowed me she'd take a job that was more
nearer her size. But I bet she done it, just the sameshe was just that
kind. She had the grit to pray for Judus if she took the notionthere
warn't no backdown to her, I judge. You may say what you want to, but
in my opinion she had more sand in her than any girl I ever see in my
opinion she was just full of sand. It sounds like flattery, but it ain't
no flattery. And when it comes to beautyand goodness, tooshe lays
over them all. I hain't ever seen her since that time that I see her go
out of that door no, I hain't ever seen her since, but I reckon I've
thought of her a many and a many a million times, and of her saying she
would pray for me and if ever I'd a thought it would do any good for me
to pray for HER, blamed if I wouldn't a done it or bust.
Well, Mary Jane she lit out the back way, I reckon because nobody see
her go. When I struck Susan and the harelip, I says
"What's the name of them people over on t'other side of the river that
you all goes to see sometimes?"
They says
"There's several but it's the Proctors, mainly."
"That's the name," I says "I most forgot it. Well, Miss Mary Jane she
told me to tell you she's gone over there in a dreadful hurryone of
them's sick."
"Which one?"
"I don't know leastways, I kinder forget but I thinks it's"
"Sakes alive, I hope it ain't HANNER?"
"I'm sorry to say it," I says, "but Hanner's the very one."
"My goodness, and she so well only last week Is she took bad?"
"It ain't no name for it. They set up with her all night, Miss Mary Jane
said, and they don't think she'll last many hours."
"Only think of that, now What's the matter with her?"
I couldn't think of anything reasonable, right off that way, so I says
"Mumps."
"Mumps your granny They don't set up with people that's got the mumps."
"They don't, don't they? You better bet they do with THESE mumps. These
mumps is different. It's a new kind, Miss Mary Jane said."
"How's it a new kind?"
"Because it's mixed up with other things."
"What other things?"
"Well, measles, and whoopingcough, and erysiplas, and consumption, and
yaller janders, and brainfever, and I don't know what all."
"My land And they call it the MUMPS?"
"That's what Miss Mary Jane said."
"Well, what in the nation do they call it the MUMPS for?"
"Why, because it IS the mumps. That's what it starts with."
"Well, ther' ain't no sense in it. A body might stump his toe, and take
pison, and fall down the well, and break his neck, and bust his brains
out, and somebody come along and ask what killed him, and some numskull
up and say, 'Why, he stumped his TOE.' Would ther' be any sense in that?
NO. And ther' ain't no sense in THIS, nuther. Is it ketching?"
"Is it KETCHING? Why, how you talk. Is a HARROW catchingin the dark?
If you don't hitch on to one tooth, you're bound to on another, ain't
you? And you can't get away with that tooth without fetching the whole
harrow along, can you? Well, these kind of mumps is a kind of a harrow,
as you may sayand it ain't no slouch of a harrow, nuther, you come to
get it hitched on good."
"Well, it's awful, I think," says the harelip. "I'll go to Uncle Harvey
and"
"Oh, yes," I says, "I WOULD. Of COURSE I would. I wouldn't lose no
time."
"Well, why wouldn't you?"
"Just look at it a minute, and maybe you can see. Hain't your uncles
obleegd to get along home to England as fast as they can? And do you
reckon they'd be mean enough to go off and leave you to go all that
journey by yourselves? YOU know they'll wait for you. So fur, so good.
Your uncle Harvey's a preacher, ain't he? Very well, then is a PREACHER
going to deceive a steamboat clerk? is he going to deceive a SHIP CLERK?
so as to get them to let Miss Mary Jane go aboard? Now YOU know he
ain't. What WILL he do, then? Why, he'll say, 'It's a great pity, but
my church matters has got to get along the best way they can for my
niece has been exposed to the dreadful pluribusunum mumps, and so it's
my bounden duty to set down here and wait the three months it takes to
show on her if she's got it.' But never mind, if you think it's best to
tell your uncle Harvey"
"Shucks, and stay fooling around here when we could all be having good
times in England whilst we was waiting to find out whether Mary Jane's
got it or not? Why, you talk like a muggins."
"Well, anyway, maybe you'd better tell some of the neighbors."
"Listen at that, now. You do beat all for natural stupidness. Can't you
SEE that THEY'D go and tell? Ther' ain't no way but just to not tell
anybody at ALL."
"Well, maybe you're rightyes, I judge you ARE right."
"But I reckon we ought to tell Uncle Harvey she's gone out a while,
anyway, so he won't be uneasy about her?"
"Yes, Miss Mary Jane she wanted you to do that. She says, 'Tell them to
give Uncle Harvey and William my love and a kiss, and say I've run over
the river to see Mr.'Mr.what IS the name of that rich family your
uncle Peter used to think so much of?I mean the one that"
"Why, you must mean the Apthorps, ain't it?"
"Of course bother them kind of names, a body can't ever seem to remember
them, half the time, somehow. Yes, she said, say she has run over for to
ask the Apthorps to be sure and come to the auction and buy this house,
because she allowed her uncle Peter would ruther they had it than anybody
else and she's going to stick to them till they say they'll come, and
then, if she ain't too tired, she's coming home and if she is, she'll be
home in the morning anyway. She said, don't say nothing about the
Proctors, but only about the Apthorpswhich 'll be perfectly true,
because she is going there to speak about their buying the house I know
it, because she told me so herself."
"All right," they said, and cleared out to lay for their uncles, and give
them the love and the kisses, and tell them the message.
Everything was all right now. The girls wouldn't say nothing because
they wanted to go to England and the king and the duke would ruther Mary
Jane was off working for the auction than around in reach of Doctor
Robinson. I felt very good I judged I had done it pretty neatI
reckoned Tom Sawyer couldn't a done it no neater himself. Of course he
would a throwed more style into it, but I can't do that very handy, not
being brung up to it.
Well, they held the auction in the public square, along towards the end
of the afternoon, and it strung along, and strung along, and the old man
he was on hand and looking his level pisonest, up there longside of the
auctioneer, and chipping in a little Scripture now and then, or a little
goodygoody saying of some kind, and the duke he was around googooing
for sympathy all he knowed how, and just spreading himself generly.
But by and by the thing dragged through, and everything was sold
everything but a little old trifling lot in the graveyard. So they'd got
to work that offI never see such a girafft as the king was for wanting
to swallow EVERYTHING. Well, whilst they was at it a steamboat landed,
and in about two minutes up comes a crowd awhooping and yelling and
laughing and carrying on, and singing out
"HERE'S your opposition line here's your two sets o' heirs to old Peter
Wilksand you pays your money and you takes your choice"
CHAPTER XXIX.
THEY was fetching a very nicelooking old gentleman along, and a
nicelooking younger one, with his right arm in a sling. And, my souls,
how the people yelled and laughed, and kept it up. But I didn't see no
joke about it, and I judged it would strain the duke and the king some to
see any. I reckoned they'd turn pale. But no, nary a pale did THEY
turn. The duke he never let on he suspicioned what was up, but just went
a googooing around, happy and satisfied, like a jug that's googling out
buttermilk and as for the king, he just gazed and gazed down sorrowful
on them newcomers like it give him the stomachache in his very heart to
think there could be such frauds and rascals in the world. Oh, he done
it admirable. Lots of the principal people gethered around the king, to
let him see they was on his side. That old gentleman that had just come
looked all puzzled to death. Pretty soon he begun to speak, and I see
straight off he pronounced LIKE an Englishmannot the king's way, though
the king's WAS pretty good for an imitation. I can't give the old gent's
words, nor I can't imitate him but he turned around to the crowd, and
says, about like this
"This is a surprise to me which I wasn't looking for and I'll
acknowledge, candid and frank, I ain't very well fixed to meet it and
answer it for my brother and me has had misfortunes he's broke his arm,
and our baggage got put off at a town above here last night in the night
by a mistake. I am Peter Wilks' brother Harvey, and this is his brother
William, which can't hear nor speakand can't even make signs to amount
to much, now't he's only got one hand to work them with. We are who we
say we are and in a day or two, when I get the baggage, I can prove it.
But up till then I won't say nothing more, but go to the hotel and wait."
So him and the new dummy started off and the king he laughs, and
blethers out
"Broke his armVERY likely, AIN'T it?and very convenient, too, for a
fraud that's got to make signs, and ain't learnt how. Lost their
baggage That's MIGHTY goodand mighty ingeniousunder the
CIRCUMSTANCES"
So he laughed again and so did everybody else, except three or four, or
maybe half a dozen. One of these was that doctor another one was a
sharplooking gentleman, with a carpetbag of the oldfashioned kind made
out of carpetstuff, that had just come off of the steamboat and was
talking to him in a low voice, and glancing towards the king now and then
and nodding their headsit was Levi Bell, the lawyer that was gone up to
Louisville and another one was a big rough husky that come along and
listened to all the old gentleman said, and was listening to the king
now. And when the king got done this husky up and says
"Say, looky here if you are Harvey Wilks, when'd you come to this town?"
"The day before the funeral, friend," says the king.
"But what time o' day?"
"In the evenin''bout an hour er two before sundown."
"HOW'D you come?"
"I come down on the Susan Powell from Cincinnati."
"Well, then, how'd you come to be up at the Pint in the MORNIN'in a
canoe?"
"I warn't up at the Pint in the mornin'."
"It's a lie."
Several of them jumped for him and begged him not to talk that way to an
old man and a preacher.
"Preacher be hanged, he's a fraud and a liar. He was up at the Pint that
mornin'. I live up there, don't I? Well, I was up there, and he was up
there. I see him there. He come in a canoe, along with Tim Collins and
a boy."
The doctor he up and says
"Would you know the boy again if you was to see him, Hines?"
"I reckon I would, but I don't know. Why, yonder he is, now. I know him
perfectly easy."
It was me he pointed at. The doctor says
"Neighbors, I don't know whether the new couple is frauds or not but if
THESE two ain't frauds, I am an idiot, that's all. I think it's our duty
to see that they don't get away from here till we've looked into this
thing. Come along, Hines come along, the rest of you. We'll take these
fellows to the tavern and affront them with t'other couple, and I reckon
we'll find out SOMETHING before we get through."
It was nuts for the crowd, though maybe not for the king's friends so we
all started. It was about sundown. The doctor he led me along by the
hand, and was plenty kind enough, but he never let go my hand.
We all got in a big room in the hotel, and lit up some candles, and
fetched in the new couple. First, the doctor says
"I don't wish to be too hard on these two men, but I think they're
frauds, and they may have complices that we don't know nothing about. If
they have, won't the complices get away with that bag of gold Peter Wilks
left? It ain't unlikely. If these men ain't frauds, they won't object
to sending for that money and letting us keep it till they prove they're
all rightain't that so?"
Everybody agreed to that. So I judged they had our gang in a pretty
tight place right at the outstart. But the king he only looked
sorrowful, and says
"Gentlemen, I wish the money was there, for I ain't got no disposition to
throw anything in the way of a fair, open, outandout investigation o'
this misable business but, alas, the money ain't there you k'n send and
see, if you want to."
"Where is it, then?"
"Well, when my niece give it to me to keep for her I took and hid it
inside o' the straw tick o' my bed, not wishin' to bank it for the few
days we'd be here, and considerin' the bed a safe place, we not bein'
used to niggers, and suppos'n' 'em honest, like servants in England. The
niggers stole it the very next mornin' after I had went down stairs and
when I sold 'em I hadn't missed the money yit, so they got clean away
with it. My servant here k'n tell you 'bout it, gentlemen."
The doctor and several said "Shucks" and I see nobody didn't altogether
believe him. One man asked me if I see the niggers steal it. I said no,
but I see them sneaking out of the room and hustling away, and I never
thought nothing, only I reckoned they was afraid they had waked up my
master and was trying to get away before he made trouble with them. That
was all they asked me. Then the doctor whirls on me and says
"Are YOU English, too?"
I says yes and him and some others laughed, and said, "Stuff"
Well, then they sailed in on the general investigation, and there we had
it, up and down, hour in, hour out, and nobody never said a word about
supper, nor ever seemed to think about itand so they kept it up, and
kept it up and it WAS the worst mixedup thing you ever see. They made
the king tell his yarn, and they made the old gentleman tell his'n and
anybody but a lot of prejudiced chuckleheads would a SEEN that the old
gentleman was spinning truth and t'other one lies. And by and by they
had me up to tell what I knowed. The king he give me a lefthanded look
out of the corner of his eye, and so I knowed enough to talk on the right
side. I begun to tell about Sheffield, and how we lived there, and all
about the English Wilkses, and so on but I didn't get pretty fur till
the doctor begun to laugh and Levi Bell, the lawyer, says
"Set down, my boy I wouldn't strain myself if I was you. I reckon you
ain't used to lying, it don't seem to come handy what you want is
practice. You do it pretty awkward."
I didn't care nothing for the compliment, but I was glad to be let off,
anyway.
The doctor he started to say something, and turns and says
"If you'd been in town at first, Levi Bell" The king broke in and
reached out his hand, and says
"Why, is this my poor dead brother's old friend that he's wrote so often
about?"
The lawyer and him shook hands, and the lawyer smiled and looked pleased,
and they talked right along awhile, and then got to one side and talked
low and at last the lawyer speaks up and says
"That 'll fix it. I'll take the order and send it, along with your
brother's, and then they'll know it's all right."
So they got some paper and a pen, and the king he set down and twisted
his head to one side, and chawed his tongue, and scrawled off something
and then they give the pen to the dukeand then for the first time the
duke looked sick. But he took the pen and wrote. So then the lawyer
turns to the new old gentleman and says
"You and your brother please write a line or two and sign your names."
The old gentleman wrote, but nobody couldn't read it. The lawyer looked
powerful astonished, and says
"Well, it beats ME"and snaked a lot of old letters out of his pocket,
and examined them, and then examined the old man's writing, and then THEM
again and then says "These old letters is from Harvey Wilks and
here's THESE two handwritings, and anybody can see they didn't write
them" the king and the duke looked sold and foolish, I tell you, to see
how the lawyer had took them in, "and here's THIS old gentleman's hand
writing, and anybody can tell, easy enough, HE didn't write themfact
is, the scratches he makes ain't properly WRITING at all. Now, here's
some letters from"
The new old gentleman says
"If you please, let me explain. Nobody can read my hand but my brother
thereso he copies for me. It's HIS hand you've got there, not mine."
"WELL" says the lawyer, "this IS a state of things. I've got some of
William's letters, too so if you'll get him to write a line or so we can
com"
"He CAN'T write with his left hand," says the old gentleman. "If he
could use his right hand, you would see that he wrote his own letters and
mine too. Look at both, pleasethey're by the same hand."
The lawyer done it, and says
"I believe it's soand if it ain't so, there's a heap stronger
resemblance than I'd noticed before, anyway. Well, well, well I
thought we was right on the track of a solution, but it's gone to grass,
partly. But anyway, one thing is provedTHESE two ain't either of 'em
Wilkses"and he wagged his head towards the king and the duke.
Well, what do you think? That muleheaded old fool wouldn't give in THEN
Indeed he wouldn't. Said it warn't no fair test. Said his brother
William was the cussedest joker in the world, and hadn't tried to write
HE see William was going to play one of his jokes the minute he put the
pen to paper. And so he warmed up and went warbling right along till he
was actuly beginning to believe what he was saying HIMSELF but pretty
soon the new gentleman broke in, and says
"I've thought of something. Is there anybody here that helped to lay out
my brhelped to lay out the late Peter Wilks for burying?"
"Yes," says somebody, "me and Ab Turner done it. We're both here."
Then the old man turns towards the king, and says
"Perhaps this gentleman can tell me what was tattooed on his breast?"
Blamed if the king didn't have to brace up mighty quick, or he'd a
squshed down like a bluff bank that the river has cut under, it took him
so sudden and, mind you, it was a thing that was calculated to make most
ANYBODY sqush to get fetched such a solid one as that without any notice,
because how was HE going to know what was tattooed on the man? He
whitened a little he couldn't help it and it was mighty still in there,
and everybody bending a little forwards and gazing at him. Says I to
myself, NOW he'll throw up the spongethere ain't no more use. Well,
did he? A body can't hardly believe it, but he didn't. I reckon he
thought he'd keep the thing up till he tired them people out, so they'd
thin out, and him and the duke could break loose and get away. Anyway,
he set there, and pretty soon he begun to smile, and says
"Mf It's a VERY tough question, AIN'T it YES, sir, I k'n tell you
what's tattooed on his breast. It's jest a small, thin, blue arrow
that's what it is and if you don't look clost, you can't see it. NOW
what do you sayhey?"
Well, I never see anything like that old blister for clean outandout
cheek.
The new old gentleman turns brisk towards Ab Turner and his pard, and his
eye lights up like he judged he'd got the king THIS time, and says
"Thereyou've heard what he said Was there any such mark on Peter
Wilks' breast?"
Both of them spoke up and says
"We didn't see no such mark."
"Good" says the old gentleman. "Now, what you DID see on his breast was
a small dim P, and a B which is an initial he dropped when he was
young, and a W, with dashes between them, so PBW"and he marked
them that way on a piece of paper. "Come, ain't that what you saw?"
Both of them spoke up again, and says
"No, we DIDN'T. We never seen any marks at all."
Well, everybody WAS in a state of mind now, and they sings out
"The whole BILIN' of 'm 's frauds Le's duck 'em le's drown 'em le's
ride 'em on a rail" and everybody was whooping at once, and there was a
rattling powwow. But the lawyer he jumps on the table and yells, and
says
"GentlemengentleMEN Hear me just a wordjust a SINGLE wordif you
PLEASE There's one way yetlet's go and dig up the corpse and look."
That took them.
"Hooray" they all shouted, and was starting right off but the lawyer
and the doctor sung out
"Hold on, hold on Collar all these four men and the boy, and fetch THEM
along, too"
"We'll do it" they all shouted "and if we don't find them marks we'll
lynch the whole gang"
I WAS scared, now, I tell you. But there warn't no getting away, you
know. They gripped us all, and marched us right along, straight for the
graveyard, which was a mile and a half down the river, and the whole town
at our heels, for we made noise enough, and it was only nine in the
evening.
As we went by our house I wished I hadn't sent Mary Jane out of town
because now if I could tip her the wink she'd light out and save me, and
blow on our deadbeats.
Well, we swarmed along down the river road, just carrying on like
wildcats and to make it more scary the sky was darking up, and the
lightning beginning to wink and flitter, and the wind to shiver amongst
the leaves. This was the most awful trouble and most dangersome I ever
was in and I was kinder stunned everything was going so different from
what I had allowed for stead of being fixed so I could take my own time
if I wanted to, and see all the fun, and have Mary Jane at my back to
save me and set me free when the closefit come, here was nothing in the
world betwixt me and sudden death but just them tattoomarks. If they
didn't find them
I couldn't bear to think about it and yet, somehow, I couldn't think
about nothing else. It got darker and darker, and it was a beautiful
time to give the crowd the slip but that big husky had me by the wrist
Hinesand a body might as well try to give Goliar the slip. He dragged
me right along, he was so excited, and I had to run to keep up.
When they got there they swarmed into the graveyard and washed over it
like an overflow. And when they got to the grave they found they had
about a hundred times as many shovels as they wanted, but nobody hadn't
thought to fetch a lantern. But they sailed into digging anyway by the
flicker of the lightning, and sent a man to the nearest house, a half a
mile off, to borrow one.
So they dug and dug like everything and it got awful dark, and the rain
started, and the wind swished and swushed along, and the lightning come
brisker and brisker, and the thunder boomed but them people never took
no notice of it, they was so full of this business and one minute you
could see everything and every face in that big crowd, and the shovelfuls
of dirt sailing up out of the grave, and the next second the dark wiped
it all out, and you couldn't see nothing at all.
At last they got out the coffin and begun to unscrew the lid, and then
such another crowding and shouldering and shoving as there was, to
scrouge in and get a sight, you never see and in the dark, that way, it
was awful. Hines he hurt my wrist dreadful pulling and tugging so, and I
reckon he clean forgot I was in the world, he was so excited and panting.
All of a sudden the lightning let go a perfect sluice of white glare, and
somebody sings out
"By the living jingo, here's the bag of gold on his breast"
Hines let out a whoop, like everybody else, and dropped my wrist and give
a big surge to bust his way in and get a look, and the way I lit out and
shinned for the road in the dark there ain't nobody can tell.
I had the road all to myself, and I fairly flewleastways, I had it all
to myself except the solid dark, and the nowandthen glares, and the
buzzing of the rain, and the thrashing of the wind, and the splitting of
the thunder and sure as you are born I did clip it along
When I struck the town I see there warn't nobody out in the storm, so I
never hunted for no back streets, but humped it straight through the main
one and when I begun to get towards our house I aimed my eye and set it.
No light there the house all darkwhich made me feel sorry and
disappointed, I didn't know why. But at last, just as I was sailing by,
FLASH comes the light in Mary Jane's window and my heart swelled up
sudden, like to bust and the same second the house and all was behind me
in the dark, and wasn't ever going to be before me no more in this world.
She WAS the best girl I ever see, and had the most sand.
The minute I was far enough above the town to see I could make the
towhead, I begun to look sharp for a boat to borrow, and the first time
the lightning showed me one that wasn't chained I snatched it and shoved.
It was a canoe, and warn't fastened with nothing but a rope. The towhead
was a rattling big distance off, away out there in the middle of the
river, but I didn't lose no time and when I struck the raft at last I
was so fagged I would a just laid down to blow and gasp if I could
afforded it. But I didn't. As I sprung aboard I sung out
"Out with you, Jim, and set her loose Glory be to goodness, we're shut
of them"
Jim lit out, and was acoming for me with both arms spread, he was so
full of joy but when I glimpsed him in the lightning my heart shot up in
my mouth and I went overboard backwards for I forgot he was old King
Lear and a drownded Arab all in one, and it most scared the livers and
lights out of me. But Jim fished me out, and was going to hug me and
bless me, and so on, he was so glad I was back and we was shut of the
king and the duke, but I says
"Not now have it for breakfast, have it for breakfast Cut loose and
let her slide"
So in two seconds away we went asliding down the river, and it DID seem
so good to be free again and all by ourselves on the big river, and
nobody to bother us. I had to skip around a bit, and jump up and crack
my heels a few timesI couldn't help it but about the third crack I
noticed a sound that I knowed mighty well, and held my breath and
listened and waited and sure enough, when the next flash busted out over
the water, here they comeand just alaying to their oars and making
their skiff hum It was the king and the duke.
So I wilted right down on to the planks then, and give up and it was all
I could do to keep from crying.
CHAPTER XXX.
WHEN they got aboard the king went for me, and shook me by the collar,
and says
"Tryin' to give us the slip, was ye, you pup Tired of our company,
hey?"
I says
"No, your majesty, we warn'tPLEASE don't, your majesty"
"Quick, then, and tell us what WAS your idea, or I'll shake the insides
out o' you"
"Honest, I'll tell you everything just as it happened, your majesty. The
man that had aholt of me was very good to me, and kept saying he had a
boy about as big as me that died last year, and he was sorry to see a boy
in such a dangerous fix and when they was all took by surprise by
finding the gold, and made a rush for the coffin, he lets go of me and
whispers, 'Heel it now, or they'll hang ye, sure' and I lit out. It
didn't seem no good for ME to stayI couldn't do nothing, and I didn't
want to be hung if I could get away. So I never stopped running till I
found the canoe and when I got here I told Jim to hurry, or they'd catch
me and hang me yet, and said I was afeard you and the duke wasn't alive
now, and I was awful sorry, and so was Jim, and was awful glad when we
see you coming you may ask Jim if I didn't."
Jim said it was so and the king told him to shut up, and said, "Oh, yes,
it's MIGHTY likely" and shook me up again, and said he reckoned he'd
drownd me. But the duke says
"Leggo the boy, you old idiot Would YOU a done any different? Did you
inquire around for HIM when you got loose? I don't remember it."
So the king let go of me, and begun to cuss that town and everybody in
it. But the duke says
"You better a blame' sight give YOURSELF a good cussing, for you're the
one that's entitled to it most. You hain't done a thing from the start
that had any sense in it, except coming out so cool and cheeky with that
imaginary bluearrow mark. That WAS brightit was right down bully and
it was the thing that saved us. For if it hadn't been for that they'd a
jailed us till them Englishmen's baggage comeand thenthe
penitentiary, you bet But that trick took 'em to the graveyard, and the
gold done us a still bigger kindness for if the excited fools hadn't let
go all holts and made that rush to get a look we'd a slept in our cravats
tonightcravats warranted to WEAR, toolonger than WE'D need 'em."
They was still a minutethinking then the king says, kind of
absentminded like
"Mf And we reckoned the NIGGERS stole it"
That made me squirm
"Yes," says the duke, kinder slow and deliberate and sarcastic, "WE did."
After about a half a minute the king drawls out
"Leastways, I did."
The duke says, the same way
"On the contrary, I did."
The king kind of ruffles up, and says
"Looky here, Bilgewater, what'r you referrin' to?"
The duke says, pretty brisk
"When it comes to that, maybe you'll let me ask, what was YOU referring
to?"
"Shucks" says the king, very sarcastic "but I don't knowmaybe you was
asleep, and didn't know what you was about."
The duke bristles up now, and says
"Oh, let UP on this cussed nonsense do you take me for a blame' fool?
Don't you reckon I know who hid that money in that coffin?"
"YES, sir I know you DO know, because you done it yourself"
"It's a lie"and the duke went for him. The king sings out
"Take y'r hands offleggo my throatI take it all back"
The duke says
"Well, you just own up, first, that you DID hide that money there,
intending to give me the slip one of these days, and come back and dig it
up, and have it all to yourself."
"Wait jest a minute, dukeanswer me this one question, honest and fair
if you didn't put the money there, say it, and I'll b'lieve you, and take
back everything I said."
"You old scoundrel, I didn't, and you know I didn't. There, now"
"Well, then, I b'lieve you. But answer me only jest this one morenow
DON'T git mad didn't you have it in your mind to hook the money and hide
it?"
The duke never said nothing for a little bit then he says
"Well, I don't care if I DID, I didn't DO it, anyway. But you not only
had it in mind to do it, but you DONE it."
"I wisht I never die if I done it, duke, and that's honest. I won't say
I warn't goin' to do it, because I WAS but youI mean somebodygot in
ahead o' me."
"It's a lie You done it, and you got to SAY you done it, or"
The king began to gurgle, and then he gasps out
"'NoughI OWN UP"
I was very glad to hear him say that it made me feel much more easier
than what I was feeling before. So the duke took his hands off and says
"If you ever deny it again I'll drown you. It's WELL for you to set
there and blubber like a babyit's fitten for you, after the way you've
acted. I never see such an old ostrich for wanting to gobble everything
and I atrusting you all the time, like you was my own father. You ought
to been ashamed of yourself to stand by and hear it saddled on to a lot
of poor niggers, and you never say a word for 'em. It makes me feel
ridiculous to think I was soft enough to BELIEVE that rubbage. Cuss you,
I can see now why you was so anxious to make up the deffisityou wanted
to get what money I'd got out of the Nonesuch and one thing or another,
and scoop it ALL"
The king says, timid, and still asnuffling
"Why, duke, it was you that said make up the deffisit it warn't me."
"Dry up I don't want to hear no more out of you" says the duke. "And
NOW you see what you GOT by it. They've got all their own money back,
and all of OURN but a shekel or two BESIDES. G'long to bed, and don't
you deffersit ME no more deffersits, long 's YOU live"
So the king sneaked into the wigwam and took to his bottle for comfort,
and before long the duke tackled HIS bottle and so in about a half an
hour they was as thick as thieves again, and the tighter they got the
lovinger they got, and went off asnoring in each other's arms. They
both got powerful mellow, but I noticed the king didn't get mellow enough
to forget to remember to not deny about hiding the moneybag again. That
made me feel easy and satisfied. Of course when they got to snoring we
had a long gabble, and I told Jim everything.
CHAPTER XXXI.
WE dasn't stop again at any town for days and days kept right along down
the river. We was down south in the warm weather now, and a mighty long
ways from home. We begun to come to trees with Spanish moss on them,
hanging down from the limbs like long, gray beards. It was the first I
ever see it growing, and it made the woods look solemn and dismal. So
now the frauds reckoned they was out of danger, and they begun to work
the villages again.
First they done a lecture on temperance but they didn't make enough for
them both to get drunk on. Then in another village they started a
dancingschool but they didn't know no more how to dance than a kangaroo
does so the first prance they made the general public jumped in and
pranced them out of town. Another time they tried to go at yellocution
but they didn't yellocute long till the audience got up and give them a
solid good cussing, and made them skip out. They tackled missionarying,
and mesmerizing, and doctoring, and telling fortunes, and a little of
everything but they couldn't seem to have no luck. So at last they got
just about dead broke, and laid around the raft as she floated along,
thinking and thinking, and never saying nothing, by the half a day at a
time, and dreadful blue and desperate.
And at last they took a change and begun to lay their heads together in
the wigwam and talk low and confidential two or three hours at a time.
Jim and me got uneasy. We didn't like the look of it. We judged they
was studying up some kind of worse deviltry than ever. We turned it over
and over, and at last we made up our minds they was going to break into
somebody's house or store, or was going into the counterfeitmoney
business, or something. So then we was pretty scared, and made up an
agreement that we wouldn't have nothing in the world to do with such
actions, and if we ever got the least show we would give them the cold
shake and clear out and leave them behind. Well, early one morning we hid
the raft in a good, safe place about two mile below a little bit of a
shabby village named Pikesville, and the king he went ashore and told us
all to stay hid whilst he went up to town and smelt around to see if
anybody had got any wind of the Royal Nonesuch there yet. "House to rob,
you MEAN," says I to myself "and when you get through robbing it you'll
come back here and wonder what has become of me and Jim and the raftand
you'll have to take it out in wondering." And he said if he warn't back
by midday the duke and me would know it was all right, and we was to come
along.
So we stayed where we was. The duke he fretted and sweated around, and
was in a mighty sour way. He scolded us for everything, and we couldn't
seem to do nothing right he found fault with every little thing.
Something was abrewing, sure. I was good and glad when midday come and
no king we could have a change, anywayand maybe a chance for THE
chance on top of it. So me and the duke went up to the village, and
hunted around there for the king, and by and by we found him in the back
room of a little low doggery, very tight, and a lot of loafers
bullyragging him for sport, and he acussing and athreatening with all
his might, and so tight he couldn't walk, and couldn't do nothing to
them. The duke he begun to abuse him for an old fool, and the king begun
to sass back, and the minute they was fairly at it I lit out and shook
the reefs out of my hind legs, and spun down the river road like a deer,
for I see our chance and I made up my mind that it would be a long day
before they ever see me and Jim again. I got down there all out of
breath but loaded up with joy, and sung out
"Set her loose, Jim we're all right now"
But there warn't no answer, and nobody come out of the wigwam. Jim was
gone I set up a shoutand then anotherand then another one and run
this way and that in the woods, whooping and screeching but it warn't no
useold Jim was gone. Then I set down and cried I couldn't help it.
But I couldn't set still long. Pretty soon I went out on the road,
trying to think what I better do, and I run across a boy walking, and
asked him if he'd seen a strange nigger dressed so and so, and he says
"Yes."
"Whereabouts?" says I.
"Down to Silas Phelps' place, two mile below here. He's a runaway
nigger, and they've got him. Was you looking for him?"
"You bet I ain't I run across him in the woods about an hour or two
ago, and he said if I hollered he'd cut my livers outand told me to lay
down and stay where I was and I done it. Been there ever since afeard
to come out."
"Well," he says, "you needn't be afeard no more, becuz they've got him.
He run off f'm down South, som'ers."
"It's a good job they got him."
"Well, I RECKON There's two hunderd dollars reward on him. It's like
picking up money out'n the road."
"Yes, it isand I could a had it if I'd been big enough I see him
FIRST. Who nailed him?"
"It was an old fellowa strangerand he sold out his chance in him for
forty dollars, becuz he's got to go up the river and can't wait. Think
o' that, now You bet I'D wait, if it was seven year."
"That's me, every time," says I. "But maybe his chance ain't worth no
more than that, if he'll sell it so cheap. Maybe there's something ain't
straight about it."
"But it IS, thoughstraight as a string. I see the handbill myself. It
tells all about him, to a dotpaints him like a picture, and tells the
plantation he's frum, below NewrLEANS. NosirreeBOB, they ain't no
trouble 'bout THAT speculation, you bet you. Say, gimme a chaw tobacker,
won't ye?"
I didn't have none, so he left. I went to the raft, and set down in the
wigwam to think. But I couldn't come to nothing. I thought till I wore
my head sore, but I couldn't see no way out of the trouble. After all
this long journey, and after all we'd done for them scoundrels, here it
was all come to nothing, everything all busted up and ruined, because
they could have the heart to serve Jim such a trick as that, and make him
a slave again all his life, and amongst strangers, too, for forty dirty
dollars.
Once I said to myself it would be a thousand times better for Jim to be a
slave at home where his family was, as long as he'd GOT to be a slave,
and so I'd better write a letter to Tom Sawyer and tell him to tell Miss
Watson where he was. But I soon give up that notion for two things
she'd be mad and disgusted at his rascality and ungratefulness for
leaving her, and so she'd sell him straight down the river again and if
she didn't, everybody naturally despises an ungrateful nigger, and they'd
make Jim feel it all the time, and so he'd feel ornery and disgraced.
And then think of ME It would get all around that Huck Finn helped a
nigger to get his freedom and if I was ever to see anybody from that
town again I'd be ready to get down and lick his boots for shame. That's
just the way a person does a lowdown thing, and then he don't want to
take no consequences of it. Thinks as long as he can hide, it ain't no
disgrace. That was my fix exactly. The more I studied about this the
more my conscience went to grinding me, and the more wicked and lowdown
and ornery I got to feeling. And at last, when it hit me all of a sudden
that here was the plain hand of Providence slapping me in the face and
letting me know my wickedness was being watched all the time from up
there in heaven, whilst I was stealing a poor old woman's nigger that
hadn't ever done me no harm, and now was showing me there's One that's
always on the lookout, and ain't agoing to allow no such miserable
doings to go only just so fur and no further, I most dropped in my tracks
I was so scared. Well, I tried the best I could to kinder soften it up
somehow for myself by saying I was brung up wicked, and so I warn't so
much to blame but something inside of me kept saying, "There was the
Sundayschool, you could a gone to it and if you'd a done it they'd a
learnt you there that people that acts as I'd been acting about that
nigger goes to everlasting fire."
It made me shiver. And I about made up my mind to pray, and see if I
couldn't try to quit being the kind of a boy I was and be better. So I
kneeled down. But the words wouldn't come. Why wouldn't they? It
warn't no use to try and hide it from Him. Nor from ME, neither. I
knowed very well why they wouldn't come. It was because my heart warn't
right it was because I warn't square it was because I was playing
double. I was letting ON to give up sin, but away inside of me I was
holding on to the biggest one of all. I was trying to make my mouth SAY
I would do the right thing and the clean thing, and go and write to that
nigger's owner and tell where he was but deep down in me I knowed it was
a lie, and He knowed it. You can't pray a lieI found that out.
So I was full of trouble, full as I could be and didn't know what to do.
At last I had an idea and I says, I'll go and write the letterand then
see if I can pray. Why, it was astonishing, the way I felt as light as a
feather right straight off, and my troubles all gone. So I got a piece
of paper and a pencil, all glad and excited, and set down and wrote
Miss Watson, your runaway nigger Jim is down here two mile below
Pikesville, and Mr. Phelps has got him and he will give him up for the
reward if you send.
HUCK FINN.
I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever
felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn't do it
straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinkingthinking
how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost
and going to hell. And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our
trip down the river and I see Jim before me all the time in the day
and in the nighttime, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we
afloating along, talking and singing and laughing. But somehow I
couldn't seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the
other kind. I'd see him standing my watch on top of his'n, 'stead of
calling me, so I could go on sleeping and see him how glad he was when I
come back out of the fog and when I come to him again in the swamp, up
there where the feud was and suchlike times and would always call me
honey, and pet me and do everything he could think of for me, and how
good he always was and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling
the men we had smallpox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was
the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the ONLY one he's got
now and then I happened to look around and see that paper.
It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was
atrembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and
I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then
says to myself
"All right, then, I'll GO to hell"and tore it up.
It was awful thoughts and awful words, but they was said. And I let them
stay said and never thought no more about reforming. I shoved the whole
thing out of my head, and said I would take up wickedness again, which
was in my line, being brung up to it, and the other warn't. And for a
starter I would go to work and steal Jim out of slavery again and if I
could think up anything worse, I would do that, too because as long as I
was in, and in for good, I might as well go the whole hog.
Then I set to thinking over how to get at it, and turned over some
considerable many ways in my mind and at last fixed up a plan that
suited me. So then I took the bearings of a woody island that was down
the river a piece, and as soon as it was fairly dark I crept out with my
raft and went for it, and hid it there, and then turned in. I slept the
night through, and got up before it was light, and had my breakfast, and
put on my store clothes, and tied up some others and one thing or another
in a bundle, and took the canoe and cleared for shore. I landed below
where I judged was Phelps's place, and hid my bundle in the woods, and
then filled up the canoe with water, and loaded rocks into her and sunk
her where I could find her again when I wanted her, about a quarter of a
mile below a little steam sawmill that was on the bank.
Then I struck up the road, and when I passed the mill I see a sign on it,
"Phelps's Sawmill," and when I come to the farmhouses, two or three
hundred yards further along, I kept my eyes peeled, but didn't see nobody
around, though it was good daylight now. But I didn't mind, because I
didn't want to see nobody just yetI only wanted to get the lay of the
land. According to my plan, I was going to turn up there from the
village, not from below. So I just took a look, and shoved along,
straight for town. Well, the very first man I see when I got there was
the duke. He was sticking up a bill for the Royal Nonesuchthreenight
performancelike that other time. They had the cheek, them frauds I
was right on him before I could shirk. He looked astonished, and says
"HelLO Where'd YOU come from?" Then he says, kind of glad and eager,
"Where's the raft?got her in a good place?"
I says
"Why, that's just what I was going to ask your grace."
Then he didn't look so joyful, and says
"What was your idea for asking ME?" he says.
"Well," I says, "when I see the king in that doggery yesterday I says to
myself, we can't get him home for hours, till he's soberer so I went
aloafing around town to put in the time and wait. A man up and offered
me ten cents to help him pull a skiff over the river and back to fetch a
sheep, and so I went along but when we was dragging him to the boat, and
the man left me aholt of the rope and went behind him to shove him
along, he was too strong for me and jerked loose and run, and we after
him. We didn't have no dog, and so we had to chase him all over the
country till we tired him out. We never got him till dark then we
fetched him over, and I started down for the raft. When I got there and
see it was gone, I says to myself, 'They've got into trouble and had to
leave and they've took my nigger, which is the only nigger I've got in
the world, and now I'm in a strange country, and ain't got no property no
more, nor nothing, and no way to make my living' so I set down and
cried. I slept in the woods all night. But what DID become of the raft,
then?and Jimpoor Jim"
"Blamed if I knowthat is, what's become of the raft. That old fool had
made a trade and got forty dollars, and when we found him in the doggery
the loafers had matched halfdollars with him and got every cent but what
he'd spent for whisky and when I got him home late last night and found
the raft gone, we said, 'That little rascal has stole our raft and shook
us, and run off down the river.'"
"I wouldn't shake my NIGGER, would I?the only nigger I had in the
world, and the only property."
"We never thought of that. Fact is, I reckon we'd come to consider him
OUR nigger yes, we did consider him sogoodness knows we had trouble
enough for him. So when we see the raft was gone and we flat broke,
there warn't anything for it but to try the Royal Nonesuch another shake.
And I've pegged along ever since, dry as a powderhorn. Where's that ten
cents? Give it here."
I had considerable money, so I give him ten cents, but begged him to
spend it for something to eat, and give me some, because it was all the
money I had, and I hadn't had nothing to eat since yesterday. He never
said nothing. The next minute he whirls on me and says
"Do you reckon that nigger would blow on us? We'd skin him if he done
that"
"How can he blow? Hain't he run off?"
"No That old fool sold him, and never divided with me, and the money's
gone."
"SOLD him?" I says, and begun to cry "why, he was MY nigger, and that
was my money. Where is he?I want my nigger."
"Well, you can't GET your nigger, that's allso dry up your blubbering.
Looky heredo you think YOU'D venture to blow on us? Blamed if I think
I'd trust you. Why, if you WAS to blow on us"
He stopped, but I never see the duke look so ugly out of his eyes before.
I went on awhimpering, and says
"I don't want to blow on nobody and I ain't got no time to blow, nohow.
I got to turn out and find my nigger."
He looked kinder bothered, and stood there with his bills fluttering on
his arm, thinking, and wrinkling up his forehead. At last he says
"I'll tell you something. We got to be here three days. If you'll
promise you won't blow, and won't let the nigger blow, I'll tell you
where to find him."
So I promised, and he says
"A farmer by the name of Silas Ph" and then he stopped. You see, he
started to tell me the truth but when he stopped that way, and begun to
study and think again, I reckoned he was changing his mind. And so he
was. He wouldn't trust me he wanted to make sure of having me out of the
way the whole three days. So pretty soon he says
"The man that bought him is named Abram FosterAbram G. Fosterand he
lives forty mile back here in the country, on the road to Lafayette."
"All right," I says, "I can walk it in three days. And I'll start this
very afternoon."
"No you wont, you'll start NOW and don't you lose any time about it,
neither, nor do any gabbling by the way. Just keep a tight tongue in
your head and move right along, and then you won't get into trouble with
US, d'ye hear?"
That was the order I wanted, and that was the one I played for. I wanted
to be left free to work my plans.
"So clear out," he says "and you can tell Mr. Foster whatever you want
to. Maybe you can get him to believe that Jim IS your niggersome idiots
don't require documentsleastways I've heard there's such down South
here. And when you tell him the handbill and the reward's bogus, maybe
he'll believe you when you explain to him what the idea was for getting
'em out. Go 'long now, and tell him anything you want to but mind you
don't work your jaw any BETWEEN here and there."
So I left, and struck for the back country. I didn't look around, but I
kinder felt like he was watching me. But I knowed I could tire him out
at that. I went straight out in the country as much as a mile before I
stopped then I doubled back through the woods towards Phelps'. I
reckoned I better start in on my plan straight off without fooling
around, because I wanted to stop Jim's mouth till these fellows could get
away. I didn't want no trouble with their kind. I'd seen all I wanted
to of them, and wanted to get entirely shut of them.
CHAPTER XXXII.
WHEN I got there it was all still and Sundaylike, and hot and sunshiny
the hands was gone to the fields and there was them kind of faint
dronings of bugs and flies in the air that makes it seem so lonesome and
like everybody's dead and gone and if a breeze fans along and quivers
the leaves it makes you feel mournful, because you feel like it's spirits
whisperingspirits that's been dead ever so many yearsand you always
think they're talking about YOU. As a general thing it makes a body wish
HE was dead, too, and done with it all.
Phelps' was one of these little onehorse cotton plantations, and they
all look alike. A rail fence round a twoacre yard a stile made out of
logs sawed off and upended in steps, like barrels of a different length,
to climb over the fence with, and for the women to stand on when they are
going to jump on to a horse some sickly grasspatches in the big yard,
but mostly it was bare and smooth, like an old hat with the nap rubbed
off big double loghouse for the white folkshewed logs, with the
chinks stopped up with mud or mortar, and these mudstripes been
whitewashed some time or another roundlog kitchen, with a big broad,
open but roofed passage joining it to the house log smokehouse back of
the kitchen three little log niggercabins in a row t'other side the
smokehouse one little hut all by itself away down against the back
fence, and some outbuildings down a piece the other side ashhopper and
big kettle to bile soap in by the little hut bench by the kitchen door,
with bucket of water and a gourd hound asleep there in the sun more
hounds asleep round about about three shade trees away off in a corner
some currant bushes and gooseberry bushes in one place by the fence
outside of the fence a garden and a watermelon patch then the cotton
fields begins, and after the fields the woods.
I went around and clumb over the back stile by the ashhopper, and
started for the kitchen. When I got a little ways I heard the dim hum of
a spinningwheel wailing along up and sinking along down again and then
I knowed for certain I wished I was deadfor that IS the lonesomest
sound in the whole world.
I went right along, not fixing up any particular plan, but just trusting
to Providence to put the right words in my mouth when the time come for
I'd noticed that Providence always did put the right words in my mouth if
I left it alone.
When I got halfway, first one hound and then another got up and went for
me, and of course I stopped and faced them, and kept still. And such
another powwow as they made In a quarter of a minute I was a kind of a
hub of a wheel, as you may sayspokes made out of dogscircle of
fifteen of them packed together around me, with their necks and noses
stretched up towards me, abarking and howling and more acoming you
could see them sailing over fences and around corners from everywheres.
A nigger woman come tearing out of the kitchen with a rollingpin in her
hand, singing out, "Begone YOU Tige you Spot begone sah" and she
fetched first one and then another of them a clip and sent them howling,
and then the rest followed and the next second half of them come back,
wagging their tails around me, and making friends with me. There ain't
no harm in a hound, nohow.
And behind the woman comes a little nigger girl and two little nigger
boys without anything on but towlinen shirts, and they hung on to their
mother's gown, and peeped out from behind her at me, bashful, the way
they always do. And here comes the white woman running from the house,
about fortyfive or fifty year old, bareheaded, and her spinningstick in
her hand and behind her comes her little white children, acting the same
way the little niggers was going. She was smiling all over so she could
hardly standand says
"It's YOU, at lastAIN'T it?"
I out with a "Yes'm" before I thought.
She grabbed me and hugged me tight and then gripped me by both hands and
shook and shook and the tears come in her eyes, and run down over and
she couldn't seem to hug and shake enough, and kept saying, "You don't
look as much like your mother as I reckoned you would but law sakes, I
don't care for that, I'm so glad to see you Dear, dear, it does seem
like I could eat you up Children, it's your cousin Tomtell him
howdy."
But they ducked their heads, and put their fingers in their mouths, and
hid behind her. So she run on
"Lize, hurry up and get him a hot breakfast right awayor did you get
your breakfast on the boat?"
I said I had got it on the boat. So then she started for the house,
leading me by the hand, and the children tagging after. When we got
there she set me down in a splitbottomed chair, and set herself down on
a little low stool in front of me, holding both of my hands, and says
"Now I can have a GOOD look at you and, lawsame, I've been hungry for
it a many and a many a time, all these long years, and it's come at last
We been expecting you a couple of days and more. What kep' you?boat
get aground?"
"Yes'mshe"
"Don't say yes'msay Aunt Sally. Where'd she get aground?"
I didn't rightly know what to say, because I didn't know whether the boat
would be coming up the river or down. But I go a good deal on instinct
and my instinct said she would be coming upfrom down towards Orleans.
That didn't help me much, though for I didn't know the names of bars
down that way. I see I'd got to invent a bar, or forget the name of the
one we got aground onorNow I struck an idea, and fetched it out
"It warn't the groundingthat didn't keep us back but a little. We
blowed out a cylinderhead."
"Good gracious anybody hurt?"
"No'm. Killed a nigger."
"Well, it's lucky because sometimes people do get hurt. Two years ago
last Christmas your uncle Silas was coming up from Newrleans on the old
Lally Rook, and she blowed out a cylinderhead and crippled a man. And I
think he died afterwards. He was a Baptist. Your uncle Silas knowed a
family in Baton Rouge that knowed his people very well. Yes, I remember
now, he DID die. Mortification set in, and they had to amputate him.
But it didn't save him. Yes, it was mortificationthat was it. He
turned blue all over, and died in the hope of a glorious resurrection.
They say he was a sight to look at. Your uncle's been up to the town
every day to fetch you. And he's gone again, not more'n an hour ago
he'll be back any minute now. You must a met him on the road, didn't
you?oldish man, with a"
"No, I didn't see nobody, Aunt Sally. The boat landed just at daylight,
and I left my baggage on the wharfboat and went looking around the town
and out a piece in the country, to put in the time and not get here too
soon and so I come down the back way."
"Who'd you give the baggage to?"
"Nobody."
"Why, child, it 'll be stole"
"Not where I hid it I reckon it won't," I says.
"How'd you get your breakfast so early on the boat?"
It was kinder thin ice, but I says
"The captain see me standing around, and told me I better have something
to eat before I went ashore so he took me in the texas to the officers'
lunch, and give me all I wanted."
I was getting so uneasy I couldn't listen good. I had my mind on the
children all the time I wanted to get them out to one side and pump them
a little, and find out who I was. But I couldn't get no show, Mrs.
Phelps kept it up and run on so. Pretty soon she made the cold chills
streak all down my back, because she says
"But here we're arunning on this way, and you hain't told me a word
about Sis, nor any of them. Now I'll rest my works a little, and you
start up yourn just tell me EVERYTHINGtell me all about 'm all every
one of 'm and how they are, and what they're doing, and what they told
you to tell me and every last thing you can think of."
Well, I see I was up a stumpand up it good. Providence had stood by me
this fur all right, but I was hard and tight aground now. I see it
warn't a bit of use to try to go aheadI'd got to throw up my hand. So
I says to myself, here's another place where I got to resk the truth. I
opened my mouth to begin but she grabbed me and hustled me in behind the
bed, and says
"Here he comes Stick your head down lowerthere, that'll do you can't
be seen now. Don't you let on you're here. I'll play a joke on him.
Children, don't you say a word."
I see I was in a fix now. But it warn't no use to worry there warn't
nothing to do but just hold still, and try and be ready to stand from
under when the lightning struck.
I had just one little glimpse of the old gentleman when he come in then
the bed hid him. Mrs. Phelps she jumps for him, and says
"Has he come?"
"No," says her husband.
"GoodNESS gracious" she says, "what in the warld can have become of
him?"
"I can't imagine," says the old gentleman "and I must say it makes me
dreadful uneasy."
"Uneasy" she says "I'm ready to go distracted He MUST a come and
you've missed him along the road. I KNOW it's sosomething tells me
so."
"Why, Sally, I COULDN'T miss him along the roadYOU know that."
"But oh, dear, dear, what WILL Sis say He must a come You must a
missed him. He"
"Oh, don't distress me any more'n I'm already distressed. I don't know
what in the world to make of it. I'm at my wit's end, and I don't mind
acknowledging 't I'm right down scared. But there's no hope that he's
come for he COULDN'T come and me miss him. Sally, it's terriblejust
terriblesomething's happened to the boat, sure"
"Why, Silas Look yonderup the roadain't that somebody coming?"
He sprung to the window at the head of the bed, and that give Mrs. Phelps
the chance she wanted. She stooped down quick at the foot of the bed and
give me a pull, and out I come and when he turned back from the window
there she stood, abeaming and asmiling like a house afire, and I
standing pretty meek and sweaty alongside. The old gentleman stared, and
says
"Why, who's that?"
"Who do you reckon 't is?"
"I hain't no idea. Who IS it?"
"It's TOM SAWYER"
By jings, I most slumped through the floor But there warn't no time to
swap knives the old man grabbed me by the hand and shook, and kept on
shaking and all the time how the woman did dance around and laugh and
cry and then how they both did fire off questions about Sid, and Mary,
and the rest of the tribe.
But if they was joyful, it warn't nothing to what I was for it was like
being born again, I was so glad to find out who I was. Well, they froze
to me for two hours and at last, when my chin was so tired it couldn't
hardly go any more, I had told them more about my familyI mean the
Sawyer familythan ever happened to any six Sawyer families. And I
explained all about how we blowed out a cylinderhead at the mouth of
White River, and it took us three days to fix it. Which was all right,
and worked firstrate because THEY didn't know but what it would take
three days to fix it. If I'd a called it a bolthead it would a done just
as well.
Now I was feeling pretty comfortable all down one side, and pretty
uncomfortable all up the other. Being Tom Sawyer was easy and
comfortable, and it stayed easy and comfortable till by and by I hear a
steamboat coughing along down the river. Then I says to myself, s'pose
Tom Sawyer comes down on that boat? And s'pose he steps in here any
minute, and sings out my name before I can throw him a wink to keep
quiet?
Well, I couldn't HAVE it that way it wouldn't do at all. I must go up
the road and waylay him. So I told the folks I reckoned I would go up to
the town and fetch down my baggage. The old gentleman was for going
along with me, but I said no, I could drive the horse myself, and I
druther he wouldn't take no trouble about me.
CHAPTER XXXIII.
SO I started for town in the wagon, and when I was halfway I see a wagon
coming, and sure enough it was Tom Sawyer, and I stopped and waited till
he come along. I says "Hold on" and it stopped alongside, and his mouth
opened up like a trunk, and stayed so and he swallowed two or three
times like a person that's got a dry throat, and then says
"I hain't ever done you no harm. You know that. So, then, what you want
to come back and ha'nt ME for?"
I says
"I hain't come backI hain't been GONE."
When he heard my voice it righted him up some, but he warn't quite
satisfied yet. He says
"Don't you play nothing on me, because I wouldn't on you. Honest injun,
you ain't a ghost?"
"Honest injun, I ain't," I says.
"WellIIwell, that ought to settle it, of course but I can't
somehow seem to understand it no way. Looky here, warn't you ever
murdered AT ALL?"
"No. I warn't ever murdered at allI played it on them. You come in
here and feel of me if you don't believe me."
So he done it and it satisfied him and he was that glad to see me again
he didn't know what to do. And he wanted to know all about it right off,
because it was a grand adventure, and mysterious, and so it hit him where
he lived. But I said, leave it alone till by and by and told his driver
to wait, and we drove off a little piece, and I told him the kind of a
fix I was in, and what did he reckon we better do? He said, let him
alone a minute, and don't disturb him. So he thought and thought, and
pretty soon he says
"It's all right I've got it. Take my trunk in your wagon, and let on
it's your'n and you turn back and fool along slow, so as to get to the
house about the time you ought to and I'll go towards town a piece, and
take a fresh start, and get there a quarter or a half an hour after you
and you needn't let on to know me at first."
I says
"All right but wait a minute. There's one more thinga thing that
NOBODY don't know but me. And that is, there's a nigger here that I'm
atrying to steal out of slavery, and his name is JIMold Miss Watson's
Jim."
He says
"What Why, Jim is"
He stopped and went to studying. I says
"I know what you'll say. You'll say it's dirty, lowdown business but
what if it is? I'm low down and I'm agoing to steal him, and I want
you keep mum and not let on. Will you?"
His eye lit up, and he says
"I'll HELP you steal him"
Well, I let go all holts then, like I was shot. It was the most
astonishing speech I ever heardand I'm bound to say Tom Sawyer fell
considerable in my estimation. Only I couldn't believe it. Tom Sawyer a
NIGGERSTEALER
"Oh, shucks" I says "you're joking."
"I ain't joking, either."
"Well, then," I says, "joking or no joking, if you hear anything said
about a runaway nigger, don't forget to remember that YOU don't know
nothing about him, and I don't know nothing about him."
Then we took the trunk and put it in my wagon, and he drove off his way
and I drove mine. But of course I forgot all about driving slow on
accounts of being glad and full of thinking so I got home a heap too
quick for that length of a trip. The old gentleman was at the door, and
he says
"Why, this is wonderful Whoever would a thought it was in that mare to
do it? I wish we'd a timed her. And she hain't sweated a hairnot a
hair. It's wonderful. Why, I wouldn't take a hundred dollars for that
horse nowI wouldn't, honest and yet I'd a sold her for fifteen
before, and thought 'twas all she was worth."
That's all he said. He was the innocentest, best old soul I ever see.
But it warn't surprising because he warn't only just a farmer, he was a
preacher, too, and had a little onehorse log church down back of the
plantation, which he built it himself at his own expense, for a church
and schoolhouse, and never charged nothing for his preaching, and it was
worth it, too. There was plenty other farmerpreachers like that, and
done the same way, down South.
In about half an hour Tom's wagon drove up to the front stile, and Aunt
Sally she see it through the window, because it was only about fifty
yards, and says
"Why, there's somebody come I wonder who 'tis? Why, I do believe it's
a stranger. Jimmy" that's one of the children "run and tell Lize to
put on another plate for dinner."
Everybody made a rush for the front door, because, of course, a stranger
don't come EVERY year, and so he lays over the yallerfever, for
interest, when he does come. Tom was over the stile and starting for the
house the wagon was spinning up the road for the village, and we was all
bunched in the front door. Tom had his store clothes on, and an
audienceand that was always nuts for Tom Sawyer. In them circumstances
it warn't no trouble to him to throw in an amount of style that was
suitable. He warn't a boy to meeky along up that yard like a sheep no,
he come ca'm and important, like the ram. When he got afront of us he
lifts his hat ever so gracious and dainty, like it was the lid of a box
that had butterflies asleep in it and he didn't want to disturb them, and
says
"Mr. Archibald Nichols, I presume?"
"No, my boy," says the old gentleman, "I'm sorry to say 't your driver
has deceived you Nichols's place is down a matter of three mile more.
Come in, come in."
Tom he took a look back over his shoulder, and says, "Too latehe's out
of sight."
"Yes, he's gone, my son, and you must come in and eat your dinner with
us and then we'll hitch up and take you down to Nichols's."
"Oh, I CAN'T make you so much trouble I couldn't think of it. I'll walk
I don't mind the distance."
"But we won't LET you walkit wouldn't be Southern hospitality to do it.
Come right in."
"Oh, DO," says Aunt Sally "it ain't a bit of trouble to us, not a bit in
the world. You must stay. It's a long, dusty three mile, and we can't
let you walk. And, besides, I've already told 'em to put on another
plate when I see you coming so you mustn't disappoint us. Come right in
and make yourself at home."
So Tom he thanked them very hearty and handsome, and let himself be
persuaded, and come in and when he was in he said he was a stranger from
Hicksville, Ohio, and his name was William Thompsonand he made another
bow.
Well, he run on, and on, and on, making up stuff about Hicksville and
everybody in it he could invent, and I getting a little nervious, and
wondering how this was going to help me out of my scrape and at last,
still talking along, he reached over and kissed Aunt Sally right on the
mouth, and then settled back again in his chair comfortable, and was
going on talking but she jumped up and wiped it off with the back of her
hand, and says
"You owdacious puppy"
He looked kind of hurt, and says
"I'm surprised at you, m'am."
"You're s'rpWhy, what do you reckon I am? I've a good notion to take
andSay, what do you mean by kissing me?"
He looked kind of humble, and says
"I didn't mean nothing, m'am. I didn't mean no harm. IIthought
you'd like it."
"Why, you born fool" She took up the spinning stick, and it looked like
it was all she could do to keep from giving him a crack with it. "What
made you think I'd like it?"
"Well, I don't know. Only, theytheytold me you would."
"THEY told you I would. Whoever told you's ANOTHER lunatic. I never
heard the beat of it. Who's THEY?"
"Why, everybody. They all said so, m'am."
It was all she could do to hold in and her eyes snapped, and her fingers
worked like she wanted to scratch him and she says
"Who's 'everybody'? Out with their names, or ther'll be an idiot short."
He got up and looked distressed, and fumbled his hat, and says
"I'm sorry, and I warn't expecting it. They told me to. They all told
me to. They all said, kiss her and said she'd like it. They all said
itevery one of them. But I'm sorry, m'am, and I won't do it no more
I won't, honest."
"You won't, won't you? Well, I sh'd RECKON you won't"
"No'm, I'm honest about it I won't ever do it againtill you ask me."
"Till I ASK you Well, I never see the beat of it in my born days I
lay you'll be the Methusalemnumskull of creation before ever I ask you
or the likes of you."
"Well," he says, "it does surprise me so. I can't make it out, somehow.
They said you would, and I thought you would. But" He stopped and
looked around slow, like he wished he could run across a friendly eye
somewheres, and fetched up on the old gentleman's, and says, "Didn't YOU
think she'd like me to kiss her, sir?"
"Why, no IIwell, no, I b'lieve I didn't."
Then he looks on around the same way to me, and says
"Tom, didn't YOU think Aunt Sally 'd open out her arms and say, 'Sid
Sawyer'"
"My land" she says, breaking in and jumping for him, "you impudent young
rascal, to fool a body so" and was going to hug him, but he fended her
off, and says
"No, not till you've asked me first."
So she didn't lose no time, but asked him and hugged him and kissed him
over and over again, and then turned him over to the old man, and he took
what was left. And after they got a little quiet again she says
"Why, dear me, I never see such a surprise. We warn't looking for YOU at
all, but only Tom. Sis never wrote to me about anybody coming but him."
"It's because it warn't INTENDED for any of us to come but Tom," he says
"but I begged and begged, and at the last minute she let me come, too
so, coming down the river, me and Tom thought it would be a firstrate
surprise for him to come here to the house first, and for me to by and by
tag along and drop in, and let on to be a stranger. But it was a
mistake, Aunt Sally. This ain't no healthy place for a stranger to
come."
"Nonot impudent whelps, Sid. You ought to had your jaws boxed I
hain't been so put out since I don't know when. But I don't care, I
don't mind the termsI'd be willing to stand a thousand such jokes to
have you here. Well, to think of that performance I don't deny it, I
was most putrified with astonishment when you give me that smack."
We had dinner out in that broad open passage betwixt the house and the
kitchen and there was things enough on that table for seven families
and all hot, too none of your flabby, tough meat that's laid in a
cupboard in a damp cellar all night and tastes like a hunk of old cold
cannibal in the morning. Uncle Silas he asked a pretty long blessing
over it, but it was worth it and it didn't cool it a bit, neither, the
way I've seen them kind of interruptions do lots of times. There was a
considerable good deal of talk all the afternoon, and me and Tom was on
the lookout all the time but it warn't no use, they didn't happen to say
nothing about any runaway nigger, and we was afraid to try to work up to
it. But at supper, at night, one of the little boys says
"Pa, mayn't Tom and Sid and me go to the show?"
"No," says the old man, "I reckon there ain't going to be any and you
couldn't go if there was because the runaway nigger told Burton and me
all about that scandalous show, and Burton said he would tell the people
so I reckon they've drove the owdacious loafers out of town before this
time."
So there it wasbut I couldn't help it. Tom and me was to sleep in the
same room and bed so, being tired, we bid goodnight and went up to bed
right after supper, and clumb out of the window and down the
lightningrod, and shoved for the town for I didn't believe anybody was
going to give the king and the duke a hint, and so if I didn't hurry up
and give them one they'd get into trouble sure.
On the road Tom he told me all about how it was reckoned I was murdered,
and how pap disappeared pretty soon, and didn't come back no more, and
what a stir there was when Jim run away and I told Tom all about our
Royal Nonesuch rapscallions, and as much of the raft voyage as I had time
to and as we struck into the town and up through thehere comes a
raging rush of people with torches, and an awful whooping and yelling,
and banging tin pans and blowing horns and we jumped to one side to let
them go by and as they went by I see they had the king and the duke
astraddle of a railthat is, I knowed it WAS the king and the duke,
though they was all over tar and feathers, and didn't look like nothing
in the world that was humanjust looked like a couple of monstrous big
soldierplumes. Well, it made me sick to see it and I was sorry for
them poor pitiful rascals, it seemed like I couldn't ever feel any
hardness against them any more in the world. It was a dreadful thing to
see. Human beings CAN be awful cruel to one another.
We see we was too latecouldn't do no good. We asked some stragglers
about it, and they said everybody went to the show looking very innocent
and laid low and kept dark till the poor old king was in the middle of
his cavortings on the stage then somebody give a signal, and the house
rose up and went for them.
So we poked along back home, and I warn't feeling so brash as I was
before, but kind of ornery, and humble, and to blame, somehowthough I
hadn't done nothing. But that's always the way it don't make no
difference whether you do right or wrong, a person's conscience ain't got
no sense, and just goes for him anyway. If I had a yaller dog that
didn't know no more than a person's conscience does I would pison him.
It takes up more room than all the rest of a person's insides, and yet
ain't no good, nohow. Tom Sawyer he says the same.
CHAPTER XXXIV.
WE stopped talking, and got to thinking. By and by Tom says
"Looky here, Huck, what fools we are to not think of it before I bet I
know where Jim is."
"No Where?"
"In that hut down by the ashhopper. Why, looky here. When we was at
dinner, didn't you see a nigger man go in there with some vittles?"
"Yes."
"What did you think the vittles was for?"
"For a dog."
"So 'd I. Well, it wasn't for a dog."
"Why?"
"Because part of it was watermelon."
"So it wasI noticed it. Well, it does beat all that I never thought
about a dog not eating watermelon. It shows how a body can see and don't
see at the same time."
"Well, the nigger unlocked the padlock when he went in, and he locked it
again when he came out. He fetched uncle a key about the time we got up
from tablesame key, I bet. Watermelon shows man, lock shows prisoner
and it ain't likely there's two prisoners on such a little plantation,
and where the people's all so kind and good. Jim's the prisoner. All
rightI'm glad we found it out detective fashion I wouldn't give
shucks for any other way. Now you work your mind, and study out a plan
to steal Jim, and I will study out one, too and we'll take the one we
like the best."
What a head for just a boy to have If I had Tom Sawyer's head I
wouldn't trade it off to be a duke, nor mate of a steamboat, nor clown in
a circus, nor nothing I can think of. I went to thinking out a plan, but
only just to be doing something I knowed very well where the right plan
was going to come from. Pretty soon Tom says
"Ready?"
"Yes," I says.
"All rightbring it out."
"My plan is this," I says. "We can easy find out if it's Jim in there.
Then get up my canoe tomorrow night, and fetch my raft over from the
island. Then the first dark night that comes steal the key out of the
old man's britches after he goes to bed, and shove off down the river on
the raft with Jim, hiding daytimes and running nights, the way me and Jim
used to do before. Wouldn't that plan work?"
"WORK? Why, cert'nly it would work, like rats afighting. But it's too
blame' simple there ain't nothing TO it. What's the good of a plan that
ain't no more trouble than that? It's as mild as goosemilk. Why, Huck,
it wouldn't make no more talk than breaking into a soap factory."
I never said nothing, because I warn't expecting nothing different but I
knowed mighty well that whenever he got HIS plan ready it wouldn't have
none of them objections to it.
And it didn't. He told me what it was, and I see in a minute it was
worth fifteen of mine for style, and would make Jim just as free a man as
mine would, and maybe get us all killed besides. So I was satisfied, and
said we would waltz in on it. I needn't tell what it was here, because I
knowed it wouldn't stay the way, it was. I knowed he would be changing
it around every which way as we went along, and heaving in new
bullinesses wherever he got a chance. And that is what he done.
Well, one thing was dead sure, and that was that Tom Sawyer was in
earnest, and was actuly going to help steal that nigger out of slavery.
That was the thing that was too many for me. Here was a boy that was
respectable and well brung up and had a character to lose and folks at
home that had characters and he was bright and not leatherheaded and
knowing and not ignorant and not mean, but kind and yet here he was,
without any more pride, or rightness, or feeling, than to stoop to this
business, and make himself a shame, and his family a shame, before
everybody. I COULDN'T understand it no way at all. It was outrageous,
and I knowed I ought to just up and tell him so and so be his true
friend, and let him quit the thing right where he was and save himself.
And I DID start to tell him but he shut me up, and says
"Don't you reckon I know what I'm about? Don't I generly know what I'm
about?"
"Yes."
"Didn't I SAY I was going to help steal the nigger?"
"Yes."
"WELL, then."
That's all he said, and that's all I said. It warn't no use to say any
more because when he said he'd do a thing, he always done it. But I
couldn't make out how he was willing to go into this thing so I just let
it go, and never bothered no more about it. If he was bound to have it
so, I couldn't help it.
When we got home the house was all dark and still so we went on down to
the hut by the ashhopper for to examine it. We went through the yard so
as to see what the hounds would do. They knowed us, and didn't make no
more noise than country dogs is always doing when anything comes by in
the night. When we got to the cabin we took a look at the front and the
two sides and on the side I warn't acquainted withwhich was the north
sidewe found a square windowhole, up tolerable high, with just one
stout board nailed across it. I says
"Here's the ticket. This hole's big enough for Jim to get through if we
wrench off the board."
Tom says
"It's as simple as tittattoe, threeinarow, and as easy as playing
hooky. I should HOPE we can find a way that's a little more complicated
than THAT, Huck Finn."
"Well, then," I says, "how 'll it do to saw him out, the way I done
before I was murdered that time?"
"That's more LIKE," he says. "It's real mysterious, and troublesome, and
good," he says "but I bet we can find a way that's twice as long. There
ain't no hurry le's keep on looking around."
Betwixt the hut and the fence, on the back side, was a leanto that
joined the hut at the eaves, and was made out of plank. It was as long
as the hut, but narrowonly about six foot wide. The door to it was at
the south end, and was padlocked. Tom he went to the soapkettle and
searched around, and fetched back the iron thing they lift the lid with
so he took it and prized out one of the staples. The chain fell down,
and we opened the door and went in, and shut it, and struck a match, and
see the shed was only built against a cabin and hadn't no connection with
it and there warn't no floor to the shed, nor nothing in it but some old
rusty playedout hoes and spades and picks and a crippled plow. The
match went out, and so did we, and shoved in the staple again, and the
door was locked as good as ever. Tom was joyful. He says
"Now we're all right. We'll DIG him out. It 'll take about a week"
Then we started for the house, and I went in the back dooryou only have
to pull a buckskin latchstring, they don't fasten the doorsbut that
warn't romantical enough for Tom Sawyer no way would do him but he must
climb up the lightningrod. But after he got up half way about three
times, and missed fire and fell every time, and the last time most busted
his brains out, he thought he'd got to give it up but after he was
rested he allowed he would give her one more turn for luck, and this time
he made the trip.
In the morning we was up at break of day, and down to the nigger cabins
to pet the dogs and make friends with the nigger that fed Jimif it WAS
Jim that was being fed. The niggers was just getting through breakfast
and starting for the fields and Jim's nigger was piling up a tin pan
with bread and meat and things and whilst the others was leaving, the
key come from the house.
This nigger had a goodnatured, chuckleheaded face, and his wool was all
tied up in little bunches with thread. That was to keep witches off. He
said the witches was pestering him awful these nights, and making him see
all kinds of strange things, and hear all kinds of strange words and
noises, and he didn't believe he was ever witched so long before in his
life. He got so worked up, and got to running on so about his troubles,
he forgot all about what he'd been agoing to do. So Tom says
"What's the vittles for? Going to feed the dogs?"
The nigger kind of smiled around gradually over his face, like when you
heave a brickbat in a mudpuddle, and he says
"Yes, Mars Sid, A dog. Cur'us dog, too. Does you want to go en look at
'im?"
"Yes."
I hunched Tom, and whispers
"You going, right here in the daybreak? THAT warn't the plan."
"No, it warn't but it's the plan NOW."
So, drat him, we went along, but I didn't like it much. When we got in
we couldn't hardly see anything, it was so dark but Jim was there, sure
enough, and could see us and he sings out
"Why, HUCK En good LAN' ain' dat Misto Tom?"
I just knowed how it would be I just expected it. I didn't know nothing
to do and if I had I couldn't a done it, because that nigger busted in
and says
"Why, de gracious sakes do he know you genlmen?"
We could see pretty well now. Tom he looked at the nigger, steady and
kind of wondering, and says
"Does WHO know us?"
"Why, disyer runaway nigger."
"I don't reckon he does but what put that into your head?"
"What PUT it dar? Didn' he jis' dis minute sing out like he knowed you?"
Tom says, in a puzzledup kind of way
"Well, that's mighty curious. WHO sung out? WHEN did he sing out? WHAT
did he sing out?" And turns to me, perfectly ca'm, and says, "Did YOU
hear anybody sing out?"
Of course there warn't nothing to be said but the one thing so I says
"No I ain't heard nobody say nothing."
Then he turns to Jim, and looks him over like he never see him before,
and says
"Did you sing out?"
"No, sah," says Jim "I hain't said nothing, sah."
"Not a word?"
"No, sah, I hain't said a word."
"Did you ever see us before?"
"No, sah not as I knows on."
So Tom turns to the nigger, which was looking wild and distressed, and
says, kind of severe
"What do you reckon's the matter with you, anyway? What made you think
somebody sung out?"
"Oh, it's de dadblame' witches, sah, en I wisht I was dead, I do. Dey's
awluz at it, sah, en dey do mos' kill me, dey sk'yers me so. Please to
don't tell nobody 'bout it sah, er ole Mars Silas he'll scole me 'kase
he say dey AIN'T no witches. I jis' wish to goodness he was heah now
DEN what would he say I jis' bet he couldn' fine no way to git aroun'
it DIS time. But it's awluz jis' so people dat's SOT, stays sot dey
won't look into noth'n'en fine it out f'r deyselves, en when YOU fine it
out en tell um 'bout it, dey doan' b'lieve you."
Tom give him a dime, and said we wouldn't tell nobody and told him to
buy some more thread to tie up his wool with and then looks at Jim, and
says
"I wonder if Uncle Silas is going to hang this nigger. If I was to catch
a nigger that was ungrateful enough to run away, I wouldn't give him up,
I'd hang him." And whilst the nigger stepped to the door to look at the
dime and bite it to see if it was good, he whispers to Jim and says
"Don't ever let on to know us. And if you hear any digging going on
nights, it's us we're going to set you free."
Jim only had time to grab us by the hand and squeeze it then the nigger
come back, and we said we'd come again some time if the nigger wanted us
to and he said he would, more particular if it was dark, because the
witches went for him mostly in the dark, and it was good to have folks
around then.
CHAPTER XXXV.
IT would be most an hour yet till breakfast, so we left and struck down
into the woods because Tom said we got to have SOME light to see how to
dig by, and a lantern makes too much, and might get us into trouble what
we must have was a lot of them rotten chunks that's called foxfire, and
just makes a soft kind of a glow when you lay them in a dark place. We
fetched an armful and hid it in the weeds, and set down to rest, and Tom
says, kind of dissatisfied
"Blame it, this whole thing is just as easy and awkward as it can be.
And so it makes it so rotten difficult to get up a difficult plan. There
ain't no watchman to be druggednow there OUGHT to be a watchman. There
ain't even a dog to give a sleepingmixture to. And there's Jim chained
by one leg, with a tenfoot chain, to the leg of his bed why, all you
got to do is to lift up the bedstead and slip off the chain. And Uncle
Silas he trusts everybody sends the key to the punkinheaded nigger, and
don't send nobody to watch the nigger. Jim could a got out of that
windowhole before this, only there wouldn't be no use trying to travel
with a tenfoot chain on his leg. Why, drat it, Huck, it's the stupidest
arrangement I ever see. You got to invent ALL the difficulties. Well, we
can't help it we got to do the best we can with the materials we've got.
Anyhow, there's one thingthere's more honor in getting him out
through a lot of difficulties and dangers, where there warn't one of them
furnished to you by the people who it was their duty to furnish them, and
you had to contrive them all out of your own head. Now look at just that
one thing of the lantern. When you come down to the cold facts, we
simply got to LET ON that a lantern's resky. Why, we could work with a
torchlight procession if we wanted to, I believe. Now, whilst I think of
it, we got to hunt up something to make a saw out of the first chance we
get."
"What do we want of a saw?"
"What do we WANT of a saw? Hain't we got to saw the leg of Jim's bed
off, so as to get the chain loose?"
"Why, you just said a body could lift up the bedstead and slip the chain
off."
"Well, if that ain't just like you, Huck Finn. You CAN get up the
infantschooliest ways of going at a thing. Why, hain't you ever read
any books at all?Baron Trenck, nor Casanova, nor Benvenuto Chelleeny,
nor Henri IV., nor none of them heroes? Who ever heard of getting a
prisoner loose in such an oldmaidy way as that? No the way all the
best authorities does is to saw the bedleg in two, and leave it just so,
and swallow the sawdust, so it can't be found, and put some dirt and
grease around the sawed place so the very keenest seneskal can't see no
sign of it's being sawed, and thinks the bedleg is perfectly sound.
Then, the night you're ready, fetch the leg a kick, down she goes slip
off your chain, and there you are. Nothing to do but hitch your rope
ladder to the battlements, shin down it, break your leg in the moat
because a rope ladder is nineteen foot too short, you knowand there's
your horses and your trusty vassles, and they scoop you up and fling you
across a saddle, and away you go to your native Langudoc, or Navarre, or
wherever it is. It's gaudy, Huck. I wish there was a moat to this cabin.
If we get time, the night of the escape, we'll dig one."
I says
"What do we want of a moat when we're going to snake him out from under
the cabin?"
But he never heard me. He had forgot me and everything else. He had his
chin in his hand, thinking. Pretty soon he sighs and shakes his head
then sighs again, and says
"No, it wouldn't dothere ain't necessity enough for it."
"For what?" I says.
"Why, to saw Jim's leg off," he says.
"Good land" I says "why, there ain't NO necessity for it. And what
would you want to saw his leg off for, anyway?"
"Well, some of the best authorities has done it. They couldn't get the
chain off, so they just cut their hand off and shoved. And a leg would
be better still. But we got to let that go. There ain't necessity
enough in this case and, besides, Jim's a nigger, and wouldn't
understand the reasons for it, and how it's the custom in Europe so
we'll let it go. But there's one thinghe can have a rope ladder we
can tear up our sheets and make him a rope ladder easy enough. And we
can send it to him in a pie it's mostly done that way. And I've et
worse pies."
"Why, Tom Sawyer, how you talk," I says "Jim ain't got no use for a rope
ladder."
"He HAS got use for it. How YOU talk, you better say you don't know
nothing about it. He's GOT to have a rope ladder they all do."
"What in the nation can he DO with it?"
"DO with it? He can hide it in his bed, can't he? That's what they all
do and HE'S got to, too. Huck, you don't ever seem to want to do
anything that's regular you want to be starting something fresh all the
time. S'pose he DON'T do nothing with it? ain't it there in his bed, for
a clew, after he's gone? and don't you reckon they'll want clews? Of
course they will. And you wouldn't leave them any? That would be a
PRETTY howdydo, WOULDN'T it I never heard of such a thing."
"Well," I says, "if it's in the regulations, and he's got to have it, all
right, let him have it because I don't wish to go back on no
regulations but there's one thing, Tom Sawyerif we go to tearing up
our sheets to make Jim a rope ladder, we're going to get into trouble
with Aunt Sally, just as sure as you're born. Now, the way I look at it,
a hickrybark ladder don't cost nothing, and don't waste nothing, and is
just as good to load up a pie with, and hide in a straw tick, as any rag
ladder you can start and as for Jim, he ain't had no experience, and so
he don't care what kind of a"
"Oh, shucks, Huck Finn, if I was as ignorant as you I'd keep still
that's what I'D do. Who ever heard of a state prisoner escaping by a
hickrybark ladder? Why, it's perfectly ridiculous."
"Well, all right, Tom, fix it your own way but if you'll take my advice,
you'll let me borrow a sheet off of the clothesline."
He said that would do. And that gave him another idea, and he says
"Borrow a shirt, too."
"What do we want of a shirt, Tom?"
"Want it for Jim to keep a journal on."
"Journal your grannyJIM can't write."
"S'pose he CAN'T writehe can make marks on the shirt, can't he, if we
make him a pen out of an old pewter spoon or a piece of an old iron
barrelhoop?"
"Why, Tom, we can pull a feather out of a goose and make him a better
one and quicker, too."
"PRISONERS don't have geese running around the donjonkeep to pull pens
out of, you muggins. They ALWAYS make their pens out of the hardest,
toughest, troublesomest piece of old brass candlestick or something like
that they can get their hands on and it takes them weeks and weeks and
months and months to file it out, too, because they've got to do it by
rubbing it on the wall. THEY wouldn't use a goosequill if they had it.
It ain't regular."
"Well, then, what'll we make him the ink out of?"
"Many makes it out of ironrust and tears but that's the common sort and
women the best authorities uses their own blood. Jim can do that and
when he wants to send any little common ordinary mysterious message to
let the world know where he's captivated, he can write it on the bottom
of a tin plate with a fork and throw it out of the window. The Iron Mask
always done that, and it's a blame' good way, too."
"Jim ain't got no tin plates. They feed him in a pan."
"That ain't nothing we can get him some."
"Can't nobody READ his plates."
"That ain't got anything to DO with it, Huck Finn. All HE'S got to do is
to write on the plate and throw it out. You don't HAVE to be able to
read it. Why, half the time you can't read anything a prisoner writes on
a tin plate, or anywhere else."
"Well, then, what's the sense in wasting the plates?"
"Why, blame it all, it ain't the PRISONER'S plates."
"But it's SOMEBODY'S plates, ain't it?"
"Well, spos'n it is? What does the PRISONER care whose"
He broke off there, because we heard the breakfasthorn blowing. So we
cleared out for the house.
Along during the morning I borrowed a sheet and a white shirt off of the
clothesline and I found an old sack and put them in it, and we went
down and got the foxfire, and put that in too. I called it borrowing,
because that was what pap always called it but Tom said it warn't
borrowing, it was stealing. He said we was representing prisoners and
prisoners don't care how they get a thing so they get it, and nobody
don't blame them for it, either. It ain't no crime in a prisoner to
steal the thing he needs to get away with, Tom said it's his right and
so, as long as we was representing a prisoner, we had a perfect right to
steal anything on this place we had the least use for to get ourselves
out of prison with. He said if we warn't prisoners it would be a very
different thing, and nobody but a mean, ornery person would steal when he
warn't a prisoner. So we allowed we would steal everything there was
that come handy. And yet he made a mighty fuss, one day, after that,
when I stole a watermelon out of the niggerpatch and eat it and he made
me go and give the niggers a dime without telling them what it was for.
Tom said that what he meant was, we could steal anything we NEEDED. Well,
I says, I needed the watermelon. But he said I didn't need it to get out
of prison with there's where the difference was. He said if I'd a
wanted it to hide a knife in, and smuggle it to Jim to kill the seneskal
with, it would a been all right. So I let it go at that, though I
couldn't see no advantage in my representing a prisoner if I got to set
down and chaw over a lot of goldleaf distinctions like that every time I
see a chance to hog a watermelon.
Well, as I was saying, we waited that morning till everybody was settled
down to business, and nobody in sight around the yard then Tom he
carried the sack into the leanto whilst I stood off a piece to keep
watch. By and by he come out, and we went and set down on the woodpile
to talk. He says
"Everything's all right now except tools and that's easy fixed."
"Tools?" I says.
"Yes."
"Tools for what?"
"Why, to dig with. We ain't agoing to GNAW him out, are we?"
"Ain't them old crippled picks and things in there good enough to dig a
nigger out with?" I says.
He turns on me, looking pitying enough to make a body cry, and says
"Huck Finn, did you EVER hear of a prisoner having picks and shovels, and
all the modern conveniences in his wardrobe to dig himself out with? Now
I want to ask youif you got any reasonableness in you at allwhat kind
of a show would THAT give him to be a hero? Why, they might as well lend
him the key and done with it. Picks and shovelswhy, they wouldn't
furnish 'em to a king."
"Well, then," I says, "if we don't want the picks and shovels, what do we
want?"
"A couple of caseknives."
"To dig the foundations out from under that cabin with?"
"Yes."
"Confound it, it's foolish, Tom."
"It don't make no difference how foolish it is, it's the RIGHT wayand
it's the regular way. And there ain't no OTHER way, that ever I heard
of, and I've read all the books that gives any information about these
things. They always dig out with a caseknifeand not through dirt, mind
you generly it's through solid rock. And it takes them weeks and weeks
and weeks, and for ever and ever. Why, look at one of them prisoners in
the bottom dungeon of the Castle Deef, in the harbor of Marseilles, that
dug himself out that way how long was HE at it, you reckon?"
"I don't know."
"Well, guess."
"I don't know. A month and a half."
"THIRTYSEVEN YEARand he come out in China. THAT'S the kind. I wish
the bottom of THIS fortress was solid rock."
"JIM don't know nobody in China."
"What's THAT got to do with it? Neither did that other fellow. But
you're always awandering off on a side issue. Why can't you stick to
the main point?"
"All rightI don't care where he comes out, so he COMES out and Jim
don't, either, I reckon. But there's one thing, anywayJim's too old to
be dug out with a caseknife. He won't last."
"Yes he will LAST, too. You don't reckon it's going to take thirtyseven
years to dig out through a DIRT foundation, do you?"
"How long will it take, Tom?"
"Well, we can't resk being as long as we ought to, because it mayn't take
very long for Uncle Silas to hear from down there by New Orleans. He'll
hear Jim ain't from there. Then his next move will be to advertise Jim,
or something like that. So we can't resk being as long digging him out
as we ought to. By rights I reckon we ought to be a couple of years but
we can't. Things being so uncertain, what I recommend is this that we
really dig right in, as quick as we can and after that, we can LET ON,
to ourselves, that we was at it thirtyseven years. Then we can snatch
him out and rush him away the first time there's an alarm. Yes, I reckon
that 'll be the best way."
"Now, there's SENSE in that," I says. "Letting on don't cost nothing
letting on ain't no trouble and if it's any object, I don't mind letting
on we was at it a hundred and fifty year. It wouldn't strain me none,
after I got my hand in. So I'll mosey along now, and smouch a couple of
caseknives."
"Smouch three," he says "we want one to make a saw out of."
"Tom, if it ain't unregular and irreligious to sejest it," I says,
"there's an old rusty sawblade around yonder sticking under the
weatherboarding behind the smokehouse."
He looked kind of weary and discouragedlike, and says
"It ain't no use to try to learn you nothing, Huck. Run along and smouch
the knivesthree of them." So I done it.
CHAPTER XXXVI.
AS soon as we reckoned everybody was asleep that night we went down the
lightningrod, and shut ourselves up in the leanto, and got out our pile
of foxfire, and went to work. We cleared everything out of the way,
about four or five foot along the middle of the bottom log. Tom said we
was right behind Jim's bed now, and we'd dig in under it, and when we got
through there couldn't nobody in the cabin ever know there was any hole
there, because Jim's counterpin hung down most to the ground, and you'd
have to raise it up and look under to see the hole. So we dug and dug
with the caseknives till most midnight and then we was dogtired, and
our hands was blistered, and yet you couldn't see we'd done anything
hardly. At last I says
"This ain't no thirtyseven year job this is a thirtyeight year job,
Tom Sawyer."
He never said nothing. But he sighed, and pretty soon he stopped
digging, and then for a good little while I knowed that he was thinking.
Then he says
"It ain't no use, Huck, it ain't agoing to work. If we was prisoners it
would, because then we'd have as many years as we wanted, and no hurry
and we wouldn't get but a few minutes to dig, every day, while they was
changing watches, and so our hands wouldn't get blistered, and we could
keep it up right along, year in and year out, and do it right, and the
way it ought to be done. But WE can't fool along we got to rush we
ain't got no time to spare. If we was to put in another night this way
we'd have to knock off for a week to let our hands get wellcouldn't
touch a caseknife with them sooner."
"Well, then, what we going to do, Tom?"
"I'll tell you. It ain't right, and it ain't moral, and I wouldn't like
it to get out but there ain't only just the one way we got to dig him
out with the picks, and LET ON it's caseknives."
"NOW you're TALKING" I says "your head gets leveler and leveler all
the time, Tom Sawyer," I says. "Picks is the thing, moral or no moral
and as for me, I don't care shucks for the morality of it, nohow. When I
start in to steal a nigger, or a watermelon, or a Sundayschool book, I
ain't no ways particular how it's done so it's done. What I want is my
nigger or what I want is my watermelon or what I want is my
Sundayschool book and if a pick's the handiest thing, that's the thing
I'm agoing to dig that nigger or that watermelon or that Sundayschool
book out with and I don't give a dead rat what the authorities thinks
about it nuther."
"Well," he says, "there's excuse for picks and lettingon in a case like
this if it warn't so, I wouldn't approve of it, nor I wouldn't stand by
and see the rules brokebecause right is right, and wrong is wrong, and
a body ain't got no business doing wrong when he ain't ignorant and knows
better. It might answer for YOU to dig Jim out with a pick, WITHOUT any
letting on, because you don't know no better but it wouldn't for me,
because I do know better. Gimme a caseknife."
He had his own by him, but I handed him mine. He flung it down, and
says
"Gimme a CASEKNIFE."
I didn't know just what to dobut then I thought. I scratched around
amongst the old tools, and got a pickaxe and give it to him, and he took
it and went to work, and never said a word.
He was always just that particular. Full of principle.
So then I got a shovel, and then we picked and shoveled, turn about, and
made the fur fly. We stuck to it about a half an hour, which was as long
as we could stand up but we had a good deal of a hole to show for it.
When I got up stairs I looked out at the window and see Tom doing his
level best with the lightningrod, but he couldn't come it, his hands was
so sore. At last he says
"It ain't no use, it can't be done. What you reckon I better do? Can't
you think of no way?"
"Yes," I says, "but I reckon it ain't regular. Come up the stairs, and
let on it's a lightningrod."
So he done it.
Next day Tom stole a pewter spoon and a brass candlestick in the house,
for to make some pens for Jim out of, and six tallow candles and I hung
around the nigger cabins and laid for a chance, and stole three tin
plates. Tom says it wasn't enough but I said nobody wouldn't ever see
the plates that Jim throwed out, because they'd fall in the dogfennel
and jimpson weeds under the windowholethen we could tote them back and
he could use them over again. So Tom was satisfied. Then he says
"Now, the thing to study out is, how to get the things to Jim."
"Take them in through the hole," I says, "when we get it done."
He only just looked scornful, and said something about nobody ever heard
of such an idiotic idea, and then he went to studying. By and by he said
he had ciphered out two or three ways, but there warn't no need to decide
on any of them yet. Said we'd got to post Jim first.
That night we went down the lightningrod a little after ten, and took
one of the candles along, and listened under the windowhole, and heard
Jim snoring so we pitched it in, and it didn't wake him. Then we
whirled in with the pick and shovel, and in about two hours and a half
the job was done. We crept in under Jim's bed and into the cabin, and
pawed around and found the candle and lit it, and stood over Jim awhile,
and found him looking hearty and healthy, and then we woke him up gentle
and gradual. He was so glad to see us he most cried and called us
honey, and all the pet names he could think of and was for having us
hunt up a coldchisel to cut the chain off of his leg with right away,
and clearing out without losing any time. But Tom he showed him how
unregular it would be, and set down and told him all about our plans, and
how we could alter them in a minute any time there was an alarm and not
to be the least afraid, because we would see he got away, SURE. So Jim
he said it was all right, and we set there and talked over old times
awhile, and then Tom asked a lot of questions, and when Jim told him
Uncle Silas come in every day or two to pray with him, and Aunt Sally
come in to see if he was comfortable and had plenty to eat, and both of
them was kind as they could be, Tom says
"NOW I know how to fix it. We'll send you some things by them."
I said, "Don't do nothing of the kind it's one of the most jackass ideas
I ever struck" but he never paid no attention to me went right on. It
was his way when he'd got his plans set.
So he told Jim how we'd have to smuggle in the ropeladder pie and other
large things by Nat, the nigger that fed him, and he must be on the
lookout, and not be surprised, and not let Nat see him open them and we
would put small things in uncle's coatpockets and he must steal them
out and we would tie things to aunt's apronstrings or put them in her
apronpocket, if we got a chance and told him what they would be and
what they was for. And told him how to keep a journal on the shirt with
his blood, and all that. He told him everything. Jim he couldn't see no
sense in the most of it, but he allowed we was white folks and knowed
better than him so he was satisfied, and said he would do it all just as
Tom said.
Jim had plenty corncob pipes and tobacco so we had a right down good
sociable time then we crawled out through the hole, and so home to bed,
with hands that looked like they'd been chawed. Tom was in high spirits.
He said it was the best fun he ever had in his life, and the most
intellectural and said if he only could see his way to it we would keep
it up all the rest of our lives and leave Jim to our children to get out
for he believed Jim would come to like it better and better the more he
got used to it. He said that in that way it could be strung out to as
much as eighty year, and would be the best time on record. And he said
it would make us all celebrated that had a hand in it.
In the morning we went out to the woodpile and chopped up the brass
candlestick into handy sizes, and Tom put them and the pewter spoon in
his pocket. Then we went to the nigger cabins, and while I got Nat's
notice off, Tom shoved a piece of candlestick into the middle of a
cornpone that was in Jim's pan, and we went along with Nat to see how it
would work, and it just worked noble when Jim bit into it it most mashed
all his teeth out and there warn't ever anything could a worked better.
Tom said so himself. Jim he never let on but what it was only just a
piece of rock or something like that that's always getting into bread,
you know but after that he never bit into nothing but what he jabbed his
fork into it in three or four places first.
And whilst we was astanding there in the dimmish light, here comes a
couple of the hounds bulging in from under Jim's bed and they kept on
piling in till there was eleven of them, and there warn't hardly room in
there to get your breath. By jings, we forgot to fasten that leanto
door The nigger Nat he only just hollered "Witches" once, and keeled
over on to the floor amongst the dogs, and begun to groan like he was
dying. Tom jerked the door open and flung out a slab of Jim's meat, and
the dogs went for it, and in two seconds he was out himself and back
again and shut the door, and I knowed he'd fixed the other door too.
Then he went to work on the nigger, coaxing him and petting him, and
asking him if he'd been imagining he saw something again. He raised up,
and blinked his eyes around, and says
"Mars Sid, you'll say I's a fool, but if I didn't b'lieve I see most a
million dogs, er devils, er some'n, I wisht I may die right heah in dese
tracks. I did, mos' sholy. Mars Sid, I FELT umI FELT um, sah dey was
all over me. Dad fetch it, I jis' wisht I could git my han's on one er
dem witches jis' wunston'y jis' wunstit's all I'd ast. But mos'ly I
wisht dey'd lemme 'lone, I does."
Tom says
"Well, I tell you what I think. What makes them come here just at this
runaway nigger's breakfasttime? It's because they're hungry that's the
reason. You make them a witch pie that's the thing for YOU to do."
"But my lan', Mars Sid, how's I gwyne to make 'm a witch pie? I doan'
know how to make it. I hain't ever hearn er sich a thing b'fo'."
"Well, then, I'll have to make it myself."
"Will you do it, honey?will you? I'll wusshup de groun' und' yo' foot,
I will"
"All right, I'll do it, seeing it's you, and you've been good to us and
showed us the runaway nigger. But you got to be mighty careful. When we
come around, you turn your back and then whatever we've put in the pan,
don't you let on you see it at all. And don't you look when Jim unloads
the pansomething might happen, I don't know what. And above all, don't
you HANDLE the witchthings."
"HANNEL 'm, Mars Sid? What IS you atalkin' 'bout? I wouldn' lay de
weight er my finger on um, not f'r ten hund'd thous'n billion dollars, I
wouldn't."
CHAPTER XXXVII.
THAT was all fixed. So then we went away and went to the rubbagepile in
the back yard, where they keep the old boots, and rags, and pieces of
bottles, and woreout tin things, and all such truck, and scratched
around and found an old tin washpan, and stopped up the holes as well as
we could, to bake the pie in, and took it down cellar and stole it full
of flour and started for breakfast, and found a couple of shinglenails
that Tom said would be handy for a prisoner to scrabble his name and
sorrows on the dungeon walls with, and dropped one of them in Aunt
Sally's apronpocket which was hanging on a chair, and t'other we stuck
in the band of Uncle Silas's hat, which was on the bureau, because we
heard the children say their pa and ma was going to the runaway nigger's
house this morning, and then went to breakfast, and Tom dropped the
pewter spoon in Uncle Silas's coatpocket, and Aunt Sally wasn't come
yet, so we had to wait a little while.
And when she come she was hot and red and cross, and couldn't hardly wait
for the blessing and then she went to sluicing out coffee with one hand
and cracking the handiest child's head with her thimble with the other,
and says
"I've hunted high and I've hunted low, and it does beat all what HAS
become of your other shirt."
My heart fell down amongst my lungs and livers and things, and a hard
piece of corncrust started down my throat after it and got met on the
road with a cough, and was shot across the table, and took one of the
children in the eye and curled him up like a fishingworm, and let a cry
out of him the size of a warwhoop, and Tom he turned kinder blue around
the gills, and it all amounted to a considerable state of things for
about a quarter of a minute or as much as that, and I would a sold out
for half price if there was a bidder. But after that we was all right
againit was the sudden surprise of it that knocked us so kind of cold.
Uncle Silas he says
"It's most uncommon curious, I can't understand it. I know perfectly
well I took it OFF, because"
"Because you hain't got but one ON. Just LISTEN at the man I know you
took it off, and know it by a better way than your woolgethering memory,
too, because it was on the clo'sline yesterdayI see it there myself.
But it's gone, that's the long and the short of it, and you'll just have
to change to a red flann'l one till I can get time to make a new one.
And it 'll be the third I've made in two years. It just keeps a body on
the jump to keep you in shirts and whatever you do manage to DO with 'm
all is more'n I can make out. A body 'd think you WOULD learn to take
some sort of care of 'em at your time of life."
"I know it, Sally, and I do try all I can. But it oughtn't to be
altogether my fault, because, you know, I don't see them nor have nothing
to do with them except when they're on me and I don't believe I've ever
lost one of them OFF of me."
"Well, it ain't YOUR fault if you haven't, Silas you'd a done it if you
could, I reckon. And the shirt ain't all that's gone, nuther. Ther's a
spoon gone and THAT ain't all. There was ten, and now ther's only nine.
The calf got the shirt, I reckon, but the calf never took the spoon,
THAT'S certain."
"Why, what else is gone, Sally?"
"Ther's six CANDLES gonethat's what. The rats could a got the candles,
and I reckon they did I wonder they don't walk off with the whole place,
the way you're always going to stop their holes and don't do it and if
they warn't fools they'd sleep in your hair, SilasYOU'D never find it
out but you can't lay the SPOON on the rats, and that I know."
"Well, Sally, I'm in fault, and I acknowledge it I've been remiss but I
won't let tomorrow go by without stopping up them holes."
"Oh, I wouldn't hurry next year 'll do. Matilda Angelina Araminta
PHELPS"
Whack comes the thimble, and the child snatches her claws out of the
sugarbowl without fooling around any. Just then the nigger woman steps
on to the passage, and says
"Missus, dey's a sheet gone."
"A SHEET gone Well, for the land's sake"
"I'll stop up them holes today," says Uncle Silas, looking sorrowful.
"Oh, DO shet ups'pose the rats took the SHEET? WHERE'S it gone,
Lize?"
"Clah to goodness I hain't no notion, Miss' Sally. She wuz on de
clo'sline yistiddy, but she done gone she ain' dah no mo' now."
"I reckon the world IS coming to an end. I NEVER see the beat of it in
all my born days. A shirt, and a sheet, and a spoon, and six can"
"Missus," comes a young yaller wench, "dey's a brass cannelstick miss'n."
"Cler out from here, you hussy, er I'll take a skillet to ye"
Well, she was just abiling. I begun to lay for a chance I reckoned I
would sneak out and go for the woods till the weather moderated. She
kept araging right along, running her insurrection all by herself, and
everybody else mighty meek and quiet and at last Uncle Silas, looking
kind of foolish, fishes up that spoon out of his pocket. She stopped,
with her mouth open and her hands up and as for me, I wished I was in
Jeruslem or somewheres. But not long, because she says
"It's JUST as I expected. So you had it in your pocket all the time and
like as not you've got the other things there, too. How'd it get there?"
"I reely don't know, Sally," he says, kind of apologizing, "or you know I
would tell. I was astudying over my text in Acts Seventeen before
breakfast, and I reckon I put it in there, not noticing, meaning to put
my Testament in, and it must be so, because my Testament ain't in but
I'll go and see and if the Testament is where I had it, I'll know I
didn't put it in, and that will show that I laid the Testament down and
took up the spoon, and"
"Oh, for the land's sake Give a body a rest Go 'long now, the whole
kit and biling of ye and don't come nigh me again till I've got back my
peace of mind."
I'd a heard her if she'd a said it to herself, let alone speaking it out
and I'd a got up and obeyed her if I'd a been dead. As we was passing
through the settingroom the old man he took up his hat, and the
shinglenail fell out on the floor, and he just merely picked it up and
laid it on the mantelshelf, and never said nothing, and went out. Tom
see him do it, and remembered about the spoon, and says
"Well, it ain't no use to send things by HIM no more, he ain't reliable."
Then he says "But he done us a good turn with the spoon, anyway,
without knowing it, and so we'll go and do him one without HIM knowing
itstop up his ratholes."
There was a noble good lot of them down cellar, and it took us a whole
hour, but we done the job tight and good and shipshape. Then we heard
steps on the stairs, and blowed out our light and hid and here comes the
old man, with a candle in one hand and a bundle of stuff in t'other,
looking as absentminded as year before last. He went a mooning around,
first to one rathole and then another, till he'd been to them all. Then
he stood about five minutes, picking tallowdrip off of his candle and
thinking. Then he turns off slow and dreamy towards the stairs, saying
"Well, for the life of me I can't remember when I done it. I could show
her now that I warn't to blame on account of the rats. But never mind
let it go. I reckon it wouldn't do no good."
And so he went on amumbling up stairs, and then we left. He was a
mighty nice old man. And always is.
Tom was a good deal bothered about what to do for a spoon, but he said
we'd got to have it so he took a think. When he had ciphered it out he
told me how we was to do then we went and waited around the spoonbasket
till we see Aunt Sally coming, and then Tom went to counting the spoons
and laying them out to one side, and I slid one of them up my sleeve, and
Tom says
"Why, Aunt Sally, there ain't but nine spoons YET."
She says
"Go 'long to your play, and don't bother me. I know better, I counted 'm
myself."
"Well, I've counted them twice, Aunty, and I can't make but nine."
She looked out of all patience, but of course she come to countanybody
would.
"I declare to gracious ther' AIN'T but nine" she says. "Why, what in
the worldplague TAKE the things, I'll count 'm again."
So I slipped back the one I had, and when she got done counting, she
says
"Hang the troublesome rubbage, ther's TEN now" and she looked huffy and
bothered both. But Tom says
"Why, Aunty, I don't think there's ten."
"You numskull, didn't you see me COUNT 'm?"
"I know, but"
"Well, I'll count 'm AGAIN."
So I smouched one, and they come out nine, same as the other time. Well,
she WAS in a tearing wayjust atrembling all over, she was so mad. But
she counted and counted till she got that addled she'd start to count in
the basket for a spoon sometimes and so, three times they come out
right, and three times they come out wrong. Then she grabbed up the
basket and slammed it across the house and knocked the cat galleywest
and she said cle'r out and let her have some peace, and if we come
bothering around her again betwixt that and dinner she'd skin us. So we
had the odd spoon, and dropped it in her apronpocket whilst she was
agiving us our sailing orders, and Jim got it all right, along with her
shingle nail, before noon. We was very well satisfied with this
business, and Tom allowed it was worth twice the trouble it took, because
he said NOW she couldn't ever count them spoons twice alike again to save
her life and wouldn't believe she'd counted them right if she DID and
said that after she'd about counted her head off for the next three days
he judged she'd give it up and offer to kill anybody that wanted her to
ever count them any more.
So we put the sheet back on the line that night, and stole one out of her
closet and kept on putting it back and stealing it again for a couple of
days till she didn't know how many sheets she had any more, and she
didn't CARE, and warn't agoing to bullyrag the rest of her soul out
about it, and wouldn't count them again not to save her life she druther
die first.
So we was all right now, as to the shirt and the sheet and the spoon and
the candles, by the help of the calf and the rats and the mixedup
counting and as to the candlestick, it warn't no consequence, it would
blow over by and by.
But that pie was a job we had no end of trouble with that pie. We fixed
it up away down in the woods, and cooked it there and we got it done at
last, and very satisfactory, too but not all in one day and we had to
use up three washpans full of flour before we got through, and we got
burnt pretty much all over, in places, and eyes put out with the smoke
because, you see, we didn't want nothing but a crust, and we couldn't
prop it up right, and she would always cave in. But of course we thought
of the right way at lastwhich was to cook the ladder, too, in the
pie. So then we laid in with Jim the second night, and tore up the sheet
all in little strings and twisted them together, and long before daylight
we had a lovely rope that you could a hung a person with. We let on it
took nine months to make it.
And in the forenoon we took it down to the woods, but it wouldn't go into
the pie. Being made of a whole sheet, that way, there was rope enough
for forty pies if we'd a wanted them, and plenty left over for soup, or
sausage, or anything you choose. We could a had a whole dinner.
But we didn't need it. All we needed was just enough for the pie,
and so we throwed the rest away. We didn't cook none of the pies in the
washpanafraid the solder would melt but Uncle Silas he had a noble
brass warmingpan which he thought considerable of, because it belonged
to one of his ancesters with a long wooden handle that come over from
England with William the Conqueror in the Mayflower or one of them early
ships and was hid away up garret with a lot of other old pots and things
that was valuable, not on account of being any account, because they
warn't, but on account of them being relicts, you know, and we snaked her
out, private, and took her down there, but she failed on the first pies,
because we didn't know how, but she come up smiling on the last one. We
took and lined her with dough, and set her in the coals, and loaded her
up with rag rope, and put on a dough roof, and shut down the lid, and put
hot embers on top, and stood off five foot, with the long handle, cool
and comfortable, and in fifteen minutes she turned out a pie that was a
satisfaction to look at. But the person that et it would want to fetch a
couple of kags of toothpicks along, for if that rope ladder wouldn't
cramp him down to business I don't know nothing what I'm talking about,
and lay him in enough stomachache to last him till next time, too.
Nat didn't look when we put the witch pie in Jim's pan and we put the
three tin plates in the bottom of the pan under the vittles and so Jim
got everything all right, and as soon as he was by himself he busted into
the pie and hid the rope ladder inside of his straw tick, and scratched
some marks on a tin plate and throwed it out of the windowhole.
CHAPTER XXXVIII.
MAKING them pens was a distressid tough job, and so was the saw and Jim
allowed the inscription was going to be the toughest of all. That's the
one which the prisoner has to scrabble on the wall. But he had to have
it Tom said he'd GOT to there warn't no case of a state prisoner not
scrabbling his inscription to leave behind, and his coat of arms.
"Look at Lady Jane Grey," he says "look at Gilford Dudley look at old
Northumberland Why, Huck, s'pose it IS considerble trouble?what you
going to do?how you going to get around it? Jim's GOT to do his
inscription and coat of arms. They all do."
Jim says
"Why, Mars Tom, I hain't got no coat o' arm I hain't got nuffn but dish
yer ole shirt, en you knows I got to keep de journal on dat."
"Oh, you don't understand, Jim a coat of arms is very different."
"Well," I says, "Jim's right, anyway, when he says he ain't got no coat
of arms, because he hain't."
"I reckon I knowed that," Tom says, "but you bet he'll have one before he
goes out of thisbecause he's going out RIGHT, and there ain't going to
be no flaws in his record."
So whilst me and Jim filed away at the pens on a brickbat apiece, Jim
amaking his'n out of the brass and I making mine out of the spoon, Tom
set to work to think out the coat of arms. By and by he said he'd struck
so many good ones he didn't hardly know which to take, but there was one
which he reckoned he'd decide on. He says
"On the scutcheon we'll have a bend OR in the dexter base, a saltire
MURREY in the fess, with a dog, couchant, for common charge, and under
his foot a chain embattled, for slavery, with a chevron VERT in a chief
engrailed, and three invected lines on a field AZURE, with the nombril
points rampant on a dancette indented crest, a runaway nigger, SABLE,
with his bundle over his shoulder on a bar sinister and a couple of
gules for supporters, which is you and me motto, MAGGIORE FRETTA, MINORE
OTTO. Got it out of a bookmeans the more haste the less speed."
"Geewhillikins," I says, "but what does the rest of it mean?"
"We ain't got no time to bother over that," he says "we got to dig in
like all gitout."
"Well, anyway," I says, "what's SOME of it? What's a fess?"
"A fessa fess isYOU don't need to know what a fess is. I'll show him
how to make it when he gets to it."
"Shucks, Tom," I says, "I think you might tell a person. What's a bar
sinister?"
"Oh, I don't know. But he's got to have it. All the nobility does."
That was just his way. If it didn't suit him to explain a thing to you,
he wouldn't do it. You might pump at him a week, it wouldn't make no
difference.
He'd got all that coat of arms business fixed, so now he started in to
finish up the rest of that part of the work, which was to plan out a
mournful inscriptionsaid Jim got to have one, like they all done. He
made up a lot, and wrote them out on a paper, and read them off, so
. Here a captive heart busted. . Here a poor prisoner, forsook by the
world and friends, fretted his sorrowful life. . Here a lonely heart
broke, and a worn spirit went to its rest, after thirtyseven years of
solitary captivity. . Here, homeless and friendless, after thirtyseven
years of bitter captivity, perished a noble stranger, natural son of
Louis XIV.
Tom's voice trembled whilst he was reading them, and he most broke down.
When he got done he couldn't no way make up his mind which one for Jim to
scrabble on to the wall, they was all so good but at last he allowed he
would let him scrabble them all on. Jim said it would take him a year to
scrabble such a lot of truck on to the logs with a nail, and he didn't
know how to make letters, besides but Tom said he would block them out
for him, and then he wouldn't have nothing to do but just follow the
lines. Then pretty soon he says
"Come to think, the logs ain't agoing to do they don't have log walls
in a dungeon we got to dig the inscriptions into a rock. We'll fetch a
rock."
Jim said the rock was worse than the logs he said it would take him such
a pison long time to dig them into a rock he wouldn't ever get out. But
Tom said he would let me help him do it. Then he took a look to see how
me and Jim was getting along with the pens. It was most pesky tedious
hard work and slow, and didn't give my hands no show to get well of the
sores, and we didn't seem to make no headway, hardly so Tom says
"I know how to fix it. We got to have a rock for the coat of arms and
mournful inscriptions, and we can kill two birds with that same rock.
There's a gaudy big grindstone down at the mill, and we'll smouch it, and
carve the things on it, and file out the pens and the saw on it, too."
It warn't no slouch of an idea and it warn't no slouch of a grindstone
nuther but we allowed we'd tackle it. It warn't quite midnight yet, so
we cleared out for the mill, leaving Jim at work. We smouched the
grindstone, and set out to roll her home, but it was a most nation tough
job. Sometimes, do what we could, we couldn't keep her from falling over,
and she come mighty near mashing us every time. Tom said she was going
to get one of us, sure, before we got through. We got her half way and
then we was plumb played out, and most drownded with sweat. We see it
warn't no use we got to go and fetch Jim So he raised up his bed and
slid the chain off of the bedleg, and wrapt it round and round his neck,
and we crawled out through our hole and down there, and Jim and me laid
into that grindstone and walked her along like nothing and Tom
superintended. He could outsuperintend any boy I ever see. He knowed
how to do everything.
Our hole was pretty big, but it warn't big enough to get the grindstone
through but Jim he took the pick and soon made it big enough. Then Tom
marked out them things on it with the nail, and set Jim to work on them,
with the nail for a chisel and an iron bolt from the rubbage in the
leanto for a hammer, and told him to work till the rest of his candle
quit on him, and then he could go to bed, and hide the grindstone under
his straw tick and sleep on it. Then we helped him fix his chain back on
the bedleg, and was ready for bed ourselves. But Tom thought of
something, and says
"You got any spiders in here, Jim?"
"No, sah, thanks to goodness I hain't, Mars Tom."
"All right, we'll get you some."
"But bless you, honey, I doan' WANT none. I's afeard un um. I jis' 's
soon have rattlesnakes aroun'."
Tom thought a minute or two, and says
"It's a good idea. And I reckon it's been done. It MUST a been done it
stands to reason. Yes, it's a prime good idea. Where could you keep
it?"
"Keep what, Mars Tom?"
"Why, a rattlesnake."
"De goodness gracious alive, Mars Tom Why, if dey was a rattlesnake to
come in heah I'd take en bust right out thoo dat log wall, I would, wid
my head."
Why, Jim, you wouldn't be afraid of it after a little. You could tame
it."
"TAME it"
"Yeseasy enough. Every animal is grateful for kindness and petting,
and they wouldn't THINK of hurting a person that pets them. Any book
will tell you that. You trythat's all I ask just try for two or three
days. Why, you can get him so in a little while that he'll love you and
sleep with you and won't stay away from you a minute and will let you
wrap him round your neck and put his head in your mouth."
"PLEASE, Mars TomDOAN' talk so I can't STAN' it He'd LET me shove
his head in my mouffer a favor, hain't it? I lay he'd wait a pow'ful
long time 'fo' I AST him. En mo' en dat, I doan' WANT him to sleep wid
me."
"Jim, don't act so foolish. A prisoner's GOT to have some kind of a dumb
pet, and if a rattlesnake hain't ever been tried, why, there's more glory
to be gained in your being the first to ever try it than any other way
you could ever think of to save your life."
"Why, Mars Tom, I doan' WANT no sich glory. Snake take 'n bite Jim's
chin off, den WHAH is de glory? No, sah, I doan' want no sich doin's."
"Blame it, can't you TRY? I only WANT you to tryyou needn't keep it up
if it don't work."
"But de trouble all DONE ef de snake bite me while I's a tryin' him.
Mars Tom, I's willin' to tackle mos' anything 'at ain't onreasonable, but
ef you en Huck fetches a rattlesnake in heah for me to tame, I's gwyne to
LEAVE, dat's SHORE."
"Well, then, let it go, let it go, if you're so bullheaded about it. We
can get you some gartersnakes, and you can tie some buttons on their
tails, and let on they're rattlesnakes, and I reckon that 'll have to
do."
"I k'n stan' DEM, Mars Tom, but blame' 'f I couldn' get along widout um,
I tell you dat. I never knowed b'fo' 't was so much bother and trouble
to be a prisoner."
"Well, it ALWAYS is when it's done right. You got any rats around here?"
"No, sah, I hain't seed none."
"Well, we'll get you some rats."
"Why, Mars Tom, I doan' WANT no rats. Dey's de dadblamedest creturs to
'sturb a body, en rustle roun' over 'im, en bite his feet, when he's
tryin' to sleep, I ever see. No, sah, gimme g'yartersnakes, 'f I's got
to have 'm, but doan' gimme no rats I hain' got no use f'r um, skasely."
"But, Jim, you GOT to have 'emthey all do. So don't make no more fuss
about it. Prisoners ain't ever without rats. There ain't no instance of
it. And they train them, and pet them, and learn them tricks, and they
get to be as sociable as flies. But you got to play music to them. You
got anything to play music on?"
"I ain' got nuffn but a coase comb en a piece o' paper, en a juiceharp
but I reck'n dey wouldn' take no stock in a juiceharp."
"Yes they would. THEY don't care what kind of music 'tis. A jewsharp's
plenty good enough for a rat. All animals like musicin a prison they
dote on it. Specially, painful music and you can't get no other kind
out of a jewsharp. It always interests them they come out to see
what's the matter with you. Yes, you're all right you're fixed very
well. You want to set on your bed nights before you go to sleep, and
early in the mornings, and play your jewsharp play 'The Last Link is
Broken'that's the thing that 'll scoop a rat quicker 'n anything else
and when you've played about two minutes you'll see all the rats, and the
snakes, and spiders, and things begin to feel worried about you, and
come. And they'll just fairly swarm over you, and have a noble good
time."
"Yes, DEY will, I reck'n, Mars Tom, but what kine er time is JIM havin'?
Blest if I kin see de pint. But I'll do it ef I got to. I reck'n I
better keep de animals satisfied, en not have no trouble in de house."
Tom waited to think it over, and see if there wasn't nothing else and
pretty soon he says
"Oh, there's one thing I forgot. Could you raise a flower here, do you
reckon?"
"I doan know but maybe I could, Mars Tom but it's tolable dark in heah,
en I ain' got no use f'r no flower, nohow, en she'd be a pow'ful sight o'
trouble."
"Well, you try it, anyway. Some other prisoners has done it."
"One er dem big cattaillookin' mullenstalks would grow in heah, Mars
Tom, I reck'n, but she wouldn't be wuth half de trouble she'd coss."
"Don't you believe it. We'll fetch you a little one and you plant it in
the corner over there, and raise it. And don't call it mullen, call it
Pitchiolathat's its right name when it's in a prison. And you want to
water it with your tears."
"Why, I got plenty spring water, Mars Tom."
"You don't WANT spring water you want to water it with your tears. It's
the way they always do."
"Why, Mars Tom, I lay I kin raise one er dem mullenstalks twyste wid
spring water whiles another man's a START'N one wid tears."
"That ain't the idea. You GOT to do it with tears."
"She'll die on my han's, Mars Tom, she sholy will kase I doan' skasely
ever cry."
So Tom was stumped. But he studied it over, and then said Jim would have
to worry along the best he could with an onion. He promised he would go
to the nigger cabins and drop one, private, in Jim's coffeepot, in the
morning. Jim said he would "jis' 's soon have tobacker in his coffee"
and found so much fault with it, and with the work and bother of raising
the mullen, and jewsharping the rats, and petting and flattering up the
snakes and spiders and things, on top of all the other work he had to do
on pens, and inscriptions, and journals, and things, which made it more
trouble and worry and responsibility to be a prisoner than anything he
ever undertook, that Tom most lost all patience with him and said he was
just loadened down with more gaudier chances than a prisoner ever had in
the world to make a name for himself, and yet he didn't know enough to
appreciate them, and they was just about wasted on him. So Jim he was
sorry, and said he wouldn't behave so no more, and then me and Tom shoved
for bed.
CHAPTER XXXIX.
IN the morning we went up to the village and bought a wire rattrap and
fetched it down, and unstopped the best rathole, and in about an hour we
had fifteen of the bulliest kind of ones and then we took it and put it
in a safe place under Aunt Sally's bed. But while we was gone for
spiders little Thomas Franklin Benjamin Jefferson Elexander Phelps found
it there, and opened the door of it to see if the rats would come out,
and they did and Aunt Sally she come in, and when we got back she was
astanding on top of the bed raising Cain, and the rats was doing what
they could to keep off the dull times for her. So she took and dusted us
both with the hickry, and we was as much as two hours catching another
fifteen or sixteen, drat that meddlesome cub, and they warn't the
likeliest, nuther, because the first haul was the pick of the flock.
I never see a likelier lot of rats than what that first haul was.
We got a splendid stock of sorted spiders, and bugs, and frogs, and
caterpillars, and one thing or another and we like to got a hornet's
nest, but we didn't. The family was at home. We didn't give it right
up, but stayed with them as long as we could because we allowed we'd
tire them out or they'd got to tire us out, and they done it. Then we
got allycumpain and rubbed on the places, and was pretty near all right
again, but couldn't set down convenient. And so we went for the snakes,
and grabbed a couple of dozen garters and housesnakes, and put them in a
bag, and put it in our room, and by that time it was suppertime, and a
rattling good honest day's work and hungry?oh, no, I reckon not And
there warn't a blessed snake up there when we went backwe didn't half
tie the sack, and they worked out somehow, and left. But it didn't
matter much, because they was still on the premises somewheres. So we
judged we could get some of them again. No, there warn't no real
scarcity of snakes about the house for a considerable spell. You'd see
them dripping from the rafters and places every now and then and they
generly landed in your plate, or down the back of your neck, and most of
the time where you didn't want them. Well, they was handsome and
striped, and there warn't no harm in a million of them but that never
made no difference to Aunt Sally she despised snakes, be the breed what
they might, and she couldn't stand them no way you could fix it and
every time one of them flopped down on her, it didn't make no difference
what she was doing, she would just lay that work down and light out. I
never see such a woman. And you could hear her whoop to Jericho. You
couldn't get her to take aholt of one of them with the tongs. And if
she turned over and found one in bed she would scramble out and lift a
howl that you would think the house was afire. She disturbed the old man
so that he said he could most wish there hadn't ever been no snakes
created. Why, after every last snake had been gone clear out of the
house for as much as a week Aunt Sally warn't over it yet she warn't
near over it when she was setting thinking about something you could
touch her on the back of her neck with a feather and she would jump right
out of her stockings. It was very curious. But Tom said all women was
just so. He said they was made that way for some reason or other.
We got a licking every time one of our snakes come in her way, and she
allowed these lickings warn't nothing to what she would do if we ever
loaded up the place again with them. I didn't mind the lickings, because
they didn't amount to nothing but I minded the trouble we had to lay in
another lot. But we got them laid in, and all the other things and you
never see a cabin as blithesome as Jim's was when they'd all swarm out
for music and go for him. Jim didn't like the spiders, and the spiders
didn't like Jim and so they'd lay for him, and make it mighty warm for
him. And he said that between the rats and the snakes and the grindstone
there warn't no room in bed for him, skasely and when there was, a body
couldn't sleep, it was so lively, and it was always lively, he said,
because THEY never all slept at one time, but took turn about, so when
the snakes was asleep the rats was on deck, and when the rats turned in
the snakes come on watch, so he always had one gang under him, in his
way, and t'other gang having a circus over him, and if he got up to hunt
a new place the spiders would take a chance at him as he crossed over.
He said if he ever got out this time he wouldn't ever be a prisoner
again, not for a salary.
Well, by the end of three weeks everything was in pretty good shape. The
shirt was sent in early, in a pie, and every time a rat bit Jim he would
get up and write a little in his journal whilst the ink was fresh the
pens was made, the inscriptions and so on was all carved on the
grindstone the bedleg was sawed in two, and we had et up the sawdust,
and it give us a most amazing stomachache. We reckoned we was all going
to die, but didn't. It was the most undigestible sawdust I ever see and
Tom said the same. But as I was saying, we'd got all the work done now,
at last and we was all pretty much fagged out, too, but mainly Jim. The
old man had wrote a couple of times to the plantation below Orleans to
come and get their runaway nigger, but hadn't got no answer, because
there warn't no such plantation so he allowed he would advertise Jim in
the St. Louis and New Orleans papers and when he mentioned the St. Louis
ones it give me the cold shivers, and I see we hadn't no time to lose.
So Tom said, now for the nonnamous letters.
"What's them?" I says.
"Warnings to the people that something is up. Sometimes it's done one
way, sometimes another. But there's always somebody spying around that
gives notice to the governor of the castle. When Louis XVI. was going to
light out of the Tooleries a servantgirl done it. It's a very good way,
and so is the nonnamous letters. We'll use them both. And it's usual
for the prisoner's mother to change clothes with him, and she stays in,
and he slides out in her clothes. We'll do that, too."
"But looky here, Tom, what do we want to WARN anybody for that
something's up? Let them find it out for themselvesit's their
lookout."
"Yes, I know but you can't depend on them. It's the way they've acted
from the very startleft us to do EVERYTHING. They're so confiding and
mulletheaded they don't take notice of nothing at all. So if we don't
GIVE them notice there won't be nobody nor nothing to interfere with us,
and so after all our hard work and trouble this escape 'll go off
perfectly flat won't amount to nothingwon't be nothing TO it."
"Well, as for me, Tom, that's the way I'd like."
"Shucks" he says, and looked disgusted. So I says
"But I ain't going to make no complaint. Any way that suits you suits
me. What you going to do about the servantgirl?"
"You'll be her. You slide in, in the middle of the night, and hook that
yaller girl's frock."
"Why, Tom, that 'll make trouble next morning because, of course, she
prob'bly hain't got any but that one."
"I know but you don't want it but fifteen minutes, to carry the
nonnamous letter and shove it under the front door."
"All right, then, I'll do it but I could carry it just as handy in my
own togs."
"You wouldn't look like a servantgirl THEN, would you?"
"No, but there won't be nobody to see what I look like, ANYWAY."
"That ain't got nothing to do with it. The thing for us to do is just to
do our DUTY, and not worry about whether anybody SEES us do it or not.
Hain't you got no principle at all?"
"All right, I ain't saying nothing I'm the servantgirl. Who's Jim's
mother?"
"I'm his mother. I'll hook a gown from Aunt Sally."
"Well, then, you'll have to stay in the cabin when me and Jim leaves."
"Not much. I'll stuff Jim's clothes full of straw and lay it on his bed
to represent his mother in disguise, and Jim 'll take the nigger woman's
gown off of me and wear it, and we'll all evade together. When a
prisoner of style escapes it's called an evasion. It's always called so
when a king escapes, f'rinstance. And the same with a king's son it
don't make no difference whether he's a natural one or an unnatural one."
So Tom he wrote the nonnamous letter, and I smouched the yaller wench's
frock that night, and put it on, and shoved it under the front door, the
way Tom told me to. It said
Beware. Trouble is brewing. Keep a sharp lookout. UNKNOWN FRIEND.
Next night we stuck a picture, which Tom drawed in blood, of a skull and
crossbones on the front door and next night another one of a coffin on
the back door. I never see a family in such a sweat. They couldn't a
been worse scared if the place had a been full of ghosts laying for them
behind everything and under the beds and shivering through the air. If a
door banged, Aunt Sally she jumped and said "ouch" if anything fell, she
jumped and said "ouch" if you happened to touch her, when she warn't
noticing, she done the same she couldn't face noway and be satisfied,
because she allowed there was something behind her every timeso she was
always awhirling around sudden, and saying "ouch," and before she'd got
twothirds around she'd whirl back again, and say it again and she was
afraid to go to bed, but she dasn't set up. So the thing was working
very well, Tom said he said he never see a thing work more satisfactory.
He said it showed it was done right.
So he said, now for the grand bulge So the very next morning at the
streak of dawn we got another letter ready, and was wondering what we
better do with it, because we heard them say at supper they was going to
have a nigger on watch at both doors all night. Tom he went down the
lightningrod to spy around and the nigger at the back door was asleep,
and he stuck it in the back of his neck and come back. This letter said
Don't betray me, I wish to be your friend. There is a desprate gang of
cutthroats from over in the Indian Territory going to steal your runaway
nigger tonight, and they have been trying to scare you so as you will
stay in the house and not bother them. I am one of the gang, but have
got religgion and wish to quit it and lead an honest life again, and will
betray the helish design. They will sneak down from northards, along the
fence, at midnight exact, with a false key, and go in the nigger's cabin
to get him. I am to be off a piece and blow a tin horn if I see any
danger but stead of that I will BA like a sheep soon as they get in and
not blow at all then whilst they are getting his chains loose, you slip
there and lock them in, and can kill them at your leasure. Don't do
anything but just the way I am telling you if you do they will suspicion
something and raise whoopjamboreehoo. I do not wish any reward but to
know I have done the right thing. UNKNOWN FRIEND.
CHAPTER XL.
WE was feeling pretty good after breakfast, and took my canoe and went
over the river afishing, with a lunch, and had a good time, and took a
look at the raft and found her all right, and got home late to supper,
and found them in such a sweat and worry they didn't know which end they
was standing on, and made us go right off to bed the minute we was done
supper, and wouldn't tell us what the trouble was, and never let on a
word about the new letter, but didn't need to, because we knowed as much
about it as anybody did, and as soon as we was half up stairs and her
back was turned we slid for the cellar cupboard and loaded up a good
lunch and took it up to our room and went to bed, and got up about
halfpast eleven, and Tom put on Aunt Sally's dress that he stole and
was going to start with the lunch, but says
"Where's the butter?"
"I laid out a hunk of it," I says, "on a piece of a cornpone."
"Well, you LEFT it laid out, thenit ain't here."
"We can get along without it," I says.
"We can get along WITH it, too," he says "just you slide down cellar and
fetch it. And then mosey right down the lightningrod and come along.
I'll go and stuff the straw into Jim's clothes to represent his mother in
disguise, and be ready to BA like a sheep and shove soon as you get
there."
So out he went, and down cellar went I. The hunk of butter, big as a
person's fist, was where I had left it, so I took up the slab of
cornpone with it on, and blowed out my light, and started up stairs very
stealthy, and got up to the main floor all right, but here comes Aunt
Sally with a candle, and I clapped the truck in my hat, and clapped my
hat on my head, and the next second she see me and she says
"You been down cellar?"
"Yes'm."
"What you been doing down there?"
"Noth'n."
"NOTH'N"
"No'm."
"Well, then, what possessed you to go down there this time of night?"
"I don't know 'm."
"You don't KNOW? Don't answer me that way. Tom, I want to know what you
been DOING down there."
"I hain't been doing a single thing, Aunt Sally, I hope to gracious if I
have."
I reckoned she'd let me go now, and as a generl thing she would but I
s'pose there was so many strange things going on she was just in a sweat
about every little thing that warn't yardstick straight so she says,
very decided
"You just march into that settingroom and stay there till I come. You
been up to something you no business to, and I lay I'll find out what it
is before I'M done with you."
So she went away as I opened the door and walked into the settingroom.
My, but there was a crowd there Fifteen farmers, and every one of them
had a gun. I was most powerful sick, and slunk to a chair and set down.
They was setting around, some of them talking a little, in a low voice,
and all of them fidgety and uneasy, but trying to look like they warn't
but I knowed they was, because they was always taking off their hats, and
putting them on, and scratching their heads, and changing their seats,
and fumbling with their buttons. I warn't easy myself, but I didn't take
my hat off, all the same.
I did wish Aunt Sally would come, and get done with me, and lick me, if
she wanted to, and let me get away and tell Tom how we'd overdone this
thing, and what a thundering hornet'snest we'd got ourselves into, so we
could stop fooling around straight off, and clear out with Jim before
these rips got out of patience and come for us.
At last she come and begun to ask me questions, but I COULDN'T answer
them straight, I didn't know which end of me was up because these men
was in such a fidget now that some was wanting to start right NOW and lay
for them desperadoes, and saying it warn't but a few minutes to midnight
and others was trying to get them to hold on and wait for the
sheepsignal and here was Aunty pegging away at the questions, and me
ashaking all over and ready to sink down in my tracks I was that scared
and the place getting hotter and hotter, and the butter beginning to melt
and run down my neck and behind my ears and pretty soon, when one of
them says, "I'M for going and getting in the cabin FIRST and right NOW,
and catching them when they come," I most dropped and a streak of butter
come atrickling down my forehead, and Aunt Sally she see it, and turns
white as a sheet, and says
"For the land's sake, what IS the matter with the child? He's got the
brainfever as shore as you're born, and they're oozing out"
And everybody runs to see, and she snatches off my hat, and out comes the
bread and what was left of the butter, and she grabbed me, and hugged me,
and says
"Oh, what a turn you did give me and how glad and grateful I am it ain't
no worse for luck's against us, and it never rains but it pours, and
when I see that truck I thought we'd lost you, for I knowed by the color
and all it was just like your brains would be ifDear, dear, whyd'nt you
TELL me that was what you'd been down there for, I wouldn't a cared. Now
cler out to bed, and don't lemme see no more of you till morning"
I was up stairs in a second, and down the lightningrod in another one,
and shinning through the dark for the leanto. I couldn't hardly get my
words out, I was so anxious but I told Tom as quick as I could we must
jump for it now, and not a minute to losethe house full of men, yonder,
with guns
His eyes just blazed and he says
"Nois that so? AIN'T it bully Why, Huck, if it was to do over
again, I bet I could fetch two hundred If we could put it off till"
"Hurry HURRY" I says. "Where's Jim?"
"Right at your elbow if you reach out your arm you can touch him. He's
dressed, and everything's ready. Now we'll slide out and give the
sheepsignal."
But then we heard the tramp of men coming to the door, and heard them
begin to fumble with the padlock, and heard a man say
"I TOLD you we'd be too soon they haven't comethe door is locked.
Here, I'll lock some of you into the cabin, and you lay for 'em in the
dark and kill 'em when they come and the rest scatter around a piece,
and listen if you can hear 'em coming."
So in they come, but couldn't see us in the dark, and most trod on us
whilst we was hustling to get under the bed. But we got under all right,
and out through the hole, swift but softJim first, me next, and Tom
last, which was according to Tom's orders. Now we was in the leanto,
and heard trampings close by outside. So we crept to the door, and Tom
stopped us there and put his eye to the crack, but couldn't make out
nothing, it was so dark and whispered and said he would listen for the
steps to get further, and when he nudged us Jim must glide out first, and
him last. So he set his ear to the crack and listened, and listened, and
listened, and the steps ascraping around out there all the time and at
last he nudged us, and we slid out, and stooped down, not breathing, and
not making the least noise, and slipped stealthy towards the fence in
Injun file, and got to it all right, and me and Jim over it but Tom's
britches catched fast on a splinter on the top rail, and then he hear the
steps coming, so he had to pull loose, which snapped the splinter and
made a noise and as he dropped in our tracks and started somebody sings
out
"Who's that? Answer, or I'll shoot"
But we didn't answer we just unfurled our heels and shoved. Then there
was a rush, and a BANG, BANG, BANG and the bullets fairly whizzed around
us We heard them sing out
"Here they are They've broke for the river After 'em, boys, and turn
loose the dogs"
So here they come, full tilt. We could hear them because they wore boots
and yelled, but we didn't wear no boots and didn't yell. We was in the
path to the mill and when they got pretty close on to us we dodged into
the bush and let them go by, and then dropped in behind them. They'd had
all the dogs shut up, so they wouldn't scare off the robbers but by this
time somebody had let them loose, and here they come, making powwow
enough for a million but they was our dogs so we stopped in our tracks
till they catched up and when they see it warn't nobody but us, and no
excitement to offer them, they only just said howdy, and tore right ahead
towards the shouting and clattering and then we upsteam again, and
whizzed along after them till we was nearly to the mill, and then struck
up through the bush to where my canoe was tied, and hopped in and pulled
for dear life towards the middle of the river, but didn't make no more
noise than we was obleeged to. Then we struck out, easy and comfortable,
for the island where my raft was and we could hear them yelling and
barking at each other all up and down the bank, till we was so far away
the sounds got dim and died out. And when we stepped on to the raft I
says
"NOW, old Jim, you're a free man again, and I bet you won't ever be a
slave no more."
"En a mighty good job it wuz, too, Huck. It 'uz planned beautiful, en it
'uz done beautiful en dey ain't NOBODY kin git up a plan dat's mo'
mixedup en splendid den what dat one wuz."
We was all glad as we could be, but Tom was the gladdest of all because
he had a bullet in the calf of his leg.
When me and Jim heard that we didn't feel so brash as what we did before.
It was hurting him considerable, and bleeding so we laid him in the
wigwam and tore up one of the duke's shirts for to bandage him, but he
says
"Gimme the rags I can do it myself. Don't stop now don't fool around
here, and the evasion booming along so handsome man the sweeps, and set
her loose Boys, we done it elegant'deed we did. I wish WE'D a had
the handling of Louis XVI., there wouldn't a been no 'Son of Saint Louis,
ascend to heaven' wrote down in HIS biography no, sir, we'd a whooped
him over the BORDERthat's what we'd a done with HIMand done it just
as slick as nothing at all, too. Man the sweepsman the sweeps"
But me and Jim was consultingand thinking. And after we'd thought a
minute, I says
"Say it, Jim."
So he says
"Well, den, dis is de way it look to me, Huck. Ef it wuz HIM dat 'uz
bein' sot free, en one er de boys wuz to git shot, would he say, 'Go on
en save me, nemmine 'bout a doctor f'r to save dis one?' Is dat like
Mars Tom Sawyer? Would he say dat? You BET he wouldn't WELL, den, is
JIM gywne to say it? No, sahI doan' budge a step out'n dis place 'dout
a DOCTOR, not if it's forty year"
I knowed he was white inside, and I reckoned he'd say what he did sayso
it was all right now, and I told Tom I was agoing for a doctor. He
raised considerable row about it, but me and Jim stuck to it and wouldn't
budge so he was for crawling out and setting the raft loose himself but
we wouldn't let him. Then he give us a piece of his mind, but it didn't
do no good.
So when he sees me getting the canoe ready, he says
"Well, then, if you re bound to go, I'll tell you the way to do when you
get to the village. Shut the door and blindfold the doctor tight and
fast, and make him swear to be silent as the grave, and put a purse full
of gold in his hand, and then take and lead him all around the back
alleys and everywheres in the dark, and then fetch him here in the canoe,
in a roundabout way amongst the islands, and search him and take his
chalk away from him, and don't give it back to him till you get him back
to the village, or else he will chalk this raft so he can find it again.
It's the way they all do."
So I said I would, and left, and Jim was to hide in the woods when he see
the doctor coming till he was gone again.
CHAPTER XLI.
THE doctor was an old man a very nice, kindlooking old man when I got
him up. I told him me and my brother was over on Spanish Island hunting
yesterday afternoon, and camped on a piece of a raft we found, and about
midnight he must a kicked his gun in his dreams, for it went off and shot
him in the leg, and we wanted him to go over there and fix it and not say
nothing about it, nor let anybody know, because we wanted to come home
this evening and surprise the folks.
"Who is your folks?" he says.
"The Phelpses, down yonder."
"Oh," he says. And after a minute, he says
"How'd you say he got shot?"
"He had a dream," I says, "and it shot him."
"Singular dream," he says.
So he lit up his lantern, and got his saddlebags, and we started. But
when he sees the canoe he didn't like the look of hersaid she was big
enough for one, but didn't look pretty safe for two. I says
"Oh, you needn't be afeard, sir, she carried the three of us easy
enough."
"What three?"
"Why, me and Sid, andandand THE GUNS that's what I mean."
"Oh," he says.
But he put his foot on the gunnel and rocked her, and shook his head, and
said he reckoned he'd look around for a bigger one. But they was all
locked and chained so he took my canoe, and said for me to wait till he
come back, or I could hunt around further, or maybe I better go down home
and get them ready for the surprise if I wanted to. But I said I didn't
so I told him just how to find the raft, and then he started.
I struck an idea pretty soon. I says to myself, spos'n he can't fix that
leg just in three shakes of a sheep's tail, as the saying is? spos'n it
takes him three or four days? What are we going to do?lay around there
till he lets the cat out of the bag? No, sir I know what I'LL do. I'll
wait, and when he comes back if he says he's got to go any more I'll get
down there, too, if I swim and we'll take and tie him, and keep him, and
shove out down the river and when Tom's done with him we'll give him
what it's worth, or all we got, and then let him get ashore.
So then I crept into a lumberpile to get some sleep and next time I
waked up the sun was away up over my head I shot out and went for the
doctor's house, but they told me he'd gone away in the night some time or
other, and warn't back yet. Well, thinks I, that looks powerful bad for
Tom, and I'll dig out for the island right off. So away I shoved, and
turned the corner, and nearly rammed my head into Uncle Silas's stomach
He says
"Why, TOM Where you been all this time, you rascal?"
"I hain't been nowheres," I says, "only just hunting for the runaway
niggerme and Sid."
"Why, where ever did you go?" he says. "Your aunt's been mighty uneasy."
"She needn't," I says, "because we was all right. We followed the men
and the dogs, but they outrun us, and we lost them but we thought we
heard them on the water, so we got a canoe and took out after them and
crossed over, but couldn't find nothing of them so we cruised along
upshore till we got kind of tired and beat out and tied up the canoe
and went to sleep, and never waked up till about an hour ago then we
paddled over here to hear the news, and Sid's at the postoffice to see
what he can hear, and I'm abranching out to get something to eat for us,
and then we're going home."
So then we went to the postoffice to get "Sid" but just as I
suspicioned, he warn't there so the old man he got a letter out of the
office, and we waited awhile longer, but Sid didn't come so the old man
said, come along, let Sid foot it home, or canoe it, when he got done
fooling aroundbut we would ride. I couldn't get him to let me stay and
wait for Sid and he said there warn't no use in it, and I must come
along, and let Aunt Sally see we was all right.
When we got home Aunt Sally was that glad to see me she laughed and cried
both, and hugged me, and give me one of them lickings of hern that don't
amount to shucks, and said she'd serve Sid the same when he come.
And the place was plum full of farmers and farmers' wives, to dinner and
such another clack a body never heard. Old Mrs. Hotchkiss was the worst
her tongue was agoing all the time. She says
"Well, Sister Phelps, I've ransacked thatair cabin over, an' I b'lieve
the nigger was crazy. I says to Sister Damrelldidn't I, Sister
Damrell?s'I, he's crazy, s'Ithem's the very words I said. You all
hearn me he's crazy, s'I everything shows it, s'I. Look at thatair
grindstone, s'I want to tell ME't any cretur 't's in his right mind 's a
goin' to scrabble all them crazy things onto a grindstone, s'I? Here
sich 'n' sich a person busted his heart 'n' here so 'n' so pegged along
for thirtyseven year, 'n' all thatnatcherl son o' Louis somebody, 'n'
sich everlast'n rubbage. He's plumb crazy, s'I it's what I says in the
fust place, it's what I says in the middle, 'n' it's what I says last 'n'
all the timethe nigger's crazycrazy 's Nebokoodneezer, s'I."
"An' look at thatair ladder made out'n rags, Sister Hotchkiss," says old
Mrs. Damrell "what in the name o' goodness COULD he ever want of"
"The very words I was asayin' no longer ago th'n this minute to Sister
Utterback, 'n' she'll tell you so herself. Shshe, look at thatair rag
ladder, shshe 'n' s'I, yes, LOOK at it, s'Iwhat COULD he awanted of
it, s'I. Shshe, Sister Hotchkiss, shshe"
"But how in the nation'd they ever GIT that grindstone IN there, ANYWAY?
'n' who dug thatair HOLE? 'n' who"
"My very WORDS, Brer Penrod I was asayin'pass thatair sasser o'
m'lasses, won't ye?I was asayin' to Sister Dunlap, jist this minute,
how DID they git that grindstone in there, s'I. Without HELP, mind you
'thout HELP THAT'S wher 'tis. Don't tell ME, s'I there WUZ help,
s'I 'n' ther' wuz a PLENTY help, too, s'I ther's ben a DOZEN ahelpin'
that nigger, 'n' I lay I'd skin every last nigger on this place but I'D
find out who done it, s'I 'n' moreover, s'I"
"A DOZEN says youFORTY couldn't a done every thing that's been done.
Look at them caseknife saws and things, how tedious they've been made
look at that bedleg sawed off with 'm, a week's work for six men look
at that nigger made out'n straw on the bed and look at"
"You may WELL say it, Brer Hightower It's jist as I was asayin' to
Brer Phelps, his own self. S'e, what do YOU think of it, Sister
Hotchkiss, s'e? Think o' what, Brer Phelps, s'I? Think o' that bedleg
sawed off that a way, s'e? THINK of it, s'I? I lay it never sawed
ITSELF off, s'Isomebody SAWED it, s'I that's my opinion, take it or
leave it, it mayn't be no 'count, s'I, but sich as 't is, it's my
opinion, s'I, 'n' if any body k'n start a better one, s'I, let him DO it,
s'I, that's all. I says to Sister Dunlap, s'I"
"Why, dog my cats, they must a ben a housefull o' niggers in there every
night for four weeks to a done all that work, Sister Phelps. Look at
that shirtevery last inch of it kivered over with secret African writ'n
done with blood Must a ben a raft uv 'm at it right along, all the
time, amost. Why, I'd give two dollars to have it read to me 'n' as for
the niggers that wrote it, I 'low I'd take 'n' lash 'm t'll"
"People to HELP him, Brother Marples Well, I reckon you'd THINK so if
you'd a been in this house for a while back. Why, they've stole
everything they could lay their hands onand we awatching all the time,
mind you. They stole that shirt right off o' the line and as for that
sheet they made the rag ladder out of, ther' ain't no telling how many
times they DIDN'T steal that and flour, and candles, and candlesticks,
and spoons, and the old warmingpan, and most a thousand things that I
disremember now, and my new calico dress and me and Silas and my Sid and
Tom on the constant watch day AND night, as I was atelling you, and not
a one of us could catch hide nor hair nor sight nor sound of them and
here at the last minute, lo and behold you, they slides right in under
our noses and fools us, and not only fools US but the Injun Territory
robbers too, and actuly gets AWAY with that nigger safe and sound, and
that with sixteen men and twentytwo dogs right on their very heels at
that very time I tell you, it just bangs anything I ever HEARD of.
Why, SPERITS couldn't a done better and been no smarter. And I reckon
they must a BEEN speritsbecause, YOU know our dogs, and ther' ain't no
better well, them dogs never even got on the TRACK of 'm once You
explain THAT to me if you canANY of you"
"Well, it does beat"
"Laws alive, I never"
"So help me, I wouldn't a be"
"HOUSEthieves as well as"
"Goodnessgracioussakes, I'd a ben afeard to live in sich a"
"'Fraid to LIVEwhy, I was that scared I dasn't hardly go to bed, or
get up, or lay down, or SET down, Sister Ridgeway. Why, they'd steal the
verywhy, goodness sakes, you can guess what kind of a fluster I was
in by the time midnight come last night. I hope to gracious if I warn't
afraid they'd steal some o' the family I was just to that pass I didn't
have no reasoning faculties no more. It looks foolish enough NOW, in the
daytime but I says to myself, there's my two poor boys asleep, 'way up
stairs in that lonesome room, and I declare to goodness I was that uneasy
't I crep' up there and locked 'em in I DID. And anybody would.
Because, you know, when you get scared that way, and it keeps running on,
and getting worse and worse all the time, and your wits gets to addling,
and you get to doing all sorts o' wild things, and by and by you think to
yourself, spos'n I was a boy, and was away up there, and the door ain't
locked, and you" She stopped, looking kind of wondering, and then she
turned her head around slow, and when her eye lit on meI got up and
took a walk.
Says I to myself, I can explain better how we come to not be in that room
this morning if I go out to one side and study over it a little. So I
done it. But I dasn't go fur, or she'd a sent for me. And when it was
late in the day the people all went, and then I come in and told her the
noise and shooting waked up me and "Sid," and the door was locked, and we
wanted to see the fun, so we went down the lightningrod, and both of us
got hurt a little, and we didn't never want to try THAT no more. And
then I went on and told her all what I told Uncle Silas before and then
she said she'd forgive us, and maybe it was all right enough anyway, and
about what a body might expect of boys, for all boys was a pretty
harumscarum lot as fur as she could see and so, as long as no harm
hadn't come of it, she judged she better put in her time being grateful
we was alive and well and she had us still, stead of fretting over what
was past and done. So then she kissed me, and patted me on the head, and
dropped into a kind of a brown study and pretty soon jumps up, and says
"Why, lawsamercy, it's most night, and Sid not come yet What HAS become
of that boy?"
I see my chance so I skips up and says
"I'll run right up to town and get him," I says.
"No you won't," she says. "You'll stay right wher' you are ONE'S enough
to be lost at a time. If he ain't here to supper, your uncle 'll go."
Well, he warn't there to supper so right after supper uncle went.
He come back about ten a little bit uneasy hadn't run across Tom's
track. Aunt Sally was a good DEAL uneasy but Uncle Silas he said there
warn't no occasion to beboys will be boys, he said, and you'll see this
one turn up in the morning all sound and right. So she had to be
satisfied. But she said she'd set up for him a while anyway, and keep a
light burning so he could see it.
And then when I went up to bed she come up with me and fetched her
candle, and tucked me in, and mothered me so good I felt mean, and like I
couldn't look her in the face and she set down on the bed and talked
with me a long time, and said what a splendid boy Sid was, and didn't
seem to want to ever stop talking about him and kept asking me every now
and then if I reckoned he could a got lost, or hurt, or maybe drownded,
and might be laying at this minute somewheres suffering or dead, and she
not by him to help him, and so the tears would drip down silent, and I
would tell her that Sid was all right, and would be home in the morning,
sure and she would squeeze my hand, or maybe kiss me, and tell me to say
it again, and keep on saying it, because it done her good, and she was in
so much trouble. And when she was going away she looked down in my eyes
so steady and gentle, and says
"The door ain't going to be locked, Tom, and there's the window and the
rod but you'll be good, WON'T you? And you won't go? For MY sake."
Laws knows I WANTED to go bad enough to see about Tom, and was all
intending to go but after that I wouldn't a went, not for kingdoms.
But she was on my mind and Tom was on my mind, so I slept very restless.
And twice I went down the rod away in the night, and slipped around
front, and see her setting there by her candle in the window with her
eyes towards the road and the tears in them and I wished I could do
something for her, but I couldn't, only to swear that I wouldn't never do
nothing to grieve her any more. And the third time I waked up at dawn,
and slid down, and she was there yet, and her candle was most out, and
her old gray head was resting on her hand, and she was asleep.
CHAPTER XLII.
THE old man was uptown again before breakfast, but couldn't get no track
of Tom and both of them set at the table thinking, and not saying
nothing, and looking mournful, and their coffee getting cold, and not
eating anything. And by and by the old man says
"Did I give you the letter?"
"What letter?"
"The one I got yesterday out of the postoffice."
"No, you didn't give me no letter."
"Well, I must a forgot it."
So he rummaged his pockets, and then went off somewheres where he had
laid it down, and fetched it, and give it to her. She says
"Why, it's from St. Petersburgit's from Sis."
I allowed another walk would do me good but I couldn't stir. But before
she could break it open she dropped it and runfor she see something.
And so did I. It was Tom Sawyer on a mattress and that old doctor and
Jim, in HER calico dress, with his hands tied behind him and a lot of
people. I hid the letter behind the first thing that come handy, and
rushed. She flung herself at Tom, crying, and says
"Oh, he's dead, he's dead, I know he's dead"
And Tom he turned his head a little, and muttered something or other,
which showed he warn't in his right mind then she flung up her hands,
and says
"He's alive, thank God And that's enough" and she snatched a kiss of
him, and flew for the house to get the bed ready, and scattering orders
right and left at the niggers and everybody else, as fast as her tongue
could go, every jump of the way.
I followed the men to see what they was going to do with Jim and the old
doctor and Uncle Silas followed after Tom into the house. The men was
very huffy, and some of them wanted to hang Jim for an example to all the
other niggers around there, so they wouldn't be trying to run away like
Jim done, and making such a raft of trouble, and keeping a whole family
scared most to death for days and nights. But the others said, don't do
it, it wouldn't answer at all he ain't our nigger, and his owner would
turn up and make us pay for him, sure. So that cooled them down a
little, because the people that's always the most anxious for to hang a
nigger that hain't done just right is always the very ones that ain't the
most anxious to pay for him when they've got their satisfaction out of
him.
They cussed Jim considerble, though, and give him a cuff or two side the
head once in a while, but Jim never said nothing, and he never let on to
know me, and they took him to the same cabin, and put his own clothes on
him, and chained him again, and not to no bedleg this time, but to a big
staple drove into the bottom log, and chained his hands, too, and both
legs, and said he warn't to have nothing but bread and water to eat after
this till his owner come, or he was sold at auction because he didn't
come in a certain length of time, and filled up our hole, and said a
couple of farmers with guns must stand watch around about the cabin every
night, and a bulldog tied to the door in the daytime and about this time
they was through with the job and was tapering off with a kind of generl
goodbye cussing, and then the old doctor comes and takes a look, and
says
"Don't be no rougher on him than you're obleeged to, because he ain't a
bad nigger. When I got to where I found the boy I see I couldn't cut the
bullet out without some help, and he warn't in no condition for me to
leave to go and get help and he got a little worse and a little worse,
and after a long time he went out of his head, and wouldn't let me come
anigh him any more, and said if I chalked his raft he'd kill me, and no
end of wild foolishness like that, and I see I couldn't do anything at
all with him so I says, I got to have HELP somehow and the minute I
says it out crawls this nigger from somewheres and says he'll help, and
he done it, too, and done it very well. Of course I judged he must be a
runaway nigger, and there I WAS and there I had to stick right straight
along all the rest of the day and all night. It was a fix, I tell you
I had a couple of patients with the chills, and of course I'd of liked to
run up to town and see them, but I dasn't, because the nigger might get
away, and then I'd be to blame and yet never a skiff come close enough
for me to hail. So there I had to stick plumb until daylight this
morning and I never see a nigger that was a better nuss or faithfuller,
and yet he was risking his freedom to do it, and was all tired out, too,
and I see plain enough he'd been worked main hard lately. I liked the
nigger for that I tell you, gentlemen, a nigger like that is worth a
thousand dollarsand kind treatment, too. I had everything I needed,
and the boy was doing as well there as he would a done at homebetter,
maybe, because it was so quiet but there I WAS, with both of 'm on my
hands, and there I had to stick till about dawn this morning then some
men in a skiff come by, and as good luck would have it the nigger was
setting by the pallet with his head propped on his knees sound asleep so
I motioned them in quiet, and they slipped up on him and grabbed him and
tied him before he knowed what he was about, and we never had no trouble.
And the boy being in a kind of a flighty sleep, too, we muffled the oars
and hitched the raft on, and towed her over very nice and quiet, and the
nigger never made the least row nor said a word from the start. He ain't
no bad nigger, gentlemen that's what I think about him."
Somebody says
"Well, it sounds very good, doctor, I'm obleeged to say."
Then the others softened up a little, too, and I was mighty thankful to
that old doctor for doing Jim that good turn and I was glad it was
according to my judgment of him, too because I thought he had a good
heart in him and was a good man the first time I see him. Then they all
agreed that Jim had acted very well, and was deserving to have some
notice took of it, and reward. So every one of them promised, right out
and hearty, that they wouldn't cuss him no more.
Then they come out and locked him up. I hoped they was going to say he
could have one or two of the chains took off, because they was rotten
heavy, or could have meat and greens with his bread and water but they
didn't think of it, and I reckoned it warn't best for me to mix in, but I
judged I'd get the doctor's yarn to Aunt Sally somehow or other as soon
as I'd got through the breakers that was laying just ahead of me
explanations, I mean, of how I forgot to mention about Sid being shot
when I was telling how him and me put in that dratted night paddling
around hunting the runaway nigger.
But I had plenty time. Aunt Sally she stuck to the sickroom all day and
all night, and every time I see Uncle Silas mooning around I dodged him.
Next morning I heard Tom was a good deal better, and they said Aunt Sally
was gone to get a nap. So I slips to the sickroom, and if I found him
awake I reckoned we could put up a yarn for the family that would wash.
But he was sleeping, and sleeping very peaceful, too and pale, not
firefaced the way he was when he come. So I set down and laid for him
to wake. In about half an hour Aunt Sally comes gliding in, and there I
was, up a stump again She motioned me to be still, and set down by me,
and begun to whisper, and said we could all be joyful now, because all
the symptoms was firstrate, and he'd been sleeping like that for ever so
long, and looking better and peacefuller all the time, and ten to one
he'd wake up in his right mind.
So we set there watching, and by and by he stirs a bit, and opened his
eyes very natural, and takes a look, and says
"Hellowhy, I'm at HOME How's that? Where's the raft?"
"It's all right," I says.
"And JIM?"
"The same," I says, but couldn't say it pretty brash. But he never
noticed, but says
"Good Splendid NOW we're all right and safe Did you tell Aunty?"
I was going to say yes but she chipped in and says "About what, Sid?"
"Why, about the way the whole thing was done."
"What whole thing?"
"Why, THE whole thing. There ain't but one how we set the runaway
nigger freeme and Tom."
"Good land Set the runWhat IS the child talking about Dear, dear,
out of his head again"
"NO, I ain't out of my HEAD I know all what I'm talking about. We DID
set him freeme and Tom. We laid out to do it, and we DONE it. And we
done it elegant, too." He'd got a start, and she never checked him up,
just set and stared and stared, and let him clip along, and I see it
warn't no use for ME to put in. "Why, Aunty, it cost us a power of work
weeks of ithours and hours, every night, whilst you was all asleep.
And we had to steal candles, and the sheet, and the shirt, and your
dress, and spoons, and tin plates, and caseknives, and the warmingpan,
and the grindstone, and flour, and just no end of things, and you can't
think what work it was to make the saws, and pens, and inscriptions, and
one thing or another, and you can't think HALF the fun it was. And we
had to make up the pictures of coffins and things, and nonnamous letters
from the robbers, and get up and down the lightningrod, and dig the hole
into the cabin, and made the rope ladder and send it in cooked up in a
pie, and send in spoons and things to work with in your apron pocket"
"Mercy sakes"
"and load up the cabin with rats and snakes and so on, for company for
Jim and then you kept Tom here so long with the butter in his hat that
you come near spiling the whole business, because the men come before we
was out of the cabin, and we had to rush, and they heard us and let drive
at us, and I got my share, and we dodged out of the path and let them go
by, and when the dogs come they warn't interested in us, but went for the
most noise, and we got our canoe, and made for the raft, and was all
safe, and Jim was a free man, and we done it all by ourselves, and WASN'T
it bully, Aunty"
"Well, I never heard the likes of it in all my born days So it was YOU,
you little rapscallions, that's been making all this trouble, and turned
everybody's wits clean inside out and scared us all most to death. I've
as good a notion as ever I had in my life to take it out o' you this very
minute. To think, here I've been, night after night, aYOU just get
well once, you young scamp, and I lay I'll tan the Old Harry out o' both
o' ye"
But Tom, he WAS so proud and joyful, he just COULDN'T hold in, and his
tongue just WENT itshe achipping in, and spitting fire all along, and
both of them going it at once, like a cat convention and she says
"WELL, you get all the enjoyment you can out of it NOW, for mind I tell
you if I catch you meddling with him again"
"Meddling with WHO?" Tom says, dropping his smile and looking surprised.
"With WHO? Why, the runaway nigger, of course. Who'd you reckon?"
Tom looks at me very grave, and says
"Tom, didn't you just tell me he was all right? Hasn't he got away?"
"HIM?" says Aunt Sally "the runaway nigger? 'Deed he hasn't. They've
got him back, safe and sound, and he's in that cabin again, on bread and
water, and loaded down with chains, till he's claimed or sold"
Tom rose square up in bed, with his eye hot, and his nostrils opening and
shutting like gills, and sings out to me
"They hain't no RIGHT to shut him up SHOVEand don't you lose a
minute. Turn him loose he ain't no slave he's as free as any cretur
that walks this earth"
"What DOES the child mean?"
"I mean every word I SAY, Aunt Sally, and if somebody don't go, I'LL go.
I've knowed him all his life, and so has Tom, there. Old Miss Watson
died two months ago, and she was ashamed she ever was going to sell him
down the river, and SAID so and she set him free in her will."
"Then what on earth did YOU want to set him free for, seeing he was
already free?"
"Well, that IS a question, I must say and just like women Why, I
wanted the ADVENTURE of it and I'd a waded neckdeep in blood to
goodness alive, AUNT POLLY"
If she warn't standing right there, just inside the door, looking as
sweet and contented as an angel half full of pie, I wish I may never
Aunt Sally jumped for her, and most hugged the head off of her, and cried
over her, and I found a good enough place for me under the bed, for it
was getting pretty sultry for us, seemed to me. And I peeped out, and in
a little while Tom's Aunt Polly shook herself loose and stood there
looking across at Tom over her spectacleskind of grinding him into the
earth, you know. And then she says
"Yes, you BETTER turn y'r head awayI would if I was you, Tom."
"Oh, deary me" says Aunt Sally "IS he changed so? Why, that ain't TOM,
it's Sid Tom'sTom'swhy, where is Tom? He was here a minute ago."
"You mean where's Huck FINNthat's what you mean I reckon I hain't
raised such a scamp as my Tom all these years not to know him when I SEE
him. That WOULD be a pretty howdydo. Come out from under that bed,
Huck Finn."
So I done it. But not feeling brash.
Aunt Sally she was one of the mixedupestlooking persons I ever see
except one, and that was Uncle Silas, when he come in and they told it
all to him. It kind of made him drunk, as you may say, and he didn't
know nothing at all the rest of the day, and preached a prayermeeting
sermon that night that gave him a rattling ruputation, because the oldest
man in the world couldn't a understood it. So Tom's Aunt Polly, she told
all about who I was, and what and I had to up and tell how I was in such
a tight place that when Mrs. Phelps took me for Tom Sawyershe chipped
in and says, "Oh, go on and call me Aunt Sally, I'm used to it now, and
'tain't no need to change"that when Aunt Sally took me for Tom Sawyer I
had to stand itthere warn't no other way, and I knowed he wouldn't
mind, because it would be nuts for him, being a mystery, and he'd make an
adventure out of it, and be perfectly satisfied. And so it turned out,
and he let on to be Sid, and made things as soft as he could for me.
And his Aunt Polly she said Tom was right about old Miss Watson setting
Jim free in her will and so, sure enough, Tom Sawyer had gone and took
all that trouble and bother to set a free nigger free and I couldn't
ever understand before, until that minute and that talk, how he COULD
help a body set a nigger free with his bringingup.
Well, Aunt Polly she said that when Aunt Sally wrote to her that Tom and
SID had come all right and safe, she says to herself
"Look at that, now I might have expected it, letting him go off that
way without anybody to watch him. So now I got to go and trapse all the
way down the river, eleven hundred mile, and find out what that creetur's
up to THIS time, as long as I couldn't seem to get any answer out of you
about it."
"Why, I never heard nothing from you," says Aunt Sally.
"Well, I wonder Why, I wrote you twice to ask you what you could mean
by Sid being here."
"Well, I never got 'em, Sis."
Aunt Polly she turns around slow and severe, and says
"You, Tom"
"WellWHAT?" he says, kind of pettish.
"Don t you what ME, you impudent thinghand out them letters."
"What letters?"
"THEM letters. I be bound, if I have to take aholt of you I'll"
"They're in the trunk. There, now. And they're just the same as they
was when I got them out of the office. I hain't looked into them, I
hain't touched them. But I knowed they'd make trouble, and I thought if
you warn't in no hurry, I'd"
"Well, you DO need skinning, there ain't no mistake about it. And I
wrote another one to tell you I was coming and I s'pose he"
"No, it come yesterday I hain't read it yet, but IT'S all right, I've
got that one."
I wanted to offer to bet two dollars she hadn't, but I reckoned maybe it
was just as safe to not to. So I never said nothing.
CHAPTER THE LAST
THE first time I catched Tom private I asked him what was his idea, time
of the evasion?what it was he'd planned to do if the evasion worked all
right and he managed to set a nigger free that was already free before?
And he said, what he had planned in his head from the start, if we got
Jim out all safe, was for us to run him down the river on the raft, and
have adventures plumb to the mouth of the river, and then tell him about
his being free, and take him back up home on a steamboat, in style, and
pay him for his lost time, and write word ahead and get out all the
niggers around, and have them waltz him into town with a torchlight
procession and a brassband, and then he would be a hero, and so would
we. But I reckoned it was about as well the way it was.
We had Jim out of the chains in no time, and when Aunt Polly and Uncle
Silas and Aunt Sally found out how good he helped the doctor nurse Tom,
they made a heap of fuss over him, and fixed him up prime, and give him
all he wanted to eat, and a good time, and nothing to do. And we had him
up to the sickroom, and had a high talk and Tom give Jim forty dollars
for being prisoner for us so patient, and doing it up so good, and Jim
was pleased most to death, and busted out, and says
"DAH, now, Huck, what I tell you?what I tell you up dah on Jackson
islan'? I TOLE you I got a hairy breas', en what's de sign un it en I
TOLE you I ben rich wunst, en gwineter to be rich AGIN en it's come
true en heah she is DAH, now doan' talk to MEsigns is SIGNS, mine I
tell you en I knowed jis' 's well 'at I 'uz gwineter be rich agin as I's
astannin' heah dis minute"
And then Tom he talked along and talked along, and says, le's all three
slide out of here one of these nights and get an outfit, and go for
howling adventures amongst the Injuns, over in the Territory, for a
couple of weeks or two and I says, all right, that suits me, but I ain't
got no money for to buy the outfit, and I reckon I couldn't get none from
home, because it's likely pap's been back before now, and got it all away
from Judge Thatcher and drunk it up.
"No, he hain't," Tom says "it's all there yetsix thousand dollars and
more and your pap hain't ever been back since. Hadn't when I come away,
anyhow."
Jim says, kind of solemn
"He ain't acomin' back no mo', Huck."
I says
"Why, Jim?"
"Nemmine why, Huckbut he ain't comin' back no mo."
But I kept at him so at last he says
"Doan' you 'member de house dat was float'n down de river, en dey wuz a
man in dah, kivered up, en I went in en unkivered him and didn' let you
come in? Well, den, you kin git yo' money when you wants it, kase dat
wuz him."
Tom's most well now, and got his bullet around his neck on a watchguard
for a watch, and is always seeing what time it is, and so there ain't
nothing more to write about, and I am rotten glad of it, because if I'd a
knowed what a trouble it was to make a book I wouldn't a tackled it, and
ain't agoing to no more. But I reckon I got to light out for the
Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me
and sivilize me, and I can't stand it. I been there before.
End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,
Complete, by Mark Twain Samuel Clemens
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte
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Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts
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Title Jane Eyre
Author Charlotte Bronte
Edition 
Language English
Character set encoding ASCII
Release Date March,  [eBook ]
[Most recently updated on August , ]
 START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OF JANE EYRE, BY BRONTE 
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Jane Eyre
by Charlotte Bronte
PREFACE
A preface to the first edition of "Jane Eyre" being unnecessary,
I gave none this second edition demands a few words both of
acknowledgment and miscellaneous remark.
My thanks are due in three quarters.
To the Public, for the indulgent ear it has inclined to a plain
tale with few pretensions.
To the Press, for the fair field its honest suffrage has opened to
an obscure aspirant.
To my Publishers, for the aid their tact, their energy, their
practical sense and frank liberality have afforded an unknown and
unrecommended Author.
The Press and the Public are but vague personifications for me, and
I must thank them in vague terms but my Publishers are definite
so are certain generous critics who have encouraged me as only
largehearted and highminded men know how to encourage a struggling
stranger to them, i.e., to my Publishers and the select Reviewers,
I say cordially, Gentlemen, I thank you from my heart.
Having thus acknowledged what I owe those who have aided and approved
me, I turn to another class a small one, so far as I know, but
not, therefore, to be overlooked. I mean the timorous or carping
few who doubt the tendency of such books as "Jane Eyre" in whose
eyes whatever is unusual is wrong whose ears detect in each protest
against bigotry  that parent of crime  an insult to piety, that
regent of God on earth. I would suggest to such doubters certain
obvious distinctions I would remind them of certain simple truths.
Conventionality is not morality. Selfrighteousness is not religion.
To attack the first is not to assail the last. To pluck the mask
from the face of the Pharisee, is not to lift an impious hand to
the Crown of Thorns.
These things and deeds are diametrically opposed they are
as distinct as is vice from virtue. Men too often confound them
they should not be confounded appearance should not be mistaken
for truth narrow human doctrines, that only tend to elate and
magnify a few, should not be substituted for the worldredeeming
creed of Christ. There is  I repeat it  a difference and it
is a good, and not a bad action to mark broadly and clearly the
line of separation between them.
The world may not like to see these ideas dissevered, for it has been
accustomed to blend them finding it convenient to make external
show pass for sterling worth  to let whitewashed walls vouch for
clean shrines. It may hate him who dares to scrutinise and expose
to rase the gilding, and show base metal under it  to penetrate
the sepulchre, and reveal charnel relics but hate as it will, it
is indebted to him.
Ahab did not like Micaiah, because he never prophesied good concerning
him, but evil probably he liked the sycophant son of Chenaannah
better yet might Ahab have escaped a bloody death, had he but
stopped his ears to flattery, and opened them to faithful counsel.
There is a man in our own days whose words are not framed to tickle
delicate ears who, to my thinking, comes before the great ones
of society, much as the son of Imlah came before the throned Kings
of Judah and Israel and who speaks truth as deep, with a power
as prophetlike and as vital  a mien as dauntless and as daring.
Is the satirist of "Vanity Fair" admired in high places? I cannot
tell but I think if some of those amongst whom he hurls the Greek
fire of his sarcasm, and over whom he flashes the levinbrand
of his denunciation, were to take his warnings in time  they or
their seed might yet escape a fatal RimothGilead.
Why have I alluded to this man? I have alluded to him, Reader,
because I think I see in him an intellect profounder and more unique
than his contemporaries have yet recognised because I regard him
as the first social regenerator of the day  as the very master
of that working corps who would restore to rectitude the warped
system of things because I think no commentator on his writings
has yet found the comparison that suits him, the terms which rightly
characterise his talent. They say he is like Fielding they talk
of his wit, humour, comic powers. He resembles Fielding as an eagle
does a vulture Fielding could stoop on carrion, but Thackeray
never does. His wit is bright, his humour attractive, but both
bear the same relation to his serious genius that the mere lambent
sheetlightning playing under the edge of the summercloud does to
the electric deathspark hid in its womb. Finally, I have alluded
to Mr. Thackeray, because to him  if he will accept the tribute
of a total stranger  I have dedicated this second edition of
"JANE EYRE."
CURRER BELL.
December st, .
NOTE TO THE THIRD EDITION
I avail myself of the opportunity which a third edition of "Jane
Eyre" affords me, of again addressing a word to the Public, to
explain that my claim to the title of novelist rests on this one
work alone. If, therefore, the authorship of other works of fiction
has been attributed to me, an honour is awarded where it is not
merited and consequently, denied where it is justly due.
This explanation will serve to rectify mistakes which may already
have been made, and to prevent future errors.
CURRER BELL.
April th, .
CHAPTER I
There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. We had
been wandering, indeed, in the leafless shrubbery an hour in the
morning but since dinner Mrs. Reed, when there was no company,
dined early the cold winter wind had brought with it clouds so
sombre, and a rain so penetrating, that further outdoor exercise
was now out of the question.
I was glad of it I never liked long walks, especially on chilly
afternoons dreadful to me was the coming home in the raw twilight,
with nipped fingers and toes, and a heart saddened by the chidings
of Bessie, the nurse, and humbled by the consciousness of my physical
inferiority to Eliza, John, and Georgiana Reed.
The said Eliza, John, and Georgiana were now clustered round
their mama in the drawingroom she lay reclined on a sofa by the
fireside, and with her darlings about her for the time neither
quarrelling nor crying looked perfectly happy. Me, she had
dispensed from joining the group saying, "She regretted to be
under the necessity of keeping me at a distance but that until
she heard from Bessie, and could discover by her own observation,
that I was endeavouring in good earnest to acquire a more sociable
and childlike disposition, a more attractive and sprightly manner
something lighter, franker, more natural, as it were  she
really must exclude me from privileges intended only for contented,
happy, little children."
"What does Bessie say I have done?" I asked.
"Jane, I don't like cavillers or questioners besides, there is
something truly forbidding in a child taking up her elders in that
manner. Be seated somewhere and until you can speak pleasantly,
remain silent."
A breakfastroom adjoined the drawingroom, I slipped in there. It
contained a bookcase I soon possessed myself of a volume, taking
care that it should be one stored with pictures. I mounted into
the windowseat gathering up my feet, I sat crosslegged, like
a Turk and, having drawn the red moreen curtain nearly close, I
was shrined in double retirement.
Folds of scarlet drapery shut in my view to the right hand to the
left were the clear panes of glass, protecting, but not separating
me from the drear November day. At intervals, while turning over
the leaves of my book, I studied the aspect of that winter afternoon.
Afar, it offered a pale blank of mist and cloud near a scene of
wet lawn and stormbeat shrub, with ceaseless rain sweeping away
wildly before a long and lamentable blast.
I returned to my book  Bewick's History of British Birds the
letterpress thereof I cared little for, generally speaking and
yet there were certain introductory pages that, child as I was, I
could not pass quite as a blank. They were those which treat of
the haunts of seafowl of "the solitary rocks and promontories"
by them only inhabited of the coast of Norway, studded with isles
from its southern extremity, the Lindeness, or Naze, to the North Cape 
"Where the Northern Ocean, in vast whirls,
Boils round the naked, melancholy isles
Of farthest Thule and the Atlantic surge
Pours in among the stormy Hebrides."
Nor could I pass unnoticed the suggestion of the bleak shores of
Lapland, Siberia, Spitzbergen, Nova Zembla, Iceland, Greenland,
with "the vast sweep of the Arctic Zone, and those forlorn regions
of dreary space,  that reservoir of frost and snow, where firm
fields of ice, the accumulation of centuries of winters, glazed
in Alpine heights above heights, surround the pole, and concentre
the multiplied rigours of extreme cold." Of these deathwhite realms
I formed an idea of my own shadowy, like all the halfcomprehended
notions that float dim through children's brains, but strangely
impressive. The words in these introductory pages connected
themselves with the succeeding vignettes, and gave significance
to the rock standing up alone in a sea of billow and spray to the
broken boat stranded on a desolate coast to the cold and ghastly
moon glancing through bars of cloud at a wreck just sinking.
I cannot tell what sentiment haunted the quite solitary churchyard,
with its inscribed headstone its gate, its two trees, its low
horizon, girdled by a broken wall, and its newlyrisen crescent,
attesting the hour of eventide.
The two ships becalmed on a torpid sea, I believed to be marine
phantoms.
The fiend pinning down the thief's pack behind him, I passed over
quickly it was an object of terror.
So was the black horned thing seated aloof on a rock, surveying a
distant crowd surrounding a gallows.
Each picture told a story mysterious often to my undeveloped
understanding and imperfect feelings, yet ever profoundly interesting
as interesting as the tales Bessie sometimes narrated on winter
evenings, when she chanced to be in good humour and when, having
brought her ironingtable to the nursery hearth, she allowed us
to sit about it, and while she got up Mrs. Reed's lace frills, and
crimped her nightcap borders, fed our eager attention with passages
of love and adventure taken from old fairy tales and other ballads
or as at a later period I discovered from the pages of Pamela,
and Henry, Earl of Moreland.
With Bewick on my knee, I was then happy happy at least in my
way. I feared nothing but interruption, and that came too soon.
The breakfastroom door opened.
"Boh Madam Mope" cried the voice of John Reed then he paused
he found the room apparently empty.
"Where the dickens is she" he continued. "Lizzy Georgy
calling to his sisters Joan is not here tell mama she is run
out into the rain  bad animal"
"It is well I drew the curtain," thought I and I wished fervently
he might not discover my hidingplace nor would John Reed have
found it out himself he was not quick either of vision or conception
but Eliza just put her head in at the door, and said at once 
"She is in the windowseat, to be sure, Jack."
And I came out immediately, for I trembled at the idea of being
dragged forth by the said Jack.
"What do you want?" I asked, with awkward diffidence.
"Say, 'What do you want, Master Reed?'" was the answer. "I want
you to come here" and seating himself in an armchair, he intimated
by a gesture that I was to approach and stand before him.
John Reed was a schoolboy of fourteen years old four years older
than I, for I was but ten large and stout for his age, with a
dingy and unwholesome skin thick lineaments in a spacious visage,
heavy limbs and large extremities. He gorged himself habitually
at table, which made him bilious, and gave him a dim and bleared
eye and flabby cheeks. He ought now to have been at school but
his mama had taken him home for a month or two, "on account of his
delicate health." Mr. Miles, the master, affirmed that he would
do very well if he had fewer cakes and sweetmeats sent him from
home but the mother's heart turned from an opinion so harsh, and
inclined rather to the more refined idea that John's sallowness
was owing to overapplication and, perhaps, to pining after home.
John had not much affection for his mother and sisters, and
an antipathy to me. He bullied and punished me not two or three
times in the week, nor once or twice in the day, but continually
every nerve I had feared him, and every morsel of flesh in my bones
shrank when he came near. There were moments when I was bewildered
by the terror he inspired, because I had no appeal whatever against
either his menaces or his inflictions the servants did not like to
offend their young master by taking my part against him, and Mrs.
Reed was blind and deaf on the subject she never saw him strike
or heard him abuse me, though he did both now and then in her very
presence, more frequently, however, behind her back.
Habitually obedient to John, I came up to his chair he spent
some three minutes in thrusting out his tongue at me as far as he
could without damaging the roots I knew he would soon strike,
and while dreading the blow, I mused on the disgusting and ugly
appearance of him who would presently deal it. I wonder if he
read that notion in my face for, all at once, without speaking,
he struck suddenly and strongly. I tottered, and on regaining my
equilibrium retired back a step or two from his chair.
"That is for your impudence in answering mama awhile since," said
he, "and for your sneaking way of getting behind curtains, and for
the look you had in your eyes two minutes since, you rat"
Accustomed to John Reed's abuse, I never had an idea of replying
to it my care was how to endure the blow which would certainly
follow the insult.
"What were you doing behind the curtain?" he asked.
"I was reading."
"Show the book."
I returned to the window and fetched it thence.
"You have no business to take our books you are a dependent, mama
says you have no money your father left you none you ought to
beg, and not to live here with gentlemen's children like us, and
eat the same meals we do, and wear clothes at our mama's expense.
Now, I'll teach you to rummage my bookshelves for they ARE mine
all the house belongs to me, or will do in a few years. Go and
stand by the door, out of the way of the mirror and the windows."
I did so, not at first aware what was his intention but when
I saw him lift and poise the book and stand in act to hurl it, I
instinctively started aside with a cry of alarm not soon enough,
however the volume was flung, it hit me, and I fell, striking my
head against the door and cutting it. The cut bled, the pain was
sharp my terror had passed its climax other feelings succeeded.
"Wicked and cruel boy" I said. "You are like a murderer  you
are like a slavedriver  you are like the Roman emperors"
I had read Goldsmith's History of Rome, and had formed my opinion
of Nero, Caligula, c. Also I had drawn parallels in silence,
which I never thought thus to have declared aloud.
"What what" he cried. "Did she say that to me? Did you hear
her, Eliza and Georgiana? Won't I tell mama? but first  "
He ran headlong at me I felt him grasp my hair and my shoulder
he had closed with a desperate thing. I really saw in him a tyrant,
a murderer. I felt a drop or two of blood from my head trickle
down my neck, and was sensible of somewhat pungent suffering these
sensations for the time predominated over fear, and I received him
in frantic sort. I don't very well know what I did with my hands,
but he called me "Rat Rat" and bellowed out aloud. Aid was
near him Eliza and Georgiana had run for Mrs. Reed, who was gone
upstairs she now came upon the scene, followed by Bessie
and her maid Abbot. We were parted I heard the words 
"Dear dear What a fury to fly at Master John"
"Did ever anybody see such a picture of passion"
Then Mrs. Reed subjoined 
"Take her away to the redroom, and lock her in there." Four hands
were immediately laid upon me, and I was borne upstairs.
CHAPTER II
I resisted all the way a new thing for me, and a circumstance
which greatly strengthened the bad opinion Bessie and Miss Abbot
were disposed to entertain of me. The fact is, I was a trifle
beside myself or rather OUT of myself, as the French would say
I was conscious that a moment's mutiny had already rendered me
liable to strange penalties, and, like any other rebel slave, I
felt resolved, in my desperation, to go all lengths.
"Hold her arms, Miss Abbot she's like a mad cat."
"For shame for shame" cried the lady'smaid. "What shocking
conduct, Miss Eyre, to strike a young gentleman, your benefactress's
son Your young master."
"Master How is he my master? Am I a servant?"
"No you are less than a servant, for you do nothing for your keep.
There, sit down, and think over your wickedness."
They had got me by this time into the apartment indicated by Mrs.
Reed, and had thrust me upon a stool my impulse was to rise from
it like a spring their two pair of hands arrested me instantly.
"If you don't sit still, you must be tied down," said Bessie. "Miss
Abbot, lend me your garters she would break mine directly."
Miss Abbot turned to divest a stout leg of the necessary ligature.
This preparation for bonds, and the additional ignominy it inferred,
took a little of the excitement out of me.
"Don't take them off," I cried "I will not stir."
In guarantee whereof, I attached myself to my seat by my hands.
"Mind you don't," said Bessie and when she had ascertained that
I was really subsiding, she loosened her hold of me then she and
Miss Abbot stood with folded arms, looking darkly and doubtfully
on my face, as incredulous of my sanity.
"She never did so before," at last said Bessie, turning to the
Abigail.
"But it was always in her," was the reply. "I've told Missis often
my opinion about the child, and Missis agreed with me. She's an
underhand little thing I never saw a girl of her age with so much
cover."
Bessie answered not but ere long, addressing me, she said  "You
ought to be aware, Miss, that you are under obligations to Mrs.
Reed she keeps you if she were to turn you off, you would have
to go to the poorhouse."
I had nothing to say to these words they were not new to me my
very first recollections of existence included hints of the same
kind. This reproach of my dependence had become a vague singsong
in my ear very painful and crushing, but only half intelligible.
Miss Abbot joined in 
"And you ought not to think yourself on an equality with the Misses
Reed and Master Reed, because Missis kindly allows you to be brought
up with them. They will have a great deal of money, and you will
have none it is your place to be humble, and to try to make
yourself agreeable to them."
"What we tell you is for your good," added Bessie, in no harsh
voice, "you should try to be useful and pleasant, then, perhaps,
you would have a home here but if you become passionate and rude,
Missis will send you away, I am sure."
"Besides," said Miss Abbot, "God will punish her He might strike
her dead in the midst of her tantrums, and then where would she go?
Come, Bessie, we will leave her I wouldn't have her heart for
anything. Say your prayers, Miss Eyre, when you are by yourself
for if you don't repent, something bad might be permitted to come
down the chimney and fetch you away."
They went, shutting the door, and locking it behind them.
The redroom was a square chamber, very seldom slept in, I might
say never, indeed, unless when a chance influx of visitors at
Gateshead Hall rendered it necessary to turn to account all the
accommodation it contained yet it was one of the largest and
stateliest chambers in the mansion. A bed supported on massive
pillars of mahogany, hung with curtains of deep red damask, stood
out like a tabernacle in the centre the two large windows, with
their blinds always drawn down, were half shrouded in festoons
and falls of similar drapery the carpet was red the table at the
foot of the bed was covered with a crimson cloth the walls were
a soft fawn colour with a blush of pink in it the wardrobe, the
toilettable, the chairs were of darkly polished old mahogany. Out
of these deep surrounding shades rose high, and glared white, the
piledup mattresses and pillows of the bed, spread with a snowy
Marseilles counterpane. Scarcely less prominent was an ample
cushioned easychair near the head of the bed, also white, with a
footstool before it and looking, as I thought, like a pale throne.
This room was chill, because it seldom had a fire it was silent,
because remote from the nursery and kitchen solemn, because it
was known to be so seldom entered. The housemaid alone came here
on Saturdays, to wipe from the mirrors and the furniture a week's
quiet dust and Mrs. Reed herself, at far intervals, visited it
to review the contents of a certain secret drawer in the wardrobe,
where were stored divers parchments, her jewelcasket, and a miniature
of her deceased husband and in those last words lies the secret
of the redroom  the spell which kept it so lonely in spite of
its grandeur.
Mr. Reed had been dead nine years it was in this chamber he breathed
his last here he lay in state hence his coffin was borne by the
undertaker's men and, since that day, a sense of dreary consecration
had guarded it from frequent intrusion.
My seat, to which Bessie and the bitter Miss Abbot had left me
riveted, was a low ottoman near the marble chimneypiece the bed
rose before me to my right hand there was the high, dark wardrobe,
with subdued, broken reflections varying the gloss of its panels
to my left were the muffled windows a great lookingglass between
them repeated the vacant majesty of the bed and room. I was not
quite sure whether they had locked the door and when I dared move,
I got up and went to see. Alas yes no jail was ever more secure.
Returning, I had to cross before the lookingglass my fascinated
glance involuntarily explored the depth it revealed. All looked
colder and darker in that visionary hollow than in reality and
the strange little figure there gazing at me, with a white face and
arms specking the gloom, and glittering eyes of fear moving where
all else was still, had the effect of a real spirit I thought
it like one of the tiny phantoms, half fairy, half imp, Bessie's
evening stories represented as coming out of lone, ferny dells
in moors, and appearing before the eyes of belated travellers. I
returned to my stool.
Superstition was with me at that moment but it was not yet her
hour for complete victory my blood was still warm the mood of
the revolted slave was still bracing me with its bitter vigour I
had to stem a rapid rush of retrospective thought before I quailed
to the dismal present.
All John Reed's violent tyrannies, all his sisters' proud indifference,
all his mother's aversion, all the servants' partiality, turned
up in my disturbed mind like a dark deposit in a turbid well. Why
was I always suffering, always browbeaten, always accused, for
ever condemned? Why could I never please? Why was it useless to
try to win any one's favour? Eliza, who was headstrong and selfish,
was respected. Georgiana, who had a spoiled temper, a very acrid
spite, a captious and insolent carriage, was universally indulged.
Her beauty, her pink cheeks and golden curls, seemed to give delight
to all who looked at her, and to purchase indemnity for every fault.
John no one thwarted, much less punished though he twisted the
necks of the pigeons, killed the little peachicks, set the dogs
at the sheep, stripped the hothouse vines of their fruit, and broke
the buds off the choicest plants in the conservatory he called
his mother "old girl," too sometimes reviled her for her dark skin,
similar to his own bluntly disregarded her wishes not unfrequently
tore and spoiled her silk attire and he was still "her own darling."
I dared commit no fault I strove to fulfil every duty and I was
termed naughty and tiresome, sullen and sneaking, from morning to
noon, and from noon to night.
My head still ached and bled with the blow and fall I had received
no one had reproved John for wantonly striking me and because I
had turned against him to avert farther irrational violence, I was
loaded with general opprobrium.
"Unjust  unjust" said my reason, forced by the agonising
stimulus into precocious though transitory power and Resolve,
equally wrought up, instigated some strange expedient to achieve
escape from insupportable oppression  as running away, or, if that
could not be effected, never eating or drinking more, and letting
myself die.
What a consternation of soul was mine that dreary afternoon How
all my brain was in tumult, and all my heart in insurrection
Yet in what darkness, what dense ignorance, was the mental battle
fought I could not answer the ceaseless inward question  WHY I
thus suffered now, at the distance of  I will not say how many
years, I see it clearly.
I was a discord in Gateshead Hall I was like nobody there I had
nothing in harmony with Mrs. Reed or her children, or her chosen
vassalage. If they did not love me, in fact, as little did I love
them. They were not bound to regard with affection a thing that
could not sympathise with one amongst them a heterogeneous thing,
opposed to them in temperament, in capacity, in propensities a
useless thing, incapable of serving their interest, or adding to
their pleasure a noxious thing, cherishing the germs of indignation
at their treatment, of contempt of their judgment. I know that
had I been a sanguine, brilliant, careless, exacting, handsome,
romping child  though equally dependent and friendless  Mrs. Reed
would have endured my presence more complacently her children would
have entertained for me more of the cordiality of fellowfeeling
the servants would have been less prone to make me the scapegoat
of the nursery.
Daylight began to forsake the redroom it was past four o'clock,
and the beclouded afternoon was tending to drear twilight. I heard
the rain still beating continuously on the staircase window, and
the wind howling in the grove behind the hall I grew by degrees
cold as a stone, and then my courage sank. My habitual mood of
humiliation, selfdoubt, forlorn depression, fell damp on the embers
of my decaying ire. All said I was wicked, and perhaps I might be
so what thought had I been but just conceiving of starving myself
to death? That certainly was a crime and was I fit to die? Or
was the vault under the chancel of Gateshead Church an inviting
bourne? In such vault I had been told did Mr. Reed lie buried
and led by this thought to recall his idea, I dwelt on it with
gathering dread. I could not remember him but I knew that he was
my own uncle  my mother's brother  that he had taken me when
a parentless infant to his house and that in his last moments he
had required a promise of Mrs. Reed that she would rear and maintain
me as one of her own children. Mrs. Reed probably considered she
had kept this promise and so she had, I dare say, as well as her
nature would permit her but how could she really like an interloper
not of her race, and unconnected with her, after her husband's
death, by any tie? It must have been most irksome to find herself
bound by a hardwrung pledge to stand in the stead of a parent to
a strange child she could not love, and to see an uncongenial alien
permanently intruded on her own family group.
A singular notion dawned upon me. I doubted not  never doubted
that if Mr. Reed had been alive he would have treated me kindly
and now, as I sat looking at the white bed and overshadowed walls
occasionally also turning a fascinated eye towards the dimly
gleaning mirror  I began to recall what I had heard of dead men,
troubled in their graves by the violation of their last wishes,
revisiting the earth to punish the perjured and avenge the oppressed
and I thought Mr. Reed's spirit, harassed by the wrongs of his
sister's child, might quit its abode  whether in the church vault
or in the unknown world of the departed  and rise before me in
this chamber. I wiped my tears and hushed my sobs, fearful lest
any sign of violent grief might waken a preternatural voice to
comfort me, or elicit from the gloom some haloed face, bending over
me with strange pity. This idea, consolatory in theory, I felt
would be terrible if realised with all my might I endeavoured
to stifle it  I endeavoured to be firm. Shaking my hair from
my eyes, I lifted my head and tried to look boldly round the dark
room at this moment a light gleamed on the wall. Was it, I asked
myself, a ray from the moon penetrating some aperture in the blind?
No moonlight was still, and this stirred while I gazed, it glided
up to the ceiling and quivered over my head. I can now conjecture
readily that this streak of light was, in all likelihood, a gleam
from a lantern carried by some one across the lawn but then,
prepared as my mind was for horror, shaken as my nerves were by
agitation, I thought the swift darting beam was a herald of some
coming vision from another world. My heart beat thick, my head grew
hot a sound filled my ears, which I deemed the rushing of wings
something seemed near me I was oppressed, suffocated endurance
broke down I rushed to the door and shook the lock in desperate
effort. Steps came running along the outer passage the key turned,
Bessie and Abbot entered.
"Miss Eyre, are you ill?" said Bessie.
"What a dreadful noise it went quite through me" exclaimed
Abbot.
"Take me out Let me go into the nursery" was my cry.
"What for? Are you hurt? Have you seen something?" again demanded
Bessie.
"Oh I saw a light, and I thought a ghost would come." I had now
got hold of Bessie's hand, and she did not snatch it from me.
"She has screamed out on purpose," declared Abbot, in some disgust.
"And what a scream If she had been in great pain one would have
excused it, but she only wanted to bring us all here I know her
naughty tricks."
"What is all this?" demanded another voice peremptorily and Mrs.
Reed came along the corridor, her cap flying wide, her gown rustling
stormily. "Abbot and Bessie, I believe I gave orders that Jane
Eyre should be left in the redroom till I came to her myself."
"Miss Jane screamed so loud, ma'am," pleaded Bessie.
"Let her go," was the only answer. "Loose Bessie's hand, child
you cannot succeed in getting out by these means, be assured. I
abhor artifice, particularly in children it is my duty to show
you that tricks will not answer you will now stay here an hour
longer, and it is only on condition of perfect submission and
stillness that I shall liberate you then."
"O aunt have pity Forgive me I cannot endure it 
let me be punished some other way I shall be killed if  "
"Silence This violence is all most repulsive" and so, no doubt,
she felt it. I was a precocious actress in her eyes she sincerely
looked on me as a compound of virulent passions, mean spirit, and
dangerous duplicity.
Bessie and Abbot having retreated, Mrs. Reed, impatient of my now
frantic anguish and wild sobs, abruptly thrust me back and locked
me in, without farther parley. I heard her sweeping away and soon
after she was gone, I suppose I had a species of fit unconsciousness
closed the scene.
CHAPTER III
The next thing I remember is, waking up with a feeling as if I
had had a frightful nightmare, and seeing before me a terrible red
glare, crossed with thick black bars. I heard voices, too, speaking
with a hollow sound, and as if muffled by a rush of wind or water
agitation, uncertainty, and an allpredominating sense of terror
confused my faculties. Ere long, I became aware that some one was
handling me lifting me up and supporting me in a sitting posture,
and that more tenderly than I had ever been raised or upheld before.
I rested my head against a pillow or an arm, and felt easy.
In five minutes more the cloud of bewilderment dissolved I knew
quite well that I was in my own bed, and that the red glare was the
nursery fire. It was night a candle burnt on the table Bessie
stood at the bedfoot with a basin in her hand, and a gentleman
sat in a chair near my pillow, leaning over me.
I felt an inexpressible relief, a soothing conviction of protection
and security, when I knew that there was a stranger in the room,
an individual not belonging to Gateshead., and not related to
Mrs. Reed. Turning from Bessie though her presence was far less
obnoxious to me than that of Abbot, for instance, would have been,
I scrutinised the face of the gentleman I knew him it was Mr.
Lloyd, an apothecary, sometimes called in by Mrs. Reed when the
servants were ailing for herself and the children she employed
a physician.
"Well, who am I?" he asked.
I pronounced his name, offering him at the same time my hand he
took it, smiling and saying, "We shall do very well byandby."
Then he laid me down, and addressing Bessie, charged her to be very
careful that I was not disturbed during the night. Having given
some further directions, and intimates that he should call again
the next day, he departed to my grief I felt so sheltered and
befriended while he sat in the chair near my pillow and as he
closed the door after him, all the room darkened and my heart again
sank inexpressible sadness weighed it down.
"Do you feel as if you should sleep, Miss?" asked Bessie, rather
softly.
Scarcely dared I answer her for I feared the next sentence might
be rough. "I will try."
"Would you like to drink, or could you eat anything?"
"No, thank you, Bessie."
"Then I think I shall go to bed, for it is past twelve o'clock
but you may call me if you want anything in the night."
Wonderful civility this It emboldened me to ask a question.
"Bessie, what is the matter with me? Am I ill?"
"You fell sick, I suppose, in the redroom with crying you'll be
better soon, no doubt."
Bessie went into the housemaid's apartment, which was near. I
heard her say 
"Sarah, come and sleep with me in the nursery I daren't for my
life be alone with that poor child tonight she might die it's
such a strange thing she should have that fit I wonder if she
saw anything. Missis was rather too hard."
Sarah came back with her they both went to bed they were whispering
together for halfanhour before they fell asleep. I caught scraps
of their conversation, from which I was able only too distinctly
to infer the main subject discussed.
"Something passed her, all dressed in white, and vanished" 
"A great black dog behind him"  "Three loud raps on the chamber
door"  "A light in the churchyard just over his grave," c. c.
At last both slept the fire and the candle went out. For me, the
watches of that long night passed in ghastly wakefulness strained
by dread such dread as children only can feel.
No severe or prolonged bodily illness followed this incident
of the redroom it only gave my nerves a shock of which I feel
the reverberation to this day. Yes, Mrs. Reed, to you I owe some
fearful pangs of mental suffering, but I ought to forgive you, for
you knew not what you did while rending my heartstrings, you
thought you were only uprooting my bad propensities.
Next day, by noon, I was up and dressed, and sat wrapped in a shawl
by the nursery hearth. I felt physically weak and broken down
but my worse ailment was an unutterable wretchedness of mind a
wretchedness which kept drawing from me silent tears no sooner had
I wiped one salt drop from my cheek than another followed. Yet,
I thought, I ought to have been happy, for none of the Reeds were
there, they were all gone out in the carriage with their mama.
Abbot, too, was sewing in another room, and Bessie, as she moved
hither and thither, putting away toys and arranging drawers, addressed
to me every now and then a word of unwonted kindness. This state
of things should have been to me a paradise of peace, accustomed
as I was to a life of ceaseless reprimand and thankless fagging
but, in fact, my racked nerves were now in such a state that no
calm could soothe, and no pleasure excite them agreeably.
Bessie had been down into the kitchen, and she brought up with
her a tart on a certain brightly painted china plate, whose bird
of paradise, nestling in a wreath of convolvuli and rosebuds, had
been wont to stir in me a most enthusiastic sense of admiration
and which plate I had often petitioned to be allowed to take in my
hand in order to examine it more closely, but had always hitherto
been deemed unworthy of such a privilege. This precious vessel
was now placed on my knee, and I was cordially invited to eat the
circlet of delicate pastry upon it. Vain favour coming, like
most other favours long deferred and often wished for, too late
I could not eat the tart and the plumage of the bird, the tints
of the flowers, seemed strangely faded I put both plate and tart
away. Bessie asked if I would have a book the word BOOK acted as
a transient stimulus, and I begged her to fetch Gulliver's Travels
from the library. This book I had again and again perused with
delight. I considered it a narrative of facts, and discovered in
it a vein of interest deeper than what I found in fairy tales for
as to the elves, having sought them in vain among foxglove leaves
and bells, under mushrooms and beneath the groundivy mantling old
wallnooks, I had at length made up my mind to the sad truth, that
they were all gone out of England to some savage country where
the woods were wilder and thicker, and the population more scant
whereas, Lilliput and Brobdignag being, in my creed, solid parts of
the earth's surface, I doubted not that I might one day, by taking
a long voyage, see with my own eyes the little fields, houses, and
trees, the diminutive people, the tiny cows, sheep, and birds of
the one realm and the cornfields foresthigh, the mighty mastiffs,
the monster cats, the towerlike men and women, of the other.
Yet, when this cherished volume was now placed in my hand  when
I turned over its leaves, and sought in its marvellous pictures
the charm I had, till now, never failed to find  all was eerie
and dreary the giants were gaunt goblins, the pigmies malevolent
and fearful imps, Gulliver a most desolate wanderer in most dread
and dangerous regions. I closed the book, which I dared no longer
peruse, and put it on the table, beside the untasted tart.
Bessie had now finished dusting and tidying the room, and having
washed her hands, she opened a certain little drawer, full
of splendid shreds of silk and satin, and began making a new
bonnet for Georgiana's doll. Meantime she sang her song was 
"In the days when we went gipsying, A long time ago."
I had often heard the song before, and always with lively delight
for Bessie had a sweet voice,  at least, I thought so. But
now, though her voice was still sweet, I found in its melody an
indescribable sadness. Sometimes, preoccupied with her work, she
sang the refrain very low, very lingeringly "A long time ago" came
out like the saddest cadence of a funeral hymn. She passed into
another ballad, this time a really doleful one.
"My feet they are sore, and my limbs they are weary Long is the way,
and the mountains are wild Soon will the twilight close moonless
and dreary Over the path of the poor orphan child.
"Why did they send me so far and so lonely, Up where the moors
spread and grey rocks are piled? Men are hardhearted, and kind
angels only Watch o'er the steps of a poor orphan child.
"Yet distant and soft the night breeze is blowing, Clouds there are
none, and clear stars beam mild, God, in His mercy, protection is
showing, Comfort and hope to the poor orphan child.
"Ev'n should I fall o'er the broken bridge passing, Or stray in
the marshes, by false lights beguiled, Still will my Father, with
promise and blessing, Take to His bosom the poor orphan child.
"There is a thought that for strength should avail me, Though both
of shelter and kindred despoiled Heaven is a home, and a rest will
not fail me God is a friend to the poor orphan child."
"Come, Miss Jane, don't cry," said Bessie as she finished. She
might as well have said to the fire, "don't burn" but how could
she divine the morbid suffering to which I was a prey? In the
course of the morning Mr. Lloyd came again.
"What, already up" said he, as he entered the nursery. "Well,
nurse, how is she?"
Bessie answered that I was doing very well.
"Then she ought to look more cheerful. Come here, Miss Jane your
name is Jane, is it not?"
"Yes, sir, Jane Eyre."
"Well, you have been crying, Miss Jane Eyre can you tell me what
about? Have you any pain?"
"No, sir."
"Oh I daresay she is crying because she could not go out with
Missis in the carriage," interposed Bessie.
"Surely not why, she is too old for such pettishness."
I thought so too and my selfesteem being wounded by the false
charge, I answered promptly, "I never cried for such a thing in
my life I hate going out in the carriage. I cry because I am
miserable."
"Oh fie, Miss" said Bessie.
The good apothecary appeared a little puzzled. I was standing
before him he fixed his eyes on me very steadily his eyes were
small and grey not very bright, but I dare say I should think them
shrewd now he had a hardfeatured yet goodnatured looking
face. Having considered me at leisure, he said 
"What made you ill yesterday?"
"She had a fall," said Bessie, again putting in her word.
"Fall why, that is like a baby again Can't she manage to walk
at her age? She must be eight or nine years old."
"I was knocked down," was the blunt explanation, jerked out of me
by another pang of mortified pride "but that did not make me ill,"
I added while Mr. Lloyd helped himself to a pinch of snuff.
As he was returning the box to his waistcoat pocket, a loud bell rang
for the servants' dinner he knew what it was. "That's for you,
nurse," said he "you can go down I'll give Miss Jane a lecture
till you come back."
Bessie would rather have stayed, but she was obliged to go, because
punctuality at meals was rigidly enforced at Gateshead Hall.
"The fall did not make you ill what did, then?" pursued Mr. Lloyd
when Bessie was gone.
"I was shut up in a room where there is a ghost till after dark."
I saw Mr. Lloyd smile and frown at the same time.
"Ghost What, you are a baby after all You are afraid of ghosts?"
"Of Mr. Reed's ghost I am he died in that room, and was laid out
there. Neither Bessie nor any one else will go into it at night,
if they can help it and it was cruel to shut me up alone without
a candle,  so cruel that I think I shall never forget it."
"Nonsense And is it that makes you so miserable? Are you afraid
now in daylight?"
"No but night will come again before long and besides,  I am
unhappy,  very unhappy, for other things."
"What other things? Can you tell me some of them?"
How much I wished to reply fully to this question How difficult
it was to frame any answer Children can feel, but they cannot
analyse their feelings and if the analysis is partially effected
in thought, they know not how to express the result of the process
in words. Fearful, however, of losing this first and only opportunity
of relieving my grief by imparting it, I, after a disturbed pause,
contrived to frame a meagre, though, as far as it went, true
response.
"For one thing, I have no father or mother, brothers or sisters."
"You have a kind aunt and cousins."
Again I paused then bunglingly enounced 
"But John Reed knocked me down, and my aunt shut me up in the red
room."
Mr. Lloyd a second time produced his snuffbox.
"Don't you think Gateshead Hall a very beautiful house?" asked
he. "Are you not very thankful to have such a fine place to live
at?"
"It is not my house, sir and Abbot says I have less right to be
here than a servant."
"Pooh you can't be silly enough to wish to leave such a splendid
place?"
"If I had anywhere else to go, I should be glad to leave it but
I can never get away from Gateshead till I am a woman."
"Perhaps you may  who knows? Have you any relations besides Mrs.
Reed?"
"I think not, sir."
"None belonging to your father?"
"I don't know. I asked Aunt Reed once, and she said possibly
I might have some poor, low relations called Eyre, but she knew
nothing about them."
"If you had such, would you like to go to them?"
I reflected. Poverty looks grim to grown people still more
so to children they have not much idea of industrious, working,
respectable poverty they think of the word only as connected with
ragged clothes, scanty food, fireless grates, rude manners, and
debasing vices poverty for me was synonymous with degradation.
"No I should not like to belong to poor people," was my reply.
"Not even if they were kind to you?"
I shook my head I could not see how poor people had the means of
being kind and then to learn to speak like them, to adopt their
manners, to be uneducated, to grow up like one of the poor women I
saw sometimes nursing their children or washing their clothes at
the cottage doors of the village of Gateshead no, I was not heroic
enough to purchase liberty at the price of caste.
"But are your relatives so very poor? Are they working people?"
"I cannot tell Aunt. Reed says if I have any, they must be a
beggarly set I should not like to go a begging."
"Would you like to go to school?"
Again I reflected I scarcely knew what school was Bessie
sometimes spoke of it as a place where young ladies sat in the stocks,
wore backboards, and were expected to be exceedingly genteel and
precise John Reed hated his school, and abused his master but
John Reed's tastes were no rule for mine, and if Bessie's accounts
of schooldiscipline gathered from the young ladies of a family
where she had lived before coming to Gateshead were somewhat
appalling, her details of certain accomplishments attained by
these same young ladies were, I thought, equally attractive. She
boasted of beautiful paintings of landscapes and flowers by them
executed of songs they could sing and pieces they could play, of
purses they could net, of French books they could translate till
my spirit was moved to emulation as I listened. Besides, school
would be a complete change it implied a long journey, an entire
separation from Gateshead, an entrance into a new life.
"I should indeed like to go to school," was the audible conclusion
of my musings.
"Well, well who knows what may happen?" said Mr. Lloyd, as he got
up. "The child ought to have change of air and scene," he added,
speaking to himself "nerves not in a good state."
Bessie now returned at the same moment the carriage was heard
rolling up the gravelwalk.
"Is that your mistress, nurse?" asked Mr. Lloyd. "I should like
to speak to her before I go."
Bessie invited him to walk into the breakfastroom, and led the way
out. In the interview which followed between him and Mrs. Reed,
I presume, from afteroccurrences, that the apothecary ventured to
recommend my being sent to school and the recommendation was no
doubt readily enough adopted for as Abbot said, in discussing the
subject with Bessie when both sat sewing in the nursery one night,
after I was in bed, and, as they thought, asleep, "Missis was, she
dared say, glad enough to get rid of such a tiresome, ill conditioned
child, who always looked as if she were watching everybody, and
scheming plots underhand." Abbot, I think, gave me credit for
being a sort of infantine Guy Fawkes.
On that same occasion I learned, for the first time, from Miss
Abbot's communications to Bessie, that my father had been a poor
clergyman that my mother had married him against the wishes of her
friends, who considered the match beneath her that my grandfather
Reed was so irritated at her disobedience, he cut her off without
a shilling that after my mother and father had been married a
year, the latter caught the typhus fever while visiting among the
poor of a large manufacturing town where his curacy was situated,
and where that disease was then prevalent that my mother took
the infection from him, and both died within a month of each other.
Bessie, when she heard this narrative, sighed and said, "Poor Miss
Jane is to be pitied, too, Abbot."
"Yes," responded Abbot "if she were a nice, pretty child, one might
compassionate her forlornness but one really cannot care for such
a little toad as that."
"Not a great deal, to be sure," agreed Bessie "at any rate, a beauty
like Miss Georgiana would be more moving in the same condition."
"Yes, I doat on Miss Georgiana" cried the fervent Abbot. "Little
darling  with her long curls and her blue eyes, and such a sweet
colour as she has just as if she were painted  Bessie, I could
fancy a Welsh rabbit for supper."
"So could I  with a roast onion. Come, we'll go down." They
went.
CHAPTER IV
From my discourse with Mr. Lloyd, and from the above reported
conference between Bessie and Abbot, I gathered enough of hope to
suffice as a motive for wishing to get well a change seemed near,
I desired and waited it in silence. It tarried, however days
and weeks passed I had regained my normal state of health, but
no new allusion was made to the subject over which I brooded. Mrs.
Reed surveyed me at times with a severe eye, but seldom addressed
me since my illness, she had drawn a more marked line of separation
than ever between me and her own children appointing me a small
closet to sleep in by myself, condemning me to take my meals
alone, and pass all my time in the nursery, while my cousins were
constantly in the drawingroom. Not a hint, however, did she drop
about sending me to school still I felt an instinctive certainty
that she would not long endure me under the same roof with her
for her glance, now more than ever, when turned on me, expressed
an insuperable and rooted aversion.
Eliza and Georgiana, evidently acting according to orders, spoke
to me as little as possible John thrust his tongue in his cheek
whenever he saw me, and once attempted chastisement but as I
instantly turned against him, roused by the same sentiment of deep
ire and desperate revolt which had stirred my corruption before, he
thought it better to desist, and ran from me tittering execrations,
and vowing I had burst his nose. I had indeed levelled at that
prominent feature as hard a blow as my knuckles could inflict
and when I saw that either that or my look daunted him, I had the
greatest inclination to follow up my advantage to purpose but he was
already with his mama. I heard him in a blubbering tone commence
the tale of how "that nasty Jane Eyre" had flown at him
like a mad cat he was stopped rather harshly 
"Don't talk to me about her, John I told you not to go near her
she is not worthy of notice I do not choose that either you or
your sisters should associate with her."
Here, leaning over the banister, I cried out suddenly,
and without at all deliberating on my words 
"They are not fit to associate with me."
Mrs. Reed was rather a stout woman but, on hearing this strange
and audacious declaration, she ran nimbly up the stair, swept me
like a whirlwind into the nursery, and crushing me down on the edge
of my crib, dared me in an emphatic voice to rise from that place,
or utter one syllable during the remainder of the day.
"What would Uncle Reed say to you, if he were alive?" was my
scarcely voluntary demand. I say scarcely voluntary, for it seemed
as if my tongue pronounced words without my will consenting to their
utterance something spoke out of me over which I had no control.
"What?" said Mrs. Reed under her breath her usually cold composed
grey eye became troubled with a look like fear she took her hand
from my arm, and gazed at me as if she really did not know whether
I were child or fiend. I was now in for it.
"My Uncle Reed is in heaven, and can see all you do and think and
so can papa and mama they know how you shut me up all day long,
and how you wish me dead."
Mrs. Reed soon rallied her spirits she shook me most soundly,
she boxed both my ears, and then left me without a word. Bessie
supplied the hiatus by a homily of an hour's length, in which she
proved beyond a doubt that I was the most wicked and abandoned child
ever reared under a roof. I half believed her for I felt indeed
only bad feelings surging in my breast.
November, December, and half of January passed away. Christmas
and the New Year had been celebrated at Gateshead with the usual
festive cheer presents had been interchanged, dinners and evening
parties given. From every enjoyment I was, of course, excluded my
share of the gaiety consisted in witnessing the daily apparelling
of Eliza and Georgiana, and seeing them descend to the drawingroom,
dressed out in thin muslin frocks and scarlet sashes, with hair
elaborately ringletted and afterwards, in listening to the sound
of the piano or the harp played below, to the passing to and fro
of the butler and footman, to the jingling of glass and china as
refreshments were handed, to the broken hum of conversation as the
drawingroom door opened and closed. When tired of this occupation,
I would retire from the stairhead to the solitary and silent nursery
there, though somewhat sad, I was not miserable. To speak truth,
I had not the least wish to go into company, for in company I was
very rarely noticed and if Bessie had but been kind and companionable,
I should have deemed it a treat to spend the evenings quietly with
her, instead of passing them under the formidable eye of Mrs. Reed,
in a room full of ladies and gentlemen. But Bessie, as soon as
she had dressed her young ladies, used to take herself off to the
lively regions of the kitchen and housekeeper's room, generally
bearing the candle along with her. I then sat with my doll on my
knee till the fire got low, glancing round occasionally to make
sure that nothing worse than myself haunted the shadowy room and
when the embers sank to a dull red, I undressed hastily, tugging
at knots and strings as I best might, and sought shelter from cold
and darkness in my crib. To this crib I always took my doll human
beings must love something, and, in the dearth of worthier objects
of affection, I contrived to find a pleasure in loving and cherishing
a faded graven image, shabby as a miniature scarecrow. It puzzles
me now to remember with what absurd sincerity I doated on this
little toy, half fancying it alive and capable of sensation. I
could not sleep unless it was folded in my nightgown and when it
lay there safe and warm, I was comparatively happy, believing it
to be happy likewise.
Long did the hours seem while I waited the departure of the company, and
listened for the sound of Bessie's step on the stairs sometimes
she would come up in the interval to seek her thimble or her
scissors, or perhaps to bring me something by way of supper  a
bun or a cheesecake  then she would sit on the bed while I ate
it, and when I had finished, she would tuck the clothes round me,
and twice she kissed me, and said, "Good night, Miss Jane." When
thus gentle, Bessie seemed to me the best, prettiest, kindest being
in the world and I wished most intensely that she would always
be so pleasant and amiable, and never push me about, or scold, or
task me unreasonably, as she was too often wont to do. Bessie Lee
must, I think, have been a girl of good natural capacity, for she
was smart in all she did, and had a remarkable knack of narrative
so, at least, I judge from the impression made on me by her nursery
tales. She was pretty too, if my recollections of her face and
person are correct. I remember her as a slim young woman, with black
hair, dark eyes, very nice features, and good, clear complexion
but she had a capricious and hasty temper, and indifferent ideas
of principle or justice still, such as she was, I preferred her
to any one else at Gateshead Hall.
It was the fifteenth of January, about nine o'clock in the morning
Bessie was gone down to breakfast my cousins had not yet been
summoned to their mama Eliza was putting on her bonnet and warm
gardencoat to go and feed her poultry, an occupation of which she
was fond and not less so of selling the eggs to the housekeeper
and hoarding up the money she thus obtained. She had a turn for
traffic, and a marked propensity for saving shown not only in the
vending of eggs and chickens, but also in driving hard bargains
with the gardener about flowerroots, seeds, and slips of plants
that functionary having orders from Mrs. Reed to buy of his young
lady all the products of her parterre she wished to sell and
Eliza would have sold the hair off her head if she could have made
a handsome profit thereby. As to her money, she first secreted
it in odd corners, wrapped in a rag or an old curlpaper but some
of these hoards having been discovered by the housemaid, Eliza,
fearful of one day losing her valued treasure, consented to intrust
it to her mother, at a usurious rate of interest  fifty or sixty
per cent. which interest she exacted every quarter, keeping her
accounts in a little book with anxious accuracy.
Georgiana sat on a high stool, dressing her hair at the glass, and
interweaving her curls with artificial flowers and faded feathers,
of which she had found a store in a drawer in the attic. I was
making my bed, having received strict orders from Bessie to get it
arranged before she returned for Bessie now frequently employed me
as a sort of undernurserymaid, to tidy the room, dust the chairs,
c.. Having spread the quilt and folded my nightdress, I went
to the windowseat to put in order some picturebooks and doll's
house furniture scattered there an abrupt command from Georgiana
to let her playthings alone for the tiny chairs and mirrors, the
fairy plates and cups, were her property stopped my proceedings
and then, for lack of other occupation, I fell to breathing on the
frostflowers with which the window was fretted, and thus clearing
a space in the glass through which I might look out on the grounds,
where all was still and petrified under the influence of a hard
frost.
From this window were visible the porter's lodge and the carriage
road, and just as I had dissolved so much of the silverwhite foliage
veiling the panes as left room to look out, I saw the gates thrown
open and a carriage roll through. I watched it ascending the drive
with indifference carriages often came to Gateshead, but none ever
brought visitors in whom I was interested it stopped in front of
the house, the doorbell rang loudly, the newcomer was admitted.
All this being nothing to me, my vacant attention soon found livelier
attraction in the spectacle of a little hungry robin, which came and
chirruped on the twigs of the leafless cherrytree nailed against
the wall near the casement. The remains of my breakfast of bread
and milk stood on the table, and having crumbled a morsel of roll,
I was tugging at the sash to put out the crumbs on the window
sill, when Bessie came running upstairs into the nursery.
"Miss Jane, take off your pinafore what are you doing there? Have
you washed your hands and face this morning?" I gave another tug
before I answered, for I wanted the bird to be secure of its bread
the sash yielded I scattered the crumbs, some on the stone sill,
some on the cherrytree bough, then, closing the window, I replied 
"No, Bessie I have only just finished dusting."
"Troublesome, careless child and what are you doing now? You
look quite red, as if you had been about some mischief what were
you opening the window for?"
I was spared the trouble of answering, for Bessie seemed in too great
a hurry to listen to explanations she hauled me to the washstand,
inflicted a merciless, but happily brief scrub on my face and hands
with soap, water, and a coarse towel disciplined my head with a
bristly brush, denuded me of my pinafore, and then hurrying me to
the top of the stairs, bid me go down directly, as I was wanted in
the breakfastroom.
I would have asked who wanted me I would have demanded if
Mrs. Reed was there but Bessie was already gone, and had closed
the nurserydoor upon me. I slowly descended. For nearly three
months, I had never been called to Mrs. Reed's presence restricted
so long to the nursery, the breakfast, dining, and drawingrooms
were become for me awful regions, on which it dismayed me to intrude.
I now stood in the empty hall before me was the breakfastroom
door, and I stopped, intimidated and trembling. What a miserable
little poltroon had fear, engendered of unjust punishment, made of
me in those days I feared to return to the nursery, and feared
to go forward to the parlour ten minutes I stood in agitated
hesitation the vehement ringing of the breakfastroom bell decided
me I MUST enter.
"Who could want me?" I asked inwardly, as with both hands I turned
the stiff doorhandle, which, for a second or two, resisted my
efforts. "What should I see besides Aunt Reed in the apartment?
a man or a woman?" The handle turned, the door unclosed,
and passing through and curtseying low, I looked up at  a black
pillar  such, at least, appeared to me, at first sight, the
straight, narrow, sableclad shape standing erect on the rug the
grim face at the top was like a carved mask, placed above the shaft
by way of capital.
Mrs. Reed occupied her usual seat by the fireside she made a
signal to me to approach I did so, and she introduced me to the
stony stranger with the words "This is the little girl respecting
whom I applied to you."
HE, for it was a man, turned his head slowly towards where I stood,
and having examined me with the two inquisitivelooking grey eyes
which twinkled under a pair of bushy brows, said solemnly, and in
a bass voice, "Her size is small what is her age?"
"Ten years."
"So much?" was the doubtful answer and he prolonged his scrutiny
for some minutes. Presently he addressed me  "Your name, little
girl?"
"Jane Eyre, sir."
In uttering these words I looked up he seemed to me a tall gentleman
but then I was very little his features were large, and they and
all the lines of his frame were equally harsh and prim.
"Well, Jane Eyre, and are you a good child?"
Impossible to reply to this in the affirmative my little world
held a contrary opinion I was silent. Mrs. Reed answered for me
by an expressive shake of the head, adding soon, "Perhaps the less
said on that subject the better, Mr. Brocklehurst."
"Sorry indeed to hear it she and I must have some talk" and
bending from the perpendicular, he installed his person in the arm
chair opposite Mrs. Reed's. "Come here," he said.
I stepped across the rug he placed me square and straight before
him. What a face he had, now that it was almost on a level
with mine what a great nose and what a mouth and what large
prominent teeth
"No sight so sad as that of a naughty child," he began, "especially a
naughty little girl. Do you know where the wicked go after death?"
"They go to hell," was my ready and orthodox answer.
"And what is hell? Can you tell me that?"
"A pit full of fire."
"And should you like to fall into that pit, and to be burning there
for ever?"
"No, sir."
"What must you do to avoid it?"
I deliberated a moment my answer, when it did come, was objectionable
"I must keep in good health, and not die."
"How can you keep in good health? Children younger than you die
daily. I buried a little child of five years old only a day or
two since,  a good little child, whose soul is now in heaven.
It is to be feared the same could not be said of you were you to
be called hence."
Not being in a condition to remove his doubt, I only cast my eyes
down on the two large feet planted on the rug, and sighed, wishing
myself far enough away.
"I hope that sigh is from the heart, and that you repent of ever
having been the occasion of discomfort to your excellent benefactress."
"Benefactress benefactress" said I inwardly "they all call
Mrs. Reed my benefactress if so, a benefactress is a disagreeable
thing."
"Do you say your prayers night and morning?" continued my
interrogator.
"Yes, sir."
"Do you read your Bible?"
"Sometimes."
"With pleasure? Are you fond of it?"
"I like Revelations, and the book of Daniel, and Genesis and Samuel,
and a little bit of Exodus, and some parts of Kings and Chronicles,
and Job and Jonah."
"And the Psalms? I hope you like them?"
"No, sir."
"No? oh, shocking I have a little boy, younger than you, who
knows six Psalms by heart and when you ask him which he would
rather have, a gingerbreadnut to eat or a verse of a Psalm to
learn, he says 'Oh the verse of a Psalm angels sing Psalms'
says he, 'I wish to be a little angel here below' he then gets
two nuts in recompense for his infant piety."
"Psalms are not interesting," I remarked.
"That proves you have a wicked heart and you must pray to God to
change it to give you a new and clean one to take away your
heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh."
I was about to propound a question, touching the manner in which
that operation of changing my heart was to be performed, when Mrs.
Reed interposed, telling me to sit down she then proceeded to
carry on the conversation herself.
"Mr. Brocklehurst, I believe I intimated in the letter which I
wrote to you three weeks ago, that this little girl has not quite
the character and disposition I could wish should you admit her
into Lowood school, I should be glad if the superintendent and
teachers were requested to keep a strict eye on her, and, above
all, to guard against her worst fault, a tendency to deceit. I
mention this in your hearing, Jane, that you may not attempt to
impose on Mr. Brocklehurst."
Well might I dread, well might I dislike Mrs. Reed for it was
her nature to wound me cruelly never was I happy in her presence
however carefully I obeyed, however strenuously I strove to please
her, my efforts were still repulsed and repaid by such sentences
as the above. Now, uttered before a stranger, the accusation cut
me to the heart I dimly perceived that she was already obliterating
hope from the new phase of existence which she destined me to
enter I felt, though I could not have expressed the feeling, that
she was sowing aversion and unkindness along my future path I saw
myself transformed under Mr. Brocklehurst's eye into an artful,
noxious child, and what could I do to remedy the injury?
"Nothing, indeed," thought I, as I struggled to repress a sob, and
hastily wiped away some tears, the impotent evidences of my anguish.
"Deceit is, indeed, a sad fault in a child," said Mr. Brocklehurst
"it is akin to falsehood, and all liars will have their portion in
the lake burning with fire and brimstone she shall, however, be
watched, Mrs. Reed. I will speak to Miss Temple and the teachers."
"I should wish her to be brought up in a manner suiting her prospects,"
continued my benefactress "to be made useful, to be kept humble
as for the vacations, she will, with your permission, spend them
always at Lowood."
"Your decisions are perfectly judicious, madam," returned Mr.
Brocklehurst. "Humility is a Christian grace, and one peculiarly
appropriate to the pupils of Lowood I, therefore, direct that
especial care shall be bestowed on its cultivation amongst them.
I have studied how best to mortify in them the worldly sentiment
of pride and, only the other day, I had a pleasing proof of my
success. My second daughter, Augusta, went with her mama to visit
the school, and on her return she exclaimed 'Oh, dear papa,
how quiet and plain all the girls at Lowood look, with their hair
combed behind their ears, and their long pinafores, and those little
holland pockets outside their frocks  they are almost like poor
people's children and,' said she, 'they looked at my dress and
mama's, as if they had never seen a silk gown before.'"
"This is the state of things I quite approve," returned Mrs.
Reed "had I sought all England over, I could scarcely have found
a system more exactly fitting a child like Jane Eyre. Consistency,
my dear Mr. Brocklehurst I advocate consistency in all things."
"Consistency, madam, is the first of Christian duties and it has
been observed in every arrangement connected with the establishment
of Lowood plain fare, simple attire, unsophisticated accommodations,
hardy and active habits such is the order of the day in the house
and its inhabitants."
"Quite right, sir. I may then depend upon this child being received
as a pupil at Lowood, and there being trained in conformity to her
position and prospects?"
"Madam, you may she shall be placed in that nursery of chosen
plants, and I trust she will show herself grateful for the inestimable
privilege of her election."
"I will send her, then, as soon as possible, Mr. Brocklehurst for,
I assure you, I feel anxious to be relieved of a responsibility
that was becoming too irksome."
"No doubt, no doubt, madam and now I wish you good morning. I
shall return to Brocklehurst Hall in the course of a week or two
my good friend, the Archdeacon, will not permit me to leave him
sooner. I shall send Miss Temple notice that she is to expect a
new girl, so that there will he no difficulty about receiving her.
Goodbye."
"Goodbye, Mr. Brocklehurst remember me to Mrs. and Miss Brocklehurst,
and to Augusta and Theodore, and Master Broughton Brocklehurst."
"I will, madam. Little girl, here is a book entitled the 'Child's
Guide,' read it with prayer, especially that part containing 'An
account of the awfully sudden death of Martha G , a naughty child
addicted to falsehood and deceit.'"
With these words Mr. Brocklehurst put into my hand a thin pamphlet
sewn in a cover, and having rung for his carriage, he departed.
Mrs. Reed and I were left alone some minutes passed in silence
she was sewing, I was watching her. Mrs. Reed might be at that
time some six or seven and thirty she was a woman of robust frame,
squareshouldered and stronglimbed, not tall, and, though stout,
not obese she had a somewhat large face, the under jaw being
much developed and very solid her brow was low, her chin large and
prominent, mouth and nose sufficiently regular under her light
eyebrows glimmered an eye devoid of ruth her skin was dark and
opaque, her hair nearly flaxen her constitution was sound as a bell
illness never came near her she was an exact, clever manager
her household and tenantry were thoroughly under her control
her children only at times defied her authority and laughed it to
scorn she dressed well, and had a presence and port calculated to
set off handsome attire.
Sitting on a low stool, a few yards from her armchair, I examined
her figure I perused her features. In my hand I held the
tract containing the sudden death of the Liar, to which narrative
my attention had been pointed as to an appropriate warning. What
had just passed what Mrs. Reed had said concerning me to Mr.
Brocklehurst the whole tenor of their conversation, was recent,
raw, and stinging in my mind I had felt every word as acutely as
I had heard it plainly, and a passion of resentment fomented now
within me.
Mrs. Reed looked up from her work her eye settled on mine, her
fingers at the same time suspended their nimble movements.
"Go out of the room return to the nursery," was her mandate. My
look or something else must have struck her as offensive, for she
spoke with extreme though suppressed irritation. I got up, I went
to the door I came back again I walked to the window, across the
room, then close up to her.
SPEAK I must I had been trodden on severely, and MUST turn but
how? What strength had I to dart retaliation at my antagonist?
I gathered my energies and launched them in this blunt sentence 
"I am not deceitful if I were, I should say I loved you but I
declare I do not love you I dislike you the worst of anybody in
the world except John Reed and this book about the liar, you may
give to your girl, Georgiana, for it is she who tells lies, and
not I."
Mrs. Reed's hands still lay on her work inactive her eye of ice
continued to dwell freezingly on mine.
"What more have you to say?" she asked, rather in the tone in
which a person might address an opponent of adult age than such as
is ordinarily used to a child.
That eye of hers, that voice stirred every antipathy I had.
Shaking from head to foot, thrilled with ungovernable excitement,
I continued 
"I am glad you are no relation of mine I will never call you
aunt again as long as I live. I will never come to see you when
I am grown up and if any one asks me how I liked you, and how you
treated me, I will say the very thought of you makes me sick, and
that you treated me with miserable cruelty."
"How dare you affirm that, Jane Eyre?"
"How dare I, Mrs. Reed? How dare I? Because it is the TRUTH. You
think I have no feelings, and that I can do without one bit of love
or kindness but I cannot live so and you have no pity. I shall
remember how you thrust me back  roughly and violently thrust
me back  into the redroom, and locked me up there, to my dying
day though I was in agony though I cried out, while suffocating
with distress, 'Have mercy Have mercy, Aunt Reed' And that
punishment you made me suffer because your wicked boy struck me
knocked me down for nothing. I will tell anybody who asks me
questions, this exact tale. People think you a good woman, but
you are bad, hard hearted. YOU are deceitful"
Ere I had finished this reply, my soul began to expand, to exult,
with the strangest sense of freedom, of triumph, I ever felt. It
seemed as if an invisible bond had burst, and that I had struggled
out into unhopedfor liberty. Not without cause was this sentiment
Mrs. Reed looked frightened her work had slipped from her knee
she was lifting up her hands, rocking herself to and fro, and even
twisting her face as if she would cry.
"Jane, you are under a mistake what is the matter with you? Why
do you tremble so violently? Would you like to drink some water?"
"No, Mrs. Reed."
"Is there anything else you wish for, Jane? I assure you, I desire
to be your friend."
"Not you. You told Mr. Brocklehurst I had a bad character, a
deceitful disposition and I'll let everybody at Lowood know what
you are, and what you have done."
"Jane, you don't understand these things children must be corrected
for their faults."
"Deceit is not my fault" I cried out in a savage, high voice.
"But you are passionate, Jane, that you must allow and now return
to the nursery  there's a dear  and lie down a little."
"I am not your dear I cannot lie down send me to school soon,
Mrs. Reed, for I hate to live here."
"I will indeed send her to school soon," murmured Mrs. Reed sotto
voce and gathering up her work, she abruptly quitted the apartment.
I was left there alone  winner of the field. It was the hardest
battle I had fought, and the first victory I had gained I stood
awhile on the rug, where Mr. Brocklehurst had stood, and I enjoyed
my conqueror's solitude. First, I smiled to myself and felt
elate but this fierce pleasure subsided in me as fast as did the
accelerated throb of my pulses. A child cannot quarrel with its
elders, as I had done cannot give its furious feelings uncontrolled
play, as I had given mine, without experiencing afterwards the pang
of remorse and the chill of reaction. A ridge of lighted heath,
alive, glancing, devouring, would have been a meet emblem of my
mind when I accused and menaced Mrs. Reed the same ridge, black
and blasted after the flames are dead, would have represented as
meetly my subsequent condition, when halfanhour's silence and
reflection had shown me the madness of my conduct, and the dreariness
of my hated and hating position.
Something of vengeance I had tasted for the first time as aromatic
wine it seemed, on swallowing, warm and racy its afterflavour,
metallic and corroding, gave me a sensation as if I had been poisoned.
Willingly would I now have gone and asked Mrs. Reed's pardon but
I knew, partly from experience and partly from instinct, that was
the way to make her repulse me with double scorn, thereby reexciting
every turbulent impulse of my nature.
I would fain exercise some better faculty than that of fierce
speaking fain find nourishment for some less fiendish feeling than
that of sombre indignation. I took a book  some Arabian tales
I sat down and endeavoured to read. I could make no sense of
the subject my own thoughts swam always between me and the page
I had usually found fascinating. I opened the glassdoor in the
breakfastroom the shrubbery was quite still the black frost
reigned, unbroken by sun or breeze, through the grounds. I covered
my head and arms with the skirt of my frock, and went out to walk
in a part of the plantation which was quite sequestrated but I
found no pleasure in the silent trees, the falling fircones, the
congealed relics of autumn, russet leaves, swept by past winds in
heaps, and now stiffened together. I leaned against a gate, and
looked into an empty field where no sheep were feeding, where the
short grass was nipped and blanched. It was a very grey day a
most opaque sky, "onding on snaw," canopied all thence flakes felt
it intervals, which settled on the hard path and on the hoary lea
without melting. I stood, a wretched child enough, whispering to
myself over and over again, "What shall I do?  what shall I do?"
All at once I heard a clear voice call, "Miss Jane where are you?
Come to lunch"
It was Bessie, I knew well enough but I did not stir her light
step came tripping down the path.
"You naughty little thing" she said. "Why don't you come when
you are called?"
Bessie's presence, compared with the thoughts over which I had been
brooding, seemed cheerful even though, as usual, she was somewhat
cross. The fact is, after my conflict with and victory over Mrs.
Reed, I was not disposed to care much for the nursemaid's transitory
anger and I WAS disposed to bask in her youthful lightness of
heart. I just put my two arms round her and said, "Come, Bessie
don't scold."
The action was more frank and fearless than any I was habituated
to indulge in somehow it pleased her.
"You are a strange child, Miss Jane," she said, as she looked down
at me "a little roving, solitary thing and you are going to
school, I suppose?"
I nodded.
"And won't you be sorry to leave poor Bessie?"
"What does Bessie care for me? She is always scolding me."
"Because you're such a queer, frightened, shy little thing. You
should be bolder."
"What to get more knocks?"
"Nonsense But you are rather put upon, that's certain. My mother
said, when she came to see me last week, that she would not like
a little one of her own to be in your place.  Now, come in, and
I've some good news for you."
"I don't think you have, Bessie."
"Child what do you mean? What sorrowful eyes you fix on me
Well, but Missis and the young ladies and Master John are going
out to tea this afternoon, and you shall have tea with me. I'll
ask cook to bake you a little cake, and then you shall help me to
look over your drawers for I am soon to pack your trunk. Missis
intends you to leave Gateshead in a day or two, and you shall choose
what toys you like to take with you."
"Bessie, you must promise not to scold me any more till I go."
"Well, I will but mind you are a very good girl, and don't be
afraid of me. Don't start when I chance to speak rather sharply
it's so provoking."
"I don't think I shall ever be afraid of you again, Bessie, because
I have got used to you, and I shall soon have another set of people
to dread."
"If you dread them they'll dislike you."
"As you do, Bessie?"
"I don't dislike you, Miss I believe I am fonder of you than of
all the others."
"You don't show it."
"You little sharp thing you've got quite a new way of talking.
What makes you so venturesome and hardy?"
"Why, I shall soon be away from you, and besides"  I was going
to say something about what had passed between me and Mrs. Reed,
but on second thoughts I considered it better to remain silent on
that head.
"And so you're glad to leave me?"
"Not at all, Bessie indeed, just now I'm rather sorry."
"Just now and rather How coolly my little lady says it I
dare say now if I were to ask you for a kiss you wouldn't give it
me you'd say you'd RATHER not."
"I'll kiss you and welcome bend your head down." Bessie stooped
we mutually embraced, and I followed her into the house quite
comforted. That afternoon lapsed in peace and harmony and in the
evening Bessie told me some of her most enchanting stories, and sang
me some of her sweetest songs. Even for me life had its gleams of
sunshine.
CHAPTER V
Five o'clock had hardly struck on the morning of the th of
January, when Bessie brought a candle into my closet and found me
already up and nearly dressed. I had risen halfanhour before
her entrance, and had washed my face, and put on my clothes by the
light of a halfmoon just setting, whose rays streamed through the
narrow window near my crib. I was to leave Gateshead that day by
a coach which passed the lodge gates at six a.m. Bessie was the
only person yet risen she had lit a fire in the nursery, where
she now proceeded to make my breakfast. Few children can eat when
excited with the thoughts of a journey nor could I. Bessie, having
pressed me in vain to take a few spoonfuls of the boiled milk and
bread she had prepared for me, wrapped up some biscuits in a paper
and put them into my bag then she helped me on with my pelisse
and bonnet, and wrapping herself in a shawl, she and I left the
nursery. As we passed Mrs. Reed's bedroom, she said, "Will you go
in and bid Missis goodbye?"
"No, Bessie she came to my crib last night when you were gone
down to supper, and said I need not disturb her in the morning, or
my cousins either and she told me to remember that she had always
been my best friend, and to speak of her and be grateful to her
accordingly."
"What did you say, Miss?"
"Nothing I covered my face with the bedclothes, and turned from
her to the wall."
"That was wrong, Miss Jane."
"It was quite right, Bessie. Your Missis has not been my friend
she has been my foe."
"O Miss Jane don't say so"
"Goodbye to Gateshead" cried I, as we passed through the hall
and went out at the front door.
The moon was set, and it was very dark Bessie carried a lantern,
whose light glanced on wet steps and gravel road sodden by a recent
thaw. Raw and chill was the winter morning my teeth chattered
as I hastened down the drive. There was a light in the porter's
lodge when we reached it, we found the porter's wife just kindling
her fire my trunk, which had been carried down the evening
before, stood corded at the door. It wanted but a few minutes of
six, and shortly after that hour had struck, the distant roll of
wheels announced the coming coach I went to the door and watched
its lamps approach rapidly through the gloom.
"Is she going by herself?" asked the porter's wife.
"Yes."
"And how far is it?"
"Fifty miles."
"What a long way I wonder Mrs. Reed is not afraid to trust her
so far alone."
The coach drew up there it was at the gates with its four horses
and its top laden with passengers the guard and coachman loudly
urged haste my trunk was hoisted up I was taken from Bessie's
neck, to which I clung with kisses.
"Be sure and take good care of her," cried she to the guard, as he
lifted me into the inside.
"Ay, ay" was the answer the door was slapped to, a voice exclaimed
"All right," and on we drove. Thus was I severed from Bessie and
Gateshead thus whirled away to unknown, and, as I then deemed,
remote and mysterious regions.
I remember but little of the journey I only know that the day
seemed to me of a preternatural length, and that we appeared to
travel over hundreds of miles of road. We passed through several
towns, and in one, a very large one, the coach stopped the horses
were taken out, and the passengers alighted to dine. I was carried
into an inn, where the guard wanted me to have some dinner but, as
I had no appetite, he left me in an immense room with a fireplace
at each end, a chandelier pendent from the ceiling, and a little red
gallery high up against the wall filled with musical instruments.
Here I walked about for a long time, feeling very strange, and
mortally apprehensive of some one coming in and kidnapping me for
I believed in kidnappers, their exploits having frequently figured
in Bessie's fireside chronicles. At last the guard returned once
more I was stowed away in the coach, my protector mounted his own
seat, sounded his hollow horn, and away we rattled over the "stony
street" of L.
The afternoon came on wet and somewhat misty as it waned into
dusk, I began to feel that we were getting very far indeed from
Gateshead we ceased to pass through towns the country changed
great grey hills heaved up round the horizon as twilight deepened,
we descended a valley, dark with wood, and long after night had
overclouded the prospect, I heard a wild wind rushing amongst trees.
Lulled by the sound, I at last dropped asleep I had not long slumbered
when the sudden cessation of motion awoke me the coachdoor was
open, and a person like a servant was standing at it I saw her
face and dress by the light of the lamps.
"Is there a little girl called Jane Eyre here?" she asked. I
answered "Yes," and was then lifted out my trunk was handed down,
and the coach instantly drove away.
I was stiff with long sitting, and bewildered with the noise and
motion of the coach Gathering my faculties, I looked about me.
Rain, wind, and darkness filled the air nevertheless, I dimly
discerned a wall before me and a door open in it through this door
I passed with my new guide she shut and locked it behind her.
There was now visible a house or houses  for the building spread
far  with many windows, and lights burning in some we went up
a broad pebbly path, splashing wet, and were admitted at a door
then the servant led me through a passage into a room with a fire,
where she left me alone.
I stood and warmed my numbed fingers over the blaze, then I looked
round there was no candle, but the uncertain light from the hearth
showed, by intervals, papered walls, carpet, curtains, shining
mahogany furniture it was a parlour, not so spacious or splendid
as the drawingroom at Gateshead, but comfortable enough. I was
puzzling to make out the subject of a picture on the wall, when the
door opened, and an individual carrying a light entered another
followed close behind.
The first was a tall lady with dark hair, dark eyes, and a pale
and large forehead her figure was partly enveloped in a shawl,
her countenance was grave, her bearing erect.
"The child is very young to be sent alone," said she, putting
her candle down on the table. She considered me attentively
for a minute or two, then further added 
"She had better be put to bed soon she looks tired are you
tired?" she asked, placing her hand on my shoulder.
"A little, ma'am."
"And hungry too, no doubt let her have some supper before she
goes to bed, Miss Miller. Is this the first time you have left
your parents to come to school, my little girl?"
I explained to her that I had no parents. She inquired how long
they had been dead then how old I was, what was my name, whether
I could read, write, and sew a little then she touched my cheek
gently with her forefinger, and saying, "She hoped I should be a
good child," dismissed me along with Miss Miller.
The lady I had left might be about twentynine the one who went
with me appeared some years younger the first impressed me by
her voice, look, and air. Miss Miller was more ordinary ruddy in
complexion, though of a careworn countenance hurried in gait and
action, like one who had always a multiplicity of tasks on hand
she looked, indeed, what I afterwards found she really was, an
underteacher. Led by her, I passed from compartment to compartment,
from passage to passage, of a large and irregular building till,
emerging from the total and somewhat dreary silence pervading that
portion of the house we had traversed, we came upon the hum of many
voices, and presently entered a wide, long room, with great deal
tables, two at each end, on each of which burnt a pair of candles,
and seated all round on benches, a congregation of girls of every
age, from nine or ten to twenty. Seen by the dim light of the
dips, their number to me appeared countless, though not in reality
exceeding eighty they were uniformly dressed in brown stuff frocks
of quaint fashion, and long holland pinafores. It was the hour of
study they were engaged in conning over their to morrow's task,
and the hum I had heard was the combined result of their whispered
repetitions.
Miss Miller signed to me to sit on a bench near the door,
then walking up to the top of the long room she cried out 
"Monitors, collect the lessonbooks and put them away Four tall
girls arose from different tables, and going round, gathered the
books and removed them. Miss Miller again gave the word of command 
"Monitors, fetch the suppertrays"
The tall girls went out and returned presently, each bearing a tray,
with portions of something, I knew not what, arranged thereon, and
a pitcher of water and mug in the middle of each tray. The portions
were handed round those who liked took a draught of the water,
the mug being common to all. When it came to my turn, I drank, for
I was thirsty, but did not touch the food, excitement and fatigue
rendering me incapable of eating I now saw, however, that it was
a thin oaten cake shaved into fragments.
The meal over, prayers were read by Miss Miller, and the classes
filed off, two and two, upstairs. Overpowered by this time with
weariness, I scarcely noticed what sort of a place the bedroom was,
except that, like the schoolroom, I saw it was very long. Tonight
I was to be Miss Miller's bedfellow she helped me to undress
when laid down I glanced at the long rows of beds, each of which
was quickly filled with two occupants in ten minutes the single
light was extinguished, and amidst silence and complete darkness
I fell asleep.
The night passed rapidly. I was too tired even to dream I only
once awoke to hear the wind rave in furious gusts, and the rain
fall in torrents, and to be sensible that Miss Miller had taken
her place by my side. When I again unclosed my eyes, a loud bell
was ringing the girls were up and dressing day had not yet begun
to dawn, and a rushlight or two burned in the room. I too rose
reluctantly it was bitter cold, and I dressed as well as I could
for shivering, and washed when there was a basin at liberty, which
did not occur soon, as there was but one basin to six girls, on
the stands down the middle of the room. Again the bell rang all
formed in file, two and two, and in that order descended the stairs
and entered the cold and dimly lit schoolroom here prayers
were read by Miss Miller afterwards she called out 
"Form classes"
A great tumult succeeded for some minutes, during which Miss Miller
repeatedly exclaimed, "Silence" and "Order" When it subsided,
I saw them all drawn up in four semicircles, before four chairs,
placed at the four tables all held books in their hands, and a great
book, like a Bible, lay on each table, before the vacant seat. A
pause of some seconds succeeded, filled up by the low, vague hum
of numbers Miss Miller walked from class to class, hushing this
indefinite sound.
A distant bell tinkled immediately three ladies entered the room,
each walked to a table and took her seat. Miss Miller assumed the
fourth vacant chair, which was that nearest the door, and around
which the smallest of the children were assembled to this inferior
class I was called, and placed at the bottom of it.
Business now began, the day's Collect was repeated, then certain
texts of Scripture were said, and to these succeeded a protracted
reading of chapters in the Bible, which lasted an hour. By
the time that exercise was terminated, day had fully dawned. The
indefatigable bell now sounded for the fourth time the classes
were marshalled and marched into another room to breakfast how
glad I was to behold a prospect of getting something to eat I
was now nearly sick from inanition, having taken so little the day
before.
The refectory was a great, lowceiled, gloomy room on two long tables
smoked basins of something hot, which, however, to my dismay, sent
forth an odour far from inviting. I saw a universal manifestation
of discontent when the fumes of the repast met the nostrils
of those destined to swallow it from the van of the procession,
the tall girls of the first class, rose the whispered words 
"Disgusting The porridge is burnt again"
"Silence" ejaculated a voice not that of Miss Miller, but one of
the upper teachers, a little and dark personage, smartly dressed,
but of somewhat morose aspect, who installed herself at the top
of one table, while a more buxom lady presided at the other. I
looked in vain for her I had first seen the night before she was
not visible Miss Miller occupied the foot of the table where I sat,
and a strange, foreignlooking, elderly lady, the French teacher,
as I afterwards found, took the corresponding seat at the other
board. A long grace was said and a hymn sung then a servant
brought in some tea for the teachers, and the meal began.
Ravenous, and now very faint, I devoured a spoonful or two of my
portion without thinking of its taste but the first edge of hunger
blunted, I perceived I had got in hand a nauseous mess burnt
porridge is almost as bad as rotten potatoes famine itself soon
sickens over it. The spoons were moved slowly I saw each girl
taste her food and try to swallow it but in most cases the effort
was soon relinquished. Breakfast was over, and none had breakfasted.
Thanks being returned for what we had not got, and a second hymn
chanted, the refectory was evacuated for the schoolroom. I was one
of the last to go out, and in passing the tables, I saw one teacher
take a basin of the porridge and taste it she looked at the others
all their countenances expressed displeasure, and one of
them, the stout one, whispered 
"Abominable stuff How shameful"
A quarter of an hour passed before lessons again began, during which
the schoolroom was in a glorious tumult for that space of time it
seemed to be permitted to talk loud and more freely, and they used
their privilege. The whole conversation ran on the breakfast,
which one and all abused roundly. Poor things it was the sole
consolation they had. Miss Miller was now the only teacher in the
room a group of great girls standing about her spoke with serious
and sullen gestures. I heard the name of Mr. Brocklehurst pronounced
by some lips at which Miss Miller shook her head disapprovingly
but she made no great effort to cheek the general wrath doubtless
she shared in it.
A clock in the schoolroom struck nine Miss Miller left
her circle, and standing in the middle of the room, cried 
"Silence To your seats"
Discipline prevailed in five minutes the confused throng was
resolved into order, and comparative silence quelled the Babel
clamour of tongues. The upper teachers now punctually resumed their
posts but still, all seemed to wait. Ranged on benches down the
sides of the room, the eighty girls sat motionless and erect a
quaint assemblage they appeared, all with plain locks combed from
their faces, not a curl visible in brown dresses, made high and
surrounded by a narrow tucker about the throat, with little pockets
of holland shaped something like a Highlander's purse tied in front
of their frocks, and destined to serve the purpose of a workbag
all, too, wearing woollen stockings and countrymade shoes, fastened
with brass buckles. Above twenty of those clad in this costume
were fullgrown girls, or rather young women it suited them ill,
and gave an air of oddity even to the prettiest.
I was still looking at them, and also at intervals examining the
teachers  none of whom precisely pleased me for the stout one
was a little coarse, the dark one not a little fierce, the foreigner
harsh and grotesque, and Miss Miller, poor thing looked purple,
weather beaten, and overworked  when, as my eye wandered from
face to face, the whole school rose simultaneously, as if moved by
a common spring.
What was the matter? I had heard no order given I was puzzled.
Ere I had gathered my wits, the classes were again seated but as
all eyes were now turned to one point, mine followed the general
direction, and encountered the personage who had received me last
night. She stood at the bottom of the long room, on the hearth
for there was a fire at each end she surveyed the two rows of girls
silently and gravely. Miss Miller approaching, seemed to ask her
a question, and having received her answer, went back to
her place, and said aloud 
"Monitor of the first class, fetch the globes"
While the direction was being executed, the lady consulted moved
slowly up the room. I suppose I have a considerable organ of
veneration, for I retain yet the sense of admiring awe with which
my eyes traced her steps. Seen now, in broad daylight, she looked
tall, fair, and shapely brown eyes with a benignant light in their
iris, and a fine pencilling of long lashes round, relieved the
whiteness of her large front on each of her temples her hair, of
a very dark brown, was clustered in round curls, according to the
fashion of those times, when neither smooth bands nor long ringlets
were in vogue her dress, also in the mode of the day, was of purple
cloth, relieved by a sort of Spanish trimming of black velvet
a gold watch watches were not so common then as now shone at
her girdle. Let the reader add, to complete the picture, refined
features a complexion, if pale, clear and a stately air and
carriage, and he will have, at least, as clearly as words can give
it, a correct idea of the exterior of Miss Temple  Maria Temple,
as I afterwards saw the name written in a prayerbook intrusted to
me to carry to church.
The superintendent of Lowood for such was this lady having taken
her seat before a pair of globes placed on one of the tables,
summoned the first class round her, and commenced giving a lesson
on geography the lower classes were called by the teachers
repetitions in history, grammar, c., went on for an hour writing
and arithmetic succeeded, and music lessons were given by Miss
Temple to some of the elder girls. The duration of each lesson
was measured by the clock, which at last struck twelve. The
superintendent rose 
"I have a word to address to the pupils," said she.
The tumult of cessation from lessons was already breaking
forth, but it sank at her voice. She went on 
"You had this morning a breakfast which you could not eat you
must be hungry  I have ordered that a lunch of bread and cheese
shall be served to all."
The teachers looked at her with a sort of surprise.
"It is to be done on my responsibility," she added, in an explanatory
tone to them, and immediately afterwards left the room.
The bread and cheese was presently brought in and distributed, to
the high delight and refreshment of the whole school. The order
was now given "To the garden" Each put on a coarse straw bonnet,
with strings of coloured calico, and a cloak of grey frieze. I was
similarly equipped, and, following the stream, I made my way into
the open air.
The garden was a wide inclosure, surrounded with walls so high as
to exclude every glimpse of prospect a covered verandah ran down
one side, and broad walks bordered a middle space divided into
scores of little beds these beds were assigned as gardens for
the pupils to cultivate, and each bed had an owner. When full of
flowers they would doubtless look pretty but now, at the latter
end of January, all was wintry blight and brown decay. I shuddered
as I stood and looked round me it was an inclement day for outdoor
exercise not positively rainy, but darkened by a drizzling yellow
fog all under foot was still soaking wet with the floods of
yesterday. The stronger among the girls ran about and engaged in
active games, but sundry pale and thin ones herded together for
shelter and warmth in the verandah and amongst these, as the dense
mist penetrated to their shivering frames, I heard frequently the
sound of a hollow cough.
As yet I had spoken to no one, nor did anybody seem to take notice
of me I stood lonely enough but to that feeling of isolation
I was accustomed it did not oppress me much. I leant against a
pillar of the verandah, drew my grey mantle close about me, and,
trying to forget the cold which nipped me without, and the unsatisfied
hunger which gnawed me within, delivered myself up to the employment
of watching and thinking. My reflections were too undefined
and fragmentary to merit record I hardly yet knew where I was
Gateshead and my past life seemed floated away to an immeasurable
distance the present was vague and strange, and of the future I
could form no conjecture. I looked round the conventlike garden,
and then up at the house  a large building, half of which seemed
grey and old, the other half quite new. The new part, containing
the schoolroom and dormitory, was lit by mullioned and latticed
windows, which gave it a churchlike aspect a stone tablet over
the door bore this inscription
"Lowood Institution.  This portion was rebuilt A.D.  , by Naomi
Brocklehurst, of Brocklehurst Hall, in this county."
"Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good
works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven."  St. Matt.
v. .
I read these words over and over again I felt that an explanation
belonged to them, and was unable fully to penetrate their import.
I was still pondering the signification of "Institution," and
endeavouring to make out a connection between the first words and
the verse of Scripture, when the sound of a cough close behind me
made me turn my head. I saw a girl sitting on a stone bench near
she was bent over a book, on the perusal of which she seemed intent
from where I stood I could see the title  it was "Rasselas" a
name that struck me as strange, and consequently attractive. In
turning a leaf she happened to look up, and I said to her directly 
"Is your book interesting?" I had already formed the intention of
asking her to lend it to me some day.
"I like it," she answered, after a pause of a second or two, during
which she examined me.
"What is it about?" I continued. I hardly know where I found the
hardihood thus to open a conversation with a stranger the step
was contrary to my nature and habits but I think her occupation
touched a chord of sympathy somewhere for I too liked reading,
though of a frivolous and childish kind I could not digest or
comprehend the serious or substantial.
"You may look at it," replied the girl, offering me the book.
I did so a brief examination convinced me that the contents were
less taking than the title "Rasselas" looked dull to my trifling
taste I saw nothing about fairies, nothing about genii no bright
variety seemed spread over the closelyprinted pages. I returned
it to her she received it quietly, and without saying anything
she was about to relapse into her former studious mood again
I ventured to disturb her 
"Can you tell me what the writing on that stone over the door means?
What is Lowood Institution?"
"This house where you are come to live."
"And why do they call it Institution? Is it in any way different
from other schools?"
"It is partly a charityschool you and I, and all the rest of
us, are charitychildren. I suppose you are an orphan are not
either your father or your mother dead?"
"Both died before I can remember."
"Well, all the girls here have lost either one or both parents,
and this is called an institution for educating orphans."
"Do we pay no money? Do they keep us for nothing?"
"We pay, or our friends pay, fifteen pounds a year for each."
"Then why do they call us charitychildren?"
"Because fifteen pounds is not enough for board and teaching, and
the deficiency is supplied by subscription."
"Who subscribes?"
"Different benevolentminded ladies and gentlemen in this neighbourhood
and in London."
"Who was Naomi Brocklehurst?"
"The lady who built the new part of this house as that tablet
records, and whose son overlooks and directs everything here."
"Why?"
"Because he is treasurer and manager of the establishment."
"Then this house does not belong to that tall lady who wears a
watch, and who said we were to have some bread and cheese?"
"To Miss Temple? Oh, no I wish it did she has to answer to
Mr. Brocklehurst for all she does. Mr. Brocklehurst buys all our
food and all our clothes."
"Does he live here?"
"No  two miles off, at a large hall."
"Is he a good man?"
"He is a clergyman, and is said to do a great deal of good."
"Did you say that tall lady was called Miss Temple?"
"Yes."
"And what are the other teachers called?"
"The one with red cheeks is called Miss Smith she attends to the
work, and cuts out  for we make our own clothes, our frocks, and
pelisses, and everything the little one with black hair is Miss
Scatcherd she teaches history and grammar, and hears the second
class repetitions and the one who wears a shawl, and has a
pockethandkerchief tied to her side with a yellow ribband, is Madame
Pierrot she comes from Lisle, in France, and teaches French."
"Do you like the teachers?"
"Well enough."
"Do you like the little black one, and the Madame ?  I cannot
pronounce her name as you do."
"Miss Scatcherd is hasty  you must take care not to offend her
Madame Pierrot is not a bad sort of person."
"But Miss Temple is the best  isn't she?"
"Miss Temple is very good and very clever she is above the rest,
because she knows far more than they do."
"Have you been long here?"
"Two years."
"Are you an orphan?"
"My mother is dead."
"Are you happy here?"
"You ask rather too many questions. I have given you answers enough
for the present now I want to read."
But at that moment the summons sounded for dinner all reentered
the house. The odour which now filled the refectory was scarcely
more appetising than that which had regaled our nostrils at breakfast
the dinner was served in two huge tinplated vessels, whence rose
a strong steam redolent of rancid fat. I found the mess to consist
of indifferent potatoes and strange shreds of rusty meat, mixed and
cooked together. Of this preparation a tolerably abundant plateful
was apportioned to each pupil. I ate what I could, and wondered
within myself whether every day's fare would be like this.
After dinner, we immediately adjourned to the schoolroom lessons
recommenced, and were continued till five o'clock.
The only marked event of the afternoon was, that I saw the girl
with whom I had conversed in the verandah dismissed in disgrace
by Miss Scatcherd from a history class, and sent to stand in the
middle of the large schoolroom. The punishment seemed to me in
a high degree ignominious, especially for so great a girl  she
looked thirteen or upwards. I expected she would show signs of
great distress and shame but to my surprise she neither wept nor
blushed composed, though grave, she stood, the central mark of
all eyes. "How can she bear it so quietly  so firmly?" I asked
of myself. "Were I in her place, it seems to me I should wish the
earth to open and swallow me up. She looks as if she were thinking
of something beyond her punishment  beyond her situation of
something not round her nor before her. I have heard of daydreams
is she in a daydream now? Her eyes are fixed on the floor,
but I am sure they do not see it  her sight seems turned in, gone
down into her heart she is looking at what she can remember, I
believe not at what is really present. I wonder what sort of a
girl she is  whether good or naughty."
Soon after five p.m. we had another meal, consisting of a small
mug of coffee, and halfaslice of brown bread. I devoured my
bread and drank my coffee with relish but I should have been glad
of as much more  I was still hungry. Halfanhour's recreation
succeeded, then study then the glass of water and the piece of
oatcake, prayers, and bed. Such was my first day at Lowood.
CHAPTER VI
The next day commenced as before, getting up and dressing by
rushlight but this morning we were obliged to dispense with the
ceremony of washing the water in the pitchers was frozen. A change
had taken place in the weather the preceding evening, and a keen
northeast wind, whistling through the crevices of our bedroom
windows all night long, had made us shiver in our beds, and turned
the contents of the ewers to ice.
Before the long hour and a half of prayers and Biblereading
was over, I felt ready to perish with cold. Breakfasttime came
at last, and this morning the porridge was not burnt the quality
was eatable, the quantity small. How small my portion seemed I
wished it had been doubled.
In the course of the day I was enrolled a member of the fourth class,
and regular tasks and occupations were assigned me hitherto, I
had only been a spectator of the proceedings at Lowood I was now
to become an actor therein. At first, being little accustomed to
learn by heart, the lessons appeared to me both long and difficult
the frequent change from task to task, too, bewildered me and
I was glad when, about three o'clock in the afternoon, Miss Smith
put into my hands a border of muslin two yards long, together with
needle, thimble, c., and sent me to sit in a quiet corner of the
schoolroom, with directions to hem the same. At that hour most of
the others were sewing likewise but one class still stood round
Miss Scatcherd's chair reading, and as all was quiet, the subject
of their lessons could be heard, together with the manner in which
each girl acquitted herself, and the animadversions or commendations
of Miss Scatcherd on the performance. It was English history
among the readers I observed my acquaintance of the verandah at
the commencement of the lesson, her place had been at the top of
the class, but for some error of pronunciation, or some inattention
to stops, she was suddenly sent to the very bottom. Even in that
obscure position, Miss Scatcherd continued to make her an object
of constant notice she was continually addressing to her such
phrases as the following
"Burns" such it seems was her name the girls here were all
called by their surnames, as boys are elsewhere, "Burns, you are
standing on the side of your shoe turn your toes out immediately."
"Burns, you poke your chin most unpleasantly draw it in." "Burns,
I insist on your holding your head up I will not have you before
me in that attitude," c. c.
A chapter having been read through twice, the books were closed
and the girls examined. The lesson had comprised part of the reign
of Charles I., and there were sundry questions about tonnage and
poundage and shipmoney, which most of them appeared unable to
answer still, every little difficulty was solved instantly when
it reached Burns her memory seemed to have retained the substance
of the whole lesson, and she was ready with answers on every point.
I kept expecting that Miss Scatcherd would praise her attention
but, instead of that, she suddenly cried out 
"You dirty, disagreeable girl you have never cleaned your nails
this morning"
Burns made no answer I wondered at her silence. "Why," thought
I, "does she not explain that she could neither clean her nails
nor wash her face, as the water was frozen?"
My attention was now called off by Miss Smith desiring me to hold a
skein of thread while she was winding it, she talked to me from
time to time, asking whether I had ever been at school before,
whether I could mark, stitch, knit, c. till she dismissed me,
I could not pursue my observations on Miss Scatcherd's movements.
When I returned to my seat, that lady was just delivering an order
of which I did not catch the import but Burns immediately left
the class, and going into the small inner room where the books were
kept, returned in half a minute, carrying in her hand a bundle of
twigs tied together at one end. This ominous tool she presented
to Miss Scatcherd with a respectful curtesy then she quietly, and
without being told, unloosed her pinafore, and the teacher instantly
and sharply inflicted on her neck a dozen strokes with the bunch
of twigs. Not a tear rose to Burns' eye and, while I paused from
my sewing, because my fingers quivered at this spectacle with a
sentiment of unavailing and impotent anger, not a feature of her
pensive face altered its ordinary expression.
"Hardened girl" exclaimed Miss Scatcherd "nothing can correct
you of your slatternly habits carry the rod away."
Burns obeyed I looked at her narrowly as she emerged from the
bookcloset she was just putting back her handkerchief into her
pocket, and the trace of a tear glistened on her thin cheek.
The playhour in the evening I thought the pleasantest fraction
of the day at Lowood the bit of bread, the draught of coffee
swallowed at five o'clock had revived vitality, if it had not
satisfied hunger the long restraint of the day was slackened
the schoolroom felt warmer than in the morning  its fires being
allowed to burn a little more brightly, to supply, in some measure,
the place of candles, not yet introduced the ruddy gloaming, the
licensed uproar, the confusion of many voices gave one a welcome
sense of liberty.
On the evening of the day on which I had seen Miss Scatcherd flog
her pupil, Burns, I wandered as usual among the forms and tables
and laughing groups without a companion, yet not feeling lonely
when I passed the windows, I now and then lifted a blind, and looked
out it snowed fast, a drift was already forming against the lower
panes putting my ear close to the window, I could distinguish from
the gleeful tumult within, the disconsolate moan of the wind outside.
Probably, if I had lately left a good home and kind parents, this
would have been the hour when I should most keenly have regretted
the separation that wind would then have saddened my heart this
obscure chaos would have disturbed my peace as it was, I derived
from both a strange excitement, and reckless and feverish, I wished
the wind to howl more wildly, the gloom to deepen to darkness, and
the confusion to rise to clamour.
Jumping over forms, and creeping under tables, I made my way to
one of the fireplaces there, kneeling by the high wire fender,
I found Burns, absorbed, silent, abstracted from all round her by
the companionship of a book, which she read by the dim glare of
the embers.
"Is it still 'Rasselas'?" I asked, coming behind her.
"Yes," she said, "and I have just finished it."
And in five minutes more she shut it up. I was glad of this.
"Now," thought I, "I can perhaps get her to talk." I sat down by
her on the floor.
"What is your name besides Burns?"
"Helen."
"Do you come a long way from here?"
"I come from a place farther north, quite on the borders of Scotland."
"Will you ever go back?"
"I hope so but nobody can be sure of the future."
"You must wish to leave Lowood?"
"No why should I? I was sent to Lowood to get an education and
it would be of no use going away until I have attained that object."
"But that teacher, Miss Scatcherd, is so cruel to you?"
"Cruel? Not at all She is severe she dislikes my faults."
"And if I were in your place I should dislike her I should resist
her. If she struck me with that rod, I should get it from her
hand I should break it under her nose."
"Probably you would do nothing of the sort but if you did, Mr.
Brocklehurst would expel you from the school that would be a great
grief to your relations. It is far better to endure patiently a
smart which nobody feels but yourself, than to commit a hasty action
whose evil consequences will extend to all connected with you and
besides, the Bible bids us return good for evil."
"But then it seems disgraceful to be flogged, and to be sent to
stand in the middle of a room full of people and you are such a
great girl I am far younger than you, and I could not bear it."
"Yet it would be your duty to bear it, if you could not avoid it
it is weak and silly to say you CANNOT BEAR what it is your fate
to be required to bear."
I heard her with wonder I could not comprehend this doctrine of
endurance and still less could I understand or sympathise with
the forbearance she expressed for her chastiser. Still I felt that
Helen Burns considered things by a light invisible to my eyes. I
suspected she might be right and I wrong but I would not ponder
the matter deeply like Felix, I put it off to a more convenient
season.
"You say you have faults, Helen what are they? To me you seem
very good."
"Then learn from me, not to judge by appearances I am, as Miss
Scatcherd said, slatternly I seldom put, and never keep, things,
in order I am careless I forget rules I read when I should
learn my lessons I have no method and sometimes I say, like you,
I cannot BEAR to be subjected to systematic arrangements. This
is all very provoking to Miss Scatcherd, who is naturally neat,
punctual, and particular."
"And cross and cruel," I added but Helen Burns would not admit my
addition she kept silence.
"Is Miss Temple as severe to you as Miss Scatcherd?"
At the utterance of Miss Temple's name, a soft smile flitted over
her grave face.
"Miss Temple is full of goodness it pains her to be severe to any
one, even the worst in the school she sees my errors, and tells
me of them gently and, if I do anything worthy of praise, she gives
me my meed liberally. One strong proof of my wretchedly defective
nature is, that even her expostulations, so mild, so rational, have
not influence to cure me of my faults and even her praise, though
I value it most highly, cannot stimulate me to continued care and
foresight."
"That is curious," said I, "it is so easy to be careful."
"For YOU I have no doubt it is. I observed you in your class this
morning, and saw you were closely attentive your thoughts never
seemed to wander while Miss Miller explained the lesson and questioned
you. Now, mine continually rove away when I should be listening
to Miss Scatcherd, and collecting all she says with assiduity, often
I lose the very sound of her voice I fall into a sort of dream.
Sometimes I think I am in Northumberland, and that the noises I
hear round me are the bubbling of a little brook which runs through
Deepden, near our house  then, when it comes to my turn to reply,
I have to be awakened and having heard nothing of what was read
for listening to the visionary brook, I have no answer ready."
"Yet how well you replied this afternoon."
"It was mere chance the subject on which we had been reading had
interested me. This afternoon, instead of dreaming of Deepden, I
was wondering how a man who wished to do right could act so unjustly
and unwisely as Charles the First sometimes did and I thought what
a pity it was that, with his integrity and conscientiousness, he
could see no farther than the prerogatives of the crown. If he had
but been able to look to a distance, and see how what they call the
spirit of the age was tending Still, I like Charles  I respect
him  I pity him, poor murdered king Yes, his enemies were the
worst they shed blood they had no right to shed. How dared they
kill him"
Helen was talking to herself now she had forgotten I could not
very well understand her  that I was ignorant, or nearly so, of
the subject she discussed. I recalled her to my level.
"And when Miss Temple teaches you, do your thoughts wander then?"
"No, certainly, not often because Miss Temple has generally something
to say which is newer than my own reflections her language is
singularly agreeable to me, and the information she communicates
is often just what I wished to gain."
"Well, then, with Miss Temple you are good?"
"Yes, in a passive way I make no effort I follow as inclination
guides me. There is no merit in such goodness."
"A great deal you are good to those who are good to you. It is
all I ever desire to be. If people were always kind and obedient
to those who are cruel and unjust, the wicked people would have
it all their own way they would never feel afraid, and so they
would never alter, but would grow worse and worse. When we are
struck at without a reason, we should strike back again very hard
I am sure we should  so hard as to teach the person who struck
us never to do it again."
"You will change your mind, I hope, when you grow older as yet
you are but a little untaught girl."
"But I feel this, Helen I must dislike those who, whatever I do
to please them, persist in disliking me I must resist those who
punish me unjustly. It is as natural as that I should love those
who show me affection, or submit to punishment when I feel it is
deserved."
"Heathens and savage tribes hold that doctrine, but Christians and
civilised nations disown it."
"How? I don't understand."
"It is not violence that best overcomes hate  nor vengeance that
most certainly heals injury."
"What then?"
"Read the New Testament, and observe what Christ says, and how He
acts make His word your rule, and His conduct your example."
"What does He say?"
"Love your enemies bless them that curse you do good to them that
hate you and despitefully use you."
"Then I should love Mrs. Reed, which I cannot do I should bless
her son John, which is impossible."
In her turn, Helen Burns asked me to explain, and I proceeded
forthwith to pour out, in my own way, the tale of my sufferings
and resentments. Bitter and truculent when excited, I spoke as I
felt, without reserve or softening.
Helen heard me patiently to the end I expected she would then
make a remark, but she said nothing.
"Well," I asked impatiently, "is not Mrs. Reed a hardhearted, bad
woman?"
"She has been unkind to you, no doubt because you see, she
dislikes your cast of character, as Miss Scatcherd does mine but
how minutely you remember all she has done and said to you What
a singularly deep impression her injustice seems to have made
on your heart No illusage so brands its record on my feelings.
Would you not be happier if you tried to forget her severity,
together with the passionate emotions it excited? Life appears
to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity or registering
wrongs. We are, and must be, one and all, burdened with faults in
this world but the time will soon come when, I trust, we shall
put them off in putting off our corruptible bodies when debasement
and sin will fall from us with this cumbrous frame of flesh, and
only the spark of the spirit will remain,  the impalpable principle
of light and thought, pure as when it left the Creator to inspire
the creature whence it came it will return perhaps again to
be communicated to some being higher than man  perhaps to pass
through gradations of glory, from the pale human soul to brighten
to the seraph Surely it will never, on the contrary, be suffered
to degenerate from man to fiend? No I cannot believe that I
hold another creed which no one ever taught me, and which I seldom
mention but in which I delight, and to which I cling for it
extends hope to all it makes Eternity a rest  a mighty home, not
a terror and an abyss. Besides, with this creed, I can so clearly
distinguish between the criminal and his crime I can so sincerely
forgive the first while I abhor the last with this creed revenge
never worries my heart, degradation never too deeply disgusts me,
injustice never crushes me too low I live in calm, looking to
the end."
Helen's head, always drooping, sank a little lower as she finished
this sentence. I saw by her look she wished no longer to talk
to me, but rather to converse with her own thoughts. She was not
allowed much time for meditation a monitor, a great rough girl,
presently came up, exclaiming in a strong Cumberland accent 
"Helen Burns, if you don't go and put your drawer in order, and
fold up your work this minute, I'll tell Miss Scatcherd to come
and look at it"
Helen sighed as her reverie fled, and getting up, obeyed the monitor
without reply as without delay.
CHAPTER VII
My first quarter at Lowood seemed an age and not the golden
age either it comprised an irksome struggle with difficulties in
habituating myself to new rules and unwonted tasks. The fear of
failure in these points harassed me worse than the physical hardships
of my lot though these were no trifles.
During January, February, and part of March, the deep snows,
and, after their melting, the almost impassable roads, prevented
our stirring beyond the garden walls, except to go to church but
within these limits we had to pass an hour every day in the open
air. Our clothing was insufficient to protect us from the severe
cold we had no boots, the snow got into our shoes and melted
there our ungloved hands became numbed and covered with chilblains,
as were our feet I remember well the distracting irritation I
endured from this cause every evening, when my feet inflamed and
the torture of thrusting the swelled, raw, and stiff toes into my shoes
in the morning. Then the scanty supply of food was distressing
with the keen appetites of growing children, we had scarcely
sufficient to keep alive a delicate invalid. From this deficiency
of nourishment resulted an abuse, which pressed hardly on the younger
pupils whenever the famished great girls had an opportunity, they
would coax or menace the little ones out of their portion. Many
a time I have shared between two claimants the precious morsel of
brown bread distributed at teatime and after relinquishing to a
third half the contents of my mug of coffee, I have swallowed the
remainder with an accompaniment of secret tears, forced from me by
the exigency of hunger.
Sundays were dreary days in that wintry season. We had to walk
two miles to Brocklebridge Church, where our patron officiated.
We set out cold, we arrived at church colder during the morning
service we became almost paralysed. It was too far to return
to dinner, and an allowance of cold meat and bread, in the same
penurious proportion observed in our ordinary meals, was served
round between the services.
At the close of the afternoon service we returned by an exposed and
hilly road, where the bitter winter wind, blowing over a range of
snowy summits to the north, almost flayed the skin from our faces.
I can remember Miss Temple walking lightly and rapidly along our
drooping line, her plaid cloak, which the frosty wind fluttered,
gathered close about her, and encouraging us, by precept and
example, to keep up our spirits, and march forward, as she said,
"like stalwart soldiers." The other teachers, poor things, were
generally themselves too much dejected to attempt the task of
cheering others.
How we longed for the light and heat of a blazing fire when we got
back But, to the little ones at least, this was denied each
hearth in the schoolroom was immediately surrounded by a double
row of great girls, and behind them the younger children crouched
in groups, wrapping their starved arms in their pinafores.
A little solace came at teatime, in the shape of a double ration
of bread  a whole, instead of a half, slice  with the delicious
addition of a thin scrape of butter it was the hebdomadal treat
to which we all looked forward from Sabbath to Sabbath. I generally
contrived to reserve a moiety of this bounteous repast for myself
but the remainder I was invariably obliged to part with.
The Sunday evening was spent in repeating, by heart, the Church
Catechism, and the fifth, sixth, and seventh chapters of St.
Matthew and in listening to a long sermon, read by Miss Miller,
whose irrepressible yawns attested her weariness. A frequent
interlude of these performances was the enactment of the part of
Eutychus by some halfdozen of little girls, who, overpowered with
sleep, would fall down, if not out of the third loft, yet off the
fourth form, and be taken up half dead. The remedy was, to thrust
them forward into the centre of the schoolroom, and oblige them
to stand there till the sermon was finished. Sometimes their
feet failed them, and they sank together in a heap they were then
propped up with the monitors' high stools.
I have not yet alluded to the visits of Mr. Brocklehurst and indeed
that gentleman was from home during the greater part of the first
month after my arrival perhaps prolonging his stay with his friend
the archdeacon his absence was a relief to me. I need not say
that I had my own reasons for dreading his coming but come he
did at last.
One afternoon I had then been three weeks at Lowood, as I was sitting
with a slate in my hand, puzzling over a sum in long division, my
eyes, raised in abstraction to the window, caught sight of a figure
just passing I recognised almost instinctively that gaunt outline
and when, two minutes after, all the school, teachers included,
rose en masse, it was not necessary for me to look up in order to
ascertain whose entrance they thus greeted. A long stride measured
the schoolroom, and presently beside Miss Temple, who herself
had risen, stood the same black column which had frowned on me so
ominously from the hearthrug of Gateshead. I now glanced sideways
at this piece of architecture. Yes, I was right it was Mr.
Brocklehurst, buttoned up in a surtout, and looking longer, narrower,
and more rigid than ever.
I had my own reasons for being dismayed at this apparition too
well I remembered the perfidious hints given by Mrs. Reed about my
disposition, c. the promise pledged by Mr. Brocklehurst to apprise
Miss Temple and the teachers of my vicious nature. All along
I had been dreading the fulfilment of this promise,  I had been
looking out daily for the "Coming Man," whose information respecting
my past life and conversation was to brand me as a bad child for
ever now there he was.
He stood at Miss Temple's side he was speaking low in her ear I did
not doubt he was making disclosures of my villainy and I watched
her eye with painful anxiety, expecting every moment to see its
dark orb turn on me a glance of repugnance and contempt. I listened
too and as I happened to be seated quite at the top of the room,
I caught most of what he said its import relieved me from immediate
apprehension.
"I suppose, Miss Temple, the thread I bought at Lowton will do
it struck me that it would be just of the quality for the calico
chemises, and I sorted the needles to match. You may tell Miss
Smith that I forgot to make a memorandum of the darning needles,
but she shall have some papers sent in next week and she is not,
on any account, to give out more than one at a time to each pupil
if they have more, they are apt to be careless and lose them. And,
O ma'am I wish the woollen stockings were better looked to 
when I was here last, I went into the kitchengarden and examined
the clothes drying on the line there was a quantity of black hose
in a very bad state of repair from the size of the holes in them
I was sure they had not been well mended from time to time."
He paused.
"Your directions shall be attended to, sir," said Miss Temple.
"And, ma'am," he continued, "the laundress tells me some of the
girls have two clean tuckers in the week it is too much the
rules limit them to one."
"I think I can explain that circumstance, sir. Agnes and Catherine
Johnstone were invited to take tea with some friends at Lowton
last Thursday, and I gave them leave to put on clean tuckers for
the occasion."
Mr. Brocklehurst nodded.
"Well, for once it may pass but please not to let the circumstance
occur too often. And there is another thing which surprised me
I find, in settling accounts with the housekeeper, that a lunch,
consisting of bread and cheese, has twice been served out to
the girls during the past fortnight. How is this? I looked over
the regulations, and I find no such meal as lunch mentioned. Who
introduced this innovation? and by what authority?"
"I must be responsible for the circumstance, sir," replied Miss
Temple "the breakfast was so ill prepared that the pupils could
not possibly eat it and I dared not allow them to remain fasting
till dinnertime."
"Madam, allow me an instant. You are aware that my plan in bringing
up these girls is, not to accustom them to habits of luxury and
indulgence, but to render them hardy, patient, selfdenying. Should
any little accidental disappointment of the appetite occur, such
as the spoiling of a meal, the under or the over dressing of a
dish, the incident ought not to be neutralised by replacing with
something more delicate the comfort lost, thus pampering the body
and obviating the aim of this institution it ought to be improved
to the spiritual edification of the pupils, by encouraging them
to evince fortitude under temporary privation. A brief address on
those occasions would not be mistimed, wherein a judicious instructor
would take the opportunity of referring to the sufferings of the
primitive Christians to the torments of martyrs to the exhortations
of our blessed Lord Himself, calling upon His disciples to take
up their cross and follow Him to His warnings that man shall not
live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the
mouth of God to His divine consolations, "If ye suffer hunger or
thirst for My sake, happy are ye." Oh, madam, when you put bread
and cheese, instead of burnt porridge, into these children's mouths,
you may indeed feed their vile bodies, but you little think how
you starve their immortal souls"
Mr. Brocklehurst again paused  perhaps overcome by his feelings.
Miss Temple had looked down when he first began to speak to her
but she now gazed straight before her, and her face, naturally pale
as marble, appeared to be assuming also the coldness and fixity of
that material especially her mouth, closed as if it would have
required a sculptor's chisel to open it, and her brow settled
gradually into petrified severity.
Meantime, Mr. Brocklehurst, standing on the hearth with his hands
behind his back, majestically surveyed the whole school. Suddenly
his eye gave a blink, as if it had met something that either dazzled
or shocked its pupil turning, he said in more rapid accents
than he had hitherto used 
"Miss Temple, Miss Temple, what  WHAT is that girl with curled
hair? Red hair, ma'am, curled  curled all over?" And extending
his cane he pointed to the awful object, his hand shaking as he
did so.
"It is Julia Severn," replied Miss Temple, very quietly.
"Julia Severn, ma'am And why has she, or any other, curled hair?
Why, in defiance of every precept and principle of this house,
does she conform to the world so openly  here in an evangelical,
charitable establishment  as to wear her hair one mass of curls?"
"Julia's hair curls naturally," returned Miss Temple, still more
quietly.
"Naturally Yes, but we are not to conform to nature I wish
these girls to be the children of Grace and why that abundance?
I have again and again intimated that I desire the hair to be
arranged closely, modestly, plainly. Miss Temple, that girl's hair
must be cut off entirely I will send a barber tomorrow and I
see others who have far too much of the excrescence  that tall
girl, tell her to turn round. Tell all the first form to rise up
and direct their faces to the wall."
Miss Temple passed her handkerchief over her lips, as if to smooth
away the involuntary smile that curled them she gave the order,
however, and when the first class could take in what was required
of them, they obeyed. Leaning a little back on my bench, I could
see the looks and grimaces with which they commented on this
manoeuvre it was a pity Mr. Brocklehurst could not see them too
he would perhaps have felt that, whatever he might do with the
outside of the cup and platter, the inside was further beyond his
interference than he imagined.
He scrutinised the reverse of these living medals some five minutes,
then pronounced sentence. These words fell like the knell of doom 
"All those topknots must be cut off."
Miss Temple seemed to remonstrate.
"Madam," he pursued, "I have a Master to serve whose kingdom is not
of this world my mission is to mortify in these girls the lusts
of the flesh to teach them to clothe themselves with shamefacedness
and sobriety, not with braided hair and costly apparel and each
of the young persons before us has a string of hair twisted in
plaits which vanity itself might have woven these, I repeat,
must be cut off think of the time wasted, of  "
Mr. Brocklehurst was here interrupted three other visitors, ladies,
now entered the room. They ought to have come a little sooner to
have heard his lecture on dress, for they were splendidly attired
in velvet, silk, and furs. The two younger of the trio fine girls
of sixteen and seventeen had grey beaver hats, then in fashion,
shaded with ostrich plumes, and from under the brim of this graceful
headdress fell a profusion of light tresses, elaborately curled
the elder lady was enveloped in a costly velvet shawl, trimmed with
ermine, and she wore a false front of French curls.
These ladies were deferentially received by Miss Temple, as Mrs.
and the Misses Brocklehurst, and conducted to seats of honour at the
top of the room. It seems they had come in the carriage with their
reverend relative, and had been conducting a rummaging scrutiny of
the room upstairs, while he transacted business with the housekeeper,
questioned the laundress, and lectured the superintendent. They
now proceeded to address divers remarks and reproofs to Miss Smith,
who was charged with the care of the linen and the inspection of
the dormitories but I had no time to listen to what they said
other matters called off and enchanted my attention.
Hitherto, while gathering up the discourse of Mr. Brocklehurst and
Miss Temple, I had not, at the same time, neglected precautions to
secure my personal safety which I thought would be effected, if
I could only elude observation. To this end, I had sat well back
on the form, and while seeming to be busy with my sum, had held my
slate in such a manner as to conceal my face I might have escaped
notice, had not my treacherous slate somehow happened to slip from
my hand, and falling with an obtrusive crash, directly drawn every
eye upon me I knew it was all over now, and, as I stooped to pick
up the two fragments of slate, I rallied my forces for the worst.
It came.
"A careless girl" said Mr. Brocklehurst, and immediately after
"It is the new pupil, I perceive." And before I could draw
breath, "I must not forget I have a word to say respecting her."
Then aloud how loud it seemed to me "Let the child who broke
her slate come forward"
Of my own accord I could not have stirred I was paralysed but
the two great girls who sit on each side of me, set me on my legs
and pushed me towards the dread judge, and then Miss Temple gently
assisted me to his very feet, and I caught her whispered counsel 
"Don't be afraid, Jane, I saw it was an accident you shall not be
punished."
The kind whisper went to my heart like a dagger.
"Another minute, and she will despise me for a hypocrite," thought
I and an impulse of fury against Reed, Brocklehurst, and Co.
bounded in my pulses at the conviction. I was no Helen Burns.
"Fetch that stool," said Mr. Brocklehurst, pointing to a very high
one from which a monitor had just risen it was brought.
"Place the child upon it."
And I was placed there, by whom I don't know I was in no condition
to note particulars I was only aware that they had hoisted me up
to the height of Mr. Brocklehurst's nose, that he was within a yard
of me, and that a spread of shot orange and purple silk pelisses
and a cloud of silvery plumage extended and waved below me.
Mr. Brocklehurst hemmed.
"Ladies," said he, turning to his family, "Miss Temple, teachers,
and children, you all see this girl?"
Of course they did for I felt their eyes directed like burningglasses
against my scorched skin.
"You see she is yet young you observe she possesses the ordinary
form of childhood God has graciously given her the shape that He
has given to all of us no signal deformity points her out as a
marked character. Who would think that the Evil One had already
found a servant and agent in her? Yet such, I grieve to say, is
the case."
A pause  in which I began to steady the palsy of my nerves, and
to feel that the Rubicon was passed and that the trial, no longer
to be shirked, must be firmly sustained.
"My dear children," pursued the black marble clergyman, with pathos,
"this is a sad, a melancholy occasion for it becomes my duty to
warn you, that this girl, who might be one of God's own lambs, is
a little castaway not a member of the true flock, but evidently
an interloper and an alien. You must be on your guard against
her you must shun her example if necessary, avoid her company,
exclude her from your sports, and shut her out from your converse.
Teachers, you must watch her keep your eyes on her movements,
weigh well her words, scrutinise her actions, punish her body to
save her soul if, indeed, such salvation be possible, for my
tongue falters while I tell it this girl, this child, the native
of a Christian land, worse than many a little heathen who says its
prayers to Brahma and kneels before Juggernaut  this girl is 
a liar"
Now came a pause of ten minutes, during which I, by this time in
perfect possession of my wits, observed all the female Brocklehursts
produce their pockethandkerchiefs and apply them to their optics,
while the elderly lady swayed herself to and fro, and the two
younger ones whispered, "How shocking" Mr. Brocklehurst resumed.
"This I learned from her benefactress from the pious and charitable
lady who adopted her in her orphan state, reared her as her own
daughter, and whose kindness, whose generosity the unhappy girl
repaid by an ingratitude so bad, so dreadful, that at last her
excellent patroness was obliged to separate her from her own young
ones, fearful lest her vicious example should contaminate their
purity she has sent her here to be healed, even as the Jews
of old sent their diseased to the troubled pool of Bethesda and,
teachers, superintendent, I beg of you not to allow the waters to
stagnate round her."
With this sublime conclusion, Mr. Brocklehurst adjusted the top button
of his surtout, muttered something to his family, who rose, bowed
to Miss Temple, and then all the great people sailed in
state from the room. Turning at the door, my judge said 
"Let her stand halfanhour longer on that stool, and let no one
speak to her during the remainder of the day."
There was I, then, mounted aloft I, who had said I could not bear
the shame of standing on my natural feet in the middle of the room,
was now exposed to general view on a pedestal of infamy. What
my sensations were no language can describe but just as they all
rose, stifling my breath and constricting my throat, a girl came
up and passed me in passing, she lifted her eyes. What a strange
light inspired them What an extraordinary sensation that ray
sent through me How the new feeling bore me up It was as if a
martyr, a hero, had passed a slave or victim, and imparted strength
in the transit. I mastered the rising hysteria, lifted up my head,
and took a firm stand on the stool. Helen Burns asked some slight
question about her work of Miss Smith, was chidden for the triviality
of the inquiry, returned to her place, and smiled at me as she
again went by. What a smile I remember it now, and I know that
it was the effluence of fine intellect, of true courage it lit up
her marked lineaments, her thin face, her sunken grey eye, like a
reflection from the aspect of an angel. Yet at that moment Helen
Burns wore on her arm "the untidy badge" scarcely an hour ago I
had heard her condemned by Miss Scatcherd to a dinner of bread and
water on the morrow because she had blotted an exercise in copying
it out. Such is the imperfect nature of man such spots are there
on the disc of the clearest planet and eyes like Miss Scatcherd's
can only see those minute defects, and are blind to the full
brightness of the orb.
CHAPTER VIII
Ere the halfhour ended, five o'clock struck school was dismissed,
and all were gone into the refectory to tea. I now ventured to
descend it was deep dusk I retired into a corner and sat down on
the floor. The spell by which I had been so far supported began
to dissolve reaction took place, and soon, so overwhelming was the
grief that seized me, I sank prostrate with my face to the ground.
Now I wept Helen Burns was not here nothing sustained me left
to myself I abandoned myself, and my tears watered the boards. I
had meant to be so good, and to do so much at Lowood to make so
many friends, to earn respect and win affection. Already I had
made visible progress that very morning I had reached the head
of my class Miss Miller had praised me warmly Miss Temple had
smiled approbation she had promised to teach me drawing, and to
let me learn French, if I continued to make similar improvement two
months longer and then I was well received by my fellowpupils
treated as an equal by those of my own age, and not molested by
any now, here I lay again crushed and trodden on and could I ever
rise more?
"Never," I thought and ardently I wished to die. While sobbing
out this wish in broken accents, some one approached I started
up  again Helen Burns was near me the fading fires just showed
her coming up the long, vacant room she brought my coffee and
bread.
"Come, eat something," she said but I put both away from me,
feeling as if a drop or a crumb would have choked me in my present
condition. Helen regarded me, probably with surprise I could not
now abate my agitation, though I tried hard I continued to weep
aloud. She sat down on the ground near me, embraced her knees
with her arms, and rested her head upon them in that attitude
she remained silent as an Indian. I was the first who spoke 
"Helen, why do you stay with a girl whom everybody believes to be
a liar?"
"Everybody, Jane? Why, there are only eighty people who have heard
you called so, and the world contains hundreds of millions."
"But what have I to do with millions? The eighty, I know, despise
me."
"Jane, you are mistaken probably not one in the school either
despises or dislikes you many, I am sure, pity you much."
"How can they pity me after what Mr. Brocklehurst has said?"
"Mr. Brocklehurst is not a god nor is he even a great and admired
man he is little liked here he never took steps to make himself
liked. Had he treated you as an especial favourite, you would
have found enemies, declared or covert, all around you as it is,
the greater number would offer you sympathy if they dared. Teachers
and pupils may look coldly on you for a day or two, but friendly
feelings are concealed in their hearts and if you persevere in
doing well, these feelings will ere long appear so much the more
evidently for their temporary suppression. Besides, Jane"  she
paused.
"Well, Helen?" said I, putting my hand into hers she
chafed my fingers gently to warm them, and went on 
"If all the world hated you, and believed you wicked, while your
own conscience approved you, and absolved you from guilt, you would
not be without friends."
"No I know I should think well of myself but that is not enough
if others don't love me I would rather die than live  I cannot
bear to be solitary and hated, Helen. Look here to gain some
real affection from you, or Miss Temple, or any other whom I truly
love, I would willingly submit to have the bone of my arm broken, or
to let a bull toss me, or to stand behind a kicking horse,
and let it dash its hoof at my chest  "
"Hush, Jane you think too much of the love of human beings you
are too impulsive, too vehement the sovereign hand that created
your frame, and put life into it, has provided you with other
resources than your feeble self, or than creatures feeble as you.
Besides this earth, and besides the race of men, there is an invisible
world and a kingdom of spirits that world is round us, for it is
everywhere and those spirits watch us, for they are commissioned
to guard us and if we were dying in pain and shame, if scorn smote
us on all sides, and hatred crushed us, angels see our tortures,
recognise our innocence if innocent we be as I know you are of
this charge which Mr. Brocklehurst has weakly and pompously repeated
at secondhand from Mrs. Reed for I read a sincere nature in
your ardent eyes and on your clear front, and God waits only the
separation of spirit from flesh to crown us with a full reward.
Why, then, should we ever sink overwhelmed with distress, when life
is so soon over, and death is so certain an entrance to happiness
to glory?"
I was silent Helen had calmed me but in the tranquillity she
imparted there was an alloy of inexpressible sadness. I felt the
impression of woe as she spoke, but I could not tell whence it
came and when, having done speaking, she breathed a little fast
and coughed a short cough, I momentarily forgot my own sorrows to
yield to a vague concern for her.
Resting my head on Helen's shoulder, I put my arms round her waist
she drew me to her, and we reposed in silence. We had not sat long
thus, when another person came in. Some heavy clouds, swept from
the sky by a rising wind, had left the moon bare and her light,
streaming in through a window near, shone full both on us and on
the approaching figure, which we at once recognised as Miss Temple.
"I came on purpose to find you, Jane Eyre," said she "I want you
in my room and as Helen Burns is with you, she may come too."
We went following the superintendent's guidance, we had to thread
some intricate passages, and mount a staircase before we reached
her apartment it contained a good fire, and looked cheerful. Miss
Temple told Helen Burns to be seated in a low armchair on one
side of the hearth, and herself taking another, she called me to
her side.
"Is it all over?" she asked, looking down at my face. "Have you
cried your grief away?"
"I am afraid I never shall do that."
"Why?"
"Because I have been wrongly accused and you, ma'am, and everybody
else, will now think me wicked."
"We shall think you what you prove yourself to be, my child.
Continue to act as a good girl, and you will satisfy us."
"Shall I, Miss Temple?"
"You will," said she, passing her arm round me. "And now tell me
who is the lady whom Mr. Brocklehurst called your benefactress?"
"Mrs. Reed, my uncle's wife. My uncle is dead, and he left me to
her care."
"Did she not, then, adopt you of her own accord?"
"No, ma'am she was sorry to have to do it but my uncle, as
I have often heard the servants say, got her to promise before he
died that she would always keep me."
"Well now, Jane, you know, or at least I will tell you, that when
a criminal is accused, he is always allowed to speak in his own
defence. You have been charged with falsehood defend yourself to
me as well as you can. Say whatever your memory suggests is true
but add nothing and exaggerate nothing."
I resolved, in the depth of my heart, that I would be most moderate
most correct and, having reflected a few minutes in order
to arrange coherently what I had to say, I told her all the story
of my sad childhood. Exhausted by emotion, my language was more
subdued than it generally was when it developed that sad theme and
mindful of Helen's warnings against the indulgence of resentment,
I infused into the narrative far less of gall and wormwood than
ordinary. Thus restrained and simplified, it sounded more credible
I felt as I went on that Miss Temple fully believed me.
In the course of the tale I had mentioned Mr. Lloyd as having come
to see me after the fit for I never forgot the, to me, frightful
episode of the redroom in detailing which, my excitement was
sure, in some degree, to break bounds for nothing could soften
in my recollection the spasm of agony which clutched my heart when
Mrs. Reed spurned my wild supplication for pardon, and locked me
a second time in the dark and haunted chamber.
I had finished Miss Temple regarded me a few minutes
in silence she then said 
"I know something of Mr. Lloyd I shall write to him if his reply
agrees with your statement, you shall be publicly cleared from
every imputation to me, Jane, you are clear now."
She kissed me, and still keeping me at her side where I was well
contented to stand, for I derived a child's pleasure from the
contemplation of her face, her dress, her one or two ornaments, her
white forehead, her clustered and shining curls, and beaming dark
eyes, she proceeded to address Helen Burns.
"How are you tonight, Helen? Have you coughed much today?"
"Not quite so much, I think, ma'am."
"And the pain in your chest?"
"It is a little better."
Miss Temple got up, took her hand and examined her pulse then
she returned to her own seat as she resumed it, I heard her sigh
low. She was pensive a few minutes, then rousing herself,
she said cheerfully 
"But you two are my visitors tonight I must treat you as such."
She rang her bell.
"Barbara," she said to the servant who answered it, "I have not yet
had tea bring the tray and place cups for these two young ladies."
And a tray was soon brought. How pretty, to my eyes, did the china
cups and bright teapot look, placed on the little round table near
the fire How fragrant was the steam of the beverage, and the
scent of the toast of which, however, I, to my dismay for I was
beginning to be hungry discerned only a very small portion Miss
Temple discerned it too.
"Barbara," said she, "can you not bring a little more bread and
butter? There is not enough for three."
Barbara went out she returned soon 
"Madam, Mrs. Harden says she has sent up the usual quantity."
Mrs. Harden, be it observed, was the housekeeper a woman after
Mr. Brocklehurst's own heart, made up of equal parts of whalebone
and iron.
"Oh, very well" returned Miss Temple "we must make it do,
Barbara, I suppose." And as the girl withdrew she added, smiling,
"Fortunately, I have it in my power to supply deficiencies for this
once."
Having invited Helen and me to approach the table, and placed
before each of us a cup of tea with one delicious but thin morsel
of toast, she got up, unlocked a drawer, and taking from it a parcel
wrapped in paper, disclosed presently to our eyes a goodsized
seedcake.
"I meant to give each of you some of this to take with you," said
she, "but as there is so little toast, you must have it now," and
she proceeded to cut slices with a generous hand.
We feasted that evening as on nectar and ambrosia and not the
least delight of the entertainment was the smile of gratification
with which our hostess regarded us, as we satisfied our famished
appetites on the delicate fare she liberally supplied.
Tea over and the tray removed, she again summoned us to the fire
we sat one on each side of her, and now a conversation followed
between her and Helen, which it was indeed a privilege to be admitted
to hear.
Miss Temple had always something of serenity in her air, of state
in her mien, of refined propriety in her language, which precluded
deviation into the ardent, the excited, the eager something which
chastened the pleasure of those who looked on her and listened to
her, by a controlling sense of awe and such was my feeling now
but as to Helen Burns, I was struck with wonder.
The refreshing meal, the brilliant fire, the presence and kindness
of her beloved instructress, or, perhaps, more than all these,
something in her own unique mind, had roused her powers within
her. They woke, they kindled first, they glowed in the bright
tint of her cheek, which till this hour I had never seen but pale
and bloodless then they shone in the liquid lustre of her eyes,
which had suddenly acquired a beauty more singular than that of
Miss Temple's  a beauty neither of fine colour nor long eyelash,
nor pencilled brow, but of meaning, of movement, of radiance. Then
her soul sat on her lips, and language flowed, from what source I
cannot tell. Has a girl of fourteen a heart large enough, vigorous
enough, to hold the swelling spring of pure, full, fervid eloquence?
Such was the characteristic of Helen's discourse on that, to me,
memorable evening her spirit seemed hastening to live within a
very brief span as much as many live during a protracted existence.
They conversed of things I had never heard of of nations and times
past of countries far away of secrets of nature discovered or
guessed at they spoke of books how many they had read What
stores of knowledge they possessed Then they seemed so familiar
with French names and French authors but my amazement reached
its climax when Miss Temple asked Helen if she sometimes snatched
a moment to recall the Latin her father had taught her, and taking
a book from a shelf, bade her read and construe a page of Virgil
and Helen obeyed, my organ of veneration expanding at every sounding
line. She had scarcely finished ere the bell announced bedtime
no delay could be admitted Miss Temple embraced us both,
saying, as she drew us to her heart 
"God bless you, my children"
Helen she held a little longer than me she let her go more
reluctantly it was Helen her eye followed to the door it was for
her she a second time breathed a sad sigh for her she wiped a tear
from her cheek.
On reaching the bedroom, we heard the voice of Miss Scatcherd she
was examining drawers she had just pulled out Helen Burns's, and
when we entered Helen was greeted with a sharp reprimand, and told
that tomorrow she should have halfadozen of untidily folded
articles pinned to her shoulder.
"My things were indeed in shameful disorder," murmured Helen to me,
in a low voice "I intended to have arranged them, but I forgot."
Next morning, Miss Scatcherd wrote in conspicuous characters on a piece
of pasteboard the word "Slattern," and bound it like a phylactery
round Helen's large, mild, intelligent, and benign looking forehead.
She wore it till evening, patient, unresentful, regarding it as
a deserved punishment. The moment Miss Scatcherd withdrew after
afternoon school, I ran to Helen, tore it off, and thrust it into
the fire the fury of which she was incapable had been burning
in my soul all day, and tears, hot and large, had continually been
scalding my cheek for the spectacle of her sad resignation gave
me an intolerable pain at the heart.
About a week subsequently to the incidents above narrated, Miss
Temple, who had written to Mr. Lloyd, received his answer it
appeared that what he said went to corroborate my account. Miss
Temple, having assembled the whole school, announced that inquiry
had been made into the charges alleged against Jane Eyre, and that
she was most happy to be able to pronounce her completely cleared
from every imputation. The teachers then shook hands with me and
kissed me, and a murmur of pleasure ran through the ranks of my
companions.
Thus relieved of a grievous load, I from that hour set to work
afresh, resolved to pioneer my way through every difficulty I
toiled hard, and my success was proportionate to my efforts my
memory, not naturally tenacious, improved with practice exercise
sharpened my wits in a few weeks I was promoted to a higher class
in less than two months I was allowed to commence French and drawing.
I learned the first two tenses of the verb ETRE, and sketched my
first cottage whose walls, bythebye, outrivalled in slope those of
the leaning tower of Pisa, on the same day. That night, on going
to bed, I forgot to prepare in imagination the Barmecide supper of
hot roast potatoes, or white bread and new milk, with which I was
wont to amuse my inward cravings I feasted instead on the spectacle
of ideal drawings, which I saw in the dark all the work of my own
hands freely pencilled houses and trees, picturesque rocks and
ruins, Cuyplike groups of cattle, sweet paintings of butterflies
hovering over unblown roses, of birds picking at ripe cherries, of
wren's nests enclosing pearllike eggs, wreathed about with young
ivy sprays. I examined, too, in thought, the possibility of
my ever being able to translate currently a certain little French
story which Madame Pierrot had that day shown me nor was that
problem solved to my satisfaction ere I fell sweetly asleep.
Well has Solomon said  "Better is a dinner of herbs where love
is, than a stalled ox and hatred therewith."
I would not now have exchanged Lowood with all its privations for
Gateshead and its daily luxuries.
CHAPTER IX
But the privations, or rather the hardships, of Lowood lessened.
Spring drew on she was indeed already come the frosts of winter
had ceased its snows were melted, its cutting winds ameliorated.
My wretched feet, flayed and swollen to lameness by the sharp air
of January, began to heal and subside under the gentler breathings
of April the nights and mornings no longer by their Canadian
temperature froze the very blood in our veins we could now endure
the playhour passed in the garden sometimes on a sunny day it
began even to be pleasant and genial, and a greenness grew over
those brown beds, which, freshening daily, suggested the thought
that Hope traversed them at night, and left each morning brighter
traces of her steps. Flowers peeped out amongst the leaves snow
drops, crocuses, purple auriculas, and goldeneyed pansies. On
Thursday afternoons halfholidays we now took walks, and found
still sweeter flowers opening by the wayside, under the hedges.
I discovered, too, that a great pleasure, an enjoyment which the
horizon only bounded, lay all outside the high and spikeguarded
walls of our garden this pleasure consisted in prospect of noble
summits girdling a great hillhollow, rich in verdure and shadow
in a bright beck, full of dark stones and sparkling eddies. How
different had this scene looked when I viewed it laid out beneath
the iron sky of winter, stiffened in frost, shrouded with snow 
when mists as chill as death wandered to the impulse of east winds
along those purple peaks, and rolled down "ing" and holm till they
blended with the frozen fog of the beck That beck itself was then
a torrent, turbid and curbless it tore asunder the wood, and sent
a raving sound through the air, often thickened with wild rain or
whirling sleet and for the forest on its banks, THAT showed only
ranks of skeletons.
April advanced to May a bright serene May it was days of blue
sky, placid sunshine, and soft western or southern gales filled
up its duration. And now vegetation matured with vigour Lowood
shook loose its tresses it became all green, all flowery its
great elm, ash, and oak skeletons were restored to majestic life
woodland plants sprang up profusely in its recesses unnumbered
varieties of moss filled its hollows, and it made a strange
groundsunshine out of the wealth of its wild primrose plants I
have seen their pale gold gleam in overshadowed spots like scatterings
of the sweetest lustre. All this I enjoyed often and fully, free,
unwatched, and almost alone for this unwonted liberty and pleasure
there was a cause, to which it now becomes my task to advert.
Have I not described a pleasant site for a dwelling, when I speak
of it as bosomed in hill and wood, and rising from the verge of a
stream? Assuredly, pleasant enough but whether healthy or not
is another question.
That forestdell, where Lowood lay, was the cradle of fog and
fogbred pestilence which, quickening with the quickening spring,
crept into the Orphan Asylum, breathed typhus through its crowded
schoolroom and dormitory, and, ere May arrived, transformed the
seminary into an hospital.
Semistarvation and neglected colds had predisposed most of the
pupils to receive infection fortyfive out of the eighty girls
lay ill at one time. Classes were broken up, rules relaxed. The
few who continued well were allowed almost unlimited license
because the medical attendant insisted on the necessity of frequent
exercise to keep them in health and had it been otherwise, no
one had leisure to watch or restrain them. Miss Temple's whole
attention was absorbed by the patients she lived in the sickroom,
never quitting it except to snatch a few hours' rest at night.
The teachers were fully occupied with packing up and making other
necessary preparations for the departure of those girls who were
fortunate enough to have friends and relations able and willing
to remove them from the seat of contagion. Many, already smitten,
went home only to die some died at the school, and were buried
quietly and quickly, the nature of the malady forbidding delay.
While disease had thus become an inhabitant of Lowood, and death
its frequent visitor while there was gloom and fear within its
walls while its rooms and passages steamed with hospital smells,
the drug and the pastille striving vainly to overcome the effluvia
of mortality, that bright May shone unclouded over the bold hills
and beautiful woodland out of doors. Its garden, too, glowed
with flowers hollyhocks had sprung up tall as trees, lilies had
opened, tulips and roses were in bloom the borders of the little
beds were gay with pink thrift and crimson double daisies the
sweetbriars gave out, morning and evening, their scent of spice and
apples and these fragrant treasures were all useless for most of
the inmates of Lowood, except to furnish now and then a handful of
herbs and blossoms to put in a coffin.
But I, and the rest who continued well, enjoyed fully the beauties
of the scene and season they let us ramble in the wood, like
gipsies, from morning till night we did what we liked, went where
we liked we lived better too. Mr. Brocklehurst and his family
never came near Lowood now household matters were not scrutinised
into the cross housekeeper was gone, driven away by the fear
of infection her successor, who had been matron at the Lowton
Dispensary, unused to the ways of her new abode, provided with
comparative liberality. Besides, there were fewer to feed the
sick could eat little our breakfastbasins were better filled
when there was no time to prepare a regular dinner, which often
happened, she would give us a large piece of cold pie, or a thick
slice of bread and cheese, and this we carried away with us to
the wood, where we each chose the spot we liked best, and dined
sumptuously.
My favourite seat was a smooth and broad stone, rising white and dry
from the very middle of the beck, and only to be got at by wading
through the water a feat I accomplished barefoot. The stone was
just broad enough to accommodate, comfortably, another girl and me,
at that time my chosen comrade  one Mary Ann Wilson a shrewd,
observant personage, whose society I took pleasure in, partly
because she was witty and original, and partly because she had a
manner which set me at my ease. Some years older than I, she knew
more of the world, and could tell me many things I liked to hear
with her my curiosity found gratification to my faults also she
gave ample indulgence, never imposing curb or rein on anything I
said. She had a turn for narrative, I for analysis she liked to
inform, I to question so we got on swimmingly together, deriving
much entertainment, if not much improvement, from our mutual
intercourse.
And where, meantime, was Helen Burns? Why did I not spend these
sweet days of liberty with her? Had I forgotten her? or was I so
worthless as to have grown tired of her pure society? Surely the
Mary Ann Wilson I have mentioned was inferior to my first acquaintance
she could only tell me amusing stories, and reciprocate any racy
and pungent gossip I chose to indulge in while, if I have spoken
truth of Helen, she was qualified to give those who enjoyed the
privilege of her converse a taste of far higher things.
True, reader and I knew and felt this and though I am a defective
being, with many faults and few redeeming points, yet I never tired
of Helen Burns nor ever ceased to cherish for her a sentiment
of attachment, as strong, tender, and respectful as any that ever
animated my heart. How could it be otherwise, when Helen, at
all times and under all circumstances, evinced for me a quiet and
faithful friendship, which illhumour never soured, nor irritation
never troubled? But Helen was ill at present for some weeks she
had been removed from my sight to I knew not what room upstairs.
She was not, I was told, in the hospital portion of the house with
the fever patients for her complaint was consumption, not typhus
and by consumption I, in my ignorance, understood something mild,
which time and care would be sure to alleviate.
I was confirmed in this idea by the fact of her once or twice coming
downstairs on very warm sunny afternoons, and being taken by Miss
Temple into the garden but, on these occasions, I was not allowed
to go and speak to her I only saw her from the schoolroom window,
and then not distinctly for she was much wrapped up, and sat at
a distance under the verandah.
One evening, in the beginning of June, I had stayed out very late
with Mary Ann in the wood we had, as usual, separated ourselves
from the others, and had wandered far so far that we lost our
way, and had to ask it at a lonely cottage, where a man and woman
lived, who looked after a herd of halfwild swine that fed on the
mast in the wood. When we got back, it was after moonrise a
pony, which we knew to be the surgeon's, was standing at the garden
door. Mary Ann remarked that she supposed some one must be very
ill, as Mr. Bates had been sent for at that time of the evening.
She went into the house I stayed behind a few minutes to plant in
my garden a handful of roots I had dug up in the forest, and which
I feared would wither if I left them till the morning. This done,
I lingered yet a little longer the flowers smelt so sweet as
the dew fell it was such a pleasant evening, so serene, so warm
the still glowing west promised so fairly another fine day on the
morrow the moon rose with such majesty in the grave east. I was
noting these things and enjoying them as a child might, when it
entered my mind as it had never done before
"How sad to be lying now on a sick bed, and to be in danger of
dying This world is pleasant  it would be dreary to be called
from it, and to have to go who knows where?"
And then my mind made its first earnest effort to comprehend what
had been infused into it concerning heaven and hell and for the
first time it recoiled, baffled and for the first time glancing
behind, on each side, and before it, it saw all round an unfathomed
gulf it felt the one point where it stood  the present all the
rest was formless cloud and vacant depth and it shuddered at the
thought of tottering, and plunging amid that chaos. While pondering
this new idea, I heard the front door open Mr. Bates came out,
and with him was a nurse. After she had seen him mount his horse
and depart, she was about to close the door, but I ran up to her.
"How is Helen Burns?"
"Very poorly," was the answer.
"Is it her Mr. Bates has been to see?"
"Yes."
"And what does he say about her?"
"He says she'll not be here long."
This phrase, uttered in my hearing yesterday, would have only conveyed
the notion that she was about to be removed to Northumberland, to
her own home. I should not have suspected that it meant she was
dying but I knew instantly now It opened clear on my comprehension
that Helen Burns was numbering her last days in this world, and
that she was going to be taken to the region of spirits, if such
region there were. I experienced a shock of horror, then a strong
thrill of grief, then a desire  a necessity to see her and I
asked in what room she lay.
"She is in Miss Temple's room," said the nurse.
"May I go up and speak to her?"
"Oh no, child It is not likely and now it is time for you to come
in you'll catch the fever if you stop out when the dew is falling."
The nurse closed the front door I went in by the side entrance which
led to the schoolroom I was just in time it was nine o'clock,
and Miss Miller was calling the pupils to go to bed.
It might be two hours later, probably near eleven, when I  not
having been able to fall asleep, and deeming, from the perfect
silence of the dormitory, that my companions were all wrapt in
profound repose  rose softly, put on my frock over my nightdress,
and, without shoes, crept from the apartment, and set off in quest
of Miss Temple's room. It was quite at the other end of the house
but I knew my way and the light of the unclouded summer moon,
entering here and there at passage windows, enabled me to find it
without difficulty. An odour of camphor and burnt vinegar warned
me when I came near the fever room and I passed its door quickly,
fearful lest the nurse who sat up all night should hear me. I
dreaded being discovered and sent back for I MUST see Helen, 
I must embrace her before she died,  I must give her one last
kiss, exchange with her one last word.
Having descended a staircase, traversed a portion of the house
below, and succeeded in opening and shutting, without noise, two
doors, I reached another flight of steps these I mounted, and then
just opposite to me was Miss Temple's room. A light shone through
the keyhole and from under the door a profound stillness pervaded
the vicinity. Coming near, I found the door slightly ajar
probably to admit some fresh air into the close abode of sickness.
Indisposed to hesitate, and full of impatient impulses  soul and
senses quivering with keen throes  I put it back and looked in.
My eye sought Helen, and feared to find death.
Close by Miss Temple's bed, and half covered with its white curtains,
there stood a little crib. I saw the outline of a form under the
clothes, but the face was hid by the hangings the nurse I had
spoken to in the garden sat in an easychair asleep an unsnuffed
candle burnt dimly on the table. Miss Temple was not to be seen
I knew afterwards that she had been called to a delirious patient
in the feverroom. I advanced then paused by the crib side my
hand was on the curtain, but I preferred speaking before I withdrew
it. I still recoiled at the dread of seeing a corpse.
"Helen" I whispered softly, "are you awake?"
She stirred herself, put back the curtain, and I saw her face, pale,
wasted, but quite composed she looked so little changed that my
fear was instantly dissipated.
"Can it be you, Jane?" she asked, in her own gentle voice.
"Oh" I thought, "she is not going to die they are mistaken she
could not speak and look so calmly if she were."
I got on to her crib and kissed her her forehead was cold, and
her cheek both cold and thin, and so were her hand and wrist but
she smiled as of old.
"Why are you come here, Jane? It is past eleven o'clock I heard
it strike some minutes since."
"I came to see you, Helen I heard you were very ill, and I could
not sleep till I had spoken to you."
"You came to bid me goodbye, then you are just in time probably."
"Are you going somewhere, Helen? Are you going home?"
"Yes to my long home  my last home."
"No, no, Helen" I stopped, distressed. While I tried to devour
my tears, a fit of coughing seized Helen it did not, however, wake
the nurse when it was over, she lay some minutes exhausted
then she whispered 
"Jane, your little feet are bare lie down and cover yourself with
my quilt."
I did so she put her arm over me, and I nestled close
to her. After a long silence, she resumed, still whispering 
"I am very happy, Jane and when you hear that I am dead, you must
be sure and not grieve there is nothing to grieve about. We
all must die one day, and the illness which is removing me is not
painful it is gentle and gradual my mind is at rest. I leave
no one to regret me much I have only a father and he is lately
married, and will not miss me. By dying young, I shall escape
great sufferings. I had not qualities or talents to make my way
very well in the world I should have been continually at fault."
"But where are you going to, Helen? Can you see? Do you know?"
"I believe I have faith I am going to God."
"Where is God? What is God?"
"My Maker and yours, who will never destroy what He created. I
rely implicitly on His power, and confide wholly in His goodness
I count the hours till that eventful one arrives which shall restore
me to Him, reveal Him to me."
"You are sure, then, Helen, that there is such a place as heaven,
and that our souls can get to it when we die?"
"I am sure there is a future state I believe God is good I can
resign my immortal part to Him without any misgiving. God is my
father God is my friend I love Him I believe He loves me."
"And shall I see you again, Helen, when I die?"
"You will come to the same region of happiness be received by
the same mighty, universal Parent, no doubt, dear Jane."
Again I questioned, but this time only in thought. "Where is
that region? Does it exist?" And I clasped my arms closer round
Helen she seemed dearer to me than ever I felt as if I could
not let her go I lay with my face hidden on her neck. Presently
she said, in the sweetest tone 
"How comfortable I am That last fit of coughing has tired me a
little I feel as if I could sleep but don't leave me, Jane I
like to have you near me."
"I'll stay with you, DEAR Helen no one shall take me away."
"Are you warm, darling?"
"Yes."
"Goodnight, Jane."
"Goodnight, Helen."
She kissed me, and I her, and we both soon slumbered.
When I awoke it was day an unusual movement roused me I looked
up I was in somebody's arms the nurse held me she was carrying
me through the passage back to the dormitory. I was not reprimanded
for leaving my bed people had something else to think about no
explanation was afforded then to my many questions but a day or
two afterwards I learned that Miss Temple, on returning to her own
room at dawn, had found me laid in the little crib my face against
Helen Burns's shoulder, my arms round her neck. I was asleep, and
Helen was  dead.
Her grave is in Brocklebridge churchyard for fifteen years after
her death it was only covered by a grassy mound but now a grey
marble tablet marks the spot, inscribed with her name, and the word
"Resurgam."
CHAPTER X
Hitherto I have recorded in detail the events of my insignificant
existence to the first ten years of my life I have given almost
as many chapters. But this is not to be a regular autobiography.
I am only bound to invoke Memory where I know her responses will
possess some degree of interest therefore I now pass a space of
eight years almost in silence a few lines only are necessary to
keep up the links of connection.
When the typhus fever had fulfilled its mission of devastation
at Lowood, it gradually disappeared from thence but not till its
virulence and the number of its victims had drawn public attention
on the school. Inquiry was made into the origin of the scourge, and
by degrees various facts came out which excited public indignation
in a high degree. The unhealthy nature of the site the quantity
and quality of the children's food the brackish, fetid water used
in its preparation the pupils' wretched clothing and accommodations
all these things were discovered, and the discovery produced
a result mortifying to Mr. Brocklehurst, but beneficial to the
institution.
Several wealthy and benevolent individuals in the county subscribed
largely for the erection of a more convenient building in a better
situation new regulations were made improvements in diet and
clothing introduced the funds of the school were intrusted to the
management of a committee. Mr. Brocklehurst, who, from his wealth
and family connections, could not be overlooked, still retained the
post of treasurer but he was aided in the discharge of his duties
by gentlemen of rather more enlarged and sympathising minds his
office of inspector, too, was shared by those who knew how to
combine reason with strictness, comfort with economy, compassion
with uprightness. The school, thus improved, became in time a truly
useful and noble institution. I remained an inmate of its walls,
after its regeneration, for eight years six as pupil, and two as
teacher and in both capacities I bear my testimony to its value
and importance.
During these eight years my life was uniform but not unhappy,
because it was not inactive. I had the means of an excellent
education placed within my reach a fondness for some of my studies,
and a desire to excel in all, together with a great delight in
pleasing my teachers, especially such as I loved, urged me on I
availed myself fully of the advantages offered me. In time I rose
to be the first girl of the first class then I was invested with
the office of teacher which I discharged with zeal for two years
but at the end of that time I altered.
Miss Temple, through all changes, had thus far continued superintendent
of the seminary to her instruction I owed the best part of
my acquirements her friendship and society had been my continual
solace she had stood me in the stead of mother, governess, and,
latterly, companion. At this period she married, removed with
her husband a clergyman, an excellent man, almost worthy of such
a wife to a distant county, and consequently was lost to me.
From the day she left I was no longer the same with her was gone
every settled feeling, every association that had made Lowood in
some degree a home to me. I had imbibed from her something of her
nature and much of her habits more harmonious thoughts what
seemed better regulated feelings had become the inmates of my
mind. I had given in allegiance to duty and order I was quiet
I believed I was content to the eyes of others, usually even to
my own, I appeared a disciplined and subdued character.
But destiny, in the shape of the Rev. Mr. Nasmyth, came between
me and Miss Temple I saw her in her travelling dress step into
a postchaise, shortly after the marriage ceremony I watched
the chaise mount the hill and disappear beyond its brow and then
retired to my own room, and there spent in solitude the greatest
part of the halfholiday granted in honour of the occasion.
I walked about the chamber most of the time. I imagined myself
only to be regretting my loss, and thinking how to repair it but
when my reflections were concluded, and I looked up and found that
the afternoon was gone, and evening far advanced, another discovery
dawned on me, namely, that in the interval I had undergone a
transforming process that my mind had put off all it had borrowed
of Miss Temple  or rather that she had taken with her the serene
atmosphere I had been breathing in her vicinity  and that now I
was left in my natural element, and beginning to feel the stirring
of old emotions. It did not seem as if a prop were withdrawn,
but rather as if a motive were gone it was not the power to be
tranquil which had failed me, but the reason for tranquillity was
no more. My world had for some years been in Lowood my experience
had been of its rules and systems now I remembered that the real
world was wide, and that a varied field of hopes and fears, of
sensations and excitements, awaited those who had courage to go
forth into its expanse, to seek real knowledge of life amidst its
perils.
I went to my window, opened it, and looked out. There were the two
wings of the building there was the garden there were the skirts
of Lowood there was the hilly horizon. My eye passed all other
objects to rest on those most remote, the blue peaks it was those
I longed to surmount all within their boundary of rock and heath
seemed prisonground, exile limits. I traced the white road winding
round the base of one mountain, and vanishing in a gorge between
two how I longed to follow it farther I recalled the time when
I had travelled that very road in a coach I remembered descending
that hill at twilight an age seemed to have elapsed since the day
which brought me first to Lowood, and I had never quitted it since.
My vacations had all been spent at school Mrs. Reed had never
sent for me to Gateshead neither she nor any of her family had ever
been to visit me. I had had no communication by letter or message
with the outer world schoolrules, schoolduties, schoolhabits
and notions, and voices, and faces, and phrases, and costumes, and
preferences, and antipathies  such was what I knew of existence.
And now I felt that it was not enough I tired of the routine of
eight years in one afternoon. I desired liberty for liberty I
gasped for liberty I uttered a prayer it seemed scattered on the
wind then faintly blowing. I abandoned it and framed a humbler
supplication for change, stimulus that petition, too, seemed swept
off into vague space "Then," I cried, half desperate, "grant me
at least a new servitude"
Here a bell, ringing the hour of supper, called me downstairs.
I was not free to resume the interrupted chain of my reflections
till bedtime even then a teacher who occupied the same room
with me kept me from the subject to which I longed to recur, by a
prolonged effusion of small talk. How I wished sleep would silence
her. It seemed as if, could I but go back to the idea which
had last entered my mind as I stood at the window, some inventive
suggestion would rise for my relief.
Miss Gryce snored at last she was a heavy Welshwoman, and till
now her habitual nasal strains had never been regarded by me in any
other light than as a nuisance tonight I hailed the first deep
notes with satisfaction I was debarrassed of interruption my
halfeffaced thought instantly revived.
"A new servitude There is something in that," I soliloquised
mentally, be it understood I did not talk aloud, "I know there
is, because it does not sound too sweet it is not like such words
as Liberty, Excitement, Enjoyment delightful sounds truly but
no more than sounds for me and so hollow and fleeting that it is
mere waste of time to listen to them. But Servitude That must
be matter of fact. Any one may serve I have served here eight
years now all I want is to serve elsewhere. Can I not get so much
of my own will? Is not the thing feasible? Yes  yes  the end
is not so difficult if I had only a brain active enough to ferret
out the means of attaining it."
I sat up in bed by way of arousing this said brain it was a chilly
night I covered my shoulders with a shawl, and then I proceeded
TO THINK again with all my might.
"What do I want? A new place, in a new house, amongst new faces,
under new circumstances I want this because it is of no use wanting
anything better. How do people do to get a new place? They apply
to friends, I suppose I have no friends. There are many others
who have no friends, who must look about for themselves and be
their own helpers and what is their resource?"
I could not tell nothing answered me I then ordered my brain to
find a response, and quickly. It worked and worked faster I felt
the pulses throb in my head and temples but for nearly an hour
it worked in chaos and no result came of its efforts. Feverish
with vain labour, I got up and took a turn in the room undrew the
curtain, noted a star or two, shivered with cold, and again crept
to bed.
A kind fairy, in my absence, had surely dropped the required suggestion
on my pillow for as I lay down, it came quietly and naturally to
my mind.  "Those who want situations advertise you must advertise
in the shire Herald."
"How? I know nothing about advertising."
Replies rose smooth and prompt now
"You must enclose the advertisement and the money to pay for it
under a cover directed to the editor of the Herald you must put
it, the first opportunity you have, into the post at Lowton answers
must be addressed to J.E., at the postoffice there you can go
and inquire in about a week after you send your letter, if any are
come, and act accordingly."
This scheme I went over twice, thrice it was then digested in my
mind I had it in a clear practical form I felt satisfied, and
fell asleep.
With earliest day, I was up I had my advertisement written,
enclosed, and directed before the bell rang to rouse the school
it ran thus
"A young lady accustomed to tuition" had I not been a teacher
two years? "is desirous of meeting with a situation in a private
family where the children are under fourteen I thought that as I
was barely eighteen, it would not do to undertake the guidance of
pupils nearer my own age. She is qualified to teach the usual
branches of a good English education, together with French, Drawing,
and Music" in those days, reader, this now narrow catalogue of
accomplishments, would have been held tolerably comprehensive.
"Address, J.E., Postoffice, Lowton, shire."
This document remained locked in my drawer all day after tea,
I asked leave of the new superintendent to go to Lowton, in order
to perform some small commissions for myself and one or two of my
fellowteachers permission was readily granted I went. It was a
walk of two miles, and the evening was wet, but the days were still
long I visited a shop or two, slipped the letter into the postoffice,
and came back through heavy rain, with streaming garments, but with
a relieved heart.
The succeeding week seemed long it came to an end at last, however,
like all sublunary things, and once more, towards the close of a
pleasant autumn day, I found myself afoot on the road to Lowton. A
picturesque track it was, by the way lying along the side of the
beck and through the sweetest curves of the dale but that day I
thought more of the letters, that might or might not be awaiting
me at the little burgh whither I was bound, than of the charms of
lea and water.
My ostensible errand on this occasion was to get measured for
a pair of shoes so I discharged that business first, and when it
was done, I stepped across the clean and quiet little street from
the shoemaker's to the postoffice it was kept by an old dame, who
wore horn spectacles on her nose, and black mittens on her hands.
"Are there any letters for J.E.?" I asked.
She peered at me over her spectacles, and then she opened a drawer and
fumbled among its contents for a long time, so long that my hopes
began to falter. At last, having held a document before her glasses
for nearly five minutes, she presented it across the counter,
accompanying the act by another inquisitive and mistrustful glance
it was for J.E.
"Is there only one?" I demanded.
"There are no more," said she and I put it in my pocket and turned
my face homeward I could not open it then rules obliged me to
be back by eight, and it was already halfpast seven.
Various duties awaited me on my arrival. I had to sit with the girls
during their hour of study then it was my turn to read prayers
to see them to bed afterwards I supped with the other teachers.
Even when we finally retired for the night, the inevitable Miss
Gryce was still my companion we had only a short end of candle
in our candlestick, and I dreaded lest she should talk till it
was all burnt out fortunately, however, the heavy supper she had
eaten produced a soporific effect she was already snoring before
I had finished undressing. There still remained an inch of candle
I now took out my letter the seal was an initial F. I broke it
the contents were brief.
"If J.E., who advertised in the shire Herald of last Thursday,
possesses the acquirements mentioned, and if she is in a position
to give satisfactory references as to character and competency, a
situation can be offered her where there is but one pupil, a little
girl, under ten years of age and where the salary is thirty pounds
per annum. J.E. is requested to send references, name, address,
and all particulars to the direction
"Mrs. Fairfax, Thornfield, near Millcote, shire."
I examined the document long the writing was oldfashioned and
rather uncertain, like that of an elderly lady. This circumstance
was satisfactory a private fear had haunted me, that in thus
acting for myself, and by my own guidance, I ran the risk of getting
into some scrape and, above all things, I wished the result of my
endeavours to be respectable, proper, en regle. I now felt that an
elderly lady was no bad ingredient in the business I had on hand.
Mrs. Fairfax I saw her in a black gown and widow's cap frigid,
perhaps, but not uncivil a model of elderly English respectability.
Thornfield that, doubtless, was the name of her house a neat
orderly spot, I was sure though I failed in my efforts to conceive
a correct plan of the premises. Millcote,  shire I brushed up
my recollections of the map of England, yes, I saw it both the
shire and the town. shire was seventy miles nearer London than
the remote county where I now resided that was a recommendation
to me. I longed to go where there was life and movement Millcote
was a large manufacturing town on the banks of the A a busy place
enough, doubtless so much the better it would be a complete
change at least. Not that my fancy was much captivated by the idea
of long chimneys and clouds of smoke  "but," I argued, "Thornfield
will, probably, be a good way from the town."
Here the socket of the candle dropped, and the wick went out.
Next day new steps were to be taken my plans could no longer be
confined to my own breast I must impart them in order to achieve
their success. Having sought and obtained an audience of the
superintendent during the noontide recreation, I told her I had a
prospect of getting a new situation where the salary would be double
what I now received for at Lowood I only got  pounds per annum
and requested she would break the matter for me to Mr. Brocklehurst,
or some of the committee, and ascertain whether they would permit
me to mention them as references. She obligingly consented to
act as mediatrix in the matter. The next day she laid the affair
before Mr. Brocklehurst, who said that Mrs. Reed must be written to,
as she was my natural guardian. A note was accordingly addressed to
that lady, who returned for answer, that "I might do as I pleased
she had long relinquished all interference in my affairs." This note
went the round of the committee, and at last, after what appeared
to me most tedious delay, formal leave was given me to better my
condition if I could and an assurance added, that as I had always
conducted myself well, both as teacher and pupil, at Lowood, a
testimonial of character and capacity, signed by the inspectors of
that institution, should forthwith be furnished me.
This testimonial I accordingly received in about a month, forwarded
a copy of it to Mrs. Fairfax, and got that lady's reply, stating
that she was satisfied, and fixing that day fortnight as the period
for my assuming the post of governess in her house.
I now busied myself in preparations the fortnight passed rapidly.
I had not a very large wardrobe, though it was adequate to my
wants and the last day sufficed to pack my trunk,  the same I
had brought with me eight years ago from Gateshead.
The box was corded, the card nailed on. In halfanhour the
carrier was to call for it to take it to Lowton, whither I myself
was to repair at an early hour the next morning to meet the coach.
I had brushed my black stuff travellingdress, prepared my bonnet,
gloves, and muff sought in all my drawers to see that no article
was left behind and now having nothing more to do, I sat down and
tried to rest. I could not though I had been on foot all day, I
could not now repose an instant I was too much excited. A phase
of my life was closing tonight, a new one opening tomorrow
impossible to slumber in the interval I must watch feverishly
while the change was being accomplished.
"Miss," said a servant who met me in the lobby, where I was wandering
like a troubled spirit, "a person below wishes to see you."
"The carrier, no doubt," I thought, and ran downstairs without
inquiry. I was passing the backparlour or teachers' sittingroom,
the door of which was half open, to go to the kitchen,
when some one ran out 
"It's her, I am sure  I could have told her anywhere" cried
the individual who stopped my progress and took my hand.
I looked I saw a woman attired like a welldressed servant,
matronly, yet still young very goodlooking, with black hair and
eyes, and lively complexion.
"Well, who is it?" she asked, in a voice and with a smile I half
recognised "you've not quite forgotten me, I think, Miss Jane?"
In another second I was embracing and kissing her rapturously
"Bessie Bessie Bessie" that was all I said whereat she half
laughed, half cried, and we both went into the parlour. By the
fire stood a little fellow of three years old, in plaid frock and
trousers.
"That is my little boy," said Bessie directly.
"Then you are married, Bessie?"
"Yes nearly five years since to Robert Leaven, the coachman and
I've a little girl besides Bobby there, that I've christened Jane."
"And you don't live at Gateshead?"
"I live at the lodge the old porter has left."
"Well, and how do they all get on? Tell me everything about them,
Bessie but sit down first and, Bobby, come and sit on my knee,
will you?" but Bobby preferred sidling over to his mother.
"You're not grown so very tall, Miss Jane, nor so very stout,"
continued Mrs. Leaven. "I dare say they've not kept you too well
at school Miss Reed is the head and shoulders taller than you
are and Miss Georgiana would make two of you in breadth."
"Georgiana is handsome, I suppose, Bessie?"
"Very. She went up to London last winter with her mama, and there
everybody admired her, and a young lord fell in love with her but
his relations were against the match and  what do you think? 
he and Miss Georgiana made it up to run away but they were found
out and stopped. It was Miss Reed that found them out I believe
she was envious and now she and her sister lead a cat
and dog life together they are always quarrelling  "
"Well, and what of John Reed?"
"Oh, he is not doing so well as his mama could wish. He went to
college, and he got  plucked, I think they call it and then
his uncles wanted him to be a barrister, and study the law but he
is such a dissipated young man, they will never make much of him,
I think."
"What does he look like?"
"He is very tall some people call him a finelooking young man
but he has such thick lips."
"And Mrs. Reed?"
"Missis looks stout and well enough in the face, but I think she's
not quite easy in her mind Mr. John's conduct does not please
her he spends a deal of money."
"Did she send you here, Bessie?"
"No, indeed but I have long wanted to see you, and when I heard
that there had been a letter from you, and that you were going to
another part of the country, I thought I'd just set off, and get
a look at you before you were quite out of my reach."
"I am afraid you are disappointed in me, Bessie." I said this
laughing I perceived that Bessie's glance, though it expressed
regard, did in no shape denote admiration.
"No, Miss Jane, not exactly you are genteel enough you look like
a lady, and it is as much as ever I expected of you you were no
beauty as a child."
I smiled at Bessie's frank answer I felt that it was correct, but
I confess I was not quite indifferent to its import at eighteen
most people wish to please, and the conviction that they have not an
exterior likely to second that desire brings anything but gratification.
"I dare say you are clever, though," continued Bessie, by way of
solace. "What can you do? Can you play on the piano?"
"A little."
There was one in the room Bessie went and opened it, and then asked
me to sit down and give her a tune I played a waltz or two, and
she was charmed.
"The Miss Reeds could not play as well" said she exultingly. "I
always said you would surpass them in learning and can you draw?"
"That is one of my paintings over the chimneypiece." It was a
landscape in water colours, of which I had made a present to the
superintendent, in acknowledgment of her obliging mediation with
the committee on my behalf, and which she had framed and glazed.
"Well, that is beautiful, Miss Jane It is as fine a picture as
any Miss Reed's drawingmaster could paint, let alone the young
ladies themselves, who could not come near it and have you learnt
French?"
"Yes, Bessie, I can both read it and speak it."
"And you can work on muslin and canvas?"
"I can."
"Oh, you are quite a lady, Miss Jane I knew you would be you
will get on whether your relations notice you or not. There was
something I wanted to ask you. Have you ever heard anything from
your father's kinsfolk, the Eyres?"
"Never in my life."
"Well, you know Missis always said they were poor and quite
despicable and they may be poor but I believe they are as much
gentry as the Reeds are for one day, nearly seven years ago, a
Mr. Eyre came to Gateshead and wanted to see you Missis said you
were it school fifty miles off he seemed so much disappointed, for
he could not stay he was going on a voyage to a foreign country,
and the ship was to sail from London in a day or two. He looked
quite a gentleman, and I believe he was your father's brother."
"What foreign country was he going to, Bessie?"
"An island thousands of miles off, where they make wine
the butler did tell me  "
"Madeira?" I suggested.
"Yes, that is it  that is the very word."
"So he went?"
"Yes he did not stay many minutes in the house Missis was very
high with him she called him afterwards a 'sneaking tradesman.'
My Robert believes he was a winemerchant."
"Very likely," I returned "or perhaps clerk or agent to a
winemerchant."
Bessie and I conversed about old times an hour longer, and then
she was obliged to leave me I saw her again for a few minutes
the next morning at Lowton, while I was waiting for the coach. We
parted finally at the door of the Brocklehurst Arms there each
went her separate way she set off for the brow of Lowood Fell
to meet the conveyance which was to take her back to Gateshead, I
mounted the vehicle which was to bear me to new duties and a new
life in the unknown environs of Millcote.
CHAPTER XI
A new chapter in a novel is something like a new scene in a play
and when I draw up the curtain this time, reader, you must fancy you
see a room in the George Inn at Millcote, with such large figured
papering on the walls as inn rooms have such a carpet, such
furniture, such ornaments on the mantelpiece, such prints, including
a portrait of George the Third, and another of the Prince of Wales,
and a representation of the death of Wolfe. All this is visible
to you by the light of an oil lamp hanging from the ceiling, and
by that of an excellent fire, near which I sit in my cloak and
bonnet my muff and umbrella lie on the table, and I am warming
away the numbness and chill contracted by sixteen hours' exposure
to the rawness of an October day I left Lowton at four o'clock
a.m., and the Millcote town clock is now just striking eight.
Reader, though I look comfortably accommodated, I am not very tranquil
in my mind. I thought when the coach stopped here there would be
some one to meet me I looked anxiously round as I descended the
wooden steps the "boots" placed for my convenience, expecting to
hear my name pronounced, and to see some description of carriage
waiting to convey me to Thornfield. Nothing of the sort was
visible and when I asked a waiter if any one had been to inquire
after a Miss Eyre, I was answered in the negative so I had no
resource but to request to be shown into a private room and here
I am waiting, while all sorts of doubts and fears are troubling my
thoughts.
It is a very strange sensation to inexperienced youth to feel
itself quite alone in the world, cut adrift from every connection,
uncertain whether the port to which it is bound can be reached,
and prevented by many impediments from returning to that it has
quitted. The charm of adventure sweetens that sensation, the glow
of pride warms it but then the throb of fear disturbs it and fear
with me became predominant when halfanhour elapsed and still I
was alone. I bethought myself to ring the bell.
"Is there a place in this neighbourhood called Thornfield?" I
asked of the waiter who answered the summons.
"Thornfield? I don't know, ma'am I'll inquire at the
bar." He vanished, but reappeared instantly 
"Is your name Eyre, Miss?"
"Yes."
"Person here waiting for you."
I jumped up, took my muff and umbrella, and hastened into the inn
passage a man was standing by the open door, and in the lamplit
street I dimly saw a onehorse conveyance.
"This will be your luggage, I suppose?" said the man rather abruptly
when he saw me, pointing to my trunk in the passage.
"Yes." He hoisted it on to the vehicle, which was a sort of car,
and then I got in before he shut me up, I asked him how far it
was to Thornfield.
"A matter of six miles."
"How long shall we be before we get there?"
"Happen an hour and a half."
He fastened the car door, climbed to his own seat outside, and
we set off. Our progress was leisurely, and gave me ample time
to reflect I was content to be at length so near the end of my
journey and as I leaned back in the comfortable though not elegant
conveyance, I meditated much at my ease.
"I suppose," thought I, "judging from the plainness of the servant
and carriage, Mrs. Fairfax is not a very dashing person so much
the better I never lived amongst fine people but once, and I was
very miserable with them. I wonder if she lives alone except this
little girl if so, and if she is in any degree amiable, I shall
surely be able to get on with her I will do my best it is a pity
that doing one's best does not always answer. At Lowood, indeed,
I took that resolution, kept it, and succeeded in pleasing but
with Mrs. Reed, I remember my best was always spurned with scorn.
I pray God Mrs. Fairfax may not turn out a second Mrs. Reed but
if she does, I am not bound to stay with her let the worst come
to the worst, I can advertise again. How far are we on our road
now, I wonder?"
I let down the window and looked out Millcote was behind us judging
by the number of its lights, it seemed a place of considerable
magnitude, much larger than Lowton. We were now, as far as I could
see, on a sort of common but there were houses scattered all over
the district I felt we were in a different region to Lowood, more
populous, less picturesque more stirring, less romantic.
The roads were heavy, the night misty my conductor let his horse
walk all the way, and the hour and a half extended, I verily
believe, to two hours at last he turned in his seat and said 
"You're noan so far fro' Thornfield now."
Again I looked out we were passing a church I saw its low broad
tower against the sky, and its bell was tolling a quarter I saw
a narrow galaxy of lights too, on a hillside, marking a village or
hamlet. About ten minutes after, the driver got down and opened a
pair of gates we passed through, and they clashed to behind us.
We now slowly ascended a drive, and came upon the long front of a
house candlelight gleamed from one curtained bowwindow all the
rest were dark. The car stopped at the front door it was opened
by a maidservant I alighted and went in.
"Will you walk this way, ma'am?" said the girl and I followed
her across a square hall with high doors all round she ushered me
into a room whose double illumination of fire and candle at first
dazzled me, contrasting as it did with the darkness to which my
eyes had been for two hours inured when I could see, however, a
cosy and agreeable picture presented itself to my view.
A snug small room a round table by a cheerful fire an armchair
highbacked and oldfashioned, wherein sat the neatest imaginable
little elderly lady, in widow's cap, black silk gown, and snowy
muslin apron exactly like what I had fancied Mrs. Fairfax, only
less stately and milder looking. She was occupied in knitting a
large cat sat demurely at her feet nothing in short was wanting
to complete the beauideal of domestic comfort. A more reassuring
introduction for a new governess could scarcely be conceived
there was no grandeur to overwhelm, no stateliness to embarrass
and then, as I entered, the old lady got up and promptly and kindly
came forward to meet me.
"How do you do, my dear? I am afraid you have had a tedious ride
John drives so slowly you must be cold, come to the fire."
"Mrs. Fairfax, I suppose?" said I.
"Yes, you are right do sit down."
She conducted me to her own chair, and then began to remove my shawl
and untie my bonnetstrings I begged she would not give herself
so much trouble.
"Oh, it is no trouble I dare say your own hands are almost numbed
with cold. Leah, make a little hot negus and cut a sandwich or
two here are the keys of the storeroom."
And she produced from her pocket a most housewifely bunch of keys,
and delivered them to the servant.
"Now, then, draw nearer to the fire," she continued. "You've
brought your luggage with you, haven't you, my dear?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"I'll see it carried into your room," she said, and bustled out.
"She treats me like a visitor," thought I. "I little expected such
a reception I anticipated only coldness and stiffness this is
not like what I have heard of the treatment of governesses but I
must not exult too soon."
She returned with her own hands cleared her knitting apparatus
and a book or two from the table, to make room for the tray which
Leah now brought, and then herself handed me the refreshments. I
felt rather confused at being the object of more attention than
I had ever before received, and, that too, shown by my employer
and superior but as she did not herself seem to consider she was
doing anything out of her place, I thought it better to take her
civilities quietly.
"Shall I have the pleasure of seeing Miss Fairfax tonight?" I
asked, when I had partaken of what she offered me.
"What did you say, my dear? I am a little deaf," returned the good
lady, approaching her ear to my mouth.
I repeated the question more distinctly.
"Miss Fairfax? Oh, you mean Miss Varens Varens is the name of
your future pupil."
"Indeed Then she is not your daughter?"
"No,  I have no family."
I should have followed up my first inquiry, by asking in what way
Miss Varens was connected with her but I recollected it was not
polite to ask too many questions besides, I was sure to hear in
time.
"I am so glad," she continued, as she sat down opposite to me, and
took the cat on her knee "I am so glad you are come it will be
quite pleasant living here now with a companion. To be sure it
is pleasant at any time for Thornfield is a fine old hall, rather
neglected of late years perhaps, but still it is a respectable
place yet you know in wintertime one feels dreary quite alone in
the best quarters. I say alone  Leah is a nice girl to be sure,
and John and his wife are very decent people but then you see
they are only servants, and one can't converse with them on terms
of equality one must keep them at due distance, for fear of losing
one's authority. I'm sure last winter it was a very severe one,
if you recollect, and when it did not snow, it rained and blew,
not a creature but the butcher and postman came to the house, from
November till February and I really got quite melancholy with sitting
night after night alone I had Leah in to read to me sometimes
but I don't think the poor girl liked the task much she felt it
confining. In spring and summer one got on better sunshine and
long days make such a difference and then, just at the commencement
of this autumn, little Adela Varens came and her nurse a child
makes a house alive all at once and now you are here I shall be
quite gay."
My heart really warmed to the worthy lady as I heard her talk and
I drew my chair a little nearer to her, and expressed my sincere
wish that she might find my company as agreeable as she anticipated.
"But I'll not keep you sitting up late tonight," said she "it is
on the stroke of twelve now, and you have been travelling all day
you must feel tired. If you have got your feet well warmed, I'll
show you your bedroom. I've had the room next to mine prepared for
you it is only a small apartment, but I thought you would like it
better than one of the large front chambers to be sure they have
finer furniture, but they are so dreary and solitary, I never sleep
in them myself."
I thanked her for her considerate choice, and as I really felt
fatigued with my long journey, expressed my readiness to retire.
She took her candle, and I followed her from the room. First she
went to see if the halldoor was fastened having taken the key
from the lock, she led the way upstairs. The steps and banisters
were of oak the staircase window was high and latticed both it
and the long gallery into which the bedroom doors opened looked
as if they belonged to a church rather than a house. A very chill
and vaultlike air pervaded the stairs and gallery, suggesting cheerless
ideas of space and solitude and I was glad, when finally ushered
into my chamber, to find it of small dimensions, and furnished in
ordinary, modern style.
When Mrs. Fairfax had bidden me a kind goodnight, and I had fastened
my door, gazed leisurely round, and in some measure effaced the
eerie impression made by that wide hall, that dark and spacious
staircase, and that long, cold gallery, by the livelier aspect of
my little room, I remembered that, after a day of bodily fatigue
and mental anxiety, I was now at last in safe haven. The impulse
of gratitude swelled my heart, and I knelt down at the bedside,
and offered up thanks where thanks were due not forgetting, ere I
rose, to implore aid on my further path, and the power of meriting
the kindness which seemed so frankly offered me before it was
earned. My couch had no thorns in it that night my solitary room
no fears. At once weary and content, I slept soon and soundly
when I awoke it was broad day.
The chamber looked such a bright little place to me as the sun shone
in between the gay blue chintz window curtains, showing papered
walls and a carpeted floor, so unlike the bare planks and stained
plaster of Lowood, that my spirits rose at the view. Externals
have a great effect on the young I thought that a fairer era of
life was beginning for me, one that was to have its flowers and
pleasures, as well as its thorns and toils. My faculties, roused
by the change of scene, the new field offered to hope, seemed all
astir. I cannot precisely define what they expected, but it was
something pleasant not perhaps that day or that month, but at an
indefinite future period.
I rose I dressed myself with care obliged to be plain  for I
had no article of attire that was not made with extreme simplicity
I was still by nature solicitous to be neat. It was not my habit
to be disregardful of appearance or careless of the impression I
made on the contrary, I ever wished to look as well as I could,
and to please as much as my want of beauty would permit. I sometimes
regretted that I was not handsomer I sometimes wished to have rosy
cheeks, a straight nose, and small cherry mouth I desired to be
tall, stately, and finely developed in figure I felt it a misfortune
that I was so little, so pale, and had features so irregular and
so marked. And why had I these aspirations and these regrets?
It would be difficult to say I could not then distinctly say it
to myself yet I had a reason, and a logical, natural reason too.
However, when I had brushed my hair very smooth, and put on my black
frock  which, Quakerlike as it was, at least had the merit of
fitting to a nicety  and adjusted my clean white tucker, I thought
I should do respectably enough to appear before Mrs. Fairfax, and
that my new pupil would not at least recoil from me with antipathy.
Having opened my chamber window, and seen that I left all things
straight and neat on the toilet table, I ventured forth.
Traversing the long and matted gallery, I descended the slippery
steps of oak then I gained the hall I halted there a minute I
looked at some pictures on the walls one, I remember, represented
a grim man in a cuirass, and one a lady with powdered hair and a
pearl necklace, at a bronze lamp pendent from the ceiling, at a great
clock whose case was of oak curiously carved, and ebon black with
time and rubbing. Everything appeared very stately and imposing to
me but then I was so little accustomed to grandeur. The halldoor,
which was half of glass, stood open I stepped over the threshold.
It was a fine autumn morning the early sun shone serenely on
embrowned groves and still green fields advancing on to the lawn,
I looked up and surveyed the front of the mansion. It was three
storeys high, of proportions not vast, though considerable a
gentleman's manorhouse, not a nobleman's seat battlements round
the top gave it a picturesque look. Its grey front stood out well
from the background of a rookery, whose cawing tenants were now on
the wing they flew over the lawn and grounds to alight in a great
meadow, from which these were separated by a sunk fence, and where
an array of mighty old thorn trees, strong, knotty, and broad as
oaks, at once explained the etymology of the mansion's designation.
Farther off were hills not so lofty as those round Lowood, nor so
craggy, nor so like barriers of separation from the living world
but yet quiet and lonely hills enough, and seeming to embrace
Thornfield with a seclusion I had not expected to find existent
so near the stirring locality of Millcote. A little hamlet, whose
roofs were blent with trees, straggled up the side of one of these
hills the church of the district stood nearer Thornfield its
old towertop looked over a knoll between the house and gates.
I was yet enjoying the calm prospect and pleasant fresh air, yet
listening with delight to the cawing of the rooks, yet surveying
the wide, hoary front of the hall, and thinking what a great place
it was for one lonely little dame like Mrs. Fairfax to inhabit,
when that lady appeared at the door.
"What out already?" said she. "I see you are an early riser."
I went up to her, and was received with an affable kiss and shake
of the hand.
"How do you like Thornfield?" she asked. I told her I liked it
very much.
"Yes," she said, "it is a pretty place but I fear it will be
getting out of order, unless Mr. Rochester should take it into his
head to come and reside here permanently or, at least, visit it
rather oftener great houses and fine grounds require the presence
of the proprietor."
"Mr. Rochester" I exclaimed. "Who is he?"
"The owner of Thornfield," she responded quietly. "Did you not
know he was called Rochester?"
Of course I did not  I had never heard of him before but the
old lady seemed to regard his existence as a universally understood
fact, with which everybody must be acquainted by instinct.
"I thought," I continued, "Thornfield belonged to you."
"To me? Bless you, child what an idea To me I am only the
housekeeper  the manager. To be sure I am distantly related to
the Rochesters by the mother's side, or at least my husband was
he was a clergyman, incumbent of Hay  that little village yonder
on the hill  and that church near the gates was his. The present
Mr. Rochester's mother was a Fairfax, and second cousin to my
husband but I never presume on the connection  in fact, it is
nothing to me I consider myself quite in the light of an ordinary
housekeeper my employer is always civil, and I expect nothing
more."
"And the little girl  my pupil"
"She is Mr. Rochester's ward he commissioned me to find a governess
for her. He intended to have her brought up in shire, I believe.
Here she comes, with her 'bonne,' as she calls her nurse." The
enigma then was explained this affable and kind little widow was
no great dame but a dependant like myself. I did not like her the
worse for that on the contrary, I felt better pleased than ever.
The equality between her and me was real not the mere result of
condescension on her part so much the better  my position was
all the freer.
As I was meditating on this discovery, a little girl, followed by
her attendant, came running up the lawn. I looked at my pupil,
who did not at first appear to notice me she was quite a child,
perhaps seven or eight years old, slightly built, with a pale,
smallfeatured face, and a redundancy of hair falling in curls to
her waist.
"Good morning, Miss Adela," said Mrs. Fairfax. "Come and speak to
the lady who is to teach you, and to make you a clever woman some
day." She approached.
"C'est le ma gouverante" said she, pointing to me, and
addressing her nurse who answered 
"Mais oui, certainement."
"Are they foreigners?" I inquired, amazed at hearing the French
language.
"The nurse is a foreigner, and Adela was born on the Continent
and, I believe, never left it till within six months ago. When
she first came here she could speak no English now she can make
shift to talk it a little I don't understand her, she mixes it
so with French but you will make out her meaning very well, I dare
say."
Fortunately I had had the advantage of being taught French by a
French lady and as I had always made a point of conversing with
Madame Pierrot as often as I could, and had besides, during the last
seven years, learnt a portion of French by heart daily  applying
myself to take pains with my accent, and imitating as closely as
possible the pronunciation of my teacher, I had acquired a certain
degree of readiness and correctness in the language, and was not
likely to be much at a loss with Mademoiselle Adela. She came and
shook hand with me when she heard that I was her governess and as
I led her in to breakfast, I addressed some phrases to her in her
own tongue she replied briefly at first, but after we were seated
at the table, and she had examined me some ten minutes with her
large hazel eyes, she suddenly commenced chattering fluently.
"Ah" cried she, in French, "you speak my language as well as
Mr. Rochester does I can talk to you as I can to him, and so can
Sophie. She will be glad nobody here understands her Madame
Fairfax is all English. Sophie is my nurse she came with me over
the sea in a great ship with a chimney that smoked  how it did
smoke  and I was sick, and so was Sophie, and so was Mr. Rochester.
Mr. Rochester lay down on a sofa in a pretty room called the salon,
and Sophie and I had little beds in another place. I nearly fell
out of mine it was like a shelf. And Mademoiselle  what is your
name?"
"Eyre  Jane Eyre."
"Aire? Bah I cannot say it. Well, our ship stopped in the
morning, before it was quite daylight, at a great city  a huge
city, with very dark houses and all smoky not at all like the
pretty clean town I came from and Mr. Rochester carried me in his
arms over a plank to the land, and Sophie came after, and we all
got into a coach, which took us to a beautiful large house, larger
than this and finer, called an hotel. We stayed there nearly a
week I and Sophie used to walk every day in a great green place
full of trees, called the Park and there were many children there
besides me, and a pond with beautiful birds in it, that I fed with
crumbs."
"Can you understand her when she runs on so fast?" asked Mrs.
Fairfax.
I understood her very well, for I had been accustomed to the fluent
tongue of Madame Pierrot.
"I wish," continued the good lady, "you would ask her a question
or two about her parents I wonder if she remembers them?"
"Adele," I inquired, "with whom did you live when you were in that
pretty clean town you spoke of?"
"I lived long ago with mama but she is gone to the Holy Virgin.
Mama used to teach me to dance and sing, and to say verses. A
great many gentlemen and ladies came to see mama, and I used to
dance before them, or to sit on their knees and sing to them I
liked it. Shall I let you hear me sing now?"
She had finished her breakfast, so I permitted her to give a specimen
of her accomplishments. Descending from her chair, she came and
placed herself on my knee then, folding her little hands demurely
before her, shaking back her curls and lifting her eyes to the
ceiling, she commenced singing a song from some opera. It was the
strain of a forsaken lady, who, after bewailing the perfidy of her
lover, calls pride to her aid desires her attendant to deck her
in her brightest jewels and richest robes, and resolves to meet the
false one that night at a ball, and prove to him, by the gaiety of
her demeanour, how little his desertion has affected her.
The subject seemed strangely chosen for an infant singer but
I suppose the point of the exhibition lay in hearing the notes of
love and jealousy warbled with the lisp of childhood and in very
bad taste that point was at least I thought so.
Adele sang the canzonette tunefully enough, and with the naivete
of her age. This achieved, she jumped from my knee and said, "Now,
Mademoiselle, I will repeat you some poetry."
Assuming an attitude, she began, "La Ligue des Rats fable de La
Fontaine." She then declaimed the little piece with an attention
to punctuation and emphasis, a flexibility of voice and an
appropriateness of gesture, very unusual indeed at her age, and
which proved she had been carefully trained.
"Was it your mama who taught you that piece?" I asked.
"Yes, and she just used to say it in this way 'Qu' avez vous
donc? lui dit un de ces rats parlez' She made me lift my hand
so  to remind me to raise my voice at the question. Now shall
I dance for you?"
"No, that will do but after your mama went to the Holy Virgin,
as you say, with whom did you live then?"
"With Madame Frederic and her husband she took care of me, but
she is nothing related to me. I think she is poor, for she had
not so fine a house as mama. I was not long there. Mr. Rochester
asked me if I would like to go and live with him in England, and I
said yes for I knew Mr. Rochester before I knew Madame Frederic,
and he was always kind to me and gave me pretty dresses and toys
but you see he has not kept his word, for he has brought me to
England, and now he is gone back again himself, and I never see
him."
After breakfast, Adele and I withdrew to the library, which room,
it appears, Mr. Rochester had directed should be used as the
schoolroom. Most of the books were locked up behind glass doors
but there was one bookcase left open containing everything that
could be needed in the way of elementary works, and several volumes
of light literature, poetry, biography, travels, a few romances,
c. I suppose he had considered that these were all the governess
would require for her private perusal and, indeed, they contented
me amply for the present compared with the scanty pickings I had
now and then been able to glean at Lowood, they seemed to offer an
abundant harvest of entertainment and information. In this room,
too, there was a cabinet piano, quite new and of superior tone
also an easel for painting and a pair of globes.
I found my pupil sufficiently docile, though disinclined to apply
she had not been used to regular occupation of any kind. I felt
it would be injudicious to confine her too much at first so, when
I had talked to her a great deal, and got her to learn a little,
and when the morning had advanced to noon, I allowed her to return
to her nurse. I then proposed to occupy myself till dinnertime
in drawing some little sketches for her use.
As I was going upstairs to fetch my portfolio and pencils, Mrs.
Fairfax called to me "Your morning schoolhours are over now, I
suppose," said she. She was in a room the foldingdoors of which
stood open I went in when she addressed me. It was a large,
stately apartment, with purple chairs and curtains, a Turkey carpet,
walnutpanelled walls, one vast window rich in slanted glass, and
a lofty ceiling, nobly moulded. Mrs. Fairfax was dusting some
vases of fine purple spar, which stood on a sideboard.
"What a beautiful room" I exclaimed, as I looked round for I
had never before seen any half so imposing.
"Yes this is the diningroom. I have just opened the window, to
let in a little air and sunshine for everything gets so damp in
apartments that are seldom inhabited the drawingroom yonder feels
like a vault."
She pointed to a wide arch corresponding to the window, and hung like
it with a Tyriandyed curtain, now looped up. Mounting to it by
two broad steps, and looking through, I thought I caught a glimpse
of a fairy place, so bright to my noviceeyes appeared the view
beyond. Yet it was merely a very pretty drawingroom, and within
it a boudoir, both spread with white carpets, on which seemed laid
brilliant garlands of flowers both ceiled with snowy mouldings of
white grapes and vineleaves, beneath which glowed in rich contrast
crimson couches and ottomans while the ornaments on the pale
Parisian mantelpiece were of sparkling Bohemian glass, ruby red
and between the windows large mirrors repeated the general blending
of snow and fire.
"In what order you keep these rooms, Mrs. Fairfax" said I. "No
dust, no canvas coverings except that the air feels chilly, one
would think they were inhabited daily."
"Why, Miss Eyre, though Mr. Rochester's visits here are rare, they
are always sudden and unexpected and as I observed that it put
him out to find everything swathed up, and to have a bustle of
arrangement on his arrival, I thought it best to keep the rooms in
readiness."
"Is Mr. Rochester an exacting, fastidious sort of man?"
"Not particularly so but he has a gentleman's tastes and habits,
and he expects to have things managed in conformity to them."
"Do you like him? Is he generally liked?"
"Oh, yes the family have always been respected here. Almost all
the land in this neighbourhood, as far as you can see, has belonged
to the Rochesters time out of mind."
"Well, but, leaving his land out of the question, do you like him?
Is he liked for himself?"
"I have no cause to do otherwise than like him and I believe he
is considered a just and liberal landlord by his tenants but he
has never lived much amongst them."
"But has he no peculiarities? What, in short, is his character?"
"Oh his character is unimpeachable, I suppose. He is rather
peculiar, perhaps he has travelled a great deal, and seen a great
deal of the world, I should think. I dare say he is clever, but
I never had much conversation with him."
"In what way is he peculiar?"
"I don't know  it is not easy to describe  nothing striking,
but you feel it when he speaks to you you cannot be always sure
whether he is in jest or earnest, whether he is pleased or the
contrary you don't thoroughly understand him, in short  at least,
I don't but it is of no consequence, he is a very good master."
This was all the account I got from Mrs. Fairfax of her employer
and mine. There are people who seem to have no notion of sketching
a character, or observing and describing salient points, either in
persons or things the good lady evidently belonged to this class
my queries puzzled, but did not draw her out. Mr. Rochester was
Mr. Rochester in her eyes a gentleman, a landed proprietor 
nothing more she inquired and searched no further, and evidently
wondered at my wish to gain a more definite notion of his identity.
When we left the diningroom, she proposed to show me over the rest
of the house and I followed her upstairs and downstairs, admiring
as I went for all was well arranged and handsome. The large front
chambers I thought especially grand and some of the thirdstorey
rooms, though dark and low, were interesting from their air of
antiquity. The furniture once appropriated to the lower apartments
had from time to time been removed here, as fashions changed
and the imperfect light entering by their narrow casement showed
bedsteads of a hundred years old chests in oak or walnut, looking,
with their strange carvings of palm branches and cherubs' heads,
like types of the Hebrew ark rows of venerable chairs, highbacked
and narrow stools still more antiquated, on whose cushioned tops
were yet apparent traces of halfeffaced embroideries, wrought by
fingers that for two generations had been coffindust. All these
relics gave to the third storey of Thornfield Hall the aspect of a
home of the past a shrine of memory. I liked the hush, the gloom,
the quaintness of these retreats in the day but I by no means
coveted a night's repose on one of those wide and heavy beds shut
in, some of them, with doors of oak shaded, others, with wrought
old English hangings crusted with thick work, portraying effigies
of strange flowers, and stranger birds, and strangest human beings,
all which would have looked strange, indeed, by the pallid gleam
of moonlight.
"Do the servants sleep in these rooms?" I asked.
"No they occupy a range of smaller apartments to the back no
one ever sleeps here one would almost say that, if there were a
ghost at Thornfield Hall, this would be its haunt."
"So I think you have no ghost, then?"
"None that I ever heard of," returned Mrs. Fairfax, smiling.
"Nor any traditions of one? no legends or ghost stories?"
"I believe not. And yet it is said the Rochesters have been rather
a violent than a quiet race in their time perhaps, though, that
is the reason they rest tranquilly in their graves now."
"Yes  'after life's fitful fever they sleep well,'" I muttered.
"Where are you going now, Mrs. Fairfax?" for she was moving away.
"On to the leads will you come and see the view from thence?" I
followed still, up a very narrow staircase to the attics, and thence
by a ladder and through a trapdoor to the roof of the hall. I
was now on a level with the crow colony, and could see into their
nests. Leaning over the battlements and looking far down, I
surveyed the grounds laid out like a map the bright and velvet
lawn closely girdling the grey base of the mansion the field,
wide as a park, dotted with its ancient timber the wood, dun and
sere, divided by a path visibly overgrown, greener with moss than
the trees were with foliage the church at the gates, the road, the
tranquil hills, all reposing in the autumn day's sun the horizon
bounded by a propitious sky, azure, marbled with pearly white. No
feature in the scene was extraordinary, but all was pleasing. When
I turned from it and repassed the trapdoor, I could scarcely see
my way down the ladder the attic seemed black as a vault compared
with that arch of blue air to which I had been looking up, and to
that sunlit scene of grove, pasture, and green hill, of which the
hall was the centre, and over which I had been gazing with delight.
Mrs. Fairfax stayed behind a moment to fasten the trapdoor I, by
drift of groping, found the outlet from the attic, and proceeded
to descend the narrow garret staircase. I lingered in the long
passage to which this led, separating the front and back rooms of
the third storey narrow, low, and dim, with only one little window
at the far end, and looking, with its two rows of small black doors
all shut, like a corridor in some Bluebeard's castle.
While I paced softly on, the last sound I expected to hear in so
still a region, a laugh, struck my ear. It was a curious laugh
distinct, formal, mirthless. I stopped the sound ceased, only
for an instant it began again, louder for at first, though
distinct, it was very low. It passed off in a clamorous peal that
seemed to wake an echo in every lonely chamber though it originated
but in one, and I could have pointed out the door whence the accents
issued.
"Mrs. Fairfax" I called out for I now heard her descending the
great stairs. "Did you hear that loud laugh? Who is it?"
"Some of the servants, very likely," she answered "perhaps Grace
Poole."
"Did you hear it?" I again inquired.
"Yes, plainly I often hear her she sews in one of these rooms.
Sometimes Leah is with her they are frequently noisy together."
The laugh was repeated in its low, syllabic tone, and terminated
in an odd murmur.
"Grace" exclaimed Mrs. Fairfax.
I really did not expect any Grace to answer for the laugh was
as tragic, as preternatural a laugh as any I ever heard and, but
that it was high noon, and that no circumstance of ghostliness
accompanied the curious cachinnation but that neither scene nor
season favoured fear, I should have been superstitiously afraid.
However, the event showed me I was a fool for entertaining a sense
even of surprise.
The door nearest me opened, and a servant came out,  a woman of
between thirty and forty a set, squaremade figure, redhaired,
and with a hard, plain face any apparition less romantic or less
ghostly could scarcely be conceived.
"Too much noise, Grace," said Mrs. Fairfax. "Remember directions"
Grace curtseyed silently and went in.
"She is a person we have to sew and assist Leah in her housemaid's
work," continued the widow "not altogether unobjectionable in some
points, but she does well enough. Bythebye, how have you got on
with your new pupil this morning?"
The conversation, thus turned on Adele, continued till we reached
the light and cheerful region below. Adele came running
to meet us in the hall, exclaiming 
"Mesdames, vous etes servies" adding, "J'ai bien faim, moi"
We found dinner ready, and waiting for us in Mrs. Fairfax's room.
CHAPTER XII
The promise of a smooth career, which my first calm introduction
to Thornfield Hall seemed to pledge, was not belied on a longer
acquaintance with the place and its inmates. Mrs. Fairfax turned
out to be what she appeared, a placidtempered, kindnatured woman,
of competent education and average intelligence. My pupil was a
lively child, who had been spoilt and indulged, and therefore was
sometimes wayward but as she was committed entirely to my care,
and no injudicious interference from any quarter ever thwarted my
plans for her improvement, she soon forgot her little freaks, and
became obedient and teachable. She had no great talents, no marked
traits of character, no peculiar development of feeling or taste
which raised her one inch above the ordinary level of childhood
but neither had she any deficiency or vice which sunk her below
it. She made reasonable progress, entertained for me a vivacious,
though perhaps not very profound, affection and by her simplicity,
gay prattle, and efforts to please, inspired me, in return, with
a degree of attachment sufficient to make us both content in each
other's society.
This, par parenthese, will be thought cool language by persons who
entertain solemn doctrines about the angelic nature of children,
and the duty of those charged with their education to conceive
for them an idolatrous devotion but I am not writing to flatter
parental egotism, to echo cant, or prop up humbug I am merely
telling the truth. I felt a conscientious solicitude for Adele's
welfare and progress, and a quiet liking for her little self just
as I cherished towards Mrs. Fairfax a thankfulness for her kindness,
and a pleasure in her society proportionate to the tranquil regard
she had for me, and the moderation of her mind and character.
Anybody may blame me who likes, when I add further, that, now and
then, when I took a walk by myself in the grounds when I went
down to the gates and looked through them along the road or when,
while Adele played with her nurse, and Mrs. Fairfax made jellies in
the storeroom, I climbed the three staircases, raised the trapdoor
of the attic, and having reached the leads, looked out afar over
sequestered field and hill, and along dim skyline  that then
I longed for a power of vision which might overpass that limit
which might reach the busy world, towns, regions full of life I had
heard of but never seen  that then I desired more of practical
experience than I possessed more of intercourse with my kind, of
acquaintance with variety of character, than was here within my
reach. I valued what was good in Mrs. Fairfax, and what was good
in Adele but I believed in the existence of other and more vivid
kinds of goodness, and what I believed in I wished to behold.
Who blames me? Many, no doubt and I shall be called discontented.
I could not help it the restlessness was in my nature it agitated
me to pain sometimes. Then my sole relief was to walk along the
corridor of the third storey, backwards and forwards, safe in the
silence and solitude of the spot, and allow my mind's eye to dwell
on whatever bright visions rose before it  and, certainly, they
were many and glowing to let my heart be heaved by the exultant
movement, which, while it swelled it in trouble, expanded it
with life and, best of all, to open my inward ear to a tale that
was never ended  a tale my imagination created, and narrated
continuously quickened with all of incident, life, fire, feeling,
that I desired and had not in my actual existence.
It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with
tranquillity they must have action and they will make it if
they cannot find it. Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than
mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot. Nobody
knows how many rebellions besides political rebellions ferment in
the masses of life which people earth. Women are supposed to be
very calm generally but women feel just as men feel they need
exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts, as
much as their brothers do they suffer from too rigid a restraint,
too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer and it
is narrowminded in their more privileged fellowcreatures to say
that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting
stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is
thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do
more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their
sex.
When thus alone, I not unfrequently heard Grace Poole's laugh the
same peal, the same low, slow ha ha which, when first heard,
had thrilled me I heard, too, her eccentric murmurs stranger
than her laugh. There were days when she was quite silent but
there were others when I could not account for the sounds she made.
Sometimes I saw her she would come out of her room with a basin,
or a plate, or a tray in her hand, go down to the kitchen and
shortly return, generally oh, romantic reader, forgive me for
telling the plain truth bearing a pot of porter. Her appearance
always acted as a damper to the curiosity raised by her oral oddities
hardfeatured and staid, she had no point to which interest could
attach. I made some attempts to draw her into conversation, but
she seemed a person of few words a monosyllabic reply usually
cut short every effort of that sort.
The other members of the household, viz., John and his wife, Leah
the housemaid, and Sophie the French nurse, were decent people
but in no respect remarkable with Sophie I used to talk French,
and sometimes I asked her questions about her native country but
she was not of a descriptive or narrative turn, and generally gave
such vapid and confused answers as were calculated rather to check
than encourage inquiry.
October, November, December passed away. One afternoon in January,
Mrs. Fairfax had begged a holiday for Adele, because she had a cold
and, as Adele seconded the request with an ardour that reminded me
how precious occasional holidays had been to me in my own childhood,
I accorded it, deeming that I did well in showing pliability on the
point. It was a fine, calm day, though very cold I was tired of
sitting still in the library through a whole long morning Mrs.
Fairfax had just written a letter which was waiting to be posted,
so I put on my bonnet and cloak and volunteered to carry it to
Hay the distance, two miles, would be a pleasant winter afternoon
walk. Having seen Adele comfortably seated in her little chair by
Mrs. Fairfax's parlour fireside, and given her her best wax doll
which I usually kept enveloped in silver paper in a drawer to
play with, and a storybook for change of amusement and having
replied to her "Revenez bientot, ma bonne amie, ma chere Mdlle.
Jeannette," with a kiss I set out.
The ground was hard, the air was still, my road was lonely I
walked fast till I got warm, and then I walked slowly to enjoy and
analyse the species of pleasure brooding for me in the hour and
situation. It was three o'clock the church bell tolled as I passed
under the belfry the charm of the hour lay in its approaching
dimness, in the lowgliding and palebeaming sun. I was a mile
from Thornfield, in a lane noted for wild roses in summer, for nuts
and blackberries in autumn, and even now possessing a few coral
treasures in hips and haws, but whose best winter delight lay in
its utter solitude and leafless repose. If a breath of air stirred,
it made no sound here for there was not a holly, not an evergreen
to rustle, and the stripped hawthorn and hazel bushes were as still
as the white, worn stones which causewayed the middle of the path.
Far and wide, on each side, there were only fields, where no cattle
now browsed and the little brown birds, which stirred occasionally
in the hedge, looked like single russet leaves that had forgotten
to drop.
This lane inclined uphill all the way to Hay having reached
the middle, I sat down on a stile which led thence into a field.
Gathering my mantle about me, and sheltering my hands in my muff,
I did not feel the cold, though it froze keenly as was attested
by a sheet of ice covering the causeway, where a little brooklet,
now congealed, had overflowed after a rapid thaw some days since.
From my seat I could look down on Thornfield the grey and
battlemented hall was the principal object in the vale below me
its woods and dark rookery rose against the west. I lingered till
the sun went down amongst the trees, and sank crimson and clear
behind them. I then turned eastward.
On the hilltop above me sat the rising moon pale yet as a cloud,
but brightening momentarily, she looked over Hay, which, half lost
in trees, sent up a blue smoke from its few chimneys it was yet
a mile distant, but in the absolute hush I could hear plainly its
thin murmurs of life. My ear, too, felt the flow of currents in
what dales and depths I could not tell but there were many hills
beyond Hay, and doubtless many becks threading their passes. That
evening calm betrayed alike the tinkle of the nearest streams, the
sough of the most remote.
A rude noise broke on these fine ripplings and whisperings, at
once so far away and so clear a positive tramp, tramp, a metallic
clatter, which effaced the soft wavewanderings as, in a picture,
the solid mass of a crag, or the rough boles of a great oak, drawn
in dark and strong on the foreground, efface the aerial distance
of azure hill, sunny horizon, and blended clouds where tint melts
into tint.
The din was on the causeway a horse was coming the windings of
the lane yet hid it, but it approached. I was just leaving the
stile yet, as the path was narrow, I sat still to let it go by.
In those days I was young, and all sorts of fancies bright and
dark tenanted my mind the memories of nursery stories were there
amongst other rubbish and when they recurred, maturing youth added
to them a vigour and vividness beyond what childhood could give.
As this horse approached, and as I watched for it to appear through
the dusk, I remembered certain of Bessie's tales, wherein figured
a NorthofEngland spirit called a "Gytrash," which, in the form
of horse, mule, or large dog, haunted solitary ways, and sometimes
came upon belated travellers, as this horse was now coming upon
me.
It was very near, but not yet in sight when, in addition to the
tramp, tramp, I heard a rush under the hedge, and close down by the
hazel stems glided a great dog, whose black and white colour made
him a distinct object against the trees. It was exactly one form
of Bessie's Gytrash  a lionlike creature with long hair and
a huge head it passed me, however, quietly enough not staying
to look up, with strange pretercanine eyes, in my face, as I half
expected it would. The horse followed,  a tall steed, and on its
back a rider. The man, the human being, broke the spell at once.
Nothing ever rode the Gytrash it was always alone and goblins,
to my notions, though they might tenant the dumb carcasses of
beasts, could scarce covet shelter in the commonplace human form.
No Gytrash was this,  only a traveller taking the short cut to
Millcote. He passed, and I went on a few steps, and I turned a
sliding sound and an exclamation of "What the deuce is to do now?"
and a clattering tumble, arrested my attention. Man and horse
were down they had slipped on the sheet of ice which glazed the
causeway. The dog came bounding back, and seeing his master in a
predicament, and hearing the horse groan, barked till the evening
hills echoed the sound, which was deep in proportion to his
magnitude. He snuffed round the prostrate group, and then he ran
up to me it was all he could do,  there was no other help at
hand to summon. I obeyed him, and walked down to the traveller, by
this time struggling himself free of his steed. His efforts were
so vigorous, I thought he could not be much hurt but I
asked him the question 
"Are you injured, sir?"
I think he was swearing, but am not certain however, he was
pronouncing some formula which prevented him from replying to me
directly.
"Can I do anything?" I asked again.
"You must just stand on one side," he answered as he rose, first to
his knees, and then to his feet. I did whereupon began a heaving,
stamping, clattering process, accompanied by a barking and baying
which removed me effectually some yards' distance but I would
not be driven quite away till I saw the event. This was finally
fortunate the horse was reestablished, and the dog was silenced
with a "Down, Pilot" The traveller now, stooping, felt his foot
and leg, as if trying whether they were sound apparently something
ailed them, for he halted to the stile whence I had just risen,
and sat down.
I was in the mood for being useful, or at least officious, I think,
for I now drew near him again.
"If you are hurt, and want help, sir, I can fetch some one either
from Thornfield Hall or from Hay."
"Thank you I shall do I have no broken bones,  only a sprain"
and again he stood up and tried his foot, but the result extorted
an involuntary "Ugh"
Something of daylight still lingered, and the moon was waxing
bright I could see him plainly. His figure was enveloped in a
riding cloak, fur collared and steel clasped its details were not
apparent, but I traced the general points of middle height and
considerable breadth of chest. He had a dark face, with stern
features and a heavy brow his eyes and gathered eyebrows looked
ireful and thwarted just now he was past youth, but had not reached
middleage perhaps he might be thirtyfive. I felt no fear of
him, and but little shyness. Had he been a handsome, heroiclooking
young gentleman, I should not have dared to stand thus questioning
him against his will, and offering my services unasked. I had
hardly ever seen a handsome youth never in my life spoken to one.
I had a theoretical reverence and homage for beauty, elegance,
gallantry, fascination but had I met those qualities incarnate
in masculine shape, I should have known instinctively that they
neither had nor could have sympathy with anything in me, and should
have shunned them as one would fire, lightning, or anything else
that is bright but antipathetic.
If even this stranger had smiled and been goodhumoured to me when
I addressed him if he had put off my offer of assistance gaily and
with thanks, I should have gone on my way and not felt any vocation
to renew inquiries but the frown, the roughness of the traveller,
set me at my ease I retained my station when he waved
to me to go, and announced 
"I cannot think of leaving you, sir, at so late an hour, in this
solitary lane, till I see you are fit to mount your horse."
He looked at me when I said this he had hardly turned his eyes in
my direction before.
"I should think you ought to be at home yourself," said he, "if
you have a home in this neighbourhood where do you come from?"
"From just below and I am not at all afraid of being out late when
it is moonlight I will run over to Hay for you with pleasure, if
you wish it indeed, I am going there to post a letter."
"You live just below  do you mean at that house with the
battlements?" pointing to Thornfield Hall, on which the moon cast
a hoary gleam, bringing it out distinct and pale from the woods that,
by contrast with the western sky, now seemed one mass of shadow.
"Yes, sir."
"Whose house is it?"
"Mr. Rochester's."
"Do you know Mr. Rochester?"
"No, I have never seen him."
"He is not resident, then?"
"No."
"Can you tell me where he is?"
"I cannot."
"You are not a servant at the hall, of course. You are  "
He stopped, ran his eye over my dress, which, as usual, was quite
simple a black merino cloak, a black beaver bonnet neither
of them half fine enough for a lady'smaid. He seemed puzzled to
decide what I was I helped him.
"I am the governess."
"Ah, the governess" he repeated "deuce take me, if I had not
forgotten The governess" and again my raiment underwent scrutiny.
In two minutes he rose from the stile his face expressed pain
when he tried to move.
"I cannot commission you to fetch help," he said "but you may help
me a little yourself, if you will be so kind."
"Yes, sir."
"You have not an umbrella that I can use as a stick?"
"No."
"Try to get hold of my horse's bridle and lead him to me you are
not afraid?"
I should have been afraid to touch a horse when alone, but when
told to do it, I was disposed to obey. I put down my muff on the
stile, and went up to the tall steed I endeavoured to catch the
bridle, but it was a spirited thing, and would not let me come
near its head I made effort on effort, though in vain meantime,
I was mortally afraid of its trampling forefeet. The traveller
waited and watched for some time, and at last he laughed.
"I see," he said, "the mountain will never be brought to Mahomet,
so all you can do is to aid Mahomet to go to the mountain I must
beg of you to come here."
I came. "Excuse me," he continued "necessity compels me to make
you useful." He laid a heavy hand on my shoulder, and leaning on
me with some stress, limped to his horse. Having once caught the
bridle, he mastered it directly and sprang to his saddle grimacing
grimly as he made the effort, for it wrenched his sprain.
"Now," said he, releasing his under lip from a hard bite, "just
hand me my whip it lies there under the hedge."
I sought it and found it.
"Thank you now make haste with the letter to Hay, and return as
fast as you can."
A touch of a spurred heel made his horse first start and rear, and
then bound away the dog rushed in his traces all three vanished,
"Like heath that, in the wilderness, The wild wind whirls away."
I took up my muff and walked on. The incident had occurred and
was gone for me it WAS an incident of no moment, no romance,
no interest in a sense yet it marked with change one single hour
of a monotonous life. My help had been needed and claimed I had
given it I was pleased to have done something trivial, transitory
though the deed was, it was yet an active thing, and I was weary
of an existence all passive. The new face, too, was like a new
picture introduced to the gallery of memory and it was dissimilar
to all the others hanging there firstly, because it was masculine
and, secondly, because it was dark, strong, and stern. I had it
still before me when I entered Hay, and slipped the letter into
the post office I saw it as I walked fast downhill all the way
home. When I came to the stile, I stopped a minute, looked round
and listened, with an idea that a horse's hoofs might ring on the
causeway again, and that a rider in a cloak, and a Gytrashlike
Newfoundland dog, might be again apparent I saw only the hedge
and a pollard willow before me, rising up still and straight to
meet the moonbeams I heard only the faintest waft of wind roaming
fitful among the trees round Thornfield, a mile distant and when
I glanced down in the direction of the murmur, my eye, traversing
the hallfront, caught a light kindling in a window it reminded
me that I was late, and I hurried on.
I did not like reentering Thornfield. To pass its threshold was
to return to stagnation to cross the silent hall, to ascend the
darksome staircase, to seek my own lonely little room, and then to
meet tranquil Mrs. Fairfax, and spend the long winter evening with
her, and her only, was to quell wholly the faint excitement wakened
by my walk,  to slip again over my faculties the viewless fetters
of an uniform and too still existence of an existence whose
very privileges of security and ease I was becoming incapable of
appreciating. What good it would have done me at that time to have
been tossed in the storms of an uncertain struggling life, and to
have been taught by rough and bitter experience to long for the
calm amidst which I now repined Yes, just as much good as it
would do a man tired of sitting still in a "too easy chair" to take
a long walk and just as natural was the wish to stir, under my
circumstances, as it would be under his.
I lingered at the gates I lingered on the lawn I paced backwards
and forwards on the pavement the shutters of the glass door were
closed I could not see into the interior and both my eyes and
spirit seemed drawn from the gloomy house  from the greyhollow
filled with rayless cells, as it appeared to me  to that sky
expanded before me,  a blue sea absolved from taint of cloud
the moon ascending it in solemn march her orb seeming to look up
as she left the hilltops, from behind which she had come, far and
farther below her, and aspired to the zenith, midnight dark in its
fathomless depth and measureless distance and for those trembling
stars that followed her course they made my heart tremble, my
veins glow when I viewed them. Little things recall us to earth
the clock struck in the hall that sufficed I turned from moon
and stars, opened a sidedoor, and went in.
The hall was not dark, nor yet was it lit, only by the highhung
bronze lamp a warm glow suffused both it and the lower steps of the
oak staircase. This ruddy shine issued from the great diningroom,
whose twoleaved door stood open, and showed a genial fire in the
grate, glancing on marble hearth and brass fireirons, and revealing
purple draperies and polished furniture, in the most pleasant
radiance. It revealed, too, a group near the mantelpiece I had
scarcely caught it, and scarcely become aware of a cheerful mingling
of voices, amongst which I seemed to distinguish the tones of Adele,
when the door closed.
I hastened to Mrs. Fairfax's room there was a fire there too,
but no candle, and no Mrs. Fairfax. Instead, all alone, sitting
upright on the rug, and gazing with gravity at the blaze, I beheld
a great black and white longhaired dog, just like the Gytrash of
the lane. It was so like it that I went forward and said  "Pilot"
and the thing got up and came to me and snuffed me. I caressed
him, and he wagged his great tail but he looked an eerie creature
to be alone with, and I could not tell whence he had come. I
rang the bell, for I wanted a candle and I wanted, too, to get an
account of this visitant. Leah entered.
"What dog is this?"
"He came with master."
"With whom?"
"With master  Mr. Rochester  he is just arrived."
"Indeed and is Mrs. Fairfax with him?"
"Yes, and Miss Adele they are in the diningroom, and John is gone
for a surgeon for master has had an accident his horse fell and
his ankle is sprained."
"Did the horse fall in Hay Lane?"
"Yes, coming downhill it slipped on some ice."
"Ah Bring me a candle will you Leah?"
Leah brought it she entered, followed by Mrs. Fairfax, who repeated
the news adding that Mr. Carter the surgeon was come, and was now
with Mr. Rochester then she hurried out to give orders about tea,
and I went upstairs to take off my things.
CHAPTER XIII
Mr. Rochester, it seems, by the surgeon's orders, went to bed early
that night nor did he rise soon next morning. When he did come
down, it was to attend to business his agent and some of his
tenants were arrived, and waiting to speak with him.
Adele and I had now to vacate the library it would be in daily
requisition as a receptionroom for callers. A fire was lit in
an apartment upstairs, and there I carried our books, and arranged
it for the future schoolroom. I discerned in the course of the
morning that Thornfield Hall was a changed place no longer silent
as a church, it echoed every hour or two to a knock at the door,
or a clang of the bell steps, too, often traversed the hall, and
new voices spoke in different keys below a rill from the outer world
was flowing through it it had a master for my part, I liked it
better.
Adele was not easy to teach that day she could not apply she
kept running to the door and looking over the banisters to see if
she could get a glimpse of Mr. Rochester then she coined pretexts
to go downstairs, in order, as I shrewdly suspected, to visit the
library, where I knew she was not wanted then, when I got a little
angry, and made her sit still, she continued to talk incessantly
of her "ami, Monsieur Edouard Fairfax DE Rochester," as she dubbed
him I had not before heard his prenomens, and to conjecture
what presents he had brought her for it appears he had intimated
the night before, that when his luggage came from Millcote, there
would be found amongst it a little box in whose contents she had
an interest.
"Et cela doit signifier," said she, "qu'il y aura le dedans un cadeau
pour moi, et peutetre pour vous aussi, mademoiselle. Monsieur
a parle de vous il m'a demande le nom de ma gouvernante, et si
elle n'etait pas une petite personne, assez mince et un peu pale.
J'ai dit qu'oui car c'est vrai, n'estce pas, mademoiselle?"
I and my pupil dined as usual in Mrs. Fairfax's parlour the
afternoon was wild and snowy, and we passed it in the schoolroom.
At dark I allowed Adele to put away books and work, and to
run downstairs for, from the comparative silence below, and from
the cessation of appeals to the doorbell, I conjectured that Mr.
Rochester was now at liberty. Left alone, I walked to the window
but nothing was to be seen thence twilight and snowflakes together
thickened the air, and hid the very shrubs on the lawn. I let down
the curtain and went back to the fireside.
In the clear embers I was tracing a view, not unlike a picture I
remembered to have seen of the castle of Heidelberg, on the Rhine,
when Mrs. Fairfax came in, breaking up by her entrance the fiery
mosaic I had been piercing together, and scattering too some heavy
unwelcome thoughts that were beginning to throng on my solitude.
"Mr. Rochester would be glad if you and your pupil would take tea
with him in the drawingroom this evening," said she "he has been
so much engaged all day that he could not ask to see you before."
"When is his teatime?" I inquired.
"Oh, at six o'clock he keeps early hours in the country. You
had better change your frock now I will go with you and fasten
it. Here is a candle."
"Is it necessary to change my frock?"
"Yes, you had better I always dress for the evening when Mr.
Rochester is here."
This additional ceremony seemed somewhat stately however, I repaired
to my room, and, with Mrs. Fairfax's aid, replaced my black stuff
dress by one of black silk the best and the only additional one
I had, except one of light grey, which, in my Lowood notions of
the toilette, I thought too fine to be worn, except on firstrate
occasions.
"You want a brooch," said Mrs. Fairfax. I had a single little pearl
ornament which Miss Temple gave me as a parting keepsake I put
it on, and then we went downstairs. Unused as I was to strangers,
it was rather a trial to appear thus formally summoned in
Mr. Rochester's presence. I let Mrs. Fairfax precede me into the
diningroom, and kept in her shade as we crossed that apartment
and, passing the arch, whose curtain was now dropped, entered the
elegant recess beyond.
Two wax candles stood lighted on the table, and two on the mantelpiece
basking in the light and heat of a superb fire, lay Pilot  Adele
knelt near him. Half reclined on a couch appeared Mr. Rochester,
his foot supported by the cushion he was looking at Adele and the
dog the fire shone full on his face. I knew my traveller with
his broad and jetty eyebrows his square forehead, made squarer by
the horizontal sweep of his black hair. I recognised his decisive
nose, more remarkable for character than beauty his full nostrils,
denoting, I thought, choler his grim mouth, chin, and jaw  yes,
all three were very grim, and no mistake. His shape, now divested
of cloak, I perceived harmonised in squareness with his physiognomy
I suppose it was a good figure in the athletic sense of the term
broad chested and thin flanked, though neither tall nor graceful.
Mr. Rochester must have been aware of the entrance of Mrs. Fairfax
and myself but it appeared he was not in the mood to notice us,
for he never lifted his head as we approached.
"Here is Miss Eyre, sir," said Mrs. Fairfax, in her quiet way.
He bowed, still not taking his eyes from the group of the dog and
child.
"Let Miss Eyre be seated," said he and there was something in the
forced stiff bow, in the impatient yet formal tone, which seemed
further to express, "What the deuce is it to me whether Miss Eyre
be there or not? At this moment I am not disposed to accost her."
I sat down quite disembarrassed. A reception of finished politeness
would probably have confused me I could not have returned or
repaid it by answering grace and elegance on my part but harsh
caprice laid me under no obligation on the contrary, a decent
quiescence, under the freak of manner, gave me the advantage.
Besides, the eccentricity of the proceeding was piquant I felt
interested to see how he would go on.
He went on as a statue would, that is, he neither spoke nor moved.
Mrs. Fairfax seemed to think it necessary that some one should be
amiable, and she began to talk. Kindly, as usual  and, as usual,
rather trite  she condoled with him on the pressure of business
he had had all day on the annoyance it must have been to him with
that painful sprain then she commended his patience and perseverance
in going through with it.
"Madam, I should like some tea," was the sole rejoinder she got.
She hastened to ring the bell and when the tray came, she proceeded
to arrange the cups, spoons, c., with assiduous celerity. I and
Adele went to the table but the master did not leave his couch.
"Will you hand Mr. Rochester's cup?" said Mrs. Fairfax to me
"Adele might perhaps spill it."
I did as requested. As he took the cup from my hand, Adele, thinking
the moment propitious for making a request in my favour, cried out 
"N'estce pas, monsieur, qu'il y a un cadeau pour Mademoiselle Eyre
dans votre petit coffre?"
"Who talks of cadeaux?" said he gruffly. "Did you expect a
present, Miss Eyre? Are you fond of presents?" and he searched
my face with eyes that I saw were dark, irate, and piercing.
"I hardly know, sir I have little experience of them they are
generally thought pleasant things."
"Generally thought? But what do YOU think?"
"I should be obliged to take time, sir, before I could give you
an answer worthy of your acceptance a present has many faces to
it, has it not? and one should consider all, before pronouncing
an opinion as to its nature."
"Miss Eyre, you are not so unsophisticated as Adele she demands
a 'cadeau,' clamorously, the moment she sees me you beat about
the bush."
"Because I have less confidence in my deserts than Adele has she
can prefer the claim of old acquaintance, and the right too of
custom for she says you have always been in the habit of giving
her playthings but if I had to make out a case I should be puzzled,
since I am a stranger, and have done nothing to entitle me to an
acknowledgment."
"Oh, don't fall back on overmodesty I have examined Adele, and
find you have taken great pains with her she is not bright, she
has no talents yet in a short time she has made much improvement."
"Sir, you have now given me my 'cadeau' I am obliged to you it
is the meed teachers most covet  praise of their pupils' progress."
"Humph" said Mr. Rochester, and he took his tea in silence.
"Come to the fire," said the master, when the tray was taken away,
and Mrs. Fairfax had settled into a corner with her knitting
while Adele was leading me by the hand round the room, showing me
the beautiful books and ornaments on the consoles and chiffonnieres.
We obeyed, as in duty bound Adele wanted to take a seat on my
knee, but she was ordered to amuse herself with Pilot.
"You have been resident in my house three months?"
"Yes, sir."
"And you came from  ?"
"From Lowood school, in shire."
"Ah a charitable concern. How long were you there?"
"Eight years."
"Eight years you must be tenacious of life. I thought half the
time in such a place would have done up any constitution No wonder
you have rather the look of another world. I marvelled where you
had got that sort of face. When you came on me in Hay Lane last
night, I thought unaccountably of fairy tales, and had half a mind
to demand whether you had bewitched my horse I am not sure yet.
Who are your parents?"
"I have none."
"Nor ever had, I suppose do you remember them?"
"No."
"I thought not. And so you were waiting for your people when you
sat on that stile?"
"For whom, sir?"
"For the men in green it was a proper moonlight evening for them.
Did I break through one of your rings, that you spread that damned
ice on the causeway?"
I shook my head. "The men in green all forsook England a hundred
years ago," said I, speaking as seriously as he had done. "And not
even in Hay Lane, or the fields about it, could you find a trace
of them. I don't think either summer or harvest, or winter moon,
will ever shine on their revels more."
Mrs. Fairfax had dropped her knitting, and, with raised eyebrows,
seemed wondering what sort of talk this was.
"Well," resumed Mr. Rochester, "if you disown parents, you must
have some sort of kinsfolk uncles and aunts?"
"No none that I ever saw."
"And your home?"
"I have none."
"Where do your brothers and sisters live?"
"I have no brothers or sisters."
"Who recommended you to come here?"
"I advertised, and Mrs. Fairfax answered my advertisement."
"Yes," said the good lady, who now knew what ground we were upon,
"and I am daily thankful for the choice Providence led me to make.
Miss Eyre has been an invaluable companion to me, and a kind and
careful teacher to Adele."
"Don't trouble yourself to give her a character," returned Mr.
Rochester "eulogiums will not bias me I shall judge for myself.
She began by felling my horse."
"Sir?" said Mrs. Fairfax.
"I have to thank her for this sprain."
The widow looked bewildered.
"Miss Eyre, have you ever lived in a town?"
"No, sir."
"Have you seen much society?"
"None but the pupils and teachers of Lowood, and now the inmates
of Thornfield."
"Have you read much?"
"Only such books as came in my way and they have not been numerous
or very learned."
"You have lived the life of a nun no doubt you are well drilled
in religious forms  Brocklehurst, who I understand directs
Lowood, is a parson, is he not?"
"Yes, sir."
"And you girls probably worshipped him, as a convent full of
religieuses would worship their director."
"Oh, no."
"You are very cool No What a novice not worship her priest
That sounds blasphemous."
"I disliked Mr. Brocklehurst and I was not alone in the feeling.
He is a harsh man at once pompous and meddling he cut off our
hair and for economy's sake bought us bad needles and thread, with
which we could hardly sew."
"That was very false economy," remarked Mrs. Fairfax, who now again
caught the drift of the dialogue.
"And was that the head and front of his offending?" demanded Mr.
Rochester.
"He starved us when he had the sole superintendence of the provision
department, before the committee was appointed and he bored us with
long lectures once a week, and with evening readings from books of
his own inditing, about sudden deaths and judgments, which made us
afraid to go to bed."
"What age were you when you went to Lowood?"
"About ten."
"And you stayed there eight years you are now, then, eighteen?"
I assented.
"Arithmetic, you see, is useful without its aid, I should hardly
have been able to guess your age. It is a point difficult to fix
where the features and countenance are so much at variance as in
your case. And now what did you learn at Lowood? Can you play?"
"A little."
"Of course that is the established answer. Go into the library
I mean, if you please.  Excuse my tone of command I am used
to say, 'Do this,' and it is done I cannot alter my customary
habits for one new inmate.  Go, then, into the library take a
candle with you leave the door open sit down to the piano, and
play a tune."
I departed, obeying his directions.
"Enough" he called out in a few minutes. "You play A LITTLE, I
see like any other English schoolgirl perhaps rather better than
some, but not well."
I closed the piano and returned. Mr. Rochester continued  "Adele
showed me some sketches this morning, which she said were yours.
I don't know whether they were entirely of your doing probably a
master aided you?"
"No, indeed" I interjected.
"Ah that pricks pride. Well, fetch me your portfolio, if you
can vouch for its contents being original but don't pass your word
unless you are certain I can recognise patchwork."
"Then I will say nothing, and you shall judge for yourself, sir."
I brought the portfolio from the library.
"Approach the table," said he and I wheeled it to his couch. Adele
and Mrs. Fairfax drew near to see the pictures.
"No crowding," said Mr. Rochester "take the drawings from my hand
as I finish with them but don't push your faces up to mine."
He deliberately scrutinised each sketch and painting. Three he
laid aside the others, when he had examined them, he swept from
him.
"Take them off to the other table, Mrs. Fairfax," said he, "and
look at them with Adele  you" glancing at me "resume your seat,
and answer my questions. I perceive those pictures were done by
one hand was that hand yours?"
"Yes."
"And when did you find time to do them? They have taken much time,
and some thought."
"I did them in the last two vacations I spent at Lowood, when I
had no other occupation."
"Where did you get your copies?"
"Out of my head."
"That head I see now on your shoulders?"
"Yes, sir."
"Has it other furniture of the same kind within?"
"I should think it may have I should hope  better."
He spread the pictures before him, and again surveyed them alternately.
While he is so occupied, I will tell you, reader, what they are
and first, I must premise that they are nothing wonderful. The
subjects had, indeed, risen vividly on my mind. As I saw them with
the spiritual eye, before I attempted to embody them, they were
striking but my hand would not second my fancy, and in each case
it had wrought out but a pale portrait of the thing I had conceived.
These pictures were in watercolours. The first represented clouds
low and livid, rolling over a swollen sea all the distance was
in eclipse so, too, was the foreground or rather, the nearest
billows, for there was no land. One gleam of light lifted into
relief a halfsubmerged mast, on which sat a cormorant, dark and
large, with wings flecked with foam its beak held a gold bracelet
set with gems, that I had touched with as brilliant tints as my
palette could yield, and as glittering distinctness as my pencil
could impart. Sinking below the bird and mast, a drowned corpse
glanced through the green water a fair arm was the only limb
clearly visible, whence the bracelet had been washed or torn.
The second picture contained for foreground only the dim peak
of a hill, with grass and some leaves slanting as if by a breeze.
Beyond and above spread an expanse of sky, dark blue as at twilight
rising into the sky was a woman's shape to the bust, portrayed in
tints as dusk and soft as I could combine. The dim forehead was
crowned with a star the lineaments below were seen as through the
suffusion of vapour the eyes shone dark and wild the hair streamed
shadowy, like a beamless cloud torn by storm or by electric travail.
On the neck lay a pale reflection like moonlight the same faint
lustre touched the train of thin clouds from which rose and bowed
this vision of the Evening Star.
The third showed the pinnacle of an iceberg piercing a polar winter
sky a muster of northern lights reared their dim lances, close
serried, along the horizon. Throwing these into distance, rose,
in the foreground, a head,  a colossal head, inclined towards
the iceberg, and resting against it. Two thin hands, joined under
the forehead, and supporting it, drew up before the lower features a
sable veil, a brow quite bloodless, white as bone, and an eye hollow
and fixed, blank of meaning but for the glassiness of despair, alone
were visible. Above the temples, amidst wreathed turban folds of
black drapery, vague in its character and consistency as cloud,
gleamed a ring of white flame, gemmed with sparkles of a more lurid
tinge. This pale crescent was "the likeness of a kingly crown"
what it diademed was "the shape which shape had none."
"Were you happy when you painted these pictures?" asked Mr.
Rochester presently.
"I was absorbed, sir yes, and I was happy. To paint them, in
short, was to enjoy one of the keenest pleasures I have ever known."
"That is not saying much. Your pleasures, by your own account,
have been few but I daresay you did exist in a kind of artist's
dreamland while you blent and arranged these strange tints. Did
you sit at them long each day?"
"I had nothing else to do, because it was the vacation, and I sat
at them from morning till noon, and from noon till night the
length of the midsummer days favoured my inclination to apply."
"And you felt selfsatisfied with the result of your ardent labours?"
"Far from it. I was tormented by the contrast between my idea and
my handiwork in each case I had imagined something which I was
quite powerless to realise."
"Not quite you have secured the shadow of your thought but no
more, probably. You had not enough of the artist's skill and science
to give it full being yet the drawings are, for a schoolgirl,
peculiar. As to the thoughts, they are elfish. These eyes in the
Evening Star you must have seen in a dream. How could you make
them look so clear, and yet not at all brilliant? for the planet
above quells their rays. And what meaning is that in their solemn
depth? And who taught you to paint wind? There is a high gale
in that sky, and on this hilltop. Where did you see Latmos? For
that is Latmos. There put the drawings away"
I had scarce tied the strings of the portfolio, when, looking
at his watch, he said abruptly 
"It is nine o'clock what are you about, Miss Eyre, to let Adele
sit up so long? Take her to bed."
Adele went to kiss him before quitting the room he endured the
caress, but scarcely seemed to relish it more than Pilot would have
done, nor so much.
"I wish you all goodnight, now," said he, making a movement of the
hand towards the door, in token that he was tired of our company,
and wished to dismiss us. Mrs. Fairfax folded up her knitting I
took my portfolio we curtseyed to him, received a frigid bow in
return, and so withdrew.
"You said Mr. Rochester was not strikingly peculiar, Mrs. Fairfax,"
I observed, when I rejoined her in her room, after putting Adele
to bed.
"Well, is he?"
"I think so he is very changeful and abrupt."
"True no doubt he may appear so to a stranger, but I am so
accustomed to his manner, I never think of it and then, if he has
peculiarities of temper, allowance should be made."
"Why?"
"Partly because it is his nature  and we can none of us help our
nature and partly because he has painful thoughts, no doubt, to
harass him, and make his spirits unequal."
"What about?"
"Family troubles, for one thing."
"But he has no family."
"Not now, but he has had  or, at least, relatives. He lost his
elder brother a few years since."
"His ELDER brother?"
"Yes. The present Mr. Rochester has not been very long in possession
of the property only about nine years."
"Nine years is a tolerable time. Was he so very fond of his brother
as to be still inconsolable for his loss?"
"Why, no  perhaps not. I believe there were some misunderstandings
between them. Mr. Rowland Rochester was not quite just to Mr.
Edward and perhaps he prejudiced his father against him. The old
gentleman was fond of money, and anxious to keep the family estate
together. He did not like to diminish the property by division,
and yet he was anxious that Mr. Edward should have wealth, too,
to keep up the consequence of the name and, soon after he was of
age, some steps were taken that were not quite fair, and made a
great deal of mischief. Old Mr. Rochester and Mr. Rowland combined
to bring Mr. Edward into what he considered a painful position, for
the sake of making his fortune what the precise nature of that
position was I never clearly knew, but his spirit could not brook
what he had to suffer in it. He is not very forgiving he broke
with his family, and now for many years he has led an unsettled
kind of life. I don't think he has ever been resident at Thornfield
for a fortnight together, since the death of his brother without
a will left him master of the estate and, indeed, no wonder he
shuns the old place."
"Why should he shun it?"
"Perhaps he thinks it gloomy."
The answer was evasive. I should have liked something clearer but
Mrs. Fairfax either could not, or would not, give me more explicit
information of the origin and nature of Mr. Rochester's trials.
She averred they were a mystery to herself, and that what she knew
was chiefly from conjecture. It was evident, indeed, that she
wished me to drop the subject, which I did accordingly.
CHAPTER XIV
For several subsequent days I saw little of Mr. Rochester. In the
mornings he seemed much engaged with business, and, in the afternoon,
gentlemen from Millcote or the neighbourhood called, and sometimes
stayed to dine with him. When his sprain was well enough to admit
of horse exercise, he rode out a good deal probably to return
these visits, as he generally did not come back till late at night.
During this interval, even Adele was seldom sent for to his presence,
and all my acquaintance with him was confined to an occasional
rencontre in the hall, on the stairs, or in the gallery, when he
would sometimes pass me haughtily and coldly, just acknowledging
my presence by a distant nod or a cool glance, and sometimes bow
and smile with gentlemanlike affability. His changes of mood did
not offend me, because I saw that I had nothing to do with their
alternation the ebb and flow depended on causes quite disconnected
with me.
One day he had had company to dinner, and had sent for my portfolio
in order, doubtless, to exhibit its contents the gentlemen went
away early, to attend a public meeting at Millcote, as Mrs. Fairfax
informed me but the night being wet and inclement, Mr. Rochester
did not accompany them. Soon after they were gone he rang the bell
a message came that I and Adele were to go downstairs. I brushed
Adele's hair and made her neat, and having ascertained that I was
myself in my usual Quaker trim, where there was nothing to retouch
all being too close and plain, braided locks included, to admit
of disarrangement  we descended, Adele wondering whether the
petit coffre was at length come for, owing to some mistake, its
arrival had hitherto been delayed. She was gratified there it
stood, a little carton, on the table when we entered the diningroom.
She appeared to know it by instinct.
"Ma boite ma boite" exclaimed she, running towards it.
"Yes, there is your 'boite' at last take it into a corner, you
genuine daughter of Paris, and amuse yourself with disembowelling
it," said the deep and rather sarcastic voice of Mr. Rochester,
proceeding from the depths of an immense easychair at the fireside.
"And mind," he continued, "don't bother me with any details of the
anatomical process, or any notice of the condition of the entrails
let your operation be conducted in silence tienstoi tranquille,
enfant comprendstu?"
Adele seemed scarcely to need the warning  she had already retired
to a sofa with her treasure, and was busy untying the cord which
secured the lid. Having removed this impediment, and lifted
certain silvery envelopes of tissue paper, she merely exclaimed 
"Oh ciel Que c'est beau" and then remained absorbed in ecstatic
contemplation.
"Is Miss Eyre there?" now demanded the master, half rising from
his seat to look round to the door, near which I still stood.
"Ah well, come forward be seated here." He drew a chair near
his own. "I am not fond of the prattle of children," he continued
"for, old bachelor as I am, I have no pleasant associations
connected with their lisp. It would be intolerable to me to pass
a whole evening teteetete with a brat. Don't draw that chair
farther off, Miss Eyre sit down exactly where I placed it  if
you please, that is. Confound these civilities I continually
forget them. Nor do I particularly affect simpleminded old ladies.
Bythebye, I must have mine in mind it won't do to neglect her
she is a Fairfax, or wed to one and blood is said to be thicker
than water."
He rang, and despatched an invitation to Mrs. Fairfax, who soon
arrived, knittingbasket in hand.
"Good evening, madam I sent to you for a charitable purpose. I
have forbidden Adele to talk to me about her presents, and she is
bursting with repletion have the goodness to serve her as auditress
and interlocutrice it will be one of the most benevolent acts you
ever performed."
Adele, indeed, no sooner saw Mrs. Fairfax, than she summoned her
to her sofa, and there quickly filled her lap with the porcelain,
the ivory, the waxen contents of her "boite" pouring out, meantime,
explanations and raptures in such broken English as she was mistress
of.
"Now I have performed the part of a good host," pursued Mr. Rochester,
"put my guests into the way of amusing each other, I ought to be at
liberty to attend to my own pleasure. Miss Eyre, draw your chair
still a little farther forward you are yet too far back I cannot
see you without disturbing my position in this comfortable chair,
which I have no mind to do."
I did as I was bid, though I would much rather have remained
somewhat in the shade but Mr. Rochester had such a direct way of
giving orders, it seemed a matter of course to obey him promptly.
We were, as I have said, in the diningroom the lustre, which
had been lit for dinner, filled the room with a festal breadth of
light the large fire was all red and clear the purple curtains
hung rich and ample before the lofty window and loftier arch
everything was still, save the subdued chat of Adele she dared
not speak loud, and, filling up each pause, the beating of winter
rain against the panes.
Mr. Rochester, as he sat in his damaskcovered chair, looked
different to what I had seen him look before not quite so stern
much less gloomy. There was a smile on his lips, and his eyes
sparkled, whether with wine or not, I am not sure but I think it
very probable. He was, in short, in his afterdinner mood more
expanded and genial, and also more selfindulgent than the frigid
and rigid temper of the morning still he looked preciously grim,
cushioning his massive head against the swelling back of his chair,
and receiving the light of the fire on his granitehewn features,
and in his great, dark eyes for he had great, dark eyes, and very
fine eyes, too  not without a certain change in their depths
sometimes, which, if it was not softness, reminded you, at least,
of that feeling.
He had been looking two minutes at the fire, and I had been looking
the same length of time at him, when, turning suddenly, he caught
my gaze fastened on his physiognomy.
"You examine me, Miss Eyre," said he "do you think me handsome?"
I should, if I had deliberated, have replied to this question by
something conventionally vague and polite but the answer somehow
slipped from my tongue before I was aware  "No, sir."
"Ah By my word there is something singular about you," said
he "you have the air of a little nonnette quaint, quiet, grave,
and simple, as you sit with your hands before you, and your eyes
generally bent on the carpet except, bythebye, when they are
directed piercingly to my face as just now, for instance and
when one asks you a question, or makes a remark to which you are
obliged to reply, you rap out a round rejoinder, which, if not
blunt, is at least brusque. What do you mean by it?"
"Sir, I was too plain I beg your pardon. I ought to have replied
that it was not easy to give an impromptu answer to a question
about appearances that tastes mostly differ and that beauty is
of little consequence, or something of that sort."
"You ought to have replied no such thing. Beauty of little consequence,
indeed And so, under pretence of softening the previous outrage,
of stroking and soothing me into placidity, you stick a sly penknife
under my ear Go on what fault do you find with me, pray? I
suppose I have all my limbs and all my features like any other
man?"
"Mr. Rochester, allow me to disown my first answer I intended no
pointed repartee it was only a blunder."
"Just so I think so and you shall be answerable for it. Criticise
me does my forehead not please you?"
He lifted up the sable waves of hair which lay horizontally over
his brow, and showed a solid enough mass of intellectual organs,
but an abrupt deficiency where the suave sign of benevolence should
have risen.
"Now, ma'am, am I a fool?"
"Far from it, sir. You would, perhaps, think me rude if I inquired
in return whether you are a philanthropist?"
"There again Another stick of the penknife, when she pretended
to pat my head and that is because I said I did not like the
society of children and old women low be it spoken. No, young
lady, I am not a general philanthropist but I bear a conscience"
and he pointed to the prominences which are said to indicate
that faculty, and which, fortunately for him, were sufficiently
conspicuous giving, indeed, a marked breadth to the upper part of
his head "and, besides, I once had a kind of rude tenderness of
heart. When I was as old as you, I was a feeling fellow enough,
partial to the unfledged, unfostered, and unlucky but Fortune has
knocked me about since she has even kneaded me with her knuckles,
and now I flatter myself I am hard and tough as an Indiarubber
ball pervious, though, through a chink or two still, and with one
sentient point in the middle of the lump. Yes does that leave
hope for me?"
"Hope of what, sir?"
"Of my final retransformation from Indiarubber back to flesh?"
"Decidedly he has had too much wine," I thought and I did not
know what answer to make to his queer question how could I tell
whether he was capable of being retransformed?
"You looked very much puzzled, Miss Eyre and though you are not
pretty any more than I am handsome, yet a puzzled air becomes you
besides, it is convenient, for it keeps those searching eyes of
yours away from my physiognomy, and busies them with the worsted
flowers of the rug so puzzle on. Young lady, I am disposed to be
gregarious and communicative tonight."
With this announcement he rose from his chair, and stood, leaning
his arm on the marble mantelpiece in that attitude his shape was
seen plainly as well as his face his unusual breadth of chest,
disproportionate almost to his length of limb. I am sure most
people would have thought him an ugly man yet there was so much
unconscious pride in his port so much ease in his demeanour such
a look of complete indifference to his own external appearance so
haughty a reliance on the power of other qualities, intrinsic or
adventitious, to atone for the lack of mere personal attractiveness,
that, in looking at him, one inevitably shared the indifference,
and, even in a blind, imperfect sense, put faith in the confidence.
"I am disposed to be gregarious and communicative tonight,"
he repeated, "and that is why I sent for you the fire and the
chandelier were not sufficient company for me nor would Pilot have
been, for none of these can talk. Adele is a degree better, but
still far below the mark Mrs. Fairfax ditto you, I am persuaded,
can suit me if you will you puzzled me the first evening I
invited you down here. I have almost forgotten you since other
ideas have driven yours from my head but tonight I am resolved
to be at ease to dismiss what importunes, and recall what pleases.
It would please me now to draw you out  to learn more of you 
therefore speak."
Instead of speaking, I smiled and not a very complacent or submissive
smile either.
"Speak," he urged.
"What about, sir?"
"Whatever you like. I leave both the choice of subject and the
manner of treating it entirely to yourself."
Accordingly I sat and said nothing "If he expects me to talk
for the mere sake of talking and showing off, he will find he has
addressed himself to the wrong person," I thought.
"You are dumb, Miss Eyre."
I was dumb still. He bent his head a little towards me, and with
a single hasty glance seemed to dive into my eyes.
"Stubborn?" he said, "and annoyed. Ah it is consistent. I put
my request in an absurd, almost insolent form. Miss Eyre, I beg
your pardon. The fact is, once for all, I don't wish to treat you
like an inferior that is" correcting himself, "I claim only
such superiority as must result from twenty years' difference in
age and a century's advance in experience. This is legitimate,
et j'y tiens, as Adele would say and it is by virtue of this
superiority, and this alone, that I desire you to have the goodness
to talk to me a little now, and divert my thoughts, which are galled
with dwelling on one point  cankering as a rusty nail."
He had deigned an explanation, almost an apology, and I did not
feel insensible to his condescension, and would not seem so.
"I am willing to amuse you, if I can, sir  quite willing but I
cannot introduce a topic, because how do I know what will interest
you? Ask me questions, and I will do my best to answer them."
"Then, in the first place, do you agree with me that I have a right
to be a little masterful, abrupt, perhaps exacting, sometimes,
on the grounds I stated, namely, that I am old enough to be your
father, and that I have battled through a varied experience with
many men of many nations, and roamed over half the globe, while
you have lived quietly with one set of people in one house?"
"Do as you please, sir."
"That is no answer or rather it is a very irritating, because a
very evasive one. Reply clearly."
"I don't think, sir, you have a right to command me, merely because
you are older than I, or because you have seen more of the world
than I have your claim to superiority depends on the use you have
made of your time and experience."
"Humph Promptly spoken. But I won't allow that, seeing that it
would never suit my case, as I have made an indifferent, not to
say a bad, use of both advantages. Leaving superiority out of the
question, then, you must still agree to receive my orders now and
then, without being piqued or hurt by the tone of command. Will
you?"
I smiled I thought to myself Mr. Rochester IS peculiar  he
seems to forget that he pays me  pounds per annum for receiving
his orders.
"The smile is very well," said he, catching instantly the passing
expression "but speak too."
"I was thinking, sir, that very few masters would trouble themselves
to inquire whether or not their paid subordinates were piqued and
hurt by their orders."
"Paid subordinates What you are my paid subordinate, are you?
Oh yes, I had forgotten the salary Well then, on that mercenary
ground, will you agree to let me hector a little?"
"No, sir, not on that ground but, on the ground that you did forget
it, and that you care whether or not a dependent is comfortable in
his dependency, I agree heartily."
"And will you consent to dispense with a great many conventional
forms and phrases, without thinking that the omission arises from
insolence?"
"I am sure, sir, I should never mistake informality for insolence
one I rather like, the other nothing freeborn would submit to,
even for a salary."
"Humbug Most things freeborn will submit to anything for a salary
therefore, keep to yourself, and don't venture on generalities of
which you are intensely ignorant. However, I mentally shake hands
with you for your answer, despite its inaccuracy and as much for
the manner in which it was said, as for the substance of the speech
the manner was frank and sincere one does not often see such a
manner no, on the contrary, affectation, or coldness, or stupid,
coarseminded misapprehension of one's meaning are the usual rewards
of candour. Not three in three thousand raw schoolgirlgovernesses
would have answered me as you have just done. But I don't mean to
flatter you if you are cast in a different mould to the majority,
it is no merit of yours Nature did it. And then, after all,
I go too fast in my conclusions for what I yet know, you may
be no better than the rest you may have intolerable defects to
counterbalance your few good points."
"And so may you," I thought. My eye met his as the idea crossed
my mind he seemed to read the glance, answering as if
its import had been spoken as well as imagined 
"Yes, yes, you are right," said he "I have plenty of faults of
my own I know it, and I don't wish to palliate them, I assure
you. God wot I need not be too severe about others I have a past
existence, a series of deeds, a colour of life to contemplate within
my own breast, which might well call my sneers and censures from
my neighbours to myself. I started, or rather for like other
defaulters, I like to lay half the blame on ill fortune and adverse
circumstances was thrust on to a wrong tack at the age of oneand
twenty, and have never recovered the right course since but I
might have been very different I might have been as good as you
wiser  almost as stainless. I envy you your peace of mind,
your clean conscience, your unpolluted memory. Little girl, a
memory without blot or contamination must be an exquisite treasure
an inexhaustible source of pure refreshment is it not?"
"How was your memory when you were eighteen, sir?"
"All right then limpid, salubrious no gush of bilge water had
turned it to fetid puddle. I was your equal at eighteen  quite
your equal. Nature meant me to be, on the whole, a good man, Miss
Eyre one of the better kind, and you see I am not so. You would
say you don't see it at least I flatter myself I read as much in
your eye beware, bythebye, what you express with that organ
I am quick at interpreting its language. Then take my word for
it,  I am not a villain you are not to suppose that  not
to attribute to me any such bad eminence but, owing, I verily
believe, rather to circumstances than to my natural bent, I am a
trite commonplace sinner, hackneyed in all the poor petty dissipations
with which the rich and worthless try to put on life. Do you wonder
that I avow this to you? Know, that in the course of your future
life you will often find yourself elected the involuntary confidant
of your acquaintances' secrets people will instinctively find
out, as I have done, that it is not your forte to tell of yourself,
but to listen while others talk of themselves they will feel, too,
that you listen with no malevolent scorn of their indiscretion,
but with a kind of innate sympathy not the less comforting and
encouraging because it is very unobtrusive in its manifestations."
"How do you know?  how can you guess all this, sir?"
"I know it well therefore I proceed almost as freely as if I were
writing my thoughts in a diary. You would say, I should have been
superior to circumstances so I should  so I should but you see
I was not. When fate wronged me, I had not the wisdom to remain
cool I turned desperate then I degenerated. Now, when any vicious
simpleton excites my disgust by his paltry ribaldry, I cannot
flatter myself that I am better than he I am forced to confess
that he and I are on a level. I wish I had stood firm  God
knows I do Dread remorse when you are tempted to err, Miss Eyre
remorse is the poison of life."
"Repentance is said to be its cure, sir."
"It is not its cure. Reformation may be its cure and I could
reform  I have strength yet for that  if  but where is the
use of thinking of it, hampered, burdened, cursed as I am? Besides,
since happiness is irrevocably denied me, I have a right to get
pleasure out of life and I WILL get it, cost what it may."
"Then you will degenerate still more, sir."
"Possibly yet why should I, if I can get sweet, fresh pleasure?
And I may get it as sweet and fresh as the wild honey the bee
gathers on the moor."
"It will sting  it will taste bitter, sir."
"How do you know?  you never tried it. How very serious  how
very solemn you look and you are as ignorant of the matter as
this cameo head" taking one from the mantelpiece. "You have no
right to preach to me, you neophyte, that have not passed the porch
of life, and are absolutely unacquainted with its mysteries."
"I only remind you of your own words, sir you said error brought
remorse, and you pronounced remorse the poison of existence."
"And who talks of error now? I scarcely think the notion
that flittered across my brain was an error. I believe it was an
inspiration rather than a temptation it was very genial, very
soothing  I know that. Here it comes again It is no devil,
I assure you or if it be, it has put on the robes of an angel of
light. I think I must admit so fair a guest when it asks entrance
to my heart."
"Distrust it, sir it is not a true angel."
"Once more, how do you know? By what instinct do you pretend to
distinguish between a fallen seraph of the abyss and a messenger
from the eternal throne  between a guide and a seducer?"
"I judged by your countenance, sir, which was troubled when you
said the suggestion had returned upon you. I feel sure it will
work you more misery if you listen to it."
"Not at all  it bears the most gracious message in the world for
the rest, you are not my consciencekeeper, so don't make yourself
uneasy. Here, come in, bonny wanderer"
He said this as if he spoke to a vision, viewless to any eye but
his own then, folding his arms, which he had half extended, on his
chest, he seemed to enclose in their embrace the invisible being.
"Now," he continued, again addressing me, "I have received the
pilgrim  a disguised deity, as I verily believe. Already it
has done me good my heart was a sort of charnel it will now be
a shrine."
"To speak truth, sir, I don't understand you at all I cannot keep
up the conversation, because it has got out of my depth. Only one
thing, I know you said you were not as good as you should like
to be, and that you regretted your own imperfection  one thing
I can comprehend you intimated that to have a sullied memory
was a perpetual bane. It seems to me, that if you tried hard, you
would in time find it possible to become what you yourself would
approve and that if from this day you began with resolution to
correct your thoughts and actions, you would in a few years have
laid up a new and stainless store of recollections, to which you
might revert with pleasure."
"Justly thought rightly said, Miss Eyre and, at this moment, I
am paving hell with energy."
"Sir?"
"I am laying down good intentions, which I believe durable as
flint. Certainly, my associates and pursuits shall be other than
they have been."
"And better?"
"And better  so much better as pure ore is than foul dross. You
seem to doubt me I don't doubt myself I know what my aim is,
what my motives are and at this moment I pass a law, unalterable
as that of the Medes and Persians, that both are right."
"They cannot be, sir, if they require a new statute to legalise
them."
"They are, Miss Eyre, though they absolutely require a new statute
unheardof combinations of circumstances demand unheardof rules."
"That sounds a dangerous maxim, sir because one can see at once
that it is liable to abuse."
"Sententious sage so it is but I swear by my household gods
not to abuse it."
"You are human and fallible."
"I am so are you  what then?"
"The human and fallible should not arrogate a power with which the
divine and perfect alone can be safely intrusted."
"What power?"
"That of saying of any strange, unsanctioned line of action, 
'Let it be right.'"
"'Let it be right'  the very words you have pronounced them."
"MAY it be right then," I said, as I rose, deeming it useless to
continue a discourse which was all darkness to me and, besides,
sensible that the character of my interlocutor was beyond my
penetration at least, beyond its present reach and feeling the
uncertainty, the vague sense of insecurity, which accompanies a
conviction of ignorance.
"Where are you going?"
"To put Adele to bed it is past her bedtime."
"You are afraid of me, because I talk like a Sphynx."
"Your language is enigmatical, sir but though I am bewildered,
I am certainly not afraid."
"You ARE afraid  your selflove dreads a blunder."
"In that sense I do feel apprehensive  I have no wish to talk
nonsense."
"If you did, it would be in such a grave, quiet manner, I should
mistake it for sense. Do you never laugh, Miss Eyre? Don't
trouble yourself to answer  I see you laugh rarely but you can
laugh very merrily believe me, you are not naturally austere,
any more than I am naturally vicious. The Lowood constraint still
clings to you somewhat controlling your features, muffling your
voice, and restricting your limbs and you fear in the presence of
a man and a brother  or father, or master, or what you will 
to smile too gaily, speak too freely, or move too quickly but,
in time, I think you will learn to be natural with me, as I find
it impossible to be conventional with you and then your looks and
movements will have more vivacity and variety than they dare offer
now. I see at intervals the glance of a curious sort of bird
through the closeset bars of a cage a vivid, restless, resolute
captive is there were it but free, it would soar cloudhigh. You
are still bent on going?"
"It has struck nine, sir."
"Never mind,  wait a minute Adele is not ready to go to bed
yet. My position, Miss Eyre, with my back to the fire, and my face
to the room, favours observation. While talking to you, I have
also occasionally watched Adele I have my own reasons for thinking
her a curious study,  reasons that I may, nay, that I shall,
impart to you some day. She pulled out of her box, about ten
minutes ago, a little pink silk frock rapture lit her face as she
unfolded it coquetry runs in her blood, blends with her brains,
and seasons the marrow of her bones. 'Il faut que je l'essaie'
cried she, 'et e l'instant meme' and she rushed out of the room.
She is now with Sophie, undergoing a robing process in a few minutes
she will reenter and I know what I shall see,  a miniature of
Celine Varens, as she used to appear on the boards at the rising of
But never mind that. However, my tenderest feelings are about
to receive a shock such is my presentiment stay now, to see
whether it will be realised."
Ere long, Adele's little foot was heard tripping across the hall.
She entered, transformed as her guardian had predicted. A dress
of rosecoloured satin, very short, and as full in the skirt as
it could be gathered, replaced the brown frock she had previously
worn a wreath of rosebuds circled her forehead her feet were
dressed in silk stockings and small white satin sandals.
"Estce que ma robe va bien?" cried she, bounding forwards "et
mes souliers? et mes bas? Tenez, je crois que je vais danser"
And spreading out her dress, she chasseed across the room till,
having reached Mr. Rochester, she wheeled lightly round before
him on tiptoe, then dropped on one knee at his feet, exclaiming 
"Monsieur, je vous remercie mille fois de votre bonte" then
rising, she added, "C'est comme cela que maman faisait, n'estce
pas, monsieur?"
"Precisely" was the answer "and, 'comme cela,' she charmed
my English gold out of my British breeches' pocket. I have been
green, too, Miss Eyre,  ay, grass green not a more vernal
tint freshens you now than once freshened me. My Spring is gone,
however, but it has left me that French floweret on my hands, which,
in some moods, I would fain be rid of. Not valuing now the root
whence it sprang having found that it was of a sort which nothing
but gold dust could manure, I have but half a liking to the blossom,
especially when it looks so artificial as just now. I keep it and
rear it rather on the Roman Catholic principle of expiating numerous
sins, great or small, by one good work. I'll explain all this some
day. Goodnight."
CHAPTER XV
Mr. Rochester did, on a future occasion, explain it. It was one
afternoon, when he chanced to meet me and Adele in the grounds
and while she played with Pilot and her shuttlecock, he asked me
to walk up and down a long beech avenue within sight of her.
He then said that she was the daughter of a French operadancer,
Celine Varens, towards whom he had once cherished what he called
a "grande passion." This passion Celine had professed to return
with even superior ardour. He thought himself her idol, ugly as
he was he believed, as he said, that she preferred his "taille
d'athlete" to the elegance of the Apollo Belvidere.
"And, Miss Eyre, so much was I flattered by this preference of
the Gallic sylph for her British gnome, that I installed her in an
hotel gave her a complete establishment of servants, a carriage,
cashmeres, diamonds, dentelles, c. In short, I began the process
of ruining myself in the received style, like any other spoony. I
had not, it seems, the originality to chalk out a new road to shame
and destruction, but trode the old track with stupid exactness not
to deviate an inch from the beaten centre. I had  as I deserved
to have  the fate of all other spoonies. Happening to call one
evening when Celine did not expect me, I found her out but it was
a warm night, and I was tired with strolling through Paris, so I
sat down in her boudoir happy to breathe the air consecrated so
lately by her presence. No,  I exaggerate I never thought there
was any consecrating virtue about her it was rather a sort of
pastille perfume she had left a scent of musk and amber, than an
odour of sanctity. I was just beginning to stifle with the fumes
of conservatory flowers and sprinkled essences, when I bethought
myself to open the window and step out on to the balcony. It was
moonlight and gaslight besides, and very still and serene. The
balcony was furnished with a chair or two I sat down, and took
out a cigar,  I will take one now, if you will excuse me."
Here ensued a pause, filled up by the producing and lighting
of a cigar having placed it to his lips and breathed a trail
of Havannah incense on the freezing and sunless air, he went on 
"I liked bonbons too in those days, Miss Eyre, and I was croquant
overlook the barbarism  croquant chocolate comfits, and
smoking alternately, watching meantime the equipages that rolled
along the fashionable streets towards the neighbouring operahouse,
when in an elegant close carriage drawn by a beautiful pair of
English horses, and distinctly seen in the brilliant citynight,
I recognised the 'voiture' I had given Celine. She was returning
of course my heart thumped with impatience against the iron rails
I leant upon. The carriage stopped, as I had expected, at the
hotel door my flame that is the very word for an opera inamorata
alighted though muffed in a cloak  an unnecessary encumbrance,
bythebye, on so warm a June evening  I knew her instantly by
her little foot, seen peeping from the skirt of her dress, as she
skipped from the carriagestep. Bending over the balcony, I was
about to murmur 'Mon ange'  in a tone, of course, which should
be audible to the ear of love alone  when a figure jumped from
the carriage after her cloaked also but that was a spurred heel
which had rung on the pavement, and that was a hatted head which
now passed under the arched porte cochere of the hotel.
"You never felt jealousy, did you, Miss Eyre? Of course not I
need not ask you because you never felt love. You have both
sentiments yet to experience your soul sleeps the shock is yet
to be given which shall waken it. You think all existence lapses
in as quiet a flow as that in which your youth has hitherto slid
away. Floating on with closed eyes and muffled ears, you neither
see the rocks bristling not far off in the bed of the flood, nor
hear the breakers boil at their base. But I tell you  and you
may mark my words  you will come some day to a craggy pass in the
channel, where the whole of life's stream will be broken up into
whirl and tumult, foam and noise either you will be dashed to
atoms on crag points, or lifted up and borne on by some masterwave
into a calmer current  as I am now.
"I like this day I like that sky of steel I like the sternness
and stillness of the world under this frost. I like Thornfield,
its antiquity, its retirement, its old crowtrees and thorntrees,
its grey facade, and lines of dark windows reflecting that metal
welkin and yet how long have I abhorred the very thought of it,
shunned it like a great plaguehouse? How I do still abhor "
He ground his teeth and was silent he arrested his step and struck
his boot against the hard ground. Some hated thought seemed to
have him in its grip, and to hold him so tightly that he could not
advance.
We were ascending the avenue when he thus paused the hall was before
us. Lifting his eye to its battlements, he cast over them a glare
such as I never saw before or since. Pain, shame, ire, impatience,
disgust, detestation, seemed momentarily to hold a quivering conflict
in the large pupil dilating under his ebon eyebrow. Wild was the
wrestle which should be paramount but another feeling rose and
triumphed something hard and cynical selfwilled and resolute
it settled his passion and petrified his countenance he went on 
"During the moment I was silent, Miss Eyre, I was arranging a point
with my destiny. She stood there, by that beechtrunk  a hag
like one of those who appeared to Macbeth on the heath of Forres.
'You like Thornfield?' she said, lifting her finger and then she
wrote in the air a memento, which ran in lurid hieroglyphics all
along the housefront, between the upper and lower row of windows,
'Like it if you can Like it if you dare'
"'I will like it,' said I 'I dare like it' and" he subjoined
moodily "I will keep my word I will break obstacles to happiness,
to goodness  yes, goodness. I wish to be a better man than I
have been, than I am as Job's leviathan broke the spear, the dart,
and the habergeon, hindrances which others count as iron and brass,
I will esteem but straw and rotten wood."
Adele here ran before him with her shuttlecock. "Away" he cried
harshly "keep at a distance, child or go in to Sophie" Continuing
then to pursue his walk in silence, I ventured to recall
him to the point whence he had abruptly diverged 
"Did you leave the balcony, sir," I asked, "when Mdlle. Varens
entered?"
I almost expected a rebuff for this hardly welltimed question,
but, on the contrary, waking out of his scowling abstraction, he
turned his eyes towards me, and the shade seemed to clear off his
brow. "Oh, I had forgotten Celine Well, to resume. When I saw
my charmer thus come in accompanied by a cavalier, I seemed to
hear a hiss, and the green snake of jealousy, rising on undulating
coils from the moonlit balcony, glided within my waistcoat, and ate
its way in two minutes to my heart's core. Strange" he exclaimed,
suddenly starting again from the point. "Strange that I should
choose you for the confidant of all this, young lady passing
strange that you should listen to me quietly, as if it were the most
usual thing in the world for a man like me to tell stories of his
operamistresses to a quaint, inexperienced girl like you But the
last singularity explains the first, as I intimated once before
you, with your gravity, considerateness, and caution were made to
be the recipient of secrets. Besides, I know what sort of a mind
I have placed in communication with my own I know it is one not
liable to take infection it is a peculiar mind it is a unique
one. Happily I do not mean to harm it but, if I did, it would
not take harm from me. The more you and I converse, the better
for while I cannot blight you, you may refresh me." After
this digression he proceeded 
"I remained in the balcony. 'They will come to her boudoir, no
doubt,' thought I 'let me prepare an ambush.' So putting my hand
in through the open window, I drew the curtain over it, leaving only
an opening through which I could take observations then I closed
the casement, all but a chink just wide enough to furnish an outlet
to lovers' whispered vows then I stole back to my chair and as
I resumed it the pair came in. My eye was quickly at the aperture.
Celine's chambermaid entered, lit a lamp, left it on the table,
and withdrew. The couple were thus revealed to me clearly both
removed their cloaks, and there was 'the Varens,' shining in satin
and jewels,  my gifts of course,  and there was her companion
in an officer's uniform and I knew him for a young roue of a
vicomte  a brainless and vicious youth whom I had sometimes met
in society, and had never thought of hating because I despised him
so absolutely. On recognising him, the fang of the snake Jealousy
was instantly broken because at the same moment my love for Celine
sank under an extinguisher. A woman who could betray me for such
a rival was not worth contending for she deserved only scorn
less, however, than I, who had been her dupe.
"They began to talk their conversation eased me completely frivolous,
mercenary, heartless, and senseless, it was rather calculated to
weary than enrage a listener. A card of mine lay on the table
this being perceived, brought my name under discussion. Neither
of them possessed energy or wit to belabour me soundly, but they
insulted me as coarsely as they could in their little way especially
Celine, who even waxed rather brilliant on my personal defects 
deformities she termed them. Now it had been her custom to launch
out into fervent admiration of what she called my 'beaute male'
wherein she differed diametrically from you, who told me pointblank,
at the second interview, that you did not think me handsome. The
contrast struck me at the time and  "
Adele here came running up again.
"Monsieur, John has just been to say that your agent has called
and wishes to see you."
"Ah in that case I must abridge. Opening the window, I walked
in upon them liberated Celine from my protection gave her notice
to vacate her hotel offered her a purse for immediate exigencies
disregarded screams, hysterics, prayers, protestations, convulsions
made an appointment with the vicomte for a meeting at the Bois de
Boulogne. Next morning I had the pleasure of encountering him left
a bullet in one of his poor etiolated arms, feeble as the wing of
a chicken in the pip, and then thought I had done with the whole
crew. But unluckily the Varens, six months before, had given me
this filette Adele, who, she affirmed, was my daughter and perhaps
she may be, though I see no proofs of such grim paternity written
in her countenance Pilot is more like me than she. Some years
after I had broken with the mother, she abandoned her child, and
ran away to Italy with a musician or singer. I acknowledged no
natural claim on Adele's part to be supported by me, nor do I now
acknowledge any, for I am not her father but hearing that she was
quite destitute, I e'en took the poor thing out of the slime and
mud of Paris, and transplanted it here, to grow up clean in the
wholesome soil of an English country garden. Mrs. Fairfax found
you to train it but now you know that it is the illegitimate
offspring of a French opera girl, you will perhaps think differently
of your post and protegee you will be coming to me some day with
notice that you have found another place  that you beg me to look
out for a new governess, c.  Eh?"
"No Adele is not answerable for either her mother's faults or
yours I have a regard for her and now that I know she is, in a
sense, parentless  forsaken by her mother and disowned by you, sir
I shall cling closer to her than before. How could I possibly
prefer the spoilt pet of a wealthy family, who would hate her governess
as a nuisance, to a lonely little orphan, who leans towards her as
a friend?"
"Oh, that is the light in which you view it Well, I must go in
now and you too it darkens."
But I stayed out a few minutes longer with Adele and Pilot  ran
a race with her, and played a game of battledore and shuttlecock.
When we went in, and I had removed her bonnet and coat, I took her
on my knee kept her there an hour, allowing her to prattle as she
liked not rebuking even some little freedoms and trivialities into
which she was apt to stray when much noticed, and which betrayed
in her a superficiality of character, inherited probably from her
mother, hardly congenial to an English mind. Still she had her
merits and I was disposed to appreciate all that was good in her
to the utmost. I sought in her countenance and features a likeness
to Mr. Rochester, but found none no trait, no turn of expression
announced relationship. It was a pity if she could but have been
proved to resemble him, he would have thought more of her.
It was not till after I had withdrawn to my own chamber for the
night, that I steadily reviewed the tale Mr. Rochester had told me.
As he had said, there was probably nothing at all extraordinary
in the substance of the narrative itself a wealthy Englishman's
passion for a French dancer, and her treachery to him, were everyday
matters enough, no doubt, in society but there was something decidedly
strange in the paroxysm of emotion which had suddenly seized him
when he was in the act of expressing the present contentment of
his mood, and his newly revived pleasure in the old hall and its
environs. I meditated wonderingly on this incident but gradually
quitting it, as I found it for the present inexplicable, I turned to
the consideration of my master's manner to myself. The confidence
he had thought fit to repose in me seemed a tribute to my discretion I
regarded and accepted it as such. His deportment had now for some
weeks been more uniform towards me than at the first. I never seemed
in his way he did not take fits of chilling hauteur when he met
me unexpectedly, the encounter seemed welcome he had always a word
and sometimes a smile for me when summoned by formal invitation
to his presence, I was honoured by a cordiality of reception that
made me feel I really possessed the power to amuse him, and that
these evening conferences were sought as much for his pleasure as
for my benefit.
I, indeed, talked comparatively little, but I heard him talk with
relish. It was his nature to be communicative he liked to open
to a mind unacquainted with the world glimpses of its scenes and
ways I do not mean its corrupt scenes and wicked ways, but such
as derived their interest from the great scale on which they were
acted, the strange novelty by which they were characterised
and I had a keen delight in receiving the new ideas he offered,
in imagining the new pictures he portrayed, and following him in
thought through the new regions he disclosed, never startled or
troubled by one noxious allusion.
The ease of his manner freed me from painful restraint the friendly
frankness, as correct as cordial, with which he treated me, drew
me to him. I felt at times as if he were my relation rather than
my master yet he was imperious sometimes still but I did not mind
that I saw it was his way. So happy, so gratified did I become
with this new interest added to life, that I ceased to pine after
kindred my thin crescentdestiny seemed to enlarge the blanks
of existence were filled up my bodily health improved I gathered
flesh and strength.
And was Mr. Rochester now ugly in my eyes? No, reader gratitude,
and many associations, all pleasurable and genial, made his face
the object I best liked to see his presence in a room was more
cheering than the brightest fire. Yet I had not forgotten his faults
indeed, I could not, for he brought them frequently before me. He
was proud, sardonic, harsh to inferiority of every description
in my secret soul I knew that his great kindness to me was balanced
by unjust severity to many others. He was moody, too unaccountably
so I more than once, when sent for to read to him, found him sitting
in his library alone, with his head bent on his folded arms and,
when he looked up, a morose, almost a malignant, scowl blackened
his features. But I believed that his moodiness, his harshness,
and his former faults of morality I say FORMER, for now he seemed
corrected of them had their source in some cruel cross of fate.
I believed he was naturally a man of better tendencies, higher
principles, and purer tastes than such as circumstances had developed,
education instilled, or destiny encouraged. I thought there were
excellent materials in him though for the present they hung together
somewhat spoiled and tangled. I cannot deny that I grieved for his
grief, whatever that was, and would have given much to assuage it.
Though I had now extinguished my candle and was laid down in bed,
I could not sleep for thinking of his look when he paused in the
avenue, and told how his destiny had risen up before him, and dared
him to be happy at Thornfield.
"Why not?" I asked myself. "What alienates him from the house?
Will he leave it again soon? Mrs. Fairfax said he seldom stayed
here longer than a fortnight at a time and he has now been resident
eight weeks. If he does go, the change will be doleful. Suppose
he should be absent spring, summer, and autumn how joyless sunshine
and fine days will seem"
I hardly know whether I had slept or not after this musing at any
rate, I started wide awake on hearing a vague murmur, peculiar and
lugubrious, which sounded, I thought, just above me. I wished I
had kept my candle burning the night was drearily dark my spirits
were depressed. I rose and sat up in bed, listening. The sound
was hushed.
I tried again to sleep but my heart beat anxiously my inward
tranquillity was broken. The clock, far down in the hall, struck two.
Just then it seemed my chamberdoor was touched as if fingers had
swept the panels in groping a way along the dark gallery outside.
I said, "Who is there?" Nothing answered. I was chilled with
fear.
All at once I remembered that it might be Pilot, who, when the
kitchendoor chanced to be left open, not unfrequently found his
way up to the threshold of Mr. Rochester's chamber I had seen him
lying there myself in the mornings. The idea calmed me somewhat
I lay down. Silence composes the nerves and as an unbroken hush
now reigned again through the whole house, I began to feel the return
of slumber. But it was not fated that I should sleep that night.
A dream had scarcely approached my ear, when it fled affrighted,
scared by a marrowfreezing incident enough.
This was a demoniac laugh  low, suppressed, and deep  uttered,
as it seemed, at the very keyhole of my chamber door. The head of
my bed was near the door, and I thought at first the goblinlaugher
stood at my bedside  or rather, crouched by my pillow but I
rose, looked round, and could see nothing while, as I still gazed,
the unnatural sound was reiterated and I knew it came from behind
the panels. My first impulse was to rise and fasten the bolt my
next, again to cry out, "Who is there?"
Something gurgled and moaned. Ere long, steps retreated up the
gallery towards the thirdstorey staircase a door had lately been
made to shut in that staircase I heard it open and close, and all
was still.
"Was that Grace Poole? and is she possessed with a devil?" thought
I. Impossible now to remain longer by myself I must go to Mrs.
Fairfax. I hurried on my frock and a shawl I withdrew the bolt
and opened the door with a trembling hand. There was a candle
burning just outside, and on the matting in the gallery. I was
surprised at this circumstance but still more was I amazed to
perceive the air quite dim, as if filled with smoke and, while
looking to the right hand and left, to find whence these blue
wreaths issued, I became further aware of a strong smell of burning.
Something creaked it was a door ajar and that door was Mr.
Rochester's, and the smoke rushed in a cloud from thence. I thought
no more of Mrs. Fairfax I thought no more of Grace Poole, or the
laugh in an instant, I was within the chamber. Tongues of flame
darted round the bed the curtains were on fire. In the midst of
blaze and vapour, Mr. Rochester lay stretched motionless, in deep
sleep.
"Wake wake" I cried. I shook him, but he only murmured and
turned the smoke had stupefied him. Not a moment could be lost
the very sheets were kindling, I rushed to his basin and ewer
fortunately, one was wide and the other deep, and both were filled
with water. I heaved them up, deluged the bed and its occupant,
flew back to my own room, brought my own waterjug, baptized the
couch afresh, and, by God's aid, succeeded in extinguishing the
flames which were devouring it.
The hiss of the quenched element, the breakage of a pitcher which
I flung from my hand when I had emptied it, and, above all, the
splash of the showerbath I had liberally bestowed, roused Mr.
Rochester at last. Though it was now dark, I knew he was awake
because I heard him fulminating strange anathemas at finding himself
lying in a pool of water.
"Is there a flood?" he cried.
"No, sir," I answered "but there has been a fire get up, do
you are quenched now I will fetch you a candle."
"In the name of all the elves in Christendom, is that Jane Eyre?"
he demanded. "What have you done with me, witch, sorceress? Who
is in the room besides you? Have you plotted to drown me?"
"I will fetch you a candle, sir and, in Heaven's name, get up.
Somebody has plotted something you cannot too soon find out who
and what it is."
"There I am up now but at your peril you fetch a candle yet
wait two minutes till I get into some dry garments, if any dry
there be  yes, here is my dressinggown. Now run"
I did run I brought the candle which still remained in the
gallery. He took it from my hand, held it up, and surveyed the
bed, all blackened and scorched, the sheets drenched, the carpet
round swimming in water.
"What is it? and who did it?" he asked. I briefly related to him
what had transpired the strange laugh I had heard in the gallery
the step ascending to the third storey the smoke,  the smell of
fire which had conducted me to his room in what state I had found
matters there, and how I had deluged him with all the water I could
lay hands on.
He listened very gravely his face, as I went on, expressed more
concern than astonishment he did not immediately speak when I had
concluded.
"Shall I call Mrs. Fairfax?" I asked.
"Mrs. Fairfax? No what the deuce would you call her for? What
can she do? Let her sleep unmolested."
"Then I will fetch Leah, and wake John and his wife."
"Not at all just be still. You have a shawl on. If you are not
warm enough, you may take my cloak yonder wrap it about you, and
sit down in the armchair there,  I will put it on. Now place
your feet on the stool, to keep them out of the wet. I am going
to leave you a few minutes. I shall take the candle. Remain where
you are till I return be as still as a mouse. I must pay a visit
to the second storey. Don't move, remember, or call any one."
He went I watched the light withdraw. He passed up the gallery
very softly, unclosed the staircase door with as little noise as
possible, shut it after him, and the last ray vanished. I was left
in total darkness. I listened for some noise, but heard nothing.
A very long time elapsed. I grew weary it was cold, in spite of
the cloak and then I did not see the use of staying, as I was not
to rouse the house. I was on the point of risking Mr. Rochester's
displeasure by disobeying his orders, when the light once more
gleamed dimly on the gallery wall, and I heard his unshod feet
tread the matting. "I hope it is he," thought I, "and not something
worse."
He reentered, pale and very gloomy. "I have found it all out,"
said he, setting his candle down on the washstand "it is as I
thought."
"How, sir?"
He made no reply, but stood with his arms folded, looking on the
ground. At the end of a few minutes he inquired in rather
a peculiar tone 
"I forget whether you said you saw anything when you opened your
chamber door."
"No, sir, only the candlestick on the ground."
"But you heard an odd laugh? You have heard that laugh before, I
should think, or something like it?"
"Yes, sir there is a woman who sews here, called Grace Poole, 
she laughs in that way. She is a singular person."
"Just so. Grace Poole  you have guessed it. She is, as you say,
singular  very. Well, I shall reflect on the subject. Meantime,
I am glad that you are the only person, besides myself, acquainted
with the precise details of tonight's incident. You are no talking
fool say nothing about it. I will account for this state of
affairs" pointing to the bed "and now return to your own room.
I shall do very well on the sofa in the library for the rest of the
night. It is near four in two hours the servants will be up."
"Goodnight, then, sir," said I, departing.
He seemed surprised  very inconsistently so, as he had just told
me to go.
"What" he exclaimed, "are you quitting me already, and in that
way?"
"You said I might go, sir."
"But not without taking leave not without a word or two of
acknowledgment and goodwill not, in short, in that brief, dry
fashion. Why, you have saved my life  snatched me from a horrible
and excruciating death and you walk past me as if we were mutual
strangers At least shake hands."
He held out his hand I gave him mine he took it first in one,
them in both his own.
"You have saved my life I have a pleasure in owing you so immense a
debt. I cannot say more. Nothing else that has being would have
been tolerable to me in the character of creditor for such an
obligation but you it is different  I feel your benefits no
burden, Jane."
He paused gazed at me words almost visible trembled on his lips,
but his voice was checked.
"Goodnight again, sir. There is no debt, benefit, burden,
obligation, in the case."
"I knew," he continued, "you would do me good in some way, at some
time  I saw it in your eyes when I first beheld you their
expression and smile did not"  again he stopped  "did not"
he proceeded hastily "strike delight to my very inmost heart so
for nothing. People talk of natural sympathies I have heard of
good genii there are grains of truth in the wildest fable. My
cherished preserver, goodnight"
Strange energy was in his voice, strange fire in his look.
"I am glad I happened to be awake," I said and then I was going.
"What you WILL go?"
"I am cold, sir."
"Cold? Yes,  and standing in a pool Go, then, Jane go" But
he still retained my hand, and I could not free it. I bethought
myself of an expedient.
"I think I hear Mrs. Fairfax move, sir," said I.
"Well, leave me" he relaxed his fingers, and I was gone.
I regained my couch, but never thought of sleep. Till morning
dawned I was tossed on a buoyant but unquiet sea, where billows
of trouble rolled under surges of joy. I thought sometimes I saw
beyond its wild waters a shore, sweet as the hills of Beulah and
now and then a freshening gale, wakened by hope, bore my spirit
triumphantly towards the bourne but I could not reach it, even
in fancy  a counteracting breeze blew off land, and continually
drove me back. Sense would resist delirium judgment would warn
passion. Too feverish to rest, I rose as soon as day dawned.
CHAPTER XVI
I both wished and feared to see Mr. Rochester on the day which
followed this sleepless night I wanted to hear his voice again,
yet feared to meet his eye. During the early part of the morning,
I momentarily expected his coming he was not in the frequent habit
of entering the schoolroom, but he did step in for a few minutes
sometimes, and I had the impression that he was sure to visit it
that day.
But the morning passed just as usual nothing happened to interrupt
the quiet course of Adele's studies only soon after breakfast, I
heard some bustle in the neighbourhood of Mr. Rochester's chamber,
Mrs. Fairfax's voice, and Leah's, and the cook's  that is, John's
wife  and even John's own gruff tones. There were exclamations
of "What a mercy master was not burnt in his bed" "It is always
dangerous to keep a candle lit at night." "How providential that
he had presence of mind to think of the waterjug" "I wonder
he waked nobody" "It is to be hoped he will not take cold with
sleeping on the library sofa," c.
To much confabulation succeeded a sound of scrubbing and setting to
rights and when I passed the room, in going downstairs to dinner,
I saw through the open door that all was again restored to complete
order only the bed was stripped of its hangings. Leah stood up
in the windowseat, rubbing the panes of glass dimmed with smoke.
I was about to address her, for I wished to know what account had
been given of the affair but, on advancing, I saw a second person
in the chamber  a woman sitting on a chair by the bedside, and
sewing rings to new curtains. That woman was no other than Grace
Poole.
There she sat, staid and taciturnlooking, as usual, in her brown
stuff gown, her check apron, white handkerchief, and cap. She was
intent on her work, in which her whole thoughts seemed absorbed
on her hard forehead, and in her commonplace features, was nothing
either of the paleness or desperation one would have expected to
see marking the countenance of a woman who had attempted murder, and
whose intended victim had followed her last night to her lair, and
as I believed, charged her with the crime she wished to perpetrate.
I was amazed  confounded. She looked up, while I still gazed at
her no start, no increase or failure of colour betrayed emotion,
consciousness of guilt, or fear of detection. She said "Good
morning, Miss," in her usual phlegmatic and brief manner and taking
up another ring and more tape, went on with her sewing.
"I will put her to some test," thought I "such absolute impenetrability
is past comprehension."
"Good morning, Grace," I said. "Has anything happened here? I
thought I heard the servants all talking together a while ago."
"Only master had been reading in his bed last night he fell asleep
with his candle lit, and the curtains got on fire but, fortunately,
he awoke before the bedclothes or the woodwork caught, and
contrived to quench the flames with the water in the ewer."
"A strange affair" I said, in a low voice then, looking at her
fixedly  "Did Mr. Rochester wake nobody? Did no one hear him
move?"
She again raised her eyes to me, and this time there was something
of consciousness in their expression. She seemed to examine
me warily then she answered 
"The servants sleep so far off, you know, Miss, they would not be
likely to hear. Mrs. Fairfax's room and yours are the nearest to
master's but Mrs. Fairfax said she heard nothing when people
get elderly, they often sleep heavy." She paused, and then added,
with a sort of assumed indifference, but still in a marked and
significant tone  "But you are young, Miss and I should say a
light sleeper perhaps you may have heard a noise?"
"I did," said I, dropping my voice, so that Leah, who was still
polishing the panes, could not hear me, "and at first I thought
it was Pilot but Pilot cannot laugh and I am certain I heard a
laugh, and a strange one."
She took a new needleful of thread, waxed it carefully, threaded her
needle with a steady hand, and then observed, with perfect composure 
"It is hardly likely master would laugh, I should think, Miss, when
he was in such danger You must have been dreaming."
"I was not dreaming," I said, with some warmth, for her brazen
coolness provoked me. Again she looked at me and with the same
scrutinising and conscious eye.
"Have you told master that you heard a laugh?" she inquired.
"I have not had the opportunity of speaking to him this morning."
"You did not think of opening your door and looking out into the
gallery?" she further asked.
She appeared to be crossquestioning me, attempting to draw from
me information unawares. The idea struck me that if she discovered
I knew or suspected her guilt, she would be playing of some of her
malignant pranks on me I thought it advisable to be on my guard.
"On the contrary," said I, "I bolted my door."
"Then you are not in the habit of bolting your door every night
before you get into bed?"
"Fiend she wants to know my habits, that she may lay her plans
accordingly" Indignation again prevailed over prudence I replied
sharply, "Hitherto I have often omitted to fasten the bolt I did
not think it necessary. I was not aware any danger or annoyance
was to be dreaded at Thornfield Hall but in future" and I laid
marked stress on the words "I shall take good care to make all
secure before I venture to lie down."
"It will be wise so to do," was her answer "this neighbourhood
is as quiet as any I know, and I never heard of the hall being
attempted by robbers since it was a house though there are hundreds
of pounds' worth of plate in the platecloset, as is well known.
And you see, for such a large house, there are very few servants,
because master has never lived here much and when he does come,
being a bachelor, he needs little waiting on but I always think
it best to err on the safe side a door is soon fastened, and it
is as well to have a drawn bolt between one and any mischief that
may be about. A deal of people, Miss, are for trusting all to
Providence but I say Providence will not dispense with the means,
though He often blesses them when they are used discreetly." And
here she closed her harangue a long one for her, and uttered with
the demureness of a Quakeress.
I still stood absolutely dumfoundered at what appeared to me her
miraculous selfpossession and most inscrutable hypocrisy, when
the cook entered.
"Mrs. Poole," said she, addressing Grace, "the servants' dinner
will soon be ready will you come down?"
"No just put my pint of porter and bit of pudding on a tray, and
I'll carry it upstairs."
"You'll have some meat?"
"Just a morsel, and a taste of cheese, that's all."
"And the sago?"
"Never mind it at present I shall be coming down before teatime
I'll make it myself."
The cook here turned to me, saying that Mrs. Fairfax was waiting
for me so I departed.
I hardly heard Mrs. Fairfax's account of the curtain conflagration
during dinner, so much was I occupied in puzzling my brains over the
enigmatical character of Grace Poole, and still more in pondering
the problem of her position at Thornfield and questioning why
she had not been given into custody that morning, or, at the very
least, dismissed from her master's service. He had almost as much
as declared his conviction of her criminality last night what
mysterious cause withheld him from accusing her? Why had he
enjoined me, too, to secrecy? It was strange a bold, vindictive,
and haughty gentleman seemed somehow in the power of one of the
meanest of his dependants so much in her power, that even when
she lifted her hand against his life, he dared not openly charge
her with the attempt, much less punish her for it.
Had Grace been young and handsome, I should have been tempted to
think that tenderer feelings than prudence or fear influenced Mr.
Rochester in her behalf but, hardfavoured and matronly as she
was, the idea could not be admitted. "Yet," I reflected, "she has
been young once her youth would be contemporary with her master's
Mrs. Fairfax told me once, she had lived here many years. I don't
think she can ever have been pretty but, for aught I know, she
may possess originality and strength of character to compensate
for the want of personal advantages. Mr. Rochester is an amateur
of the decided and eccentric Grace is eccentric at least. What
if a former caprice a freak very possible to a nature so sudden and
headstrong as his has delivered him into her power, and she now
exercises over his actions a secret influence, the result of his own
indiscretion, which he cannot shake off, and dare not disregard?"
But, having reached this point of conjecture, Mrs. Poole's square,
flat figure, and uncomely, dry, even coarse face, recurred so
distinctly to my mind's eye, that I thought, "No impossible my
supposition cannot be correct. Yet," suggested the secret voice
which talks to us in our own hearts, "you are not beautiful either,
and perhaps Mr. Rochester approves you at any rate, you have often
felt as if he did and last night  remember his words remember
his look remember his voice"
I well remembered all language, glance, and tone seemed at the
moment vividly renewed. I was now in the schoolroom Adele was
drawing I bent over her and directed her pencil. She looked up
with a sort of start.
"Qu' avezvous, mademoiselle?" said she. "Vos doigts tremblent
comme la feuille, et vos joues sont rouges mais, rouges comme
des cerises"
"I am hot, Adele, with stooping" She went on sketching I went
on thinking.
I hastened to drive from my mind the hateful notion I had been
conceiving respecting Grace Poole it disgusted me. I compared
myself with her, and found we were different. Bessie Leaven had
said I was quite a lady and she spoke truth  I was a lady. And
now I looked much better than I did when Bessie saw me I had more
colour and more flesh, more life, more vivacity, because I had
brighter hopes and keener enjoyments.
"Evening approaches," said I, as I looked towards the window. "I
have never heard Mr. Rochester's voice or step in the house today
but surely I shall see him before night I feared the meeting in
the morning now I desire it, because expectation has been so long
baffled that it is grown impatient."
When dusk actually closed, and when Adele left me to go and play in
the nursery with Sophie, I did most keenly desire it. I listened
for the bell to ring below I listened for Leah coming up with
a message I fancied sometimes I heard Mr. Rochester's own tread,
and I turned to the door, expecting it to open and admit him.
The door remained shut darkness only came in through the window.
Still it was not late he often sent for me at seven and eight
o'clock, and it was yet but six. Surely I should not be wholly
disappointed to night, when I had so many things to say to him I
wanted again to introduce the subject of Grace Poole, and to hear
what he would answer I wanted to ask him plainly if he really
believed it was she who had made last night's hideous attempt and
if so, why he kept her wickedness a secret. It little mattered
whether my curiosity irritated him I knew the pleasure of vexing
and soothing him by turns it was one I chiefly delighted in, and
a sure instinct always prevented me from going too far beyond
the verge of provocation I never ventured on the extreme brink I
liked well to try my skill. Retaining every minute form of respect,
every propriety of my station, I could still meet him in argument
without fear or uneasy restraint this suited both him and me.
A tread creaked on the stairs at last. Leah made her appearance
but it was only to intimate that tea was ready in Mrs. Fairfax's
room. Thither I repaired, glad at least to go downstairs for that
brought me, I imagined, nearer to Mr. Rochester's presence.
"You must want your tea," said the good lady, as I joined her
"you ate so little at dinner. I am afraid," she continued, "you
are not well today you look flushed and feverish."
"Oh, quite well I never felt better."
"Then you must prove it by evincing a good appetite will you fill
the teapot while I knit off this needle?" Having completed her
task, she rose to draw down the blind, which she had hitherto kept
up, by way, I suppose, of making the most of daylight, though dusk
was now fast deepening into total obscurity.
"It is fair tonight," said she, as she looked through the panes,
"though not starlight Mr. Rochester has, on the whole, had a
favourable day for his journey."
"Journey  Is Mr. Rochester gone anywhere? I did not know he
was out."
"Oh, he set off the moment he had breakfasted He is gone to the
Leas, Mr. Eshton's place, ten miles on the other side Millcote. I
believe there is quite a party assembled there Lord Ingram, Sir
George Lynn, Colonel Dent, and others."
"Do you expect him back tonight?"
"No  nor tomorrow either I should think he is very likely to stay
a week or more when these fine, fashionable people get together,
they are so surrounded by elegance and gaiety, so well provided with
all that can please and entertain, they are in no hurry to separate.
Gentlemen especially are often in request on such occasions and Mr.
Rochester is so talented and so lively in society, that I believe he
is a general favourite the ladies are very fond of him though
you would not think his appearance calculated to recommend him
particularly in their eyes but I suppose his acquirements and
abilities, perhaps his wealth and good blood, make amends for any
little fault of look."
"Are there ladies at the Leas?"
"There are Mrs. Eshton and her three daughters  very elegant young
ladies indeed and there are the Honourable Blanche and Mary Ingram,
most beautiful women, I suppose indeed I have seen Blanche, six
or seven years since, when she was a girl of eighteen. She came
here to a Christmas ball and party Mr. Rochester gave. You should
have seen the diningroom that day  how richly it was decorated,
how brilliantly lit up I should think there were fifty ladies
and gentlemen present  all of the first county families and Miss
Ingram was considered the belle of the evening."
"You saw her, you say, Mrs. Fairfax what was she like?"
"Yes, I saw her. The diningroom doors were thrown open and, as
it was Christmastime, the servants were allowed to assemble in
the hall, to hear some of the ladies sing and play. Mr. Rochester
would have me to come in, and I sat down in a quiet corner and
watched them. I never saw a more splendid scene the ladies were
magnificently dressed most of them  at least most of the younger
ones  looked handsome but Miss Ingram was certainly the queen."
"And what was she like?"
"Tall, fine bust, sloping shoulders long, graceful neck olive
complexion, dark and clear noble features eyes rather like Mr.
Rochester's large and black, and as brilliant as her jewels. And
then she had such a fine head of hair ravenblack and so becomingly
arranged a crown of thick plaits behind, and in front the longest,
the glossiest curls I ever saw. She was dressed in pure white an
ambercoloured scarf was passed over her shoulder and across her
breast, tied at the side, and descending in long, fringed ends
below her knee. She wore an ambercoloured flower, too, in her
hair it contrasted well with the jetty mass of her curls."
"She was greatly admired, of course?"
"Yes, indeed and not only for her beauty, but for her accomplishments.
She was one of the ladies who sang a gentleman accompanied her
on the piano. She and Mr. Rochester sang a duet."
"Mr. Rochester? I was not aware he could sing."
"Oh he has a fine bass voice, and an excellent taste for music."
"And Miss Ingram what sort of a voice had she?"
"A very rich and powerful one she sang delightfully it was a treat
to listen to her  and she played afterwards. I am no judge of
music, but Mr. Rochester is and I heard him say her execution was
remarkably good."
"And this beautiful and accomplished lady, she is not yet married?"
"It appears not I fancy neither she nor her sister have very
large fortunes. Old Lord Ingram's estates were chiefly entailed,
and the eldest son came in for everything almost."
"But I wonder no wealthy nobleman or gentleman has taken a fancy
to her Mr. Rochester, for instance. He is rich, is he not?"
"Oh yes. But you see there is a considerable difference in age
Mr. Rochester is nearly forty she is but twentyfive."
"What of that? More unequal matches are made every day."
"True yet I should scarcely fancy Mr. Rochester would entertain
an idea of the sort. But you eat nothing you have scarcely tasted
since you began tea."
"No I am too thirsty to eat. Will you let me have another cup?"
I was about again to revert to the probability of a union between
Mr. Rochester and the beautiful Blanche but Adele came in, and
the conversation was turned into another channel.
When once more alone, I reviewed the information I had got looked
into my heart, examined its thoughts and feelings, and endeavoured
to bring back with a strict hand such as had been straying through
imagination's boundless and trackless waste, into the safe fold of
common sense.
Arraigned at my own bar, Memory having given her evidence of the
hopes, wishes, sentiments I had been cherishing since last night
of the general state of mind in which I had indulged for nearly
a fortnight past Reason having come forward and told, in her own
quiet way a plain, unvarnished tale, showing how I had rejected the
real, and rabidly devoured the ideal  I pronounced judgment to
this effect
That a greater fool than Jane Eyre had never breathed the breath
of life that a more fantastic idiot had never surfeited herself
on sweet lies, and swallowed poison as if it were nectar.
"YOU," I said, "a favourite with Mr. Rochester? YOU gifted with the
power of pleasing him? YOU of importance to him in any way? Go
your folly sickens me. And you have derived pleasure from occasional
tokens of preference  equivocal tokens shown by a gentleman of
family and a man of the world to a dependent and a novice. How
dared you? Poor stupid dupe  Could not even selfinterest make
you wiser? You repeated to yourself this morning the brief scene
of last night?  Cover your face and be ashamed He said something
in praise of your eyes, did he? Blind puppy Open their bleared
lids and look on your own accursed senselessness It does good
to no woman to be flattered by her superior, who cannot possibly
intend to marry her and it is madness in all women to let a secret
love kindle within them, which, if unreturned and unknown, must
devour the life that feeds it and, if discovered and responded
to, must lead, ignisfatuslike, into miry wilds whence there is
no extrication.
"Listen, then, Jane Eyre, to your sentence tomorrow, place the
glass before you, and draw in chalk your own picture, faithfully,
without softening one defect omit no harsh line, smooth away no
displeasing irregularity write under it, 'Portrait of a Governess,
disconnected, poor, and plain.'
"Afterwards, take a piece of smooth ivory  you have one prepared
in your drawingbox take your palette, mix your freshest, finest,
clearest tints choose your most delicate camelhair pencils
delineate carefully the loveliest face you can imagine paint
it in your softest shades and sweetest lines, according to the
description given by Mrs. Fairfax of Blanche Ingram remember the
raven ringlets, the oriental eye  What you revert to Mr. Rochester
as a model Order No snivel  no sentiment  no regret I
will endure only sense and resolution. Recall the august yet
harmonious lineaments, the Grecian neck and bust let the round
and dazzling arm be visible, and the delicate hand omit neither
diamond ring nor gold bracelet portray faithfully the attire,
aerial lace and glistening satin, graceful scarf and golden rose
call it 'Blanche, an accomplished lady of rank.'
"Whenever, in future, you should chance to fancy Mr. Rochester
thinks well of you, take out these two pictures and compare them
say, 'Mr. Rochester might probably win that noble lady's love, if
he chose to strive for it is it likely he would waste a serious
thought on this indigent and insignificant plebeian?'"
"I'll do it," I resolved and having framed this determination,
I grew calm, and fell asleep.
I kept my word. An hour or two sufficed to sketch my own portrait
in crayons and in less than a fortnight I had completed an ivory
miniature of an imaginary Blanche Ingram. It looked a lovely face
enough, and when compared with the real head in chalk, the contrast
was as great as selfcontrol could desire. I derived benefit from
the task it had kept my head and hands employed, and had given
force and fixedness to the new impressions I wished to stamp
indelibly on my heart.
Ere long, I had reason to congratulate myself on the course
of wholesome discipline to which I had thus forced my feelings to
submit. Thanks to it, I was able to meet subsequent occurrences
with a decent calm, which, had they found me unprepared, I should
probably have been unequal to maintain, even externally.
CHAPTER XVII
A week passed, and no news arrived of Mr. Rochester ten days,
and still he did not come. Mrs. Fairfax said she should not be
surprised if he were to go straight from the Leas to London, and
thence to the Continent, and not show his face again at Thornfield
for a year to come he had not unfrequently quitted it in a manner
quite as abrupt and unexpected. When I heard this, I was beginning
to feel a strange chill and failing at the heart. I was actually
permitting myself to experience a sickening sense of disappointment
but rallying my wits, and recollecting my principles, I at once
called my sensations to order and it was wonderful how I got over
the temporary blunder  how I cleared up the mistake of supposing
Mr. Rochester's movements a matter in which I had any cause to take
a vital interest. Not that I humbled myself by a slavish
notion of inferiority on the contrary, I just said 
"You have nothing to do with the master of Thornfield, further than
to receive the salary he gives you for teaching his protegee, and
to be grateful for such respectful and kind treatment as, if you do
your duty, you have a right to expect at his hands. Be sure that
is the only tie he seriously acknowledges between you and him so
don't make him the object of your fine feelings, your raptures,
agonies, and so forth. He is not of your order keep to your
caste, and be too selfrespecting to lavish the love of the whole
heart, soul, and strength, where such a gift is not wanted and
would be despised."
I went on with my day's business tranquilly but ever and anon
vague suggestions kept wandering across my brain of reasons why I
should quit Thornfield and I kept involuntarily framing advertisements
and pondering conjectures about new situations these thoughts I
did not think to check they might germinate and bear fruit if they
could.
Mr. Rochester had been absent upwards of a fortnight, when the post
brought Mrs. Fairfax a letter.
"It is from the master," said she, as she looked at the direction.
"Now I suppose we shall know whether we are to expect his return
or not."
And while she broke the seal and perused the document, I went on
taking my coffee we were at breakfast it was hot, and I attributed
to that circumstance a fiery glow which suddenly rose to my face.
Why my hand shook, and why I involuntarily spilt half the contents
of my cup into my saucer, I did not choose to consider.
"Well, I sometimes think we are too quiet but we run a chance of
being busy enough now for a little while at least," said Mrs.
Fairfax, still holding the note before her spectacles.
Ere I permitted myself to request an explanation, I tied the string
of Adele's pinafore, which happened to be loose having helped her
also to another bun and refilled her mug with milk, I said, nonchalantly 
"Mr. Rochester is not likely to return soon, I suppose?"
"Indeed he is  in three days, he says that will be next Thursday
and not alone either. I don't know how many of the fine people
at the Leas are coming with him he sends directions for all the
best bedrooms to be prepared and the library and drawingrooms are
to be cleaned out I am to get more kitchen hands from the George
Inn, at Millcote, and from wherever else I can and the ladies will
bring their maids and the gentlemen their valets so we shall have
a full house of it." And Mrs. Fairfax swallowed her breakfast and
hastened away to commence operations.
The three days were, as she had foretold, busy enough. I had thought
all the rooms at Thornfield beautifully clean and well arranged
but it appears I was mistaken. Three women were got to help and
such scrubbing, such brushing, such washing of paint and beating of
carpets, such taking down and putting up of pictures, such polishing
of mirrors and lustres, such lighting of fires in bedrooms, such
airing of sheets and featherbeds on hearths, I never beheld,
either before or since. Adele ran quite wild in the midst of it
the preparations for company and the prospect of their arrival,
seemed to throw her into ecstasies. She would have Sophie to look
over all her "toilettes," as she called frocks to furbish up any
that were "passees," and to air and arrange the new. For herself,
she did nothing but caper about in the front chambers, jump on and
off the bedsteads, and lie on the mattresses and piledup bolsters
and pillows before the enormous fires roaring in the chimneys.
From school duties she was exonerated Mrs. Fairfax had pressed
me into her service, and I was all day in the storeroom, helping
or hindering her and the cook learning to make custards and
cheesecakes and French pastry, to truss game and garnish desertdishes.
The party were expected to arrive on Thursday afternoon, in time
for dinner at six. During the intervening period I had no time to
nurse chimeras and I believe I was as active and gay as anybody
Adele excepted. Still, now and then, I received a damping check
to my cheerfulness and was, in spite of myself, thrown back on
the region of doubts and portents, and dark conjectures. This was
when I chanced to see the thirdstorey staircase door which of
late had always been kept locked open slowly, and give passage to
the form of Grace Poole, in prim cap, white apron, and handkerchief when
I watched her glide along the gallery, her quiet tread muffled in
a list slipper when I saw her look into the bustling, topsyturvy
bedrooms,  just say a word, perhaps, to the charwoman about the
proper way to polish a grate, or clean a marble mantelpiece, or
take stains from papered walls, and then pass on. She would thus
descend to the kitchen once a day, eat her dinner, smoke a moderate
pipe on the hearth, and go back, carrying her pot of porter with
her, for her private solace, in her own gloomy, upper haunt. Only
one hour in the twentyfour did she pass with her fellowservants
below all the rest of her time was spent in some lowceiled,
oaken chamber of the second storey there she sat and sewed 
and probably laughed drearily to herself,  as companionless as
a prisoner in his dungeon.
The strangest thing of all was, that not a soul in the house,
except me, noticed her habits, or seemed to marvel at them no one
discussed her position or employment no one pitied her solitude
or isolation. I once, indeed, overheard part of a dialogue between
Leah and one of the charwomen, of which Grace formed the subject.
Leah had been saying something I had not caught, and the
charwoman remarked 
"She gets good wages, I guess?"
"Yes," said Leah "I wish I had as good not that mine are to
complain of,  there's no stinginess at Thornfield but they're
not one fifth of the sum Mrs. Poole receives. And she is laying
by she goes every quarter to the bank at Millcote. I should
not wonder but she has saved enough to keep her independent if she
liked to leave but I suppose she's got used to the place and then
she's not forty yet, and strong and able for anything. It is too
soon for her to give up business."
"She is a good hand, I daresay," said the charwoman.
"Ah  she understands what she has to do,  nobody better,"
rejoined Leah significantly "and it is not every one could fill
her shoes  not for all the money she gets."
"That it is not" was the reply. "I wonder whether the master  "
The charwoman was going on but here Leah turned and perceived me,
and she instantly gave her companion a nudge.
"Doesn't she know?" I heard the woman whisper.
Leah shook her head, and the conversation was of course dropped.
All I had gathered from it amounted to this,  that there was a
mystery at Thornfield and that from participation in that mystery
I was purposely excluded.
Thursday came all work had been completed the previous evening
carpets were laid down, bedhangings festooned, radiant white
counterpanes spread, toilet tables arranged, furniture rubbed,
flowers piled in vases both chambers and saloons looked as fresh
and bright as hands could make them. The hall, too, was scoured
and the great carved clock, as well as the steps and banisters of
the staircase, were polished to the brightness of glass in the
diningroom, the sideboard flashed resplendent with plate in the
drawingroom and boudoir, vases of exotics bloomed on all sides.
Afternoon arrived Mrs. Fairfax assumed her best black satin gown,
her gloves, and her gold watch for it was her part to receive the
company,  to conduct the ladies to their rooms, c. Adele, too,
would be dressed though I thought she had little chance of being
introduced to the party that day at least. However, to please her,
I allowed Sophie to apparel her in one of her short, full muslin
frocks. For myself, I had no need to make any change I should not
be called upon to quit my sanctum of the schoolroom for a sanctum
it was now become to me,  "a very pleasant refuge in time of
trouble."
It had been a mild, serene spring day  one of those days which,
towards the end of March or the beginning of April, rise shining
over the earth as heralds of summer. It was drawing to an end now
but the evening was even warm, and I sat at work in the schoolroom
with the window open.
"It gets late," said Mrs. Fairfax, entering in rustling state.
"I am glad I ordered dinner an hour after the time Mr. Rochester
mentioned for it is past six now. I have sent John down to the
gates to see if there is anything on the road one can see a long
way from thence in the direction of Millcote." She went to the
window. "Here he is" said she. "Well, John" leaning out, "any
news?"
"They're coming, ma'am," was the answer. "They'll be here in ten
minutes."
Adele flew to the window. I followed, taking care to stand on one
side, so that, screened by the curtain, I could see without being
seen.
The ten minutes John had given seemed very long, but at last wheels
were heard four equestrians galloped up the drive, and after them
came two open carriages. Fluttering veils and waving plumes filled
the vehicles two of the cavaliers were young, dashinglooking
gentlemen the third was Mr. Rochester, on his black horse, Mesrour,
Pilot bounding before him at his side rode a lady, and he and she
were the first of the party. Her purple ridinghabit almost swept
the ground, her veil streamed long on the breeze mingling with
its transparent folds, and gleaming through them, shone rich raven
ringlets.
"Miss Ingram" exclaimed Mrs. Fairfax, and away she hurried to
her post below.
The cavalcade, following the sweep of the drive, quickly turned the
angle of the house, and I lost sight of it. Adele now petitioned
to go down but I took her on my knee, and gave her to understand
that she must not on any account think of venturing in sight of
the ladies, either now or at any other time, unless expressly sent
for that Mr. Rochester would be very angry, c. "Some natural
tears she shed" on being told this but as I began to look very
grave, she consented at last to wipe them.
A joyous stir was now audible in the hall gentlemen's deep
tones and ladies' silvery accents blent harmoniously together, and
distinguishable above all, though not loud, was the sonorous voice
of the master of Thornfield Hall, welcoming his fair and gallant
guests under its roof. Then light steps ascended the stairs and
there was a tripping through the gallery, and soft cheerful laughs,
and opening and closing doors, and, for a time, a hush.
"Elles changent de toilettes," said Adele who, listening attentively,
had followed every movement and she sighed.
"Chez maman," said she, "quand il y avait du monde, je le suivais
partout, au salon et e leurs chambres souvent je regardais les
femmes de chambre coiffer et habiller les dames, et c'etait si
amusant comme cela on apprend."
"Don't you feel hungry, Adele?"
"Mais oui, mademoiselle voile cinq ou six heures que nous n'avons
pas mange."
"Well now, while the ladies are in their rooms, I will venture down
and get you something to eat."
And issuing from my asylum with precaution, I sought a backstairs
which conducted directly to the kitchen. All in that region was
fire and commotion the soup and fish were in the last stage of
projection, and the cook hung over her crucibles in a frame of mind
and body threatening spontaneous combustion. In the servants' hall
two coachmen and three gentlemen's gentlemen stood or sat round the
fire the abigails, I suppose, were upstairs with their mistresses
the new servants, that had been hired from Millcote, were bustling
about everywhere. Threading this chaos, I at last reached the
larder there I took possession of a cold chicken, a roll of bread,
some tarts, a plate or two and a knife and fork with this booty
I made a hasty retreat. I had regained the gallery, and was just
shutting the backdoor behind me, when an accelerated hum warned me
that the ladies were about to issue from their chambers. I could
not proceed to the schoolroom without passing some of their doors,
and running the risk of being surprised with my cargo of victualage
so I stood still at this end, which, being windowless, was dark
quite dark now, for the sun was set and twilight gathering.
Presently the chambers gave up their fair tenants one after another
each came out gaily and airily, with dress that gleamed lustrous
through the dusk. For a moment they stood grouped together at
the other extremity of the gallery, conversing in a key of sweet
subdued vivacity they then descended the staircase almost as
noiselessly as a bright mist rolls down a hill. Their collective
appearance had left on me an impression of highborn elegance, such
as I had never before received.
I found Adele peeping through the schoolroom door, which she held
ajar. "What beautiful ladies" cried she in English. "Oh, I wish
I might go to them Do you think Mr. Rochester will send for us
byandbye, after dinner?"
"No, indeed, I don't Mr. Rochester has something else to think
about. Never mind the ladies tonight perhaps you will see them
tomorrow here is your dinner."
She was really hungry, so the chicken and tarts served to divert
her attention for a time. It was well I secured this forage, or
both she, I, and Sophie, to whom I conveyed a share of our repast,
would have run a chance of getting no dinner at all every one
downstairs was too much engaged to think of us. The dessert was not
carried out till after nine and at ten footmen were still running
to and fro with trays and coffeecups. I allowed Adele to sit up
much later than usual for she declared she could not possibly go
to sleep while the doors kept opening and shutting below, and people
bustling about. Besides, she added, a message might possibly come
from Mr. Rochester when she was undressed "et alors quel dommage"
I told her stories as long as she would listen to them and then
for a change I took her out into the gallery. The hall lamp was
now lit, and it amused her to look over the balustrade and watch
the servants passing backwards and forwards. When the evening
was far advanced, a sound of music issued from the drawingroom,
whither the piano had been removed Adele and I sat down on the
top step of the stairs to listen. Presently a voice blent with
the rich tones of the instrument it was a lady who sang, and very
sweet her notes were. The solo over, a duet followed, and then a
glee a joyous conversational murmur filled up the intervals. I
listened long suddenly I discovered that my ear was wholly intent
on analysing the mingled sounds, and trying to discriminate amidst
the confusion of accents those of Mr. Rochester and when it caught
them, which it soon did, it found a further task in framing the
tones, rendered by distance inarticulate, into words.
The clock struck eleven. I looked at Adele, whose head leant
against my shoulder her eyes were waxing heavy, so I took her up
in my arms and carried her off to bed. It was near one before the
gentlemen and ladies sought their chambers.
The next day was as fine as its predecessor it was devoted by
the party to an excursion to some site in the neighbourhood. They
set out early in the forenoon, some on horseback, the rest in
carriages I witnessed both the departure and the return. Miss
Ingram, as before, was the only lady equestrian and, as before,
Mr. Rochester galloped at her side the two rode a little apart from
the rest. I pointed out this circumstance to Mrs. Fairfax,
who was standing at the window with me 
"You said it was not likely they should think of being married,"
said I, "but you see Mr. Rochester evidently prefers her to any of
the other ladies."
"Yes, I daresay no doubt he admires her."
"And she him," I added "look how she leans her head towards him
as if she were conversing confidentially I wish I could see her
face I have never had a glimpse of it yet."
"You will see her this evening," answered Mrs. Fairfax. "I happened
to remark to Mr. Rochester how much Adele wished to be introduced
to the ladies, and he said 'Oh let her come into the drawingroom
after dinner and request Miss Eyre to accompany her.'"
"Yes he said that from mere politeness I need not go, I am sure,"
I answered.
"Well, I observed to him that as you were unused to company, I did
not think you would like appearing before so gay a party  all
strangers and he replied, in his quick way  'Nonsense If she
objects, tell her it is my particular wish and if she resists,
say I shall come and fetch her in case of contumacy.'"
"I will not give him that trouble," I answered. "I will go, if
no better may be but I don't like it. Shall you be there, Mrs.
Fairfax?"
"No I pleaded off, and he admitted my plea. I'll tell you how to
manage so as to avoid the embarrassment of making a formal entrance,
which is the most disagreeable part of the business. You must go
into the drawingroom while it is empty, before the ladies leave
the dinnertable choose your seat in any quiet nook you like you
need not stay long after the gentlemen come in, unless you please
just let Mr. Rochester see you are there and then slip away 
nobody will notice you."
"Will these people remain long, do you think?"
"Perhaps two or three weeks, certainly not more. After the
Easter recess, Sir George Lynn, who was lately elected member for
Millcote, will have to go up to town and take his seat I daresay
Mr. Rochester will accompany him it surprises me that he has
already made so protracted a stay at Thornfield."
It was with some trepidation that I perceived the hour approach
when I was to repair with my charge to the drawingroom. Adele
had been in a state of ecstasy all day, after hearing she was to be
presented to the ladies in the evening and it was not till Sophie
commenced the operation of dressing her that she sobered down. Then
the importance of the process quickly steadied her, and by the time
she had her curls arranged in wellsmoothed, drooping clusters, her
pink satin frock put on, her long sash tied, and her lace mittens
adjusted, she looked as grave as any judge. No need to warn her not
to disarrange her attire when she was dressed, she sat demurely
down in her little chair, taking care previously to lift up the
satin skirt for fear she should crease it, and assured me she would
not stir thence till I was ready. This I quickly was my best
dress the silvergrey one, purchased for Miss Temple's wedding,
and never worn since was soon put on my hair was soon smoothed
my sole ornament, the pearl brooch, soon assumed. We descended.
Fortunately there was another entrance to the drawingroom than
that through the saloon where they were all seated at dinner. We
found the apartment vacant a large fire burning silently on the
marble hearth, and wax candles shining in bright solitude, amid the
exquisite flowers with which the tables were adorned. The crimson
curtain hung before the arch slight as was the separation
this drapery formed from the party in the adjoining saloon, they
spoke in so low a key that nothing of their conversation could be
distinguished beyond a soothing murmur.
Adele, who appeared to be still under the influence of a most
solemnising impression, sat down, without a word, on the footstool I
pointed out to her. I retired to a windowseat, and taking a book
from a table near, endeavoured to read. Adele brought her stool
to my feet ere long she touched my knee.
"What is it, Adele?"
"Estce que je ne puis pas prendrie une seule de ces fleurs
magnifiques, mademoiselle? Seulement pour completer ma toilette."
"You think too much of your 'toilette,' Adele but you may have
a flower." And I took a rose from a vase and fastened it in her
sash. She sighed a sigh of ineffable satisfaction, as if her cup
of happiness were now full. I turned my face away to conceal a
smile I could not suppress there was something ludicrous as well
as painful in the little Parisienne's earnest and innate devotion
to matters of dress.
A soft sound of rising now became audible the curtain was swept
back from the arch through it appeared the diningroom, with its
lit lustre pouring down light on the silver and glass of a magnificent
dessertservice covering a long table a band of ladies stood in
the opening they entered, and the curtain fell behind them.
There were but eight yet, somehow, as they flocked in, they gave
the impression of a much larger number. Some of them were very
tall many were dressed in white and all had a sweeping amplitude
of array that seemed to magnify their persons as a mist magnifies
the moon. I rose and curtseyed to them one or two bent their
heads in return, the others only stared at me.
They dispersed about the room, reminding me, by the lightness and
buoyancy of their movements, of a flock of white plumy birds. Some
of them threw themselves in halfreclining positions on the sofas
and ottomans some bent over the tables and examined the flowers
and books the rest gathered in a group round the fire all
talked in a low but clear tone which seemed habitual to them. I
knew their names afterwards, and may as well mention them now.
First, there was Mrs. Eshton and two of her daughters. She had
evidently been a handsome woman, and was well preserved still.
Of her daughters, the eldest, Amy, was rather little naive,
and childlike in face and manner, and piquant in form her white
muslin dress and blue sash became her well. The second, Louisa,
was taller and more elegant in figure with a very pretty face,
of that order the French term minois chiffone both sisters were
fair as lilies.
Lady Lynn was a large and stout personage of about forty, very erect,
very haughtylooking, richly dressed in a satin robe of changeful
sheen her dark hair shone glossily under the shade of an azure
plume, and within the circlet of a band of gems.
Mrs. Colonel Dent was less showy but, I thought, more ladylike.
She had a slight figure, a pale, gentle face, and fair hair. Her
black satin dress, her scarf of rich foreign lace, and her pearl
ornaments, pleased me better than the rainbow radiance of the titled
dame.
But the three most distinguished  partly, perhaps, because the
tallest figures of the band  were the Dowager Lady Ingram and her
daughters, Blanche and Mary. They were all three of the loftiest
stature of women. The Dowager might be between forty and fifty
her shape was still fine her hair by candlelight at least still
black her teeth, too, were still apparently perfect. Most people
would have termed her a splendid woman of her age and so she was,
no doubt, physically speaking but then there was an expression of
almost insupportable haughtiness in her bearing and countenance.
She had Roman features and a double chin, disappearing into a throat
like a pillar these features appeared to me not only inflated and
darkened, but even furrowed with pride and the chin was sustained
by the same principle, in a position of almost preternatural
erectness. She had, likewise, a fierce and a hard eye it reminded
me of Mrs. Reed's she mouthed her words in speaking her voice
was deep, its inflections very pompous, very dogmatical,  very
intolerable, in short. A crimson velvet robe, and a shawl turban
of some goldwrought Indian fabric, invested her I suppose she
thought with a truly imperial dignity.
Blanche and Mary were of equal stature,  straight and tall as
poplars. Mary was too slim for her height, but Blanche was moulded
like a Dian. I regarded her, of course, with special interest.
First, I wished to see whether her appearance accorded with
Mrs. Fairfax's description secondly, whether it at all resembled
the fancy miniature I had painted of her and thirdly  it will
out  whether it were such as I should fancy likely to suit Mr.
Rochester's taste.
As far as person went, she answered point for point, both to my
picture and Mrs. Fairfax's description. The noble bust, the sloping
shoulders, the graceful neck, the dark eyes and black ringlets
were all there  but her face? Her face was like her mother's
a youthful unfurrowed likeness the same low brow, the same high
features, the same pride. It was not, however, so saturnine a
pride she laughed continually her laugh was satirical, and so
was the habitual expression of her arched and haughty lip.
Genius is said to be selfconscious. I cannot tell whether Miss
Ingram was a genius, but she was selfconscious  remarkably self
conscious indeed. She entered into a discourse on botany with the
gentle Mrs. Dent. It seemed Mrs. Dent had not studied that science
though, as she said, she liked flowers, "especially wild ones"
Miss Ingram had, and she ran over its vocabulary with an air. I
presently perceived she was what is vernacularly termed TRAILING
Mrs. Dent that is, playing on her ignorance  her TRAIL might be
clever, but it was decidedly not goodnatured. She played her
execution was brilliant she sang her voice was fine she talked
French apart to her mamma and she talked it well, with fluency
and with a good accent.
Mary had a milder and more open countenance than Blanche softer
features too, and a skin some shades fairer Miss Ingram was dark
as a Spaniard  but Mary was deficient in life her face lacked
expression, her eye lustre she had nothing to say, and having once
taken her seat, remained fixed like a statue in its niche. The
sisters were both attired in spotless white.
And did I now think Miss Ingram such a choice as Mr. Rochester
would be likely to make? I could not tell  I did not know his
taste in female beauty. If he liked the majestic, she was the
very type of majesty then she was accomplished, sprightly. Most
gentlemen would admire her, I thought and that he DID admire her,
I already seemed to have obtained proof to remove the last shade
of doubt, it remained but to see them together.
You are not to suppose, reader, that Adele has all this time been
sitting motionless on the stool at my feet no when the ladies
entered, she rose, advanced to meet them, made a stately
reverence, and said with gravity 
"Bon jour, mesdames."
And Miss Ingram had looked down at her with a mocking air, and
exclaimed, "Oh, what a little puppet"
Lady Lynn had remarked, "It is Mr. Rochester's ward, I suppose 
the little French girl he was speaking of."
Mrs. Dent had kindly taken her hand, and given her a kiss.
Amy and Louisa Eshton had cried out simultaneously  "What a love
of a child"
And then they had called her to a sofa, where she now sat, ensconced
between them, chattering alternately in French and broken English
absorbing not only the young ladies' attention, but that of Mrs.
Eshton and Lady Lynn, and getting spoilt to her heart's content.
At last coffee is brought in, and the gentlemen are summoned. I
sit in the shade  if any shade there be in this brilliantlylit
apartment the windowcurtain half hides me. Again the arch yawns
they come. The collective appearance of the gentlemen, like that
of the ladies, is very imposing they are all costumed in black
most of them are tall, some young. Henry and Frederick Lynn are
very dashing sparks indeed and Colonel Dent is a fine soldierly
man. Mr. Eshton, the magistrate of the district, is gentlemanlike
his hair is quite white, his eyebrows and whiskers still dark,
which gives him something of the appearance of a "pere noble de
theatre." Lord Ingram, like his sisters, is very tall like them,
also, he is handsome but he shares Mary's apathetic and listless
look he seems to have more length of limb than vivacity of blood
or vigour of brain.
And where is Mr. Rochester?
He comes in last I am not looking at the arch, yet I see him
enter. I try to concentrate my attention on those nettingneedles,
on the meshes of the purse I am forming  I wish to think only
of the work I have in my hands, to see only the silver beads and
silk threads that lie in my lap whereas, I distinctly behold his
figure, and I inevitably recall the moment when I last saw it just
after I had rendered him, what he deemed, an essential service, and
he, holding my hand, and looking down on my face, surveyed me with
eyes that revealed a heart full and eager to overflow in whose
emotions I had a part. How near had I approached him at that moment
What had occurred since, calculated to change his and my relative
positions? Yet now, how distant, how far estranged we were So
far estranged, that I did not expect him to come and speak to me.
I did not wonder, when, without looking at me, he took a seat at
the other side of the room, and began conversing with some of the
ladies.
No sooner did I see that his attention was riveted on them, and
that I might gaze without being observed, than my eyes were drawn
involuntarily to his face I could not keep their lids under control
they would rise, and the irids would fix on him. I looked, and had
an acute pleasure in looking,  a precious yet poignant pleasure
pure gold, with a steely point of agony a pleasure like what the
thirstperishing man might feel who knows the well to which he has
crept is poisoned, yet stoops and drinks divine draughts nevertheless.
Most true is it that "beauty is in the eye of the gazer." My
master's colourless, olive face, square, massive brow, broad and
jetty eyebrows, deep eyes, strong features, firm, grim mouth,  all
energy, decision, will,  were not beautiful, according to rule
but they were more than beautiful to me they were full of an interest,
an influence that quite mastered me,  that took my feelings from
my own power and fettered them in his. I had not intended to love
him the reader knows I had wrought hard to extirpate from my soul
the germs of love there detected and now, at the first renewed view
of him, they spontaneously arrived, green and strong He made me
love him without looking at me.
I compared him with his guests. What was the gallant grace of the
Lynns, the languid elegance of Lord Ingram,  even the military
distinction of Colonel Dent, contrasted with his look of native
pith and genuine power? I had no sympathy in their appearance,
their expression yet I could imagine that most observers would
call them attractive, handsome, imposing while they would pronounce
Mr. Rochester at once harshfeatured and melancholylooking. I
saw them smile, laugh  it was nothing the light of the candles
had as much soul in it as their smile the tinkle of the bell as
much significance as their laugh. I saw Mr. Rochester smile his
stern features softened his eye grew both brilliant and gentle,
its ray both searching and sweet. He was talking, at the moment,
to Louisa and Amy Eshton. I wondered to see them receive with
calm that look which seemed to me so penetrating I expected their
eyes to fall, their colour to rise under it yet I was glad when I
found they were in no sense moved. "He is not to them what he is
to me," I thought "he is not of their kind. I believe he is of
mine  I am sure he is  I feel akin to him  I understand the
language of his countenance and movements though rank and wealth
sever us widely, I have something in my brain and heart, in my
blood and nerves, that assimilates me mentally to him. Did I say,
a few days since, that I had nothing to do with him but to receive
my salary at his hands? Did I forbid myself to think of him in any
other light than as a paymaster? Blasphemy against nature Every
good, true, vigorous feeling I have gathers impulsively round him.
I know I must conceal my sentiments I must smother hope I must
remember that he cannot care much for me. For when I say that I
am of his kind, I do not mean that I have his force to influence,
and his spell to attract I mean only that I have certain tastes
and feelings in common with him. I must, then, repeat continually
that we are for ever sundered and yet, while I breathe and think,
I must love him."
Coffee is handed. The ladies, since the gentlemen entered, have
become lively as larks conversation waxes brisk and merry. Colonel
Dent and Mr. Eshton argue on politics their wives listen. The two
proud dowagers, Lady Lynn and Lady Ingram, confabulate together.
Sir George  whom, bythebye, I have forgotten to describe,  a
very big, and very freshlooking country gentleman, stands before
their sofa, coffeecup in hand, and occasionally puts in a word.
Mr. Frederick Lynn has taken a seat beside Mary Ingram, and is
showing her the engravings of a splendid volume she looks, smiles
now and then, but apparently says little. The tall and phlegmatic
Lord Ingram leans with folded arms on the chairback of the little
and lively Amy Eshton she glances up at him, and chatters like
a wren she likes him better than she does Mr. Rochester. Henry
Lynn has taken possession of an ottoman at the feet of Louisa
Adele shares it with him he is trying to talk French with her,
and Louisa laughs at his blunders. With whom will Blanche Ingram
pair? She is standing alone at the table, bending gracefully over
an album. She seems waiting to be sought but she will not wait
too long she herself selects a mate.
Mr. Rochester, having quitted the Eshtons, stands on the hearth
as solitary as she stands by the table she confronts him, taking
her station on the opposite side of the mantelpiece.
"Mr. Rochester, I thought you were not fond of children?"
"Nor am I."
"Then, what induced you to take charge of such a little doll as
that?" pointing to Adele. "Where did you pick her up?"
"I did not pick her up she was left on my hands."
"You should have sent her to school."
"I could not afford it schools are so dear."
"Why, I suppose you have a governess for her I saw a person with
her just now  is she gone? Oh, no there she is still, behind
the windowcurtain. You pay her, of course I should think it
quite as expensive,  more so for you have them both to keep in
addition."
I feared  or should I say, hoped?  the allusion to me would
make Mr. Rochester glance my way and I involuntarily shrank farther
into the shade but he never turned his eyes.
"I have not considered the subject," said he indifferently, looking
straight before him.
"No, you men never do consider economy and common sense. You should
hear mama on the chapter of governesses Mary and I have had, I
should think, a dozen at least in our day half of them detestable
and the rest ridiculous, and all incubi  were they not, mama?"
"Did you speak, my own?"
The young lady thus claimed as the dowager's special property,
reiterated her question with an explanation.
"My dearest, don't mention governesses the word makes me nervous.
I have suffered a martyrdom from their incompetency and caprice.
I thank Heaven I have now done with them"
Mrs. Dent here bent over to the pious lady and whispered something
in her ear I suppose, from the answer elicited, it was a reminder
that one of the anathematised race was present.
"Tant pis" said her Ladyship, "I hope it may do her good" Then,
in a lower tone, but still loud enough for me to hear, "I noticed
her I am a judge of physiognomy, and in hers I see all the faults
of her class."
"What are they, madam?" inquired Mr. Rochester aloud.
"I will tell you in your private ear," replied she, wagging her
turban three times with portentous significancy.
"But my curiosity will be past its appetite it craves food now."
"Ask Blanche she is nearer you than I."
"Oh, don't refer him to me, mama I have just one word to say of
the whole tribe they are a nuisance. Not that I ever suffered much
from them I took care to turn the tables. What tricks Theodore
and I used to play on our Miss Wilsons, and Mrs. Greys, and Madame
Jouberts Mary was always too sleepy to join in a plot with
spirit. The best fun was with Madame Joubert Miss Wilson was
a poor sickly thing, lachrymose and lowspirited, not worth the
trouble of vanquishing, in short and Mrs. Grey was coarse and
insensible no blow took effect on her. But poor Madame Joubert
I see her yet in her raging passions, when we had driven her to
extremities  spilt our tea, crumbled our bread and butter, tossed
our books up to the ceiling, and played a charivari with the ruler
and desk, the fender and fireirons. Theodore, do you remember
those merry days?"
"Yaas, to be sure I do," drawled Lord Ingram "and the poor old
stick used to cry out 'Oh you villains childs'  and then we
sermonised her on the presumption of attempting to teach such clever
blades as we were, when she was herself so ignorant."
"We did and, Tedo, you know, I helped you in prosecuting or
persecuting your tutor, wheyfaced Mr. Vining  the parson in the
pip, as we used to call him. He and Miss Wilson took the liberty
of falling in love with each other  at least Tedo and I thought
so we surprised sundry tender glances and sighs which we interpreted
as tokens of 'la belle passion,' and I promise you the public soon
had the benefit of our discovery we employed it as a sort of lever
to hoist our deadweights from the house. Dear mama, there, as
soon as she got an inkling of the business, found out that it was
of an immoral tendency. Did you not, my ladymother?"
"Certainly, my best. And I was quite right depend on that
there are a thousand reasons why liaisons between governesses and
tutors should never be tolerated a moment in any wellregulated
house firstly  "
"Oh, gracious, mama Spare us the enumeration Au reste, we
all know them danger of bad example to innocence of childhood
distractions and consequent neglect of duty on the part of the attached
mutual alliance and reliance confidence thence resulting 
insolence accompanying  mutiny and general blowup. Am I right,
Baroness Ingram, of Ingram Park?"
"My lilyflower, you are right now, as always."
"Then no more need be said change the subject."
Amy Eshton, not hearing or not heeding this dictum, joined in with
her soft, infantine tone "Louisa and I used to quiz our governess
too but she was such a good creature, she would bear anything
nothing put her out. She was never cross with us was she, Louisa?"
"No, never we might do what we pleased ransack her desk and
her workbox, and turn her drawers inside out and she was so good
natured, she would give us anything we asked for."
"I suppose, now," said Miss Ingram, curling her lip sarcastically,
"we shall have an abstract of the memoirs of all the governesses
extant in order to avert such a visitation, I again move
the introduction of a new topic. Mr. Rochester, do you second my
motion?"
"Madam, I support you on this point, as on every other."
"Then on me be the onus of bringing it forward. Signior Eduardo,
are you in voice tonight?"
"Donna Bianca, if you command it, I will be."
"Then, signior, I lay on you my sovereign behest to furbish up your
lungs and other vocal organs, as they will be wanted on my royal
service."
"Who would not be the Rizzio of so divine a Mary?"
"A fig for Rizzio" cried she, tossing her head with all its
curls, as she moved to the piano. "It is my opinion the fiddler
David must have been an insipid sort of fellow I like black Bothwell
better to my mind a man is nothing without a spice of the devil
in him and history may say what it will of James Hepburn, but I
have a notion, he was just the sort of wild, fierce, bandit hero
whom I could have consented to gift with my hand."
"Gentlemen, you hear Now which of you most resembles Bothwell?"
cried Mr. Rochester.
"I should say the preference lies with you," responded Colonel
Dent.
"On my honour, I am much obliged to you," was the reply.
Miss Ingram, who had now seated herself with proud grace at the
piano, spreading out her snowy robes in queenly amplitude, commenced
a brilliant prelude talking meantime. She appeared to be on her
high horse tonight both her words and her air seemed intended to
excite not only the admiration, but the amazement of her auditors
she was evidently bent on striking them as something very dashing
and daring indeed.
"Oh, I am so sick of the young men of the present day" exclaimed
she, rattling away at the instrument. "Poor, puny things, not fit
to stir a step beyond papa's park gates nor to go even so far
without mama's permission and guardianship Creatures so absorbed
in care about their pretty faces, and their white hands, and
their small feet as if a man had anything to do with beauty As
if loveliness were not the special prerogative of woman  her
legitimate appanage and heritage I grant an ugly WOMAN is a blot
on the fair face of creation but as to the GENTLEMEN, let them be
solicitous to possess only strength and valour let their motto
be Hunt, shoot, and fight the rest is not worth a fillip. Such
should be my device, were I a man."
"Whenever I marry," she continued after a pause which none interrupted,
"I am resolved my husband shall not be a rival, but a foil to me.
I will suffer no competitor near the throne I shall exact an
undivided homage his devotions shall not be shared between me
and the shape he sees in his mirror. Mr. Rochester, now sing, and
I will play for you."
"I am all obedience," was the response.
"Here then is a Corsairsong. Know that I doat on Corsairs and
for that reason, sing it con spirito."
"Commands from Miss Ingram's lips would put spirit into a mug of
milk and water."
"Take care, then if you don't please me, I will shame you by
showing how such things SHOULD be done."
"That is offering a premium on incapacity I shall now endeavour
to fail."
"Gardezvous en bien If you err wilfully, I shall devise a
proportionate punishment."
"Miss Ingram ought to be clement, for she has it in her power to
inflict a chastisement beyond mortal endurance."
"Ha explain" commanded the lady.
"Pardon me, madam no need of explanation your own fine sense must
inform you that one of your frowns would be a sufficient substitute
for capital punishment."
"Sing" said she, and again touching the piano, she commenced an
accompaniment in spirited style.
"Now is my time to slip away," thought I but the tones that then
severed the air arrested me. Mrs. Fairfax had said Mr. Rochester
possessed a fine voice he did  a mellow, powerful bass, into
which he threw his own feeling, his own force finding a way through
the ear to the heart, and there waking sensation strangely. I
waited till the last deep and full vibration had expired  till
the tide of talk, checked an instant, had resumed its flow I then
quitted my sheltered corner and made my exit by the sidedoor,
which was fortunately near. Thence a narrow passage led into the
hall in crossing it, I perceived my sandal was loose I stopped
to tie it, kneeling down for that purpose on the mat at the foot of
the staircase. I heard the diningroom door unclose a gentleman
came out rising hastily, I stood face to face with him it was
Mr. Rochester.
"How do you do?" he asked.
"I am very well, sir."
"Why did you not come and speak to me in the room?"
I thought I might have retorted the question on him who
put it but I would not take that freedom. I answered 
"I did not wish to disturb you, as you seemed engaged, sir."
"What have you been doing during my absence?"
"Nothing particular teaching Adele as usual."
"And getting a good deal paler than you were  as I saw at first
sight. What is the matter?"
"Nothing at all, sir."
"Did you take any cold that night you half drowned me?"
"Not the least."
"Return to the drawingroom you are deserting too early."
"I am tired, sir."
He looked at me for a minute.
"And a little depressed," he said. "What about? Tell me."
"Nothing  nothing, sir. I am not depressed."
"But I affirm that you are so much depressed that a few more
words would bring tears to your eyes  indeed, they are there
now, shining and swimming and a bead has slipped from the lash
and fallen on to the flag. If I had time, and was not in mortal
dread of some prating prig of a servant passing, I would know what
all this means. Well, tonight I excuse you but understand that
so long as my visitors stay, I expect you to appear in the drawingroom
every evening it is my wish don't neglect it. Now go, and send
Sophie for Adele. Goodnight, my  " He stopped, bit his lip,
and abruptly left me.
CHAPTER XVIII
Merry days were these at Thornfield Hall and busy days too how
different from the first three months of stillness, monotony, and
solitude I had passed beneath its roof All sad feelings seemed
now driven from the house, all gloomy associations forgotten there
was life everywhere, movement all day long. You could not now
traverse the gallery, once so hushed, nor enter the front chambers,
once so tenantless, without encountering a smart lady'smaid or a
dandy valet.
The kitchen, the butler's pantry, the servants' hall, the entrance
hall, were equally alive and the saloons were only left void and
still when the blue sky and halcyon sunshine of the genial spring
weather called their occupants out into the grounds. Even when
that weather was broken, and continuous rain set in for some days,
no damp seemed cast over enjoyment indoor amusements only became
more lively and varied, in consequence of the stop put to outdoor
gaiety.
I wondered what they were going to do the first evening a change
of entertainment was proposed they spoke of "playing charades,"
but in my ignorance I did not understand the term. The servants
were called in, the diningroom tables wheeled away, the lights
otherwise disposed, the chairs placed in a semicircle opposite the
arch. While Mr. Rochester and the other gentlemen directed these
alterations, the ladies were running up and down stairs ringing
for their maids. Mrs. Fairfax was summoned to give information
respecting the resources of the house in shawls, dresses, draperies of
any kind and certain wardrobes of the third storey were ransacked,
and their contents, in the shape of brocaded and hooped petticoats,
satin sacques, black modes, lace lappets, c., were brought down in
armfuls by the abigails then a selection was made, and such things
as were chosen were carried to the boudoir within the drawingroom.
Meantime, Mr. Rochester had again summoned the ladies round him,
and was selecting certain of their number to be of his party. "Miss
Ingram is mine, of course," said he afterwards he named the two
Misses Eshton, and Mrs. Dent. He looked at me I happened to be
near him, as I had been fastening the clasp of Mrs. Dent's bracelet,
which had got loose.
"Will you play?" he asked. I shook my head. He did not insist,
which I rather feared he would have done he allowed me to return
quietly to my usual seat.
He and his aids now withdrew behind the curtain the other party,
which was headed by Colonel Dent, sat down on the crescent of chairs.
One of the gentlemen, Mr. Eshton, observing me, seemed to propose
that I should be asked to join them but Lady Ingram instantly
negatived the notion.
"No," I heard her say "she looks too stupid for any game of the
sort."
Ere long a bell tinkled, and the curtain drew up. Within the arch,
the bulky figure of Sir George Lynn, whom Mr. Rochester had likewise
chosen, was seen enveloped in a white sheet before him, on
a table, lay open a large book and at his side stood Amy Eshton,
draped in Mr. Rochester's cloak, and holding a book in her hand.
Somebody, unseen, rang the bell merrily then Adele who had insisted
on being one of her guardian's party, bounded forward, scattering
round her the contents of a basket of flowers she carried on her
arm. Then appeared the magnificent figure of Miss Ingram, clad
in white, a long veil on her head, and a wreath of roses round her
brow by her side walked Mr. Rochester, and together they drew near
the table. They knelt while Mrs. Dent and Louisa Eshton, dressed
also in white, took up their stations behind them. A ceremony
followed, in dumb show, in which it was easy to recognise the
pantomime of a marriage. At its termination, Colonel Dent and his
party consulted in whispers for two minutes, then the Colonel called out 
"Bride" Mr. Rochester bowed, and the curtain fell.
A considerable interval elapsed before it again rose. Its second
rising displayed a more elaborately prepared scene than the last.
The drawingroom, as I have before observed, was raised two steps
above the diningroom, and on the top of the upper step, placed a
yard or two back within the room, appeared a large marble basin 
which I recognised as an ornament of the conservatory  where it
usually stood, surrounded by exotics, and tenanted by gold fish
and whence it must have been transported with some trouble, on
account of its size and weight.
Seated on the carpet, by the side of this basin, was seen Mr.
Rochester, costumed in shawls, with a turban on his head. His
dark eyes and swarthy skin and Paynim features suited the costume
exactly he looked the very model of an Eastern emir, an agent
or a victim of the bowstring. Presently advanced into view Miss
Ingram. She, too, was attired in oriental fashion a crimson
scarf tied sashlike round the waist an embroidered handkerchief
knotted about her temples her beautifullymoulded arms bare, one
of them upraised in the act of supporting a pitcher, poised gracefully
on her head. Both her cast of form and feature, her complexion and
her general air, suggested the idea of some Israelitish princess
of the patriarchal days and such was doubtless the character she
intended to represent.
She approached the basin, and bent over it as if to fill her pitcher
she again lifted it to her head. The personage on the wellbrink
now seemed to accost her to make some request "She hasted, let
down her pitcher on her hand, and gave him to drink." From the
bosom of his robe he then produced a casket, opened it and showed
magnificent bracelets and earrings she acted astonishment and
admiration kneeling, he laid the treasure at her feet incredulity
and delight were expressed by her looks and gestures the stranger
fastened the bracelets on her arms and the rings in her ears. It
was Eliezer and Rebecca the camels only were wanting.
The divining party again laid their heads together apparently they
could not agree about the word or syllable the scene illustrated.
Colonel Dent, their spokesman, demanded "the tableau of the whole"
whereupon the curtain again descended.
On its third rising only a portion of the drawingroom was disclosed
the rest being concealed by a screen, hung with some sort of dark
and coarse drapery. The marble basin was removed in its place,
stood a deal table and a kitchen chair these objects were visible
by a very dim light proceeding from a horn lantern, the wax candles
being all extinguished.
Amidst this sordid scene, sat a man with his clenched hands resting
on his knees, and his eyes bent on the ground. I knew Mr. Rochester
though the begrimed face, the disordered dress his coat hanging
loose from one arm, as if it had been almost torn from his back
in a scuffle, the desperate and scowling countenance, the rough,
bristling hair might well have disguised him. As he moved, a chain
clanked to his wrists were attached fetters.
"Bridewell" exclaimed Colonel Dent, and the charade was solved.
A sufficient interval having elapsed for the performers to resume
their ordinary costume, they reentered the diningroom. Mr. Rochester
led in Miss Ingram she was complimenting him on his acting.
"Do you know," said she, "that, of the three characters, I liked
you in the last best? Oh, had you but lived a few years earlier,
what a gallant gentlemanhighwayman you would have made"
"Is all the soot washed from my face?" he asked, turning it towards
her.
"Alas yes the more's the pity Nothing could be more becoming
to your complexion than that ruffian's rouge."
"You would like a hero of the road then?"
"An English hero of the road would be the next best thing to an
Italian bandit and that could only be surpassed by a Levantine
pirate."
"Well, whatever I am, remember you are my wife we were married an
hour since, in the presence of all these witnesses." She giggled,
and her colour rose.
"Now, Dent," continued Mr. Rochester, "it is your turn." And as
the other party withdrew, he and his band took the vacated seats.
Miss Ingram placed herself at her leader's right hand the other
diviners filled the chairs on each side of him and her. I did
not now watch the actors I no longer waited with interest for the
curtain to rise my attention was absorbed by the spectators my
eyes, erewhile fixed on the arch, were now irresistibly attracted
to the semicircle of chairs. What charade Colonel Dent and his party
played, what word they chose, how they acquitted themselves, I no
longer remember but I still see the consultation which followed
each scene I see Mr. Rochester turn to Miss Ingram, and Miss
Ingram to him I see her incline her head towards him, till the
jetty curls almost touch his shoulder and wave against his cheek
I hear their mutual whisperings I recall their interchanged glances
and something even of the feeling roused by the spectacle returns
in memory at this moment.
I have told you, reader, that I had learnt to love Mr. Rochester
I could not unlove him now, merely because I found that he had
ceased to notice me  because I might pass hours in his presence,
and he would never once turn his eyes in my direction  because
I saw all his attentions appropriated by a great lady, who scorned
to touch me with the hem of her robes as she passed who, if ever
her dark and imperious eye fell on me by chance, would withdraw
it instantly as from an object too mean to merit observation. I
could not unlove him, because I felt sure he would soon marry this
very lady  because I read daily in her a proud security in his
intentions respecting her  because I witnessed hourly in him
a style of courtship which, if careless and choosing rather to be
sought than to seek, was yet, in its very carelessness, captivating,
and in its very pride, irresistible.
There was nothing to cool or banish love in these circumstances,
though much to create despair. Much too, you will think, reader,
to engender jealousy if a woman, in my position, could presume
to be jealous of a woman in Miss Ingram's. But I was not jealous
or very rarely  the nature of the pain I suffered could not be
explained by that word. Miss Ingram was a mark beneath jealousy
she was too inferior to excite the feeling. Pardon the seeming
paradox I mean what I say. She was very showy, but she was not
genuine she had a fine person, many brilliant attainments but
her mind was poor, her heart barren by nature nothing bloomed
spontaneously on that soil no unforced natural fruit delighted by
its freshness. She was not good she was not original she used
to repeat sounding phrases from books she never offered, nor had,
an opinion of her own. She advocated a high tone of sentiment but
she did not know the sensations of sympathy and pity tenderness and
truth were not in her. Too often she betrayed this, by the undue
vent she gave to a spiteful antipathy she had conceived against
little Adele pushing her away with some contumelious epithet if
she happened to approach her sometimes ordering her from the room,
and always treating her with coldness and acrimony. Other eyes
besides mine watched these manifestations of character  watched
them closely, keenly, shrewdly. Yes the future bridegroom,
Mr. Rochester himself, exercised over his intended a ceaseless
surveillance and it was from this sagacity  this guardedness of
his  this perfect, clear consciousness of his fair one's defects
this obvious absence of passion in his sentiments towards her,
that my evertorturing pain arose.
I saw he was going to marry her, for family, perhaps political
reasons, because her rank and connections suited him I felt he
had not given her his love, and that her qualifications were ill
adapted to win from him that treasure. This was the point  this
was where the nerve was touched and teased  this was where the
fever was sustained and fed SHE COULD NOT CHARM HIM.
If she had managed the victory at once, and he had yielded and
sincerely laid his heart at her feet, I should have covered my face,
turned to the wall, and figuratively have died to them. If Miss
Ingram had been a good and noble woman, endowed with force, fervour,
kindness, sense, I should have had one vital struggle with two tigers
jealousy and despair then, my heart torn out and devoured, I
should have admired her  acknowledged her excellence, and been
quiet for the rest of my days and the more absolute her superiority,
the deeper would have been my admiration  the more truly tranquil
my quiescence. But as matters really stood, to watch Miss Ingram's
efforts at fascinating Mr. Rochester, to witness their repeated
failure  herself unconscious that they did fail vainly fancying
that each shaft launched hit the mark, and infatuatedly pluming
herself on success, when her pride and selfcomplacency repelled
further and further what she wished to allure  to witness THIS,
was to be at once under ceaseless excitation and ruthless restraint.
Because, when she failed, I saw how she might have succeeded. Arrows
that continually glanced off from Mr. Rochester's breast and fell
harmless at his feet, might, I knew, if shot by a surer hand,
have quivered keen in his proud heart  have called love into his
stern eye, and softness into his sardonic face or, better still,
without weapons a silent conquest might have been won.
"Why can she not influence him more, when she is privileged to draw
so near to him?" I asked myself. "Surely she cannot truly like
him, or not like him with true affection If she did, she need not
coin her smiles so lavishly, flash her glances so unremittingly,
manufacture airs so elaborate, graces so multitudinous. It seems
to me that she might, by merely sitting quietly at his side, saying
little and looking less, get nigher his heart. I have seen in his
face a far different expression from that which hardens it now while
she is so vivaciously accosting him but then it came of itself
it was not elicited by meretricious arts and calculated manoeuvres
and one had but to accept it  to answer what he asked without
pretension, to address him when needful without grimace  and
it increased and grew kinder and more genial, and warmed one like
a fostering sunbeam. How will she manage to please him when they
are married? I do not think she will manage it and yet it might
be managed and his wife might, I verily believe, be the very
happiest woman the sun shines on."
I have not yet said anything condemnatory of Mr. Rochester's project
of marrying for interest and connections. It surprised me when I
first discovered that such was his intention I had thought him a
man unlikely to be influenced by motives so commonplace in his choice
of a wife but the longer I considered the position, education, c.,
of the parties, the less I felt justified in judging and blaming
either him or Miss Ingram for acting in conformity to ideas and
principles instilled into them, doubtless, from their childhood.
All their class held these principles I supposed, then, they had
reasons for holding them such as I could not fathom. It seemed
to me that, were I a gentleman like him, I would take to my bosom
only such a wife as I could love but the very obviousness of the
advantages to the husband's own happiness offered by this plan
convinced me that there must be arguments against its general
adoption of which I was quite ignorant otherwise I felt sure all
the world would act as I wished to act.
But in other points, as well as this, I was growing very lenient to
my master I was forgetting all his faults, for which I had once
kept a sharp lookout. It had formerly been my endeavour to study
all sides of his character to take the bad with the good and
from the just weighing of both, to form an equitable judgment. Now
I saw no bad. The sarcasm that had repelled, the harshness that
had startled me once, were only like keen condiments in a choice
dish their presence was pungent, but their absence would be felt
as comparatively insipid. And as for the vague something  was it
a sinister or a sorrowful, a designing or a desponding expression?
that opened upon a careful observer, now and then, in his eye,
and closed again before one could fathom the strange depth partially
disclosed that something which used to make me fear and shrink,
as if I had been wandering amongst volcaniclooking hills, and had
suddenly felt the ground quiver and seen it gape that something,
I, at intervals, beheld still and with throbbing heart, but not
with palsied nerves. Instead of wishing to shun, I longed only
to dare  to divine it and I thought Miss Ingram happy, because
one day she might look into the abyss at her leisure, explore its
secrets and analyse their nature.
Meantime, while I thought only of my master and his future bride
saw only them, heard only their discourse, and considered only
their movements of importance  the rest of the party were occupied
with their own separate interests and pleasures. The Ladies Lynn
and Ingram continued to consort in solemn conferences, where they
nodded their two turbans at each other, and held up their four
hands in confronting gestures of surprise, or mystery, or horror,
according to the theme on which their gossip ran, like a pair of
magnified puppets. Mild Mrs. Dent talked with goodnatured Mrs.
Eshton and the two sometimes bestowed a courteous word or smile
on me. Sir George Lynn, Colonel Dent, and Mr. Eshton discussed
politics, or county affairs, or justice business. Lord Ingram
flirted with Amy Eshton Louisa played and sang to and with one
of the Messrs. Lynn and Mary Ingram listened languidly to the
gallant speeches of the other. Sometimes all, as with one consent,
suspended their byplay to observe and listen to the principal actors
for, after all, Mr. Rochester and  because closely connected
with him  Miss Ingram were the life and soul of the party. If
he was absent from the room an hour, a perceptible dulness seemed
to steal over the spirits of his guests and his reentrance was
sure to give a fresh impulse to the vivacity of conversation.
The want of his animating influence appeared to be peculiarly felt
one day that he had been summoned to Millcote on business, and was
not likely to return till late. The afternoon was wet a walk
the party had proposed to take to see a gipsy camp, lately pitched
on a common beyond Hay, was consequently deferred. Some of the
gentlemen were gone to the stables the younger ones, together with
the younger ladies, were playing billiards in the billiardroom.
The dowagers Ingram and Lynn sought solace in a quiet game at cards.
Blanche Ingram, after having repelled, by supercilious taciturnity,
some efforts of Mrs. Dent and Mrs. Eshton to draw her into
conversation, had first murmured over some sentimental tunes and
airs on the piano, and then, having fetched a novel from the library,
had flung herself in haughty listlessness on a sofa, and prepared
to beguile, by the spell of fiction, the tedious hours of absence.
The room and the house were silent only now and then the merriment
of the billiardplayers was heard from above.
It was verging on dusk, and the clock had already given warning of
the hour to dress for dinner, when little Adele, who knelt
by me in the drawingroom windowseat, suddenly exclaimed 
"Voile, Monsieur Rochester, qui revient"
I turned, and Miss Ingram darted forwards from her sofa the
others, too, looked up from their several occupations for at the
same time a crunching of wheels and a splashing tramp of horsehoofs
became audible on the wet gravel. A postchaise was approaching.
"What can possess him to come home in that style?" said Miss Ingram.
"He rode Mesrour the black horse, did he not, when he went out?
and Pilot was with him what has he done with the animals?"
As she said this, she approached her tall person and ample garments
so near the window, that I was obliged to bend back almost to the
breaking of my spine in her eagerness she did not observe me at
first, but when she did, she curled her lip and moved to another
casement. The postchaise stopped the driver rang the doorbell,
and a gentleman alighted attired in travelling garb but it was not
Mr. Rochester it was a tall, fashionablelooking man, a stranger.
"How provoking" exclaimed Miss Ingram "you tiresome monkey"
apostrophising Adele, "who perched you up in the window to give
false intelligence?" and she cast on me an angry glance, as if I
were in fault.
Some parleying was audible in the hall, and soon the newcomer
entered. He bowed to Lady Ingram, as deeming her the eldest lady
present.
"It appears I come at an inopportune time, madam," said he, "when
my friend, Mr. Rochester, is from home but I arrive from a very
long journey, and I think I may presume so far on old and intimate
acquaintance as to instal myself here till he returns."
His manner was polite his accent, in speaking, struck me as being
somewhat unusual,  not precisely foreign, but still not altogether
English his age might be about Mr. Rochester's,  between thirty
and forty his complexion was singularly sallow otherwise he was
a finelooking man, at first sight especially. On closer examination,
you detected something in his face that displeased, or rather that
failed to please. His features were regular, but too relaxed his
eye was large and well cut, but the life looking out of it was a
tame, vacant life  at least so I thought.
The sound of the dressingbell dispersed the party. It was not
till after dinner that I saw him again he then seemed quite at
his ease. But I liked his physiognomy even less than before it
struck me as being at the same time unsettled and inanimate. His
eye wandered, and had no meaning in its wandering this gave him
an odd look, such as I never remembered to have seen. For a handsome
and not an unamiablelooking man, he repelled me exceedingly there
was no power in that smoothskinned face of a full oval shape no
firmness in that aquiline nose and small cherry mouth there was
no thought on the low, even forehead no command in that blank,
brown eye.
As I sat in my usual nook, and looked at him with the light of
the girandoles on the mantelpiece beaming full over him  for he
occupied an armchair drawn close to the fire, and kept shrinking
still nearer, as if he were cold, I compared him with Mr. Rochester.
I think with deference be it spoken the contrast could not be
much greater between a sleek gander and a fierce falcon between
a meek sheep and the roughcoated keeneyed dog, its guardian.
He had spoken of Mr. Rochester as an old friend. A curious friendship
theirs must have been a pointed illustration, indeed, of the old
adage that "extremes meet."
Two or three of the gentlemen sat near him, and I caught at times
scraps of their conversation across the room. At first I could
not make much sense of what I heard for the discourse of Louisa
Eshton and Mary Ingram, who sat nearer to me, confused the fragmentary
sentences that reached me at intervals. These last were discussing
the stranger they both called him "a beautiful man." Louisa
said he was "a love of a creature," and she "adored him" and Mary
instanced his "pretty little mouth, and nice nose," as her ideal
of the charming.
"And what a sweettempered forehead he has" cried Louisa,  "so
smooth  none of those frowning irregularities I dislike so much
and such a placid eye and smile"
And then, to my great relief, Mr. Henry Lynn summoned them to the
other side of the room, to settle some point about the deferred
excursion to Hay Common.
I was now able to concentrate my attention on the group by the fire,
and I presently gathered that the newcomer was called Mr. Mason
then I learned that he was but just arrived in England, and that
he came from some hot country which was the reason, doubtless,
his face was so sallow, and that he sat so near the hearth, and
wore a surtout in the house. Presently the words Jamaica, Kingston,
Spanish Town, indicated the West Indies as his residence and it
was with no little surprise I gathered, ere long, that he had there
first seen and become acquainted with Mr. Rochester. He spoke
of his friend's dislike of the burning heats, the hurricanes, and
rainy seasons of that region. I knew Mr. Rochester had been a
traveller Mrs. Fairfax had said so but I thought the continent
of Europe had bounded his wanderings till now I had never heard
a hint given of visits to more distant shores.
I was pondering these things, when an incident, and a somewhat
unexpected one, broke the thread of my musings. Mr. Mason, shivering
as some one chanced to open the door, asked for more coal to be
put on the fire, which had burnt out its flame, though its mass of
cinder still shone hot and red. The footman who brought the coal,
in going out, stopped near Mr. Eshton's chair, and said something
to him in a low voice, of which I heard only the words, "old woman,"
"quite troublesome."
"Tell her she shall be put in the stocks if she does not take
herself off," replied the magistrate.
"No  stop" interrupted Colonel Dent. "Don't send her away,
Eshton we might turn the thing to account better consult the
ladies." And speaking aloud, he continued  "Ladies, you talked
of going to Hay Common to visit the gipsy camp Sam here says that
one of the old Mother Bunches is in the servants' hall at this
moment, and insists upon being brought in before 'the quality,' to
tell them their fortunes. Would you like to see her?"
"Surely, colonel," cried Lady Ingram, "you would not encourage such
a low impostor? Dismiss her, by all means, at once"
"But I cannot persuade her to go away, my lady," said the footman
"nor can any of the servants Mrs. Fairfax is with her just now,
entreating her to be gone but she has taken a chair in the chimney
comer, and says nothing shall stir her from it till she gets leave
to come in here."
"What does she want?" asked Mrs. Eshton.
"'To tell the gentry their fortunes,' she says, ma'am and she
swears she must and will do it."
"What is she like?" inquired the Misses Eshton, in a breath.
"A shockingly ugly old creature, miss almost as black as a crock."
"Why, she's a real sorceress" cried Frederick Lynn. "Let us have
her in, of course."
"To be sure," rejoined his brother "it would be a thousand pities
to throw away such a chance of fun."
"My dear boys, what are you thinking about?" exclaimed Mrs. Lynn.
"I cannot possibly countenance any such inconsistent proceeding,"
chimed in the Dowager Ingram.
"Indeed, mama, but you can  and will," pronounced the haughty
voice of Blanche, as she turned round on the pianostool where
till now she had sat silent, apparently examining sundry sheets of
music. "I have a curiosity to hear my fortune told therefore,
Sam, order the beldame forward."
"My darling Blanche recollect  "
"I do  I recollect all you can suggest and I must have my will
quick, Sam"
"Yes  yes  yes" cried all the juveniles, both ladies and
gentlemen. "Let her come  it will be excellent sport"
The footman still lingered. "She looks such a rough one," said
he.
"Go" ejaculated Miss Ingram, and the man went.
Excitement instantly seized the whole party a running fire of
raillery and jests was proceeding when Sam returned.
"She won't come now," said he. "She says it's not her mission to
appear before the 'vulgar herd' them's her words. I must show
her into a room by herself, and then those who wish to consult her
must go to her one by one."
"You see now, my queenly Blanche," began Lady Ingram, "she
encroaches. Be advised, my angel girl  and  "
"Show her into the library, of course," cut in the "angel girl." "It
is not my mission to listen to her before the vulgar herd either
I mean to have her all to myself. Is there a fire in the library?"
"Yes, ma'am  but she looks such a tinkler."
"Cease that chatter, blockhead and do my bidding."
Again Sam vanished and mystery, animation, expectation rose to
full flow once more.
"She's ready now," said the footman, as he reappeared. "She wishes
to know who will be her first visitor."
"I think I had better just look in upon her before any of the ladies
go," said Colonel Dent.
"Tell her, Sam, a gentleman is coming."
Sam went and returned.
"She says, sir, that she'll have no gentlemen they need not
trouble themselves to come near her nor," he added, with difficulty
suppressing a titter, "any ladies either, except the young, and
single."
"By Jove, she has taste" exclaimed Henry Lynn.
Miss Ingram rose solemnly "I go first," she said, in a tone which
might have befitted the leader of a forlorn hope, mounting a breach
in the van of his men.
"Oh, my best oh, my dearest pause  reflect" was her mama's
cry but she swept past her in stately silence, passed through
the door which Colonel Dent held open, and we heard her enter the
library.
A comparative silence ensued. Lady Ingram thought it "le cas" to
wring her hands which she did accordingly. Miss Mary declared
she felt, for her part, she never dared venture. Amy and Louisa
Eshton tittered under their breath, and looked a little frightened.
The minutes passed very slowly fifteen were counted before the
librarydoor again opened. Miss Ingram returned to us through the
arch.
Would she laugh? Would she take it as a joke? All eyes met her
with a glance of eager curiosity, and she met all eyes with one of
rebuff and coldness she looked neither flurried nor merry she
walked stiffly to her seat, and took it in silence.
"Well, Blanche?" said Lord Ingram.
"What did she say, sister?" asked Mary.
"What did you think? How do you feel?  Is she a real fortuneteller?"
demanded the Misses Eshton.
"Now, now, good people," returned Miss Ingram, "don't press upon
me. Really your organs of wonder and credulity are easily excited
you seem, by the importance of you all  my good mama included
ascribe to this matter, absolutely to believe we have a genuine
witch in the house, who is in close alliance with the old gentleman.
I have seen a gipsy vagabond she has practised in hackneyed fashion
the science of palmistry and told me what such people usually tell.
My whim is gratified and now I think Mr. Eshton will do well to
put the hag in the stocks tomorrow morning, as he threatened."
Miss Ingram took a book, leant back in her chair, and so declined
further conversation. I watched her for nearly halfanhour during
all that time she never turned a page, and her face grew momently
darker, more dissatisfied, and more sourly expressive of disappointment.
She had obviously not heard anything to her advantage and it
seemed to me, from her prolonged fit of gloom and taciturnity, that
she herself, notwithstanding her professed indifference, attached
undue importance to whatever revelations had been made her.
Meantime, Mary Ingram, Amy and Louisa Eshton, declared they dared
not go alone and yet they all wished to go. A negotiation was opened
through the medium of the ambassador, Sam and after much pacing
to and fro, till, I think, the said Sam's calves must have ached
with the exercise, permission was at last, with great difficulty,
extorted from the rigorous Sibyl, for the three to wait upon her
in a body.
Their visit was not so still as Miss Ingram's had been we heard
hysterical giggling and little shrieks proceeding from the library
and at the end of about twenty minutes they burst the door open,
and came running across the hall, as if they were halfscared out
of their wits.
"I am sure she is something not right" they cried, one and all.
"She told us such things She knows all about us" and they sank
breathless into the various seats the gentlemen hastened to bring
them.
Pressed for further explanation, they declared she had told them
of things they had said and done when they were mere children
described books and ornaments they had in their boudoirs at home
keepsakes that different relations had presented to them. They
affirmed that she had even divined their thoughts, and had whispered
in the ear of each the name of the person she liked best in the
world, and informed them of what they most wished for.
Here the gentlemen interposed with earnest petitions to be further
enlightened on these two lastnamed points but they got only
blushes, ejaculations, tremors, and titters, in return for their
importunity. The matrons, meantime, offered vinaigrettes and
wielded fans and again and again reiterated the expression of
their concern that their warning had not been taken in time and
the elder gentlemen laughed, and the younger urged their services
on the agitated fair ones.
In the midst of the tumult, and while my eyes and ears were fully
engaged in the scene before me, I heard a hem close at my elbow
I turned, and saw Sam.
"If you please, miss, the gipsy declares that there is another
young single lady in the room who has not been to her yet, and she
swears she will not go till she has seen all. I thought it must
be you there is no one else for it. What shall I tell her?"
"Oh, I will go by all means," I answered and I was glad of the
unexpected opportunity to gratify my muchexcited curiosity. I
slipped out of the room, unobserved by any eye  for the company
were gathered in one mass about the trembling trio just returned
and I closed the door quietly behind me.
"If you like, miss," said Sam, "I'll wait in the hall for you and
if she frightens you, just call and I'll come in."
"No, Sam, return to the kitchen I am not in the least afraid."
Nor was I but I was a good deal interested and excited.
CHAPTER XIX
The library looked tranquil enough as I entered it, and the Sibyl
if Sibyl she were  was seated snugly enough in an easychair
at the chimneycorner. She had on a red cloak and a black bonnet
or rather, a broadbrimmed gipsy hat, tied down with a striped
handkerchief under her chin. An extinguished candle stood on
the table she was bending over the fire, and seemed reading in a
little black book, like a prayerbook, by the light of the blaze
she muttered the words to herself, as most old women do, while she
read she did not desist immediately on my entrance it appeared
she wished to finish a paragraph.
I stood on the rug and warmed my hands, which were rather cold with
sitting at a distance from the drawingroom fire. I felt now as
composed as ever I did in my life there was nothing indeed in
the gipsy's appearance to trouble one's calm. She shut her book
and slowly looked up her hatbrim partially shaded her face, yet
I could see, as she raised it, that it was a strange one. It looked
all brown and black elflocks bristled out from beneath a white
band which passed under her chin, and came half over her cheeks,
or rather jaws her eye confronted me at once, with a bold and
direct gaze.
"Well, and you want your fortune told?" she said, in a voice as
decided as her glance, as harsh as her features.
"I don't care about it, mother you may please yourself but I
ought to warn you, I have no faith."
"It's like your impudence to say so I expected it of you I heard
it in your step as you crossed the threshold."
"Did you? You've a quick ear."
"I have and a quick eye and a quick brain."
"You need them all in your trade."
"I do especially when I've customers like you to deal with. Why
don't you tremble?"
"I'm not cold."
"Why don't you turn pale?"
"I am not sick."
"Why don't you consult my art?"
"I'm not silly."
The old crone "nichered" a laugh under her bonnet and bandage she
then drew out a short black pipe, and lighting it began to smoke.
Having indulged a while in this sedative, she raised her bent body,
took the pipe from her lips, and while gazing steadily at the fire,
said very deliberately  "You are cold you are sick and you are
silly."
"Prove it," I rejoined.
"I will, in few words. You are cold, because you are alone no
contact strikes the fire from you that is in you. You are sick
because the best of feelings, the highest and the sweetest given
to man, keeps far away from you. You are silly, because, suffer
as you may, you will not beckon it to approach, nor will you stir
one step to meet it where it waits you."
She again put her short black pipe to her lips, and renewed her
smoking with vigour.
"You might say all that to almost any one who you knew lived as a
solitary dependent in a great house."
"I might say it to almost any one but would it be true of almost
any one?"
"In my circumstances."
"Yes just so, in YOUR circumstances but find me another precisely
placed as you are."
"It would be easy to find you thousands."
"You could scarcely find me one. If you knew it, you are peculiarly
situated very near happiness yes, within reach of it. The
materials are all prepared there only wants a movement to combine
them. Chance laid them somewhat apart let them be once approached
and bliss results."
"I don't understand enigmas. I never could guess a riddle in my
life."
"If you wish me to speak more plainly, show me your palm."
"And I must cross it with silver, I suppose?"
"To be sure."
I gave her a shilling she put it into an old stockingfoot which
she took out of her pocket, and having tied it round and returned
it, she told me to hold out my hand. I did. She arched her face
to the palm, and pored over it without touching it.
"It is too fine," said she. "I can make nothing of such a hand as
that almost without lines besides, what is in a palm? Destiny
is not written there."
"I believe you," said I.
"No," she continued, "it is in the face on the forehead, about
the eyes, in the lines of the mouth. Kneel, and lift up your head."
"Ah now you are coming to reality," I said, as I obeyed her. "I
shall begin to put some faith in you presently."
I knelt within half a yard of her. She stirred the fire, so
that a ripple of light broke from the disturbed coal the glare,
however, as she sat, only threw her face into deeper shadow mine,
it illumined.
"I wonder with what feelings you came to me tonight," she said,
when she had examined me a while. "I wonder what thoughts are busy
in your heart during all the hours you sit in yonder room with the
fine people flitting before you like shapes in a magiclantern
just as little sympathetic communion passing between you and them
as if they were really mere shadows of human forms, and not the
actual substance."
"I feel tired often, sleepy sometimes, but seldom sad."
"Then you have some secret hope to buoy you up and please you with
whispers of the future?"
"Not I. The utmost I hope is, to save money enough out of my earnings
to set up a school some day in a little house rented by myself."
"A mean nutriment for the spirit to exist on and sitting
in that windowseat you see I know your habits   "
"You have learned them from the servants."
"Ah you think yourself sharp. Well, perhaps I have to speak
truth, I have an acquaintance with one of them, Mrs. Poole  "
I started to my feet when I heard the name.
"You have  have you?" thought I "there is diablerie in the
business after all, then"
"Don't be alarmed," continued the strange being "she's a safe
hand is Mrs. Poole close and quiet any one may repose confidence
in her. But, as I was saying sitting in that windowseat, do
you think of nothing but your future school? Have you no present
interest in any of the company who occupy the sofas and chairs
before you? Is there not one face you study? one figure whose
movements you follow with at least curiosity?"
"I like to observe all the faces and all the figures."
"But do you never single one from the rest  or it may be, two?"
"I do frequently when the gestures or looks of a pair seem telling
a tale it amuses me to watch them."
"What tale do you like best to hear?"
"Oh, I have not much choice They generally run on the same theme
courtship and promise to end in the same catastrophe  marriage."
"And do you like that monotonous theme?"
"Positively, I don't care about it it is nothing to me."
"Nothing to you? When a lady, young and full of life and
health, charming with beauty and endowed with the gifts of rank
and fortune, sits and smiles in the eyes of a gentleman you  "
"I what?"
"You know  and perhaps think well of."
"I don't know the gentlemen here. I have scarcely interchanged
a syllable with one of them and as to thinking well of them, I
consider some respectable, and stately, and middleaged, and others
young, dashing, handsome, and lively but certainly they are all
at liberty to be the recipients of whose smiles they please, without
my feeling disposed to consider the transaction of any moment to
me."
"You don't know the gentlemen here? You have not exchanged a
syllable with one of them? Will you say that of the master of the
house"
"He is not at home."
"A profound remark A most ingenious quibble He went to Millcote
this morning, and will be back here tonight or tomorrow does
that circumstance exclude him from the list of your acquaintance
blot him, as it were, out of existence?"
"No but I can scarcely see what Mr. Rochester has to do with the
theme you had introduced."
"I was talking of ladies smiling in the eyes of gentlemen and of
late so many smiles have been shed into Mr. Rochester's eyes that
they overflow like two cups filled above the brim have you never
remarked that?"
"Mr. Rochester has a right to enjoy the society of his guests."
"No question about his right but have you never observed that,
of all the tales told here about matrimony, Mr. Rochester has been
favoured with the most lively and the most continuous?"
"The eagerness of a listener quickens the tongue of a narrator." I
said this rather to myself than to the gipsy, whose strange talk,
voice, manner, had by this time wrapped me in a kind of dream. One
unexpected sentence came from her lips after another, till I got
involved in a web of mystification and wondered what unseen spirit
had been sitting for weeks by my heart watching its workings and
taking record of every pulse.
"Eagerness of a listener" repeated she "yes Mr. Rochester has
sat by the hour, his ear inclined to the fascinating lips that took
such delight in their task of communicating and Mr. Rochester was
so willing to receive and looked so grateful for the pastime given
him you have noticed this?"
"Grateful I cannot remember detecting gratitude in his face."
"Detecting You have analysed, then. And what did you detect, if
not gratitude?"
I said nothing.
"You have seen love have you not?  and, looking forward, you
have seen him married, and beheld his bride happy?"
"Humph Not exactly. Your witch's skill is rather at fault
sometimes."
"What the devil have you seen, then?"
"Never mind I came here to inquire, not to confess. Is it known
that Mr. Rochester is to be married?"
"Yes and to the beautiful Miss Ingram."
"Shortly?"
"Appearances would warrant that conclusion and, no doubt though,
with an audacity that wants chastising out of you, you seem to
question it, they will be a superlatively happy pair. He must
love such a handsome, noble, witty, accomplished lady and probably
she loves him, or, if not his person, at least his purse. I know
she considers the Rochester estate eligible to the last degree
though God pardon me I told her something on that point about
an hour ago which made her look wondrous grave the corners of her
mouth fell half an inch. I would advise her blackaviced suitor to
look out if another comes, with a longer or clearer rentroll,
he's dished  "
"But, mother, I did not come to hear Mr. Rochester's fortune I
came to hear my own and you have told me nothing of it."
"Your fortune is yet doubtful when I examined your face, one trait
contradicted another. Chance has meted you a measure of happiness
that I know. I knew it before I came here this evening. She has
laid it carefully on one side for you. I saw her do it. It depends
on yourself to stretch out your hand, and take it up but whether
you will do so, is the problem I study. Kneel again on the rug."
"Don't keep me long the fire scorches me."
I knelt. She did not stoop towards me, but only gazed,
leaning back in her chair. She began muttering, 
"The flame flickers in the eye the eye shines like dew it looks
soft and full of feeling it smiles at my jargon it is susceptible
impression follows impression through its clear sphere where it
ceases to smile, it is sad an unconscious lassitude weighs on the
lid that signifies melancholy resulting from loneliness. It turns
from me it will not suffer further scrutiny it seems to deny,
by a mocking glance, the truth of the discoveries I have already
made,  to disown the charge both of sensibility and chagrin
its pride and reserve only confirm me in my opinion. The eye is
favourable.
"As to the mouth, it delights at times in laughter it is disposed
to impart all that the brain conceives though I daresay it would
be silent on much the heart experiences. Mobile and flexible,
it was never intended to be compressed in the eternal silence of
solitude it is a mouth which should speak much and smile often,
and have human affection for its interlocutor. That feature too
is propitious.
"I see no enemy to a fortunate issue but in the brow and that
brow professes to say,  'I can live alone, if selfrespect, and
circumstances require me so to do. I need not sell my soul to buy
bliss. I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me
alive if all extraneous delights should be withheld, or offered
only at a price I cannot afford to give.' The forehead declares,
'Reason sits firm and holds the reins, and she will not let the
feelings burst away and hurry her to wild chasms. The passions may
rage furiously, like true heathens, as they are and the desires
may imagine all sorts of vain things but judgment shall still
have the last word in every argument, and the casting vote in
every decision. Strong wind, earthquakeshock, and fire may pass
by but I shall follow the guiding of that still small voice which
interprets the dictates of conscience.'
"Well said, forehead your declaration shall be respected. I have
formed my plans  right plans I deem them  and in them I have
attended to the claims of conscience, the counsels of reason. I
know how soon youth would fade and bloom perish, if, in the cup
of bliss offered, but one dreg of shame, or one flavour of remorse
were detected and I do not want sacrifice, sorrow, dissolution 
such is not my taste. I wish to foster, not to blight  to earn
gratitude, not to wring tears of blood  no, nor of brine my
harvest must be in smiles, in endearments, in sweet  That will
do. I think I rave in a kind of exquisite delirium. I should wish
now to protract this moment ad infinitum but I dare not. So far
I have governed myself thoroughly. I have acted as I inwardly swore
I would act but further might try me beyond my strength. Rise,
Miss Eyre leave me the play is played out'."
Where was I? Did I wake or sleep? Had I been dreaming? Did I
dream still? The old woman's voice had changed her accent, her
gesture, and all were familiar to me as my own face in a glass
as the speech of my own tongue. I got up, but did not go. I
looked I stirred the fire, and I looked again but she drew her
bonnet and her bandage closer about her face, and again beckoned me
to depart. The flame illuminated her hand stretched out roused
now, and on the alert for discoveries, I at once noticed that
hand. It was no more the withered limb of eld than my own it was
a rounded supple member, with smooth fingers, symmetrically turned
a broad ring flashed on the little finger, and stooping forward,
I looked at it, and saw a gem I had seen a hundred times before.
Again I looked at the face which was no longer turned from me 
on the contrary, the bonnet was doffed, the bandage displaced, the
head advanced.
"Well, Jane, do you know me?" asked the familiar voice.
"Only take off the red cloak, sir, and then  "
"But the string is in a knot  help me."
"Break it, sir."
"There, then  'Off, ye lendings'" And Mr. Rochester stepped
out of his disguise.
"Now, sir, what a strange idea"
"But well carried out, eh? Don't you think so?"
"With the ladies you must have managed well."
"But not with you?"
"You did not act the character of a gipsy with me."
"What character did I act? My own?"
"No some unaccountable one. In short, I believe you have been
trying to draw me out  or in you have been talking nonsense to
make me talk nonsense. It is scarcely fair, sir."
"Do you forgive me, Jane?"
"I cannot tell till I have thought it all over. If, on reflection,
I find I have fallen into no great absurdity, I shall try to forgive
you but it was not right."
"Oh, you have been very correct  very careful, very sensible."
I reflected, and thought, on the whole, I had. It was a comfort
but, indeed, I had been on my guard almost from the beginning of
the interview. Something of masquerade I suspected. I knew gipsies
and fortunetellers did not express themselves as this seeming old
woman had expressed herself besides I had noted her feigned voice,
her anxiety to conceal her features. But my mind had been running
on Grace Poole  that living enigma, that mystery of mysteries,
as I considered her. I had never thought of Mr. Rochester.
"Well," said he, "what are you musing about? What does that grave
smile signify?"
"Wonder and selfcongratulation, sir. I have your permission to
retire now, I suppose?"
"No stay a moment and tell me what the people in the drawingroom
yonder are doing."
"Discussing the gipsy, I daresay."
"Sit down  Let me hear what they said about me."
"I had better not stay long, sir it must be near eleven o'clock.
Oh, are you aware, Mr. Rochester, that a stranger has arrived here
since you left this morning?"
"A stranger  no who can it be? I expected no one is he gone?"
"No he said he had known you long, and that he could take the
liberty of installing himself here till you returned."
"The devil he did Did he give his name?"
"His name is Mason, sir and he comes from the West Indies from
Spanish Town, in Jamaica, I think."
Mr. Rochester was standing near me he had taken my hand, as if
to lead me to a chair. As I spoke he gave my wrist a convulsive
grip the smile on his lips froze apparently a spasm caught his
breath.
"Mason  the West Indies" he said, in the tone one might fancy
a speaking automaton to enounce its single words "Mason  the
West Indies" he reiterated and he went over the syllables three
times, growing, in the intervals of speaking, whiter than ashes
he hardly seemed to know what he was doing.
"Do you feel ill, sir?" I inquired.
"Jane, I've got a blow I've got a blow, Jane" He staggered.
"Oh, lean on me, sir."
"Jane, you offered me your shoulder once before let me have it
now."
"Yes, sir, yes and my arm."
He sat down, and made me sit beside him. Holding my hand in both
his own, he chafed it gazing on me, at the same time, with the
most troubled and dreary look.
"My little friend" said he, "I wish I were in a quiet island
with only you and trouble, and danger, and hideous recollections
removed from me."
"Can I help you, sir?  I'd give my life to serve you."
"Jane, if aid is wanted, I'll seek it at your hands I promise you
that."
"Thank you, sir. Tell me what to do,  I'll try, at least, to do
it."
"Fetch me now, Jane, a glass of wine from the diningroom they
will be at supper there and tell me if Mason is with them, and
what he is doing."
I went. I found all the party in the diningroom at supper, as Mr.
Rochester had said they were not seated at table,  the supper was
arranged on the sideboard each had taken what he chose, and they
stood about here and there in groups, their plates and glasses in
their hands. Every one seemed in high glee laughter and conversation
were general and animated. Mr. Mason stood near the fire, talking
to Colonel and Mrs. Dent, and appeared as merry as any of them. I
filled a wineglass I saw Miss Ingram watch me frowningly as I did
so she thought I was taking a liberty, I daresay, and I returned
to the library.
Mr. Rochester's extreme pallor had disappeared, and he looked once
more firm and stern. He took the glass from my hand.
"Here is to your health, ministrant spirit" he said. He swallowed
the contents and returned it to me. "What are they doing, Jane?"
"Laughing and talking, sir."
"They don't look grave and mysterious, as if they had heard something
strange?"
"Not at all they are full of jests and gaiety."
"And Mason?"
"He was laughing too."
"If all these people came in a body and spat at me, what would you
do, Jane?"
"Turn them out of the room, sir, if I could."
He half smiled. "But if I were to go to them, and they only looked
at me coldly, and whispered sneeringly amongst each other, and then
dropped off and left me one by one, what then? Would you go with
them?"
"I rather think not, sir I should have more pleasure in staying
with you."
"To comfort me?"
"Yes, sir, to comfort you, as well as I could."
"And if they laid you under a ban for adhering to me?"
"I, probably, should know nothing about their ban and if I did,
I should care nothing about it."
"Then, you could dare censure for my sake?"
"I could dare it for the sake of any friend who deserved my adherence
as you, I am sure, do."
"Go back now into the room step quietly up to Mason, and whisper
in his ear that Mr. Rochester is come and wishes to see him show
him in here and then leave me."
"Yes, sir."
I did his behest. The company all stared at me as I passed straight
among them. I sought Mr. Mason, delivered the message, and preceded
him from the room I ushered him into the library, and then I went
upstairs.
At a late hour, after I had been in bed some time, I heard the
visitors repair to their chambers I distinguished Mr. Rochester's
voice, and heard him say, "This way, Mason this is your room."
He spoke cheerfully the gay tones set my heart at ease. I was
soon asleep.
CHAPTER XX
I had forgotten to draw my curtain, which I usually did, and also
to let down my windowblind. The consequence was, that when the
moon, which was full and bright for the night was fine, came in
her course to that space in the sky opposite my casement, and looked
in at me through the unveiled panes, her glorious gaze roused me.
Awaking in the dead of night, I opened my eyes on her disk 
silverwhite and crystal clear. It was beautiful, but too solemn
I half rose, and stretched my arm to draw the curtain.
Good God What a cry
The night  its silence  its rest, was rent in twain by a savage,
a sharp, a shrilly sound that ran from end to end of Thornfield
Hall.
My pulse stopped my heart stood still my stretched arm was
paralysed. The cry died, and was not renewed. Indeed, whatever
being uttered that fearful shriek could not soon repeat it not
the widestwinged condor on the Andes could, twice in succession,
send out such a yell from the cloud shrouding his eyrie. The thing
delivering such utterance must rest ere it could repeat the effort.
It came out of the third storey for it passed overhead. And
overhead  yes, in the room just above my chamberceiling  I now
heard a struggle a deadly one it seemed from the noise
and a halfsmothered voice shouted 
"Help help help" three times rapidly.
"Will no one come?" it cried and then, while the staggering and
stamping went on wildly, I distinguished through plank and plaster
"Rochester Rochester for God's sake, come"
A chamberdoor opened some one ran, or rushed, along the gallery.
Another step stamped on the flooring above and something fell and
there was silence.
I had put on some clothes, though horror shook all my limbs I issued
from my apartment. The sleepers were all aroused ejaculations,
terrified murmurs sounded in every room door after door unclosed
one looked out and another looked out the gallery filled. Gentlemen
and ladies alike had quitted their beds and "Oh what is it?" 
"Who is hurt?"  "What has happened?"  "Fetch a light"  "Is
it fire?"  "Are there robbers?"  "Where shall we run?" was
demanded confusedly on all hands. But for the moonlight they would
have been in complete darkness. They ran to and fro they crowded
together some sobbed, some stumbled the confusion was inextricable.
"Where the devil is Rochester?" cried Colonel Dent. "I cannot
find him in his bed."
"Here here" was shouted in return. "Be composed, all of you
I'm coming."
And the door at the end of the gallery opened, and Mr. Rochester
advanced with a candle he had just descended from the upper storey.
One of the ladies ran to him directly she seized his arm it was
Miss Ingram.
"What awful event has taken place?" said she. "Speak let us
know the worst at once"
"But don't pull me down or strangle me," he replied for the Misses
Eshton were clinging about him now and the two dowagers, in vast
white wrappers, were bearing down on him like ships in full sail.
"All's right  all's right" he cried. "It's a mere rehearsal of
Much Ado about Nothing. Ladies, keep off, or I shall wax dangerous."
And dangerous he looked his black eyes darted sparks. Calming
himself by an effort, he added 
"A servant has had the nightmare that is all. She's an excitable,
nervous person she construed her dream into an apparition, or
something of that sort, no doubt and has taken a fit with fright.
Now, then, I must see you all back into your rooms for, till the
house is settled, she cannot be looked after. Gentlemen, have the
goodness to set the ladies the example. Miss Ingram, I am sure
you will not fail in evincing superiority to idle terrors. Amy and
Louisa, return to your nests like a pair of doves, as you are.
Mesdames" to the dowagers, "you will take cold to a dead certainty,
if you stay in this chill gallery any longer."
And so, by dint of alternate coaxing and commanding, he contrived
to get them all once more enclosed in their separate dormitories.
I did not wait to be ordered back to mine, but retreated unnoticed,
as unnoticed I had left it.
Not, however, to go to bed on the contrary, I began and dressed
myself carefully. The sounds I had heard after the scream, and the
words that had been uttered, had probably been heard only by me
for they had proceeded from the room above mine but they assured
me that it was not a servant's dream which had thus struck horror
through the house and that the explanation Mr. Rochester had given
was merely an invention framed to pacify his guests. I dressed,
then, to be ready for emergencies. When dressed, I sat a long
time by the window looking out over the silent grounds and silvered
fields and waiting for I knew not what. It seemed to me that some
event must follow the strange cry, struggle, and call.
No stillness returned each murmur and movement ceased gradually,
and in about an hour Thornfield Hall was again as hushed as a
desert. It seemed that sleep and night had resumed their empire.
Meantime the moon declined she was about to set. Not liking to
sit in the cold and darkness, I thought I would lie down on my bed,
dressed as I was. I left the window, and moved with little noise
across the carpet as I stooped to take off my shoes, a cautious
hand tapped low at the door.
"Am I wanted?" I asked.
"Are you up?" asked the voice I expected to hear, viz., my master's.
"Yes, sir."
"And dressed?"
"Yes."
"Come out, then, quietly."
I obeyed. Mr. Rochester stood in the gallery holding a light.
"I want you," he said "come this way take your time, and make
no noise."
My slippers were thin I could walk the matted floor as softly as
a cat. He glided up the gallery and up the stairs, and stopped in
the dark, low corridor of the fateful third storey I had followed
and stood at his side.
"Have you a sponge in your room?" he asked in a whisper.
"Yes, sir."
"Have you any salts  volatile salts?"
"Yes."
"Go back and fetch both."
I returned, sought the sponge on the washstand, the salts in my
drawer, and once more retraced my steps. He still waited he held
a key in his hand approaching one of the small, black doors, he
put it in the lock he paused, and addressed me again.
"You don't turn sick at the sight of blood?"
"I think I shall not I have never been tried yet."
I felt a thrill while I answered him but no coldness, and no
faintness.
"Just give me your hand," he said "it will not do to risk a
fainting fit."
I put my fingers into his. "Warm and steady," was his remark he
turned the key and opened the door.
I saw a room I remembered to have seen before, the day Mrs.
Fairfax showed me over the house it was hung with tapestry but
the tapestry was now looped up in one part, and there was a door
apparent, which had then been concealed. This door was open
a light shone out of the room within I heard thence a snarling,
snatching sound, almost like a dog quarrelling. Mr. Rochester,
putting down his candle, said to me, "Wait a minute," and he went
forward to the inner apartment. A shout of laughter greeted his
entrance noisy at first, and terminating in Grace Poole's own goblin
ha ha SHE then was there. He made some sort of arrangement
without speaking, though I heard a low voice address him he came
out and closed the door behind him.
"Here, Jane" he said and I walked round to the other side of a
large bed, which with its drawn curtains concealed a considerable
portion of the chamber. An easychair was near the bedhead a
man sat in it, dressed with the exception of his coat he was still
his head leant back his eyes were closed. Mr. Rochester held the
candle over him I recognised in his pale and seemingly lifeless
face  the stranger, Mason I saw too that his linen on one side,
and one arm, was almost soaked in blood.
"Hold the candle," said Mr. Rochester, and I took it he fetched
a basin of water from the washstand "Hold that," said he. I
obeyed. He took the sponge, dipped it in, and moistened the
corpselike face he asked for my smellingbottle, and applied it
to the nostrils. Mr. Mason shortly unclosed his eyes he groaned.
Mr. Rochester opened the shirt of the wounded man, whose arm and
shoulder were bandaged he sponged away blood, trickling fast
down.
"Is there immediate danger?" murmured Mr. Mason.
"Pooh No  a mere scratch. Don't be so overcome, man bear
up I'll fetch a surgeon for you now, myself you'll be able to
be removed by morning, I hope. Jane," he continued.
"Sir?"
"I shall have to leave you in this room with this gentleman, for
an hour, or perhaps two hours you will sponge the blood as I
do when it returns if he feels faint, you will put the glass of
water on that stand to his lips, and your salts to his nose. You
will not speak to him on any pretext  and  Richard, it will be
at the peril of your life if you speak to her open your lips 
agitate yourself and I'll not answer for the consequences."
Again the poor man groaned he looked as if he dared not move fear,
either of death or of something else, appeared almost to paralyse
him. Mr. Rochester put the now bloody sponge into my hand, and
I proceeded to use it as he had done. He watched me a second,
then saying, "Remember  No conversation," he left the room. I
experienced a strange feeling as the key grated in the lock, and
the sound of his retreating step ceased to be heard.
Here then I was in the third storey, fastened into one of its mystic
cells night around me a pale and bloody spectacle under my eyes
and hands a murderess hardly separated from me by a single door
yes  that was appalling  the rest I could bear but I shuddered
at the thought of Grace Poole bursting out upon me.
I must keep to my post, however. I must watch this ghastly
countenance  these blue, still lips forbidden to unclose 
these eyes now shut, now opening, now wandering through the room,
now fixing on me, and ever glazed with the dulness of horror. I must
dip my hand again and again in the basin of blood and water, and
wipe away the trickling gore. I must see the light of the unsnuffed
candle wane on my employment the shadows darken on the wrought,
antique tapestry round me, and grow black under the hangings of
the vast old bed, and quiver strangely over the doors of a great
cabinet opposite  whose front, divided into twelve panels, bore,
in grim design, the heads of the twelve apostles, each enclosed in
its separate panel as in a frame while above them at the top rose
an ebon crucifix and a dying Christ.
According as the shifting obscurity and flickering gleam hovered
here or glanced there, it was now the bearded physician, Luke,
that bent his brow now St. John's long hair that waved and anon
the devilish face of Judas, that grew out of the panel, and seemed
gathering life and threatening a revelation of the archtraitor 
of Satan himself  in his subordinate's form.
Amidst all this, I had to listen as well as watch to listen for
the movements of the wild beast or the fiend in yonder side den.
But since Mr. Rochester's visit it seemed spellbound all the
night I heard but three sounds at three long intervals,  a step
creak, a momentary renewal of the snarling, canine noise, and a
deep human groan.
Then my own thoughts worried me. What crime was this that lived
incarnate in this sequestered mansion, and could neither be expelled
nor subdued by the owner?  what mystery, that broke out now in
fire and now in blood, at the deadest hours of night? What creature
was it, that, masked in an ordinary woman's face and shape, uttered
the voice, now of a mocking demon, and anon of a carrionseeking
bird of prey?
And this man I bent over  this commonplace, quiet stranger 
how had he become involved in the web of horror? and why had the
Fury flown at him? What made him seek this quarter of the house
at an untimely season, when he should have been asleep in bed? I
had heard Mr. Rochester assign him an apartment below  what
brought him here And why, now, was he so tame under the violence
or treachery done him? Why did he so quietly submit to the
concealment Mr. Rochester enforced? Why DID Mr. Rochester enforce
this concealment? His guest had been outraged, his own life
on a former occasion had been hideously plotted against and both
attempts he smothered in secrecy and sank in oblivion Lastly, I
saw Mr. Mason was submissive to Mr. Rochester that the impetuous
will of the latter held complete sway over the inertness of the
former the few words which had passed between them assured me of
this. It was evident that in their former intercourse, the passive
disposition of the one had been habitually influenced by the active
energy of the other whence then had arisen Mr. Rochester's dismay
when he heard of Mr. Mason's arrival? Why had the mere name of
this unresisting individual  whom his word now sufficed to control
like a child  fallen on him, a few hours since, as a thunderbolt
might fall on an oak?
Oh I could not forget his look and his paleness when he whispered
"Jane, I have got a blow  I have got a blow, Jane." I could not
forget how the arm had trembled which he rested on my shoulder
and it was no light matter which could thus bow the resolute spirit
and thrill the vigorous frame of Fairfax Rochester.
"When will he come? When will he come?" I cried inwardly, as
the night lingered and lingered  as my bleeding patient drooped,
moaned, sickened and neither day nor aid arrived. I had, again
and again, held the water to Mason's white lips again and again
offered him the stimulating salts my efforts seemed ineffectual
either bodily or mental suffering, or loss of blood, or all three
combined, were fast prostrating his strength. He moaned so, and
looked so weak, wild, and lost, I feared he was dying and I might
not even speak to him.
The candle, wasted at last, went out as it expired, I perceived
streaks of grey light edging the window curtains dawn was
then approaching. Presently I heard Pilot bark far below, out of
his distant kennel in the courtyard hope revived. Nor was it
unwarranted in five minutes more the grating key, the yielding
lock, warned me my watch was relieved. It could not have lasted
more than two hours many a week has seemed shorter.
Mr. Rochester entered, and with him the surgeon he had been to
fetch.
"Now, Carter, be on the alert," he said to this last "I give you
but halfanhour for dressing the wound, fastening the bandages,
getting the patient downstairs and all."
"But is he fit to move, sir?"
"No doubt of it it is nothing serious he is nervous, his spirits
must be kept up. Come, set to work."
Mr. Rochester drew back the thick curtain, drew up the holland
blind, let in all the daylight he could and I was surprised and
cheered to see how far dawn was advanced what rosy streaks were
beginning to brighten the east. Then he approached Mason, whom
the surgeon was already handling.
"Now, my good fellow, how are you?" he asked.
"She's done for me, I fear," was the faint reply.
"Not a whit  courage This day fortnight you'll hardly be a pin
the worse of it you've lost a little blood that's all. Carter,
assure him there's no danger."
"I can do that conscientiously," said Carter, who had now undone
the bandages "only I wish I could have got here sooner he would
not have bled so much  but how is this? The flesh on the shoulder
is torn as well as cut. This wound was not done with a knife
there have been teeth here"
"She bit me," he murmured. "She worried me like a tigress, when
Rochester got the knife from her."
"You should not have yielded you should have grappled with her
at once," said Mr. Rochester.
"But under such circumstances, what could one do?" returned Mason.
"Oh, it was frightful" he added, shuddering. "And I did not
expect it she looked so quiet at first."
"I warned you," was his friend's answer "I said  be on your
guard when you go near her. Besides, you might have waited till
to morrow, and had me with you it was mere folly to attempt the
interview tonight, and alone."
"I thought I could have done some good."
"You thought you thought Yes, it makes me impatient to hear
you but, however, you have suffered, and are likely to suffer
enough for not taking my advice so I'll say no more. Carter 
hurry  hurry The sun will soon rise, and I must have him off."
"Directly, sir the shoulder is just bandaged. I must look to this
other wound in the arm she has had her teeth here too, I think."
"She sucked the blood she said she'd drain my heart," said Mason.
I saw Mr. Rochester shudder a singularly marked expression of disgust,
horror, hatred, warped his countenance almost to distortion
but he only said 
"Come, be silent, Richard, and never mind her gibberish don't
repeat it."
"I wish I could forget it," was the answer.
"You will when you are out of the country when you get back to
Spanish Town, you may think of her as dead and buried  or rather,
you need not think of her at all."
"Impossible to forget this night"
"It is not impossible have some energy, man. You thought you
were as dead as a herring two hours since, and you are all alive
and talking now. There  Carter has done with you or nearly so
I'll make you decent in a trice. Jane" he turned to me for the
first time since his reentrance, "take this key go down into
my bedroom, and walk straight forward into my dressingroom open
the top drawer of the wardrobe and take out a clean shirt and
neckhandkerchief bring them here and be nimble."
I went sought the repository he had mentioned, found the articles
named, and returned with them.
"Now," said he, "go to the other side of the bed while I order his
toilet but don't leave the room you may be wanted again."
I retired as directed.
"Was anybody stirring below when you went down, Jane?" inquired
Mr. Rochester presently.
"No, sir all was very still."
"We shall get you off cannily, Dick and it will be better, both
for your sake, and for that of the poor creature in yonder. I have
striven long to avoid exposure, and I should not like it to come
at last. Here, Carter, help him on with his waistcoat. Where
did you leave your furred cloak? You can't travel a mile without
that, I know, in this damned cold climate. In your room?  Jane,
run down to Mr. Mason's room,  the one next mine,  and fetch
a cloak you will see there."
Again I ran, and again returned, bearing an immense mantle lined
and edged with fur.
"Now, I've another errand for you," said my untiring master "you
must away to my room again. What a mercy you are shod with velvet,
Jane  a clodhopping messenger would never do at this juncture.
You must open the middle drawer of my toilettable and take out a
little phial and a little glass you will find there,  quick"
I flew thither and back, bringing the desired vessels.
"That's well Now, doctor, I shall take the liberty of administering
a dose myself, on my own responsibility. I got this cordial at
Rome, of an Italian charlatan  a fellow you would have kicked,
Carter. It is not a thing to be used indiscriminately, but it is
good upon occasion as now, for instance. Jane, a little water."
He held out the tiny glass, and I half filled it from the waterbottle
on the washstand.
"That will do  now wet the lip of the phial."
I did so he measured twelve drops of a crimson liquid, and presented
it to Mason.
"Drink, Richard it will give you the heart you lack, for an hour
or so."
"But will it hurt me?  is it inflammatory?"
"Drink drink drink"
Mr. Mason obeyed, because it was evidently useless to resist. He
was dressed now he still looked pale, but he was no longer gory
and sullied. Mr. Rochester let him sit three minutes after
he had swallowed the liquid he then took his arm 
"Now I am sure you can get on your feet," he said  "try."
The patient rose.
"Carter, take him under the other shoulder. Be of good cheer,
Richard step out  that's it"
"I do feel better," remarked Mr. Mason.
"I am sure you do. Now, Jane, trip on before us away to the
backstairs unbolt the sidepassage door, and tell the driver of
the postchaise you will see in the yard  or just outside, for I
told him not to drive his rattling wheels over the pavement  to
be ready we are coming and, Jane, if any one is about, come to
the foot of the stairs and hem."
It was by this time halfpast five, and the sun was on the point of
rising but I found the kitchen still dark and silent. The side
passage door was fastened I opened it with as little noise as
possible all the yard was quiet but the gates stood wide open,
and there was a postchaise, with horses ready harnessed, and driver
seated on the box, stationed outside. I approached him, and said
the gentlemen were coming he nodded then I looked carefully round
and listened. The stillness of early morning slumbered everywhere
the curtains were yet drawn over the servants' chamber windows
little birds were just twittering in the blossomblanched orchard
trees, whose boughs drooped like white garlands over the wall
enclosing one side of the yard the carriage horses stamped from
time to time in their closed stables all else was still.
The gentlemen now appeared. Mason, supported by Mr. Rochester and
the surgeon, seemed to walk with tolerable ease they assisted
him into the chaise Carter followed.
"Take care of him," said Mr. Rochester to the latter, "and keep
him at your house till he is quite well I shall ride over in a
day or two to see how he gets on. Richard, how is it with you?"
"The fresh air revives me, Fairfax."
"Leave the window open on his side, Carter there is no wind 
good bye, Dick."
"Fairfax  "
"Well what is it?"
"Let her be taken care of let her be treated as tenderly as may
be let her  " he stopped and burst into tears.
"I do my best and have done it, and will do it," was the answer
he shut up the chaise door, and the vehicle drove away.
"Yet would to God there was an end of all this" added Mr. Rochester,
as he closed and barred the heavy yardgates.
This done, he moved with slow step and abstracted air towards a
door in the wall bordering the orchard. I, supposing he had done
with me, prepared to return to the house again, however, I heard
him call "Jane" He had opened feel portal and stood at it, waiting
for me.
"Come where there is some freshness, for a few moments," he said
"that house is a mere dungeon don't you feel it so?"
"It seems to me a splendid mansion, sir."
"The glamour of inexperience is over your eyes," he answered "and
you see it through a charmed medium you cannot discern that the
gilding is slime and the silk draperies cobwebs that the marble
is sordid slate, and the polished woods mere refuse chips and scaly
bark. Now HERE" he pointed to the leafy enclosure we had entered
"all is real, sweet, and pure."
He strayed down a walk edged with box, with apple trees, pear trees,
and cherry trees on one side, and a border on the other full of all
sorts of oldfashioned flowers, stocks, sweetwilliams, primroses,
pansies, mingled with southernwood, sweetbriar, and various fragrant
herbs. They were fresh now as a succession of April showers and
gleams, followed by a lovely spring morning, could make them the
sun was just entering the dappled east, and his light illumined
the wreathed and dewy orchard trees and shone down the quiet walks
under them.
"Jane, will you have a flower?"
He gathered a halfblown rose, the first on the bush, and offered
it to me.
"Thank you, sir."
"Do you like this sunrise, Jane? That sky with its high and light
clouds which are sure to melt away as the day waxes warm  this
placid and balmly atmosphere?"
"I do, very much."
"You have passed a strange night, Jane."
"Yes, sir."
"And it has made you look pale  were you afraid when I left you
alone with Mason?"
"I was afraid of some one coming out of the inner room."
"But I had fastened the door  I had the key in my pocket I should
have been a careless shepherd if I had left a lamb  my pet lamb
so near a wolf's den, unguarded you were safe."
"Will Grace Poole live here still, sir?"
"Oh yes don't trouble your head about her  put the thing out
of your thoughts."
"Yet it seems to me your life is hardly secure while she stays."
"Never fear  I will take care of myself."
"Is the danger you apprehended last night gone by now, sir?"
"I cannot vouch for that till Mason is out of England nor even
then. To live, for me, Jane, is to stand on a cratercrust which
may crack and spue fire any day."
"But Mr. Mason seems a man easily led. Your influence, sir, is
evidently potent with him he will never set you at defiance or
wilfully injure you."
"Oh, no Mason will not defy me nor, knowing it, will he hurt
me  but, unintentionally, he might in a moment, by one careless
word, deprive me, if not of life, yet for ever of happiness."
"Tell him to be cautious, sir let him know what you fear, and
show him how to avert the danger."
He laughed sardonically, hastily took my hand, and as hastily threw
it from him.
"If I could do that, simpleton, where would the danger be? Annihilated
in a moment. Ever since I have known Mason, I have only had to say
to him 'Do that,' and the thing has been done. But I cannot give
him orders in this case I cannot say 'Beware of harming me,
Richard' for it is imperative that I should keep him ignorant that
harm to me is possible. Now you look puzzled and I will puzzle
you further. You are my little friend, are you not?"
"I like to serve you, sir, and to obey you in all that is right."
"Precisely I see you do. I see genuine contentment in your gait
and mien, your eye and face, when you are helping me and pleasing
me  working for me, and with me, in, as you characteristically
say, 'ALL THAT IS RIGHT' for if I bid you do what you thought wrong,
there would be no lightfooted running, no neathanded alacrity, no
lively glance and animated complexion. My friend would then turn
to me, quiet and pale, and would say, 'No, sir that is impossible
I cannot do it, because it is wrong' and would become immutable
as a fixed star. Well, you too have power over me, and may injure
me yet I dare not show you where I am vulnerable, lest, faithful
and friendly as you are, you should transfix me at once."
"If you have no more to fear from Mr. Mason than you have from me,
sir, you are very safe."
"God grant it may be so Here, Jane, is an arbour sit down."
The arbour was an arch in the wall, lined with ivy it contained
a rustic seat. Mr. Rochester took it, leaving room, however, for
me but I stood before him.
"Sit," he said "the bench is long enough for two. You don't
hesitate to take a place at my side, do you? Is that wrong, Jane?"
I answered him by assuming it to refuse would, I felt, have been
unwise.
"Now, my little friend, while the sun drinks the dew  while all
the flowers in this old garden awake and expand, and the birds
fetch their young ones' breakfast out of the Thornfield, and the
early bees do their first spell of work  I'll put a case to you,
which you must endeavour to suppose your own but first, look
at me, and tell me you are at ease, and not fearing that I err in
detaining you, or that you err in staying."
"No, sir I am content."
"Well then, Jane, call to aid your fancy suppose you were no
longer a girl well reared and disciplined, but a wild boy indulged
from childhood upwards imagine yourself in a remote foreign land
conceive that you there commit a capital error, no matter of what
nature or from what motives, but one whose consequences must follow
you through life and taint all your existence. Mind, I don't say
a CRIME I am not speaking of shedding of blood or any other guilty
act, which might make the perpetrator amenable to the law my word
is ERROR. The results of what you have done become in time to you
utterly insupportable you take measures to obtain relief unusual
measures, but neither unlawful nor culpable. Still you are
miserable for hope has quitted you on the very confines of life
your sun at noon darkens in an eclipse, which you feel will not
leave it till the time of setting. Bitter and base associations
have become the sole food of your memory you wander here and
there, seeking rest in exile happiness in pleasure  I mean in
heartless, sensual pleasure  such as dulls intellect and blights
feeling. Heartweary and soulwithered, you come home after years
of voluntary banishment you make a new acquaintance  how or
where no matter you find in this stranger much of the good and
bright qualities which you have sought for twenty years, and never
before encountered and they are all fresh, healthy, without soil
and without taint. Such society revives, regenerates you feel
better days come back  higher wishes, purer feelings you desire
to recommence your life, and to spend what remains to you of days
in a way more worthy of an immortal being. To attain this end,
are you justified in overleaping an obstacle of custom  a mere
conventional impediment which neither your conscience sanctifies
nor your judgment approves?"
He paused for an answer and what was I to say? Oh, for some
good spirit to suggest a judicious and satisfactory response Vain
aspiration The west wind whispered in the ivy round me but no
gentle Ariel borrowed its breath as a medium of speech the birds
sang in the treetops but their song, however sweet, was inarticulate.
Again Mr. Rochester propounded his query
"Is the wandering and sinful, but now restseeking and repentant,
man justified in daring the world's opinion, in order to attach
to him for ever this gentle, gracious, genial stranger, thereby
securing his own peace of mind and regeneration of life?"
"Sir," I answered, "a wanderer's repose or a sinner's reformation
should never depend on a fellowcreature. Men and women die
philosophers falter in wisdom, and Christians in goodness if any
one you know has suffered and erred, let him look higher than his
equals for strength to amend and solace to heal."
"But the instrument  the instrument God, who does the work,
ordains the instrument. I have myself  I tell it you without
parable  been a worldly, dissipated, restless man and
I believe I have found the instrument for my cure in  "
He paused the birds went on carolling, the leaves lightly rustling.
I almost wondered they did not check their songs and whispers to
catch the suspended revelation but they would have had to wait many
minutes  so long was the silence protracted. At last I looked
up at the tardy speaker he was looking eagerly at me.
"Little friend," said he, in quite a changed tone  while his
face changed too, losing all its softness and gravity, and becoming
harsh and sarcastic  "you have noticed my tender penchant for Miss
Ingram don't you think if I married her she would regenerate me
with a vengeance?"
He got up instantly, went quite to the other end of the walk, and
when he came back he was humming a tune.
"Jane, Jane," said he, stopping before me, "you are quite pale with
your vigils don't you curse me for disturbing your rest?"
"Curse you? No, sir."
"Shake hands in confirmation of the word. What cold fingers
They were warmer last night when I touched them at the door of the
mysterious chamber. Jane, when will you watch with me again?"
"Whenever I can be useful, sir."
"For instance, the night before I am married I am sure I shall
not be able to sleep. Will you promise to sit up with me to bear
me company? To you I can talk of my lovely one for now you have
seen her and know her."
"Yes, sir."
"She's a rare one, is she not, Jane?"
"Yes, sir."
"A strapper  a real strapper, Jane big, brown, and buxom with
hair just such as the ladies of Carthage must have had. Bless me
there's Dent and Lynn in the stables Go in by the shrubbery,
through that wicket."
As I went one way, he went another, and I heard him in
the yard, saying cheerfully 
"Mason got the start of you all this morning he was gone before
sunrise I rose at four to see him off."
CHAPTER XXI
Presentiments are strange things and so are sympathies and so
are signs and the three combined make one mystery to which humanity
has not yet found the key. I never laughed at presentiments in
my life, because I have had strange ones of my own. Sympathies,
I believe, exist for instance, between fardistant, longabsent,
wholly estranged relatives asserting, notwithstanding their
alienation, the unity of the source to which each traces his origin
whose workings baffle mortal comprehension. And signs, for aught
we know, may be but the sympathies of Nature with man.
When I was a little girl, only six years old, I one night heard
Bessie Leaven say to Martha Abbot that she had been dreaming about
a little child and that to dream of children was a sure sign of
trouble, either to one's self or one's kin. The saying might have
worn out of my memory, had not a circumstance immediately followed
which served indelibly to fix it there. The next day Bessie was
sent for home to the deathbed of her little sister.
Of late I had often recalled this saying and this incident for
during the past week scarcely a night had gone over my couch that
had not brought with it a dream of an infant, which I sometimes
hushed in my arms, sometimes dandled on my knee, sometimes watched
playing with daisies on a lawn, or again, dabbling its hands in
running water. It was a wailing child this night, and a laughing
one the next now it nestled close to me, and now it ran from me
but whatever mood the apparition evinced, whatever aspect it wore,
it failed not for seven successive nights to meet me the moment I
entered the land of slumber.
I did not like this iteration of one idea  this strange recurrence
of one image, and I grew nervous as bedtime approached and the
hour of the vision drew near. It was from companionship with this
babyphantom I had been roused on that moonlight night when I heard
the cry and it was on the afternoon of the day following I was
summoned downstairs by a message that some one wanted me in Mrs.
Fairfax's room. On repairing thither, I found a man waiting for
me, having the appearance of a gentleman's servant he was dressed
in deep mourning, and the hat he held in his hand was surrounded
with a crape band.
"I daresay you hardly remember me, Miss," he said, rising as I
entered "but my name is Leaven I lived coachman with Mrs. Reed
when you were at Gateshead, eight or nine years since, and I live
there still."
"Oh, Robert how do you do? I remember you very well you used
to give me a ride sometimes on Miss Georgiana's bay pony. And how
is Bessie? You are married to Bessie?"
"Yes, Miss my wife is very hearty, thank you she brought me
another little one about two months since  we have three now 
and both mother and child are thriving."
"And are the family well at the house, Robert?"
"I am sorry I can't give you better news of them, Miss they are
very badly at present  in great trouble."
"I hope no one is dead," I said, glancing at his black dress. He
too looked down at the crape round his hat and replied 
"Mr. John died yesterday was a week, at his chambers in London."
"Mr. John?"
"Yes."
"And how does his mother bear it?"
"Why, you see, Miss Eyre, it is not a common mishap his life
has been very wild these last three years he gave himself up to
strange ways, and his death was shocking."
"I heard from Bessie he was not doing well."
"Doing well He could not do worse he ruined his health and
his estate amongst the worst men and the worst women. He got into
debt and into jail his mother helped him out twice, but as soon
as he was free he returned to his old companions and habits. His
head was not strong the knaves he lived amongst fooled him beyond
anything I ever heard. He came down to Gateshead about three weeks
ago and wanted missis to give up all to him. Missis refused her
means have long been much reduced by his extravagance so he went
back again, and the next news was that he was dead. How he died,
God knows  they say he killed himself."
I was silent the things were frightful. Robert Leaven resumed 
"Missis had been out of health herself for some time she had got
very stout, but was not strong with it and the loss of money and
fear of poverty were quite breaking her down. The information
about Mr. John's death and the manner of it came too suddenly
it brought on a stroke. She was three days without speaking but
last Tuesday she seemed rather better she appeared as if she wanted
to say something, and kept making signs to my wife and mumbling.
It was only yesterday morning, however, that Bessie understood
she was pronouncing your name and at last she made out the words,
'Bring Jane  fetch Jane Eyre I want to speak to her.' Bessie
is not sure whether she is in her right mind, or means anything by
the words but she told Miss Reed and Miss Georgiana, and advised
them to send for you. The young ladies put it off at first but
their mother grew so restless, and said, 'Jane, Jane,' so many
times, that at last they consented. I left Gateshead yesterday
and if you can get ready, Miss, I should like to take you back with
me early tomorrow morning."
"Yes, Robert, I shall be ready it seems to me that I ought to
go."
"I think so too, Miss. Bessie said she was sure you would not
refuse but I suppose you will have to ask leave before you can
get off?"
"Yes and I will do it now" and having directed him to the
servants' hall, and recommended him to the care of John's wife,
and the attentions of John himself, I went in search of Mr. Rochester.
He was not in any of the lower rooms he was not in the yard, the
stables, or the grounds. I asked Mrs. Fairfax if she had seen him
yes she believed he was playing billiards with Miss Ingram.
To the billiardroom I hastened the click of balls and the hum
of voices resounded thence Mr. Rochester, Miss Ingram, the two
Misses Eshton, and their admirers, were all busied in the game. It
required some courage to disturb so interesting a party my errand,
however, was one I could not defer, so I approached the master
where he stood at Miss Ingram's side. She turned as I drew near,
and looked at me haughtily her eyes seemed to demand, "What can
the creeping creature want now?" and when I said, in a low voice,
"Mr. Rochester," she made a movement as if tempted to order me away.
I remember her appearance at the moment  it was very graceful and
very striking she wore a morning robe of skyblue crape a gauzy
azure scarf was twisted in her hair. She had been all animation
with the game, and irritated pride did not lower the expression of
her haughty lineaments.
"Does that person want you?" she inquired of Mr. Rochester and
Mr. Rochester turned to see who the "person" was. He made a curious
grimace  one of his strange and equivocal demonstrations  threw
down his cue and followed me from the room.
"Well, Jane?" he said, as he rested his back against the schoolroom
door, which he had shut.
"If you please, sir, I want leave of absence for a week or two."
"What to do?  where to go?"
"To see a sick lady who has sent for me."
"What sick lady?  where does she live?"
"At Gateshead in shire."
"shire? That is a hundred miles off Who may she be that sends
for people to see her that distance?"
"Her name is Reed, sir  Mrs. Reed."
"Reed of Gateshead? There was a Reed of Gateshead, a magistrate."
"It is his widow, sir."
"And what have you to do with her? How do you know her?"
"Mr. Reed was my uncle  my mother's brother."
"The deuce he was You never told me that before you always said
you had no relations."
"None that would own me, sir. Mr. Reed is dead, and his wife cast
me off."
"Why?"
"Because I was poor, and burdensome, and she disliked me."
"But Reed left children?  you must have cousins? Sir George
Lynn was talking of a Reed of Gateshead yesterday, who, he said,
was one of the veriest rascals on town and Ingram was mentioning
a Georgiana Reed of the same place, who was much admired for her
beauty a season or two ago in London."
"John Reed is dead, too, sir he ruined himself and halfruined
his family, and is supposed to have committed suicide. The news
so shocked his mother that it brought on an apoplectic attack."
"And what good can you do her? Nonsense, Jane I would never think
of running a hundred miles to see an old lady who will, perhaps,
be dead before you reach her besides, you say she cast you off."
"Yes, sir, but that is long ago and when her circumstances were
very different I could not be easy to neglect her wishes now."
"How long will you stay?"
"As short a time as possible, sir."
"Promise me only to stay a week  "
"I had better not pass my word I might be obliged to break it."
"At all events you WILL come back you will not be induced under
any pretext to take up a permanent residence with her?"
"Oh, no I shall certainly return if all be well."
"And who goes with you? You don't travel a hundred miles alone."
"No, sir, she has sent her coachman."
"A person to be trusted?"
"Yes, sir, he has lived ten years in the family."
Mr. Rochester meditated. "When do you wish to go?"
"Early tomorrow morning, sir."
"Well, you must have some money you can't travel without money,
and I daresay you have not much I have given you no salary yet.
How much have you in the world, Jane?" he asked, smiling.
I drew out my purse a meagre thing it was. "Five shillings, sir."
He took the purse, poured the hoard into his palm, and chuckled over
it as if its scantiness amused him. Soon he produced his pocket
book "Here," said he, offering me a note it was fifty pounds,
and he owed me but fifteen. I told him I had no change.
"I don't want change you know that. Take your wages."
I declined accepting more than was my due. He scowled
at first then, as if recollecting something, he said 
"Right, right Better not give you all now you would, perhaps,
stay away three months if you had fifty pounds. There are ten is
it not plenty?"
"Yes, sir, but now you owe me five."
"Come back for it, then I am your banker for forty pounds."
"Mr. Rochester, I may as well mention another matter of business
to you while I have the opportunity."
"Matter of business? I am curious to hear it."
"You have as good as informed me, sir, that you are going shortly
to be married?"
"Yes what then?"
"In that case, sir, Adele ought to go to school I am sure you
will perceive the necessity of it."
"To get her out of my bride's way, who might otherwise walk over
her rather too emphatically? There's sense in the suggestion not
a doubt of it. Adele, as you say, must go to school and you, of
course, must march straight to  the devil?"
"I hope not, sir but I must seek another situation somewhere."
"In course" he exclaimed, with a twang of voice and a distortion
of features equally fantastic and ludicrous. He looked at me some
minutes.
"And old Madam Reed, or the Misses, her daughters, will be solicited
by you to seek a place, I suppose?"
"No, sir I am not on such terms with my relatives as would justify
me in asking favours of them  but I shall advertise."
"You shall walk up the pyramids of Egypt" he growled. "At your
peril you advertise I wish I had only offered you a sovereign
instead of ten pounds. Give me back nine pounds, Jane I've a use
for it."
"And so have I, sir," I returned, putting my hands and my purse
behind me. "I could not spare the money on any account."
"Little niggard" said he, "refusing me a pecuniary request Give
me five pounds, Jane."
"Not five shillings, sir nor five pence."
"Just let me look at the cash."
"No, sir you are not to be trusted."
"Jane"
"Sir?"
"Promise me one thing."
"I'll promise you anything, sir, that I think I am likely to
perform."
"Not to advertise and to trust this quest of a situation to me.
I'll find you one in time."
"I shall be glad so to do, sir, if you, in your turn, will promise
that I and Adele shall be both safe out of the house before your
bride enters it."
"Very well very well I'll pledge my word on it. You go tomorrow,
then?"
"Yes, sir early."
"Shall you come down to the drawingroom after dinner?"
"No, sir, I must prepare for the journey."
"Then you and I must bid goodbye for a little while?"
"I suppose so, sir."
"And how do people perform that ceremony of parting, Jane? Teach
me I'm not quite up to it."
"They say, Farewell, or any other form they prefer."
"Then say it."
"Farewell, Mr. Rochester, for the present."
"What must I say?"
"The same, if you like, sir."
"Farewell, Miss Eyre, for the present is that all?"
"Yes?"
"It seems stingy, to my notions, and dry, and unfriendly. I should
like something else a little addition to the rite. If one shook
hands, for instance but no  that would not content me either.
So you'll do no more than say Farewell, Jane?"
"It is enough, sir as much goodwill may be conveyed in one hearty
word as in many."
"Very likely but it is blank and cool  'Farewell.'"
"How long is he going to stand with his back against that door?"
I asked myself "I want to commence my packing." The dinnerbell
rang, and suddenly away he bolted, without another syllable I
saw him no more during the day, and was off before he had risen in
the morning.
I reached the lodge at Gateshead about five o'clock in the afternoon
of the first of May I stepped in there before going up to the
hall. It was very clean and neat the ornamental windows were
hung with little white curtains the floor was spotless the grate
and fireirons were burnished bright, and the fire burnt clear.
Bessie sat on the hearth, nursing her lastborn, and Robert and
his sister played quietly in a corner.
"Bless you  I knew you would come" exclaimed Mrs. Leaven, as
I entered.
"Yes, Bessie," said I, after I had kissed her "and I trust I am
not too late. How is Mrs. Reed?  Alive still, I hope."
"Yes, she is alive and more sensible and collected than she was.
The doctor says she may linger a week or two yet but he hardly
thinks she will finally recover."
"Has she mentioned me lately?"
"She was talking of you only this morning, and wishing you would
come, but she is sleeping now, or was ten minutes ago, when I was
up at the house. She generally lies in a kind of lethargy all the
afternoon, and wakes up about six or seven. Will you rest yourself
here an hour, Miss, and then I will go up with you?"
Robert here entered, and Bessie laid her sleeping child in the
cradle and went to welcome him afterwards she insisted on my taking
off my bonnet and having some tea for she said I looked pale and
tired. I was glad to accept her hospitality and I submitted to
be relieved of my travelling garb just as passively as I used to
let her undress me when a child.
Old times crowded fast back on me as I watched her bustling about
setting out the teatray with her best china, cutting bread and
butter, toasting a teacake, and, between whiles, giving little
Robert or Jane an occasional tap or push, just as she used to give
me in former days. Bessie had retained her quick temper as well
as her light foot and good looks.
Tea ready, I was going to approach the table but she desired me
to sit still, quite in her old peremptory tones. I must be served
at the fireside, she said and she placed before me a little round
stand with my cup and a plate of toast, absolutely as she used to
accommodate me with some privately purloined dainty on a nursery
chair and I smiled and obeyed her as in bygone days.
She wanted to know if I was happy at Thornfield Hall, and what sort
of a person the mistress was and when I told her there was only
a master, whether he was a nice gentleman, and if I liked him. I
told her he was rather an ugly man, but quite a gentleman and
that he treated me kindly, and I was content. Then I went on to
describe to her the gay company that had lately been staying at the
house and to these details Bessie listened with interest they
were precisely of the kind she relished.
In such conversation an hour was soon gone Bessie restored to me
my bonnet, c., and, accompanied by her, I quitted the lodge for
the hall. It was also accompanied by her that I had, nearly nine
years ago, walked down the path I was now ascending. On a dark,
misty, raw morning in January, I had left a hostile roof with a
desperate and embittered heart  a sense of outlawry and almost
of reprobation  to seek the chilly harbourage of Lowood that
bourne so far away and unexplored. The same hostile roof now again
rose before me my prospects were doubtful yet and I had yet an
aching heart. I still felt as a wanderer on the face of the earth
but I experienced firmer trust in myself and my own powers, and
less withering dread of oppression. The gaping wound of my wrongs,
too, was now quite healed and the flame of resentment extinguished.
"You shall go into the breakfastroom first," said Bessie, as she
preceded me through the hall "the young ladies will be there."
In another moment I was within that apartment. There was every
article of furniture looking just as it did on the morning I was
first introduced to Mr. Brocklehurst the very rug he had stood upon
still covered the hearth. Glancing at the bookcases, I thought I
could distinguish the two volumes of Bewick's British Birds occupying
their old place on the third shelf, and Gulliver's Travels and the
Arabian Nights ranged just above. The inanimate objects were not
changed but the living things had altered past recognition.
Two young ladies appeared before me one very tall, almost as tall
as Miss Ingram  very thin too, with a sallow face and severe
mien. There was something ascetic in her look, which was augmented
by the extreme plainness of a straightskirted, black, stuff dress,
a starched linen collar, hair combed away from the temples, and
the nunlike ornament of a string of ebony beads and a crucifix.
This I felt sure was Eliza, though I could trace little resemblance
to her former self in that elongated and colourless visage.
The other was as certainly Georgiana but not the Georgiana
I remembered  the slim and fairylike girl of eleven. This was
a fullblown, very plump damsel, fair as waxwork, with handsome
and regular features, languishing blue eyes, and ringleted yellow
hair. The hue of her dress was black too but its fashion was so
different from her sister's  so much more flowing and becoming
it looked as stylish as the other's looked puritanical.
In each of the sisters there was one trait of the mother  and only
one the thin and pallid elder daughter had her parent's Cairngorm
eye the blooming and luxuriant younger girl had her contour of
jaw and chin  perhaps a little softened, but still imparting an
indescribable hardness to the countenance otherwise so voluptuous
and buxom.
Both ladies, as I advanced, rose to welcome me, and both addressed
me by the name of "Miss Eyre." Eliza's greeting was delivered in
a short, abrupt voice, without a smile and then she sat down again,
fixed her eyes on the fire, and seemed to forget me. Georgiana
added to her "How d'ye do?" several commonplaces about my journey,
the weather, and so on, uttered in rather a drawling tone and
accompanied by sundry sideglances that measured me from head to
foot  now traversing the folds of my drab merino pelisse, and
now lingering on the plain trimming of my cottage bonnet. Young
ladies have a remarkable way of letting you know that they
think you a "quiz" without actually saying the words. A certain
superciliousness of look, coolness of manner, nonchalance of tone,
express fully their sentiments on the point, without committing
them by any positive rudeness in word or deed.
A sneer, however, whether covert or open, had now no longer that
power over me it once possessed as I sat between my cousins, I
was surprised to find how easy I felt under the total neglect of
the one and the semisarcastic attentions of the other  Eliza did
not mortify, nor Georgiana ruffle me. The fact was, I had other
things to think about within the last few months feelings had
been stirred in me so much more potent than any they could raise
pains and pleasures so much more acute and exquisite had been
excited than any it was in their power to inflict or bestow  that
their airs gave me no concern either for good or bad.
"How is Mrs. Reed?" I asked soon, looking calmly at Georgiana,
who thought fit to bridle at the direct address, as if it were an
unexpected liberty.
"Mrs. Reed? Ah mama, you mean she is extremely poorly I doubt
if you can see her tonight."
"If," said I, "you would just step upstairs and tell her I am come,
I should be much obliged to you."
Georgiana almost started, and she opened her blue eyes wild and
wide. "I know she had a particular wish to see me," I added, "and
I would not defer attending to her desire longer than is absolutely
necessary."
"Mama dislikes being disturbed in an evening," remarked Eliza. I
soon rose, quietly took off my bonnet and gloves, uninvited, and
said I would just step out to Bessie  who was, I dared say, in the
kitchen  and ask her to ascertain whether Mrs. Reed was disposed
to receive me or not tonight. I went, and having found Bessie and
despatched her on my errand, I proceeded to take further measures.
It had heretofore been my habit always to shrink from arrogance
received as I had been today, I should, a year ago, have resolved
to quit Gateshead the very next morning now, it was disclosed
to me all at once that that would be a foolish plan. I had taken
a journey of a hundred miles to see my aunt, and I must stay with
her till she was better  or dead as to her daughters' pride or
folly, I must put it on one side, make myself independent of it.
So I addressed the housekeeper asked her to show me a room, told
her I should probably be a visitor here for a week or two, had my
trunk conveyed to my chamber, and followed it thither myself I
met Bessie on the landing.
"Missis is awake," said she "I have told her you are here come
and let us see if she will know you."
I did not need to be guided to the wellknown room, to which I
had so often been summoned for chastisement or reprimand in former
days. I hastened before Bessie I softly opened the door a shaded
light stood on the table, for it was now getting dark. There was
the great fourpost bed with amber hangings as of old there the
toilettable, the armchair, and the footstool, at which I had a
hundred times been sentenced to kneel, to ask pardon for offences
by me uncommitted. I looked into a certain corner near, halfexpecting
to see the slim outline of a once dreaded switch which used to lurk
there, waiting to leap out implike and lace my quivering palm or
shrinking neck. I approached the bed I opened the curtains and
leant over the highpiled pillows.
Well did I remember Mrs. Reed's face, and I eagerly sought the
familiar image. It is a happy thing that time quells the longings
of vengeance and hushes the promptings of rage and aversion. I had
left this woman in bitterness and hate, and I came back to her now
with no other emotion than a sort of ruth for her great sufferings,
and a strong yearning to forget and forgive all injuries  to be
reconciled and clasp hands in amity.
The wellknown face was there stern, relentless as ever  there
was that peculiar eye which nothing could melt, and the somewhat
raised, imperious, despotic eyebrow. How often had it lowered on me
menace and hate and how the recollection of childhood's terrors
and sorrows revived as I traced its harsh line now And yet I
stooped down and kissed her she looked at me.
"Is this Jane Eyre?" she said.
"Yes, Aunt Reed. How are you, dear aunt?"
I had once vowed that I would never call her aunt again I thought
it no sin to forget and break that vow now. My fingers had fastened
on her hand which lay outside the sheet had she pressed mine
kindly, I should at that moment have experienced true pleasure. But
unimpressionable natures are not so soon softened, nor are natural
antipathies so readily eradicated. Mrs. Reed took her hand away,
and, turning her face rather from me, she remarked that the night
was warm. Again she regarded me so icily, I felt at once that
her opinion of me  her feeling towards me  was unchanged and
unchangeable. I knew by her stony eye  opaque to tenderness,
indissoluble to tears  that she was resolved to consider me bad
to the last because to believe me good would give her no generous
pleasure only a sense of mortification.
I felt pain, and then I felt ire and then I felt a determination
to subdue her  to be her mistress in spite both of her nature
and her will. My tears had risen, just as in childhood I ordered
them back to their source. I brought a chair to the bedhead I
sat down and leaned over the pillow.
"You sent for me," I said, "and I am here and it is my intention
to stay till I see how you get on."
"Oh, of course You have seen my daughters?"
"Yes."
"Well, you may tell them I wish you to stay till I can talk some
things over with you I have on my mind tonight it is too late, and
I have a difficulty in recalling them. But there was something
I wished to say  let me see  "
The wandering look and changed utterance told what wreck had taken
place in her once vigorous frame. Turning restlessly, she drew the
bedclothes round her my elbow, resting on a corner of the quilt,
fixed it down she was at once irritated.
"Sit up" said she "don't annoy me with holding the clothes fast.
Are you Jane Eyre?"
"I am Jane Eyre."
"I have had more trouble with that child than any one would believe.
Such a burden to be left on my hands  and so much annoyance as she
caused me, daily and hourly, with her incomprehensible disposition,
and her sudden starts of temper, and her continual, unnatural
watchings of one's movements I declare she talked to me once like
something mad, or like a fiend  no child ever spoke or looked as
she did I was glad to get her away from the house. What did they
do with her at Lowood? The fever broke out there, and many of the
pupils died. She, however, did not die but I said she did  I
wish she had died"
"A strange wish, Mrs. Reed why do you hate her so?"
"I had a dislike to her mother always for she was my husband's only
sister, and a great favourite with him he opposed the family's
disowning her when she made her low marriage and when news came of
her death, he wept like a simpleton. He would send for the baby
though I entreated him rather to put it out to nurse and pay for
its maintenance. I hated it the first time I set my eyes on it 
a sickly, whining, pining thing It would wail in its cradle all
night long  not screaming heartily like any other child, but
whimpering and moaning. Reed pitied it and he used to nurse it
and notice it as if it had been his own more, indeed, than he
ever noticed his own at that age. He would try to make my children
friendly to the little beggar the darlings could not bear it,
and he was angry with them when they showed their dislike. In his
last illness, he had it brought continually to his bedside and but
an hour before he died, he bound me by vow to keep the creature.
I would as soon have been charged with a pauper brat out of a
workhouse but he was weak, naturally weak. John does not at all
resemble his father, and I am glad of it John is like me and like
my brothers  he is quite a Gibson. Oh, I wish he would cease
tormenting me with letters for money? I have no more money to give
him we are getting poor. I must send away half the servants and
shut up part of the house or let it off. I can never submit to
do that  yet how are we to get on? Twothirds of my income goes
in paying the interest of mortgages. John gambles dreadfully, and
always loses  poor boy He is beset by sharpers John is sunk
and degraded  his look is frightful  I feel ashamed for him
when I see him."
She was getting much excited. "I think I had better leave her
now," said I to Bessie, who stood on the other side of the bed.
"Perhaps you had, Miss but she often talks in this way towards
night  in the morning she is calmer."
I rose. "Stop" exclaimed Mrs. Reed, "there is another thing
I wished to say. He threatens me  he continually threatens me
with his own death, or mine and I dream sometimes that I see him
laid out with a great wound in his throat, or with a swollen and
blackened face. I am come to a strange pass I have heavy troubles.
What is to be done? How is the money to be had?"
Bessie now endeavoured to persuade her to take a sedative draught
she succeeded with difficulty. Soon after, Mrs. Reed grew more
composed, and sank into a dozing state. I then left her.
More than ten days elapsed before I had again any conversation with
her. She continued either delirious or lethargic and the doctor
forbade everything which could painfully excite her. Meantime,
I got on as well as I could with Georgiana and Eliza. They were
very cold, indeed, at first. Eliza would sit half the day sewing,
reading, or writing, and scarcely utter a word either to me or her
sister. Georgiana would chatter nonsense to her canary bird by the
hour, and take no notice of me. But I was determined not to seem
at a loss for occupation or amusement I had brought my drawing
materials with me, and they served me for both.
Provided with a case of pencils, and some sheets of paper, I used
to take a seat apart from them, near the window, and busy myself
in sketching fancy vignettes, representing any scene that happened
momentarily to shape itself in the evershifting kaleidoscope of
imagination a glimpse of sea between two rocks the rising moon,
and a ship crossing its disk a group of reeds and waterflags, and
a naiad's head, crowned with lotusflowers, rising out of them an
elf sitting in a hedgesparrow's nest, under a wreath of hawthornbloom.
One morning I fell to sketching a face what sort of a face it was
to be, I did not care or know. I took a soft black pencil, gave
it a broad point, and worked away. Soon I had traced on the paper
a broad and prominent forehead and a square lower outline of visage
that contour gave me pleasure my fingers proceeded actively to
fill it with features. Stronglymarked horizontal eyebrows must
be traced under that brow then followed, naturally, a welldefined
nose, with a straight ridge and full nostrils then a flexible
looking mouth, by no means narrow then a firm chin, with a decided
cleft down the middle of it of course, some black whiskers were
wanted, and some jetty hair, tufted on the temples, and waved above
the forehead. Now for the eyes I had left them to the last,
because they required the most careful working. I drew them
large I shaped them well the eyelashes I traced long and sombre
the irids lustrous and large. "Good but not quite the thing,"
I thought, as I surveyed the effect "they want more force and
spirit" and I wrought the shades blacker, that the lights might
flash more brilliantly  a happy touch or two secured success.
There, I had a friend's face under my gaze and what did it signify
that those young ladies turned their backs on me? I looked at it
I smiled at the speaking likeness I was absorbed and content.
"Is that a portrait of some one you know?" asked Eliza, who had
approached me unnoticed. I responded that it was merely a fancy
head, and hurried it beneath the other sheets. Of course, I lied
it was, in fact, a very faithful representation of Mr. Rochester.
But what was that to her, or to any one but myself? Georgiana
also advanced to look. The other drawings pleased her much, but
she called that "an ugly man." They both seemed surprised at my
skill. I offered to sketch their portraits and each, in turn,
sat for a pencil outline. Then Georgiana produced her album. I
promised to contribute a watercolour drawing this put her at once
into good humour. She proposed a walk in the grounds. Before we
had been out two hours, we were deep in a confidential conversation
she had favoured me with a description of the brilliant winter she
had spent in London two seasons ago  of the admiration she had
there excited  the attention she had received and I even got
hints of the titled conquest she had made. In the course of the
afternoon and evening these hints were enlarged on various soft
conversations were reported, and sentimental scenes represented
and, in short, a volume of a novel of fashionable life was that day
improvised by her for my benefit. The communications were renewed
from day to day they always ran on the same theme  herself, her
loves, and woes. It was strange she never once adverted either to
her mother's illness, or her brother's death, or the present gloomy
state of the family prospects. Her mind seemed wholly taken up with
reminiscences of past gaiety, and aspirations after dissipations
to come. She passed about five minutes each day in her mother's
sickroom, and no more.
Eliza still spoke little she had evidently no time to talk. I
never saw a busier person than she seemed to be yet it was
difficult to say what she did or rather, to discover any result
of her diligence. She had an alarm to call her up early. I know
not how she occupied herself before breakfast, but after that meal
she divided her time into regular portions, and each hour had its
allotted task. Three times a day she studied a little book, which
I found, on inspection, was a Common Prayer Book. I asked her once
what was the great attraction of that volume, and she said, "the
Rubric." Three hours she gave to stitching, with gold thread,
the border of a square crimson cloth, almost large enough for a
carpet. In answer to my inquiries after the use of this article,
she informed me it was a covering for the altar of a new church
lately erected near Gateshead. Two hours she devoted to her diary
two to working by herself in the kitchengarden and one to the
regulation of her accounts. She seemed to want no company no
conversation. I believe she was happy in her way this routine
sufficed for her and nothing annoyed her so much as the occurrence
of any incident which forced her to vary its clockwork regularity.
She told me one evening, when more disposed to be communicative
than usual, that John's conduct, and the threatened ruin of the
family, had been a source of profound affliction to her but she
had now, she said, settled her mind, and formed her resolution.
Her own fortune she had taken care to secure and when her mother
died  and it was wholly improbable, she tranquilly remarked,
that she should either recover or linger long  she would execute
a longcherished project seek a retirement where punctual habits
would be permanently secured from disturbance, and place safe barriers
between herself and a frivolous world. I asked if Georgiana would
accompany her.
"Of course not. Georgiana and she had nothing in common they
never had had. She would not be burdened with her society for
any consideration. Georgiana should take her own course and she,
Eliza, would take hers."
Georgiana, when not unburdening her heart to me, spent most of her
time in lying on the sofa, fretting about the dulness of the house,
and wishing over and over again that her aunt Gibson would send
her an invitation up to town. "It would be so much better," she
said, "if she could only get out of the way for a month or two, till
all was over." I did not ask what she meant by "all being over,"
but I suppose she referred to the expected decease of her mother
and the gloomy sequel of funeral rites. Eliza generally took no
more notice of her sister's indolence and complaints than if no such
murmuring, lounging object had been before her. One day, however,
as she put away her accountbook and unfolded her embroidery,
she suddenly took her up thus 
"Georgiana, a more vain and absurd animal than you was certainly
never allowed to cumber the earth. You had no right to be born,
for you make no use of life. Instead of living for, in, and with
yourself, as a reasonable being ought, you seek only to fasten
your feebleness on some other person's strength if no one can be
found willing to burden her or himself with such a fat, weak, puffy,
useless thing, you cry out that you are illtreated, neglected,
miserable. Then, too, existence for you must be a scene of continual
change and excitement, or else the world is a dungeon you must
be admired, you must be courted, you must be flattered  you must
have music, dancing, and society  or you languish, you die away.
Have you no sense to devise a system which will make you independent
of all efforts, and all wills, but your own? Take one day share
it into sections to each section apportion its task leave no
stray unemployed quarters of an hour, ten minutes, five minutes
include all do each piece of business in its turn with method,
with rigid regularity. The day will close almost before you are
aware it has begun and you are indebted to no one for helping you
to get rid of one vacant moment you have had to seek no one's
company, conversation, sympathy, forbearance you have lived,
in short, as an independent being ought to do. Take this advice
the first and last I shall offer you then you will not want me or
any one else, happen what may. Neglect it  go on as heretofore,
craving, whining, and idling  and suffer the results of your
idiocy, however bad and insuperable they may be. I tell you this
plainly and listen for though I shall no more repeat what I am
now about to say, I shall steadily act on it. After my mother's
death, I wash my hands of you from the day her coffin is carried
to the vault in Gateshead Church, you and I will be as separate as
if we had never known each other. You need not think that because
we chanced to be born of the same parents, I shall suffer you to
fasten me down by even the feeblest claim I can tell you this 
if the whole human race, ourselves excepted, were swept away, and
we two stood alone on the earth, I would leave you in the old world,
and betake myself to the new."
She closed her lips.
"You might have spared yourself the trouble of delivering that
tirade," answered Georgiana. "Everybody knows you are the most
selfish, heartless creature in existence and I know your spiteful
hatred towards me I have had a specimen of it before in the
trick you played me about Lord Edwin Vere you could not bear me
to be raised above you, to have a title, to be received into circles
where you dare not show your face, and so you acted the spy and
informer, and ruined my prospects for ever." Georgiana took out
her handkerchief and blew her nose for an hour afterwards Eliza
sat cold, impassable, and assiduously industrious.
True, generous feeling is made small account of by some, but here
were two natures rendered, the one intolerably acrid, the other
despicably savourless for the want of it. Feeling without judgment
is a washy draught indeed but judgment untempered by feeling is
too bitter and husky a morsel for human deglutition.
It was a wet and windy afternoon Georgiana had fallen asleep on
the sofa over the perusal of a novel Eliza was gone to attend a
saint'sday service at the new church  for in matters of religion
she was a rigid formalist no weather ever prevented the punctual
discharge of what she considered her devotional duties fair or foul,
she went to church thrice every Sunday, and as often on weekdays
as there were prayers.
I bethought myself to go upstairs and see how the dying woman sped,
who lay there almost unheeded the very servants paid her but a
remittent attention the hired nurse, being little looked after,
would slip out of the room whenever she could. Bessie was faithful
but she had her own family to mind, and could only come occasionally
to the hall. I found the sickroom unwatched, as I had expected
no nurse was there the patient lay still, and seemingly lethargic
her livid face sunk in the pillows the fire was dying in the
grate. I renewed the fuel, rearranged the bedclothes, gazed awhile
on her who could not now gaze on me, and then I moved away to the
window.
The rain beat strongly against the panes, the wind blew tempestuously
"One lies there," I thought, "who will soon be beyond the war of
earthly elements. Whither will that spirit  now struggling to
quit its material tenement  flit when at length released?"
In pondering the great mystery, I thought of Helen Burns, recalled
her dying words  her faith  her doctrine of the equality
of disembodied souls. I was still listening in thought to her
wellremembered tones  still picturing her pale and spiritual
aspect, her wasted face and sublime gaze, as she lay on her placid
deathbed, and whispered her longing to be restored to her divine
Father's bosom  when a feeble voice murmured from the couch
behind "Who is that?"
I knew Mrs. Reed had not spoken for days was she reviving? I
went up to her.
"It is I, Aunt Reed."
"Who  I?" was her answer. "Who are you?" looking at me with
surprise and a sort of alarm, but still not wildly. "You are quite
a stranger to me  where is Bessie?"
"She is at the lodge, aunt."
"Aunt," she repeated. "Who calls me aunt? You are not one of the
Gibsons and yet I know you  that face, and the eyes and forehead,
are quiet familiar to me you are like  why, you are like Jane
Eyre"
I said nothing I was afraid of occasioning some shock by declaring
my identity.
"Yet," said she, "I am afraid it is a mistake my thoughts deceive
me. I wished to see Jane Eyre, and I fancy a likeness where none
exists besides, in eight years she must be so changed." I now
gently assured her that I was the person she supposed and desired
me to be and seeing that I was understood, and that her senses
were quite collected, I explained how Bessie had sent her husband
to fetch me from Thornfield.
"I am very ill, I know," she said ere long. "I was trying to turn
myself a few minutes since, and find I cannot move a limb. It is
as well I should ease my mind before I die what we think little
of in health, burdens us at such an hour as the present is to me.
Is the nurse here? or is there no one in the room but you?"
I assured her we were alone.
"Well, I have twice done you a wrong which I regret now. One was
in breaking the promise which I gave my husband to bring you up as
my own child the other  " she stopped. "After all, it is of no
great importance, perhaps," she murmured to herself "and then I
may get better and to humble myself so to her is painful."
She made an effort to alter her position, but failed her face
changed she seemed to experience some inward sensation  the
precursor, perhaps, of the last pang.
"Well, I must get it over. Eternity is before me I had better
tell her.  Go to my dressingcase, open it, and take out a letter
you will see there."
I obeyed her directions. "Read the letter," she said.
It was short, and thus conceived
"Madam,  Will you have the goodness to send me the address of my
niece, Jane Eyre, and to tell me how she is? It is my intention to
write shortly and desire her to come to me at Madeira. Providence
has blessed my endeavours to secure a competency and as I am
unmarried and childless, I wish to adopt her during my life, and
bequeath her at my death whatever I may have to leave.  I am,
Madam, c., c.,
"JOHN EYRE, Madeira."
It was dated three years back.
"Why did I never hear of this?" I asked.
"Because I disliked you too fixedly and thoroughly ever to lend a
hand in lifting you to prosperity. I could not forget your conduct
to me, Jane  the fury with which you once turned on me the tone
in which you declared you abhorred me the worst of anybody in the
world the unchildlike look and voice with which you affirmed that
the very thought of me made you sick, and asserted that I had treated
you with miserable cruelty. I could not forget my own sensations
when you thus started up and poured out the venom of your mind I
felt fear as if an animal that I had struck or pushed had looked
up at me with human eyes and cursed me in a man's voice.  Bring
me some water Oh, make haste"
"Dear Mrs. Reed," said I, as I offered her the draught she
required, "think no more of all this, let it pass away from your
mind. Forgive me for my passionate language I was a child then
eight, nine years have passed since that day."
She heeded nothing of what I said but when she had tasted
the water and drawn breath, she went on thus 
"I tell you I could not forget it and I took my revenge for
you to be adopted by your uncle, and placed in a state of ease
and comfort, was what I could not endure. I wrote to him I said
I was sorry for his disappointment, but Jane Eyre was dead she
had died of typhus fever at Lowood. Now act as you please write
and contradict my assertion  expose my falsehood as soon as you
like. You were born, I think, to be my torment my last hour is
racked by the recollection of a deed which, but for you, I should
never have been tempted to commit."
"If you could but be persuaded to think no more of it, aunt, and
to regard me with kindness and forgiveness"
"You have a very bad disposition," said she, "and one to this day
I feel it impossible to understand how for nine years you could
be patient and quiescent under any treatment, and in the tenth
break out all fire and violence, I can never comprehend."
"My disposition is not so bad as you think I am passionate, but
not vindictive. Many a time, as a little child, I should have been
glad to love you if you would have let me and I long earnestly to
be reconciled to you now kiss me, aunt."
I approached my cheek to her lips she would not touch it. She
said I oppressed her by leaning over the bed, and again demanded
water. As I laid her down  for I raised her and supported her
on my arm while she drank  I covered her icecold and clammy hand
with mine the feeble fingers shrank from my touch  the glazing
eyes shunned my gaze.
"Love me, then, or hate me, as you will," I said at last, "you have
my full and free forgiveness ask now for God's, and be at peace."
Poor, suffering woman it was too late for her to make now the
effort to change her habitual frame of mind living, she had ever
hated me  dying, she must hate me still.
The nurse now entered, and Bessie followed. I yet lingered
halfanhour longer, hoping to see some sign of amity but she
gave none. She was fast relapsing into stupor nor did her mind
again rally at twelve o'clock that night she died. I was not
present to close her eyes, nor were either of her daughters. They
came to tell us the next morning that all was over. She was by
that time laid out. Eliza and I went to look at her Georgiana,
who had burst out into loud weeping, said she dared not go. There
was stretched Sarah Reed's once robust and active frame, rigid and
still her eye of flint was covered with its cold lid her brow
and strong traits wore yet the impress of her inexorable soul.
A strange and solemn object was that corpse to me. I gazed on it
with gloom and pain nothing soft, nothing sweet, nothing pitying,
or hopeful, or subduing did it inspire only a grating anguish
for HER woes  not MY loss  and a sombre tearless dismay at the
fearfulness of death in such a form.
Eliza surveyed her parent calmly. After a silence of some
minutes she observed 
"With her constitution she should have lived to a good old age
her life was shortened by trouble." And then a spasm constricted
her mouth for an instant as it passed away she turned and left
the room, and so did I. Neither of us had dropt a tear.
CHAPTER XXII
Mr. Rochester had given me but one week's leave of absence yet
a month elapsed before I quitted Gateshead. I wished to leave
immediately after the funeral, but Georgiana entreated me to stay
till she could get off to London, whither she was now at last
invited by her uncle, Mr. Gibson, who had come down to direct his
sister's interment and settle the family affairs. Georgiana said
she dreaded being left alone with Eliza from her she got neither
sympathy in her dejection, support in her fears, nor aid in her
preparations so I bore with her feebleminded wailings and selfish
lamentations as well as I could, and did my best in sewing for
her and packing her dresses. It is true, that while I worked, she
would idle and I thought to myself, "If you and I were destined
to live always together, cousin, we would commence matters on a
different footing. I should not settle tamely down into being the
forbearing party I should assign you your share of labour, and
compel you to accomplish it, or else it should be left undone I
should insist, also, on your keeping some of those drawling,
halfinsincere complaints hushed in your own breast. It is only
because our connection happens to be very transitory, and comes at
a peculiarly mournful season, that I consent thus to render it so
patient and compliant on my part."
At last I saw Georgiana off but now it was Eliza's turn to
request me to stay another week. Her plans required all her time
and attention, she said she was about to depart for some unknown
bourne and all day long she stayed in her own room, her door
bolted within, filling trunks, emptying drawers, burning papers,
and holding no communication with any one. She wished me to look
after the house, to see callers, and answer notes of condolence.
One morning she told me I was at liberty. "And," she added, "I
am obliged to you for your valuable services and discreet conduct
There is some difference between living with such an one as you
and with Georgiana you perform your own part in life and burden
no one. Tomorrow," she continued, "I set out for the Continent.
I shall take up my abode in a religious house near Lisle  a
nunnery you would call it there I shall be quiet and unmolested.
I shall devote myself for a time to the examination of the Roman
Catholic dogmas, and to a careful study of the workings of their
system if I find it to be, as I half suspect it is, the one best
calculated to ensure the doing of all things decently and in order,
I shall embrace the tenets of Rome and probably take the veil."
I neither expressed surprise at this resolution nor attempted to
dissuade her from it. "The vocation will fit you to a hair," I
thought "much good may it do you"
When we parted, she said "Goodbye, cousin Jane Eyre I wish you
well you have some sense."
I then returned "You are not without sense, cousin Eliza but
what you have, I suppose, in another year will be walled up alive
in a French convent. However, it is not my business, and so it
suits you, I don't much care."
"You are in the right," said she and with these words we each went
our separate way. As I shall not have occasion to refer either to
her or her sister again, I may as well mention here, that Georgiana
made an advantageous match with a wealthy wornout man of fashion,
and that Eliza actually took the veil, and is at this day superior
of the convent where she passed the period of her novitiate, and
which she endowed with her fortune.
How people feel when they are returning home from an absence, long
or short, I did not know I had never experienced the sensation.
I had known what it was to come back to Gateshead when a child after
a long walk, to be scolded for looking cold or gloomy and later,
what it was to come back from church to Lowood, to long for
a plenteous meal and a good fire, and to be unable to get either.
Neither of these returnings was very pleasant or desirable no
magnet drew me to a given point, increasing in its strength of
attraction the nearer I came. The return to Thornfield was yet to
be tried.
My journey seemed tedious  very tedious fifty miles one day, a
night spent at an inn fifty miles the next day. During the first
twelve hours I thought of Mrs. Reed in her last moments I saw her
disfigured and discoloured face, and heard her strangely altered
voice. I mused on the funeral day, the coffin, the hearse, the black
train of tenants and servants  few was the number of relatives
the gaping vault, the silent church, the solemn service. Then
I thought of Eliza and Georgiana I beheld one the cynosure of a
ballroom, the other the inmate of a convent cell and I dwelt on
and analysed their separate peculiarities of person and character.
The evening arrival at the great town of  scattered these thoughts
night gave them quite another turn laid down on my traveller's
bed, I left reminiscence for anticipation.
I was going back to Thornfield but how long was I to stay there?
Not long of that I was sure. I had heard from Mrs. Fairfax in
the interim of my absence the party at the hall was dispersed
Mr. Rochester had left for London three weeks ago, but he was then
expected to return in a fortnight. Mrs. Fairfax surmised that he
was gone to make arrangements for his wedding, as he had talked of
purchasing a new carriage she said the idea of his marrying Miss
Ingram still seemed strange to her but from what everybody said,
and from what she had herself seen, she could no longer doubt
that the event would shortly take place. "You would be strangely
incredulous if you did doubt it," was my mental comment. "I don't
doubt it."
The question followed, "Where was I to go?" I dreamt of Miss
Ingram all the night in a vivid morning dream I saw her closing
the gates of Thornfield against me and pointing me out another
road and Mr. Rochester looked on with his arms folded  smiling
sardonically, as it seemed, at both her and me.
I had not notified to Mrs. Fairfax the exact day of my return for
I did not wish either car or carriage to meet me at Millcote. I
proposed to walk the distance quietly by myself and very quietly,
after leaving my box in the ostler's care, did I slip away from
the George Inn, about six o'clock of a June evening, and take the
old road to Thornfield a road which lay chiefly through fields,
and was now little frequented.
It was not a bright or splendid summer evening, though fair and soft
the haymakers were at work all along the road and the sky, though
far from cloudless, was such as promised well for the future its
blue  where blue was visible  was mild and settled, and its
cloud strata high and thin. The west, too, was warm no watery
gleam chilled it  it seemed as if there was a fire lit, an altar
burning behind its screen of marbled vapour, and out of apertures
shone a golden redness.
I felt glad as the road shortened before me so glad that I stopped
once to ask myself what that joy meant and to remind reason that
it was not to my home I was going, or to a permanent restingplace,
or to a place where fond friends looked out for me and waited my
arrival. "Mrs. Fairfax will smile you a calm welcome, to be sure,"
said I "and little Adele will clap her hands and jump to see you
but you know very well you are thinking of another than they, and
that he is not thinking of you."
But what is so headstrong as youth? What so blind as inexperience?
These affirmed that it was pleasure enough to have the privilege
of again looking on Mr. Rochester, whether he looked on me or not
and they added  "Hasten hasten be with him while you may
but a few more days or weeks, at most, and you are parted from him
for ever" And then I strangled a newborn agony  a deformed
thing which I could not persuade myself to own and rear  and ran
on.
They are making hay, too, in Thornfield meadows or rather, the
labourers are just quitting their work, and returning home with
their rakes on their shoulders, now, at the hour I arrive. I have
but a field or two to traverse, and then I shall cross the road and
reach the gates. How full the hedges are of roses But I have no
time to gather any I want to be at the house. I passed a tall
briar, shooting leafy and flowery branches across the path I
see the narrow stile with stone steps and I see  Mr. Rochester
sitting there, a book and a pencil in his hand he is writing.
Well, he is not a ghost yet every nerve I have is unstrung for
a moment I am beyond my own mastery. What does it mean? I did
not think I should tremble in this way when I saw him, or lose my
voice or the power of motion in his presence. I will go back as
soon as I can stir I need not make an absolute fool of myself.
I know another way to the house. It does not signify if I knew
twenty ways for he has seen me.
"Hillo" he cries and he puts up his book and his pencil. "There
you are Come on, if you please."
I suppose I do come on though in what fashion I know not being
scarcely cognisant of my movements, and solicitous only to appear
calm and, above all, to control the working muscles of my face
which I feel rebel insolently against my will, and struggle to
express what I had resolved to conceal. But I have a veil  it
is down I may make shift yet to behave with decent composure.
"And this is Jane Eyre? Are you coming from Millcote, and on foot?
Yes  just one of your tricks not to send for a carriage, and
come clattering over street and road like a common mortal, but to
steal into the vicinage of your home along with twilight, just as
if you were a dream or a shade. What the deuce have you done with
yourself this last month?"
"I have been with my aunt, sir, who is dead."
"A true Janian reply Good angels be my guard She comes from the
other world  from the abode of people who are dead and tells me
so when she meets me alone here in the gloaming If I dared, I'd
touch you, to see if you are substance or shadow, you elf  but
I'd as soon offer to take hold of a blue ignis fatuus light in a
marsh. Truant truant" he added, when he had paused an instant.
"Absent from me a whole month, and forgetting me quite, I'll be
sworn"
I knew there would be pleasure in meeting my master again, even
though broken by the fear that he was so soon to cease to be my
master, and by the knowledge that I was nothing to him but there
was ever in Mr. Rochester so at least I thought such a wealth
of the power of communicating happiness, that to taste but of the
crumbs he scattered to stray and stranger birds like me, was to
feast genially. His last words were balm they seemed to imply
that it imported something to him whether I forgot him or not.
And he had spoken of Thornfield as my home  would that it were
my home
He did not leave the stile, and I hardly liked to ask to go by. I
inquired soon if he had not been to London.
"Yes I suppose you found that out by secondsight."
"Mrs. Fairfax told me in a letter."
"And did she inform you what I went to do?"
"Oh, yes, sir Everybody knew your errand."
"You must see the carriage, Jane, and tell me if you don't think it
will suit Mrs. Rochester exactly and whether she won't look like
Queen Boadicea, leaning back against those purple cushions. I wish,
Jane, I were a trifle better adapted to match with her externally.
Tell me now, fairy as you are  can't you give me a charm, or a
philter, or something of that sort, to make me a handsome man?"
"It would be past the power of magic, sir" and, in thought, I added,
"A loving eye is all the charm needed to such you are handsome
enough or rather your sternness has a power beyond beauty."
Mr. Rochester had sometimes read my unspoken thoughts with an acumen
to me incomprehensible in the present instance he took no notice
of my abrupt vocal response but he smiled at me with a certain
smile he had of his own, and which he used but on rare occasions.
He seemed to think it too good for common purposes it was the
real sunshine of feeling  he shed it over me now.
"Pass, Janet," said he, making room for me to cross the stile "go
up home, and stay your weary little wandering feet at a friend's
threshold."
All I had now to do was to obey him in silence no need for me
to colloquise further. I got over the stile without a word, and
meant to leave him calmly. An impulse held me fast  a force turned
me round. I said  or something in me said for me, and in spite of me 
"Thank you, Mr. Rochester, for your great kindness. I am strangely
glad to get back again to you and wherever you are is my home 
my only home."
I walked on so fast that even he could hardly have overtaken me
had he tried. Little Adele was half wild with delight when she saw
me. Mrs. Fairfax received me with her usual plain friendliness.
Leah smiled, and even Sophie bid me "bon soir" with glee. This
was very pleasant there is no happiness like that of being loved
by your fellowcreatures, and feeling that your presence is an
addition to their comfort.
I that evening shut my eyes resolutely against the future I stopped
my cars against the voice that kept warning me of near separation
and coming grief. When tea was over and Mrs. Fairfax had taken
her knitting, and I had assumed a low seat near her, and Adele,
kneeling on the carpet, had nestled close up to me, and a sense of
mutual affection seemed to surround us with a ring of golden peace,
I uttered a silent prayer that we might not be parted far or soon
but when, as we thus sat, Mr. Rochester entered, unannounced, and
looking at us, seemed to take pleasure in the spectacle of a group
so amicable  when he said he supposed the old lady was all right
now that she had got her adopted daughter back again, and added
that he saw Adele was "prete e croquer sa petite maman Anglaise"
I half ventured to hope that he would, even after his marriage,
keep us together somewhere under the shelter of his protection,
and not quite exiled from the sunshine of his presence.
A fortnight of dubious calm succeeded my return to Thornfield Hall.
Nothing was said of the master's marriage, and I saw no preparation
going on for such an event. Almost every day I asked Mrs. Fairfax
if she had yet heard anything decided her answer was always in
the negative. Once she said she had actually put the question to
Mr. Rochester as to when he was going to bring his bride home but
he had answered her only by a joke and one of his queer looks, and
she could not tell what to make of him.
One thing specially surprised me, and that was, there were no
journeyings backward and forward, no visits to Ingram Park to
be sure it was twenty miles off, on the borders of another county
but what was that distance to an ardent lover? To so practised
and indefatigable a horseman as Mr. Rochester, it would be but a
morning's ride. I began to cherish hopes I had no right to conceive
that the match was broken off that rumour had been mistaken that
one or both parties had changed their minds. I used to look at
my master's face to see if it were sad or fierce but I could not
remember the time when it had been so uniformly clear of clouds or
evil feelings. If, in the moments I and my pupil spent with him, I
lacked spirits and sank into inevitable dejection, he became even
gay. Never had he called me more frequently to his presence never
been kinder to me when there  and, alas never had I loved him
so well.
CHAPTER XXIII
A splendid Midsummer shone over England skies so pure, suns so
radiant as were then seen in long succession, seldom favour even
singly, our wavegirt land. It was as if a band of Italian days
had come from the South, like a flock of glorious passenger birds,
and lighted to rest them on the cliffs of Albion. The hay was
all got in the fields round Thornfield were green and shorn the
roads white and baked the trees were in their dark prime hedge
and wood, fullleaved and deeply tinted, contrasted well with the
sunny hue of the cleared meadows between.
On Midsummereve, Adele, weary with gathering wild strawberries
in Hay Lane half the day, had gone to bed with the sun. I watched
her drop asleep, and when I left her, I sought the garden.
It was now the sweetest hour of the twentyfour "Day its fervid
fires had wasted," and dew fell cool on panting plain and scorched
summit. Where the sun had gone down in simple state  pure of the
pomp of clouds  spread a solemn purple, burning with the light
of red jewel and furnace flame at one point, on one hillpeak, and
extending high and wide, soft and still softer, over half heaven.
The east had its own charm or fine deep blue, and its own modest
gem, a casino and solitary star soon it would boast the moon
but she was yet beneath the horizon.
I walked a while on the pavement but a subtle, wellknown scent
that of a cigar  stole from some window I saw the library
casement open a handbreadth I knew I might be watched thence so
I went apart into the orchard. No nook in the grounds more sheltered
and more Edenlike it was full of trees, it bloomed with flowers
a very high wall shut it out from the court, on one side on the
other, a beech avenue screened it from the lawn. At the bottom was
a sunk fence its sole separation from lonely fields a winding
walk, bordered with laurels and terminating in a giant horsechestnut,
circled at the base by a seat, led down to the fence. Here one could
wander unseen. While such honeydew fell, such silence reigned,
such gloaming gathered, I felt as if I could haunt such shade for
ever but in threading the flower and fruit parterres at the upper
part of the enclosure, enticed there by the light the now rising
moon cast on this more open quarter, my step is stayed  not by
sound, not by sight, but once more by a warning fragrance.
Sweetbriar and southernwood, jasmine, pink, and rose have long
been yielding their evening sacrifice of incense this new scent
is neither of shrub nor flower it is  I know it well  it is
Mr. Rochester's cigar. I look round and I listen. I see trees
laden with ripening fruit. I hear a nightingale warbling in a wood
half a mile off no moving form is visible, no coming step audible
but that perfume increases I must flee. I make for the wicket
leading to the shrubbery, and I see Mr. Rochester entering. I step
aside into the ivy recess he will not stay long he will soon
return whence he came, and if I sit still he will never see me.
But no  eventide is as pleasant to him as to me, and this antique
garden as attractive and he strolls on, now lifting the gooseberry
tree branches to look at the fruit, large as plums, with which they
are laden now taking a ripe cherry from the wall now stooping
towards a knot of flowers, either to inhale their fragrance or to
admire the dewbeads on their petals. A great moth goes humming
by me it alights on a plant at Mr. Rochester's foot he sees it,
and bends to examine it.
"Now, he has his back towards me," thought I, "and he is occupied
too perhaps, if I walk softly, I can slip away unnoticed."
I trode on an edging of turf that the crackle of the pebbly gravel
might not betray me he was standing among the beds at a yard or
two distant from where I had to pass the moth apparently engaged
him. "I shall get by very well," I meditated. As I crossed his
shadow, thrown long over the garden by the moon, not yet
risen high, he said quietly, without turning 
"Jane, come and look at this fellow."
I had made no noise he had not eyes behind  could his shadow
feel? I started at first, and then I approached him.
"Look at his wings," said he, "he reminds me rather of a West Indian
insect one does not often see so large and gay a nightrover in
England there he is flown."
The moth roamed away. I was sheepishly retreating also but Mr.
Rochester followed me, and when we reached the wicket, he said 
"Turn back on so lovely a night it is a shame to sit in the house
and surely no one can wish to go to bed while sunset is thus at
meeting with moonrise."
It is one of my faults, that though my tongue is sometimes prompt
enough at an answer, there are times when it sadly fails me in
framing an excuse and always the lapse occurs at some crisis, when
a facile word or plausible pretext is specially wanted to get me
out of painful embarrassment. I did not like to walk at this hour
alone with Mr. Rochester in the shadowy orchard but I could not
find a reason to allege for leaving him. I followed with lagging
step, and thoughts busily bent on discovering a means of extrication
but he himself looked so composed and so grave also, I became
ashamed of feeling any confusion the evil  if evil existent or
prospective there was  seemed to lie with me only his mind was
unconscious and quiet.
"Jane," he recommenced, as we entered the laurel walk, and slowly
strayed down in the direction of the sunk fence and the horsechestnut,
"Thornfield is a pleasant place in summer, is it not?"
"Yes, sir."
"You must have become in some degree attached to the house, 
you, who have an eye for natural beauties, and a good deal of the
organ of Adhesiveness?"
"I am attached to it, indeed."
"And though I don't comprehend how it is, I perceive you have
acquired a degree of regard for that foolish little child Adele,
too and even for simple dame Fairfax?"
"Yes, sir in different ways, I have an affection for both."
"And would be sorry to part with them?"
"Yes."
"Pity" he said, and sighed and paused. "It is always the way
of events in this life," he continued presently "no sooner have
you got settled in a pleasant restingplace, than a voice calls
out to you to rise and move on, for the hour of repose is expired."
"Must I move on, sir?" I asked. "Must I leave Thornfield?"
"I believe you must, Jane. I am sorry, Janet, but I believe indeed
you must."
This was a blow but I did not let it prostrate me.
"Well, sir, I shall be ready when the order to march comes."
"It is come now  I must give it tonight."
"Then you ARE going to be married, sir?"
"Exactly  precisely with your usual acuteness, you have
hit the nail straight on the head."
"Soon, sir?"
"Very soon, my  that is, Miss Eyre and you'll remember, Jane,
the first time I, or Rumour, plainly intimated to you that it was
my intention to put my old bachelor's neck into the sacred noose,
to enter into the holy estate of matrimony  to take Miss Ingram
to my bosom, in short she's an extensive armful but that's not
to the point  one can't have too much of such a very excellent
thing as my beautiful Blanche well, as I was saying  listen to
me, Jane You're not turning your head to look after more moths,
are you? That was only a ladyclock, child, 'flying away home.'
I wish to remind you that it was you who first said to me, with
that discretion I respect in you  with that foresight, prudence,
and humility which befit your responsible and dependent position
that in case I married Miss Ingram, both you and little Adele
had better trot forthwith. I pass over the sort of slur conveyed
in this suggestion on the character of my beloved indeed, when
you are far away, Janet, I'll try to forget it I shall notice
only its wisdom which is such that I have made it my law of
action. Adele must go to school and you, Miss Eyre, must get a
new situation."
"Yes, sir, I will advertise immediately and meantime, I suppose
" I was going to say, "I suppose I may stay here, till I find
another shelter to betake myself to" but I stopped, feeling it
would not do to risk a long sentence, for my voice was not quite
under command.
"In about a month I hope to be a bridegroom," continued Mr. Rochester
"and in the interim, I shall myself look out for employment and an
asylum for you."
"Thank you, sir I am sorry to give  "
"Oh, no need to apologise I consider that when a dependent does
her duty as well as you have done yours, she has a sort of claim
upon her employer for any little assistance he can conveniently
render her indeed I have already, through my future motherinlaw,
heard of a place that I think will suit it is to undertake the
education of the five daughters of Mrs. Dionysius O'Gall of Bitternutt
Lodge, Connaught, Ireland. You'll like Ireland, I think they're
such warmhearted people there, they say."
"It is a long way off, sir."
"No matter  a girl of your sense will not object to the voyage
or the distance."
"Not the voyage, but the distance and then the sea is a barrier  "
"From what, Jane?"
"From England and from Thornfield and  "
"Well?"
"From YOU, sir."
I said this almost involuntarily, and, with as little sanction of
free will, my tears gushed out. I did not cry so as to be heard,
however I avoided sobbing. The thought of Mrs. O'Gall and Bitternutt
Lodge struck cold to my heart and colder the thought of all the
brine and foam, destined, as it seemed, to rush between me and the
master at whose side I now walked, and coldest the remembrance of
the wider ocean  wealth, caste, custom intervened between me and
what I naturally and inevitably loved.
"It is a long way," I again said.
"It is, to be sure and when you get to Bitternutt Lodge, Connaught,
Ireland, I shall never see you again, Jane that's morally certain.
I never go over to Ireland, not having myself much of a fancy for
the country. We have been good friends, Jane have we not?"
"Yes, sir."
"And when friends are on the eve of separation, they like to spend
the little time that remains to them close to each other. Come
we'll talk over the voyage and the parting quietly halfanhour
or so, while the stars enter into their shining life up in heaven
yonder here is the chestnut tree here is the bench at its old
roots. Come, we will sit there in peace tonight, though we should
never more be destined to sit there together." He seated me and
himself.
"It is a long way to Ireland, Janet, and I am sorry to send my
little friend on such weary travels but if I can't do better,
how is it to be helped? Are you anything akin to me, do you think,
Jane?"
I could risk no sort of answer by this time my heart was still.
"Because," he said, "I sometimes have a queer feeling with regard
to you  especially when you are near me, as now it is as if I
had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably
knotted to a similar string situated in the corresponding quarter
of your little frame. And if that boisterous Channel, and two
hundred miles or so of land come broad between us, I am afraid that
cord of communion will be snapt and then I've a nervous notion I
should take to bleeding inwardly. As for you,  you'd forget me."
"That I NEVER should, sir You know  " Impossible to proceed.
"Jane, do you hear that nightingale singing in the wood? Listen"
In listening, I sobbed convulsively for I could repress what I
endured no longer I was obliged to yield, and I was shaken from
head to foot with acute distress. When I did speak, it was only
to express an impetuous wish that I had never been born, or never
come to Thornfield.
"Because you are sorry to leave it?"
The vehemence of emotion, stirred by grief and love within me,
was claiming mastery, and struggling for full sway, and asserting
a right to predominate, to overcome, to live, rise, and reign at
last yes,  and to speak.
"I grieve to leave Thornfield I love Thornfield I love it, because
I have lived in it a full and delightful life,  momentarily at
least. I have not been trampled on. I have not been petrified. I
have not been buried with inferior minds, and excluded from every
glimpse of communion with what is bright and energetic and high.
I have talked, face to face, with what I reverence, with what I
delight in,  with an original, a vigorous, an expanded mind. I
have known you, Mr. Rochester and it strikes me with terror and
anguish to feel I absolutely must be torn from you for ever. I see
the necessity of departure and it is like looking on the necessity
of death."
"Where do you see the necessity?" he asked suddenly.
"Where? You, sir, have placed it before me."
"In what shape?"
"In the shape of Miss Ingram a noble and beautiful woman,  your
bride."
"My bride What bride? I have no bride"
"But you will have."
"Yes  I will  I will" He set his teeth.
"Then I must go you have said it yourself."
"No you must stay I swear it  and the oath shall be kept."
"I tell you I must go" I retorted, roused to something like
passion. "Do you think I can stay to become nothing to you? Do
you think I am an automaton?  a machine without feelings? and
can bear to have my morsel of bread snatched from my lips, and my
drop of living water dashed from my cup? Do you think, because I
am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless?
You think wrong  I have as much soul as you,  and full as much
heart And if God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth,
I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for
me to leave you. I am not talking to you now through the medium
of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh  it is
my spirit that addresses your spirit just as if both had passed
through the grave, and we stood at God's feet, equal,  as we
are"
"As we are" repeated Mr. Rochester  "so," he added, enclosing
me in his arms. Gathering me to his breast, pressing his lips on
my lips "so, Jane"
"Yes, so, sir," I rejoined "and yet not so for you are a married
man  or as good as a married man, and wed to one inferior to you
to one with whom you have no sympathy  whom I do not believe
you truly love for I have seen and heard you sneer at her. I would
scorn such a union therefore I am better than you  let me go"
"Where, Jane? To Ireland?"
"Yes  to Ireland. I have spoken my mind, and can go anywhere
now."
"Jane, be still don't struggle so, like a wild frantic bird that
is rending its own plumage in its desperation."
"I am no bird and no net ensnares me I am a free human being with
an independent will, which I now exert to leave you."
Another effort set me at liberty, and I stood erect before him.
"And your will shall decide your destiny," he said "I offer you
my hand, my heart, and a share of all my possessions."
"You play a farce, which I merely laugh at."
"I ask you to pass through life at my side  to be my second self,
and best earthly companion."
"For that fate you have already made your choice, and must abide
by it."
"Jane, be still a few moments you are overexcited I will be
still too."
A waft of wind came sweeping down the laurelwalk, and trembled
through the boughs of the chestnut it wandered away  away 
to an indefinite distance  it died. The nightingale's song was
then the only voice of the hour in listening to it, I again wept.
Mr. Rochester sat quiet, looking at me gently and seriously.
Some time passed before he spoke he at last said 
"Come to my side, Jane, and let us explain and understand one
another."
"I will never again come to your side I am torn away now, and
cannot return."
"But, Jane, I summon you as my wife it is you only I intend to
marry."
I was silent I thought he mocked me.
"Come, Jane  come hither."
"Your bride stands between us."
He rose, and with a stride reached me.
"My bride is here," he said, again drawing me to him, "because my
equal is here, and my likeness. Jane, will you marry me?"
Still I did not answer, and still I writhed myself from his grasp
for I was still incredulous.
"Do you doubt me, Jane?"
"Entirely."
"You have no faith in me?"
"Not a whit."
"Am I a liar in your eyes?" he asked passionately. "Little sceptic,
you SHALL be convinced. What love have I for Miss Ingram? None
and that you know. What love has she for me? None as I have
taken pains to prove I caused a rumour to reach her that my fortune
was not a third of what was supposed, and after that I presented
myself to see the result it was coldness both from her and her
mother. I would not  I could not  marry Miss Ingram. You 
you strange, you almost unearthly thing  I love as my own flesh.
You  poor and obscure, and small and plain as you are  I entreat
to accept me as a husband."
"What, me" I ejaculated, beginning in his earnestness  and
especially in his incivility  to credit his sincerity "me who
have not a friend in the world but you  if you are my friend
not a shilling but what you have given me?"
"You, Jane, I must have you for my own  entirely my own. Will
you be mine? Say yes, quickly."
"Mr. Rochester, let me look at your face turn to the moonlight."
"Why?"
"Because I want to read your countenance  turn"
"There you will find it scarcely more legible than a crumpled,
scratched page. Read on only make haste, for I suffer."
His face was very much agitated and very much flushed, and there
were strong workings in the features, and strange gleams in the
eyes
"Oh, Jane, you torture me" he exclaimed. "With that searching
and yet faithful and generous look, you torture me"
"How can I do that? If you are true, and your offer real, my
only feelings to you must be gratitude and devotion  they cannot
torture."
"Gratitude" he ejaculated and added wildly  "Jane accept me
quickly. Say, Edward  give me my name  Edward  I will marry
you."
"Are you in earnest? Do you truly love me? Do you sincerely wish
me to be your wife?"
"I do and if an oath is necessary to satisfy you, I swear it."
"Then, sir, I will marry you."
"Edward  my little wife"
"Dear Edward"
"Come to me  come to me entirely now," said he and added, in
his deepest tone, speaking in my ear as his cheek was laid on mine,
"Make my happiness  I will make yours."
"God pardon me" he subjoined ere long "and man meddle not with
me I have her, and will hold her."
"There is no one to meddle, sir. I have no kindred to interfere."
"No  that is the best of it," he said. And if I had loved
him less I should have thought his accent and look of exultation
savage but, sitting by him, roused from the nightmare of parting
called to the paradise of union  I thought only of the bliss
given me to drink in so abundant a flow. Again and again he said,
"Are you happy, Jane?" And again and again I answered, "Yes."
After which he murmured, "It will atone  it will atone. Have I
not found her friendless, and cold, and comfortless? Will I not
guard, and cherish, and solace her? Is there not love in my heart,
and constancy in my resolves? It will expiate at God's tribunal.
I know my Maker sanctions what I do. For the world's judgment 
I wash my hands thereof. For man's opinion  I defy it."
But what had befallen the night? The moon was not yet set, and we
were all in shadow I could scarcely see my master's face, near as
I was. And what ailed the chestnut tree? it writhed and groaned
while wind roared in the laurel walk, and came sweeping over us.
"We must go in," said Mr. Rochester "the weather changes. I
could have sat with thee till morning, Jane."
"And so," thought I, "could I with you." I should have said so,
perhaps, but a livid, vivid spark leapt out of a cloud at which I
was looking, and there was a crack, a crash, and a close rattling
peal and I thought only of hiding my dazzled eyes against Mr.
Rochester's shoulder.
The rain rushed down. He hurried me up the walk, through the grounds,
and into the house but we were quite wet before we could pass the
threshold. He was taking off my shawl in the hall, and shaking
the water out of my loosened hair, when Mrs. Fairfax emerged from
her room. I did not observe her at first, nor did Mr. Rochester.
The lamp was lit. The clock was on the stroke of twelve.
"Hasten to take off your wet things," said he "and before you go,
goodnight  goodnight, my darling"
He kissed me repeatedly. When I looked up, on leaving his arms,
there stood the widow, pale, grave, and amazed. I only smiled at
her, and ran upstairs. "Explanation will do for another time,"
thought I. Still, when I reached my chamber, I felt a pang at the
idea she should even temporarily misconstrue what she had seen. But
joy soon effaced every other feeling and loud as the wind blew,
near and deep as the thunder crashed, fierce and frequent as the
lightning gleamed, cataractlike as the rain fell during a storm
of two hours' duration, I experienced no fear and little awe. Mr.
Rochester came thrice to my door in the course of it, to ask if
I was safe and tranquil and that was comfort, that was strength
for anything.
Before I left my bed in the morning, little Adele came running
in to tell me that the great horsechestnut at the bottom of the
orchard had been struck by lightning in the night, and half of it
split away.
CHAPTER XXIV
As I rose and dressed, I thought over what had happened, and wondered
if it were a dream. I could not be certain of the reality till I
had seen Mr. Rochester again, and heard him renew his words of love
and promise.
While arranging my hair, I looked at my face in the glass, and felt
it was no longer plain there was hope in its aspect and life in
its colour and my eyes seemed as if they had beheld the fount of
fruition, and borrowed beams from the lustrous ripple. I had often
been unwilling to look at my master, because I feared he could not
be pleased at my look but I was sure I might lift my face to his
now, and not cool his affection by its expression. I took a plain
but clean and light summer dress from my drawer and put it on it
seemed no attire had ever so well become me, because none had I
ever worn in so blissful a mood.
I was not surprised, when I ran down into the hall, to see that a
brilliant June morning had succeeded to the tempest of the night
and to feel, through the open glass door, the breathing of a fresh
and fragrant breeze. Nature must be gladsome when I was so happy.
A beggarwoman and her little boy  pale, ragged objects both 
were coming up the walk, and I ran down and gave them all the money
I happened to have in my purse  some three or four shillings
good or bad, they must partake of my jubilee. The rooks cawed,
and blither birds sang but nothing was so merry or so musical as
my own rejoicing heart.
Mrs. Fairfax surprised me by looking out of the window with a
sad countenance, and saying gravely  "Miss Eyre, will you come
to breakfast?" During the meal she was quiet and cool but I
could not undeceive her then. I must wait for my master to give
explanations and so must she. I ate what I could, and then I
hastened upstairs. I met Adele leaving the schoolroom.
"Where are you going? It is time for lessons."
"Mr. Rochester has sent me away to the nursery."
"Where is he?"
"In there," pointing to the apartment she had left and I went in,
and there he stood.
"Come and bid me goodmorning," said he. I gladly advanced and it
was not merely a cold word now, or even a shake of the hand that I
received, but an embrace and a kiss. It seemed natural it seemed
genial to be so well loved, so caressed by him.
"Jane, you look blooming, and smiling, and pretty," said he
"truly pretty this morning. Is this my pale, little elf? Is this
my mustardseed? This little sunnyfaced girl with the dimpled
cheek and rosy lips the satinsmooth hazel hair, and the radiant
hazel eyes?" I had green eyes, reader but you must excuse the
mistake for him they were newdyed, I suppose.
"It is Jane Eyre, sir."
"Soon to be Jane Rochester," he added "in four weeks, Janet not
a day more. Do you hear that?"
I did, and I could not quite comprehend it it made me giddy. The
feeling, the announcement sent through me, was something stronger
than was consistent with joy  something that smote and stunned.
It was, I think almost fear.
"You blushed, and now you are white, Jane what is that for?"
"Because you gave me a new name  Jane Rochester and it seems so
strange."
"Yes, Mrs. Rochester," said he "young Mrs. Rochester  Fairfax
Rochester's girlbride."
"It can never be, sir it does not sound likely. Human beings
never enjoy complete happiness in this world. I was not born for
a different destiny to the rest of my species to imagine such a
lot befalling me is a fairy tale  a daydream."
"Which I can and will realise. I shall begin today. This morning
I wrote to my banker in London to send me certain jewels he has in
his keeping,  heirlooms for the ladies of Thornfield. In a day
or two I hope to pour them into your lap for every privilege, every
attention shall be yours that I would accord a peer's daughter, if
about to marry her."
"Oh, sir  never rain jewels I don't like to hear them spoken
of. Jewels for Jane Eyre sounds unnatural and strange I would
rather not have them."
"I will myself put the diamond chain round your neck, and the circlet
on your forehead,  which it will become for nature, at least,
has stamped her patent of nobility on this brow, Jane and I will
clasp the bracelets on these fine wrists, and load these fairylike
fingers with rings."
"No, no, sir think of other subjects, and speak of other things,
and in another strain. Don't address me as if I were a beauty I
am your plain, Quakerish governess."
"You are a beauty in my eyes, and a beauty just after the desire
of my heart,  delicate and aerial."
"Puny and insignificant, you mean. You are dreaming, sir,  or
you are sneering. For God's sake don't be ironical"
"I will make the world acknowledge you a beauty, too," he went on,
while I really became uneasy at the strain he had adopted, because
I felt he was either deluding himself or trying to delude me. "I
will attire my Jane in satin and lace, and she shall have roses in
her hair and I will cover the head I love best with a priceless
veil."
"And then you won't know me, sir and I shall not be your Jane
Eyre any longer, but an ape in a harlequin's jacket  a jay in
borrowed plumes. I would as soon see you, Mr. Rochester, tricked
out in stagetrappings, as myself clad in a courtlady's robe and
I don't call you handsome, sir, though I love you most dearly far
too dearly to flatter you. Don't flatter me."
He pursued his theme, however, without noticing my deprecation.
"This very day I shall take you in the carriage to Millcote, and
you must choose some dresses for yourself. I told you we shall be
married in four weeks. The wedding is to take place quietly, in
the church down below yonder and then I shall waft you away at
once to town. After a brief stay there, I shall bear my treasure
to regions nearer the sun to French vineyards and Italian plains
and she shall see whatever is famous in old story and in modern
record she shall taste, too, of the life of cities and she shall
learn to value herself by just comparison with others."
"Shall I travel?  and with you, sir?"
"You shall sojourn at Paris, Rome, and Naples at Florence,
Venice, and Vienna all the ground I have wandered over shall be
retrodden by you wherever I stamped my hoof, your sylph's foot
shall step also. Ten years since, I flew through Europe half mad
with disgust, hate, and rage as my companions now I shall revisit
it healed and cleansed, with a very angel as my comforter."
I laughed at him as he said this. "I am not an angel," I asserted
"and I will not be one till I die I will be myself. Mr. Rochester,
you must neither expect nor exact anything celestial of me  for
you will not get it, any more than I shall get it of you which
I do not at all anticipate."
"What do you anticipate of me?"
"For a little while you will perhaps be as you are now,  a very
little while and then you will turn cool and then you will be
capricious and then you will be stern, and I shall have much ado
to please you but when you get well used to me, you will perhaps
like me again,  LIKE me, I say, not LOVE me. I suppose your love
will effervesce in six months, or less. I have observed in books
written by men, that period assigned as the farthest to which a
husband's ardour extends. Yet, after all, as a friend and companion,
I hope never to become quite distasteful to my dear master."
"Distasteful and like you again I think I shall like you again,
and yet again and I will make you confess I do not only LIKE,
but LOVE you  with truth, fervour, constancy."
"Yet are you not capricious, sir?"
"To women who please me only by their faces, I am the very devil
when I find out they have neither souls nor hearts  when they
open to me a perspective of flatness, triviality, and perhaps
imbecility, coarseness, and illtemper but to the clear eye and
eloquent tongue, to the soul made of fire, and the character that
bends but does not break  at once supple and stable, tractable
and consistent  I am ever tender and true."
"Had you ever experience of such a character, sir? Did you ever
love such an one?"
"I love it now."
"But before me if I, indeed, in any respect come up to your
difficult standard?"
"I never met your likeness. Jane, you please me, and you master me
you seem to submit, and I like the sense of pliancy you impart
and while I am twining the soft, silken skein round my finger, it
sends a thrill up my arm to my heart. I am influenced  conquered
and the influence is sweeter than I can express and the conquest
I undergo has a witchery beyond any triumph I can win. Why do you
smile, Jane? What does that inexplicable, that uncanny turn of
countenance mean?"
"I was thinking, sir you will excuse the idea it was involuntary,
I was thinking of Hercules and Samson with their charmers  "
"You were, you little elfish  "
"Hush, sir You don't talk very wisely just now any more than
those gentlemen acted very wisely. However, had they been married,
they would no doubt by their severity as husbands have made up for
their softness as suitors and so will you, I fear. I wonder how
you will answer me a year hence, should I ask a favour it does not
suit your convenience or pleasure to grant."
"Ask me something now, Jane,  the least thing I desire
to be entreated  "
"Indeed I will, sir I have my petition all ready."
"Speak But if you look up and smile with that countenance, I shall
swear concession before I know to what, and that will make a fool
of me."
"Not at all, sir I ask only this don't send for the jewels, and
don't crown me with roses you might as well put a border of gold
lace round that plain pocket handkerchief you have there."
"I might as well 'gild refined gold.' I know it your request is
granted then  for the time. I will remand the order I despatched
to my banker. But you have not yet asked for anything you have
prayed a gift to be withdrawn try again."
"Well then, sir, have the goodness to gratify my curiosity, which
is much piqued on one point."
He looked disturbed. "What? what?" he said hastily. "Curiosity
is a dangerous petition it is well I have not taken a
vow to accord every request  "
"But there can be no danger in complying with this, sir."
"Utter it, Jane but I wish that instead of a mere inquiry into,
perhaps, a secret, it was a wish for half my estate."
"Now, King Ahasuerus What do I want with half your estate? Do
you think I am a Jewusurer, seeking good investment in land? I
would much rather have all your confidence. You will not exclude
me from your confidence if you admit me to your heart?"
"You are welcome to all my confidence that is worth having, Jane
but for God's sake, don't desire a useless burden Don't long for
poison  don't turn out a downright Eve on my hands"
"Why not, sir? You have just been telling me how much you liked
to be conquered, and how pleasant overpersuasion is to you. Don't
you think I had better take advantage of the confession, and begin
and coax and entreat  even cry and be sulky if necessary  for
the sake of a mere essay of my power?"
"I dare you to any such experiment. Encroach, presume, and the
game is up."
"Is it, sir? You soon give in. How stern you look now Your
eyebrows have become as thick as my finger, and your forehead
resembles what, in some very astonishing poetry, I once saw styled,
'a bluepiled thunderloft.' That will be your married look, sir,
I suppose?"
"If that will be YOUR married look, I, as a Christian, will soon
give up the notion of consorting with a mere sprite or salamander.
But what had you to ask, thing,  out with it?"
"There, you are less than civil now and I like rudeness a great
deal better than flattery. I had rather be a THING than an angel.
This is what I have to ask,  Why did you take such pains to make
me believe you wished to marry Miss Ingram?"
"Is that all? Thank God it is no worse" And now he unknit his
black brows looked down, smiling at me, and stroked my hair, as if
well pleased at seeing a danger averted. "I think I may confess,"
he continued, "even although I should make you a little indignant,
Jane  and I have seen what a firespirit you can be when you are
indignant. You glowed in the cool moonlight last night, when you
mutinied against fate, and claimed your rank as my equal. Janet,
bythebye, it was you who made me the offer."
"Of course I did. But to the point if you please, sir  Miss
Ingram?"
"Well, I feigned courtship of Miss Ingram, because I wished to
render you as madly in love with me as I was with you and I knew
jealousy would be the best ally I could call in for the furtherance
of that end."
"Excellent Now you are small  not one whit bigger than the
end of my little finger. It was a burning shame and a scandalous
disgrace to act in that way. Did you think nothing of Miss Ingram's
feelings, sir?"
"Her feelings are concentrated in one  pride and that needs
humbling. Were you jealous, Jane?"
"Never mind, Mr. Rochester it is in no way interesting to you
to know that. Answer me truly once more. Do you think Miss Ingram
will not suffer from your dishonest coquetry? Won't she feel
forsaken and deserted?"
"Impossible  when I told you how she, on the contrary, deserted
me the idea of my insolvency cooled, or rather extinguished, her
flame in a moment."
"You have a curious, designing mind, Mr. Rochester. I am afraid
your principles on some points are eccentric."
"My principles were never trained, Jane they may have grown a
little awry for want of attention."
"Once again, seriously may I enjoy the great good that has been
vouchsafed to me, without fearing that any one else is suffering
the bitter pain I myself felt a while ago?"
"That you may, my good little girl there is not another being in
the world has the same pure love for me as yourself  for I lay
that pleasant unction to my soul, Jane, a belief in your affection."
I turned my lips to the hand that lay on my shoulder. I loved him
very much  more than I could trust myself to say  more than
words had power to express.
"Ask something more," he said presently "it is my delight to be
entreated, and to yield."
I was again ready with my request. "Communicate your intentions
to Mrs. Fairfax, sir she saw me with you last night in the hall,
and she was shocked. Give her some explanation before I see her
again. It pains me to be misjudged by so good a woman."
"Go to your room, and put on your bonnet," he replied. "I mean
you to accompany me to Millcote this morning and while you prepare
for the drive, I will enlighten the old lady's understanding. Did
she think, Janet, you had given the world for love, and considered
it well lost?"
"I believe she thought I had forgotten my station, and yours, sir."
"Station station  your station is in my heart, and on the
necks of those who would insult you, now or hereafter.  Go."
I was soon dressed and when I heard Mr. Rochester quit Mrs.
Fairfax's parlour, I hurried down to it. The old lady, had been
reading her morning portion of Scripture  the Lesson for the
day her Bible lay open before her, and her spectacles were upon
it. Her occupation, suspended by Mr. Rochester's announcement,
seemed now forgotten her eyes, fixed on the blank wall opposite,
expressed the surprise of a quiet mind stirred by unwonted tidings.
Seeing me, she roused herself she made a sort of effort to smile,
and framed a few words of congratulation but the smile expired, and
the sentence was abandoned unfinished. She put up her spectacles,
shut the Bible, and pushed her chair back from the table.
"I feel so astonished," she began, "I hardly know what to say to
you, Miss Eyre. I have surely not been dreaming, have I? Sometimes
I half fall asleep when I am sitting alone and fancy things that
have never happened. It has seemed to me more than once when I
have been in a doze, that my dear husband, who died fifteen years
since, has come in and sat down beside me and that I have even
heard him call me by my name, Alice, as he used to do. Now, can
you tell me whether it is actually true that Mr. Rochester has
asked you to marry him? Don't laugh at me. But I really thought
he came in here five minutes ago, and said that in a month you
would be his wife."
"He has said the same thing to me," I replied.
"He has Do you believe him? Have you accepted him?"
"Yes."
She looked at me bewildered. "I could never have thought it. He
is a proud man all the Rochesters were proud and his father,
at least, liked money. He, too, has always been called careful.
He means to marry you?"
"He tells me so."
She surveyed my whole person in her eyes I read that they had
there found no charm powerful enough to solve the enigma.
"It passes me" she continued "but no doubt, it is true since you
say so. How it will answer, I cannot tell I really don't know.
Equality of position and fortune is often advisable in such cases
and there are twenty years of difference in your ages. He might
almost be your father."
"No, indeed, Mrs. Fairfax" exclaimed I, nettled "he is nothing
like my father No one, who saw us together, would suppose it for
an instant. Mr. Rochester looks as young, and is as young, as some
men at fiveandtwenty."
"Is it really for love he is going to marry you?" she asked.
I was so hurt by her coldness and scepticism, that the tears rose
to my eyes.
"I am sorry to grieve you," pursued the widow "but you are
so young, and so little acquainted with men, I wished to put you
on your guard. It is an old saying that 'all is not gold that
glitters' and in this case I do fear there will be something found
to be different to what either you or I expect."
"Why?  am I a monster?" I said "is it impossible that Mr.
Rochester should have a sincere affection for me?"
"No you are very well and much improved of late and Mr. Rochester,
I daresay, is fond of you. I have always noticed that you were a
sort of pet of his. There are times when, for your sake, I have
been a little uneasy at his marked preference, and have wished
to put you on your guard but I did not like to suggest even the
possibility of wrong. I knew such an idea would shock, perhaps
offend you and you were so discreet, and so thoroughly modest and
sensible, I hoped you might be trusted to protect yourself. Last
night I cannot tell you what I suffered when I sought all over
the house, and could find you nowhere, nor the master either and
then, at twelve o'clock, saw you come in with him."
"Well, never mind that now," I interrupted impatiently "it is
enough that all was right."
"I hope all will be right in the end," she said "but believe me,
you cannot be too careful. Try and keep Mr. Rochester at a distance
distrust yourself as well as him. Gentlemen in his station are
not accustomed to marry their governesses."
I was growing truly irritated happily, Adele ran in.
"Let me go,  let me go to Millcote too" she cried. "Mr. Rochester
won't though there is so much room in the new carriage. Beg him
to let me go mademoiselle."
"That I will, Adele" and I hastened away with her, glad to quit
my gloomy monitress. The carriage was ready they were bringing
it round to the front, and my master was on the pavement, Pilot
following him backwards and forwards.
"Adele may accompany us, may she not, sir?"
"I told her no. I'll have no brats  I'll have only you."
"Do let her go, Mr. Rochester, if you please it would be better."
"Not it she will be a restraint."
He was quite peremptory, both in look and voice. The chill of
Mrs. Fairfax's warnings, and the damp of her doubts were upon me
something of unsubstantiality and uncertainty had beset my hopes.
I half lost the sense of power over him. I was about mechanically
to obey him, without further remonstrance but as he helped me into
the carriage, he looked at my face.
"What is the matter?" he asked "all the sunshine is gone. Do
you really wish the bairn to go? Will it annoy you if she is left
behind?"
"I would far rather she went, sir."
"Then off for your bonnet, and back like a flash of lightning"
cried he to Adele.
She obeyed him with what speed she might.
"After all, a single morning's interruption will not matter much,"
said he, "when I mean shortly to claim you  your thoughts,
conversation, and company  for life."
Adele, when lifted in, commenced kissing me, by way of expressing
her gratitude for my intercession she was instantly stowed away
into a corner on the other side of him. She then peeped round to
where I sat so stern a neighbour was too restrictive to him, in
his present fractious mood, she dared whisper no observations, nor
ask of him any information.
"Let her come to me," I entreated "she will, perhaps, trouble
you, sir there is plenty of room on this side."
He handed her over as if she had been a lapdog. "I'll send her to
school yet," he said, but now he was smiling.
Adele heard him, and asked if she was to go to school "sans
mademoiselle?"
"Yes," he replied, "absolutely sans mademoiselle for I am to take
mademoiselle to the moon, and there I shall seek a cave in one of
the white valleys among the volcanotops, and mademoiselle shall
live with me there, and only me."
"She will have nothing to eat you will starve her," observed
Adele.
"I shall gather manna for her morning and night the plains and
hillsides in the moon are bleached with manna, Adele."
"She will want to warm herself what will she do for a fire?"
"Fire rises out of the lunar mountains when she is cold, I'll
carry her up to a peak, and lay her down on the edge of a crater."
"Oh, qu' elle y sera mal  peu comfortable And her clothes, they
will wear out how can she get new ones?"
Mr. Rochester professed to be puzzled. "Hem" said he. "What
would you do, Adele? Cudgel your brains for an expedient. How
would a white or a pink cloud answer for a gown, do you think? And
one could cut a pretty enough scarf out of a rainbow."
"She is far better as she is," concluded Adele, after musing some
time "besides, she would get tired of living with only you in
the moon. If I were mademoiselle, I would never consent to go with
you."
"She has consented she has pledged her word."
"But you can't get her there there is no road to the moon it is
all air and neither you nor she can fly."
"Adele, look at that field." We were now outside Thornfield gates,
and bowling lightly along the smooth road to Millcote, where the
dust was well laid by the thunderstorm, and, where the low hedges
and lofty timber trees on each side glistened green and rainrefreshed.
"In that field, Adele, I was walking late one evening about
a fortnight since  the evening of the day you helped me to make
hay in the orchard meadows and, as I was tired with raking swaths,
I sat down to rest me on a stile and there I took out a little book
and a pencil, and began to write about a misfortune that befell me
long ago, and a wish I had for happy days to come I was writing
away very fast, though daylight was fading from the leaf, when
something came up the path and stopped two yards off me. I looked
at it. It was a little thing with a veil of gossamer on its head.
I beckoned it to come near me it stood soon at my knee. I never
spoke to it, and it never spoke to me, in words but I read its eyes,
and it read mine and our speechless colloquy was to this effect 
"It was a fairy, and come from Elfland, it said and its errand
was to make me happy I must go with it out of the common world to
a lonely place  such as the moon, for instance  and it nodded
its head towards her horn, rising over Hayhill it told me of
the alabaster cave and silver vale where we might live. I said I
should like to go but reminded it, as you did me, that I had no
wings to fly.
"'Oh,' returned the fairy, 'that does not signify Here is a
talisman will remove all difficulties' and she held out a pretty
gold ring. 'Put it,' she said, 'on the fourth finger of my left
hand, and I am yours, and you are mine and we shall leave earth,
and make our own heaven yonder.' She nodded again at the moon.
The ring, Adele, is in my breechespocket, under the disguise of
a sovereign but I mean soon to change it to a ring again."
"But what has mademoiselle to do with it? I don't care for the
fairy you said it was mademoiselle you would take to the moon?"
"Mademoiselle is a fairy," he said, whispering mysteriously. Whereupon
I told her not to mind his badinage and she, on her part, evinced
a fund of genuine French scepticism denominating Mr. Rochester "un
vrai menteur," and assuring him that she made no account whatever
of his "contes de fee," and that "du reste, il n'y avait pas de
fees, et quand meme il y en avait" she was sure they would never
appear to him, nor ever give him rings, or offer to live with him
in the moon.
The hour spent at Millcote was a somewhat harassing one to me. Mr.
Rochester obliged me to go to a certain silk warehouse there I
was ordered to choose halfadozen dresses. I hated the business,
I begged leave to defer it no  it should be gone through with
now. By dint of entreaties expressed in energetic whispers, I
reduced the halfdozen to two these however, he vowed he would
select himself. With anxiety I watched his eye rove over the gay
stores he fixed on a rich silk of the most brilliant amethyst dye,
and a superb pink satin. I told him in a new series of whispers,
that he might as well buy me a gold gown and a silver bonnet at
once I should certainly never venture to wear his choice. With
infinite difficulty, for he was stubborn as a stone, I persuaded him
to make an exchange in favour of a sober black satin and pearlgrey
silk. "It might pass for the present," he said "but he would yet
see me glittering like a parterre."
Glad was I to get him out of the silk warehouse, and then out of
a jewellers shop the more he bought me, the more my cheek burned
with a sense of annoyance and degradation. As we reentered the
carriage, and I sat back feverish and fagged, I remembered what,
in the hurry of events, dark and bright, I had wholly forgotten 
the letter of my uncle, John Eyre, to Mrs. Reed his intention to
adopt me and make me his legatee. "It would, indeed, be a relief,"
I thought, "if I had ever so small an independency I never can
bear being dressed like a doll by Mr. Rochester, or sitting like
a second Danae with the golden shower falling daily round me. I
will write to Madeira the moment I get home, and tell my uncle John
I am going to be married, and to whom if I had but a prospect
of one day bringing Mr. Rochester an accession of fortune, I could
better endure to be kept by him now." And somewhat relieved by
this idea which I failed not to execute that day, I ventured once
more to meet my master's and lover's eye, which most pertinaciously
sought mine, though I averted both face and gaze. He smiled and
I thought his smile was such as a sultan might, in a blissful and
fond moment, bestow on a slave his gold and gems had enriched I
crushed his hand, which was ever hunting mine, vigorously, and
thrust it back to him red with the passionate pressure.
"You need not look in that way," I said "if you do, I'll wear
nothing but my old Lowood frocks to the end of the chapter. I'll
be married in this lilac gingham you may make a dressinggown
for yourself out of the pearlgrey silk, and an infinite series of
waistcoats out of the black satin."
He chuckled he rubbed his hands. "Oh, it is rich to see and hear
her?" he exclaimed. "Is she original? Is she piquant? I would
not exchange this one little English girl for the Grand Turk's
whole seraglio, gazelleeyes, houri forms, and all"
The Eastern allusion bit me again. "I'll not stand you an inch in
the stead of a seraglio," I said "so don't consider me an equivalent
for one. If you have a fancy for anything in that line, away with
you, sir, to the bazaars of Stamboul without delay, and lay out
in extensive slavepurchases some of that spare cash you seem at
a loss to spend satisfactorily here."
"And what will you do, Janet, while I am bargaining for so many
tons of flesh and such an assortment of black eyes?"
"I'll be preparing myself to go out as a missionary to preach
liberty to them that are enslaved  your harem inmates amongst the
rest. I'll get admitted there, and I'll stir up mutiny and you,
threetailed bashaw as you are, sir, shall in a trice find yourself
fettered amongst our hands nor will I, for one, consent to cut
your bonds till you have signed a charter, the most liberal that
despot ever yet conferred."
"I would consent to be at your mercy, Jane."
"I would have no mercy, Mr. Rochester, if you supplicated for it
with an eye like that. While you looked so, I should be certain
that whatever charter you might grant under coercion, your first
act, when released, would be to violate its conditions."
"Why, Jane, what would you have? I fear you will compel me to go
through a private marriage ceremony, besides that performed at the
altar. You will stipulate, I see, for peculiar terms  what will
they be?"
"I only want an easy mind, sir not crushed by crowded obligations.
Do you remember what you said of Celine Varens?  of the diamonds,
the cashmeres you gave her? I will not be your English Celine
Varens. I shall continue to act as Adele's governess by that I
shall earn my board and lodging, and thirty pounds a year besides.
I'll furnish my own wardrobe out of that money, and you
shall give me nothing but  "
"Well, but what?"
"Your regard and if I give you mine in return, that debt will be
quit."
"Well, for cool native impudence and pure innate pride, you haven't
your equal," said he. We were now approaching Thornfield. "Will
it please you to dine with me today?" he asked, as we reentered
the gates.
"No, thank you, sir."
"And what for, 'no, thank you?' if one may inquire."
"I never have dined with you, sir and I see no reason
why I should now till  "
"Till what? You delight in halfphrases."
"Till I can't help it."
"Do you suppose I eat like an ogre or a ghoul, that you dread being
the companion of my repast?"
"I have formed no supposition on the subject, sir but I want to
go on as usual for another month."
"You will give up your governessing slavery at once."
"Indeed, begging your pardon, sir, I shall not. I shall just go
on with it as usual. I shall keep out of your way all day, as I
have been accustomed to do you may send for me in the evening,
when you feel disposed to see me, and I'll come then but at no
other time."
"I want a smoke, Jane, or a pinch of snuff, to comfort me under
all this, 'pour me donner une contenance,' as Adele would say and
unfortunately I have neither my cigarcase, nor my snuffbox. But
listen  whisper. It is your time now, little tyrant, but it will
be mine presently and when once I have fairly seized you, to have
and to hold, I'll just  figuratively speaking  attach you to
a chain like this" touching his watchguard. "Yes, bonny wee
thing, I'll wear you in my bosom, lest my jewel I should tyne."
He said this as he helped me to alight from the carriage, and while
he afterwards lifted out Adele, I entered the house, and made good
my retreat upstairs.
He duly summoned me to his presence in the evening. I had prepared
an occupation for him for I was determined not to spend the whole
time in a teteetete conversation. I remembered his fine voice
I knew he liked to sing  good singers generally do. I was
no vocalist myself, and, in his fastidious judgment, no musician,
either but I delighted in listening when the performance was good.
No sooner had twilight, that hour of romance, began to lower her
blue and starry banner over the lattice, than I rose, opened the
piano, and entreated him, for the love of heaven, to give me a
song. He said I was a capricious witch, and that he would rather
sing another time but I averred that no time was like the present.
"Did I like his voice?" he asked.
"Very much." I was not fond of pampering that susceptible vanity
of his but for once, and from motives of expediency, I would e'en
soothe and stimulate it.
"Then, Jane, you must play the accompaniment."
"Very well, sir, I will try."
I did try, but was presently swept off the stool and denominated "a
little bungler." Being pushed unceremoniously to one side  which
was precisely what I wished  he usurped my place, and proceeded
to accompany himself for he could play as well as sing. I hied
me to the windowrecess. And while I sat there and looked out on
the still trees and dim lawn, to a sweet air was sung in mellow
tones the following strain
"The truest love that ever heart
Felt at its kindled core,
Did through each vein, in quickened start,
The tide of being pour.
"Her coming was my hope each day,
Her parting was my pain
The chance that did her steps delay
Was ice in every vein.
"I dreamed it would be nameless bliss,
As I loved, loved to be
And to this object did I press
As blind as eagerly.
"But wide as pathless was the space
That lay our lives between,
And dangerous as the foamy race
Of oceansurges green.
"And haunted as a robberpath
Through wilderness or wood
For Might and Right, and Woe and Wrath,
Between our spirits stood.
"I dangers dared I hindrance scorned
I omens did defy
Whatever menaced, harassed, warned,
I passed impetuous by.
"On sped my rainbow, fast as light
I flew as in a dream
For glorious rose upon my sight
That child of Shower and Gleam.
"Still bright on clouds of suffering dim
Shines that soft, solemn joy
Nor care I now, how dense and grim
Disasters gather nigh.
"I care not in this moment sweet,
Though all I have rushed o'er
Should come on pinion, strong and fleet,
Proclaiming vengeance sore
"Though haughty Hate should strike me down,
Right, bar approach to me,
And grinding Might, with furious frown,
Swear endless enmity.
"My love has placed her little hand
With noble faith in mine,
And vowed that wedlock's sacred band
Our nature shall entwine.
"My love has sworn, with sealing kiss,
With me to live  to die
I have at last my nameless bliss.
As I love  loved am I"
He rose and came towards me, and I saw his face all kindled, and
his full falconeye flashing, and tenderness and passion in every
lineament. I quailed momentarily  then I rallied. Soft scene,
daring demonstration, I would not have and I stood in peril of
both a weapon of defence must be prepared  I whetted my tongue
as he reached me, I asked with asperity, "whom he was going to
marry now?"
"That was a strange question to be put by his darling Jane."
"Indeed I considered it a very natural and necessary one he
had talked of his future wife dying with him. What did he mean
by such a pagan idea? I had no intention of dying with him  he
might depend on that."
"Oh, all he longed, all he prayed for, was that I might live with
him Death was not for such as I."
"Indeed it was I had as good a right to die when my time came as
he had but I should bide that time, and not be hurried away in
a suttee."
"Would I forgive him for the selfish idea, and prove my pardon by
a reconciling kiss?"
"No I would rather be excused."
Here I heard myself apostrophised as a "hard little thing" and
it was added, "any other woman would have been melted to marrow at
hearing such stanzas crooned in her praise."
I assured him I was naturally hard  very flinty, and that he would
often find me so and that, moreover, I was determined to show him
divers rugged points in my character before the ensuing four weeks
elapsed he should know fully what sort of a bargain he had made,
while there was yet time to rescind it.
"Would I be quiet and talk rationally?"
"I would be quiet if he liked, and as to talking rationally, I
flattered myself I was doing that now."
He fretted, pished, and pshawed. "Very good," I thought "you may
fume and fidget as you please but this is the best plan to pursue
with you, I am certain. I like you more than I can say but I'll
not sink into a bathos of sentiment and with this needle of
repartee I'll keep you from the edge of the gulf too and, moreover,
maintain by its pungent aid that distance between you and myself
most conducive to our real mutual advantage."
From less to more, I worked him up to considerable irritation then,
after he had retired, in dudgeon, quite to the other end of the
room, I got up, and saying, "I wish you goodnight, sir," in my
natural and wonted respectful manner, I slipped out by the sidedoor
and got away.
The system thus entered on, I pursued during the whole season of
probation and with the best success. He was kept, to be sure, rather
cross and crusty but on the whole I could see he was excellently
entertained, and that a lamblike submission and turtledove
sensibility, while fostering his despotism more, would have pleased
his judgment, satisfied his commonsense, and even suited his taste
less.
In other people's presence I was, as formerly, deferential and
quiet any other line of conduct being uncalled for it was only
in the evening conferences I thus thwarted and afflicted him. He
continued to send for me punctually the moment the clock struck
seven though when I appeared before him now, he had no such
honeyed terms as "love" and "darling" on his lips the best words
at my service were "provoking puppet," "malicious elf," "sprite,"
"changeling," c. For caresses, too, I now got grimaces for a
pressure of the hand, a pinch on the arm for a kiss on the cheek, a
severe tweak of the ear. It was all right at present I decidedly
preferred these fierce favours to anything more tender. Mrs.
Fairfax, I saw, approved me her anxiety on my account vanished
therefore I was certain I did well. Meantime, Mr. Rochester
affirmed I was wearing him to skin and bone, and threatened awful
vengeance for my present conduct at some period fast coming. I
laughed in my sleeve at his menaces. "I can keep you in reasonable
check now," I reflected "and I don't doubt to be able to do
it hereafter if one expedient loses its virtue, another must be
devised."
Yet after all my task was not an easy one often I would rather have
pleased than teased him. My future husband was becoming to me my
whole world and more than the world almost my hope of heaven.
He stood between me and every thought of religion, as an eclipse
intervenes between man and the broad sun. I could not, in those
days, see God for His creature of whom I had made an idol.
CHAPTER XXV
The month of courtship had wasted its very last hours were being
numbered. There was no putting off the day that advanced  the
bridal day and all preparations for its arrival were complete. I,
at least, had nothing more to do there were my trunks, packed,
locked, corded, ranged in a row along the wall of my little chamber
tomorrow, at this time, they would be far on their road to London
and so should I D.V.,  or rather, not I, but one Jane Rochester,
a person whom as yet I knew not. The cards of address alone remained
to nail on they lay, four little squares, in the drawer. Mr.
Rochester had himself written the direction, "Mrs. Rochester,
Hotel, London," on each I could not persuade myself to affix
them, or to have them affixed. Mrs. Rochester She did not exist
she would not be born till tomorrow, some time after eight o'clock
a.m. and I would wait to be assured she had come into the world
alive before I assigned to her all that property. It was enough
that in yonder closet, opposite my dressingtable, garments said to
be hers had already displaced my black stuff Lowood frock and straw
bonnet for not to me appertained that suit of wedding raiment
the pearlcoloured robe, the vapoury veil pendent from the usurped
portmanteau. I shut the closet to conceal the strange, wraithlike
apparel it contained which, at this evening hour  nine o'clock
gave out certainly a most ghostly shimmer through the shadow
of my apartment. "I will leave you by yourself, white dream," I
said. "I am feverish I hear the wind blowing I will go out of
doors and feel it."
It was not only the hurry of preparation that made me feverish
not only the anticipation of the great change  the new life which
was to commence tomorrow both these circumstances had their
share, doubtless, in producing that restless, excited mood which
hurried me forth at this late hour into the darkening grounds but
a third cause influenced my mind more than they.
I had at heart a strange and anxious thought. Something had
happened which I could not comprehend no one knew of or had seen
the event but myself it had taken place the preceding night. Mr.
Rochester that night was absent from home nor was he yet returned
business had called him to a small estate of two or three farms he
possessed thirty miles off  business it was requisite he should
settle in person, previous to his meditated departure from England.
I waited now his return eager to disburthen my mind, and to seek
of him the solution of the enigma that perplexed me. Stay till
he comes, reader and, when I disclose my secret to him, you shall
share the confidence.
I sought the orchard, driven to its shelter by the wind, which all
day had blown strong and full from the south, without, however,
bringing a speck of rain. Instead of subsiding as night drew on,
it seemed to augment its rush and deepen its roar the trees blew
steadfastly one way, never writhing round, and scarcely tossing
back their boughs once in an hour so continuous was the strain
bending their branchy heads northward  the clouds drifted from
pole to pole, fast following, mass on mass no glimpse of blue
sky had been visible that July day.
It was not without a certain wild pleasure I ran before the wind,
delivering my trouble of mind to the measureless airtorrent thundering
through space. Descending the laurel walk, I faced the wreck of
the chestnuttree it stood up black and riven the trunk, split
down the centre, gasped ghastly. The cloven halves were not broken
from each other, for the firm base and strong roots kept them
unsundered below though community of vitality was destroyed 
the sap could flow no more their great boughs on each side were
dead, and next winter's tempests would be sure to fell one or both
to earth as yet, however, they might be said to form one tree 
a ruin, but an entire ruin.
"You did right to hold fast to each other," I said as if
the monstersplinters were living things, and could hear me. "I
think, scathed as you look, and charred and scorched, there must
be a little sense of life in you yet, rising out of that adhesion
at the faithful, honest roots you will never have green leaves
more  never more see birds making nests and singing idyls in
your boughs the time of pleasure and love is over with you but
you are not desolate each of you has a comrade to sympathise
with him in his decay." As I looked up at them, the moon appeared
momentarily in that part of the sky which filled their fissure
her disk was blood red and half overcast she seemed to throw on
me one bewildered, dreary glance, and buried herself again instantly
in the deep drift of cloud. The wind fell, for a second, round
Thornfield but far away over wood and water, poured a wild,
melancholy wail it was sad to listen to, and I ran off again.
Here and there I strayed through the orchard, gathered up the apples
with which the grass round the tree roots was thickly strewn then
I employed myself in dividing the ripe from the unripe I carried
them into the house and put them away in the storeroom. Then
I repaired to the library to ascertain whether the fire was lit,
for, though summer, I knew on such a gloomy evening Mr. Rochester
would like to see a cheerful hearth when he came in yes, the fire
had been kindled some time, and burnt well. I placed his armchair
by the chimneycorner I wheeled the table near it I let down
the curtain, and had the candles brought in ready for lighting.
More restless than ever, when I had completed these arrangements
I could not sit still, nor even remain in the house a little
timepiece in the room and the old clock in the hall simultaneously
struck ten.
"How late it grows" I said. "I will run down to the gates it
is moonlight at intervals I can see a good way on the road. He may
be coming now, and to meet him will save some minutes of suspense."
The wind roared high in the great trees which embowered the gates
but the road as far as I could see, to the right hand and the
left, was all still and solitary save for the shadows of clouds
crossing it at intervals as the moon looked out, it was but a long
pale line, unvaried by one moving speck.
A puerile tear dimmed my eye while I looked  a tear of disappointment
and impatience ashamed of it, I wiped it away. I lingered the
moon shut herself wholly within her chamber, and drew close her
curtain of dense cloud the night grew dark rain came driving
fast on the gale.
"I wish he would come I wish he would come" I exclaimed, seized
with hypochondriac foreboding. I had expected his arrival before
tea now it was dark what could keep him? Had an accident happened?
The event of last night again recurred to me. I interpreted it
as a warning of disaster. I feared my hopes were too bright to be
realised and I had enjoyed so much bliss lately that I imagined
my fortune had passed its meridian, and must now decline.
"Well, I cannot return to the house," I thought "I cannot sit by
the fireside, while he is abroad in inclement weather better tire
my limbs than strain my heart I will go forward and meet him."
I set out I walked fast, but not far ere I had measured a quarter
of a mile, I heard the tramp of hoofs a horseman came on, full
gallop a dog ran by his side. Away with evil presentiment It
was he here he was, mounted on Mesrour, followed by Pilot. He
saw me for the moon had opened a blue field in the sky, and rode
in it watery bright he took his hat off, and waved it round his
head. I now ran to meet him.
"There" he exclaimed, as he stretched out his hand and bent from
the saddle "You can't do without me, that is evident. Step on
my boottoe give me both hands mount"
I obeyed joy made me agile I sprang up before him. A hearty
kissing I got for a welcome, and some boastful triumph, which I
swallowed as well as I could. He checked himself in his exultation
to demand, "But is there anything the matter, Janet, that you come
to meet me at such an hour? Is there anything wrong?"
"No, but I thought you would never come. I could not bear to wait
in the house for you, especially with this rain and wind."
"Rain and wind, indeed Yes, you are dripping like a mermaid pull
my cloak round you but I think you are feverish, Jane both your
cheek and hand are burning hot. I ask again, is there anything
the matter?
"Nothing now I am neither afraid nor unhappy."
"Then you have been both?"
"Rather but I'll tell you all about it byandbye, sir and I
daresay you will only laugh at me for my pains."
"I'll laugh at you heartily when tomorrow is past till then I
dare not my prize is not certain. This is you, who have been as
slippery as an eel this last month, and as thorny as a briarrose?
I could not lay a finger anywhere but I was pricked and now I seem
to have gathered up a stray lamb in my arms. You wandered out of
the fold to seek your shepherd, did you, Jane?"
"I wanted you but don't boast. Here we are at Thornfield now
let me get down."
He landed me on the pavement. As John took his horse, and he followed
me into the hall, he told me to make haste and put something dry
on, and then return to him in the library and he stopped me, as
I made for the staircase, to extort a promise that I would not be
long nor was I long in five minutes I rejoined him. I found
him at supper.
"Take a seat and bear me company, Jane please God, it is the last
meal but one you will eat at Thornfield Hall for a long time."
I sat down near him, but told him I could not eat. "Is it because
you have the prospect of a journey before you, Jane? Is it the
thoughts of going to London that takes away your appetite?"
"I cannot see my prospects clearly tonight, sir and I hardly know
what thoughts I have in my head. Everything in life seems unreal."
"Except me I am substantial enough  touch me."
"You, sir, are the most phantomlike of all you are a mere dream."
He held out his hand, laughing. "Is that a dream?" said he, placing
it close to my eyes. He had a rounded, muscular, and vigorous
hand, as well as a long, strong arm.
"Yes though I touch it, it is a dream," said I, as I put it down
from before my face. "Sir, have you finished supper?"
"Yes, Jane."
I rang the bell and ordered away the tray. When we were again
alone, I stirred the fire, and then took a low seat at my master's
knee.
"It is near midnight," I said.
"Yes but remember, Jane, you promised to wake with me the night
before my wedding."
"I did and I will keep my promise, for an hour or two at least
I have no wish to go to bed."
"Are all your arrangements complete?"
"All, sir."
"And on my part likewise," he returned, "I have settled everything
and we shall leave Thornfield tomorrow, within halfanhour after
our return from church."
"Very well, sir."
"With what an extraordinary smile you uttered that word  'very
well,' Jane What a bright spot of colour you have on each cheek
and how strangely your eyes glitter Are you well?"
"I believe I am."
"Believe What is the matter? Tell me what you feel."
"I could not, sir no words could tell you what I feel. I wish
this present hour would never end who knows with what fate the
next may come charged?"
"This is hypochondria, Jane. You have been overexcited, or
overfatigued."
"Do you, sir, feel calm and happy?"
"Calm?  no but happy  to the heart's core."
I looked up at him to read the signs of bliss in his face it was
ardent and flushed.
"Give me your confidence, Jane," he said "relieve your mind of
any weight that oppresses it, by imparting it to me. What do you
fear? that I shall not prove a good husband?"
"It is the idea farthest from my thoughts."
"Are you apprehensive of the new sphere you are about to enter? 
of the new life into which you are passing?"
"No."
"You puzzle me, Jane your look and tone of sorrowful audacity
perplex and pain me. I want an explanation."
"Then, sir, listen. You were from home last night?"
"I was I know that and you hinted a while ago at something which
had happened in my absence nothing, probably, of consequence
but, in short, it has disturbed you. Let me hear it. Mrs. Fairfax
has said something, perhaps? or you have overheard the servants
talk?  your sensitive selfrespect has been wounded?"
"No, sir." It struck twelve  I waited till the timepiece had
concluded its silver chime, and the clock its hoarse, vibrating
stroke, and then I proceeded.
"All day yesterday I was very busy, and very happy in my ceaseless
bustle for I am not, as you seem to think, troubled by any haunting
fears about the new sphere, et cetera I think it a glorious
thing to have the hope of living with you, because I love you. No,
sir, don't caress me now  let me talk undisturbed. Yesterday I
trusted well in Providence, and believed that events were working
together for your good and mine it was a fine day, if you recollect
the calmness of the air and sky forbade apprehensions respecting
your safety or comfort on your journey. I walked a little while
on the pavement after tea, thinking of you and I beheld you in
imagination so near me, I scarcely missed your actual presence.
I thought of the life that lay before me  YOUR life, sir  an
existence more expansive and stirring than my own as much more
so as the depths of the sea to which the brook runs are than the
shallows of its own strait channel. I wondered why moralists call
this world a dreary wilderness for me it blossomed like a rose.
Just at sunset, the air turned cold and the sky cloudy I went in,
Sophie called me upstairs to look at my weddingdress, which they
had just brought and under it in the box I found your present 
the veil which, in your princely extravagance, you sent for from
London resolved, I suppose, since I would not have jewels, to
cheat me into accepting something as costly. I smiled as I unfolded
it, and devised how I would tease you about your aristocratic tastes,
and your efforts to masque your plebeian bride in the attributes
of a peeress. I though how I would carry down to you the square
of unembroidered blond I had myself prepared as a covering for my
lowborn head, and ask if that was not good enough for a woman who
could bring her husband neither fortune, beauty, nor connections.
I saw plainly how you would look and heard your impetuous republican
answers, and your haughty disavowal of any necessity on your part
to augment your wealth, or elevate your standing, by marrying either
a purse or a coronet."
"How well you read me, you witch" interposed Mr. Rochester "but
what did you find in the veil besides its embroidery? Did you find
poison, or a dagger, that you look so mournful now?"
"No, no, sir besides the delicacy and richness of the fabric,
I found nothing save Fairfax Rochester's pride and that did not
scare me, because I am used to the sight of the demon. But, sir,
as it grew dark, the wind rose it blew yesterday evening, not as
it blows now  wild and high  but 'with a sullen, moaning sound'
far more eerie. I wished you were at home. I came into this room,
and the sight of the empty chair and fireless hearth chilled me.
For some time after I went to bed, I could not sleep  a sense of
anxious excitement distressed me. The gale still rising, seemed
to my ear to muffle a mournful undersound whether in the house
or abroad I could not at first tell, but it recurred, doubtful
yet doleful at every lull at last I made out it must be some dog
howling at a distance. I was glad when it ceased. On sleeping, I
continued in dreams the idea of a dark and gusty night. I continued
also the wish to be with you, and experienced a strange, regretful
consciousness of some barrier dividing us. During all my first
sleep, I was following the windings of an unknown road total
obscurity environed me rain pelted me I was burdened with the
charge of a little child a very small creature, too young and
feeble to walk, and which shivered in my cold arms, and wailed
piteously in my ear. I thought, sir, that you were on the road
a long way before me and I strained every nerve to overtake you,
and made effort on effort to utter your name and entreat you to
stop  but my movements were fettered, and my voice still died
away inarticulate while you, I felt, withdrew farther and farther
every moment."
"And these dreams weigh on your spirits now, Jane, when I am close
to you? Little nervous subject Forget visionary woe, and think
only of real happiness You say you love me, Janet yes  I will
not forget that and you cannot deny it. THOSE words did not die
inarticulate on your lips. I heard them clear and soft a thought
too solemn perhaps, but sweet as music  'I think it is a glorious
thing to have the hope of living with you, Edward, because I love
you.' Do you love me, Jane?  repeat it."
"I do, sir  I do, with my whole heart."
"Well," he said, after some minutes' silence, "it is strange but
that sentence has penetrated my breast painfully. Why? I think
because you said it with such an earnest, religious energy, and
because your upward gaze at me now is the very sublime of faith,
truth, and devotion it is too much as if some spirit were near
me. Look wicked, Jane as you know well how to look coin one
of your wild, shy, provoking smiles tell me you hate me  tease
me, vex me do anything but move me I would rather be incensed
than saddened."
"I will tease you and vex you to your heart's content, when I have
finished my tale but hear me to the end."
"I thought, Jane, you had told me all. I thought I had found the
source of your melancholy in a dream."
I shook my head. "What is there more? But I will not believe
it to be anything important. I warn you of incredulity beforehand.
Go on."
The disquietude of his air, the somewhat apprehensive impatience
of his manner, surprised me but I proceeded.
"I dreamt another dream, sir that Thornfield Hall was a dreary
ruin, the retreat of bats and owls. I thought that of all the
stately front nothing remained but a shelllike wall, very high and
very fragilelooking. I wandered, on a moonlight night, through
the grassgrown enclosure within here I stumbled over a marble
hearth, and there over a fallen fragment of cornice. Wrapped up
in a shawl, I still carried the unknown little child I might not
lay it down anywhere, however tired were my arms  however much its
weight impeded my progress, I must retain it. I heard the gallop
of a horse at a distance on the road I was sure it was you and
you were departing for many years and for a distant country. I
climbed the thin wall with frantic perilous haste, eager to catch
one glimpse of you from the top the stones rolled from under my
feet, the ivy branches I grasped gave way, the child clung round
my neck in terror, and almost strangled me at last I gained the
summit. I saw you like a speck on a white track, lessening every
moment. The blast blew so strong I could not stand. I sat down
on the narrow ledge I hushed the scared infant in my lap you
turned an angle of the road I bent forward to take a last look
the wall crumbled I was shaken the child rolled from my knee, I
lost my balance, fell, and woke."
"Now, Jane, that is all."
"All the preface, sir the tale is yet to come. On waking, a
gleam dazzled my eyes I thought  Oh, it is daylight But I was
mistaken it was only candlelight. Sophie, I supposed, had come
in. There was a light in the dressingtable, and the door of the
closet, where, before going to bed, I had hung my weddingdress
and veil, stood open I heard a rustling there. I asked, 'Sophie,
what are you doing?' No one answered but a form emerged from the
closet it took the light, held it aloft, and surveyed the garments
pendent from the portmanteau. 'Sophie Sophie' I again cried
and still it was silent. I had risen up in bed, I bent forward
first surprise, then bewilderment, came over me and then my blood
crept cold through my veins. Mr. Rochester, this was not Sophie,
it was not Leah, it was not Mrs. Fairfax it was not  no, I was
sure of it, and am still  it was not even that strange woman,
Grace Poole."
"It must have been one of them," interrupted my master.
"No, sir, I solemnly assure you to the contrary. The shape
standing before me had never crossed my eyes within the precincts
of Thornfield Hall before the height, the contour were new to me."
"Describe it, Jane."
"It seemed, sir, a woman, tall and large, with thick and dark hair
hanging long down her back. I know not what dress she had on
it was white and straight but whether gown, sheet, or shroud, I
cannot tell."
"Did you see her face?"
"Not at first. But presently she took my veil from its place she
held it up, gazed at it long, and then she threw it over her own
head, and turned to the mirror. At that moment I saw the reflection
of the visage and features quite distinctly in the dark oblong
glass."
"And how were they?"
"Fearful and ghastly to me  oh, sir, I never saw a face like it
It was a discoloured face  it was a savage face. I wish I could
forget the roll of the red eyes and the fearful blackened inflation
of the lineaments"
"Ghosts are usually pale, Jane."
"This, sir, was purple the lips were swelled and dark the brow
furrowed the black eyebrows widely raised over the bloodshot
eyes. Shall I tell you of what it reminded me?"
"You may."
"Of the foul German spectre  the Vampyre."
"Ah  what did it do?"
"Sir, it removed my veil from its gaunt head, rent it in two parts,
and flinging both on the floor, trampled on them."
"Afterwards?"
"It drew aside the windowcurtain and looked out perhaps it saw
dawn approaching, for, taking the candle, it retreated to the door.
Just at my bedside, the figure stopped the fiery eyes glared upon
me  she thrust up her candle close to my face, and extinguished
it under my eyes. I was aware her lurid visage flamed over mine,
and I lost consciousness for the second time in my life  only
the second time  I became insensible from terror."
"Who was with you when you revived?"
"No one, sir, but the broad day. I rose, bathed my head and face
in water, drank a long draught felt that though enfeebled I was
not ill, and determined that to none but you would I impart this
vision. Now, sir, tell me who and what that woman was?"
"The creature of an overstimulated brain that is certain. I must
be careful of you, my treasure nerves like yours were not made
for rough handling."
"Sir, depend on it, my nerves were not in fault the thing was
real the transaction actually took place."
"And your previous dreams, were they real too? Is Thornfield
Hall a ruin? Am I severed from you by insuperable obstacles? Am
I leaving you without a tear  without a kiss  without a word?"
"Not yet."
"Am I about to do it? Why, the day is already commenced which is
to bind us indissolubly and when we are once united, there shall
be no recurrence of these mental terrors I guarantee that."
"Mental terrors, sir I wish I could believe them to be only such
I wish it more now than ever since even you cannot explain to me
the mystery of that awful visitant."
"And since I cannot do it, Jane, it must have been unreal."
"But, sir, when I said so to myself on rising this morning, and
when I looked round the room to gather courage and comfort from the
cheerful aspect of each familiar object in full daylight, there 
on the carpet  I saw what gave the distinct lie to my hypothesis,
the veil, torn from top to bottom in two halves"
I felt Mr. Rochester start and shudder he hastily flung his arms
round me. "Thank God" he exclaimed, "that if anything malignant
did come near you last night, it was only the veil that was harmed.
Oh, to think what might have happened"
He drew his breath short, and strained me so close to him, I could
scarcely pant. After some minutes' silence, he continued, cheerily 
"Now, Janet, I'll explain to you all about it. It was half dream,
half reality. A woman did, I doubt not, enter your room and that
woman was  must have been  Grace Poole. You call her a strange
being yourself from all you know, you have reason so to call
her  what did she do to me? what to Mason? In a state between
sleeping and waking, you noticed her entrance and her actions
but feverish, almost delirious as you were, you ascribed to her
a goblin appearance different from her own the long dishevelled
hair, the swelled black face, the exaggerated stature, were figments
of imagination results of nightmare the spiteful tearing of the
veil was real and it is like her. I see you would ask why I keep
such a woman in my house when we have been married a year and a
day, I will tell you but not now. Are you satisfied, Jane? Do
you accept my solution of the mystery?"
I reflected, and in truth it appeared to me the only possible one
satisfied I was not, but to please him I endeavoured to appear so
relieved, I certainly did feel so I answered him with a contented
smile. And now, as it was long past one, I prepared to leave him.
"Does not Sophie sleep with Adele in the nursery?" he asked, as
I lit my candle.
"Yes, sir."
"And there is room enough in Adele's little bed for you. You must
share it with her tonight, Jane it is no wonder that the incident
you have related should make you nervous, and I would rather you
did not sleep alone promise me to go to the nursery."
"I shall be very glad to do so, sir."
"And fasten the door securely on the inside. Wake Sophie when you
go upstairs, under pretence of requesting her to rouse you in good
time tomorrow for you must be dressed and have finished breakfast
before eight. And now, no more sombre thoughts chase dull care
away, Janet. Don't you hear to what soft whispers the wind has
fallen? and there is no more beating of rain against the windowpanes
look here" he lifted up the curtain  "it is a lovely night"
It was. Half heaven was pure and stainless the clouds, now
trooping before the wind, which had shifted to the west, were filing
off eastward in long, silvered columns. The moon shone peacefully.
"Well," said Mr. Rochester, gazing inquiringly into my eyes, "how
is my Janet now?"
"The night is serene, sir and so am I."
"And you will not dream of separation and sorrow tonight but of
happy love and blissful union."
This prediction was but half fulfilled I did not indeed dream of
sorrow, but as little did I dream of joy for I never slept at all.
With little Adele in my arms, I watched the slumber of childhood
so tranquil, so passionless, so innocent  and waited for the
coming day all my life was awake and astir in my frame and as
soon as the sun rose I rose too. I remember Adele clung to me as I
left her I remember I kissed her as I loosened her little hands
from my neck and I cried over her with strange emotion, and quitted
her because I feared my sobs would break her still sound repose.
She seemed the emblem of my past life and he I was now to array
myself to meet, the dread, but adored, type of my unknown future
day.
CHAPTER XXVI
Sophie came at seven to dress me she was very long indeed in
accomplishing her task so long that Mr. Rochester, grown, I suppose,
impatient of my delay, sent up to ask why I did not come. She was
just fastening my veil the plain square of blond after all to
my hair with a brooch I hurried from under her hands as soon as
I could.
"Stop" she cried in French. "Look at yourself in the mirror
you have not taken one peep."
So I turned at the door I saw a robed and veiled figure, so
unlike my usual self that it seemed almost the image of a stranger.
"Jane" called a voice, and I hastened down. I was received at
the foot of the stairs by Mr. Rochester.
"Lingerer" he said, "my brain is on fire with impatience, and
you tarry so long"
He took me into the diningroom, surveyed me keenly all over,
pronounced me "fair as a lily, and not only the pride of his life,
but the desire of his eyes," and then telling me he would give me
but ten minutes to eat some breakfast, he rang the bell. One of
his lately hired servants, a footman, answered it.
"Is John getting the carriage ready?"
"Yes, sir."
"Is the luggage brought down?"
"They are bringing it down, sir."
"Go you to the church see if Mr. Wood the clergyman and the
clerk are there return and tell me."
The church, as the reader knows, was but just beyond the gates
the footman soon returned.
"Mr. Wood is in the vestry, sir, putting on his surplice."
"And the carriage?"
"The horses are harnessing."
"We shall not want it to go to church but it must be ready the
moment we return all the boxes and luggage arranged and strapped
on, and the coachman in his seat."
"Yes, sir."
"Jane, are you ready?"
I rose. There were no groomsmen, no bridesmaids, no relatives to
wait for or marshal none but Mr. Rochester and I. Mrs. Fairfax
stood in the hall as we passed. I would fain have spoken to her,
but my hand was held by a grasp of iron I was hurried along by a
stride I could hardly follow and to look at Mr. Rochester's face
was to feel that not a second of delay would be tolerated for any
purpose. I wonder what other bridegroom ever looked as he did 
so bent up to a purpose, so grimly resolute or who, under such
steadfast brows, ever revealed such flaming and flashing eyes.
I know not whether the day was fair or foul in descending the drive,
I gazed neither on sky nor earth my heart was with my eyes and
both seemed migrated into Mr. Rochester's frame. I wanted to see
the invisible thing on which, as we went along, he appeared to
fasten a glance fierce and fell. I wanted to feel the thoughts
whose force he seemed breasting and resisting.
At the churchyard wicket he stopped he discovered I was quite out
of breath. "Am I cruel in my love?" he said. "Delay an instant
lean on me, Jane."
And now I can recall the picture of the grey old house of God
rising calm before me, of a rook wheeling round the steeple, of a
ruddy morning sky beyond. I remember something, too, of the green
gravemounds and I have not forgotten, either, two figures of
strangers straying amongst the low hillocks and reading the mementoes
graven on the few mossy headstones. I noticed them, because,
as they saw us, they passed round to the back of the church and
I doubted not they were going to enter by the sideaisle door and
witness the ceremony. By Mr. Rochester they were not observed he
was earnestly looking at my face from which the blood had, I daresay,
momentarily fled for I felt my forehead dewy, and my cheeks and
lips cold. When I rallied, which I soon did, he walked gently with
me up the path to the porch.
We entered the quiet and humble temple the priest waited in his
white surplice at the lowly altar, the clerk beside him. All was
still two shadows only moved in a remote corner. My conjecture
had been correct the strangers had slipped in before us, and they
now stood by the vault of the Rochesters, their backs towards us,
viewing through the rails the old timestained marble tomb, where
a kneeling angel guarded the remains of Damer de Rochester, slain
at Marston Moor in the time of the civil wars, and of Elizabeth,
his wife.
Our place was taken at the communion rails. Hearing a cautious
step behind me, I glanced over my shoulder one of the strangers
a gentleman, evidently  was advancing up the chancel. The
service began. The explanation of the intent of matrimony was gone
through and then the clergyman came a step further forward, and,
bending slightly towards Mr. Rochester, went on.
"I require and charge you both as ye will answer at the dreadful
day of judgment, when the secrets of all hearts shall be disclosed,
that if either of you know any impediment why ye may not lawfully
be joined together in matrimony, ye do now confess it for be ye
well assured that so many as are coupled together otherwise than
God's Word doth allow, are not joined together by God, neither is
their matrimony lawful."
He paused, as the custom is. When is the pause after that sentence
ever broken by reply? Not, perhaps, once in a hundred years. And
the clergyman, who had not lifted his eyes from his book, and had
held his breath but for a moment, was proceeding his hand was
already stretched towards Mr. Rochester, as his lips unclosed to
ask, "Wilt thou have this woman for thy wedded wife?" 
when a distinct and near voice said 
"The marriage cannot go on I declare the existence of an impediment."
The clergyman looked up at the speaker and stood mute the clerk
did the same Mr. Rochester moved slightly, as if an earthquake had
rolled under his feet taking a firmer footing, and not turning
his head or eyes, he said, "Proceed."
Profound silence fell when he had uttered that word, with
deep but low intonation. Presently Mr. Wood said 
"I cannot proceed without some investigation into what has been
asserted, and evidence of its truth or falsehood."
"The ceremony is quite broken off," subjoined the voice behind
us. "I am in a condition to prove my allegation an insuperable
impediment to this marriage exists."
Mr. Rochester heard, but heeded not he stood stubborn and rigid,
making no movement but to possess himself of my hand. What a hot
and strong grasp he had and how like quarried marble was his
pale, firm, massive front at this moment How his eye shone, still
watchful, and yet wild beneath
Mr. Wood seemed at a loss. "What is the nature of the impediment?"
he asked. "Perhaps it may be got over  explained away?"
"Hardly," was the answer. "I have called it insuperable, and I
speak advisedly."
The speaker came forward and leaned on the rails. He continued,
uttering each word distinctly, calmly, steadily, but not loudly 
"It simply consists in the existence of a previous marriage. Mr.
Rochester has a wife now living."
My nerves vibrated to those lowspoken words as they had never
vibrated to thunder  my blood felt their subtle violence as it
had never felt frost or fire but I was collected, and in no danger
of swooning. I looked at Mr. Rochester I made him look at me.
His whole face was colourless rock his eye was both spark and
flint. He disavowed nothing he seemed as if he would defy all
things. Without speaking, without smiling, without seeming to
recognise in me a human being, he only twined my waist with his
arm and riveted me to his side.
"Who are you?" he asked of the intruder.
"My name is Briggs, a solicitor of  Street, London."
"And you would thrust on me a wife?"
"I would remind you of your lady's existence, sir, which the law
recognises, if you do not."
"Favour me with an account of her  with her name, her parentage,
her place of abode."
"Certainly." Mr. Briggs calmly took a paper from his pocket, and
read out in a sort of official, nasal voice
"'I affirm and can prove that on the th of October A.D.  a
date of fifteen years back, Edward Fairfax Rochester, of Thornfield
Hall, in the county of , and of Ferndean Manor, in shire, England,
was married to my sister, Bertha Antoinetta Mason, daughter of
Jonas Mason, merchant, and of Antoinetta his wife, a Creole, at 
church, Spanish Town, Jamaica. The record of the marriage will be
found in the register of that church  a copy of it is now in my
possession. Signed, Richard Mason.'"
"That  if a genuine document  may prove I have been married,
but it does not prove that the woman mentioned therein as my wife
is still living."
"She was living three months ago," returned the lawyer.
"How do you know?"
"I have a witness to the fact, whose testimony even you, sir, will
scarcely controvert."
"Produce him  or go to hell."
"I will produce him first  he is on the spot. Mr. Mason, have
the goodness to step forward."
Mr. Rochester, on hearing the name, set his teeth he experienced,
too, a sort of strong convulsive quiver near to him as I was, I
felt the spasmodic movement of fury or despair run through his frame.
The second stranger, who had hitherto lingered in the background,
now drew near a pale face looked over the solicitor's shoulder
yes, it was Mason himself. Mr. Rochester turned and glared at
him. His eye, as I have often said, was a black eye it had now
a tawny, nay, a bloody light in its gloom and his face flushed 
olive cheek and hueless forehead received a glow as from spreading,
ascending heartfire and he stirred, lifted his strong arm  he
could have struck Mason, dashed him on the churchfloor, shocked
by ruthless blow the breath from his body  but Mason shrank away,
and cried faintly, "Good God" Contempt fell cool on Mr. Rochester
his passion died as if a blight had shrivelled it up he only
asked  "What have YOU to say?"
An inaudible reply escaped Mason's white lips.
"The devil is in it if you cannot answer distinctly. I again
demand, what have you to say?"
"Sir  sir," interrupted the clergyman, "do not forget you are in
a sacred place." Then addressing Mason, he inquired gently, "Are
you aware, sir, whether or not this gentleman's wife is still
living?"
"Courage," urged the lawyer,  "speak out."
"She is now living at Thornfield Hall," said Mason, in more articulate
tones "I saw her there last April. I am her brother."
"At Thornfield Hall" ejaculated the clergyman. "Impossible I
am an old resident in this neighbourhood, sir, and I never heard
of a Mrs. Rochester at Thornfield Hall."
I saw a grim smile contort Mr. Rochester's lips, and he muttered 
"No, by God I took care that none should hear of it 
or of her under that name." He mused  for ten minutes he held
counsel with himself he formed his resolve, and announced it 
"Enough all shall bolt out at once, like the bullet from the
barrel. Wood, close your book and take off your surplice John
Green to the clerk, leave the church there will be no wedding
today." The man obeyed.
Mr. Rochester continued, hardily and recklessly "Bigamy is an
ugly word  I meant, however, to be a bigamist but fate has out
manoeuvred me, or Providence has checked me,  perhaps the last.
I am little better than a devil at this moment and, as my pastor
there would tell me, deserve no doubt the sternest judgments of
God, even to the quenchless fire and deathless worm. Gentlemen,
my plan is broken up what this lawyer and his client say is true
I have been married, and the woman to whom I was married lives
You say you never heard of a Mrs. Rochester at the house up yonder,
Wood but I daresay you have many a time inclined your ear to gossip
about the mysterious lunatic kept there under watch and ward. Some
have whispered to you that she is my bastard halfsister some,
my castoff mistress. I now inform you that she is my wife, whom
I married fifteen years ago,  Bertha Mason by name sister of
this resolute personage, who is now, with his quivering limbs and
white cheeks, showing you what a stout heart men may bear. Cheer
up, Dick  never fear me  I'd almost as soon strike a woman
as you. Bertha Mason is mad and she came of a mad family idiots
and maniacs through three generations Her mother, the Creole,
was both a madwoman and a drunkard  as I found out after I had
wed the daughter for they were silent on family secrets before.
Bertha, like a dutiful child, copied her parent in both points.
I had a charming partner  pure, wise, modest you can fancy I
was a happy man. I went through rich scenes Oh my experience
has been heavenly, if you only knew it But I owe you no further
explanation. Briggs, Wood, Mason, I invite you all to come up to
the house and visit Mrs. Poole's patient, and MY WIFE You shall
see what sort of a being I was cheated into espousing, and judge
whether or not I had a right to break the compact, and seek sympathy
with something at least human. This girl," he continued, looking
at me, "knew no more than you, Wood, of the disgusting secret
she thought all was fair and legal and never dreamt she was going
to be entrapped into a feigned union with a defrauded wretch,
already bound to a bad, mad, and embruted partner Come all of
you  follow"
Still holding me fast, he left the church the three gentlemen
came after. At the front door of the hall we found the carriage.
"Take it back to the coachhouse, John," said Mr. Rochester coolly
"it will not be wanted today."
At our entrance, Mrs. Fairfax, Adele, Sophie, Leah, advanced to
meet and greet us.
"To the rightabout  every soul" cried the master "away with
your congratulations Who wants them? Not I  they are fifteen
years too late"
He passed on and ascended the stairs, still holding my hand, and
still beckoning the gentlemen to follow him, which they did. We
mounted the first staircase, passed up the gallery, proceeded to
the third storey the low, black door, opened by Mr. Rochester's
masterkey, admitted us to the tapestried room, with its great bed
and its pictorial cabinet.
"You know this place, Mason," said our guide "she bit and stabbed
you here."
He lifted the hangings from the wall, uncovering the second door
this, too, he opened. In a room without a window, there burnt a
fire guarded by a high and strong fender, and a lamp suspended from
the ceiling by a chain. Grace Poole bent over the fire, apparently
cooking something in a saucepan. In the deep shade, at the farther
end of the room, a figure ran backwards and forwards. What it
was, whether beast or human being, one could not, at first sight,
tell it grovelled, seemingly, on all fours it snatched and growled
like some strange wild animal but it was covered with clothing,
and a quantity of dark, grizzled hair, wild as a mane, hid its head
and face.
"Goodmorrow, Mrs. Poole" said Mr. Rochester. "How are you? and
how is your charge today?"
"We're tolerable, sir, I thank you," replied Grace, lifting the
boiling mess carefully on to the hob "rather snappish, but not
'rageous."
A fierce cry seemed to give the lie to her favourable report the
clothed hyena rose up, and stood tall on its hindfeet.
"Ah sir, she sees you" exclaimed Grace "you'd better not
stay."
"Only a few moments, Grace you must allow me a few moments."
"Take care then, sir  for God's sake, take care"
The maniac bellowed she parted her shaggy locks from her visage,
and gazed wildly at her visitors. I recognised well that purple
face,  those bloated features. Mrs. Poole advanced.
"Keep out of the way," said Mr. Rochester, thrusting her aside
"she has no knife now, I suppose, and I'm on my guard."
"One never knows what she has, sir she is so cunning it is not
in mortal discretion to fathom her craft."
"We had better leave her," whispered Mason.
"Go to the devil" was his brotherinlaw's recommendation.
"'Ware" cried Grace. The three gentlemen retreated simultaneously.
Mr. Rochester flung me behind him the lunatic sprang and grappled
his throat viciously, and laid her teeth to his cheek they
struggled. She was a big woman, in stature almost equalling her
husband, and corpulent besides she showed virile force in the
contest  more than once she almost throttled him, athletic as
he was. He could have settled her with a wellplanted blow but
he would not strike he would only wrestle. At last he mastered
her arms Grace Poole gave him a cord, and he pinioned them behind
her with more rope, which was at hand, he bound her to a chair.
The operation was performed amidst the fiercest yells and the most
convulsive plunges. Mr. Rochester then turned to the spectators
he looked at them with a smile both acrid and desolate.
"That is MY WIFE," said he. "Such is the sole conjugal embrace
I am ever to know  such are the endearments which are to solace
my leisure hours And THIS is what I wished to have" laying his
hand on my shoulder "this young girl, who stands so grave and
quiet at the mouth of hell, looking collectedly at the gambols of
a demon, I wanted her just as a change after that fierce ragout.
Wood and Briggs, look at the difference Compare these clear eyes
with the red balls yonder  this face with that mask  this form
with that bulk then judge me, priest of the gospel and man of the
law, and remember with what judgment ye judge ye shall be judged
Off with you now. I must shut up my prize."
We all withdrew. Mr. Rochester stayed a moment behind us, to give
some further order to Grace Poole. The solicitor addressed me as
he descended the stair.
"You, madam," said he, "are cleared from all blame your uncle
will be glad to hear it  if, indeed, he should be still living
when Mr. Mason returns to Madeira."
"My uncle What of him? Do you know him?"
"Mr. Mason does. Mr. Eyre has been the Funchal correspondent of
his house for some years. When your uncle received your letter
intimating the contemplated union between yourself and Mr. Rochester,
Mr. Mason, who was staying at Madeira to recruit his health, on his
way back to Jamaica, happened to be with him. Mr. Eyre mentioned
the intelligence for he knew that my client here was acquainted
with a gentleman of the name of Rochester. Mr. Mason, astonished
and distressed as you may suppose, revealed the real state of
matters. Your uncle, I am sorry to say, is now on a sick bed from
which, considering the nature of his disease  decline  and the
stage it has reached, it is unlikely he will ever rise. He could
not then hasten to England himself, to extricate you from the snare
into which you had fallen, but he implored Mr. Mason to lose no
time in taking steps to prevent the false marriage. He referred
him to me for assistance. I used all despatch, and am thankful
I was not too late as you, doubtless, must be also. Were I not
morally certain that your uncle will be dead ere you reach Madeira,
I would advise you to accompany Mr. Mason back but as it is, I
think you had better remain in England till you can hear further,
either from or of Mr. Eyre. Have we anything else to stay for?"
he inquired of Mr. Mason.
"No, no  let us be gone," was the anxious reply and without
waiting to take leave of Mr. Rochester, they made their exit at
the hall door. The clergyman stayed to exchange a few sentences,
either of admonition or reproof, with his haughty parishioner this
duty done, he too departed.
I heard him go as I stood at the halfopen door of my own room, to
which I had now withdrawn. The house cleared, I shut myself in,
fastened the bolt that none might intrude, and proceeded  not to
weep, not to mourn, I was yet too calm for that, but  mechanically
to take off the wedding dress, and replace it by the stuff gown I
had worn yesterday, as I thought, for the last time. I then sat
down I felt weak and tired. I leaned my arms on a table, and
my head dropped on them. And now I thought till now I had only
heard, seen, moved  followed up and down where I was led or dragged
watched event rush on event, disclosure open beyond disclosure
but NOW, I THOUGHT.
The morning had been a quiet morning enough  all except the brief
scene with the lunatic the transaction in the church had not been
noisy there was no explosion of passion, no loud altercation, no
dispute, no defiance or challenge, no tears, no sobs a few words
had been spoken, a calmly pronounced objection to the marriage
made some stern, short questions put by Mr. Rochester answers,
explanations given, evidence adduced an open admission of the
truth had been uttered by my master then the living proof had been
seen the intruders were gone, and all was over.
I was in my own room as usual  just myself, without obvious
change nothing had smitten me, or scathed me, or maimed me. And
yet where was the Jane Eyre of yesterday?  where was her life?
where were her prospects?
Jane Eyre, who had been an ardent, expectant woman  almost
a bride, was a cold, solitary girl again her life was pale her
prospects were desolate. A Christmas frost had come at midsummer
a white December storm had whirled over June ice glazed the ripe
apples, drifts crushed the blowing roses on hayfield and cornfield lay
a frozen shroud lanes which last night blushed full of flowers,
today were pathless with untrodden snow and the woods, which
twelve hours since waved leafy and flagrant as groves between the
tropics, now spread, waste, wild, and white as pineforests in wintry
Norway. My hopes were all dead  struck with a subtle doom, such
as, in one night, fell on all the firstborn in the land of Egypt.
I looked on my cherished wishes, yesterday so blooming and glowing
they lay stark, chill, livid corpses that could never revive. I
looked at my love that feeling which was my master's  which he
had created it shivered in my heart, like a suffering child in a
cold cradle sickness and anguish had seized it it could not seek
Mr. Rochester's arms  it could not derive warmth from his breast.
Oh, never more could it turn to him for faith was blighted
confidence destroyed Mr. Rochester was not to me what he had
been for he was not what I had thought him. I would not ascribe
vice to him I would not say he had betrayed me but the attribute
of stainless truth was gone from his idea, and from his presence I
must go THAT I perceived well. When  how  whither, I could
not yet discern but he himself, I doubted not, would hurry me from
Thornfield. Real affection, it seemed, he could not have for me
it had been only fitful passion that was balked he would want me
no more. I should fear even to cross his path now my view must
be hateful to him. Oh, how blind had been my eyes How weak my
conduct
My eyes were covered and closed eddying darkness seemed to swim
round me, and reflection came in as black and confused a flow.
Selfabandoned, relaxed, and effortless, I seemed to have laid me
down in the driedup bed of a great river I heard a flood loosened
in remote mountains, and felt the torrent come to rise I had no
will, to flee I had no strength. I lay faint, longing to be dead.
One idea only still throbbed lifelike within me  a remembrance
of God it begot an unuttered prayer these words went wandering
up and down in my rayless mind, as something that should
be whispered, but no energy was found to express them 
"Be not far from me, for trouble is near there is none to help."
It was near and as I had lifted no petition to Heaven to avert it
as I had neither joined my hands, nor bent my knees, nor moved
my lips  it came in full heavy swing the torrent poured over
me. The whole consciousness of my life lorn, my love lost, my
hope quenched, my faith deathstruck, swayed full and mighty above
me in one sullen mass. That bitter hour cannot be described in
truth, "the waters came into my soul I sank in deep mire I felt
no standing I came into deep waters the floods overflowed me."
CHAPTER XXVII
Some time in the afternoon I raised my head, and looking round
and seeing the western sun gilding the sign of its decline on the
wall, I asked, "What am I to do?"
But the answer my mind gave  "Leave Thornfield at once"  was
so prompt, so dread, that I stopped my ears. I said I could not
bear such words now. "That I am not Edward Rochester's bride is
the least part of my woe," I alleged "that I have wakened out of
most glorious dreams, and found them all void and vain, is a horror
I could bear and master but that I must leave him decidedly,
instantly, entirely, is intolerable. I cannot do it."
But, then, a voice within me averred that I could do it and foretold
that I should do it. I wrestled with my own resolution I wanted
to be weak that I might avoid the awful passage of further suffering
I saw laid out for me and Conscience, turned tyrant, held Passion
by the throat, told her tauntingly, she had yet but dipped her
dainty foot in the slough, and swore that with that arm of iron he
would thrust her down to unsounded depths of agony.
"Let me be torn away," then I cried. "Let another help me"
"No you shall tear yourself away, none shall help you you shall
yourself pluck out your right eye yourself cut off your right hand
your heart shall be the victim, and you the priest to transfix it."
I rose up suddenly, terrorstruck at the solitude which so ruthless
a judge haunted,  at the silence which so awful a voice filled.
My head swam as I stood erect. I perceived that I was sickening
from excitement and inanition neither meat nor drink had passed my
lips that day, for I had taken no breakfast. And, with a strange
pang, I now reflected that, long as I had been shut up here, no
message had been sent to ask how I was, or to invite me to come
down not even little Adele had tapped at the door not even Mrs.
Fairfax had sought me. "Friends always forget those whom fortune
forsakes," I murmured, as I undrew the bolt and passed out. I
stumbled over an obstacle my head was still dizzy, my sight was
dim, and my limbs were feeble. I could not soon recover myself.
I fell, but not on to the ground an outstretched arm caught me.
I looked up  I was supported by Mr. Rochester, who sat in a chair
across my chamber threshold.
"You come out at last," he said. "Well, I have been waiting for
you long, and listening yet not one movement have I heard, nor
one sob five minutes more of that deathlike hush, and I should
have forced the lock like a burglar. So you shun me?  you shut
yourself up and grieve alone I would rather you had come and
upbraided me with vehemence. You are passionate. I expected a
scene of some kind. I was prepared for the hot rain of tears only
I wanted them to be shed on my breast now a senseless floor has
received them, or your drenched handkerchief. But I err you have
not wept at all I see a white cheek and a faded eye, but no trace
of tears. I suppose, then, your heart has been weeping blood?"
"Well, Jane not a word of reproach? Nothing bitter  nothing
poignant? Nothing to cut a feeling or sting a passion? You sit
quietly where I have placed you, and regard me with a weary, passive
look."
"Jane, I never meant to wound you thus. If the man who had but
one little ewe lamb that was dear to him as a daughter, that ate of
his bread and drank of his cup, and lay in his bosom, had by some
mistake slaughtered it at the shambles, he would not have rued his
bloody blunder more than I now rue mine. Will you ever forgive
me?"
Reader, I forgave him at the moment and on the spot. There was
such deep remorse in his eye, such true pity in his tone, such
manly energy in his manner and besides, there was such unchanged
love in his whole look and mien  I forgave him all yet not in
words, not outwardly only at my heart's core.
"You know I am a scoundrel, Jane?" ere long he inquired wistfully
wondering, I suppose, at my continued silence and tameness, the
result rather of weakness than of will.
"Yes, sir."
"Then tell me so roundly and sharply  don't spare me."
"I cannot I am tired and sick. I want some water." He heaved
a sort of shuddering sigh, and taking me in his arms, carried me
downstairs. At first I did not know to what room he had borne me
all was cloudy to my glazed sight presently I felt the reviving
warmth of a fire for, summer as it was, I had become icy cold in
my chamber. He put wine to my lips I tasted it and revived then
I ate something he offered me, and was soon myself. I was in the
library  sitting in his chair  he was quite near. "If I could
go out of life now, without too sharp a pang, it would be well
for me," I thought "then I should not have to make the effort of
cracking my heartstrings in rending them from among Mr. Rochester's.
I must leave him, it appears. I do not want to leave him  I
cannot leave him."
"How are you now, Jane?"
"Much better, sir I shall be well soon."
"Taste the wine again, Jane."
I obeyed him then he put the glass on the table, stood before me,
and looked at me attentively. Suddenly he turned away, with an
inarticulate exclamation, full of passionate emotion of some kind
he walked fast through the room and came back he stooped towards
me as if to kiss me but I remembered caresses were now forbidden.
I turned my face away and put his aside.
"What  How is this?" he exclaimed hastily. "Oh, I know you
won't kiss the husband of Bertha Mason? You consider my arms filled
and my embraces appropriated?"
"At any rate, there is neither room nor claim for me, sir."
"Why, Jane? I will spare you the trouble of much talking I will
answer for you  Because I have a wife already, you would reply.
I guess rightly?"
"Yes."
"If you think so, you must have a strange opinion of me you must
regard me as a plotting profligate  a base and low rake who
has been simulating disinterested love in order to draw you into
a snare deliberately laid, and strip you of honour and rob you of
self respect. What do you say to that? I see you can say nothing
in the first place, you are faint still, and have enough to do
to draw your breath in the second place, you cannot yet accustom
yourself to accuse and revile me, and besides, the floodgates of
tears are opened, and they would rush out if you spoke much and
you have no desire to expostulate, to upbraid, to make a scene
you are thinking how TO ACT  TALKING you consider is of no use.
I know you  I am on my guard."
"Sir, I do not wish to act against you," I said and my unsteady
voice warned me to curtail my sentence.
"Not in your sense of the word, but in mine you are scheming to
destroy me. You have as good as said that I am a married man 
as a married man you will shun me, keep out of my way just now
you have refused to kiss me. You intend to make yourself a complete
stranger to me to live under this roof only as Adele's governess
if ever I say a friendly word to you, if ever a friendly feeling
inclines you again to me, you will say,  'That man had nearly
made me his mistress I must be ice and rock to him' and ice and
rock you will accordingly become."
I cleared and steadied my voice to reply "All is changed about me,
sir I must change too  there is no doubt of that and to avoid
fluctuations of feeling, and continual combats with recollections
and associations, there is only one way  Adele must have a new
governess, sir."
"Oh, Adele will go to school  I have settled that already nor do
I mean to torment you with the hideous associations and recollections
of Thornfield Hall  this accursed place  this tent of Achan 
this insolent vault, offering the ghastliness of living death to
the light of the open sky  this narrow stone hell, with its one
real fiend, worse than a legion of such as we imagine. Jane, you
shall not stay here, nor will I. I was wrong ever to bring you to
Thornfield Hall, knowing as I did how it was haunted. I charged
them to conceal from you, before I ever saw you, all knowledge of
the curse of the place merely because I feared Adele never would
have a governess to stay if she knew with what inmate she was housed,
and my plans would not permit me to remove the maniac elsewhere 
though I possess an old house, Ferndean Manor, even more retired
and hidden than this, where I could have lodged her safely enough,
had not a scruple about the unhealthiness of the situation, in the
heart of a wood, made my conscience recoil from the arrangement.
Probably those damp walls would soon have eased me of her charge
but to each villain his own vice and mine is not a tendency to
indirect assassination, even of what I most hate.
"Concealing the madwoman's neighbourhood from you, however, was
something like covering a child with a cloak and laying it down
near a upastree that demon's vicinage is poisoned, and always
was. But I'll shut up Thornfield Hall I'll nail up the front
door and board the lower windows I'll give Mrs. Poole two hundred
a year to live here with MY WIFE, as you term that fearful hag
Grace will do much for money, and she shall have her son, the keeper
at Grimsby Retreat, to bear her company and be at hand to give her
aid in the paroxysms, when MY WIFE is prompted by her familiar to
burn people in their beds at night, to stab them, to bite
their flesh from their bones, and so on  "
"Sir," I interrupted him, "you are inexorable for that unfortunate
lady you speak of her with hate  with vindictive antipathy.
It is cruel  she cannot help being mad."
"Jane, my little darling so I will call you, for so you are, you
don't know what you are talking about you misjudge me again it
is not because she is mad I hate her. If you were mad, do you
think I should hate you?"
"I do indeed, sir."
"Then you are mistaken, and you know nothing about me, and nothing
about the sort of love of which I am capable. Every atom of your
flesh is as dear to me as my own in pain and sickness it would
still be dear. Your mind is my treasure, and if it were broken, it
would be my treasure still if you raved, my arms should confine
you, and not a strait waistcoat  your grasp, even in fury, would
have a charm for me if you flew at me as wildly as that woman
did this morning, I should receive you in an embrace, at least as
fond as it would be restrictive. I should not shrink from you with
disgust as I did from her in your quiet moments you should have
no watcher and no nurse but me and I could hang over you with
untiring tenderness, though you gave me no smile in return and
never weary of gazing into your eyes, though they had no longer
a ray of recognition for me.  But why do I follow that train of
ideas? I was talking of removing you from Thornfield. All, you
know, is prepared for prompt departure tomorrow you shall go. I
only ask you to endure one more night under this roof, Jane and
then, farewell to its miseries and terrors for ever I have a
place to repair to, which will be a secure sanctuary from hateful
reminiscences, from unwelcome intrusion  even from falsehood and
slander."
"And take Adele with you, sir," I interrupted "she will be a
companion for you."
"What do you mean, Jane? I told you I would send Adele to school
and what do I want with a child for a companion, and not my own
child,  a French dancer's bastard? Why do you importune me about
her I say, why do you assign Adele to me for a companion?"
"You spoke of a retirement, sir and retirement and solitude are
dull too dull for you."
"Solitude solitude" he reiterated with irritation. "I see I must
come to an explanation. I don't know what sphynxlike expression
is forming in your countenance. You are to share my solitude. Do
you understand?"
I shook my head it required a degree of courage, excited as he
was becoming, even to risk that mute sign of dissent. He had been
walking fast about the room, and he stopped, as if suddenly rooted
to one spot. He looked at me long and hard I turned my eyes
from him, fixed them on the fire, and tried to assume and maintain
a quiet, collected aspect.
"Now for the hitch in Jane's character," he said at last, speaking
more calmly than from his look I had expected him to speak. "The
reel of silk has run smoothly enough so far but I always knew there
would come a knot and a puzzle here it is. Now for vexation,
and exasperation, and endless trouble By God I long to exert
a fraction of Samson's strength, and break the entanglement like
tow"
He recommenced his walk, but soon again stopped, and this time just
before me.
"Jane will you hear reason?" he stooped and approached his
lips to my ear "because, if you won't, I'll try violence." His
voice was hoarse his look that of a man who is just about to
burst an insufferable bond and plunge headlong into wild license.
I saw that in another moment, and with one impetus of frenzy more,
I should be able to do nothing with him. The present  the passing
second of time  was all I had in which to control and restrain
him  a movement of repulsion, flight, fear would have sealed my
doom,  and his. But I was not afraid not in the least. I felt
an inward power a sense of influence, which supported me. The
crisis was perilous but not without its charm such as the Indian,
perhaps, feels when he slips over the rapid in his canoe. I took
hold of his clenched hand, loosened the contorted fingers,
and said to him, soothingly 
"Sit down I'll talk to you as long as you like, and hear all you
have to say, whether reasonable or unreasonable."
He sat down but he did not get leave to speak directly. I had
been struggling with tears for some time I had taken great pains
to repress them, because I knew he would not like to see me weep.
Now, however, I considered it well to let them flow as freely
and as long as they liked. If the flood annoyed him, so much the
better. So I gave way and cried heartily.
Soon I heard him earnestly entreating me to be composed. I said
I could not while he was in such a passion.
"But I am not angry, Jane I only love you too well and you had
steeled your little pale face with such a resolute, frozen look,
I could not endure it. Hush, now, and wipe your eyes."
His softened voice announced that he was subdued so I, in my
turn, became calm. Now he made an effort to rest his head on my
shoulder, but I would not permit it. Then he would draw me to him
no.
"Jane Jane" he said, in such an accent of bitter sadness it
thrilled along every nerve I had "you don't love me, then? It
was only my station, and the rank of my wife, that you valued? Now
that you think me disqualified to become your husband, you recoil
from my touch as if I were some toad or ape."
These words cut me yet what could I do or I say? I ought probably
to have done or said nothing but I was so tortured by a sense of
remorse at thus hurting his feelings, I could not control the wish
to drop balm where I had wounded.
"I DO love you," I said, "more than ever but I must not show or
indulge the feeling and this is the last time I must express it."
"The last time, Jane What do you think you can live with me,
and see me daily, and yet, if you still love me, be always cold
and distant?"
"No, sir that I am certain I could not and therefore I see there
is but one way but you will be furious if I mention it."
"Oh, mention it If I storm, you have the art of weeping."
"Mr. Rochester, I must leave you."
"For how long, Jane? For a few minutes, while you smooth your
hair  which is somewhat dishevelled and bathe your face  which
looks feverish?"
"I must leave Adele and Thornfield. I must part with you for my
whole life I must begin a new existence among strange faces and
strange scenes."
"Of course I told you you should. I pass over the madness about
parting from me. You mean you must become a part of me. As to
the new existence, it is all right you shall yet be my wife I
am not married. You shall be Mrs. Rochester  both virtually and
nominally. I shall keep only to you so long as you and I live. You
shall go to a place I have in the south of France a whitewashed
villa on the shores of the Mediterranean. There you shall live
a happy, and guarded, and most innocent life. Never fear that I
wish to lure you into error  to make you my mistress. Why did
you shake your head? Jane, you must be reasonable, or in truth I
shall again become frantic."
His voice and hand quivered his large nostrils dilated his eye
blazed still I dared to speak.
"Sir, your wife is living that is a fact acknowledged this morning
by yourself. If I lived with you as you desire, I should then be
your mistress to say otherwise is sophistical  is false."
"Jane, I am not a gentletempered man  you forget that I am
not longenduring I am not cool and dispassionate. Out of pity to
me and yourself, put your finger on my pulse, feel how it throbs,
and  beware"
He bared his wrist, and offered it to me the blood was forsaking
his cheek and lips, they were growing livid I was distressed on all
hands. To agitate him thus deeply, by a resistance he so abhorred,
was cruel to yield was out of the question. I did what human
beings do instinctively when they are driven to utter extremity 
looked for aid to one higher than man the words "God help me"
burst involuntarily from my lips.
"I am a fool" cried Mr. Rochester suddenly. "I keep telling
her I am not married, and do not explain to her why. I forget she
knows nothing of the character of that woman, or of the circumstances
attending my infernal union with her. Oh, I am certain Jane will
agree with me in opinion, when she knows all that I know Just put
your hand in mine, Janet  that I may have the evidence of touch
as well as sight, to prove you are near me  and I will in a few
words show you the real state of the case. Can you listen to me?"
"Yes, sir for hours if you will."
"I ask only minutes. Jane, did you ever hear or know that I was
not the eldest son of my house that I had once a brother older
than I?"
"I remember Mrs. Fairfax told me so once."
"And did you ever hear that my father was an avaricious, grasping
man?"
"I have understood something to that effect."
"Well, Jane, being so, it was his resolution to keep the property
together he could not bear the idea of dividing his estate
and leaving me a fair portion all, he resolved, should go to my
brother, Rowland. Yet as little could he endure that a son of his
should be a poor man. I must be provided for by a wealthy marriage.
He sought me a partner betimes. Mr. Mason, a West India planter and
merchant, was his old acquaintance. He was certain his possessions
were real and vast he made inquiries. Mr. Mason, he found, had a
son and daughter and he learned from him that he could and would
give the latter a fortune of thirty thousand pounds that sufficed.
When I left college, I was sent out to Jamaica, to espouse a bride
already courted for me. My father said nothing about her money
but he told me Miss Mason was the boast of Spanish Town for her
beauty and this was no lie. I found her a fine woman, in the
style of Blanche Ingram tall, dark, and majestic. Her family
wished to secure me because I was of a good race and so did she.
They showed her to me in parties, splendidly dressed. I seldom
saw her alone, and had very little private conversation with her.
She flattered me, and lavishly displayed for my pleasure her charms
and accomplishments. All the men in her circle seemed to admire her
and envy me. I was dazzled, stimulated my senses were excited
and being ignorant, raw, and inexperienced, I thought I loved
her. There is no folly so besotted that the idiotic rivalries of
society, the prurience, the rashness, the blindness of youth, will
not hurry a man to its commission. Her relatives encouraged me
competitors piqued me she allured me a marriage was achieved
almost before I knew where I was. Oh, I have no respect for myself
when I think of that act  an agony of inward contempt masters
me. I never loved, I never esteemed, I did not even know her. I
was not sure of the existence of one virtue in her nature I had
marked neither modesty, nor benevolence, nor candour, nor refinement
in her mind or manners  and, I married her gross, grovelling,
moleeyed blockhead that I was With less sin I might have  But
let me remember to whom I am speaking."
"My bride's mother I had never seen I understood she was dead.
The honeymoon over, I learned my mistake she was only mad, and
shut up in a lunatic asylum. There was a younger brother, too 
a complete dumb idiot. The elder one, whom you have seen and whom
I cannot hate, whilst I abhor all his kindred, because he has some
grains of affection in his feeble mind, shown in the continued
interest he takes in his wretched sister, and also in a doglike
attachment he once bore me, will probably be in the same state
one day. My father and my brother Rowland knew all this but they
thought only of the thirty thousand pounds, and joined in the plot
against me."
"These were vile discoveries but except for the treachery
of concealment, I should have made them no subject of reproach to
my wife, even when I found her nature wholly alien to mine, her
tastes obnoxious to me, her cast of mind common, low, narrow, and
singularly incapable of being led to anything higher, expanded
to anything larger  when I found that I could not pass a single
evening, nor even a single hour of the day with her in comfort
that kindly conversation could not be sustained between us, because
whatever topic I started, immediately received from her a turn at
once coarse and trite, perverse and imbecile  when I perceived
that I should never have a quiet or settled household, because
no servant would bear the continued outbreaks of her violent and
unreasonable temper, or the vexations of her absurd, contradictory,
exacting orders  even then I restrained myself I eschewed
upbraiding, I curtailed remonstrance I tried to devour my repentance
and disgust in secret I repressed the deep antipathy I felt.
"Jane, I will not trouble you with abominable details some strong
words shall express what I have to say. I lived with that woman
upstairs four years, and before that time she had tried me indeed
her character ripened and developed with frightful rapidity her
vices sprang up fast and rank they were so strong, only cruelty
could check them, and I would not use cruelty. What a pigmy
intellect she had, and what giant propensities How fearful were
the curses those propensities entailed on me Bertha Mason, the
true daughter of an infamous mother, dragged me through all the
hideous and degrading agonies which must attend a man bound to a
wife at once intemperate and unchaste.
"My brother in the interval was dead, and at the end of the four
years my father died too. I was rich enough now  yet poor to
hideous indigence a nature the most gross, impure, depraved I ever
saw, was associated with mine, and called by the law and by society
a part of me. And I could not rid myself of it by any legal
proceedings for the doctors now discovered that MY WIFE was mad
her excesses had prematurely developed the germs of insanity.
Jane, you don't like my narrative you look almost sick  shall
I defer the rest to another day?"
"No, sir, finish it now I pity you  I do earnestly pity you."
"Pity, Jane, from some people is a noxious and insulting sort of
tribute, which one is justified in hurling back in the teeth of
those who offer it but that is the sort of pity native to callous,
selfish hearts it is a hybrid, egotistical pain at hearing of
woes, crossed with ignorant contempt for those who have endured
them. But that is not your pity, Jane it is not the feeling of
which your whole face is full at this moment  with which your eyes
are now almost overflowing  with which your heart is heaving 
with which your hand is trembling in mine. Your pity, my darling,
is the suffering mother of love its anguish is the very natal
pang of the divine passion. I accept it, Jane let the daughter
have free advent  my arms wait to receive her."
"Now, sir, proceed what did you do when you found she was mad?"
"Jane, I approached the verge of despair a remnant of selfrespect
was all that intervened between me and the gulf. In the eyes
of the world, I was doubtless covered with grimy dishonour but I
resolved to be clean in my own sight  and to the last I repudiated
the contamination of her crimes, and wrenched myself from connection
with her mental defects. Still, society associated my name and
person with hers I yet saw her and heard her daily something
of her breath faugh mixed with the air I breathed and besides,
I remembered I had once been her husband  that recollection was
then, and is now, inexpressibly odious to me moreover, I knew that
while she lived I could never be the husband of another and better
wife and, though five years my senior her family and her father
had lied to me even in the particular of her age, she was likely
to live as long as I, being as robust in frame as she was infirm
in mind. Thus, at the age of twentysix, I was hopeless.
"One night I had been awakened by her yells  since the medical
men had pronounced her mad, she had, of course, been shut up
it was a fiery West Indian night one of the description that
frequently precede the hurricanes of those climates. Being unable
to sleep in bed, I got up and opened the window. The air was like
sulphursteams  I could find no refreshment anywhere. Mosquitoes
came buzzing in and hummed sullenly round the room the sea, which
I could hear from thence, rumbled dull like an earthquake  black
clouds were casting up over it the moon was setting in the waves,
broad and red, like a hot cannonball  she threw her last bloody
glance over a world quivering with the ferment of tempest. I was
physically influenced by the atmosphere and scene, and my ears were
filled with the curses the maniac still shrieked out wherein she
momentarily mingled my name with such a tone of demonhate, with
such language  no professed harlot ever had a fouler vocabulary
than she though two rooms off, I heard every word  the thin
partitions of the West India house opposing but slight obstruction
to her wolfish cries.
"'This life,' said I at last, 'is hell this is the air  those
are the sounds of the bottomless pit I have a right to deliver
myself from it if I can. The sufferings of this mortal state will
leave me with the heavy flesh that now cumbers my soul. Of the
fanatic's burning eternity I have no fear there is not a future
state worse than this present one  let me break away, and go home
to God'
"I said this whilst I knelt down at, and unlocked a trunk which
contained a brace of loaded pistols I mean to shoot myself. I
only entertained the intention for a moment for, not being insane,
the crisis of exquisite and unalloyed despair, which had originated
the wish and design of selfdestruction, was past in a second.
"A wind fresh from Europe blew over the ocean and rushed through
the open casement the storm broke, streamed, thundered, blazed,
and the air grew pure. I then framed and fixed a resolution.
While I walked under the dripping orangetrees of my wet garden,
and amongst its drenched pomegranates and pineapples, and while
the refulgent dawn of the tropics kindled round me  I reasoned
thus, Jane  and now listen for it was true Wisdom that consoled
me in that hour, and showed me the right path to follow.
"The sweet wind from Europe was still whispering in the refreshed
leaves, and the Atlantic was thundering in glorious liberty my
heart, dried up and scorched for a long time, swelled to the tone,
and filled with living blood  my being longed for renewal  my
soul thirsted for a pure draught. I saw hope revive  and felt
regeneration possible. From a flowery arch at the bottom of my
garden I gazed over the sea  bluer than the sky the old world
was beyond clear prospects opened thus
"'Go,' said Hope, 'and live again in Europe there it is not known
what a sullied name you bear, nor what a filthy burden is bound
to you. You may take the maniac with you to England confine her
with due attendance and precautions at Thornfield then travel
yourself to what clime you will, and form what new tie you like.
That woman, who has so abused your longsuffering, so sullied your
name, so outraged your honour, so blighted your youth, is not your
wife, nor are you her husband. See that she is cared for as her
condition demands, and you have done all that God and humanity
require of you. Let her identity, her connection with yourself,
be buried in oblivion you are bound to impart them to no living
being. Place her in safety and comfort shelter her degradation
with secrecy, and leave her.'
"I acted precisely on this suggestion. My father and brother had
not made my marriage known to their acquaintance because, in the
very first letter I wrote to apprise them of the union  having
already begun to experience extreme disgust of its consequences,
and, from the family character and constitution, seeing a hideous
future opening to me  I added an urgent charge to keep it
secret and very soon the infamous conduct of the wife my father
had selected for me was such as to make him blush to own her as his
daughterinlaw. Far from desiring to publish the connection, he
became as anxious to conceal it as myself.
"To England, then, I conveyed her a fearful voyage I had with
such a monster in the vessel. Glad was I when I at last got her
to Thornfield, and saw her safely lodged in that thirdstorey room,
of whose secret inner cabinet she has now for ten years made a wild
beast's den  a goblin's cell. I had some trouble in finding an
attendant for her, as it was necessary to select one on whose fidelity
dependence could be placed for her ravings would inevitably betray
my secret besides, she had lucid intervals of days  sometimes
weeks  which she filled up with abuse of me. At last I hired
Grace Poole from the Grimbsy Retreat. She and the surgeon, Carter
who dressed Mason's wounds that night he was stabbed and worried,
are the only two I have ever admitted to my confidence. Mrs. Fairfax
may indeed have suspected something, but she could have gained no
precise knowledge as to facts. Grace has, on the whole, proved a
good keeper though, owing partly to a fault of her own, of which
it appears nothing can cure her, and which is incident to her
harassing profession, her vigilance has been more than once lulled
and baffled. The lunatic is both cunning and malignant she has
never failed to take advantage of her guardian's temporary lapses
once to secrete the knife with which she stabbed her brother, and
twice to possess herself of the key of her cell, and issue therefrom
in the nighttime. On the first of these occasions, she perpetrated
the attempt to burn me in my bed on the second, she paid that
ghastly visit to you. I thank Providence, who watched over you,
that she then spent her fury on your wedding apparel, which perhaps
brought back vague reminiscences of her own bridal days but on what
might have happened, I cannot endure to reflect. When I think of
the thing which flew at my throat this morning, hanging its black
and scarlet visage over the nest of my dove, my blood curdles."
"And what, sir," I asked, while he paused, "did you do when you
had settled her here? Where did you go?"
"What did I do, Jane? I transformed myself into a willo'thewisp.
Where did I go? I pursued wanderings as wild as those of the
Marchspirit. I sought the Continent, and went devious through
all its lands. My fixed desire was to seek and find a good and
intelligent woman, whom I could love a contrast to the
fury I left at Thornfield  "
"But you could not marry, sir."
"I had determined and was convinced that I could and ought. It
was not my original intention to deceive, as I have deceived you.
I meant to tell my tale plainly, and make my proposals openly and
it appeared to me so absolutely rational that I should be considered
free to love and be loved, I never doubted some woman might be found
willing and able to understand my case and accept me, in spite of
the curse with which I was burdened."
"Well, sir?"
"When you are inquisitive, Jane, you always make me smile. You
open your eyes like an eager bird, and make every now and then a
restless movement, as if answers in speech did not flow fast enough
for you, and you wanted to read the tablet of one's heart. But
before I go on, tell me what you mean by your 'Well, sir?' It is
a small phrase very frequent with you and which many a time has
drawn me on and on through interminable talk I don't very well
know why."
"I mean,  What next? How did you proceed? What came of such an
event?"
"Precisely and what do you wish to know now?"
"Whether you found any one you liked whether you asked her to
marry you and what she said."
"I can tell you whether I found any one I liked, and whether I
asked her to marry me but what she said is yet to be recorded in
the book of Fate. For ten long years I roved about, living first
in one capital, then another sometimes in St. Petersburg oftener
in Paris occasionally in Rome, Naples, and Florence. Provided
with plenty of money and the passport of an old name, I could choose
my own society no circles were closed against me. I sought my
ideal of a woman amongst English ladies, French countesses, Italian
signoras, and German grafinnen. I could not find her. Sometimes,
for a fleeting moment, I thought I caught a glance, heard a tone,
beheld a form, which announced the realisation of my dream but
I was presently undeserved. You are not to suppose that I desired
perfection, either of mind or person. I longed only for what
suited me  for the antipodes of the Creole and I longed vainly.
Amongst them all I found not one whom, had I been ever so free,
I  warned as I was of the risks, the horrors, the loathings of
incongruous unions  would have asked to marry me. Disappointment
made me reckless. I tried dissipation  never debauchery that
I hated, and hate. That was my Indian Messalina's attribute
rooted disgust at it and her restrained me much, even in pleasure.
Any enjoyment that bordered on riot seemed to approach me to her
and her vices, and I eschewed it.
"Yet I could not live alone so I tried the companionship
of mistresses. The first I chose was Celine Varens  another of
those steps which make a man spurn himself when he recalls them. You
already know what she was, and how my liaison with her terminated.
She had two successors an Italian, Giacinta, and a German, Clara
both considered singularly handsome. What was their beauty to me
in a few weeks? Giacinta was unprincipled and violent I tired
of her in three months. Clara was honest and quiet but heavy,
mindless, and unimpressible not one whit to my taste. I was
glad to give her a sufficient sum to set her up in a good line of
business, and so get decently rid of her. But, Jane, I see by your
face you are not forming a very favourable opinion of me just now.
You think me an unfeeling, looseprincipled rake don't you?"
"I don't like you so well as I have done sometimes, indeed, sir.
Did it not seem to you in the least wrong to live in that way,
first with one mistress and then another? You talk of it as a mere
matter of course."
"It was with me and I did not like it. It was a grovelling
fashion of existence I should never like to return to it. Hiring
a mistress is the next worse thing to buying a slave both are
often by nature, and always by position, inferior and to live
familiarly with inferiors is degrading. I now hate the recollection
of the time I passed with Celine, Giacinta, and Clara."
I felt the truth of these words and I drew from them the certain
inference, that if I were so far to forget myself and all the teaching
that had ever been instilled into me, as  under any pretext 
with any justification  through any temptation  to become the
successor of these poor girls, he would one day regard me with the
same feeling which now in his mind desecrated their memory. I did
not give utterance to this conviction it was enough to feel it.
I impressed it on my heart, that it might remain there to serve me
as aid in the time of trial.
"Now, Jane, why don't you say 'Well, sir?' I have not done. You
are looking grave. You disapprove of me still, I see. But let
me come to the point. Last January, rid of all mistresses  in a
harsh, bitter frame of mind, the result of a useless, roving, lonely
life  corroded with disappointment, sourly disposed against all
men, and especially against all womankind for I began to regard
the notion of an intellectual, faithful, loving woman as a mere
dream, recalled by business, I came back to England.
"On a frosty winter afternoon, I rode in sight of Thornfield Hall.
Abhorred spot I expected no peace  no pleasure there. On a
stile in Hay Lane I saw a quiet little figure sitting by itself.
I passed it as negligently as I did the pollard willow opposite
to it I had no presentiment of what it would be to me no inward
warning that the arbitress of my life  my genius for good or evil
waited there in humble guise. I did not know it, even when, on
the occasion of Mesrour's accident, it came up and gravely offered
me help. Childish and slender creature It seemed as if a linnet
had hopped to my foot and proposed to bear me on its tiny wing. I
was surly but the thing would not go it stood by me with strange
perseverance, and looked and spoke with a sort of authority. I
must be aided, and by that hand and aided I was.
"When once I had pressed the frail shoulder, something new  a
fresh sap and sense  stole into my frame. It was well I had learnt
that this elf must return to me  that it belonged to my house
down below  or I could not have felt it pass away from under my
hand, and seen it vanish behind the dim hedge, without singular
regret. I heard you come home that night, Jane, though probably
you were not aware that I thought of you or watched for you. The
next day I observed you  myself unseen  for halfanhour,
while you played with Adele in the gallery. It was a snowy day,
I recollect, and you could not go out of doors. I was in my room
the door was ajar I could both listen and watch. Adele claimed
your outward attention for a while yet I fancied your thoughts
were elsewhere but you were very patient with her, my little
Jane you talked to her and amused her a long time. When at last
she left you, you lapsed at once into deep reverie you betook
yourself slowly to pace the gallery. Now and then, in passing a
casement, you glanced out at the thickfalling snow you listened
to the sobbing wind, and again you paced gently on and dreamed.
I think those day visions were not dark there was a pleasurable
illumination in your eye occasionally, a soft excitement in your
aspect, which told of no bitter, bilious, hypochondriac brooding
your look revealed rather the sweet musings of youth when its spirit
follows on willing wings the flight of Hope up and on to an ideal
heaven. The voice of Mrs. Fairfax, speaking to a servant in the
hall, wakened you and how curiously you smiled to and at yourself,
Janet There was much sense in your smile it was very shrewd,
and seemed to make light of your own abstraction. It seemed to say
'My fine visions are all very well, but I must not forget they
are absolutely unreal. I have a rosy sky and a green flowery Eden
in my brain but without, I am perfectly aware, lies at my feet
a rough tract to travel, and around me gather black tempests to
encounter.' You ran downstairs and demanded of Mrs. Fairfax some
occupation the weekly house accounts to make up, or something of
that sort, I think it was. I was vexed with you for getting out
of my sight.
"Impatiently I waited for evening, when I might summon you
to my presence. An unusual  to me  a perfectly new character
I suspected was yours I desired to search it deeper and know it
better. You entered the room with a look and air at once shy and
independent you were quaintly dressed  much as you are now.
I made you talk ere long I found you full of strange contrasts.
Your garb and manner were restricted by rule your air was often
diffident, and altogether that of one refined by nature, but
absolutely unused to society, and a good deal afraid of making
herself disadvantageously conspicuous by some solecism or blunder
yet when addressed, you lifted a keen, a daring, and a glowing
eye to your interlocutor's face there was penetration and power
in each glance you gave when plied by close questions, you found
ready and round answers. Very soon you seemed to get used to me
I believe you felt the existence of sympathy between you and your
grim and cross master, Jane for it was astonishing to see how
quickly a certain pleasant ease tranquillised your manner snarl
as I would, you showed no surprise, fear, annoyance, or displeasure
at my moroseness you watched me, and now and then smiled at me
with a simple yet sagacious grace I cannot describe. I was at once
content and stimulated with what I saw I liked what I had seen,
and wished to see more. Yet, for a long time, I treated you
distantly, and sought your company rarely. I was an intellectual
epicure, and wished to prolong the gratification of making this
novel and piquant acquaintance besides, I was for a while troubled
with a haunting fear that if I handled the flower freely its bloom
would fade  the sweet charm of freshness would leave it. I did
not then know that it was no transitory blossom, but rather the
radiant resemblance of one, cut in an indestructible gem. Moreover,
I wished to see whether you would seek me if I shunned you  but
you did not you kept in the schoolroom as still as your own desk
and easel if by chance I met you, you passed me as soon, and with
as little token of recognition, as was consistent with respect.
Your habitual expression in those days, Jane, was a thoughtful
look not despondent, for you were not sickly but not buoyant,
for you had little hope, and no actual pleasure. I wondered what
you thought of me, or if you ever thought of me, and resolved to
find this out.
"I resumed my notice of you. There was something glad in your
glance, and genial in your manner, when you conversed I saw you
had a social heart it was the silent schoolroom  it was the
tedium of your life  that made you mournful. I permitted myself
the delight of being kind to you kindness stirred emotion soon
your face became soft in expression, your tones gentle I liked my
name pronounced by your lips in a grateful happy accent. I used to
enjoy a chance meeting with you, Jane, at this time there was a
curious hesitation in your manner you glanced at me with a slight
trouble  a hovering doubt you did not know what my caprice might
be  whether I was going to play the master and be stern, or the
friend and be benignant. I was now too fond of you often to simulate
the first whim and, when I stretched my hand out cordially, such
bloom and light and bliss rose to your young, wistful features,
I had much ado often to avoid straining you then and there to my
heart."
"Don't talk any more of those days, sir," I interrupted, furtively
dashing away some tears from my eyes his language was torture
to me for I knew what I must do  and do soon  and all these
reminiscences, and these revelations of his feelings only made my
work more difficult.
"No, Jane," he returned "what necessity is there to dwell on
the Past, when the Present is so much surer  the Future so much
brighter?"
I shuddered to hear the infatuated assertion.
"You see now how the case stands  do you not?" he continued.
"After a youth and manhood passed half in unutterable misery and
half in dreary solitude, I have for the first time found what I can
truly love  I have found you. You are my sympathy  my better
self  my good angel. I am bound to you with a strong attachment.
I think you good, gifted, lovely a fervent, a solemn passion
is conceived in my heart it leans to you, draws you to my centre
and spring of life, wraps my existence about you, and, kindling in
pure, powerful flame, fuses you and me in one.
"It was because I felt and knew this, that I resolved to marry
you. To tell me that I had already a wife is empty mockery you
know now that I had but a hideous demon. I was wrong to attempt
to deceive you but I feared a stubbornness that exists in your
character. I feared early instilled prejudice I wanted to have
you safe before hazarding confidences. This was cowardly I should
have appealed to your nobleness and magnanimity at first, as I do
now  opened to you plainly my life of agony  described to you
my hunger and thirst after a higher and worthier existence  shown
to you, not my RESOLUTION that word is weak, but my resistless
BENT to love faithfully and well, where I am faithfully and well
loved in return. Then I should have asked you to accept my pledge
of fidelity and to give me yours. Jane  give it me now."
A pause.
"Why are you silent, Jane?"
I was experiencing an ordeal a hand of fiery iron grasped my
vitals. Terrible moment full of struggle, blackness, burning
Not a human being that ever lived could wish to be loved better
than I was loved and him who thus loved me I absolutely worshipped
and I must renounce love and idol. One drear word comprised my
intolerable duty  "Depart"
"Jane, you understand what I want of you? Just this promise  'I
will be yours, Mr. Rochester.'"
"Mr. Rochester, I will NOT be yours."
Another long silence.
"Jane" recommenced he, with a gentleness that broke me down with
grief, and turned me stonecold with ominous terror  for this
still voice was the pant of a lion rising  "Jane, do you mean to
go one way in the world, and to let me go another?"
"I do."
"Jane" bending towards and embracing me, "do you mean it now?"
"I do."
"And now?" softly kissing my forehead and cheek.
"I do," extricating myself from restraint rapidly and completely.
"Oh, Jane, this is bitter This  this is wicked. It would not
be wicked to love me."
"It would to obey you."
A wild look raised his brows  crossed his features he rose
but he forebore yet. I laid my hand on the back of a chair for
support I shook, I feared  but I resolved.
"One instant, Jane. Give one glance to my horrible life when you
are gone. All happiness will be torn away with you. What then is
left? For a wife I have but the maniac upstairs as well might
you refer me to some corpse in yonder churchyard. What shall I
do, Jane? Where turn for a companion and for some hope?"
"Do as I do trust in God and yourself. Believe in heaven. Hope
to meet again there."
"Then you will not yield?"
"No."
"Then you condemn me to live wretched and to die accursed?" His
voice rose.
"I advise you to live sinless, and I wish you to die tranquil."
"Then you snatch love and innocence from me? You fling me back on
lust for a passion  vice for an occupation?"
"Mr. Rochester, I no more assign this fate to you than I grasp at
it for myself. We were born to strive and endure  you as well
as I do so. You will forget me before I forget you."
"You make me a liar by such language you sully my honour. I
declared I could not change you tell me to my face I shall change
soon. And what a distortion in your judgment, what a perversity
in your ideas, is proved by your conduct Is it better to drive
a fellowcreature to despair than to transgress a mere human law,
no man being injured by the breach? for you have neither relatives
nor acquaintances whom you need fear to offend by living with me?"
This was true and while he spoke my very conscience and reason
turned traitors against me, and charged me with crime in resisting
him. They spoke almost as loud as Feeling and that clamoured
wildly. "Oh, comply" it said. "Think of his misery think of his
danger  look at his state when left alone remember his headlong
nature consider the recklessness following on despair  soothe
him save him love him tell him you love him and will be his.
Who in the world cares for YOU? or who will be injured by what you
do?"
Still indomitable was the reply  "I care for myself. The more
solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more
I will respect myself. I will keep the law given by God sanctioned
by man. I will hold to the principles received by me when I was
sane, and not mad  as I am now. Laws and principles are not for
the times when there is no temptation they are for such moments
as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour
stringent are they inviolate they shall be. If at my individual
convenience I might break them, what would be their worth? They
have a worth  so I have always believed and if I cannot believe
it now, it is because I am insane  quite insane with my veins
running fire, and my heart beating faster than I can count its
throbs. Preconceived opinions, foregone determinations, are all
I have at this hour to stand by there I plant my foot."
I did. Mr. Rochester, reading my countenance, saw I had done so.
His fury was wrought to the highest he must yield to it for a
moment, whatever followed he crossed the floor and seized my arm
and grasped my waist. He seemed to devour me with his flaming
glance physically, I felt, at the moment, powerless as stubble
exposed to the draught and glow of a furnace mentally, I still
possessed my soul, and with it the certainty of ultimate safety.
The soul, fortunately, has an interpreter  often an unconscious,
but still a truthful interpreter  in the eye. My eye rose to
his and while I looked in his fierce face I gave an involuntary
sigh his gripe was painful, and my overtaxed strength almost
exhausted.
"Never," said he, as he ground his teeth, "never was anything at once
so frail and so indomitable. A mere reed she feels in my hand"
And he shook me with the force of his hold. "I could bend her
with my finger and thumb and what good would it do if I bent,
if I uptore, if I crushed her? Consider that eye consider the
resolute, wild, free thing looking out of it, defying me, with
more than courage  with a stern triumph. Whatever I do with its
cage, I cannot get at it  the savage, beautiful creature If
I tear, if I rend the slight prison, my outrage will only let the
captive loose. Conqueror I might be of the house but the inmate
would escape to heaven before I could call myself possessor of its
clay dwellingplace. And it is you, spirit  with will and energy,
and virtue and purity  that I want not alone your brittle frame.
Of yourself you could come with soft flight and nestle against my
heart, if you would seized against your will, you will elude the
grasp like an essence  you will vanish ere I inhale your fragrance.
Oh come, Jane, come"
As he said this, he released me from his clutch, and only looked
at me. The look was far worse to resist than the frantic strain
only an idiot, however, would have succumbed now. I had dared and
baffled his fury I must elude his sorrow I retired to the door.
"You are going, Jane?"
"I am going, sir."
"You are leaving me?"
"Yes."
"You will not come? You will not be my comforter, my rescuer? My
deep love, my wild woe, my frantic prayer, are all nothing to you?"
What unutterable pathos was in his voice How hard it was to
reiterate firmly, "I am going."
"Jane"
"Mr. Rochester"
"Withdraw, then,  I consent but remember, you leave me here in
anguish. Go up to your own room think over all I have said, and,
Jane, cast a glance on my sufferings  think of me."
He turned away he threw himself on his face on the sofa. "Oh,
Jane my hope  my love  my life" broke in anguish from his
lips. Then came a deep, strong sob.
I had already gained the door but, reader, I walked back  walked
back as determinedly as I had retreated. I knelt down by him
I turned his face from the cushion to me I kissed his cheek I
smoothed his hair with my hand.
"God bless you, my dear master" I said. "God keep you from harm
and wrong  direct you, solace you  reward you well for your
past kindness to me."
"Little Jane's love would have been my best reward," he answered
"without it, my heart is broken. But Jane will give me her love
yes  nobly, generously."
Up the blood rushed to his face forth flashed the fire from
his eyes erect he sprang he held his arms out but I evaded the
embrace, and at once quitted the room.
"Farewell" was the cry of my heart as I left him. Despair added,
"Farewell for ever"
That night I never thought to sleep but a slumber fell on me as
soon as I lay down in bed. I was transported in thought to the
scenes of childhood I dreamt I lay in the redroom at Gateshead
that the night was dark, and my mind impressed with strange fears.
The light that long ago had struck me into syncope, recalled in
this vision, seemed glidingly to mount the wall, and tremblingly to
pause in the centre of the obscured ceiling. I lifted up my head
to look the roof resolved to clouds, high and dim the gleam
was such as the moon imparts to vapours she is about to sever. I
watched her come  watched with the strangest anticipation as
though some word of doom were to be written on her disk. She broke
forth as never moon yet burst from cloud a hand first penetrated
the sable folds and waved them away then, not a moon, but a white
human form shone in the azure, inclining a glorious brow earthward.
It gazed and gazed on me. It spoke to my spirit immeasurably
distant was the tone, yet so near, it whispered in my heart 
"My daughter, flee temptation."
"Mother, I will."
So I answered after I had waked from the trancelike dream. It was
yet night, but July nights are short soon after midnight, dawn
comes. "It cannot be too early to commence the task I have to
fulfil," thought I. I rose I was dressed for I had taken off
nothing but my shoes. I knew where to find in my drawers some linen,
a locket, a ring. In seeking these articles, I encountered the
beads of a pearl necklace Mr. Rochester had forced me to accept a
few days ago. I left that it was not mine it was the visionary
bride's who had melted in air. The other articles I made up in a
parcel my purse, containing twenty shillings it was all I had,
I put in my pocket I tied on my straw bonnet, pinned my shawl,
took the parcel and my slippers, which I would not put on yet, and
stole from my room.
"Farewell, kind Mrs. Fairfax" I whispered, as I glided past her
door. "Farewell, my darling Adele" I said, as I glanced towards
the nursery. No thought could be admitted of entering to embrace
her. I had to deceive a fine ear for aught I knew it might now
be listening.
I would have got past Mr. Rochester's chamber without a pause but
my heart momentarily stopping its beat at that threshold, my foot
was forced to stop also. No sleep was there the inmate was
walking restlessly from wall to wall and again and again he sighed
while I listened. There was a heaven  a temporary heaven 
in this room for me, if I chose I had but to go in and to say 
"Mr. Rochester, I will love you and live with you through life till
death," and a fount of rapture would spring to my lips. I thought
of this.
That kind master, who could not sleep now, was waiting with
impatience for day. He would send for me in the morning I should
be gone. He would have me sought for vainly. He would feel
himself forsaken his love rejected he would suffer perhaps
grow desperate. I thought of this too. My hand moved towards the
lock I caught it back, and glided on.
Drearily I wound my way downstairs I knew what I had to do, and
I did it mechanically. I sought the key of the sidedoor in the
kitchen I sought, too, a phial of oil and a feather I oiled the
key and the lock. I got some water, I got some bread for perhaps
I should have to walk far and my strength, sorely shaken of late,
must not break down. All this I did without one sound. I opened
the door, passed out, shut it softly. Dim dawn glimmered in the
yard. The great gates were closed and locked but a wicket in
one of them was only latched. Through that I departed it, too,
I shut and now I was out of Thornfield.
A mile off, beyond the fields, lay a road which stretched in the
contrary direction to Millcote a road I had never travelled, but
often noticed, and wondered where it led thither I bent my steps.
No reflection was to be allowed now not one glance was to be
cast back not even one forward. Not one thought was to be given
either to the past or the future. The first was a page so heavenly
sweet  so deadly sad  that to read one line of it would dissolve
my courage and break down my energy. The last was an awful blank
something like the world when the deluge was gone by.
I skirted fields, and hedges, and lanes till after sunrise. I
believe it was a lovely summer morning I know my shoes, which I
had put on when I left the house, were soon wet with dew. But I
looked neither to rising sun, nor smiling sky, nor wakening nature.
He who is taken out to pass through a fair scene to the scaffold,
thinks not of the flowers that smile on his road, but of the block
and axeedge of the disseverment of bone and vein of the grave
gaping at the end and I thought of drear flight and homeless
wandering  and oh with agony I thought of what I left. I could
not help it. I thought of him now  in his room  watching the
sunrise hoping I should soon come to say I would stay with him
and be his. I longed to be his I panted to return it was not
too late I could yet spare him the bitter pang of bereavement. As
yet my flight, I was sure, was undiscovered. I could go back and
be his comforter  his pride his redeemer from misery, perhaps
from ruin. Oh, that fear of his selfabandonment  far worse than
my abandonment  how it goaded me It was a barbed arrowhead
in my breast it tore me when I tried to extract it it sickened
me when remembrance thrust it farther in. Birds began singing in
brake and copse birds were faithful to their mates birds were
emblems of love. What was I? In the midst of my pain of heart and
frantic effort of principle, I abhorred myself. I had no solace
from self approbation none even from selfrespect. I had injured
wounded  left my master. I was hateful in my own eyes. Still
I could not turn, nor retrace one step. God must have led me on.
As to my own will or conscience, impassioned grief had trampled one
and stifled the other. I was weeping wildly as I walked along my
solitary way fast, fast I went like one delirious. A weakness,
beginning inwardly, extending to the limbs, seized me, and I fell
I lay on the ground some minutes, pressing my face to the wet turf.
I had some fear  or hope  that here I should die but I was
soon up crawling forwards on my hands and knees, and then again
raised to my feet  as eager and as determined as ever to reach
the road.
When I got there, I was forced to sit to rest me under the hedge
and while I sat, I heard wheels, and saw a coach come on. I stood
up and lifted my hand it stopped. I asked where it was going
the driver named a place a long way off, and where I was sure Mr.
Rochester had no connections. I asked for what sum he would take
me there he said thirty shillings I answered I had but twenty
well, he would try to make it do. He further gave me leave to get
into the inside, as the vehicle was empty I entered, was shut
in, and it rolled on its way.
Gentle reader, may you never feel what I then felt May your eyes
never shed such stormy, scalding, heartwrung tears as poured from
mine. May you never appeal to Heaven in prayers so hopeless and
so agonised as in that hour left my lips for never may you, like
me, dread to be the instrument of evil to what you wholly love.
CHAPTER XXVIII
Two days are passed. It is a summer evening the coachman has set
me down at a place called Whitcross he could take me no farther
for the sum I had given, and I was not possessed of another shilling
in the world. The coach is a mile off by this time I am alone.
At this moment I discover that I forgot to take my parcel out of
the pocket of the coach, where I had placed it for safety there
it remains, there it must remain and now, I am absolutely destitute.
Whitcross is no town, nor even a hamlet it is but a stone pillar
set up where four roads meet whitewashed, I suppose, to be more
obvious at a distance and in darkness. Four arms spring from its
summit the nearest town to which these point is, according to the
inscription, distant ten miles the farthest, above twenty. From
the wellknown names of these towns I learn in what county I have
lighted a northmidland shire, dusk with moorland, ridged with
mountain this I see. There are great moors behind and on each
hand of me there are waves of mountains far beyond that deep
valley at my feet. The population here must be thin, and I see
no passengers on these roads they stretch out east, west, north,
and south  white, broad, lonely they are all cut in the moor,
and the heather grows deep and wild to their very verge. Yet a
chance traveller might pass by and I wish no eye to see me now
strangers would wonder what I am doing, lingering here at the
signpost, evidently objectless and lost. I might be questioned
I could give no answer but what would sound incredible and excite
suspicion. Not a tie holds me to human society at this moment 
not a charm or hope calls me where my fellowcreatures are  none
that saw me would have a kind thought or a good wish for me. I
have no relative but the universal mother, Nature I will seek
her breast and ask repose.
I struck straight into the heath I held on to a hollow I saw
deeply furrowing the brown moorside I waded kneedeep in its dark
growth I turned with its turnings, and finding a mossblackened
granite crag in a hidden angle, I sat down under it. High banks of
moor were about me the crag protected my head the sky was over
that.
Some time passed before I felt tranquil even here I had a vague
dread that wild cattle might be near, or that some sportsman or
poacher might discover me. If a gust of wind swept the waste, I
looked up, fearing it was the rush of a bull if a plover whistled,
I imagined it a man. Finding my apprehensions unfounded, however,
and calmed by the deep silence that reigned as evening declined
at nightfall, I took confidence. As yet I had not thought I had
only listened, watched, dreaded now I regained the faculty of
reflection.
What was I to do? Where to go? Oh, intolerable questions, when
I could do nothing and go nowhere  when a long way must yet be
measured by my weary, trembling limbs before I could reach human
habitation  when cold charity must be entreated before I could get
a lodging reluctant sympathy importuned, almost certain repulse
incurred, before my tale could be listened to, or one of my wants
relieved
I touched the heath, it was dry, and yet warm with the beat of the
summer day. I looked at the sky it was pure a kindly star twinkled
just above the chasm ridge. The dew fell, but with propitious
softness no breeze whispered. Nature seemed to me benign and
good I thought she loved me, outcast as I was and I, who from
man could anticipate only mistrust, rejection, insult, clung to her
with filial fondness. Tonight, at least, I would be her guest,
as I was her child my mother would lodge me without money and
without price. I had one morsel of bread yet the remnant of a
roll I had bought in a town we passed through at noon with a stray
penny  my last coin. I saw ripe bilberries gleaming here and
there, like jet beads in the heath I gathered a handful and ate
them with the bread. My hunger, sharp before, was, if not satisfied,
appeased by this hermit's meal. I said my evening prayers at its
conclusion, and then chose my couch.
Beside the crag the heath was very deep when I lay down my feet
were buried in it rising high on each side, it left only a narrow
space for the nightair to invade. I folded my shawl double, and
spread it over me for a coverlet a low, mossy swell was my pillow.
Thus lodged, I was not, at least  at the commencement of the
night, cold.
My rest might have been blissful enough, only a sad heart broke it.
It plained of its gaping wounds, its inward bleeding, its riven
chords. It trembled for Mr. Rochester and his doom it bemoaned
him with bitter pity it demanded him with ceaseless longing and,
impotent as a bird with both wings broken, it still quivered its
shattered pinions in vain attempts to seek him.
Worn out with this torture of thought, I rose to my knees. Night
was come, and her planets were risen a safe, still night too
serene for the companionship of fear. We know that God is everywhere
but certainly we feel His presence most when His works are on the
grandest scale spread before us and it is in the unclouded nightsky,
where His worlds wheel their silent course, that we read clearest
His infinitude, His omnipotence, His omnipresence. I had risen to
my knees to pray for Mr. Rochester. Looking up, I, with teardimmed
eyes, saw the mighty Milkyway. Remembering what it was  what
countless systems there swept space like a soft trace of light 
I felt the might and strength of God. Sure was I of His efficiency
to save what He had made convinced I grew that neither earth should
perish, nor one of the souls it treasured. I turned my prayer to
thanksgiving the Source of Life was also the Saviour of spirits.
Mr. Rochester was safe he was God's, and by God would he be
guarded. I again nestled to the breast of the hill and ere long
in sleep forgot sorrow.
But next day, Want came to me pale and bare. Long after the little
birds had left their nests long after bees had come in the sweet
prime of day to gather the heath honey before the dew was dried 
when the long morning shadows were curtailed, and the sun filled
earth and sky  I got up, and I looked round me.
What a still, hot, perfect day What a golden desert this spreading
moor Everywhere sunshine. I wished I could live in it and on
it. I saw a lizard run over the crag I saw a bee busy among the
sweet bilberries. I would fain at the moment have become bee or
lizard, that I might have found fitting nutriment, permanent shelter
here. But I was a human being, and had a human being's wants I
must not linger where there was nothing to supply them. I rose I
looked back at the bed I had left. Hopeless of the future, I wished
but this  that my Maker had that night thought good to require
my soul of me while I slept and that this weary frame, absolved
by death from further conflict with fate, had now but to decay
quietly, and mingle in peace with the soil of this wilderness. Life,
however, was yet in my possession, with all its requirements, and
pains, and responsibilities. The burden must be carried the want
provided for the suffering endured the responsibility fulfilled.
I set out.
Whitcross regained, I followed a road which led from the sun, now
fervent and high. By no other circumstance had I will to decide
my choice. I walked a long time, and when I thought I had nearly
done enough, and might conscientiously yield to the fatigue that
almost overpowered me  might relax this forced action, and, sitting
down on a stone I saw near, submit resistlessly to the apathy that
clogged heart and limb  I heard a bell chime  a church bell.
I turned in the direction of the sound, and there, amongst the
romantic hills, whose changes and aspect I had ceased to note an
hour ago, I saw a hamlet and a spire. All the valley at my right
hand was full of pasturefields, and cornfields, and wood and a
glittering stream ran zigzag through the varied shades of green,
the mellowing grain, the sombre woodland, the clear and sunny lea.
Recalled by the rumbling of wheels to the road before me, I saw
a heavilyladen waggon labouring up the hill, and not far beyond
were two cows and their drover. Human life and human labour were
near. I must struggle on strive to live and bend to toil like
the rest.
About two o'clock p.m. I entered the village. At the bottom of
its one street there was a little shop with some cakes of bread
in the window. I coveted a cake of bread. With that refreshment
I could perhaps regain a degree of energy without it, it would
be difficult to proceed. The wish to have some strength and some
vigour returned to me as soon as I was amongst my fellowbeings.
I felt it would be degrading to faint with hunger on the causeway
of a hamlet. Had I nothing about me I could offer in exchange for
one of these rolls? I considered. I had a small silk handkerchief
tied round my throat I had my gloves. I could hardly tell how
men and women in extremities of destitution proceeded. I did not
know whether either of these articles would be accepted probably
they would not but I must try.
I entered the shop a woman was there. Seeing a respectablydressed
person, a lady as she supposed, she came forward with civility.
How could she serve me? I was seized with shame my tongue would
not utter the request I had prepared. I dared not offer her the
halfworn gloves, the creased handkerchief besides, I felt it
would be absurd. I only begged permission to sit down a moment,
as I was tired. Disappointed in the expectation of a customer, she
coolly acceded to my request. She pointed to a seat I sank into
it. I felt sorely urged to weep but conscious how unseasonable
such a manifestation would be, I restrained it. Soon I asked her
"if there were any dressmaker or plainworkwoman in the village?"
"Yes two or three. Quite as many as there was employment for."
I reflected. I was driven to the point now. I was brought face
to face with Necessity. I stood in the position of one without a
resource, without a friend, without a coin. I must do something.
What? I must apply somewhere. Where?
"Did she know of any place in the neighbourhood where a servant
was wanted?"
"Nay she couldn't say."
"What was the chief trade in this place? What did most of the
people do?"
"Some were farm labourers a good deal worked at Mr. Oliver's
needlefactory, and at the foundry."
"Did Mr. Oliver employ women?"
"Nay it was men's work."
"And what do the women do?"
"I knawn't," was the answer. "Some does one thing, and some another.
Poor folk mun get on as they can."
She seemed to be tired of my questions and, indeed, what claim
had I to importune her? A neighbour or two came in my chair was
evidently wanted. I took leave.
I passed up the street, looking as I went at all the houses to the
right hand and to the left but I could discover no pretext, nor
see an inducement to enter any. I rambled round the hamlet, going
sometimes to a little distance and returning again, for an hour or
more. Much exhausted, and suffering greatly now for want of food,
I turned aside into a lane and sat down under the hedge. Ere many
minutes had elapsed, I was again on my feet, however, and again
searching something  a resource, or at least an informant. A
pretty little house stood at the top of the lane, with a garden
before it, exquisitely neat and brilliantly blooming. I stopped
at it. What business had I to approach the white door or touch the
glittering knocker? In what way could it possibly be the interest
of the inhabitants of that dwelling to serve me? Yet I drew near
and knocked. A mildlooking, cleanlyattired young woman opened
the door. In such a voice as might be expected from a hopeless
heart and fainting frame  a voice wretchedly low and faltering
I asked if a servant was wanted here?
"No," said she "we do not keep a servant."
"Can you tell me where I could get employment of any kind?" I
continued. "I am a stranger, without acquaintance in this place.
I want some work no matter what."
But it was not her business to think for me, or to seek a place
for me besides, in her eyes, how doubtful must have appeared my
character, position, tale. She shook her head, she "was sorry she
could give me no information," and the white door closed, quite
gently and civilly but it shut me out. If she had held it open
a little longer, I believe I should have begged a piece of bread
for I was now brought low.
I could not bear to return to the sordid village, where, besides,
no prospect of aid was visible. I should have longed rather to
deviate to a wood I saw not far off, which appeared in its thick
shade to offer inviting shelter but I was so sick, so weak, so
gnawed with nature's cravings, instinct kept me roaming round abodes
where there was a chance of food. Solitude would be no solitude
rest no rest  while the vulture, hunger, thus sank beak and
talons in my side.
I drew near houses I left them, and came back again, and again I
wandered away always repelled by the consciousness of having no
claim to ask  no right to expect interest in my isolated lot.
Meantime, the afternoon advanced, while I thus wandered about like
a lost and starving dog. In crossing a field, I saw the church
spire before me I hastened towards it. Near the churchyard, and
in the middle of a garden, stood a wellbuilt though small house,
which I had no doubt was the parsonage. I remembered that strangers
who arrive at a place where they have no friends, and who want
employment, sometimes apply to the clergyman for introduction
and aid. It is the clergyman's function to help  at least with
advice  those who wished to help themselves. I seemed to have
something like a right to seek counsel here. Renewing then my
courage, and gathering my feeble remains of strength, I pushed on.
I reached the house, and knocked at the kitchendoor. An old woman
opened I asked was this the parsonage?
"Yes."
"Was the clergyman in?"
"No."
"Would he be in soon?"
"No, he was gone from home."
"To a distance?"
"Not so far  happen three mile. He had been called away by the
sudden death of his father he was at Marsh End now, and would
very likely stay there a fortnight longer."
"Was there any lady of the house?"
"Nay, there was naught but her, and she was housekeeper" and of
her, reader, I could not bear to ask the relief for want of which
I was sinking I could not yet beg and again I crawled away.
Once more I took off my handkerchief  once more I thought of the
cakes of bread in the little shop. Oh, for but a crust for but
one mouthful to allay the pang of famine Instinctively I turned
my face again to the village I found the shop again, and I went
in and though others were there besides the woman I ventured the
request  "Would she give me a roll for this handkerchief?"
She looked at me with evident suspicion "Nay, she never sold
stuff i' that way."
Almost desperate, I asked for half a cake she again refused. "How
could she tell where I had got the handkerchief?" she said.
"Would she take my gloves?"
"No what could she do with them?"
Reader, it is not pleasant to dwell on these details. Some say
there is enjoyment in looking back to painful experience past
but at this day I can scarcely bear to review the times to which I
allude the moral degradation, blent with the physical suffering,
form too distressing a recollection ever to be willingly dwelt on.
I blamed none of those who repulsed me. I felt it was what was to
be expected, and what could not be helped an ordinary beggar is
frequently an object of suspicion a welldressed beggar inevitably
so. To be sure, what I begged was employment but whose business
was it to provide me with employment? Not, certainly, that of
persons who saw me then for the first time, and who knew nothing
about my character. And as to the woman who would not take my
handkerchief in exchange for her bread, why, she was right, if the
offer appeared to her sinister or the exchange unprofitable. Let
me condense now. I am sick of the subject.
A little before dark I passed a farmhouse, at the open door
of which the farmer was sitting, eating his supper of bread
and cheese. I stopped and said 
"Will you give me a piece of bread? for I am very hungry." He cast
on me a glance of surprise but without answering, he cut a thick
slice from his loaf, and gave it to me. I imagine he did not think
I was a beggar, but only an eccentric sort of lady, who had taken
a fancy to his brown loaf. As soon as I was out of sight of his
house, I sat down and ate it.
I could not hope to get a lodging under a roof, and sought it in
the wood I have before alluded to. But my night was wretched, my
rest broken the ground was damp, the air cold besides, intruders
passed near me more than once, and I had again and again to change
my quarters no sense of safety or tranquillity befriended me.
Towards morning it rained the whole of the following day was
wet. Do not ask me, reader, to give a minute account of that day
as before, I sought work as before, I was repulsed as before, I
starved but once did food pass my lips. At the door of a cottage
I saw a little girl about to throw a mess of cold porridge into a
pig trough. "Will you give me that?" I asked.
She stared at me. "Mother" she exclaimed, "there is a woman
wants me to give her these porridge."
"Well lass," replied a voice within, "give it her if she's a beggar.
T' pig doesn't want it."
The girl emptied the stiffened mould into my hand, and I devoured
it ravenously.
As the wet twilight deepened, I stopped in a solitary bridlepath,
which I had been pursuing an hour or more.
"My strength is quite failing me," I said in a soliloquy. "I feel
I cannot go much farther. Shall I be an outcast again this night?
While the rain descends so, must I lay my head on the cold, drenched
ground? I fear I cannot do otherwise for who will receive me? But
it will be very dreadful, with this feeling of hunger, faintness,
chill, and this sense of desolation  this total prostration of
hope. In all likelihood, though, I should die before morning. And
why cannot I reconcile myself to the prospect of death? Why do I
struggle to retain a valueless life? Because I know, or believe,
Mr. Rochester is living and then, to die of want and cold is
a fate to which nature cannot submit passively. Oh, Providence
sustain me a little longer Aid  direct me"
My glazed eye wandered over the dim and misty landscape. I saw
I had strayed far from the village it was quite out of sight.
The very cultivation surrounding it had disappeared. I had, by
crossways and bypaths, once more drawn near the tract of moorland
and now, only a few fields, almost as wild and unproductive as the
heath from which they were scarcely reclaimed, lay between me and
the dusky hill.
"Well, I would rather die yonder than in a street or on a frequented
road," I reflected. "And far better that crows and ravens  if
any ravens there be in these regions  should pick my flesh from
my bones, than that they should be prisoned in a workhouse coffin
and moulder in a pauper's grave."
To the hill, then, I turned. I reached it. It remained now only
to find a hollow where I could lie down, and feel at least hidden,
if not secure. But all the surface of the waste looked level.
It showed no variation but of tint green, where rush and moss
overgrew the marshes black, where the dry soil bore only heath.
Dark as it was getting, I could still see these changes, though
but as mere alternations of light and shade for colour had faded
with the daylight.
My eye still roved over the sullen swell and along the mooredge,
vanishing amidst the wildest scenery, when at one dim point, far
in among the marshes and the ridges, a light sprang up. "That is
an ignis fatuus," was my first thought and I expected it would
soon vanish. It burnt on, however, quite steadily, neither receding
nor advancing. "Is it, then, a bonfire just kindled?" I questioned.
I watched to see whether it would spread but no as it did not
diminish, so it did not enlarge. "It may be a candle in a house,"
I then conjectured "but if so, I can never reach it. It is much
too far away and were it within a yard of me, what would it avail?
I should but knock at the door to have it shut in my face."
And I sank down where I stood, and hid my face against the ground.
I lay still a while the nightwind swept over the hill and over
me, and died moaning in the distance the rain fell fast, wetting
me afresh to the skin. Could I but have stiffened to the still
frost  the friendly numbness of death  it might have pelted
on I should not have felt it but my yet living flesh shuddered
at its chilling influence. I rose ere long.
The light was yet there, shining dim but constant through the rain.
I tried to walk again I dragged my exhausted limbs slowly towards
it. It led me aslant over the hill, through a wide bog, which
would have been impassable in winter, and was splashy and shaking
even now, in the height of summer. Here I fell twice but as often
I rose and rallied my faculties. This light was my forlorn hope
I must gain it.
Having crossed the marsh, I saw a trace of white over the moor.
I approached it it was a road or a track it led straight up to
the light, which now beamed from a sort of knoll, amidst a clump
of trees  firs, apparently, from what I could distinguish of the
character of their forms and foliage through the gloom. My star
vanished as I drew near some obstacle had intervened between
me and it. I put out my hand to feel the dark mass before me I
discriminated the rough stones of a low wall  above it, something
like palisades, and within, a high and prickly hedge. I groped
on. Again a whitish object gleamed before me it was a gate 
a wicket it moved on its hinges as I touched it. On each side
stood a sable bushholly or yew.
Entering the gate and passing the shrubs, the silhouette of a house
rose to view, black, low, and rather long but the guiding light
shone nowhere. All was obscurity. Were the inmates retired to
rest? I feared it must be so. In seeking the door, I turned an
angle there shot out the friendly gleam again, from the lozenged
panes of a very small latticed window, within a foot of the ground,
made still smaller by the growth of ivy or some other creeping
plant, whose leaves clustered thick over the portion of the house
wall in which it was set. The aperture was so screened and narrow,
that curtain or shutter had been deemed unnecessary and when I
stooped down and put aside the spray of foliage shooting over it,
I could see all within. I could see clearly a room with a sanded
floor, clean scoured a dresser of walnut, with pewter plates
ranged in rows, reflecting the redness and radiance of a glowing
peatfire. I could see a clock, a white deal table, some chairs.
The candle, whose ray had been my beacon, burnt on the table and
by its light an elderly woman, somewhat roughlooking, but scrupulously
clean, like all about her, was knitting a stocking.
I noticed these objects cursorily only  in them there was nothing
extraordinary. A group of more interest appeared near the hearth,
sitting still amidst the rosy peace and warmth suffusing it. Two
young, graceful women  ladies in every point  sat, one in a low
rockingchair, the other on a lower stool both wore deep mourning
of crape and bombazeen, which sombre garb singularly set off very
fair necks and faces a large old pointer dog rested its massive
head on the knee of one girl  in the lap of the other was cushioned
a black cat.
A strange place was this humble kitchen for such occupants Who
were they? They could not be the daughters of the elderly person
at the table for she looked like a rustic, and they were all
delicacy and cultivation. I had nowhere seen such faces as theirs
and yet, as I gazed on them, I seemed intimate with every lineament.
I cannot call them handsome  they were too pale and grave for
the word as they each bent over a book, they looked thoughtful
almost to severity. A stand between them supported a second candle
and two great volumes, to which they frequently referred, comparing
them, seemingly, with the smaller books they held in their hands,
like people consulting a dictionary to aid them in the task of
translation. This scene was as silent as if all the figures had
been shadows and the firelit apartment a picture so hushed was
it, I could hear the cinders fall from the grate, the clock tick
in its obscure corner and I even fancied I could distinguish the
clickclick of the woman's knittingneedles. When, therefore, a
voice broke the strange stillness at last, it was audible enough
to me.
"Listen, Diana," said one of the absorbed students "Franz and
old Daniel are together in the nighttime, and Franz is telling a
dream from which he has awakened in terror  listen" And in a
low voice she read something, of which not one word was intelligible
to me for it was in an unknown tongue  neither French nor Latin.
Whether it were Greek or German I could not tell.
"That is strong," she said, when she had finished "I relish it."
The other girl, who had lifted her head to listen to her sister,
repeated, while she gazed at the fire, a line of what had been
read. At a later day, I knew the language and the book therefore,
I will here quote the line though, when I first heard it, it was
only like a stroke on sounding brass to me  conveying no meaning
"'Da trat hervor Einer, anzusehen wie die Sternen Nacht.' Good
good" she exclaimed, while her dark and deep eye sparkled. "There
you have a dim and mighty archangel fitly set before you The
line is worth a hundred pages of fustian. 'Ich wage die Gedanken
in der Schale meines Zornes und die Werke mit dem Gewichte meines
Grimms.' I like it"
Both were again silent.
"Is there ony country where they talk i' that way?" asked the old
woman, looking up from her knitting.
"Yes, Hannah  a far larger country than England, where they talk
in no other way."
"Well, for sure case, I knawn't how they can understand t' one
t'other and if either o' ye went there, ye could tell what they
said, I guess?"
"We could probably tell something of what they said, but not all 
for we are not as clever as you think us, Hannah. We don't speak
German, and we cannot read it without a dictionary to help us."
"And what good does it do you?"
"We mean to teach it some time  or at least the elements, as they
say and then we shall get more money than we do now."
"Varry like but give ower studying ye've done enough for tonight."
"I think we have at least I'm tired. Mary, are you?"
"Mortally after all, it's tough work fagging away at a language
with no master but a lexicon."
"It is, especially such a language as this crabbed but glorious
Deutsch. I wonder when St. John will come home."
"Surely he will not be long now it is just ten looking at a
little gold watch she drew from her girdle. It rains fast, Hannah
will you have the goodness to look at the fire in the parlour?"
The woman rose she opened a door, through which I dimly saw
a passage soon I heard her stir a fire in an inner room she
presently came back.
"Ah, childer" said she, "it fair troubles me to go into yond'
room now it looks so lonesome wi' the chair empty and set back
in a corner."
She wiped her eyes with her apron the two girls, grave before,
looked sad now.
"But he is in a better place," continued Hannah "we shouldn't
wish him here again. And then, nobody need to have a quieter death
nor he had."
"You say he never mentioned us?" inquired one of the ladies.
"He hadn't time, bairn he was gone in a minute, was your father.
He had been a bit ailing like the day before, but naught to signify
and when Mr. St. John asked if he would like either o' ye to be
sent for, he fair laughed at him. He began again with a bit of a
heaviness in his head the next day  that is, a fortnight sin' 
and he went to sleep and niver wakened he wor a'most stark when
your brother went into t' chamber and fand him. Ah, childer
that's t' last o' t' old stock  for ye and Mr. St. John is like
of different soart to them 'at's gone for all your mother wor mich
i' your way, and a'most as booklearned. She wor the pictur' o'
ye, Mary Diana is more like your father."
I thought them so similar I could not tell where the old servant
for such I now concluded her to be saw the difference. Both were
fair complexioned and slenderly made both possessed faces full of
distinction and intelligence. One, to be sure, had hair a shade
darker than the other, and there was a difference in their style
of wearing it Mary's pale brown locks were parted and braided
smooth Diana's duskier tresses covered her neck with thick curls.
The clock struck ten.
"Ye'll want your supper, I am sure," observed Hannah "and so will
Mr. St. John when he comes in."
And she proceeded to prepare the meal. The ladies rose they
seemed about to withdraw to the parlour. Till this moment, I had
been so intent on watching them, their appearance and conversation
had excited in me so keen an interest, I had halfforgotten my own
wretched position now it recurred to me. More desolate, more
desperate than ever, it seemed from contrast. And how impossible
did it appear to touch the inmates of this house with concern on
my behalf to make them believe in the truth of my wants and woes
to induce them to vouchsafe a rest for my wanderings As I
groped out the door, and knocked at it hesitatingly, I felt that
last idea to be a mere chimera. Hannah opened.
"What do you want?" she inquired, in a voice of surprise, as she
surveyed me by the light of the candle she held.
"May I speak to your mistresses?" I said.
"You had better tell me what you have to say to them. Where do
you come from?"
"I am a stranger."
"What is your business here at this hour?"
"I want a night's shelter in an outhouse or anywhere, and a morsel
of bread to eat."
Distrust, the very feeling I dreaded, appeared in Hannah's face.
"I'll give you a piece of bread," she said, after a pause "but we
can't take in a vagrant to lodge. It isn't likely."
"Do let me speak to your mistresses."
"No, not I. What can they do for you? You should not be roving
about now it looks very ill."
"But where shall I go if you drive me away? What shall I do?"
"Oh, I'll warrant you know where to go and what to do. Mind
you don't do wrong, that's all. Here is a penny now go  "
"A penny cannot feed me, and I have no strength to go farther.
Don't shut the door oh, don't, for God's sake"
"I must the rain is driving in  "
"Tell the young ladies. Let me see them "
"Indeed, I will not. You are not what you ought to be, or you
wouldn't make such a noise. Move off."
"But I must die if I am turned away."
"Not you. I'm fear'd you have some ill plans agate, that bring you
about folk's houses at this time o' night. If you've any followers
housebreakers or such like  anywhere near, you may tell them
we are not by ourselves in the house we have a gentleman, and
dogs, and guns." Here the honest but inflexible servant clapped
the door to and bolted it within.
This was the climax. A pang of exquisite suffering  a throe
of true despair  rent and heaved my heart. Worn out, indeed, I
was not another step could I stir. I sank on the wet doorstep I
groaned  I wrung my hands  I wept in utter anguish. Oh, this
spectre of death Oh, this last hour, approaching in such horror
Alas, this isolation  this banishment from my kind Not only the
anchor of hope, but the footing of fortitude was gone  at least
for a moment but the last I soon endeavoured to regain.
"I can but die," I said, "and I believe in God. Let me try to wait
His will in silence."
These words I not only thought, but uttered and thrusting back all
my misery into my heart, I made an effort to compel it to remain
there  dumb and still.
"All men must die," said a voice quite close at hand "but all
are not condemned to meet a lingering and premature doom, such as
yours would be if you perished here of want."
"Who or what speaks?" I asked, terrified at the unexpected sound,
and incapable now of deriving from any occurrence a hope of aid. A
form was near  what form, the pitchdark night and my enfeebled
vision prevented me from distinguishing. With a loud long knock,
the newcomer appealed to the door.
"Is it you, Mr. St. John?" cried Hannah.
"Yes  yes open quickly."
"Well, how wet and cold you must be, such a wild night as it is
Come in  your sisters are quite uneasy about you, and I believe
there are bad folks about. There has been a beggarwoman 
I declare she is not gone yet  laid down there. Get up for
shame Move off, I say"
"Hush, Hannah I have a word to say to the woman. You have done
your duty in excluding, now let me do mine in admitting her. I was
near, and listened to both you and her. I think this is a peculiar
case  I must at least examine into it. Young woman, rise, and
pass before me into the house."
With difficulty I obeyed him. Presently I stood within that
clean, bright kitchen  on the very hearth  trembling, sickening
conscious of an aspect in the last degree ghastly, wild, and
weatherbeaten. The two ladies, their brother, Mr. St. John, the
old servant, were all gazing at me.
"St. John, who is it?" I heard one ask.
"I cannot tell I found her at the door," was the reply.
"She does look white," said Hannah.
"As white as clay or death," was responded. "She will fall let
her sit."
And indeed my head swam I dropped, but a chair received me. I
still possessed my senses, though just now I could not speak.
"Perhaps a little water would restore her. Hannah, fetch some.
But she is worn to nothing. How very thin, and how very bloodless"
"A mere spectre"
"Is she ill, or only famished?"
"Famished, I think. Hannah, is that milk? Give it me, and a piece
of bread."
Diana I knew her by the long curls which I saw drooping between
me and the fire as she bent over me broke some bread, dipped it
in milk, and put it to my lips. Her face was near mine I saw
there was pity in it, and I felt sympathy in her hurried breathing.
In her simple words, too, the same balmlike emotion spoke "Try
to eat."
"Yes  try," repeated Mary gently and Mary's hand removed my
sodden bonnet and lifted my head. I tasted what they offered me
feebly at first, eagerly soon.
"Not too much at first  restrain her," said the brother "she
has had enough." And he withdrew the cup of milk and the plate of
bread.
"A little more, St. John  look at the avidity in her eyes."
"No more at present, sister. Try if she can speak now  ask her
her name."
I felt I could speak, and I answered  "My name is Jane Elliott."
Anxious as ever to avoid discovery, I had before resolved to assume
an ALIAS.
"And where do you live? Where are your friends?"
I was silent.
"Can we send for any one you know?"
I shook my head.
"What account can you give of yourself?"
Somehow, now that I had once crossed the threshold of this house,
and once was brought face to face with its owners, I felt no longer
outcast, vagrant, and disowned by the wide world. I dared to put
off the mendicant  to resume my natural manner and character.
I began once more to know myself and when Mr. St. John demanded
an account  which at present I was far too weak to render
I said after a brief pause 
"Sir, I can give you no details tonight."
"But what, then," said he, "do you expect me to do for you?"
"Nothing," I replied. My strength sufficed for but short
answers. Diana took the word 
"Do you mean," she asked, "that we have now given you what aid you
require? and that we may dismiss you to the moor and the rainy
night?"
I looked at her. She had, I thought, a remarkable countenance,
instinct both with power and goodness. I took sudden courage.
Answering her compassionate gaze with a smile, I said  "I will
trust you. If I were a masterless and stray dog, I know that you
would not turn me from your hearth tonight as it is, I really
have no fear. Do with me and for me as you like but excuse me
from much discourse  my breath is short  I feel a spasm when
I speak." All three surveyed me, and all three were silent.
"Hannah," said Mr. St. John, at last, "let her sit there at
present, and ask her no questions in ten minutes more, give her
the remainder of that milk and bread. Mary and Diana, let us go
into the parlour and talk the matter over."
They withdrew. Very soon one of the ladies returned  I could
not tell which. A kind of pleasant stupor was stealing over me as
I sat by the genial fire. In an undertone she gave some directions
to Hannah. Ere long, with the servant's aid, I contrived to mount
a staircase my dripping clothes were removed soon a warm, dry
bed received me. I thanked God  experienced amidst unutterable
exhaustion a glow of grateful joy  and slept.
CHAPTER XXIX
The recollection of about three days and nights succeeding this is
very dim in my mind. I can recall some sensations felt in that
interval but few thoughts framed, and no actions performed. I knew
I was in a small room and in a narrow bed. To that bed I seemed
to have grown I lay on it motionless as a stone and to have torn
me from it would have been almost to kill me. I took no note of
the lapse of time  of the change from morning to noon, from noon
to evening. I observed when any one entered or left the apartment
I could even tell who they were I could understand what was said
when the speaker stood near to me but I could not answer to
open my lips or move my limbs was equally impossible. Hannah, the
servant, was my most frequent visitor. Her coming disturbed me. I
had a feeling that she wished me away that she did not understand
me or my circumstances that she was prejudiced against me. Diana
and Mary appeared in the chamber once or twice a day. They
would whisper sentences of this sort at my bedside 
"It is very well we took her in."
"Yes she would certainly have been found dead at the door in the
morning had she been left out all night. I wonder what she has
gone through?"
"Strange hardships, I imagine  poor, emaciated, pallid wanderer?"
"She is not an uneducated person, I should think, by her manner of
speaking her accent was quite pure and the clothes she took off,
though splashed and wet, were little worn and fine."
"She has a peculiar face fleshless and haggard as it is, I rather
like it and when in good health and animated, I can fancy her
physiognomy would be agreeable."
Never once in their dialogues did I hear a syllable of regret at
the hospitality they had extended to me, or of suspicion of, or
aversion to, myself. I was comforted.
Mr. St. John came but once he looked at me, and said my state of
lethargy was the result of reaction from excessive and protracted
fatigue. He pronounced it needless to send for a doctor nature,
he was sure, would manage best, left to herself. He said every nerve
had been overstrained in some way, and the whole system must sleep
torpid a while. There was no disease. He imagined my recovery would
be rapid enough when once commenced. These opinions he delivered
in a few words, in a quiet, low voice and added, after a pause, in
the tone of a man little accustomed to expansive comment, "Rather
an unusual physiognomy certainly, not indicative of vulgarity or
degradation."
"Far otherwise," responded Diana. "To speak truth, St. John, my
heart rather warms to the poor little soul. I wish we may be able
to benefit her permanently."
"That is hardly likely," was the reply. "You will find she is
some young lady who has had a misunderstanding with her friends,
and has probably injudiciously left them. We may, perhaps, succeed
in restoring her to them, if she is not obstinate but I trace lines
of force in her face which make me sceptical of her tractability."
He stood considering me some minutes then added, "She looks
sensible, but not at all handsome."
"She is so ill, St. John."
"Ill or well, she would always be plain. The grace and harmony of
beauty are quite wanting in those features."
On the third day I was better on the fourth, I could speak, move,
rise in bed, and turn. Hannah had brought me some gruel and dry
toast, about, as I supposed, the dinnerhour. I had eaten with
relish the food was good  void of the feverish flavour which
had hitherto poisoned what I had swallowed. When she left me, I
felt comparatively strong and revived ere long satiety of repose
and desire for action stirred me. I wished to rise but what could
I put on? Only my damp and bemired apparel in which I had slept
on the ground and fallen in the marsh. I felt ashamed to appear
before my benefactors so clad. I was spared the humiliation.
On a chair by the bedside were all my own things, clean and dry.
My black silk frock hung against the wall. The traces of the bog
were removed from it the creases left by the wet smoothed out it
was quite decent. My very shoes and stockings were purified and
rendered presentable. There were the means of washing in the room,
and a comb and brush to smooth my hair. After a weary process,
and resting every five minutes, I succeeded in dressing myself.
My clothes hung loose on me for I was much wasted, but I covered
deficiencies with a shawl, and once more, clean and respectable looking
no speck of the dirt, no trace of the disorder I so hated, and
which seemed so to degrade me, left  I crept down a stone staircase
with the aid of the banisters, to a narrow low passage, and found
my way presently to the kitchen.
It was full of the fragrance of new bread and the warmth of a
generous fire. Hannah was baking. Prejudices, it is well known,
are most difficult to eradicate from the heart whose soil has never
been loosened or fertilised by education they grow there, firm
as weeds among stones. Hannah had been cold and stiff, indeed,
at the first latterly she had begun to relent a little and when
she saw me come in tidy and welldressed, she even smiled.
"What, you have got up" she said. "You are better, then. You
may sit you down in my chair on the hearthstone, if you will."
She pointed to the rockingchair I took it. She bustled about,
examining me every now and then with the corner of her eye. Turning
to me, as she took some loaves from the oven, she asked bluntly 
"Did you ever go abegging afore you came here?"
I was indignant for a moment but remembering that anger was out
of the question, and that I had indeed appeared as a beggar to her,
I answered quietly, but still not without a certain marked firmness 
"You are mistaken in supposing me a beggar. I am no beggar any
more than yourself or your young ladies."
After a pause she said, "I dunnut understand that you've like no
house, nor no brass, I guess?"
"The want of house or brass by which I suppose you mean money
does not make a beggar in your sense of the word."
"Are you booklearned?" she inquired presently.
"Yes, very."
"But you've never been to a boardingschool?"
"I was at a boardingschool eight years."
She opened her eyes wide. "Whatever cannot ye keep yourself for,
then?"
"I have kept myself and, I trust, shall keep myself again. What
are you going to do with these gooseberries?" I inquired, as she
brought out a basket of the fruit.
"Mak' 'em into pies."
"Give them to me and I'll pick them."
"Nay I dunnut want ye to do nought."
"But I must do something. Let me have them."
She consented and she even brought me a clean towel to spread over
my dress, "lest," as she said, "I should mucky it."
"Ye've not been used to sarvant's wark, I see by your hands," she
remarked. "Happen ye've been a dressmaker?"
"No, you are wrong. And now, never mind what I have been don't
trouble your head further about me but tell me the name of the
house where we are."
"Some calls it Marsh End, and some calls it Moor House."
"And the gentleman who lives here is called Mr. St. John?"
"Nay he doesn't live here he is only staying a while. When he
is at home, he is in his own parish at Morton."
"That village a few miles off?
"Aye."
"And what is he?"
"He is a parson."
I remembered the answer of the old housekeeper at the parsonage,
when I had asked to see the clergyman. "This, then, was his father's
residence?"
"Aye old Mr. Rivers lived here, and his father, and grandfather,
and gurt great grandfather afore him."
"The name, then, of that gentleman, is Mr. St. John Rivers?"
"Aye St. John is like his kirstened name."
"And his sisters are called Diana and Mary Rivers?"
"Yes."
"Their father is dead?"
"Dead three weeks sin' of a stroke."
"They have no mother?"
"The mistress has been dead this mony a year."
"Have you lived with the family long?"
"I've lived here thirty year. I nursed them all three."
"That proves you must have been an honest and faithful servant.
I will say so much for you, though you have had the incivility to
call me a beggar."
She again regarded me with a surprised stare. "I believe," she
said, "I was quite mista'en in my thoughts of you but there is
so mony cheats goes about, you mun forgie me."
"And though," I continued, rather severely, "you wished to turn me
from the door, on a night when you should not have shut out a dog."
"Well, it was hard but what can a body do? I thought more o' th'
childer nor of mysel poor things They've like nobody to tak'
care on 'em but me. I'm like to look sharpish."
I maintained a grave silence for some minutes.
"You munnut think too hardly of me," she again remarked.
"But I do think hardly of you," I said "and I'll tell you why 
not so much because you refused to give me shelter, or regarded me
as an impostor, as because you just now made it a species of reproach
that I had no 'brass' and no house. Some of the best people that
ever lived have been as destitute as I am and if you are a Christian,
you ought not to consider poverty a crime."
"No more I ought," said she "Mr. St. John tells me so too and
I see I wor wrang  but I've clear a different notion on you now
to what I had. You look a raight down dacent little crater."
"That will do  I forgive you now. Shake hands."
She put her floury and horny hand into mine another and heartier
smile illumined her rough face, and from that moment we were friends.
Hannah was evidently fond of talking. While I picked the fruit,
and she made the paste for the pies, she proceeded to give me sundry
details about her deceased master and mistress, and "the childer,"
as she called the young people.
Old Mr. Rivers, she said, was a plain man enough, but a gentleman, and
of as ancient a family as could be found. Marsh End had belonged
to the Rivers ever since it was a house and it was, she affirmed,
"aboon two hundred year old  for all it looked but a small,
humble place, naught to compare wi' Mr. Oliver's grand hall down
i' Morton Vale. But she could remember Bill Oliver's father a
journeyman needlemaker and th' Rivers wor gentry i' th' owd days
o' th' Henrys, as onybody might see by looking into th' registers
i' Morton Church vestry." Still, she allowed, "the owd maister was
like other folk  naught mich out o' t' common way stark mad o'
shooting, and farming, and sich like." The mistress was different.
She was a great reader, and studied a deal and the "bairns" had
taken after her. There was nothing like them in these parts, nor
ever had been they had liked learning, all three, almost from
the time they could speak and they had always been "of a mak' of
their own." Mr. St. John, when he grew up, would go to college
and be a parson and the girls, as soon as they left school, would
seek places as governesses for they had told her their father had
some years ago lost a great deal of money by a man he had trusted
turning bankrupt and as he was now not rich enough to give them
fortunes, they must provide for themselves. They had lived very
little at home for a long while, and were only come now to stay a
few weeks on account of their father's death but they did so like
Marsh End and Morton, and all these moors and hills about. They
had been in London, and many other grand towns but they always
said there was no place like home and then they were so agreeable
with each other  never fell out nor "threaped." She did not know
where there was such a family for being united.
Having finished my task of gooseberry picking, I asked where the
two ladies and their brother were now.
"Gone over to Morton for a walk but they would be back in halfanhour
to tea."
They returned within the time Hannah had allotted them they
entered by the kitchen door. Mr. St. John, when he saw me, merely
bowed and passed through the two ladies stopped Mary, in a few
words, kindly and calmly expressed the pleasure she felt in seeing
me well enough to be able to come down Diana took my hand she
shook her head at me.
"You should have waited for my leave to descend," she said. "You
still look very pale  and so thin Poor child  poor girl"
Diana had a voice toned, to my ear, like the cooing of a dove.
She possessed eyes whose gaze I delighted to encounter. Her whole
face seemed to me full of charm. Mary's countenance was equally
intelligent  her features equally pretty but her expression
was more reserved, and her manners, though gentle, more distant.
Diana looked and spoke with a certain authority she had a will,
evidently. It was my nature to feel pleasure in yielding to an
authority supported like hers, and to bend, where my conscience
and selfrespect permitted, to an active will.
"And what business have you here?" she continued. "It is not your
place. Mary and I sit in the kitchen sometimes, because at home
we like to be free, even to license  but you are a visitor, and
must go into the parlour."
"I am very well here."
"Not at all, with Hannah bustling about and covering you with
flour."
"Besides, the fire is too hot for you," interposed Mary.
"To be sure," added her sister. "Come, you must be obedient." And
still holding my hand she made me rise, and led me into the inner
room.
"Sit there," she said, placing me on the sofa, "while we take
our things off and get the tea ready it is another privilege we
exercise in our little moorland home  to prepare our own meals
when we are so inclined, or when Hannah is baking, brewing, washing,
or ironing."
She closed the door, leaving me solus with Mr. St. John, who sat
opposite, a book or newspaper in his hand. I examined first, the
parlour, and then its occupant.
The parlour was rather a small room, very plainly furnished, yet
comfortable, because clean and neat. The oldfashioned chairs were
very bright, and the walnutwood table was like a lookingglass. A
few strange, antique portraits of the men and women of other days
decorated the stained walls a cupboard with glass doors contained
some books and an ancient set of china. There was no superfluous
ornament in the room  not one modern piece of furniture, save a
brace of workboxes and a lady's desk in rosewood, which stood on
a sidetable everything  including the carpet and curtains 
looked at once well worn and well saved.
Mr. St. John  sitting as still as one of the dusty pictures on
the walls, keeping his eyes fixed on the page he perused, and his
lips mutely sealed  was easy enough to examine. Had he been
a statue instead of a man, he could not have been easier. He was
young  perhaps from twentyeight to thirty  tall, slender
his face riveted the eye it was like a Greek face, very pure in
outline quite a straight, classic nose quite an Athenian mouth
and chin. It is seldom, indeed, an English face comes so near the
antique models as did his. He might well be a little shocked at
the irregularity of my lineaments, his own being so harmonious.
His eyes were large and blue, with brown lashes his high forehead,
colourless as ivory, was partially streaked over by careless locks
of fair hair.
This is a gentle delineation, is it not, reader? Yet he whom
it describes scarcely impressed one with the idea of a gentle, a
yielding, an impressible, or even of a placid nature. Quiescent
as he now sat, there was something about his nostril, his mouth,
his brow, which, to my perceptions, indicated elements within either
restless, or hard, or eager. He did not speak to me one word, nor
even direct to me one glance, till his sisters returned. Diana,
as she passed in and out, in the course of preparing tea, brought
me a little cake, baked on the top of the oven.
"Eat that now," she said "you must be hungry. Hannah says you
have had nothing but some gruel since breakfast."
I did not refuse it, for my appetite was awakened and keen. Mr.
Rivers now closed his book, approached the table, and, as he took
a seat, fixed his blue pictoriallooking eyes full on me. There
was an unceremonious directness, a searching, decided steadfastness
in his gaze now, which told that intention, and not diffidence,
had hitherto kept it averted from the stranger.
"You are very hungry," he said.
"I am, sir." It is my way  it always was my way, by instinct 
ever to meet the brief with brevity, the direct with plainness.
"It is well for you that a low fever has forced you to abstain for
the last three days there would have been danger in yielding to
the cravings of your appetite at first. Now you may eat, though
still not immoderately."
"I trust I shall not eat long at your expense, sir," was my very
clumsilycontrived, unpolished answer.
"No," he said coolly "when you have indicated to us the residence
of your friends, we can write to them, and you may be restored to
home."
"That, I must plainly tell you, is out of my power to do being
absolutely without home and friends."
The three looked at me, but not distrustfully I felt there was no
suspicion in their glances there was more of curiosity. I speak
particularly of the young ladies. St. John's eyes, though clear
enough in a literal sense, in a figurative one were difficult
to fathom. He seemed to use them rather as instruments to search
other people's thoughts, than as agents to reveal his own the
which combination of keenness and reserve was considerably more
calculated to embarrass than to encourage.
"Do you mean to say," he asked, "that you are completely isolated
from every connection?"
"I do. Not a tie links me to any living thing not a claim do I
possess to admittance under any roof in England."
"A most singular position at your age"
Here I saw his glance directed to my hands, which were folded on
the table before me. I wondered what he sought there his words
soon explained the quest.
"You have never been married? You are a spinster?"
Diana laughed. "Why, she can't he above seventeen or eighteen
years old, St. John," said she.
"I am near nineteen but I am not married. No."
I felt a burning glow mount to my face for bitter and agitating
recollections were awakened by the allusion to marriage. They all
saw the embarrassment and the emotion. Diana and Mary relieved me
by turning their eyes elsewhere than to my crimsoned visage but
the colder and sterner brother continued to gaze, till the trouble
he had excited forced out tears as well as colour.
"Where did you last reside?" he now asked.
"You are too inquisitive, St. John," murmured Mary in a low voice
but he leaned over the table and required an answer by a second
firm and piercing look.
"The name of the place where, and of the person with whom I lived,
is my secret," I replied concisely.
"Which, if you like, you have, in my opinion, a right to keep, both
from St. John and every other questioner," remarked Diana.
"Yet if I know nothing about you or your history, I cannot help
you," he said. "And you need help, do you not?"
"I need it, and I seek it so far, sir, that some true philanthropist
will put me in the way of getting work which I can do, and the
remuneration for which will keep me, if but in the barest necessaries
of life."
"I know not whether I am a true philanthropist yet I am willing to
aid you to the utmost of my power in a purpose so honest. First,
then, tell me what you have been accustomed to do, and what you
CAN do."
I had now swallowed my tea. I was mightily refreshed by the beverage
as much so as a giant with wine it gave new tone to my unstrung
nerves, and enabled me to address this penetrating young judge
steadily.
"Mr. Rivers," I said, turning to him, and looking at him, as he
looked at me, openly and without diffidence, "you and your sisters
have done me a great service  the greatest man can do his fellow
being you have rescued me, by your noble hospitality, from death.
This benefit conferred gives you an unlimited claim on my gratitude,
and a claim, to a certain extent, on my confidence. I will tell
you as much of the history of the wanderer you have harboured,
as I can tell without compromising my own peace of mind  my own
security, moral and physical, and that of others.
"I am an orphan, the daughter of a clergyman. My parents died
before I could know them. I was brought up a dependant educated
in a charitable institution. I will even tell you the name of the
establishment, where I passed six years as a pupil, and two as a
teacher  Lowood Orphan Asylum, shire you will have heard of
it, Mr. Rivers?  the Rev. Robert Brocklehurst is the treasurer."
"I have heard of Mr. Brocklehurst, and I have seen the school."
"I left Lowood nearly a year since to become a private governess.
I obtained a good situation, and was happy. This place I was
obliged to leave four days before I came here. The reason of my
departure I cannot and ought not to explain it would be useless,
dangerous, and would sound incredible. No blame attached to me
I am as free from culpability as any one of you three. Miserable
I am, and must be for a time for the catastrophe which drove me
from a house I had found a paradise was of a strange and direful
nature. I observed but two points in planning my departure  speed,
secrecy to secure these, I had to leave behind me everything I
possessed except a small parcel which, in my hurry and trouble of
mind, I forgot to take out of the coach that brought me to Whitcross.
To this neighbourhood, then, I came, quite destitute. I slept two
nights in the open air, and wandered about two days without crossing
a threshold but twice in that space of time did I taste food
and it was when brought by hunger, exhaustion, and despair almost
to the last gasp, that you, Mr. Rivers, forbade me to perish of
want at your door, and took me under the shelter of your roof. I
know all your sisters have done for me since  for I have not
been insensible during my seeming torpor  and I owe to their
spontaneous, genuine, genial compassion as large a debt as to your
evangelical charity."
"Don't make her talk any more now, St. John," said Diana, as I
paused "she is evidently not yet fit for excitement. Come to the
sofa and sit down now, Miss Elliott."
I gave an involuntary half start at hearing the alias I had
forgotten my new name. Mr. Rivers, whom nothing seemed to escape,
noticed it at once.
"You said your name was Jane Elliott?" he observed.
"I did say so and it is the name by which I think it expedient to
be called at present, but it is not my real name, and when I hear
it, it sounds strange to me."
"Your real name you will not give?"
"No I fear discovery above all things and whatever disclosure
would lead to it, I avoid."
"You are quite right, I am sure," said Diana. "Now do, brother,
let her be at peace a while."
But when St. John had mused a few moments he recommenced as
imperturbably and with as much acumen as ever.
"You would not like to be long dependent on our hospitality  you
would wish, I see, to dispense as soon as may be with my sisters'
compassion, and, above all, with my CHARITY I am quite sensible
of the distinction drawn, nor do I resent it  it is just you
desire to be independent of us?"
"I do I have already said so. Show me how to work, or how to seek
work that is all I now ask then let me go, if it be but to the
meanest cottage but till then, allow me to stay here I dread
another essay of the horrors of homeless destitution."
"Indeed you SHALL stay here," said Diana, putting her white hand on
my head. "You SHALL," repeated Mary, in the tone of undemonstrative
sincerity which seemed natural to her.
"My sisters, you see, have a pleasure in keeping you," said Mr.
St. John, "as they would have a pleasure in keeping and cherishing
a halffrozen bird, some wintry wind might have driven through
their casement. I feel more inclination to put you in the way of
keeping yourself, and shall endeavour to do so but observe, my
sphere is narrow. I am but the incumbent of a poor country parish
my aid must be of the humblest sort. And if you are inclined to
despise the day of small things, seek some more efficient succour
than such as I can offer."
"She has already said that she is willing to do anything honest
she can do," answered Diana for me "and you know, St. John, she
has no choice of helpers she is forced to put up with such crusty
people as you."
"I will be a dressmaker I will be a plainworkwoman I will be a
servant, a nursegirl, if I can be no better," I answered.
"Right," said Mr. St. John, quite coolly. "If such is your spirit,
I promise to aid you, in my own time and way."
He now resumed the book with which he had been occupied before tea.
I soon withdrew, for I had talked as much, and sat up as long, as
my present strength would permit.
CHAPTER XXX
The more I knew of the inmates of Moor House, the better I liked
them. In a few days I had so far recovered my health that I could
sit up all day, and walk out sometimes. I could join with Diana
and Mary in all their occupations converse with them as much as
they wished, and aid them when and where they would allow me. There
was a reviving pleasure in this intercourse, of a kind now tasted
by me for the first time  the pleasure arising from perfect
congeniality of tastes, sentiments, and principles.
I liked to read what they liked to read what they enjoyed,
delighted me what they approved, I reverenced. They loved their
sequestered home. I, too, in the grey, small, antique structure,
with its low roof, its latticed casements, its mouldering walls,
its avenue of aged firs  all grown aslant under the stress of
mountain winds its garden, dark with yew and holly  and where
no flowers but of the hardiest species would bloom  found a charm
both potent and permanent. They clung to the purple moors behind
and around their dwelling  to the hollow vale into which the
pebbly bridlepath leading from their gate descended, and which
wound between fernbanks first, and then amongst a few of the
wildest little pasturefields that ever bordered a wilderness of
heath, or gave sustenance to a flock of grey moorland sheep, with
their little mossyfaced lambs they clung to this scene, I say,
with a perfect enthusiasm of attachment. I could comprehend the
feeling, and share both its strength and truth. I saw the fascination
of the locality. I felt the consecration of its loneliness my eye
feasted on the outline of swell and sweep  on the wild colouring
communicated to ridge and dell by moss, by heathbell, by
flowersprinkled turf, by brilliant bracken, and mellow granite
crag. These details were just to me what they were to them  so
many pure and sweet sources of pleasure. The strong blast and the
soft breeze the rough and the halcyon day the hours of sunrise
and sunset the moonlight and the clouded night, developed for me,
in these regions, the same attraction as for them  wound round
my faculties the same spell that entranced theirs.
Indoors we agreed equally well. They were both more accomplished
and better read than I was but with eagerness I followed in the
path of knowledge they had trodden before me. I devoured the books
they lent me then it was full satisfaction to discuss with them
in the evening what I had perused during the day. Thought fitted
thought opinion met opinion we coincided, in short, perfectly.
If in our trio there was a superior and a leader, it was Diana.
Physically, she far excelled me she was handsome she was vigorous.
In her animal spirits there was an affluence of life and certainty
of flow, such as excited my wonder, while it baffled my comprehension.
I could talk a while when the evening commenced, but the first
gush of vivacity and fluency gone, I was fain to sit on a stool at
Diana's feet, to rest my head on her knee, and listen alternately
to her and Mary, while they sounded thoroughly the topic on which
I had but touched. Diana offered to teach me German. I liked to
learn of her I saw the part of instructress pleased and suited
her that of scholar pleased and suited me no less. Our natures
dovetailed mutual affection  of the strongest kind  was the
result. They discovered I could draw their pencils and colourboxes
were immediately at my service. My skill, greater in this one
point than theirs, surprised and charmed them. Mary would sit and
watch me by the hour together then she would take lessons and
a docile, intelligent, assiduous pupil she made. Thus occupied,
and mutually entertained, days passed like hours, and weeks like
days.
As to Mr. St John, the intimacy which had arisen so naturally and
rapidly between me and his sisters did not extend to him. One
reason of the distance yet observed between us was, that he
was comparatively seldom at home a large proportion of his time
appeared devoted to visiting the sick and poor among the scattered
population of his parish.
No weather seemed to hinder him in these pastoral excursions rain
or fair, he would, when his hours of morning study were over, take
his hat, and, followed by his father's old pointer, Carlo, go out
on his mission of love or duty  I scarcely know in which light
he regarded it. Sometimes, when the day was very unfavourable,
his sisters would expostulate. He would then say, with a peculiar
smile, more solemn than cheerful 
"And if I let a gust of wind or a sprinkling of rain turn me aside
from these easy tasks, what preparation would such sloth be for
the future I propose to myself?"
Diana and Mary's general answer to this question was a sigh, and
some minutes of apparently mournful meditation.
But besides his frequent absences, there was another barrier to
friendship with him he seemed of a reserved, an abstracted, and
even of a brooding nature. Zealous in his ministerial labours,
blameless in his life and habits, he yet did not appear to enjoy
that mental serenity, that inward content, which should be the
reward of every sincere Christian and practical philanthropist.
Often, of an evening, when he sat at the window, his desk and papers
before him, he would cease reading or writing, rest his chin on his
hand, and deliver himself up to I know not what course of thought
but that it was perturbed and exciting might be seen in the frequent
flash and changeful dilation of his eye.
I think, moreover, that Nature was not to him that treasury of
delight it was to his sisters. He expressed once, and but once in
my hearing, a strong sense of the rugged charm of the hills, and
an inborn affection for the dark roof and hoary walls he called
his home but there was more of gloom than pleasure in the tone
and words in which the sentiment was manifested and never did he
seem to roam the moors for the sake of their soothing silence 
never seek out or dwell upon the thousand peaceful delights they
could yield.
Incommunicative as he was, some time elapsed before I had
an opportunity of gauging his mind. I first got an idea of its
calibre when I heard him preach in his own church at Morton. I wish
I could describe that sermon but it is past my power. I cannot
even render faithfully the effect it produced on me.
It began calm  and indeed, as far as delivery and pitch of voice
went, it was calm to the end an earnestly felt, yet strictly
restrained zeal breathed soon in the distinct accents, and prompted
the nervous language. This grew to force  compressed, condensed,
controlled. The heart was thrilled, the mind astonished, by the
power of the preacher neither were softened. Throughout there
was a strange bitterness an absence of consolatory gentleness
stern allusions to Calvinistic doctrines  election, predestination,
reprobation  were frequent and each reference to these points
sounded like a sentence pronounced for doom. When he had done,
instead of feeling better, calmer, more enlightened by his discourse,
I experienced an inexpressible sadness for it seemed to me  I
know not whether equally so to others  that the eloquence to which
I had been listening had sprung from a depth where lay turbid dregs
of disappointment  where moved troubling impulses of insatiate
yearnings and disquieting aspirations. I was sure St. John Rivers
purelived, conscientious, zealous as he was  had not yet
found that peace of God which passeth all understanding he had no
more found it, I thought, than had I with my concealed and racking
regrets for my broken idol and lost elysium  regrets to which I
have latterly avoided referring, but which possessed me and tyrannised
over me ruthlessly.
Meantime a month was gone. Diana and Mary were soon to leave Moor
House, and return to the far different life and scene which awaited
them, as governesses in a large, fashionable, southofEngland
city, where each held a situation in families by whose wealthy
and haughty members they were regarded only as humble dependants,
and who neither knew nor sought out their innate excellences, and
appreciated only their acquired accomplishments as they appreciated
the skill of their cook or the taste of their waitingwoman. Mr.
St. John had said nothing to me yet about the employment he had
promised to obtain for me yet it became urgent that I should have
a vocation of some kind. One morning, being left alone with him a
few minutes in the parlour, I ventured to approach the windowrecess
which his table, chair, and desk consecrated as a kind of study
and I was going to speak, though not very well knowing in what
words to frame my inquiry  for it is at all times difficult to
break the ice of reserve glassing over such natures as his  when
he saved me the trouble by being the first to commence a dialogue.
Looking up as I drew near  "You have a question to ask of me?"
he said.
"Yes I wish to know whether you have heard of any service I can
offer myself to undertake?"
"I found or devised something for you three weeks ago but as you
seemed both useful and happy here  as my sisters had evidently
become attached to you, and your society gave them unusual pleasure
I deemed it inexpedient to break in on your mutual comfort till
their approaching departure from Marsh End should render yours
necessary."
"And they will go in three days now?" I said.
"Yes and when they go, I shall return to the parsonage at Morton
Hannah will accompany me and this old house will be shut up."
I waited a few moments, expecting he would go on with the subject
first broached but he seemed to have entered another train of
reflection his look denoted abstraction from me and my business.
I was obliged to recall him to a theme which was of necessity one
of close and anxious interest to me.
"What is the employment you had in view, Mr. Rivers? I hope this
delay will not have increased the difficulty of securing it."
"Oh, no since it is an employment which depends only on me to
give, and you to accept."
He again paused there seemed a reluctance to continue. I grew
impatient a restless movement or two, and an eager and exacting
glance fastened on his face, conveyed the feeling to him as
effectually as words could have done, and with less trouble.
"You need be in no hurry to hear," he said "let me frankly tell
you, I have nothing eligible or profitable to suggest. Before I
explain, recall, if you please, my notice, clearly given, that if
I helped you, it must be as the blind man would help the lame. I
am poor for I find that, when I have paid my father's debts, all
the patrimony remaining to me will be this crumbling grange, the
row of scathed firs behind, and the patch of moorish soil, with the
yewtrees and hollybushes in front. I am obscure Rivers is an
old name but of the three sole descendants of the race, two earn
the dependant's crust among strangers, and the third considers
himself an alien from his native country  not only for life, but
in death. Yes, and deems, and is bound to deem, himself honoured by
the lot, and aspires but after the day when the cross of separation
from fleshly ties shall be laid on his shoulders, and when the
Head of that churchmilitant of whose humblest members he is one,
shall give the word, 'Rise, follow Me'"
St. John said these words as he pronounced his sermons, with
a quiet, deep voice with an unflushed cheek, and a coruscating
radiance of glance. He resumed 
"And since I am myself poor and obscure, I can offer you but a
service of poverty and obscurity. YOU may even think it degrading
for I see now your habits have been what the world calls refined
your tastes lean to the ideal, and your society has at least been
amongst the educated but I consider that no service degrades which
can better our race. I hold that the more arid and unreclaimed
the soil where the Christian labourer's task of tillage is appointed
him  the scantier the meed his toil brings  the higher the honour.
His, under such circumstances, is the destiny of the pioneer and
the first pioneers of the Gospel were the Apostles  their captain
was Jesus, the Redeemer, Himself."
"Well?" I said, as he again paused  "proceed."
He looked at me before he proceeded indeed, he seemed leisurely
to read my face, as if its features and lines were characters
on a page. The conclusions drawn from this scrutiny he partially
expressed in his succeeding observations.
"I believe you will accept the post I offer you," said he, "and
hold it for a while not permanently, though any more than I
could permanently keep the narrow and narrowing  the tranquil,
hidden office of English country incumbent for in your nature
is an alloy as detrimental to repose as that in mine, though of a
different kind."
"Do explain," I urged, when he halted once more.
"I will and you shall hear how poor the proposal is,  how trivial
how cramping. I shall not stay long at Morton, now that my
father is dead, and that I am my own master. I shall leave the
place probably in the course of a twelvemonth but while I do stay,
I will exert myself to the utmost for its improvement. Morton,
when I came to it two years ago, had no school the children of
the poor were excluded from every hope of progress. I established
one for boys I mean now to open a second school for girls. I
have hired a building for the purpose, with a cottage of two rooms
attached to it for the mistress's house. Her salary will be thirty
pounds a year her house is already furnished, very simply, but
sufficiently, by the kindness of a lady, Miss Oliver the only
daughter of the sole rich man in my parish  Mr. Oliver, the
proprietor of a needlefactory and ironfoundry in the valley. The
same lady pays for the education and clothing of an orphan from
the workhouse, on condition that she shall aid the mistress in such
menial offices connected with her own house and the school as her
occupation of teaching will prevent her having time to discharge
in person. Will you be this mistress?"
He put the question rather hurriedly he seemed half to expect an
indignant, or at least a disdainful rejection of the offer not
knowing all my thoughts and feelings, though guessing some, he
could not tell in what light the lot would appear to me. In truth
it was humble  but then it was sheltered, and I wanted a safe asylum
it was plodding  but then, compared with that of a governess in
a rich house, it was independent and the fear of servitude with
strangers entered my soul like iron it was not ignoble  not
unworthy  not mentally degrading, I made my decision.
"I thank you for the proposal, Mr. Rivers, and I accept it with
all my heart."
"But you comprehend me?" he said. "It is a village school your
scholars will be only poor girls  cottagers' children  at the
best, farmers' daughters. Knitting, sewing, reading, writing,
ciphering, will be all you will have to teach. What will you do
with your accomplishments? What, with the largest portion of your
mind  sentiments  tastes?"
"Save them till they are wanted. They will keep."
"You know what you undertake, then?"
"I do."
He now smiled and not a bitter or a sad smile, but one well
pleased and deeply gratified.
"And when will you commence the exercise of your function?"
"I will go to my house tomorrow, and open the school, if you like,
next week."
"Very well so be it."
He rose and walked through the room. Standing still, he again
looked at me. He shook his head.
"What do you disapprove of, Mr. Rivers?" I asked.
"You will not stay at Morton long no, no"
"Why? What is your reason for saying so?"
"I read it in your eye it is not of that description which promises
the maintenance of an even tenor in life."
"I am not ambitious."
He started at the word "ambitious." He repeated, "No. What made
you think of ambition? Who is ambitious? I know I am but how
did you find it out?"
"I was speaking of myself."
"Well, if you are not ambitious, you are  " He paused.
"What?"
"I was going to say, impassioned but perhaps you would have
misunderstood the word, and been displeased. I mean, that human
affections and sympathies have a most powerful hold on you. I am
sure you cannot long be content to pass your leisure in solitude,
and to devote your working hours to a monotonous labour wholly
void of stimulus any more than I can be content," he added, with
emphasis, "to live here buried in morass, pent in with mountains
my nature, that God gave me, contravened my faculties,
heavenbestowed, paralysed  made useless. You hear now how I
contradict myself. I, who preached contentment with a humble lot,
and justified the vocation even of hewers of wood and drawers of
water in God's service  I, His ordained minister, almost rave
in my restlessness. Well, propensities and principles must be
reconciled by some means."
He left the room. In this brief hour I had learnt more of him than
in the whole previous month yet still he puzzled me.
Diana and Mary Rivers became more sad and silent as the day
approached for leaving their brother and their home. They both
tried to appear as usual but the sorrow they had to struggle against
was one that could not be entirely conquered or concealed. Diana
intimated that this would be a different parting from any they had
ever yet known. It would probably, as far as St. John was concerned,
be a parting for years it might be a parting for life.
"He will sacrifice all to his longframed resolves," she said
"natural affection and feelings more potent still. St. John looks
quiet, Jane but he hides a fever in his vitals. You would think
him gentle, yet in some things he is inexorable as death and the
worst of it is, my conscience will hardly permit me to dissuade him
from his severe decision certainly, I cannot for a moment blame
him for it. It is right, noble, Christian yet it breaks my
heart" And the tears gushed to her fine eyes. Mary bent her head
low over her work.
"We are now without father we shall soon be without home and
brother," she murmured,
At that moment a little accident supervened, which seemed decreed
by fate purposely to prove the truth of the adage, that "misfortunes
never come singly," and to add to their distresses the vexing one
of the slip between the cup and the lip. St. John passed the window
reading a letter. He entered.
"Our uncle John is dead," said he.
Both the sisters seemed struck not shocked or appalled the
tidings appeared in their eyes rather momentous than afflicting.
"Dead?" repeated Diana.
"Yes."
She riveted a searching gaze on her brother's face. "And what
then?" she demanded, in a low voice.
"What then, Die?" he replied, maintaining a marble immobility of
feature. "What then? Why  nothing. Read."
He threw the letter into her lap. She glanced over it, and handed
it to Mary. Mary perused it in silence, and returned it to her
brother. All three looked at each other, and all three smiled 
a dreary, pensive smile enough.
"Amen We can yet live," said Diana at last.
"At any rate, it makes us no worse off than we were before," remarked
Mary.
"Only it forces rather strongly on the mind the picture of what
MIGHT HAVE BEEN," said Mr. Rivers, "and contrasts it somewhat too
vividly with what IS."
He folded the letter, locked it in his desk, and again went out.
For some minutes no one spoke. Diana then turned to me.
"Jane, you will wonder at us and our mysteries," she said, "and
think us hardhearted beings not to be more moved at the death of
so near a relation as an uncle but we have never seen him or known
him. He was my mother's brother. My father and he quarrelled
long ago. It was by his advice that my father risked most of his
property in the speculation that ruined him. Mutual recrimination
passed between them they parted in anger, and were never reconciled.
My uncle engaged afterwards in more prosperous undertakings it
appears he realised a fortune of twenty thousand pounds. He
was never married, and had no near kindred but ourselves and one
other person, not more closely related than we. My father always
cherished the idea that he would atone for his error by leaving his
possessions to us that letter informs us that he has bequeathed
every penny to the other relation, with the exception of thirty
guineas, to be divided between St. John, Diana, and Mary Rivers, for
the purchase of three mourning rings. He had a right, of course,
to do as he pleased and yet a momentary damp is cast on the
spirits by the receipt of such news. Mary and I would have esteemed
ourselves rich with a thousand pounds each and to St. John such
a sum would have been valuable, for the good it would have enabled
him to do."
This explanation given, the subject was dropped, and no further
reference made to it by either Mr. Rivers or his sisters. The next
day I left Marsh End for Morton. The day after, Diana and Mary
quitted it for distant B. In a week, Mr. Rivers and Hannah repaired
to the parsonage and so the old grange was abandoned.
CHAPTER XXXI
My home, then, when I at last find a home,  is a cottage a
little room with whitewashed walls and a sanded floor, containing
four painted chairs and a table, a clock, a cupboard, with two or
three plates and dishes, and a set of teathings in delf. Above, a
chamber of the same dimensions as the kitchen, with a deal bedstead
and chest of drawers small, yet too large to be filled with my
scanty wardrobe though the kindness of my gentle and generous
friends has increased that, by a modest stock of such things as
are necessary.
It is evening. I have dismissed, with the fee of an orange, the
little orphan who serves me as a handmaid. I am sitting alone on
the hearth. This morning, the village school opened. I had twenty
scholars. But three of the number can read none write or cipher.
Several knit, and a few sew a little. They speak with the broadest
accent of the district. At present, they and I have a difficulty
in understanding each other's language. Some of them are unmannered,
rough, intractable, as well as ignorant but others are docile,
have a wish to learn, and evince a disposition that pleases me.
I must not forget that these coarselyclad little peasants are of
flesh and blood as good as the scions of gentlest genealogy and
that the germs of native excellence, refinement, intelligence, kind
feeling, are as likely to exist in their hearts as in those of the
bestborn. My duty will be to develop these germs surely I shall
find some happiness in discharging that office. Much enjoyment I
do not expect in the life opening before me yet it will, doubtless,
if I regulate my mind, and exert my powers as I ought, yield me
enough to live on from day to day.
Was I very gleeful, settled, content, during the hours I passed in
yonder bare, humble schoolroom this morning and afternoon? Not to
deceive myself, I must reply  No I felt desolate to a degree. I
felt  yes, idiot that I am  I felt degraded. I doubted I had
taken a step which sank instead of raising me in the scale of social
existence. I was weakly dismayed at the ignorance, the poverty,
the coarseness of all I heard and saw round me. But let me not hate
and despise myself too much for these feelings I know them to be
wrong  that is a great step gained I shall strive to overcome
them. Tomorrow, I trust, I shall get the better of them partially
and in a few weeks, perhaps, they will be quite subdued. In a
few months, it is possible, the happiness of seeing progress, and
a change for the better in my scholars may substitute gratification
for disgust.
Meantime, let me ask myself one question  Which is better?  To
have surrendered to temptation listened to passion made no painful
effort  no struggle  but to have sunk down in the silken snare
fallen asleep on the flowers covering it wakened in a southern
clime, amongst the luxuries of a pleasure villa to have been
now living in France, Mr. Rochester's mistress delirious with his
love half my time  for he would  oh, yes, he would have loved
me well for a while. He DID love me  no one will ever love me so
again. I shall never more know the sweet homage given to beauty,
youth, and grace  for never to any one else shall I seem to
possess these charms. He was fond and proud of me  it is what
no man besides will ever be.  But where am I wandering, and what
am I saying, and above all, feeling? Whether is it better, I ask,
to be a slave in a fool's paradise at Marseilles  fevered with
delusive bliss one hour  suffocating with the bitterest tears of
remorse and shame the next  or to be a villageschoolmistress,
free and honest, in a breezy mountain nook in the healthy heart of
England?
Yes I feel now that I was right when I adhered to principle and
law, and scorned and crushed the insane promptings of a frenzied
moment. God directed me to a correct choice I thank His providence
for the guidance
Having brought my eventide musings to this point, I rose, went
to my door, and looked at the sunset of the harvestday, and at
the quiet fields before my cottage, which, with the school, was
distant half a mile from the village. The birds were singing
their last strains 
"The air was mild, the dew was balm."
While I looked, I thought myself happy, and was surprised to find
myself ere long weeping  and why? For the doom which had reft
me from adhesion to my master for him I was no more to see for
the desperate grief and fatal fury  consequences of my departure 
which might now, perhaps, be dragging him from the path of right,
too far to leave hope of ultimate restoration thither. At this
thought, I turned my face aside from the lovely sky of eve and lonely
vale of Morton  I say LONELY, for in that bend of it visible to
me there was no building apparent save the church and the parsonage,
halfhid in trees, and, quite at the extremity, the roof of Vale
Hall, where the rich Mr. Oliver and his daughter lived. I hid my
eyes, and leant my head against the stone frame of my door but
soon a slight noise near the wicket which shut in my tiny garden
from the meadow beyond it made me look up. A dog  old Carlo,
Mr. Rivers' pointer, as I saw in a moment  was pushing the gate
with his nose, and St. John himself leant upon it with folded arms
his brow knit, his gaze, grave almost to displeasure, fixed on me.
I asked him to come in.
"No, I cannot stay I have only brought you a little parcel my
sisters left for you. I think it contains a colourbox, pencils,
and paper."
I approached to take it a welcome gift it was. He examined my
face, I thought, with austerity, as I came near the traces of
tears were doubtless very visible upon it.
"Have you found your first day's work harder than you expected?"
he asked.
"Oh, no On the contrary, I think in time I shall get on with my
scholars very well."
"But perhaps your accommodations  your cottage  your furniture
have disappointed your expectations? They are, in truth,
scanty enough but  " I interrupted 
"My cottage is clean and weatherproof my furniture sufficient
and commodious. All I see has made me thankful, not despondent.
I am not absolutely such a fool and sensualist as to regret the
absence of a carpet, a sofa, and silver plate besides, five weeks
ago I had nothing  I was an outcast, a beggar, a vagrant now I
have acquaintance, a home, a business. I wonder at the goodness
of God the generosity of my friends the bounty of my lot. I do
not repine."
"But you feel solitude an oppression? The little house there behind
you is dark and empty."
"I have hardly had time yet to enjoy a sense of tranquillity, much
less to grow impatient under one of loneliness."
"Very well I hope you feel the content you express at any rate,
your good sense will tell you that it is too soon yet to yield to
the vacillating fears of Lot's wife. What you had left before I
saw you, of course I do not know but I counsel you to resist firmly
every temptation which would incline you to look back pursue your
present career steadily, for some months at least."
"It is what I mean to do," I answered. St. John continued 
"It is hard work to control the workings of inclination and turn
the bent of nature but that it may be done, I know from experience.
God has given us, in a measure, the power to make our own fate
and when our energies seem to demand a sustenance they cannot get
when our will strains after a path we may not follow  we need
neither starve from inanition, nor stand still in despair we
have but to seek another nourishment for the mind, as strong as the
forbidden food it longed to taste  and perhaps purer and to hew
out for the adventurous foot a road as direct and broad as the one
Fortune has blocked up against us, if rougher than it.
"A year ago I was myself intensely miserable, because I thought I
had made a mistake in entering the ministry its uniform duties
wearied me to death. I burnt for the more active life of the
world  for the more exciting toils of a literary career  for
the destiny of an artist, author, orator anything rather than
that of a priest yes, the heart of a politician, of a soldier,
of a votary of glory, a lover of renown, a luster after power, beat
under my curate's surplice. I considered my life was so wretched,
it must be changed, or I must die. After a season of darkness and
struggling, light broke and relief fell my cramped existence all
at once spread out to a plain without bounds  my powers heard a
call from heaven to rise, gather their full strength, spread their
wings, and mount beyond ken. God had an errand for me to bear which
afar, to deliver it well, skill and strength, courage and eloquence,
the best qualifications of soldier, statesman, and orator, were
all needed for these all centre in the good missionary.
"A missionary I resolved to be. From that moment my state of mind
changed the fetters dissolved and dropped from every faculty,
leaving nothing of bondage but its galling soreness  which time
only can heal. My father, indeed, imposed the determination,
but since his death, I have not a legitimate obstacle to contend
with some affairs settled, a successor for Morton provided, an
entanglement or two of the feelings broken through or cut asunder
a last conflict with human weakness, in which I know I shall
overcome, because I have vowed that I WILL overcome  and I leave
Europe for the East."
He said this, in his peculiar, subdued, yet emphatic voice looking,
when he had ceased speaking, not at me, but at the setting sun, at
which I looked too. Both he and I had our backs towards the path
leading up the field to the wicket. We had heard no step on that
grassgrown track the water running in the vale was the one lulling
sound of the hour and scene we might well then start when
a gay voice, sweet as a silver bell, exclaimed 
"Good evening, Mr. Rivers. And good evening, old Carlo. Your dog
is quicker to recognise his friends than you are, sir he pricked
his ears and wagged his tail when I was at the bottom of the field,
and you have your back towards me now."
It was true. Though Mr. Rivers had started at the first of those
musical accents, as if a thunderbolt had split a cloud over his head,
he stood yet, at the close of the sentence, in the same attitude
in which the speaker had surprised him  his arm resting on the
gate, his face directed towards the west. He turned at last, with
measured deliberation. A vision, as it seemed to me, had risen at
his side. There appeared, within three feet of him, a form clad
in pure white  a youthful, graceful form full, yet fine in
contour and when, after bending to caress Carlo, it lifted up its
head, and threw back a long veil, there bloomed under his glance
a face of perfect beauty. Perfect beauty is a strong expression
but I do not retrace or qualify it as sweet features as ever the
temperate clime of Albion moulded as pure hues of rose and lily
as ever her humid gales and vapoury skies generated and screened,
justified, in this instance, the term. No charm was wanting, no
defect was perceptible the young girl had regular and delicate
lineaments eyes shaped and coloured as we see them in lovely
pictures, large, and dark, and full the long and shadowy eyelash
which encircles a fine eye with so soft a fascination the pencilled
brow which gives such clearness the white smooth forehead, which
adds such repose to the livelier beauties of tint and ray the
cheek oval, fresh, and smooth the lips, fresh too, ruddy, healthy,
sweetly formed the even and gleaming teeth without flaw the
small dimpled chin the ornament of rich, plenteous tresses  all
advantages, in short, which, combined, realise the ideal of beauty,
were fully hers. I wondered, as I looked at this fair creature
I admired her with my whole heart. Nature had surely formed her
in a partial mood and, forgetting her usual stinted stepmother
dole of gifts, had endowed this, her darling, with a granddame's
bounty.
What did St. John Rivers think of this earthly angel? I naturally
asked myself that question as I saw him turn to her and look at
her and, as naturally, I sought the answer to the inquiry in his
countenance. He had already withdrawn his eye from the Peri, and
was looking at a humble tuft of daisies which grew by the wicket.
"A lovely evening, but late for you to be out alone," he said, as
he crushed the snowy heads of the closed flowers with his foot.
"Oh, I only came home from S" she mentioned the name of a large
town some twenty miles distant "this afternoon. Papa told me you
had opened your school, and that the new mistress was come and
so I put on my bonnet after tea, and ran up the valley to see her
this is she?" pointing to me.
"It is," said St. John.
"Do you think you shall like Morton?" she asked of me, with a direct
and naive simplicity of tone and manner, pleasing, if childlike.
"I hope I shall. I have many inducements to do so."
"Did you find your scholars as attentive as you expected?"
"Quite."
"Do you like your house?"
"Very much."
"Have I furnished it nicely?"
"Very nicely, indeed."
"And made a good choice of an attendant for you in Alice Wood?"
"You have indeed. She is teachable and handy." This then, I thought,
is Miss Oliver, the heiress favoured, it seems, in the gifts of
fortune, as well as in those of nature What happy combination of
the planets presided over her birth, I wonder?
"I shall come up and help you to teach sometimes," she added. "It
will be a change for me to visit you now and then and I like a
change. Mr. Rivers, I have been SO gay during my stay at S. Last
night, or rather this morning, I was dancing till two o'clock. The
th regiment are stationed there since the riots and the officers
are the most agreeable men in the world they put all our young
knifegrinders and scissor merchants to shame."
It seemed to me that Mr. St. John's under lip protruded, and his
upper lip curled a moment. His mouth certainly looked a good deal
compressed, and the lower part of his face unusually stern and
square, as the laughing girl gave him this information. He lifted
his gaze, too, from the daisies, and turned it on her. An unsmiling,
a searching, a meaning gaze it was. She answered it with a second
laugh, and laughter well became her youth, her roses, her dimples,
her bright eyes.
As he stood, mute and grave, she again fell to caressing Carlo.
"Poor Carlo loves me," said she. "HE is not stern and distant to
his friends and if he could speak, he would not be silent."
As she patted the dog's head, bending with native grace before his
young and austere master, I saw a glow rise to that master's face.
I saw his solemn eye melt with sudden fire, and flicker with
resistless emotion. Flushed and kindled thus, he looked nearly as
beautiful for a man as she for a woman. His chest heaved once, as
if his large heart, weary of despotic constriction, had expanded,
despite the will, and made a vigorous bound for the attainment of
liberty. But he curbed it, I think, as a resolute rider would curb
a rearing steed. He responded neither by word nor movement to the
gentle advances made him.
"Papa says you never come to see us now," continued Miss Oliver,
looking up. "You are quite a stranger at Vale Hall. He is alone
this evening, and not very well will you return with me and visit
him?"
"It is not a seasonable hour to intrude on Mr. Oliver," answered
St. John.
"Not a seasonable hour But I declare it is. It is just the hour
when papa most wants company when the works are closed and he
has no business to occupy him. Now, Mr. Rivers, DO come. Why are
you so very shy, and so very sombre?" She filled up the hiatus
his silence left by a reply of her own.
"I forgot" she exclaimed, shaking her beautiful curled head, as
if shocked at herself. "I am so giddy and thoughtless DO excuse
me. It had slipped my memory that you have good reasons to be
indisposed for joining in my chatter. Diana and Mary have left
you, and Moor House is shut up, and you are so lonely. I am sure
I pity you. Do come and see papa."
"Not tonight, Miss Rosamond, not tonight."
Mr. St. John spoke almost like an automaton himself only knew
the effort it cost him thus to refuse.
"Well, if you are so obstinate, I will leave you for I dare not
stay any longer the dew begins to fall. Good evening"
She held out her hand. He just touched it. "Good evening" he
repeated, in a voice low and hollow as an echo. She turned, but
in a moment returned.
"Are you well?" she asked. Well might she put the question his
face was blanched as her gown.
"Quite well," he enunciated and, with a bow, he left the gate.
She went one way he another. She turned twice to gaze after him
as she tripped fairylike down the field he, as he strode firmly
across, never turned at all.
This spectacle of another's suffering and sacrifice rapt my thoughts
from exclusive meditation on my own. Diana Rivers had designated
her brother "inexorable as death." She had not exaggerated.
CHAPTER XXXII
I continued the labours of the villageschool as actively and
faithfully as I could. It was truly hard work at first. Some time
elapsed before, with all my efforts, I could comprehend my scholars
and their nature. Wholly untaught, with faculties quite torpid,
they seemed to me hopelessly dull and, at first sight, all dull
alike but I soon found I was mistaken. There was a difference
amongst them as amongst the educated and when I got to know them,
and they me, this difference rapidly developed itself. Their
amazement at me, my language, my rules, and ways, once subsided,
I found some of these heavylooking, gaping rustics wake up into
sharpwitted girls enough. Many showed themselves obliging, and
amiable too and I discovered amongst them not a few examples of
natural politeness, and innate selfrespect, as well as of excellent
capacity, that won both my goodwill and my admiration. These soon
took a pleasure in doing their work well, in keeping their persons
neat, in learning their tasks regularly, in acquiring quiet and
orderly manners. The rapidity of their progress, in some instances,
was even surprising and an honest and happy pride I took in it
besides, I began personally to like some of the best girls and they
liked me. I had amongst my scholars several farmers' daughters
young women grown, almost. These could already read, write, and sew
and to them I taught the elements of grammar, geography, history,
and the finer kinds of needlework. I found estimable characters
amongst them  characters desirous of information and disposed
for improvement  with whom I passed many a pleasant evening hour
in their own homes. Their parents then the farmer and his wife
loaded me with attentions. There was an enjoyment in accepting
their simple kindness, and in repaying it by a consideration
a scrupulous regard to their feelings  to which they were
not, perhaps, at all times accustomed, and which both charmed and
benefited them because, while it elevated them in their own eyes, it
made them emulous to merit the deferential treatment they received.
I felt I became a favourite in the neighbourhood. Whenever I went
out, I heard on all sides cordial salutations, and was welcomed with
friendly smiles. To live amidst general regard, though it be but
the regard of working people, is like "sitting in sunshine, calm
and sweet" serene inward feelings bud and bloom under the ray.
At this period of my life, my heart far oftener swelled with
thankfulness than sank with dejection and yet, reader, to tell
you all, in the midst of this calm, this useful existence  after
a day passed in honourable exertion amongst my scholars, an evening
spent in drawing or reading contentedly alone  I used to rush into
strange dreams at night dreams manycoloured, agitated, full of
the ideal, the stirring, the stormy  dreams where, amidst unusual
scenes, charged with adventure, with agitating risk and romantic
chance, I still again and again met Mr. Rochester, always at some
exciting crisis and then the sense of being in his arms, hearing
his voice, meeting his eye, touching his hand and cheek, loving
him, being loved by him  the hope of passing a lifetime at his
side, would be renewed, with all its first force and fire. Then
I awoke. Then I recalled where I was, and how situated. Then I
rose up on my curtainless bed, trembling and quivering and then
the still, dark night witnessed the convulsion of despair, and
heard the burst of passion. By nine o'clock the next morning I
was punctually opening the school tranquil, settled, prepared for
the steady duties of the day.
Rosamond Oliver kept her word in coming to visit me. Her call at
the school was generally made in the course of her morning ride.
She would canter up to the door on her pony, followed by a mounted
livery servant. Anything more exquisite than her appearance,
in her purple habit, with her Amazon's cap of black velvet placed
gracefully above the long curls that kissed her cheek and floated
to her shoulders, can scarcely be imagined and it was thus she
would enter the rustic building, and glide through the dazzled ranks
of the village children. She generally came at the hour when Mr.
Rivers was engaged in giving his daily catechising lesson. Keenly,
I fear, did the eye of the visitress pierce the young pastor's
heart. A sort of instinct seemed to warn him of her entrance, even
when he did not see it and when he was looking quite away from the
door, if she appeared at it, his cheek would glow, and his marble
seeming features, though they refused to relax, changed indescribably,
and in their very quiescence became expressive of a repressed fervour,
stronger than working muscle or darting glance could indicate.
Of course, she knew her power indeed, he did not, because he could
not, conceal it from her. In spite of his Christian stoicism, when
she went up and addressed him, and smiled gaily, encouragingly,
even fondly in his face, his hand would tremble and his eye burn.
He seemed to say, with his sad and resolute look, if he did not
say it with his lips, "I love you, and I know you prefer me. It is
not despair of success that keeps me dumb. If I offered my heart,
I believe you would accept it. But that heart is already laid on
a sacred altar the fire is arranged round it. It will soon be
no more than a sacrifice consumed."
And then she would pout like a disappointed child a pensive cloud
would soften her radiant vivacity she would withdraw her hand
hastily from his, and turn in transient petulance from his aspect,
at once so heroic and so martyrlike. St. John, no doubt, would
have given the world to follow, recall, retain her, when she thus
left him but he would not give one chance of heaven, nor relinquish,
for the elysium of her love, one hope of the true, eternal Paradise.
Besides, he could not bind all that he had in his nature  the
rover, the aspirant, the poet, the priest  in the limits of a
single passion. He could not  he would not  renounce his wild
field of mission warfare for the parlours and the peace of Vale
Hall. I learnt so much from himself in an inroad I once, despite
his reserve, had the daring to make on his confidence.
Miss Oliver already honoured me with frequent visits to my cottage.
I had learnt her whole character, which was without mystery or
disguise she was coquettish but not heartless exacting, but not
worthlessly selfish. She had been indulged from her birth, but was
not absolutely spoilt. She was hasty, but goodhumoured vain she
could not help it, when every glance in the glass showed her such
a flush of loveliness, but not affected liberalhanded innocent
of the pride of wealth ingenuous sufficiently intelligent gay,
lively, and unthinking she was very charming, in short, even to
a cool observer of her own sex like me but she was not profoundly
interesting or thoroughly impressive. A very different sort of
mind was hers from that, for instance, of the sisters of St. John.
Still, I liked her almost as I liked my pupil Adele except that,
for a child whom we have watched over and taught, a closer affection is
engendered than we can give an equally attractive adult acquaintance.
She had taken an amiable caprice to me. She said I was like Mr.
Rivers, only, certainly, she allowed, "not onetenth so handsome,
though I was a nice neat little soul enough, but he was an angel."
I was, however, good, clever, composed, and firm, like him. I was
a lusus naturae, she affirmed, as a village schoolmistress she
was sure my previous history, if known, would make a delightful
romance.
One evening, while, with her usual childlike activity, and thoughtless
yet not offensive inquisitiveness, she was rummaging the cupboard
and the tabledrawer of my little kitchen, she discovered first two
French books, a volume of Schiller, a German grammar and dictionary,
and then my drawingmaterials and some sketches, including a
pencilhead of a pretty little cherublike girl, one of my scholars,
and sundry views from nature, taken in the Vale of Morton and on
the surrounding moors. She was first transfixed with surprise,
and then electrified with delight.
"Had I done these pictures? Did I know French and German? What
a love  what a miracle I was I drew better than her master in
the first school in S. Would I sketch a portrait of her, to show
to papa?"
"With pleasure," I replied and I felt a thrill of artistdelight
at the idea of copying from so perfect and radiant a model. She
had then on a darkblue silk dress her arms and her neck were
bare her only ornament was her chestnut tresses, which waved over
her shoulders with all the wild grace of natural curls. I took a
sheet of fine cardboard, and drew a careful outline. I promised
myself the pleasure of colouring it and, as it was getting late
then, I told her she must come and sit another day.
She made such a report of me to her father, that Mr. Oliver
himself accompanied her next evening  a tall, massivefeatured,
middleaged, and greyheaded man, at whose side his lovely daughter
looked like a bright flower near a hoary turret. He appeared
a taciturn, and perhaps a proud personage but he was very kind
to me. The sketch of Rosamond's portrait pleased him highly he
said I must make a finished picture of it. He insisted, too, on
my coming the next day to spend the evening at Vale Hall.
I went. I found it a large, handsome residence, showing abundant
evidences of wealth in the proprietor. Rosamond was full of glee
and pleasure all the time I stayed. Her father was affable and
when he entered into conversation with me after tea, he expressed
in strong terms his approbation of what I had done in Morton school,
and said he only feared, from what he saw and heard, I was too good
for the place, and would soon quit it for one more suitable.
"Indeed," cried Rosamond, "she is clever enough to be a governess
in a high family, papa."
I thought I would far rather be where I am than in any high family
in the land. Mr. Oliver spoke of Mr. Rivers  of the Rivers family
with great respect. He said it was a very old name in that
neighbourhood that the ancestors of the house were wealthy that
all Morton had once belonged to them that even now he considered
the representative of that house might, if he liked, make an alliance
with the best. He accounted it a pity that so fine and talented a
young man should have formed the design of going out as a missionary
it was quite throwing a valuable life away. It appeared, then,
that her father would throw no obstacle in the way of Rosamond's
union with St. John. Mr. Oliver evidently regarded the young
clergyman's good birth, old name, and sacred profession as sufficient
compensation for the want of fortune.
It was the th of November, and a holiday. My little servant,
after helping me to clean my house, was gone, well satisfied with
the fee of a penny for her aid. All about me was spotless and
bright  scoured floor, polished grate, and wellrubbed chairs.
I had also made myself neat, and had now the afternoon before me
to spend as I would.
The translation of a few pages of German occupied an hour then I
got my palette and pencils, and fell to the more soothing, because
easier occupation, of completing Rosamond Oliver's miniature. The
head was finished already there was but the background to tint
and the drapery to shade off a touch of carmine, too, to add to
the ripe lips  a soft curl here and there to the tresses  a
deeper tinge to the shadow of the lash under the azured eyelid. I
was absorbed in the execution of these nice details, when, after
one rapid tap, my door unclosed, admitting St. John Rivers.
"I am come to see how you are spending your holiday," he said. "Not,
I hope, in thought? No, that is well while you draw you will
not feel lonely. You see, I mistrust you still, though you have
borne up wonderfully so far. I have brought you a book for evening
solace," and he laid on the table a new publication  a poem one
of those genuine productions so often vouchsafed to the fortunate
public of those days  the golden age of modern literature. Alas
the readers of our era are less favoured. But courage I will
not pause either to accuse or repine. I know poetry is not dead,
nor genius lost nor has Mammon gained power over either, to bind
or slay they will both assert their existence, their presence,
their liberty and strength again one day. Powerful angels, safe
in heaven they smile when sordid souls triumph, and feeble ones
weep over their destruction. Poetry destroyed? Genius banished?
No Mediocrity, no do not let envy prompt you to the thought.
No they not only live, but reign and redeem and without their
divine influence spread everywhere, you would be in hell  the
hell of your own meanness.
While I was eagerly glancing at the bright pages of "Marmion" for
"Marmion" it was, St. John stooped to examine my drawing. His
tall figure sprang erect again with a start he said nothing. I
looked up at him he shunned my eye. I knew his thoughts well,
and could read his heart plainly at the moment I felt calmer and
cooler than he I had then temporarily the advantage of him, and
I conceived an inclination to do him some good, if I could.
"With all his firmness and selfcontrol," thought I, "he tasks
himself too far locks every feeling and pang within  expresses,
confesses, imparts nothing. I am sure it would benefit him to talk
a little about this sweet Rosamond, whom he thinks he ought not to
marry I will make him talk."
I said first, "Take a chair, Mr. Rivers." But he answered, as
he always did, that he could not stay. "Very well," I responded,
mentally, "stand if you like but you shall not go just yet, I am
determined solitude is at least as bad for you as it is for me.
I'll try if I cannot discover the secret spring of your confidence,
and find an aperture in that marble breast through which I can shed
one drop of the balm of sympathy."
"Is this portrait like?" I asked bluntly.
"Like Like whom? I did not observe it closely."
"You did, Mr. Rivers."
He almost started at my sudden and strange abruptness he looked
at me astonished. "Oh, that is nothing yet," I muttered within.
"I don't mean to be baffled by a little stiffness on your part
I'm prepared to go to considerable lengths." I continued, "You
observed it closely and distinctly but I have no objection to your
looking at it again," and I rose and placed it in his hand.
"A wellexecuted picture," he said "very soft, clear colouring
very graceful and correct drawing."
"Yes, yes I know all that. But what of the resemblance? Who is
it like?"
Mastering some hesitation, he answered, "Miss Oliver, I presume."
"Of course. And now, sir, to reward you for the accurate guess, I
will promise to paint you a careful and faithful duplicate of this
very picture, provided you admit that the gift would be acceptable
to you. I don't wish to throw away my time and trouble on an
offering you would deem worthless."
He continued to gaze at the picture the longer he looked, the
firmer he held it, the more he seemed to covet it. "It is like"
he murmured "the eye is well managed the colour, light, expression,
are perfect. It smiles"
"Would it comfort, or would it wound you to have a similar painting?
Tell me that. When you are at Madagascar, or at the Cape, or
in India, would it be a consolation to have that memento in your
possession? or would the sight of it bring recollections calculated
to enervate and distress?"
He now furtively raised his eyes he glanced at me, irresolute,
disturbed he again surveyed the picture.
"That I should like to have it is certain whether it would be
judicious or wise is another question."
Since I had ascertained that Rosamond really preferred him, and that
her father was not likely to oppose the match, I  less exalted
in my views than St. John  had been strongly disposed in my
own heart to advocate their union. It seemed to me that, should
he become the possessor of Mr. Oliver's large fortune, he might
do as much good with it as if he went and laid his genius out to
wither, and his strength to waste, under a tropical sun. With
this persuasion I now answered 
"As far as I can see, it would be wiser and more judicious if you
were to take to yourself the original at once."
By this time he had sat down he had laid the picture on the table
before him, and with his brow supported on both hands, hung fondly
over it. I discerned he was now neither angry nor shocked at my
audacity. I saw even that to be thus frankly addressed on a subject
he had deemed unapproachable  to hear it thus freely handled 
was beginning to be felt by him as a new pleasure  an unhopedfor
relief. Reserved people often really need the frank discussion
of their sentiments and griefs more than the expansive. The
sternestseeming stoic is human after all and to "burst" with
boldness and goodwill into "the silent sea" of their souls is
often to confer on them the first of obligations.
"She likes you, I am sure," said I, as I stood behind his chair,
"and her father respects you. Moreover, she is a sweet girl 
rather thoughtless but you would have sufficient thought for both
yourself and her. You ought to marry her."
"DOES she like me?" he asked.
"Certainly better than she likes any one else. She talks of you
continually there is no subject she enjoys so much or touches
upon so often."
"It is very pleasant to hear this," he said  "very go on for
another quarter of an hour." And he actually took out his watch
and laid it upon the table to measure the time.
"But where is the use of going on," I asked, "when you are probably
preparing some iron blow of contradiction, or forging a fresh chain
to fetter your heart?"
"Don't imagine such hard things. Fancy me yielding and melting,
as I am doing human love rising like a freshly opened fountain
in my mind and overflowing with sweet inundation all the field I
have so carefully and with such labour prepared  so assiduously
sown with the seeds of good intentions, of selfdenying plans. And
now it is deluged with a nectarous flood  the young germs swamped
delicious poison cankering them now I see myself stretched on
an ottoman in the drawingroom at Vale Hall at my bride Rosamond
Oliver's feet she is talking to me with her sweet voice  gazing
down on me with those eyes your skilful hand has copied so well
smiling at me with these coral lips. She is mine  I am hers
this present life and passing world suffice to me. Hush say
nothing  my heart is full of delight  my senses are entranced
let the time I marked pass in peace."
I humoured him the watch ticked on he breathed fast and low I
stood silent. Amidst this hush the quartet sped he replaced the
watch, laid the picture down, rose, and stood on the hearth.
"Now," said he, "that little space was given to delirium and delusion.
I rested my temples on the breast of temptation, and put my neck
voluntarily under her yoke of flowers. I tasted her cup. The
pillow was burning there is an asp in the garland the wine has
a bitter taste her promises are hollow  her offers false I
see and know all this."
I gazed at him in wonder.
"It is strange," pursued he, "that while I love Rosamond Oliver so
wildly  with all the intensity, indeed, of a first passion, the
object of which is exquisitely beautiful, graceful, fascinating 
I experience at the same time a calm, unwarped consciousness that
she would not make me a good wife that she is not the partner suited
to me that I should discover this within a year after marriage
and that to twelve months' rapture would succeed a lifetime of
regret. This I know."
"Strange indeed" I could not help ejaculating.
"While something in me," he went on, "is acutely sensible to her
charms, something else is as deeply impressed with her defects they
are such that she could sympathise in nothing I aspired to  co
operate in nothing I undertook. Rosamond a sufferer, a labourer,
a female apostle? Rosamond a missionary's wife? No"
"But you need not be a missionary. You might relinquish that
scheme."
"Relinquish What my vocation? My great work? My foundation
laid on earth for a mansion in heaven? My hopes of being numbered
in the band who have merged all ambitions in the glorious one of
bettering their race  of carrying knowledge into the realms of
ignorance  of substituting peace for war  freedom for bondage
religion for superstition  the hope of heaven for the fear of
hell? Must I relinquish that? It is dearer than the blood in my
veins. It is what I have to look forward to, and to live for."
After a considerable pause, I said  "And Miss Oliver? Are her
disappointment and sorrow of no interest to you?"
"Miss Oliver is ever surrounded by suitors and flatterers in less
than a month, my image will be effaced from her heart. She will
forget me and will marry, probably, some one who will make her
far happier than I should do."
"You speak coolly enough but you suffer in the conflict. You are
wasting away."
"No. If I get a little thin, it is with anxiety about my prospects,
yet unsettled  my departure, continually procrastinated. Only
this morning, I received intelligence that the successor, whose
arrival I have been so long expecting, cannot be ready to replace
me for three months to come yet and perhaps the three months may
extend to six."
"You tremble and become flushed whenever Miss Oliver enters the
schoolroom."
Again the surprised expression crossed his face. He had not imagined
that a woman would dare to speak so to a man. For me, I felt at
home in this sort of discourse. I could never rest in communication
with strong, discreet, and refined minds, whether male or female,
till I had passed the outworks of conventional reserve, and crossed
the threshold of confidence, and won a place by their heart's very
hearthstone.
"You are original," said he, "and not timid. There is something
brave in your spirit, as well as penetrating in your eye but allow
me to assure you that you partially misinterpret my emotions. You
think them more profound and potent than they are. You give me a
larger allowance of sympathy than I have a just claim to. When I
colour, and when I shade before Miss Oliver, I do not pity myself.
I scorn the weakness. I know it is ignoble a mere fever of the
flesh not, I declare, the convulsion of the soul. THAT is just
as fixed as a rock, firm set in the depths of a restless sea. Know
me to be what I am  a cold hard man."
I smiled incredulously.
"You have taken my confidence by storm," he continued, "and now
it is much at your service. I am simply, in my original state 
stripped of that bloodbleached robe with which Christianity covers
human deformity  a cold, hard, ambitious man. Natural affection
only, of all the sentiments, has permanent power over me. Reason,
and not feeling, is my guide my ambition is unlimited my desire
to rise higher, to do more than others, insatiable. I honour
endurance, perseverance, industry, talent because these are the
means by which men achieve great ends and mount to lofty eminence.
I watch your career with interest, because I consider you a specimen
of a diligent, orderly, energetic woman not because I deeply
compassionate what you have gone through, or what you still suffer."
"You would describe yourself as a mere pagan philosopher," I said.
"No. There is this difference between me and deistic philosophers
I believe and I believe the Gospel. You missed your epithet. I
am not a pagan, but a Christian philosopher  a follower of the
sect of Jesus. As His disciple I adopt His pure, His merciful,
His benignant doctrines. I advocate them I am sworn to spread
them. Won in youth to religion, she has cultivated my original
qualities thus From the minute germ, natural affection, she has
developed the overshadowing tree, philanthropy. From the wild
stringy root of human uprightness, she has reared a due sense of
the Divine justice. Of the ambition to win power and renown for
my wretched self, she has formed the ambition to spread my Master's
kingdom to achieve victories for the standard of the cross. So
much has religion done for me turning the original materials to
the best account pruning and training nature. But she could not
eradicate nature nor will it be eradicated 'till this mortal
shall put on immortality.'"
Having said this, he took his hat, which lay on the table beside
my palette. Once more he looked at the portrait.
"She IS lovely," he murmured. "She is well named the Rose of the
World, indeed"
"And may I not paint one like it for you?"
"CUI BONO? No."
He drew over the picture the sheet of thin paper on which I was
accustomed to rest my hand in painting, to prevent the cardboard
from being sullied. What he suddenly saw on this blank paper, it
was impossible for me to tell but something had caught his eye.
He took it up with a snatch he looked at the edge then shot a
glance at me, inexpressibly peculiar, and quite incomprehensible
a glance that seemed to take and make note of every point in
my shape, face, and dress for it traversed all, quick, keen as
lightning. His lips parted, as if to speak but he checked the
coming sentence, whatever it was.
"What is the matter?" I asked.
"Nothing in the world," was the reply and, replacing the paper,
I saw him dexterously tear a narrow slip from the margin. It
disappeared in his glove and, with one hasty nod and "goodafternoon,"
he vanished.
"Well" I exclaimed, using an expression of the district, "that
caps the globe, however"
I, in my turn, scrutinised the paper but saw nothing on it save a
few dingy stains of paint where I had tried the tint in my pencil.
I pondered the mystery a minute or two but finding it insolvable,
and being certain it could not be of much moment, I dismissed, and
soon forgot it.
CHAPTER XXXIII
When Mr. St. John went, it was beginning to snow the whirling
storm continued all night. The next day a keen wind brought fresh
and blinding falls by twilight the valley was drifted up and almost
impassable. I had closed my shutter, laid a mat to the door to
prevent the snow from blowing in under it, trimmed my fire, and
after sitting nearly an hour on the hearth listening to the muffled
fury of the tempest, I lit a candle, took down "Marmion," and beginning 
"Day set on Norham's castled steep,
And Tweed's fair river broad and deep,
And Cheviot's mountains lone
The massive towers, the donjon keep,
The flanking walls that round them sweep,
In yellow lustre shone" 
I soon forgot storm in music.
I heard a noise the wind, I thought, shook the door. No it was
St. John Rivers, who, lifting the latch, came in out of the frozen
hurricane  the howling darkness  and stood before me the
cloak that covered his tall figure all white as a glacier. I was
almost in consternation, so little had I expected any guest from
the blockedup vale that night.
"Any ill news?" I demanded. "Has anything happened?"
"No. How very easily alarmed you are" he answered, removing his
cloak and hanging it up against the door, towards which he again
coolly pushed the mat which his entrance had deranged. He stamped
the snow from his boots.
"I shall sully the purity of your floor," said he, "but you must
excuse me for once." Then he approached the fire. "I have had
hard work to get here, I assure you," he observed, as he warmed his
hands over the flame. "One drift took me up to the waist happily
the snow is quite soft yet."
"But why are you come?" I could not forbear saying.
"Rather an inhospitable question to put to a visitor but since
you ask it, I answer simply to have a little talk with you I got
tired of my mute books and empty rooms. Besides, since yesterday
I have experienced the excitement of a person to whom a tale has
been half told, and who is impatient to hear the sequel."
He sat down. I recalled his singular conduct of yesterday, and
really I began to fear his wits were touched. If he were insane,
however, his was a very cool and collected insanity I had never
seen that handsomefeatured face of his look more like chiselled
marble than it did just now, as he put aside his snowwet hair from
his forehead and let the firelight shine free on his pale brow and
cheek as pale, where it grieved me to discover the hollow trace of
care or sorrow now so plainly graved. I waited, expecting he would
say something I could at least comprehend but his hand was now at
his chin, his finger on his lip he was thinking. It struck me
that his hand looked wasted like his face. A perhaps uncalledfor
gush of pity came over my heart I was moved to say 
"I wish Diana or Mary would come and live with you it is too bad
that you should be quite alone and you are recklessly rash about
your own health."
"Not at all," said he "I care for myself when necessary. I am
well now. What do you see amiss in me?"
This was said with a careless, abstracted indifference, which showed
that my solicitude was, at least in his opinion, wholly superfluous.
I was silenced.
He still slowly moved his finger over his upper lip, and still his
eye dwelt dreamily on the glowing grate thinking it urgent to say
something, I asked him presently if he felt any cold draught from
the door, which was behind him.
"No, no" he responded shortly and somewhat testily.
"Well," I reflected, "if you won't talk, you may be still I'll
let you alone now, and return to my book."
So I snuffed the candle and resumed the perusal of "Marmion." He
soon stirred my eye was instantly drawn to his movements he only
took out a morocco pocketbook, thence produced a letter, which he
read in silence, folded it, put it back, relapsed into meditation.
It was vain to try to read with such an inscrutable fixture before
me nor could I, in impatience, consent to be dumb he might rebuff
me if he liked, but talk I would.
"Have you heard from Diana and Mary lately?"
"Not since the letter I showed you a week ago."
"There has not been any change made about your own arrangements?
You will not be summoned to leave England sooner than you expected?"
"I fear not, indeed such chance is too good to befall me." Baffled
so far, I changed my ground. I bethought myself to talk about the
school and my scholars.
"Mary Garrett's mother is better, and Mary came back to the school
this morning, and I shall have four new girls next week from the
Foundry Close  they would have come today but for the snow."
"Indeed"
"Mr. Oliver pays for two."
"Does he?"
"He means to give the whole school a treat at Christmas."
"I know."
"Was it your suggestion?"
"No."
"Whose, then?"
"His daughter's, I think."
"It is like her she is so goodnatured."
"Yes."
Again came the blank of a pause the clock struck eight strokes.
It aroused him he uncrossed his legs, sat erect, turned to me.
"Leave your book a moment, and come a little nearer the fire," he
said.
Wondering, and of my wonder finding no end, I complied.
"Halfanhour ago," he pursued, "I spoke of my impatience to hear
the sequel of a tale on reflection, I find the matter will be
better managed by my assuming the narrator's part, and converting
you into a listener. Before commencing, it is but fair to warn
you that the story will sound somewhat hackneyed in your ears but
stale details often regain a degree of freshness when they pass
through new lips. For the rest, whether trite or novel, it is
short.
"Twenty years ago, a poor curate  never mind his name at this
moment  fell in love with a rich man's daughter she fell in love
with him, and married him, against the advice of all her friends,
who consequently disowned her immediately after the wedding. Before
two years passed, the rash pair were both dead, and laid quietly
side by side under one slab. I have seen their grave it formed
part of the pavement of a huge churchyard surrounding the grim,
sootblack old cathedral of an overgrown manufacturing town in
shire. They left a daughter, which, at its very birth, Charity
received in her lap  cold as that of the snowdrift I almost stuck
fast in tonight. Charity carried the friendless thing to the house
of its rich maternal relations it was reared by an auntinlaw,
called I come to names now Mrs. Reed of Gateshead. You start 
did you hear a noise? I daresay it is only a rat scrambling along
the rafters of the adjoining schoolroom it was a barn before
I had it repaired and altered, and barns are generally haunted by
rats.  To proceed. Mrs. Reed kept the orphan ten years whether
it was happy or not with her, I cannot say, never having been told
but at the end of that time she transferred it to a place you know
being no other than Lowood School, where you so long resided
yourself. It seems her career there was very honourable from a
pupil, she became a teacher, like yourself  really it strikes me
there are parallel points in her history and yours  she left it
to be a governess there, again, your fates were analogous she
undertook the education of the ward of a certain Mr. Rochester."
"Mr. Rivers" I interrupted.
"I can guess your feelings," he said, "but restrain them for a while
I have nearly finished hear me to the end. Of Mr. Rochester's
character I know nothing, but the one fact that he professed to
offer honourable marriage to this young girl, and that at the very
altar she discovered he had a wife yet alive, though a lunatic.
What his subsequent conduct and proposals were is a matter of pure
conjecture but when an event transpired which rendered inquiry
after the governess necessary, it was discovered she was gone  no
one could tell when, where, or how. She had left Thornfield Hall
in the night every research after her course had been vain the
country had been scoured far and wide no vestige of information
could be gathered respecting her. Yet that she should be found is
become a matter of serious urgency advertisements have been put
in all the papers I myself have received a letter from one Mr.
Briggs, a solicitor, communicating the details I have just imparted.
Is it not an odd tale?"
"Just tell me this," said I, "and since you know so much, you
surely can tell it me  what of Mr. Rochester? How and where is
he? What is he doing? Is he well?"
"I am ignorant of all concerning Mr. Rochester the letter never
mentions him but to narrate the fraudulent and illegal attempt I
have adverted to. You should rather ask the name of the governess
the nature of the event which requires her appearance."
"Did no one go to Thornfield Hall, then? Did no one see Mr.
Rochester?"
"I suppose not."
"But they wrote to him?"
"Of course."
"And what did he say? Who has his letters?"
"Mr. Briggs intimates that the answer to his application was not
from Mr. Rochester, but from a lady it is signed 'Alice Fairfax.'"
I felt cold and dismayed my worst fears then were probably true
he had in all probability left England and rushed in reckless
desperation to some former haunt on the Continent. And what opiate
for his severe sufferings  what object for his strong passions
had he sought there? I dared not answer the question. Oh, my
poor master  once almost my husband  whom I had often called
"my dear Edward"
"He must have been a bad man," observed Mr. Rivers.
"You don't know him  don't pronounce an opinion upon him," I
said, with warmth.
"Very well," he answered quietly "and indeed my head is otherwise
occupied than with him I have my tale to finish. Since you won't
ask the governess's name, I must tell it of my own accord. Stay
I have it here  it is always more satisfactory to see important
points written down, fairly committed to black and white."
And the pocketbook was again deliberately produced, opened, sought
through from one of its compartments was extracted a shabby slip
of paper, hastily torn off I recognised in its texture and its
stains of ultramarine, and lake, and vermillion, the ravished margin
of the portraitcover. He got up, held it close to my eyes and
I read, traced in Indian ink, in my own handwriting, the words
"JANE EYRE"  the work doubtless of some moment of abstraction.
"Briggs wrote to me of a Jane Eyre" he said, "the advertisements
demanded a Jane Eyre I knew a Jane Elliott.  I confess I had my
suspicions, but it was only yesterday afternoon they were at once
resolved into certainty. You own the name and renounce the alias?"
"Yes  yes but where is Mr. Briggs? He perhaps knows more of
Mr. Rochester than you do."
"Briggs is in London. I should doubt his knowing anything at all
about Mr. Rochester it is not in Mr. Rochester he is interested.
Meantime, you forget essential points in pursuing trifles you do
not inquire why Mr. Briggs sought after you  what he wanted with
you."
"Well, what did he want?"
"Merely to tell you that your uncle, Mr. Eyre of Madeira, is dead
that he has left you all his property, and that you are now rich
merely that  nothing more."
"I  rich?"
"Yes, you, rich  quite an heiress."
Silence succeeded.
"You must prove your identity of course," resumed St. John presently
"a step which will offer no difficulties you can then enter on
immediate possession. Your fortune is vested in the English funds
Briggs has the will and the necessary documents."
Here was a new card turned up It is a fine thing, reader, to be
lifted in a moment from indigence to wealth  a very fine thing
but not a matter one can comprehend, or consequently enjoy, all at
once. And then there are other chances in life far more thrilling
and rapturegiving THIS is solid, an affair of the actual world,
nothing ideal about it all its associations are solid and sober,
and its manifestations are the same. One does not jump, and spring,
and shout hurrah at hearing one has got a fortune one begins
to consider responsibilities, and to ponder business on a base
of steady satisfaction rise certain grave cares, and we contain
ourselves, and brood over our bliss with a solemn brow.
Besides, the words Legacy, Bequest, go side by side with the words,
Death, Funeral. My uncle I had heard was dead  my only relative
ever since being made aware of his existence, I had cherished the
hope of one day seeing him now, I never should. And then this
money came only to me not to me and a rejoicing family, but to
my isolated self. It was a grand boon doubtless and independence
would be glorious  yes, I felt that  that thought swelled my
heart.
"You unbend your forehead at last," said Mr. Rivers. "I thought
Medusa had looked at you, and that you were turning to stone.
Perhaps now you will ask how much you are worth?"
"How much am I worth?"
"Oh, a trifle Nothing of course to speak of  twenty thousand
pounds, I think they say  but what is that?"
"Twenty thousand pounds?"
Here was a new stunner  I had been calculating on four or five
thousand. This news actually took my breath for a moment Mr.
St. John, whom I had never heard laugh before, laughed now.
"Well," said he, "if you had committed a murder, and I had told
you your crime was discovered, you could scarcely look more aghast."
"It is a large sum  don't you think there is a mistake?"
"No mistake at all."
"Perhaps you have read the figures wrong  it may be two thousand"
"It is written in letters, not figures,  twenty thousand."
I again felt rather like an individual of but average gastronomical
powers sitting down to feast alone at a table spread with provisions
for a hundred. Mr. Rivers rose now and put his cloak on.
"If it were not such a very wild night," he said, "I would send
Hannah down to keep you company you look too desperately miserable
to be left alone. But Hannah, poor woman could not stride the
drifts so well as I her legs are not quite so long so I must
e'en leave you to your sorrows. Goodnight."
He was lifting the latch a sudden thought occurred to me. "Stop
one minute" I cried.
"Well?"
"It puzzles me to know why Mr. Briggs wrote to you about me or how
he knew you, or could fancy that you, living in such an outoftheway
place, had the power to aid in my discovery."
"Oh I am a clergyman," he said "and the clergy are often appealed
to about odd matters." Again the latch rattled.
"No that does not satisfy me" I exclaimed and indeed there
was something in the hasty and unexplanatory reply which, instead
of allaying, piqued my curiosity more than ever.
"It is a very strange piece of business," I added "I must know
more about it."
"Another time."
"No tonight  tonight" and as he turned from the door, I
placed myself between it and him. He looked rather embarrassed.
"You certainly shall not go till you have told me all," I said.
"I would rather not just now."
"You shall  you must"
"I would rather Diana or Mary informed you."
Of course these objections wrought my eagerness to a climax
gratified it must be, and that without delay and I told him so.
"But I apprised you that I was a hard man," said he, "difficult to
persuade."
"And I am a hard woman,  impossible to put off."
"And then," he pursued, "I am cold no fervour infects me."
"Whereas I am hot, and fire dissolves ice. The blaze there has
thawed all the snow from your cloak by the same token, it has
streamed on to my floor, and made it like a trampled street. As
you hope ever to be forgiven, Mr. Rivers, the high crime and
misdemeanour of spoiling a sanded kitchen, tell me what I wish to
know."
"Well, then," he said, "I yield if not to your earnestness, to your
perseverance as stone is worn by continual dropping. Besides,
you must know some day,  as well now as later. Your name is Jane
Eyre?"
"Of course that was all settled before."
"You are not, perhaps, aware that I am your namesake?  that I
was christened St. John Eyre Rivers?"
"No, indeed I remember now seeing the letter E. comprised in your
initials written in books you have at different times lent me but
I never asked for what name it stood. But what then? Surely  "
I stopped I could not trust myself to entertain, much less to
express, the thought that rushed upon me  that embodied itself,
that, in a second, stood out a strong, solid probability.
Circumstances knit themselves, fitted themselves, shot into order
the chain that had been lying hitherto a formless lump of links
was drawn out straight,  every ring was perfect, the connection
complete. I knew, by instinct, how the matter stood, before St.
John had said another word but I cannot expect the reader to have
the same intuitive perception, so I must repeat his explanation.
"My mother's name was Eyre she had two brothers one a clergyman,
who married Miss Jane Reed, of Gateshead the other, John Eyre, Esq.,
merchant, late of Funchal, Madeira. Mr. Briggs, being Mr. Eyre's
solicitor, wrote to us last August to inform us of our uncle's
death, and to say that he had left his property to his brother the
clergyman's orphan daughter, overlooking us, in consequence of a
quarrel, never forgiven, between him and my father. He wrote again
a few weeks since, to intimate that the heiress was lost, and asking
if we knew anything of her. A name casually written on a slip of
paper has enabled me to find her out. You know the rest." Again
he was going, but I set my back against the door.
"Do let me speak," I said "let me have one moment to draw breath
and reflect." I paused  he stood before me, hat in hand,
looking composed enough. I resumed 
"Your mother was my father's sister?"
"Yes."
"My aunt, consequently?"
He bowed.
"My uncle John was your uncle John? You, Diana, and Mary are his
sister's children, as I am his brother's child?"
"Undeniably."
"You three, then, are my cousins half our blood on each side flows
from the same source?"
"We are cousins yes."
I surveyed him. It seemed I had found a brother one I could be
proud of,  one I could love and two sisters, whose qualities
were such, that, when I knew them but as mere strangers, they had
inspired me with genuine affection and admiration. The two girls,
on whom, kneeling down on the wet ground, and looking through the
low, latticed window of Moor House kitchen, I had gazed with so
bitter a mixture of interest and despair, were my near kinswomen
and the young and stately gentleman who had found me almost dying
at his threshold was my blood relation. Glorious discovery to a
lonely wretch This was wealth indeed  wealth to the heart 
a mine of pure, genial affections. This was a blessing, bright,
vivid, and exhilarating  not like the ponderous gift of gold
rich and welcome enough in its way, but sobering from its weight.
I now clapped my hands in sudden joy  my pulse bounded, my veins
thrilled.
"Oh, I am glad  I am glad" I exclaimed.
St. John smiled. "Did I not say you neglected essential points
to pursue trifles?" he asked. "You were serious when I told you
you had got a fortune and now, for a matter of no moment, you are
excited."
"What can you mean? It may be of no moment to you you have
sisters and don't care for a cousin but I had nobody and now
three relations,  or two, if you don't choose to be counted, 
are born into my world fullgrown. I say again, I am glad"
I walked fast through the room I stopped, half suffocated with
the thoughts that rose faster than I could receive, comprehend,
settle them thoughts of what might, could, would, and should be,
and that ere long. I looked at the blank wall it seemed a sky
thick with ascending stars,  every one lit me to a purpose or
delight. Those who had saved my life, whom, till this hour, I had
loved barrenly, I could now benefit. They were under a yoke, 
I could free them they were scattered,  I could reunite them
the independence, the affluence which was mine, might be theirs too.
Were we not four? Twenty thousand pounds shared equally would be
five thousand each, justice  enough and to spare justice would
be done,  mutual happiness secured. Now the wealth did not weigh
on me now it was not a mere bequest of coin,  it was a legacy
of life, hope, enjoyment.
How I looked while these ideas were taking my spirit by storm,
I cannot tell but I perceived soon that Mr. Rivers had placed a
chair behind me, and was gently attempting to make me sit down on
it. He also advised me to be composed I scorned the insinuation
of helplessness and distraction, shook off his hand, and began to
walk about again.
"Write to Diana and Mary tomorrow," I said, "and tell them to come
home directly. Diana said they would both consider themselves rich
with a thousand pounds, so with five thousand they will do very
well."
"Tell me where I can get you a glass of water," said St. John "you
must really make an effort to tranquillise your feelings."
"Nonsense and what sort of an effect will the bequest have on you?
Will it keep you in England, induce you to marry Miss Oliver, and
settle down like an ordinary mortal?"
"You wander your head becomes confused. I have been too abrupt
in communicating the news it has excited you beyond your strength."
"Mr. Rivers you quite put me out of patience I am rational enough
it is you who misunderstand, or rather who affect to misunderstand."
"Perhaps, if you explained yourself a little more fully, I should
comprehend better."
"Explain What is there to explain? You cannot fail to see that
twenty thousand pounds, the sum in question, divided equally between
the nephew and three nieces of our uncle, will give five thousand
to each? What I want is, that you should write to your sisters
and tell them of the fortune that has accrued to them."
"To you, you mean."
"I have intimated my view of the case I am incapable of taking any
other. I am not brutally selfish, blindly unjust, or fiendishly
ungrateful. Besides, I am resolved I will have a home and
connections. I like Moor House, and I will live at Moor House
I like Diana and Mary, and I will attach myself for life to Diana
and Mary. It would please and benefit me to have five thousand
pounds it would torment and oppress me to have twenty thousand
which, moreover, could never be mine in justice, though it might
in law. I abandon to you, then, what is absolutely superfluous to
me. Let there be no opposition, and no discussion about it let
us agree amongst each other, and decide the point at once."
"This is acting on first impulses you must take days to consider
such a matter, ere your word can be regarded as valid."
"Oh if all you doubt is my sincerity, I am easy you see the
justice of the case?"
"I DO see a certain justice but it is contrary to all custom.
Besides, the entire fortune is your right my uncle gained it by
his own efforts he was free to leave it to whom he would he left
it to you. After all, justice permits you to keep it you may,
with a clear conscience, consider it absolutely your own."
"With me," said I, "it is fully as much a matter of feeling as
of conscience I must indulge my feelings I so seldom have had
an opportunity of doing so. Were you to argue, object, and annoy
me for a year, I could not forego the delicious pleasure of which
I have caught a glimpse  that of repaying, in part, a mighty
obligation, and winning to myself lifelong friends."
"You think so now," rejoined St. John, "because you do not know
what it is to possess, nor consequently to enjoy wealth you
cannot form a notion of the importance twenty thousand pounds would
give you of the place it would enable you to take in society
of the prospects it would open to you you cannot  "
"And you," I interrupted, "cannot at all imagine the craving I have
for fraternal and sisterly love. I never had a home, I never had
brothers or sisters I must and will have them now you are not
reluctant to admit me and own me, are you?"
"Jane, I will be your brother  my sisters will be your sisters
without stipulating for this sacrifice of your just rights."
"Brother? Yes at the distance of a thousand leagues Sisters?
Yes slaving amongst strangers I, wealthy  gorged with gold I
never earned and do not merit You, penniless Famous equality
and fraternisation Close union Intimate attachment"
"But, Jane, your aspirations after family ties and domestic happiness
may be realised otherwise than by the means you contemplate you
may marry."
"Nonsense, again Marry I don't want to marry, and never shall
marry."
"That is saying too much such hazardous affirmations are a proof
of the excitement under which you labour."
"It is not saying too much I know what I feel, and how averse
are my inclinations to the bare thought of marriage. No one would
take me for love and I will not be regarded in the light of a mere
money speculation. And I do not want a stranger  unsympathising,
alien, different from me I want my kindred those with whom I
have full fellowfeeling. Say again you will be my brother when
you uttered the words I was satisfied, happy repeat them, if you
can, repeat them sincerely."
"I think I can. I know I have always loved my own sisters and
I know on what my affection for them is grounded,  respect for
their worth and admiration of their talents. You too have principle
and mind your tastes and habits resemble Diana's and Mary's your
presence is always agreeable to me in your conversation I have
already for some time found a salutary solace. I feel I can easily
and naturally make room in my heart for you, as my third and youngest
sister."
"Thank you that contents me for tonight. Now you had better
go for if you stay longer, you will perhaps irritate me afresh by
some mistrustful scruple."
"And the school, Miss Eyre? It must now be shut up, I suppose?"
"No. I will retain my post of mistress till you get a substitute."
He smiled approbation we shook hands, and he took leave.
I need not narrate in detail the further struggles I had, and
arguments I used, to get matters regarding the legacy settled as
I wished. My task was a very hard one but, as I was absolutely
resolved  as my cousins saw at length that my mind was really
and immutably fixed on making a just division of the property  as
they must in their own hearts have felt the equity of the intention
and must, besides, have been innately conscious that in my place
they would have done precisely what I wished to do  they yielded
at length so far as to consent to put the affair to arbitration. The
judges chosen were Mr. Oliver and an able lawyer both coincided
in my opinion I carried my point. The instruments of transfer
were drawn out St. John, Diana, Mary, and I, each became possessed
of a competency.
CHAPTER XXXIV
It was near Christmas by the time all was settled the season of
general holiday approached. I now closed Morton school, taking care
that the parting should not be barren on my side. Good fortune
opens the hand as well as the heart wonderfully and to give
somewhat when we have largely received, is but to afford a vent
to the unusual ebullition of the sensations. I had long felt with
pleasure that many of my rustic scholars liked me, and when we
parted, that consciousness was confirmed they manifested their
affection plainly and strongly. Deep was my gratification to find
I had really a place in their unsophisticated hearts I promised
them that never a week should pass in future that I did not visit
them, and give them an hour's teaching in their school.
Mr. Rivers came up as, having seen the classes, now numbering sixty
girls, file out before me, and locked the door, I stood with the
key in my hand, exchanging a few words of special farewell with some
halfdozen of my best scholars as decent, respectable, modest,
and wellinformed young women as could be found in the ranks of
the British peasantry. And that is saying a great deal for after
all, the British peasantry are the best taught, best mannered, most
selfrespecting of any in Europe since those days I have seen
paysannes and Bauerinnen and the best of them seemed to me ignorant,
coarse, and besotted, compared with my Morton girls.
"Do you consider you have got your reward for a season of
exertion?" asked Mr. Rivers, when they were gone. "Does not the
consciousness of having done some real good in your day and generation
give pleasure?"
"Doubtless."
"And you have only toiled a few months Would not a life devoted
to the task of regenerating your race be well spent?"
"Yes," I said "but I could not go on for ever so I want to enjoy
my own faculties as well as to cultivate those of other people.
I must enjoy them now don't recall either my mind or body to the
school I am out of it and disposed for full holiday."
He looked grave. "What now? What sudden eagerness is this you
evince? What are you going to do?"
"To be active as active as I can. And first I must beg you to
set Hannah at liberty, and get somebody else to wait on you."
"Do you want her?"
"Yes, to go with me to Moor House. Diana and Mary will be at home
in a week, and I want to have everything in order against their
arrival."
"I understand. I thought you were for flying off on some excursion.
It is better so Hannah shall go with you."
"Tell her to be ready by tomorrow then and here is the schoolroom
key I will give you the key of my cottage in the morning."
He took it. "You give it up very gleefully," said he "I don't
quite understand your lightheartedness, because I cannot tell what
employment you propose to yourself as a substitute for the one you
are relinquishing. What aim, what purpose, what ambition in life
have you now?"
"My first aim will be to CLEAN DOWN do you comprehend the full
force of the expression?  to CLEAN DOWN Moor House from chamber to
cellar my next to rub it up with beeswax, oil, and an indefinite
number of cloths, till it glitters again my third, to arrange every
chair, table, bed, carpet, with mathematical precision afterwards
I shall go near to ruin you in coals and peat to keep up good fires
in every room and lastly, the two days preceding that on which your
sisters are expected will be devoted by Hannah and me to such a
beating of eggs, sorting of currants, grating of spices, compounding
of Christmas cakes, chopping up of materials for mincepies,
and solemnising of other culinary rites, as words can convey but
an inadequate notion of to the uninitiated like you. My purpose,
in short, is to have all things in an absolutely perfect state of
readiness for Diana and Mary before next Thursday and my ambition
is to give them a beauideal of a welcome when they come."
St. John smiled slightly still he was dissatisfied.
"It is all very well for the present," said he "but seriously, I
trust that when the first flush of vivacity is over, you will look
a little higher than domestic endearments and household joys."
"The best things the world has" I interrupted.
"No, Jane, no this world is not the scene of fruition do not
attempt to make it so nor of rest do not turn slothful."
"I mean, on the contrary, to be busy."
"Jane, I excuse you for the present two months' grace I allow
you for the full enjoyment of your new position, and for pleasing
yourself with this latefound charm of relationship but THEN, I hope
you will begin to look beyond Moor House and Morton, and sisterly
society, and the selfish calm and sensual comfort of civilised
affluence. I hope your energies will then once more trouble you
with their strength."
I looked at him with surprise. "St. John," I said, "I think you
are almost wicked to talk so. I am disposed to be as content as
a queen, and you try to stir me up to restlessness To what end?"
"To the end of turning to profit the talents which God has committed
to your keeping and of which He will surely one day demand a strict
account. Jane, I shall watch you closely and anxiously  I warn
you of that. And try to restrain the disproportionate fervour with
which you throw yourself into commonplace home pleasures. Don't
cling so tenaciously to ties of the flesh save your constancy
and ardour for an adequate cause forbear to waste them on trite
transient objects. Do you hear, Jane?"
"Yes just as if you were speaking Greek. I feel I have adequate
cause to be happy, and I WILL be happy. Goodbye"
Happy at Moor House I was, and hard I worked and so did Hannah
she was charmed to see how jovial I could be amidst the bustle
of a house turned topsyturvy  how I could brush, and dust, and
clean, and cook. And really, after a day or two of confusion worse
confounded, it was delightful by degrees to invoke order from the
chaos ourselves had made. I had previously taken a journey to S
to purchase some new furniture my cousins having given me CARTE
BLANCHE to effect what alterations I pleased, and a sum having been
set aside for that purpose. The ordinary sittingroom and bedrooms
I left much as they were for I knew Diana and Mary would derive
more pleasure from seeing again the old homely tables, and chairs,
and beds, than from the spectacle of the smartest innovations. Still
some novelty was necessary, to give to their return the piquancy
with which I wished it to be invested. Dark handsome new carpets
and curtains, an arrangement of some carefully selected antique
ornaments in porcelain and bronze, new coverings, and mirrors,
and dressingcases, for the toilet tables, answered the end they
looked fresh without being glaring. A spare parlour and bedroom
I refurnished entirely, with old mahogany and crimson upholstery
I laid canvas on the passage, and carpets on the stairs. When all
was finished, I thought Moor House as complete a model of bright
modest snugness within, as it was, at this season, a specimen of
wintry waste and desert dreariness without.
The eventful Thursday at length came. They were expected about
dark, and ere dusk fires were lit upstairs and below the kitchen
was in perfect trim Hannah and I were dressed, and all was in
readiness.
St. John arrived first. I had entreated him to keep quite clear
of the house till everything was arranged and, indeed, the bare
idea of the commotion, at once sordid and trivial, going on within
its walls sufficed to scare him to estrangement. He found me
in the kitchen, watching the progress of certain cakes for tea,
then baking. Approaching the hearth, he asked, "If I was at last
satisfied with housemaid's work?" I answered by inviting him to
accompany me on a general inspection of the result of my labours.
With some difficulty, I got him to make the tour of the house.
He just looked in at the doors I opened and when he had wandered
upstairs and downstairs, he said I must have gone through a great
deal of fatigue and trouble to have effected such considerable changes
in so short a time but not a syllable did he utter indicating
pleasure in the improved aspect of his abode.
This silence damped me. I thought perhaps the alterations had
disturbed some old associations he valued. I inquired whether this
was the case no doubt in a somewhat crestfallen tone.
"Not at all he had, on the contrary, remarked that I had scrupulously
respected every association he feared, indeed, I must have bestowed
more thought on the matter than it was worth. How many minutes,
for instance, had I devoted to studying the arrangement of this
very room?  Bythebye, could I tell him where such a book was?"
I showed him the volume on the shelf he took it down, and
withdrawing to his accustomed window recess, he began to read it.
Now, I did not like this, reader. St. John was a good man but I
began to feel he had spoken truth of himself when he said he was hard
and cold. The humanities and amenities of life had no attraction
for him  its peaceful enjoyments no charm. Literally, he lived
only to aspire  after what was good and great, certainly but
still he would never rest, nor approve of others resting round him.
As I looked at his lofty forehead, still and pale as a white stone
at his fine lineaments fixed in study  I comprehended all at
once that he would hardly make a good husband that it would be
a trying thing to be his wife. I understood, as by inspiration,
the nature of his love for Miss Oliver I agreed with him that it
was but a love of the senses. I comprehended how he should despise
himself for the feverish influence it exercised over him how he
should wish to stifle and destroy it how he should mistrust its
ever conducting permanently to his happiness or hers. I saw he
was of the material from which nature hews her heroes  Christian
and Pagan  her lawgivers, her statesmen, her conquerors a
steadfast bulwark for great interests to rest upon but, at the
fireside, too often a cold cumbrous column, gloomy and out of place.
"This parlour is not his sphere," I reflected "the Himalayan
ridge or Caffre bush, even the plaguecursed Guinea Coast swamp
would suit him better. Well may he eschew the calm of domestic
life it is not his element there his faculties stagnate  they
cannot develop or appear to advantage. It is in scenes of strife
and danger  where courage is proved, and energy exercised, and
fortitude tasked  that he will speak and move, the leader and
superior. A merry child would have the advantage of him on this
hearth. He is right to choose a missionary's career  I see it
now."
"They are coming they are coming" cried Hannah, throwing open
the parlour door. At the same moment old Carlo barked joyfully.
Out I ran. It was now dark but a rumbling of wheels was audible.
Hannah soon had a lantern lit. The vehicle had stopped at the
wicket the driver opened the door first one wellknown form,
then another, stepped out. In a minute I had my face under their
bonnets, in contact first with Mary's soft cheek, then with Diana's
flowing curls. They laughed  kissed me  then Hannah patted
Carlo, who was half wild with delight asked eagerly if all was
well and being assured in the affirmative, hastened into the house.
They were stiff with their long and jolting drive from Whitcross,
and chilled with the frosty night air but their pleasant countenances
expanded to the cheerful firelight. While the driver and Hannah
brought in the boxes, they demanded St. John. At this moment he
advanced from the parlour. They both threw their arms round his
neck at once. He gave each one quiet kiss, said in a low tone
a few words of welcome, stood a while to be talked to, and then,
intimating that he supposed they would soon rejoin him in the
parlour, withdrew there as to a place of refuge.
I had lit their candles to go upstairs, but Diana had first to give
hospitable orders respecting the driver this done, both followed
me. They were delighted with the renovation and decorations
of their rooms with the new drapery, and fresh carpets, and rich
tinted china vases they expressed their gratification ungrudgingly.
I had the pleasure of feeling that my arrangements met their wishes
exactly, and that what I had done added a vivid charm to their
joyous return home.
Sweet was that evening. My cousins, full of exhilaration, were so
eloquent in narrative and comment, that their fluency covered St.
John's taciturnity he was sincerely glad to see his sisters but
in their glow of fervour and flow of joy he could not sympathise.
The event of the day  that is, the return of Diana and Mary 
pleased him but the accompaniments of that event, the glad tumult,
the garrulous glee of reception irked him I saw he wished the calmer
morrow was come. In the very meridian of the night's enjoyment,
about an hour after tea, a rap was heard at the door. Hannah entered
with the intimation that "a poor lad was come, at that unlikely
time, to fetch Mr. Rivers to see his mother, who was drawing away."
"Where does she live, Hannah?"
"Clear up at Whitcross Brow, almost four miles off, and moor and
moss all the way."
"Tell him I will go."
"I'm sure, sir, you had better not. It's the worst road to travel
after dark that can be there's no track at all over the bog. And
then it is such a bitter night  the keenest wind you ever felt.
You had better send word, sir, that you will be there in the
morning."
But he was already in the passage, putting on his cloak and without
one objection, one murmur, he departed. It was then nine o'clock
he did not return till midnight. Starved and tired enough he was
but he looked happier than when he set out. He had performed
an act of duty made an exertion felt his own strength to do and
deny, and was on better terms with himself.
I am afraid the whole of the ensuing week tried his patience. It
was Christmas week we took to no settled employment, but spent
it in a sort of merry domestic dissipation. The air of the moors,
the freedom of home, the dawn of prosperity, acted on Diana and
Mary's spirits like some lifegiving elixir they were gay from
morning till noon, and from noon till night. They could always
talk and their discourse, witty, pithy, original, had such charms
for me, that I preferred listening to, and sharing in it, to doing
anything else. St. John did not rebuke our vivacity but he escaped
from it he was seldom in the house his parish was large, the
population scattered, and he found daily business in visiting the
sick and poor in its different districts.
One morning at breakfast, Diana, after looking a little pensive
for some minutes, asked him, "If his plans were yet unchanged."
"Unchanged and unchangeable," was the reply. And he proceeded
to inform us that his departure from England was now definitively
fixed for the ensuing year.
"And Rosamond Oliver?" suggested Mary, the words seeming to escape
her lips involuntarily for no sooner had she uttered them, than
she made a gesture as if wishing to recall them. St. John had a
book in his hand  it was his unsocial custom to read at meals 
he closed it, and looked up,
"Rosamond Oliver," said he, "is about to be married to Mr. Granby,
one of the best connected and most estimable residents in S,
grandson and heir to Sir Frederic Granby I had the intelligence
from her father yesterday."
His sisters looked at each other and at me we all three looked at
him he was serene as glass.
"The match must have been got up hastily," said Diana "they cannot
have known each other long."
"But two months they met in October at the county ball at S. But
where there are no obstacles to a union, as in the present case,
where the connection is in every point desirable, delays are
unnecessary they will be married as soon as S Place, which Sir
Frederic gives up to them, can he refitted for their reception."
The first time I found St. John alone after this communication, I
felt tempted to inquire if the event distressed him but he seemed
so little to need sympathy, that, so far from venturing to offer
him more, I experienced some shame at the recollection of what I
had already hazarded. Besides, I was out of practice in talking
to him his reserve was again frozen over, and my frankness was
congealed beneath it. He had not kept his promise of treating me
like his sisters he continually made little chilling differences
between us, which did not at all tend to the development of
cordiality in short, now that I was acknowledged his kinswoman,
and lived under the same roof with him, I felt the distance between
us to be far greater than when he had known me only as the village
schoolmistress. When I remembered how far I had once been admitted
to his confidence, I could hardly comprehend his present frigidity.
Such being the case, I felt not a little surprised when he raised
his head suddenly from the desk over which he was stooping, and said 
"You see, Jane, the battle is fought and the victory won."
Startled at being thus addressed, I did not immediately
reply after a moment's hesitation I answered 
"But are you sure you are not in the position of those conquerors
whose triumphs have cost them too dear? Would not such another
ruin you?"
"I think not and if I were, it does not much signify I shall
never be called upon to contend for such another. The event of the
conflict is decisive my way is now clear I thank God for it"
So saying, he returned to his papers and his silence.
As our mutual happiness i.e., Diana's, Mary's, and mine settled
into a quieter character, and we resumed our usual habits and regular
studies, St. John stayed more at home he sat with us in the same
room, sometimes for hours together. While Mary drew, Diana pursued
a course of encyclopaedic reading she had to my awe and amazement
undertaken, and I fagged away at German, he pondered a mystic lore
of his own that of some Eastern tongue, the acquisition of which
he thought necessary to his plans.
Thus engaged, he appeared, sitting in his own recess, quiet and
absorbed enough but that blue eye of his had a habit of leaving
the outlandishlooking grammar, and wandering over, and sometimes
fixing upon us, his fellowstudents, with a curious intensity of
observation if caught, it would be instantly withdrawn yet ever
and anon, it returned searchingly to our table. I wondered what
it meant I wondered, too, at the punctual satisfaction he never
failed to exhibit on an occasion that seemed to me of small moment,
namely, my weekly visit to Morton school and still more was I
puzzled when, if the day was unfavourable, if there was snow, or
rain, or high wind, and his sisters urged me not to go, he would
invariably make light of their solicitude, and encourage me to
accomplish the task without regard to the elements.
"Jane is not such a weakling as you would make her," he would say
"she can bear a mountain blast, or a shower, or a few flakes of
snow, as well as any of us. Her constitution is both sound and
elastic  better calculated to endure variations of climate than
many more robust."
And when I returned, sometimes a good deal tired, and not a little
weatherbeaten, I never dared complain, because I saw that to murmur
would be to vex him on all occasions fortitude pleased him the
reverse was a special annoyance.
One afternoon, however, I got leave to stay at home, because I
really had a cold. His sisters were gone to Morton in my stead I
sat reading Schiller he, deciphering his crabbed Oriental scrolls.
As I exchanged a translation for an exercise, I happened to look his
way there I found myself under the influence of the everwatchful
blue eye. How long it had been searching me through and through,
and over and over, I cannot tell so keen was it, and yet so cold,
I felt for the moment superstitious  as if I were sitting in the
room with something uncanny.
"Jane, what are you doing?"
"Learning German."
"I want you to give up German and learn Hindostanee."
"You are not in earnest?"
"In such earnest that I must have it so and I will tell you why."
He then went on to explain that Hindostanee was the language he
was himself at present studying that, as he advanced, he was apt
to forget the commencement that it would assist him greatly to have
a pupil with whom he might again and again go over the elements,
and so fix them thoroughly in his mind that his choice had hovered
for some time between me and his sisters but that he had fixed on
me because he saw I could sit at a task the longest of the three.
Would I do him this favour? I should not, perhaps, have to make
the sacrifice long, as it wanted now barely three months to his
departure.
St. John was not a man to be lightly refused you felt that every
impression made on him, either for pain or pleasure, was deepgraved and
permanent. I consented. When Diana and Mary returned, the former
found her scholar transferred from her to her brother she
laughed, and both she and Mary agreed that St. John should
never have persuaded them to such a step. He answered quietly 
"I know it."
I found him a very patient, very forbearing, and yet an exacting
master he expected me to do a great deal and when I fulfilled his
expectations, he, in his own way, fully testified his approbation.
By degrees, he acquired a certain influence over me that took away
my liberty of mind his praise and notice were more restraining
than his indifference. I could no longer talk or laugh freely when
he was by, because a tiresomely importunate instinct reminded me
that vivacity at least in me was distasteful to him. I was so
fully aware that only serious moods and occupations were acceptable,
that in his presence every effort to sustain or follow any other
became vain I fell under a freezing spell. When he said "go," I
went "come," I came "do this," I did it. But I did not love my
servitude I wished, many a time, he had continued to neglect me.
One evening when, at bedtime, his sisters and I stood round him,
bidding him goodnight, he kissed each of them, as was his custom
and, as was equally his custom, he gave me his hand. Diana, who
chanced to be in a frolicsome humour SHE was not painfully controlled
by his will for hers, in another way, was as strong, exclaimed 
"St. John you used to call Jane your third sister, but you don't
treat her as such you should kiss her too."
She pushed me towards him. I thought Diana very provoking, and felt
uncomfortably confused and while I was thus thinking and feeling,
St. John bent his head his Greek face was brought to a level with
mine, his eyes questioned my eyes piercingly  he kissed me. There
are no such things as marble kisses or ice kisses, or I should say
my ecclesiastical cousin's salute belonged to one of these classes
but there may be experiment kisses, and his was an experiment kiss.
When given, he viewed me to learn the result it was not striking
I am sure I did not blush perhaps I might have turned a little
pale, for I felt as if this kiss were a seal affixed to my fetters.
He never omitted the ceremony afterwards, and the gravity and
quiescence with which I underwent it, seemed to invest it for him
with a certain charm.
As for me, I daily wished more to please him but to do so, I felt
daily more and more that I must disown half my nature, stifle half
my faculties, wrest my tastes from their original bent, force myself
to the adoption of pursuits for which I had no natural vocation. He
wanted to train me to an elevation I could never reach it racked
me hourly to aspire to the standard he uplifted. The thing was
as impossible as to mould my irregular features to his correct and
classic pattern, to give to my changeable green eyes the seablue
tint and solemn lustre of his own.
Not his ascendancy alone, however, held me in thrall at present.
Of late it had been easy enough for me to look sad a cankering
evil sat at my heart and drained my happiness at its source  the
evil of suspense.
Perhaps you think I had forgotten Mr. Rochester, reader, amidst
these changes of place and fortune. Not for a moment. His idea
was still with me, because it was not a vapour sunshine could
disperse, nor a sandtraced effigy storms could wash away it was
a name graven on a tablet, fated to last as long as the marble it
inscribed. The craving to know what had become of him followed
me everywhere when I was at Morton, I reentered my cottage every
evening to think of that and now at Moor House, I sought my bedroom
each night to brood over it.
In the course of my necessary correspondence with Mr. Briggs about
the will, I had inquired if he knew anything of Mr. Rochester's present
residence and state of health but, as St. John had conjectured,
he was quite ignorant of all concerning him. I then wrote to Mrs.
Fairfax, entreating information on the subject. I had calculated
with certainty on this step answering my end I felt sure it would
elicit an early answer. I was astonished when a fortnight passed
without reply but when two months wore away, and day after day
the post arrived and brought nothing for me, I fell a prey to the
keenest anxiety.
I wrote again there was a chance of my first letter having
missed. Renewed hope followed renewed effort it shone like the
former for some weeks, then, like it, it faded, flickered not
a line, not a word reached me. When half a year wasted in vain
expectancy, my hope died out, and then I felt dark indeed.
A fine spring shone round me, which I could not enjoy. Summer
approached Diana tried to cheer me she said I looked ill, and
wished to accompany me to the seaside. This St. John opposed he
said I did not want dissipation, I wanted employment my present
life was too purposeless, I required an aim and, I suppose, by way
of supplying deficiencies, he prolonged still further my lessons in
Hindostanee, and grew more urgent in requiring their accomplishment
and I, like a fool, never thought of resisting him  I could not
resist him.
One day I had come to my studies in lower spirits than usual the
ebb was occasioned by a poignantly felt disappointment. Hannah had
told me in the morning there was a letter for me, and when I went
down to take it, almost certain that the longlooked for tidings
were vouchsafed me at last, I found only an unimportant note from
Mr. Briggs on business. The bitter check had wrung from me some
tears and now, as I sat poring over the crabbed characters and
flourishing tropes of an Indian scribe, my eyes filled again.
St. John called me to his side to read in attempting to do this
my voice failed me words were lost in sobs. He and I were the
only occupants of the parlour Diana was practising her music in
the drawingroom, Mary was gardening  it was a very fine May day,
clear, sunny, and breezy. My companion expressed no surprise at
this emotion, nor did he question me as to its cause he only said 
"We will wait a few minutes, Jane, till you are more composed."
And while I smothered the paroxysm with all haste, he sat calm and
patient, leaning on his desk, and looking like a physician watching
with the eye of science an expected and fully understood crisis
in a patient's malady. Having stifled my sobs, wiped my eyes,
and muttered something about not being very well that morning, I
resumed my task, and succeeded in completing it. St. John
put away my books and his, locked his desk, and said 
"Now, Jane, you shall take a walk and with me."
"I will call Diana and Mary."
"No I want only one companion this morning, and that must be you.
Put on your things go out by the kitchendoor take the road
towards the head of Marsh Glen I will join you in a moment."
I know no medium I never in my life have known any medium in my
dealings with positive, hard characters, antagonistic to my own,
between absolute submission and determined revolt. I have always
faithfully observed the one, up to the very moment of bursting,
sometimes with volcanic vehemence, into the other and as neither
present circumstances warranted, nor my present mood inclined me
to mutiny, I observed careful obedience to St. John's directions
and in ten minutes I was treading the wild track of the glen, side
by side with him.
The breeze was from the west it came over the hills, sweet with
scents of heath and rush the sky was of stainless blue the stream
descending the ravine, swelled with past spring rains, poured
along plentiful and clear, catching golden gleams from the sun,
and sapphire tints from the firmament. As we advanced and left the
track, we trod a soft turf, mossy fine and emerald green, minutely
enamelled with a tiny white flower, and spangled with a starlike
yellow blossom the hills, meantime, shut us quite in for the
glen, towards its head, wound to their very core.
"Let us rest here," said St. John, as we reached the first stragglers
of a battalion of rocks, guarding a sort of pass, beyond which the
beck rushed down a waterfall and where, still a little farther,
the mountain shook off turf and flower, had only heath for raiment
and crag for gem  where it exaggerated the wild to the savage,
and exchanged the fresh for the frowning  where it guarded the
forlorn hope of solitude, and a last refuge for silence.
I took a seat St. John stood near me. He looked up the pass
and down the hollow his glance wandered away with the stream, and
returned to traverse the unclouded heaven which coloured it he
removed his hat, let the breeze stir his hair and kiss his brow.
He seemed in communion with the genius of the haunt with his eye
he bade farewell to something.
"And I shall see it again," he said aloud, "in dreams when I sleep
by the Ganges and again in a more remote hour  when another
slumber overcomes me  on the shore of a darker stream"
Strange words of a strange love An austere patriot's passion
for his fatherland He sat down for halfanhour we never spoke
neither he to me nor I to him that interval past, he recommenced 
"Jane, I go in six weeks I have taken my berth in an East Indiaman
which sails on the th of June."
"God will protect you for you have undertaken His work," I answered.
"Yes," said he, "there is my glory and joy. I am the servant of
an infallible Master. I am not going out under human guidance,
subject to the defective laws and erring control of my feeble
fellowworms my king, my lawgiver, my captain, is the Allperfect.
It seems strange to me that all round me do not burn to enlist
under the same banner,  to join in the same enterprise."
"All have not your powers, and it would be folly for the feeble to
wish to march with the strong."
"I do not speak to the feeble, or think of them I address only
such as are worthy of the work, and competent to accomplish it."
"Those are few in number, and difficult to discover."
"You say truly but when found, it is right to stir them up  to
urge and exhort them to the effort  to show them what their gifts
are, and why they were given  to speak Heaven's message in their
ear,  to offer them, direct from God, a place in the ranks of
His chosen."
"If they are really qualified for the task, will not their own
hearts be the first to inform them of it?"
I felt as if an awful charm was framing round and gathering over
me I trembled to hear some fatal word spoken which would at once
declare and rivet the spell.
"And what does YOUR heart say?" demanded St. John.
"My heart is mute,  my heart is mute," I answered, struck and
thrilled.
"Then I must speak for it," continued the deep, relentless voice.
"Jane, come with me to India come as my helpmeet and fellowlabourer."
The glen and sky spun round the hills heaved It was as if I had
heard a summons from Heaven  as if a visionary messenger, like
him of Macedonia, had enounced, "Come over and help us" But I
was no apostle,  I could not behold the herald,  I could not
receive his call.
"Oh, St. John" I cried, "have some mercy"
I appealed to one who, in the discharge of what he believed
his duty, knew neither mercy nor remorse. He continued 
"God and nature intended you for a missionary's wife. It is
not personal, but mental endowments they have given you you are
formed for labour, not for love. A missionary's wife you must 
shall be. You shall be mine I claim you  not for my pleasure,
but for my Sovereign's service."
"I am not fit for it I have no vocation," I said.
He had calculated on these first objections he was not irritated
by them. Indeed, as he leaned back against the crag behind him,
folded his arms on his chest, and fixed his countenance, I saw he
was prepared for a long and trying opposition, and had taken in a
stock of patience to last him to its close  resolved, however,
that that close should be conquest for him.
"Humility, Jane," said he, "is the groundwork of Christian virtues
you say right that you are not fit for the work. Who is fit for
it? Or who, that ever was truly called, believed himself worthy
of the summons? I, for instance, am but dust and ashes. With St.
Paul, I acknowledge myself the chiefest of sinners but I do not
suffer this sense of my personal vileness to daunt me. I know
my Leader that He is just as well as mighty and while He has
chosen a feeble instrument to perform a great task, He will, from
the boundless stores of His providence, supply the inadequacy of
the means to the end. Think like me, Jane  trust like me. It
is the Rock of Ages I ask you to lean on do not doubt but it will
bear the weight of your human weakness."
"I do not understand a missionary life I have never studied
missionary labours."
"There I, humble as I am, can give you the aid you want I can
set you your task from hour to hour stand by you always help you
from moment to moment. This I could do in the beginning soon
for I know your powers you would be as strong and apt as myself,
and would not require my help."
"But my powers  where are they for this undertaking? I do not
feel them. Nothing speaks or stirs in me while you talk. I am
sensible of no light kindling  no life quickening  no voice
counselling or cheering. Oh, I wish I could make you see how much
my mind is at this moment like a rayless dungeon, with one shrinking
fear fettered in its depths  the fear of being persuaded by you
to attempt what I cannot accomplish"
"I have an answer for you  hear it. I have watched you ever
since we first met I have made you my study for ten months. I
have proved you in that time by sundry tests and what have I
seen and elicited? In the village school I found you could perform
well, punctually, uprightly, labour uncongenial to your habits and
inclinations I saw you could perform it with capacity and tact
you could win while you controlled. In the calm with which you
learnt you had become suddenly rich, I read a mind clear of the
vice of Demas lucre had no undue power over you. In the resolute
readiness with which you cut your wealth into four shares, keeping
but one to yourself, and relinquishing the three others to the
claim of abstract justice, I recognised a soul that revelled in
the flame and excitement of sacrifice. In the tractability with
which, at my wish, you forsook a study in which you were interested,
and adopted another because it interested me in the untiring assiduity
with which you have since persevered in it  in the unflagging
energy and unshaken temper with which you have met its difficulties
I acknowledge the complement of the qualities I seek. Jane,
you are docile, diligent, disinterested, faithful, constant,
and courageous very gentle, and very heroic cease to mistrust
yourself  I can trust you unreservedly. As a conductress of
Indian schools, and a helper amongst Indian women, your assistance
will be to me invaluable."
My iron shroud contracted round me persuasion advanced with
slow sure step. Shut my eyes as I would, these last words of his
succeeded in making the way, which had seemed blocked up, comparatively
clear. My work, which had appeared so vague, so hopelessly diffuse,
condensed itself as he proceeded, and assumed a definite form under
his shaping hand. He waited for an answer. I demanded a quarter
of an hour to think, before I again hazarded a reply.
"Very willingly," he rejoined and rising, he strode a little
distance up the pass, threw himself down on a swell of heath, and
there lay still.
"I CAN do what he wants me to do I am forced to see and acknowledge
that," I meditated,  "that is, if life be spared me. But I feel
mine is not the existence to be long protracted under an Indian
sun. What then? He does not care for that when my time came to
die, he would resign me, in all serenity and sanctity, to the God
who gave me. The case is very plain before me. In leaving England,
I should leave a loved but empty land  Mr. Rochester is not there
and if he were, what is, what can that ever be to me? My business
is to live without him now nothing so absurd, so weak as to drag
on from day to day, as if I were waiting some impossible change in
circumstances, which might reunite me to him. Of course as St.
John once said I must seek another interest in life to replace the
one lost is not the occupation he now offers me truly the most
glorious man can adopt or God assign? Is it not, by its noble cares
and sublime results, the one best calculated to fill the void left
by uptorn affections and demolished hopes? I believe I must say,
Yes  and yet I shudder. Alas If I join St. John, I abandon
half myself if I go to India, I go to premature death. And how
will the interval between leaving England for India, and India for
the grave, be filled? Oh, I know well That, too, is very clear
to my vision. By straining to satisfy St. John till my sinews ache,
I SHALL satisfy him  to the finest central point and farthest
outward circle of his expectations. If I DO go with him  if I
DO make the sacrifice he urges, I will make it absolutely I will
throw all on the altar  heart, vitals, the entire victim. He will
never love me but he shall approve me I will show him energies
he has not yet seen, resources he has never suspected. Yes, I can
work as hard as he can, and with as little grudging.
"Consent, then, to his demand is possible but for one item 
one dreadful item. It is  that he asks me to be his wife, and
has no more of a husband's heart for me than that frowning giant
of a rock, down which the stream is foaming in yonder gorge. He
prizes me as a soldier would a good weapon and that is all.
Unmarried to him, this would never grieve me but can I let him
complete his calculations  coolly put into practice his plans 
go through the wedding ceremony? Can I receive from him the bridal
ring, endure all the forms of love which I doubt not he would
scrupulously observe and know that the spirit was quite absent?
Can I bear the consciousness that every endearment he bestows
is a sacrifice made on principle? No such a martyrdom would
be monstrous. I will never undergo it. As his sister, I might
accompany him  not as his wife I will tell him so."
I looked towards the knoll there he lay, still as a prostrate
column his face turned to me his eye beaming watchful and keen.
He started to his feet and approached me.
"I am ready to go to India, if I may go free."
"Your answer requires a commentary," he said "it is not clear."
"You have hitherto been my adopted brother  I, your adopted
sister let us continue as such you and I had better not marry."
He shook his head. "Adopted fraternity will not do in this case.
If you were my real sister it would be different I should take
you, and seek no wife. But as it is, either our union must be
consecrated and sealed by marriage, or it cannot exist practical
obstacles oppose themselves to any other plan. Do you not see it,
Jane? Consider a moment  your strong sense will guide you."
I did consider and still my sense, such as it was, directed me
only to the fact that we did not love each other as man and wife
should and therefore it inferred we ought not to marry. I said
so. "St. John," I returned, "I regard you as a brother  you, me
as a sister so let us continue."
"We cannot  we cannot," he answered, with short, sharp
determination "it would not do. You have said you will go with
me to India remember  you have said that."
"Conditionally."
"Well  well. To the main point  the departure with me from
England, the cooperation with me in my future labours  you do not
object. You have already as good as put your hand to the plough
you are too consistent to withdraw it. You have but one end to
keep in view  how the work you have undertaken can best be done.
Simplify your complicated interests, feelings, thoughts, wishes,
aims merge all considerations in one purpose that of fulfilling
with effect  with power  the mission of your great Master. To
do so, you must have a coadjutor not a brother  that is a loose
tie  but a husband. I, too, do not want a sister a sister
might any day be taken from me. I want a wife the sole helpmeet
I can influence efficiently in life, and retain absolutely till
death."
I shuddered as he spoke I felt his influence in my marrow  his
hold on my limbs.
"Seek one elsewhere than in me, St. John seek one fitted to you."
"One fitted to my purpose, you mean  fitted to my vocation. Again
I tell you it is not the insignificant private individual  the
mere man, with the man's selfish senses  I wish to mate it is
the missionary."
"And I will give the missionary my energies  it is all he wants
but not myself that would be only adding the husk and shell
to the kernel. For them he has no use I retain them."
"You cannot  you ought not. Do you think God will be satisfied
with half an oblation? Will He accept a mutilated sacrifice? It
is the cause of God I advocate it is under His standard I enlist
you. I cannot accept on His behalf a divided allegiance it must
be entire."
"Oh I will give my heart to God," I said. "YOU do not want it."
I will not swear, reader, that there was not something of repressed
sarcasm both in the tone in which I uttered this sentence, and in
the feeling that accompanied it. I had silently feared St. John
till now, because I had not understood him. He had held me in
awe, because he had held me in doubt. How much of him was saint,
how much mortal, I could not heretofore tell but revelations
were being made in this conference the analysis of his nature was
proceeding before my eyes. I saw his fallibilities I comprehended
them. I understood that, sitting there where I did, on the bank
of heath, and with that handsome form before me, I sat at the feet
of a man, caring as I. The veil fell from his hardness and despotism.
Having felt in him the presence of these qualities, I felt his
imperfection and took courage. I was with an equal  one with
whom I might argue  one whom, if I saw good, I might resist.
He was silent after I had uttered the last sentence, and I presently
risked an upward glance at his countenance.
His eye, bent on me, expressed at once stern surprise and keen
inquiry. "Is she sarcastic, and sarcastic to ME" it seemed to
say. "What does this signify?"
"Do not let us forget that this is a solemn matter," he said ere
long "one of which we may neither think nor talk lightly without
sin. I trust, Jane, you are in earnest when you say you will serve
your heart to God it is all I want. Once wrench your heart from
man, and fix it on your Maker, the advancement of that Maker's
spiritual kingdom on earth will be your chief delight and endeavour
you will be ready to do at once whatever furthers that end. You
will see what impetus would be given to your efforts and mine by
our physical and mental union in marriage the only union that
gives a character of permanent conformity to the destinies and
designs of human beings and, passing over all minor caprices 
all trivial difficulties and delicacies of feeling  all scruple
about the degree, kind, strength or tenderness of mere personal
inclination  you will hasten to enter into that union at once."
"Shall I?" I said briefly and I looked at his features, beautiful
in their harmony, but strangely formidable in their still severity
at his brow, commanding but not open at his eyes, bright and deep
and searching, but never soft at his tall imposing figure and
fancied myself in idea HIS WIFE. Oh it would never do As his
curate, his comrade, all would be right I would cross oceans with
him in that capacity toil under Eastern suns, in Asian deserts with
him in that office admire and emulate his courage and devotion and
vigour accommodate quietly to his masterhood smile undisturbed
at his ineradicable ambition discriminate the Christian from the
man profoundly esteem the one, and freely forgive the other. I
should suffer often, no doubt, attached to him only in this capacity
my body would be under rather a stringent yoke, but my heart and
mind would be free. I should still have my unblighted self to turn
to my natural unenslaved feelings with which to communicate in
moments of loneliness. There would be recesses in my mind which
would be only mine, to which he never came, and sentiments growing
there fresh and sheltered which his austerity could never blight,
nor his measured warriormarch trample down but as his wife 
at his side always, and always restrained, and always checked 
forced to keep the fire of my nature continually low, to compel
it to burn inwardly and never utter a cry, though the imprisoned
flame consumed vital after vital  THIS would be unendurable.
"St. John" I exclaimed, when I had got so far in my meditation.
"Well?" he answered icily.
"I repeat I freely consent to go with you as your fellowmissionary,
but not as your wife I cannot marry you and become part of you."
"A part of me you must become," he answered steadily "otherwise
the whole bargain is void. How can I, a man not yet thirty, take
out with me to India a girl of nineteen, unless she be married to
me? How can we be for ever together  sometimes in solitudes,
sometimes amidst savage tribes  and unwed?"
"Very well," I said shortly "under the circumstances, quite as
well as if I were either your real sister, or a man and a clergyman
like yourself."
"It is known that you are not my sister I cannot introduce you as
such to attempt it would be to fasten injurious suspicions on us
both. And for the rest, though you have a man's vigorous brain,
you have a woman's heart and  it would not do."
"It would do," I affirmed with some disdain, "perfectly well. I
have a woman's heart, but not where you are concerned for you
I have only a comrade's constancy a fellowsoldier's frankness,
fidelity, fraternity, if you like a neophyte's respect and submission
to his hierophant nothing more  don't fear."
"It is what I want," he said, speaking to himself "it is just what
I want. And there are obstacles in the way they must be hewn
down. Jane, you would not repent marrying me  be certain of
that we MUST be married. I repeat it there is no other way
and undoubtedly enough of love would follow upon marriage to render
the union right even in your eyes."
"I scorn your idea of love," I could not help saying, as I rose up
and stood before him, leaning my back against the rock. "I scorn
the counterfeit sentiment you offer yes, St. John, and I scorn
you when you offer it."
He looked at me fixedly, compressing his wellcut lips while he
did so. Whether he was incensed or surprised, or what, it was not
easy to tell he could command his countenance thoroughly.
"I scarcely expected to hear that expression from you," he said
"I think I have done and uttered nothing to deserve scorn."
I was touched by his gentle tone, and overawed by his high, calm
mien.
"Forgive me the words, St. John but it is your own fault that
I have been roused to speak so unguardedly. You have introduced
a topic on which our natures are at variance  a topic we should
never discuss the very name of love is an apple of discord between
us. If the reality were required, what should we do? How should
we feel? My dear cousin, abandon your scheme of marriage  forget
it."
"No," said he "it is a longcherished scheme, and the only one
which can secure my great end but I shall urge you no further
at present. Tomorrow, I leave home for Cambridge I have many
friends there to whom I should wish to say farewell. I shall be
absent a fortnight  take that space of time to consider my offer
and do not forget that if you reject it, it is not me you deny,
but God. Through my means, He opens to you a noble career as my
wife only can you enter upon it. Refuse to be my wife, and you limit
yourself for ever to a track of selfish ease and barren obscurity.
Tremble lest in that case you should be numbered with those who
have denied the faith, and are worse than infidels"
He had done. Turning from me, he once more
"Looked to river, looked to hill."
But this time his feelings were all pent in his heart I was not
worthy to hear them uttered. As I walked by his side homeward,
I read well in his iron silence all he felt towards me the
disappointment of an austere and despotic nature, which has met
resistance where it expected submission  the disapprobation of a
cool, inflexible judgment, which has detected in another feelings
and views in which it has no power to sympathise in short, as a
man, he would have wished to coerce me into obedience it was only
as a sincere Christian he bore so patiently with my perversity,
and allowed so long a space for reflection and repentance.
That night, after he had kissed his sisters, he thought proper to
forget even to shake hands with me, but left the room in silence.
I  who, though I had no love, had much friendship for him  was
hurt by the marked omission so much hurt that tears started to
my eyes.
"I see you and St. John have been quarrelling, Jane," said Diana,
"during your walk on the moor. But go after him he is now lingering
in the passage expecting you  he will make it up."
I have not much pride under such circumstances I would always
rather be happy than dignified and I ran after him  he stood at
the foot of the stairs.
"Goodnight, St. John," said I.
"Goodnight, Jane," he replied calmly.
"Then shake hands," I added.
What a cold, loose touch, he impressed on my fingers He was
deeply displeased by what had occurred that day cordiality would
not warm, nor tears move him. No happy reconciliation was to
be had with him  no cheering smile or generous word but still
the Christian was patient and placid and when I asked him if he
forgave me, he answered that he was not in the habit of cherishing
the remembrance of vexation that he had nothing to forgive, not
having been offended.
And with that answer he left me. I would much rather he had knocked
me down.
CHAPTER XXXV
He did not leave for Cambridge the next day, as he had said he
would. He deferred his departure a whole week, and during that
time he made me feel what severe punishment a good yet stern, a
conscientious yet implacable man can inflict on one who has offended
him. Without one overt act of hostility, one upbraiding word, he
contrived to impress me momently with the conviction that I was
put beyond the pale of his favour.
Not that St. John harboured a spirit of unchristian vindictiveness
not that he would have injured a hair of my head, if it had been
fully in his power to do so. Both by nature and principle, he was
superior to the mean gratification of vengeance he had forgiven
me for saying I scorned him and his love, but he had not forgotten
the words and as long as he and I lived he never would forget
them. I saw by his look, when he turned to me, that they were
always written on the air between me and him whenever I spoke, they
sounded in my voice to his ear, and their echo toned every answer
he gave me.
He did not abstain from conversing with me he even called me as
usual each morning to join him at his desk and I fear the corrupt
man within him had a pleasure unimparted to, and unshared by, the
pure Christian, in evincing with what skill he could, while acting
and speaking apparently just as usual, extract from every deed and
every phrase the spirit of interest and approval which had formerly
communicated a certain austere charm to his language and manner.
To me, he was in reality become no longer flesh, but marble his
eye was a cold, bright, blue gem his tongue a speaking instrument
nothing more.
All this was torture to me  refined, lingering torture. It kept
up a slow fire of indignation and a trembling trouble of grief,
which harassed and crushed me altogether. I felt how  if I were
his wife, this good man, pure as the deep sunless source, could soon
kill me, without drawing from my veins a single drop of blood, or
receiving on his own crystal conscience the faintest stain of crime.
Especially I felt this when I made any attempt to propitiate him.
No ruth met my ruth. HE experienced no suffering from estrangement
no yearning after reconciliation and though, more than once,
my fast falling tears blistered the page over which we both bent,
they produced no more effect on him than if his heart had been
really a matter of stone or metal. To his sisters, meantime, he
was somewhat kinder than usual as if afraid that mere coldness
would not sufficiently convince me how completely I was banished
and banned, he added the force of contrast and this I am sure he
did not by force, but on principle.
The night before he left home, happening to see him walking in the
garden about sunset, and remembering, as I looked at him, that this
man, alienated as he now was, had once saved my life, and that we
were near relations, I was moved to make a last attempt to regain
his friendship. I went out and approached him as he stood leaning
over the little gate I spoke to the point at once.
"St. John, I am unhappy because you are still angry with me. Let
us be friends."
"I hope we are friends," was the unmoved reply while he still
watched the rising of the moon, which he had been contemplating as
I approached.
"No, St. John, we are not friends as we were. You know that."
"Are we not? That is wrong. For my part, I wish you no ill and
all good."
"I believe you, St. John for I am sure you are incapable of wishing
any one ill but, as I am your kinswoman, I should desire somewhat
more of affection than that sort of general philanthropy you extend
to mere strangers."
"Of course," he said. "Your wish is reasonable, and I am far from
regarding you as a stranger."
This, spoken in a cool, tranquil tone, was mortifying and baffling
enough. Had I attended to the suggestions of pride and ire, I
should immediately have left him but something worked within me
more strongly than those feelings could. I deeply venerated my
cousin's talent and principle. His friendship was of value to me
to lose it tried me severely. I would not so soon relinquish the
attempt to reconquer it.
"Must we part in this way, St. John? And when you go to India, will
you leave me so, without a kinder word than you have yet spoken?"
He now turned quite from the moon and faced me.
"When I go to India, Jane, will I leave you What do you not go
to India?"
"You said I could not unless I married you."
"And you will not marry me You adhere to that resolution?"
Reader, do you know, as I do, what terror those cold people can
put into the ice of their questions? How much of the fall of the
avalanche is in their anger? of the breaking up of the frozen sea
in their displeasure?
"No. St. John, I will not marry you. I adhere to my resolution."
The avalanche had shaken and slid a little forward, but it did not
yet crash down.
"Once more, why this refusal?" he asked.
"Formerly," I answered, "because you did not love me now, I reply,
because you almost hate me. If I were to marry you, you would kill
me. You are killing me now."
His lips and cheeks turned white  quite white.
"I SHOULD KILL YOU  I AM KILLING YOU? Your words are such as ought
not to be used violent, unfeminine, and untrue. They betray an
unfortunate state of mind they merit severe reproof they would
seem inexcusable, but that it is the duty of man to forgive his
fellow even until seventyandseven times."
I had finished the business now. While earnestly wishing to erase
from his mind the trace of my former offence, I had stamped on that
tenacious surface another and far deeper impression, I had burnt
it in.
"Now you will indeed hate me," I said. "It is useless to attempt
to conciliate you I see I have made an eternal enemy of you."
A fresh wrong did these words inflict the worse, because they
touched on the truth. That bloodless lip quivered to a temporary
spasm. I knew the steely ire I had whetted. I was heartwrung.
"You utterly misinterpret my words," I said, at once seizing his
hand "I have no intention to grieve or pain you  indeed, I have
not."
Most bitterly he smiled  most decidedly he withdrew his hand from
mine. "And now you recall your promise, and will not go to India
at all, I presume?" said he, after a considerable pause.
"Yes, I will, as your assistant," I answered.
A very long silence succeeded. What struggle there was in him
between Nature and Grace in this interval, I cannot tell only
singular gleams scintillated in his eyes, and strange shadows passed
over his face. He spoke at last.
"I before proved to you the absurdity of a single woman of your
age proposing to accompany abroad a single man of mine. I proved
it to you in such terms as, I should have thought, would have
prevented your ever again alluding to the plan. That you have done
so, I regret  for your sake."
I interrupted him. Anything like a tangible reproach gave me
courage at once. "Keep to common sense, St. John you are verging
on nonsense. You pretend to be shocked by what I have said. You
are not really shocked for, with your superior mind, you cannot
be either so dull or so conceited as to misunderstand my meaning.
I say again, I will be your curate, if you like, but never your
wife."
Again he turned lividly pale but, as before, controlled
his passion perfectly. He answered emphatically but calmly 
"A female curate, who is not my wife, would never suit me. With
me, then, it seems, you cannot go but if you are sincere in your
offer, I will, while in town, speak to a married missionary, whose
wife needs a coadjutor. Your own fortune will make you independent
of the Society's aid and thus you may still be spared the dishonour
of breaking your promise and deserting the band you engaged to
join."
Now I never had, as the reader knows, either given any formal
promise or entered into any engagement and this language was all
much too hard and much too despotic for the occasion. I replied 
"There is no dishonour, no breach of promise, no desertion in the
case. I am not under the slightest obligation to go to India,
especially with strangers. With you I would have ventured much,
because I admire, confide in, and, as a sister, I love you but I
am convinced that, go when and with whom I would, I should not live
long in that climate."
"Ah you are afraid of yourself," he said, curling his lip.
"I am. God did not give me my life to throw away and to do as you
wish me would, I begin to think, be almost equivalent to committing
suicide. Moreover, before I definitively resolve on quitting
England, I will know for certain whether I cannot be of greater
use by remaining in it than by leaving it."
"What do you mean?"
"It would be fruitless to attempt to explain but there is a point
on which I have long endured painful doubt, and I can go nowhere
till by some means that doubt is removed."
"I know where your heart turns and to what it clings. The interest
you cherish is lawless and unconsecrated. Long since you ought to
have crushed it now you should blush to allude to it. You think
of Mr. Rochester?"
It was true. I confessed it by silence.
"Are you going to seek Mr. Rochester?"
"I must find out what is become of him."
"It remains for me, then," he said, "to remember you in my prayers,
and to entreat God for you, in all earnestness, that you may not
indeed become a castaway. I had thought I recognised in you one of
the chosen. But God sees not as man sees HIS will be done  "
He opened the gate, passed through it, and strayed away down the
glen. He was soon out of sight.
On reentering the parlour, I found Diana standing at the window,
looking very thoughtful. Diana was a great deal taller than I
she put her hand on my shoulder, and, stooping, examined my face.
"Jane," she said, "you are always agitated and pale now. I am
sure there is something the matter. Tell me what business St. John
and you have on hands. I have watched you this half hour from the
window you must forgive my being such a spy, but for a long time
I have fancied I hardly know what. St. John is a strange being  "
She paused  I did not speak soon she resumed 
"That brother of mine cherishes peculiar views of some sort respecting
you, I am sure he has long distinguished you by a notice and
interest he never showed to any one else  to what end? I wish
he loved you  does he, Jane?"
I put her cool hand to my hot forehead "No, Die, not one whit."
"Then why does he follow you so with his eyes, and get you so
frequently alone with him, and keep you so continually at his side?
Mary and I had both concluded he wished you to marry him."
"He does  he has asked me to be his wife."
Diana clapped her hands. "That is just what we hoped and thought
And you will marry him, Jane, won't you? And then he will stay in
England."
"Far from that, Diana his sole idea in proposing to me is to
procure a fitting fellowlabourer in his Indian toils."
"What He wishes you to go to India?"
"Yes."
"Madness" she exclaimed. "You would not live three months there,
I am certain. You never shall go you have not consented, have
you, Jane?"
"I have refused to marry him  "
"And have consequently displeased him?" she suggested.
"Deeply he will never forgive me, I fear yet I offered to
accompany him as his sister."
"It was frantic folly to do so, Jane. Think of the task you undertook
one of incessant fatigue, where fatigue kills even the strong,
and you are weak. St. John  you know him  would urge you to
impossibilities with him there would be no permission to rest
during the hot hours and unfortunately, I have noticed, whatever
he exacts, you force yourself to perform. I am astonished you
found courage to refuse his hand. You do not love him then, Jane?"
"Not as a husband."
"Yet he is a handsome fellow."
"And I am so plain, you see, Die. We should never suit."
"Plain You? Not at all. You are much too pretty, as well as too
good, to be grilled alive in Calcutta." And again she earnestly
conjured me to give up all thoughts of going out with her brother.
"I must indeed," I said "for when just now I repeated the offer of
serving him for a deacon, he expressed himself shocked at my want
of decency. He seemed to think I had committed an impropriety in
proposing to accompany him unmarried as if I had not from the
first hoped to find in him a brother, and habitually regarded him
as such."
"What makes you say he does not love you, Jane?"
"You should hear himself on the subject. He has again and again
explained that it is not himself, but his office he wishes to mate.
He has told me I am formed for labour  not for love which is
true, no doubt. But, in my opinion, if I am not formed for love,
it follows that I am not formed for marriage. Would it not be
strange, Die, to be chained for life to a man who regarded one but
as a useful tool?"
"Insupportable  unnatural  out of the question"
"And then," I continued, "though I have only sisterly affection
for him now, yet, if forced to be his wife, I can imagine the
possibility of conceiving an inevitable, strange, torturing kind
of love for him, because he is so talented and there is often a
certain heroic grandeur in his look, manner, and conversation. In
that case, my lot would become unspeakably wretched. He would not
want me to love him and if I showed the feeling, he would make me
sensible that it was a superfluity, unrequired by him, unbecoming
in me. I know he would."
"And yet St. John is a good man," said Diana.
"He is a good and a great man but he forgets, pitilessly, the
feelings and claims of little people, in pursuing his own large
views. It is better, therefore, for the insignificant to keep out
of his way, lest, in his progress, he should trample them down.
Here he comes I will leave you, Diana." And I hastened upstairs
as I saw him entering the garden.
But I was forced to meet him again at supper. During that meal he
appeared just as composed as usual. I had thought he would hardly
speak to me, and I was certain he had given up the pursuit of
his matrimonial scheme the sequel showed I was mistaken on both
points. He addressed me precisely in his ordinary manner, or what
had, of late, been his ordinary manner  one scrupulously polite.
No doubt he had invoked the help of the Holy Spirit to subdue the
anger I had roused in him, and now believed he had forgiven me once
more.
For the evening reading before prayers, he selected the twentyfirst
chapter of Revelation. It was at all times pleasant to listen
while from his lips fell the words of the Bible never did his
fine voice sound at once so sweet and full  never did his manner
become so impressive in its noble simplicity, as when he delivered
the oracles of God and tonight that voice took a more solemn
tone  that manner a more thrilling meaning  as he sat in the
midst of his household circle the May moon shining in through the
uncurtained window, and rendering almost unnecessary the light of
the candle on the table as he sat there, bending over the great
old Bible, and described from its page the vision of the new heaven
and the new earth  told how God would come to dwell with men,
how He would wipe away all tears from their eyes, and promised that
there should be no more death, neither sorrow nor crying, nor any
more pain, because the former things were passed away.
The succeeding words thrilled me strangely as he spoke them
especially as I felt, by the slight, indescribable alteration in
sound, that in uttering them, his eye had turned on me.
"He that overcometh shall inherit all things and I will be his
God, and he shall be my son. But," was slowly, distinctly read,
"the fearful, the unbelieving, c., shall have their part in the
lake which burneth with fire and brimstone, which is the second
death."
Henceforward, I knew what fate St. John feared for me.
A calm, subdued triumph, blent with a longing earnestness, marked
his enunciation of the last glorious verses of that chapter. The
reader believed his name was already written in the Lamb's book of
life, and he yearned after the hour which should admit him to the
city to which the kings of the earth bring their glory and honour
which has no need of sun or moon to shine in it, because the glory
of God lightens it, and the Lamb is the light thereof.
In the prayer following the chapter, all his energy gathered  all
his stern zeal woke he was in deep earnest, wrestling with God,
and resolved on a conquest. He supplicated strength for the weak
hearted guidance for wanderers from the fold a return, even at
the eleventh hour, for those whom the temptations of the world and
the flesh were luring from the narrow path. He asked, he urged, he
claimed the boon of a brand snatched from the burning. Earnestness
is ever deeply solemn first, as I listened to that prayer, I
wondered at his then, when it continued and rose, I was touched
by it, and at last awed. He felt the greatness and goodness of
his purpose so sincerely others who heard him plead for it, could
not but feel it too.
The prayer over, we took leave of him he was to go at a very
early hour in the morning. Diana and Mary having kissed him, left
the room  in compliance, I think, with a whispered hint from him
I tendered my hand, and wished him a pleasant journey.
"Thank you, Jane. As I said, I shall return from Cambridge in a
fortnight that space, then, is yet left you for reflection. If
I listened to human pride, I should say no more to you of marriage
with me but I listen to my duty, and keep steadily in view my
first aim  to do all things to the glory of God. My Master was
longsuffering so will I be. I cannot give you up to perdition
as a vessel of wrath repent  resolve, while there is yet time.
Remember, we are bid to work while it is day  warned that 'the
night cometh when no man shall work.' Remember the fate of Dives,
who had his good things in this life. God give you strength to
choose that better part which shall not be taken from you"
He laid his hand on my head as he uttered the last words. He had
spoken earnestly, mildly his look was not, indeed, that of a lover
beholding his mistress, but it was that of a pastor recalling his
wandering sheep  or better, of a guardian angel watching the
soul for which he is responsible. All men of talent, whether they
be men of feeling or not whether they be zealots, or aspirants,
or despots  provided only they be sincere  have their sublime
moments, when they subdue and rule. I felt veneration for St. John
veneration so strong that its impetus thrust me at once to the
point I had so long shunned. I was tempted to cease struggling
with him  to rush down the torrent of his will into the gulf of
his existence, and there lose my own. I was almost as hard beset
by him now as I had been once before, in a different way, by another.
I was a fool both times. To have yielded then would have been an
error of principle to have yielded now would have been an error of
judgment. So I think at this hour, when I look back to the crisis
through the quiet medium of time I was unconscious of folly at
the instant.
I stood motionless under my hierophant's touch. My refusals were
forgotten  my fears overcome  my wrestlings paralysed. The
Impossible  I.E., my marriage with St. John  was fast becoming
the Possible. All was changing utterly with a sudden sweep.
Religion called  Angels beckoned  God commanded  life rolled
together like a scroll  death's gates opening, showed eternity
beyond it seemed, that for safety and bliss there, all here might
be sacrificed in a second. The dim room was full of visions.
"Could you decide now?" asked the missionary. The inquiry was put
in gentle tones he drew me to him as gently. Oh, that gentleness
how far more potent is it than force I could resist St. John's
wrath I grew pliant as a reed under his kindness. Yet I knew all
the time, if I yielded now, I should not the less be made to repent,
some day, of my former rebellion. His nature was not changed by
one hour of solemn prayer it was only elevated.
"I could decide if I were but certain," I answered "were I but
convinced that it is God's will I should marry you, I could vow to
marry you here and now  come afterwards what would"
"My prayers are heard" ejaculated St. John. He pressed his hand
firmer on my head, as if he claimed me he surrounded me with his
arm, ALMOST as if he loved me I say ALMOST  I knew the difference
for I had felt what it was to be loved but, like him, I had
now put love out of the question, and thought only of duty. I
contended with my inward dimness of vision, before which clouds
yet rolled. I sincerely, deeply, fervently longed to do what was
right and only that. "Show me, show me the path" I entreated
of Heaven. I was excited more than I had ever been and whether
what followed was the effect of excitement the reader shall judge.
All the house was still for I believe all, except St. John and
myself, were now retired to rest. The one candle was dying out
the room was full of moonlight. My heart beat fast and thick I
heard its throb. Suddenly it stood still to an inexpressible
feeling that thrilled it through, and passed at once to my head
and extremities. The feeling was not like an electric shock, but
it was quite as sharp, as strange, as startling it acted on my
senses as if their utmost activity hitherto had been but torpor,
from which they were now summoned and forced to wake. They rose
expectant eye and ear waited while the flesh quivered on my bones.
"What have you heard? What do you see?" asked St. John. I
saw nothing, but I heard a voice somewhere cry 
"Jane Jane Jane"  nothing more.
"O God what is it?" I gasped.
I might have said, "Where is it?" for it did not seem in the room
nor in the house  nor in the garden it did not come out of
the air  nor from under the earth  nor from overhead. I had
heard it  where, or whence, for ever impossible to know And it
was the voice of a human being  a known, loved, wellremembered
voice  that of Edward Fairfax Rochester and it spoke in pain
and woe, wildly, eerily, urgently.
"I am coming" I cried. "Wait for me Oh, I will come" I flew
to the door and looked into the passage it was dark. I ran out
into the garden it was void.
"Where are you?" I exclaimed.
The hills beyond Marsh Glen sent the answer faintly back  "Where
are you?" I listened. The wind sighed low in the firs all was
moorland loneliness and midnight hush.
"Down superstition" I commented, as that spectre rose up black
by the black yew at the gate. "This is not thy deception, nor thy
witchcraft it is the work of nature. She was roused, and did 
no miracle  but her best."
I broke from St. John, who had followed, and would have detained
me. It was MY time to assume ascendency. MY powers were in play
and in force. I told him to forbear question or remark I desired
him to leave me I must and would be alone. He obeyed at once.
Where there is energy to command well enough, obedience never fails.
I mounted to my chamber locked myself in fell on my knees and
prayed in my way  a different way to St. John's, but effective in
its own fashion. I seemed to penetrate very near a Mighty Spirit
and my soul rushed out in gratitude at His feet. I rose from the
thanksgiving  took a resolve  and lay down, unscared, enlightened
eager but for the daylight.
CHAPTER XXXVI
The daylight came. I rose at dawn. I busied myself for an hour or
two with arranging my things in my chamber, drawers, and wardrobe,
in the order wherein I should wish to leave them during a brief
absence. Meantime, I heard St. John quit his room. He stopped
at my door I feared he would knock  no, but a slip of paper
was passed under the door. I took it up. It bore these words 
"You left me too suddenly last night. Had you stayed but a little
longer, you would have laid your hand on the Christian's cross and
the angel's crown. I shall expect your clear decision when I return
this day fortnight. Meantime, watch and pray that you enter not
into temptation the spirit, I trust, is willing, but the flesh,
I see, is weak. I shall pray for you hourly.  Yours, ST. JOHN."
"My spirit," I answered mentally, "is willing to do what is right
and my flesh, I hope, is strong enough to accomplish the will
of Heaven, when once that will is distinctly known to me. At any
rate, it shall be strong enough to search  inquire  to grope an
outlet from this cloud of doubt, and find the open day of certainty."
It was the first of June yet the morning was overcast and chilly
rain beat fast on my casement. I heard the frontdoor open, and
St. John pass out. Looking through the window, I saw him traverse
the garden. He took the way over the misty moors in the direction
of Whitcross  there he would meet the coach.
"In a few more hours I shall succeed you in that track, cousin,"
thought I "I too have a coach to meet at Whitcross. I too have
some to see and ask after in England, before I depart for ever."
It wanted yet two hours of breakfasttime. I filled the interval
in walking softly about my room, and pondering the visitation which
had given my plans their present bent. I recalled that inward
sensation I had experienced for I could recall it, with all its
unspeakable strangeness. I recalled the voice I had heard again
I questioned whence it came, as vainly as before it seemed in
ME  not in the external world. I asked was it a mere nervous
impression  a delusion? I could not conceive or believe it was
more like an inspiration. The wondrous shock of feeling had come
like the earthquake which shook the foundations of Paul and Silas's
prison it had opened the doors of the soul's cell and loosed
its bands  it had wakened it out of its sleep, whence it sprang
trembling, listening, aghast then vibrated thrice a cry on my
startled ear, and in my quaking heart and through my spirit, which
neither feared nor shook, but exulted as if in joy over the success
of one effort it had been privileged to make, independent of the
cumbrous body.
"Ere many days," I said, as I terminated my musings, "I will know
something of him whose voice seemed last night to summon me. Letters
have proved of no avail  personal inquiry shall replace them."
At breakfast I announced to Diana and Mary that I was going a
journey, and should be absent at least four days.
"Alone, Jane?" they asked.
"Yes it was to see or hear news of a friend about whom I had for
some time been uneasy."
They might have said, as I have no doubt they thought, that they
had believed me to be without any friends save them for, indeed,
I had often said so but, with their true natural delicacy, they
abstained from comment, except that Diana asked me if I was sure
I was well enough to travel. I looked very pale, she observed. I
replied, that nothing ailed me save anxiety of mind, which I hoped
soon to alleviate.
It was easy to make my further arrangements for I was troubled with
no inquiries  no surmises. Having once explained to them that
I could not now be explicit about my plans, they kindly and wisely
acquiesced in the silence with which I pursued them, according to
me the privilege of free action I should under similar circumstances
have accorded them.
I left Moor House at three o'clock p.m., and soon after four I
stood at the foot of the signpost of Whitcross, waiting the arrival
of the coach which was to take me to distant Thornfield. Amidst
the silence of those solitary roads and desert hills, I heard it
approach from a great distance. It was the same vehicle whence,
a year ago, I had alighted one summer evening on this very spot
how desolate, and hopeless, and objectless It stopped as
I beckoned. I entered  not now obliged to part with my whole
fortune as the price of its accommodation. Once more on the road
to Thornfield, I felt like the messengerpigeon flying home.
It was a journey of sixandthirty hours. I had set out from
Whitcross on a Tuesday afternoon, and early on the succeeding
Thursday morning the coach stopped to water the horses at a wayside
inn, situated in the midst of scenery whose green hedges and large
fields and low pastoral hills how mild of feature and verdant of
hue compared with the stern NorthMidland moors of Morton met my
eye like the lineaments of a once familiar face. Yes, I knew the
character of this landscape I was sure we were near my bourne.
"How far is Thornfield Hall from here?" I asked of the ostler.
"Just two miles, ma'am, across the fields."
"My journey is closed," I thought to myself. I got out of the
coach, gave a box I had into the ostler's charge, to be kept till
I called for it paid my fare satisfied the coachman, and was
going the brightening day gleamed on the sign of the inn, and I
read in gilt letters, "The Rochester Arms." My heart leapt up I
was already on my master's very lands. It fell again the thought
struck it
"Your master himself may be beyond the British Channel, for aught
you know and then, if he is at Thornfield Hall, towards which
you hasten, who besides him is there? His lunatic wife and you
have nothing to do with him you dare not speak to him or seek
his presence. You have lost your labour  you had better go no
farther," urged the monitor. "Ask information of the people at the
inn they can give you all you seek they can solve your doubts at
once. Go up to that man, and inquire if Mr. Rochester be at home."
The suggestion was sensible, and yet I could not force myself to
act on it. I so dreaded a reply that would crush me with despair.
To prolong doubt was to prolong hope. I might yet once more see
the Hall under the ray of her star. There was the stile before
me  the very fields through which I had hurried, blind, deaf,
distracted with a revengeful fury tracking and scourging me, on
the morning I fled from Thornfield ere I well knew what course
I had resolved to take, I was in the midst of them. How fast I
walked How I ran sometimes How I looked forward to catch the
first view of the wellknown woods With what feelings I welcomed
single trees I knew, and familiar glimpses of meadow and hill
between them
At last the woods rose the rookery clustered dark a loud cawing
broke the morning stillness. Strange delight inspired me on I
hastened. Another field crossed  a lane threaded  and there
were the courtyard walls  the back offices the house itself,
the rookery still hid. "My first view of it shall be in front," I
determined, "where its bold battlements will strike the eye nobly at
once, and where I can single out my master's very window perhaps
he will be standing at it  he rises early perhaps he is now
walking in the orchard, or on the pavement in front. Could I but
see him  but a moment Surely, in that case, I should not be
so mad as to run to him? I cannot tell  I am not certain. And
if I did  what then? God bless him What then? Who would be
hurt by my once more tasting the life his glance can give me? I
rave perhaps at this moment he is watching the sun rise over the
Pyrenees, or on the tideless sea of the south."
I had coasted along the lower wall of the orchard  turned
its angle there was a gate just there, opening into the meadow,
between two stone pillars crowned by stone balls. From behind one
pillar I could peep round quietly at the full front of the mansion.
I advanced my head with precaution, desirous to ascertain if any
bedroom windowblinds were yet drawn up battlements, windows,
long front  all from this sheltered station were at my command.
The crows sailing overhead perhaps watched me while I took this
survey. I wonder what they thought. They must have considered
I was very careful and timid at first, and that gradually I grew
very bold and reckless. A peep, and then a long stare and then
a departure from my niche and a straying out into the meadow and
a sudden stop full in front of the great mansion, and a protracted,
hardy gaze towards it. "What affectation of diffidence was this
at first?" they might have demanded "what stupid regardlessness
now?"
Hear an illustration, reader.
A lover finds his mistress asleep on a mossy bank he wishes to
catch a glimpse of her fair face without waking her. He steals
softly over the grass, careful to make no sound he pauses 
fancying she has stirred he withdraws not for worlds would he
be seen. All is still he again advances he bends above her
a light veil rests on her features he lifts it, bends lower now
his eyes anticipate the vision of beauty  warm, and blooming,
and lovely, in rest. How hurried was their first glance But how
they fix How he starts How he suddenly and vehemently clasps
in both arms the form he dared not, a moment since, touch with
his finger How he calls aloud a name, and drops his burden, and
gazes on it wildly He thus grasps and cries, and gazes, because
he no longer fears to waken by any sound he can utter  by any
movement he can make. He thought his love slept sweetly he finds
she is stone dead.
I looked with timorous joy towards a stately house I saw a
blackened ruin.
No need to cower behind a gatepost, indeed  to peep up at
chamber lattices, fearing life was astir behind them No need to
listen for doors opening  to fancy steps on the pavement or the
gravelwalk The lawn, the grounds were trodden and waste the
portal yawned void. The front was, as I had once seen it in a
dream, but a welllike wall, very high and very fragilelooking,
perforated with paneless windows no roof, no battlements, no
chimneys  all had crashed in.
And there was the silence of death about it the solitude of
a lonesome wild. No wonder that letters addressed to people here
had never received an answer as well despatch epistles to a vault
in a church aisle. The grim blackness of the stones told by what
fate the Hall had fallen  by conflagration but how kindled?
What story belonged to this disaster? What loss, besides mortar and
marble and woodwork had followed upon it? Had life been wrecked
as well as property? If so, whose? Dreadful question there was
no one here to answer it  not even dumb sign, mute token.
In wandering round the shattered walls and through the devastated
interior, I gathered evidence that the calamity was not of late
occurrence. Winter snows, I thought, had drifted through that
void arch, winter rains beaten in at those hollow casements for,
amidst the drenched piles of rubbish, spring had cherished vegetation
grass and weed grew here and there between the stones and fallen
rafters. And oh where meantime was the hapless owner of this
wreck? In what land? Under what auspices? My eye involuntarily
wandered to the grey church tower near the gates, and I asked,
"Is he with Damer de Rochester, sharing the shelter of his narrow
marble house?"
Some answer must be had to these questions. I could find it nowhere
but at the inn, and thither, ere long, I returned. The host himself
brought my breakfast into the parlour. I requested him to shut the
door and sit down I had some questions to ask him. But when he
complied, I scarcely knew how to begin such horror had I of the
possible answers. And yet the spectacle of desolation I had just
left prepared me in a measure for a tale of misery. The host was
a respectablelooking, middleaged man.
"You know Thornfield Hall, of course?" I managed to say at last.
"Yes, ma'am I lived there once."
"Did you?" Not in my time, I thought you are a stranger to me.
"I was the late Mr. Rochester's butler," he added.
The late I seem to have received, with full force, the blow I
had been trying to evade.
"The late" I gasped. "Is he dead?"
"I mean the present gentleman, Mr. Edward's father," he explained.
I breathed again my blood resumed its flow. Fully assured by
these words that Mr. Edward  MY Mr. Rochester God bless him,
wherever he was  was at least alive was, in short, "the present
gentleman." Gladdening words It seemed I could hear all that was
to come  whatever the disclosures might be  with comparative
tranquillity. Since he was not in the grave, I could bear, I
thought, to learn that he was at the Antipodes.
"Is Mr. Rochester living at Thornfield Hall now?" I asked, knowing,
of course, what the answer would be, but yet desirous of deferring
the direct question as to where he really was.
"No, ma'am  oh, no No one is living there. I suppose you are
a stranger in these parts, or you would have heard what happened
last autumn,  Thornfield Hall is quite a ruin it was burnt down
just about harvesttime. A dreadful calamity such an immense
quantity of valuable property destroyed hardly any of the furniture
could be saved. The fire broke out at dead of night, and before
the engines arrived from Millcote, the building was one mass of
flame. It was a terrible spectacle I witnessed it myself."
"At dead of night" I muttered. Yes, that was ever the hour
of fatality at Thornfield. "Was it known how it originated?" I
demanded.
"They guessed, ma'am they guessed. Indeed, I should say it was
ascertained beyond a doubt. You are not perhaps aware," he continued,
edging his chair a little nearer the table, and speaking low, "that
there was a lady  a  a lunatic, kept in the house?"
"I have heard something of it."
"She was kept in very close confinement, ma'am people even for
some years was not absolutely certain of her existence. No one
saw her they only knew by rumour that such a person was at the
Hall and who or what she was it was difficult to conjecture. They
said Mr. Edward had brought her from abroad, and some believed she
had been his mistress. But a queer thing happened a year since 
a very queer thing."
I feared now to hear my own story. I endeavoured to recall him to
the main fact.
"And this lady?"
"This lady, ma'am," he answered, "turned out to be Mr. Rochester's
wife The discovery was brought about in the strangest way. There
was a young lady, a governess at the Hall, that Mr. Rochester fell in  "
"But the fire," I suggested.
"I'm coming to that, ma'am  that Mr. Edward fell in love with.
The servants say they never saw anybody so much in love as he was
he was after her continually. They used to watch him  servants
will, you know, ma'am  and he set store on her past everything
for all, nobody but him thought her so very handsome. She was
a little small thing, they say, almost like a child. I never saw
her myself but I've heard Leah, the housemaid, tell of her. Leah
liked her well enough. Mr. Rochester was about forty, and this
governess not twenty and you see, when gentlemen of his age fall
in love with girls, they are often like as if they were bewitched.
Well, he would marry her."
"You shall tell me this part of the story another time," I said
"but now I have a particular reason for wishing to hear all about
the fire. Was it suspected that this lunatic, Mrs. Rochester, had
any hand in it?"
"You've hit it, ma'am it's quite certain that it was her, and
nobody but her, that set it going. She had a woman to take care
of her called Mrs. Poole  an able woman in her line, and very
trustworthy, but for one fault  a fault common to a deal of them
nurses and matrons  she KEPT A PRIVATE BOTTLE OF GIN BY HER,
and now and then took a drop overmuch. It is excusable, for she
had a hard life of it but still it was dangerous for when Mrs.
Poole was fast asleep after the gin and water, the mad lady, who
was as cunning as a witch, would take the keys out of her pocket,
let herself out of her chamber, and go roaming about the house,
doing any wild mischief that came into her head. They say she had
nearly burnt her husband in his bed once but I don't know about
that. However, on this night, she set fire first to the hangings
of the room next her own, and then she got down to a lower storey,
and made her way to the chamber that had been the governess's 
she was like as if she knew somehow how matters had gone on, and
had a spite at her  and she kindled the bed there but there
was nobody sleeping in it, fortunately. The governess had run away
two months before and for all Mr. Rochester sought her as if she
had been the most precious thing he had in the world, he never
could hear a word of her and he grew savage  quite savage on
his disappointment he never was a wild man, but he got dangerous
after he lost her. He would be alone, too. He sent Mrs. Fairfax,
the housekeeper, away to her friends at a distance but he did it
handsomely, for he settled an annuity on her for life and she
deserved it  she was a very good woman. Miss Adele, a ward he
had, was put to school. He broke off acquaintance with all the
gentry, and shut himself up like a hermit at the Hall."
"What did he not leave England?"
"Leave England? Bless you, no He would not cross the doorstones
of the house, except at night, when he walked just like a ghost
about the grounds and in the orchard as if he had lost his senses
which it is my opinion he had for a more spirited, bolder, keener
gentleman than he was before that midge of a governess crossed him,
you never saw, ma'am. He was not a man given to wine, or cards,
or racing, as some are, and he was not so very handsome but he
had a courage and a will of his own, if ever man had. I knew him
from a boy, you see and for my part, I have often wished that
Miss Eyre had been sunk in the sea before she came to Thornfield
Hall."
"Then Mr. Rochester was at home when the fire broke out?"
"Yes, indeed was he and he went up to the attics when all was
burning above and below, and got the servants out of their beds
and helped them down himself, and went back to get his mad wife out
of her cell. And then they called out to him that she was on the
roof, where she was standing, waving her arms, above the battlements,
and shouting out till they could hear her a mile off I saw her
and heard her with my own eyes. She was a big woman, and had long
black hair we could see it streaming against the flames as she
stood. I witnessed, and several more witnessed, Mr. Rochester ascend
through the skylight on to the roof we heard him call 'Bertha'
We saw him approach her and then, ma'am, she yelled and gave a
spring, and the next minute she lay smashed on the pavement."
"Dead?"
"Dead Ay, dead as the stones on which her brains and blood were
scattered."
"Good God"
"You may well say so, ma'am it was frightful"
He shuddered.
"And afterwards?" I urged.
"Well, ma'am, afterwards the house was burnt to the ground there
are only some bits of walls standing now."
"Were any other lives lost?"
"No  perhaps it would have been better if there had."
"What do you mean?"
"Poor Mr. Edward" he ejaculated, "I little thought ever to have
seen it Some say it was a just judgment on him for keeping his
first marriage secret, and wanting to take another wife while he
had one living but I pity him, for my part."
"You said he was alive?" I exclaimed.
"Yes, yes he is alive but many think he had better he dead."
"Why? How?" My blood was again running cold. "Where is he?" I
demanded. "Is he in England?"
"Ay  ay  he's in England he can't get out of England, I fancy
he's a fixture now."
What agony was this And the man seemed resolved to protract it.
"He is stoneblind," he said at last. "Yes, he is stoneblind, is
Mr. Edward."
I had dreaded worse. I had dreaded he was mad. I summoned strength
to ask what had caused this calamity.
"It was all his own courage, and a body may say, his kindness,
in a way, ma'am he wouldn't leave the house till every one else
was out before him. As he came down the great staircase at last,
after Mrs. Rochester had flung herself from the battlements, there
was a great crash  all fell. He was taken out from under the
ruins, alive, but sadly hurt a beam had fallen in such a way as
to protect him partly but one eye was knocked out, and one hand so
crushed that Mr. Carter, the surgeon, had to amputate it directly.
The other eye inflamed he lost the sight of that also. He is
now helpless, indeed  blind and a cripple."
"Where is he? Where does he now live?"
"At Ferndean, a manorhouse on a farm he has, about thirty miles
off quite a desolate spot."
"Who is with him?"
"Old John and his wife he would have none else. He is quite
broken down, they say."
"Have you any sort of conveyance?"
"We have a chaise, ma'am, a very handsome chaise."
"Let it be got ready instantly and if your postboy can drive me
to Ferndean before dark this day, I'll pay both you and him twice
the hire you usually demand."
CHAPTER XXXVII
The manorhouse of Ferndean was a building of considerable antiquity,
moderate size, and no architectural pretensions, deep buried in
a wood. I had heard of it before. Mr. Rochester often spoke of
it, and sometimes went there. His father had purchased the estate
for the sake of the game covers. He would have let the house, but
could find no tenant, in consequence of its ineligible and insalubrious
site. Ferndean then remained uninhabited and unfurnished, with the
exception of some two or three rooms fitted up for the accommodation
of the squire when he went there in the season to shoot.
To this house I came just ere dark on an evening marked by the
characteristics of sad sky, cold gale, and continued small penetrating
rain. The last mile I performed on foot, having dismissed the
chaise and driver with the double remuneration I had promised. Even
when within a very short distance of the manorhouse, you could
see nothing of it, so thick and dark grew the timber of the gloomy
wood about it. Iron gates between granite pillars showed me where
to enter, and passing through them, I found myself at once in the
twilight of closeranked trees. There was a grassgrown track
descending the forest aisle between hoar and knotty shafts and
under branched arches. I followed it, expecting soon to reach the
dwelling but it stretched on and on, it would far and farther
no sign of habitation or grounds was visible.
I thought I had taken a wrong direction and lost my way. The
darkness of natural as well as of sylvan dusk gathered over me. I
looked round in search of another road. There was none all was
interwoven stem, columnar trunk, dense summer foliage  no opening
anywhere.
I proceeded at last my way opened, the trees thinned a little
presently I beheld a railing, then the house  scarce, by this
dim light, distinguishable from the trees so dank and green were
its decaying walls. Entering a portal, fastened only by a latch,
I stood amidst a space of enclosed ground, from which the wood swept
away in a semicircle. There were no flowers, no gardenbeds only
a broad gravelwalk girdling a grassplat, and this set in the
heavy frame of the forest. The house presented two pointed gables
in its front the windows were latticed and narrow the front
door was narrow too, one step led up to it. The whole looked, as
the host of the Rochester Arms had said, "quite a desolate spot."
It was as still as a church on a weekday the pattering rain on
the forest leaves was the only sound audible in its vicinage.
"Can there be life here?" I asked.
Yes, life of some kind there was for I heard a movement  that
narrow frontdoor was unclosing, and some shape was about to issue
from the grange.
It opened slowly a figure came out into the twilight and stood
on the step a man without a hat he stretched forth his hand as
if to feel whether it rained. Dusk as it was, I had recognised
him  it was my master, Edward Fairfax Rochester, and no other.
I stayed my step, almost my breath, and stood to watch him  to
examine him, myself unseen, and alas to him invisible. It was
a sudden meeting, and one in which rapture was kept well in check
by pain. I had no difficulty in restraining my voice from exclamation,
my step from hasty advance.
His form was of the same strong and stalwart contour as ever his
port was still erect, his hair was still raven black nor were his
features altered or sunk not in one year's space, by any sorrow,
could his athletic strength be quelled or his vigorous prime blighted.
But in his countenance I saw a change that looked desperate and
brooding  that reminded me of some wronged and fettered wild
beast or bird, dangerous to approach in his sullen woe. The caged
eagle, whose goldringed eyes cruelty has extinguished, might look
as looked that sightless Samson.
And, reader, do you think I feared him in his blind ferocity? 
if you do, you little know me. A soft hope blest with my sorrow
that soon I should dare to drop a kiss on that brow of rock, and
on those lips so sternly sealed beneath it but not yet. I would
not accost him yet.
He descended the one step, and advanced slowly and gropingly towards
the grassplat. Where was his daring stride now? Then he paused,
as if he knew not which way to turn. He lifted his hand and opened
his eyelids gazed blank, and with a straining effort, on the sky,
and toward the amphitheatre of trees one saw that all to him
was void darkness. He stretched his right hand the left arm, the
mutilated one, he kept hidden in his bosom he seemed to wish by
touch to gain an idea of what lay around him he met but vacancy
still for the trees were some yards off where he stood. He
relinquished the endeavour, folded his arms, and stood quiet and
mute in the rain, now falling fast on his uncovered head. At this
moment John approached him from some quarter.
"Will you take my arm, sir?" he said "there is a heavy shower
coming on had you not better go in?"
"Let me alone," was the answer.
John withdrew without having observed me. Mr. Rochester now tried
to walk about vainly,  all was too uncertain. He groped his
way back to the house, and, reentering it, closed the door.
I now drew near and knocked John's wife opened for me. "Mary,"
I said, "how are you?"
She started as if she had seen a ghost I calmed her. To her
hurried "Is it really you, miss, come at this late hour to this
lonely place?" I answered by taking her hand and then I followed
her into the kitchen, where John now sat by a good fire. I explained
to them, in few words, that I had heard all which had happened since
I left Thornfield, and that I was come to see Mr. Rochester. I
asked John to go down to the turnpikehouse, where I had dismissed
the chaise, and bring my trunk, which I had left there and
then, while I removed my bonnet and shawl, I questioned Mary as to
whether I could be accommodated at the Manor House for the night
and finding that arrangements to that effect, though difficult,
would not be impossible, I informed her I should stay. Just at
this moment the parlourbell rang.
"When you go in," said I, "tell your master that a person wishes
to speak to him, but do not give my name."
"I don't think he will see you," she answered "he refuses everybody."
When she returned, I inquired what he had said. "You are to send
in your name and your business," she replied. She then proceeded
to fill a glass with water, and place it on a tray, together with
candles.
"Is that what he rang for?" I asked.
"Yes he always has candles brought in at dark, though he is
blind."
"Give the tray to me I will carry it in."
I took it from her hand she pointed me out the parlour door. The
tray shook as I held it the water spilt from the glass my heart
struck my ribs loud and fast. Mary opened the door for me, and
shut it behind me.
This parlour looked gloomy a neglected handful of fire burnt low
in the grate and, leaning over it, with his head supported against
the high, oldfashioned mantelpiece, appeared the blind tenant
of the room. His old dog, Pilot, lay on one side, removed out of
the way, and coiled up as if afraid of being inadvertently trodden
upon. Pilot pricked up his ears when I came in then he jumped
up with a yelp and a whine, and bounded towards me he almost
knocked the tray from my hands. I set it on the table then patted
him, and said softly, "Lie down" Mr. Rochester turned mechanically
to SEE what the commotion was but as he SAW nothing, he returned
and sighed.
"Give me the water, Mary," he said.
I approached him with the now only halffilled glass Pilot followed
me, still excited.
"What is the matter?" he inquired.
"Down, Pilot" I again said. He checked the water on its way to
his lips, and seemed to listen he drank, and put the glass down.
"This is you, Mary, is it not?"
"Mary is in the kitchen," I answered.
He put out his hand with a quick gesture, but not seeing where
I stood, he did not touch me. "Who is this? Who is this?" he
demanded, trying, as it seemed, to SEE with those sightless eyes
unavailing and distressing attempt "Answer me  speak again"
he ordered, imperiously and aloud.
"Will you have a little more water, sir? I spilt half of what was
in the glass," I said.
"WHO is it? WHAT is it? Who speaks?"
"Pilot knows me, and John and Mary know I am here. I came only
this evening," I answered.
"Great God  what delusion has come over me? What sweet madness
has seized me?"
"No delusion  no madness your mind, sir, is too strong for
delusion, your health too sound for frenzy."
"And where is the speaker? Is it only a voice? Oh I CANNOT
see, but I must feel, or my heart will stop and my brain burst.
Whatever  whoever you are  be perceptible to the touch or I
cannot live"
He groped I arrested his wandering hand, and prisoned it in both
mine.
"Her very fingers" he cried "her small, slight fingers If so
there must be more of her."
The muscular hand broke from my custody my arm was seized, my
shoulder  neck  waist  I was entwined and gathered to him.
"Is it Jane? WHAT is it? This is her shape  this is her size  "
"And this her voice," I added. "She is all here her heart, too.
God bless you, sir I am glad to be so near you again."
"Jane Eyre  Jane Eyre," was all he said.
"My dear master," I answered, "I am Jane Eyre I have found you
out  I am come back to you."
"In truth?  in the flesh? My living Jane?"
"You touch me, sir,  you hold me, and fast enough I am not cold
like a corpse, nor vacant like air, am I?"
"My living darling These are certainly her limbs, and these her
features but I cannot be so blest, after all my misery. It is a
dream such dreams as I have had at night when I have clasped her
once more to my heart, as I do now and kissed her, as thus  and
felt that she loved me, and trusted that she would not leave me."
"Which I never will, sir, from this day."
"Never will, says the vision? But I always woke and found it an
empty mockery and I was desolate and abandoned  my life dark,
lonely, hopeless  my soul athirst and forbidden to drink  my
heart famished and never to be fed. Gentle, soft dream, nestling
in my arms now, you will fly, too, as your sisters have all fled
before you but kiss me before you go  embrace me, Jane."
"There, sir  and there"'
I pressed my lips to his once brilliant and now rayless eyes 
I swept his hair from his brow, and kissed that too. He suddenly
seemed to arouse himself the conviction of the reality of all
this seized him.
"It is you  is it, Jane? You are come back to me then?"
"I am."
"And you do not lie dead in some ditch under some stream? And you
are not a pining outcast amongst strangers?"
"No, sir I am an independent woman now."
"Independent What do you mean, Jane?"
"My uncle in Madeira is dead, and he left me five thousand pounds."
"Ah this is practical  this is real" he cried "I should
never dream that. Besides, there is that peculiar voice of hers,
so animating and piquant, as well as soft it cheers my withered
heart it puts life into it.  What, Janet Are you an independent
woman? A rich woman?"
"If you won't let me live with you, I can build a house of my own
close up to your door, and you may come and sit in my parlour when
you want company of an evening."
"But as you are rich, Jane, you have now, no doubt, friends who
will look after you, and not suffer you to devote yourself to a
blind lameter like me?"
"I told you I am independent, sir, as well as rich I am my own
mistress."
"And you will stay with me?"
"Certainly  unless you object. I will be your neighbour,
your nurse, your housekeeper. I find you lonely I will be your
companion  to read to you, to walk with you, to sit with you,
to wait on you, to be eyes and hands to you. Cease to look so
melancholy, my dear master you shall not be left desolate, so long
as I live."
He replied not he seemed serious  abstracted he sighed
he halfopened his lips as if to speak he closed them again. I
felt a little embarrassed. Perhaps I had too rashly overleaped
conventionalities and he, like St. John, saw impropriety in my
inconsiderateness. I had indeed made my proposal from the idea
that he wished and would ask me to be his wife an expectation,
not the less certain because unexpressed, had buoyed me up, that
he would claim me at once as his own. But no hint to that effect
escaping him and his countenance becoming more overcast, I suddenly
remembered that I might have been all wrong, and was perhaps playing
the fool unwittingly and I began gently to withdraw myself from
his arms  but he eagerly snatched me closer.
"No  no  Jane you must not go. No  I have touched you,
heard you, felt the comfort of your presence  the sweetness of
your consolation I cannot give up these joys. I have little left
in myself  I must have you. The world may laugh  may call me
absurd, selfish  but it does not signify. My very soul demands
you it will be satisfied, or it will take deadly vengeance on
its frame."
"Well, sir, I will stay with you I have said so."
"Yes  but you understand one thing by staying with me and I
understand another. You, perhaps, could make up your mind to be
about my hand and chair  to wait on me as a kind little nurse
for you have an affectionate heart and a generous spirit, which
prompt you to make sacrifices for those you pity, and that ought
to suffice for me no doubt. I suppose I should now entertain none
but fatherly feelings for you do you think so? Come  tell me."
"I will think what you like, sir I am content to be only your
nurse, if you think it better."
"But you cannot always be my nurse, Janet you are young  you
must marry one day."
"I don't care about being married."
"You should care, Janet if I were what I once was, I would try
to make you care  but  a sightless block"
He relapsed again into gloom. I, on the contrary, became more
cheerful, and took fresh courage these last words gave me an
insight as to where the difficulty lay and as it was no difficulty
with me, I felt quite relieved from my previous embarrassment. I
resumed a livelier vein of conversation.
"It is time some one undertook to rehumanise you," said I, parting
his thick and long uncut locks "for I see you are being metamorphosed
into a lion, or something of that sort. You have a 'faux air' of
Nebuchadnezzar in the fields about you, that is certain your hair
reminds me of eagles' feathers whether your nails are grown like
birds' claws or not, I have not yet noticed."
"On this arm, I have neither hand nor nails," he said, drawing
the mutilated limb from his breast, and showing it to me. "It is
a mere stump  a ghastly sight Don't you think so, Jane?"
"It is a pity to see it and a pity to see your eyes  and the
scar of fire on your forehead and the worst of it is, one is in
danger of loving you too well for all this and making too much of
you."
"I thought you would be revolted, Jane, when you saw my arm, and
my cicatrised visage."
"Did you? Don't tell me so  lest I should say something
disparaging to your judgment. Now, let me leave you an instant,
to make a better fire, and have the hearth swept up. Can you tell
when there is a good fire?"
"Yes with the right eye I see a glow  a ruddy haze."
"And you see the candles?"
"Very dimly  each is a luminous cloud."
"Can you see me?"
"No, my fairy but I am only too thankful to hear and feel you."
"When do you take supper?"
"I never take supper."
"But you shall have some tonight. I am hungry so are you, I
daresay, only you forget."
Summoning Mary, I soon had the room in more cheerful order I
prepared him, likewise, a comfortable repast. My spirits were
excited, and with pleasure and ease I talked to him during supper,
and for a long time after. There was no harassing restraint, no
repressing of glee and vivacity with him for with him I was at
perfect ease, because I knew I suited him all I said or did seemed
either to console or revive him. Delightful consciousness It
brought to life and light my whole nature in his presence I
thoroughly lived and he lived in mine. Blind as he was, smiles
played over his face, joy dawned on his forehead his lineaments
softened and warmed.
After supper, he began to ask me many questions, of where I had
been, what I had been doing, how I had found him out but I gave
him only very partial replies it was too late to enter into
particulars that night. Besides, I wished to touch no deepthrilling
chord  to open no fresh well of emotion in his heart my sole
present aim was to cheer him. Cheered, as I have said, he was
and yet but by fits. If a moment's silence broke the conversation,
he would turn restless, touch me, then say, "Jane."
"You are altogether a human being, Jane? You are certain of that?"
"I conscientiously believe so, Mr. Rochester."
"Yet how, on this dark and doleful evening, could you so suddenly
rise on my lone hearth? I stretched my hand to take a glass of water
from a hireling, and it was given me by you I asked a question,
expecting John's wife to answer me, and your voice spoke at my
ear."
"Because I had come in, in Mary's stead, with the tray."
"And there is enchantment in the very hour I am now spending with
you. Who can tell what a dark, dreary, hopeless life I have dragged
on for months past? Doing nothing, expecting nothing merging night
in day feeling but the sensation of cold when I let the fire go
out, of hunger when I forgot to eat and then a ceaseless sorrow,
and, at times, a very delirium of desire to behold my Jane again.
Yes for her restoration I longed, far more than for that of my
lost sight. How can it be that Jane is with me, and says she loves
me? Will she not depart as suddenly as she came? Tomorrow, I
fear I shall find her no more."
A commonplace, practical reply, out of the train of his own
disturbed ideas, was, I was sure, the best and most reassuring for
him in this frame of mind. I passed my finger over his eyebrows,
and remarked that they were scorched, and that I would apply
something which would make them grow as broad and black as ever.
"Where is the use of doing me good in any way, beneficent spirit,
when, at some fatal moment, you will again desert me  passing
like a shadow, whither and how to me unknown, and for me remaining
afterwards undiscoverable?
"Have you a pocketcomb about you, sir?"
"What for, Jane?"
"Just to comb out this shaggy black mane. I find you rather
alarming, when I examine you close at hand you talk of my being
a fairy, but I am sure, you are more like a brownie."
"Am I hideous, Jane?"
"Very, sir you always were, you know."
"Humph The wickedness has not been taken out of you, wherever
you have sojourned."
"Yet I have been with good people far better than you a hundred
times better people possessed of ideas and views you never
entertained in your life quite more refined and exalted."
"Who the deuce have you been with?"
"If you twist in that way you will make me pull the hair out of
your head and then I think you will cease to entertain doubts of
my substantiality."
"Who have you been with, Jane?"
"You shall not get it out of me tonight, sir you must wait till
tomorrow to leave my tale half told, will, you know, be a sort
of security that I shall appear at your breakfast table to finish
it. By the bye, I must mind not to rise on your hearth with only
a glass of water then I must bring an egg at the least, to say
nothing of fried ham."
"You mocking changeling  fairyborn and humanbred You make me
feel as I have not felt these twelve months. If Saul could have
had you for his David, the evil spirit would have been exorcised
without the aid of the harp."
"There, sir, you are redd up and made decent. Now I'll leave you
I have been travelling these last three days, and I believe I am
tired. Good night."
"Just one word, Jane were there only ladies in the house where
you have been?"
I laughed and made my escape, still laughing as I ran upstairs.
"A good idea" I thought with glee. "I see I have the means of
fretting him out of his melancholy for some time to come."
Very early the next morning I heard him up and astir, wandering
from one room to another. As soon as Mary came down I heard the
question "Is Miss Eyre here?" Then "Which room did you put her
into? Was it dry? Is she up? Go and ask if she wants anything
and when she will come down."
I came down as soon as I thought there was a prospect of breakfast.
Entering the room very softly, I had a view of him before he
discovered my presence. It was mournful, indeed, to witness the
subjugation of that vigorous spirit to a corporeal infirmity. He
sat in his chair  still, but not at rest expectant evidently
the lines of now habitual sadness marking his strong features. His
countenance reminded one of a lamp quenched, waiting to be relit
and alas it was not himself that could now kindle the lustre
of animated expression he was dependent on another for that
office I had meant to be gay and careless, but the powerlessness
of the strong man touched my heart to the quick still I accosted
him with what vivacity I could.
"It is a bright, sunny morning, sir," I said. "The rain is over
and gone, and there is a tender shining after it you shall have
a walk soon."
I had wakened the glow his features beamed.
"Oh, you are indeed there, my skylark Come to me. You are not
gone not vanished? I heard one of your kind an hour ago, singing
high over the wood but its song had no music for me, any more than
the rising sun had rays. All the melody on earth is concentrated
in my Jane's tongue to my ear I am glad it is not naturally a
silent one all the sunshine I can feel is in her presence."
The water stood in my eyes to hear this avowal of his dependence
just as if a royal eagle, chained to a perch, should be forced
to entreat a sparrow to become its purveyor. But I would not be
lachrymose I dashed off the salt drops, and busied myself with
preparing breakfast.
Most of the morning was spent in the open air. I led him out of
the wet and wild wood into some cheerful fields I described to
him how brilliantly green they were how the flowers and hedges
looked refreshed how sparklingly blue was the sky. I sought a
seat for him in a hidden and lovely spot, a dry stump of a tree
nor did I refuse to let him, when seated, place me on his knee. Why
should I, when both he and I were happier near than apart? Pilot
lay beside us all was quiet. He broke out suddenly while
clasping me in his arms 
"Cruel, cruel deserter Oh, Jane, what did I feel when I discovered
you had fled from Thornfield, and when I could nowhere find you
and, after examining your apartment, ascertained that you had taken
no money, nor anything which could serve as an equivalent A pearl
necklace I had given you lay untouched in its little casket your
trunks were left corded and locked as they had been prepared for
the bridal tour. What could my darling do, I asked, left destitute
and penniless? And what did she do? Let me hear now."
Thus urged, I began the narrative of my experience for the last
year. I softened considerably what related to the three days of
wandering and starvation, because to have told him all would have
been to inflict unnecessary pain the little I did say lacerated
his faithful heart deeper than I wished.
I should not have left him thus, he said, without any means of
making my way I should have told him my intention. I should have
confided in him he would never have forced me to be his mistress.
Violent as he had seemed in his despair, he, in truth, loved me
far too well and too tenderly to constitute himself my tyrant he
would have given me half his fortune, without demanding so much as
a kiss in return, rather than I should have flung myself friendless
on the wide world. I had endured, he was certain, more than I had
confessed to him.
"Well, whatever my sufferings had been, they were very short," I
answered and then I proceeded to tell him how I had been received
at Moor House how I had obtained the office of schoolmistress, c.
The accession of fortune, the discovery of my relations, followed
in due order. Of course, St. John Rivers' name came in frequently
in the progress of my tale. When I had done, that name was
immediately taken up.
"This St. John, then, is your cousin?"
"Yes."
"You have spoken of him often do you like him?"
"He was a very good man, sir I could not help liking him."
"A good man. Does that mean a respectable wellconducted man of
fifty? Or what does it mean?"
"St John was only twentynine, sir."
"'Jeune encore,' as the French say. Is he a person of low stature,
phlegmatic, and plain. A person whose goodness consists rather in
his guiltlessness of vice, than in his prowess in virtue."
"He is untiringly active. Great and exalted deeds are what he
lives to perform."
"But his brain? That is probably rather soft? He means well but
you shrug your shoulders to hear him talk?"
"He talks little, sir what he does say is ever to the point. His
brain is firstrate, I should think not impressible, but vigorous."
"Is he an able man, then?"
"Truly able."
"A thoroughly educated man?"
"St. John is an accomplished and profound scholar."
"His manners, I think, you said are not to your taste?  priggish
and parsonic?"
"I never mentioned his manners but, unless I had a very bad taste,
they must suit it they are polished, calm, and gentlemanlike."
"His appearance,  I forget what description you gave of his
appearance  a sort of raw curate, half strangled with his white
neckcloth, and stilted up on his thicksoled highlows, eh?"
"St. John dresses well. He is a handsome man tall, fair, with
blue eyes, and a Grecian profile."
Aside. "Damn him"  To me. "Did you like him, Jane?"
"Yes, Mr. Rochester, I liked him but you asked me that before."
I perceived, of course, the drift of my interlocutor. Jealousy
had got hold of him she stung him but the sting was salutary
it gave him respite from the gnawing fang of melancholy. I would
not, therefore, immediately charm the snake.
"Perhaps you would rather not sit any longer on my knee, Miss Eyre?"
was the next somewhat unexpected observation.
"Why not, Mr. Rochester?"
"The picture you have just drawn is suggestive of a rather too
overwhelming contrast. Your words have delineated very prettily
a graceful Apollo he is present to your imagination,  tall,
fair, blueeyed, and with a Grecian profile. Your eyes dwell on a
Vulcan,  a real blacksmith, brown, broadshouldered and blind
and lame into the bargain."
"I never thought of it, before but you certainly are rather like
Vulcan, sir."
"Well, you can leave me, ma'am but before you go" and he retained
me by a firmer grasp than ever, "you will be pleased just to answer
me a question or two." He paused.
"What questions, Mr. Rochester?"
Then followed this crossexamination.
"St. John made you schoolmistress of Morton before he knew you were
his cousin?"
"Yes."
"You would often see him? He would visit the school sometimes?"
"Daily."
"He would approve of your plans, Jane? I know they would be clever,
for you are a talented creature"
"He approved of them  yes."
"He would discover many things in you he could not have expected
to find? Some of your accomplishments are not ordinary."
"I don't know about that."
"You had a little cottage near the school, you say did he ever
come there to see you?"
"Now and then?"
"Of an evening?"
"Once or twice."
A pause.
"How long did you reside with him and his sisters after the cousinship
was discovered?"
"Five months."
"Did Rivers spend much time with the ladies of his family?"
"Yes the back parlour was both his study and ours he sat near
the window, and we by the table."
"Did he study much?"
"A good deal."
"What?"
"Hindostanee."
"And what did you do meantime?"
"I learnt German, at first."
"Did he teach you?"
"He did not understand German."
"Did he teach you nothing?"
"A little Hindostanee."
"Rivers taught you Hindostanee?"
"Yes, sir."
"And his sisters also?"
"No."
"Only you?"
"Only me."
"Did you ask to learn?"
"No."
"He wished to teach you?"
"Yes."
A second pause.
"Why did he wish it? Of what use could Hindostanee be to you?"
"He intended me to go with him to India."
"Ah here I reach the root of the matter. He wanted you to marry
him?"
"He asked me to marry him."
"That is a fiction  an impudent invention to vex me."
"I beg your pardon, it is the literal truth he asked me more than
once, and was as stiff about urging his point as ever you could
be."
"Miss Eyre, I repeat it, you can leave me. How often am I to say
the same thing? Why do you remain pertinaciously perched on my
knee, when I have given you notice to quit?"
"Because I am comfortable there."
"No, Jane, you are not comfortable there, because your heart is not
with me it is with this cousin  this St. John. Oh, till this
moment, I thought my little Jane was all mine I had a belief she
loved me even when she left me that was an atom of sweet in much
bitter. Long as we have been parted, hot tears as I have wept over
our separation, I never thought that while I was mourning her, she
was loving another But it is useless grieving. Jane, leave me
go and marry Rivers."
"Shake me off, then, sir,  push me away, for I'll not leave you
of my own accord."
"Jane, I ever like your tone of voice it still renews hope, it
sounds so truthful. When I hear it, it carries me back a year. I
forget that you have formed a new tie. But I am not a fool  go  "
"Where must I go, sir?"
"Your own way  with the husband you have chosen."
"Who is that?"
"You know  this St. John Rivers."
"He is not my husband, nor ever will be. He does not love me I
do not love him. He loves as he CAN love, and that is not as you
love a beautiful young lady called Rosamond. He wanted to marry
me only because he thought I should make a suitable missionary's
wife, which she would not have done. He is good and great, but
severe and, for me, cold as an iceberg. He is not like you, sir
I am not happy at his side, nor near him, nor with him. He has no
indulgence for me  no fondness. He sees nothing attractive in
me not even youth  only a few useful mental points.  Then I
must leave you, sir, to go to him?"
I shuddered involuntarily, and clung instinctively closer to my
blind but beloved master. He smiled.
"What, Jane Is this true? Is such really the state of matters
between you and Rivers?"
"Absolutely, sir Oh, you need not be jealous I wanted to tease
you a little to make you less sad I thought anger would be better
than grief. But if you wish me to love you, could you but see how
much I DO love you, you would be proud and content. All my heart
is yours, sir it belongs to you and with you it would remain,
were fate to exile the rest of me from your presence for ever."
Again, as he kissed me, painful thoughts darkened his aspect. "My
scarred vision My crippled strength" he murmured regretfully.
I caressed, in order to soothe him. I knew of what he was thinking,
and wanted to speak for him, but dared not. As he turned aside
his face a minute, I saw a tear slide from under the sealed eyelid,
and trickle down the manly cheek. My heart swelled.
"I am no better than the old lightningstruck chestnuttree in
Thornfield orchard," he remarked ere long. "And what right would
that ruin have to bid a budding woodbine cover its decay with
freshness?"
"You are no ruin, sir  no lightningstruck tree you are green
and vigorous. Plants will grow about your roots, whether you ask
them or not, because they take delight in your bountiful shadow
and as they grow they will lean towards you, and wind round you,
because your strength offers them so safe a prop."
Again he smiled I gave him comfort.
"You speak of friends, Jane?" he asked.
"Yes, of friends," I answered rather hesitatingly for I knew
I meant more than friends, but could not tell what other word to
employ. He helped me.
"Ah Jane. But I want a wife."
"Do you, sir?"
"Yes is it news to you?"
"Of course you said nothing about it before."
"Is it unwelcome news?"
"That depends on circumstances, sir  on your choice."
"Which you shall make for me, Jane. I will abide by your decision."
"Choose then, sir  HER WHO LOVES YOU BEST."
"I will at least choose  HER I LOVE BEST. Jane, will you marry
me?"
"Yes, sir."
"A poor blind man, whom you will have to lead about by the hand?"
"Yes, sir."
"A crippled man, twenty years older than you, whom you will have
to wait on?"
"Yes, sir."
"Truly, Jane?"
"Most truly, sir."
"Oh my darling God bless you and reward you"
"Mr. Rochester, if ever I did a good deed in my life  if ever I
thought a good thought  if ever I prayed a sincere and blameless
prayer  if ever I wished a righteous wish,  I am rewarded now.
To be your wife is, for me, to be as happy as I can be on earth."
"Because you delight in sacrifice."
"Sacrifice What do I sacrifice? Famine for food, expectation
for content. To be privileged to put my arms round what I value
to press my lips to what I love  to repose on what I trust
is that to make a sacrifice? If so, then certainly I delight in
sacrifice."
"And to bear with my infirmities, Jane to overlook my deficiencies."
"Which are none, sir, to me. I love you better now, when I can really
be useful to you, than I did in your state of proud independence,
when you disdained every part but that of the giver and protector."
"Hitherto I have hated to be helped  to be led henceforth, I
feel I shall hate it no more. I did not like to put my hand into
a hireling's, but it is pleasant to feel it circled by Jane's little
fingers. I preferred utter loneliness to the constant attendance
of servants but Jane's soft ministry will be a perpetual joy.
Jane suits me do I suit her?"
"To the finest fibre of my nature, sir."
"The case being so, we have nothing in the world to wait for we
must be married instantly."
He looked and spoke with eagerness his old impetuosity was rising.
"We must become one flesh without any delay, Jane there is but
the licence to get  then we marry."
"Mr. Rochester, I have just discovered the sun is far declined from
its meridian, and Pilot is actually gone home to his dinner. Let
me look at your watch."
"Fasten it into your girdle, Janet, and keep it henceforward I
have no use for it."
"It is nearly four o'clock in the afternoon, sir. Don't you feel
hungry?"
"The third day from this must be our weddingday, Jane. Never mind
fine clothes and jewels, now all that is not worth a fillip."
"The sun has dried up all the raindrops, sir. The breeze is still
it is quite hot."
"Do you know, Jane, I have your little pearl necklace at this moment
fastened round my bronze scrag under my cravat? I have worn it
since the day I lost my only treasure, as a memento of her."
"We will go home through the wood that will be the shadiest way."
He pursued his own thoughts without heeding me.
"Jane you think me, I daresay, an irreligious dog but my heart
swells with gratitude to the beneficent God of this earth just
now. He sees not as man sees, but far clearer judges not as man
judges, but far more wisely. I did wrong I would have sullied
my innocent flower  breathed guilt on its purity the Omnipotent
snatched it from me. I, in my stiffnecked rebellion, almost cursed
the dispensation instead of bending to the decree, I defied it.
Divine justice pursued its course disasters came thick on me I
was forced to pass through the valley of the shadow of death. HIS
chastisements are mighty and one smote me which has humbled me for
ever. You know I was proud of my strength but what is it now,
when I must give it over to foreign guidance, as a child does its
weakness? Of late, Jane  only  only of late  I began to see
and acknowledge the hand of God in my doom. I began to experience
remorse, repentance the wish for reconcilement to my Maker. I
began sometimes to pray very brief prayers they were, but very
sincere.
"Some days since nay, I can number them  four it was last Monday
night, a singular mood came over me one in which grief replaced
frenzy  sorrow, sullenness. I had long had the impression that
since I could nowhere find you, you must be dead. Late that night
perhaps it might be between eleven and twelve o'clock  ere I
retired to my dreary rest, I supplicated God, that, if it seemed
good to Him, I might soon be taken from this life, and admitted to
that world to come, where there was still hope of rejoining Jane.
"I was in my own room, and sitting by the window, which was open
it soothed me to feel the balmy nightair though I could see no
stars and only by a vague, luminous haze, knew the presence of a
moon. I longed for thee, Janet Oh, I longed for thee both with
soul and flesh I asked of God, at once in anguish and humility,
if I had not been long enough desolate, afflicted, tormented and
might not soon taste bliss and peace once more. That I merited all
I endured, I acknowledged  that I could scarcely endure more,
I pleaded and the alpha and omega of my heart's wishes broke
involuntarily from my lips in the words  'Jane Jane Jane'"
"Did you speak these words aloud?"
"I did, Jane. If any listener had heard me, he would have thought
me mad I pronounced them with such frantic energy."
"And it was last Monday night, somewhere near midnight?"
"Yes but the time is of no consequence what followed is the
strange point. You will think me superstitious,  some superstition
I have in my blood, and always had nevertheless, this is true 
true at least it is that I heard what I now relate.
"As I exclaimed 'Jane Jane Jane' a voice  I cannot tell
whence the voice came, but I know whose voice it was  replied,
'I am coming wait for me' and a moment after, went whispering
on the wind the words  'Where are you?'
"I'll tell you, if I can, the idea, the picture these words opened
to my mind yet it is difficult to express what I want to express.
Ferndean is buried, as you see, in a heavy wood, where sound falls
dull, and dies unreverberating. 'Where are you?' seemed spoken
amongst mountains for I heard a hillsent echo repeat the words.
Cooler and fresher at the moment the gale seemed to visit my brow
I could have deemed that in some wild, lone scene, I and Jane were
meeting. In spirit, I believe we must have met. You no doubt
were, at that hour, in unconscious sleep, Jane perhaps your soul
wandered from its cell to comfort mine for those were your accents
as certain as I live  they were yours"
Reader, it was on Monday night  near midnight  that I too had
received the mysterious summons those were the very words by
which I replied to it. I listened to Mr. Rochester's narrative,
but made no disclosure in return. The coincidence struck me as too
awful and inexplicable to be communicated or discussed. If I told
anything, my tale would be such as must necessarily make a profound
impression on the mind of my hearer and that mind, yet from its
sufferings too prone to gloom, needed not the deeper shade of the
supernatural. I kept these things then, and pondered them in my
heart.
"You cannot now wonder," continued my master, "that when you rose
upon me so unexpectedly last night, I had difficulty in believing
you any other than a mere voice and vision, something that would melt
to silence and annihilation, as the midnight whisper and mountain
echo had melted before. Now, I thank God I know it to be otherwise.
Yes, I thank God"
He put me off his knee, rose, and reverently lifting his hat from
his brow, and bending his sightless eyes to the earth, he stood in
mute devotion. Only the last words of the worship were audible.
"I thank my Maker, that, in the midst of judgment, he has remembered
mercy. I humbly entreat my Redeemer to give me strength to lead
henceforth a purer life than I have done hitherto"
Then he stretched his hand out to be led. I took that dear hand,
held it a moment to my lips, then let it pass round my shoulder
being so much lower of stature than he, I served both for his prop
and guide. We entered the wood, and wended homeward.
CHAPTER XXXVIII  CONCLUSION
Reader, I married him. A quiet wedding we had he and I, the parson
and clerk, were alone present. When we got back from church, I went
into the kitchen of the manorhouse, where Mary was cooking
the dinner and John cleaning the knives, and I said 
"Mary, I have been married to Mr. Rochester this morning." The
housekeeper and her husband were both of that decent phlegmatic
order of people, to whom one may at any time safely communicate
a remarkable piece of news without incurring the danger of having
one's ears pierced by some shrill ejaculation, and subsequently
stunned by a torrent of wordy wonderment. Mary did look up, and
she did stare at me the ladle with which she was basting a pair
of chickens roasting at the fire, did for some three minutes hang
suspended in air and for the same space of time John's knives
also had rest from the polishing process but Mary, bending
again over the roast, said only 
"Have you, Miss? Well, for sure"
A short time after she pursued  "I seed you go out with the
master, but I didn't know you were gone to church to be wed" and
she basted away. John, when I turned to him, was grinning from
ear to ear.
"I telled Mary how it would be," he said "I knew what Mr. Edward"
John was an old servant, and had known his master when he was
the cadet of the house, therefore, he often gave him his Christian
name  "I knew what Mr. Edward would do and I was certain he would
not wait long neither and he's done right, for aught I know. I
wish you joy, Miss" and he politely pulled his forelock.
"Thank you, John. Mr. Rochester told me to give you and Mary
this." I put into his hand a fivepound note. Without waiting to
hear more, I left the kitchen. In passing the door of
that sanctum some time after, I caught the words 
"She'll happen do better for him nor ony o't' grand ladies." And
again, "If she ben't one o' th' handsomest, she's noan faal and
varry goodnatured and i' his een she's fair beautiful, onybody
may see that."
I wrote to Moor House and to Cambridge immediately, to say what I
had done fully explaining also why I had thus acted. Diana and
Mary approved the step unreservedly. Diana announced that she
would just give me time to get over the honeymoon, and then she
would come and see me.
"She had better not wait till then, Jane," said Mr. Rochester, when
I read her letter to him "if she does, she will be too late, for
our honeymoon will shine our life long its beams will only fade
over your grave or mine."
How St. John received the news, I don't know he never answered
the letter in which I communicated it yet six months after he
wrote to me, without, however, mentioning Mr. Rochester's name or
alluding to my marriage. His letter was then calm, and, though very
serious, kind. He has maintained a regular, though not frequent,
correspondence ever since he hopes I am happy, and trusts I am not
of those who live without God in the world, and only mind earthly
things.
You have not quite forgotten little Adele, have you, reader? I
had not I soon asked and obtained leave of Mr. Rochester, to go
and see her at the school where he had placed her. Her frantic
joy at beholding me again moved me much. She looked pale and thin
she said she was not happy. I found the rules of the establishment
were too strict, its course of study too severe for a child of her
age I took her home with me. I meant to become her governess
once more, but I soon found this impracticable my time and cares
were now required by another  my husband needed them all. So I
sought out a school conducted on a more indulgent system, and near
enough to permit of my visiting her often, and bringing her home
sometimes. I took care she should never want for anything that
could contribute to her comfort she soon settled in her new abode,
became very happy there, and made fair progress in her studies.
As she grew up, a sound English education corrected in a great
measure her French defects and when she left school, I found in
her a pleasing and obliging companion docile, goodtempered, and
wellprincipled. By her grateful attention to me and mine, she
has long since well repaid any little kindness I ever had it in my
power to offer her.
My tale draws to its close one word respecting my experience of
married life, and one brief glance at the fortunes of those whose
names have most frequently recurred in this narrative, and I have
done.
I have now been married ten years. I know what it is to live
entirely for and with what I love best on earth. I hold myself
supremely blest  blest beyond what language can express because
I am my husband's life as fully is he is mine. No woman was ever
nearer to her mate than I am ever more absolutely bone of his
bone and flesh of his flesh. I know no weariness of my Edward's
society he knows none of mine, any more than we each do of the
pulsation of the heart that beats in our separate bosoms consequently,
we are ever together. To be together is for us to be at once as
free as in solitude, as gay as in company. We talk, I believe,
all day long to talk to each other is but a more animated and an
audible thinking. All my confidence is bestowed on him, all his
confidence is devoted to me we are precisely suited in character
perfect concord is the result.
Mr. Rochester continued blind the first two years of our union
perhaps it was that circumstance that drew us so very near  that
knit us so very close for I was then his vision, as I am still
his right hand. Literally, I was what he often called me the
apple of his eye. He saw nature  he saw books through me and
never did I weary of gazing for his behalf, and of putting into
words the effect of field, tree, town, river, cloud, sunbeam  of
the landscape before us of the weather round us  and impressing
by sound on his ear what light could no longer stamp on his eye.
Never did I weary of reading to him never did I weary of conducting
him where he wished to go of doing for him what he wished to be
done. And there was a pleasure in my services, most full, most
exquisite, even though sad  because he claimed these services
without painful shame or damping humiliation. He loved me so truly,
that he knew no reluctance in profiting by my attendance he felt
I loved him so fondly, that to yield that attendance was to indulge
my sweetest wishes.
One morning at the end of the two years, as I was writing a letter
to his dictation, he came and bent over me, and said  "Jane, have
you a glittering ornament round your neck?"
I had a gold watchchain I answered "Yes."
"And have you a pale blue dress on?"
I had. He informed me then, that for some time he had fancied the
obscurity clouding one eye was becoming less dense and that now
he was sure of it.
He and I went up to London. He had the advice of an eminent oculist
and he eventually recovered the sight of that one eye. He cannot
now see very distinctly he cannot read or write much but he can
find his way without being led by the hand the sky is no longer
a blank to him  the earth no longer a void. When his firstborn
was put into his arms, he could see that the boy had inherited his
own eyes, as they once were  large, brilliant, and black. On
that occasion, he again, with a full heart, acknowledged that God
had tempered judgment with mercy.
My Edward and I, then, are happy and the more so, because those
we most love are happy likewise. Diana and Mary Rivers are both
married alternately, once every year, they come to see us, and
we go to see them. Diana's husband is a captain in the navy, a
gallant officer and a good man. Mary's is a clergyman, a college
friend of her brother's, and, from his attainments and principles,
worthy of the connection. Both Captain Fitzjames and Mr. Wharton
love their wives, and are loved by them.
As to St. John Rivers, he left England he went to India. He
entered on the path he had marked for himself he pursues it still.
A more resolute, indefatigable pioneer never wrought amidst rocks
and dangers. Firm, faithful, and devoted, full of energy, and
zeal, and truth, he labours for his race he clears their painful
way to improvement he hews down like a giant the prejudices of creed
and caste that encumber it. He may be stern he may be exacting
he may be ambitious yet but his is the sternness of the warrior
Greatheart, who guards his pilgrim convoy from the onslaught of
Apollyon. His is the exaction of the apostle, who speaks but for
Christ, when he says  "Whosoever will come after me, let him deny
himself, and take up his cross and follow me." His is the ambition
of the high masterspirit, which aims to fill a place in the first
rank of those who are redeemed from the earth  who stand without
fault before the throne of God, who share the last mighty victories
of the Lamb, who are called, and chosen, and faithful.
St. John is unmarried he never will marry now. Himself has
hitherto sufficed to the toil, and the toil draws near its close
his glorious sun hastens to its setting. The last letter I received
from him drew from my eyes human tears, and yet filled my heart
with divine joy he anticipated his sure reward, his incorruptible
crown. I know that a stranger's hand will write to me next, to say
that the good and faithful servant has been called at length into
the joy of his Lord. And why weep for this? No fear of death
will darken St. John's last hour his mind will be unclouded, his
heart will be undaunted, his hope will be sure, his faith
steadfast. His own words are a pledge of this 
"My Master," he says, "has forewarned me. Daily He announces more
distinctly,  'Surely I come quickly' and hourly I more eagerly
respond,  'Amen even so come, Lord Jesus'"
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Preliminary Matter.
This text of Melville's MobyDick is based on the Hendricks House edition.
It was prepared by Professor Eugene F. Irey at the University of Colorado.
Any subsequent copies of this data must include this notice
and any publications resulting from analysis of this data must
include reference to Professor Irey's work.
Etymology Supplied by a late consumptive usher to a grammar school.
The pale Usheirthreadbare in coat, heart, body, and brain I see him now.
He was ever dusting his old lexicons and grammars, with a queer handkerchief,
mockingly embellished with all the gay flags of all the known nations of the world.
He loved to dust his old grammars it somehow mildly reminded him of his mortality.
Extracts supplied by a subsublibrarian.
It will be seen that this mere painstaking burrower and grubworm of a poor
devil of a SubSub appears to have gone through the long Vaticans and
streetstalls of the earth, picking up whatever random allusions to whales
he could anyways find in any book whatsoever, sacred or profane.
Therefore you must not, in every case at least, take the higgledypiggledy
whale statements, however authentic, in these extracts, for veritable gospel
cetology. Far from it. As touching the ancient authors generally, as well
as the poets here appearing, these extracts are solely valuable or entertaining,
as affording a glancing bird's eye view of what has been promiscuously said,
thought, fancied, and sung of Leviathan, by many nations and generations,
including our own.
So fare thee well, poor devil of a SubSub, whose commentator I am.
Thou belongest to that hopeless, sallow tribe which no wine of this world will
ever warm and for whom even Pale Sherry would be too rosystrong
but with whom one sometimes loves to sit, and feel poordevilish, too
and grow convivial upon tears and say to them bluntly, with full eyes and empty
glasses, and in not altogether unpleasant sadness igive it up, subsubs
For by how much the more pains ye take to please the world,
by so much the more shall ye for ever go thankless
Would that I could clear out Hampton Court and the Tuileries for ye But
gulp down your tears and hie aloft to the royalmast with your hearts for
your friends who have gone before are clearing out the sevenstoried heavens,
and making refugees of longpampered Gabriel, Michael, and Raphael, against
your coming. Here ye strike but splintered hearts together ithere, ye shall
strike unsplinterable
Call me Ishmael. Some years agonever mind how
long precisely having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular
to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the
watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and
regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the
mouth whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul whenever I find
myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the
rear of every funeral I meet and especially whenever my hypos get such an
upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me
from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking
people's hats offthen, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.
This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish
Cato throws himself upon his sword I quietly take to the ship. There is
nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their
degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the
ocean with me. There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round
by wharves as Indian isles by coral reefscommerce surrounds it with her surf.
Right and left, the streets take you waterward. Its extreme downtown is
the battery, where that noble mole is washed by waves, and cooled by
breezes, which a few hours previous were out of sight of land. Look at the
crowds of watergazers there. Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath
afternoon. Go from Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by
Whitehall northward. What do you see?Posted like silent sentinels all
around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean
reveries. Some leaning against the spiles some seated upon the pierheads
some looking over the bulwarks glasses
of ships from China some high aloft in the rigging, as if striving to get a
still better seaward peep. But these are all landsmen of week days pent up
in lath and plastertied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks.
How then is this? Are the green fields gone? What do they here? But look
here come more crowds, pacing straight for the water, and seemingly bound for
a dive. Strange Nothing will content them but the extremest limit of the
land loitering under the shady lee of yonder warehouses will not suffice.
No. They must get just as nigh the water as they possibly can without falling
in. And there they standmiles of themleagues. Inlanders all, they come
from lanes and alleys, streets and avenues, north, east, south, and west.
Yet here they all unite. Tell me, does the magnetic virtue of the needles of
the compasses of all those ships attract them thither? Once more. Say, you
are in the country in some high land of lakes. Take almost any path you
please, and ten to one it carries you down in a dale, and leaves you there
by a pool in the stream. There is magic in it. Let the most absentminded
of men be plunged in his deepest reveriesstand that man on his legs, set his
feet agoing, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in
all that region. Should you ever be athirst in the great American desert,
try this experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied with a metaphysical
professor. Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.
But here is an artist. He desires to paint you the dreamiest, shadiest,
quietest, most enchanting bit of romantic landscape in all the valley of the
Saco. What is the chief element he employs? There stand his trees, each with
a hollow trunk, as if a hermit and a crucifix were within and here sleeps
his meadow, and there sleep his cattle and up from yonder cottage goes a
sleepy smoke. Deep into distant woodlands winds a mazy way, reaching to
overlapping spurs of mountains bathed in their hillside blue. But though
the picture lies thus tranced, and though this pinetree shakes down its sighs
like leaves upon this shepherd's head, yet all were vain, unless the
shepherd's eye were fixed upon the magic stream before him. Go visit the
Prairies in June,
when for scores on scores of miles you wade kneedeep among Tigerlilieswhat
is the one charm wanting? Water there is not a drop of water there Were
Niagara but a cataract of sand, would you travel your thousand miles to see
it? Why did the poor poet of Tennessee, upon suddenly receiving two handfuls
of silver, deliberate whether to buy him a coat, which he sadly needed, or
invest his money in a pedestrian trip to Rockaway Beach? Why is almost every
robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him, at some time or other
crazy to go to sea? Why upon your first voyage as a passenger, did you
yourself feel such a mystical vibration, when first told that you and your
ship were now out of sight of land? Why did the old Persians hold the sea
holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity, and own brother of Jove?
Surely all this is not without meaning. And still deeper the meaning of that
story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image
he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same
image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the
ungraspable phantom of life and this is the key to it all. Now, when I say
that I am in the habit of going to sea whenever I begin to grow hazy about the
eyes, and begin to be over conscious of my lungs, I do not mean to have it
inferred that I ever go to sea as a passenger. For to go as a passenger you
must needs have a purse, and a purse is but a rag unless you have something
in it. Besides, passengers get seasick grow quarrelsome don't sleep of
nights do not enjoy themselves much, as a general thing no, I never go as a
passenger nor, though I am something of a salt, do I ever go to sea as a
Commodore, or a Captain, or a Cook. I abandon the glory and distinction of
such offices to those who like them. For my part, I abominate all honorable
respectable toils, trials, and tribulations of every kind whatsoever. It is
quite as much as I can do to take care of myself, without taking care of
ships, barques, brigs, schooners, and what not. And as for going as cook, 
though I confess there is considerable glory in that, a cook being a sort of
officer on shipboard yet, somehow, I never fancied broiling fowls though
once broiled, judiciously buttered, and judgmatically salted and peppered,
there is no one who will
speak more respectfully, not to say reverentially, of a broiled fowl than I
will. It is out of the idolatrous dotings of the old Egyptians upon broiled
ibis and roasted river horse, that you see the mummies of those creatures in
their huge bakehouses the pyramids. No, when I go to sea, I go as a simple
sailor, right before the mast, plumb down into the forecastle, aloft there
to the royal masthead. True, they rather order me about some, and make me
jump from spar to spar, like a grasshopper in a May meadow. And at first,
this sort of thing is unpleasant enough. It touches one's sense of honor,
particularly if you come of an old established family in the land, the van
Rensselaers, or Randolphs, or Hardicanutes. And more than all, if just
previous to putting your hand into the tarpot, you have been lording it as a
country schoolmaster, making the tallest boys stand in awe of you. The
transition is a keen one, I assure you, from the schoolmaster to a sailor,
and requires a strong decoction of Seneca and the Stoics to enable you to grin
and bear it. But even this wears off in time. What of it, if some old hunks
of a seacaptain orders me to get a broom and sweep down the decks? What does
that indignity amount to, weighed, I mean, in the scales of the New
Testament? Do you think the archangel Gabriel thinks anything the less of me,
because I promptly and respectfully obey that old hunks in that particular
instance? Who aint a slave? Tell me that. Well, then, however the old
seacaptains may order me abouthowever they may thump and punch me about, I
have the satisfaction of knowing that it is all right that everybody else
is one way or other served in much the same way  either in a physical or
metaphysical point of view, that is and so the universal thump is passed
round, and all hands should rub each other's shoulderblades, and be
content. Again, I always go to sea as a sailor, because they make a point of
paying me for my trouble, whereas they never pay passengers a single penny
that I ever heard of. On the contrary, passengers themselves must pay. And
there is all the difference in the world between paying and being paid. The
act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction that the two
orchard
thieves entailed upon us. But being paid, what will compare with it? The
urbane activity with which a man receives money is really marvellous,
considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly
ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven. Ah how
cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition Finally, I always go to sea as
a sailor, because of the wholesome exercise and pure air of the forecastle
deck. For as in this world, head winds are far more prevalent than winds
from astern that is, if you never violate the Pythagorean maxim, so for
the most part the Commodore on the quarterdeck gets his atmosphere at second
hand from the sailors on the forecastle. He thinks he breathes it first but
not so. In much the same way do the commonalty lead their leaders in many
other things, at the same time that the leaders little suspect it. But
wherefore it was that after having repeatedly smelt the sea as a merchant
sailor, I should now take it into my head to go on a whaling voyage this
the invisible police officer of the Fates, who has the constant surveillance
of me, and secretly dogs me, and influences me in some unaccountable way he
can better answer than any one else. And, doubtless, my going on this whaling
voyage, formed part of the grand programme of Providence that was drawn up a
long time ago. It came in as a sort of brief interlude and solo between more
extensive performances. I take it that this part of the bill must have run
something like this Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the
United States. Whaling Voyage by one Ishmael. Bloody Battle in
Affghanistan. Though I cannot tell why it was exactly that those stage
managers, the Fates, put me down for this shabby part of a whaling voyage,
when others were set down for magnificent parts in high tragedies, and short
and easy parts in genteel comedies, and jolly parts in farces though I
cannot tell why this was exactly yet, now that I recall all the
circumstances, I think I can see a little into the springs and motives which
being cunningly presented to me under various disguises, induced me to set
about
performing the part I did, besides cajoling me into the delusion that it was
a choice resulting from my own unbiased freewill and discriminating judgment.
chief among these motives was the overwhelming idea of the great whale
himself. Such a portentous and mysterious monster roused all my curiosity.
Then the wild and distant seas where he rolled his island bulk the
undeliverable, nameless perils of the whale these, with all the attending
marvels of a thousand Patagonian sights and sounds, helped to sway me to my
wish. With other men, perhaps, such things would not have been inducements
but as for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I
love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts. Not ignoring what
is good, I am quick to perceive a horror, and could still be social with
itwould they let me since it is but well to be on friendly terms with all
the inmates of the place one lodges in. By reason of these things, then, the
whaling voyage was welcome the great floodgates of the wonderworld swung
open, and in the wild conceits that swayed me to my purpose, two and two
there floated into my inmost soul, endless processions of the whale, and, mid
most of them all, one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air.
Returning to the SpouterInn from the
Chapel, I found Queequeg there quite alone he having left the Chapel before
the benediction some time. He was sitting on a bench before the fire, with
his feet on the stove hearth, and in one hand was holding close up to his
face that little negro idol of his peering hard into its face, and with a
jackknife gently whittling away at its nose, meanwhile humming to himself in
his heathenish way. But being now interrupted, he put up the image and
pretty
soon, going to the table, took up a large book there, and placing it on his
lap began counting the pages with deliberate regularity at every fiftieth
page as I fancied stopping a moment, looking vacantly around him, and
giving utterance to a longdrawn gurgling whistle of astonishment. He would
then begin again at the next fifty seeming to commence at number one each
time, as though he could not count more than fifty, and it was only by such
a large number of fifties being found together, that his astonishment at the
multitude of pages was excited. With much interest I sat watching him. Savage
though he was, and hideously marred about the face at least to my taste 
his countenance yet had a something in it which was by no means disagreeable.
You cannot hide the soul. Through all his unearthly tattooings, I thought I
saw the traces of a simple honest heart and in his large, deep eyes, fiery
black and bold, there seemed tokens of a spirit that would dare a thousand
devils. And besides all this, there was a certain lofty bearing about the
Pagan, which even his uncouthness could not altogether maim. He looked like
a man who had never cringed and never had had a creditor. Whether it was,
too, that his head being shaved, his forehead was drawn out in freer and
brighter relief, and looked more expansive than it otherwise would, this I
will not venture to decide but certain it was his head was phrenologically
an excellent one. It may seem ridiculous, but it reminded me of General
Washington's head, as seen in the popular busts of him. It had the same long
regularly graded retreating slope from above the brows, which were likewise
very projecting, like two long promontories thickly wooded on top. Queequeg
was George Washington cannibalistically developed. Whilst I was thus closely
scanning him, halfpretending meanwhile to be looking out at the storm from
the casement, he never heeded my presence, never troubled himself with so
much as a single glance but appeared wholly occupied with counting the
pages of the marvellous book. Considering how sociably we had been sleeping
together the night previous, and especially considering the affectionate arm
I had found thrown over me upon waking in the morning, I thought this
indifference of his
very strange. But savages are strange beings at times you do not know
exactly how to take them. At first they are overawing their calm
selfcollectedness of simplicity seems a Socratic wisdom. I had noticed also
that Queequeg never consorted at all, or but very little, with the other
seamen in the inn. He made no advances whatever appeared to have no desire
to enlarge the circle of his acquaintances. All this struck me as mighty
singular yet, upon second thoughts, there was something almost sublime in
it. Here was a man some twenty thousand miles from home, by the way of Cape
Horn, that is which was the only way he could get there thrown among people
as strange to him as though he were in the planet Jupiter and yet he seemed
entirely at his ease preserving the utmost serenity content with his own
companionship always equal to himself. Surely this was a touch of fine
philosophy though no doubt he had never heard there was such a thing as
that. But, perhaps, to be true philosophers, we mortals should not be
conscious of so living or so striving. So soon as I hear that such or such a
man gives himself out for a philosopher, I conclude that, like the dyspeptic
old woman, he must have broken his digester. As I sat there in that now
lonely room the fire burning low, in that mild stage when, after its first
intensity has warmed the air, it then only glows to be looked at the
evening shades and phantoms gathering round the casements, and peering in
upon us silent, solitary twain the storm booming without in solemn swells
I began to be sensible of strange feelings. I felt a melting in me. No
more my splintered heart and maddened hand were turned against the wolfish
world. This soothing savage had redeemed it. There he sat, his very
indifference speaking a nature in which there lurked no civilized hypocrisies
and bland deceits. Wild he was a very sight of sights to see yet I began
to feel myself mysteriously drawn towards him. And those same things that
would have repelled most others, they were the very magnets that thus drew
me. I'll try a pagan friend, thought I, since Christian kindness has proved
but hollow courtesy. I drew my bench near him, and made some friendly signs
and hints, doing my best to talk with him meanwhile. At first he little
noticed these advances but presently, upon my referring to his last
night's hospitalities, he made out to ask me whether we were again to be
bedfellows. I told him yes whereat I thought he looked pleased, perhaps a
little complimented. We then turned over the book together, and I endeavored
to explain to him the purpose of the printing, and the meaning of the few
pictures that were in it. Thus I soon engaged his interest and from that we
went to jabbering the best we could about the various outer sights to be seen
in this famous town. Soon I proposed a social smoke and, producing his pouch
and tomahawk, he quietly offered me a puff. And then we sat exchanging puffs
from that wild pipe of his, and keeping it regularly passing between us. If
there yet lurked any ice of indifference towards me in the Pagan's breast,
this pleasant, genial smoke we had, soon thawed it out, and left us cronies.
He seemed to take to me quite as naturally and unbiddenly as I to him and
when our smoke was over, he pressed his forehead against mine, clasped me
round the waist, and said that henceforth we were married meaning, in his
country's phrase, that we were bosom friends he would gladly die for me, if
need should be. In a countryman, this sudden flame of friendship would have
seemed far too premature, a thing to be much distrusted but in this simple
savage those old rules would not apply. After supper, and another social chat
and smoke, we went to our room together. He made me a present of his
embalmed head took out his enormous tobacco wallet, and groping under the
tobacco, drew out some thirty dollars in silver then spreading them on the
table, and mechanically dividing them into two equal portions, pushed one of
them towards me, and said it was mine. I was going to remonstrate but he
silenced me by pouring them into my trowsers' pockets. I let them stay. He
then went about his evening prayers, took out his idol, and removed the
paper fireboard. By certain signs and symptoms, I thought he seemed anxious
for me to join him but well knowing what was to follow, I deliberated a
moment whether, in case he invited me, I would comply or otherwise. I was a
good Christian born and bred in the bosom of the infallible Presbyterian
Church. How then could I unite with
this wild idolator in worshipping his piece of wood? But what is worship?
thought I. Do you suppose now, Ishmael, that the magnanimous God of heaven
and earth pagans and all included can possibly be jealous of an
insignificant bit of black wood? Impossible But what is worship? to do the
will of God  that is worship. And what is the will of God? to do to my
fellow man what I would have my fellow man to do to me  that is the will of
God. Now, Queequeg is my fellow man. And what do I wish that this Queequeg
would do to me? Why, unite with me in my particular Presbyterian form of
worship. consequently, i must then unite with him in his ergo, I must turn
idolator. So I kindled the shavings helped prop up the innocent little
idol offered him burnt biscuit with Queequeg salamed before him twice or
thrice kissed his nose and that done, we undressed and went to bed, at
peace with our own consciences and all the world. But we did not go to sleep
without some little chat. How it is I know not but there is no place like a
bed for confidential disclosures between friends. Man and wife, they say,
there open the very bottom of their souls to each other and some old couples
often lie and chat over old times till nearly morning. Thus, then, in our
hearts' honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg a cosy, loving pair.
ENDERBY, OF LONDON Ship, ahoy Hast seen the White Whale? So cried Ahab,
once more hailing a ship showing English colors, bearing down under the
stern. Trumpet to mouth, the old man was standing in his hoisted
quarterboat, his ivory leg plainly revealed to the stranger captain, who
was carelessly reclining in his own boat's bow. He was a darklytanned,
burly, goodnatured, finelooking man, of sixty or thereabouts, dressed in
a spacious roundabout, that hung round him in festoons of blue pilotcloth
and one empty arm of this jacket streamed behind him like the broidered arm of
a huzzar's surcoat. Hast seen the White Whale? See you this? and
withdrawing it from the fold that had hidden it, he held up a white arm of
sperm whale bone, terminating in a wooden head like a mallet. Man my boat
cried Ahab, impetuously, and tossing about the oars near him  Stand by to
lower In less than a minute, without quitting his little craft, he and
his crew were dropped to the water, and were soon alongside of the stranger.
But here a curious difficulty presented itself. In the excitement of the
moment, Ahab had forgotten that since the loss of his leg he had never once
stepped on board of any vessel at sea but his own, and then it was always by
an ingenious and very handy mechanical contrivance peculiar to the Pequod,
and a thing not to be rigged and shipped in any other vessel at a moment's
warning. Now, it is no very easy matter for anybody except those who are
almost hourly used to it, like whalemen to clamber up a ship's side from a
boat on the open sea for the great swells now lift the boat high up towards
the bulwarks, and then instantaneously drop it half way down to the kelson.
so, deprived of one leg, and the strange ship of course being altogether
unsupplied with the kindly invention, Ahab now found himself abjectly reduced
to a clumsy landsman again hopelessly eyeing the uncertain changeful height
he could hardly hope to attain. It has before been hinted, perhaps, that
every little untoward circumstance that befel him, and which indirectly
sprang from his luckless mishap, almost invariably irritated or exasperated
Ahab. And in the present instance, all this was heightened by the sight of
the two officers of the strange ship, leaning over the side, by the
perpendicular ladder of nailed cleets there, and swinging towards him a pair
of tastefullyornamented manropes for at first they did not seem to bethink
them that a onelegged man must be too much of a cripple to use their sea
bannisters. But this awkwardness only lasted a minute, because the strange
captain, observing at a glance how affairs stood, cried out, I see, I see
avast heaving there Jump, boys, and swing over the cuttingtackle. As
good luck would have it, they had had a whale alongside a day or two
previous, and the great tackles were still aloft, and the massive curved
blubberhook, now clean and dry, was still attached to the end. This was
quickly lowered to Ahab, who at once comprehending it all, slid his solitary
thigh into the curve of the hook it was like sitting in the fluke of an
anchor, or the crotch of an apple tree, and then giving the word, held
himself fast, and at the same time also helped to hoist his own weight, by
pulling handoverhand upon one of the running parts of the tackle. Soon he
was carefully swung inside the high bulwarks, and gently landed upon the
capstan head. With his ivory arm frankly thrust forth in welcome, the other
captain advanced, and Ahab, putting out his ivory leg, and crossing the ivory
arm like two swordfish blades cried out in his walrus way, Aye, aye,
hearty let us shake bones together an arm and a leg an arm that never
can shrink, d'ye see and a leg that never can run. Where did'st thou see
the White Whale? how long ago? The White Whale, said the Englishman,
pointing his ivory
arm towards the East, and taking a rueful sight along it, as if it had been a
telescope There I saw him, on the Line, last season. And he took that
arm off, did he? asked Ahab, now sliding down from the capstan, and resting
on the Englishman's shoulder, as he did so. Aye, he was the cause of it, at
least and that leg, too? Spin me the yarn, said Ahab how was it? It
was the first time in my life that I ever cruised on the Line, began the
Englishman. I was ignorant of the White Whale at that time. Well, one day
we lowered for a pod of four or five whales, and my boat fastened to one of
them a regular circus horse he was, too, that went milling and milling
round so, that my boat's crew could only trim dish, by sitting all their
sterns on the outer gunwale. Presently up breaches from the bottom of the sea
a bouncing great whale, with a milkywhite head and hump, all crows' feet and
wrinkles. It was he, it was he cried Ahab, suddenly letting out his
suspended breath. And harpoons sticking in near his starboard fin. Aye,
aye they were mine  my irons, cried Ahab, exultingly  but on Give me a
chance, then, said the Englishman, goodhumoredly. Well, this old
greatgrandfather, with the white head and hump, runs all afoam into the pod,
and goes to snapping furiously at my fastline. Aye, I see wanted to part
it free the fastfish an old trick I know him. How it was exactly,
continued the onearmed commander, I do not know but in biting the line, it
got foul of his teeth, caught there somehow but we didn't know it then so
that when we afterwards pulled on the line, bounce we came plump on to his
hump instead of the other whale's that went off to windward, all fluking.
Seeing how matters stood, and what a noble great whale it was the noblest
and biggest I ever saw, sir, in my life I resolved to capture him, spite of
the boiling rage he seemed to be in. And thinking the haphazard line would
get loose, or the tooth it was tangled to might draw for I have
a devil of a boat's crew for a pull on a whaleline seeing all this, I say,
I jumped into my first mate's boat Mr. Mounttop's here by the way, Captain
Mounttop Mounttopthe captain as I was saying, I jumped into Mounttop's
boat, which, d'ye see, was gunwale and gunwale with mine, then and snatching
the first harpoon, let this old greatgrandfather have it. But, Lord, look
you, sir hearts and souls alive, man the next instant, in a jiff, I was
blind as a bat both eyes out all befogged and bedeadened with black foam
the whale's tail looming straight up out of it, perpendicular in the air,
like a marble steeple. No use sterning all, then but as I was groping at
midday, with a blinding sun, all crownjewels as I was groping, I say,
after the second iron, to toss it overboard down comes the tail like a Lima
tower, cutting my boat in two, leaving each half in splinters and, flukes
first, the white hump backed through the wreck, as though it was all chips.
We all struck out. To escape his terrible flailings, I seized hold of my
harpoonpole sticking in him, and for a moment clung to that like a sucking
fish. But a combing sea dashed me off, and at the same instant, the fish,
taking one good dart forwards, went down like a flash and the barb of that
cursed second iron towing along near me caught me here clapping his hand
just below his shoulder yes, caught me just here, I say, and bore me down
to Hell's flames, I was thinking when, when, all of a sudden, thank the
good God, the barb ript its way along the flesh clear along the whole length
of my arm came out nigh my wrist, and up i floated and that gentleman
there will tell you the rest by the way, captain Dr. Bunger, ship's
surgeon Bunger, my lad,  the captain. Now, Bunger boy, spin your part
of the yarn. The professional gentleman thus familiarly pointed out, had
been all the time standing near them, with nothing specific visible, to
denote his gentlemanly rank on board. His face was an exceedingly round but
sober one he was dressed in a faded blue woollen frock or shirt, and patched
trowsers and had thus far been dividing his attention between a marlingspike
he held in one hand, and a pillbox held in the other, occasionally casting
a critical glance at the ivory limbs of the two crippled captains. But, at his
superior's introduction of him to Ahab, he
politely bowed, and straightway went on to do his captain's bidding. It was
a shocking bad wound, began the whalesurgeon and, taking my advice,
Captain Boomer here, stood our old Sammy Samuel Enderby is the name of
my ship, interrupted the onearmed captain, addressing Ahab go on, boy.
Stood our old Sammy off to the northward, to get out of the blazing hot
weather there on the Line. But it was no use I did all I could sat up with
him nights was very severe with him in the matter of diet Oh, very
severe chimed in the patient himself then suddenly altering his voice,
Drinking hot rum toddies with me every night, till he couldn't see to put on
the bandages and sending me to bed, half seas over, about three o'clock in
the morning. Oh, ye stars he sat up with me indeed, and was very severe
in my diet. Oh a great watcher, and very dietetically severe, is Dr.
Bunger. Bunger, you dog, laugh out why don't ye? You know you're a
precious jolly rascal. But, heave ahead, boy, I'd rather be killed by you
than kept alive by any other man. My captain, you must have ere this
perceived, respected sir said the imperturbable godlylooking Bunger,
slightly bowing to Ahab  is apt to be facetious at times he spins us many
clever things of that sort. But I may as well say en passant, as the French
remark that I myself that is to say, Jack Bunger, late of the reverend
clergy am a strict total abstinence man I never drink Water cried the
captain he never drinks it it's a sort of fits to him fresh water
throws him into the hydrophobia but go on go on with the arm story. Yes,
I may as well, said the surgeon, coolly. I was about observing, sir, before
Captain Boomer's facetious interruption, that spite of my best and severest
endeavors, the wound kept getting worse and worse the truth was, sir, it
was as ugly gaping wound as surgeon ever saw more than two feet and several
inches long. I measured it with the lead line. In short, it grew black I
knew what was threatened, and off it came.
But I had no hand in shipping that ivory arm there that thing is against all
rule pointing at it with the marlingspike  that is the captain's work,
not mine he ordered the carpenter to make it he had that clubhammer there
put to the end, to knock some one's brains out with, I suppose, as he tried
mine once. He flies into diabolical passions sometimes. Do ye see this
dent, sir removing his hat, and brushing aside his hair, and exposing a
bowllike cavity in his skull, but which bore not the slightest scarry trace,
or any token of ever having been a wound  Well, the captain there will tell
you how that came here he knows. No, I don't, said the captain, but
his mother did he was born with it. Oh, you solemn rogue, you you Bunger
was there ever such another Bunger in the watery world? Bunger, when you
die, you ought to die in pickle, you dog you should be preserved to future
ages, you rascal. What became of the White Whale? now cried Ahab, who
thus far had been impatiently listening to this byeplay between the two
Englishmen. Oh cried the onearmed captain, Oh, yes Well after he
sounded, we didn't see him again for some time in fact, as I before hinted,
I didn't then know what whale it was that had served me such a trick, till
some time afterwards, when coming back to the Line, we heard about Moby Dick
as some call him and then I knew it was he. Did'st thou cross his wake
again? Twice. But could not fasten? Didn't want to try to ain't one
limb enough? What should I do without this other arm? And I'm thinking Moby
Dick doesn't bite so much as he swallows. Well, then, interrupted Bunger,
give him your left arm for bait to get the right. Do you know, gentlemen
very gravely and mathematically bowing to each Captain in succession  Do
you know, gentlemen, that the digestive organs of the whale are so
inscrutably constructed by Divine Providence, that it is quite impossible for
him to completely digest even a
man's arm? And he knows it too. So that what you take for the White Whale's
malice is only his awkwardness. For he never means to swallow a single limb
he only thinks to terrify by feints. But sometimes he is like the old
juggling fellow, formerly a patient of mine in Ceylon, that making believe
swallow jackknives, once upon a time let one drop into him in good earnest,
and there it stayed for a twelvemonth or more when I gave him an emetic,
and he heaved it up in small tacks, d'ye see. No possible way for him to
digest that jackknife, and fully incorporate it into his general bodily
system. Yes, Captain Boomer, if you are quick enough about it, and have a
mind to pawn one arm for the sake of the privilege of giving decent burial to
the other, why in that case the arm is yours only let the whale have
another chance at you shortly, that's all. No, thank ye, Bunger, said the
english captain, he's welcome to the arm he has, since I can't help it,
and didn't know him then but not to another one. No more White Whales for
me I've lowered for him once, and that has satisfied me. There would be
great glory in killing him, I know that and there is a shipload of
precious sperm in him, but, hark ye, he's best let alone don't you think
so, Captain? glancing at the ivory leg. He is. But he will still be
hunted, for all that. What is best let alone, that accursed thing is not
always what least allures. He's all a magnet How long since thou saw'st him
last? Which way heading? Bless my soul, and curse the foul fiend's,
cried Bunger, stoopingly walking round Ahab, and like a dog, strangely
snuffing this man's blood bring the thermometer it's at the boiling
point his pulse makes these planks beat sir taking a lancet from his
pocket, and drawing near to Ahab's arm. Avast roared Ahab, dashing him
against the bulwarks  Man the boat Which way heading? Good God cried
the English Captain, to whom the question was put. What's the matter? He
was heading east, I think. Is your Captain crazy? whispering Fedallah.
But Fedallah, putting a finger on his lip, slid over the bulwarks
to take the boat's steering oar, and Ahab, swinging the cuttingtackle
towards him, commanded the ship's sailors to stand by to lower. In a moment
he was standing in the boat's stern, and the Manilla men were springing to
their oars. In vain the English Captain hailed him. With back to the
stranger ship, and face set like a flint to his own, Ahab stood upright till
alongside of the Pequod.
Ere the English ship fades from sight, be
it set down here, that she hailed from London, and was named after the late
Samuel Enderby, merchant of that city, the original of the famous whaling
house of enderby and sons a house which in my poor whaleman's opinion,
comes not far behind the united royal houses of the Tudors and Bourbons, in
point of real historical interest. How long, prior to the year of our Lord 
, this great whaling house was in existence, my numerous fishdocuments
do not make plain but in that year 
 it fitted out the first English
ships that ever regularly hunted the Sperm Whale though for some score of
years previous ever since
 our valiant Coffins and Maceys of Nantucket
and the Vineyard had in large fleets pursued that Leviathan, but only in the
North and South Atlantic not elsewhere. Be it distinctly recorded here,
that the Nantucketers were the first among mankind to harpoon with civilized
steel the great Sperm Whale and that for half a century they were the only
people of the whole globe who so harpooned him. In
, a fine ship, the
Amelia, fitted out for the express purpose, and at the sole charge of the
vigorous Enderbys, boldly rounded Cape Horn, and was the first among the
nations to lower a whaleboat of any sort in the great South Sea. The
voyage was a skilful and lucky one and returning to her berth with her hold
full of the precious sperm, the Amelia's example was soon followed by other
ships, English and American, and thus the vast Sperm Whale grounds of the
Pacific were thrown open. But not content with this good deed, the
indefatigable house again bestirred itself Samuel and all his Sons how
many, their mother only knows and under their immediate auspices, and
partly, I think, at their expense, the British government was induced to send
the sloopofwar Rattler on a whaling voyage of discovery into the South Sea.
Commanded by a naval PostCaptain, the Rattler made a rattling voyage of it,
and did some service how much does not appear. But this is not all. In 
, the same house fitted out a discovery whale ship of their own, to go on
a tasting cruise to the remote waters of Japan. That ship well called the
Syren made a noble experimental cruise and it was thus that the great
Japanese Whaling Ground first became generally known. The Syren in this
famous voyage was commanded by a Captain Coffin, a Nantucketer. All honor to
the Enderbies, therefore, whose house, I think, exists to the present day
though doubtless the original Samuel must long ago have slipped his cable for
the great South Sea of the other world. The ship named after him was worthy
of the honor, being a very fast sailer and a noble craft every way. I
boarded her once at midnight somewhere off the Patagonian coast, and drank
good flip down in the forecastle. It was a fine gam we had, and they were all
trumps every soul on board. A short life to them, and a jolly death. And
that fine gam I had long, very long after old Ahab touched her planks with
his ivory heel  it minds me of the noble, solid, Saxon hospitality of that
ship and may my parson forget me, and the devil remember me, if I ever lose
sight of it. Flip? Did I say we had flip? Yes, and we flipped it at the
rate of ten gallons the hour and when the squall came for it's squally off
there by Patagonia, and all hands visitors and all were called to reef
topsails, we were so topheavy that we had to swing each other aloft in
bowlines and we ignorantly furled the skirts of our jackets into
the sails, so that we hung there, reefed fast in the howling gale, a warning
example to all drunken tars. However, the masts did not go overboard and by
and bye we scrambled down, so sober, that we had to pass the flip again,
though the savage salt spray bursting down the forecastle scuttle, rather too
much diluted and pickled it to my taste. The beef was fine tough, but with
body in it. They said it was bullbeef others, that it was dromedary beef
but i do not know, for certain, how that was. they had dumplings too small,
but substantial, symmetrically globular, and indestructible dumplings. I
fancied that you could feel them, and roll them about in you after they were
swallowed. If you stooped over too far forward, you risked their pitching
out of you like billiardballs. The bread but that couldn't be helped
besides, it was an antiscorbutic in short, the bread contained the only
fresh fare they had. But the forecastle was not very light, and it was very
easy to step over into a dark corner when you ate it. But all in all, taking
her from truck to helm, considering the dimensions of the cook's boilers,
including his own live parchment boilers fore and aft, I say, the Samuel
Enderby was a jolly ship of good fare and plenty fine flip and strong
crack fellows all, and capital from boot heels to hatband. But why was it,
think ye, that the Samuel Enderby, and some other English whalers I know of
not all though were such famous, hospitable ships that passed round the
beef, and the bread, and the can, and the joke and were not soon weary
of eating, and drinking, and laughing? I will tell you. The abounding good
cheer of these English whalers is matter for historical research. Nor have I
been at all sparing of historical whale research, when it has seemed needed.
The English were preceded in the whale fishery by the Hollanders, Zealanders,
and Danes from whom they derived many terms still extant in the fishery
and what is yet more, their fat old fashions, touching plenty to eat and
drink. For, as a general thing, the English merchantship scrimps her crew
but not so the English whaler. Hence, in the English, this thing of whaling
good cheer is not normal and natural, but incidental and particular and,
therefore, must have some special origin,
which is here pointed out, and will be still further elucidated. During my
researches in the leviathanic histories, I stumbled upon an ancient Dutch
volume, which, by the musty whaling smell of it, I knew must be about
whalers. The title was, Dan Coopman, wherefore I concluded that this must
be the invaluable memoirs of some Amsterdam cooper in the fishery, as every
whale ship must carry its cooper. I was reinforced in this opinion by seeing
that it was the production of one Fitz Swackhammer. But my friend Dr.
Snodhead, a very learned man, professor of Low Dutch and High German in the
college of Santa Claus and St. Pott's, to whom I handed the work for
translation, giving him a box of sperm candles for his trouble  this same
Dr. Snodhead, so soon as he spied the book, assured me that Dan Coopman did
not mean The Cooper, but The Merchant. In short, this ancient and
learned Low Dutch book treated of the commerce of Holland and, among other
subjects, contained a very interesting account of its whale fishery. And in
this chapter it was, headed Smeer, or Fat, that I found a long detailed
list of the outfits for the larders and cellars of  sail of Dutch whalemen
from which list, as translated by Dr. Snodhead. I transcribe the following , lbs. of beef. , lbs. Friesland pork. , lbs. of stock fish.
, lbs. of biscuit. , lbs. of soft bread. , firkins of butter.
, lbs. of Texel and Leyden cheese. , lbs. cheese probably an
inferior article.  ankers of Geneva. , barrels of beer. Most
statistical tables are parchingly dry in the reading not so in the present
case, however, where the reader is flooded with whole pipes, barrels, quarts,
and gills of good gin and good cheer. At the time, I devoted three days to
the studious digesting of all this beer, beef, and bread, during which many
profound
thoughts were incidentally suggested to me, capable of a transcendental
and Platonic application and, furthermore, I compiled supplementary tables
of my own, touching the probable quantity of stockfish, etc., consumed by
every Low Dutch harpooneer in that ancient Greenland and Spitzbergen whale
fishery. In the first place, the amount of butter, and Texel and Leyden
cheese consumed, seems amazing. I impute it, though, to their naturally
unctuous natures, being rendered still more unctuous by the nature of their
vocation, and especially by their pursuing their game in those frigid Polar
Seas, on the very coasts of that Esquimaux country where the convivial
natives pledge each other in bumpers of train oil. The quantity of beer, too,
is very large, , barrels. Now, as those polar fisheries could only be
prosecuted in the short summer of that climate, so that the whole cruise of
one of these Dutch whalemen, including the short voyage to and from the
Spitzbergen sea, did not much exceed three months, say, and reckoning  men
to each of their fleet of  sail, we have , Low Dutch seamen in all
therefore, I say, we have precisely two barrels of beer per man, for a
twelve weeks' allowance, exclusive of his fair proportion of that  ankers
of gin. Now, whether these gin and beer harpooneers, so fuddled as one might
fancy them to have been, were the right sort of men to stand up in a boat's
head, and take good aim at flying whales this would seem somewhat
improbable. Yet they did aim at them, and hit them too. But this was very
far North, be it remembered, where beer agrees well with the constitution
upon the Equator, in our southern fishery, beer would be apt to make the
harpooneer sleepy at the masthead and boozy in his boat and grievous loss
might ensue to Nantucket and New Bedford. But no more enough has been said
to show that the old Dutch whalers of two or three centuries ago were high
livers and that the English whalers have not neglected so excellent an
example. For, say they, when cruising in an empty ship, if you can get
nothing better out of the world, get a good dinner out of it, at least. And
this empties the decanter.
Hitherto, in descriptively
treating of the Sperm Whale, I have chiefly dwelt upon the marvels of his
outer aspect or separately and in detail upon some few interior structural
features. But to a large and thorough sweeping comprehension of him, it
behoves me now to unbutton him still further, and untagging the points of his
hose, unbuckling his garters, and casting loose the hooks and the eyes of
the joints of his innermost bones, set him before you in his ultimatum that
is to say, in his unconditional skeleton. But how now, Ishmael? How is it,
that you, a mere oarsman in the fishery, pretend to know aught about the
subterranean parts of the whale? Did erudite Stubb, mounted upon your
capstan, deliver lectures on the anatomy of the Cetacea and by help of the
windlass, hold up a specimen rib for exhibition? Explain thyself, Ishmael.
Can you land a fullgrown whale on your deck for examination, as a cook
dishes a roastpig? Surely not. A veritable witness have you hitherto been,
Ishmael but have a care how you seize the privilege of Jonah alone the
privilege of discoursing upon the joists and beams the rafters, ridgepole,
sleepers, and underpinnings, making up the framework of leviathan and
belike of the tallowvats, dairyrooms, butteries, and cheeseries in his
bowels. I confess, that since Jonah, few whalemen have penetrated very far
beneath the skin of the adult whale nevertheless, I have been blessed with
an opportunity to dissect him in miniature. In a ship I belonged to, a small
cub Sperm Whale was once bodily hoisted to the deck for his poke or bag, to
make sheaths for the barbs of the harpoons, and for the heads of the lances.
Think you I let that chance go, without using my boathatchet and
jackknife, and breaking the seal and reading all the contents of that young
cub?
And as for my exact knowledge of the bones of the leviathan in their gigantic,
full grown development, for that rare knowledge I am indebted to my late
royal friend Tranquo, king of Tranque, one of the Arsacides. For being at
Tranque, years ago, when attached to the tradingship Dey of Algiers, I was
invited to spend part of the Arsacidean holidays with the lord of Tranque, at
his retired palm villa at Pupella a seaside glen not very far distant from
what our sailors called BambooTown, his capital. Among many other fine
qualities, my royal friend Tranquo, being gifted with a devout love for all
matters of barbaric vertu, had brought together in Pupella whatever rare
things the more ingenious of his people could invent chiefly carved woods of
wonderful devices, chiselled shells, inlaid spears, costly paddles,
aromatic canoes and all these distributed among whatever natural wonders,
the wonderfreighted, tributerendering waves had cast upon his shores. Chief
among these latter was a great Sperm Whale, which, after an unusually long
raging gale, had been found dead and stranded, with his head against a
cocoanut tree, whose plumagelike, tufted droopings seemed his verdant jet.
When the vast body had at last been stripped of its fathomdeep enfoldings,
and the bones become dust dry in the sun, then the skeleton was carefully
transported up the Pupella glen, where a grand temple of lordly palms now
sheltered it. The ribs were hung with trophies the vertebrae were carved
with Arsacidean annals, in strange hieroglyphics in the skull, the priests
kept up an unextinguished aromatic flame, so that the mystic head again sent
forth its vapory spout while, suspended from a bough, the terrific lower jaw
vibrated over all the devotees, like the hairhung sword that so affrighted
damocles. it was a wondrous sight. the wood was green as mosses of the icy
Glen the trees stood high and haughty, feeling their living sap the
industrious earth beneath was as a weaver's loom, with a gorgeous carpet on
it, whereof the groundvine tendrils formed the warp and woof, and the
living flowers the figures. All the trees, with all their laden branches
all the shrubs, and ferns, and grasses the messagecarrying air all
these unceasingly were active. Through the lacings of the leaves, the great
sun seemed a flying shuttle weaving the unwearied verdure. Oh, busy weaver
unseen weaver pause one word  whither flows the fabric? what palace may
it deck? wherefore all these ceaseless toilings? Speak, weaver stay thy
hand  but one single word with thee Nay the shuttle flies the figures
float from forth the loom the freshetrushing carpet for ever slides away.
The weavergod, he weaves and by that weaving is he deafened, that he hears
no mortal voice and by that humming, we, too, who look on the loom are
deafened and only when we escape it shall we hear the thousand voices that
speak through it. For even so it is in all material factories. The spoken
words that are inaudible among the flying spindles those same words are
plainly heard without the walls, bursting from the opened casements. Thereby
have villanies been detected. Ah, mortal then, be heedful for so, in all
this din of the great world's loom, thy subtlest thinkings may be overheard
afar. Now, amid the green, liferestless loom of that Arsacidean wood, the
great, white, worshipped skeleton lay lounging a gigantic idler Yet, as the
everwoven verdant warp and woof intermixed and hummed around him, the mighty
idler seemed the cunning weaver himself all woven over with the vines
every month assuming greener, fresher verdure but himself a skeleton. Life
folded Death Death trellised Life the grim god wived with youthful Life,
and begat him curlyheaded glories. Now, when with royal Tranquo I visited
this wondrous whale, and saw the skull an altar, and the artificial smoke
ascending from where the real jet had issued, I marvelled that the king
should regard a chapel as an object of vertu. He laughed. But more I
marvelled that the priests should swear that smoky jet of his was genuine. To
and fro I paced before this skeleton brushed the vines aside broke through
the ribs and with a ball of Arsacidean twine, wandered, eddied long amid
its many winding, shaded collonades and arbors. But soon my line was out
and following it back, I emerged from the opening where I entered. I saw no
living thing within naught was there but bones.
Cutting me a green measuringrod, I once more dived within the skeleton.
From their arrowslit in the skull, the priests perceived me taking the
altitude of the final rib. How now they shouted Dar'st thou measure
this our god That's for us. Aye, priests well, how long do ye make him,
then? But hereupon a fierce contest rose among them, concerning feet and
inches they cracked each other's sconces with their yardsticks  the great
skull echoed and seizing that lucky chance, I quickly concluded my own
admeasurements. These admeasurements I now propose to set before you. But
first, be it recorded, that, in this matter, I am not free to utter any
fancied measurement I please. Because there are skeleton authorities you can
refer to, to test my accuracy. There is a Leviathanic Museum, they tell me,
in Hull, England, one of the whaling ports of that country, where they have
some fine specimens of finbacks and other whales. Likewise, I have heard
that in the museum of Manchester, in New Hampshire, they have what the
proprietors call the only perfect specimen of a Greenland or River Whale in
the United States. Moreover, at a place in Yorkshire, England, Burton
constable by name, a certain sir clifford constable has in his possession the
skeleton of a Sperm Whale, but of moderate size, by no means of the
fullgrown magnitude of my friend King Tranquo's. In both cases, the stranded
whales to which these two skeletons belonged, were originally claimed by
their proprietors upon similar grounds. King Tranquo seizing his because he
wanted it and Sir Clifford, because he was lord of the seignories of those
parts. Sir Clifford's whale has been articulated throughout so that, like a
great chest of drawers, you can open and shut him, in all his bony cavities
spread out his ribs like a gigantic fan and swing all day upon his lower
jaw. Locks are to be put upon some of his trapdoors and shutters and a
footman will show round future visitors with a bunch of keys at his side.
Sir Clifford thinks of charging twopence for a peep at the whispering gallery
in the spinal column threepence to hear the echo in the hollow of his
cerebellum and sixpence for the unrivalled view from his forehead. The
skeleton dimensions I shall now proceed to set down are
copied verbatim from my right arm, where I had them tattooed as in my wild
wanderings at that period, there was no other secure way of preserving such
valuable statistics. But as I was crowded for space, and wished the other
parts of my body to remain a blank page for a poem I was then composing at
least, what untattooed parts might remain I did not trouble myself with the
odd inches nor, indeed, should inches at all enter into a congenial
admeasurement of the whale.
In the first
place, I wish to lay before you a particular, plain statement, touching the
living bulk of this leviathan, whose skeleton we are briefly to exhibit.
Such a statement may prove useful here. According to a careful calculation I
have made, and which I partly base upon Captain Scoresby's estimate, of
seventy tons for the largest sized Greenland whale of sixty feet in length
according to my careful calculation, I say, a Sperm Whale of the largest
magnitude, between eightyfive and ninety feet in length, and something less
than forty feet in its fullest circumference, such a whale will weigh at
least ninety tons so that reckoning thirteen men to a ton, he would
considerably outweigh the combined population of a whole village of one
thousand one hundred inhabitants. Think you not then that brains, like yoked
cattle, should be put to this leviathan, to make him at all budge to any
landsman's imagination? Having already in various ways put before you his
skull, spouthole, jaw, teeth, tail, forehead, fins, and divers other parts,
I shall now simply point out what is most interesting in the general bulk of
his unobstructed bones. But as the colossal skull embraces so very large a
proportion of the entire extent
of the skeleton as it is by far the most complicated part and as nothing
is to be repeated concerning it in this chapter, you must not fail to carry
it in your mind, or under your arm, as we proceed, otherwise you will not
gain a complete notion of the general structure we are about to view. In
length, the Sperm Whale's skeleton at Tranque measured seventytwo feet so
that when fully invested and extended in life, he must have been ninety feet
long for in the whale, the skeleton loses about one fifth in length
compared with the living body. Of this seventytwo feet, his skull and jaw
comprised some twenty feet, leaving some fifty feet of plain backbone.
Attached to this backbone, for something less than a third of its length,
was the mighty circular basket of ribs which once enclosed his vitals. To me
this vast ivoryribbed chest, with the long, unrelieved spine, extending far
away from it in a straight line, not a little resembled the hull of a great
ship newlaid upon the stocks, when only some twenty of her naked bowribs are
inserted, and the keel is otherwise, for the time, but a long, disconnected
timber. The ribs were ten on a side. The first, to begin from the neck, was
nearly six feet long the second, third, and fourth were each successively
longer, till you came to the climax of the fifth, or one of the middle ribs,
which measured eight feet and some inches. From that part, the remaining
ribs diminished, till the tenth and last only spanned five feet and some
inches. In general thickness, they all bore a seemly correspondence to their
length. The middle ribs were the most arched. In some of the Arsacides they
are used for beams whereon to lay footpath bridges over small streams. In
considering these ribs, I could not but be struck anew with the circumstance,
so variously repeated in this book, that the skeleton of the whale is by no
means the mould of his invested form. The largest of the Tranque ribs, one
of the middle ones, occupied that part of the fish which, in life, is greatest
in depth. Now, the greatest depth of the invested body of this particular
whale must have been at least sixteen feet whereas, the corresponding rib
measured but little more than eight feet. So that this rib only conveyed half
of the true notion of the living
magnitude of that part. Besides, for some way, where I now saw but a naked
spine, all that had been once wrapped round with tons of added bulk in flesh,
muscle, blood, and bowels. Still more, for the ample fins, I here saw but a
few disordered joints and in place of the weighty and majestic, but boneless
flukes, an utter blank How vain and foolish, then, thought I, for timid
untravelled man to try to comprehend aright this wondrous whale, by merely
poring over his dead attenuated skeleton, stretched in this peaceful wood.
no. only in the heart of quickest perils only when within the eddyings of
his angry flukes only on the profound unbounded sea, can the fully invested
whale be truly and livingly found out. But the spine. For that, the best way
we can consider it is, with a crane, to pile its bones high up on end. No
speedy enterprise. But now it's done, it looks much like Pompey's Pillar.
There are forty and odd vertebrae in all, which in the skeleton are not
locked together. They mostly lie like the great knobbed blocks on a Gothic
spire, forming solid courses of heavy masonry. The largest, a middle one, is
in width something less than three feet, and in depth more than four. The
smallest, where the spine tapers away into the tail, is only two inches in
width, and looks something like a white billiardball. I was told that there
were still smaller ones, but they had been lost by some little cannibal
urchins, the priest's children, who had stolen them to play marbles with.
Thus we see how that the spine of even the hugest of living things tapers off
at last into simple child's play.
From his mighty bulk the whale
affords a most congenial theme whereon to enlarge, amplify, and generally
expatiate. Would you, you could not compress him. By good rights he
should only be treated of in imperial folio. Not to tell over again his
furlongs from spiracle to tail, and the yards he measures about the waist
only think of the gigantic involutions of his intestines, where they lie in
him like great cables and hausers coiled away in the subterranean orlopdeck
of a lineofbattleship. Since I have undertaken to manhandle this
Leviathan, it behoves me to approve myself omnisciently exhaustive in the
enterprise not overlooking the minutest seminal germs of his blood, and
spinning him out to the uttermost coil of his bowels. Having already described
him in most of his present habitatory and anatomical peculiarities, it now
remains to magnify him in an archaeological, fossiliferous, and antediluvian
point of view. Applied to any other creature than the Leviathan to an ant or
a flea such portly terms might justly be deemed unwarrantably grandiloquent.
But when Leviathan is the text, the case is altered. Fain am I to stagger to
this emprise under the weightiest words of the dictionary. And here be it
said, that whenever it has been convenient to consult one in the course of
these dissertations, I have invariably used a huge quarto edition of Johnson,
expressly purchased for that purpose because that famous lexicographer's
uncommon personal bulk more fitted him to compile a lexicon to be used by a
whale author like me. One often hears of writers that rise and swell with
their subject, though it may seem but an ordinary one. How, then, with me,
writing of this Leviathan? Unconsciously my chirography expands into placard
capitals. Give me a condor's quill Give me Vesuvius' crater for an inkstand
Friends, hold my arms For in the mere act of penning my thoughts of this
Leviathan, they weary me, and make me faint with their outreaching
comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the whole circle of the
sciences, and all the generations of whales, and men, and mastodons, past,
present, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas of empire on earth,
and throughout the whole universe, not excluding its suburbs. Such, and so
magnifying, is the virtue of a large and liberal theme We expand to its
bulk. To produce a mighty book, you must choose a
mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea,
though many there be who have tried it. Ere entering upon the subject of
Fossil Whales, I present my credentials as a geologist, by stating that in my
miscellaneous time i have been a stonemason, and also a great digger of
ditches, canals, and wells, winevaults, cellars, and cisterns of all sorts.
Likewise, by way of preliminary, I desire to remind the reader, that while
in the earlier geological strata there are found the fossils of monsters now
almost completely extinct the subsequent relics discovered in what are
called the Tertiary formations seem the connecting, or at any rate
intercepted links, between the antichronical creatures, and those whose
remote posterity are said to have entered the Ark all the Fossil Whales
hitherto discovered belong to the Tertiary period, which is the last
preceding the superficial formations. And though none of them precisely
answer to any known species of the present time, they are yet sufficiently
akin to them in general respects, to justify their taking ranks as Cetacean
fossils. Detached broken fossils of preadamite whales, fragments of their
bones and skeletons, have within thirty years past, at various intervals,
been found at the base of the Alps, in Lombardy, in France, in England, in
Scotland, and in the States of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. Among the
more curious of such remains is part of a skull, which in the year
was
disinterred in the Rue Dauphine in Paris, a short street opening almost
directly upon the palace of the Tuileries and bones disinterred in
excavating the great docks of Antwerp, in Napoleon's time. Cuvier pronounced
these fragments to have belonged to some utterly unknown Leviathanic species.
But by far the most wonderful of all cetacean relics was the almost complete
vast skeleton of an extinct monster, found in the year
, on the
plantation of Judge Creagh, in Alabama. The awestricken credulous slaves in
the vicinity took it for the bones of one of the fallen angels. The Alabama
doctors declared it a huge reptile, and bestowed upon it the name of
Basilosaurus. But some specimen bones of it being taken across the sea to
owen, the english anatomist, it turned out that this alleged reptile was a
whale, though of a departed species.
A significant illustration of the fact, again and again repeated in this book,
that the skeleton of the whale furnishes but little clue to the shape of his
fully invested body. So Owen rechristened the monster Zeuglodon and in his
paper read before the London Geological Society, pronounced it, in substance,
one of the most extraordinary creatures which the mutations of the globe have
blotted out of existence. When I stand among these mighty Leviathan skeletons,
skulls, tusks, jaws, ribs, and vertebrae, all characterized by partial
resemblances to the existing breeds of seamonsters but at the same time
bearing on the other hand similar affinities to the annihilated antichronical
Leviathans, their incalculable seniors I am, by a flood, borne back to that
wondrous period, ere time itself can be said to have begun for time began
with man. Here Saturn's grey chaos rolls over me, and I obtain dim, shuddering
glimpses into those Polar eternities when wedged bastions of ice pressed
hard upon what are now the Tropics and in all the , miles of this
world's circumference, not an inhabitable hand's breadth of land was visible.
Then the whole world was the whale's and, king of creation, he left his
wake along the present lines of the Andes and the Himmalehs. Who can show a
pedigree like Leviathan? Ahab's harpoon had shed older blood than the
Pharaoh's. Methuselah seems a schoolboy. I look round to shake hands with
Shem. I am horrorstruck at this antemosaic, unsourced existence of the
unspeakable terrors of the whale, which, having been before all time, must
needs exist after all humane ages are over. But not alone has this Leviathan
left his preadamite traces in the stereotype plates of nature, and in
limestone and marl bequeathed his ancient bust but upon Egyptian tablets,
whose antiquity seems to claim for them an almost fossiliferous character, we
find the unmistakable print of his fin. In an apartment of the great temple
of Denderah, some fifty years ago, there was discovered upon the granite
ceiling a sculptured and painted planisphere, abounding in centaurs,
griffins, and dolphins, similar to the grotesque figures on the celestial
globe of the moderns. Gliding among them, old Leviathan swam as of yore was
there swimming in that planisphere, centuries before Solomon was cradled.
Nor must there be omitted another strange attestation of the antiquity of the
whale, in his own osseous postdiluvian reality, as set down by the venerable
John Leo, the old Barbary traveller. Not far from the Seaside, they have a
Temple, the Rafters and Beams of which are made of WhaleBones for Whales
of a monstrous size are oftentimes cast up dead upon that shore. The Common
People imagine, that by a secret Power bestowed by God upon the Temple, no
Whale can pass it without immediate death. But the truth of the Matter is,
that on either side of the Temple, there are Rocks that shoot two Miles into
the Sea, and wound the Whales when they light upon 'em. They keep a Whale's
Rib of an incredible length for a Miracle, which lying upon the Ground with
its convex part uppermost, makes an Arch, the Head of which cannot be
reached by a Man upon a Camel's Back. This Rib says John Leo is said to
have layn there a hundred Years before I saw it. Their Historians affirm,
that a Prophet who prophesy'd of Mahomet, came from this Temple, and some do
not stand to assert, that the Prophet Jonas was cast forth by the Whale at
the Base of the Temple. In this Afric Temple of the Whale I leave you,
reader, and if you be a Nantucketer, and a whaleman, you will silently worship
there.
Inasmuch, then, as this Leviathan comes floundering down upon us from the
headwaters of the Eternities, it may be fitly inquired, whether, in the
long course of his generations, he has not degenerated from the original bulk
of his sires. But upon investigation we find, that not only are the whales of
the present day superior in magnitude to those whose fossil remains are found
in the Tertiary system embracing a distinct geological period prior to man,
but of the whales found in that
Tertiary system, those belonging to its latter formations exceed in size
those of its earlier ones. Of all the preadamite whales yet exhumed, by far
the largest is the Alabama one mentioned in the last chapter, and that was
less than seventy feet in length in the skeleton. Whereas, we have already
seen, that the tapemeasure gives seventytwo feet for the skeleton of a
large sized modern whale. And I have heard, on whalemen's authority, that
Sperm Whales have been captured near a hundred feet long at the time of
capture. But may it not be, that while the whales of the present hour are an
advance in magnitude upon those of all previous geological periods may it
not be, that since Adam's time they have degenerated? Assuredly, we must
conclude so, if we are to credit the accounts of such gentlemen as Pliny,
and the ancient naturalists generally. For Pliny tells us of whales that
embraced acres of living bulk, and Aldrovandus of others which measured eight
hundred feet in length Rope Walks and Thames Tunnels of Whales And even in
the days of Banks and Solander, Cooke's naturalists, we find a Danish member
of the Academy of Sciences setting down certain Iceland Whales
reydansiskur, or Wrinkled Bellies at one hundred and twenty yards that
is, three hundred and sixty feet. And Lacepede, the French naturalist, in his
elaborate history of whales, in the very beginning of his work page ,
sets down the Right Whale at one hundred metres, three hundred and
twentyeight feet. And this work was published so late as A. D.
. But
will any whaleman believe these stories? No. The whale of today is as big
as his ancestors in Pliny's time. And if ever I go where Pliny is, I, a
whaleman more than he was, will make bold to tell him so. Because I
cannot understand how it is, that while the Egyptian mummies that were buried
thousands of years before even Pliny was born, do not measure so much in
their coffins as a modern Kentuckian in his socks and while the cattle and
other animals sculptured on the oldest Egyptian and Nineveh tablets, by the
relative proportions in which they are drawn, just as plainly prove that the
highbred, stallfed, prize cattle of Smithfield, not only equal, but far
exceed in magnitude the fattest of Pharaoh's fat kine in the face of
all this, I will not admit that of all animals the whale alone should have
degenerated. But still another inquiry remains one often agitated by the
more recondite Nantucketers. Whether owing to the almost omniscient
lookouts at the mastheads of the whaleships, now penetrating even through
Behring's straits, and into the remotest secret drawers and lockers of the
world and the thousand harpoons and lances darted along all continental
coasts the moot point is, whether Leviathan can long endure so wide a chase,
and so remorseless a havoc whether he must not at last be exterminated from
the waters, and the last whale, like the last man, smoke his last pipe, and
then himself evaporate in the final puff. Comparing the humped herds of
whales with the humped herds of buffalo, which, not forty years ago,
overspread by tens of thousands the prairies of Illinois and Missouri, and
shook their iron manes and scowled with their thunderclotted brows upon the
sites of populous rivercapitals, where now the polite broker sells you land
at a dollar an inch in such a comparison an irresistible argument would seem
furnished, to show that the hunted whale cannot now escape speedy extinction.
But you must look at this matter in every light. Though so short a period
ago not a good lifetime the census of the buffalo in Illinois exceeded the
census of men now in London, and though at the present day not one horn or
hoof of them remains in all that region and though the cause of this
wondrous extermination was the spear of man yet the far different nature of
the whalehunt peremptorily forbids so inglorious an end to the Leviathan.
Forty men in one ship hunting the Sperm Whale for fortyeight months think
they have done extremely well, and thank God, if at last they carry home the
oil of forty fish. Whereas, in the days of the old Canadian and Indian hunters
and trappers of the West, when the far west in whose sunset suns still
rise was a wilderness and a virgin, the same number of moccasined men, for
the same number of months, mounted on horse instead of sailing in ships,
would have slain not forty, but forty thousand and more buffaloes a fact
that, if need were, could be statistically stated. Nor, considered aright,
does it seem any argument in favor
of the gradual extinction of the Sperm Whale, for example, that in former
years the latter part of the last century, say these Leviathans, in small
pods, were encountered much oftener than at present, and, in consequence,
the voyages were not so prolonged, and were also much more remunerative.
Because, as has been elsewhere noticed, those whales, influenced by some
views to safety, now swim the seas in immense caravans, so that to a large
degree the scattered solitaries, yokes, and pods, and schools of other days
are now aggregated into vast but widely separated, unfrequent armies. That is
all. And equally fallacious seems the conceit, that because the socalled
whalebone whales no longer haunt many grounds in former years abounding with
them, hence that species also is declining. For they are only being driven
from promontory to cape and if one coast is no longer enlivened with their
jets, then, be sure, some other and remoter strand has been very recently
startled by the unfamiliar spectacle. Furthermore concerning these last
mentioned Leviathans, they have two firm fortresses, which, in all human
probability, will for ever remain impregnable. And as upon the invasion of
their valleys, the frosty Swiss have retreated to their mountains so,
hunted from the savannas and glades of the middle seas, the whalebone whales
can at last resort to their Polar citadels, and diving under the ultimate
glassy barriers and walls there, come up among icy fields and floes and in
a charmed circle of everlasting December, bid defiance to all pursuit from
man. But as perhaps fifty of these whalebone whales are harpooned for one
cachalot, some philosophers of the forecastle have concluded that this
positive havoc has already very seriously diminished their battalions. But
though for some time past a number of these whales, not less than , have
been annually slain on the nor' west coast by the Americans alone yet there
are considerations which render even this circumstance of little or no account
as an opposing argument in this matter. Natural as it is to be somewhat
incredulous concerning the populousness of the more enormous creatures of the
globe, yet what shall we say to Harto, the historian of Goa, when he tells
us that at one hunting the King of Siam took
elephants
that in those regions elephants are numerous as droves of cattle in the
temperate climes. And there seems no reason to doubt that if these elephants,
which have now been hunted for thousands of years, by Semiramis, by Porus,
by hannibal, and by all the successive monarchs of the East if they still
survive there in great numbers, much more may the great whale outlast all
hunting, since he has a pasture to expatiate in, which is precisely twice as
large as all Asia, both Americas, Europe and Africa, New Holland, and all the
Isles of the sea combined. Moreover we are to consider, that from the
presumed great longevity of whales, their probably attaining the age of a
century and more, therefore at any one period of time, several distinct
adult generations must be contemporary. And what that is, we may soon gain
some idea of, by imagining all the graveyards, cemeteries, and family vaults
of creation yielding up the live bodies of all the men, women, and children
who were alive seventyfive years ago and adding this countless host to the
present human population of the globe. Wherefore, for all these things, we
account the whale immortal in his species, however perishable in his
individuality. He swam the seas before the continents broke water he once
swam over the site of the Tuileries, and Windsor Castle, and the Kremlin. In
Noah's flood, he despised Noah's Ark and if ever the world is to be again
flooded, like the Netherlands, to kill off its rats, then the eternal whale
will still survive, and rearing upon the topmost crest of the equatorial
flood, spout his frothed defiance to the skies.
The precipitating manner in which Captain
Ahab had quitted the Samuel Enderby of London, had not been unattended with
some small violence to his own person. He had lighted with such energy upon a
thwart of his boat that his ivory leg had
received a halfsplintering shock. And when after gaining his own deck, and
his own pivothole there, he so vehemently wheeled round with an urgent
command to the steersman it was, as ever, something about his not steering
inflexibly enough then, the already shaken ivory received such an additional
twist and wrench, that though it still remained entire, and to all
appearances lusty, yet Ahab did not deem it entirely trustworthy. And,
indeed, it seemed small matter for wonder, that for all his pervading, mad
recklessness, Ahab did at times give careful heed to the condition of that
dead bone upon which he partly stood. For it had not been very long prior to
the Pequod's sailing from Nantucket, that he had been found one night lying
prone upon the ground, and insensible by some unknown, and seemingly
inexplicable, unimaginable casualty, his ivory limb having been so violently
displaced, that it had stakewise smitten, and all but pierced his groin
nor was it without extreme difficulty that the agonizing wound was entirely
cured. Nor, at the time, had it failed to enter his monomaniac mind, that all
the anguish of that then present suffering was but the direct issue of a
former woe and he too plainly seemed to see, that as the most poisonous
reptile of the marsh perpetuates his kind as inevitably as the sweetest
songster of the grove so, equally with every felicity, all miserable events
do naturally beget their like. Yea, more than equally, thought Ahab since
both the ancestry and posterity of Grief go further than the ancestry and
posterity of Joy. For, not to hint of this that it is an inference from
certain canonic teachings, that while some natural enjoyments here shall have
no children born to them for the other world, but, on the contrary, shall be
followed by the joychildlessness of all hell's despair whereas, some guilty
mortal miseries shall still fertilely beget to themselves an eternally
progressive progeny of griefs beyond the grave not at all to hint of this,
there still seems an inequality in the deeper analysis of the thing. For,
thought Ahab, while even the highest earthly felicities ever have a certain
unsignifying pettiness lurking in them, but, at bottom, all heartwoes, a
mystic significance, and, in some men, an archangelic grandeur so do their
diligent tracingsout not belie the obvious deduction. To trail the
genealogies
of these high mortal miseries, carries us at last among the sourceless
primogenitures of the gods so that, in the face of all the glad, haymaking
suns, and softcymballing, round harvestmoons, we must needs give in to
this that the gods themselves are not for ever glad. The ineffaceable, sad
birthmark in the brow of man, is but the stamp of sorrow in the signers.
Unwittingly here a secret has been divulged, which perhaps might more
properly, in set way, have been disclosed before. With many other particulars
concerning Ahab, always had it remained a mystery to some, why it was, that
for a certain period, both before and after the sailing of the Pequod, he
had hidden himself away with such GrandLamalike exclusiveness and, for
that one interval, sought speechless refuge, as it were, among the marble
senate of the dead. Captain Peleg's bruited reason for this thing appeared by
no means adequate though, indeed, as touching all Ahab's deeper part, every
revelation partook more of significant darkness than of explanatory light.
But, in the end, it all came out this one matter did, at least. That direful
mishap was at the bottom of his temporary recluseness. And not only this, but
to that evercontracting, dropping circle ashore, who, for any reason,
possessed the privilege of a less banned approach to him to that timid
circle the above hinted casualty remaining, as it did, moodily unaccounted
for by Ahab invested itself with terrors, not entirely underived from the
land of spirits and of wails. So that, through their zeal for him, they had
all conspired, so far as in them lay, to muffle up the knowledge of this
thing from others and hence it was, that not till a considerable interval
had elapsed, did it transpire upon the Pequod's decks. But be all this as it
may let the unseen, ambiguous synod in the air, or the vindictive princes
and potentates of fire, have to do or not with earthly Ahab, yet, in this
present matter of his leg, he took plain practical procedures he called the
carpenter. And when that functionary appeared before him, he bade him
without delay set about making a new leg, and directed the mates to see him
supplied with all the studs and joists of jawivory Sperm Whale which had
thus far been accumulated
on the voyage, in order that a careful selection of the stoutest,
clearestgrained stuff might be secured. This done, the carpenter received
orders to have the leg completed that night and to provide all the fittings
for it, independent of those pertaining to the distrusted one in use.
Moreover, the ship's forge was ordered to be hoisted out of its temporary
idleness in the hold and, to accelerate the affair, the blacksmith was
commanded to proceed at once to the forging of whatever iron contrivances
might be needed.
Seat thyself sultanically among the
moons of Saturn, and take high abstracted man alone and he seems a wonder,
a grandeur, and a woe. But from the same point, take mankind in mass, and
for the most part, they seem a mob of unnecessary duplicates, both
contemporary and hereditary. But most humble though he was, and far from
furnishing an example of the high, humane abstraction the Pequod's carpenter
was no duplicate hence, he now comes in person on this stage. Like all
seagoing ship carpenters, and more especially those belonging to whaling
vessels, he was, to a certain offhanded, practical extent, alike experienced
in numerous trades and callings collateral to his own the carpenter's
pursuit being the ancient and outbranching trunk of all those numerous
handicrafts which more or less have to do with wood as an auxiliary material.
but, besides the application to him of the generic remark above, this
carpenter of the Pequod was singularly efficient in those thousand nameless
mechanical emergencies continually recurring in a large ship, upon a three
or four years' voyage, in uncivilized and fardistant seas. For not to speak
of his readiness in ordinary duties repairing stove boats, sprung spars,
reforming the shape of clumsybladed oars, inserting bull's
eyes in the deck, or new treenails in the side planks, and other
miscellaneous matters more directly pertaining to his special business he
was moreover unhesitatingly expert in all manner of conflicting aptitudes,
both useful and capricious. The one grand stage where he enacted all his
various parts so manifold, was his vicebench a long rude ponderous table
furnished with several vices, of different sizes, and both of iron and of
wood. At all times except when whales were alongside, this bench was securely
lashed athwartships against the rear of the Tryworks. A belaying pin is
found too large to be easily inserted into its hole the carpenter claps it
into one of his everready vices, and straightway files it smaller. A lost
landbird of strange plumage strays on board, and is made a captive out of
clean shaved rods of rightwhale bone, and crossbeams of sperm whale ivory,
the carpenter makes a pagodalooking cage for it. An oarsman sprains his
wrist the carpenter concocts a soothing lotion. Stubb longed for vermillion
stars to be painted upon the blade of his every oar screwing each oar in his
big vice of wood, the carpenter symmetrically supplies the constellation. A
sailor takes a fancy to wear sharkbone earrings the carpenter drills his
ears. Another has the toothache the carpenter out pincers, and clapping
one hand upon his bench bids him be seated there but the poor fellow
unmanageably winces under the unconcluded operation whirling round the
handle of his wooden vice, the carpenter signs him to clap his jaw in that,
if he would have him draw the tooth. Thus, this carpenter was prepared at all
points, and alike indifferent and without respect in all. Teeth he
accounted bits of ivory heads he deemed but topblocks men themselves he
lightly held for capstans. But while now upon so wide a field thus variously
accomplished, and with such liveliness of expertness in him, too all this
would seem to argue some uncommon vivacity of intelligence. But not precisely
so. For nothing was this man more remarkable, than for a certain impersonal
stolidity as it were impersonal, I say for it so shaded off into the
surrounding infinite of things, that it seemed one with the general
stolidity discernible in the whole visible world which while
pauselessly active in uncounted modes, still eternally holds its peace, and
ignores you, though you dig foundations for cathedrals. Yet was this
halfhorrible stolidity in him, involving, too, as it appeared, an
allramifying heartlessness yet was it oddly dashed at times, with an old,
crutchlike, antediluvian, wheezing humorousness, not unstreaked now and then
with a certain grizzled wittiness such as might have served to pass the time
during the midnight watch on the bearded forecastle of Noah's ark. Was it
that this old carpenter had been a lifelong wanderer, whose much rolling, to
and fro, not only had gathered no moss but what is more, had rubbed off
whatever small outward clingings might have originally pertained to him? He
was a stript abstract an unfractioned integral uncompromised as a newborn
babe living without premeditated reference to this world or the next. You
might almost say, that this strange uncompromisedness in him involved a sort
of unintelligence for in his numerous trades, he did not seem to work so
much by reason or by instinct, or simply because he had been tutored to it,
or by any intermixture of all these, even or uneven but merely by a kind of
deaf and dumb, spontaneous literal process. He was a pure manipulator his
brain, if he had ever had one, must have early oozed along into the muscles of
his fingers. He was like one of those unreasoning but still highly useful,
multum in parvo, Sheffield contrivances, assuming the exterior  though a
little swelled of a common pocket knife but containing, not only blades of
various sizes, but also screwdrivers, corkscrews, tweezers, awls, pens,
rulers, nailfilers, countersinkers. So, if his superiors wanted to use the
carpenter for a screwdriver, all they had to do was to open that part of
him, and the screw was fast or if for tweezers, take him up by the legs,
and there they were. Yet, as previously hinted, this omnitooled,
openandshut carpenter, was, after all, no mere machine of an automaton. If
he did not have a common soul in him, he had a subtle something that somehow
anomalously did its duty. What that was, whether essence of quicksilver, or a
few drops of hartshorn, there is no telling. But there it was and there it
had abided for now some sixty years or more. And this it was, this same
unaccountable, cunning lifeprinciple in him this it was, that kept him a
great part of the time soliloquizing but only like an unreasoning wheel,
which also hummingly soliloquizes or rather, his body was a sentrybox and
this soliloquizer on guard there, and talking all the time to keep himself
awake.
Carpenter standing before his vicebench, and by the light of two lanterns
busily filing the ivory joist for the leg, which joist is firmly fixed in the
vice. Slabs of ivory, leather straps, pads, screws, and various tools of all
sorts lying about the bench. Forward, the red flame of the forge is seen,
where the blacksmith is at work. Drat the file, and drat the bone That is
hard which should be soft, and that soft which should be hard. So we go,
who file old jaws and shinbones. Let's try another. Aye, now, this works
better  sneezes. Halloa, this bone dust is  sneezes why it's
 sneezesyes it's  sneezesbless my soul, it won't let me speak This is
what an old fellow gets now for working in dead lumber. Saw a live tree, and
you don't get this dust amputate a live bone, and you don't get it
 sneezes. Come, come, you old Smut, there, bear a hand, and let's have
that ferule and bucklescrew I'll be ready for them presently. Lucky now
 sneezes there's no kneejoint to make that might puzzle a little but a
mere shinbone why it's easy as making hoppoles only I should like to put a
good finish on. Time, time if I but only had the time, I could turn him
out as neat a leg now as ever  sneezes scraped to a lady in a parlor. Those
buckskin legs and calves of legs I've seen in shop windows wouldn't compare
at all. They soak water, they do and of
course get rheumatic, and have to be doctored  sneezes with washes and
lotions, just like live legs. There before I saw it off, now, I must call
his old Mogulship, and see whether the length will be all right too short,
if anything, I guess. Ha that's the heel we are in luck here he comes,
or it's somebody else, that's certain. Ahab  advancing. During the
ensuing scene, the carpenter continues sneezing at times. Well, manmaker
Just in time, sir. If the captain pleases, I will now mark the length. Let
me measure, sir. Measured for a leg good. Well, it's not the first time.
About it There keep thy finger on it. This is a cogent vice thou hast
here, carpenter let me feel its grip once. so, so it does pinch some.
Oh, sir, it will break bonesbeware, beware No fear I like a good grip I
like to feel something in this slippery world that can hold, man. What's
Prometheus about there? the blacksmith, I mean what's he about? He must be
forging the bucklescrew, sir, now. Right. It's a partnership he supplies
the muscle part. He makes a fierce red flame there Aye, sir he must have
the white heat for this kind of fine work. Umm. So he must. I do deem it
now a most meaning thing, that that old Greek, Prometheus, who made men, they
say, should have been a blacksmith, and animated them with fire for what's
made in fire must properly belong to fire and so hell's probable. How the
soot flies This must be the remainder the Greek made the Africans of.
Carpenter, when he's through with that buckle, tell him to forge a pair of
steel shoulderblades there's a pedlar aboard with a crushing pack. Sir?
Hold while Prometheus is about it, I'll order a complete man after a
desirable pattern. Imprimis, fifty feet high in his socks then, chest
modelled after the Thames Tunnel then, legs with roots to 'em, to stay in
one place then, arms three
feet through the wrist no heart at all, brass forehead, and about a
quarter of an acre of fine brains and let me see shall I order eyes to see
outwards? No, but put a skylight on top of his head to illuminate inwards.
There, take the order, and away. Now, what's he speaking about, and who's he
speaking to, I should like to know? Shall I keep standing here?  aside.
'Tis but indifferent architecture to make a blind dome here's one. No, no,
no I must have a lantern. Ho, ho That's it, hey? Here are two, sir one
will serve my turn. What art thou thrusting that thiefcatcher into my face
for, man? thrusted light is worse than presented pistols. i thought, sir,
that you spoke to carpenter. Carpenter? why that's but no a very tidy,
and, I may say, an extremely gentlemanlike sort of business thou art in here,
carpenter or would'st thou rather work in clay? Sir? Clay? clay, sir?
That's mud we leave clay to ditchers, sir. The fellow's impious What art
thou sneezing about? Bone is rather dusty, sir. Take the hint, then and
when thou art dead, never bury thyself under living people's noses. Sir?
oh ah I guess so so yes, yes oh dear Look ye, carpenter, I dare say
thou callest thyself a right good workmanlike workman, eh Well, then, will
it speak thoroughly well for thy work, if, when I come to mount this leg
thou makest, I shall nevertheless feel another leg in the same identical
place with it that is, carpenter, my old lost leg the flesh and blood one,
I mean. Canst thou not drive that old Adam away? Truly, sir, I begin to
understand somewhat now. Yes, I have heard something curious on that score,
sir how that a dismasted man never entirely loses the feeling of his old
spar, but it will be still pricking him at times. May I humbly ask if it be
really so, sir? It is, man. Look, put thy live leg here in the place where
mine once was so, now, here is only one distinct leg to the eye,
yet two to the soul. Where thou feelest tingling life there, exactly there,
there to a hair, do I. Is't a riddle? I should humbly call it a poser, sir.
Hist, then. How dost thou know that some entire, living, thinking thing may
not be invisibly and uninterpenetratingly standing precisely where thou now
standest aye, and standing there in thy spite? In thy most solitary hours,
then, dost thou not fear eavesdroppers? Hold, don't speak And if I still
feel the smart of my crushed leg, though it be now so long dissolved then,
why mayest not thou, carpenter, feel the fiery pains of hell for ever, and
without a body? Hah Good Lord Truly, sir, if it comes to that, I must
calculate over again I think I didn't carry a small figure, sir. Look ye,
puddingheads should never grant premises. How long before this leg is
done? Perhaps an hour, sir. Bungle away at it then, and bring it to me
turns to go. Oh, Life Here I am, proud as Greek god, and yet standing
debtor to this blockhead for a bone to stand on Cursed be that mortal
interindebtedness which will not do away with ledgers. I would be free as
air and I'm down in the whole world's books. I am so rich, I could have
given bid for bid with the wealthiest Praetorians at the auction of the Roman
empire which was the world's and yet I owe for the flesh in the tongue I
brag with. By heavens I'll get a crucible, and into it, and dissolve
myself down to one small, compendious vertebra. So. Carpenter  resuming
his work. Well, well, well Stubb knows him best of all, and Stubb
always says he's queer says nothing but that one sufficient little word
queer he's queer, says Stubb he's queerqueer, queer and keeps dinning
it into Mr. Starbuck all the time  queer, sir queer, queer, very queer. And
here's his leg Yes, now that I think of it, here's his bedfellow has a
stick of whale's jawbone for a wife And this is his leg he'll stand on
this. What was that now about one leg standing in three places, and all
three places standing in one hell how was that? Oh I don't wonder he
looked so scornful at me I'm a sort of strangethoughted
sometimes, they say but that's only haphazardlike. Then, a short, little
old body like me, should never undertake to wade out into deep waters with
tall, heronbuilt captains the water chucks you under the chin pretty quick,
and there's a great cry for lifeboats. And here's the heron's leg long and
slim, sure enough Now, for most folks one pair of legs lasts a lifetime,
and that must be because they use them mercifully, as a tenderhearted old
lady uses her rolypoly old coachhorses. But Ahab oh he's a hard driver.
Look, driven one leg to death, and spavined the other for life, and now wears
out bone legs by the cord. Halloa, there, you Smut bear a hand there with
those screws, and let's finish it before the resurrection fellow comes
acalling with his horn for all legs, true or false, as brewerymen go round
collecting old beer barrels, to fill 'em up again. What a leg this is It
looks like a real live leg, filed down to nothing but the core he'll be
standing on this tomorrow he'll be taking altitudes on it. Halloa I
almost forgot the little oval slate, smoothed ivory, where he figures up the
latitude. So, so chisel, file, and sandpaper, now
According to usage they
were pumping the ship next morning and lo no inconsiderable oil came up
with the water the casks below must have sprung a bad leak. Much concern
was shown and Starbuck went down into the cabin to report this unfavorable
affair.
Now, from the South and West the Pequod was drawing nigh to Formosa and the
Bashee Isles, between which lies one of the tropical outlets from the China
waters into the Pacific. And so Starbuck found Ahab with a general chart of
the oriental archipelagoes spread before him and another separate one
representing the long eastern coasts of the Japanese islands  Niphon,
Matsmai, and Sikoke. With his snowwhite new ivory leg braced against the
screwed leg of his table, and with a long pruninghook of a jackknife in his
hand, the wondrous old man, with his back to the gangway door, was wrinkling
his brow, and tracing his old courses again. Who's there? hearing the
footstep at the door, but not turning round to it. On deck Begone
captain ahab mistakes it is I. The oil in the hold is leaking, sir. We
must up Burtons and break out. Up Burtons and break out? Now that we are
nearing Japan heaveto here for a week to tinker a parcel of old hoops?
Either do that, sir, or waste in one day more oil than we may make good in a
year. What we come twenty thousand miles to get is worth saving, sir. So
it is, so it is if we get it. I was speaking of the oil in the hold,
sir. And I was not speaking or thinking of that at all. Begone Let it
leak I'm all aleak myself. Aye leaks in leaks not only full of leaky
casks, but those leaky casks are in a leaky ship and that's a far worse
plight than the Pequod's, man. Yet I don't stop to plug my leak for who can
find it in the deeploaded hull or how hope to plug it, even if found, in
this life's howling gale? Starbuck I'll not have the Burtons hoisted.
What will the owners say, sir? Let the owners stand on Nantucket beach and
outyell the Typhoons. What cares Ahab? Owners, owners? Thou art always
prating to me, Starbuck, about those miserly owners, as if the owners were my
conscience. But look ye, the only real owner of anything is its commander
and hark ye, my conscience is in this ship's keel. On deck Captain
Ahab, said the reddening mate, moving further into the cabin, with a daring
so strangely respectful and cautious that
it almost seemed not only every way seeking to avoid the slightest outward
manifestation of itself, but within also seemed more than half distrustful of
itself A better man than I might well pass over in thee what he would
quickly enough resent in a younger man aye and in a happier, Captain
Ahab. Devils Dost thou then so much as dare to critically think of me?
On deck Nay, sir, not yet I do entreat. And I do dare, sir to be
forbearing Shall we not understand each other better than hitherto, Captain
ahab? ahab seized a loaded musket from the rack forming part of most
SouthSeamen's cabin furniture, and pointing it towards Starbuck,
exclaimed There is one God that is Lord over the earth, and one Captain
that is lord over the Pequod. On deck For an instant in the flashing eyes
of the mate, and his fiery cheeks, you would have almost thought that he had
really received the blaze of the levelled tube. But, mastering his emotion,
he half calmly rose, and as he quitted the cabin, paused for an instant and
said Thou hast outraged, not insulted me, Sir but for that I ask thee not
to beware of Starbuck thou wouldst but laugh but let Ahab beware of Ahab
beware of thyself, old man. He waxes brave, but nevertheless obeys most
careful bravery that murmured Ahab, as Starbuck disappeared. What's that
he said Ahab beware of Ahab there's something there Then unconsciously
using the musket for a staff, with an iron brow he paced to and fro in the
little cabin but presently the thick plaits of his forehead relaxed, and
returning the gun to the rack, he went to the deck. Thou art but too good a
fellow, Starbuck, he said lowly to the mate then raising his voice to the
crew Furl the t'gallantsails and closereef the topsails, fore and aft
back the mainyard up Burtons, and break out in the mainhold. It were
perhaps vain to surmise exactly why it was, that as respecting Starbuck,
Ahab thus acted. It may have been a flash of honesty in him or mere
prudential policy which, under the circumstance, imperiously forbade the
slightest symptom of open disaffection, however transient, in the important
chief
officer of his ship. However it was, his orders were executed and the
Burtons were hoisted.
In Spermwhalemen with any considerable quantity of oil on board, it is a
regular semiweekly duty to conduct a hose into the hold, and drench the
casks with seawater which afterwards, at varying intervals, is removed by
the ship's pumps. Hereby the casks are sought to be kept damply tight while
by the changed character of the withdrawn water, the mariners readily detect
any serious leakage in the precious cargo.
We had lain thus in bed, chatting and
napping at short intervals, and Queequeg now and then affectionately throwing
his brown tattooed legs over mine, and then drawing them back so entirely
sociable and free and easy were we when, at last, by reason of our
confabulations, what little nappishness remained in us altogether departed,
and we felt like getting up again, though daybreak was yet some way down the
future. Yes, we became very wakeful so much so that our recumbent
position began to grow wearisome, and by little and little we found ourselves
sitting up the clothes well tucked around us, leaning against the
headboard with our four knees drawn up close together, and our two noses
bending over them, as if our kneepans were warmingpans. We felt very nice
and snug, the more so since it was so chilly out of doors indeed out of
bedclothes too, seeing that there was no fire in the room. The more so, I
say, because truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be
cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by
contrast. Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all
over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to
be comfortable any more. But if, like Queequeg and me in the bed, the tip
of your nose or the crown of your head be slightly chilled, why then, indeed,
in the general consciousness you feel most delightfully and unmistakably warm.
For this reason a sleeping apartment should never be furnished with a fire,
which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich. For the height of
this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blanket between you and
your snugness and the cold of the outer air. Then there you lie like the one
warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal. We had been sitting in this
crouching manner for some time, when all at once I thought I would open my
eyes for when between sheets, whether by day or by night, and whether
asleep or awake, I have a way of always keeping my eyes shut, in order the
more to concentrate the snugness of being in bed. Because no man can ever
feel his own identity aright except his eyes be closed as if darkness were
indeed the proper element of our essences, though light be more congenial to
our clayey part. Upon opening my eyes then, and coming out of my own pleasant
and selfcreated darkness into the imposed and coarse outer gloom of the
unilluminated twelveo'clockatnight, I experienced a disagreeable
revulsion. Nor did I at all object to the hint from Queequeg that perhaps it
were best to strike a light, seeing that we were so wide awake and besides
he felt a strong desire to have a few quiet puffs from his Tomahawk. Be it
said, that though I had felt such a strong repugnance to his smoking in
the bed the night before, yet see how elastic our stiff prejudices grow when
love once comes to bend them. For now I liked nothing better than to have
Queequeg smoking by me, even in bed, because he seemed to be full of such
serene household joy then. I no more felt unduly concerned for the landlord's
policy of insurance. I was only alive to the condensed confidential
comfortableness of sharing a pipe and a blanket with a real friend. With our
shaggy jackets drawn about our shoulders, we now passed the Tomahawk from one
to the other, till slowly there grew over us a blue hanging tester of smoke,
illuminated by the flame of the newlit lamp. Whether it was that this
undulating tester rolled the savage away to far distant scenes, I know not,
but he now spoke of his native island and, eager to hear his history, I
begged him to go on and tell it. He gladly complied. Though at the time I
but ill comprehended not a few of his words, yet subsequent disclosures,
when I had become more familiar with his broken phraseology, now enable me to
present the whole story such as it may prove in the mere skeleton I give.
Upon searching, it was found
that the casks last struck into the hold were perfectly sound, and that the
leak must be further off. So, it being calm weather, they broke out deeper
and deeper, disturbing the slumbers of the huge groundtier butts and from
that black midnight sending those gigantic moles into the daylight above. So
deep did they go and so ancient, and corroded, and weedy the aspect of the
lowermost puncheons, that you almost looked next for some mouldy cornerstone
cask containing coins of Captain Noah, with copies of the posted placards,
vainly warning the infatuated old world from the flood. Tierce after tierce,
too, of water, and bread, and beef, and shooks of staves, and iron bundles of
hoops, were hoisted out, till at last the piled decks were hard to get
about and the hollow hull echoed under foot, as if you were treading over
empty catacombs, and reeled and rolled in the sea like an airfreighted
demijohn. Topheavy was the ship as a dinnerless student with all Aristotle
in his head. Well was it that the Typhoons did not visit them then. Now, at
this time it was that my poor pagan companion, and fast bosomfriend,
Queequeg, was seized with a fever, which brought him nigh to his endless end.
Be it said, that in this vocation of whaling, sinecures are unknown
dignity and danger go hand in hand till you get to be Captain, the higher
you rise the harder you toil. So with poor Queequeg, who, as harpooneer,
must not only face all the rage of the living whale, but as we have
elsewhere seen  mount his dead back in a rolling sea and finally descend
into the gloom of the hold, and bitterly sweating all day in that
subterraneous confinement, resolutely manhandle the clumsiest casks and see
to their stowage. To be short, among whalemen, the harpooneers are the
holders, so called. Poor Queequeg when the ship was about half
disembowelled, you should have stooped over the hatchway, and peered down
upon him there where, stripped to his woollen drawers, the tattooed savage
was crawling about amid that dampness and slime, like a green spotted lizard
at the bottom of a well. And a well, or an icehouse, it somehow proved to
him, poor pagan where, strange to say, for all the heat of his sweatings,
he caught a terrible chill which lapsed into a fever and at last, after some
days' suffering, laid him in his hammock, close to the very sill of the door
of death. How he wasted and wasted away in those few longlingering days,
till there seemed but little left of him but his frame and tattooing. But as
all else in him thinned, and his cheekbones grew sharper, his eyes,
nevertheless, seemed growing fuller and fuller they became of a strange
softness of lustre and mildly but deeply looked out at you there from his
sickness, a wondrous testimony to that immortal health in him which could not
die, or be weakened. And like circles on the water, which, as they grow
fainter, expand so his eyes seemed rounding and rounding, like the rings of
Eternity. An awe that cannot be named would steal over you as you sat by the
side of this waning savage, and saw as strange things in his face, as any
beheld who were bystanders when Zoroaster died. For whatever is truly
wondrous and fearful in man, never yet was put into words or books. And the
drawing near of Death, which alike levels all, alike impresses all with a
last revelation, which only an author from the dead could adequately tell. So
that let us say it again no dying Chaldee or Greek had higher and holier
thoughts than those, whose mysterious shades you saw creeping over the face
of poor Queequeg, as he quietly lay in his swaying hammock, and the rolling
sea seemed gently rocking him to his final rest, and the ocean's invisible
floodtide lifted him higher and higher towards his destined heaven. Not a
man of the crew but gave him up and, as for Queequeg himself, what he
thought of his case was forcibly shown by a curious favor he asked. He called
one to him in the grey
morning watch, when the day was just breaking, and taking his hand, said
that while in Nantucket he had chanced to see certain little canoes of dark
wood, like the rich warwood of his native isle and upon inquiry, he had
learned that all whalemen who died in Nantucket, were laid in those same
dark canoes, and that the fancy of being so laid had much pleased him for
it was not unlike the custom of his own race, who, after embalming a dead
warrior, stretched him out in his canoe, and so left him to be floated away
to the starry archipelagoes for not only do they believe that the stars are
isles, but that far beyond all visible horizons, their own mild,
uncontinented seas, interflow with the blue heavens and so form the white
breakers of the milky way. He added, that he shuddered at the thought of
being buried in his hammock, according to the usual seacustom, tossed like
something vile to the deathdevouring sharks. No he desired a canoe like
those of Nantucket, all the more congenial to him, being a whaleman, that
like a whaleboat these coffincanoes were without a keel though that
involved but uncertain steering, and much leeway adown the dim ages. Now,
when this strange circumstance was made known aft, the carpenter was at once
commanded to do Queequeg's bidding, whatever it might include. There was some
heathenish, coffincolored old lumber aboard, which, upon a long previous
voyage, had been cut from the aboriginal groves of the Lackaday islands, and
from these dark planks the coffin was recommended to be made. No sooner was
the carpenter apprised of the order, than taking his rule, he forthwith with
all the indifferent promptitude of his character, proceeded into the
forecastle and took Queequeg's measure with great accuracy, regularly
chalking Queequeg's person as he shifted the rule. Ah poor fellow he'll
have to die now, ejaculated the Long Island sailor. Going to his
vicebench, the carpenter for convenience' sake and general reference, now
transferringly measured on it the exact length the coffin was to be, and then
made the transfer permanent by cutting two notches at its extremities. This
done, he marshalled the planks and his tools, and to work.
When the last nail was driven, and the lid duly planed and fitted, he
lightly shouldered the coffin and went forward with it, inquiring whether they
were ready for it yet in that direction. Overhearing the indignant but
halfhumorous cries with which the people on deck began to drive the coffin
away, Queequeg, to every one's consternation, commanded that the thing should
be instantly brought to him, nor was there any denying him seeing that, of
all mortals, some dying men are the most tyrannical and certainly, since they
will shortly trouble us so little for evermore, the poor fellows ought to be
indulged. Leaning over in his hammock, Queequeg long regarded the coffin
with an attentive eye. He then called for his harpoon, had the wooden stock
drawn from it, and then had the iron part placed in the coffin along with one
of the paddles of his boat. All by his own request, also, biscuits were
then ranged round the sides within a flask of fresh water was placed at the
head, and a small bag of woody earth scraped up in the hold at the foot and
a piece of sailcloth being rolled up for a pillow, Queequeg now entreated to
be lifted into his final bed, that he might make trial of its comforts, if
any it had. He lay without moving a few minutes, then told one to go to his
bag and bring out his little god, Yojo. Then crossing his arms on his breast
with Yojo between, he called for the coffin lid hatch he called it to be
placed over him. The head part turned over with a leather hinge, and there
lay Queequeg in his coffin with little but his composed countenance in view.
Rarmai it will do it is easy, he murmured at last, and signed to be
replaced in his hammock. But ere this was done, Pip, who had been slily
hovering near by all this while, drew nigh to him where he lay, and with
soft sobbings, took him by the hand in the other, holding his tambourine.
Poor rover will ye never have done with all this weary roving? Where go ye
now? But if the currents carry ye to those sweet Antilles where the beaches
are only beat with waterlilies, will ye do one little errand for me? Seek
out one Pip, who's now been missing long I think he's in those far
Antilles. If ye find him, then comfort him for he must be very sad for
look
he's left his tambourine behind I found it. Rigadig, dig, dig Now,
Queequeg, die and I'll beat ye your dying march. I have heard, murmured
Starbuck, gazing down the scuttle, that in violent fevers, men, all
ignorance, have talked in ancient tongues and that when the mystery is
probed, it turns out always that in their wholly forgotten childhood those
ancient tongues had been really spoken in their hearing by some lofty
scholars. So, to my fond faith, poor Pip, in this strange sweetness of his
lunacy, brings heavenly vouchers of all our heavenly homes. Where learned he
that, but there? Hark he speaks again but more wildly now. Form two
and two Let's make a General of him Ho, where's his harpoon? Lay it
across here. Rigadig, dig, dig huzza Oh for a game cock now to sit upon
his head and crow queequeg dies game mind ye that queequeg dies game 
take ye good heed of that Queequeg dies game I say game, game, game
but base little Pip, he died a coward died all a'shiver out upon Pip
Hark ye if ye find Pip, tell all the Antilles he's a runaway a coward, a
coward, a coward Tell them he jumped from a whaleboat I'd never beat my
tambourine over base Pip, and hail him General, if he were once more dying
here. No, no shame upon all cowards shame upon them Let 'em go drown
like Pip, that jumped from a whaleboat. Shame shame During all this,
Queequeg lay with closed eyes, as if in a dream. Pip was led away, and the
sick man was replaced in his hammock. But now that he had apparently made
every preparation for death now that his coffin was proved a good fit,
Queequeg suddenly rallied soon there seemed no need of the carpenter's box
and thereupon, when some expressed their delighted surprise, he, in
substance, said, that the cause of his sudden convalescence was this at a
critical moment, he had just recalled a little duty ashore, which he was
leaving undone and therefore had changed his mind about dying he could not
die yet, he averred. They asked him, then, whether to live or die was a
matter of his own sovereign will and pleasure. He answered, certainly. In a
word, it was Queequeg's conceit, that if a man
made up his mind to live, mere sickness could not kill him nothing but a
whale, or a gale, or some violent, ungovernable, unintelligent destroyer of
that sort. Now, there is this noteworthy difference between savage and
civilized that while a sick, civilized man may be six months convalescing,
generally speaking, a sick savage is almost halfwell again in a day. So, in
good time my Queequeg gained strength and at length after sitting on the
windlass for a few indolent days but eating with a vigorous appetite he
suddenly leaped to his feet, threw out arms and legs, gave himself a good
stretching, yawned a little bit, and then springing into the head of his
hoisted boat, and poising a harpoon, pronounced himself fit for a fight.
With a wild whimsiness, he now used his coffin for a seachest and emptying
into it his canvas bag of clothes, set them in order there. Many spare hours
he spent, in carving the lid with all manner of grotesque figures and
drawings and it seemed that hereby he was striving, in his rude way, to copy
parts of the twisted tattooing on his body. And this tattooing, had been the
work of a departed prophet and seer of his island, who, by those hieroglyphic
marks, had written out on his body a complete theory of the heavens and the
earth, and a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth so that
Queequeg in his own proper person was a riddle to unfold a wondrous work in
one volume but whose mysteries not even himself could read, though his own
live heart beat against them and these mysteries were therefore destined in
the end to moulder away with the living parchment whereon they were inscribed,
and so be unsolved to the last. And this thought it must have been which
suggested to Ahab that wild exclamation of his, when one morning turning away
from surveying poor Queequeg  Oh, devilish tantalization of the gods
When gliding by the Bashee isles we emerged
at last upon the great South Sea were it not for other things, I could have
greeted my dear Pacific with uncounted thanks, for now the long supplication
of my youth was answered that serene ocean rolled eastwards from me a
thousand leagues of blue. There is, one knows not what sweet mystery about
this sea, whose gently awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul
beneath like those fabled undulations of the Ephesian sod over the buried
Evangelist St. John. And meet it is, that over these seapastures,
widerolling watery prairies and Potters' Fields of all four continents, the
waves should rise and fall, and ebb and flow unceasingly for here, millions
of mixed shades and shadows, drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries all
that we call lives and souls, lie dreaming, dreaming, still tossing like
slumberers in their beds the everrolling waves but made so by their
restlessness. To any meditative Magian rover, this serene Pacific, once
beheld, must ever after be the sea of his adoption. It rolls the midmost
waters of the world, the Indian ocean and Atlantic being but its arms. The
same waves wash the moles of the newbuilt Californian towns, but yesterday
planted by the recentest race of men, and lave the faded but still gorgeous
skirts of Asiatic lands, older than Abraham while all between float
milkyways of coral isles, and lowlying, endless, unknown Archipelagoes, and
impenetrable Japans. Thus this mysterious, divine Pacific zones the world's
whole bulk about makes all coasts one bay to it seems the tidebeating
heart of earth. Lifted by those eternal swells, you needs must own the
seductive god, bowing your head to Pan. But few thoughts of Pan stirred
Ahab's brain, as standing like an iron statue at his accustomed place beside
the mizen
rigging, with one nostril he unthinkingly snuffed the sugary musk from the
Bashee isles in whose sweet woods mild lovers must be walking, and with
the other consciously inhaled the salt breath of the new found sea that sea
in which the hated White Whale must even then be swimming. Launched at length
upon these almost final waters, and gliding towards the Japanese
cruisingground, the old man's purpose intensified itself. His firm lips met
like the lips of a vice the Delta of his forehead's veins swelled like
overladen brooks in his very sleep, his ringing cry ran through the vaulted
hull, Stern all the White Whale spouts thick blood
The blacksmith availing himself of the mild,
summercool weather that now reigned in these latitudes, and in preparation
for the peculiarly active pursuits shortly to be anticipated, Perth, the
begrimed, blistered old blacksmith, had not removed his portable forge to
the hold again, after concluding his contributory work for Ahab's leg, but
still retained it on deck, fast lashed to ringbolts by the foremast being
now almost incessantly invoked by the headsmen, and harpooneers, and bowsmen
to do some little job for them altering, or repairing, or new shaping their
various weapons and boat furniture. Often he would be surrounded by an eager
circle, all waiting to be served holding boatspades, pikeheads, harpoons,
and lances, and jealously watching his every sooty movement, as he toiled.
Nevertheless, this old man's was a patient hammer wielded by a patient arm.
No murmur, no impatience, no petulence did come from him. Silent, slow, and
solemn bowing over still further his chronically broken back, he toiled
away, as if toil were life itself, and the heavy beating of his hammer the
heavy beating of his heart. And so it was. Most miserable
A peculiar walk in this old man, a certain slight but painful appearing yawing
in his gait, had at an early period of the voyage excited the curiosity of
the mariners. And to the importunity of their persisted questionings he had
finally given in and so it came to pass that every one now knew the shameful
story of his wretched fate. Belated, and not innocently, one bitter winter's
midnight, on the road running between two country towns, the blacksmith
halfstupidly felt the deadly numbness stealing over him, and sought refuge
in a leaning, dilapidated barn. The issue was, the loss of the extremities of
both feet. Out of this revelation, part by part, at last came out the four
acts of the gladness, and the one long, and as yet uncatastrophied fifth act
of the grief of his life's drama. He was an old man, who, at the age of
nearly sixty, had postponedly encountered that thing in sorrow's technicals
called ruin. He had been an artisan of famed excellence, and with plenty to
do owned a house and garden embraced a youthful, daughterlike, loving
wife, and three blithe, ruddy children every Sunday went to a
cheerfullooking church, planted in a grove. But one night, under cover of
darkness, and further concealed in a most cunning disguisement, a desperate
burglar slid into his happy home, and robbed them all of everything. And
darker yet to tell, the blacksmith himself did ignorantly conduct this
burglar into his family's heart. It was the Bottle Conjuror Upon the opening
of that fatal cork, forth flew the fiend, and shrivelled up his home. Now,
for prudent, most wise, and economic reasons, the blacksmith's shop was in the
basement of his dwelling, but with a separate entrance to it so that always
had the young and loving healthy wife listened with no unhappy nervousness,
but with vigorous pleasure, to the stout ringing of her youngarmed old
husband's hammer whose reverberations, muffled by passing through the floors
and walls, came up to her, not unsweetly, in her nursery and so, to stout
Labor's iron lullaby, the blacksmith's infants were rocked to slumber. Oh,
woe on woe Oh, Death, why canst thou not sometimes be timely? Hadst thou
taken this old blacksmith to thyself ere his full ruin came upon him, then
had the young widow had a
delicious grief, and her orphans a truly venerable, legendary sire to dream
of in their after years and all of them a carekilling competency. But
Death plucked down some virtuous elder brother, on whose whistling daily toil
solely hung the responsibilities of some other family, and left the worse
than useless old man standing, till the hideous rot of life should make him
easier to harvest. Why tell the whole? The blows of the basement hammer
every day grew more and more between and each blow every day grew fainter
than the last the wife sat frozen at the window, with tearless eyes,
glitteringly gazing into the weeping faces of her children the bellows fell
the forge choked up with cinders the house was sold the mother dived down
into the long churchyard grass her children twice followed her thither
and the houseless, familyless old man staggered off a vagabond in crape his
every woe unreverenced his grey head a scorn to flaxen curls Death seems
the only desirable sequel for a career like this but Death is only a
launching into the region of the strange Untried it is but the first
salutation to the possibilities of the immense Remote, the Wild, the Watery,
the Unshored therefore, to the deathlonging eyes of such men, who still
have left in them some interior compunctions against suicide, does the
allcontributed and allreceptive ocean alluringly spread forth his whole
plain of unimaginable, taking terrors, and wonderful, newlife adventures
and from the hearts of infinite Pacifics, the thousand mermaids sing to them
Come hither, brokenhearted here is another life without the guilt of
intermediate death here are wonders supernatural, without dying for them.
Come hither bury thyself in a life which, to your now equally abhorred and
abhorring, landed world, is more oblivious than death. Come hither put up
thy gravestone, too, within the churchyard, and come hither, till we marry
thee Hearkening to these voices, East and West, by early sunrise, and by
fall of eve, the blacksmith's soul responded, Aye, I come And so Perth
went awhaling.
With matted beard, and swathed in a
bristling sharkskin apron, about midday, Perth was standing between his
forge and anvil, the latter placed upon an ironwood log, with one hand
holding a pikehead in the coals, and with the other at his forge's lungs,
when captain ahab came along, carrying in his hand a small rustylooking
leathern bag. While yet a little distance from the forge, moody Ahab paused
till at last, Perth, withdrawing his iron from the fire, began hammering it
upon the anvil the red mass sending off the sparks in thick hovering
flights, some of which flew close to Ahab. Are these thy Mother Carey's
chickens, Perth? they are always flying in thy wake birds of good omen,
too, but not to all look here, they burn but thouthou liv'st among them
without a scorch. Because I am scorched all over, Captain Ahab, answered
Perth, resting for a moment on his hammer I am past scorching not easily
can'st thou scorch a scar. Well, well no more. Thy shrunk voice sounds
too calmly, sanely woful to me. In no Paradise myself, I am impatient of
all misery in others that is not mad. Thou should'st go mad, blacksmith
say, why dost thou not go mad? How can'st thou endure without being mad? Do
the heavens yet hate thee, that thou can'st not go mad? What wert thou
making there? Welding an old pikehead, sir there were seams and dents in
it. And can'st thou make it all smooth, again, blacksmith, after such hard
usage as it had? I think so, sir. And I suppose thou can'st smoothe
almost any seams and dents never mind how hard the metal, blacksmith?
Aye, sir, I think I can all seams and dents but one.
Look ye here, then, cried Ahab, passionately advancing, and leaning with
both hands on Perth's shoulders look ye here  here can ye smoothe out a
seam like this, blacksmith, sweeping one hand across his ribbed browif
thou could'st, blacksmith, glad enough would I lay my head upon thy anvil,
and feel thy heaviest hammer between my eyes. Answer Can'st thou smoothe
this seam? Oh that is the one, sir Said I not all seams and dents but
one? aye, blacksmith, it is the one aye, man, it is unsmoothable for
though thou only see'st it here in my flesh, it has worked down into the bone
of my skull  that is all wrinkles But, away with child's play no more
gaffs and pikes today. Look ye here jingling the leathern bag, as if it
were full of gold coins. I, too, want a harpoon made one that a thousand
yoke of fiends could not part, Perth something that will stick in a whale
like his own finbone. There's the stuff, flinging the pouch upon the
anvil. Look ye, blacksmith, these are the gathered nailstubbs of the steel
shoes of racing horses. Horseshoe stubbs, sir? Why, Captain Ahab, thou
hast here, then, the best and stubbornest stuff we blacksmiths ever work. I
know it, old man these stubbs will weld together like glue from the melted
bones of murderers. Quick forge me the harpoon. And forge me first, twelve
rods for its shank then wind, and twist, and hammer these twelve together
like the yarns and strands of a towline. Quick I'll blow the fire. When
at last the twelve rods were made, Ahab tried them, one by one, by spiralling
them, with his own hand, round a long, heavy iron bolt. A flaw rejecting
the last one. Work that over again, Perth. This done, Perth was about to
begin welding the twelve into one, when Ahab stayed his hand, and said he
would weld his own iron. As, then, with regular, gasping hems, he hammered
on the anvil, Perth passing to him the glowing rods, one after the other,
and the hard pressed forge shooting up its intense straight flame, the Parsee
passed silently, and bowing over his head towards the fire, seemed invoking
some curse or some blessing on the toil. But, as Ahab looked up, he slid
aside.
What's that bunch of lucifers dodging about there for? muttered Stubb,
looking on from the forecastle. That Parsee smells fire like a fusee and
smells of it himself, like a hot musket's powderpan. At last the shank, in
one complete rod, received its final heat and as perth, to temper it, plunged
it all hissing into the cask of water near by, the scalding steam shot up
into Ahab's bent face. Would'st thou brand me, Perth? wincing for a moment
with the pain have I been but forging my own brandingiron, then? Pray
God, not that yet I fear something, Captain Ahab. Is not this harpoon for
the White Whale? For the white fiend But now for the barbs thou must
make them thyself, man. Here are my razors the best of steel here, and make
the barbs sharp as the needlesleet of the Icy Sea. For a moment, the old
blacksmith eyed the razors as though he would fain not use them. Take them,
man, I have no need for them for I now neither shave, sup, nor pray till
but here to work Fashioned at last into an arrowy shape, and welded by
Perth to the shank, the steel soon pointed the end of the iron and as the
blacksmith was about giving the barbs their final heat, prior to tempering
them, he cried to Ahab to place the watercask near. No, no no water for
that I want it of the true deathtemper. Ahoy, there Tashtego, Queequeg,
Daggoo What say ye, pagans Will ye give me as much blood as will cover
this barb? holding it high up. A cluster of dark nods replied, Yes. Three
punctures were made in the heathen flesh, and the White Whale's barbs were
then tempered. Ego non baptizo te in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli
deliriously howled Ahab, as the malignant iron scorchingly devoured the
baptismal blood. Now, mustering the spare poles from below, and selecting one
of hickory, with the bark still investing it, Ahab fitted the end to the
socket of the iron. A coil of new towline was then unwound, and some fathoms
of it taken to the windlass, and
stretched to a great tension. Pressing his foot upon it, till the rope
hummed like a harpstring, then eagerly bending over it, and seeing no
strandings, ahab exclaimed, good and now for the seizings. At one
extremity the rope was unstranded, and the separate spread yarns were all
braided and woven round the socket of the harpoon the pole was then driven
hard up into the socket from the lower end the rope was traced half way along
the pole's length, and firmly secured so, with intertwistings of twine.
This done, pole, iron, and rope like the Three Fates remained inseparable,
and Ahab moodily stalked away with the weapon the sound of his ivory leg,
and the sound of the hickory pole, both hollowly ringing along every plank.
But ere he entered his cabin, a light, unnatural, halfbantering, yet most
piteous sound was heard. Oh, Pip thy wretched laugh, thy idle but
unresting eye all thy strange mummeries not unmeaningly blended with the
black tragedy of the melancholy ship, and mocked it
Penetrating further and further into the
heart of the Japanese cruising ground, the Pequod was soon all astir in the
fishery. Often, in mild, pleasant weather, for twelve, fifteen, eighteen,
and twenty hours on the stretch, they were engaged in the boats, steadily
pulling, or sailing, or paddling after the whales, or for an interlude of
sixty or seventy minutes calmly awaiting their uprising though with but
small success for their pains. At such times, under an abated sun afloat
all day upon smooth, slow heaving swells seated in his boat, light as a
birch canoe and so sociably mixing with the soft waves themselves, that
like hearthstone cats they purr against the gunwale these are the times of
dreamy quietude, when beholding the tranquil
beauty and brilliancy of the ocean's skin, one forgets the tiger heart that
pants beneath it and would not willingly remember, that this velvet paw but
conceals a remorseless fang. These are the times, when in his whaleboat the
rover softly feels a certain filial, confident, landlike feeling towards the
sea that he regards it as so much flowery earth and the distant ship
revealing only the tops of her masts, seems struggling forward, not though
high rolling waves, but through the tall grass of a rolling prairie as when
the western emigrants' horses only show their erected ears, while their
hidden bodies widely wade through the amazing verdure. The longdrawn virgin
vales the mild blue hillsides as over these there steals the hush, the
hum you almost swear that playwearied children lie sleeping in these
solitudes, in some glad Maytime, when the flowers of the woods are plucked.
And all this mixes with your most mystic mood so that fact and fancy,
halfway meeting, interpenetrate, and form one seamless whole. Nor did such
soothing scenes, however temporary, fail of at least as temporary an effect on
Ahab. But if these secret golden keys did seem to open in him his own secret
golden treasuries, yet did his breath upon them prove but tarnishing. Oh,
grassy glades oh, ever vernal endless landscapes in the soul in ye,
though long parched by the dead drought of the earthy life, in ye, men yet
may roll, like young horses in new morning clover and for some few fleeting
moments, feel the cool dew of the life immortal on them. Would to God these
blessed calms would last. But the mingled, mingling threads of life are woven
by warp and woof calms crossed by storms, a storm for every calm. There is
no steady unretracing progress in this life we do not advance through fixed
gradations, and at the last one pause through infancy's unconscious spell,
boyhood's thoughtless faith, adolescence' doubt the common doom, then
scepticism, then disbelief, resting at last in manhood's pondering repose of
If. But once gone through, we trace the round again and are infants, boys,
and men, and Ifs eternally. Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no
more? in what rapt ether sails the world, of which the weariest will
never weary? Where is the foundling's father hidden? Our souls are like
those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them the secret of our
paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it. And that same
day, too, gazing far down from his boat's side into that same golden sea,
Starbuck lowly murmured  Loveliness unfathomable, as ever lover saw in his
young bride's eye Tell me not of thy teethtiered sharks, and thy
kidnapping cannibal ways. Let faith oust fact let fancy oust memory I
look deep down and do believe. And Stubb, fishlike, with sparkling scales,
leaped up in that same golden light  I am Stubb, and Stubb has his
history but here Stubb takes oaths that he has always been jolly
And jolly enough were
the sights and the sounds that came bearing down before the wind, some few
weeks after Ahab's harpoon had been welded. It was a Nantucket ship, the
Bachelor, which had just wedged in her last cask of oil, and bolted down her
bursting hatches and now, in glad holiday apparel, was joyously, though
somewhat vaingloriously, sailing round among the widelyseparated ships on
the ground, previous to pointing her prow for home. The three men at her
masthead wore long streamers of narrow red bunting at their hats from the
stern, a whaleboat was suspended, bottom down and hanging captive from the
bowsprit was seen the long lower jaw of the last whale they had slain.
Signals, ensigns, and jacks of all colors were flying from her rigging, on
every side. Sideways lashed in each of her three basketed tops were two
barrels of sperm above which, in her topmast crosstrees, you saw slender
breakers of the
same precious fluid and nailed to her main truck was a brazen lamp. As was
afterwards learned, the bachelor had met with the most surprising success
all the more wonderful, for that while cruising in the same seas numerous
other vessels had gone entire months without securing a single fish. Not only
had barrels of beef and bread been given away to make room for the far more
valuable sperm, but additional supplemental casks had been bartered for,
from the ships she had met and these were stowed along the deck, and in the
captain's and officers' staterooms. Even the cabin table itself had been
knocked into kindlingwood and the cabin mess dined off the broad head of
an oilbutt, lashed down to the floor for a centrepiece. In the forecastle,
the sailors had actually caulked and pitched their chests, and filled them
it was humorously added, that the cook had clapped a head on his largest
boiler, and filled it that the steward had plugged his spare coffeepot and
filled it that the harpooneers had headed the sockets of their irons and
filled them that indeed everything was filled with sperm, except the
captain's pantaloons pockets, and those he reserved to thrust his hands into,
in selfcomplacent testimony of his entire satisfaction. As this glad ship of
good luck bore down upon the moody Pequod, the barbarian sound of enormous
drums came from her forecastle and drawing still nearer, a crowd of her men
were seen standing round her huge trypots, which, covered with the
parchmentlike poke or stomach skin of the black fish, gave forth a loud roar
to every stroke of the clenched hands of the crew. On the quarterdeck, the
mates and harpooneers were dancing with the olivehued girls who had eloped
with them from the Polynesian Isles while suspended in an ornamented boat,
firmly secured aloft between the foremast and mainmast, three Long Island
negroes, with glittering fiddlebows of whale ivory, were presiding over the
hilarious jig. Meanwhile, others of the ship's company were tumultuously busy
at the masonry of the tryworks, from which the huge pots had been removed.
You would have almost thought they were pulling down the cursed Bastile, such
wild cries they raised, as the now useless brick and mortar were being hurled
into the sea.
Lord and master over all this scene, the captain stood erect on the ship's
elevated quarterdeck, so that the whole rejoicing drama was full before him,
and seemed merely contrived for his own individual diversion. And Ahab, he
too was standing on his quarterdeck, shaggy and black, with a stubborn
gloom and as the two ships crossed each other's wakes one all jubilations
for things passed, the other all forebodings as to things to come their two
captains in themselves impersonated the whole striking contrast of the scene.
Come aboard, come aboard cried the gay Bachelor's commander, lifting a
glass and a bottle in the air. Hast seen the White Whale? gritted Ahab in
reply. No only heard of him but don't believe in him at all, said the
other goodhumoredly. Come aboard Thou are too damned jolly. Sail on.
Hast lost any men? Not enough to speak of two islanders, that's all but
come aboard, old hearty, come along. I'll soon take that black from your
brow. Come along, will ye merry's the play a full ship and
homewardbound. How wondrous familiar is a fool muttered Ahab then
aloud, Thou art a full ship and homeward bound, thou sayest well, then,
call me an empty ship, and outwardbound. So go thy ways, and I will mine.
Forward there Set all sail, and keep her to the wind And thus, while the
one ship went cheerily before the breeze, the other stubbornly fought against
it and so the two vessels parted the crew of the Pequod looking with
grave, lingering glances towards the receding Bachelor but the Bachelor's
men never heeding their gaze for the lively revelry they were in. And as
Ahab, leaning over the taffrail, eyed the homewardbound craft, he took from
his pocket a small vial of sand, and then looking from the ship to the vial,
seemed thereby bringing two remote associations together, for that vial was
filled with Nantucket soundings.
Not seldom in this life, when, on the
right side, fortune's favorites sail close by us, we, though all adroop
before, catch somewhat of the rushing breeze, and joyfully feel our bagging
sails fill out. So seemed it with the Pequod. For next day after
encountering the gay Bachelor, whales were seen and four were slain and one
of them by Ahab. It was far down the afternoon and when all the spearings of
the crimson fight were done and floating in the lovely sunset sea and sky,
sun and whale both stilly died together then, such a sweetness and such
plaintiveness, such inwreathing orisons curled up in that rosy air, that it
almost seemed as if far over from the deep green convent valleys of the
Manilla isles, the Spanish landbreeze, wantonly turned sailor, had gone to
sea, freighted with these vesper hymns. Soothed again, but only soothed to
deeper gloom, Ahab, who had sterned off from the whale, sat intently
watching his final wanings from the now tranquil boat. For that strange
spectacle observable in all sperm whales dying the turning sunwards of the
head, and so expiring that strange spectacle, beheld of such a placid
evening, somehow to Ahab conveyed a wondrousness unknown before. He turns
and turns him to it, how slowly, but how steadfastly, his homagerendering
and invoking brow, with his last dying motions. He too worships fire most
faithful, broad, baronial vassal of the sun Oh that these toofavoring eyes
should see these toofavoring sights. Look here, far waterlocked beyond
all hum of human weal or woe in these most candid and impartial seas where
to traditions no rocks furnish tablets where for long Chinese ages, the
billows have still rolled on speechless and unspoken to, as stars that shine
upon the Niger's unknown source here, too, life dies sunwards full of
faith but see no sooner dead, than death whirls round the corpse, and it
heads some other way.  Oh, thou dark Hindoo half of nature, who of drowned
bones hast builded thy separate throne somewhere in the heart of these
unverdured seas thou art an infidel, thou queen, and too truly speakest to
me in the wideslaughtering Typhoon, and the hushed burial of its after calm.
Nor has this thy whale sunwards turned his dying head, and then gone round
again, without a lesson to me. Oh, trebly hooped and welded hip of power
Oh, high aspiring, rainbowed jet that one strivest, this one jettest all in
vain In vain, oh whale, dost thou seek intercedings with yon
allquickening sun, that only calls forth life, but gives it not again. Yet
dost thou, darker half, rock me with a prouder, if a darker faith. All thy
unnamable imminglings, float beneath me here I am buoyed by breaths of once
living things, exhaled as air, but water now. Then hail, for ever hail, O
sea, in whose eternal tossings the wild fowl finds his only rest. Born of
earth, yet suckled by the sea though hill and valley mothered me, ye
billows are my fosterbrothers
The four whales slain that evening
had died wide apart one, far to windward one, less distant, to leeward
one ahead one astern. These last three were brought alongside ere
nightfall but the windward one could not be reached till morning and the
boat that had killed it lay by its side all night and that boat was Ahab's.
The waifpole was thrust upright into the dead whale's spouthole and the
lantern hanging from its top, cast a troubled flickering glare upon the
black, glossy back, and far out upon the
midnight waves, which gently chafed the whale's broad flank, like soft surf
upon a beach. Ahab and all his boat's crew seemed asleep but the Parsee who
crouching in the bow, sat watching the sharks, that spectrally played round
the whale, and tapped the light cedar planks with their tails. A sound like
the moaning in squadrons over Asphaltites of unforgiven ghosts of Gomorrah,
ran shuddering through the air. Started from his slumbers, Ahab, face to
face, saw the Parsee and hooped round by the gloom of the night they seemed
the last men in a flooded world. I have dreamed it again, said he. Of the
hearses? Have I not said, old man, that neither hearse nor coffin can be
thine? And who are hearsed that die on the sea? But I said, old man, that
ere thou couldst die on this voyage, two hearses must verily be seen by thee
on the sea the first not made by mortal hands and the visible wood of the
last one must be grown in America. Aye, aye a strange sight that, Parsee
a hearse and its plumes floating over the ocean with the waves for the
pallbearers. Ha Such a sight we shall not soon see. Believe it or not,
thou canst not die till it be seen, old man. And what was that saying about
thyself? Though it come to the last, I shall still go before thee thy
pilot. And when thou art so gone before if that ever befall then ere I
can follow, thou must still appear to me, to pilot me still? Was it not so?
Well, then, did I believe all ye say, oh my pilot I have here two pledges
that I shall yet slay Moby Dick and survive it. Take another pledge, old
man, said the Parsee, as his eyes lighted up like fireflies in the gloom,
Hemp only can kill thee. The gallows, ye mean. I am immortal then, on
land and on sea, cried Ahab, with a laugh of derision  Immortal on land
and on sea Both were silent again, as one man. The grey dawn came on, and
the slumbering crew arose from the boat's bottom, and ere noon the dead whale
was brought to the ship.
The season for the Line at length drew
near and every day when Ahab, coming from his cabin, cast his eyes aloft,
the vigilant helmsman would ostentatiously handle his spokes, and the eager
mariners quickly run to the braces, and would stand there with all their eyes
centrally fixed on the nailed doubloon impatient for the order to point the
ship's prow for the equator. In good time the order came. It was hard upon
high noon and Ahab, seated in the bows of his highhoisted boat, was about
taking his wonted daily obervation of the sun to determine his latitude. Now,
in that Japanese sea, the days in summer are as freshets of effulgences.
That unblinkingly vivid Japanese sun seems the blazing focus of the glassy
ocean's immeasureable burningglass. The sky looks lacquered clouds there
are none the horizon floats and this nakedness of unrelieved radiance is
as the insufferable splendors of God's throne. Well that Ahab's quadrant
was furnished with colored glasses, through which to take sight of that solar
fire. So, swinging his seated form to the roll of the ship, and with his
astrologicallooking instrument placed to his eye, he remained in that posture
for some moments to catch the precise instant when the sun should gain its
precise meridian. Meantime while his whole attention was absorbed, the Parsee
was kneeling beneath him on the ship's deck, and with face thrown up like
Ahab's, was eyeing the same sun with him only the lids of his eyes half
hooded their orbs, and his wild face was subdued to an earthly
passionlessness. At length the desired observation was taken and with his
pencil upon his ivory leg, Ahab soon calculated what his latitude must be at
that precise instant. Then falling into a moment's revery, he again looked
up towards the sun and murmured to himself Thou seamark thou high and
mighty Pilot thou tellest me truly
where I am but canst thou cast the least hint where I shall be? Or canst
thou tell where some other thing besides me is this moment living? Where is
Moby Dick? This instant thou must be eyeing him. These eyes of mine look
into the very eye that is even now beholding him aye, and into the eye that
is even now equally beholding the objects on the unknown, thither side of
thee, thou sun Then gazing at his quadrant, and handling, one after the
other, its numerous cabalistical contrivances, he pondered again, and
muttered Foolish toy babies' plaything of haughty Admirals, and
Commodores, and Captains the world brags of thee, of thy cunning and might
but what after all canst thou do, but tell the poor, pitiful point, where
thou thyself happenest to be on this wide planet, and the hand that holds
thee no not one jot more Thou canst not tell where one drop of water or
one grain of sand will be tomorrow noon and yet with thy impotence thou
insultest the sun Science Curse thee, thou vain toy and cursed be all
the things that cast man's eyes aloft to that heaven, whose live vividness
but scorches him, as these old eyes are even now scorched with thy light, O
sun Level by nature to this earth's horizon are the glances of man's eyes
not shot from the crown of his head, as if God had meant him to gaze on his
firmament. Curse thee, thou quadrant dashing it to the deck, no longer
will I guide my earthly way by thee the level ship's compass, and the level
deadreckoning, by log and by line these shall conduct me, and show me my
place on the sea. Aye, lighting from the boat to the deck, thus I
trample on thee, thou paltry thing that feebly pointest on high thus I split
and destroy thee As the frantic old man thus spoke and thus trampled with
his live and dead feet, a sneering triumph that seemed meant for Ahab, and a
fatalistic despair that seemed meant for himself these passed over the mute,
motionless Parsee's face. Unobserved he rose and glided away while,
awestruck by the aspect of their commander, the seamen clustered together on
the forecastle, till Ahab, troubledly pacing the deck, shouted out  To the
braces Up helm square in In an instant the yards swung round and as
the ship halfwheeled
upon her heel, her three firmseated graceful masts erectly poised upon her
long, ribbed hull, seemed as the three Horatii pirouetting on one sufficient
steed. Standing between the knightheads, Starbuck watched the Pequod's
tumultuous way, and Ahab's also, as he went lurching along the deck. I
have sat before the dense coal fire and watched it all aglow, full of its
tormented flaming life and I have seen it wane at last, down, down, to
dumbest dust. Old man of oceans of all this fiery life of thine, what will
at length remain but one little heap of ashes Aye, cried Stubb, but
seacoal ashes mind ye that, Mr. Starbuck seacoal, not your common
charcoal. Well, well I heard Ahab mutter, "Here some one thrusts these
cards into these old hands of mine swears that I must play them, and no
others." And damn me, Ahab, but thou actest right live in the game, and
die it
Warmest climes but nurse the cruellest
fangs the tiger of Bengal crouches in spiced groves of ceaseless verdure.
Skies the most effulgent but basket the deadliest thunders gorgeous Cuba
knows tornadoes that never swept tame northern lands. So, too, it is, that in
these resplendent Japanese seas the mariner encounters the direst of all
storms, the Typhoon. It will sometimes burst from out that cloudless sky,
like an exploding bomb upon a dazed and sleepy town. Towards evening of that
day, the Pequod was torn of her canvas, and barepoled was left to fight a
Typhoon which had struck her directly ahead. When darkness came on, sky and
sea roared and split with the thunder, and blazed with the lightning, that
showed the disabled masts fluttering here and there with
the rags which the first fury of the tempest had left for its after sport.
Holding by a shroud, Starbuck was standing on the quarterdeck at every
flash of the lightning glancing aloft, to see what additional disaster might
have befallen the intricate hamper there while Stubb and Flask were
directing the men in the higher hoisting and firmer lashing of the boats. But
all their pains seemed naught. Though lifted to the very top of the cranes,
the windward quarter boat Ahab's did not escape. A great rolling sea,
dashing high up against the reeling ship's high tetering side, stove in the
boat's bottom at the stern, and left it again, all dripping through like a
sieve. Bad work, bad work Mr. Starbuck, said Stubb, regarding the wreck,
but the sea will have its way. Stubb, for one, can't fight it. You see, Mr.
Starbuck, a wave has such a great long start before it leaps, all round the
world it runs, and then comes the spring But as for me, all the start I
have to meet it, is just across the deck here. But never mind it's all in
fun so the old song says  sings. Oh jolly is the gale, And a joker
is the whale, A' flourishin' his tail,  Such a funny, sporty, gamy, jesty,
joky, hokypoky lad, is the Ocean, oh The scud all a flyin' That's his
flip only foamin' When he stirs in the spicin',  Such a funny, sporty,
gamy, jesty, joky, hokypoky lad, is the Ocean, oh Thunder splits the
ships, But he only smacks his lips, A tastin' of this flip,  Such a funny,
sporty, gamy, jesty, joky, hokypoky lad, is the Ocean, oh Avast Stubb,
cried Starbuck, let the Typhoon sing, and strike his harp here in our
rigging but if thou art a brave man thou wilt hold thy peace. But I am
not a brave man never said i was a brave man I am a coward and I sing to
keep up my spirits. And I tell you what it is, Mr. Starbuck, there's no way
to stop my singing
in this world but to cut my throat. And when that's done, ten to one I sing
ye the doxology for a windup. Madman look through my eyes if thou hast
none of thine own. What how can you see better of a dark night than
anybody else, never mind how foolish? Here cried Starbuck, seizing
Stubb by the shoulder, and pointing his hand towards the weather bow,
markest thou not that the gale comes from the eastward, the very course Ahab
is to run for Moby Dick? the very course he swung to this day noon? now
mark his boat there where is that stove? In the sternsheets, man where
he is wont to stand his standpoint is stove, man Now jump overboard, and
sing away, if thou must I don't half understand ye what's in the wind?
Yes, yes, round the Cape of Good Hope is the shortest way to Nantucket,
soliloquized Starbuck suddenly, heedless of Stubb's question. The gale that
now hammers at us to stave us, we can turn it into a fair wind that will
drive us towards home. Yonder, to windward, all is blackness of doom but
to leeward, homeward I see it lightens up there but not with the
lightning. At that moment in one of the intervals of profound darkness,
following the flashes, a voice was heard at his side and almost at the same
instant a volley of thunder peals rolled overhead. Who's there? Old
Thunder said Ahab, groping his way along the bulwarks to his pivothole
but suddenly finding his path made plain to him by elbowed lances of fire.
Now, as the lightning rod to a spire on shore is intended to carry off the
perilous fluid into the soil so the kindred rod which at sea some ships
carry to each mast, is intended to conduct it into the water. But as this
conductor must descend to considerable depth, that its end may avoid all
contact with the hull and as moreover, if kept constantly towing there, it
would be liable to many mishaps, besides interfering not a little with some
of the rigging, and more or less impeding the vessel's way in the water
because of all this, the lower parts of a ship's
lightningrods are not always overboard but are generally made in long
slender links, so as to be the more readily hauled up into the chains
outside, or thrown down into the sea, as occasion may require. The rods
the rods cried Starbuck to the crew, suddenly admonished to vigilance by
the vivid lightning that had just been darting flambeaux, to light Ahab to his
post. Are they overboard? drop them over, fore and aft. Quick Avast
cried Ahab let's have fair play here, though we be the weaker side. Yet
I'll contribute to raise rods on the Himmalehs and Andes, that all the world
may be secured but out on privileges Let them be, sir. Look aloft
cried Starbuck. The corpusants the corpusants All the yardarms were
tipped with a pallid fire and touched at each tripointed lightningrodend
with three tapering white flames, each of the three tall masts was silently
burning in that sulphurous air, like three gigantic wax tapers before an
altar. Blast the boat let it go cried Stubb at this instant, as a
swashing sea heaved up under his own little craft, so that its gunwale
violently jammed his hand, as he was passing a lashing. Blast it but
slipping backward on the deck, his uplifted eyes caught the flames and
immediately shifting his tone, he cried  The corpusants have mercy on us
all To sailors, oaths are household words they will swear in the trance
of the calm, and in the teeth of the tempest they will imprecate curses
from the topsailyardarms, when most they teter over to a seething sea but
in all my voyagings, seldom have I heard a common oath when God's burning
finger has been laid on the ship when his mene, mene, Tekel Upharsin has
been woven into the shrouds and the cordage. While this pallidness was burning
aloft, few words were heard from the enchanted crew who in one thick
cluster stood on the forecastle, all their eyes gleaming in that pale
phosphorescence, like a far away constellation of stars. Relieved against
the ghostly light, the gigantic jet negro, Daggoo, loomed up to thrice his
real stature, and seemed the black cloud from which the thunder had come.
The parted mouth of Tashtego revealed his sharkwhite teeth, which strangely
gleamed as if they too
had been tipped by corpusants while lit up by the preternatural light,
Queequeg's tattooing burned like Satanic blue flames on his body. The tableau
all waned at last with the pallidness aloft and once more the Pequod and
every soul on her decks were wrapped in a pall. A moment or two passed, when
Starbuck, going forward, pushed against some one. It was Stubb. What
thinkest thou now, man I heard thy cry it was not the same in the song.
No, no, it wasn't I said the corpusants have mercy on us all and I hope
they will, still. But do they only have mercy on long faces? have they no
bowels for a laugh? And look ye, Mr. Starbuck but it's too dark to look.
Hear me, then I take that masthead flame we saw for a sign of good luck
for those masts are rooted in a hold that is going to be chock a' block with
spermoil, d'ye see and so, all that sperm will work up into the masts,
like sap in a tree. Yes, our three masts will yet be as three spermaceti
candles that's the good promise we saw. At that moment Starbuck caught
sight of Stubb's face slowly beginning to glimmer into sight. Glancing
upwards, he cried See see and once more the high tapering flames were
beheld with what seemed redoubled supernaturalness in their pallor. The
corpusants have mercy on us all, cried Stubb, again. At the base of the
mainmast, full beneath the doubloon and the flame, the parsee was kneeling
in Ahab's front, but with his head bowed away from him while near by, from
the arched and overhanging rigging, where they had just been engaged securing
a spar, a number of the seamen, arrested by the glare, now cohered
together, and hung pendulous, like a knot of numbed wasps from a drooping,
orchard twig. In various enchanted attitudes, like the standing, or
stepping, or running skeletons in Herculaneum, others remained rooted to the
deck but all their eyes upcast. Aye, aye, men cried Ahab. Look up at
it mark it well the white flame but lights the way to the White Whale
Hand me those mainmast links there I would fain feel this pulse, and let
mine beat against it blood against fire So.
Then turning the last link held fast in his left hand, he put his foot upon
the Parsee and with fixed upward eye, and highflung right arm, he stood
erect before the lofty tripointed trinity of flames. Oh thou clear spirit
of clear fire, whom on these seas I as Persian once did worship, till in the
sacramental act so burned by thee, that to this hour I bear the scar I now
know thee, thou clear spirit, and I now know that thy right worship is
defiance. To neither love nor reverence wilt thou be kind and e'en for hate
thou canst but kill and all are killed. No fearless fool now fronts thee.
I own thy speechless, placeless power but to the last gasp of my earthquake
life will dispute its unconditional, unintegral mastery in me. In the midst
of the personified impersonal, a personality stands here. Though but a
point at best whencesoe'er I came wheresoe'er I go yet while I earthly
live, the queenly personality lives in me, and feels her royal rights. But
war is pain, and hate is woe. Come in thy lowest form of love, and I will
kneel and kiss thee but at thy highest, come as mere supernal power and
though thou launchest navies of fullfreighted worlds, there's that in here
that still remains indifferent. Oh, thou clear spirit, of thy fire thou
madest me, and like a true child of fire, I breathe it back to thee.
[Sudden, repeated flashes of lightning the nine flames leap lengthwise to
thrice their previous height Ahab, with the rest, closes his eyes, his
right hand pressed hard upon them.] I own thy speechless, placeless power
said I not so? Nor was it wrung from me nor do I now drop these links.
Thou canst blind but I can then grope. Thou canst consume but I can then
be ashes. Take the homage of these poor eyes, and shutterhands. I would
not take it. The lightning flashes through my skull mine eyeballs ache and
ache my whole beaten brain seems as beheaded, and rolling on some stunning
ground. Oh, oh Yet blindfold, yet will I talk to thee. Light though thou
be, thou leapest out of darkness but I am darkness leaping out of light,
leaping out of thee The javelins cease open eyes see, or not? There burn
the flames Oh, thou magnanimous now do I glory in my genealogy. But thou
art but my fiery father my sweet mother, I know not. Oh, cruel what hast
thou done with her? There lies my puzzle but thine is greater. Thou knowest
not how came ye, hence callest thyself unbegotten certainly knowest not thy
beginning, hence callest thyself unbegun. I know that of me, which thou
knowest not of thyself, oh, thou omnipotent. There is some unsuffusing thing
beyond thee, thou clear spirit, to whom all thy eternity is but time, all
thy creativeness mechanical. Through thee, thy flaming self, my scorched
eyes do dimly see it. Oh, thou foundling fire, thou hermit immemorial, thou
too hast thy incommunicable riddle, thy unparticipated grief. Here again with
haughty agony, i read my sire. leap leap up, and lick the sky I leap
with thee I burn with thee would fain be welded with thee defyingly I
worship thee The boat the boat cried Starbuck, look at thy boat, old
man Ahab's harpoon, the one forged at Perth's fire, remained firmly lashed
in its conspicuous crotch, so that it projected beyond his whaleboat's bow
but the sea that had stove its bottom had caused the loose leather sheath to
drop off and from the keen steel barb there now came a levelled flame of
pale, forked fire. As the silent harpoon burned there like a serpent's
tongue, Starbuck grasped Ahab by the arm  God, God is against thee, old
man forbear t'is an ill voyage ill begun, ill continued let me square
the yards, while we may, old man, and make a fair wind of it homewards, to
go on a better voyage than this. Overhearing Starbuck, the panicstricken
crew instantly ran to the braces though not a sail was left aloft. For the
moment all the aghast mate's thoughts seemed theirs they raised a half
mutinous cry. But dashing the rattling lightning links to the deck, and
snatching the burning harpoon, Ahab waved it like a torch among them
swearing to transfix with it the first sailor that but cast loose a rope's
end. Petrified by his aspect, and still more shrinking from the fiery dart
that he held, the men fell back in dismay, and Ahab again spoke  All
your oaths to hunt the White Whale are as binding as mine and heart, soul,
and body, lungs and life, old Ahab is bound. And that ye may know to what
tune this heart beats
look ye here thus I blow out the last fear And with one blast of his
breath he extinguished the flame. As in the hurricane that sweeps the plain,
men fly the neighborhood of some lone, gigantic elm, whose very height and
strength but render it so much the more unsafe, because so much the more a
mark for thunderbolts so at those last words of ahab's many of the mariners
did run from him in a terror of dismay.
Queequeg was a native of Kokovoko, an
island far away to the West and South. It is not down in any map true
places never are. When a newhatched savage running wild about his native
woodlands in a grass clout, followed by the nibbling goats, as if he were a
green sapling even then, in Queequeg's ambitious soul, lurked a strong
desire to see something more of Christendom than a specimen whaler or two.
His father was a High Chief, a King his uncle a High Priest and on the
maternal side he boasted aunts who were the wives of unconquerable warriors.
There was excellent blood in his veins royal stuff though
sadly vitiated, I fear, by the cannibal propensity he nourished in his
untutored youth. A Sag Harbor ship visited his father's bay, and Queequeg
sought a passage to Christian lands. But the ship, having her full complement
of seamen, spurned his suit and not all the King his father's influence
could prevail. But Queequeg vowed a vow. Alone in his canoe, he paddled off
to a distant strait, which he knew the ship must pass through when she quitted
the island. On one side was a coral reef on the other a low tongue of
land, covered with mangrove thickets that grew out into the water. Hiding
his canoe, still afloat, among these thickets, with its prow seaward, he sat
down in the stern, paddle low in hand and when the ship was gliding by,
like a flash he darted out gained her side with one backward dash of his
foot capsized and sank his canoe climbed up the chains and throwing
himself at full length upon the deck, grappled a ringbolt there, and swore not
to let it go, though hacked in pieces. In vain the captain threatened to throw
him overboard suspended a cutlass over his naked wrists Queequeg was the
son of a King, and Queequeg budged not. Struck by his desperate
dauntlessness, and his wild desire to visit Christendom, the captain at last
relented, and told him he might make himself at home. But this fine young
savage this sea Prince of Wales, never saw the captain's cabin. They put him
down among the sailors, and made a whaleman of him. But like Czar Peter
content to toil in the shipyards of foreign cities, Queequeg disdained no
seeming ignominy, if thereby he might happily gain the power of enlightening
his untutored countrymen. For at bottom so he told me he was actuated by a
profound desire to learn among the Christians, the arts whereby to make his
people still happier than they were and more than that, still better than
they were. But, alas the practices of whalemen soon convinced him that even
Christians could be both miserable and wicked infinitely more so, than all
his father's heathens. Arrived at last in old Sag Harbor and seeing what
the sailors did there and then going on to Nantucket, and seeing how they
spent their wages in that place also, poor Queequeg gave it up for lost.
Thought he, it's a wicked world in all meridians I'll die a pagan.
and thus an old idolator at heart, he yet lived among these Christians, wore
their clothes, and tried to talk their gibberish. Hence the queer ways about
him, though now some time from home. By hints, I asked him whether he did
not propose going back, and having a coronation since he might now consider
his father dead and gone, he being very old and feeble at the last accounts.
He answered no, not yet and added that he was fearful Christianity, or
rather Christians, had unfitted him for ascending the pure and undefiled
throne of thirty pagan Kings before him. But by and by, he said, he would
return, as soon as he felt himself baptized again. For the nonce, however,
he proposed to sail about, and sow his wild oats in all four oceans. They
had made a harpooneer of him, and that barbed iron was in lieu of a sceptre
now. I asked him what might be his immediate purpose, touching his future
movements. He answered, to go to sea again, in his old vocation. Upon this,
I told him that whaling was my own design, and informed him of my intention
to sail out of Nantucket, as being the most promising port for an adventurous
whaleman to embark from. He at once resolved to accompany me to that island,
ship aboard the same vessel, get into the same watch, the same boat, the
same mess with me, in short to share my every hap with both my hands in
his, boldly dip into the Potluck of both worlds. To all this I joyously
assented for besides the affection I now felt for Queequeg, he was an
experienced harpooneer, and as such, could not fail to be of great usefulness
to one, who, like me, was wholly ignorant of the mysteries of whaling, though
well acquainted with the sea, as known to merchant seamen. His story being
ended with his pipe's last dying puff, Queequeg embraced me, pressed his
forehead against mine, and blowing out the light, we rolled over from each
other, this way and that, and very soon were sleeping.
Ahab standing by the helm. Starbuck approaching him. We must send down the
maintopsail yard, sir. The band is working loose, and the lee lift is
halfstranded. Shall I strike it, sir? Strike nothing lash it. If I had
skysail poles, I'd sway them up now. Sir? in God's name sir? Well.
The anchors are working, sir. Shall I get them inboard? Strike nothing,
and stir nothing, but lash everything. The wind rises, but it has not got
up to my tablelands yet. Quick, and see to it. By masts and keels he
takes me for the hunchbacked skipper of some coasting smack. Send down my
maintopsail yard Ho, gluepots Loftiest trucks were made for wildest
winds, and this braintruck of mine now sails amid the cloudscud. Shall I
strike that? Oh, none but cowards send down their braintrucks in tempest
time. What a hooroosh aloft there I would e'en take it for sublime, did I
not know that the colic is a noisy malady. Oh, take medicine, take
medicine
Stubb and Flask
mounted on them, and passing additional lashings over the anchors there
hanging. No, Stubb you may pound that knot there as much as you please,
but you will never pound into me what you were just now saying. And how long
ago is it since you said the very contrary? Didn't you once say that whatever
ship Ahab sails in, that ship should pay something extra on its insurance
policy, just as though it were loaded with powder barrels aft and boxes of
lucifers forward? Stop, now didn't you say so? Well, suppose I did? What
then? i've part changed my flesh since that time, why not my mind? Besides,
supposing we are loaded with powder barrels aft and lucifers forward how
the devil could the lucifers get afire in this drenching spray here? Why, my
little man, you have pretty red hair, but you couldn't get afire now. Shake
yourself you're Aquarius, or the waterbearer, Flask might fill pitchers
at your coat collar. Don't you see, then, that for these extra risks the
Marine Insurance companies have extra guarantees? Here are hydrants,
Flask. But hark, again, and I'll answer ye the other thing. First take your
leg off from the crown of the anchor here, though, so I can pass the rope
now listen. What's the mighty difference between holding a mast's
lightningrod in the storm, and standing close by a mast that hasn't got any
lightningrod at all in a storm? Don't you see, you timberhead, that no
harm can come to the holder of the rod, unless the mast is first struck?
What are you talking about, then? Not one ship in a hundred carries rods,
and Ahab, aye, man, and all of us, were in no more danger then, in my poor
opinion, than all the crews in ten thousand ships now sailing the seas. Why,
you KingPost, you, I suppose you would have every man in the world go about
with a small lightningrod running up the corner of his hat, like a militia
officer's skewered feather, and trailing behind like his sash. Why don't ye
be sensible, Flask? it's easy to be sensible why don't ye, then? any man
with half an eye can be sensible. I don't know that, Stubb. You sometimes
find it rather hard. Yes, when a fellow's soaked through, it's hard to be
sensible, that's a fact. And I am about drenched with this spray. Never
mind catch the turn there, and pass it. Seems to me we are lashing down
these anchors now as if they were never going to be used again. tying these
two anchors here, Flask, seems like tying a man's hands behind him. And what
big generous hands they are, to be sure. These are your iron fists, hey?
What a hold they have, too I wonder, Flask, whether the world is anchored
anywhere if she is, she swings with an uncommon long cable, though. There,
hammer that knot down, and we've done. So next to touching land, lighting
on deck is the most satisfactory. I say, just wring out my jacket skirts,
will ye? Thank ye. They laugh at longtogs so, Flask but seems to me, a
long tailed coat ought always to be worn in all storms afloat. The tails
tapering down that way, serve to carry off the water, d'ye see. Same with
cocked hats the cocks form gableend eavetroughs, Flask. No more
monkeyjackets and tarpaulins for me I must mount a swallowtail, and drive
down a beaver so. Halloa whew there goes my tarpaulin overboard Lord,
Lord, that the winds that come from heaven should be so unmannerly This is
a nasty night, lad.
During the most violent shocks of the
Typhoon, the man at the Pequod's jawbone tiller had several times been
reelingly hurled to the deck by its spasmodic motions, even though preventer
tackles had been attached to it for they were slack  because some play to
the tiller was indispensable. In a severe gale like this, while the ship is
but a tossed shuttlecock to the blast, it is by no means uncommon to see
the needles in the compasses, at intervals, go round and round. It was thus
with the Pequod's at almost every shock the helmsman had not failed to
notice the whirling velocity with which they revolved upon the cards it is a
sight that hardly any one can behold without some sort of unwonted emotion.
Some hours after midnight, the Typhoon abated so much, that through the
strenuous exertions of Starbuck and Stubb one engaged forward and the other
aft the shivered remnants of the jib and fore and maintopsails were cut
adrift from the spars, and went eddying away to leeward, like the feathers
of
an albatross, which sometimes are cast to the winds when that stormtossed
bird is on the wing. The three corresponding new sails were now bent and
reefed, and a stormtrysail was set further aft so that the ship soon went
through the water with some precision again and the course for the present,
Eastsoutheast which he was to steer, if practicable, was once more given
to the helmsman. For during the violence of the gale, he had only steered
according to its vicissitudes. But as he was now bringing the ship as near
her course as possible, watching the compass meanwhile, lo a good sign
the wind seemed coming round astern aye the foul breeze became fair
Instantly the yards were squared, to the lively song of Ho the fair
wind ohheyo, cheerly, men the crew singing for joy, that so
promising an event should so soon have falsified the evil portents preceding
it. In compliance with the standing order of his commander  to report
immediately, and at any one of the twentyfour hours, any decided change in
the affairs of the deck, Starbuck had no sooner trimmed the yards to the
breeze however reluctantly and gloomily, than he mechanically went below to
apprise Captain Ahab of the circumstance. Ere knocking at his stateroom, he
involuntarily paused before it a moment. The cabin lamp taking long swings
this way and that was burning fitfully, and casting fitful shadows upon the
old man's bolted door, a thin one, with fixed blinds inserted, in place of
upper panels. The isolated subterraneousness of the cabin made a certain
humming silence to reign there, though it was hooped round by all the roar of
the elements. The loaded muskets in the rack were shiningly revealed, as
they stood upright against the forward bulkhead. Starbuck was an honest,
upright man but out of Starbuck's heart, at that instant when he saw the
muskets, there strangely evolved an evil thought but so blent with its
neutral or good accompaniments that for the instant he hardly knew it for
itself. He would have shot me once, he murmured, yes, there's the very
musket that he pointed at me that one with the studded stock let me touch
it lift it. Strange, that I, who have
handled so many deadly lances, strange, that I should shake so now. Loaded?
I must see. Aye, aye and powder in the pan  that's not good. Best spill
it? wait. I'll cure myself of this. I'll hold the musket boldly while I
think. I come to report a fair wind to him. But how fair? Fair for death
and doom,  that's fair for Moby Dick. It's a fair wind that's only fair for
that accursed fish. The very tube he pointed at me the very one this one
I hold it here he would have killed me with the very thing I handle now.
Aye and he would fain kill all his crew. Does he not say he will not strike
his spars to any gale? Has he not dashed his heavenly quadrant? and in these
same perilous seas, gropes he not his way by mere dead reckoning of the
errorabounding log? and in this very Typhoon, did he not swear that he
would have no lightningrods? But shall this crazed old man be tamely
suffered to drag a whole ship's company down to doom with him? Yes, it would
make him the wilful murderer of thirty men and more, if this ship come to any
deadly harm and come to deadly harm, my soul swears this ship will, if Ahab
have his way. If, then, he were this instantput aside, that crime would
not be his. Ha is he muttering in his sleep? Yes, just there, in there,
he's sleeping. Sleeping? aye, but still alive, and soon awake again. I
can't withstand thee, then, old man. Not reasoning not remonstrance not
entreaty wilt thou hearken to all this thou scornest. Flat obedience to thy
own flat commands, this is all thou breathest. Aye, and say'st the men
have vow'd thy vow say'st all of us are Ahabs. Great God forbid  But is
there no other way? no lawful way? Make him a prisoner to be taken home?
What hope to wrest this old man's living power from his own living hands?
Only a fool would try it. Say he were pinioned even knotted all over with
ropes and hawsers chained down to ringbolts on this cabin floor he would
be more hideous than a caged tiger, then. I could not endure the sight
could not possibly fly his howlings all comfort, sleep itself, inestimable
reason would leave me on the long intolerable voyage. What, then, remains?
The land is hundreds of leagues away, and locked Japan the nearest. I stand
alone here upon an open sea, with two oceans and a whole continent between
me and law. Aye, aye, 'tis so. Is heaven a murderer
when its lightning strikes a wouldbe murderer in his bed, tindering sheets
and skin together? And would I be a murderer, then, if and slowly,
stealthily, and half sideways looking, he placed the loaded musket's end
against the door. On this level, Ahab's hammock swings within his head
this way. A touch, and Starbuck may survive to hug his wife and child
again. Oh Mary Mary boy boy boy But if I wake thee not to death, old
man, who can tell to what unsounded deeps Starbuck's body this day week may
sink, with all the crew Great God, where art thou? Shall I? shall I? The
wind has gone down and shifted, sir the fore and main topsails are reefed
and set she heads her course. Stern all Oh Moby Dick, I clutch thy heart
at last Such were the sounds that now came hurtling from out the old man's
tormented sleep, as if Starbuck's voice had caused the long dumb dream to
speak. The yet levelled musket shook like a drunkard's arm against the panel
Starbuck seemed wrestling with an angel but turning from the door, he
placed the deathtube in its rack, and left the place. He's too sound
asleep, Mr Stubb go thou down, and wake him, and tell him. I must see to
the deck here. Thou know'st what to say.
Next morning the notyetsubsided sea
rolled in long slow billows of mighty bulk, and striving in the Pequod's
gurgling track, pushed her on like giants' palms outspread. The strong,
unstaggering breeze abounded so, that sky and air seemed vast outbellying
sails the whole world boomed before the wind. Muffled in the full morning
light, the invisible sun was only known by the spread intensity of his place
where his bayonet
rays moved on in stacks. Emblazonings, as of crowned Babylonian kings and
queens, reigned over everything. The sea was as a crucible of molten gold,
that bubblingly leaps with light and heat. Long maintaining an enchanted
silence, Ahab stood apart and every time the tetering ship loweringly
pitched down her bowsprit, he turned to eye the bright sun's rays produced
ahead and when she profoundly settled by the stern, he turned behind, and
saw the sun's rearward place, and how the same yellow rays were blending with
his undeviating wake. Ha, ha, my ship thou mightest well be taken now for
the seachariot of the sun. Ho, ho all ye nations before my prow, I bring
the sun to ye Yoke on the further billows hallo a tandem, I drive the
sea But suddenly reined back by some counter thought, he hurried towards
the helm, huskily demanding how the ship was heading. Eastsoueast,
sir, said the frightened steersman. Thou liest smiting him with his
clenched fist. Heading East at this hour in the morning, and the sun
astern? Upon this every soul was confounded for the phenomenon just then
observed by Ahab had unaccountably escaped every one else but its very
blinding palpableness must have been the cause. Thrusting his head half way
into the binnacle, Ahab caught one glimpse of the compasses his uplifted
arm slowly fell for a moment he almost seemed to stagger. Standing behind
him Starbuck looked, and lo the two compasses pointed East, and the
Pequod was as infallibly going West. But ere the first wild alarm could get
out abroad among the crew, the old man with a rigid laugh exclaimed, I have
it It has happened before. Mr. Starbuck, last night's thunder turned our
compasses that's all. Thou hast before now heard of such a thing, I take
it. Aye but never before has it happened to me, sir, said the pale
mate, gloomily. Here, it must needs be said, that accidents like this have in
more than one case occurred to ships in violent storms. The
magnetic energy, as developed in the mariner's needle, is, as all know,
essentially one with the electricity beheld in heaven hence it is not to be
much marvelled at, that such things should be. In instances where the
lightning has actually struck the vessel, so as to smite down some of the
spars and rigging, the effect upon the needle has at times been still more
fatal all its loadstone virtue being annihilated, so that the before
magnetic steel was of no more use than an old wife's knitting needle. But in
either case, the needle never again, of itself, recovers the original virtue
thus marred or lost and if the binnacle compasses be affected, the same
fate reaches all the others that may be in the ship even were the lowermost
one inserted into the kelson. Deliberately standing before the binnacle, and
eyeing the transpointed compasses, the old man, with the sharp of his
extended hand, now took the precise bearing of the sun, and satisfied that
the needles were exactly inverted, shouted out his orders for the ship's
course to be changed accordingly. The yards were hard up and once more the
Pequod thrust her undaunted bows into the opposing wind, for the supposed
fair one had only been juggling her. Meanwhile, whatever were his own secret
thoughts, Starbuck said nothing, but quietly he issued all requisite orders
while Stubb and Flask who in some small degree seemed then to be sharing
his feelings likewise unmurmuringly acquiesced. As for the men, though some
of them lowly rumbled, their fear of Ahab was greater than their fear of
Fate. But as ever before, the pagan harpooneers remained almost wholly
unimpressed or if impressed, it was only with a certain magnetism shot into
their congenial hearts from inflexible Ahab's. For a space the old man walked
the deck in rolling reveries. But chancing to slip with his ivory heel, he
saw the crushed copper sighttubes of the quadrant he had the day before
dashed to the deck. Thou poor, proud heavengazer and sun's pilot yesterday
I wrecked thee, and today the compasses would feign have wrecked me. So,
so. But Ahab is lord over the level loadstone
yet. Mr. Starbucka lance without a pole a topmaul, and the smallest of
the sailmaker's needles. Quick Accessory, perhaps, to the impulse
dictating the thing he was now about to do, were certain prudential motives,
whose object might have been to revive the spirits of his crew by a stroke of
his subtile skill, in a matter so wondrous as that of the inverted compasses.
Besides, the old man well knew that to steer by transpointed needles, though
clumsily practicable, was not a thing to be passed over by superstitious
sailors, without some shudderings and evil portents. Men, said he,
steadily turning upon the crew, as the mate handed him the things he had
demanded, my men, the thunder turned old Ahab's needles but out of this
bit of steel Ahab can make one of his own, that will point as true as any.
Abashed glances of servile wonder were exchanged by the sailors, as this was
said and with fascinated eyes they awaited whatever magic might follow. But
Starbuck looked away. With a blow from the topmaul Ahab knocked off the steel
head of the lance, and then handing to the mate the long iron rod remaining,
bade him hold it upright, without its touching the deck. Then, with the
maul, after repeatedly smiting the upper end of this iron rod, he placed the
blunted needle endwise on the top of it, and less strongly hammered that,
several times, the mate still holding the rod as before. Then going through
some small strange motions with it whether indispensable to the magnetizing
of the steel, or merely intended to augment the awe of the crew, is uncertain
he called for linen thread and moving to the binnacle, slipped out the two
reversed needles there, and horizontally suspended the sailneedle by its
middle, over one of the compasscards. At first, the steel went round and
round, quivering and vibrating at either end but at last it settled to its
place, when Ahab, who had been intently watching for this result, stepped
frankly back from the binnacle, and pointing his stretched arm towards it,
exclaimed, Look ye, for yourselves, if Ahab be not the lord of the level
loadstone The sun is East, and that compass swears it One after another
they peered in, for nothing but their own
eyes could persuade such ignorance as theirs, and one after another they
slunk away. In his fiery eyes of scorn and triumph, you then saw Ahab in all
his fatal pride.
While now the fated Pequod had been
so long afloat this voyage, the log and line had but very seldom been in use.
Owing to a confident reliance upon other means of determining the vessel's
place, some merchantmen, and many whalemen, especially when cruising,
wholly neglect to heave the log though at the same time, and frequently more
for form's sake than anything else, regularly putting down upon the customary
slate the course steered by the ship, as well as the presumed average rate of
progression every hour. It had been thus with the Pequod. The wooden reel
and angular log attached hung, long untouched, just beneath the railing of
the after bulwarks. Rains and spray had damped it the sun and wind had
warped it all the elements had combined to rot a thing that hung so idly.
But heedless of all this, his mood seized Ahab, as he happened to glance
upon the reel, not many hours after the magnet scene, and he remembered how
his quadrant was no more, and recalled his frantic oath about the level log
and line. The ship was sailing plungingly astern the billows rolled in
riots. Forward, there Heave the log Two seamen came. The goldenhued
Tahitian and the grizzly Manxman. Take the reel, one of ye, I'll heave.
They went towards the extreme stern, on the ship's lee side, where the deck,
with the oblique energy of the wind, was now almost dipping into the creamy,
sidelongrushing sea. The Manxman took the reel, and holding it high up, by
the projecting handleends of the spindle, round which the spool
of line revolved, so stood with the angular log hanging downwards, till Ahab
advanced to him. Ahab stood before him, and was lightly unwinding some thirty
or forty turns to form a preliminary handcoil to toss overboard, when the
old Manxman, who was intently eyeing both him and the line, made bold to
speak. Sir, I mistrust it this line looks far gone, long heat and wet
have spoiled it. 'Twill hold, old gentleman. Long heat and wet, have they
spoiled thee? Thou seem'st to hold. Or, truer perhaps, life holds thee not
thou it. I hold the spool, sir. But just as my captain says. With these
grey hairs of mine 'tis not worth while disputing, 'specially with a
superior, who'll ne'er confess. What's that? There now's a patched
professor in Queen Nature's granitefounded College but methinks he's too
subservient. Where wert thou born? In the little rocky Isle of Man, sir.
Excellent Thou'st hit the world by that. I know not, sir, but I was born
there. In the Isle of Man, hey? Well, the other way, it's good. Here's a
man from Man a man born in once independent Man, and now unmanned of Man
which is sucked in by what? Up with the reel The dead, blind wall butts
all inquiring heads at last. Up with it So. The log was heaved. The
loose coils rapidly straightened out in a long dragging line astern, and
then, instantly, the reel began to whirl. In turn, jerkingly raised and
lowered by the rolling billows, the towing resistance of the log caused the
old reelman to stagger strangely. Hold hard Snap the overstrained line
sagged down in one long festoon the tugging log was gone. I crush the
quadrant, the thunder turns the needles, and now the mad sea parts the
logline. But Ahab can mend all. Haul in here, Tahitian reel up, Manxman.
And look ye, let the carpenter make another log, and mend thou the line. See
to it.
There he goes now to him nothing's happened but to me, the skewer seems
loosening out of the middle of the world. Haul in, haul in, Tahitian These
lines run whole, and whirling out come in broken, and dragging slow. Ha,
Pip? come to help eh, Pip? Pip? whom call ye Pip? Pip jumped from the
whaleboat. pip's missing. let's see now if ye haven't fished him up here,
fisherman. It drags hard I guess he's holding on. Jerk him, Tahiti Jerk
him off we haul in no cowards here. Ho there's his arm just breaking
water. A hatchet a hatchet cut it off  we haul in no cowards here.
Captain Ahab sir, sir here's Pip, trying to get on board again. Peace,
thou crazy loon, cried the Manxman, seizing him by the arm. Away from the
quarterdeck The greater idiot ever scolds the lesser, muttered Ahab,
advancing. Hands off from that holiness Where sayest thou Pip was, boy?
Astern there, sir, astern Lo, lo And who art thou, boy? I see not my
reflection in the vacant pupils of thy eyes. Oh God that man should be a
thing for immortal souls to sieve through Who art thou, boy? Bellboy,
sir ship'scrier ding, dong, ding Pip Pip Pip One hundred pounds
of clay reward for Pip five feet high looks cowardly quickest known by
that Ding, dong, ding Who's seen Pip the coward? There can be no hearts
above the snowline. Oh, ye frozen heavens look down here. Ye did beget
this luckless child, and have abandoned him, ye creative libertines. Here,
boy Ahab's cabin shall be Pip's home henceforth, while Ahab lives. Thou
touchest my inmost centre, boy thou art tied to me by cords woven of my
heartstrings. Come, let's down. What's this? here's velvet sharkskin,
intently gazing at Ahab's hand, and feeling it. Ah, now, had poor Pip but
felt so kind a thing as this, perhaps he had ne'er been lost This seems to
me, sir, as a manrope something that weak souls may hold by. Oh, sir, let
old Perth now come and rivet these two hands together the black one with the
white, for I will not let this go.
Oh, boy, nor will I thee, unless I should thereby drag thee to worse horrors
than are here. come, then, to my cabin. Lo ye believers in gods all
goodness, and in man all ill, lo you see the omniscient gods oblivious of
suffering man and man, though idiotic, and knowing not what he does, yet
full of the sweet things of love and gratitude. Come I feel prouder leading
thee by thy black hand, than though I grasped an Emperor's There go two
daft ones now, muttered the old Manxman. One daft with strength, the other
daft with weakness. But here's the end of the rotten line all dripping, too.
Mend it, eh? I think we had best have a new line altogether. I'll see Mr.
Stubb about it.
Steering now southeastward by Ahab's
levelled steel, and her progress solely determined by Ahab's level log and
line the Pequod held on her path towards the Equator. Making so long a
passage through such unfrequented waters, descrying no ships, and ere long,
sideways impelled by unvarying trade winds, over waves monotonously mild
all these seemed the strange calm things preluding some riotous and desperate
scene. At last, when the ship drew near to the outskirts, as it were, of
the Equatorial fishingground, and in the deep darkness that goes before the
dawn, was sailing by a cluster of rocky islets the watch then headed by
Flask was startled by a cry so plaintively wild and unearthly like
halfarticulated wailings of the ghosts of all Herod's murdered Innocents
that one and all, they started from their reveries, and for the space of
some moments stood, or sat, or leaned all transfixedly listening, like the
carved Roman slave, while that wild cry remained within hearing. The
Christian or civilized part of the crew said it was mermaids, and shuddered
but the pagan harpooneers remained
unappalled. Yet the grey Manxman the oldest mariner of all  declared that
the wild thrilling sounds that were heard, were the voices of newly drowned
men in the sea. below in his hammock, ahab did not hear of this till grey
dawn, when he came to the deck it was then recounted to him by Flask, not
unaccompanied with hinted dark meanings. He hollowly laughed, and thus
explained the wonder. Those rocky islands the ship had passed were the resort
of great numbers of seals, and some young seals that had lost their dams,
or some dams that had lost their cubs, must have risen nigh the ship and kept
company with her, crying and sobbing with their human sort of wail. But this
only the more affected some of them, because most mariners cherish a very
superstitious feeling about seals, arising not only from their peculiar tones
when in distress, but also from the human look of their round heads and
semiintelligent faces, seen peeringly uprising from the water alongside. In
the sea, under certain circumstances, seals have more than once been mistaken
for men. But the bodings of the crew were destined to receive a most
plausible confirmation in the fate of one of their number that morning. At
sunrise this man went from his hammock to his masthead at the fore and
whether it was that he was not yet half waked from his sleep for sailors
sometimes go aloft in a transition state, whether it was thus with the man,
there is now no telling but, be that as it may, he had not been long at
his perch, when a cry was heard a cry and a rushing and looking up, they
saw a falling phantom in the air and looking down, a little tossed heap of
white bubbles in the blue of the sea. The lifebuoy a long slender cask was
dropped from the stern, where it always hung obedient to a cunning spring
but no hand rose to seize it, and the sun having long beat upon this cask
it had shrunken, so that it slowly filled, and the parched wood also filled
at its every pore and the studded ironbound cask followed the sailor to the
bottom, as if to yield him his pillow, though in sooth but a hard one. And
thus the first man of the pequod that mounted the mast to look out for the
White Whale, on the White Whale's own
peculiar ground that man was swallowed up in the deep. But few, perhaps,
thought of that at the time. Indeed, in some sort, they were not grieved at
this event, at least as a portent for they regarded it, not as a
foreshadowing of evil in the future, but as the fulfilment of an evil already
presaged. They declared that now they knew the reason of those wild shrieks
they had heard the night before. But again the old Manxman said nay. The
lost lifebuoy was now to be replaced Starbuck was directed to see to it
but as no cask of sufficient lightness could be found, and as in the feverish
eagerness of what seemed the approaching crisis of the voyage, all hands were
impatient of any toil but what was directly connected with its final end,
whatever that might prove to be therefore, they were going to leave the
ship's stern unprovided with a buoy, when by certain strange signs and
inuendoes Queequeg hinted a hint concerning his coffin. A lifebuoy of a
coffin cried Starbuck, starting. Rather queer, that, I should say, said
Stubb. It will make a good enough one, said Flask, the carpenter here can
arrange it easily. Bring it up there's nothing else for it, said
Starbuck, after a melancholy pause. Rig it, carpenter do not look at me
so  the coffin, I mean. Dost thou hear me? Rig it. And shall I nail down
the lid, sir? moving his hand as with a hammer. aye. And shall I caulk
the seams, sir? moving his hand as with a caulkingiron. Aye. And shall
I then pay over the same with pitch, sir? moving his hand as with a
pitchpot. Away What possesses thee to this? Make a lifebuoy of the
coffin, and no more. Mr. Stubb, Mr. Flask, come forward with me. He goes
off in a huff. The whole he can endure at the parts he baulks. Now I don't
like this. i make a leg for captain ahab, and he wears it like a gentleman
but I make a bandbox for Queequeg, and he wont put his head into it. Are
all my pains to go for nothing with that coffin? And now I'm ordered to make
a lifebuoy of it. It's like turning an old coat going to bring the flesh on
the other side now. I don't like this cobbling sort of business I don't like
it at all it's undignified it's not my place. Let tinkers' brats do
tinkerings we are their betters. I like to take in hand none but clean,
virgin, fairandsquare mathematical jobs, something that regularly begins
at the beginning, and is at the middle when midway, and comes to an end at
the conclusion not a cobbler's job, that's at an end in the middle, and at
the beginning at the end. It's the old woman's tricks to be giving cobbling
jobs. Lord what an affection all old women have for tinkers. I know an old
woman of sixtyfive who ran away with a baldheaded young tinker once. And
that's the reason I never would work for lonely widow old women ashore, when
I kept my jobshop in the Vineyard they might have taken it into their
lonely old heads to run off with me. But heighho there are no caps at sea
but snowcaps. Let me see. Nail down the lid caulk the seams pay over
the same with pitch batten them down tight, and hang it with the snapspring
over the ship's stern. Were ever such things done before with a coffin? Some
superstitious old carpenters, now, would be tied up in the rigging, ere they
would do the job. But I'm made of knotty Aroostook hemlock I don't budge.
Cruppered with a coffin Sailing about with a graveyard tray But never
mind. We workers in woods make bridalbedsteads and cardtables, as well as
coffins and hearses. We work by the month, or by the job, or by the profit
not for us to ask the why and wherefore of our work, unless it be too
confounded cobbling, and then we stash it if we can. hem i'll do the job,
now, tenderly. I'll have me let's see how many in the ship's company, all
told? But I've forgotten. Any way, I'll have me thirty separate,
Turk'sheaded lifelines, each three feet long hanging all round to the
coffin. Then, if the hull go down, there'll be thirty lively fellows all
fighting for one coffin, a sight not seen very often beneath the sun Come
hammer, calkingiron, pitchpot, and marlingspike Let's to it.
The coffin laid upon two linetubs, between
the vicebench and the open hatchway the Carpenter calking its seams the
string of twisted oakum slowly unwinding from a large roll of it placed in the
bosom of his frock. Ahab comes slowly from the cabingangway, and hears Pip
following him. Back, lad I will be with ye again presently. He goes Not
this hand complies with my humor more genially than that boy.  Middle aisle
of a church What's here? Life buoy, sir. Mr. Starbuck's orders. Oh,
look, sir Beware the hatchway Thank ye, man. Thy coffin lies handy to
the vault. Sir? The hatchway? oh So it does, sir, so it does. Art
not thou the legmaker? Look, did not this stump come from thy shop? I
believe it did, sir does the ferrule stand, sir? Well enough. But art
thou not also the undertaker? Aye, sir I patched up this thing here as a
coffin for Queequeg but they've set me now to turning it into something
else. Then tell me art thou not an arrant, allgrasping, intermeddling,
monopolizing, heathenish old scamp, to be one day making legs, and the next
day coffins to clap them in, and yet again lifebuoys out of those same
coffins? Thou art as unprincipled as the gods, and as much of a
jackofalltrades. But I do not mean anything, sir. I do as I do. The
gods again. hark ye, dost thou not ever sing working about a coffin? The
Titans, they say, hummed snatches when chipping out the craters for volcanoes
and the gravedigger in the play sings, spade in hand. Dost thou never?
Sing, sir? Do I sing? Oh, I'm indifferent enough, sir, for that but the
reason why the gravedigger made music must
have been because there was none in his spade, sir. But the calking mallet is
full of it. Hark to it. Aye, and that's because the lid there's a
soundingboard and what in all things makes the soundingboard is this
there's naught beneath. And yet, a coffin with a body in it rings pretty
much the same, Carpenter. Hast thou ever helped carry a bier, and heard the
coffin knock against the churchyard gate, going in? Faith, sir, I've
Faith? What's that? Why, faith, sir, it's only a sort of exclamationlike
that's all, sir. Um, um go on. I was about to say, sir, that Art
thou a silkworm? Dost thou spin thy own shroud out of thyself? Look at thy
bosom Despatch and get these traps out of sight. He goes aft. That was
sudden, now but squalls come sudden in hot latitudes. I've heard that the
Isle of Albemarle, one of the Gallipagos, is cut by the Equator right in the
middle. Seems to me some sort of Equator cuts yon old man, too, right in his
middle. He's always under the Linefiery hot, I tell ye He's looking this
way come, oakum quick. Here we go again. This wooden mallet is the cork,
and I'm the professor of musical glasses tap, tap  Ahab to himself.
There's a sight There's sound The greyheaded woodpecker tapping the
hollow tree Blind and dumb might well be envied now. See that thing rests
on two linetubs, full of towlines. A most malicious wag, that fellow.
Rattat So man's seconds tick Oh how immaterial are all materials What
things real are there, but imponderable thoughts? Here now's the very
dreaded symbol of grim death, by a mere hap, made the expressive sign of the
help and hope of most endangered life. A lifebuoy of a coffin Does it go
further? Can it be that in some spiritual sense the coffin is, after all, but
an immortalitypreserver I'll think of that. But no. So far gone
am I in the dark side of earth, that its other side, the theoretic bright one,
seems but uncertain twilight to me. Will ye never have done, Carpenter, with
that accursed sound? I go below let me not see that thing here when I return
again. Now, then, Pip, we'll talk this over I do suck most wondrous
philosophies from thee Some unknown conduits from the unknown worlds must
empty into thee
Next day, a large
ship, the Rachel, was descried, bearing directly down upon the Pequod, all her
spars thickly clustering with men. At the time the Pequod was making good
speed through the water but as the broadwinged windward stranger shot nigh
to her, the boastful sails all fell together as blank bladders that are
burst, and all life fled from the smitten hull. Bad news she brings bad
news, muttered the old Manxman. But ere her commander, who, with trumpet to
mouth, stood up in his boat ere he could hopefully hail, Ahab's voice was
heard. Hast seen the White Whale? Aye, yesterday. Have ye seen a
whaleboat adrift? Throttling his joy, Ahab negatively answered this
unexpected question and would then have fain boarded the stranger, when
the stranger captain himself, having stopped his vessel's way, was seen
descending her side. A few keen pulls, and his boathook soon clinched the
Pequod's mainchains, and he sprang to the deck. Immediately he was
recognized by ahab for a nantucketer he knew. But no formal salutation was
exchanged. Where was he? not killed not killed cried Ahab, closely
advancing. How was it? It seemed that somewhat late on the afternoon of the
day previous, while three of the stranger's boats were engaged with
a shoal of whales, which had led them some four or five miles from the ship
and while they were yet in swift chase to windward, the white hump and head of
Moby Dick had suddenly loomed up out of the blue water, not very far to
leeward whereupon, the fourth rigged boat a reserved one had been
instantly lowered in chase. After a keen sail before the wind, this fourth
boat the swiftest keeled of all seemed to have succeeded in fastening at
least, as well as the man at the masthead could tell anything about it. In
the distance he saw the diminished dotted boat and then a swift gleam of
bubbling white water and after that nothing more whence it was concluded
that the stricken whale must have indefinitely run away with his pursuers, as
often happens. There was some apprehension, but no positive alarm, as yet.
The recall signals were placed in the rigging darkness came on and forced
to pick up her three far to windward boats ere going in quest of the fourth
one in the precisely opposite direction the ship had not only been
necessitated to leave that boat to its fate till near midnight, but, for the
time, to increase her distance from it. But the rest of her crew being at
last safe aboard, she crowded all sail stunsail on stunsail after the
missing boat kindling a fire in her trypots for a beacon and every
other man aloft on the lookout. But though when she had thus sailed a
sufficient distance to gain the presumed place of the absent ones when last
seen though she then paused to lower her spare boats to pull all around her
and not finding anything, had again dashed on again paused, and lowered her
boats and though she had thus continued doing till day light yet not the
least glimpse of the missing keel had been seen. The story told, the
stranger Captain immediately went on to reveal his object in boarding the
Pequod. He desired that ship to unite with his own in the search by sailing
over the sea some four or five miles apart, on parallel lines, and so sweeping
a double horizon, as it were. I will wager something now, whispered Stubb
to Flask, that some one in that missing boat wore off that Captain's best
coat mayhap, his watch he's so cursed anxious to get it back. Who ever
heard of two pious whaleships cruising after
one missing whaleboat in the height of the whaling season? See, Flask, only
see how pale he looks pale in the very buttons of his eyes look it wasn't
the coat it must have been the My boy, my own boy is among them. For
God's sake I beg, I conjure here exclaimed the stranger Captain to Ahab,
who thus far had but icily received his petition. For eightandforty hours
let me charter your ship I will gladly pay for it, and roundly pay for it
if there be no other way for eightandforty hours only only that you
must, oh, you must, and you shall do this thing. His son cried Stubb,
oh, it's his son he's lost I take back the coat and watch what says Ahab?
We must save that boy. He's drowned with the rest on 'em, last night, said
the old Manx sailor standing behind them I heard all of ye heard their
spirits. Now, as it shortly turned out, what made this incident of the
Rachel's the more melancholy, was the circumstance, that not only was one of
the Captain's sons among the number of the missing boat's crew but among the
number of the other boat's crews, at the same time, but on the other hand,
separated from the ship during the dark vicissitudes of the chase, there had
been still another son as that for a time, the wretched father was plunged
to the bottom of the cruellest perplexity which was only solved for him by
his chief mate's instinctively adopting the ordinary procedure of a whaleship
in such emergencies, that is, when placed between jeopardized but divided
boats, always to pick up the majority first. But the captain, for some
unknown constitutional reason, had refrained from mentioning all this, and not
till forced to it by Ahab's iciness did he allude to his one yet missing boy
a little lad, but twelve years old, whose father with the earnest but
unmisgiving hardihood of a Nantucketer's paternal love, had thus early sought
to initiate him in the perils and wonders of a vocation almost immemorially
the destiny of all his race. Nor does it unfrequently occur, that Nantucket
captains will send a son of such tender age away from them, for a protracted
three or four years' voyage in some other ship than their own so that their
first knowledge of a whaleman's career shall be unenervated by any chance
display
of a father's natural but untimely partiality, or undue apprehensiveness
and concern. Meantime, now the stranger was still beseeching his poor boon of
Ahab and Ahab still stood like an anvil, receiving every shock, but
without the least quivering of his own. I will not go, said the stranger,
till you say aye to me. Do to me as you would have me do to you in the like
case. For you too have a boy, Captain Ahab though but a child, and nestling
safely at home now a child of your old age too  Yes, yes, you relent I
see it run, run, men, now, and stand by to square in the yards. Avast,
cried Ahab  touch not a ropeyarn then in a voice that prolongingly
moulded every word  Captain Gardiner, I will not do it. Even now I lose
time. Good bye, good bye. God bless ye, man, and may I forgive myself,
but I must go. Mr. Starbuck, look at the binnacle watch, and in three
minutes from this present instant warn off all strangers then brace forward
again, and let the ship sail as before. Hurriedly turning, with averted face,
he descended into his cabin, leaving the strange captain transfixed at this
unconditional and utter rejection of his so earnest suit. But starting from
his enchantment, Gardiner silently hurried to the side more fell than
stepped into his boat, and returned to his ship. Soon the two ships diverged
their wakes and long as the strange vessel was in view, she was seen to yaw
hither and thither at every dark spot, however small, on the sea. This way
and that her yards were swung round starboard and larboard, she continued to
tack now she beat against a head sea and again it pushed her before it
while all the while, her masts and yards were thickly clustered with men, as
three tall cherry trees, when the boys are cherrying among the boughs. But by
her still halting course and winding, woful way, you plainly saw that this
ship that so wept with spray, still remained without comfort. She was
Rachel, weeping for her children, because they were not.
Ahab moving to go on deck Pip catches
him by the hand to follow. Lad, lad, I tell thee thou must not follow Ahab
now. The hour is coming when Ahab would not scare thee from him, yet would
not have thee by him. There is that in thee, poor lad, which I feel too
curing to my malady. Like cures like and for this hunt, my malady becomes
my most desired health. Do thou abide below here, where they shall serve
thee, as if thou wert the captain. Aye, lad, thou shalt sit here in my own
screwed chair another screw to it, thou must be. No, no, no ye have not
a whole body, sir do ye but use poor me for your one lost leg only tread
upon me, sir I ask no more, so I remain a part of ye. Oh spite of
million villains, this makes me a bigot in the fadeless fidelity of man and
a black and crazy but methinks likecureslike applies to him too he
grows so sane again. They tell me, sir, that Stubb did once desert poor
little Pip, whose drowned bones now show white, for all the blackness of his
living skin. But I will never desert ye, sir, as Stubb did him. Sir, I must
go with ye. If thou speakest thus to me much more, Ahab's purpose keels up
in him. I tell thee no it cannot be. Oh good master, master, master
Weep so, and I will murder thee have a care, for Ahab too is mad.
Listen, and thou wilt often hear my ivory foot upon the deck, and still know
that I am there. And now I quit thee. Thy hand Met True art thou, lad,
as the circumference to its centre. So God for ever bless thee and if it
come to that,  God for ever save thee, let what will befall.
Ahab goes Pip steps one step forward. Here he this instant stood
I stand in his air, but I'm alone. Now were even poor Pip here I could
endure it, but he's missing. Pip Pip Ding, dong, ding Who's seen Pip?
He must be up here let's try the door. What? neither lock, nor bolt, nor
bar and yet there's no opening it. It must be the spell he told me to
stay here Aye, and told me this screwed chair was mine. Here, then, I'll
seat me, against the transom, in the ship's full middle, all her keel and
her three masts before me. Here, our old sailors say, in their black
seventyfours great admirals sometimes sit at table, and lord it over rows
of captains and lieutenants. Ha what's this? epaulets epaulets the
epaulets all come crowding Pass round the decanters glad to see ye fill
up, monsieurs What an odd feeling, now, when a black boy's host to white men
with gold lace upon their coats Monsieurs, have ye seen one Pip? a little
negro lad, five feet high, hangdog look, and cowardly Jumped from a
whaleboat once seen him? No Well then, fill up again, captains, and
let's drink shame upon all cowards I name no names. Shame upon them Put
one foot upon the table. Shame upon all cowards. Hist above there, I hear
ivory Oh, master, master I am indeed downhearted when you walk over me.
But here I'll stay, though this stern strikes rocks and they bulge
through and oysters come to join me.
wheelbarrow next morning, Monday, after disposing of
the embalmed head to a barber, for a block, I settled my own and comrade's
bill using, however, my comrade's money. The grinning landlord, as well as
the boarders, seemed amazingly tickled at the sudden friendship which had
sprung up between me and Queequeg  especially as Peter Coffin's cock and bull
stories about him had previously so much alarmed me concerning the very person
whom I now companied with. We borrowed a wheelbarrow, and embarking our
things, including my own poor carpetbag, and Queequeg's canvas sack and
hammock, away we went down to the Moss, the little Nantucket packet
schooner moored at the wharf. As we were going along the people stared not
at Queequeg so much for they were used to seeing cannibals like him in their
streets,  but at seeing him and me upon such confidential terms. But we
heeded them not, going along wheeling the barrow by turns, and Queequeg now
and then stopping to adjust the sheath on his harpoon barbs. I asked him why
he carried such a troublesome thing with him ashore, and whether all whaling
ships did not find their own harpoons. To this, in substance, he replied,
that though what I hinted was true enough, yet he had a particular affection
for his own harpoon, because it was of assured stuff, well tried in many a
mortal combat, and deeply intimate with the hearts of whales. In short, like
many inland reapers and mowers, who go into the farmers' meadows armed with
their own scythes though in no wise obliged to furnished them  even so,
Queequeg, for his own private reasons, preferred his own harpoon. Shifting
the barrow from my hand to his, he told me a funny story about the first
wheelbarrow he had ever seen. It was in Sag Harbor. The owners of his ship,
it seems, had lent him one,
in which to carry his heavy chest to his boarding house. Not to seem ignorant
about the thing though in truth he was entirely so, concerning the precise
way in which to manage the barrow Queequeg puts his chest upon it lashes
it fast and then shoulders the barrow and marches up the wharf. Why, said
I, Queequeg, you might have known better than that, one would think. Didn't
the people laugh? Upon this, he told me another story. The people of his
island of Rokovoko, it seems, at their wedding feasts express the fragrant
water of young cocoanuts into a large stained calabash like a punchbowl and
this punchbowl always forms the great central ornament on the braided mat
where the feast is held. Now a certain grand merchant ship once touched at
Rokovoko, and its commander from all accounts, a very stately punctilious
gentleman, at least for a sea captain this commander was invited to the
wedding feast of Queequeg's sister, a pretty young princess just turned of
ten. Well when all the wedding guests were assembled at the bride's bamboo
cottage, this Captain marches in, and being assigned the post of honor,
placed himself over against the punchbowl, and between the High Priest and
his majesty the King, Queequeg's father. Grace being said,  for those people
have their grace as well as we though Queequeg told me that unlike us, who
at such times look downwards to our platters, they, on the contrary, copying
the ducks, glance upwards to the great Giver of all feasts Grace, I say,
being said, the High Priest opens the banquet by the immemorial ceremony of
the island that is, dipping his consecrated and consecrating fingers into
the bowl before the blessed beverage circulates. Seeing himself placed next
the Priest, and noting the ceremony, and thinking himself being Captain of
a ship as having plain precedence over a mere island King, especially in the
King's own house the Captain coolly proceeds to wash his hands in the punch
bowl taking it i suppose for a huge fingerglass. now, said Queequeg,
what you tink now, Didn't our people laugh? At last, passage paid, and
luggage safe, we stood on board the schooner. Hoisting sail, it glided down
the Acushnet river. On
one side, New Bedford rose in terraces of streets, their icecovered trees
all glittering in the clear, cold air. Huge hills and mountains of casks on
casks were piled upon her wharves, and side by side the worldwandering whale
ships lay silent and safely moored at last while from others came a sound of
carpenters and coopers, with blended noises of fires and forges to melt the
pitch, all betokening that new cruises were on the start that one most
perilous and long voyage ended, only begins a second and a second ended,
only begins a third, and so on, for ever and for aye. Such is the
endlessness, yea, the intolerableness of all earthly effort. Gaining the
more open water, the bracing breeze waxed fresh the little Moss tossed the
quick foam from her bows, as a young colt his snortings. How I snuffed that
Tartar air how I spurned that turnpike earth that common highway all over
dented with the marks of slavish heels and hoofs and turned me to admire the
magnanimity of the sea which will permit no records. At the same
foamfountain, Queequeg seemed to drink and reel with me. His dusky nostrils
swelled apart he showed his filed and pointed teeth. On, on we flew, and
our offing gained, the Moss did homage to the blast ducked and dived her
brows as a slave before the Sultan. Sideways leaning, we sideways darted
every ropeyarn tingling like a wire the two tall masts buckling like Indian
canes in land tornadoes. So full of this reeling scene were we, as we stood
by the plunging bowsprit, that for some time we did not notice the jeering
glances of the passengers, a lubberlike assembly, who marvelled that two
fellow beings should be so companionable as though a white man were anything
more dignified than a whitewashed negro. But there were some boobies and
bumpkins there, who, by their intense greenness, must have come from the heart
and centre of all verdure. Queequeg caught one of these young saplings
mimicking him behind his back. I thought the bumpkin's hour of doom was come.
Dropping his harpoon, the brawny savage caught him in his arms, and by an
almost miraculous dexterity and strength, sent him high up bodily into the
air then slightly
tapping his stern in midsomerset, the fellow landed with bursting lungs upon
his feet, while Queequeg, turning his back upon him, lighted his tomahawk
pipe and passed it to me for a puff. Capting Capting yelled the
bumpkin, running towards that officer Capting, Capting, here's the devil.
Hallo, you sir, cried the Captain, a gaunt rib of the sea, stalking up to
Queequeg, what in thunder do you mean by that? Don't you know you might have
killed that chap? What him say? said Queequeg, as he mildly turned to me.
He say, said I, that you came near kille that man there, pointing to the
still shivering greenhorn. Kille, cried Queequeg, twisting his tattooed
face into an unearthly expression of disdain, ah him bevy smalle fishe
Queequeg no kille so smalle fishe Queequeg kille big whale Look you,
roared the Captain, I'll kille you, you cannibal, if you try any more of
your tricks aboard here so mind your eye. But it so happened just then,
that it was high time for the Captain to mind his own eye. The prodigious
strain upon the mainsail had parted the weathersheet, and the tremendous
boom was now flying from side to side, completely sweeping the entire after
part of the deck. The poor fellow whom Queequeg had handled so roughly, was
swept overboard all hands were in a panic and to attempt snatching at the
boom to stay it, seemed madness. It flew from right to left, and back again,
almost in one ticking of a watch, and every instant seemed on the point of
snapping into splinters. Nothing was done, and nothing seemed capable of
being done those on deck rushed towards the bows, and stood eyeing the boom
as if it were the lower jaw of an exasperated whale. In the midst of this
consternation, Queequeg dropped deftly to his knees, and crawling under the
path of the boom, whipped hold of a rope, secured one end to the bulwarks,
and then flinging the other like a lasso, caught it round the boom as it swept
over his head, and at the next jerk, the spar was that way trapped, and all
was safe. The schooner was run into the wind, and while the hands were
clearing away the stern boat, Queequeg, stripped to the waist, darted from
the side with a long living arc of a leap. For three
minutes or more he was seen swimming like a dog, throwing his long arms
straight out before him, and by turns revealing his brawny shoulders through
the freezing foam. I looked at the grand and glorious fellow, but saw no one
to be saved. The greenhorn had gone down. Shooting himself perpendicularly
from the water, Queequeg now took an instant's glance around him, and
seeming to see just how matters were, dived down and disappeared. A few
minutes more, and he rose again, one arm still striking out, and with the
other dragging a lifeless form. The boat soon picked them up. The poor
bumpkin was restored. All hands voted Queequeg a noble trump the captain
begged his pardon. From that hour I clove to Queequeg like a barnacle yea,
till poor Queequeg took his last long dive. Was there ever such
unconsciousness? He did not seem to think that he at all deserved a medal
from the Humane and Magnanimous Societies. He only asked for water fresh
water  something to wipe the brine off that done, he put on dry clothes,
lighted his pipe, and leaning against the bulwarks, and mildly eyeing those
around him, seemed to be saying to himself  It's a mutual, jointstock
world, in all meridians. We cannibals must help these Christians.
And now that at the proper time and place,
after so long and wide a preliminary cruise, Ahab, all other whaling waters
swept seemed to have chased his foe into an oceanfold, to slay him the more
securely there now, that he found himself hard by the very latitude and
longitude where his tormenting wound
had been inflicted now that a vessel had been spoken which on the very day
preceding had actually encountered Moby Dick and now that all his successive
meetings with various ships contrastingly concurred to show the demoniac
indifference with which the white whale tore his hunters, whether sinning or
sinned against now it was that there lurked a something in the old man's
eyes, which it was hardly sufferable for feeble souls to see. As the
unsetting polar star, which through the livelong, arctic, six months' night
sustains its piercing, steady, central gaze so Ahab's purpose now fixedly
gleamed down upon the constant midnight of the gloomy crew. It domineered
above them so, that all their bodings, doubts, misgivings, fears, were fain
to hide beneath their souls, and not sprout forth a single spear or leaf. In
this foreshadowing interval too, all humor, forced or natural, vanished.
Stubb no more strove to raise a smile Starbuck no more strove to check one.
Alike, joy and sorrow, hope and fear, seemed ground to finest dust, and
powdered, for the time, in the clamped mortar of ahab's iron soul. like
machines, they dumbly moved about the deck, ever conscious that the old
man's despot eye was on them. But did you deeply scan him in his more secret
confidential hours when he thought no glance but one was on him then you
would have seen that even as Ahab's eyes so awed the crew's, the inscrutable
Parsee's glance awed his or somehow, at least, in some wild way, at times
affected it. Such an added, gliding strangeness began to invest the thin
Fedallah now such ceaseless shudderings shook him that the men looked
dubious at him half uncertain, as it seemed, whether indeed he were a
mortal substance, or else a tremulous shadow cast upon the deck by some
unseen being's body. And that shadow was always hovering there. For not by
night, even, had Fedallah ever certainly been known to slumber, or go below.
He would stand still for hours but never sat or leaned his wan but
wondrous eyes did plainly say We two watchmen never rest. Nor, at any time,
by night or day could the mariners now step up the deck, unless Ahab was
before them either standing in his pivothole, or exactly pacing the planks
between two
undeviating limits, the mainmast and the mizen or else they saw him
standing in the cabinscuttle, his living foot advanced upon the deck, as if
to step his hat slouched heavily over his eyes so that however motionless
he stood, however the days and nights were added on, that he had not swung
in his hammock yet hidden beneath that slouching hat, they could never tell
unerringly whether, for all this, his eyes were really closed at times or
whether he was still intently scanning them no matter, though he stood so
in the scuttle for a whole hour on the stretch, and the unheeded nightdamp
gathered in beads of dew upon that stonecarved coat and hat. The clothes
that the night had wet, the next day's sunshine dried upon him and so,
day after day, and night after night he went no more beneath the planks
whatever he wanted from the cabin that thing he sent for. He ate in the same
open air that is, his two only meals,  breakfast and dinner supper he
never touched nor reaped his beard which darkly grew all gnarled, as
unearthed roots of trees blown over, which still grow idly on at naked base,
though perished in the upper verdure. But though his whole life was now
become one watch on deck and though the Parsee's mystic watch was without
intermission as his own yet these two never seemed to speak one man to the
other unless at long intervals some passing unmomentous matter made it
necessary. Though such a potent spell seemed secretly to join the twain
openly, and to the awestruck crew, they seemed polelike asunder. If by day
they chanced to speak one word by night, dumb men were both, so far as
concerned the slightest verbal interchange. At times, for longest hours,
without a single hail, they stood far parted in the starlight Ahab in his
scuttle, the Parsee by the mainmast but still fixedly gazing upon each
other as if in the Parsee Ahab saw his forethrown shadow, in Ahab the
Parsee his abandoned substance. And yet, somehow, did Ahab in his own proper
self, as daily, hourly, and every instant, commandingly revealed to his
subordinates, Ahab seemed an independent lord the Parsee but his slave.
Still again both seemed yoked together, and an unseen
tyrant driving them the lean shade siding the solid rib. For be this Parsee
what he may, all rib and keel was solid Ahab. At the first faintest
glimmering of the dawn, his iron voice was heard from aft  Man the
mastheads and all through the day, till after sunset and after twilight,
the same voice every hour, at the striking of the helmsman's bell, was heard
What d'ye see? sharp sharp But when three or four days had slided by,
after meeting the childrenseeking Rachel and no spout had yet been seen
the monomaniac old man seemed distrustful of his crew's fidelity at least,
of nearly all except the Pagan harpooneers he seemed to doubt, even, whether
Stubb and Flask might not willingly overlook the sight he sought. But if
these suspicions were really his, he sagaciously refrained from verbally
expressing them, however his actions might seem to hint them. I will have
the first sight of the whale myself, he said. Aye Ahab must have the
doubloon and with his own hands he rigged a nest of basketed bowlines and
sending a hand aloft, with a single sheaved block, to secure to the
mainmast head, he received the two ends of the downwardreeved rope and
attaching one to his basket prepared a pin for the other end, in order to
fasten it at the rail. This done, with that end yet in his hand and standing
beside the pin, he looked round upon his crew, sweeping from one to the
other pausing his glance long upon Daggoo, Queequeg, Tashtego but shunning
Fedallah and then settling his firm relying eye upon the chief mate, said,
Take the rope, sir I give it into thy hands, Starbuck. Then arranging
his person in the basket, he gave the word for them to hoist him to his
perch, Starbuck being the one who secured the rope at last and afterwards
stood near it. And thus, with one hand clinging round the royal mast, Ahab
gazed abroad upon the sea for miles and miles, ahead, astern, this side, and
that, within the wide expanded circle commanded at so great a height. When
in working with his hands at some lofty almost isolated place in the rigging,
which chances to afford no foothold, the sailor at sea is hoisted up to that
spot, and sustained there by
the rope under these circumstances, its fastened end on deck is always given
in strict charge to some one man who has the special watch of it. Because in
such a wilderness of running rigging, whose various different relations aloft
cannot always be infallibly discerned by what is seen of them at the deck
and when the deckends of these ropes are being every few minutes cast down
from the fastenings, it would be but a natural fatality, if, unprovided with
a constant watchman, the hoisted sailor should by some carelessness of the
crew be cast adrift and fall all swooping to the sea. So Ahab's proceedings
in this matter were not unusual the only strange thing about them seemed to
be, that Starbuck, almost the one only man who had ever ventured to oppose
him with anything in the slightest degree approaching to decision one of
those too, whose faithfulness on the lookout he had seemed to doubt somewhat
it was strange, that this was the very man he should select for his watchman
freely giving his whole life into such an otherwise distrusted person's
hands. Now, the first time Ahab was perched aloft ere he had been there ten
minutes one of those redbilled savage seahawks which so often fly
incommodiously close round the manned mastheads of whalemen in these
latitudes one of these birds came wheeling and screaming round his head in a
maze of untrackably swift circlings. Then it darted a thousand feet straight
up into the air then spiralized downwards, and went eddying again round his
head. But with his gaze fixed upon the dim and distant horizon, Ahab seemed
not to mark this wild bird nor, indeed, would any one else have marked it
much, it being no uncommon circumstance only now almost the least heedful
eye seemed to see some sort of cunning meaning in almost every sight. Your
hat, your hat, sir suddenly cried the Sicilian seaman, who being posted at
the mizenmasthead, stood directly behind Ahab, though somewhat lower than
his level, and with a deep gulf of air dividing them. But already the sable
wing was before the old man's eyes the long hooked bill at his head with a
scream, the black hawk darted away with his prize.
an eagle flew thrice round Tarquin's head, removing his cap to replace it,
and thereupon Tanaquil, his wife, declared that Tarquin would be king of Rome.
But only by the replacing of the cap was that omen accounted good. Ahab's
hat was never restored the wild hawk flew on and on with it far in
advance of the prow and at last disappeared while from the point of that
disappearance, a minute black spot was dimly discerned, falling from that vast
height into the sea.
The intense Pequod
sailed on the rolling waves and days went by the lifebuoycoffin still
lightly swung and another ship, most miserably misnamed the Delight, was
descried. As she drew nigh, all eyes were fixed upon her broad beams,
called shears, which, in some whalingships, cross the quarterdeck at the
height of eight or nine feet serving to carry the spare, unrigged, or
disabled boats. Upon the stranger's shears were beheld the shattered, white
ribs, and some few splintered planks, of what had once been a whaleboat but
you now saw through this wreck, as plainly as you see through the peeled,
halfunhinged, and bleaching skeleton of a horse. Hast seen the White
Whale? Look replied the hollowcheeked captain from his taffrail and
with his trumpet he pointed to the wreck. Hast killed him? The harpoon is
not yet forged that will ever do that, answered the other, sadly glancing
upon a rounded hammock on the deck, whose gathered sides some noiseless
sailors were busy in sewing together. Not forged and snatching Perth's
levelled iron from the crotch, Ahab held it out, exclaiming  Look ye,
Nantucketer
here in this hand I hold his death Tempered in blood, and tempered by
lightning are these barbs and I swear to temper them triply in that hot
place behind the fin, where the white whale most feels his accursed life
Then God keep thee, old man see'st thou that pointing to the hammock  I
bury but one of five stout men, who were alive only yesterday but were dead
ere night. Only that one I bury the rest were buried before they died
you sail upon their tomb. Then turning to his crew  Are ye ready there?
place the plank then on the rail, and lift the body so, then  Oh God
advancing towards the hammock with uplifted hands  may the resurrection and
the life Brace forward Up helm cried Ahab like lightning to his men.
But the suddenly started Pequod was not quick enough to escape the sound of
the splash that the corpse soon made as it struck the sea not so quick,
indeed, but that some of the flying bubbles might have sprinkled her hull with
their ghostly baptism. As Ahab now glided from the dejected Delight, the
strange lifebuoy hanging at the Pequod's stern came into conspicuous relief.
Ha yonder look yonder, men cried a foreboding voice in her wake. In
vain, oh, ye strangers, ye fly our sad burial ye but turn us your taffrail
to show us your coffin
It was a clear steelblue day. The
firmaments of air and sea were hardly separable in that allpervading azure
only, the pensive air was transparently pure and soft, with a woman's look,
and the robust and manlike sea heaved with long, strong, lingering swells,
as Samson's chest in his sleep.
Hither, and thither, on high, glided the snowwhite wings of small,
unspeckled birds these were the gentle thoughts of the feminine air but to
and fro in the deeps, far down in the bottomless blue, rushed mighty
leviathans, swordfish, and sharks and these were the strong, troubled,
murderous thinkings of the masculine sea. But though thus contrasting within,
the contrast was only in shades and shadows without those two seemed one
it was only the sex, as it were, that distinguished them. Aloft, like a royal
czar and king, the sun seemed giving this gentle air to this bold and rolling
sea even as bride to groom. And at the girdling line of the horizon, a
soft and tremulous motion most seen here at the equator denoted the fond,
throbbing trust, the loving alarms, with which the poor bride gave her bosom
away. Tied up and twisted gnarled and knotted with wrinkles haggardly firm
and unyielding his eyes glowing like coals, that still glow in the ashes of
ruin untottering Ahab stood forth in the clearness of the morn lifting his
splintered helmet of a brow to the fair girl's forehead of heaven. Oh,
immortal infancy, and innocency of the azure Invisible winged creatures
that frolic all round us Sweet childhood of air and sky how oblivious were
ye of old Ahab's closecoiled woe But so have I seen little Miriam and
Martha, laughingeyed elves, heedlessly gambol around their old sire
sporting with the circle of singed locks which grew on the marge of that
burntout crater of his brain. Slowly crossing the deck from the scuttle,
Ahab leaned over the side, and watched how his shadow in the water sank and
sank to his gaze, the more and the more that he strove to pierce the
profundity. But the lovely aromas in that enchanted air did at last seem to
dispel, for a moment, the cankerous thing in his soul. That glad, happy air,
that winsome sky, did at last stroke and caress him the stepmother world,
so long cruel  forbidding now threw affectionate arms round his stubborn
neck, and did seem to joyously sob over him, as if over one, that however
wilful and erring, she could yet find it in her
heart to save and to bless. From beneath his slouched hat Ahab dropped a tear
into the sea nor did all the pacific contain such wealth as that one wee
drop. Starbuck saw the old man saw him, how he heavily leaned over the
side and he seemed to hear in his own true heart the measureless sobbing
that stole out of the centre of the serenity around. Careful not to touch
him, or be noticed by him, he yet drew near to him, and stood there. Ahab
turned. Starbuck Sir. Oh, Starbuck it is a mild, mild wind, and a
mild looking sky. On such a day very much such a sweetness as this I
struck my first whale a boyharpooneer of eighteen Forty fortyforty years
ago ago Forty years of continual whaling forty years of privation, and
peril, and stormtime forty years on the pitiless sea for forty years has
Ahab forsaken the peaceful land, for forty years to make war on the horrors
of the deep Aye and yes, Starbuck, out of those forty years I have not spent
three ashore. When I think of this life I have led the desolation of
solitude it has been the masoned, walledtown of a Captain's exclusiveness,
which admits but small entrance to any sympathy from the green country without
oh, weariness heaviness Guineacoast slavery of solitary command when
I think of all this only halfsuspected, not so keenly known to me before
and how for forty years I have fed upon dry salted fare  fit emblem of the
dry nourishment of my soul when the poorest landsman has had fresh fruit to
his daily hand, and broken the world's fresh bread to my mouldy crusts away,
whole oceans away, from that young girlwife I wedded past fifty, and
sailed for Cape Horn the next day, leaving but one dent in my marriage
pillow wife? wife? rather a widow with her husband alive Aye, I widowed
that poor girl when I married her, Starbuck and then, the madness, the
frenzy, the boiling blood and the smoking brow, with which, for a thousand
lowerings old Ahab has furiously, foamingly chased his prey more a demon
than a man aye, aye what a forty years' fool fool old fool, has old
Ahab been Why this strife of the chase? why weary,
and palsy the arm at the oar, and the iron, and the lance? how the richer or
better is Ahab now? Behold. Oh, Starbuck is it not hard, that with this
weary load I bear, one poor leg should have been snatched from under me?
Here, brush this old hair aside it blinds me, that I seem to weep. Locks
so grey did never grow but from out some ashes But do I look very old, so
very, very old, Starbuck? I feel deadly faint, bowed, and humped, as though
I were Adam, staggering beneath the piled centuries since Paradise. God
God God crack my heart stave my brain mockery mockery bitter,
biting mockery of grey hairs, have I lived enough joy to wear ye and seem
and feel thus intolerably old? Close stand close to me, Starbuck let me
look into a human eye it is better than to gaze into sea or sky better
than to gaze upon God. By the green land by the bright hearthstone this
is the magic glass, man I see my wife and my child in thine eye. No, no
stay on board, on board lower not when I do when branded Ahab gives chase
to Moby Dick. That hazard shall not be thine. No, no not with the far
away home I see in that eye Oh, my Captain my Captain noble soul
grand old heart, after all why should any one give chase to that hated fish
Away with me let us fly these deadly waters let us home Wife and child,
too, are Starbuck's wife and child of his brotherly, sisterly, playfellow
youth even as thine, sir, are the wife and child of thy loving, longing,
paternal old age Away let us away this instant let me alter the course
How cheerily, how hilariously, O my Captain, would we bowl on our way to
see old Nantucket again I think, sir, they have some such mild blue days,
even as this, in nantucket. they have, they have. I have seen them some
summer days in the morning. About this time yes, it is his noon nap now 
the boy vivaciously wakes sits up in bed and his mother tells him of me,
of cannibal old me how I am abroad upon the deep, but will yet come back to
dance him again. Tis my Mary, my Mary herself She promised that my boy,
every morning, should be carried to the hill to catch the first glimpse of
his father's sail Yes, yes no more it is done we head for Nantucket
Come, my Captain, study out the course,
and let us away See, see the boy's face from the window the boy's hand
on the hill But Ahab's glance was averted like a blighted fruit tree he
shook, and cast his last, cindered apple to the soil. What is it, what
nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it what cozzening, hidden lord and
master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me that against all natural
lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on
all the time recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural
heart, I durst not so much as dare? Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who,
that lifts this arm? But if the great sun move not of himself but is as an
errandboy in heaven nor one single star can revolve, but by some invisible
power how then can this one small heart beat this one small brain think
thoughts unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that
living, and not I. By heaven, man, we are turned round and round in this
world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the handspike. And all the time,
lo that smiling sky, and this unsounded sea Look see yon Albicore who
put it into him to chase and fang that flyingfish? Where do murderers go,
man Who's to doom, when the judge himself is dragged to the bar? But it is
a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky and the air smells now, as if it
blew from a faraway meadow they have been making hay somewhere under the
slopes of the Andes, Starbuck, and the mowers are sleeping among the
newmown hay. Sleeping? Aye, toil we how we may, we all sleep at last on the
field. Sleep? Aye, and rust amid greenness as last year's scythes flung
down, and left in the halfcut swaths Starbuck But blanched to a
corpse's hue with despair, the Mate had stolen away. Ahab crossed the deck
to gaze over on the other side but started at two reflected, fixed eyes in
the water there. Fedallah was motionlessly leaning over the same rail.
That night, in the midwatch,
when the old man as his wont at intervals stepped forth from the scuttle in
which he leaned, and went to his pivothole, he suddenly thrust out his
face fiercely, snuffing up the sea air as a sagacious ship's dog will, in
drawing nigh to some barbarous isle. He declared that a whale must be near.
Soon that peculiar odor, sometimes to a great distance given forth by the
living sperm whale, was palpable to all the watch nor was any mariner
surprised when, after inspecting the compass, and then the dogvane, and
then ascertaining the precise bearing of the odor as nearly as possible, Ahab
rapidly ordered the ship's course to be slightly altered, and the sail to be
shortened. The acute policy dictating these movements was sufficiently
vindicated at daybreak, by the sight of a long sleek on the sea directly and
lengthwise ahead, smooth as oil, and resembling in the pleated watery
wrinkles bordering it, the polished metalliclike marks of some swift
tiderip, at the mouth of a deep, rapid stream. Man the mastheads Call
all hands Thundering with the butts of three clubbed handspikes on the
forecastle deck, Daggoo roused the sleepers with such judgment claps that
they seemed to exhale from the scuttle, so instantaneously did they appear
with their clothes in their hands. What d'ye see? cried Ahab, flattening
his face to the sky. Nothing, nothing, sir was the sound hailing down in
reply. T'gallant sails stunsails alow and aloft, and on both sides All
sail being set, he now cast loose the lifeline, reserved for swaying him to
the main royalmast head and in a few moments they were hoisting him
thither, when, while but two thirds of the way aloft, and while peering
ahead through the horizontal vacancy between the maintopsail and
topgallantsail,
he raised a gulllike cry in the air, There she blows there she blows A
hump like a snowhill It is Moby Dick Fired by the cry which seemed
simultaneously taken up by the three lookouts, the men on deck rushed to the
rigging to behold the famous whale they had so long been pursuing. Ahab had
now gained his final perch, some feet above the other lookouts, Tashtego
standing just beneath him on the cap of the topgallant mast, so that the
Indian's head was almost on a level with Ahab's heel. From this height the
whale was now seen some mile or so ahead, at every roll of the sea revealing
his high sparkling hump, and regularly jetting his silent spout into the air.
To the credulous mariners it seemed the same silent spout they had so long
ago beheld in the moonlit Atlantic and Indian Oceans. And did none of ye see
it before? cried Ahab, hailing the perched men all around him. I saw him
almost that same instant, sir, that Captain Ahab did, and I cried out, said
Tashtego. Not the same instant not the same no, the doubloon is mine,
Fate reserved the doubloon for me. I only none of ye could have raised the
White Whale first. There she blows there she blows there she blows
There again there again he cried, in longdrawn, lingering, methodic
tones, attuned to the gradual prolongings of the whale's visible jets. He's
going to sound In stunsails Down topgallantsails Stand by three
boats. Mr. Starbuck, remember, stay on board, and keep the ship. Helm
there Luff, luff a point So steady, man, steady There go flukes No,
no only black water All ready the boats there? Stand by, stand by
Lower me, Mr. Starbuck lower, lower, quick, quicker and he slid through
the air to the deck. He is heading straight to leeward, sir, cried Stubb,
right away from us cannot have seen the ship yet. Be dumb, man Stand
by the braces Hard down the helm brace up Shiver her shiver her So
well that Boats, boats Soon all the boats but Starbuck's were dropped
all the boatsails set all the paddles plying with rippling swiftness,
shooting to leeward and Ahab heading the onset. A pale, deathglimmer
lit up Fedallah's sunken eyes a hideous motion gnawed his mouth. Like
noiseless nautilus shells, their light prows sped through the sea but only
slowly they neared the foe. As they neared him, the ocean grew still more
smooth seemed drawing a carpet over its waves seemed a noonmeadow, so
serenely it spread. At length the breathless hunter came so nigh his
seemingly unsuspecting prey, that his entire dazzling hump was distinctly
visible, sliding along the sea as if an isolated thing, and continually
set in a revolving ring of finest, fleecy, greenish foam. He saw the vast,
involved wrinkles of the slightly projecting head beyond. Before it, far out
on the soft Turkishrugged waters, went the glistening white shadow from his
broad, milky forehead, a musical rippling playfully accompanying the shade
and behind, the blue waters interchangeably flowed over into the moving valley
of his steady wake and on either hand bright bubbles arose and danced by his
side. But these were broken again by the light toes of hundreds of gay fowl
softly feathering the sea, alternate with their fitful flight and like to
some flagstaff rising from the painted hull of an argosy, the tall but
shattered pole of a recent lance projected from the white whale's back and
at intervals one of the cloud of softtoed fowls hovering, and to and fro
skimming like a canopy over the fish, silently perched and rocked on this
pole, the long tail feathers streaming like pennons. A gentle joyousness a
mighty mildness of repose in swiftness, invested the gliding whale. Not the
white bull Jupiter swimming away with ravished Europa clinging to his graceful
horns his lovely, leering eyes sideways intent upon the maid with smooth
bewitching fleetness, rippling straight for the nuptial bower in Crete not
Jove, not that great majesty Supreme did surpass the glorified White Whale
as he so divinely swam. On each soft side coincident with the parted swell,
that but once leaving him, then flowed so wide away on each bright side,
the whale shed off enticings. No wonder there had been some among the hunters
who namelessly transported and allured by all this serenity, had ventured to
assail it but had fatally
found that quietude but the vesture of tornadoes. Yet calm, enticing calm,
oh, whale thou glidest on, to all who for the first time eye thee, no
matter how many in that same way thou may'st have bejuggled and destroyed
before. And thus, through the serene tranquillities of the tropical sea,
among waves whose handclappings were suspended by exceeding rapture, Moby
Dick moved on, still withholding from sight the full terrors of his submerged
trunk, entirely hiding the wrenched hideousness of his jaw. But soon the
fore part of him slowly rose from the water for an instant his whole
marbleized body formed a high arch, like Virginia's Natural Bridge, and
warningly waving his bannered flukes in the air, the grand god revealed
himself, sounded, and went out of sight. Hoveringly halting, and dipping on
the wing, the white seafowls longingly lingered over the agitated pool that
he left. With oars apeak, and paddles down, the sheets of their sails
adrift, the three boats now stilly floated, awaiting Moby Dick's
reappearance. An hour, said Ahab, standing rooted in his boat's stern
and he gazed beyond the whale's place, towards the dim blue spaces and wide
wooing vacancies to leeward. It was only an instant for again his eyes
seemed whirling round in his head as he swept the watery circle. The breeze
now freshened the sea began to swell. The birds the birds cried
Tashtego. In long Indian file, as when herons take wing, the white birds
were now all flying towards Ahab's boat and when within a few yards began
fluttering over the water there, wheeling round and round, with joyous,
expectant cries. Their vision was keener than man's Ahab could discover no
sign in the sea. But suddenly as he peered down and down into its depths, he
profoundly saw a white living spot no bigger than a white weasel, with
wonderful celerity uprising, and magnifying as it rose, till it turned, and
then there were plainly revealed two long crooked rows of white, glistening
teeth, floating up from the undiscoverable bottom. It was Moby Dick's open
mouth and scrolled jaw his vast, shadowed bulk still half blending with the
blue of the sea. The glittering mouth yawned beneath
the boat like an opendoored marble tomb and giving one sidelong sweep with
his steering oar, Ahab whirled the craft aside from this tremendous
apparition. Then, calling upon Fedallah to change places with him, went
forward to the bows, and seizing Perth's harpoon, commanded his crew to
grasp their oars and stand by to stern. Now, by reason of this timely
spinning round the boat upon its axis, its bow, by anticipation, was made to
face the whale's head while yet under water. But as if perceiving this
strategem, moby dick, with that malicious intelligence ascribed to him,
sidelingly transplanted himself, as it were, in an instant, shooting his
pleated head lengthwise beneath the boat. Through and through through every
plank and each rib, it thrilled for an instant, the whale obliquely lying on
his back, in the manner of a biting shark, slowly and feelingly taking its
bows full within his mouth, so that the long, narrow, scrolled lower jaw
curled high up into the open air, and one of the teeth caught in a rowlock.
The bluish pearlwhite of the inside of the jaw was within six inches of
Ahab's head, and reached higher than that. In this attitude the White Whale
now shook the slight cedar as a mildly cruel cat her mouse. With unastonished
eyes Fedallah gazed, and crossed his arms but the tigeryellow crew were
tumbling over each other's heads to gain the uttermost stern. And now, while
both elastic gunwales were springing in and out, as the whale dallied with
the doomed craft in this devilish way and from his body being submerged
beneath the boat, he could not be darted at from the bows, for the bows were
almost inside of him, as it were and while the other boats involuntarily
paused, as before a quick crisis impossible to withstand, then it was that
monomaniac Ahab, furious with this tantalizing vicinity of his foe, which
placed him all alive and helpless in the very jaws he hated frenzied with
all this, he seized the long bone with his naked hands, and wildly strove to
wrench it from its gripe. As now he thus vainly strove, the jaw slipped
from him the frail gunwales bent in, collapsed, and snapped, as both jaws,
like an enormous shears, sliding further aft, bit the craft completely in
twain, and locked themselves fast again in
the sea, midway between the two floating wrecks. These floated aside, the
broken ends drooping, the crew at the sternwreck clinging to the gunwales,
and striving to hold fast to the oars to lash them across. At that preluding
moment, ere the boat was yet snapped, Ahab, the first to perceive the whale's
intent, by the crafty upraising of his head, a movement that loosed his
hold for the time at that moment his hand had made one final effort to push
the boat out of the bite. But only slipping further into the whale's mouth,
and tilting over sideways as it slipped, the boat had shaken off his hold on
the jaw spilled him out of it, as he leaned to the push and so he fell
flatfaced upon the sea. Ripplingly withdrawing from his prey, Moby Dick now
lay at a little distance, vertically thrusting his oblong white head up and
down in the billows and at the same time slowly revolving his whole spindled
body so that when his vast wrinkled forehead rose some twenty or more feet
out of the water the now rising swells, with all their confluent waves,
dazzlingly broke against it vindictively tossing their shivered spray still
higher into the air. So, in a gale, the but halfbaffled Channel billows only
recoil from the base of the Eddystone, triumphantly to overleap its summit
with their scud. But soon resuming his horizontal attitude, Moby Dick swam
swiftly round and round the wrecked crew sideways churning the water in his
vengeful wake, as if lashing himself up to still another and more deadly
assault. The sight of the splintered boat seemed to madden him, as the blood
of grapes and mulberries cast before Antiochus's elephants in the book of
Maccabees. Meanwhile Ahab half smothered in the foam of the whale's insolent
tail, and too much of a cripple to swim, though he could still keep afloat,
even in the heart of such a whirlpool as that helpless Ahab's head was seen,
like a tossed bubble which the least chance shock might burst. From the
boat's fragmentary
stern, Fedallah incuriously and mildly eyed him the clinging crew, at the
other drifting end, could not succor him more than enough was it for them
to look to themselves. For so revolvingly appalling was the White Whale's
aspect, and so planetarily swift the evercontracting circles he made, that
he seemed horizontally swooping upon them. And though the other boats,
unharmed, still hovered hard by still they dared not pull into the eddy to
strike, lest that should be the signal for the instant destruction of the
jeopardized castaways, Ahab and all nor in that case could they themselves
hope to escape. With straining eyes, then, they remained on the outer edge
of the direful zone, whose centre had now become the old man's head.
Meantime, from the beginning all this had been descried from the ship's mast
heads and squaring her yards, she had borne down upon the scene and was
now so nigh, that Ahab in the water hailed her  Sail on the but that
moment a breaking sea dashed on him from Moby Dick, and whelmed him for the
time. But struggling out of it again, and chancing to rise on a towering
crest, he shouted,  Sail on the whale Drive him off The Pequod's
prows were pointed and breaking up the charmed circle, she effectually
parted the white whale from his victim. As he sullenly swam off, the boats
flew to the rescue. Dragged into Stubb's boat with bloodshot, blinded eyes,
the white brine caking in his wrinkles the long tension of Ahab's bodily
strength did crack, and helplessly he yielded to his body's doom for a
time, lying all crushed in the bottom of Stubb's boat, like one trodden under
foot of herds of elephants. Far inland, nameless wails came from him, as
desolate sounds from out ravines. But this intensity of his physical
prostration did but so much the more abbreviate it. In an instant's compass,
great hearts sometimes condense to one deep pang, the sum total of those
shallow pains kindly diffused through feebler men's whole lives. And so, such
hearts, though summary in each one suffering still, if the gods decree it,
in their lifetime aggregate a whole age of woe, wholly made up of
instantaneous intensities for even in their pointless centres, those noble
natures contain the entire circumferences of inferior souls.
The harpoon, said Ahab, half way rising, and draggingly leaning on one
bended arm  is it safe? Aye, sir, for it was not darted this is it, said
Stubb, showing it. Lay it before me any missing men? One, two, three,
four, five there were five oars, sir, and here are five men. That's
good. Help me, man I wish to stand. So, so, I see him there there
going to leeward still what a leaping spout Hands off from me The eternal
sap runs up in Ahab's bones again Set the sail out oars the helm It
is often the case that when a boat is stove, its crew, being picked up by
another boat, help to work that second boat and the chase is thus continued
with what is called doublebanked oars. It was thus now. But the added power
of the boat did not equal the added power of the whale, for he seemed to have
treblebanked his every fin swimming with a velocity which plainly showed,
that if now, under these circumstances, pushed on, the chase would prove an
indefinitely prolonged, if not a hopeless one nor could any crew endure for
so long a period, such an unintermitted, intense straining at the oar a
thing barely tolerable only in some one brief vicissitude. The ship itself,
then, as it sometimes happens, offered the most promising intermediate means
of overtaking the chase. Accordingly, the boats now made for her, and were
soon swayed up to their cranes the two parts of the wrecked boat having been
previously secured by her and then hoisting everything to her side, and
stacking her canvas high up, and sideways outstretching it with stunsails,
like the doublejointed wings of an albatross the Pequod bore down in the
leeward wake of Moby Dick. At the well known, methodic intervals, the
whale's glittering spout was regularly announced from the manned mastheads
and when he would be reported as just gone down, Ahab would take the time,
and then pacing the deck, binnaclewatch in hand, so soon as the last second
of the allotted hour expired, his voice was heard.  Whose is the doubloon
now? D'ye see him? and if the reply was, No, sir straightway he
commanded them to lift him to his perch. In this way the day wore on Ahab,
now aloft and motionless anon, unrestingly pacing the planks. As he was thus
walking, uttering no sound, except to hail the men aloft, or to bid them
hoist a sail still higher, or to spread one to a still greater breadth thus
to and fro pacing, beneath his slouched hat, at every turn he passed his own
wrecked boat, which had been dropped upon the quarterdeck, and lay there
reversed broken bow to shattered stern. At last he paused before it and
as in an already overclouded sky fresh troops of clouds will sometimes sail
across, so over the old man's face there now stole some such added gloom as
this. Stubb saw him pause and perhaps intending, not vainly, though, to
evince his own unabated fortitude, and thus keep up a valiant place in his
Captain's mind, he advanced, and eyeing the wreck exclaimed  The thistle
the ass refused it pricked his mouth too keenly, sir ha ha What
soulless thing is this that laughs before a wreck? Man, man did I not know
thee brave as fearless fire and as mechanical I could swear thou wert a
poltroon. Groan nor laugh should be heard before a wreck. Aye, sir, said
Starbuck drawing near, 'tis a solemn sight an omen, and an ill one.
Omen? omen? the dictionary If the gods think to speak outright to man,
they will honorably speak outright not shake their heads, and give an old
wives' darkling hint. Begone Ye two are the opposite poles of one thing
Starbuck is Stubb reversed, and Stubb is Starbuck and ye two are all
mankind and Ahab stands alone among the millions of the peopled earth, nor
gods nor men his neighbors Cold, cold I shiver How now? Aloft there
D'ye see him? Sing out for every spout, though he spout ten times a second
The day was nearly done only the hem of his golden robe was rustling. Soon,
it was almost dark, but the lookout men still remained unset. Can't see
the spout now, sir too dark cried a voice from the air. How heading when
last seen? As before, sir, straight to leeward. Good he will travel
slower now 'tis night. Down royals and
topgallant stunsails, Mr. Starbuck. We must not run over him before
morning he's making a passage now, and may heaveto a while. Helm there
keep her full before the wind Aloft come down Mr. Stubb, send a fresh
hand to the foremast head, and see it manned till morning. Then advancing
towards the doubloon in the mainmast  Men, this gold is mine, for I earned
it but I shall let it abide here till the White Whale is dead and then,
whosoever of ye first raises him, upon the day he shall be killed, this gold
is that man's and if on that day I shall again raise him, then, ten times
its sum shall be divided among all of ye Away now the deck is thine, sir.
And so saying, he placed himself half way within the scuttle, and slouching
his hat, stood there till dawn, except when at intervals rousing himself to
see how the night wore on.
This motion is peculiar to the sperm whale. It receives its designation
pitchpoling from its being likened to that preliminary upanddown poise
of the whalelance, in the exercise called pitchpoling, previously
described. By this motion the whale must best and most comprehensively view
whatever objects may be encircling him.
At daybreak, the three
mastheads were punctually manned afresh. D'ye see him? cried Ahab, after
allowing a little space for the light to spread. see nothing, sir. Turn
up all hands and make sail he travels faster than I thought for the
topgallant sails aye, they should have been kept on her all night. But no
matter 'tis but resting for the rush. Here be it said, that this
pertinacious pursuit of one particular whale, continued through day into
night, and through night into day, is a thing by no means unprecedented in
the South sea fishery. For such is the wonderful skill, prescience of
experience, and invincible confidence acquired by some great natural geniuses
among the Nantucket commanders that from the simple observation of a whale
when last descried, they will,
under certain given circumstances, pretty accurately foretell both the
direction in which he will continue to swim for a time, while out of sight,
as well as his probable rate of progression during that period. And, in these
cases, somewhat as a pilot, when about losing sight of a coast, whose
general trending he well knows, and which he desires shortly to return to
again, but at some further point like as this pilot stands by his compass,
and takes the precise bearing of the cape at present visible, in order the
more certainly to hit aright the remote, unseen headland, eventually to be
visited so does the fisherman, at his compass, with the whale for after
being chased, and diligently marked, through several hours of daylight,
then, when night obscures the fish, the creature's future wake through the
darkness is almost as established to the sagacious mind of the hunter, as the
pilot's coast is to him. So that to this hunter's wondrous skill, the
proverbial evanescence of a thing writ in water, a wake, is to all desired
purposes well nigh as reliable as the steadfast land. And as the mighty iron
Leviathan of the modern railway is so familiarly known in its every pace,
that, with watches in their hands, men time his rate as doctors that of a
baby's pulse and lightly say of it, the up train or the down train will
reach such or such a spot, at such or such an hour even so, almost, there
are occasions when these Nantucketers time that other Leviathan of the deep,
according to the observed humor of his speed and say to themselves, so many
hours hence this whale will have gone two hundred miles, will have about
reached this or that degree of latitude or longitude. But to render this
acuteness at all successful in the end, the wind and the sea must be the
whaleman's allies for of what present avail to the becalmed or windbound
mariner is the skill that assures him he is exactly ninetythree leagues and a
quarter from his port? Inferable from these statements, are many
collateral subtile matters touching the chase of whales. The ship tore on
leaving such a furrow in the sea as when a cannonball, missent, becomes a
ploughshare and turns up the level field. By salt and hemp cried Stubb,
but this swift motion of the deck creeps up one's legs and tingles at the
heart. This
ship and I are two brave fellows Ha ha Some one take me up, and launch
me, spinewise, on the sea, for by liveoaks my spine's a keel. Ha, ha
we go the gait that leaves no dust behind There she blows she blows she
blows right ahead was now the masthead cry. Aye, aye cried Stubb.
I knew it ye can't escape blow on and split your spout, O whale the mad
fiend himself is after ye blow your trump blister your lungs Ahab will
dam off your blood, as a miller shuts his watergate upon the stream And
Stubb did but speak out for well nigh all that crew. The frenzies of the
chase had by this time worked them bubblingly up, like old wine worked anew.
Whatever pale fears and forebodings some of them might have felt before
these were not only now kept out of sight through the growing awe of Ahab,
but they were broken up, and on all sides routed, as timid prairie hares
that scatter before the bounding bison. The hand of Fate had snatched all
their souls and by the stirring perils of the previous day the rack of the
past night's suspense the fixed, unfearing, blind, reckless way in which
their wild craft went plunging towards its flying mark by all these things,
their hearts were bowled along. The wind that made great bellies of their
sails, and rushed the vessel on by arms invisible as irresistible this
seemed the symbol of that unseen agency which so enslaved them to the race.
They were one man, not thirty. For as the one ship that held them all
though it was put together of all contrasting things oak, and maple, and pine
wood iron, and pitch, and hemp yet all these ran into each other in the one
concrete hull, which shot on its way, both balanced and directed by the long
central keel even so, all the individualities of the crew, this man's
valor, that man's fear guilt and guiltiness, all varieties were welded
into oneness, and were all directed to that fatal goal which Ahab their one
lord and keel did point to. The rigging lived. The mastheads, like the tops
of tall palms, were outspreadingly tufted with arms and legs. Clinging to a
spar with one hand, some reached forth the other with impatient wavings
others, shading their eyes from the vivid sunlight, sat
far out on the rocking yards all the spars in full bearing of mortals,
ready and ripe for their fate. Ah how they still strove through that
infinite blueness to seek out the thing that might destroy them Why sing ye
not out for him, if ye see him? cried Ahab, when, after the lapse of some
minutes since the first cry, no more had been heard. Sway me up, men ye
have been deceived not moby dick casts one odd jet that way, and then
disappears. It was even so in their headlong eagerness, the men had
mistaken some other thing for the whalespout, as the event itself soon
proved for hardly had Ahab reached his perch hardly was the rope belayed
to its pin on deck, when he struck the keynote to an orchestra, that made
the air vibrate as with the combined discharges of rifles. The triumphant
halloo of thirty buckskin lungs was heard, as much nearer to the ship than
the place of the imaginary jet, less than a mile ahead Moby Dick bodily
burst into view For not by any calm and indolent spoutings not by the
peaceable gush of that mystic fountain in his head, did the White Whale now
reveal his vicinity but by the far more wondrous phenomenon of breaching.
Rising with his utmost velocity from the furthest depths, the Sperm Whale
thus booms his entire bulk into the pure element of air, and piling up a
mountain of dazzling foam, shows his place to the distance of seven miles and
more. In those moments, the torn, enraged waves he shakes off, seem his
mane in some cases, this breaching is his act of defiance. There she
breaches there she breaches was the cry, as in his immeasureable
bravadoes the White Whale tossed himself salmonlike to Heaven. So suddenly
seen in the blue plain of the sea, and relieved against the still bluer
margin of the sky, the spray that he raised, for the moment, intolerably
glittered and glared like a glacier and stood there gradually fading and
fading away from its first sparkling intensity, to the dim mistiness of an
advancing shower in a vale. Aye, breach your last to the sun, Moby Dick
cried Ahab, thy hour and thy harpoon are at hand Down down all of ye,
but one man at the fore. The boats stand by
Unmindful of the tedious ropeladders of the shrouds, the men, like shooting
stars, slid to the deck, by the isolated backstays and halyards while
Ahab, less dartingly, but still rapidly was dropped from his perch. Lower
away, he cried, so soon as he had reached his boat a spare one, rigged the
afternoon previous. Mr. Starbuck, the ship is thine keep away from the
boats, but keep near them. Lower, all As if to strike a quick terror into
them, by this time being the first assailant himself, Moby Dick had turned,
and was now coming for the three crews. Ahab's boat was central and
cheering his men, he told them he would take the whale headandhead, that
is, pull straight up to his forehead, a not uncommon thing for when within
a certain limit, such a course excludes the coming onset from the whale's
sidelong vision. But ere that close limit was gained, and while yet all
three boats were plain as the ship's three masts to his eye the White Whale
churning himself into furious speed, almost in an instant as it were,
rushing among the boats with open jaws, and a lashing tail, offered
appalling battle on every side and heedless of the irons darted at him from
every boat, seemed only intent on annihilating each separate plank of which
those boats were made. But skilfully manoeuvred, incessantly wheeling like
trained chargers in the field the boats for a while eluded him though, at
times, but by a plank's breadth while all the time, Ahab's unearthly slogan
tore every other cry but his to shreds. But at last in his untraceable
evolutions, the White Whale so crossed and recrossed, and in a thousand ways
entangled the slack of the three lines now fast to him, that they
foreshortened, and, of themselves, warped the devoted boats towards the
planted irons in him though now for a moment the whale drew aside a little,
as if to rally for a more tremendous charge. Seizing that opportunity, Ahab
first paid out more line and then was rapidly hauling and jerking in upon it
again hoping that way to disencumber it of some snarls when lo a sight
more savage than the embattled teeth of sharks Caught and twisted
corkscrewed in the mazes of the line, loose harpoons and lances, with all
their bristling barbs and
points, came flashing and dripping up to the chocks in the bows of Ahab's
boat. Only one thing could be done. Seizing the boatknife, he critically
reached within through and then, without the rays of steel dragged in
the line beyond, passed it, inboard, to the bowsman, and then, twice
sundering the rope near the chocks dropped the intercepted fagot of steel
into the sea and was all fast again. That instant, the White Whale made
a sudden rush among the remaining tangles of the other lines by so doing,
irresistibly dragged the more involved boats of Stubb and Flask towards his
flukes dashed them together like two rolling husks on a surfbeaten beach,
and then, diving down into the sea, disappeared in a boiling maelstrom, in
which, for a space, the odorous cedar chips of the wrecks danced round and
round, like the grated nutmeg in a swiftly stirred bowl of punch. While the
two crews were yet circling in the waters, reaching out after the revolving
linetubs, oars, and other floating furniture, while aslope little Flask
bobbed up and down like an empty vial, twitching his legs upwards to escape
the dreaded jaws of sharks and Stubb was lustily singing out for some one
to ladle him up and while the old man's line now parting  admitted of his
pulling into the creamy pool to rescue whom he could in that wild
simultaneousness of a thousand concreted perils, Ahab's yet unstricken boat
seemed drawn up towards Heaven by invisible wires, as, arrowlike, shooting
perpendicularly from the sea, the White Whale dashed his broad forehead
against its bottom, and sent it, turning over and over, into the air till
it fell again gunwale downwards and Ahab and his men struggled out from
under it, like seals from a seaside cave. The first uprising momentum of the
whale modifying its direction as he struck the surface involuntarily
launched him along it, to a little distance from the centre of the
destruction he had made and with his back to it, he now lay for a moment
slowly feeling with his flukes from side to side and whenever a stray oar,
bit of plank, the least chip or crumb of the boats touched his skin, his tail
swiftly drew back, and came sideways smiting the sea. But soon, as if
satisfied that his work for that time was done, he pushed his pleated
forehead through the
ocean, and trailing after him the intertangled lines, continued his leeward
way at a traveller's methodic pace. As before, the attentive ship having
descried the whole fight, again came bearing down to the rescue, and dropping
a boat, picked up the floating mariners, tubs, oars and whatever else could
be caught at, and safely landed them on her decks. Some sprained shoulders,
wrists, and ankles livid contusions wrenched harpoons and lances
inextricable intricacies of rope shattered oars and planks all these were
there but no fatal or even serious ill seemed to have befallen any one. As
with Fedallah the day before, so Ahab was now found grimly clinging to his
boat's broken half, which afforded a comparatively easy float nor did it so
exhaust him as the previous day's mishap. But when he was helped to the deck,
all eyes were fastened upon him as instead of standing by himself he still
halfhung upon the shoulder of Starbuck, who had thus far been the foremost
to assist him. His ivory leg had been snapped off, leaving but one short
sharp splinter. Aye, aye, Starbuck, 'tis sweet to lean sometimes, be the
leaner who he will and would old Ahab had leaned oftener than he has. The
ferrule has not stood, sir, said the carpenter, now coming up I put good
work into that leg. But no bones broken, sir, I hope, said Stubb with true
concern. Aye and all splintered to pieces, Stubb d'ye see it.  But
even with a broken bone, old Ahab is untouched and I account no living bone
of mine one jot more me, than this dead one that's lost. Nor white whale,
nor man, nor fiend, can so much as graze old Ahab in his own proper and
inaccessible being. Can any lead touch yonder floor, any mast scrape yonder
roof?  Aloft there which way? Dead to leeward, sir. Up helm, then
pile on the sail again, ship keepers down the rest of the spare boats and
rig them Mr. Starbuck away, and muster the boat's crews. Let me first help
thee towards the bulwarks, sir. Oh, oh, oh how this splinter gores me now
Accursed fate
that the unconquerable captain in the soul should have such a craven mate
Sir? My body, man, not thee. Give me something for a cane  there, that
shivered lance will do. Muster the men. Surely I have not seen him yet. By
heaven it cannot be missing?  quick call them all. The old man's hinted
thought was true. Upon mustering the company, the Parsee was not there.
The Parsee cried Stubb  he must have been caught in The black vomit
wrench thee run all of ye above, alow, cabin, forecastle find him not gone
not gone But quickly they returned to him with the tidings that the Parsee
was nowhere to be found. Aye, sir, said Stubb  caught among the tangles of
your line I thought I saw him dragging under. My line my line? Gone?
gone? What means that little word? What deathknell rings in it, that old
Ahab shakes as if he were the belfry. The harpoon, too toss over the litter
there, d'ye see it? the forged iron, men, the white whale's  no, no, no,
blistered fool this hand did dart it 'tis in the fish Aloft there
keep him nailed quick all hands to the rigging of the boats collect the
oars harpooneers the irons, the irons  hoist the royals higher a pull
on all the sheets helm there steady, steady for your life I'll ten
times girdle the unmeasured globe yea and dive straight through it, but
I'll slay him yet Great God but for one single instant show thyself,
cried Starbuck never, never wilt thou capture him, old man In Jesus' name
no more of this, that's worse than devil's madness. Two days chased twice
stove to splinters thy very leg once more snatched from under thee thy
evil shadow gone all good angels mobbing thee with warnings what more
wouldst thou have? Shall we keep chasing this murderous fish till he swamps
the last man? Shall we be dragged by him to the bottom of the sea? Shall we
be towed by him to the infernal world? Oh, oh,  Impiety and blasphemy to
hunt him more Starbuck, of late I've felt strangely moved to thee ever
since that hour we both saw thou know'st what, in one another's
eyes. But in this matter of the whale, be the front of thy face to me as the
palm of this hand a lipless, unfeatured blank. Ahab is for ever Ahab, man.
This whole act's immutably decreed. 'Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion
years before this ocean rolled. Fool I am the Fates' lieutenant I act
under orders. Look thou, underling that thou obeyest mine. Stand round
me, men. Ye see an old man cut down to the stump leaning on a shivered
lance propped up on a lonely foot. 'Tis Ahab his body's part but Ahab's
soul's a centipede, that moves upon a hundred legs. I feel strained, half
stranded, as ropes that tow dismasted frigates in a gale and I may look so.
But ere I break, ye'll hear me crack and till ye hear that, know that
Ahab's hawser tows his purpose yet. Believe ye, men, in the things called
omens? Then laugh aloud, and cry encore For ere they drown, drowning things
will twice rise to the surface then rise again, to sink for evermore. So
with Moby Dick two days he's floated tomorrow will be the third. Aye, men,
he'll rise once more, but only to spout his last D'ye feel brave men,
brave? As fearless fire, cried Stubb. And as mechanical, muttered Ahab.
Then as the men went forward, he muttered on  The things called omens
And yesterday I talked the same to Starbuck there, concerning my broken
boat. Oh how valiantly I seek to drive out of others' hearts what's
clinched so fast in mine The Parsee the Parsee  gone, gone? and he
was to go before but still was to be seen again ere I could perish How's
that? There's a riddle now might baffle all the lawyers backed by the ghosts
of the whole line of judges like a hawk's beak it pecks my brain. I'll,
I'll solve it, though When dusk descended, the whale was still in sight
to leeward. So once more the sail was shortened, and everything passed
nearly as on the previous night only, the sound of hammers, and the hum of
the grindstone was heard till nearly daylight, as the men toiled by lanterns
in the complete and careful rigging of the spare boats and sharpening their
fresh weapons for the morrow. Meantime, of the broken keel of Ahab's wrecked
craft the carpenter made him another leg while still as on the
night before, slouched Ahab stood fixed within his scuttle his hid,
heliotrope glance anticipatingly gone backward on its dial sat due eastward
for the earliest sun.
THE CHASETHIRD DAY The morning of the third day dawned fair and fresh, and
once more the solitary nightman at the foremasthead was relieved by crowds
of the daylight lookouts, who dotted every mast and almost every spar.
D'ye see him? cried Ahab but the whale was not yet in sight. In his
infallible wake, though but follow that wake, that's all. Helm there
steady, as thou goest, and hast been going. What a lovely day again were it
a newmade world, and made for a summerhouse to the angels, and this
morning the first of its throwing open to them, a fairer day could not dawn
upon that world. Here's food for thought, had Ahab time to think but Ahab
never thinks he only feels, feels, feels that's tingling enough for
mortal man to think's audacity. God only has that right and privilege.
Thinking is, or ought to be, a coolness and a calmness and our poor hearts
throb, and our poor brains beat too much for that. And yet, I've sometimes
thought my brain was very calm frozen calm, this old skull cracks so, like
a glass in which the contents turned to ice, and shiver it. And still this
hair is growing now this moment growing, and heat must breed it but no,
it's like that sort of common grass that will grow anywhere, between the
earthy clefts of Greenland ice or in Vesuvius lava. How the wild winds blow
it they whip it about me as the torn shreds of split sails lash the tossed
ship they cling to. A vile wind that has no doubt blown ere this through
prison corridors and cells, and wards of hospitals, and ventilated them,
and now comes blowing hither as innocent as
fleeces. Out upon it it's tainted. Were I the wind, I'd blow no more on
such a wicked, miserable world. I'd crawl somewhere to a cave, and slink
there. And yet, 'tis a noble and heroic thing, the wind who ever
conquered it? In every fight it has the last and bitterest blow. Run tilting
at it, and you but run through it. Ha a coward wind that strikes stark
naked men, but will not stand to receive a single blow. Even Ahab is a braver
thing a nobler thing that that. Would now the wind but had a body but
all the things that most exasperate and outrage mortal man, all these things
are bodiless, but only bodiless as objects, not as agents. There's a most
special, a most cunning, oh, a most malicious difference And yet, I say
again, and swear it now, that there's something all glorious and gracious in
the wind. These warm Trade Winds, at least, that in the clear heavens blow
straight on, in strong and steadfast, vigorous mildness and veer not from
their mark, however the baser currents of the sea may turn and tack, and
mightiest Mississippies of the land swift and swerve about, uncertain where
to go at last. And by the eternal Poles these same Trades that so directly
blow my good ship on these Trades, or something like them something so
unchangeable, and full as strong, blow my keeled soul along To it Aloft
there What d'ye see? Nothing, sir. Nothing and noon at hand The
doubloon goes abegging See the sun Aye, aye, it must be so. I've
oversailed him. How, got the start? Aye, he's chasing me now not I, him
that's bad I might have known it, too. Fool the lines the harpoons
he's towing. Aye, aye, I have run him by last night. About about Come
down, all of ye, but the regular look outs Man the braces Steering as
she had done, the wind had been somewhat on the Pequod's quarter, so that
now being pointed in the reverse direction, the braced ship sailed hard upon
the breeze as she rechurned the cream in her own white wake. Against the
wind he now steers for the open jaw, murmured Starbuck to himself, as he
coiled the newhauled mainbrace upon the rail. God keep us, but already my
bones feel
damp within me, and from the inside wet my flesh. I misdoubt me that I
disobey my God in obeying him Stand by to sway me up cried Ahab,
advancing to the hempen basket. We should meet him soon. Aye, aye, sir,
and straightway Starbuck did Ahab's bidding, and once more Ahab swung on high.
a whole hour now passed goldbeaten out to ages. time itself now held long
breaths with keen suspense. But at last, some three points off the weather
bow, Ahab descried the spout again, and instantly from the three mastheads
three shrieks went up as if the tongues of fire had voiced it. Forehead to
forehead I meet thee, this third time, Moby Dick On deck there brace
sharper up crowd her into the wind's eye. He's too far off to lower yet,
Mr. Starbuck. The sails shake Stand over that helmsman with a topmaul
So, so he travels fast, and I must down. But let me have one more good
round look aloft here at the sea there's time for that. An old, old sight,
and yet somehow so young aye, and not changed a wink since I first saw it,
a boy, from the sandhills of Nantucket The same the same the same to
Noah as to me. There's a soft shower to leeward. Such lovely leewardings
They must lead somewhere to something else than common land, more palmy than
the palms. Leeward the white whale goes that way look to windward, then
the better if the bitterer quarter. But good bye, good bye, old masthead
What's this?  green? aye, tiny mosses in these warped cracks. No such green
weather stains on Ahab's head There's the difference now between man's old
age and matter's. But aye, old mast, we both grow old together sound in
our hulls, though, are we not, my ship? Aye, minus a leg, that's all. By
heaven this dead wood has the better of my live flesh every way. I can't
compare with it and I've known some ships made of dead trees outlast the
lives of men made of the most vital stuff of vital fathers. What's that he
said? he should still go before me, my pilot and yet to be seen again? But
where? Will I have eyes at the bottom of the sea, supposing I descend those
endless stairs? and all night I've been sailing from him, wherever he did
sink to. Aye,
aye, like many more thou told'st direful truth as touching thyself, O Parsee
but, Ahab, there thy shot fell short. Good by, masthead keep a good eye
upon the whale, the while I'm gone. We'll talk tomorrow, nay, tonight,
when the white whale lies down there, tied by head and tail. He gave the
word and still gazing round him, was steadily lowered through the cloven
blue air to the deck. In due time the boats were lowered, but as standing in
his shallop's stern, Ahab just hovered upon the point of the descent, he
waved to the mate, who held one of the tackleropes on deck and bade him
pause. Starbuck Sir? For the third time my soul's ship starts upon
this voyage, Starbuck. Aye, sir, thou wilt have it so. Some ships sail
from their ports, and ever afterwards are missing, Starbuck Truth, sir
saddest truth. Some men die at ebb tide some at low water some at the
full of the flood and I feel now like a billow that's all one crested comb,
Starbuck. I am old shake hands with me, man. Their hands met their eyes
fastened Starbuck's tears the glue. Oh, my captain, my captain noble
heart go not go not  see, it's a brave man that weeps how great the
agony of the persuasion then Lower away cried Ahab, tossing the mate's
arm from him. Stand by the crew In an instant the boat was pulling round
close under the stern. The sharks the sharks cried a voice from the low
cabinwindow there O master, my master, come back But Ahab heard
nothing for his own voice was highlifted then and the boat leaped on.
Yet the voice spake true for scarce had he pushed from the ship, when
numbers of sharks, seemingly rising from out the dark waters beneath the
hull, maliciously snapped at the blades of the oars, every time they dipped
in the water and in this
way accompanied the boat with their bites. It is a thing not uncommonly
happening to the whaleboats in those swarming seas the sharks at times
apparently following them in the same prescient way that vultures hover over
the banners of marching regiments in the east. But these were the first
sharks that had been observed by the Pequod since the White Whale had been
first descried and whether it was that Ahab's crew were all such
tigeryellow barbarians, and therefore their flesh more musky to the senses
of the sharks a matter sometimes well known to affect them, however it was,
they seemed to follow that one boat without molesting the others. Heart of
wrought steel murmured Starbuck gazing over the side, and following with
his eyes the receding boat  canst thou yet ring boldly to that sight?
lowering thy keel among ravening sharks, and followed by them, openmouthed
to the chase and this the critical third day? For when three days flow
together in one continuous intense pursuit be sure the first is the morning,
the second the noon, and the third the evening and the end of that thing be
that end what it may. Oh my God what is this that shoots through me, and
leaves me so deadly calm, yet expectant, fixed at the top of a shudder
Future things swim before me, as in empty outlines and skeletons all the
past is somehow grown dim. Mary, girl thou fadest in pale glories behind
me boy I seem to see but thy eyes grown wondrous blue. Strangest problems
of life seem clearing but clouds sweep between Is my journey's end coming?
My legs feel faint like his who has footed it all day. Feel thy heart,
beats it yet? Stir thyself, Starbuck stave it off move, move speak
aloud Masthead there See ye my boy's hand on the hill? Crazed aloft
there keep thy keenest eye upon the boats mark well the whale Ho
again drive off that hawk see he pecks he tears the vane pointing to
the red flag flying at the maintruck  Ha he soars away with it  Where's
the old man now? sees't thou that sight, oh Ahab  shudder, shudder The
boats had not gone very far, when by a signal from the mastheads a downward
pointed arm, Ahab knew that the whale had sounded but intending to be near
him at the next rising, he
held on his way a little sideways from the vessel the becharmed crew
maintaining the profoundest silence, as the headbeat waves hammered and
hammered against the opposing bow. Drive, drive in your nails, oh ye waves
to their uttermost heads, drive them in ye but strike a thing without a
lid and no coffin and no hearse can be mine and hemp only can kill me
Ha ha Suddenly the waters around them slowly swelled in broad circles
then quickly upheaved, as if sideways sliding from a submerged berg of ice,
swiftly rising to the surface. A low rumbling sound was heard a
subterraneous hum and then all held their breaths as bedraggled with
trailing ropes, and harpoons, and lances, a vast form shot lengthwise, but
obliquely from the sea. Shrouded in a thin drooping veil of mist, it
hovered for a moment in the rainbowed air and then fell swamping back into
the deep. Crushed thirty feet upwards, the waters flashed for an instant
like heaps of fountains, then brokenly sank in a shower of flakes, leaving
the circling surface creamed like new milk round the marble trunk of the
whale. Give way cried Ahab to the oarsmen, and the boats darted forward
to the attack but maddened by yesterday's fresh irons that corroded in him,
Moby Dick seemed combinedly possessed by all the angels that fell from heaven.
The wide tiers of welded tendons overspreading his broad white forehead,
beneath the transparent skin, looked knitted together as head on, he came
churning his tail among the boats and once more flailed them apart
spilling out the irons and lances from the two mates' boats, and dashing in
one side of the upper part of their bows, but leaving Ahab's almost without a
scar. While Daggoo and Queequeg were stopping the strained planks and as
the whale swimming out from them, turned, and showed one entire flank as he
shot by them again at that moment a quick cry went up. Lashed round and
round to the fish's back pinioned in the turns upon turns in which, during
the past night, the whale had reeled the involutions of the lines around him,
the half torn body of the Parsee was seen his sable raiment frayed to
shreds his distended eyes turned full upon old Ahab.
The harpoon dropped from his hand. Befooled, befooled drawing in a long
lean breath  Aye, Parsee I see thee again. Aye, and thou goest before
and this, this then is the hearse that thou didst promise. But I hold thee
to the last letter of thy word. Where is the second hearse? Away, mates, to
the ship those boats are useless now repair them if ye can in time, and
return to me if not, Ahab is enough to die Down, men the first thing
that but offers to jump from this boat I stand in, that thing I harpoon. Ye
are not other men, but my arms and my legs and so obey me. Where's the
whale? gone down again? But he looked too nigh the boat for as if bent
upon escaping with the corpse he bore, and as if the particular place of the
last encounter had been but a stage in his leeward voyage, Moby Dick was now
again steadily swimming forward and had almost passed the ship, which thus
far had been sailing in the contrary direction to him, though for the present
her headway had been stopped. He seemed swimming with his utmost velocity,
and now only intent upon pursuing his own straight path in the sea. Oh
Ahab, cried Starbuck, not too late is it, even now, the third day, to
desist. See Moby Dick seeks thee not. It is thou, thou, that madly
seekest him Setting sail to the rising wind, the lonely boat was swiftly
impelled to leeward, by both oars and canvas. And at last when Ahab was
sliding by the vessel, so near as plainly to distinguish Starbuck's face as
he leaned over the rail, he hailed him to turn the vessel about, and follow
him, not too swiftly, at a judicious interval. Glancing upwards, he saw
Tashtego, Queequeg, and Daggoo, eagerly mounting to the three mastheads
while the oarsmen were rocking in the two staved boats which had but just been
hoisted to the side, and were busily at work in repairing them. One after
the other, through the portholes, as he sped, he also caught flying glimpses
of Stubb and Flask, busying themselves on deck among bundles of new irons and
lances. As he saw all this as he heard the hammers in the broken boats
far other hammers seemed driving a nail into his heart. But he rallied. And
now marking that the vane or
flag was gone from the mainmasthead, he shouted to Tashtego, who had just
gained that perch, to descend again for another flag, and a hammer and
nails, and so nail it to the mast. Whether fagged by the three days' running
chase, and the resistance to his swimming in the knotted hamper he bore or
whether it was some latent deceitfulness and malice in him whichever was
true, the White Whale's way now began to abate, as it seemed, from the boat
so rapidly nearing him once more though indeed the whale's last start had not
been so long a one as before. And still as Ahab glided over the waves the
unpitying sharks accompanied him and so pertinaciously stuck to the boat
and so continually bit at the plying oars, that the blades became jagged and
crunched, and left small splinters in the sea, at almost every dip. Heed
them not those teeth but give new rowlocks to your oars. Pull on 'tis the
better rest, the shark's jaw than the yielding water. But at every bite,
sir, the thin blades grow smaller and smaller They will last long enough
pull on But who can tell he muttered  whether these sharks swim to feast
on the whale or on ahab? But pull on Aye, all alive, now we near him. The
helm take the helm let me pass, and so saying, two of the oarsmen
helped him forward to the bows of the still flying boat. At length as the
craft was cast to one side, and ran ranging along with the White Whale's
flank, he seemed strangely oblivious of its advance as the whale sometimes
will and Ahab was fairly within the smoky mountain mist, which, thrown off
from the whale's spout, curled round his great, Monadnock hump he was even
thus close to him when, with body arched back, and both arms lengthwise
highlifted to the poise, he darted his fierce iron, and his far fiercer
curse into the hated whale. As both steel and curse sank to the socket, as
if sucked into a morass, Moby Dick sideways writhed spasmodically rolled
his nigh flank against the bow, and, without staving a hole in it, so
suddenly canted the boat over, that had it not been for the elevated part of
the gunwale to which he then clung, Ahab would once more have been tossed
into the sea.
As it was, three of the oarsmen who foreknew not the precise instant of the
dart, and were therefore unprepared for its effects  these were flung out
but so fell, that, in an instant two of them clutched the gunwale again, and
rising to its level on a combing wave, hurled themselves bodily inboard
again the third man helplessly dropping astern, but still afloat and
swimming. Almost simultaneously, with a mighty volition of ungraduated,
instantaneous swiftness, the White Whale darted through the weltering sea.
But when Ahab cried out to the steersman to take new turns with the line, and
hold it so and commanded the crew to turn round on their seats, and tow the
boat up to the mark the moment the treacherous line felt that double strain
and tug, it snapped in the empty air What breaks in me? Some sinew cracks
'tis whole again oars oars Burst in upon him Hearing the tremendous
rush of the seacrashing boat, the whale wheeled round to present his blank
forehead at bay but in that evolution, catching sight of the nearing black
hull of the ship seemingly seeing in it the source of all his persecutions
bethinking it it may be a larger and nobler foe of a sudden, he bore down
upon its advancing prow, smiting his jaws amid fiery showers of foam. Ahab
staggered his hand smote his forehead. I grow blind hands stretch out
before me that I may yet grope my way. Is't night? The whale The ship
cried the cringing oarsmen. Oars oars Slope downwards to thy depths, O
sea, that ere it be for ever too late, Ahab may slide this last, last time
upon his mark I see the ship the ship Dash on, my men Will ye not
save my ship? But as the oarsmen violently forced their boat through the
sledgehammering seas, the before whalesmitten bowends of two planks burst
through, and in an instant almost, the temporarily disabled boat lay nearly
level with the waves its halfwading, splashing crew, trying hard to stop
the gap and bale out the pouring water. Meantime, for that one beholding
instant, Tashtego's masthead hammer remained suspended in his hand and the
red
flag, halfwrapping him as with a plaid, then streamed itself straight out
from him, as his own forwardflowing heart while Starbuck and Stubb,
standing upon the bowsprit beneath, caught sight of the downcoming monster
just as soon as he. The whale, the whale Up helm, up helm Oh, all ye
sweet powers of air, now hug me close Let not Starbuck die, if die he
must, in a woman's fainting fit. Up helm, I say ye fools, the jaw the
jaw Is this the end of all my bursting prayers? all my lifelong fidelities?
Oh, Ahab, Ahab, lo, thy work. Steady helmsman, steady. Nay, nay Up
helm again He turns to meet us Oh, his unappeasable brow drives on towards
one, whose duty tells him he cannot depart. My God, stand by me now
Stand not by me, but stand under me, whoever you are that will now help
Stubb for Stubb, too, sticks here. I grin at thee, thou grinning whale
Who ever helped Stubb, or kept Stubb awake, but Stubb's own unwinking eye?
And now poor Stubb goes to bed upon a mattrass that is all too soft would it
were stuffed with brushwood I grin at thee, thou grinning whale Look ye,
sun, moon, and stars I call ye assassins of as good a fellow as ever spouted
up his ghost. For all that, I would yet ring glasses with ye, would ye but
hand the cup Oh, oh oh, oh thou grinning whale, but there'll be plenty
of gulping soon Why fly ye not, O Ahab For me, off shoes and jacket to
it let Stubb die in his drawers A most mouldy and over salted death,
though cherries cherries cherries Oh, Flask, for one red cherry ere we
die Cherries? I only wish that we were where they grow. Oh, Stubb, I
hope my poor mother's drawn my partpay ere this if not, few coppers will now
come to her, for the voyage is up. From the ship's bows, nearly all the
seamen now hung inactive hammers, bits of plank, lances, and harpoons,
mechanically retained in their hands, just as they had darted from their
various employments all their enchanted eyes intent upon the whale, which
from side to side strangely vibrating his predestinating head, sent a broad
band of overspreading semicircular foam before him as he rushed. Retribution,
swift vengeance, eternal malice were in his whole aspect, and spite of all
that mortal man could do, the solid white buttress of his forehead
smote the ship's starboard bow, till men and timbers reeled. Some fell flat
upon their faces. Like dislodged trucks, the heads of the harpooneers aloft
shook on their bulllike necks. Through the breach, they heard the waters
pour, as mountain torrents down a flume. The ship The hearse the second
hearse cried ahab from the boat its wood could only be American
Diving beneath the settling ship, the whale ran quivering along its keel
but turning under water, swiftly shot to the surface again, far off the
other bow, but within a few yards of Ahab's boat, where, for a time, he lay
quiescent. I turn my body from the sun. What ho, Tashtego Let me hear thy
hammer. Oh ye three unsurrendered spires of mine thou uncracked keel and
only godbullied hull thou firm deck, and haughty helm, and Polepointed
prow, deathglorious ship must ye then perish, and without me? Am I cut
off from the last fond pride of meanest shipwrecked captains? Oh, lonely
death on lonely life Oh, now I feel my topmost greatness lies in my topmost
grief. Ho, ho from all your furthest bounds, pour ye now in, ye bold
billows of my whole foregone life, and top this one piled comber of my death
Towards thee I roll, thou alldestroying but unconquering whale to the last
I grapple with thee from hell's heart I stab at thee for hate's sake I
spit my last breath at thee. Sink all coffins and all hearses to one common
pool and since neither can be mine, let me then tow to pieces, while still
chasing thee, though tied to thee, thou damned whale Thus, I give up the
spear The harpoon was darted the stricken whale flew forward with
igniting velocity the line ran through the groove ran foul. Ahab stooped to
clear it he did clear it but the flying turn caught him round the neck,
and voicelessly as Turkish mutes bowstring their victim, he was shot out of
the boat, ere the crew knew he was gone. Next instant, the heavy eyesplice
in the rope's final end flew out of the starkempty tub, knocked down an
oarsman, and smiting the sea, disappeared in its depths. For an instant,
the tranced boat's crew stood still then turned. The ship? Great God,
where is the ship? Soon they through dim, bewildering mediums saw her
sidelong fading phantom,
as in the gaseous Fata Morgana only the uppermost masts out of water
while fixed by infatuation, or fidelity, or fate, to their once lofty perches,
the pagan harpooneers still maintained their sinking lookouts on the sea.
And now, concentric circles seized the lone boat itself, and all its crew,
and each floating oar, and every lancepole, and spinning, animate and
inanimate, all round and round in one vortex, carried the smallest chip of
the Pequod out of sight. But as the last whelmings intermixingly poured
themselves over the sunken head of the Indian at the mainmast, leaving a few
inches of the erect spar yet visible, together with long streaming yards of
the flag, which calmly undulated, with ironical coincidings, over the
destroying billows they almost touched at that instant, a red arm and a
hammer hovered backwardly uplifted in the open air, in the act of nailing the
flag faster and yet faster to the subsiding spar. A skyhawk that tauntingly
had followed the maintruck downwards from its natural home among the stars,
pecking at the flag, and incommoding Tashtego there this bird now chanced
to intercept its broad fluttering wing between the hammer and the wood and
simultaneously feeling that etherial thrill, the submerged savage beneath,
in his deathgasp, kept his hammer frozen there and so the bird of heaven,
with archangelic shrieks, and his imperial beak thrust upwards, and his
whole captive form folded in the flag of Ahab, went down with his ship,
which, like Satan, would not sink to hell till she had dragged a living part
of heaven along with her, and helmeted herself with it. Now small fowls flew
screaming over the yet yawning gulf a sullen white surf beat against its
steep sides then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as
it rolled five thousand years ago.
House / edition. It was prepared by Professor Eugene F. Irey AT THE UNIVERSIT
Y / OF COLORADO, BOULDER, COLORADO , U.S.A. / ANY SUBSEQUENT COP
IES OF THIS DATA MUST INCLUDE THIS NOTICE / AND ANY PUBLICATIONS RESULTING FRO
M ANALYSIS OF THIS DATA MUST INCLUDE / REFERENCE TO PROFESSOR IREY'S WORK.
 AND I ONLY AM ESCAPED ALONE TO TELL THEE. JOB. THE DRAMA'S DONE.
WHY THEN HERE DOES ANY ONE STEP FORTH? BECAUSE ONE DID SURVIVE THE WRECK. 
IT SO CHANCED, THAT AFTER THE PARSEE'S DISAPPEARANCE, I WAS HE WHOM THE FA
TES ORDAINED TO TAKE THE PLACE OF AHAB'S BOWSMAN, WHEN THAT BOWSMAN ASSUMED TH
E VACANT POST THE SAME, WHO, WHEN ON THE LAST DAY THE THREE MEN WERE TOSSED F
ROM OUT THE ROCKING BOAT, WAS DROPPED ASTERN. SO, FLOATING ON THE MARGIN OF
THE ENSUING SCENE, AND IN FULL SIGHT OF IT, WHEN THE HALFSPENT SUCTION OF T
HE SUNK SHIP REACHED ME, I WAS THEN, BUT SLOWLY, DRAWN TOWARDS THE CLOSING VO
RTEX. WHEN I REACHED IT, IT HAD SUBSIDED TO A CREAMY POOL. ROUND AND ROUND
, THEN, AND EVER CONTRACTING TOWARDS THE BUTTONLIKE BLACK BUBBLE AT THE AXIS
OF THAT SLOWLY WHEELING CIRCLE, LIKE ANOTHER IXION I DID REVOLVE. TILL, G
AINING THAT VITAL CENTRE, THE BLACK BUBBLE UPWARD BURST AND NOW, LIBERATED
BY REASON OF ITS CUNNING SPRING, AND OWING TO ITS GREAT BUOYANCY, RISING WITH
GREAT FORCE, THE COFFIN LIFEBUOY SHOT LENGTHWISE FROM THE SEA, FELL OVER,
AND FLOATED BY MY SIDE. BUOYED UP BY THAT COFFIN, FOR ALMOST ONE WHOLE DAY
AND NIGHT, I FLOATED ON A SOFT AND DIRGELIKE MAIN. THE UNHARMING SHARKS,
THEY GLIDED BY AS IF WITH PADLOCKS ON THEIR MOUTHS THE SAVAGE SEAHAWKS SAILE
D WITH SHEATHED BEAKS. ON THE SECOND DAY, A SAIL DREW NEAR, NEARER, AND PIC
KED ME UP AT LAST. IT WAS THE DEVIOUSCRUISING RACHEL, THAT IN HER RETRACIN
Nothing more happened on the passage worthy
the mentioning so, after a fine run, we safely arrived in Nantucket.
Nantucket Take out your map and look at it. See what a real corner of the
world it occupies how it stands there, away off shore, more lonely than the
Eddystone lighthouse. Look at it a mere hillock, and elbow of sand all
beach, without a background. There is more sand there than you would use in
twenty years as a substitute for blotting paper. Some gamesome wights will
tell you that they have to plant weeds there, they don't
grow naturally that they import Canada thistles that they have to send
beyond seas for a spile to stop a leak in an oil cask that pieces of wood in
Nantucket are carried about like bits of the true cross in Rome that people
there plant toadstools before their houses, to get under the shade in summer
time that one blade of grass makes an oasis, three blades in a day's walk a
prairie that they wear quicksand shoes, something like Laplander snowshoes
that they are so shut up, belted about, every way inclosed, surrounded, and
made an utter island of by the ocean, that to their very chairs and tables
small clams will sometimes be found adhering, as to the backs of sea
turtles. But these extravaganzas only show that Nantucket is no Illinois.
Look now at the wondrous traditional story of how this island was settled by
the redmen. Thus goes the legend. In olden times an eagle swooped down upon
the New England coast, and carried off an infant Indian in his talons. With
loud lament the parents saw their child borne out of sight over the wide
waters. They resolved to follow in the same direction. Setting out in their
canoes, after a perilous passage they discovered the island, and there they
found an empty ivory casket, the poor little Indian's skeleton. What wonder,
then, that these Nantucketers, born on a beach, should take to the sea for a
livelihood They first caught crabs and quohogs in the sand grown bolder,
they waded out with nets for mackerel more experienced, they pushed off in
boats and captured cod and at last, launching a navy of great ships on the
sea, explored this watery world put an incessant belt of circumnavigations
round it peeped in at Behring's Straits and in all seasons and all oceans
declared everlasting war with the mightiest animated mass that has survived
the flood most monstrous and most mountainous That Himmalehan, saltsea
Mastodon, clothed with such portentousness of unconscious power, that his
very panics are more to be dreaded than his most fearless and malicious
assaults And thus have these naked Nantucketers, these sea hermits, issuing
from their anthill in the sea, overrun and conquered the watery world like
so many Alexanders parcelling out among
them the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans, as the three pirate powers did
Poland. Let America add Mexico to Texas, and pile Cuba upon Canada let the
English overswarm all India, and hang out their blazing banner from the sun
two thirds of this terraqueous globe are the Nantucketer's. For the sea is
his he owns it, as Emperors own empires other seamen having but a right
of way through it. Merchant ships are but extension bridges armed ones but
floating forts even pirates and privateers, though following the sea as
highwaymen the road, they but plunder other ships, other fragments of the
land like themselves, without seeking to draw their living from the bottomless
deep itself. The Nantucketer, he alone resides and riots on the sea he
alone, in Bible language, goes down to it in ships to and fro ploughing it
as his own special plantation. There is his home there lies his business,
which a noah's flood would not interrupt, though it overwhelmed all the
millions in China. He lives on the sea, as prairie cocks in the prairie he
hides among the waves, he climbs them as chamois hunters climb the Alps. For
years he knows not the land so that when he comes to it at last, it smells
like another world, more strangely than the moon would to an Earthsman. With
the landless gull, that at sunset folds her wings and is rocked to sleep
between billows so at nightfall, the Nantucketer, out of sight of land,
furls his sails, and lays him to his rest, while under his very pillow rush
herds of walruses and whales.
It was quite late in the evening when the
little Moss came snugly to anchor, and Queequeg and I went ashore so we
could attend to no business that day, at least none but a supper and a bed.
The landlord of the SpouterInn had recommended us to his cousin Hosea Hussey
of the Try Pots, whom he asserted to
be the proprietor of one of the best kept hotels in all Nantucket, and
moreover he had assured us that cousin Hosea, as he called him, was famous for
his chowders. In short, he plainly hinted that we could not possibly do
better than try potluck at the Try Pots. But the directions he had given us
about keeping a yellow warehouse on our starboard hand till we opened a white
church to the larboard, and then keeping that on the larboard hand till we
made a corner three points to the starboard, and that done, then ask the first
man we met where the place was these crooked directions of his very much
puzzled us at first, especially as, at the outset, Queequeg insisted that the
yellow warehouse our first point of departure must be left on the larboard
hand, whereas I had understood Peter Coffin to say it was on the starboard.
However, by dint of beating about a little in the dark, and now and then
knocking up a peaceable inhabitant to inquire the way, we at last came to
something which there was no mistaking. Two enormous wooden pots painted
black, and suspended by asses' ears, swung from the crosstrees of an old
topmast, planted in front of an old doorway. The horns of the crosstrees
were sawed off on the other side, so that this old topmast looked not a
little like a gallows. Perhaps I was over sensitive to such impressions at
the time, but I could not help staring at this gallows with a vague
misgiving. A sort of crick was in my neck as I gazed up to the two remaining
horns yes, two of them, one for Queequeg, and one for me. It's ominous,
thinks I. A Coffin my Innkeeper upon landing in my first whaling port
tombstones staring at me in the whalemen's chapel and here a gallows and a
pair of prodigious black pots too Are these last throwing out oblique hints
touching tophet? I was called from these reflections by the sight of a
freckled woman with yellow hair and a yellow gown, standing in the porch of
the inn, under a dull red lamp swinging there, that looked much like an
injured eye, and carrying on a brisk scolding with a man in a purple woollen
shirt. Get along with ye, said she to the man, or I'll be combing ye
Come on, Queequeg, said I, all right. There's Mrs. Hussey.
And so it turned out Mr. Hosea Hussey being from home, but leaving Mrs.
Hussey entirely competent to attend to all his affairs. Upon making known our
desires for a supper and a bed, Mrs. Hussey, postponing further scolding for
the present, ushered us into a little room, and seating us at a table spread
with the relics of a recently concluded repast, turned round to us and
said Clam or Cod? What's that about Cods, ma'am? said I, with much
politeness. Clam or Cod? she repeated. A clam for supper? a cold clam
is that what you mean, Mrs. Hussey? says I but that's a rather cold and
clammy reception in the winter time, ain't it, Mrs Hussey? But being in a
great hurry to resume scolding the man in the purple shirt, who was waiting
for it in the entry, and seeming to hear nothing but the word clam, Mrs.
Hussey hurried towards an open door leading to the kitchen, and bawling out
clam for two, disappeared. Queequeg, said I, do you think that we can
make out a supper for us both on one clam? However, a warm savory steam from
the kitchen served to belie the apparently cheerless prospect before us. But
when that smoking chowder came in, the mystery was delightfully explained.
Oh, sweet friends hearken to me. It was made of small juicy clams, scarcely
bigger than hazel nuts, mixed with pounded ship biscuit, and salted pork cut
up into little flakes the whole enriched with butter, and plentifully
seasoned with pepper and salt. Our appetites being sharpened by the frosty
voyage, and in particular, Queequeg seeing his favorite fishing food before
him, and the chowder being surpassingly excellent, we despatched it with
great expedition when leaning back a moment and bethinking me of Mrs.
Hussey's clam and cod announcement, I thought I would try a little experiment.
Stepping to the kitchen door, I uttered the word cod with great emphasis,
and resumed my seat. In a few moments the savory steam came forth again, but
with a different flavor, and in good time a fine codchowder was placed
before us. We resumed business and while plying our spoons in the
bowl, thinks I to myself, I wonder now if this here has any effect on the
head? What's that stultifying saying about chowderheaded people? But look,
Queequeg, ain't that a live eel in your bowl? Where's your harpoon?
Fishiest of all fishy places was the Try Pots, which well deserved its name
for the pots there were always boiling chowders. Chowder for breakfast, and
chowder for dinner, and chowder for supper, till you began to look for
fishbones coming through your clothes. The area before the house was paved
with clamshells. Mrs. Hussey wore a polished necklace of codfish vertebra
and Hosea Hussey had his account books bound in superior old sharkskin.
There was a fishy flavor to the milk, too, which I could not at all account
for, till one morning happening to take a stroll along the beach among some
fishermen's boats, I saw Hosea's brindled cow feeding on fish remnants, and
marching along the sand with each foot in a cod's decapitated head, looking
very slipshod, I assure ye. Supper concluded, we received a lamp, and
directions from Mrs. Hussey concerning the nearest way to bed but, as
Queequeg was about to precede me up the stairs, the lady reached forth her
arm, and demanded his harpoon she allowed no harpoon in her chambers. Why
not? said I every true whaleman sleeps with his harpoon but why not?
Because it's dangerous, says she. Ever since young Stiggs coming from that
unfort'nt v'y'ge of his, when he was gone four years and a half, with only
three barrels of ile, was found dead in my first floor back, with his
harpoon in his side ever since then I allow no boarders to take sich
dangerous weepons in their rooms at night. So, Mr. Queequeg for she had
learned his name, I will just take this here iron, and keep it for you till
morning. But the chowder clam or cod tomorrow for breakfast, men? Both,
says I and let's have a couple of smoked herring by way of variety.
In bed we concocted our plans for the morrow.
But to my surprise and no small concern, Queequeg now gave me to understand,
that he had been diligently consulting Yojo the name of his black little god
and Yojo had told him two or three times over, and strongly insisted upon it
everyway, that instead of our going together among the whalingfleet in
harbor, and in concert selecting our craft instead of this, I say, Yojo
earnestly enjoined that the selection of the ship should rest wholly with me,
inasmuch as Yojo purposed befriending us and, in order to do so, had already
pitched upon a vessel, which, if left to myself, I, Ishmael, should
infallibly light upon, for all the world as though it had turned out by
chance and in that vessel I must immediately ship myself, for the present
irrespective of Queequeg. I have forgotten to mention that, in many things,
Queequeg placed great confidence in the excellence of Yojo's judgment and
surprising forecast of things and cherished Yojo with considerable esteem,
as a rather good sort of god, who perhaps meant well enough upon the whole,
but in all cases did not succeed in his benevolent designs. Now, this plan of
Queequeg's, or rather Yojo's, touching the selection of our craft I did not
like that plan at all. I had not a little relied on Queequeg's sagacity to
point out the whaler best fitted to carry us and our fortunes securely. But
as all my remonstrances produced no effect upon Queequeg, I was obliged to
acquiesce and accordingly prepared to set about this business with a
determined rushing sort of energy and vigor, that should quickly settle that
trifling little affair. Next morning early, leaving Queequeg shut up with
Yojo in our little bedroom for it seemed that it was some sort of Lent or
Ramadan, or day of fasting, humiliation, and prayer with Queequeg and Yojo
that
day how it was I never could find out, for, though I applied myself to it
several times, I never could master his liturgies and XXXIX Articles leaving
Queequeg, then, fasting on his tomahawk pipe, and Yojo warming himself at
his sacrificial fire of shavings, I sallied out among the shipping. After
much prolonged sauntering and many random inquiries, I learnt that there
were three ships up for threeyears' voyages The DevilDam the Titbit,
and the pequod. devil dam, i do not know the origin of titbit is
obvious Pequod, you will no doubt remember, was the name of a celebrated
tribe of Massachusetts Indians, now extinct as the ancient Medes. I peered
and pryed about the DevilDam from her, hopped over to the Titbit and,
finally, going on board the Pequod, looked around her for a moment, and then
decided that this was the very ship for us. You may have seen many a quaint
craft in your day, for aught I know squaredtoed luggers mountainous
Japanese junks butterbox galliots, and what not but take my word for it,
you never saw such a rare old craft as this same rare old Pequod. She was a
ship of the old school, rather small if anything with an old fashioned
clawfooted look about her. Long seasoned and weatherstained in the typhoons
and calms of all four oceans, her old hull's complexion was darkened like a
French grenadier's, who has alike fought in Egypt and Siberia. Her
venerable bows looked bearded. Her mastscut somewhere on the coast of Japan,
where her original ones were lost overboard in a gale her masts stood
stiffly up like the spines of the three old kings of Cologne. Her ancient
decks were worn and wrinkled, like the pilgrimworshipped flagstone in
Canterbury Cathedral where Beckett bled. But to all these her old
antiquities, were added new and marvellous features, pertaining to the wild
business that for more than half a century she had followed. Old Captain
Peleg, many years her chiefmate, before he commanded another vessel of his
own, and now a retired seaman, and one of the principal owners of the
Pequod, this old Peleg, during the term of his chiefmateship, had built upon
her original grotesqueness, and inlaid it, all over, with a quaintness both
of material and device, unmatched by anything except it be ThorkillHake's
carved buckler or bedstead. She was
apparelled like any barbaric Ethiopian emperor, his neck heavy with pendants
of polished ivory. She was a thing of trophies. A cannibal of a craft,
tricking herself forth in the chased bones of her enemies. All round, her
unpanelled, open bulwarks were garnished like one continuous jaw, with the
long sharp teeth of the sperm whale, inserted there for pins, to fasten her
old hempen thews and tendons to. Those thews ran not through base blocks of
land wood, but deftly travelled over sheaves of seaivory. Scorning a
turnstile wheel at her reverend helm, she sported there a tiller and that
tiller was in one mass, curiously carved from the long narrow lower jaw of her
hereditary foe. The helmsman who steered by that tiller in a tempest, felt
like the Tartar, when he holds back his fiery steed by clutching its jaw. A
noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy All noble things are touched
with that. Now when I looked about the quarterdeck, for some one having
authority, in order to propose myself as a candidate for the voyage, at
first I saw nobody but I could not well overlook a strange sort of tent, or
rather wigwam, pitched a little behind the mainmast. It seemed only a
temporary erection used in port. It was of a conical shape, some ten feet
high consisting of the long, huge slabs of limber black bone taken from
the middle and highest part of the jaws of the rightwhale. Planted with their
broad ends on the deck, a circle of these slabs laced together, mutually
sloped towards each other, and at the apex united in a tufted point, where
the loose hairy fibres waved to and fro like a topknot on some old
Pottowotamie Sachem's head. A triangular opening faced towards the bows of
the ship, so that the insider commanded a complete view forward. And half
concealed in this queer tenement, I at length found one who by his aspect
seemed to have authority and who, it being noon, and the ship's work
suspended, was now enjoying respite from the burden of command. He was seated
on an oldfashioned oaken chair, wriggling all over with curious carving and
the bottom of which was formed of a stout interlacing of the same elastic
stuff of which the wigwam was constructed. There was nothing so very
particular, perhaps, about the
appearance of the elderly man I saw he was brown and brawny, like most old
seamen, and heavily rolled up in blue pilotcloth, cut in the Quaker style
only there was a fine and almost microscopic network of the minutest wrinkles
interlacing round his eyes, which must have arisen from his continual
sailings in many hard gales, and always looking to windward for this
causes the muscles about the eyes to become pursed together. Such
eyewrinkles are very effectual in a scowl. Is this the Captain of the
Pequod? said I, advancing to the door of the tent. Supposing it be the
Captain of the Pequod, what dost thou want of him? he demanded. I was
thinking of shipping. Thou wast, wast thou? I see thou are no Nantucketer
ever been in a stove boat? No, Sir, I never have. Dost know nothing at
all about whaling, I dare say eh? Nothing, Sir but I have no doubt I
shall soon learn. I've been several voyages in the merchant service, and I
think that Merchant service be damned. Talk not that lingo to me. Dost
see that leg? I'll take that leg away from thy stern, if ever thou talkest
of the marchant service to me again. Marchant service indeed I suppose now
ye feel considerable proud of having served in those marchant ships. But
flukes man, what makes thee want to go a whaling, eh? it looks a little
suspicious, don't it, eh? Hast not been a pirate, hast thou? Didst not rob
thy last Captain, didst thou? Dost not think of murdering the officers when
thou gettest to sea? I protested my innocence of these things. I saw that
under the mask of these half humorous inuendoes, this old seaman, as an
insulated Quakerish Nantucketer, was full of his insular prejudices, and
rather distrustful of all aliens, unless they hailed from Cape Cod or the
Vineyard. But what takes thee awhaling? I want to know that before I think
of shipping ye. Well, sir, I want to see what whaling is. I want to see
the world. Want to see what whaling is, eh? Have ye clapped eye on
Captain Ahab?
Who is Captain Ahab, sir? Aye, aye, I thought so. Captain Ahab is the
Captain of this ship. I am mistaken then. I thought I was speaking to the
Captain himself. Thou art speaking to Captain Peleg that's who ye are
speaking to, young man. It belongs to me and Captain Bildad to see the
Pequod fitted out for the voyage, and supplied with all her needs, including
crew. We are part owners and agents. But as I was going to say, if thou
wantest to know what whaling is, as thou tellest ye do, I can put ye in a way
of finding it out before ye bind yourself to it, past backing out. Clap eye
on Captain Ahab, young man, and thou wilt find that he has only one leg.
What do you mean, sir? Was the other one lost by a whale? Lost by a whale
Young man, come nearer to me it was devoured, chewed up, crunched by the
monstrousest parmacetty that ever chipped a boat ah, ah I was a little
alarmed by his energy, perhaps also a little touched at the hearty grief in
his concluding exclamation, but said as calmly as I could, What you say is
no doubt true enough, sir but how could I know there was any peculiar
ferocity in that particular whale, though indeed I might have inferred as
much from the simple fact of the accident. Look ye now, young man, thy
lungs are a sort of soft, d'ye see thou dost not talk shark a bit. Sure,
ye've been to sea before now sure of that? Sir, said I, I thought I
told you that I had been four voyages in the merchant Hard down out of
that Mind what I said about the marchant service don't aggravate me I
won't have it. But let us understand each other. I have given thee a hint
about what whaling is do ye yet feel inclined for it? I do, sir. Very
good. Now, art thou the man to pitch a harpoon down a live whale's throat,
and then jump after it? Answer, quick I am, sir, if it should be
positively indispensable to do so not to be got rid of, that is which I
don't take to be the fact. Good again. Now then, thou not only wantest to
go awhaling, to find out by experience what whaling is, but ye also want to
go in order to see the world? Was not that what ye said? I thought so. Well
then, just step forward there, and take a peep over the weatherbow, and
then back to me and tell me what ye see there. For a moment I stood a little
puzzled by this curious request, not knowing exactly how to take it, whether
humorously or in earnest. But concentrating all his crow's feet into one
scowl, Captain Peleg started me on the errand. Going forward and glancing
over the weather bow, I perceived that the ship swinging to her anchor with
the floodtide, was now obliquely pointing towards the open ocean. The
prospect was unlimited, but exceedingly monotonous and forbidding not the
slightest variety that I could see. Well, what's the report? said Peleg
when I came back what did ye see? Not much, I replied  nothing but
water considerable horizon though, and there's a squall coming up, I
think. Well, what dost thou think then of seeing the world? Do ye wish to
go round Cape Horn to see any more of it, eh? Can't ye see the world where
you stand? I was a little staggered, but go awhaling I must, and I would
and the Pequod was as good a ship as any I thought the best  and all this I
now repeated to Peleg. Seeing me so determined, he expressed his willingness
to ship me. And thou mayest as well sign the papers right off, he added
come along with ye. And so saying, he led the way below deck into the
cabin. seated on the transom was what seemed to me a most uncommon and
surprising figure. It turned out to be Captain Bildad, who along with
Captain Peleg was one of the largest owners of the vessel the other shares,
as is sometimes the case in these ports, being held by a crowd of old
annuitants widows, fatherless children, and chancery wards each owning
about the value of a timber head, or a foot of plank, or a nail or two in the
ship. People in Nantucket invest their money in whaling vessels, the same
way that you do yours in approved state stocks bringing in good interest.
Now, Bildad, like Peleg, and indeed many other Nantucketers,
was a Quaker, the island having been originally settled by that sect and to
this day its inhabitants in general retain in an uncommon measure the
peculiarities of the Quaker, only variously and anomalously modified by
things altogether alien and heterogeneous. For some of these same Quakers are
the most sanguinary of all sailors and whalehunters. They are fighting
Quakers they are Quakers with a vengeance. So that there are instances among
them of men, who, named with Scripture names a singularly common fashion on
the island and in childhood naturally imbibing the stately dramatic thee and
thou of the Quaker idiom still, from the audacious, daring, and boundless
adventure of their subsequent lives, strangely blend with these unoutgrown
peculiarities, a thousand bold dashes of character, not unworthy a
Scandinavian seaking, or a poetical Pagan Roman. And when these things unite
in a man of greatly superior natural force, with a globular brain and a
ponderous heart who has also by the stillness and seclusion of many long
nightwatches in the remotest waters, and beneath constellations never seen
here at the north, been led to think untraditionally and independently
receiving all nature's sweet or savage impressions fresh from her own virgin
voluntary and confiding breast, and thereby chiefly, but with some help from
accidental advantages, to learn a bold and nervous lofty language that man
makes one in a whole nation's census a mighty pageant creature, formed for
noble tragedies. Nor will it at all detract from him, dramatically regarded,
if either by birth or other circumstances, he have what seems a half wilful
overruling morbidness at the bottom of his nature. For all men tragically
great are made so through a certain morbidness. Be sure of this, O young
ambition, all mortal greatness is but disease. But, as yet we have not to
do with such an one, but with quite another and still a man, who, if indeed
peculiar, it only results again from another phase of the Quaker, modified by
individual circumstances. Like Captain Peleg, Captain Bildad was a welltodo,
retired whaleman. But unlike Captain Peleg who cared not a rush for what
are called serious things, and indeed deemed those selfsame serious things
the veriest of all trifles Captain Bildad
had not only been originally educated according to the strictest sect of
Nantucket Quakerism, but all his subsequent ocean life, and the sight of many
unclad, lovely island creatures, round the Horn all that had not moved this
native born Quaker one single jot, had not so much as altered one angle of
his vest. Still, for all this immutableness, was there some lack of common
consistency about worthy Captain Bildad. Though refusing, from conscientious
scruples, to bear arms against land invaders, yet himself had illimitably
invaded the Atlantic and Pacific and though a sworn foe to human bloodshed,
yet had he in his straightbodied coat, spilled tuns upon tuns of leviathan
gore. How now in the contemplative evening of his days, the pious Bildad
reconciled these things in the reminiscence, I do not know but it did not
seem to concern him much, and very probably he had long since come to the
sage and sensible conclusion that a man's religion is one thing, and this
practical world quite another. This world pays dividends. Rising from a
little cabinboy in short clothes of the drabbest drab, to a harpooneer in a
broad shadbellied waistcoat from that becoming boatheader, chiefmate, and
captain, and finally a shipowner Bildad, as I hinted before, had concluded
his adventurous career by wholly retiring from active life at the goodly age
of sixty, and dedicating his remaining days to the quiet receiving of his
wellearned income. Now Bildad, I am sorry to say, had the reputation of
being an incorrigible old hunks, and in his seagoing days, a bitter, hard
taskmaster. They told me in Nantucket, though it certainly seems a curious
story, that when he sailed the old Categut whaleman, his crew, upon arriving
home, were mostly all carried ashore to the hospital, sore exhausted and worn
out. For a pious man, especially for a Quaker, he was certainly rather
hardhearted to say the least. He never used to swear, though, at his men,
they said but somehow he got an inordinate quantity of cruel, unmitigated
hard work out of them. When Bildad was a chiefmate, to have his
drabcolored eye intently looking at you, made you feel completely nervous,
till you could clutch something a hammer or a marlingspike, and go to work
like mad, at something or other, never mind what. Indolence and
idleness perished from before him. His own person was the exact embodiment of
his utilitarian character. On his long, gaunt body, he carried no spare
flesh, no superfluous beard, his chin having a soft, economical nap to it,
like the worn nap of his broadbrimmed hat. Such, then, was the person that I
saw seated on the transom when I followed Captain Peleg down into the cabin.
The space between the decks was small and there, boltupright, sat old
Bildad, who always sat so, and never leaned, and this to save his coat
tails. His broadbrim was placed beside him his legs were stiffly crossed
his drab vesture was buttoned up to his chin and spectacles on nose, he
seemed absorbed in reading from a ponderous volume. Bildad, cried Captain
Peleg, at it again, Bildad, eh? Ye have been studying those Scriptures,
now, for the last thirty years, to my certain knowledge. How far ye got,
Bildad? As if long habituated to such profane talk from his old shipmate,
Bildad, without noticing his present irreverence, quietly looked up, and
seeing me, glanced again inquiringly towards Peleg. He says he's our man,
Bildad, said Peleg, he wants to ship. Dost thee? said Bildad, in a
hollow tone, and turning round to me. I dost, said I unconsciously, he was
so intense a Quaker. What do ye think of him, Bildad? said Peleg. He'll
do, said Bildad, eyeing me, and then went on spelling away at his book in a
mumbling tone quite audible. I thought him the queerest old Quaker I ever saw,
especially as Peleg, his friend and old shipmate, seemed such a blusterer.
But I said nothing, only looking round me sharply. Peleg now threw open a
chest, and drawing forth the ship's articles, placed pen and ink before him,
and seated himself at a little table. I began to think it was high time to
settle with myself at what terms I would be willing to engage for the voyage.
I was already aware that in the whaling business they paid no wages but all
hands, including the captain, received certain shares of the profits called
lays, and that these lays were proportioned to the degree of importance
pertaining to the respective duties of the ship's company.
I was also aware that being a green hand at whaling, my own lay would not be
very large but considering that I was used to the sea, could steer a ship,
splice a rope, and all that, I made no doubt that from all I had heard I
should be offered at least the th lay that is, the th part of the clear
nett proceeds of the voyage, whatever that might eventually amount to. And
though the th lay was what they call a rather long lay, yet it was
better than nothing and if we had a lucky voyage, might pretty nearly pay
for the clothing I would wear out on it, not to speak of my three years' beef
and board, for which I would not have to pay one stiver. It might be thought
that this was a poor way to accumulate a princely fortune and so it was, a
very poor way indeed. But I am one of those that never take on about princely
fortunes, and am quite content if the world is ready to board and lodge me,
while I am putting up at this grim sign of the Thunder Cloud. Upon the whole,
I thought that the th lay would be about the fair thing, but would not
have been surprised had I been offered the th, considering I was of a
broadshouldered make. But one thing, nevertheless, that made me a little
distrustful about receiving a generous share of the profits was this Ashore,
I had heard something of both Captain Peleg and his unaccountable old crony
Bildad how that they being the principal proprietors of the Pequod,
therefore the other and more inconsiderable and scattered owners, left nearly
the whole management of the ship's affairs to these two. And I did not know
but what the stingy old Bildad might have a mighty deal to say about shipping
hands, especially as I now found him on board the Pequod, quite at home there
in the cabin, and reading his Bible as if at his own fireside. Now while
Peleg was vainly trying to mend a pen with his jackknife, old Bildad, to my
no small surprise, considering that he was such an interested party in these
proceedings Bildad never heeded us, but went on mumbling to himself out of
his book, Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth
Well, Captain Bildad, interrupted Peleg, what d'ye say, what lay shall we
give this young man?
Thou knowest best, was the sepulchral reply, the seven hundred and
seventyseventh wouldn't be too much, would it?  "where moth and rust do
corrupt, but lay" Lay, indeed, thought I, and such a lay the seven
hundred and seventyseventh Well, old Bildad, you are determined that I,
for one, shall not lay up many lays here below, where moth and rust do
corrupt. It was an exceedingly long lay that, indeed and though from the
magnitude of the figure it might at first deceive a landsman, yet the
slightest consideration will show that though seven hundred and seventyseven
is a pretty large number, yet, when you come to make a teenth of it, you
will then see, I say, that the seven hundred and seventyseventh part of a
farthing is a good deal less than seven hundred and seventyseven gold
doubloons and so I thought at the time. Why, blast your eyes, Bildad,
cried Peleg, Thou dost not want to swindle this young man he must have
more than that. Seven hundred and seventyseventh, again said Bildad,
without lifting his eyes and then went on mumbling  for where your
treasure is, there will your heart be also. I am going to put him down for
the three hundredth, said Peleg, do ye hear that, Bildad The three
hundredth lay, I say. Bildad laid down his book, and turning solemnly
towards him said, Captain Peleg, thou hast a generous heart but thou must
consider the duty thou owest to the other owners of this ship widows and
orphans, many of them and that if we too abundantly reward the labors of this
young man, we may be taking the bread from those widows and those orphans.
The seven hundred and seventyseventh lay, Captain Peleg. Thou Bildad
roared Peleg, starting up and clattering about the cabin. Blast ye, Captain
Bildad, if I had followed thy advice in these matters, I would afore now had
a conscience to lug about that would be heavy enough to founder the largest
ship that ever sailed round Cape Horn. Captain Peleg, said Bildad
steadily, thy conscience may be drawing ten inches of water, or ten fathoms,
i can't tell but as thou art still an impenitent man, captain Peleg, I
greatly fear lest thy conscience be but a leaky one and will in the end
sink thee foundering down to the fiery pit, Captain Peleg.
Fiery pit fiery pit ye insult me, man past all natural bearing, ye
insult me. It's an allfired outrage to tell any human creature that he's
bound to hell. Flukes and flames Bildad, say that again to me, and start
my soulbolts, but I'llI'llyes, I'll swallow a live goat with all his
hair and horns on. Out of the cabin, ye canting, drabcolored son of a wooden
gun a straight wake with ye As he thundered out this he made a rush at
Bildad, but with a marvellous oblique, sliding celerity, Bildad for that
time eluded him. Alarmed at this terrible outburst between the two principal
and responsible owners of the ship, and feeling half a mind to give up all
idea of sailing in a vessel so questionably owned and temporarily commanded,
I stepped aside from the door to give egress to Bildad, who, I made no doubt,
was all eagerness to vanish from before the awakened wrath of Peleg. But to
my astonishment, he sat down again on the transom very quietly, and seemed
to have not the slightest intention of withdrawing. He seemed quite used to
impenitent Peleg and his ways. As for Peleg, after letting off his rage as
he had, there seemed no more left in him, and he, too, sat down like a lamb,
though he twitched a little as if still nervously agitated. Whew he
whistled at last  the squall's gone off to leeward, I think. Bildad, thou
used to be good at sharpening a lance, mend that pen, will ye. My jackknife
here needs the grindstone. That's he thank ye, Bildad. Now then, my young
man, Ishmael's thy name, didn't ye say? Well then, down ye go here, Ishmael,
for the three hundredth lay. Captain Peleg, said I, I have a friend with
me who wants to ship too shall I bring him down tomorrow? To be sure,
said peleg. fetch him along, and we'll look at him. What lay does he
want? groaned Bildad, glancing up from the book in which he had again been
burying himself. Oh never thee mind about that, Bildad, said Peleg. Has
he ever whaled it any? turning to me. Killed more whales than I can count,
Captain Peleg. Well, bring him along then.
And, after signing the papers, off I went nothing doubting but that I had
done a good morning's work, and that the Pequod was the identical ship that
Yojo had provided to carry Queequeg and me round the Cape. But I had not
proceeded far, when I began to bethink me that the captain with whom I was to
sail yet remained unseen by me though, indeed, in many cases, a whaleship
will be completely fitted out, and receive all her crew on board, ere the
captain makes himself visible by arriving to take command for sometimes these
voyages are so prolonged, and the shore intervals at home so exceedingly
brief, that if the captain have a family, or any absorbing concernment of
that sort, he does not trouble himself much about his ship in port, but
leaves her to the owners till all is ready for sea. However, it is always as
well to have a look at him before irrevocably committing yourself into his
hands. Turning back I accosted Captain Peleg, inquiring where Captain Ahab
was to be found. And what dost thou want of Captain Ahab? It's all right
enough thou art shipped. Yes, but I should like to see him. But I
don't think thou wilt be able to at present. I don't know exactly what's the
matter with him but he keeps close inside the house a sort of sick, and
yet he don't look so. In fact, he ain't sick but no, he isn't well either.
Any how, young man, he won't always see me, so I don't suppose he will thee.
He's a queer man, Captain Ahab so some think but a good one. Oh, thou'lt
like him well enough no fear, no fear. he's a grand, ungodly, godlike
man, Captain Ahab doesn't speak much but, when he does speak, then you may
well listen. Mark ye, be forewarned Ahab's above the common Ahab's been
in colleges, as well as 'mong the cannibals been used to deeper wonders than
the waves fixed his fiery lance in mightier stranger foes than whales. His
lance aye, the keenest and the surest that out of all our isle Oh he
ain't Captain Bildad no, and he ain't Captain Peleg he's Ahab, boy and
Ahab of old, thou knowest, was a crowned king And a very vile one. When
that wicked king was slain, the dogs, did they not lick his blood?
Come hither to me hither, hither, said Peleg, with a significance in his
eye that almost startled me. Look ye, lad never say that on board the
Pequod. Never say it anywhere. Captain Ahab did not name himself. 'Twas a
foolish, ignorant whim of his crazy, widowed mother, who died when he was
only a twelvemonth old. And yet the old squaw Tistig, at Gayhead, said that
the name would somehow prove prophetic. And, perhaps, other fools like her
may tell thee the same. I wish to warn thee. It's a lie. I know Captain
Ahab well I've sailed with him as mate years ago I know what he isa
good man not a pious, good man, like Bildad, but a swearing good man
something like me only there's a good deal more of him. Aye, aye, I know
that he was never very jolly and I know that on the passage home, he was a
little out of his mind for a spell but it was the sharp shooting pains in
his bleeding stump that brought that about, as any one might see. I know,
too, that ever since he lost his leg last voyage by that accursed whale, he's
been a kind of moody desperate moody, and savage sometimes but that will
all pass off. And once for all, let me tell thee and assure thee, young man,
it's better to sail with a moody good captain than a laughing bad one. So
goodbye to thee and wrong not Captain Ahab, because he happens to have a
wicked name. Besides, my boy, he has a wife not three voyages wedded a
sweet, resigned girl. Think of that by that sweet girl that old man has a
child hold ye then there can be any utter, hopeless harm in Ahab? No, no,
my lad stricken, blasted, if he be, Ahab has his humanities As I walked
away, I was full of thoughtfulness what had been incidentally revealed to
me of Captain Ahab, filled me with a certain wild vagueness of painfulness
concerning him. And somehow, at the time, I felt a sympathy and a sorrow for
him, but for I don't know what, unless it was the cruel loss of his leg. And
yet I also felt a strange awe of him but that sort of awe, which I cannot at
all describe, was not exactly awe I do not know what it was. But I felt
it and it did not disincline me towards him though I felt impatience at
what seemed like mystery in him, so imperfectly as he was known to me then.
However, my thoughts were at length carried in other directions, so that for
the present dark Ahab slipped my mind.
As Queequeg's Ramadan, or Fasting and
Humiliation, was to continue all day, I did not choose to disturb him till
towards nightfall for I cherish the greatest respect towards everybody's
religious obligations, never mind how comical, and could not find it in my
heart to undervalue even a congregation of ants worshipping a toadstool or
those other creatures in certain parts of our earth, who with a degree of
footmanism quite unprecedented in other planets, bow down before the torso
of a deceased landed proprietor merely on account of the inordinate
possessions yet owned and rented in his name. I say, we good Presbyterian
christians should be charitable in these things, and not fancy ourselves so
vastly superior to other mortals, pagans and what not, because of their
halfcrazy conceits on these subjects. There was Queequeg, now, certainly
entertaining the most absurd notions about Yojo and his Ramadan but what of
that? Queequeg thought he knew what he was about, I suppose he seemed to be
content and there let him rest. All our arguing with him would not avail
let him be, I say and Heaven have mercy on us all Presbyterians and Pagans
alike for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly
need mending. Towards evening, when I felt assured that all his performances
and rituals must be over, I went up to his room and knocked at the door but
no answer. I tried to open it, but it was fastened inside. Queequeg, said
I softly through the keyhole all silent. I say, Queequeg why don't you
speak? It's IIshmael. But all remained still as before. I began to grow
alarmed. I had allowed him such abundant time I thought he might have had
an apoplectic fit. I looked through the keyhole but the door opening into
an odd corner of the room, the keyhole prospect was but a crooked and
sinister one. I could only see part of the footboard of the bed and a line of
the wall, but nothing more. I was surprised to behold resting against the
wall the wooden shaft of Queequeg's harpoon, which the landlady the evening
previous had taken from him, before our mounting to the chamber. That's
strange, thought I but at any rate, since the harpoon stands yonder, and he
seldom or never goes abroad without it, therefore he must be inside here,
and no possible mistake. Queequeg Queequeg all still. Something must
have happened. Apoplexy I tried to burst open the door but it stubbornly
resisted. Running down stairs, I quickly stated my suspicions to the first
person i met the chambermaid. la la she cried, i thought something
must be the matter. I went to make the bed after breakfast, and the door
was locked and not a mouse to be heard and it's been just so silent ever
since. But I thought, may be, you had both gone off and locked your baggage
in for safe keeping. La La, ma'am Mistress murder Mrs. Hussey
apoplexy and with these cries, she ran towards the kitchen, I following.
Mrs. Hussey soon appeared, with a mustardpot in one hand and a vinegarcruet
in the other, having just broken away from the occupation of attending to the
castors, and scolding her little black boy meantime. Woodhouse cried I,
which way to it? Run for God's sake, and fetch something to pry open the
door the axe the axe he's had a stroke depend upon it and so saying I
was unmethodically rushing up stairs again emptyhanded, when Mrs. Hussey
interposed the mustardpot and vinegarcruet, and the entire castor of her
countenance. What's the matter with you, young man? Get the axe For
God's sake, run for the doctor, some one, while I pry it open Look here,
said the landlady, quickly putting down the vinegarcruet, so as to have one
hand free look here are you talking about prying open any of my doors?
and with that she seized my arm. What's the matter with you? What's the
matter with you, shipmate? In as calm, but rapid a manner as possible, I
gave her to understand the whole case. Unconsciously clapping the
vinegarcruet
to one side of her nose, she ruminated for an instant then exclaimed  No I
haven't seen it since I put it there. Running to a little closet under the
landing of the stairs, she glanced in, and returning, told me that Queequeg's
harpoon was missing. He's killed himself, she cried. It's unfort'nate
stiggs done over again there goes another counterpane god pity his poor
mother it will be the ruin of my house. Has the poor lad a sister? Where's
that girl? there, Betty, go to Snarles the Painter, and tell him to paint
me a sign, with "no suicides permitted here, and no smoking in the parlor"
might as well kill both birds at once. Kill? The Lord be merciful to his
ghost What's that noise there? You, young man, avast there And running
up after me, she caught me as I was again trying to force open the door. I
won't allow it I won't have my premises spoiled. Go for the locksmith,
there's one about a mile from here. But avast putting her hand in her
sidepocket, here's a key that'll fit, I guess let's see. And with that,
she turned it in the lock but, alas Queequeg's supplemental bolt remained
unwithdrawn within. Have to burst it open, said I, and was running down
the entry a little, for a good start, when the landlady caught at me, again
vowing I should not break down her premises but I tore from her, and with a
sudden bodily rush dashed myself full against the mark. With a prodigious
noise the door flew open, and the knob slamming against the wall, sent the
plaster to the ceiling and there, good heavens there sat Queequeg,
altogether cool and selfcollected right in the middle of the room
squatting on his hams, and holding Yojo on top of his head. He looked neither
one way nor the other way, but sat like a carved image with scarce a sign of
active life. Queequeg, said I, going up to him, Queequeg, what's the
matter with you? He hain't been a sittin' so all day, has he? said the
landlady. But all we said, not a word could we drag out of him I almost
felt like pushing him over, so as to change his position, for it was almost
intolerable, it seemed so painfully and unnaturally
constrained especially, as in all probability he had been sitting so for
upwards of eight or ten hours, going too without his regular meals. Mrs.
Hussey, said I, he's alive at all events so leave us, if you please, and
I will see to this strange affair myself. Closing the door upon the landlady,
I endeavored to prevail upon Queequeg to take a chair but in vain. There
he sat and all he could do for all my polite arts and blandishments he
would not move a peg, nor say a single word, nor even look at me, nor
notice my presence in any the slightest way. I wonder, thought I, if this can
possibly be a part of his Ramadan do they fast on their hams that way in his
native island. It must be so yes, it's part of his creed, I suppose
well, then, let him rest he'll get up sooner or later, no doubt. It can't
last for ever, thank God, and his Ramadan only comes once a year and I
don't believe it's very punctual then. I went down to supper. After sitting a
long time listening to the long stories of some sailors who had just come from
a plumpudding voyage, as they called it that is, a short whalingvoyage in
a schooner or brig, confined to the north of the line, in the Atlantic Ocean
only after listening to these plumpuddingers till nearly eleven o'clock,
I went up stairs to go to bed, feeling quite sure by this time Queequeg must
certainly have brought his Ramadan to a termination. But no there he was
just where I had left him he had not stirred an inch. I began to grow
vexed with him it seemed so downright senseless and insane to be sitting
there all day and half the night on his hams in a cold room, holding a piece
of wood on his head. For heaven's sake, Queequeg, get up and shake yourself
get up and have some supper. You'll starve you'll kill yourself,
Queequeg. But not a word did he reply. Despairing of him, therefore, I
determined to go to bed and to sleep and no doubt, before a great while, he
would follow me. But previous to turning in, I took my heavy bearskin
jacket, and threw it over him, as it promised to be a very cold night and he
had nothing but his ordinary round jacket on. For some time, do all I would,
I could not get into the faintest doze. I had blown out the candle and the
mere thought of Queequeg
not four feet off sitting there in that uneasy position, stark alone in
the cold and dark this made me really wretched. Think of it sleeping all
night in the same room with a wide awake pagan on his hams in this dreary,
unaccountable Ramadan But somehow I dropped off at last, and knew nothing
more till break of day when, looking over the bedside, there squatted
Queequeg, as if he had been screwed down to the floor. But as soon as the
first glimpse of sun entered the window, up he got, with stiff and grating
joints, but with a cheerful look limped towards me where I lay pressed
his forehead again against mine and said his Ramadan was over. Now, as I
before hinted, I have no objection to any person's religion, be it what it
may, so long as that person does not kill or insult any other person,
because that other person don't believe it also. But when a man's religion
becomes really frantic when it is a positive torment to him and, in fine,
makes this earth of ours an uncomfortable inn to lodge in then I think it
high time to take that individual aside and argue the point with him. And
just so I now did with Queequeg. Queequeg, said I, get into bed now, and
lie and listen to me. I then went on, beginning with the rise and progress
of the primitive religions, and coming down to the various religions of the
present time, during which time I labored to show Queequeg that all these
Lents, Ramadans, and prolonged hamsquattings in cold, cheerless rooms were
stark nonsense bad for the health useless for the soul opposed, in
short, to the obvious laws of Hygiene and common sense. I told him, too, that
he being in other things such an extremely sensible and sagacious savage, it
pained me, very badly pained me, to see him now so deplorably foolish about
this ridiculous Ramadan of his. Besides, argued I, fasting makes the body
cave in hence the spirit caves in and all thoughts born of a fast must
necessarily be halfstarved. This is the reason why most dyspeptic
religionists cherish such melancholy notions about their hereafters. In one
word, Queequeg, said I, rather digressively hell is an idea first born on
an undigested appledumpling and since then perpetuated through the
hereditary dyspepsias nurtured by Ramadans.
I then asked Queequeg whether he himself was ever troubled with dyspepsia
expressing the idea very plainly, so that he could take it in. He said no
only upon one memorable occasion. It was after a great feast given by his
father the king, on the gaining of a great battle wherein fifty of the enemy
had been killed by about two o'clock in the afternoon, and all cooked and
eaten that very evening. No more, Queequeg, said I, shuddering that will
do for I knew the inferences without his further hinting them. I had seen
a sailor who had visited that very island, and he told me that it was the
custom, when a great battle had been gained there, to barbecue all the slain
in the yard or garden of the victor and then, one by one, they were placed
in great wooden trenchers, and garnished round like a pilau, with breadfruit
and cocoanuts and with some parsley in their mouths, were sent round with
the victor's compliments to all his friends, just as though these presents
were so many Christmas turkeys. After all, I do not think that my remarks
about religion made much impression upon Queequeg. Because, in the first
place, he somehow seemed dull of hearing on that important subject, unless
considered from his own point of view and, in the second place, he did not
more than one third understand me, couch my ideas simply as I would and,
finally, he no doubt thought he knew a good deal more about the true religion
than I did. He looked at me with a sort of condescending concern and
compassion, as though he thought it a great pity that such a sensible young
man should be so hopelessly lost to evangelical pagan piety. At last we rose
and dressed and Queequeg, taking a prodigiously hearty breakfast of chowders
of all sorts, so that the landlady should not make much profit by reason of
his Ramadan, we sallied out to board the Pequod, sauntering along, and
picking our teeth with halibut bones.
As we were walking down the end of the wharf
towards the ship, Queequeg carrying his harpoon, Captain Peleg in his gruff
voice loudly hailed us from his wigwam, saying he had not suspected my friend
was a cannibal, and furthermore announcing that he let no cannibals on board
that craft, unless they previously produced their papers. What do you mean
by that, Captain Peleg? said I, now jumping on the bulwarks, and leaving my
comrade standing on the wharf. I mean, he replied, he must show his
papers. Yea, said Captain Bildad in his hollow voice, sticking his head
from behind Peleg's, out of the wigwam. He must show that he's converted.
Son of darkness, he added, turning to Queequeg, art thou at present in
communion with any christian church? Why, said I, he's a member of the
first Congregational Church. Here be it said, that many tattooed savages
sailing in Nantucket ships at last come to be converted into the churches.
First Congregational Church, cried Bildad, what that worships in Deacon
Deuteronomy Coleman's meetinghouse? and so saying, taking out his
spectacles, he rubbed them with his great yellow bandana handkerchief, and
putting them on very carefully, came out of the wigwam, and leaning stiffly
over the bulwarks, took a good long look at Queequeg. How long hath he been
a member? he then said, turning to me not very long, I rather guess,
young man. No, said Peleg, and he hasn't been baptized right either, or
it would have washed some of that devil's blue off his face. Do tell, now,
cried Bildad, is this Philistine a regular member of Deacon Deuteronomy's
meeting? I never saw him going there, and I pass it every Lord's day.
I don't know anything about Deacon Deuteronomy or his meeeting, said I,
all I know is, that Queequeg here is a born member of the First
Congregational Church. He is a deacon himself, Queequeg is. Young man,
said Bildad sternly, thou art skylarking with me explain thyself, thou
young Hittite. What church dost thee mean? answer me. Finding myself thus
hard pushed, I replied. I mean, sir, the same ancient Catholic Church to
which you and I, and Captain Peleg there, and Queequeg here, and all of us,
and every mother's son and soul of us belong the great and everlasting
First Congregation of this whole worshipping world we all belong to that
only some of us cherish some queer crotchets noways touching the grand belief
in that we all join hands. Splice, thou mean'st splice hands, cried
Peleg, drawing nearer. Young man, you'd better ship for a missionary,
instead of a foremast hand I never heard a better sermon. Deacon
Deuteronomy why Father Mapple himself couldn't beat it, and he's reckoned
something. Come aboard, come aboard never mind about the papers. I say,
tell Quohog there what's that you call him? tell Quohog to step along. By
the great anchor, what a harpoon he's got there looks like good stuff that
and he handles it about right. I say, Quohog, or whatever your name is, did
you ever stand in the head of a whaleboat? did you ever strike a fish?
Without saying a word, Queequeg, in his wild sort of way, jumped upon the
bulwarks, from thence into the bows of one of the whaleboats hanging to the
side and then bracing his left knee, and poising his harpoon, cried out in
some such way as this  Cap'ain, you see him small drop tar on water dere?
You see him? well, spose him one whale eye, well, den and taking sharp
aim at it, he darted the iron right over old Bildad's broad brim, clean across
the ship's decks, and struck the glistening tar spot out of sight. Now,
said Queequeg, quietly hauling in the line, sposee him whalee eye why,
dad whale dead. Quick, Bildad, said Peleg, his partner, who, aghast at the
close vicinity of the flying harpoon, had retreated towards the cabin gangway.
Quick, I say, you Bildad, and get the ship's papers. We must have Hedgehog
there, I mean Quohog, in one of our boats. Look ye, Quohog, we'll give ye
the ninetieth lay, and that's more than ever was given a harpooneer yet out of
Nantucket. So down we went into the cabin, and to my great joy Queequeg
was soon enrolled among the same ship's company to which I myself belonged.
When all preliminaries were over and Peleg had got everything ready for
signing, he turned to me and said, I guess Quohog there don't know how to
write, does he? I say, Quohog, blast ye dost thou sign thy name or make thy
mark? But at this question, Queequeg, who had twice or thrice before taken
part in similar ceremonies, looked no ways abashed but taking the offered
pen, copied upon the paper, in the proper place, an exact counterpart of a
queer round figure which was tattooed upon his arm so that through Captain
Peleg's obstinate mistake touching his appellative, it stood something like
this  Quohog his mark. Meanwhile Captain Bildad sat earnestly and
steadfastly eyeing Queequeg, and at last rising solemnly and fumbling in the
huge pockets of his broadskirted drab coat, took out a bundle of tracts,
and selecting one entitled The Latter Day Coming or No Time to Lose, placed
it in queequeg's hands, and then grasping them and the book with both his,
looked earnestly into his eyes, and said, Son of darkness, I must do my
duty by thee I am part owner of this ship, and feel concerned for the souls
of all its crew if thou still clingest to thy Pagan ways, which I sadly
fear, I beseech thee, remain not for aye a Belial bondsman. Spurn the idol
Bell, and the hideous dragon turn from the wrath to come mind thine eye,
I say oh goodness gracious steer clear of the fiery pit Something of
the salt sea yet lingered in old Bildad's language, heterogeneously mixed with
Scriptural and domestic phrases. Avast there, avast there, Bildad, avast now
spoiling our harpooneer,
cried Peleg. Pious harpooneers never make good voyagers it takes the shark
out of 'em no harpooneer is worth a straw who aint pretty sharkish. There
was young Nat Swaine, once the bravest boatheader out of all Nantucket and
the Vineyard he joined the meeting, and never came to good. He got so
frightened about his plaguy soul, that he shrinked and sheered away from
whales, for fear of afterclaps in case he got stove and went to Davy Jones.
Peleg Peleg said Bildad, lifting his eyes and hands, thou thyself, as
I myself, hast seen many a perilous time thou knowest, Peleg, what it is to
have the fear of death how, then, can'st thou prate in this ungodly guise.
Thou beliest thine own heart, Peleg. Tell me, when this same Pequod here had
her three masts overboard in that typhoon on Japan, that same voyage when
thou went mate with Captain Ahab, did'st thou not think of Death and the
Judgment then? Hear him, hear him now, cried Peleg, marching across the
cabin, and thrusting his hands far down into his pockets,  hear him, all of
ye. Think of that When every moment we thought the ship would sink Death
and the judgment then? What? With all three masts making such an everlasting
thundering against the side and every sea breaking over us, fore and aft.
Think of Death and the Judgment then? No no time to think about Death then.
Life was what Captain Ahab and I was thinking of and how to save all hands
how to rig jurymasts  how to get into the nearest port that was what I
was thinking of. Bildad said no more, but buttoning up his coat, stalked on
deck, where we followed him. There he stood, very quietly overlooking some
sailmakers who were mending a topsail in the waist. Now and then he
stooped to pick up a patch, or save an end of tarred twine, which otherwise
might have been wasted.
Shipmates, have ye shipped in that ship?
Queequeg and I had just left the Pequod, and were sauntering away from the
water, for the moment each occupied with his own thoughts, when the above
words were put to us by a stranger, who, pausing before us, levelled his
massive forefinger at the vessel in question. He was but shabbily apparelled
in faded jacket and patched trowsers a rag of a black handkerchief
investing his neck. A confluent smallpox had in all directions flowed over
his face, and left it like the complicated ribbed bed of a torrent, when the
rushing waters have been dried up. Have ye shipped in her? he repeated.
You mean the ship Pequod, I suppose, said I, trying to gain a little more
time for an uninterrupted look at him. Aye, the Pequod that ship there, he
said, drawing back his whole arm, and then rapidly shoving it straight out
from him, with the fixed bayonet of his pointed finger darted full at the
object. Yes, said I, we have just signed the articles. Anything down
there about your souls? About what? Oh, perhaps you hav'n't got any, he
said quickly. no matter though, i know many chaps that hav'n't got any,
good luck to 'em and they are all the better off for it. A soul's a sort
of a fifth wheel to a wagon. What are you jabbering about, shipmate? said
I. He's got enough, though, to make up for all deficiencies of that sort in
other chaps, abruptly said the stranger, placing a nervous emphasis upon the
word he. Queequeg, said I, let's go this fellow has broken loose from
somewhere he's talking about something and somebody we don't know.
Stop cried the stranger. Ye said true ye hav'n't seen Old Thunder yet,
have ye? Who's Old Thunder? said I, again riveted with the insane
earnestness of his manner. Captain Ahab. What the captain of our ship,
the Pequod? Aye, among some of us old sailor chaps, he goes by that name.
Ye hav'n't seen him yet, have ye? No, we hav'n't. He's sick they say, but
is getting better, and will be all right again before long. All right again
before long laughed the stranger, with a solemnly derisive sort of laugh.
Look ye when captain Ahab is all right, then this left arm of mine will be
all right not before. What do you know about him? What did they tell
you about him? Say that They didn't tell much of anything about him only
I've heard that he's a good whalehunter, and a good captain to his crew.
That's true, that's true yes, both true enough. But you must jump when he
gives an order. Step and growl growl and go that's the word with Captain
Ahab. But nothing about that thing that happened to him off Cape Horn, long
ago, when he lay like dead for three days and nights nothing about that
deadly skrimmage with the Spaniard afore the altar in Santa?  heard nothing
about that, eh? Nothing about the silver calabash he spat into? And nothing
about his losing his leg last voyage, according to the prophecy. Didn't ye
hear a word about them matters and something more, eh? No, I don't think ye
did how could ye? Who knows it? Not all Nantucket, I guess. But
hows'ever, mayhap, ye've heard tell about the leg, and how he lost it aye,
ye have heard of that, I dare say. Oh yes, that every one knows a'most I
mean they know he's only one leg and that a parmacetti took the other off.
My friend, said I, what all this gibberish of yours is about, I don't
know, and I don't much care for it seems to me that you must be a little
damaged in the head. But if you are speaking of Captain Ahab, of that ship
there, the Pequod, then let me tell you, that I know all about the loss of
his leg.
All about it, eh sure you do? all? Pretty sure. With finger pointed
and eye levelled at the Pequod, the beggarlike stranger stood a moment, as if
in a troubled reverie then starting a little, turned and said  Ye've
shipped, have ye? Names down on the papers? Well, well, what's signed, is
signed and what's to be, will be and then again, perhaps it wont be, after
all. Any how, it's all fixed and arranged a'ready and some sailors or
other must go with him, I suppose as well these as any other men, God pity
'em Morning to ye, shipmates, morning the ineffable heavens bless ye I'm
sorry I stopped ye. Look here, friend, said I, if you have anything
important to tell us, out with it but if you are only trying to bamboozle
us, you are mistaken in your game that's all I have to say. And it's said
very well, and I like to hear a chap talk up that way you are just the man
for him the likes of ye. Morning to ye, shipmates, morning Oh, when ye get
there, tell 'em I've concluded not to make one of 'em. Ah, my dear fellow,
you can't fool us that way you can't fool us. It is the easiest thing in
the world for a man to look as if he had a great secret in him. Morning to
ye, shipmates, morning. Morning it is, said I. Come along, Queequeg,
let's leave this crazy man. But stop, tell me your name, will you?
Elijah. Elijah thought I, and we walked away, both commenting, after
each other's fashion, upon this ragged old sailor and agreed that he was
nothing but a humbug, trying to be a bugbear. But we had not gone perhaps
above a hundred yards, when chancing to turn a corner, and looking back as I
did so, who should be seen but Elijah following us, though at a distance.
Somehow, the sight of him struck me so, that I said nothing to Queequeg of
his being behind, but passed on with my comrade, anxious to see whether the
stranger would turn the same corner that we did. He did and then it seemed
to me that he was dogging us, but with what intent I could not for the life
of me imagine. This circumstance, coupled with his ambiguous, halfhinting,
halfrevealing, shrouded sort of talk, now begat in me
all kinds of vague wonderments and halfapprehensions, and all connected with
the Pequod and Captain Ahab and the leg he had lost and the Cape Horn
fit and the silver calabash and what Captain Peleg had said of him, when
I left the ship the day previous and the prediction of the squaw Tistig
and the voyage we had bound ourselves to sail and a hundred other shadowy
things. I was resolved to satisfy myself whether this ragged Elijah was
really dogging us or not, and with that intent crossed the way with Queequeg,
and on that side of it retraced our steps. But Elijah passed on, without
seeming to notice us. This relieved me and once more, and finally as it
seemed to me, I pronounced him in my heart, a humbug.
I stuffed a shirt or two into my old
carpetbag, tucked it under my arm, and started for Cape Horn and the
Pacific. Quitting the good city of old Manhatto, I duly arrived in New
Bedford. It was on a Saturday night in December. Much was I disappointed
upon learning that the little packet for Nantucket had already sailed, and
that no way of reaching that place would offer, till the following Monday. As
most young candidates for the pains and penalties of whaling
stop at this same New Bedford, thence to embark on their voyage, it may as
well be related that I, for one, had no idea of so doing. For my mind was
made up to sail in no other than a Nantucket craft, because there was a fine,
boisterous something about everything connected with that famous old island,
which amazingly pleased me. Besides though New Bedford has of late been
gradually monopolizing the business of whaling, and though in this matter poor
old Nantucket is now much behind her, yet Nantucket was her great original
the Tyre of this Carthage the place where the first dead American whale
was stranded. Where else but from Nantucket did those aboriginal whalemen,
the RedMen, first sally out in canoes to give chase to the Leviathan? And
where but from Nantucket, too, did that first adventurous little sloop put
forth, partly laden with imported cobblestones so goes the story to throw
at the whales, in order to discover when they were nigh enough to risk a
harpoon from the bowsprit? Now having a night, a day, and still another night
following before me in New Bedford, ere I could embark for my destined port,
it became a matter of concernment where I was to eat and sleep meanwhile. It
was a very dubiouslooking, nay, a very dark and dismal night, bitingly cold
and cheerless. I knew no one in the place. With anxious grapnels I had
sounded my pocket, and only brought up a few pieces of silver, So,
wherever you go, Ishmael, said I to myself, as I stood in the middle of a
dreary street shouldering my bag, and comparing the gloom towards the north
with the darkness towards the south wherever in your wisdom you may conclude
to lodge for the night, my dear Ishmael, be sure to inquire the price, and
don't be too particular. With halting steps I paced the streets, and passed
the sign of The Crossed Harpoons but it looked too expensive and jolly
there. Further on, from the bright red windows of the SwordFish Inn, there
came such fervent rays, that it seemed to have melted the packed snow and ice
from before the house, for everywhere else the congealed frost lay ten inches
thick in a hard, asphaltic pavement, rather weary for me, when I struck my
foot against the flinty projections, because from hard, remorseless
service the soles of my boots were in a most miserable plight. Too expensive
and jolly, again thought I, pausing one moment to watch the broad glare in
the street, and hear the sounds of the tinkling glasses within. But go on,
Ishmael, said I at last don't you hear? get away from before the door
your patched boots are stopping the way. So on I went. I now by instinct
followed the streets that took me waterward, for there, doubtless, were the
cheapest, if not the cheeriest inns. Such dreary streets Blocks of
blackness, not houses, on either hand, and here and there a candle, like a
candle moving about in a tomb. At this hour of the night, of the last day of
the week, that quarter of the town proved all but deserted. But presently I
came to a smoky light proceeding from a low, wide building, the door of which
stood invitingly open. It had a careless look, as if it were meant for the
uses of the public so, entering, the first thing I did was to stumble over
an ashbox in the porch. Ha thought I, ha, as the flying particles almost
choked me, are these ashes from that destroyed city, Gomorrah? But The
Crossed Harpoons, and The SwordFish? this, then, must needs be the sign
of The Trap. However, I picked myself up and hearing a loud voice within,
pushed on and opened a second, interior door. It seemed the great Black
Parliament sitting in Tophet. A hundred black faces turned round in their
rows to peer and beyond, a black Angel of Doom was beating a book in a
pulpit. It was a negro church and the preacher's text was about the
blackness of darkness, and the weeping and wailing and teethgnashing
there. Ha, Ishmael, muttered I, backing out, Wretched entertainment at the
sign of The Trap Moving on, I at last came to a dim sort of light not far
from the docks, and heard a forlorn creaking in the air and looking up,
saw a swinging sign over the door with a white painting upon it, faintly
representing a tall straight jet of misty spray, and these words underneath
The SpouterInn Peter Coffin. Coffin? Spouter? Rather ominous in that
particular connexion, thought I. But it is a common name in Nantucket,
they say, and I suppose this Peter here is an emigrant from there. As the
light looked so dim, and the place, for the time, looked
quiet enough, and the dilapidated little wooden house itself looked as if it
might have been carted here from the ruins of some burnt district, and as the
swinging sign had a povertystricken sort of creak to it, I thought that here
was the very spot for cheap lodgings, and the best of pea coffee. It was a
queer sort of place a gableended old house, one side palsied as it were, and
leaning over sadly. It stood on a sharp bleak corner, where that tempestuous
wind Euroclydon kept up a worse howling than ever it did about poor Paul's
tossed craft. Euroclydon, nevertheless, is a mighty pleasant zephyr to any
one indoors, with his feet on the hob quietly toasting for bed. In judging
of that tempestuous wind called Euroclydon, says an old writer of whose
works I possess the only copy extant  it maketh a marvellous difference,
whether thou lookest out at it from a glass window where the frost is all on
the outside, or whether thou observest it from that sashless window, where
the frost is on both sides, and of which the wight Death is the only
glazier. True enough, thought I, as this passage occurred to my mind old
blackletter, thou reasonest well. Yes, these eyes are windows, and this
body of mine is the house. What a pity they didn't stop up the chinks and the
crannies though, and thrust in a little lint here and there. But it's too
late to make any improvements now. The universe is finished the copestone
is on, and the chips were carted off a million years ago. Poor Lazarus
there, chattering his teeth against the curbstone for his pillow, and shaking
off his tatters with his shiverings, he might plug up both ears with rags,
and put a corncob into his mouth, and yet that would not keep out the
tempestuous Euroclydon. Euroclydon says old Dives, in his red silken
wrapper he had a redder one afterwards pooh, pooh What a fine frosty
night how Orion glitters what northern lights Let them talk of their
oriental summer climes of everlasting conservatories give me the privilege
of making my own summer with my own coals. But what thinks Lazarus? Can he
warm his blue hands by holding them up to the grand northern lights? Would
not Lazarus rather be in Sumatra than here? Would he not far rather lay him
down lengthwise along the line of the equator yea, ye
gods go down to the fiery pit itself, in order to keep out this frost? Now,
that Lazarus should lie stranded there on the curbstone before the door of
Dives, this is more wonderful than that an iceberg should be moored to one of
the Moluccas. Yet Dives himself, he too lives like a Czar in an ice palace
made of frozen sighs, and being a president of a temperance society, he only
drinks the tepid tears of orphans. But no more of this blubbering now, we are
going awhaling, and there is plenty of that yet to come. Let us scrape the
ice from our frosted feet, and see what sort of a place this Spouter may
be.
A day or two passed, and there was great
activity aboard the pequod. not only were the old sails being mended, but
new sails were coming on board, and bolts of canvas, and coils of rigging
in short, everything betokened that the ship's preparations were hurrying to a
close. Captain Peleg seldom or never went ashore, but sat in his wigwam
keeping a sharp lookout upon the hands Bildad did all the purchasing and
providing at the stores and the men employed in the hold and on the rigging
were working till long after nightfall. On the day following Queequeg's
signing the articles, word was given at all the inns where the ship's company
were stopping, that their chests must be on board before night, for there
was no telling how soon the vessel might be sailing. So Queequeg and I got
down our traps, resolving, however, to sleep ashore till the last. But it
seems they always give very long notice in these cases, and the ship did not
sail for several days. But no wonder there was a good deal to be done, and
there
is no telling how many things to be thought of, before the Pequod was fully
equipped. Every one knows what a multitude of things beds, saucepans,
knives and forks, shovels and tongs, napkins, nutcrackers, and what not, are
indispensable to the business of housekeeping. Just so with whaling, which
necessitates a threeyears' housekeeping upon the wide ocean, far from all
grocers, costermongers, doctors, bakers, and bankers. And though this also
holds true of merchant vessels, yet not by any means to the same extent as
with whalemen. For besides the great length of the whaling voyage, the
numerous articles peculiar to the prosecution of the fishery, and the
impossibility of replacing them at the remote harbors usually frequented, it
must be remembered, that of all ships, whaling vessels are the most exposed
to accidents of all kinds, and especially to the destruction and loss of the
very things upon which the success of the voyage most depends. Hence, the
spare boats, spare spars, and spare lines and harpoons, and spare everythings,
almost, but a spare captain and duplicate ship. At the period of our arrival
at the Island, the heaviest storage of the Pequod had been almost completed
comprising her beef, bread, water, fuel, and iron hoops and staves. But, as
before hinted, for some time there was a continual fetching and carrying on
board of divers odds and ends of things, both large and small. Chief among
those who did this fetching and carrying was Captain Bildad's sister, a lean
old lady of a most determined and indefatigable spirit, but withal very
kindhearted, who seemed resolved that, if she could help it, nothing should
be found wanting in the Pequod, after once fairly getting to sea. At one time
she would come on board with a jar of pickles for the steward's pantry
another time with a bunch of quills for the chief mate's desk, where he kept
his log a third time with a roll of flannel for the small of some one's
rheumatic back. Never did any woman better deserve her name, which was
Charity Aunt Charity, as everybody called her. And like a sister of
charity did this charitable Aunt Charity bustle about hither and thither,
ready to turn her hand and heart to anything that promised to yield safety,
comfort, and consolation to all on board
a ship in which her beloved brother Bildad was concerned, and in which she
herself owned a score or two of wellsaved dollars. But it was startling to
see this excellent hearted Quakeress coming on board, as she did the last
day, with a long oilladle in one hand, and a still longer whaling lance in
the other. Nor was Bildad himself nor Captain Peleg at all backward. As for
Bildad, he carried about with him a long list of the articles needed, and at
every fresh arrival, down went his mark opposite that article upon the paper.
Every once and a while Peleg came hobbling out of his whalebone den, roaring
at the men down the hatchways, roaring up to the riggers at the masthead,
and then concluded by roaring back into his wigwam. During these days of
preparation, Queequeg and I often visited the craft, and as often I asked
about Captain Ahab, and how he was, and when he was going to come on board
his ship. To these questions they would answer, that he was getting better
and better, and was expected aboard every day meantime, the two Captains,
Peleg and Bildad, could attend to everything necessary to fit the vessel for
the voyage. If I had been downright honest with myself, I would have seen
very plainly in my heart that I did but half fancy being committed this way to
so long a voyage, without once laying my eyes on the man who was to be the
absolute dictator of it, so soon as the ship sailed out upon the open sea.
But when a man suspects any wrong, it sometimes happens that if he be
already involved in the matter, he insensibly strives to cover up his
suspicions even from himself. And much this way it was with me. I said
nothing, and tried to think nothing. At last it was given out that some time
next day the ship would certainly sail. So next morning, Queequeg and I took
a very early start.
It was nearly six o'clock, but only grey
imperfect misty dawn, when we drew nigh the wharf. There are some sailors
running ahead there, if I see right, said I to Queequeg, it can't be
shadows she's off by sunrise, I guess come on Avast cried a voice,
whose owner at the same time coming close behind us, laid a hand upon both our
shoulders, and then insinuating himself between us, stood stooping forward a
little, in the uncertain twilight, strangely peering from Queequeg to me. It
was Elijah. Going aboard? Hands off, will you, said I. Lookee here,
said Queequeg, shaking himself, go 'way Aint going aboard, then? Yes,
we are, said I, but what business is that of yours? Do you know, Mr.
Elijah, that I consider you a little impertinent? No, no, no I wasn't
aware of that, said elijah, slowly and wonderingly looking from me to
Queequeg, with the most unaccountable glances. Elijah, said I, you will
oblige my friend and me by withdrawing. We are going to the Indian and Pacific
Oceans, and would prefer not to be detained. Ye be, be ye? Coming back
afore breakfast? He's cracked, Queequeg, said I, come on. Holloa
cried stationary Elijah, hailing us when we had removed a few paces. Never
mind him, said I, Queequeg, come on. But he stole up to us again, and
suddenly clapping his hand on my shoulder, said  Did ye see anything looking
like men going towards that ship a while ago? Struck by this plain
matteroffact question, I answered, saying,
Yes, I thought I did see four or five men but it was too dim to be sure.
Very dim, very dim, said Elijah. Morning to ye. Once more we quitted him
but once more he came softly after us and touching my shoulder again, said,
See if you can find 'em now, will ye? Find who? Morning to ye morning
to ye he rejoined, again moving off. Oh I was going to warn ye against
but never mind, never mind it's all one, all in the family too sharp
frost this morning, ain't it? Good bye to ye. Shan't see ye again very
soon, I guess unless it's before the Grand Jury. And with these cracked
words he finally departed, leaving me, for the moment, in no small wonderment
at his frantic impudence. At last, stepping on board the Pequod, we found
everything in profound quiet, not a soul moving. The cabin entrance was
locked within the hatches were all on, and lumbered with coils of rigging.
Going forward to the forecastle, we found the slide of the scuttle open.
Seeing a light, we went down, and found only an old rigger there, wrapped in a
tattered peajacket. He was thrown at whole length upon two chests, his face
downwards and inclosed in his folded arms. The profoundest slumber slept
upon him. Those sailors we saw, Queequeg, where can they have gone to?
said I, looking dubiously at the sleeper. But it seemed that, when on the
wharf, Queequeg had not at all noticed what I now alluded to hence I would
have thought myself to have been optically deceived in that matter, were it
not for Elijah's otherwise inexplicable question. But I beat the thing down
and again marking the sleeper, jocularly hinted to Queequeg that perhaps we
had best sit up with the body telling him to establish himself accordingly.
He put his hand upon the sleeper's rear, as though feeling if it was soft
enough and then, without more ado, sat quietly down there. Gracious
Queequeg, don't sit there, said I. Oh perry dood seat, said Queequeg, my
country way won't hurt him face. Face said I, call that his face? very
benevolent countenance
then but how hard he breathes, he's heaving himself get off, Queequeg,
you are heavy, it's grinding the face of the poor. Get off, Queequeg Look,
he'll twitch you off soon. I wonder he don't wake. Queequeg removed himself
to just beyond the head of the sleeper, and lighted his tomahawk pipe. I sat
at the feet. We kept the pipe passing over the sleeper, from one to the
other. Meanwhile, upon questioning him in his broken fashion, Queequeg gave
me to understand that, in his land, owing to the absence of settees and sofas
of all sorts, the king, chiefs, and great people generally, were in the
custom of fattening some of the lower orders for ottomans and to furnish a
house comfortably in that respect, you had only to buy up eight or ten lazy
fellows, and lay them round in the piers and alcoves. Besides, it was very
convenient on an excursion much better than those gardenchairs which are
convertible into walkingsticks upon occasion, a chief calling his attendant,
and desiring him to make a settee of himself under a spreading tree, perhaps
in some damp marshy place. While narrating these things, every time Queequeg
received the tomahawk from me, he flourished the hatchetside of it over the
sleeper's head. What's that for, Queequeg? Perry easy, kille oh perry
easy He was going on with some wild reminiscences about his tomahawkpipe,
which, it seemed, had in its two uses both brained his foes and soothed his
soul, when we were directly attracted to the sleeping rigger. The strong
vapor now completely filling the contracted hole, it began to tell upon him.
He breathed with a sort of muffledness then seemed troubled in the nose
then revolved over once or twice then sat up and rubbed his eyes. Holloa
he breathed at last, who be ye smokers? Shipped men, answered I, when
does she sail? Aye, aye, ye are going in her, be ye? She sails today.
The Captain came aboard last night. What Captain? Ahab? Who but him
indeed?
I was going to ask him some further questions concerning Ahab, when we heard a
noise on deck. Halloa Starbuck's astir, said the rigger. He's a lively
chief mate, that good man, and a pious but all alive now, I must turn
to. And so saying he went on deck, and we followed. It was now clear
sunrise. Soon the crew came on board in twos and threes the riggers
bestirred themselves the mates were actively engaged and several of the
shore people were busy in bringing various last things on board. Meanwhile
Captain Ahab remained invisibly enshrined within his cabin.
At length, towards noon, upon the
final dismissal of the ship's riggers, and after the Pequod had been hauled
out from the wharf, and after the everthoughtful Charity had come off in a
whaleboat, with her last gift a nightcap for Stubb, the second mate, her
brotherinlaw, and a spare bible for the steward  after all this, the two
captains, Peleg and Bildad, issued from the cabin, and turning to the chief
mate, Peleg said Now, Mr. Starbuck, are you sure everything is right?
Captain Ahab is all ready just spoke to him nothing more to be got from
shore, eh? Well, call all hands, then. Muster 'em aft here blast 'em No
need of profane words, however great the hurry, Peleg, said Bildad, but
away with thee, friend Starbuck, and do our bidding. How now Here upon the
very point of starting for the voyage, Captain Peleg and Captain Bildad were
going it with a high hand on the quarterdeck, just as if they were to be
jointcommanders at sea, as well as to all appearances in port. And, as for
Captain Ahab, no sign of him was yet to be seen Only, they said he was in the
cabin. But then, the idea was,
that his presence was by no means necessary in getting the ship under weigh,
and steering her well out to sea. Indeed, as that was not at all his proper
business, but the pilot's and as he was not yet completely recovered so
they said therefore, Captain Ahab stayed below. And all this seemed natural
enough especially as in the merchant service many captains never show
themselves on deck for a considerable time after heaving up the anchor, but
remain over the cabin table, having a farewell merrymaking with their shore
friends, before they quit the ship for good with the pilot. But there was
not much chance to think over the matter, for Captain Peleg was now all
alive. He seemed to do most of the talking and commanding, and not Bildad.
Aft here, ye sons of bachelors, he cried, as the sailors lingered at the
mainmast. Mr. Starbuck, drive 'em aft. Strike the tent there was the
next order. As I hinted before, this whalebone marquee was never pitched
except in port and on board the Pequod, for thirty years, the order to
strike the tent was well known to be the next thing to heaving up the anchor.
Man the capstan Blood and thunder jump was the next command, and the
crew sprang for the handspikes. Now, in getting under weigh, the station
generally occupied by the pilot is the forward part of the ship. And here
Bildad, who, with Peleg, be it known, in addition to his other offices, was
one of the licensed pilots of the port he being suspected to have got himself
made a pilot in order to save the Nantucket pilotfee to all the ships he was
concerned in, for he never piloted any other craft Bildad, I say, might now
be seen actively engaged in looking over the bows for the approaching anchor,
and at intervals singing what seemed a dismal stave of psalmody, to cheer the
hands at the windlass, who roared forth some sort of a chorus about the girls
in Booble Alley, with hearty good will. Nevertheless, not three days
previous, Bildad had told them that no profane songs would be allowed on
board the Pequod, particularly in getting under weigh and Charity, his
sister, had placed a small choice copy of Watts in each seaman's berth.
Meantime, overseeing the other part of the ship, Captain Peleg
ripped and swore astern in the most frightful manner. I almost thought he
would sink the ship before the anchor could be got up involuntarily I paused
on my handspike, and told Queequeg to do the same, thinking of the perils we
both ran, in starting on the voyage with such a devil for a pilot. I was
comforting myself, however, with the thought that in pious Bildad might be
found some salvation, spite of his seven hundred and seventyseventh lay
when I felt a sudden sharp poke in my rear, and turning round, was horrified
at the apparition of Captain Peleg in the act of withdrawing his leg from my
immediate vicinity. That was my first kick. Is that the way they heave in
the marchant service? he roared. Spring, thou sheephead spring, and
break thy backbone why don't ye spring, i say, all of yespring Quohog
spring, thou chap with the red whiskers spring there, Scotchcap spring,
thou green pants. Spring, I say, all of ye, and spring your eyes out And
so saying, he moved along the windlass, here and there using his leg very
freely, while imperturbable Bildad kept leading off with his psalmody. Thinks
I, Captain Peleg must have been drinking something today. At last the anchor
was up, the sails were set, and off we glided. It was a short, cold
Christmas and as the short northern day merged into night, we found
ourselves almost broad upon the wintry ocean, whose freezing spray cased us
in ice, as in polished armor. The long rows of teeth on the bulwarks
glistened in the moonlight and like the white ivory tusks of some huge
elephant, vast curving icicles depended from the bows. Lank Bildad, as pilot,
headed the first watch, and ever and anon, as the old craft deep dived into
the green seas, and sent the shivering frost all over her, and the winds
howled, and the cordage rang, his steady notes were heard,  Sweet fields
beyond the swelling flood, Stand dressed in living green. So to the Jews old
Canaan stood, While Jordan rolled between. Never did those sweet words sound
more sweetly to me than then. They were full of hope and fruition. Spite of
this frigid
winter night in the boisterous Atlantic, spite of my wet feet and wetter
jacket, there was yet, it then seemed to me, many a pleasant haven in
store and meads and glades so eternally vernal, that the grass shot up by
the spring, untrodden, unwilted, remains at midsummer. At last we gained such
an offing, that the two pilots were needed no longer. The stout sailboat
that had accompanied us began ranging alongside. It was curious and not
unpleasing, how Peleg and Bildad were affected at this juncture, especially
Captain Bildad. For loath to depart, yet very loath to leave, for good, a
ship bound on so long and perilous a voyage beyond both stormy Capes a ship
in which some thousands of his hard earned dollars were invested a ship, in
which an old shipmate sailed as captain a man almost as old as he, once
more starting to encounter all the terrors of the pitiless jaw loath to say
goodbye to a thing so every way brimful of every interest to him, poor old
Bildad lingered long paced the deck with anxious strides" ran down into the
cabin to speak another farewell word there again came on deck, and looked
to windward looked towards the wide and endless waters, only bounded by the
faroff unseen Eastern Continents looked towards the land, looked aloft
looked right and left looked everywhere and nowhere and at last,
mechanically coiling a rope upon its pin, convulsively grasped stout Peleg by
the hand, and holding up a lantern, for a moment stood gazing heroically in
his face, as much as to say, Nevertheless, friend Peleg, I can stand it
yes, I can. As for Peleg himself, he took it more like a philosopher but
for all his philosophy, there was a tear twinkling in his eye, when the
lantern came too near. And he, too, did not a little run from cabin to deck
now a word below, and now a word with Starbuck, the chief mate. But, at
last, he turned to his comrade, with a final sort of look about him,  Captain
Bildad come, old shipmate, we must go. Back the mainyard there Boat ahoy
Stand by to come close alongside, now Careful, careful come, Bildad, boy
say your last. Luck to ye, Starbuck luck to ye, Mr. Stubb luck to ye,
Mr. Flask goodbye, and good luck to ye all and this day three years I'll
have a hot supper smoking for ye in old Nantucket. Hurrah and away God
bless ye, and have ye in His holy keeping, men, murmured old Bildad, almost
incoherently. I hope ye'll have fine weather now, so that Captain Ahab may
soon be moving among ye a pleasant sun is all he needs, and ye'll have
plenty of them in the tropic voyage ye go. Be careful in the hunt, ye mates.
Don't stave the boats needlessly, ye harpooneers good white cedar plank is
raised full three per cent. within the year. Don't forget your prayers,
either. Mr Starbuck, mind that cooper don't waste the spare staves. Oh the
sailneedles are in the green locker Don't whale it too much a' Lord's days,
men but don't miss a fair chance either, that's rejecting Heaven's good
gifts. Have an eye to the molasses tierce, Mr. Stubb it was a little leaky,
I thought. If ye touch at the islands, Mr. Flask, beware of fornication.
Goodbye, goodbye Don't keep that cheese too long down in the hold, Mr.
Starbuck it'll spoil. Be careful with the butter twenty cents the pound it
was, and mind ye, if Come, come, Captain Bildad stop palavering, away
and with that, Peleg hurried him over the side, and both dropt into the
boat. Ship and boat diverged the cold, damp night breeze blew between a
screaming gull flew overhead the two hulls wildly rolled we gave three
heavyhearted cheers, and blindly plunged like fate into the lone Atlantic.
Some chapters back, one Bulkington was
spoken of, a tall, newlanded mariner, encountered in New Bedford at the inn.
When on that shivering winter's night, the Pequod thrust her vindictive bows
into the cold malicious waves, who should I see
standing at her helm but Bulkington I looked with sympathetic awe and
fearfulness upon the man, who in midwinter just landed from a four years'
dangerous voyage, could so unrestingly push off again for still another
tempestuous term. The land seemed scorching to his feet. Wonderfullest
things are ever the unmentionable deep memories yield no epitaphs this
sixinch chapter is the stoneless grave of Bulkington. Let me only say that
it fared with him as with the stormtossed ship, that miserably drives along
the leeward land. The port would fain give succor the port is pitiful in
the port is safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends,
all that's kind to our mortalities. But in that gale, the port, the land, is
that ship's direst jeopardy she must fly all hospitality one touch of
land, though it but graze the keel, would make her shudder through and
through. With all her might she crowds all sail off shore in so doing,
fights 'gainst the very winds that fain would blow her homeward seeks all
the lashed sea's landlessness again for refuge's sake forlornly rushing into
peril her only friend her bitterest foe Know ye, now, Bulkington?
Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth that all deep,
earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open
independence of her sea while the wildest winds of heaven and earth
conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore? But as in landlessness
alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God so, better is
it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the
lee, even if that were safety For wormlike, then, oh who would craven
crawl to land Terrors of the terrible is all this agony so vain? Take
heart, take heart, O Bulkington Bear thee grimly, demigod Up from the spray
of thy oceanperishing straight up, leaps thy apotheosis
As Queequeg and I are now fairly embarked
in this business of whaling and as this business of whaling has somehow come
to be regarded among landsmen as a rather unpoetical and disreputable
pursuit therefore, I am all anxiety to convince ye, ye landsmen, of the
injustice hereby done to us hunters of whales. In the first place, it may be
deemed almost superfluous to establish the fact, that among people at large,
the business of whaling is not accounted on a level with what are called the
liberal professions. If a stranger were introduced into any miscellaneous
metropolitan society, it would but slightly advance the general opinion of
his merits, were he presented to the company as a harpooneer, say and if in
emulation of the naval officers he should append the initials S. W. F. Sperm
Whale Fishery to his visiting card, such a procedure would be deemed
preeminently presuming and ridiculous. Doubtless one leading reason why the
world declines honoring us whalemen, is this they think that, at best, our
vocation amounts to a butchering sort of business and that when actively
engaged therein, we are surrounded by all manner of defilements. Butchers we
are, that is true. But butchers, also, and butchers of the bloodiest badge
have been all Martial Commanders whom the world invariably delights to honor.
And as for the matter of the alleged uncleanliness of our business, ye shall
soon be initiated into certain facts hitherto pretty generally unknown, and
which, upon the whole, will triumphantly plant the sperm whaleship at least
among the cleanliest things of this tidy earth. But even granting the charge
in question to be true what disordered slippery decks of a whaleship are
comparable to the unspeakable carrion of those battlefields from which so
many soldiers return to drink in all ladies' plaudits? And if the
idea of peril so much enhances the popular conceit of the soldier's
profession let me assure ye that many a veteran who has freely marched up to
a battery, would quickly recoil at the apparition of the sperm whale's vast
tail, fanning into eddies the air over his head. For what are the
comprehensible terrors of man compared with the interlinked terrors and
wonders of God But, though the world scouts at us whale hunters, yet does it
unwittingly pay us the profoundest homage yea, an allabounding adoration
for almost all the tapers, lamps, and candles that burn round the globe,
burn, as before so many shrines, to our glory But look at this matter in
other lights weigh it in all sorts of scales see what we whalemen are, and
have been. Why did the Dutch in DeWitt's time have admirals of their whaling
fleets? Why did Louis XVI. of France, at his own personal expense, fit out
whaling ships from Dunkirk, and politely invite to that town some score or two
of families from our own island of Nantucket? Why did Britain between the
years
and
pay to her whalemen in bounties upwards of ,,
pounds? And lastly, how comes it that we whalemen of America now outnumber
all the rest of the banded whalemen in the world sail a navy of upwards of
seven hundred vessels manned by eighteen thousand men yearly consuming ,, of dollars the ships worth, at the time of sailing, ,,
dollars and every year importing into our harbors a well reaped harvest of ,, dollars. How comes all this, if there be not something puissant in
whaling? But this is not the half look again. I freely assert, that the
cosmopolite philosopher cannot, for his life, point out one single peaceful
influence, which within the last sixty years has operated more potentially
upon the whole broad world, taken in one aggregate, than the high and mighty
business of whaling. One way and another, it has begotten events so
remarkable in themselves, and so continuously momentous in their sequential
issues, that whaling may well be regarded as that Egyptian mother, who bore
offspring themselves pregnant from her womb. It would be a hopeless, endless
task to catalogue all these things. Let a handful suffice. For many
years past the whaleship has been the pioneer in ferreting out the remotest
and least known parts of the earth. She has explored seas and archipelagoes
which had no chart, where no Cook or Vancouver had ever sailed. If American
and european menofwar now peacefully ride in once savage harbors, let them
fire salutes to the honor and glory of the whaleship, which originally showed
them the way, and first interpreted between them and the savages. They may
celebrate as they will the heroes of Exploring Expeditions, your Cookes,
Your Krusensterns but I say that scores of anonymous Captains have sailed
out of Nantucket, that were as great, and greater than your Cooke and your
Krusenstern. For in their succorless emptyhandedness, they, in the
heathenish sharked waters, and by the beaches of unrecorded, javelin islands,
battled with virgin wonders and terrors that Cooke with all his marines and
muskets would not willingly have dared. All that is made such a flourish of
in the old South Sea Voyages, those things were but the lifetime commonplaces
of our heroic Nantucketers. Often, adventures which Vancouver dedicates three
chapters to, these men accounted unworthy of being set down in the ship's
common log. Ah, the world Oh, the world Until the whale fishery rounded
Cape Horn, no commerce but colonial, scarcely any intercourse but colonial,
was carried on between Europe and the long line of the opulent Spanish
provinces on the Pacific coast. It was the whaleman who first broke through
the jealous policy of the Spanish crown, touching those colonies and, if
space permitted, it might be distinctly shown how from those whalemen at last
eventuated the liberation of Peru, Chili, and Bolivia from the yoke of Old
Spain, and the establishment of the eternal democracy in those parts. That
great America on the other side of the sphere, Australia, was given to the
enlightened world by the whaleman. After its first blunderborn discovery by
a Dutchman, all other ships long shunned those shores as pestiferously
barbarous but the whaleship touched there. The whaleship is the true
mother of that now mighty colony. Moreover, in the infancy of the first
Australian settlement, the emigrants were several times saved
from starvation by the benevolent biscuit of the whaleship luckily dropping
an anchor in their waters. The uncounted isles of all Polynesia confess the
same truth, and do commercial homage to the whaleship, that cleared the way
for the missionary and the merchant, and in many cases carried the primitive
missionaries to their first destinations. If that doublebolted land, Japan,
is ever to become hospitable, it is the whaleship alone to whom the credit
will be due for already she is on the threshold. But if, in the face of all
this, you still declare that whaling has no aesthetically noble associations
connected with it, then am I ready to shiver fifty lances with you there,
and unhorse you with a split helmet every time. The whale has no famous
author, and whaling no famous chronicler, you will say. The whale no
famous author, and whaling no famous chronicler? Who wrote the first
account of our Leviathan? Who but mighty Job And who composed the first
narrative of a whalingvoyage? Who, but no less a prince than Alfred the
Great, who, with his own royal pen, took down the words from Other, the
Norwegian whalehunter of those times And who pronounced our glowing eulogy
in Parliament? Who, but Edmund Burke True enough, but then whalemen
themselves are poor devils they have no good blood in their veins. No good
blood in their veins? They have something better than royal blood there.
The grandmother of Benjamin Franklin was Mary Morrel" afterwards, by marriage,
Mary Folger, one of the old settlers of Nantucket, and the ancestress to a
long line of Folgers and harpooneers all kith and kin to noble Benjamin
this day darting the barbed iron from one side of the world to the other.
Good again but then all confess that somehow whaling is not respectable.
Whaling not respectable? Whaling is imperial By old English statutory
law, the whale is declared a royal fish.
Oh, that's only nominal The whale himself has never figured in any grand
imposing way. The whale never figured in any grand imposing way? In
one of the mighty triumphs given to a Roman general upon his entering the
world's capital, the bones of a whale, brought all the way from the Syrian
coast, were the most conspicuous object in the cymballed procession. Grant
it, since you cite it but, say what you will, there is no real dignity in
whaling. No dignity in whaling? The dignity of our calling the very
heavens attest. Cetus is a constellation in the South No more Drive down
your hat in presence of the Czar, and take it off to Queequeg No more I
know a man that, in his lifetime, has taken three hundred and fifty whales. I
account that man more honorable than that great captain of antiquity who
boasted of taking as many walled towns. And, as for me, if, by any
possibility, there be any as yet undiscovered prime thing in me if I shall
ever deserve any real repute in that small but high hushed world which I might
not be unreasonably ambitious of if hereafter I shall do anything that,
upon the whole, a man might rather have done than to have left undone if, at
my death, my executors, or more properly my creditors, find any precious MSS.
in my desk, then here I prospectively ascribe all the honor and the glory to
whaling for a whaleship was my Yale College and my Harvard.
See subsequent chapters for something more on this head.
See subsequent chapters for something more on this head.
In behalf of the dignity of whaling, I
would fain advance naught but substantiated facts. But after embattling his
facts, an advocate who should wholly suppress a not unreasonable
surmise, which might tell eloquently upon his cause such an advocate, would
he not be blameworthy? It is well known that at the coronation of kings and
queens, even modern ones, a certain curious process of seasoning them for
their functions is gone through. There is a saltcellar of state, so called,
and there may be a caster of state. How they use the salt, precisely who
knows? Certain I am, however, that a king's head is solemnly oiled at his
coronation, even as a head of salad. Can it be, though, that they anoint it
with a view of making its interior run well, as they anoint machinery? Much
might be ruminated here, concerning the essential dignity of this regal
process, because in common life we esteem but meanly and contemptibly a
fellow who anoints his hair, and palpably smells of that anointing. In truth,
a mature man who uses hairoil, unless medicinally, that man has probably got
a quoggy spot in him somewhere. As a general rule, he can't amount to much in
his totality. But the only thing to be considered here, is this what kind
of oil is used at coronations? Certainly it cannot be olive oil, nor macassar
oil, nor castor oil, nor bear's oil, nor train oil, nor codliver oil. What
then can it possibly be, but sperm oil in its unmanufactured, unpolluted
state, the sweetest of all oils? Think of that, ye loyal Britons we
whalemen supply your kings and queens with coronation stuff
The chief mate of the Pequod was
Starbuck, a native of Nantucket, and a Quaker by descent. He was a long,
earnest man, and though born on an icy coast, seemed well adapted to endure
hot latitudes, his flesh being hard as twicebaked biscuit. Transported to
the Indies, his live blood would not spoil like bottled
ale. He must have been born in some time of general drought and famine, or
upon one of those fast days for which his state is famous. Only some thirty
arid summers had he seen those summers had dried up all his physical
superfluousness. But this, his thinness, so to speak, seemed no more the
token of wasting anxieties and cares, than it seemed the indication of any
bodily blight. It was merely the condensation of the man. He was by no
means illlooking quite the contrary. His pure tight skin was an excellent
fit and closely wrapped up in it, and embalmed with inner health and
strength, like a revivified Egyptian, this Starbuck seemed prepared to endure
for long ages to come, and to endure always, as now for be it Polar snow or
torrid sun, like a patent chronometer, his interior vitality was warranted to
do well in all climates. Looking into his eyes, you seemed to see there the
yet lingering images of those thousandfold perils he had calmly confronted
through life. A staid, steadfast man, whose life for the most part was a
telling pantomime of action, and not a tame chapter of sounds. Yet, for all
his hardy sobriety and fortitude, there were certain qualities in him which
at times affected, and in some cases seemed well nigh to overbalance all the
rest. Uncommonly conscientious for a seaman, and endued with a deep natural
reverence, the wild watery loneliness of his life did therefore strongly
incline him to superstition but to that sort of superstition, which in some
organizations seems rather to spring, somehow, from intelligence than from
ignorance. Outward portents and inward presentiments were his. And if at
times these things bent the welded iron of his soul, much more did his
faraway domestic memories of his young Cape wife and child, tend to bend him
still more from the original ruggedness of his nature, and open him still
further to those latent influences which, in some honesthearted men,
restrain the gush of daredevil daring, so often evinced by others in the more
perilous vicissitudes of the fishery. I will have no man in my boat, said
starbuck, who is not afraid of a whale. by this, he seemed to mean, not only
that the most reliable and useful courage was that which arises from the fair
estimation of the encountered peril, but that an utterly fearless man is a
far more dangerous comrade than a coward.
Aye, aye, said Stubb, the second mate, Starbuck, there, is as careful a
man as you'll find anywhere in this fishery. But we shall ere long see what
that word careful precisely means when used by a man like Stubb, or almost
any other whale hunter. Starbuck was no crusader after perils in him
courage was not a sentiment but a thing simply useful to him, and always
at hand upon all mortally practical occasions. Besides, he thought, perhaps,
that in this business of whaling, courage was one of the great staple outfits
of the ship, like her beef and her bread, and not to be foolishly wasted.
Wherefore he had no fancy for lowering for whales after sundown nor for
persisting in fighting a fish that too much persisted in fighting him. For,
thought Starbuck, I am here in this critical ocean to kill whales for my
living, and not to be killed by them for theirs and that hundreds of men had
been so killed Starbuck well knew. What doom was his own father's? Where, in
the bottomless deeps, could he find the torn limbs of his brother? With
memories like these in him, and, moreover, given to a certain
superstitiousness, as has been said the courage of this Starbuck which
could, nevertheless, still flourish, must indeed have been extreme. But it
was not in reasonable nature that a man so organized, and with such terrible
experiences and remembrances as he had it was not in nature that these
things should fail in latently engendering an element in him, which, under
suitable circumstances, would break out from its confinement, and burn all his
courage up. And brave as he might be, it was that sort of bravery chiefly,
visible in some intrepid men, which, while generally abiding firm in the
conflict with seas, or winds, or whales, or any of the ordinary irrational
horrors of the world, yet cannot withstand those more terrific, because more
spiritual terrors, which sometimes menace you from the concentrating brow of
an enraged and mighty man. But were the coming narrative to reveal, in any
instance, the complete abasement of poor Starbuck's fortitude, scarce might I
have the heart to write it for it is a thing most sorrowful, nay shocking,
to expose the fall of valor in the soul. Men may seem detestable as joint
stockcompanies and nations knaves,
fools, and murderers there may be men may have mean and meagre faces but
man, in the ideal, is so noble and so sparkling, such a grand and glowing
creature, that over any ignominious blemish in him all his fellows should run
to throw their costliest robes. That immaculate manliness we feel within
ourselves, so far within us, that it remains intact though all the outer
character seem gone bleeds with keenest anguish at the undraped spectacle
of a valorruined man. Nor can piety itself, at such a shameful sight,
completely stifle her upbraidings against the permitting stars. But this
august dignity I treat of, is not the dignity of kings and robes, but that
abounding dignity which has no robed investiture. Thou shalt see it shining
in the arm that wields a pick or drives a spike that democratic dignity
which, on all hands, radiates without end from God Himself The great God
absolute The centre and circumference of all democracy His omnipresence,
our divine equality If, then, to meanest mariners, and renegades and
castaways, I shall hereafter ascribe high qualities, though dark weave round
them tragic graces if even the most mournful, perchance the most abased,
among them all, shall at times lift himself to the exalted mounts if I shall
touch that workman's arm with some ethereal light if I shall spread a
rainbow over his disastrous set of sun then against all mortal critics bear
me out in it, thou just spirit of equality, which hast spread one royal
mantle of humanity over all my kind Bear me out in it, thou great democratic
God who didst not refuse to the swart convict, Bunyan, the pale, poetic
pearl Thou who didst clothe with doubly hammered leaves of finest gold, the
stumped and paupered arm of old Cervantes Thou who didst pick up Andrew
Jackson from the pebbles who didst hurl him upon a warhorse who didst
thunder him higher than a throne Thou who, in all Thy mighty, earthly
marchings, ever cullest Thy selectest champions from the kingly commons bear
me out in it, O God
Stubb was the second mate. He
was a native of Cape Cod and hence, according to local usage, was called a
CapeCodman. A happygolucky neither craven nor valiant taking perils as
they came with an indifferent air and while engaged in the most imminent
crisis of the chase, toiling away, calm and collected as a journeyman joiner
engaged for the year. Goodhumored, easy, and careless, he presided over his
whaleboat as if the most deadly encounter were but a dinner, and his crew
all invited guests. He was as particular about the comfortable arrangement of
his part of the boat, as an old stagedriver is about the snugness of his box.
When close to the whale, in the very deathlock of the fight, he handled his
unpitying lance coolly and offhandedly, as a whistling tinker his hammer.
He would hum over his old rigadig tunes while flank and flank with the most
exasperated monster. Long usage had, for this Stubb, converted the jaws of
death into an easy chair. What he thought of death itself, there is no
telling. Whether he ever thought of it at all, might be a question but, if
he ever did chance to cast his mind that way after a comfortable dinner, no
doubt, like a good sailor, he took it to be a sort of call of the watch to
tumble aloft, and bestir themselves there, about something which he would find
out when he obeyed the order, and not sooner. What, perhaps, with other
things, made Stubb such an easygoing, unfearing man, so cheerily trudging off
with the burden of life in a world full of grave peddlers, all bowed to the
ground with their packs what helped to bring about that almost impious
goodhumor of his that thing must have been his pipe. For, like his nose,
his short, black little pipe was one of the regular features of his face. You
would almost as soon have expected him to turn out of his bunk without his
nose as without his pipe.
He kept a whole row of pipes there ready loaded, stuck in a rack, within easy
reach of his hand and, whenever he turned in, he smoked them all out in
succession, lighting one from the other to the end of the chapter then
loading them again to be in readiness anew. For, when Stubb dressed, instead
of first putting his legs into his trowsers, he put his pipe into his mouth.
I say this continual smoking must have been one cause, at least, of his
peculiar disposition for every one knows that this earthly air, whether
ashore or afloat, is terribly infected with the nameless miseries of the
numberless mortals who have died exhaling it and as in time of the cholera,
some people go about with a camphorated handkerchief to their mouths so,
likewise, against all mortal tribulations, Stubb's tobacco smoke might have
operated as a sort of disinfecting agent. The third mate was Flask, a native
of Tisbury, in Martha's Vineyard. A short, stout, ruddy young fellow, very
pugnacious concerning whales, who somehow seemed to think that the great
Leviathans had personally and hereditarily affronted him and therefore it
was a sort of point of honor with him, to destroy them whenever encountered.
So utterly lost was he to all sense of reverence for the many marvels of their
majestic bulk and mystic ways and so dead to anything like an apprehension
of any possible danger from encountering them that in his poor opinion, the
wondrous whale was but a species of magnified mouse, or at least waterrat,
requiring only a little circumvention and some small application of time and
trouble in order to kill and boil. This ignorant, unconscious fearlessness of
his made him a little waggish in the matter of whales he followed these
fish for the fun of it and a three years' voyage round Cape Horn was only a
jolly joke that lasted that length of time. As a carpenter's nails are
divided into wrought nails and cut nails so mankind may be similarly divided.
Little Flask was one of the wrought ones made to clinch tight and last
long. They called him KingPost on board of the Pequod because, in form,
he could be well likened to the short, square timber known by that name in
Arctic whalers and which by the means of many radiating side timbers
inserted in it, served to brace the ship against the icy concussions of those
battering seas. Now these three mates Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask, were
momentous men. They it was who by universal prescription commanded three of
the Pequod's boats as headsmen. In that grand order of battle in which
Captain Ahab would probably marshal his forces to descend on the whales,
these three headsmen were as captains of companies. Or, being armed with
their long keen whaling spears, they were as a picked trio of lancers even
as the harpooneers were flingers of javelins. And since in this famous
fishery, each mate or headsman, like a Gothic Knight of old, is always
accompanied by his boatsteerer or harpooneer, who in certain conjunctures
provides him with a fresh lance, when the former one has been badly twisted,
or elbowed in the assault and moreover, as there generally subsists between
the two, a close intimacy and friendliness it is therefore but meet, that in
this place we set down who the Pequod's harpooneers were, and to what
headsman each of them belonged. first of all was queequeg, whom Starbuck, the
chief mate, had selected for his squire. But Queequeg is already known. Next
was Tashtego, an unmixed Indian from Gay Head, the most westerly promontory of
Martha's Vineyard, where there still exists the last remnant of a village of
red men, which has long supplied the neighboring island of Nantucket with
many of her most daring harpooneers. In the fishery, they usually go by the
generic name of GayHeaders. Tashtego's long, lean, sable hair, his high
cheek bones, and black rounding eyes for an Indian, Oriental in their
largeness, but Antarctic in their glittering expression all this
sufficiently proclaimed him an inheritor of the unvitiated blood of those
proud warrior hunters, who, in quest of the great New England moose, had
scoured, bow in hand, the aboriginal forests of the main. But no longer
snuffing in the trail of the wild beasts of the woodland, Tashtego now
hunted in the wake of the great whales of the sea the unerring harpoon of
the son fitly replacing the infallible arrow of the sires. To look at the
tawny brawn of his lithe snaky limbs, you would almost have credited the
superstitions of some of the earlier Puritans, and half believed this wild
Indian to be a son of the Prince of the Powers of the Air. Tashtego was Stubb
the second mate's squire. Third among the harpooneers was Daggoo, a gigantic,
coalblack
negrosavage, with a lionlike tread an Ahasuerus to behold. Suspended from
his ears were two golden hoops, so large that the sailors called them
ringbolts, and would talk of securing the topsail halyards to them. In his
youth Daggoo had voluntarily shipped on board of a whaler, lying in a lonely
bay on his native coast. And never having been anywhere in the world but in
Africa, Nantucket, and the pagan harbors most frequented by whalemen and
having now led for many years the bold life of the fishery in the ships of
owners uncommonly heedful of what manner of men they shipped daggoo retained
all his barbaric virtues, and erect as a giraffe, moved about the decks in
all the pomp of six feet five in his socks. There was a corporeal humility
in looking up at him and a white man standing before him seemed a white flag
come to beg truce of a fortress. Curious to tell, this imperial negro,
Ahasuerus Daggoo, was the Squire of little Flask, who looked like a chessman
beside him. As for the residue of the Pequod's company, be it said, that at
the present day not one in two of the many thousand men before the mast
employed in the American whale fishery, are Americans born, though pretty
nearly all the officers are. Herein it is the same with the American whale
fishery as with the American army and military and merchant navies, and the
engineering forces employed in the construction of the American Canals and
Railroads. The same, I say, because in all these cases the native American
liberally provides the brains, the rest of the world as generously supplying
the muscles. No small number of these whaling seamen belong to the Azores,
where the outward bound Nantucket whalers frequently touch to augment their
crews from the hardy peasants of those rocky shores. In like manner, the
Greenland whalers sailing out of Hull or London, put in at the Shetland
Islands, to receive the full complement of their crew. Upon the passage
homewards, they drop them there again. How it is, there is no telling, but
Islanders seem to make the best whalemen. They were nearly all Islanders in
the Pequod, Isolatoes too, I call such, not acknowledging the common
continent of men, but each Isolato living on a separate continent of his
own. Yet now, federated along one keel, what a set these Isolatoes were An
Anacharsis Clootz deputation from all the
isles of the sea, and all the ends of the earth, accompanying Old Ahab in the
pequod to lay the world's grievances before that bar from which not very many
of them ever come back. Black Little Pip he never did oh, no he went
before. Poor Alabama boy On the grim Pequod's forecastle, ye shall ere
long see him, beating his tambourine prelusive of the eternal time, when
sent for, to the great quarterdeck on high, he was bid strike in with
angels, and beat his tambourine in glory called a coward here, hailed a
hero there
For several days after leaving Nantucket,
nothing above hatches was seen of Captain Ahab. The mates regularly relieved
each other at the watches, and for aught that could be seen to the contrary,
they seemed to be the only commanders of the ship only they sometimes issued
from the cabin with orders so sudden and peremptory, that after all it was
plain they but commanded vicariously. Yes, their supreme lord and dictator
was there, though hitherto unseen by any eyes not permitted to penetrate into
the now sacred retreat of the cabin. Every time I ascended to the deck from my
watches below, I instantly gazed aft to mark if any strange face were
visible for my first vague disquietude touching the unknown captain, now in
the seclusion of the sea, became almost a perturbation. This was strangely
heightened at times by the ragged Elijah's diabolical incoherences uninvitedly
recurring to me, with a subtle energy I could not have before conceived of.
But poorly could I withstand them, much as in other moods I was almost ready
to smile at the solemn whimsicalities of that outlandish prophet of the
wharves. But whatever it was of apprehensiveness or uneasiness to call it so
which I felt, yet whenever I came to look about me in the ship, it seemed
against all warrantry to
cherish such emotions. For though the harpooneers, with the great body of
the crew, were a far more barbaric, heathenish, and motley set than any of the
tame merchantship companies which my previous experiences had made me
acquainted with, still I ascribed this and rightly ascribed it to the
fierce uniqueness of the very nature of that wild Scandinavian vocation in
which I had so abandonedly embarked. But it was especially the aspect of the
three chief officers of the ship, the mates, which was most forcibly
calculated to allay these colorless misgivings, and induce confidence and
cheerfulness in every presentment of the voyage. Three better, more likely
seaofficers and men, each in his own different way, could not readily be
found, and they were every one of them Americans a Nantucketer, a
Vineyarder, a Cape man. Now, it being Christmas when the ship shot from out
her harbor, for a space we had biting Polar weather, though all the time
running away from it to the southward and by every degree and minute of
latitude which we sailed, gradually leaving that merciless winter, and all
its intolerable weather behind us. It was one of those less lowering, but
still grey and gloomy enough mornings of the transition, when with a fair wind
the ship was rushing through the water with a vindictive sort of leaping and
melancholy rapidity, that as I mounted to the deck at the call of the forenoon
watch, so soon as I levelled my glance towards the taffrail, foreboding
shivers ran over me. Reality outran apprehension Captain Ahab stood upon
his quarterdeck. There seemed no sign of common bodily illness about him,
nor of the recovery from any. He looked like a man cut away from the stake,
when the fire has overrunningly wasted all the limbs without consuming them,
or taking away one particle from their compacted aged robustness. His whole
high, broad form, seemed made of solid bronze, and shaped in an unalterable
mould, like Cellini's cast Perseus. Threading its way out from among his grey
hairs, and continuing right down one side of his tawny scorched face and neck,
till it disappeared in his clothing, you saw a slender rodlike mark, lividly
whitish. It resembled that perpendicular seam sometimes made in the
straight, lofty trunk of a great tree, when the upper lightning
tearingly darts down it, and without wrenching a single twig, peels and
grooves out the bark from top to bottom, ere running off into the soil,
leaving the tree still greenly alive, but branded. Whether that mark was born
with him, or whether it was the scar left by some desperate wound, no one
could certainly say. By some tacit consent, throughout the voyage little or no
allusion was made to it, especially by the mates. But once Tashtego's
senior, an old GayHead Indian among the crew, superstitiously asserted that
not till he was full forty years old did Ahab become that way branded, and
then it came upon him, not in the fury of any mortal fray, but in an
elemental strife at sea. Yet, this wild hint seemed inferentially negatived,
by what a grey Manxman insinuated, an old sepulchral man, who, having never
before sailed out of Nantucket, had never ere this laid eye upon wild Ahab.
Nevertheless, the old seatraditions, the immemorial credulities, popularly
invested this old Manxman with preternatural powers of discernment. So that
no white sailor seriously contradicted him when he said that if ever Captain
Ahab should be tranquilly laid out which might hardly come to pass, so he
muttered then, whoever should do that last office for the dead, would find a
birthmark on him from crown to sole. So powerfully did the whole grim aspect
of Ahab affect me, and the livid brand which streaked it, that for the first
few moments I hardly noted that not a little of this overbearing grimness was
owing to the barbaric white leg upon which he partly stood. It had previously
come to me that this ivory leg had at sea been fashioned from the polished
bone of the sperm whale's jaw. Aye, he was dismasted off Japan, said the
old GayHead Indian once but like his dismasted craft, he shipped another
mast without coming home for it. he has a quiver of 'em. I was struck with
the singular posture he maintained. Upon each side of the Pequod's quarter
deck, and pretty close to the mizen shrouds, there was an auger hole, bored
about half an inch or so, into the plank. His bone leg steadied in that hole
one arm elevated, and holding by a shroud Captain Ahab stood erect, looking
straight out beyond the ship's everpitching prow. There was an infinity of
firmest fortitude, a determinate unsurrenderable
wilfulness, in the fixed and fearless, forward dedication of that glance. Not
a word he spoke nor did his officers say aught to him though by all their
minutest gestures and expressions, they plainly showed the uneasy, if not
painful, consciousness of being under a troubled mastereye. And not only
that, but moody stricken Ahab stood before them with a crucifixion in his
face in all the nameless regal overbearing dignity of some mighty woe. Ere
long, from his first visit in the air, he withdrew into his cabin. But after
that morning, he was every day visible to the crew either standing in his
pivothole, or seated upon an ivory stool he had or heavily walking the
deck. As the sky grew less gloomy indeed, began to grow a little genial, he
became still less and less a recluse as if, when the ship had sailed from
home, nothing but the dead wintry bleakness of the sea had then kept him so
secluded. And, by and by, it came to pass, that he was almost continually in
the air but, as yet, for all that he said, or perceptibly did, on the at
last sunny deck, he seemed as unnecessary there as another mast. But the
Pequod was only making a passage now not regularly cruising nearly all
whaling preparatives needing supervision the mates were fully competent to,
so that there was little or nothing, out of himself, to employ or excite Ahab,
now and thus chase away, for that one interval, the clouds that layer upon
layer were piled upon his brow, as ever all clouds choose the loftiest peaks
to pile themselves upon. Nevertheless, ere long, the warm, warbling
persuasiveness of the pleasant, holiday weather we came to, seemed gradually
to charm him from his mood. For, as when the redcheeked, dancing girls,
April and May, trip home to the wintry, misanthropic woods even the barest,
ruggedest, most thundercloven old oak will at least send forth some few green
sprouts, to welcome such gladhearted visitants so Ahab did, in the end, a
little respond to the playful allurings of that girlish air. More than once
did he put forth the faint blossom of a look, which, in any other man, would
have soon flowered out in a smile.
Some days elapsed, and ice
and icebergs all astern, the Pequod now went rolling through the bright Quito
spring, which, at sea, almost perpetually reigns on the threshold of the
eternal August of the Tropic. The warmly cool, clear, ringing, perfumed,
overflowing, redundant days, were as crystal goblets of Persian sherbet,
heaped up flaked up, with rosewater snow. The starred and stately nights
seemed haughty dames in jewelled velvets, nursing at home in lonely pride, the
memory of their absent conquering Earls, the golden helmeted suns For
sleeping man, 'twas hard to choose between such winsome days and such
seducing nights. But all the witcheries of that unwaning weather did not
merely lend new spells and potencies to the outward world. Inward they turned
upon the soul, especially when the still mild hours of eve came on then,
memory shot her crystals as the clear ice most forms of noiseless twilights.
And all these subtle agencies, more and more they wrought on Ahab's texture.
Old age is always wakeful as if, the longer linked with life, the less man
has to do with aught that looks like death. among seacommanders, the old
greybeards will oftenest leave their berths to visit the nightcloaked deck.
It was so with Ahab only that now, of late, he seemed so much to live in
the open air, that truly speaking, his visits were more to the cabin, than
from, the cabin to the planks. It feels like going down into one's tomb,
he would mutter to himself,  for an old captain like me to be descending
this narrow scuttle, to go to my gravedug berth. So, almost every
twentyfour hours, when the watches of the night were set, and the band on
deck sentinelled the slumbers of the band below and when if a rope was to be
hauled upon the forecastle, the sailors flung it not rudely down, as by day,
but with some cautiousness dropt it to its place, for fear of disturbing
their slumbering shipmates when this sort of steady quietude would begin to
prevail, habitually, the silent steersman would watch the cabinscuttle and
ere long the old man would emerge, griping at the iron banister, to help his
crippled way. Some considerating touch of humanity was in him for at times
like these, he usually abstained from patrolling the quarterdeck because to
his wearied mates, seeking repose within six inches of his ivory heel, such
would have been the reverberating crack and din of that bony step, that their
dreams would have been of the crunching teeth of sharks. But once, the mood
was on him too deep for common regardings and as with heavy, lumberlike
pace he was measuring the ship from taffrail to mainmast, Stubb, the odd
second mate, came up from below, and with a certain unassured, deprecating
humorousness, hinted that if Captain Ahab was pleased to walk the planks,
then, no one could say nay but there might be some way of muffling the
noise hinting something indistinctly and hesitatingly about a globe of tow,
and the insertion into it, of the ivory heel. Ah Stubb, thou did'st not
know Ahab then. Am I a cannonball, Stubb, said Ahab, that thou wouldst
wad me that fashion? But go thy ways I had forgot. Below to thy nightly
grave where such as ye sleep between shrouds, to use ye to the filling one
at last. Down, dog, and kennel Starting at the unforeseen concluding
exclamation of the so suddenly scornful old man, Stubb was speechless a
moment then said excitedly, I am not used to be spoken to that way, sir
I do but less than half like it, sir. Avast gritted Ahab between his set
teeth, and violently moving away, as if to avoid some passionate temptation.
No, sir not yet, said Stubb, emboldened, I will not tamely be called a
dog, sir. Then be called ten times a donkey, and a mule, and an ass, and
begone, or I'll clear the world of thee As he said this, Ahab advanced upon
him with such overbearing terrors in his aspect, that Stubb involuntarily
retreated. I was never served so before without giving a hard blow for it,
muttered Stubb, as he found himself descending the cabinscuttle.
It's very queer. Stop, Stubb somehow, now, I don't well know whether to go
back and strike him, or what's that?  down here on my knees and pray for
him? Yes, that was the thought coming up in me but it would be the first
time I ever did pray. It's queer very queer and he's queer too aye,
take him fore and aft, he's about the queerest old man Stubb ever sailed
with. How he flashed at me his eyes like powderpans is he mad? Anyway
there's something on his mind, as sure as there must be something on a deck
when it cracks. He aint in his bed now, either, more than three hours out of
the twentyfour and he don't sleep then. Didn't that DoughBoy, the
steward, tell me that of a morning he always finds the old man's hammock
clothes all rumpled and tumbled, and the sheets down at the foot, and the
coverlid almost tied into knots, and the pillow a sort of frightful hot, as
though a baked brick had been on it? A hot old man I guess he's got what
some folks ashore call a conscience it's a kind of TicDollyrow they say
worse nor a toothache. Well, well I don't know what it is, but the Lord
keep me from catching it. He's full of riddles I wonder what he goes into
the after hold for, every night, as DoughBoy tells me he suspects what's
that for, I should like to know? Who's made appointments with him in the hold?
Ain't that queer, now? But there's no telling, it's the old game Here goes
for a snooze. Damn me, it's worth a fellow's while to be born into the
world, if only to fall right asleep. And now that I think of it, that's
about the first thing babies do, and that's a sort of queer, too. Damn me,
but all things are queer, come to think of 'em. But that's against my
principles. Think not, is my eleventh commandment and sleep when you can,
is my twelfth  So here goes again. But how's that? didn't he call me a dog?
blazes he called me ten times a donkey, and piled a lot of jackasses on
top of that He might as well have kicked me, and done with it. Maybe he
did kick me, and I didn't observe it, I was so taken all aback with his brow,
somehow. It flashed like a bleached bone. What the devil's the matter with
me? I don't stand right on my legs. Coming afoul of that old man has a sort
of turned me wrong side out. By the Lord, I must have been dreaming, though
How? how? how? but the only way's
to stash it so here goes to hammock again and in the morning, I'll see how
this plaguey juggling thinks over by daylight.
Entering that gableended SpouterInn,
you found yourself in a wide, low, straggling entry with oldfashioned
wainscots, reminding one of the bulwarks of some condemned old craft. On one
side hung a very large oilpainting so thoroughly besmoked, and every way
defaced, that in the unequal crosslights by which you viewed it, it was
only by diligent study and a series of systematic visits to it, and careful
inquiry of the neighbors, that you could any way arrive at an understanding
of its purpose. such unaccountable masses of shades and shadows, that at
first you almost thought some ambitious young artist, in the time of the New
England hags, had endeavored to delineate chaos bewitched. But by dint of
much and earnest contemplation, and oft repeated ponderings, and especially by
throwing open the little window towards the back of the entry, you at last
come to the conclusion that such an idea, however wild, might not be
altogether unwarranted. But what most puzzled and confounded you was a long,
limber, portentous, black mass of something hovering in the
centre of the picture over three blue, dim, perpendicular lines floating in a
nameless yeast. A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a
nervous man distracted. Yet was there a sort of indefinite, halfattained,
unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it, till you
involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what that marvellous
painting meant. Ever and anon a bright, but, alas, deceptive idea would dart
you through. It's the Black Sea in a midnight gale. It's the unnatural
combat of the four primal elements. It's a blasted heath. It's a Hyperborean
winter scene. It's the breakingup of the icebound stream of Time. But at
last all these fancies yielded to that one portentous something in the
picture's midst. That once found out, and all the rest were plain. But stop
does it not bear a faint resemblance to a gigantic fish? even the great
leviathan himself? In fact, the artist's design seemed this a final theory
of my own, partly based upon the aggregated opinions of many aged persons
with whom I conversed upon the subject. The picture represents a CapeHorner
in a great hurricane the halffoundered ship weltering there with its three
dismantled masts alone visible and an exasperated whale, purposing to spring
clean over the craft, is in the enormous act of impaling himself upon the
three mastheads. The opposite wall of this entry was hung all over with a
heathenish array of monstrous clubs and spears. Some were thickly set with
glittering teeth resembling ivory saws others were tufted with knots of
human hair and one was sickleshaped, with a vast handle sweeping round like
the segment made in the newmown grass by a longarmed mower. You shuddered
as you gazed, and wondered what monstrous cannibal and savage could ever have
gone a deathharvesting with such a hacking, horrifying implement. Mixed with
these were rusty old whaling lances and harpoons all broken and deformed.
Some were storied weapons. With this once long lance, now wildly elbowed,
fifty years ago did Nathan Swain kill fifteen whales between a sunrise and a
sunset. And that harpoonso like a corkscrew nowwas flung in Javan seas,
and run away with by a whale, years afterward slain off the Cape of Blanco.
The original iron entered
nigh the tail, and, like a restless needle sojourning in the body of a man,
travelled full forty feet, and at last was found imbedded in the hump.
Crossing this dusky entry, and on through yon lowarched way cut through
what in old times must have been a great central chimney with fireplaces all
round you enter the public room. A still duskier place is this, with such
low ponderous beams above, and such old wrinkled planks beneath, that you
would almost fancy you trod some old craft's cockpits, especially of such a
howling night, when this corneranchored old ark rocked so furiously. On one
side stood a long, low, shelflike table covered with cracked glass cases,
filled with dusty rarities gathered from this wide world's remotest nooks.
Projecting from the further angle of the room stands a darklooking den the
bar a rude attempt at a right whale's head. Be that how it may, there
stands the vast arched bone of the whale's jaw, so wide, a coach might
almost drive beneath it. within are shabby shelves, ranged round with old
decanters, bottles, flasks and in those jaws of swift destruction, like
another cursed Jonah by which name indeed they called him, bustles a
little withered old man, who, for their money, dearly sells the sailors
deliriums and death. Abominable are the tumblers into which he pours his
poison. Though true cylinders without within, the villanous green goggling
glasses deceitfully tapered downwards to a cheating bottom. Parallel
meridians rudely pecked into the glass, surround these footpads' goblets.
Fill to this mark, and your charge is but a penny to this a penny more
and so on to the full glass the Cape Horn measure, which you may gulp down
for a shilling. Upon entering the place I found a number of young seamen
gathered about a table, examining by a dim light divers specimens of
skrimshander. I sought the landlord, and telling him I desired to be
accommodated with a room, received for answer that his house was full not a
bed unoccupied. But avast, he added, tapping his forehead, you haint no
objections to sharing a harpooneer's blanket, have ye? I s'pose you are goin'
a whalin', so you'd better get used to that sort of thing.
I told him that I never liked to sleep two in a bed that if I should ever do
so, it would depend upon who the harpooneer might be, and that if he the
landlord really had no other place for me, and the harpooneer was not
decidedly objectionable, why rather than wander further about a strange town
on so bitter a night, I would put up with the half of any decent man's
blanket. I thought so. All right take a seat. Supper? you want supper?
Supper 'll be ready directly. I sat down on an old wooden settle, carved all
over like a bench on the Battery. At one end a ruminating tar was still
further adorning it with his jackknife, stooping over and diligently working
away at the space between his legs. he was trying his hand at a ship under
full sail, but he didn't make much headway, I thought. At last some four or
five of us were summoned to our meal in an adjoining room. It was cold as
Iceland no fire at all the landlord said he couldn't afford it. Nothing
but two dismal tallow candles, each in a winding sheet. We were fain to
button up our monkey jackets, and hold to our lips cups of scalding tea with
our half frozen fingers. But the fare was of the most substantial kind not
only meat and potatoes, but dumplings good heavens dumplings for supper
One young fellow in a green box coat, addressed himself to these dumplings in
a most direful manner. My boy, said the landlord, you'll have the
nightmare to a dead sartainty. Landlord, I whispered, that aint the
harpooneer, is it? Oh, no, said he, looking a sort of diabolically funny,
the harpooneer is a dark complexioned chap. He never eats dumplings, he
don'the eats nothing but steaks, and likes 'em rare. The devil he does,
says I. Where is that harpooneer? Is he here? He'll be here afore long,
was the answer. I could not help it, but I began to feel suspicious of this
dark complexioned harpooneer. At any rate, I made up my mind that if it
so turned out that we should sleep together, he must undress and get into bed
before I did.
Supper over, the company went back to the barroom, when, knowing not what
else to do with myself, I resolved to spend the rest of the evening as a
looker on. Presently a rioting noise was heard without. Starting up, the
landlord cried, That's the Grampus's crew. I seed her reported in the
offing this morning a three years' voyage, and a full ship. Hurrah, boys
now we'll have the latest news from the Feegees. A tramping of sea boots was
heard in the entry the door was flung open, and in rolled a wild set of
mariners enough. Enveloped in their shaggy watch coats, and with their
heads muffled in woollen comforters, all bedarned and ragged, and their
beards stiff with icicles, they seemed an eruption of bears from Labrador.
They had just landed from their boat, and this was the first house they
entered. No wonder, then, that they made a straight wake for the whale's
mouth the bar when the wrinkled little old Jonah, there officiating, soon
poured them out brimmers all round. One complained of a bad cold in his head,
upon which Jonah mixed him a pitchlike potion of gin and molasses, which
he swore was a sovereign cure for all colds and catarrhs whatsoever, never
mind of how long standing, or whether caught off the coast of Labrador, or
on the weather side of an iceisland. The liquor soon mounted into their
heads, as it generally does even with the arrantest topers newly landed from
sea, and they began capering about most obstreperously. I observed, however,
that one of them held somewhat aloof, and though he seemed desirous not to
spoil the hilarity of his shipmates by his own sober face, yet upon the whole
he refrained from making as much noise as the rest. This man interested me
at once and since the seagods had ordained that he should soon become my
shipmate though but a sleepingpartner one, so far as this narrative is
concerned, I will here venture upon a little description of him. He stood
full six feet in height, with noble shoulders, and a chest like a
cofferdam. I have seldom seen such brawn in a man. His face was deeply
brown and burnt, making his white teeth dazzling by the contrast while in
the deep shadows of his eyes floated some reminiscences that did not seem to
give him much joy. His voice at once announced
that he was a Southerner, and from his fine stature, I thought he must be
one of those tall mountaineers from the Alleganian Ridge in Virginia. When
the revelry of his companions had mounted to its height, this man slipped
away unobserved, and I saw no more of him till he became my comrade on the
sea. In a few minutes, however, he was missed by his shipmates, and being,
it seems, for some reason a huge favorite with them, they raised a cry of
Bulkington Bulkington where's Bulkington? and darted out of the house in
pursuit of him. It was now about nine o'clock, and the room seeming almost
supernaturally quiet after these orgies, I began to congratulate myself upon
a little plan that had occurred to me just previous to the entrance of the
seamen. No man prefers to sleep two in a bed. In fact, you would a good deal
rather not sleep with your own brother. I don't know how it is, but people
like to be private when they are sleeping. And when it comes to sleeping with
an unknown stranger, in a strange inn, in a strange town, and that stranger
a harpooneer, then your objections indefinitely multiply. Nor was there any
earthly reason why I as a sailor should sleep two in a bed, more than anybody
else for sailors no more sleep two in a bed at sea, than bachelor Kings do
ashore. To be sure they all sleep together in one apartment, but you have
your own hammock, and cover yourself with your own blanket, and sleep in your
own skin. The more I pondered over this harpooneer, the more I abominated
the thought of sleeping with him. It was fair to presume that being a
harpooneer, his linen or woollen, as the case might be, would not be of the
tidiest, certainly none of the finest. I began to twitch all over. Besides,
it was getting late, and my decent harpooneer ought to be home and going
bedwards. Suppose now, he should tumble in upon me at midnight how could I
tell from what vile hole he had been coming? Landlord I've changed my mind
about that harpooneer.  I shan't sleep with him. I'll try the bench here.
just as you please i'm sorry i cant spare ye a tablecloth for a mattress,
and it's a plaguy rough board here feeling of the knots and notches. But
wait a bit, Skrimshander I've
got a carpenter's plane there in the bar wait, I say, and I'll make ye snug
enough. So saying he procured the plane and with his old silk handkerchief
first dusting the bench, vigorously set to planing away at my bed, the while
grinning like an ape. The shavings flew right and left till at last the
planeiron came bump against an indestructible knot. The landlord was near
spraining his wrist, and I told him for heaven's sake to quit  the bed was
soft enough to suit me, and I did not know how all the planing in the world
could make eider down of a pine plank. So gathering up the shavings with
another grin, and throwing them into the great stove in the middle of the
room, he went about his business, and left me in a brown study. I now took
the measure of the bench, and found that it was a foot too short but that
could be mended with a chair. But it was a foot too narrow, and the other
bench in the room was about four inches higher than the planed one so there
was no yoking them. I then placed the first bench lengthwise along the only
clear space against the wall, leaving a little interval between, for my back
to settle down in. But I soon found that there came such a draught of cold
air over me from under the sill of the window, that this plan would never do
at all, especially as another current from the rickety door met the one from
the window, and both together formed a series of small whirlwinds in the
immediate vicinity of the spot where I had thought to spend the night. The
devil fetch that harpooneer, thought I, but stop, couldn't I steal a march on
him bolt his door inside, and jump into his bed, not to be wakened by the
most violent knockings? it seemed no bad idea but upon second thoughts I
dismissed it. For who could tell but what the next morning, so soon as I
popped out of the room, the harpooneer might be standing in the entry, all
ready to knock me down Still, looking around me again, and seeing no possible
chance of spending a sufferable night unless in some other person's bed, I
began to think that after all I might be cherishing unwarrantable prejudices
against this unknown harpooneer. Thinks I, I'll wait awhile he must be
dropping in before long. I'll have a good look at him then, and perhaps we
may become jolly good bedfellows after all there's no telling.
But though the other boarders kept coming in by ones, twos, and threes, and
going to bed, yet no sign of my harpooneer. Landlord said I, what sort of
a chap is he does he always keep such late hours? It was now hard upon
twelve o'clock. The landlord chuckled again with his lean chuckle, and
seemed to be mightily tickled at something beyond my comprehension. No, he
answered, generally he's an early bird  airley to bed and airley to rise
yes, he's the bird what catches the worm. But tonight he went out a
peddling, you see, and I don't see what on airth keeps him so late, unless,
may be, he can't sell his head. Can't sell his head? What sort of a
bamboozingly story is this you are telling me? getting into a towering rage.
Do you pretend to say, landlord, that this harpooneer is actually engaged
this blessed Saturday night, or rather Sunday morning, in peddling his head
around this town? That's precisely it, said the landlord, and I told him
he couldn't sell it here, the market's overstocked. With what? shouted I.
With heads to be sure ain't there too many heads in the world? I tell
you what it is, landlord, said I, quite calmly, you'd better stop spinning
that yarn to me I'm not green. May be not, taking out a stick and
whittling a toothpick, but I rayther guess you'll be done brown if that ere
harpooneer hears you a slanderin' his head. I'll break it for him, said I,
now flying into a passion again at this unaccountable farrago of the
landlord's. It's broke a'ready, said he. Broke, said I  broke, do you
mean? Sartain, and that's the very reason he can't sell it, I guess.
Landlord, said I, going up to him as cool as Mt. Hecla in a snow storm,
landlord, stop whittling. You and I must understand one another, and
that too without delay. I come to your house and want a bed you tell me you
can only give me half a one that the other half belongs to a certain
harpooneer. And about this harpooneer, whom I have not yet seen, you
persist in telling me the most mystifying and exasperating stories, tending
to beget in me an uncomfortable feeling towards the man whom
you design for my bedfellow a sort of connexion, landlord, which is an
intimate and confidential one in the highest degree. I now demand of you to
speak out and tell me who and what this harpooneer is, and whether I shall be
in all respects safe to spend the night with him. And in the first place,
you will be so good as to unsay that story about selling his head, which if
true I take to be good evidence that this harpooneer is stark mad, and I've
no idea of sleeping with a madman and you, sir, you I mean, landlord, you,
sir, by trying to induce me to do so knowingly, would thereby render yourself
liable to a criminal prosecution. Wall, said the landlord, fetching a long
breath, that's a purty long sarmon for a chap that rips a little now and
then. But be easy, be easy, this here harpooneer I have been tellin' you of
has just arrived from the south seas, where he bought up a lot of 'balmed New
Zealand heads great curios, you know, and he's sold all on 'em but one,
and that one he's trying to sell tonight, cause tomorrow's Sunday, and it
would not do to be sellin' human heads about the streets when folks is goin'
to churches. He wanted to, last Sunday, but I stopped him just as he was
goin' out of the door with four heads strung on a string, for all the airth
like a string of inions. This account cleared up the otherwise unaccountable
mystery, and showed that the landlord, after all, had had no idea of fooling
me but at the same time what could I think of a harpooneer who stayed out a
Saturday night clean into the holy Sabbath, engaged in such a cannibal
business as selling the heads of dead idolators? Depend upon it, landlord,
that harpooneer is a dangerous man. He pays reg'lar, was the rejoinder.
But come, it's getting dreadful late, you had better be turning flukes it's
a nice bed Sal and me slept in that ere bed the night we were spliced.
There's plenty room for two to kick about in that bed it's an almighty big
bed that. Why, afore we give it up, Sal used to put our Sam and little
Johnny in the foot of it. But I got a dreaming and sprawling about one night,
and somehow, Sam got pitched on the floor, and came near breaking his arm.
After
that, Sal said it wouldn't do. Come along here, I'll give ye a glim in a
jiffy and so saying he lighted a candle and held it towards me, offering to
lead the way. But I stood irresolute when looking at a clock in the corner,
he exclaimed I vum it's Sunday you won't see that harpooneer tonight he's
come to anchor somewhere come along then do come won't ye come? I
considered the matter a moment, and then up stairs we went, and I was
ushered into a small room, cold as a clam, and furnished, sure enough, with a
prodigious bed, almost big enough indeed for any four harpooneers to sleep
abreast. There, said the landlord, placing the candle on a crazy old sea
chest that did double duty as a washstand and centre table there, make
yourself comfortable now, and good night to ye. I turned round from eyeing
the bed, but he had disappeared. Folding back the counterpane, I stooped
over the bed. Though none of the most elegant, it yet stood the scrutiny
tolerably well. I then glanced round the room and besides the bedstead and
centre table, could see no other furniture belonging to the place, but a
rude shelf, the four walls, and a papered fireboard representing a man
striking a whale. Of things not properly belonging to the room, there was a
hammock lashed up, and thrown upon the floor in one corner also a large
seaman's bag, containing the harpooneer's wardrobe, no doubt in lieu of a
land trunk. Likewise, there was a parcel of outlandish bone fish hooks on the
shelf over the fireplace, and a tall harpoon standing at the head of the
bed. But what is this on the chest? I took it up, and held it close to the
light, and felt it, and smelt it, and tried every way possible to arrive at
some satisfactory conclusion concerning it. I can compare it to nothing but a
large door mat, ornamented at the edges with little tinkling tags something
like the stained porcupine quills round an Indian moccasin. There was a hole
or slit in the middle of this mat, as you see the same in South American
ponchos. But could it be possible that any sober harpooneer would get into
a door mat, and parade the streets of any Christian town in that sort of
guise? I put it on, to try it, and it weighed me down like a hamper, being
uncommonly shaggy and thick, and I thought a little damp, as though this
mysterious harpooneer had been wearing it of a rainy day. I went up in it to
a bit of glass stuck against the wall, and I never saw such a sight in my
life. I tore myself out of it in such a hurry that I gave myself a kink in
the neck. I sat down on the side of the bed, and commenced thinking about
this headpeddling harpooneer, and his door mat. After thinking some time on
the bedside, I got up and took off my monkey jacket, and then stood in the
middle of the room thinking. I then took off my coat, and thought a little
more in my shirt sleeves. But beginning to feel very cold now, half undressed
as I was, and remembering what the landlord said about the harpooneer's not
coming home at all that night, it being so very late, I made no more ado,
but jumped out of my pantaloons and boots, and then blowing out the light
tumbled into bed, and commended myself to the care of heaven. Whether that
mattress was stuffed with corncobs or broken crockery, there is no telling,
but I rolled about a good deal, and could not sleep for a long time. At
last I slid off into a light doze, and had pretty nearly made a good offing
towards the land of Nod, when I heard a heavy footfall in the passage, and
saw a glimmer of light come into the room from under the door. Lord save me,
thinks I, that must be the harpooneer, the infernal headpeddler. But I lay
perfectly still, and resolved not to say a word till spoken to. Holding a
light in one hand, and that identical New Zealand head in the other, the
stranger entered the room, and without looking towards the bed, placed his
candle a good way off from me on the floor in one corner, and then began
working away at the knotted cords of the large bag I before spoke of as being
in the room. I was all eagerness to see his face, but he kept it averted for
some time while employed in unlacing the bag's mouth. This accomplished,
however, he turned round when, good heavens what a sight Such a face It
was of a dark purplish, yellow color, here and there stuck over with large,
blackish looking squares. Yes, it's just as I thought, he's a terrible
bedfellow he's been in a fight, got dreadfully cut, and here he is, just
from the surgeon. But at that moment he chanced to turn his face so towards
the light, that I plainly saw they could not be stickingplasters at all,
those black squares on his cheeks. they were stains of some sort or other. At
first I knew not what to make of this but soon an inkling of the truth
occurred to me. I remembered a story of a white man a whaleman toowho,
falling among the cannibals, had been tattooed by them. I concluded that this
harpooneer, in the course of his distant voyages, must have met with a
similar adventure. And what is it, thought I, after all It's only his
outside a man can be honest in any sort of skin. But then, what to make of
his unearthly complexion, that part of it, I mean, lying round about, and
completely independent of the squares of tattooing. To be sure, it might be
nothing but a good coat of tropical tanning but I never heard of a hot sun's
tanning a white man into a purplish yellow one. However, I had never been
in the South Seas and perhaps the sun there produced these extraordinary
effects upon the skin. Now, while all these ideas were passing through me
like lightning, this harpooneer never noticed me at all. But, after some
difficulty having opened his bag, he commenced fumbling in it, and presently
pulled out a sort of tomahawk, and a sealskin wallet with the hair on.
Placing these on the old chest in the middle of the room, he then took the
New Zealand head a ghastly thing enough and crammed it down into the bag.
He now took off his hat a new beaver hat when I came nigh singing out with
fresh surprise. There was no hair on his head none to speak of at least 
nothing but a small scalpknot twisted up on his forehead. His bald purplish
head now looked for all the world like a mildewed skull. Had not the stranger
stood between me and the door, I would have bolted out of it quicker than ever
I bolted a dinner. Even as it was, I thought something of slipping out of the
window, but it was the second floor back. I am no coward, but what to make
of this headpeddling purple rascal altogether passed my comprehension.
Ignorance is the parent of fear, and being completely nonplussed and
confounded about the stranger, i confess i was now as much afraid of him as if
it was the devil himself who had thus broken into my room at the dead of
night. In fact, I was so afraid of him that I was not game enough just then
to address him, and demand a satisfactory answer concerning what seemed
inexplicable in him.
Meanwhile, he continued the business of undressing, and at last showed his
chest and arms. As I live, these covered parts of him were checkered with
the same squares as his face his back, too, was all over the same dark
squares he seemed to have been in a Thirty Years' War, and just escaped from
it with a stickingplaster shirt. Still more, his very legs were marked, as
if a parcel of dark green frogs were running up the trunks of young palms. It
was now quite plain that he must be some abominable savage or other shipped
aboard of a whaleman in the South Seas, and so landed in this Christian
country. I quaked to think of it. A peddler of heads too perhaps the heads
of his own brothers. He might take a fancy to mine heavens look at that
tomahawk But there was no time for shuddering, for now the savage went about
something that completely fascinated my attention, and convinced me that he
must indeed be a heathen. Going to his heavy grego, or wrapall, or
dreadnaught, which he had previously hung on a chair, he fumbled in the
pockets, and produced at length a curious little deformed image with a hunch
on its back, and exactly the color of a three days' old Congo baby.
Remembering the embalmed head, at first I almost thought that this black
manikin was a real baby preserved in some similar manner. But seeing that it
was not at all limber, and that it glistened a good deal like polished ebony,
I concluded that it must be nothing but a wooden idol, which indeed it
proved to be. For now the savage goes up to the empty fireplace, and removing
the papered fireboard, sets up this little hunchbacked image, like a tenpin,
between the andirons. the chimney jambs and all the bricks inside were very
sooty, so that I thought this fireplace made a very appropriate little shrine
or chapel for his Congo idol. I now screwed my eyes hard towards the half
hidden image, feeling but ill at ease meantime to see what was next to
follow. First he takes about a double handful of shavings out of his grego
pocket, and places them carefully before the idol then laying a bit of ship
biscuit on top and applying the flame from the lamp, he kindled the shavings
into a sacrificial blaze. Presently, after many hasty snatches into the
fire, and still hastier
withdrawals of his fingers whereby he seemed to be scorching them badly,
he at last succeeded in drawing out the biscuit then blowing off the heat
and ashes a little, he made a polite offer of it to the little negro. But the
little devil did not seem to fancy such dry sort of fare at all he never
moved his lips. All these strange antics were accompanied by still stranger
guttural noises from the devotee, who seemed to be praying in a singsong or
else singing some pagan psalmody or other, during which his face twitched
about in the most unnatural manner. At last extinguishing the fire, he took
the idol up very unceremoniously, and bagged it again in his grego pocket
as carelessly as if he were a sportsman bagging a dead woodcock. All these
queer proceedings increased my uncomfortableness, and seeing him now
exhibiting strong symptoms of concluding his business operations, and jumping
into bed with me, I thought it was high time, now or never, before the light
was put out, to break the spell into which I had so long been bound. But the
interval I spent in deliberating what to say, was a fatal one. Taking up his
tomahawk from the table, he examined the head of it for an instant, and then
holding it to the light, with his mouth at the handle, he puffed out great
clouds of tobacco smoke. The next moment the light was extinguished, and
this wild cannibal, tomahawk between his teeth, sprang into bed with me. I
sang out, I could not help it now and giving a sudden grunt of astonishment
he began feeling me. Stammering out something, I knew not what, I rolled away
from him against the wall, and then conjured him, whoever or whatever he might
be, to keep quiet, and let me get up and light the lamp again. But his
guttural responses satisfied me at once that he but ill comprehended my
meaning. Whoe debel you? he at last said  you no speake, damme, I
kille. And so saying the lighted tomahawk began flourishing about me in the
dark. Landlord, for God's sake, Peter Coffin shouted I. Landlord
Watch Coffin Angels save me Speake tellee me whoee be, or damme,
I kille again growled the cannibal, while his horrid flourishings of the
tomahawk scattered the hot tobacco ashes about me till I thought
my linen would get on fire. But thank heaven, at that moment the landlord
came into the room light in hand, and leaping from the bed I ran up to him.
Don't be afraid now, said he, grinning again. Queequeg here wouldn't harm
a hair of your head. Stop your grinning, shouted I, and why didn't you
tell me that that infernal harpooneer was a cannibal? I thought ye know'd
it didn't I tell ye, he was peddlin' heads around town? but turn flukes
again and go to sleep. Queequeg, look here you sabbee me, I sabbee you this
man sleepe you you sabbee? Me sabbee plenty grunted Queequeg, puffing
away at his pipe and sitting up in bed. You gettee in, he added, motioning
to me with his tomahawk, and throwing the clothes to one side. He really did
this in not only a civil but a really kind and charitable way. I stood
looking at him a moment. For all his tattooings he was on the whole a clean,
comely looking cannibal. What's all this fuss I have been making about,
thought i to myself the man's a human being just as I am he has just as
much reason to fear me, as I have to be afraid of him. Better sleep with a
sober cannibal than a drunken Christian. Landlord, said I, tell him to
stash his tomahawk there, or pipe, or whatever you call it tell him to
stop smoking, in short, and I will turn in with him. But I don't fancy having
a man smoking in bed with me. It's dangerous. Besides, I aint insured.
This being told to Queequeg, he at once complied, and again politely motioned
me to get into bed rolling over to one side as much as to say I wont touch a
leg of ye. Good night, landlord, said I, you may go. I turned in, and
never slept better in my life.
When Stubb had departed, Ahab stood for a
while leaning over the bulwarks and then, as had been usual with him of
late, calling a sailor of the watch, he sent him below for his ivory stool,
and also his pipe. lighting the pipe at the binnacle lamp and planting the
stool on the weather side of the deck, he sat and smoked. In old Norse times,
the thrones of the sealoving Danish kings were fabricated, saith tradition,
of the tusks of the narwhale. How could one look at Ahab then, seated on that
tripod of bones, without bethinking him of the royalty it symbolized? For a
Khan of the plank, and a king of the sea, and a great lord of Leviathans was
Ahab. Some moments passed, during which the thick vapor came from his mouth
in quick and constant puffs, which blew back again into his face. How now,
he soliloquized at last, withdrawing the tube, this smoking no longer
soothes. Oh, my pipe hard must it go with me if thy charm be gone Here
have I been unconsciously toiling, not pleasuring, aye, and ignorantly
smoking to windward all the while to windward, and with such nervous
whiffs, as if, like the dying whale, my final jets were the strongest and
fullest of trouble. What business have I with this pipe? This thing that is
meant for sereneness, to send up mild white vapors among mild white hairs,
not among torn irongrey locks like mine. I'll smoke no more He tossed the
still lighted pipe into the sea. The fire hissed in the waves the same
instant the ship shot by the bubble the sinking pipe made. With slouched hat,
Ahab lurchingly paced the planks.
Next morning Stubb accosted Flask. Such a
queer dream, KingPost, I never had. You know the old man's ivory leg, well
I dreamed he kicked me with it and when I tried to kick back, upon my soul,
my little man, I kicked my leg right off And then, presto Ahab seemed a
pyramid, and I, like a blazing fool, kept kicking at it. But what was still
more curious, Flaskyou know how curious all dreams are through all this rage
that I was in, I somehow seemed to be thinking to myself, that after all, it
was not much of an insult, that kick from ahab. "Why," thinks I,"what's the
row? It's not a real leg, only a false leg." And there's a mighty difference
between a living thump and a dead thump. That's what makes a blow from the
hand, Flask, fifty times more savage to bear than a blow from a cane. The
living member that makes the living insult, my little man. And thinks I to
myself all the while, mind, while I was stubbing my silly toes against that
cursed pyramid  so confoundedly contradictory was it all, all the while, I
say, I was thinking to myself, "what's his leg now, but a cane a whalebone
cane. Yes," thinks I,"it was only a playful cudgelling in fact, only a
whaleboning that he gave me not a base kick. Besides," thinks I,"look at it
once why, the end of it the foot part what a small sort of end it is
whereas, if a broad footed farmer kicked me, there's a devilish broad insult.
But this insult is whittled down to a point only." But now comes the
greatest joke of the dream, Flask. While I was battering away at the
pyramid, a sort of badgerhaired old merman, with a hump on his back, takes
me by the shoulders, and slews me round. "What are you 'bout?" says he. Slid
man, but I was frightened. Such a phiz But, somehow, next moment I was over
the fright. "What am I about?" says I at last. "And what business is that of
yours, I should like to know, Mr. Humpback? Do you want a
kick?" By the lord, Flask, I had no sooner said that, than he turned round
his stern to me, bent over, and dragging up a lot of seaweed he had for a
clout what do you think, I saw? why thunder alive, man, his stern was stuck
full of marlinspikes, with the points out. Says I, on second thoughts,"I
guess I won't kick you, old fellow." "Wise Stubb," said he,"wise Stubb" and
kept muttering it all the time, a sort of eating of his own gums like a
chimney hag. seeing he wasn't going to stop saying over his "wise Stubb, wise
Stubb," I thought I might as well fall to kicking the pyramid again. But I
had only just lifted my foot for it, when he roared out, "Stop that kicking"
"Halloa," says I,"what's the matter now, old fellow?" "Look ye here," says
he"let's argue the insult. Captain Ahab kicked ye, didn't he?" "Yes, he
did," says I "right here it was." "Very good," says he "he used his ivory
leg, didn't he?" "Yes, he did," says I. "Well then," says he, "wise Stubb,
what have you to complain of? Didn't he kick with right good will? it wasn't
a common pitch pine leg he kicked with, was it? No, you were kicked by a
great man, and with a beautiful ivory leg, Stubb. It's an honor I consider
it an honor. Listen, wise Stubb. In old England the greatest lords think it
great glory to be slapped by a queen, and made garterknights of but, be
your boast, Stubb, that ye were kicked by old Ahab, and made a wise man of.
Remember what I say be kicked by him account his kicks honors and on no
account kick back for you can't help yourself, wise Stubb. Don't you see
that pyramid?" With that, he all of a sudden seemed somehow, in some queer
fashion, to swim off into the air. I snored rolled over and there I was
in my hammock Now, what do you think of that dream, Flask? I don't know
it seems a sort of foolish to me, tho'. May be, may be. But it's made a
wise man of me, Flask. D'ye see Ahab standing there, sideways looking over the
stern? Well, the best thing you can do, Flask, is to let that old man alone
never speak to him, whatever he says. Halloa what's that he shouts? Hark
Masthead, there Look sharp, all of ye There are whales hereabouts If
ye see a white one, split your lungs for him What d'ye think of that now,
Flask? ain't there a small drop
of something queer about that, eh? a white whaledid ye mark that, man? Look
yethere's something special in the wind. Stand by for it, Flask. Ahab has
that that's bloody on his mind. But, mum he comes this way.
Already we are boldly launched upon the
deep but soon we shall be lost in its unshored, harborless immensities. Ere
that come to pass ere the Pequod's weedy hull rolls side by side with the
barnacled hulls of the leviathan at the outset it is but well to attend to a
matter almost indispensable to a thorough appreciative understanding of the
more special leviathanic revelations and allusions of all sorts which are to
follow. It is some systematized exhibition of the whale in his broad genera,
that I would now fain put before you. Yet is it no easy task. The
classification of the constituents of a chaos, nothing less is here essayed.
Listen to what the best and latest authorities have laid down. No branch of
Zoology is so much involved as that which is entitled Cetology, says Captain
Scoresby, A. D.
. It is not my intention, were it in my power, to enter
into the inquiry as to the true method of dividing the cetacea into groups
and families.... Utter confusion exists among the historians of this animal
sperm whale, says Surgeon Beale, A. D.
. Unfitness to pursue our
research in the unfathomable waters. Impenetrable veil covering our
knowledge of the cetacea. A field strewn with thorns. All these
incomplete indications but serve to torture us naturalists. Thus speak of
the whale, the great Cuvier, and John Hunter, and Lesson, those lights of
zoology and anatomy. Nevertheless, though of real knowledge there be little,
yet of books there are
a plenty and so in some small degree, with cetology, or the science of
whales. many are the men, small and great, old and new, landsmen and seamen,
who have at large or in little, written of the whale. Run over a few The
Authors of the Bible Aristotle Pliny Aldrovandi Sir Thomas Browne
Gesner Ray Linnaeus Rondeletius Willoughby Green Artedi Sibbald
Brisson Marten Lacepede Bonneterre Desmarest Baron Cuvier Frederick
Cuvier John Hunter Owen Scoresby Beale Bennett J. Ross Browne the
Author of Miriam Coffin Olmstead and the Rev. T. Cheever. But to what
ultimate generalizing purpose all these have written, the above cited extracts
will show. Of the names in this list of whale authors, only those following
Owen ever saw living whales and but one of them was a real professional
harpooneer and whaleman. I mean Captain Scoresby. On the separate subject of
the Greenland or rightwhale, he is the best existing authority. But Scoresby
knew nothing and says nothing of the great sperm whale, compared with which
the Greenland whale is almost unworthy mentioning. And here be it said, that
the Greenland whale is an usurper upon the throne of the seas. He is not even
by any means the largest of the whales. Yet, owing to the long priority of
his claims, and the profound ignorance which, till some seventy years back,
invested the then fabulous and utterly unknown spermwhale, and which
ignorance to this present day still reigns in all but some few scientific
retreats and whaleports this usurpation has been every way complete.
Reference to nearly all the leviathanic allusions in the great poets of past
days, will satisfy you that the Greenland whale, without one rival, was to
them the monarch of the seas. But the time has at last come for a new
proclamation. This is Charing Cross hear ye good people all, the
Greenland whale is deposed, the great sperm whale now reigneth There are
only two books in being which at all pretend to put the living sperm whale
before you, and at the same time, in the remotest degree succeed in the
attempt. Those books are Beale's and Bennett's both in their time surgeons
to English SouthSea whaleships, and both exact and reliable men. The
original matter touching the sperm whale to be found in their volumes is
necessarily small but so far as it goes, it is of excellent quality,
though mostly confined to scientific description. As yet, however, the sperm
whale, scientific or poetic, lives not complete in any literature. Far above
all other hunted whales, his is an unwritten life. Now the various species of
whales need some sort of popular comprehensive classification, if only an easy
outline one for the present, hereafter to be filled in all its departments by
subsequent laborers. As no better man advances to take this matter in hand,
I hereupon offer my own poor endeavors. I promise nothing complete because
any human thing supposed to be complete, must for that very reason infallibly
be faulty. I shall not pretend to a minute anatomical description of the
various species, or in this place at least to much of any description. My
object here is simply to project the draught of a systematization of cetology.
I am the architect, not the builder. But it is a ponderous task no ordinary
lettersorter in the Postoffice is equal to it. To grope down into the
bottom of the sea after them to have one's hands among the unspeakable
foundations, ribs, and very pelvis of the world this is a fearful thing.
What am I that I should essay to hook the nose of this leviathan The awful
tauntings in Job might well appal me. Will he the leviathan make a covenant
with thee? Behold the hope of him is vain But I have swam through
libraries and sailed through oceans I have had to do with whales with these
visible hands I am in earnest and I will try. There are some
preliminaries to settle. first the uncertain, unsettled condition of this
science of Cetology is in the very vestibule attested by the fact, that in
some quarters it still remains a moot point whether a whale be a fish. In his
System of Nature, A. D.
, Linnaeus declares, I hereby separate the whales
from the fish. But of my own knowledge, I know that down to the year
sharks and shad, alewives and herring, against Linnaeus's express edict, were
still found dividing the possession of the same seas with the Leviathan. The
grounds upon which Linnaeus would fain have banished
the whales from the waters, he states as follows On account of their warm
bilocular heart, their lungs, their movable eyelids, their hollow ears, penem
intrantem feminam mammis lactantem, and finally, ex lege naturae jure
meritoque. I submitted all this to my friends Simeon Macey and Charley
Coffin, of Nantucket, both messmates of mine in a certain voyage, and they
united in the opinion that the reasons set forth were altogether insufficient.
Charley profanely hinted they were humbug. Be it known that, waiving all
argument, I take the good old fashioned ground that the whale is a fish, and
call upon holy Jonah to back me. This fundamental thing settled, the next
point is, in what internal respect does the whale differ from other fish.
Above, Linnaeus has given you those items. But in brief, they are these
lungs and warm blood whereas, all other fish are lungless and cold blooded.
Next how shall we define the whale, by his obvious externals, so as
conspicuously to label him for all time to come? To be short, then, a whale
is a spouting fish with a horizontal tail. There you have him.
However contracted, that definition is the result of expanded meditation. A
walrus spouts much like a whale, but the walrus is not a fish, because he is
amphibious. but the last term of the definition is still more cogent, as
coupled with the first. Almost any one must have noticed that all the fish
familiar to landsmen have not a flat, but a vertical, or upanddown tail.
Whereas, among spouting fish the tail, though it may be similarly shaped,
invariably assumes a horizontal position. By the above definition of what a
whale is, I do by no means exclude from the leviathanic brotherhood any sea
creature hitherto identified with the whale by the best informed Nantucketers
nor, on the other hand, link with it any fish hitherto authoritatively
regarded as alien. Hence, all the smaller, spouting,
and horizontal tailed fish must be included in this groundplan of Cetology.
Now, then, come the grand divisions of the entire whale host. First
According to magnitude I divide the whales into three primary BOOKS
subdivisible into Chapters, and these shall comprehend them all, both small
and large. I. The FOLIO WHALE II. the OCTAVO WHALE III. the DUODECIMO
WHALE. As the type of the FOLIO I present the Sperm Whale of the
OCTAVO, the Grampus of the DUODECIMO, the Porpoise. FOLIOS. Among these I
here include the following chapters  I. The Sperm Whale II. the Right
Whale III. the Fin Back Whale IV. the Humpbacked Whale V. the
Razor Back Whale VI. the Sulphur Bottom Whale. BOOK I.  Folio,
CHAPTER I.  Sperm Whale. This whale, among the English of old vaguely
known as the Trumpa whale, and the Physeter whale, and the Anvil Headed whale,
is the present Cachalot of the French, and the Pottsfich of the Germans, and
the Macrocephalus of the Long Words. He is, without doubt, the largest
inhabitant of the globe the most formidable of all whales to encounter the
most majestic in aspect and lastly, by far the most valuable in commerce
he being the only creature from which that valuable substance, spermaceti, is
obtained. All his peculiarities will, in many other places, be enlarged upon.
It is chiefly with his name that I now have to do. Philologically considered,
it is absurd. Some centuries ago, when the Sperm whale was almost wholly
unknown in his own proper individuality, and when his oil was only
accidentally obtained from the stranded fish in those days spermaceti, it
would seem, was popularly supposed to be derived from a creature identical
with the one then known in England as the Greenland or Right Whale. It was
the idea also, that this same spermaceti was that quickening humor of the
Greenland Whale which the first syllable of the word literally expresses. In
those times, also, spermaceti was exceedingly scarce, not being used for
light, but only as an ointment and medicament. It was only to be had from the
druggists as you nowadays buy an ounce of rhubarb. When, as I opine, in the
course of time, the true nature of spermaceti became
known, its original name was still retained by the dealers no doubt to
enhance its value by a notion so strangely significant of its scarcity. And
so the appellation must at last have come to be bestowed upon the whale from
which this spermaceti was really derived. BOOK I.  Folio, CHAPTER II.
 Right Whale.In one respect this is the most venerable of the
leviathans, being the one first regularly hunted by man. It yields the
article commonly known as whalebone or baleen and the oil specially known as
whale oil, an inferior article in commerce. Among the fishermen, he is
indiscriminately designated by all the following titles The Whale the
Greenland Whale the Black Whale the Great Whale the True Whale the Right
whale. there is a deal of obscurity concerning the identity of the species
thus multitudinously baptized. What then is the whale, which I include in
the second species of my Folios? It is the Great Mysticetus of the English
naturalists the Greenland Whale of the English Whalemen the Baliene
Ordinaire of the French whalemen the Growlands Walfish of the Swedes. It is
the whale which for more than two centuries past has been hunted by the Dutch
and English in the Arctic seas it is the whale which the American fishermen
have long pursued in the Indian ocean, on the Brazil Banks, on the Nor' West
Coast, and various other parts of the world, designated by them Right Whale
Cruising Grounds. Some pretend to see a difference between the Greenland
whale of the English and the right whale of the Americans. But they precisely
agree in all their grand features nor has there yet been presented a single
determinate fact upon which to ground a radical distinction. It is by endless
subdivisions based upon the most inconclusive differences, that some
departments of natural history become so repellingly intricate. The right
whale will be elsewhere treated of at some length, with reference to
elucidating the sperm whale. BOOK I.  Folio, CHAPTER III.  FinBack.
Under this head I reckon a monster which, by the various names of
FinBack, TallSpout, and LongJohn, has been seen almost in every sea and is
commonly the whale whose distant jet is so often descried by passengers
crossing the Atlantic, in the New York
packettracks. In the length he attains, and in his baleen, the Finback
resembles the right whale, but is of a less portly girth, and a lighter
color, approaching to olive. His great lips present a cablelike aspect,
formed by the intertwisting, slanting folds of large wrinkles. His grand
distinguishing feature, the fin, from which he derives his name, is often a
conspicuous object. this fin is some three or four feet long, growing
vertically from the hinder part of the back, of an angular shape, and with a
very sharp pointed end. Even if not the slightest other part of the creature
be visible, this isolated fin will, at times, be seen plainly projecting from
the surface. When the sea is moderately calm, and slightly marked with
spherical ripples, and this gnomonlike fin stands up and casts shadows upon
the wrinkled surface, it may well be supposed that the watery circle
surrounding it somewhat resembles a dial, with its style and wavy hourlines
graved on it. On that Ahazdial the shadow often goes back. The FinBack is
not gregarious. He seems a whalehater, as some men are manhaters. Very
shy always going solitary unexpectedly rising to the surface in the
remotest and most sullen waters his straight and single lofty jet rising
like a tall misanthropic spear upon a barren plain gifted with such
wondrous power and velocity in swimming, as to defy all present pursuit from
man this leviathan seems the banished and unconquerable Cain of his race,
bearing for his mark that style upon his back. From having the baleen in his
mouth, the FinBack is sometimes included with the right whale, among a
theoretic species denominated Whalebone whales, that is, whales with baleen.
Of these so called Whalebone whales, there would seem to be several
varieties, most of which, however, are little known. Broadnosed whales and
beaked whales pikeheaded whales bunched whales underjawed whales and
rostrated whales, are the fishermen's names for a few sorts. In connexion
with this appellative of Whalebone whales , it is of great importance to
mention, that however such a nomenclature may be convenient in facilitating
allusions to some kind of whales, yet it is in vain to attempt a clear
classification of the Leviathan, founded upon either his baleen, or hump, or
fin, or teeth notwithstanding that those marked parts or features very
obviously seem better adapted to afford the basis for a regular system of
Cetology than any other detached bodily distinctions, which the whale, in his
kinds, presents. How then? The baleen, hump, backfin, and teeth these are
things whose peculiarities are indiscriminately dispersed among all sorts of
whales, without any regard to what may be the nature of their structure in
other and more essential particulars. Thus, the sperm whale and the
humpbacked whale, each has a hump but there the similitude ceases. Then,
this same humpbacked whale and the Greenland whale, each of these has baleen
but there again the similitude ceases. And it is just the same with the other
parts above mentioned. In various sorts of whales, they form such irregular
combinations or, in the case of any one of them detached, such an irregular
isolation as utterly to defy all general methodization formed upon such a
basis. On this rock every one of the whalenaturalists has split. But it
may possibly be conceived that, in the internal parts of the whale, in his
anatomy there, at least, we shall be able to hit the right classification.
Nay what thing, for example, is there in the Greenland whale's anatomy more
striking than his baleen? Yet we have seen that by his baleen it is
impossible correctly to classify the Greenland whale. And if you descend
into the bowels of the various leviathans, why there you will not find
distinctions a fiftieth part as available to the systematizer as those
external ones already enumerated. What then remains? nothing but to take hold
of the whales bodily, in their entire liberal volume, and boldly sort them
that way. And this is the Bibliographical system here adopted and it is the
only one that can possibly succeed, for it alone is practicable. To proceed.
book i.  folio, chapter iv.  hump back. this whale is often seen on
the northern American coast. He has been frequently captured there, and towed
into harbor. He has a great pack on him like a peddler or you might call
him the Elephant and Castle whale. At any rate, the popular name for him does
not sufficiently distinguish him, since the sperm whale also has a hump,
though a smaller one. His oil is not very valuable. He has baleen. He is
the most gamesome and lighthearted of all
the whales, making more gay foam and white water generally than any other of
them. BOOK I.  Folio, CHAPTER V.  Razor Back. Of this whale little is
known but his name. I have seen him at a distance off Cape Horn. Of a
retiring nature, he eludes both hunters and philosophers. Though no coward,
he has never yet shown any part of him but his back, which rises in a long
sharp ridge. Let him go. I know little more of him, nor does anybody else.
BOOK I.  Folio, CHAPTER VI.  Sulphur Bottom.  Another retiring
gentleman, with a brimstone belly, doubtless got by scraping along the
Tartarian tiles in some of his profounder divings. He is seldom seen at
least I have never seen him except in the remoter southern seas, and then
always at too great a distance to study his countenance. He is never chased
he would run away with ropewalks of line. Prodigies are told of him. Adieu,
Sulphur Bottom I can say nothing more that is true of ye, nor can the oldest
Nantucketer. Thus ends BOOK I.  Folio, and now begins BOOK II.  octavo.
OCTAVOES. These embrace the whales of middling magnitude, among which at
present may be numbered I., the Grampus II., the Black Fish III., the
Narwhale IV., the Thrasher V., the Killer. BOOK II.  Octavo, CHAPTER
I.  Grampus. Though this fish, whose loud sonorous breathing, or rather
blowing, has furnished a proverb to landsmen, is so well known a denizen of
the deep, yet is he not popularly classed among whales. But possessing all
the grand distinctive features of the leviathan, most naturalists have
recognised him for one. He is of moderate octavo size, varying from fifteen
to twentyfive feet in length, and of corresponding dimensions round the
waist. He swims in herds he is never regularly hunted, though his oil is
considerable
in quantity, and pretty good for light. By some fishermen his approach is
regarded as premonitory of the advance of the great sperm whale. BOOK II.
 Octavo, CHAPTER II.  Black Fish. I give the popular fishermen's names
for all these fish, for generally they are the best. Where any name happens
to be vague or inexpressive, I shall say so, and suggest another. I do so
now, touching the Black Fish, so called, because blackness is the rule among
almost all whales. So, call him the Hyena Whale, if you please. His voracity
is well known, and from the circumstance that the inner angles of his lips
are curved upwards, he carries an everlasting Mephistophelean grin on his
face. This whale averages some sixteen or eighteen feet in length. He is
found in almost all latitudes. He has a peculiar way of showing his dorsal
hooked fin in swimming, which looks something like a Roman nose. When not
more profitably employed, the sperm whale hunters sometimes capture the Hyena
whale, to keep up the supply of cheap oil for domestic employment as some
frugal housekeepers, in the absence of company, and quite alone by themselves,
burn unsavory tallow instead of odorous wax. Though their blubber is very
thin, some of these whales will yield you upwards of thirty gallons of oil.
BOOK II.  Octavo, CHAPTER III.  Narwhale, that is, Nostril whale.
Another instance of a curiously named whale, so named I suppose from his
peculiar horn being originally mistaken for a peaked nose. The creature is
some sixteen feet in length, while its horn averages five feet, though some
exceed ten, and even attain to fifteen feet. Strictly speaking, this horn is
but a lengthened tusk, growing out from the jaw in a line a little depressed
from the horizontal. But it is only found on the sinister side, which has an
ill effect, giving its owner something analogous to the aspect of a clumsy
lefthanded man. What precise purpose this ivory horn or lance answers, it
would be hard to say. It does not seemed to be used like the blade of the
swordfish and billfish though some sailors tell me that the Narwhale
employs it for a rake in turning over the bottom of the sea for food. Charley
Coffin said it was used for an icepiercer for the Narwhale, rising to the
surface of the Polar Sea,
and finding it sheeted with ice, thrusts his horn up, and so breaks through.
But you cannot prove either of these surmises to be correct. My own opinion
is, that however this onesided horn may really be used by the Narwhale
however that may be it would certainly be very convenient to him for a
folder in reading pamphlets. The Narwhale I have heard called the Tusked
whale, the Horned whale, and the Unicorn whale. He is certainly a curious
example of the Unicornism to be found in almost every kingdom of animated
nature. From certain cloistered old authors I have gathered that this same
seaunicorn's horn was in ancient days regarded as the great antidote against
poison, and as such, preparations of it brought immense prices. It was also
distilled to a volatile salts for fainting ladies, the same way that the
horns of the male deer are manufactured into hartshorn. Originally it was in
itself accounted an object of great curiosity. Black Letter tells me that Sir
Martin Frobisher on his return from that voyage, when Queen Bess did
gallantly wave her jewelled hand to him from a window of Greenwich Palace, as
his bold ship sailed down the Thames when Sir Martin returned from that
voyage, saith Black Letter, on bended knees he presented to her highness a
prodigious long horn of the Narwhale, which for a long period after hung in
the castle at Windsor. An Irish author avers that the Earl of Leicester,
on bended knees, did likewise present to her highness another horn, pertaining
to a land beast of the unicorn nature. The Narwhale has a very picturesque,
leopardlike look, being of a milkwhite ground color, dotted with round and
oblong spots of black. His oil is very superior, clear and fine but there
is little of it, and he is seldom hunted. He is mostly found in the
circumpolar seas. BOOK II.  Octavo, CHAPTER IV.  Killer. Of this whale
little is precisely known to the Nantucketer, and nothing at all to the
professed naturalist. From what I have seen of him at a distance, I should
say that he was about the bigness of a grampus. He is very savage a sort of
Feegee fish. He sometimes takes the great Folio whales by the lip, and hangs
there like a leech, till the mighty brute is worried to death. The Killer
is never hunted. I never heard what sort of oil he has. Exception
might be taken to the name bestowed upon this whale, on the ground of its
indistinctness. For we are all killers, on land and on sea Bonapartes and
Sharks included. BOOK II.  Octavo, CHAPTER V.  Thrasher. This gentleman
is famous for his tail, which he uses for a ferule in thrashing his foes. He
mounts the Folio whale's back, and as he swims, he works his passage by
flogging him as some schoolmasters get along in the world by a similar
process. Still less is known of the Thrasher than of the Killer. Both are
outlaws, even in the lawless seas. thus ends book II.  Octavo, and begins
BOOK III.  Duodecimo. DUODECIMOES. These include the smaller whales. I.
The Huzza Porpoise. II. The Algerine Porpoise. III. The Mealymouthed
Porpoise. To those who have not chanced specially to study the subject, it
may possibly seem strange, that fishes not commonly exceeding four or five
feet should be marshalled among WHALES a word, which, in the popular sense,
always conveys an idea of hugeness. But the creatures set down above as
Duodecimoes are infallibly whales, by the terms of my definition of what a
whale is i. e. a spouting fish, with a horizontal tail. BOOK III.
 Duodecimo, CHAPTER I  Huzza Porpoise.  This is the common porpoise
found almost all over the globe. The name is of my own bestowal for there
are more than one sort of porpoises, and something must be done to distinguish
them. I call them thus, because he always swims in hilarious shoals, which
upon the broad sea keep tossing themselves to heaven like caps in a
FourthofJuly crowd. Their appearance is generally hailed with delight by
the mariner. Full of fine spirits, they invariably come from the breezy
billows to windward. They are the lads that always live before the wind. They
are accounted a lucky omen. If you yourself can withstand three cheers at
beholding these vivacious fish, then heaven help ye the spirit of godly
gamesomeness is not in ye. A wellfed, plump Huzza Porpoise will yield you
one good gallon of good oil. But the fine and delicate fluid extracted from
his jaws is exceedingly valuable. It is in request among jewellers and
watchmakers.
Sailors put it on their hones. Porpoise meat is good eating, you know. It
may never have occurred to you that a porpoise spouts. Indeed, his spout is
so small that it is not very readily discernible. But the next time you have
a chance, watch him and you will then see the great Sperm whale himself in
miniature. BOOK III.  Duodecimo, CHAPTER II.  Algerine Porpoise.  A
pirate. Very savage. He is only found, I think, in the Pacific. He is
somewhat larger than the Huzza Porpoise, but much of the same general make.
Provoke him, and he will buckle to a shark. I have lowered for him many
times, but never yet saw him captured. BOOK III.  Duodecimo, CHAPTER III.
 Mealymouthed Porpoise. The largest kind of Porpoise and only found in
the Pacific, so far as it is known. The only English name, by which he has
hitherto been designated, is that of the fishers  RightWhale Porpoise,
from the circumstance that he is chiefly found in the vicinity of that Folio.
In shape, he differs in some degree from the Huzza Porpoise, being of a less
rotund and jolly girth indeed, he is of quite a neat and gentlemanlike
figure. He has no fins on his back most other porpoises have, he has a
lovely tail, and sentimental Indian eyes of a hazel hue. But his
mealymouth spoils all. Though his entire back down to his side fins is of a
deep sable, yet a boundary line, distinct as the mark in a ship's hull, called
the bright waist, that line streaks him from stem to stern, with two
separate colors, black above and white below. The white comprises part of his
head, and the whole of his mouth, which makes him look as if he had just
escaped from a felonious visit to a mealbag. A most mean and mealy aspect
His oil is much like that of the common porpoise. Beyond the DUODECIMO, this
system does not proceed, inasmuch as the Porpoise is the smallest of the
whales. Above, you have all the Leviathans of note. But there are a rabble
of uncertain, fugitive, halffabulous whales, which, as an American
whaleman, I know by reputation, but not personally. I shall enumerate them by
their forecastle appellations for possibly such a list may be valuable to
future investigators, who may complete what I have here but begun. If any of
the following
whales, shall hereafter be caught and marked, then he can readily be
incorporated into this System, according to his Folio, Octavo, or Duodecimo
magnitude The BottleNose Whale the Junk Whale the PuddingHeaded
Whale the Cape Whale the Leading Whale the Cannon Whale the Scragg Whale
the Coppered Whale the Elephant Whale the Iceberg Whale the Quog Whale
the Blue Whale etc. From Icelandic, Dutch, and old English authorities,
there might be quoted other lists of uncertain whales, blessed with all
manner of uncouth names. But I omit them as altogether obsolete and can
hardly help suspecting them for mere sounds, full of Leviathanism, but
signifying nothing. Finally It was stated at the outset, that this system
would not be here, and at once, perfected. You cannot but plainly see that I
have kept my word. But I now leave my cetological System standing thus
unfinished, even as the great Cathedral of Cologne was left, with the crane
still standing upon the top of the uncompleted tower. For small erections may
be finished by their first architects grand ones, true ones, ever leave the
copestone to posterity. God keep me from ever completing anything. This
whole book is but a draught nay, but the draught of a draught. Oh Time,
Strength, Cash, and Patience
I am aware that down to the present time, the fish styled Lamatins and
Dugongs Pigfish and Sowfish of the Coffins of Nantucket are included by
many naturalists among the whales. But as these pigfish are a nosy,
contemptible set, mostly lurking in the mouths of rivers, and feeding on wet
hay, and especially as they do not spout, I deny their credentials as
whales and have presented them with their passports to quit the kingdom of
Cetology.
Why this book of whales is not denominated the Quarto is very plain. Because,
while the whales of this order, though smaller than those of the former
order, nevertheless retain a proportionate likeness to them in figure, yet
the bookbinder's Quarto volume in its diminished form does not preserve the
shape of the Folio volume, but the Octavo volume does.
Concerning the officers of the
whalecraft, this seems as good a place as any to set down a little domestic
peculiarity on shipboard, arising from the existence of the harpooneer class
of officers, a class unknown of course in any other marine than the
whalefleet. The large importance attached to the harpooneer's vocation is
evinced by the fact, that originally in the old Dutch Fishery, two centuries
and more ago, the command of a whale ship was
not wholly lodged in the person now called the captain, but was divided
between him and an officer called the Specksynder. Literally this word means
FatCutter usage, however, in time made it equivalent to Chief Harpooneer.
In those days, the captain's authority was restricted to the navigation and
general management of the vessel while over the whalehunting department
and all its concerns, the Specksynder or Chief Harpooneer reigned supreme. In
the British Greenland Fishery, under the corrupted title of Specksioneer,
this old Dutch official is still retained, but his former dignity is sadly
abridged. At present he ranks simply as senior Harpooneer and as such, is
but one of the captain's more inferior subalterns. Nevertheless, as upon the
good conduct of the harpooneers the success of a whaling voyage largely
depends, and since in the American Fishery he is not only an important
officer in the boat, but under certain circumstances night watches on a
whaling ground the command of the ship's deck is also his therefore the
grand political maxim of the sea demands, that he should nominally live apart
from the men before the mast, and be in some way distinguished as their
professional superior though always, by them, familiarly regarded as their
social equal. Now, the grand distinction drawn between officer and man at
sea, is thisthe first lives aft, the last forward. Hence, in whaleships
and merchantmen alike, the mates have their quarters with the captain and
so, too, in most of the American whalers the harpooneers are lodged in the
after part of the ship. That is to say, they take their meals in the
captain's cabin, and sleep in a place indirectly communicating with it.
Though the long period of a Southern whaling voyage by far the longest of
all voyages now or ever made by man, the peculiar perils of it, and the
community of interest prevailing among a company, all of whom, high or low,
depend for their profits, not upon fixed wages, but upon their common luck,
together with their common vigilance, intrepidity, and hard work though all
these things do in some cases tend to beget a less rigorous discipline than in
merchantmen generally yet, never mind how much like an old Mesopotamian
family these whalemen may, in some primitive instances, live together for
all that,
the punctilious externals, at least, of the quarterdeck are seldom materially
relaxed, and in no instance done away. Indeed, many are the Nantucket ships
in which you will see the skipper parading his quarterdeck with an elated
grandeur not surpassed in any military navy nay, extorting almost as much
outward homage as if he wore the imperial purple, and not the shabbiest of
pilotcloth. And though of all men the moody captain of the Pequod was the
least given to that sort of shallowest assumption and though the only homage
he ever exacted, was implicit, instantaneous obedience though he required no
man to remove the shoes from his feet ere stepping upon the quarterdeck and
though there were times when, owing to peculiar circumstances connected with
events hereafter to be detailed, he addressed them in unusual terms, whether
of condescension or in terrorem, or otherwise yet even Captain Ahab was
by no means unobservant of the paramount forms and usages of the sea. Nor,
perhaps, will it fail to be eventually perceived, that behind those forms and
usages, as it were, he sometimes masked himself incidentally making use of
them for other and more private ends than they were legitimately intended to
subserve. That certain sultanism of his brain, which had otherwise in a good
degree remained unmanifested through those forms that same sultanism became
incarnate in an irresistible dictatorship. For be a man's intellectual
superiority what it will, it can never assume the practical, available
supremacy over other men, without the aid of some sort of external arts and
entrenchments, always, in themselves, more or less paltry and base. This it
is, that for ever keeps God's true princes of the Empire from the world's
hustings and leaves the highest honors that this air can give, to those men
who become famous more through their infinite inferiority to the choice hidden
handful of the Divine Inert, than through their undoubted superiority over
the dead level of the mass. Such large virtue lurks in these small things
when extreme political superstitions invest them, that in some royal
instances even to idiot imbecility they have imparted potency. But when, as
in the case of Nicholas the Czar, the ringed crown of geographical empire
encircles an imperial brain
then, the plebeian herds crouch abased before the tremendous centralization.
Nor, will the tragic dramatist who would depict mortal indomitableness in its
fullest sweep and direct swing, ever forget a hint, incidentally so important
in his art, as the one now alluded to. But Ahab, my Captain, still moves
before me in all his Nantucket grimness and shagginess and in this episode
touching Emperors and Kings, I must not conceal that I have only to do with
a poor old whalehunter like him and, therefore, all outward majestical
trappings and housings are denied me. Oh, Ahab what shall be grand in thee,
it must needs be plucked at from the skies, and dived for in the deep, and
featured in the unbodied air
It is noon and DoughBoy, the
steward, thrusting his pale loafofbread face from the cabinscuttle,
announces dinner to his lord and master who, sitting in the lee
quarterboat, has just been taking an observation of the sun and is now
mutely reckoning the latitude on the smooth, medallionshaped tablet,
reserved for that daily purpose on the upper part of his ivory leg. From his
complete inattention to the tidings, you would think that moody Ahab had not
heard his menial. But presently, catching hold of the mizen shrouds, he
swings himself to the deck, and in an even, unexhilarated voice, saying,
Dinner, Mr. Starbuck, disappears into the cabin. When the last echo of his
sultan's step has died away, and Starbuck, the first Emir, has every reason to
suppose that he is seated, then Starbuck rouses from his quietude, takes a
few turns along the planks, and, after a grave peep into the binnacle, says,
with some touch of pleasantness, Dinner, Mr. Stubb, and descends the
scuttle. The second Emir lounges about the rigging
awhile, and then slightly shaking the main brace, to see whether it be all
right with that important rope, he likewise takes up the old burden, and with
a rapid Dinner, Mr. Flask, follows after his predecessors. But the third
emir, now seeing himself all alone on the quarterdeck, seems to feel
relieved from some curious restraint for, tipping all sorts of knowing winks
in all sorts of directions, and kicking off his shoes, he strikes into a sharp
but noiseless squall of a hornpipe right over the Grand Turk's head and
then, by a dexterous sleight, pitching his cap up into the mizentop for a
shelf, he goes down rollicking, so far at least as he remains visible from
the deck, reversing all other processions, by bringing up the rear with music.
But ere stepping into the cabin doorway below, he pauses, ships a new face
altogether, and, then, independent, hilarious little Flask enters King Ahab's
presence, in the character of Abjectus, or the Slave. It is not the least
among the strange things bred by the intense artificialness of seausages,
that while in the open air of the deck some officers will, upon provocation,
bear themselves boldly and defyingly enough towards their commander yet,
ten to one, let those very officers the next moment go down to their customary
dinner in that same commander's cabin, and straightway their inoffensive, not
to say deprecatory and humble air towards him, as he sits at the head of the
table this is marvellous, sometimes most comical. Wherefore this
difference? A problem? Perhaps not. To have been Belshazzar, King of
Babylon and to have been Belshazzar, not haughtily but courteously,
therein certainly must have been some touch of mundane grandeur. But he who
in the rightly regal and intelligent spirit presides over his own private
dinnertable of invited guests, that man's unchallenged power and dominion of
individual influence for the time that man's royalty of state transcends
Belshazzar's, for Belshazzar was not the greatest. Who has but once dined
his friends, has tasted what it is to be Caesar. It is a witchery of social
czarship which there is no withstanding. Now, if to this consideration you
superadd the official supremacy of a shipmaster, then, by inference, you
will derive the cause of that peculiarity of sealife just mentioned.
Over his ivoryinlaid table, Ahab presided like a mute, maned sealion on the
white coral beach, surrounded by his warlike but still deferential cubs. In
his own proper turn, each officer waited to be served. They were as little
children before Ahab and yet, in Ahab, there seemed not to lurk the smallest
social arrogance. With one mind, their intent eyes all fastened upon the old
man's knife, as he carved the chief dish before him. I do not suppose that
for the world they would have profaned that moment with the slightest
observation, even upon so neutral a topic as the weather. No And when
reaching out his knife and fork, between which the slice of beef was locked,
Ahab thereby motioned Starbuck's plate towards him, the mate received his
meat as though receiving alms and cut it tenderly and a little started if,
perchance, the knife grazed against the plate and chewed it noiselessly
and swallowed it, not without circumspection. For, like the Coronation
banquet at Frankfort, where the German Emperor profoundly dines with the seven
Imperial Electors, so these cabin meals were somehow solemn meals, eaten in
awful silence and yet at table old Ahab forbade not conversation only he
himself was dumb. What a relief it was to choking Stubb, when a rat made a
sudden racket in the hold below. And poor little Flask, he was the youngest
son, and little boy of this weary family party. His were the shinbones of
the saline beef his would have been the drumsticks. For Flask to have
presumed to help himself, this must have seemed to him tantamount to larceny
in the first degree. Had he helped himself at that table, doubtless, never
more would he have been able to hold his head up in this honest world
nevertheless, strange to say, Ahab never forbade him. And had Flask helped
himself, the chances were Ahab had never so much as noticed it. Least of all,
did flask presume to help himself to butter. Whether he thought the owners of
the ship denied it to him, on account of its clotting his clear, sunny
complexion or whether he deemed that, on so long a voyage in such marketless
waters, butter was at a premium, and therefore was not for him, a subaltern
however it was, Flask, alas was a butterless man Another thing. Flask was
the last person down at the dinner,
and Flask is the first man up. Consider For hereby Flask's dinner was badly
jammed in point of time. Starbuck and Stubb both had the start of him and
yet they also have the privilege of lounging in the rear. If Stubb even, who
is but a peg higher than Flask, happens to have but a small appetite, and
soon shows symptoms of concluding his repast, then Flask must bestir
himself, he will not get more than three mouthfuls that day for it is
against holy usage for Stubb to precede Flask to the deck. Therefore it was
that Flask once admitted in private, that ever since he had arisen to the
dignity of an officer, from that moment he had never known what it was to be
otherwise than hungry, more or less. For what he ate did not so much relieve
his hunger, as keep it immortal in him. Peace and satisfaction, thought
Flask, have for ever departed from my stomach. I am an officer but, how I
wish I could fist a bit of oldfashioned beef in the forecastle, as I used to
when I was before the mast. There's the fruits of promotion now there's the
vanity of glory there's the insanity of life Besides, if it were so that
any mere sailor of the Pequod had a grudge against Flask in Flask's official
capacity, all that sailor had to do, in order to obtain ample vengeance, was
to go aft at dinnertime, and get a peep at Flask through the cabin skylight,
sitting silly and dumfoundered before awful Ahab. Now, Ahab and his three
mates formed what may be called the first table in the Pequod's cabin. After
their departure, taking place in inverted order to their arrival, the canvas
cloth was cleared, or rather was restored to some hurried order by the pallid
steward. And then the three harpooneers were bidden to the feast, they being
its residuary legatees. They made a sort of temporary servants' hall of the
high and mighty cabin. In strange contrast to the hardly tolerable constraint
and nameless invisible domineerings of the captain's table, was the entire
carefree license and ease, the almost frantic democracy of those inferior
fellows the harpooneers. While their masters, the mates, seemed afraid of the
sound of the hinges of their own jaws, the harpooneers chewed their food with
such a relish that there was a report to it. They dined like lords they
filled their bellies like Indian ships all day loading with spices. Such
portentous
appetites had Queequeg and Tashtego, that to fill out the vacancies made by
the previous repast, often the pale DoughBoy was fain to bring on a great
baron of saltjunk, seemingly quarried out of the solid ox. And if he were
not lively about it, if he did not go with a nimble hopskipandjump, then
Tashtego had an ungentlemanly way of accelerating him by darting a fork at his
back, harpoonwise. And once Daggoo, seized with a sudden humor, assisted
DoughBoy's memory by snatching him up bodily, and thrusting his head into a
great empty wooden trencher, while Tashtego, knife in hand, began laying out
the circle preliminary to scalping him. He was naturally a very nervous,
shuddering sort of little fellow, this breadfaced steward the progeny of a
bankrupt baker and a hospital nurse. And what with the standing spectacle of
the black terrific Ahab, and the periodical tumultuous visitations of these
three savages, DoughBoy's whole life was one continual lipquiver.
Commonly, after seeing the harpooneers furnished with all things they
demanded, he would escape from their clutches into his little pantry
adjoining, and fearfully peep out at them through the blinds of its door,
till all was over. It was a sight to see Queequeg seated over against
Tashtego, opposing his filed teeth to the Indian's crosswise to them,
Daggoo seated on the floor, for a bench would have brought his hearseplumed
head to the low carlines at every motion of his colossal limbs, making the
low cabin framework to shake, as when an African elephant goes passenger in a
ship. But for all this, the great negro was wonderfully abstemious, not to
say dainty. It seemed hardly possible that by such comparatively small
mouthfuls he could keep up the vitality diffused through so broad, baronial,
and superb a person. But, doubtless, this noble savage fed strong and drank
deep of the abounding element of air and through his dilated nostrils
snuffed in the sublime life of the worlds. Not by beef or by bread, are
giants made or nourished. But Queequeg, he had a mortal, barbaric smack of
the lip in eating an ugly sound enough so much so, that the trembling
DoughBoy almost looked to see whether any marks of teeth lurked in his own
lean arms. And when he would hear Tashtego singing out for him to produce
himself,
that his bones might be picked, the simplewitted Steward all but shattered
the crockery hanging round him in the pantry, by his sudden fits of the
palsy. Nor did the whetstone which the harpooneers carried in their pockets,
for their lances and other weapons and with which whetstones, at dinner,
they would ostentatiously sharpen their knives that grating sound did not
at all tend to tranquillize poor DoughBoy. How could he forget that in his
Island days, Queequeg, for one, must certainly have been guilty of some
murderous, convivial indiscretions. Alas DoughBoy hard fares the white
waiter who waits upon cannibals. Not a napkin should he carry on his arm,
but a buckler. in good time, though, to his great delight, the three
saltsea warriors would rise and depart to his credulous, fablemongering
ears, all their martial bones jingling in them at every step, like Moorish
scimetars in scabbards. But, though these barbarians dined in the cabin, and
nominally lived there still, being anything but sedentary in their habits,
they were scarcely ever in it except at mealtimes, and just before
sleepingtime, when they passed through it to their own peculiar quarters.
In this one matter, Ahab seemed no exception to most American whale captains,
who, as a set, rather incline to the opinion that by rights the ship's cabin
belongs to them and that it is by courtesy alone that anybody else is, at
any time, permitted there. So that, in real truth, the mates and harpooneers
of the Pequod might more properly be said to have lived out of the cabin than
in it. For when they did enter it, it was something as a streetdoor enters a
house turning inwards for a moment, only to be turned out the next and, as
a permanent thing, residing in the open air. Nor did they lose much hereby
in the cabin was no companionship socially, Ahab was inaccessible. Though
nominally included in the census of Christendom, he was still an alien to it.
He lived in the world, as the last of the Grisly Bears lived in settled
Missouri. And as when Spring and Summer had departed, that wild Logan of the
woods, burying himself in the hollow of a tree, lived out the winter there,
sucking his own paws so, in his inclement, howling old age, Ahab's soul,
shut up in the caved trunk of his body, there fed upon the sullen paws of its
gloom
It was during the more pleasant weather,
that in due rotation with the other seamen my first masthead came round. In
most American whalemen the mastheads are manned almost simultaneously with
the vessel's leaving her port even though she may have fifteen thousand
miles, and more, to sail ere reaching her proper cruising ground. and if,
after a three, four, or five years' voyage she is drawing nigh home with
anything empty in her say, an empty vial even then, her mastheads are kept
manned to the last and not till her skysailpoles sail in among the spires
of the port, does she altogether relinquish the hope of capturing one whale
more. Now, as the business of standing mastheads, ashore or afloat, is a
very ancient and interesting one, let us in some measure expatiate here. I
take it, that the earliest standers of mastheads were the old Egyptians
because, in all my researches, I find none prior to them. For though their
progenitors, the builders of Babel, must doubtless, by their tower, have
intended to rear the loftiest masthead in all Asia, or Africa either yet
ere the final truck was put to it as that great stone mast of theirs may be
said to have gone by the board, in the dread gale of God's wrath therefore,
we cannot give these Babel builders priority over the Egyptians. And that the
Egyptians were a nation of masthead standers, is an assertion based upon the
general belief among archaeologists, that the first pyramids were founded for
astronomical purposes a theory singularly supported by the peculiar
stairlike formation of all four sides of those edifices whereby, with
prodigious long upliftings of their legs, those old astronomers were wont to
mount to the apex, and sing out for new stars even as the lookouts of a
modern ship sing out for a sail, or a whale just bearing in sight. In Saint
Stylites, the famous Christian hermit of old times, who built him a lofty
stone pillar in the desert and spent the whole latter portion of
his life on its summit, hoisting his food from the ground with a tackle in
him we have a remarkable instance of a dauntless standerofmastheads who
was not to be driven from his place by fogs or frosts, rain, hail, or sleet
but valiantly facing everything out to the last, literally died at his post.
Of modern standersofmastheads we have but a lifeless set mere stone,
iron, and bronze men who, though well capable of facing out a stiff gale,
are still entirely incompetent to the business of singing out upon discovering
any strange sight. There is Napoleon who, upon the top of the column of
Vendome, stands with arms folded, some one hundred and fifty feet in the air
careless, now, who rules the decks below whether Louis Philippe, Louis
Blanc, or Louis the Devil. Great Washington, too, stands high aloft on his
towering mainmast in Baltimore, and like one of Hercules' pillars, his
column marks that point of human grandeur beyond which few mortals will go.
Admiral Nelson, also, on a capstan of gunmetal, stands his masthead in
Trafalgar Square and ever when most obscured by that London smoke, token is
yet given that a hidden hero is there for where there is smoke, must be
fire. But neither great Washington, nor Napoleon, nor Nelson, will answer a
single hail from below, however madly invoked to befriend by their counsels
the distracted decks upon which they gaze however it may be surmised, that
their spirits penetrate through the thick haze of the future, and descry what
shoals and what rocks must be shunned. It may seem unwarrantable to couple in
any respect the masthead standers of the land with those of the sea but
that in truth it is not so, is plainly evinced by an item for which Obed
Macy, the sole historian of Nantucket, stands accountable. The worthy Obed
tells us, that in the early times of the whale fishery, ere ships were
regularly launched in pursuit of the game, the people of that island erected
lofty spars along the seacoast, to which the lookouts ascended by means of
nailed cleats, something as fowls go upstairs in a henhouse. A few years
ago this same plan was adopted by the Bay whalemen of New Zealand, who, upon
descrying the game, gave notice to the readymanned boats nigh the beach. But
this custom has now become obsolete turn we then to the one proper masthead,
that of a whaleship
at sea. The three mastheads are kept manned from sunrise to sunset the
seamen taking their regular turns as at the helm, and relieving each other
every two hours. In the serene weather of the tropics it is exceedingly
pleasant the masthead nay, to a dreamy meditative man it is delightful.
There you stand, a hundred feet above the silent decks, striding along the
deep, as if the masts were gigantic stilts, while beneath you and between
your legs, as it were, swim the hugest monsters of the sea, even as ships
once sailed between the boots of the famous Colossus at old Rhodes. There you
stand, lost in the infinite series of the sea, with nothing ruffled but the
waves. The tranced ship indolently rolls the drowsy trade winds blow
everything resolves you into languor. For the most part, in this tropic
whaling life, a sublime uneventfulness invests you you hear no news read
no gazettes extras with startling accounts of commonplaces never delude you
into unnecessary excitements you hear of no domestic afflictions bankrupt
securities fall of stocks are never troubled with the thought of what you
shall have for dinner for all your meals for three years and more are snugly
stowed in casks, and your bill of fare is immutable. In one of those southern
whalemen, on a long three or four years' voyage, as often happens, the sum of
the various hours you spend at the masthead would amount to several entire
months. And it is much to be deplored that the place to which you devote so
considerable a portion of the whole term of your natural life, should be so
sadly destitute of anything approaching to a cosy inhabitiveness, or adapted
to breed a comfortable localness of feeling, such as pertains to a bed, a
hammock, a hearse, a sentry box, a pulpit, a coach, or any other of those
small and snug contrivances in which men temporarily isolate themselves. Your
most usual point of perch is the head of the t' gallantmast, where you stand
upon two thin parallel sticks almost peculiar to whalemen called the t'
gallant crosstrees. Here, tossed about by the sea, the beginner feels about
as cosy as he would standing on a bull's horns. To be sure, in cold weather
you may carry your house aloft with you, in the shape of a watchcoat but
properly speaking the thickest watchcoat is no more of a house than the
unclad body for as the soul is glued inside
of its fleshly tabernacle, and cannot freely move about in it, nor even move
out of it, without running great risk of perishing like an ignorant pilgrim
crossing the snowy Alps in winter so a watchcoat is not so much of a house
as it is a mere envelope, or additional skin encasing you. You cannot put a
shelf or chest of drawers in your body, and no more can you make a
convenient closet of your watchcoat. Concerning all this, it is much to be
deplored that the mastheads of a southern whale ship are unprovided with
those enviable little tents or pulpits, called crow'snests, in which the
lookouts of a Greenland whaler are protected from the inclement weather of
the frozen seas. In the fireside narrative of Captain Sleet, entitled A
Voyage among the Icebergs, in quest of the Greenland Whale, and incidentally
for the rediscovery of the Lost Icelandic Colonies of Old Greenland in
this admirable volume, all standers of mastheads are furnished with a
charmingly circumstantial account of the then recently invented crow'snest
of the Glacier, which was the name of Captain Sleet's good craft. He called
it the Sleet's crow'snest, in honor of himself he being the original
inventor and patentee, and free from all ridiculous false delicacy, and
holding that if we call our own children after our own names we fathers
being the original inventors and patentees, so likewise should we denominate
after ourselves any other apparatus we may beget. In shape, the Sleet's
crow'snest is something like a large tierce or pipe it is open above,
however, where it is furnished with a movable sidescreen to keep to windward
of your head in a hard gale. Being fixed on the summit of the mast, you
ascend into it through a little traphatch in the bottom. On the after side,
or side next the stern of the ship, is a comfortable seat, with a locker
underneath for umbrellas, comforters, and coats. In front is a leather rack,
in which to keep your speaking trumpet, pipe, telescope, and other nautical
conveniences. When Captain Sleet in person stood his masthead in this crow's
nest of his, he tells us that he always had a rifle with him also fixed in
the rack, together with a powder flask and shot, for the purpose of popping
off the stray narwhales, or vagrant sea unicorns infesting those waters for
you cannot successfully shoot at them from
the deck owing to the resistance of the water, but to shoot down upon them is
a very different thing. Now, it was plainly a labor of love for Captain Sleet
to describe, as he does, all the little detailed conveniences of his
crow'snest but though he so enlarges upon many of these, and though he
treats us to a very scientific account of his experiments in this crow'snest,
with a small compass he kept there for the purpose of counteracting the
errors resulting from what is called the local attraction of all binnacle
magnets an error ascribable to the horizontal vicinity of the iron in the
ship's planks, and in the Glacier's case, perhaps, to there having been so
many brokendown blacksmiths among her crew I say, that though the Captain
is very discreet and scientific here, yet, for all his learned binnacle
deviations, azimuth compass observations, and approximate errors, he
knows very well, Captain Sleet, that he was not so much immersed in those
profound magnetic meditations, as to fail being attracted occasionally towards
that well replenished little casebottle, so nicely tucked in on one side of
his crow's nest, within easy reach of his hand. Though, upon the whole, I
greatly admire and even love the brave, the honest, and learned Captain yet
I take it very ill of him that he should so utterly ignore that casebottle,
seeing what a faithful friend and comforter it must have been, while with
mittened fingers and hooded head he was studying the mathematics aloft there
in that bird's nest within three or four perches of the pole. But if we
Southern whalefishers are not so snugly housed aloft as Captain Sleet and his
Greenlandmen were yet that disadvantage is greatly counterbalanced by the
widely contrasting serenity of those seductive seas in which we South fishers
mostly float. For one, I used to lounge up the rigging very leisurely,
resting in the top to have a chat with Queequeg, or any one else off duty whom
I might find there then ascending a little way further, and throwing a lazy
leg over the topsail yard, take a preliminary view of the watery pastures,
and so at last mount to my ultimate destination. Let me make a clean breast
of it here, and frankly admit that I kept but sorry guard. With the problem
of the universe revolving in me, how could Ibeing left completely to myself
at such a thoughtengendering altitude, how could I but lightly hold my
obligations to observe all whaleships' standing orders, Keep your weather
eye open, and sing out every time. And let me in this place movingly admonish
you, ye shipowners of Nantucket Beware of enlisting in your vigilant
fisheries any lad with lean brow and hollow eye given to unseasonable
meditativeness and who offers to ship with the phaedon instead of Bowditch
in his head. Beware of such an one, I say your whales must be seen before
they can be killed and this sunkeneyed young Platonist will tow you ten
wakes round the world, and never make you one pint of sperm the richer. Nor
are these monitions at all unneeded. For nowadays, the whalefishery
furnishes an asylum for many romantic, melancholy, and absentminded young
men, disgusted with the carking cares of earth, and seeking sentiment in tar
and blubber. Childe Harold not unfrequently perches himself upon the
masthead of some luckless disappointed whaleship, and in moody phrase
ejaculates  Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll Ten thousand
blubberhunters sweep over thee in vain. Very often do the captains of such
ships take those absentminded young philosophers to task, upbraiding them
with not feeling sufficient interest in the voyage halfhinting that they
are so hopelessly lost to all honorable ambition, as that in their secret
souls they would rather not see whales than otherwise. But all in vain those
young Platonists have a notion that their vision is imperfect they are
shortsighted what use, then, to strain the visual nerve? They have left
their operaglasses at home. Why, thou monkey, said a harpooneer to one of
these lads, we've been cruising now hard upon three years, and thou hast not
raised a whale yet. Whales are scarce as hen's teeth whenever thou art up
here. Perhaps they were or perhaps there might have been shoals of them in
the far horizon but lulled into such an opiumlike listlessness of vacant,
unconscious reverie is this absentminded youth by the blending cadence of
waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity takes the mystic
ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul,
pervading mankind and nature and every strange, halfseen, gliding,
beautiful thing that eludes him every dimlydiscovered, uprising fin of some
undiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that
only people the soul by continually flitting through it. In this enchanted
mood, thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came becomes diffused through time
and space like Cranmer's sprinkled Pantheistic ashes, forming at last a
part of every shore the round globe over. There is no life in thee, now,
except that rocking life imparted by a gently rolling ship by her, borrowed
from the sea by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God. But while this
sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch slip your hold
at all and your identity comes back in horror. Over Descartian vortices you
hover. And perhaps, at midday, in the fairest weather, with one
halfthrottled shriek you drop through that transparent air into the summer
sea, no more to rise for ever. Heed it well, ye Pantheists
 enter Ahab Then, all. It
was not a great while after the affair of the pipe, that one morning shortly
after breakfast, Ahab, as was his wont, ascended the cabingangway to the
deck. There most seacaptains usually walk at that hour, as country
gentlemen, after the same meal, take a few turns in the garden. Soon his
steady, ivory stride was heard, as to and fro he paced his old rounds, upon
planks so familiar to his tread, that they were all over dented, like
geological stones, with the peculiar mark of his walk. Did you fixedly gaze,
too, upon that ribbed
and dented brow there also, you would see still stranger footprints the
footprints of his one unsleeping, everpacing thought. But on the occasion in
question, those dents looked deeper, even as his nervous step that morning
left a deeper mark. And, so full of his thought was Ahab, that at every
uniform turn that he made, now at the mainmast and now at the binnacle, you
could almost see that thought turn in him as he turned, and pace in him as he
paced so completely possessing him, indeed, that it all but seemed the
inward mould of every outer movement. D'ye mark him, Flask? whispered Stubb
the chick that's in him pecks the shell. T'will soon be out. The hours
wore on Ahab now shut up within his cabin anon, pacing the deck, with the
same intense bigotry of purpose in his aspect. It drew near the close of day.
Suddenly he came to a halt by the bulwarks, and inserting his bone leg into
the augerhole there, and with one hand grasping a shroud, he ordered Starbuck
to send everybody aft. Sir said the mate, astonished at an order seldom or
never given on shipboard except in some extraordinary case. Send everybody
aft, repeated Ahab. Mastheads, there come down When the entire ship's
company were assembled, and with curious and not wholly unapprehensive faces,
were eyeing him, for he looked not unlike the weather horizon when a storm is
coming up, Ahab, after rapidly glancing over the bulwarks, and then darting
his eyes among the crew, started from his standpoint and as though not a
soul were nigh him resumed his heavy turns upon the deck. With bent head and
halfslouched hat he continued to pace, unmindful of the wondering whispering
among the men till Stubb cautiously whispered to Flask, that Ahab must have
summoned them there for the purpose of witnessing a pedestrian feat. But this
did not last long. Vehemently pausing, he cried  What do ye do when ye see
a whale, men? Sing out for him was the impulsive rejoinder from a score
of clubbed voices.
Good cried Ahab, with a wild approval in his tones observing the hearty
animation into which his unexpected question had so magnetically thrown them.
And what do ye next, men? Lower away, and after him And what tune is
it ye pull to, men? A dead whale or a stove boat More and more strangely
and fiercely glad and approving, grew the countenance of the old man at every
shout while the mariners began to gaze curiously at each other, as if
marvelling how it was that they themselves became so excited at such
seemingly purposeless questions. But, they were all eagerness again, as Ahab,
now halfrevolving in his pivothole, with one hand reaching high up a shroud,
and tightly, almost convulsively grasping it, addressed them thus  All ye
mastheaders have before now heard me give orders about a white whale. Look
ye d'ye see this Spanish ounce of gold? holding up a broad bright coin to
the sun  it is a sixteen dollar piece, men. D'ye see it? Mr. Starbuck,
hand me yon topmaul. While the mate was getting the hammer, Ahab, without
speaking, was slowly rubbing the gold piece against the skirts of his jacket,
as if to heighten its lustre, and without using any words was meanwhile lowly
humming to himself, producing a sound so strangely muffled and inarticulate
that it seemed the mechanical humming of the wheels of his vitality in him.
Receiving the topmaul from Starbuck, he advanced towards the mainmast with
the hammer uplifted in one hand, exhibiting the gold with the other, and with
a high raised voice exclaiming Whosoever of ye raises me a whiteheaded
whale with a wrinkled brow and a crooked jaw whosoever of ye raises me that
whiteheaded whale, with three holes punctured in his starboard fluke look
ye, whosoever of ye raises me that same white whale, he shall have this gold
ounce, my boys Huzza huzza cried the seamen, as with swinging
tarpaulins they hailed the act of nailing the gold to the mast. It's a
white whale, I say, resumed Ahab, as he threw down
the topmaul a white whale. Skin your eyes for him, men look sharp for
white water if ye see but a bubble, sing out. All this while Tashtego,
Daggoo, and Queequeg had looked on with even more intense interest and
surprise than the rest, and at the mention of the wrinkled brow and crooked
jaw they had started as if each was separately touched by some specific
recollection. Captain Ahab, said Tashtego, that white whale must be the
same that some call Moby Dick. Moby Dick? shouted Ahab. Do ye know the
white whale then, Tash? Does he fantail a little curious, sir, before he
goes down? said the GayHeader deliberately. And has he a curious spout,
too, said Daggoo, very bushy, even for a parmacetty, and mighty quick,
Captain Ahab? And he have one, two, tree oh good many iron in him hide,
too, Captain, cried Queequeg disjointedly, all twisketee betwisk, like
himhim faltering hard for a word, and screwing his hand round and round as
though uncorking a bottle  like himhim Corkscrew cried Ahab, aye,
Queequeg, the harpoons lie all twisted and wrenched in him aye, Daggoo, his
spout is a big one, like a whole shock of wheat, and white as a pile of our
Nantucket wool after the great annual sheepshearing aye, Tashtego, and he
fantails like a split jib in a squall. Death and devils men, it is Moby
Dick ye have seen Moby Dick Moby Dick Captain Ahab, said Starbuck, who,
with Stubb and Flask, had thus far been eyeing his superior with increasing
surprise, but at last seemed struck with a thought which somewhat explained
all the wonder. Captain Ahab, I have heard of Moby Dickbut it was not Moby
Dick that took off thy leg? Who told thee that? cried Ahab then pausing,
Aye, Starbuck aye, my hearties all round it was Moby Dick that dismasted
me Moby Dick that brought me to this dead stump I stand on now. Aye, aye,
he shouted with a terrific, loud, animal sob, like that of a heartstricken
moose Aye, aye it was that accursed white whale that razeed me made a
poor pegging
lubber of me for ever and a day Then tossing both arms, with measureless
imprecations he shouted out Aye, aye and I'll chase him round Good Hope,
and round the horn, and round the norway maelstrom, and round perdition's
flames before I give him up. And this is what ye have shipped for, men to
chase that white whale on both sides of land, and over all sides of earth,
till he spouts black blood and rolls fin out. What say ye, men, will ye
splice hands on it, now? I think ye do look brave. Aye, aye shouted the
harpooneers and seamen, running closer to the excited old man A sharp eye
for the White Whale a sharp lance for Moby Dick God bless ye, he seemed
to half sob and half shout. God bless ye, men. Steward go draw the great
measure of grog. But what's this long face about, Mr. Starbuck wilt thou not
chase the white whale? art not game for Moby Dick? I am game for his
crooked jaw, and for the jaws of Death too, Captain Ahab, if it fairly comes
in the way of the business we follow but I came here to hunt whales, not my
commander's vengeance. How many barrels will thy vengeance yield thee even
if thou gettest it, Captain Ahab? it will not fetch thee much in our
Nantucket market. Nantucket market Hoot But come closer, Starbuck thou
requirest a little lower layer. If money's to be the measurer, man, and the
accountants have computed their great countinghouse the globe, by girdling
it with guineas, one to every three parts of an inch then, let me tell thee,
that my vengeance will fetch a great premium here He smites his chest,
whispered Stubb, what's that for? methinks it rings most vast, but hollow.
Vengeance on a dumb brute cried Starbuck, that simply smote thee from
blindest instinct Madness To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab,
seems blasphemous. Hark ye yet again, the little lower layer. All visible
objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event in the living
act, the undoubted deed there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts
forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man
will strike, strike through
the mask How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the
wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I
think there's naught beyond. But 'tis enough. He tasks me he heaps me I
see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it.
That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate and be the white whale agent,
or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not
to me of blasphemy, man I'd strike the sun if it insulted me. For could the
sun do that, then could I do the other since there is ever a sort of fair
play herein, jealousy presiding over all creations. But not my master, man,
is even that fair play. Who's over me? Truth hath no confines. Take off
thine eye more intolerable than fiends' glarings is a doltish stare So,
so thou reddenest and palest my heat has melted thee to angerglow. But
look ye, Starbuck, what is said in heat, that thing unsays itself. There are
men from whom warm words are small indignity. I meant not to incense thee.
Let it go. Look see yonder Turkish cheeks of spotted tawn  living,
breathing pictures painted by the sun. The Pagan leopards the unrecking and
unworshipping things, that live and seek, and give no reasons for the torrid
life they feel The crew, man, the crew Are they not one and all with Ahab,
in this matter of the whale? See Stubb he laughs See yonder Chilian he
snorts to think of it. Stand up amid the general hurricane, thy one tost
sapling cannot, Starbuck And what is it? Reckon it. 'Tis but to help strike
a fin no wondrous feat for Starbuck. What is it more? From this one poor
hunt, then, the best lance out of all Nantucket, surely he will not hang back,
when every foremasthand has clutched a whetstone? Ah constrainings seize
thee I see the billow lifts thee Speak, but speak Aye, aye thy
silence, then, that voices thee.  aside something shot from my dilated
nostrils, he has inhaled it in his lungs. Starbuck now is mine cannot
oppose me now, without rebellion. God keep me keep us all murmured
Starbuck, lowly. But in his joy at the enchanted, tacit acquiescence of the
mate, Ahab did not hear his foreboding invocation nor yet the low laugh
from the hold nor yet the presaging vibrations of
the winds in the cordage nor yet the hollow flap of the sails against the
masts, as for a moment their hearts sank in. For again Starbuck's downcast
eyes lighted up with the stubbornness of life the subterranean laugh died
away the winds blew on the sails filled out the ship heaved and rolled as
before. Ah, ye admonitions and warnings why stay ye not when ye come? But
rather are ye predictions than warnings, ye shadows Yet not so much
predictions from without, as verifications of the foregoing things within.
For with little external to constrain us, the innermost necessities in our
being, these still drive us on. The measure the measure cried Ahab.
Receiving the brimming pewter, and turning to the harpooneers, he ordered
them to produce their weapons. Then ranging them before him near the capstan,
with their harpoons in their hands, while his three mates stood at his side
with their lances, and the rest of the ship's company formed a circle round
the group he stood for an instant searchingly eyeing every man of his crew.
But those wild eyes met his, as the bloodshot eyes of the prairie wolves
meet the eye of their leader, ere he rushes on at their head in the trail of
the bison but, alas only to fall into the hidden snare of the Indian.
Drink and pass he cried, handing the heavy charged flagon to the nearest
seaman. The crew alone now drink. Round with it, round Short draughts
long swallows, men 'tis hot as Satan's hoof. So, so it goes round
excellently. It spiralizes in ye forks out at the serpentsnapping eye.
well done almost drained. That way it went, this way it comes. Hand it me
here's a hollow Men, ye seem the years so brimming life is gulped and
gone. Steward, refill Attend now, my braves. I have mustered ye all round
this capstan and ye mates, flank me with your lances and ye harpooneers,
stand there with your irons and ye, stout mariners, ring me in, that I may
in some sort revive a noble custom of my fisherman fathers before me. O men,
you will yet see that Ha boy, come back? bad pennies come not sooner.
Hand it me. Why, now, this pewter had run brimming again, wer't not thou St.
Vitus' imp away, thou ague Advance, ye mates Cross your lances full
before me. Well
done Let me touch the axis. So saying, with extended arm, he grasped the
three level, radiating lances at their crossed centre while so doing,
suddenly and nervously twitched them meanwhile, glancing intently from
Starbuck to Stubb from Stubb to Flask. It seemed as though, by some
nameless, interior volition, he would fain have shocked into them the same
fiery emotion accumulated within the Leyden jar of his own magnetic life.
The three mates quailed before his strong, sustained, and mystic aspect.
Stubb and Flask looked sideways from him the honest eye of Starbuck fell
downright. In vain cried Ahab but, maybe, 'tis well. For did ye three
but once take the fullforced shock, then mine own electric thing, that had
perhaps expired from out me. Perchance, too, it would have dropped ye dead.
Perchance ye need it not. Down lances And now, ye mates, I do appoint ye
three cupbearers to my three pagan kinsmen there yon three most honorable
gentlemen and noblemen, my valiant harpooneers. Disdain the task? What, when
the great Pope washes the feet of beggars, using his tiara for ewer? Oh, my
sweet cardinals your own condescension, that shall bend ye to it. I do not
order ye ye will it. Cut your seizings and draw the poles, ye harpooneers
Silently obeying the order, the three harpooneers now stood with the detached
iron part of their harpoons, some three feet long, held, barbs up, before him.
Stab me not with that keen steel Cant them cant them over know ye not
the goblet end? Turn up the socket So, so now, ye cupbearers, advance.
The irons take them hold them while I fill Forthwith, slowly going from
one officer to the other, he brimmed the harpoon sockets with the fiery waters
from the pewter. Now, three to three, ye stand. Commend the murderous
chalices Bestow them, ye who are now made parties to this indissoluble
league. Ha Starbuck but the deed is done Yon ratifying sun now waits to
sit upon it. Drink, ye harpooneers drink and swear, ye men that man the
deathful whaleboat's bow  Death to Moby Dick God hunt us all, if we do not
hunt Moby Dick to his death The long, barbed steel goblets were lifted
and to cries and maledictions against the white whale, the spirits
were simultaneously quaffed down with a hiss. Starbuck paled, and turned, and
shivered. Once more, and finally, the replenished pewter went the rounds
among the frantic crew when, waving his free hand to them, they all
dispersed and Ahab retired within his cabin.
The cabin by the stern windows
Ahab sitting alone, and gazing out. I leave a white and turbid wake
pale waters, paler cheeks, where'er I sail. The envious billows sidelong
swell to whelm my track let them but first I pass. Yonder, by the
everbrimming goblet's rim, the warm waves blush like wine. The gold brow
plumbs the blue. The diver sun slow dived from noon, goes down my soul
mounts up she wearies with her endless hill. Is, then, the crown too heavy
that I wear? this Iron Crown of Lombardy. Yet is it bright with many a gem
i, the wearer, see not its far flashings but darkly feel that i wear that,
that dazzlingly confounds. 'Tis iron that I knownot gold. 'Tis split, too
that I feel the jagged edge galls me so, my brain seems to beat against
the solid metal aye, steel skull, mine the sort that needs no helmet in the
most brainbattering fight Dry heat upon my brow? Oh time was, when as the
sunrise nobly spurred me, so the sunset soothed. No more. This lovely
light, it lights not me all loveliness is anguish to me, since I can ne'er
enjoy. Gifted with the high perception, I lack the low, enjoying power
damned, most subtly and most malignantly damned in the midst of Paradise
Good night good night  waving his hand, he moves from the window.
'Twas not so hard a task. I thought to find one stubborn, at
the least but my one cogged circle fits into all their various wheels, and
they revolve. Or, if you will, like so many anthills of powder, they all
stand before me and I their match. Oh, hard that to fire others, the
match itself must needs be wasting What I've dared, I've willed and what
I've willed, I'll do They think me mad Starbuck does but I'm demoniac, I
am madness maddened That wild madness that's only calm to comprehend
itself The prophecy was that I should be dismembered andAye I lost this
leg. I now prophesy that I will dismember my dismemberer. Now, then, be the
prophet and the fulfiller one. That's more than ye, ye great gods, ever
were. I laugh and hoot at ye, ye cricketplayers, ye pugilists, ye deaf
Burkes and blinded Bendigoes I will not say as schoolboys do to bullies,
Take some one of your own size don't pommel me No, ye've knocked me
down, and I am up again but ye have run and hidden. Come forth from behind
your cotton bags I have no long gun to reach ye. Come, Ahab's compliments
to ye come and see if ye can swerve me. Swerve me? ye cannot swerve me,
else ye swerve yourselves man has ye there. Swerve me? The path to my
fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run.
Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under
torrents' beds, unerringly I rush Naught's an obstacle, naught's an angle
to the iron way
By the Mainmast Starbuck leaning
against it. My soul is more than matched she's overmanned and by a
madman Insufferable sting, that sanity should ground arms on such a field
But he drilled deep down, and blasted all my reason out of me I think I see
his impious end but feel that
I must help him to it. Will I, nill I, the ineffable thing has tied me to
him tows me with a cable I have no knife to cut. Horrible old man Who's
over him, he cries aye, he would be a democrat to all above look, how he
lords it over all below Oh I plainly see my miserable office, to obey,
rebelling and worse yet, to hate with touch of pity For in his eyes I read
some lurid woe would shrivel me up, had I it. Yet is there hope. Time and
tide flow wide. The hated whale has the round watery world to swim in, as the
small goldfish has its glassy globe. His heaveninsulting purpose, God may
wedge aside. I would up heart, were it not like lead. But my whole clock's
run down my heart the allcontrolling weight, I have no key to lift again.
[ A burst of revelry from the forecastle.] Oh, God to sail with such a
heathen crew that have small touch of human mothers in them Whelped
somewhere by the sharkish sea. The white whale is their demigorgon. Hark
the infernal orgies that revelry is forward mark the unfaltering silence
aft Methinks it pictures life. Foremost through the sparkling sea shoots on
the gay, embattled, bantering bow, but only to drag dark Ahab after it, where
he broods within his sternward cabin, builded over the dead water of the
wake, and further on, hunted by its wolfish gurglings. The long howl thrills
me through Peace ye revellers, and set the watch Oh, life 'tis in an
hour like this, with soul beat down and held to knowledge, as wild,
untutored things are forced to feed Oh, life 'tis now that I do feel the
latent horror in thee but 'tis not me that horror's out of me and with
the soft feeling of the human in me, yet will I try to fight ye, ye grim,
phantom futures Stand by me, hold me, bind me, O ye blessed influences
 Stubb solus, and
mending a brace. Ha ha ha ha hem clear my throat I've been
thinking over it ever since, and that ha, ha's the final consequence. Why
so? Because a laugh's the wisest, easiest answer to all that's queer and
come what will, one comfort's always left  that unfailing comfort is, it's
all predestinated. I heard not all his talk with Starbuck but to my poor
eye Starbuck then looked something as I the other evening felt. Be sure the
old Mogul has fixed him, too. I twigged it, knew it had had the gift,
might readily have prophesied it for when I clapped my eye upon his skull I
saw it. Well, Stubb, wise Stubb that's my title well, Stubb, what of it,
Stubb? Here's a carcase. I know not all that may be coming, but be it what
it will, I'll go to it laughing. Such a waggish leering as lurks in all your
horribles I feel funny. Fa, la lirra, skirra What's my juicy little pear
at home doing now? Crying its eyes out? Giving a party to the last arrived
harpooneers, I dare say, gay as a frigate's pennant, and so am Ifa, la
lirra, skirra Oh We'll drink tonight with hearts as light, To love, as
gay and fleeting As bubbles that swim, on the beaker's brim, And break on the
lips while meeting. a brave stave that who calls? mr. starbuck? Aye, aye,
sir   Aside he's my superior, he has his too, if I'm not mistaken.  Aye,
aye, sir, just through with this job coming.
Upon waking next morning about daylight,
I found Queequeg's arm thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate
manner. You had almost thought I had been his wife. The counterpane was of
patchwork, full of odd little particolored squares and triangles and this
arm of his tattooed all over with an interminable Cretan labyrinth of a
figure, no two parts of which were of one precise shade owing I suppose to
his keeping his arm at sea unmethodically in sun and shade, his shirt
sleeves irregularly rolled up at various times this same arm of his, I say,
looked for all the world like a strip of that same patchwork quilt. Indeed,
partly lying on it as the arm did when I first awoke, I could hardly tell it
from the quilt, they so blended their hues together and it was only by the
sense of weight and pressure that I could tell that Queequeg was hugging me.
My sensations were strange. Let me try to explain them. When I was a child,
I well remember a somewhat similar circumstance that befell me whether it
was a reality or a dream, I never could entirely settle. The circumstance was
this. I had been cutting up some caper or other I think it was trying to
crawl up the chimney, as i had seen a little sweep do a few days previous
and my stepmother who, somehow or other, was all the time whipping me, or
sending me to bed supperless, my mother dragged me by the legs out of the
chimney and packed me off to bed, though it was only two o'clock in the
afternoon of the st June, the longest day in the year in our hemisphere. I
felt dreadfully. But there was no help for it, so up stairs I went to my
little room in the third floor, undressed myself as slowly as possible so as
to kill time, and with a bitter sigh got between the sheets. I lay there
dismally calculating that sixteen entire hours must elapse before I could hope
for a resurrection. Sixteen hours in
bed the small of my back ached to think of it. And it was so light too
the sun shining in at the window, and a great rattling of coaches in the
streets, and the sound of gay voices all over the house. I felt worse and
worse at last I got up, dressed, and softly going down in my stockinged
feet, sought out my stepmother, and suddenly threw myself at her feet,
beseeching her as a particular favor to give me a good slippering for my
misbehavior anything indeed but condemning me to lie abed such an
unendurable length of time. But she was the best and most conscientious of
stepmothers, and back I had to go to my room. For several hours I lay there
broad awake, feeling a great deal worse than I have ever done since, even
from the greatest subsequent misfortunes. At last I must have fallen into a
troubled nightmare of a doze and slowly waking from it half steeped in
dreams I opened my eyes, and the before sunlit room was now wrapped in outer
darkness. Instantly I felt a shock running through all my frame nothing was
to be seen, and nothing was to be heard but a supernatural hand seemed
placed in mine. My arm hung over the counterpane, and the nameless,
unimaginable, silent form or phantom, to which the hand belonged, seemed
closely seated by my bedside. For what seemed ages piled on ages, I lay
there, frozen with the most awful fears, not daring to drag away my hand
yet ever thinking that if I could but stir it one single inch, the horrid
spell would be broken. I knew not how this consciousness at last glided away
from me but waking in the morning, I shudderingly remembered it all, and
for days and weeks and months afterwards I lost myself in confounding attempts
to explain the mystery. Nay, to this very hour, I often puzzle myself with
it. Now, take away the awful fear, and my sensations at feeling the
supernatural hand in mine were very similar, in their strangeness, to those
which I experienced on waking up and seeing Queequeg's pagan arm thrown round
me. But at length all the past night's events soberly recurred, one by one,
in fixed reality, and then I lay only alive to the comical predicament. For
though I tried to move his arm unlock his bridegroom clasp yet, sleeping
as he was, he still hugged me tightly, as though naught but death should part
us twain. I now strove to rouse him 
Queequeg but his only answer was a snore. I then rolled over, my neck
feeling as if it were in a horsecollar and suddenly felt a slight scratch.
Throwing aside the counterpane, there lay the tomahawk sleeping by the
savage's side, as if it were a hatchetfaced baby. A pretty pickle, truly,
thought I abed here in a strange house in the broad day, with a cannibal and
a tomahawk Queequeg in the name of goodness, Queequeg, wake At length,
by dint of much wriggling, and loud and incessant expostulations upon the
unbecomingness of his hugging a fellow male in that matrimonial sort of style,
I succeeded in extracting a grunt and presently, he drew back his arm,
shook himself all over like a Newfoundland dog just from the water, and sat
up in bed, stiff as a pikestaff, looking at me, and rubbing his eyes as if
he did not altogether remember how I came to be there, though a dim
consciousness of knowing something about me seemed slowly dawning over him.
Meanwhile, I lay quietly eyeing him, having no serious misgivings now, and
bent upon narrowly observing so curious a creature. When, at last, his mind
seemed made up touching the character of his bedfellow, and he became, as it
were, reconciled to the fact he jumped out upon the floor, and by certain
signs and sounds gave me to understand that, if it pleased me, he would
dress first and then leave me to dress afterwards, leaving the whole
apartment to myself. Thinks I, Queequeg, under the circumstances, this is a
very civilized overture but, the truth is, these savages have an innate
sense of delicacy, say what you will it is marvellous how essentially
polite they are. I pay this particular compliment to Queequeg, because he
treated me with so much civility and consideration, while I was guilty of
great rudeness staring at him from the bed, and watching all his toilette
motions for the time my curiosity getting the better of my breeding.
Nevertheless, a man like Queequeg you don't see every day, he and his ways
were well worth unusual regarding. He commenced dressing at top by donning his
beaver hat, a very tall one, by the by, and then still minus his trowsers
he hunted up his boots. What under the heavens he did it for, I cannot
tell, but his next movement was to crush himself boots in hand, and hat on
under the bed when, from sundry violent
gaspings and strainings, I inferred he was hard at work booting himself
though by no law of propriety that I ever heard of, is any man required to be
private when putting on his boots. But Queequeg, do you see, was a creature
in the transition state  neither caterpillar nor butterfly. He was just
enough civilized to show off his outlandishness in the strangest possible
manner. his education was not yet completed. He was an undergraduate. If he
had not been a small degree civilized, he very probably would not have
troubled himself with boots at all but then, if he had not been still a
savage, he never would have dreamt of getting under the bed to put them on.
At last, he emerged with his hat very much dented and crushed down over his
eyes, and began creaking and limping about the room, as if, not being much
accustomed to boots, his pair of damp, wrinkled cowhide ones  probably not
made to order either rather pinched and tormented him at the first go off of
a bitter cold morning. Seeing, now, that there were no curtains to the window,
and that the street being very narrow, the house opposite commanded a plain
view into the room, and observing more and more the indecorous figure that
Queequeg made, staving about with little else but his hat and boots on I
begged him as well as I could, to accelerate his toilet somewhat, and
particularly to get into his pantaloons as soon as possible. He complied,
and then proceeded to wash himself. At that time in the morning any
Christian would have washed his face but Queequeg, to my amazement,
contented himself with restricting his ablutions to his chest, arms, and
hands. He then donned his waistcoat, and taking up a piece of hard soap on
the washstand centretable, dipped it into water and commenced lathering his
face. I was watching to see where he kept his razor, when lo and behold, he
takes the harpoon from the bed corner, slips out the long wooden stock,
unsheathes the head, whets it a little on his boot, and striding up to the
bit of mirror against the wall, begins a vigorous scraping, or rather
harpooning of his cheeks. Thinks I, Queequeg, this is using Rogers's best
cutlery with a vengeance. Afterwards I wondered the less at this operation
when I came to know of what fine steel the head of a harpoon is made, and how
exceedingly sharp the long straight edges are always kept.
the rest of his toilet was soon achieved, and he proudly marched out of the
room, wrapped up in his great pilot monkey jacket, and sporting his harpoon
like a marshal's baton.
 Foresail
rises and discovers the watch standing, lounging, leaning, and
lying in various attitudes, all singing in chorus. Farewell and
adieu to you, Spanish ladies Farewell and adieu to you, ladies of Spain Our
captain's commanded.  st Nantucket Sailor Oh, boys, don't be sentimental
it's bad for the digestion Take a tonic, follow me  Sings, and all
follow. Our captain stood upon the deck, A spyglass in his hand, A
viewing of those gallant whales That blew at every strand. Oh, your tubs in
your boats, my boys, And by your braces stand, And we'll have one of those
fine whales, Hand, boys, over hand So, be cheery, my lads may your hearts
never fail While the bold harpooneer is striking the whale Mate's Voice
from the QuarterDeck Eight bells there, forward nd Nantucket Sailor
Avast the chorus Eight bells there d'ye hear, bellboy? Strike the bell
eight, thou Pip thou blackling and let me call the watch. I've the sort
of mouth for that the hogshead mouth. So, so,  thrusts his head down the
scuttle, Starboleens, ahoy Eight bells there below Tumble
up Dutch Sailor Grand snoozing tonight, maty fat night for that. I mark
this in our old Mogul's wine it's quite as deadening to some as
filliping to others. We sing they sleep aye, lie down there, like
groundtier butts. At 'em again There, take this copperpump, and hail
'em through it. Tell 'em to avast dreaming of their lasses. Tell 'em it's
the resurrection they must kiss their last, and come to judgment. That's
the way  that's it thy throat ain't spoiled with eating Amsterdam butter.
French Sailor Hist, boys let's have a jig or two before we ride to anchor
in Blanket Bay. What say ye? There comes the other watch. Stand by all
legs Pip little Pip hurrah with your tambourine Pip  Sulky and
sleepy. Don't know where it is. French Sailor Beat thy belly, then, and
wag thy ears. Jig it, men, I say merry's the word hurrah Damn me, won't
you dance? Form, now, Indianfile, and gallop into the doubleshuffle?
Throw yourselves Legs Legs Iceland Sailor I don't like your floor,
maty it's too springy to my taste. I'm used to icefloors. I'm sorry to
throw cold water on the subject but excuse me. Maltese Sailor Me too
where's your girls? Who but a fool would take his left hand by his right,
and say to himself, how d'ye do? Partners I must have partners Sicilian
Sailor Aye girls and a green then I'll hop with ye yea, turn
grasshopper LongIsland Sailor Well, well, ye sulkies, there's plenty more
of us. Hoe corn when you may, I say. All legs go to harvest soon. Ah here
comes the music now for it Azore Sailor  Ascending, and pitching the
tambourine up the scuttle.
Here you are, Pip and there's the windlassbitts up you mount Now, boys
 The half of them dance to the tambourine some go below some
sleep or lie among the coils of rigging. Oaths aplenty. Azore
Sailor  Dancing. Go it, Pip Bang it, bellboy Rig it, dig it, stig
it, quig it, bellboy Make fireflies break the jinglers Pip
Jinglers, you say? there goes another, dropped off I pound it so. China
Sailor Rattle thy teeth, then, and pound away make a pagoda of thyself.
French Sailor Merrymad Hold up thy hoop, Pip, till I jump through it
split jibs tear yourselves Tashtego  Quietly smoking. That's a white
man he calls that fun humph I save my sweat. Old Manx Sailor I wonder
whether those jolly lads bethink them of what they are dancing over. I'll
dance over your grave, I will that's the bitterest threat of your
nightwomen, that beat headwinds round corners. O Christ to think of the
green navies and the greenskulled crews Well, well belike the whole
world's a ball, as you scholars have it and so 'tis right to make one
ballroom of it. Dance on, lads, you're young I was once. d Nantucket
Sailor Spell oh whew this is worse than pulling after whales in a calm
give us a whiff, Tash.  They cease dancing, and gather in clusters.
Meantime the sky darkens  the wind rises.
Lascar Sailor By Brahma boys, it'll be douse sail soon. The skyborn,
hightide Ganges turned to wind Thou showest thy black brow, Seeva
Maltese Sailor  Reclining and shaking his cap. It's the waves the
snow's caps turn to jig it now. They'll shake their tassels soon. Now would
all the waves were women, then I'd go drown, and chassee with them evermore
There's naught so sweet on earth heaven may not match it as those swift
glances of warm, wild bosoms in the dance, when the overarboring arms hide
such ripe, bursting grapes. Sicilian Sailor  Reclining. Tell me not of
it Hark ye, lad fleet interlacings of the limbs lithe swayings coyings
flutterings lip heart hip all graze unceasing touch and go not
taste, observe ye, else come satiety. Eh, Pagan?  Nudging. Tahitan
Sailor  Reclining on a mat. Hail, holy nakedness of our dancing girls
the HeevaHeeva Ah low veiled, high palmed Tahiti I still rest me on thy
mat, but the soft soil has slid I saw thee woven in the wood, my mat
green the first day i brought ye thence now worn and wilted quite. Ah me
not thou nor I can bear the change How then, if so be transplanted to yon
sky? Hear I the roaring streams from Pirohitee's peak of spears, when they
leap down the crags and drown the villages? The blast the blast Up,
spine, and meet it  Leaps to his feet. Portuguese Sailor How the sea
rolls swashing 'gainst the side Stand by for reefing, hearties the winds
are just crossing swords, pellmell they'll go lunging presently. Danish
Sailor Crack, crack, old ship so long as thou crackest, thou holdest Well
done The mate there holds ye to it stiffly. He's no more
afraid than the isle fort at Cattegat, put there to fight the Baltic with
stormlashed guns, on which the seasalt cakes th Nantucket Sailor He has
his orders, mind ye that. I heard old Ahab tell him he must always kill a
squall, something as they burst a waterspout with a pistol fire your ship
right into it English Sailor Blood but that old man's a grand old cove
We are the lads to hunt him up his whale All Aye aye Old Manx Sailor
How the three pines shake Pines are the hardest sort of tree to live when
shifted to any other soil, and here there's none but the crew's cursed clay.
Steady, helmsman steady. This is the sort of weather when brave hearts snap
ashore, and keeled hulls split at sea. Our captain has his birthmark look
yonder, boys, there's another in the sky luridlike, ye see, all else pitch
black. Daggoo What of that? Who's afraid of black's afraid of me I'm
quarried out of it Spanish Sailor  Aside. He wants to bully, ah the
old grudge makes me touchy.  Advancing. Aye, harpooneer, thy race is the
undeniable dark side of mankind devilish dark at that. No offence. Daggoo
 grimly None. St. Jago's Sailor That Spaniard's mad or drunk. But that
can't be, or else in his one case our old Mogul's firewaters are somewhat
long in working. th Nantucket Sailor What's that I sawlightning? Yes.
Spanish Sailor No Daggoo showing his teeth. Daggoo  springing Swallow
thine, mannikin White skin, white liver Spanish Sailor  meeting him
Knife thee heartily big frame, small spirit All A row a row a row
Tashtego  with a whiff A row a'low, and a row aloft Gods and men both
brawlers Humph Belfast Sailor A row arrah a row The Virgin be blessed,
a row Plunge in with ye English Sailor Fair play Snatch the Spaniard's
knife A ring, a ring Old Manx Sailor Ready formed. There the ringed
horizon. In that ring Cain struck Abel. Sweet work, right work No? Why
then, God, mad'st thou the ring? Mate's Voice from the Quarter Deck Hands by
the halyards in topgallant sails Stand by to reef topsails All The
squall the squall jump, my jollies  They scatter. Pip  shrinking
under the windlass Jollies? Lord help such jollies Crish, crash there
goes the jibstay Blangwhang God Duck lower, Pip, here comes the royal
yard It's worse than being in the whirled woods, the last day of the year
Who'd go climbing after chestnuts now? But there they go, all cursing, and
here I don't. Fine prospects to 'em they're on the road to heaven. Hold on
hard Jimmini, what a squall But those chaps there are worse yet they are
your white squalls, they. White squalls? white whale, shirr
shirr Here have I heard all their chat just now, and the white whale
shirr shirr but spoken of once and only this evening  it makes me
jingle all over like my tambourine that anaconda of an old man swore 'em in
to hunt him Oh, thou big white God aloft there somewhere in yon darkness,
have mercy on this small black boy down here preserve him from all men that
have no bowels to feel fear
I, Ishmael, was one of that crew my shouts
had gone up with the rest my oath had been welded with theirs and
stronger I shouted, and more did I hammer and clinch my oath, because of the
dread in my soul. A wild, mystical, sympathetical feeling was in me Ahab's
quenchless feud seemed mine. With greedy ears I learned the history of that
murderous monster against whom I and all the others had taken our oaths of
violence and revenge. For some time past, though at intervals only, the
unaccompanied, secluded White Whale had haunted those uncivilized seas mostly
frequented by the Sperm Whale fishermen. But not all of them knew of his
existence only a few of them, comparatively, had knowingly seen him while
the number who as yet had actually and knowingly given battle to him, was
small indeed. For, owing to the large number of whalecruisers the
disorderly way they were sprinkled over the entire watery circumference,
many of them adventurously pushing their quest along solitary latitudes, so
as seldom or never for a whole twelvemonth or more on a stretch, to encounter
a single newstelling sail of any sort the inordinate length of each
separate voyage the irregularity of the times of sailing from home all
these, with other circumstances, direct and indirect, long obstructed
the spread through the whole worldwide whalingfleet of the special
individualizing tidings concerning Moby Dick. It was hardly to be doubted,
that several vessels reported to have encountered, at such or such a time, or
on such or such a meridian, a Sperm Whale of uncommon magnitude and
malignity, which whale, after doing great mischief to his assailants, had
completely escaped them to some minds it was not an unfair presumption, I
say, that the whale in question must have been no other than moby Dick. Yet
as of late the Sperm Whale fishery had been marked by various and not
unfrequent instances of great ferocity, cunning, and malice in the monster
attacked therefore it was, that those who by accident ignorantly gave
battle to Moby Dick such hunters, perhaps, for the most part, were content
to ascribe the peculiar terror he bred, more, as it were, to the perils of
the Sperm Whale fishery at large, than to the individual cause. In that way,
mostly, the disastrous encounter between Ahab and the whale had hitherto been
popularly regarded. And as for those who, previously hearing of the White
Whale, by chance caught sight of him in the beginning of the thing they had
every one of them, almost, as boldly and fearlessly lowered for him, as for
any other whale of that species. But at length, such calamities did ensue in
these assaults not restricted to sprained wrists and ancles, broken limbs,
or devouring amputations but fatal to the last degree of fatality those
repeated disastrous repulses, all accumulating and piling their terrors upon
Moby Dick those things had gone far to shake the fortitude of many brave
hunters, to whom the story of the White Whale had eventually come. Nor did
wild rumors of all sorts fail to exaggerate, and still the more horrify the
true histories of these deadly encounters. For not only do fabulous rumors
naturally grow out of the very body of all surprising terrible events, as the
smitten tree gives birth to its fungi but, in maritime life, far more than
in that of terra firma, wild rumors abound, wherever there is any adequate
reality for them to cling to. And as the sea surpasses the land in this
matter, so the whale fishery surpasses every other sort of maritime life, in
the wonderfulness and fearfulness of the
rumors which sometimes circulate there. For not only are whalemen as a body
unexempt from that ignorance and superstitiousness hereditary to all sailors
but of all sailors, they are by all odds the most directly brought into
contact with whatever is appallingly astonishing in the sea face to face
they not only eye its greatest marvels, but, hand to jaw, give battle to
them. Alone, in such remotest waters, that though you sailed a thousand
miles, and passed a thousand shores, you would not come to any chiselled
hearthstone, or aught hospitable beneath that part of the sun in such
latitudes and longitudes, pursuing too such a calling as he does, the whaleman
is wrapped by influences all tending to make his fancy pregnant with many a
mighty birth. No wonder, then, that ever gathering volume from the mere
transit over the widest watery spaces, the outblown rumors of the White Whale
did in the end incorporate with themselves all manner of morbid hints, and
halfformed foetal suggestions of supernatural agencies, which eventually
invested Moby Dick with new terrors unborrowed from anything that visibly
appears. So that in many cases such a panic did he finally strike, that few
who by those rumors, at least, had heard of the White Whale, few of those
hunters were willing to encounter the perils of his jaw. But there were still
other and more vital practical influences at work. Not even at the present
day has the original prestige of the Sperm Whale, as fearfully distinguished
from all other species of the leviathan, died out of the minds of the whalemen
as a body. There are those this day among them, who, though intelligent and
courageous enough in offering battle to the Greenland or Right whale, would
perhaps either from professional inexperience, or incompetency, or timidity,
decline a contest with the Sperm Whale at any rate, there are plenty of
whalemen, especially among those whaling nations not sailing under the
American flag, who have never hostilely encountered the Sperm Whale, but
whose sole knowledge of the leviathan is restricted to the ignoble monster
primitively pursued in the North seated on their hatches, these men will
hearken with a childish fireside interest and awe, to the wild, strange
tales of
Southern whaling. Nor is the preeminent tremendousness of the great Sperm
Whale anywhere more feelingly comprehended, than on board of those prows which
stem him. And as if the now tested reality of his might had in former
legendary times thrown its shadow before it we find some book naturalists
Olassen and Povelson declaring the Sperm Whale not only to be a
consternation to every other creature in the sea, but also to be so incredibly
ferocious as continually to be athirst for human blood. Nor even down to so
late a time as Cuvier's, were these or almost similar impressions effaced.
For in his Natural History, the Baron himself affirms that at sight of the
Sperm Whale, all fish sharks included are struck with the most lively
terrors, and often in the precipitancy of their flight dash themselves
against the rocks with such violence as to cause instantaneous death. And
however the general experiences in the fishery may amend such reports as
these yet in their full terribleness, even to the bloodthirsty item of
Povelson, the superstitious belief in them is, in some vicissitudes of their
vocation, revived in the minds of the hunters. So that overawed by the rumors
and portents concerning him, not a few of the fishermen recalled, in reference
to Moby Dick, the earlier days of the Sperm Whale fishery, when it was
oftentimes hard to induce long practised Right whalemen to embark in the
perils of this new and daring warfare such men protesting that although
other leviathans might be hopefully pursued, yet to chase and point lance at
such an apparition as the Sperm Whale was not for mortal man. That to attempt
it, would be inevitably to be torn into a quick eternity. on this head, there
are some remarkable documents that may be consulted. Nevertheless, some there
were, who even in the face of these things were ready to give chase to Moby
Dick and a still greater number who, chancing only to hear of him distantly
and vaguely, without the specific details of any certain calamity, and
without superstitious accompaniments, were sufficiently hardy not to flee
from the battle if offered. One of the wild suggestings referred to, as at
last coming to be linked with the White Whale in the minds of the
superstitiously inclined, was the unearthly conceit that Moby Dick was
ubiquitous that he had actually been encountered in opposite latitudes at
one and the same instant of time. Nor, credulous as such minds must have been,
was this conceit altogether without some faint show of superstitious
probability. For as the secrets of the currents in the seas have never yet
been divulged, even to the most erudite research so the hidden ways of the
Sperm Whale when beneath the surface remain, in great part, unaccountable to
his pursuers and from time to time have originated the most curious and
contradictory speculations regarding them, especially concerning the mystic
modes whereby, after sounding to a great depth, he transports himself with
such vast swiftness to the most widely distant points. It is a thing well
known to both American and English whaleships, and as well a thing placed
upon authoritative record years ago by Scoresby, that some whales have been
captured far north in the Pacific, in whose bodies have been found the barbs
of harpoons darted in the Greenland seas. Nor is it to be gainsaid, that in
some of these instances it has been declared that the interval of time between
the two assaults could not have exceeded very many days. Hence, by inference,
it has been believed by some whalemen, that the nor' west passage, so long a
problem to man, was never a problem to the whale. So that here, in the real
living experience of living men, the prodigies related in old times of the
inland Strello mountain in Portugal near whose top there was said to be a
lake in which the wrecks of ships floated up to the surface and that still
more wonderful story of the Arethusa fountain near Syracuse whose waters
were believed to have come from the Holy Land by an underground passage
these fabulous narrations are almost fully equalled by the realities of the
whaleman. Forced into familiarity, then, with such prodigies as these and
knowing that after repeated, intrepid assaults, the White Whale had escaped
alive it cannot be much matter of surprise that some whalemen should go
still further in their superstitions declaring Moby Dick not only ubiquitous,
but immortal for immortality is but ubiquity in time that though groves
of spears should be planted in his flanks, he would still swim away unharmed
or if indeed he should ever be made to spout thick
blood, such a sight would be but a ghastly deception for again in
unensanguined billows hundreds of leagues away, his unsullied jet would once
more be seen. But even stripped of these supernatural surmisings, there was
enough in the earthly make and incontestable character of the monster to
strike the imagination with unwonted power. For, it was not so much his
uncommon bulk that so much distinguished him from other sperm whales, but, as
was elsewhere thrown out a peculiar snowwhite wrinkled forehead, and a
high, pyramidical white hump. These were his prominent features the tokens
whereby, even in the limitless, uncharted seas, he revealed his identity, at
a long distance, to those who knew him. The rest of his body was so streaked,
and spotted, and marbled with the same shrouded hue, that, in the end, he had
gained his distinctive appellation of the white Whale a name, indeed,
literally justified by his vivid aspect, when seen gliding at high noon
through a dark blue sea, leaving a milkyway wake of creamy foam, all
spangled with golden gleamings. Nor was it his unwonted magnitude, nor his
remarkable hue, nor yet his deformed lower jaw, that so much invested the
whale with natural terror, as that unexampled, intelligent malignity which,
according to specific accounts, he had over and over again evinced in his
assaults. More than all, his treacherous retreats struck more of dismay than
perhaps aught else. For, when swimming before his exulting pursuers, with
every apparent symptom of alarm, he had several times been known to turn
around suddenly, and, bearing down upon them, either stave their boats to
splinters, or drive them back in consternation to their ship. Already several
fatalities had attended his chase. But though similar disasters, however
little bruited ashore, were by no means unusual in the fishery yet, in most
instances, such seemed the White Whale's infernal aforethought of ferocity,
that every dismembering or death that he caused, was not wholly regarded as
having been inflicted by an unintelligent agent. Judge, then, to what pitches
of inflamed, distracted fury the
minds of his more desperate hunters were impelled, when amid the chips of
chewed boats, and the sinking limbs of torn comrades, they swam out of the
white curds of the whale's direful wrath into the serene, exasperating
sunlight, that smiled on, as if at a birth or a bridal. His three boats stove
around him, and oars and men both whirling in the eddies one captain,
seizing the lineknife from his broken prow, had dashed at the whale, as an
Arkansas duellist at his foe, blindly seeking with a six inch blade to reach
the fathomdeep life of the whale. That captain was Ahab. And then it was,
that suddenly sweeping his sickleshaped lower jaw beneath him, Moby Dick had
reaped away ahab's leg, as a mower a blade of grass in the field. No turbaned
Turk, no hired Venetian or Malay, could have smote him with more seeming
malice. Small reason was there to doubt, then, that ever since that almost
fatal encounter, Ahab had cherished a wild vindictiveness against the whale,
all the more fell for that in his frantic morbidness he at last came to
identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but all his intellectual and
spiritual exasperations. The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac
incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in
them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung. That
intangible malignity which has been from the beginning to whose dominion
even the modern Christians ascribe onehalf of the worlds which the ancient
Ophites of the east reverenced in their statue devil  Ahab did not fall down
and worship it like them but deliriously transferring its idea to the
abhorred white whale, he pitted himself, all mutilated, against it. All that
most maddens and torments all that stirs up the lees of things all truth
with malice in it all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain all the
subtle demonisms of life and thought all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly
personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the
whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole
race from Adam down and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst
his hot heart's shell upon it.
It is not probable that this monomania in him took its instant rise at the
precise time of his bodily dismemberment. Then, in darting at the monster,
knife in hand, he had but given loose to a sudden, passionate, corporal
animosity and when he received the stroke that tore him, he probably but
felt the agonizing bodily laceration, but nothing more. Yet, when by this
collision forced to turn towards home, and for long months of days and weeks,
ahab and anguish lay stretched together in one hammock, rounding in mid
winter that dreary, howling Patagonian Cape then it was, that his torn body
and gashed soul bled into one another and so interfusing, made him mad.
That it was only then, on the homeward voyage, after the encounter, that the
final monomania seized him, seems all but certain from the fact that, at
intervals during the passage, he was a raving lunatic and, though unlimbed
of a leg, yet such vital strength yet lurked in his Egyptian chest, and was
moreover intensified by his delirium, that his mates were forced to lace him
fast, even there, as he sailed, raving in his hammock. In a straitjacket,
he swung to the mad rockings of the gales. And, when running into more
sufferable latitudes, the ship, with mild stun'sails spread, floated across
the tranquil tropics, and, to all appearances, the old man's delirium seemed
left behind him with the Cape Horn swells, and he came forth from his dark
den into the blessed light and air even then, when he bore that firm,
collected front, however pale, and issued his calm orders once again and
his mates thanked God the direful madness was now gone even then, Ahab, in
his hidden self, raved on. Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most
feline thing. When you think it fled, it may have but become transfigured
into some still subtler form. Ahab's full lunacy subsided not, but
deepeningly contracted like the unabated Hudson, when that noble Northman
flows narrowly, but unfathomably through the Highland gorge. But, as in his
narrowflowing monomania, not one jot of Ahab's broad madness had been left
behind so in that broad madness, not one jot of his great natural intellect
had perished. That before living agent, now became the living instrument. If
such a furious trope may stand, his special lunacy
stormed his general sanity, and carried it, and turned all its concentred
cannon upon its own mad mark so that far from having lost his strength,
Ahab, to that one end, did now possess a thousand fold more potency than ever
he had sanely brought to bear upon any one reasonable object. This is much
yet Ahab's larger, darker, deeper part remains unhinted. But vain to
popularize profundities, and all truth is profound. Winding far down from
within the very heart of this spiked Hotel de Cluny where we here stand
however grand and wonderful, now quit it and take your way, ye nobler,
sadder souls, to those vast Roman halls of Thermes where far beneath the
fantastic towers of man's upper earth, his root of grandeur, his whole awful
essence sits in bearded state an antique buried beneath antiquities, and
throned on torsoes So with a broken throne, the great gods mock that
captive king so like a Caryatid, he patient sits, upholding on his frozen
brow the piled entablatures of ages. Wind ye down there, ye prouder, sadder
souls question that proud, sad king A family likeness aye, he did beget
ye, ye young exiled royalties and from your grim sire only will the old
Statesecret come. Now, in his heart, Ahab had some glimpse of this, namely
all my means are sane, my motive and my object mad. Yet without power to
kill, or change, or shun the fact he likewise knew that to mankind he did
now long dissemble in some sort, did still. But that thing of his
dissembling was only subject to his perceptibility, not to his will
determinate. Nevertheless, so well did he succeed in that dissembling, that
when with ivory leg he stepped ashore at last, no Nantucketer thought him
otherwise than but naturally grieved, and that to the quick, with the
terrible casualty which had overtaken him. The report of his undeniable
delirium at sea was likewise popularly ascribed to a kindred cause. And so
too, all the added moodiness which always afterwards, to the very day of
sailing in the pequod on the present voyage, sat brooding on his brow. Nor is
it so very unlikely, that far from distrusting his fitness for another whaling
voyage, on account of such dark symptoms, the calculating people of that
prudent isle were inclined to
harbor the conceit, that for those very reasons he was all the better
qualified and set on edge, for a pursuit so full of rage and wildness as the
bloody hunt of whales. Gnawed within and scorched without, with the infixed,
unrelenting fangs of some incurable idea such an one, could he be found,
would seem the very man to dart his iron and lift his lance against the most
appalling of all brutes. Or, if for any reason thought to be corporeally
incapacitated for that, yet such an one would seem superlatively competent to
cheer and howl on his underlings to the attack. But be all this as it may,
certain it is, that with the mad secret of his unabated rage bolted up and
keyed in him, Ahab had purposely sailed upon the present voyage with the
one only and allengrossing object of hunting the White Whale. Had any one of
his old acquaintances on shore but half dreamed of what was lurking in him
then, how soon would their aghast and righteous souls have wrenched the ship
from such a fiendish man They were bent on profitable cruises, the profit
to be counted down in dollars from the mint. He was intent on an audacious,
immitigable, and supernatural revenge. Here, then, was this greyheaded,
ungodly old man, chasing with curses a Job's whale round the world, at the
head of a crew, too, chiefly made up of mongrel renegades, and castaways, and
cannibals morally enfeebled also, by the incompetence of mere unaided virtue
or rightmindedness in Starbuck, the invulnerable jollity of indifference
and recklessness in Stubb, and the pervading mediocrity in Flask. Such a
crew, so officered, seemed specially picked and packed by some infernal
fatality to help him to his monomaniac revenge. How it was that they so
aboundingly responded to the old man's ire by what evil magic their souls
were possessed, that at times his hate seemed almost theirs the White Whale
as much their insufferable foe as his how all this came to be what the
White Whale was to them, or how to their unconscious understandings, also, in
some dim, unsuspected way, he might have seemed the gliding great demon of
the seas of life, all this to explain, would be to dive deeper than Ishmael
can go. The subterranean miner that works in us all, how can one tell
whither leads his shaft by the ever shifting, muffled sound of his pick? Who
does not feel the
irresistible arm drag? What skiff in tow of a seventyfour can stand still?
For one, I gave myself up to the abandonment of the time and the place but
while yet all arush to encounter the whale, could see naught in that brute
but the deadliest ill.
What the white whale was to
Ahab, has been hinted what, at times, he was to me, as yet remains unsaid.
Aside from those more obvious considerations touching Moby Dick, which could
not but occasionally awaken in any man's soul some alarm, there was another
thought, or rather vague, nameless horror concerning him, which at times by
its intensity completely overpowered all the rest and yet so mystical and
well nigh ineffable was it, that I almost despair of putting it in a
comprehensible form. It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things
appalled me. But how can I hope to explain myself here and yet, in some
dim, random way, explain myself I must, else all these chapters might be
naught. Though in many natural objects, whiteness refiningly enhances
beauty, as if imparting some special virtue of its own, as in marbles,
japonicas, and pearls and though various nations have in some way recognised
a certain royal preeminence in this hue even the barbaric, grand old kings
of Pegu placing the title Lord of the White Elephants above all their other
magniloquent ascriptions of dominion and the modern kings of Siam unfurling
the same snowwhite quadruped in the royal standard and the Hanoverian flag
bearing the one figure of a snowwhite charger and the great Austrian
Empire, Caesarian, heir to overlording Rome, having for the imperial color
the same imperial hue and though this preeminence in it applies to the
human race itself, giving the white man ideal mastership over every dusky
tribe and though, besides all this, whiteness has been
even made significant of gladness, for among the Romans a white stone marked
a joyful day and though in other mortal sympathies and symbolizings, this
same hue is made the emblem of many touching, noble things the innocence of
brides, the benignity of age though among the Red Men of America the giving
of the white belt of wampum was the deepest pledge of honor though in many
climes, whiteness typifies the majesty of Justice in the ermine of the Judge,
and contributes to the daily state of kings and queens drawn by milkwhite
steeds though even in the higher mysteries of the most august religions it
has been made the symbol of the divine spotlessness and power by the Persian
fire worshippers, the white forked flame being held the holiest on the altar
and in the Greek mythologies, Great Jove himself made incarnate in a
snowwhite bull and though to the noble Iroquois, the midwinter sacrifice
of the sacred White Dog was by far the holiest festival of their theology,
that spotless, faithful creature being held the purest envoy they could send
to the Great Spirit with the annual tidings of their own fidelity and though
directly from the Latin word for white, all Christian priests derive the name
of one part of their sacred vesture, the alb or tunic, worn beneath the
cassock and though among the holy pomps of the Romish faith, white is
specially employed in the celebration of the Passion of our Lord though in
the Vision of St. John, white robes are given to the redeemed, and the
fourandtwenty elders stand clothed in white before the great white throne,
and the Holy One that sitteth there white like wool yet for all these
accumulated associations, with whatever is sweet, and honorable, and sublime,
there yet lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue, which
strikes more of panic to the soul than that redness which affrights in blood.
This elusive quality it is, which causes the thought of whiteness, when
divorced from more kindly associations, and coupled with any object terrible
in itself, to heighten that terror to the furthest bounds. Witness the white
bear of the poles, and the white shark of the tropics what but their smooth,
flaky whiteness makes them the transcendent horrors they are? That ghastly
whiteness it is which imparts such an abhorrent mildness, even
more loathsome than terrific, to the dumb gloating of their aspect. So that
not the fiercefanged tiger in his heraldic coat can so stagger courage as the
whiteshrouded bear or shark. Bethink thee of the albatross, whence come those
clouds of spiritual wonderment and pale dread, in which that white phantom
sails in all imaginations? Not Coleridge first threw that spell but God's
great, unflattering laureate, Nature.
Most famous in our Western annals and Indian traditions is that of the White
Steed of the Prairies a magnificent milkwhite charger, largeeyed,
smallheaded, bluffchested, and with the dignity of a thousand monarchs in
his lofty, overscorning carriage. He was the elected Xerxes of vast herds of
wild horses, whose pastures in those days were only fenced by the Rocky
Mountains and the Alleghanies. At their flaming head he westward trooped it
like that chosen star which every evening leads on the hosts of light. The
flashing cascade of his mane, the curving comet of his tail, invested him
with housings more resplendent than gold and silverbeaters could have
furnished him. A most imperial and archangelical apparition of that unfallen,
western world, which to the eyes of the old trappers and hunters revived the
glories of those primeval times when Adam walked majestic as a god,
bluffbowed and fearless as this mighty steed. Whether marching amid his aides
and marshals in the van of countless cohorts that endlessly streamed it over
the plains, like an Ohio or whether with his circumambient subjects browsing
all around at the horizon, the White Steed gallopingly reviewed them with
warm nostrils reddening through his cool milkiness in whatever aspect he
presented himself, always to the bravest Indians he was the object of
trembling reverence and awe. Nor can it be questioned from what stands on
legendary record of
this noble horse, that it was his spiritual whiteness chiefly, which so
clothed him with divineness and that this divineness had that in it which,
though commanding worship, at the same time enforced a certain nameless
terror. But there are other instances where this whiteness loses all that
accessory and strange glory which invests it in the White Steed and Albatross.
What is it that in the Albino man so peculiarly repels and often shocks the
eye, as that sometimes he is loathed by his own kith and kin It is that
whiteness which invests him, a thing expressed by the name he bears. The
Albino is as well made as other men has no substantive deformity and yet
this mere aspect of allpervading whiteness makes him more strangely hideous
than the ugliest abortion. Why should this be so? Nor, in quite other
aspects, does Nature in her least palpable but not the less malicious
agencies, fail to enlist among her forces this crowning attribute of the
terrible. From its snowy aspect, the gauntleted ghost of the Southern Seas
has been denominated the White Squall. Nor, in some historic instances, has
the art of human malice omitted so potent an auxiliary. How wildly it
heightens the effect of that passage in Froissart, when, masked in the snowy
symbol of their faction, the desperate White Hoods of Ghent murder their
bailiff in the marketplace Nor, in some things, does the common, hereditary
experience of all mankind fail to bear witness to the supernaturalism of this
hue. It cannot well be doubted, that the one visible quality in the aspect of
the dead which most appals the gazer, is the marble pallor lingering there
as if indeed that pallor were as much like the badge of consternation in the
other world, as of mortal trepidation here. And from that pallor of the dead,
we borrow the expressive hue of the shroud in which we wrap them. Nor even
in our superstitions do we fail to throw the same snowy mantle round our
phantoms all ghosts rising in a milkwhite fog Yea, while these terrors
seize us, let us add, that even the king of terrors, when personified by the
evangelist, rides on his pallid horse. Therefore, in his other moods,
symbolize whatever grand or
gracious thing he will by whiteness, no man can deny that in its profoundest
idealized significance it calls up a peculiar apparition to the soul. But
though without dissent this point be fixed, how is mortal man to account for
it? To analyse it, would seem impossible. Can we, then, by the citation of
some of those instances wherein this thing of whiteness though for the time
either wholly or in great part stripped of all direct associations calculated
to impart to it aught fearful, but, nevertheless, is found to exert over us
the same sorcery, however modified can we thus hope to light upon some
chance clue to conduct us to the hidden cause we seek? Let us try. But in a
matter like this, subtlety appeals to subtlety, and without imagination no
man can follow another into these halls. And though, doubtless, some at least
of the imaginative impressions about to be presented may have been shared by
most men, yet few perhaps were entirely conscious of them at the time, and
therefore may not be able to recall them now. Why to the man of untutored
ideality, who happens to be but loosely acquainted with the peculiar
character of the day, does the bare mention of Whitsuntide marshal in the
fancy such long, dreary, speechless processions of slowpacing pilgrims,
downcast and hooded with newfallen snow? Or, to the unread, unsophisticated
Protestant of the Middle American States, why does the passing mention of a
White Friar or a White Nun, evoke such an eyeless statue in the soul? Or what
is there apart from the traditions of dungeoned warriors and kings which
will not wholly account for it that makes the White Tower of London tell so
much more strongly on the imagination of an untravelled American, than those
other storied structures, its neighbors the Byward Tower, or even the
Bloody? And those sublimer towers, the White Mountains of New Hampshire,
whence, in peculiar moods, comes that gigantic ghostliness over the soul at
the bare mention of that name, while the thought of Virginia's Blue Ridge is
full of a soft, dewy, distant dreaminess? Or why, irrespective of all
latitudes and longitudes, does the name of the White Sea exert such a
spectralness
over the fancy, while that of the Yellow Sea lulls us with mortal thoughts of
long lacquered mild afternoons on the waves, followed by the gaudiest and yet
sleepiest of sunsets? Or, to choose a wholly unsubstantial instance, purely
addressed to the fancy, why, in reading the old fairy tales of Central
Europe, does the tall pale man of the Hartz forests, whose changeless
pallor unrestingly glides through the green of the groves why is this phantom
more terrible than all the whooping imps of the Blocksburg? Nor is it,
altogether, the remembrance of her cathedraltoppling earthquakes nor the
stampedoes of her frantic seas nor the tearlessness of arid skies that never
rain nor the sight of her wide field of leaning spires, wrenched
copestones, and crosses all adroop like canted yards of anchored fleets
and her suburban avenues of housewalls lying over upon each other, as a
tossed pack of cards it is not these things alone which make tearless Lima,
the strangest, saddest city thou can'st see. For Lima has taken the white
veil and there is a higher horror in this whiteness of her woe. Old as
Pizarro, this whiteness keeps her ruins for ever new admits not the
cheerful greenness of complete decay spreads over her broken ramparts the
rigid pallor of an apoplexy that fixes its own distortions. I know that, to
the common apprehension, this phenomenon of whiteness is not confessed to be
the prime agent in exaggerating the terror of objects otherwise terrible nor
to the unimaginative mind is there aught of terror in those appearances whose
awfulness to another mind almost solely consists in this one phenomenon,
especially when exhibited under any form at all approaching to muteness or
universality. What I mean by these two statements may perhaps be respectively
elucidated by the following examples. First The mariner, when drawing nigh
the coasts of foreign lands, if by night he hear the roar of breakers, starts
to vigilance, and feels just enough of trepidation to sharpen all his
faculties but under precisely similar circumstances, let him be called from
his hammock to view his ship sailing through a midnight sea of milky whiteness
as if from encircling headlands shoals of combed white bears were swimming
round him, then he feels
a silent, superstitious dread the shrouded phantom of the whitened waters is
horrible to him as a real ghost in vain the lead assures him he is still off
soundings heart and helm they both go down he never rests till blue water
is under him again. Yet where is the mariner who will tell thee, Sir, it was
not so much the fear of striking hidden rocks, as the fear of that hideous
whiteness that so stirred me? Second To the native Indian of Peru, the
continual sight of the snowhowdahed Andes conveys naught of dread, except,
perhaps, in the mere fancying of the eternal frosted desolateness reigning at
such vast altitudes, and the natural conceit of what a fearfulness it would
be to lose oneself in such inhuman solitudes. Much the same is it with the
backwoodsman of the West, who with comparative indifference views an
unbounded prairie sheeted with driven snow, no shadow of tree or twig to
break the fixed trance of whiteness. Not so the sailor, beholding the
scenery of the Antarctic seas where at times, by some infernal trick of
legerdemain in the powers of frost and air, he, shivering and half
shipwrecked, instead of rainbows speaking hope and solace to his misery,
views what seems a boundless churchyard grinning upon him with its lean ice
monuments and splintered crosses. But thou sayest, methinks this whitelead
chapter about whiteness is but a white flag hung out from a craven soul thou
surrenderest to a hypo, Ishmael. Tell me, why this strong young colt, foaled
in some peaceful valley of Vermont, far removed from all beasts of prey why
is it that upon the sunniest day, if you but shake a fresh buffalo robe
behind him, so that he cannot even see it, but only smells its wild animal
muskiness why will he start, snort, and with bursting eyes paw the ground in
phrensies of affright? There is no remembrance in him of any gorings of wild
creatures in his green northern home, so that the strange muskiness he smells
cannot recall to him anything associated with the experience of former
perils for what knows he, this New England colt, of the black bisons of
distant oregon? no but here thou beholdest even in a dumb brute, the
instinct of the knowledge of the demonism in the world. Though
thousands of miles from Oregon, still when he smells that savage musk, the
rending, goring bison herds are as present as to the deserted wild foal of the
prairies, which this instant they may be trampling into dust. Thus, then,
the muffled rollings of a milky sea the bleak rustlings of the festooned
frosts of mountains the desolate shiftings of the windrowed snows of
prairies all these, to Ishmael, are as the shaking of that buffalo robe to
the frightened colt Though neither knows where lie the nameless things of
which the mystic sign gives forth such hints yet with me, as with the colt,
somewhere those things must exist. Though in many of its aspects this visible
world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright. But
not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness, and learned why it
appeals with such power to the soul and more strange and far more portentous
why, as we have seen, it is at once the most meaning symbol of spiritual
things, nay, the very veil of the Christian's Deity and yet should be as it
is, the intensifying agent in things the most appalling to mankind. Is it
that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and
immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought
of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it,
that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of
color, and at the same time the concrete of all colors is it for these
reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide
landscape of snows a colorless, allcolor of atheism from which we shrink?
And when we consider that other theory of the natural philosophers, that all
other earthly hues every stately or lovely emblazoning the sweet tinges of
sunset skies and woods yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the
butterfly cheeks of young girls all these are but subtile deceits, not
actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without so that all
deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover
nothing but the charnelhouse within and when we proceed further, and
consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the
great principle of light, for ever remains white or colorless in itself, and
if
operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and
roses, with its own blank tinge pondering all this, the palsied universe lies
before us a leper and like wilful travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear
colored and coloring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes
himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect
around him. And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder
ye then at the fiery hunt?
With reference to the Polar bear, it may possibly be urged by him who would
fain go still deeper into this matter, that it is not the whiteness,
separately regarded, which heightens the intolerable hideousness of that
brute for, analysed, that heightened hideousness, it might be said, only
arises from the circumstance, that the irresponsible ferociousness of the
creature stands invested in the fleece of celestial innocence and love and
hence, by bringing together two such opposite emotions in our minds, the
Polar bear frightens us with so unnatural a contrast. But even assuming all
this to be true yet, were it not for the whiteness, you would not have
that intensified terror. As for the white shark, the white gliding
ghostliness of repose in that creature, when beheld in his ordinary moods,
strangely tallies with the same quality in the Polar quadruped. This
peculiarity is most vividly hit by the French in the name they bestow upon
that fish. The Romish mass for the dead begins with Requiem eternam
eternal rest, whence Requiem denominating the mass itself, and any
other funereal music. Now, in allusion to the white, silent stillness of
death in this shark, and the mild deadliness of his habits, the French
call him Requin. I remember the first albatross I ever saw. It was during a
prolonged gale, in waters hard upon the Antarctic seas. From my forenoon
watch below, I ascended to the overclouded deck and there, dashed upon the
main hatches, I saw a regal, feathery thing of unspotted whiteness, and
with a hooked, Roman bill sublime. At intervals, it arched forth its vast
archangel wings, as if to embrace some holy ark. Wondrous flutterings and
throbbings shook it. Though bodily unharmed, it uttered cries, as some
king's ghost in supernatural distress. Through its inexpressible, strange
eyes, methought I peeped to secrets which took hold of God. As Abraham
before the angels, I bowed myself the white thing was so white, its wings
so wide, and in those for ever exiled waters, I had lost the miserable
warping memories of traditions and of towns. Long I gazed at that prodigy
of plumage. I cannot tell, can only hint, the things that darted through me
then. But at last I awoke and turning, asked a sailor what bird was this.
A goney, he replied. Goney I never had heard that name before is it
conceivable that this glorious thing is utterly unknown to men ashore
never But some time after, I learned that goney was some seaman's name for
albatross. So that by no possibility could Coleridge's wild Rhyme have had
aught to do with those mystical impressions which were mine, when I saw
that bird upon our deck. For neither had I then read the Rhyme, nor knew
the bird to be an albatross. Yet, in saying this, I do but indirectly
burnish a little brighter the noble merit of the poem and the poet. I
assert, then, that in the wondrous bodily whiteness of the bird chiefly
lurks the secret of the spell a truth the more evinced in this, that by a
solecism of terms there are birds called grey albatrosses and these I have
frequently seen, but never with such emotions as when I beheld the Antarctic
fowl. But how had the mystic thing been caught? Whisper it not, and I will
tell with a treacherous hook and line, as the fowl floated on the sea. At
last the Captain made a postman of it tying a lettered, leathern tally
round its neck, with the ship's time and place and then letting it escape.
But I doubt not, that leathern tally, meant for man, was taken off in
Heaven, when the white fowl flew to join the wingfolding, the invoking, and
adoring cherubim
 Hist Did you hear that noise, Cabaco?
It was the middlewatch a fair moonlight the seamen were standing in a
cordon, extending from one of the freshwater butts in the waist, to the
scuttlebutt near the taffrail. In this manner, they passed the buckets to
fill the scuttlebutt. Standing, for the most part, on the hallowed precincts
of the quarterdeck, they were careful not to speak or rustle their feet.
From hand to hand, the buckets went in the deepest silence, only broken by
the occasional flap of a sail, and the steady hum of the unceasingly
advancing keel. It was in the midst of this repose, that Archy, one of the
cordon, whose post was near the afterhatches, whispered to his neighbor, a
Cholo, the words above. Hist did you hear that noise, Cabaco? Take the
bucket, will ye, Archy? what noise d'ye mean? There it is again under the
hatches don't you hear it a coughit sounded like a cough. Cough be
damned Pass along that return bucket. There again there it is it sounds
like two or three sleepers turning over, now Caramba have done,
shipmate, will ye? It's the three soaked biscuits ye eat for supper turning
over inside of ye nothing else. Look to the bucket
Say what ye will, shipmate I've sharp ears. Aye, you are the chap, ain't
ye, that heard the hum of the old Quakeress's knittingneedles fifty miles at
sea from Nantucket you're the chap. Grin away we'll see what turns up.
Hark ye, Cabaco, there is somebody down in the afterhold that has not yet
been seen on deck and I suspect our old Mogul knows something of it too. I
heard Stubb tell Flask, one morning watch, that there was something of that
sort in the wind. Tish the bucket
Had you followed Captain Ahab down into his
cabin after the squall that took place on the night succeeding that wild
ratification of his purpose with his crew, you would have seen him go to a
locker in the transom, and bringing out a large wrinkled roll of yellowish
sea charts, spread them before him on his screweddown table. Then seating
himself before it, you would have seen him intently study the various lines
and shadings which there met his eye and with slow but steady pencil trace
additional courses over spaces that before were blank. At intervals, he would
refer to piles of old logbooks beside him, wherein were set down the seasons
and places in which, on various former voyages of various ships, sperm whales
had been captured or seen. While thus employed, the heavy pewter lamp
suspended in chains over his head, continually rocked with the motion of the
ship, and for ever threw shifting gleams and shadows of lines upon his
wrinkled brow, till it almost seemed that while he himself was marking out
lines and courses on the wrinkled charts, some invisible pencil was also
tracing lines and courses upon the deeply marked chart of his forehead. But
it was not this night in particular that, in the solitude of
his cabin, Ahab thus pondered over his charts. Almost every night they were
brought out almost every night some pencil marks were effaced, and others
were substituted. For with the charts of all four oceans before him, Ahab
was threading a maze of currents and eddies, with a view to the more certain
accomplishment of that monomaniac thought of his soul. Now, to any one not
fully acquainted with the ways of the leviathans, it might seem an absurdly
hopeless task thus to seek out one solitary creature in the unhooped oceans of
this planet. But not so did it seem to Ahab, who knew the sets of all tides
and currents and thereby calculating the driftings of the sperm whale's
food and, also, calling to mind the regular, ascertained seasons for hunting
him in particular latitudes could arrive at reasonable surmises, almost
approaching to certainties, concerning the timeliest day to be upon this or
that ground in search of his prey. So assured, indeed, is the fact concerning
the periodicalness of the sperm whale's resorting to given waters, that many
hunters believe that, could he be closely observed and studied throughout the
world were the logs for one voyage of the entire whale fleet carefully
collated, then the migrations of the sperm whale would be found to correspond
in invariability to those of the herringshoals or the flights of swallows.
On this hint, attempts have been made to construct elaborate migratory charts
of the sperm whale. Besides, when making a passage from one feedingground to
another, the sperm whales, guided by some infallible instinct  say, rather,
secret intelligence from the Deity mostly swim in
veins, as they are called continuing their way along a given oceanline
with such undeviating exactitude, that no ship ever sailed her course, by any
chart, with one tithe of such marvellous precision. Though, in these cases,
the direction taken by any one whale be straight as a surveyor's parallel, and
though the line of advance be strictly confined to its own unavoidable,
straight wake, yet the arbitrary vein in which at these times he is said to
swim, generally embraces some few miles in width more or less, as the vein
is presumed to expand or contract but never exceeds the visual sweep from
the whaleship's mastheads, when circumspectly gliding along this magic
zone. The sum is, that at particular seasons within that breadth and along
that path, migrating whales may with great confidence be looked for. And
hence not only at substantiated times, upon well known separate
feedinggrounds, could Ahab hope to encounter his prey but in crossing the
widest expanses of water between those grounds he could, by his art, so place
and time himself on his way, as even then not to be wholly without prospect of
a meeting. There was a circumstance which at first sight seemed to entangle
his delirious but still methodical scheme. But not so in the reality,
perhaps. Though the gregarious sperm whales have their regular seasons for
particular grounds, yet in general you cannot conclude that the herds which
hunted such and such a latitude or longitude this year, say, will turn out to
be identically the same with those that were found there the preceding
season though there are peculiar and unquestionable instances where the
contrary of this has proved true. In general, the same remark, only within a
less wide limit, applies to the solitaries and hermits among the matured, aged
sperm whales. So that though Moby Dick had in a former year been seen, for
example, on what is called the Seychelle ground in the Indian ocean, or
Volcano Bay on the Japanese Coast yet it did not follow, that were the
pequod to visit either of those spots at any subsequent corresponding season,
she would infallibly encounter him there. So, too, with some other feeding
grounds, where he had at times revealed himself. But all these seemed only
his casual stoppingplaces and oceaninns, so to speak, not his places of
prolonged abode. And where Ahab's chances of accomplishing
his object have hitherto been spoken of, allusion has only been made to
whatever wayside, antecedent, extra prospects were his, ere a particular set
time or place were attained, when all possibilities would become
probabilities, and, as Ahab fondly thought, every possibility the next thing
to a certainty. That particular set time and place were conjoined in the one
technical phrase the SeasonontheLine. For there and then, for several
consecutive years, Moby Dick had been periodically descried, lingering in
those waters for awhile, as the sun, in its annual round, loiters for a
predicted interval in any one sign of the Zodiac. There it was, too, that
most of the deadly encounters with the white whale had taken place there the
waves were storied with his deeds there also was that tragic spot where the
monomaniac old man had found the awful motive to his vengeance. But in the
cautious comprehensiveness and unloitering vigilance with which Ahab threw his
brooding soul into this unfaltering hunt, he would not permit himself to rest
all his hopes upon the one crowning fact above mentioned, however flattering
it might be to those hopes nor in the sleeplessness of his vow could he so
tranquillize his unquiet heart as to postpone all intervening quest. Now,
the Pequod had sailed from Nantucket at the very beginning of the
SeasonontheLine. No possible endeavor then could enable her commander to
make the great passage southwards, double Cape Horn, and then running down
sixty degrees of latitude arrive in the equatorial Pacific in time to cruise
there. Therefore, he must wait for the next ensuing season. Yet the
premature hour of the Pequod's sailing had, perhaps, been correctly selected
by Ahab, with a view to this very complexion of things. Because, an interval
of three hundred and sixtyfive days and nights was before him an interval
which, instead of impatiently enduring ashore, he would spend in a
miscellaneous hunt if by chance the White Whale, spending his vacation in
seas far remote from his periodical feedinggrounds, should turn up his
wrinkled brow off the Persian Gulf, or in the Bengal Bay, or China Seas, or
in any other waters haunted by his race. So that Monsoons, Pampas,
NorWesters, Harmattans, Trades any wind but the Levanter and Simoom, might
blow Moby Dick into
the devious zigzag worldcircle of the Pequod's circumnavigating wake. But
granting all this yet, regarded discreetly and coolly, seems it not but a
mad idea, this that in the broad boundless ocean, one solitary whale, even
if encountered, should be thought capable of individual recognition from his
hunter, even as a whitebearded Mufti in the thronged thoroughfares of
Constantinople? Yes. For the peculiar snowwhite brow of Moby Dick, and his
snowwhite hump, could not but be unmistakable. And have I not tallied the
whale, Ahab would mutter to himself, as after poring over his charts till
long after midnight he would throw himself back in reveries tallied him,
and shall he escape? His broad fins are bored, and scalloped out like a lost
sheep's ear And here, his mad mind would run on in a breathless race till
a weariness and faintness of pondering came over him and in the open air of
the deck he would seek to recover his strength. Ah, God what trances of
torments does that man endure who is consumed with one unachieved revengeful
desire. He sleeps with clenched hands and wakes with his own bloody nails
in his palms. often, when forced from his hammock by exhausting and
intolerably vivid dreams of the night, which, resuming his own intense
thoughts through the day, carried them on amid a clashing of phrensies, and
whirled them round and round in his blazing brain, till the very throbbing of
his lifespot became insufferable anguish and when, as was sometimes the
case, these spiritual throes in him heaved his being up from its base, and a
chasm seemed opening in him, from which forked flames and lightnings shot up,
and accursed fiends beckoned him to leap down among them when this hell in
himself yawned beneath him, a wild cry would be heard through the ship and
with glaring eyes Ahab would burst from his state room, as though escaping
from a bed that was on fire. Yet these, perhaps, instead of being the
unsuppressable symptoms of some latent weakness, or fright at his own resolve,
were but the plainest tokens of its intensity. For, at such times, crazy
Ahab, the scheming, unappeasedly steadfast hunter of the white whale this
Ahab that had gone to his hammock, was not the agent that so caused
him to burst from it in horror again. The latter was the eternal, living
principle or soul in him and in sleep, being for the time dissociated from
the characterizing mind, which at other times employed it for its outer
vehicle or agent, it spontaneously sought escape from the scorching contiguity
of the frantic thing, of which, for the time, it was no longer an integral.
But as the mind does not exist unless leagued with the soul, therefore it
must have been that, in Ahab's case, yielding up all his thoughts and fancies
to his one supreme purpose that purpose, by its own sheer inveteracy of
will, forced itself against gods and devils into a kind of selfassumed,
independent being of its own. Nay, could grimly live and burn, while the
common vitality to which it was conjoined, fled horrorstricken from the
unbidden and unfathered birth. Therefore, the tormented spirit that glared
out of bodily eyes, when what seemed Ahab rushed from his room, was for the
time but a vacated thing, a formless somnambulistic being, a ray of living
light, to be sure, but without an object to color, and therefore a blankness
in itself. God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in
thee and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus a vulture
feeds upon that heart for ever that vulture the very creature he creates.
Since the above was written, the statement is happily borne out by an official
circular, issued by Lieutenant Maury, of the National Observatory,
Washington, April th,
. By that circular, it appears that precisely
such a chart is in course of completion and portions of it are presented in
the circular. This chart divides the ocean into districts of five degrees
of latitude by five degrees of longitude perpendicularly through each of
which districts are twelve columns for the twelve months and horizontally
through each of which districts are three lines one to show the number of
days that have been spent in each month in every district, and the two
others to show the number of days in which whales, sperm or right, have been
seen.
So far as what there may be of a
narrative in this book and, indeed, as indirectly touching one or two very
interesting and curious particulars in the habits of sperm whales, the
foregoing chapter, in its earliest part, is as important a one as will be
found in this volume but the leading matter of it requires to be still
further and more familiarly enlarged upon, in order to be adequately
understood, and moreover to take away any incredulity which a profound
ignorance of the entire subject may
induce in some minds, as to the natural verity of the main points of this
affair. I care not to perform this part of my task methodically but shall
be content to produce the desired impression by separate citations of items,
practically or reliably known to me as a whaleman and from these citations,
I take it the conclusion aimed at will naturally follow of itself. First I
have personally known three instances where a whale, after receiving a
harpoon, has effected a complete escape and, after an interval in one
instance of three years, has been again struck by the same hand, and slain
when the two irons, both marked by the same private cypher, have been taken
from the body. In the instance where three years intervened between the
flinging of the two harpoons and I think it may have been something more
than that the man who darted them happening, in the interval, to go in a
trading ship on a voyage to Africa, went ashore there, joined a discovery
party, and penetrated far into the interior, where he travelled for a period
of nearly two years, often endangered by serpents, savages, tigers, poisonous
miasmas, with all the other common perils incident to wandering in the heart
of unknown regions. Meanwhile, the whale he had struck must also have been on
its travels no doubt it had thrice circumnavigated the globe, brushing with
its flanks all the coasts of Africa but to no purpose. This man and this
whale again came together, and the one vanquished the other. I say I,
myself, have known three instances similar to this that is in two of them I
saw the whales struck and, upon the second attack, saw the two irons with
the respective marks cut in them, afterwards taken from the dead fish. In the
threeyear instance, it so fell out that I was in the boat both times, first
and last, and the last time distinctly recognized a peculiar sort of huge
mole under the whale's eye, which I had observed there three years previous.
I say three years, but I am pretty sure it was more than that. Here are
three instances, then, which I personally know the truth of but I have heard
of many other instances from persons whose veracity in the matter there is no
good ground to impeach. secondly It is well known in the Sperm Whale
Fishery,
however ignorant the world ashore may be of it, that there have been several
memorable historical instances where a particular whale in the ocean has been
at distant times and places popularly cognisable. Why such a whale became
thus marked was not altogether and originally owing to his bodily
peculiarities as distinguished from other whales for however peculiar in
that respect any chance whale may be, they soon put an end to his
peculiarities by killing him, and boiling him down into a peculiarly valuable
oil. No the reason was this that from the fatal experiences of the
fishery there hung a terrible prestige of perilousness about such a whale as
there did about Rinaldo Rinaldini, insomuch that most fishermen were
content to recognise him by merely touching their tarpaulins when he would be
discovered lounging by them on the sea, without seeking to cultivate a more
intimate acquaintance. Like some poor devils ashore that happen to know an
irascible great man, they make distant unobtrusive salutations to him in the
street, lest if they pursued the acquaintance further, they might receive a
summary thump for their presumption. But not only did each of these famous
whales enjoy great individual celebrity nay, you may call it an oceanwide
renown not only was he famous in life and now is immortal in forecastle
stories after death, but he was admitted into all the rights, privileges,
and distinctions of a name had as much a name indeed as Cambyses or Caesar.
Was it not so, O Timor Tom thou famed leviathan, scarred like an iceberg,
who so long did'st lurk in the Oriental straits of that name, whose spout was
oft seen from the palmy beach of Ombay? Was it not so, O New Zealand Jack
thou terror of all cruisers that crossed their wakes in the vicinity of the
Tattoo Land? Was it not so, O Morquan King of Japan, whose lofty jet
they say at times assumed the semblance of a snowwhite cross against the sky?
Was it not so, O Don Miguel thou Chilian whale, marked like an old
tortoise with mystic hieroglyphics upon the back In plain prose, here are
four whales as well known to the students of Cetacean History as Marius or
Sylla to the classic scholar. But this is not all. New Zealand Tom and Don
Miguel, after at various times creating great havoc among the boats of
different
vessels, were finally gone in quest of, systematically hunted out, chased and
killed by valiant whaling captains, who heaved up their anchors with that
express object as much in view, as in setting out through the Narragansett
Woods, Captain Butler of old had it in his mind to capture that notorious
murderous savage Annawon, the headmost warrior of the Indian King Philip. I
do not know where I can find a better place than just here, to make mention of
one or two other things, which to me seem important, as in printed form
establishing in all respects the reasonableness of the whole story of the
White Whale, more especially the catastrophe. For this is one of those
disheartening instances where truth requires full as much bolstering as error.
So ignorant are most landsmen of some of the plainest and most palpable
wonders of the world, that without some hints touching the plain facts,
historical and otherwise, of the fishery, they might scout at Moby Dick as a
monstrous fable, or still worse and more detestable, a hideous and
intolerable allegory. First Though most men have some vague flitting ideas
of the general perils of the grand fishery, yet they have nothing like a
fixed, vivid conception of those perils, and the frequency with which they
recur. One reason perhaps is, that not one in fifty of the actual disasters
and deaths by casualties in the fishery, ever finds a public record at home,
however transient and immediately forgotten that record. Do you suppose that
that poor fellow there, who this moment perhaps caught by the whaleline off
the coast of New Guinea, is being carried down to the bottom of the sea by
the sounding leviathan do you suppose that that poor fellow's name will
appear in the newspaper obituary you will read tomorrow at your breakfast?
No because the mails are very irregular between here and New Guinea. In
fact, did you ever hear what might be called regular news direct or indirect
from New Guinea? Yet I tell you that upon one particular voyage which I made
to the Pacific, among many others we spoke thirty different ships, every one
of which had had a death by a whale, some of them more than one, and three
that had each lost a boat's crew. For God's sake, be economical with your
lamps and candles not a gallon you burn, but at least one drop of man's
blood was spilled for it.
Secondly People ashore have indeed some indefinite idea that a whale is an
enormous creature of enormous power but I have ever found that when
narrating to them some specific example of this twofold enormousness, they
have significantly complimented me upon my facetiousness when, I declare
upon my soul, I had no more idea of being facetious than Moses, when he wrote
the history of the plagues of Egypt. But fortunately the special point I here
seek can be established upon testimony entirely independent of my own. That
point is this The Sperm Whale is in some cases sufficiently powerful,
knowing, and judiciously malicious, as with direct aforethought to stave in,
utterly destroy, and sink a large ship and what is more, the Sperm Whale has
done it. First In the year
the ship Essex, Captain Pollard, of
Nantucket, was cruising in the Pacific Ocean. One day she saw spouts,
lowered her boats, and gave chase to a shoal of sperm whales. Ere long,
several of the whales were wounded when, suddenly, a very large whale
escaping from the boats, issued from the shoal, and bore directly down upon
the ship. dashing his forehead against her hull, he so stove her in, that
in less than ten minutes she settled down and fell over. Not a surviving
plank of her has been seen since. After the severest exposure, part of the
crew reached the land in their boats. Being returned home at last, Captain
Pollard once more sailed for the Pacific in command of another ship, but the
gods shipwrecked him again upon unknown rocks and breakers for the second
time his ship was utterly lost, and forthwith forswearing the sea, he has
never tempted it since. At this day Captain Pollard is a resident of
Nantucket. I have seen Owen Chace, who was chief mate of the Essex at the
time of the tragedy I have read his plain and faithful narrative I have
conversed with his son and all this within a few miles of the scene of the
catastrophe.
Secondly The ship Union, also of Nantucket, was in the year
totally
lost off the Azores by a similar onset, but the authentic particulars of
this catastrophe I have never chanced to encounter, though from the whale
hunters I have now and then heard casual allusions to it. Thirdly Some
eighteen or twenty years ago Commodore J then commanding an American
sloopofwar of the first class, happened to be dining with a party of
whaling captains, on board a Nantucket ship in the harbor of Oahu, Sandwich
Islands. Conversation turning upon whales, the Commodore was pleased to be
sceptical touching the amazing strength ascribed to them by the professional
gentlemen present. He peremptorily denied for example, that any whale could
so smite his stout sloopofwar as to cause her to leak so much as a
thimbleful. Very good but there is more coming. Some weeks after, the
commodore set sail in this impregnable craft for Valparaiso. But he was
stopped on the way by a portly sperm whale, that begged a few moments'
confidential business with him. that business consisted in fetching the
Commodore's craft
such a thwack, that with all his pumps going he made straight for the nearest
port to heave down and repair. I am not superstitious, but I consider the
Commodore's interview with that whale as providential. Was not Saul of Tarsus
converted from unbelief by a similar fright? I tell you, the sperm whale will
stand no nonsense. I will now refer you to Langsdorff's Voyages for a little
circumstance in point, peculiarly interesting to the writer hereof.
Langsdorff, you must know by the way, was attached to the Russian Admiral
Krusenstern's famous Discovery Expedition in the beginning of the present
century. Captain Langsdorff thus begins his seventeenth chapter. By the
thirteenth of May our ship was ready to sail, and the next day we were out in
the open sea, on our way to Ochotsh. The weather was very clear and fine,
but so intolerably cold that we were obliged to keep on our fur clothing. For
some days we had very little wind it was not till the nineteenth that a
brisk gale from the northwest sprang up. An uncommon large whale, the body
of which was larger than the ship itself, lay almost at the surface of the
water, but was not perceived by any one on board till the moment when the
ship, which was in full sail, was almost upon him, so that it was
impossible to prevent its striking against him. We were thus placed in the
most imminent danger, as this gigantic creature, setting up its back,
raised the ship three feet at least out of the water. The masts reeled, and
the sails fell altogether, while we who were below all sprang instantly upon
the deck, concluding that we had struck upon some rock instead of this we
saw the monster sailing off with the utmost gravity and solemnity. Captain
D'Wolf applied immediately to the pumps to examine whether or not the vessel
had received any damage from the shock, but we found that very happily it had
escaped entirely uninjured. now, the captain d'wolf here alluded to as
commanding the ship in question, is a New Englander, who, after a long life
of unusual adventures as a seacaptain, this day resides in the village of
Dorchester near Boston. I have the honor of being a nephew of his. I have
particularly questioned him concerning this passage in Langsdorff. He
substantiates every word.
The ship, however, was by no means a large one a Russian craft built on the
Siberian coast, and purchased by my uncle after bartering away the vessel in
which he sailed from home. In that up and down manly book of oldfashioned
adventure, so full, too, of honest wonders the voyage of Lionel Wafer, one
of ancient Dampier's old chums I found a little matter set down so like that
just quoted from Langsdorff, that I cannot forbear inserting it here for a
corroborative example, if such be needed. Lionel, it seems, was on his way
to John Ferdinando, as he calls the modern Juan Fernandes. In our way
thither, he says, about four o'clock in the morning, when we were about
one hundred and fifty leagues from the Main of America, our ship felt a
terrible shock, which put our men in such consternation that they could
hardly tell where they were or what to think but every one began to prepare
for death. And, indeed, the shock was so sudden and violent, that we took it
for granted the ship had struck against a rock but when the amazement was a
little over, we cast the lead, and sounded, but found no ground. The
suddenness of the shock made the guns leap in their carriages, and several of
the men were shaken out of their hammocks. Captain Davis, who lay with his
head on a gun, was thrown out of his cabin Lionel then goes on to impute
the shock to an earthquake, and seems to substantiate the imputation by
stating that a great earthquake, somewhere about that time, did actually do
great mischief along the spanish land. but i should not much wonder if, in the
darkness of that early hour of the morning, the shock was after all caused by
an unseen whale vertically bumping the hull from beneath. I might proceed
with several more examples, one way or another known to me, of the great
power and malice at times of the sperm whale. In more than one instance, he
has been known, not only to chase the assailing boats back to their ships,
but to pursue the ship itself, and long withstand all the lances hurled at
him from its decks. The English ship Pusie Hall can tell a story on that
head and, as for his strength, let me say, that there have been examples
where the lines attached to
a running sperm whale have, in a calm, been transferred to the ship, and
secured there the whale towing her great hull through the water, as a
horse walks off with a cart. Again, it is very often observed that, if the
sperm whale, once struck, is allowed time to rally, he then acts, not so
often with blind rage, as with wilful, deliberate designs of destruction to
his pursuers nor is it without conveying some eloquent indication of his
character, that upon being attacked he will frequently open his mouth, and
retain it in that dread expansion for several consecutive minutes. But I must
be content with only one more and a concluding illustration a remarkable and
most significant one, by which you will not fail to see, that not only is
the most marvellous event in this book corroborated by plain facts of the
present day, but that these marvels like all marvels are mere repetitions
of the ages so that for the millionth time we say amen with Solomon Verily
there is nothing new under the sun. In the sixth Christian century lived
Procopius, a Christian magistrate of Constantinople, in the days when
Justinian was Emperor and Belisarius general. As many know, he wrote the
history of his own times, a work every way of uncommon value. By the best
authorities, he has always been considered a most trustworthy and
unexaggerating historian, except in some one or two particulars, not at all
affecting the matter presently to be mentioned. Now, in this history of his,
Procopius mentions that, during the term of his prefecture at Constantinople,
a great seamonster was captured in the neighboring Propontis, or Sea of
Marmora, after having destroyed vessels at intervals in those waters for a
period of more than fifty years. A fact thus set down in substantial history
cannot easily be gainsaid. Nor is there any reason it should be. Of what
precise species this seamonster was, is not mentioned. But as he destroyed
ships, as well as for other reasons, he must have been a whale and I am
strongly inclined to think a sperm whale. And I will tell you why. For a
long time I fancied that the sperm whale had been always unknown in the
Mediterranean and the deep waters connecting with it. Even now I am certain
that those seas are not, and perhaps never can be, in the present
constitution of
things, a place for his habitual gregarious resort. But further
investigations have recently proved to me, that in modern times there have
been isolated instances of the presence of the sperm whale in the
Mediterranean. I am told, on good authority, that on the Barbary coast, a
Commodore Davis of the British navy found the skeleton of a sperm whale. Now,
as a vessel of war readily passes through the Dardanelles, hence a sperm
whale could, by the same route, pass out of the Mediterranean into the
Propontis. In the Propontis, as far as I can learn, none of that peculiar
substance called brit is to be found, the aliment of the right whale. But I
have every reason to believe that the food of the sperm whale squid or
cuttlefish lurks at the bottom of that sea, because large creatures, but
by no means the largest of that sort, have been found at its surface. If,
then, you properly put these statements together, and reason upon them a bit,
you will clearly perceive that, according to all human reasoning,
Procopius's seamonster, that for half a century stove the ships of a Roman
Emperor, must in all probability have been a sperm whale.
The following are extracts from Chace's narrative Every fact seemed to
warrant me in concluding that it was anything but chance which directed his
operations he made two several attacks upon the ship, at a short interval
between them, both of which, according to their direction, were
calculated to do us the most injury, by being made ahead, and thereby
combining the speed of the two objects for the shock to effect which, the
exact manoeuvres which he made were necessary. His aspect was most horrible,
and such as indicated resentment and fury. He came directly from the shoal
which we had just before entered, and in which we had struck three of his
companions, as if fired with revenge for their sufferings. Again At all
events, the whole circumstances taken together, all happening before my own
eyes, and producing, at the time, impressions in my mind of decided,
calculating mischief, on the part of the whale many of which impressions I
cannot now recall, induce me to be satisfied that I am correct in my
opinion. Here are his reflections some time after quitting the ship, during
a black night in an open boat, when almost despairing of reaching any
hospitable shore. The dark ocean and swelling waters were nothing the
fears of being swallowed up by some dreadful tempest, or dashed upon hidden
rocks, with all the other ordinary subjects of fearful contemplation,
seemed scarcely entitled to a moment's thought the dismal looking wreck,
and the horrid aspect and revenge of the whale, wholly engrossed my
reflections, until day again made its appearance. In another place p. ,
he speaks of the mysterious and mortal attack of the animal.
Though, consumed with the hot fire of his
purpose, Ahab in all his thoughts and actions ever had in view the ultimate
capture of Moby Dick though he seemed ready to sacrifice all mortal
interests to that one passion nevertheless it may have been that he was by
nature and long habituation far too wedded to a fiery whaleman's ways,
altogether to abandon the collateral prosecution of the voyage. Or at least
if this were otherwise, there were not wanting other motives much more
influential with him. It would be refining too much, perhaps, even
considering his monomania, to hint that his vindictiveness towards
the White Whale might have possibly extended itself in some degree to all
sperm whales, and that the more monsters he slew by so much the more he
multiplied the chances that each subsequently encountered whale would prove to
be the hated one he hunted. But if such an hypothesis be indeed
exceptionable, there were still additional considerations which, though not
so strictly according with the wildness of his ruling passion, yet were by
no means incapable of swaying him. To accomplish his object Ahab must use
tools and of all tools used in the shadow of the moon, men are most apt to
get out of order. He knew, for example, that however magnetic his ascendency
in some respects was over Starbuck, yet that ascendency did not cover the
complete spiritual man any more than mere corporeal superiority involves
intellectual mastership for to the purely spiritual, the intellectual but
stand in a sort of corporeal relation. Starbuck's body and Starbuck's coerced
will were Ahab's, so long as Ahab kept his magnet at Starbuck's brain
still he knew that for all this the chief mate, in his soul, abhorred his
captain's quest, and could he, would joyfully disintegrate himself from it,
or even frustrate it. it might be that a long interval would elapse ere the
White Whale was seen. During that long interval Starbuck would ever be apt to
fall into open relapses of rebellion against his captain's leadership, unless
some ordinary, prudential, circumstantial influences were brought to bear upon
him. Not only that, but the subtle insanity of Ahab respecting Moby Dick was
noways more significantly manifested than in his superlative sense and
shrewdness in foreseeing that, for the present, the hunt should in some way
be stripped of that strange imaginative impiousness which naturally invested
it that the full terror of the voyage must be kept withdrawn into the
obscure background for few men's courage is proof against protracted
meditation unrelieved by action that when they stood their long night
watches, his officers and men must have some nearer things to think of than
Moby Dick. For however eagerly and impetuously the savage crew had hailed the
announcement of his quest yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less
capricious and unreliable they live in the varying outer weather, and they
inhale its fickleness and when retained
for any object remote and blank in the pursuit, however promissory of life
and passion in the end, it is above all things requisite that temporary
interests and employment should intervene and hold them healthily suspended
for the final dash. Nor was Ahab unmindful of another thing. In times of
strong emotion mankind disdain all base considerations but such times are
evanescent. The permanent constitutional condition of the manufactured man,
thought Ahab, is sordidness. Granting that the White Whale fully incites the
hearts of this my savage crew, and playing round their savageness even breeds
a certain generous knighterrantism in them, still, while for the love of it
they give chase to Moby Dick, they must also have food for their more common,
daily appetites. For even the high lifted and chivalric Crusaders of old
times were not content to traverse two thousand miles of land to fight for
their holy sepulchre, without committing burglaries, picking pockets, and
gaining other pious perquisites by the way. Had they been strictly held to
their one final and romantic object that final and romantic object, too many
would have turned from in disgust. I will not strip these men, thought Ahab,
of all hopes of cash aye, cash. They may scorn cash now but let some months
go by, and no perspective promise of it to them, and then this same
quiescent cash all at once mutinying in them, this same cash would soon
cashier Ahab. Nor was there wanting still another precautionary motive more
related to Ahab personally. Having impulsively, it is probable, and perhaps
somewhat prematurely revealed the prime but private purpose of the Pequod's
voyage, Ahab was now entirely conscious that, in so doing, he had indirectly
laid himself open to the unanswerable charge of usurpation and with perfect
impunity, both moral and legal, his crew if so disposed, and to that end
competent, could refuse all further obedience to him, and even violently
wrest from him the command. From even the barely hinted imputation of
usurpation, and the possible consequences of such a suppressed impression
gaining ground, Ahab must of course have been most anxious to protect himself.
That protection could only consist in his own predominating brain and heart
and hand, backed by a heedful, closely calculating
attention to every minute atmospheric influence which it was possible for his
crew to be subjected to. For all these reasons then, and others perhaps too
analytic to be verbally developed here, Ahab plainly saw that he must still
in a good degree continue true to the natural, nominal purpose of the Pequod's
voyage observe all customary usages and not only that, but force himself
to evince all his well known passionate interest in the general pursuit of his
profession. be all this as it may, his voice was now often heard hailing the
three mastheads and admonishing them to keep a bright lookout, and not omit
reporting even a porpoise. This vigilance was not long without reward.
It was a cloudy, sultry afternoon
the seamen were lazily lounging about the decks, or vacantly gazing over
into the leadcolored waters. Queequeg and I were mildly employed weaving
what is called a swordmat, for an additional lashing to our boat. So still
and subdued and yet somehow preluding was all the scene, and such an
incantation of revery lurked in the air, that each silent sailor seemed
resolved into his own invisible self. I was the attendant or page of
Queequeg, while busy at the mat. As I kept passing and repassing the
filling or woof of marline between the long yarns of the warp, using my own
hand for the shuttle, and as Queequeg, standing sideways, ever and anon slid
his heavy oaken sword between the threads, and idly looking off upon the
water, carelessly and unthinkingly drove home every yarn I say so strange a
dreaminess did there then reign all over the ship and all over the sea, only
broken by the intermitting dull sound of the sword, that it seemed as if this
were the Loom of Time, and I myself were a shuttle mechanically weaving and
weaving away at the Fates. There lay the fixed
threads of the warp subject to but one single, ever returning, unchanging
vibration, and that vibration merely enough to admit of the crosswise
interblending of other threads with its own. This warp seemed necessity and
here, thought I, with my own hand I ply my own shuttle and weave my own
destiny into these unalterable threads. Meantime, Queequeg's impulsive,
indifferent sword, sometimes hitting the woof slantingly, or crookedly, or
strongly, or weakly, as the case might be and by this difference in the
concluding blow producing a corresponding contrast in the final aspect of the
completed fabric this savage's sword, thought I, which thus finally shapes
and fashions both warp and woof this easy, indifferent sword must be chance
aye, chance, free will, and necessity no wise incompatible all
interweavingly working together. The straight warp of necessity, not to be
swerved from its ultimate course its every alternating vibration, indeed,
only tending to that free will still free to ply her shuttle between given
threads and chance, though restrained in its play within the right lines of
necessity, and sideways in its motions directed by free will, though thus
prescribed to by both, chance by turns rules either, and has the last
featuring blow at events. Thus we were weaving and weaving away when I started
at a sound so strange, long drawn, and musically wild and unearthly, that the
ball of free will dropped from my hand, and I stood gazing up at the clouds
whence that voice dropped like a wing. High aloft in the crosstrees was that
mad GayHeader, Tashtego. His body was reaching eagerly forward, his hand
stretched out like a wand, and at brief sudden intervals he continued his
cries. To be sure the same sound was that very moment perhaps being heard all
over the seas, from hundreds of whalemen's lookouts perched as high in the
air but from few of those lungs could that accustomed old cry have derived
such a marvellous cadence as from Tashtego the Indian's. As he stood hovering
over you half suspended in air, so wildly and eagerly peering towards the
horizon, you would have thought him some prophet or seer beholding the
shadows of Fate, and by those wild cries announcing their coming. There she
blows there there there she blows she blows
Whereaway? On the leebeam, about two miles off a school of them
Instantly all was commotion. The Sperm Whale blows as a clock ticks, with the
same undeviating and reliable uniformity. And thereby whalemen distinguish
this fish from other tribes of his genus. There go flukes was now the cry
from Tashtego and the whales disappeared. Quick, steward cried Ahab.
Time time DoughBoy hurried below, glanced at the watch, and reported
the exact minute to Ahab. The ship was now kept away from the wind, and she
went gently rolling before it. Tashtego reporting that the whales had gone
down heading to leeward, we confidently looked to see them again directly in
advance of our bows. For that singular craft at times evinced by the Sperm
Whale when, sounding with his head in one direction, he nevertheless, while
concealed beneath the surface, mills round, and swiftly swims off in the
opposite quarter this deceitfulness of his could not now be in action for
there was no reason to suppose that the fish seen by Tashtego had been in any
way alarmed, or indeed knew at all of our vicinity. One of the men selected
for shipkeepers  that is, those not appointed to the boats, by this time
relieved the Indian at the mainmast head. The sailors at the fore and
mizzen had come down the line tubs were fixed in their places the cranes
were thrust out the mainyard was backed, and the three boats swung over the
sea like three samphire baskets over high cliffs. Outside of the bulwarks
their eager crews with one hand clung to the rail, while one foot was
expectantly poised on the gunwale. So look the long line of manofwar's men
about to throw themselves on board an enemy's ship. But at this critical
instant a sudden exclamation was heard that took every eye from the whale.
With a start all glared at dark Ahab, who was surrounded by five dusky
phantoms that seemed fresh formed out of air.
The phantoms, for so they then
seemed, were flitting on the other side of the deck, and, with a noiseless
celerity, were casting loose the tackles and bands of the boat which swung
there. This boat had always been deemed one of the spare boats, though
technically called the captain's, on account of its hanging from the
starboard quarter. The figure that now stood by its bows was tall and swart,
with one white tooth evilly protruding from its steellike lips. A rumpled
Chinese jacket of black cotton funereally invested him, with wide black
trowsers of the same dark stuff. But strangely crowning his ebonness was a
glistening white plaited turban, the living hair braided and coiled round
and round upon his head. Less swart in aspect, the companions of this figure
were of that vivid, tigeryellow complexion peculiar to some of the aboriginal
natives of the Manillas a race notorious for a certain diabolism of
subtilty, and by some honest white mariners supposed to be the paid spies and
secret confidential agents on the water of the devil, their lord, whose
countingroom they suppose to be elsewhere. While yet the wondering ship's
company were gazing upon these strangers, Ahab cried out to the
whiteturbaned old man at their head, All ready there, Fedallah? Ready,
was the halfhissed reply. Lower away then d'ye hear? shouting across the
deck. Lower away there, I say. Such was the thunder of his voice, that
spite of their amazement the men sprang over the rail the sheaves whirled
round in the blocks with a wallow, the three boats dropped into the sea
while, with a dexterous, offhanded daring, unknown in any other vocation,
the sailors, goatlike, leaped down the rolling ship's side into the tossed
boats below. Hardly had they pulled out from under the ship's lee, when
a fourth keel, coming from the windward side, pulled round under the stern,
and showed the five strangers rowing Ahab, who, standing erect in the stern,
loudly hailed Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask, to spread themselves widely, so as
to cover a large expanse of water. but with all their eyes again riveted upon
the swart Fedallah and his crew, the inmates of the other boats obeyed not
the command. Captain Ahab? said Starbuck. Spread yourselves, cried Ahab
give way, all four boats. Thou, Flask, pull out more to leeward Aye,
aye, sir, cheerily cried little KingPost, sweeping round his great steering
oar. Lay back addressing his crew. There there there again There
she blows right ahead, boys  lay back Never heed yonder yellow boys,
Archy. Oh, I don't mind 'em, sir, said Archy I knew it all before now.
Didn't I hear 'em in the hold? And didn't I tell Cabaco here of it? What say
ye, Cabaco? They are stowaways, Mr. Flask. Pull, pull, my fine
heartsalive pull, my children pull, my little ones, drawingly and
soothingly sighed Stubb to his crew, some of whom still showed signs of
uneasiness. Why don't you break your backbones, my boys? What is it you
stare at? Those chaps in yonder boat? Tut They are only five more hands
come to help us never mind from where the more the merrier. Pull, then, do
pull never mind the brimstone devils are good fellows enough. So, so
there you are now that's the stroke for a thousand pounds that's the
stroke to sweep the stakes Hurrah for the gold cup of sperm oil, my heroes
Three cheers, men all hearts alive Easy, easy don't be in a hurry don't
be in a hurry. Why don't you snap your oars, you rascals? Bite something,
you dogs So, so, so, then softly, softly That's it  that's it long
and strong. Give way there, give way The devil fetch ye, ye ragamuffin
rapscallions ye are all asleep. Stop snoring, ye sleepers, and pull. Pull,
will ye? pull, can't ye? pull, won't ye? Why in the name of gudgeons and
gingercakes don't ye pull? pull and break something pull, and start your
eyes out Here whipping out the sharp knife from his girdle every
mother's son of ye draw his knife, and pull with the blade between his teeth.
That's it that's it. Now ye do something that looks like it, my
steelbits. Start her start her, my silverspoons Start her,
marlingspikes Stubb's exordium to his crew is given here at large, because
he had rather a peculiar way of talking to them in general, and especially
in inculcating the religion of rowing. But you must not suppose from this
specimen of his sermonizings that he ever flew into downright passions with
his congregation. Not at all and therein consisted his chief peculiarity.
He would say the most terrific things to his crew, in a tone so strangely
compounded of fun and fury, and the fury seemed so calculated merely as a
spice to the fun, that no oarsman could hear such queer invocations without
pulling for dear life, and yet pulling for the mere joke of the thing.
Besides he all the time looked so easy and indolent himself, so loungingly
managed his steeringoar, and so broadly gaped openmouthed at times that
the mere sight of such a yawning commander, by sheer force of contrast,
acted like a charm upon the crew. Then again, Stubb was one of those odd sort
of humorists, whose jollity is sometimes so curiously ambiguous, as to put
all inferiors on their guard in the matter of obeying them. In obedience to a
sign from Ahab, Starbuck was now pulling obliquely across Stubb's bow and
when for a minute or so the two boats were pretty near to each other, Stubb
hailed the mate. Mr. Starbuck larboard boat there, ahoy a word with ye,
sir, if ye please Halloa returned Starbuck, turning round not a single
inch as he spoke still earnestly but whisperingly urging his crew his face
set like a flint from Stubb's. What think ye of those yellow boys, sir
Smuggled on board, somehow, before the ship sailed. Strong, strong, boys 
in a whisper to his crew, then speaking out loud again A sad business,
Mr. Stubb seethe her, seethe her, my lads but never mind, Mr. Stubb,
all for the best. Let all your crew pull strong, come what will. Spring, my
men, spring
There's hogsheads of sperm ahead, Mr. Stubb, and that's what ye came for.
Pull, my boys Sperm, sperm's the play This at least is duty duty and
profit hand in hand Aye, aye, I thought as much, soliloquized Stubb,
when the boats diverged, as soon as I clapt eye on 'em, I thought so. Aye,
and that's what he went into the after hold for, so often, as DoughBoy long
suspected. They were hidden down there. The White Whale's at the bottom of
it. Well, well, so be it Can't be helped All right Give way, men It
ain't the White Whale today Give way Now the advent of these outlandish
strangers at such a critical instant as the lowering of the boats from the
deck, this had not unreasonably awakened a sort of superstitious amazement in
some of the ship's company but Archy's fancied discovery having some time
previous got abroad among them, though indeed not credited then, this had in
some small measure prepared them for the event. It took off the extreme edge
of their wonder and so what with all this and Stubb's confident way of
accounting for their appearance, they were for the time freed from
superstitious surmisings though the affair still left abundant room for all
manner of wild conjectures as to dark Ahab's precise agency in the matter from
the beginning. For me, I silently recalled the mysterious shadows I had seen
creeping on board the Pequod during the dim Nantucket dawn, as well as the
enigmatical hintings of the unaccountable Elijah. Meantime, Ahab, out of
hearing of his officers, having sided the furthest to windward, was still
ranging ahead of the other boats a circumstance bespeaking how potent a crew
was pulling him. those tiger yellow creatures of his seemed all steel and
whalebone like five triphammers they rose and fell with regular strokes of
strength, which periodically started the boat along the water like a
horizontal burst boiler out of a Mississippi steamer. As for Fedallah, who was
seen pulling the harpooneer oar, he had thrown aside his black jacket, and
displayed his naked chest with the whole part of his body above the gunwale,
clearly cut against the alternating depressions of the watery horizon while
at the other end of the boat Ahab, with one
arm, like a fencer's, thrown half backward into the air, as if to
counterbalance any tendency to trip Ahab was seen steadily managing his
steering oar as in a thousand boat lowerings ere the White Whale had torn him.
All at once the outstretched arm gave a peculiar motion and then remained
fixed, while the boat's five oars were seen simultaneously peaked. Boat and
crew sat motionless on the sea. Instantly the three spread boats in the rear
paused on their way. The whales had irregularly settled bodily down into the
blue, thus giving no distantly discernible token of the movement, though
from his closer vicinity Ahab had observed it. Every man look out along his
oars cried Starbuck. Thou, Queequeg, stand up Nimbly springing up on
the triangular raised box in the bow, the savage stood erect there, and with
intensely eager eyes gazed off towards the spot where the chase had last been
descried. Likewise upon the extreme stern of the boat where it was also
triangularly platformed level with the gunwale, Starbuck himself was seen
coolly and adroitly balancing himself to the jerking tossings of his chip of a
craft, and silently eyeing the vast blue eye of the sea. Not very far
distant Flask's boat was also lying breathlessly still its commander
recklessly standing upon the top of the loggerhead, a stout sort of post
rooted in the keel, and rising some two feet above the level of the stern
platform. it is used for catching turns with the whale line. Its top is not
more spacious than the palm of a man's hand, and standing upon such a base
as that, Flask seemed perched at the masthead of some ship which had sunk to
all but her trucks. But little KingPost was small and short, and at the
same time little KingPost was full of a large and tall ambition, so that
this loggerhead standpoint of his did by no means satisfy KingPost. I
can't see three seas off tip us up an oar there, and let me on to that.
Upon this, Daggoo, with either hand upon the gunwale to steady his way,
swiftly slid aft, and then erecting himself volunteered his lofty shoulders
for a pedestal.
Good a masthead as any, sir. Will you mount? That I will, and thank ye
very much, my fine fellow only I wish you fifty feet taller. Whereupon
planting his feet firmly against two opposite planks of the boat, the gigantic
negro, stooping a little, presented his flat palm to Flask's foot, and then
putting Flask's hand on his hearseplumed head and bidding him spring as he
himself should toss, with one dexterous fling landed the little man high and
dry on his shoulders. And here was Flask now standing, Daggoo with one
lifted arm furnishing him with a breastband to lean against and steady
himself by. At any time it is a strange sight to the tyro to see with what
wondrous habitude of unconscious skill the whaleman will maintain an erect
posture in his boat, even when pitched about by the most riotously perverse
and crossrunning seas. Still more strange to see him giddily perched upon
the loggerhead itself, under such circumstances. But the sight of little
Flask mounted upon gigantic Daggoo was yet more curious for sustaining
himself with a cool, indifferent, easy, unthought of, barbaric majesty, the
noble negro to every roll of the sea harmoniously rolled his fine form. On
his broad back, flaxenhaired flask seemed a snowflake. The bearer looked
nobler than the rider. Though truly vivacious, tumultuous, ostentatious
little Flask would now and then stamp with impatience but not one added
heave did he thereby give to the negro's lordly chest. So have I seen
Passion and Vanity stamping the living magnanimous earth, but the earth did
not alter her tides and her seasons for that. Meanwhile Stubb, the third mate,
betrayed no such fargazing solicitudes. The whales might have made one of
their regular soundings, not a temporary dive from mere fright and if that
were the case, Stubb, as his wont in such cases, it seems, was resolved to
solace the languishing interval with his pipe. He withdrew it from his
hatband, where he always wore it aslant like a feather. He loaded it, and
rammed home the loading with his thumbend but hardly had he ignited his
match across the rough sandpaper of his hand, when Tashtego, his harpooneer,
whose eyes had been setting to windward like two fixed stars, suddenly
dropped like light from his erect attitude to his seat,
crying out in a quick phrensy of hurry, Down, down all, and give way there
they are To a landsman, no whale, nor any sign of a herring, would have
been visible at that moment nothing but a troubled bit of greenish white
water, and thin scattered puffs of vapor hovering over it, and suffusingly
blowing off to leeward, like the confused scud from white rolling billows.
The air around suddenly vibrated and tingled, as it were, like the air over
intensely heated plates of iron. Beneath this atmospheric waving and curling,
and partially beneath a thin layer of water, also, the whales were swimming.
Seen in advance of all the other indications, the puffs of vapor they spouted,
seemed their forerunning couriers and detached flying outriders. All four
boats were now in keen pursuit of that one spot of troubled water and air.
But it bade far to outstrip them it flew on and on, as a mass of
interblending bubbles borne down a rapid stream from the hills. Pull, pull,
my good boys, said Starbuck, in the lowest possible but intensest
concentrated whisper to his men while the sharp fixed glance from his eyes
darted straight ahead of the bow, almost seemed as two visible needles in two
unerring binnacle compasses. He did not say much to his crew, though, nor
did his crew say anything to him. Only the silence of the boat was at
intervals startlingly pierced by one of his peculiar whispers, now harsh with
command, now soft with entreaty. How different the loud little KingPost.
Sing out and say something, my hearties. Roar and pull, my thunderbolts
Beach me, beach me on their black backs, boys only do that for me, and I'll
sign over to you my Martha's Vineyard plantation, boys including wife and
children, boys. Lay me on lay me on O Lord, Lord but I shall go stark,
staring mad See see that white water And so shouting, he pulled his hat
from his head, and stamped up and down on it then picking it up, flirted it
far off upon the sea and finally fell to rearing and plunging in the boat's
stern like a crazed colt from the prairie. Look at that chap now,
philosophically drawled Stubb, who, with his unlighted short pipe,
mechanically retained between his teeth, at a short distance, followed after
He's got fits, that
Flask has. Fits? yes, give him fits that's the very word  pitch fits
into 'em. Merrily, merrily, heartsalive. Pudding for supper, you know
merry's the word. Pull, babes pull, sucklings  pull, all. But what the
devil are you hurrying about? Softly, softly, and steadily, my men. Only
pull, and keep pulling nothing more. Crack all your backbones, and bite
your knives in two  that's all. Take it easy why don't ye take it easy, I
say, and burst all your livers and lungs But what it was that inscrutable
Ahab said to that tigeryellow crew of his these were words best omitted
here for you live under the blessed light of the evangelical land. Only the
infidel sharks in the audacious seas may give ear to such words, when, with
tornado brow, and eyes of red murder, and foamglued lips, Ahab leaped after
his prey. Meanwhile, all the boats tore on. The repeated specific allusions
of Flask to that whale, as he called the fictitious monster which he
declared to be incessantly tantalizing his boat's bow with its tail these
allusions of his were at times so vivid and lifelike, that they would cause
some one or two of his men to snatch a fearful look over the shoulder. But
this was against all rule for the oarsmen must put out their eyes, and ram
a skewer through their necks usage pronouncing that they must have no organs
but ears, and no limbs but arms, in these critical moments. It was a sight
full of quick wonder and awe The vast swells of the omnipotent sea the
surging, hollow roar they made, as they rolled along the eight gunwales, like
gigantic bowls in a boundless bowlinggreen the brief suspended agony of the
boat, as it would tip for an instant on the knifelike edge of the sharper
waves, that almost seemed threatening to cut it in two the sudden profound
dip into the watery glens and hollows the keen spurrings and goadings to
gain the top of the opposite hill the headlong, sledlike slide down its
other side all these, with the cries of the headsmen and harpooneers, and
the shuddering gasps of the oarsmen, with the wondrous sight of the ivory
Pequod bearing down upon her boats with outstretched sails, like a wild hen
after her screaming brood all this was thrilling. Not the raw recruit,
marching from the bosom of his wife into the fever heat of his first battle
not the dead man's ghost encountering
the first unknown phantom in the other world neither of these can feel
stranger and stronger emotions than that man does, who for the first time
finds himself pulling into the charmed, churned circle of the hunted sperm
whale. The dancing white water made by the chase was now becoming more and
more visible, owing to the increasing darkness of the dun cloudshadows flung
upon the sea. The jets of vapor no longer blended, but tilted everywhere to
right and left the whales seemed separating their wakes. The boats were
pulled more apart Starbuck giving chase to three whales running dead to
leeward. Our sail was now set, and, with the still rising wind, we rushed
along the boat going with such madness through the water, that the lee oars
could scarcely be worked rapidly enough to escape being torn from the
rowlocks. Soon we were running through a suffusing wide veil of mist
neither ship nor boat to be seen. Give way, men, whispered Starbuck, drawing
still further aft the sheet of his sail there is time to kill a fish yet
before the squall comes. There's white water again close to Spring
Soon after, two cries in quick succession on each side of us denoted that the
other boats had got fast but hardly were they overheard, when with a
lightninglike hurtling whisper Starbuck said Stand up and Queequeg,
harpoon in hand, sprang to his feet. Though not one of the oarsmen was then
facing the life and death peril so close to them ahead, yet with their eyes
on the intense countenance of the mate in the stern of the boat, they knew
that the imminent instant had come they heard, too, an enormous wallowing
sound as of fifty elephants stirring in their litter. Meanwhile the boat was
still booming through the mist, the waves curling and hissing around us like
the erected crests of enraged serpents. That's his hump. There, there,
give it to him whispered Starbuck. A short rushing sound leaped out of the
boat it was the darted iron of Queequeg. Then all in one welded commotion
came an invisible push from astern, while forward the boat seemed striking on
a ledge the sail collapsed and exploded a
gush of scalding vapor shot up near by something rolled and tumbled like an
earthquake beneath us. The whole crew were half suffocated as they were
tossed helterskelter into the white curdling cream of the squall. Squall,
whale, and harpoon had all blended together and the whale, merely grazed by
the iron, escaped. Though completely swamped, the boat was nearly unharmed.
Swimming round it we picked up the floating oars, and lashing them across the
gunwale, tumbled back to our places. There we sat up to our knees in the sea,
the water covering every rib and plank, so that to our downward gazing eyes
the suspended craft seemed a coral boat grown up to us from the bottom of the
ocean. The wind increased to a howl the waves dashed their bucklers
together the whole squall roared, forked, and crackled around us like a
white fire upon the prairie, in which, unconsumed, we were burning immortal
in these jaws of death In vain we hailed the other boats as well roar to
the live coals down the chimney of a flaming furnace as hail those boats in
that storm. Meanwhile the driving scud, rack, and mist, grew darker with the
shadows of night no sign of the ship could be seen. The rising sea forbade
all attempts to bale out the boat. The oars were useless as propellers,
performing now the office of lifepreservers. So, cutting the lashing of the
waterproof match keg, after many failures Starbuck contrived to ignite the
lamp in the lantern then stretching it on a waif pole, handed it to Queequeg
as the standardbearer of this forlorn hope. There, then, he sat, holding up
that imbecile candle in the heart of that almighty forlornness. There, then,
he sat, the sign and symbol of a man without faith, hopelessly holding up hope
in the midst of despair. Wet, drenched through, and shivering cold,
despairing of ship or boat, we lifted up our eyes as the dawn came on. The
mist still spread over the sea, the empty lantern lay crushed in the bottom
of the boat. Suddenly Queequeg started to his feet, hollowing his hand to his
ear. We all heard a faint creaking, as of ropes and yards hitherto muffled by
the storm. The sound came nearer and nearer the thick mists were dimly
parted by
a huge, vague form. Affrighted, we all sprang into the sea as the ship at
last loomed into view, bearing right down upon us within a distance of not
much more than its length. Floating on the waves we saw the abandoned boat, as
for one instant it tossed and gaped beneath the ship's bows like a chip at
the base of a cataract and then the vast hull rolled over it, and it was
seen no more till it came up weltering astern. Again we swam for it, were
dashed against it by the seas, and were at last taken up and safely landed on
board. Ere the squall came close to, the other boats had cut loose from
their fish and returned to the ship in good time. The ship had given us up,
but was still cruising, if haply it might light upon some token of our
perishing, an oar or a lance pole.
There are certain queer times and occasions
in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe
for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns,
and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own.
However, nothing dispirits, and nothing seems worth while disputing. He bolts
down all events, all creeds, and beliefs, and persuasions, all hard things
visible and invisible, never mind how knobby as an ostrich of potent
digestion gobbles down bullets and gun flints. And as for small difficulties
and worryings, prospects of sudden disaster, peril of life and limb all
these, and death itself, seem to him only sly, goodnatured hits, and jolly
punches in the side bestowed by the unseen and unaccountable old joker. That
odd sort of wayward mood I am speaking of, comes over a man only in some time
of extreme tribulation it comes in the very midst of his earnestness, so
that what just before might have seemed to him a thing most momentous, now
seems but a part of the general
joke. There is nothing like the perils of whaling to breed this free and easy
sort of genial, desperado philosophy and with it I now regarded this whole
voyage of the Pequod, and the great White Whale its object. Queequeg, said
I, when they had dragged me, the last man, to the deck, and I was still
shaking myself in my jacket to fling off the water Queequeg, my fine
friend, does this sort of thing often happen? Without much emotion, though
soaked through just like me, he gave me to understand that such things did
often happen. Mr. Stubb, said I, turning to that worthy, who, buttoned up
in his oiljacket, was now calmly smoking his pipe in the rain Mr. Stubb,
I think I have heard you say that of all whalemen you ever met, our chief
mate, Mr. Starbuck, is by far the most careful and prudent. I suppose then,
that going plump on a flying whale with your sail set in a foggy squall is the
height of a whaleman's discretion? Certain. I've lowered for whales from a
leaking ship in a gale off Cape Horn. Mr. Flask, said I, turning to
little KingPost, who was standing close by you are experienced in these
things, and I am not. Will you tell me whether it is an unalterable law in
this fishery, Mr. Flask, for an oarsman to break his own back pulling himself
backforemost into death's jaws? Can't you twist that smaller? said Flask.
Yes, that's the law. I should like to see a boat's crew backing water up to a
whale face foremost. Ha, ha the whale would give them squint for squint,
mind that here then, from three impartial witnesses, i had a deliberate
statement of the entire case. Considering, therefore, that squalls and
capsizings in the water and consequent bivouacks on the deep, were matters
of common occurrence in this kind of life considering that at the
superlatively critical instant of going on to the whale I must resign my life
into the hands of him who steered the boat oftentimes a fellow who at that
very moment is in his impetuousness upon the point of scuttling the craft
with his own frantic stampings considering that the particular disaster to
our own particular boat was chiefly to be
imputed to Starbuck's driving on to his whale almost in the teeth of a squall,
and considering that Starbuck, notwithstanding, was famous for his great
heedfulness in the fishery considering that I belonged to this uncommonly
prudent Starbuck's boat and finally considering in what a devil's chase I was
implicated, touching the White Whale taking all things together, I say, I
thought I might as well go below and make a rough draft of my will.
Queequeg, said I, come along, you shall be my lawyer, executor, and
legatee. It may seem strange that of all men sailors should be tinkering at
their last wills and testaments, but there are no people in the world more
fond of that diversion. This was the fourth time in my nautical life that I
had done the same thing. After the ceremony was concluded upon the present
occasion, I felt all the easier a stone was rolled away from my heart.
Besides, all the days I should now live would be as good as the days that
Lazarus lived after his resurrection a supplementary clean gain of so many
months or weeks as the case might be. I survived myself my death and burial
were locked up in my chest. I looked round me tranquilly and contentedly,
like a quiet ghost with a clean conscience sitting inside the bars of a snug
family vault. now then, thought i, unconsciously rolling up the sleeves of
my frock, here goes a cool, collected dive at death and destruction, and the
devil fetch the hindmost.
I quickly followed suit, and descending into
the barroom accosted the grinning landlord very pleasantly. I cherished no
malice towards him, though he had been skylarking with me not a little in the
matter of my bedfellow. However, a good laugh is a mighty good thing, and
rather too scarce a good thing the more's the pity. So, if any one man, in
his own proper person, afford stuff for a good joke to anybody, let him not
be backward, but let him cheerfully allow himself to spend and be spent in
that way. And the man that has anything bountifully laughable about him, be
sure there is more in that man than you perhaps think for. The barroom was
now full of the boarders who had been dropping in the night previous, and
whom I had not as yet had a good look at. They were nearly all whalemen
chief mates, and second mates, and third mates, and sea carpenters, and sea
coopers, and sea blacksmiths, and harpooneers, and ship keepers a brown and
brawny company, with bosky beards an unshorn, shaggy set, all wearing
monkey jackets for morning gowns. You could pretty plainly tell how long each
one had been ashore. This young fellow's healthy cheek is like a suntoasted
pear in hue, and would seem to smell almost as musky he cannot have been
three days landed from his Indian voyage. That man next him looks a few
shades lighter you might say a touch of satin wood is in him. In the
complexion of a third still lingers a tropic tawn, but slightly bleached
withal he doubtless has tarried whole weeks ashore. But who could show a
cheek like
Queequeg? which, barred with various tints, seemed like the Andes' western
slope, to show forth in one array, contrasting climates, zone by zone.
Grub, ho now cried the landlord, flinging open a door, and in we went to
breakfast. They say that men who have seen the world, thereby become quite at
ease in manner, quite selfpossessed in company. Not always, though
Ledyard, the great New England traveller, and Mungo Park, the Scotch one of
all men, they possessed the least assurance in the parlor. But perhaps the
mere crossing of Siberia in a sledge drawn by dogs as Ledyard did, or the
taking a long solitary walk on an empty stomach, in the negro heart of
Africa, which was the sum of poor Mungo's performances  this kind of travel,
I say, may not be the very best mode of attaining a high social polish.
Still, for the most part, that sort of thing is to be had anywhere. These
reflections just here are occasioned by the circumstance that after we were
all seated at the table, and I was preparing to hear some good stories about
whaling to my no small surprise, nearly every man maintained a profound
silence. And not only that, but they looked embarrassed. Yes, here were a
set of seadogs, many of whom without the slightest bashfulness had boarded
great whales on the high seas entire strangers to them and duelled them dead
without winking and yet, here they sat at a social breakfast table all of
the same calling, all of kindred tastes looking round as sheepishly at
each other as though they had never been out of sight of some sheepfold among
the Green Mountains. A curious sight these bashful bears, these timid
warrior whalemen But as for Queequeg why, Queequeg sat there among them at
the head of the table, too, it so chanced as cool as an icicle. To be sure
I cannot say much for his breeding. His greatest admirer could not have
cordially justified his bringing his harpoon into breakfast with him, and
using it there without ceremony reaching over the table with it, to the
imminent jeopardy of many heads, and grappling the beefsteaks towards him.
But that was certainly very coolly done by him, and every
one knows that in most people's estimation, to do anything coolly is to do it
genteelly. We will not speak of all Queequeg's peculiarities here how he
eschewed coffee and hot rolls, and applied his undivided attention to
beefsteaks, done rare. Enough, that when breakfast was over he withdrew like
the rest into the public room, lighted his tomahawkpipe, and was sitting
there quietly digesting and smoking with his inseparable hat on, when I
sallied out for a stroll.
Who would have thought
it, Flask cried Stubb if I had but one leg you would not catch me in a
boat, unless maybe to stop the plughole with my timber toe. Oh he's a
wonderful old man I don't think it so strange, after all, on that
account, said
Flask. If his leg were off at the hip, now, it would be a different thing.
That would disable him but he has one knee, and good part of the other left,
you know. I don't know that, my little man I never yet saw him kneel.
Among whalewise people it has often been argued whether, considering the
paramount importance of his life to the success of the voyage, it is right for
a whaling captain to jeopardize that life in the active perils of the chase.
So Tamerlane's soldiers often argued with tears in their eyes, whether that
invaluable life of his ought to be carried into the thickest of the fight.
But with Ahab the question assumed a modified aspect. Considering that with
two legs man is but a hobbling wight in all times of danger considering that
the pursuit of whales is always under great and extraordinary difficulties
that every individual moment, indeed, then comprises a peril under these
circumstances is it wise for any maimed man to enter a whaleboat in the
hunt? As a general thing, the jointowners of the Pequod must have plainly
thought not. Ahab well knew that although his friends at home would think
little of his entering a boat in certain comparatively harmless vicissitudes
of the chase, for the sake of being near the scene of action and giving his
orders in person, yet for Captain Ahab to have a boat actually apportioned to
him as a regular headsman in the hunt above all for Captain Ahab to be
supplied with five extra men, as that same boat's crew, he well knew that
such generous conceits never entered the heads of the owners of the Pequod.
Therefore he had not solicited a boat's crew from them, nor had he in any way
hinted his desires on that head. Nevertheless he had taken private measures
of his own touching all that matter. Until Cabaco's published discovery, the
sailors had little foreseen it, though to be sure when, after being a little
while out of port, all hands had concluded the customary business of fitting
the whaleboats for service when some time after this Ahab was now and then
found bestirring himself in the matter of making tholepins with his own hands
for what was thought to be one of the spare boats, and even solicitously
cutting the small wooden skewers, which when the
line is running out are pinned over the groove in the bow when all this was
observed in him, and particularly his solicitude in having an extra coat of
sheathing in the bottom of the boat, as if to make it better withstand the
pointed pressure of his ivory limb and also the anxiety he evinced in
exactly shaping the thigh board, or clumsy cleat, as it is sometimes called,
the horizontal piece in the boat's bow for bracing the knee against in
darting or stabbing at the whale when it was observed how often he stood up
in that boat with his solitary knee fixed in the semicircular depression in
the cleat, and with the carpenter's chisel gouged out a little here and
straightened it a little there all these things, I say, had awakened much
interest and curiosity at the time. But almost everybody supposed that this
particular preparative heedfulness in Ahab must only be with a view to the
ultimate chase of Moby Dick for he had already revealed his intention to
hunt that mortal monster in person. But such a supposition did by no means
involve the remotest suspicion as to any boat's crew being assigned to that
boat. now, with the subordinate phantoms, what wonder remained soon waned
away for in a whaler wonders soon wane. Besides, now and then such
unaccountable odds and ends of strange nations come up from the unknown nooks
and ashholes of the earth to man these floating outlaws of whalers and the
ships themselves often pick up such queer castaway creatures found tossing
about the open sea on planks, bits of wreck, oars, whaleboats, canoes,
blownoff Japanese junks, and what not that Beelzebub himself might climb up
the side and step down into the cabin to chat with the captain, and it would
not create any unsubduable excitement in the forecastle. But be all this as
it may, certain it is that while the subordinate phantoms soon found their
place among the crew, though still as it were somehow distinct from them,
yet that hairturbaned Fedallah remained a muffled mystery to the last.
Whence he came in a mannerly world like this, by what sort of unaccountable
tie he soon evinced himself to be linked with Ahab's peculiar fortunes nay,
so far as to have some sort of a halfhinted influence Heaven knows, but
it might have been even authority over him all this none knew. But one
cannot sustain
an indifferent air concerning Fedallah. He was such a creature as civilized,
domestic people in the temperate zone only see in their dreams, and that but
dimly but the like of whom now and then glide among the unchanging Asiatic
communities, especially the Oriental isles to the east of the continent those
insulated, immemorial, unalterable countries, which even in these modern
days still preserve much of the ghostly aboriginalness of earth's primal
generations, when the memory of the first man was a distinct recollection,
and all men his descendants, unknowing whence he came, eyed each other as
real phantoms, and asked of the sun and the moon why they were created and to
what end when though, according to genesis, the angels indeed consorted
with the daughters of men, the devils also, add the uncanonical Rabbins,
indulged in mundane amours.
Days, weeks passed, and under easy
sail, the ivory Pequod had slowly swept across four several cruisinggrounds
that off the Azores off the Cape de Verdes on the Plate so called,
being off the mouth of the Rio de la Plata and the Carrol Ground, an
unstaked, watery locality, southerly from St. Helena. It was while gliding
through these latter waters that one serene and moonlight night, when all
the waves rolled by like scrolls of silver and, by their soft, suffusing
seethings, made what seemed a silvery silence, not a solitude on such a
silent night a silvery jet was seen far in advance of the white bubbles at
the bow. Lit up by the moon, it looked celestial seemed some plumed and
glittering god uprising from the sea. Fedallah first descried this jet. For
of these moonlight nights, it was his wont to mount to the mainmast head,
and stand a lookout there, with the same precision as if it had been day.
And yet, though herds of whales were seen by night, not one whaleman
in a hundred would venture a lowering for them. You may think with what
emotions, then, the seamen beheld this old Oriental perched aloft at such
unusual hours his turban and the moon, companions in one sky. But when,
after spending his uniform interval there for several successive nights
without uttering a single sound when, after all this silence, his unearthly
voice was heard announcing that silvery, moonlit jet, every reclining
mariner started to his feet as if some winged spirit had lighted in the
rigging, and hailed the mortal crew. There she blows Had the trump of
judgment blown, they could not have quivered more yet still they felt no
terror rather pleasure. for though it was a most unwonted hour, yet so
impressive was the cry, and so deliriously exciting, that almost every soul
on board instinctively desired a lowering. Walking the deck with quick,
sidelunging strides, Ahab commanded the t'gallant sails and royals to be set,
and every stunsail spread. The best man in the ship must take the helm.
Then, with every masthead manned, the piledup craft rolled down before the
wind. The strange, upheaving, lifting tendency of the taffrail breeze filling
the hollows of so many sails, made the buoyant, hovering deck to feel like
air beneath the feet while still she rushed along, as if two antagonistic
influences were struggling in her one to mount direct to heaven, the other
to drive yawingly to some horizontal goal. And had you watched Ahab's face
that night, you would have thought that in him also two different things were
warring. While his one live leg made lively echoes along the deck, every
stroke of his dead limb sounded like a coffintap. On life and death this old
man walked. But though the ship so swiftly sped, and though from every eye,
like arrows, the eager glances shot, yet the silvery jet was no more seen
that night. Every sailor swore he saw it once, but not a second time. This
midnightspout had almost grown a forgotten thing, when, some days after, lo
at the same silent hour, it was again announced again it was descried by
all but upon making sail to overtake it, once more it disappeared as if it
had never been. And so it served us night after night, till no one heeded it
but to wonder at it. Mysteriously jetted into the clear moonlight,
or starlight, as the case might be disappearing again for one whole day, or
two days, or three and somehow seeming at every distinct repetition to be
advancing still further and further in our van, this solitary jet seemed for
ever alluring us on. Nor with the immemorial superstition of their race, and
in accordance with the preternaturalness, as it seemed, which in many
things invested the Pequod, were there wanting some of the seamen who swore
that whenever and wherever descried at however remote times, or in however
far apart latitudes and longitudes, that unnearable spout was cast by one
selfsame whale and that whale, Moby Dick. For a time, there reigned, too, a
sense of peculiar dread at this flitting apparition, as if it were
treacherously beckoning us on and on, in order that the monster might turn
round upon us, and rend us at last in the remotest and most savage seas.
These temporary apprehensions, so vague but so awful, derived a wondrous
potency from the contrasting serenity of the weather, in which, beneath all
its blue blandness, some thought there lurked a devilish charm, as for days
and days we voyaged along, through seas so wearily, lonesomely mild, that
all space, in repugnance to our vengeful errand, seemed vacating itself of
life before our urnlike prow. But, at last, when turning to the eastward,
the Cape winds began howling around us, and we rose and fell upon the long,
troubled seas that are there when the ivorytusked Pequod sharply bowed to
the blast, and gored the dark waves in her madness, till, like showers of
silver chips, the foamflakes flew over her bulwarks then all this desolate
vacuity of life went away, but gave place to sights more dismal than before.
Close to our bows, strange forms in the water darted hither and thither before
us while thick in our rear flew the inscrutable searavens. And every
morning, perched on our stays, rows of these birds were seen and spite of
our hootings, for a long time obstinately clung to the hemp, as though they
deemed our ship some drifting, uninhabited craft a thing appointed to
desolation, and therefore fit roostingplace for their homeless selves. And
heaved and heaved, still unrestingly heaved the black sea, as if its vast
tides were a conscience and the great
mundane soul were in anguish and remorse for the long sin and suffering it had
bred. Cape of Good Hope, do they call ye? Rather Cape Tormentoto, as called
of yore for long allured by the perfidious silences that before had attended
us, we found ourselves launched into this tormented sea, where guilty beings
transformed into those fowls and these fish, seemed condemned to swim on
everlastingly without any haven in store, or beat that black air without any
horizon. But calm, snowwhite, and unvarying still directing its fountain of
feathers to the sky still beckoning us on from before, the solitary jet
would at times be descried. During all this blackness of the elements, Ahab,
though assuming for the time the almost continual command of the drenched and
dangerous deck, manifested the gloomiest reserve and more seldom than ever
addressed his mates. In tempestuous times like these, after everything above
and aloft has been secured, nothing more can be done but passively to await
the issue of the gale. Then Captain and crew become practical fatalists.
So, with his ivory leg inserted into its accustomed hole, and with one hand
firmly grasping a shroud, Ahab for hours and hours would stand gazing dead to
windward, while an occasional squall of sleet or snow would all but congeal
his very eyelashes together. Meantime, the crew driven from the forward
part of the ship by the perilous seas that burstingly broke over its bows,
stood in a line along the bulwarks in the waist and the better to guard
against the leaping waves, each man had slipped himself into a sort of
bowline secured to the rail, in which he swung as in a loosened belt. Few or
no words were spoken and the silent ship, as if manned by painted sailors in
wax, day after day tore on through all the swift madness and gladness of the
demoniac waves. By night the same muteness of humanity before the shrieks of
the ocean prevailed still in silence the men swung in the bowlines still
wordless ahab stood up to the blast. Even when wearied nature seemed
demanding repose he would not seek that repose in his hammock. Never could
Starbuck forget the old man's aspect, when one night going down into the cabin
to mark how the
barometer stood, he saw him with closed eyes sitting straight in his
floorscrewed chair the rain and halfmelted sleet of the storm from which
he had some time before emerged, still slowly dripping from the unremoved hat
and coat. On the table beside him lay unrolled one of those charts of tides
and currents which have previously been spoken of. His lantern swung from his
tightly clenched hand. Though the body was erect, the head was thrown back
so that the closed eyes were pointed towards the needle of the telltale that
swung from a beam in the ceiling. Terrible old man thought Starbuck with a
shudder, sleeping in this gale, still thou steadfastly eyest thy purpose.
Southeastward from the Cape, off the
distant Crozetts, a good cruising ground for Right Whalemen, a sail loomed
ahead, the Goney Albatross by name. As she slowly drew nigh, from my lofty
perch at the foremasthead, I had a good view of that sight so remarkable to
a tyro in the far ocean fisheries a whaler at sea, and long absent from
home. As if the waves had been fullers, this craft was bleached like the
skeleton of a stranded walrus. All down her sides, this spectral appearance
was traced with long channels of reddened rust, while all her spars and her
rigging were like the thick branches of trees furred over with hoarfrost.
Only her lower sails were set. A wild sight it was to see her longbearded
lookouts at those three mastheads. They seemed clad in the skins of
beasts, so torn and bepatched the raiment that had survived nearly four years
of cruising. Standing in iron hoops nailed to the mast, they swayed and
swung over a fathomless sea
and though, when the ship slowly glided close under our stern, we six men in
the air came so nigh to each other that we might almost have leaped from the
mastheads of one ship to those of the other yet, those forlornlooking
fishermen, mildly eyeing us as they passed, said not one word to our own
lookouts, while the quarterdeck hail was being heard from below. Ship
ahoy Have ye seen the White Whale? But as the strange captain, leaning over
the pallid bulwarks, was in the act of putting his trumpet to his mouth, it
somehow fell from his hand into the sea and the wind now rising amain, he
in vain strove to make himself heard without it. Meantime his ship was still
increasing the distance between. While in various silent ways the seamen of
the Pequod were evincing their observance of this ominous incident at the
first mere mention of the White Whale's name to another ship, Ahab for a
moment paused it almost seemed as though he would have lowered a boat to
board the stranger, had not the threatening wind forbade. But taking
advantage of his windward position, he again seized his trumpet, and knowing
by her aspect that the stranger vessel was a Nantucketer and shortly bound
home, he loudly hailed  Ahoy there This is the Pequod, bound round the
world Tell them to address all future letters to the Pacific ocean and
this time three years, if I am not at home, tell them to address them to
At that moment the two wakes were fairly crossed, and instantly, then, in
accordance with their singular ways, shoals of small harmless fish, that for
some days before had been placidly swimming by our side, darted away with what
seemed shuddering fins, and ranged themselves fore and aft with the
stranger's flanks. Though in the course of his continual voyagings Ahab must
often before have noticed a similar sight, yet, to any monomaniac man, the
veriest trifles capriciously carry meanings. Swim away from me, do ye?
murmured Ahab, gazing over into the water. There seemed but little in the
words, but the tone conveyed more of deep helpless sadness than the insane
old man had ever before evinced. But turning to the steersman, who thus far
had been holding the ship in the wind to diminish
her headway, he cried out in his old lion voice,  Up helm Keep her off
round the world Round the world There is much in that sound to inspire
proud feelings but whereto does all that circumnavigation conduct? Only
through numberless perils to the very point whence we started, where those
that we left behind secure, were all the time before us. Were this world an
endless plain, and by sailing eastward we could for ever reach new distances,
and discover sights more sweet and strange than any Cyclades or Islands of
King Solomon, then there were promise in the voyage. But in pursuit of those
far mysteries we dream of, or in tormented chase of that demon phantom that,
some time or other, swims before all human hearts while chasing such over
this round globe, they either lead us on in barren mazes or midway leave us
whelmed.
The cabincompass is called the telltale, because without going to the
compass at the helm, the Captain, while below, can inform himself of the
course of the ship.
The ostensible reason why Ahab did not go on
board of the whaler we had spoken was this the wind and sea betokened
storms. But even had this not been the case, he would not after all,
perhaps, have boarded her judging by his subsequent conduct on similar
occasions if so it had been that, by the process of hailing, he had obtained
a negative answer to the question he put. For, as it eventually turned out,
he cared not to consort, even for five minutes, with any stranger captain,
except he could contribute some of that information he so absorbingly sought.
But all this might remain inadequately estimated, were not something said
here of the peculiar usages of whalingvessels when meeting each other in
foreign seas, and especially on a common cruisingground. If two strangers
crossing the Pine Barrens in New York State, or the equally desolate Salisbury
Plain in England if
casually encountering each other in such inhospitable wilds, these twain, for
the life of them, cannot well avoid a mutual salutation and stopping for a
moment to interchange the news and, perhaps, sitting down for a while and
resting in concert then, how much more natural that upon the illimitable Pine
Barrens and Salisbury Plains of the sea, two whaling vessels descrying each
other at the ends of the earth off lone Fanning's Island, or the far away
King's Mills how much more natural, I say, that under such circumstances
these ships should not only interchange hails, but come into still closer,
more friendly and sociable contact. And especially would this seem to be a
matter of course, in the case of vessels owned in one seaport, and whose
captains, officers, and not a few of the men are personally known to each
other and consequently, have all sorts of dear domestic things to talk
about. For the long absent ship, the outwardbounder, perhaps, has letters
on board at any rate, she will be sure to let her have some papers of a date
a year or two later than the last one on her blurred and thumbworn files.
And in return for that courtesy, the outwardbound ship would receive the
latest whaling intelligence from the cruisingground to which she may be
destined, a thing of the utmost importance to her. And in degree, all this
will hold true concerning whaling vessels crossing each other's track on the
cruisingground itself, even though they are equally long absent from home.
for one of them may have received a transfer of letters from some third, and
now far remote vessel and some of those letters may be for the people of the
ship she now meets. Besides, they would exchange the whaling news, and have
an agreeable chat. For not only would they meet with all the sympathies of
sailors, but likewise with all the peculiar congenialities arising from a
common pursuit and mutually shared privations and perils. Nor would
difference of country make any very essential difference that is, so long as
both parties speak one language, as is the case with Americans and English.
Though, to be sure, from the small number of English whalers, such meetings
do not very often occur, and when they do occur there is too apt to be a
sort of shyness between them for your Englishman is rather
reserved, and your Yankee, he does not fancy that sort of thing in anybody
but himself. Besides, the English whalers sometimes affect a kind of
metropolitan superiority over the American whalers regarding the long, lean
Nantucketer, with his nondescript provincialisms, as a sort of seapeasant.
But where this superiority in the English whalemen does really consist, it
would be hard to say, seeing that the Yankees in one day, collectively, kill
more whales than all the English, collectively, in ten years. But this is a
harmless little foible in the English whalehunters, which the Nantucketer
does not take much to heart probably, because he knows that he has a few
foibles himself. So, then, we see that of all ships separately sailing the
sea, the whalers have most reason to be sociable and they are so. Whereas,
some merchant ships crossing each other's wake in the midAtlantic, will
oftentimes pass on without so much as a single word of recognition, mutually
cutting each other on the high seas, like a brace of dandies in Broadway
and all the time indulging, perhaps, in finical criticism upon each other's
rig. As for MenofWar, when they chance to meet at sea, they first go
through such a string of silly bowings and scrapings, such a ducking of
ensigns, that there does not seem to be much rightdown hearty goodwill and
brotherly love about it at all. As touching Slaveships meeting, why, they are
in such a prodigious hurry, they run away from each other as soon as possible.
And as for Pirates, when they chance to cross each other's crossbones, the
first hail is  How many skulls? the same way that whalers hail How many
barrels? And that question once answered, pirates straightway steer apart,
for they are infernal villains on both sides, and don't like to see overmuch
of each other's villanous likenesses. But look at the godly, honest,
unostentatious, hospitable, sociable, freeandeasy whaler What does the
whaler do when she meets another whaler in any sort of decent weather? She
has a Gam, a thing so utterly unknown to all other ships that they never
heard of the name even and if by chance they should hear of it, they only
grin at it, and repeat gamesome stuff about spouters and blubberboilers,
and such like pretty exclamations. Why it is that all Merchantseamen, and
also all
Pirates and ManofWar's men, and Slaveship sailors, cherish such a scornful
feeling towards Whaleships this is a question it would be hard to answer.
Because, in the case of pirates, say, I should like to know whether that
profession of theirs has any peculiar glory about it. It sometimes ends in
uncommon elevation, indeed but only at the gallows. And besides, when a
man is elevated in that odd fashion, he has no proper foundation for his
superior altitude. Hence, I conclude, that in boasting himself to be high
lifted above a whaleman, in that assertion the pirate has no solid basis to
stand on. but what is a gam? you might wear out your indexfinger running
up and down the columns of dictionaries, and never find the word. Dr.
Johnson never attained to that erudition Noah Webster's ark does not hold it.
Nevertheless, this same expressive word has now for many years been in
constant use among some fifteen thousand true born Yankees. Certainly it
needs a definition, and should be incorporated into the Lexicon. With that
view, let me learnedly define it. Gam. Noun A social meeting of two or more
Whaleships, generally on a cruisingground when, after exchanging hails,
they exchange visits by boats' crews the two captains remaining, for the
time, on board of one ship, and the two chief mates on the other. There is
another little item about Gamming which must not be forgotten here. All
professions have their own little peculiarities of detail so has the whale
fishery. In a pirate, manofwar, or slave ship, when the captain is rowed
anywhere in his boat, he always sits in the stern sheets on a comfortable,
sometimes cushioned seat there, and often steers himself with a pretty little
milliner's tiller decorated with gay cords and ribbons. But the whaleboat
has no seat astern, no sofa of that sort whatever, and no tiller at all.
High times indeed, if whaling captains were wheeled about the water on castors
like gouty old aldermen in patent chairs. And as for a tiller, the
whaleboat never admits of any such effeminacy and therefore as in gamming a
complete boat's crew must leave the ship, and hence as the boat steerer or
harpooneer is of the number, that subordinate is the steersman upon the
occasion, and the captain, having no
place to sit in, is pulled off to his visit all standing like a pine tree.
And often you will notice that being conscious of the eyes of the whole
visible world resting on him from the sides of the two ships, this standing
captain is all alive to the importance of sustaining his dignity by
maintaining his legs. nor is this any very easy matter for in his rear is
the immense projecting steering oar hitting him now and then in the small of
his back, the afteroar reciprocating by rapping his knees in front. He is
thus completely wedged before and behind, and can only expand himself
sideways by settling down on his stretched legs but a sudden, violent pitch
of the boat will often go far to topple him, because length of foundation is
nothing without corresponding breadth. Merely make a spread angle of two
poles, and you cannot stand them up. Then, again, it would never do in plain
sight of the world's riveted eyes, it would never do, I say, for this
straddling captain to be seen steadying himself the slightest particle by
catching hold of anything with his hands indeed, as token of his entire,
buoyant selfcommand, he generally carries his hands in his trowsers'
pockets but perhaps being generally very large, heavy hands, he carries them
there for ballast. Nevertheless there have occurred instances, well
authenticated ones too, where the captain has been known for an uncommonly
critical moment or two, in a sudden squall say to seize hold of the nearest
oarsman's hair, and hold on there like grim death.
 As told at the Golden Inn.
The Cape of Good Hope, and all the watery region round about there, is much
like some noted four corners of a great highway, where you meet more
travellers than in any other part. It was not very long after speaking the
Goney that another
homewardbound whaleman, the TownHo, was encountered. She was manned almost
wholly by Polynesians. In the short gam that ensued she gave us strong news
of Moby Dick. To some the general interest in the White Whale was now wildly
heightened by a circumstance of the TownHo's story, which seemed obscurely
to involve with the whale a certain wondrous, inverted visitation of one of
those so called judgments of God which at times are said to overtake some men.
This latter circumstance, with its own particular accompaniments, forming
what may be called the secret part of the tragedy about to be narrated, never
reached the ears of Captain Ahab or his mates. For that secret part of the
story was unknown to the captain of the TownHo himself. It was the private
property of three confederate white seamen of that ship, one of whom, it
seems, communicated it to Tashtego with Romish injunctions of secresy, but
the following night Tashtego rambled in his sleep, and revealed so much of it
in that way, that when he was wakened he could not well withhold the rest.
Nevertheless, so potent an influence did this thing have on those seamen in
the Pequod who came to the full knowledge of it, and by such a strange
delicacy, to call it so, were they governed in this matter, that they kept
the secret among themselves so that it never transpired abaft the Pequod's
mainmast. Interweaving in its proper place this darker thread with the story
as publicly narrated on the ship, the whole of this strange affair I now
proceed to put on lasting record. For my humor's sake, I shall preserve the
style in which I once narrated it at Lima, to a lounging circle of my Spanish
friends, one saint's eve, smoking upon the thickgilt tiled piazza of the
Golden Inn. Of those fine cavaliers, the young Dons, Pedro and Sebastian,
were on the closer terms with me and hence the interluding questions they
occasionally put, and which are duly answered at the time. Some two years
prior to my first learning the events which I am about rehearsing to you,
gentlemen, the TownHo, Sperm
Whaler of Nantucket, was cruising in your Pacific here, not very many days'
sail westward from the eaves of this good Golden Inn. She was somewhere to
the northward of the Line. One morning upon handling the pumps, according to
daily usage, it was observed that she made more water in her hold than
common. They supposed a swordfish had stabbed her, gentlemen. But the
captain, having some unusual reason for believing that rare good luck awaited
him in those latitudes and therefore being very averse to quit them, and
the leak not being then considered at all dangerous, though, indeed, they
could not find it after searching the hold as low down as was possible in
rather heavy weather, the ship still continued her cruisings, the mariners
working at the pumps at wide and easy intervals but no good luck came more
days went by, and not only was the leak yet undiscovered, but it sensibly
increased. So much so, that now taking some alarm, the captain, making all
sail, stood away for the nearest harbor among the islands, there to have
his hull hove out and repaired. Though no small passage was before her, yet,
if the commonest chance favored, he did not at all fear that his ship would
founder by the way, because his pumps were of the best, and being
periodically relieved at them, those sixandthirty men of his could easily
keep the ship free never mind if the leak should double on her. In truth,
well nigh the whole of this passage being attended by very prosperous breezes,
the TownHo had all but certainly arrived in perfect safety at her port
without the occurrence of the least fatality, had it not been for the brutal
overbearing of Radney, the mate, a Vineyarder, and the bitterly provoked
vengeance of Steelkilt, a Lakeman and desperado from Buffalo. "Lakeman
Buffalo Pray, what is a Lakeman, and where is Buffalo?" said Don
Sebastian, rising in his swinging mat of grass. On the eastern shore of our
Lake Erie, Don butI crave your courtesymay be, you shall soon hear further
of all that. Now, gentlemen, in squaresail brigs and threemasted ships,
wellnigh as large and stout as any that ever sailed out of your old Callao to
far manilla this lakeman, in the landlocked heart of our America, had yet
been nurtured by all those agrarian
freebooting impressions popularly connected with the open ocean. For in their
interflowing aggregate, those grand freshwater seas of ours Erie, and
Ontario, and Huron, and Superior, and Michigan, possess an oceanlike
expansiveness, with many of the ocean's noblest traits with many of its
rimmed varieties of races and of climes. They contain round archipelagoes of
romantic isles, even as the Polynesian waters do in large part, are shored
by two great contrasting nations, as the Atlantic is they furnish long
maritime approaches to our numerous territorial colonies from the East,
dotted all round their banks here and there are frowned upon by batteries,
and by the goatlike craggy guns of lofty Mackinaw they have heard the fleet
thunderings of naval victories at intervals, they yield their beaches to
wild barbarians, whose red painted faces flash from out their peltry wigwams
for leagues and leagues are flanked by ancient and unentered forests, where
the gaunt pines stand like serried lines of kings in Gothic genealogies
those same woods harboring wild Afric beasts of prey, and silken creatures
whose exported furs give robes to Tartar Emperors they mirror the paved
capitals of Buffalo and Cleveland, as well as Winnebago villages they float
alike the fullrigged merchant ship, the armed cruiser of the State, the
steamer, and the beech canoe they are swept by Borean and dismasting blasts
as direful as any that lash the salted wave they know what shipwrecks are,
for out of sight of land, however inland, they have drowned full many a
midnight ship with all its shrieking crew. Thus, gentlemen, though an
inlander, Steelkilt was wildocean born, and wildocean nurtured as much
of an audacious mariner as any. And for Radney, though in his infancy he may
have laid him down on the lone Nantucket beach, to nurse at his maternal sea
though in after life he had long followed our austere Atlantic and your
contemplative Pacific yet was he quite as vengeful and full of social
quarrel as the backwoods seaman, fresh from the latitudes of buckhorn
handled Bowieknives. Yet was this Nantucketer a man with some goodhearted
traits and this Lakeman, a mariner, who though a sort of devil indeed,
might yet by inflexible firmness, only tempered by that common decency of
human recognition which is the meanest slave's right thus
treated, this Steelkilt had long been retained harmless and docile. At all
events, he had proved so thus far but Radney was doomed and made mad, and
Steelkilt but, gentlemen, you shall hear. It was not more than a day or two
at the furthest after pointing her prow for her island haven, that the
TownHo's leak seemed again increasing, but only so as to require an hour or
more at the pumps every day. You must know that in a settled and civilized
ocean like our Atlantic, for example, some skippers think little of pumping
their whole way across it though of a still, sleepy night, should the
officer of the deck happen to forget his duty in that respect, the
probability would be that he and his shipmates would never again remember it,
on account of all hands gently subsiding to the bottom. Nor in the solitary
and savage seas far from you to the westward, gentlemen, is it altogether
unusual for ships to keep clanging at their pumphandles in full chorus even
for a voyage of considerable length that is, if it lie along a tolerably
accessible coast, or if any other reasonable retreat is afforded them. It is
only when a leaky vessel is in some very out of the way part of those waters,
some really landless latitude, that her captain begins to feel a little
anxious. Much this way had it been with the TownHo so when her leak was
found gaining once more, there was in truth some small concern manifested by
several of her company especially by radney the mate. He commanded the
upper sails to be well hoisted, sheeted home anew, and every way expanded to
the breeze. Now this Radney, I suppose, was as little of a coward, and as
little inclined to any sort of nervous apprehensiveness touching his own
person as any fearless, unthinking creature on land or on sea that you can
conveniently imagine, gentlemen. Therefore when he betrayed this solicitude
about the safety of the ship, some of the seamen declared that it was only on
account of his being a part owner in her. So when they were working that
evening at the pumps, there was on this head no small gamesomeness slily
going on among them, as they stood with their feet continually overflowed by
the rippling clear water clear as any mountain spring, gentlemen that
bubbling from
the pumps ran across the deck, and poured itself out in steady spouts at the
lee scupperholes. Now, as you well know, it is not seldom the case in this
conventional world of ours watery or otherwise that when a person placed
in command over his fellowmen finds one of them to be very significantly his
superior in general pride of manhood, straightway against that man he
conceives an unconquerable dislike and bitterness and if he have a chance
he will pull down and pulverize that subaltern's tower, and make a little
heap of dust of it. Be this conceit of mine as it may, gentlemen, at all
events Steelkilt was a tall and noble animal with a head like a Roman, and a
flowing golden beard like the tasseled housings of your last viceroy's
snorting charger and a brain, and a heart, and a soul in him, gentlemen,
which had made Steelkilt Charlemagne, had he been born son to Charlemagne's
father. But Radney, the mate, was ugly as a mule yet as hardy, as stubborn,
as malicious. He did not love Steelkilt, and Steelkilt knew it. Espying the
mate drawing near as he was toiling at the pump with the rest, the Lakeman
affected not to notice him, but unawed, went on with his gay banterings.
"Aye, aye, my merry lads, it's a lively leak this hold a cannikin, one of
ye, and let's have a taste. By the Lord, it's worth bottling I tell ye
what, men, old Rad's investment must go for it he had best cut away his part
of the hull and tow it home. The fact is, boys, that swordfish only began
the job he's come back again with a gang of shipcarpenters, sawfish, and
filefish, and what not and the whole posse of 'em are now hard at work
cutting and slashing at the bottom making improvements, I suppose. If old
Rad were here now, I'd tell him to jump overboard and scatter 'em. They're
playing the devil with his estate, I can tell him. But he's a simple old
soul,  Rad, and a beauty too. Boys, they say the rest of his property is
invested in lookingglasses. I wonder if he'd give a poor devil like me the
model of his nose." "Damn your eyes what's that pump stopping for?" roared
Radney, pretending not to have heard the sailors' talk. "Thunder away at it"
"Aye, aye, sir," said Steelkilt, merry as a cricket. "Lively, boys, lively,
now" And with that the pump clanged like fifty fireengines the men tossed
their hats off to it, and ere long that peculiar gasping of the lungs was
heard which denotes the fullest tension of life's utmost energies. Quitting
the pump at last, with the rest of his band, the Lakeman went forward all
panting, and sat himself down on the windlass his face fiery red, his eyes
bloodshot, and wiping the profuse sweat from his brow. Now what cozening
fiend it was, gentlemen, that possessed Radney to meddle with such a man in
that corporeally exasperated state, I know not but so it happened.
Intolerably striding along the deck, the mate commanded him to get a broom
and sweep down the planks, and also a shovel, and remove some offensive
matters consequent upon allowing a pig to run at large. Now, gentlemen,
sweeping a ship's deck at sea is a piece of household work which in all times
but raging gales is regularly attended to every evening it has been known to
be done in the case of ships actually foundering at the time. Such,
gentlemen, is the inflexibility of seausages and the instinctive love of
neatness in seamen some of whom would not willingly drown without first
washing their faces. But in all vessels this broom business is the
prescriptive province of the boys, if boys there be aboard. Besides, it was
the stronger men in the TownHo that had been divided into gangs, taking
turns at the pumps and being the most athletic seaman of them all,
Steelkilt had been regularly assigned captain of one of the gangs
consequently he should have been freed from any trivial business not connected
with truly nautical duties, such being the case with his comrades. I mention
all these particulars so that you may understand exactly how this affair stood
between the two men. But there was more than this the order about the
shovel was almost as plainly meant to sting and insult Steelkilt, as though
Radney had spat in his face. Any man who has gone sailor in a whaleship will
understand this and all this and doubtless much more, the Lakeman fully
comprehended when the mate uttered his command. But as he sat still for a
moment, and as he steadfastly looked into the mate's malignant eye and
perceived the stacks of powdercasks heaped up in him and the slowmatch
silently burning along towards them as he instinctively saw all this, that
strange forbearance and unwillingness to stir up the deeper passionateness in
any already ireful being a repugnance most felt, when felt at all, by
really valiant men even when aggrieved this nameless phantom feeling,
gentlemen, stole over Steelkilt. Therefore, in his ordinary tone, only a
little broken by the bodily exhaustion he was temporarily in, he answered him
saying that sweeping the deck was not his business, and he would not do it.
and then, without at all alluding to the shovel, he pointed to three lads as
the customary sweepers who, not being billeted at the pumps, had done little
or nothing all day. To this, Radney replied with an oath, in a most
domineering and outrageous manner unconditionally reiterating his command
meanwhile advancing upon the still seated Lakeman, with an uplifted cooper's
club hammer which he had snatched from a cask near by. Heated and irritated
as he was by his spasmodic toil at the pumps, for all his first nameless
feeling of forbearance the sweating Steelkilt could but ill brook this bearing
in the mate but somehow still smothering the conflagration within him,
without speaking he remained doggedly rooted to his seat, till at last the
incensed Radney shook the hammer within a few inches of his face, furiously
commanding him to do his bidding. Steelkilt rose, and slowly retreating
round the windlass, steadily followed by the mate with his menacing hammer,
deliberately repeated his intention not to obey. Seeing, however, that his
forbearance had not the slightest effect, by an awful and unspeakable
intimation with his twisted hand he warned off the foolish and infatuated man
but it was to no purpose. And in this way the two went once slowly round the
windlass when, resolved at last no longer to retreat, bethinking him that
he had now forborne as much as comported with his humor, the Lakeman paused
on the hatches and thus spoke to the officer "Mr. Radney, I will not obey
you. Take that hammer away, or look to yourself." But the predestinated mate
coming still closer to him, where the Lakeman stood fixed, now shook the
heavy hammer within an inch of his teeth meanwhile repeating a string of
insufferable maledictions. Retreating not the thousandth part of an inch
stabbing him in the eye with the unflinching poniard of his glance,
steelkilt, clenching his right hand behind him and creepingly drawing it back,
told his persecutor that if the hammer but grazed his cheek he Steelkilt
would murder him. But, gentlemen, the fool had been branded for the slaughter
by the gods. Immediately the hammer touched the cheek the next instant the
lower jaw of the mate was stove in his head he fell on the hatch spouting
blood like a whale. Ere the cry could go aft Steelkilt was shaking one of
the backstays leading far aloft to where two of his comrades were standing
their mastheads. They were both Canallers. "Canallers" cried Don Pedro,
"We have seen many whaleships in our harbors, but never heard of your
Canallers. Pardon who and what are they?" "Canallers, Don, are the boatmen
belonging to our grand Erie Canal. You must have heard of it." "Nay, Senor
hereabouts in this dull, warm, most lazy, and hereditary land, we know but
little of your vigorous North." "Aye? Well then, Don, refill my cup. Your
chicha's very fine and ere proceeding further I will tell ye what our
Canallers are for such information may throw sidelight upon my story."
For three hundred and sixty miles, gentlemen, through the entire breadth of
the state of New York through numerous populous cities and most thriving
villages through long, dismal, uninhabited swamps, and affluent, cultivated
fields, unrivalled for fertility by billiardroom and barroom through
the holyofholies of great forests on Roman arches over Indian rivers
through sun and shade by happy hearts or broken through all the wide
contrasting scenery of those noble Mohawk counties and especially, by rows of
snowwhite chapels, whose spires stand almost like milestones, flows one
continual stream of Venetianly corrupt and often lawless life. There's your
true Ashantee, gentlemen there howl your pagans where you ever find them,
next door to you under the longflung shadow, and the snug patronizing lee
of churches. For by some curious fatality, as it is often noted of your
metropolitan freebooters
that they ever encamp around the halls of justice, so sinners, gentlemen,
most abound in holiest vicinities. "Is that a friar passing?" said Don
Pedro, looking downwards into the crowded plazza, with humorous concern.
"Well for our northern friend, Dame Isabella's Inquisition wanes in Lima,"
laughed Don Sebastian. "Proceed, Senor." "A moment Pardon" cried another
of the company. "In the name of all us Limeese, I but desire to express to
you, sir sailor, that we have by no means overlooked your delicacy in not
substituting present Lima for distant Venice in your corrupt comparison. Oh
do not bow and look surprised you know the proverb all along this coast
Corrupt as Lima. It but bears out your saying, too churches more
plentiful than billiardtables, and for ever openand Corrupt as Lima.
So, too, Venice I have been there the holy city of the blessed evangelist,
St. Mark St. Dominic, purge it Your cup Thanks here I refill now,
you pour out again." Freely depicted in his own vocation, gentlemen, the
Canaller would make a fine dramatic hero, so abundantly and picturesquely
wicked is he. Like Mark Antony, for days and days along his greenturfed,
flowery Nile, he indolently floats, openly toying with his redcheeked
Cleopatra, ripening his apricot thigh upon the sunny deck. But ashore, all
this effeminacy is dashed. The brigandish guise which the Canaller so proudly
sports his slouched and gailyribboned hat betoken his grand features. A
terror to the smiling innocence of the villages through which he floats his
swart visage and bold swagger are not unshunned in cities. Once a vagabond on
his own canal, I have received good turns from one of these Canallers I
thank him heartily would fain be not ungrateful but it is often one of the
prime redeeming qualities of your man of violence, that at times he has as
stiff an arm to back a poor stranger in a strait, as to plunder a wealthy
one. In sum, gentlemen, what the wildness of this canal life is, is
emphatically evinced by this that our wild whalefishery contains so many of
its most finished graduates, and that scarce any race of mankind, except
Sydney men, are so much distrusted by our whaling captains. Nor does it at
all diminish the curiousness of this matter, that to many thousands of our
rural boys and young men born along its line, the probationary life of the
Grand Canal furnishes the sole transition between quietly reaping in a
Christian cornfield, and recklessly ploughing the waters of the most barbaric
seas. "I see I see " impetuously exclaimed Don Pedro, spilling his
chicha upon his silvery ruffles. "No need to travel The world's one Lima. I
had thought, now, that at your temperate North the generations were cold and
holy as the hills. But the story." I left off, gentlemen, where the Lakeman
shook the backstay. Hardly had he done so, when he was surrounded by the
three junior mates and the four harpooneers, who all crowded him to the deck.
But sliding down the ropes like baleful comets, the two Canallers rushed into
the uproar, and sought to drag their man out of it towards the forecastle.
Others of the sailors joined with them in this attempt, and a twisted turmoil
ensued while standing out of harm's way, the valiant captain danced up and
down with a whalepike, calling upon his officers to manhandle that atrocious
scoundrel, and smoke him along to the quarterdeck. At intervals, he ran
close up to the revolving border of the confusion, and prying into the heart
of it with his pike, sought to prick out the object of his resentment. But
Steelkilt and his desperadoes were too much for them all they succeeded in
gaining the forecastle deck, where, hastily slewing about three or four large
casks in a line with the windlass, these seaParisians entrenched themselves
behind the barricade. "come out of that, ye pirates" roared the captain,
now menacing them with a pistol in each hand, just brought to him by the
steward. "Come out of that, ye cutthroats" Steelkilt leaped on the
barricade, and striding up and down there, defied the worst the pistols could
do but gave the captain to understand distinctly, that his Steelkilt's
death would be the signal for a murderous mutiny on the part of all hands.
Fearing in his heart lest this might prove but too true, the captain a little
desisted, but still commanded the insurgents instantly to return to their
duty. "Will you promise not to touch us, if we do?" demanded their
ringleader.
"Turn to turn to I make no promise to your duty Do you want to sink
the ship, by knocking off at a time like this? Turn to" and he once more
raised a pistol. "Sink the ship?" cried Steelkilt. "Aye, let her sink. Not
a man of us turns to, unless you swear not to raise a ropeyarn against us.
What say ye, men?" turning to his comrades. A fierce cheer was their
response. The Lakeman now patrolled the barricade, all the while keeping
his eye on the Captain, and jerking out such sentences as these "It's not
our fault we didn't want it I told him to take his hammer away it was
boy's business he might have known me before this I told him not to prick
the buffalo I believe I have broken a finger here against his cursed jaw
ain't those mincing knives down in the forecastle there, men? look to those
handspikes, my hearties. Captain, by God, look to yourself say the word
don't be a fool forget it all we are ready to turn to treat us decently,
and we're your men but we won't be flogged." "Turn to I make no
promises, turn to, I say" "Look ye, now," cried the Lakeman, flinging out
his arm towards him. "there are a few of us here and I am one of them who
have shipped for the cruise, d'ye see now as you well know, sir, we can
claim our discharge as soon as the anchor is down so we don't want a row
it's not our interest we want to be peaceable we are ready to work, but we
won't be flogged." "Turn to" roared the Captain. Steelkilt glanced round
him a moment, and then said "I tell you what it is now, Captain, rather
than kill ye, and be hung for such a shabby rascal, we won't lift a hand
against ye unless ye attack us but till you say the word about not flogging
us, we won't do a hand's turn." "Down into the forecastle then, down with
ye, I'll keep ye there till ye're sick of it. Down ye go." "Shall we?"
cried the ringleader to his men. Most of them were against it but at
length, in obedience to Steelkilt, they preceded him down into their dark
den, growlingly disappearing, like bears into a cave. As the Lakeman's bare
head was just level with the planks,
the Captain and his posse leaped the barricade, and rapidly drawing over the
slide of the scuttle, planted their group of hands upon it, and loudly
called for the steward to bring the heavy brass padlock, belonging to the
companionway. Then opening the slide a little, the Captain whispered
something down the crack, closed it, and turned the key upon them ten in
number leaving on deck some twenty or more, who thus far had remained
neutral. All night a wideawake watch was kept by all the officers, forward
and aft, especially about the forecastle scuttle and fore hatchway at which
last place it was feared the insurgents might emerge, after breaking through
the bulkhead below. But the hours of darkness passed in peace the men who
still remained at their duty toiling hard at the pumps, whose clinking and
clanking at intervals through the dreary night dismally resounded through the
ship. at sunrise the captain went forward, and knocking on the deck,
summoned the prisoners to work but with a yell they refused. Water was
then lowered down to them, and a couple of handfuls of biscuit were tossed
after it when again turning the key upon them and pocketing it, the Captain
returned to the quarterdeck. Twice every day for three days this was
repeated but on the fourth morning a confused wrangling, and then a
scuffling was heard, as the customary summons was delivered and suddenly
four men burst up from the forecastle, saying they were ready to turn to.
The fetid closeness of the air, and a famishing diet, united perhaps to some
fears of ultimate retribution, had constrained them to surrender at
discretion. Emboldened by this, the Captain reiterated his demand to the
rest, but Steelkilt shouted up to him a terrific hint to stop his babbling
and betake himself where he belonged. On the fifth morning three others of
the mutineers bolted up into the air from the desperate arms below that sought
to restrain them. Only three were left. "Better turn to, now?" said the
Captain with a heartless jeer. "Shut us up again, will ye" cried Steelkilt.
"Oh certainly," said the Captain and the key clicked. It was at this
point, gentlemen, that enraged by the defection
of seven of his former associates, and stung by the mocking voice that had
last hailed him, and maddened by his long entombment in a place as black as
the bowels of despair it was then that Steelkilt proposed to the two
Canallers, thus far apparently of one mind with him, to burst out of their
hole at the next summoning of the garrison and armed with their keen
mincing knives long, crescentic, heavy implements with a handle at each end
run a muck from the bowsprit to the taffrail and if by any devilishness of
desperation possible, seize the ship. For himself, he would do this, he said,
whether they joined him or not. That was the last night he should spend in
that den. but the scheme met with no opposition on the part of the other two
they swore they were ready for that, or for any other mad thing, for
anything in short but a surrender. And what was more, they each insisted
upon being the first man on deck, when the time to make the rush should come.
But to this their leader as fiercely objected, reserving that priority for
himself particularly as his two comrades would not yield, the one to the
other, in the matter and both of them could not be first, for the ladder
would but admit one man at a time. And here, gentlemen, the foul play of
these miscreants must come out. Upon hearing the frantic project of their
leader, each in his own separate soul had suddenly lighted, it would seem,
upon the same piece of treachery, namely to be foremost in breaking out,
in order to be the first of the three, though the last of the ten, to
surrender and thereby secure whatever small chance of pardon such conduct
might merit. But when Steelkilt made known his determination still to lead
them to the last, they in some way, by some subtle chemistry of villany,
mixed their before secret treacheries together and when their leader fell
into a doze, verbally opened their souls to each other in three sentences
and bound the sleeper with cords, and gagged him with cords and shrieked
out for the Captain at midnight. Thinking murder at hand, and smelling in
the dark for the blood, he and all his armed mates and harpooneers rushed for
the forecastle. In a few minutes the scuttle was opened, and, bound hand
and foot, the still struggling ringleader was shoved up into the air by his
perfidious allies, who at once claimed the
honor of securing a man who had been fully ripe for murder. But all these were
collared, and dragged along the deck like dead cattle and, side by side,
were seized up into the mizen rigging, like three quarters of meat, and there
they hung till morning. "Damn ye," cried the Captain, pacing to and fro
before them, "the vultures would not touch ye, ye villains" At sunrise he
summoned all hands and separating those who had rebelled from those who had
taken no part in the mutiny, he told the former that he had a good mind to
flog them all round thought, upon the whole, he would do so he ought to
justice demanded it but for the present, considering their timely
surrender, he would let them go with a reprimand, which he accordingly
administered in the vernacular. "But as for you, ye carrion rogues," turning
to the three men in the rigging "for you, I mean to mince ye up for the
trypots" and, seizing a rope, he applied it with all his might to the backs
of the two traitors, till they yelled no more, but lifelessly hung their
heads sideways, as the two crucified thieves are drawn. "My wrist is
sprained with ye" he cried, at last "but there is still rope enough left
for you, my fine bantam, that wouldn't give up. Take that gag from his mouth,
and let us hear what he can say for himself." For a moment the exhausted
mutineer made a tremulous motion of his cramped jaws, and then painfully
twisting round his head, said in a sort of hiss, "What I say is this and
mind it well if you flog me, I murder you" "Say ye so? then see how ye
frighten me" and the Captain drew off with the rope to strike. "Best not,"
hissed the Lakeman. "But I must," and the rope was once more drawn back for
the stroke. Steelkilt here hissed out something, inaudible to all but the
Captain who, to the amazement of all hands, started back, paced the deck
rapidly two or three times, and then suddenly throwing down his rope, said,"I
won't do it let him gocut him down d'ye hear?" But as the junior mates
were hurrying to execute the order,
a pale man, with a bandaged head, arrested them Radney the chief mate. Ever
since the blow, he had lain in his berth but that morning, hearing the
tumult on the deck, he had crept out, and thus far had watched the whole
scene. Such was the state of his mouth, that he could hardly speak but
mumbling something about his being willing and able to do what the captain
dared not attempt, he snatched the rope and advanced to his pinioned foe.
"You are a coward" hissed the Lakeman. "So I am, but take that." The mate
was in the very act of striking, when another hiss stayed his uplifted arm.
He paused and then pausing no more, made good his word, spite of Steelkilt's
threat, whatever that might have been. The three men were then cut down,
all hands were turned to, and, sullenly worked by the moody seamen, the iron
pumps clanged as before. Just after dark that day, when one watch had retired
below, a clamor was heard in the forecastle and the two trembling traitors
running up, besieged the cabin door, saying they durst not consort with the
crew. Entreaties, cuffs, and kicks could not drive them back, so at their
own instance they were put down in the ship's run for salvation. Still, no
sign of mutiny reappeared among the rest. On the contrary, it seemed, that
mainly at Steelkilt's instigation, they had resolved to maintain the
strictest peacefulness, obey all orders to the last, and, when the ship
reached port, desert her in a body. But in order to insure the speediest end
to the voyage, they all agreed to another thing namely, not to sing out for
whales, in case any should be discovered. For, spite of her leak, and spite
of all her other perils, the TownHo still maintained her mastheads, and
her captain was just as willing to lower for a fish that moment, as on the
day his craft first struck the cruising ground and Radney the mate was quite
as ready to change his berth for a boat, and with his bandaged mouth seek to
gag in death the vital jaw of the whale. But though the Lakeman had induced
the seamen to adopt this sort of passiveness in their conduct, he kept his
own counsel at least till all was over concerning his own proper and
private revenge upon the man who had stung him in the ventricles
of his heart. He was in Radney the chief mate's watch and as if the
infatuated man sought to run more than half way to meet his doom, after the
scene at the rigging, he insisted, against the express counsel of the captain,
upon resuming the head of his watch at night. Upon this, and one or two
other circumstances, Steelkilt systematically built the plan of his revenge.
During the night, Radney had an unseamanlike way of sitting on the
bulwarks of the quarterdeck, and leaning his arm upon the gunwale of the
boat which was hoisted up there, a little above the ship's side. In this
attitude, it was well known, he sometimes dozed. There was a considerable
vacancy between the boat and the ship, and down between this was the sea.
Steelkilt calculated his time, and found that his next trick at the helm
would come round at two o'clock, in the morning of the third day from that in
which he had been betrayed. At his leisure, he employed the interval in
braiding something very carefully in his watches below. "What are you making
there?" said a shipmate. "What do you think? what does it look like?"
"Like a lanyard for your bag but it's an odd one, seems to me." "Yes,
rather oddish," said the Lakeman, holding it at arm's length before him
"but I think it will answer. Shipmate, I haven't enough twine, have you
any?" But there was none in the forecastle. "Then I must get some from old
Rad" and he rose to go aft. "You don't mean to go a begging to him" said
a sailor. "Why not? Do you think he won't do me a turn, when it's to help
himself in the end, shipmate?" and going to the mate, he looked at him
quietly, and asked him for some twine to mend his hammock. It was given him
neither twine nor lanyard were seen again but the next night an iron ball,
closely netted, partly rolled from the pocket of the Lakeman's monkey jacket,
as he was tucking the coat into his hammock for a pillow. Twentyfour hours
after, his trick at the silent helm nigh to the man who was apt to doze over
the grave always ready dug to the seaman's hand that fatal hour was then to
come and in
the foreordaining soul of Steelkilt, the mate was already stark and
stretched as a corpse, with his forehead crushed in. But, gentlemen, a fool
saved the wouldbe murderer from the bloody deed he had planned. Yet complete
revenge he had, and without being the avenger. For by a mysterious fatality,
Heaven itself seemed to step in to take out of his hands into its own the
damning thing he would have done. It was just between daybreak and sunrise of
the morning of the second day, when they were washing down the decks, that
a stupid Teneriffe man, drawing water in the mainchains, all at once
shouted out, "There she rolls there she rolls" Jesu, what a whale It
was Moby Dick. "Moby Dick" cried Don Sebastian "St. Dominic Sir sailor,
but do whales have christenings? Whom call you Moby Dick?" "A very white,
and famous, and most deadly immortal monster, Don but that would be too long
a story." "How? how" cried all the young Spaniards, crowding. "Nay, Dons,
Dons nay, nay I cannot rehearse that now. Let me get more into the air,
Sirs." "The chicha the chicha" cried Don Pedro "our vigorous friend
looks faint fill up his empty glass" No need, gentlemen one moment, and
I proceed. Now, gentlemen, so suddenly perceiving the snowy whale within
fifty yards of the ship forgetful of the compact among the crew in the
excitement of the moment, the Teneriffe man had instinctively and
involuntarily lifted his voice for the monster, though for some little time
past it had been plainly beheld from the three sullen mastheads. All was now
a phrensy. "The White Whale the White Whale" was the cry from captain,
mates, and harpooneers, who, undeterred by fearful rumors, were all anxious
to capture so famous and precious a fish while the dogged crew eyed askance,
and with curses, the appalling beauty of the vast milky mass, that lit up by
a horizontal spangling sun, shifted and glistened like a living opal in the
blue morning sea. Gentlemen, a strange fatality pervades the whole career of
these events, as if verily mapped out before the world itself was charted.
The mutineer was the bowsman of the mate, and when fast to a fish, it was
his duty to sit next him, while Radney stood
up with his lance in the prow, and haul in or slacken the line, at the word
of command. Moreover, when the four boats were lowered, the mate's got the
start and none howled more fiercely with delight than did Steelkilt, as he
strained at his oar. After a stiff pull, their harpooneer got fast, and,
spear in hand, Radney sprang to the bow. He was always a furious man, it
seems, in a boat. And now his bandaged cry was, to beach him on the whale's
topmost back. Nothing loath, his bowsman hauled him up and up, through a
blinding foam that blent two whitenesses together till of a sudden the boat
struck as against a sunken ledge, and keeling over, spilled out the standing
mate. That instant, as he fell on the whale's slippery back, the boat
righted, and was dashed aside by the swell, while Radney was tossed over
into the sea, on the other flank of the whale. He struck out through the
spray, and, for an instant, was dimly seen through that veil, wildly seeking
to remove himself from the eye of Moby Dick. But the whale rushed round in a
sudden maelstrom seized the swimmer between his jaws and rearing high up
with him, plunged headlong again, and went down. Meantime, at the first tap
of the boat's bottom, the Lakeman had slackened the line, so as to drop
astern from the whirlpool calmly looking on, he thought his own thoughts.
But a sudden, terrific, downward jerking of the boat, quickly brought his
knife to the line. He cut it and the whale was free. But, at some
distance, Moby Dick rose again, with some tatters of Radney's red woollen
shirt, caught in the teeth that had destroyed him. All four boats gave chase
again but the whale eluded them, and finally wholly disappeared. In good
time, the TownHo reached her port a savage, solitary place where no
civilized creature resided. There, headed by the Lakeman, all but five or
six of the foremastmen deliberately deserted among the palms eventually, as
it turned out, seizing a large double warcanoe of the savages, and setting
sail for some other harbor. The ship's company being reduced to but a
handful, the captain called upon the Islanders to assist him in the laborious
business of heaving down the ship to stop the leak. But to such unresting
vigilance over their dangerous allies was this small
band of whites necessitated, both by night and by day, and so extreme was the
hard work they underwent, that upon the vessel being ready again for sea,
they were in such a weakened condition that the captain durst not put off with
them in so heavy a vessel. After taking counsel with his officers, he
anchored the ship as far off shore as possible loaded and ran out his two
cannon from the bows stacked his muskets on the poop and warning the
Islanders not to approach the ship at their peril, took one man with him, and
setting the sail of his best whaleboat, steered straight before the wind for
Tahiti, five hundred miles distant, to procure a reinforcement to his crew.
On the fourth day of the sail, a large canoe was descried, which seemed to
have touched at a low isle of corals. He steered away from it but the
savage craft bore down on him and soon the voice of Steelkilt hailed him to
heave to, or he would run him under water. the captain presented a pistol.
With one foot on each prow of the yoked warcanoes, the Lakeman laughed him
to scorn assuring him that if the pistol so much as clicked in the lock, he
would bury him in bubbles and foam. "What do you want of me? cried the
captain. "Where are you bound? and for what are you bound?" demanded
Steelkilt "no lies." "I am bound to Tahiti for more men." "Very good. Let
me board you a moment I come in peace." With that he leaped from the canoe,
swam to the boat and climbing the gunwale, stood face to face with the
captain. "Cross your arms, sir throw back your head. Now, repeat after
me. As soon as Steelkilt leaves me, I swear to beach this boat on yonder
island, and remain there six days. If I do not, may lightnings strike me"
"A pretty scholar," laughed the Lakeman."Adios, Senor" and leaping into the
sea, he swam back to his comrades. Watching the boat till it was fairly
beached, and drawn up to the roots of the cocoanut trees, Steelkilt made sail
again, and in due time arrived at Tahiti, his own place of destination.
There, luck befriended him two ships were about to sail for France, and
were providentially in want of precisely that number
of men which the sailor headed. They embarked and so for ever got the start
of their former captain, had he been at all minded to work them legal
retribution. Some ten days after the French ships sailed, the whaleboat
arrived, and the captain was forced to enlist some of the more civilized
Tahitians, who had been somewhat used to the sea. Chartering a small native
schooner, he returned with them to his vessel and finding all right there,
again resumed his cruisings. Where Steelkilt now is, gentlemen, none know
but upon the island of Nantucket, the widow of Radney still turns to the sea
which refuses to give up its dead still in dreams sees the awful white whale
that destroyed him. "Are you through?" said Don Sebastian, quietly. "I am,
Don." "Then I entreat you, tell me if to the best of your own convictions,
this story is in substance really true? It is so passing wonderful Did you
get it from an unquestionable source? Bear with me if I seem to press."
"Also bear with all of us, sir sailor for we all join in Don Sebastian's
suit," cried the company, with exceeding interest. "Is there a copy of the
Holy Evangelists in the Golden Inn, gentlemen?" "Nay," said Don Sebastian
"but I know a worthy priest near by, who will quickly procure one for me. I
go for it but are you well advised? this may grow too serious." "Will you
be so good as to bring the priest also, Don?" "Though there are no
AutodaFes in Lima now," said one of the company to another "I fear our
sailor friend runs risk of the archiepiscopacy. Let us withdraw more out of
the moonlight. I see no need for this." "Excuse me for running after you,
Don Sebastian but may I also beg that you will be particular in procuring
the largest sized Evangelists you can." "This is the priest, he brings you
the Evangelists," said Don Sebastian, gravely, returning with a tall and
solemn figure. "Let me remove my hat. Now, venerable priest, further into
the light, and hold the Holy Book before me that I may touch it."
"So help me Heaven, and on my honor the story I have told ye, gentlemen, is
in substance and its great items, true. I know it to be true it happened on
this ball I trod the ship I knew the crew I have seen and talked with
Steelkilt since the death of Radney."
The ancient whalecry upon first sighting a whale from the masthead, still
used by whalemen in hunting the famous Gallipagos terrapin.
I shall ere long
paint to you as well as one can without canvas, something like the true form
of the whale as he actually appears to the eye of the whaleman when in his own
absolute body the whale is moored alongside the whaleship so that he can be
fairly stepped upon there. It may be worth while, therefore, previously to
advert to those curious imaginary portraits of him which even down to the
present day confidently challenge the faith of the landsman. It is time to
set the world right in this matter, by proving such pictures of the whale all
wrong. It may be that the primal source of all those pictorial delusions will
be found among the oldest Hindoo, Egyptian, and Grecian sculptures. For ever
since those inventive but unscrupulous times when on the marble panellings of
temples, the pedestals of statues, and on shields, medallions, cups, and
coins, the dolphin was drawn in scales of chainarmor like Saladin's, and a
helmeted head like St. George's ever since then has something of the same
sort of license prevailed, not only in most popular pictures of the whale,
but in many scientific presentations of him. Now, by all odds, the most
ancient extant portrait anyways purporting to be the whale's, is to be found
in the famous cavernpagoda of Elephanta, in India. The Brahmins maintain
that in the almost endless sculptures of that immemorial pagoda, all the
trades and pursuits, every conceivable avocation of man, were prefigured ages
before any of them actually came into being. No wonder then, that in some
sort our noble profession
of whaling should have been there shadowed forth. The Hindoo whale referred
to, occurs in a separate department of the wall, depicting the incarnation of
Vishnu in the form of leviathan, learnedly known as the Matse Avatar. But
though this sculpture is half man and half whale, so as only to give the tail
of the latter, yet that small section of him is all wrong. It looks more
like the tapering tail of an anaconda, than the broad palms of the true
whale's majestic flukes. But go to the old Galleries, and look now at a great
Christian painter's portrait of this fish for he succeeds no better than the
antediluvian Hindoo. It is Guido's picture of Perseus rescuing Andromeda
from the seamonster or whale. Where did Guido get the model of such a
strange creature as that? Nor does Hogarth, in painting the same scene in
his own Perseus Descending, make out one whit better. The huge corpulence
of that Hogarthian monster undulates on the surface, scarcely drawing one
inch of water. It has a sort of howdah on its back, and its distended tusked
mouth into which the billows are rolling, might be taken for the Traitors'
Gate leading from the Thames by water into the Tower. Then, there are the
Prodromus whales of the old Scotch Sibbald, and Jonah's whale, as depicted
in the prints of old Bibles and the cuts of old primers. What shall be said
of these? As for the bookbinder's whale winding like a vinestalk round the
stock of a descending anchor as stamped and gilded on the backs and
titlepages of many books both old and new that is a very picturesque but
purely fabulous creature, imitated, I take it, from the like figures on
antique vases. Though universally denominated a dolphin, I nevertheless call
this bookbinder's fish an attempt at a whale because it was so intended
when the device was first introduced. It was introduced by an old Italian
publisher somewhere about the th century, during the Revival of Learning
and in those days, and even down to a comparatively late period, dolphins
were popularly supposed to be a species of the Leviathan. In the vignettes
and other embellishments of some ancient books you will at times meet with
very curious touches at the whale, where all manner of spouts, jets d'eau,
hot springs and cold, Saratoga and BadenBaden, come bubbling up from his
unexhausted brain. In the titlepage of the original edition of the
Advancement of Learning you will find some curious whales. But quitting all
these unprofessional attempts, let us glance at those pictures of leviathan
purporting to be sober, scientific delineations, by those who know. In old
Harris's collection of voyages there are some plates of whales extracted from
a Dutch book of voyages, A. D.
, entitled A Whaling Voyage to
Spitzbergen in the ship Jonas in the Whale, Peter Peterson of Friesland,
master. In one of those plates the whales, like great rafts of logs, are
represented lying among iceisles, with white bears running over their living
backs. In another plate, the prodigious blunder is made of representing the
whale with perpendicular flukes. Then again, there is an imposing quarto,
written by one Captain Colnett, a Post Captain in the English navy, entitled
A Voyage round Cape Horn into the South Seas, for the purpose of extending
the Spermaceti Whale Fisheries. In this book is an outline purporting to be
a Picture of a Physeter or Spermaceti whale, drawn by scale from one killed
on the coast of Mexico, August,
, and hoisted on deck. I doubt not the
captain had this veracious picture taken for the benefit of his marines. To
mention but one thing about it, let me say that it has an eye which applied,
according to the accompanying scale, to a full grown sperm whale, would make
the eye of that whale a bowwindow some five feet long. Ah, my gallant
captain, why did ye not give us Jonah looking out of that eye Nor are the
most conscientious compilations of Natural History for the benefit of the
young and tender, free from the same heinousness of mistake. Look at that
popular work Goldsmith's Animated Nature. In the abridged London edition of
, there are plates of an alleged whale and a narwhale. I do not wish
to seem inelegant, but this unsightly whale looks much like an amputated sow
and, as for the narwhale, one glimpse at it is enough to amaze one, that in
this nineteenth century such a hippogriff could be palmed for genuine upon any
intelligent public of schoolboys. Then, again, in
, Bernard Germain,
Count de Lacepede,
a great naturalist, published a scientific systemized whale book, wherein are
several pictures of the different species of the Leviathan. All these are
not only incorrect, but the picture of the Mysticetus or Greenland whale
that is to say, the Right whale, even Scoresby, a long experienced man as
touching that species, declares not to have its counterpart in nature. But
the placing of the capsheaf to all this blundering business was reserved for
the scientific Frederick Cuvier, brother to the famous Baron. In
, he
published a Natural History of Whales, in which he gives what he calls a
picture of the Sperm Whale. Before showing that picture to any Nantucketer,
you had best provide for your summary retreat from Nantucket. In a word,
Frederick Cuvier's Sperm Whale is not a Sperm Whale, but a squash. Of course,
he never had the benefit of a whaling voyage such men seldom have, but
whence he derived that picture, who can tell? Perhaps he got it as his
scientific predecessor in the same field, Desmarest, got one of his
authentic abortions that is, from a Chinese drawing. And what sort of
lively lads with the pencil those Chinese are, many queer cups and saucers
inform us. As for the signpainters' whales seen in the streets hanging over
the shops of oildealers, what shall be said of them? They are generally
Richard III. whales, with dromedary humps, and very savage breakfasting on
three or four sailor tarts, that is whaleboats full of mariners their
deformities floundering in seas of blood and blue paint. but these manifold
mistakes in depicting the whale are not so very surprising after all.
Consider Most of the scientific drawings have been taken from the
stranded fish and these are about as correct as a drawing of a wrecked ship,
with broken back, would correctly represent the noble animal itself in all
its undashed pride of hull and spars. Though elephants have stood for their
fulllengths, the living Leviathan has never yet fairly floated himself for
his portrait. The living whale, in his full majesty and significance, is
only to be seen at sea in unfathomable waters and afloat the vast bulk of
him is out of sight, like a launched lineofbattle ship and out of that
element it is a thing eternally impossible for mortal man to hoist
him bodily into the air, so as to preserve all his mighty swells and
undulations. And, not to speak of the highly presumable difference of
contour between a young sucking whale and a fullgrown Platonian Leviathan
yet, even in the case of one of those young sucking whales hoisted to a ship's
deck, such is then the outlandish, eellike, limbered, varying shape of him,
that his precise expression the devil himself could not catch. But it may be
fancied, that from the naked skeleton of the stranded whale, accurate hints
may be derived touching his true form. Not at all. For it is one of the more
curious things about this Leviathan, that his skeleton gives very little idea
of his general shape. Though Jeremy Bentham's skeleton, which hangs for
candelabra in the library of one of his executors, correctly conveys the idea
of a burlybrowed utilitarian old gentleman, with all Jeremy's other leading
personal characteristics yet nothing of this kind could be inferred from
any leviathan's articulated bones. In fact, as the great Hunter says, the
mere skeleton of the whale bears the same relation to the fully invested and
padded animal as the insect does to the chrysalis that so roundingly envelopes
it. This peculiarity is strikingly evinced in the head, as in some part of
this book will be incidentally shown. It is also very curiously displayed in
the side fin, the bones of which almost exactly answer to the bones of the
human hand, minus only the thumb. This fin has four regular bonefingers,
the index, middle, ring, and little finger. But all these are permanently
lodged in their fleshy covering, as the human fingers in an artificial
covering. However recklessly the whale may sometimes serve us, said
humorous Stubb one day, he can never be truly said to handle us without
mittens. For all these reasons, then, any way you may look at it, you must
needs conclude that the great Leviathan is that one creature in the world
which must remain unpainted to the last. True, one portrait may hit the mark
much nearer than another, but none can hit it with any very considerable
degree of exactness. So there is no earthly way of finding out precisely what
the whale really looks like. And the only mode in which you can derive even a
tolerable idea of his living contour, is by
going a whaling yourself but by so doing, you run no small risk of being
eternally stove and sunk by him. Wherefore, it seems to me you had best not
be too fastidious in your curiosity touching this Leviathan.
PICTURES OF WHALING SCENES In connexion with the monstrous pictures of
whales, I am strongly tempted here to enter upon those still more monstrous
stories of them which are to be found in certain books, both ancient and
modern, especially in Pliny, Purchas, Hackluyt, Harris, Cuvier, etc. But I
pass that matter by. i know of only four published outlines of the great Sperm
Whale Colnett's, Huggins's, Frederick Cuvier's, and Beale's. In the
previous chapter Colnett and Cuvier have been referred to. Huggins's is far
better than theirs but, by great odds, Beale's is the best. All Beale's
drawings of this whale are good, excepting the middle figure in the picture of
three whales in various attitudes, capping his second chapter. His
frontispiece, boats attacking Sperm Whales, though no doubt calculated to
excite the civil scepticism of some parlor men, is admirably correct and
lifelike in its general effect. Some of the Sperm Whale drawings in J. Ross
Browne are pretty correct in contour but they are wretchedly engraved. That
is not his fault though. Of the Right Whale, the best outline pictures are in
Scoresby but they are drawn on too small a scale to convey a desirable
impression. He has but one picture of whaling scenes, and this is a sad
deficiency, because it is by such pictures only, when at all well done,
that you can derive anything like a truthful idea of the living whale as seen
by his living hunters. But, taken for all in all, by far the finest, though
in some details not the most correct, presentations of whales and whaling
scenes to be anywhere found, are two large French engravings, well executed,
and taken from paintings by one Garnery. Respectively, they represent
attacks on the Sperm and Right Whale. In the first engraving a noble Sperm
Whale is depicted in full majesty of might, just risen beneath the boat from
the profundities of the ocean, and bearing high in the air upon his back the
terrific wreck of the stoven planks. The prow of the boat is partially
unbroken, and is drawn just balancing upon the monster's spine and standing
in that prow, for that one single incomputable flash of time, you behold an
oarsman, half shrouded by the incensed boiling spout of the whale, and in
the act of leaping, as if from a precipice. The action of the whole thing is
wonderfully good and true. The halfemptied linetub floats on the whitened
sea the wooden poles of the spilled harpoons obliquely bob in it the heads
of the swimming crew are scattered about the whale in contrasting expressions
of affright while in the black stormy distance the ship is bearing down upon
the scene. Serious fault might be found with the anatomical details of this
whale, but let that pass since, for the life of me, I could not draw so
good a one. In the second engraving, the boat is in the act of drawing
alongside the barnacled flank of a large running Right Whale, that rolls his
black weedy bulk in the sea like some mossy rockslide from the Patagonian
cliffs. His jets are erect, full, and black like soot so that from so
abounding a smoke in the chimney, you would think there must be a brave
supper cooking in the great bowels below. Sea fowls are pecking at the small
crabs, shellfish, and other sea candies and maccaroni, which the Right Whale
sometimes carries on his pestilent back. And all the while the thicklipped
leviathan is rushing through the deep, leaving tons of tumultuous white curds
in his wake, and causing the slight boat to rock in the swells like a skiff
caught nigh the paddlewheels of an ocean steamer. Thus, the foreground is
all raging commotion but behind, in admirable artistic contrast, is the
glassy level of a sea becalmed, the drooping unstarched sails of the
powerless ship, and the inert mass of a dead whale, a conquered fortress,
with the flag of capture lazily hanging from the whalepole inserted into his
spouthole.
Who Garnery the painter is, or was, I know not. But my life for it he was
either practically conversant with his subject, or else marvellously tutored
by some experienced whaleman. The French are the lads for painting action.
Go and gaze upon all the paintings in Europe, and where will you find such a
gallery of living and breathing commotion on canvas, as in that triumphal
hall at Versailles where the beholder fights his way, pellmell, through the
consecutive great battles of France where every sword seems a flash of the
Northern Lights, and the successive armed kings and Emperors dash by, like a
charge of crowned centaurs? Not wholly unworthy of a place in that gallery,
are these sea battlepieces of Garnery. The natural aptitude of the French for
seizing the picturesqueness of things seems to be peculiarly evinced in what
paintings and engravings they have of their whaling scenes. With not one
tenth of England's experience in the fishery, and not the thousandth part of
that of the Americans, they have nevertheless furnished both nations with the
only finished sketches at all capable of conveying the real spirit of the
whale hunt. For the most part, the English and American whale draughtsmen
seem entirely content with presenting the mechanical outline of things, such
as the vacant profile of the whale which, so far as picturesqueness of
effect is concerned, is about tantamount to sketching the profile of a
pyramid. Even Scoresby, the justly renowned Right whaleman, after giving us
a stiff full length of the Greenland whale, and three or four delicate
miniatures of narwhales and porpoises, treats us to a series of classical
engravings of boat hooks, chopping knives, and grapnels and with the
microscopic diligence of a Leuwenhoeck submits to the inspection of a
shivering world ninetysix facsimiles of magnified Arctic snow crystals. I
mean no disparagement to the excellent voyager I honor him for a veteran,
but in so important a matter it was certainly an oversight not to have
procured for every crystal a sworn affidavit taken before a Greenland Justice
of the Peace. In addition to those fine engravings from Garnery, there are
two other French engravings worthy of note, by some one who subscribes
himself h. durand. one of them, though not precisely
adapted to our present purpose, nevertheless deserves mention on other
accounts. It is a quiet noonscene among the isles of the Pacific a French
whaler anchored, inshore, in a calm, and lazily taking water on board the
loosened sails of the ship, and the long leaves of the palms in the
background, both drooping together in the breezeless air. The effect is very
fine, when considered with reference to its presenting the hardy fishermen
under one of their few aspects of oriental repose. The other engraving is
quite a different affair the ship hoveto upon the open sea, and in the
very heart of the Leviathanic life, with a Right Whale alongside the vessel
in the act of cuttingin hove over to the monster as if to a quay and a
boat, hurriedly pushing off from this scene of activity, is about giving
chase to whales in the distance. The harpoons and lances lie levelled for
use three oarsmen are just setting the mast in its hole while from a
sudden roll of the sea, the little craft stands halferect out of the water,
like a rearing horse. From the ship, the smoke of the torments of the boiling
whale is going up like the smoke over a village of smithies and to
windward, a black cloud, rising up with earnest of squalls and rains, seems
to quicken the activity of the excited seamen.
SHEETIRON IN STONE IN MOUNTAINS IN STARS On Towerhill, as you go down
to the London docks, you may have seen a crippled beggar or kedger, as the
sailors say holding a painted board before him, representing the tragic
scene in which he lost his leg. There are three whales and three boats and
one of the boats presumed to contain the missing leg in all its original
integrity is being crunched by the jaws of the foremost whale. Any time
these ten years, they tell me, has that man held up that picture, and
exhibited
that stump to an incredulous world. But the time of his justification has now
come. His three whales are as good whales as were ever published in Wapping,
at any rate and his stump as unquestionable a stump as any you will find in
the western clearings. But, though for ever mounted on that stump, never a
stumpspeech does the poor whaleman make but, with downcast eyes, stands
ruefully contemplating his own amputation. Throughout the Pacific, and also
in Nantucket, and New Bedford, and Sag Harbor, you will come across lively
sketches of whales and whalingscenes, graven by the fishermen themselves on
Sperm Whaleteeth, or ladies' busks wrought out of the Right Whalebone, and
other like skrimshander articles, as the whalemen call the numerous little
ingenious contrivances they elaborately carve out of the rough material, in
their hours of ocean leisure. Some of them have little boxes of
dentisticallooking implements, specially intended for the skrimshandering
business. But, in general, they toil with their jackknives alone and, with
that almost omnipotent tool of the sailor, they will turn you out anything
you please, in the way of a mariner's fancy. Long exile from Christendom and
civilization inevitably restores a man to that condition in which God placed
him, i. e. what is called savagery. Your true whalehunter is as much a
savage as an Iroquois. I myself am a savage owning no allegiance but to the
King of the Cannibals and ready at any moment to rebel against him. Now,
one of the peculiar characteristics of the savage in his domestic hours, is
his wonderful patience of industry. An ancient Hawaiian warclub or
spearpaddle, in its full multiplicity and elaboration of carving, is as
great a trophy of human perseverance as a Latin lexicon. For, with but a bit
of broken seashell or a shark's tooth, that miraculous intricacy of wooden
network has been achieved and it has cost steady years of steady
application. As with the Hawaiian savage, so with the white sailorsavage.
With the same marvellous patience, and with the same single shark's tooth,
of his one poor jackknife, he will carve you a bit of bone sculpture, not
quite as workmanlike, but as close
packed in its maziness of design, as the Greek savage, Achilles's shield
and full of barbaric spirit and suggestiveness, as the prints of that fine
old Dutch savage, Albert Durer. Wooden whales, or whales cut in profile out
of the small dark slabs of the noble South Sea warwood, are frequently met
with in the forecastles of American whalers. Some of them are done with much
accuracy. At some old gableroofed country houses you will see brass whales
hung by the tail for knockers to the roadside door. When the porter is
sleepy, the anvilheaded whale would be best. But these knocking whales are
seldom remarkable as faithful essays. On the spires of some oldfashioned
churches you will see sheetiron whales placed there for weathercocks but
they are so elevated, and besides that are to all intents and purposes so
labelled with Hands off you cannot examine them closely enough to decide
upon their merit. In bony, ribby regions of the earth, where at the base of
high broken cliffs masses of rock lie strewn in fantastic groupings upon the
plain, you will often discover images as of the petrified forms of the
Leviathan partly merged in grass, which of a windy day breaks against them in
a surf of green surges. Then, again, in mountainous countries where the
traveller is continually girdled by amphitheatrical heights here and there
from some lucky point of view you will catch passing glimpses of the profiles
of whales defined along the undulating ridges. But you must be a thorough
whaleman, to see these sights and not only that, but if you wish to return
to such a sight again, you must be sure and take the exact intersecting
latitude and longitude of your first standpoint, else so chancelike are
such observations of the hills, that your precise, previous standpoint would
require a laborious rediscovery like the Solomon islands, which still
remain incognita, though once highruffed Mendanna trod them and old Figuera
chronicled them. Nor when expandingly lifted by your subject, can you fail to
trace out great whales in the starry heavens, and boats in pursuit of them
as when long filled with thoughts of war the Eastern nations saw armies locked
in battle among the clouds. Thus at the North have I chased Leviathan round
and round
the Pole with the revolutions of the bright points that first defined him to
me. And beneath the effulgent Antarctic skies I have boarded the ArgoNavis,
and joined the chase against the starry Cetus far beyond the utmost stretch of
Hydrus and the Flying Fish. With a frigate's anchors for my bridlebitts and
fasces of harpoons for spurs, would I could mount that whale and leap the
topmost skies, to see whether the fabled heavens with all their countless
tents really lie encamped beyond my mortal sight
Steering northeastward from the Crozetts, we
fell in with vast meadows of brit, the minute, yellow substance, upon which
the Right Whale largely feeds. For leagues and leagues it undulated round us,
so that we seemed to be sailing through boundless fields of ripe and golden
wheat. On the second day, numbers of Right Whales were seen, who, secure
from the attack of a Sperm Whaler like the Pequod, with open jaws sluggishly
swam through the brit, which, adhering to the fringing fibres of that wondrous
Venetian blind in their mouths, was in that manner separated from the water
that escaped at the lip. As morning mowers, who side by side slowly and
seethingly advance their scythes through the long wet grass of marshy meads
even so these monsters swam, making a strange, grassy, cutting sound and
leaving behind them endless swaths of blue upon the yellow sea.
But it was only the sound they made as they parted the brit which at all
reminded one of mowers. Seen from the mastheads, especially when they paused
and were stationary for a while, their vast black forms looked more like
lifeless masses of rock than anything else. And as in the great hunting
countries of India, the stranger at a distance will sometimes pass on the
plains recumbent elephants without knowing them to be such, taking them for
bare, blackened elevations of the soil even so, often, with him, who for the
first time beholds this species of the leviathans of the sea. And even when
recognised at last, their immense magnitude renders it very hard really to
believe that such bulky masses of overgrowth can possibly be instinct, in all
parts, with the same sort of life that lives in a dog or a horse. Indeed, in
other respects, you can hardly regard any creatures of the deep with the same
feelings that you do those of the shore. For though some old naturalists have
maintained that all creatures of the land are of their kind in the sea and
though taking a broad general view of the thing, this may very well be yet
coming to specialties, where, for example, does the ocean furnish any fish
that in disposition answers to the sagacious kindness of the dog? The
accursed shark alone can in any generic respect be said to bear comparative
analogy to him. But though, to landsmen in general, the native inhabitants
of the seas have ever been regarded with emotions unspeakably unsocial and
repelling though we know the sea to be an everlasting terra incognita, so
that Columbus sailed over numberless unknown worlds to discover his one
superficial western one though, by vast odds, the most terrific of all mortal
disasters have immemorially and indiscriminately befallen tens and hundreds
of thousands of those who have gone upon the waters though but a moment's
consideration will teach, that however baby man may brag of his science and
skill, and however much, in a flattering future, that science and skill may
augment yet for ever and for ever, to the crack of doom, the sea will
insult and murder him, and pulverize the stateliest, stiffest frigate he can
make nevertheless, by the continual repetition of these
very impressions, man has lost that sense of the full awfulness of the sea
which aboriginally belongs to it. The first boat we read of, floated on an
ocean, that with Portuguese vengeance had whelmed a whole world without
leaving so much as a widow. That same ocean rolls now that same ocean
destroyed the wrecked ships of last year. Yea, foolish mortals, Noah's flood
is not yet subsided two thirds of the fair world it yet covers. Wherein
differ the sea and the land, that a miracle upon one is not a miracle upon
the other? Preternatural terrors rested upon the Hebrews, when under the
feet of Korah and his company the live ground opened and swallowed them up for
ever yet not a modern sun ever sets, but in precisely the same manner the
live sea swallows up ships and crews. But not only is the sea such a foe to
man who is an alien to it, but it is also a fiend to its own offspring
worse than the Persian host who murdered his own guests sparing not the
creatures which itself hath spawned. Like a savage tigress that tossing in
the jungle overlays her own cubs, so the sea dashes even the mightiest whales
against the rocks, and leaves them there side by side with the split wrecks
of ships. No mercy, no power but its own controls it. Panting and snorting
like a mad battle steed that has lost its rider, the masterless ocean
overruns the globe. Consider the subtleness of the sea how its most dreaded
creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously
hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure. Consider also the devilish
brilliance and beauty of many of its most remorseless tribes, as the dainty
embellished shape of many species of sharks. Consider, once more, the
universal cannibalism of the sea all whose creatures prey upon each other,
carrying on eternal war since the world began. Consider all this and then
turn to this green, gentle, and most docile earth consider them both, the
sea and the land and do you not find a strange analogy to something in
yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the
soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but
encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life.
God keep thee Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return
That part of the sea known among whalemen as the Brazil Banks does not bear
that name as the Banks of Newfoundland do, because of there being shallows
and soundings there, but because of this remarkable meadowlike appearance,
caused by the vast drifts of brit continually floating in those latitudes,
where the Right Whale is often chased.
Slowly wading through the meadows of brit, the
Pequod still held on her way northeastward towards the island of Java a
gentle air impelling her keel, so that in the surrounding serenity her three
tall tapering masts mildly waved to that languid breeze, as three mild palms
on a plain. And still, at wide intervals in the silvery night, the lonely,
alluring jet would be seen. But one transparent blue morning, when a
stillness almost preternatural spread over the sea, however unattended with
any stagnant calm when the long burnished sunglade on the waters seemed a
golden finger laid across them, enjoining some secresy when the slippered
waves whispered together as they softly ran on in this profound hush of the
visible sphere a strange spectre was seen by Daggoo from the mainmasthead.
In the distance, a great white mass lazily rose, and rising higher and
higher, and disentangling itself from the azure, at last gleamed before our
prow like a snowslide, new slid from the hills. Thus glistening for a
moment, as slowly it subsided, and sank. Then once more arose, and silently
gleamed. It seemed not a whale and yet is this Moby Dick? thought Daggoo.
Again the phantom went down, but on reappearing once more, with a
stilettolike cry that startled every man from his nod, the negro yelled out
There there again there she breaches right ahead The White Whale,
the White Whale Upon this, the seamen rushed to the yardarms, as in
swarmingtime the bees rush to the boughs. Bareheaded in the sultry sun,
Ahab stood on the bowsprit, and with one hand pushed far behind in readiness
to wave his orders to the helmsman, cast
his eager glance in the direction indicated aloft by the outstretched
motionless arm of Daggoo. Whether the flitting attendance of the one still and
solitary jet had gradually worked upon Ahab, so that he was now prepared to
connect the ideas of mildness and repose with the first sight of the
particular whale he pursued however this was, or whether his eagerness
betrayed him whichever way it might have been, no sooner did he distinctly
perceive the white mass, than with a quick intensity he instantly gave orders
for lowering. The four boats were soon on the water Ahab's in advance, and
all swiftly pulling towards their prey. Soon it went down, and while, with
oars suspended, we were awaiting its reappearance, lo in the same spot where
it sank, once more it slowly rose. Almost forgetting for the moment all
thoughts of Moby Dick, we now gazed at the most wondrous phenomenon which the
secret seas have hitherto revealed to mankind. A vast pulpy mass, furlongs in
length and breadth, of a glancing creamcolor, lay floating on the water,
innumerable long arms radiating from its centre, and curling and twisting like
a nest of anacondas, as if blindly to clutch at any hapless object within
reach. No perceptible face or front did it have no conceivable token of
either sensation or instinct but undulated there on the billows, an
unearthly, formless, chancelike apparition of life. As with a low sucking
sound it slowly disappeared again, Starbuck still gazing at the agitated
waters where it had sunk, with a wild voice exclaimed  Almost rather had I
seen Moby Dick and fought him, than to have seen thee, thou white ghost
What was it, Sir? said Flask. The great live squid, which they say, few
whaleships ever beheld, and returned to their ports to tell of it. But
Ahab said nothing turning his boat, he sailed back to the vessel the rest
as silently following. Whatever superstitions the sperm whalemen in general
have connected with the sight of this object, certain it is, that a glimpse
of it being so very unusual, that circumstance has gone far to invest it with
portentousness. So rarely is it beheld, that though one and all of them
declare it to be the largest animated thing in the ocean, yet very few of
them have any but
the most vague ideas concerning its true nature and form notwithstanding,
they believe it to furnish to the sperm whale his only food. For though other
species of whales find their food above water, and may be seen by man in the
act of feeding, the spermaceti whale obtains his whole food in unknown zones
below the surface and only by inference is it that any one can tell of what,
precisely, that food consists. At times, when closely pursued, he will
disgorge what are supposed to be the detached arms of the squid some of them
thus exhibited exceeding twenty and thirty feet in length. They fancy that
the monster to which these arms belonged ordinarily clings by them to the bed
of the ocean and that the sperm whale, unlike other species, is supplied
with teeth in order to attack and tear it. There seems some ground to imagine
that the great Kraken of Bishop Pontoppodan may ultimately resolve itself into
Squid. The manner in which the Bishop describes it, as alternately rising
and sinking, with some other particulars he narrates, in all this the two
correspond. But much abatement is necessary with respect to the incredible
bulk he assigns it. By some naturalists who have vaguely heard rumors of the
mysterious creature, here spoken of, it is included among the class of
cuttlefish, to which, indeed, in certain external respects it would seem to
belong, but only as the Anak of the tribe.
If I had been astonished at first catching a
glimpse of so outlandish an individual as Queequeg circulating among the
polite society of a civilized town, that astonishment soon departed upon
taking my first daylight stroll through the streets of New Bedford. In
thoroughfares nigh the docks, any considerable seaport will frequently offer
to view the queerest looking nondescripts from foreign parts. Even in
Broadway and Chestnut streets, Mediterranean mariners will sometimes jostle
the affrighted ladies. Regent street is not unknown to Lascars and Malays
and at Bombay, in the Apollo Green, live Yankees have often scared the
natives. But New Bedford beats all Water street and Wapping. In these
lastmentioned haunts you see only sailors but in New Bedford, actual
cannibals stand chatting at street corners savages outright many of whom
yet carry on their bones unholy flesh. It makes a stranger stare. But,
besides the Feegeeans, Tongatabooarrs, Erromanggoans, Pannangians, and
Brighggians, and, besides the wild specimens of the whalingcraft which
unheeded reel about the streets, you will see other sights still more
curious, certainly more comical.
There weekly arrive in this town scores of green Vermonters and New Hampshire
men, all athirst for gain and glory in the fishery. They are mostly young,
of stalwart frames fellows who have felled forests, and now seek to drop
the axe and snatch the whalelance. Many are as green as the Green Mountains
whence they came. In some things you would think them but a few hours old.
Look there that chap strutting round the corner. He wears a beaver hat and
swallowtailed coat, girdled with a sailorbelt and sheathknife. Here comes
another with a sou'wester and a bombazine cloak. No townbred dandy will
compare with a countrybred one  I mean a downright bumpkin dandy a fellow
that, in the dogdays, will mow his two acres in buckskin gloves for fear of
tanning his hands. Now when a country dandy like this takes it into his head
to make a distinguished reputation, and joins the great whalefishery, you
should see the comical things he does upon reaching the seaport. In
bespeaking his seaoutfit, he orders bellbuttons to his waistcoats straps
to his canvas trowsers. Ah, poor HaySeed how bitterly will burst those
straps in the first howling gale, when thou art driven, straps, buttons, and
all, down the throat of the tempest. But think not that this famous town has
only harpooneers, cannibals, and bumpkins to show her visitors. Not at all.
Still New Bedford is a queer place. Had it not been for us whalemen, that
tract of land would this day perhaps have been in as howling condition as the
coast of Labrador. As it is, parts of her back country are enough to frighten
one, they look so bony. The town itself is perhaps the dearest place to live
in, in all New England. It is a land of oil, true enough but not like
Canaan a land, also, of corn and wine. The streets do not run with milk
nor in the springtime do they pave them with fresh eggs. Yet, in spite of
this, nowhere in all America will you find more patricianlike houses parks
and gardens more opulent, than in New Bedford. Whence came they? how planted
upon this once scraggy scoria of a country? Go and gaze upon the iron
emblematical harpoons round yonder lofty mansion, and your question will be
answered. Yes all these brave houses and flowery gardens came from the
Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans. One and all, they were harpooned and
dragged up hither from the bottom of the sea. Can Herr Alexander perform a
feat like that? In New Bedford, fathers, they say, give whales for dowers to
their daughters, and portion off their nieces with a few porpoises apiece.
You must go to New Bedford to see a brilliant wedding for, they say, they
have reservoirs of oil in every house, and every night recklessly burn their
lengths in spermaceti candles. In summer time, the town is sweet to see
full of fine maples long avenues of green and gold. And in August, high in
air, the beautiful and bountiful horsechestnuts, candelabrawise, proffer
the passerby their tapering upright cones of congregated blossoms. So
omnipotent is art which in many a district of New Bedford has superinduced
bright terraces of flowers upon the barren refuse rocks thrown aside at
creation's final day. And the women of New Bedford, they bloom like their own
red roses. But roses only bloom in summer whereas the fine carnation of
their cheeks is perennial as sunlight in the seventh heavens. Elsewhere match
that bloom of theirs, ye cannot, save in Salem, where they tell me the young
girls breathe such musk, their sailor sweethearts smell them miles off shore,
as though they were drawing nigh the odorous Moluccas instead of the
Puritanic sands.
With reference to the whaling scene shortly to
be described, as well as for the better understanding of all similar scenes
elsewhere presented, I have here to speak of the magical, sometimes horrible
whaleline. The line originally used in the fishery was of the best hemp,
slightly vapored with tar, not impregnated with it, as in the
case of ordinary ropes for while tar, as ordinarily used, makes the hemp
more pliable to the ropemaker, and also renders the rope itself more
convenient to the sailor for common ship use yet, not only would the ordinary
quantity too much stiffen the whaleline for the close coiling to which it
must be subjected but as most seamen are beginning to learn, tar in general
by no means adds to the rope's durability or strength, however much it may
give it compactness and gloss. Of late years the Manilla rope has in the
American fishery almost entirely superseded hemp as a material for
whalelines for, though not so durable as hemp, it is stronger, and far
more soft and elastic and I will add since there is an aesthetics in all
things, is much more handsome and becoming to the boat, than hemp. Hemp is
a dusky, dark fellow, a sort of Indian but Manilla is as a goldenhaired
Circassian to behold. The whale line is only two thirds of an inch in
thickness. At first sight, you would not think it so strong as it really is.
By experiment its one and fifty yarns will each suspend a weight of one
hundred and twenty pounds so that the whole rope will bear a strain nearly
equal to three tons. In length, the common sperm whaleline measures
something over two hundred fathoms. Towards the stern of the boat it is
spirally coiled away in the tub, not like the wormpipe of a still though,
but so as to form one round, cheeseshaped mass of densely bedded sheaves,
or layers of concentric spiralizations, without any hollow but the heart,
or minute vertical tube formed at the axis of the cheese. As the least tangle
or kink in the coiling would, in running out, infallibly take somebody's arm,
leg, or entire body off, the utmost precaution is used in stowing the line in
its tub. Some harpooneers will consume almost an entire morning in this
business, carrying the line high aloft and then reeving it downwards through a
block towards the tub, so as in the act of coiling to free it from all
possible wrinkles and twists. In the English boats two tubs are used instead
of one the same line being continuously coiled in both tubs. There is
some advantage in this because these twintubs being so small they fit more
readily into the boat, and do not strain it so much whereas, the American
tub, nearly three feet in diameter and
of proportionate depth, makes a rather bulky freight for a craft whose planks
are but one halfinch in thickness for the bottom of the whaleboat is like
critical ice, which will bear up a considerable distributed weight, but
not very much of a concentrated one. When the painted canvas cover is clapped
on the american linetub, the boat looks as if it were pulling off with a
prodigious great weddingcake to present to the whales. Both ends of the line
are exposed the lower end terminating in an eyesplice or loop coming up
from the bottom against the side of the tub, and hanging over its edge
completely disengaged from everything. This arrangement of the lower end is
necessary on two accounts. First In order to facilitate the fastening to
it of an additional line from a neighboring boat, in case the stricken whale
should sound so deep as to threaten to carry off the entire line originally
attached to the harpoon. In these instances, the whale of course is shifted
like a mug of ale, as it were, from the one boat to the other though the
first boat always hovers at hand to assist its consort. Second This
arrangement is indispensable for common safety's sake for were the lower end
of the line in any way attached to the boat, and were the whale then to run
the line out to the end almost in a single, smoking minute as he sometimes
does, he would not stop there, for the doomed boat would infallibly be
dragged down after him into the profundity of the sea and in that case no
towncrier would ever find her again. Before lowering the boat for the chase,
the upper end of the line is taken aft from the tub, and passing round the
loggerhead there, is again carried forward the entire length of the boat,
resting crosswise upon the loom or handle of every man's oar, so that it jogs
against his wrist in rowing and also passing between the men, as they
alternately sit at the opposite gunwales, to the leaded chocks or grooves in
the extreme pointed prow of the boat, where a wooden pin or skewer the size
of a common quill, prevents it from slipping out. From the chocks it hangs
in a slight festoon over the bows, and is then passed inside the boat again
and some ten or twenty fathoms called boxline being coiled upon the box in
the bows, it continues its way to the gunwale still a little further aft,
and is then
attached to the shortwarp the rope which is immediately connected with the
harpoon but previous to that connexion, the shortwarp goes through sundry
mystifications too tedious to detail. Thus the whaleline folds the whole
boat in its complicated coils, twisting and writhing around it in almost
every direction. All the oarsmen are involved in its perilous contortions so
that to the timid eye of the landsman, they seem as Indian jugglers, with
the deadliest snakes sportively festooning their limbs. Nor can any son of
mortal woman, for the first time, seat himself amid those hempen
intricacies, and while straining his utmost at the oar, bethink him that at
any unknown instant the harpoon may be darted, and all these horrible
contortions be put in play like ringed lightnings he cannot be thus
circumstanced without a shudder that makes the very marrow in his bones to
quiver in him like a shaken jelly. Yet habit strange thing what cannot
habit accomplish? Gayer sallies, more merry mirth, better jokes, and brighter
repartees, you never heard over your mahogany, than you will hear over the
halfinch white cedar of the whaleboat, when thus hung in hangman's nooses
and, like the six burghers of Calais before King Edward, the six men
composing the crew pull into the jaws of death, with a halter around every
neck, as you may say. Perhaps a very little thought will now enable you to
account for those repeated whaling disasters some few of which are casually
chronicled of this man or that man being taken out of the boat by the line,
and lost. For, when the line is darting out, to be seated then in the boat,
is like being seated in the midst of the manifold whizzings of a steamengine
in full play, when every flying beam, and shaft, and wheel, is grazing you.
It is worse for you cannot sit motionless in the heart of these perils,
because the boat is rocking like a cradle, and you are pitched one way and
the other, without the slightest warning and only by a certain
selfadjusting buoyancy and simultaneousness of volition and action, can you
escape being made a Mazeppa of, and run away with where the allseeing sun
himself could never pierce you out. Again as the profound calm which only
apparently precedes
and prophesies of the storm, is perhaps more awful than the storm itself
for, indeed, the calm is but the wrapper and envelope of the storm and
contains it in itself, as the seemingly harmless rifle holds the fatal powder,
and the ball, and the explosion so the graceful repose of the line, as it
silently serpentines about the oarsmen before being brought into actual play 
this is a thing which carries more of true terror than any other aspect of
this dangerous affair. But why say more? All men live enveloped in
whalelines. All are born with halters round their necks but it is only
when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the
silent, subtle, everpresent perils of life. And if you be a philosopher,
though seated in the whaleboat, you would not at heart feel one whit more of
terror, than though seated before your evening fire with a poker, and not a
harpoon, by your side.
If to Starbuck the apparition of
the Squid was a thing of portents, to Queequeg it was quite a different
object. When you see him 'quid, said the savage, honing his harpoon in the
bow of his hoisted boat, then you quick see him 'parm whale. The next day
was exceedingly still and sultry, and with nothing special to engage them,
the Pequod's crew could hardly resist the spell of sleep induced by such a
vacant sea. For this part of the Indian Ocean through which we then were
voyaging is not what whalemen call a lively ground that is, it affords
fewer glimpses of porpoises, dolphins, flyingfish, and other vivacious
denizens of more stirring waters, than those off the Rio de la Plata, or the
inshore ground off Peru. It was my turn to stand at the foremasthead and
with my shoulders leaning against the slackened royal shrouds, to and
fro I idly swayed in what seemed an enchanted air. No resolution could
withstand it in that dreamy mood losing all consciousness, at last my soul
went out of my body though my body still continued to sway as a pendulum
will, long after the power which first moved it is withdrawn. Ere
forgetfulness altogether came over me, I had noticed that the seamen at the
main and mizen mastheads were already drowsy. So that at last all three of
us lifelessly swung from the spars, and for every swing that we made there
was a nod from below from the slumbering helmsman. The waves, too, nodded
their indolent crests and across the wide trance of the sea, east nodded to
west, and the sun over all. Suddenly bubbles seemed bursting beneath my
closed eyes like vices my hands grasped the shrouds some invisible,
gracious agency preserved me with a shock I came back to life. And lo
close under our lee, not forty fathoms off, a gigantic Sperm Whale lay rolling
in the water like the capsized hull of a frigate, his broad, glossy back, of
an Ethiopian hue, glistening in the sun's rays like a mirror. But lazily
undulating in the trough of the sea, and ever and anon tranquilly spouting
his vapory jet, the whale looked like a portly burgher smoking his pipe of a
warm afternoon. But that pipe, poor whale, was thy last. As if struck by
some enchanter's wand, the sleepy ship and every sleeper in it all at once
started into wakefulness and more than a score of voices from all parts of
the vessel, simultaneously with the three notes from aloft, shouted forth the
accustomed cry, as the great fish slowly and regularly spouted the sparkling
brine into the air. clear away the boats luff cried Ahab. And obeying
his own order, he dashed the helm down before the helmsman could handle the
spokes. The sudden exclamations of the crew must have alarmed the whale and
ere the boats were down, majestically turning, he swam away to the leeward,
but with such a steady tranquillity, and making so few ripples as he swam,
that thinking after all he might not as yet be alarmed, Ahab gave orders that
not an oar should be used, and no man must speak but in whispers. So seated
like Ontario Indians on the gunwales of the boats,
we swiftly but silently paddled along the calm not admitting of the
noiseless sails being set. Presently, as we thus glided in chase, the
monster perpendicularly flitted his tail forty feet into the air, and then
sank out of sight like a tower swallowed up. There go flukes was the cry,
an announcement immediately followed by Stubb's producing his match and
igniting his pipe, for now a respite was granted. After the full interval of
his sounding had elapsed, the whale rose again, and being now in advance of
the smoker's boat, and much nearer to it than to any of the others, Stubb
counted upon the honor of the capture. It was obvious, now, that the whale
had at length become aware of his pursuers. All silence of cautiousness was
therefore no longer of use. Paddles were dropped, and oars came loudly into
play. And still puffing at his pipe, Stubb cheered on his crew to the
assault. Yes, a mighty change had come over the fish. All alive to his
jeopardy, he was going head out that part obliquely projecting from the
mad yeast which he brewed. Start her, start her, my men Don't hurry
yourselves take plenty of time but start her start her like
thunderclaps, that's all, cried Stubb, spluttering out the smoke as he
spoke. start her, now give 'em the long and strong stroke, tashtego.
Start her, Tash, my boy start her, all but keep cool, keep cool
cucumbers is the word easy, easy only start her like grim death and
grinning devils, and raise the buried dead perpendicular out of their graves,
boys that's all. Start her Woohoo Wahee screamed the GayHeader in
reply, raising some old warwhoop to the skies as every oarsman in the
strained boat involuntarily bounced forward with the one tremendous leading
stroke which the eager Indian gave.
But his wild screams were answered by others quite as wild. Keehee
Keehee yelled Daggoo, straining forwards and backwards on his seat,
like a pacing tiger in his cage. Kala Kooloo howled Queequeg, as if
smacking his lips over a mouthful of Grenadier's steak. And thus with oars
and yells the keels cut the sea. Meanwhile, Stubb retaining his place in the
van, still encouraged his men to the onset, all the while puffing the smoke
from his mouth. Like desperadoes they tugged and they strained, till the
welcome cry was heard  Stand up, Tashtego give it to him The harpoon was
hurled. Stern all The oarsmen backed water the same moment something
went hot and hissing along every one of their wrists. It was the magical
line. An instant before, Stubb had swiftly caught two additional turns with
it round the loggerhead, whence, by reason of its increased rapid circlings,
a hempen blue smoke now jetted up and mingled with the steady fumes from his
pipe. As the line passed round and round the loggerhead so also, just
before reaching that point, it blisteringly passed through and through both
of Stubb's hands, from which the handcloths, or squares of quilted canvas
sometimes worn at these times, had accidentally dropped. It was like holding
an enemy's sharp twoedged sword by the blade, and that enemy all the time
striving to wrest it out of your clutch. Wet the line wet the line cried
stubb to the tub oarsman him seated by the tub who, snatching off his hat,
dashed the seawater into it. More turns were taken, so that the line began
holding its place. The boat now flew through the boiling water like a shark
all fins. Stubb and Tashtego here changed places  stem for stern a
staggering business truly in that rocking commotion. From the vibrating line
extending the entire length of the upper part of the boat, and from its now
being more tight than a harpstring, you would have thought the craft had two
keels  one cleaving the water, the other the air as the boat churned
on through both opposing elements at once. A continual cascade played at the
bows a ceaseless whirling eddy in her wake and, at the slightest motion
from within, even but of a little finger, the vibrating, cracking craft
canted over her spasmodic gunwale into the sea. Thus they rushed each man
with might and main clinging to his seat, to prevent being tossed to the
foam and the tall form of Tashtego at the steering oar crouching almost
double, in order to bring down his centre of gravity. Whole Atlantics and
Pacifics seemed passed as they shot on their way, till at length the whale
somewhat slackened his flight. Haul in haul in cried Stubb to the
bowsman and, facing round towards the whale, all hands began pulling the
boat up to him, while yet the boat was being towed on. Soon ranging up by
his flank, Stubb, firmly planting his knee in the clumsy cleat, darted dart
after dart into the flying fish at the word of command, the boat
alternately sterning out of the way of the whale's horrible wallow, and then
ranging up for another fling. The red tide now poured from all sides of the
monster like brooks down a hill. His tormented body rolled not in brine but
in blood, which bubbled and seethed for furlongs behind in their wake. The
slanting sun playing upon this crimson pond in the sea, sent back its
reflection into every face, so that they all glowed to each other like red
men. And all the while, jet after jet of white smoke was agonizingly shot
from the spiracle of the whale, and vehement puff after puff from the mouth
of the excited headsman as at every dart, hauling in upon his crooked
lance by the line attached to it, Stubb straightened it again and again,
by a few rapid blows against the gunwale, then again and again sent it into
the whale. Pull up pull up he now cried to the bowsman, as the waning
whale relaxed in his wrath. Pull up close to and the boat ranged along
the fish's flank. When reaching far over the bow, Stubb slowly churned his
long sharp lance into the fish, and kept it there, carefully churning and
churning, as if cautiously seeking to feel after some gold watch that the
whale might have swallowed, and which he was fearful of breaking ere he
could hook it out. But that gold watch he sought was the innermost life of
the fish. And now it is struck for, starting
from his trance into that unspeakable thing called his flurry, the monster
horribly wallowed in his blood, overwrapped himself in impenetrable, mad,
boiling spray, so that the imperilled craft, instantly dropping astern, had
much ado blindly to struggle out from that phrensied twilight into the clear
air of the day. And now abating in his flurry, the whale once more rolled
out into view surging from side to side spasmodically dilating and
contracting his spouthole, with sharp, cracking, agonized respirations. At
last, gush after gush of clotted red gore, as if it had been the purple lees
of red wine, shot into the frighted air and falling back again, ran dripping
down his motionless flanks into the sea. His heart had burst He's dead,
Mr. Stubb, said Daggoo. Yes both pipes smoked out and withdrawing his
own from his mouth, Stubb scattered the dead ashes over the water and, for
a moment, stood thoughtfully eyeing the vast corpse he had made.
It will be seen in some other place of what a very light substance the entire
interior of the sperm whale's enormous head consists. Though apparently the
most massive, it is by far the most buoyant part about him. So that with ease
he elevates it in the air, and invariably does so when going at his utmost
speed. Besides, such is the breadth of the upper part of the front of his
head, and such the tapering cutwater formation of the lower part, that by
obliquely elevating his head, he thereby may be said to transform himself
from a bluffbowed sluggish galliot into a sharppointed New York
pilotboat.
Partly to show the indispensableness of this act, it may here be stated,
that, in the old Dutch fishery, a mop was used to dash the running line with
water in many other ships, a wooden piggin, or bailer, is set apart for
that purpose. Your hat, however, is the most convenient.
A word concerning an incident in the last
chapter. According to the invariable usage of the fishery, the whaleboat
pushes off from the ship, with the headsman or whalekiller as temporary
steersman, and the harpooneer or whalefastener pulling the foremost oar,
the one known as the harpooneeroar. Now it needs a strong, nervous arm to
strike the first iron into the fish for often, in what is called a long
dart, the heavy implement has to be flung to the distance of twenty or thirty
feet. But however prolonged and exhausting the chase, the harpooneer is
expected to pull his oar meanwhile to the uttermost indeed, he is expected
to set an example of superhuman activity to the rest, not only by incredible
rowing, but by repeated loud and intrepid exclamations and what it is to
keep shouting at the top of one's compass, while all the other
muscles are strained and half started what that is none know but those who
have tried it. For one, I cannot bawl very heartily and work very recklessly
at one and the same time. In this straining, bawling state, then, with his
back to the fish, all at once the exhausted harpooneer hears the exciting cry
Stand up, and give it to him He now has to drop and secure his oar,
turn round on his centre half way, seize his harpoon from the crotch, and
with what little strength may remain, he essays to pitch it somehow into the
whale. No wonder, taking the whole fleet of whalemen in a body, that out of
fifty fair chances for a dart, not five are successful no wonder that so
many hapless harpooneers are madly cursed and disrated no wonder that some
of them actually burst their bloodvessels in the boat no wonder that some
sperm whalemen are absent four years with four barrels no wonder that to
many ship owners, whaling is but a losing concern for it is the harpooneer
that makes the voyage, and if you take the breath out of his body how can
you expect to find it there when most wanted Again, if the dart be
successful, then at the second critical instant, that is, when the whale
starts to run, the boatheader and harpooneer likewise start to running fore
and aft, to the imminent jeopardy of themselves and every one else. It is
then they change places and the headsman, the chief officer of the little
craft, takes his proper station in the bows of the boat. Now, I care not who
maintains the contrary, but all this is both foolish and unnecessary. The
headsman should stay in the bows from first to last he should both dart the
harpoon and the lance, and no rowing whatever should be expected of him,
except under circumstances obvious to any fisherman. I know that this would
sometimes involve a slight loss of speed in the chase but long experience in
various whalemen of more than one nation has convinced me that in the vast
majority of failures in the fishery, it has not by any means been so much
the speed of the whale as the before described exhaustion of the harpooneer
that has caused them. To insure the greatest efficiency in the dart, the
harpooneers of this world must start to their feet from out of idleness, and
not from out of toil.
Out of the trunk, the branches grow out
of them, the twigs. So, in productive subjects, grow the chapters. The crotch
alluded to on a previous page deserves independent mention. It is a notched
stick of a peculiar form, some two feet in length, which is perpendicularly
inserted into the starboard gunwale near the bow, for the purpose of
furnishing a rest for the wooden extremity of the harpoon, whose other
naked, barbed end slopingly projects from the prow. Thereby the weapon is
instantly at hand to its hurler, who snatches it up as readily from its rest
as a backwoodsman swings his rifle from the wall. It is customary to have two
harpoons reposing in the crotch, respectively called the first and second
irons. But these two harpoons, each by its own cord, are both connected with
the line the object being this to dart them both, if possible, one
instantly after the other into the same whale so that if, in the coming drag,
one should draw out, the other may still retain a hold. It is a doubling of
the chances. But it very often happens that owing to the instantaneous,
violent, convulsive running of the whale upon receiving the first iron, it
becomes impossible for the harpooneer, however lightninglike in his
movements, to pitch the second iron into him. Nevertheless, as the second
iron is already connected with the line, and the line is running, hence that
weapon must, at all events, be anticipatingly tossed out of the boat,
somehow and somewhere else the most terrible jeopardy would involve all
hands. Tumbled into the water, it accordingly is in such cases the spare
coils of box line mentioned in a preceding chapter making this feat, in
most instances, prudently practicable. But this critical act is not always
unattended with the saddest and most fatal casualties. Furthermore you must
know that when the second iron is thrown overboard, it thenceforth becomes a
dangling, sharpedged
terror, skittishly curvetting about both boat and whale, entangling the lines,
or cutting them, and making a prodigious sensation in all directions. Nor,
in general, is it possible to secure it again until the whale is fairly
captured and a corpse. Consider, now, how it must be in the case of four boats
all engaging one unusually strong, active, and knowing whale when owing to
these qualities in him, as well as to the thousand concurring accidents of
such an audacious enterprise, eight or ten loose second irons may be
simultaneously dangling about him. For, of course, each boat is supplied with
several harpoons to bend on to the line should the first one be ineffectually
darted without recovery. All these particulars are faithfully narrated here,
as they will not fail to elucidate several most important, however intricate
passages, in scenes hereafter to be painted.
Stubb's whale had been killed some
distance from the ship. It was a calm so, forming a tandem of three boats,
we commenced the slow business of towing the trophy to the Pequod. And now,
as we eighteen men with our thirtysix arms, and one hundred and eighty
thumbs and fingers, slowly toiled hour after hour upon that inert, sluggish
corpse in the sea and it seemed hardly to budge at all, except at long
intervals good evidence was hereby furnished of the enormousness of the mass
we moved. For, upon the great canal of HangHo, or whatever they call it, in
China, four or five laborers on the footpath will draw a bulky freighted
junk at the rate of a mile an hour but this grand argosy we towed heavily
forged along, as if laden with piglead in bulk. Darkness came on but
three lights up and down in the Pequod's mainrigging dimly guided our way
till drawing nearer we saw Ahab dropping one of several more lanterns over the
bulwarks. Vacantly eyeing the heaving whale for a moment, he issued the usual
orders for securing it for the night, and then handing his lantern to a
seaman, went his way into the cabin, and did not come forward again until
morning. Though, in overseeing the pursuit of this whale, Captain Ahab had
evinced his customary activity, to call it so yet now that the creature was
dead, some vague dissatisfaction, or impatience, or despair, seemed working
in him as if the sight of that dead body reminded him that Moby Dick was
yet to be slain and though a thousand other whales were brought to his ship,
all that would not one jot advance his grand, monomaniac object. Very soon
you would have thought from the sound on the Pequod's decks, that all hands
were preparing to cast anchor in the deep for heavy chains are being dragged
along the deck, and thrust rattling out of the portholes. But by those
clanking links, the vast corpse itself, not the ship, is to be moored. Tied
by the head to the stern, and by the tail to the bows, the whale now lies
with its black hull close to the vessel's, and seen through the darkness of
the night, which obscured the spars and rigging aloft, the two ship and
whale, seemed yoked together like colossal bullocks, whereof one reclines
while the other remains standing. If moody Ahab was now all quiescence, at
least so far as could be known on deck, Stubb, his second mate, flushed with
conquest, betrayed an unusual but still goodnatured excitement. Such an
unwonted bustle was he in that the staid Starbuck, his
official superior, quietly resigned to him for the time the sole management
of affairs. One small, helping cause of all this liveliness in Stubb, was
soon made strangely manifest. Stubb was a high liver he was somewhat
intemperately fond of the whale as a flavorish thing to his palate. A steak,
a steak, ere I sleep You, Daggoo overboard you go, and cut me one from
his small Here be it known, that though these wild fishermen do not, as a
general thing, and according to the great military maxim, make the enemy
defray the current expenses of the war at least before realizing the
proceeds of the voyage, yet now and then you find some of these Nantucketers
who have a genuine relish for that particular part of the Sperm Whale
designated by Stubb comprising the tapering extremity of the body. About
midnight that steak was cut and cooked and lighted by two lanterns of sperm
oil, Stubb stoutly stood up to his spermaceti supper at the capstanhead,
as if that capstan were a sideboard. Nor was Stubb the only banqueter on
whale's flesh that night. Mingling their mumblings with his own mastications,
thousands on thousands of sharks, swarming round the dead leviathan,
smackingly feasted on its fatness. The few sleepers below in their bunks were
often startled by the sharp slapping of their tails against the hull, within
a few inches of the sleepers' hearts. Peering over the side you could just
see them as before you heard them wallowing in the sullen, black waters,
and turning over on their backs as they scooped out huge globular pieces of
the whale of the bigness of a human head. This particular feat of the shark
seems all but miraculous. How, at such an apparently unassailable surface,
they contrive to gouge out such symmetrical mouthfuls, remains a part of the
universal problem of all things. The mark they thus leave on the whale, may
best be likened to the hollow made by a carpenter in countersinking for a
screw. Though amid all the smoking horror and diabolism of a seafight,
sharks will be seen longingly gazing up to the ship's decks, like hungry dogs
round a table where red meat is being carved, ready to bolt down every killed
man that is tossed to them and though, while the valiant butchers over the
decktable are
thus cannibally carving each other's live meat with carvingknives all gilded
and tasselled, the sharks, also, with their jewelhilted mouths, are
quarrelsomely carving away under the table at the dead meat and though, were
you to turn the whole affair upside down, it would still be pretty much the
same thing, that is to say, a shocking sharkish business enough for all
parties and though sharks also are the invariable outriders of all slave
ships crossing the Atlantic, systematically trotting alongside, to be handy
in case a parcel is to be carried anywhere, or a dead slave to be decently
buried and though one or two other like instances might be set down,
touching the set terms, places, and occasions, when sharks do most socially
congregate, and most hilariously feast yet is there no conceivable time or
occasion when you will find them in such countless numbers, and in gayer or
more jovial spirits, than around a dead sperm whale, moored by night to a
whaleship at sea. If you have never seen that sight, then suspend your
decision about the propriety of devilworship, and the expediency of
conciliating the devil. But, as yet, Stubb heeded not the mumblings of the
banquet that was going on so nigh him, no more than the sharks heeded the
smacking of his own epicurean lips. Cook, cook where's that old Fleece?
he cried at length, widening his legs still further, as if to form a more
secure base for his supper and, at the same time darting his fork into the
dish, as if stabbing with his lance cook, you cook sail this way, cook
the old black, not in any very high glee at having been previously routed from
his warm hammock at a most unseasonable hour, came shambling along from his
galley, for, like many old blacks, there was something the matter with his
kneepans, which he did not keep well scoured like his other pans this old
Fleece, as they called him, came shuffling and limping along, assisting his
step with his tongs, which, after a clumsy fashion, were made of straightened
iron hoops this old Ebony floundered along, and in obedience to the word of
command, came to a dead stop on the opposite side of Stubb's sideboard
when,
with both hands folded before him, and resting on his twolegged cane, he
bowed his arched back still further over, at the same time sideways inclining
his head, so as to bring his best ear into play. Cook, said Stubb, rapidly
lifting a rather reddish morsel to his mouth, don't you think this steak is
rather overdone? You've been beating this steak too much, cook it's too
tender. Don't I always say that to be good, a whalesteak must be tough?
There are those sharks now over the side, don't you see they prefer it tough
and rare? What a shindy they are kicking up Cook, go and talk to 'em tell
'em they are welcome to help themselves civilly, and in moderation, but they
must keep quiet. Blast me, if I can hear my own voice. Away, cook, and
deliver my message. Here, take this lantern, snatching one from his
sideboard now then, go and preach to 'em Sullenly taking the offered
lantern, old Fleece limped across the deck to the bulwarks and then, with
one hand dropping his light low over the sea, so as to get a good view of
his congregation, with the other hand he solemnly flourished his tongs, and
leaning far over the side in a mumbling voice began addressing the sharks,
while Stubb, softly crawling behind, overheard all that was said.
Fellowcritters I'se ordered here to say dat you must stop dat dam noise
dare. you hear? stop dat dam smackin' ob de lip massa Stubb say dat you
can fill your dam bellies up to de hatchings, but by Gor you must stop dat
dam racket Cook, here interposed Stubb, accompanying the word with a
sudden slap on the shoulder,  Cook why, damn your eyes, you mustn't swear
that way when you're preaching. That's no way to convert sinners, Cook
Who dat? Den preach to him yourself, sullenly turning to go. No, Cook
go on, go on. Well, den, Belubed fellowcritters  Right exclaimed
Stubb, approvingly, coax 'em to it try that, and Fleece continued. Do
you is all sharks, and by natur wery woracious, yet I
zay to you, fellowcritters, dat dat woraciousness 'top dat dam slappin' ob
de tail How you tink to hear, 'spose you keep up such a dam slappin' and
bitin' dare? Cook, cried Stubb, collaring him, I wont have that swearing.
Talk to 'em gentlemanly. Once more the sermon proceeded. Your
woraciousness, fellowcritters, I don't blame ye so much for dat is natur,
and can't be helped but to gobern dat wicked natur, dat is de pint. You is
sharks, sartin but if you gobern de shark in you, why den you be angel for
all angel is not'ing more dan de shark well goberned. Now, look here,
bred'ren, just try wonst to be cibil, a helping yourselbs from dat whale.
Don't be tearin' de blubber out your neighbour's mout, I say. Is not one
shark dood right as toder to dat whale? And, by Gor, none on you has de right
to dat whale dat whale belong to some one else. I know some o' you has
berry brig mout, brigger dan oders but den de brig mouts sometimes has de
small bellies so dat de brigness ob de mout is not to swallar wid, but to
bite off de blubber for de small fry ob sharks, dat can't get into de scrouge
to help demselves. Well done, old Fleece cried Stubb, that's
Christianity go on. No use goin' on de dam willains will keep a
scrougin' and slappin' each oder, Massa Stubb dey don't hear one word no
use apreachin' to such dam g'uttons as you call 'em, till dare bellies is
full, and dare bellies is bottomless and when dey do get em full, dey wont
hear you den for den dey sink in de sea, go fast to sleep on de coral, and
can't hear not'ing at all, no more, for eber and eber. Upon my soul, I am
about of the same opinion so give the benediction, Fleece, and I'll away to
my supper. Upon this, Fleece, holding both hands over the fishy mob, raised
his shrill voice, and cried  Cussed fellowcritters Kick up de damndest
row as ever you can fill your dam' bellies 'till dey bust and den die.
Now, cook, said Stubb, resuming his supper at the capstan Stand just where
you stood before, there, over against me, and pay particular attention.
All dention, said Fleece, again stooping over upon his tongs in the
desired position. Well, said Stubb, helping himself freely meanwhile I
shall now go back to the subject of this steak. In the first place, how old
are you, cook? What dat do wid de 'teak, said the old black, testily.
Silence How old are you, cook? 'Bout ninety, dey say, he gloomily
muttered. And have you lived in this world hard upon one hundred years,
cook, and don't know yet how to cook a whalesteak? rapidly bolting another
mouthful at the last word, so that that morsel seemed a continuation of the
question. Where were you born, cook? 'Hind de hatchway, in ferryboat,
goin' ober de Roanoke. Born in a ferryboat That's queer, too. But I want
to know what country you were born in, cook? Didn't I say de Roanoke
country? he cried, sharply. No, you didn't, cook but I'll tell you what
I'm coming to, cook. You must go home and be born over again you don't
know how to cook a whalesteak yet. Bress my soul, if I cook noder one, he
growled, angrily, turning round to depart. Come back, cook here, hand me
those tongs now take that bit of steak there, and tell me if you think that
steak cooked as it should be? Take it, I say holding the tongs towards him
take it, and taste it. Faintly smacking his withered lips over it for a
moment, the old negro muttered, Best cooked 'teak I eber taste joosy,
berry joosy. Cook, said Stubb, squaring himself once more do you
belong to the church? Passed one once in CapeDown, said the old man
sullenly. And you have once in your life passed a holy church in CapeTown,
where you doubtless overheard a holy parson addressing his hearers as his
beloved fellowcreatures, have you, cook And yet you come here, and tell
me such a dreadful lie as you did just now, eh? said Stubb. Where do you
expect to go to, cook?
Go to bed berry soon, he mumbled, halfturning as he spoke. Avast heave
to I mean when you die, cook. It's an awful question. Now what's your
answer? When dis old brack man dies, said the negro slowly, changing his
whole air and demeanor, he hisself won't go nowhere but some bressed angel
will come and fetch him. Fetch him? How? In a coach and four, as they
fetched Elijah? And fetch him where? Up dere, said Fleece, holding his
tongs straight over his head, and keeping it there very solemnly. So, then,
you expect to go up into our maintop, do you, cook, when you are dead?
But don't you know the higher you climb, the colder it gets? Maintop, eh?
Didn't say dat t'all, said Fleece, again in the sulks. You said up there,
didn't you, and now look yourself, and see where your tongs are pointing.
But, perhaps you expect to get into heaven by crawling through the lubber's
hole, cook but no, no, cook, you don't get there, except you go the
regular way, round by the rigging. It's a ticklish business, but must be
done, or else it's no go. But none of us are in heaven yet. Drop your
tongs, cook, and hear my orders. Do ye hear? Hold your hat in one hand, and
clap t'other a'top of your heart, when I'm giving my orders, cook. What
that your heart, there? that's your gizzard Aloft aloft that's it now
you have it. Hold it there now, and pay attention. All 'dention, said
the old black, with both hands placed as desired, vainly wriggling his
grizzled head, as if to get both ears in front at one and the same time.
Well then, cook you see this whalesteak of yours was so very bad, that I
have put it out of sight as soon as possible you see that, don't you? Well,
for the future, when you cook another whalesteak for my private table here,
the capstan, I'll tell you what to do so as not to spoil it by overdoing.
Hold the steak in one hand, and show a live coal to it with the other that
done, dish it d'ye hear? And now tomorrow, cook, when we are cutting in
the fish, be sure you stand by to get the tips of his fins have them put in
pickle. As for the ends of the flukes, have them soused, cook. There, now
ye may go.
But Fleece had hardly got three paces off, when he was recalled. Cook, give
me cutlets for supper tomorrow night in the midwatch. D'ye hear? away you
sail, then. Halloa stop make a bow before you go. Avast heaving again
Whaleballs for breakfast don't forget. Wish, by gor whale eat him,
'stead of him eat whale. I'm bressed if he ain't more of shark dan Massa
Shark hisself, muttered the old man, limping away with which sage
ejaculation he went to his hammock.
A little item may as well be related here. The strongest and most reliable
hold which the ship has upon the whale when moored alongside, is by the flukes
or tail and as from its greater density that part is relatively heavier
than any other excepting the sidefins, its flexibility even in death,
causes it to sink low beneath the surface so that with the hand you
cannot get at it from the boat, in order to put the chain round it. But
this difficulty is ingeniously overcome a small, strong line is prepared
with a wooden float at its outer end, and a weight in its middle, while the
other end is secured to the ship. By adroit management the wooden float is
to rise on the other side of the mass, so that now having girdled the made
whale, the chain is readily made to follow suit and being slipped along the
body, is at last locked fast round the smallest part of the tail, at the
point of junction with its broad flukes or lobes.
That mortal man should feed upon
the creature that feeds his lamp, and, like Stubb, eat him by his own light,
as you may say this seems so outlandish a thing that one must needs go a
little into the history and philosophy of it. It is upon record, that three
centuries ago the tongue of the Right Whale was esteemed a great delicacy in
France, and commanded large prices there. Also, that in Henry VIIIth's
time, a certain cook of the court obtained a handsome reward for inventing an
admirable sauce to be eaten with barbacued porpoises, which, you remember,
are a species of whale. Porpoises, indeed, are to this day considered fine
eating. The meat is made into balls about the size of billiard balls, and
being well seasoned and spiced might be taken for turtleballs or veal balls.
The old monks of Dunfermline were very fond of them. They had a great
porpoise grant from the crown. The fact is, that among his hunters at least,
the whale would by all hands be considered a noble dish, were there not so
much of him but when you come to sit down before a meatpie nearly one
hundred feet long, it takes away your appetite. Only the most unprejudiced
of men like Stubb, nowadays partake of
cooked whales but the Esquimaux are not so fastidious. We all know how they
live upon whales, and have rare old vintages of prime old train oil.
Zogranda, one of their most famous doctors, recommends strips of blubber for
infants, as being exceedingly juicy and nourishing. And this reminds me
that certain Englishmen, who long ago were accidentally left in Greenland by
a whaling vessel that these men actually lived for several months on the
mouldy scraps of whales which had been left ashore after trying out the
blubber. Among the Dutch whalemen these scraps are called fritters which,
indeed, they greatly resemble, being brown and crisp, and smelling
something like old Amsterdam housewives' doughnuts or olycooks, when fresh.
They have such an eatable look that the most selfdenying stranger can hardly
keep his hands off. But what further depreciates the whale as a civilized
dish, is his exceeding richness. He is the great prize ox of the sea, too
fat to be delicately good. Look at his hump, which would be as fine eating
as the buffalo's which is esteemed a rare dish, were it not such a solid
pyramid of fat. But the spermaceti itself, how bland and creamy that is
like the transparent, halfjellied, white meat of a cocoanut in the third
month of its growth, yet far too rich to supply a substitute for butter.
Nevertheless, many whalemen have a method of absorbing it into some other
substance, and then partaking of it. In the long try watches of the night it
is a common thing for the seamen to dip their shipbiscuit into the huge
oilpots and let them fry there awhile. Many a good supper have I thus made.
In the case of a small Sperm Whale the brains are accounted a fine dish. The
casket of the skull is broken into with an axe, and the two plump, whitish
lobes being withdrawn precisely resembling two large puddings, they are
then mixed with flour, and cooked into a most delectable mess, in flavor
somewhat resembling calves' head, which is quite a dish among some epicures
and every one knows that some young bucks among the epicures, by continually
dining upon calves' brains, by and by get to have a little brains of their
own, so as to be able to tell a calf's head from their own heads which,
indeed, requires uncommon discrimination. And that is the reason why
a young buck with an intelligent looking calf's head before him, is somehow
one of the saddest sights you can see. The head looks a sort of reproachfully
at him, with an Et tu Brute expression. It is not, perhaps, entirely
because the whale is so excessively unctuous that landsmen seem to regard the
eating of him with abhorrence that appears to result, in some way, from the
consideration before mentioned i. e. that a man should eat a newly murdered
thing of the sea, and eat it too by its own light. But no doubt the first
man that ever murdered an ox was regarded as a murderer perhaps he was hung
and if he had been put on his trial by oxen, he certainly would have been
and he certainly deserved it if any murderer does. Go to the meatmarket of
a Saturday night and see the crowds of live bipeds staring up at the long rows
of dead quadrupeds. Does not that sight take a tooth out of the cannibal's
jaw? Cannibals? who is not a cannibal? I tell you it will be more tolerable
for the Fejee that salted down a lean missionary in his cellar against a
coming famine it will be more tolerable for that provident Fejee, I say, in
the day of judgment, than for thee, civilized and enlightened gourmand, who
nailest geese to the ground and feastest on their bloated livers in thy
patedefoiegras. But Stubb, he eats the whale by its own light, does he?
and that is adding insult to injury, is it? Look at your knifehandle,
there, my civilized and enlightened gourmand dining off that roast beef,
what is that handle made of? what but the bones of the brother of the very ox
you are eating? And what do you pick your teeth with, after devouring that
fat goose? With a feather of the same fowl. And with what quill did the
Secretary of the Society for the Suppression of Cruelty to Ganders formally
indite his circulars? It is only within the last month or two that that
society passed a resolution to patronize nothing but steel pens.
When in the Southern Fishery, a
captured Sperm Whale, after long and weary toil, is brought alongside late at
night, it is not, as a general thing at least, customary to proceed at once
to the business of cutting him in. For that business is an exceedingly
laborious one is not very soon completed and requires all hands to set
about it. Therefore, the common usage is to take in all sail lash the helm
a'lee and then send every one below to his hammock till daylight, with the
reservation that, until that time, anchorwatches shall be kept that is,
two and two for an hour, each couple, the crew in rotation shall mount the
deck to see that all goes well. But sometimes, especially upon the Line in the
Pacific, this plan will not answer at all because such incalculable hosts
of sharks gather round the moored carcase, that were he left so for six
hours, say, on a stretch, little more than the skeleton would be visible by
morning. In most other parts of the ocean, however, where these fish do not
so largely abound, their wondrous voracity can be at times considerably
diminished, by vigorously stirring them up with sharp whalingspades, a
procedure notwithstanding, which, in some instances, only seems to tickle
them into still greater activity. But it was not thus in the present case
with the Pequod's sharks though, to be sure, any man unaccustomed to such
sights, to have looked over her side that night, would have almost thought
the whole round sea was one huge cheese, and those sharks the maggots in it.
nevertheless, upon stubb setting the anchorwatch after his supper was
concluded and when, accordingly, Queequeg and a forecastle seaman came on
deck, no small excitement was created among the sharks for immediately
suspending the cutting stages over the side, and lowering three lanterns, so
that they cast long gleams of light over the turbid sea, these
two mariners, darting their long whalingspades, kept up an incessant
murdering of the sharks, by striking the keen steel deep into their skulls,
seemingly their only vital part. But in the foamy confusion of their mixed
and struggling hosts, the marksmen could not always hit their mark and this
brought about new revelations of the incredible ferocity of the foe. They
viciously snapped, not only at each other's disembowelments, but like
flexible bows, bent round, and bit their own till those entrails seemed
swallowed over and over again by the same mouth, to be oppositely voided by
the gaping wound. Nor was this all. It was unsafe to meddle with the corpses
and ghosts of these creatures. A sort of generic or Pantheistic vitality
seemed to lurk in their very joints and bones, after what might be called the
individual life had departed. Killed and hoisted on deck for the sake of his
skin, one of these sharks almost took poor Queequeg's hand off, when he
tried to shut down the dead lid of his murderous jaw. Queequeg no care what
god made him shark, said the savage, agonizingly lifting his hand up and
down wedder Fejee god or Nantucket god but de god wat made shark must be
one dam Ingin.
The whalingspade used for cuttingin is made of the very best steel is about
the bigness of a man's spread hand and in general shape, corresponds to
the garden implement after which it is named only its sides are perfectly
flat, and its upper end considerably narrower than the lower. This weapon
is always kept as sharp as possible and when being used is occasionally
honed, just like a razor. In its socket, a stiff pole, from twenty to
thirty feet long, is inserted for a handle.
It was a Saturday night, and such a
Sabbath as followed Ex officio professors of Sabbath breaking are all
whalemen. The ivory Pequod was turned into what seemed a shamble
every sailor a butcher. You would have thought we were offering up ten
thousand red oxen to the sea gods. In the first place, the enormous cutting
tackles, among other ponderous things comprising a cluster of blocks generally
painted green, and which no single man can possibly lift this vast bunch of
grapes was swayed up to the maintop and firmly lashed to the lower masthead,
the strongest point anywhere above a ship's deck. The end of the hawserlike
rope winding through these intricacies, was then conducted to the windlass,
and the huge lower block of the tackles was swung over the whale to this
block the great blubber hook, weighing some one hundred pounds, was attached.
And now suspended in stages over the side, Starbuck and Stubb, the mates,
armed with their long spades, began cutting a hole in the body for the
insertion of the hook just above the nearest of the two sidefins. This done,
a broad, semicircular line is cut round the hole, the hook is inserted, and
the main body of the crew striking up a wild chorus, now commence heaving in
one dense crowd at the windlass. When instantly, the entire ship careens over
on her side every bolt in her starts like the nailheads of an old house in
frosty weather she trembles, quivers, and nods her frighted mastheads to
the sky. More and more she leans over to the whale, while every gasping
heave of the windlass is answered by a helping heave from the billows till
at last, a swift, startling snap is heard with a great swash the ship rolls
upwards and backwards from the whale, and the triumphant tackle rises into
sight dragging after it the disengaged semicircular end of the first strip of
blubber. Now as the blubber envelopes the whale precisely as the rind does an
orange, so is it stripped off from the body precisely as an orange is
sometimes stripped by spiralizing it. For the strain constantly kept up by
the windlass continually keeps the whale rolling over and over in the water,
and as the blubber in one strip uniformly peels off along the line called the
scarf, simultaneously cut by the spades of Starbuck and Stubb, the mates
and just as fast as it is thus peeled off, and indeed by that very act itself,
it is all the time being hoisted higher and higher aloft till its upper end
grazes the maintop the men at the windlass then cease heaving, and for a
moment
or two the prodigious blooddripping mass sways to and fro as if let down from
the sky, and every one present must take good heed to dodge it when it
swings, else it may box his ears and pitch him headlong overboard. One of
the attending harpooneers now advances with a long, keen weapon called a
boardingsword, and watching his chance he dexterously slices out a
considerable hole in the lower part of the swaying mass. Into this hole, the
end of the second alternating great tackle is then hooked so as to retain a
hold upon the blubber, in order to prepare for what follows. Whereupon, this
accomplished swordsman, warning all hands to stand off, once more makes a
scientific dash at the mass, and with a few sidelong, desperate, lunging
slicings, severs it completely in twain so that while the short lower part
is still fast, the long upper strip, called a blanketpiece, swings clear,
and is all ready for lowering. The heavers forward now resume their song,
and while the one tackle is peeling and hoisting a second strip from the
whale, the other is slowly slackened away, and down goes the first strip
through the main hatchway right beneath, into an unfurnished parlor called the
blubberroom. Into this twilight apartment sundry nimble hands keep coiling
away the long blanketpiece as if it were a great live mass of plaited
serpents. And thus the work proceeds the two tackles hoisting and lowering
simultaneously both whale and windlass heaving, the heavers singing, the
blubberroom gentlemen coiling, the mates scarfing, the ship straining, and
all hands swearing occasionally, by way of assuaging the general friction.
I have given no small attention to that
not unvexed subject, the skin of the whale. I have had controversies about it
with experienced whalemen afloat, and learned naturalists ashore.
My original opinion remains unchanged but it is only an opinion. The
question is, what and where is the skin of the whale? Already you know what
his blubber is. That blubber is something of the consistence of firm,
closegrained beef, but tougher, more elastic and compact, and ranges from
eight or ten to twelve and fifteen inches in thickness. Now, however
preposterous it may at first seem to talk of any creature's skin as being of
that sort of consistence and thickness, yet in point of fact these are no
arguments against such a presumption because you cannot raise any other
dense enveloping layer from the whale's body but that same blubber and the
outermost enveloping layer of any animal, if reasonably dense, what can that
be but the skin? True, from the unmarred dead body of the whale, you may
scrape off with your hand an infinitely thin, transparent substance, somewhat
resembling the thinnest shreds of isinglass, only it is almost as flexible
and soft as satin that is, previous to being dried, when it not only
contracts and thickens, but becomes rather hard and brittle. I have several
such dried bits, which I use for marks in my whalebooks. It is
transparent, as I said before and being laid upon the printed page, I have
sometimes pleased myself with fancying it exerted a magnifying influence. At
any rate, it is pleasant to read about whales through their own spectacles,
as you may say. But what I am driving at here is this. That same infinitely
thin, isinglass substance, which, I admit, invests the entire body of the
whale, is not so much to be regarded as the skin of the creature, as the
skin of the skin, so to speak for it were simply ridiculous to say, that
the proper skin of the tremendous whale is thinner and more tender than the
skin of a newborn child. But no more of this. Assuming the blubber to be the
skin of the whale then, when this skin, as in the case of a very large
Sperm Whale, will yield the bulk of one hundred barrels of oil and, when it
is considered that, in quantity, or rather weight, that oil, in its expressed
state, is only three fourths, and not the entire substance of the coat some
idea may hence be had of the enormousness of that animated mass, a mere part
of whose mere
integument yields such a lake of liquid as that. Reckoning ten barrels to the
ton, you have ten tons for the net weight of only three quarters of the stuff
of the whale's skin. In life, the visible surface of the Sperm Whale is not
the least among the many marvels he presents. Almost invariably it is all
over obliquely crossed and recrossed with numberless straight marks in thick
array, something like those in the finest Italian line engravings. But these
marks do not seem to be impressed upon the isinglass substance above
mentioned, but seem to be seen through it, as if they were engraved upon the
body itself. Nor is this all. In some instances, to the quick, observant
eye, those linear marks, as in a veritable engraving, but afford the ground
for far other delineations. These are hieroglyphical that is, if you call
those mysterious cyphers on the walls of pyramids hieroglyphics, then that is
the proper word to use in the present connexion. By my retentive memory of
the hieroglyphics upon one Sperm Whale in particular, I was much struck with
a plate representing the old Indian characters chiselled on the famous
hieroglyphic palisades on the banks of the Upper Mississippi. Like those
mystic rocks, too, the mysticmarked whale remains undecipherable. This
allusion to the Indian rocks reminds me of another thing. Besides all the
other phenomena which the exterior of the Sperm Whale presents, he not
seldom displays the back, and more especially his flanks, effaced in great
part of the regular linear appearance, by reason of numerous rude scratches,
altogether of an irregular, random aspect. I should say that those New
England rocks on the seacoast, which Agassiz imagines to bear the marks of
violent scraping contact with vast floating icebergs I should say, that
those rocks must not a little resemble the Sperm Whale in this particular. It
also seems to me that such scratches in the whale are probably made by hostile
contact with other whales for I have most remarked them in the large,
fullgrown bulls of the species. A word or two more concerning this matter
of the skin or blubber of the whale. It has already been said, that it is
stript from him in long pieces, called blanketpieces. Like most seaterms,
this one is very happy and significant. For the whale is
indeed wrapt up in his blubber as in a real blanket or counterpane or, still
better, an Indian poncho slipt over his head, and skirting his extremity. It
is by reason of this cosy blanketing of his body, that the whale is enabled to
keep himself comfortable in all weathers, in all seas, times, and tides.
What would become of a Greenland whale, say, in those shuddering, icy seas of
the north, if unsupplied with his cosy surtout? True, other fish are found
exceedingly brisk in those Hyperborean waters but these, be it observed, are
your coldblooded, lungless fish, whose very bellies are refrigerators
creatures, that warm themselves under the lee of an iceberg, as a traveller
in winter would bask before an inn fire whereas, like man, the whale has
lungs and warm blood. Freeze his blood, and he dies. How wonderful is it
then except after explanation that this great monster, to whom corporeal
warmth is as indispensable as it is to man how wonderful that he should be
found at home, immersed to his lips for life in those Arctic waters where,
when seamen fall overboard, they are sometimes found, months afterwards,
perpendicularly frozen into the hearts of fields of ice, as a fly is found
glued in amber. But more surprising is it to know, as has been proved by
experiment, that the blood of a Polar whale is warmer than that of a Borneo
negro in summer. It does seem to me, that herein we see the rare virtue of a
strong individual vitality, and the rare virtue of thick walls, and the rare
virtue of interior spaciousness. Oh, man admire and model thyself after the
whale Do thou, too, remain warm among ice. Do thou, too, live in this world
without being of it. Be cool at the equator keep thy blood fluid at the
Pole. Like the great dome of St. Peter's, and like the great whale, retain,
O man in all seasons a temperature of thine own. But how easy and how
hopeless to teach these fine things Of erections, how few are domed like St.
Peter's of creatures, how few vast as the whale
Haul in the chains Let the carcase go
astern The vast tackles have now done their duty. The peeled white body of
the beheaded whale flashes like a marble sepulchre though changed in hue, it
has not perceptibly lost anything in bulk. it is still colossal. slowly it
floats more and more away, the water round it torn and splashed by the
insatiate sharks, and the air above vexed with rapacious flights of screaming
fowls, whose beaks are like so many insulting poniards in the whale. The
vast white headless phantom floats further and further from the ship, and
every rod that it so floats, what seem square roods of sharks and cubic roods
of fowls, augment the murderous din. For hours and hours from the almost
stationary ship that hideous sight is seen. Beneath the unclouded and mild
azure sky, upon the fair face of the pleasant sea, wafted by the joyous
breezes, that great mass of death floats on and on, till lost in infinite
perspectives. There's a most doleful and most mocking funeral The
seavultures all in pious mourning, the airsharks all punctiliously in
black or speckled. In life but few of them would have helped the whale, I
ween, if peradventure he had needed it but upon the banquet of his funeral
they most piously do pounce. Oh, horrible vultureism of earth from which
not the mightiest whale is free. Nor is this the end. Desecrated as the body
is, a vengeful ghost survives and hovers over it to scare. Espied by some
timid manofwar or blundering discoveryvessel from afar, when the distance
obscuring the swarming fowls, nevertheless still shows the white mass
floating in the sun, and the white spray heaving high against it
straightway the whale's unharming corpse, with trembling fingers is set down
in the log  shoals, rocks, and breakers hereabouts beware And for
years afterwards,
perhaps, ships shun the place leaping over it as silly sheep leap over a
vacuum, because their leader originally leaped there when a stick was held.
There's your law of precedents there's your utility of traditions there's
the story of your obstinate survival of old beliefs never bottomed on the
earth, and now not even hovering in the air There's orthodoxy Thus, while
in life the great whale's body may have been a real terror to his foes, in
his death his ghost becomes a powerless panic to a world. Are you a believer
in ghosts, my friend? There are other ghosts than the CockLane one, and far
deeper men than Doctor Johnson who believe in them.
In this same New Bedford there stands a
Whaleman's Chapel, and few are the moody fishermen, shortly bound for the
Indian Ocean or Pacific, who fail to make a Sunday visit to the spot. I am
sure that I did not. Returning from my first morning stroll, I again sallied
out upon this special errand. The sky had changed from clear,
sunny cold, to driving sleet and mist. Wrapping myself in my shaggy jacket
of the cloth called bearskin, I fought my way against the stubborn storm.
Entering, I found a small scattered congregation of sailors, and sailors'
wives and widows. A muffled silence reigned, only broken at times by the
shrieks of the storm. Each silent worshipper seemed purposely sitting apart
from the other, as if each silent grief were insular and incommunicable. The
chaplain had not yet arrived and there these silent islands of men and women
sat steadfastly eyeing several marble tablets, with black borders, masoned
into the wall on either side the pulpit. Three of them ran something like the
following, but I do not pretend to quote  Sacred To the Memory of John
Talbot, Who, at the age of eighteen, was lost overboard, Near the Isle of
Desolation, off Patagonia, November st,
. This Tablet Is erected to his
Memory By his Sister. Sacred To the Memory of Robert Long, Willis Ellery,
Nathan Coleman, Walter Canny, Seth Macy, and Samuel Gleig, Forming one of the
boats' crews of the Ship Eliza, Who were towed out of sight by a Whale, On
the Offshore Ground in the Pacific, December st,
. This Marble Is
here placed by their surviving Shipmates.
Sacred To the Memory of The late Captain Ezekiel Hardy, Who in the bows of
his boat was killed by a Sperm Whale on the coast of Japan, August d,
This Tablet Is erected to his Memory by His Widow. Shaking off the sleet
from my iceglazed hat and jacket, I seated myself near the door, and
turning sideways was surprised to see Queequeg near me. Affected by the
solemnity of the scene, there was a wondering gaze of incredulous curiosity
in his countenance. This savage was the only person present who seemed to
notice my entrance because he was the only one who could not read, and,
therefore, was not reading those frigid inscriptions on the wall. Whether any
of the relatives of the seamen whose names appeared there were now among the
congregation, I knew not but so many are the unrecorded accidents in the
fishery, and so plainly did several women present wear the countenance if not
the trappings of some unceasing grief, that I feel sure that here before me
were assembled those, in whose unhealing hearts the sight of those bleak
tablets sympathetically caused the old wounds to bleed afresh. Oh ye whose
dead lie buried beneath the green grass who standing among flowers can say
here, here lies my beloved ye know not the desolation that broods in bosoms
like these. What bitter blanks in those blackbordered marbles which cover no
ashes What despair in those immovable inscriptions What deadly voids and
unbidden infidelities in the lines that seem to gnaw upon all Faith, and
refuse resurrections to the beings who have placelessly perished without a
grave. As well might those tablets stand in the cave of Elephanta as here.
In what census of living creatures, the dead of mankind are included why it
is that a universal proverb says of them, that
they tell no tales, though containing more secrets than the Goodwin Sands
how it is that to his name who yesterday departed for the other world, we
prefix so significant and infidel a word, and yet do not thus entitle him, if
he but embarks for the remotest Indies of this living earth why the Life
Insurance Companies pay deathforfeitures upon immortals in what eternal,
unstirring paralysis, and deadly, hopeless trance, yet lies antique Adam who
died sixty round centuries ago how it is that we still refuse to be
comforted for those who we nevertheless maintain are dwelling in unspeakable
bliss why all the living so strive to hush all the dead wherefore but the
rumor of a knocking in a tomb will terrify a whole city. All these things
are not without their meanings. But Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the
tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope. It
needs scarcely to be told, with what feelings, on the eve of a Nantucket
voyage, I regarded those marble tablets, and by the murky light of that
darkened, doleful day read the fate of the whalemen who had gone before me,
Yes, Ishmael, the same fate may be thine. But somehow I grew merry again.
Delightful inducements to embark, fine chance for promotion, it seems  aye,
a stove boat will make me an immortal by brevet. Yes, there is death in this
business of whaling a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into
Eternity. But what then? Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of
Life and Death. Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my
true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much
like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick
water the thinnest of air. Methinks my body is but the lees of my better
being. In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me. And
therefore three cheers for Nantucket and come a stove boat and stove body
when they will, for stave my soul, Jove himself cannot.
It should not have been omitted that
previous to completely stripping the body of the leviathan, he was beheaded.
Now, the beheading of the Sperm Whale is a scientific anatomical feat, upon
which experienced whale surgeons very much pride themselves and not without
reason. Consider that the whale has nothing that can properly be called a
neck on the contrary, where his head and body seem to join, there, in that
very place, is the thickest part of him. Remember, also, that the surgeon must
operate from above, some eight or ten feet intervening between him and his
subject, and that subject almost hidden in a discolored, rolling, and
oftentimes tumultuous and bursting sea. Bear in mind, too, that under these
untoward circumstances he has to cut many feet deep in the flesh and in that
subterraneous manner, without so much as getting one single peep into the
evercontracting gash thus made, he must skilfully steer clear of all
adjacent, interdicted parts, and exactly divide the spine at a critical
point hard by its insertion into the skull. Do you not marvel,
then, at Stubb's boast, that he demanded but ten minutes to behead a sperm
whale? When first severed, the head is dropped astern and held there by a
cable till the body is stripped. That done, if it belong to a small whale it
is hoisted on deck to be deliberately disposed of. But, with a full grown
leviathan this is impossible for the sperm whale's head embraces nearly one
third of his entire bulk, and completely to suspend such a burden as that,
even by the immense tackles of a whaler, this were as vain a thing as to
attempt weighing a Dutch barn in jewellers' scales The Pequod's whale being
decapitated and the body stripped, the head was hoisted against the ship's
side about half way out of the sea, so that it might yet in great part be
buoyed up by its native element. And there with the strained craft steeply
leaning over to it, by reason of the enormous downward drag from the lower
masthead, and every yardarm on that side projecting like a crane over the
waves there, that blooddripping head hung to the Pequod's waist like the
giant Holofernes's from the girdle of Judith. When this last task was
accomplished it was noon, and the seamen went below to their dinner. Silence
reigned over the before tumultuous but now deserted deck. An intense copper
calm, like a universal yellow lotus, was more and more unfolding its
noiseless measureless leaves upon the sea. A short space elapsed, and up into
this noiselessness came Ahab alone from his cabin. Taking a few turns on the
quarterdeck, he paused to gaze over the side, then slowly getting into the
mainchains he took Stubb's long spade still remaining there after the
whale's decapitation and striking it into the lower part of the
halfsuspended mass, placed its other end crutchwise under one arm, and so
stood leaning over with eyes attentively fixed on this head. It was a black
and hooded head and hanging there in the midst of so intense a calm, it
seemed the Sphynx's in the desert. Speak, thou vast and venerable head,
muttered Ahab, which, though ungarnished with a beard, yet here and there
lookest hoary with mosses speak, mighty head, and tell us the secret thing
that is in thee. Of all divers, thou hast dived the deepest.
that head upon which the upper sun now gleams, has moved amid this world's
foundations. Where unrecorded names and navies rust, and untold hopes and
anchors rot where in her murderous hold this frigate earth is ballasted with
bones of millions of the drowned there, in that awful waterland, there was
thy most familiar home. Thou hast been where bell or diver never went hast
slept by many a sailor's side, where sleepless mothers would give their lives
to lay them down. Thou saw'st the locked lovers when leaping from their
flaming ship heart to heart they sank beneath the exulting wave true to
each other, when heaven seemed false to them. Thou saw'st the murdered mate
when tossed by pirates from the midnight deck for hours he fell into the
deeper midnight of the insatiate maw and his murderers still sailed on
unharmed while swift lightnings shivered the neighboring ship that would have
borne a righteous husband to outstretched, longing arms. O head thou hast
seen enough to split the planets and make an infidel of Abraham, and not one
syllable is thine Sail ho cried a triumphant voice from the
mainmasthead. Aye? Well, now, that's cheering, cried Ahab, suddenly
erecting himself, while whole thunderclouds swept aside from his brow.
That lively cry upon this deadly calm might almost convert a better man.
Where away? Three points on the starboard bow, sir, and bringing down her
breeze to us Better and better, man. Would now St. Paul would come along
that way, and to my breezelessness bring his breeze O Nature, and O soul of
man how far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies not the
smallest atom stirs or lives on matter, but has its cunning duplicate in
mind.
Hand in hand, ship and breeze
blew on but the breeze came faster than the ship, and soon the Pequod began
to rock. By and by, through the glass the stranger's boats and manned
mastheads proved her a whaleship. but as she was so far to windward, and
shooting by, apparently making a passage to some other ground, the Pequod
could not hope to reach her. So the signal was set to see what response would
be made. Here be it said, that like the vessels of military marines, the
ships of the American Whale Fleet have each a private signal all which
signals being collected in a book with the names of the respective vessels
attached, every captain is provided with it. Thereby, the whale commanders
are enabled to recognise each other upon the ocean, even at considerable
distances, and with no small facility. The Pequod's signal was at last
responded to by the stranger's setting her own which proved the ship to be
the Jeroboam of Nantucket. Squaring her yards, she bore down, ranged abeam
under the Pequod's lee, and lowered a boat it soon drew nigh but, as the
sideladder was being rigged by Starbuck's order to accommodate the visiting
captain, the stranger in question waved his hand from his boat's stern in
token of that proceeding being entirely unnecessary. It turned out that the
Jeroboam had a malignant epidemic on board, and that Mayhew, her captain,
was fearful of infecting the Pequod's company. For, though himself and boat's
crew remained untainted, and though his ship was half a rifleshot off, and
an incorruptible sea and air rolling and flowing between yet conscientiously
adhering to the timid quarantine of the land, he peremptorily refused to come
into direct contact with the Pequod. But this did by no means prevent all
communication. Preserving an interval of some few yards between itself and
the
ship, the Jeroboam's boat by the occasional use of its oars contrived to keep
parallel to the Pequod, as she heavily forged through the sea for by this
time it blew very fresh, with her maintopsail aback though, indeed, at
times by the sudden onset of a large rolling wave, the boat would be pushed
some way ahead but would be soon skilfully brought to her proper bearings
again. Subject to this, and other the like interruptions now and then, a
conversation was sustained between the two parties but at intervals not
without still another interruption of a very different sort. Pulling an oar
in the Jeroboam's boat, was a man of a singular appearance, even in that wild
whaling life where individual notabilities make up all totalities. He was a
small, short, youngish man, sprinkled all over his face with freckles, and
wearing redundant yellow hair. A longskirted, cabalisticallycut coat of a
faded walnut tinge enveloped him the overlapping sleeves of which were
rolled up on his wrists. A deep, settled, fanatic delirium was in his eyes.
So soon as this figure had been first descried, Stubb had exclaimed  That's
he that's he the longtogged scaramouch the TownHo's company told us of
Stubb here alluded to a strange story told of the Jeroboam, and a certain
man among her crew, some time previous when the Pequod spoke the TownHo.
According to this account and what was subsequently learned, it seemed that
the scaramouch in question had gained a wonderful ascendency over almost
everybody in the Jeroboam. His story was this He had been originally
nurtured among the crazy society of Neskyeuna Shakers, where he had been a
great prophet in their cracked, secret meetings having several times
descended from heaven by the way of a trapdoor, announcing the speedy
opening of the seventh vial, which he carried in his vestpocket but, which,
instead of containing gunpowder, was supposed to be charged with laudanum. A
strange, apostolic whim having seized him, he had left Neskyeuna for
Nantucket, where, with that cunning peculiar to craziness, he assumed a
steady, common sense exterior and offered himself as a greenhand candidate
for the Jeroboam's whaling voyage. They engaged him
but straightway upon the ship's getting out of sight of land, his insanity
broke out in a freshet. He announced himself as the archangel Gabriel, and
commanded the captain to jump overboard. He published his manifesto, whereby
he set himself forth as the deliverer of the isles of the sea and
vicargeneral of all Oceanica. The unflinching earnestness with which he
declared these things the dark, daring play of his sleepless, excited
imagination, and all the preternatural terrors of real delirium, united to
invest this Gabriel in the minds of the majority of the ignorant crew, with
an atmosphere of sacredness. Moreover, they were afraid of him. As such a
man, however, was not of much practical use in the ship, especially as he
refused to work except when he pleased, the incredulous captain would fain
have been rid of him but apprised that that individual's intention was to
land him in the first convenient port, the archangel forthwith opened all his
seals and vials  devoting the ship and all hands to unconditional perdition,
in case this intention was carried out. So strongly did he work upon his
disciples among the crew, that at last in a body they went to the captain and
told him if Gabriel was sent from the ship, not a man of them would remain.
He was therefore forced to relinquish his plan. Nor would they permit Gabriel
to be any way maltreated, say or do what he would so that it came to pass
that Gabriel had the complete freedom of the ship. The consequence of all
this was, that the archangel cared little or nothing for the captain and
mates and since the epidemic had broken out, he carried a higher hand than
ever declaring that the plague, as he called it, was at his sole command
nor should it be stayed but according to his good pleasure. The sailors,
mostly poor devils, cringed, and some of them fawned before him in
obedience to his instructions, sometimes rendering him personal homage, as to
a god. Such things may seem incredible but, however wondrous, they are
true. Nor is the history of fanatics half so striking in respect to the
measureless selfdeception of the fanatic himself, as his measureless power
of deceiving and bedevilling so many others. But it is time to return to the
Pequod. I fear not thy epidemic, man, said Ahab from the bulwarks
to Captain Mayhew, who stood in the boat's stern come on board. But now
Gabriel started to his feet. Think, think of the fevers, yellow and bilious
Beware of the horrible plague Gabriel, Gabriel cried Captain Mayhew
thou must either But that instant a headlong wave shot the boat far
ahead, and its seethings drowned all speech. Hast thou seen the White Whale?
demanded Ahab, when the boat drifted back. Think, think of thy whaleboat,
stoven and sunk Beware of the horrible tail I tell thee again, Gabriel,
that But again the boat tore ahead as if dragged by fiends. Nothing was
said for some moments, while a succession of riotous waves rolled by, which
by one of those occasional caprices of the seas were tumbling, not heaving it.
Meantime, the hoisted sperm whale's head jogged about very violently, and
Gabriel was seen eyeing it with rather more apprehensiveness than his
archangel nature seemed to warrant. When this interlude was over, Captain
Mayhew began a dark story concerning Moby Dick not, however, without
frequent interruptions from Gabriel, whenever his name was mentioned, and
the crazy sea that seemed leagued with him. It seemed that the Jeroboam had
not long left home, when upon speaking a whaleship, her people were
reliably apprised of the existence of Moby Dick, and the havoc he had made.
Greedily sucking in this intelligence, Gabriel solemnly warned the captain
against attacking the white whale, in case the monster should be seen in his
gibbering insanity, pronouncing the White Whale to be no less a being than the
Shaker God incarnated the Shakers receiving the Bible. But when, some year
or two afterwards, Moby Dick was fairly sighted from the mastheads, Macey,
the chief mate, burned with ardor to encounter him and the captain himself
being not unwilling to let him have the opportunity, despite all the
archangel's denunciations and forewarnings, Macey succeeded in persuading
five men to man his boat. With them he pushed off and, after
much weary pulling, and many perilous, unsuccessful onsets, he at last
succeeded in getting one iron fast. Meantime, Gabriel, ascending to the
mainroyal masthead, was tossing one arm in frantic gestures, and hurling
forth prophecies of speedy doom to the sacrilegious assailants of his
divinity. Now, while Macey, the mate, was standing up in his boat's bow, and
with all the reckless energy of his tribe was venting his wild exclamations
upon the whale, and essaying to get a fair chance for his poised lance, lo
a broad white shadow rose from the sea by its quick, fanning motion,
temporarily taking the breath out of the bodies of the oarsmen. Next instant,
the luckless mate, so full of furious life, was smitten bodily into the air,
and making a long arc in his descent, fell into the sea at the distance of
about fifty yards. Not a chip of the boat was harmed, nor a hair of any
oarsman's head but the mate for ever sank. It is well to parenthesize here,
that of the fatal accidents in the SpermWhale Fishery, this kind is perhaps
almost as frequent as any. Sometimes, nothing is injured but the man who is
thus annihilated oftener the boat's bow is knocked off, or the
thighboard, in which the headsman stands, is torn from its place and
accompanies the body. But strangest of all is the circumstance, that in more
instances than one, when the body has been recovered, not a single mark of
violence is discernible the man being stark dead. The whole calamity, with
the falling form of Macey, was plainly descried from the ship. Raising a
piercing shriek  The vial the vial Gabriel called off the
terrorstricken crew from the further hunting of the whale. This terrible
event clothed the archangel with added influence because his credulous
disciples believed that he had specifically foreannounced it, instead of
only making a general prophecy, which any one might have done, and so have
chanced to hit one of many marks in the wide margin allowed. He became a
nameless terror to the ship. Mayhew having concluded his narration, Ahab put
such questions to him, that the stranger captain could not forbear inquiring
whether he intended to hunt the White Whale, if opportunity should offer. To
which Ahab answered  Aye. Straightway, then, Gabriel once more started to
his feet, glaring
upon the old man, and vehemently exclaimed, with downward pointed finger
Think, think of the blasphemer dead, and down there beware of the
blasphemer's end Ahab stolidly turned aside then said to Mayhew,
Captain, I have just bethought me of my letterbag there is a letter for
one of thy officers, if I mistake not. Starbuck, look over the bag. Every
whaleship takes out a goodly number of letters for various ships, whose
delivery to the persons to whom they may be addressed, depends upon the mere
chance of encountering them in the four oceans. Thus, most letters never
reach their mark and many are only received after attaining an age of two
or three years or more. Soon Starbuck returned with a letter in his hand. It
was sorely tumbled, damp, and covered with a dull, spotted, green mould, in
consequence of being kept in a dark locker of the cabin. Of such a letter,
Death himself might well have been the postboy. Can'st not read it? cried
ahab. give it me, man. aye, aye it's but a dim scrawl what's this? As
he was studying it out, Starbuck took a long cuttingspade pole, and with his
knife slightly split the end, to insert the letter there, and in that way,
hand it to the boat, without its coming any closer to the ship. Meantime, Ahab
holding the letter, muttered, Mr. Haryes, Mr. Harrya woman's pinny hand,
the man's wife, I'll wager  Aye Mr. Harry Macey, Ship Jeroboam why
it's Macey, and he's dead Poor fellow poor fellow and from his wife,
sighed Mayhew but let me have it. Nay, keep it thyself, cried Gabriel to
Ahab thou art soon going that way. Curses throttle thee yelled Ahab.
Captain Mayhew, stand by now to receive it and taking the fatal missive
from Starbuck's hands, he caught it in the slit of the pole, and reached it
over towards the boat. But as he did so, the oarsmen expectantly desisted
from rowing the boat drifted a little towards the ship's stern so that, as
if by magic, the letter suddenly ranged along with Gabriel's eager hand. He
clutched it in an instant, seized the boatknife, and impaling the letter on
it, sent it thus loaded back into the ship. It fell at Ahab's feet. Then
Gabriel
shrieked out to his comrades to give way with their oars, and in that manner
the mutinous boat rapidly shot away from the Pequod. As, after this
interlude, the seamen resumed their work upon the jacket of the whale, many
strange things were hinted in reference to this wild affair.
A TALK OVER HIM It must be borne in mind that all this time we have a Sperm
Whale's prodigious head hanging to the Pequod's side. But we must let it
continue hanging there a while till we can get a chance to attend to it. For
the present other matters press, and the best we can do now for the head, is
to pray heaven the tackles may hold. Now, during the past night and forenoon,
the Pequod had gradually drifted into a sea, which, by its occasional
patches of
yellow brit, gave unusual tokens of the vicinity of Right Whales, a species
of the Leviathan that but few supposed to be at this particular time lurking
anywhere near. And though all hands commonly disdained the capture of those
inferior creatures and though the Pequod was not commissioned to cruise for
them at all, and though she had passed numbers of them near the Crozetts
without lowering a boat yet now that a Sperm Whale had been brought
alongside and beheaded, to the surprise of all, the announcement was made
that a Right Whale should be captured that day, if opportunity offered. Nor
was this long wanting. Tall spouts were seen to leeward and two boats,
Stubb's and Flask's, were detached in pursuit. Pulling further and further
away, they at last became almost invisible to the men at the masthead. But
suddenly in the distance, they saw a great heap of tumultuous white water,
and soon after news came from aloft that one or both the boats must be fast.
An interval passed and the boats were in plain sight, in the act of being
dragged right towards the ship by the towing whale. So close did the monster
come to the hull, that at first it seemed as if he meant it malice but
suddenly going down in a maelstrom, within three rods of the planks, he
wholly disappeared from view, as if diving under the keel. Cut, cut was
the cry from the ship to the boats, which, for one instant, seemed on the
point of being brought with a deadly dash against the vessel's side. But
having plenty of line yet in the tubs, and the whale not sounding very
rapidly, they paid out abundance of rope, and at the same time pulled with
all their might so as to get ahead of the ship. For a few minutes the
struggle was intensely critical for while they still slacked out the
tightened line in one direction, and still plied their oars in another, the
contending strain threatened to take them under. But it was only a few feet
advance they sought to gain. And they stuck to it till they did gain it
when instantly, a swift tremor was felt running like lightning along the keel,
as the strained line, scraping beneath the ship, suddenly rose to view under
her bows, snapping and quivering and so flinging off its drippings, that
the drops fell like bits of broken glass on the water, while the whale
beyond also rose to sight, and once more the boats were free
to fly. But the fagged whale abated his speed, and blindly altering his
course, went round the stern of the ship towing the two boats after him, so
that they performed a complete circuit. Meantime, they hauled more and more
upon their lines, till close flanking him on both sides, Stubb answered
Flask with lance for lance and thus round and round the Pequod the battle
went, while the multitudes of sharks that had before swum round the Sperm
Whale's body, rushed to the fresh blood that was spilled, thirstily drinking
at every new gash, as the eager Israelites did at the new bursting fountains
that poured from the smitten rock. At last his spout grew thick, and with a
frightful roll and vomit, he turned upon his back a corpse. While the two
headsmen were engaged in making fast cords to his flukes, and in other ways
getting the mass in readiness for towing, some conversation ensued between
them. I wonder what the old man wants with this lump of foul lard, said
Stubb, not without some disgust at the thought of having to do with so
ignoble a leviathan. Wants with it? said Flask, coiling some spare line in
the boat's bow, did you never hear that the ship which but once has a Sperm
Whale's head hoisted on her starboard side, and at the same time a Right
Whale's on the larboard did you never hear, Stubb, that that ship can never
afterwards capsize? Why not? I don't know, but I heard that gamboge
ghost of a Fedallah saying so, and he seems to know all about ships' charms.
But I sometimes think he'll charm the ship to no good at last. I don't half
like that chap, Stubb. Did you ever notice how that tusk of his is a sort of
carved into a snake's head, Stubb? Sink him I never look at him at all
but if ever I get a chance of a dark night, and he standing hard by the
bulwarks, and no one by look down there, Flask pointing into the sea with
a peculiar motion of both hands  Aye, will I Flask, I take that Fedallah to
be the devil in disguise. Do you believe that cock and bull story about his
having been stowed away on board ship? He's the devil, I say. The reason why
you don't see his tail, is because he tucks it up out of sight he carries
it
coiled away in his pocket, I guess. Blast him now that I think of it, he's
always wanting oakum to stuff into the toes of his boots. He sleeps in his
boots, don't he? He hasn't got any hammock but I've seen him lay of nights
in a coil of rigging. No doubt, and it's because of his cursed tail he
coils it down, do ye see, in the eye of the rigging. What's the old man
have so much to do with him for? Striking up a swap or a bargain, I
suppose. Bargain? about what? Why, do ye see, the old man is hard bent
after that White Whale, and the devil there is trying to come round him, and
get him to swap away his silver watch, or his soul, or something of that
sort, and then he'll surrender Moby Dick. Pooh Stubb, you are
skylarking how can Fedallah do that? I don't know, Flask, but the devil
is a curious chap, and a wicked one, I tell ye. Why, they say as how he
went a sauntering into the old flagship once, switching his tail about
devilish easy and gentlemanlike, and inquiring if the old governor was at
home. Well, he was at home, and asked the devil what he wanted. The devil,
switching his hoofs, up and says, "I want John." "What for?" says the old
governor, "What business is that of yours," says the devil, getting mad, "I
want to use him." "Take him," says the governor and by the Lord, Flask, if
the devil didn't give John the Asiatic cholera before he got through with
him, I'll eat this whale in one mouthful. But look sharp aint you all ready
there? Well, then, pull ahead, and let's get the whale alongside. I think
I remember some such story as you were telling, said Flask, when at last the
two boats were slowly advancing with their burden towards the ship, but I
can't remember where. Three Spaniards? Adventures of those three
bloodyminded soldadoes? Did ye read it there, Flask? I guess ye did? No
never saw such a book heard of it, though. But now, tell me, Stubb, do you
suppose that that devil you was speaking of just now, was the same you say is
now on board the Pequod?
Am I the same man that helped kill this whale? Doesn't the devil live for
ever who ever heard that the devil was dead? Did you ever see any parson a
wearing mourning for the devil? And if the devil has a latchkey to get into
the admiral's cabin, don't you suppose he can crawl into a porthole? Tell me
that, Mr. Flask? How old do you suppose Fedallah is, Stubb? Do you see
that mainmast there? pointing to the ship well, that's the figure one
now take all the hoops in the Pequod's hold, and string 'em along in a row
with that mast, for oughts, do you see well, that wouldn't begin to be
Fedallah's age. Nor all the coopers in creation couldn't show hoops enough to
make oughts enough. but see here, stubb, i thought you a little boasted
just now, that you meant to give Fedallah a seatoss, if you got a good
chance. Now, if he's so old as all those hoops of yours come to, and if he
is going to live for ever, what good will it do to pitch him overboard tell
me that? Give him a good ducking, anyhow. But he'd crawl back. Duck
him again and keep ducking him. Suppose he should take it into his head to
duck you, though  yes, and drown you what then? I should like to see him
try it I'd give him such a pair of black eyes that he wouldn't dare to show
his face in the admiral's cabin again for a long while, let alone down in the
orlop there, where he lives, and hereabouts on the upper decks where he
sneaks so much. Damn the devil, Flask do you suppose I'm afraid of the
devil? Who's afraid of him, except the old governor who daresn't catch him
and put him in doubledarbies, as he deserves, but lets him go about
kidnapping people aye, and signed a bond with him, that all the people the
devil kidnapped, he'd roast for him? There's a governor Do you suppose
Fedallah wants to kidnap Captain Ahab? Do I suppose it? You'll know it
before long, Flask. But I am going now to keep a sharp lookout on him and
if I see anything very suspicious going on, I'll just take him by the nape
of his neck, and say Look here, Beelzebub, you don't do
it and if he makes any fuss, by the Lord I'll make a grab into his pocket
for his tail, take it to the capstan, and give him such a wrenching and
heaving, that his tail will come short off at the stump do you see and
then, I rather guess when he finds himself docked in that queer fashion,
he'll sneak off without the poor satisfaction of feeling his tail between his
legs. And what will you do with the tail, Stubb? Do with it? Sell it for
an ox whip when we get home  what else? Now, do you mean what you say,
and have been saying all along, stubb? Mean or not mean, here we are at
the ship. The boats were here hailed, to tow the whale on the larboard
side, where fluke chains and other necessaries were already prepared for
securing him. Didn't I tell you so? said Flask yes, you'll soon see this
right whale's head hoisted up opposite that parmacetti's. In good time,
Flask's saying proved true. As before, the Pequod steeply leaned over towards
the sperm whale's head, now, by the counterpoise of both heads, she regained
her even keel though sorely strained, you may well believe. So, when on one
side you hoist in Locke's head, you go over that way but now, on the other
side, hoist in Kant's and you come back again but in very poor plight.
Thus, some minds for ever keep trimming boat. Oh, ye foolish throw all
these thunderheads overboard, and then you will float light and right. In
disposing of the body of a right whale, when brought alongside the ship, the
same preliminary proceedings commonly take place as in the case of a sperm
whale only, in the latter instance, the head is cut off whole, but in the
former the lips and tongue are separately removed and hoisted on deck, with
all the well known black bone attached to what is called the crownpiece.
But nothing like this, in the present case, had been done. The carcases of
both whales had dropped astern and the headladen ship not a little resembled
a mule carrying a pair of overburdening panniers. Meantime, Fedallah was
calmly eyeing the right whale's head, and ever and anon glancing from the deep
wrinkles there to the
lines in his own hand. And Ahab chanced so to stand, that the Parsee
occupied his shadow while, if the Parsee's shadow was there at all it seemed
only to blend with, and lengthen Ahab's. As the crew toiled on, Laplandish
speculations were bandied among them, concerning all these passing things.
Here, now, are
two great whales, laying their heads together let us join them, and lay
together our own. Of the grand order of folio leviathans, the Sperm Whale and
the Right Whale are by far the most noteworthy. They are the only whales
regularly hunted by man. To the Nantucketer, they present the two extremes of
all the known varieties of the whale. As the external difference between them
is mainly observable in their heads and as a head of each is this moment
hanging from the Pequod's side and as we may freely go from one to the
other, by merely stepping across the deck where, I should like to know,
will you obtain a better chance to study practical cetology than here? In the
first place, you are struck by the general contrast between these heads.
Both are massive enough in all conscience but there is a certain mathematical
symmetry in the Sperm Whale's which the Right Whale's sadly lacks. There is
more character in the Sperm Whale's head. As you behold it, you
involuntarily yield the immense superiority to him, in point of pervading
dignity. In the present instance, too, this dignity is heightened by the
pepper and salt color of his head at the summit, giving token of advanced age
and large experience. In short, he is what the fishermen technically call a
greyheaded whale. Let us now note what is least dissimilar in these heads
namely, the two most important organs, the eye and the ear.
Far back on the side of the head, and low down, near the angle of either
whale's jaw, if you narrowly search, you will at last see a lashless eye,
which you would fancy to be a young colt's eye so out of all proportion is it
to the magnitude of the head. Now, from this peculiar sideway position of the
whale's eyes, it is plain that he can never see an object which is exactly
ahead, no more than he can one exactly astern. in a word, the position of
the whale's eyes corresponds to that of a man's ears and you may fancy, for
yourself, how it would fare with you, did you sideways survey objects through
your ears. You would find that you could only command some thirty degrees of
vision in advance of the straight sideline of sight and about thirty more
behind it. If your bitterest foe were walking straight towards you, with
dagger uplifted in broad day, you would not be able to see him, any more
than if he were stealing upon you from behind. In a word, you would have two
backs, so to speak but, at the same time, also, two fronts side fronts
for what is it that makes the front of a man what, indeed, but his eyes?
Moreover, while in most other animals that I can now think of, the eyes are so
planted as imperceptibly to blend their visual power, so as to produce one
picture and not two to the brain the peculiar position of the whale's eyes,
effectually divided as they are by many cubic feet of solid head, which
towers between them like a great mountain separating two lakes in valleys
this, of course, must wholly separate the impressions which each independent
organ imparts. The whale, therefore, must see one distinct picture on this
side, and another distinct picture on that side while all between must be
profound darkness and nothingness to him. Man may, in effect, be said to look
out on the world from a sentrybox with two joined sashes for his window.
But with the whale, these two sashes are separately inserted, making two
distinct windows, but sadly impairing the view. This peculiarity of the
whale's eyes is a thing always to be borne in mind in the fishery and to be
remembered by the reader in some subsequent scenes. A curious and most
puzzling question might be started concerning
this visual matter as touching the Leviathan. But I must be content with a
hint. so long as a man's eyes are open in the light, the act of seeing is
involuntary that is, he cannot then help mechanically seeing whatever
objects are before him. Nevertheless, any one's experience will teach him,
that though he can take in an undiscriminating sweep of things at one glance,
it is quite impossible for him, attentively, and completely, to examine any
two things however large or however small at one and the same instant of
time never mind if they lie side by side and touch each other. But if you
now come to separate these two objects, and surround each by a circle of
profound darkness then, in order to see one of them, in such a manner as to
bring your mind to bear on it, the other will be utterly excluded from your
contemporary consciousness. How is it, then, with the whale? True, both his
eyes, in themselves, must simultaneously act but is his brain so much more
comprehensive, combining, and subtle than man's, that he can at the same
moment of time attentively examine two distinct prospects, one on one side of
him, and the other in an exactly opposite direction? If he can, then is it as
marvellous a thing in him, as if a man were able simultaneously to go through
the demonstrations of two distinct problems in Euclid. Nor, strictly
investigated, is there any incongruity in this comparison. It may be but an
idle whim, but it has always seemed to me, that the extraordinary
vacillations of movement displayed by some whales when beset by three or four
boats the timidity and liability to queer frights, so common to such whales
I think that all this indirectly proceeds from the helpless perplexity of
volition, in which their divided and diametrically opposite powers of vision
must involve them. But the ear of the whale is full as curious as the eye. If
you are an entire stranger to their race, you might hunt over these two
heads for hours, and never discover that organ. The ear has no external leaf
whatever and into the hole itself you can hardly insert a quill, so
wondrously minute is it. It is lodged a little behind the eye. With respect
to their ears, this important difference is to be observed between the sperm
whale and the
right. While the ear of the former has an external opening, that of the
latter is entirely and evenly covered over with a membrane, so as to be quite
imperceptible from without. Is it not curious, that so vast a being as the
whale should see the world through so small an eye, and hear the thunder
through an ear which is smaller than a hare's? But if his eyes were broad as
the lens of Herschel's great telescope and his ears capacious as the porches
of cathedrals would that make him any longer of sight, or sharper of
hearing? Not at all.  Why then do you try to enlarge your mind? Subtilize
it. Let us now with whatever levers and steamengines we have at hand, cant
over the sperm whale's head, so that it may lie bottom up then, ascending
by a ladder to the summit, have a peep down the mouth and were it not that
the body is now completely separated from it, with a lantern we might descend
into the great Kentucky Mammoth Cave of his stomach. But let us hold on here
by this tooth, and look about us where we are. What a really beautiful and
chastelooking mouth from floor to ceiling, lined, or rather papered with a
glistening white membrane, glossy as bridal satins. But come out now, and
look at this portentous lower jaw, which seems like the long narrow lid of an
immense snuffbox, with a hinge at one end, instead of one side. If you pry
it up, so as to get it overhead, and expose its rows of teeth, it seems a
terrific portcullis and such, alas it proves to many a poor wight in the
fishery, upon whom these spikes fall with impaling force. But far more
terrible is it to behold, when fathoms down in the sea, you see some sulky
whale, floating there suspended, with his prodigious jaw, some fifteen feet
long, hanging straight down at rightangles with his body, for all the world
like a ship's jibboom. This whale is not dead he is only dispirited out
of sorts, perhaps hypochondriac and so supine, that the hinges of his jaw
have relaxed, leaving him there in that ungainly sort of plight, a reproach
to all his tribe, who must, no doubt, imprecate lockjaws upon him. In most
cases this lower jaw being easily unhinged by a practised artist is
disengaged and hoisted on deck for the purpose of extracting the ivory teeth,
and furnishing a supply of
that hard white whalebone with which the fishermen fashion all sorts of
curious articles, including canes, umbrellastocks, and handles to
ridingwhips. With a long, weary hoist the jaw is dragged on board, as if it
were an anchor and when the proper time comes some few days after the other
work Queequeg, Daggoo, and Tashtego, being all accomplished dentists, are set
to drawing teeth. With a keen cuttingspade, Queequeg lances the gums then
the jaw is lashed down to ringbolts, and a tackle being rigged from aloft,
they drag out these teeth, as Michigan oxen drag stumps of old oaks out of
wild woodlands. There are generally fortytwo teeth in all in old whales,
much worn down, but undecayed nor filled after our artificial fashion. The
jaw is afterwards sawn into slabs, and piled away like joists for building
houses.
Crossing the
deck, let us now have a good long look at the Right Whale's head. As in
general shape the noble Sperm Whale's head may be compared to a Roman
warchariot especially in front, where it is so broadly rounded so, at a
broad view, the Right Whale's head bears a rather inelegant resemblance to a
gigantic galliottoed shoe. Two hundred years ago an old Dutch voyager
likened its shape to that of a shoemaker's last. And in this same last or
shoe, that old woman of the nursery tale, with the swarming brood, might
very comfortably be lodged, she and all her progeny. But as you come nearer
to this great head it begins to assume different aspects, according to your
point of view. If you stand on its summit and look at these two fshaped
spoutholes, you would take the whole head for an enormous bassviol, and
these
spiracles, the apertures in its soundingboard. Then, again, if you fix your
eye upon this strange, crested, comblike incrustation on the top of the mass
this green, barnacled thing, which the Greenlanders call the crown, and
the Southern fishers the bonnet of the Right Whale fixing your eyes solely
on this, you would take the head for the trunk of some huge oak, with a
bird's nest in its crotch. At any rate, when you watch those live crabs that
nestle here on this bonnet, such an idea will be almost sure to occur to you
unless, indeed, your fancy has been fixed by the technical term crown also
bestowed upon it in which case you will take great interest in thinking how
this mighty monster is actually a diademed king of the sea, whose green
crown has been put together for him in this marvellous manner. But if this
whale be a king, he is a very sulky looking fellow to grace a diadem. Look
at that hanging lower lip what a huge sulk and pout is there a sulk and
pout, by carpenter's measurement, about twenty feet long and five feet deep
a sulk and pout that will yield you some  gallons of oil and more. A great
pity, now, that this unfortunate whale should be harelipped. The fissure is
about a foot across. Probably the mother during an important interval was
sailing down the Peruvian coast, when earthquakes caused the beach to gape.
Over this lip, as over a slippery threshold, we now slide into the mouth.
Upon my word were I at Mackinaw, I should take this to be the inside of an
Indian wigwam. Good Lord is this the road that Jonah went? The roof is
about twelve feet high, and runs to a pretty sharp angle, as if there were a
regular ridgepole there while these ribbed, arched, hairy sides, present us
with those wondrous, half vertical, scimetarshaped slats of whalebone, say
three hundred on a side, which depending from the upper part of the head or
crown bone, form those Venetian blinds which have elsewhere been cursorily
mentioned. The edges of these bones are fringed with hairy fibres, through
which the Right Whale strains the water, and in whose intricacies he retains
the small fish, when openmouthed he goes through the seas of brit in feeding
time. In the central blinds of bone, as they stand in their natural order,
there are certain curious marks, curves, hollows, and ridges, whereby some
whalemen calculate
the creature's age, as the age of an oak by its circular rings. Though the
certainty of this criterion is far from demonstrable, yet it has the savor of
analogical probability. At any rate, if we yield to it, we must grant a far
greater age to the Right Whale than at first glance will seem reasonable. In
old times, there seem to have prevailed the most curious fancies concerning
these blinds. One voyager in Purchas calls them the wondrous whiskers
inside of the whale's mouth another, hogs' bristles a third old gentleman
in Hackluyt uses the following elegant language There are about two hundred
and fifty fins growing on each side of his upper chop, which arch over his
tongue on each side of his mouth. As every one knows, these same hogs'
bristles, fins, whiskers, blinds, or whatever you please, furnish to
the ladies their busks and other stiffening contrivances. But in this
particular, the demand has long been on the decline. It was in Queen Anne's
time that the bone was in its glory, the farthingale being then all the
fashion. And as those ancient dames moved about gaily, though in the jaws of
the whale, as you may say even so, in a shower, with the like
thoughtlessness, do we nowadays fly under the same jaws for protection the
umbrella being a tent spread over the same bone. But now forget all about
blinds and whiskers for a moment, and, standing in the Right Whale's mouth,
look around you afresh. Seeing all these colonnades of bone so methodically
ranged about, would you not think you were inside the great Haarlem organ,
and gazing upon its thousand pipes? For a carpet to the organ we have a rug
of the softest Turkey the tongue, which is glued, as it were, to the floor of
the mouth. It is very fat and tender, and apt to tear in pieces in hoisting
it on deck. This particular tongue now before us at a passing glance I
should say it was a sixbarreler that is, it will yield you about that
amount of oil. Ere this, you must have plainly seen the truth of what I
started with that the Sperm Whale and the Right Whale have almost entirely
different heads. To sum up, then in the Right Whale's there is no great
well of sperm no ivory teeth at all no long, slender mandible of a lower
jaw, like the Sperm Whale's. Nor in the Sperm Whale are there any of those
blinds of bone no huge lower lip and scarcely anything of a tongue. Again,
the Right Whale has two external spoutholes, the Sperm Whale only one.
Look your last, now, on these venerable hooded heads, while they yet lie
together for one will soon sink, unrecorded, in the sea the other will not
be very long in following. Can you catch the expression of the Sperm Whale's
there? It is the same he died with, only some of the longer wrinkles in the
forehead seem now faded away. I think his broad brow to be full of a
prairielike placidity, born of a speculative indifference as to death.
But mark the other head's expression. See that amazing lower lip, pressed by
accident against the vessel's side, so as firmly to embrace the jaw. Does
not this whole head seem to speak of an enormous practical resolution in
facing death? This Right Whale I take to have been a Stoic the Sperm
Whale, a Platonian, who might have taken up Spinoza in his latter years.
This reminds us that the Right Whale really has a sort of whisker, or rather
a moustache, consisting of a few scattered white hairs on the upper part of
the outer end of the lower jaw. Sometimes these tufts impart a rather
brigandish expression to his otherwise solemn countenance.
Ere quitting, for the nonce, the
Sperm Whale's head, I would have you, as a sensible physiologist, simply
particularly remark its front aspect, in all its compacted collectedness. I
would have you investigate it now with the sole view of forming to yourself
some unexaggerated, intelligent estimate of whatever batteringram power may
be lodged there. Here is a vital point for you must either satisfactorily
settle this matter with yourself, or for ever remain an infidel as to one of
the most appalling,
but not the less true events, perhaps anywhere to be found in all recorded
history. You observe that in the ordinary swimming position of the Sperm
Whale, the front of his head presents an almost wholly vertical plane to the
water you observe that the lower part of that front slopes considerably
backwards, so as to furnish more of a retreat for the long socket which
receives the boomlike lower jaw you observe that the mouth is entirely
under the head, much in the same way, indeed, as though your own mouth were
entirely under your chin. Moreover you observe that the whale has no external
nose and that what nose he has his spout hole is on the top of his head
you observe that his eyes and ears are at the sides of his head, nearly one
third of his entire length from the front. Wherefore, you must now have
perceived that the front of the Sperm Whale's head is a dead, blind wall,
without a single organ or tender prominence of any sort whatsoever.
Furthermore, you are now to consider that only in the extreme, lower, backward
sloping part of the front of the head, is there the slightest vestige of bone
and not till you get near twenty feet from the forehead do you come to the
full cranial development. So that this whole enormous boneless mass is as one
wad. Finally, though, as will soon be revealed, its contents partly comprise
the most delicate oil yet, you are now to be apprised of the nature of the
substance which so impregnably invests all that apparent effeminacy. In some
previous place I have described to you how the blubber wraps the body of the
whale, as the rind wraps an orange. Just so with the head but with this
difference about the head this envelope, though not so thick, is of a
boneless toughness, inestimable by any man who has not handled it. The
severest pointed harpoon, the sharpest lance darted by the strongest human
arm, impotently rebounds from it. It is as though the forehead of the Sperm
Whale were paved with horses' hoofs. I do not think that any sensation lurks
in it. Bethink yourself also of another thing. When two large, loaded
Indiamen chance to crowd and crush towards each other in the docks, what do
the sailors do? They do not suspend between them, at the point of coming
contact, any merely hard substance,
like iron or wood. No, they hold there a large, round wad of tow and cork,
enveloped in the thickest and toughest of oxhide. That bravely and uninjured
takes the jam which would have snapped all their oaken handspikes and iron
crowbars. By itself this sufficiently illustrates the obvious fact I drive
at. But supplementary to this, it has hypothetically occurred to me, that
as ordinary fish possess what is called a swimming bladder in them, capable,
at will, of distension or contraction and as the Sperm Whale, as far as I
know, has no such provision in him considering, too, the otherwise
inexplicable manner in which he now depresses his head altogether beneath the
surface, and anon swims with it high elevated out of the water considering
the unobstructed elasticity of its envelop considering the unique interior
of his head it has hypothetically occurred to me, I say, that those mystical
lungcelled honeycombs there may possibly have some hitherto unknown and
unsuspected connexion with the outer air, so as to be susceptible to
atmospheric distension and contraction. If this be so, fancy the
irresistibleness of that might, to which the most impalpable and destructive
of all elements contributes. Now, mark. Unerringly impelling this dead,
impregnable, uninjurable wall, and this most buoyant thing within there
swims behind it all a mass of tremendous life, only to be adequately
estimated as piled wood is by the cord and all obedient to one volition, as
the smallest insect. So that when I shall hereafter detail to you all the
specialities and concentrations of potency everywhere lurking in this
expansive monster when I shall show you some of his more inconsiderable
braining feats I trust you will have renounced all ignorant incredulity,
and be ready to abide by this that though the Sperm Whale stove a passage
through the Isthmus of Darien, and mixed the Atlantic with the Pacific, you
would not elevate one hair of your eyebrow. For unless you own the whale,
you are but a provincial and sentimentalist in Truth. But clear Truth is a
thing for salamander giants only to encounter how small the chances for the
provincials then? What befel the weakling youth lifting the dread goddess's
veil at Sais?
Now comes the Baling of
the Case. But to comprehend it aright, you must know something of the
curious internal structure of the thing operated upon. Regarding the Sperm
whale's head as a solid oblong, you may, on an inclined plane, sideways
divide it into two quoins, whereof the lower is the bony structure, forming
the cranium and jaws, and the upper an unctuous mass wholly free from bones
its broad forward end forming the expanded vertical apparent forehead of the
whale. At the middle of the forehead horizontally subdivide this upper quoin,
and then you have two almost equal parts, which before were naturally
divided by an internal wall of a thick tendinous substance. The lower
subdivided part, called the junk, is one immense honeycomb of oil, formed by
the crossing and recrossing, into ten thousand infiltrated cells, of tough
elastic white fibres throughout its whole extent. The upper part, known as
the Case, may be regarded as the great Heidelburgh Tun of the Sperm Whale.
And as that famous great tierce is mystically carved in front, so the whale's
vast plaited forehead forms innumerable strange devices for the emblematical
adornment of his wondrous tun. Moreover, as that of Heidelburgh was always
replenished with the most excellent of the wines of the Rhenish valleys, so
the tun of the whale contains by far the most precious of all his oily
vintages namely, the highlyprized spermaceti, in its absolutely pure,
limpid, and odoriferous state. Nor is this precious substance found unalloyed
in any other part of the creature. Though in life it remains perfectly fluid,
yet, upon
exposure to the air, after death, it soon begins to concrete sending forth
beautiful crystalline shoots, as when the first thin delicate ice is just
forming in water. A large whale's case generally yields about five hundred
gallons of sperm, though from unavoidable circumstances, considerable of it
is spilled, leaks, and dribbles away, or is otherwise irrevocably lost in the
ticklish business of securing what you can. I know not with what fine and
costly material the heidelburgh Tun was coated within, but in superlative
richness that coating could not possibly have compared with the silken
pearlcolored membrane, like the line of a fine pelisse, forming the inner
surface of the Sperm Whale's case. It will have been seen that the Heidelburgh
Tun of the Sperm Whale embraces the entire length of the entire top of the
head and since as has been elsewhere set forth the head embraces one third
of the whole length of the creature, then setting that length down at eighty
feet for a good sized whale, you have more than twentysix feet for the depth
of the tun, when it is lengthwise hoisted up and down against a ship's side.
As in decapitating the whale, the operator's instrument is brought close to
the spot where an entrance is subsequently forced into the spermaceti
magazine he has, therefore, to be uncommonly heedful, lest a careless,
untimely stroke should invade the sanctuary and wastingly let out its
invaluable contents. It is this decapitated end of the head, also, which is at
last elevated out of the water, and retained in that position by the
enormous cutting tackles, whose hempen combinations, on one side, make
quite a wilderness of ropes in that quarter. Thus much being said, attend
now, I pray you, to that marvellous and in this particular instance
almost fatal operation whereby the Sperm Whale's great Heidelburgh Tun is
tapped.
Quoin is not a Euclidean term. It belongs to the pure nautical mathematics.
I know not that it has been defined before. A quoin is a solid which differs
from a wedge in having its sharp end formed by the steep inclination of one
side, instead of the mutual tapering of both sides.
Nimble as a cat, Tashtego
mounts aloft and without altering his erect posture, runs straight out upon
the overhanging mainyardarm, to the part where it exactly projects over the
hoisted Tun. He has carried with him a light tackle called a whip,
consisting of only two parts, travelling through a singlesheaved block.
Securing this block, so that it hangs down from the yardarm, he swings one
end of the rope, till it is caught and firmly held by a hand on deck. Then,
handoverhand, down the other part, the Indian drops through the air, till
dexterously he lands on the summit of the head. There still high elevated
above the rest of the company, to whom he vivaciously cries he seems some
Turkish Muezzin calling the good people to prayers from the top of a tower. A
shorthandled sharp spade being sent up to him, he diligently searches for
the proper place to begin breaking into the Tun. In this business he proceeds
very heedfully, like a treasurehunter in some old house, sounding the
walls to find where the gold is masoned in. By the time this cautious search
is over, a stout ironbound bucket, precisely like a wellbucket, has been
attached to one end of the whip while the other end, being stretched across
the deck, is there held by two or three alert hands. These last now hoist
the bucket within grasp of the Indian, to whom another person has reached up
a very long pole. Inserting this pole into the bucket, Tashtego downward
guides the bucket into the Tun, till it entirely disappears then giving the
word to the seamen at the whip, up comes the bucket again, all bubbling like
a dairymaid's pail of new milk. Carefully lowered from its height, the
fullfreighted vessel is caught by an appointed hand, and quickly emptied
into a large tub. Then remounting aloft, it again goes through the same
round until the deep cistern will yield no more. Towards the end, Tashtego
has to ram his long pole harder and
harder, and deeper and deeper into the Tun, until some twenty feet of the
pole have gone down. Now, the people of the Pequod had been baling some time
in this way several tubs had been filled with the fragrant sperm when all
at once a queer accident happened. Whether it was that Tashtego, that wild
Indian, was so heedless and reckless as to let go for a moment his onehanded
hold on the great cabled tackles suspending the head or whether the place
where he stood was so treacherous and oozy or whether the Evil One himself
would have it to fall out so, without stating his particular reasons how it
was exactly, there is no telling now but, on a sudden, as the eightieth
or ninetieth bucket came suckingly up my God poor Tashtego like the twin
reciprocating bucket in a veritable well, dropped headforemost down into
this great Tun of Heidelburgh, and with a horrible oily gurgling, went
clean out of sight Man overboard cried Daggoo, who amid the general
consternation first came to his senses. Swing the bucket this way and
putting one foot into it, so as the better to secure his slippery handhold
on the whip itself, the hoisters ran him high up to the top of the head,
almost before Tashtego could have reached its interior bottom. Meantime,
there was a terrible tumult. Looking over the side, they saw the before
lifeless head throbbing and heaving just below the surface of the sea, as if
that moment seized with some momentous idea whereas it was only the poor
Indian unconsciously revealing by those struggles the perilous depth to which
he had sunk. At this instant, while Daggoo, on the summit of the head, was
clearing the whip which had somehow got foul of the great cutting tackles a
sharp cracking noise was heard and to the unspeakable horror of all, one of
the two enormous hooks suspending the head tore out, and with a vast
vibration the enormous mass sideways swung, till the drunk ship reeled and
shook as if smitten by an iceberg. The one remaining hook, upon which the
entire strain now depended, seemed every instant to be on the point of giving
way an event still more likely from the violent motions of the head. Come
down, come down yelled the seamen to Daggoo, but
with one hand holding on to the heavy tackles, so that if the head should
drop, he would still remain suspended the negro having cleared the foul
line, rammed down the bucket into the now collapsed well, meaning that the
buried harpooneer should grasp it, and so be hoisted out. In heaven's name,
man, cried Stubb, are you ramming home a cartridge there? Avast How
will that help him jamming that ironbound bucket on top of his head? Avast,
will ye Stand clear of the tackle cried a voice like the bursting of a
rocket. Almost in the same instant, with a thunderboom, the enormous mass
dropped into the sea, like Niagara's TableRock into the whirlpool the
suddenly relieved hull rolled away from it, to far down her glittering copper
and all caught their breath, as half swinging now over the sailors' heads,
and now over the water Daggoo, through a thick mist of spray, was dimly
beheld clinging to the pendulous tackles, while poor, buriedalive
Tashtego was sinking utterly down to the bottom of the sea But hardly had
the blinding vapor cleared away, when a naked figure with a boardingsword in
its hand, was for one swift moment seen hovering over the bulwarks. The
next, a loud splash announced that my brave Queequeg had dived to the
rescue. One packed rush was made to the side, and every eye counted every
ripple, as moment followed moment, and no sign of either the sinker or the
diver could be seen. Some hands now jumped into a boat alongside, and pushed
a little off from the ship. Ha ha cried Daggoo, all at once, from his
now quiet, swinging perch overhead and looking further off from the side,
we saw an arm thrust upright from the blue waves a sight strange to see, as
an arm thrust forth from the grass over a grave. both both it is both
cried daggoo again with a joyful shout and soon after, Queequeg was seen
boldly striking out with one hand, and with the other clutching the long hair
of the Indian. Drawn into the waiting boat, they were quickly brought to
the deck but Tashtego was long in coming to, and Queequeg did not look very
brisk.
Now, how had this noble rescue been accomplished? Why, diving after the
slowly descending head, Queequeg with his keen sword had made side lunges
near its bottom, so as to scuttle a large hole there then dropping his
sword, had thrust his long arm far inwards and upwards, and so hauled out our
poor Tash by the head. He averred, that upon first thrusting in for him, a
leg was presented but well knowing that that was not as it ought to be, and
might occasion great trouble  he had thrust back the leg, and by a
dexterous heave and toss, had wrought a somerset upon the Indian so that
with the next trial, he came forth in the good old way head foremost. As
for the great head itself, that was doing as well as could be expected. And
thus, through the courage and great skill in obstetrics of Queequeg, the
deliverance, or rather, delivery of Tashtego, was successfully accomplished,
in the teeth, too, of the most untoward and apparently hopeless impediments
which is a lesson by no means to be forgotten. Midwifery should be taught in
the same course with fencing and boxing, riding and rowing. I know that this
queer adventure of the GayHeader's will be sure to seem incredible to some
landsmen, though they themselves may have either seen or heard of some one's
falling into a cistern ashore an accident which not seldom happens, and
with much less reason too than the Indian's, considering the exceeding
slipperiness of the curb of the Sperm Whale's well. But, peradventure, it may
be sagaciously urged, how is this? We thought the tissued, infiltrated head
of the Sperm Whale, was the lightest and most corky part about him and yet
thou makest it sink in an element of a far greater specific gravity than
itself. We have thee there. Not at all, but I have ye for at the time
poor Tash fell in, the case had been nearly emptied of its lighter contents,
leaving little but the dense tendinous wall of the well a double welded,
hammered substance, as I have before said, much heavier than the sea water,
and a lump of which sinks in it like lead almost. But the tendency to rapid
sinking in this substance was in the present instance materially counteracted
by the other parts of the head remaining undetached from it, so that it sank
very slowly and deliberately indeed, affording Queequeg a fair chance for
performing his agile
obstetrics on the run, as you may say. Yes, it was a running delivery, so
it was. Now, had Tashtego perished in that head, it had been a very precious
perishing smothered in the very whitest and daintiest of fragrant
spermaceti coffined, hearsed, and tombed in the secret inner chamber and
sanctum sanctorum of the whale. Only one sweeter end can readily be recalled
the delicious death of an Ohio honeyhunter, who seeking honey in the crotch
of a hollow tree, found such exceeding store of it, that leaning too far
over, it sucked him in, so that he died embalmed. How many, think ye,
have likewise fallen into Plato's honey head, and sweetly perished there?
To scan the lines of his face, or feel
the bumps on the head of this Leviathan this is a thing which no
Physiognomist or Phrenologist has as yet undertaken. Such an enterprise would
seem almost as hopeful as for Lavater to have scrutinized the wrinkles on the
Rock of Gibraltar, or for Gall to have mounted a ladder and manipulated the
Dome of the Pantheon. Still, in that famous work of his, Lavater not only
treats of the various faces of men, but also attentively studies the faces of
horses, birds, serpents, and fish and dwells in detail upon the
modifications of expression discernible therein. Nor have Gall and his
disciple Spurzheim failed to throw out some hints touching the phrenological
characteristics of other beings than man. Therefore, though I am but ill
qualified for a pioneer, in the application of these two semisciences to the
whale, I will do my endeavor. I try all things I achieve what I can.
Physiognomically regarded, the Sperm Whale is an anomalous creature. He has
no proper nose. And since the nose is the central and most conspicuous of the
features and since it perhaps
most modifies and finally controls their combined expression hence it would
seem that its entire absence, as an external appendage, must very largely
affect the countenance of the whale. For as in landscape gardening, a spire,
cupola, monument, or tower of some sort, is deemed almost indispensable to
the completion of the scene so no face can be physiognomically in keeping
without the elevated openwork belfry of the nose. Dash the nose from
Phidias's marble Jove, and what a sorry remainder Nevertheless, Leviathan
is of so mighty a magnitude, all his proportions are so stately, that the
same deficiency which in the sculptured Jove were hideous, in him is no
blemish at all. Nay, it is an added grandeur. A nose to the whale would have
been impertinent. As on your physiognomical voyage you sail round his vast
head in your jollyboat, your noble conceptions of him are never insulted by
the reflection that he has a nose to be pulled. A pestilent conceit, which
so often will insist upon obtruding even when beholding the mightiest royal
beadle on his throne. In some particulars, perhaps, the most imposing
physiognomical view to be had of the Sperm Whale, is that of the full front
of his head. This aspect is sublime. In thought a fine human brow is like the
east when troubled with the morning. in the repose of the pasture, the
curled brow of the bull has a touch of the grand in it. Pushing heavy cannon
up mountain defiles, the elephant's brow is majestic. Human or animal, the
mystical brow is as that great golden seal affixed by the German emperors to
their decrees. It signifies God done this day by my hand. But in most
creatures, nay in man himself, very often the brow is but a mere strip of
alpine land lying along the snow line. Few are the foreheads which like
Shakespeare's or Melancthon's rise so high, and descend so low, that the eyes
themselves seem clear, eternal, tideless mountain lakes and all above them
in the forehead's wrinkles, you seem to track the antlered thoughts descending
there to drink, as the Highland hunters track the snow prints of the deer.
But in the great Sperm Whale, this high and mighty godlike dignity inherent
in the brow is so immensely amplified, that gazing on it, in that full front
view, you feel the Deity and the dread powers
more forcibly than in beholding any other object in living nature. For you see
no one point precisely not one distinct feature is revealed no nose, eyes,
ears, or mouth no face he has none, proper nothing but that one broad
firmament of a forehead, pleated with riddles dumbly lowering with the doom
of boats, and ships, and men. Nor, in profile, does this wondrous brow
diminish though that way viewed, its grandeur does not domineer upon you
so. In profile, you plainly perceive that horizontal, semicrescentic
depression in the forehead's middle, which, in man, is Lavater's mark of
genius. But how? Genius in the Sperm Whale? Has the Sperm Whale ever
written a book, spoken a speech? No, his great genius is declared in his
doing nothing particular to prove it. It is moreover declared in his
pyramidical silence. And this reminds me that had the great Sperm Whale been
known to the young Orient World, he would have been deified by their
childmagian thoughts. they deified the crocodile of the nile, because the
crocodile is tongueless and the Sperm Whale has no tongue, or as least it
is so exceedingly small, as to be incapable of protrusion. If hereafter any
highly cultured, poetical nation shall lure back to their birthright, the
merry Mayday gods of old and livingly enthrone them again in the now
egotistical sky in the now unhaunted hill then be sure, exalted to Jove's
high seat, the great Sperm Whale shall lord it. Champollion deciphered the
wrinkled granite hieroglyphics. But there is no Champollion to decipher the
Egypt of every man's and every being's face. Physiognomy, like every other
human science, is but a passing fable. If then, Sir William Jones, who
read in thirty languages, could not read the simplest peasant's face, in its
profounder and more subtle meanings, how may unlettered Ishmael hope to read
the awful Chaldee of the Sperm Whale's brow? I but put that brow before you.
Read if it you can.
I had not been seated very long ere a man
of a certain venerable robustness entered immediately as the stormpelted
door flew back upon admitting him, a quick regardful eyeing of him by all
the congregation, sufficiently attested that this fine old man was the
chaplain. Yes, it was the famous Father Mapple, so called by the whalemen,
among whom he was a very great favorite. He had been a sailor and a
harpooneer in his youth, but for many years past had dedicated his life to the
ministry. At the time I now write of, Father Mapple was in the hardy winter
of a healthy old age that sort of old age which seems merging into a second
flowering youth, for among all the fissures of his wrinkles, there shone
certain mild gleams of a newly developing bloom the spring verdure peeping
forth even beneath February's snow. No one having previously heard his
history, could for the first time behold Father Mapple without the utmost
interest, because there were certain engrafted clerical peculiarities about
him, imputable to that adventurous maritime life he had led. When he entered
I observed that he carried no umbrella, and certainly had not come in his
carriage, for his tarpaulin hat ran down with melting sleet, and his great
pilot cloth jacket seemed almost to drag him to the floor with the weight of
the water it had absorbed. However, hat and coat and overshoes were one by
one removed, and hung up in a little space in an adjacent corner when,
arrayed in a decent suit, he quietly approached the pulpit. Like most old
fashioned pulpits, it was a very lofty one, and since a regular stairs to
such a height would, by its long angle with the floor, seriously contract the
already small area of the chapel, the architect, it seemed, had acted upon the
hint of Father Mapple, and finished the pulpit without a stairs, substituting
a perpendicular side ladder, like those used in mounting
a ship from a boat at sea. The wife of a whaling captain had provided the
chapel with a handsome pair of red worsted manropes for this ladder, which,
being itself nicely headed, and stained with a mahogany color, the whole
contrivance, considering what manner of chapel it was, seemed by no means in
bad taste. Halting for an instant at the foot of the ladder, and with both
hands grasping the ornamental knobs of the manropes, Father Mapple cast a
look upwards, and then with a truly sailorlike but still reverential
dexterity, hand over hand, mounted the steps as if ascending the maintop of
his vessel. the perpendicular parts of this side ladder, as is usually the
case with swinging ones, were of clothcovered rope, only the rounds were of
wood, so that at every step there was a joint. At my first glimpse of the
pulpit, it had not escaped me that however convenient for a ship, these
joints in the present instance seemed unnecessary. For I was not prepared to
see Father Mapple after gaining the height, slowly turn round, and stooping
over the pulpit, deliberately drag up the ladder step by step, till the whole
was deposited within, leaving him impregnable in his little Quebec. I
pondered some time without fully comprehending the reason for this. Father
Mapple enjoyed such a wide reputation for sincerity and sanctity, that I
could not suspect him of courting notoriety by any mere tricks of the stage.
No, thought I, there must be some sober reason for this thing furthermore,
it must symbolize something unseen. Can it be, then, that by that act of
physical isolation, he signifies his spiritual withdrawal for the time, from
all outward worldly ties and connexions? Yes, for replenished with the meat
and wine of the word, to the faithful man of God, this pulpit, I see, is a
selfcontaining stronghold a lofty Ehrenbreitstein, with a perennial well
of water within the walls. But the side ladder was not the only strange
feature of the place, borrowed from the chaplain's former seafarings.
Between the marble cenotaphs on either hand of the pulpit, the wall which
formed its back was adorned with a large painting representing a gallant ship
beating against a terrible storm off a lee coast of black rocks and snowy
breakers. But high above the
flying scud and darkrolling clouds, there floated a little isle of sunlight,
from which beamed forth an angel's face and this bright face shed a distinct
spot of radiance upon the ship's tossed deck, something like that silver
plate now inserted into the Victory's plank where Nelson fell. Ah, noble
ship, the angel seemed to say, beat on, beat on, thou noble ship, and
bear a hardy helm for lo the sun is breaking through the clouds are
rolling off serenest azure is at hand. Nor was the pulpit itself without a
trace of the same seataste that had achieved the ladder and the picture. Its
panelled front was in the likeness of a ship's bluff bows, and the Holy Bible
rested on the projecting piece of scroll work, fashioned after a ship's
fiddleheaded beak. What could be more full of meaning? for the pulpit is
ever this earth's foremost part all the rest comes in its rear the pulpit
leads the world. From thence it is the storm of God's quick wrath is first
descried, and the bow must bear the earliest brunt. From thence it is the
God of breezes fair or foul is first invoked for favorable winds. Yes, the
world's a ship on its passage out, and not a voyage complete and the pulpit
is its prow.
If the Sperm Whale be physiognomically a
Sphinx, to the phrenologist his brain seems that geometrical circle which it
is impossible to square. In the fullgrown creature the skull will measure at
least twenty feet in length. Unhinge the lower jaw, and the side view of
this skull is as the side view of a moderately inclined plane resting
throughout on a level base. But in life as we have elsewhere seen this
inclined plane is angularly filled up, and almost squared by the enormous
superincumbent mass of the junk and sperm. At the high end the skull forms a
crater to bed that part of the mass while under the long floor of this
crater  in another cavity seldom exceeding ten inches in length and as many
in depth reposes the mere handful of this monster's brain. The brain is at
least twenty feet from his apparent forehead in life it is hidden away
behind its vast outworks, like the innermost citadel within the amplified
fortifications of Quebec. So like a choice casket is it secreted in him,
that I have known some whalemen who peremptorily deny that the Sperm Whale
has any other brain than that palpable semblance of one formed by the
cubicyards of his sperm magazine. Lying in strange folds, courses, and
convolutions, to their apprehensions, it seems more in keeping with the idea
of his general might to regard that mystic part of him as the seat of his
intelligence. It is plain, then, that phrenologically the head of this
Leviathan, in the creature's living intact state, is an entire delusion. As
for his true brain, you can then see no indications of it, nor feel any.
The whale, like all things that are mighty, wears a false brow to the common
world. If you unload his skull of its spermy heaps and then take a rear view
of its rear end, which is the high end, you will be
struck by its resemblance to the human skull, beheld in the same situation,
and from the same point of view. Indeed, place this reversed skull scaled
down to the human magnitude among a plate of men's skulls, and you would
involuntarily confound it with them and remarking the depressions on one
part of its summit, in phrenological phrase you would say This man had no
selfesteem, and no veneration. And by those negations, considered along with
the affirmative fact of his prodigious bulk and power, you can best form to
yourself the truest, though not the most exhilarating conception of what the
most exalted potency is. But if from the comparative dimensions of the
whale's proper brain, you deem it incapable of being adequately charted,
then I have another idea for you. If you attentively regard almost any
quadruped's spine, you will be struck with the resemblance of its vertebrae
to a strung necklace of dwarfed skulls, all bearing rudimental resemblance
to the skull proper. It is a German conceit, that the vertebrae are
absolutely undeveloped skulls. But the curious external resemblance, I take
it the Germans were not the first men to perceive. A foreign friend once
pointed it out to me, in the skeleton of a foe he had slain, and with the
vertebrae of which he was inlaying, in a sort of bassorelievo, the beaked
prow of his canoe. Now, I consider that the phrenologists have omitted an
important thing in not pushing their investigations from the cerebellum
through the spinal canal. For I believe that much of a man's character will be
found betokened in his backbone. I would rather feel your spine than your
skull, whoever you are. A thin joist of a spine never yet upheld a full and
noble soul. I rejoice in my spine, as in the firm audacious staff of that
flag which I fling half out to the world. Apply this spinal branch of
phrenology to the Sperm Whale. His cranial cavity is continuous with the first
neckvertebra and in that vertebra the bottom of the spinal canal will
measure ten inches across, being eight in height, and of a triangular
figure with the base downwards. As it passes through the remaining vertebrae
the canal tapers in size, but for a considerable distance remains of large
capacity. Now, of course, this
canal is filled with much the same strangely fibrous substance  the spinal
cord as the brain and directly communicates with the brain. And what is
still more, for many feet after emerging from the brain's cavity, the spinal
cord remains of an undecreasing girth, almost equal to that of the brain.
Under all these circumstances, would it be unreasonable to survey and map
out the whale's spine phrenologically? For, viewed in this light, the
wonderful comparative smallness of his brain proper is more than compensated
by the wonderful comparative magnitude of his spinal cord. But leaving this
hint to operate as it may with the phrenologists, I would merely assume the
spinal theory for a moment, in reference to the sperm whale's hump. This
august hump, if I mistake not, rises over one of the larger vertebrae, and
is, therefore, in some sort, the outer convex mould of it. From its relative
situation then, I should call this high hump the organ of firmness or
indomitableness in the Sperm Whale. And that the great monster is
indomitable, you will yet have reason to know.
The predestinated day
arrived, and we duly met the ship Jungfrau, Derick De Deer, master, of
Bremen. At one time the greatest whaling people in the world, the Dutch and
Germans are now among the least but here and there at very wide intervals of
latitude and longitude, you still occasionally meet with their flag in the
Pacific. For some reason, the Jungfrau seemed quite eager to pay her
respects. While yet some distance from the Pequod, she rounded to, and
dropping a boat, her captain was impelled towards us, impatiently standing
in the bows instead of the stern.
What has he in his hand there? cried Starbuck, pointing to something
wavingly held by the German. Impossible a lampfeeder Not that, said
Stubb, no, no, it's a coffeepot, Mr. Starbuck he's coming off to make
us our coffee, is the Yarman don't you see that big tin can there alongside
of him? that's his boiling water. Oh he's all right, is the Yarman. Go
along with you, cried Flask, it's a lampfeeder and an oilcan. He's out
of oil, and has come abegging. However curious it may seem for an oilship
to be borrowing oil on the whaleground, and however much it may invertedly
contradict the old proverb about carrying coals to Newcastle, yet sometimes
such a thing really happens and in the present case Captain Derick De Deer
did indubitably conduct a lampfeeder as Flask did declare. As he mounted the
deck, ahab abruptly accosted him, without at all heeding what he had in his
hand but in his broken lingo, the German soon evinced his complete
ignorance of the White Whale immediately turning the conversation to his
lampfeeder and oil can, with some remarks touching his having to turn into
his hammock at night in profound darkness his last drop of Bremen oil being
gone, and not a single flyingfish yet captured to supply the deficiency
concluding by hinting that his ship was indeed what in the Fishery is
technically called a clean one that is, an empty one, well deserving the
name of Jungfrau or the Virgin. His necessities supplied, Derick departed
but he had not gained his ship's side, when whales were almost simultaneously
raised from the mastheads of both vessels and so eager for the chase was
Derick, that without pausing to put his oilcan and lampfeeder aboard, he
slewed round his boat and made after the leviathan lampfeeders. Now, the
game having risen to leeward, he and the other three German boats that soon
followed him, had considerably the start of the Pequod's keels. There were
eight whales, an average pod. Aware of their danger, they were going all
abreast with great speed straight before the wind, rubbing their flanks as
closely as so many spans of horses in harness. They left a
great, wide wake, as though continually unrolling a great wide parchment upon
the sea. Full in this rapid wake, and many fathoms in the rear, swam a
huge, humped old bull, which by his comparatively slow progress, as well as
by the unusual yellowish incrustations overgrowing him, seemed afflicted
with the jaundice, or some other infirmity. Whether this whale belonged to
the pod in advance, seemed questionable for it is not customary for such
venerable leviathans to be at all social. Nevertheless, he stuck to their
wake, though indeed their back water must have retarded him, because the
whitebone or swell at his broad muzzle was a dashed one, like the swell
formed when two hostile currents meet. His spout was short, slow, and
laborious coming forth with a choking sort of gush, and spending itself in
torn shreds, followed by strange subterranean commotions in him, which
seemed to have egress at his other buried extremity, causing the waters
behind him to upbubble. Who's got some paregoric? said Stubb, he has the
stomachache, I'm afraid. Lord, think of having half an acre of stomachache
Adverse winds are holding mad Christmas in him, boys. It's the first foul
wind I ever knew to blow from astern but look, did ever whale yaw so
before? it must be, he's lost his tiller. As an overladen Indiaman bearing
down the Hindostan coast with a deck load of frightened horses, careens,
buries, rolls, and wallows on her way so did this old whale heave his aged
bulk, and now and then partly turning over on his cumbrous ribends, expose
the cause of his devious wake in the unnatural stump of his starboard fin.
Whether he had lost that fin in battle, or had been born without it, it were
hard to say. Only wait a bit, old chap, and I'll give ye a sling for that
wounded arm, cried cruel Flask, pointing to the whaleline near him. Mind
he don't sling thee with it, cried Starbuck. Give way, or the German will
have him. With one intent all the combined rival boats were pointed for this
one fish, because not only was he the largest, and therefore the most
valuable whale, but he was nearest to them, and the other whales were going
with such great velocity, moreover,
as almost to defy pursuit for the time. At this juncture, the Pequod's keel
had shot by the three German boats last lowered but from the great start he
had had, Derick's boat still led the chase, though every moment neared by
his foreign rivals. The only thing they feared, was, that from being already
so nigh to his mark, he would be enabled to dart his iron before they could
completely overtake and pass him. as for derick, he seemed quite confident
that this would be the case, and occasionally with a deriding gesture shook
his lampfeeder at the other boats. The ungracious and ungrateful dog
cried Starbuck he mocks and dares me with the very poorbox I filled for
him not five minutes ago then in his old intense whisper  give way,
greyhounds Dog to it I tell ye what it is, men cried Stubb to his crew
It's against my religion to get mad but I'd like to eat that villanous
Yarman Pullwon't ye? Are ye going to let that rascal beat ye? Do ye love
brandy? A hogshead of brandy, then, to the best man. Come, why don't some of
ye burst a bloodvessel? Who's that been dropping an anchor overboard we
don't budge an inch we're becalmed. Halloo, here's grass growing in the
boat's bottom and by the Lord, the mast there's budding. This won't do,
boys. Look at that Yarman The short and long of it is, men, will ye spit
fire or not? Oh see the suds he makes cried Flask, dancing up and down
What a hump Oh, do pile on the beef lays like a log Oh my lads, do
spring slapjacks and quohogs for supper, you know, my lads baked clams and
muffins oh, do, do spring he's a hundred barreler don't lose him now
don't oh, don't  see that Yarman Oh won't ye pull for your duff, my
lads such a sog such a sogger Don't ye love sperm? There goes three
thousand dollars, men a bank a whole bank The bank of England Oh, do,
do, do What's that Yarman about now? At this moment Derick was in the act
of pitching his lampfeeder at the advancing boats, and also his oilcan
perhaps with the double view of retarding his rivals' way, and at the same
time economically accelerating his own by the momentary impetus of the
backward toss. The unmannerly Dutch dogger cried Stubb. Pull now,
men, like fifty thousand lineofbattleship loads of redhaired devils. What
d'ye say, Tashtego are you the man to snap your spine in twoandtwenty
pieces for the honor of old Gayhead? What d'ye say? I say, pull like
goddam, cried the Indian. Fiercely, but evenly incited by the taunts of
the German, the Pequod's three boats now began ranging almost abreast and,
so disposed, momentarily neared him. In that fine, loose, chivalrous attitude
of the headsman when drawing near to his prey, the three mates stood up
proudly, occasionally backing the after oarsman with an exhilarating cry of,
There she slides, now Hurrah for the whiteash breeze Down with the
Yarman Sail over him But so decided an original start had Derick had,
that spite of all their gallantry, he would have proved the victor in this
race, had not a righteous judgment descended upon him in a crab which caught
the blade of his midship oarsman. While this clumsy lubber was striving to
free his whiteash, and while, in consequence, Derick's boat was nigh to
capsizing, and he thundering away at his men in a mighty rage that was a
good time for Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask. With a shout, they took a mortal
start forwards, and slantingly ranged up on the German's quarter. An instant
more, and all four boats were diagonically in the whale's immediate wake,
while stretching from them, on both sides, was the foaming swell that he made.
It was a terrific, most pitiable, and maddening sight. The whale was now
going head out, and sending his spout before him in a continual tormented
jet while his one poor fin beat his side in an agony of fright. Now to this
hand, now to that, he yawed in his faltering flight, and still at every
billow that he broke, he spasmodically sank in the sea, or sideways rolled
towards the sky his one beating fin. So have I seen a bird with clipped wing,
making affrighted broken circles in the air, vainly striving to escape the
piratical hawks. But the bird has a voice, and with plaintive cries will make
known her fear but the fear of this vast dumb brute of the sea, was chained
up and enchanted in him he had no voice, save that choking respiration
through his spiracle, and this made the sight of him unspeakably
pitiable while still, in his amazing bulk, portcullis jaw, and omnipotent
tail, there was enough to appal the stoutest man who so pitied. Seeing now
that but a very few moments more would give the Pequod's boats the advantage,
and rather than be thus foiled of his game, Derick chose to hazard what to
him must have seemed a most unusually long dart, ere the last chance would
for ever escape. But no sooner did his harpooneer stand up for the stroke,
than all three tigers Queequeg, Tashtego, Daggoo  instinctively sprang to
their feet, and standing in a diagonal row, simultaneously pointed their
barbs and darted over the head of the German harpooneer, their three
Nantucket irons entered the whale. Blinding vapors of foam and whitefire
The three boats, in the first fury of the whale's headlong rush, bumped the
German's aside with such force, that both Derick and his baffled harpooneer
were spilled out, and sailed over by the three flying keels. Don't be
afraid, my butterboxes, cried Stubb, casting a passing glance upon them as
he shot by ye'll be picked up presently all right I saw some sharks
astern St. Bernard's dogs, you know relieve distressed travellers.
Hurrah this is the way to sail now. Every keel a sunbeam Hurrah Here
we go like three tin kettles at the tail of a mad cougar This puts me in
mind of fastening to an elephant in a tilbury on a plain makes the
wheelspokes fly, boys, when you fasten to him that way and there's danger of
being pitched out too, when you strike a hill. Hurrah this is the way a
fellow feels when he's going to Davy Jones all a rush down an endless
inclined plane Hurrah this whale carries the everlasting mail But the
monster's run was a brief one. Giving a sudden gasp, he tumultuously sounded.
With a grating rush, the three lines flew round the loggerheads with such a
force as to gouge deep grooves in them while so fearful were the
harpooneers that this rapid sounding would soon exhaust the lines, that using
all their dexterous might, they caught repeated smoking turns with the rope
to hold on till at last owing to the perpendicular strain from the
leadlined chocks of the boats, whence the three
ropes went straight down into the blue the gunwales of the bows were almost
even with the water, while the three sterns tilted high in the air. And the
whale soon ceasing to sound, for some time they remained in that attitude,
fearful of expending more line, though the position was a little ticklish.
But though boats have been taken down and lost in this way, yet it is this
holding on, as it is called this hooking up by the sharp barbs of his live
flesh from the back this it is that often torments the Leviathan into soon
rising again to meet the sharp lance of his foes. Yet not to speak of the
peril of the thing, it is to be doubted whether this course is always the
best for it is but reasonable to presume, that the longer the stricken
whale stays under water, the more he is exhausted. Because, owing to the
enormous surface of him in a full grown sperm whale something less than
square feet the pressure of the water is immense. We all know what an
astonishing atmospheric weight we ourselves stand up under even here,
aboveground, in the air how vast, then, the burden of a whale, bearing on
his back a column of two hundred fathoms of ocean It must at least equal the
weight of fifty atmospheres. One whaleman has estimated it at the weight of
twenty lineofbattle ships, with all their guns, and stores, and men on
board. As the three boats lay there on that gently rolling sea, gazing down
into its eternal blue noon and as not a single groan or cry of any sort,
nay, not so much as a ripple or a bubble came up from its depths what
landsman would have thought, that beneath all that silence and placidity, the
utmost monster of the seas was writhing and wrenching in agony Not eight
inches of perpendicular rope were visible at the bows. Seems it credible
that by three such thin threads the great Leviathan was suspended like the big
weight to an eight day clock. Suspended? and to what? To three bits of
board. Is this the creature of whom it was once so triumphantly said  Canst
thou fill his skin with barbed irons? or his head with fishspears? The
sword of him that layeth at him cannot hold, the spear, the dart, nor the
habergeon he esteemeth iron as straw the arrow cannot make him flee
darts are counted as stubble he laugheth at the shaking of a spear This
the creature? this he? Oh that unfulfilments
should follow the prophets. For with the strength of a thousand thighs in his
tail, Leviathan had run his head under the mountains of the sea, to hide him
from the Pequod's fishspears In that sloping afternoon sunlight, the
shadows that the three boats sent down beneath the surface, must have been
long enough and broad enough to shade half Xerxes' army. Who can tell how
appalling to the wounded whale must have been such huge phantoms flitting over
his head Stand by, men he stirs, cried Starbuck, as the three lines
suddenly vibrated in the water, distinctly conducting upwards to them, as by
magnetic wires, the life and death throbs of the whale, so that every oarsman
felt them in his seat. The next moment, relieved in a great part from the
downward strain at the bows, the boats gave a sudden bounce upwards, as a
small icefield will, when a dense herd of white bears are scared from it
into the sea. Haul in Haul in cried Starbuck again he's rising. The
lines, of which, hardly an instant before, not one hand's breadth could have
been gained, were now in long quick coils flung back all dripping into the
boats, and soon the whale broke water within two ship's lengths of the
hunters. His motions plainly denoted his extreme exhaustion. In most land
animals there are certain valves or floodgates in many of their veins,
whereby when wounded, the blood is in some degree at least instantly shut off
in certain directions. Not so with the whale one of whose peculiarities it
is, to have an entire nonvalvular structure of the bloodvessels, so that
when pierced even by so small a point as a harpoon, a deadly drain is at once
begun upon his whole arterial system and when this is heightened by the
extraordinary pressure of water at a great distance below the surface, his
life may be said to pour from him in incessant streams. Yet so vast is the
quantity of blood in him, and so distant and numerous its interior fountains,
that he will keep thus bleeding and bleeding for a considerable period even
as in a drought a river will flow, whose source is in the wellsprings of
faroff and undiscernible hills. Even now, when the boats pulled upon this
whale, and perilously drew over his swaying
flukes, and the lances were darted into him, they were followed by steady
jets from the new made wound, which kept continually playing, while the
natural spouthole in his head was only at intervals, however rapid, sending
its affrighted moisture into the air. From this last vent no blood yet came,
because no vital part of him had thus far been struck. His life, as they
significantly call it, was untouched. As the boats now more closely
surrounded him, the whole upper part of his form, with much of it that is
ordinarily submerged, was plainly revealed. His eyes, or rather the places
where his eyes had been, were beheld. As strange misgrown masses gather in
the knotholes of the noblest oaks when prostrate, so from the points which
the whale's eyes had once occupied, now protruded blind bulbs, horribly
pitiable to see. but pity there was none. For all his old age, and his one
arm, and his blind eyes, he must die the death and be murdered, in order to
light the gay bridals and other merrymakings of men, and also to illuminate
the solemn churches that preach unconditional inoffensiveness by all to all.
Still rolling in his blood, at last he partially disclosed a strangely
discolored bunch or protuberance, the size of a bushel, low down on the flank.
A nice spot, cried Flask just let me prick him there once. Avast
cried Starbuck, there's no need of that But humane Starbuck was too late.
At the instant of the dart an ulcerous jet shot from this cruel wound, and
goaded by it into more than sufferable anguish, the whale now spouting thick
blood, with swift fury blindly darted at the craft, bespattering them and
their glorying crews all over with showers of gore, capsizing Flask's boat and
marring the bows. It was his death stroke. For, by this time, so spent was
he by loss of blood, that he helplessly rolled away from the wreck he had
made lay panting on his side, impotently flapped with his stumped fin,
then over and over slowly revolved like a waning world turned up the white
secrets of his belly lay like a log, and died. It was most piteous, that
last expiring spout. As when by unseen hands the water is gradually drawn off
from some mighty fountain, and with halfstifled melancholy gurglings the
spraycolumn lowers and lowers to the ground so the last long dying spout
of the whale.
Soon, while the crews were awaiting the arrival of the ship, the body showed
symptoms of sinking with all its treasures unrifled. Immediately, by
Starbuck's orders, lines were secured to it at different points, so that ere
long every boat was a buoy the sunken whale being suspended a few inches
beneath them by the cords. By very heedful management, when the ship drew
nigh, the whale was transferred to her side, and was strongly secured there
by the stiffest flukechains, for it was plain that unless artificially
upheld, the body would at once sink to the bottom. It so chanced that almost
upon first cutting into him with the spade, the entire length of a corroded
harpoon was found imbedded in his flesh, on the lower part of the bunch
before described. But as the stumps of harpoons are frequently found in the
dead bodies of captured whales, with the flesh perfectly healed around them,
and no prominence of any kind to denote their place therefore, there must
needs have been some other unknown reason in the present case fully to account
for the ulceration alluded to. But still more curious was the fact of a
lancehead of stone being found in him, not far from the buried iron, the
flesh perfectly firm about it. Who had darted that stone lance? And when?
It might have been darted by some Nor' West Indian long before America was
discovered. What other marvels might have been rummaged out of this monstrous
cabinet there is no telling. But a sudden stop was put to further
discoveries, by the ship's being unprecedentedly dragged over sideways to the
sea, owing to the body's immensely increasing tendency to sink. However,
Starbuck, who had the ordering of affairs, hung on to it to the last hung
on to it so resolutely, indeed, that when at length the ship would have been
capsized, if still persisting in locking arms with the body then, when the
command was given to break clear from it, such was the immovable strain upon
the timberheads to which the flukechains and cables were fastened, that it
was impossible to cast them off. Meantime everything in the Pequod was
aslant. To cross to the other side of the deck was like walking up the steep
gabled roof of a house. The ship groaned and gasped. Many of the ivory
inlayings of her bulwarks and cabins were started from their places, by the
unnatural dislocation. In
vain handspikes and crows were brought to bear upon the immovable
flukechains, to pry them adrift from the timberheads and so low had the
whale now settled that the submerged ends could not be at all approached,
while every moment whole tons of ponderosity seemed added to the sinking bulk,
and the ship seemed on the point of going over. Hold on, hold on, won't
ye? cried Stubb to the body, don't be in such a devil of a hurry to sink
By thunder, men, we must do something or go for it. No use prying there
avast, I say with your handspikes, and run one of ye for a prayer book and a
penknife, and cut the big chains. Knife? Aye, aye, cried Queequeg, and
seizing the carpenter's heavy hatchet, he leaned out of a porthole, and
steel to iron, began slashing at the largest flukechains. But a few strokes,
full of sparks, were given, when the exceeding strain effected the rest.
With a terrific snap, every fastening went adrift the ship righted, the
carcase sank. Now, this occasional inevitable sinking of the recently killed
Sperm Whale is a very curious thing nor has any fisherman yet adequately
accounted for it. Usually the dead Sperm Whale floats with great buoyancy,
with its side or belly considerably elevated above the surface. If the only
whales that thus sank were old, meagre, and brokenhearted creatures, their
pads of lard diminished and all their bones heavy and rheumatic then you
might with some reason assert that this sinking is caused by an uncommon
specific gravity in the fish so sinking, consequent upon this absence of
buoyant matter in him. But it is not so. For young whales, in the highest
health, and swelling with noble aspirations, prematurely cut off in the warm
flush and May of life, with all their panting lard about them even these
brawny, buoyant heroes do sometimes sink. Be it said, however, that the Sperm
Whale is far less liable to this accident than any other species. Where one
of that sort go down, twenty Right Whales do. This difference in the
species is no doubt imputable in no small degree to the greater quantity of
bone in the Right Whale his Venetian blinds alone sometimes weighing more
than a ton from this incumbrance the Sperm Whale is wholly free. But there
are instances where,
after the lapse of many hours or several days, the sunken whale again rises,
more buoyant than in life. But the reason of this is obvious. Gases are
generated in him he swells to a prodigious magnitude becomes a sort of
animal balloon. A lineofbattle ship could hardly keep him under then. In
the Shore Whaling, on soundings, among the Bays of New Zealand, when a Right
Whale gives token of sinking, they fasten buoys to him, with plenty of
rope so that when the body has gone down, they know where to look for it
when it shall have ascended again. It was not long after the sinking of the
body that a cry was heard from the Pequod's mastheads, announcing that the
Jungfrau was again lowering her boats though the only spout in sight was
that of a FinBack, belonging to the species of uncapturable whales,
because of its incredible power of swimming. Nevertheless, the FinBack's
spout is so similar to the Sperm Whale's, that by unskilful fishermen it is
often mistaken for it. And consequently Derick and all his host were now in
valiant chase of this unnearable brute. The Virgin crowding all sail, made
after her four young keels, and thus they all disappeared far to leeward,
still in bold, hopeful chase. Oh many are the FinBacks, and many are the
Dericks, my friend.
There are some
enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method. The more I
dive into this matter of whaling, and push my researches up to the very
springhead of it, so much the more am I impressed with its great
honorableness and antiquity and especially when I find so many great
demigods and heroes, prophets of all sorts, who one way or other have shed
distinction upon it, I am transported with the reflection that I myself
belong, though but subordinately, to so emblazoned a fraternity. The gallant
Perseus, a son of Jupiter, was the first whaleman and to the eternal honor of
our calling be it said, that the first whale attacked by our brotherhood was
not killed with any sordid intent. Those were the knightly days of our
profession, when we only bore arms to succor the distressed, and not to fill
men's lampfeeders. Every one knows the fine story of Perseus and Andromeda
how the lovely Andromeda, the daughter of a king, was tied to a rock on the
seacoast, and as Leviathan was in the very act of carrying her off,
Perseus, the prince of whalemen, intrepidly advancing, harpooned the monster,
and delivered and married the maid. It was an admirable artistic exploit,
rarely achieved by the best harpooneers of the present day inasmuch as this
Leviathan was slain at the very first dart. And let no man doubt this Arkite
story for in the ancient Joppa, now Jaffa, on the Syrian coast, in one of
the Pagan temples, there stood for many ages the vast skeleton of a whale,
which the city's legends and all the inhabitants asserted to be the identical
bones of the monster that Perseus slew. When the Romans took Joppa, the same
skeleton was carried to Italy in triumph. What seems most singular and
suggestively important in this story, is this it was from Joppa that Jonah
set sail. Akin to the adventure of Perseus and Andromeda indeed, by some
supposed to be indirectly derived from it is that famous story of St. George
and the Dragon which dragon I maintain to have been a whale for in many
old chronicles whales and dragons are strangely jumbled together, and often
stand for each other. Thou art as a lion of the waters, and as a dragon of
the sea, saith ezekiel hereby, plainly meaning a whale in truth, some
versions of the Bible use that word itself. Besides, it would much subtract
from the glory of the exploit had St. George but encountered a crawling
reptile of the land, instead of doing battle with the great monster of the
deep. Any man may kill a snake, but only a Perseus, a St. George, a Coffin,
have the heart in them to march boldly up to a whale. Let not the modern
paintings of this scene mislead us for though the creature encountered by
that valiant whaleman of old is vaguely represented of a griffinlike shape,
and though
the battle is depicted on land and the saint on horseback, yet considering
the great ignorance of those times, when the true form of the whale was
unknown to artists and considering that as in Perseus' case, St. George's
whale might have crawled up out of the sea on the beach and considering that
the animal ridden by St. George might have been only a large seal, or
seahorse bearing all this in mind, it will not appear altogether
incompatible with the sacred legend and the ancientest draughts of the scene,
to hold this socalled dragon no other than the great Leviathan himself. In
fact, placed before the strict and piercing truth, this whole story will
fare like that fish, flesh, and fowl idol of the Philistines, Dagon by name
who being planted before the ark of Israel, his horse's head and both the
palms of his hands fell off from him, and only the stump or fishy part of him
remained. Thus, then, one of our own noble stamp, even a whaleman, is the
tutelary guardian of England and by good rights, we harpooneers of Nantucket
should be enrolled in the most noble order of St. George. And therefore, let
not the knights of that honorable company none of whom, I venture to say,
have ever had to do with a whale like their great patron, let them never eye
a Nantucketer with disdain, since even in our woollen frocks and tarred
trowsers we are much better entitled to st. george's decoration than they.
Whether to admit Hercules among us or not, concerning this I long remained
dubious for though according to the Greek mythologies, that antique
Crockett and Kit Carson that brawny doer of rejoicing good deeds, was
swallowed down and thrown up by a whale still, whether that strictly makes a
whaleman of him, that might be mooted. It nowhere appears that he ever
actually harpooned his fish, unless, indeed, from the inside. Nevertheless,
he may be deemed a sort of involuntary whaleman at any rate the whale caught
him, if he did not the whale. I claim him for one of our clan. But, by the
best contradictory authorities, this Grecian story of Hercules and the whale
is considered to be derived from the still more ancient Hebrew story of Jonah
and the whale and vice versa certainly they are very similar. If I claim
the demigod then, why not the prophet?
Nor do heroes, saints, demigods, and prophets alone comprise the whole roll of
our order. Our grand master is still to be named for like royal kings of
old times, we find the headwaters of our fraternity in nothing short of the
great gods themselves. That wondrous oriental story is now to be rehearsed
from the Shaster, which gives us the dread Vishnoo, one of the three persons
in the godhead of the Hindoos gives us this divine Vishnoo himself for our
Lord Vishnoo, who, by the first of his ten earthly incarnations, has for
ever set apart and sanctified the whale. When Brahma, or the God of Gods,
saith the Shaster, resolved to recreate the world after one of its
periodical dissolutions, he gave birth to Vishnoo, to preside over the work
but the Vedas, or mystical books, whose perusal would seem to have been
indispensable to Vishnoo before beginning the creation, and which therefore
must have contained something in the shape of practical hints to young
architects, these Vedas were lying at the bottom of the waters so Vishnoo
became incarnate in a whale, and sounding down in him to the uttermost
depths, rescued the sacred volumes. Was not this Vishnoo a whaleman, then?
even as a man who rides a horse is called a horseman? Perseus, St. George,
Hercules, Jonah, and Vishnoo there's a memberroll for you What club but
the whaleman's can head off like that?
Reference was made to
the historical story of Jonah and the whale in the preceding chapter. Now
some Nantucketers rather distrust this historical story of Jonah and the
whale. But then there were some sceptical Greeks and Romans, who, standing
out from the orthodox pagans of their times, equally doubted the story of
Hercules and the whale, and Arion and the dolphin
and yet their doubting those traditions did not make those traditions one
whit the less facts, for all that. One old SagHarbor whaleman's chief reason
for questioning the Hebrew story was this He had one of those quaint
oldfashioned Bibles, embellished with curious, unscientific plates one of
which represented Jonah's whale with two spouts in his head a peculiarity
only true with respect to a species of the Leviathan the Right Whale, and
the varieties of that order, concerning which the fishermen have this saying,
A penny roll would choke him his swallow is so very small. But, to this,
Bishop Jebb's anticipative answer is ready. It is not necessary, hints the
Bishop, that we consider Jonah as tombed in the whale's belly, but as
temporarily lodged in some part of his mouth. And this seems reasonable
enough in the good Bishop. For truly, the Right Whale's mouth would
accommodate a couple of whist tables, and comfortably seat all the players.
Possibly, too, Jonah might have ensconced himself in a hollow tooth but, on
second thoughts, the Right Whale is toothless. Another reason which
SagHarbor he went by that name urged for his want of faith in this matter
of the prophet, was something obscurely in reference to his incarcerated body
and the whale's gastric juices. But this objection likewise falls to the
ground, because a German exegetist supposes that Jonah must have taken refuge
in the floating body of a dead whale  even as the French soldiers in the
Russian campaign turned their dead horses into tents, and crawled into them.
Besides, it has been divined by other continental commentators, that when
Jonah was thrown overboard from the Joppa ship, he straightway effected his
escape to another vessel near by, some vessel with a whale for a figurehead
and, I would add, possibly called The Whale, as some craft are nowadays
christened the Shark, the Gull, the Eagle. Nor have there been wanting
learned exegetists who have opined that the whale mentioned in the book of
Jonah merely meant a lifepreserver an inflated bag of wind which the
endangered prophet swam to, and so was saved from a watery doom. Poor
SagHarbor, therefore, seems worsted all round. But he had still another
reason for his want of faith. It was this, if I remember right Jonah was
swallowed by the whale in the Mediterranean Sea, and after three days he was
vomited up somewhere within three days' journey of Nineveh, a city on the
Tigris, very much more than three days' journey across from the nearest point
of the Mediterranean coast. How is that? But was there no other way for the
whale to land the prophet within that short distance of Nineveh? Yes. He
might have carried him round by the way of the Cape of Good Hope. But not to
speak of the passage through the whole length of the Mediterranean, and
another passage up the Persian Gulf and Red Sea, such a supposition would
involve the complete circumnavigation of all Africa in three days, not to
speak of the Tigris waters, near the site of Nineveh, being too shallow for
any whale to swim in. Besides, this idea of Jonah's weathering the Cape of
Good Hope at so early a day would wrest the honor of the discovery of that
great headland from Bartholomew Diaz, its reputed discoverer, and so make
modern history a liar. But all these foolish arguments of old SagHarbor only
evinced his foolish pride of reason a thing still more reprehensible in
him, seeing that he had but little learning except what he had picked up from
the sun and the sea. I say it only shows his foolish, impious pride, and
abominable, devilish rebellion against the reverend clergy. For by a
Portuguese Catholic priest, this very idea of Jonah's going to Nineveh via
the Cape of Good Hope was advanced as a signal magnification of the general
miracle. And so it was. Besides, to this day, the highly enlightened Turks
devoutly believe in the historical story of Jonah. And some three centuries
ago, an English traveller in old Harris's Voyages, speaks of a Turkish
Mosque built in honor of Jonah, in which mosque was a miraculous lamp that
burnt without any oil.
To make them run easily and swiftly,
the axles of carriages are anointed and for much the same purpose, some
whalers perform an analogous operation upon their boat they grease the
bottom. Nor is it to be doubted that as such a procedure can do no harm, it
may possibly be of no contemptible advantage considering that oil and water
are hostile that oil is a sliding thing, and that the object in view is to
make the boat slide bravely. Queequeg believed strongly in anointing his
boat, and one morning not long after the German ship Jungfrau disappeared,
took more than customary pains in that occupation crawling under its bottom,
where it hung over the side, and rubbing in the unctuousness as though
diligently seeking to insure a crop of hair from the craft's bald keel. He
seemed to be working in obedience to some particular presentiment. Nor did
it remain unwarranted by the event. Towards noon whales were raised but so
soon as the ship sailed down to them, they turned and fled with swift
precipitancy a disordered flight, as of Cleopatra's barges from Actium.
Nevertheless, the boats pursued, and Stubb's was foremost. By great exertion,
Tashtego at last succeeded in planting one iron but the stricken whale,
without at all sounding, still continued his horizontal flight, with added
fleetness. Such unintermitted strainings upon the planted iron must sooner or
later inevitably extract it. It became imperative to lance the flying whale,
or be content to lose him. But to haul the boat up to his flank was
impossible, he swam so fast and furious. What then remained? Of all the
wondrous devices and dexterities, the sleights of hand and countless
subtleties, to which the veteran whaleman is so often forced, none exceed
that fine manoeuvre with the lance called pitchpoling. Small sword, or broad
sword, in all its
exercises boasts nothing like it. It is only indispensable with an inveterate
running whale its grand fact and feature is the wonderful distance to which
the long lance is accurately darted from a violently rocking, jerking boat,
under extreme headway. Steel and wood included, the entire spear is some ten
or twelve feet in length the staff is much slighter than that of the
harpoon, and also of a lighter materialpine. It is furnished with a small
rope called a warp, of considerable length, by which it can be hauled back to
the hand after darting. But before going further, it is important to mention
here, that though the harpoon may be pitchpoled in the same way with the
lance, yet it is seldom done and when done, is still less frequently
successful, on account of the greater weight and inferior length of the
harpoon as compared with the lance, which in effect become serious drawbacks.
As a general thing, therefore, you must first get fast to a whale, before any
pitchpoling comes into play. Look now at Stubb a man who from his humorous,
deliberate coolness and equanimity in the direst emergencies, was specially
qualified to excel in pitchpoling. Look at him he stands upright in the
tossed bow of the flying boat wrapt in fleecy foam, the towing whale is
forty feet ahead. Handling the long lance lightly, glancing twice or thrice
along its length to see if it be exactly straight, Stubb whistlingly gathers
up the coil of the warp in one hand, so as to secure its free end in his
grasp, leaving the rest unobstructed. Then holding the lance full before
his waistband's middle, he levels it at the whale when, covering him with
it, he steadily depresses the buttend in his hand, thereby elevating the
point till the weapon stands fairly balanced upon his palm, fifteen feet in
the air. He minds you somewhat of a juggler, balancing a long staff on his
chin. Next moment with a rapid, nameless impulse, in a superb lofty arch the
bright steel spans the foaming distance, and quivers in the life spot of the
whale. Instead of sparkling water, he now spouts red blood. That drove the
spigot out of him cries Stubb. 'Tis July's immortal Fourth all fountains
must run wine today Would now, it were old Orleans whiskey, or old Ohio,
or unspeakable
old Monongahela Then, Tashtego, lad, I'd have ye hold a canakin to the jet,
and we'd drink round it Yea, verily, hearts alive, we'd brew choice punch
in the spread of his spouthole there, and from that live punchbowl quaff
the living stuff Again and again to such gamesome talk, the dexterous dart
is repeated, the spear returning to its master like a greyhound held in
skilful leash. The agonized whale goes into his flurry the towline is
slackened, and the pitchpoler dropping astern, folds his hands, and mutely
watches the monster die.
That for six thousand years and no one
knows how many millions of ages before the great whales should have been
spouting all over the sea, and sprinkling and mistifying the gardens of the
deep, as with so many sprinkling or mistifying pots and that for some
centuries back, thousands of hunters should have been close by the fountain
of the whale, watching these sprinklings and spoutings that all this should
be, and yet, that down to this blessed minute fifteen and a quarter
minutes past one o'clock P. M. of this sixteenth day of December, A. D.
it should still remain a problem, whether these spoutings are, after all,
really water, or nothing but vapor this is surely a noteworthy thing. Let
us, then, look at this matter, along with some interesting items contingent.
Every one knows that by the peculiar cunning of their gills, the finny tribes
in general breathe the air which at all times is combined with the element in
which they swim, hence, a herring or a cod might live a century, and never
once raise its head above the surface. But owing to his marked internal
structure which gives him regular lungs, like a human being's, the whale can
only live by inhaling the disengaged air in the open atmosphere. Wherefore
the necessity
for his periodical visits to the upper world. But he cannot in any degree
breathe through his mouth, for, in his ordinary attitude, the Sperm Whale's
mouth is buried at least eight feet beneath the surface and what is still
more, his windpipe has no connexion with his mouth. No, he breathes through
his spiracle alone and this is on the top of his head. If I say, that in
any creature breathing is only a function indispensable to vitality, inasmuch
as it withdraws from the air a certain element, which being subsequently
brought into contact with the blood imparts to the blood its vivifying
principle, I do not think I shall err though I may possibly use some
superfluous scientific words. Assume it, and it follows that if all the
blood in a man could be aerated with one breath, he might then seal up his
nostrils and not fetch another for a considerable time. That is to say, he
would then live without breathing. Anomalous as it may seem, this is
precisely the case with the whale, who systematically lives, by intervals,
his full hour and more when at the bottom without drawing a single
breath, or so much as in any way inhaling a particle of air for, remember,
he has no gills. How is this? Between his ribs and on each side of his spine
he is supplied with a remarkable involved Cretan labyrinth of vermicellilike
vessels, which vessels, when he quits the surface, are completely distended
with oxygenated blood. So that for an hour or more, a thousand fathoms in the
sea, he carries a surplus stock of vitality in him, just as the camel
crossing the waterless desert carries a surplus supply of drink for future use
in its four supplementary stomachs. The anatomical fact of this labyrinth
is indisputable and that the supposition founded upon it is reasonable and
true, seems the more cogent to me, when I consider the otherwise inexplicable
obstinacy of that leviathan in having his spoutings out, as the fishermen
phrase it. This is what I mean. If unmolested, upon rising to the surface,
the Sperm Whale will continue there for a period of time exactly uniform with
all his other unmolested risings. Say he stays eleven minutes, and jets
seventy times, that is, respires seventy breaths then whenever he rises
again, he will be sure to have his seventy breaths over again, to a minute.
Now, if after he fetches a few
breaths you alarm him, so that he sounds, he will be always dodging up again
to make good his regular allowance of air. And not till those seventy breaths
are told, will he finally go down to stay out his full term below. Remark,
however, that in different individuals these rates are different but in any
one they are alike. Now, why should the whale thus insist upon having his
spoutings out, unless it be to replenish his reservoir of air, ere
descending for good? How obvious is it, too, that this necessity for the
whale's rising exposes him to all the fatal hazards of the chase. For not by
hook or by net could this vast leviathan be caught, when sailing a thousand
fathoms beneath the sunlight. Not so much thy skill, then, O hunter, as the
great necessities that strike the victory to thee In man, breathing is
incessantly going on one breath only serving for two or three pulsations so
that whatever other business he has to attend to, waking or sleeping,
breathe he must, or die he will. But the Sperm Whale only breathes about one
seventh or Sunday of his time. It has been said that the whale only breathes
through his spouthole if it could truthfully be added that his spouts are
mixed with water, then I opine we should be furnished with the reason why his
sense of smell seems obliterated in him for the only thing about him that at
all answers to his nose is that identical spouthole and being so clogged
with two elements, it could not be expected to have the power of smelling.
But owing to the mystery of the spout whether it be water or whether it be
vapor no absolute certainty can as yet be arrived at on this head. Sure it
is, nevertheless, that the Sperm Whale has no proper olfactories. But what
does he want of them? No roses, no violets, no Colognewater in the sea.
Furthermore, as his windpipe solely opens into the tube of his spouting canal,
and as that long canal like the grand Erie Canal is furnished with a sort
of locks that open and shut for the downward retention of air or the
upward exclusion of water, therefore the whale has no voice unless you
insult him by saying, that when he so strangely rumbles, he talks through
his nose. But then again, what has the whale to say? Seldom have I known
any profound being that had anything to say to this
world, unless forced to stammer out something by way of getting a living.
Oh happy that the world is such an excellent listener Now, the spouting
canal of the Sperm Whale, chiefly intended as it is for the conveyance of air,
and for several feet laid along, horizontally, just beneath the upper
surface of his head, and a little to one side this curious canal is very
much like a gaspipe laid down in a city on one side of a street. But the
question returns whether this gaspipe is also a waterpipe in other words,
whether the spout of the Sperm Whale is the mere vapor of the exhaled breath,
or whether that exhaled breath is mixed with water taken in at the mouth,
and discharged through the spiracle. It is certain that the mouth indirectly
communicates with the spouting canal but it cannot be proved that this is
for the purpose of discharging water through the spiracle. Because the
greatest necessity for so doing would seem to be, when in feeding he
accidentally takes in water. But the Sperm Whale's food is far beneath the
surface, and there he cannot spout even if he would. Besides, if you regard
him very closely, and time him with your watch, you will find that when
unmolested, there is an undeviating rhyme between the periods of his jets and
the ordinary periods of respiration. But why pester one with all this
reasoning on the subject? Speak out You have seen him spout then declare
what the spout is can you not tell water from air? My dear sir, in this
world it is not so easy to settle these plain things. I have ever found your
plain things the knottiest of all. And as for this whale spout, you might
almost stand in it, and yet be undecided as to what it is precisely. The
central body of it is hidden in the snowy sparkling mist enveloping it and
how can you certainly tell whether any water falls from it, when, always,
when you are close enough to a whale to get a close view of his spout, he is
in a prodigious commotion, the water cascading all around him. And if at
such times you should think that you really perceived drops of moisture in
the spout, how do you know that they are not merely condensed from its vapor
or how do you know that they are not those identical drops superficially
lodged in the spouthole fissure, which is countersunk into the summit of the
whale's head? For even when tranquilly swimming through the midday
sea in a calm, with his elevated hump sundried as a dromedary's in the
desert even then, the whale always carries a small basin of water on his
head, as under a blazing sun you will sometimes see a cavity in a rock filled
up with rain. Nor is it at all prudent for the hunter to be over curious
touching the precise nature of the whale spout. It will not do for him to be
peering into it, and putting his face in it. You cannot go with your pitcher
to this fountain and fill it, and bring it away. For even when coming into
slight contact with the outer, vapory shreds of the jet, which will often
happen, your skin will feverishly smart, from the acridness of the thing so
touching it. And I know one, who coming into still closer contact with the
spout, whether with some scientific object in view, or otherwise, I cannot
say, the skin peeled off from his cheek and arm. Wherefore, among whalemen,
the spout is deemed poisonous they try to evade it. Another thing I have
heard it said, and I do not much doubt it, that if the jet is fairly spouted
into your eyes, it will blind you. The wisest thing the investigator can do
then, it seems to me, is to let this deadly spout alone. Still, we can
hypothesize, even if we cannot prove and establish. My hypothesis is this
that the spout is nothing but mist. And besides other reasons, to this
conclusion I am impelled, by considerations touching the great inherent
dignity and sublimity of the Sperm Whale I account him no common, shallow
being, inasmuch as it is an undisputed fact that he is never found on
soundings, or near shores all other whales sometimes are. He is both
ponderous and profound. And I am convinced that from the heads of all
ponderous profound beings, such as Plato, Pyrrho, the Devil, Jupiter, Dante,
and so on, there always goes up a certain semivisible steam, while in the
act of thinking deep thoughts. While composing a little treatise on Eternity,
I had the curiosity to place a mirror before me and ere long saw reflected
there, a curious involved worming and undulation in the atmosphere over my
head. The invariable moisture of my hair, while plunged in deep thought,
after six cups of hot tea in my thin shingled attic, of an August noon this
seems an additional argument for the above supposition. And how nobly it
raises our conceit of the mighty, misty
monster, to behold him solemnly sailing through a calm tropical sea his
vast, mild head overhung by a canopy of vapor, engendered by his
incommunicable contemplations, and that vapor as you will sometimes see it
glorified by a rainbow, as if Heaven itself had put its seal upon his
thoughts. For, d'ye see, rainbows do not visit the clear air they only
irradiate vapor. And so, through all the thick mists of the dim doubts in my
mind, divine intuitions now and then shoot, enkindling my fog with a
heavenly ray. And for this I thank God for all have doubts many deny
but doubts or denials, few along with them, have intuitions. Doubts of all
things earthly, and intuitions of some things heavenly this combination
makes neither believer nor infidel, but makes a man who regards them both
with equal eye.
Other poets have warbled the praises of
the soft eye of the antelope, and the lovely plumage of the bird that never
alights less celestial, I celebrate a tail. Reckoning the largest sized
Sperm Whale's tail to begin at that point of the trunk where it tapers to
about the girth of a man, it comprises upon its upper surface alone, an area
of at least fifty square feet. The compact round body of its root expands
into two broad, firm, flat palms or flukes, gradually shoaling away to less
than an inch in thickness. At the crotch or junction, these flukes slightly
overlap, then sideways recede from each other like wings, leaving a wide
vacancy between. In no living thing are the lines of beauty more exquisitely
defined than in the crescentic borders of these flukes. At its utmost
expansion in the full grown whale, the tail will considerably exceed twenty
feet across. The entire member seems a dense webbed bed of welded
sinews but cut into it, and you find that three distinct strata compose it
upper, middle, and lower. The fibres in the upper and lower layers, are long
and horizontal those of the middle one, very short, and running crosswise
between the outside layers. This triune structure, as much as anything else,
imparts power to the tail. To the student of old Roman walls, the middle
layer will furnish a curious parallel to the thin course of tiles always
alternating with the stone in those wonderful relics of the antique, and
which undoubtedly contribute so much to the great strength of the masonry.
But as if this vast local power in the tendinous tail were not enough, the
whole bulk of the leviathan is knit over with a warp and woof of muscular
fibres and filaments, which passing on either side the loins and running down
into the flukes, insensibly blend with them, and largely contribute to their
might so that in the tail the confluent measureless force of the whole
whale seems concentrated to a point. Could annihilation occur to matter, this
were the thing to do it. Nor does this its amazing strength, at all tend to
cripple the graceful flexion of its motions where infantileness of ease
undulates through a Titanism of power. On the contrary, those motions derive
their most appalling beauty from it. Real strength never impairs beauty or
harmony, but it often bestows it and in everything imposingly beautiful,
strength has much to do with the magic. Take away the tied tendons that all
over seem bursting from the marble in the carved Hercules, and its charm
would be gone. As devout Eckerman lifted the linen sheet from the naked
corpse of Goethe, he was overwhelmed with the massive chest of the man, that
seemed as a Roman triumphal arch. When Angelo paints even God the Father in
human form, mark what robustness is there. And whatever they may reveal of
the divine love in the Son, the soft, curled, hermaphroditical Italian
pictures, in which his idea has been most successfully embodied these
pictures, so destitute as they are of all brawniness, hint nothing of any
power, but the mere negative, feminine one of submission and endurance,
which on all hands it is conceded, form the peculiar practical virtues of his
teachings. Such is the subtle elasticity of the organ I treat of, that
whether wielded in sport, or in earnest, or in anger, whatever be the mood it
be in, its flexions are invariably marked by exceeding grace. Therein no
fairy's arm can transcend it. Five great motions are peculiar to it. First,
when used as a fin for progression Second, when used as a mace in battle
Third, in sweeping Fourth, in lobtailing Fifth, in peaking flukes. First
Being horizontal in its position, the Leviathan's tail acts in a different
manner from the tails of all other sea creatures. It never wriggles. In man
or fish, wriggling is a sign of inferiority. To the whale, his tail is the
sole means of propulsion. Scrollwise coiled forwards beneath the body, and
then rapidly sprung backwards, it is this which gives that singular darting,
leaping motion to the monster when furiously swimming. His sidefins only
serve to steer by. Second It is a little significant, that while one sperm
whale only fights another sperm whale with his head and jaw, nevertheless,
in his conflicts with man, he chiefly and contemptuously uses his tail. In
striking at a boat, he swiftly curves away his flukes from it, and the blow
is only inflicted by the recoil. If it be made in the unobstructed air,
especially if it descend to its mark, the stroke is then simply irresistible.
No ribs of man or boat can withstand it. Your only salvation lies in eluding
it but if it comes sideways through the opposing water, then partly owing
to the light buoyancy of the whaleboat, and the elasticity of its materials,
a cracked rib or a dashed plank or two, a sort of stitch in the side, is
generally the most serious result. These submerged side blows are so often
received in the fishery, that they are accounted mere child's play. Some one
strips off a frock, and the hole is stopped. Third I cannot demonstrate it,
but it seems to me, that in the whale the sense of touch is concentrated in
the tail for in this respect there is a delicacy in it only equalled by the
daintiness of the elephant's trunk. This delicacy is chiefly evinced in the
action of sweeping, when in maidenly gentleness the whale with a certain soft
slowness moves his immense flukes from side to side upon the surface of the
sea and if he feel but a sailor's whisker, woe to that sailor, whiskers and
all.
What tenderness there is in that preliminary touch Had this tail any
prehensile power, I should straightway bethink me of Darmonodes' elephant
that so frequented the flowermarket, and with low salutations presented
nosegays to damsels, and then caressed their zones. On more accounts than
one, a pity it is that the whale does not possess this prehensile virtue in
his tail for I have heard of yet another elephant, that when wounded in
the fight, curved round his trunk and extracted the dart. Fourth Stealing
unawares upon the whale in the fancied security of the middle of solitary
seas, you find him unbent from the vast corpulence of his dignity, and
kittenlike, he plays on the ocean as if it were a hearth. But still you see
his power in his play. The broad palms of his tail are flirted high into the
air then smiting the surface, the thunderous concussion resounds for miles.
You would almost think a great gun had been discharged and if you noticed
the light wreath of vapor from the spiracle at his other extremity, you would
think that that was the smoke from the touchhole. Fifth As in the ordinary
floating posture of the leviathan the flukes lie considerably below the level
of his back, they are then completely out of sight beneath the surface but
when he is about to plunge into the deeps, his entire flukes with at least
thirty feet of his body are tossed erect in the air, and so remain vibrating
a moment, till they downwards shoot out of view. Excepting the sublime
breach somewhere else to be described this peaking of the whale's flukes is
perhaps the grandest sight to be seen in all animated nature. Out of the
bottomless profundities the gigantic tail seems spasmodically snatching at the
highest heaven. So in dreams, have I seen majestic Satan thrusting forth his
tormented colossal claw from the flame Baltic of Hell. But in gazing at such
scenes, it is all in all what mood you are in if in the Dantean, the devils
will occur to you if in that of Isaiah, the archangels. Standing at the
masthead of my ship during a sunrise that crimsoned sky and sea, I once saw
a large herd of whales in the east, all heading towards the sun, and for a
moment vibrating in concert with peaked flukes. As it seemed to me at the
time, such a grand
embodiment of adoration of the gods was never beheld, even in Persia, the
home of the fire worshippers. As Ptolemy Philopater testified of the African
elephant, I then testified of the whale, pronouncing him the most devout of
all beings. For according to King Juba, the military elephants of antiquity
often hailed the morning with their trunks uplifted in the profoundest
silence. The chance comparison in this chapter, between the whale and the
elephant, so far as some aspects of the tail of the one and the trunk of the
other are concerned, should not tend to place those two opposite organs on an
equality, much less the creatures to which they respectively belong. For as
the mightiest elephant is but a terrier to Leviathan, so, compared with
Leviathan's tail, his trunk is but the stalk of a lily. The most direful
blow from the elephant's trunk were as the playful tap of a fan, compared with
the measureless crush and crash of the sperm whale's ponderous flukes, which
in repeated instances have one after the other hurled entire boats with all
their oars and crews into the air, very much as an Indian juggler tosses his
balls. The more I consider this mighty tail, the more do I deplore my
inability to express it. At times there are gestures in it, which, though
they would well grace the hand of man, remain wholly inexplicable. In an
extensive herd, so remarkable, occasionally, are these mystic gestures,
that I have heard hunters who have declared them akin to FreeMason signs and
symbols that the whale, indeed, by these methods intelligently conversed
with the world. Nor are there wanting other motions of the whale in his
general body, full of strangeness, and unaccountable to his most experienced
assailant. Dissect him how I may, then, I but go skin deep I know him not,
and never will. But if I know not even the tail of this whale, how
understand his head? much more, how comprehend his face, when face he has
none?
Thou shalt see my back parts, my tail, he seems to say, but my face shall not
be seen. But I cannot completely make out his back parts and hint what he
will about his face, I say again he has no face.
Though all comparison in the way of general bulk between the whale and the
elephant is preposterous, inasmuch as in that particular the elephant
stands in much the same respect to the whale that a dog does to the elephant
nevertheless, there are not wanting some points of curious similitude among
these is the spout. It is well known that the elephant will often draw up
water or dust in his trunk, and then elevating it, jet it forth in a
stream.
The long and narrow peninsula of
Malacca, extending southeastward from the territories of Birmah, forms the
most southerly point of all Asia. In a continuous line from that peninsula
stretch the long islands of Sumatra, Java, Bally, and Timor which, with many
others, form a vast mole, or rampart, lengthwise connecting Asia with
Australia, and dividing the long unbroken Indian ocean from the thickly
studded oriental archipelagoes. This rampart is pierced by several sallyports
for the convenience of ships and whales conspicuous among which are the
straits of Sunda and Malacca. By the straits of Sunda, chiefly, vessels
bound to China from the west, emerge into the China seas. Those narrow straits
of Sunda divide Sumatra from Java and standing midway in that vast rampart
of islands, buttressed by that bold green promontory, known to seamen as
Java Head they not a little correspond to the central gateway opening into
some vast walled empire and considering the inexhaustible wealth of spices,
and silks, and jewels, and gold, and ivory, with which the thousand islands of
that oriental sea are enriched, it seems a significant provision of nature,
that such treasures, by the very formation of the land, should at least bear
the appearance, however ineffectual, of being guarded from the allgrasping
western world. The shores of the Straits of Sunda are unsupplied with those
domineering fortresses which guard the entrances to the Mediterranean, the
Baltic, and the Propontis. Unlike the Danes, these Orientals do not demand the
obsequious homage of lowered topsails from the endless procession of ships
before the wind, which for centuries past, by night and by day, have passed
between the islands of Sumatra and Java, freighted with the costliest cargoes
of the east. But while they freely waive a ceremonial like this, they do by
no means renounce their claim to more solid tribute. Time out of mind the
piratical proas of the Malays, lurking among the low shaded coves and islets
of Sumatra, have sallied out upon the vessels sailing through the straits,
fiercely demanding tribute at the point of their spears. Though by the
repeated bloody chastisements they have received at the hands of European
cruisers, the audacity of these corsairs has of late been somewhat repressed
yet, even at the present day, we occasionally hear of English and American
vessels, which, in those waters, have been remorselessly boarded and pillaged.
With a fair, fresh wind, the Pequod was now drawing nigh to these straits
Ahab purposing to pass through them into the Javan sea, and thence, cruising
northwards, over waters known to be frequented here and there by the Sperm
whale, sweep inshore by the Philippine Islands, and gain the far coast of
Japan, in time for the great whaling season there. By these means, the
circumnavigating Pequod would sweep almost all the known Sperm Whale cruising
grounds of the world, previous to descending upon the Line in the Pacific
where Ahab, though everywhere else foiled in his pursuit, firmly counted upon
giving battle to Moby Dick, in the sea he was most known to frequent and at
a season when he might most reasonably be presumed to be haunting it. But how
now? in this zoned quest, does Ahab touch no land? does his crew drink air?
Surely, he will stop for water. Nay. For a long time, now, the circusrunning
sun has raced within his fiery ring, and needs no sustenance but what's in
himself. So Ahab. Mark this, too, in the whaler. While other hulls are
loaded down with alien stuff, to be transferred to foreign wharves the
worldwandering whaleship carries no cargo but herself and crew, their
weapons and their wants. She has a whole lake's contents bottled in her ample
hold. She is ballasted with utilities not altogether with unusable piglead
and kentledge. She carries years' water in her. Clear old prime Nantucket
water which, when three years afloat, the Nantucketer,
in the Pacific, prefers to drink before the brackish fluid, but yesterday
rafted off in casks, from the Peruvian or Indian streams. Hence it is, that,
while other ships may have gone to China from New York, and back again,
touching at a score of ports, the whaleship, in all that interval, may not
have sighted one grain of soil her crew having seen no man but floating
seamen like themselves. So that did you carry them the news that another
flood had come they would only answer  Well, boys, here's the ark Now,
as many Sperm Whales had been captured off the western coast of Java, in the
near vicinity of the straits of Sunda indeed, as most of the ground,
roundabout, was generally recognised by the fishermen as an excellent spot for
cruising therefore, as the Pequod gained more and more upon Java Head, the
lookouts were repeatedly hailed, and admonished to keep wide awake. But
though the green palmy cliffs of the land soon loomed on the starboard bow,
and with delighted nostrils the fresh cinnamon was snuffed in the air, yet
not a single jet was descried. Almost renouncing all thought of falling in
with any game hereabouts, the ship had well nigh entered the straits, when
the customary cheering cry was heard from aloft, and ere long a spectacle of
singular magnificence saluted us. But here be it premised, that owing to the
unwearied activity with which of late they have been hunted over all four
oceans, the Sperm Whales, instead of almost invariably sailing in small
detached companies, as in former times, are now frequently met with in
extensive herds, sometimes embracing so great a multitude, that it would
almost seem as if numerous nations of them had sworn solemn league and
covenant for mutual assistance and protection. To this aggregation of the
Sperm Whale into such immense caravans, may be imputed the circumstance that
even in the best cruising grounds, you may now sometimes sail for weeks and
months together, without being greeted by a single spout and then be
suddenly saluted by what sometimes seems thousands on thousands. Broad on
both bows, at the distance of some two or three miles, and forming a great
semicircle, embracing one half of the level horizon, a continuous chain of
whalejets were upplaying and sparkling in the noonday air. Unlike the
straight perpendicular
twinjets of the Right Whale, which, dividing at top, falls over in two
branches, like the cleft drooping boughs of a willow, the single
forwardslanting spout of the Sperm Whale presents a thick curled bush of
white mist, continually rising and falling away to leeward. Seen from the
Pequod's deck, then, as she would rise on a high hill of the sea, this host
of vapory spouts, individually curling up into the air, and beheld through a
blending atmosphere of bluish haze, showed like the thousand cheerful chimneys
of some dense metropolis, descried of a balmy autumnal morning, by some
horseman on a height. As marching armies approaching an unfriendly defile in
the mountains, accelerate their march, all eagerness to place that perilous
passage in their rear, and once more expand in comparative security upon the
plain even so did this vast fleet of whales now seem hurrying forward
through the straits gradually contracting the wings of their semicircle,
and swimming on, in one solid, but still crescentic centre. Crowding all sail
the Pequod pressed after them the harpooneers handling their weapons, and
loudly cheering from the heads of their yet suspended boats. If the wind only
held, little doubt had they, that chased through these Straits of Sunda,
the vast host would only deploy into the Oriental seas to witness the capture
of not a few of their number. And who could tell whether, in that congregated
caravan, Moby Dick himself might not temporarily be swimming, like the
worshipped whiteelephant in the coronation procession of the Siamese So
with stunsail piled on stunsail, we sailed along, driving these
leviathans before us when, of a sudden, the voice of Tashtego was heard,
loudly directing attention to something in our wake. Corresponding to the
crescent in our van, we beheld another in our rear. It seemed formed of
detached white vapors, rising and falling something like the spouts of the
whales only they did not so completely come and go for they constantly
hovered, without finally disappearing. Levelling his glass at this sight,
ahab quickly revolved in his pivothole, crying, aloft there, and rig whips
and buckets to wet the sails Malays, sir, and after us
As if too long lurking behind the headlands, till the Pequod should fairly
have entered the straits, these rascally Asiatics were now in hot pursuit, to
make up for their overcautious delay. But when the swift Pequod, with a fresh
leading wind, was herself in hot chase how very kind of these tawny
philanthropists to assist in speeding her on to her own chosen pursuit, 
mere ridingwhips and rowels to her, that they were. As with glass under arm,
Ahab toandfro paced the deck in his forward turn beholding the monsters he
chased, and in the after one the bloodthirsty pirates chasing him some
such fancy as the above seemed his. And when he glanced upon the green walls
of the watery defile in which the ship was then sailing, and bethought him
that through that gate lay the route to his vengeance, and beheld, how that
through that same gate he was now both chasing and being chased to his deadly
end and not only that, but a herd of remorseless wild pirates and inhuman
atheistical devils were infernally cheering him on with their curses when
all these conceits had passed through his brain, Ahab's brow was left gaunt
and ribbed, like the black sand beach after some stormy tide has been gnawing
it, without being able to drag the firm thing from its place. But thoughts
like these troubled very few of the reckless crew and when, after steadily
dropping and dropping the pirates astern, the Pequod at last shot by the
vivid green Cockatoo Point on the Sumatra side, emerging at last upon the
broad waters beyond then, the harpooneers seemed more to grieve that the
swift whales had been gaining upon the ship, than to rejoice that the ship
had so victoriously gained upon the Malays. But still driving on in the wake
of the whales, at length they seemed abating their speed gradually the ship
neared them and the wind now dying away, word was passed to spring to the
boats. But no sooner did the herd, by some presumed wonderful instinct of
the Sperm Whale, become notified of the three keels that were after them,
though as yet a mile in their rear, than they rallied again, and forming in
close ranks and battalions, so that their spouts all looked like flashing
lines of stacked bayonets, moved on with redoubled velocity. Stripped to our
shirts and drawers, we sprang to the whiteash,
and after several hours' pulling were almost disposed to renounce the chase,
when a general pausing commotion among the whales gave animating token that
they were now at last under the influence of that strange perplexity of inert
irresolution, which, when the fishermen perceive it in the whale, they say he
is gallied. The compact martial columns in which they had been hitherto
rapidly and steadily swimming, were now broken up in one measureless rout
and like King Porus' elephants in the Indian battle with Alexander, they
seemed going mad with consternation. In all directions expanding in vast
irregular circles, and aimlessly swimming hither and thither, by their short
thick spoutings, they plainly betrayed their distraction of panic. This
was still more strangely evinced by those of their number, who, completely
paralysed as it were, helplessly floated like waterlogged dismantled ships on
the sea. Had these leviathans been but a flock of simple sheep, pursued over
the pasture by three fierce wolves, they could not possibly have evinced such
excessive dismay. But this occasional timidity is characteristic of almost
all herding creatures. Though banding together in tens of thousands, the
lionmaned buffaloes of the West have fled before a solitary horseman.
Witness, too, all human beings, how when herded together in the sheepfold of
a theatre's pit, they will, at the slightest alarm of fire, rush
helterskelter for the outlets, crowding, trampling, jamming, and
remorselessly dashing each other to death. Best, therefore, withhold
any amazement at the strangely gallied whales before us, for there is no folly
of the beasts of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of
men. Though many of the whales, as has been said, were in violent motion,
yet it is to be observed that as a whole the herd neither advanced nor
retreated, but collectively remained in one place. As is customary in those
cases, the boats at once separated, each making for some one lone whale on
the outskirts of the shoal. In about three minutes' time, Queequeg's harpoon
was flung the stricken fish darted blinding spray in our faces, and then
running away with us like light, steered straight for the heart of the herd.
Though such a movement on the part of the whale struck under such
circumstances, is in no wise unprecedented and indeed is almost always more
or less anticipated yet does it present one of the more perilous vicissitudes
of the fishery. For as the swift monster drags you deeper and deeper into
the frantic shoal, you bid adieu to circumspect life and only exist in a
delirious throb. As, blind and deaf, the whale plunged forward, as if by sheer
power of speed to rid himself of the iron leech that had fastened to him as
we thus tore a white gash in the sea, on all sides menaced as we flew, by
the crazed creatures to and fro rushing about us our beset boat was like a
ship mobbed by iceisles in a tempest, and striving to steer through their
complicated channels and straits, knowing not at what moment it may be
locked in and crushed. But not a bit daunted, Queequeg steered us manfully
now sheering off from this monster directly across our route in advance now
edging away from that, whose colossal flukes were suspended overhead, while
all the time, Starbuck stood up in the bows, lance in hand, pricking out of
our way whatever whales he could reach by short darts, for there was no time
to make long ones. Nor were the oarsmen quite idle, though their wonted
duty was now altogether dispensed with. They chiefly attended to the shouting
part of the business. Out of the way, Commodore cried one, to a great
dromedary that of a sudden rose bodily to the surface, and for an instant
threatened to swamp us. Hard down with your tail, there cried a second
to another, which, close to our gunwale, seemed calmly cooling himself with
his own fanlike extremity. All whaleboats carry certain curious contrivances,
originally invented by the Nantucket Indians, called druggs. Two thick
squares of wood of equal size are stoutly clenched together, so that they
cross each other's grain at right angles a line of considerable length is
then attached to the middle of this block, and the other end of the line
being looped, it can in a moment be fastened to a harpoon. It is chiefly
among gallied whales that this drugg is used. For then, more whales are close
round you than you can possibly chase at one time. But sperm whales are not
every day encountered while you may, then, you must kill all you can. And
if you cannot kill them all at once, you must wing them, so that they can be
afterwards killed at your leisure. Hence it is, that at times like these the
drugg comes into requisition. Our boat was furnished with three of them.
The first and second were successfully darted, and we saw the whales
staggeringly running off, fettered by the enormous sidelong resistance of the
towing drugg. They were cramped like malefactors with the chain and ball.
But upon flinging the third, in the act of tossing overboard the clumsy
wooden block, it caught under one of the seats of the boat, and in an
instant tore it out and carried it away, dropping the oarsman in the boat's
bottom as the seat slid from under him. On both sides the sea came in at the
wounded planks, but we stuffed two or three drawers and shirts in, and so
stopped the leaks for the time. It had been next to impossible to dart these
druggedharpoons, were it not that as we advanced into the herd, our whale's
way greatly diminished moreover, that as we went still further and further
from the circumference of commotion, the direful disorders seemed waning. So
that when at last the jerking harpoon drew out, and the towing whale sideways
vanished then, with the tapering force of his parting momentum, we glided
between two whales into the innermost heart of the shoal, as if from some
mountain torrent we had slid into a serene valley lake. Here the storms in the
roaring glens between the outermost whales, were heard but not felt. In this
central expanse the sea presented that smooth satinlike surface, called a
sleek, produced
by the subtle moisture thrown off by the whale in his more quiet moods. Yes,
we were now in that enchanted calm which they say lurks at the heart of every
commotion. And still in the distracted distance we beheld the tumults of the
outer concentric circles, and saw successive pods of whales, eight or ten in
each, swiftly going round and round, like multiplied spans of horses in a
ring and so closely shoulder to shoulder, that a Titanic circusrider might
easily have overarched the middle ones, and so have gone round on their
backs. Owing to the density of the crowd of reposing whales, more
immediately surrounding the embayed axis of the herd, no possible chance of
escape was at present afforded us. We must watch for a breach in the living
wall that hemmed us in the wall that had only admitted us in order to shut
us up. Keeping at the centre of the lake, we were occasionally visited by
small tame cows and calves the women and children of this routed host. Now,
inclusive of the occasional wide intervals between the revolving outer
circles, and inclusive of the spaces between the various pods in any one of
those circles, the entire area at this juncture, embraced by the whole
multitude, must have contained at least two or three square miles. At any
rate though indeed such a test at such a time might be deceptive spoutings
might be discovered from our low boat that seemed playing up almost from the
rim of the horizon. I mention this circumstance, because, as if the cows and
calves had been purposely locked up in this innermost fold and as if the
wide extent of the herd had hitherto prevented them from learning the precise
cause of its stopping or, possibly, being so young, unsophisticated, and
every way innocent and inexperienced however it may have been, these
smaller whales now and then visiting our becalmed boat from the margin of the
lake evinced a wondrous fearlessness and confidence, or else a still
becharmed panic which it was impossible not to marvel at. Like household dogs
they came snuffling round us, right up to our gunwales, and touching them
till it almost seemed that some spell had suddenly domesticated them.
Queequeg patted their foreheads Starbuck scratched their backs with his
lance but fearful of the consequences, for the time refrained from darting
it.
But far beneath this wondrous world upon the surface, another and still
stranger world met our eyes as we gazed over the side. For, suspended in
those watery vaults, floated the forms of the nursing mothers of the whales,
and those that by their enormous girth seemed shortly to become mothers. The
lake, as I have hinted, was to a considerable depth exceedingly transparent
and as human infants while suckling will calmly and fixedly gaze away from the
breast, as if leading two different lives at the time and while yet drawing
mortal nourishment, be still spiritually feasting upon some unearthly
reminiscence even so did the young of these whales seem looking up towards
us, but not at us, as if we were but a bit of Gulfweed in their newborn
sight. floating on their sides, the mothers also seemed quietly eyeing us.
One of these little infants, that from certain queer tokens seemed hardly a
day old, might have measured some fourteen feet in length, and some six feet
in girth. He was a little frisky though as yet his body seemed scarce yet
recovered from that irksome position it had so lately occupied in the
maternal reticule where, tail to head, and all ready for the final spring,
the unborn whale lies bent like a Tartar's bow. The delicate sidefins, and
the palms of his flukes, still freshly retained the plaited crumpled
appearance of a baby's ears newly arrived from foreign parts. Line line
cried Queequeg, looking over the gunwale him fast him fast Who line
him Who struck? Two whale one big, one little What ails ye, man?
cried Starbuck. Looke here, said Queequeg pointing down. As when the
stricken whale, that from the tub has reeled out hundreds of fathoms of rope
as, after deep sounding, he floats up again, and shows the slackened curling
line buoyantly rising and spiralling towards the air so now, Starbuck saw
long coils of the umbilical cord of Madame Leviathan, by which the young cub
seemed still tethered to its dam. Not seldom in the rapid vicissitudes of the
chase, this natural line, with the maternal end loose, becomes entangled
with the hempen one, so that the cub is thereby trapped. Some of the
subtlest secrets of the seas
seemed divulged to us in this enchanted pond. We saw young Leviathan amours
in the deep. And thus, though surrounded by circle upon circle of
consternations and affrights, did these inscrutable creatures at the centre
freely and fearlessly indulge in all peaceful concernments yea, serenely
revelled in dalliance and delight. But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic
of my being, do I myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm and
while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep
inland there i still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy. Meanwhile, as we
thus lay entranced, the occasional sudden frantic spectacles in the distance
evinced the activity of the other boats, still engaged in drugging the whales
on the frontier of the host or possibly carrying on the war within the first
circle, where abundance of room and some convenient retreats were afforded
them. But the sight of the enraged drugged whales now and then blindly
darting to and fro across the circles, was nothing to what at last met our
eyes. It is sometimes the custom when fast to a whale more than commonly
powerful and alert, to seek to hamstring him, as it were, by sundering or
maiming his gigantic tailtendon. It is done by darting a shorthandled
cuttingspade, to which is attached a rope for hauling it back again. A
whale wounded as we afterwards learned in this part, but not effectually,
as it seemed, had broken away from the boat, carrying along with him half of
the harpoon line and in the extraordinary agony of the wound, he was now
dashing among the revolving circles like the lone mounted desperado
Arnold, at the battle of Saratoga, carrying dismay wherever he went. But
agonizing as was the wound of this whale, and an appalling spectacle enough,
any way yet the peculiar horror with which he seemed to inspire the rest of
the herd, was owing to a cause which at first the intervening distance
obscured from us. But at length we perceived that by one of the unimaginable
accidents of the fishery, this whale had become entangled in the harpoonline
that he towed he had also run away with the cuttingspade in him and while
the free end of the rope attached to that weapon, had permanently caught in
the coils of the harpoonline round his tail, the cuttingspade itself had
worked loose from his flesh. So that tormented to madness, he was now
churning through the water, violently flailing with his flexible tail, and
tossing the keen spade about him, wounding and murdering his own comrades.
this terrific object seemed to recall the whole herd from their stationary
fright. First, the whales forming the margin of our lake began to crowd a
little, and tumble against each other, as if lifted by half spent billows
from afar then the lake itself began faintly to heave and swell the
submarine bridalchambers and nurseries vanished in more and more
contracting orbits the whales in the more central circles began to swim in
thickening clusters. Yes, the long calm was departing. A low advancing hum
was soon heard and then like to the tumultuous masses of blockice when the
great river Hudson breaks up in Spring, the entire host of whales came
tumbling upon their inner centre, as if to pile themselves up in one common
mountain. Instantly Starbuck and Queequeg changed places Starbuck taking
the stern. Oars Oars he intensely whispered, seizing the helm  gripe
your oars, and clutch your souls, now My God, men, stand by Shove him off,
you Queequeg the whale there prick him hit him Stand up stand up, and
stay so Spring, men  pull, men never mind their backs scrape them
scrape away The boat was now all but jammed between two vast black bulks,
leaving a narrow Dardanelles between their long lengths. But by desperate
endeavor we at last shot into a temporary
opening then giving way rapidly, and at the same time earnestly watching
for another outlet. After many similar hairbreadth escapes, we at last
swiftly glided into what had just been one of the outer circles, but now
crossed by random whales, all violently making for one centre. This lucky
salvation was cheaply purchased by the loss of Queequeg's hat, who, while
standing in the bows to prick the fugitive whales, had his hat taken clean
from his head by the aireddy made by the sudden tossing of a pair of broad
flukes close by. Riotous and disordered as the universal commotion now was,
it soon resolved itself into what seemed a systematic movement for having
clumped together at last in one dense body, they then renewed their onward
flight with augmented fleetness. Further pursuit was useless but the boats
still lingered in their wake to pick up what drugged whales might be dropped
astern, and likewise to secure one which Flask had killed and waifed. The
waif is a pennoned pole, two or three of which are carried by every boat
and which, when additional game is at hand, are inserted upright into the
floating body of a dead whale, both to mark its place on the sea, and also
as token of prior possession, should the boats of any other ship draw near.
The result of this lowering was somewhat illustrative of that sagacious saying
in the Fishery, the more whales the less fish. Of all the drugged whales
only one was captured. The rest contrived to escape for the time, but only
to be taken, as will hereafter be seen, by some other craft than the Pequod.
To gally, or gallow, is to frighten excessively to confound with fright.
It is an old Saxon word. It occurs once in Shakespeare  The wrathful skies
Gallow the very wanderers of the dark And make them keep their caves. To
common language, the word is now completely obsolete. When the polite
landsman first hears it from the gaunt Nantucketer, he is apt to set it
down as one of the whaleman's selfderived savageries. Much the same is it
with many other sinewy Saxonisms of this sort, which emigrated to
NewEngland rocks with the noble brawn of the old English emigrants in the
time of the Commonwealth. Thus, some of the best and furthestdescended
English words the etymological Howards and Percys are now democratised, nay,
plebeianised so to speak in the New World.
The sperm whale, as with all other species of the Leviathan, but unlike
most other fish, breeds indifferently at all seasons after a gestation
which may probably be set down at nine months, producing but one at a time
though in some few known instances giving birth to an Esau and Jacob  a
contingency provided for in suckling by two teats, curiously situated, one
on each side of the anus but the breasts themselves extend upwards from
that. When by chance these precious parts in a nursing whale are cut by the
hunter's lance, the mother's pouring milk and blood rivallingly discolor
the sea for rods. The milk is very sweet and rich it has been tasted by
man it might do well with strawberries. When overflowing with mutual
esteem, the whales salute more hominum.
The previous chapter
gave account of an immense body or herd of Sperm Whales, and there was also
then given the probable cause inducing those vast aggregations. Now, though
such great bodies are at times encountered, yet,
as must have been seen, even at the present day, small detached bands are
occasionally observed, embracing from twenty to fifty individuals each. Such
bands are known as schools. They generally are of two sorts those composed
almost entirely of females, and those mustering none but young vigorous
males, or bulls, as they are familiarly designated. In cavalier attendance
upon the school of females, you invariably see a male of full grown magnitude,
but not old who, upon any alarm, evinces his gallantry by falling in the
rear and covering the flight of his ladies. In truth, this gentleman is a
luxurious Ottoman, swimming about over the watery world, surroundingly
accompanied by all the solaces and endearments of the harem. The contrast
between this Ottoman and his concubines is striking because, while he is
always of the largest leviathanic proportions, the ladies, even at full
growth, are not more than one third of the bulk of an averagesized male.
They are comparatively delicate, indeed I dare say, not to exceed half a
dozen yards round the waist. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied, that upon the
whole they are hereditarily entitled to en bon point. It is very curious
to watch this harem and its lord in their indolent ramblings. Like
fashionables, they are for ever on the move in leisurely search of variety.
You meet them on the Line in time for the full flower of the Equatorial
feeding season, having just returned, perhaps, from spending the summer in
the Northern seas, and so cheating summer of all unpleasant weariness and
warmth. By the time they have lounged up and down the promenade of the
Equator awhile, they start for the Oriental waters in anticipation of the
cool season there, and so evade the other excessive temperature of the year.
When serenely advancing on one of these journeys, if any strange suspicious
sights are seen, my lord whale keeps a wary eye on his interesting family.
Should any unwarrantably pert young Leviathan coming that way, presume to
draw confidentially close to one of the ladies, with what prodigious fury the
Bashaw assails him, and chases him away High times, indeed, if
unprincipled young rakes like him are to be permitted to invade the sanctity
of domestic bliss though do what the Bashaw will, he cannot keep the most
notorious Lothario out
of his bed for, alas all fish bed in common. As ashore, the ladies often
cause the most terrible duels among their rival admirers just so with the
whales, who sometimes come to deadly battle, and all for love. They fence
with their long lower jaws, sometimes locking them together, and so striving
for the supremacy like elks that warringly interweave their antlers. Not a
few are captured having the deep scars of these encounters, furrowed heads,
broken teeth, scolloped fins and in some instances, wrenched and dislocated
mouths. but supposing the invader of domestic bliss to betake himself away at
the first rush of the harem's lord, then is it very diverting to watch that
lord. Gently he insinuates his vast bulk among them again and revels there
awhile, still in tantalizing vicinity to young Lothario, like pious Solomon
devoutly worshipping among his thousand concubines. Granting other whales to
be in sight, the fishermen will seldom give chase to one of these Grand
Turks for these Grand Turks are too lavish of their strength, and hence
their unctuousness is small. As for the sons and the daughters they beget,
why, those sons and daughters must take care of themselves at least, with
only the maternal help. For like certain other omnivorous roving lovers that
might be named, my Lord Whale has no taste for the nursery, however much for
the bower and so, being a great traveller, he leaves his anonymous babies
all over the world every baby an exotic. In good time, nevertheless, as the
ardor of youth declines as years and dumps increase as reflection lends
her solemn pauses in short, as a general lassitude overtakes the sated Turk
then a love of ease and virtue supplants the love for maidens our Ottoman
enters upon the impotent, repentant, admonitory stage of life, forswears,
disbands the harem, and grown to an exemplary, sulky old soul, goes about
all alone among the meridians and parallels saying his prayers, and warning
each young Leviathan from his amorous errors. Now, as the harem of whales is
called by the fishermen a school, so is the lord and master of that school
technically known as the schoolmaster. It is therefore not in strict
character, however admirably satirical, that after going to school himself,
he should then go abroad inculcating not what he learned there, but the folly
of it. His title, schoolmaster, would very naturally
seem derived from the name bestowed upon the harem itself, but some have
surmised that the man who first thus entitled this sort of Ottoman whale,
must have read the memoirs of Vidocq, and informed himself what sort of a
countryschoolmaster that famous Frenchman was in his younger days, and what
was the nature of those occult lessons he inculcated into some of his pupils.
The same secludedness and isolation to which the schoolmaster whale betakes
himself in his advancing years, is true of all aged Sperm Whales. Almost
universally, a lone whale as a solitary Leviathan is called proves an
ancient one. Like venerable mossbearded Daniel Boone, he will have no one
near him but Nature herself and her he takes to wife in the wilderness of
waters, and the best of wives she is, though she keeps so many moody
secrets. The schools composing none but young and vigorous males, previously
mentioned, offer a strong contrast to the harem schools. For while those
female whales are characteristically timid, the young males, or
fortybarrelbulls, as they call them, are by far the most pugnacious of all
Leviathans, and proverbially the most dangerous to encounter excepting
those wondrous greyheaded, grizzled whales, sometimes met, and these will
fight you like grim fiends exasperated by a penal gout. The Fortybarrelbull
schools are larger than the harem schools. Like a mob of young collegians,
they are full of fight, fun, and wickedness, tumbling round the world at such
a reckless, rollicking rate, that no prudent underwriter would insure them
any more than he would a riotous lad at Yale or Harvard. They soon relinquish
this turbulence though, and when about three fourths grown, break up, and
separately go about in quest of settlements, that is, harems. Another point
of difference between the male and female schools is still more characteristic
of the sexes. Say you strike a Fortybarrelbull poor devil all his
comrades quit him. But strike a member of the harem school, and her
companions swim around her with every token of concern, sometimes lingering
so near her and so long, as themselves to fall a prey.
The allusion to the waifs
and waifpoles in the last chapter but one, necessitates some account of the
laws and regulations of the whale fishery, of which the waif may be deemed
the grand symbol and badge. It frequently happens that when several ships are
cruising in company, a whale may be struck by one vessel, then escape, and
be finally killed and captured by another vessel and herein are indirectly
comprised many minor contingencies, all partaking of this one grand feature.
For example, after a weary and perilous chase and capture of a whale, the
body may get loose from the ship by reason of a violent storm and drifting
far away to leeward, be retaken by a second whaler, who, in a calm, snugly
tows it alongside, without risk of life or line. Thus the most vexatious and
violent disputes would often arise between the fishermen, were there not some
written or unwritten, universal, undisputed law applicable to all cases.
Perhaps the only formal whaling code authorized by legislative enactment, was
that of Holland. It was decreed by the StatesGeneral in A. D.
. But
though no other nation has ever had any written whaling law, yet the American
fishermen have been their own legislators and lawyers in this matter. They
have provided a system which for terse comprehensiveness surpasses Justinian's
Pandects and the Bylaws of the Chinese Society for the Suppression of
Meddling with other People's Business. Yes these laws might be engraven on a
Queen Anne's farthing, or the barb of a harpoon, and worn round the neck, so
small are they. I. A FastFish belongs to the party fast to it. II. A
LooseFish is fair game for anybody who can soonest catch it. But what plays
the mischief with this masterly code is the
admirable brevity of it, which necessitates a vast volume of commentaries to
expound it. First What is a FastFish? Alive or dead a fish is technically
fast, when it is connected with an occupied ship or boat, by any medium at
all controllable by the occupant or occupants,  a mast, an oar, a nineinch
cable, a telegraph wire, or a strand of cobweb, it is all the same. Likewise
a fish is technically fast when it bears a waif, or any other recognised
symbol of possession so long as the party waifing it plainly evince their
ability at any time to take it alongside, as well as their intention so to
do. These are scientific commentaries but the commentaries of the whalemen
themselves sometimes consist in hard words and harder knocks the
CokeuponLittleton of the fist. True, among the more upright and honorable
whalemen allowances are always made for peculiar cases, where it would be an
outrageous moral injustice for one party to claim possession of a whale
previously chased or killed by another party. But others are by no means so
scrupulous. Some fifty years ago there was a curious case of whaletrover
litigated in England, wherein the plaintiffs set forth that after a hard
chase of a whale in the Northern seas and when indeed they the plaintiffs
had succeeded in harpooning the fish they were at last, through peril of
their lives, obliged to forsake not only their lines, but their boat itself.
Ultimately the defendants the crew of another ship came up with the whale,
struck, killed, seized, and finally appropriated it before the very eyes of
the plaintiffs. And when those defendants were remonstrated with, their
captain snapped his fingers in the plaintiffs' teeth, and assured them that by
way of doxology to the deed he had done, he would now retain their line,
harpoons, and boat, which had remained attached to the whale at the time of
the seizure. Wherefore the plaintiffs now sued for the recovery of the value
of their whale, line, harpoons, and boat. Mr. Erskine was counsel for the
defendants Lord Ellenborough was the judge. In the course of the defence,
the witty Erskine went on to illustrate his position, by alluding to a recent
crim. con. case, wherein a gentleman, after in vain trying to bridle his
wife's viciousness, had at last abandoned her upon
the seas of life but in the course of years, repenting of that step, he
instituted an action to recover possession of her. Erskine was on the other
side and he then supported it by saying, that though the gentleman had
originally harpooned the lady, and had once had her fast, and only by reason
of the great stress of her plunging viciousness, had as last abandoned her
yet abandon her he did, so that she became a loosefish and therefore when
a subsequent gentleman reharpooned her, the lady then became that subsequent
gentleman's property, along with whatever harpoon might have been found
sticking in her. Now in the present case Erskine contended that the examples
of the whale and the lady were reciprocally illustrative of each other. These
pleadings, and the counter pleadings, being duly heard, the very learned judge
in set terms decided, to wit, That as for the boat, he awarded it to the
plaintiffs, because they had merely abandoned it to save their lives but
that with regard to the controverted whale, harpoons, and line, they belonged
to the defendants the whale, because it was a LooseFish at the time of the
final capture and the harpoons and line because when the fish made off with
them, it the fish acquired a property in those articles and hence anybody
who afterwards took the fish had a right to them. Now the defendants
afterwards took the fish ergo, the aforesaid articles were theirs. A common
man looking at this decision of the very learned Judge, might possibly object
to it. But ploughed up to the primary rock of the matter, the two great
principles laid down in the twin whaling laws previously quoted, and applied
and elucidated by Lord Ellenborough in the above cited case these two laws
touching FastFish and LooseFish, I say, will, on reflection, be found the
fundamentals of all human jurisprudence For notwithstanding its complicated
tracery of sculpture, the Temple of the Law, like the Temple of the
Philistines, has but two props to stand on. Is it not a saying in every one's
mouth, Possession is half of the law that is, regardless of how the thing
came into possession? But often possession is the whole of the law. What are
the sinews and souls of Russian serfs and Republican slaves
but FastFish, whereof possession is the whole of the law? What to the
rapacious landlord is the widow's last mite but a FastFish? What is yonder
undetected villain's marble mansion with a doorplate for a waif what is
that but a FastFish? What is the ruinous discount which Mordecai, the broker,
gets from poor Woebegone, the bankrupt, on a loan to keep Woebegone's family
from starvation what is that ruinous discount but a FastFish? What is the
archbishop of Savesoul's income of , pounds seized from the scant bread
and cheese of hundreds of thousands of brokenbacked laborers all sure of
heaven without any of Savesoul's help what is that globular , but a
FastFish? What are the Duke of Dunder's hereditary towns and hamlets but
FastFish? What to that redoubted harpooneer, John Bull, is poor Ireland,
but a FastFish? What to that apostolic lancer, Brother Jonathan, is Texas
but a FastFish? And concerning all these, is not Possession the whole of
the law? But if the doctrine of FastFish be pretty generally applicable, the
kindred doctrine of LooseFish is still more widely so. That is
internationally and universally applicable. What was America in
but a
loosefish, in which Columbus struck the Spanish standard by way of waifing
it for his royal master and mistress? What was Poland to the Czar? What
Greece to the Turk? What India to England? What at last will Mexico be to
the United States? All LooseFish. What are the Rights of Man and the
Liberties of the World but LooseFish? What all men's minds and opinions but
LooseFish? What is the principle of religious belief in them but a
LooseFish? What to the ostentatious smuggling verbalists are the thoughts of
thinkers but LooseFish? What is the great globe itself but a LooseFish?
And what are you, reader, but a LooseFish and a FastFish, too?
Father Mapple rose, and in a mild voice of
unassuming authority ordered the scattered people to condense. Starboard
gangway, there side away to larboardlarboard gangway to starboard
Midships midships There was a low rumbling of heavy seaboots among the
benches, and a still slighter shuffling of women's shoes, and all was quiet
again, and every eye on the preacher. He paused a little then kneeling in
the pulpit's bows, folded his large brown hands across his chest, uplifted his
closed eyes,
and offered a prayer so deeply devout that he seemed kneeling and praying at
the bottom of the sea. This ended, in prolonged solemn tones, like the
continual tolling of a bell in a ship that is foundering at sea in a fog in
such tones he commenced reading the following hymn but changing his manner
towards the concluding stanzas, burst forth with a pealing exultation and joy
The ribs and terrors in the whale, Arched over me a dismal gloom, While
all God's sunlit waves rolled by, And lift me deepening down to doom. I saw
the opening maw of hell, With endless pains and sorrows there Which none but
they that feel can tell Oh, I was plunging to despair. In black distress,
I called my God, When I could scarce believe him mine, He bowed his ear to my
complaints  No more the whale did me confine. With speed he flew to my
relief, As on a radiant dolphin borne Awful, yet bright, as lightning shone
The face of my Deliverer God. My song for ever shall record That terrible,
that joyful hour I give the glory to my God, His all the mercy and the
power. Nearly all joined in singing this hymn, which swelled high above the
howling of the storm. A brief pause ensued the preacher slowly turned over
the leaves of the Bible, and at last, folding his hand down upon the proper
page, said Beloved shipmates, clinch the last verse of the first chapter of
Jonah  And God had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah. Shipmates,
this book, containing only four chapters four yarns is one of the smallest
strands in the mighty cable of the Scriptures. Yet what depths of the soul
does Jonah's deep sealine sound what a pregnant lesson to us is this
prophet What
a noble thing is that canticle in the fish's belly How billowlike and
boisterously grand We feel the floods surging over us we sound with him to
the kelpy bottom of the waters seaweed and all the slime of the sea is
about us But what is this lesson that the book of Jonah teaches?
Shipmates, it is a twostranded lesson a lesson to us all as sinful men,
and a lesson to me as a pilot of the living God. As sinful men, it is a
lesson to us all, because it is a story of the sin, hardheartedness,
suddenly awakened fears, the swift punishment, repentance, prayers, and
finally the deliverance and joy of Jonah. As with all sinners among men,
the sin of this son of Amittai was in his wilful disobedience of the command
of God never mind now what that command was, or how conveyed which he found
a hard command. But all the things that God would have us do are hard for us
to do remember that and hence, he oftener commands us than endeavors to
persuade. And if we obey God, we must disobey ourselves and it is in this
disobeying ourselves, wherein the hardness of obeying God consists. With
this sin of disobedience in him, Jonah still further flouts at God, by
seeking to flee from Him. He thinks that a ship made by men, will carry him
into countries where God does not reign, but only the Captains of this earth.
He skulks about the wharves of Joppa, and seeks a ship that's bound for
Tarshish. There lurks, perhaps, a hitherto unheeded meaning here. By all
accounts Tarshish could have been no other city than the modern Cadiz. That's
the opinion of learned men. And where is Cadiz, shipmates? Cadiz is in
Spain as far by water, from Joppa, as Jonah could possibly have sailed in
those ancient days, when the Atlantic was an almost unknown sea. Because
Joppa, the modern Jaffa, shipmates, is on the most easterly coast of the
Mediterranean, the Syrian and Tarshish or Cadiz more than two thousand miles
to the westward from that, just outside the Straits of Gibraltar. See ye not
then, shipmates, that Jonah sought to flee worldwide from God? Miserable
man Oh most contemptible and worthy of all scorn with slouched hat and
guilty eye, skulking from his God prowling among the shipping like a vile
burglar hastening to cross the seas. So disordered, selfcondemning is his
look, that had there been policemen in
those days, jonah, on the mere suspicion of something wrong, had been arrested
ere he touched a deck. How plainly he's a fugitive no baggage, not a
hatbox, valise, or carpetbag, no friends accompany him to the wharf with
their adieux. At last, after much dodging search, he finds the Tarshish ship
receiving the last items of her cargo and as he steps on board to see its
Captain in the cabin, all the sailors for the moment desist from hoisting in
the goods, to mark the stranger's evil eye. Jonah sees this but in vain he
tries to look all ease and confidence in vain essays his wretched smile.
Strong intuitions of the man assure the mariners he can be no innocent. In
their gamesome but still serious way, one whispers to the other "Jack, he's
robbed a widow" or,"Joe, do you mark him he's a bigamist" or,"Harry lad,
I guess he's the adulterer that broke jail in old Gomorrah, or belike, one of
the missing murderers from Sodom." Another runs to read the bill that's stuck
against the spile upon the wharf to which the ship is moored, offering five
hundred gold coins for the apprehension of a parricide, and containing a
description of his person. He reads, and looks from Jonah to the bill
while all his sympathetic shipmates now crowd round Jonah, prepared to lay
their hands upon him. Frighted Jonah trembles, and summoning all his
boldness to his face, only looks so much the more a coward. He will not
confess himself suspected but that itself is strong suspicion. So he makes
the best of it and when the sailors find him not to be the man that is
advertised, they let him pass, and he descends into the cabin. "Who's
there?" cries the Captain at his busy desk, hurriedly making out his papers
for the Customs "who's there?" Oh how that harmless question mangles Jonah
For the instant he almost turns to flee again. But he rallies. "I seek a
passage in this ship to Tarshish how soon sail ye, sir?" Thus far the busy
captain had not looked up to jonah, though the man now stands before him
but no sooner does he hear that hollow voice, than he darts a scrutinizing
glance. "We sail with the next coming tide," at last he slowly answered,
still intently eyeing him. "No sooner, sir?" "Soon enough for any honest man
that goes a passenger." Ha Jonah, that's another stab. But he swiftly calls
away the Captain from that scent. "I'll sail with ye," he says, "the
passage
money, how much is that, I'll pay now." For it is particularly written,
shipmates, as if it were a thing not to be overlooked in this history,"that he
paid the fare thereof" ere the craft did sail. And taken with the context,
this is full of meaning. Now Jonah's Captain, shipmates, was one whose
discernment detects crime in any, but whose cupidity exposes it only in the
penniless. In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely,
and without a passport whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all
frontiers. So Jonah's Captain prepares to test the length of Jonah's purse,
ere he judge him openly. He charges him thrice the usual sum and it's
assented to. Then the Captain knows that Jonah is a fugitive but at the
same time resolves to help a flight that paves its rear with gold. Yet when
Jonah fairly takes out his purse, prudent suspicions still molest the Captain.
He rings every coin to find a counterfeit. Not a forger, any way, he mutters
and Jonah is put down for his passage. "Point out my stateroom, Sir," says
Jonah now. "I'm travelweary I need sleep." "Thou look'st like it," says
the Captain, "there's thy room." Jonah enters, and would lock the door,
but the lock contains no key. Hearing him foolishly fumbling there, the
Captain laughs lowly to himself, and mutters something about the doors of
convicts' cells being never allowed to be locked within. All dressed and
dusty as he is, Jonah throws himself into his berth, and finds the little
stateroom ceiling almost resting on his forehead. The air is close, and
jonah gasps. then, in that contracted hole, sunk, too, beneath the ship's
waterline, Jonah feels the heralding presentiment of that stifling hour, when
the whale shall hold him in the smallest of his bowel's wards. Screwed at
its axis against the side, a swinging lamp slightly oscillates in Jonah's
room and the ship, heeling over towards the wharf with the weight of the
last bales received, the lamp, flame and all, though in slight motion, still
maintains a permanent obliquity with reference to the room though, in truth,
infallibly straight itself, it but made obvious the false, lying levels
among which it hung. The lamp alarms and frightens Jonah as lying in his
berth his tormented eyes roll round the place, and this thus far successful
fugitive finds no refuge for his restless glance. But that contradiction in
the lamp more and
more appals him. The floor, the ceiling, and the side, are all awry. "Oh so
my conscience hangs in me" he groans, "straight upward, so it burns but the
chambers of my soul are all in crookedness" Like one who after a night of
drunken revelry hies to his bed, still reeling, but with conscience yet
pricking him, as the plungings of the Roman racehorse but so much the more
strike his steel tags into him as one who in that miserable plight still
turns and turns in giddy anguish, praying God for annihilation until the fit
be passed and at last amid the whirl of woe he feels, a deep stupor steals
over him, as over the man who bleeds to death, for conscience is the wound,
and there's naught to staunch it so, after sore wrestlings in his berth,
Jonah's prodigy of ponderous misery drags him drowning down to sleep. And
now the time of tide has come the ship casts off her cables and from the
deserted wharf the uncheered ship for Tarshish, all careening, glides to sea.
That ship, my friends, was the first of recorded smugglers the contraband
was jonah. but the sea rebels he will not bear the wicked burden. A
dreadful storm comes on, the ship is like to break. But now when the
boatswain calls all hands to lighten her when boxes, bales, and jars are
clattering overboard when the wind is shrieking, and the men are yelling,
and every plank thunders with trampling feet right over Jonah's head in all
this raging tumult, Jonah sleeps his hideous sleep. He sees no black sky and
raging sea, feels not the reeling timbers, and little hears he or heeds he
the far rush of the mighty whale, which even now with open mouth is cleaving
the seas after him. Aye, shipmates, Jonah was gone down into the sides of
the ship a berth in the cabin as I have taken it, and was fast asleep. But
the frightened master comes to him, and shrieks in his dead ear, "What
meanest thou, O sleeper arise" Startled from his lethargy by that direful
cry, Jonah staggers to his feet, and stumbling to the deck, grasps a shroud,
to look out upon the sea. But at that moment he is sprung upon by a panther
billow leaping over the bulwarks. Wave after wave thus leaps into the ship,
and finding no speedy vent runs roaring fore and aft, till the mariners come
nigh to drowning while yet afloat. And ever, as the white moon shows
her affrighted face from the steep gullies in the blackness overhead, aghast
Jonah sees the rearing bowsprit pointing high upward, but soon beat downward
again towards the tormented deep. Terrors upon terrors run shouting through
his soul. In all his cringing attitudes, the Godfugitive is now too plainly
known. The sailors mark him more and more certain grow their suspicions of
him, and at last, fully to test the truth, by referring the whole matter to
high Heaven, they fall to casting lots, to see for whose cause this great
tempest was upon them. The lot is Jonah's that discovered, then how
furiously they mob him with their questions. "What is thine occupation?
whence comest thou? thy country? what people?" but mark now, my shipmates,
the behavior of poor Jonah. The eager mariners but ask him who he is, and
where from whereas, they not only receive an answer to those questions, but
likewise another answer to a question not put by them, but the unsolicited
answer is forced from Jonah by the hard hand of God that is upon him. "I am
a Hebrew," he cries and then "I fear the Lord the God of Heaven who hath
made the sea and the dry land" Fear him, O Jonah? Aye, well mightest thou
fear the Lord God then Straightway, he now goes on to make a full
confession whereupon the mariners became more and more appalled, but still
are pitiful. For when Jonah, not yet supplicating God for mercy, since he
but too well knew the darkness of his deserts, when wretched Jonah cries out
to them to take him and cast him forth into the sea, for he knew that for
his sake this great tempest was upon them they mercifully turn from him,
and seek by other means to save the ship. But all in vain the indignant
gale howls louder then, with one hand raised invokingly to God, with the
other they not unreluctantly lay hold of Jonah. And now behold Jonah taken up
as an anchor and dropped into the sea when instantly an oily calmness floats
out from the east, and the sea is still, as Jonah carries down the gale with
him, leaving smooth water behind. He goes down in the whirling heart of such
a masterless commotion that he scarce heeds the moment when he drops seething
into the yawning jaws
awaiting him and the whale shootsto all his ivory teeth, like the Lord out
of the fish's belly. But observe his prayer, and so many white bolts, upon
his prison. Then Jonah prayed unto learn a weighty lesson. For sinful as he
is, Jonah does not weep and wail for direct deliverance. He feels that his
dreadful punishment is just. He leaves all his deliverance to God, contenting
himself with this, that spite of all his pains and pangs, he will still
look towards His holy temple. And here, shipmates, is true and faithful
repentance not clamorous for pardon, but grateful for punishment. And how
pleasing to God was this conduct in Jonah, is shown in the eventual
deliverance of him from the sea and the whale. Shipmates, I do not place
Jonah before you to be copied for his sin but I do place him before you as a
model for repentance. Sin not but if you do, take heed to repent of it like
Jonah. While he was speaking these words, the howling of the shrieking,
slanting storm without seemed to add new power to the preacher, who, when
describing Jonah's seastorm, seemed tossed by a storm himself. His deep
chest heaved as with a groundswell his tossed arms seemed the warring
elements at work and the thunders that rolled away from off his swarthy
brow, and the light leaping from his eye, made all his simple hearers look
on him with a quick fear that was strange to them. There now came a lull in
his look, as he silently turned over the leaves of the Book once more and,
at last, standing motionless, with closed eyes, for the moment, seemed
communing with God and himself. But again he leaned over towards the people,
and bowing his head lowly, with an aspect of the deepest yet manliest
humility, he spake these words Shipmates, God has laid but one hand upon
you both his hands press upon me. I have read ye by what murky light may
be mine the lesson that Jonah teaches to all sinners and therefore to ye,
and still more to me, for I am a greater sinner than ye. And now how gladly
would I come down from this masthead and sit on the hatches there where you
sit, and listen as you listen, while some one of you reads me that other
and more awful lesson which Jonah teaches to me as a pilot of
the living God. How being an anointed pilotprophet, or speaker of true
things, and bidden by the Lord to sound those unwelcome truths in the ears of
a wicked nineveh, jonah, appalled at the hostility he should raise, fled from
his mission, and sought to escape his duty and his God by taking ship at
Joppa. But God is everywhere Tarshish he never reached. As we have seen,
God came upon him in the whale, and swallowed him down to living gulfs of
doom, and with swift slantings tore him along"into the midst of the seas,"
where the eddying depths sucked him ten thousand fathoms down, and"the weeds
were wrapped about his head," and all the watery world of woe bowled over
him. Yet even then beyond the reach of any plummet "out of the belly of
hell" when the whale grounded upon the ocean's utmost bones, even then, God
heard the engulphed, repenting prophet when he cried. Then God spake unto the
fish and from the shuddering cold and blackness of the sea, the whale came
breeching up towards the warm and pleasant sun, and all the delights of air
and earth and"vomited out Jonah upon the dry land" when the word of the
Lord came a second time and Jonah, bruised and beaten his ears, like two
seashells, still multitudinously murmuring of the ocean Jonah did the
Almighty's bidding. And what was that, shipmates? To preach the Truth to the
face of Falsehood That was it This, shipmates, this is that other lesson
and woe to that pilot of the living God who slights it. Woe to him whom this
world charms from Gospel duty Woe to him who seeks to pour oil upon the
waters when God has brewed them into a gale Woe to him who seeks to please
rather than to appal Woe to him whose good name is more to him than goodness
Woe to him who, in this world, courts not dishonor Woe to him who would not
be true, even though to be false were salvation Yea, woe to him who, as the
great Pilot Paul has it, while preaching to others is himself a castaway
He drooped and fell away from himself for a moment then lifting his face to
them again, showed a deep joy in his eyes, as he cried out with a heavenly
enthusiasm,  but oh shipmates on the starboard hand of every woe, there is
a sure delight and higher the top of that delight, than the bottom of the
woe is
deep. Is not the maintruck higher than the kelson is low? Delight is to
him a far, far upward, and inward delight who against the proud gods and
commodores of this earth, ever stands forth his own inexorable self. Delight
is to him whose strong arms yet support him, when the ship of this base
treacherous world has gone down beneath him. Delight is to him, who gives
no quarter in the truth, and kills, burns, and destroys all sin though he
pluck it out from under the robes of Senators and Judges. Delight,
topgallant delight is to him, who acknowledges no law or lord, but the
Lord his God, and is only a patriot to heaven. Delight is to him, whom all
the waves of the billows of the seas of the boisterous mob can never shake
from this sure Keel of the Ages. And eternal delight and deliciousness will
be his, who coming to lay him down, can say with his final breath O Father
chiefly known to me by Thy rod mortal or immortal, here I die. I have
striven to be Thine, more than to be this world's, or mine own. Yet this is
nothing I leave eternity to Thee for what is man that he should live out
the lifetime of his God? He said no more, but slowly waving a benediction,
covered his face with his hands, and so remained kneeling, till all the
people had departed, and he was left alone in the place.
De balena vero sufficit, si rex habeat
caput, et regina caudam. Bracton, l . c. . Latin from the books of the
Laws of England, which taken along with the context, means, that of all whales
captured by anybody on the coast of that land, the King, as Honorary Grand
Harpooneer, must have the head, and the Queen be respectfully presented with
the tail. A division which, in the whale, is much like halving an apple
there is no intermediate remainder. Now as this law, under a modified form,
is to this day in force in England and as it offers in various respects a
strange anomaly touching the general law of Fast and LooseFish, it is here
treated of in a separate chapter, on the same courteous principle that
prompts the English railways to be at the expense of a separate car, specially
reserved for the accommodation of royalty. In the first place, in curious
proof of the fact that the abovementioned law is still in force, I proceed to
lay before you a circumstance that happened within the last two years. It
seems that some honest mariners of Dover, or Sandwich, or some one of the
Cinque Ports, had after a hard chase succeeded in killing and beaching a fine
whale which they had originally descried afar off from the shore. Now the
Cinque Ports are partially or somehow under the jurisdiction of a sort of
policeman or beadle, called a Lord Warden. Holding the office directly from
the crown, I believe, all the royal emoluments incident to the Cinque Port
territories become by assignment his. By some writers this office is called a
sinecure. But not so. Because the Lord Warden is busily employed at times
in fobbing his perquisites which are his chiefly by virtue of that same
fobbing of them. Now when these poor sunburnt mariners, barefooted, and
with their trowsers rolled high up on their eely legs, had wearily hauled
their fat fish high and dry, promising themselves a good  pounds from the
precious oil and bone and in fantasy sipping rare tea with their wives, and
good ale with their cronies, upon the strength of their respective shares
up steps a very learned and most Christian and charitable gentleman, with a
copy of Blackstone under his arm and laying it upon the whale's head, he
says  Hands off this fish, my masters, is a FastFish. I seize it as the
Lord Warden's. Upon this the poor mariners in their respectful consternation
so truly English knowing not what to say, fall to vigorously scratching
their heads all round meanwhile ruefully glancing from the whale to the
stranger. But that did in nowise mend the matter, or at all soften the hard
heart of the learned gentleman with the copy of Blackstone. At length one of
them, after long scratching about for his ideas, made bold to speak. Please,
sir, who is the Lord Warden? The Duke. But the duke had nothing to do
with taking this fish? It is his. We have been at great trouble, and
peril, and some expense, and is all that to go to the Duke's benefit we
getting nothing at all for our pains but our blisters? It is his. Is the
duke so very poor as to be forced to this desperate mode of getting a
livelihood? It is his. I thought to relieve my old bedridden mother by
part of my share of this whale. It is his. Won't the Duke be content
with a quarter or a half? It is his. In a word, the whale was seized and
sold, and his Grace the Duke of Wellington received the money. Thinking that
viewed in some particular lights, the case might by a bare possibility in
some small degree be deemed, under the circumstances, a rather hard one, an
honest clergyman of the town respectfully addressed a note to his Grace,
begging him to take the case of those unfortunate
mariners into full consideration. To which my Lord Duke in substance replied
both letters were published that he had already done so, and received the
money, and would be obliged to the reverend gentleman if for the future he
the reverend gentleman would decline meddling with other people's business.
Is this the still militant old man, standing at the corners of the three
kingdoms, on all hands coercing alms of beggars? It will readily be seen that
in this case the alleged right of the Duke to the whale was a delegated one
from the Sovereign. We must needs inquire then on what principle the Sovereign
is originally invested with that right. The law itself has already been set
forth. But Plowdon gives us the reason for it. Says Plowdon, the whale so
caught belongs to the King and Queen, because of its superior excellence.
And by the soundest commentators this has ever been held a cogent argument
in such matters. But why should the King have the head, and the Queen the
tail? A reason for that, ye lawyers In his treatise on QueenGold, or
Queenpinmoney, an old King's Bench author, one William Prynne, thus
discourseth Ye tail is ye Queen's, that ye Queen's wardrobe may be supplied
with ye whalebone. Now this was written at a time when the black limber bone
of the Greenland or Right whale was largely used in ladies' bodices. But this
same bone is not in the tail it is in the head, which is a sad mistake for
a sagacious lawyer like Prynne. But is the Queen a mermaid, to be presented
with a tail? An allegorical meaning may lurk here. There are two royal fish
so styled by the English law writers  the whale and the sturgeon both royal
property under certain limitations, and nominally supplying the tenth branch
of the crown's ordinary revenue. I know not that any other author has hinted
of the matter but by inference it seems to me that the sturgeon must be
divided in the same way as the whale, the King receiving the highly dense and
elastic head peculiar to that fish, which, symbolically regarded, may
possibly be humorously grounded upon some presumed congeniality. And thus
there seems a reason in all things, even in law.
In vain it was to rake
for Ambergriese in the paunch of this Leviathan, insufferable fetor denying
not inquiry. Sir T. Browne, V. E. It was a week or two after the last
whaling scene recounted, and when we were slowly sailing over a sleepy,
vapory, midday sea, that the many noses on the Pequod's deck proved more
vigilant discoverers than the three pairs of eyes aloft. A peculiar and not
very pleasant smell was smelt in the sea. I will bet something now, said
Stubb, that somewhere hereabouts are some of those drugged whales we tickled
the other day. I thought they would keel up before long. Presently, the
vapors in advance slid aside and there in the distance lay a ship, whose
furled sails betokened that some sort of whale must be alongside. As we
glided nearer, the stranger showed French colors from his peak and by the
eddying cloud of vulture seafowl that circled, and hovered, and swooped
around him, it was plain that the whale alongside must be what the fishermen
call a blasted whale, that is, a whale that has died unmolested on the sea,
and so floated an unappropriated corpse. It may well be conceived, what an
unsavory odor such a mass must exhale worse than an Assyrian city in the
plague, when the living are incompetent to bury the departed. So intolerable
indeed is it regarded by some, that no cupidity could persuade them to moor
alongside of it. Yet are there those who will still do it notwithstanding
the fact that the oil obtained from such subjects is of a very inferior
quality, and by no means of the nature of attarofrose. Coming still nearer
with the expiring breeze, we saw that the Frenchman had a second whale
alongside and this second whale seemed even more of a nosegay than the
first. In truth, it turned out to be one of those problematical whales that
seem
to dry up and die with a sort of prodigious dyspepsia, or indigestion
leaving their defunct bodies almost entirely bankrupt of anything like oil.
Nevertheless, in the proper place we shall see that no knowing fisherman will
ever turn up his nose at such a whale as this, however much he may shun
blasted whales in general. The Pequod had now swept so nigh to the stranger,
that Stubb vowed he recognized his cutting spadepole entangled in the lines
that were knotted round the tail of one of these whales. There's a pretty
fellow, now, he banteringly laughed, standing in the ship's bows, there's
a jackal for ye I well know that these Crappoes of Frenchmen are but poor
devils in the fishery sometimes lowering their boats for breakers, mistaking
them for Sperm Whale spouts yes, and sometimes sailing from their port with
their hold full of boxes of tallow candles, and cases of snuffers,
foreseeing that all the oil they will get won't be enough to dip the Captain's
wick into aye, we all know these things but look ye, here's a Crappo
that is content with our leavings, the drugged whale there, I mean aye, and
is content too with scraping the dry bones of that other precious fish he has
there. Poor devil I say, pass round a hat, some one, and let's make him a
present of a little oil for dear charity's sake. For what oil he'll get from
that drugged whale there, wouldn't be fit to burn in a jail no, not in a
condemned cell. And as for the other whale, why, I'll agree to get more oil
by chopping up and trying out these three masts of ours, than he'll get from
that bundle of bones though, now that I think of it, it may contain
something worth a good deal more than oil yes, ambergris. I wonder now if
our old man has thought of that. It's worth trying. Yes, I'm for it and
so saying he started for the quarterdeck. By this time the faint air had
become a complete calm so that whether or no, the Pequod was now fairly
entrapped in the smell, with no hope of escaping except by its breezing up
again. Issuing from the cabin, Stubb now called his boat's crew, and pulled
off for the stranger. Drawing across her bow, he perceived that in accordance
with the fanciful French taste, the upper part of her stempiece was carved in
the likeness of a
huge drooping stalk, was painted green, and for thorns had copper spikes
projecting from it here and there the whole terminating in a symmetrical
folded bulb of a bright red color. Upon her head boards, in large gilt
letters, he read Bouton de Rose, Rosebutton, or Rosebud and this was
the romantic name of this aromatic ship. Though Stubb did not understand the
Bouton part of the inscription, yet the word rose, and the bulbous
figurehead put together, sufficiently explained the whole to him. A wooden
rosebud, eh? he cried with his hand to his nose, that will do very well
but how like all creation it smells Now in order to hold direct
communication with the people on deck, he had to pull round the bows to the
starboard side, and thus come close to the blasted whale and so talk over
it. Arrived then at this spot, with one hand still to his nose, he bawled
BoutondeRose, ahoy are there any of you BoutondeRoses that speak
English? Yes, rejoined a Guernseyman from the bulwarks, who turned out
to be the chiefmate. Well, then, my BoutondeRosebud, have you seen the
White Whale? What whale? The White Whale a Sperm Whale Moby Dick,
have ye seen him? Never heard of such a whale. Cachalot Blanche White
Whale no. Very good, then good bye now, and I'll call again in a
minute. Then rapidly pulling back towards the Pequod, and seeing Ahab
leaning over the quarterdeck rail awaiting his report, he moulded his two
hands into a trumpet and shouted  No, Sir No Upon which Ahab retired,
and Stubb returned to the Frenchman. He now perceived that the Guernseyman,
who had just got into the chains, and was using a cuttingspade, had slung his
nose in a sort of bag. What's the matter with your nose, there? said Stubb.
Broke it?
I wish it was broken, or that I didn't have any nose at all answered the
Guernseyman, who did not seem to relish the job he was at very much. But
what are you holding yours for? Oh, nothing It's a wax nose I have to
hold it on. Fine day, aint it? Air rather gardenny, I should say throw us
a bunch of posies, will ye, BoutondeRose? What in the devil's name do you
want here? roared the Guernseyman, flying into a sudden passion. Oh
keep coolcool? yes, that's the word why don't you pack those whales in ice
while you're working at 'em? But joking aside, though do you know,
Rosebud, that it's all nonsense trying to get any oil out of such whales? As
for that dried up one, there, he hasn't a gill in his whole carcase. I
know that well enough but, d'ye see, the Captain here won't believe it
this is his first voyage he was a Cologne manufacturer before. But come
aboard, and mayhap he'll believe you, if he won't me and so I'll get out of
this dirty scrape. Anything to oblige ye, my sweet and pleasant fellow,
rejoined Stubb, and with that he soon mounted to the deck. There a queer
scene presented itself. The sailors, in tasselled caps of red worsted, were
getting the heavy tackles in readiness for the whales. But they worked rather
slow and talked very fast, and seemed in anything but a good humor. All
their noses upwardly projected from their faces like so many jibbooms. Now
and then pairs of them would drop their work, and run up to the masthead to
get some fresh air. Some thinking they would catch the plague, dipped oakum
in coaltar, and at intervals held it to their nostrils. Others having
broken the stems of their pipes almost short off at the bowl, were vigorously
puffing tobaccosmoke, so that it constantly filled their olfactories.
Stubb was struck by a shower of outcries and anathemas proceeding from the
Captain's roundhouse abaft and looking in that direction saw a fiery face
thrust from behind the door, which was held ajar from within. This was the
tormented surgeon, who, after in vain remonstrating against the proceedings of
the day, had betaken himself to the Captain's roundhouse  cabinet he
called it to avoid the pest but still, could not help yelling out his
entreaties and indignations at times.
Marking all this, Stubb argued well for his scheme, and turning to the
Guernseyman had a little chat with him, during which the stranger mate
expressed his detestation of his Captain as a conceited ignoramus, who had
brought them all into so unsavory and unprofitable a pickle. Sounding him
carefully, Stubb further perceived that the Guernseyman had not the
slightest suspicion concerning the ambergris. He therefore held his peace on
that head, but otherwise was quite frank and confidential with him, so that
the two quickly concocted a little plan for both circumventing and satirizing
the Captain, without his at all dreaming of distrusting their sincerity.
According to this little plan of theirs, the Guernseyman, under cover of an
interpreter's office, was to tell the Captain what he pleased, but as coming
from Stubb and as for Stubb, he was to utter any nonsense that should come
uppermost in him during the interview. By this time their destined victim
appeared from his cabin. He was a small and dark, but rather delicate looking
man for a seacaptain, with large whiskers and moustache, however and wore
a red cotton velvet vest with watchseals at his side. To this gentleman,
Stubb was now politely introduced by the Guernseyman, who at once
ostentatiously put on the aspect of interpreting between them. What shall I
say to him first? said he. Why, said Stubb, eyeing the velvet vest and the
watch and seals, you may as well begin by telling him that he looks a sort
of babyish to me, though I don't pretend to be a judge. He says, Monsieur,
said the Guernseyman, in French, turning to his captain, that only
yesterday his ship spoke a vessel, whose captain and chiefmate, with six
sailors, had all died of a fever caught from a blasted whale they had brought
alongside. Upon this the captain started, and eagerly desired to know more.
What now? said the Guernseyman to Stubb. Why, since he takes it so easy,
tell him that now I have eyed him carefully, I'm quite certain that he's no
more fit to command a whaleship than a St. Jago monkey. In fact, tell him
from me he's a baboon.
He vows and declares, Monsieur, that the other whale, the dried one, is far
more deadly than the blasted one in fine, Monsieur, he conjures us, as we
value our lives, to cut loose from these fish. Instantly the captain ran
forward, and in a loud voice commanded his crew to desist from hoisting the
cuttingtackles, and at once cast loose the cables and chains confining the
whales to the ship. What now? said the Guernseyman, when the captain had
returned to them. Why, let me see yes, you may as well tell him now that 
that in fact, tell him I've diddled him, and aside to himself perhaps
somebody else. He says, Monsieur, that he's very happy to have been of any
service to us. Hearing this, the captain vowed that they were the grateful
parties meaning himself and mate and concluded by inviting Stubb down into
his cabin to drink a bottle of Bordeaux. He wants you to take a glass of wine
with him, said the interpreter. Thank him heartily but tell him it's
against my principles to drink with the man I've diddled. In fact, tell him
I must go. He says, Monsieur, that his principles won't admit of his
drinking but that if Monsieur wants to live another day to drink, then
Monsieur had best drop all four boats, and pull the ship away from these
whales, for it's so calm they won't drift. By this time Stubb was over the
side, and getting into his boat, hailed the Guernseyman to this effect,
that having a long towline in his boat, he would do what he could to help
them, by pulling out the lighter whale of the two from the ship's side. While
the Frenchman's boats, then, were engaged in towing the ship one way, Stubb
benevolently towed away at his whale the other way, ostentatiously slacking
out a most unusually long towline. Presently a breeze sprang up Stubb
feigned to cast off from the whale hoisting his boats, the Frenchman soon
increased his distance, while the Pequod slid in between him and Stubb's
whale. Whereupon Stubb quickly pulled to the floating body,
and hailing the pequod to give notice of his intentions, at once proceeded to
reap the fruit of his unrighteous cunning. Seizing his sharp boatspade, he
commenced an excavation in the body, a little behind the side fin. You would
almost have thought he was digging a cellar there in the sea and when at
length his spade struck against the gaunt ribs, it was like turning up old
Roman tiles and pottery buried in fat English loam. His boat's crew were all
in high excitement, eagerly helping their chief, and looking as anxious as
goldhunters. And all the time numberless fowls were diving, and ducking, and
screaming, and yelling, and fighting around them. Stubb was beginning to look
disappointed, especially as the horrible nosegay increased, when suddenly
from out the very heart of this plague, there stole a faint stream of
perfume, which flowed through the tide of bad smells without being absorbed
by it, as one river will flow into and then along with another, without at
all blending with it for a time. I have it, I have it, cried Stubb, with
delight, striking something in the subterranean regions, a purse a
purse Dropping his spade, he thrust both hands in, and drew out handfuls
of something that looked like ripe Windsor soap, or rich mottled old cheese
very unctuous and savory withal. You might easily dent it with your thumb
it is of a hue between yellow and ash color. And this, good friends, is
ambergris, worth a gold guinea an ounce to any druggist. Some six handfuls
were obtained but more was unavoidably lost in the sea, and still more,
perhaps, might have been secured were it not for impatient Ahab's loud command
to Stubb to desist, and come on board, else the ship would bid them good
bye.
Now this ambergris is a very curious
substance, and so important as an article of commerce, that in
a
certain Nantucketborn
Captain Coffin was examined at the bar of the English House of Commons on that
subject. for at that time, and indeed until a comparatively late day, the
precise origin of ambergris remained, like amber itself, a problem to the
learned. Though the word ambergris is but the French compound for grey amber,
yet the two substances are quite distinct. For amber, though at times found
on the seacoast, is also dug up in some far inland soils, whereas ambergris
is never found except upon the sea. Besides, amber is a hard, transparent,
brittle, odorless substance, used for mouthpieces to pipes, for beads and
ornaments but ambergris is soft, waxy, and so highly fragrant and spicy,
that it is largely used in perfumery, in pastiles, precious candles,
hairpowders, and pomatum. The Turks use it in cooking, and also carry it to
Mecca, for the same purpose that frankincense is carried to St. Peter's in
Rome. Some wine merchants drop a few grains into claret, to flavor it. Who
would think, then, that such fine ladies and gentlemen should regale
themselves with an essence found in the inglorious bowels of a sick whale
Yet so it is. By some, ambergris is supposed to be the cause, and by others
the effect, of the dyspepsia in the whale. How to cure such a dyspepsia it
were hard to say, unless by administering three or four boat loads of
Brandreth's pills, and then running out of harm's way, as laborers do in
blasting rocks. I have forgotten to say that there were found in this
ambergris, certain hard, round, bony plates, which at first Stubb thought
might be sailors' trousers buttons but it afterwards turned out that they
were nothing more than pieces of small squid bones embalmed in that manner.
Now that the incorruption of this most fragrant ambergris should be found in
the heart of such decay is this nothing? Bethink thee of that saying of St.
Paul in Corinthians, about corruption and incorruption how that we are sown
in dishonor, but raised in glory. And likewise call to mind that saying of
paracelsus about what it is that maketh the best musk. Also forget not the
strange fact that of all things of illsavor, Colognewater, in its
rudimental manufacturing stages, is the worst. I should like to conclude the
chapter with the above appeal, but cannot, owing to my anxiety to repel a
charge often made
against whalemen, and which, in the estimation of some already biased minds,
might be considered as indirectly substantiated by what has been said of the
Frenchman's two whales. Elsewhere in this volume the slanderous aspersion has
been disproved, that the vocation of whaling is throughout a slatternly,
untidy business. But there is another thing to rebut. They hint that all
whales always smell bad. Now how did this odious stigma originate? I opine,
that it is plainly traceable to the first arrival of the Greenland whaling
ships in London, more than two centuries ago. Because those whalemen did not
then, and do not now, try out their oil at sea as the Southern ships have
always done but cutting up the fresh blubber in small bits, thrust it
through the bung holes of large casks, and carry it home in that manner the
shortness of the season in those Icy Seas, and the sudden and violent storms
to which they are exposed, forbidding any other course. The consequence is,
that upon breaking into the hold, and unloading one of these whale
cemeteries, in the Greenland dock, a savor is given forth somewhat similar to
that arising from excavating an old city graveyard, for the foundations of
a Lyingin Hospital. I partly surmise also, that this wicked charge against
whalers may be likewise imputed to the existence on the coast of Greenland,
in former times, of a Dutch village called Schmerenburgh or Smeerenberg,
which latter name is the one used by the learned Fogo Von Slack, in his great
work on Smells, a textbook on that subject. As its name imports smeer, fat
berg, to put up, this village was founded in order to afford a place for
the blubber of the dutch whale fleet to be tried out, without being taken
home to Holland for that purpose. It was a collection of furnaces,
fatkettles, and oil sheds and when the works were in full operation
certainly gave forth no very pleasant savor. But all this is quite different
from a South Sea Sperm Whaler which in a voyage of four years perhaps,
after completely filling her hold with oil, does not, perhaps, consume fifty
days in the business of boiling out and in the state that it is casked, the
oil is nearly scentless. The truth is, that living or dead, if but decently
treated, whales as a species are by no
means creatures of ill odor nor can whalemen be recognised, as the people of
the middle ages affected to detect a Jew in the company, by the nose. Nor
indeed can the whale possibly be otherwise than fragrant, when, as a general
thing, he enjoys such high health taking abundance of exercise always out
of doors though, it is true, seldom in the open air. I say, that the
motion of a Sperm Whale's flukes above water dispenses a perfume, as when a
muskscented lady rustles her dress in a warm parlor. What then shall I liken
the Sperm Whale to for fragrance, considering his magnitude? Must it not be
to that famous elephant, with jewelled tusks, and redolent with myrrh, which
was led out of an Indian town to do honor to Alexander the Great?
It was but some few days after
encountering the Frenchman, that a most significant event befell the most
insignificant of the Pequod's crew an event most lamentable and which
ended in providing the sometimes madly merry and predestinated craft with a
living and ever accompanying prophecy of whatever shattered sequel might prove
her own. Now, in the whale ship, it is not every one that goes in the boats.
Some few hands are reserved called shipkeepers, whose province it is to work
the vessel while the boats are pursuing the whale. As a general thing, these
shipkeepers are as hardy fellows as the men comprising the boats' crews. But
if there happen to be an unduly slender, clumsy, or timorous wight in the
ship, that wight is certain to be made a shipkeeper. It was so in the
Pequod with the little negro Pippin by nickname, Pip by abbreviation. Poor
Pip ye have heard of him before ye must remember his tambourine on that
dramatic midnight, so gloomyjolly.
In outer aspect, Pip and DoughBoy made a match, like a black pony and a
white one, of equal developments, though of dissimilar color, driven in one
eccentric span. But while hapless DoughBoy was by nature dull and torpid in
his intellects, Pip, though over tenderhearted, was at bottom very bright,
with that pleasant, genial, jolly brightness peculiar to his tribe a tribe,
which ever enjoy all holidays and festivities with finer, freer relish than
any other race. For blacks, the year's calendar should show naught but three
hundred and sixtyfive Fourth of Julys and New Year's Days. Nor smile so,
while I write that this little black was brilliant, for even blackness has
its brilliancy behold yon lustrous ebony, panelled in king's cabinets. But
Pip loved life, and all life's peaceable securities so that the
panicstriking business in which he had somehow unaccountably become
entrapped, had most sadly blurred his brightness though, as ere long will be
seen, what was thus temporarily subdued in him, in the end was destined to
be luridly illumined by strange wild fires, that fictitiously showed him off
to ten times the natural lustre with which in his native Tolland County in
Connecticut, he had once enlivened many a fiddler's frolic on the green and
at melodious eventide, with his gay haha had turned the round horizon into
one starbelled tambourine. So, though in the clear air of day, suspended
against a blueveined neck, the purewatered diamond drop will healthful
glow yet, when the cunning jeweller would show you the diamond in its most
impressive lustre, he lays it against a gloomy ground, and then lights it
up, not by the sun, but by some unnatural gases. Then come out those fiery
effulgences, infernally superb then the evilblazing diamond, once the
divinest symbol of the crystal skies, looks like some crownjewel stolen from
the King of Hell. But let us to the story. It came to pass, that in the
ambergris affair Stubb's afteroarsman chanced so to sprain his hand, as
for a time to become quite maimed and, temporarily, Pip was put into his
place. The first time Stubb lowered with him, Pip evinced much nervousness
but happily, for that time, escaped close contact with the whale and
therefore came off not altogether discreditably though Stubb observing him,
took care, afterwards,
to exhort him to cherish his courageousness to the utmost, for he might often
find it needful. Now upon the second lowering, the boat paddled upon the
whale and as the fish received the darted iron, it gave its customary rap,
which happened, in this instance, to be right under poor Pip's seat. The
involuntary consternation of the moment caused him to leap, paddle in hand,
out of the boat and in such a way, that part of the slack whale line coming
against his chest, he breasted it overboard with him, so as to become
entangled in it, when at last plumping into the water. That instant the
stricken whale started on a fierce run, the line swiftly straightened and
presto poor Pip came all foaming up to the chocks of the boat,
remorselessly dragged there by the line, which had taken several turns around
his chest and neck. Tashtego stood in the bows. He was full of the fire of
the hunt. He hated Pip for a poltroon. Snatching the boatknife from its
sheath, he suspended its sharp edge over the line, and turning towards Stubb,
exclaimed interrogatively, cut? meantime pip's blue, choked face plainly
looked, Do, for God's sake All passed in a flash. In less than half a
minute, this entire thing happened. Damn him, cut roared Stubb and so
the whale was lost and Pip was saved. So soon as he recovered himself, the
poor little negro was assailed by yells and execrations from the crew.
Tranquilly permitting these irregular cursings to evaporate, Stubb then in a
plain, businesslike, but still half humorous manner, cursed Pip officially
and that done, unofficially gave him much wholesome advice. The substance
was, Never jump from a boat, Pip, except but all the rest was indefinite,
as the soundest advice ever is. Now, in general, Stick to the boat, is
your true motto in whaling but cases will sometimes happen when Leap
from the boat, is still better. Moreover, as if perceiving at last that if
he should give undiluted conscientious advice to Pip, he would be leaving him
too wide a margin to jump in for the future Stubb suddenly dropped all
advice, and concluded with a peremptory command, Stick to the boat, Pip, or
by the Lord, I wont pick you up if you jump mind that. We can't afford
to lose whales by the likes of you a whale would sell for thirty times what
you would, Pip, in Alabama. Bear that in mind, and don't jump any more.
Hereby perhaps Stubb indirectly hinted, that though man loved his fellow,
yet man is a moneymaking animal, which propensity too often interferes with
his benevolence. But we are all in the hands of the Gods and Pip jumped
again. It was under very similar circumstances to the first performance but
this time he did not breast out the line and hence, when the whale started
to run, Pip was left behind on the sea, like a hurried traveller's trunk.
Alas Stubb was but too true to his word. It was a beautiful, bounteous,
blue day the spangled sea calm and cool, and flatly stretching away, all
round, to the horizon, like goldbeater's skin hammered out to the extremest.
Bobbing up and down in that sea, Pip's ebon head showed like a head of cloves.
No boatknife was lifted when he fell so rapidly astern. Stubb's inexorable
back was turned upon him and the whale was winged. In three minutes, a
whole mile of shoreless ocean was between Pip and Stubb. Out from the centre
of the sea, poor Pip turned his crisp, curling, black head to the sun,
another lonely castaway, though the loftiest and the brightest. Now, in calm
weather, to swim in the open ocean is as easy to the practised swimmer as to
ride in a springcarriage ashore. But the awful lonesomeness is intolerable.
The intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity,
my God who can tell it? Mark, how when sailors in a dead calm bathe in
the open sea mark how closely they hug their ship and only coast along her
sides. But had Stubb really abandoned the poor little negro to his fate? No
he did not mean to, at least. Because there were two boats in his wake, and
he supposed, no doubt, that they would of course come up to Pip very quickly,
and pick him up though, indeed, such considerations towards oarsmen
jeopardized through their own timidity, is not always manifested by the
hunters in all similar instances and such instances not unfrequently occur
almost invariably in the fishery, a coward, so called, is marked with the same
ruthless detestation peculiar to military navies and armies.
But it so happened, that those boats, without seeing Pip, suddenly spying
whales close to them on one side, turned, and gave chase and Stubb's boat
was now so far away, and he and all his crew so intent upon his fish, that
Pip's ringed horizon began to expand around him miserably. By the merest
chance the ship itself at last rescued him but from that hour the little
negro went about the deck an idiot such, at least, they said he was. The
sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his
soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous
depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro
before his passive eyes and the misermerman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded
heaps and among the joyous, heartless, everjuvenile eternities, Pip saw the
multitudinous, Godomnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of
waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the
loom, and spoke it and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man's
insanity is heaven's sense and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes
at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic
and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God. For the
rest, blame not Stubb too hardly. The thing is common in that fishery and
in the sequel of the narrative, it will then be seen what like abandonment
befell myself.
That whale of Stubb's so dearly
purchased, was duly brought to the Pequod's side, where all those cutting and
hoisting operations previously detailed, were regularly gone through, even to
the baling of the Heidelburgh Tun, or Case. While some were occupied with
this latter duty, others were employed in dragging away the larger tubs, so
soon as filled with the sperm and when the proper time arrived, this same
sperm was carefully manipulated ere going to the tryworks, of which anon. It
had cooled and crystallized to such a degree, that when, with several others,
I sat down before a large Constantine's bath of it, I found it strangely
concreted into lumps, here and there rolling about in the liquid part. It
was our business to squeeze these lumps back into fluid. A sweet and unctuous
duty no wonder that in old times this sperm was such a favorite cosmetic.
Such a clearer such a sweetener such a softener such a delicious
mollifier After having my hands in it for only a few minutes, my fingers
felt like eels, and began, as it were, to serpentine and spiralize. As I sat
there at my ease, crosslegged on the deck after the bitter exertion at the
windlass under a blue tranquil sky the ship under indolent sail, and
gliding so serenely along as I bathed my hands among those soft, gentle
globules of infiltrated tissues, woven almost within the hour as they richly
broke to my fingers, and discharged all their opulence, like fully ripe
grapes their wine as I snuffed up that uncontaminated aroma, literally and
truly, like the smell of spring violets I declare to you, that for the
time I lived as in a musky meadow I forgot all about our horrible oath in
that inexpressible sperm, I washed my hands and my heart of it I almost
began to credit the old Paracelsan superstition that sperm is of rare virtue
in allaying the heat of anger while bathing in that bath, I felt divinely
free from all illwill, or petulence, or malice, of any sort whatsoever.
Squeeze squeeze squeeze all the morning long I squeezed that sperm till
I myself almost melted into it I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of
insanity came over me and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my
colaborers' hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such
an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget
that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into
their eyes sentimentally as much as to say, Oh my dear fellow beings, why
should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest
illhumor or envy Come let us squeeze hands all round nay, let us all
squeeze ourselves
into each other let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and
sperm of kindness. Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm for ever For
now, since by many prolonged, repeated experiences, I have perceived that in
all cases man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of
attainable felicity not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy
but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fireside,
the country now that I have perceived all this, I am ready to squeeze case
eternally. In thoughts of the visions of the night, I saw long rows of
angels in paradise, each with his hands in a jar of spermaceti. Now, while
discoursing of sperm, it behooves to speak of other things akin to it, in the
business of preparing the sperm whale for the tryworks. First comes
whitehorse, so called, which is obtained from the tapering part of the fish,
and also from the thicker portions of his flukes. It is tough with congealed
tendons a wad of muscle but still contains some oil. After being severed
from the whale, the whitehorse is first cut into portable oblongs ere going
to the mincer. They look much like blocks of Berkshire marble. Plumpudding
is the term bestowed upon certain fragmentary parts of the whale's flesh, here
and there adhering to the blanket of blubber, and often participating to a
considerable degree in its unctuousness. It is a most refreshing, convivial,
beautiful object to behold. As its name imports, it is of an exceedingly
rich, mottled tint, with a bestreaked snowy and golden ground, dotted with
spots of the deepest crimson and purple. It is plums of rubies, in pictures
of citron. Spite of reason, it is hard to keep yourself from eating it. I
confess, that once I stole behind the foremast to try it. It tasted something
as I should conceive a royal cutlet from the thigh of Louis le Gros might
have tasted, supposing him to have been killed the first day after the venison
season, and that particular venison season contemporary with an unusually
fine vintage of the vineyards of Champagne.
There is another substance, and a very singular one, which turns up in the
course of this business, but which I feel it to be very puzzling adequately
to describe. It is called slobgollion an appellation original with the
whalemen, and even so is the nature of the substance. It is an ineffably
oozy, stringy affair, most frequently found in the tubs of sperm, after a
prolonged squeezing, and subsequent decanting. I hold it to be the
wondrously thin, ruptured membranes of the case, coalescing. Gurry, so
called, is a term properly belonging to right whalemen, but sometimes
incidentally used by the sperm fishermen. It designates the dark, glutinous
substance which is scraped off the back of the Greenland or right whale, and
much of which covers the decks of those inferior souls who hunt that ignoble
Leviathan. Nippers. Strictly this word is not indigenous to the whale's
vocabulary. But as applied by whalemen, it becomes so. A whaleman's nipper
is a short firm strip of tendinous stuff cut from the tapering part of
Leviathan's tail it averages an inch in thickness, and for the rest, is
about the size of the iron part of a hoe. Edgewise moved along the oily deck,
it operates like a leathern squilgee and by nameless blandishments, as of
magic, allures along with it all impurities. But to learn all about these
recondite matters, your best way is at once to descend into the blubberroom,
and have a long talk with its inmates. This place has previously been
mentioned as the receptacle for the blanketpieces, when stript and hoisted
from the whale. When the proper time arrives for cutting up its contents,
this apartment is a scene of terror to all tyros, especially by night. On one
side, lit by a dull lantern, a space has been left clear for the workmen.
They generally go in pairs, a pikeandgaffman and a spademan. The
whalingpike is similar to a frigate's boardingweapon of the same name. The
gaff is something like a boathook. With his gaff, the gaffman hooks on to a
sheet of blubber, and strives to hold it from slipping, as the ship pitches
and lurches about. Meanwhile, the spademan stands on the sheet itself,
perpendicularly chopping it into the portable horsepieces. This spade is
sharp as hone can make it the spademan's feet are shoeless the thing
he stands on will sometimes irresistibly slide away from him, like a sledge.
If he cuts off one of his own toes, or one of his assistants', would you be
very much astonished? Toes are scarce among veteran blubberroom men.
Had you stepped on board the Pequod at a
certain juncture of this postmortemizing of the whale and had you strolled
forward nigh the windlass, pretty sure am I that you would have scanned with
no small curiosity a very strange, enigmatical object, which you would have
seen there, lying along lengthwise in the lee scuppers. Not the wondrous
cistern in the whale's huge head not the prodigy of his unhinged lower jaw
not the miracle of his symmetrical tail none of these would so surprise you,
as half a glimpse of that unaccountable cone,  longer than a Kentuckian is
tall, nigh a foot in diameter at the base, and jetblack as Yojo, the ebony
idol of Queequeg. And an idol, indeed, it is or, rather, in old times, its
likeness was. Such an idol as that found in the secret groves of Queen
Maachah in Judea and for worshipping which, king Asa, her son, did depose
her, and destroyed the idol, and burnt it for an abomination at the brook
Kedron, as darkly set forth in the th chapter of the first book of Kings.
Look at the sailor, called the mincer, who now comes along, and assisted by
two allies, heavily backs the grandissimus, as the mariners call it, and
with bowed shoulders, staggers off with it as if he were a grenadier carrying
a dead comrade from the field. extending it upon the forecastle deck, he now
proceeds cylindrically to remove its dark pelt, as an African hunter the
pelt of a boa. This done he turns the pelt inside out, like a pantaloon leg
gives it a good stretching, so as almost to double its diameter and at last
hangs it, well spread, in the
rigging, to dry. Ere long, it is taken down when removing some three feet
of it, towards the pointed extremity, and then cutting two slits for
armholes at the other end, he lengthwise slips himself bodily into it. The
mincer now stands before you invested in the full canonicals of his calling.
Immemorial to all his order, this investiture alone will adequately protect
him, while employed in the peculiar functions of his office. That office
consists in mincing the horsepieces of blubber for the pots an operation
which is conducted at a curious wooden horse, planted endwise against the
bulwarks, and with a capacious tub beneath it, into which the minced pieces
drop, fast as the sheets from a rapt orator's desk. Arrayed in decent black
occupying a conspicuous pulpit intent on bible leaves what a candidate for
an archbishoprick, what a lad for a Pope were this mincer
Bible leaves Bible leaves This is the invariable cry from the mates to
the mincer. It enjoins him to be careful, and cut his work into as thin
slices as possible, inasmuch as by so doing the business of boiling out the
oil is much accelerated, and its quantity considerably increased, besides
perhaps improving it in quality.
Besides her hoisted boats, an American
whaler is outwardly distinguished by her tryworks. She presents the curious
anomaly of the most solid masonry joining with oak and hemp in constituting
the completed ship. it is as if from the open field a brickkiln were
transported to her planks. The tryworks are planted between the foremast and
mainmast, the most roomy part of the deck. The timbers beneath are of a
peculiar strength, fitted to sustain the weight of an almost solid mass of
brick and mortar, some ten feet by eight square, and five in height. The
foundation does not penetrate the deck, but the masonry is firmly secured to
the surface by
ponderous knees of iron bracing it on all sides, and screwing it down to the
timbers. On the flanks it is cased with wood, and at top completely covered
by a large, sloping, battened hatchway. Removing this hatch we expose the
great trypots, two in number, and each of several barrels' capacity. When
not in use, they are kept remarkably clean. Sometimes they are polished
with soapstone and sand, till they shine within like silver punchbowls.
During the nightwatches some cynical old sailors will crawl into them and
coil themselves away there for a nap. While employed in polishing them one
man in each pot, side by side many confidential communications are carried
on, over the iron lips. It is a place also for profound mathematical
meditation. It was in the left hand trypot of the Pequod, with the
soapstone diligently circling round me, that I was first indirectly struck by
the remarkable fact, that in geometry all bodies gliding along the cycloid,
my soapstone for example, will descend from any point in precisely the same
time. Removing the fireboard from the front of the tryworks, the bare
masonry of that side is exposed, penetrated by the two iron mouths of the
furnaces, directly underneath the pots. These mouths are fitted with heavy
doors of iron. The intense heat of the fire is prevented from communicating
itself to the deck, by means of a shallow reservoir extending under the entire
inclosed surface of the works. By a tunnel inserted at the rear, this
reservoir is kept replenished with water as fast as it evaporates. There are
no external chimneys they open direct from the rear wall. And here let us
go back for a moment. It was about nine o'clock at night that the Pequod's
tryworks were first started on this present voyage. It belonged to Stubb to
oversee the business. All ready there? Off hatch, then, and start her. You
cook, fire the works. This was an easy thing, for the carpenter had been
thrusting his shavings into the furnace throughout the passage. Here be it
said that in a whaling voyage the first fire in the tryworks has to be fed
for a time with wood. After that no wood is used, except as a means of quick
ignition to the staple fuel. In a word, after being tried out, the crisp,
shrivelled
blubber, now called scraps or fritters, still contains considerable of its
unctuous properties. These fritters feed the flames. Like a plethoric
burning martyr, or a selfconsuming misanthrope, once ignited, the whale
supplies his own fuel and burns by his own body. Would that he consumed his
own smoke for his smoke is horrible to inhale, and inhale it you must, and
not only that, but you must live in it for the time. It has an unspeakable,
wild, Hindoo odor about it, such as may lurk in the vicinity of funereal
pyres. It smells like the left wing of the day of judgment it is an argument
for the pit. By midnight the works were in full operation. We were clear
from the carcase sail had been made the wind was freshening the wild
ocean darkness was intense. But that darkness was licked up by the fierce
flames, which at intervals forked forth from the sooty flues, and
illuminated every lofty rope in the rigging, as with the famed Greek fire.
The burning ship drove on, as if remorselessly commissioned to some vengeful
deed. So the pitch and sulphurfreighted brigs of the bold Hydriote, Canaris,
issuing from their midnight harbors, with broad sheets of flame for sails,
bore down upon the turkish frigates, and folded them in conflagrations. The
hatch, removed from the top of the works, now afforded a wide hearth in front
of them. Standing on this were the Tartarean shapes of the pagan harpooneers,
always the whaleship's stokers. With huge pronged poles they pitched
hissing masses of blubber into the scalding pots, or stirred up the fires
beneath, till the snaky flames darted, curling, out of the doors to catch
them by the feet. The smoke rolled away in sullen heaps. To every pitch of
the ship there was a pitch of the boiling oil, which seemed all eagerness to
leap into their faces. Opposite the mouth of the works, on the further side
of the wide wooden hearth, was the windlass. This served for a seasofa.
Here lounged the watch, when not otherwise employed, looking into the red
heat of the fire, till their eyes felt scorched in their heads. Their tawny
features, now all begrimed with smoke and sweat, their matted beards, and
the contrasting barbaric brilliancy of their teeth, all these were strangely
revealed in the capricious emblazonings of the works. As they
narrated to each other their unholy adventures, their tales of terror told in
words of mirth as their uncivilized laughter forked upwards out of them,
like the flames from the furnace as to and fro, in their front, the
harpooneers wildly gesticulated with their huge pronged forks and dippers as
the wind howled on, and the sea leaped, and the ship groaned and dived, and
yet steadfastly shot her red hell further and further into the blackness of
the sea and the night, and scornfully champed the white bone in her mouth,
and viciously spat round her on all sides then the rushing Pequod, freighted
with savages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into
that blackness of darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her
monomaniac commander's soul. So seemed it to me, as I stood at her helm,
and for long hours silently guided the way of this fireship on the sea.
Wrapped, for that interval, in darkness myself, I but the better saw the
redness, the madness, the ghastliness of others. The continual sight of the
fiend shapes before me, capering half in smoke and half in fire, these at
last begat kindred visions in my soul, so soon as I began to yield to that
unaccountable drowsiness which ever would come over me at a midnight helm.
But that night, in particular, a strange and ever since inexplicable
thing occurred to me. Starting from a brief standing sleep, I was horribly
conscious of something fatally wrong. The jawbone tiller smote my side,
which leaned against it in my ears was the low hum of sails, just beginning
to shake in the wind I thought my eyes were open I was half conscious of
putting my fingers to the lids and mechanically stretching them still further
apart. But, spite of all this, I could see no compass before me to steer by
though it seemed but a minute since I had been watching the card, by the
steady binnacle lamp illuminating it. Nothing seemed before me but a jet
gloom, now and then made ghastly by flashes of redness. Uppermost was the
impression, that whatever swift, rushing thing I stood on was not so much
bound to any haven ahead as rushing from all havens astern. A stark,
bewildered feeling, as of death, came over me. Convulsively my hands grasped
the tiller, but with the crazy conceit that the tiller was, somehow,
in some enchanted way, inverted. My God what is the matter with me? thought
I. Lo in my brief sleep I had turned myself about, and was fronting the
ship's stern, with my back to her prow and the compass. In an instant I faced
back, just in time to prevent the vessel from flying up into the wind, and
very probably capsizing her. How glad and how grateful the relief from this
unnatural hallucination of the night, and the fatal contingency of being
brought by the lee look not too long in the face of the fire, O man Never
dream with thy hand on the helm Turn not thy back to the compass accept
the first hint of the hitching tiller believe not the artificial fire, when
its redness makes all things look ghastly. Tomorrow, in the natural sun,
the skies will be bright those who glared like devils in the forking flames,
the morn will show in far other, at least gentler, relief the glorious,
golden, glad sun, the only true lamp all others but liars Nevertheless the
sun hides not Virginia's Dismal Swamp, nor Rome's accursed Campagna, nor wide
Sahara, nor all the millions of miles of deserts and of griefs beneath the
moon. The sun hides not the ocean, which is the dark side of this earth,
and which is two thirds of this earth. So, therefore, that mortal man who
hath more of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal man cannot be true not true,
or undeveloped. With books the same. The truest of all men was the Man of
Sorrows, and the truest of all books is Solomon's, and Ecclesiastes is the
fine hammered steel of woe. All is vanity. ALL. This wilful world hath
not got hold of unchristian Solomon's wisdom yet. But he who dodges hospitals
and jails, and walks fast crossing graveyards, and would rather talk of
operas than hell calls Cowper, Young, Pascal, Rousseau, poor devils all of
sick men and throughout a carefree lifetime swears by Rabelais as passing
wise, and therefore jolly not that man is fitted to sit down on
tombstones, and break the green damp mould with unfathomably wondrous
Solomon. But even Solomon, he says, the man that wandereth out of the way
of understanding shall remain  i. e. even while living in the congregation
of the dead. Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee,
deaden thee as for the time it did me.
There is a wisdom that is woe but there is a woe that is madness. And there
is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest
gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces.
And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the
mountains so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still
higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.
Had you descended from the Pequod's
tryworks to the Pequod's forecastle, where the off duty watch were sleeping,
for one single moment you would have almost thought you were standing in
some illuminated shrine of canonized kings and counsellors. There they lay in
their triangular oaken vaults, each mariner a chiselled muteness a score of
lamps flashing upon his hooded eyes. In merchantmen, oil for the sailor is
more scarce than the milk of queens. To dress in the dark, and eat in the
dark, and stumble in darkness to his pallet, this is his usual lot. But the
whaleman, as he seeks the food of light, so he lives in light. He makes his
berth an Aladdin's lamp, and lays him down in it so that in the pitchiest
night the ship's black hull still houses an illumination. See with what
entire freedom the whaleman takes his handful of lamps often but old bottles
and vials, though to the copper cooler at the tryworks, and replenishes
them there, as mugs of ale at a vat. He burns, too, the purest of oil, in
its unmanufactured, and, therefore, unvitiated state a fluid unknown to
solar, lunar, or astral contrivances ashore. It is sweet as early grass
butter in April. He goes and hunts for his oil, so as to be sure of its
freshness and genuineness, even as the traveller on the prairie hunts up his
own supper of game.
Already has it been
related how the great leviathan is afar off descried from the masthead how
he is chased over the watery moors, and slaughtered in the valleys of the
deep how he is then towed alongside and beheaded and how on the
principle which entitled the headsman of old to the garments in which the
beheaded was killed his great padded surtout becomes the property of his
executioner how, in due time, he is condemned to the pots, and, like
Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, his spermaceti, oil, and bone pass unscathed
through the fire but now it remains to conclude the last chapter of this
part of the description by rehearsing singing, if I may  the romantic
proceeding of decanting off his oil into the casks and striking them down into
the hold, where once again leviathan returns to his native profundities,
sliding along beneath the surface as before but, alas never more to rise
and blow. While still warm, the oil, like hot punch, is received into the
sixbarrel casks and while, perhaps, the ship is pitching and rolling this
way and that in the midnight sea, the enormous casks are slewed round and
headed over, end for end, and sometimes perilously scoot across the slippery
deck, like so many land slides, till at last manhandled and stayed in their
course and all round the hoops, rap, rap, go as many hammers as can play
upon them, for now, ex officio, every sailor is a cooper. At length, when
the last pint is casked, and all is cool, then the great hatchways are
unsealed, the bowels of the ship are thrown open, and down go the casks to
their final rest in the sea. This done, the hatches are replaced, and
hermetically closed, like a closet walled up. In the sperm fishery, this is
perhaps one of the most remarkable incidents in all the business of whaling.
One day the planks stream with freshets of blood and oil on the sacred
quarterdeck enormous masses of the whale's head are profanely piled great
rusty casks lie about, as in a brewery yard the smoke from the tryworks has
besooted all the bulwarks the mariners go about suffused with unctuousness
the entire ship seems great leviathan himself while on all hands the din is
deafening. But a day or two after, you look about you, and prick your ears
in this selfsame ship and were it not for the telltale boats and
tryworks, you would all but swear you trod some silent merchant vessel,
with a most scrupulously neat commander. The unmanufactured sperm oil
possesses a singularly cleansing virtue. This is the reason why the decks
never look so white as just after what they call an affair of oil. Besides,
from the ashes of the burned scraps of the whale, a potent ley is readily
made and whenever any adhesiveness from the back of the whale remains
clinging to the side, that ley quickly exterminates it. Hands go diligently
along the bulwarks, and with buckets of water and rags restore them to their
full tidiness. The soot is brushed from the lower rigging. All the numerous
implements which have been in use are likewise faithfully cleansed and put
away. The great hatch is scrubbed and placed upon the tryworks, completely
hiding the pots every cask is out of sight all tackles are coiled in
unseen nooks and when by the combined and simultaneous industry of almost
the entire ship's company, the whole of this conscientious duty is at last
concluded, then the crew themselves proceed to their own ablutions shift
themselves from top to toe and finally issue to the immaculate deck, fresh
and all aglow, as bridegrooms newleaped from out the daintiest Holland. Now,
with elated step, they pace the planks in twos and threes, and humorously
discourse of parlors, sofas, carpets, and fine cambrics propose to mat the
deck think of having hangings to the top object not to taking tea by
moonlight on the piazza of the forecastle. To hint to such musked mariners of
oil, and bone, and blubber, were little short of audacity. They know not the
thing you distantly allude to. Away, and bring us napkins But mark aloft
there, at the three mast heads, stand three
men intent on spying out more whales, which, if caught, infallibly will again
soil the old oaken furniture, and drop at least one small greasespot
somewhere. Yes and many is the time, when, after the severest uninterrupted
labors, which know no night continuing straight through for ninetysix
hours when from the boat, where they have swelled their wrists with all day
rowing on the Line, they only step to the deck to carry vast chains, and
heave the heavy windlass, and cut and slash, yea, and in their very
sweatings to be smoked and burned anew by the combined fires of the equatorial
sun and the equatorial tryworks when, on the heel of all this, they have
finally bestirred themselves to cleanse the ship, and make a spotless dairy
room of it many is the time the poor fellows, just buttoning the necks of
their clean frocks, are startled by the cry of There she blows and away
they fly to fight another whale, and go through the whole weary thing again.
Oh my friends, but this is mankilling Yet this is life. For hardly have
we mortals by long toilings extracted from the world's vast bulk its small but
valuable sperm and then, with weary patience, cleansed ourselves from its
defilements, and learned to live here in clean tabernacles of the soul
hardly is this done, when  There she blows the ghost is spouted up, and
away we sail to fight some other world, and go through young life's old
routine again. Oh the metempsychosis Oh Pythagoras, that in bright
Greece, two thousand years ago, did die, so good, so wise, so mild I
sailed with thee along the Peruvian coast last voyage  and, foolish as I am,
taught thee, a green simple boy, how to splice a rope
Ere now it has been related how Ahab was
wont to pace his quarterdeck, taking regular turns at either limit, the
binnacle
and mainmast but in the multiplicity of other things requiring narration it
has not been added how that sometimes in these walks, when most plunged in
his mood, he was wont to pause in turn at each spot, and stand there
strangely eyeing the particular object before him. When he halted before the
binnacle, with his glance fastened on the pointed needle in the compass, that
glance shot like a javelin with the pointed intensity of his purpose and
when resuming his walk he again paused before the mainmast, then, as the same
riveted glance fastened upon the riveted gold coin there, he still wore the
same aspect of nailed firmness, only dashed with a certain wild longing, if
not hopefulness. But one morning, turning to pass the doubloon, he seemed
to be newly attracted by the strange figures and inscriptions stamped on it,
as though now for the first time beginning to interpret for himself in some
monomaniac way whatever significance might lurk in them. And some certain
significance lurks in all things, else all things are little worth, and the
round world itself but an empty cipher, except to sell by the cartload, as
they do hills about Boston, to fill up some morass in the Milky Way. Now
this doubloon was of purest, virgin gold, raked somewhere out of the heart of
gorgeous hills, whence, east and west, over golden sands, the headwaters of
many a Pactolus flows. And though now nailed amidst all the rustiness of iron
bolts and the verdigris of copper spikes, yet, untouchable and immaculate to
any foulness, it still preserved its Quito glow. Nor, though placed amongst
a ruthless crew and every hour passed by ruthless hands, and through the
livelong nights shrouded with thick darkness which might cover any pilfering
approach, nevertheless every sunrise found the doubloon where the sunset left
it last. For it was set apart and sanctified to one awestriking end and
however wanton in their sailor ways, one and all, the mariners revered it as
the white whale's talisman. Sometimes they talked it over in the weary watch
by night, wondering whose it was to be at last, and whether he would ever
live to spend it. Now those noble golden coins of South America are as
medals of the sun and tropic tokenpieces. Here palms, alpacas, and
volcanoes sun's disks and stars ecliptics, hornsofplenty, and rich
banners waving, are in luxuriant profusion stamped so that the precious gold
seems almost to derive an added preciousness and enhancing glories, by
passing through those fancy mints, so Spanishly poetic. It so chanced that
the doubloon of the Pequod was a most wealthy example of these things. On its
round border it bore the letters, REPUBLICA DEL ECUADOR QUITO. So this
bright coin came from a country planted in the middle of the world, and
beneath the great equator, and named after it and it had been cast midway
up the Andes, in the unwaning clime that knows no autumn. Zoned by those
letters you saw the likeness of three Andes' summits from one a flame a
tower on another on the third a crowing cock while arching over all was a
segment of the partitioned zodiac, the signs all marked with their usual
cabalistics, and the keystone sun entering the equinoctial point at Libra.
Before this equatorial coin, Ahab, not unobserved by others, was now pausing.
There's something ever egotistical in mountaintops and towers, and all
other grand and lofty things look here, three peaks as proud as Lucifer.
The firm tower, that is Ahab the volcano, that is Ahab the courageous, the
undaunted, and victorious fowl, that, too, is Ahab all are Ahab and this
round gold is but the image of the rounder globe, which, like a magician's
glass, to each and every man in turn but mirrors back his own mysterious
self. Great pains, small gains for those who ask the world to solve them it
cannot solve itself. Methinks now this coined sun wears a ruddy face but
see aye, he enters the sign of storms, the equinox and but six months
before he wheeled out of a former equinox at Aries From storm to storm So
be it, then. Born in throes, 't is fit that man should live in pains and die
in pangs So be it, then Here's stout stuff for woe to work on. So be it,
then. No fairy fingers can have pressed the gold, but devil's claws must
have left their mouldings there since yesterday, murmured Starbuck to
himself, leaning against the bulwarks. The old
man seems to read Belshazzar's awful writing. I have never marked the coin
inspectingly. He goes below let me read. A dark valley between three
mighty, heavenabiding peaks, that almost seem the Trinity, in some faint
earthly symbol. So in this vale of Death, God girds us round and over all
our gloom, the sun of Righteousness still shines a beacon and a hope. If we
bend down our eyes, the dark vale shows her mouldy soil but if we lift them,
the bright sun meets our glance half way, to cheer. Yet, oh, the great sun
is no fixture and if, at midnight, we would fain snatch some sweet solace
from him, we gaze for him in vain This coin speaks wisely, mildly, truly,
but still sadly to me. I will quit it, lest Truth shake me falsely. There
now's the old Mogul, soliloquized Stubb by the tryworks, he's been twigging
it and there goes Starbuck from the same, and both with faces which I
should say might be somewhere within nine fathoms long. And all from looking
at a piece of gold, which did I have it now on Negro Hill or in Corlaer's
Hook, I'd not look at it very long ere spending it. Humph in my poor,
insignificant opinion, I regard this as queer. I have seen doubloons before
now in my voyagings your doubloons of old Spain, your doubloons of Peru,
your doubloons of Chili, your doubloons of Bolivia, your doubloons of
Popayan with plenty of gold moidores and pistoles, and joes, and half joes,
and quarter joes. what then should there be in this doubloon of the Equator
that is so killing wonderful? By Golconda let me read it once. Halloa
here's signs and wonders truly That, now, is what old Bowditch in his
Epitome calls the zodiac, and what my almanack below calls ditto. I'll get
the almanack and as I have heard devils can be raised with Daboll's
arithmetic, I'll try my hand at raising a meaning out of these queer
curvicues here with the Massachusetts calendar. Here's the book. Let's see
now. Signs and wonders and the sun, he's always among 'em. Hem, hem, hem
here they are here they go all alive Aries, or the Ram Taurus, or the
Bull and Jimimi here's Gemini himself, or the Twins. Well the sun he
wheels among 'em. Aye, here on the coin he's just crossing the threshold
between two of twelve sittingrooms all in a ring. Book you lie there the
fact is, you books must know your
places. You'll do to give us the bare words and facts, but we come in to
supply the thoughts. That's my small experience, so far as the Massachusetts
calendar, and Bowditch's navigator, and Daboll's arithmetic go. Signs and
wonders, eh? Pity if there is nothing wonderful in signs, and significant in
wonders There's a clue somewhere wait a bit histhark By Jove, I have
it Look you, Doubloon, your zodiac here is the life of man in one round
chapter and now I'll read it off, straight out of the book. Come, Almanack
To begin there's Aries, or the Ram lecherous dog, he begets us then,
Taurus, or the Bull he bumps us the first thing then Gemini, or the Twins 
that is, Virtue and Vice we try to reach Virtue, when lo comes Cancer
the Crab, and drags us back and here, going from Virtue, Leo, a roaring
Lion, lies in the path he gives a few fierce bites and surly dabs with his
paw we escape, and hail Virgo, the Virgin that's our first love we marry
and think to be happy for aye, when pop comes Libra, or the Scales happiness
weighed and found wanting and while we are very sad about that, Lord how
we suddenly jump, as Scorpio, or the Scorpion, stings us in rear we are
curing the wound, when whang come the arrows all round Sagittarius, or the
Archer, is amusing himself. As we pluck out the shafts, stand aside here's
the batteringram, Capricornus, or the Goat full tilt, he comes rushing, and
headlong we are tossed when Aquarius, or the Waterbearer, pours out his
whole deluge and drowns us and to wind up with Pisces, or the Fishes, we
sleep. There's a sermon now, writ in high heaven, and the sun goes through
it every year, and yet comes out of it all alive and hearty. Jollily he,
aloft there, wheels through toil and trouble and so, alow here, does jolly
Stubb. Oh, jolly's the word for aye Adieu, Doubloon But stop here comes
little KingPost dodge round the tryworks, now, and let's hear what he'll
have to say. There he's before it he'll out with something presently. So,
so he's beginning. I see nothing here, but a round thing made of gold,
and whoever raises a certain whale, this round thing belongs to him. So,
what's all this staring been about? It is worth sixteen dollars, that's true
and at two cents the cigar, that's nine hundred and
sixty cigars. I wont smoke dirty pipes like Stubb, but I like cigars, and
here's nine hundred and sixty of them so here goes Flask aloft to spy 'em
out. Shall I call that wise or foolish, now if it be really wise it has a
foolish look to it yet, if it be really foolish, then has it a sort of
wiseish look to it. But, avast here comes our old Manxman the old
hearsedriver, he must have been, that is, before he took to the sea. He
luffs up before the doubloon halloa, and goes round on the other side of the
mast why, there's a horseshoe nailed on that side and now he's back
again what does that mean? Hark he's muttering voice like an old
wornout coffeemill. Prick ears, and listen If the White Whale be
raised, it must be in a month and a day, when the sun stands in some one of
these signs. I've studied signs, and know their marks they were taught me
two score years ago, by the old witch in Copenhagen. Now, in what sign will
the sun then be? The horseshoe sign for there it is, right opposite the
gold. And what's the horseshoe sign? The lion is the horseshoe sign the
roaring and devouring lion. Ship, old ship my old head shakes to think of
thee. There's another rendering now but still one text. All sorts of men
in one kind of world, you see. Dodge again here comes Queequeg all
tattooing looks like the signs of the Zodiac himself. What says the
Cannibal? As I live he's comparing notes looking at his thigh bone thinks
the sun is in the thigh, or in the calf, or in the bowels, I suppose, as
the old women talk Surgeon's Astronomy in the back country. And by Jove, he's
found something there in the vicinity of his thigh I guess it's Sagittarius,
or the Archer. No he don't know what to make of the doubloon he takes it
for an old button off some king's trowsers. But, aside again here comes
that ghostdevil, Fedallah tail coiled out of sight as usual, oakum in the
toes of his pumps as usual. What does he say, with that look of his? Ah,
only makes a sign to the sign and bows himself there is a sun on the coin
fire worshipper, depend upon it. Ho more and more. This way comes Pip
poor boy would he had died, or I he's half horrible to me. He too has
been watching all of these interpreters myself included and look now, he
comes to read,
with that unearthly idiot face. stand away again and hear him. hark I
look, you look, he looks we look, ye look, they look. Upon my soul,
he's been studying Murray's Grammar Improving his mind, poor fellow But
what's that he says now  hist I look, you look, he looks we look, ye
look, they look. Why, he's getting it by heart hist again. I look,
you look, he looks we look, ye look, they look. Well, that's funny.
And I, you, and he and we, ye, and they, are all bats and I'm a crow,
especially when I stand a'top of this pine tree here. Caw caw caw caw caw
caw Ain't I a crow? And where's the scarecrow? There he stands two
bones stuck into a pair of old trowsers, and two more poked into the sleeves
of an old jacket. Wonder if he means me? complimentary poor lad I
could go hang myself. Any way, for the present, I'll quit Pip's vicinity.
I can stand the rest, for they have plain wits but he's too crazywitty
for my sanity. So, so, I leave him muttering. Here's the ship's navel,
this doubloon here, and they are all on fire to unscrew it. But, unscrew
your navel, and what's the consequence? Then again, if it stays here, that
is ugly, too, for when aught's nailed to the mast it's a sign that things grow
desperate. Ha, ha old Ahab the White Whale he'll nail ye This is a
pine tree. My father, in old Tolland county, cut down a pine tree once, and
found a silver ring grown over in it some old darkey's wedding ring. How
did it get there? And so they'll say in the resurrection, when they come to
fish up this old mast, and find a doubloon lodged in it, with bedded oysters
for the shaggy bark. Oh, the gold the precious, precious gold the green
miser 'll hoard ye soon Hish hish God goes 'mong the worlds
blackberrying. Cook ho, cook and cook us Jenny hey, hey, hey, hey,
hey, Jenny, Jenny and get your hoecake done
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by Alexandre Dumas [Pere]
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The Count of Monte Cristo
by Alexandre Dumas [Pere]
Chapter 
Marseilles  The Arrival.
On the th of February, , the lookout at NotreDame de
la Garde signalled the threemaster, the Pharaon from
Smyrna, Trieste, and Naples.
As usual, a pilot put off immediately, and rounding the
Chateau d'If, got on board the vessel between Cape Morgion
and Rion island.
Immediately, and according to custom, the ramparts of Fort
SaintJean were covered with spectators it is always an
event at Marseilles for a ship to come into port, especially
when this ship, like the Pharaon, has been built, rigged,
and laden at the old Phocee docks, and belongs to an owner
of the city.
The ship drew on and had safely passed the strait, which
some volcanic shock has made between the Calasareigne and
Jaros islands had doubled Pomegue, and approached the
harbor under topsails, jib, and spanker, but so slowly and
sedately that the idlers, with that instinct which is the
forerunner of evil, asked one another what misfortune could
have happened on board. However, those experienced in
navigation saw plainly that if any accident had occurred, it
was not to the vessel herself, for she bore down with all
the evidence of being skilfully handled, the anchor
acockbill, the jibboom guys already eased off, and
standing by the side of the pilot, who was steering the
Pharaon towards the narrow entrance of the inner port, was a
young man, who, with activity and vigilant eye, watched
every motion of the ship, and repeated each direction of the
pilot.
The vague disquietude which prevailed among the spectators
had so much affected one of the crowd that he did not await
the arrival of the vessel in harbor, but jumping into a
small skiff, desired to be pulled alongside the Pharaon,
which he reached as she rounded into La Reserve basin.
When the young man on board saw this person approach, he
left his station by the pilot, and, hat in hand, leaned over
the ship's bulwarks.
He was a fine, tall, slim young fellow of eighteen or
twenty, with black eyes, and hair as dark as a raven's wing
and his whole appearance bespoke that calmness and
resolution peculiar to men accustomed from their cradle to
contend with danger.
"Ah, is it you, Dantes?" cried the man in the skiff. "What's
the matter? and why have you such an air of sadness aboard?"
"A great misfortune, M. Morrel," replied the young man, 
"a great misfortune, for me especially Off Civita Vecchia
we lost our brave Captain Leclere."
"And the cargo?" inquired the owner, eagerly.
"Is all safe, M. Morrel and I think you will be satisfied
on that head. But poor Captain Leclere  "
"What happened to him?" asked the owner, with an air of
considerable resignation. "What happened to the worthy
captain?"
"He died."
"Fell into the sea?"
"No, sir, he died of brainfever in dreadful agony." Then
turning to the crew, he said, "Bear a hand there, to take in
sail"
All hands obeyed, and at once the eight or ten seamen who
composed the crew, sprang to their respective stations at
the spanker brails and outhaul, topsail sheets and halyards,
the jib downhaul, and the topsail clewlines and buntlines.
The young sailor gave a look to see that his orders were
promptly and accurately obeyed, and then turned again to the
owner.
"And how did this misfortune occur?" inquired the latter,
resuming the interrupted conversation.
"Alas, sir, in the most unexpected manner. After a long talk
with the harbormaster, Captain Leclere left Naples greatly
disturbed in mind. In twentyfour hours he was attacked by a
fever, and died three days afterwards. We performed the
usual burial service, and he is at his rest, sewn up in his
hammock with a thirtysix pound shot at his head and his
heels, off El Giglio island. We bring to his widow his sword
and cross of honor. It was worth while, truly," added the
young man with a melancholy smile, "to make war against the
English for ten years, and to die in his bed at last, like
everybody else."
"Why, you see, Edmond," replied the owner, who appeared more
comforted at every moment, "we are all mortal, and the old
must make way for the young. If not, why, there would be no
promotion and since you assure me that the cargo  "
"Is all safe and sound, M. Morrel, take my word for it and
I advise you not to take , francs for the profits of
the voyage."
Then, as they were just passing the Round Tower, the young
man shouted "Stand by there to lower the topsails and jib
brail up the spanker"
The order was executed as promptly as it would have been on
board a manofwar.
"Let go  and clue up" At this last command all the sails
were lowered, and the vessel moved almost imperceptibly
onwards.
"Now, if you will come on board, M. Morrel," said Dantes,
observing the owner's impatience, "here is your supercargo,
M. Danglars, coming out of his cabin, who will furnish you
with every particular. As for me, I must look after the
anchoring, and dress the ship in mourning."
The owner did not wait for a second invitation. He seized a
rope which Dantes flung to him, and with an activity that
would have done credit to a sailor, climbed up the side of
the ship, while the young man, going to his task, left the
conversation to Danglars, who now came towards the owner. He
was a man of twentyfive or twentysix years of age, of
unprepossessing countenance, obsequious to his superiors,
insolent to his subordinates and this, in addition to his
position as responsible agent on board, which is always
obnoxious to the sailors, made him as much disliked by the
crew as Edmond Dantes was beloved by them.
"Well, M. Morrel," said Danglars, "you have heard of the
misfortune that has befallen us?"
"Yes  yes poor Captain Leclere He was a brave and an
honest man."
"And a firstrate seaman, one who had seen long and
honorable service, as became a man charged with the
interests of a house so important as that of Morrel  Son,"
replied Danglars.
"But," replied the owner, glancing after Dantes, who was
watching the anchoring of his vessel, "it seems to me that a
sailor needs not be so old as you say, Danglars, to
understand his business, for our friend Edmond seems to
understand it thoroughly, and not to require instruction
from any one."
"Yes," said Danglars, darting at Edmond a look gleaming with
hate. "Yes, he is young, and youth is invariably
selfconfident. Scarcely was the captain's breath out of his
body when he assumed the command without consulting any one,
and he caused us to lose a day and a half at the Island of
Elba, instead of making for Marseilles direct."
"As to taking command of the vessel," replied Morrel, "that
was his duty as captain's mate as to losing a day and a
half off the Island of Elba, he was wrong, unless the vessel
needed repairs."
"The vessel was in as good condition as I am, and as, I hope
you are, M. Morrel, and this day and a half was lost from
pure whim, for the pleasure of going ashore, and nothing
else."
"Dantes," said the shipowner, turning towards the young man,
"come this way"
"In a moment, sir," answered Dantes, "and I'm with you."
Then calling to the crew, he said  "Let go"
The anchor was instantly dropped, and the chain ran rattling
through the porthole. Dantes continued at his post in spite
of the presence of the pilot, until this manoeuvre was
completed, and then he added, "Halfmast the colors, and
square the yards"
"You see," said Danglars, "he fancies himself captain
already, upon my word."
"And so, in fact, he is," said the owner.
"Except your signature and your partner's, M. Morrel."
"And why should he not have this?" asked the owner "he is
young, it is true, but he seems to me a thorough seaman, and
of full experience."
A cloud passed over Danglars' brow. "Your pardon, M.
Morrel," said Dantes, approaching, "the vessel now rides at
anchor, and I am at your service. You hailed me, I think?"
Danglars retreated a step or two. "I wished to inquire why
you stopped at the Island of Elba?"
"I do not know, sir it was to fulfil the last instructions
of Captain Leclere, who, when dying, gave me a packet for
Marshal Bertrand."
"Then did you see him, Edmond?"
"Who?"
"The marshal."
"Yes."
Morrel looked around him, and then, drawing Dantes on one
side, he said suddenly  "And how is the emperor?"
"Very well, as far as I could judge from the sight of him."
"You saw the emperor, then?"
"He entered the marshal's apartment while I was there."
"And you spoke to him?"
"Why, it was he who spoke to me, sir," said Dantes, with a
smile.
"And what did he say to you?"
"Asked me questions about the vessel, the time she left
Marseilles, the course she had taken, and what was her
cargo. I believe, if she had not been laden, and I had been
her master, he would have bought her. But I told him I was
only mate, and that she belonged to the firm of Morrel 
Son. "Ah, yes,' he said, "I know them. The Morrels have been
shipowners from father to son and there was a Morrel who
served in the same regiment with me when I was in garrison
at Valence.'"
"Pardieu, and that is true" cried the owner, greatly
delighted. "And that was Policar Morrel, my uncle, who was
afterwards a captain. Dantes, you must tell my uncle that
the emperor remembered him, and you will see it will bring
tears into the old soldier's eyes. Come, come," continued
he, patting Edmond's shoulder kindly, "you did very right,
Dantes, to follow Captain Leclere's instructions, and touch
at Elba, although if it were known that you had conveyed a
packet to the marshal, and had conversed with the emperor,
it might bring you into trouble."
"How could that bring me into trouble, sir?" asked Dantes
"for I did not even know of what I was the bearer and the
emperor merely made such inquiries as he would of the first
comer. But, pardon me, here are the health officers and the
customs inspectors coming alongside." And the young man went
to the gangway. As he departed, Danglars approached, and
said, 
"Well, it appears that he has given you satisfactory reasons
for his landing at PortoFerrajo?"
"Yes, most satisfactory, my dear Danglars."
"Well, so much the better," said the supercargo "for it is
not pleasant to think that a comrade has not done his duty."
"Dantes has done his," replied the owner, "and that is not
saying much. It was Captain Leclere who gave orders for this
delay."
"Talking of Captain Leclere, has not Dantes given you a
letter from him?"
"To me?  no  was there one?"
"I believe that, besides the packet, Captain Leclere
confided a letter to his care."
"Of what packet are you speaking, Danglars?"
"Why, that which Dantes left at PortoFerrajo."
"How do you know he had a packet to leave at PortoFerrajo?"
Danglars turned very red.
"I was passing close to the door of the captain's cabin,
which was half open, and I saw him give the packet and
letter to Dantes."
"He did not speak to me of it," replied the shipowner "but
if there be any letter he will give it to me."
Danglars reflected for a moment. "Then, M. Morrel, I beg of
you," said he, "not to say a word to Dantes on the subject.
I may have been mistaken."
At this moment the young man returned Danglars withdrew.
"Well, my dear Dantes, are you now free?" inquired the
owner.
"Yes, sir."
"You have not been long detained."
"No. I gave the customhouse officers a copy of our bill of
lading and as to the other papers, they sent a man off with
the pilot, to whom I gave them."
"Then you have nothing more to do here?"
"No  everything is all right now."
"Then you can come and dine with me?"
"I really must ask you to excuse me, M. Morrel. My first
visit is due to my father, though I am not the less grateful
for the honor you have done me."
"Right, Dantes, quite right. I always knew you were a good
son."
"And," inquired Dantes, with some hesitation, "do you know
how my father is?"
"Well, I believe, my dear Edmond, though I have not seen him
lately."
"Yes, he likes to keep himself shut up in his little room."
"That proves, at least, that he has wanted for nothing
during your absence."
Dantes smiled. "My father is proud, sir, and if he had not a
meal left, I doubt if he would have asked anything from
anyone, except from Heaven."
"Well, then, after this first visit has been made we shall
count on you."
"I must again excuse myself, M. Morrel, for after this first
visit has been paid I have another which I am most anxious
to pay."
"True, Dantes, I forgot that there was at the Catalans some
one who expects you no less impatiently than your father 
the lovely Mercedes."
Dantes blushed.
"Ah, ha," said the shipowner, "I am not in the least
surprised, for she has been to me three times, inquiring if
there were any news of the Pharaon. Peste, Edmond, you have
a very handsome mistress"
"She is not my mistress," replied the young sailor, gravely
"she is my betrothed."
"Sometimes one and the same thing," said Morrel, with a
smile.
"Not with us, sir," replied Dantes.
"Well, well, my dear Edmond," continued the owner, "don't
let me detain you. You have managed my affairs so well that
I ought to allow you all the time you require for your own.
Do you want any money?"
"No, sir I have all my pay to take  nearly three months'
wages."
"You are a careful fellow, Edmond."
"Say I have a poor father, sir."
"Yes, yes, I know how good a son you are, so now hasten away
to see your father. I have a son too, and I should be very
wroth with those who detained him from me after a three
months' voyage."
"Then I have your leave, sir?"
"Yes, if you have nothing more to say to me."
"Nothing."
"Captain Leclere did not, before he died, give you a letter
for me?"
"He was unable to write, sir. But that reminds me that I
must ask your leave of absence for some days."
"To get married?"
"Yes, first, and then to go to Paris."
"Very good have what time you require, Dantes. It will take
quite six weeks to unload the cargo, and we cannot get you
ready for sea until three months after that only be back
again in three months, for the Pharaon," added the owner,
patting the young sailor on the back, "cannot sail without
her captain."
"Without her captain" cried Dantes, his eyes sparkling with
animation "pray mind what you say, for you are touching on
the most secret wishes of my heart. Is it really your
intention to make me captain of the Pharaon?"
"If I were sole owner we'd shake hands on it now, my dear
Dantes, and call it settled but I have a partner, and you
know the Italian proverb  Chi ha compagno ha padrone 
"He who has a partner has a master.' But the thing is at
least half done, as you have one out of two votes. Rely on
me to procure you the other I will do my best."
"Ah, M. Morrel," exclaimed the young seaman, with tears in
his eyes, and grasping the owner's hand, "M. Morrel, I thank
you in the name of my father and of Mercedes."
"That's all right, Edmond. There's a providence that watches
over the deserving. Go to your father go and see Mercedes,
and afterwards come to me."
"Shall I row you ashore?"
"No, thank you I shall remain and look over the accounts
with Danglars. Have you been satisfied with him this
voyage?"
"That is according to the sense you attach to the question,
sir. Do you mean is he a good comrade? No, for I think he
never liked me since the day when I was silly enough, after
a little quarrel we had, to propose to him to stop for ten
minutes at the island of Monte Cristo to settle the dispute
a proposition which I was wrong to suggest, and he quite
right to refuse. If you mean as responsible agent when you
ask me the question, I believe there is nothing to say
against him, and that you will be content with the way in
which he has performed his duty."
"But tell me, Dantes, if you had command of the Pharaon
should you be glad to see Danglars remain?"
"Captain or mate, M. Morrel, I shall always have the
greatest respect for those who possess the owners'
confidence."
"That's right, that's right, Dantes I see you are a
thoroughly good fellow, and will detain you no longer. Go,
for I see how impatient you are."
"Then I have leave?"
"Go, I tell you."
"May I have the use of your skiff?"
"Certainly."
"Then, for the present, M. Morrel, farewell, and a thousand
thanks"
"I hope soon to see you again, my dear Edmond. Good luck to
you."
The young sailor jumped into the skiff, and sat down in the
stern sheets, with the order that he be put ashore at La
Canebiere. The two oarsmen bent to their work, and the
little boat glided away as rapidly as possible in the midst
of the thousand vessels which choke up the narrow way which
leads between the two rows of ships from the mouth of the
harbor to the Quai d'Orleans.
The shipowner, smiling, followed him with his eyes until he
saw him spring out on the quay and disappear in the midst of
the throng, which from five o'clock in the morning until
nine o'clock at night, swarms in the famous street of La
Canebiere,  a street of which the modern Phocaeans are so
proud that they say with all the gravity in the world, and
with that accent which gives so much character to what is
said, "If Paris had La Canebiere, Paris would be a second
Marseilles." On turning round the owner saw Danglars behind
him, apparently awaiting orders, but in reality also
watching the young sailor,  but there was a great
difference in the expression of the two men who thus
followed the movements of Edmond Dantes.
Chapter 
Father and Son.
We will leave Danglars struggling with the demon of hatred,
and endeavoring to insinuate in the ear of the shipowner
some evil suspicions against his comrade, and follow Dantes,
who, after having traversed La Canebiere, took the Rue de
Noailles, and entering a small house, on the left of the
Allees de Meillan, rapidly ascended four flights of a dark
staircase, holding the baluster with one hand, while with
the other he repressed the beatings of his heart, and paused
before a halfopen door, from which he could see the whole
of a small room.
This room was occupied by Dantes' father. The news of the
arrival of the Pharaon had not yet reached the old man, who,
mounted on a chair, was amusing himself by training with
trembling hand the nasturtiums and sprays of clematis that
clambered over the trellis at his window. Suddenly, he felt
an arm thrown around his body, and a wellknown voice behind
him exclaimed, "Father  dear father"
The old man uttered a cry, and turned round then, seeing
his son, he fell into his arms, pale and trembling.
"What ails you, my dearest father? Are you ill?" inquired
the young man, much alarmed.
"No, no, my dear Edmond  my boy  my son  no but I
did not expect you and joy, the surprise of seeing you so
suddenly  Ah, I feel as if I were going to die."
"Come, come, cheer up, my dear father 'Tis I  really I
They say joy never hurts, and so I came to you without any
warning. Come now, do smile, instead of looking at me so
solemnly. Here I am back again, and we are going to be
happy."
"Yes, yes, my boy, so we will  so we will," replied the
old man "but how shall we be happy? Shall you never leave
me again? Come, tell me all the good fortune that has
befallen you."
"God forgive me," said the young man, "for rejoicing at
happiness derived from the misery of others, but, Heaven
knows, I did not seek this good fortune it has happened,
and I really cannot pretend to lament it. The good Captain
Leclere is dead, father, and it is probable that, with the
aid of M. Morrel, I shall have his place. Do you understand,
father? Only imagine me a captain at twenty, with a hundred
louis pay, and a share in the profits Is this not more than
a poor sailor like me could have hoped for?"
"Yes, my dear boy," replied the old man, "it is very
fortunate."
"Well, then, with the first money I touch, I mean you to
have a small house, with a garden in which to plant
clematis, nasturtiums, and honeysuckle. But what ails you,
father? Are you not well?"
"'Tis nothing, nothing it will soon pass away"  and as he
said so the old man's strength failed him, and he fell
backwards.
"Come, come," said the young man, "a glass of wine, father,
will revive you. Where do you keep your wine?"
"No, no thanks. You need not look for it I do not want
it," said the old man.
"Yes, yes, father, tell me where it is," and he opened two
or three cupboards.
"It is no use," said the old man, "there is no wine."
"What, no wine?" said Dantes, turning pale, and looking
alternately at the hollow cheeks of the old man and the
empty cupboards. "What, no wine? Have you wanted money,
father?"
"I want nothing now that I have you," said the old man.
"Yet," stammered Dantes, wiping the perspiration from his
brow,  "yet I gave you two hundred francs when I left,
three months ago."
"Yes, yes, Edmond, that is true, but you forgot at that time
a little debt to our neighbor, Caderousse. He reminded me of
it, telling me if I did not pay for you, he would be paid by
M. Morrel and so, you see, lest he might do you an injury"
"Well?"
"Why, I paid him."
"But," cried Dantes, "it was a hundred and forty francs I
owed Caderousse."
"Yes," stammered the old man.
"And you paid him out of the two hundred francs I left you?"
The old man nodded.
"So that you have lived for three months on sixty francs,"
muttered Edmond.
"You know how little I require," said the old man.
"Heaven pardon me," cried Edmond, falling on his knees
before his father.
"What are you doing?"
"You have wounded me to the heart."
"Never mind it, for I see you once more," said the old man
"and now it's all over  everything is all right again."
"Yes, here I am," said the young man, "with a promising
future and a little money. Here, father, here" he said,
"take this  take it, and send for something immediately."
And he emptied his pockets on the table, the contents
consisting of a dozen gold pieces, five or six fivefranc
pieces, and some smaller coin. The countenance of old Dantes
brightened.
"Whom does this belong to?" he inquired.
"To me, to you, to us Take it buy some provisions be
happy, and tomorrow we shall have more."
"Gently, gently," said the old man, with a smile "and by
your leave I will use your purse moderately, for they would
say, if they saw me buy too many things at a time, that I
had been obliged to await your return, in order to be able
to purchase them."
"Do as you please but, first of all, pray have a servant,
father. I will not have you left alone so long. I have some
smuggled coffee and most capital tobacco, in a small chest
in the hold, which you shall have tomorrow. But, hush, here
comes somebody."
"'Tis Caderousse, who has heard of your arrival, and no
doubt comes to congratulate you on your fortunate return."
"Ah, lips that say one thing, while the heart thinks
another," murmured Edmond. "But, never mind, he is a
neighbor who has done us a service on a time, so he's
welcome."
As Edmond paused, the black and bearded head of Caderousse
appeared at the door. He was a man of twentyfive or six,
and held a piece of cloth, which, being a tailor, he was
about to make into a coatlining.
"What, is it you, Edmond, back again?" said he, with a broad
Marseillaise accent, and a grin that displayed his
ivorywhite teeth.
"Yes, as you see, neighbor Caderousse and ready to be
agreeable to you in any and every way," replied Dantes, but
illconcealing his coldness under this cloak of civility.
"Thanks  thanks but, fortunately, I do not want for
anything and it chances that at times there are others who
have need of me." Dantes made a gesture. "I do not allude to
you, my boy. No  no I lent you money, and you returned
it that's like good neighbors, and we are quits."
"We are never quits with those who oblige us," was Dantes'
reply "for when we do not owe them money, we owe them
gratitude."
"What's the use of mentioning that? What is done is done.
Let us talk of your happy return, my boy. I had gone on the
quay to match a piece of mulberry cloth, when I met friend
Danglars. "You at Marseilles?'  "Yes,' says he.
""I thought you were at Smyrna.'  "I was but am now back
again.'
""And where is the dear boy, our little Edmond?'
""Why, with his father, no doubt,' replied Danglars. And so
I came," added Caderousse, "as fast as I could to have the
pleasure of shaking hands with a friend."
"Worthy Caderousse" said the old man, "he is so much
attached to us."
"Yes, to be sure I am. I love and esteem you, because honest
folks are so rare. But it seems you have come back rich, my
boy," continued the tailor, looking askance at the handful
of gold and silver which Dantes had thrown on the table.
The young man remarked the greedy glance which shone in the
dark eyes of his neighbor. "Eh," he said, negligently. "this
money is not mine. I was expressing to my father my fears
that he had wanted many things in my absence, and to
convince me he emptied his purse on the table. Come, father"
added Dantes, "put this money back in your box  unless
neighbor Caderousse wants anything, and in that case it is
at his service."
"No, my boy, no," said Caderousse. "I am not in any want,
thank God, my living is suited to my means. Keep your money
keep it, I say  one never has too much  but, at the
same time, my boy, I am as much obliged by your offer as if
I took advantage of it."
"It was offered with good will," said Dantes.
"No doubt, my boy no doubt. Well, you stand well with M.
Morrel I hear,  you insinuating dog, you"
"M. Morrel has always been exceedingly kind to me," replied
Dantes.
"Then you were wrong to refuse to dine with him."
"What, did you refuse to dine with him?" said old Dantes
"and did he invite you to dine?"
"Yes, my dear father," replied Edmond, smiling at his
father's astonishment at the excessive honor paid to his
son.
"And why did you refuse, my son?" inquired the old man.
"That I might the sooner see you again, my dear father,"
replied the young man. "I was most anxious to see you."
"But it must have vexed M. Morrel, good, worthy man," said
Caderousse. "And when you are looking forward to be captain,
it was wrong to annoy the owner."
"But I explained to him the cause of my refusal," replied
Dantes, "and I hope he fully understood it."
"Yes, but to be captain one must do a little flattery to
one's patrons."
"I hope to be captain without that," said Dantes.
"So much the better  so much the better Nothing will give
greater pleasure to all your old friends and I know one
down there behind the Saint Nicolas citadel who will not be
sorry to hear it."
"Mercedes?" said the old man.
"Yes, my dear father, and with your permission, now I have
seen you, and know you are well and have all you require, I
will ask your consent to go and pay a visit to the
Catalans."
"Go, my dear boy," said old Dantes "and heaven bless you in
your wife, as it has blessed me in my son"
"His wife" said Caderousse "why, how fast you go on,
father Dantes she is not his wife yet, as it seems to me."
"So, but according to all probability she soon will be,"
replied Edmond.
"Yes  yes," said Caderousse "but you were right to return
as soon as possible, my boy."
"And why?"
"Because Mercedes is a very fine girl, and fine girls never
lack followers she particularly has them by dozens."
"Really?" answered Edmond, with a smile which had in it
traces of slight uneasiness.
"Ah, yes," continued Caderousse, "and capital offers, too
but you know, you will be captain, and who could refuse you
then?"
"Meaning to say," replied Dantes, with a smile which but
illconcealed his trouble, "that if I were not a captain" 
"Eh  eh" said Caderousse, shaking his head.
"Come, come," said the sailor, "I have a better opinion than
you of women in general, and of Mercedes in particular and
I am certain that, captain or not, she will remain ever
faithful to me."
"So much the better  so much the better," said Caderousse.
"When one is going to be married, there is nothing like
implicit confidence but never mind that, my boy,  go and
announce your arrival, and let her know all your hopes and
prospects."
"I will go directly," was Edmond's reply and, embracing his
father, and nodding to Caderousse, he left the apartment.
Caderousse lingered for a moment, then taking leave of old
Dantes, he went downstairs to rejoin Danglars, who awaited
him at the corner of the Rue Senac.
"Well," said Danglars, "did you see him?"
"I have just left him," answered Caderousse.
"Did he allude to his hope of being captain?"
"He spoke of it as a thing already decided."
"Indeed" said Danglars, "he is in too much hurry, it
appears to me."
"Why, it seems M. Morrel has promised him the thing."
"So that he is quite elated about it?"
"Why, yes, he is actually insolent over the matter  has
already offered me his patronage, as if he were a grand
personage, and proffered me a loan of money, as though he
were a banker."
"Which you refused?"
"Most assuredly although I might easily have accepted it,
for it was I who put into his hands the first silver he ever
earned but now M. Dantes has no longer any occasion for
assistance  he is about to become a captain."
"Pooh" said Danglars, "he is not one yet."
"Ma foi, it will be as well if he is not," answered
Caderousse "for if he should be, there will be really no
speaking to him."
"If we choose," replied Danglars, "he will remain what he
is and perhaps become even less than he is."
"What do you mean?"
"Nothing  I was speaking to myself. And is he still in
love with the Catalane?"
"Over head and ears but, unless I am much mistaken, there
will be a storm in that quarter."
"Explain yourself."
"Why should I?"
"It is more important than you think, perhaps. You do not
like Dantes?"
"I never like upstarts."
"Then tell me all you know about the Catalane."
"I know nothing for certain only I have seen things which
induce me to believe, as I told you, that the future captain
will find some annoyance in the vicinity of the Vieilles
Infirmeries."
"What have you seen?  come, tell me"
"Well, every time I have seen Mercedes come into the city
she has been accompanied by a tall, strapping, blackeyed
Catalan, with a red complexion, brown skin, and fierce air,
whom she calls cousin."
"Really and you think this cousin pays her attentions?"
"I only suppose so. What else can a strapping chap of
twentyone mean with a fine wench of seventeen?"
"And you say that Dantes has gone to the Catalans?"
"He went before I came down."
"Let us go the same way we will stop at La Reserve, and we
can drink a glass of La Malgue, whilst we wait for news."
"Come along," said Caderousse "but you pay the score."
"Of course," replied Danglars and going quickly to the
designated place, they called for a bottle of wine, and two
glasses.
Pere Pamphile had seen Dantes pass not ten minutes before
and assured that he was at the Catalans, they sat down under
the budding foliage of the planes and sycamores, in the
branches of which the birds were singing their welcome to
one of the first days of spring.
Chapter 
The Catalans.
Beyond a bare, weatherworn wall, about a hundred paces from
the spot where the two friends sat looking and listening as
they drank their wine, was the village of the Catalans. Long
ago this mysterious colony quitted Spain, and settled on the
tongue of land on which it is to this day. Whence it came no
one knew, and it spoke an unknown tongue. One of its chiefs,
who understood Provencal, begged the commune of Marseilles
to give them this bare and barren promontory, where, like
the sailors of old, they had run their boats ashore. The
request was granted and three months afterwards, around the
twelve or fifteen small vessels which had brought these
gypsies of the sea, a small village sprang up. This village,
constructed in a singular and picturesque manner, half
Moorish, half Spanish, still remains, and is inhabited by
descendants of the first comers, who speak the language of
their fathers. For three or four centuries they have
remained upon this small promontory, on which they had
settled like a flight of seabirds, without mixing with the
Marseillaise population, intermarrying, and preserving their
original customs and the costume of their mothercountry as
they have preserved its language.
Our readers will follow us along the only street of this
little village, and enter with us one of the houses, which
is sunburned to the beautiful deadleaf color peculiar to
the buildings of the country, and within coated with
whitewash, like a Spanish posada. A young and beautiful
girl, with hair as black as jet, her eyes as velvety as the
gazelle's, was leaning with her back against the wainscot,
rubbing in her slender delicately moulded fingers a bunch of
heath blossoms, the flowers of which she was picking off and
strewing on the floor her arms, bare to the elbow, brown,
and modelled after those of the Arlesian Venus, moved with a
kind of restless impatience, and she tapped the earth with
her arched and supple foot, so as to display the pure and
full shape of her wellturned leg, in its red cotton, gray
and blue clocked, stocking. At three paces from her, seated
in a chair which he balanced on two legs, leaning his elbow
on an old wormeaten table, was a tall young man of twenty,
or twoandtwenty, who was looking at her with an air in
which vexation and uneasiness were mingled. He questioned
her with his eyes, but the firm and steady gaze of the young
girl controlled his look.
"You see, Mercedes," said the young man, "here is Easter
come round again tell me, is this the moment for a
wedding?"
"I have answered you a hundred times, Fernand, and really
you must be very stupid to ask me again."
"Well, repeat it,  repeat it, I beg of you, that I may at
last believe it Tell me for the hundredth time that you
refuse my love, which had your mother's sanction. Make me
understand once for all that you are trifling with my
happiness, that my life or death are nothing to you. Ah, to
have dreamed for ten years of being your husband, Mercedes,
and to lose that hope, which was the only stay of my
existence"
"At least it was not I who ever encouraged you in that hope,
Fernand," replied Mercedes "you cannot reproach me with the
slightest coquetry. I have always said to you, "I love you
as a brother but do not ask from me more than sisterly
affection, for my heart is another's.' Is not this true,
Fernand?"
"Yes, that is very true, Mercedes," replied the young man,
"Yes, you have been cruelly frank with me but do you forget
that it is among the Catalans a sacred law to intermarry?"
"You mistake, Fernand it is not a law, but merely a custom,
and, I pray of you, do not cite this custom in your favor.
You are included in the conscription, Fernand, and are only
at liberty on sufferance, liable at any moment to be called
upon to take up arms. Once a soldier, what would you do with
me, a poor orphan, forlorn, without fortune, with nothing
but a halfruined hut and a few ragged nets, the miserable
inheritance left by my father to my mother, and by my mother
to me? She has been dead a year, and you know, Fernand, I
have subsisted almost entirely on public charity. Sometimes
you pretend I am useful to you, and that is an excuse to
share with me the produce of your fishing, and I accept it,
Fernand, because you are the son of my father's brother,
because we were brought up together, and still more because
it would give you so much pain if I refuse. But I feel very
deeply that this fish which I go and sell, and with the
produce of which I buy the flax I spin,  I feel very
keenly, Fernand, that this is charity."
"And if it were, Mercedes, poor and lone as you are, you
suit me as well as the daughter of the first shipowner or
the richest banker of Marseilles What do such as we desire
but a good wife and careful housekeeper, and where can I
look for these better than in you?"
"Fernand," answered Mercedes, shaking her head, "a woman
becomes a bad manager, and who shall say she will remain an
honest woman, when she loves another man better than her
husband? Rest content with my friendship, for I say once
more that is all I can promise, and I will promise no more
than I can bestow."
"I understand," replied Fernand, "you can endure your own
wretchedness patiently, but you are afraid to share mine.
Well, Mercedes, beloved by you, I would tempt fortune you
would bring me good luck, and I should become rich. I could
extend my occupation as a fisherman, might get a place as
clerk in a warehouse, and become in time a dealer myself."
"You could do no such thing, Fernand you are a soldier, and
if you remain at the Catalans it is because there is no war
so remain a fisherman, and contented with my friendship, as
I cannot give you more."
"Well, I will do better, Mercedes. I will be a sailor
instead of the costume of our fathers, which you despise, I
will wear a varnished hat, a striped shirt, and a blue
jacket, with an anchor on the buttons. Would not that dress
please you?"
"What do you mean?" asked Mercedes, with an angry glance, 
"what do you mean? I do not understand you?"
"I mean, Mercedes, that you are thus harsh and cruel with
me, because you are expecting some one who is thus attired
but perhaps he whom you await is inconstant, or if he is
not, the sea is so to him."
"Fernand," cried Mercedes, "I believed you were
goodhearted, and I was mistaken Fernand, you are wicked to
call to your aid jealousy and the anger of God Yes, I will
not deny it, I do await, and I do love him of whom you
speak and, if he does not return, instead of accusing him
of the inconstancy which you insinuate, I will tell you that
he died loving me and me only." The young girl made a
gesture of rage. "I understand you, Fernand you would be
revenged on him because I do not love you you would cross
your Catalan knife with his dirk. What end would that
answer? To lose you my friendship if he were conquered, and
see that friendship changed into hate if you were victor.
Believe me, to seek a quarrel with a man is a bad method of
pleasing the woman who loves that man. No, Fernand, you will
not thus give way to evil thoughts. Unable to have me for
your wife, you will content yourself with having me for your
friend and sister and besides," she added, her eyes
troubled and moistened with tears, "wait, wait, Fernand you
said just now that the sea was treacherous, and he has been
gone four months, and during these four months there have
been some terrible storms."
Fernand made no reply, nor did he attempt to check the tears
which flowed down the cheeks of Mercedes, although for each
of these tears he would have shed his heart's blood but
these tears flowed for another. He arose, paced a while up
and down the hut, and then, suddenly stopping before
Mercedes, with his eyes glowing and his hands clinched, 
"Say, Mercedes," he said, "once for all, is this your final
determination?"
"I love Edmond Dantes," the young girl calmly replied, "and
none but Edmond shall ever be my husband."
"And you will always love him?"
"As long as I live."
Fernand let fall his head like a defeated man, heaved a sigh
that was like a groan, and then suddenly looking her full in
the face, with clinched teeth and expanded nostrils, said,
"But if he is dead" 
"If he is dead, I shall die too."
"If he has forgotten you" 
"Mercedes" called a joyous voice from without, 
"Mercedes"
"Ah," exclaimed the young girl, blushing with delight, and
fairly leaping in excess of love, "you see he has not
forgotten me, for here he is" And rushing towards the door,
she opened it, saying, "Here, Edmond, here I am"
Fernand, pale and trembling, drew back, like a traveller at
the sight of a serpent, and fell into a chair beside him.
Edmond and Mercedes were clasped in each other's arms. The
burning Marseilles sun, which shot into the room through the
open door, covered them with a flood of light. At first they
saw nothing around them. Their intense happiness isolated
them from all the rest of the world, and they only spoke in
broken words, which are the tokens of a joy so extreme that
they seem rather the expression of sorrow. Suddenly Edmond
saw the gloomy, pale, and threatening countenance of
Fernand, as it was defined in the shadow. By a movement for
which he could scarcely account to himself, the young
Catalan placed his hand on the knife at his belt.
"Ah, your pardon," said Dantes, frowning in his turn "I did
not perceive that there were three of us." Then, turning to
Mercedes, he inquired, "Who is this gentleman?"
"One who will be your best friend, Dantes, for he is my
friend, my cousin, my brother it is Fernand  the man
whom, after you, Edmond, I love the best in the world. Do
you not remember him?"
"Yes" said Dantes, and without relinquishing Mercedes hand
clasped in one of his own, he extended the other to the
Catalan with a cordial air. But Fernand, instead of
responding to this amiable gesture, remained mute and
trembling. Edmond then cast his eyes scrutinizingly at the
agitated and embarrassed Mercedes, and then again on the
gloomy and menacing Fernand. This look told him all, and his
anger waxed hot.
"I did not know, when I came with such haste to you, that I
was to meet an enemy here."
"An enemy" cried Mercedes, with an angry look at her
cousin. "An enemy in my house, do you say, Edmond If I
believed that, I would place my arm under yours and go with
you to Marseilles, leaving the house to return to it no
more."
Fernand's eye darted lightning. "And should any misfortune
occur to you, dear Edmond," she continued with the same
calmness which proved to Fernand that the young girl had
read the very innermost depths of his sinister thought, "if
misfortune should occur to you, I would ascend the highest
point of the Cape de Morgion and cast myself headlong from
it."
Fernand became deadly pale. "But you are deceived, Edmond,"
she continued. "You have no enemy here  there is no one
but Fernand, my brother, who will grasp your hand as a
devoted friend."
And at these words the young girl fixed her imperious look
on the Catalan, who, as if fascinated by it, came slowly
towards Edmond, and offered him his hand. His hatred, like a
powerless though furious wave, was broken against the strong
ascendancy which Mercedes exercised over him. Scarcely,
however, had he touched Edmond's hand than he felt he had
done all he could do, and rushed hastily out of the house.
"Oh," he exclaimed, running furiously and tearing his hair
"Oh, who will deliver me from this man? Wretched 
wretched that I am"
"Hallo, Catalan Hallo, Fernand where are you running to?"
exclaimed a voice.
The young man stopped suddenly, looked around him, and
perceived Caderousse sitting at table with Danglars, under
an arbor.
"Well", said Caderousse, "why don't you come? Are you really
in such a hurry that you have no time to pass the time of
day with your friends?"
"Particularly when they have still a full bottle before
them," added Danglars. Fernand looked at them both with a
stupefied air, but did not say a word.
"He seems besotted," said Danglars, pushing Caderousse with
his knee. "Are we mistaken, and is Dantes triumphant in
spite of all we have believed?"
"Why, we must inquire into that," was Caderousse's reply
and turning towards the young man, said, "Well, Catalan,
can't you make up your mind?"
Fernand wiped away the perspiration steaming from his brow,
and slowly entered the arbor, whose shade seemed to restore
somewhat of calmness to his senses, and whose coolness
somewhat of refreshment to his exhausted body.
"Goodday," said he. "You called me, didn't you?" And he
fell, rather than sat down, on one of the seats which
surrounded the table.
"I called you because you were running like a madman, and I
was afraid you would throw yourself into the sea," said
Caderousse, laughing. "Why, when a man has friends, they are
not only to offer him a glass of wine, but, moreover, to
prevent his swallowing three or four pints of water
unnecessarily"
Fernand gave a groan, which resembled a sob, and dropped his
head into his hands, his elbows leaning on the table.
"Well, Fernand, I must say," said Caderousse, beginning the
conversation, with that brutality of the common people in
which curiosity destroys all diplomacy, "you look uncommonly
like a rejected lover" and he burst into a hoarse laugh.
"Bah" said Danglars, "a lad of his make was not born to be
unhappy in love. You are laughing at him, Caderousse."
"No," he replied, "only hark how he sighs Come, come,
Fernand," said Caderousse, "hold up your head, and answer
us. It's not polite not to reply to friends who ask news of
your health."
"My health is well enough," said Fernand, clinching his
hands without raising his head.
"Ah, you see, Danglars," said Caderousse, winking at his
friend, "this is how it is Fernand, whom you see here, is a
good and brave Catalan, one of the best fishermen in
Marseilles, and he is in love with a very fine girl, named
Mercedes but it appears, unfortunately, that the fine girl
is in love with the mate of the Pharaon and as the Pharaon
arrived today  why, you understand"
"No I do not understand," said Danglars.
"Poor Fernand has been dismissed," continued Caderousse.
"Well, and what then?" said Fernand, lifting up his head,
and looking at Caderousse like a man who looks for some one
on whom to vent his anger "Mercedes is not accountable to
any person, is she? Is she not free to love whomsoever she
will?"
"Oh, if you take it in that sense," said Caderousse, "it is
another thing. But I thought you were a Catalan, and they
told me the Catalans were not men to allow themselves to be
supplanted by a rival. It was even told me that Fernand,
especially, was terrible in his vengeance."
Fernand smiled piteously. "A lover is never terrible," he
said.
"Poor fellow" remarked Danglars, affecting to pity the
young man from the bottom of his heart. "Why, you see, he
did not expect to see Dantes return so suddenly  he
thought he was dead, perhaps or perchance faithless These
things always come on us more severely when they come
suddenly."
"Ah, ma foi, under any circumstances," said Caderousse, who
drank as he spoke, and on whom the fumes of the wine began
to take effect,  "under any circumstances Fernand is not
the only person put out by the fortunate arrival of Dantes
is he, Danglars?"
"No, you are right  and I should say that would bring him
illluck."
"Well, never mind," answered Caderousse, pouring out a glass
of wine for Fernand, and filling his own for the eighth or
ninth time, while Danglars had merely sipped his. "Never
mind  in the meantime he marries Mercedes  the lovely
Mercedes  at least he returns to do that."
During this time Danglars fixed his piercing glance on the
young man, on whose heart Caderousse's words fell like
molten lead.
"And when is the wedding to be?" he asked.
"Oh, it is not yet fixed" murmured Fernand.
"No, but it will be," said Caderousse, "as surely as Dantes
will be captain of the Pharaon  eh, Danglars?"
Danglars shuddered at this unexpected attack, and turned to
Caderousse, whose countenance he scrutinized, to try and
detect whether the blow was premeditated but he read
nothing but envy in a countenance already rendered brutal
and stupid by drunkenness.
"Well," said he, filling the glasses, "let us drink to
Captain Edmond Dantes, husband of the beautiful Catalane"
Caderousse raised his glass to his mouth with unsteady hand,
and swallowed the contents at a gulp. Fernand dashed his on
the ground.
"Eh, eh, eh" stammered Caderousse. "What do I see down
there by the wall, in the direction of the Catalans? Look,
Fernand, your eyes are better than mine. I believe I see
double. You know wine is a deceiver but I should say it was
two lovers walking side by side, and hand in hand. Heaven
forgive me, they do not know that we can see them, and they
are actually embracing"
Danglars did not lose one pang that Fernand endured.
"Do you know them, Fernand?" he said.
"Yes," was the reply, in a low voice. "It is Edmond and
Mercedes"
"Ah, see there, now" said Caderousse "and I did not
recognize them Hallo, Dantes hello, lovely damsel Come
this way, and let us know when the wedding is to be, for
Fernand here is so obstinate he will not tell us."
"Hold your tongue, will you?" said Danglars, pretending to
restrain Caderousse, who, with the tenacity of drunkards,
leaned out of the arbor. "Try to stand upright, and let the
lovers make love without interruption. See, look at Fernand,
and follow his example he is wellbehaved"
Fernand, probably excited beyond bearing, pricked by
Danglars, as the bull is by the bandilleros, was about to
rush out for he had risen from his seat, and seemed to be
collecting himself to dash headlong upon his rival, when
Mercedes, smiling and graceful, lifted up her lovely head,
and looked at them with her clear and bright eyes. At this
Fernand recollected her threat of dying if Edmond died, and
dropped again heavily on his seat. Danglars looked at the
two men, one after the other, the one brutalized by liquor,
the other overwhelmed with love.
"I shall get nothing from these fools," he muttered "and I
am very much afraid of being here between a drunkard and a
coward. Here's an envious fellow making himself boozy on
wine when he ought to be nursing his wrath, and here is a
fool who sees the woman he loves stolen from under his nose
and takes on like a big baby. Yet this Catalan has eyes that
glisten like those of the vengeful Spaniards, Sicilians, and
Calabrians, and the other has fists big enough to crush an
ox at one blow. Unquestionably, Edmond's star is in the
ascendant, and he will marry the splendid girl  he will be
captain, too, and laugh at us all, unless"  a sinister
smile passed over Danglars' lips  "unless I take a hand in
the affair," he added.
"Hallo" continued Caderousse, halfrising, and with his
fist on the table, "hallo, Edmond do you not see your
friends, or are you too proud to speak to them?"
"No, my dear fellow" replied Dantes, "I am not proud, but I
am happy, and happiness blinds, I think, more than pride."
"Ah, very well, that's an explanation" said Caderousse.
"How do you do, Madame Dantes?"
Mercedes courtesied gravely, and said  "That is not my
name, and in my country it bodes ill fortune, they say, to
call a young girl by the name of her betrothed before he
becomes her husband. So call me Mercedes, if you please."
"We must excuse our worthy neighbor, Caderousse," said
Dantes, "he is so easily mistaken."
"So, then, the wedding is to take place immediately, M.
Dantes," said Danglars, bowing to the young couple.
"As soon as possible, M. Danglars today all preliminaries
will be arranged at my father's, and tomorrow, or next day
at latest, the wedding festival here at La Reserve. My
friends will be there, I hope that is to say, you are
invited, M. Danglars, and you, Caderousse."
"And Fernand," said Caderousse with a chuckle "Fernand,
too, is invited"
"My wife's brother is my brother," said Edmond "and we,
Mercedes and I, should be very sorry if he were absent at
such a time."
Fernand opened his mouth to reply, but his voice died on his
lips, and he could not utter a word.
"Today the preliminaries, tomorrow or next day the
ceremony You are in a hurry, captain"
"Danglars," said Edmond, smiling, "I will say to you as
Mercedes said just now to Caderousse, "Do not give me a
title which does not belong to me' that may bring me bad
luck."
"Your pardon," replied Danglars, "I merely said you seemed
in a hurry, and we have lots of time the Pharaon cannot be
under weigh again in less than three months."
"We are always in a hurry to be happy, M. Danglars for when
we have suffered a long time, we have great difficulty in
believing in good fortune. But it is not selfishness alone
that makes me thus in haste I must go to Paris."
"Ah, really?  to Paris and will it be the first time you
have ever been there, Dantes?"
"Yes."
"Have you business there?"
"Not of my own the last commission of poor Captain Leclere
you know to what I allude, Danglars  it is sacred.
Besides, I shall only take the time to go and return."
"Yes, yes, I understand," said Danglars, and then in a low
tone, he added, "To Paris, no doubt to deliver the letter
which the grand marshal gave him. Ah, this letter gives me
an idea  a capital idea Ah Dantes, my friend, you are
not yet registered number one on board the good ship
Pharaon" then turning towards Edmond, who was walking away,
"A pleasant journey," he cried.
"Thank you," said Edmond with a friendly nod, and the two
lovers continued on their way, as calm and joyous as if they
were the very elect of heaven.
Chapter 
Conspiracy.
Danglars followed Edmond and Mercedes with his eyes until
the two lovers disappeared behind one of the angles of Fort
Saint Nicolas, then turning round, he perceived Fernand, who
had fallen, pale and trembling, into his chair, while
Caderousse stammered out the words of a drinkingsong.
"Well, my dear sir," said Danglars to Fernand, "here is a
marriage which does not appear to make everybody happy."
"It drives me to despair," said Fernand.
"Do you, then, love Mercedes?"
"I adore her"
"For long?"
"As long as I have known her  always."
"And you sit there, tearing your hair, instead of seeking to
remedy your condition I did not think that was the way of
your people."
"What would you have me do?" said Fernand.
"How do I know? Is it my affair? I am not in love with
Mademoiselle Mercedes but for you  in the words of the
gospel, seek, and you shall find."
"I have found already."
"What?"
"I would stab the man, but the woman told me that if any
misfortune happened to her betrothed, she would kill
herself."
"Pooh Women say those things, but never do them."
"You do not know Mercedes what she threatens she will do."
"Idiot" muttered Danglars "whether she kill herself or
not, what matter, provided Dantes is not captain?"
"Before Mercedes should die," replied Fernand, with the
accents of unshaken resolution, "I would die myself"
"That's what I call love" said Caderousse with a voice more
tipsy than ever. "That's love, or I don't know what love
is."
"Come," said Danglars, "you appear to me a good sort of
fellow, and hang me, I should like to help you, but" 
"Yes," said Caderousse, "but how?"
"My dear fellow," replied Danglars, "you are three parts
drunk finish the bottle, and you will be completely so.
Drink then, and do not meddle with what we are discussing,
for that requires all one's wit and cool judgment."
"I  drunk" said Caderousse "well that's a good one I
could drink four more such bottles they are no bigger than
cologne flasks. Pere Pamphile, more wine" and Caderousse
rattled his glass upon the table.
"You were saying, sir"  said Fernand, awaiting with great
anxiety the end of this interrupted remark.
"What was I saying? I forget. This drunken Caderousse has
made me lose the thread of my sentence."
"Drunk, if you like so much the worse for those who fear
wine, for it is because they have bad thoughts which they
are afraid the liquor will extract from their hearts" and
Caderousse began to sing the two last lines of a song very
popular at the time, 
"Tous les mechants sont beuveurs d'eau
C'est bien prouve par le deluge.'
 "The wicked are great drinkers of water
As the flood proved once for all."
"You said, sir, you would like to help me, but" 
"Yes but I added, to help you it would be sufficient that
Dantes did not marry her you love and the marriage may
easily be thwarted, methinks, and yet Dantes need not die."
"Death alone can separate them," remarked Fernand.
"You talk like a noodle, my friend," said Caderousse "and
here is Danglars, who is a wideawake, clever, deep fellow,
who will prove to you that you are wrong. Prove it,
Danglars. I have answered for you. Say there is no need why
Dantes should die it would, indeed, be a pity he should.
Dantes is a good fellow I like Dantes. Dantes, your
health."
Fernand rose impatiently. "Let him run on," said Danglars,
restraining the young man "drunk as he is, he is not much
out in what he says. Absence severs as well as death, and if
the walls of a prison were between Edmond and Mercedes they
would be as effectually separated as if he lay under a
tombstone."
"Yes but one gets out of prison," said Caderousse, who,
with what sense was left him, listened eagerly to the
conversation, "and when one gets out and one's name is
Edmond Dantes, one seeks revenge" 
"What matters that?" muttered Fernand.
"And why, I should like to know," persisted Caderousse,
"should they put Dantes in prison? he has not robbed or
killed or murdered."
"Hold your tongue" said Danglars.
"I won't hold my tongue" replied Caderousse "I say I want
to know why they should put Dantes in prison I like Dantes
Dantes, your health" and he swallowed another glass of
wine.
Danglars saw in the muddled look of the tailor the progress
of his intoxication, and turning towards Fernand, said,
"Well, you understand there is no need to kill him."
"Certainly not, if, as you said just now, you have the means
of having Dantes arrested. Have you that means?"
"It is to be found for the searching. But why should I
meddle in the matter? it is no affair of mine."
"I know not why you meddle," said Fernand, seizing his arm
"but this I know, you have some motive of personal hatred
against Dantes, for he who himself hates is never mistaken
in the sentiments of others."
"I  motives of hatred against Dantes? None, on my word I
saw you were unhappy, and your unhappiness interested me
that's all but since you believe I act for my own account,
adieu, my dear friend, get out of the affair as best you
may" and Danglars rose as if he meant to depart.
"No, no," said Fernand, restraining him, "stay It is of
very little consequence to me at the end of the matter
whether you have any angry feeling or not against Dantes. I
hate him I confess it openly. Do you find the means, I will
execute it, provided it is not to kill the man, for Mercedes
has declared she will kill herself if Dantes is killed."
Caderousse, who had let his head drop on the table, now
raised it, and looking at Fernand with his dull and fishy
eyes, he said,  "Kill Dantes who talks of killing Dantes?
I won't have him killed  I won't He's my friend, and this
morning offered to share his money with me, as I shared mine
with him. I won't have Dantes killed  I won't"
"And who has said a word about killing him, muddlehead?"
replied Danglars. "We were merely joking drink to his
health," he added, filling Caderousse's glass, "and do not
interfere with us."
"Yes, yes, Dantes' good health" said Caderousse, emptying
his glass, "here's to his health his health  hurrah"
"But the means  the means?" said Fernand.
"Have you not hit upon any?" asked Danglars.
"No  you undertook to do so."
"True," replied Danglars "the French have the superiority
over the Spaniards, that the Spaniards ruminate, while the
French invent."
"Do you invent, then," said Fernand impatiently.
"Waiter," said Danglars, "pen, ink, and paper."
"Pen, ink, and paper," muttered Fernand.
"Yes I am a supercargo pen, ink, and paper are my tools,
and without my tools I am fit for nothing."
"Pen, ink, and paper, then," called Fernand loudly.
"There's what you want on that table," said the waiter.
"Bring them here." The waiter did as he was desired.
"When one thinks," said Caderousse, letting his hand drop on
the paper, "there is here wherewithal to kill a man more
sure than if we waited at the corner of a wood to
assassinate him I have always had more dread of a pen, a
bottle of ink, and a sheet of paper, than of a sword or
pistol."
"The fellow is not so drunk as he appears to be," said
Danglars. "Give him some more wine, Fernand." Fernand filled
Caderousse's glass, who, like the confirmed toper he was,
lifted his hand from the paper and seized the glass.
The Catalan watched him until Caderousse, almost overcome by
this fresh assault on his senses, rested, or rather dropped,
his glass upon the table.
"Well" resumed the Catalan, as he saw the final glimmer of
Caderousse's reason vanishing before the last glass of wine.
"Well, then, I should say, for instance," resumed Danglars,
"that if after a voyage such as Dantes has just made, in
which he touched at the Island of Elba, some one were to
denounce him to the king's procureur as a Bonapartist agent"
"I will denounce him" exclaimed the young man hastily.
"Yes, but they will make you then sign your declaration, and
confront you with him you have denounced I will supply you
with the means of supporting your accusation, for I know the
fact well. But Dantes cannot remain forever in prison, and
one day or other he will leave it, and the day when he comes
out, woe betide him who was the cause of his incarceration"
"Oh, I should wish nothing better than that he would come
and seek a quarrel with me."
"Yes, and Mercedes Mercedes, who will detest you if you
have only the misfortune to scratch the skin of her dearly
beloved Edmond"
"True" said Fernand.
"No, no," continued Danglars "if we resolve on such a step,
it would be much better to take, as I now do, this pen, dip
it into this ink, and write with the left hand that the
writing may not be recognized the denunciation we propose."
And Danglars, uniting practice with theory, wrote with his
left hand, and in a writing reversed from his usual style,
and totally unlike it, the following lines, which he handed
to Fernand, and which Fernand read in an undertone 
"The honorable, the king's attorney, is informed by a friend
of the throne and religion, that one Edmond Dantes, mate of
the ship Pharaon, arrived this morning from Smyrna, after
having touched at Naples and PortoFerrajo, has been
intrusted by Murat with a letter for the usurper, and by the
usurper with a letter for the Bonapartist committee in
Paris. Proof of this crime will be found on arresting him,
for the letter will be found upon him, or at his father's,
or in his cabin on board the Pharaon."
"Very good," resumed Danglars "now your revenge looks like
commonsense, for in no way can it revert to yourself, and
the matter will thus work its own way there is nothing to
do now but fold the letter as I am doing, and write upon it,
"To the king's attorney,' and that's all settled." And
Danglars wrote the address as he spoke.
"Yes, and that's all settled" exclaimed Caderousse, who, by
a last effort of intellect, had followed the reading of the
letter, and instinctively comprehended all the misery which
such a denunciation must entail. "Yes, and that's all
settled only it will be an infamous shame" and he
stretched out his hand to reach the letter.
"Yes," said Danglars, taking it from beyond his reach "and
as what I say and do is merely in jest, and I, amongst the
first and foremost, should be sorry if anything happened to
Dantes  the worthy Dantes  look here" And taking the
letter, he squeezed it up in his hands and threw it into a
corner of the arbor.
"All right" said Caderousse. "Dantes is my friend, and I
won't have him illused."
"And who thinks of using him ill? Certainly neither I nor
Fernand," said Danglars, rising and looking at the young
man, who still remained seated, but whose eye was fixed on
the denunciatory sheet of paper flung into the corner.
"In this case," replied Caderousse, "let's have some more
wine. I wish to drink to the health of Edmond and the lovely
Mercedes."
"You have had too much already, drunkard," said Danglars
"and if you continue, you will be compelled to sleep here,
because unable to stand on your legs."
"I?" said Caderousse, rising with all the offended dignity
of a drunken man, "I can't keep on my legs? Why, I'll wager
I can go up into the belfry of the Accoules, and without
staggering, too"
"Done" said Danglars, "I'll take your bet but tomorrow 
today it is time to return. Give me your arm, and let us
go."
"Very well, let us go," said Caderousse "but I don't want
your arm at all. Come, Fernand, won't you return to
Marseilles with us?"
"No," said Fernand "I shall return to the Catalans."
"You're wrong. Come with us to Marseilles  come along."
"I will not."
"What do you mean? you will not? Well, just as you like, my
prince there's liberty for all the world. Come along,
Danglars, and let the young gentleman return to the Catalans
if he chooses."
Danglars took advantage of Caderousse's temper at the
moment, to take him off towards Marseilles by the Porte
SaintVictor, staggering as he went.
When they had advanced about twenty yards, Danglars looked
back and saw Fernand stoop, pick up the crumpled paper, and
putting it into his pocket then rush out of the arbor
towards Pillon.
"Well," said Caderousse, "why, what a lie he told He said
he was going to the Catalans, and he is going to the city.
Hallo, Fernand"
"Oh, you don't see straight," said Danglars "he's gone
right enough."
"Well," said Caderousse, "I should have said not  how
treacherous wine is"
"Come, come," said Danglars to himself, "now the thing is at
work and it will effect its purpose unassisted."
Chapter 
The MarriageFeast.
The morning's sun rose clear and resplendent, touching the
foamy waves into a network of rubytinted light.
The feast had been made ready on the second floor at La
Reserve, with whose arbor the reader is already familiar.
The apartment destined for the purpose was spacious and
lighted by a number of windows, over each of which was
written in golden letters for some inexplicable reason the
name of one of the principal cities of France beneath these
windows a wooden balcony extended the entire length of the
house. And although the entertainment was fixed for twelve
o'clock, an hour previous to that time the balcony was
filled with impatient and expectant guests, consisting of
the favored part of the crew of the Pharaon, and other
personal friends of the bridegroom, the whole of whom had
arrayed themselves in their choicest costumes, in order to
do greater honor to the occasion.
Various rumors were afloat to the effect that the owners of
the Pharaon had promised to attend the nuptial feast but
all seemed unanimous in doubting that an act of such rare
and exceeding condescension could possibly be intended.
Danglars, however, who now made his appearance, accompanied
by Caderousse, effectually confirmed the report, stating
that he had recently conversed with M. Morrel, who had
himself assured him of his intention to dine at La Reserve.
In fact, a moment later M. Morrel appeared and was saluted
with an enthusiastic burst of applause from the crew of the
Pharaon, who hailed the visit of the shipowner as a sure
indication that the man whose wedding feast he thus
delighted to honor would ere long be first in command of the
ship and as Dantes was universally beloved on board his
vessel, the sailors put no restraint on their tumultuous joy
at finding that the opinion and choice of their superiors so
exactly coincided with their own.
With the entrance of M. Morrel, Danglars and Caderousse were
despatched in search of the bridegroom to convey to him the
intelligence of the arrival of the important personage whose
coming had created such a lively sensation, and to beseech
him to make haste.
Danglars and Caderousse set off upon their errand at full
speed but ere they had gone many steps they perceived a
group advancing towards them, composed of the betrothed
pair, a party of young girls in attendance on the bride, by
whose side walked Dantes' father the whole brought up by
Fernand, whose lips wore their usual sinister smile.
Neither Mercedes nor Edmond observed the strange expression
of his countenance they were so happy that they were
conscious only of the sunshine and the presence of each
other.
Having acquitted themselves of their errand, and exchanged a
hearty shake of the hand with Edmond, Danglars and
Caderousse took their places beside Fernand and old Dantes,
the latter of whom attracted universal notice. The old
man was attired in a suit of glistening watered silk,
trimmed with steel buttons, beautifully cut and polished.
His thin but wiry legs were arrayed in a pair of richly
embroidered clocked stockings, evidently of English
manufacture, while from his threecornered hat depended a
long streaming knot of white and blue ribbons. Thus he came
along, supporting himself on a curiously carved stick, his
aged countenance lit up with happiness, looking for all the
world like one of the aged dandies of , parading the
newly opened gardens of the Tuileries and Luxembourg. Beside
him glided Caderousse, whose desire to partake of the good
things provided for the weddingparty had induced him to
become reconciled to the Dantes, father and son, although
there still lingered in his mind a faint and unperfect
recollection of the events of the preceding night just as
the brain retains on waking in the morning the dim and misty
outline of a dream.
As Danglars approached the disappointed lover, he cast on
him a look of deep meaning, while Fernand, as he slowly
paced behind the happy pair, who seemed, in their own
unmixed content, to have entirely forgotten that such a
being as himself existed, was pale and abstracted
occasionally, however, a deep flush would overspread his
countenance, and a nervous contraction distort his features,
while, with an agitated and restless gaze, he would glance
in the direction of Marseilles, like one who either
anticipated or foresaw some great and important event.
Dantes himself was simply, but becomingly, clad in the dress
peculiar to the merchant service  a costume somewhat
between a military and a civil garb and with his fine
countenance, radiant with joy and happiness, a more perfect
specimen of manly beauty could scarcely be imagined.
Lovely as the Greek girls of Cyprus or Chios, Mercedes
boasted the same bright flashing eyes of jet, and ripe,
round, coral lips. She moved with the light, free step of an
Arlesienne or an Andalusian. One more practiced in the arts
of great cities would have hid her blushes beneath a veil,
or, at least, have cast down her thickly fringed lashes, so
as to have concealed the liquid lustre of her animated eyes
but, on the contrary, the delighted girl looked around her
with a smile that seemed to say "If you are my friends,
rejoice with me, for I am very happy."
As soon as the bridal party came in sight of La Reserve, M.
Morrel descended and came forth to meet it, followed by the
soldiers and sailors there assembled, to whom he had
repeated the promise already given, that Dantes should be
the successor to the late Captain Leclere. Edmond, at the
approach of his patron, respectfully placed the arm of his
affianced bride within that of M. Morrel, who, forthwith
conducting her up the flight of wooden steps leading to the
chamber in which the feast was prepared, was gayly followed
by the guests, beneath whose heavy tread the slight
structure creaked and groaned for the space of several
minutes.
"Father," said Mercedes, stopping when she had reached the
centre of the table, "sit, I pray you, on my right hand on
my left I will place him who has ever been as a brother to
me," pointing with a soft and gentle smile to Fernand but
her words and look seemed to inflict the direst torture on
him, for his lips became ghastly pale, and even beneath the
dark hue of his complexion the blood might be seen
retreating as though some sudden pang drove it back to the
heart.
During this time, Dantes, at the opposite side of the table,
had been occupied in similarly placing his most honored
guests. M. Morrel was seated at his right hand, Danglars at
his left while, at a sign from Edmond, the rest of the
company ranged themselves as they found it most agreeable.
Then they began to pass around the dusky, piquant, Arlesian
sausages, and lobsters in their dazzling red cuirasses,
prawns of large size and brilliant color, the echinus with
its prickly outside and dainty morsel within, the clovis,
esteemed by the epicures of the South as more than rivalling
the exquisite flavor of the oyster,  all the delicacies,
in fact, that are cast up by the wash of waters on the sandy
beach, and styled by the grateful fishermen "fruits of the
sea."
"A pretty silence truly" said the old father of the
bridegroom, as he carried to his lips a glass of wine of
the hue and brightness of the topaz, and which had just been
placed before Mercedes herself. "Now, would anybody think
that this room contained a happy, merry party, who desire
nothing better than to laugh and dance the hours away?"
"Ah," sighed Caderousse, "a man cannot always feel happy
because he is about to be married."
"The truth is," replied Dantes, "that I am too happy for
noisy mirth if that is what you meant by your observation,
my worthy friend, you are right joy takes a strange effect
at times, it seems to oppress us almost the same as sorrow."
Danglars looked towards Fernand, whose excitable nature
received and betrayed each fresh impression.
"Why, what ails you?" asked he of Edmond. "Do you fear any
approaching evil? I should say that you were the happiest
man alive at this instant."
"And that is the very thing that alarms me," returned
Dantes. "Man does not appear to me to be intended to enjoy
felicity so unmixed happiness is like the enchanted palaces
we read of in our childhood, where fierce, fiery dragons
defend the entrance and approach and monsters of all shapes
and kinds, requiring to be overcome ere victory is ours. I
own that I am lost in wonder to find myself promoted to an
honor of which I feel myself unworthy  that of being the
husband of Mercedes."
"Nay, nay" cried Caderousse, smiling, "you have not
attained that honor yet. Mercedes is not yet your wife. Just
assume the tone and manner of a husband, and see how she
will remind you that your hour is not yet come"
The bride blushed, while Fernand, restless and uneasy,
seemed to start at every fresh sound, and from time to time
wiped away the large drops of perspiration that gathered on
his brow.
"Well, never mind that, neighbor Caderousse it is not worth
while to contradict me for such a trifle as that. 'Tis true
that Mercedes is not actually my wife but," added he,
drawing out his watch, "in an hour and a half she will be."
A general exclamation of surprise ran round the table, with
the exception of the elder Dantes, whose laugh displayed the
still perfect beauty of his large white teeth. Mercedes
looked pleased and gratified, while Fernand grasped the
handle of his knife with a convulsive clutch.
"In an hour?" inquired Danglars, turning pale. "How is that,
my friend?"
"Why, thus it is," replied Dantes. "Thanks to the influence
of M. Morrel, to whom, next to my father, I owe every
blessing I enjoy, every difficulty his been removed. We have
purchased permission to waive the usual delay and at
halfpast two o'clock the mayor of Marseilles will be
waiting for us at the city hall. Now, as a quarterpast one
has already struck, I do not consider I have asserted too
much in saying, that, in another hour and thirty minutes
Mercedes will have become Madame Dantes."
Fernand closed his eyes, a burning sensation passed across
his brow, and he was compelled to support himself by the
table to prevent his falling from his chair but in spite of
all his efforts, he could not refrain from uttering a deep
groan, which, however, was lost amid the noisy felicitations
of the company.
"Upon my word," cried the old man, "you make short work of
this kind of affair. Arrived here only yesterday morning,
and married today at three o'clock Commend me to a sailor
for going the quick way to work"
"But," asked Danglars, in a timid tone, "how did you manage
about the other formalities  the contract  the
settlement?"
"The contract," answered Dantes, laughingly, "it didn't take
long to fix that. Mercedes has no fortune I have none to
settle on her. So, you see, our papers were quickly written
out, and certainly do not come very expensive." This joke
elicited a fresh burst of applause.
"So that what we presumed to be merely the betrothal feast
turns out to be the actual wedding dinner" said Danglars.
"No, no," answered Dantes "don't imagine I am going to put
you off in that shabby manner. Tomorrow morning I start for
Paris four days to go, and the same to return, with one day
to discharge the commission intrusted to me, is all the time
I shall be absent. I shall be back here by the first of
March, and on the second I give my real marriage feast."
This prospect of fresh festivity redoubled the hilarity of
the guests to such a degree, that the elder Dantes, who, at
the commencement of the repast, had commented upon the
silence that prevailed, now found it difficult, amid the
general din of voices, to obtain a moment's tranquillity in
which to drink to the health and prosperity of the bride and
bridegroom.
Dantes, perceiving the affectionate eagerness of his father,
responded by a look of grateful pleasure while Mercedes
glanced at the clock and made an expressive gesture to
Edmond.
Around the table reigned that noisy hilarity which usually
prevails at such a time among people sufficiently free from
the demands of social position not to feel the trammels of
etiquette. Such as at the commencement of the repast had not
been able to seat themselves according to their inclination
rose unceremoniously, and sought out more agreeable
companions. Everybody talked at once, without waiting for a
reply and each one seemed to be contented with expressing
his or her own thoughts.
Fernand's paleness appeared to have communicated itself to
Danglars. As for Fernand himself, he seemed to be enduring
the tortures of the damned unable to rest, he was among the
first to quit the table, and, as though seeking to avoid the
hilarious mirth that rose in such deafening sounds, he
continued, in utter silence, to pace the farther end of the
salon.
Caderousse approached him just as Danglars, whom Fernand
seemed most anxious to avoid, had joined him in a corner of
the room.
"Upon my word," said Caderousse, from whose mind the
friendly treatment of Dantes, united with the effect of the
excellent wine he had partaken of, had effaced every feeling
of envy or jealousy at Dantes' good fortune,  "upon my
word, Dantes is a downright good fellow, and when I see him
sitting there beside his pretty wife that is so soon to be.
I cannot help thinking it would have been a great pity to
have served him that trick you were planning yesterday."
"Oh, there was no harm meant," answered Danglars "at first
I certainly did feel somewhat uneasy as to what Fernand
might be tempted to do but when I saw how completely he had
mastered his feelings, even so far as to become one of his
rival's attendants, I knew there was no further cause for
apprehension." Caderousse looked full at Fernand  he was
ghastly pale.
"Certainly," continued Danglars, "the sacrifice was no
trifling one, when the beauty of the bride is concerned.
Upon my soul, that future captain of mine is a lucky dog
Gad, I only wish he would let me take his place."
"Shall we not set forth?" asked the sweet, silvery voice of
Mercedes "two o'clock has just struck, and you know we are
expected in a quarter of an hour."
"To be sure  to be sure" cried Dantes, eagerly quitting
the table "let us go directly"
His words were reechoed by the whole party, with vociferous
cheers.
At this moment Danglars, who had been incessantly observing
every change in Fernand's look and manner, saw him stagger
and fall back, with an almost convulsive spasm, against a
seat placed near one of the open windows. At the same
instant his ear caught a sort of indistinct sound on the
stairs, followed by the measured tread of soldiery, with the
clanking of swords and military accoutrements then came a
hum and buzz as of many voices, so as to deaden even the
noisy mirth of the bridal party, among whom a vague feeling
of curiosity and apprehension quelled every disposition to
talk, and almost instantaneously the most deathlike
stillness prevailed.
The sounds drew nearer. Three blows were struck upon the
panel of the door. The company looked at each other in
consternation.
"I demand admittance," said a loud voice outside the room,
"in the name of the law" As no attempt was made to prevent
it, the door was opened, and a magistrate, wearing his
official scarf, presented himself, followed by four soldiers
and a corporal. Uneasiness now yielded to the most extreme
dread on the part of those present.
"May I venture to inquire the reason of this unexpected
visit?" said M. Morrel, addressing the magistrate, whom he
evidently knew "there is doubtless some mistake easily
explained."
"If it be so," replied the magistrate, "rely upon every
reparation being made meanwhile, I am the bearer of an
order of arrest, and although I most reluctantly perform the
task assigned me, it must, nevertheless, be fulfilled. Who
among the persons here assembled answers to the name of
Edmond Dantes?" Every eye was turned towards the young man
who, spite of the agitation he could not but feel, advanced
with dignity, and said, in a firm voice, "I am he what is
your pleasure with me?"
"Edmond Dantes," replied the magistrate, "I arrest you in
the name of the law"
"Me" repeated Edmond, slightly changing color, "and
wherefore, I pray?"
"I cannot inform you, but you will be duly acquainted with
the reasons that have rendered such a step necessary at the
preliminary examination."
M. Morrel felt that further resistance or remonstrance was
useless. He saw before him an officer delegated to enforce
the law, and perfectly well knew that it would be as
unavailing to seek pity from a magistrate decked with his
official scarf, as to address a petition to some cold marble
effigy. Old Dantes, however, sprang forward. There are
situations which the heart of a father or a mother cannot be
made to understand. He prayed and supplicated in terms so
moving, that even the officer was touched, and, although
firm in his duty, he kindly said, "My worthy friend, let me
beg of you to calm your apprehensions. Your son has probably
neglected some prescribed form or attention in registering
his cargo, and it is more than probable he will be set at
liberty directly he has given the information required,
whether touching the health of his crew, or the value of his
freight."
"What is the meaning of all this?" inquired Caderousse,
frowningly, of Danglars, who had assumed an air of utter
surprise.
"How can I tell you?" replied he "I am, like yourself,
utterly bewildered at all that is going on, and cannot in
the least make out what it is about." Caderousse then looked
around for Fernand, but he had disappeared.
The scene of the previous night now came back to his mind
with startling clearness. The painful catastrophe he had
just witnessed appeared effectually to have rent away the
veil which the intoxication of the evening before had raised
between himself and his memory.
"So, so," said he, in a hoarse and choking voice, to
Danglars, "this, then, I suppose, is a part of the trick you
were concerting yesterday? All I can say is, that if it be
so, 'tis an ill turn, and well deserves to bring double evil
on those who have projected it."
"Nonsense," returned Danglars, "I tell you again I have
nothing whatever to do with it besides, you know very well
that I tore the paper to pieces."
"No, you did not" answered Caderousse, "you merely threw it
by  I saw it lying in a corner."
"Hold your tongue, you fool  what should you know about
it?  why, you were drunk"
"Where is Fernand?" inquired Caderousse.
"How do I know?" replied Danglars "gone, as every prudent
man ought to be, to look after his own affairs, most likely.
Never mind where he is, let you and I go and see what is to
be done for our poor friends."
During this conversation, Dantes, after having exchanged a
cheerful shake of the hand with all his sympathizing
friends, had surrendered himself to the officer sent to
arrest him, merely saying, "Make yourselves quite easy, my
good fellows, there is some little mistake to clear up,
that's all, depend upon it and very likely I may not have
to go so far as the prison to effect that."
"Oh, to be sure" responded Danglars, who had now approached
the group, "nothing more than a mistake, I feel quite
certain."
Dantes descended the staircase, preceded by the magistrate,
and followed by the soldiers. A carriage awaited him at the
door he got in, followed by two soldiers and the
magistrate, and the vehicle drove off towards Marseilles.
"Adieu, adieu, dearest Edmond" cried Mercedes, stretching
out her arms to him from the balcony.
The prisoner heard the cry, which sounded like the sob of a
broken heart, and leaning from the coach he called out,
"Goodby, Mercedes  we shall soon meet again" Then the
vehicle disappeared round one of the turnings of Fort Saint
Nicholas.
"Wait for me here, all of you" cried M. Morrel "I will
take the first conveyance I find, and hurry to Marseilles,
whence I will bring you word how all is going on."
"That's right" exclaimed a multitude of voices, "go, and
return as quickly as you can"
This second departure was followed by a long and fearful
state of terrified silence on the part of those who were
left behind. The old father and Mercedes remained for some
time apart, each absorbed in grief but at length the two
poor victims of the same blow raised their eyes, and with a
simultaneous burst of feeling rushed into each other's arms.
Meanwhile Fernand made his appearance, poured out for
himself a glass of water with a trembling hand then hastily
swallowing it, went to sit down at the first vacant place,
and this was, by mere chance, placed next to the seat on
which poor Mercedes had fallen half fainting, when released
from the warm and affectionate embrace of old Dantes.
Instinctively Fernand drew back his chair.
"He is the cause of all this misery  I am quite sure of
it," whispered Caderousse, who had never taken his eyes off
Fernand, to Danglars.
"I don't think so," answered the other he's too stupid to
imagine such a scheme. I only hope the mischief will fall
upon the head of whoever wrought it."
"You don't mention those who aided and abetted the deed,"
said Caderousse.
"Surely," answered Danglars, "one cannot be held responsible
for every chance arrow shot into the air."
"You can, indeed, when the arrow lights point downward on
somebody's head."
Meantime the subject of the arrest was being canvassed in
every different form.
"What think you, Danglars," said one of the party, turning
towards him, "of this event?"
"Why," replied he, "I think it just possible Dantes may have
been detected with some trifling article on board ship
considered here as contraband."
"But how could he have done so without your knowledge,
Danglars, since you are the ship's supercargo?"
"Why, as for that, I could only know what I was told
respecting the merchandise with which the vessel was laden.
I know she was loaded with cotton, and that she took in her
freight at Alexandria from Pastret's warehouse, and at
Smyrna from Pascal's that is all I was obliged to know, and
I beg I may not be asked for any further particulars."
"Now I recollect," said the afflicted old father "my poor
boy told me yesterday he had got a small case of coffee, and
another of tobacco for me"
"There, you see," exclaimed Danglars. "Now the mischief is
out depend upon it the customhouse people went rummaging
about the ship in our absence, and discovered poor Dantes'
hidden treasures."
Mercedes, however, paid no heed to this explanation of her
lover's arrest. Her grief, which she had hitherto tried to
restrain, now burst out in a violent fit of hysterical
sobbing.
"Come, come," said the old man, "be comforted, my poor
child there is still hope"
"Hope" repeated Danglars.
"Hope" faintly murmured Fernand, but the word seemed to die
away on his pale agitated lips, and a convulsive spasm
passed over his countenance.
"Good news good news" shouted forth one of the party
stationed in the balcony on the lookout. "Here comes M.
Morrel back. No doubt, now, we shall hear that our friend is
released"
Mercedes and the old man rushed to meet the shipowner and
greeted him at the door. He was very pale.
"What news?" exclaimed a general burst of voices.
"Alas, my friends," replied M. Morrel, with a mournful shake
of his head, "the thing has assumed a more serious aspect
than I expected."
"Oh, indeed  indeed, sir, he is innocent" sobbed forth
Mercedes.
"That I believe" answered M. Morrel "but still he is
charged" 
"With what?" inquired the elder Dantes.
"With being an agent of the Bonapartist faction" Many of
our readers may be able to recollect how formidable such an
accusation became in the period at which our story is dated.
A despairing cry escaped the pale lips of Mercedes the old
man sank into a chair.
"Ah, Danglars" whispered Caderousse, "you have deceived me
the trick you spoke of last night has been played but I
cannot suffer a poor old man or an innocent girl to die of
grief through your fault. I am determined to tell them all
about it."
"Be silent, you simpleton" cried Danglars, grasping him by
the arm, "or I will not answer even for your own safety. Who
can tell whether Dantes be innocent or guilty? The vessel
did touch at Elba, where he quitted it, and passed a whole
day in the island. Now, should any letters or other
documents of a compromising character be found upon him,
will it not be taken for granted that all who uphold him are
his accomplices?"
With the rapid instinct of selfishness, Caderousse readily
perceived the solidity of this mode of reasoning he gazed,
doubtfully, wistfully, on Danglars, and then caution
supplanted generosity.
"Suppose we wait a while, and see what comes of it," said
he, casting a bewildered look on his companion.
"To be sure" answered Danglars. "Let us wait, by all means.
If he be innocent, of course he will be set at liberty if
guilty, why, it is no use involving ourselves in a
conspiracy."
"Let us go, then. I cannot stay here any longer."
"With all my heart" replied Danglars, pleased to find the
other so tractable. "Let us take ourselves out of the way,
and leave things for the present to take their course."
After their departure, Fernand, who had now again become the
friend and protector of Mercedes, led the girl to her home,
while the friends of Dantes conducted the now halffainting
man back to his abode.
The rumor of Edmond's arrest as a Bonapartist agent was not
slow in circulating throughout the city.
"Could you ever have credited such a thing, my dear
Danglars?" asked M. Morrel, as, on his return to the port
for the purpose of gleaning fresh tidings of Dantes, from M.
de Villefort, the assistant procureur, he overtook his
supercargo and Caderousse. "Could you have believed such a
thing possible?"
"Why, you know I told you," replied Danglars, "that I
considered the circumstance of his having anchored at the
Island of Elba as a very suspicious circumstance."
"And did you mention these suspicions to any person beside
myself?"
"Certainly not" returned Danglars. Then added in a low
whisper, "You understand that, on account of your uncle, M.
Policar Morrel, who served under the other government, and
who does not altogether conceal what he thinks on the
subject, you are strongly suspected of regretting the
abdication of Napoleon. I should have feared to injure both
Edmond and yourself, had I divulged my own apprehensions to
a soul. I am too well aware that though a subordinate, like
myself, is bound to acquaint the shipowner with everything
that occurs, there are many things he ought most carefully
to conceal from all else."
"'Tis well, Danglars  'tis well" replied M. Morrel. "You
are a worthy fellow and I had already thought of your
interests in the event of poor Edmond having become captain
of the Pharaon."
"Is it possible you were so kind?"
"Yes, indeed I had previously inquired of Dantes what was
his opinion of you, and if he should have any reluctance to
continue you in your post, for somehow I have perceived a
sort of coolness between you."
"And what was his reply?"
"That he certainly did think he had given you offence in an
affair which he merely referred to without entering into
particulars, but that whoever possessed the good opinion and
confidence of the ship's owner would have his preference
also."
"The hypocrite" murmured Danglars.
"Poor Dantes" said Caderousse. "No one can deny his being a
noblehearted young fellow."
"But meanwhile," continued M. Morrel, "here is the Pharaon
without a captain."
"Oh," replied Danglars, "since we cannot leave this port for
the next three months, let us hope that ere the expiration
of that period Dantes will be set at liberty."
"No doubt but in the meantime?"
"I am entirely at your service, M. Morrel," answered
Danglars. "You know that I am as capable of managing a ship
as the most experienced captain in the service and it will
be so far advantageous to you to accept my services, that
upon Edmond's release from prison no further change will be
requisite on board the Pharaon than for Dantes and myself
each to resume our respective posts."
"Thanks, Danglars  that will smooth over all difficulties.
I fully authorize you at once to assume the command of the
Pharaon, and look carefully to the unloading of her freight.
Private misfortunes must never be allowed to interfere with
business."
"Be easy on that score, M. Morrel but do you think we shall
be permitted to see our poor Edmond?"
"I will let you know that directly I have seen M. de
Villefort, whom I shall endeavor to interest in Edmond's
favor. I am aware he is a furious royalist but, in spite of
that, and of his being king's attorney, he is a man like
ourselves, and I fancy not a bad sort of one."
"Perhaps not," replied Danglars "but I hear that he is
ambitious, and that's rather against him."
"Well, well," returned M. Morrel, "we shall see. But now
hasten on board, I will join you there ere long." So saying,
the worthy shipowner quitted the two allies, and proceeded
in the direction of the Palais de Justice.
"You see," said Danglars, addressing Caderousse, "the turn
things have taken. Do you still feel any desire to stand up
in his defence?"
"Not the slightest, but yet it seems to me a shocking thing
that a mere joke should lead to such consequences."
"But who perpetrated that joke, let me ask? neither you nor
myself, but Fernand you knew very well that I threw the
paper into a corner of the room  indeed, I fancied I had
destroyed it."
"Oh, no," replied Caderousse, "that I can answer for, you
did not. I only wish I could see it now as plainly as I saw
it lying all crushed and crumpled in a corner of the arbor."
"Well, then, if you did, depend upon it, Fernand picked it
up, and either copied it or caused it to be copied perhaps,
even, he did not take the trouble of recopying it. And now I
think of it, by Heavens, he may have sent the letter itself
Fortunately, for me, the handwriting was disguised."
"Then you were aware of Dantes being engaged in a
conspiracy?"
"Not I. As I before said, I thought the whole thing was a
joke, nothing more. It seems, however, that I have
unconsciously stumbled upon the truth."
"Still," argued Caderousse, "I would give a great deal if
nothing of the kind had happened or, at least, that I had
had no hand in it. You will see, Danglars, that it will turn
out an unlucky job for both of us."
"Nonsense If any harm come of it, it should fall on the
guilty person and that, you know, is Fernand. How can we be
implicated in any way? All we have got to do is, to keep our
own counsel, and remain perfectly quiet, not breathing a
word to any living soul and you will see that the storm
will pass away without in the least affecting us."
"Amen" responded Caderousse, waving his hand in token of
adieu to Danglars, and bending his steps towards the Allees
de Meillan, moving his head to and fro, and muttering as he
went, after the manner of one whose mind was overcharged
with one absorbing idea.
"So far, then," said Danglars, mentally, "all has gone as I
would have it. I am, temporarily, commander of the Pharaon,
with the certainty of being permanently so, if that fool of
a Caderousse can be persuaded to hold his tongue. My only
fear is the chance of Dantes being released. But, there, he
is in the hands of Justice and," added he with a smile,
"she will take her own." So saying, he leaped into a boat,
desiring to be rowed on board the Pharaon, where M. Morrel
had agreed to meet him.
Chapter 
The Deputy Procureur du Roi.
In one of the aristocratic mansions built by Puget in the
Rue du Grand Cours opposite the Medusa fountain, a second
marriage feast was being celebrated, almost at the same hour
with the nuptial repast given by Dantes. In this case,
however, although the occasion of the entertainment was
similar, the company was strikingly dissimilar. Instead of a
rude mixture of sailors, soldiers, and those belonging to
the humblest grade of life, the present assembly was
composed of the very flower of Marseilles society, 
magistrates who had resigned their office during the
usurper's reign officers who had deserted from the imperial
army and joined forces with Conde and younger members of
families, brought up to hate and execrate the man whom five
years of exile would convert into a martyr, and fifteen of
restoration elevate to the rank of a god.
The guests were still at table, and the heated and energetic
conversation that prevailed betrayed the violent and
vindictive passions that then agitated each dweller of the
South, where unhappily, for five centuries religious strife
had long given increased bitterness to the violence of party
feeling.
The emperor, now king of the petty Island of Elba, after
having held sovereign sway over onehalf of the world,
counting as his subjects a small population of five or six
thousand souls,  after having been accustomed to hear the
"Vive Napoleons" of a hundred and twenty millions of human
beings, uttered in ten different languages,  was looked
upon here as a ruined man, separated forever from any fresh
connection with France or claim to her throne.
The magistrates freely discussed their political views the
military part of the company talked unreservedly of Moscow
and Leipsic, while the women commented on the divorce of
Josephine. It was not over the downfall of the man, but over
the defeat of the Napoleonic idea, that they rejoiced, and
in this they foresaw for themselves the bright and cheering
prospect of a revivified political existence.
An old man, decorated with the cross of Saint Louis, now
rose and proposed the health of King Louis XVIII. It was the
Marquis de SaintMeran. This toast, recalling at once the
patient exile of Hartwell and the peaceloving King of
France, excited universal enthusiasm glasses were elevated
in the air a l'Anglais, and the ladies, snatching their
bouquets from their fair bosoms, strewed the table with
their floral treasures. In a word, an almost poetical fervor
prevailed.
"Ah," said the Marquise de SaintMeran, a woman with a
stern, forbidding eye, though still noble and distinguished
in appearance, despite her fifty years  "ah, these
revolutionists, who have driven us from those very
possessions they afterwards purchased for a mere trifle
during the Reign of Terror, would be compelled to own, were
they here, that all true devotion was on our side, since we
were content to follow the fortunes of a falling monarch,
while they, on the contrary, made their fortune by
worshipping the rising sun yes, yes, they could not help
admitting that the king, for whom we sacrificed rank,
wealth, and station was truly our "Louis the wellbeloved,'
while their wretched usurper his been, and ever will be, to
them their evil genius, their "Napoleon the accursed.' Am I
not right, Villefort?"
"I beg your pardon, madame. I really must pray you to excuse
me, but  in truth  I was not attending to the
conversation."
"Marquise, marquise" interposed the old nobleman who had
proposed the toast, "let the young people alone let me tell
you, on one's wedding day there are more agreeable subjects
of conversation than dry politics."
"Never mind, dearest mother," said a young and lovely girl,
with a profusion of light brown hair, and eyes that seemed
to float in liquid crystal, "'tis all my fault for seizing
upon M. de Villefort, so as to prevent his listening to what
you said. But there  now take him  he is your own for as
long as you like. M. Villefort, I beg to remind you my
mother speaks to you."
"If the marquise will deign to repeat the words I but
imperfectly caught, I shall be delighted to answer," said M.
de Villefort.
"Never mind, Renee," replied the marquise, with a look of
tenderness that seemed out of keeping with her harsh dry
features but, however all other feelings may be withered in
a woman's nature, there is always one bright smiling spot in
the desert of her heart, and that is the shrine of maternal
love. "I forgive you. What I was saying, Villefort, was,
that the Bonapartists had not our sincerity, enthusiasm, or
devotion."
"They had, however, what supplied the place of those fine
qualities," replied the young man, "and that was fanaticism.
Napoleon is the Mahomet of the West, and is worshipped by
his commonplace but ambitions followers, not only as a
leader and lawgiver, but also as the personification of
equality."
"He" cried the marquise "Napoleon the type of equality
For mercy's sake, then, what would you call Robespierre?
Come, come, do not strip the latter of his just rights to
bestow them on the Corsican, who, to my mind, has usurped
quite enough."
"Nay, madame I would place each of these heroes on his
right pedestal  that of Robespierre on his scaffold in the
Place Louis Quinze that of Napoleon on the column of the
Place Vendome. The only difference consists in the opposite
character of the equality advocated by these two men one is
the equality that elevates, the other is the equality that
degrades one brings a king within reach of the guillotine,
the other elevates the people to a level with the throne.
Observe," said Villefort, smiling, "I do not mean to deny
that both these men were revolutionary scoundrels, and that
the th Thermidor and the th of April, in the year ,
were lucky days for France, worthy of being gratefully
remembered by every friend to monarchy and civil order and
that explains how it comes to pass that, fallen, as I trust
he is forever, Napoleon has still retained a train of
parasitical satellites. Still, marquise, it has been so with
other usurpers  Cromwell, for instance, who was not half
so bad as Napoleon, had his partisans and advocates."
"Do you know, Villefort, that you are talking in a most
dreadfully revolutionary strain? But I excuse it, it is
impossible to expect the son of a Girondin to be free from a
small spice of the old leaven." A deep crimson suffused the
countenance of Villefort.
"'Tis true, madame," answered he, "that my father was a
Girondin, but he was not among the number of those who voted
for the king's death he was an equal sufferer with yourself
during the Reign of Terror, and had wellnigh lost his head
on the same scaffold on which your father perished."
"True," replied the marquise, without wincing in the
slightest degree at the tragic remembrance thus called up
"but bear in mind, if you please, that our respective
parents underwent persecution and proscription from
diametrically opposite principles in proof of which I may
remark, that while my family remained among the stanchest
adherents of the exiled princes, your father lost no time in
joining the new government and that while the Citizen
Noirtier was a Girondin, the Count Noirtier became a
senator."
"Dear mother," interposed Renee, "you know very well it was
agreed that all these disagreeable reminiscences should
forever be laid aside."
"Suffer me, also, madame," replied Villefort, "to add my
earnest request to Mademoiselle de SaintMeran's, that you
will kindly allow the veil of oblivion to cover and conceal
the past. What avails recrimination over matters wholly past
recall? For my own part, I have laid aside even the name of
my father, and altogether disown his political principles.
He was  nay, probably may still be  a Bonapartist, and
is called Noirtier I, on the contrary, am a stanch
royalist, and style myself de Villefort. Let what may remain
of revolutionary sap exhaust itself and die away with the
old trunk, and condescend only to regard the young shoot
which has started up at a distance from the parent tree,
without having the power, any more than the wish, to
separate entirely from the stock from which it sprung."
"Bravo, Villefort" cried the marquis "excellently well
said Come, now, I have hopes of obtaining what I have been
for years endeavoring to persuade the marquise to promise
namely, a perfect amnesty and forgetfulness of the past."
"With all my heart," replied the marquise "let the past be
forever forgotten. I promise you it affords me as little
pleasure to revive it as it does you. All I ask is, that
Villefort will be firm and inflexible for the future in his
political principles. Remember, also, Villefort, that we
have pledged ourselves to his majesty for your fealty and
strict loyalty, and that at our recommendation the king
consented to forget the past, as I do" and here she
extended to him her hand  "as I now do at your entreaty.
But bear in mind, that should there fall in your way any one
guilty of conspiring against the government, you will be so
much the more bound to visit the offence with rigorous
punishment, as it is known you belong to a suspected
family."
"Alas, madame," returned Villefort, "my profession, as well
as the times in which we live, compels me to be severe. I
have already successfully conducted several public
prosecutions, and brought the offenders to merited
punishment. But we have not done with the thing yet."
"Do you, indeed, think so?" inquired the marquise.
"I am, at least, fearful of it. Napoleon, in the Island of
Elba, is too near France, and his proximity keeps up the
hopes of his partisans. Marseilles is filled with halfpay
officers, who are daily, under one frivolous pretext or
other, getting up quarrels with the royalists from hence
arise continual and fatal duels among the higher classes of
persons, and assassinations in the lower."
"You have heard, perhaps," said the Comte de Salvieux, one
of M. de SaintMeran's oldest friends, and chamberlain to
the Comte d'Artois, "that the Holy Alliance purpose removing
him from thence?"
"Yes they were talking about it when we left Paris," said
M. de SaintMeran "and where is it decided to transfer
him?"
"To Saint Helena."
"For heaven's sake, where is that?" asked the marquise.
"An island situated on the other side of the equator, at
least two thousand leagues from here," replied the count.
"So much the better. As Villefort observes, it is a great
act of folly to have left such a man between Corsica, where
he was born, and Naples, of which his brotherinlaw is
king, and face to face with Italy, the sovereignty of which
he coveted for his son."
"Unfortunately," said Villefort, "there are the treaties of
, and we cannot molest Napoleon without breaking those
compacts."
"Oh, well, we shall find some way out of it," responded M.
de Salvieux. "There wasn't any trouble over treaties when it
was a question of shooting the poor Duc d'Enghien."
"Well," said the marquise, "it seems probable that, by the
aid of the Holy Alliance, we shall be rid of Napoleon and
we must trust to the vigilance of M. de Villefort to purify
Marseilles of his partisans. The king is either a king or no
king if he be acknowledged as sovereign of France, he
should be upheld in peace and tranquillity and this can
best be effected by employing the most inflexible agents to
put down every attempt at conspiracy  'tis the best and
surest means of preventing mischief."
"Unfortunately, madame," answered Villefort, "the strong arm
of the law is not called upon to interfere until the evil
has taken place."
"Then all he has got to do is to endeavor to repair it."
"Nay, madame, the law is frequently powerless to effect
this all it can do is to avenge the wrong done."
"Oh, M. de Villefort," cried a beautiful young creature,
daughter to the Comte de Salvieux, and the cherished friend
of Mademoiselle de SaintMeran, "do try and get up some
famous trial while we are at Marseilles. I never was in a
lawcourt I am told it is so very amusing"
"Amusing, certainly," replied the young man, "inasmuch as,
instead of shedding tears as at the fictitious tale of woe
produced at a theatre, you behold in a lawcourt a case of
real and genuine distress  a drama of life. The prisoner
whom you there see pale, agitated, and alarmed, instead of
as is the case when a curtain falls on a tragedy  going
home to sup peacefully with his family, and then retiring to
rest, that he may recommence his mimic woes on the morrow,
is removed from your sight merely to be reconducted to
his prison and delivered up to the executioner. I leave you
to judge how far your nerves are calculated to bear you
through such a scene. Of this, however, be assured, that
should any favorable opportunity present itself, I will not
fail to offer you the choice of being present."
"For shame, M. de Villefort" said Renee, becoming quite
pale "don't you see how you are frightening us?  and yet
you laugh."
"What would you have? 'Tis like a duel. I have already
recorded sentence of death, five or six times, against the
movers of political conspiracies, and who can say how many
daggers may be ready sharpened, and only waiting a favorable
opportunity to be buried in my heart?"
"Gracious heavens, M. de Villefort," said Renee, becoming
more and more terrified "you surely are not in earnest."
"Indeed I am," replied the young magistrate with a smile
"and in the interesting trial that young lady is anxious to
witness, the case would only be still more aggravated.
Suppose, for instance, the prisoner, as is more than
probable, to have served under Napoleon  well, can you
expect for an instant, that one accustomed, at the word of
his commander, to rush fearlessly on the very bayonets of
his foe, will scruple more to drive a stiletto into the
heart of one he knows to be his personal enemy, than to
slaughter his fellowcreatures, merely because bidden to do
so by one he is bound to obey? Besides, one requires the
excitement of being hateful in the eyes of the accused, in
order to lash one's self into a state of sufficient
vehemence and power. I would not choose to see the man
against whom I pleaded smile, as though in mockery of my
words. No my pride is to see the accused pale, agitated,
and as though beaten out of all composure by the fire of my
eloquence." Renee uttered a smothered exclamation.
"Bravo" cried one of the guests "that is what I call
talking to some purpose."
"Just the person we require at a time like the present,"
said a second.
"What a splendid business that last case of yours was, my
dear Villefort" remarked a third "I mean the trial of the
man for murdering his father. Upon my word, you killed him
ere the executioner had laid his hand upon him."
"Oh, as for parricides, and such dreadful people as that,"
interposed Renee, "it matters very little what is done to
them but as regards poor unfortunate creatures whose only
crime consists in having mixed themselves up in political
intrigues" 
"Why, that is the very worst offence they could possibly
commit for, don't you see, Renee, the king is the father of
his people, and he who shall plot or contrive aught against
the life and safety of the parent of thirtytwo millions of
souls, is a parricide upon a fearfully great scale?"
"I don't know anything about that," replied Renee "but, M.
de Villefort, you have promised me  have you not? 
always to show mercy to those I plead for."
"Make yourself quite easy on that point," answered
Villefort, with one of his sweetest smiles "you and I will
always consult upon our verdicts."
"My love," said the marquise, "attend to your doves, your
lapdogs, and embroidery, but do not meddle with what you do
not understand. Nowadays the military profession is in
abeyance and the magisterial robe is the badge of honor.
There is a wise Latin proverb that is very much in point."
"Cedant arma togae," said Villefort with a bow.
"I cannot speak Latin," responded the marquise.
"Well," said Renee, "I cannot help regretting you had not
chosen some other profession than your own  a physician,
for instance. Do you know I always felt a shudder at the
idea of even a destroying angel?"
"Dear, good Renee," whispered Villefort, as he gazed with
unutterable tenderness on the lovely speaker.
"Let us hope, my child," cried the marquis, "that M. de
Villefort may prove the moral and political physician of
this province if so, he will have achieved a noble work."
"And one which will go far to efface the recollection of his
father's conduct," added the incorrigible marquise.
"Madame," replied Villefort, with a mournful smile, "I have
already had the honor to observe that my father has  at
least, I hope so  abjured his past errors, and that he is,
at the present moment, a firm and zealous friend to religion
and order  a better royalist, possibly, than his son for
he has to atone for past dereliction, while I have no other
impulse than warm, decided preference and conviction."
Having made this wellturned speech, Villefort looked
carefully around to mark the effect of his oratory, much as
he would have done had he been addressing the bench in open
court.
"Do you know, my dear Villefort," cried the Comte de
Salvieux, "that is exactly what I myself said the other day
at the Tuileries, when questioned by his majesty's principal
chamberlain touching the singularity of an alliance between
the son of a Girondin and the daughter of an officer of the
Duc de Conde and I assure you he seemed fully to comprehend
that this mode of reconciling political differences was
based upon sound and excellent principles. Then the king,
who, without our suspecting it, had overheard our
conversation, interrupted us by saying, "Villefort' 
observe that the king did not pronounce the word Noirtier,
but, on the contrary, placed considerable emphasis on that
of Villefort  "Villefort,' said his majesty, "is a young
man of great judgment and discretion, who will be sure to
make a figure in his profession I like him much, and it
gave me great pleasure to hear that he was about to become
the soninlaw of the Marquis and Marquise de SaintMeran. I
should myself have recommended the match, had not the noble
marquis anticipated my wishes by requesting my consent to
it.'"
"Is it possible the king could have condescended so far as
to express himself so favorably of me?" asked the enraptured
Villefort.
"I give you his very words and if the marquis chooses to be
candid, he will confess that they perfectly agree with what
his majesty said to him, when he went six months ago to
consult him upon the subject of your espousing his
daughter."
"That is true," answered the marquis.
"How much do I owe this gracious prince What is there I
would not do to evince my earnest gratitude"
"That is right," cried the marquise. "I love to see you
thus. Now, then, were a conspirator to fall into your hands,
he would be most welcome."
"For my part, dear mother." interposed Renee, "I trust your
wishes will not prosper, and that Providence will only
permit petty offenders, poor debtors, and miserable cheats
to fall into M. de Villefort's hands,  then I shall be
contented."
"Just the same as though you prayed that a physician might
only be called upon to prescribe for headaches, measles, and
the stings of wasps, or any other slight affection of the
epidermis. If you wish to see me the king's attorney, you
must desire for me some of those violent and dangerous
diseases from the cure of which so much honor redounds to
the physician."
At this moment, and as though the utterance of Villefort's
wish had sufficed to effect its accomplishment, a servant
entered the room, and whispered a few words in his ear.
Villefort immediately rose from table and quitted the room
upon the plea of urgent business he soon, however,
returned, his whole face beaming with delight. Renee
regarded him with fond affection and certainly his handsome
features, lit up as they then were with more than usual fire
and animation, seemed formed to excite the innocent
admiration with which she gazed on her graceful and
intelligent lover.
"You were wishing just now," said Villefort, addressing her,
"that I were a doctor instead of a lawyer. Well, I at least
resemble the disciples of Esculapius in one thing  that of
not being able to call a day my own, not even that of my
betrothal."
"And wherefore were you called away just now?" asked
Mademoiselle de SaintMeran, with an air of deep interest.
"For a very serious matter, which bids fair to make work for
the executioner."
"How dreadful" exclaimed Renee, turning pale.
"Is it possible?" burst simultaneously from all who were
near enough to the magistrate to hear his words.
"Why, if my information prove correct, a sort of Bonaparte
conspiracy has just been discovered."
"Can I believe my ears?" cried the marquise.
"I will read you the letter containing the accusation, at
least," said Villefort 
""The king's attorney is informed by a friend to the throne
and the religions institutions of his country, that one
named Edmond Dantes, mate of the ship Pharaon, this day
arrived from Smyrna, after having touched at Naples and
PortoFerrajo, has been the bearer of a letter from Murat to
the usurper, and again taken charge of another letter from
the usurper to the Bonapartist club in Paris. Ample
corroboration of this statement may be obtained by arresting
the abovementioned Edmond Dantes, who either carries the
letter for Paris about with him, or has it at his father's
abode. Should it not be found in the possession of father or
son, then it will assuredly be discovered in the cabin
belonging to the said Dantes on board the Pharaon.'"
"But," said Renee, "this letter, which, after all, is but an
anonymous scrawl, is not even addressed to you, but to the
king's attorney."
"True but that gentleman being absent, his secretary, by
his orders, opened his letters thinking this one of
importance, he sent for me, but not finding me, took upon
himself to give the necessary orders for arresting the
accused party."
"Then the guilty person is absolutely in custody?" said the
marquise.
"Nay, dear mother, say the accused person. You know we
cannot yet pronounce him guilty."
"He is in safe custody," answered Villefort "and rely upon
it, if the letter is found, he will not be likely to be
trusted abroad again, unless he goes forth under the
especial protection of the headsman."
"And where is the unfortunate being?" asked Renee.
"He is at my house."
"Come, come, my friend," interrupted the marquise, "do not
neglect your duty to linger with us. You are the king's
servant, and must go wherever that service calls you."
"O Villefort" cried Renee, clasping her hands, and looking
towards her lover with piteous earnestness, "be merciful on
this the day of our betrothal."
The young man passed round to the side of the table where
the fair pleader sat, and leaning over her chair said
tenderly, 
"To give you pleasure, my sweet Renee, I promise to show all
the lenity in my power but if the charges brought against
this Bonapartist hero prove correct, why, then, you really
must give me leave to order his head to be cut off." Renee
shuddered.
"Never mind that foolish girl, Villefort," said the
marquise. "She will soon get over these things." So saying,
Madame de SaintMeran extended her dry bony hand to
Villefort, who, while imprinting a soninlaw's respectful
salute on it, looked at Renee, as much as to say, "I must
try and fancy 'tis your dear hand I kiss, as it should have
been."
"These are mournful auspices to accompany a betrothal,"
sighed poor Renee.
"Upon my word, child" exclaimed the angry marquise, "your
folly exceeds all bounds. I should be glad to know what
connection there can possibly be between your sickly
sentimentality and the affairs of the state"
"O mother" murmured Renee.
"Nay, madame, I pray you pardon this little traitor. I
promise you that to make up for her want of loyalty, I will
be most inflexibly severe" then casting an expressive
glance at his betrothed, which seemed to say, "Fear not, for
your dear sake my justice shall be tempered with mercy," and
receiving a sweet and approving smile in return, Villefort
quitted the room.
Chapter 
The Examination.
No sooner had Villefort left the salon, than he assumed the
grave air of a man who holds the balance of life and death
in his hands. Now, in spite of the mobility of his
countenance, the command of which, like a finished actor, he
had carefully studied before the glass, it was by no means
easy for him to assume an air of judicial severity. Except
the recollection of the line of politics his father had
adopted, and which might interfere, unless he acted with the
greatest prudence, with his own career, Gerard de Villefort
was as happy as a man could be. Already rich, he held a high
official situation, though only twentyseven. He was about
to marry a young and charming woman, whom he loved, not
passionately, but reasonably, as became a deputy attorney of
the king and besides her personal attractions, which were
very great, Mademoiselle de SaintMeran's family possessed
considerable political influence, which they would, of
course, exert in his favor. The dowry of his wife amounted
to fifty thousand crowns, and he had, besides, the prospect
of seeing her fortune increased to half a million at her
father's death. These considerations naturally gave
Villefort a feeling of such complete felicity that his mind
was fairly dazzled in its contemplation.
At the door he met the commissary of police, who was waiting
for him. The sight of this officer recalled Villefort from
the third heaven to earth he composed his face, as we have
before described, and said, "I have read the letter, sir,
and you have acted rightly in arresting this man now inform
me what you have discovered concerning him and the
conspiracy."
"We know nothing as yet of the conspiracy, monsieur all the
papers found have been sealed up and placed on your desk.
The prisoner himself is named Edmond Dantes, mate on board
the threemaster the Pharaon, trading in cotton with
Alexandria and Smyrna, and belonging to Morrel  Son, of
Marseilles."
"Before he entered the merchant service, had he ever served
in the marines?"
"Oh, no, monsieur, he is very young."
"How old?"
"Nineteen or twenty at the most."
At this moment, and as Villefort had arrived at the corner
of the Rue des Conseils, a man, who seemed to have been
waiting for him, approached it was M. Morrel.
"Ah, M. de Villefort," cried he, "I am delighted to see you.
Some of your people have committed the strangest mistake 
they have just arrested Edmond Dantes, mate of my vessel."
"I know it, monsieur," replied Villefort, "and I am now
going to examine him."
"Oh," said Morrel, carried away by his friendship, "you do
not know him, and I do. He is the most estimable, the most
trustworthy creature in the world, and I will venture to
say, there is not a better seaman in all the merchant
service. Oh, M. de Villefort, I beseech your indulgence for
him."
Villefort, as we have seen, belonged to the aristocratic
party at Marseilles, Morrel to the plebeian the first was a
royalist, the other suspected of Bonapartism. Villefort
looked disdainfully at Morrel, and replied, 
"You are aware, monsieur, that a man may be estimable and
trustworthy in private life, and the best seaman in the
merchant service, and yet be, politically speaking, a great
criminal. Is it not true?"
The magistrate laid emphasis on these words, as if he wished
to apply them to the owner himself, while his eyes seemed to
plunge into the heart of one who, interceding for another,
had himself need of indulgence. Morrel reddened, for his own
conscience was not quite clear on politics besides, what
Dantes had told him of his interview with the grandmarshal,
and what the emperor had said to him, embarrassed him. He
replied, however, 
"I entreat you, M. de Villefort, be, as you always are, kind
and equitable, and give him back to us soon." This give us
sounded revolutionary in the deputy's ears.
"Ah, ah," murmured he, "is Dantes then a member of some
Carbonari society, that his protector thus employs the
collective form? He was, if I recollect, arrested in a
tavern, in company with a great many others." Then he added,
"Monsieur, you may rest assured I shall perform my duty
impartially, and that if he be innocent you shall not have
appealed to me in vain should he, however, be guilty, in
this present epoch, impunity would furnish a dangerous
example, and I must do my duty."
As he had now arrived at the door of his own house, which
adjoined the Palais de Justice, he entered, after having,
coldly saluted the shipowner, who stood, as if petrified, on
the spot where Villefort had left him. The antechamber was
full of police agents and gendarmes, in the midst of whom,
carefully watched, but calm and smiling, stood the prisoner.
Villefort traversed the antechamber, cast a side glance at
Dantes, and taking a packet which a gendarme offered him,
disappeared, saying, "Bring in the prisoner."
Rapid as had been Villefort's glance, it had served to give
him an idea of the man he was about to interrogate. He had
recognized intelligence in the high forehead, courage in the
dark eye and bent brow, and frankness in the thick lips that
showed a set of pearly teeth. Villefort's first impression
was favorable but he had been so often warned to mistrust
first impulses, that he applied the maxim to the impression,
forgetting the difference between the two words. He stifled,
therefore, the feelings of compassion that were rising,
composed his features, and sat down, grim and sombre, at his
desk. An instant after Dantes entered. He was pale, but calm
and collected, and saluting his judge with easy politeness,
looked round for a seat, as if he had been in M. Morrel's
salon. It was then that he encountered for the first time
Villefort's look,  that look peculiar to the magistrate,
who, while seeming to read the thoughts of others, betrays
nothing of his own.
"Who and what are you?" demanded Villefort, turning over a
pile of papers, containing information relative to the
prisoner, that a police agent had given to him on his entry,
and that, already, in an hour's time, had swelled to
voluminous proportions, thanks to the corrupt espionage of
which "the accused" is always made the victim.
"My name is Edmond Dantes," replied the young man calmly "I
am mate of the Pharaon, belonging to Messrs. Morrel  Son."
"Your age?" continued Villefort.
"Nineteen," returned Dantes.
"What were you doing at the moment you were arrested?"
"I was at the festival of my marriage, monsieur," said the
young man, his voice slightly tremulous, so great was the
contrast between that happy moment and the painful ceremony
he was now undergoing so great was the contrast between the
sombre aspect of M. de Villefort and the radiant face of
Mercedes.
"You were at the festival of your marriage?" said the
deputy, shuddering in spite of himself.
"Yes, monsieur I am on the point of marrying a young girl I
have been attached to for three years." Villefort, impassive
as he was, was struck with this coincidence and the
tremulous voice of Dantes, surprised in the midst of his
happiness, struck a sympathetic chord in his own bosom  he
also was on the point of being married, and he was summoned
from his own happiness to destroy that of another. "This
philosophic reflection," thought he, "will make a great
sensation at M. de SaintMeran's" and he arranged mentally,
while Dantes awaited further questions, the antithesis by
which orators often create a reputation for eloquence. When
this speech was arranged, Villefort turned to Dantes.
"Go on, sir," said he.
"What would you have me say?"
"Give all the information in your power."
"Tell me on which point you desire information, and I will
tell all I know only," added he, with a smile, "I warn you
I know very little."
"Have you served under the usurper?"
"I was about to be mustered into the Royal Marines when he
fell."
"It is reported your political opinions are extreme," said
Villefort, who had never heard anything of the kind, but was
not sorry to make this inquiry, as if it were an accusation.
"My political opinions" replied Dantes. "Alas, sir, I never
had any opinions. I am hardly nineteen I know nothing I
have no part to play. If I obtain the situation I desire, I
shall owe it to M. Morrel. Thus all my opinions  I will
not say public, but private  are confined to these three
sentiment,  I love my father, I respect M. Morrel, and I
adore Mercedes. This, sir, is all I can tell you, and you
see how uninteresting it is." As Dantes spoke, Villefort
gazed at his ingenuous and open countenance, and recollected
the words of Renee, who, without knowing who the culprit
was, had besought his indulgence for him. With the deputy's
knowledge of crime and criminals, every word the young man
uttered convinced him more and more of his innocence. This
lad, for he was scarcely a man,  simple, natural, eloquent
with that eloquence of the heart never found when sought
for full of affection for everybody, because he was happy,
and because happiness renders even the wicked good 
extended his affection even to his judge, spite of
Villefort's severe look and stern accent. Dantes seemed full
of kindness.
"Pardieu," said Villefort, "he is a noble fellow. I hope I
shall gain Renee's favor easily by obeying the first command
she ever imposed on me. I shall have at least a pressure of
the hand in public, and a sweet kiss in private." Full of
this idea, Villefort's face became so joyous, that when he
turned to Dantes, the latter, who had watched the change on
his physiognomy, was smiling also.
"Sir," said Villefort, "have you any enemies, at least, that
you know."
"I have enemies?" replied Dantes "my position is not
sufficiently elevated for that. As for my disposition, that
is, perhaps, somewhat too hasty but I have striven to
repress it. I have had ten or twelve sailors under me, and
if you question them, they will tell you that they love and
respect me, not as a father, for I am too young, but as an
elder brother."
"But you may have excited jealousy. You are about to become
captain at nineteen  an elevated post you are about to
marry a pretty girl, who loves you and these two pieces of
good fortune may have excited the envy of some one."
"You are right you know men better than I do, and what you
say may possibly be the case, I confess but if such persons
are among my acquaintances I prefer not to know it, because
then I should be forced to hate them."
"You are wrong you should always strive to see clearly
around you. You seem a worthy young man I will depart from
the strict line of my duty to aid you in discovering the
author of this accusation. Here is the paper do you know
the writing?" As he spoke, Villefort drew the letter from
his pocket, and presented it to Dantes. Dantes read it. A
cloud passed over his brow as he said, 
"No, monsieur, I do not know the writing, and yet it is
tolerably plain. Whoever did it writes well. I am very
fortunate," added he, looking gratefully at Villefort, "to
be examined by such a man as you for this envious person is
a real enemy." And by the rapid glance that the young man's
eyes shot forth, Villefort saw how much energy lay hid
beneath this mildness.
"Now," said the deputy, "answer me frankly, not as a
prisoner to a judge, but as one man to another who takes an
interest in him, what truth is there in the accusation
contained in this anonymous letter?" And Villefort threw
disdainfully on his desk the letter Dantes had just given
back to him.
"None at all. I will tell you the real facts. I swear by my
honor as a sailor, by my love for Mercedes, by the life of
my father" 
"Speak, monsieur," said Villefort. Then, internally, "If
Renee could see me, I hope she would be satisfied, and would
no longer call me a decapitator."
"Well, when we quitted Naples, Captain Leclere was attacked
with a brain fever. As we had no doctor on board, and he was
so anxious to arrive at Elba, that he would not touch at any
other port, his disorder rose to such a height, that at the
end of the third day, feeling he was dying, he called me to
him. "My dear Dantes,' said he, "swear to perform what I am
going to tell you, for it is a matter of the deepest
importance.'
""I swear, captain,' replied I.
""Well, as after my death the command devolves on you as
mate, assume the command, and bear up for the Island of
Elba, disembark at PortoFerrajo, ask for the grandmarshal,
give him this letter  perhaps they will give you another
letter, and charge you with a commission. You will
accomplish what I was to have done, and derive all the honor
and profit from it.'
""I will do it, captain but perhaps I shall not be admitted
to the grand marshal's presence as easily as you expect?'
""Here is a ring that will obtain audience of him, and
remove every difficulty,' said the captain. At these words
he gave me a ring. It was time  two hours after he was
delirious the next day he died."
"And what did you do then?"
"What I ought to have done, and what every one would have
done in my place. Everywhere the last requests of a dying
man are sacred but with a sailor the last requests of his
superior are commands. I sailed for the Island of Elba,
where I arrived the next day I ordered everybody to remain
on board, and went on shore alone. As I had expected, I
found some difficulty in obtaining access to the
grandmarshal but I sent the ring I had received from the
captain to him, and was instantly admitted. He questioned me
concerning Captain Leclere's death and, as the latter had
told me, gave me a letter to carry on to a person in Paris.
I undertook it because it was what my captain had bade me
do. I landed here, regulated the affairs of the vessel, and
hastened to visit my affianced bride, whom I found more
lovely than ever. Thanks to M. Morrel, all the forms were
got over in a word I was, as I told you, at my
marriagefeast and I should have been married in an hour,
and tomorrow I intended to start for Paris, had I not been
arrested on this charge which you as well as I now see to be
unjust."
"Ah," said Villefort, "this seems to me the truth. If you
have been culpable, it was imprudence, and this imprudence
was in obedience to the orders of your captain. Give up this
letter you have brought from Elba, and pass your word you
will appear should you be required, and go and rejoin your
friends.
"I am free, then, sir?" cried Dantes joyfully.
"Yes but first give me this letter."
"You have it already, for it was taken from me with some
others which I see in that packet."
"Stop a moment," said the deputy, as Dantes took his hat and
gloves. "To whom is it addressed?"
"To Monsieur Noirtier, Rue CoqHeron, Paris." Had a
thunderbolt fallen into the room, Villefort could not have
been more stupefied. He sank into his seat, and hastily
turning over the packet, drew forth the fatal letter, at
which he glanced with an expression of terror.
"M. Noirtier, Rue CoqHeron, No. ," murmured he, growing
still paler.
"Yes," said Dantes "do you know him?"
"No," replied Villefort "a faithful servant of the king
does not know conspirators."
"It is a conspiracy, then?" asked Dantes, who after
believing himself free, now began to feel a tenfold alarm.
"I have, however, already told you, sir, I was entirely
ignorant of the contents of the letter."
"Yes but you knew the name of the person to whom it was
addressed," said Villefort.
"I was forced to read the address to know to whom to give
it."
"Have you shown this letter to any one?" asked Villefort,
becoming still more pale.
"To no one, on my honor."
"Everybody is ignorant that you are the bearer of a letter
from the Island of Elba, and addressed to M. Noirtier?"
"Everybody, except the person who gave it to me."
"And that was too much, far too much," murmured Villefort.
Villefort's brow darkened more and more, his white lips and
clinched teeth filled Dantes with apprehension. After
reading the letter, Villefort covered his face with his
hands.
"Oh," said Dantes timidly, "what is the matter?" Villefort
made no answer, but raised his head at the expiration of a
few seconds, and again perused the letter.
"And you say that you are ignorant of the contents of this
letter?"
"I give you my word of honor, sir," said Dantes "but what
is the matter? You are ill  shall I ring for assistance?
shall I call?"
"No," said Villefort, rising hastily "stay where you are.
It is for me to give orders here, and not you."
"Monsieur," replied Dantes proudly, "it was only to summon
assistance for you."
"I want none it was a temporary indisposition. Attend to
yourself answer me." Dantes waited, expecting a question,
but in vain. Villefort fell back on his chair, passed his
hand over his brow, moist with perspiration, and, for the
third time, read the letter.
"Oh, if he knows the contents of this" murmured he, "and
that Noirtier is the father of Villefort, I am lost" And he
fixed his eyes upon Edmond as if he would have penetrated
his thoughts.
"Oh, it is impossible to doubt it," cried he, suddenly.
"In heaven's name" cried the unhappy young man, "if you
doubt me, question me I will answer you." Villefort made a
violent effort, and in a tone he strove to render firm, 
"Sir," said he, "I am no longer able, as I had hoped, to
restore you immediately to liberty before doing so, I must
consult the trial justice what my own feeling is you
already know."
"Oh, monsieur," cried Dantes, "you have been rather a friend
than a judge."
"Well, I must detain you some time longer, but I will strive
to make it as short as possible. The principal charge
against you is this letter, and you see"  Villefort
approached the fire, cast it in, and waited until it was
entirely consumed.
"You see, I destroy it?"
"Oh," exclaimed Dantes, "you are goodness itself."
"Listen," continued Villefort "you can now have confidence
in me after what I have done."
"Oh, command, and I will obey."
"Listen this is not a command, but advice I give you."
"Speak, and I will follow your advice."
"I shall detain you until this evening in the Palais de
Justice. Should any one else interrogate you, say to him
what you have said to me, but do not breathe a word of this
letter."
"I promise." It was Villefort who seemed to entreat, and the
prisoner who reassured him.
"You see," continued he, glancing toward the grate, where
fragments of burnt paper fluttered in the flames, "the
letter is destroyed you and I alone know of its existence
should you, therefore, be questioned, deny all knowledge of
it  deny it boldly, and you are saved."
"Be satisfied I will deny it."
"It was the only letter you had?"
"It was."
"Swear it."
"I swear it."
Villefort rang. A police agent entered. Villefort whispered
some words in his ear, to which the officer replied by a
motion of his head.
"Follow him," said Villefort to Dantes. Dantes saluted
Villefort and retired. Hardly had the door closed when
Villefort threw himself halffainting into a chair.
"Alas, alas," murmured he, "if the procureur himself had
been at Marseilles I should have been ruined. This accursed
letter would have destroyed all my hopes. Oh, my father,
must your past career always interfere with my successes?"
Suddenly a light passed over his face, a smile played round
his set mouth, and his haggard eyes were fixed in thought.
"This will do," said he, "and from this letter, which might
have ruined me, I will make my fortune. Now to the work I
have in hand." And after having assured himself that the
prisoner was gone, the deputy procureur hastened to the
house of his betrothed.
Chapter 
The Chateau D'If.
The commissary of police, as he traversed the antechamber,
made a sign to two gendarmes, who placed themselves one on
Dantes' right and the other on his left. A door that
communicated with the Palais de Justice was opened, and they
went through a long range of gloomy corridors, whose
appearance might have made even the boldest shudder. The
Palais de Justice communicated with the prison,  a sombre
edifice, that from its grated windows looks on the
clocktower of the Accoules. After numberless windings,
Dantes saw a door with an iron wicket. The commissary took
up an iron mallet and knocked thrice, every blow seeming to
Dantes as if struck on his heart. The door opened, the two
gendarmes gently pushed him forward, and the door closed
with a loud sound behind him. The air he inhaled was no
longer pure, but thick and mephitic,  he was in prison. He
was conducted to a tolerably neat chamber, but grated and
barred, and its appearance, therefore, did not greatly alarm
him besides, the words of Villefort, who seemed to interest
himself so much, resounded still in his ears like a promise
of freedom. It was four o'clock when Dantes was placed in
this chamber. It was, as we have said, the st of March, and
the prisoner was soon buried in darkness. The obscurity
augmented the acuteness of his hearing at the slightest
sound he rose and hastened to the door, convinced they were
about to liberate him, but the sound died away, and Dantes
sank again into his seat. At last, about ten o'clock, and
just as Dantes began to despair, steps were heard in the
corridor, a key turned in the lock, the bolts creaked, the
massy oaken door flew open, and a flood of light from two
torches pervaded the apartment. By the torchlight Dantes saw
the glittering sabres and carbines of four gendarmes. He had
advanced at first, but stopped at the sight of this display
of force.
"Are you come to fetch me?" asked he.
"Yes," replied a gendarme.
"By the orders of the deputy procureur?"
"I believe so." The conviction that they came from M. de
Villefort relieved all Dantes' apprehensions he advanced
calmly, and placed himself in the centre of the escort. A
carriage waited at the door, the coachman was on the box,
and a police officer sat beside him.
"Is this carriage for me?" said Dantes.
"It is for you," replied a gendarme.
Dantes was about to speak but feeling himself urged
forward, and having neither the power nor the intention to
resist, he mounted the steps, and was in an instant seated
inside between two gendarmes the two others took their
places opposite, and the carriage rolled heavily over the
stones.
The prisoner glanced at the windows  they were grated he
had changed his prison for another that was conveying him he
knew not whither. Through the grating, however, Dantes saw
they were passing through the Rue Caisserie, and by the Rue
SaintLaurent and the Rue Taramis, to the port. Soon he saw
the lights of La Consigne.
The carriage stopped, the officer descended, approached the
guardhouse, a dozen soldiers came out and formed themselves
in order Dantes saw the reflection of their muskets by the
light of the lamps on the quay.
"Can all this force be summoned on my account?" thought he.
The officer opened the door, which was locked, and, without
speaking a word, answered Dantes' question for he saw
between the ranks of the soldiers a passage formed from the
carriage to the port. The two gendarmes who were opposite to
him descended first, then he was ordered to alight and the
gendarmes on each side of him followed his example. They
advanced towards a boat, which a customhouse officer held
by a chain, near the quay.
The soldiers looked at Dantes with an air of stupid
curiosity. In an instant he was placed in the sternsheets
of the boat, between the gendarmes, while the officer
stationed himself at the bow a shove sent the boat adrift,
and four sturdy oarsmen impelled it rapidly towards the
Pilon. At a shout from the boat, the chain that closes the
mouth of the port was lowered and in a second they were, as
Dantes knew, in the Frioul and outside the inner harbor.
The prisoner's first feeling was of joy at again breathing
the pure air  for air is freedom but he soon sighed, for
he passed before La Reserve, where he had that morning been
so happy, and now through the open windows came the laughter
and revelry of a ball. Dantes folded his hands, raised his
eyes to heaven, and prayed fervently.
The boat continued her voyage. They had passed the Tete de
Morte, were now off the Anse du Pharo, and about to double
the battery. This manoeuvre was incomprehensible to Dantes.
"Whither are you taking me?" asked he.
"You will soon know."
"But still" 
"We are forbidden to give you any explanation." Dantes,
trained in discipline, knew that nothing would be more
absurd than to question subordinates, who were forbidden to
reply and so he remained silent.
The most vague and wild thoughts passed through his mind.
The boat they were in could not make a long voyage there
was no vessel at anchor outside the harbor he thought,
perhaps, they were going to leave him on some distant point.
He was not bound, nor had they made any attempt to handcuff
him this seemed a good augury. Besides, had not the deputy,
who had been so kind to him, told him that provided he did
not pronounce the dreaded name of Noirtier, he had nothing
to apprehend? Had not Villefort in his presence destroyed
the fatal letter, the only proof against him?
He waited silently, striving to pierce through the darkness.
They had left the Ile Ratonneau, where the lighthouse stood,
on the right, and were now opposite the Point des Catalans.
It seemed to the prisoner that he could distinguish a
feminine form on the beach, for it was there Mercedes dwelt.
How was it that a presentiment did not warn Mercedes that
her lover was within three hundred yards of her?
One light alone was visible and Dantes saw that it came
from Mercedes' chamber. Mercedes was the only one awake in
the whole settlement. A loud cry could be heard by her. But
pride restrained him and he did not utter it. What would his
guards think if they heard him shout like a madman?
He remained silent, his eyes fixed upon the light the boat
went on, but the prisoner thought only of Mercedes. An
intervening elevation of land hid the light. Dantes turned
and perceived that they had got out to sea. While he had
been absorbed in thought, they had shipped their oars and
hoisted sail the boat was now moving with the wind.
In spite of his repugnance to address the guards, Dantes
turned to the nearest gendarme, and taking his hand, 
"Comrade," said he, "I adjure you, as a Christian and a
soldier, to tell me where we are going. I am Captain Dantes,
a loyal Frenchman, thought accused of treason tell me where
you are conducting me, and I promise you on my honor I will
submit to my fate."
The gendarme looked irresolutely at his companion, who
returned for answer a sign that said, "I see no great harm
in telling him now," and the gendarme replied, 
"You are a native of Marseilles, and a sailor, and yet you
do not know where you are going?"
"On my honor, I have no idea."
"Have you no idea whatever?"
"None at all."
"That is impossible."
"I swear to you it is true. Tell me, I entreat."
"But my orders."
"Your orders do not forbid your telling me what I must know
in ten minutes, in half an hour, or an hour. You see I
cannot escape, even if I intended."
"Unless you are blind, or have never been outside the
harbor, you must know."
"I do not."
"Look round you then." Dantes rose and looked forward, when
he saw rise within a hundred yards of him the black and
frowning rock on which stands the Chateau d'If. This gloomy
fortress, which has for more than three hundred years
furnished food for so many wild legends, seemed to Dantes
like a scaffold to a malefactor.
"The Chateau d'If?" cried he, "what are we going there for?"
The gendarme smiled.
"I am not going there to be imprisoned," said Dantes "it is
only used for political prisoners. I have committed no
crime. Are there any magistrates or judges at the Chateau
d'If?"
"There are only," said the gendarme, "a governor, a
garrison, turnkeys, and good thick walls. Come, come, do not
look so astonished, or you will make me think you are
laughing at me in return for my good nature." Dantes pressed
the gendarme's hand as though he would crush it.
"You think, then," said he, "that I am taken to the Chateau
d'If to be imprisoned there?"
"It is probable but there is no occasion to squeeze so
hard."
"Without any inquiry, without any formality?"
"All the formalities have been gone through the inquiry is
already made."
"And so, in spite of M. de Villefort's promises?"
"I do not know what M. de Villefort promised you," said the
gendarme, "but I know we are taking you to the Chateau d'If.
But what are you doing? Help, comrades, help"
By a rapid movement, which the gendarme's practiced eye had
perceived, Dantes sprang forward to precipitate himself into
the sea but four vigorous arms seized him as his feet
quitted the bottom of the boat. He fell back cursing with
rage.
"Good" said the gendarme, placing his knee on his chest
"believe softspoken gentlemen again Harkye, my friend, I
have disobeyed my first order, but I will not disobey the
second and if you move, I will blow your brains out." And
he levelled his carbine at Dantes, who felt the muzzle
against his temple.
For a moment the idea of struggling crossed his mind, and of
so ending the unexpected evil that had overtaken him. But he
bethought him of M. de Villefort's promise and, besides,
death in a boat from the hand of a gendarme seemed too
terrible. He remained motionless, but gnashing his teeth and
wringing his hands with fury.
At this moment the boat came to a landing with a violent
shock. One of the sailors leaped on shore, a cord creaked as
it ran through a pulley, and Dantes guessed they were at the
end of the voyage, and that they were mooring the boat.
His guards, taking him by the arms and coatcollar, forced
him to rise, and dragged him towards the steps that lead to
the gate of the fortress, while the police officer carrying
a musket with fixed bayonet followed behind.
Dantes made no resistance he was like a man in a dream he
saw soldiers drawn up on the embankment he knew vaguely
that he was ascending a flight of steps he was conscious
that he passed through a door, and that the door closed
behind him but all this indistinctly as through a mist. He
did not even see the ocean, that terrible barrier against
freedom, which the prisoners look upon with utter despair.
They halted for a minute, during which he strove to collect
his thoughts. He looked around he was in a court surrounded
by high walls he heard the measured tread of sentinels, and
as they passed before the light he saw the barrels of their
muskets shine.
They waited upwards of ten minutes. Certain Dantes could not
escape, the gendarmes released him. They seemed awaiting
orders. The orders came.
"Where is the prisoner?" said a voice.
"Here," replied the gendarmes.
"Let him follow me I will take him to his cell."
"Go" said the gendarmes, thrusting Dantes forward.
The prisoner followed his guide, who led him into a room
almost under ground, whose bare and reeking walls seemed as
though impregnated with tears a lamp placed on a stool
illumined the apartment faintly, and showed Dantes the
features of his conductor, an underjailer, illclothed, and
of sullen appearance.
"Here is your chamber for tonight," said he. "It is late,
and the governor is asleep. Tomorrow, perhaps, he may
change you. In the meantime there is bread, water, and fresh
straw and that is all a prisoner can wish for. Goodnight."
And before Dantes could open his mouth  before he had
noticed where the jailer placed his bread or the water 
before he had glanced towards the corner where the straw
was, the jailer disappeared, taking with him the lamp and
closing the door, leaving stamped upon the prisoner's mind
the dim reflection of the dripping walls of his dungeon.
Dantes was alone in darkness and in silence  cold as the
shadows that he felt breathe on his burning forehead. With
the first dawn of day the jailer returned, with orders to
leave Dantes where he was. He found the prisoner in the same
position, as if fixed there, his eyes swollen with weeping.
He had passed the night standing, and without sleep. The
jailer advanced Dantes appeared not to perceive him. He
touched him on the shoulder. Edmond started.
"Have you not slept?" said the jailer.
"I do not know," replied Dantes. The jailer stared.
"Are you hungry?" continued he.
"I do not know."
"Do you wish for anything?"
"I wish to see the governor." The jailer shrugged his
shoulders and left the chamber.
Dantes followed him with his eyes, and stretched forth his
hands towards the open door but the door closed. All his
emotion then burst forth he cast himself on the ground,
weeping bitterly, and asking himself what crime he had
committed that he was thus punished.
The day passed thus he scarcely tasted food, but walked
round and round the cell like a wild beast in its cage. One
thought in particular tormented him namely, that during his
journey hither he had sat so still, whereas he might, a
dozen times, have plunged into the sea, and, thanks to his
powers of swimming, for which he was famous, have gained the
shore, concealed himself until the arrival of a Genoese or
Spanish vessel, escaped to Spain or Italy, where Mercedes
and his father could have joined him. He had no fears as to
how he should live  good seamen are welcome everywhere. He
spoke Italian like a Tuscan, and Spanish like a Castilian
he would have been free, and happy with Mercedes and his
father, whereas he was now confined in the Chateau d'If,
that impregnable fortress, ignorant of the future destiny of
his father and Mercedes and all this because he had trusted
to Villefort's promise. The thought was maddening, and
Dantes threw himself furiously down on his straw. The next
morning at the same hour, the jailer came again.
"Well," said the jailer, "are you more reasonable today?"
Dantes made no reply.
"Come, cheer up is there anything that I can do for you?"
"I wish to see the governor."
"I have already told you it was impossible."
"Why so?"
"Because it is against prison rules, and prisoners must not
even ask for it."
"What is allowed, then?"
"Better fare, if you pay for it, books, and leave to walk
about."
"I do not want books, I am satisfied with my food, and do
not care to walk about but I wish to see the governor."
"If you worry me by repeating the same thing, I will not
bring you any more to eat."
"Well, then," said Edmond, "if you do not, I shall die of
hunger  that is all."
The jailer saw by his tone he would be happy to die and as
every prisoner is worth ten sous a day to his jailer, he
replied in a more subdued tone.
"What you ask is impossible but if you are very well
behaved you will be allowed to walk about, and some day you
will meet the governor, and if he chooses to reply, that is
his affair."
"But," asked Dantes, "how long shall I have to wait?"
"Ah, a month  six months  a year."
"It is too long a time. I wish to see him at once."
"Ah," said the jailer, "do not always brood over what is
impossible, or you will be mad in a fortnight."
"You think so?"
"Yes we have an instance here it was by always offering a
million of francs to the governor for his liberty that an
abbe became mad, who was in this chamber before you."
"How long has he left it?"
"Two years."
"Was he liberated, then?"
"No he was put in a dungeon."
"Listen" said Dantes. "I am not an abbe, I am not mad
perhaps I shall be, but at present, unfortunately, I am not.
I will make you another offer."
"What is that?"
"I do not offer you a million, because I have it not but I
will give you a hundred crowns if, the first time you go to
Marseilles, you will seek out a young girl named Mercedes,
at the Catalans, and give her two lines from me."
"If I took them, and were detected, I should lose my place,
which is worth two thousand francs a year so that I should
be a great fool to run such a risk for three hundred."
"Well," said Dantes, "mark this if you refuse at least to
tell Mercedes I am here, I will some day hide myself behind
the door, and when you enter I will dash out your brains
with this stool."
"Threats" cried the jailer, retreating and putting himself
on the defensive "you are certainly going mad. The abbe
began like you, and in three days you will be like him, mad
enough to tie up but, fortunately, there are dungeons
here." Dantes whirled the stool round his head.
"All right, all right," said the jailer "all right, since
you will have it so. I will send word to the governor."
"Very well," returned Dantes, dropping the stool and sitting
on it as if he were in reality mad. The jailer went out, and
returned in an instant with a corporal and four soldiers.
"By the governor's orders," said he, "conduct the prisoner
to the tier beneath."
"To the dungeon, then," said the corporal.
"Yes we must put the madman with the madmen." The soldiers
seized Dantes, who followed passively.
He descended fifteen steps, and the door of a dungeon was
opened, and he was thrust in. The door closed, and Dantes
advanced with outstretched hands until he touched the wall
he then sat down in the corner until his eyes became
accustomed to the darkness. The jailer was right Dantes
wanted but little of being utterly mad.
Chapter 
The Evening of the Betrothal.
Villefort had, as we have said, hastened back to Madame de
SaintMeran's in the Place du Grand Cours, and on entering
the house found that the guests whom he had left at table
were taking coffee in the salon. Renee was, with all the
rest of the company, anxiously awaiting him, and his
entrance was followed by a general exclamation.
"Well, Decapitator, Guardian of the State, Royalist, Brutus,
what is the matter?" said one. "Speak out."
"Are we threatened with a fresh Reign of Terror?" asked
another.
"Has the Corsican ogre broken loose?" cried a third.
"Marquise," said Villefort, approaching his future
motherinlaw, "I request your pardon for thus leaving you.
Will the marquis honor me by a few moments' private
conversation?"
"Ah, it is really a serious matter, then?" asked the
marquis, remarking the cloud on Villefort's brow.
"So serious that I must take leave of you for a few days
so," added he, turning to Renee, "judge for yourself if it
be not important."
"You are going to leave us?" cried Renee, unable to hide her
emotion at this unexpected announcement.
"Alas," returned Villefort, "I must"
"Where, then, are you going?" asked the marquise.
"That, madame, is an official secret but if you have any
commissions for Paris, a friend of mine is going there
tonight, and will with pleasure undertake them." The guests
looked at each other.
"You wish to speak to me alone?" said the marquis.
"Yes, let us go to the library, please." The marquis took
his arm, and they left the salon.
"Well," asked he, as soon as they were by themselves, "tell
me what it is?"
"An affair of the greatest importance, that demands my
immediate presence in Paris. Now, excuse the indiscretion,
marquis, but have you any landed property?"
"All my fortune is in the funds seven or eight hundred
thousand francs."
"Then sell out  sell out, marquis, or you will lose it
all."
"But how can I sell out here?"
"You have a broker, have you not?"
"Yes."
"Then give me a letter to him, and tell him to sell out
without an instant's delay, perhaps even now I shall arrive
too late."
"The deuce you say" replied the marquis, "let us lose no
time, then"
And, sitting down, he wrote a letter to his broker, ordering
him to sell out at the market price.
"Now, then," said Villefort, placing the letter in his
pocketbook, "I must have another"
"To whom?"
"To the king."
"To the king?"
"Yes."
"I dare not write to his majesty."
"I do not ask you to write to his majesty, but ask M. de
Salvieux to do so. I want a letter that will enable me to
reach the king's presence without all the formalities of
demanding an audience that would occasion a loss of
precious time."
"But address yourself to the keeper of the seals he has the
right of entry at the Tuileries, and can procure you
audience at any hour of the day or night."
"Doubtless but there is no occasion to divide the honors of
my discovery with him. The keeper would leave me in the
background, and take all the glory to himself. I tell you,
marquis, my fortune is made if I only reach the Tuileries
the first, for the king will not forget the service I do
him."
"In that case go and get ready. I will call Salvieux and
make him write the letter."
"Be as quick as possible, I must be on the road in a quarter
of an hour."
"Tell your coachman to stop at the door."
"You will present my excuses to the marquise and
Mademoiselle Renee, whom I leave on such a day with great
regret."
"You will find them both here, and can make your farewells
in person."
"A thousand thanks  and now for the letter."
The marquis rang, a servant entered.
"Say to the Comte de Salvieux that I would like to see him."
"Now, then, go," said the marquis.
"I shall be gone only a few moments."
Villefort hastily quitted the apartment, but reflecting that
the sight of the deputy procureur running through the
streets would be enough to throw the whole city into
confusion, he resumed his ordinary pace. At his door he
perceived a figure in the shadow that seemed to wait for
him. It was Mercedes, who, hearing no news of her lover, had
come unobserved to inquire after him.
As Villefort drew near, she advanced and stood before him.
Dantes had spoken of Mercedes, and Villefort instantly
recognized her. Her beauty and high bearing surprised him,
and when she inquired what had become of her lover, it
seemed to him that she was the judge, and he the accused.
"The young man you speak of," said Villefort abruptly, "is a
great criminal. and I can do nothing for him, mademoiselle."
Mercedes burst into tears, and, as Villefort strove to pass
her, again addressed him.
"But, at least, tell me where he is, that I may know whether
he is alive or dead," said she.
"I do not know he is no longer in my hands," replied
Villefort.
And desirous of putting an end to the interview, he pushed
by her, and closed the door, as if to exclude the pain he
felt. But remorse is not thus banished like Virgil's
wounded hero, he carried the arrow in his wound, and,
arrived at the salon, Villefort uttered a sigh that was
almost a sob, and sank into a chair.
Then the first pangs of an unending torture seized upon his
heart. The man he sacrificed to his ambition, that innocent
victim immolated on the altar of his father's faults,
appeared to him pale and threatening, leading his affianced
bride by the hand, and bringing with him remorse, not such
as the ancients figured, furious and terrible, but that slow
and consuming agony whose pangs are intensified from hour to
hour up to the very moment of death. Then he had a moment's
hesitation. He had frequently called for capital punishment
on criminals, and owing to his irresistible eloquence they
had been condemned, and yet the slightest shadow of remorse
had never clouded Villefort's brow, because they were
guilty at least, he believed so but here was an innocent
man whose happiness he had destroyed in this case he was
not the judge, but the executioner.
As he thus reflected, he felt the sensation we have
described, and which had hitherto been unknown to him, arise
in his bosom, and fill him with vague apprehensions. It is
thus that a wounded man trembles instinctively at the
approach of the finger to his wound until it be healed, but
Villefort's was one of those that never close, or if they
do, only close to reopen more agonizing than ever. If at
this moment the sweet voice of Renee had sounded in his ears
pleading for mercy, or the fair Mercedes had entered and
said, "In the name of God, I conjure you to restore me my
affianced husband," his cold and trembling hands would have
signed his release but no voice broke the stillness of the
chamber, and the door was opened only by Villefort's valet,
who came to tell him that the travelling carriage was in
readiness.
Villefort rose, or rather sprang, from his chair, hastily
opened one of the drawers of his desk, emptied all the gold
it contained into his pocket, stood motionless an instant,
his hand pressed to his head, muttered a few inarticulate
sounds, and then, perceiving that his servant had placed his
cloak on his shoulders, he sprang into the carriage,
ordering the postilions to drive to M. de SaintMeran's. The
hapless Dantes was doomed.
As the marquis had promised, Villefort found the marquise
and Renee in waiting. He started when he saw Renee, for he
fancied she was again about to plead for Dantes. Alas, her
emotions were wholly personal she was thinking only of
Villefort's departure.
She loved Villefort, and he left her at the moment he was
about to become her husband. Villefort knew not when he
should return, and Renee, far from pleading for Dantes,
hated the man whose crime separated her from her lover.
Meanwhile what of Mercedes? She had met Fernand at the
corner of the Rue de la Loge she had returned to the
Catalans, and had despairingly cast herself on her couch.
Fernand, kneeling by her side, took her hand, and covered it
with kisses that Mercedes did not even feel. She passed the
night thus. The lamp went out for want of oil, but she paid
no heed to the darkness, and dawn came, but she knew not
that it was day. Grief had made her blind to all but one
object  that was Edmond.
"Ah, you are there," said she, at length, turning towards
Fernand.
"I have not quitted you since yesterday," returned Fernand
sorrowfully.
M. Morrel had not readily given up the fight. He had learned
that Dantes had been taken to prison, and he had gone to all
his friends, and the influential persons of the city but
the report was already in circulation that Dantes was
arrested as a Bonapartist agent and as the most sanguine
looked upon any attempt of Napoleon to remount the throne as
impossible, he met with nothing but refusal, and had
returned home in despair, declaring that the matter was
serious and that nothing more could be done.
Caderousse was equally restless and uneasy, but instead of
seeking, like M. Morrel, to aid Dantes, he had shut himself
up with two bottles of black currant brandy, in the hope of
drowning reflection. But he did not succeed, and became too
intoxicated to fetch any more drink, and yet not so
intoxicated as to forget what had happened. With his elbows
on the table he sat between the two empty bottles, while
spectres danced in the light of the unsnuffed candle 
spectres such as Hoffmann strews over his punchdrenched
pages, like black, fantastic dust.
Danglars alone was content and joyous  he had got rid of
an enemy and made his own situation on the Pharaon secure.
Danglars was one of those men born with a pen behind the
ear, and an inkstand in place of a heart. Everything with
him was multiplication or subtraction. The life of a man was
to him of far less value than a numeral, especially when, by
taking it away, he could increase the sum total of his own
desires. He went to bed at his usual hour, and slept in
peace.
Villefort, after having received M. de Salvieux' letter,
embraced Renee, kissed the marquise's hand, and shaken that
of the marquis, started for Paris along the Aix road.
Old Dantes was dying with anxiety to know what had become of
Edmond. But we know very well what had become of Edmond.
Chapter 
The King's Closet at the Tuileries.
We will leave Villefort on the road to Paris, travelling 
thanks to trebled fees  with all speed, and passing
through two or three apartments, enter at the Tuileries the
little room with the arched window, so well known as having
been the favorite closet of Napoleon and Louis XVIII., and
now of Louis Philippe.
There, seated before a walnut table he had brought with him
from Hartwell, and to which, from one of those fancies not
uncommon to great people, he was particularly attached, the
king, Louis XVIII., was carelessly listening to a man of
fifty or fiftytwo years of age, with gray hair,
aristocratic bearing, and exceedingly gentlemanly attire,
and meanwhile making a marginal note in a volume of
Gryphius's rather inaccurate, but much soughtafter, edition
of Horace  a work which was much indebted to the sagacious
observations of the philosophical monarch.
"You say, sir"  said the king.
"That I am exceedingly disquieted, sire."
"Really, have you had a vision of the seven fat kine and the
seven lean kine?"
"No, sire, for that would only betoken for us seven years of
plenty and seven years of scarcity and with a king as full
of foresight as your majesty, scarcity is not a thing to be
feared."
"Then of what other scourge are you afraid, my dear Blacas?"
"Sire, I have every reason to believe that a storm is
brewing in the south."
"Well, my dear duke," replied Louis XVIII., "I think you are
wrongly informed, and know positively that, on the contrary,
it is very fine weather in that direction." Man of ability
as he was, Louis XVIII. liked a pleasant jest.
"Sire," continued M. de Blacas, "if it only be to reassure a
faithful servant, will your majesty send into Languedoc,
Provence, and Dauphine, trusty men, who will bring you back
a faithful report as to the feeling in these three
provinces?"
"Caninus surdis," replied the king, continuing the
annotations in his Horace.
"Sire," replied the courtier, laughing, in order that he
might seem to comprehend the quotation, "your majesty may be
perfectly right in relying on the good feeling of France,
but I fear I am not altogether wrong in dreading some
desperate attempt."
"By whom?"
"By Bonaparte, or, at least, by his adherents."
"My dear Blacas," said the king, "you with your alarms
prevent me from working."
"And you, sire, prevent me from sleeping with your
security."
"Wait, my dear sir, wait a moment for I have such a
delightful note on the Pastor quum traheret  wait, and I
will listen to you afterwards."
There was a brief pause, during which Louis XVIII. wrote, in
a hand as small as possible, another note on the margin of
his Horace, and then looking at the duke with the air of a
man who thinks he has an idea of his own, while he is only
commenting upon the idea of another, said, 
"Go on, my dear duke, go on  I listen."
"Sire," said Blacas, who had for a moment the hope of
sacrificing Villefort to his own profit, "I am compelled to
tell you that these are not mere rumors destitute of
foundation which thus disquiet me but a seriousminded man,
deserving all my confidence, and charged by me to watch over
the south" the duke hesitated as he pronounced these
words, "has arrived by post to tell me that a great peril
threatens the king, and so I hastened to you, sire."
"Mala ducis avi domum," continued Louis XVIII., still
annotating.
"Does your majesty wish me to drop the subject?"
"By no means, my dear duke but just stretch out your hand."
"Which?"
"Whichever you please  there to the left."
"Here, sire?"
"I tell you to the left, and you are looking to the right I
mean on my left  yes, there. You will find yesterday's
report of the minister of police. But here is M. Dandre
himself" and M. Dandre, announced by the
chamberlaininwaiting, entered.
"Come in," said Louis XVIII., with repressed smile, "come
in, Baron, and tell the duke all you know  the latest news
of M. de Bonaparte do not conceal anything, however
serious,  let us see, the Island of Elba is a volcano, and
we may expect to have issuing thence flaming and bristling
war  bella, horrida bella." M. Dandre leaned very
respectfully on the back of a chair with his two hands, and
said, 
"Has your majesty perused yesterday's report?"
"Yes, yes but tell the duke himself, who cannot find
anything, what the report contains  give him the
particulars of what the usurper is doing in his islet."
"Monsieur," said the baron to the duke, "all the servants of
his majesty must approve of the latest intelligence which we
have from the Island of Elba. Bonaparte"  M. Dandre looked
at Louis XVIII., who, employed in writing a note, did not
even raise his head. "Bonaparte," continued the baron, "is
mortally wearied, and passes whole days in watching his
miners at work at PortoLongone."
"And scratches himself for amusement," added the king.
"Scratches himself?" inquired the duke, "what does your
majesty mean?"
"Yes, indeed, my dear duke. Did you forget that this great
man, this hero, this demigod, is attacked with a malady of
the skin which worries him to death, prurigo?"
"And, moreover, my dear duke," continued the minister of
police, "we are almost assured that, in a very short time,
the usurper will be insane."
"Insane?"
"Raving mad his head becomes weaker. Sometimes he weeps
bitterly, sometimes laughs boisterously, at other time he
passes hours on the seashore, flinging stones in the water
and when the flint makes "duckanddrake' five or six times,
he appears as delighted as if he had gained another Marengo
or Austerlitz. Now, you must agree that these are
indubitable symptoms of insanity."
"Or of wisdom, my dear baron  or of wisdom," said Louis
XVIII., laughing "the greatest captains of antiquity amused
themselves by casting pebbles into the ocean  see
Plutarch's life of Scipio Africanus."
M. de Blacas pondered deeply between the confident monarch
and the truthful minister. Villefort, who did not choose to
reveal the whole secret, lest another should reap all the
benefit of the disclosure, had yet communicated enough to
cause him the greatest uneasiness.
"Well, well, Dandre," said Louis XVIII., "Blacas is not yet
convinced let us proceed, therefore, to the usurper's
conversion." The minister of police bowed.
"The usurper's conversion" murmured the duke, looking at
the king and Dandre, who spoke alternately, like Virgil's
shepherds. "The usurper converted"
"Decidedly, my dear duke."
"In what way converted?"
"To good principles. Tell him all about it, baron."
"Why, this is the way of it," said the minister, with the
gravest air in the world "Napoleon lately had a review, and
as two or three of his old veterans expressed a desire to
return to France, he gave them their dismissal, and exhorted
them to "serve the good king.' These were his own words, of
that I am certain."
"Well, Blacas, what think you of this?" inquired the king
triumphantly, and pausing for a moment from the voluminous
scholiast before him.
"I say, sire, that the minister of police is greatly
deceived or I am and as it is impossible it can be the
minister of police as he has the guardianship of the safety
and honor of your majesty, it is probable that I am in
error. However, sire, if I might advise, your majesty will
interrogate the person of whom I spoke to you, and I will
urge your majesty to do him this honor."
"Most willingly, duke under your auspices I will receive
any person you please, but you must not expect me to be too
confiding. Baron, have you any report more recent than this
dated the th February.  this is the th of March?"
"No, sire, but I am hourly expecting one it may have
arrived since I left my office."
"Go thither, and if there be none  well, well," continued
Louis XVIII., "make one that is the usual way, is it not?"
and the king laughed facetiously.
"Oh, sire," replied the minister, "we have no occasion to
invent any every day our desks are loaded with most
circumstantial denunciations, coming from hosts of people
who hope for some return for services which they seek to
render, but cannot they trust to fortune, and rely upon
some unexpected event in some way to justify their
predictions."
"Well, sir, go" said Louis XVIII., "and remember that I am
waiting for you."
"I will but go and return, sire I shall be back in ten
minutes."
"And I, sire," said M. de Blacas, "will go and find my
messenger."
"Wait, sir, wait," said Louis XVIII. "Really, M. de Blacas,
I must change your armorial bearings I will give you an
eagle with outstretched wings, holding in its claws a prey
which tries in vain to escape, and bearing this device 
Tenax."
"Sire, I listen," said De Blacas, biting his nails with
impatience.
"I wish to consult you on this passage, "Molli fugiens
anhelitu,' you know it refers to a stag flying from a wolf.
Are you not a sportsman and a great wolfhunter? Well, then,
what do you think of the molli anhelitu?"
"Admirable, sire but my messenger is like the stag you
refer to, for he has posted two hundred and twenty leagues
in scarcely three days."
"Which is undergoing great fatigue and anxiety, my dear
duke, when we have a telegraph which transmits messages in
three or four hours, and that without getting in the least
out of breath."
"Ah, sire, you recompense but badly this poor young man, who
has come so far, and with so much ardor, to give your
majesty useful information. If only for the sake of M. de
Salvieux, who recommends him to me, I entreat your majesty
to receive him graciously."
"M. de Salvieux, my brother's chamberlain?"
"Yes, sire."
"He is at Marseilles."
"And writes me thence."
"Does he speak to you of this conspiracy?"
"No but strongly recommends M. de Villefort, and begs me to
present him to your majesty."
"M. de Villefort" cried the king, "is the messenger's name
M. de Villefort?"
"Yes, sire."
"And he comes from Marseilles?"
"In person."
"Why did you not mention his name at once?" replied the
king, betraying some uneasiness.
"Sire, I thought his name was unknown to your majesty."
"No, no, Blacas he is a man of strong and elevated
understanding, ambitious, too, and, pardieu, you know his
father's name"
"His father?"
"Yes, Noirtier."
"Noirtier the Girondin?  Noirtier the senator?"
"He himself."
"And your majesty has employed the son of such a man?"
"Blacas, my friend, you have but limited comprehension. I
told you Villefort was ambitious, and to attain this
ambition Villefort would sacrifice everything, even his
father."
"Then, sire, may I present him?"
"This instant, duke Where is he?"
"Waiting below, in my carriage."
"Seek him at once."
"I hasten to do so." The duke left the royal presence with
the speed of a young man his really sincere royalism made
him youthful again. Louis XVIII. remained alone, and turning
his eyes on his halfopened Horace, muttered, 
"Justum et tenacem propositi virum."
M. de Blacas returned as speedily as he had departed, but in
the antechamber he was forced to appeal to the king's
authority. Villefort's dusty garb, his costume, which was
not of courtly cut, excited the susceptibility of M. de
Breze, who was all astonishment at finding that this young
man had the audacity to enter before the king in such
attire. The duke, however, overcame all difficulties with a
word  his majesty's order and, in spite of the
protestations which the master of ceremonies made for the
honor of his office and principles, Villefort was
introduced.
The king was seated in the same place where the duke had
left him. On opening the door, Villefort found himself
facing him, and the young magistrate's first impulse was to
pause.
"Come in, M. de Villefort," said the king, "come in."
Villefort bowed, and advancing a few steps, waited until the
king should interrogate him.
"M. de Villefort," said Louis XVIII., "the Duc de Blacas
assures me you have some interesting information to
communicate."
"Sire, the duke is right, and I believe your majesty will
think it equally important."
"In the first place, and before everything else, sir, is the
news as bad in your opinion as I am asked to believe?"
"Sire, I believe it to be most urgent, but I hope, by the
speed I have used, that it is not irreparable."
"Speak as fully as you please, sir," said the king, who
began to give way to the emotion which had showed itself in
Blacas's face and affected Villefort's voice. "Speak, sir,
and pray begin at the beginning I like order in
everything."
"Sire," said Villefort, "I will render a faithful report to
your majesty, but I must entreat your forgiveness if my
anxiety leads to some obscurity in my language." A glance at
the king after this discreet and subtle exordium, assured
Villefort of the benignity of his august auditor, and he
went on 
"Sire, I have come as rapidly to Paris as possible, to
inform your majesty that I have discovered, in the exercise
of my duties, not a commonplace and insignificant plot, such
as is every day got up in the lower ranks of the people and
in the army, but an actual conspiracy  a storm which
menaces no less than your majesty's throne. Sire, the
usurper is arming three ships, he meditates some project,
which, however mad, is yet, perhaps, terrible. At this
moment he will have left Elba, to go whither I know not, but
assuredly to attempt a landing either at Naples, or on the
coast of Tuscany, or perhaps on the shores of France. Your
majesty is well aware that the sovereign of the Island of
Elba has maintained his relations with Italy and France?"
"I am, sir," said the king, much agitated "and recently we
have had information that the Bonapartist clubs have had
meetings in the Rue SaintJacques. But proceed, I beg of
you. How did you obtain these details?"
"Sire, they are the results of an examination which I have
made of a man of Marseilles, whom I have watched for some
time, and arrested on the day of my departure. This person,
a sailor, of turbulent character, and whom I suspected of
Bonapartism, has been secretly to the Island of Elba. There
he saw the grandmarshal, who charged him with an oral
message to a Bonapartist in Paris, whose name I could not
extract from him but this mission was to prepare men's
minds for a return it is the man who says this, sire  a
return which will soon occur."
"And where is this man?"
"In prison, sire."
"And the matter seems serious to you?"
"So serious, sire, that when the circumstance surprised me
in the midst of a family festival, on the very day of my
betrothal, I left my bride and friends, postponing
everything, that I might hasten to lay at your majesty's
feet the fears which impressed me, and the assurance of my
devotion."
"True," said Louis XVIII., "was there not a marriage
engagement between you and Mademoiselle de SaintMeran?"
"Daughter of one of your majesty's most faithful servants."
"Yes, yes but let us talk of this plot, M. de Villefort."
"Sire, I fear it is more than a plot I fear it is a
conspiracy."
"A conspiracy in these times," said Louis XVIII., smiling,
"is a thing very easy to meditate, but more difficult to
conduct to an end, inasmuch as, reestablished so recently
on the throne of our ancestors, we have our eyes open at
once upon the past, the present, and the future. For the
last ten months my ministers have redoubled their vigilance,
in order to watch the shore of the Mediterranean. If
Bonaparte landed at Naples, the whole coalition would be on
foot before he could even reach Piomoino if he land in
Tuscany, he will be in an unfriendly territory if he land
in France, it must be with a handful of men, and the result
of that is easily foretold, execrated as he is by the
population. Take courage, sir but at the same time rely on
our royal gratitude."
"Ah, here is M. Dandre" cried de Blacas. At this instant
the minister of police appeared at the door, pale,
trembling, and as if ready to faint. Villefort was about to
retire, but M. de Blacas, taking his hand, restrained him.
Chapter 
The Corsican Ogre.
At the sight of this agitation Louis XVIII. pushed from him
violently the table at which he was sitting.
"What ails you, baron?" he exclaimed. "You appear quite
aghast. Has your uneasiness anything to do with what M. de
Blacas has told me, and M. de Villefort has just confirmed?"
M. de Blacas moved suddenly towards the baron, but the
fright of the courtier pleaded for the forbearance of the
statesman and besides, as matters were, it was much more to
his advantage that the prefect of police should triumph over
him than that he should humiliate the prefect.
"Sire"  stammered the baron.
"Well, what is it?" asked Louis XVIII. The minister of
police, giving way to an impulse of despair, was about to
throw himself at the feet of Louis XVIII., who retreated a
step and frowned.
"Will you speak?" he said.
"Oh, sire, what a dreadful misfortune I am, indeed, to be
pitied. I can never forgive myself"
"Monsieur," said Louis XVIII., "I command you to speak."
"Well, sire, the usurper left Elba on the th February, and
landed on the st of March."
"And where? In Italy?" asked the king eagerly.
"In France, sire,  at a small port, near Antibes, in the
Gulf of Juan."
"The usurper landed in France, near Antibes, in the Gulf of
Juan, two hundred and fifty leagues from Paris, on the st
of March, and you only acquired this information today, the
th of March Well, sir, what you tell me is impossible. You
must have received a false report, or you have gone mad."
"Alas, sire, it is but too true" Louis made a gesture of
indescribable anger and alarm, and then drew himself up as
if this sudden blow had struck him at the same moment in
heart and countenance.
"In France" he cried, "the usurper in France Then they did
not watch over this man. Who knows? they were, perhaps, in
league with him."
"Oh, sire," exclaimed the Duc de Blacas, "M. Dandre is not a
man to be accused of treason Sire, we have all been blind,
and the minister of police has shared the general blindness,
that is all."
"But"  said Villefort, and then suddenly checking himself,
he was silent then he continued, "Your pardon, sire," he
said, bowing, "my zeal carried me away. Will your majesty
deign to excuse me?"
"Speak, sir, speak boldly," replied Louis. "You alone
forewarned us of the evil now try and aid us with the
remedy."
"Sire," said Villefort, "the usurper is detested in the
south and it seems to me that if he ventured into the
south, it would be easy to raise Languedoc and Provence
against him."
"Yes, assuredly," replied the minister "but he is advancing
by Gap and Sisteron."
"Advancing  he is advancing" said Louis XVIII. "Is he
then advancing on Paris?" The minister of police maintained
a silence which was equivalent to a complete avowal.
"And Dauphine, sir?" inquired the king, of Villefort. "Do
you think it possible to rouse that as well as Provence?"
"Sire, I am sorry to tell your majesty a cruel fact but the
feeling in Dauphine is quite the reverse of that in Provence
or Languedoc. The mountaineers are Bonapartists, sire."
"Then," murmured Louis, "he was well informed. And how many
men had he with him?"
"I do not know, sire," answered the minister of police.
"What, you do not know Have you neglected to obtain
information on that point? Of course it is of no
consequence," he added, with a withering smile.
"Sire, it was impossible to learn the despatch simply
stated the fact of the landing and the route taken by the
usurper."
"And how did this despatch reach you?" inquired the king.
The minister bowed his head, and while a deep color
overspread his cheeks, he stammered out, 
"By the telegraph, sire."  Louis XVIII. advanced a step,
and folded his arms over his chest as Napoleon would have
done.
"So then," he exclaimed, turning pale with anger, "seven
conjoined and allied armies overthrew that man. A miracle of
heaven replaced me on the throne of my fathers after
fiveandtwenty years of exile. I have, during those
fiveandtwenty years, spared no pains to understand the
people of France and the interests which were confided to
me and now, when I see the fruition of my wishes almost
within reach, the power I hold in my hands bursts, and
shatters me to atoms"
"Sire, it is fatality" murmured the minister, feeling that
the pressure of circumstances, however light a thing to
destiny, was too much for any human strength to endure.
"What our enemies say of us is then true. We have learnt
nothing, forgotten nothing If I were betrayed as he was, I
would console myself but to be in the midst of persons
elevated by myself to places of honor, who ought to watch
over me more carefully than over themselves,  for my
fortune is theirs  before me they were nothing  after me
they will be nothing, and perish miserably from incapacity
ineptitude Oh, yes, sir, you are right  it is
fatality"
The minister quailed before this outburst of sarcasm. M. de
Blacas wiped the moisture from his brow. Villefort smiled
within himself, for he felt his increased importance.
"To fall," continued King Louis, who at the first glance had
sounded the abyss on which the monarchy hung suspended, 
"to fall, and learn of that fall by telegraph Oh, I would
rather mount the scaffold of my brother, Louis XVI., than
thus descend the staircase at the Tuileries driven away by
ridicule. Ridicule, sir  why, you know not its power in
France, and yet you ought to know it"
"Sire, sire," murmured the minister, "for pity's" 
"Approach, M. de Villefort," resumed the king, addressing
the young man, who, motionless and breathless, was listening
to a conversation on which depended the destiny of a
kingdom. "Approach, and tell monsieur that it is possible to
know beforehand all that he has not known."
"Sire, it was really impossible to learn secrets which that
man concealed from all the world."
"Really impossible Yes  that is a great word, sir.
Unfortunately, there are great words, as there are great
men I have measured them. Really impossible for a minister
who has an office, agents, spies, and fifteen hundred
thousand francs for secret service money, to know what is
going on at sixty leagues from the coast of France Well,
then, see, here is a gentleman who had none of these
resources at his disposal  a gentleman, only a simple
magistrate, who learned more than you with all your police,
and who would have saved my crown, if, like you, he had the
power of directing a telegraph." The look of the minister of
police was turned with concentrated spite on Villefort, who
bent his head in modest triumph.
"I do not mean that for you, Blacas," continued Louis
XVIII. "for if you have discovered nothing, at least you
have had the good sense to persevere in your suspicions. Any
other than yourself would have considered the disclosure of
M. de Villefort insignificant, or else dictated by venal
ambition," These words were an allusion to the sentiments
which the minister of police had uttered with so much
confidence an hour before.
Villefort understood the king's intent. Any other person
would, perhaps, have been overcome by such an intoxicating
draught of praise but he feared to make for himself a
mortal enemy of the police minister, although he saw that
Dandre was irrevocably lost. In fact, the minister, who, in
the plenitude of his power, had been unable to unearth
Napoleon's secret, might in despair at his own downfall
interrogate Dantes and so lay bare the motives of
Villefort's plot. Realizing this, Villefort came to the
rescue of the crestfallen minister, instead of aiding to
crush him.
"Sire," said Villefort, "the suddenness of this event must
prove to your majesty that the issue is in the hands of
Providence what your majesty is pleased to attribute to me
as profound perspicacity is simply owing to chance, and I
have profited by that chance, like a good and devoted
servant  that's all. Do not attribute to me more than I
deserve, sire, that your majesty may never have occasion to
recall the first opinion you have been pleased to form of
me." The minister of police thanked the young man by an
eloquent look, and Villefort understood that he had
succeeded in his design that is to say, that without
forfeiting the gratitude of the king, he had made a friend
of one on whom, in case of necessity, he might rely.
"'Tis well," resumed the king. "And now, gentlemen," he
continued, turning towards M. de Blacas and the minister of
police, "I have no further occasion for you, and you may
retire what now remains to do is in the department of the
minister of war."
"Fortunately, sire," said M. de Blacas, "we can rely on the
army your majesty knows how every report confirms their
loyalty and attachment."
"Do not mention reports, duke, to me, for I know now what
confidence to place in them. Yet, speaking of reports,
baron, what have you learned with regard to the affair in
the Rue SaintJacques?"
"The affair in the Rue SaintJacques" exclaimed Villefort,
unable to repress an exclamation. Then, suddenly pausing, he
added, "Your pardon, sire, but my devotion to your majesty
has made me forget, not the respect I have, for that is too
deeply engraved in my heart, but the rules of etiquette."
"Go on, go on, sir," replied the king "you have today
earned the right to make inquiries here."
"Sire," interposed the minister of police, "I came a moment
ago to give your majesty fresh information which I had
obtained on this head, when your majesty's attention was
attracted by the terrible event that has occurred in the
gulf, and now these facts will cease to interest your
majesty."
"On the contrary, sir,  on the contrary," said Louis
XVIII., "this affair seems to me to have a decided
connection with that which occupies our attention, and the
death of General Quesnel will, perhaps, put us on the direct
track of a great internal conspiracy." At the name of
General Quesnel, Villefort trembled.
"Everything points to the conclusion, sire," said the
minister of police, "that death was not the result of
suicide, as we first believed, but of assassination. General
Quesnel, it appears, had just left a Bonapartist club when
he disappeared. An unknown person had been with him that
morning, and made an appointment with him in the Rue
SaintJacques unfortunately, the general's valet, who was
dressing his hair at the moment when the stranger entered,
heard the street mentioned, but did not catch the number."
As the police minister related this to the king, Villefort,
who looked as if his very life hung on the speaker's lips,
turned alternately red and pale. The king looked towards
him.
"Do you not think with me, M. de Villefort, that General
Quesnel, whom they believed attached to the usurper, but who
was really entirely devoted to me, has perished the victim
of a Bonapartist ambush?"
"It is probable, sire," replied Villefort. "But is this all
that is known?"
"They are on the track of the man who appointed the meeting
with him."
"On his track?" said Villefort.
"Yes, the servant has given his description. He is a man of
from fifty to fiftytwo years of age, dark, with black eyes
covered with shaggy eyebrows, and a thick mustache. He was
dressed in a blue frockcoat, buttoned up to the chin, and
wore at his buttonhole the rosette of an officer of the
Legion of Honor. Yesterday a person exactly corresponding
with this description was followed, but he was lost sight of
at the corner of the Rue de la Jussienne and the Rue
CoqHeron." Villefort leaned on the back of an armchair,
for as the minister of police went on speaking he felt his
legs bend under him but when he learned that the unknown
had escaped the vigilance of the agent who followed him, he
breathed again.
"Continue to seek for this man, sir," said the king to the
minister of police "for if, as I am all but convinced,
General Quesnel, who would have been so useful to us at this
moment, has been murdered, his assassins, Bonapartists or
not, shall be cruelly punished." It required all Villefort's
coolness not to betray the terror with which this
declaration of the king inspired him.
"How strange," continued the king, with some asperity "the
police think that they have disposed of the whole matter
when they say, "A murder has been committed,' and especially
so when they can add, "And we are on the track of the guilty
persons.'"
"Sire, your majesty will, I trust, be amply satisfied on
this point at least."
"We shall see. I will no longer detain you, M. de Villefort,
for you must be fatigued after so long a journey go and
rest. Of course you stopped at your father's?" A feeling of
faintness came over Villefort.
"No, sire," he replied, "I alighted at the Hotel de Madrid,
in the Rue de Tournon."
"But you have seen him?"
"Sire, I went straight to the Duc de Blacas."
"But you will see him, then?"
"I think not, sire."
"Ah, I forgot," said Louis, smiling in a manner which proved
that all these questions were not made without a motive "I
forgot you and M. Noirtier are not on the best terms
possible, and that is another sacrifice made to the royal
cause, and for which you should be recompensed."
"Sire, the kindness your majesty deigns to evince towards me
is a recompense which so far surpasses my utmost ambition
that I have nothing more to ask for."
"Never mind, sir, we will not forget you make your mind
easy. In the meanwhile" the king here detached the cross of
the Legion of Honor which he usually wore over his blue
coat, near the cross of St. Louis, above the order of
NotreDameduMontCarmel and St. Lazare, and gave it to
Villefort  "in the meanwhile take this cross."
"Sire," said Villefort, "your majesty mistakes this is an
officer's cross."
"Ma foi," said Louis XVIII., "take it, such as it is, for I
have not the time to procure you another. Blacas, let it be
your care to see that the brevet is made out and sent to M.
de Villefort." Villefort's eyes were filled with tears of
joy and pride he took the cross and kissed it.
"And now," he said, "may I inquire what are the orders with
which your majesty deigns to honor me?"
"Take what rest you require, and remember that if you are
not able to serve me here in Paris, you may be of the
greatest service to me at Marseilles."
"Sire," replied Villefort, bowing, "in an hour I shall have
quitted Paris."
"Go, sir," said the king "and should I forget you kings'
memories are short, do not be afraid to bring yourself to
my recollection. Baron, send for the minister of war.
Blacas, remain."
"Ah, sir," said the minister of police to Villefort, as they
left the Tuileries, "you entered by luck's door  your
fortune is made."
"Will it be long first?" muttered Villefort, saluting the
minister, whose career was ended, and looking about him for
a hackneycoach. One passed at the moment, which he hailed
he gave his address to the driver, and springing in, threw
himself on the seat, and gave loose to dreams of ambition.
Ten minutes afterwards Villefort reached his hotel, ordered
horses to be ready in two hours, and asked to have his
breakfast brought to him. He was about to begin his repast
when the sound of the bell rang sharp and loud. The valet
opened the door, and Villefort heard some one speak his
name.
"Who could know that I was here already?" said the young
man. The valet entered.
"Well," said Villefort, "what is it?  Who rang?  Who
asked for me?"
"A stranger who will not send in his name."
"A stranger who will not send in his name What can he want
with me?"
"He wishes to speak to you."
"To me?"
"Yes."
"Did he mention my name?"
"Yes."
"What sort of person is he?"
"Why, sir, a man of about fifty."
"Short or tall?"
"About your own height, sir."
"Dark or fair?"
"Dark,  very dark with black eyes, black hair, black
eyebrows."
"And how dressed?" asked Villefort quickly.
"In a blue frockcoat, buttoned up close, decorated with the
Legion of Honor."
"It is he" said Villefort, turning pale.
"Eh, pardieu," said the individual whose description we have
twice given, entering the door, "what a great deal of
ceremony Is it the custom in Marseilles for sons to keep
their fathers waiting in their anterooms?"
"Father" cried Villefort, "then I was not deceived I felt
sure it must be you."
"Well, then, if you felt so sure," replied the newcomer,
putting his cane in a corner and his hat on a chair, "allow
me to say, my dear Gerard, that it was not very filial of
you to keep me waiting at the door."
"Leave us, Germain," said Villefort. The servant quitted the
apartment with evident signs of astonishment.
Chapter 
Father and Son.
M. Noirtier  for it was, indeed, he who entered  looked
after the servant until the door was closed, and then,
fearing, no doubt, that he might be overheard in the
antechamber, he opened the door again, nor was the
precaution useless, as appeared from the rapid retreat of
Germain, who proved that he was not exempt from the sin
which ruined our first parents. M. Noirtier then took the
trouble to close and bolt the antechamber door, then that
of the bedchamber, and then extended his hand to Villefort,
who had followed all his motions with surprise which he
could not conceal.
"Well, now, my dear Gerard," said he to the young man, with
a very significant look, "do you know, you seem as if you
were not very glad to see me?"
"My dear father," said Villefort, "I am, on the contrary,
delighted but I so little expected your visit, that it has
somewhat overcome me."
"But, my dear fellow," replied M. Noirtier, seating himself,
"I might say the same thing to you, when you announce to me
your wedding for the th of February, and on the rd of
March you turn up here in Paris."
"And if I have come, my dear father," said Gerard, drawing
closer to M. Noirtier, "do not complain, for it is for you
that I came, and my journey will be your salvation."
"Ah, indeed" said M. Noirtier, stretching himself out at
his ease in the chair. "Really, pray tell me all about it,
for it must be interesting."
"Father, you have heard speak of a certain Bonapartist club
in the Rue SaintJacques?"
"No.  yes, I am vicepresident."
"Father, your coolness makes me shudder."
"Why, my dear boy, when a man has been proscribed by the
mountaineers, has escaped from Paris in a haycart, been
hunted over the plains of Bordeaux by Robespierre's
bloodhounds, he becomes accustomed to most things. But go
on, what about the club in the Rue SaintJacques?"
"Why, they induced General Quesnel to go there, and General
Quesnel, who quitted his own house at nine o'clock in the
evening, was found the next day in the Seine."
"And who told you this fine story?"
"The king himself."
"Well, then, in return for your story," continued Noirtier,
"I will tell you another."
"My dear father, I think I already know what you are about
to tell me."
"Ah, you have heard of the landing of the emperor?"
"Not so loud, father, I entreat of you  for your own sake
as well as mine. Yes, I heard this news, and knew it even
before you could for three days ago I posted from
Marseilles to Paris with all possible speed, halfdesperate
at the enforced delay."
"Three days ago? You are crazy. Why, three days ago the
emperor had not landed."
"No matter, I was aware of his intention."
"How did you know about it?"
"By a letter addressed to you from the Island of Elba."
"To me?"
"To you and which I discovered in the pocketbook of the
messenger. Had that letter fallen into the hands of another,
you, my dear father, would probably ere this have been
shot." Villefort's father laughed.
"Come, come," said he, "will the Restoration adopt imperial
methods so promptly? Shot, my dear boy? What an idea Where
is the letter you speak of? I know you too well to suppose
you would allow such a thing to pass you."
"I burnt it, for fear that even a fragment should remain
for that letter must have led to your condemnation."
"And the destruction of your future prospects," replied
Noirtier "yes, I can easily comprehend that. But I have
nothing to fear while I have you to protect me."
"I do better than that, sir  I save you."
"You do? Why, really, the thing becomes more and more
dramatic  explain yourself."
"I must refer again to the club in the Rue SaintJacques."
"It appears that this club is rather a bore to the police.
Why didn't they search more vigilantly? they would have
found" 
"They have not found but they are on the track."
"Yes, that the usual phrase I am quite familiar with it.
When the police is at fault, it declares that it is on the
track and the government patiently awaits the day when it
comes to say, with a sneaking air, that the track is lost."
"Yes, but they have found a corpse the general has been
killed, and in all countries they call that a murder."
"A murder do you call it? why, there is nothing to prove
that the general was murdered. People are found every day in
the Seine, having thrown themselves in, or having been
drowned from not knowing how to swim."
"Father, you know very well that the general was not a man
to drown himself in despair, and people do not bathe in the
Seine in the month of January. No, no, do not be deceived
this was murder in every sense of the word."
"And who thus designated it?"
"The king himself."
"The king I thought he was philosopher enough to allow that
there was no murder in politics. In politics, my dear
fellow, you know, as well as I do, there are no men, but
ideas  no feelings, but interests in politics we do not
kill a man, we only remove an obstacle, that is all. Would
you like to know how matters have progressed? Well, I will
tell you. It was thought reliance might be placed in General
Quesnel he was recommended to us from the Island of Elba
one of us went to him, and invited him to the Rue
SaintJacques, where he would find some friends. He came
there, and the plan was unfolded to him for leaving Elba,
the projected landing, etc. When he had heard and
comprehended all to the fullest extent, he replied that he
was a royalist. Then all looked at each other,  he was
made to take an oath, and did so, but with such an ill grace
that it was really tempting Providence to swear him, and
yet, in spite of that, the general was allowed to depart
free  perfectly free. Yet he did not return home. What
could that mean? why, my dear fellow, that on leaving us he
lost his way, that's all. A murder? really, Villefort, you
surprise me. You, a deputy procureur, to found an accusation
on such bad premises Did I ever say to you, when you were
fulfilling your character as a royalist, and cut off the
head of one of my party, "My son, you have committed a
murder?' No, I said, "Very well, sir, you have gained the
victory tomorrow, perchance, it will be our turn.'"
"But, father, take care when our turn comes, our revenge
will be sweeping."
"I do not understand you."
"You rely on the usurper's return?"
"We do."
"You are mistaken he will not advance two leagues into the
interior of France without being followed, tracked, and
caught like a wild beast."
"My dear fellow, the emperor is at this moment on the way to
Grenoble on the th or th he will be at Lyons, and on
the th or th at Paris."
"The people will rise."
"Yes, to go and meet him."
"He has but a handful of men with him, and armies will be
despatched against him."
"Yes, to escort him into the capital. Really, my dear
Gerard, you are but a child you think yourself well
informed because the telegraph has told you, three days
after the landing, "The usurper has landed at Cannes with
several men. He is pursued.' But where is he? what is he
doing? You do not know at all, and in this way they will
chase him to Paris, without drawing a trigger."
"Grenoble and Lyons are faithful cities, and will oppose to
him an impassable barrier."
"Grenoble will open her gates to him with enthusiasm  all
Lyons will hasten to welcome him. Believe me, we are as well
informed as you, and our police are as good as your own.
Would you like a proof of it? well, you wished to conceal
your journey from me, and yet I knew of your arrival half an
hour after you had passed the barrier. You gave your
direction to no one but your postilion, yet I have your
address, and in proof I am here the very instant you are
going to sit at table. Ring, then, if you please, for a
second knife, fork, and plate, and we will dine together."
"Indeed" replied Villefort, looking at his father with
astonishment, "you really do seem very well informed."
"Eh? the thing is simple enough. You who are in power have
only the means that money produces  we who are in
expectation, have those which devotion prompts."
"Devotion" said Villefort, with a sneer.
"Yes, devotion for that is, I believe, the phrase for
hopeful ambition."
And Villefort's father extended his hand to the bellrope,
to summon the servant whom his son had not called. Villefort
caught his arm.
"Wait, my dear father," said the young man, "one word more."
"Say on."
"However stupid the royalist police may be, they do know one
terrible thing."
"What is that?"
"The description of the man who, on the morning of the day
when General Quesnel disappeared, presented himself at his
house."
"Oh, the admirable police have found that out, have they?
And what may be that description?"
"Dark complexion hair, eyebrows, and whiskers, black blue
frockcoat, buttoned up to the chin rosette of an officer
of the Legion of Honor in his buttonhole a hat with wide
brim, and a cane."
"Ah, ha, that's it, is it?" said Noirtier "and why, then,
have they not laid hands on him?"
"Because yesterday, or the day before, they lost sight of
him at the corner of the Rue CoqHeron."
"Didn't I say that your police were good for nothing?"
"Yes but they may catch him yet."
"True," said Noirtier, looking carelessly around him, "true,
if this person were not on his guard, as he is" and he
added with a smile, "He will consequently make a few changes
in his personal appearance." At these words he rose, and put
off his frockcoat and cravat, went towards a table on which
lay his son's toilet articles, lathered his face, took a
razor, and, with a firm hand, cut off the compromising
whiskers. Villefort watched him with alarm not devoid of
admiration.
His whiskers cut off, Noirtier gave another turn to his
hair took, instead of his black cravat, a colored
neckerchief which lay at the top of an open portmanteau put
on, in lieu of his blue and highbuttoned frockcoat, a coat
of Villefort's of dark brown, and cut away in front tried
on before the glass a narrowbrimmed hat of his son's, which
appeared to fit him perfectly, and, leaving his cane in the
corner where he had deposited it, he took up a small bamboo
switch, cut the air with it once or twice, and walked about
with that easy swagger which was one of his principal
characteristics.
"Well," he said, turning towards his wondering son, when
this disguise was completed, "well, do you think your police
will recognize me now."
"No, father," stammered Villefort "at least, I hope not."
"And now, my dear boy," continued Noirtier, "I rely on your
prudence to remove all the things which I leave in your
care."
"Oh, rely on me," said Villefort.
"Yes, yes and now I believe you are right, and that you
have really saved my life be assured I will return the
favor hereafter." Villefort shook his head.
"You are not convinced yet?"
"I hope at least, that you may be mistaken."
"Shall you see the king again?"
"Perhaps."
"Would you pass in his eyes for a prophet?"
"Prophets of evil are not in favor at the court, father."
"True, but some day they do them justice and supposing a
second restoration, you would then pass for a great man."
"Well, what should I say to the king?"
"Say this to him "Sire, you are deceived as to the feeling
in France, as to the opinions of the towns, and the
prejudices of the army he whom in Paris you call the
Corsican ogre, who at Nevers is styled the usurper, is
already saluted as Bonaparte at Lyons, and emperor at
Grenoble. You think he is tracked, pursued, captured he is
advancing as rapidly as his own eagles. The soldiers you
believe to be dying with hunger, worn out with fatigue,
ready to desert, gather like atoms of snow about the rolling
ball as it hastens onward. Sire, go, leave France to its
real master, to him who acquired it, not by purchase, but by
right of conquest go, sire, not that you incur any risk,
for your adversary is powerful enough to show you mercy, but
because it would be humiliating for a grandson of Saint
Louis to owe his life to the man of Arcola, Marengo,
Austerlitz.' Tell him this, Gerard or, rather, tell him
nothing. Keep your journey a secret do not boast of what
you have come to Paris to do, or have done return with all
speed enter Marseilles at night, and your house by the
backdoor, and there remain, quiet, submissive, secret, and,
above all, inoffensive for this time, I swear to you, we
shall act like powerful men who know their enemies. Go, my
son  go, my dear Gerard, and by your obedience to my
paternal orders, or, if you prefer it, friendly counsels, we
will keep you in your place. This will be," added Noirtier,
with a smile, "one means by which you may a second time save
me, if the political balance should some day take another
turn, and cast you aloft while hurling me down. Adieu, my
dear Gerard, and at your next journey alight at my door."
Noirtier left the room when he had finished, with the same
calmness that had characterized him during the whole of this
remarkable and trying conversation. Villefort, pale and
agitated, ran to the window, put aside the curtain, and saw
him pass, cool and collected, by two or three illlooking
men at the corner of the street, who were there, perhaps, to
arrest a man with black whiskers, and a blue frockcoat, and
hat with broad brim.
Villefort stood watching, breathless, until his father had
disappeared at the Rue Bussy. Then he turned to the various
articles he had left behind him, put the black cravat and
blue frockcoat at the bottom of the portmanteau, threw the
hat into a dark closet, broke the cane into small bits and
flung it in the fire, put on his travellingcap, and calling
his valet, checked with a look the thousand questions he was
ready to ask, paid his bill, sprang into his carriage, which
was ready, learned at Lyons that Bonaparte had entered
Grenoble, and in the midst of the tumult which prevailed
along the road, at length reached Marseilles, a prey to all
the hopes and fears which enter into the heart of man with
ambition and its first successes.
Chapter 
The Hundred Days.
M. Noirtier was a true prophet, and things progressed
rapidly, as he had predicted. Every one knows the history of
the famous return from Elba, a return which was
unprecedented in the past, and will probably remain without
a counterpart in the future.
Louis XVIII. made but a faint attempt to parry this
unexpected blow the monarchy he had scarcely reconstructed
tottered on its precarious foundation, and at a sign from
the emperor the incongruous structure of ancient prejudices
and new ideas fell to the ground. Villefort, therefore,
gained nothing save the king's gratitude which was rather
likely to injure him at the present time and the cross of
the Legion of Honor, which he had the prudence not to wear,
although M. de Blacas had duly forwarded the brevet.
Napoleon would, doubtless, have deprived Villefort of his
office had it not been for Noirtier, who was all powerful at
court, and thus the Girondin of ' and the Senator of 
protected him who so lately had been his protector. All
Villefort's influence barely enabled him to stifle the
secret Dantes had so nearly divulged. The king's procureur
alone was deprived of his office, being suspected of
royalism.
However, scarcely was the imperial power established  that
is, scarcely had the emperor reentered the Tuileries and
begun to issue orders from the closet into which we have
introduced our readers,  he found on the table there Louis
XVIII.'s halffilled snuffbox,  scarcely had this
occurred when Marseilles began, in spite of the authorities,
to rekindle the flames of civil war, always smouldering in
the south, and it required but little to excite the populace
to acts of far greater violence than the shouts and insults
with which they assailed the royalists whenever they
ventured abroad.
Owing to this change, the worthy shipowner became at that
moment  we will not say all powerful, because Morrel was a
prudent and rather a timid man, so much so, that many of the
most zealous partisans of Bonaparte accused him of
"moderation"  but sufficiently influential to make a
demand in favor of Dantes.
Villefort retained his place, but his marriage was put off
until a more favorable opportunity. If the emperor remained
on the throne, Gerard required a different alliance to aid
his career if Louis XVIII. returned, the influence of M. de
SaintMeran, like his own, could be vastly increased, and
the marriage be still more suitable. The deputyprocureur
was, therefore, the first magistrate of Marseilles, when one
morning his door opened, and M. Morrel was announced.
Any one else would have hastened to receive him but
Villefort was a man of ability, and he knew this would be a
sign of weakness. He made Morrel wait in the antechamber,
although he had no one with him, for the simple reason that
the king's procureur always makes every one wait, and after
passing a quarter of an hour in reading the papers, he
ordered M. Morrel to be admitted.
Morrel expected Villefort would be dejected he found him as
he had found him six weeks before, calm, firm, and full of
that glacial politeness, that most insurmountable barrier
which separates the wellbred from the vulgar man.
He had entered Villefort's office expecting that the
magistrate would tremble at the sight of him on the
contrary, he felt a cold shudder all over him when he saw
Villefort sitting there with his elbow on his desk, and his
head leaning on his hand. He stopped at the door Villefort
gazed at him as if he had some difficulty in recognizing
him then, after a brief interval, during which the honest
shipowner turned his hat in his hands, 
"M. Morrel, I believe?" said Villefort.
"Yes, sir."
"Come nearer," said the magistrate, with a patronizing wave
of the hand, "and tell me to what circumstance I owe the
honor of this visit."
"Do you not guess, monsieur?" asked Morrel.
"Not in the least but if I can serve you in any way I shall
be delighted."
"Everything depends on you."
"Explain yourself, pray."
"Monsieur," said Morrel, recovering his assurance as he
proceeded, "do you recollect that a few days before the
landing of his majesty the emperor, I came to intercede for
a young man, the mate of my ship, who was accused of being
concerned in correspondence with the Island of Elba? What
was the other day a crime is today a title to favor. You
then served Louis XVIII., and you did not show any favor 
it was your duty today you serve Napoleon, and you ought
to protect him  it is equally your duty I come,
therefore, to ask what has become of him?"
Villefort by a strong effort sought to control himself.
"What is his name?" said he. "Tell me his name."
"Edmond Dantes."
Villefort would probably have rather stood opposite the
muzzle of a pistol at fiveandtwenty paces than have heard
this name spoken but he did not blanch.
"Dantes," repeated he, "Edmond Dantes."
"Yes, monsieur." Villefort opened a large register, then
went to a table, from the table turned to his registers, and
then, turning to Morrel, 
"Are you quite sure you are not mistaken, monsieur?" said
he, in the most natural tone in the world.
Had Morrel been a more quicksighted man, or better versed
in these matters, he would have been surprised at the king's
procureur answering him on such a subject, instead of
referring him to the governors of the prison or the prefect
of the department. But Morrel, disappointed in his
expectations of exciting fear, was conscious only of the
other's condescension. Villefort had calculated rightly.
"No," said Morrel "I am not mistaken. I have known him for
ten years, the last four of which he was in my service. Do
not you recollect, I came about six weeks ago to plead for
clemency, as I come today to plead for justice. You
received me very coldly. Oh, the royalists were very severe
with the Bonapartists in those days."
"Monsieur," returned Villefort, "I was then a royalist,
because I believed the Bourbons not only the heirs to the
throne, but the chosen of the nation. The miraculous return
of Napoleon has conquered me, the legitimate monarch is he
who is loved by his people."
"That's right" cried Morrel. "I like to hear you speak
thus, and I augur well for Edmond from it."
"Wait a moment," said Villefort, turning over the leaves of
a register "I have it  a sailor, who was about to marry a
young Catalan girl. I recollect now it was a very serious
charge."
"How so?"
"You know that when he left here he was taken to the Palais
de Justice."
"Well?"
"I made my report to the authorities at Paris, and a week
after he was carried off."
"Carried off" said Morrel. "What can they have done with
him?"
"Oh, he has been taken to Fenestrelles, to Pignerol, or to
the SainteMarguerite islands. Some fine morning he will
return to take command of your vessel."
"Come when he will, it shall be kept for him. But how is it
he is not already returned? It seems to me the first care of
government should be to set at liberty those who have
suffered for their adherence to it."
"Do not be too hasty, M. Morrel," replied Villefort. "The
order of imprisonment came from high authority, and the
order for his liberation must proceed from the same source
and, as Napoleon has scarcely been reinstated a fortnight,
the letters have not yet been forwarded."
"But," said Morrel, "is there no way of expediting all these
formalities  of releasing him from arrest?"
"There has been no arrest."
"How?"
"It is sometimes essential to government to cause a man's
disappearance without leaving any traces, so that no written
forms or documents may defeat their wishes."
"It might be so under the Bourbons, but at present" 
"It has always been so, my dear Morrel, since the reign of
Louis XIV. The emperor is more strict in prison discipline
than even Louis himself, and the number of prisoners whose
names are not on the register is incalculable." Had Morrel
even any suspicions, so much kindness would have dispelled
them.
"Well, M. de Villefort, how would you advise me to act?"
asked he.
"Petition the minister."
"Oh, I know what that is the minister receives two hundred
petitions every day, and does not read three."
"That is true but he will read a petition countersigned and
presented by me."
"And will you undertake to deliver it?"
"With the greatest pleasure. Dantes was then guilty, and now
he is innocent, and it is as much my duty to free him as it
was to condemn him." Villefort thus forestalled any danger
of an inquiry, which, however improbable it might be, if it
did take place would leave him defenceless.
"But how shall I address the minister?"
"Sit down there," said Villefort, giving up his place to
Morrel, "and write what I dictate."
"Will you be so good?"
"Certainly. But lose no time we have lost too much
already."
"That is true. Only think what the poor fellow may even now
be suffering." Villefort shuddered at the suggestion but he
had gone too far to draw back. Dantes must be crushed to
gratify Villefort's ambition.
Villefort dictated a petition, in which, from an excellent
intention, no doubt, Dantes' patriotic services were
exaggerated, and he was made out one of the most active
agents of Napoleon's return. It was evident that at the
sight of this document the minister would instantly release
him. The petition finished, Villefort read it aloud.
"That will do," said he "leave the rest to me."
"Will the petition go soon?"
"Today."
"Countersigned by you?"
"The best thing I can do will be to certify the truth of the
contents of your petition." And, sitting down, Villefort
wrote the certificate at the bottom.
"What more is to be done?"
"I will do whatever is necessary." This assurance delighted
Morrel, who took leave of Villefort, and hastened to
announce to old Dantes that he would soon see his son.
As for Villefort, instead of sending to Paris, he carefully
preserved the petition that so fearfully compromised Dantes,
in the hopes of an event that seemed not unlikely,  that
is, a second restoration. Dantes remained a prisoner, and
heard not the noise of the fall of Louis XVIII.'s throne, or
the still more tragic destruction of the empire.
Twice during the Hundred Days had Morrel renewed his demand,
and twice had Villefort soothed him with promises. At last
there was Waterloo, and Morrel came no more he had done all
that was in his power, and any fresh attempt would only
compromise himself uselessly.
Louis XVIII. remounted the throne Villefort, to whom
Marseilles had become filled with remorseful memories,
sought and obtained the situation of king's procureur at
Toulouse, and a fortnight afterwards he married Mademoiselle
de SaintMeran, whose father now stood higher at court than
ever.
And so Dantes, after the Hundred Days and after Waterloo,
remained in his dungeon, forgotten of earth and heaven.
Danglars comprehended the full extent of the wretched fate
that overwhelmed Dantes and, when Napoleon returned to
France, he, after the manner of mediocre minds, termed the
coincidence, "a decree of Providence." But when Napoleon
returned to Paris, Danglars' heart failed him, and he lived
in constant fear of Dantes' return on a mission of
vengeance. He therefore informed M. Morrel of his wish to
quit the sea, and obtained a recommendation from him to a
Spanish merchant, into whose service he entered at the end
of March, that is, ten or twelve days after Napoleon's
return. He then left for Madrid, and was no more heard of.
Fernand understood nothing except that Dantes was absent.
What had become of him he cared not to inquire. Only, during
the respite the absence of his rival afforded him, he
reflected, partly on the means of deceiving Mercedes as to
the cause of his absence, partly on plans of emigration and
abduction, as from time to time he sat sad and motionless on
the summit of Cape Pharo, at the spot from whence Marseilles
and the Catalans are visible, watching for the apparition of
a young and handsome man, who was for him also the messenger
of vengeance. Fernand's mind was made up he would shoot
Dantes, and then kill himself. But Fernand was mistaken a
man of his disposition never kills himself, for he
constantly hopes.
During this time the empire made its last conscription, and
every man in France capable of bearing arms rushed to obey
the summons of the emperor. Fernand departed with the rest,
bearing with him the terrible thought that while he was
away, his rival would perhaps return and marry Mercedes. Had
Fernand really meant to kill himself, he would have done so
when he parted from Mercedes. His devotion, and the
compassion he showed for her misfortunes, produced the
effect they always produce on noble minds  Mercedes had
always had a sincere regard for Fernand, and this was now
strengthened by gratitude.
"My brother," said she as she placed his knapsack on his
shoulders, "be careful of yourself, for if you are killed, I
shall be alone in the world." These words carried a ray of
hope into Fernand's heart. Should Dantes not return,
Mercedes might one day be his.
Mercedes was left alone face to face with the vast plain
that had never seemed so barren, and the sea that had never
seemed so vast. Bathed in tears she wandered about the
Catalan village. Sometimes she stood mute and motionless as
a statue, looking towards Marseilles, at other times gazing
on the sea, and debating as to whether it were not better to
cast herself into the abyss of the ocean, and thus end her
woes. It was not want of courage that prevented her putting
this resolution into execution but her religious feelings
came to her aid and saved her. Caderousse was, like Fernand,
enrolled in the army, but, being married and eight years
older, he was merely sent to the frontier. Old Dantes, who
was only sustained by hope, lost all hope at Napoleon's
downfall. Five months after he had been separated from his
son, and almost at the hour of his arrest, he breathed his
last in Mercedes' arms. M. Morrel paid the expenses of his
funeral, and a few small debts the poor old man had
contracted.
There was more than benevolence in this action there was
courage the south was aflame, and to assist, even on his
deathbed, the father of so dangerous a Bonapartist as
Dantes, was stigmatized as a crime.
Chapter 
The Two Prisoners.
A year after Louis XVIII.'s restoration, a visit was made by
the inspectorgeneral of prisons. Dantes in his cell heard
the noise of preparation,  sounds that at the depth where
he lay would have been inaudible to any but the ear of a
prisoner, who could hear the splash of the drop of water that
every hour fell from the roof of his dungeon. He guessed
something uncommon was passing among the living but he had
so long ceased to have any intercourse with the world, that
he looked upon himself as dead.
The inspector visited, one after another, the cells and
dungeons of several of the prisoners, whose good behavior or
stupidity recommended them to the clemency of the
government. He inquired how they were fed, and if they had
any request to make. The universal response was, that the
fare was detestable, and that they wanted to be set free.
The inspector asked if they had anything else to ask for.
They shook their heads. What could they desire beyond their
liberty? The inspector turned smilingly to the governor.
"I do not know what reason government can assign for these
useless visits when you see one prisoner, you see all, 
always the same thing,  ill fed and innocent. Are there
any others?"
"Yes the dangerous and mad prisoners are in the dungeons."
"Let us visit them," said the inspector with an air of
fatigue. "We must play the farce to the end. Let us see the
dungeons."
"Let us first send for two soldiers," said the governor.
"The prisoners sometimes, through mere uneasiness of life,
and in order to be sentenced to death, commit acts of
useless violence, and you might fall a victim."
"Take all needful precautions," replied the inspector.
Two soldiers were accordingly sent for, and the inspector
descended a stairway, so foul, so humid, so dark, as to be
loathsome to sight, smell, and respiration.
"Oh," cried the inspector, "who can live here?"
"A most dangerous conspirator, a man we are ordered to keep
the most strict watch over, as he is daring and resolute."
"He is alone?"
"Certainly."
"How long his he been there?"
"Nearly a year."
"Was he placed here when he first arrived?"
"No not until he attempted to kill the turnkey, who took
his food to him."
"To kill the turnkey?"
"Yes, the very one who is lighting us. Is it not true,
Antoine?" asked the governor.
"True enough he wanted to kill me" returned the turnkey.
"He must be mad," said the inspector.
"He is worse than that,  he is a devil" returned the
turnkey.
"Shall I complain of him?" demanded the inspector.
"Oh, no it is useless. Besides, he is almost mad now, and
in another year he will be quite so."
"So much the better for him,  he will suffer less," said
the inspector. He was, as this remark shows, a man full of
philanthropy, and in every way fit for his office.
"You are right, sir," replied the governor "and this remark
proves that you have deeply considered the subject. Now we
have in a dungeon about twenty feet distant, and to which
you descend by another stair, an abbe, formerly leader of a
party in Italy, who has been here since , and in  he
went mad, and the change is astonishing. He used to weep, he
now laughs he grew thin, he now grows fat. You had better
see him, for his madness is amusing."
"I will see them both," returned the inspector "I must
conscientiously perform my duty." This was the inspector's
first visit he wished to display his authority.
"Let us visit this one first," added he.
"By all means," replied the governor, and he signed to the
turnkey to open the door. At the sound of the key turning in
the lock, and the creaking of the hinges, Dantes, who was
crouched in a corner of the dungeon, whence he could see the
ray of light that came through a narrow iron grating above,
raised his head. Seeing a stranger, escorted by two turnkeys
holding torches and accompanied by two soldiers, and to whom
the governor spoke bareheaded, Dantes, who guessed the
truth, and that the moment to address himself to the
superior authorities was come, sprang forward with clasped
hands.
The soldiers interposed their bayonets, for they thought
that he was about to attack the inspector, and the latter
recoiled two or three steps. Dantes saw that he was looked
upon as dangerous. Then, infusing all the humility he
possessed into his eyes and voice, he addressed the
inspector, and sought to inspire him with pity.
The inspector listened attentively then, turning to the
governor, observed, "He will become religious  he is
already more gentle he is afraid, and retreated before the
bayonets  madmen are not afraid of anything I made some
curious observations on this at Charenton." Then, turning to
the prisoner, "What is it you want?" said he.
"I want to know what crime I have committed  to be tried
and if I am guilty, to be shot if innocent, to be set at
liberty."
"Are you well fed?" said the inspector.
"I believe so I don't know it's of no consequence. What
matters really, not only to me, but to officers of justice
and the king, is that an innocent man should languish in
prison, the victim of an infamous denunciation, to die here
cursing his executioners."
"You are very humble today," remarked the governor "you
are not so always the other day, for instance, when you
tried to kill the turnkey."
"It is true, sir, and I beg his pardon, for he his always
been very good to me, but I was mad."
"And you are not so any longer?"
"No captivity has subdued me  I have been here so long."
"So long?  when were you arrested, then?" asked the
inspector.
"The th of February, , at halfpast two in the
afternoon."
"Today is the th of July, ,  why it is but
seventeen months."
"Only seventeen months," replied Dantes. "Oh, you do not
know what is seventeen months in prison  seventeen ages
rather, especially to a man who, like me, had arrived at the
summit of his ambition  to a man, who, like me, was on the
point of marrying a woman he adored, who saw an honorable
career opened before him, and who loses all in an instant 
who sees his prospects destroyed, and is ignorant of the
fate of his affianced wife, and whether his aged father be
still living Seventeen months captivity to a sailor
accustomed to the boundless ocean, is a worse punishment
than human crime ever merited. Have pity on me, then, and
ask for me, not intelligence, but a trial not pardon, but a
verdict  a trial, sir, I ask only for a trial that,
surely, cannot be denied to one who is accused"
"We shall see," said the inspector then, turning to the
governor, "On my word, the poor devil touches me. You must
show me the proofs against him."
"Certainly but you will find terrible charges."
"Monsieur," continued Dantes, "I know it is not in your
power to release me but you can plead for me  you can
have me tried  and that is all I ask. Let me know my
crime, and the reason why I was condemned. Uncertainty is
worse than all."
"Go on with the lights," said the inspector.
"Monsieur," cried Dantes, "I can tell by your voice you are
touched with pity tell me at least to hope."
"I cannot tell you that," replied the inspector "I can only
promise to examine into your case."
"Oh, I am free  then I am saved"
"Who arrested you?"
"M. Villefort. See him, and hear what he says."
"M. Villefort is no longer at Marseilles he is now at
Toulouse."
"I am no longer surprised at my detention," murmured Dantes,
"since my only protector is removed."
"Had M. de Villefort any cause of personal dislike to you?"
"None on the contrary, he was very kind to me."
"I can, then, rely on the notes he has left concerning you?"
"Entirely."
"That is well wait patiently, then." Dantes fell on his
knees, and prayed earnestly. The door closed but this time
a fresh inmate was left with Dantes  hope.
"Will you see the register at once," asked the governor, "or
proceed to the other cell?"
"Let us visit them all," said the inspector. "If I once went
up those stairs. I should never have the courage to come
down again."
"Ah, this one is not like the other, and his madness is less
affecting than this one's display of reason."
"What is his folly?"
"He fancies he possesses an immense treasure. The first year
he offered government a million of francs for his release
the second, two the third, three and so on progressively.
He is now in his fifth year of captivity he will ask to
speak to you in private, and offer you five millions."
"How curious  what is his name?"
"The Abbe Faria."
"No. ," said the inspector.
"It is here unlock the door, Antoine." The turnkey obeyed,
and the inspector gazed curiously into the chamber of the
"mad abbe."
In the centre of the cell, in a circle traced with a
fragment of plaster detached from the wall, sat a man whose
tattered garments scarcely covered him. He was drawing in
this circle geometrical lines, and seemed as much absorbed
in his problem as Archimedes was when the soldier of
Marcellus slew him.
He did not move at the sound of the door, and continued his
calculations until the flash of the torches lighted up with
an unwonted glare the sombre walls of his cell then,
raising his head, he perceived with astonishment the number
of persons present. He hastily seized the coverlet of his
bed, and wrapped it round him.
"What is it you want?" said the inspector.
"I, monsieur," replied the abbe with an air of surprise 
"I want nothing."
"You do not understand," continued the inspector "I am sent
here by government to visit the prison, and hear the
requests of the prisoners."
"Oh, that is different," cried the abbe "and we shall
understand each other, I hope."
"There, now," whispered the governor, "it is just as I told
you."
"Monsieur," continued the prisoner, "I am the Abbe Faria,
born at Rome. I was for twenty years Cardinal Spada's
secretary I was arrested, why, I know not, toward the
beginning of the year  since then I have demanded my
liberty from the Italian and French government."
"Why from the French government?"
"Because I was arrested at Piombino, and I presume that,
like Milan and Florence, Piombino has become the capital of
some French department."
"Ah," said the inspector, "you have not the latest news from
Italy?"
"My information dates from the day on which I was arrested,"
returned the Abbe Faria "and as the emperor had created the
kingdom of Rome for his infant son, I presume that he has
realized the dream of Machiavelli and Caesar Borgia, which
was to make Italy a united kingdom."
"Monsieur," returned the inspector, "providence has changed
this gigantic plan you advocate so warmly."
"It is the only means of rendering Italy strong, happy, and
independent."
"Very possibly only I am not come to discuss politics, but
to inquire if you have anything to ask or to complain of."
"The food is the same as in other prisons,  that is, very
bad the lodging is very unhealthful, but, on the whole,
passable for a dungeon but it is not that which I wish to
speak of, but a secret I have to reveal of the greatest
importance."
"We are coming to the point," whispered the governor.
"It is for that reason I am delighted to see you," continued
the abbe, "although you have disturbed me in a most
important calculation, which, if it succeeded, would
possibly change Newton's system. Could you allow me a few
words in private."
"What did I tell you?" said the governor.
"You knew him," returned the inspector with a smile.
"What you ask is impossible, monsieur," continued he,
addressing Faria.
"But," said the abbe, "I would speak to you of a large sum,
amounting to five millions."
"The very sum you named," whispered the inspector in his
turn.
"However," continued Faria, seeing that the inspector was
about to depart, "it is not absolutely necessary for us to
be alone the governor can be present."
"Unfortunately," said the governor, "I know beforehand what
you are about to say it concerns your treasures, does it
not?" Faria fixed his eyes on him with an expression that
would have convinced any one else of his sanity.
"Of course," said he "of what else should I speak?"
"Mr. Inspector," continued the governor, "I can tell you the
story as well as he, for it has been dinned in my ears for
the last four or five years."
"That proves," returned the abbe, "that you are like those
of Holy Writ, who having ears hear not, and having eyes see
not."
"My dear sir, the government is rich and does not want your
treasures," replied the inspector "keep them until you are
liberated." The abbe's eyes glistened he seized the
inspector's hand.
"But what if I am not liberated," cried he, "and am detained
here until my death? this treasure will be lost. Had not
government better profit by it? I will offer six millions,
and I will content myself with the rest, if they will only
give me my liberty."
"On my word," said the inspector in a low tone, "had I not
been told beforehand that this man was mad, I should believe
what he says."
"I am not mad," replied Faria, with that acuteness of
hearing peculiar to prisoners. "The treasure I speak of
really exists, and I offer to sign an agreement with you, in
which I promise to lead you to the spot where you shall dig
and if I deceive you, bring me here again,  I ask no
more."
The governor laughed. "Is the spot far from here?"
"A hundred leagues."
"It is not illplanned," said the governor. "If all the
prisoners took it into their heads to travel a hundred
leagues, and their guardians consented to accompany them,
they would have a capital chance of escaping."
"The scheme is well known," said the inspector "and the
abbe's plan has not even the merit of originality."
Then turning to Faria  "I inquired if you are well fed?"
said he.
"Swear to me," replied Faria, "to free me if what I tell you
prove true, and I will stay here while you go to the spot."
"Are you well fed?" repeated the inspector.
"Monsieur, you run no risk, for, as I told you, I will stay
here so there is no chance of my escaping."
"You do not reply to my question," replied the inspector
impatiently.
"Nor you to mine," cried the abbe. "You will not accept my
gold I will keep it for myself. You refuse me my liberty
God will give it me." And the abbe, casting away his
coverlet, resumed his place, and continued his calculations.
"What is he doing there?" said the inspector.
"Counting his treasures," replied the governor.
Faria replied to this sarcasm with a glance of profound
contempt. They went out. The turnkey closed the door behind
them.
"He was wealthy once, perhaps?" said the inspector.
"Or dreamed he was, and awoke mad."
"After all," said the inspector, "if he had been rich, he
would not have been here." So the matter ended for the Abbe
Faria. He remained in his cell, and this visit only
increased the belief in his insanity.
Caligula or Nero, those treasureseekers, those desirers of
the impossible, would have accorded to the poor wretch, in
exchange for his wealth, the liberty he so earnestly prayed
for. But the kings of modern times, restrained by the limits
of mere probability, have neither courage nor desire. They
fear the ear that hears their orders, and the eye that
scrutinizes their actions. Formerly they believed themselves
sprung from Jupiter, and shielded by their birth but
nowadays they are not inviolable.
It has always been against the policy of despotic
governments to suffer the victims of their persecutions to
reappear. As the Inquisition rarely allowed its victims to
be seen with their limbs distorted and their flesh lacerated
by torture, so madness is always concealed in its cell, from
whence, should it depart, it is conveyed to some gloomy
hospital, where the doctor has no thought for man or mind in
the mutilated being the jailer delivers to him. The very
madness of the Abbe Faria, gone mad in prison, condemned him
to perpetual captivity.
The inspector kept his word with Dantes he examined the
register, and found the following note concerning him 
Edmond Dantes
Violent Bonapartist took an active part in the return from
Elba.
The greatest watchfulness and care to be exercised.
This note was in a different hand from the rest, which
showed that it had been added since his confinement. The
inspector could not contend against this accusation he
simply wrote,  "Nothing to be done."
This visit had infused new vigor into Dantes he had, till
then, forgotten the date but now, with a fragment of
plaster, he wrote the date, th July, , and made a mark
every day, in order not to lose his reckoning again. Days
and weeks passed away, then months  Dantes still waited
he at first expected to be freed in a fortnight. This
fortnight expired, he decided that the inspector would do
nothing until his return to Paris, and that he would not
reach there until his circuit was finished, he therefore
fixed three months three months passed away, then six more.
Finally ten months and a half had gone by and no favorable
change had taken place, and Dantes began to fancy the
inspector's visit but a dream, an illusion of the brain.
At the expiration of a year the governor was transferred he
had obtained charge of the fortress at Ham. He took with him
several of his subordinates, and amongst them Dantes'
jailer. A new governor arrived it would have been too
tedious to acquire the names of the prisoners he learned
their numbers instead. This horrible place contained fifty
cells their inhabitants were designated by the numbers of
their cell, and the unhappy young man was no longer called
Edmond Dantes  he was now number .
Chapter 
Number  and Number .
Dantes passed through all the stages of torture natural to
prisoners in suspense. He was sustained at first by that
pride of conscious innocence which is the sequence to hope
then he began to doubt his own innocence, which justified in
some measure the governor's belief in his mental alienation
and then, relaxing his sentiment of pride, he addressed his
supplications, not to God, but to man. God is always the
last resource. Unfortunates, who ought to begin with God, do
not have any hope in him till they have exhausted all other
means of deliverance.
Dantes asked to be removed from his present dungeon into
another for a change, however disadvantageous, was still a
change, and would afford him some amusement. He entreated to
be allowed to walk about, to have fresh air, books, and
writing materials. His requests were not granted, but he
went on asking all the same. He accustomed himself to
speaking to the new jailer, although the latter was, if
possible, more taciturn than the old one but still, to
speak to a man, even though mute, was something. Dantes
spoke for the sake of hearing his own voice he had tried to
speak when alone, but the sound of his voice terrified him.
Often, before his captivity, Dantes' mind had revolted at
the idea of assemblages of prisoners, made up of thieves,
vagabonds, and murderers. He now wished to be amongst them,
in order to see some other face besides that of his jailer
he sighed for the galleys, with the infamous costume, the
chain, and the brand on the shoulder. The galleyslaves
breathed the fresh air of heaven, and saw each other. They
were very happy. He besought the jailer one day to let him
have a companion, were it even the mad abbe.
The jailer, though rough and hardened by the constant sight
of so much suffering, was yet a man. At the bottom of his
heart he had often had a feeling of pity for this unhappy
young man who suffered so and he laid the request of number
 before the governor but the latter sapiently imagined
that Dantes wished to conspire or attempt an escape, and
refused his request. Dantes had exhausted all human
resources, and he then turned to God.
All the pious ideas that had been so long forgotten,
returned he recollected the prayers his mother had taught
him, and discovered a new meaning in every word for in
prosperity prayers seem but a mere medley of words, until
misfortune comes and the unhappy sufferer first understands
the meaning of the sublime language in which he invokes the
pity of heaven He prayed, and prayed aloud, no longer
terrified at the sound of his own voice, for he fell into a
sort of ecstasy. He laid every action of his life before the
Almighty, proposed tasks to accomplish, and at the end of
every prayer introduced the entreaty oftener addressed to
man than to God "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive
them that trespass against us." Yet in spite of his earnest
prayers, Dantes remained a prisoner.
Then gloom settled heavily upon him. Dantes was a man of
great simplicity of thought, and without education he could
not, therefore, in the solitude of his dungeon, traverse in
mental vision the history of the ages, bring to life the
nations that had perished, and rebuild the ancient cities so
vast and stupendous in the light of the imagination, and
that pass before the eye glowing with celestial colors in
Martin's Babylonian pictures. He could not do this, he whose
past life was so short, whose present so melancholy, and his
future so doubtful. Nineteen years of light to reflect upon
in eternal darkness No distraction could come to his aid
his energetic spirit, that would have exalted in thus
revisiting the past, was imprisoned like an eagle in a cage.
He clung to one idea  that of his happiness, destroyed,
without apparent cause, by an unheardof fatality he
considered and reconsidered this idea, devoured it so to
speak, as the implacable Ugolino devours the skull of
Archbishop Roger in the Inferno of Dante.
Rage supplanted religious fervor. Dantes uttered blasphemies
that made his jailer recoil with horror, dashed himself
furiously against the walls of his prison, wreaked his anger
upon everything, and chiefly upon himself, so that the least
thing,  a grain of sand, a straw, or a breath of air that
annoyed him, led to paroxysms of fury. Then the letter that
Villefort had showed to him recurred to his mind, and every
line gleamed forth in fiery letters on the wall like the
mene tekel upharsin of Belshazzar. He told himself that it
was the enmity of man, and not the vengeance of heaven, that
had thus plunged him into the deepest misery. He consigned
his unknown persecutors to the most horrible tortures he
could imagine, and found them all insufficient, because
after torture came death, and after death, if not repose, at
least the boon of unconsciousness.
By dint of constantly dwelling on the idea that tranquillity
was death, and if punishment were the end in view other
tortures than death must be invented, he began to reflect on
suicide. Unhappy he, who, on the brink of misfortune, broods
over ideas like these
Before him is a dead sea that stretches in azure calm before
the eye but he who unwarily ventures within its embrace
finds himself struggling with a monster that would drag him
down to perdition. Once thus ensnared, unless the protecting
hand of God snatch him thence, all is over, and his
struggles but tend to hasten his destruction. This state of
mental anguish is, however, less terrible than the
sufferings that precede or the punishment that possibly will
follow. There is a sort of consolation at the contemplation
of the yawning abyss, at the bottom of which lie darkness
and obscurity.
Edmond found some solace in these ideas. All his sorrows,
all his sufferings, with their train of gloomy spectres,
fled from his cell when the angel of death seemed about to
enter. Dantes reviewed his past life with composure, and,
looking forward with terror to his future existence, chose
that middle line that seemed to afford him a refuge.
"Sometimes," said he, "in my voyages, when I was a man and
commanded other men, I have seen the heavens overcast, the
sea rage and foam, the storm arise, and, like a monstrous
bird, beating the two horizons with its wings. Then I felt
that my vessel was a vain refuge, that trembled and shook
before the tempest. Soon the fury of the waves and the sight
of the sharp rocks announced the approach of death, and
death then terrified me, and I used all my skill and
intelligence as a man and a sailor to struggle against the
wrath of God. But I did so because I was happy, because I
had not courted death, because to be cast upon a bed of
rocks and seaweed seemed terrible, because I was unwilling
that I, a creature made for the service of God, should serve
for food to the gulls and ravens. But now it is different I
have lost all that bound me to life, death smiles and
invites me to repose I die after my own manner, I die
exhausted and brokenspirited, as I fall asleep when I have
paced three thousand times round my cell."
No sooner had this idea taken possession of him than he
became more composed, arranged his couch to the best of his
power, ate little and slept less, and found existence almost
supportable, because he felt that he could throw it off at
pleasure, like a wornout garment. Two methods of
selfdestruction were at his disposal. He could hang himself
with his handkerchief to the window bars, or refuse food and
die of starvation. But the first was repugnant to him.
Dantes had always entertained the greatest horror of
pirates, who are hung up to the yardarm he would not die
by what seemed an infamous death. He resolved to adopt the
second, and began that day to carry out his resolve. Nearly
four years had passed away at the end of the second he had
ceased to mark the lapse of time.
Dantes said, "I wish to die," and had chosen the manner of
his death, and fearful of changing his mind, he had taken an
oath to die. "When my morning and evening meals are
brought," thought he, "I will cast them out of the window,
and they will think that I have eaten them."
He kept his word twice a day he cast out, through the
barred aperture, the provisions his jailer brought him  at
first gayly, then with deliberation, and at last with
regret. Nothing but the recollection of his oath gave him
strength to proceed. Hunger made viands once repugnant, now
acceptable he held the plate in his hand for an hour at a
time, and gazed thoughtfully at the morsel of bad meat, of
tainted fish, of black and mouldy bread. It was the last
yearning for life contending with the resolution of despair
then his dungeon seemed less sombre, his prospects less
desperate. He was still young  he was only four or five
and twenty  he had nearly fifty years to live. What
unforseen events might not open his prison door, and restore
him to liberty? Then he raised to his lips the repast that,
like a voluntary Tantalus, he refused himself but he
thought of his oath, and he would not break it. He persisted
until, at last, he had not sufficient strength to rise and
cast his supper out of the loophole. The next morning he
could not see or hear the jailer feared he was dangerously
ill. Edmond hoped he was dying.
Thus the day passed away. Edmond felt a sort of stupor
creeping over him which brought with it a feeling almost of
content the gnawing pain at his stomach had ceased his
thirst had abated when he closed his eyes he saw myriads of
lights dancing before them like the willo'thewisps that
play about the marshes. It was the twilight of that
mysterious country called Death
Suddenly, about nine o'clock in the evening, Edmond heard a
hollow sound in the wall against which he was lying.
So many loathsome animals inhabited the prison, that their
noise did not, in general, awake him but whether abstinence
had quickened his faculties, or whether the noise was really
louder than usual, Edmond raised his head and listened. It
was a continual scratching, as if made by a huge claw, a
powerful tooth, or some iron instrument attacking the
stones.
Although weakened, the young man's brain instantly responded
to the idea that haunts all prisoners  liberty It seemed
to him that heaven had at length taken pity on him, and had
sent this noise to warn him on the very brink of the abyss.
Perhaps one of those beloved ones he had so often thought of
was thinking of him, and striving to diminish the distance
that separated them.
No, no, doubtless he was deceived, and it was but one of
those dreams that forerun death
Edmond still heard the sound. It lasted nearly three hours
he then heard a noise of something falling, and all was
silent.
Some hours afterwards it began again, nearer and more
distinct. Edmond was intensely interested. Suddenly the
jailer entered.
For a week since he had resolved to die, and during the four
days that he had been carrying out his purpose, Edmond had
not spoken to the attendant, had not answered him when he
inquired what was the matter with him, and turned his face
to the wall when he looked too curiously at him but now the
jailer might hear the noise and put an end to it, and so
destroy a ray of something like hope that soothed his last
moments.
The jailer brought him his breakfast. Dantes raised himself
up and began to talk about everything about the bad quality
of the food, about the coldness of his dungeon, grumbling
and complaining, in order to have an excuse for speaking
louder, and wearying the patience of his jailer, who out of
kindness of heart had brought broth and white bread for his
prisoner.
Fortunately, he fancied that Dantes was delirious and
placing the food on the rickety table, he withdrew. Edmond
listened, and the sound became more and more distinct.
"There can be no doubt about it," thought he "it is some
prisoner who is striving to obtain his freedom. Oh, if I
were only there to help him" Suddenly another idea took
possession of his mind, so used to misfortune, that it was
scarcely capable of hope  the idea that the noise was made
by workmen the governor had ordered to repair the
neighboring dungeon.
It was easy to ascertain this but how could he risk the
question? It was easy to call his jailer's attention to the
noise, and watch his countenance as he listened but might
he not by this means destroy hopes far more important than
the shortlived satisfaction of his own curiosity?
Unfortunately, Edmond's brain was still so feeble that he
could not bend his thoughts to anything in particular.
He saw but one means of restoring lucidity and clearness to
his judgment. He turned his eyes towards the soup which the
jailer had brought, rose, staggered towards it, raised the
vessel to his lips, and drank off the contents with a
feeling of indescribable pleasure. He had often heard that
shipwrecked persons had died through having eagerly devoured
too much food. Edmond replaced on the table the bread he was
about to devour, and returned to his couch  he did not
wish to die. He soon felt that his ideas became again
collected  he could think, and strengthen his thoughts by
reasoning. Then he said to himself, "I must put this to the
test, but without compromising anybody. If it is a workman,
I need but knock against the wall, and he will cease to
work, in order to find out who is knocking, and why he does
so but as his occupation is sanctioned by the governor, he
will soon resume it. If, on the contrary, it is a prisoner,
the noise I make will alarm him, he will cease, and not
begin again until he thinks every one is asleep."
Edmond rose again, but this time his legs did not tremble,
and his sight was clear he went to a corner of his dungeon,
detached a stone, and with it knocked against the wall where
the sound came. He struck thrice. At the first blow the
sound ceased, as if by magic.
Edmond listened intently an hour passed, two hours passed,
and no sound was heard from the wall  all was silent
there.
Full of hope, Edmond swallowed a few mouthfuls of bread and
water, and, thanks to the vigor of his constitution, found
himself wellnigh recovered.
The day passed away in utter silence  night came without
recurrence of the noise.
"It is a prisoner," said Edmond joyfully. The night passed
in perfect silence. Edmond did not close his eyes.
In the morning the jailer brought him fresh provisions  he
had already devoured those of the previous day he ate these
listening anxiously for the sound, walking round and round
his cell, shaking the iron bars of the loophole, restoring
vigor and agility to his limbs by exercise, and so preparing
himself for his future destiny. At intervals he listened to
learn if the noise had not begun again, and grew impatient
at the prudence of the prisoner, who did not guess he had
been disturbed by a captive as anxious for liberty as
himself.
Three days passed  seventytwo long tedious hours which he
counted off by minutes
At length one evening, as the jailer was visiting him for
the last time that night, Dantes, with his ear for the
hundredth time at the wall, fancied he heard an almost
imperceptible movement among the stones. He moved away,
walked up and down his cell to collect his thoughts, and
then went back and listened.
The matter was no longer doubtful. Something was at work on
the other side of the wall the prisoner had discovered the
danger, and had substituted a lever for a chisel.
Encouraged by this discovery, Edmond determined to assist
the indefatigable laborer. He began by moving his bed, and
looked around for anything with which he could pierce the
wall, penetrate the moist cement, and displace a stone.
He saw nothing, he had no knife or sharp instrument, the
window grating was of iron, but he had too often assured
himself of its solidity. All his furniture consisted of a
bed, a chair, a table, a pail, and a jug. The bed had iron
clamps, but they were screwed to the wood, and it would have
required a screwdriver to take them off. The table and
chair had nothing, the pail had once possessed a handle, but
that had been removed.
Dantes had but one resource, which was to break the jug, and
with one of the sharp fragments attack the wall. He let the
jug fall on the floor, and it broke in pieces.
Dantes concealed two or three of the sharpest fragments in
his bed, leaving the rest on the floor. The breaking of his
jug was too natural an accident to excite suspicion. Edmond
had all the night to work in, but in the darkness he could
not do much, and he soon felt that he was working against
something very hard he pushed back his bed, and waited for
day.
All night he heard the subterranean workman, who continued
to mine his way. Day came, the jailer entered. Dantes told
him that the jug had fallen from his hands while he was
drinking, and the jailer went grumblingly to fetch another,
without giving himself the trouble to remove the fragments
of the broken one. He returned speedily, advised the
prisoner to be more careful, and departed.
Dantes heard joyfully the key grate in the lock he listened
until the sound of steps died away, and then, hastily
displacing his bed, saw by the faint light that penetrated
into his cell, that he had labored uselessly the previous
evening in attacking the stone instead of removing the
plaster that surrounded it.
The damp had rendered it friable, and Dantes was able to
break it off  in small morsels, it is true, but at the end
of half an hour he had scraped off a handful a
mathematician might have calculated that in two years,
supposing that the rock was not encountered, a passage
twenty feet long and two feet broad, might be formed.
The prisoner reproached himself with not having thus
employed the hours he had passed in vain hopes, prayer, and
despondency. During the six years that he had been
imprisoned, what might he not have accomplished?
In three days he had succeeded, with the utmost precaution,
in removing the cement, and exposing the stonework. The
wall was built of rough stones, among which, to give
strength to the structure, blocks of hewn stone were at
intervals imbedded. It was one of these he had uncovered,
and which he must remove from its socket.
Dantes strove to do this with his nails, but they were too
weak. The fragments of the jug broke, and after an hour of
useless toil, he paused.
Was he to be thus stopped at the beginning, and was he to
wait inactive until his fellow workman had completed his
task? Suddenly an idea occurred to him  he smiled, and the
perspiration dried on his forehead.
The jailer always brought Dantes' soup in an iron saucepan
this saucepan contained soup for both prisoners, for Dantes
had noticed that it was either quite full, or half empty,
according as the turnkey gave it to him or to his companion
first.
The handle of this saucepan was of iron Dantes would have
given ten years of his life in exchange for it.
The jailer was accustomed to pour the contents of the
saucepan into Dantes' plate, and Dantes, after eating his
soup with a wooden spoon, washed the plate, which thus
served for every day. Now when evening came Dantes put his
plate on the ground near the door the jailer, as he
entered, stepped on it and broke it.
This time he could not blame Dantes. He was wrong to leave
it there, but the jailer was wrong not to have looked before
him.
The jailer, therefore, only grumbled. Then he looked about
for something to pour the soup into Dantes' entire dinner
service consisted of one plate  there was no alternative.
"Leave the saucepan," said Dantes "you can take it away
when you bring me my breakfast." This advice was to the
jailer's taste, as it spared him the necessity of making
another trip. He left the saucepan.
Dantes was beside himself with joy. He rapidly devoured his
food, and after waiting an hour, lest the jailer should
change his mind and return, he removed his bed, took the
handle of the saucepan, inserted the point between the hewn
stone and rough stones of the wall, and employed it as a
lever. A slight oscillation showed Dantes that all went
well. At the end of an hour the stone was extricated from
the wall, leaving a cavity a foot and a half in diameter.
Dantes carefully collected the plaster, carried it into the
corner of his cell, and covered it with earth. Then, wishing
to make the best use of his time while he had the means of
labor, he continued to work without ceasing. At the dawn of
day he replaced the stone, pushed his bed against the wall,
and lay down. The breakfast consisted of a piece of bread
the jailer entered and placed the bread on the table.
"Well, don't you intend to bring me another plate?" said
Dantes.
"No," replied the turnkey "you destroy everything. First
you break your jug, then you make me break your plate if
all the prisoners followed your example, the government
would be ruined. I shall leave you the saucepan, and pour
your soup into that. So for the future I hope you will not
be so destructive."
Dantes raised his eyes to heaven and clasped his hands
beneath the coverlet. He felt more gratitude for the
possession of this piece of iron than he had ever felt for
anything. He had noticed, however, that the prisoner on the
other side had ceased to labor no matter, this was a
greater reason for proceeding  if his neighbor would not
come to him, he would go to his neighbor. All day he toiled
on untiringly, and by the evening he had succeeded in
extracting ten handfuls of plaster and fragments of stone.
When the hour for his jailer's visit arrived, Dantes
straightened the handle of the saucepan as well as he could,
and placed it in its accustomed place. The turnkey poured
his ration of soup into it, together with the fish  for
thrice a week the prisoners were deprived of meat. This
would have been a method of reckoning time, had not Dantes
long ceased to do so. Having poured out the soup, the
turnkey retired. Dantes wished to ascertain whether his
neighbor had really ceased to work. He listened  all was
silent, as it had been for the last three days. Dantes
sighed it was evident that his neighbor distrusted him.
However, he toiled on all the night without being
discouraged but after two or three hours he encountered an
obstacle. The iron made no impression, but met with a smooth
surface Dantes touched it, and found that it was a beam.
This beam crossed, or rather blocked up, the hole Dantes had
made it was necessary, therefore, to dig above or under it.
The unhappy young man had not thought of this. "O my God, my
God" murmured he, "I have so earnestly prayed to you, that
I hoped my prayers had been heard. After having deprived me
of my liberty, after having deprived me of death, after
having recalled me to existence, my God, have pity on me,
and do not let me die in despair"
"Who talks of God and despair at the same time?" said a
voice that seemed to come from beneath the earth, and,
deadened by the distance, sounded hollow and sepulchral in
the young man's ears. Edmond's hair stood on end, and he
rose to his knees.
"Ah," said he, "I hear a human voice." Edmond had not heard
any one speak save his jailer for four or five years and a
jailer is no man to a prisoner  he is a living door, a
barrier of flesh and blood adding strength to restraints of
oak and iron.
"In the name of heaven," cried Dantes, "speak again, though
the sound of your voice terrifies me. Who are you?"
"Who are you?" said the voice.
"An unhappy prisoner," replied Dantes, who made no
hesitation in answering.
"Of what country?"
"A Frenchman."
"Your name?"
"Edmond Dantes."
"Your profession?"
"A sailor."
"How long have you been here?"
"Since the th of February, ."
"Your crime?"
"I am innocent."
"But of what are you accused?"
"Of having conspired to aid the emperor's return."
"What For the emperor's return?  the emperor is no longer
on the throne, then?"
"He abdicated at Fontainebleau in , and was sent to the
Island of Elba. But how long have you been here that you are
ignorant of all this?"
"Since ."
Dantes shuddered this man had been four years longer than
himself in prison.
"Do not dig any more," said the voice "only tell me how
high up is your excavation?"
"On a level with the floor."
"How is it concealed?"
"Behind my bed."
"Has your bed been moved since you have been a prisoner?"
"No."
"What does your chamber open on?"
"A corridor."
"And the corridor?"
"On a court."
"Alas" murmured the voice.
"Oh, what is the matter?" cried Dantes.
"I have made a mistake owing to an error in my plans. I took
the wrong angle, and have come out fifteen feet from where I
intended. I took the wall you are mining for the outer wall
of the fortress."
"But then you would be close to the sea?"
"That is what I hoped."
"And supposing you had succeeded?"
"I should have thrown myself into the sea, gained one of the
islands near here  the Isle de Daume or the Isle de
Tiboulen  and then I should have been safe."
"Could you have swum so far?"
"Heaven would have given me strength but now all is lost."
"All?"
"Yes stop up your excavation carefully, do not work any
more, and wait until you hear from me."
"Tell me, at least, who you are?"
"I am  I am No. ."
"You mistrust me, then," said Dantes. Edmond fancied he
heard a bitter laugh resounding from the depths.
"Oh, I am a Christian," cried Dantes, guessing instinctively
that this man meant to abandon him. "I swear to you by him
who died for us that naught shall induce me to breathe one
syllable to my jailers but I conjure you do not abandon me.
If you do, I swear to you, for I have got to the end of my
strength, that I will dash my brains out against the wall,
and you will have my death to reproach yourself with."
"How old are you? Your voice is that of a young man."
"I do not know my age, for I have not counted the years I
have been here. All I do know is, that I was just nineteen
when I was arrested, the th of February, ."
"Not quite twentysix" murmured the voice "at that age he
cannot be a traitor."
"Oh, no, no," cried Dantes. "I swear to you again, rather
than betray you, I would allow myself to be hacked in
pieces"
"You have done well to speak to me, and ask for my
assistance, for I was about to form another plan, and leave
you but your age reassures me. I will not forget you.
Wait."
"How long?"
"I must calculate our chances I will give you the signal."
"But you will not leave me you will come to me, or you will
let me come to you. We will escape, and if we cannot escape
we will talk you of those whom you love, and I of those
whom I love. You must love somebody?"
"No, I am alone in the world."
"Then you will love me. If you are young, I will be your
comrade if you are old, I will be your son. I have a father
who is seventy if he yet lives I only love him and a young
girl called Mercedes. My father has not yet forgotten me, I
am sure, but God alone knows if she loves me still I shall
love you as I loved my father."
"It is well," returned the voice "tomorrow."
These few words were uttered with an accent that left no
doubt of his sincerity Dantes rose, dispersed the fragments
with the same precaution as before, and pushed his bed back
against the wall. He then gave himself up to his happiness.
He would no longer be alone. He was, perhaps, about to
regain his liberty at the worst, he would have a companion,
and captivity that is shared is but half captivity. Plaints
made in common are almost prayers, and prayers where two or
three are gathered together invoke the mercy of heaven.
All day Dantes walked up and down his cell. He sat down
occasionally on his bed, pressing his hand on his heart. At
the slightest noise he bounded towards the door. Once or
twice the thought crossed his mind that he might be
separated from this unknown, whom he loved already and then
his mind was made up  when the jailer moved his bed and
stooped to examine the opening, he would kill him with his
water jug. He would be condemned to die, but he was about to
die of grief and despair when this miraculous noise recalled
him to life.
The jailer came in the evening. Dantes was on his bed. It
seemed to him that thus he better guarded the unfinished
opening. Doubtless there was a strange expression in his
eyes, for the jailer said, "Come, are you going mad again?"
Dantes did not answer he feared that the emotion of his
voice would betray him. The jailer went away shaking his
head. Night came Dantes hoped that his neighbor would
profit by the silence to address him, but he was mistaken.
The next morning, however, just as he removed his bed from
the wall, he heard three knocks he threw himself on his
knees.
"Is it you?" said he "I am here."
"Is your jailer gone?"
"Yes," said Dantes "he will not return until the evening
so that we have twelve hours before us."
"I can work, then?" said the voice.
"Oh, yes, yes this instant, I entreat you."
In a moment that part of the floor on which Dantes was
resting his two hands, as he knelt with his head in the
opening, suddenly gave way he drew back smartly, while a
mass of stones and earth disappeared in a hole that opened
beneath the aperture he himself had formed. Then from the
bottom of this passage, the depth of which it was impossible
to measure, he saw appear, first the head, then the
shoulders, and lastly the body of a man, who sprang lightly
into his cell.
Chapter 
A Learned Italian.
Seizing in his arms the friend so long and ardently desired,
Dantes almost carried him towards the window, in order to
obtain a better view of his features by the aid of the
imperfect light that struggled through the grating.
He was a man of small stature, with hair blanched rather by
suffering and sorrow than by age. He had a deepset,
penetrating eye, almost buried beneath the thick gray
eyebrow, and a long and still black beard reaching down to
his breast. His thin face, deeply furrowed by care, and the
bold outline of his strongly marked features, betokened a
man more accustomed to exercise his mental faculties than
his physical strength. Large drops of perspiration were now
standing on his brow, while the garments that hung about him
were so ragged that one could only guess at the pattern upon
which they had originally been fashioned.
The stranger might have numbered sixty or sixtyfive years
but a certain briskness and appearance of vigor in his
movements made it probable that he was aged more from
captivity than the course of time. He received the
enthusiastic greeting of his young acquaintance with evident
pleasure, as though his chilled affections were rekindled
and invigorated by his contact with one so warm and ardent.
He thanked him with grateful cordiality for his kindly
welcome, although he must at that moment have been suffering
bitterly to find another dungeon where he had fondly
reckoned on discovering a means of regaining his liberty.
"Let us first see," said he, "whether it is possible to
remove the traces of my entrance here  our future
tranquillity depends upon our jailers being entirely
ignorant of it." Advancing to the opening, he stooped and
raised the stone easily in spite of its weight then,
fitting it into its place, he said, 
"You removed this stone very carelessly but I suppose you
had no tools to aid you."
"Why," exclaimed Dantes, with astonishment, "do you possess
any?"
"I made myself some and with the exception of a file, I
have all that are necessary,  a chisel, pincers, and
lever."
"Oh, how I should like to see these products of your
industry and patience."
"Well, in the first place, here is my chisel." So saying, he
displayed a sharp strong blade, with a handle made of
beechwood.
"And with what did you contrive to make that?" inquired
Dantes.
"With one of the clamps of my bedstead and this very tool
has sufficed me to hollow out the road by which I came
hither, a distance of about fifty feet."
"Fifty feet" responded Dantes, almost terrified.
"Do not speak so loud, young man  don't speak so loud. It
frequently occurs in a state prison like this, that persons
are stationed outside the doors of the cells purposely to
overhear the conversation of the prisoners."
"But they believe I am shut up alone here."
"That makes no difference."
"And you say that you dug your way a distance of fifty feet
to get here?"
"I do that is about the distance that separates your
chamber from mine only, unfortunately, I did not curve
aright for want of the necessary geometrical instruments to
calculate my scale of proportion, instead of taking an
ellipsis of forty feet, I made it fifty. I expected, as I
told you, to reach the outer wall, pierce through it, and
throw myself into the sea I have, however, kept along the
corridor on which your chamber opens, instead of going
beneath it. My labor is all in vain, for I find that the
corridor looks into a courtyard filled with soldiers."
"That's true," said Dantes "but the corridor you speak of
only bounds one side of my cell there are three others 
do you know anything of their situation?"
"This one is built against the solid rock, and it would take
ten experienced miners, duly furnished with the requisite
tools, as many years to perforate it. This adjoins the lower
part of the governor's apartments, and were we to work our
way through, we should only get into some lockup cellars,
where we must necessarily be recaptured. The fourth and last
side of your cell faces on  faces on  stop a minute, now
where does it face?"
The wall of which he spoke was the one in which was fixed
the loophole by which light was admitted to the chamber.
This loophole, which gradually diminished in size as it
approached the outside, to an opening through which a child
could not have passed, was, for better security, furnished
with three iron bars, so as to quiet all apprehensions even
in the mind of the most suspicious jailer as to the
possibility of a prisoner's escape. As the stranger asked
the question, he dragged the table beneath the window.
"Climb up," said he to Dantes. The young man obeyed, mounted
on the table, and, divining the wishes of his companion,
placed his back securely against the wall and held out both
hands. The stranger, whom as yet Dantes knew only by the
number of his cell, sprang up with an agility by no means to
be expected in a person of his years, and, light and steady
on his feet as a cat or a lizard, climbed from the table to
the outstretched hands of Dantes, and from them to his
shoulders then, bending double, for the ceiling of the
dungeon prevented him from holding himself erect, he managed
to slip his head between the upper bars of the window, so as
to be able to command a perfect view from top to bottom.
An instant afterwards he hastily drew back his head, saying,
"I thought so" and sliding from the shoulders of Dantes as
dextrously as he had ascended, he nimbly leaped from the
table to the ground.
"What was it that you thought?" asked the young man
anxiously, in his turn descending from the table.
The elder prisoner pondered the matter. "Yes," said he at
length, "it is so. This side of your chamber looks out upon
a kind of open gallery, where patrols are continually
passing, and sentries keep watch day and night."
"Are you quite sure of that?"
"Certain. I saw the soldier's shape and the top of his
musket that made me draw in my head so quickly, for I was
fearful he might also see me."
"Well?" inquired Dantes.
"You perceive then the utter impossibility of escaping
through your dungeon?"
"Then," pursued the young man eagerly 
"Then," answered the elder prisoner, "the will of God be
done" and as the old man slowly pronounced those words, an
air of profound resignation spread itself over his careworn
countenance. Dantes gazed on the man who could thus
philosophically resign hopes so long and ardently nourished
with an astonishment mingled with admiration.
"Tell me, I entreat of you, who and what you are?" said he
at length "never have I met with so remarkable a person as
yourself."
"Willingly," answered the stranger "if, indeed, you feel
any curiosity respecting one, now, alas, powerless to aid
you in any way."
"Say not so you can console and support me by the strength
of your own powerful mind. Pray let me know who you really
are?"
The stranger smiled a melancholy smile. "Then listen," said
he. "I am the Abbe Faria, and have been imprisoned as you
know in this Chateau d'If since the year  previously to
which I had been confined for three years in the fortress of
Fenestrelle. In the year  I was transferred to Piedmont
in France. It was at this period I learned that the destiny
which seemed subservient to every wish formed by Napoleon,
had bestowed on him a son, named king of Rome even in his
cradle. I was very far then from expecting the change you
have just informed me of namely, that four years
afterwards, this colossus of power would be overthrown. Then
who reigns in France at this moment  Napoleon II.?"
"No, Louis XVIII."
"The brother of Louis XVII. How inscrutable are the ways of
providence  for what great and mysterious purpose has it
pleased heaven to abase the man once so elevated, and raise
up him who was so abased?"
Dantes' whole attention was riveted on a man who could thus
forget his own misfortunes while occupying himself with the
destinies of others.
"Yes, yes," continued he, "'Twill be the same as it was in
England. After Charles I., Cromwell after Cromwell, Charles
II., and then James II., and then some soninlaw or
relation, some Prince of Orange, a stadtholder who becomes a
king. Then new concessions to the people, then a
constitution, then liberty. Ah, my friend" said the abbe,
turning towards Dantes, and surveying him with the kindling
gaze of a prophet, "you are young, you will see all this
come to pass."
"Probably, if ever I get out of prison"
"True," replied Faria, "we are prisoners but I forget this
sometimes, and there are even moments when my mental vision
transports me beyond these walls, and I fancy myself at
liberty."
"But wherefore are you here?"
"Because in  I dreamed of the very plan Napoleon tried
to realize in  because, like Machiavelli, I desired to
alter the political face of Italy, and instead of allowing
it to be split up into a quantity of petty principalities,
each held by some weak or tyrannical ruler, I sought to form
one large, compact, and powerful empire and, lastly,
because I fancied I had found my Caesar Borgia in a crowned
simpleton, who feigned to enter into my views only to betray
me. It was the plan of Alexander VI. and Clement VII., but
it will never succeed now, for they attempted it
fruitlessly, and Napoleon was unable to complete his work.
Italy seems fated to misfortune." And the old man bowed his
head.
Dantes could not understand a man risking his life for such
matters. Napoleon certainly he knew something of, inasmuch
as he had seen and spoken with him but of Clement VII. and
Alexander VI. he knew nothing.
"Are you not," he asked, "the priest who here in the Chateau
d'If is generally thought to be  ill?"
"Mad, you mean, don't you?"
"I did not like to say so," answered Dantes, smiling.
"Well, then," resumed Faria with a bitter smile, "let me
answer your question in full, by acknowledging that I am the
poor mad prisoner of the Chateau d'If, for many years
permitted to amuse the different visitors with what is said
to be my insanity and, in all probability, I should be
promoted to the honor of making sport for the children, if
such innocent beings could be found in an abode devoted like
this to suffering and despair."
Dantes remained for a short time mute and motionless at
length he said,  "Then you abandon all hope of escape?"
"I perceive its utter impossibility and I consider it
impious to attempt that which the Almighty evidently does
not approve."
"Nay, be not discouraged. Would it not be expecting too much
to hope to succeed at your first attempt? Why not try to
find an opening in another direction from that which has so
unfortunately failed?"
"Alas, it shows how little notion you can have of all it has
cost me to effect a purpose so unexpectedly frustrated, that
you talk of beginning over again. In the first place, I was
four years making the tools I possess, and have been two
years scraping and digging out earth, hard as granite
itself then what toil and fatigue has it not been to remove
huge stones I should once have deemed impossible to loosen.
Whole days have I passed in these Titanic efforts,
considering my labor well repaid if, by nighttime I had
contrived to carry away a square inch of this hardbound
cement, changed by ages into a substance unyielding as the
stones themselves then to conceal the mass of earth and
rubbish I dug up, I was compelled to break through a
staircase, and throw the fruits of my labor into the hollow
part of it but the well is now so completely choked up,
that I scarcely think it would be possible to add another
handful of dust without leading to discovery. Consider also
that I fully believed I had accomplished the end and aim of
my undertaking, for which I had so exactly husbanded my
strength as to make it just hold out to the termination of
my enterprise and now, at the moment when I reckoned upon
success, my hopes are forever dashed from me. No, I repeat
again, that nothing shall induce me to renew attempts
evidently at variance with the Almighty's pleasure."
Dantes held down his head, that the other might not see how
joy at the thought of having a companion outweighed the
sympathy he felt for the failure of the abbe's plans.
The abbe sank upon Edmond's bed, while Edmond himself
remained standing. Escape had never once occurred to him.
There are, indeed, some things which appear so impossible
that the mind does not dwell on them for an instant. To
undermine the ground for fifty feet  to devote three years
to a labor which, if successful, would conduct you to a
precipice overhanging the sea  to plunge into the waves
from the height of fifty, sixty, perhaps a hundred feet, at
the risk of being dashed to pieces against the rocks, should
you have been fortunate enough to have escaped the fire of
the sentinels and even, supposing all these perils past,
then to have to swim for your life a distance of at least
three miles ere you could reach the shore  were
difficulties so startling and formidable that Dantes had
never even dreamed of such a scheme, resigning himself
rather to death. But the sight of an old man clinging to
life with so desperate a courage, gave a fresh turn to his
ideas, and inspired him with new courage. Another, older and
less strong than he, had attempted what he had not had
sufficient resolution to undertake, and had failed only
because of an error in calculation. This same person, with
almost incredible patience and perseverance, had contrived
to provide himself with tools requisite for so unparalleled
an attempt. Another had done all this why, then, was it
impossible to Dantes? Faria had dug his way through fifty
feet, Dantes would dig a hundred Faria, at the age of
fifty, had devoted three years to the task he, who was but
half as old, would sacrifice six Faria, a priest and
savant, had not shrunk from the idea of risking his life by
trying to swim a distance of three miles to one of the
islands  Daume, Rattonneau, or Lemaire should a hardy
sailer, an experienced diver, like himself, shrink from a
similar task should he, who had so often for mere
amusement's sake plunged to the bottom of the sea to fetch
up the bright coral branch, hesitate to entertain the same
project? He could do it in an hour, and how many times had
he, for pure pastime, continued in the water for more than
twice as long At once Dantes resolved to follow the brave
example of his energetic companion, and to remember that
what has once been done may be done again.
After continuing some time in profound meditation, the young
man suddenly exclaimed, "I have found what you were in
search of"
Faria started "Have you, indeed?" cried he, raising his
head with quick anxiety "pray, let me know what it is you
have discovered?"
"The corridor through which you have bored your way from the
cell you occupy here, extends in the same direction as the
outer gallery, does it not?"
"It does."
"And is not above fifteen feet from it?"
"About that."
"Well, then, I will tell you what we must do. We must pierce
through the corridor by forming a side opening about the
middle, as it were the top part of a cross. This time you
will lay your plans more accurately we shall get out into
the gallery you have described kill the sentinel who guards
it, and make our escape. All we require to insure success is
courage, and that you possess, and strength, which I am not
deficient in as for patience, you have abundantly proved
yours  you shall now see me prove mine."
"One instant, my dear friend," replied the abbe "it is
clear you do not understand the nature of the courage with
which I am endowed, and what use I intend making of my
strength. As for patience, I consider that I have abundantly
exercised that in beginning every morning the task of the
night before, and every night renewing the task of the day.
But then, young man and I pray of you to give me your full
attention, then I thought I could not be doing anything
displeasing to the Almighty in trying to set an innocent
being at liberty  one who had committed no offence, and
merited not condemnation."
"And have your notions changed?" asked Dantes with much
surprise "do you think yourself more guilty in making the
attempt since you have encountered me?"
"No neither do I wish to incur guilt. Hitherto I have
fancied myself merely waging war against circumstances, not
men. I have thought it no sin to bore through a wall, or
destroy a staircase but I cannot so easily persuade myself
to pierce a heart or take away a life." A slight movement of
surprise escaped Dantes.
"Is it possible," said he, "that where your liberty is at
stake you can allow any such scruple to deter you from
obtaining it?"
"Tell me," replied Faria, "what has hindered you from
knocking down your jailer with a piece of wood torn from
your bedstead, dressing yourself in his clothes, and
endeavoring to escape?"
"Simply the fact that the idea never occurred to me,"
answered Dantes.
"Because," said the old man, "the natural repugnance to the
commission of such a crime prevented you from thinking of
it and so it ever is because in simple and allowable things
our natural instincts keep us from deviating from the strict
line of duty. The tiger, whose nature teaches him to delight
in shedding blood, needs but the sense of smell to show him
when his prey is within his reach, and by following this
instinct he is enabled to measure the leap necessary to
permit him to spring on his victim but man, on the
contrary, loathes the idea of blood  it is not alone that
the laws of social life inspire him with a shrinking dread
of taking life his natural construction and physiological
formation" 
Dantes was confused and silent at this explanation of the
thoughts which had unconsciously been working in his mind,
or rather soul for there are two distinct sorts of ideas,
those that proceed from the head and those that emanate from
the heart.
"Since my imprisonment," said Faria, "I have thought over
all the most celebrated cases of escape on record. They have
rarely been successful. Those that have been crowned with
full success have been long meditated upon, and carefully
arranged such, for instance, as the escape of the Duc de
Beaufort from the Chateau de Vincennes, that of the Abbe
Dubuquoi from For l'Eveque of Latude from the Bastille.
Then there are those for which chance sometimes affords
opportunity, and those are the best of all. Let us,
therefore, wait patiently for some favorable moment, and
when it presents itself, profit by it."
"Ah," said Dantes, "you might well endure the tedious delay
you were constantly employed in the task you set yourself,
and when weary with toil, you had your hopes to refresh and
encourage you."
"I assure you," replied the old man, "I did not turn to that
source for recreation or support."
"What did you do then?"
"I wrote or studied."
"Were you then permitted the use of pens, ink, and paper?"
"Oh, no," answered the abbe "I had none but what I made for
myself."
"You made paper, pens and ink?"
"Yes."
Dantes gazed with admiration, but he had some difficulty in
believing. Faria saw this.
"When you pay me a visit in my cell, my young friend," said
he, "I will show you an entire work, the fruits of the
thoughts and reflections of my whole life many of them
meditated over in the shades of the Coloseum at Rome, at the
foot of St. Mark's column at Venice, and on the borders of
the Arno at Florence, little imagining at the time that they
would be arranged in order within the walls of the Chateau
d'If. The work I speak of is called "A Treatise on the
Possibility of a General Monarchy in Italy,' and will make
one large quarto volume."
"And on what have you written all this?"
"On two of my shirts. I invented a preparation that makes
linen as smooth and as easy to write on as parchment."
"You are, then, a chemist?"
"Somewhat I know Lavoisier, and was the intimate friend of
Cabanis."
"But for such a work you must have needed books  had you
any?"
"I had nearly five thousand volumes in my library at Rome
but after reading them over many times, I found out that
with one hundred and fifty wellchosen books a man
possesses, if not a complete summary of all human knowledge,
at least all that a man need really know. I devoted three
years of my life to reading and studying these one hundred
and fifty volumes, till I knew them nearly by heart so that
since I have been in prison, a very slight effort of memory
has enabled me to recall their contents as readily as though
the pages were open before me. I could recite you the whole
of Thucydides, Xenophon, Plutarch, Titus Livius, Tacitus,
Strada, Jornandes, Dante, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Spinoza,
Machiavelli, and Bossuet. I name only the most important."
"You are, doubtless, acquainted with a variety of languages,
so as to have been able to read all these?"
"Yes, I speak five of the modern tongues  that is to say,
German, French, Italian, English, and Spanish by the aid of
ancient Greek I learned modern Greek  I don't speak it so
well as I could wish, but I am still trying to improve
myself."
"Improve yourself" repeated Dantes "why, how can you
manage to do so?"
"Why, I made a vocabulary of the words I knew turned,
returned, and arranged them, so as to enable me to express
my thoughts through their medium. I know nearly one thousand
words, which is all that is absolutely necessary, although I
believe there are nearly one hundred thousand in the
dictionaries. I cannot hope to be very fluent, but I
certainly should have no difficulty in explaining my wants
and wishes and that would be quite as much as I should ever
require."
Stronger grew the wonder of Dantes, who almost fancied he
had to do with one gifted with supernatural powers still
hoping to find some imperfection which might bring him down
to a level with human beings, he added, "Then if you were
not furnished with pens, how did you manage to write the
work you speak of?"
"I made myself some excellent ones, which would be
universally preferred to all others if once known. You are
aware what huge whitings are served to us on maigre days.
Well, I selected the cartilages of the heads of these
fishes, and you can scarcely imagine the delight with which
I welcomed the arrival of each Wednesday, Friday, and
Saturday, as affording me the means of increasing my stock
of pens for I will freely confess that my historical labors
have been my greatest solace and relief. While retracing the
past, I forget the present and traversing at will the path
of history I cease to remember that I am myself a prisoner."
"But the ink," said Dantes "of what did you make your ink?"
"There was formerly a fireplace in my dungeon," replied
Faria, "but it was closed up long ere I became an occupant
of this prison. Still, it must have been many years in use,
for it was thickly covered with a coating of soot this soot
I dissolved in a portion of the wine brought to me every
Sunday, and I assure you a better ink cannot be desired. For
very important notes, for which closer attention is
required, I pricked one of my fingers, and wrote with my own
blood."
"And when," asked Dantes, "may I see all this?"
"Whenever you please," replied the abbe.
"Oh, then let it be directly" exclaimed the young man.
"Follow me, then," said the abbe, as he reentered the
subterranean passage, in which he soon disappeared, followed
by Dantes.
Chapter 
The Abbe's Chamber.
After having passed with tolerable ease through the
subterranean passage, which, however, did not admit of their
holding themselves erect, the two friends reached the
further end of the corridor, into which the abbe's cell
opened from that point the passage became much narrower,
and barely permitted one to creep through on hands and
knees. The floor of the abbe's cell was paved, and it had
been by raising one of the stones in the most obscure corner
that Faria had to been able to commence the laborious task
of which Dantes had witnessed the completion.
As he entered the chamber of his friend, Dantes cast around
one eager and searching glance in quest of the expected
marvels, but nothing more than common met his view.
"It is well," said the abbe "we have some hours before us
it is now just a quarter past twelve o'clock."
Instinctively Dantes turned round to observe by what watch
or clock the abbe had been able so accurately to specify the
hour.
"Look at this ray of light which enters by my window," said
the abbe, "and then observe the lines traced on the wall.
Well, by means of these lines, which are in accordance with
the double motion of the earth, and the ellipse it describes
round the sun, I am enabled to ascertain the precise hour
with more minuteness than if I possessed a watch for that
might be broken or deranged in its movements, while the sun
and earth never vary in their appointed paths."
This last explanation was wholly lost upon Dantes, who had
always imagined, from seeing the sun rise from behind the
mountains and set in the Mediterranean, that it moved, and
not the earth. A double movement of the globe he inhabited,
and of which he could feel nothing, appeared to him
perfectly impossible. Each word that fell from his
companion's lips seemed fraught with the mysteries of
science, as worthy of digging out as the gold and diamonds
in the mines of Guzerat and Golconda, which he could just
recollect having visited during a voyage made in his
earliest youth.
"Come," said he to the abbe, "I am anxious to see your
treasures."
The abbe smiled, and, proceeding to the disused fireplace,
raised, by the help of his chisel, a long stone, which had
doubtless been the hearth, beneath which was a cavity of
considerable depth, serving as a safe depository of the
articles mentioned to Dantes.
"What do you wish to see first?" asked the abbe.
"Oh, your great work on the monarchy of Italy"
Faria then drew forth from his hidingplace three or four
rolls of linen, laid one over the other, like folds of
papyrus. These rolls consisted of slips of cloth about four
inches wide and eighteen long they were all carefully
numbered and closely covered with writing, so legible that
Dantes could easily read it, as well as make out the sense
it being in Italian, a language he, as a Provencal,
perfectly understood.
"There," said he, "there is the work complete. I wrote the
word finis at the end of the sixtyeighth strip about a week
ago. I have torn up two of my shirts, and as many
handkerchiefs as I was master of, to complete the precious
pages. Should I ever get out of prison and find in all Italy
a printer courageous enough to publish what I have composed,
my literary reputation is forever secured."
"I see," answered Dantes. "Now let me behold the curious
pens with which you have written your work."
"Look" said Faria, showing to the young man a slender stick
about six inches long, and much resembling the size of the
handle of a fine paintingbrush, to the end of which was
tied, by a piece of thread, one of those cartilages of which
the abbe had before spoken to Dantes it was pointed, and
divided at the nib like an ordinary pen. Dantes examined it
with intense admiration, then looked around to see the
instrument with which it had been shaped so correctly into
form.
"Ah, yes," said Faria "the penknife. That's my masterpiece.
I made it, as well as this larger knife, out of an old iron
candlestick." The penknife was sharp and keen as a razor as
for the other knife, it would serve a double purpose, and
with it one could cut and thrust.
Dantes examined the various articles shown to him with the
same attention that he had bestowed on the curiosities and
strange tools exhibited in the shops at Marseilles as the
works of the savages in the South Seas from whence they had
been brought by the different trading vessels.
"As for the ink," said Faria, "I told you how I managed to
obtain that  and I only just make it from time to time, as
I require it."
"One thing still puzzles me," observed Dantes, "and that is
how you managed to do all this by daylight?"
"I worked at night also," replied Faria.
"Night  why, for heaven's sake, are your eyes like cats',
that you can see to work in the dark?"
"Indeed they are not but God his supplied man with the
intelligence that enables him to overcome the limitations of
natural conditions. I furnished myself with a light."
"You did? Pray tell me how."
"I separated the fat from the meat served to me, melted it,
and so made oil  here is my lamp." So saying, the abbe
exhibited a sort of torch very similar to those used in
public illuminations.
"But light?"
"Here are two flints and a piece of burnt linen."
"And matches?"
"I pretended that I had a disorder of the skin, and asked
for a little sulphur, which was readily supplied." Dantes
laid the different things he had been looking at on the
table, and stood with his head drooping on his breast, as
though overwhelmed by the perseverance and strength of
Faria's mind.
"You have not seen all yet," continued Faria, "for I did not
think it wise to trust all my treasures in the same
hidingplace. Let us shut this one up." They put the stone
back in its place the abbe sprinkled a little dust over it
to conceal the traces of its having been removed, rubbed his
foot well on it to make it assume the same appearance as the
other, and then, going towards his bed, he removed it from
the spot it stood in. Behind the head of the bed, and
concealed by a stone fitting in so closely as to defy all
suspicion, was a hollow space, and in this space a ladder of
cords between twentyfive and thirty feet in length. Dantes
closely and eagerly examined it he found it firm, solid,
and compact enough to bear any weight.
"Who supplied you with the materials for making this
wonderful work?"
"I tore up several of my shirts, and ripped out the seams in
the sheets of my bed, during my three years' imprisonment at
Fenestrelle and when I was removed to the Chateau d'If, I
managed to bring the ravellings with me, so that I have been
able to finish my work here."
"And was it not discovered that your sheets were unhemmed?"
"Oh, no, for when I had taken out the thread I required, I
hemmed the edges over again."
"With what?"
"With this needle," said the abbe, as, opening his ragged
vestments, he showed Dantes a long, sharp fishbone, with a
small perforated eye for the thread, a small portion of
which still remained in it. "I once thought," continued
Faria, "of removing these iron bars, and letting myself down
from the window, which, as you see, is somewhat wider than
yours, although I should have enlarged it still more
preparatory to my flight however, I discovered that I
should merely have dropped into a sort of inner court, and I
therefore renounced the project altogether as too full of
risk and danger. Nevertheless, I carefully preserved my
ladder against one of those unforeseen opportunities of
which I spoke just now, and which sudden chance frequently
brings about." While affecting to be deeply engaged in
examining the ladder, the mind of Dantes was, in fact,
busily occupied by the idea that a person so intelligent,
ingenious, and clearsighted as the abbe might probably be
able to solve the dark mystery of his own misfortunes, where
he himself could see nothing.
"What are you thinking of?" asked the abbe smilingly,
imputing the deep abstraction in which his visitor was
plunged to the excess of his awe and wonder.
"I was reflecting, in the first place," replied Dantes,
"upon the enormous degree of intelligence and ability you
must have employed to reach the high perfection to which you
have attained. What would you not have accomplished if you
had been free?"
"Possibly nothing at all the overflow of my brain would
probably, in a state of freedom, have evaporated in a
thousand follies misfortune is needed to bring to light the
treasures of the human intellect. Compression is needed to
explode gunpowder. Captivity has brought my mental faculties
to a focus and you are well aware that from the collision
of clouds electricity is produced  from electricity,
lightning, from lightning, illumination."
"No," replied Dantes. "I know nothing. Some of your words
are to me quite empty of meaning. You must be blessed indeed
to possess the knowledge you have."
The abbe smiled. "Well," said he, "but you had another
subject for your thoughts did you not say so just now?"
"I did"
"You have told me as yet but one of them  let me hear the
other."
"It was this,  that while you had related to me all the
particulars of your past life, you were perfectly
unacquainted with mine."
"Your life, my young friend, has not been of sufficient
length to admit of your having passed through any very
important events."
"It has been long enough to inflict on me a great and
undeserved misfortune. I would fain fix the source of it on
man that I may no longer vent reproaches upon heaven."
"Then you profess ignorance of the crime with which you are
charged?"
"I do, indeed and this I swear by the two beings most dear
to me upon earth,  my father and Mercedes."
"Come," said the abbe, closing his hidingplace, and pushing
the bed back to its original situation, "let me hear your
story."
Dantes obeyed, and commenced what he called his history, but
which consisted only of the account of a voyage to India,
and two or three voyages to the Levant until he arrived at
the recital of his last cruise, with the death of Captain
Leclere, and the receipt of a packet to be delivered by
himself to the grand marshal his interview with that
personage, and his receiving, in place of the packet
brought, a letter addressed to a Monsieur Noirtier  his
arrival at Marseilles, and interview with his father  his
affection for Mercedes, and their nuptual feast  his
arrest and subsequent examination, his temporary detention
at the Palais de Justice, and his final imprisonment in the
Chateau d'If. From this point everything was a blank to
Dantes  he knew nothing more, not even the length of time
he had been imprisoned. His recital finished, the abbe
reflected long and earnestly.
"There is," said he, at the end of his meditations, "a
clever maxim, which bears upon what I was saying to you some
little while ago, and that is, that unless wicked ideas take
root in a naturally depraved mind, human nature, in a right
and wholesome state, revolts at crime. Still, from an
artificial civilization have originated wants, vices, and
false tastes, which occasionally become so powerful as to
stifle within us all good feelings, and ultimately to lead
us into guilt and wickedness. From this view of things,
then, comes the axiom that if you visit to discover the
author of any bad action, seek first to discover the person
to whom the perpetration of that bad action could be in any
way advantageous. Now, to apply it in your case,  to whom
could your disappearance have been serviceable?"
"To no one, by heaven I was a very insignificant person."
"Do not speak thus, for your reply evinces neither logic nor
philosophy everything is relative, my dear young friend,
from the king who stands in the way of his successor, to the
employee who keeps his rival out of a place. Now, in the
event of the king's death, his successor inherits a crown,
when the employee dies, the supernumerary steps into his
shoes, and receives his salary of twelve thousand livres.
Well, these twelve thousand livres are his civil list, and
are as essential to him as the twelve millions of a king.
Every one, from the highest to the lowest degree, has his
place on the social ladder, and is beset by stormy passions
and conflicting interests, as in Descartes' theory of
pressure and impulsion. But these forces increase as we go
higher, so that we have a spiral which in defiance of reason
rests upon the apex and not on the base. Now let us return
to your particular world. You say you were on the point of
being made captain of the Pharaon?"
"Yes."
"And about to become the husband of a young and lovely
girl?"
"Yes."
"Now, could any one have had any interest in preventing the
accomplishment of these two things? But let us first settle
the question as to its being the interest of any one to
hinder you from being captain of the Pharaon. What say you?"
"I cannot believe such was the case. I was generally liked
on board, and had the sailors possessed the right of
selecting a captain themselves, I feel convinced their
choice would have fallen on me. There was only one person
among the crew who had any feeling of illwill towards me. I
had quarelled with him some time previously, and had even
challenged him to fight me but he refused."
"Now we are getting on. And what was this man's name?"
"Danglars."
"What rank did he hold on board?"
"He was supercargo."
"And had you been captain, should you have retained him in
his employment?"
"Not if the choice had remained with me, for I had
frequently observed inaccuracies in his accounts."
"Good again Now then, tell me, was any person present
during your last conversation with Captain Leclere?"
"No we were quite alone."
"Could your conversation have been overheard by any one?"
"It might, for the cabin door was open  and  stay now I
recollect,  Danglars himself passed by just as Captain
Leclere was giving me the packet for the grand marshal."
"That's better," cried the abbe "now we are on the right
scent. Did you take anybody with you when you put into the
port of Elba?"
"Nobody."
"Somebody there received your packet, and gave you a letter
in place of it, I think?"
"Yes the grand marshal did."
"And what did you do with that letter?"
"Put it into my portfolio."
"You had your portfolio with you, then? Now, how could a
sailor find room in his pocket for a portfolio large enough
to contain an official letter?"
"You are right it was left on board."
"Then it was not till your return to the ship that you put
the letter in the portfolio?"
"No."
"And what did you do with this same letter while returning
from PortoFerrajo to the vessel?"
"I carried it in my hand."
"So that when you went on board the Pharaon, everybody could
see that you held a letter in your hand?"
"Yes."
"Danglars, as well as the rest?"
"Danglars, as well as others."
"Now, listen to me, and try to recall every circumstance
attending your arrest. Do you recollect the words in which
the information against you was formulated?"
"Oh yes, I read it over three times, and the words sank
deeply into my memory."
"Repeat it to me."
Dantes paused a moment, then said, "This is it, word for
word "The king's attorney is informed by a friend to the
throne and religion, that one Edmond Dantes, mate on board
the Pharaon, this day arrived from Smyrna, after having
touched at Naples and PortoFerrajo, has been intrusted by
Murat with a packet for the usurper again, by the usurper,
with a letter for the Bonapartist Club in Paris. This proof
of his guilt may be procured by his immediate arrest, as the
letter will be found either about his person, at his
father's residence, or in his cabin on board the Pharaon.'"
The abbe shrugged his shoulders. "The thing is clear as
day," said he "and you must have had a very confiding
nature, as well as a good heart, not to have suspected the
origin of the whole affair."
"Do you really think so? Ah, that would indeed be infamous."
"How did Danglars usually write?"
"In a handsome, running hand."
"And how was the anonymous letter written?"
"Backhanded." Again the abbe smiled. "Disguised."
"It was very boldly written, if disguised."
"Stop a bit," said the abbe, taking up what he called his
pen, and, after dipping it into the ink, he wrote on a piece
of prepared linen, with his left hand, the first two or
three words of the accusation. Dantes drew back, and gazed
on the abbe with a sensation almost amounting to terror.
"How very astonishing" cried he at length. "Why your
writing exactly resembles that of the accusation."
"Simply because that accusation had been written with the
left hand and I have noticed that" 
"What?"
"That while the writing of different persons done with the
right hand varies, that performed with the left hand is
invariably uniform."
"You have evidently seen and observed everything."
"Let us proceed."
"Oh, yes, yes"
"Now as regards the second question."
"I am listening."
"Was there any person whose interest it was to prevent your
marriage with Mercedes?"
"Yes a young man who loved her."
"And his name was" 
"Fernand."
"That is a Spanish name, I think?"
"He was a Catalan."
"You imagine him capable of writing the letter?"
"Oh, no he would more likely have got rid of me by sticking
a knife into me."
"That is in strict accordance with the Spanish character an
assassination they will unhesitatingly commit, but an act of
cowardice, never."
"Besides," said Dantes, "the various circumstances mentioned
in the letter were wholly unknown to him."
"You had never spoken of them yourself to any one?"
"To no one."
"Not even to your mistress?"
"No, not even to my betrothed."
"Then it is Danglars."
"I feel quite sure of it now."
"Wait a little. Pray, was Danglars acquainted with Fernand?"
"No  yes, he was. Now I recollect" 
"What?"
"To have seen them both sitting at table together under an
arbor at Pere Pamphile's the evening before the day fixed
for my wedding. They were in earnest conversation. Danglars
was joking in a friendly way, but Fernand looked pale and
agitated."
"Were they alone?"
"There was a third person with them whom I knew perfectly
well, and who had, in all probability made their
acquaintance he was a tailor named Caderousse, but he was
very drunk. Stay  stay  How strange that it should not
have occurred to me before Now I remember quite well, that
on the table round which they were sitting were pens, ink,
and paper. Oh, the heartless, treacherous scoundrels"
exclaimed Dantes, pressing his hand to his throbbing brows.
"Is there anything else I can assist you in discovering,
besides the villany of your friends?" inquired the abbe with
a laugh.
"Yes, yes," replied Dantes eagerly "I would beg of you, who
see so completely to the depths of things, and to whom the
greatest mystery seems but an easy riddle, to explain to me
how it was that I underwent no second examination, was never
brought to trial, and, above all, was condemned without ever
having had sentence passed on me?"
"That is altogether a different and more serious matter,"
responded the abbe. "The ways of justice are frequently too
dark and mysterious to be easily penetrated. All we have
hitherto done in the matter has been child's play. If you
wish me to enter upon the more difficult part of the
business, you must assist me by the most minute information
on every point."
"Pray ask me whatever questions you please for, in good
truth, you see more clearly into my life than I do myself."
"In the first place, then, who examined you,  the king's
attorney, his deputy, or a magistrate?"
"The deputy."
"Was he young or old?"
"About six or seven and twenty years of age, I should say."
"So," answered the abbe. "Old enough to be ambitions, but
too young to be corrupt. And how did he treat you?"
"With more of mildness than severity."
"Did you tell him your whole story?"
"I did."
"And did his conduct change at all in the course of your
examination?"
"He did appear much disturbed when he read the letter that
had brought me into this scrape. He seemed quite overcome by
my misfortune."
"By your misfortune?"
"Yes."
"Then you feel quite sure that it was your misfortune he
deplored?"
"He gave me one great proof of his sympathy, at any rate."
"And that?"
"He burnt the sole evidence that could at all have
criminated me."
"What? the accusation?"
"No the letter."
"Are you sure?"
"I saw it done."
"That alters the case. This man might, after all, be a
greater scoundrel than you have thought possible."
"Upon my word," said Dantes, "you make me shudder. Is the
world filled with tigers and crocodiles?"
"Yes and remember that twolegged tigers and crocodiles are
more dangerous than the others."
"Never mind let us go on."
"With all my heart You tell me he burned the letter?"
"He did saying at the same time, "You see I thus destroy
the only proof existing against you.'"
"This action is somewhat too sublime to be natural."
"You think so?"
"I am sure of it. To whom was this letter addressed?"
"To M. Noirtier, No.  CoqHeron, Paris."
"Now can you conceive of any interest that your heroic
deputy could possibly have had in the destruction of that
letter?"
"Why, it is not altogether impossible he might have had, for
he made me promise several times never to speak of that
letter to any one, assuring me he so advised me for my own
interest and, more than this, he insisted on my taking a
solemn oath never to utter the name mentioned in the
address."
"Noirtier" repeated the abbe "Noirtier  I knew a person
of that name at the court of the Queen of Etruria,  a
Noirtier, who had been a Girondin during the Revolution
What was your deputy called?"
"De Villefort" The abbe burst into a fit of laughter, while
Dantes gazed on him in utter astonishment.
"What ails you?" said he at length.
"Do you see that ray of sunlight?"
"I do."
"Well, the whole thing is more clear to me than that sunbeam
is to you. Poor fellow poor young man And you tell me this
magistrate expressed great sympathy and commiseration for
you?"
"He did."
"And the worthy man destroyed your compromising letter?"
"Yes."
"And then made you swear never to utter the name of
Noirtier?"
"Yes."
"Why, you poor shortsighted simpleton, can you not guess
who this Noirtier was, whose very name he was so careful to
keep concealed? Noirtier was his father."
Had a thunderbolt fallen at the feet of Dantes, or hell
opened its yawning gulf before him, he could not have been
more completely transfixed with horror than he was at the
sound of these unexpected words. Starting up, he clasped his
hands around his head as though to prevent his very brain
from bursting, and exclaimed, "His father his father"
"Yes, his father," replied the abbe "his right name was
Noirtier de Villefort." At this instant a bright light shot
through the mind of Dantes, and cleared up all that had been
dark and obscure before. The change that had come over
Villefort during the examination, the destruction of the
letter, the exacted promise, the almost supplicating tones
of the magistrate, who seemed rather to implore mercy than
to pronounce punishment,  all returned with a stunning
force to his memory. He cried out, and staggered against the
wall like a drunken man, then he hurried to the opening that
led from the abbe's cell to his own, and said, "I must be
alone, to think over all this."
When he regained his dungeon, he threw himself on his bed,
where the turnkey found him in the evening visit, sitting
with fixed gaze and contracted features, dumb and motionless
as a statue. During these hours of profound meditation,
which to him had seemed only minutes, he had formed a
fearful resolution, and bound himself to its fulfilment by a
solemn oath.
Dantes was at length roused from his revery by the voice of
Faria, who, having also been visited by his jailer, had come
to invite his fellowsufferer to share his supper. The
reputation of being out of his mind, though harmlessly and
even amusingly so, had procured for the abbe unusual
privileges. He was supplied with bread of a finer, whiter
quality than the usual prison fare, and even regaled each
Sunday with a small quantity of wine. Now this was a Sunday,
and the abbe had come to ask his young companion to share
the luxuries with him. Dantes followed his features were no
longer contracted, and now wore their usual expression, but
there was that in his whole appearance that bespoke one who
had come to a fixed and desperate resolve. Faria bent on him
his penetrating eye "I regret now," said he, "having helped
you in your late inquiries, or having given you the
information I did."
"Why so?" inquired Dantes.
"Because it has instilled a new passion in your heart 
that of vengeance."
Dantes smiled. "Let us talk of something else," said he.
Again the abbe looked at him, then mournfully shook his
head but in accordance with Dantes' request, he began to
speak of other matters. The elder prisoner was one of those
persons whose conversation, like that of all who have
experienced many trials, contained many useful and important
hints as well as sound information but it was never
egotistical, for the unfortunate man never alluded to his
own sorrows. Dantes listened with admiring attention to all
he said some of his remarks corresponded with what he
already knew, or applied to the sort of knowledge his
nautical life had enabled him to acquire. A part of the good
abbe's words, however, were wholly incomprehensible to him
but, like the aurora which guides the navigator in northern
latitudes, opened new vistas to the inquiring mind of the
listener, and gave fantastic glimpses of new horizons,
enabling him justly to estimate the delight an intellectual
mind would have in following one so richly gifted as Faria
along the heights of truth, where he was so much at home.
"You must teach me a small part of what you know," said
Dantes, "if only to prevent your growing weary of me. I can
well believe that so learned a person as yourself would
prefer absolute solitude to being tormented with the company
of one as ignorant and uninformed as myself. If you will
only agree to my request, I promise you never to mention
another word about escaping." The abbe smiled. "Alas, my
boy," said he, "human knowledge is confined within very
narrow limits and when I have taught you mathematics,
physics, history, and the three or four modern languages
with which I am acquainted, you will know as much as I do
myself. Now, it will scarcely require two years for me to
communicate to you the stock of learning I possess."
"Two years" exclaimed Dantes "do you really believe I can
acquire all these things in so short a time?"
"Not their application, certainly, but their principles you
may to learn is not to know there are the learners and the
learned. Memory makes the one, philosophy the other."
"But cannot one learn philosophy?"
"Philosophy cannot be taught it is the application of the
sciences to truth it is like the golden cloud in which the
Messiah went up into heaven."
"Well, then," said Dantes, "What shall you teach me first? I
am in a hurry to begin. I want to learn."
"Everything," said the abbe. And that very evening the
prisoners sketched a plan of education, to be entered upon
the following day. Dantes possessed a prodigious memory,
combined with an astonishing quickness and readiness of
conception the mathematical turn of his mind rendered him
apt at all kinds of calculation, while his naturally
poetical feelings threw a light and pleasing veil over the
dry reality of arithmetical computation, or the rigid
severity of geometry. He already knew Italian, and had also
picked up a little of the Romaic dialect during voyages to
the East and by the aid of these two languages he easily
comprehended the construction of all the others, so that at
the end of six months he began to speak Spanish, English,
and German. In strict accordance with the promise made to
the abbe, Dantes spoke no more of escape. Perhaps the
delight his studies afforded him left no room for such
thoughts perhaps the recollection that he had pledged his
word on which his sense of honor was keen kept him from
referring in any way to the possibilities of flight. Days,
even months, passed by unheeded in one rapid and instructive
course. At the end of a year Dantes was a new man. Dantes
observed, however, that Faria, in spite of the relief his
society afforded, daily grew sadder one thought seemed
incessantly to harass and distract his mind. Sometimes he
would fall into long reveries, sigh heavily and
involuntarily, then suddenly rise, and, with folded arms,
begin pacing the confined space of his dungeon. One day he
stopped all at once, and exclaimed, "Ah, if there were no
sentinel"
"There shall not be one a minute longer than you please,"
said Dantes, who had followed the working of his thoughts as
accurately as though his brain were enclosed in crystal so
clear as to display its minutest operations.
"I have already told you," answered the abbe, "that I loathe
the idea of shedding blood."
"And yet the murder, if you choose to call it so, would be
simply a measure of selfpreservation."
"No matter I could never agree to it."
"Still, you have thought of it?"
"Incessantly, alas" cried the abbe.
"And you have discovered a means of regaining our freedom,
have you not?" asked Dantes eagerly.
"I have if it were only possible to place a deaf and blind
sentinel in the gallery beyond us."
"He shall be both blind and deaf," replied the young man,
with an air of determination that made his companion
shudder.
"No, no," cried the abbe "impossible" Dantes endeavored to
renew the subject the abbe shook his head in token of
disapproval, and refused to make any further response. Three
months passed away.
"Are you strong?" the abbe asked one day of Dantes. The
young man, in reply, took up the chisel, bent it into the
form of a horseshoe, and then as readily straightened it.
"And will you engage not to do any harm to the sentry,
except as a last resort?"
"I promise on my honor."
"Then," said the abbe, "we may hope to put our design into
execution."
"And how long shall we be in accomplishing the necessary
work?"
"At least a year."
"And shall we begin at once?"
"At once."
"We have lost a year to no purpose" cried Dantes.
"Do you consider the last twelve months to have been
wasted?" asked the abbe.
"Forgive me" cried Edmond, blushing deeply.
"Tut, tut" answered the abbe, "man is but man after all,
and you are about the best specimen of the genus I have ever
known. Come, let me show you my plan." The abbe then showed
Dantes the sketch he had made for their escape. It consisted
of a plan of his own cell and that of Dantes, with the
passage which united them. In this passage he proposed to
drive a level as they do in mines this level would bring
the two prisoners immediately beneath the gallery where the
sentry kept watch once there, a large excavation would be
made, and one of the flagstones with which the gallery was
paved be so completely loosened that at the desired moment
it would give way beneath the feet of the soldier, who,
stunned by his fall, would be immediately bound and gagged
by Dantes before he had power to offer any resistance. The
prisoners were then to make their way through one of the
gallery windows, and to let themselves down from the outer
walls by means of the abbe's ladder of cords. Dantes' eyes
sparkled with joy, and he rubbed his hands with delight at
the idea of a plan so simple, yet apparently so certain to
succeed.
That very day the miners began their labors, with a vigor
and alacrity proportionate to their long rest from fatigue
and their hopes of ultimate success. Nothing interrupted the
progress of the work except the necessity that each was
under of returning to his cell in anticipation of the
turnkey's visits. They had learned to distinguish the almost
imperceptible sound of his footsteps as he descended towards
their dungeons, and happily, never failed of being prepared
for his coming. The fresh earth excavated during their
present work, and which would have entirely blocked up the
old passage, was thrown, by degrees and with the utmost
precaution, out of the window in either Faria's or Dantes'
cell, the rubbish being first pulverized so finely that the
night wind carried it far away without permitting the
smallest trace to remain. More than a year had been consumed
in this undertaking, the only tools for which had been a
chisel, a knife, and a wooden lever Faria still continuing
to instruct Dantes by conversing with him, sometimes in one
language, sometimes in another at others, relating to him
the history of nations and great men who from time to time
have risen to fame and trodden the path of glory.
The abbe was a man of the world, and had, moreover, mixed in
the first society of the day he wore an air of melancholy
dignity which Dantes, thanks to the imitative powers
bestowed on him by nature, easily acquired, as well as that
outward polish and politeness he had before been wanting in,
and which is seldom possessed except by those who have been
placed in constant intercourse with persons of high birth
and breeding. At the end of fifteen months the level was
finished, and the excavation completed beneath the gallery,
and the two workmen could distinctly hear the measured tread
of the sentinel as he paced to and fro over their heads.
Compelled, as they were, to await a night sufficiently dark
to favor their flight, they were obliged to defer their
final attempt till that auspicious moment should arrive
their greatest dread now was lest the stone through which
the sentry was doomed to fall should give way before its
right time, and this they had in some measure provided
against by propping it up with a small beam which they had
discovered in the walls through which they had worked their
way. Dantes was occupied in arranging this piece of wood
when he heard Faria, who had remained in Edmond's cell for
the purpose of cutting a peg to secure their ropeladder,
call to him in a tone indicative of great suffering. Dantes
hastened to his dungeon, where he found him standing in the
middle of the room, pale as death, his forehead streaming
with perspiration, and his hands clinched tightly together.
"Gracious heavens" exclaimed Dantes, "what is the matter?
what has happened?"
"Quick quick" returned the abbe, "listen to what I have to
say." Dantes looked in fear and wonder at the livid
countenance of Faria, whose eyes, already dull and sunken,
were surrounded by purple circles, while his lips were white
as those of a corpse, and his very hair seemed to stand on
end.
"Tell me, I beseech you, what ails you?" cried Dantes,
letting his chisel fall to the floor.
"Alas," faltered out the abbe, "all is over with me. I am
seized with a terrible, perhaps mortal illness I can feel
that the paroxysm is fast approaching. I had a similar
attack the year previous to my imprisonment. This malady
admits but of one remedy I will tell you what that is. Go
into my cell as quickly as you can draw out one of the feet
that support the bed you will find it has been hollowed out
for the purpose of containing a small phial you will see
there halffilled with a redlooking fluid. Bring it to me
or rather  no, no  I may be found here, therefore
help me back to my room while I have the strength to drag
myself along. Who knows what may happen, or how long the
attack may last?"
In spite of the magnitude of the misfortune which thus
suddenly frustrated his hopes, Dantes did not lose his
presence of mind, but descended into the passage, dragging
his unfortunate companion with him then, halfcarrying,
halfsupporting him, he managed to reach the abbe's chamber,
when he immediately laid the sufferer on his bed.
"Thanks," said the poor abbe, shivering as though his veins
were filled with ice. "I am about to be seized with a fit of
catalepsy when it comes to its height I shall probably lie
still and motionless as though dead, uttering neither sigh
nor groan. On the other hand, the symptoms may be much more
violent, and cause me to fall into fearful convulsions, foam
at the mouth, and cry out loudly. Take care my cries are not
heard, for if they are it is more than probable I should be
removed to another part of the prison, and we be separated
forever. When I become quite motionless, cold, and rigid as
a corpse, then, and not before,  be careful about this, 
force open my teeth with the knife, pour from eight to ten
drops of the liquor contained in the phial down my throat,
and I may perhaps revive."
"Perhaps" exclaimed Dantes in griefstricken tones.
"Help help" cried the abbe, "I  I  die  I" 
So sudden and violent was the fit that the unfortunate
prisoner was unable to complete the sentence a violent
convulsion shook his whole frame, his eyes started from
their sockets, his mouth was drawn on one side, his cheeks
became purple, he struggled, foamed, dashed himself about,
and uttered the most dreadful cries, which, however, Dantes
prevented from being heard by covering his head with the
blanket. The fit lasted two hours then, more helpless than
an infant, and colder and paler than marble, more crushed
and broken than a reed trampled under foot, he fell back,
doubled up in one last convulsion, and became as rigid as a
corpse.
Edmond waited till life seemed extinct in the body of his
friend, then, taking up the knife, he with difficulty forced
open the closely fixed jaws, carefully administered the
appointed number of drops, and anxiously awaited the result.
An hour passed away and the old man gave no sign of
returning animation. Dantes began to fear he had delayed too
long ere he administered the remedy, and, thrusting his
hands into his hair, continued gazing on the lifeless
features of his friend. At length a slight color tinged the
livid cheeks, consciousness returned to the dull, open
eyeballs, a faint sigh issued from the lips, and the
sufferer made a feeble effort to move.
"He is saved he is saved" cried Dantes in a paroxysm of
delight.
The sick man was not yet able to speak, but he pointed with
evident anxiety towards the door. Dantes listened, and
plainly distinguished the approaching steps of the jailer.
It was therefore near seven o'clock but Edmond's anxiety
had put all thoughts of time out of his head. The young man
sprang to the entrance, darted through it, carefully drawing
the stone over the opening, and hurried to his cell. He had
scarcely done so before the door opened, and the jailer saw
the prisoner seated as usual on the side of his bed. Almost
before the key had turned in the lock, and before the
departing steps of the jailer had died away in the long
corridor he had to traverse, Dantes, whose restless anxiety
concerning his friend left him no desire to touch the food
brought him, hurried back to the abbe's chamber, and raising
the stone by pressing his head against it, was soon beside
the sick man's couch. Faria had now fully regained his
consciousness, but he still lay helpless and exhausted.
"I did not expect to see you again," said he feebly, to
Dantes.
"And why not?" asked the young man. "Did you fancy yourself
dying?"
"No, I had no such idea but, knowing that all was ready for
flight, I thought you might have made your escape." The deep
glow of indignation suffused the cheeks of Dantes.
"Without you? Did you really think me capable of that?"
"At least," said the abbe, "I now see how wrong such an
opinion would have been. Alas, alas I am fearfully
exhausted and debilitated by this attack."
"Be of good cheer," replied Dantes "your strength will
return." And as he spoke he seated himself near the bed
beside Faria, and took his hands. The abbe shook his head.
"The last attack I had," said he, "lasted but half an hour,
and after it I was hungry, and got up without help now I
can move neither my right arm nor leg, and my head seems
uncomfortable, which shows that there has been a suffusion
of blood on the brain. The third attack will either carry me
off, or leave me paralyzed for life."
"No, no," cried Dantes "you are mistaken  you will not
die And your third attack if, indeed, you should have
another will find you at liberty. We shall save you another
time, as we have done this, only with a better chance of
success, because we shall be able to command every requisite
assistance."
"My good Edmond," answered the abbe, "be not deceived. The
attack which has just passed away, condemns me forever to
the walls of a prison. None can fly from a dungeon who
cannot walk."
"Well, we will wait,  a week, a month, two months, if need
be,  and meanwhile your strength will return. Everything
is in readiness for our flight, and we can select any time
we choose. As soon as you feel able to swim we will go."
"I shall never swim again," replied Faria. "This arm is
paralyzed not for a time, but forever. Lift it, and judge
if I am mistaken." The young man raised the arm, which fell
back by its own weight, perfectly inanimate and helpless. A
sigh escaped him.
"You are convinced now, Edmond, are you not?" asked the
abbe. "Depend upon it, I know what I say. Since the first
attack I experienced of this malady, I have continually
reflected on it. Indeed, I expected it, for it is a family
inheritance both my father and grandfather died of it in a
third attack. The physician who prepared for me the remedy I
have twice successfully taken, was no other than the
celebrated Cabanis, and he predicted a similar end for me."
"The physician may be mistaken" exclaimed Dantes. "And as
for your poor arm, what difference will that make? I can
take you on my shoulders, and swim for both of us."
"My son," said the abbe, "you, who are a sailor and a
swimmer, must know as well as I do that a man so loaded
would sink before he had done fifty strokes. Cease, then, to
allow yourself to be duped by vain hopes, that even your own
excellent heart refuses to believe in. Here I shall remain
till the hour of my deliverance arrives, and that, in all
human probability, will be the hour of my death. As for you,
who are young and active, delay not on my account, but fly
goI give you back your promise."
"It is well," said Dantes. "Then I shall also remain." Then,
rising and extending his hand with an air of solemnity over
the old man's head, he slowly added, "By the blood of Christ
I swear never to leave you while you live."
Faria gazed fondly on his nobleminded, singlehearted,
highprincipled young friend, and read in his countenance
ample confirmation of the sincerity of his devotion and the
loyalty of his purpose.
"Thanks," murmured the invalid, extending one hand. "I
accept. You may one of these days reap the reward of your
disinterested devotion. But as I cannot, and you will not,
quit this place, it becomes necessary to fill up the
excavation beneath the soldier's gallery he might, by
chance, hear the hollow sound of his footsteps, and call the
attention of his officer to the circumstance. That would
bring about a discovery which would inevitably lead to our
being separated. Go, then, and set about this work, in
which, unhappily, I can offer you no assistance keep at it
all night, if necessary, and do not return here tomorrow
till after the jailer his visited me. I shall have something
of the greatest importance to communicate to you."
Dantes took the hand of the abbe in his, and affectionately
pressed it. Faria smiled encouragingly on him, and the young
man retired to his task, in the spirit of obedience and
respect which he had sworn to show towards his aged friend.
Chapter 
The Treasure.
When Dantes returned next morning to the chamber of his
companion in captivity, he found Faria seated and looking
composed. In the ray of light which entered by the narrow
window of his cell, he held open in his left hand, of which
alone, it will be recollected, he retained the use, a sheet
of paper, which, from being constantly rolled into a small
compass, had the form of a cylinder, and was not easily kept
open. He did not speak, but showed the paper to Dantes.
"What is that?" he inquired.
"Look at it," said the abbe with a smile.
"I have looked at it with all possible attention," said
Dantes, "and I only see a halfburnt paper, on which are
traces of Gothic characters inscribed with a peculiar kind
of ink."
"This paper, my friend," said Faria, "I may now avow to you,
since I have the proof of your fidelity  this paper is my
treasure, of which, from this day forth, onehalf belongs to
you."
The sweat started forth on Dantes brow. Until this day and
for how long a time  he had refrained from talking of the
treasure, which had brought upon the abbe the accusation of
madness. With his instinctive delicacy Edmond had preferred
avoiding any touch on this painful chord, and Faria had been
equally silent. He had taken the silence of the old man for
a return to reason and now these few words uttered by
Faria, after so painful a crisis, seemed to indicate a
serious relapse into mental alienation.
"Your treasure?" stammered Dantes. Faria smiled.
"Yes," said he. "You have, indeed, a noble nature, Edmond,
and I see by your paleness and agitation what is passing in
your heart at this moment. No, be assured, I am not mad.
This treasure exists, Dantes, and if I have not been allowed
to possess it, you will. Yes  you. No one would listen or
believe me, because everyone thought me mad but you, who
must know that I am not, listen to me, and believe me so
afterwards if you will."
"Alas," murmured Edmond to himself, "this is a terrible
relapse There was only this blow wanting." Then he said
aloud, "My dear friend, your attack has, perhaps, fatigued
you had you not better repose awhile? Tomorrow, if you
will, I will hear your narrative but today I wish to nurse
you carefully. Besides," he said, "a treasure is not a thing
we need hurry about."
"On the contrary, it is a matter of the utmost importance,
Edmond" replied the old man. "Who knows if tomorrow, or
the next day after, the third attack may not come on? and
then must not all be over? Yes, indeed, I have often thought
with a bitter joy that these riches, which would make the
wealth of a dozen families, will be forever lost to those
men who persecute me. This idea was one of vengeance to me,
and I tasted it slowly in the night of my dungeon and the
despair of my captivity. But now I have forgiven the world
for the love of you now that I see you, young and with a
promising future,  now that I think of all that may result
to you in the good fortune of such a disclosure, I shudder
at any delay, and tremble lest I should not assure to one as
worthy as yourself the possession of so vast an amount of
hidden wealth." Edmond turned away his head with a sigh.
"You persist in your incredulity, Edmond," continued Faria.
"My words have not convinced you. I see you require proofs.
Well, then, read this paper, which I have never shown to any
one."
"Tomorrow, my dear friend," said Edmond, desirous of not
yielding to the old man's madness. "I thought it was
understood that we should not talk of that until tomorrow."
"Then we will not talk of it until tomorrow but read this
paper today."
"I will not irritate him," thought Edmond, and taking the
paper, of which half was wanting,  having been burnt, no
doubt, by some accident,  he read 
"This treasure, which may amount to two...
of Roman crowns in the most distant a...
of the second opening wh...
declare to belong to him alo...
heir.
"th April, "
"Well" said Faria, when the young man had finished reading
it.
"Why," replied Dantes, "I see nothing but broken lines and
unconnected words, which are rendered illegible by fire."
"Yes, to you, my friend, who read them for the first time
but not for me, who have grown pale over them by many
nights' study, and have reconstructed every phrase,
completed every thought."
"And do you believe you have discovered the hidden meaning?"
"I am sure I have, and you shall judge for yourself but
first listen to the history of this paper."
"Silence" exclaimed Dantes. "Steps approach  I go 
adieu."
And Dantes, happy to escape the history and explanation
which would be sure to confirm his belief in his friend's
mental instability, glided like a snake along the narrow
passage while Faria, restored by his alarm to a certain
amount of activity, pushed the stone into place with his
foot, and covered it with a mat in order the more
effectually to avoid discovery.
It was the governor, who, hearing of Faria's illness from
the jailer, had come in person to see him.
Faria sat up to receive him, avoiding all gestures in order
that he might conceal from the governor the paralysis that
had already half stricken him with death. His fear was lest
the governor, touched with pity, might order him to be
removed to better quarters, and thus separate him from his
young companion. But fortunately this was not the case, and
the governor left him, convinced that the poor madman, for
whom in his heart he felt a kind of affection, was only
troubled with a slight indisposition.
During this time, Edmond, seated on his bed with his head in
his hands, tried to collect his scattered thoughts. Faria,
since their first acquaintance, had been on all points so
rational and logical, so wonderfully sagacious, in fact,
that he could not understand how so much wisdom on all
points could be allied with madness. Was Faria deceived as
to his treasure, or was all the world deceived as to Faria?
Dantes remained in his cell all day, not daring to return to
his friend, thinking thus to defer the moment when he should
be convinced, once for all, that the abbe was mad  such a
conviction would be so terrible
But, towards the evening after the hour for the customary
visit had gone by, Faria, not seeing the young man appear,
tried to move and get over the distance which separated
them. Edmond shuddered when he heard the painful efforts
which the old man made to drag himself along his leg was
inert, and he could no longer make use of one arm. Edmond
was obliged to assist him, for otherwise he would not have
been able to enter by the small aperture which led to
Dantes' chamber.
"Here I am, pursuing you remorselessly," he said with a
benignant smile. "You thought to escape my munificence, but
it is in vain. Listen to me."
Edmond saw there was no escape, and placing the old man on
his bed, he seated himself on the stool beside him.
"You know," said the abbe, "that I was the secretary and
intimate friend of Cardinal Spada, the last of the princes
of that name. I owe to this worthy lord all the happiness I
ever knew. He was not rich, although the wealth of his
family had passed into a proverb, and I heard the phrase
very often, "As rich as a Spada.' But he, like public rumor,
lived on this reputation for wealth his palace was my
paradise. I was tutor to his nephews, who are dead and when
he was alone in the world, I tried by absolute devotion to
his will, to make up to him all he had done for me during
ten years of unremitting kindness. The cardinal's house had
no secrets for me. I had often seen my noble patron
annotating ancient volumes, and eagerly searching amongst
dusty family manuscripts. One day when I was reproaching him
for his unavailing searches, and deploring the prostration
of mind that followed them, he looked at me, and, smiling
bitterly, opened a volume relating to the History of the
City of Rome. There, in the twentieth chapter of the Life of
Pope Alexander VI., were the following lines, which I can
never forget 
""The great wars of Romagna had ended Caesar Borgia, who
had completed his conquest, had need of money to purchase
all Italy. The pope had also need of money to bring matters
to an end with Louis XII. King of France, who was formidable
still in spite of his recent reverses and it was necessary,
therefore, to have recourse to some profitable scheme, which
was a matter of great difficulty in the impoverished
condition of exhausted Italy. His holiness had an idea. He
determined to make two cardinals.'
"By choosing two of the greatest personages of Rome,
especially rich men  this was the return the holy father
looked for. In the first place, he could sell the great
appointments and splendid offices which the cardinals
already held and then he had the two hats to sell besides.
There was a third point in view, which will appear
hereafter. The pope and Caesar Borgia first found the two
future cardinals they were Giovanni Rospigliosi, who held
four of the highest dignities of the Holy See, and Caesar
Spada, one of the noblest and richest of the Roman nobility
both felt the high honor of such a favor from the pope. They
were ambitious, and Caesar Borgia soon found purchasers for
their appointments. The result was, that Rospigliosi and
Spada paid for being cardinals, and eight other persons paid
for the offices the cardinals held before their elevation,
and thus eight hundred thousand crowns entered into the
coffers of the speculators.
"It is time now to proceed to the last part of the
speculation. The pope heaped attentions upon Rospigliosi and
Spada, conferred upon them the insignia of the cardinalate,
and induced them to arrange their affairs and take up their
residence at Rome. Then the pope and Caesar Borgia invited
the two cardinals to dinner. This was a matter of dispute
between the holy father and his son. Caesar thought they
could make use of one of the means which he always had ready
for his friends, that is to say, in the first place, the
famous key which was given to certain persons with the
request that they go and open a designated cupboard. This
key was furnished with a small iron point,  a negligence
on the part of the locksmith. When this was pressed to
effect the opening of the cupboard, of which the lock was
difficult, the person was pricked by this small point, and
died next day. Then there was the ring with the lion's head,
which Caesar wore when he wanted to greet his friends with a
clasp of the hand. The lion bit the hand thus favored, and
at the end of twentyfour hours, the bite was mortal. Caesar
proposed to his father, that they should either ask the
cardinals to open the cupboard, or shake hands with them
but Alexander VI., replied "Now as to the worthy cardinals,
Spada and Rospigliosi, let us ask both of them to dinner,
something tells me that we shall get that money back.
Besides, you forget, Caesar, an indigestion declares itself
immediately, while a prick or a bite occasions a delay of a
day or two.' Caesar gave way before such cogent reasoning,
and the cardinals were consequently invited to dinner.
"The table was laid in a vineyard belonging to the pope,
near San Pierdarena, a charming retreat which the cardinals
knew very well by report. Rospigliosi, quite set up with his
new dignities, went with a good appetite and his most
ingratiating manner. Spada, a prudent man, and greatly
attached to his only nephew, a young captain of the highest
promise, took paper and pen, and made his will. He then sent
word to his nephew to wait for him near the vineyard but it
appeared the servant did not find him.
"Spada knew what these invitations meant since
Christianity, so eminently civilizing, had made progress in
Rome, it was no longer a centurion who came from the tyrant
with a message, "Caesar wills that you die.' but it was a
legate a latere, who came with a smile on his lips to say
from the pope, "His holiness requests you to dine with him.'
"Spada set out about two o'clock to San Pierdarena. The pope
awaited him. The first sight that attracted the eyes of
Spada was that of his nephew, in full costume, and Caesar
Borgia paying him most marked attentions. Spada turned pale,
as Caesar looked at him with an ironical air, which proved
that he had anticipated all, and that the snare was well
spread. They began dinner and Spada was only able to inquire
of his nephew if he had received his message. The nephew
replied no perfectly comprehending the meaning of the
question. It was too late, for he had already drunk a glass
of excellent wine, placed for him expressly by the pope's
butler. Spada at the same moment saw another bottle approach
him, which he was pressed to taste. An hour afterwards a
physician declared they were both poisoned through eating
mushrooms. Spada died on the threshold of the vineyard the
nephew expired at his own door, making signs which his wife
could not comprehend.
"Then Caesar and the pope hastened to lay hands on the
heritage, under presence of seeking for the papers of the
dead man. But the inheritance consisted in this only, a
scrap of paper on which Spada had written  "I bequeath to
my beloved nephew my coffers, my books, and, amongst others,
my breviary with the gold corners, which I beg he will
preserve in remembrance of his affectionate uncle.'
"The heirs sought everywhere, admired the breviary, laid
hands on the furniture, and were greatly astonished that
Spada, the rich man, was really the most miserable of uncles
no treasures  unless they were those of science,
contained in the library and laboratories. That was all.
Caesar and his father searched, examined, scrutinized, but
found nothing, or at least very little not exceeding a few
thousand crowns in plate, and about the same in ready money
but the nephew had time to say to his wife before he
expired "Look well among my uncle's papers there is a
will.'
"They sought even more thoroughly than the august heirs had
done, but it was fruitless. There were two palaces and a
vineyard behind the Palatine Hill but in these days landed
property had not much value, and the two palaces and the
vineyard remained to the family since they were beneath the
rapacity of the pope and his son. Months and years rolled
on. Alexander VI. died, poisoned,  you know by what
mistake. Caesar, poisoned at the same time, escaped by
shedding his skin like a snake but the new skin was spotted
by the poison till it looked like a tiger's. Then, compelled
to quit Rome, he went and got himself obscurely killed in a
night skirmish, scarcely noticed in history. After the
pope's death and his son's exile, it was supposed that the
Spada family would resume the splendid position they had
held before the cardinal's time but this was not the case.
The Spadas remained in doubtful ease, a mystery hung over
this dark affair, and the public rumor was, that Caesar, a
better politician than his father, had carried off from the
pope the fortune of the two cardinals. I say the two,
because Cardinal Rospigliosi, who had not taken any
precaution, was completely despoiled.
"Up to this point," said Faria, interrupting the thread of
his narrative, "this seems to you very meaningless, no
doubt, eh?"
"Oh, my friend," cried Dantes, "on the contrary, it seems as
if I were reading a most interesting narrative go on, I beg
of you."
"I will."
"The family began to get accustomed to their obscurity.
Years rolled on, and amongst the descendants some were
soldiers, others diplomatists some churchmen, some bankers
some grew rich, and some were ruined. I come now to the last
of the family, whose secretary I was  the Count of Spada.
I had often heard him complain of the disproportion of his
rank with his fortune and I advised him to invest all he
had in an annuity. He did so, and thus doubled his income.
The celebrated breviary remained in the family, and was in
the count's possession. It had been handed down from father
to son for the singular clause of the only will that had
been found, had caused it to be regarded as a genuine relic,
preserved in the family with superstitious veneration. It
was an illuminated book, with beautiful Gothic characters,
and so weighty with gold, that a servant always carried it
before the cardinal on days of great solemnity.
"At the sight of papers of all sorts,  titles, contracts,
parchments, which were kept in the archives of the family,
all descending from the poisoned cardinal, I in my turn
examined the immense bundles of documents, like twenty
servitors, stewards, secretaries before me but in spite of
the most exhaustive researches, I found  nothing. Yet I
had read, I had even written a precise history of the Borgia
family, for the sole purpose of assuring myself whether any
increase of fortune had occurred to them on the death of the
Cardinal Caesar Spada but could only trace the acquisition
of the property of the Cardinal Rospigliosi, his companion
in misfortune.
"I was then almost assured that the inheritance had neither
profited the Borgias nor the family, but had remained
unpossessed like the treasures of the Arabian Nights, which
slept in the bosom of the earth under the eyes of the genie.
I searched, ransacked, counted, calculated a thousand and a
thousand times the income and expenditure of the family for
three hundred years. It was useless. I remained in my
ignorance, and the Count of Spada in his poverty. My patron
died. He had reserved from his annuity his family papers,
his library, composed of five thousand volumes, and his
famous breviary. All these he bequeathed to me, with a
thousand Roman crowns, which he had in ready money, on
condition that I would have anniversary masses said for the
repose of his soul, and that I would draw up a genealogical
tree and history of his house. All this I did scrupulously.
Be easy, my dear Edmond, we are near the conclusion.
"In , a month before I was arrested, and a fortnight
after the death of the Count of Spada, on the th of
December you will see presently how the date became fixed
in my memory, I was reading, for the thousandth time, the
papers I was arranging, for the palace was sold to a
stranger, and I was going to leave Rome and settle at
Florence, intending to take with me twelve thousand francs I
possessed, my library, and the famous breviary, when, tired
with my constant labor at the same thing, and overcome by a
heavy dinner I had eaten, my head dropped on my hands, and I
fell asleep about three o'clock in the afternoon. I awoke as
the clock was striking six. I raised my head I was in utter
darkness. I rang for a light, but as no one came, I
determined to find one for myself. It was indeed but
anticipating the simple manners which I should soon be under
the necessity of adopting. I took a waxcandle in one hand,
and with the other groped about for a piece of paper my
matchbox being empty, with which I proposed to get a light
from the small flame still playing on the embers. Fearing,
however, to make use of any valuable piece of paper, I
hesitated for a moment, then recollected that I had seen in
the famous breviary, which was on the table beside me, an
old paper quite yellow with age, and which had served as a
marker for centuries, kept there by the request of the
heirs. I felt for it, found it, twisted it up together, and
putting it into the expiring flame, set light to it.
"But beneath my fingers, as if by magic, in proportion as
the fire ascended, I saw yellowish characters appear on the
paper. I grasped it in my hand, put out the flame as quickly
as I could, lighted my taper in the fire itself, and opened
the crumpled paper with inexpressible emotion, recognizing,
when I had done so, that these characters had been traced in
mysterious and sympathetic ink, only appearing when exposed
to the fire nearly onethird of the paper had been consumed
by the flame. It was that paper you read this morning read
it again, Dantes, and then I will complete for you the
incomplete words and unconnected sense."
Faria, with an air of triumph, offered the paper to Dantes,
who this time read the following words, traced with an ink
of a reddish color resembling rust 
"This th day of April, , be...
Alexander VI., and fearing that not...
he may desire to become my heir, and re...
and Bentivoglio, who were poisoned,...
my sole heir, that I have bu...
and has visited with me, that is, in...
Island of Monte Cristo, all I poss...
jewels, diamonds, gems that I alone...
may amount to nearly two mil...
will find on raising the twentieth ro...
creek to the east in a right line. Two open...
in these caves the treasure is in the furthest a...
which treasure I bequeath and leave en...
as my sole heir.
"th April, .
"Caes...
"And now," said the abbe, "read this other paper" and he
presented to Dantes a second leaf with fragments of lines
written on it, which Edmond read as follows 
"...ing invited to dine by his Holiness
...content with making me pay for my hat,
...serves for me the fate of Cardinals Caprara
...I declare to my nephew, Guido Spada
...ried in a place he knows
...the caves of the small
...essed of ingots, gold, money,
...know of the existence of this treasure, which
...lions of Roman crowns, and which he
...ck from the small
...ings have been made
...ngle in the second
...tire to him
...ar Spada."
Faria followed him with an excited look. "and now," he said,
when he saw that Dantes had read the last line, "put the two
fragments together, and judge for yourself." Dantes obeyed,
and the conjointed pieces gave the following 
"This th day of April, , be...ing invited to dine by
his Holiness Alexander VI., and fearing that not...content
with making me pay for my hat, he may desire to become my
heir, and re...serves for me the fate of Cardinals Caprara
and Bentivoglio, who were poisoned...I declare to my nephew,
Guido Spada, my sole heir, that I have bu...ried in a place
he knows and has visited with me, that is, in...the caves of
the small Island of Monte Cristo all I poss...ssed of
ingots, gold, money, jewels, diamonds, gems that I
alone...know of the existence of this treasure, which may
amount to nearly two mil...lions of Roman crowns, and which
he will find on raising the twentieth ro...ck from the small
creek to the east in a right line. Two open...ings have been
made in these caves the treasure is in the furthest
a...ngle in the second which treasure I bequeath and leave
en...tire to him as my sole heir.
"th April, .
"Caes...ar Spada."
"Well, do you comprehend now?" inquired Faria.
"It is the declaration of Cardinal Spada, and the will so
long sought for," replied Edmond, still incredulous.
"Yes a thousand times, yes"
"And who completed it as it now is?"
"I did. Aided by the remaining fragment, I guessed the rest
measuring the length of the lines by those of the paper, and
divining the hidden meaning by means of what was in part
revealed, as we are guided in a cavern by the small ray of
light above us."
"And what did you do when you arrived at this conclusion?"
"I resolved to set out, and did set out at that very
instant, carrying with me the beginning of my great work,
the unity of the Italian kingdom but for some time the
imperial police who at this period, quite contrary to what
Napoleon desired so soon as he had a son born to him, wished
for a partition of provinces had their eyes on me and my
hasty departure, the cause of which they were unable to
guess, having aroused their suspicions, I was arrested at
the very moment I was leaving Piombino.
"Now," continued Faria, addressing Dantes with an almost
paternal expression, "now, my dear fellow, you know as much
as I do myself. If we ever escape together, half this
treasure is yours if I die here, and you escape alone, the
whole belongs to you."
"But," inquired Dantes hesitating, "has this treasure no
more legitimate possessor in the world than ourselves?"
"No, no, be easy on that score the family is extinct. The
last Count of Spada, moreover, made me his heir, bequeathing
to me this symbolic breviary, he bequeathed to me all it
contained no, no, make your mind satisfied on that point.
If we lay hands on this fortune, we may enjoy it without
remorse."
"And you say this treasure amounts to" 
"Two millions of Roman crowns nearly thirteen millions of
our money."
 ,, in .
"Impossible" said Dantes, staggered at the enormous amount.
"Impossible? and why?" asked the old man. "The Spada family
was one of the oldest and most powerful families of the
fifteenth century and in those times, when other
opportunities for investment were wanting, such
accumulations of gold and jewels were by no means rare
there are at this day Roman families perishing of hunger,
though possessed of nearly a million in diamonds and jewels,
handed down by entail, and which they cannot touch." Edmond
thought he was in a dream  he wavered between incredulity
and joy.
"I have only kept this secret so long from you," continued
Faria, "that I might test your character, and then surprise
you. Had we escaped before my attack of catalepsy, I should
have conducted you to Monte Cristo now," he added, with a
sigh, "it is you who will conduct me thither. Well, Dantes,
you do not thank me?"
"This treasure belongs to you, my dear friend," replied
Dantes, "and to you only. I have no right to it. I am no
relation of yours."
"You are my son, Dantes," exclaimed the old man. "You are
the child of my captivity. My profession condemns me to
celibacy. God has sent you to me to console, at one and the
same time, the man who could not be a father, and the
prisoner who could not get free." And Faria extended the arm
of which alone the use remained to him to the young man who
threw himself upon his neck and wept.
Chapter 
The Third Attack.
Now that this treasure, which had so long been the object of
the abbe's meditations, could insure the future happiness of
him whom Faria really loved as a son, it had doubled its
value in his eyes, and every day he expatiated on the
amount, explaining to Dantes all the good which, with
thirteen or fourteen millions of francs, a man could do in
these days to his friends and then Dantes' countenance
became gloomy, for the oath of vengeance he had taken
recurred to his memory, and he reflected how much ill, in
these times, a man with thirteen or fourteen millions could
do to his enemies.
The abbe did not know the Island of Monte Cristo but Dantes
knew it, and had often passed it, situated twentyfive miles
from Pianosa, between Corsica and the Island of Elba, and
had once touched there. This island was, always had been,
and still is, completely deserted. It is a rock of almost
conical form, which looks as though it had been thrust up by
volcanic force from the depth to the surface of the ocean.
Dantes drew a plan of the island for Faria, and Faria gave
Dantes advice as to the means he should employ to recover
the treasure. But Dantes was far from being as enthusiastic
and confident as the old man. It was past a question now
that Faria was not a lunatic, and the way in which he had
achieved the discovery, which had given rise to the
suspicion of his madness, increased Edmond's admiration of
him but at the same time Dantes could not believe that the
deposit, supposing it had ever existed, still existed and
though he considered the treasure as by no means chimerical,
he yet believed it was no longer there.
However, as if fate resolved on depriving the prisoners of
their last chance, and making them understand that they were
condemned to perpetual imprisonment, a new misfortune befell
them the gallery on the sea side, which had long been in
ruins, was rebuilt. They had repaired it completely, and
stopped up with vast masses of stone the hole Dantes had
partly filled in. But for this precaution, which, it will be
remembered, the abbe had made to Edmond, the misfortune
would have been still greater, for their attempt to escape
would have been detected, and they would undoubtedly have
been separated. Thus a new, a stronger, and more inexorable
barrier was interposed to cut off the realization of their
hopes.
"You see," said the young man, with an air of sorrowful
resignation, to Faria, "that God deems it right to take from
me any claim to merit for what you call my devotion to you.
I have promised to remain forever with you, and now I could
not break my promise if I would. The treasure will be no
more mine than yours, and neither of us will quit this
prison. But my real treasure is not that, my dear friend,
which awaits me beneath the sombre rocks of Monte Cristo, it
is your presence, our living together five or six hours a
day, in spite of our jailers it is the rays of intelligence
you have elicited from my brain, the languages you have
implanted in my memory, and which have taken root there with
all their philological ramifications. These different
sciences that you have made so easy to me by the depth of
the knowledge you possess of them, and the clearness of the
principles to which you have reduced them  this is my
treasure, my beloved friend, and with this you have made me
rich and happy. Believe me, and take comfort, this is better
for me than tons of gold and cases of diamonds, even were
they not as problematical as the clouds we see in the
morning floating over the sea, which we take for terra
firma, and which evaporate and vanish as we draw near to
them. To have you as long as possible near me, to hear your
eloquent speech,  which embellishes my mind, strengthens
my soul, and makes my whole frame capable of great and
terrible things, if I should ever be free,  so fills my
whole existence, that the despair to which I was just on the
point of yielding when I knew you, has no longer any hold
over me and this  this is my fortune  not chimerical,
but actual. I owe you my real good, my present happiness
and all the sovereigns of the earth, even Caesar Borgia
himself, could not deprive me of this."
Thus, if not actually happy, yet the days these two
unfortunates passed together went quickly. Faria, who for so
long a time had kept silence as to the treasure, now
perpetually talked of it. As he had prophesied would be the
case, he remained paralyzed in the right arm and the left
leg, and had given up all hope of ever enjoying it himself.
But he was continually thinking over some means of escape
for his young companion, and anticipating the pleasure he
would enjoy. For fear the letter might be some day lost or
stolen, he compelled Dantes to learn it by heart and Dantes
knew it from the first to the last word. Then he destroyed
the second portion, assured that if the first were seized,
no one would be able to discover its real meaning. Whole
hours sometimes passed while Faria was giving instructions
to Dantes,  instructions which were to serve him when he
was at liberty. Then, once free, from the day and hour and
moment when he was so, he could have but one only thought,
which was, to gain Monte Cristo by some means, and remain
there alone under some pretext which would arouse no
suspicions and once there, to endeavor to find the
wonderful caverns, and search in the appointed spot,  the
appointed spot, be it remembered, being the farthest angle
in the second opening.
In the meanwhile the hours passed, if not rapidly, at least
tolerably. Faria, as we have said, without having recovered
the use of his hand and foot, had regained all the clearness
of his understanding, and had gradually, besides the moral
instructions we have detailed, taught his youthful companion
the patient and sublime duty of a prisoner, who learns to
make something from nothing. They were thus perpetually
employed,  Faria, that he might not see himself grow old
Dantes, for fear of recalling the almost extinct past which
now only floated in his memory like a distant light
wandering in the night. So life went on for them as it does
for those who are not victims of misfortune and whose
activities glide along mechanically and tranquilly beneath
the eye of providence.
But beneath this superficial calm there were in the heart of
the young man, and perhaps in that of the old man, many
repressed desires, many stifled sighs, which found vent when
Faria was left alone, and when Edmond returned to his cell.
One night Edmond awoke suddenly, believing that he heard
some one calling him. He opened his eyes upon utter
darkness. His name, or rather a plaintive voice which
essayed to pronounce his name, reached him. He sat up in bed
and a cold sweat broke out upon his brow. Undoubtedly the
call came from Faria's dungeon. "Alas," murmured Edmond
"can it be?"
He moved his bed, drew up the stone, rushed into the
passage, and reached the opposite extremity the secret
entrance was open. By the light of the wretched and wavering
lamp, of which we have spoken, Dantes saw the old man, pale,
but yet erect, clinging to the bedstead. His features were
writhing with those horrible symptoms which he already knew,
and which had so seriously alarmed him when he saw them for
the first time.
"Alas, my dear friend," said Faria in a resigned tone, "you
understand, do you not, and I need not attempt to explain to
you?"
Edmond uttered a cry of agony, and, quite out of his senses,
rushed towards the door, exclaiming, "Help, help" Faria had
just sufficient strength to restrain him.
"Silence," he said, "or you are lost. We must now only think
of you, my dear friend, and so act as to render your
captivity supportable or your flight possible. It would
require years to do again what I have done here, and the
results would be instantly destroyed if our jailers knew we
had communicated with each other. Besides, be assured, my
dear Edmond, the dungeon I am about to leave will not long
remain empty some other unfortunate being will soon take my
place, and to him you will appear like an angel of
salvation. Perhaps he will be young, strong, and enduring,
like yourself, and will aid you in your escape, while I have
been but a hindrance. You will no longer have half a dead
body tied to you as a drag to all your movements. At length
providence has done something for you he restores to you
more than he takes away, and it was time I should die."
Edmond could only clasp his hands and exclaim, "Oh, my
friend, my friend, speak not thus" and then resuming all
his presence of mind, which had for a moment staggered under
this blow, and his strength, which had failed at the words
of the old man, he said, "Oh, I have saved you once, and I
will save you a second time" And raising the foot of the
bed, he drew out the phial, still a third filled with the
red liquor.
"See," he exclaimed, "there remains still some of the magic
draught. Quick, quick tell me what I must do this time are
there any fresh instructions? Speak, my friend I listen."
"There is not a hope," replied Faria, shaking his head, "but
no matter God wills it that man whom he has created, and in
whose heart he has so profoundly rooted the love of life,
should do all in his power to preserve that existence,
which, however painful it may be, is yet always so dear."
"Oh, yes, yes" exclaimed Dantes "and I tell you that I
will save you yet."
"Well, then, try. The cold gains upon me. I feel the blood
flowing towards my brain. These horrible chills, which make
my teeth chatter and seem to dislocate my bones, begin to
pervade my whole frame in five minutes the malady will
reach its height, and in a quarter of an hour there will be
nothing left of me but a corpse."
"Oh" exclaimed Dantes, his heart wrung with anguish.
"Do as you did before, only do not wait so long, all the
springs of life are now exhausted in me, and death," he
continued, looking at his paralyzed arm and leg, "has but
half its work to do. If, after having made me swallow twelve
drops instead of ten, you see that I do not recover, then
pour the rest down my throat. Now lift me on my bed, for I
can no longer support myself."
Edmond took the old man in his arms, and laid him on the
bed.
"And now, my dear friend," said Faria, "sole consolation of
my wretched existence,  you whom heaven gave me somewhat
late, but still gave me, a priceless gift, and for which I
am most grateful,  at the moment of separating from you
forever, I wish you all the happiness and all the prosperity
you so well deserve. My son, I bless thee" The young man
cast himself on his knees, leaning his head against the old
man's bed.
"Listen, now, to what I say in this my dying moment. The
treasure of the Spadas exists. God grants me the boon of
vision unrestricted by time or space. I see it in the depths
of the inner cavern. My eyes pierce the inmost recesses of
the earth, and are dazzled at the sight of so much riches.
If you do escape, remember that the poor abbe, whom all the
world called mad, was not so. Hasten to Monte Cristo 
avail yourself of the fortune  for you have indeed
suffered long enough." A violent convulsion attacked the old
man. Dantes raised his head and saw Faria's eyes injected
with blood. It seemed as if a flow of blood had ascended
from the chest to the head.
"Adieu, adieu" murmured the old man, clasping Edmond's hand
convulsively  "adieu"
"Oh, no,  no, not yet," he cried "do not forsake me Oh,
succor him Help  help  help"
"Hush  hush" murmured the dying man, "that they may not
separate us if you save me"
"You are right. Oh, yes, yes be assured I shall save you
Besides, although you suffer much, you do not seem to be in
such agony as you were before."
"Do not mistake. I suffer less because there is in me less
strength to endure. At your age we have faith in life it is
the privilege of youth to believe and hope, but old men see
death more clearly. Oh, 'tis here  'tis here  'tis over
my sight is gone  my senses fail Your hand, Dantes
Adieu  adieu" And raising himself by a final effort, in
which he summoned all his faculties, he said,  "Monte
Cristo, forget not Monte Cristo" And he fell back on the
bed. The crisis was terrible, and a rigid form with twisted
limbs, swollen eyelids, and lips flecked with bloody foam,
lay on the bed of torture, in place of the intellectual
being who so lately rested there.
Dantes took the lamp, placed it on a projecting stone above
the bed, whence its tremulous light fell with strange and
fantastic ray on the distorted countenance and motionless,
stiffened body. With steady gaze he awaited confidently the
moment for administering the restorative.
When he believed that the right moment had arrived, he took
the knife, pried open the teeth, which offered less
resistance than before, counted one after the other twelve
drops, and watched the phial contained, perhaps, twice as
much more. He waited ten minutes, a quarter of an hour, half
an hour,  no change took place. Trembling, his hair erect,
his brow bathed with perspiration, he counted the seconds by
the beating of his heart. Then he thought it was time to
make the last trial, and he put the phial to the purple lips
of Faria, and without having occasion to force open his
jaws, which had remained extended, he poured the whole of
the liquid down his throat.
The draught produced a galvanic effect, a violent trembling
pervaded the old man's limbs, his eyes opened until it was
fearful to gaze upon them, he heaved a sigh which resembled
a shriek, and then his convulsed body returned gradually to
its former immobility, the eyes remaining open.
Half an hour, an hour, an hour and a half elapsed, and
during this period of anguish, Edmond leaned over his
friend, his hand applied to his heart, and felt the body
gradually grow cold, and the heart's pulsation become more
and more deep and dull, until at length it stopped the last
movement of the heart ceased, the face became livid, the
eyes remained open, but the eyeballs were glazed. It was six
o'clock in the morning, the dawn was just breaking, and its
feeble ray came into the dungeon, and paled the ineffectual
light of the lamp. Strange shadows passed over the
countenance of the dead man, and at times gave it the
appearance of life. While the struggle between day and night
lasted, Dantes still doubted but as soon as the daylight
gained the preeminence, he saw that he was alone with a
corpse. Then an invincible and extreme terror seized upon
him, and he dared not again press the hand that hung out of
bed, he dared no longer to gaze on those fixed and vacant
eyes, which he tried many times to close, but in vain 
they opened again as soon as shut. He extinguished the lamp,
carefully concealed it, and then went away, closing as well
as he could the entrance to the secret passage by the large
stone as he descended.
It was time, for the jailer was coming. On this occasion he
began his rounds at Dantes' cell, and on leaving him he went
on to Faria's dungeon, taking thither breakfast and some
linen. Nothing betokened that the man know anything of what
had occurred. He went on his way.
Dantes was then seized with an indescribable desire to know
what was going on in the dungeon of his unfortunate friend.
He therefore returned by the subterraneous gallery, and
arrived in time to hear the exclamations of the turnkey, who
called out for help. Other turnkeys came, and then was heard
the regular tramp of soldiers. Last of all came the
governor.
Edmond heard the creaking of the bed as they moved the
corpse, heard the voice of the governor, who asked them to
throw water on the dead man's face and seeing that, in
spite of this application, the prisoner did not recover,
they sent for the doctor. The governor then went out, and
words of pity fell on Dantes' listening ears, mingled with
brutal laughter.
"Well, well," said one, "the madman has gone to look after
his treasure. Good journey to him"
"With all his millions, he will not have enough to pay for
his shroud" said another.
"Oh," added a third voice, "the shrouds of the Chateau d'If
are not dear"
"Perhaps," said one of the previous speakers, "as he was a
churchman, they may go to some expense in his behalf."
"They may give him the honors of the sack."
Edmond did not lose a word, but comprehended very little of
what was said. The voices soon ceased, and it seemed to him
as if every one had left the cell. Still he dared not to
enter, as they might have left some turnkey to watch the
dead. He remained, therefore, mute and motionless, hardly
venturing to breathe. At the end of an hour, he heard a
faint noise, which increased. It was the governor who
returned, followed by the doctor and other attendants. There
was a moment's silence,  it was evident that the doctor
was examining the dead body. The inquiries soon commenced.
The doctor analyzed the symptoms of the malady to which the
prisoner had succumbed, and declared that he was dead.
Questions and answers followed in a nonchalant manner that
made Dantes indignant, for he felt that all the world should
have for the poor abbe a love and respect equal to his own.
"I am very sorry for what you tell me," said the governor,
replying to the assurance of the doctor, "that the old man
is really dead for he was a quiet, inoffensive prisoner,
happy in his folly, and required no watching."
"Ah," added the turnkey, "there was no occasion for watching
him he would have stayed here fifty years, I'll answer for
it, without any attempt to escape."
"Still," said the governor, "I believe it will be requisite,
notwithstanding your certainty, and not that I doubt your
science, but in discharge of my official duty, that we
should be perfectly assured that the prisoner is dead."
There was a moment of complete silence, during which Dantes,
still listening, knew that the doctor was examining the
corpse a second time.
"You may make your mind easy," said the doctor "he is dead.
I will answer for that."
"You know, sir," said the governor, persisting, "that we are
not content in such cases as this with such a simple
examination. In spite of all appearances, be so kind,
therefore, as to finish your duty by fulfilling the
formalities described by law."
"Let the irons be heated," said the doctor "but really it
is a useless precaution." This order to heat the irons made
Dantes shudder. He heard hasty steps, the creaking of a
door, people going and coming, and some minutes afterwards a
turnkey entered, saying, 
"Here is the brazier, lighted." There was a moment's
silence, and then was heard the crackling of burning flesh,
of which the peculiar and nauseous smell penetrated even
behind the wall where Dantes was listening in horror. The
perspiration poured forth upon the young man's brow, and he
felt as if he should faint.
"You see, sir, he is really dead," said the doctor "this
burn in the heel is decisive. The poor fool is cured of his
folly, and delivered from his captivity."
"Wasn't his name Faria?" inquired one of the officers who
accompanied the governor.
"Yes, sir and, as he said, it was an ancient name. He was,
too, very learned, and rational enough on all points which
did not relate to his treasure but on that, indeed, he was
intractable."
"It is the sort of malady which we call monomania," said the
doctor.
"You had never anything to complain of?" said the governor
to the jailer who had charge of the abbe.
"Never, sir," replied the jailer, "never on the contrary,
he sometimes amused me very much by telling me stories. One
day, too, when my wife was ill, he gave me a prescription
which cured her."
"Ah, ah" said the doctor, "I did not know that I had a
rival but I hope, governor, that you will show him all
proper respect."
"Yes, yes, make your mind easy, he shall be decently
interred in the newest sack we can find. Will that satisfy
you?"
"Must this last formality take place in your presence, sir?"
inquired a turnkey.
"Certainly. But make haste  I cannot stay here all day."
Other footsteps, going and coming, were now heard, and a
moment afterwards the noise of rustling canvas reached
Dantes' ears, the bed creaked, and the heavy footfall of a
man who lifts a weight sounded on the floor then the bed
again creaked under the weight deposited upon it.
"This evening," said the governor.
"Will there be any mass?" asked one of the attendants.
"That is impossible," replied the governor. "The chaplain of
the chateau came to me yesterday to beg for leave of
absence, in order to take a trip to Hyeres for a week. I
told him I would attend to the prisoners in his absence. If
the poor abbe had not been in such a hurry, he might have
had his requiem."
"Pooh, pooh" said the doctor, with the impiety usual in
persons of his profession "he is a churchman. God will
respect his profession, and not give the devil the wicked
delight of sending him a priest." A shout of laughter
followed this brutal jest. Meanwhile the operation of
putting the body in the sack was going on.
"This evening," said the governor, when the task was ended.
"At what hour?" inquired a turnkey.
"Why, about ten or eleven o'clock."
"Shall we watch by the corpse?"
"Of what use would it be? Shut the dungeon as if he were
alive  that is all." Then the steps retreated, and the
voices died away in the distance the noise of the door,
with its creaking hinges and bolts ceased, and a silence
more sombre than that of solitude ensued,  the silence of
death, which was allpervasive, and struck its icy chill to
the very soul of Dantes. Then he raised the flagstone
cautiously with his head, and looked carefully around the
chamber. It was empty, and Dantes emerged from the tunnel.
Chapter 
The Cemetery of the Chateau D'If.
On the bed, at full length, and faintly illuminated by the
pale light that came from the window, lay a sack of canvas,
and under its rude folds was stretched a long and stiffened
form it was Faria's last windingsheet,  a windingsheet
which, as the turnkey said, cost so little. Everything was
in readiness. A barrier had been placed between Dantes and
his old friend. No longer could Edmond look into those
wideopen eyes which had seemed to be penetrating the
mysteries of death no longer could he clasp the hand which
had done so much to make his existence blessed. Faria, the
beneficent and cheerful companion, with whom he was
accustomed to live so intimately, no longer breathed. He
seated himself on the edge of that terrible bed, and fell
into melancholy and gloomy revery.
Alone  he was alone again  again condemned to silence 
again face to face with nothingness Alone  never again
to see the face, never again to hear the voice of the only
human being who united him to earth Was not Faria's fate
the better, after all  to solve the problem of life at its
source, even at the risk of horrible suffering? The idea of
suicide, which his friend had driven away and kept away by
his cheerful presence, now hovered like a phantom over the
abbe's dead body.
"If I could die," he said, "I should go where he goes, and
should assuredly find him again. But how to die? It is very
easy," he went on with a smile "I will remain here, rush on
the first person that opens the door, strangle him, and then
they will guillotine me." But excessive grief is like a
storm at sea, where the frail bark is tossed from the depths
to the top of the wave. Dantes recoiled from the idea of so
infamous a death, and passed suddenly from despair to an
ardent desire for life and liberty.
"Die? oh, no," he exclaimed  "not die now, after having
lived and suffered so long and so much Die? yes, had I died
years ago but now to die would be, indeed, to give way to
the sarcasm of destiny. No, I want to live I shall struggle
to the very last I will yet win back the happiness of which
I have been deprived. Before I die I must not forget that I
have my executioners to punish, and perhaps, too, who knows,
some friends to reward. Yet they will forget me here, and I
shall die in my dungeon like Faria." As he said this, he
became silent and gazed straight before him like one
overwhelmed with a strange and amazing thought. Suddenly he
arose, lifted his hand to his brow as if his brain wore
giddy, paced twice or thrice round the dungeon, and then
paused abruptly by the bed.
"Just God" he muttered, "whence comes this thought? Is it
from thee? Since none but the dead pass freely from this
dungeon, let me take the place of the dead" Without giving
himself time to reconsider his decision, and, indeed, that
he might not allow his thoughts to be distracted from his
desperate resolution, he bent over the appalling shroud,
opened it with the knife which Faria had made, drew the
corpse from the sack, and bore it along the tunnel to his
own chamber, laid it on his couch, tied around its head the
rag he wore at night around his own, covered it with his
counterpane, once again kissed the icecold brow, and tried
vainly to close the resisting eyes, which glared horribly,
turned the head towards the wall, so that the jailer might,
when he brought the evening meal, believe that he was
asleep, as was his frequent custom entered the tunnel
again, drew the bed against the wall, returned to the other
cell, took from the hidingplace the needle and thread,
flung off his rags, that they might feel only naked flesh
beneath the coarse canvas, and getting inside the sack,
placed himself in the posture in which the dead body had
been laid, and sewed up the mouth of the sack from the
inside.
He would have been discovered by the beating of his heart,
if by any mischance the jailers had entered at that moment.
Dantes might have waited until the evening visit was over,
but he was afraid that the governor would change his mind,
and order the dead body to be removed earlier. In that case
his last hope would have been destroyed. Now his plans were
fully made, and this is what he intended to do. If while he
was being carried out the gravediggers should discover that
they were bearing a live instead of a dead body, Dantes did
not intend to give them time to recognize him, but with a
sudden cut of the knife, he meant to open the sack from top
to bottom, and, profiting by their alarm, escape if they
tried to catch him, he would use his knife to better
purpose.
If they took him to the cemetery and laid him in a grave, he
would allow himself to be covered with earth, and then, as
it was night, the gravediggers could scarcely have turned
their backs before he would have worked his way through the
yielding soil and escaped. He hoped that the weight of earth
would not be so great that he could not overcome it. If he
was detected in this and the earth proved too heavy, he
would be stifled, and then  so much the better, all would
be over. Dantes had not eaten since the preceding evening,
but he had not thought of hunger, nor did he think of it
now. His situation was too precarious to allow him even time
to reflect on any thought but one.
The first risk that Dantes ran was, that the jailer, when he
brought him his supper at seven o'clock, might perceive the
change that had been made fortunately, twenty times at
least, from misanthropy or fatigue, Dantes had received his
jailer in bed, and then the man placed his bread and soup on
the table, and went away without saying a word. This time
the jailer might not be as silent as usual, but speak to
Dantes, and seeing that he received no reply, go to the bed,
and thus discover all.
When seven o'clock came, Dantes' agony really began. His
hand placed upon his heart was unable to redress its
throbbings, while, with the other he wiped the perspiration
from his temples. From time to time chills ran through his
whole body, and clutched his heart in a grasp of ice. Then
he thought he was going to die. Yet the hours passed on
without any unusual disturbance, and Dantes knew that he had
escaped the first peril. It was a good augury. At length,
about the hour the governor had appointed, footsteps were
heard on the stairs. Edmond felt that the moment had
arrived, summoned up all his courage, held his breath, and
would have been happy if at the same time he could have
repressed the throbbing of his veins. The footsteps  they
were double  paused at the door  and Dantes guessed that
the two gravediggers had come to seek him  this idea was
soon converted into certainty, when he heard the noise they
made in putting down the handbier. The door opened, and a
dim light reached Dantes' eyes through the coarse sack that
covered him he saw two shadows approach his bed, a third
remaining at the door with a torch in its hand. The two men,
approaching the ends of the bed, took the sack by its
extremities.
"He's heavy though for an old and thin man," said one, as he
raised the head.
"They say every year adds half a pound to the weight of the
bones," said another, lifting the feet.
"Have you tied the knot?" inquired the first speaker.
"What would be the use of carrying so much more weight?" was
the reply, "I can do that when we get there."
"Yes, you're right," replied the companion.
"What's the knot for?" thought Dantes.
They deposited the supposed corpse on the bier. Edmond
stiffened himself in order to play the part of a dead man,
and then the party, lighted by the man with the torch, who
went first, ascended the stairs. Suddenly he felt the fresh
and sharp night air, and Dantes knew that the mistral was
blowing. It was a sensation in which pleasure and pain were
strangely mingled. The bearers went on for twenty paces,
then stopped, putting the bier down on the ground. One of
them went away, and Dantes heard his shoes striking on the
pavement.
"Where am I?" he asked himself.
"Really, he is by no means a light load" said the other
bearer, sitting on the edge of the handbarrow. Dantes'
first impulse was to escape, but fortunately he did not
attempt it.
"Give us a light," said the other bearer, "or I shall never
find what I am looking for." The man with the torch
complied, although not asked in the most polite terms.
"What can he be looking for?" thought Edmond. "The spade,
perhaps." An exclamation of satisfaction indicated that the
gravedigger had found the object of his search. "Here it is
at last," he said, "not without some trouble though."
"Yes," was the answer, "but it has lost nothing by waiting."
As he said this, the man came towards Edmond, who heard a
heavy metallic substance laid down beside him, and at the
same moment a cord was fastened round his feet with sudden
and painful violence.
"Well, have you tied the knot?" inquired the gravedigger,
who was looking on.
"Yes, and pretty tight too, I can tell you," was the answer.
"Move on, then." And the bier was lifted once more, and they
proceeded.
They advanced fifty paces farther, and then stopped to open
a door, then went forward again. The noise of the waves
dashing against the rocks on which the chateau is built,
reached Dantes' ear distinctly as they went forward.
"Bad weather" observed one of the bearers "not a pleasant
night for a dip in the sea."
"Why, yes, the abbe runs a chance of being wet," said the
other and then there was a burst of brutal laughter. Dantes
did not comprehend the jest, but his hair stood erect on his
head.
"Well, here we are at last," said one of them. "A little
farther  a little farther," said the other. "You know very
well that the last was stopped on his way, dashed on the
rocks, and the governor told us next day that we were
careless fellows."
They ascended five or six more steps, and then Dantes felt
that they took him, one by the head and the other by the
heels, and swung him to and fro. "One" said the
gravediggers, "two three" And at the same instant Dantes
felt himself flung into the air like a wounded bird,
falling, falling, with a rapidity that made his blood
curdle. Although drawn downwards by the heavy weight which
hastened his rapid descent, it seemed to him as if the fall
lasted for a century.
At last, with a horrible splash, he darted like an arrow
into the icecold water, and as he did so he uttered a
shrill cry, stifled in a moment by his immersion beneath the
waves.
Dantes had been flung into the sea, and was dragged into its
depths by a thirtysix pound shot tied to his feet. The sea
is the cemetery of the Chateau d'If.
Chapter 
The Island of Tiboulen.
Dantes, although stunned and almost suffocated, had
sufficient presence of mind to hold his breath, and as his
right hand prepared as he was for every chance held his
knife open, he rapidly ripped up the sack, extricated his
arm, and then his body but in spite of all his efforts to
free himself from the shot, he felt it dragging him down
still lower. He then bent his body, and by a desperate
effort severed the cord that bound his legs, at the moment
when it seemed as if he were actually strangled. With a
mighty leap he rose to the surface of the sea, while the
shot dragged down to the depths the sack that had so nearly
become his shroud.
Dantes waited only to get breath, and then dived, in order
to avoid being seen. When he arose a second time, he was
fifty paces from where he had first sunk. He saw overhead a
black and tempestuous sky, across which the wind was driving
clouds that occasionally suffered a twinkling star to
appear before him was the vast expanse of waters, sombre
and terrible, whose waves foamed and roared as if before the
approach of a storm. Behind him, blacker than the sea,
blacker than the sky, rose phantomlike the vast stone
structure, whose projecting crags seemed like arms extended
to seize their prey, and on the highest rock was a torch
lighting two figures. He fancied that these two forms were
looking at the sea doubtless these strange gravediggers
had heard his cry. Dantes dived again, and remained a long
time beneath the water. This was an easy feat to him, for he
usually attracted a crowd of spectators in the bay before
the lighthouse at Marseilles when he swam there, and was
unanimously declared to be the best swimmer in the port.
When he came up again the light had disappeared.
He must now get his bearings. Ratonneau and Pomegue are the
nearest islands of all those that surround the Chateau d'If,
but Ratonneau and Pomegue are inhabited, as is also the
islet of Daume. Tiboulen and Lemaire were therefore the
safest for Dantes' venture. The islands of Tiboulen and
Lemaire are a league from the Chateau d'If Dantes,
nevertheless, determined to make for them. But how could he
find his way in the darkness of the night? At this moment he
saw the light of Planier, gleaming in front of him like a
star. By leaving this light on the right, he kept the Island
of Tiboulen a little on the left by turning to the left,
therefore, he would find it. But, as we have said, it was at
least a league from the Chateau d'If to this island. Often
in prison Faria had said to him, when he saw him idle and
inactive, "Dantes, you must not give way to this
listlessness you will be drowned if you seek to escape, and
your strength has not been properly exercised and prepared
for exertion." These words rang in Dantes' ears, even
beneath the waves he hastened to cleave his way through
them to see if he had not lost his strength. He found with
pleasure that his captivity had taken away nothing of his
power, and that he was still master of that element on whose
bosom he had so often sported as a boy.
Fear, that relentless pursuer, clogged Dantes' efforts. He
listened for any sound that might be audible, and every time
that he rose to the top of a wave he scanned the horizon,
and strove to penetrate the darkness. He fancied that every
wave behind him was a pursuing boat, and he redoubled his
exertions, increasing rapidly his distance from the chateau,
but exhausting his strength. He swam on still, and already
the terrible chateau had disappeared in the darkness. He
could not see it, but he felt its presence. An hour passed,
during which Dantes, excited by the feeling of freedom,
continued to cleave the waves. "Let us see," said he, "I
have swum above an hour, but as the wind is against me, that
has retarded my speed however, if I am not mistaken, I must
be close to Tiboulen. But what if I were mistaken?" A
shudder passed over him. He sought to tread water, in order
to rest himself but the sea was too violent, and he felt
that he could not make use of this means of recuperation.
"Well," said he, "I will swim on until I am worn out, or the
cramp seizes me, and then I shall sink" and he struck out
with the energy of despair.
Suddenly the sky seemed to him to become still darker and
more dense, and heavy clouds seemed to sweep down towards
him at the same time he felt a sharp pain in his knee. He
fancied for a moment that he had been shot, and listened for
the report but he heard nothing. Then he put out his hand,
and encountered an obstacle and with another stroke knew
that he had gained the shore.
Before him rose a grotesque mass of rocks, that resembled
nothing so much as a vast fire petrified at the moment of
its most fervent combustion. It was the Island of Tiboulen.
Dantes rose, advanced a few steps, and, with a fervent
prayer of gratitude, stretched himself on the granite, which
seemed to him softer than down. Then, in spite of the wind
and rain, he fell into the deep, sweet sleep of utter
exhaustion. At the expiration of an hour Edmond was awakened
by the roar of thunder. The tempest was let loose and
beating the atmosphere with its mighty wings from time to
time a flash of lightning stretched across the heavens like
a fiery serpent, lighting up the clouds that rolled on in
vast chaotic waves.
Dantes had not been deceived  he had reached the first of
the two islands, which was, in fact, Tiboulen. He knew that
it was barren and without shelter but when the sea became
more calm, he resolved to plunge into its waves again, and
swim to Lemaire, equally arid, but larger, and consequently
better adapted for concealment.
An overhanging rock offered him a temporary shelter, and
scarcely had he availed himself of it when the tempest burst
forth in all its fury. Edmond felt the trembling of the rock
beneath which he lay the waves, dashing themselves against
it, wetted him with their spray. He was safely sheltered,
and yet he felt dizzy in the midst of the warring of the
elements and the dazzling brightness of the lightning. It
seemed to him that the island trembled to its base, and that
it would, like a vessel at anchor, break moorings, and bear
him off into the centre of the storm. He then recollected
that he had not eaten or drunk for fourandtwenty hours. He
extended his hands, and drank greedily of the rainwater that
had lodged in a hollow of the rock.
As he rose, a flash of lightning, that seemed to rive the
remotest heights of heaven, illumined the darkness. By its
light, between the Island of Lemaire and Cape Croiselle, a
quarter of a league distant, Dantes saw a fishingboat
driven rapidly like a spectre before the power of winds and
waves. A second after, he saw it again, approaching with
frightful rapidity. Dantes cried at the top of his voice to
warn them of their danger, but they saw it themselves.
Another flash showed him four men clinging to the shattered
mast and the rigging, while a fifth clung to the broken
rudder.
The men he beheld saw him undoubtedly, for their cries were
carried to his ears by the wind. Above the splintered mast a
sail rent to tatters was waving suddenly the ropes that
still held it gave way, and it disappeared in the darkness
of the night like a vast seabird. At the same moment a
violent crash was heard, and cries of distress. Dantes from
his rocky perch saw the shattered vessel, and among the
fragments the floating forms of the hapless sailors. Then
all was dark again.
Dantes ran down the rocks at the risk of being himself
dashed to pieces he listened, he groped about, but he heard
and saw nothing  the cries had ceased, and the tempest
continued to rage. By degrees the wind abated, vast gray
clouds rolled towards the west, and the blue firmament
appeared studded with bright stars. Soon a red streak became
visible in the horizon, the waves whitened, a light played
over them, and gilded their foaming crests with gold. It was
day.
Dantes stood mute and motionless before this majestic
spectacle, as if he now beheld it for the first time and
indeed since his captivity in the Chateau d'If he had
forgotten that such scenes were ever to be witnessed. He
turned towards the fortress, and looked at both sea and
land. The gloomy building rose from the bosom of the ocean
with imposing majesty and seemed to dominate the scene. It
was about five o'clock. The sea continued to get calmer.
"In two or three hours," thought Dantes, "the turnkey will
enter my chamber, find the body of my poor friend, recognize
it, seek for me in vain, and give the alarm. Then the tunnel
will be discovered the men who cast me into the sea and who
must have heard the cry I uttered, will be questioned. Then
boats filled with armed soldiers will pursue the wretched
fugitive. The cannon will warn every one to refuse shelter
to a man wandering about naked and famished. The police of
Marseilles will be on the alert by land, whilst the governor
pursues me by sea. I am cold, I am hungry. I have lost even
the knife that saved me. O my God, I have suffered enough
surely Have pity on me, and do for me what I am unable to
do for myself."
As Dantes his eyes turned in the direction of the Chateau
d'If uttered this prayer, he saw off the farther point of
the Island of Pomegue a small vessel with lateen sail
skimming the sea like a gull in search of prey and with his
sailor's eye he knew it to be a Genoese tartan. She was
coming out of Marseilles harbor, and was standing out to sea
rapidly, her sharp prow cleaving through the waves. "Oh,"
cried Edmond, "to think that in half an hour I could join
her, did I not fear being questioned, detected, and conveyed
back to Marseilles What can I do? What story can I invent?
under pretext of trading along the coast, these men, who are
in reality smugglers, will prefer selling me to doing a good
action. I must wait. But I cannot I am starving. In a few
hours my strength will be utterly exhausted besides,
perhaps I have not been missed at the fortress. I can pass
as one of the sailors wrecked last night. My story will be
accepted, for there is no one left to contradict me."
As he spoke, Dantes looked toward the spot where the
fishingvessel had been wrecked, and started. The red cap of
one of the sailors hung to a point of the rock and some
timbers that had formed part of the vessel's keel, floated
at the foot of the crag. In an instant Dantes' plan was
formed. He swam to the cap, placed it on his head, seized
one of the timbers, and struck out so as to cut across the
course the vessel was taking.
"I am saved" murmured he. And this conviction restored his
strength.
He soon saw that the vessel, with the wind dead ahead, was
tacking between the Chateau d'If and the tower of Planier.
For an instant he feared lest, instead of keeping in shore,
she should stand out to sea but he soon saw that she would
pass, like most vessels bound for Italy, between the islands
of Jaros and Calaseraigne. However, the vessel and the
swimmer insensibly neared one another, and in one of its
tacks the tartan bore down within a quarter of a mile of
him. He rose on the waves, making signs of distress but no
one on board saw him, and the vessel stood on another tack.
Dantes would have shouted, but he knew that the wind would
drown his voice.
It was then he rejoiced at his precaution in taking the
timber, for without it he would have been unable, perhaps,
to reach the vessel  certainly to return to shore, should
he be unsuccessful in attracting attention.
Dantes, though almost sure as to what course the vessel
would take, had yet watched it anxiously until it tacked and
stood towards him. Then he advanced but before they could
meet, the vessel again changed her course. By a violent
effort he rose half out of the water, waving his cap, and
uttering a loud shout peculiar to sailers. This time he was
both seen and heard, and the tartan instantly steered
towards him. At the same time, he saw they were about to
lower the boat.
An instant after, the boat, rowed by two men, advanced
rapidly towards him. Dantes let go of the timber, which he
now thought to be useless, and swam vigorously to meet them.
But he had reckoned too much upon his strength, and then he
realized how serviceable the timber had been to him. His
arms became stiff, his legs lost their flexibility, and he
was almost breathless.
He shouted again. The two sailors redoubled their efforts,
and one of them cried in Italian, "Courage"
The word reached his ear as a wave which he no longer had
the strength to surmount passed over his head. He rose again
to the surface, struggled with the last desperate effort of
a drowning man, uttered a third cry, and felt himself
sinking, as if the fatal cannon shot were again tied to his
feet. The water passed over his head, and the sky turned
gray. A convulsive movement again brought him to the
surface. He felt himself seized by the hair, then he saw and
heard nothing. He had fainted.
When he opened his eyes Dantes found himself on the deck of
the tartan. His first care was to see what course they were
taking. They were rapidly leaving the Chateau d'If behind.
Dantes was so exhausted that the exclamation of joy he
uttered was mistaken for a sigh.
As we have said, he was lying on the deck. A sailor was
rubbing his limbs with a woollen cloth another, whom he
recognized as the one who had cried out "Courage" held a
gourd full of rum to his mouth while the third, an old
sailer, at once the pilot and captain, looked on with that
egotistical pity men feel for a misfortune that they have
escaped yesterday, and which may overtake them tomorrow.
A few drops of the rum restored suspended animation, while
the friction of his limbs restored their elasticity.
"Who are you?" said the pilot in bad French.
"I am," replied Dantes, in bad Italian, "a Maltese sailor.
We were coming from Syracuse laden with grain. The storm of
last night overtook us at Cape Morgion, and we were wrecked
on these rocks."
"Where do you come from?"
"From these rocks that I had the good luck to cling to while
our captain and the rest of the crew were all lost. I saw
your vessel, and fearful of being left to perish on the
desolate island, I swam off on a piece of wreckage to try
and intercept your course. You have saved my life, and I
thank you," continued Dantes. "I was lost when one of your
sailors caught hold of my hair."
"It was I," said a sailor of a frank and manly appearance
"and it was time, for you were sinking."
"Yes," returned Dantes, holding out his hand, "I thank you
again."
"I almost hesitated, though," replied the sailor "you
looked more like a brigand than an honest man, with your
beard six inches, and your hair a foot long." Dantes
recollected that his hair and beard had not been cut all the
time he was at the Chateau d'If.
"Yes," said he, "I made a vow, to our Lady of the Grotto not
to cut my hair or beard for ten years if I were saved in a
moment of danger but today the vow expires."
"Now what are we to do with you?" said the captain.
"Alas, anything you please. My captain is dead I have
barely escaped but I am a good sailor. Leave me at the
first port you make I shall be sure to find employment."
"Do you know the Mediterranean?"
"I have sailed over it since my childhood."
"You know the best harbors?"
"There are few ports that I could not enter or leave with a
bandage over my eyes."
"I say, captain," said the sailor who had cried "Courage"
to Dantes, "if what he says is true, what hinders his
staying with us?"
"If he says true," said the captain doubtingly. "But in his
present condition he will promise anything, and take his
chance of keeping it afterwards."
"I will do more than I promise," said Dantes.
"We shall see," returned the other, smiling.
"Where are you going?" asked Dantes.
"To Leghorn."
"Then why, instead of tacking so frequently, do you not sail
nearer the wind?"
"Because we should run straight on to the Island of Rion."
"You shall pass it by twenty fathoms."
"Take the helm, and let us see what you know." The young man
took the helm, felt to see if the vessel answered the rudder
promptly and seeing that, without being a firstrate sailer,
she yet was tolerably obedient, 
"To the sheets," said he. The four seamen, who composed the
crew, obeyed, while the pilot looked on. "Haul taut." 
They obeyed.
"Belay." This order was also executed and the vessel
passed, as Dantes had predicted, twenty fathoms to windward.
"Bravo" said the captain.
"Bravo" repeated the sailors. And they all looked with
astonishment at this man whose eye now disclosed an
intelligence and his body a vigor they had not thought him
capable of showing.
"You see," said Dantes, quitting the helm, "I shall be of
some use to you, at least during the voyage. If you do not
want me at Leghorn, you can leave me there, and I will pay
you out of the first wages I get, for my food and the
clothes you lend me."
"Ah," said the captain, "we can agree very well, if you are
reasonable."
"Give me what you give the others, and it will be all
right," returned Dantes.
"That's not fair," said the seaman who had saved Dantes
"for you know more than we do."
"What is that to you, Jacopo?" returned the Captain. "Every
one is free to ask what he pleases."
"That's true," replied Jacopo "I only make a remark."
"Well, you would do much better to find him a jacket and a
pair of trousers, if you have them."
"No," said Jacopo "but I have a shirt and a pair of
trousers."
"That is all I want," interrupted Dantes. Jacopo dived into
the hold and soon returned with what Edmond wanted.
"Now, then, do you wish for anything else?" said the patron.
"A piece of bread and another glass of the capital rum I
tasted, for I have not eaten or drunk for a long time." He
had not tasted food for forty hours. A piece of bread was
brought, and Jacopo offered him the gourd.
"Larboard your helm," cried the captain to the steersman.
Dantes glanced that way as he lifted the gourd to his mouth
then paused with hand in midair.
"Hollo what's the matter at the Chateau d'If?" said the
captain.
A small white cloud, which had attracted Dantes' attention,
crowned the summit of the bastion of the Chateau d'If. At
the same moment the faint report of a gun was heard. The
sailors looked at one another.
"What is this?" asked the captain.
"A prisoner has escaped from the Chateau d'If, and they are
firing the alarm gun," replied Dantes. The captain glanced
at him, but he had lifted the rum to his lips and was
drinking it with so much composure, that suspicions, if the
captain had any, died away.
"At any rate," murmured he, "if it be, so much the better,
for I have made a rare acquisition." Under pretence of being
fatigued, Dantes asked to take the helm the steersman, glad
to be relieved, looked at the captain, and the latter by a
sign indicated that he might abandon it to his new comrade.
Dantes could thus keep his eyes on Marseilles.
"What is the day of the month?" asked he of Jacopo, who sat
down beside him.
"The th of February."
"In what year?"
"In what year  you ask me in what year?"
"Yes," replied the young man, "I ask you in what year"
"You have forgotten then?"
"I got such a fright last night," replied Dantes, smiling,
"that I have almost lost my memory. I ask you what year is
it?"
"The year ," returned Jacopo. It was fourteen years day
for day since Dantes' arrest. He was nineteen when he
entered the Chateau d'If he was thirtythree when he
escaped. A sorrowful smile passed over his face he asked
himself what had become of Mercedes, who must believe him
dead. Then his eyes lighted up with hatred as he thought of
the three men who had caused him so long and wretched a
captivity. He renewed against Danglars, Fernand, and
Villefort the oath of implacable vengeance he had made in
his dungeon. This oath was no longer a vain menace for the
fastest sailer in the Mediterranean would have been unable
to overtake the little tartan, that with every stitch of
canvas set was flying before the wind to Leghorn.
Chapter 
The Smugglers.
Dantes had not been a day on board before he had a very
clear idea of the men with whom his lot had been cast.
Without having been in the school of the Abbe Faria, the
worthy master of The Young Amelia the name of the Genoese
tartan knew a smattering of all the tongues spoken on the
shores of that large lake called the Mediterranean, from the
Arabic to the Provencal, and this, while it spared him
interpreters, persons always troublesome and frequently
indiscreet, gave him great facilities of communication,
either with the vessels he met at sea, with the small boats
sailing along the coast, or with the people without name,
country, or occupation, who are always seen on the quays of
seaports, and who live by hidden and mysterious means which
we must suppose to be a direct gift of providence, as they
have no visible means of support. It is fair to assume that
Dantes was on board a smuggler.
At first the captain had received Dantes on board with a
certain degree of distrust. He was very well known to the
customs officers of the coast and as there was between
these worthies and himself a perpetual battle of wits, he
had at first thought that Dantes might be an emissary of
these industrious guardians of rights and duties, who
perhaps employed this ingenious means of learning some of
the secrets of his trade. But the skilful manner in which
Dantes had handled the lugger had entirely reassured him
and then, when he saw the light plume of smoke floating
above the bastion of the Chateau d'If, and heard the distant
report, he was instantly struck with the idea that he had on
board his vessel one whose coming and going, like that of
kings, was accompanied with salutes of artillery. This made
him less uneasy, it must be owned, than if the newcomer had
proved to be a customs officer but this supposition also
disappeared like the first, when he beheld the perfect
tranquillity of his recruit.
Edmond thus had the advantage of knowing what the owner was,
without the owner knowing who he was and however the old
sailor and his crew tried to "pump" him, they extracted
nothing more from him he gave accurate descriptions of
Naples and Malta, which he knew as well as Marseilles, and
held stoutly to his first story. Thus the Genoese, subtle as
he was, was duped by Edmond, in whose favor his mild
demeanor, his nautical skill, and his admirable
dissimulation, pleaded. Moreover, it is possible that the
Genoese was one of those shrewd persons who know nothing but
what they should know, and believe nothing but what they
should believe.
In this state of mutual understanding, they reached Leghorn.
Here Edmond was to undergo another trial he was to find out
whether he could recognize himself, as he had not seen his
own face for fourteen years. He had preserved a tolerably
good remembrance of what the youth had been, and was now to
find out what the man had become. His comrades believed that
his vow was fulfilled. As he had twenty times touched at
Leghorn, he remembered a barber in St. Ferdinand Street he
went there to have his beard and hair cut. The barber gazed
in amazement at this man with the long, thick and black hair
and beard, which gave his head the appearance of one of
Titian's portraits. At this period it was not the fashion to
wear so large a beard and hair so long now a barber would
only be surprised if a man gifted with such advantages
should consent voluntarily to deprive himself of them. The
Leghorn barber said nothing and went to work.
When the operation was concluded, and Edmond felt that his
chin was completely smooth, and his hair reduced to its
usual length, he asked for a handglass. He was now, as we
have said, threeandthirty years of age, and his fourteen
years' imprisonment had produced a great transformation in
his appearance. Dantes had entered the Chateau d'If with the
round, open, smiling face of a young and happy man, with
whom the early paths of life have been smooth, and who
anticipates a future corresponding with his past. This was
now all changed. The oval face was lengthened, his smiling
mouth had assumed the firm and marked lines which betoken
resolution his eyebrows were arched beneath a brow furrowed
with thought his eyes were full of melancholy, and from
their depths occasionally sparkled gloomy fires of
misanthropy and hatred his complexion, so long kept from
the sun, had now that pale color which produces, when the
features are encircled with black hair, the aristocratic
beauty of the man of the north the profound learning he had
acquired had besides diffused over his features a refined
intellectual expression and he had also acquired, being
naturally of a goodly stature, that vigor which a frame
possesses which has so long concentrated all its force
within itself.
To the elegance of a nervous and slight form had succeeded
the solidity of a rounded and muscular figure. As to his
voice, prayers, sobs, and imprecations had changed it so
that at times it was of a singularly penetrating sweetness,
and at others rough and almost hoarse. Moreover, from being
so long in twilight or darkness, his eyes had acquired the
faculty of distinguishing objects in the night, common to
the hyena and the wolf. Edmond smiled when he beheld
himself it was impossible that his best friend  if,
indeed, he had any friend left  could recognize him he
could not recognize himself.
The master of The Young Amelia, who was very desirous of
retaining amongst his crew a man of Edmond's value, had
offered to advance him funds out of his future profits,
which Edmond had accepted. His next care on leaving the
barber's who had achieved his first metamorphosis was to
enter a shop and buy a complete sailor's suit  a garb, as
we all know, very simple, and consisting of white trousers,
a striped shirt, and a cap. It was in this costume, and
bringing back to Jacopo the shirt and trousers he had lent
him, that Edmond reappeared before the captain of the
lugger, who had made him tell his story over and over again
before he could believe him, or recognize in the neat and
trim sailor the man with thick and matted beard, hair
tangled with seaweed, and body soaking in seabrine, whom he
had picked up naked and nearly drowned. Attracted by his
prepossessing appearance, he renewed his offers of an
engagement to Dantes but Dantes, who had his own projects,
would not agree for a longer time than three months.
The Young Amelia had a very active crew, very obedient to
their captain, who lost as little time as possible. He had
scarcely been a week at Leghorn before the hold of his
vessel was filled with printed muslins, contraband cottons,
English powder, and tobacco on which the excise had
forgotten to put its mark. The master was to get all this
out of Leghorn free of duties, and land it on the shores of
Corsica, where certain speculators undertook to forward the
cargo to France. They sailed Edmond was again cleaving the
azure sea which had been the first horizon of his youth, and
which he had so often dreamed of in prison. He left Gorgone
on his right and La Pianosa on his left, and went towards
the country of Paoli and Napoleon. The next morning going on
deck, as he always did at an early hour, the patron found
Dantes leaning against the bulwarks gazing with intense
earnestness at a pile of granite rocks, which the rising sun
tinged with rosy light. It was the Island of Monte Cristo.
The Young Amelia left it threequarters of a league to the
larboard, and kept on for Corsica.
Dantes thought, as they passed so closely to the island
whose name was so interesting to him, that he had only to
leap into the sea and in half an hour be at the promised
land. But then what could he do without instruments to
discover his treasure, without arms to defend himself?
Besides, what would the sailors say? What would the patron
think? He must wait.
Fortunately, Dantes had learned how to wait he had waited
fourteen years for his liberty, and now he was free he could
wait at least six months or a year for wealth. Would he not
have accepted liberty without riches if it had been offered
to him? Besides, were not those riches chimerical? 
offspring of the brain of the poor Abbe Faria, had they not
died with him? It is true, the letter of the Cardinal Spada
was singularly circumstantial, and Dantes repeated it to
himself, from one end to the other, for he had not forgotten
a word.
Evening came, and Edmond saw the island tinged with the
shades of twilight, and then disappear in the darkness from
all eyes but his own, for he, with vision accustomed to the
gloom of a prison, continued to behold it last of all, for
he remained alone upon deck. The next morn broke off the
coast of Aleria all day they coasted, and in the evening
saw fires lighted on land the position of these was no
doubt a signal for landing, for a ship's lantern was hung up
at the masthead instead of the streamer, and they came to
within a gunshot of the shore. Dantes noticed that the
captain of The Young Amelia had, as he neared the land,
mounted two small culverins, which, without making much
noise, can throw a four ounce ball a thousand paces or so.
But on this occasion the precaution was superfluous, and
everything proceeded with the utmost smoothness and
politeness. Four shallops came off with very little noise
alongside the lugger, which, no doubt, in acknowledgement of
the compliment, lowered her own shallop into the sea, and
the five boats worked so well that by two o'clock in the
morning all the cargo was out of The Young Amelia and on
terra firma. The same night, such a man of regularity was
the patron of The Young Amelia, the profits were divided,
and each man had a hundred Tuscan livres, or about eighty
francs. But the voyage was not ended. They turned the
bowsprit towards Sardinia, where they intended to take in a
cargo, which was to replace what had been discharged. The
second operation was as successful as the first, The Young
Amelia was in luck. This new cargo was destined for the
coast of the Duchy of Lucca, and consisted almost entirely
of Havana cigars, sherry, and Malaga wines.
There they had a bit of a skirmish in getting rid of the
duties the excise was, in truth, the everlasting enemy of
the patron of The Young Amelia. A customs officer was laid
low, and two sailors wounded Dantes was one of the latter,
a ball having touched him in the left shoulder. Dantes was
almost glad of this affray, and almost pleased at being
wounded, for they were rude lessons which taught him with
what eye he could view danger, and with what endurance he
could bear suffering. He had contemplated danger with a
smile, and when wounded had exclaimed with the great
philosopher, "Pain, thou art not an evil." He had, moreover,
looked upon the customs officer wounded to death, and,
whether from heat of blood produced by the encounter, or the
chill of human sentiment, this sight had made but slight
impression upon him. Dantes was on the way he desired to
follow, and was moving towards the end he wished to achieve
his heart was in a fair way of petrifying in his bosom.
Jacopo, seeing him fall, had believed him killed, and
rushing towards him raised him up, and then attended to him
with all the kindness of a devoted comrade.
This world was not then so good as Doctor Pangloss believed
it, neither was it so wicked as Dantes thought it, since
this man, who had nothing to expect from his comrade but the
inheritance of his share of the prizemoney, manifested so
much sorrow when he saw him fall. Fortunately, as we have
said, Edmond was only wounded, and with certain herbs
gathered at certain seasons, and sold to the smugglers by
the old Sardinian women, the wound soon closed. Edmond then
resolved to try Jacopo, and offered him in return for his
attention a share of his prizemoney, but Jacopo refused it
indignantly.
As a result of the sympathetic devotion which Jacopo had
from the first bestowed on Edmond, the latter was moved to a
certain degree of affection. But this sufficed for Jacopo,
who instinctively felt that Edmond had a right to
superiority of position  a superiority which Edmond had
concealed from all others. And from this time the kindness
which Edmond showed him was enough for the brave seaman.
Then in the long days on board ship, when the vessel,
gliding on with security over the azure sea, required no
care but the hand of the helmsman, thanks to the favorable
winds that swelled her sails, Edmond, with a chart in his
hand, became the instructor of Jacopo, as the poor Abbe
Faria had been his tutor. He pointed out to him the bearings
of the coast, explained to him the variations of the
compass, and taught him to read in that vast book opened
over our heads which they call heaven, and where God writes
in azure with letters of diamonds. And when Jacopo inquired
of him, "What is the use of teaching all these things to a
poor sailor like me?" Edmond replied, "Who knows? You may
one day be the captain of a vessel. Your fellowcountryman,
Bonaparte, became emperor." We had forgotten to say that
Jacopo was a Corsican.
Two months and a half elapsed in these trips, and Edmond had
become as skilful a coaster as he had been a hardy seaman
he had formed an acquaintance with all the smugglers on the
coast, and learned all the Masonic signs by which these half
pirates recognize each other. He had passed and repassed
his Island of Monte Cristo twenty times, but not once had he
found an opportunity of landing there. He then formed a
resolution. As soon as his engagement with the patron of The
Young Amelia ended, he would hire a small vessel on his own
account  for in his several voyages he had amassed a
hundred piastres  and under some pretext land at the
Island of Monte Cristo. Then he would be free to make his
researches, not perhaps entirely at liberty, for he would be
doubtless watched by those who accompanied him. But in this
world we must risk something. Prison had made Edmond
prudent, and he was desirous of running no risk whatever.
But in vain did he rack his imagination fertile as it was,
he could not devise any plan for reaching the island without
companionship.
Dantes was tossed about on these doubts and wishes, when the
patron, who had great confidence in him, and was very
desirous of retaining him in his service, took him by the
arm one evening and led him to a tavern on the Via del'
Oglio, where the leading smugglers of Leghorn used to
congregate and discuss affairs connected with their trade.
Already Dantes had visited this maritime Bourse two or three
times, and seeing all these hardy freetraders, who supplied
the whole coast for nearly two hundred leagues in extent, he
had asked himself what power might not that man attain who
should give the impulse of his will to all these contrary
and diverging minds. This time it was a great matter that
was under discussion, connected with a vessel laden with
Turkey carpets, stuffs of the Levant, and cashmeres. It was
necessary to find some neutral ground on which an exchange
could be made, and then to try and land these goods on the
coast of France. If the venture was successful the profit
would be enormous, there would be a gain of fifty or sixty
piastres each for the crew.
The patron of The Young Amelia proposed as a place of
landing the Island of Monte Cristo, which being completely
deserted, and having neither soldiers nor revenue officers,
seemed to have been placed in the midst of the ocean since
the time of the heathen Olympus by Mercury, the god of
merchants and robbers, classes of mankind which we in modern
times have separated if not made distinct, but which
antiquity appears to have included in the same category. At
the mention of Monte Cristo Dantes started with joy he rose
to conceal his emotion, and took a turn around the smoky
tavern, where all the languages of the known world were
jumbled in a lingua franca. When he again joined the two
persons who had been discussing the matter, it had been
decided that they should touch at Monte Cristo and set out
on the following night. Edmond, being consulted, was of
opinion that the island afforded every possible security,
and that great enterprises to be well done should be done
quickly. Nothing then was altered in the plan, and orders
were given to get under weigh next night, and, wind and
weather permitting, to make the neutral island by the
following day.
Chapter 
The Island of Monte Cristo.
Thus, at length, by one of the unexpected strokes of fortune
which sometimes befall those who have for a long time been
the victims of an evil destiny, Dantes was about to secure
the opportunity he wished for, by simple and natural means,
and land on the island without incurring any suspicion. One
night more and he would be on his way.
The night was one of feverish distraction, and in its
progress visions good and evil passed through Dantes' mind.
If he closed his eyes, he saw Cardinal Spada's letter
written on the wall in characters of flame  if he slept
for a moment the wildest dreams haunted his brain. He
ascended into grottos paved with emeralds, with panels of
rubies, and the roof glowing with diamond stalactites.
Pearls fell drop by drop, as subterranean waters filter in
their caves. Edmond, amazed, wonderstruck, filled his
pockets with the radiant gems and then returned to daylight,
when be discovered that his prizes had all changed into
common pebbles. He then endeavored to reenter the
marvellous grottos, but they had suddenly receded, and now
the path became a labyrinth, and then the entrance vanished,
and in vain did he tax his memory for the magic and
mysterious word which opened the splendid caverns of Ali
Baba to the Arabian fisherman. All was useless, the treasure
disappeared, and had again reverted to the genii from whom
for a moment he had hoped to carry it off. The day came at
length, and was almost as feverish as the night had been,
but it brought reason to the aid of imagination, and Dantes
was then enabled to arrange a plan which had hitherto been
vague and unsettled in his brain. Night came, and with it
the preparation for departure, and these preparations served
to conceal Dantes' agitation. He had by degrees assumed such
authority over his companions that he was almost like a
commander on board and as his orders were always clear,
distinct, and easy of execution, his comrades obeyed him
with celerity and pleasure.
The old patron did not interfere, for he too had recognized
the superiority of Dantes over the crew and himself. He saw
in the young man his natural successor, and regretted that
he had not a daughter, that he might have bound Edmond to
him by a more secure alliance. At seven o'clock in the
evening all was ready, and at ten minutes past seven they
doubled the lighthouse just as the beacon was kindled. The
sea was calm, and, with a fresh breeze from the southeast,
they sailed beneath a bright blue sky, in which God also
lighted up in turn his beacon lights, each of which is a
world. Dantes told them that all hands might turn in, and he
would take the helm. When the Maltese for so they called
Dantes had said this, it was sufficient, and all went to
their bunks contentedly. This frequently happened. Dantes,
cast from solitude into the world, frequently experienced an
imperious desire for solitude and what solitude is more
complete, or more poetical, than that of a ship floating in
isolation on the sea during the obscurity of the night, in
the silence of immensity, and under the eye of heaven?
Now this solitude was peopled with his thoughts, the night
lighted up by his illusions, and the silence animated by his
anticipations. When the patron awoke, the vessel was
hurrying on with every sail set, and every sail full with
the breeze. They were making nearly ten knots an hour. The
Island of Monte Cristo loomed large in the horizon. Edmond
resigned the lugger to the master's care, and went and lay
down in his hammock but, in spite of a sleepless night, he
could not close his eyes for a moment. Two hours afterwards
he came on deck, as the boat was about to double the Island
of Elba. They were just abreast of Mareciana, and beyond the
flat but verdant Island of La Pianosa. The peak of Monte
Cristo reddened by the burning sun, was seen against the
azure sky. Dantes ordered the helmsman to put down his helm,
in order to leave La Pianosa to starboard, as he knew that
he should shorten his course by two or three knots. About
five o'clock in the evening the island was distinct, and
everything on it was plainly perceptible, owing to that
clearness of the atmosphere peculiar to the light which the
rays of the sun cast at its setting.
Edmond gazed very earnestly at the mass of rocks which gave
out all the variety of twilight colors, from the brightest
pink to the deepest blue and from time to time his cheeks
flushed, his brow darkened, and a mist passed over his eyes.
Never did gamester, whose whole fortune is staked on one
cast of the die, experience the anguish which Edmond felt in
his paroxysms of hope. Night came, and at ten o'clock they
anchored. The Young Amelia was first at the rendezvous. In
spite of his usual command over himself, Dantes could not
restrain his impetuosity. He was the first to jump on shore
and had he dared, he would, like Lucius Brutus, have "kissed
his mother earth." It was dark, but at eleven o'clock the
moon rose in the midst of the ocean, whose every wave she
silvered, and then, "ascending high," played in floods of
pale light on the rocky hills of this second Pelion.
The island was familiar to the crew of The Young Amelia, 
it was one of her regular haunts. As to Dantes, he had
passed it on his voyage to and from the Levant, but never
touched at it. He questioned Jacopo. "Where shall we pass
the night?" he inquired.
"Why, on board the tartan," replied the sailor.
"Should we not do better in the grottos?"
"What grottos?"
"Why, the grottos  caves of the island."
"I do not know of any grottos," replied Jacopo. The cold
sweat sprang forth on Dantes' brow.
"What, are there no grottos at Monte Cristo?" he asked.
"None."
For a moment Dantes was speechless then he remembered that
these caves might have been filled up by some accident, or
even stopped up, for the sake of greater security, by
Cardinal Spada. The point was, then, to discover the hidden
entrance. It was useless to search at night, and Dantes
therefore delayed all investigation until the morning.
Besides, a signal made half a league out at sea, and to
which The Young Amelia replied by a similar signal,
indicated that the moment for business had come. The boat
that now arrived, assured by the answering signal that all
was well, soon came in sight, white and silent as a phantom,
and cast anchor within a cable's length of shore.
Then the landing began. Dantes reflected, as he worked, on
the shout of joy which, with a single word, he could evoke
from all these men, if he gave utterance to the one
unchanging thought that pervaded his heart but, far from
disclosing this precious secret, he almost feared that he
had already said too much, and by his restlessness and
continual questions, his minute observations and evident
preoccupation, aroused suspicions. Fortunately, as regarded
this circumstance at least, his painful past gave to his
countenance an indelible sadness, and the glimmerings of
gayety seen beneath this cloud were indeed but transitory.
No one had the slightest suspicion and when next day,
taking a fowlingpiece, powder, and shot, Dantes declared
his intention to go and kill some of the wild goats that
were seen springing from rock to rock, his wish was
construed into a love of sport, or a desire for solitude.
However, Jacopo insisted on following him, and Dantes did
not oppose this, fearing if he did so that he might incur
distrust. Scarcely, however, had they gone a quarter of a
league when, having killed a kid, he begged Jacopo to take
it to his comrades, and request them to cook it, and when
ready to let him know by firing a gun. This and some dried
fruits and a flask of Monte Pulciano, was the bill of fare.
Dantes went on, looking from time to time behind and around
about him. Having reached the summit of a rock, he saw, a
thousand feet beneath him, his companions, whom Jacopo had
rejoined, and who were all busy preparing the repast which
Edmond's skill as a marksman had augmented with a capital
dish.
Edmond looked at them for a moment with the sad and gentle
smile of a man superior to his fellows. "In two hours'
time," said he, "these persons will depart richer by fifty
piastres each, to go and risk their lives again by
endeavoring to gain fifty more then they will return with a
fortune of six hundred francs, and waste this treasure in
some city with the pride of sultans and the insolence of
nabobs. At this moment hope makes me despise their riches,
which seem to me contemptible. Yet perchance tomorrow
deception will so act on me, that I shall, on compulsion,
consider such a contemptible possession as the utmost
happiness. Oh, no" exclaimed Edmond, "that will not be. The
wise, unerring Faria could not be mistaken in this one
thing. Besides, it were better to die than to continue to
lead this low and wretched life." Thus Dantes, who but three
months before had no desire but liberty had now not liberty
enough, and panted for wealth. The cause was not in Dantes,
but in providence, who, while limiting the power of man, has
filled him with boundless desires.
Meanwhile, by a cleft between two walls of rock, following a
path worn by a torrent, and which, in all human probability,
human foot had never before trod, Dantes approached the spot
where he supposed the grottos must have existed. Keeping
along the shore, and examining the smallest object with
serious attention, he thought he could trace, on certain
rocks, marks made by the hand of man.
Time, which encrusts all physical substances with its mossy
mantle, as it invests all things of the mind with
forgetfulness, seemed to have respected these signs, which
apparently had been made with some degree of regularity, and
probably with a definite purpose. Occasionally the marks
were hidden under tufts of myrtle, which spread into large
bushes laden with blossoms, or beneath parasitical lichen.
So Edmond had to separate the branches or brush away the
moss to know where the guidemarks were. The sight of marks
renewed Edmond fondest hopes. Might it not have been the
cardinal himself who had first traced them, in order that
they might serve as a guide for his nephew in the event of a
catastrophe, which he could not foresee would have been so
complete. This solitary place was precisely suited to the
requirements of a man desirous of burying treasure. Only,
might not these betraying marks have attracted other eyes
than those for whom they were made? and had the dark and
wondrous island indeed faithfully guarded its precious
secret?
It seemed, however, to Edmond, who was hidden from his
comrades by the inequalities of the ground, that at sixty
paces from the harbor the marks ceased nor did they
terminate at any grotto. A large round rock, placed solidly
on its base, was the only spot to which they seemed to lead.
Edmond concluded that perhaps instead of having reached the
end of the route he had only explored its beginning, and he
therefore turned round and retraced his steps.
Meanwhile his comrades had prepared the repast, had got some
water from a spring, spread out the fruit and bread, and
cooked the kid. Just at the moment when they were taking the
dainty animal from the spit, they saw Edmond springing with
the boldness of a chamois from rock to rock, and they fired
the signal agreed upon. The sportsman instantly changed his
direction, and ran quickly towards them. But even while they
watched his daring progress, Edmond's foot slipped, and they
saw him stagger on the edge of a rock and disappear. They
all rushed towards him, for all loved Edmond in spite of his
superiority yet Jacopo reached him first.
He found Edmond lying prone, bleeding, and almost senseless.
He had rolled down a declivity of twelve or fifteen feet.
They poured a little rum down his throat, and this remedy
which had before been so beneficial to him, produced the
same effect as formerly. Edmond opened his eyes, complained
of great pain in his knee, a feeling of heaviness in his
head, and severe pains in his loins. They wished to carry
him to the shore but when they touched him, although under
Jacopo's directions, he declared, with heavy groans, that he
could not bear to be moved.
It may be supposed that Dantes did not now think of his
dinner, but he insisted that his comrades, who had not his
reasons for fasting, should have their meal. As for himself,
he declared that he had only need of a little rest, and that
when they returned he should be easier. The sailors did not
require much urging. They were hungry, and the smell of the
roasted kid was very savory, and your tars are not very
ceremonious. An hour afterwards they returned. All that
Edmond had been able to do was to drag himself about a dozen
paces forward to lean against a mossgrown rock.
But, instead of growing easier, Dantes' pains appeared to
increase in violence. The old patron, who was obliged to
sail in the morning in order to land his cargo on the
frontiers of Piedmont and France, between Nice and Frejus,
urged Dantes to try and rise. Edmond made great exertions in
order to comply but at each effort he fell back, moaning
and turning pale.
"He has broken his ribs," said the commander, in a low
voice. "No matter he is an excellent fellow, and we must
not leave him. We will try and carry him on board the
tartan." Dantes declared, however, that he would rather die
where he was than undergo the agony which the slightest
movement cost him. "Well," said the patron, "let what may
happen, it shall never be said that we deserted a good
comrade like you. We will not go till evening." This very
much astonished the sailors, although, not one opposed it.
The patron was so strict that this was the first time they
had ever seen him give up an enterprise, or even delay in
its execution. Dantes would not allow that any such
infraction of regular and proper rules should be made in his
favor. "No, no," he said to the patron, "I was awkward, and
it is just that I pay the penalty of my clumsiness. Leave me
a small supply of biscuit, a gun, powder, and balls, to kill
the kids or defend myself at need, and a pickaxe, that I may
build a shelter if you delay in coming back for me."
"But you'll die of hunger," said the patron.
"I would rather do so," was Edmond reply, "than suffer the
inexpressible agonies which the slightest movement causes
me." The patron turned towards his vessel, which was rolling
on the swell in the little harbor, and, with sails partly
set, would be ready for sea when her toilet should be
completed.
"What are we to do, Maltese?" asked the captain. "We cannot
leave you here so, and yet we cannot stay."
"Go, go" exclaimed Dantes.
"We shall be absent at least a week," said the patron, "and
then we must run out of our course to come here and take you
up again."
"Why," said Dantes, "if in two or three days you hail any
fishingboat, desire them to come here to me. I will pay
twentyfive piastres for my passage back to Leghorn. If you
do not come across one, return for me." The patron shook his
head.
"Listen, Captain Baldi there's one way of settling this,"
said Jacopo. "Do you go, and I will stay and take care of
the wounded man."
"And give up your share of the venture," said Edmond, "to
remain with me?"
"Yes," said Jacopo, "and without any hesitation."
"You are a good fellow and a kindhearted messmate," replied
Edmond, "and heaven will recompense you for your generous
intentions but I do not wish any one to stay with me. A day
or two of rest will set me up, and I hope I shall find among
the rocks certain herbs most excellent for bruises."
A peculiar smile passed over Dantes' lips he squeezed
Jacopo's hand warmly, but nothing could shake his
determination to remain  and remain alone. The smugglers
left with Edmond what he had requested and set sail, but not
without turning about several times, and each time making
signs of a cordial farewell, to which Edmond replied with
his hand only, as if he could not move the rest of his body.
Then, when they had disappeared, he said with a smile, 
"'Tis strange that it should be among such men that we find
proofs of friendship and devotion." Then he dragged himself
cautiously to the top of a rock, from which he had a full
view of the sea, and thence he saw the tartan complete her
preparations for sailing, weigh anchor, and, balancing
herself as gracefully as a waterfowl ere it takes to the
wing, set sail. At the end of an hour she was completely out
of sight at least, it was impossible for the wounded man to
see her any longer from the spot where he was. Then Dantes
rose more agile and light than the kid among the myrtles and
shrubs of these wild rocks, took his gun in one hand, his
pickaxe in the other, and hastened towards the rock on which
the marks he had noted terminated. "And now," he exclaimed,
remembering the tale of the Arabian fisherman, which Faria
had related to him, "now, open sesame"
Chapter 
The Secret Cave.
The sun had nearly reached the meridian, and his scorching
rays fell full on the rocks, which seemed themselves
sensible of the heat. Thousands of grasshoppers, hidden in
the bushes, chirped with a monotonous and dull note the
leaves of the myrtle and olive trees waved and rustled in
the wind. At every step that Edmond took he disturbed the
lizards glittering with the hues of the emerald afar off he
saw the wild goats bounding from crag to crag. In a word,
the island was inhabited, yet Edmond felt himself alone,
guided by the hand of God. He felt an indescribable
sensation somewhat akin to dread  that dread of the
daylight which even in the desert makes us fear we are
watched and observed. This feeling was so strong that at the
moment when Edmond was about to begin his labor, he stopped,
laid down his pickaxe, seized his gun, mounted to the summit
of the highest rock, and from thence gazed round in every
direction.
But it was not upon Corsica, the very houses of which he
could distinguish or on Sardinia or on the Island of Elba,
with its historical associations or upon the almost
imperceptible line that to the experienced eye of a sailor
alone revealed the coast of Genoa the proud, and Leghorn the
commercial, that he gazed. It was at the brigantine that had
left in the morning, and the tartan that had just set sail,
that Edmond fixed his eyes. The first was just disappearing
in the straits of Bonifacio the other, following an
opposite direction, was about to round the Island of
Corsica. This sight reassured him. He then looked at the
objects near him. He saw that he was on the highest point of
the island,  a statue on this vast pedestal of granite,
nothing human appearing in sight, while the blue ocean beat
against the base of the island, and covered it with a fringe
of foam. Then he descended with cautious and slow step, for
he dreaded lest an accident similar to that he had so
adroitly feigned should happen in reality.
Dantes, as we have said, had traced the marks along the
rocks, and he had noticed that they led to a small creek.
which was hidden like the bath of some ancient nymph. This
creek was sufficiently wide at its mouth, and deep in the
centre, to admit of the entrance of a small vessel of the
lugger class, which would be perfectly concealed from
observation.
Then following the clew that, in the hands of the Abbe
Faria, had been so skilfully used to guide him through the
Daedalian labyrinth of probabilities, he thought that the
Cardinal Spada, anxious not to be watched, had entered the
creek, concealed his little barque, followed the line marked
by the notches in the rock, and at the end of it had buried
his treasure. It was this idea that had brought Dantes back
to the circular rock. One thing only perplexed Edmond, and
destroyed his theory. How could this rock, which weighed
several tons, have been lifted to this spot, without the aid
of many men? Suddenly an idea flashed across his mind.
Instead of raising it, thought he, they have lowered it. And
he sprang from the rock in order to inspect the base on
which it had formerly stood. He soon perceived that a slope
had been formed, and the rock had slid along this until it
stopped at the spot it now occupied. A large stone had
served as a wedge flints and pebbles had been inserted
around it, so as to conceal the orifice this species of
masonry had been covered with earth, and grass and weeds had
grown there, moss had clung to the stones, myrtlebushes had
taken root, and the old rock seemed fixed to the earth.
Dantes dug away the earth carefully, and detected, or
fancied he detected, the ingenious artifice. He attacked
this wall, cemented by the hand of time, with his pickaxe.
After ten minutes' labor the wall gave way, and a hole large
enough to insert the arm was opened. Dantes went and cut the
strongest olivetree he could find, stripped off its
branches, inserted it in the hole, and used it as a lever.
But the rock was too heavy, and too firmly wedged, to be
moved by any one man, were he Hercules himself. Dantes saw
that he must attack the wedge. But how? He cast his eyes
around, and saw the horn full of powder which his friend
Jacopo had left him. He smiled the infernal invention would
serve him for this purpose. With the aid of his pickaxe,
Dantes, after the manner of a laborsaving pioneer, dug a
mine between the upper rock and the one that supported it,
filled it with powder, then made a match by rolling his
handkerchief in saltpetre. He lighted it and retired. The
explosion soon followed the upper rock was lifted from its
base by the terrific force of the powder the lower one flew
into pieces thousands of insects escaped from the aperture
Dantes had previously formed, and a huge snake, like the
guardian demon of the treasure, rolled himself along in
darkening coils, and disappeared.
Dantes approached the upper rock, which now, without any
support, leaned towards the sea. The intrepid
treasureseeker walked round it, and, selecting the spot
from whence it appeared most susceptible to attack, placed
his lever in one of the crevices, and strained every nerve
to move the mass. The rock, already shaken by the explosion,
tottered on its base. Dantes redoubled his efforts he
seemed like one of the ancient Titans, who uprooted the
mountains to hurl against the father of the gods. The rock
yielded, rolled over, bounded from point to point, and
finally disappeared in the ocean.
On the spot it had occupied was a circular space, exposing
an iron ring let into a square flagstone. Dantes uttered a
cry of joy and surprise never had a first attempt been
crowned with more perfect success. He would fain have
continued, but his knees trembled, and his heart beat so
violently, and his sight became so dim, that he was forced
to pause. This feeling lasted but for a moment. Edmond
inserted his lever in the ring and exerted all his strength
the flagstone yielded, and disclosed steps that descended
until they were lost in the obscurity of a subterraneous
grotto. Any one else would have rushed on with a cry of joy.
Dantes turned pale, hesitated, and reflected. "Come," said
he to himself, "be a man. I am accustomed to adversity. I
must not be cast down by the discovery that I have been
deceived. What, then, would be the use of all I have
suffered? The heart breaks when, after having been elated by
flattering hopes, it sees all its illusions destroyed. Faria
has dreamed this the Cardinal Spada buried no treasure
here perhaps he never came here, or if he did, Caesar
Borgia, the intrepid adventurer, the stealthy and
indefatigable plunderer, has followed him, discovered his
traces, pursued them as I have done, raised the stone, and
descending before me, has left me nothing." He remained
motionless and pensive, his eyes fixed on the gloomy
aperture that was open at his feet.
"Now that I expect nothing, now that I no longer entertain
the slightest hopes, the end of this adventure becomes
simply a matter of curiosity." And he remained again
motionless and thoughtful.
"Yes, yes this is an adventure worthy a place in the varied
career of that royal bandit. This fabulous event formed but
a link in a long chain of marvels. Yes, Borgia has been
here, a torch in one hand, a sword in the other, and within
twenty paces, at the foot of this rock, perhaps two guards
kept watch on land and sea, while their master descended, as
I am about to descend, dispelling the darkness before his
aweinspiring progress."
"But what was the fate of the guards who thus possessed his
secret?" asked Dantes of himself.
"The fate," replied he, smiling, "of those who buried
Alaric."
"Yet, had he come," thought Dantes, "he would have found the
treasure, and Borgia, he who compared Italy to an artichoke,
which he could devour leaf by leaf, knew too well the value
of time to waste it in replacing this rock. I will go down."
Then he descended, a smile on his lips, and murmuring that
last word of human philosophy, "Perhaps" But instead of the
darkness, and the thick and mephitic atmosphere he had
expected to find, Dantes saw a dim and bluish light, which,
as well as the air, entered, not merely by the aperture he
had just formed, but by the interstices and crevices of the
rock which were visible from without, and through which he
could distinguish the blue sky and the waving branches of
the evergreen oaks, and the tendrils of the creepers that
grew from the rocks. After having stood a few minutes in the
cavern, the atmosphere of which was rather warm than damp,
Dantes' eye, habituated as it was to darkness, could pierce
even to the remotest angles of the cavern, which was of
granite that sparkled like diamonds. "Alas," said Edmond,
smiling, "these are the treasures the cardinal has left and
the good abbe, seeing in a dream these glittering walls, has
indulged in fallacious hopes."
But he called to mind the words of the will, which he knew
by heart. "In the farthest angle of the second opening,"
said the cardinal's will. He had only found the first
grotto he had now to seek the second. Dantes continued his
search. He reflected that this second grotto must penetrate
deeper into the island he examined the stones, and sounded
one part of the wall where he fancied the opening existed,
masked for precaution's sake. The pickaxe struck for a
moment with a dull sound that drew out of Dantes' forehead
large drops of perspiration. At last it seemed to him that
one part of the wall gave forth a more hollow and deeper
echo he eagerly advanced, and with the quickness of
perception that no one but a prisoner possesses, saw that
there, in all probability, the opening must be.
However, he, like Caesar Borgia, knew the value of time
and, in order to avoid fruitless toil, he sounded all the
other walls with his pickaxe, struck the earth with the butt
of his gun, and finding nothing that appeared suspicious,
returned to that part of the wall whence issued the
consoling sound he had before heard. He again struck it, and
with greater force. Then a singular thing occurred. As he
struck the wall, pieces of stucco similar to that used in
the ground work of arabesques broke off, and fell to the
ground in flakes, exposing a large white stone. The aperture
of the rock had been closed with stones, then this stucco
had been applied, and painted to imitate granite. Dantes
struck with the sharp end of his pickaxe, which entered
someway between the interstices. It was there he must dig.
But by some strange play of emotion, in proportion as the
proofs that Faria, had not been deceived became stronger, so
did his heart give way, and a feeling of discouragement
stole over him. This last proof, instead of giving him fresh
strength, deprived him of it the pickaxe descended, or
rather fell he placed it on the ground, passed his hand
over his brow, and remounted the stairs, alleging to
himself, as an excuse, a desire to be assured that no one
was watching him, but in reality because he felt that he was
about to faint. The island was deserted, and the sun seemed
to cover it with its fiery glance afar off, a few small
fishing boats studded the bosom of the blue ocean.
Dantes had tasted nothing, but he thought not of hunger at
such a moment he hastily swallowed a few drops of rum, and
again entered the cavern. The pickaxe that had seemed so
heavy, was now like a feather in his grasp he seized it,
and attacked the wall. After several blows he perceived that
the stones were not cemented, but had been merely placed one
upon the other, and covered with stucco he inserted the
point of his pickaxe, and using the handle as a lever, with
joy soon saw the stone turn as if on hinges, and fall at his
feet. He had nothing more to do now, but with the iron tooth
of the pickaxe to draw the stones towards him one by one.
The aperture was already sufficiently large for him to
enter, but by waiting, he could still cling to hope, and
retard the certainty of deception. At last, after renewed
hesitation, Dantes entered the second grotto. The second
grotto was lower and more gloomy than the first the air
that could only enter by the newly formed opening had the
mephitic smell Dantes was surprised not to find in the outer
cavern. He waited in order to allow pure air to displace the
foul atmosphere, and then went on. At the left of the
opening was a dark and deep angle. But to Dantes' eye there
was no darkness. He glanced around this second grotto it
was, like the first, empty.
The treasure, if it existed, was buried in this corner. The
time had at length arrived two feet of earth removed, and
Dantes' fate would be decided. He advanced towards the
angle, and summoning all his resolution, attacked the ground
with the pickaxe. At the fifth or sixth blow the pickaxe
struck against an iron substance. Never did funeral knell,
never did alarmbell, produce a greater effect on the
hearer. Had Dantes found nothing he could not have become
more ghastly pale. He again struck his pickaxe into the
earth, and encountered the same resistance, but not the same
sound. "It is a casket of wood bound with iron," thought he.
At this moment a shadow passed rapidly before the opening
Dantes seized his gun, sprang through the opening, and
mounted the stair. A wild goat had passed before the mouth
of the cave, and was feeding at a little distance. This
would have been a favorable occasion to secure his dinner
but Dantes feared lest the report of his gun should attract
attention.
He thought a moment, cut a branch of a resinous tree,
lighted it at the fire at which the smugglers had prepared
their breakfast, and descended with this torch. He wished to
see everything. He approached the hole he had dug, and now,
with the aid of the torch, saw that his pickaxe had in
reality struck against iron and wood. He planted his torch
in the ground and resumed his labor. In an instant a space
three feet long by two feet broad was cleared, and Dantes
could see an oaken coffer, bound with cut steel in the
middle of the lid he saw engraved on a silver plate, which
was still untarnished, the arms of the Spada family  viz.,
a sword, pale, on an oval shield, like all the Italian
armorial bearings, and surmounted by a cardinal's hat
Dantes easily recognized them, Faria had so often drawn them
for him. There was no longer any doubt the treasure was
there  no one would have been at such pains to conceal an
empty casket. In an instant he had cleared every obstacle
away, and he saw successively the lock, placed between two
padlocks, and the two handles at each end, all carved as
things were carved at that epoch, when art rendered the
commonest metals precious. Dantes seized the handles, and
strove to lift the coffer it was impossible. He sought to
open it lock and padlock were fastened these faithful
guardians seemed unwilling to surrender their trust. Dantes
inserted the sharp end of the pickaxe between the coffer and
the lid, and pressing with all his force on the handle,
burst open the fastenings. The hinges yielded in their turn
and fell, still holding in their grasp fragments of the
wood, and the chest was open.
Edmond was seized with vertigo he cocked his gun and laid
it beside him. He then closed his eyes as children do in
order that they may see in the resplendent night of their
own imagination more stars than are visible in the
firmament then he reopened them, and stood motionless with
amazement. Three compartments divided the coffer. In the
first, blazed piles of golden coin in the second, were
ranged bars of unpolished gold, which possessed nothing
attractive save their value in the third, Edmond grasped
handfuls of diamonds, pearls, and rubies, which, as they
fell on one another, sounded like hail against glass. After
having touched, felt, examined these treasures, Edmond
rushed through the caverns like a man seized with frenzy he
leaped on a rock, from whence he could behold the sea. He
was alone  alone with these countless, these unheardof
treasures was he awake, or was it but a dream?
He would fain have gazed upon his gold, and yet he had not
strength enough for an instant he leaned his head in his
hands as if to prevent his senses from leaving him, and then
rushed madly about the rocks of Monte Cristo, terrifying the
wild goats and scaring the seafowls with his wild cries and
gestures then he returned, and, still unable to believe the
evidence of his senses, rushed into the grotto, and found
himself before this mine of gold and jewels. This time he
fell on his knees, and, clasping his hands convulsively,
uttered a prayer intelligible to God alone. He soon became
calmer and more happy, for only now did he begin to realize
his felicity. He then set himself to work to count his
fortune. There were a thousand ingots of gold, each weighing
from two to three pounds then he piled up twentyfive
thousand crowns, each worth about eighty francs of our
money, and bearing the effigies of Alexander VI. and his
predecessors and he saw that the complement was not half
empty. And he measured ten double handfuls of pearls,
diamonds, and other gems, many of which, mounted by the most
famous workmen, were valuable beyond their intrinsic worth.
Dantes saw the light gradually disappear, and fearing to be
surprised in the cavern, left it, his gun in his hand. A
piece of biscuit and a small quantity of rum formed his
supper, and he snatched a few hours' sleep, lying over the
mouth of the cave.
It was a night of joy and terror, such as this man of
stupendous emotions had already experienced twice or thrice
in his lifetime.
Chapter 
The Unknown.
Day, for which Dantes had so eagerly and impatiently waited
with open eyes, again dawned. With the first light Dantes
resumed his search. Again he climbed the rocky height he had
ascended the previous evening, and strained his view to
catch every peculiarity of the landscape but it wore the
same wild, barren aspect when seen by the rays of the
morning sun which it had done when surveyed by the fading
glimmer of eve. Descending into the grotto, he lifted the
stone, filled his pockets with gems, put the box together as
well and securely as he could, sprinkled fresh sand over the
spot from which it had been taken, and then carefully trod
down the earth to give it everywhere a uniform appearance
then, quitting the grotto, he replaced the stone, heaping on
it broken masses of rocks and rough fragments of crumbling
granite, filling the interstices with earth, into which he
deftly inserted rapidly growing plants, such as the wild
myrtle and flowering thorn, then carefully watering these
new plantations, he scrupulously effaced every trace of
footsteps, leaving the approach to the cavern as
savagelooking and untrodden as he had found it. This done,
he impatiently awaited the return of his companions. To wait
at Monte Cristo for the purpose of watching like a dragon
over the almost incalculable riches that had thus fallen into
his possession satisfied not the cravings of his heart,
which yearned to return to dwell among mankind, and to
assume the rank, power, and influence which are always
accorded to wealth  that first and greatest of all the
forces within the grasp of man.
On the sixth day, the smugglers returned. From a distance
Dantes recognized the rig and handling of The Young Amelia,
and dragging himself with affected difficulty towards the
landingplace, he met his companions with an assurance that,
although considerably better than when they quitted him, he
still suffered acutely from his late accident. He then
inquired how they had fared in their trip. To this question
the smugglers replied that, although successful in landing
their cargo in safety, they had scarcely done so when they
received intelligence that a guardship had just quitted the
port of Toulon and was crowding all sail towards them. This
obliged them to make all the speed they could to evade the
enemy, when they could but lament the absence of Dantes,
whose superior skill in the management of a vessel would
have availed them so materially. In fact, the pursuing
vessel had almost overtaken them when, fortunately, night
came on, and enabled them to double the Cape of Corsica, and
so elude all further pursuit. Upon the whole, however, the
trip had been sufficiently successful to satisfy all
concerned while the crew, and particularly Jacopo,
expressed great regrets that Dantes had not been an equal
sharer with themselves in the profits, which amounted to no
less a sum than fifty piastres each.
Edmond preserved the most admirable selfcommand, not
suffering the faintest indication of a smile to escape him
at the enumeration of all the benefits he would have reaped
had he been able to quit the island but as The Young Amelia
had merely come to Monte Cristo to fetch him away, he
embarked that same evening, and proceeded with the captain
to Leghorn. Arrived at Leghorn, he repaired to the house of
a Jew, a dealer in precious stones, to whom he disposed of
four of his smallest diamonds for five thousand francs each.
Dantes half feared that such valuable jewels in the hands of
a poor sailor like himself might excite suspicion but the
cunning purchaser asked no troublesome questions concerning
a bargain by which he gained a round profit of at least
eighty per cent.
The following day Dantes presented Jacopo with an entirely
new vessel, accompanying the gift by a donation of one
hundred piastres, that he might provide himself with a
suitable crew and other requisites for his outfit, upon
condition that he would go at once to Marseilles for the
purpose of inquiring after an old man named Louis Dantes,
residing in the Allees de Meillan, and also a young woman
called Mercedes, an inhabitant of the Catalan village.
Jacopo could scarcely believe his senses at receiving this
magnificent present, which Dantes hastened to account for by
saying that he had merely been a sailor from whim and a
desire to spite his family, who did not allow him as much
money as he liked to spend but that on his arrival at
Leghorn he had come into possession of a large fortune, left
him by an uncle, whose sole heir he was. The superior
education of Dantes gave an air of such extreme probability
to this statement that it never once occurred to Jacopo to
doubt its accuracy. The term for which Edmond had engaged to
serve on board The Young Amelia having expired, Dantes took
leave of the captain, who at first tried all his powers of
persuasion to induce him to remain as one of the crew, but
having been told the history of the legacy, he ceased to
importune him further. The following morning Jacopo set sail
for Marseilles, with directions from Dantes to join him at
the Island of Monte Cristo.
Having seen Jacopo fairly out of the harbor, Dantes
proceeded to make his final adieus on board The Young
Amelia, distributing so liberal a gratuity among her crew as
to secure for him the good wishes of all, and expressions of
cordial interest in all that concerned him. To the captain
he promised to write when he had made up his mind as to his
future plans. Then Dantes departed for Genoa. At the moment
of his arrival a small yacht was under trial in the bay
this yacht had been built by order of an Englishman, who,
having heard that the Genoese excelled all other builders
along the shores of the Mediterranean in the construction of
fastsailing vessels, was desirous of possessing a specimen
of their skill the price agreed upon between the Englishman
and the Genoese builder was forty thousand francs. Dantes,
struck with the beauty and capability of the little vessel,
applied to its owner to transfer it to him, offering sixty
thousand francs, upon condition that he should be allowed to
take immediate possession. The proposal was too advantageous
to be refused, the more so as the person for whom the yacht
was intended had gone upon a tour through Switzerland, and
was not expected back in less than three weeks or a month,
by which time the builder reckoned upon being able to
complete another. A bargain was therefore struck. Dantes led
the owner of the yacht to the dwelling of a Jew retired
with the latter for a few minutes to a small back parlor,
and upon their return the Jew counted out to the shipbuilder
the sum of sixty thousand francs in bright gold pieces.
The delighted builder then offered his services in providing
a suitable crew for the little vessel, but this Dantes
declined with many thanks, saying he was accustomed to
cruise about quite alone, and his principal pleasure
consisted in managing his yacht himself the only thing the
builder could oblige him in would be to contrive a sort of
secret closet in the cabin at his bed's head, the closet to
contain three divisions, so constructed as to be concealed
from all but himself. The builder cheerfully undertook the
commission, and promised to have these secret places
completed by the next day, Dantes furnishing the dimensions
and plan in accordance with which they were to be
constructed.
The following day Dantes sailed with his yacht from Genoa,
under the inspection of an immense crowd drawn together by
curiosity to see the rich Spanish nobleman who preferred
managing his own yacht. But their wonder was soon changed to
admiration at seeing the perfect skill with which Dantes
handled the helm. The boat, indeed, seemed to be animated
with almost human intelligence, so promptly did it obey the
slightest touch and Dantes required but a short trial of
his beautiful craft to acknowledge that the Genoese had not
without reason attained their high reputation in the art of
shipbuilding. The spectators followed the little vessel with
their eyes as long as it remained visible they then turned
their conjectures upon her probable destination. Some
insisted she was making for Corsica, others the Island of
Elba bets were offered to any amount that she was bound for
Spain while Africa was positively reported by many persons
as her intended course but no one thought of Monte Cristo.
Yet thither it was that Dantes guided his vessel, and at
Monte Cristo he arrived at the close of the second day his
boat had proved herself a firstclass sailer, and had come
the distance from Genoa in thirtyfive hours. Dantes had
carefully noted the general appearance of the shore, and,
instead of landing at the usual place, he dropped anchor in
the little creek. The island was utterly deserted, and bore
no evidence of having been visited since he went away his
treasure was just as he had left it. Early on the following
morning he commenced the removal of his riches, and ere
nightfall the whole of his immense wealth was safely
deposited in the compartments of the secret locker.
A week passed by. Dantes employed it in manoeuvring his
yacht round the island, studying it as a skilful horseman
would the animal he destined for some important service,
till at the end of that time he was perfectly conversant
with its good and bad qualities. The former Dantes proposed
to augment, the latter to remedy.
Upon the eighth day he discerned a small vessel under full
sail approaching Monte Cristo. As it drew near, he
recognized it as the boat he had given to Jacopo. He
immediately signalled it. His signal was returned, and in
two hours afterwards the newcomer lay at anchor beside the
yacht. A mournful answer awaited each of Edmond's eager
inquiries as to the information Jacopo had obtained. Old
Dantes was dead, and Mercedes had disappeared. Dantes
listened to these melancholy tidings with outward calmness
but, leaping lightly ashore, he signified his desire to be
quite alone. In a couple of hours he returned. Two of the
men from Jacopo's boat came on board the yacht to assist in
navigating it, and he gave orders that she should be steered
direct to Marseilles. For his father's death he was in some
manner prepared but he knew not how to account for the
mysterious disappearance of Mercedes.
Without divulging his secret, Dantes could not give
sufficiently clear instructions to an agent. There were,
besides, other particulars he was desirous of ascertaining,
and those were of a nature he alone could investigate in a
manner satisfactory to himself. His lookingglass had
assured him, during his stay at Leghorn, that he ran no risk
of recognition moreover, he had now the means of adopting
any disguise he thought proper. One fine morning, then, his
yacht, followed by the little fishingboat, boldly entered
the port of Marseilles, and anchored exactly opposite the
spot from whence, on the nevertobeforgotten night of his
departure for the Chateau d'If, he had been put on board the
boat destined to convey him thither. Still Dantes could not
view without a shudder the approach of a gendarme who
accompanied the officers deputed to demand his bill of
health ere the yacht was permitted to hold communication
with the shore but with that perfect selfpossession he had
acquired during his acquaintance with Faria, Dantes coolly
presented an English passport he had obtained from Leghorn,
and as this gave him a standing which a French passport
would not have afforded, he was informed that there existed
no obstacle to his immediate debarkation.
The first person to attract the attention of Dantes, as he
landed on the Canebiere, was one of the crew belonging to
the Pharaon. Edmond welcomed the meeting with this fellow 
who had been one of his own sailors  as a sure means of
testing the extent of the change which time had worked in
his own appearance. Going straight towards him, he
propounded a variety of questions on different subjects,
carefully watching the man's countenance as he did so but
not a word or look implied that he had the slightest idea of
ever having seen before the person with whom he was then
conversing. Giving the sailor a piece of money in return for
his civility, Dantes proceeded onwards but ere he had gone
many steps he heard the man loudly calling him to stop.
Dantes instantly turned to meet him. "I beg your pardon,
sir," said the honest fellow, in almost breathless haste,
"but I believe you made a mistake you intended to give me a
twofranc piece, and see, you gave me a double Napoleon."
"Thank you, my good friend. I see that I have made a
trifling mistake, as you say but by way of rewarding your
honesty I give you another double Napoleon, that you may
drink to my health, and be able to ask your messmates to
join you."
So extreme was the surprise of the sailor, that he was
unable even to thank Edmond, whose receding figure he
continued to gaze after in speechless astonishment. "Some
nabob from India," was his comment.
Dantes, meanwhile, went on his way. Each step he trod
oppressed his heart with fresh emotion his first and most
indelible recollections were there not a tree, not a
street, that he passed but seemed filled with dear and
cherished memories. And thus he proceeded onwards till he
arrived at the end of the Rue de Noailles, from whence a
full view of the Allees de Meillan was obtained. At this
spot, so pregnant with fond and filial remembrances, his
heart beat almost to bursting, his knees tottered under him,
a mist floated over his sight, and had he not clung for
support to one of the trees, he would inevitably have fallen
to the ground and been crushed beneath the many vehicles
continually passing there. Recovering himself, however, he
wiped the perspiration from his brows, and stopped not again
till he found himself at the door of the house in which his
father had lived.
The nasturtiums and other plants, which his father had
delighted to train before his window, had all disappeared
from the upper part of the house. Leaning against the tree,
he gazed thoughtfully for a time at the upper stories of the
shabby little house. Then he advanced to the door, and asked
whether there were any rooms to be let. Though answered in
the negative, he begged so earnestly to be permitted to
visit those on the fifth floor, that, in despite of the
oftrepeated assurance of the concierge that they were
occupied, Dantes succeeded in inducing the man to go up to
the tenants, and ask permission for a gentleman to be
allowed to look at them.
The tenants of the humble lodging were a young couple who
had been scarcely married a week and seeing them, Dantes
sighed heavily. Nothing in the two small chambers forming
the apartments remained as it had been in the time of the
elder Dantes the very paper was different, while the
articles of antiquated furniture with which the rooms had
been filled in Edmond's time had all disappeared the four
walls alone remained as he had left them. The bed belonging
to the present occupants was placed as the former owner of
the chamber had been accustomed to have his and, in spite
of his efforts to prevent it, the eyes of Edmond were
suffused in tears as he reflected that on that spot the old
man had breathed his last, vainly calling for his son. The
young couple gazed with astonishment at the sight of their
visitor's emotion, and wondered to see the large tears
silently chasing each other down his otherwise stern and
immovable features but they felt the sacredness of his
grief, and kindly refrained from questioning him as to its
cause, while, with instinctive delicacy, they left him to
indulge his sorrow alone. When he withdrew from the scene of
his painful recollections, they both accompanied him
downstairs, reiterating their hope that he would come again
whenever he pleased, and assuring him that their poor
dwelling would ever be open to him. As Edmond passed the
door on the fourth floor, he paused to inquire whether
Caderousse the tailor still dwelt there but he received,
for reply, that the person in question had got into
difficulties, and at the present time kept a small inn on
the route from Bellegarde to Beaucaire.
Having obtained the address of the person to whom the house
in the Allees de Meillan belonged, Dantes next proceeded
thither, and, under the name of Lord Wilmore the name and
title inscribed on his passport, purchased the small
dwelling for the sum of twentyfive thousand francs, at
least ten thousand more than it was worth but had its owner
asked half a million, it would unhesitatingly have been
given. The very same day the occupants of the apartments on
the fifth floor of the house, now become the property of
Dantes, were duly informed by the notary who had arranged
the necessary transfer of deeds, etc., that the new landlord
gave them their choice of any of the rooms in the house,
without the least augmentation of rent, upon condition of
their giving instant possession of the two small chambers
they at present inhabited.
This strange event aroused great wonder and curiosity in the
neighborhood of the Allees de Meillan, and a multitude of
theories were afloat, none of which was anywhere near the
truth. But what raised public astonishment to a climax, and
set all conjecture at defiance, was the knowledge that the
same stranger who had in the morning visited the Allees de
Meillan had been seen in the evening walking in the little
village of the Catalans, and afterwards observed to enter a
poor fisherman's hut, and to pass more than an hour in
inquiring after persons who had either been dead or gone
away for more than fifteen or sixteen years. But on the
following day the family from whom all these particulars had
been asked received a handsome present, consisting of an
entirely new fishingboat, with two seines and a tender. The
delighted recipients of these munificent gifts would gladly
have poured out their thanks to their generous benefactor,
but they had seen him, upon quitting the hut, merely give
some orders to a sailor, and then springing lightly on
horseback, leave Marseilles by the Porte d'Aix.
Chapter 
The Pont du Gard Inn.
Such of my readers as have made a pedestrian excursion to
the south of France may perchance have noticed, about midway
between the town of Beaucaire and the village of Bellegarde,
a little nearer to the former than to the latter,  a
small roadside inn, from the front of which hung, creaking
and flapping in the wind, a sheet of tin covered with a
grotesque representation of the Pont du Gard. This modern
place of entertainment stood on the lefthand side of the
post road, and backed upon the Rhone. It also boasted of
what in Languedoc is styled a garden, consisting of a small
plot of ground, on the side opposite to the main entrance
reserved for the reception of guests. A few dingy olives and
stunted figtrees struggled hard for existence, but their
withered dusty foliage abundantly proved how unequal was the
conflict. Between these sickly shrubs grew a scanty supply
of garlic, tomatoes, and eschalots while, lone and
solitary, like a forgotten sentinel, a tall pine raised its
melancholy head in one of the corners of this unattractive
spot, and displayed its flexible stem and fanshaped summit
dried and cracked by the fierce heat of the subtropical
sun.
In the surrounding plain, which more resembled a dusty lake
than solid ground, were scattered a few miserable stalks of
wheat, the effect, no doubt, of a curious desire on the part
of the agriculturists of the country to see whether such a
thing as the raising of grain in those parched regions was
practicable. Each stalk served as a perch for a grasshopper,
which regaled the passers by through this Egyptian scene
with its strident, monotonous note.
For about seven or eight years the little tavern had been
kept by a man and his wife, with two servants,  a
chambermaid named Trinette, and a hostler called Pecaud.
This small staff was quite equal to all the requirements,
for a canal between Beaucaire and Aiguemortes had
revolutionized transportation by substituting boats for the
cart and the stagecoach. And, as though to add to the daily
misery which this prosperous canal inflicted on the
unfortunate innkeeper, whose utter ruin it was fast
accomplishing, it was situated between the Rhone from which
it had its source and the postroad it had depleted, not a
hundred steps from the inn, of which we have given a brief
but faithful description.
The innkeeper himself was a man of from forty to fiftyfive
years of age, tall, strong, and bony, a perfect specimen of
the natives of those southern latitudes he had dark,
sparkling, and deepset eyes, hooked nose, and teeth white
as those of a carnivorous animal his hair, like his beard,
which he wore under his chin, was thick and curly, and in
spite of his age but slightly interspersed with a few
silvery threads. His naturally dark complexion had assumed a
still further shade of brown from the habit the unfortunate
man had acquired of stationing himself from morning till eve
at the threshold of his door, on the lookout for guests who
seldom came, yet there he stood, day after day, exposed to
the meridional rays of a burning sun, with no other
protection for his head than a red handkerchief twisted
around it, after the manner of the Spanish muleteers. This
man was our old acquaintance, Gaspard Caderousse. His wife,
on the contrary, whose maiden name had been Madeleine
Radelle, was pale, meagre, and sicklylooking. Born in the
neighborhood of Arles, she had shared in the beauty for
which its women are proverbial but that beauty had
gradually withered beneath the devastating influence of the
slow fever so prevalent among dwellers by the ponds of
Aiguemortes and the marshes of Camargue. She remained nearly
always in her secondfloor chamber, shivering in her chair,
or stretched languid and feeble on her bed, while her
husband kept his daily watch at the door  a duty he
performed with so much the greater willingness, as it saved
him the necessity of listening to the endless plaints and
murmurs of his helpmate, who never saw him without breaking
out into bitter invectives against fate to all of which her
husband would calmly return an unvarying reply, in these
philosophic words 
"Hush, La Carconte. It is God's pleasure that things should
be so."
The sobriquet of La Carconte had been bestowed on Madeleine
Radelle from the fact that she had been born in a village,
so called, situated between Salon and Lambesc and as a
custom existed among the inhabitants of that part of France
where Caderousse lived of styling every person by some
particular and distinctive appellation, her husband had
bestowed on her the name of La Carconte in place of her
sweet and euphonious name of Madeleine, which, in all
probability, his rude gutteral language would not have
enabled him to pronounce. Still, let it not be supposed that
amid this affected resignation to the will of Providence,
the unfortunate innkeeper did not writhe under the double
misery of seeing the hateful canal carry off his customers
and his profits, and the daily infliction of his peevish
partner's murmurs and lamentations.
Like other dwellers in the south, he was a man of sober
habits and moderate desires, but fond of external show,
vain, and addicted to display. During the days of his
prosperity, not a festivity took place without himself and
wife being among the spectators. He dressed in the
picturesque costume worn upon grand occasions by the
inhabitants of the south of France, bearing equal
resemblance to the style adopted both by the Catalans and
Andalusians while La Carconte displayed the charming
fashion prevalent among the women of Arles, a mode of attire
borrowed equally from Greece and Arabia. But, by degrees,
watchchains, necklaces, particolored scarfs, embroidered
bodices, velvet vests, elegantly worked stockings, striped
gaiters, and silver buckles for the shoes, all disappeared
and Gaspard Caderousse, unable to appear abroad in his
pristine splendor, had given up any further participation in
the pomps and vanities, both for himself and wife, although
a bitter feeling of envious discontent filled his mind as
the sound of mirth and merry music from the joyous revellers
reached even the miserable hostelry to which he still clung,
more for the shelter than the profit it afforded.
Caderousse, then, was, as usual, at his place of observation
before the door, his eyes glancing listlessly from a piece
of closely shaven grass  on which some fowls were
industriously, though fruitlessly, endeavoring to turn up
some grain or insect suited to their palate  to the
deserted road, which led away to the north and south, when
he was aroused by the shrill voice of his wife, and
grumbling to himself as he went, he mounted to her chamber,
first taking care, however, to set the entrance door wide
open, as an invitation to any chance traveller who might be
passing.
At the moment Caderousse quitted his sentrylike watch
before the door, the road on which he so eagerly strained
his sight was void and lonely as a desert at midday. There
it lay stretching out into one interminable line of dust and
sand, with its sides bordered by tall, meagre trees,
altogether presenting so uninviting an appearance, that no
one in his senses could have imagined that any traveller, at
liberty to regulate his hours for journeying, would choose
to expose himself in such a formidable Sahara. Nevertheless,
had Caderousse but retained his post a few minutes longer,
he might have caught a dim outline of something approaching
from the direction of Bellegarde as the moving object drew
nearer, he would easily have perceived that it consisted of
a man and horse, between whom the kindest and most amiable
understanding appeared to exist. The horse was of Hungarian
breed, and ambled along at an easy pace. His rider was a
priest, dressed in black, and wearing a threecornered hat
and, spite of the ardent rays of a noonday sun, the pair
came on with a fair degree of rapidity.
Having arrived before the Pont du Gard, the horse stopped,
but whether for his own pleasure or that of his rider would
have been difficult to say. However that might have been,
the priest, dismounting, led his steed by the bridle in
search of some place to which he could secure him. Availing
himself of a handle that projected from a halffallen door,
he tied the animal safely and having drawn a red cotton
handkerchief, from his pocket, wiped away the perspiration
that streamed from his brow, then, advancing to the door,
struck thrice with the end of his ironshod stick. At this
unusual sound, a huge black dog came rushing to meet the
daring assailant of his ordinarily tranquil abode, snarling
and displaying his sharp white teeth with a determined
hostility that abundantly proved how little he was
accustomed to society. At that moment a heavy footstep was
heard descending the wooden staircase that led from the
upper floor, and, with many bows and courteous smiles, mine
host of the Pont du Gard besought his guest to enter.
"You are welcome, sir, most welcome" repeated the
astonished Caderousse. "Now, then, Margotin," cried he,
speaking to the dog, "will you be quiet? Pray don't heed
him, sir  he only barks, he never bites. I make no doubt
a glass of good wine would be acceptable this dreadfully hot
day." Then perceiving for the first time the garb of the
traveller he had to entertain, Caderousse hastily exclaimed
"A thousand pardons I really did not observe whom I had the
honor to receive under my poor roof. What would the abbe
please to have? What refreshment can I offer? All I have is
at his service."
The priest gazed on the person addressing him with a long
and searching gaze  there even seemed a disposition on his
part to court a similar scrutiny on the part of the
innkeeper then, observing in the countenance of the latter
no other expression than extreme surprise at his own want of
attention to an inquiry so courteously worded, he deemed it
as well to terminate this dumb show, and therefore said,
speaking with a strong Italian accent, "You are, I presume,
M. Caderousse?"
"Yes, sir," answered the host, even more surprised at the
question than he had been by the silence which had preceded
it "I am Gaspard Caderousse, at your service."
"Gaspard Caderousse," rejoined the priest. "Yes, 
Christian and surname are the same. You formerly lived, I
believe in the Allees de Meillan, on the fourth floor?"
"I did."
"And you followed the business of a tailor?"
"True, I was a tailor, till the trade fell off. It is so hot
at Marseilles, that really I believe that the respectable
inhabitants will in time go without any clothing whatever.
But talking of heat, is there nothing I can offer you by way
of refreshment?"
"Yes let me have a bottle of your best wine, and then, with
your permission, we will resume our conversation from where
we left off."
"As you please, sir," said Caderousse, who, anxious not to
lose the present opportunity of finding a customer for one
of the few bottles of Cahors still remaining in his
possession, hastily raised a trapdoor in the floor of the
apartment they were in, which served both as parlor and
kitchen. Upon issuing forth from his subterranean retreat at
the expiration of five minutes, he found the abbe seated
upon a wooden stool, leaning his elbow on a table, while
Margotin, whose animosity seemed appeased by the unusual
command of the traveller for refreshments, had crept up to
him, and had established himself very comfortably between
his knees, his long, skinny neck resting on his lap, while
his dim eye was fixed earnestly on the traveller's face.
"Are you quite alone?" inquired the guest, as Caderousse
placed before him the bottle of wine and a glass.
"Quite, quite alone," replied the man  "or, at least,
practically so, for my poor wife, who is the only person in
the house besides myself, is laid up with illness, and
unable to render me the least assistance, poor thing"
"You are married, then?" said the priest, with a show of
interest, glancing round as he spoke at the scanty
furnishings of the apartment.
"Ah, sir," said Caderousse with a sigh, "it is easy to
perceive I am not a rich man but in this world a man does
not thrive the better for being honest." The abbe fixed on
him a searching, penetrating glance.
"Yes, honest  I can certainly say that much for myself,"
continued the innkeeper, fairly sustaining the scrutiny of
the abbe's gaze "I can boast with truth of being an honest
man and," continued he significantly, with a hand on his
breast and shaking his head, "that is more than every one
can say nowadays."
"So much the better for you, if what you assert be true,"
said the abbe "for I am firmly persuaded that, sooner or
later, the good will be rewarded, and the wicked punished."
"Such words as those belong to your profession," answered
Caderousse, "and you do well to repeat them but," added he,
with a bitter expression of countenance, "one is free to
believe them or not, as one pleases."
"You are wrong to speak thus," said the abbe "and perhaps I
may, in my own person, be able to prove to you how
completely you are in error."
"What mean you?" inquired Caderousse with a look of
surprise.
"In the first place, I must be satisfied that you are the
person I am in search of."
"What proofs do you require?"
"Did you, in the year  or , know anything of a young
sailor named Dantes?"
"Dantes? Did I know poor dear Edmond? Why, Edmond Dantes and
myself were intimate friends" exclaimed Caderousse, whose
countenance flushed darkly as he caught the penetrating gaze
of the abbe fixed on him, while the clear, calm eye of the
questioner seemed to dilate with feverish scrutiny.
"You remind me," said the priest, "that the young man
concerning whom I asked you was said to bear the name of
Edmond."
"Said to bear the name" repeated Caderousse, becoming
excited and eager. "Why, he was so called as truly as I
myself bore the appellation of Gaspard Caderousse but tell
me, I pray, what has become of poor Edmond? Did you know
him? Is he alive and at liberty? Is he prosperous and
happy?"
"He died a more wretched, hopeless, heartbroken prisoner
than the felons who pay the penalty of their crimes at the
galleys of Toulon."
A deadly pallor followed the flush on the countenance of
Caderousse, who turned away, and the priest saw him wiping
the tears from his eyes with the corner of the red
handkerchief twisted round his head.
"Poor fellow, poor fellow" murmured Caderousse. "Well,
there, sir, is another proof that good people are never
rewarded on this earth, and that none but the wicked
prosper. Ah," continued Caderousse, speaking in the highly
colored language of the south, "the world grows worse and
worse. Why does not God, if he really hates the wicked, as
he is said to do, send down brimstone and fire, and consume
them altogether?"
"You speak as though you had loved this young Dantes,"
observed the abbe, without taking any notice of his
companion's vehemence.
"And so I did," replied Caderousse "though once, I confess,
I envied him his good fortune. But I swear to you, sir, I
swear to you, by everything a man holds dear, I have, since
then, deeply and sincerely lamented his unhappy fate." There
was a brief silence, during which the fixed, searching eye
of the abbe was employed in scrutinizing the agitated
features of the innkeeper.
"You knew the poor lad, then?" continued Caderousse.
"I was called to see him on his dying bed, that I might
administer to him the consolations of religion."
"And of what did he die?" asked Caderousse in a choking
voice.
"Of what, think you, do young and strong men die in prison,
when they have scarcely numbered their thirtieth year,
unless it be of imprisonment?" Caderousse wiped away the
large beads of perspiration that gathered on his brow.
"But the strangest part of the story is," resumed the abbe,
"that Dantes, even in his dying moments, swore by his
crucified Redeemer, that he was utterly ignorant of the
cause of his detention."
"And so he was," murmured Caderousse. "How should he have
been otherwise? Ah, sir, the poor fellow told you the
truth."
"And for that reason, he besought me to try and clear up a
mystery he had never been able to penetrate, and to clear
his memory should any foul spot or stain have fallen on it."
And here the look of the abbe, becoming more and more fixed,
seemed to rest with illconcealed satisfaction on the gloomy
depression which was rapidly spreading over the countenance
of Caderousse.
"A rich Englishman," continued the abbe, "who had been his
companion in misfortune, but had been released from prison
during the second restoration, was possessed of a diamond of
immense value this jewel he bestowed on Dantes upon himself
quitting the prison, as a mark of his gratitude for the
kindness and brotherly care with which Dantes had nursed him
in a severe illness he underwent during his confinement.
Instead of employing this diamond in attempting to bribe his
jailers, who might only have taken it and then betrayed him
to the governor, Dantes carefully preserved it, that in the
event of his getting out of prison he might have wherewithal
to live, for the sale of such a diamond would have quite
sufficed to make his fortune."
"Then, I suppose," asked Caderousse, with eager, glowing
looks, "that it was a stone of immense value?"
"Why, everything is relative," answered the abbe. "To one in
Edmond's position the diamond certainly was of great value.
It was estimated at fifty thousand francs."
"Bless me" exclaimed Caderousse, "fifty thousand francs
Surely the diamond was as large as a nut to be worth all
that."
"No," replied the abbe, "it was not of such a size as that
but you shall judge for yourself. I have it with me."
The sharp gaze of Caderousse was instantly directed towards
the priest's garments, as though hoping to discover the
location of the treasure. Calmly drawing forth from his
pocket a small box covered with black shagreen, the abbe
opened it, and displayed to the dazzled eyes of Caderousse
the sparkling jewel it contained, set in a ring of admirable
workmanship. "And that diamond," cried Caderousse, almost
breathless with eager admiration, "you say, is worth fifty
thousand francs?"
"It is, without the setting, which is also valuable,"
replied the abbe, as he closed the box, and returned it to
his pocket, while its brilliant hues seemed still to dance
before the eyes of the fascinated innkeeper.
"But how comes the diamond in your possession, sir? Did
Edmond make you his heir?"
"No, merely his testamentary executor. "I once possessed
four dear and faithful friends, besides the maiden to whom I
was betrothed' he said "and I feel convinced they have all
unfeignedly grieved over my loss. The name of one of the
four friends is Caderousse.'" The innkeeper shivered.
""Another of the number,'" continued the abbe, without
seeming to notice the emotion of Caderousse, ""is called
Danglars and the third, in spite of being my rival,
entertained a very sincere affection for me.'" A fiendish
smile played over the features of Caderousse, who was about
to break in upon the abbe's speech, when the latter, waving
his hand, said, "Allow me to finish first, and then if you
have any observations to make, you can do so afterwards.
"The third of my friends, although my rival, was much
attached to me,  his name was Fernand that of my
betrothed was'  Stay, stay," continued the abbe, "I have
forgotten what he called her."
"Mercedes," said Caderousse eagerly.
"True," said the abbe, with a stifled sigh, "Mercedes it
was."
"Go on," urged Caderousse.
"Bring me a carafe of water," said the abbe.
Caderousse quickly performed the stranger's bidding and
after pouring some into a glass, and slowly swallowing its
contents, the abbe, resuming his usual placidity of manner,
said, as he placed his empty glass on the table,  "Where
did we leave off?"
"The name of Edmond's betrothed was Mercedes."
"To be sure. "You will go to Marseilles,' said Dantes, 
for you understand, I repeat his words just as he uttered
them. Do you understand?"
"Perfectly."
""You will sell this diamond you will divide the money into
five equal parts, and give an equal portion to these good
friends, the only persons who have loved me upon earth.'"
"But why into five parts?" asked Caderousse "you only
mentioned four persons."
"Because the fifth is dead, as I hear. The fifth sharer in
Edmond's bequest, was his own father."
"Too true, too true" ejaculated Caderousse, almost
suffocated by the contending passions which assailed him,
"the poor old man did die."
"I learned so much at Marseilles," replied the abbe, making
a strong effort to appear indifferent "but from the length
of time that has elapsed since the death of the elder
Dantes, I was unable to obtain any particulars of his end.
Can you enlighten me on that point?"
"I do not know who could if I could not," said Caderousse.
"Why, I lived almost on the same floor with the poor old
man. Ah, yes, about a year after the disappearance of his
son the poor old man died."
"Of what did he die?"
"Why, the doctors called his complaint gastroenteritis, I
believe his acquaintances say he died of grief but I, who
saw him in his dying moments, I say he died of" 
Caderousse paused.
"Of what?" asked the priest, anxiously and eagerly.
"Why, of downright starvation."
"Starvation" exclaimed the abbe, springing from his seat.
"Why, the vilest animals are not suffered to die by such a
death as that. The very dogs that wander houseless and
homeless in the streets find some pitying hand to cast them
a mouthful of bread and that a man, a Christian, should be
allowed to perish of hunger in the midst of other men who
call themselves Christians, is too horrible for belief. Oh,
it is impossible  utterly impossible"
"What I have said, I have said," answered Caderousse.
"And you are a fool for having said anything about it," said
a voice from the top of the stairs. "Why should you meddle
with what does not concern you?"
The two men turned quickly, and saw the sickly countenance
of La Carconte peering between the baluster rails attracted
by the sound of voices, she had feebly dragged herself down
the stairs, and, seated on the lower step, head on knees,
she had listened to the foregoing conversation. "Mind your
own business, wife," replied Caderousse sharply. "This
gentleman asks me for information, which common politeness
will not permit me to refuse."
"Politeness, you simpleton" retorted La Carconte. "What
have you to do with politeness, I should like to know?
Better study a little common prudence. How do you know the
motives that person may have for trying to extract all he
can from you?"
"I pledge you my word, madam," said the abbe, "that my
intentions are good and that you husband can incur no risk,
provided he answers me candidly."
"Ah, that's all very fine," retorted the woman. "Nothing is
easier than to begin with fair promises and assurances of
nothing to fear but when poor, silly folks, like my husband
there, have been persuaded to tell all they know, the
promises and assurances of safety are quickly forgotten and
at some moment when nobody is expecting it, behold trouble
and misery, and all sorts of persecutions, are heaped on the
unfortunate wretches, who cannot even see whence all their
afflictions come."
"Nay, nay, my good woman, make yourself perfectly easy, I
beg of you. Whatever evils may befall you, they will not be
occasioned by my instrumentality, that I solemnly promise
you."
La Carconte muttered a few inarticulate words, then let her
head again drop upon her knees, and went into a fit of ague,
leaving the two speakers to resume the conversation, but
remaining so as to be able to hear every word they uttered.
Again the abbe had been obliged to swallow a draught of
water to calm the emotions that threatened to overpower him.
When he had sufficiently recovered himself, he said, "It
appears, then, that the miserable old man you were telling
me of was forsaken by every one. Surely, had not such been
the case, he would not have perished by so dreadful a
death."
"Why, he was not altogether forsaken," continued Caderousse,
"for Mercedes the Catalan and Monsieur Morrel were very kind
to him but somehow the poor old man had contracted a
profound hatred for Fernand  the very person," added
Caderousse with a bitter smile, "that you named just now as
being one of Dantes' faithful and attached friends."
"And was he not so?" asked the abbe.
"Gaspard, Gaspard" murmured the woman, from her seat on the
stairs, "mind what you are saying" Caderousse made no reply
to these words, though evidently irritated and annoyed by
the interruption, but, addressing the abbe, said, "Can a man
be faithful to another whose wife he covets and desires for
himself? But Dantes was so honorable and true in his own
nature, that he believed everybody's professions of
friendship. Poor Edmond, he was cruelly deceived but it was
fortunate that he never knew, or he might have found it more
difficult, when on his deathbed, to pardon his enemies. And,
whatever people may say," continued Caderousse, in his
native language, which was not altogether devoid of rude
poetry, "I cannot help being more frightened at the idea of
the malediction of the dead than the hatred of the living."
"Imbecile" exclaimed La Carconte.
"Do you, then, know in what manner Fernand injured Dantes?"
inquired the abbe of Caderousse.
"Do I? No one better."
"Speak out then, say what it was"
"Gaspard" cried La Carconte, "do as you will you are
master  but if you take my advice you'll hold your
tongue."
"Well, wife," replied Caderousse, "I don't know but what
you're right"
"So you will say nothing?" asked the abbe.
"Why, what good would it do?" asked Caderousse. "If the poor
lad were living, and came to me and begged that I would
candidly tell which were his true and which his false
friends, why, perhaps, I should not hesitate. But you tell
me he is no more, and therefore can have nothing to do with
hatred or revenge, so let all such feeling be buried with
him."
"You prefer, then," said the abbe, "that I should bestow on
men you say are false and treacherous, the reward intended
for faithful friendship?"
"That is true enough," returned Caderousse. "You say truly,
the gift of poor Edmond was not meant for such traitors as
Fernand and Danglars besides, what would it be to them? no
more than a drop of water in the ocean."
"Remember," chimed in La Carconte, "those two could crush
you at a single blow"
"How so?" inquired the abbe. "Are these persons, then, so
rich and powerful?"
"Do you not know their history?"
"I do not. Pray relate it to me" Caderousse seemed to
reflect for a few moments, then said, "No, truly, it would
take up too much time."
"Well, my good friend," returned the abbe, in a tone that
indicated utter indifference on his part, "you are at
liberty, either to speak or be silent, just as you please
for my own part, I respect your scruples and admire your
sentiments so let the matter end. I shall do my duty as
conscientiously as I can, and fulfil my promise to the dying
man. My first business will be to dispose of this diamond."
So saying, the abbe again draw the small box from his
pocket, opened it, and contrived to hold it in such a light,
that a bright flash of brilliant hues passed before the
dazzled gaze of Caderousse.
"Wife, wife" cried he in a hoarse voice, "come here"
"Diamond" exclaimed La Carconte, rising and descending to
the chamber with a tolerably firm step "what diamond are
you talking about?"
"Why, did you not hear all we said?" inquired Caderousse.
"It is a beautiful diamond left by poor Edmond Dantes, to be
sold, and the money divided between his father, Mercedes,
his betrothed bride, Fernand, Danglars, and myself. The
jewel is worth at least fifty thousand francs."
"Oh, what a magnificent jewel" cried the astonished woman.
"The fifth part of the profits from this stone belongs to us
then, does it not?" asked Caderousse.
"It does," replied the abbe "with the addition of an equal
division of that part intended for the elder Dantes, which I
believe myself at liberty to divide equally with the four
survivors."
"And why among us four?" inquired Caderousse.
"As being the friends Edmond esteemed most faithful and
devoted to him."
"I don't call those friends who betray and ruin you,"
murmured the wife in her turn, in a low, muttering voice.
"Of course not" rejoined Caderousse quickly "no more do I,
and that was what I was observing to this gentleman just
now. I said I looked upon it as a sacrilegious profanation
to reward treachery, perhaps crime."
"Remember," answered the abbe calmly, as he replaced the
jewel and its case in the pocket of his cassock, "it is your
fault, not mine, that I do so. You will have the goodness to
furnish me with the address of both Fernand and Danglars, in
order that I may execute Edmond's last wishes." The
agitation of Caderousse became extreme, and large drops of
perspiration rolled from his heated brow. As he saw the abbe
rise from his seat and go towards the door, as though to
ascertain if his horse were sufficiently refreshed to
continue his journey, Caderousse and his wife exchanged
looks of deep meaning.
"There, you see, wife," said the former, "this splendid
diamond might all be ours, if we chose"
"Do you believe it?"
"Why, surely a man of his holy profession would not deceive
us"
"Well," replied La Carconte, "do as you like. For my part, I
wash my hands of the affair." So saying, she once more
climbed the staircase leading to her chamber, her body
convulsed with chills, and her teeth rattling in her head,
in spite of the intense heat of the weather. Arrived at the
top stair, she turned round, and called out, in a warning
tone, to her husband, "Gaspard, consider well what you are
about to do"
"I have both reflected and decided," answered he. La
Carconte then entered her chamber, the flooring of which
creaked beneath her heavy, uncertain tread, as she proceeded
towards her armchair, into which she fell as though
exhausted.
"Well," asked the abbe, as he returned to the apartment
below, "what have you made up your mind to do?"
"To tell you all I know," was the reply.
"I certainly think you act wisely in so doing," said the
priest. "Not because I have the least desire to learn
anything you may please to conceal from me, but simply that
if, through your assistance, I could distribute the legacy
according to the wishes of the testator, why, so much the
better, that is all."
"I hope it may be so," replied Caderousse, his face flushed
with cupidity.
"I am all attention," said the abbe.
"Stop a minute," answered Caderousse "we might be
interrupted in the most interesting part of my story, which
would be a pity and it is as well that your visit hither
should be made known only to ourselves." With these words he
went stealthily to the door, which he closed, and, by way of
still greater precaution, bolted and barred it, as he was
accustomed to do at night. During this time the abbe had
chosen his place for listening at his ease. He removed his
seat into a corner of the room, where he himself would be in
deep shadow, while the light would be fully thrown on the
narrator then, with head bent down and hands clasped, or
rather clinched together, he prepared to give his whole
attention to Caderousse, who seated himself on the little
stool, exactly opposite to him.
"Remember, this is no affair of mine," said the trembling
voice of La Carconte, as though through the flooring of her
chamber she viewed the scene that was enacting below.
"Enough, enough" replied Caderousse "say no more about it
I will take all the consequences upon myself." And he began
his story.
Chapter 
The Story.
"First, sir," said Caderousse, "you must make me a promise."
"What is that?" inquired the abbe.
"Why, if you ever make use of the details I am about to give
you, that you will never let any one know that it was I who
supplied them for the persons of whom I am about to talk
are rich and powerful, and if they only laid the tips of
their fingers on me, I should break to pieces like glass."
"Make yourself easy, my friend," replied the abbe. "I am a
priest, and confessions die in my breast. Recollect, our
only desire is to carry out, in a fitting manner, the last
wishes of our friend. Speak, then, without reserve, as
without hatred tell the truth, the whole truth I do not
know, never may know, the persons of whom you are about to
speak besides, I am an Italian, and not a Frenchman, and
belong to God, and not to man, and I shall shortly retire to
my convent, which I have only quitted to fulfil the last
wishes of a dying man." This positive assurance seemed to
give Caderousse a little courage.
"Well, then, under these circumstances," said Caderousse, "I
will, I even believe I ought to undeceive you as to the
friendship which poor Edmond thought so sincere and
unquestionable."
"Begin with his father, if you please." said the abbe
"Edmond talked to me a great deal about the old man for whom
he had the deepest love."
"The history is a sad one, sir," said Caderousse, shaking
his head "perhaps you know all the earlier part of it?"
"Yes." answered the abbe "Edmond related to me everything
until the moment when he was arrested in a small cabaret
close to Marseilles."
"At La Reserve Oh, yes I can see it all before me this
moment."
"Was it not his betrothal feast?"
"It was and the feast that began so gayly had a very
sorrowful ending a police commissary, followed by four
soldiers, entered, and Dantes was arrested."
"Yes, and up to this point I know all," said the priest.
"Dantes himself only knew that which personally concerned
him, for he never beheld again the five persons I have named
to you, or heard mention of any one of them."
"Well, when Dantes was arrested, Monsieur Morrel hastened to
obtain the particulars, and they were very sad. The old man
returned alone to his home, folded up his wedding suit with
tears in his eyes, and paced up and down his chamber the
whole day, and would not go to bed at all, for I was
underneath him and heard him walking the whole night and
for myself, I assure you I could not sleep either, for the
grief of the poor father gave me great uneasiness, and every
step he took went to my heart as really as if his foot had
pressed against my breast. The next day Mercedes came to
implore the protection of M. de Villefort she did not
obtain it, however, and went to visit the old man when she
saw him so miserable and heartbroken, having passed a
sleepless night, and not touched food since the previous
day, she wished him to go with her that she might take care
of him but the old man would not consent. "No,' was the old
man's reply, "I will not leave this house, for my poor dear
boy loves me better than anything in the world and if he
gets out of prison he will come and see me the first thing,
and what would he think if I did not wait here for him?' I
heard all this from the window, for I was anxious that
Mercedes should persuade the old man to accompany her, for
his footsteps over my head night and day did not leave me a
moment's repose."
"But did you not go upstairs and try to console the poor
old man?" asked the abbe.
"Ah, sir," replied Caderousse, "we cannot console those who
will not be consoled, and he was one of these besides, I
know not why, but he seemed to dislike seeing me. One night,
however, I heard his sobs, and I could not resist my desire
to go up to him, but when I reached his door he was no
longer weeping but praying. I cannot now repeat to you, sir,
all the eloquent words and imploring language he made use
of it was more than piety, it was more than grief, and I,
who am no canter, and hate the Jesuits, said then to myself,
"It is really well, and I am very glad that I have not any
children for if I were a father and felt such excessive
grief as the old man does, and did not find in my memory or
heart all he is now saying, I should throw myself into the
sea at once, for I could not bear it.'"
"Poor father" murmured the priest.
"From day to day he lived on alone, and more and more
solitary. M. Morrel and Mercedes came to see him, but his
door was closed and, although I was certain he was at home,
he would not make any answer. One day, when, contrary to his
custom, he had admitted Mercedes, and the poor girl, in
spite of her own grief and despair, endeavored to console
him, he said to her,  "Be assured, my dear daughter, he is
dead and instead of expecting him, it is he who is awaiting
us I am quite happy, for I am the oldest, and of course
shall see him first.' However well disposed a person may be,
why you see we leave off after a time seeing persons who are
in sorrow, they make one melancholy and so at last old
Dantes was left all to himself, and I only saw from time to
time strangers go up to him and come down again with some
bundle they tried to hide but I guessed what these bundles
were, and that he sold by degrees what he had to pay for his
subsistence. At length the poor old fellow reached the end
of all he had he owed three quarters' rent, and they
threatened to turn him out he begged for another week,
which was granted to him. I know this, because the landlord
came into my apartment when he left his. For the first three
days I heard him walking about as usual, but, on the fourth
I heard nothing. I then resolved to go up to him at all
risks. The door was closed, but I looked through the
keyhole, and saw him so pale and haggard, that believing him
very ill, I went and told M. Morrel and then ran on to
Mercedes. They both came immediately, M. Morrel bringing a
doctor, and the doctor said it was inflammation of the
bowels, and ordered him a limited diet. I was there, too,
and I never shall forget the old man's smile at this
prescription. From that time he received all who came he
had an excuse for not eating any more the doctor had put
him on a diet." The abbe uttered a kind of groan. "The story
interests you, does it not, sir?" inquired Caderousse.
"Yes," replied the abbe, "it is very affecting."
"Mercedes came again, and she found him so altered that she
was even more anxious than before to have him taken to her
own home. This was M. Morrel's wish also, who would fain
have conveyed the old man against his consent but the old
man resisted, and cried so that they were actually
frightened. Mercedes remained, therefore, by his bedside,
and M. Morrel went away, making a sign to the Catalan that
he had left his purse on the chimneypiece. But availing
himself of the doctor's order, the old man would not take
any sustenance at length after nine days of despair and
fasting, the old man died, cursing those who had caused his
misery, and saying to Mercedes, "If you ever see my Edmond
again, tell him I die blessing him.'" The abbe rose from his
chair, made two turns round the chamber, and pressed his
trembling hand against his parched throat. "And you believe
he died" 
"Of hunger, sir, of hunger," said Caderousse. "I am as
certain of it as that we two are Christians."
The abbe, with a shaking hand, seized a glass of water that
was standing by him halffull, swallowed it at one gulp, and
then resumed his seat, with red eyes and pale cheeks. "This
was, indeed, a horrid event." said he in a hoarse voice.
"The more so, sir, as it was men's and not God's doing."
"Tell me of those men," said the abbe, "and remember too,"
he added in an almost menacing tone, "you have promised to
tell me everything. Tell me, therefore, who are these men
who killed the son with despair, and the father with
famine?"
"Two men jealous of him, sir one from love, and the other
from ambition,  Fernand and Danglars."
"How was this jealousy manifested? Speak on."
"They denounced Edmond as a Bonapartist agent."
"Which of the two denounced him? Which was the real
delinquent?"
"Both, sir one with a letter, and the other put it in the
post."
"And where was this letter written?"
"At La Reserve, the day before the betrothal feast."
"'Twas so, then  'twas so, then," murmured the abbe. "Oh,
Faria, Faria, how well did you judge men and things"
"What did you please to say, sir?" asked Caderousse.
"Nothing, nothing," replied the priest "go on."
"It was Danglars who wrote the denunciation with his left
hand, that his writing might not be recognized, and Fernand
who put it in the post."
"But," exclaimed the abbe suddenly, "you were there
yourself."
"I" said Caderousse, astonished "who told you I was
there?"
The abbe saw he had overshot the mark, and he added quickly,
"No one but in order to have known everything so well,
you must have been an eyewitness."
"True, true" said Caderousse in a choking voice, "I was
there."
"And did you not remonstrate against such infamy?" asked the
abbe "if not, you were an accomplice."
"Sir," replied Caderousse, "they had made me drink to such
an excess that I nearly lost all perception. I had only an
indistinct understanding of what was passing around me. I
said all that a man in such a state could say but they both
assured me that it was a jest they were carrying on, and
perfectly harmless."
"Next day  next day, sir, you must have seen plain enough
what they had been doing, yet you said nothing, though you
were present when Dantes was arrested."
"Yes, sir, I was there, and very anxious to speak but
Danglars restrained me. "If he should really be guilty,'
said he, "and did really put in to the Island of Elba if he
is really charged with a letter for the Bonapartist
committee at Paris, and if they find this letter upon him,
those who have supported him will pass for his accomplices.'
I confess I had my fears, in the state in which politics
then were, and I held my tongue. It was cowardly, I confess,
but it was not criminal."
"I understand  you allowed matters to take their course,
that was all."
"Yes, sir," answered Caderousse "and remorse preys on me
night and day. I often ask pardon of God, I swear to you,
because this action, the only one with which I have
seriously to reproach myself in all my life, is no doubt the
cause of my abject condition. I am expiating a moment of
selfishness, and so I always say to La Carconte, when she
complains, "Hold your tongue, woman it is the will of
God.'" And Caderousse bowed his head with every sign of real
repentance.
"Well, sir," said the abbe, "you have spoken unreservedly
and thus to accuse yourself is to deserve pardon."
"Unfortunately, Edmond is dead, and has not pardoned me."
"He did not know," said the abbe.
"But he knows it all now," interrupted Caderousse "they say
the dead know everything." There was a brief silence the
abbe rose and paced up and down pensively, and then resumed
his seat. "You have two or three times mentioned a M.
Morrel," he said "who was he?"
"The owner of the Pharaon and patron of Dantes."
"And what part did he play in this sad drama?" inquired the
abbe.
"The part of an honest man, full of courage and real regard.
Twenty times he interceded for Edmond. When the emperor
returned, he wrote, implored, threatened, and so
energetically, that on the second restoration he was
persecuted as a Bonapartist. Ten times, as I told you, he
came to see Dantes' father, and offered to receive him in
his own house and the night or two before his death, as I
have already said, he left his purse on the mantelpiece,
with which they paid the old man's debts, and buried him
decently and so Edmond's father died, as he had lived,
without doing harm to any one. I have the purse still by me
a large one, made of red silk."
"And," asked the abbe, "is M. Morrel still alive?"
"Yes," replied Caderousse.
"In that case," replied the abbe, "he should be rich,
happy."
Caderousse smiled bitterly. "Yes, happy as myself," said he.
"What M. Morrel unhappy?" exclaimed the abbe.
"He is reduced almost to the last extremity  nay, he is
almost at the point of dishonor."
"How?"
"Yes," continued Caderousse, "so it is after five and
twenty years of labor, after having acquired a most
honorable name in the trade of Marseilles, M. Morrel is
utterly ruined he has lost five ships in two years, has
suffered by the bankruptcy of three large houses, and his
only hope now is in that very Pharaon which poor Dantes
commanded, and which is expected from the Indies with a
cargo of cochineal and indigo. If this ship founders, like
the others, he is a ruined man."
"And has the unfortunate man wife or children?" inquired the
abbe.
"Yes, he has a wife, who through everything has behaved like
an angel he has a daughter, who was about to marry the man
she loved, but whose family now will not allow him to wed
the daughter of a ruined man he has, besides, a son, a
lieutenant in the army and, as you may suppose, all this,
instead of lessening, only augments his sorrows. If he were
alone in the world he would blow out his brains, and there
would be an end."
"Horrible" ejaculated the priest.
"And it is thus heaven recompenses virtue, sir," added
Caderousse. "You see, I, who never did a bad action but that
I have told you of  am in destitution, with my poor wife
dying of fever before my very eyes, and I unable to do
anything in the world for her I shall die of hunger, as old
Dantes did, while Fernand and Danglars are rolling in
wealth."
"How is that?"
"Because their deeds have brought them good fortune, while
honest men have been reduced to misery."
"What has become of Danglars, the instigator, and therefore
the most guilty?"
"What has become of him? Why, he left Marseilles, and was
taken, on the recommendation of M. Morrel, who did not know
his crime, as cashier into a Spanish bank. During the war
with Spain he was employed in the commissariat of the French
army, and made a fortune then with that money he speculated
in the funds, and trebled or quadrupled his capital and,
having first married his banker's daughter, who left him a
widower, he has married a second time, a widow, a Madame de
Nargonne, daughter of M. de Servieux, the king's
chamberlain, who is in high favor at court. He is a
millionaire, and they have made him a baron, and now he is
the Baron Danglars, with a fine residence in the Rue de
MontBlanc, with ten horses in his stables, six footmen in
his antechamber, and I know not how many millions in his
strongbox."
"Ah" said the abbe, in a peculiar tone, "he is happy."
"Happy? Who can answer for that? Happiness or unhappiness is
the secret known but to one's self and the walls  walls
have ears but no tongue but if a large fortune produces
happiness, Danglars is happy."
"And Fernand?"
"Fernand? Why, much the same story."
"But how could a poor Catalan fisherboy, without education
or resources, make a fortune? I confess this staggers me."
"And it has staggered everybody. There must have been in his
life some strange secret that no one knows."
"But, then, by what visible steps has he attained this high
fortune or high position?"
"Both, sir  he has both fortune and position  both."
"This must be impossible"
"It would seem so but listen, and you will understand. Some
days before the return of the emperor, Fernand was drafted.
The Bourbons left him quietly enough at the Catalans, but
Napoleon returned, a special levy was made, and Fernand was
compelled to join. I went too but as I was older than
Fernand, and had just married my poor wife, I was only sent
to the coast. Fernand was enrolled in the active troop, went
to the frontier with his regiment, and was at the battle of
Ligny. The night after that battle he was sentry at the door
of a general who carried on a secret correspondence with the
enemy. That same night the general was to go over to the
English. He proposed to Fernand to accompany him Fernand
agreed to do so, deserted his post, and followed the
general. Fernand would have been courtmartialed if Napoleon
had remained on the throne, but his action was rewarded by
the Bourbons. He returned to France with the epaulet of
sublieutenant, and as the protection of the general, who is
in the highest favor, was accorded to him, he was a captain
in , during the Spanish war  that is to say, at the
time when Danglars made his early speculations. Fernand was
a Spaniard, and being sent to Spain to ascertain the feeling
of his fellowcountrymen, found Danglars there, got on very
intimate terms with him, won over the support of the
royalists at the capital and in the provinces, received
promises and made pledges on his own part, guided his
regiment by paths known to himself alone through the
mountain gorges which were held by the royalists, and, in
fact, rendered such services in this brief campaign that,
after the taking of Trocadero, he was made colonel, and
received the title of count and the cross of an officer of
the Legion of Honor."
"Destiny destiny" murmured the abbe.
"Yes, but listen this was not all. The war with Spain being
ended, Fernand's career was checked by the long peace which
seemed likely to endure throughout Europe. Greece only had
risen against Turkey, and had begun her war of independence
all eyes were turned towards Athens  it was the fashion to
pity and support the Greeks. The French government, without
protecting them openly, as you know, gave countenance to
volunteer assistance. Fernand sought and obtained leave to
go and serve in Greece, still having his name kept on the
army roll. Some time after, it was stated that the Comte de
Morcerf this was the name he bore had entered the service
of Ali Pasha with the rank of instructorgeneral. Ali Pasha
was killed, as you know, but before he died he recompensed
the services of Fernand by leaving him a considerable sum,
with which he returned to France, when he was gazetted
lieutenantgeneral."
"So that now?"  inquired the abbe.
"So that now," continued Caderousse, "he owns a magnificent
house  No. , Rue du Helder, Paris." The abbe opened his
mouth, hesitated for a moment, then, making an effort at
selfcontrol, he said, "And Mercedes  they tell me that
she has disappeared?"
"Disappeared," said Caderousse, "yes, as the sun disappears,
to rise the next day with still more splendor."
"Has she made a fortune also?" inquired the abbe, with an
ironical smile.
"Mercedes is at this moment one of the greatest ladies in
Paris," replied Caderousse.
"Go on," said the abbe "it seems as if I were listening to
the story of a dream. But I have seen things so
extraordinary, that what you tell me seems less astonishing
than it otherwise might."
"Mercedes was at first in the deepest despair at the blow
which deprived her of Edmond. I have told you of her
attempts to propitiate M. de Villefort, her devotion to the
elder Dantes. In the midst of her despair, a new affliction
overtook her. This was the departure of Fernand  of
Fernand, whose crime she did not know, and whom she regarded
as her brother. Fernand went, and Mercedes remained alone.
Three months passed and still she wept  no news of Edmond,
no news of Fernand, no companionship save that of an old man
who was dying with despair. One evening, after a day of
accustomed vigil at the angle of two roads leading to
Marseilles from the Catalans, she returned to her home more
depressed than ever. Suddenly she heard a step she knew,
turned anxiously around, the door opened, and Fernand,
dressed in the uniform of a sublieutenant, stood before
her. It was not the one she wished for most, but it seemed
as if a part of her past life had returned to her. Mercedes
seized Fernand's hands with a transport which he took for
love, but which was only joy at being no longer alone in the
world, and seeing at last a friend, after long hours of
solitary sorrow. And then, it must be confessed, Fernand had
never been hated  he was only not precisely loved. Another
possessed all Mercedes' heart that other was absent, had
disappeared, perhaps was dead. At this last thought Mercedes
burst into a flood of tears, and wrung her hands in agony
but the thought, which she had always repelled before when
it was suggested to her by another, came now in full force
upon her mind and then, too, old Dantes incessantly said to
her, "Our Edmond is dead if he were not, he would return to
us.' The old man died, as I have told you had he lived,
Mercedes, perchance, had not become the wife of another, for
he would have been there to reproach her infidelity. Fernand
saw this, and when he learned of the old man's death he
returned. He was now a lieutenant. At his first coming he
had not said a word of love to Mercedes at the second he
reminded her that he loved her. Mercedes begged for six
months more in which to await and mourn for Edmond."
"So that," said the abbe, with a bitter smile, "that makes
eighteen months in all. What more could the most devoted
lover desire?" Then he murmured the words of the English
poet, ""Frailty, thy name is woman.'"
"Six months afterwards," continued Caderousse, "the marriage
took place in the church of Accoules."
"The very church in which she was to have married Edmond,"
murmured the priest "there was only a change of
bridegrooms."
"Well, Mercedes was married," proceeded Caderousse "but
although in the eyes of the world she appeared calm, she
nearly fainted as she passed La Reserve, where, eighteen
months before, the betrothal had been celebrated with him
whom she might have known she still loved had she looked to
the bottom of her heart. Fernand, more happy, but not more
at his ease  for I saw at this time he was in constant
dread of Edmond's return  Fernand was very anxious to get
his wife away, and to depart himself. There were too many
unpleasant possibilities associated with the Catalans, and
eight days after the wedding they left Marseilles."
"Did you ever see Mercedes again?" inquired the priest.
"Yes, during the Spanish war, at Perpignan, where Fernand
had left her she was attending to the education of her
son." The abbe started. "Her son?" said he.
"Yes," replied Caderousse, "little Albert."
"But, then, to be able to instruct her child," continued the
abbe, "she must have received an education herself. I
understood from Edmond that she was the daughter of a simple
fisherman, beautiful but uneducated."
"Oh," replied Caderousse, "did he know so little of his
lovely betrothed? Mercedes might have been a queen, sir, if
the crown were to be placed on the heads of the loveliest
and most intelligent. Fernand's fortune was already waxing
great, and she developed with his growing fortune. She
learned drawing, music  everything. Besides, I believe,
between ourselves, she did this in order to distract her
mind, that she might forget and she only filled her head in
order to alleviate the weight on her heart. But now her
position in life is assured," continued Caderousse "no
doubt fortune and honors have comforted her she is rich, a
countess, and yet"  Caderousse paused.
"And yet what?" asked the abbe.
"Yet, I am sure, she is not happy," said Caderousse.
"What makes you believe this?"
"Why, when I found myself utterly destitute, I thought my
old friends would, perhaps, assist me. So I went to
Danglars, who would not even receive me. I called on
Fernand, who sent me a hundred francs by his
valetdechambre."
"Then you did not see either of them?"
"No, but Madame de Morcerf saw me."
"How was that?"
"As I went away a purse fell at my feet  it contained five
and twenty louis I raised my head quickly, and saw
Mercedes, who at once shut the blind."
"And M. de Villefort?" asked the abbe.
"Oh, he never was a friend of mine, I did not know him, and
I had nothing to ask of him."
"Do you not know what became of him, and the share he had in
Edmond's misfortunes?"
"No I only know that some time after Edmond's arrest, he
married Mademoiselle de SaintMeran, and soon after left
Marseilles no doubt he has been as lucky as the rest no
doubt he is as rich as Danglars, as high in station as
Fernand. I only, as you see, have remained poor, wretched,
and forgotten."
"You are mistaken, my friend," replied the abbe "God may
seem sometimes to forget for a time, while his justice
reposes, but there always comes a moment when he remembers
and behold  a proof" As he spoke, the abbe took the
diamond from his pocket, and giving it to Caderousse, said,
"Here, my friend, take this diamond, it is yours."
"What, for me only?" cried Caderousse, "ah, sir, do not jest
with me"
"This diamond was to have been shared among his friends.
Edmond had one friend only, and thus it cannot be divided.
Take the diamond, then, and sell it it is worth fifty
thousand francs, and I repeat my wish that this sum may
suffice to release you from your wretchedness."
"Oh, sir," said Caderousse, putting out one hand timidly,
and with the other wiping away the perspiration which
bedewed his brow,  "Oh, sir, do not make a jest of the
happiness or despair of a man."
"I know what happiness and what despair are, and I never
make a jest of such feelings. Take it, then, but in exchange
Caderousse, who touched the diamond, withdrew his hand. The
abbe smiled. "In exchange," he continued, "give me the red
silk purse that M. Morrel left on old Dantes' chimneypiece,
and which you tell me is still in your hands." Caderousse,
more and more astonished, went toward a large oaken
cupboard, opened it, and gave the abbe a long purse of faded
red silk, round which were two copper runners that had once
been gilt. The abbe took it, and in return gave Caderousse
the diamond.
"Oh, you are a man of God, sir," cried Caderousse "for no
one knew that Edmond had given you this diamond, and you
might have kept it."
"Which," said the abbe to himself, "you would have done."
The abbe rose, took his hat and gloves. "Well," he said,
"all you have told me is perfectly true, then, and I may
believe it in every particular."
"See, sir," replied Caderousse, "in this corner is a
crucifix in holy wood  here on this shelf is my wife's
testament open this book, and I will swear upon it with my
hand on the crucifix. I will swear to you by my soul's
salvation, my faith as a Christian, I have told everything
to you as it occurred, and as the recording angel will tell
it to the ear of God at the day of the last judgment"
"'Tis well," said the abbe, convinced by his manner and tone
that Caderousse spoke the truth. "'Tis well, and may this
money profit you Adieu I go far from men who thus so
bitterly injure each other." The abbe with difficulty got
away from the enthusiastic thanks of Caderousse, opened the
door himself, got out and mounted his horse, once more
saluted the innkeeper, who kept uttering his loud farewells,
and then returned by the road he had travelled in coming.
When Caderousse turned around, he saw behind him La
Carconte, paler and trembling more than ever. "Is, then, all
that I have heard really true?" she inquired.
"What? That he has given the diamond to us only?" inquired
Caderousse, half bewildered with joy "yes, nothing more
true See, here it is." The woman gazed at it a moment, and
then said, in a gloomy voice, "Suppose it's false?"
Caderousse started and turned pale. "False" he muttered.
"False Why should that man give me a false diamond?"
"To get your secret without paying for it, you blockhead"
Caderousse remained for a moment aghast under the weight of
such an idea. "Oh" he said, taking up his hat, which he
placed on the red handkerchief tied round his head, "we will
soon find out."
"In what way?"
"Why, the fair is on at Beaucaire, there are always
jewellers from Paris there, and I will show it to them. Look
after the house, wife, and I shall be back in two hours,"
and Caderousse left the house in haste, and ran rapidly in
the direction opposite to that which the priest had taken.
"Fifty thousand francs" muttered La Carconte when left
alone "it is a large sum of money, but it is not a
fortune."
Chapter 
The Prison Register.
The day after that in which the scene we have just described
had taken place on the road between Bellegarde and
Beaucaire, a man of about thirty or two and thirty, dressed
in a bright blue frock coat, nankeen trousers, and a white
waistcoat, having the appearance and accent of an
Englishman, presented himself before the mayor of
Marseilles. "Sir," said he, "I am chief clerk of the house
of Thomson  French, of Rome. We are, and have been these
ten years, connected with the house of Morrel  Son, of
Marseilles. We have a hundred thousand francs or thereabouts
loaned on their securities, and we are a little uneasy at
reports that have reached us that the firm is on the brink
of ruin. I have come, therefore, express from Rome, to ask
you for information."
"Sir," replied the mayor. "I know very well that during the
last four or five years misfortune has seemed to pursue M.
Morrel. He has lost four or five vessels, and suffered by
three or four bankruptcies but it is not for me, although I
am a creditor myself to the amount of ten thousand francs,
to give any information as to the state of his finances. Ask
of me, as mayor, what is my opinion of M. Morrel, and I
shall say that he is a man honorable to the last degree, and
who has up to this time fulfilled every engagement with
scrupulous punctuality. This is all I can say, sir if you
wish to learn more, address yourself to M. de Boville, the
inspector of prisons, No. , Rue de Nouailles he has, I
believe, two hundred thousand francs in Morrel's hands, and
if there be any grounds for apprehension, as this is a
greater amount than mine, you will most probably find him
better informed than myself."
The Englishman seemed to appreciate this extreme delicacy,
made his bow and went away, proceeding with a characteristic
British stride towards the street mentioned. M. de Boville
was in his private room, and the Englishman, on perceiving
him, made a gesture of surprise, which seemed to indicate
that it was not the first time he had been in his presence.
As to M. de Boville, he was in such a state of despair, that
it was evident all the faculties of his mind, absorbed in
the thought which occupied him at the moment, did not allow
either his memory or his imagination to stray to the past.
The Englishman, with the coolness of his nation, addressed
him in terms nearly similar to those with which he had
accosted the mayor of Marseilles. "Oh, sir," exclaimed M. de
Boville, "your fears are unfortunately but too well founded,
and you see before you a man in despair. I had two hundred
thousand francs placed in the hands of Morrel  Son these
two hundred thousand francs were the dowry of my daughter,
who was to be married in a fortnight, and these two hundred
thousand francs were payable, half on the th of this
month, and the other half on the th of next month. I had
informed M. Morrel of my desire to have these payments
punctually, and he has been here within the last halfhour
to tell me that if his ship, the Pharaon, did not come into
port on the th, he would be wholly unable to make this
payment."
"But," said the Englishman, "this looks very much like a
suspension of payment."
"It looks more like bankruptcy" exclaimed M. de Boville
despairingly.
The Englishman appeared to reflect a moment, and then said,
"From which it would appear, sir, that this credit
inspires you with considerable apprehension?"
"To tell you the truth, I consider it lost."
"Well, then, I will buy it of you"
"You?"
"Yes, I"
"But at a tremendous discount, of course?"
"No, for two hundred thousand francs. Our house," added the
Englishman with a laugh, "does not do things in that way."
"And you will pay" 
"Ready money." And the Englishman drew from his pocket a
bundle of banknotes, which might have been twice the sum M.
de Boville feared to lose. A ray of joy passed across M. de
Boville's countenance, yet he made an effort at
selfcontrol, and said,  "Sir, I ought to tell you that,
in all probability, you will not realize six per cent of
this sum."
"That's no affair of mine," replied the Englishman, "that is
the affair of the house of Thomson  French, in whose name I
act. They have, perhaps, some motive to serve in hastening
the ruin of a rival firm. But all I know, sir, is, that I am
ready to hand you over this sum in exchange for your
assignment of the debt. I only ask a brokerage."
"Of course, that is perfectly just," cried M. de Boville.
"The commission is usually one and a half will you have two
three  five per cent, or even more? Whatever you say."
"Sir," replied the Englishman, laughing, "I am like my
house, and do not do such things  no, the commission I ask
is quite different."
"Name it, sir, I beg."
"You are the inspector of prisons?"
"I have been so these fourteen years."
"You keep the registers of entries and departures?"
"I do."
"To these registers there are added notes relative to the
prisoners?"
"There are special reports on every prisoner."
"Well, sir, I was educated at home by a poor devil of an
abbe, who disappeared suddenly. I have since learned that he
was confined in the Chateau d'If, and I should like to learn
some particulars of his death."
"What was his name?"
"The Abbe Faria."
"Oh, I recollect him perfectly," cried M. de Boville "he
was crazy."
"So they said."
"Oh, he was, decidedly."
"Very possibly but what sort of madness was it?"
"He pretended to know of an immense treasure, and offered
vast sums to the government if they would liberate him."
"Poor devil  and he is dead?"
"Yes, sir, five or six months ago  last February."
"You have a good memory, sir, to recollect dates so well."
"I recollect this, because the poor devil's death was
accompanied by a singular incident."
"May I ask what that was?" said the Englishman with an
expression of curiosity, which a close observer would have
been astonished at discovering in his phlegmatic
countenance.
"Oh dear, yes, sir the abbe's dungeon was forty or fifty
feet distant from that of one of Bonaparte's emissaries, 
one of those who had contributed the most to the return of
the usurper in ,  a very resolute and very dangerous
man."
"Indeed" said the Englishman.
"Yes," replied M. de Boville "I myself had occasion to see
this man in  or , and we could only go into his
dungeon with a file of soldiers. That man made a deep
impression on me I shall never forget his countenance" The
Englishman smiled imperceptibly.
"And you say, sir," he interposed, "that the two dungeons"
"Were separated by a distance of fifty feet but it appears
that this Edmond Dantes" 
"This dangerous man's name was" 
"Edmond Dantes. It appears, sir, that this Edmond Dantes had
procured tools, or made them, for they found a tunnel
through which the prisoners held communication with one
another."
"This tunnel was dug, no doubt, with an intention of
escape?"
"No doubt but unfortunately for the prisoners, the Abbe
Faria had an attack of catalepsy, and died."
"That must have cut short the projects of escape."
"For the dead man, yes," replied M. de Boville, "but not for
the survivor on the contrary, this Dantes saw a means of
accelerating his escape. He, no doubt, thought that
prisoners who died in the Chateau d'If were interred in an
ordinary burialground, and he conveyed the dead man into
his own cell, took his place in the sack in which they had
sewed up the corpse, and awaited the moment of interment."
"It was a bold step, and one that showed some courage,"
remarked the Englishman.
"As I have already told you, sir, he was a very dangerous
man and, fortunately, by his own act disembarrassed the
government of the fears it had on his account."
"How was that?"
"How? Do you not comprehend?"
"No."
"The Chateau d'If has no cemetery, and they simply throw the
dead into the sea, after fastening a thirtysix pound
cannonball to their feet."
"Well," observed the Englishman as if he were slow of
comprehension.
"Well, they fastened a thirtysix pound ball to his feet,
and threw him into the sea."
"Really" exclaimed the Englishman.
"Yes, sir," continued the inspector of prisons. "You may
imagine the amazement of the fugitive when he found himself
flung headlong over the rocks I should like to have seen
his face at that moment."
"That would have been difficult."
"No matter," replied De Boville, in supreme goodhumor at
the certainty of recovering his two hundred thousand francs,
"no matter, I can fancy it." And he shouted with
laughter.
"So can I," said the Englishman, and he laughed too but he
laughed as the English do, "at the end of his teeth."
"And so," continued the Englishman who first gained his
composure, "he was drowned?"
"Unquestionably."
"So that the governor got rid of the dangerous and the crazy
prisoner at the same time?"
"Precisely."
"But some official document was drawn up as to this affair,
I suppose?" inquired the Englishman.
"Yes, yes, the mortuary deposition. You understand, Dantes'
relations, if he had any, might have some interest in
knowing if he were dead or alive."
"So that now, if there were anything to inherit from him,
they may do so with easy conscience. He is dead, and no
mistake about it."
"Oh, yes and they may have the fact attested whenever they
please."
"So be it," said the Englishman. "But to return to these
registers."
"True, this story has diverted our attention from them.
Excuse me."
"Excuse you for what? For the story? By no means it really
seems to me very curious."
"Yes, indeed. So, sir, you wish to see all relating to the
poor abbe, who really was gentleness itself."
"Yes, you will much oblige me."
"Go into my study here, and I will show it to you." And they
both entered M. de Boville's study. Everything was here
arranged in perfect order each register had its number,
each file of papers its place. The inspector begged the
Englishman to seat himself in an armchair, and placed
before him the register and documents relative to the
Chateau d'If, giving him all the time he desired for the
examination, while De Boville seated himself in a corner,
and began to read his newspaper. The Englishman easily found
the entries relative to the Abbe Faria but it seemed that
the history which the inspector had related interested him
greatly, for after having perused the first documents he
turned over the leaves until he reached the deposition
respecting Edmond Dantes. There he found everything arranged
in due order,  the accusation, examination, Morrel's
petition, M. de Villefort's marginal notes. He folded up the
accusation quietly, and put it as quietly in his pocket
read the examination, and saw that the name of Noirtier was
not mentioned in it perused, too, the application dated
th April, , in which Morrel, by the deputy procureur's
advice, exaggerated with the best intentions for Napoleon
was then on the throne the services Dantes had rendered to
the imperial cause  services which Villefort's
certificates rendered indispensable. Then he saw through the
whole thing. This petition to Napoleon, kept back by
Villefort, had become, under the second restoration, a
terrible weapon against him in the hands of the king's
attorney. He was no longer astonished when he searched on to
find in the register this note, placed in a bracket against
his name 
Edmond Dantes.
An inveterate Bonapartist took an active part in the return
from the Island of Elba.
To be kept in strict solitary confinement, and to be closely
watched and guarded.
Beneath these lines was written in another hand "See note
above  nothing can be done." He compared the writing in
the bracket with the writing of the certificate placed
beneath Morrel's petition, and discovered that the note in
the bracket was the same writing as the certificate  that
is to say, was in Villefort's handwriting. As to the note
which accompanied this, the Englishman understood that it
might have been added by some inspector who had taken a
momentary interest in Dantes' situation, but who had, from
the remarks we have quoted, found it impossible to give any
effect to the interest he had felt.
As we have said, the inspector, from discretion, and that he
might not disturb the Abbe Faria's pupil in his researches,
had seated himself in a corner, and was reading Le Drapeau
Blanc. He did not see the Englishman fold up and place in
his pocket the accusation written by Danglars under the
arbor of La Reserve, and which had the postmark,
"Marseilles, th Feb., delivery  o'clock, P.M." But it
must be said that if he had seen it, he attached so little
importance to this scrap of paper, and so much importance to
his two hundred thousand francs, that he would not have
opposed whatever the Englishman might do, however irregular
it might be.
"Thanks," said the latter, closing the register with a slam,
"I have all I want now it is for me to perform my promise.
Give me a simple assignment of your debt acknowledge
therein the receipt of the cash, and I will hand you over
the money." He rose, gave his seat to M. de Boville, who
took it without ceremony, and quickly drew up the required
assignment, while the Englishman counted out the banknotes
on the other side of the desk.
Chapter 
The House of Morrel  Son.
Any one who had quitted Marseilles a few years previously,
well acquainted with the interior of Morrel's warehouse, and
had returned at this date, would have found a great change.
Instead of that air of life, of comfort, and of happiness
that permeates a flourishing and prosperous business
establishment  instead of merry faces at the windows, busy
clerks hurrying to and fro in the long corridors  instead
of the court filled with bales of goods, reechoing with the
cries and the jokes of porters, one would have immediately
perceived all aspect of sadness and gloom. Out of all the
numerous clerks that used to fill the deserted corridor and
the empty office, but two remained. One was a young man of
three or four and twenty, who was in love with M. Morrel's
daughter, and had remained with him in spite of the efforts
of his friends to induce him to withdraw the other was an
old oneeyed cashier, called "Cocles," or "Cockeye," a
nickname given him by the young men who used to throng this
vast now almost deserted beehive, and which had so
completely replaced his real name that he would not, in all
probability, have replied to any one who addressed him by
it.
Cocles remained in M. Morrel's service, and a most singular
change had taken place in his position he had at the same
time risen to the rank of cashier, and sunk to the rank of a
servant. He was, however, the same Cocles, good, patient,
devoted, but inflexible on the subject of arithmetic, the
only point on which he would have stood firm against the
world, even against M. Morrel and strong in the
multiplicationtable, which he had at his fingers' ends, no
matter what scheme or what trap was laid to catch him. In
the midst of the disasters that befell the house, Cocles was
the only one unmoved. But this did not arise from a want of
affection on the contrary, from a firm conviction. Like the
rats that one by one forsake the doomed ship even before the
vessel weighs anchor, so all the numerous clerks had by
degrees deserted the office and the warehouse. Cocles had
seen them go without thinking of inquiring the cause of
their departure. Everything was as we have said, a question
of arithmetic to Cocles, and during twenty years he had
always seen all payments made with such exactitude, that it
seemed as impossible to him that the house should stop
payment, as it would to a miller that the river that had so
long turned his mill should cease to flow.
Nothing had as yet occurred to shake Cocles' belief the
last month's payment had been made with the most scrupulous
exactitude Cocles had detected an overbalance of fourteen
sous in his cash, and the same evening he had brought them
to M. Morrel, who, with a melancholy smile, threw them into
an almost empty drawer, saying 
"Thanks, Cocles you are the pearl of cashiers."
Cocles went away perfectly happy, for this eulogium of M.
Morrel, himself the pearl of the honest men of Marseilles,
flattered him more than a present of fifty crowns. But since
the end of the month M. Morrel had passed many an anxious
hour. In order to meet the payments then due he had
collected all his resources, and, fearing lest the report of
his distress should get bruited abroad at Marseilles when he
was known to be reduced to such an extremity, he went to the
Beaucaire fair to sell his wife's and daughter's jewels and
a portion of his plate. By this means the end of the month
was passed, but his resources were now exhausted. Credit,
owing to the reports afloat, was no longer to be had and to
meet the one hundred thousand francs due on the th of the
present month, and the one hundred thousand francs due on
the th of the next month to M. de Boville, M. Morrel had,
in reality, no hope but the return of the Pharaon, of whose
departure he had learnt from a vessel which had weighed
anchor at the same time, and which had already arrived in
harbor. But this vessel which, like the Pharaon, came from
Calcutta, had been in for a fortnight, while no intelligence
had been received of the Pharaon.
Such was the state of affairs when, the day after his
interview with M. de Boville, the confidential clerk of the
house of Thomson  French of Rome, presented himself at M.
Morrel's. Emmanuel received him this young man was alarmed
by the appearance of every new face, for every new face
might be that of a new creditor, come in anxiety to question
the head of the house. The young man, wishing to spare his
employer the pain of this interview, questioned the
newcomer but the stranger declared that he had nothing to
say to M. Emmanuel, and that his business was with M. Morrel
in person. Emmanuel sighed, and summoned Cocles. Cocles
appeared, and the young man bade him conduct the stranger to
M. Morrel's apartment. Cocles went first, and the stranger
followed him. On the staircase they met a beautiful girl of
sixteen or seventeen, who looked with anxiety at the
stranger.
"M. Morrel is in his room, is he not, Mademoiselle Julie?"
said the cashier.
"Yes I think so, at least," said the young girl
hesitatingly. "Go and see, Cocles, and if my father is
there, announce this gentleman."
"It will be useless to announce me, mademoiselle," returned
the Englishman. "M. Morrel does not know my name this
worthy gentleman has only to announce the confidential clerk
of the house of Thomson  French of Rome, with whom your
father does business."
The young girl turned pale and continued to descend, while
the stranger and Cocles continued to mount the staircase.
She entered the office where Emmanuel was, while Cocles, by
the aid of a key he possessed, opened a door in the corner
of a landingplace on the second staircase, conducted the
stranger into an antechamber, opened a second door, which
he closed behind him, and after having left the clerk of the
house of Thomson  French alone, returned and signed to him
that he could enter. The Englishman entered, and found
Morrel seated at a table, turning over the formidable
columns of his ledger, which contained the list of his
liabilities. At the sight of the stranger, M. Morrel closed
the ledger, arose, and offered a seat to the stranger and
when he had seen him seated, resumed his own chair. Fourteen
years had changed the worthy merchant, who, in his
thirtysixth year at the opening of this history, was now in
his fiftieth his hair had turned white, time and sorrow had
ploughed deep furrows on his brow, and his look, once so
firm and penetrating, was now irresolute and wandering, as
if he feared being forced to fix his attention on some
particular thought or person. The Englishman looked at him
with an air of curiosity, evidently mingled with interest.
"Monsieur," said Morrel, whose uneasiness was increased by
this examination, "you wish to speak to me?"
"Yes, monsieur you are aware from whom I come?"
"The house of Thomson  French at least, so my cashier
tells me."
"He has told you rightly. The house of Thomson  French had
, or , francs to pay this month in France and,
knowing your strict punctuality, have collected all the
bills bearing your signature, and charged me as they became
due to present them, and to employ the money otherwise."
Morrel sighed deeply, and passed his hand over his forehead,
which was covered with perspiration.
"So then, sir," said Morrel, "you hold bills of mine?"
"Yes, and for a considerable sum."
"What is the amount?" asked Morrel with a voice he strove to
render firm.
"Here is," said the Englishman, taking a quantity of papers
from his pocket, "an assignment of , francs to our
house by M. de Boville, the inspector of prisons, to whom
they are due. You acknowledge, of course, that you owe this
sum to him?"
"Yes he placed the money in my hands at four and a half per
cent nearly five years ago."
"When are you to pay?"
"Half the th of this month, half the th of next."
"Just so and now here are , francs payable shortly
they are all signed by you, and assigned to our house by the
holders."
"I recognize them," said Morrel, whose face was suffused, as
he thought that, for the first time in his life, he would be
unable to honor his own signature. "Is this all?"
"No, I have for the end of the month these bills which have
been assigned to us by the house of Pascal, and the house of
Wild  Turner of Marseilles, amounting to nearly ,
francs in all, , francs." It is impossible to
describe what Morrel suffered during this enumeration. "Two
hundred and eightyseven thousand five hundred francs,"
repeated he.
"Yes, sir," replied the Englishman. "I will not," continued
he, after a moment's silence, "conceal from you, that while
your probity and exactitude up to this moment are
universally acknowledged, yet the report is current in
Marseilles that you are not able to meet your liabilities."
At this almost brutal speech Morrel turned deathly pale.
"Sir," said he, "up to this time  and it is now more than
fourandtwenty years since I received the direction of this
house from my father, who had himself conducted it for five
and thirty years  never has anything bearing the signature
of Morrel  Son been dishonored."
"I know that," replied the Englishman. "But as a man of
honor should answer another, tell me fairly, shall you pay
these with the same punctuality?" Morrel shuddered, and
looked at the man, who spoke with more assurance than he had
hitherto shown. "To questions frankly put," said he, "a
straightforward answer should be given. Yes, I shall pay,
if, as I hope, my vessel arrives safely for its arrival
will again procure me the credit which the numerous
accidents, of which I have been the victim, have deprived
me but if the Pharaon should be lost, and this last
resource be gone"  the poor man's eyes filled with tears.
"Well," said the other, "if this last resource fail you?"
"Well," returned Morrel, "it is a cruel thing to be forced
to say, but, already used to misfortune, I must habituate
myself to shame. I fear I shall be forced to suspend
payment."
"Have you no friends who could assist you?" Morrel smiled
mournfully. "In business, sir," said he, "one has no
friends, only correspondents."
"It is true," murmured the Englishman "then you have but
one hope."
"But one."
"The last?"
"The last."
"So that if this fail" 
"I am ruined,  completely ruined"
"As I was on my way here, a vessel was coming into port."
"I know it, sir a young man, who still adheres to my fallen
fortunes, passes a part of his time in a belvidere at the
top of the house, in hopes of being the first to announce
good news to me he has informed me of the arrival of this
ship."
"And it is not yours?"
"No, she is a Bordeaux vessel, La Gironde she comes from
India also but she is not mine."
"Perhaps she has spoken the Pharaon, and brings you some
tidings of her?"
"Shall I tell you plainly one thing, sir? I dread almost as
much to receive any tidings of my vessel as to remain in
doubt. Uncertainty is still hope." Then in a low voice
Morrel added,  "This delay is not natural. The Pharaon
left Calcutta the th February she ought to have been here
a month ago."
"What is that?" said the Englishman. "What is the meaning of
that noise?"
"Oh, oh" cried Morrel, turning pale, "what is it?" A loud
noise was heard on the stairs of people moving hastily, and
halfstifled sobs. Morrel rose and advanced to the door but
his strength failed him and he sank into a chair. The two
men remained opposite one another, Morrel trembling in every
limb, the stranger gazing at him with an air of profound
pity. The noise had ceased but it seemed that Morrel
expected something  something had occasioned the noise,
and something must follow. The stranger fancied he heard
footsteps on the stairs and that the footsteps, which were
those of several persons, stopped at the door. A key was
inserted in the lock of the first door, and the creaking of
hinges was audible.
"There are only two persons who have the key to that door,"
murmured Morrel, "Cocles and Julie." At this instant the
second door opened, and the young girl, her eyes bathed with
tears, appeared. Morrel rose tremblingly, supporting himself
by the arm of the chair. He would have spoken, but his voice
failed him. "Oh, father" said she, clasping her hands,
"forgive your child for being the bearer of evil tidings."
Morrel again changed color. Julie threw herself into his
arms.
"Oh, father, father" murmured she, "courage"
"The Pharaon has gone down, then?" said Morrel in a hoarse
voice. The young girl did not speak but she made an
affirmative sign with her head as she lay on her father's
breast.
"And the crew?" asked Morrel.
"Saved," said the girl "saved by the crew of the vessel
that has just entered the harbor." Morrel raised his two
hands to heaven with an expression of resignation and
sublime gratitude. "Thanks, my God," said he, "at least thou
strikest but me alone." A tear moistened the eye of the
phlegmatic Englishman.
"Come in, come in," said Morrel, "for I presume you are all
at the door."
Scarcely had he uttered those words than Madame Morrel
entered weeping bitterly. Emmanuel followed her, and in the
antechamber were visible the rough faces of seven or eight
halfnaked sailors. At the sight of these men the Englishman
started and advanced a step then restrained himself, and
retired into the farthest and most obscure corner of the
apartment. Madame Morrel sat down by her husband and took
one of his hands in hers, Julie still lay with her head on
his shoulder, Emmanuel stood in the centre of the chamber
and seemed to form the link between Morrel's family and the
sailors at the door.
"How did this happen?" said Morrel.
"Draw nearer, Penelon," said the young man, "and tell us all
about it."
An old seaman, bronzed by the tropical sun, advanced,
twirling the remains of a tarpaulin between his hands.
"Goodday, M. Morrel," said he, as if he had just quitted
Marseilles the previous evening, and had just returned from
Aix or Toulon.
"Goodday, Penelon," returned Morrel, who could not refrain
from smiling through his tears, "where is the captain?"
"The captain, M. Morrel,  he has stayed behind sick at
Palma but please God, it won't be much, and you will see
him in a few days all alive and hearty."
"Well, now tell your story, Penelon."
Penelon rolled his quid in his cheek, placed his hand before
his mouth, turned his head, and sent a long jet of
tobaccojuice into the antechamber, advanced his foot,
balanced himself, and began,  "You see, M. Morrel," said
he, "we were somewhere between Cape Blanc and Cape Boyador,
sailing with a fair breeze, southsouthwest after a week's
calm, when Captain Gaumard comes up to me  I was at the
helm I should tell you  and says, "Penelon, what do you
think of those clouds coming up over there?' I was just then
looking at them myself. "What do I think, captain? Why I
think that they are rising faster than they have any
business to do, and that they would not be so black if they
didn't mean mischief.'  "That's my opinion too,' said the
captain, "and I'll take precautions accordingly. We are
carrying too much canvas. Avast, there, all hands Take in
the studdingsl's and stow the flying jib.' It was time the
squall was on us, and the vessel began to heel. "Ah,' said
the captain, "we have still too much canvas set all hands
lower the mains'l' Five minutes after, it was down and we
sailed under mizzentops'ls and to'gall'nt sails. "Well,
Penelon,' said the captain, "what makes you shake your
head?' "Why,' I says, "I still think you've got too much
on.' "I think you're right,' answered he, "we shall have a
gale.' "A gale? More than that, we shall have a tempest, or
I don't know what's what.' You could see the wind coming
like the dust at Montredon luckily the captain understood
his business. "Take in two reefs in the tops'ls,' cried the
captain "let go the bowlin's, haul the brace, lower the
to'gall'nt sails, haul out the reeftackles on the yards.'"
"That was not enough for those latitudes," said the
Englishman "I should have taken four reefs in the topsails
and furled the spanker."
His firm, sonorous, and unexpected voice made every one
start. Penelon put his hand over his eyes, and then stared
at the man who thus criticized the manoeuvres of his
captain. "We did better than that, sir," said the old sailor
respectfully "we put the helm up to run before the tempest
ten minutes after we struck our tops'ls and scudded under
bare poles."
"The vessel was very old to risk that," said the Englishman.
"Eh, it was that that did the business after pitching
heavily for twelve hours we sprung a leak. "Penelon,' said
the captain, "I think we are sinking, give me the helm, and
go down into the hold.' I gave him the helm, and descended
there was already three feet of water. "All hands to the
pumps' I shouted but it was too late, and it seemed the
more we pumped the more came in. "Ah,' said I, after four
hours' work, "since we are sinking, let us sink we can die
but once.' "That's the example you set, Penelon,' cries the
captain "very well, wait a minute.' He went into his cabin
and came back with a brace of pistols. "I will blow the
brains out of the first man who leaves the pump,' said he."
"Well done" said the Englishman.
"There's nothing gives you so much courage as good reasons,"
continued the sailor "and during that time the wind had
abated, and the sea gone down, but the water kept rising
not much, only two inches an hour, but still it rose. Two
inches an hour does not seem much, but in twelve hours that
makes two feet, and three we had before, that makes five.
"Come,' said the captain, "we have done all in our power,
and M. Morrel will have nothing to reproach us with, we have
tried to save the ship, let us now save ourselves. To the
boats, my lads, as quick as you can.' Now," continued
Penelon, "you see, M. Morrel, a sailor is attached to his
ship, but still more to his life, so we did not wait to be
told twice the more so, that the ship was sinking under us,
and seemed to say, "Get along  save yourselves.' We soon
launched the boat, and all eight of us got into it. The
captain descended last, or rather, he did not descend, he
would not quit the vessel so I took him round the waist,
and threw him into the boat, and then I jumped after him. It
was time, for just as I jumped the deck burst with a noise
like the broadside of a manofwar. Ten minutes after she
pitched forward, then the other way, spun round and round,
and then goodby to the Pharaon. As for us, we were three
days without anything to eat or drink, so that we began to
think of drawing lots who should feed the rest, when we saw
La Gironde we made signals of distress, she perceived us,
made for us, and took us all on board. There now, M. Morrel,
that's the whole truth, on the honor of a sailor is not it
true, you fellows there?" A general murmur of approbation
showed that the narrator had faithfully detailed their
misfortunes and sufferings.
"Well, well," said M. Morrel, "I know there was no one in
fault but destiny. It was the will of God that this should
happen, blessed be his name. What wages are due to you?"
"Oh, don't let us talk of that, M. Morrel."
"Yes, but we will talk of it."
"Well, then, three months," said Penelon.
"Cocles, pay two hundred francs to each of these good
fellows," said Morrel. "At another time," added be, "I
should have said, Give them, besides, two hundred francs
over as a present but times are changed, and the little
money that remains to me is not my own."
Penelon turned to his companions, and exchanged a few words
with them.
"As for that, M. Morrel," said he, again turning his quid,
"as for that" 
"As for what?"
"The money."
"Well" 
"Well, we all say that fifty francs will be enough for us at
present, and that we will wait for the rest."
"Thanks, my friends, thanks" cried Morrel gratefully "take
it  take it and if you can find another employer, enter
his service you are free to do so." These last words
produced a prodigious effect on the seaman. Penelon nearly
swallowed his quid fortunately he recovered. "What, M.
Morrel" said he in a low voice, "you send us away you are
then angry with us"
"No, no," said M. Morrel, "I am not angry, quite the
contrary, and I do not send you away but I have no more
ships, and therefore I do not want any sailors."
"No more ships" returned Penelon "well, then, you'll build
some we'll wait for you."
"I have no money to build ships with, Penelon," said the
poor owner mournfully, "so I cannot accept your kind offer."
"No more money? Then you must not pay us we can scud, like
the Pharaon, under bare poles."
"Enough, enough" cried Morrel, almost overpowered "leave
me, I pray you we shall meet again in a happier time.
Emmanuel, go with them, and see that my orders are
executed."
"At least, we shall see each other again, M. Morrel?" asked
Penelon.
"Yes I hope so, at least. Now go." He made a sign to
Cocles, who went first the seamen followed him and Emmanuel
brought up the rear. "Now," said the owner to his wife and
daughter, "leave me I wish to speak with this gentleman."
And he glanced towards the clerk of Thomson  French, who
had remained motionless in the corner during this scene, in
which he had taken no part, except the few words we have
mentioned. The two women looked at this person whose
presence they had entirely forgotten, and retired but, as
she left the apartment, Julie gave the stranger a
supplicating glance, to which he replied by a smile that an
indifferent spectator would have been surprised to see on
his stern features. The two men were left alone. "Well,
sir," said Morrel, sinking into a chair, "you have heard
all, and I have nothing further to tell you."
"I see," returned the Englishman, "that a fresh and
unmerited misfortune his overwhelmed you, and this only
increases my desire to serve you."
"Oh, sir" cried Morrel.
"Let me see," continued the stranger, "I am one of your
largest creditors."
"Your bills, at least, are the first that will fall due."
"Do you wish for time to pay?"
"A delay would save my honor, and consequently my life."
"How long a delay do you wish for?"  Morrel reflected.
"Two months," said he.
"I will give you three," replied the stranger.
"But," asked Morrel, "will the house of Thomson  French
consent?"
"Oh, I take everything on myself. Today is the th of
June."
"Yes."
"Well, renew these bills up to the th of September and on
the th of September at eleven o'clock the hand of the
clock pointed to eleven, I shall come to receive the
money."
"I shall expect you," returned Morrel "and I will pay you
or I shall be dead." These last words were uttered in so
low a tone that the stranger could not hear them. The bills
were renewed, the old ones destroyed, and the poor
shipowner found himself with three months before him to
collect his resources. The Englishman received his thanks
with the phlegm peculiar to his nation and Morrel,
overwhelming him with grateful blessings, conducted him to
the staircase. The stranger met Julie on the stairs she
pretended to be descending, but in reality she was waiting
for him. "Oh, sir"  said she, clasping her hands.
"Mademoiselle," said the stranger, "one day you will receive
a letter signed "Sinbad the Sailor.' Do exactly what the
letter bids you, however strange it may appear."
"Yes, sir," returned Julie.
"Do you promise?"
"I swear to you I will."
"It is well. Adieu, mademoiselle. Continue to be the good,
sweet girl you are at present, and I have great hopes that
heaven will reward you by giving you Emmanuel for a
husband."
Julie uttered a faint cry, blushed like a rose, and leaned
against the baluster. The stranger waved his hand, and
continued to descend. In the court he found Penelon, who,
with a rouleau of a hundred francs in either hand, seemed
unable to make up his mind to retain them. "Come with me, my
friend," said the Englishman "I wish to speak to you."
Chapter 
The Fifth of September.
The extension provided for by the agent of Thomson  French,
at the moment when Morrel expected it least, was to the poor
shipowner so decided a stroke of good fortune that he almost
dared to believe that fate was at length grown weary of
wasting her spite upon him. The same day he told his wife,
Emmanuel, and his daughter all that had occurred and a ray
of hope, if not of tranquillity, returned to the family.
Unfortunately, however, Morrel had not only engagements with
the house of Thomson  French, who had shown themselves so
considerate towards him and, as he had said, in business he
had correspondents, and not friends. When he thought the
matter over, he could by no means account for this generous
conduct on the part of Thomson  French towards him and
could only attribute it to some such selfish argument as
this  "We had better help a man who owes us nearly
, francs, and have those , francs at the end of
three months than hasten his ruin, and get only six or eight
per cent of our money back again." Unfortunately, whether
through envy or stupidity, all Morrel's correspondents did
not take this view and some even came to a contrary
decision. The bills signed by Morrel were presented at his
office with scrupulous exactitude, and, thanks to the delay
granted by the Englishman, were paid by Cocles with equal
punctuality. Cocles thus remained in his accustomed
tranquillity. It was Morrel alone who remembered with alarm,
that if he had to repay on the th the , francs of M.
de Boville, and on the th the , francs of bills, for
which, as well as the debt due to the inspector of prisons,
he had time granted, he must be a ruined man.
The opinion of all the commercial men was that, under the
reverses which had successively weighed down Morrel, it was
impossible for him to remain solvent. Great, therefore, was
the astonishment when at the end of the month, he cancelled
all his obligations with his usual punctuality. Still
confidence was not restored to all minds, and the general
opinion was that the complete ruin of the unfortunate
shipowner had been postponed only until the end of the
month. The month passed, and Morrel made extraordinary
efforts to get in all his resources. Formerly his paper, at
any date, was taken with confidence, and was even in
request. Morrel now tried to negotiate bills at ninety days
only, and none of the banks would give him credit.
Fortunately, Morrel had some funds coming in on which he
could rely and, as they reached him, he found himself in a
condition to meet his engagements when the end of July came.
The agent of Thomson  French had not been again seen at
Marseilles the day after, or two days after his visit to
Morrel, he had disappeared and as in that city he had had
no intercourse but with the mayor, the inspector of prisons,
and M. Morrel, his departure left no trace except in the
memories of these three persons. As to the sailors of the
Pharaon, they must have found snug berths elsewhere, for
they also had disappeared.
Captain Gaumard, recovered from his illness, had returned
from Palma. He delayed presenting himself at Morrel's, but
the owner, hearing of his arrival, went to see him. The
worthy shipowner knew, from Penelon's recital, of the
captain's brave conduct during the storm, and tried to
console him. He brought him also the amount of his wages,
which Captain Gaumard had not dared to apply for. As he
descended the staircase, Morrel met Penelon, who was going
up. Penelon had, it would seem, made good use of his money,
for he was newly clad. When he saw his employer, the worthy
tar seemed much embarrassed, drew on one side into the
corner of the landingplace, passed his quid from one cheek
to the other, stared stupidly with his great eyes, and only
acknowledged the squeeze of the hand which Morrel as usual
gave him by a slight pressure in return. Morrel attributed
Penelon's embarrassment to the elegance of his attire it
was evident the good fellow had not gone to such an expense
on his own account he was, no doubt, engaged on board some
other vessel, and thus his bashfulness arose from the fact
of his not having, if we may so express ourselves, worn
mourning for the Pharaon longer. Perhaps he had come to tell
Captain Gaumard of his good luck, and to offer him
employment from his new master. "Worthy fellows" said
Morrel, as he went away, "may your new master love you as I
loved you, and be more fortunate than I have been"
August rolled by in unceasing efforts on the part of Morrel
to renew his credit or revive the old. On the th of August
it was known at Marseilles that he had left town in the
mailcoach, and then it was said that the bills would go to
protest at the end of the month, and that Morrel had gone
away and left his chief clerk Emmanuel, and his cashier
Cocles, to meet the creditors. But, contrary to all
expectation, when the st of August came, the house opened
as usual, and Cocles appeared behind the grating of the
counter, examined all bills presented with the usual
scrutiny, and, from first to last, paid all with the usual
precision. There came in, moreover, two drafts which M.
Morrel had fully anticipated, and which Cocles paid as
punctually as the bills which the shipowner had accepted.
All this was incomprehensible, and then, with the tenacity
peculiar to prophets of bad news, the failure was put off
until the end of September. On the st, Morrel returned he
was awaited by his family with extreme anxiety, for from
this journey to Paris they hoped great things. Morrel had
thought of Danglars, who was now immensely rich, and had
lain under great obligations to Morrel in former days, since
to him it was owing that Danglars entered the service of the
Spanish banker, with whom he had laid the foundations of his
vast wealth. It was said at this moment that Danglars was
worth from six to eight millions of francs, and had
unlimited credit. Danglars, then, without taking a crown
from his pocket, could save Morrel he had but to pass his
word for a loan, and Morrel was saved. Morrel had long
thought of Danglars, but had kept away from some instinctive
motive, and had delayed as long as possible availing himself
of this last resource. And Morrel was right, for he returned
home crushed by the humiliation of a refusal. Yet, on his
arrival, Morrel did not utter a complaint, or say one harsh
word. He embraced his weeping wife and daughter, pressed
Emmanuel's hand with friendly warmth, and then going to his
private room on the second floor had sent for Cocles.
"Then," said the two women to Emmanuel, "we are indeed
ruined."
It was agreed in a brief council held among them, that Julie
should write to her brother, who was in garrison at Nimes,
to come to them as speedily as possible. The poor women felt
instinctively that they required all their strength to
support the blow that impended. Besides, Maximilian Morrel,
though hardly two and twenty, had great influence over his
father. He was a strongminded, upright young man. At the
time when he decided on his profession his father had no
desire to choose for him, but had consulted young
Maximilian's taste. He had at once declared for a military
life, and had in consequence studied hard, passed
brilliantly through the Polytechnic School, and left it as
sublieutenant of the d of the line. For a year he had
held this rank, and expected promotion on the first vacancy.
In his regiment Maximilian Morrel was noted for his rigid
observance, not only of the obligations imposed on a
soldier, but also of the duties of a man and he thus gained
the name of "the stoic." We need hardly say that many of
those who gave him this epithet repeated it because they had
heard it, and did not even know what it meant. This was the
young man whom his mother and sister called to their aid to
sustain them under the serious trial which they felt they
would soon have to endure. They had not mistaken the gravity
of this event, for the moment after Morrel had entered his
private office with Cocles, Julie saw the latter leave it
pale, trembling, and his features betraying the utmost
consternation. She would have questioned him as he passed by
her, but the worthy creature hastened down the staircase
with unusual precipitation, and only raised his hands to
heaven and exclaimed, "Oh, mademoiselle, mademoiselle, what
a dreadful misfortune Who could ever have believed it" A
moment afterwards Julie saw him go upstairs carrying two or
three heavy ledgers, a portfolio, and a bag of money.
Morrel examined the ledgers, opened the portfolio, and
counted the money. All his funds amounted to ,, or ,
francs, his bills receivable up to the th to , or
,, which, making the best of everything, gave him ,
francs to meet debts amounting to , francs. He had not
even the means for making a possible settlement on account.
However, when Morrel went down to his dinner, he appeared
very calm. This calmness was more alarming to the two women
than the deepest dejection would have been. After dinner
Morrel usually went out and used to take his coffee at the
Phocaean club, and read the Semaphore this day he did not
leave the house, but returned to his office.
As to Cocles, he seemed completely bewildered. For part of
the day he went into the courtyard, seated himself on a
stone with his head bare and exposed to the blazing sun.
Emmanuel tried to comfort the women, but his eloquence
faltered. The young man was too well acquainted with the
business of the house, not to feel that a great catastrophe
hung over the Morrel family. Night came, the two women had
watched, hoping that when he left his room Morrel would come
to them, but they heard him pass before their door, and
trying to conceal the noise of his footsteps. They listened
he went into his sleepingroom, and fastened the door
inside. Madame Morrel sent her daughter to bed, and half an
hour after Julie had retired, she rose, took off her shoes,
and went stealthily along the passage, to see through the
keyhole what her husband was doing. In the passage she saw a
retreating shadow it was Julie, who, uneasy herself, had
anticipated her mother. The young lady went towards Madame
Morrel.
"He is writing," she said. They had understood each other
without speaking. Madame Morrel looked again through the
keyhole, Morrel was writing but Madame Morrel remarked,
what her daughter had not observed, that her husband was
writing on stamped paper. The terrible idea that he was
writing his will flashed across her she shuddered, and yet
had not strength to utter a word. Next day M. Morrel seemed
as calm as ever, went into his office as usual, came to his
breakfast punctually, and then, after dinner, he placed his
daughter beside him, took her head in his arms, and held her
for a long time against his bosom. In the evening, Julie
told her mother, that although he was apparently so calm,
she had noticed that her father's heart beat violently. The
next two days passed in much the same way. On the evening of
the th of September, M. Morrel asked his daughter for the
key of his study. Julie trembled at this request, which
seemed to her of bad omen. Why did her father ask for this
key which she always kept, and which was only taken from her
in childhood as a punishment? The young girl looked at
Morrel.
"What have I done wrong, father," she said, "that you should
take this key from me?"
"Nothing, my dear," replied the unhappy man, the tears
starting to his eyes at this simple question,  "nothing,
only I want it." Julie made a pretence to feel for the key.
"I must have left it in my room," she said. And she went
out, but instead of going to her apartment she hastened to
consult Emmanuel. "Do not give this key to your father,"
said he, "and tomorrow morning, if possible, do not quit
him for a moment." She questioned Emmanuel, but he knew
nothing, or would not say what he knew. During the night,
between the th and th of September, Madame Morrel remained
listening for every sound, and, until three o'clock in the
morning, she heard her husband pacing the room in great
agitation. It was three o'clock when he threw himself on the
bed. The mother and daughter passed the night together. They
had expected Maximilian since the previous evening. At eight
o'clock in the morning Morrel entered their chamber. He was
calm but the agitation of the night was legible in his pale
and careworn visage. They did not dare to ask him how he had
slept. Morrel was kinder to his wife, more affectionate to
his daughter, than he had ever been. He could not cease
gazing at and kissing the sweet girl. Julie, mindful of
Emmanuel's request, was following her father when he quitted
the room, but he said to her quickly,  "Remain with your
mother, dearest." Julie wished to accompany him. "I wish you
to do so," said he.
This was the first time Morrel had ever so spoken, but he
said it in a tone of paternal kindness, and Julie did not
dare to disobey. She remained at the same spot standing mute
and motionless. An instant afterwards the door opened, she
felt two arms encircle her, and a mouth pressed her
forehead. She looked up and uttered an exclamation of joy.
"Maximilian, my dearest brother" she cried. At these words
Madame Morrel rose, and threw herself into her son's arms.
"Mother," said the young man, looking alternately at Madame
Morrel and her daughter, "what has occurred  what has
happened? Your letter has frightened me, and I have come
hither with all speed."
"Julie," said Madame Morrel, making a sign to the young man,
"go and tell your father that Maximilian has just arrived."
The young lady rushed out of the apartment, but on the first
step of the staircase she found a man holding a letter in
his hand.
"Are you not Mademoiselle Julie Morrel?" inquired the man,
with a strong Italian accent.
"Yes, sir," replied Julie with hesitation "what is your
pleasure? I do not know you."
"Read this letter," he said, handing it to her. Julie
hesitated. "It concerns the best interests of your father,"
said the messenger.
The young girl hastily took the letter from him. She opened
it quickly and read 
"Go this moment to the Allees de Meillan, enter the house
No. , ask the porter for the key of the room on the fifth
floor, enter the apartment, take from the corner of the
mantelpiece a purse netted in red silk, and give it to your
father. It is important that he should receive it before
eleven o'clock. You promised to obey me implicitly. Remember
your oath.
"Sinbad the Sailor."
The young girl uttered a joyful cry, raised her eyes, looked
round to question the messenger, but he had disappeared. She
cast her eyes again over the note to peruse it a second
time, and saw there was a postscript. She read 
"It is important that you should fulfil this mission in
person and alone. If you go accompanied by any other person,
or should any one else go in your place, the porter will
reply that he does not know anything about it."
This postscript decreased greatly the young girl's
happiness. Was there nothing to fear? was there not some
snare laid for her? Her innocence had kept her in ignorance
of the dangers that might assail a young girl of her age.
But there is no need to know danger in order to fear it
indeed, it may be observed, that it is usually unknown
perils that inspire the greatest terror.
Julie hesitated, and resolved to take counsel. Yet, through
a singular impulse, it was neither to her mother nor her
brother that she applied, but to Emmanuel. She hastened down
and told him what had occurred on the day when the agent of
Thomson  French had come to her father's, related the scene
on the staircase, repeated the promise she had made, and
showed him the letter. "You must go, then, mademoiselle,"
said Emmanuel.
"Go there?" murmured Julie.
"Yes I will accompany you."
"But did you not read that I must be alone?" said Julie.
"And you shall be alone," replied the young man. "I will
await you at the corner of the Rue de Musee, and if you are
so long absent as to make me uneasy, I will hasten to rejoin
you, and woe to him of whom you shall have cause to complain
to me"
"Then, Emmanuel?" said the young girl with hesitation, "it
is your opinion that I should obey this invitation?"
"Yes. Did not the messenger say your father's safety
depended upon it?"
"But what danger threatens him, then, Emmanuel?" she asked.
Emmanuel hesitated a moment, but his desire to make Julie
decide immediately made him reply.
"Listen," he said "today is the th of September, is it
not?"
"Yes."
"Today, then, at eleven o'clock, your father has nearly
three hundred thousand francs to pay?"
"Yes, we know that."
"Well, then," continued Emmanuel, "we have not fifteen
thousand francs in the house."
"What will happen then?"
"Why, if today before eleven o'clock your father has not
found someone who will come to his aid, he will be compelled
at twelve o'clock to declare himself a bankrupt."
"Oh, come, then, come" cried she, hastening away with the
young man. During this time, Madame Morrel had told her son
everything. The young man knew quite well that, after the
succession of misfortunes which had befallen his father,
great changes had taken place in the style of living and
housekeeping but he did not know that matters had reached
such a point. He was thunderstruck. Then, rushing hastily
out of the apartment, he ran upstairs, expecting to find
his father in his study, but he rapped there in vain.
While he was yet at the door of the study he heard the
bedroom door open, turned, and saw his father. Instead of
going direct to his study, M. Morrel had returned to his
bedchamber, which he was only this moment quitting. Morrel
uttered a cry of surprise at the sight of his son, of whose
arrival he was ignorant. He remained motionless on the spot,
pressing with his left hand something he had concealed under
his coat. Maximilian sprang down the staircase, and threw
his arms round his father's neck but suddenly he recoiled,
and placed his right hand on Morrel's breast. "Father," he
exclaimed, turning pale as death, "what are you going to do
with that brace of pistols under your coat?"
"Oh, this is what I feared" said Morrel.
"Father, father, in heaven's name," exclaimed the young man,
"what are these weapons for?"
"Maximilian," replied Morrel, looking fixedly at his son,
"you are a man, and a man of honor. Come, and I will explain
to you."
And with a firm step Morrel went up to his study, while
Maximilian followed him, trembling as he went. Morrel opened
the door, and closed it behind his son then, crossing the
anteroom, went to his desk on which he placed the pistols,
and pointed with his finger to an open ledger. In this
ledger was made out an exact balancesheet of his affair's.
Morrel had to pay, within half an hour, , francs. All
he possessed was , francs. "Read" said Morrel.
The young man was overwhelmed as he read. Morrel said not a
word. What could he say? What need he add to such a
desperate proof in figures? "And have you done all that is
possible, father, to meet this disastrous result?" asked the
young man, after a moment's pause. "I have," replied Morrel.
"You have no money coming in on which you can rely?"
"None."
"You have exhausted every resource?"
"All."
"And in half an hour," said Maximilian in a gloomy voice,
"our name is dishonored"
"Blood washes out dishonor," said Morrel.
"You are right, father I understand you." Then extending
his hand towards one of the pistols, he said, "There is one
for you and one for me  thanks" Morrel caught his hand.
"Your mother  your sister Who will support them?" A
shudder ran through the young man's frame. "Father," he
said, "do you reflect that you are bidding me to live?"
"Yes, I do so bid you," answered Morrel, "it is your duty.
You have a calm, strong mind, Maximilian. Maximilian, you
are no ordinary man. I make no requests or commands I only
ask you to examine my position as if it were your own, and
then judge for yourself."
The young man reflected for a moment, then an expression of
sublime resignation appeared in his eyes, and with a slow
and sad gesture he took off his two epaulets, the insignia
of his rank. "Be it so, then, my father," he said, extending
his hand to Morrel, "die in peace, my father I will live."
Morrel was about to cast himself on his knees before his
son, but Maximilian caught him in his arms, and those two
noble hearts were pressed against each other for a moment.
"You know it is not my fault," said Morrel. Maximilian
smiled. "I know, father, you are the most honorable man I
have ever known."
"Good, my son. And now there is no more to be said go and
rejoin your mother and sister."
"My father," said the young man, bending his knee, "bless
me" Morrel took the head of his son between his two hands,
drew him forward, and kissing his forehead several times
said, "Oh, yes, yes, I bless you in my own name, and in the
name of three generations of irreproachable men, who say
through me, "The edifice which misfortune has destroyed,
providence may build up again.' On seeing me die such a
death, the most inexorable will have pity on you. To you,
perhaps, they will accord the time they have refused to me.
Then do your best to keep our name free from dishonor. Go to
work, labor, young man, struggle ardently and courageously
live, yourself, your mother and sister, with the most rigid
economy, so that from day to day the property of those whom
I leave in your hands may augment and fructify. Reflect how
glorious a day it will be, how grand, how solemn, that day
of complete restoration, on which you will say in this very
office, "My father died because he could not do what I have
this day done but he died calmly and peaceably, because in
dying he knew what I should do.'"
"My father, my father" cried the young man, "why should you
not live?"
"If I live, all would be changed if I live, interest would
be converted into doubt, pity into hostility if I live I am
only a man who his broken his word, failed in his
engagements  in fact, only a bankrupt. If, on the
contrary, I die, remember, Maximilian, my corpse is that of
an honest but unfortunate man. Living, my best friends would
avoid my house dead, all Marseilles will follow me in tears
to my last home. Living, you would feel shame at my name
dead, you may raise your head and say, "I am the son of him
you killed, because, for the first time, he has been
compelled to break his word.'"
The young man uttered a groan, but appeared resigned.
"And now," said Morrel, "leave me alone, and endeavor to
keep your mother and sister away."
"Will you not see my sister once more?" asked Maximilian. A
last but final hope was concealed by the young man in the
effect of this interview, and therefore he had suggested it.
Morrel shook his head. "I saw her this morning, and bade her
adieu."
"Have you no particular commands to leave with me, my
father?" inquired Maximilian in a faltering voice.
"Yes my son, and a sacred command."
"Say it, my father."
"The house of Thomson  French is the only one who, from
humanity, or, it may be, selfishness  it is not for me to
read men's hearts  has had any pity for me. Its agent, who
will in ten minutes present himself to receive the amount of
a bill of , francs, I will not say granted, but
offered me three months. Let this house be the first repaid,
my son, and respect this man."
"Father, I will," said Maximilian.
"And now, once more, adieu," said Morrel. "Go, leave me I
would be alone. You will find my will in the secretary in my
bedroom."
The young man remained standing and motionless, having but
the force of will and not the power of execution.
"Hear me, Maximilian," said his father. "Suppose I was a
soldier like you, and ordered to carry a certain redoubt,
and you knew I must be killed in the assault, would you not
say to me, as you said just now, "Go, father for you are
dishonored by delay, and death is preferable to shame'"
"Yes, yes," said the young man, "yes" and once again
embracing his father with convulsive pressure, he said, "Be
it so, my father."
And he rushed out of the study. When his son had left him,
Morrel remained an instant standing with his eyes fixed on
the door then putting forth his arm, he pulled the bell.
After a moment's interval, Cocles appeared.
It was no longer the same man  the fearful revelations of
the three last days had crushed him. This thought  the
house of Morrel is about to stop payment  bent him to the
earth more than twenty years would otherwise have done.
"My worthy Cocles," said Morrel in a tone impossible to
describe, "do you remain in the antechamber. When the
gentleman who came three months ago  the agent of Thomson
 French  arrives, announce his arrival to me." Cocles
made no reply he made a sign with his head, went into the
anteroom, and seated himself. Morrel fell back in his chair,
his eyes fixed on the clock there were seven minutes left,
that was all. The hand moved on with incredible rapidity, he
seemed to see its motion.
What passed in the mind of this man at the supreme moment of
his agony cannot be told in words. He was still
comparatively young, he was surrounded by the loving care of
a devoted family, but he had convinced himself by a course
of reasoning, illogical perhaps, yet certainly plausible,
that he must separate himself from all he held dear in the
world, even life itself. To form the slightest idea of his
feelings, one must have seen his face with its expression of
enforced resignation and its tearmoistened eyes raised to
heaven. The minute hand moved on. The pistols were loaded
he stretched forth his hand, took one up, and murmured his
daughter's name. Then he laid it down seized his pen, and
wrote a few words. It seemed to him as if he had not taken a
sufficient farewell of his beloved daughter. Then he turned
again to the clock, counting time now not by minutes, but by
seconds. He took up the deadly weapon again, his lips parted
and his eyes fixed on the clock, and then shuddered at the
click of the trigger as he cocked the pistol. At this moment
of mortal anguish the cold sweat came forth upon his brow, a
pang stronger than death clutched at his heartstrings. He
heard the door of the staircase creak on its hinges  the
clock gave its warning to strike eleven  the door of his
study opened Morrel did not turn round  he expected these
words of Cocles, "The agent of Thomson  French."
He placed the muzzle of the pistol between his teeth.
Suddenly he heard a cry  it was his daughter's voice. He
turned and saw Julie. The pistol fell from his hands. "My
father" cried the young girl, out of breath, and half dead
with joy  "saved, you are saved" And she threw herself
into his arms, holding in her extended hand a red, netted
silk purse.
"Saved, my child" said Morrel "what do you mean?"
"Yes, saved  saved See, see" said the young girl.
Morrel took the purse, and started as he did so, for a vague
remembrance reminded him that it once belonged to himself.
At one end was the receipted bill for the , francs,
and at the other was a diamond as large as a hazelnut, with
these words on a small slip of parchment  Julie's Dowry.
Morrel passed his hand over his brow it seemed to him a
dream. At this moment the clock struck eleven. He felt as if
each stroke of the hammer fell upon his heart. "Explain, my
child," he said, "Explain, my child," he said, "explain 
where did you find this purse?"
"In a house in the Allees de Meillan, No. , on the corner
of a mantelpiece in a small room on the fifth floor."
"But," cried Morrel, "this purse is not yours" Julie handed
to her father the letter she had received in the morning.
"And did you go alone?" asked Morrel, after he had read it.
"Emmanuel accompanied me, father. He was to have waited for
me at the corner of the Rue de Musee, but, strange to say,
he was not there when I returned."
"Monsieur Morrel" exclaimed a voice on the stairs. 
"Monsieur Morrel"
"It is his voice" said Julie. At this moment Emmanuel
entered, his countenance full of animation and joy. "The
Pharaon" he cried "the Pharaon"
"What  what  the Pharaon Are you mad, Emmanuel? You
know the vessel is lost."
"The Pharaon, sir  they signal the Pharaon The Pharaon is
entering the harbor" Morrel fell back in his chair, his
strength was failing him his understanding weakened by such
events, refused to comprehend such incredible, unheardof,
fabulous facts. But his son came in. "Father," cried
Maximilian, "how could you say the Pharaon was lost? The
lookout has signalled her, and they say she is now coming
into port."
"My dear friends," said Morrel, "if this be so, it must be a
miracle of heaven Impossible, impossible"
But what was real and not less incredible was the purse he
held in his hand, the acceptance receipted  the splendid
diamond.
"Ah, sir," exclaimed Cocles, "what can it mean?  the
Pharaon?"
"Come, dear ones," said Morrel, rising from his seat, "let
us go and see, and heaven have pity upon us if it be false
intelligence" They all went out, and on the stairs met
Madame Morrel, who had been afraid to go up into the study.
In a moment they were at the Cannebiere. There was a crowd
on the pier. All the crowd gave way before Morrel. "The
Pharaon, the Pharaon" said every voice.
And, wonderful to see, in front of the tower of SaintJean,
was a ship bearing on her stern these words, printed in
white letters, "The Pharaon, Morrel  Son, of Marseilles."
She was the exact duplicate of the other Pharaon, and
loaded, as that had been, with cochineal and indigo. She
cast anchor, clued up sails, and on the deck was Captain
Gaumard giving orders, and good old Penelon making signals
to M. Morrel. To doubt any longer was impossible there was
the evidence of the senses, and ten thousand persons who
came to corroborate the testimony. As Morrel and his son
embraced on the pierhead, in the presence and amid the
applause of the whole city witnessing this event, a man,
with his face halfcovered by a black beard, and who,
concealed behind the sentrybox, watched the scene with
delight, uttered these words in a low tone "Be happy, noble
heart, be blessed for all the good thou hast done and wilt
do hereafter, and let my gratitude remain in obscurity like
your good deeds."
And with a smile expressive of supreme content, he left his
hidingplace, and without being observed, descended one of
the flights of steps provided for debarkation, and hailing
three times, shouted "Jacopo, Jacopo, Jacopo" Then a launch
came to shore, took him on board, and conveyed him to a
yacht splendidly fitted up, on whose deck he sprung with the
activity of a sailor thence he once again looked towards
Morrel, who, weeping with joy, was shaking hands most
cordially with all the crowd around him, and thanking with a
look the unknown benefactor whom he seemed to be seeking in
the skies. "And now," said the unknown, "farewell kindness,
humanity, and gratitude Farewell to all the feelings that
expand the heart I have been heaven's substitute to
recompense the good  now the god of vengeance yields to me
his power to punish the wicked" At these words he gave a
signal, and, as if only awaiting this signal, the yacht
instantly put out to sea.
Chapter 
Italy Sinbad the Sailor.
Towards the beginning of the year , two young men
belonging to the first society of Paris, the Vicomte Albert
de Morcerf and the Baron Franz d'Epinay, were at Florence.
They had agreed to see the Carnival at Rome that year, and
that Franz, who for the last three or four years had
inhabited Italy, should act as cicerone to Albert. As it is
no inconsiderable affair to spend the Carnival at Rome,
especially when you have no great desire to sleep on the
Piazza del Popolo, or the Campo Vaccino, they wrote to
Signor Pastrini, the proprietor of the Hotel de Londres,
Piazza di Spagna, to reserve comfortable apartments for
them. Signor Pastrini replied that he had only two rooms and
a parlor on the third floor, which he offered at the low
charge of a louis per diem. They accepted his offer but
wishing to make the best use of the time that was left,
Albert started for Naples. As for Franz, he remained at
Florence, and after having passed a few days in exploring
the paradise of the Cascine, and spending two or three
evenings at the houses of the Florentine nobility, he took a
fancy into his head having already visited Corsica, the
cradle of Bonaparte to visit Elba, the waitingplace of
Napoleon.
One evening he cast off the painter of a sailboat from the
iron ring that secured it to the dock at Leghorn, wrapped
himself in his coat and lay down, and said to the crew, 
"To the Island of Elba" The boat shot out of the harbor
like a bird and the next morning Franz disembarked at
PortoFerrajo. He traversed the island, after having
followed the traces which the footsteps of the giant have
left, and reembarked for Marciana. Two hours after he again
landed at Pianosa, where he was assured that red partridges
abounded. The sport was bad Franz only succeeded in killing
a few partridges, and, like every unsuccessful sportsman, he
returned to the boat very much out of temper. "Ah, if your
excellency chose," said the captain, "you might have capital
sport."
"Where?"
"Do you see that island?" continued the captain, pointing to
a conical pile rising from the indigo sea.
"Well, what is this island?"
"The Island of Monte Cristo."
"But I have no permission to shoot over this island."
"Your excellency does not require a permit, for the island
is uninhabited."
"Ah, indeed" said the young man. "A desert island in the
midst of the Mediterranean must be a curiosity."
"It is very natural this island is a mass of rocks, and
does not contain an acre of land capable of cultivation."
"To whom does this island belong?"
"To Tuscany."
"What game shall I find there"
"Thousands of wild goats."
"Who live upon the stones, I suppose," said Franz with an
incredulous smile.
"No, but by browsing the shrubs and trees that grow out of
the crevices of the rocks."
"Where can I sleep?"
"On shore in the grottos, or on board in your cloak
besides, if your excellency pleases, we can leave as soon as
you like  we can sail as well by night as by day, and if
the wind drops we can use our oars."
As Franz had sufficient time, and his apartments at Rome
were not yet available, he accepted the proposition. Upon
his answer in the affirmative, the sailors exchanged a few
words together in a low tone. "Well," asked he, "what now?
Is there any difficulty in the way?"
"No." replied the captain, "but we must warn your excellency
that the island is an infected port."
"What do you mean?"
"Monte Cristo although uninhabited, yet serves occasionally
as a refuge for the smugglers and pirates who come from
Corsica, Sardinia, and Africa, and if it becomes known that
we have been there, we shall have to perform quarantine for
six days on our return to Leghorn."
"The deuce That puts a different face on the matter. Six
days Why, that's as long as the Almighty took to make the
world Too long a wait  too long."
"But who will say your excellency has been to Monte Cristo?"
"Oh, I shall not," cried Franz.
"Nor I, nor I," chorused the sailors.
"Then steer for Monte Cristo."
The captain gave his orders, the helm was put up, and the
boat was soon sailing in the direction of the island. Franz
waited until all was in order, and when the sail was filled,
and the four sailors had taken their places  three
forward, and one at the helm  he resumed the conversation.
"Gaetano," said he to the captain, "you tell me Monte Cristo
serves as a refuge for pirates, who are, it seems to me, a
very different kind of game from the goats."
"Yes, your excellency, and it is true."
"I knew there were smugglers, but I thought that since the
capture of Algiers, and the destruction of the regency,
pirates existed only in the romances of Cooper and Captain
Marryat."
"Your excellency is mistaken there are pirates, like the
bandits who were believed to have been exterminated by Pope
Leo XII., and who yet, every day, rob travellers at the
gates of Rome. Has not your excellency heard that the French
charge d'affaires was robbed six months ago within five
hundred paces of Velletri?"
"Oh, yes, I heard that."
"Well, then, if, like us, your excellency lived at Leghorn,
you would hear, from time to time, that a little merchant
vessel, or an English yacht that was expected at Bastia, at
PortoFerrajo, or at Civita Vecchia, has not arrived no one
knows what has become of it, but, doubtless, it has struck
on a rock and foundered. Now this rock it has met has been a
long and narrow boat, manned by six or eight men, who have
surprised and plundered it, some dark and stormy night, near
some desert and gloomy island, as bandits plunder a carriage
in the recesses of a forest."
"But," asked Franz, who lay wrapped in his cloak at the
bottom of the boat, "why do not those who have been
plundered complain to the French, Sardinian, or Tuscan
governments?"
"Why?" said Gaetano with a smile.
"Yes, why?"
"Because, in the first place, they transfer from the vessel
to their own boat whatever they think worth taking, then
they bind the crew hand and foot, they attach to every one's
neck a four and twenty pound ball, a large hole is chopped
in the vessel's bottom, and then they leave her. At the end
of ten minutes the vessel begins to roll heavily and settle
down. First one gun'l goes under, then the other. Then they
lift and sink again, and both go under at once. All at once
there's a noise like a cannon  that's the air blowing up
the deck. Soon the water rushes out of the scupperholes
like a whale spouting, the vessel gives a last groan, spins
round and round, and disappears, forming a vast whirlpool in
the ocean, and then all is over, so that in five minutes
nothing but the eye of God can see the vessel where she lies
at the bottom of the sea. Do you understand now," said the
captain, "why no complaints are made to the government, and
why the vessel never reaches port?"
It is probable that if Gaetano had related this previous to
proposing the expedition, Franz would have hesitated, but
now that they had started, he thought it would be cowardly
to draw back. He was one of those men who do not rashly
court danger, but if danger presents itself, combat it with
the most unalterable coolness. Calm and resolute, he treated
any peril as he would an adversary in a duel,  calculated
its probable method of approach retreated, if at all, as a
point of strategy and not from cowardice was quick to see
an opening for attack, and won victory at a single thrust.
"Bah" said he, "I have travelled through Sicily and
Calabria  I have sailed two months in the Archipelago, and
yet I never saw even the shadow of a bandit or a pirate."
"I did not tell your excellency this to deter you from your
project," replied Gaetano, "but you questioned me, and I
have answered that's all."
"Yes, and your conversation is most interesting and as I
wish to enjoy it as long as possible, steer for Monte
Cristo."
The wind blew strongly, the boat made six or seven knots an
hour, and they were rapidly reaching the end of their
voyage. As they drew near the island seemed to lift from the
sea, and the air was so clear that they could already
distinguish the rocks heaped on one another, like cannon
balls in an arsenal, with green bushes and trees growing in
the crevices. As for the sailors, although they appeared
perfectly tranquil yet it was evident that they were on the
alert, and that they carefully watched the glassy surface
over which they were sailing, and on which a few
fishingboats, with their white sails, were alone visible.
They were within fifteen miles of Monte Cristo when the sun
began to set behind Corsica, whose mountains appeared
against the sky, showing their rugged peaks in bold relief
this mass of rock, like the giant Adamastor, rose dead
ahead, a formidable barrier, and intercepting the light that
gilded its massive peaks so that the voyagers were in
shadow. Little by little the shadow rose higher and seemed
to drive before it the last rays of the expiring day at
last the reflection rested on the summit of the mountain,
where it paused an instant, like the fiery crest of a
volcano, then gloom gradually covered the summit as it had
covered the base, and the island now only appeared to be a
gray mountain that grew continually darker half an hour
after, the night was quite dark.
Fortunately, the mariners were used to these latitudes, and
knew every rock in the Tuscan Archipelago for in the midst
of this obscurity Franz was not without uneasiness 
Corsica had long since disappeared, and Monte Cristo itself
was invisible but the sailors seemed, like the lynx, to see
in the dark, and the pilot who steered did not evince the
slightest hesitation. An hour had passed since the sun had
set, when Franz fancied he saw, at a quarter of a mile to
the left, a dark mass, but he could not precisely make out
what it was, and fearing to excite the mirth of the sailors
by mistaking a floating cloud for land, he remained silent
suddenly a great light appeared on the strand land might
resemble a cloud, but the fire was not a meteor. "What is
this light?" asked he.
"Hush" said the captain "it is a fire."
"But you told me the island was uninhabited?"
"I said there were no fixed habitations on it, but I said
also that it served sometimes as a harbor for smugglers."
"And for pirates?"
"And for pirates," returned Gaetano, repeating Franz's
words. "It is for that reason I have given orders to pass
the island, for, as you see, the fire is behind us."
"But this fire?" continued Franz. "It seems to me rather
reassuring than otherwise men who did not wish to be seen
would not light a fire."
"Oh, that goes for nothing," said Gaetano. "If you can guess
the position of the island in the darkness, you will see
that the fire cannot be seen from the side or from Pianosa,
but only from the sea."
"You think, then, this fire indicates the presence of
unpleasant neighbors?"
"That is what we must find out," returned Gaetano, fixing
his eyes on this terrestrial star.
"How can you find out?"
"You shall see." Gaetano consulted with his companions, and
after five minutes' discussion a manoeuvre was executed
which caused the vessel to tack about, they returned the way
they had come, and in a few minutes the fire disappeared,
hidden by an elevation of the land. The pilot again changed
the course of the boat, which rapidly approached the island,
and was soon within fifty paces of it. Gaetano lowered the
sail, and the boat came to rest. All this was done in
silence, and from the moment that their course was changed
not a word was spoken.
Gaetano, who had proposed the expedition, had taken all the
responsibility on himself the four sailors fixed their eyes
on him, while they got out their oars and held themselves in
readiness to row away, which, thanks to the darkness, would
not be difficult. As for Franz, he examined his arms with
the utmost coolness he had two doublebarrelled guns and a
rifle he loaded them, looked at the priming, and waited
quietly. During this time the captain had thrown off his
vest and shirt, and secured his trousers round his waist
his feet were naked, so he had no shoes and stockings to
take off after these preparations he placed his finger on
his lips, and lowering himself noiselessly into the sea,
swam towards the shore with such precaution that it was
impossible to hear the slightest sound he could only be
traced by the phosphorescent line in his wake. This track
soon disappeared it was evident that he had touched the
shore. Every one on board remained motionless for half an
hour, when the same luminous track was again observed, and
the swimmer was soon on board. "Well?" exclaimed Franz and
the sailors in unison.
"They are Spanish smugglers," said he "they have with them
two Corsican bandits."
"And what are these Corsican bandits doing here with Spanish
smugglers?"
"Alas," returned the captain with an accent of the most
profound pity, "we ought always to help one another. Very
often the bandits are hard pressed by gendarmes or
carbineers well, they see a vessel, and good fellows like
us on board, they come and demand hospitality of us you
can't refuse help to a poor hunted devil we receive them,
and for greater security we stand out to sea. This costs us
nothing, and saves the life, or at least the liberty, of a
fellowcreature, who on the first occasion returns the
service by pointing out some safe spot where we can land our
goods without interruption."
"Ah" said Franz, "then you are a smuggler occasionally,
Gaetano?"
"Your excellency, we must live somehow," returned the other,
smiling impenetrably.
"Then you know the men who are now on Monte Cristo?"
"Oh, yes, we sailors are like freemasons, and recognize each
other by signs."
"And do you think we have nothing to fear if we land?"
"Nothing at all smugglers are not thieves."
"But these two Corsican bandits?" said Franz, calculating
the chances of peril.
"It is not their fault that they are bandits, but that of
the authorities."
"How so?"
"Because they are pursued for having made a stiff, as if it
was not in a Corsican's nature to revenge himself."
"What do you mean by having made a stiff?  having
assassinated a man?" said Franz, continuing his
investigation.
"I mean that they have killed an enemy, which is a very
different thing," returned the captain.
"Well," said the young man, "let us demand hospitality of
these smugglers and bandits. Do you think they will grant
it?"
"Without doubt."
"How many are they?"
"Four, and the two bandits make six."
"Just our number, so that if they prove troublesome, we
shall be able to hold them in check so, for the last time,
steer to Monte Cristo."
"Yes, but your excellency will permit us to take all due
precautions."
"By all means, be as wise as Nestor and as prudent as
Ulysses I do more than permit, I exhort you."
"Silence, then" said Gaetano.
Every one obeyed. For a man who, like Franz, viewed his
position in its true light, it was a grave one. He was alone
in the darkness with sailors whom he did not know, and who
had no reason to be devoted to him who knew that he had
several thousand francs in his belt, and who had often
examined his weapons,  which were very beautiful,  if
not with envy, at least with curiosity. On the other hand,
he was about to land, without any other escort than these
men, on an island which had, indeed, a very religious name,
but which did not seem to Franz likely to afford him much
hospitality, thanks to the smugglers and bandits. The
history of the scuttled vessels, which had appeared
improbable during the day, seemed very probable at night
placed as he was between two possible sources of danger, he
kept his eye on the crew, and his gun in his hand. The
sailors had again hoisted sail, and the vessel was once more
cleaving the waves. Through the darkness Franz, whose eyes
were now more accustomed to it, could see the looming shore
along which the boat was sailing, and then, as they rounded
a rocky point, he saw the fire more brilliant than ever, and
about it five or six persons seated. The blaze illumined the
sea for a hundred paces around. Gaetano skirted the light,
carefully keeping the boat in the shadow then, when they
were opposite the fire, he steered to the centre of the
circle, singing a fishing song, of which his companions sung
the chorus. At the first words of the song the men seated
round the fire arose and approached the landingplace, their
eyes fixed on the boat, evidently seeking to know who the
newcomers were and what were their intentions. They soon
appeared satisfied and returned with the exception of one,
who remained at the shore to their fire, at which the
carcass of a goat was roasting. When the boat was within
twenty paces of the shore, the man on the beach, who carried
a carbine, presented arms after the manner of a sentinel,
and cried, "Who comes there?" in Sardinian. Franz coolly
cocked both barrels. Gaetano then exchanged a few words with
this man which the traveller did not understand, but which
evidently concerned him. "Will your excellency give your
name, or remain incognito?" asked the captain.
"My name must rest unknown,  merely say I am a Frenchman
travelling for pleasure." As soon as Gaetano had transmitted
this answer, the sentinel gave an order to one of the men
seated round the fire, who rose and disappeared among the
rocks. Not a word was spoken, every one seemed occupied,
Franz with his disembarkment, the sailors with their sails,
the smugglers with their goat but in the midst of all this
carelessness it was evident that they mutually observed each
other. The man who had disappeared returned suddenly on the
opposite side to that by which he had left he made a sign
with his head to the sentinel, who, turning to the boat,
said, "S'accommodi." The Italian s'accommodi is
untranslatable it means at once, "Come, enter, you are
welcome make yourself at home you are the master." It is
like that Turkish phrase of Moliere's that so astonished the
bourgeois gentleman by the number of things implied in its
utterance. The sailors did not wait for a second invitation
four strokes of the oar brought them to land Gaetano sprang
to shore, exchanged a few words with the sentinel, then his
comrades disembarked, and lastly came Franz. One of his guns
was swung over his shoulder, Gaetano had the other, and a
sailor held his rifle his dress, half artist, half dandy,
did not excite any suspicion, and, consequently, no
disquietude. The boat was moored to the shore, and they
advanced a few paces to find a comfortable bivouac but,
doubtless, the spot they chose did not suit the smuggler who
filled the post of sentinel, for he cried out, "Not that
way, if you please."
Gaetano faltered an excuse, and advanced to the opposite
side, while two sailors kindled torches at the fire to light
them on their way. They advanced about thirty paces, and
then stopped at a small esplanade surrounded with rocks, in
which seats had been cut, not unlike sentryboxes. Around in
the crevices of the rocks grew a few dwarf oaks and thick
bushes of myrtles. Franz lowered a torch, and saw by the
mass of cinders that had accumulated that he was not the
first to discover this retreat, which was, doubtless, one of
the haltingplaces of the wandering visitors of Monte
Cristo. As for his suspicions, once on terra firma, once
that he had seen the indifferent, if not friendly,
appearance of his hosts, his anxiety had quite disappeared,
or rather, at sight of the goat, had turned to appetite. He
mentioned this to Gaetano, who replied that nothing could be
more easy than to prepare a supper when they had in their
boat, bread, wine, half a dozen partridges, and a good fire
to roast them by. "Besides," added he, "if the smell of
their roast meat tempts you, I will go and offer them two of
our birds for a slice."
"You are a born diplomat," returned Franz "go and try."
Meanwhile the sailors had collected dried sticks and
branches with which they made a fire. Franz waited
impatiently, inhaling the aroma of the roasted meat, when
the captain returned with a mysterious air.
"Well," said Franz, "anything new?  do they refuse?"
"On the contrary," returned Gaetano, "the chief, who was
told you were a young Frenchman, invites you to sup with
him."
"Well," observed Franz, "this chief is very polite, and I
see no objection  the more so as I bring my share of the
supper."
"Oh, it is not that he has plenty, and to spare, for
supper but he makes one condition, and rather a peculiar
one, before he will receive you at his house."
"His house? Has he built one here, then?"
"No but he has a very comfortable one all the same, so they
say."
"You know this chief, then?"
"I have heard talk of him."
"Favorably or otherwise?"
"Both."
"The deuce  and what is this condition?"
"That you are blindfolded, and do not take off the bandage
until he himself bids you." Franz looked at Gaetano, to see,
if possible, what he thought of this proposal. "Ah," replied
he, guessing Franz's thought, "I know this is a serious
matter."
"What should you do in my place?"
"I, who have nothing to lose,  I should go."
"You would accept?"
"Yes, were it only out of curiosity."
"There is something very peculiar about this chief, then?"
"Listen," said Gaetano, lowering his voice, "I do not know
if what they say is true"  he stopped to see if any one
was near.
"What do they say?"
"That this chief inhabits a cavern to which the Pitti Palace
is nothing."
"What nonsense" said Franz, reseating himself.
"It is no nonsense it is quite true. Cama, the pilot of the
Saint Ferdinand, went in once, and he came back amazed,
vowing that such treasures were only to be heard of in fairy
tales."
"Do you know," observed Franz, "that with such stories you
make me think of Ali Baba's enchanted cavern?"
"I tell you what I have been told."
"Then you advise me to accept?"
"Oh, I don't say that your excellency will do as you
please I should be sorry to advise you in the matter."
Franz pondered the matter for a few moments, concluded that
a man so rich could not have any intention of plundering him
of what little he had, and seeing only the prospect of a
good supper, accepted. Gaetano departed with the reply.
Franz was prudent, and wished to learn all he possibly could
concerning his host. He turned towards the sailor, who,
during this dialogue, had sat gravely plucking the
partridges with the air of a man proud of his office, and
asked him how these men had landed, as no vessel of any kind
was visible.
"Never mind that," returned the sailor, "I know their
vessel."
"Is it a very beautiful vessel?"
"I would not wish for a better to sail round the world."
"Of what burden is she?"
"About a hundred tons but she is built to stand any
weather. She is what the English call a yacht."
"Where was she built?"
"I know not but my own opinion is she is a Genoese."
"And how did a leader of smugglers," continued Franz,
"venture to build a vessel designed for such a purpose at
Genoa?"
"I did not say that the owner was a smuggler," replied the
sailor.
"No but Gaetano did, I thought."
"Gaetano had only seen the vessel from a distance, he had
not then spoken to any one."
"And if this person be not a smuggler, who is he?"
"A wealthy signor, who travels for his pleasure."
"Come," thought Franz, "he is still more mysterious, since
the two accounts do not agree."
"What is his name?"
"If you ask him he says Sinbad the Sailor but I doubt if it
be his real name."
"Sinbad the Sailor?"
"Yes."
"And where does he reside?"
"On the sea."
"What country does he come from?"
"I do not know."
"Have you ever seen him?"
"Sometimes."
"What sort of a man is he?"
"Your excellency will judge for yourself."
"Where will he receive me?"
"No doubt in the subterranean palace Gaetano told you of."
"Have you never had the curiosity, when you have landed and
found this island deserted, to seek for this enchanted
palace?"
"Oh, yes, more than once, but always in vain we examined
the grotto all over, but we never could find the slightest
trace of any opening they say that the door is not opened
by a key, but a magic word."
"Decidedly," muttered Franz, "this is an Arabian Nights'
adventure."
"His excellency waits for you," said a voice, which he
recognized as that of the sentinel. He was accompanied by
two of the yacht's crew. Franz drew his handkerchief from
his pocket, and presented it to the man who had spoken to
him. Without uttering a word, they bandaged his eyes with a
care that showed their apprehensions of his committing some
indiscretion. Afterwards he was made to promise that he
would not make the least attempt to raise the bandage. He
promised. Then his two guides took his arms, and he went on,
guided by them, and preceded by the sentinel. After going
about thirty paces, he smelt the appetizing odor of the kid
that was roasting, and knew thus that he was passing the
bivouac they then led him on about fifty paces farther,
evidently advancing towards that part of the shore where
they would not allow Gaetano to go  a refusal he could now
comprehend. Presently, by a change in the atmosphere, he
knew that they were entering a cave after going on for a
few seconds more he heard a crackling, and it seemed to him
as though the atmosphere again changed, and became balmy and
perfumed. At length his feet touched on a thick and soft
carpet, and his guides let go their hold of him. There was a
moment's silence, and then a voice, in excellent French,
although, with a foreign accent, said, "Welcome, sir. I beg
you will remove your bandage." It may be supposed, then,
Franz did not wait for a repetition of this permission, but
took off the handkerchief, and found himself in the presence
of a man from thirtyeight to forty years of age, dressed in
a Tunisian costume  that is to say, a red cap with a long
blue silk tassel, a vest of black cloth embroidered with
gold, pantaloons of deep red, large and full gaiters of the
same color, embroidered with gold like the vest, and yellow
slippers he had a splendid cashmere round his waist, and a
small sharp and crooked cangiar was passed through his
girdle. Although of a paleness that was almost livid, this
man had a remarkably handsome face his eyes were
penetrating and sparkling his nose, quite straight, and
projecting direct from the brow, was of the pure Greek type,
while his teeth, as white as pearls, were set off to
admiration by the black mustache that encircled them.
His pallor was so peculiar, that it seemed to pertain to one
who had been long entombed, and who was incapable of
resuming the healthy glow and hue of life. He was not
particularly tall, but extremely well made, and, like the
men of the south, had small hands and feet. But what
astonished Franz, who had treated Gaetano's description as a
fable, was the splendor of the apartment in which he found
himself. The entire chamber was lined with crimson brocade,
worked with flowers of gold. In a recess was a kind of
divan, surmounted with a stand of Arabian swords in silver
scabbards, and the handles resplendent with gems from the
ceiling hung a lamp of Venetian glass, of beautiful shape
and color, while the feet rested on a Turkey carpet, in
which they sunk to the instep tapestry hung before the door
by which Franz had entered, and also in front of another
door, leading into a second apartment which seemed to be
brilliantly illuminated. The host gave Franz time to recover
from his surprise, and, moreover, returned look for look,
not even taking his eyes off him. "Sir," he said, after a
pause, "a thousand excuses for the precaution taken in your
introduction hither but as, during the greater portion of
the year, this island is deserted, if the secret of this
abode were discovered. I should doubtless, find on my return
my temporary retirement in a state of great disorder, which
would be exceedingly annoying, not for the loss it
occasioned me, but because I should not have the certainty I
now possess of separating myself from all the rest of
mankind at pleasure. Let me now endeavor to make you forget
this temporary unpleasantness, and offer you what no doubt
you did not expect to find here  that is to say, a
tolerable supper and pretty comfortable beds."
"Ma foi, my dear sir," replied Franz, "make no apologies. I
have always observed that they bandage people's eyes who
penetrate enchanted palaces, for instance, those of Raoul in
the "Huguenots,' and really I have nothing to complain of,
for what I see makes me think of the wonders of the "Arabian
Nights.'"
"Alas, I may say with Lucullus, if I could have anticipated
the honor of your visit, I would have prepared for it. But
such as is my hermitage, it is at your disposal such as is
my supper, it is yours to share, if you will. Ali, is the
supper ready?" At this moment the tapestry moved aside, and
a Nubian, black as ebony, and dressed in a plain white
tunic, made a sign to his master that all was prepared in
the diningroom. "Now," said the unknown to Franz, "I do not
know if you are of my opinion, but I think nothing is more
annoying than to remain two or three hours together without
knowing by name or appellation how to address one another.
Pray observe, that I too much respect the laws of
hospitality to ask your name or title. I only request you to
give me one by which I may have the pleasure of addressing
you. As for myself, that I may put you at your ease, I tell
you that I am generally called "Sinbad the Sailor.'"
"And I," replied Franz, "will tell you, as I only require
his wonderful lamp to make me precisely like Aladdin, that I
see no reason why at this moment I should not be called
Aladdin. That will keep us from going away from the East
whither I am tempted to think I have been conveyed by some
good genius."
"Well, then, Signor Aladdin," replied the singular
amphitryon, "you heard our repast announced, will you now
take the trouble to enter the diningroom, your humble
servant going first to show the way?" At these words, moving
aside the tapestry, Sinbad preceded his guest. Franz now
looked upon another scene of enchantment the table was
splendidly covered, and once convinced of this important
point he cast his eyes around him. The diningroom was
scarcely less striking than the room he had just left it
was entirely of marble, with antique basreliefs of
priceless value and at the four corners of this apartment,
which was oblong, were four magnificent statues, having
baskets in their hands. These baskets contained four
pyramids of most splendid fruit there were Sicily
pineapples, pomegranates from Malaga, oranges from the
Balearic Isles, peaches from France, and dates from Tunis.
The supper consisted of a roast pheasant garnished with
Corsican blackbirds a boar's ham with jelly, a quarter of a
kid with tartar sauce, a glorious turbot, and a gigantic
lobster. Between these large dishes were smaller ones
containing various dainties. The dishes were of silver, and
the plates of Japanese china.
Franz rubbed his eyes in order to assure himself that this
was not a dream. Ali alone was present to wait at table, and
acquitted himself so admirably, that the guest complimented
his host thereupon. "Yes," replied he, while he did the
honors of the supper with much ease and grace  "yes, he is
a poor devil who is much devoted to me, and does all he can
to prove it. He remembers that I saved his life, and as he
has a regard for his head, he feels some gratitude towards
me for having kept it on his shoulders." Ali approached his
master, took his hand, and kissed it.
"Would it be impertinent, Signor Sinbad," said Franz, "to
ask you the particulars of this kindness?"
"Oh, they are simple enough," replied the host. "It seems
the fellow had been caught wandering nearer to the harem of
the Bey of Tunis than etiquette permits to one of his color,
and he was condemned by the bey to have his tongue cut out,
and his hand and head cut off the tongue the first day, the
hand the second, and the head the third. I always had a
desire to have a mute in my service, so learning the day his
tongue was cut out, I went to the bey, and proposed to give
him for Ali a splendid doublebarreled gun which I knew he
was very desirous of having. He hesitated a moment, he was
so very desirous to complete the poor devil's punishment.
But when I added to the gun an English cutlass with which I
had shivered his highness's yataghan to pieces, the bey
yielded, and agreed to forgive the hand and head, but on
condition that the poor fellow never again set foot in
Tunis. This was a useless clause in the bargain, for
whenever the coward sees the first glimpse of the shores of
Africa, he runs down below, and can only be induced to
appear again when we are out of sight of that quarter of the
globe."
Franz remained a moment silent and pensive, hardly knowing
what to think of the halfkindness, halfcruelty, with which
his host related the brief narrative. "And like the
celebrated sailor whose name you have assumed," he said, by
way of changing the conversation, "you pass your life in
travelling?"
"Yes. I made a vow at a time when I little thought I should
ever be able to accomplish it," said the unknown with a
singular smile "and I made some others also which I hope I
may fulfil in due season." Although Sinbad pronounced these
words with much calmness, his eyes gave forth gleams of
extraordinary ferocity.
"You have suffered a great deal, sir?" said Franz
inquiringly.
Sinbad started and looked fixedly at him, as he replied,
"What makes you suppose so?"
"Everything," answered Franz,  "your voice, your look,
your pallid complexion, and even the life you lead."
"I?  I live the happiest life possible, the real life of a
pasha. I am king of all creation. I am pleased with one
place, and stay there I get tired of it, and leave it I am
free as a bird and have wings like one my attendants obey
my slightest wish. Sometimes I amuse myself by delivering
some bandit or criminal from the bonds of the law. Then I
have my mode of dispensing justice, silent and sure, without
respite or appeal, which condemns or pardons, and which no
one sees. Ah, if you had tasted my life, you would not
desire any other, and would never return to the world unless
you had some great project to accomplish there."
"Revenge, for instance" observed Franz.
The unknown fixed on the young man one of those looks which
penetrate into the depth of the heart and thoughts. "And why
revenge?" he asked.
"Because," replied Franz, "you seem to me like a man who,
persecuted by society, has a fearful account to settle with
it."
"Ah," responded Sinbad, laughing with his singular laugh
which displayed his white and sharp teeth. "You have not
guessed rightly. Such as you see me I am, a sort of
philosopher, and one day perhaps I shall go to Paris to
rival Monsieur Appert, and the little man in the blue
cloak."
"And will that be the first time you ever took that
journey?"
"Yes it will. I must seem to you by no means curious, but I
assure you that it is not my fault I have delayed it so long
it will happen one day or the other."
"And do you propose to make this journey very shortly?"
"I do not know it depends on circumstances which depend on
certain arrangements."
"I should like to be there at the time you come, and I will
endeavor to repay you, as far as lies in my power, for your
liberal hospitality displayed to me at Monte Cristo."
"I should avail myself of your offer with pleasure," replied
the host, "but, unfortunately, if I go there, it will be, in
all probability, incognito."
The supper appeared to have been supplied solely for Franz,
for the unknown scarcely touched one or two dishes of the
splendid banquet to which his guest did ample justice. Then
Ali brought on the dessert, or rather took the baskets from
the hands of the statues and placed them on the table.
Between the two baskets he placed a small silver cup with a
silver cover. The care with which Ali placed this cup on the
table roused Franz's curiosity. He raised the cover and saw
a kind of greenish paste, something like preserved angelica,
but which was perfectly unknown to him. He replaced the lid,
as ignorant of what the cup contained as he was before he
had looked at it, and then casting his eyes towards his host
he saw him smile at his disappointment. "You cannot guess,"
said he, "what there is in that small vase, can you?"
"No, I really cannot."
"Well, then, that green preserve is nothing less than the
ambrosia which Hebe served at the table of Jupiter."
"But," replied Franz, "this ambrosia, no doubt, in passing
through mortal hands has lost its heavenly appellation and
assumed a human name in vulgar phrase, what may you term
this composition, for which, to tell the truth, I do not
feel any particular desire?"
"Ah, thus it is that our material origin is revealed," cried
Sinbad "we frequently pass so near to happiness without
seeing, without regarding it, or if we do see and regard it,
yet without recognizing it. Are you a man for the
substantials, and is gold your god? taste this, and the
mines of Peru, Guzerat, and Golconda are opened to you. Are
you a man of imagination  a poet? taste this, and the
boundaries of possibility disappear the fields of infinite
space open to you, you advance free in heart, free in mind,
into the boundless realms of unfettered revery. Are you
ambitious, and do you seek after the greatnesses of the
earth? taste this, and in an hour you will be a king, not a
king of a petty kingdom hidden in some corner of Europe like
France, Spain, or England, but king of the world, king of
the universe, king of creation without bowing at the feet
of Satan, you will be king and master of all the kingdoms of
the earth. Is it not tempting what I offer you, and is it
not an easy thing, since it is only to do thus? look" At
these words he uncovered the small cup which contained the
substance so lauded, took a teaspoonful of the magic
sweetmeat, raised it to his lips, and swallowed it slowly
with his eyes half shut and his head bent backwards. Franz
did not disturb him whilst he absorbed his favorite
sweetmeat, but when he had finished, he inquired,  "What,
then, is this precious stuff?"
"Did you ever hear," he replied, "of the Old Man of the
Mountain, who attempted to assassinate Philip Augustus?"
"Of course I have."
"Well, you know he reigned over a rich valley which was
overhung by the mountain whence he derived his picturesque
name. In this valley were magnificent gardens planted by
HassenbenSabah, and in these gardens isolated pavilions.
Into these pavilions he admitted the elect, and there, says
Marco Polo, gave them to eat a certain herb, which
transported them to Paradise, in the midst of everblooming
shrubs, everripe fruit, and everlovely virgins. What these
happy persons took for reality was but a dream but it was a
dream so soft, so voluptuous, so enthralling, that they sold
themselves body and soul to him who gave it to them, and
obedient to his orders as to those of a deity, struck down
the designated victim, died in torture without a murmur,
believing that the death they underwent was but a quick
transition to that life of delights of which the holy herb,
now before you had given them a slight foretaste."
"Then," cried Franz, "it is hashish I know that  by name
at least."
"That is it precisely, Signor Aladdin it is hashish  the
purest and most unadulterated hashish of Alexandria,  the
hashish of AbouGor, the celebrated maker, the only man, the
man to whom there should be built a palace, inscribed with
these words, "A grateful world to the dealer in happiness.'"
"Do you know," said Franz, "I have a very great inclination
to judge for myself of the truth or exaggeration of your
eulogies."
"Judge for yourself, Signor Aladdin  judge, but do not
confine yourself to one trial. Like everything else, we must
habituate the senses to a fresh impression, gentle or
violent, sad or joyous. There is a struggle in nature
against this divine substance,  in nature which is not
made for joy and clings to pain. Nature subdued must yield
in the combat, the dream must succeed to reality, and then
the dream reigns supreme, then the dream becomes life, and
life becomes the dream. But what changes occur It is only
by comparing the pains of actual being with the joys of the
assumed existence, that you would desire to live no longer,
but to dream thus forever. When you return to this mundane
sphere from your visionary world, you would seem to leave a
Neapolitan spring for a Lapland winter  to quit paradise
for earth  heaven for hell Taste the hashish, guest of
mine  taste the hashish."
Franz's only reply was to take a teaspoonful of the
marvellous preparation, about as much in quantity as his
host had eaten, and lift it to his mouth. "Diable" he said,
after having swallowed the divine preserve. "I do not know
if the result will be as agreeable as you describe, but the
thing does not appear to me as palatable as you say."
"Because your palate his not yet been attuned to the
sublimity of the substances it flavors. Tell me, the first
time you tasted oysters, tea, porter, truffles, and sundry
other dainties which you now adore, did you like them? Could
you comprehend how the Romans stuffed their pheasants with
assafoetida, and the Chinese eat swallows' nests? Eh? no
Well, it is the same with hashish only eat for a week, and
nothing in the world will seem to you to equal the delicacy
of its flavor, which now appears to you flat and
distasteful. Let us now go into the adjoining chamber, which
is your apartment, and Ali will bring us coffee and pipes."
They both arose, and while he who called himself Sinbad 
and whom we have occasionally named so, that we might, like
his guest, have some title by which to distinguish him 
gave some orders to the servant, Franz entered still another
apartment. It was simply yet richly furnished. It was round,
and a large divan completely encircled it. Divan, walls,
ceiling, floor, were all covered with magnificent skins as
soft and downy as the richest carpets there were
heavymaned lionskins from Atlas, striped tigerskins from
Bengal pantherskins from the Cape, spotted beautifully,
like those that appeared to Dante bearskins from Siberia,
foxskins from Norway, and so on and all these skins were
strewn in profusion one on the other, so that it seemed like
walking over the most mossy turf, or reclining on the most
luxurious bed. Both laid themselves down on the divan
chibouques with jasmine tubes and amber mouthpieces were
within reach, and all prepared so that there was no need to
smoke the same pipe twice. Each of them took one, which Ali
lighted and then retired to prepare the coffee. There was a
moment's silence, during which Sinbad gave himself up to
thoughts that seemed to occupy him incessantly, even in the
midst of his conversation and Franz abandoned himself to
that mute revery, into which we always sink when smoking
excellent tobacco, which seems to remove with its fume all
the troubles of the mind, and to give the smoker in exchange
all the visions of the soul. Ali brought in the coffee. "How
do you take it?" inquired the unknown "in the French or
Turkish style, strong or weak, sugar or none, cool or
boiling? As you please it is ready in all ways."
"I will take it in the Turkish style," replied Franz.
"And you are right," said his host "it shows you have a
tendency for an Oriental life. Ah, those Orientals they are
the only men who know how to live. As for me," he added,
with one of those singular smiles which did not escape the
young man, "when I have completed my affairs in Paris, I
shall go and die in the East and should you wish to see me
again, you must seek me at Cairo, Bagdad, or Ispahan."
"Ma foi," said Franz, "it would be the easiest thing in the
world for I feel eagle's wings springing out at my
shoulders, and with those wings I could make a tour of the
world in four and twenty hours."
"Ah, yes, the hashish is beginning its work. Well, unfurl
your wings, and fly into superhuman regions fear nothing,
there is a watch over you and if your wings, like those of
Icarus, melt before the sun, we are here to ease your fall."
He then said something in Arabic to Ali, who made a sign of
obedience and withdrew, but not to any distance. As to Franz
a strange transformation had taken place in him. All the
bodily fatigue of the day, all the preoccupation of mind
which the events of the evening had brought on, disappeared
as they do at the first approach of sleep, when we are still
sufficiently conscious to be aware of the coming of slumber.
His body seemed to acquire an airy lightness, his perception
brightened in a remarkable manner, his senses seemed to
redouble their power, the horizon continued to expand but
it was not the gloomy horizon of vague alarms, and which he
had seen before he slept, but a blue, transparent, unbounded
horizon, with all the blue of the ocean, all the spangles of
the sun, all the perfumes of the summer breeze then, in the
midst of the songs of his sailors,  songs so clear and
sonorous, that they would have made a divine harmony had
their notes been taken down,  he saw the Island of Monte
Cristo, no longer as a threatening rock in the midst of the
waves, but as an oasis in the desert then, as his boat drew
nearer, the songs became louder, for an enchanting and
mysterious harmony rose to heaven, as if some Loreley had
decreed to attract a soul thither, or Amphion, the
enchanter, intended there to build a city.
At length the boat touched the shore, but without effort,
without shock, as lips touch lips and he entered the grotto
amidst continued strains of most delicious melody. He
descended, or rather seemed to descend, several steps,
inhaling the fresh and balmy air, like that which may be
supposed to reign around the grotto of Circe, formed from
such perfumes as set the mind a dreaming, and such fires as
burn the very senses and he saw again all he had seen
before his sleep, from Sinbad, his singular host, to Ali,
the mute attendant then all seemed to fade away and become
confused before his eyes, like the last shadows of the magic
lantern before it is extinguished, and he was again in the
chamber of statues, lighted only by one of those pale and
antique lamps which watch in the dead of the night over the
sleep of pleasure. They were the same statues, rich in form,
in attraction, and poesy, with eyes of fascination, smiles
of love, and bright and flowing hair. They were Phryne,
Cleopatra, Messalina, those three celebrated courtesans.
Then among them glided like a pure ray, like a Christian
angel in the midst of Olympus, one of those chaste figures,
those calm shadows, those soft visions, which seemed to veil
its virgin brow before these marble wantons. Then the three
statues advanced towards him with looks of love, and
approached the couch on which he was reposing, their feet
hidden in their long white tunics, their throats bare, hair
flowing like waves, and assuming attitudes which the gods
could not resist, but which saints withstood, and looks
inflexible and ardent like those with which the serpent
charms the bird and then he gave way before looks that held
him in a torturing grasp and delighted his senses as with a
voluptuous kiss. It seemed to Franz that he closed his eyes,
and in a last look about him saw the vision of modesty
completely veiled and then followed a dream of passion like
that promised by the Prophet to the elect. Lips of stone
turned to flame, breasts of ice became like heated lava, so
that to Franz, yielding for the first time to the sway of
the drug, love was a sorrow and voluptuousness a torture, as
burning mouths were pressed to his thirsty lips, and he was
held in cool serpentlike embraces. The more he strove
against this unhallowed passion the more his senses yielded
to its thrall, and at length, weary of a struggle that taxed
his very soul, he gave way and sank back breathless and
exhausted beneath the kisses of these marble goddesses, and
the enchantment of his marvellous dream.
Chapter 
The Waking.
When Franz returned to himself, he seemed still to be in a
dream. He thought himself in a sepulchre, into which a ray
of sunlight in pity scarcely penetrated. He stretched forth
his hand, and touched stone he rose to his seat, and found
himself lying on his bournous in a bed of dry heather, very
soft and odoriferous. The vision had fled and as if the
statues had been but shadows from the tomb, they had
vanished at his waking. He advanced several paces towards
the point whence the light came, and to all the excitement
of his dream succeeded the calmness of reality. He found
that he was in a grotto, went towards the opening, and
through a kind of fanlight saw a blue sea and an azure sky.
The air and water were shining in the beams of the morning
sun on the shore the sailors were sitting, chatting and
laughing and at ten yards from them the boat was at anchor,
undulating gracefully on the water. There for some time he
enjoyed the fresh breeze which played on his brow, and
listened to the dash of the waves on the beach, that left
against the rocks a lace of foam as white as silver. He was
for some time without reflection or thought for the divine
charm which is in the things of nature, specially after a
fantastic dream then gradually this view of the outer
world, so calm, so pure, so grand, reminded him of the
illusiveness of his vision, and once more awakened memory.
He recalled his arrival on the island, his presentation to a
smuggler chief, a subterranean palace full of splendor, an
excellent supper, and a spoonful of hashish. It seemed,
however, even in the very face of open day, that at least a
year had elapsed since all these things had passed, so deep
was the impression made in his mind by the dream, and so
strong a hold had it taken of his imagination. Thus every
now and then he saw in fancy amid the sailors, seated on a
rock, or undulating in the vessel, one of the shadows which
had shared his dream with looks and kisses. Otherwise, his
head was perfectly clear, and his body refreshed he was
free from the slightest headache on the contrary, he felt a
certain degree of lightness, a faculty for absorbing the
pure air, and enjoying the bright sunshine more vividly than
ever.
He went gayly up to the sailors, who rose as soon as they
perceived him and the patron, accosting him, said, "The
Signor Sinbad has left his compliments for your excellency,
and desires us to express the regret he feels at not being
able to take his leave in person but he trusts you will
excuse him, as very important business calls him to Malaga."
"So, then, Gaetano," said Franz, "this is, then, all
reality there exists a man who has received me in this
island, entertained me right royally, and his departed while
I was asleep?"
"He exists as certainly as that you may see his small yacht
with all her sails spread and if you will use your glass,
you will, in all probability, recognize your host in the
midst of his crew." So saying, Gaetano pointed in a
direction in which a small vessel was making sail towards
the southern point of Corsica. Franz adjusted his telescope,
and directed it towards the yacht. Gaetano was not mistaken.
At the stern the mysterious stranger was standing up looking
towards the shore, and holding a spyglass in his hand. He
was attired as he had been on the previous evening, and
waved his pockethandkerchief to his guest in token of
adieu. Franz returned the salute by shaking his handkerchief
as an exchange of signals. After a second, a slight cloud of
smoke was seen at the stern of the vessel, which rose
gracefully as it expanded in the air, and then Franz heard a
slight report. "There, do you hear?" observed Gaetano "he
is bidding you adieu." The young man took his carbine and
fired it in the air, but without any idea that the noise
could be heard at the distance which separated the yacht
from the shore.
"What are your excellency's orders?" inquired Gaetano.
"In the first place, light me a torch."
"Ah, yes, I understand," replied the patron, "to find the
entrance to the enchanted apartment. With much pleasure,
your excellency, if it would amuse you and I will get you
the torch you ask for. But I too have had the idea you have,
and two or three times the same fancy has come over me but
I have always given it up. Giovanni, light a torch," he
added, "and give it to his excellency."
Giovanni obeyed. Franz took the lamp, and entered the
subterranean grotto, followed by Gaetano. He recognized the
place where he had awaked by the bed of heather that was
there but it was in vain that he carried his torch all
round the exterior surface of the grotto. He saw nothing,
unless that, by traces of smoke, others had before him
attempted the same thing, and, like him, in vain. Yet he did
not leave a foot of this granite wall, as impenetrable as
futurity, without strict scrutiny he did not see a fissure
without introducing the blade of his hunting sword into it,
or a projecting point on which he did not lean and press in
the hopes it would give way. All was vain and he lost two
hours in his attempts, which were at last utterly useless.
At the end of this time he gave up his search, and Gaetano
smiled.
When Franz appeared again on the shore, the yacht only
seemed like a small white speck on the horizon. He looked
again through his glass, but even then he could not
distinguish anything. Gaetano reminded him that he had come
for the purpose of shooting goats, which he had utterly
forgotten. He took his fowlingpiece, and began to hunt over
the island with the air of a man who is fulfilling a duty,
rather than enjoying a pleasure and at the end of a quarter
of an hour he had killed a goat and two kids. These animals,
though wild and agile as chamois, were too much like
domestic goats, and Franz could not consider them as game.
Moreover, other ideas, much more enthralling, occupied his
mind. Since, the evening before, he had really been the hero
of one of the tales of the "Thousand and One Nights," and he
was irresistibly attracted towards the grotto. Then, in
spite of the failure of his first search, he began a second,
after having told Gaetano to roast one of the two kids. The
second visit was a long one, and when he returned the kid
was roasted and the repast ready. Franz was sitting on the
spot where he was on the previous evening when his
mysterious host had invited him to supper and he saw the
little yacht, now like a seagull on the wave, continuing
her flight towards Corsica. "Why," he remarked to Gaetano,
"you told me that Signor Sinbad was going to Malaga, while
it seems he is in the direction of PortoVecchio."
"Don't you remember," said the patron, "I told you that
among the crew there were two Corsican brigands?"
"True and he is going to land them," added Franz.
"Precisely so," replied Gaetano. "Ah, he is one who fears
neither God nor Satan, they say, and would at any time run
fifty leagues out of his course to do a poor devil a
service."
"But such services as these might involve him with the
authorities of the country in which he practices this kind
of philanthropy," said Franz.
"And what cares he for that," replied Gaetano with a laugh,
"or any authorities? He smiles at them. Let them try to
pursue him Why, in the first place, his yacht is not a
ship, but a bird, and he would beat any frigate three knots
in every nine and if he were to throw himself on the coast,
why, is he not certain of finding friends everywhere?"
It was perfectly clear that the Signor Sinbad, Franz's host,
had the honor of being on excellent terms with the smugglers
and bandits along the whole coast of the Mediterranean, and
so enjoyed exceptional privileges. As to Franz, he had no
longer any inducement to remain at Monte Cristo. He had lost
all hope of detecting the secret of the grotto he
consequently despatched his breakfast, and, his boat being
ready, he hastened on board, and they were soon under way.
At the moment the boat began her course they lost sight of
the yacht, as it disappeared in the gulf of PortoVecchio.
With it was effaced the last trace of the preceding night
and then supper, Sinbad, hashish, statues,  all became a
dream for Franz. The boat sailed on all day and all night,
and next morning, when the sun rose, they had lost sight of
Monte Cristo. When Franz had once again set foot on shore,
he forgot, for the moment at least, the events which had
just passed, while he finished his affairs of pleasure at
Florence, and then thought of nothing but how he should
rejoin his companion, who was awaiting him at Rome.
He set out, and on the Saturday evening reached the Eternal
City by the mailcoach. An apartment, as we have said, had
been retained beforehand, and thus he had but to go to
Signor Pastrini's hotel. But this was not so easy a matter,
for the streets were thronged with people, and Rome was
already a prey to that low and feverish murmur which
precedes all great events and at Rome there are four great
events in every year,  the Carnival, Holy Week, Corpus
Christi, and the Feast of St. Peter. All the rest of the
year the city is in that state of dull apathy, between life
and death, which renders it similar to a kind of station
between this world and the next  a sublime spot, a
restingplace full of poetry and character, and at which
Franz had already halted five or six times, and at each time
found it more marvellous and striking. At last he made his
way through the mob, which was continually increasing and
getting more and more turbulent, and reached the hotel. On
his first inquiry he was told, with the impertinence
peculiar to hired hackneycoachmen and innkeepers with
their houses full, that there was no room for him at the
Hotel de Londres. Then he sent his card to Signor Pastrini,
and asked for Albert de Morcerf. This plan succeeded and
Signor Pastrini himself ran to him, excusing himself for
having made his excellency wait, scolding the waiters,
taking the candlestick from the porter, who was ready to
pounce on the traveller and was about to lead him to Albert,
when Morcerf himself appeared.
The apartment consisted of two small rooms and a parlor. The
two rooms looked onto the street  a fact which Signor
Pastrini commented upon as an inappreciable advantage. The
rest of the floor was hired by a very rich gentleman who was
supposed to be a Sicilian or Maltese but the host was
unable to decide to which of the two nations the traveller
belonged. "Very good, signor Pastrini," said Franz "but we
must have some supper instantly, and a carriage for tomorrow
and the following days."
"As to supper," replied the landlord, "you shall be served
immediately but as for the carriage" 
"What as to the carriage?" exclaimed Albert. "Come, come,
Signor Pastrini, no joking we must have a carriage."
"Sir," replied the host, "we will do all in our power to
procure you one  this is all I can say."
"And when shall we know?" inquired Franz.
"Tomorrow morning," answered the innkeeper.
"Oh, the deuce then we shall pay the more, that's all, I
see plainly enough. At Drake's or Aaron's one pays
twentyfive lire for common days, and thirty or thirtyfive
lire a day more for Sundays and feast days add five lire a
day more for extras, that will make forty, and there's an
end of it."
"I am afraid if we offer them double that we shall not
procure a carriage."
"Then they must put horses to mine. It is a little worse for
the journey, but that's no matter."
"There are no horses." Albert looked at Franz like a man who
hears a reply he does not understand.
"Do you understand that, my dear Franz  no horses?" he
said, "but can't we have posthorses?"
"They have been all hired this fortnight, and there are none
left but those absolutely requisite for posting."
"What are we to say to this?" asked Franz.
"I say, that when a thing completely surpasses my
comprehension, I am accustomed not to dwell on that thing,
but to pass to another. Is supper ready, Signor Pastrini?"
"Yes, your excellency."
"Well, then, let us sup."
"But the carriage and horses?" said Franz.
"Be easy, my dear boy they will come in due season it is
only a question of how much shall be charged for them."
Morcerf then, with that delighted philosophy which believes
that nothing is impossible to a full purse or welllined
pocketbook, supped, went to bed, slept soundly, and dreamed
he was racing all over Rome at Carnival time in a coach with
six horses.
Chapter 
Roman Bandits.
The next morning Franz woke first, and instantly rang the
bell. The sound had not yet died away when Signor Pastrini
himself entered.
"Well, excellency," said the landlord triumphantly, and
without waiting for Franz to question him, "I feared
yesterday, when I would not promise you anything, that you
were too late  there is not a single carriage to be had 
that is, for the last three days of the carnival."
"Yes," returned Franz, "for the very three days it is most
needed."
"What is the matter?" said Albert, entering "no carriage to
be had?"
"Just so," returned Franz, "you have guessed it."
"Well, your Eternal City is a nice sort of place."
"That is to say, excellency," replied Pastrini, who was
desirous of keeping up the dignity of the capital of the
Christian world in the eyes of his guest, "that there are no
carriages to be had from Sunday to Tuesday evening, but from
now till Sunday you can have fifty if you please."
"Ah, that is something," said Albert "today is Thursday,
and who knows what may arrive between this and Sunday?"
"Ten or twelve thousand travellers will arrive," replied
Franz, "which will make it still more difficult."
"My friend," said Morcerf, "let us enjoy the present without
gloomy forebodings for the future."
"At least we can have a window?"
"Where?"
"In the Corso."
"Ah, a window" exclaimed Signor Pastrini,  "utterly
impossible there was only one left on the fifth floor of
the Doria Palace, and that has been let to a Russian prince
for twenty sequins a day."
The two young men looked at each other with an air of
stupefaction.
"Well," said Franz to Albert, "do you know what is the best
thing we can do? It is to pass the Carnival at Venice there
we are sure of obtaining gondolas if we cannot have
carriages."
"Ah, the devil, no," cried Albert "I came to Rome to see
the Carnival, and I will, though I see it on stilts."
"Bravo an excellent idea. We will disguise ourselves as
monster pulchinellos or shepherds of the Landes, and we
shall have complete success."
"Do your excellencies still wish for a carriage from now to
Sunday morning?"
"Parbleu" said Albert, "do you think we are going to run
about on foot in the streets of Rome, like lawyer's clerks?"
"I hasten to comply with your excellencies' wishes only, I
tell you beforehand, the carriage will cost you six piastres
a day."
"And, as I am not a millionaire, like the gentleman in the
next apartments," said Franz, "I warn you, that as I have
been four times before at Rome, I know the prices of all the
carriages we will give you twelve piastres for today,
tomorrow, and the day after, and then you will make a good
profit."
"But, excellency"  said Pastrini, still striving to gain
his point.
"Now go," returned Franz, "or I shall go myself and bargain
with your affettatore, who is mine also he is an old friend
of mine, who has plundered me pretty well already, and, in
the hope of making more out of me, he will take a less price
than the one I offer you you will lose the preference, and
that will be your fault."
"Do not give yourselves the trouble, excellency," returned
Signor Pastrini, with the smile peculiar to the Italian
speculator when he confesses defeat "I will do all I can,
and I hope you will be satisfied."
"And now we understand each other."
"When do you wish the carriage to be here?"
"In an hour."
"In an hour it will be at the door."
An hour after the vehicle was at the door it was a hack
conveyance which was elevated to the rank of a private
carriage in honor of the occasion, but, in spite of its
humble exterior, the young men would have thought themselves
happy to have secured it for the last three days of the
Carnival. "Excellency," cried the cicerone, seeing Franz
approach the window, "shall I bring the carriage nearer to
the palace?"
Accustomed as Franz was to the Italian phraseology, his
first impulse was to look round him, but these words were
addressed to him. Franz was the "excellency," the vehicle
was the "carriage," and the Hotel de Londres was the
"palace." The genius for laudation characteristic of the
race was in that phrase.
Franz and Albert descended, the carriage approached the
palace their excellencies stretched their legs along the
seats the cicerone sprang into the seat behind. "Where do
your excellencies wish to go?" asked he.
"To Saint Peter's first, and then to the Colosseum,"
returned Albert. But Albert did not know that it takes a day
to see Saint Peter's, and a month to study it. The day was
passed at Saint Peter's alone. Suddenly the daylight began
to fade away Franz took out his watch  it was halfpast
four. They returned to the hotel at the door Franz ordered
the coachman to be ready at eight. He wished to show Albert
the Colosseum by moonlight, as he had shown him Saint
Peter's by daylight. When we show a friend a city one has
already visited, we feel the same pride as when we point out
a woman whose lover we have been. He was to leave the city
by the Porta del Popolo, skirt the outer wall, and reenter
by the Porta San Giovanni thus they would behold the
Colosseum without finding their impressions dulled by first
looking on the Capitol, the Forum, the Arch of Septimus
Severus, the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina, and the Via
Sacra. They sat down to dinner. Signor Pastrini had promised
them a banquet he gave them a tolerable repast. At the end
of the dinner he entered in person. Franz thought that he
came to hear his dinner praised, and began accordingly, but
at the first words he was interrupted. "Excellency," said
Pastrini, "I am delighted to have your approbation, but it
was not for that I came."
"Did you come to tell us you have procured a carriage?"
asked Albert, lighting his cigar.
"No and your excellencies will do well not to think of that
any longer at Rome things can or cannot be done when you
are told anything cannot he done, there is an end of it."
"It is much more convenient at Paris,  when anything
cannot be done, you pay double, and it is done directly."
"That is what all the French say," returned Signor Pastrini,
somewhat piqued "for that reason, I do not understand why
they travel."
"But," said Albert, emitting a volume of smoke and balancing
his chair on its hind legs, "only madmen, or blockheads like
us, ever do travel. Men in their senses do not quit their
hotel in the Rue du Helder, their walk on the Boulevard de
Gand, and the Cafe de Paris." It is of course understood
that Albert resided in the aforesaid street, appeared every
day on the fashionable walk, and dined frequently at the
only restaurant where you can really dine, that is, if you
are on good terms with its frequenters. Signor Pastrini
remained silent a short time it was evident that he was
musing over this answer, which did not seem very clear.
"But," said Franz, in his turn interrupting his host's
meditations, "you had some motive for coming here, may I beg
to know what it was?"
"Ah, yes you have ordered your carriage at eight o'clock
precisely?"
"I have."
"You intend visiting Il Colosseo."
"You mean the Colosseum?"
"It is the same thing. You have told your coachman to leave
the city by the Porta del Popolo, to drive round the walls,
and reenter by the Porta San Giovanni?"
"These are my words exactly."
"Well, this route is impossible."
"Impossible"
"Very dangerous, to say the least."
"Dangerous  and why?"
"On account of the famous Luigi Vampa."
"Pray, who may this famous Luigi Vampa be?" inquired Albert
"he may be very famous at Rome, but I can assure you he is
quite unknown at Paris."
"What do you not know him?"
"I have not that honor."
"You have never heard his name?"
"Never."
"Well, then, he is a bandit, compared to whom the Decesaris
and the Gasparones were mere children."
"Now then, Albert," cried Franz, "here is a bandit for you
at last."
"I forewarn you, Signor Pastrini, that I shall not believe
one word of what you are going to tell us having told you
this, begin."
"Once upon a time" 
"Well, go on." Signor Pastrini turned toward Franz, who
seemed to him the more reasonable of the two we must do him
justice,  he had had a great many Frenchmen in his house,
but had never been able to comprehend them. "Excellency,"
said he gravely, addressing Franz, "if you look upon me as a
liar, it is useless for me to say anything it was for your
interest I" 
"Albert does not say you are a liar, Signor Pastrini," said
Franz, "but that he will not believe what you are going to
tell us,  but I will believe all you say so proceed."
"But if your excellency doubt my veracity" 
"Signor Pastrini," returned Franz, "you are more susceptible
than Cassandra, who was a prophetess, and yet no one
believed her while you, at least, are sure of the credence
of half your audience. Come, sit down, and tell us all about
this Signor Vampa."
"I had told your excellency he is the most famous bandit we
have had since the days of Mastrilla."
"Well, what has this bandit to do with the order I have
given the coachman to leave the city by the Porta del
Popolo, and to reenter by the Porta San Giovanni?"
"This," replied Signor Pastrini, "that you will go out by
one, but I very much doubt your returning by the other."
"Why?" asked Franz.
"Because, after nightfall, you are not safe fifty yards from
the gates."
"On your honor is that true?" cried Albert.
"Count," returned Signor Pastrini, hurt at Albert's repeated
doubts of the truth of his assertions, "I do not say this to
you, but to your companion, who knows Rome, and knows, too,
that these things are not to be laughed at."
"My dear fellow," said Albert, turning to Franz, "here is an
admirable adventure we will fill our carriage with pistols,
blunderbusses, and doublebarrelled guns. Luigi Vampa comes
to take us, and we take him  we bring him back to Rome,
and present him to his holiness the Pope, who asks how he
can repay so great a service then we merely ask for a
carriage and a pair of horses, and we see the Carnival in
the carriage, and doubtless the Roman people will crown us
at the Capitol, and proclaim us, like Curtius and the veiled
Horatius, the preservers of their country." Whilst Albert
proposed this scheme, Signor Pastrini's face assumed an
expression impossible to describe.
"And pray," asked Franz, "where are these pistols,
blunderbusses, and other deadly weapons with which you
intend filling the carriage?"
"Not out of my armory, for at Terracina I was plundered even
of my huntingknife."
"I shared the same fate at Aquapendente."
"Do you know, Signor Pastrini," said Albert, lighting a
second cigar at the first, "that this practice is very
convenient for bandits, and that it seems to be due to an
arrangement of their own." Doubtless Signor Pastrini found
this pleasantry compromising, for he only answered half the
question, and then he spoke to Franz, as the only one likely
to listen with attention. "Your excellency knows that it is
not customary to defend yourself when attacked by bandits."
"What" cried Albert, whose courage revolted at the idea of
being plundered tamely, "not make any resistance"
"No, for it would be useless. What could you do against a
dozen bandits who spring out of some pit, ruin, or aqueduct,
and level their pieces at you?"
"Eh, parbleu  they should kill me."
The innkeeper turned to Franz with an air that seemed to
say, "Your friend is decidedly mad."
"My dear Albert," returned Franz, "your answer is sublime,
and worthy the "Let him die,' of Corneille, only, when
Horace made that answer, the safety of Rome was concerned
but, as for us, it is only to gratify a whim, and it would
be ridiculous to risk our lives for so foolish a motive."
Albert poured himself out a glass of lacryma Christi, which
he sipped at intervals, muttering some unintelligible words.
"Well, Signor Pastrini," said Franz, "now that my companion
is quieted, and you have seen how peaceful my intentions
are, tell me who is this Luigi Vampa. Is he a shepherd or a
nobleman?  young or old?  tall or short? Describe him,
in order that, if we meet him by chance, like Bugaboo John
or Lara, we may recognize him."
"You could not apply to any one better able to inform you on
all these points, for I knew him when he was a child, and
one day that I fell into his hands, going from Ferentino to
Alatri, he, fortunately for me, recollected me, and set me
free, not only without ransom, but made me a present of a
very splendid watch, and related his history to me."
"Let us see the watch," said Albert.
Signor Pastrini drew from his fob a magnificent Breguet,
bearing the name of its maker, of Parisian manufacture, and
a count's coronet.
"Here it is," said he.
"Peste," returned Albert, "I compliment you on it I have
its fellow"  he took his watch from his waistcoat pocket
"and it cost me , francs."
"Let us hear the history," said Franz, motioning Signor
Pastrini to seat himself.
"Your excellencies permit it?" asked the host.
"Pardieu" cried Albert, "you are not a preacher, to remain
standing"
The host sat down, after having made each of them a
respectful bow, which meant that he was ready to tell them
all they wished to know concerning Luigi Vampa. "You tell
me," said Franz, at the moment Signor Pastrini was about to
open his mouth, "that you knew Luigi Vampa when he was a
child  he is still a young man, then?"
"A young man? he is only two and twenty  he will gain
himself a reputation."
"What do you think of that, Albert?  at two and twenty to
be thus famous?"
"Yes, and at his age, Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon, who
have all made some noise in the world, were quite behind
him."
"So," continued Franz, "the hero of this history is only two
and twenty?"
"Scarcely so much."
"Is he tall or short?"
"Of the middle height  about the same stature as his
excellency," returned the host, pointing to Albert.
"Thanks for the comparison," said Albert, with a bow.
"Go on, Signor Pastrini," continued Franz, smiling at his
friend's susceptibility. "To what class of society does he
belong?"
"He was a shepherdboy attached to the farm of the Count of
SanFelice, situated between Palestrina and the lake of
Gabri he was born at Pampinara, and entered the count's
service when he was five years old his father was also a
shepherd, who owned a small flock, and lived by the wool and
the milk, which he sold at Rome. When quite a child, the
little Vampa displayed a most extraordinary precocity. One
day, when he was seven years old, he came to the curate of
Palestrina, and asked to be taught to read it was somewhat
difficult, for he could not quit his flock but the good
curate went every day to say mass at a little hamlet too
poor to pay a priest and which, having no other name, was
called Borgo he told Luigi that he might meet him on his
return, and that then he would give him a lesson, warning
him that it would be short, and that he must profit as much
as possible by it. The child accepted joyfully. Every day
Luigi led his flock to graze on the road that leads from
Palestrina to Borgo every day, at nine o'clock in the
morning, the priest and the boy sat down on a bank by the
wayside, and the little shepherd took his lesson out of the
priest's breviary. At the end of three months he had learned
to read. This was not enough  he must now learn to write.
The priest had a writing teacher at Rome make three
alphabets  one large, one middling, and one small and
pointed out to him that by the help of a sharp instrument he
could trace the letters on a slate, and thus learn to write.
The same evening, when the flock was safe at the farm, the
little Luigi hastened to the smith at Palestrina, took a
large nail, heated and sharpened it, and formed a sort of
stylus. The next morning he gathered an armful of pieces of
slate and began. At the end of three months he had learned
to write. The curate, astonished at his quickness and
intelligence, made him a present of pens, paper, and a
penknife. This demanded new effort, but nothing compared to
the first at the end of a week he wrote as well with this
pen as with the stylus. The curate related the incident to
the Count of SanFelice, who sent for the little shepherd,
made him read and write before him, ordered his attendant to
let him eat with the domestics, and to give him two piastres
a month. With this, Luigi purchased books and pencils. He
applied his imitative powers to everything, and, like
Giotto, when young, he drew on his slate sheep, houses, and
trees. Then, with his knife, he began to carve all sorts of
objects in wood it was thus that Pinelli, the famous
sculptor, had commenced.
"A girl of six or seven  that is, a little younger than
Vampa  tended sheep on a farm near Palestrina she was an
orphan, born at Valmontone and was named Teresa. The two
children met, sat down near each other, let their flocks
mingle together, played, laughed, and conversed together in
the evening they separated the Count of SanFelice's flock
from those of Baron Cervetri, and the children returned to
their respective farms, promising to meet the next morning.
The next day they kept their word, and thus they grew up
together. Vampa was twelve, and Teresa eleven. And yet their
natural disposition revealed itself. Beside his taste for
the fine arts, which Luigi had carried as far as he could in
his solitude, he was given to alternating fits of sadness
and enthusiasm, was often angry and capricious, and always
sarcastic. None of the lads of Pampinara, Palestrina, or
Valmontone had been able to gain any influence over him or
even to become his companion. His disposition always
inclined to exact concessions rather than to make them kept
him aloof from all friendships. Teresa alone ruled by a
look, a word, a gesture, this impetuous character, which
yielded beneath the hand of a woman, and which beneath the
hand of a man might have broken, but could never have been
bended. Teresa was lively and gay, but coquettish to excess.
The two piastres that Luigi received every month from the
Count of SanFelice's steward, and the price of all the
little carvings in wood he sold at Rome, were expended in
earrings, necklaces, and gold hairpins. So that, thanks to
her friend's generosity, Teresa was the most beautiful and
the bestattired peasant near Rome. The two children grew up
together, passing all their time with each other, and giving
themselves up to the wild ideas of their different
characters. Thus, in all their dreams, their wishes, and
their conversations, Vampa saw himself the captain of a
vessel, general of an army, or governor of a province.
Teresa saw herself rich, superbly attired, and attended by a
train of liveried domestics. Then, when they had thus passed
the day in building castles in the air, they separated their
flocks, and descended from the elevation of their dreams to
the reality of their humble position.
"One day the young shepherd told the count's steward that he
had seen a wolf come out of the Sabine mountains, and prowl
around his flock. The steward gave him a gun this was what
Vampa longed for. This gun had an excellent barrel, made at
Breschia, and carrying a ball with the precision of an
English rifle but one day the count broke the stock, and
had then cast the gun aside. This, however, was nothing to a
sculptor like Vampa he examined the broken stock,
calculated what change it would require to adapt the gun to
his shoulder, and made a fresh stock, so beautifully carved
that it would have fetched fifteen or twenty piastres, had
he chosen to sell it. But nothing could be farther from his
thoughts. For a long time a gun had been the young man's
greatest ambition. In every country where independence has
taken the place of liberty, the first desire of a manly
heart is to possess a weapon, which at once renders him
capable of defence or attack, and, by rendering its owner
terrible, often makes him feared. From this moment Vampa
devoted all his leisure time to perfecting himself in the
use of his precious weapon he purchased powder and ball,
and everything served him for a mark  the trunk of some
old and mossgrown olivetree, that grew on the Sabine
mountains the fox, as he quitted his earth on some
marauding excursion the eagle that soared above their
heads and thus he soon became so expert, that Teresa
overcame the terror she at first felt at the report, and
amused herself by watching him direct the ball wherever he
pleased, with as much accuracy as if he placed it by hand.
"One evening a wolf emerged from a pinewood hear which they
were usually stationed, but the wolf had scarcely advanced
ten yards ere he was dead. Proud of this exploit, Vampa took
the dead animal on his shoulders, and carried him to the
farm. These exploits had gained Luigi considerable
reputation. The man of superior abilities always finds
admirers, go where he will. He was spoken of as the most
adroit, the strongest, and the most courageous contadino for
ten leagues around and although Teresa was universally
allowed to be the most beautiful girl of the Sabines, no one
had ever spoken to her of love, because it was known that
she was beloved by Vampa. And yet the two young people had
never declared their affection they had grown together like
two trees whose roots are mingled, whose branches
intertwined, and whose intermingled perfume rises to the
heavens. Only their wish to see each other had become a
necessity, and they would have preferred death to a day's
separation. Teresa was sixteen, and Vampa seventeen. About
this time, a band of brigands that had established itself in
the Lepini mountains began to be much spoken of. The
brigands have never been really extirpated from the
neighborhood of Rome. Sometimes a chief is wanted, but when
a chief presents himself he rarely has to wait long for a
band of followers.
"The celebrated Cucumetto, pursued in the Abruzzo, driven
out of the kingdom of Naples, where he had carried on a
regular war, had crossed the Garigliano, like Manfred, and
had taken refuge on the banks of the Amasine between Sonnino
and Juperno. He strove to collect a band of followers, and
followed the footsteps of Decesaris and Gasperone, whom he
hoped to surpass. Many young men of Palestrina, Frascati,
and Pampinara had disappeared. Their disappearance at first
caused much disquietude but it was soon known that they had
joined Cucumetto. After some time Cucumetto became the
object of universal attention the most extraordinary traits
of ferocious daring and brutality were related of him. One
day he carried off a young girl, the daughter of a surveyor
of Frosinone. The bandit's laws are positive a young girl
belongs first to him who carries her off, then the rest draw
lots for her, and she is abandoned to their brutality until
death relieves her sufferings. When their parents are
sufficiently rich to pay a ransom, a messenger is sent to
negotiate the prisoner is hostage for the security of the
messenger should the ransom be refused, the prisoner is
irrevocably lost. The young girl's lover was in Cucumetto's
troop his name was Carlini. When she recognized her lover,
the poor girl extended her arms to him, and believed herself
safe but Carlini felt his heart sink, for he but too well
knew the fate that awaited her. However, as he was a
favorite with Cucumetto, as he had for three years
faithfully served him, and as he had saved his life by
shooting a dragoon who was about to cut him down, he hoped
the chief would have pity on him. He took Cucumetto one
side, while the young girl, seated at the foot of a huge
pine that stood in the centre of the forest, made a veil of
her picturesque headdress to hide her face from the
lascivious gaze of the bandits. There he told the chief all
his affection for the prisoner, their promises of mutual
fidelity, and how every night, since he had been near, they
had met in some neighboring ruins.
"It so happened that night that Cucumetto had sent Carlini
to a village, so that he had been unable to go to the place
of meeting. Cucumetto had been there, however, by accident,
as he said, and had carried the maiden off. Carlini besought
his chief to make an exception in Rita's favor, as her
father was rich, and could pay a large ransom. Cucumetto
seemed to yield to his friend's entreaties, and bade him
find a shepherd to send to Rita's father at Frosinone.
Carlini flew joyfully to Rita, telling her she was saved,
and bidding her write to her father, to inform him what had
occurred, and that her ransom was fixed at three hundred
piastres. Twelve hours' delay was all that was granted 
that is, until nine the next morning. The instant the letter
was written, Carlini seized it, and hastened to the plain to
find a messenger. He found a young shepherd watching his
flock. The natural messengers of the bandits are the
shepherds who live between the city and the mountains,
between civilized and savage life. The boy undertook the
commission, promising to be in Frosinone in less than an
hour. Carlini returned, anxious to see his mistress, and
announce the joyful intelligence. He found the troop in the
glade, supping off the provisions exacted as contributions
from the peasants but his eye vainly sought Rita and
Cucumetto among them. He inquired where they were, and was
answered by a burst of laughter. A cold perspiration burst
from every pore, and his hair stood on end. He repeated his
question. One of the bandits rose, and offered him a glass
filled with Orvietto, saying, "To the health of the brave
Cucumetto and the fair Rita.' At this moment Carlini heard a
woman's cry he divined the truth, seized the glass, broke
it across the face of him who presented it, and rushed
towards the spot whence the cry came. After a hundred yards
he turned the corner of the thicket he found Rita senseless
in the arms of Cucumetto. At the sight of Carlini, Cucumetto
rose, a pistol in each hand. The two brigands looked at each
other for a moment  the one with a smile of lasciviousness
on his lips, the other with the pallor of death on his brow.
A terrible battle between the two men seemed imminent but
by degrees Carlini's features relaxed, his hand, which had
grasped one of the pistols in his belt, fell to his side.
Rita lay between them. The moon lighted the group.
""Well,' said Cucumetto, "have you executed your
commission?'
""Yes, captain,' returned Carlini. "At nine o'clock
tomorrow Rita's father will be here with the money.'  "It
is well in the meantime, we will have a merry night this
young girl is charming, and does credit to your taste. Now,
as I am not egotistical, we will return to our comrades and
draw lots for her.'  "You have determined, then, to
abandon her to the common law?" said Carlini.
""Why should an exception be made in her favor?'
""I thought that my entreaties' 
""What right have you, any more than the rest, to ask for an
exception?'  "It is true.'  "But never mind,' continued
Cucumetto, laughing, "sooner or later your turn will come.'
Carlini's teeth clinched convulsively.
""Now, then,' said Cucumetto, advancing towards the other
bandits, "are you coming?'  "I follow you.'
"Cucumetto departed, without losing sight of Carlini, for,
doubtless, he feared lest he should strike him unawares but
nothing betrayed a hostile design on Carlini's part. He was
standing, his arms folded, near Rita, who was still
insensible. Cucumetto fancied for a moment the young man was
about to take her in his arms and fly but this mattered
little to him now Rita had been his and as for the money,
three hundred piastres distributed among the band was so
small a sum that he cared little about it. He continued to
follow the path to the glade but, to his great surprise,
Carlini arrived almost as soon as himself. "Let us draw
lots let us draw lots' cried all the brigands, when they
saw the chief.
"Their demand was fair, and the chief inclined his head in
sign of acquiescence. The eyes of all shone fiercely as they
made their demand, and the red light of the fire made them
look like demons. The names of all, including Carlini, were
placed in a hat, and the youngest of the band drew forth a
ticket the ticket bore the name of Diovolaccio. He was the
man who had proposed to Carlini the health of their chief,
and to whom Carlini replied by breaking the glass across his
face. A large wound, extending from the temple to the mouth,
was bleeding profusely. Diovalaccio, seeing himself thus
favored by fortune, burst into a loud laugh. "Captain,' said
he, "just now Carlini would not drink your health when I
proposed it to him propose mine to him, and let us see if
he will be more condescending to you than to me.' Every one
expected an explosion on Carlini's part but to their great
surprise, he took a glass in one hand and a flask in the
other, and filling it,  "Your health, Diavolaccio,' said
he calmly, and he drank it off, without his hand trembling
in the least. Then sitting down by the fire, "My supper,'
said he "my expedition has given me an appetite.'  "Well
done, Carlini' cried the brigands "that is acting like a
good fellow' and they all formed a circle round the fire,
while Diavolaccio disappeared. Carlini ate and drank as if
nothing had happened. The bandits looked on with
astonishment at this singular conduct until they heard
footsteps. They turned round, and saw Diavolaccio bearing
the young girl in his arms. Her head hung back, and her long
hair swept the ground. As they entered the circle, the
bandits could perceive, by the firelight, the unearthly
pallor of the young girl and of Diavolaccio. This apparition
was so strange and so solemn, that every one rose, with the
exception of Carlini, who remained seated, and ate and drank
calmly. Diavolaccio advanced amidst the most profound
silence, and laid Rita at the captain's feet. Then every one
could understand the cause of the unearthly pallor in the
young girl and the bandit. A knife was plunged up to the
hilt in Rita's left breast. Every one looked at Carlini the
sheath at his belt was empty. "Ah, ah,' said the chief, "I
now understand why Carlini stayed behind.' All savage
natures appreciate a desperate deed. No other of the bandits
would, perhaps, have done the same but they all understood
what Carlini had done. "Now, then,' cried Carlini, rising in
his turn, and approaching the corpse, his hand on the butt
of one of his pistols, "does any one dispute the possession
of this woman with me?'  "No,' returned the chief, "she is
thine.' Carlini raised her in his arms, and carried her out
of the circle of firelight. Cucumetto placed his sentinels
for the night, and the bandits wrapped themselves in their
cloaks, and lay down before the fire. At midnight the
sentinel gave the alarm, and in an instant all were on the
alert. It was Rita's father, who brought his daughter's
ransom in person. "Here,' said he, to Cucumetto, "here are
three hundred piastres give me back my child. But the
chief, without taking the money, made a sign to him to
follow. The old man obeyed. They both advanced beneath the
trees, through whose branches streamed the moonlight.
Cucumetto stopped at last, and pointed to two persons
grouped at the foot of a tree.
""There,' said he, "demand thy child of Carlini he will
tell thee what has become of her' and he returned to his
companions. The old man remained motionless he felt that
some great and unforeseen misfortune hung over his head. At
length he advanced toward the group, the meaning of which he
could not comprehend. As he approached, Carlini raised his
head, and the forms of two persons became visible to the old
man's eyes. A woman lay on the ground, her head resting on
the knees of a man, who was seated by her as he raised his
head, the woman's face became visible. The old man
recognized his child, and Carlini recognized the old man. "I
expected thee,' said the bandit to Rita's father. 
"Wretch' returned the old man, "what hast thou done?' and
he gazed with terror on Rita, pale and bloody, a knife
buried in her bosom. A ray of moonlight poured through the
trees, and lighted up the face of the dead.  "Cucumetto
had violated thy daughter,' said the bandit "I loved her,
therefore I slew her for she would have served as the sport
of the whole band.' The old man spoke not, and grew pale as
death. "Now,' continued Carlini, "if I have done wrongly,
avenge her' and withdrawing the knife from the wound in
Rita's bosom, he held it out to the old man with one hand,
while with the other he tore open his vest.  "Thou hast
done well' returned the old man in a hoarse voice "embrace
me, my son.' Carlini threw himself, sobbing like a child,
into the arms of his mistress's father. These were the first
tears the man of blood had ever wept. "Now,' said the old
man, "aid me to bury my child.' Carlini fetched two
pickaxes and the father and the lover began to dig at the
foot of a huge oak, beneath which the young girl was to
repose. When the grave was formed, the father kissed her
first, and then the lover afterwards, one taking the head,
the other the feet, they placed her in the grave. Then they
knelt on each side of the grave, and said the prayers of the
dead. Then, when they had finished, they cast the earth over
the corpse, until the grave was filled. Then, extending his
hand, the old man said "I thank you, my son and now leave
me alone.'  "Yet'  replied Carlini.  "Leave me, I
command you.' Carlini obeyed, rejoined his comrades, folded
himself in his cloak, and soon appeared to sleep as soundly
as the rest. It had been resolved the night before to change
their encampment. An hour before daybreak, Cucumetto aroused
his men, and gave the word to march. But Carlini would not
quit the forest, without knowing what had become of Rita's
father. He went toward the place where he had left him. He
found the old man suspended from one of the branches of the
oak which shaded his daughter's grave. He then took an oath
of bitter vengeance over the dead body of the one and the
tomb of the other. But he was unable to complete this oath,
for two days afterwards, in an encounter with the Roman
carbineers, Carlini was killed. There was some surprise,
however, that, as he was with his face to the enemy, he
should have received a ball between his shoulders. That
astonishment ceased when one of the brigands remarked to his
comrades that Cucumetto was stationed ten paces in Carlini's
rear when he fell. On the morning of the departure from the
forest of Frosinone he had followed Carlini in the darkness,
and heard this oath of vengeance, and, like a wise man,
anticipated it. They told ten other stories of this bandit
chief, each more singular than the other. Thus, from Fondi
to Perusia, every one trembles at the name of Cucumetto.
"These narratives were frequently the theme of conversation
between Luigi and Teresa. The young girl trembled very much
at hearing the stories but Vampa reassured her with a
smile, tapping the butt of his good fowlingpiece, which
threw its ball so well and if that did not restore her
courage, he pointed to a crow, perched on some dead branch,
took aim, touched the trigger, and the bird fell dead at the
foot of the tree. Time passed on, and the two young people
had agreed to be married when Vampa should be twenty and
Teresa nineteen years of age. They were both orphans, and
had only their employers' leave to ask, which had been
already sought and obtained. One day when they were talking
over their plans for the future, they heard two or three
reports of firearms, and then suddenly a man came out of the
wood, near which the two young persons used to graze their
flocks, and hurried towards them. When he came within
hearing, he exclaimed. "I am pursued can you conceal me?'
They knew full well that this fugitive must be a bandit but
there is an innate sympathy between the Roman brigand and
the Roman peasant and the latter is always ready to aid the
former. Vampa, without saying a word, hastened to the stone
that closed up the entrance to their grotto, drew it away,
made a sign to the fugitive to take refuge there, in a
retreat unknown to every one, closed the stone upon him, and
then went and resumed his seat by Teresa. Instantly
afterwards four carbineers, on horseback, appeared on the
edge of the wood three of them appeared to be looking for
the fugitive, while the fourth dragged a brigand prisoner by
the neck. The three carbineers looked about carefully on
every side, saw the young peasants, and galloping up, began
to question them. They had seen no one. "That is very
annoying,' said the brigadier for the man we are looking
for is the chief.'  "Cucumetto?' cried Luigi and Teresa at
the same moment.
""Yes,' replied the brigadier "and as his head is valued at
a thousand Roman crowns, there would have been five hundred
for you, if you had helped us to catch him.' The two young
persons exchanged looks. The brigadier had a moment's hope.
Five hundred Roman crowns are three thousand lire, and three
thousand lire are a fortune for two poor orphans who are
going to be married.
""Yes, it is very annoying,' said Vampa "but we have not
seen him.'
"Then the carbineers scoured the country in different
directions, but in vain then, after a time, they
disappeared. Vampa then removed the stone, and Cucumetto
came out. Through the crevices in the granite he had seen
the two young peasants talking with the carbineers, and
guessed the subject of their parley. He had read in the
countenances of Luigi and Teresa their steadfast resolution
not to surrender him, and he drew from his pocket a purse
full of gold, which he offered to them. But Vampa raised his
head proudly as to Teresa, her eyes sparkled when she
thought of all the fine gowns and gay jewellery she could
buy with this purse of gold.
"Cucumetto was a cunning fiend, and had assumed the form of
a brigand instead of a serpent, and this look from Teresa
showed to him that she was a worthy daughter of Eve, and he
returned to the forest, pausing several times on his way,
under the pretext of saluting his protectors. Several days
elapsed, and they neither saw nor heard of Cucumetto. The
time of the Carnival was at hand. The Count of SanFelice
announced a grand masked ball, to which all that were
distinguished in Rome were invited. Teresa had a great
desire to see this ball. Luigi asked permission of his
protector, the steward, that she and he might be present
amongst the servants of the house. This was granted. The
ball was given by the Count for the particular pleasure of
his daughter Carmela, whom he adored. Carmela was precisely
the age and figure of Teresa, and Teresa was as handsome as
Carmela. On the evening of the ball Teresa was attired in
her best, her most brilliant ornaments in her hair, and
gayest glass beads,  she was in the costume of the women
of Frascati. Luigi wore the very picturesque garb of the
Roman peasant at holiday time. They both mingled, as they
had leave to do, with the servants and peasants.
"The festa was magnificent not only was the villa
brilliantly illuminated, but thousands of colored lanterns
were suspended from the trees in the garden and very soon
the palace overflowed to the terraces, and the terraces to
the gardenwalks. At each crosspath was an orchestra, and
tables spread with refreshments the guests stopped, formed
quadrilles, and danced in any part of the grounds they
pleased. Carmela was attired like a woman of Sonnino. Her
cap was embroidered with pearls, the pins in her hair were
of gold and diamonds, her girdle was of Turkey silk, with
large embroidered flowers, her bodice and skirt were of
cashmere, her apron of Indian muslin, and the buttons of her
corset were of jewels. Two of her companions were dressed,
the one as a woman of Nettuno, and the other as a woman of
La Riccia. Four young men of the richest and noblest
families of Rome accompanied them with that Italian freedom
which has not its parallel in any other country in the
world. They were attired as peasants of Albano, Velletri,
CivitaCastellana, and Sora. We need hardly add that these
peasant costumes, like those of the young women, were
brilliant with gold and jewels.
"Carmela wished to form a quadrille, but there was one lady
wanting. Carmela looked all around her, but not one of the
guests had a costume similar to her own, or those of her
companions. The Count of SanFelice pointed out Teresa, who
was hanging on Luigi's arm in a group of peasants. "Will you
allow me, father?' said Carmela.  "Certainly,' replied the
count, "are we not in Carnival time?'  Carmela turned
towards the young man who was talking with her, and saying a
few words to him, pointed with her finger to Teresa. The
young man looked, bowed in obedience, and then went to
Teresa, and invited her to dance in a quadrille directed by
the count's daughter. Teresa felt a flush pass over her
face she looked at Luigi, who could not refuse his assent.
Luigi slowly relinquished Teresa's arm, which he had held
beneath his own, and Teresa, accompanied by her elegant
cavalier, took her appointed place with much agitation in
the aristocratic quadrille. Certainly, in the eyes of an
artist, the exact and strict costume of Teresa had a very
different character from that of Carmela and her companions
and Teresa was frivolous and coquettish, and thus the
embroidery and muslins, the cashmere waistgirdles, all
dazzled her, and the reflection of sapphires and diamonds
almost turned her giddy brain.
"Luigi felt a sensation hitherto unknown arising in his
mind. It was like an acute pain which gnawed at his heart,
and then thrilled through his whole body. He followed with
his eye each movement of Teresa and her cavalier when their
hands touched, he felt as though he should swoon every
pulse beat with violence, and it seemed as though a bell
were ringing in his ears. When they spoke, although Teresa
listened timidly and with downcast eyes to the conversation
of her cavalier, as Luigi could read in the ardent looks of
the goodlooking young man that his language was that of
praise, it seemed as if the whole world was turning round
with him, and all the voices of hell were whispering in his
ears ideas of murder and assassination. Then fearing that
his paroxysm might get the better of him, he clutched with
one hand the branch of a tree against which he was leaning,
and with the other convulsively grasped the dagger with a
carved handle which was in his belt, and which, unwittingly,
he drew from the scabbard from time to time. Luigi was
jealous He felt that, influenced by her ambitions and
coquettish disposition, Teresa might escape him.
"The young peasant girl, at first timid and scared, soon
recovered herself. We have said that Teresa was handsome,
but this is not all Teresa was endowed with all those wild
graces which are so much more potent than our affected and
studied elegancies. She had almost all the honors of the
quadrille, and if she were envious of the Count of
SanFelice's daughter, we will not undertake to say that
Carmela was not jealous of her. And with overpowering
compliments her handsome cavalier led her back to the place
whence he had taken her, and where Luigi awaited her. Twice
or thrice during the dance the young girl had glanced at
Luigi, and each time she saw that he was pale and that his
features were agitated, once even the blade of his knife,
half drawn from its sheath, had dazzled her eyes with its
sinister glare. Thus, it was almost tremblingly that she
resumed her lover's arm. The quadrille had been most
perfect, and it was evident there was a great demand for a
repetition, Carmela alone objecting to it, but the Count of
SanFelice besought his daughter so earnestly, that she
acceded. One of the cavaliers then hastened to invite
Teresa, without whom it was impossible for the quadrille to
be formed, but the young girl had disappeared. The truth
was, that Luigi had not felt the strength to support another
such trial, and, half by persuasion and half by force, he
had removed Teresa toward another part of the garden. Teresa
had yielded in spite of herself, but when she looked at the
agitated countenance of the young man, she understood by his
silence and trembling voice that something strange was
passing within him. She herself was not exempt from internal
emotion, and without having done anything wrong, yet fully
comprehended that Luigi was right in reproaching her. Why,
she did not know, but yet she did not the less feel that
these reproaches were merited. However, to Teresa's great
astonishment, Luigi remained mute, and not a word escaped
his lips the rest of the evening. When the chill of the
night had driven away the guests from the gardens, and the
gates of the villa were closed on them for the festa
indoors, he took Teresa quite away, and as he left her at
her home, he said, 
""Teresa, what were you thinking of as you danced opposite
the young Countess of SanFelice?'  "I thought,' replied
the young girl, with all the frankness of her nature, "that
I would give half my life for a costume such as she wore.'
""And what said your cavalier to you?'  "He said it only
depended on myself to have it, and I had only one word to
say.'
""He was right,' said Luigi. "Do you desire it as ardently
as you say?'  "Yes.'  "Well, then, you shall have it'
"The young girl, much astonished, raised her head to look at
him, but his face was so gloomy and terrible that her words
froze to her lips. As Luigi spoke thus, he left her. Teresa
followed him with her eyes into the darkness as long as she
could, and when he had quite disappeared, she went into the
house with a sigh.
"That night a memorable event occurred, due, no doubt, to
the imprudence of some servant who had neglected to
extinguish the lights. The Villa of SanFelice took fire in
the rooms adjoining the very apartment of the lovely
Carmela. Awakened in the night by the light of the flames,
she sprang out of bed, wrapped herself in a dressinggown,
and attempted to escape by the door, but the corridor by
which she hoped to fly was already a prey to the flames. She
then returned to her room, calling for help as loudly as she
could, when suddenly her window, which was twenty feet from
the ground, was opened, a young peasant jumped into the
chamber, seized her in his arms, and with superhuman skill
and strength conveyed her to the turf of the grassplot,
where she fainted. When she recovered, her father was by her
side. All the servants surrounded her, offering her
assistance. An entire wing of the villa was burnt down but
what of that, as long as Carmela was safe and uninjured? Her
preserver was everywhere sought for, but he did not appear
he was inquired after, but no one had seen him. Carmela was
greatly troubled that she had not recognized him. As the
count was immensely rich, excepting the danger Carmela had
run,  and the marvellous manner in which she had escaped,
made that appear to him rather a favor of providence than a
real misfortune,  the loss occasioned by the conflagration
was to him but a trifle.
"The next day, at the usual hour, the two young peasants
were on the borders of the forest. Luigi arrived first. He
came toward Teresa in high spirits, and seemed to have
completely forgotten the events of the previous evening. The
young girl was very pensive, but seeing Luigi so cheerful,
she on her part assumed a smiling air, which was natural to
her when she was not excited or in a passion. Luigi took her
arm beneath his own, and led her to the door of the grotto.
Then he paused. The young girl, perceiving that there was
something extraordinary, looked at him steadfastly.
"Teresa,' said Luigi, "yesterday evening you told me you
would give all the world to have a costume similar to that
of the count's daughter.'  "Yes,' replied Teresa with
astonishment "but I was mad to utter such a wish.'  "And
I replied, "Very well, you shall have it."'  "Yes,'
replied the young girl, whose astonishment increased at
every word uttered by Luigi, "but of course your reply was
only to please me.'
""I have promised no more than I have given you, Teresa,'
said Luigi proudly. "Go into the grotto and dress yourself.'
At these words he drew away the stone, and showed Teresa the
grotto, lighted up by two wax lights, which burnt on each
side of a splendid mirror on a rustic table, made by Luigi,
were spread out the pearl necklace and the diamond pins, and
on a chair at the side was laid the rest of the costume.
"Teresa uttered a cry of joy, and, without inquiring whence
this attire came, or even thanking Luigi, darted into the
grotto, transformed into a dressingroom. Luigi pushed the
stone behind her, for on the crest of a small adjacent hill
which cut off the view toward Palestrina, he saw a traveller
on horseback, stopping a moment, as if uncertain of his
road, and thus presenting against the blue sky that perfect
outline which is peculiar to distant objects in southern
climes. When he saw Luigi, he put his horse into a gallop
and advanced toward him. Luigi was not mistaken. The
traveller, who was going from Palestrina to Tivoli, had
mistaken his way the young man directed him but as at a
distance of a quarter of a mile the road again divided into
three ways, and on reaching these the traveller might again
stray from his route, he begged Luigi to be his guide. Luigi
threw his cloak on the ground, placed his carbine on his
shoulder, and freed from his heavy covering, preceded the
traveller with the rapid step of a mountaineer, which a
horse can scarcely keep up with. In ten minutes Luigi and
the traveller reached the crossroads. On arriving there,
with an air as majestic as that of an emperor, he stretched
his hand towards that one of the roads which the traveller
was to follow.  "That is your road, excellency, and now
you cannot again mistake.'  "And here is your recompense,'
said the traveller, offering the young herdsman some small
pieces of money.
""Thank you,' said Luigi, drawing back his hand "I render a
service, I do not sell it.'  "Well,' replied the
traveller, who seemed used to this difference between the
servility of a man of the cities and the pride of the
mountaineer, "if you refuse wages, you will, perhaps, accept
a gift.'  "Ah, yes, that is another thing.'  "Then,'
said the traveller, "take these two Venetian sequins and
give them to your bride, to make herself a pair of
earrings.'
""And then do you take this poniard,' said the young
herdsman "you will not find one better carved between
Albano and CivitaCastellana.'
""I accept it,' answered the traveller, "but then the
obligation will be on my side, for this poniard is worth
more than two sequins.'  "For a dealer perhaps but for
me, who engraved it myself, it is hardly worth a piastre.'
""What is your name?' inquired the traveller.  "Luigi
Vampa,' replied the shepherd, with the same air as he would
have replied, Alexander, King of Macedon.  "And yours?' 
"I,' said the traveller, "am called Sinbad the Sailor.'"
Franz d'Epinay started with surprise.
"Sinbad the Sailor." he said.
"Yes," replied the narrator "that was the name which the
traveller gave to Vampa as his own."
"Well, and what may you have to say against this name?"
inquired Albert "it is a very pretty name, and the
adventures of the gentleman of that name amused me very much
in my youth, I must confess."  Franz said no more. The
name of Sinbad the Sailor, as may well be supposed, awakened
in him a world of recollections, as had the name of the
Count of Monte Cristo on the previous evening.
"Proceed" said he to the host.
"Vampa put the two sequins haughtily into his pocket, and
slowly returned by the way he had gone. As he came within
two or three hundred paces of the grotto, he thought he
heard a cry. He listened to know whence this sound could
proceed. A moment afterwards he thought he heard his own
name pronounced distinctly. The cry proceeded from the
grotto. He bounded like a chamois, cocking his carbine as he
went, and in a moment reached the summit of a hill opposite
to that on which he had perceived the traveller. Three cries
for help came more distinctly to his ear. He cast his eyes
around him and saw a man carrying off Teresa, as Nessus, the
centaur, carried Dejanira. This man, who was hastening
towards the wood, was already threequarters of the way on
the road from the grotto to the forest. Vampa measured the
distance the man was at least two hundred paces in advance
of him, and there was not a chance of overtaking him. The
young shepherd stopped, as if his feet had been rooted to
the ground then he put the butt of his carbine to his
shoulder, took aim at the ravisher, followed him for a
second in his track, and then fired. The ravisher stopped
suddenly, his knees bent under him, and he fell with Teresa
in his arms. The young girl rose instantly, but the man lay
on the earth struggling in the agonies of death. Vampa then
rushed towards Teresa for at ten paces from the dying man
her legs had failed her, and she had dropped on her knees,
so that the young man feared that the ball that had brought
down his enemy, had also wounded his betrothed. Fortunately,
she was unscathed, and it was fright alone that had overcome
Teresa. When Luigi had assured himself that she was safe and
unharmed, he turned towards the wounded man. He had just
expired, with clinched hands, his mouth in a spasm of agony,
and his hair on end in the sweat of death. His eyes remained
open and menacing. Vampa approached the corpse, and
recognized Cucumetto. From the day on which the bandit had
been saved by the two young peasants, he had been enamoured
of Teresa, and had sworn she should be his. From that time
he had watched them, and profiting by the moment when her
lover had left her alone, had carried her off, and believed
he at length had her in his power, when the ball, directed
by the unerring skill of the young herdsman, had pierced his
heart. Vampa gazed on him for a moment without betraying the
slightest emotion while, on the contrary, Teresa,
shuddering in every limb, dared not approach the slain
ruffian but by degrees, and threw a hesitating glance at the
dead body over the shoulder of her lover. Suddenly Vampa
turned toward his mistress  "Ah,' said he  "good, good
You are dressed it is now my turn to dress myself.'
"Teresa was clothed from head to foot in the garb of the
Count of SanFelice's daughter. Vampa took Cucumetto's body
in his arms and conveyed it to the grotto, while in her turn
Teresa remained outside. If a second traveller had passed,
he would have seen a strange thing,  a shepherdess
watching her flock, clad in a cashmere grown, with earrings
and necklace of pearls, diamond pins, and buttons of
sapphires, emeralds, and rubies. He would, no doubt, have
believed that he had returned to the times of Florian, and
would have declared, on reaching Paris, that he had met an
Alpine shepherdess seated at the foot of the Sabine Hill. At
the end of a quarter of an hour Vampa quitted the grotto
his costume was no less elegant than that of Teresa. He wore
a vest of garnetcolored velvet, with buttons of cut gold a
silk waistcoat covered with embroidery a Roman scarf tied
round his neck a cartridgebox worked with gold, and red
and green silk skyblue velvet breeches, fastened above the
knee with diamond buckles garters of deerskin, worked with
a thousand arabesques, and a hat whereon hung ribbons of all
colors two watches hung from his girdle, and a splendid
poniard was in his belt. Teresa uttered a cry of admiration.
Vampa in this attire resembled a painting by Leopold Robert,
or Schnetz. He had assumed the entire costume of Cucumetto.
The young man saw the effect produced on his betrothed, and
a smile of pride passed over his lips.  "Now,' he said to
Teresa, "are you ready to share my fortune, whatever it may
be?'  "Oh, yes' exclaimed the young girl
enthusiastically.  "And follow me wherever I go?'  "To
the world's end.'  "Then take my arm, and let us on we
have no time to lose.'  The young girl did so without
questioning her lover as to where he was conducting her, for
he appeared to her at this moment as handsome, proud, and
powerful as a god. They went towards the forest, and soon
entered it. We need scarcely say that all the paths of the
mountain were known to Vampa he therefore went forward
without a moment's hesitation, although there was no beaten
track, but he knew his path by looking at the trees and
bushes, and thus they kept on advancing for nearly an hour
and a half. At the end of this time they had reached the
thickest of the forest. A torrent, whose bed was dry, led
into a deep gorge. Vampa took this wild road, which,
enclosed between two ridges, and shadowed by the tufted
umbrage of the pines, seemed, but for the difficulties of
its descent, that path to Avernus of which Virgil speaks.
Teresa had become alarmed at the wild and deserted look of
the plain around her, and pressed closely against her guide,
not uttering a syllable but as she saw him advance with
even step and composed countenance, she endeavored to
repress her emotion. Suddenly, about ten paces from them, a
man advanced from behind a tree and aimed at Vampa.  "Not
another step,' he said, "or you are a dead man.'  "What,
then,' said Vampa, raising his hand with a gesture of
disdain, while Teresa, no longer able to restrain her alarm,
clung closely to him, "do wolves rend each other?'  "Who
are you?' inquired the sentinel.  "I am Luigi Vampa,
shepherd of the SanFelice farm.'  "What do you want?' 
"I would speak with your companions who are in the glade at
Rocca Bianca.'  "Follow me, then,' said the sentinel "or,
as you know your way, go first.'  Vampa smiled
disdainfully at this precaution on the part of the bandit,
went before Teresa, and continued to advance with the same
firm and easy step as before. At the end of ten minutes the
bandit made them a sign to stop. The two young persons
obeyed. Then the bandit thrice imitated the cry of a crow a
croak answered this signal.  "Good' said the sentry, "you
may now go on.'  Luigi and Teresa again set forward as
they went on Teresa clung tremblingly to her lover at the
sight of weapons and the glistening of carbines through the
trees. The retreat of Rocca Bianca was at the top of a small
mountain, which no doubt in former days had been a volcano
an extinct volcano before the days when Remus and Romulus
had deserted Alba to come and found the city of Rome. Teresa
and Luigi reached the summit, and all at once found
themselves in the presence of twenty bandits. "Here is a
young man who seeks and wishes to speak to you,' said the
sentinel.  "What has he to say?' inquired the young man
who was in command in the chief's absence.  "I wish to say
that I am tired of a shepherd's life,' was Vampa's reply. 
"Ah, I understand,' said the lieutenant "and you seek
admittance into our ranks?'  "Welcome' cried several
bandits from Ferrusino, Pampinara, and Anagni, who had
recognized Luigi Vampa.  "Yes, but I came to ask something
more than to be your companion.'  "And what may that be?'
inquired the bandits with astonishment.  "I come to ask to
be your captain,' said the young man. The bandits shouted
with laughter. "And what have you done to aspire to this
honor?' demanded the lieutenant.  "I have killed your
chief, Cucumetto, whose dress I now wear and I set fire to
the villa SanFelice to procure a weddingdress for my
betrothed.' An hour afterwards Luigi Vampa was chosen
captain, vice Cucumetto deceased."
"Well, my dear Albert," said Franz, turning towards his
friend "what think you of citizen Luigi Vampa?"
"I say he is a myth," replied Albert, "and never had an
existence."
"And what may a myth be?" inquired Pastrini.
"The explanation would be too long, my dear landlord,"
replied Franz.
"And you say that Signor Vampa exercises his profession at
this moment in the environs of Rome?"
"And with a boldness of which no bandit before him ever gave
an example."
"Then the police have vainly tried to lay hands on him?"
"Why, you see, he has a good understanding with the
shepherds in the plains, the fishermen of the Tiber, and the
smugglers of the coast. They seek for him in the mountains,
and he is on the waters they follow him on the waters, and
he is on the open sea then they pursue him, and he has
suddenly taken refuge in the islands, at Giglio, Guanouti,
or Monte Cristo and when they hunt for him there, he
reappears suddenly at Albano, Tivoli, or La Riccia."
"And how does he behave towards travellers?"
"Alas his plan is very simple. It depends on the distance
he may be from the city, whether he gives eight hours,
twelve hours, or a day wherein to pay their ransom and when
that time has elapsed he allows another hour's grace. At the
sixtieth minute of this hour, if the money is not
forthcoming, he blows out the prisoner's brains with a
pistolshot, or plants his dagger in his heart, and that
settles the account."
"Well, Albert," inquired Franz of his companion, "are you
still disposed to go to the Colosseum by the outer wall?"
"Quite so," said Albert, "if the way be picturesque." The
clock struck nine as the door opened, and a coachman
appeared. "Excellencies," said he, "the coach is ready."
"Well, then," said Franz, "let us to the Colosseum."
"By the Porta del Popolo or by the streets, your
excellencies?"
"By the streets, morbleu, by the streets" cried Franz.
"Ah, my dear fellow," said Albert, rising, and lighting his
third cigar, "really, I thought you had more courage." So
saying, the two young men went down the staircase, and got
into the carriage.
Chapter 
The Colosseum.
Franz had so managed his route, that during the ride to the
Colosseum they passed not a single ancient ruin, so that no
preliminary impression interfered to mitigate the colossal
proportions of the gigantic building they came to admire.
The road selected was a continuation of the Via Sistina
then by cutting off the right angle of the street in which
stands Santa Maria Maggiore and proceeding by the Via Urbana
and San Pietro in Vincoli, the travellers would find
themselves directly opposite the Colosseum. This itinerary
possessed another great advantage,  that of leaving Franz
at full liberty to indulge his deep reverie upon the subject
of Signor Pastrini's story, in which his mysterious host of
Monte Cristo was so strangely mixed up. Seated with folded
arms in a corner of the carriage, he continued to ponder
over the singular history he had so lately listened to, and
to ask himself an interminable number of questions touching
its various circumstances without, however, arriving at a
satisfactory reply to any of them. One fact more than the
rest brought his friend "Sinbad the Sailor" back to his
recollection, and that was the mysterious sort of intimacy
that seemed to exist between the brigands and the sailors
and Pastrini's account of Vampa's having found refuge on
board the vessels of smugglers and fishermen, reminded Franz
of the two Corsican bandits he had found supping so amicably
with the crew of the little yacht, which had even deviated
from its course and touched at PortoVecchio for the sole
purpose of landing them. The very name assumed by his host
of Monte Cristo and again repeated by the landlord of the
Hotel de Londres, abundantly proved to him that his island
friend was playing his philanthropic part on the shores of
Piombino, CivitaVecchio, Ostia, and Gaeta, as on those of
Corsica, Tuscany, and Spain and further, Franz bethought
him of having heard his singular entertainer speak both of
Tunis and Palermo, proving thereby how largely his circle of
acquaintances extended.
But however the mind of the young man might be absorbed in
these reflections, they were at once dispersed at the sight
of the dark frowning ruins of the stupendous Colosseum,
through the various openings of which the pale moonlight
played and flickered like the unearthly gleam from the eyes
of the wandering dead. The carriage stopped near the Meta
Sudans the door was opened, and the young men, eagerly
alighting, found themselves opposite a cicerone, who
appeared to have sprung up from the ground, so unexpected
was his appearance.
The usual guide from the hotel having followed them, they
had paid two conductors, nor is it possible, at Rome, to
avoid this abundant supply of guides besides the ordinary
cicerone, who seizes upon you directly you set foot in your
hotel, and never quits you while you remain in the city,
there is also a special cicerone belonging to each monument
nay, almost to each part of a monument. It may,
therefore, be easily imagined there is no scarcity of guides
at the Colosseum, that wonder of all ages, which Martial
thus eulogizes "Let Memphis cease to boast the barbarous
miracles of her pyramids, and the wonders of Babylon be
talked of no more among us all must bow to the superiority
of the gigantic labor of the Caesars, and the many voices of
Fame spread far and wide the surpassing merits of this
incomparable monument."
As for Albert and Franz, they essayed not to escape from
their ciceronian tyrants and, indeed, it would have been so
much the more difficult to break their bondage, as the
guides alone are permitted to visit these monuments with
torches in their hands. Thus, then, the young men made no
attempt at resistance, but blindly and confidingly
surrendered themselves into the care and custody of their
conductors. Albert had already made seven or eight similar
excursions to the Colosseum, while his less favored
companion trod for the first time in his life the classic
ground forming the monument of Flavius Vespasian and, to
his credit be it spoken, his mind, even amid the glib
loquacity of the guides, was duly and deeply touched with
awe and enthusiastic admiration of all he saw and certainly
no adequate notion of these stupendous ruins can be formed
save by such as have visited them, and more especially by
moonlight, at which time the vast proportions of the
building appear twice as large when viewed by the mysterious
beams of a southern moonlit sky, whose rays are sufficiently
clear and vivid to light the horizon with a glow equal to
the soft twilight of an eastern clime. Scarcely, therefore,
had the reflective Franz walked a hundred steps beneath the
interior porticoes of the ruin, than, abandoning Albert to
the guides who would by no means yield their prescriptive
right of carrying their victims through the routine
regularly laid down, and as regularly followed by them, but
dragged the unconscious visitor to the various objects with
a pertinacity that admitted of no appeal, beginning, as a
matter of course, with the Lions' Den, and finishing with
Caesar's "Podium,", to escape a jargon and mechanical
survey of the wonders by which he was surrounded, Franz
ascended a halfdilapidated staircase, and, leaving them to
follow their monotonous round, seated himself at the foot of
a column, and immediately opposite a large aperture, which
permitted him to enjoy a full and undisturbed view of the
gigantic dimensions of the majestic ruin.
Franz had remained for nearly a quarter of an hour perfectly
hidden by the shadow of the vast column at whose base he had
found a restingplace, and from whence his eyes followed the
motions of Albert and his guides, who, holding torches in
their hands, had emerged from a vomitarium at the opposite
extremity of the Colosseum, and then again disappeared down
the steps conducting to the seats reserved for the Vestal
virgins, resembling, as they glided along, some restless
shades following the flickering glare of so many
ignesfatui. All at once his ear caught a sound resembling
that of a stone rolling down the staircase opposite the one
by which he had himself ascended. There was nothing
remarkable in the circumstance of a fragment of granite
giving way and falling heavily below but it seemed to him
that the substance that fell gave way beneath the pressure
of a foot, and also that some one, who endeavored as much as
possible to prevent his footsteps from being heard, was
approaching the spot where he sat. Conjecture soon became
certainty, for the figure of a man was distinctly visible to
Franz, gradually emerging from the staircase opposite, upon
which the moon was at that moment pouring a full tide of
silvery brightness.
The stranger thus presenting himself was probably a person
who, like Franz, preferred the enjoyment of solitude and his
own thoughts to the frivolous gabble of the guides. And his
appearance had nothing extraordinary in it but the
hesitation with which he proceeded, stopping and listening
with anxious attention at every step he took, convinced
Franz that he expected the arrival of some person. By a sort
of instinctive impulse, Franz withdrew as much as possible
behind his pillar. About ten feet from the spot where he and
the stranger were, the roof had given way, leaving a large
round opening, through which might be seen the blue vault of
heaven, thickly studded with stars. Around this opening,
which had, possibly, for ages permitted a free entrance to
the brilliant moonbeams that now illumined the vast pile,
grew a quantity of creeping plants, whose delicate green
branches stood out in bold relief against the clear azure of
the firmament, while large masses of thick, strong fibrous
shoots forced their way through the chasm, and hung floating
to and fro, like so many waving strings. The person whose
mysterious arrival had attracted the attention of Franz
stood in a kind of halflight, that rendered it impossible
to distinguish his features, although his dress was easily
made out. He wore a large brown mantle, one fold of which,
thrown over his left shoulder, served likewise to mask the
lower part of his countenance, while the upper part was
completely hidden by his broadbrimmed hat. The lower part
of his dress was more distinctly visible by the bright rays
of the moon, which, entering through the broken ceiling,
shed their refulgent beams on feet cased in elegantly made
boots of polished leather, over which descended fashionably
cut trousers of black cloth.
From the imperfect means Franz had of judging, he could only
come to one conclusion,  that the person whom he was thus
watching certainly belonged to no inferior station of life.
Some few minutes had elapsed, and the stranger began to show
manifest signs of impatience, when a slight noise was heard
outside the aperture in the roof, and almost immediately a
dark shadow seemed to obstruct the flood of light that had
entered it, and the figure of a man was clearly seen gazing
with eager scrutiny on the immense space beneath him then,
as his eye caught sight of him in the mantle, he grasped a
floating mass of thickly matted boughs, and glided down by
their help to within three or four feet of the ground, and
then leaped lightly on his feet. The man who had performed
this daring act with so much indifference wore the
Transtevere costume. "I beg your excellency's pardon for
keeping you waiting," said the man, in the Roman dialect,
"but I don't think I'm many minutes after my time, ten
o'clock his just struck on the Lateran."
"Say not a word about being late," replied the stranger in
purest Tuscan "'tis I who am too soon. But even if you had
caused me to wait a little while, I should have felt quite
sure that the delay was not occasioned by any fault of
yours."
"Your excellency is perfectly right in so thinking," said
the man "I came here direct from the Castle of St. Angelo,
and I had an immense deal of trouble before I could get a
chance to speak to Beppo."
"And who is Beppo?"
"Oh, Beppo is employed in the prison, and I give him so much
a year to let me know what is going on within his holiness's
castle."
"Indeed You are a provident person, I see."
"Why, you see, no one knows what may happen. Perhaps some of
these days I may be entrapped, like poor Peppino and may be
very glad to have some little nibbling mouse to gnaw the
meshes of my net, and so help me out of prison."
"Briefly, what did you glean?"
"That two executions of considerable interest will take
place the day after tomorrow at two o'clock, as is
customary at Rome at the commencement of all great
festivals. One of the culprits will be mazzolato he is an
atrocious villain, who murdered the priest who brought him
up, and deserves not the smallest pity. The other sufferer
is sentenced to be decapitato and he, your excellency, is
poor Peppino."
 Knocked on the head.
 Beheaded.
"The fact is, that you have inspired not only the pontifical
government, but also the neighboring states, with such
extreme fear, that they are glad of all opportunity of
making an example."
"But Peppino did not even belong to my band he was merely a
poor shepherd, whose only crime consisted in furnishing us
with provisions."
"Which makes him your accomplice to all intents and
purposes. But mark the distinction with which he is treated
instead of being knocked on the head as you would be if once
they caught hold of you, he is simply sentenced to be
guillotined, by which means, too, the amusements of the day
are diversified, and there is a spectacle to please every
spectator."
"Without reckoning the wholly unexpected one I am preparing
to surprise them with."
"My good friend," said the man in the cloak, "excuse me for
saying that you seem to me precisely in the mood to commit
some wild or extravagant act."
"Perhaps I am but one thing I have resolved on, and that
is, to stop at nothing to restore a poor devil to liberty,
who has got into this scrape solely from having served me. I
should hate and despise myself as a coward did I desert the
brave fellow in his present extremity."
"And what do you mean to do?"
"To surround the scaffold with twenty of my best men, who,
at a signal from me, will rush forward directly Peppino is
brought for execution, and, by the assistance of their
stilettos, drive back the guard, and carry off the
prisoner."
"That seems to me as hazardous as uncertain, and convinces
me that my scheme is far better than yours."
"And what is your excellency's project?"
"Just this. I will so advantageously bestow , piastres,
that the person receiving them shall obtain a respite till
next year for Peppino and during that year, another
skilfully placed , piastres will afford him the means of
escaping from his prison."
"And do you feel sure of succeeding?"
"Pardieu" exclaimed the man in the cloak, suddenly
expressing himself in French.
"What did your excellency say?" inquired the other.
"I said, my good fellow, that I would do more singlehanded
by the means of gold than you and all your troop could
effect with stilettos, pistols, carbines, and blunderbusses
included. Leave me, then, to act, and have no fears for the
result."
"At least, there can be no harm in myself and party being in
readiness, in case your excellency should fail."
"None whatever. Take what precautions you please, if it is
any satisfaction to you to do so but rely upon my obtaining
the reprieve I seek."
"Remember, the execution is fixed for the day after
tomorrow, and that you have but one day to work in."
"And what of that? Is not a day divided into twentyfour
hours, each hour into sixty minutes, and every minute
subdivided into sixty seconds? Now in , seconds very
many things can be done."
"And how shall I know whether your excellency has succeeded
or not."
"Oh, that is very easily arranged. I have engaged the three
lower windows at the Cafe Rospoli should I have obtained
the requisite pardon for Peppino, the two outside windows
will be hung with yellow damasks, and the centre with white,
having a large cross in red marked on it."
"And whom will you employ to carry the reprieve to the
officer directing the execution?"
"Send one of your men, disguised as a penitent friar, and I
will give it to him. His dress will procure him the means of
approaching the scaffold itself, and he will deliver the
official order to the officer, who, in his turn, will hand
it to the executioner in the meantime, it will be as well
to acquaint Peppino with what we have determined on, if it
be only to prevent his dying of fear or losing his senses,
because in either case a very useless expense will have been
incurred."
"Your excellency," said the man, "you are fully persuaded of
my entire devotion to you, are you not?"
"Nay, I flatter myself that there can be no doubt of it,"
replied the cavalier in the cloak.
"Well, then, only fulfil your promise of rescuing Peppino,
and henceforward you shall receive not only devotion, but
the most absolute obedience from myself and those under me
that one human being can render to another."
"Have a care how far you pledge yourself, my good friend,
for I may remind you of your promise at some, perhaps, not
very distant period, when I, in my turn, may require your
aid and influence."
"Let that day come sooner or later, your excellency will
find me what I have found you in this my heavy trouble and
if from the other end of the world you but write me word to
do such or such a thing, you may regard it as done, for done
it shall be, on the word and faith of" 
"Hush" interrupted the stranger "I hear a noise."
"'Tis some travellers, who are visiting the Colosseum by
torchlight."
"'Twere better we should not be seen together those guides
are nothing but spies, and might possibly recognize you
and, however I may be honored by your friendship, my worthy
friend, if once the extent of our intimacy were known, I am
sadly afraid both my reputation and credit would suffer
thereby."
"Well, then, if you obtain the reprieve?"
"The middle window at the Cafe Rospoli will be hung with
white damask, bearing a red cross."
"And if you fail?"
"Then all three windows will have yellow draperies."
"And then?"
"And then, my good fellow, use your daggers in any way you
please, and I further promise you to be there as a spectator
of your prowess."
"We understand each other perfectly, then. Adieu, your
excellency depend upon me as firmly as I do upon you."
Saying these words, the Transteverin disappeared down the
staircase, while his companion, muffling his features more
closely than before in the folds of his mantle, passed
almost close to Franz, and descended to the arena by an
outward flight of steps. The next minute Franz heard himself
called by Albert, who made the lofty building reecho with
the sound of his friend's name. Franz, however, did not obey
the summons till he had satisfied himself that the two men
whose conversation he had overheard were at a sufficient
distance to prevent his encountering them in his descent. In
ten minutes after the strangers had departed, Franz was on
the road to the Piazza de Spagni, listening with studied
indifference to the learned dissertation delivered by
Albert, after the manner of Pliny and Calpurnius, touching
the ironpointed nets used to prevent the ferocious beasts
from springing on the spectators. Franz let him proceed
without interruption, and, in fact, did not hear what was
said he longed to be alone, and free to ponder over all
that had occurred. One of the two men, whose mysterious
meeting in the Colosseum he had so unintentionally
witnessed, was an entire stranger to him, but not so the
other and though Franz had been unable to distinguish his
features, from his being either wrapped in his mantle or
obscured by the shadow, the tones of his voice had made too
powerful an impression on him the first time he had heard
them for him ever again to forget them, hear them when or
where he might. It was more especially when this man was
speaking in a manner half jesting, half bitter, that Franz's
ear recalled most vividly the deep sonorous, yet
wellpitched voice that had addressed him in the grotto of
Monte Cristo, and which he heard for the second time amid
the darkness and ruined grandeur of the Colosseum. And the
more he thought, the more entire was his conviction, that
the person who wore the mantle was no other than his former
host and entertainer, "Sinbad the Sailor."
Under any other circumstances, Franz would have found it
impossible to resist his extreme curiosity to know more of
so singular a personage, and with that intent have sought to
renew their short acquaintance but in the present instance,
the confidential nature of the conversation he had overheard
made him, with propriety, judge that his appearance at such
a time would be anything but agreeable. As we have seen,
therefore, he permitted his former host to retire without
attempting a recognition, but fully promising himself a rich
indemnity for his present forbearance should chance afford
him another opportunity. In vain did Franz endeavor to
forget the many perplexing thoughts which assailed him in
vain did he court the refreshment of sleep. Slumber refused
to visit his eyelids and the night was passed in feverish
contemplation of the chain of circumstances tending to prove
the identity of the mysterious visitant to the Colosseum
with the inhabitant of the grotto of Monte Cristo and the
more he thought, the firmer grew his opinion on the subject.
Worn out at length, he fell asleep at daybreak, and did not
awake till late. Like a genuine Frenchman, Albert had
employed his time in arranging for the evening's diversion
he had sent to engage a box at the Teatro Argentino and
Franz, having a number of letters to write, relinquished the
carriage to Albert for the whole of the day. At five o'clock
Albert returned, delighted with his day's work he had been
occupied in leaving his letters of introduction, and had
received in return more invitations to balls and routs than
it would be possible for him to accept besides this, he had
seen as he called it all the remarkable sights at Rome.
Yes, in a single day he had accomplished what his more
seriousminded companion would have taken weeks to effect.
Neither had he neglected to ascertain the name of the piece
to be played that night at the Teatro Argentino, and also
what performers appeared in it.
The opera of "Parisina" was announced for representation,
and the principal actors were Coselli, Moriani, and La
Specchia. The young men, therefore, had reason to consider
themselves fortunate in having the opportunity of hearing
one of the best works by the composer of "Lucia di
Lammermoor," supported by three of the most renowned
vocalists of Italy. Albert had never been able to endure the
Italian theatres, with their orchestras from which it is
impossible to see, and the absence of balconies, or open
boxes all these defects pressed hard on a man who had had
his stall at the Bouffes, and had shared a lower box at the
Opera. Still, in spite of this, Albert displayed his most
dazzling and effective costumes each time he visited the
theatres but, alas, his elegant toilet was wholly thrown
away, and one of the most worthy representatives of Parisian
fashion had to carry with him the mortifying reflection that
he had nearly overrun Italy without meeting with a single
adventure.
Sometimes Albert would affect to make a joke of his want of
success but internally he was deeply wounded, and his
selflove immensely piqued, to think that Albert de Morcerf,
the most admired and most sought after of any young person
of his day, should thus be passed over, and merely have his
labor for his pains. And the thing was so much the more
annoying, as, according to the characteristic modesty of a
Frenchman, Albert had quitted Paris with the full conviction
that he had only to show himself in Italy to carry all
before him, and that upon his return he should astonish the
Parisian world with the recital of his numerous
loveaffairs. Alas, poor Albert none of those interesting
adventures fell in his way the lovely Genoese, Florentines,
and Neapolitans were all faithful, if not to their husbands,
at least to their lovers, and thought not of changing even
for the splendid appearance of Albert de Morcerf and all he
gained was the painful conviction that the ladies of Italy
have this advantage over those of France, that they are
faithful even in their infidelity. Yet he could not restrain
a hope that in Italy, as elsewhere, there might be an
exception to the general rule. Albert, besides being an
elegant, welllooking young man, was also possessed of
considerable talent and ability moreover, he was a viscount
a recently created one, certainly, but in the present day
it is not necessary to go as far back as Noah in tracing a
descent, and a genealogical tree is equally estimated,
whether dated from  or merely  but to crown all
these advantages, Albert de Morcerf commanded an income of
, livres, a more than sufficient sum to render him a
personage of considerable importance in Paris. It was
therefore no small mortification to him to have visited most
of the principal cities in Italy without having excited the
most trifling observation. Albert, however, hoped to
indemnify himself for all these slights and indifferences
during the Carnival, knowing full well that among the
different states and kingdoms in which this festivity is
celebrated, Rome is the spot where even the wisest and
gravest throw off the usual rigidity of their lives, and
deign to mingle in the follies of this time of liberty and
relaxation.
The Carnival was to commence on the morrow therefore Albert
had not an instant to lose in setting forth the programme of
his hopes, expectations, and claims to notice. With this
design he had engaged a box in the most conspicuous part of
the theatre, and exerted himself to set off his personal
attractions by the aid of the most rich and elaborate
toilet. The box taken by Albert was in the first circle
although each of the three tiers of boxes is deemed equally
aristocratic, and is, for this reason, generally styled the
"nobility's boxes," and although the box engaged for the two
friends was sufficiently capacious to contain at least a
dozen persons, it had cost less than would be paid at some
of the French theatres for one admitting merely four
occupants. Another motive had influenced Albert's selection
of his seat,  who knew but that, thus advantageously
placed, he might not in truth attract the notice of some
fair Roman, and an introduction might ensue that would
procure him the offer of a seat in a carriage, or a place in
a princely balcony, from which he might behold the gayeties
of the Carnival? These united considerations made Albert
more lively and anxious to please than he had hitherto been.
Totally disregarding the business of the stage, he leaned
from his box and began attentively scrutinizing the beauty
of each pretty woman, aided by a powerful operaglass but,
alas, this attempt to attract notice wholly failed not even
curiosity had been excited, and it was but too apparent that
the lovely creatures, into whose good graces he was desirous
of stealing, were all so much engrossed with themselves,
their lovers, or their own thoughts, that they had not so
much as noticed him or the manipulation of his glass.
The truth was, that the anticipated pleasures of the
Carnival, with the "holy week" that was to succeed it, so
filled every fair breast, as to prevent the least attention
being bestowed even on the business of the stage. The actors
made their entries and exits unobserved or unthought of at
certain conventional moments, the spectators would suddenly
cease their conversation, or rouse themselves from their
musings, to listen to some brilliant effort of Moriani's, a
wellexecuted recitative by Coselli, or to join in loud
applause at the wonderful powers of La Specchia but that
momentary excitement over, they quickly relapsed into their
former state of preoccupation or interesting conversation.
Towards the close of the first act, the door of a box which
had been hitherto vacant was opened a lady entered to whom
Franz had been introduced in Paris, where indeed, he had
imagined she still was. The quick eye of Albert caught the
involuntary start with which his friend beheld the new
arrival, and, turning to him, he said hastily, "Do you know
the woman who has just entered that box?"
"Yes what do you think of her?"
"Oh, she is perfectly lovely  what a complexion And such
magnificent hair Is she French?"
"No a Venetian."
"And her name is  "
"Countess G ."
"Ah, I know her by name" exclaimed Albert "she is said to
possess as much wit and cleverness as beauty. I was to have
been presented to her when I met her at Madame Villefort's
ball."
"Shall I assist you in repairing your negligence?" asked
Franz.
"My dear fellow, are you really on such good terms with her
as to venture to take me to her box?"
"Why, I have only had the honor of being in her society and
conversing with her three or four times in my life but you
know that even such an acquaintance as that might warrant my
doing what you ask." At that instant, the countess perceived
Franz, and graciously waved her hand to him, to which he
replied by a respectful inclination of the head. "Upon my
word," said Albert, "you seem to be on excellent terms with
the beautiful countess."
"You are mistaken in thinking so," returned Franz calmly
"but you merely fall into the same error which leads so many
of our countrymen to commit the most egregious blunders, 
I mean that of judging the habits and customs of Italy and
Spain by our Parisian notions believe me, nothing is more
fallacious than to form any estimate of the degree of
intimacy you may suppose existing among persons by the
familiar terms they seem upon there is a similarity of
feeling at this instant between ourselves and the countess
nothing more."
"Is there, indeed, my good fellow? Pray tell me, is it
sympathy of heart?"
"No of taste," continued Franz gravely.
"And in what manner has this congeniality of mind been
evinced?"
"By the countess's visiting the Colosseum, as we did last
night, by moonlight, and nearly alone."
"You were with her, then?"
"I was."
"And what did you say to her?"
"Oh, we talked of the illustrious dead of whom that
magnificent ruin is a glorious monument"
"Upon my word," cried Albert, "you must have been a very
entertaining companion alone, or all but alone, with a
beautiful woman in such a place of sentiment as the
Colosseum, and yet to find nothing better a talk about than
the dead All I can say is, if ever I should get such a
chance, the living should be my theme."
"And you will probably find your theme illchosen."
"But," said Albert, breaking in upon his discourse, "never
mind the past let us only remember the present. Are you not
going to keep your promise of introducing me to the fair
subject of our remarks?"
"Certainly, directly the curtain falls on the stage."
"What a confounded time this first act takes. I believe, on
my soul, that they never mean to finish it."
"Oh, yes, they will only listen to that charming finale.
How exquisitely Coselli sings his part."
"But what an awkward, inelegant fellow he is."
"Well, then, what do you say to La Specchia? Did you ever
see anything more perfect than her acting?"
"Why, you know, my dear fellow, when one has been accustomed
to Malibran and Sontag, such singers as these don't make the
same impression on you they perhaps do on others."
"At least, you must admire Moriani's style and execution."
"I never fancied men of his dark, ponderous appearance
singing with a voice like a woman's."
"My good friend," said Franz, turning to him, while Albert
continued to point his glass at every box in the theatre,
"you seem determined not to approve you are really too
difficult to please." The curtain at length fell on the
performances, to the infinite satisfaction of the Viscount
of Morcerf, who seized his hat, rapidly passed his fingers
through his hair, arranged his cravat and wristbands, and
signified to Franz that he was waiting for him to lead the
way. Franz, who had mutely interrogated the countess, and
received from her a gracious smile in token that he would be
welcome, sought not to retard the gratification of Albert's
eager impatience, but began at once the tour of the house,
closely followed by Albert, who availed himself of the few
minutes required to reach the opposite side of the theatre
to settle the height and smoothness of his collar, and to
arrange the lappets of his coat. This important task was
just completed as they arrived at the countess's box. At the
knock, the door was immediately opened, and the young man
who was seated beside the countess, in obedience to the
Italian custom, instantly rose and surrendered his place to
the strangers, who, in turn, would be expected to retire
upon the arrival of other visitors.
Franz presented Albert as one of the most distinguished
young men of the day, both as regarded his position in
society and extraordinary talents nor did he say more than
the truth, for in Paris and the circle in which the viscount
moved, he was looked upon and cited as a model of
perfection. Franz added that his companion, deeply grieved
at having been prevented the honor of being presented to the
countess during her sojourn in Paris, was most anxious to
make up for it, and had requested him Franz to remedy the
past misfortune by conducting him to her box, and concluded
by asking pardon for his presumption in having taken it upon
himself to do so. The countess, in reply, bowed gracefully
to Albert, and extended her hand with cordial kindness to
Franz then, inviting Albert to take the vacant seat beside
her, she recommended Franz to take the next best, if he
wished to view the ballet, and pointed to the one behind her
own chair. Albert was soon deeply engrossed in discoursing
upon Paris and Parisian matters, speaking to the countess of
the various persons they both knew there. Franz perceived
how completely he was in his element and, unwilling to
interfere with the pleasure he so evidently felt, took up
Albert's glass, and began in his turn to survey the
audience. Sitting alone, in the front of a box immediately
opposite, but situated on the third row, was a woman of
exquisite beauty, dressed in a Greek costume, which
evidently, from the ease and grace with which she wore it,
was her national attire. Behind her, but in deep shadow, was
the outline of a masculine figure but the features of this
latter personage it was not possible to distinguish. Franz
could not forbear breaking in upon the apparently
interesting conversation passing between the countess and
Albert, to inquire of the former if she knew who was the
fair Albanian opposite, since beauty such as hers was well
worthy of being observed by either sex. "All I can tell
about her," replied the countess, "is, that she has been at
Rome since the beginning of the season for I saw her where
she now sits the very first night of the season, and since
then she has never missed a performance. Sometimes she is
accompanied by the person who is now with her, and at others
she is merely attended by a black servant."
"And what do you think of her personal appearance?"
"Oh, I consider her perfectly lovely  she is just my idea
of what Medora must have been."
Franz and the countess exchanged a smile, and then the
latter resumed her conversation with Albert, while Franz
returned to his previous survey of the house and company.
The curtain rose on the ballet, which was one of those
excellent specimens of the Italian school, admirably
arranged and put on the stage by Henri, who has established
for himself a great reputation throughout Italy for his
taste and skill in the choreographic art  one of those
masterly productions of grace, method, and elegance in which
the whole corps de ballet, from the principal dancers to the
humblest supernumerary, are all engaged on the stage at the
same time and a hundred and fifty persons may be seen
exhibiting the same attitude, or elevating the same arm or
leg with a simultaneous movement, that would lead you to
suppose that but one mind, one act of volition, influenced
the moving mass  the ballet was called "Poliska." However
much the ballet might have claimed his attention, Franz was
too deeply occupied with the beautiful Greek to take any
note of it while she seemed to experience an almost
childlike delight in watching it, her eager, animated looks
contrasting strongly with the utter indifference of her
companion, who, during the whole time the piece lasted,
never even moved, not even when the furious, crashing din
produced by the trumpets, cymbals, and Chinese bells sounded
their loudest from the orchestra. Of this he took no heed,
but was, as far as appearances might be trusted, enjoying
soft repose and bright celestial dreams. The ballet at
length came to a close, and the curtain fell amid the loud,
unanimous plaudits of an enthusiastic and delighted
audience.
Owing to the very judicious plan of dividing the two acts of
the opera with a ballet, the pauses between the performances
are very short, the singers in the opera having time to
repose themselves and change their costume, when necessary,
while the dancers are executing their pirouettes and
exhibiting their graceful steps. The overture to the second
act began and, at the first sound of the leader's bow
across his violin, Franz observed the sleeper slowly arise
and approach the Greek girl, who turned around to say a few
words to him, and then, leaning forward again on the railing
of her box, she became as absorbed as before in what was
going on. The countenance of the person who had addressed
her remained so completely in the shade, that, though Franz
tried his utmost, he could not distinguish a single feature.
The curtain rose, and the attention of Franz was attracted
by the actors and his eyes turned from the box containing
the Greek girl and her strange companion to watch the
business of the stage.
Most of my readers are aware that the second act of
"Parisina" opens with the celebrated and effective duet in
which Parisina, while sleeping, betrays to Azzo the secret
of her love for Ugo. The injured husband goes through all
the emotions of jealousy, until conviction seizes on his
mind, and then, in a frenzy of rage and indignation, he
awakens his guilty wife to tell her that he knows her guilt
and to threaten her with his vengeance. This duet is one of
the most beautiful, expressive and terrible conceptions that
has ever emanated from the fruitful pen of Donizetti. Franz
now listened to it for the third time yet its notes, so
tenderly expressive and fearfully grand as the wretched
husband and wife give vent to their different griefs and
passions, thrilled through the soul of Franz with an effect
equal to his first emotions upon hearing it. Excited beyond
his usual calm demeanor, Franz rose with the audience, and
was about to join the loud, enthusiastic applause that
followed but suddenly his purpose was arrested, his hands
fell by his sides, and the halfuttered "bravos" expired on
his lips. The occupant of the box in which the Greek girl
sat appeared to share the universal admiration that
prevailed for he left his seat to stand up in front, so
that, his countenance being fully revealed, Franz had no
difficulty in recognizing him as the mysterious inhabitant
of Monte Cristo, and the very same person he had encountered
the preceding evening in the ruins of the Colosseum, and
whose voice and figure had seemed so familiar to him. All
doubt of his identity was now at an end his singular host
evidently resided at Rome. The surprise and agitation
occasioned by this full confirmation of Franz's former
suspicion had no doubt imparted a corresponding expression
to his features for the countess, after gazing with a
puzzled look at his face, burst into a fit of laughter, and
begged to know what had happened. "Countess," returned
Franz, totally unheeding her raillery, "I asked you a short
time since if you knew any particulars respecting the
Albanian lady opposite I must now beseech you to inform me
who and what is her husband?"
"Nay," answered the countess, "I know no more of him than
yourself."
"Perhaps you never before noticed him?"
"What a question  so truly French Do you not know that we
Italians have eyes only for the man we love?"
"True," replied Franz.
"All I can say is," continued the countess, taking up the
lorgnette, and directing it toward the box in question,
"that the gentleman, whose history I am unable to furnish,
seems to me as though he had just been dug up he looks more
like a corpse permitted by some friendly gravedigger to
quit his tomb for a while, and revisit this earth of ours,
than anything human. How ghastly pale he is"
"Oh, he is always as colorless as you now see him," said
Franz.
"Then you know him?" almost screamed the countess. "Oh, pray
do, for heaven's sake, tell us all about  is he a vampire,
or a resuscitated corpse, or what?"
"I fancy I have seen him before and I even think he
recognizes me."
"And I can well understand," said the countess, shrugging up
her beautiful shoulders, as though an involuntary shudder
passed through her veins, "that those who have once seen
that man will never be likely to forget him." The sensation
experienced by Franz was evidently not peculiar to himself
another, and wholly uninterested person, felt the same
unaccountable awe and misgiving. "Well." inquired Franz,
after the countess had a second time directed her lorgnette
at the box, "what do you think of our opposite neighbor?"
"Why, that he is no other than Lord Ruthven himself in a
living form." This fresh allusion to Byron drew a smile to
Franz's countenance although he could but allow that if
anything was likely to induce belief in the existence of
vampires, it would be the presence of such a man as the
mysterious personage before him.
"I must positively find out who and what he is," said Franz,
rising from his seat.
"No, no," cried the countess "you must not leave me. I
depend upon you to escort me home. Oh, indeed, I cannot
permit you to go."
 Scott, of course "The son of an illfated sire, and the
father of a yet more unfortunate family, bore in his looks
that cast of inauspicious melancholy by which the
physiognomists of that time pretended to distinguish those
who were predestined to a violent and unhappy death."  The
Abbot, ch. xxii.
"Is it possible," whispered Franz, "that you entertain any
fear?"
"I'll tell you," answered the countess. "Byron had the most
perfect belief in the existence of vampires, and even
assured me that he had seen them. The description he gave me
perfectly corresponds with the features and character of the
man before us. Oh, he is the exact personification of what I
have been led to expect The coalblack hair, large bright,
glittering eyes, in which a wild, unearthly fire seems
burning,  the same ghastly paleness. Then observe, too,
that the woman with him is altogether unlike all others of
her sex. She is a foreigner  a stranger. Nobody knows who
she is, or where she comes from. No doubt she belongs to the
same horrible race he does, and is, like himself, a dealer
in magical arts. I entreat of you not to go near him  at
least tonight and if tomorrow your curiosity still
continues as great, pursue your researches if you will but
tonight you neither can nor shall. For that purpose I mean
to keep you all to myself." Franz protested he could not
defer his pursuit till the following day, for many reasons.
"Listen to me," said the countess, "and do not be so very
headstrong. I am going home. I have a party at my house
tonight, and therefore cannot possibly remain till the end
of the opera. Now, I cannot for one instant believe you so
devoid of gallantry as to refuse a lady your escort when she
even condescends to ask you for it."
There was nothing else left for Franz to do but to take up
his hat, open the door of the box, and offer the countess
his arm. It was quite evident, by her manner, that her
uneasiness was not feigned and Franz himself could not
resist a feeling of superstitious dread  so much the
stronger in him, as it arose from a variety of corroborative
recollections, while the terror of the countess sprang from
an instinctive belief, originally created in her mind by the
wild tales she had listened to till she believed them
truths. Franz could even feel her arm tremble as he assisted
her into the carriage. Upon arriving at her hotel, Franz
perceived that she had deceived him when she spoke of
expecting company on the contrary, her own return before
the appointed hour seemed greatly to astonish the servants.
"Excuse my little subterfuge," said the countess, in reply
to her companion's halfreproachful observation on the
subject "but that horrid man had made me feel quite
uncomfortable, and I longed to be alone, that I might
compose my startled mind." Franz essayed to smile. "Nay,"
said she, "do not smile it ill accords with the expression
of your countenance, and I am sure it does not spring from
your heart. However, promise me one thing."
"What is it?"
"Promise me, I say."
"I will do anything you desire, except relinquish my
determination of finding out who this man is. I have more
reasons than you can imagine for desiring to know who he is,
from whence he came, and whither he is going."
"Where he comes from I am ignorant but I can readily tell
you where he is going to, and that is down below, without
the least doubt."
"Let us only speak of the promise you wished me to make,"
said Franz.
"Well, then, you must give me your word to return
immediately to your hotel, and make no attempt to follow
this man tonight. There are certain affinities between the
persons we quit and those we meet afterwards. For heaven's
sake, do not serve as a conductor between that man and me.
Pursue your chase after him tomorrow as eagerly as you
please but never bring him near me, if you would not see me
die of terror. And now, goodnight go to your rooms, and
try to sleep away all recollections of this evening. For my
own part, I am quite sure I shall not be able to close my
eyes." So saying, the countess quitted Franz, leaving him
unable to decide whether she were merely amusing herself at
his expense, or whether her fears and agitations were
genuine.
Upon his return to the hotel, Franz found Albert in his
dressinggown and slippers, listlessly extended on a sofa,
smoking a cigar. "My dear fellow." cried he, springing up,
"is it really you? Why, I did not expect to see you before
tomorrow."
"My dear Albert," replied Franz, "I am glad of this
opportunity to tell you, once and forever, that you
entertain a most erroneous notion concerning Italian women.
I should have thought the continual failures you have met
with in all your own love affairs might have taught you
better by this time."
"Upon my soul, these women would puzzle the very Devil to
read them aright. Why, here  they give you their hand 
they press yours in return  they keep up a whispering
conversation  permit you to accompany them home. Why, if a
Parisian were to indulge in a quarter of these marks of
flattering attention, her reputation would be gone forever."
"And the very reason why the women of this fine country put
so little restraint on their words and actions, is because
they live so much in public, and have really nothing to
conceal. Besides, you must have perceived that the countess
was really alarmed."
"At what? At the sight of that respectable gentleman sitting
opposite to us in the same box with the lovely Greek girl?
Now, for my part, I met them in the lobby after the
conclusion of the piece and hang me, if I can guess where
you took your notions of the other world from. I can assure
you that this hobgoblin of yours is a deuced finelooking
fellow  admirably dressed. Indeed, I feel quite sure, from
the cut of his clothes, they are made by a firstrate Paris
tailor  probably Blin or Humann. He was rather too pale,
certainly but then, you know, paleness is always looked
upon as a strong proof of aristocratic descent and
distinguished breeding." Franz smiled for he well
remembered that Albert particularly prided himself on the
entire absence of color in his own complexion.
"Well, that tends to confirm my own ideas," said Franz,
"that the countess's suspicions were destitute alike of
sense and reason. Did he speak in your hearing? and did you
catch any of his words?"
"I did but they were uttered in the Romaic dialect. I knew
that from the mixture of Greek words. I don't know whether I
ever told you that when I was at college I was rather 
rather strong in Greek."
"He spoke the Romaic language, did he?"
"I think so."
"That settles it," murmured Franz. "'Tis he, past all
doubt."
"What do you say?"
"Nothing, nothing. But tell me, what were you thinking about
when I came in?"
"Oh, I was arranging a little surprise for you."
"Indeed. Of what nature?"
"Why, you know it is quite impossible to procure a
carriage."
"Certainly and I also know that we have done all that human
means afforded to endeavor to get one."
"Now, then, in this difficulty a bright idea has flashed
across my brain." Franz looked at Albert as though he had
not much confidence in the suggestions of his imagination.
"I tell you what, Sir Franz," cried Albert, "you deserve to
be called out for such a misgiving and incredulous glance as
that you were pleased to bestow on me just now."
"And I promise to give you the satisfaction of a gentleman
if your scheme turns out as ingenious as you assert."
"Well, then, hearken to me."
"I listen."
"You agree, do you not, that obtaining a carriage is out of
the question?"
"I do."
"Neither can we procure horses?"
"True we have offered any sum, but have failed."
"Well, now, what do you say to a cart? I dare say such a
thing might be had."
"Very possibly."
"And a pair of oxen?"
"As easily found as the cart."
"Then you see, my good fellow, with a cart and a couple of
oxen our business can be managed. The cart must be
tastefully ornamented and if you and I dress ourselves as
Neapolitan reapers, we may get up a striking tableau, after
the manner of that splendid picture by Leopold Robert. It
would add greatly to the effect if the countess would join
us in the costume of a peasant from Puzzoli or Sorrento. Our
group would then be quite complete, more especially as the
countess is quite beautiful enough to represent a madonna."
"Well," said Franz, "this time, Albert, I am bound to give
you credit for having hit upon a most capital idea."
"And quite a national one, too," replied Albert with
gratified pride. "A mere masque borrowed from our own
festivities. Ha, ha, ye Romans you thought to make us,
unhappy strangers, trot at the heels of your processions,
like so many lazzaroni, because no carriages or horses are
to be had in your beggarly city. But you don't know us when
we can't have one thing we invent another."
"And have you communicated your triumphant idea to anybody?"
"Only to our host. Upon my return home I sent for him, and I
then explained to him what I wished to procure. He assured
me that nothing would be easier than to furnish all I
desired. One thing I was sorry for when I bade him have the
horns of the oxen gilded, he told me there would not be
time, as it would require three days to do that so you see
we must do without this little superfluity."
"And where is he now?"
"Who?"
"Our host."
"Gone out in search of our equipage, by tomorrow it might
be too late."
"Then he will be able to give us an answer tonight."
"Oh, I expect him every minute." At this instant the door
opened, and the head of Signor Pastrini appeared.
"Permesso?" inquired he.
"Certainly  certainly," cried Franz. "Come in, mine host."
"Now, then," asked Albert eagerly, "have you found the
desired cart and oxen?"
"Better than that" replied Signor Pastrini, with the air of
a man perfectly well satisfied with himself.
"Take care, my worthy host," said Albert, "better is a sure
enemy to well."
"Let your excellencies only leave the matter to me,"
returned Signor Pastrini in a tone indicative of unbounded
selfconfidence.
"But what have you done?" asked Franz. "Speak out, there's a
worthy fellow."
"Your excellencies are aware," responded the landlord,
swelling with importance, "that the Count of Monte Cristo is
living on the same floor with yourselves"
"I should think we did know it," exclaimed Albert, "since it
is owing to that circumstance that we are packed into these
small rooms, like two poor students in the back streets of
Paris."
"When, then, the Count of Monte Cristo, hearing of the
dilemma in which you are placed, has sent to offer you seats
in his carriage and two places at his windows in the Palazzo
Rospoli." The friends looked at each other with unutterable
surprise.
"But do you think," asked Albert, "that we ought to accept
such offers from a perfect stranger?"
"What sort of person is this Count of Monte Cristo?" asked
Franz of his host. "A very great nobleman, but whether
Maltese or Sicilian I cannot exactly say but this I know,
that he is noble as a Borghese and rich as a goldmine."
"It seems to me," said Franz, speaking in an undertone to
Albert, "that if this person merited the high panegyrics of
our landlord, he would have conveyed his invitation through
another channel, and not permitted it to be brought to us in
this unceremonious way. He would have written  or" 
At this instant some one knocked at the door. "Come in,"
said Franz. A servant, wearing a livery of considerable
style and richness, appeared at the threshold, and, placing
two cards in the landlord's hands, who forthwith presented
them to the two young men, he said, "Please to deliver
these, from the Count of Monte Cristo to Viscomte Albert de
Morcerf and M. Franz d'Epinay. The Count of Monte Cristo,"
continued the servant, "begs these gentlemen's permission to
wait upon them as their neighbor, and he will be honored by
an intimation of what time they will please to receive him."
"Faith, Franz," whispered Albert, "there is not much to find
fault with here."
"Tell the count," replied Franz, "that we will do ourselves
the pleasure of calling on him." The servant bowed and
retired.
"That is what I call an elegant mode of attack," said
Albert, "You were quite correct in what you said, Signor
Pastrini. The Count of Monte Cristo is unquestionably a man
of firstrate breeding and knowledge of the world."
"Then you accept his offer?" said the host.
"Of course we do," replied Albert. "Still, I must own I am
sorry to be obliged to give up the cart and the group of
reapers  it would have produced such an effect And were
it not for the windows at the Palazzo Rospoli, by way of
recompense for the loss of our beautiful scheme, I don't
know but what I should have held on by my original plan.
What say you, Franz?"
"Oh, I agree with you the windows in the Palazzo Rospoli
alone decided me." The truth was, that the mention of two
places in the Palazzo Rospoli had recalled to Franz the
conversation he had overheard the preceding evening in the
ruins of the Colosseum between the mysterious unknown and
the Transteverin, in which the stranger in the cloak had
undertaken to obtain the freedom of a condemned criminal
and if this muffledup individual proved as Franz felt sure
he would the same as the person he had just seen in the
Teatro Argentino, then he should be able to establish his
identity, and also to prosecute his researches respecting
him with perfect facility and freedom. Franz passed the
night in confused dreams respecting the two meetings he had
already had with his mysterious tormentor, and in waking
speculations as to what the morrow would produce. The next
day must clear up every doubt and unless his near neighbor
and wouldbe friend, the Count of Monte Cristo, possessed
the ring of Gyges, and by its power was able to render
himself invisible, it was very certain he could not escape
this time. Eight o'clock found Franz up and dressed, while
Albert, who had not the same motives for early rising, was
still soundly asleep. The first act of Franz was to summon
his landlord, who presented himself with his accustomed
obsequiousness.
"Pray, Signor Pastrini," asked Franz, "is not some execution
appointed to take place today?"
"Yes, your excellency but if your reason for inquiry is
that you may procure a window to view it from, you are much
too late."
"Oh, no," answered Franz, "I had no such intention and even
if I had felt a wish to witness the spectacle, I might have
done so from Monte Pincio  could I not?"
"Ah" exclaimed mine host, "I did not think it likely your
excellency would have chosen to mingle with such a rabble as
are always collected on that hill, which, indeed, they
consider as exclusively belonging to themselves."
"Very possibly I may not go," answered Franz "but in case I
feel disposed, give me some particulars of today's
executions."
"What particulars would your excellency like to hear?"
"Why, the number of persons condemned to suffer, their
names, and description of the death they are to die."
"That happens just lucky, your excellency Only a few
minutes ago they brought me the tavolettas."
"What are they?"
"Sort of wooden tablets hung up at the corners of streets
the evening before an execution, on which is pasted up a
paper containing the names of the condemned persons, their
crimes, and mode of punishment. The reason for so publicly
announcing all this is, that all good and faithful Catholics
may offer up their prayers for the unfortunate culprits,
and, above all, beseech of heaven to grant them a sincere
repentance."
"And these tablets are brought to you that you may add your
prayers to those of the faithful, are they?" asked Franz
somewhat incredulously.
"Oh, dear, no, your excellency I have not time for
anybody's affairs but my own and those of my honorable
guests but I make an agreement with the man who pastes up
the papers, and he brings them to me as he would the
playbills, that in case any person staying at my hotel
should like to witness an execution, he may obtain every
requisite information concerning the time and place etc."
"Upon my word, that is a most delicate attention on your
part, Signor Pastrini," cried Franz.
"Why, your excellency," returned the landlord, chuckling and
rubbing his hands with infinite complacency, "I think I may
take upon myself to say I neglect nothing to deserve the
support and patronage of the noble visitors to this poor
hotel."
"I see that plainly enough, my most excellent host, and you
may rely upon me to proclaim so striking a proof of your
attention to your guests wherever I go. Meanwhile, oblige me
by a sight of one of these tavolettas."
"Nothing can be easier than to comply with your excellency's
wish," said the landlord, opening the door of the chamber
"I have caused one to be placed on the landing, close by
your apartment." Then, taking the tablet from the wall, he
handed it to Franz, who read as follows 
""The public is informed that on Wednesday, February d,
being the first day of the Carnival, executions will take
place in the Piazza del Popolo, by order of the Tribunal of
the Rota, of two persons, named Andrea Rondola, and Peppino,
otherwise called Rocca Priori the former found guilty of
the murder of a venerable and exemplary priest, named Don
Cesare Torlini, canon of the church of St. John Lateran and
the latter convicted of being an accomplice of the atrocious
and sanguinary bandit, Luigi Vampa, and his band. The
firstnamed malefactor will be subjected to the mazzuola,
the second culprit beheaded. The prayers of all good
Christians are entreated for these unfortunate men, that it
may please God to awaken them to a sense of their guilt, and
to grant them a hearty and sincere repentance for their
crimes.'"
This was precisely what Franz had heard the evening before
in the ruins of the Colosseum. No part of the programme
differed,  the names of the condemned persons, their
crimes, and mode of punishment, all agreed with his previous
information. In all probability, therefore, the Transteverin
was no other than the bandit Luigi Vampa himself, and the
man shrouded in the mantle the same he had known as "Sinbad
the Sailor," but who, no doubt, was still pursuing his
philanthropic expedition in Rome, as he had already done at
PortoVecchio and Tunis. Time was getting on, however, and
Franz deemed it advisable to awaken Albert but at the
moment he prepared to proceed to his chamber, his friend
entered the room in perfect costume for the day. The
anticipated delights of the Carnival had so run in his head
as to make him leave his pillow long before his usual hour.
"Now, my excellent Signor Pastrini," said Franz, addressing
his landlord, "since we are both ready, do you think we may
proceed at once to visit the Count of Monte Cristo?"
"Most assuredly," replied he. "The Count of Monte Cristo is
always an early riser and I can answer for his having been
up these two hours."
"Then you really consider we shall not be intruding if we
pay our respects to him directly?"
"Oh, I am quite sure. I will take all the blame on myself if
you find I have led you into an error."
"Well, then, if it be so, are you ready, Albert?"
"Perfectly."
"Let us go and return our best thanks for his courtesy."
"Yes, let us do so." The landlord preceded the friends
across the landing, which was all that separated them from
the apartments of the count, rang at the bell, and, upon the
door being opened by a servant, said, "I signori Francesi."
The domestic bowed respectfully, and invited them to enter.
They passed through two rooms, furnished in a luxurious
manner they had not expected to see under the roof of Signor
Pastrini, and were shown into an elegantly fittedup
drawingroom. The richest Turkey carpets covered the floor,
and the softest and most inviting couches, easychairs, and
sofas, offered their highpiled and yielding cushions to
such as desired repose or refreshment. Splendid paintings by
the first masters were ranged against the walls,
intermingled with magnificent trophies of war, while heavy
curtains of costly tapestry were suspended before the
different doors of the room. "If your excellencies will
please to be seated," said the man, "I will let the count
know that you are here."
And with these words he disappeared behind one of the
tapestried portieres. As the door opened, the sound of a
guzla reached the ears of the young men, but was almost
immediately lost, for the rapid closing of the door merely
allowed one rich swell of harmony to enter. Franz and Albert
looked inquiringly at each other, then at the gorgeous
furnishings of the apartment. Everything seemed more
magnificent at a second view than it had done at their first
rapid survey.
"Well," said Franz to his friend, "what think you of all
this?"
"Why, upon my soul, my dear fellow, it strikes me that our
elegant and attentive neighbor must either be some
successful stockjobber who has speculated in the fall of
the Spanish funds, or some prince travelling incog."
"Hush, hush" replied Franz "we shall ascertain who and
what he is  he comes" As Franz spoke, he heard the sound
of a door turning on its hinges, and almost immediately
afterwards the tapestry was drawn aside, and the owner of
all these riches stood before the two young men. Albert
instantly rose to meet him, but Franz remained, in a manner,
spellbound on his chair for in the person of him who had
just entered he recognized not only the mysterious visitant
to the Colosseum, and the occupant of the box at the Teatro
Argentino, but also his extraordinary host of Monte Cristo.
Chapter 
La Mazzolata.
"Gentlemen," said the Count of Monte Cristo as he entered,
"I pray you excuse me for suffering my visit to be
anticipated but I feared to disturb you by presenting
myself earlier at your apartments besides, you sent me word
that you would come to me, and I have held myself at your
disposal."
"Franz and I have to thank you a thousand times, count,"
returned Albert "you extricated us from a great dilemma,
and we were on the point of inventing a very fantastic
vehicle when your friendly invitation reached us."
"Indeed," returned the count, motioning the two young men to
sit down. "It was the fault of that blockhead Pastrini, that
I did not sooner assist you in your distress. He did not
mention a syllable of your embarrassment to me, when he
knows that, alone and isolated as I am, I seek every
opportunity of making the acquaintance of my neighbors. As
soon as I learned I could in any way assist you, I most
eagerly seized the opportunity of offering my services." The
two young men bowed. Franz had, as yet, found nothing to
say he had come to no determination, and as nothing in the
count's manner manifested the wish that he should recognize
him, he did not know whether to make any allusion to the
past, or wait until he had more proof besides, although
sure it was he who had been in the box the previous evening,
he could not be equally positive that this was the man he
had seen at the Colosseum. He resolved, therefore, to let
things take their course without making any direct overture
to the count. Moreover, he had this advantage, he was master
of the count's secret, while the count had no hold on Franz,
who had nothing to conceal. However, he resolved to lead the
conversation to a subject which might possibly clear up his
doubts.
"Count," said he, "you have offered us places in your
carriage, and at your windows in the Rospoli Palace. Can you
tell us where we can obtain a sight of the Piazza del
Popolo?"
"Ah," said the count negligently, looking attentively at
Morcerf, "is there not something like an execution upon the
Piazza del Popolo?"
"Yes," returned Franz, finding that the count was coming to
the point he wished.
"Stay, I think I told my steward yesterday to attend to
this perhaps I can render you this slight service also." He
extended his hand, and rang the bell thrice. "Did you ever
occupy yourself," said he to Franz, "with the employment of
time and the means of simplifying the summoning your
servants? I have. When I ring once, it is for my valet
twice, for my majordomo thrice, for my steward,  thus I
do not waste a minute or a word. Here he is." A man of about
fortyfive or fifty entered, exactly resembling the smuggler
who had introduced Franz into the cavern but he did not
appear to recognize him. It was evident he had his orders.
"Monsieur Bertuccio," said the count, "you have procured me
windows looking on the Piazza del Popolo, as I ordered you
yesterday."
"Yes, excellency," returned the steward "but it was very
late."
"Did I not tell you I wished for one?" replied the count,
frowning.
"And your excellency has one, which was let to Prince
Lobanieff but I was obliged to pay a hundred" 
"That will do  that will do, Monsieur Bertuccio spare
these gentlemen all such domestic arrangements. You have the
window, that is sufficient. Give orders to the coachman and
be in readiness on the stairs to conduct us to it." The
steward bowed, and was about to quit the room. "Ah,"
continued the count, "be good enough to ask Pastrini if he
has received the tavoletta, and if he can send us an account
of the execution."
"There is no need to do that," said Franz, taking out his
tablets "for I saw the account, and copied it down."
"Very well, you can retire, M. Bertuccio but let us know
when breakfast is ready. These gentlemen," added he, turning
to the two friends, "will, I trust, do me the honor to
breakfast with me?"
"But, my dear count," said Albert, "we shall abuse your
kindness."
"Not at all on the contrary, you will give me great
pleasure. You will, one or other of you, perhaps both,
return it to me at Paris. M. Bertuccio, lay covers for
three." He then took Franz's tablets out of his hand. ""We
announce,' he read, in the same tone with which he would
have read a newspaper, "that today, the d of February,
will be executed Andrea Rondolo, guilty of murder on the
person of the respected and venerated Don Cesare Torlini,
canon of the church of St. John Lateran, and Peppino, called
Rocca Priori, convicted of complicity with the detestable
bandit Luigi Vampa, and the men of his band.' Hum "The
first will be mazzolato, the second decapitato.' Yes,"
continued the count, "it was at first arranged in this way
but I think since yesterday some change has taken place in
the order of the ceremony."
"Really?" said Franz.
"Yes, I passed the evening at the Cardinal Rospigliosi's,
and there mention was made of something like a pardon for
one of the two men."
"For Andrea Rondolo?" asked Franz.
"No," replied the count, carelessly "for the other he
glanced at the tablets as if to recall the name, for
Peppino, called Rocca Priori. You are thus deprived of
seeing a man guillotined but the mazzuola still remains,
which is a very curious punishment when seen for the first
time, and even the second, while the other, as you must
know, is very simple. The mandaia never fails, never
trembles, never strikes thirty times ineffectually, like the
soldier who beheaded the Count of Chalais, and to whose
tender mercy Richelieu had doubtless recommended the
sufferer. Ah," added the count, in a contemptuous tone, "do
not tell me of European punishments, they are in the
infancy, or rather the old age, of cruelty."
 Guillotine.
"Really, count," replied Franz, "one would think that you
had studied the different tortures of all the nations of the
world."
"There are, at least, few that I have not seen," said the
count coldly.
"And you took pleasure in beholding these dreadful
spectacles?"
"My first sentiment was horror, the second indifference, the
third curiosity."
"Curiosity  that is a terrible word."
"Why so? In life, our greatest preoccupation is death is it
not then, curious to study the different ways by which the
soul and body can part and how, according to their
different characters, temperaments, and even the different
customs of their countries, different persons bear the
transition from life to death, from existence to
annihilation? As for myself, I can assure you of one thing,
the more men you see die, the easier it becomes to die
yourself and in my opinion, death may be a torture, but it
is not an expiation."
"I do not quite understand you," replied Franz "pray
explain your meaning, for you excite my curiosity to the
highest pitch."
"Listen," said the count, and deep hatred mounted to his
face, as the blood would to the face of any other. "If a man
had by unheardof and excruciating tortures destroyed your
father, your mother, your betrothed,  a being who, when
torn from you, left a desolation, a wound that never closes,
in your breast,  do you think the reparation that society
gives you is sufficient when it interposes the knife of the
guillotine between the base of the occiput and the trapezal
muscles of the murderer, and allows him who has caused us
years of moral sufferings to escape with a few moments of
physical pain?"
"Yes, I know," said Franz, "that human justice is
insufficient to console us she can give blood in return for
blood, that is all but you must demand from her only what
it is in her power to grant."
"I will put another case to you," continued the count "that
where society, attacked by the death of a person, avenges
death by death. But are there not a thousand tortures by
which a man may be made to suffer without society taking the
least cognizance of them, or offering him even the
insufficient means of vengeance, of which we have just
spoken? Are there not crimes for which the impalement of the
Turks, the augers of the Persians, the stake and the brand
of the Iroquois Indians, are inadequate tortures, and which
are unpunished by society? Answer me, do not these crimes
exist?"
"Yes," answered Franz "and it is to punish them that
duelling is tolerated."
"Ah, duelling," cried the count "a pleasant manner, upon my
soul, of arriving at your end when that end is vengeance A
man has carried off your mistress, a man has seduced your
wife, a man has dishonored your daughter he has rendered
the whole life of one who had the right to expect from
heaven that portion of happiness God his promised to every
one of his creatures, an existence of misery and infamy and
you think you are avenged because you send a ball through
the head, or pass a sword through the breast, of that man
who has planted madness in your brain, and despair in your
heart. And remember, moreover, that it is often he who comes
off victorious from the strife, absolved of all crime in the
eyes of the world. No, no," continued the count, "had I to
avenge myself, it is not thus I would take revenge."
"Then you disapprove of duelling? You would not fight a
duel?" asked Albert in his turn, astonished at this strange
theory.
"Oh, yes," replied the count "understand me, I would fight
a duel for a trifle, for an insult, for a blow and the more
so that, thanks to my skill in all bodily exercises, and the
indifference to danger I have gradually acquired, I should
be almost certain to kill my man. Oh, I would fight for such
a cause but in return for a slow, profound, eternal
torture, I would give back the same, were it possible an
eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, as the Orientalists
say,  our masters in everything,  those favored
creatures who have formed for themselves a life of dreams
and a paradise of realities."
"But," said Franz to the count, "with this theory, which
renders you at once judge and executioner of your own cause,
it would be difficult to adopt a course that would forever
prevent your falling under the power of the law. Hatred is
blind, rage carries you away and he who pours out vengeance
runs the risk of tasting a bitter draught."
"Yes, if he be poor and inexperienced, not if he be rich and
skilful besides, the worst that could happen to him would
be the punishment of which we have already spoken, and which
the philanthropic French Revolution has substituted for
being torn to pieces by horses or broken on the wheel. What
matters this punishment, as long as he is avenged? On my
word, I almost regret that in all probability this miserable
Peppino will not be beheaded, as you might have had an
opportunity then of seeing how short a time the punishment
lasts, and whether it is worth even mentioning but, really
this is a most singular conversation for the Carnival,
gentlemen how did it arise? Ah, I recollect, you asked for
a place at my window you shall have it but let us first
sit down to table, for here comes the servant to inform us
that breakfast is ready." As he spoke, a servant opened one
of the four doors of the apartment, saying  "Al suo
commodo" The two young men arose and entered the
breakfastroom.
During the meal, which was excellent, and admirably served,
Franz looked repeatedly at Albert, in order to observe the
impressions which he doubted not had been made on him by the
words of their entertainer but whether with his usual
carelessness he had paid but little attention to him,
whether the explanation of the Count of Monte Cristo with
regard to duelling had satisfied him, or whether the events
which Franz knew of had had their effect on him alone, he
remarked that his companion did not pay the least regard to
them, but on the contrary ate like a man who for the last
four or five months had been condemned to partake of Italian
cookery  that is, the worst in the world. As for the
count, he just touched the dishes he seemed to fulfil the
duties of a host by sitting down with his guests, and
awaited their departure to be served with some strange or
more delicate food. This brought back to Franz, in spite of
himself, the recollection of the terror with which the count
had inspired the Countess G , and her firm conviction
that the man in the opposite box was a vampire. At the end
of the breakfast Franz took out his watch. "Well," said the
count, "what are you doing?"
"You must excuse us, count," returned Franz, "but we have
still much to do."
"What may that be?"
"We have no masks, and it is absolutely necessary to procure
them."
"Do not concern yourself about that we have, I think, a
private room in the Piazza del Popolo I will have whatever
costumes you choose brought to us, and you can dress there."
"After the execution?" cried Franz.
"Before or after, whichever you please."
"Opposite the scaffold?"
"The scaffold forms part of the fete."
"Count, I have reflected on the matter," said Franz, "I
thank you for your courtesy, but I shall content myself with
accepting a place in your carriage and at your window at the
Rospoli Palace, and I leave you at liberty to dispose of my
place at the Piazza del Popolo."
"But I warn you, you will lose a very curious sight,"
returned the count.
"You will describe it to me," replied Franz, "and the
recital from your lips will make as great an impression on
me as if I had witnessed it. I have more than once intended
witnessing an execution, but I have never been able to make
up my mind and you, Albert?"
"I," replied the viscount,  "I saw Castaing executed, but
I think I was rather intoxicated that day, for I had quitted
college the same morning, and we had passed the previous
night at a tavern."
"Besides, it is no reason because you have not seen an
execution at Paris, that you should not see one anywhere
else when you travel, it is to see everything. Think what a
figure you will make when you are asked, "How do they
execute at Rome?' and you reply, "I do not know' And,
besides, they say that the culprit is an infamous scoundrel,
who killed with a log of wood a worthy canon who had brought
him up like his own son. Diable, when a churchman is killed,
it should be with a different weapon than a log, especially
when he has behaved like a father. If you went to Spain,
would you not see the bullfight? Well, suppose it is a
bullfight you are going to see? Recollect the ancient
Romans of the Circus, and the sports where they killed three
hundred lions and a hundred men. Think of the eighty
thousand applauding spectators, the sage matrons who took
their daughters, and the charming Vestals who made with the
thumb of their white hands the fatal sign that said, "Come,
despatch the dying.'"
"Shall you go, then, Albert?" asked Franz.
"Ma foi, yes like you, I hesitated, but the count's
eloquence decides me."
"Let us go, then," said Franz, "since you wish it but on
our way to the Piazza del Popolo, I wish to pass through the
Corso. Is this possible, count?"
"On foot, yes, in a carriage, no."
"I will go on foot, then."
"Is it important that you should go that way?"
"Yes, there is something I wish to see."
"Well, we will go by the Corso. We will send the carriage to
wait for us on the Piazza del Popolo, by the Strada del
Babuino, for I shall be glad to pass, myself, through the
Corso, to see if some orders I have given have been
executed."
"Excellency," said a servant, opening the door, "a man in
the dress of a penitent wishes to speak to you."
"Ah, yes" returned the count, "I know who he is, gentlemen
will you return to the salon? you will find good cigars on
the centre table. I will be with you directly." The young
men rose and returned into the salon, while the count, again
apologizing, left by another door. Albert, who was a great
smoker, and who had considered it no small sacrifice to be
deprived of the cigars of the Cafe de Paris, approached the
table, and uttered a cry of joy at perceiving some veritable
puros.
"Well," asked Franz, "what think you of the Count of Monte
Cristo?"
"What do I think?" said Albert, evidently surprised at such
a question from his companion "I think he is a delightful
fellow, who does the honors of his table admirably who has
travelled much, read much, is, like Brutus, of the Stoic
school, and moreover," added he, sending a volume of smoke
up towards the ceiling, "that he has excellent cigars." Such
was Albert's opinion of the count, and as Franz well knew
that Albert professed never to form an opinion except upon
long reflection, he made no attempt to change it. "But,"
said he, "did you observe one very singular thing?"
"What?"
"How attentively he looked at you."
"At me?"
"Yes."  Albert reflected. "Ah," replied he, sighing, "that
is not very surprising I have been more than a year absent
from Paris, and my clothes are of a most antiquated cut the
count takes me for a provincial. The first opportunity you
have, undeceive him, I beg, and tell him I am nothing of the
kind." Franz smiled an instant after the count entered.
"I am now quite at your service, gentlemen," said he. "The
carriage is going one way to the Piazza del Popolo, and we
will go another and, if you please, by the Corso. Take some
more of these cigars, M. de Morcerf."
"With all my heart," returned Albert "Italian cigars are
horrible. When you come to Paris, I will return all this."
"I will not refuse I intend going there soon, and since you
allow me, I will pay you a visit. Come, we have not any time
to lose, it is halfpast twelve  let us set off." All
three descended the coachman received his master's orders,
and drove down the Via del Babuino. While the three
gentlemen walked along the Piazza de Spagni and the Via
Frattina, which led directly between the Fiano and Rospoli
palaces, Franz's attention was directed towards the windows
of that last palace, for he had not forgotten the signal
agreed upon between the man in the mantle and the
Transtevere peasant. "Which are your windows?" asked he of
the count, with as much indifference as he could assume.
"The three last," returned he, with a negligence evidently
unaffected, for he could not imagine with what intention the
question was put. Franz glanced rapidly towards the three
windows. The side windows were hung with yellow damask, and
the centre one with white damask and a red cross. The man in
the mantle had kept his promise to the Transteverin, and
there could now be no doubt that he was the count. The three
windows were still untenanted. Preparations were making on
every side chairs were placed, scaffolds were raised, and
windows were hung with flags. The masks could not appear
the carriages could not move about but the masks were
visible behind the windows, the carriages, and the doors.
Franz, Albert, and the count continued to descend the Corso.
As they approached the Piazza del Popolo, the crowd became
more dense, and above the heads of the multitude two objects
were visible the obelisk, surmounted by a cross, which
marks the centre of the square, and in front of the obelisk,
at the point where the three streets, del Babuino, del
Corso, and di Ripetta, meet, the two uprights of the
scaffold, between which glittered the curved knife of the
mandaia. At the corner of the street they met the count's
steward, who was awaiting his master. The window, let at an
exorbitant price, which the count had doubtless wished to
conceal from his guests, was on the second floor of the
great palace, situated between the Via del Babuino and the
Monte Pincio. It consisted, as we have said, of a small
dressingroom, opening into a bedroom, and, when the door of
communication was shut, the inmates were quite alone. On
chairs were laid elegant masquerade costumes of blue and
white satin. "As you left the choice of your costumes to
me," said the count to the two friends, "I have had these
brought, as they will be the most worn this year and they
are most suitable, on account of the confetti sweetmeats,
as they do not show the flour."
Franz heard the words of the count but imperfectly, and he
perhaps did not fully appreciate this new attention to their
wishes for he was wholly absorbed by the spectacle that the
Piazza del Popolo presented, and by the terrible instrument
that was in the centre. It was the first time Franz had ever
seen a guillotine,  we say guillotine, because the Roman
mandaia is formed on almost the same model as the French
instrument. The knife, which is shaped like a crescent,
that cuts with the convex side, falls from a less height,
and that is all the difference. Two men, seated on the
movable plank on which the victim is laid, were eating their
breakfasts, while waiting for the criminal. Their repast
consisted apparently of bread and sausages. One of them
lifted the plank, took out a flask of wine, drank some, and
then passed it to his companion. These two men were the
executioner's assistants. At this sight Franz felt the
perspiration start forth upon his brow. The prisoners,
transported the previous evening from the Carcere Nuovo to
the little church of Santa Maria del Popolo, had passed the
night, each accompanied by two priests, in a chapel closed
by a grating, before which were two sentinels, who were
relieved at intervals. A double line of carbineers, placed
on each side of the door of the church, reached to the
scaffold, and formed a circle around it, leaving a path
about ten feet wide, and around the guillotine a space of
nearly a hundred feet. All the rest of the square was paved
with heads. Many women held their infants on their
shoulders, and thus the children had the best view. The
Monte Pincio seemed a vast amphitheatre filled with
spectators the balconies of the two churches at the corner
of the Via del Babuino and the Via di Ripetta were crammed
the steps even seemed a particolored sea, that was impelled
towards the portico every niche in the wall held its living
statue. What the count said was true  the most curious
spectacle in life is that of death. And yet, instead of the
silence and the solemnity demanded by the occasion, laughter
and jests arose from the crowd. It was evident that the
execution was, in the eyes of the people, only the
commencement of the Carnival. Suddenly the tumult ceased, as
if by magic, and the doors of the church opened. A
brotherhood of penitents, clothed from head to foot in robes
of gray sackcloth, with holes for the eyes, and holding in
their hands lighted tapers, appeared first the chief
marched at the head. Behind the penitents came a man of vast
stature and proportions. He was naked, with the exception of
cloth drawers at the left side of which hung a large knife
in a sheath, and he bore on his right shoulder a heavy iron
sledgehammer. This man was the executioner. He had,
moreover, sandals bound on his feet by cords. Behind the
executioner came, in the order in which they were to die,
first Peppino and then Andrea. Each was accompanied by two
priests. Neither had his eyes bandaged. Peppino walked with
a firm step, doubtless aware of what awaited him. Andrea was
supported by two priests. Each of them, from time to time,
kissed the crucifix a confessor held out to them. At this
sight alone Franz felt his legs tremble under him. He looked
at Albert  he was as white as his shirt, and mechanically
cast away his cigar, although he had not half smoked it. The
count alone seemed unmoved  nay, more, a slight color
seemed striving to rise in his pale cheeks. His nostrils
dilated like those of a wild beast that scents its prey, and
his lips, half opened, disclosed his white teeth, small and
sharp like those of a jackal. And yet his features wore an
expression of smiling tenderness, such as Franz had never
before witnessed in them his black eyes especially were
full of kindness and pity. However, the two culprits
advanced, and as they approached their faces became visible.
Peppino was a handsome young man of four or five and twenty,
bronzed by the sun he carried his head erect, and seemed on
the watch to see on which side his liberator would appear.
Andrea was short and fat his visage, marked with brutal
cruelty, did not indicate age he might be thirty. In prison
he had suffered his beard to grow his head fell on his
shoulder, his legs bent beneath him, and his movements were
apparently automatic and unconscious.
 Dr. Guillotin got the idea of his famous machine from
witnessing an execution in Italy.
"I thought," said Franz to the count, "that you told me
there would be but one execution."
"I told you true," replied he coldly.
"And yet here are two culprits."
"Yes but only one of these two is about to die the other
has many years to live."
"If the pardon is to come, there is no time to lose."
"And see, here it is," said the count. At the moment when
Peppino reached the foot of the mandaia, a priest arrived in
some haste, forced his way through the soldiers, and,
advancing to the chief of the brotherhood, gave him a folded
paper. The piercing eye of Peppino had noticed all. The
chief took the paper, unfolded it, and, raising his hand,
"Heaven be praised, and his holiness also," said he in a
loud voice "here is a pardon for one of the prisoners"
"A pardon" cried the people with one voice  "a pardon"
At this cry Andrea raised his head. "Pardon for whom?" cried
he.
Peppino remained breathless. "A pardon for Peppino, called
Rocca Priori," said the principal friar. And he passed the
paper to the officer commanding the carbineers, who read and
returned it to him.
"For Peppino" cried Andrea, who seemed roused from the
torpor in which he had been plunged. "Why for him and not
for me? We ought to die together. I was promised he should
die with me. You have no right to put me to death alone. I
will not die alone  I will not" And he broke from the
priests struggling and raving like a wild beast, and
striving desperately to break the cords that bound his
hands. The executioner made a sign, and his two assistants
leaped from the scaffold and seized him. "What is going on?"
asked Franz of the count for, as all the talk was in the
Roman dialect, he had not perfectly understood it. "Do you
not see?" returned the count, "that this human creature who
is about to die is furious that his fellowsufferer does not
perish with him? and, were he able, he would rather tear him
to pieces with his teeth and nails than let him enjoy the
life he himself is about to be deprived of. Oh, man, man 
race of crocodiles," cried the count, extending his clinched
hands towards the crowd, "how well do I recognize you there,
and that at all times you are worthy of yourselves"
Meanwhile Andrea and the two executioners were struggling on
the ground, and he kept exclaiming, "He ought to die  he
shall die  I will not die alone"
"Look, look," cried the count, seizing the young men's hands
"look, for on my soul it is curious. Here is a man who
had resigned himself to his fate, who was going to the
scaffold to die  like a coward, it is true, but he was
about to die without resistance. Do you know what gave him
strength?  do you know what consoled him? It was, that
another partook of his punishment  that another partook of
his anguish  that another was to die before him. Lead two
sheep to the butcher's, two oxen to the slaughterhouse, and
make one of them understand that his companion will not die
the sheep will bleat for pleasure, the ox will bellow with
joy. But man  man, whom God created in his own image 
man, upon whom God has laid his first, his sole commandment,
to love his neighbor  man, to whom God has given a voice
to express his thoughts  what is his first cry when he
hears his fellowman is saved? A blasphemy. Honor to man,
this masterpiece of nature, this king of the creation" And
the count burst into a laugh a terrible laugh, that showed
he must have suffered horribly to be able thus to laugh.
However, the struggle still continued, and it was dreadful
to witness. The people all took part against Andrea, and
twenty thousand voices cried, "Put him to death put him to
death" Franz sprang back, but the count seized his arm, and
held him before the window. "What are you doing?" said he.
"Do you pity him? If you heard the cry of "Mad dog' you
would take your gun  you would unhesitatingly shoot the
poor beast, who, after all, was only guilty of having been
bitten by another dog. And yet you pity a man who, without
being bitten by one of his race, has yet murdered his
benefactor and who, now unable to kill any one, because his
hands are bound, wishes to see his companion in captivity
perish. No, no  look, look"
The command was needless. Franz was fascinated by the
horrible spectacle. The two assistants had borne Andrea to
the scaffold, and there, in spite of his struggles, his
bites, and his cries, had forced him to his knees. During
this time the executioner had raised his mace, and signed to
them to get out of the way the criminal strove to rise,
but, ere he had time, the mace fell on his left temple. A
dull and heavy sound was heard, and the man dropped like an
ox on his face, and then turned over on his back. The
executioner let fall his mace, drew his knife, and with one
stroke opened his throat, and mounting on his stomach,
stamped violently on it with his feet. At every stroke a jet
of blood sprang from the wound.
This time Franz could contain himself no longer, but sank,
half fainting, into a seat. Albert, with his eyes closed,
was standing grasping the windowcurtains. The count was
erect and triumphant, like the Avenging Angel
Chapter 
The Carnival at Rome.
When Franz recovered his senses, he saw Albert drinking a
glass of water, of which, to judge from his pallor, he stood
in great need and the count, who was assuming his
masquerade costume. He glanced mechanically towards the
square  the scene was wholly changed scaffold,
executioners, victims, all had disappeared only the people
remained, full of noise and excitement. The bell of Monte
Citorio, which only sounds on the pope's decease and the
opening of the Carnival, was ringing a joyous peal. "Well,"
asked he of the count, "what has, then, happened?"
"Nothing," replied the count "only, as you see, the
Carnival his commenced. Make haste and dress yourself."
"In fact," said Franz, "this horrible scene has passed away
like a dream."
"It is but a dream, a nightmare, that has disturbed you."
"Yes, that I have suffered but the culprit?"
"That is a dream also only he has remained asleep, while
you have awakened and who knows which of you is the most
fortunate?"
"But Peppino  what has become of him?"
"Peppino is a lad of sense, who, unlike most men, who are
happy in proportion as they are noticed, was delighted to
see that the general attention was directed towards his
companion. He profited by this distraction to slip away
among the crowd, without even thanking the worthy priests
who accompanied him. Decidedly man is an ungrateful and
egotistical animal. But dress yourself see, M. de Morcerf
sets you the example." Albert was drawing on the satin
pantaloon over his black trousers and varnished boots.
"Well, Albert," said Franz, "do you feel much inclined to
join the revels? Come, answer frankly."
"Ma foi, no," returned Albert. "But I am really glad to have
seen such a sight and I understand what the count said 
that when you have once habituated yourself to a similar
spectacle, it is the only one that causes you any emotion."
"Without reflecting that this is the only moment in which
you can study character," said the count "on the steps of
the scaffold death tears off the mask that has been worn
through life, and the real visage is disclosed. It must be
allowed that Andrea was not very handsome, the hideous
scoundrel Come, dress yourselves, gentlemen, dress
yourselves." Franz felt it would be ridiculous not to follow
his two companions' example. He assumed his costume, and
fastened on the mask that scarcely equalled the pallor of
his own face. Their toilet finished, they descended the
carriage awaited them at the door, filled with sweetmeats
and bouquets. They fell into the line of carriages. It is
difficult to form an idea of the perfect change that had
taken place. Instead of the spectacle of gloomy and silent
death, the Piazza del Popolo presented a spectacle of gay
and noisy mirth and revelry. A crowd of masks flowed in from
all sides, emerging from the doors, descending from the
windows. From every street and every corner drove carriages
filled with clowns, harlequins, dominoes, mummers,
pantomimists, Transteverins, knights, and peasants,
screaming, fighting, gesticulating, throwing eggs filled
with flour, confetti, nosegays, attacking, with their
sarcasms and their missiles, friends and foes, companions
and strangers, indiscriminately, and no one took offence, or
did anything but laugh. Franz and Albert were like men who,
to drive away a violent sorrow, have recourse to wine, and
who, as they drink and become intoxicated, feel a thick veil
drawn between the past and the present. They saw, or rather
continued to see, the image of what they had witnessed but
little by little the general vertigo seized them, and they
felt themselves obliged to take part in the noise and
confusion. A handful of confetti that came from a
neighboring carriage, and which, while it covered Morcerf
and his two companions with dust, pricked his neck and that
portion of his face uncovered by his mask like a hundred
pins, incited him to join in the general combat, in which
all the masks around him were engaged. He rose in his turn,
and seizing handfuls of confetti and sweetmeats, with which
the carriage was filled, cast them with all the force and
skill he was master of.
The strife had fairly begun, and the recollection of what
they had seen half an hour before was gradually effaced from
the young men's minds, so much were they occupied by the gay
and glittering procession they now beheld. As for the Count
of Monte Cristo, he had never for an instant shown any
appearance of having been moved. Imagine the large and
splendid Corso, bordered from one end to the other with
lofty palaces, with their balconies hung with carpets, and
their windows with flags. At these balconies are three
hundred thousand spectators  Romans, Italians, strangers
from all parts of the world, the united aristocracy of
birth, wealth, and genius. Lovely women, yielding to the
influence of the scene, bend over their balconies, or lean
from their windows, and shower down confetti, which are
returned by bouquets the air seems darkened with the
falling confetti and flying flowers. In the streets the
lively crowd is dressed in the most fantastic costumes 
gigantic cabbages walk gravely about, buffaloes' heads bellow
from men's shoulders, dogs walk on their hind legs in the
midst of all this a mask is lifted, and, as in Callot's
Temptation of St. Anthony, a lovely face is exhibited, which
we would fain follow, but from which we are separated by
troops of fiends. This will give a faint idea of the
Carnival at Rome. At the second turn the Count stopped the
carriage, and requested permission to withdraw, leaving the
vehicle at their disposal. Franz looked up  they were
opposite the Rospoli Palace. At the centre window, the one
hung with white damask with a red cross, was a blue domino,
beneath which Franz's imagination easily pictured the
beautiful Greek of the Argentina. "Gentlemen," said the
count, springing out, "when you are tired of being actors,
and wish to become spectators of this scene, you know you
have places at my windows. In the meantime, dispose of my
coachman, my carriage, and my servants." We have forgotten
to mention, that the count's coachman was attired in a
bearskin, exactly resembling Odry's in "The Bear and the
Pasha" and the two footmen behind were dressed up as green
monkeys, with spring masks, with which they made grimaces at
every one who passed. Franz thanked the count for his
attention. As for Albert, he was busily occupied throwing
bouquets at a carriage full of Roman peasants that was
passing near him. Unfortunately for him, the line of
carriages moved on again, and while he descended the Piazza
del Popolo, the other ascended towards the Palazzo di
Venezia. "Ah, my dear fellow," said he to Franz "you did
not see?"
"What?"
"There,  that calash filled with Roman peasants."
"No."
"Well, I am convinced they are all charming women."
"How unfortunate that you were masked, Albert," said Franz
"here was an opportunity of making up for past
disappointments."
"Oh," replied he, half laughing, half serious "I hope the
Carnival will not pass without some amends in one shape or
the other."
But, in spite of Albert's hope, the day passed unmarked by
any incident, excepting two or three encounters with the
carriage full of Roman peasants. At one of these encounters,
accidentally or purposely, Albert's mask fell off. He
instantly rose and cast the remainder of the bouquets into
the carriage. Doubtless one of the charming females Albert
had detected beneath their coquettish disguise was touched
by his gallantry for, as the carriage of the two friends
passed her, she threw a bunch of violets. Albert seized it,
and as Franz had no reason to suppose it was meant for him,
he suffered Albert to retain it. Albert placed it in his
buttonhole, and the carriage went triumphantly on.
"Well," said Franz to him "there is the beginning of an
adventure."
"Laugh if you please  I really think so. So I will not
abandon this bouquet."
"Pardieu," returned Franz, laughing, "in token of your
ingratitude." The jest, however, soon appeared to become
earnest for when Albert and Franz again encountered the
carriage with the contadini, the one who had thrown the
violets to Albert, clapped her hands when she beheld them in
his buttonhole. "Bravo, bravo," said Franz "things go
wonderfully. Shall I leave you? Perhaps you would prefer
being alone?"
"No," replied he "I will not be caught like a fool at a
first disclosure by a rendezvous under the clock, as they
say at the operaballs. If the fair peasant wishes to carry
matters any further, we shall find her, or rather, she will
find us tomorrow then she will give me some sign or other,
and I shall know what I have to do."
"On my word," said Franz, "you are wise as Nestor and
prudent as Ulysses, and your fair Circe must be very skilful
or very powerful if she succeed in changing you into a beast
of any kind." Albert was right the fair unknown had
resolved, doubtless, to carry the intrigue no farther for
although the young men made several more turns, they did not
again see the calash, which had turned up one of the
neighboring streets. Then they returned to the Rospoli
Palace but the count and the blue domino had also
disappeared the two windows, hung with yellow damask, were
still occupied by the persons whom the count had invited. At
this moment the same bell that had proclaimed the beginning
of the mascherata sounded the retreat. The file on the Corso
broke the line, and in a second all the carriages had
disappeared. Franz and Albert were opposite the Via delle
Maratte the coachman, without saying a word, drove up it,
passed along the Piazza di Spagni and the Rospoli Palace and
stopped at the door of the hotel. Signor Pastrini came to
the door to receive his guests. Franz hastened to inquire
after the count, and to express regret that he had not
returned in sufficient time but Pastrini reassured him by
saying that the Count of Monte Cristo had ordered a second
carriage for himself, and that it had gone at four o'clock
to fetch him from the Rospoli Palace. The count had,
moreover, charged him to offer the two friends the key of
his box at the Argentina. Franz questioned Albert as to his
intentions but Albert had great projects to put into
execution before going to the theatre and instead of making
any answer, he inquired if Signor Pastrini could procure him
a tailor. "A tailor," said the host "and for what?"
"To make us between now and tomorrow two Roman peasant
costumes," returned Albert. The host shook his head. "To
make you two costumes between now and tomorrow? I ask your
excellencies' pardon, but this is quite a French demand for
the next week you will not find a single tailor who would
consent to sew six buttons on a waistcoat if you paid him a
crown a piece for each button."
"Then I must give up the idea?"
"No we have them readymade. Leave all to me and
tomorrow, when you awake, you shall find a collection of
costumes with which you will be satisfied."
"My dear Albert," said Franz, "leave all to our host he has
already proved himself full of resources let us dine
quietly, and afterwards go and see "The Algerian Captive.'"
"Agreed," returned Albert "but remember, Signor Pastrini,
that both my friend and myself attach the greatest
importance to having tomorrow the costumes we have asked
for." The host again assured them they might rely on him,
and that their wishes should be attended to upon which
Franz and Albert mounted to their apartments, and proceeded
to disencumber themselves of their costumes. Albert, as he
took off his dress, carefully preserved the bunch of
violets it was his token reserved for the morrow. The two
friends sat down to table but they could not refrain from
remarking the difference between the Count of Monte Cristo's
table and that of Signor Pastrini. Truth compelled Franz, in
spite of the dislike he seemed to have taken to the count,
to confess that the advantage was not on Pastrini's side.
During dessert, the servant inquired at what time they
wished for the carriage. Albert and Franz looked at each
other, fearing really to abuse the count's kindness. The
servant understood them. "His excellency the Count of Monte
Cristo had," he said, "given positive orders that the
carriage was to remain at their lordships' orders all day,
and they could therefore dispose of it without fear of
indiscretion."
They resolved to profit by the count's courtesy, and ordered
the horses to be harnessed, while they substituted evening
dress for that which they had on, and which was somewhat the
worse for the numerous combats they had sustained. This
precaution taken, they went to the theatre, and installed
themselves in the count's box. During the first act, the
Countess G entered. Her first look was at the box where
she had seen the count the previous evening, so that she
perceived Franz and Albert in the place of the very person
concerning whom she had expressed so strange an opinion to
Franz. Her operaglass was so fixedly directed towards them,
that Franz saw it would be cruel not to satisfy her
curiosity and, availing himself of one of the privileges of
the spectators of the Italian theatres, who use their boxes
to hold receptions, the two friends went to pay their
respects to the countess. Scarcely had they entered, when
she motioned to Franz to assume the seat of honor. Albert,
in his turn, sat behind.
"Well," said she, hardly giving Franz time to sit down, "it
seems you have nothing better to do than to make the
acquaintance of this new Lord Ruthven, and you are already
the best friends in the world."
"Without being so far advanced as that, my dear countess,"
returned Franz, "I cannot deny that we have abused his good
nature all day."
"All day?"
"Yes this morning we breakfasted with him we rode in his
carriage all day, and now we have taken possession of his
box."
"You know him, then?"
"Yes, and no."
"How so?"
"It is a long story."
'Tell it to me."
"It would frighten you too much."
"So much the more reason."
"At least wait until the story has a conclusion."
"Very well I prefer complete histories but tell me how you
made his acquaintance? Did any one introduce you to him?"
"No it was he who introduced himself to us."
"When?"
"Last night, after we left you."
"Through what medium?"
"The very prosaic one of our landlord."
"He is staying, then, at the Hotel de Londres with you?"
"Not only in the same hotel, but on the same floor."
"What is his name  for, of course, you know?"
"The Count of Monte Cristo."
"That is not a family name?"
"No, it is the name of the island he has purchased."
"And he is a count?"
"A Tuscan count."
"Well, we must put up with that," said the countess, who was
herself from one of the oldest Venetian families. "What sort
of a man is he?"
"Ask the Vicomte de Morcerf."
"You hear, M. de Morcerf, I am referred to you," said the
countess.
"We should be very hard to please, madam," returned Albert,
"did we not think him delightful. A friend of ten years'
standing could not have done more for us, or with a more
perfect courtesy."
"Come," observed the countess, smiling, "I see my vampire is
only some millionaire, who has taken the appearance of Lara
in order to avoid being confounded with M. de Rothschild
and you have seen her?"
"Her?"
"The beautiful Greek of yesterday."
"No we heard, I think, the sound of her guzla, but she
remained perfectly invisible."
"When you say invisible," interrupted Albert, "it is only to
keep up the mystery for whom do you take the blue domino at
the window with the white curtains?"
"Where was this window with white hangings?" asked the
countess.
"At the Rospoli Palace."
"The count had three windows at the Rospoli Palace?"
"Yes. Did you pass through the Corso?"
"Yes."
"Well, did you notice two windows hung with yellow damask,
and one with white damask with a red cross? Those were the
count's windows."
"Why, he must be a nabob. Do you know what those three
windows were worth?"
"Two or three hundred Roman crowns?"
"Two or three thousand."
"The deuce."
"Does his island produce him such a revenue?"
"It does not bring him a baiocco."
"Then why did he purchase it?"
"For a whim."
"He is an original, then?"
"In reality," observed Albert, "he seemed to me somewhat
eccentric were he at Paris, and a frequenter of the
theatres, I should say he was a poor devil literally mad.
This morning he made two or three exits worthy of Didier or
Anthony." At this moment a fresh visitor entered, and,
according to custom, Franz gave up his seat to him. This
circumstance had, moreover, the effect of changing the
conversation an hour afterwards the two friends returned to
their hotel. Signor Pastrini had already set about procuring
their disguises for the morrow and he assured them that
they would be perfectly satisfied. The next morning, at nine
o'clock, he entered Franz's room, followed by a tailor, who
had eight or ten Roman peasant costumes on his arm they
selected two exactly alike, and charged the tailor to sew on
each of their hats about twenty yards of ribbon, and to
procure them two of the long silk sashes of different colors
with which the lower orders decorate themselves on
fetedays. Albert was impatient to see how he looked in his
new dress  a jacket and breeches of blue velvet, silk
stockings with clocks, shoes with buckles, and a silk
waistcoat. This picturesque attire set him off to great
advantage and when he had bound the scarf around his waist,
and when his hat, placed coquettishly on one side, let fall
on his shoulder a stream of ribbons, Franz was forced to
confess that costume has much to do with the physical
superiority we accord to certain nations. The Turks used to
be so picturesque with their long and flowing robes, but are
they not now hideous with their blue frocks buttoned up to
the chin, and their red caps, which make them look like a
bottle of wine with a red seal? Franz complimented Albert,
who looked at himself in the glass with an unequivocal smile
of satisfaction. They were thus engaged when the Count of
Monte Cristo entered.
"Gentlemen," said he, "although a companion is agreeable,
perfect freedom is sometimes still more agreeable. I come to
say that today, and for the remainder of the Carnival, I
leave the carriage entirely at your disposal. The host will
tell you I have three or four more, so that you will not
inconvenience me in any way. Make use of it, I pray you, for
your pleasure or your business."
The young men wished to decline, but they could find no good
reason for refusing an offer which was so agreeable to them.
The Count of Monte Cristo remained a quarter of an hour with
them, conversing on all subjects with the greatest ease. He
was, as we have already said, perfectly well acquainted with
the literature of all countries. A glance at the walls of
his salon proved to Franz and Albert that he was a
connoisseur of pictures. A few words he let fall showed them
that he was no stranger to the sciences, and he seemed much
occupied with chemistry. The two friends did not venture to
return the count the breakfast he had given them it would
have been too absurd to offer him in exchange for his
excellent table the very inferior one of Signor Pastrini.
They told him so frankly, and he received their excuses with
the air of a man who appreciated their delicacy. Albert was
charmed with the count's manners, and he was only prevented
from recognizing him for a perfect gentleman by reason of
his varied knowledge. The permission to do what he liked
with the carriage pleased him above all, for the fair
peasants had appeared in a most elegant carriage the
preceding evening, and Albert was not sorry to be upon an
equal footing with them. At halfpast one they descended,
the coachman and footman had put on their livery over their
disguises, which gave them a more ridiculous appearance than
ever, and which gained them the applause of Franz and
Albert. Albert had fastened the faded bunch of violets to
his buttonhole. At the first sound of the bell they
hastened into the Corso by the Via Vittoria. At the second
turn, a bunch of fresh violets, thrown from a carriage
filled with harlequins, indicated to Albert that, like
himself and his friend, the peasants had changed their
costume, also and whether it was the result of chance, or
whether a similar feeling had possessed them both, while he
had changed his costume they had assumed his.
Albert placed the fresh bouquet in his buttonhole, but he
kept the faded one in his hand and when he again met the
calash, he raised it to his lips, an action which seemed
greatly to amuse not only the fair lady who had thrown it,
but her joyous companions also. The day was as gay as the
preceding one, perhaps even more animated and noisy the
count appeared for an instant at his window, but when they
again passed he had disappeared. It is almost needless to
say that the flirtation between Albert and the fair peasant
continued all day. In the evening, on his return, Franz
found a letter from the embassy, informing him that he would
have the honor of being received by his holiness the next
day. At each previous visit he had made to Rome, he had
solicited and obtained the same favor and incited as much
by a religious feeling as by gratitude, he was unwilling to
quit the capital of the Christian world without laying his
respectful homage at the feet of one of St. Peter's
successors who has set the rare example of all the virtues.
He did not then think of the Carnival, for in spite of his
condescension and touching kindness, one cannot incline
one's self without awe before the venerable and noble old
man called Gregory XVI. On his return from the Vatican,
Franz carefully avoided the Corso he brought away with him
a treasure of pious thoughts, to which the mad gayety of the
maskers would have been profanation. At ten minutes past
five Albert entered overjoyed. The harlequin had reassumed
her peasant's costume, and as she passed she raised her
mask. She was charming. Franz congratulated Albert, who
received his congratulations with the air of a man conscious
that they are merited. He had recognized by certain
unmistakable signs, that his fair incognita belonged to the
aristocracy. He had made up his mind to write to her the
next day. Franz remarked, while he gave these details, that
Albert seemed to have something to ask of him, but that he
was unwilling to ask it. He insisted upon it, declaring
beforehand that he was willing to make any sacrifice the
other wished. Albert let himself be pressed just as long as
friendship required, and then avowed to Franz that he would
do him a great favor by allowing him to occupy the carriage
alone the next day. Albert attributed to Franz's absence the
extreme kindness of the fair peasant in raising her mask.
Franz was not sufficiently egotistical to stop Albert in the
middle of an adventure that promised to prove so agreeable
to his curiosity and so flattering to his vanity. He felt
assured that the perfect indiscretion of his friend would
duly inform him of all that happened and as, during three
years that he had travelled all over Italy, a similar piece
of good fortune had never fallen to his share, Franz was by
no means sorry to learn how to act on such an occasion. He
therefore promised Albert that he would content himself the
morrow with witnessing the Carnival from the windows of the
Rospoli Palace.
The next morning he saw Albert pass and repass, holding an
enormous bouquet, which he doubtless meant to make the
bearer of his amorous epistle. This belief was changed into
certainty when Franz saw the bouquet conspicuous by a
circle of white camellias in the hand of a charming
harlequin dressed in rosecolored satin. The evening was no
longer joy, but delirium. Albert nothing doubted but that
the fair unknown would reply in the same manner. Franz
anticipated his wishes by saying that the noise fatigued
him, and that he should pass the next day in writing and
looking over his journal. Albert was not deceived, for the
next evening Franz saw him enter triumphantly shaking a
folded paper which he held by one corner. "Well," said he,
"was I mistaken?"
"She has answered you" cried Franz.
"Read." This word was pronounced in a manner impossible to
describe. Franz took the letter, and read 
Tuesday evening, at seven o'clock, descend from your
carriage opposite the Via dei Pontefici, and follow the
Roman peasant who snatches your torch from you. When you
arrive at the first step of the church of San Giacomo, be
sure to fasten a knot of rosecolored ribbons to the
shoulder of your harlequin costume, in order that you may be
recognized. Until then you will not see me.
Constancy and Discretion.
"Well," asked he, when Franz had finished, "what do you
think of that?"
"I think that the adventure is assuming a very agreeable
appearance."
"I think so, also," replied Albert "and I very much fear
you will go alone to the Duke of Bracciano's ball." Franz
and Albert had received that morning an invitation from the
celebrated Roman banker. "Take care, Albert," said Franz.
"All the nobility of Rome will be present, and if your fair
incognita belong to the higher class of society, she must go
there."
"Whether she goes there or not, my opinion is still the
same," returned Albert. "You have read the letter?"
"Yes."
"You know how imperfectly the women of the mezzo cito are
educated in Italy?" This is the name of the lower class.
"Yes."
"Well, read the letter again. Look at the writing, and find
if you can, any blemish in the language or orthography."
The writing was, in reality, charming, and the orthography
irreproachable. "You are born to good fortune," said Franz,
as he returned the letter.
"Laugh as much as you will," replied Albert, "I am in love."
"You alarm me," cried Franz. "I see that I shall not only go
alone to the Duke of Bracciano's, but also return to
Florence alone."
"If my unknown be as amiable as she is beautiful," said
Albert, "I shall fix myself at Rome for six weeks, at least.
I adore Rome, and I have always had a great taste for
archaeology."
"Come, two or three more such adventures, and I do not
despair of seeing you a member of the Academy." Doubtless
Albert was about to discuss seriously his right to the
academic chair when they were informed that dinner was
ready. Albert's love had not taken away his appetite. He
hastened with Franz to seat himself, free to recommence the
discussion after dinner. After dinner, the Count of Monte
Cristo was announced. They had not seen him for two days.
Signor Pastrini informed them that business had called him
to Civita Vecchia. He had started the previous evening, and
had only returned an hour since. He was charming. Whether he
kept a watch over himself, or whether by accident he did not
sound the acrimonious chords that in other circumstances had
been touched, he was tonight like everybody else. The man
was an enigma to Franz. The count must feel sure that Franz
recognized him and yet he had not let fall a single word
indicating any previous acquaintance between them. On his
side, however great Franz's desire was to allude to their
former interview, the fear of being disagreeable to the man
who had loaded him and his friend with kindness prevented
him from mentioning it. The count had learned that the two
friends had sent to secure a box at the Argentina Theatre,
and were told they were all let. In consequence, he brought
them the key of his own  at least such was the apparent
motive of his visit. Franz and Albert made some difficulty,
alleging their fear of depriving him of it but the count
replied that, as he was going to the Palli Theatre, the box
at the Argentina Theatre would be lost if they did not
profit by it. This assurance determined the two friends to
accept it.
Franz had by degrees become accustomed to the count's
pallor, which had so forcibly struck him at their first
meeting. He could not refrain from admiring the severe
beauty of his features, the only defect, or rather the
principal quality of which was the pallor. Truly, a Byronic
hero Franz could not, we will not say see him, but even
think of him without imagining his stern head upon Manfred's
shoulders, or beneath Lara's helmet. His forehead was marked
with the line that indicates the constant presence of bitter
thoughts he had the fiery eyes that seem to penetrate to
the very soul, and the haughty and disdainful upper lip that
gives to the words it utters a peculiar character that
impresses them on the minds of those to whom they are
addressed. The count was no longer young. He was at least
forty and yet it was easy to understand that he was formed
to rule the young men with whom he associated at present.
And, to complete his resemblance with the fantastic heroes
of the English poet, the count seemed to have the power of
fascination. Albert was constantly expatiating on their good
fortune in meeting such a man. Franz was less enthusiastic
but the count exercised over him also the ascendency a
strong mind always acquires over a mind less domineering. He
thought several times of the project the count had of
visiting Paris and he had no doubt but that, with his
eccentric character, his characteristic face, and his
colossal fortune, he would produce a great effect there. And
yet he did not wish to be at Paris when the count was there.
The evening passed as evenings mostly pass at Italian
theatres that is, not in listening to the music, but in
paying visits and conversing. The Countess G wished to
revive the subject of the count, but Franz announced he had
something far newer to tell her, and, in spite of Albert's
demonstrations of false modesty, he informed the countess of
the great event which had preoccupied them for the last
three days. As similar intrigues are not uncommon in Italy,
if we may credit travellers, the comtess did not manifest
the least incredulity, but congratulated Albert on his
success. They promised, upon separating, to meet at the Duke
of Bracciano's ball, to which all Rome was invited. The
heroine of the bouquet kept her word she gave Albert no
sign of her existence the morrow or the day after.
At length Tuesday came, the last and most tumultuous day of
the Carnival. On Tuesday, the theatres open at ten o'clock
in the morning, as Lent begins after eight at night. On
Tuesday, all those who through want of money, time, or
enthusiasm, have not been to see the Carnival before, mingle
in the gayety, and contribute to the noise and excitement.
From two o'clock till five Franz and Albert followed in the
fete, exchanging handfuls of confetti with the other
carriages and the pedestrians, who crowded amongst the
horses' feet and the carriage wheels without a single
accident, a single dispute, or a single fight. The fetes are
veritable pleasure days to the Italians. The author of this
history, who has resided five or six years in Italy, does
not recollect to have ever seen a ceremony interrupted by
one of those events so common in other countries. Albert was
triumphant in his harlequin costume. A knot of rosecolored
ribbons fell from his shoulder almost to the ground. In
order that there might be no confusion, Franz wore his
peasant's costume.
As the day advanced, the tumult became greater. There was
not on the pavement, in the carriages, at the windows, a
single tongue that was silent, a single arm that did not
move. It was a human storm, made up of a thunder of cries,
and a hail of sweetmeats, flowers, eggs, oranges, and
nosegays. At three o'clock the sound of fireworks, let off
on the Piazza del Popolo and the Piazza di Venezia heard
with difficulty amid the din and confusion announced that
the races were about to begin. The races, like the moccoli,
are one of the episodes peculiar to the last days of the
Carnival. At the sound of the fireworks the carriages
instantly broke ranks, and retired by the adjacent streets.
All these evolutions are executed with an inconceivable
address and marvellous rapidity, without the police
interfering in the matter. The pedestrians ranged themselves
against the walls then the trampling of horses and the
clashing of steel were heard. A detachment of carbineers,
fifteen abreast, galloped up the Corso in order to clear it
for the barberi. When the detachment arrived at the Piazza
di Venezia, a second volley of fireworks was discharged, to
announce that the street was clear. Almost instantly, in the
midst of a tremendous and general outcry, seven or eight
horses, excited by the shouts of three hundred thousand
spectators, passed by like lightning. Then the Castle of
Saint Angelo fired three cannon to indicate that number
three had won. Immediately, without any other signal, the
carriages moved on, flowing on towards the Corso, down all
the streets, like torrents pent up for a while, which again
flow into the parent river and the immense stream again
continued its course between its two granite banks.
A new source of noise and movement was added to the crowd.
The sellers of moccoletti entered on the scene. The moccoli,
or moccoletti, are candles which vary in size from the
pascal taper to the rushlight, and which give to each actor
in the great final scene of the Carnival two very serious
problems to grapple with,  first, how to keep his own
moccoletto alight and secondly, how to extinguish the
moccoletti of others. The moccoletto is like life man has
found but one means of transmitting it, and that one comes
from God. But he has discovered a thousand means of taking
it away, and the devil has somewhat aided him. The
moccoletto is kindled by approaching it to a light. But who
can describe the thousand means of extinguishing the
moccoletto?  the gigantic bellows, the monstrous
extinguishers, the superhuman fans. Every one hastened to
purchase moccoletti  Franz and Albert among the rest.
The night was rapidly approaching and already, at the cry
of "Moccoletti" repeated by the shrill voices of a thousand
vendors, two or three stars began to burn among the crowd.
It was a signal. At the end of ten minutes fifty thousand
lights glittered, descending from the Palazzo di Venezia to
the Piazza del Popolo, and mounting from the Piazzo del
Popolo to the Palazzo di Venezia. It seemed like the fete of
jacko'lanterns. It is impossible to form any idea of it
without having seen it. Suppose that all the stars had
descended from the sky and mingled in a wild dance on the
face of the earth the whole accompanied by cries that were
never heard in any other part of the world. The facchino
follows the prince, the Transteverin the citizen, every one
blowing, extinguishing, relighting. Had old AEolus appeared
at this moment, he would have been proclaimed king of the
moccoli, and Aquilo the heirpresumptive to the throne. This
battle of folly and flame continued for two hours the Corso
was light as day the features of the spectators on the
third and fourth stories were visible. Every five minutes
Albert took out his watch at length it pointed to seven.
The two friends were in the Via dei Pontefici. Albert sprang
out, bearing his moccoletto in his hand. Two or three masks
strove to knock his moccoletto out of his hand but Albert,
a firstrate pugilist, sent them rolling in the street, one
after the other, and continued his course towards the church
of San Giacomo. The steps were crowded with masks, who
strove to snatch each other's torches. Franz followed Albert
with his eyes, and saw him mount the first step. Instantly a
mask, wearing the wellknown costume of a peasant woman,
snatched his moccoletto from him without his offering any
resistance. Franz was too far off to hear what they said
but, without doubt, nothing hostile passed, for he saw
Albert disappear arminarm with the peasant girl. He
watched them pass through the crowd for some time, but at
length he lost sight of them in the Via Macello. Suddenly
the bell that gives the signal for the end of the carnival
sounded, and at the same instant all the moccoletti were
extinguished as if by enchantment. It seemed as though one
immense blast of the wind had extinguished every one. Franz
found himself in utter darkness. No sound was audible save
that of the carriages that were carrying the maskers home
nothing was visible save a few lights that burnt behind the
windows. The Carnival was over.
Chapter 
The Catacombs of Saint Sebastian.
In his whole life, perhaps, Franz had never before
experienced so sudden an impression, so rapid a transition
from gayety to sadness, as in this moment. It seemed as
though Rome, under the magic breath of some demon of the
night, had suddenly changed into a vast tomb. By a chance,
which added yet more to the intensity of the darkness, the
moon, which was on the wane, did not rise until eleven
o'clock, and the streets which the young man traversed were
plunged in the deepest obscurity. The distance was short,
and at the end of ten minutes his carriage, or rather the
count's, stopped before the Hotel de Londres. Dinner was
waiting, but as Albert had told him that he should not
return so soon, Franz sat down without him. Signor Pastrini,
who had been accustomed to see them dine together, inquired
into the cause of his absence, but Franz merely replied that
Albert had received on the previous evening an invitation
which he had accepted. The sudden extinction of the
moccoletti, the darkness which had replaced the light, and
the silence which had succeeded the turmoil, had left in
Franz's mind a certain depression which was not free from
uneasiness. He therefore dined very silently, in spite of
the officious attention of his host, who presented himself
two or three times to inquire if he wanted anything.
Franz resolved to wait for Albert as late as possible. He
ordered the carriage, therefore, for eleven o'clock,
desiring Signor Pastrini to inform him the moment that
Albert returned to the hotel. At eleven o'clock Albert had
not come back. Franz dressed himself, and went out, telling
his host that he was going to pass the night at the Duke of
Bracciano's. The house of the Duke of Bracciano is one of
the most delightful in Rome, the duchess, one of the last
heiresses of the Colonnas, does its honors with the most
consummate grace, and thus their fetes have a European
celebrity. Franz and Albert had brought to Rome letters of
introduction to them, and their first question on his
arrival was to inquire the whereabouts of his travelling
companion. Franz replied that he had left him at the moment
they were about to extinguish the moccoli, and that he had
lost sight of him in the Via Macello. "Then he has not
returned?" said the duke.
"I waited for him until this hour," replied Franz.
"And do you know whither he went?"
"No, not precisely however, I think it was something very
like a rendezvous."
"Diavolo" said the duke, "this is a bad day, or rather a
bad night, to be out late is it not, countess" These words
were addressed to the Countess G , who had just
arrived, and was leaning on the arm of Signor Torlonia, the
duke's brother.
"I think, on the contrary, that it is a charming night,"
replied the countess, "and those who are here will complain
of but one thing  its too rapid flight."
"I am not speaking," said the duke with a smile, "of the
persons who are here the men run no other danger than that
of falling in love with you, and the women of falling ill of
jealousy at seeing you so lovely I meant persons who were
out in the streets of Rome."
"Ah," asked the countess, "who is out in the streets of Rome
at this hour, unless it be to go to a ball?"
"Our friend, Albert de Morcerf, countess, whom I left in
pursuit of his unknown about seven o'clock this evening,"
said Franz, "and whom I have not seen since."
"And don't you know where he is?"
"Not at all."
"Is he armed?"
"He is in masquerade."
"You should not have allowed him to go," said the duke to
Franz "you, who know Rome better than he does."
"You might as well have tried to stop number three of the
barberi, who gained the prize in the race today," replied
Franz "and then moreover, what could happen to him?"
"Who can tell? The night is gloomy, and the Tiber is very
near the Via Macello." Franz felt a shudder run through his
veins at observing that the feeling of the duke and the
countess was so much in unison with his own personal
disquietude. "I informed them at the hotel that I had the
honor of passing the night here, duke," said Franz, "and
desired them to come and inform me of his return."
"Ah," replied the duke, "here I think, is one of my servants
who is seeking you."
The duke was not mistaken when he saw Franz, the servant
came up to him. "Your excellency," he said, "the master of
the Hotel de Londres has sent to let you know that a man is
waiting for you with a letter from the Viscount of Morcerf."
"A letter from the viscount" exclaimed Franz.
"Yes."
"And who is the man?"
"I do not know."
"Why did he not bring it to me here?"
"The messenger did not say."
"And where is the messenger?"
"He went away directly he saw me enter the ballroom to find
you."
"Oh," said the countess to Franz, "go with all speed  poor
young man Perhaps some accident has happened to him."
"I will hasten," replied Franz.
"Shall we see you again to give us any information?"
inquired the countess.
"Yes, if it is not any serious affair, otherwise I cannot
answer as to what I may do myself."
"Be prudent, in any event," said the countess.
"Oh, pray be assured of that." Franz took his hat and went
away in haste. He had sent away his carriage with orders for
it to fetch him at two o'clock fortunately the Palazzo
Bracciano, which is on one side in the Corso, and on the
other in the Square of the Holy Apostles, is hardly ten
minutes' walk from the Hotel de Londres. As he came near the
hotel, Franz saw a man in the middle of the street. He had
no doubt that it was the messenger from Albert. The man was
wrapped up in a large cloak. He went up to him, but, to his
extreme astonishment, the stranger first addressed him.
"What wants your excellency of me?" inquired the man,
retreating a step or two, as if to keep on his guard.
"Are not you the person who brought me a letter," inquired
Franz, "from the Viscount of Morcerf?"
"Your excellency lodges at Pastrini's hotel?"
"I do."
"Your excellency is the travelling companion of the
viscount?"
"I am."
"Your excellency's name" 
"Is the Baron Franz d'Epinay."
"Then it is to your excellency that this letter is
addressed."
"Is there any answer?" inquired Franz, taking the letter
from him.
"Yes  your friend at least hopes so."
"Come upstairs with me, and I will give it to you."
"I prefer waiting here," said the messenger, with a smile.
"And why?"
"Your excellency will know when you have read the letter."
"Shall I find you here, then?"
"Certainly."
Franz entered the hotel. On the staircase he met Signor
Pastrini. "Well?" said the landlord.
"Well  what?" responded Franz.
"You have seen the man who desired to speak with you from
your friend?" he asked of Franz.
"Yes, I have seen him," he replied, "and he has handed this
letter to me. Light the candles in my apartment, if you
please." The innkeeper gave orders to a servant to go
before Franz with a light. The young man had found Signor
Pastrini looking very much alarmed, and this had only made
him the more anxious to read Albert's letter and so he went
instantly towards the waxlight, and unfolded it. It was
written and signed by Albert. Franz read it twice before he
could comprehend what it contained. It was thus worded 
My Dear Fellow,  The moment you have received this, have
the kindness to take the letter of credit from my
pocketbook, which you will find in the square drawer of the
secretary add your own to it, if it be not sufficient. Run
to Torlonia, draw from him instantly four thousand piastres,
and give them to the bearer. It is urgent that I should have
this money without delay. I do not say more, relying on you
as you may rely on me. Your friend,
Albert de Morcerf.
P.S.  I now believe in Italian banditti.
Below these lines were written, in a strange hand, the
following in Italian 
Se alle sei della mattina le quattro mile piastre non sono
nelle mie mani, alla sette il conte Alberto avra cessato di
vivere.
Luigi Vampa.
"If by six in the morning the four thousand piastres are not
in my hands, by seven o'clock the Count Albert will have
ceased to live."
This second signature explained everything to Franz, who now
understood the objection of the messenger to coming up into
the apartment the street was safer for him. Albert, then,
had fallen into the hands of the famous bandit chief, in
whose existence he had for so long a time refused to
believe. There was no time to lose. He hastened to open the
secretary, and found the pocketbook in the drawer, and in
it the letter of credit. There were in all six thousand
piastres, but of these six thousand Albert had already
expended three thousand. As to Franz, he had no letter of
credit, as he lived at Florence, and had only come to Rome
to pass seven or eight days he had brought but a hundred
louis, and of these he had not more than fifty left. Thus
seven or eight hundred piastres were wanting to them both to
make up the sum that Albert required. True, he might in such
a case rely on the kindness of Signor Torlonia. He was,
therefore, about to return to the Palazzo Bracciano without
loss of time, when suddenly a luminous idea crossed his
mind. He remembered the Count of Monte Cristo. Franz was
about to ring for Signor Pastrini, when that worthy
presented himself. "My dear sir," he said, hastily, "do you
know if the count is within?"
"Yes, your excellency he has this moment returned."
"Is he in bed?"
"I should say no."
"Then ring at his door, if you please, and request him to be
so kind as to give me an audience." Signor Pastrini did as
he was desired, and returning five minutes after, he said,
"The count awaits your excellency." Franz went along the
corridor, and a servant introduced him to the count. He was
in a small room which Franz had not yet seen, and which was
surrounded with divans. The count came towards him. "Well,
what good wind blows you hither at this hour?" said he
"have you come to sup with me? It would be very kind of
you."
"No I have come to speak to you of a very serious matter."
"A serious matter," said the count, looking at Franz with
the earnestness usual to him "and what may it be?"
"Are we alone?"
"Yes," replied the count, going to the door, and returning.
Franz gave him Albert's letter. "Read that," he said. The
count read it.
"Well, well" said he.
"Did you see the postscript?"
"I did, indeed.
""Se alle sei della mattina le quattro mile piastre non sono
nelle mie mani, alla sette il conte Alberto avra cessato di
vivere.
""Luigi Vampa.'"
"What think you of that?" inquired Franz.
"Have you the money he demands?"
"Yes, all but eight hundred piastres." The count went to his
secretary, opened it, and pulling out a drawer filled with
gold, said to Franz,  "I hope you will not offend me by
applying to any one but myself."
"You see, on the contrary, I come to you first and
instantly," replied Franz.
"And I thank you have what you will" and he made a sign to
Franz to take what he pleased.
"Is it absolutely necessary, then, to send the money to
Luigi Vampa?" asked the young man, looking fixedly in his
turn at the count.
"Judge for yourself," replied he. "The postscript is
explicit."
"I think that if you would take the trouble of reflecting,
you could find a way of simplifying the negotiation," said
Franz.
"How so?" returned the count, with surprise.
"If we were to go together to Luigi Vampa, I am sure he
would not refuse you Albert's freedom."
"What influence can I possibly have over a bandit?"
"Have you not just rendered him a service that can never be
forgotten?"
"What is that?"
"Have you not saved Peppino's life?"
"Well, well," said the count, "who told you that?"
"No matter I know it." The count knit his brows, and
remained silent an instant. "And if I went to seek Vampa,
would you accompany me?"
"If my society would not be disagreeable."
"Be it so. It is a lovely night, and a walk without Rome
will do us both good."
"Shall I take any arms?"
"For what purpose?"
"Any money?"
"It is useless. Where is the man who brought the letter?"
"In the street."
"He awaits the answer?"
"Yes."
"I must learn where we are going. I will summon him hither."
"It is useless he would not come up."
"To your apartments, perhaps but he will not make any
difficulty at entering mine." The count went to the window
of the apartment that looked on to the street, and whistled
in a peculiar manner. The man in the mantle quitted the
wall, and advanced into the middle of the street. "Salite"
said the count, in the same tone in which he would have
given an order to his servant. The messenger obeyed without
the least hesitation, but rather with alacrity, and,
mounting the steps at a bound, entered the hotel five
seconds afterwards he was at the door of the room. "Ah, it
is you, Peppino," said the count. But Peppino, instead of
answering, threw himself on his knees, seized the count's
hand, and covered it with kisses. "Ah," said the count, "you
have, then, not forgotten that I saved your life that is
strange, for it is a week ago."
"No, excellency and never shall I forget it," returned
Peppino, with an accent of profound gratitude.
"Never? That is a long time but it is something that you
believe so. Rise and answer." Peppino glanced anxiously at
Franz. "Oh, you may speak before his excellency," said he
"he is one of my friends. You allow me to give you this
title?" continued the count in French, "it is necessary to
excite this man's confidence."
"You can speak before me," said Franz "I am a friend of the
count's."
"Good" returned Peppino. "I am ready to answer any
questions your excellency may address to me."
"How did the Viscount Albert fall into Luigi's hands?"
"Excellency, the Frenchman's carriage passed several times
the one in which was Teresa."
"The chief's mistress?"
"Yes. The Frenchman threw her a bouquet Teresa returned it
all this with the consent of the chief, who was in the
carriage."
"What?" cried Franz, "was Luigi Vampa in the carriage with
the Roman peasants?"
"It was he who drove, disguised as the coachman," replied
Peppino.
"Well?" said the count.
"Well, then, the Frenchman took off his mask Teresa, with
the chief's consent, did the same. The Frenchman asked for a
rendezvous Teresa gave him one  only, instead of Teresa,
it was Beppo who was on the steps of the church of San
Giacomo."
"What" exclaimed Franz, "the peasant girl who snatched his
mocoletto from him" 
"Was a lad of fifteen," replied Peppino. "But it was no
disgrace to your friend to have been deceived Beppo has
taken in plenty of others."
"And Beppo led him outside the walls?" said the count.
"Exactly so a carriage was waiting at the end of the Via
Macello. Beppo got in, inviting the Frenchman to follow him,
and he did not wait to be asked twice. He gallantly offered
the righthand seat to Beppo, and sat by him. Beppo told him
he was going to take him to a villa a league from Rome the
Frenchman assured him he would follow him to the end of the
world. The coachman went up the Via di Ripetta and the Porta
San Paola and when they were two hundred yards outside, as
the Frenchman became somewhat too forward, Beppo put a brace
of pistols to his head, the coachman pulled up and did the
same. At the same time, four of the band, who were concealed
on the banks of the Almo, surrounded the carriage. The
Frenchman made some resistance, and nearly strangled Beppo
but he could not resist five armed men, and was forced to
yield. They made him get out, walk along the banks of the
river, and then brought him to Teresa and Luigi, who were
waiting for him in the catacombs of St. Sebastian."
"Well," said the count, turning towards Franz, "it seems to
me that this is a very likely story. What do you say to it?"
"Why, that I should think it very amusing," replied Franz,
"if it had happened to any one but poor Albert."
"And, in truth, if you had not found me here," said the
count, "it might have proved a gallant adventure which would
have cost your friend dear but now, be assured, his alarm
will be the only serious consequence."
"And shall we go and find him?" inquired Franz.
"Oh, decidedly, sir. He is in a very picturesque place  do
you know the catacombs of St. Sebastian?"
"I was never in them but I have often resolved to visit
them."
"Well, here is an opportunity made to your hand, and it
would be difficult to contrive a better. Have you a
carriage?"
"No."
"That is of no consequence I always have one ready, day and
night."
"Always ready?"
"Yes. I am a very capricious being, and I should tell you
that sometimes when I rise, or after my dinner, or in the
middle of the night, I resolve on starting for some
particular point, and away I go." The count rang, and a
footman appeared. "Order out the carriage," he said, "and
remove the pistols which are in the holsters. You need not
awaken the coachman Ali will drive." In a very short time
the noise of wheels was heard, and the carriage stopped at
the door. The count took out his watch. "Halfpast twelve,"
he said. "We might start at five o'clock and be in time, but
the delay may cause your friend to pass an uneasy night, and
therefore we had better go with all speed to extricate him
from the hands of the infidels. Are you still resolved to
accompany me?"
"More determined than ever."
"Well, then, come along."
Franz and the count went downstairs, accompanied by Peppino.
At the door they found the carriage. Ali was on the box, in
whom Franz recognized the dumb slave of the grotto of Monte
Cristo. Franz and the count got into the carriage. Peppino
placed himself beside Ali, and they set off at a rapid pace.
Ali had received his instructions, and went down the Corso,
crossed the Campo Vaccino, went up the Strada San Gregorio,
and reached the gates of St. Sebastian. Then the porter
raised some difficulties, but the Count of Monte Cristo
produced a permit from the governor of Rome, allowing him to
leave or enter the city at any hour of the day or night the
portcullis was therefore raised, the porter had a louis for
his trouble, and they went on their way. The road which the
carriage now traversed was the ancient Appian Way, and
bordered with tombs. From time to time, by the light of the
moon, which began to rise, Franz imagined that he saw
something like a sentinel appear at various points among the
ruins, and suddenly retreat into the darkness on a signal
from Peppino. A short time before they reached the Baths of
Caracalla the carriage stopped, Peppino opened the door, and
the count and Franz alighted.
"In ten minutes," said the count to his companion, "we shall
be there."
He then took Peppino aside, gave him an order in a low
voice, and Peppino went away, taking with him a torch,
brought with them in the carriage. Five minutes elapsed,
during which Franz saw the shepherd going along a narrow
path that led over the irregular and broken surface of the
Campagna and finally he disappeared in the midst of the
tall red herbage, which seemed like the bristling mane of an
enormous lion. "Now," said the count, "let us follow him."
Franz and the count in their turn then advanced along the
same path, which, at the distance of a hundred paces, led
them over a declivity to the bottom of a small valley. They
then perceived two men conversing in the obscurity. "Ought
we to go on?" asked Franz of the count "or shall we wait
awhile?"
"Let us go on Peppino will have warned the sentry of our
coming." One of the two men was Peppino, and the other a
bandit on the lookout. Franz and the count advanced, and the
bandit saluted them. "Your excellency," said Peppino,
addressing the count, "if you will follow me, the opening of
the catacombs is close at hand."
"Go on, then," replied the count. They came to an opening
behind a clump of bushes and in the midst of a pile of
rocks, by which a man could scarcely pass. Peppino glided
first into this crevice after they got along a few paces
the passage widened. Peppino passed, lighted his torch, and
turned to see if they came after him. The count first
reached an open space and Franz followed him closely. The
passageway sloped in a gentle descent, enlarging as they
proceeded still Franz and the count were compelled to
advance in a stooping posture, and were scarcely able to
proceed abreast of one another. They went on a hundred and
fifty paces in this way, and then were stopped by, "Who
comes there?" At the same time they saw the reflection of a
torch on a carbine barrel.
"A friend" responded Peppino and, advancing alone towards
the sentry, he said a few words to him in a low tone and
then he, like the first, saluted the nocturnal visitors,
making a sign that they might proceed.
Behind the sentinel was a staircase with twenty steps. Franz
and the count descended these, and found themselves in a
mortuary chamber. Five corridors diverged like the rays of a
star, and the walls, dug into niches, which were arranged
one above the other in the shape of coffins, showed that
they were at last in the catacombs. Down one of the
corridors, whose extent it was impossible to determine, rays
of light were visible. The count laid his hand on Franz's
shoulder. "Would you like to see a camp of bandits in
repose?" he inquired.
"Exceedingly," replied Franz.
"Come with me, then. Peppino, put out the torch." Peppino
obeyed, and Franz and the count were in utter darkness,
except that fifty paces in advance of them a reddish glare,
more evident since Peppino had put out his torch, was
visible along the wall. They advanced silently, the count
guiding Franz as if he had the singular faculty of seeing in
the dark. Franz himself, however, saw his way more plainly
in proportion as he went on towards the light, which served
in some manner as a guide. Three arcades were before them,
and the middle one was used as a door. These arcades opened
on one side into the corridor where the count and Franz
were, and on the other into a large square chamber, entirely
surrounded by niches similar to those of which we have
spoken. In the midst of this chamber were four stones, which
had formerly served as an altar, as was evident from the
cross which still surmounted them. A lamp, placed at the
base of a pillar, lighted up with its pale and flickering
flame the singular scene which presented itself to the eyes
of the two visitors concealed in the shadow. A man was
seated with his elbow leaning on the column, and was reading
with his back turned to the arcades, through the openings of
which the newcomers contemplated him. This was the chief of
the band, Luigi Vampa. Around him, and in groups, according
to their fancy, lying in their mantles, or with their backs
against a sort of stone bench, which went all round the
columbarium, were to be seen twenty brigands or more, each
having his carbine within reach. At the other end, silent,
scarcely visible, and like a shadow, was a sentinel, who was
walking up and down before a grotto, which was only
distinguishable because in that spot the darkness seemed
more dense than elsewhere. When the count thought Franz had
gazed sufficiently on this picturesque tableau, he raised
his finger to his lips, to warn him to be silent, and,
ascending the three steps which led to the corridor of the
columbarium, entered the chamber by the middle arcade, and
advanced towards Vampa, who was so intent on the book before
him that he did not hear the noise of his footsteps.
"Who comes there?" cried the sentinel, who was less
abstracted, and who saw by the lamplight a shadow
approaching his chief. At this challenge, Vampa rose
quickly, drawing at the same moment a pistol from his
girdle. In a moment all the bandits were on their feet, and
twenty carbines were levelled at the count. "Well," said he
in a voice perfectly calm, and no muscle of his countenance
disturbed, "well, my dear Vampa, it appears to me that you
receive a friend with a great deal of ceremony."
"Ground arms," exclaimed the chief, with an imperative sign
of the hand, while with the other he took off his hat
respectfully then, turning to the singular personage who
had caused this scene, he said, "Your pardon, your
excellency, but I was so far from expecting the honor of a
visit, that I did not really recognize you."
"It seems that your memory is equally short in everything,
Vampa," said the count, "and that not only do you forget
people's faces, but also the conditions you make with them."
"What conditions have I forgotten, your excellency?"
inquired the bandit, with the air of a man who, having
committed an error, is anxious to repair it.
"Was it not agreed," asked the count, "that not only my
person, but also that of my friends, should be respected by
you?"
"And how have I broken that treaty, your excellency?"
"You have this evening carried off and conveyed hither the
Vicomte Albert de Morcerf. Well," continued the count, in a
tone that made Franz shudder, "this young gentleman is one
of my friends  this young gentleman lodges in the same
hotel as myself  this young gentleman has been up and down
the Corso for eight hours in my private carriage, and yet, I
repeat to you, you have carried him off, and conveyed him
hither, and," added the count, taking the letter from his
pocket, "you have set a ransom on him, as if he were an
utter stranger."
"Why did you not tell me all this  you?" inquired the
brigand chief, turning towards his men, who all retreated
before his look. "Why have you caused me thus to fail in my
word towards a gentleman like the count, who has all our
lives in his hands? By heavens, if I thought one of you knew
that the young gentleman was the friend of his excellency, I
would blow his brains out with my own hand"
"Well," said the count, turning towards Franz, "I told you
there was some mistake in this."
"Are you not alone?" asked Vampa with uneasiness.
"I am with the person to whom this letter was addressed, and
to whom I desired to prove that Luigi Vampa was a man of his
word. Come, your excellency," the count added, turning to
Franz, "here is Luigi Vampa, who will himself express to you
his deep regret at the mistake he has committed." Franz
approached, the chief advancing several steps to meet him.
"Welcome among us, your excellency," he said to him "you
heard what the count just said, and also my reply let me
add that I would not for the four thousand piastres at which
I had fixed your friend's ransom, that this had happened."
"But," said Franz, looking round him uneasily, "where is the
Viscount?  I do not see him."
"Nothing has happened to him, I hope," said the count
frowningly.
"The prisoner is there," replied Vampa, pointing to the
hollow space in front of which the bandit was on guard, "and
I will go myself and tell him he is free." The chief went
towards the place he had pointed out as Albert's prison, and
Franz and the count followed him. "What is the prisoner
doing?" inquired Vampa of the sentinel.
"Ma foi, captain," replied the sentry, "I do not know for
the last hour I have not heard him stir."
"Come in, your excellency," said Vampa. The count and Franz
ascended seven or eight steps after the chief, who drew back
a bolt and opened a door. Then, by the gleam of a lamp,
similar to that which lighted the columbarium, Albert was to
be seen wrapped up in a cloak which one of the bandits had
lent him, lying in a corner in profound slumber. "Come,"
said the count, smiling with his own peculiar smile, "not so
bad for a man who is to be shot at seven o'clock tomorrow
morning." Vampa looked at Albert with a kind of admiration
he was not insensible to such a proof of courage.
"You are right, your excellency," he said "this must be one
of your friends." Then going to Albert, he touched him on
the shoulder, saying, "Will your excellency please to
awaken?" Albert stretched out his arms, rubbed his eyelids,
and opened his eyes. "Oh," said he, "is it you, captain? You
should have allowed me to sleep. I had such a delightful
dream. I was dancing the galop at Torlonia's with the
Countess G ." Then he drew his watch from his pocket,
that he might see how time sped.
"Halfpast one only?" said he. "Why the devil do you rouse
me at this hour?"
"To tell you that you are free, your excellency."
"My dear fellow," replied Albert, with perfect ease of mind,
"remember, for the future, Napoleon's maxim, "Never awaken
me but for bad news' if you had let me sleep on, I should
have finished my galop, and have been grateful to you all my
life. So, then, they have paid my ransom?"
"No, your excellency."
"Well, then, how am I free?"
"A person to whom I can refuse nothing has come to demand
you."
"Come hither?"
"Yes, hither."
"Really? Then that person is a most amiable person." Albert
looked around and perceived Franz. "What," said he, "is it
you, my dear Franz, whose devotion and friendship are thus
displayed?"
"No, not I," replied Franz, "but our neighbor, the Count of
Monte Cristo."
"Oh. my dear count." said Albert gayly, arranging his cravat
and wristbands, "you are really most kind, and I hope you
will consider me as under eternal obligations to you, in the
first place for the carriage, and in the next for this
visit," and he put out his hand to the Count, who shuddered
as he gave his own, but who nevertheless did give it. The
bandit gazed on this scene with amazement he was evidently
accustomed to see his prisoners tremble before him, and yet
here was one whose gay temperament was not for a moment
altered as for Franz, he was enchanted at the way in which
Albert had sustained the national honor in the presence of
the bandit. "My dear Albert," he said, "if you will make
haste, we shall yet have time to finish the night at
Torlonia's. You may conclude your interrupted galop, so that
you will owe no illwill to Signor Luigi, who has, indeed,
throughout this whole affair acted like a gentleman."
"You are decidedly right, and we may reach the Palazzo by
two o'clock. Signor Luigi," continued Albert, "is there any
formality to fulfil before I take leave of your excellency?"
"None, sir," replied the bandit, "you are as free as air."
"Well, then, a happy and merry life to you. Come, gentlemen,
come."
And Albert, followed by Franz and the count, descended the
staircase, crossed the square chamber, where stood all the
bandits, hat in hand. "Peppino," said the brigand chief,
"give me the torch."
"What are you going to do?" inquired the count.
"I will show you the way back myself," said the captain
"that is the least honor that I can render to your
excellency." And taking the lighted torch from the hands of
the herdsman, he preceded his guests, not as a servant who
performs an act of civility, but like a king who precedes
ambassadors. On reaching the door, he bowed. "And now, your
excellency," added he, "allow me to repeat my apologies, and
I hope you will not entertain any resentment at what has
occurred."
"No, my dear Vampa," replied the count "besides, you
compensate for your mistakes in so gentlemanly a way, that
one almost feels obliged to you for having committed them."
"Gentlemen," added the chief, turning towards the young men,
"perhaps the offer may not appear very tempting to you but
if you should ever feel inclined to pay me a second visit,
wherever I may be, you shall be welcome." Franz and Albert
bowed. The count went out first, then Albert. Franz paused
for a moment. "Has your excellency anything to ask me?" said
Vampa with a smile.
"Yes, I have," replied Franz "I am curious to know what
work you were perusing with so much attention as we
entered."
"Caesar's "Commentaries,'" said the bandit, "it is my
favorite work."
"Well, are you coming?" asked Albert.
"Yes," replied Franz, "here I am," and he, in his turn, left
the caves. They advanced to the plain. "Ah, your pardon,"
said Albert, turning round "will you allow me, captain?"
And he lighted his cigar at Vampa's torch. "Now, my dear
count," he said, "let us on with all the speed we may. I am
enormously anxious to finish my night at the Duke of
Bracciano's." They found the carriage where they had left
it. The count said a word in Arabic to Ali, and the horses
went on at great speed. It was just two o'clock by Albert's
watch when the two friends entered into the dancingroom.
Their return was quite an event, but as they entered
together, all uneasiness on Albert's account ceased
instantly. "Madame," said the Viscount of Morcerf, advancing
towards the countess, "yesterday you were so condescending
as to promise me a galop I am rather late in claiming this
gracious promise, but here is my friend, whose character for
veracity you well know, and he will assure you the delay
arose from no fault of mine." And as at this moment the
orchestra gave the signal for the waltz, Albert put his arm
round the waist of the countess, and disappeared with her in
the whirl of dancers. In the meanwhile Franz was considering
the singular shudder that had passed over the Count of Monte
Cristo at the moment when he had been, in some sort, forced
to give his hand to Albert.
Chapter 
The Compact.
The first words that Albert uttered to his friend, on the
following morning, contained a request that Franz would
accompany him on a visit to the count true, the young man
had warmly and energetically thanked the count on the
previous evening but services such as he had rendered could
never be too often acknowledged. Franz, who seemed attracted
by some invisible influence towards the count, in which
terror was strangely mingled, felt an extreme reluctance to
permit his friend to be exposed alone to the singular
fascination that this mysterious personage seemed to
exercise over him, and therefore made no objection to
Albert's request, but at once accompanied him to the desired
spot, and, after a short delay, the count joined them in the
salon. "My dear count," said Albert, advancing to meet him,
"permit me to repeat the poor thanks I offered last night,
and to assure you that the remembrance of all I owe to you
will never be effaced from my memory believe me, as long as
I live, I shall never cease to dwell with grateful
recollection on the prompt and important service you
rendered me and also to remember that to you I am indebted
even for my life."
"My very good friend and excellent neighbor," replied the
count, with a smile, "you really exaggerate my trifling
exertions. You owe me nothing but some trifle of ,
francs, which you have been saved out of your travelling
expenses, so that there is not much of a score between us
but you must really permit me to congratulate you on the
ease and unconcern with which you resigned yourself to your
fate, and the perfect indifference you manifested as to the
turn events might take."
"Upon my word," said Albert, "I deserve no credit for what I
could not help, namely, a determination to take everything
as I found it, and to let those bandits see, that although
men get into troublesome scrapes all over the world, there
is no nation but the French that can smile even in the face
of grim Death himself. All that, however, has nothing to do
with my obligations to you, and I now come to ask you
whether, in my own person, my family, or connections, I can
in any way serve you? My father, the Comte de Morcerf,
although of Spanish origin, possesses considerable
influence, both at the court of France and Madrid, and I
unhesitatingly place the best services of myself, and all to
whom my life is dear, at your disposal."
"Monsieur de Morcerf," replied the count, "your offer, far
from surprising me, is precisely what I expected from you,
and I accept it in the same spirit of hearty sincerity with
which it is made  nay, I will go still further, and say
that I had previously made up my mind to ask a great favor
at your hands."
"Oh, pray name it."
"I am wholly a stranger to Paris  it is a city I have
never yet seen."
"Is it possible," exclaimed Albert, "that you have reached
your present age without visiting the finest capital in the
world? I can scarcely credit it."
"Nevertheless, it is quite true still, I agree with you in
thinking that my present ignorance of the first city in
Europe is a reproach to me in every way, and calls for
immediate correction but, in all probability, I should have
performed so important, so necessary a duty, as that of
making myself acquainted with the wonders and beauties of
your justly celebrated capital, had I known any person who
would have introduced me into the fashionable world, but
unfortunately I possessed no acquaintance there, and, of
necessity, was compelled to abandon the idea."
"So distinguished an individual as yourself," cried Albert,
"could scarcely have required an introduction."
"You are most kind but as regards myself, I can find no
merit I possess, save that, as a millionaire, I might have
become a partner in the speculations of M. Aguado and M.
Rothschild but as my motive in travelling to your capital
would not have been for the pleasure of dabbling in stocks,
I stayed away till some favorable chance should present
itself of carrying my wish into execution. Your offer,
however, smooths all difficulties, and I have only to ask
you, my dear M. de Morcerf" these words were accompanied by
a most peculiar smile, "whether you undertake, upon my
arrival in France, to open to me the doors of that
fashionable world of which I know no more than a Huron or a
native of CochinChina?"
"Oh, that I do, and with infinite pleasure," answered
Albert "and so much the more readily as a letter received
this morning from my father summons me to Paris, in
consequence of a treaty of marriage my dear Franz, do not
smile, I beg of you with a family of high standing, and
connected with the very cream of Parisian society."
"Connected by marriage, you mean," said Franz, laughingly.
"Well, never mind how it is," answered Albert, "it comes to
the same thing in the end. Perhaps by the time you return to
Paris, I shall be quite a sober, staid father of a family A
most edifying representative I shall make of all the
domestic virtues  don't you think so? But as regards your
wish to visit our fine city, my dear count, I can only say
that you may command me and mine to any extent you please."
"Then it is settled," said the count, "and I give you my
solemn assurance that I only waited an opportunity like the
present to realize plans that I have long meditated." Franz
did not doubt that these plans were the same concerning
which the count had dropped a few words in the grotto of
Monte Cristo, and while the Count was speaking the young man
watched him closely, hoping to read something of his purpose
in his face, but his countenance was inscrutable especially
when, as in the present case, it was veiled in a sphinxlike
smile. "But tell me now, count," exclaimed Albert, delighted
at the idea of having to chaperon so distinguished a person
as Monte Cristo "tell me truly whether you are in earnest,
or if this project of visiting Paris is merely one of the
chimerical and uncertain air castles of which we make so
many in the course of our lives, but which, like a house
built on the sand, is liable to be blown over by the first
puff of wind?"
"I pledge you my honor," returned the count, "that I mean to
do as I have said both inclination and positive necessity
compel me to visit Paris."
"When do you propose going thither?"
"Have you made up your mind when you shall be there
yourself?"
"Certainly I have in a fortnight or three weeks' time, that
is to say, as fast as I can get there"
"Nay," said the Count "I will give you three months ere I
join you you see I make an ample allowance for all delays
and difficulties.
"And in three months' time," said Albert, "you will be at my
house?"
"Shall we make a positive appointment for a particular day
and hour?" inquired the count "only let me warn you that I
am proverbial for my punctilious exactitude in keeping my
engagements."
"Day for day, hour for hour," said Albert "that will suit
me to a dot."
"So be it, then," replied the count, and extending his hand
towards a calendar, suspended near the chimneypiece, he
said, "today is the st of February" and drawing out his
watch, added, "it is exactly halfpast ten o'clock. Now
promise me to remember this, and expect me the st of May
at the same hour in the forenoon."
"Capital," exclaimed Albert "your breakfast shall be
waiting."
"Where do you live?"
"No. , Rue du Helder."
"Have you bachelor's apartments there? I hope my coming will
not put you to any inconvenience."
"I reside in my father's house, but occupy a pavilion at the
farther side of the courtyard, entirely separated from the
main building."
"Quite sufficient," replied the count, as, taking out his
tablets, he wrote down "No. , Rue du Helder, st May,
halfpast ten in the morning."
"Now then," said the count, returning his tablets to his
pocket, "make yourself perfectly easy the hand of your
timepiece will not be more accurate in marking the time
than myself."
"Shall I see you again ere my departure?" asked Albert.
"That depends when do you leave?"
"Tomorrow evening, at five o'clock."
"In that case I must say adieu to you, as I am compelled to
go to Naples, and shall not return hither before Saturday
evening or Sunday morning. And you, baron," pursued the
count, addressing Franz, "do you also depart tomorrow?"
"Yes."
"For France?"
"No, for Venice I shall remain in Italy for another year or
two."
"Then we shall not meet in Paris?"
"I fear I shall not have that honor."
"Well, since we must part," said the count, holding out a
hand to each of the young men, "allow me to wish you both a
safe and pleasant journey." It was the first time the hand
of Franz had come in contact with that of the mysterious
individual before him, and unconsciously he shuddered at its
touch, for it felt cold and icy as that of a corpse. "Let us
understand each other," said Albert "it is agreed  is it
not?  that you are to be at No. , in the Rue du Helder,
on the st of May, at halfpast ten in the morning, and
your word of honor passed for your punctuality?"
"The st of May, at halfpast ten in the morning, Rue du
Helder, No. ," replied the Count. The young men then rose,
and bowing to the count, quitted the room. "What is the
matter?" asked Albert of Franz, when they had returned to
their own apartments "you seem more than commonly
thoughtful."
"I will confess to you, Albert," replied Franz, "the count
is a very singular person, and the appointment you have made
to meet him in Paris fills me with a thousand
apprehensions."
"My dear fellow," exclaimed Albert, "what can there possibly
be in that to excite uneasiness? Why, you must have lost
your senses."
"Whether I am in my senses or not," answered Franz, "that is
the way I feel."
"Listen to me, Franz," said Albert "I am glad that the
occasion has presented itself for saying this to you, for I
have noticed how cold you are in your bearing towards the
count, while he, on the other hand, has always been courtesy
itself to us. Have you anything particular against him?"
"Possibly."
"Did you ever meet him previously to coming hither?"
"I have."
"And where?"
"Will you promise me not to repeat a single word of what I
am about to tell you?"
"I promise."
"Upon your honor?"
"Upon my honor."
"Then listen to me." Franz then related to his friend the
history of his excursion to the Island of Monte Cristo and
of his finding a party of smugglers there, and the two
Corsican bandits with them. He dwelt with considerable force
and energy on the almost magical hospitality he had received
from the count, and the magnificence of his entertainment in
the grotto of the "Thousand and One Nights." He recounted,
with circumstantial exactitude, all the particulars of the
supper, the hashish, the statues, the dream, and how, at his
awakening, there remained no proof or trace of all these
events, save the small yacht, seen in the distant horizon
driving under full sail toward PortoVecchio. Then he
detailed the conversation overheard by him at the Colosseum,
between the count and Vampa, in which the count had promised
to obtain the release of the bandit Peppino,  an
engagement which, as our readers are aware, he most
faithfully fulfilled. At last he arrived at the adventure of
the preceding night, and the embarrassment in which he found
himself placed by not having sufficient cash by six or seven
hundred piastres to make up the sum required, and finally of
his application to the count and the picturesque and
satisfactory result that followed. Albert listened with the
most profound attention. "Well," said he, when Franz had
concluded, "what do you find to object to in all you have
related? The count is fond of travelling, and, being rich,
possesses a vessel of his own. Go but to Portsmouth or
Southampton, and you will find the harbors crowded with the
yachts belonging to such of the English as can afford the
expense, and have the same liking for this amusement. Now,
by way of having a restingplace during his excursions,
avoiding the wretched cookery  which has been trying its
best to poison me during the last four months, while you
have manfully resisted its effects for as many years,  and
obtaining a bed on which it is possible to slumber, Monte
Cristo has furnished for himself a temporary abode where you
first found him but, to prevent the possibility of the
Tuscan government taking a fancy to his enchanted palace,
and thereby depriving him of the advantages naturally
expected from so large an outlay of capital, he has wisely
enough purchased the island, and taken its name. Just ask
yourself, my good fellow, whether there are not many persons
of our acquaintance who assume the names of lands and
properties they never in their lives were masters of?"
"But," said Franz, "the Corsican bandits that were among the
crew of his vessel?"
"Why, really the thing seems to me simple enough. Nobody
knows better than yourself that the bandits of Corsica are
not rogues or thieves, but purely and simply fugitives,
driven by some sinister motive from their native town or
village, and that their fellowship involves no disgrace or
stigma for my own part, I protest that, should I ever go to
Corsica, my first visit, ere even I presented myself to the
mayor or prefect, should be to the bandits of Colomba, if I
could only manage to find them for, on my conscience, they
are a race of men I admire greatly."
"Still," persisted Franz, "I suppose you will allow that
such men as Vampa and his band are regular villains, who
have no other motive than plunder when they seize your
person. How do you explain the influence the count evidently
possessed over those ruffians?"
"My good friend, as in all probability I own my present
safety to that influence, it would ill become me to search
too closely into its source therefore, instead of
condemning him for his intimacy with outlaws, you must give
me leave to excuse any little irregularity there may be in
such a connection not altogether for preserving my life,
for my own idea was that it never was in much danger, but
certainly for saving me , piastres, which, being
translated, means neither more nor less than , livres
of our money  a sum at which, most assuredly, I should
never have been estimated in France, proving most
indisputably," added Albert with a laugh, "that no prophet
is honored in his own country."
"Talking of countries," replied Franz, "of what country is
the count, what is his native tongue, whence does he derive
his immense fortune, and what were those events of his early
life  a life as marvellous as unknown  that have
tinctured his succeeding years with so dark and gloomy a
misanthropy? Certainly these are questions that, in your
place, I should like to have answered."
"My dear Franz," replied Albert, "when, upon receipt of my
letter, you found the necessity of asking the count's
assistance, you promptly went to him, saying, "My friend
Albert de Morcerf is in danger help me to deliver him.' Was
not that nearly what you said?"
"It was."
"Well, then, did he ask you, "Who is M. Albert de Morcerf?
how does he come by his name  his fortune? what are his
means of existence? what is his birthplace of what country
is he a native?' Tell me, did he put all these questions to
you?"
"I confess he asked me none."
"No he merely came and freed me from the hands of Signor
Vampa, where, I can assure you, in spite of all my outward
appearance of ease and unconcern, I did not very
particularly care to remain. Now, then, Franz, when, for
services so promptly and unhesitatingly rendered, he but
asks me in return to do for him what is done daily for any
Russian prince or Italian nobleman who may pass through
Paris  merely to introduce him into society  would you
have me refuse? My good fellow, you must have lost your
senses to think it possible I could act with such
coldblooded policy." And this time it must be confessed
that, contrary to the usual state of affairs in discussions
between the young men, the effective arguments were all on
Albert's side.
"Well," said Franz with a sigh, "do as you please my dear
viscount, for your arguments are beyond my powers of
refutation. Still, in spite of all, you must admit that this
Count of Monte Cristo is a most singular personage."
"He is a philanthropist," answered the other "and no doubt
his motive in visiting Paris is to compete for the Monthyon
prize, given, as you are aware, to whoever shall be proved
to have most materially advanced the interests of virtue and
humanity. If my vote and interest can obtain it for him, I
will readily give him the one and promise the other. And
now, my dear Franz, let us talk of something else. Come,
shall we take our luncheon, and then pay a last visit to St.
Peter's?" Franz silently assented and the following
afternoon, at halfpast five o'clock, the young men parted.
Albert de Morcerf to return to Paris, and Franz d'Epinay to
pass a fortnight at Venice. But, ere he entered his
travelling carriage, Albert, fearing that his expected guest
might forget the engagement he had entered into, placed in
the care of a waiter at the hotel a card to be delivered to
the Count of Monte Cristo, on which, beneath the name of
Vicomte Albert de Morcerf, he had written in pencil  ",
Rue du Helder, on the st May, halfpast ten A.M."
Chapter 
The Guests.
In the house in the Rue du Helder, where Albert had invited
the Count of Monte Cristo, everything was being prepared on
the morning of the st of May to do honor to the occasion.
Albert de Morcerf inhabited a pavilion situated at the
corner of a large court, and directly opposite another
building, in which were the servants' apartments. Two
windows only of the pavilion faced the street three other
windows looked into the court, and two at the back into the
garden. Between the court and the garden, built in the heavy
style of the imperial architecture, was the large and
fashionable dwelling of the Count and Countess of Morcerf. A
high wall surrounded the whole of the hotel, surmounted at
intervals by vases filled with flowers, and broken in the
centre by a large gate of gilded iron, which served as the
carriage entrance. A small door, close to the lodge of the
concierge, gave ingress and egress to the servants and
masters when they were on foot.
It was easy to discover that the delicate care of a mother,
unwilling to part from her son, and yet aware that a young
man of the viscount's age required the full exercise of his
liberty, had chosen this habitation for Albert. There were
not lacking, however, evidences of what we may call the
intelligent egoism of a youth who is charmed with the
indolent, careless life of an only son, and who lives as it
were in a gilded cage. By means of the two windows looking
into the street, Albert could see all that passed the sight
of what is going on is necessary to young men, who always
want to see the world traverse their horizon, even if that
horizon is only a public thoroughfare. Then, should anything
appear to merit a more minute examination, Albert de Morcerf
could follow up his researches by means of a small gate,
similar to that close to the concierge's door, and which
merits a particular description. It was a little entrance
that seemed never to have been opened since the house was
built, so entirely was it covered with dust and dirt but
the welloiled hinges and locks told quite another story.
This door was a mockery to the concierge, from whose
vigilance and jurisdiction it was free, and, like that
famous portal in the "Arabian Nights," opening at the
"Sesame" of Ali Baba, it was wont to swing backward at a
cabalistic word or a concerted tap from without from the
sweetest voices or whitest fingers in the world. At the end
of a long corridor, with which the door communicated, and
which formed the antechamber, was, on the right, Albert's
breakfastroom, looking into the court, and on the left the
salon, looking into the garden. Shrubs and creeping plants
covered the windows, and hid from the garden and court these
two apartments, the only rooms into which, as they were on
the groundfloor, the prying eyes of the curious could
penetrate. On the floor above were similar rooms, with the
addition of a third, formed out of the antechamber these
three rooms were a salon, a boudoir, and a bedroom. The
salon downstairs was only an Algerian divan, for the use of
smokers. The boudoir upstairs communicated with the
bedchamber by an invisible door on the staircase it was
evident that every precaution had been taken. Above this
floor was a large atelier, which had been increased in size
by pulling down the partitions  a pandemonium, in which
the artist and the dandy strove for preeminence. There were
collected and piled up all Albert's successive caprices,
huntinghorns, bassviols, flutes  a whole orchestra, for
Albert had had not a taste but a fancy for music easels,
palettes, brushes, pencils  for music had been succeeded
by painting foils, boxinggloves, broadswords, and
singlesticks  for, following the example of the
fashionable young men of the time, Albert de Morcerf
cultivated, with far more perseverance than music and
drawing, the three arts that complete a dandy's education,
i.e., fencing, boxing, and singlestick and it was here
that he received Grisier, Cook, and Charles Leboucher. The
rest of the furniture of this privileged apartment consisted
of old cabinets, filled with Chinese porcelain and Japanese
vases, Lucca della Robbia faience, and Palissy platters of
old armchairs, in which perhaps had sat Henry IV. or Sully,
Louis XIII. or Richelieu  for two of these armchairs,
adorned with a carved shield, on which were engraved the
fleurdelis of France on an azure field evidently came from
the Louvre, or, at least, some royal residence. Over these
dark and sombre chairs were thrown splendid stuffs, dyed
beneath Persia's sun, or woven by the fingers of the women
of Calcutta or of Chandernagor. What these stuffs did there,
it was impossible to say they awaited, while gratifying the
eyes, a destination unknown to their owner himself in the
meantime they filled the place with their golden and silky
reflections. In the centre of the room was a Roller and
Blanchet "baby grand" piano in rosewood, but holding the
potentialities of an orchestra in its narrow and sonorous
cavity, and groaning beneath the weight of the
chefsd'oeuvre of Beethoven, Weber, Mozart, Haydn, Gretry,
and Porpora. On the walls, over the doors, on the ceiling,
were swords, daggers, Malay creeses, maces, battleaxes
gilded, damasked, and inlaid suits of armor dried plants,
minerals, and stuffed birds, their flamecolored wings
outspread in motionless flight, and their beaks forever
open. This was Albert's favorite lounging place.
However, the morning of the appointment, the young man had
established himself in the small salon downstairs. There,
on a table, surrounded at some distance by a large and
luxurious divan, every species of tobacco known,  from the
yellow tobacco of Petersburg to the black of Sinai, and so
on along the scale from Maryland and PortoRico, to Latakia,
was exposed in pots of crackled earthenware of which the
Dutch are so fond beside them, in boxes of fragrant wood,
were ranged, according to their size and quality, pueros,
regalias, havanas, and manillas and, in an open cabinet, a
collection of German pipes, of chibouques, with their amber
mouthpieces ornamented with coral, and of narghiles, with
their long tubes of morocco, awaiting the caprice or the
sympathy of the smokers. Albert had himself presided at the
arrangement, or, rather, the symmetrical derangement, which,
after coffee, the guests at a breakfast of modern days love
to contemplate through the vapor that escapes from their
mouths, and ascends in long and fanciful wreaths to the
ceiling. At a quarter to ten, a valet entered he composed,
with a little groom named John, and who only spoke English,
all Albert's establishment, although the cook of the hotel
was always at his service, and on great occasions the
count's chasseur also. This valet, whose name was Germain,
and who enjoyed the entire confidence of his young master,
held in one hand a number of papers, and in the other a
packet of letters, which he gave to Albert. Albert glanced
carelessly at the different missives, selected two written
in a small and delicate hand, and enclosed in scented
envelopes, opened them and perused their contents with some
attention. "How did these letters come?" said he.
"One by the post, Madame Danglars' footman left the other."
"Let Madame Danglars know that I accept the place she offers
me in her box. Wait then, during the day, tell Rosa that
when I leave the Opera I will sup with her as she wishes.
Take her six bottles of different wine  Cyprus, sherry,
and Malaga, and a barrel of Ostend oysters get them at
Borel's, and be sure you say they are for me."
"At what o'clock, sir, do you breakfast?"
"What time is it now?"
"A quarter to ten."
"Very well, at half past ten. Debray will, perhaps, be
obliged to go to the minister  and besides" Albert looked
at his tablets, "it is the hour I told the count, st May,
at half past ten and though I do not much rely upon his
promise, I wish to be punctual. Is the countess up yet?"
"If you wish, I will inquire."
"Yes, ask her for one of her liqueur cellarets, mine is
incomplete and tell her I shall have the honor of seeing
her about three o'clock, and that I request permission to
introduce some one to her." The valet left the room. Albert
threw himself on the divan, tore off the cover of two or
three of the papers, looked at the theatre announcements,
made a face seeing they gave an opera, and not a ballet
hunted vainly amongst the advertisements for a new
toothpowder of which he had heard, and threw down, one
after the other, the three leading papers of Paris,
muttering, "These papers become more and more stupid every
day." A moment after, a carriage stopped before the door,
and the servant announced M. Lucien Debray. A tall young
man, with light hair, clear gray eyes, and thin and
compressed lips, dressed in a blue coat with beautifully
carved gold buttons, a white neckcloth, and a tortoiseshell
eyeglass suspended by a silken thread, and which, by an
effort of the superciliary and zygomatic muscles, he fixed
in his eye, entered, with a halfofficial air, without
smiling or speaking. "Goodmorning, Lucien, goodmorning,"
said Albert "your punctuality really alarms me. What do I
say? punctuality You, whom I expected last, you arrive at
five minutes to ten, when the time fixed was halfpast Has
the ministry resigned?"
"No, my dear fellow," returned the young man, seating
himself on the divan "reassure yourself we are tottering
always, but we never fall, and I begin to believe that we
shall pass into a state of immobility, and then the affairs
of the Peninsula will completely consolidate us."
"Ah, true you drive Don Carlos out of Spain."
"No, no, my dear fellow, do not confound our plans. We take
him to the other side of the French frontier, and offer him
hospitality at Bourges."
"At Bourges?"
"Yes, he has not much to complain of Bourges is the capital
of Charles VII. Do you not know that all Paris knew it
yesterday, and the day before it had already transpired on
the Bourse, and M. Danglars I do not know by what means
that man contrives to obtain intelligence as soon as we do
made a million"
"And you another order, for I see you have a blue ribbon at
your buttonhole."
"Yes they sent me the order of Charles III.," returned
Debray, carelessly.
"Come, do not affect indifference, but confess you were
pleased to have it."
"Oh, it is very well as a finish to the toilet. It looks
very neat on a black coat buttoned up."
"And makes you resemble the Prince of Wales or the Duke of
Reichstadt."
"It is for that reason you see me so early."
"Because you have the order of Charles III., and you wish to
announce the good news to me?"
"No, because I passed the night writing letters,  five and
twenty despatches. I returned home at daybreak, and strove
to sleep but my head ached and I got up to have a ride for
an hour. At the Bois de Boulogne, ennui and hunger attacked
me at once,  two enemies who rarely accompany each other,
and who are yet leagued against me, a sort of
Carlorepublican alliance. I then recollected you gave a
breakfast this morning, and here I am. I am hungry, feed me
I am bored, amuse me."
"It is my duty as your host," returned Albert, ringing the
bell, while Lucien turned over, with his goldmounted cane,
the papers that lay on the table. "Germain, a glass of
sherry and a biscuit. In the meantime, my dear Lucien, here
are cigars  contraband, of course  try them, and
persuade the minister to sell us such instead of poisoning
us with cabbage leaves."
"Peste, I will do nothing of the kind the moment they come
from government you would find them execrable. Besides, that
does not concern the home but the financial department.
Address yourself to M. Humann, section of the indirect
contributions, corridor A., No. ."
"On my word," said Albert, "you astonish me by the extent of
your knowledge. Take a cigar."
"Really, my dear Albert," replied Lucien, lighting a manilla
at a rosecolored taper that burnt in a beautifully
enamelled stand  "how happy you are to have nothing to do.
You do not know your own good fortune"
"And what would you do, my dear diplomatist," replied
Morcerf, with a slight degree of irony in his voice, "if you
did nothing? What? private secretary to a minister, plunged
at once into European cabals and Parisian intrigues having
kings, and, better still, queens, to protect, parties to
unite, elections to direct making more use of your cabinet
with your pen and your telegraph than Napoleon did of his
battlefields with his sword and his victories possessing
five and twenty thousand francs a year, besides your place
a horse, for which ChateauRenaud offered you four hundred
louis, and which you would not part with a tailor who never
disappoints you with the opera, the jockeyclub, and other
diversions, can you not amuse yourself? Well, I will amuse
you."
"How?"
"By introducing to you a new acquaintance."
"A man or a woman?"
"A man."
"I know so many men already."
"But you do not know this man."
"Where does he come from  the end of the world?"
"Farther still, perhaps."
"The deuce I hope he does not bring our breakfast with
him."
"Oh, no our breakfast comes from my father's kitchen. Are
you hungry?"
"Humiliating as such a confession is, I am. But I dined at
M. de Villefort's, and lawyers always give you very bad
dinners. You would think they felt some remorse did you
ever remark that?"
"Ah, depreciate other persons' dinners you ministers give
such splendid ones."
"Yes but we do not invite people of fashion. If we were not
forced to entertain a parcel of country boobies because they
think and vote with us, we should never dream of dining at
home, I assure you."
"Well, take another glass of sherry and another biscuit."
"Willingly. Your Spanish wine is excellent. You see we were
quite right to pacify that country."
"Yes but Don Carlos?"
"Well, Don Carlos will drink Bordeaux, and in ten years we
will marry his son to the little queen."
"You will then obtain the Golden Fleece, if you are still in
the ministry."
"I think, Albert, you have adopted the system of feeding me
on smoke this morning."
"Well, you must allow it is the best thing for the stomach
but I hear Beauchamp in the next room you can dispute
together, and that will pass away the time."
"About what?"
"About the papers."
"My dear friend," said Lucien with an air of sovereign
contempt, "do I ever read the papers?"
"Then you will dispute the more."
"M. Beauchamp," announced the servant. "Come in, come in,"
said Albert, rising and advancing to meet the young man.
"Here is Debray, who detests you without reading you, so he
says."
"He is quite right," returned Beauchamp "for I criticise
him without knowing what he does. Goodday, commander"
"Ah, you know that already," said the private secretary,
smiling and shaking hands with him.
"Pardieu?"
"And what do they say of it in the world?"
"In which world? we have so many worlds in the year of grace
"In the entire political world, of which you are one of the
leaders."
"They say that it is quite fair, and that sowing so much
red, you ought to reap a little blue."
"Come, come, that is not bad" said Lucien. "Why do you not
join our party, my dear Beauchamp? With your talents you
would make your fortune in three or four years."
"I only await one thing before following your advice that
is, a minister who will hold office for six months. My dear
Albert, one word, for I must give poor Lucien a respite. Do
we breakfast or dine? I must go to the Chamber, for our life
is not an idle one."
"You only breakfast I await two persons, and the instant
they arrive we shall sit down to table."
Chapter 
The Breakfast.
"And what sort of persons do you expect to breakfast?" said
Beauchamp.
"A gentleman, and a diplomatist."
"Then we shall have to wait two hours for the gentleman, and
three for the diplomatist. I shall come back to dessert
keep me some strawberries, coffee, and cigars. I shall take
a cutlet on my way to the Chamber."
"Do not do anything of the sort for were the gentleman a
Montmorency, and the diplomatist a Metternich, we will
breakfast at eleven in the meantime, follow Debray's
example, and take a glass of sherry and a biscuit."
"Be it so I will stay I must do something to distract my
thoughts."
"You are like Debray, and yet it seems to me that when the
minister is out of spirits, the opposition ought to be
joyous."
"Ah, you do not know with what I am threatened. I shall hear
this morning that M. Danglars make a speech at the Chamber
of Deputies, and at his wife's this evening I shall hear the
tragedy of a peer of France. The devil take the
constitutional government, and since we had our choice, as
they say, at least, how could we choose that?"
"I understand you must lay in a stock of hilarity."
"Do not run down M. Danglars' speeches," said Debray "he
votes for you, for he belongs to the opposition."
"Pardieu, that is exactly the worst of all. I am waiting
until you send him to speak at the Luxembourg, to laugh at
my ease."
"My dear friend," said Albert to Beauchamp, "it is plain
that the affairs of Spain are settled, for you are most
desperately out of humor this morning. Recollect that
Parisian gossip has spoken of a marriage between myself and
Mlle. Eugenie Danglars I cannot in conscience, therefore,
let you run down the speeches of a man who will one day say
to me, "Vicomte, you know I give my daughter two millions.'"
"Ah, this marriage will never take place," said Beauchamp.
"The king has made him a baron, and can make him a peer, but
he cannot make him a gentleman, and the Count of Morcerf is
too aristocratic to consent, for the paltry sum of two
million francs, to a mesalliance. The Viscount of Morcerf
can only wed a marchioness."
"But two million francs make a nice little sum," replied
Morcerf.
"It is the social capital of a theatre on the boulevard, or
a railroad from the Jardin des Plantes to La Rapee."
"Never mind what he says, Morcerf," said Debray, "do you
marry her. You marry a moneybag label, it is true well,
but what does that matter? It is better to have a blazon
less and a figure more on it. You have seven martlets on
your arms give three to your wife, and you will still have
four that is one more than M. de Guise had, who so nearly
became King of France, and whose cousin was Emperor of
Germany."
"On my word, I think you are right, Lucien," said Albert
absently.
"To be sure besides, every millionaire is as noble as a
bastard  that is, he can be."
"Do not say that, Debray," returned Beauchamp, laughing,
"for here is ChateauRenaud, who, to cure you of your mania
for paradoxes, will pass the sword of Renaud de Montauban,
his ancestor, through your body."
"He will sully it then," returned Lucien "for I am low 
very low."
"Oh, heavens," cried Beauchamp, "the minister quotes
Beranger, what shall we come to next?"
"M. de ChateauRenaud  M. Maximilian Morrel," said the
servant, announcing two fresh guests.
"Now, then, to breakfast," said Beauchamp "for, if I
remember, you told me you only expected two persons,
Albert."
"Morrel," muttered Albert  "Morrel  who is he?" But
before he had finished, M. de ChateauRenaud, a handsome
young man of thirty, gentleman all over,  that is, with
the figure of a Guiche and the wit of a Mortemart,  took
Albert's hand. "My dear Albert," said he, "let me introduce
to you M. Maximilian Morrel, captain of Spahis, my friend
and what is more  however the man speaks for himself my
preserver. Salute my hero, viscount." And he stepped on one
side to give place to a young man of refined and dignified
bearing, with large and open brow, piercing eyes, and black
mustache, whom our readers have already seen at Marseilles,
under circumstances sufficiently dramatic not to be
forgotten. A rich uniform, half French, half Oriental, set
off his graceful and stalwart figure, and his broad chest
was decorated with the order of the Legion of Honor. The
young officer bowed with easy and elegant politeness.
"Monsieur," said Albert with affectionate courtesy, "the
count of ChateauRenaud knew how much pleasure this
introduction would give me you are his friend, be ours
also."
"Well said," interrupted ChateauRenaud "and pray that, if
you should ever be in a similar predicament, he may do as
much for you as he did for me."
"What has he done?" asked Albert.
"Oh, nothing worth speaking of," said Morrel "M. de
ChateauRenaud exaggerates."
"Not worth speaking of?" cried ChateauRenaud "life is not
worth speaking of  that is rather too philosophical, on
my word, Morrel. It is very well for you, who risk your life
every day, but for me, who only did so once" 
"We gather from all this, baron, that Captain Morrel saved
your life."
"Exactly so."
"On what occasion?" asked Beauchamp.
"Beauchamp, my good fellow, you know I am starving," said
Debray "do not set him off on some long story."
"Well, I do not prevent your sitting down to table," replied
Beauchamp, "ChateauRenaud can tell us while we eat our
breakfast."
"Gentlemen," said Morcerf, "it is only a quarter past ten,
and I expect some one else."
"Ah, true, a diplomatist" observed Debray.
"Diplomat or not, I don't know I only know that he charged
himself on my account with a mission, which he terminated so
entirely to my satisfaction, that had I been king, I should
have instantly created him knight of all my orders, even had
I been able to offer him the Golden Fleece and the Garter."
"Well, since we are not to sit down to table," said Debray,
"take a glass of sherry, and tell us all about it."
"You all know that I had the fancy of going to Africa."
"It is a road your ancestors have traced for you," said
Albert gallantly.
"Yes? but I doubt that your object was like theirs  to
rescue the Holy Sepulchre."
"You are quite right, Beauchamp," observed the young
aristocrat. "It was only to fight as an amateur. I cannot
bear duelling since two seconds, whom I had chosen to
arrange an affair, forced me to break the arm of one of my
best friends, one whom you all know  poor Franz d'Epinay."
"Ah, true," said Debray, "you did fight some time ago about
what?"
"The devil take me, if I remember," returned ChateauRenaud.
"But I recollect perfectly one thing, that, being unwilling
to let such talents as mine sleep, I wished to try upon the
Arabs the new pistols that had been given to me. In
consequence I embarked for Oran, and went from thence to
Constantine, where I arrived just in time to witness the
raising of the siege. I retreated with the rest, for eight
and forty hours. I endured the rain during the day, and the
cold during the night tolerably well, but the third morning
my horse died of cold. Poor brute  accustomed to be
covered up and to have a stove in the stable, the Arabian
finds himself unable to bear ten degrees of cold in Arabia."
"That's why you want to purchase my English horse," said
Debray, "you think he will bear the cold better."
"You are mistaken, for I have made a vow never to return to
Africa."
"You were very much frightened, then?" asked Beauchamp.
"Well, yes, and I had good reason to be so," replied
ChateauRenaud. "I was retreating on foot, for my horse was
dead. Six Arabs came up, full gallop, to cut off my head. I
shot two with my doublebarrelled gun, and two more with my
pistols, but I was then disarmed, and two were still left
one seized me by the hair that is why I now wear it so
short, for no one knows what may happen, the other swung a
yataghan, and I already felt the cold steel on my neck, when
this gentleman whom you see here charged them, shot the one
who held me by the hair, and cleft the skull of the other
with his sabre. He had assigned himself the task of saving a
man's life that day chance caused that man to be myself.
When I am rich I will order a statue of Chance from Klagmann
or Marochetti."
"Yes," said Morrel, smiling, "it was the th of September,
the anniversary of the day on which my father was
miraculously preserved therefore, as far as it lies in my
power, I endeavor to celebrate it by some" 
"Heroic action," interrupted ChateauRenaud. "I was chosen.
But that is not all  after rescuing me from the sword, he
rescued me from the cold, not by sharing his cloak with me,
like St. Martin, but by giving me the whole then from
hunger by sharing with me  guess what?"
"A Strasbourg pie?" asked Beauchamp.
"No, his horse of which we each of us ate a slice with a
hearty appetite. It was very hard."
"The horse?" said Morcerf, laughing.
"No, the sacrifice," returned ChateauRenaud "ask Debray if
he would sacrifice his English steed for a stranger?"
"Not for a stranger," said Debray, "but for a friend I
might, perhaps."
"I divined that you would become mine, count," replied
Morrel "besides, as I had the honor to tell you, heroism or
not, sacrifice or not, that day I owed an offering to bad
fortune in recompense for the favors good fortune had on
other days granted to us."
"The history to which M. Morrel alludes," continued
ChateauRenaud, "is an admirable one, which he will tell you
some day when you are better acquainted with him today let
us fill our stomachs, and not our memories. What time do you
breakfast, Albert?"
"At halfpast ten."
"Precisely?" asked Debray, taking out his watch.
"Oh, you will give me five minutes' grace," replied Morcerf,
"for I also expect a preserver."
"Of whom?"
"Of myself," cried Morcerf "parbleu, do you think I cannot
be saved as well as any one else, and that there are only
Arabs who cut off heads? Our breakfast is a philanthropic
one, and we shall have at table  at least, I hope so 
two benefactors of humanity."
"What shall we do?" said Debray "we have only one Monthyon
prize."
"Well, it will be given to some one who has done nothing to
deserve it," said Beauchamp "that is the way the Academy
mostly escapes from the dilemma."
"And where does he come from?" asked Debray. "You have
already answered the question once, but so vaguely that I
venture to put it a second time."
"Really," said Albert, "I do not know when I invited him
three months ago, he was then at Rome, but since that time
who knows where he may have gone?"
"And you think him capable of being exact?" demanded Debray.
"I think him capable of everything."
"Well, with the five minutes' grace, we have only ten left."
"I will profit by them to tell you something about my
guest."
"I beg pardon," interrupted Beauchamp "are there any
materials for an article in what you are going to tell us?"
"Yes, and for a most curious one."
"Go on, then, for I see I shall not get to the Chamber this
morning, and I must make up for it."
"I was at Rome during the last Carnival."
"We know that," said Beauchamp.
"Yes, but what you do not know is that I was carried off by
bandits."
"There are no bandits," cried Debray.
"Yes there are, and most hideous, or rather most admirable
ones, for I found them ugly enough to frighten me."
"Come, my dear Albert," said Debray, "confess that your cook
is behindhand, that the oysters have not arrived from Ostend
or Marennes, and that, like Madame de Maintenon, you are
going to replace the dish by a story. Say so at once we are
sufficiently wellbred to excuse you, and to listen to your
history, fabulous as it promises to be."
"And I say to you, fabulous as it may seem, I tell it as a
true one from beginning to end. The brigands had carried me
off, and conducted me to a gloomy spot, called the Catacombs
of Saint Sebastian."
"I know it," said ChateauRenaud "I narrowly escaped
catching a fever there."
"And I did more than that," replied Morcerf, "for I caught
one. I was informed that I was prisoner until I paid the sum
of , Roman crowns  about , francs. Unfortunately,
I had not above ,. I was at the end of my journey and of
my credit. I wrote to Franz  and were he here he would
confirm every word  I wrote then to Franz that if he did
not come with the four thousand crowns before six, at ten
minutes past I should have gone to join the blessed saints
and glorious martyrs in whose company I had the honor of
being and Signor Luigi Vampa, such was the name of the
chief of these bandits, would have scrupulously kept his
word."
"But Franz did come with the four thousand crowns," said
ChateauRenaud. "A man whose name is Franz d'Epinay or
Albert de Morcerf has not much difficulty in procuring
them."
"No, he arrived accompanied simply by the guest I am going
to present to you."
"Ah, this gentleman is a Hercules killing Cacus, a Perseus
freeing Andromeda."
"No, he is a man about my own size."
"Armed to the teeth?"
"He had not even a knittingneedle."
"But he paid your ransom?"
"He said two words to the chief and I was free."
"And they apologized to him for having carried you off?"
said Beauchamp.
"Just so."
"Why, he is a second Ariosto."
"No, his name is the Count of Monte Cristo."
"There is no Count of Monte Cristo" said Debray.
"I do not think so," added ChateauRenaud, with the air of a
man who knows the whole of the European nobility perfectly.
"Does any one know anything of a Count of Monte Cristo?"
"He comes possibly from the Holy Land, and one of his
ancestors possessed Calvary, as the Mortemarts did the Dead
Sea."
"I think I can assist your researches," said Maximilian.
"Monte Cristo is a little island I have often heard spoken
of by the old sailors my father employed  a grain of sand
in the centre of the Mediterranean, an atom in the
infinite."
"Precisely" cried Albert. "Well, he of whom I speak is the
lord and master of this grain of sand, of this atom he has
purchased the title of count somewhere in Tuscany."
"He is rich, then?"
"I believe so."
"But that ought to be visible."
"That is what deceives you, Debray."
"I do not understand you."
"Have you read the "Arabian Nights'?"
"What a question"
"Well, do you know if the persons you see there are rich or
poor, if their sacks of wheat are not rubies or diamonds?
They seem like poor fishermen, and suddenly they open some
mysterious cavern filled with the wealth of the Indies."
"Which means?"
"Which means that my Count of Monte Cristo is one of those
fishermen. He has even a name taken from the book, since he
calls himself Sinbad the Sailor, and has a cave filled with
gold."
"And you have seen this cavern, Morcerf?" asked Beauchamp.
"No, but Franz has for heaven's sake, not a word of this
before him. Franz went in with his eyes blindfolded, and was
waited on by mutes and by women to whom Cleopatra was a
painted strumpet. Only he is not quite sure about the women,
for they did not come in until after he had taken hashish,
so that what he took for women might have been simply a row
of statues."
The two young men looked at Morcerf as if to say,  "Are
you mad, or are you laughing at us?"
"And I also," said Morrel thoughtfully, "have heard
something like this from an old sailor named Penelon."
"Ah," cried Albert, "it is very lucky that M. Morrel comes
to aid me you are vexed, are you not, that he thus gives a
clew to the labyrinth?"
"My dear Albert," said Debray, "what you tell us is so
extraordinary."
"Ah, because your ambassadors and your consuls do not tell
you of them  they have no time. They are too much taken up
with interfering in the affairs of their countrymen who
travel."
"Now you get angry, and attack our poor agents. How will you
have them protect you? The Chamber cuts down their salaries
every day, so that now they have scarcely any. Will you be
ambassador, Albert? I will send you to Constantinople."
"No, lest on the first demonstration I make in favor of
Mehemet Ali, the Sultan send me the bowstring, and make my
secretaries strangle me."
"You say very true," responded Debray.
"Yes," said Albert, "but this has nothing to do with the
existence of the Count of Monte Cristo."
"Pardieu, every one exists."
"Doubtless, but not in the same way every one has not black
slaves, a princely retinue, an arsenal of weapons that would
do credit to an Arabian fortress, horses that cost six
thousand francs apiece, and Greek mistresses."
"Have you seen the Greek mistress?"
"I have both seen and heard her. I saw her at the theatre,
and heard her one morning when I breakfasted with the
count."
"He eats, then?"
"Yes but so little, it can hardly be called eating."
"He must be a vampire."
"Laugh, if you will the Countess G , who knew Lord
Ruthven, declared that the count was a vampire."
"Ah, capital," said Beauchamp. "For a man not connected with
newspapers, here is the pendant to the famous seaserpent of
the Constitutionnel."
"Wild eyes, the iris of which contracts or dilates at
pleasure," said Debray "facial angle strongly developed,
magnificent forehead, livid complexion, black beard, sharp
and white teeth, politeness unexceptionable."
"Just so, Lucien," returned Morcerf "you have described him
feature for feature. Yes, keen and cutting politeness. This
man has often made me shudder and one day that we were
viewing an execution, I thought I should faint, more from
hearing the cold and calm manner in which he spoke of every
description of torture, than from the sight of the
executioner and the culprit."
"Did he not conduct you to the ruins of the Colosseum and
suck your blood?" asked Beauchamp.
"Or, having delivered you, make you sign a flaming
parchment, surrendering your soul to him as Esau did his
birthright?"
"Rail on, rail on at your ease, gentlemen," said Morcerf,
somewhat piqued. "When I look at you Parisians, idlers on
the Boulevard de Gand or the Bois de Boulogne, and think of
this man, it seems to me we are not of the same race."
"I am highly flattered," returned Beauchamp. "At the same
time," added ChateauRenaud, "your Count of Monte Cristo is
a very fine fellow, always excepting his little arrangements
with the Italian banditti."
"There are no Italian banditti," said Debray.
"No vampire," cried Beauchamp. "No Count of Monte Cristo"
added Debray. "There is halfpast ten striking, Albert."
"Confess you have dreamed this, and let us sit down to
breakfast," continued Beauchamp. But the sound of the clock
had not died away when Germain announced, "His excellency
the Count of Monte Cristo." The involuntary start every one
gave proved how much Morcerf's narrative had impressed them,
and Albert himself could not wholly refrain from manifesting
sudden emotion. He had not heard a carriage stop in the
street, or steps in the antechamber the door had itself
opened noiselessly. The count appeared, dressed with the
greatest simplicity, but the most fastidious dandy could
have found nothing to cavil at in his toilet. Every article
of dress  hat, coat, gloves, and boots  was from the
first makers. He seemed scarcely five and thirty. But what
struck everybody was his extreme resemblance to the portrait
Debray had drawn. The count advanced, smiling, into the
centre of the room, and approached Albert, who hastened
towards him holding out his hand in a ceremonial manner.
"Punctuality," said Monte Cristo, "is the politeness of
kings, according to one of your sovereigns, I think but it
is not the same with travellers. However, I hope you will
excuse the two or three seconds I am behindhand five
hundred leagues are not to be accomplished without some
trouble, and especially in France, where, it seems, it is
forbidden to beat the postilions."
"My dear count," replied Albert, "I was announcing your
visit to some of my friends, whom I had invited in
consequence of the promise you did me the honor to make, and
whom I now present to you. They are the Count of
ChateauRenaud, whose nobility goes back to the twelve
peers, and whose ancestors had a place at the Round Table
M. Lucien Debray, private secretary to the minister of the
interior M. Beauchamp, an editor of a paper, and the terror
of the French government, but of whom, in spite of his
national celebrity, you perhaps have not heard in Italy,
since his paper is prohibited there and M. Maximilian
Morrel, captain of Spahis."
At this name the count, who had hitherto saluted every one
with courtesy, but at the same time with coldness and
formality, stepped a pace forward, and a slight tinge of red
colored his pale cheeks. "You wear the uniform of the new
French conquerors, monsieur," said he "it is a handsome
uniform." No one could have said what caused the count's
voice to vibrate so deeply, and what made his eye flash,
which was in general so clear, lustrous, and limpid when he
pleased. "You have never seen our Africans, count?" said
Albert. "Never," replied the count, who was by this time
perfectly master of himself again.
"Well, beneath this uniform beats one of the bravest and
noblest hearts in the whole army."
"Oh, M. de Morcerf," interrupted Morrel.
"Let me go on, captain. And we have just heard," continued
Albert, "of a new deed of his, and so heroic a one, that,
although I have seen him today for the first time, I
request you to allow me to introduce him as my friend." At
these words it was still possible to observe in Monte Cristo
the concentrated look, changing color, and slight trembling
of the eyelid that show emotion. "Ah, you have a noble
heart," said the count "so much the better." This
exclamation, which corresponded to the count's own thought
rather than to what Albert was saying, surprised everybody,
and especially Morrel, who looked at Monte Cristo with
wonder. But, at the same time, the intonation was so soft
that, however strange the speech might seem, it was
impossible to be offended at it. "Why should he doubt it?"
said Beauchamp to ChateauRenaud.
"In reality," replied the latter, who, with his aristocratic
glance and his knowledge of the world, had penetrated at
once all that was penetrable in Monte Cristo, "Albert has
not deceived us, for the count is a most singular being.
What say you, Morrel"
"Ma foi, he has an open look about him that pleases me, in
spite of the singular remark he has made about me."
"Gentlemen," said Albert, "Germain informs me that breakfast
is ready. My dear count, allow me to show you the way." They
passed silently into the breakfastroom, and every one took
his place. "Gentlemen," said the count, seating himself,
"permit me to make a confession which must form my excuse
for any improprieties I may commit. I am a stranger, and a
stranger to such a degree, that this is the first time I
have ever been at Paris. The French way of living is utterly
unknown to me, and up to the present time I have followed
the Eastern customs, which are entirely in contrast to the
Parisian. I beg you, therefore, to excuse if you find
anything in me too Turkish, too Italian, or too Arabian.
Now, then, let us breakfast."
"With what an air he says all this," muttered Beauchamp
"decidedly he is a great man."
"A great man in his own country," added Debray.
"A great man in every country, M. Debray," said
ChateauRenaud. The count was, it may be remembered, a most
temperate guest. Albert remarked this, expressing his fears
lest, at the outset, the Parisian mode of life should
displease the traveller in the most essential point. "My
dear count," said he, "I fear one thing, and that is, that
the fare of the Rue du Helder is not so much to your taste
as that of the Piazza di Spagni. I ought to have consulted
you on the point, and have had some dishes prepared
expressly."
"Did you know me better," returned the count, smiling, "you
would not give one thought of such a thing for a traveller
like myself, who has successively lived on maccaroni at
Naples, polenta at Milan, olla podrida at Valencia, pilau at
Constantinople, karrick in India, and swallows' nests in
China. I eat everywhere, and of everything, only I eat but
little and today, that you reproach me with my want of
appetite, is my day of appetite, for I have not eaten since
yesterday morning."
"What," cried all the guests, "you have not eaten for four
and twenty hours?"
"No," replied the count "I was forced to go out of my road
to obtain some information near Nimes, so that I was
somewhat late, and therefore I did not choose to stop."
"And you ate in your carriage?" asked Morcerf.
"No, I slept, as I generally do when I am weary without
having the courage to amuse myself, or when I am hungry
without feeling inclined to eat."
"But you can sleep when you please, monsieur?" said Morrel.
"Yes."
"You have a recipe for it?"
"An infallible one."
"That would be invaluable to us in Africa, who have not
always any food to eat, and rarely anything to drink."
"Yes," said Monte Cristo "but, unfortunately, a recipe
excellent for a man like myself would be very dangerous
applied to an army, which might not awake when it was
needed."
"May we inquire what is this recipe?" asked Debray.
"Oh, yes," returned Monte Cristo "I make no secret of it.
It is a mixture of excellent opium, which I fetched myself
from Canton in order to have it pure, and the best hashish
which grows in the East  that is, between the Tigris and
the Euphrates. These two ingredients are mixed in equal
proportions, and formed into pills. Ten minutes after one is
taken, the effect is produced. Ask Baron Franz d'Epinay I
think he tasted them one day."
"Yes," replied Morcerf, "he said something about it to me."
"But," said Beauchamp, who, as became a journalist, was very
incredulous, "you always carry this drug about you?"
"Always."
"Would it be an indiscretion to ask to see those precious
pills?" continued Beauchamp, hoping to take him at a
disadvantage.
"No, monsieur," returned the count and he drew from his
pocket a marvellous casket, formed out of a single emerald
and closed by a golden lid which unscrewed and gave passage
to a small greenish colored pellet about the size of a pea.
This ball had an acrid and penetrating odor. There were four
or five more in the emerald, which would contain about a
dozen. The casket passed around the table, but it was more
to examine the admirable emerald than to see the pills that
it passed from hand to hand. "And is it your cook who
prepares these pills?" asked Beauchamp.
"Oh, no, monsieur," replied Monte Cristo "I do not thus
betray my enjoyments to the vulgar. I am a tolerable
chemist, and prepare my pills myself."
"This is a magnificent emerald, and the largest I have ever
seen," said ChateauRenaud, "although my mother has some
remarkable family jewels."
"I had three similar ones," returned Monte Cristo. "I gave
one to the Sultan, who mounted it in his sabre another to
our holy father the Pope, who had it set in his tiara,
opposite to one nearly as large, though not so fine, given
by the Emperor Napoleon to his predecessor, Pius VII. I kept
the third for myself, and I had it hollowed out, which
reduced its value, but rendered it more commodious for the
purpose I intended." Every one looked at Monte Cristo with
astonishment he spoke with so much simplicity that it was
evident he spoke the truth, or that he was mad. However, the
sight of the emerald made them naturally incline to the
former belief. "And what did these two sovereigns give you
in exchange for these magnificent presents?" asked Debray.
"The Sultan, the liberty of a woman," replied the Count
"the Pope, the life of a man so that once in my life I have
been as powerful as if heaven had brought me into the world
on the steps of a throne."
"And it was Peppino you saved, was it not?" cried Morcerf
"it was for him that you obtained pardon?"
"Perhaps," returned the count, smiling.
"My dear count, you have no idea what pleasure it gives me
to hear you speak thus," said Morcerf. "I had announced you
beforehand to my friends as an enchanter of the "Arabian
Nights,' a wizard of the Middle Ages but the Parisians are
so subtle in paradoxes that they mistake for caprices of the
imagination the most incontestable truths, when these truths
do not form a part of their daily existence. For example,
here is Debray who reads, and Beauchamp who prints, every
day, "A member of the Jockey Club has been stopped and
robbed on the Boulevard' "four persons have been
assassinated in the Rue St. Denis' or "the Faubourg St.
Germain' "ten, fifteen, or twenty thieves, have been
arrested in a cafe on the Boulevard du Temple, or in the
Thermes de Julien,'  and yet these same men deny the
existence of the bandits in the Maremma, the Campagna di
Romana, or the Pontine Marshes. Tell them yourself that I
was taken by bandits, and that without your generous
intercession I should now have been sleeping in the
Catacombs of St. Sebastian, instead of receiving them in my
humble abode in the Rue du Helder."
"Ah," said Monte Cristo "you promised me never to mention
that circumstance."
"It was not I who made that promise," cried Morcerf "it
must have been some one else whom you have rescued in the
same manner, and whom you have forgotten. Pray speak of it,
for I shall not only, I trust, relate the little I do know,
but also a great deal I do not know."
"It seems to me," returned the count, smiling, "that you
played a sufficiently important part to know as well as
myself what happened."
"Well, you promise me, if I tell all I know, to relate, in
your turn, all that I do not know?"
"That is but fair," replied Monte Cristo.
"Well," said Morcerf, "for three days I believed myself the
object of the attentions of a masque, whom I took for a
descendant of Tullia or Poppoea, while I was simply the
object of the attentions of a contadina, and I say contadina
to avoid saying peasant girl. What I know is, that, like a
fool, a greater fool than he of whom I spoke just now, I
mistook for this peasant girl a young bandit of fifteen or
sixteen, with a beardless chin and slim waist, and who, just
as I was about to imprint a chaste salute on his lips,
placed a pistol to my head, and, aided by seven or eight
others, led, or rather dragged me, to the Catacombs of St.
Sebastian, where I found a highly educated brigand chief
perusing Caesar's "Commentaries,' and who deigned to leave
off reading to inform me, that unless the next morning,
before six o'clock, four thousand piastres were paid into
his account at his banker's, at a quarter past six I should
have ceased to exist. The letter is still to be seen, for it
is in Franz d'Epinay's possession, signed by me, and with a
postscript of M. Luigi Vampa. This is all I know, but I know
not, count, how you contrived to inspire so much respect in
the bandits of Rome who ordinarily have so little respect
for anything. I assure you, Franz and I were lost in
admiration."
"Nothing more simple," returned the count. "I had known the
famous Vampa for more than ten years. When he was quite a
child, and only a shepherd, I gave him a few gold pieces for
showing me my way, and he, in order to repay me, gave me a
poniard, the hilt of which he had carved with his own hand,
and which you may have seen in my collection of arms. In
after years, whether he had forgotten this interchange of
presents, which ought to have cemented our friendship, or
whether he did not recollect me, he sought to take me, but,
on the contrary, it was I who captured him and a dozen of
his band. I might have handed him over to Roman justice,
which is somewhat expeditious, and which would have been
particularly so with him but I did nothing of the sort  I
suffered him and his band to depart."
"With the condition that they should sin no more," said
Beauchamp, laughing. "I see they kept their promise."
"No, monsieur," returned Monte Cristo "upon the simple
condition that they should respect myself and my friends.
Perhaps what I am about to say may seem strange to you, who
are socialists, and vaunt humanity and your duty to your
neighbor, but I never seek to protect a society which does
not protect me, and which I will even say, generally
occupies itself about me only to injure me and thus by
giving them a low place in my esteem, and preserving a
neutrality towards them, it is society and my neighbor who
are indebted to me."
"Bravo," cried ChateauRenaud "you are the first man I ever
met sufficiently courageous to preach egotism. Bravo, count,
bravo"
"It is frank, at least," said Morrel. "But I am sure that
the count does not regret having once deviated from the
principles he has so boldly avowed."
"How have I deviated from those principles, monsieur?" asked
Monte Cristo, who could not help looking at Morrel with so
much intensity, that two or three times the young man had
been unable to sustain that clear and piercing glance.
"Why, it seems to me," replied Morrel, "that in delivering
M. de Morcerf, whom you did not know, you did good to your
neighbor and to society."
"Of which he is the brightest ornament," said Beauchamp,
drinking off a glass of champagne.
"My dear count," cried Morcerf, "you are at fault  you,
one of the most formidable logicians I know  and you must
see it clearly proved that instead of being an egotist, you
are a philanthropist. Ah, you call yourself Oriental, a
Levantine, Maltese, Indian, Chinese your family name is
Monte Cristo Sinbad the Sailor is your baptismal
appellation, and yet the first day you set foot in Paris you
instinctively display the greatest virtue, or rather the
chief defect, of us eccentric Parisians,  that is, you
assume the vices you have not, and conceal the virtues you
possess."
"My dear vicomte," returned Monte Cristo, "I do not see, in
all I have done, anything that merits, either from you or
these gentlemen, the pretended eulogies I have received. You
were no stranger to me, for I knew you from the time I gave
up two rooms to you, invited you to breakfast with me, lent
you one of my carriages, witnessed the Carnival in your
company, and saw with you from a window in the Piazza del
Popolo the execution that affected you so much that you
nearly fainted. I will appeal to any of these gentlemen,
could I leave my guest in the hands of a hideous bandit, as
you term him? Besides, you know, I had the idea that you
could introduce me into some of the Paris salons when I came
to France. You might some time ago have looked upon this
resolution as a vague project, but today you see it was a
reality, and you must submit to it under penalty of breaking
your word."
"I will keep it," returned Morcerf "but I fear that you
will be much disappointed, accustomed as you are to
picturesque events and fantastic horizons. Amongst us you
will not meet with any of those episodes with which your
adventurous existence has so familiarized you our
Chimborazo is Mortmartre, our Himalaya is Mount Valerien,
our Great Desert is the plain of Grenelle, where they are
now boring an artesian well to water the caravans. We have
plenty of thieves, though not so many as is said but these
thieves stand in far more dread of a policeman than a lord.
France is so prosaic, and Paris so civilized a city, that
you will not find in its eightyfive departments  I say
eightyfive, because I do not include Corsica  you will
not find, then, in these eightyfive departments a single
hill on which there is not a telegraph, or a grotto in which
the commissary of police has not put up a gaslamp. There is
but one service I can render you, and for that I place
myself entirely at your orders, that is, to present, or make
my friends present, you everywhere besides, you have no
need of any one to introduce you  with your name, and your
fortune, and your talent" Monte Cristo bowed with a
somewhat ironical smile "you can present yourself
everywhere, and be well received. I can be useful in one way
only  if knowledge of Parisian habits, of the means of
rendering yourself comfortable, or of the bazaars, can
assist, you may depend upon me to find you a fitting
dwelling here. I do not dare offer to share my apartments
with you, as I shared yours at Rome  I, who do not profess
egotism, but am yet egotist par excellence for, except
myself, these rooms would not hold a shadow more, unless
that shadow were feminine."
"Ah," said the count, "that is a most conjugal reservation
I recollect that at Rome you said something of a projected
marriage. May I congratulate you?"
"The affair is still in projection."
"And he who says in "projection,' means already decided,"
said Debray.
"No," replied Morcerf, "my father is most anxious about it
and I hope, ere long, to introduce you, if not to my wife,
at least to my betrothed  Mademoiselle Eugenie Danglars."
"Eugenie Danglars," said Monte Cristo "tell me, is not her
father Baron Danglars?"
"Yes," returned Morcerf, "a baron of a new creation."
"What matter," said Monte Cristo "if he has rendered the
State services which merit this distinction?"
"Enormous ones," answered Beauchamp. "Although in reality a
Liberal, he negotiated a loan of six millions for Charles
X., in , who made him a baron and chevalier of the
Legion of Honor so that he wears the ribbon, not, as you
would think, in his waistcoatpocket, but at his
buttonhole."
"Ah," interrupted Morcerf, laughing, "Beauchamp, Beauchamp,
keep that for the Corsaire or the Charivari, but spare my
future fatherinlaw before me." Then, turning to Monte
Cristo, "You just now spoke his name as if you knew the
baron?"
"I do not know him," returned Monte Cristo "but I shall
probably soon make his acquaintance, for I have a credit
opened with him by the house of Richard  Blount, of London,
Arstein  Eskeles of Vienna, and Thomson  French at Rome."
As he pronounced the two last names, the count glanced at
Maximilian Morrel. If the stranger expected to produce an
effect on Morrel, he was not mistaken  Maximilian started
as if he had been electrified. "Thomson  French," said he
"do you know this house, monsieur?"
"They are my bankers in the capital of the Christian world,"
returned the count quietly. "Can my influence with them be
of any service to you?"
"Oh, count, you could assist me perhaps in researches which
have been, up to the present, fruitless. This house, in past
years, did ours a great service, and has, I know not for
what reason, always denied having rendered us this service."
"I shall be at your orders," said Monte Cristo bowing.
"But," continued Morcerf, "a propos of Danglars,  we have
strangely wandered from the subject. We were speaking of a
suitable habitation for the Count of Monte Cristo. Come,
gentlemen, let us all propose some place. Where shall we
lodge this new guest in our great capital?"
"Faubourg SaintGermain," said ChateauRenaud. "The count
will find there a charming hotel, with a court and garden."
"Bah, ChateauRenaud," returned Debray, "you only know your
dull and gloomy Faubourg SaintGermain do not pay any
attention to him, count  live in the Chaussee d'Antin,
that's the real centre of Paris."
"Boulevard de l'Opera," said Beauchamp "the second floor 
a house with a balcony. The count will have his cushions of
silver cloth brought there, and as he smokes his chibouque,
see all Paris pass before him."
"You have no idea, then, Morrel?" asked ChateauRenaud "you
do not propose anything."
"Oh, yes," returned the young man, smiling "on the
contrary, I have one, but I expected the count would be
tempted by one of the brilliant proposals made him, yet as
he has not replied to any of them, I will venture to offer
him a suite of apartments in a charming hotel, in the
Pompadour style, that my sister has inhabited for a year, in
the Rue Meslay."
"You have a sister?" asked the count.
"Yes, monsieur, a most excellent sister."
"Married?"
"Nearly nine years."
"Happy?" asked the count again.
"As happy as it is permitted to a human creature to be,"
replied Maximilian. "She married the man she loved, who
remained faithful to us in our fallen fortunes  Emmanuel
Herbaut." Monte Cristo smiled imperceptibly. "I live there
during my leave of absence," continued Maximilian "and I
shall be, together with my brotherinlaw Emmanuel, at the
disposition of the Count, whenever he thinks fit to honor
us."
"One minute," cried Albert, without giving Monte Cristo the
time to reply. "Take care, you are going to immure a
traveller, Sinbad the Sailor, a man who comes to see Paris
you are going to make a patriarch of him."
"Oh, no," said Morrel "my sister is five and twenty, my
brotherinlaw is thirty, they are gay, young, and happy.
Besides, the count will be in his own house, and only see
them when he thinks fit to do so."
"Thanks, monsieur," said Monte Cristo "I shall content
myself with being presented to your sister and her husband,
if you will do me the honor to introduce me but I cannot
accept the offer of any one of these gentlemen, since my
habitation is already prepared."
"What," cried Morcerf "you are, then, going to an hotel 
that will be very dull for you."
"Was I so badly lodged at Rome?" said Monte Cristo smiling.
"Parbleu, at Rome you spent fifty thousand piastres in
furnishing your apartments, but I presume that you are not
disposed to spend a similar sum every day."
"It is not that which deterred me," replied Monte Cristo
"but as I determined to have a house to myself, I sent on my
valet de chambre, and he ought by this time to have bought
the house and furnished it."
"But you have, then, a valet de chambre who knows Paris?"
said Beauchamp.
"It is the first time he has ever been in Paris. He is
black, and cannot speak," returned Monte Cristo.
"It is Ali" cried Albert, in the midst of the general
surprise.
"Yes, Ali himself, my Nubian mute, whom you saw, I think, at
Rome."
"Certainly," said Morcerf "I recollect him perfectly. But
how could you charge a Nubian to purchase a house, and a
mute to furnish it?  he will do everything wrong."
"Undeceive yourself, monsieur," replied Monte Cristo "I am
quite sure, that, on the contrary, he will choose everything
as I wish. He knows my tastes, my caprices, my wants. He has
been here a week, with the instinct of a hound, hunting by
himself. He will arrange everything for me. He knew, that I
should arrive today at ten o'clock he was waiting for me
at nine at the Barriere de Fontainebleau. He gave me this
paper it contains the number of my new abode read it
yourself," and Monte Cristo passed a paper to Albert. "Ah,
that is really original," said Beauchamp.
"And very princely," added ChateauRenaud.
"What, do you not know your house?" asked Debray.
"No," said Monte Cristo "I told you I did not wish to be
behind my time I dressed myself in the carriage, and
descended at the viscount's door." The young men looked at
each other they did not know if it was a comedy Monte
Cristo was playing, but every word he uttered had such an
air of simplicity, that it was impossible to suppose what he
said was false  besides, why should he tell a falsehood?
"We must content ourselves, then," said Beauchamp, "with
rendering the count all the little services in our power. I,
in my quality of journalist, open all the theatres to him."
"Thanks, monsieur," returned Monte Cristo, "my steward has
orders to take a box at each theatre."
"Is your steward also a Nubian?" asked Debray.
"No, he is a countryman of yours, if a Corsican is a
countryman of any one's. But you know him, M. de Morcerf."
"Is it that excellent M. Bertuccio, who understands hiring
windows so well?"
"Yes, you saw him the day I had the honor of receiving you
he has been a soldier, a smuggler  in fact, everything. I
would not be quite sure that he has not been mixed up with
the police for some trifle  a stab with a knife, for
instance."
"And you have chosen this honest citizen for your steward,"
said Debray. "Of how much does he rob you every year?"
"On my word," replied the count, "not more than another. I
am sure he answers my purpose, knows no impossibility, and
so I keep him."
"Then," continued ChateauRenaud, "since you have an
establishment, a steward, and a hotel in the Champs Elysees,
you only want a mistress." Albert smiled. He thought of the
fair Greek he had seen in the count's box at the Argentina
and Valle theatres. "I have something better than that,"
said Monte Cristo "I have a slave. You procure your
mistresses from the opera, the Vaudeville, or the Varietes
I purchased mine at Constantinople it cost me more, but I
have nothing to fear."
"But you forget," replied Debray, laughing, "that we are
Franks by name and franks by nature, as King Charles said,
and that the moment she puts her foot in France your slave
becomes free."
"Who will tell her?"
"The first person who sees her."
"She only speaks Romaic."
"That is different."
"But at least we shall see her," said Beauchamp, "or do you
keep eunuchs as well as mutes?"
"Oh, no," replied Monte Cristo "I do not carry brutalism so
far. Every one who surrounds me is free to quit me, and when
they leave me will no longer have any need of me or any one
else it is for that reason, perhaps, that they do not quit
me." They had long since passed to dessert and cigars.
"My dear Albert," said Debray, rising, "it is halfpast two.
Your guest is charming, but you leave the best company to go
into the worst sometimes. I must return to the minister's. I
will tell him of the count, and we shall soon know who he
is."
"Take care," returned Albert "no one has been able to
accomplish that."
"Oh, we have three millions for our police it is true they
are almost always spent beforehand, but, no matter, we shall
still have fifty thousand francs to spend for this purpose."
"And when you know, will you tell me?"
"I promise you. Au revoir, Albert. Gentlemen, good morning."
As he left the room, Debray called out loudly, "My
carriage."
"Bravo," said Beauchamp to Albert "I shall not go to the
Chamber, but I have something better to offer my readers
than a speech of M. Danglars."
"For heaven's sake, Beauchamp," returned Morcerf, "do not
deprive me of the merit of introducing him everywhere. Is he
not peculiar?"
"He is more than that," replied ChateauRenaud "he is one
of the most extraordinary men I ever saw in my life. Are you
coming, Morrel?"
"Directly I have given my card to the count, who has
promised to pay us a visit at Rue Meslay, No. ."
"Be sure I shall not fail to do so," returned the count,
bowing. And Maximilian Morrel left the room with the Baron
de ChateauRenaud, leaving Monte Cristo alone with Morcerf.
Chapter 
The Presentation.
When Albert found himself alone with Monte Cristo, "My dear
count," said he, "allow me to commence my services as
cicerone by showing you a specimen of a bachelor's
apartment. You, who are accustomed to the palaces of Italy,
can amuse yourself by calculating in how many square feet a
young man who is not the worst lodged in Paris can live. As
we pass from one room to another, I will open the windows to
let you breathe." Monte Cristo had already seen the
breakfastroom and the salon on the groundfloor. Albert led
him first to his atelier, which was, as we have said, his
favorite apartment. Monte Cristo quickly appreciated all
that Albert had collected here  old cabinets, Japanese
porcelain, Oriental stuffs, Venetian glass, arms from all
parts of the world  everything was familiar to him and at
the first glance he recognized their date, their country,
and their origin. Morcerf had expected he should be the
guide on the contrary, it was he who, under the count's
guidance, followed a course of archaeology, mineralogy, and
natural history. They descended to the first floor Albert
led his guest into the salon. The salon was filled with the
works of modern artists there were landscapes by Dupre,
with their long reeds and tall trees, their lowing oxen and
marvellous skies Delacroix's Arabian cavaliers, with their
long white burnouses, their shining belts, their damasked
arms, their horses, who tore each other with their teeth
while their riders contended fiercely with their maces
aquarelles of Boulanger, representing Notre Dame de Paris
with that vigor that makes the artist the rival of the poet
there were paintings by Diaz, who makes his flowers more
beautiful than flowers, his suns more brilliant than the
sun designs by Decamp, as vividly colored as those of
Salvator Rosa, but more poetic pastels by Giraud and
Muller, representing children like angels and women with the
features of a virgin sketches torn from the album of
Dauzats' "Travels in the East," that had been made in a few
seconds on the saddle of a camel, or beneath the dome of a
mosque  in a word, all that modern art can give in
exchange and as recompense for the art lost and gone with
ages long since past.
Albert expected to have something new this time to show to
the traveller, but, to his great surprise, the latter,
without seeking for the signatures, many of which, indeed,
were only initials, named instantly the author of every
picture in such a manner that it was easy to see that each
name was not only known to him, but that each style
associated with it had been appreciated and studied by him.
From the salon they passed into the bedchamber it was a
model of taste and simple elegance. A single portrait,
signed by Leopold Robert, shone in its carved and gilded
frame. This portrait attracted the Count of Monte Cristo's
attention, for he made three rapid steps in the chamber, and
stopped suddenly before it. It was the portrait of a young
woman of five or six and twenty, with a dark complexion, and
light and lustrous eyes, veiled beneath long lashes. She
wore the picturesque costume of the Catalan fisherwomen, a
red and black bodice, and golden pins in her hair. She was
looking at the sea, and her form was outlined on the blue
ocean and sky. The light was so faint in the room that
Albert did not perceive the pallor that spread itself over
the count's visage, or the nervous heaving of his chest and
shoulders. Silence prevailed for an instant, during which
Monte Cristo gazed intently on the picture.
"You have there a most charming mistress, viscount," said
the count in a perfectly calm tone "and this costume  a
ball costume, doubtless  becomes her admirably."
"Ah, monsieur," returned Albert, "I would never forgive you
this mistake if you had seen another picture beside this.
You do not know my mother she it is whom you see here. She
had her portrait painted thus six or eight years ago. This
costume is a fancy one, it appears, and the resemblance is
so great that I think I still see my mother the same as she
was in . The countess had this portrait painted during
the count's absence. She doubtless intended giving him an
agreeable surprise but, strange to say, this portrait
seemed to displease my father, and the value of the picture,
which is, as you see, one of the best works of Leopold
Robert, could not overcome his dislike to it. It is true,
between ourselves, that M. de Morcerf is one of the most
assiduous peers at the Luxembourg, a general renowned for
theory, but a most mediocre amateur of art. It is different
with my mother, who paints exceedingly well, and who,
unwilling to part with so valuable a picture, gave it to me
to put here, where it would be less likely to displease M.
de Morcerf, whose portrait, by Gros, I will also show you.
Excuse my talking of family matters, but as I shall have the
honor of introducing you to the count, I tell you this to
prevent you making any allusions to this picture. The
picture seems to have a malign influence, for my mother
rarely comes here without looking at it, and still more
rarely does she look at it without weeping. This
disagreement is the only one that has ever taken place
between the count and countess, who are still as much
united, although married more than twenty years, as on the
first day of their wedding."
Monte Cristo glanced rapidly at Albert, as if to seek a
hidden meaning in his words, but it was evident the young
man uttered them in the simplicity of his heart. "Now," said
Albert, "that you have seen all my treasures, allow me to
offer them to you, unworthy as they are. Consider yourself
as in your own house, and to put yourself still more at your
ease, pray accompany me to the apartments of M. de Morcerf,
he whom I wrote from Rome an account of the services you
rendered me, and to whom I announced your promised visit,
and I may say that both the count and countess anxiously
desire to thank you in person. You are somewhat blase I
know, and family scenes have not much effect on Sinbad the
Sailor, who has seen so many others. However, accept what I
propose to you as an initiation into Parisian life  a life
of politeness, visiting, and introductions." Monte Cristo
bowed without making any answer he accepted the offer
without enthusiasm and without regret, as one of those
conventions of society which every gentleman looks upon as a
duty. Albert summoned his servant, and ordered him to
acquaint M. and Madame de Morcerf of the arrival of the
Count of Monte Cristo. Albert followed him with the count.
When they arrived at the antechamber, above the door was
visible a shield, which, by its rich ornaments and its
harmony with the rest of the furniture, indicated the
importance the owner attached to this blazon. Monte Cristo
stopped and examined it attentively.
"Azure seven merlets, or, placed bender," said he. "These
are, doubtless, your family arms? Except the knowledge of
blazons, that enables me to decipher them, I am very
ignorant of heraldry  I, a count of a fresh creation,
fabricated in Tuscany by the aid of a commandery of St.
Stephen, and who would not have taken the trouble had I not
been told that when you travel much it is necessary.
Besides, you must have something on the panels of your
carriage, to escape being searched by the customhouse
officers. Excuse my putting such a question to you."
"It is not indiscreet," returned Morcerf, with the
simplicity of conviction. "You have guessed rightly. These
are our arms, that is, those of my father, but they are, as
you see, joined to another shield, which has gules, a silver
tower, which are my mother's. By her side I am Spanish, but
the family of Morcerf is French, and, I have heard, one of
the oldest of the south of France."
"Yes," replied Monte Cristo "these blazons prove that.
Almost all the armed pilgrims that went to the Holy Land
took for their arms either a cross, in honor of their
mission, or birds of passage, in sign of the long voyage
they were about to undertake, and which they hoped to
accomplish on the wings of faith. One of your ancestors had
joined the Crusades, and supposing it to be only that of St.
Louis, that makes you mount to the thirteenth century, which
is tolerably ancient."
"It is possible," said Morcerf "my father has in his study
a genealogical tree which will tell you all that, and on
which I made commentaries that would have greatly edified
Hozier and Jaucourt. At present I no longer think of it, and
yet I must tell you that we are beginning to occupy
ourselves greatly with these things under our popular
government."
"Well, then, your government would do well to choose from
the past something better than the things that I have
noticed on your monuments, and which have no heraldic
meaning whatever. As for you, viscount," continued Monte
Cristo to Morcerf, "you are more fortunate than the
government, for your arms are really beautiful, and speak to
the imagination. Yes, you are at once from Provence and
Spain that explains, if the portrait you showed me be like,
the dark hue I so much admired on the visage of the noble
Catalan." It would have required the penetration of Oedipus
or the Sphinx to have divined the irony the count concealed
beneath these words, apparently uttered with the greatest
politeness. Morcerf thanked him with a smile, and pushed
open the door above which were his arms, and which, as we
have said, opened into the salon. In the most conspicuous
part of the salon was another portrait. It was that of a
man, from five to eight and thirty, in the uniform of a
general officer, wearing the double epaulet of heavy
bullion, that indicates superior rank, the ribbon of the
Legion of Honor around his neck, which showed he was a
commander, and on the right breast, the star of a grand
officer of the order of the Saviour, and on the left that of
the grand cross of Charles III., which proved that the
person represented by the picture had served in the wars of
Greece and Spain, or, what was just the same thing as
regarded decorations, had fulfilled some diplomatic mission
in the two countries.
Monte Cristo was engaged in examining this portrait with no
less care than he had bestowed upon the other, when another
door opened, and he found himself opposite to the Count of
Morcerf in person. He was a man of forty to fortyfive
years, but he seemed at least fifty, and his black mustache
and eyebrows contrasted strangely with his almost white
hair, which was cut short, in the military fashion. He was
dressed in plain clothes, and wore at his buttonhole the
ribbons of the different orders to which he belonged. He
entered with a tolerably dignified step, and some little
haste. Monte Cristo saw him advance towards him without
making a single step. It seemed as if his feet were rooted
to the ground, and his eyes on the Count of Morcerf.
"Father," said the young man, "I have the honor of
presenting to you the Count of Monte Cristo, the generous
friend whom I had the good fortune to meet in the critical
situation of which I have told you."
"You are most welcome, monsieur," said the Count of Morcerf,
saluting Monte Cristo with a smile, "and monsieur has
rendered our house, in preserving its only heir, a service
which insures him our eternal gratitude." As he said these
words, the count of Morcerf pointed to a chair, while he
seated himself in another opposite the window.
Monte Cristo, in taking the seat Morcerf offered him, placed
himself in such a manner as to remain concealed in the
shadow of the large velvet curtains, and read on the
careworn and livid features of the count a whole history of
secret griefs written in each wrinkle time had planted
there. "The countess," said Morcerf, "was at her toilet when
she was informed of the visit she was about to receive. She
will, however, be in the salon in ten minutes."
"It is a great honor to me," returned Monte Cristo, "to be
thus, on the first day of my arrival in Paris, brought in
contact with a man whose merit equals his reputation, and to
whom fortune has for once been equitable, but has she not
still on the plains of Metidja, or in the mountains of
Atlas, a marshal's staff to offer you?"
"Oh," replied Morcerf, reddening slightly, "I have left the
service, monsieur. Made a peer at the Restoration, I served
through the first campaign under the orders of Marshal
Bourmont. I could, therefore, expect a higher rank, and who
knows what might have happened had the elder branch remained
on the throne? But the Revolution of July was, it seems,
sufficiently glorious to allow itself to be ungrateful, and
it was so for all services that did not date from the
imperial period. I tendered my resignation, for when you
have gained your epaulets on the battlefield, you do not
know how to manoeuvre on the slippery grounds of the salons.
I have hung up my sword, and cast myself into politics. I
have devoted myself to industry I study the useful arts.
During the twenty years I served, I often wished to do so,
but I had not the time."
"These are the ideas that render your nation superior to any
other," returned Monte Cristo. "A gentleman of high birth,
possessor of an ample fortune, you have consented to gain
your promotion as an obscure soldier, step by step  this
is uncommon then become general, peer of France, commander
of the Legion of Honor, you consent to again commence a
second apprenticeship, without any other hope or any other
desire than that of one day becoming useful to your
fellowcreatures this, indeed, is praiseworthy,  nay,
more, it is sublime." Albert looked on and listened with
astonishment he was not used to see Monte Cristo give vent
to such bursts of enthusiasm. "Alas," continued the
stranger, doubtless to dispel the slight cloud that covered
Morcerf's brow, "we do not act thus in Italy we grow
according to our race and our species, and we pursue the
same lines, and often the same uselessness, all our lives."
"But, monsieur," said the Count of Morcerf, "for a man of
your merit, Italy is not a country, and France opens her
arms to receive you respond to her call. France will not,
perhaps, be always ungrateful. She treats her children ill,
but she always welcomes strangers."
"Ah, father," said Albert with a smile, "it is evident you
do not know the Count of Monte Cristo he despises all
honors, and contents himself with those written on his
passport."
"That is the most just remark," replied the stranger, "I
ever heard made concerning myself."
"You have been free to choose your career," observed the
Count of Morcerf, with a sigh "and you have chosen the path
strewed with flowers."
"Precisely, monsieur," replied Monte Cristo with one of
those smiles that a painter could never represent or a
physiologist analyze.
"If I did not fear to fatigue you," said the general,
evidently charmed with the count's manners, "I would have
taken you to the Chamber there is a debate very curious to
those who are strangers to our modern senators."
"I shall be most grateful, monsieur, if you will, at some
future time, renew your offer, but I have been flattered
with the hope of being introduced to the countess, and I
will therefore wait."
"Ah, here is my mother," cried the viscount. Monte Cristo,
turned round hastily, and saw Madame de Morcerf at the
entrance of the salon, at the door opposite to that by which
her husband had entered, pale and motionless when Monte
Cristo turned round, she let fall her arm, which for some
unknown reason had been resting on the gilded doorpost. She
had been there some moments, and had heard the last words of
the visitor. The latter rose and bowed to the countess, who
inclined herself without speaking. "Ah, good heavens,
madame," said the count, "are you ill, or is it the heat of
the room that affects you?"
"Are you ill, mother?" cried the viscount, springing towards
her.
She thanked them both with a smile. "No," returned she, "but
I feel some emotion on seeing, for the first time, the man
without whose intervention we should have been in tears and
desolation. Monsieur," continued the countess, advancing
with the majesty of a queen, "I owe to you the life of my
son, and for this I bless you. Now, I thank you for the
pleasure you give me in thus affording me the opportunity of
thanking you as I have blessed you, from the bottom of my
heart." The count bowed again, but lower than before He was
even paler than Mercedes. "Madame," said he, "the count and
yourself recompense too generously a simple action. To save
a man, to spare a father's feelings, or a mother's
sensibility, is not to do a good action, but a simple deed
of humanity." At these words, uttered with the most
exquisite sweetness and politeness, Madame de Morcerf
replied. "It is very fortunate for my son, monsieur, that he
found such a friend, and I thank God that things are thus."
And Mercedes raised her fine eyes to heaven with so fervent
an expression of gratitude, that the count fancied he saw
tears in them. M. de Morcerf approached her. "Madame," said
he. "I have already made my excuses to the count for
quitting him, and I pray you to do so also. The sitting
commences at two it is now three, and I am to speak."
"Go, then, and monsieur and I will strive our best to forget
your absence," replied the countess, with the same tone of
deep feeling. "Monsieur," continued she, turning to Monte
Cristo, "will you do us the honor of passing the rest of the
day with us?"
"Believe me, madame, I feel most grateful for your kindness,
but I got out of my travelling carriage at your door this
morning, and I am ignorant how I am installed in Paris,
which I scarcely know this is but a trifling inquietude, I
know, but one that may be appreciated."
"We shall have the pleasure another time," said the
countess "you promise that?" Monte Cristo inclined himself
without answering, but the gesture might pass for assent. "I
will not detain you, monsieur," continued the countess "I
would not have our gratitude become indiscreet or
importunate."
"My dear Count," said Albert, "I will endeavor to return
your politeness at Rome, and place my coupe at your disposal
until your own be ready."
"A thousand thanks for your kindness, viscount," returned
the Count of Monte Cristo "but I suppose that M. Bertuccio
has suitably employed the four hours and a half I have given
him, and that I shall find a carriage of some sort ready at
the door." Albert was used to the count's manner of
proceeding he knew that, like Nero, he was in search of the
impossible, and nothing astonished him, but wishing to judge
with his own eyes how far the count's orders had been
executed, he accompanied him to the door of the house. Monte
Cristo was not deceived. As soon as he appeared in the Count
of Morcerf's antechamber, a footman, the same who at Rome
had brought the count's card to the two young men, and
announced his visit, sprang into the vestibule, and when he
arrived at the door the illustrious traveller found his
carriage awaiting him. It was a coupe of Koller's building,
and with horses and harness for which Drake had, to the
knowledge of all the lions of Paris, refused on the previous
day seven hundred guineas. "Monsieur," said the count to
Albert, "I do not ask you to accompany me to my house, as I
can only show you a habitation fitted up in a hurry, and I
have, as you know, a reputation to keep up as regards not
being taken by surprise. Give me, therefore, one more day
before I invite you I shall then be certain not to fail in
my hospitality."
"If you ask me for a day, count, I know what to anticipate
it will not be a house I shall see, but a palace. You have
decidedly some genius at your control."
"Ma foi, spread that idea," replied the Count of Monte
Cristo, putting his foot on the velvetlined steps of his
splendid carriage, "and that will be worth something to me
among the ladies." As he spoke, he sprang into the vehicle,
the door was closed, but not so rapidly that Monte Cristo
failed to perceive the almost imperceptible movement which
stirred the curtains of the apartment in which he had left
Madame de Morcerf. When Albert returned to his mother, he
found her in the boudoir reclining in a large velvet
armchair, the whole room so obscure that only the shining
spangle, fastened here and there to the drapery, and the
angles of the gilded frames of the pictures, showed with
some degree of brightness in the gloom. Albert could not see
the face of the countess, as it was covered with a thin veil
she had put on her head, and which fell over her features in
misty folds, but it seemed to him as though her voice had
altered. He could distinguish amid the perfumes of the roses
and heliotropes in the flowerstands, the sharp and fragrant
odor of volatile salts, and he noticed in one of the chased
cups on the mantlepiece the countess's smellingbottle,
taken from its shagreen case, and exclaimed in a tone of
uneasiness, as he entered,  "My dear mother, have you been
ill during my absence?"
"No, no, Albert, but you know these roses, tuberoses, and
orangeflowers throw out at first, before one is used to
them, such violent perfumes."
"Then, my dear mother," said Albert, putting his hand to the
bell, "they must be taken into the antechamber. You are
really ill, and just now were so pale as you came into the
room" 
"Was I pale, Albert?"
"Yes a pallor that suits you admirably, mother, but which
did not the less alarm my father and myself."
"Did your father speak of it?" inquired Mercedes eagerly.
"No, madame but do you not remember that he spoke of the
fact to you?"
"Yes, I do remember," replied the countess. A servant
entered, summoned by Albert's ring of the bell. "Take these
flowers into the anteroom or dressingroom," said the
viscount "they make the countess ill." The footman obeyed
his orders. A long pause ensued, which lasted until all the
flowers were removed. "What is this name of Monte Cristo?"
inquired the countess, when the servant had taken away the
last vase of flowers, "is it a family name, or the name of
the estate, or a simple title?"
"I believe, mother, it is merely a title. The count
purchased an island in the Tuscan archipelago, and, as he
told you today, has founded a commandery. You know the same
thing was done for Saint Stephen of Florence, Saint George,
Constantinian of Parma, and even for the Order of Malta.
Except this, he has no pretension to nobility, and calls
himself a chance count, although the general opinion at Rome
is that the count is a man of very high distinction."
"His manners are admirable," said the countess, "at least,
as far as I could judge in the few minutes he remained
here."
"They are perfect mother, so perfect, that they surpass by
far all I have known in the leading aristocracy of the three
proudest nobilities of Europe  the English, the Spanish,
and the German." The countess paused a moment then, after a
slight hesitation, she resumed,  "You have seen, my dear
Albert  I ask the question as a mother  you have seen M.
de Monte Cristo in his house, you are quicksighted, have
much knowledge of the world, more tact than is usual at your
age, do you think the count is really what he appears to
be?"
"What does he appear to be?"
"Why, you have just said,  a man of high distinction."
"I told you, my dear mother, he was esteemed such."
"But what is your own opinion, Albert?"
"I must tell you that I have not come to any decided opinion
respecting him, but I think him a Maltese."
"I do not ask you of his origin but what he is."
"Ah, what he is that is quite another thing. I have seen so
many remarkable things in him, that if you would have me
really say what I think, I shall reply that I really do look
upon him as one of Byron's heroes, whom misery has marked
with a fatal brand some Manfred, some Lara, some Werner,
one of those wrecks, as it were, of some ancient family,
who, disinherited of their patrimony, have achieved one by
the force of their adventurous genius, which has placed them
above the laws of society."
"You say" 
"I say that Monte Cristo is an island in the midst of the
Mediterranean, without inhabitants or garrison, the resort
of smugglers of all nations, and pirates of every flag. Who
knows whether or not these industrious worthies do not pay
to their feudal lord some dues for his protection?"
"That is possible," said the countess, reflecting.
"Never mind," continued the young man, "smuggler or not, you
must agree, mother dear, as you have seen him, that the
Count of Monte Cristo is a remarkable man, who will have the
greatest success in the salons of Paris. Why, this very
morning, in my rooms, he made his entree amongst us by
striking every man of us with amazement, not even excepting
ChateauRenaud."
"And what do you suppose is the count's age?" inquired
Mercedes, evidently attaching great importance to this
question.
"Thirtyfive or thirtysix, mother."
"So young,  it is impossible," said Mercedes, replying at
the same time to what Albert said as well as to her own
private reflection.
"It is the truth, however. Three or four times he has said
to me, and certainly without the slightest premeditation,
"at such a period I was five years old, at another ten years
old, at another twelve,' and I, induced by curiosity, which
kept me alive to these details, have compared the dates, and
never found him inaccurate. The age of this singular man,
who is of no age, is then, I am certain, thirtyfive.
Besides, mother, remark how vivid his eye, how ravenblack
his hair, and his brow, though so pale, is free from
wrinkles,  he is not only vigorous, but also young." The
countess bent her head, as if beneath a heavy wave of bitter
thoughts. "And has this man displayed a friendship for you,
Albert?" she asked with a nervous shudder.
"I am inclined to think so."
"And  do  you  like  him?"
"Why, he pleases me in spite of Franz d'Epinay, who tries to
convince me that he is a being returned from the other
world." The countess shuddered. "Albert," she said, in a
voice which was altered by emotion, "I have always put you
on your guard against new acquaintances. Now you are a man,
and are able to give me advice yet I repeat to you, Albert,
be prudent."
"Why, my dear mother, it is necessary, in order to make your
advice turn to account, that I should know beforehand what I
have to distrust. The count never plays, he only drinks pure
water tinged with a little sherry, and is so rich that he
cannot, without intending to laugh at me, try to borrow
money. What, then, have I to fear from him?"
"You are right," said the countess, "and my fears are
weakness, especially when directed against a man who has
saved your life. How did your father receive him, Albert? It
is necessary that we should be more than complaisant to the
count. M. de Morcerf is sometimes occupied, his business
makes him reflective, and he might, without intending it" 
"Nothing could be in better taste than my father's demeanor,
madame," said Albert "nay, more, he seemed greatly
flattered at two or three compliments which the count very
skilfully and agreeably paid him with as much ease as if he
had known him these thirty years. Each of these little
tickling arrows must have pleased my father," added Albert
with a laugh. "And thus they parted the best possible
friends, and M. de Morcerf even wished to take him to the
Chamber to hear the speakers." The countess made no reply.
She fell into so deep a revery that her eyes gradually
closed. The young man, standing up before her, gazed upon
her with that filial affection which is so tender and
endearing with children whose mothers are still young and
handsome. Then, after seeing her eyes closed, and hearing
her breathe gently, he believed she had dropped asleep, and
left the apartment on tiptoe, closing the door after him
with the utmost precaution. "This devil of a fellow," he
muttered, shaking his head "I said at the time he would
create a sensation here, and I measure his effect by an
infallible thermometer. My mother has noticed him, and he
must therefore, perforce, be remarkable." He went down to
the stables, not without some slight annoyance, when he
remembered that the Count of Monte Cristo had laid his hands
on a "turnout" which sent his bays down to second place in
the opinion of connoisseurs. "Most decidedly," said he, "men
are not equal, and I must beg my father to develop this
theorem in the Chamber of Peers."
Chapter 
Monsieur Bertuccio.
Meanwhile the count had arrived at his house it had taken
him six minutes to perform the distance, but these six
minutes were sufficient to induce twenty young men who knew
the price of the equipage they had been unable to purchase
themselves, to put their horses in a gallop in order to see
the rich foreigner who could afford to give , francs
apiece for his horses. The house Ali had chosen, and which
was to serve as a town residence to Monte Cristo, was
situated on the right hand as you ascend the Champs Elysees.
A thick clump of trees and shrubs rose in the centre, and
masked a portion of the front around this shrubbery two
alleys, like two arms, extended right and left, and formed a
carriagedrive from the iron gates to a double portico, on
every step of which stood a porcelain vase, filled with
flowers. This house, isolated from the rest, had, besides
the main entrance, another in the Rue Ponthieu. Even before
the coachman had hailed the concierge, the massy gates
rolled on their hinges  they had seen the Count coming,
and at Paris, as everywhere else, he was served with the
rapidity of lightning. The coachman entered and traversed
the halfcircle without slackening his speed, and the gates
were closed ere the wheels had ceased to sound on the
gravel. The carriage stopped at the left side of the
portico, two men presented themselves at the
carriagewindow the one was Ali, who, smiling with an
expression of the most sincere joy, seemed amply repaid by a
mere look from Monte Cristo. The other bowed respectfully,
and offered his arm to assist the count in descending.
"Thanks, M. Bertuccio," said the count, springing lightly up
the three steps of the portico "and the notary?"
"He is in the small salon, excellency," returned Bertuccio.
"And the cards I ordered to be engraved as soon as you knew
the number of the house?"
"Your excellency, it is done already. I have been myself to
the best engraver of the Palais Royal, who did the plate in
my presence. The first card struck off was taken, according
to your orders, to the Baron Danglars, Rue de la Chaussee
d'Antin, No.  the others are on the mantlepiece of your
excellency's bedroom."
"Good what o'clock is it?"
"Four o'clock." Monte Cristo gave his hat, cane, and gloves
to the same French footman who had called his carriage at
the Count of Morcerf's, and then he passed into the small
salon, preceded by Bertuccio, who showed him the way. "These
are but indifferent marbles in this antechamber," said
Monte Cristo. "I trust all this will soon be taken away."
Bertuccio bowed. As the steward had said, the notary awaited
him in the small salon. He was a simplelooking lawyer's
clerk, elevated to the extraordinary dignity of a provincial
scrivener. "You are the notary empowered to sell the country
house that I wish to purchase, monsieur?" asked Monte
Cristo.
"Yes, count," returned the notary.
"Is the deed of sale ready?"
"Yes, count."
"Have you brought it?"
"Here it is."
"Very well and where is this house that I purchase?" asked
the count carelessly, addressing himself half to Bertuccio,
half to the notary. The steward made a gesture that
signified, "I do not know." The notary looked at the count
with astonishment. "What" said he, "does not the count know
where the house he purchases is situated?"
"No," returned the count.
"The count does not know?"
"How should I know? I have arrived from Cadiz this morning.
I have never before been at Paris, and it is the first time
I have ever even set my foot in France."
"Ah, that is different the house you purchase is at
Auteuil." At these words Bertuccio turned pale. "And where
is Auteuil?" asked the count.
"Close by here, monsieur," replied the notary  "a little
beyond Passy a charming situation, in the heart of the Bois
de Boulogne."
"So near as that?" said the Count "but that is not in the
country. What made you choose a house at the gates of Paris,
M. Bertuccio?"
"I," cried the steward with a strange expression. "His
excellency did not charge me to purchase this house. If his
excellency will recollect  if he will think" 
"Ah, true," observed Monte Cristo "I recollect now. I read
the advertisement in one of the papers, and was tempted by
the false title, "a country house.'"
"It is not yet too late," cried Bertuccio, eagerly "and if
your excellency will intrust me with the commission, I will
find you a better at Enghien, at FontenayauxRoses, or at
Bellevue."
"Oh, no," returned Monte Cristo negligently "since I have
this, I will keep it."
"And you are quite right," said the notary, who feared to
lose his fee. "It is a charming place, well supplied with
springwater and fine trees a comfortable habitation,
although abandoned for a long time, without reckoning the
furniture, which, although old, is yet valuable, now that
old things are so much sought after. I suppose the count has
the tastes of the day?"
"To be sure," returned Monte Cristo "it is very convenient,
then?"
"It is more  it is magnificent."
"Peste, let us not lose such an opportunity," returned Monte
Cristo. "The deed, if you please, Mr. Notary." And he signed
it rapidly, after having first run his eye over that part of
the deed in which were specified the situation of the house
and the names of the proprietors. "Bertuccio," said he,
"give fiftyfive thousand francs to monsieur." The steward
left the room with a faltering step, and returned with a
bundle of banknotes, which the notary counted like a man
who never gives a receipt for money until after he is sure
it is all there. "And now," demanded the count, "are all the
forms complied with?"
"All, sir."
"Have you the keys?"
"They are in the hands of the concierge, who takes care of
the house, but here is the order I have given him to install
the count in his new possessions."
"Very well" and Monte Cristo made a sign with his hand to
the notary, which said, "I have no further need of you you
may go."
"But," observed the honest notary, "the count is, I think,
mistaken it is only fifty thousand francs, everything
included."
"And your fee?"
"Is included in this sum."
"But have you not come from Auteuil here?"
"Yes, certainly."
"Well, then, it is but fair that you should be paid for your
loss of time and trouble," said the count and he made a
gesture of polite dismissal. The notary left the room
backwards, and bowing down to the ground it was the first
time he had ever met a similar client. "See this gentleman
out," said the count to Bertuccio. And the steward followed
the notary out of the room. Scarcely was the count alone,
when he drew from his pocket a book closed with a lock, and
opened it with a key which he wore round his neck, and which
never left him. After having sought for a few minutes, he
stopped at a leaf which had several notes, and compared them
with the deed of sale, which lay on the table. ""Auteuil,
Rue de la Fontaine, No. ' it is indeed the same," said
he "and now, am I to rely upon an avowal extorted by
religious or physical terror? However, in an hour I shall
know all. Bertuccio" cried he, striking a light hammer with
a pliant handle on a small gong. "Bertuccio" The steward
appeared at the door. "Monsieur Bertuccio," said the count,
"did you never tell me that you had travelled in France?"
"In some parts of France  yes, excellency."
"You know the environs of Paris, then?"
"No, excellency, no," returned the steward, with a sort of
nervous trembling, which Monte Cristo, a connoisseur in all
emotions, rightly attributed to great disquietude.
"It is unfortunate," returned he, "that you have never
visited the environs, for I wish to see my new property this
evening, and had you gone with me, you could have given me
some useful information."
"To Auteuil" cried Bertuccio, whose copper complexion
became livid  "I go to Auteuil?"
"Well, what is there surprising in that? When I live at
Auteuil, you must come there, as you belong to my service."
Bertuccio hung down his head before the imperious look of
his master, and remained motionless, without making any
answer. "Why, what has happened to you?  are you going to
make me ring a second time for the carriage?" asked Monte
Cristo, in the same tone that Louis XIV. pronounced the
famous, "I have been almost obliged to wait." Bertuccio made
but one bound to the antechamber, and cried in a hoarse
voice  "His excellency's horses" Monte Cristo wrote two
or three notes, and, as he sealed the last, the steward
appeared. "Your excellency's carriage is at the door," said
he.
"Well, take your hat and gloves," returned Monte Cristo.
"Am I to accompany you, your excellency?" cried Bertuccio.
"Certainly, you must give the orders, for I intend residing
at the house." It was unexampled for a servant of the
count's to dare to dispute an order of his, so the steward,
without saying a word, followed his master, who got into the
carriage, and signed to him to follow, which he did, taking
his place respectfully on the front seat.
Chapter 
The House at Auteuil.
Monte Cristo noticed, as they descended the staircase, that
Bertuccio signed himself in the Corsican manner that is,
had formed the sign of the cross in the air with his thumb,
and as he seated himself in the carriage, muttered a short
prayer. Any one but a man of exhaustless thirst for
knowledge would have had pity on seeing the steward's
extraordinary repugnance for the count's projected drive
without the walls but the Count was too curious to let
Bertuccio off from this little journey. In twenty minutes
they were at Auteuil the steward's emotion had continued to
augment as they entered the village. Bertuccio, crouched in
the corner of the carriage, began to examine with a feverish
anxiety every house they passed. "Tell them to stop at Rue
de la Fontaine, No. ," said the count, fixing his eyes on
the steward, to whom he gave this order. Bertuccio's
forehead was covered with perspiration however, he obeyed,
and, leaning out of the window, he cried to the coachman, 
"Rue de la Fontaine, No. ." No.  was situated at the
extremity of the village during the drive night had set in,
and darkness gave the surroundings the artificial appearance
of a scene on the stage. The carriage stopped, the footman
sprang off the box, and opened the door. "Well," said the
count, "you do not get out, M. Bertuccio  you are going to
stay in the carriage, then? What are you thinking of this
evening?" Bertuccio sprang out, and offered his shoulder to
the count, who, this time, leaned upon it as he descended
the three steps of the carriage. "Knock," said the count,
"and announce me." Bertuccio knocked, the door opened, and
the concierge appeared. "What is it?" asked he.
"It is your new master, my good fellow," said the footman.
And he held out to the concierge the notary's order.
"The house is sold, then?" demanded the concierge "and this
gentleman is coming to live here?"
"Yes, my friend," returned the count "and I will endeavor
to give you no cause to regret your old master."
"Oh, monsieur," said the concierge, "I shall not have much
cause to regret him, for he came here but seldom it is five
years since he was here last, and he did well to sell the
house, for it did not bring him in anything at all."
"What was the name of your old master?" said Monte Cristo.
"The Marquis of SaintMeran. Ah, I am sure he has not sold
the house for what he gave for it."
"The Marquis of SaintMeran" returned the count. "The name
is not unknown to me the Marquis of SaintMeran" and he
appeared to meditate.
"An old gentleman," continued the concierge, "a stanch
follower of the Bourbons he had an only daughter, who
married M. de Villefort, who had been the king's attorney at
Nimes, and afterwards at Versailles." Monte Cristo glanced
at Bertuccio, who became whiter than the wall against which
he leaned to prevent himself from falling. "And is not this
daughter dead?" demanded Monte Cristo "I fancy I have heard
so."
"Yes, monsieur, one and twenty years ago and since then we
have not seen the poor marquis three times."
"Thanks, thanks," said Monte Cristo, judging from the
steward's utter prostration that he could not stretch the
cord further without danger of breaking it. "Give me a
light."
"Shall I accompany you, monsieur?"
"No, it is unnecessary Bertuccio will show me a light." And
Monte Cristo accompanied these words by the gift of two gold
pieces, which produced a torrent of thanks and blessings
from the concierge. "Ah, monsieur," said he, after having
vainly searched on the mantlepiece and the shelves, "I have
not got any candles."
"Take one of the carriagelamps, Bertuccio," said the count,
"and show me the apartments." The steward obeyed in silence,
but it was easy to see, from the manner in which the hand
that held the light trembled, how much it cost him to obey.
They went over a tolerably large groundfloor a second
floor consisted of a salon, a bathroom, and two bedrooms
near one of the bedrooms they came to a winding staircase
that led down to the garden.
"Ah, here is a private staircase," said the count "that is
convenient. Light me, M. Bertuccio, and go first we will
see where it leads to."
"Monsieur," replied Bertuccio, "it leads to the garden."
"And, pray, how do you know that?"
"It ought to do so, at least."
"Well, let us be sure of that." Bertuccio sighed, and went
on first the stairs did, indeed, lead to the garden. At the
outer door the steward paused. "Go on, Monsieur Bertuccio,"
said the count. But he who was addressed stood there,
stupefied, bewildered, stunned his haggard eyes glanced
around, as if in search of the traces of some terrible
event, and with his clinched hands he seemed striving to
shut out horrible recollections. "Well," insisted the Count.
"No, no," cried Bertuccio, setting down the lantern at the
angle of the interior wall. "No, monsieur, it is impossible
I can go no farther."
"What does this mean?" demanded the irresistible voice of
Monte Cristo.
"Why, you must see, your excellency," cried the steward,
"that this is not natural that, having a house to purchase,
you purchase it exactly at Auteuil, and that, purchasing it
at Auteuil, this house should be No. , Rue de la Fontaine.
Oh, why did I not tell you all? I am sure you would not have
forced me to come. I hoped your house would have been some
other one than this as if there was not another house at
Auteuil than that of the assassination"
"What, what" cried Monte Cristo, stopping suddenly, "what
words do you utter? Devil of a man, Corsican that you are 
always mysteries or superstitions. Come, take the lantern,
and let us visit the garden you are not afraid of ghosts
with me, I hope?" Bertuccio raised the lantern, and obeyed.
The door, as it opened, disclosed a gloomy sky, in which the
moon strove vainly to struggle through a sea of clouds that
covered her with billows of vapor which she illumined for an
instant, only to sink into obscurity. The steward wished to
turn to the left. "No, no, monsieur," said Monte Cristo.
"What is the use of following the alleys? Here is a
beautiful lawn let us go on straight forwards."
Bertuccio wiped the perspiration from his brow, but obeyed
however, he continued to take the left hand. Monte Cristo,
on the contrary, took the right hand arrived near a clump
of trees, he stopped. The steward could not restrain
himself. "Move, monsieur  move away, I entreat you you
are exactly in the spot"
"What spot?"
"Where he fell."
"My dear Monsieur Bertuccio," said Monte Cristo, laughing,
"control yourself we are not at Sartena or at Corte. This
is not a Corsican arbor, but an English garden badly kept,
I own, but still you must not calumniate it for that."
"Monsieur, I implore you do not stay there"
"I think you are going mad, Bertuccio," said the count
coldly. "If that is the case, I warn you, I shall have you
put in a lunatic asylum."
"Alas, excellency," returned Bertuccio, joining his hands,
and shaking his head in a manner that would have excited the
count's laughter, had not thoughts of a superior interest
occupied him, and rendered him attentive to the least
revelation of this timorous conscience. "Alas, excellency,
the evil has arrived"
"M. Bertuccio," said the count, "I am very glad to tell you,
that while you gesticulate, you wring your hands and roll
your eyes like a man possessed by a devil who will not leave
him and I have always observed, that the devil most
obstinate to be expelled is a secret. I knew you were a
Corsican. I knew you were gloomy, and always brooding over
some old history of the vendetta and I overlooked that in
Italy, because in Italy those things are thought nothing of.
But in France they are considered in very bad taste there
are gendarmes who occupy themselves with such affairs,
judges who condemn, and scaffolds which avenge." Bertuccio
clasped his hands, and as, in all these evolutions, he did
not let fall the lantern, the light showed his pale and
altered countenance. Monte Cristo examined him with the same
look that, at Rome, he had bent upon the execution of
Andrea, and then, in a tone that made a shudder pass through
the veins of the poor steward,  "The Abbe Busoni, then
told me an untruth," said he, "when, after his journey in
France, in , he sent you to me, with a letter of
recommendation, in which he enumerated all your valuable
qualities. Well, I shall write to the abbe I shall hold him
responsible for his protege's misconduct, and I shall soon
know all about this assassination. Only I warn you, that
when I reside in a country, I conform to all its code, and I
have no wish to put myself within the compass of the French
laws for your sake."
"Oh, do not do that, excellency I have always served you
faithfully," cried Bertuccio, in despair. "I have always
been an honest man, and, as far as lay in my power, I have
done good."
"I do not deny it," returned the count "but why are you
thus agitated. It is a bad sign a quiet conscience does not
occasion such paleness in the cheeks, and such fever in the
hands of a man."
"But, your excellency," replied Bertuccio hesitatingly, "did
not the Abbe Busoni, who heard my confession in the prison
at Nimes, tell you that I had a heavy burden upon my
conscience?"
"Yes but as he said you would make an excellent steward, I
concluded you had stolen  that was all."
"Oh, your excellency," returned Bertuccio in deep contempt.
"Or, as you are a Corsican, that you had been unable to
resist the desire of making a "stiff,' as you call it."
"Yes, my good master," cried Bertuccio, casting himself at
the count's feet, "it was simply vengeance  nothing else."
"I understand that, but I do not understand what it is that
galvanizes you in this manner."
"But, monsieur, it is very natural," returned Bertuccio,
"since it was in this house that my vengeance was
accomplished."
"What my house?"
"Oh, your excellency, it was not yours, then."
"Whose, then? The Marquis de SaintMeran, I think, the
concierge said. What had you to revenge on the Marquis de
SaintMeran?"
"Oh, it was not on him, monsieur it was on another."
"This is strange," returned Monte Cristo, seeming to yield
to his reflections, "that you should find yourself without
any preparation in a house where the event happened that
causes you so much remorse."
"Monsieur," said the steward, "it is fatality, I am sure.
First, you purchase a house at Auteuil  this house is the
one where I have committed an assassination you descend to
the garden by the same staircase by which he descended you
stop at the spot where he received the blow and two paces
farther is the grave in which he had just buried his child.
This is not chance, for chance, in this case, is too much
like providence."
"Well, amiable Corsican, let us suppose it is providence. I
always suppose anything people please, and, besides, you
must concede something to diseased minds. Come, collect
yourself, and tell me all."
"I have related it but once, and that was to the Abbe
Busoni. Such things," continued Bertuccio, shaking his head,
"are only related under the seal of confession."
"Then," said the count, "I refer you to your confessor. Turn
Chartreux or Trappist, and relate your secrets, but, as for
me, I do not like any one who is alarmed by such phantasms,
and I do not choose that my servants should be afraid to
walk in the garden of an evening. I confess I am not very
desirous of a visit from the commissary of police, for, in
Italy, justice is only paid when silent  in France she is
paid only when she speaks. Peste, I thought you somewhat
Corsican, a great deal smuggler, and an excellent steward
but I see you have other strings to your bow. You are no
longer in my service, Monsieur Bertuccio."
"Oh, your excellency, your excellency" cried the steward,
struck with terror at this threat, "if that is the only
reason I cannot remain in your service, I will tell all, for
if I quit you, it will only be to go to the scaffold."
"That is different," replied Monte Cristo "but if you
intend to tell an untruth, reflect it were better not to
speak at all."
"No, monsieur, I swear to you, by my hopes of salvation, I
will tell you all, for the Abbe Busoni himself only knew a
part of my secret but, I pray you, go away from that
planetree. The moon is just bursting through the clouds,
and there, standing where you do, and wrapped in that cloak
that conceals your figure, you remind me of M. de
Villefort."
"What" cried Monte Cristo, "it was M. de Villefort?"
"Your excellency knows him?"
"The former royal attorney at Nimes?"
"Yes."
"Who married the Marquis of SaintMeran's daughter?"
"Yes."
"Who enjoyed the reputation of being the most severe, the
most upright, the most rigid magistrate on the bench?"
"Well, monsieur," said Bertuccio, "this man with this
spotless reputation" 
"Well?"
"Was a villain."
"Bah," replied Monte Cristo, "impossible"
"It is as I tell you."
"Ah, really," said Monte Cristo. "Have you proof of this?"
"I had it."
"And you have lost it how stupid"
"Yes but by careful search it might be recovered."
"Really," returned the count, "relate it to me, for it
begins to interest me." And the count, humming an air from
"Lucia," went to sit down on a bench, while Bertuccio
followed him, collecting his thoughts. Bertuccio remained
standing before him.
Chapter 
The Vendetta.
"At what point shall I begin my story, your excellency?"
asked Bertuccio.
"Where you please," returned Monte Cristo, "since I know
nothing at all of it."
"I thought the Abbe Busoni had told your excellency."
"Some particulars, doubtless, but that is seven or eight
years ago, and I have forgotten them."
"Then I can speak without fear of tiring your excellency."
"Go on, M. Bertuccio you will supply the want of the
evening papers."
"The story begins in ."
"Ah," said Monte Cristo, " is not yesterday."
"No, monsieur, and yet I recollect all things as clearly as
if they had happened but then. I had a brother, an elder
brother, who was in the service of the emperor he had
become lieutenant in a regiment composed entirely of
Corsicans. This brother was my only friend we became
orphans  I at five, he at eighteen. He brought me up as if
I had been his son, and in  he married. When the emperor
returned from the Island of Elba, my brother instantly
joined the army, was slightly wounded at Waterloo, and
retired with the army beyond the Loire."
"But that is the history of the Hundred Days, M. Bertuccio,"
said the count "unless I am mistaken, it has been already
written."
"Excuse me, excellency, but these details are necessary, and
you promised to be patient."
"Go on I will keep my word."
"One day we received a letter. I should tell you that we
lived in the little village of Rogliano, at the extremity of
Cape Corso. This letter was from my brother. He told us that
the army was disbanded, and that he should return by
Chateauroux, ClermontFerrand, Le Puy, and Nimes and, if I
had any money, he prayed me to leave it for him at Nimes,
with an innkeeper with whom I had dealings."
"In the smuggling line?" said Monte Cristo.
"Eh, your excellency? Every one must live."
"Certainly go on."
"I loved my brother tenderly, as I told your excellency, and
I resolved not to send the money, but to take it to him
myself. I possessed a thousand francs. I left five hundred
with Assunta, my sisterinlaw, and with the other five
hundred I set off for Nimes. It was easy to do so, and as I
had my boat and a lading to take in at sea, everything
favored my project. But, after we had taken in our cargo,
the wind became contrary, so that we were four or five days
without being able to enter the Rhone. At last, however, we
succeeded, and worked up to Arles. I left the boat between
Bellegarde and Beaucaire, and took the road to Nimes."
"We are getting to the story now?"
"Yes, your excellency excuse me, but, as you will see, I
only tell you what is absolutely necessary. Just at this
time the famous massacres took place in the south of France.
Three brigands, called Trestaillon, Truphemy, and Graffan,
publicly assassinated everybody whom they suspected of
Bonapartism. You have doubtless heard of these massacres,
your excellency?"
"Vaguely I was far from France at that period. Go on."
"As I entered Nimes, I literally waded in blood at every
step you encountered dead bodies and bands of murderers, who
killed, plundered, and burned. At the sight of this
slaughter and devastation I became terrified, not for myself
for I, a simple Corsican fisherman, had nothing to fear
on the contrary, that time was most favorable for us
smugglers  but for my brother, a soldier of the empire,
returning from the army of the Loire, with his uniform and
his epaulets, there was everything to apprehend. I hastened
to the innkeeper. My misgivings had been but too true. My
brother had arrived the previous evening at Nimes, and, at
the very door of the house where he was about to demand
hospitality, he had been assassinated. I did all in my power
to discover the murderers, but no one durst tell me their
names, so much were they dreaded. I then thought of that
French justice of which I had heard so much, and which
feared nothing, and I went to the king's attorney."
"And this king's attorney was named Villefort?" asked Monte
Cristo carelessly.
"Yes, your excellency he came from Marseilles, where he had
been deputyprocureur. His zeal had procured him
advancement, and he was said to be one of the first who had
informed the government of the departure from the Island of
Elba."
"Then," said Monte Cristo "you went to him?"
""Monsieur,' I said, "my brother was assassinated yesterday
in the streets of Nimes, I know not by whom, but it is your
duty to find out. You are the representative of justice
here, and it is for justice to avenge those she has been
unable to protect.'  "Who was your brother?' asked he. 
"A lieutenant in the Corsican battalion.'  "A soldier of
the usurper, then?'  "A soldier of the French army.' 
"Well,' replied he, "he has smitten with the sword, and he
has perished by the sword.'  "You are mistaken, monsieur,'
I replied "he has perished by the poniard.'  "What do you
want me to do?' asked the magistrate.  "I have already
told you  avenge him.'  "On whom?'  "On his
murderers.'  "How should I know who they are?'  "Order
them to be sought for.'  "Why, your brother has been
involved in a quarrel, and killed in a duel. All these old
soldiers commit excesses which were tolerated in the time of
the emperor, but which are not suffered now, for the people
here do not like soldiers of such disorderly conduct.' 
"Monsieur,' I replied, "it is not for myself that I entreat
your interference  I should grieve for him or avenge him,
but my poor brother had a wife, and were anything to happen
to me, the poor creature would perish from want, for my
brother's pay alone kept her. Pray, try and obtain a small
government pension for her.'
""Every revolution has its catastrophes,' returned M. de
Villefort "your brother has been the victim of this. It is
a misfortune, and government owes nothing to his family. If
we are to judge by all the vengeance that the followers of
the usurper exercised on the partisans of the king, when, in
their turn, they were in power, your brother would be
today, in all probability, condemned to death. What has
happened is quite natural, and in conformity with the law of
reprisals.'  "What,' cried I, "do you, a magistrate, speak
thus to me?'  "All these Corsicans are mad, on my honor,'
replied M. de Villefort "they fancy that their countryman
is still emperor. You have mistaken the time, you should
have told me this two months ago, it is too late now. Go
now, at once, or I shall have you put out.'
"I looked at him an instant to see if there was anything to
hope from further entreaty. But he was a man of stone. I
approached him, and said in a low voice, "Well, since you
know the Corsicans so well, you know that they always keep
their word. You think that it was a good deed to kill my
brother, who was a Bonapartist, because you are a royalist.
Well, I, who am a Bonapartist also, declare one thing to
you, which is, that I will kill you. From this moment I
declare the vendetta against you, so protect yourself as
well as you can, for the next time we meet your last hour
has come.' And before he had recovered from his surprise, I
opened the door and left the room."
"Well, well," said Monte Cristo, "such an innocent looking
person as you are to do those things, M. Bertuccio, and to a
king's attorney at that But did he know what was meant by
the terrible word "vendetta'?"
"He knew so well, that from that moment he shut himself in
his house, and never went out unattended, seeking me high
and low. Fortunately, I was so well concealed that he could
not find me. Then he became alarmed, and dared not stay any
longer at Nimes, so he solicited a change of residence, and,
as he was in reality very influential, he was nominated to
Versailles. But, as you know, a Corsican who has sworn to
avenge himself cares not for distance, so his carriage, fast
as it went, was never above half a day's journey before me,
who followed him on foot. The most important thing was, not
to kill him only  for I had an opportunity of doing so a
hundred times  but to kill him without being discovered 
at least, without being arrested. I no longer belonged to
myself, for I had my sisterinlaw to protect and provide
for. For three months I watched M. de Villefort, for three
months he took not a step outofdoors without my following
him. At length I discovered that he went mysteriously to
Auteuil. I followed him thither, and I saw him enter the
house where we now are, only, instead of entering by the
great door that looks into the street, he came on horseback,
or in his carriage, left the one or the other at the little
inn, and entered by the gate you see there." Monte Cristo
made a sign with his head to show that he could discern in
the darkness the door to which Bertuccio alluded. "As I had
nothing more to do at Versailles, I went to Auteuil, and
gained all the information I could. If I wished to surprise
him, it was evident this was the spot to lie in wait for
him. The house belonged, as the concierge informed your
excellency, to M. de SaintMeran, Villefort's fatherinlaw.
M. de SaintMeran lived at Marseilles, so that this country
house was useless to him, and it was reported to be let to a
young widow, known only by the name of "the baroness.'
"One evening, as I was looking over the wall, I saw a young
and handsome woman who was walking alone in that garden,
which was not overlooked by any windows, and I guessed that
she was awaiting M. de Villefort. When she was sufficiently
near for me to distinguish her features, I saw she was from
eighteen to nineteen, tall and very fair. As she had a loose
muslin dress on and as nothing concealed her figure, I saw
she would ere long become a mother. A few moments after, the
little door was opened and a man entered. The young woman
hastened to meet him. They threw themselves into each
other's arms, embraced tenderly, and returned together to
the house. The man was M. de Villefort I fully believed
that when he went out in the night he would be forced to
traverse the whole of the garden alone."
"And," asked the count, "did you ever know the name of this
woman?"
"No, excellency," returned Bertuccio "you will see that I
had no time to learn it."
"Go on."
"That evening," continued Bertuccio, "I could have killed
the procureur, but as I was not sufficiently acquainted with
the neighborhood, I was fearful of not killing him on the
spot, and that if his cries were overheard I might be taken
so I put it off until the next occasion, and in order that
nothing should escape me, I took a chamber looking into the
street bordered by the wall of the garden. Three days after,
about seven o'clock in the evening, I saw a servant on
horseback leave the house at full gallop, and take the road
to Sevres. I concluded that he was going to Versailles, and
I was not deceived. Three hours later, the man returned
covered with dust, his errand was performed, and two minutes
after, another man on foot, muffled in a mantle, opened the
little door of the garden, which he closed after him. I
descended rapidly although I had not seen Villefort's face,
I recognized him by the beating of my heart. I crossed the
street, and stopped at a post placed at the angle of the
wall, and by means of which I had once before looked into
the garden. This time I did not content myself with looking,
but I took my knife out of my pocket, felt that the point
was sharp, and sprang over the wall. My first care was to
run to the door he had left the key in it, taking the
simple precaution of turning it twice in the lock. Nothing,
then, preventing my escape by this means, I examined the
grounds. The garden was long and narrow a stretch of smooth
turf extended down the middle, and at the corners were
clumps of trees with thick and massy foliage, that made a
background for the shrubs and flowers. In order to go from
the door to the house, or from the house to the door, M. de
Villefort would be obliged to pass by one of these clumps of
trees.
"It was the end of September the wind blew violently. The
faint glimpses of the pale moon, hidden momentarily by
masses of dark clouds that were sweeping across the sky,
whitened the gravel walks that led to the house, but were
unable to pierce the obscurity of the thick shrubberies, in
which a man could conceal himself without any fear of
discovery. I hid myself in the one nearest to the path
Villefort must take, and scarcely was I there when, amidst
the gusts of wind, I fancied I heard groans but you know,
or rather you do not know, your excellency, that he who is
about to commit an assassination fancies that he hears low
cries perpetually ringing in his ears. Two hours passed
thus, during which I imagined I heard moans repeatedly.
Midnight struck. As the last stroke died away, I saw a faint
light shine through the windows of the private staircase by
which we have just descended. The door opened, and the man
in the mantle reappeared. The terrible moment had come, but
I had so long been prepared for it that my heart did not
fail in the least. I drew my knife from my pocket again,
opened it, and made ready to strike. The man in the mantle
advanced towards me, but as he drew near I saw that he had a
weapon in his hand. I was afraid, not of a struggle, but of
a failure. When he was only a few paces from me, I saw that
what I had taken for a weapon was only a spade. I was still
unable to divine for what reason M. de Villefort had this
spade in his hands, when he stopped close to the thicket
where I was, glanced round, and began to dig a hole in the
earth. I then perceived that he was hiding something under
his mantle, which he laid on the grass in order to dig more
freely. Then, I confess, curiosity mingled with hatred I
wished to see what Villefort was going to do there, and I
remained motionless, holding my breath. Then an idea crossed
my mind, which was confirmed when I saw the procureur lift
from under his mantle a box, two feet long, and six or eight
inches deep. I let him place the box in the hole he had
made, then, while he stamped with his feet to remove all
traces of his occupation, I rushed on him and plunged my
knife into his breast, exclaiming,  "I am Giovanni
Bertuccio thy death for my brother's thy treasure for his
widow thou seest that my vengeance is more complete than I
had hoped.' I know not if he heard these words I think he
did not, for he fell without a cry. I felt his blood gush
over my face, but I was intoxicated, I was delirious, and
the blood refreshed, instead of burning me. In a second I
had disinterred the box then, that it might not be known I
had done so, I filled up the hole, threw the spade over the
wall, and rushed through the door, which I doublelocked,
carrying off the key."
"Ah," said Monte Cristo "it seems to me this was nothing but
murder and robbery."
"No, your excellency," returned Bertuccio "it was a
vendetta followed by restitution."
"And was the sum a large one?"
"It was not money."
"Ah, I recollect," replied the count "did you not say
something of an infant?"
"Yes, excellency I hastened to the river, sat down on the
bank, and with my knife forced open the lock of the box. In
a fine linen cloth was wrapped a newborn child. Its purple
visage, and its violetcolored hands showed that it had
perished from suffocation, but as it was not yet cold, I
hesitated to throw it into the water that ran at my feet.
After a moment I fancied that I felt a slight pulsation of
the heart, and as I had been assistant at the hospital at
Bastia, I did what a doctor would have done  I inflated
the lungs by blowing air into them, and at the expiration of
a quarter of an hour, it began to breathe, and cried feebly.
In my turn I uttered a cry, but a cry of joy. "God has not
cursed me then,' I cried, "since he permits me to save the
life of a human creature, in exchange for the life I have
taken away.'"
"And what did you do with the child?" asked Monte Cristo.
"It was an embarrassing load for a man seeking to escape."
"I had not for a moment the idea of keeping it, but I knew
that at Paris there was an asylum where they receive such
creatures. As I passed the city gates I declared that I had
found the child on the road, and I inquired where the asylum
was the box confirmed my statement, the linen proved that
the infant belonged to wealthy parents, the blood with which
I was covered might have proceeded from the child as well as
from any one else. No objection was raised, but they pointed
out the asylum, which was situated at the upper end of the
Rue d'Enfer, and after having taken the precaution of
cutting the linen in two pieces, so that one of the two
letters which marked it was on the piece wrapped around the
child, while the other remained in my possession, I rang the
bell, and fled with all speed. A fortnight after I was at
Rogliano, and I said to Assunta,  "Console thyself,
sister Israel is dead, but he is avenged.' She demanded
what I meant, and when I had told her all,  "Giovanni,'
said she, "you should have brought this child with you we
would have replaced the parents it has lost, have called it
Benedetto, and then, in consequence of this good action, God
would have blessed us.' In reply I gave her the half of the
linen I had kept in order to reclaim him if we became rich."
"What letters were marked on the linen?" said Monte Cristo.
"An H and an N, surmounted by a baron's coronet."
"By heaven, M. Bertuccio, you make use of heraldic terms
where did you study heraldry?"
"In your service, excellency, where everything is learned."
"Go on, I am curious to know two things."
"What are they, your excellency ?"
"What became of this little boy? for I think you told me it
was a boy, M. Bertuccio."
"No excellency, I do not recollect telling you that."
"I thought you did I must have been mistaken."
"No, you were not, for it was in reality a little boy. But
your excellency wished to know two things what was the
second?"
"The second was the crime of which you were accused when you
asked for a confessor, and the Abbe Busoni came to visit you
at your request in the prison at Nimes."
"The story will be very long, excellency."
"What matter? you know I take but little sleep, and I do not
suppose you are very much inclined for it either." Bertuccio
bowed, and resumed his story.
"Partly to drown the recollections of the past that haunted
me, partly to supply the wants of the poor widow, I eagerly
returned to my trade of smuggler, which had become more easy
since that relaxation of the laws which always follows a
revolution. The southern districts were illwatched in
particular, in consequence of the disturbances that were
perpetually breaking out in Avignon, Nimes, or Uzes. We
profited by this respite on the part of the government to
make friends everywhere. Since my brother's assassination in
the streets of Nimes, I had never entered the town the
result was that the innkeeper with whom we were connected,
seeing that we would no longer come to him, was forced to
come to us, and had established a branch to his inn, on the
road from Bellegarde to Beaucaire, at the sign of the Pont
du Gard. We had thus, at AiguesMortes, Martigues, or Bouc,
a dozen places where we left our goods, and where, in case
of necessity, we concealed ourselves from the gendarmes and
customhouse officers. Smuggling is a profitable trade, when
a certain degree of vigor and intelligence is employed as
for myself, brought up in the mountains, I had a double
motive for fearing the gendarmes and customhouse officers,
as my appearance before the judges would cause an inquiry,
and an inquiry always looks back into the past. And in my
past life they might find something far more grave than the
selling of smuggled cigars, or barrels of brandy without a
permit. So, preferring death to capture, I accomplished the
most astonishing deeds, and which, more than once, showed me
that the too great care we take of our bodies is the only
obstacle to the success of those projects which require
rapid decision, and vigorous and determined execution. In
reality, when you have once devoted your life to your
enterprises, you are no longer the equal of other men, or,
rather, other men are no longer your equals, and whosoever
has taken this resolution, feels his strength and resources
doubled."
"Philosophy, M. Bertuccio," interrupted the Count "you have
done a little of everything in your life."
"Oh, excellency,"
"No, no but philosophy at halfpast ten at night is
somewhat late yet I have no other observation to make, for
what you say is correct, which is more than can be said for
all philosophy."
"My journeys became more and more extensive and more
productive. Assunta took care of all, and our little fortune
increased. One day as I was setting off on an expedition,
"Go,' said she "at your return I will give you a surprise.'
I questioned her, but in vain she would tell me nothing,
and I departed. Our expedition lasted nearly six weeks we
had been to Lucca to take in oil, to Leghorn for English
cottons, and we ran our cargo without opposition, and
returned home full of joy. When I entered the house, the
first thing I beheld in the middle of Assunta's chamber was
a cradle that might be called sumptuous compared with the
rest of the furniture, and in it a baby seven or eight
months old. I uttered a cry of joy the only moments of
sadness I had known since the assassination of the procureur
were caused by the recollection that I had abandoned this
child. For the assassination itself I had never felt any
remorse. Poor Assunta had guessed all. She had profited by
my absence, and furnished with the half of the linen, and
having written down the day and hour at which I had
deposited the child at the asylum, had set off for Paris,
and had reclaimed it. No objection was raised, and the
infant was given up to her. Ah, I confess, your excellency,
when I saw this poor creature sleeping peacefully in its
cradle, I felt my eyes filled with tears. "Ah, Assunta,'
cried I, "you are an excellent woman, and heaven will bless
you.'"
"This," said Monte Cristo, "is less correct than your
philosophy,  it is only faith."
"Alas, your excellency is right," replied Bertuccio, "and
God made this infant the instrument of our punishment. Never
did a perverse nature declare itself more prematurely, and
yet it was not owing to any fault in his bringing up. He was
a most lovely child, with large blue eyes, of that deep
color that harmonizes so well with the blond complexion
only his hair, which was too light, gave his face a most
singular expression, and added to the vivacity of his look,
and the malice of his smile. Unfortunately, there is a
proverb which says that "red is either altogether good or
altogether bad.' The proverb was but too correct as regarded
Benedetto, and even in his infancy he manifested the worst
disposition. It is true that the indulgence of his
fostermother encouraged him. This child, for whom my poor
sister would go to the town, five or six leagues off, to
purchase the earliest fruits and the most tempting
sweetmeats, preferred to Palma grapes or Genoese preserves,
the chestnuts stolen from a neighbor's orchard, or the dried
apples in his loft, when he could eat as well of the nuts
and apples that grew in my garden. One day, when Benedetto
was about five or six, our neighbor Vasilio, who, according
to the custom of the country, never locked up his purse or
his valuables  for, as your excellency knows, there are no
thieves in Corsica  complained that he had lost a louis
out of his purse we thought he must have made a mistake in
counting his money, but he persisted in the accuracy of his
statement. One day, Benedetto, who had been gone from the
house since morning, to our great anxiety, did not return
until late in the evening, dragging a monkey after him,
which he said he had found chained to the foot of a tree.
For more than a month past, the mischievous child, who knew
not what to wish for, had taken it into his head to have a
monkey. A boatman, who had passed by Rogliano, and who had
several of these animals, whose tricks had greatly diverted
him, had, doubtless, suggested this idea to him. "Monkeys
are not found in our woods chained to trees,' said I
"confess how you obtained this animal.' Benedetto maintained
the truth of what he had said, and accompanied it with
details that did more honor to his imagination than to his
veracity. I became angry he began to laugh, I threatened to
strike him, and he made two steps backwards. "You cannot
beat me,' said he "you have no right, for you are not my
father.'
"We never knew who had revealed this fatal secret, which we
had so carefully concealed from him however, it was this
answer, in which the child's whole character revealed
itself, that almost terrified me, and my arm fell without
touching him. The boy triumphed, and this victory rendered
him so audacious, that all the money of Assunta, whose
affection for him seemed to increase as he became more
unworthy of it, was spent in caprices she knew not how to
contend against, and follies she had not the courage to
prevent. When I was at Rogliano everything went on properly,
but no sooner was my back turned than Benedetto became
master, and everything went ill. When he was only eleven, he
chose his companions from among the young men of eighteen or
twenty, the worst characters in Bastia, or, indeed, in
Corsica, and they had already, for some mischievous pranks,
been several times threatened with a prosecution. I became
alarmed, as any prosecution might be attended with serious
consequences. I was compelled, at this period, to leave
Corsica on an important expedition I reflected for a long
time, and with the hope of averting some impending
misfortune, I resolved that Benedetto should accompany me. I
hoped that the active and laborious life of a smuggler, with
the severe discipline on board, would have a salutary effect
on his character, which was now wellnigh, if not quite,
corrupt. I spoke to Benedetto alone, and proposed to him to
accompany me, endeavoring to tempt him by all the promises
most likely to dazzle the imagination of a child of twelve.
He heard me patiently, and when I had finished, burst out
laughing.
""Are you mad, uncle?' he called me by this name when he
was in good humor "do you think I am going to change the
life I lead for your mode of existence  my agreeable
indolence for the hard and precarious toil you impose on
yourself, exposed to the bitter frost at night, and the
scorching heat by day, compelled to conceal yourself, and
when you are perceived, receive a volley of bullets, all to
earn a paltry sum? Why, I have as much money as I want
mother Assunta always furnishes me when I ask for it You
see that I should be a fool to accept your offer.' The
arguments, and his audacity, perfectly stupefied me.
Benedetto rejoined his associates, and I saw him from a
distance point me out to them as a fool."
"Sweet child," murmured Monte Cristo.
"Oh, had he been my own son," replied Bertuccio, "or even my
nephew, I would have brought him back to the right road, for
the knowledge that you are doing your duty gives you
strength, but the idea that I was striking a child whose
father I had killed, made it impossible for me to punish
him. I gave my sister, who constantly defended the
unfortunate boy, good advice, and as she confessed that she
had several times missed money to a considerable amount, I
showed her a safe place in which to conceal our little
treasure for the future. My mind was already made up.
Benedetto could read, write, and cipher perfectly, for when
the fit seized him, he learned more in a day than others in
a week. My intention was to enter him as a clerk in some
ship, and without letting him know anything of my plan, to
convey him some morning on board by this means his future
treatment would depend upon his own conduct. I set off for
France, after having fixed upon the plan. Our cargo was to
be landed in the Gulf of Lyons, and this was a difficult
thing to do because it was then the year . The most
perfect tranquillity was restored, and the vigilance of the
customhouse officers was redoubled, and their strictness
was increased at this time, in consequence of the fair at
Beaucaire.
"Our expedition made a favorable beginning. We anchored our
vessel  which had a double hold, where our goods were
concealed  amidst a number of other vessels that bordered
the banks of the Rhone from Beaucaire to Arles. On our
arrival we began to discharge our cargo in the night, and to
convey it into the town, by the help of the innkeeper with
whom we were connected. Whether success rendered us
imprudent, or whether we were betrayed, I know not but one
evening, about five o'clock, our little cabinboy came
breathlessly, to inform us that he had seen a detachment of
customhouse officers advancing in our direction. It was not
their proximity that alarmed us, for detachments were
constantly patrolling along the banks of the Rhone, but the
care, according to the boy's account, that they took to
avoid being seen. In an instant we were on the alert, but it
was too late our vessel was surrounded, and amongst the
customhouse officers I observed several gendarmes, and, as
terrified at the sight of their uniforms as I was brave at
the sight of any other, I sprang into the hold, opened a
port, and dropped into the river, dived, and only rose at
intervals to breathe, until I reached a ditch that had
recently been made from the Rhone to the canal that runs
from Beaucaire to AiguesMortes. I was now safe, for I could
swim along the ditch without being seen, and I reached the
canal in safety. I had designedly taken this direction. I
have already told your excellency of an innkeeper from
Nimes who had set up a little tavern on the road from
Bellegarde to Beaucaire."
"Yes," said Monte Cristo "I perfectly recollect him I think
he was your colleague."
"Precisely," answered Bertuccio "but he had, seven or eight
years before this period, sold his establishment to a tailor
at Marseilles, who, having almost ruined himself in his old
trade, wished to make his fortune in another. Of course, we
made the same arrangements with the new landlord that we had
with the old and it was of this man that I intended to ask
shelter."
"What was his name?" inquired the count, who seemed to
become somewhat interested in Bertuccio's story.
"Gaspard Caderousse he had married a woman from the village
of Carconte, and whom we did not know by any other name than
that of her village. She was suffering from malarial fever,
and seemed dying by inches. As for her husband, he was a
strapping fellow of forty, or five and forty, who had more
than once, in time of danger, given ample proof of his
presence of mind and courage."
"And you say," interrupted Monte Cristo "that this took
place towards the year" 
", your excellency."
"In what month?"
"June."
"The beginning or the end?"
"The evening of the d."
"Ah," said Monte Cristo "the evening of the d of June,
. Go on."
"It was from Caderousse that I intended demanding shelter,
and, as we never entered by the door that opened onto the
road, I resolved not to break through the rule, so climbing
over the gardenhedge, I crept amongst the olive and wild
fig trees, and fearing that Caderousse might have some
guest, I entered a kind of shed in which I had often passed
the night, and which was only separated from the inn by a
partition, in which holes had been made in order to enable
us to watch an opportunity of announcing our presence. My
intention was, if Caderousse was alone, to acquaint him with
my presence, finish the meal the customhouse officers had
interrupted, and profit by the threatened storm to return to
the Rhone, and ascertain the state of our vessel and its
crew. I stepped into the shed, and it was fortunate I did
so, for at that moment Caderousse entered with a stranger.
"I waited patiently, not to overhear what they said, but
because I could do nothing else besides, the same thing had
occurred often before. The man who was with Caderousse was
evidently a stranger to the South of France he was one of
those merchants who come to sell jewellery at the Beaucaire
fair, and who during the month the fair lasts, and during
which there is so great an influx of merchants and customers
from all parts of Europe, often have dealings to the amount
of , to , francs. Caderousse entered hastily.
Then, seeing that the room was, as usual, empty, and only
guarded by the dog, he called to his wife, "Hello,
Carconte,' said he, "the worthy priest has not deceived us
the diamond is real.' An exclamation of joy was heard, and
the staircase creaked beneath a feeble step. "What do you
say?' asked his wife, pale as death.
""I say that the diamond is real, and that this gentleman,
one of the first jewellers of Paris, will give us ,
francs for it. Only, in order to satisfy himself that it
really belongs to us, he wishes you to relate to him, as I
have done already, the miraculous manner in which the
diamond came into our possession. In the meantime please to
sit down, monsieur, and I will fetch you some refreshment.'
The jeweller examined attentively the interior of the inn
and the apparent poverty of the persons who were about to
sell him a diamond that seemed to have come from the casket
of a prince. "Relate your story, madame,' said he, wishing,
no doubt, to profit by the absence of the husband, so that
the latter could not influence the wife's story, to see if
the two recitals tallied.
""Oh,' returned she, "it was a gift of heaven. My husband
was a great friend, in  or , of a sailor named
Edmond Dantes. This poor fellow, whom Caderousse had
forgotten, had not forgotten him, and at his death he
bequeathed this diamond to him.'  "But how did he obtain
it?' asked the jeweller "had he it before he was
imprisoned?'  "No, monsieur but it appears that in prison
he made the acquaintance of a rich Englishman, and as in
prison he fell sick, and Dantes took the same care of him as
if he had been his brother, the Englishman, when he was set
free, gave this stone to Dantes, who, less fortunate, died,
and, in his turn, left it to us, and charged the excellent
abbe, who was here this morning, to deliver it.'  "The
same story,' muttered the jeweller "and improbable as it
seemed at first, it may be true. There's only the price we
are not agreed about.'  "How not agreed about?' said
Caderousse. "I thought we agreed for the price I asked.' 
"That is,' replied the jeweller, "I offered , francs.'
"Forty thousand,' cried La Carconte "we will not part
with it for that sum. The abbe told us it was worth ,
without the setting.'
""What was the abbe's name?' asked the indefatigable
questioner.  "The Abbe Busoni,' said La Carconte.  "He
was a foreigner?'  "An Italian, from the neighborhood of
Mantua, I believe.'  "Let me see this diamond again,'
replied the jeweller "the first time you are often mistaken
as to the value of a stone.' Caderousse took from his pocket
a small case of black shagreen, opened, and gave it to the
jeweller. At the sight of the diamond, which was as large as
a hazelnut, La Carconte's eyes sparkled with cupidity."
"And what did you think of this fine story, eavesdropper?"
said Monte Cristo "did you credit it?"
"Yes, your excellency. I did not look on Caderousse as a bad
man, and I thought him incapable of committing a crime, or
even a theft."
"That did more honor to your heart than to your experience,
M. Bertuccio. Had you known this Edmond Dantes, of whom they
spoke?"
"No, your excellency, I had never heard of him before, and
never but once afterwards, and that was from the Abbe Busoni
himself, when I saw him in the prison at Nimes."
"Go on."
"The jeweller took the ring, and drawing from his pocket a
pair of steel pliers and a small set of copper scales, he
took the stone out of its setting, and weighed it carefully.
"I will give you ,,' said he, "but not a sou more
besides, as that is the exact value of the stone, I brought
just that sum with me.'  "Oh, that's no matter,' replied
Caderousse, "I will go back with you to fetch the other
, francs.'  "No,' returned the jeweller, giving back
the diamond and the ring to Caderousse  "no, it is worth
no more, and I am sorry I offered so much, for the stone has
a flaw in it, which I had not seen. However, I will not go
back on my word, and I will give ,.'  "At least,
replace the diamond in the ring,' said La Carconte sharply.
"Ah, true,' replied the jeweller, and he reset the stone.
"No matter,' observed Caderousse, replacing the box in
his pocket, "some one else will purchase it.'  "Yes,'
continued the jeweller "but some one else will not be so
easy as I am, or content himself with the same story. It is
not natural that a man like you should possess such a
diamond. He will inform against you. You will have to find
the Abbe Busoni and abbes who give diamonds worth two
thousand louis are rare. The law would seize it, and put you
in prison if at the end of three or four months you are set
at liberty, the ring will be lost, or a false stone, worth
three francs, will be given you, instead of a diamond worth
, or perhaps , francs from which you must allow
that one runs considerable risk in purchasing.' Caderousse
and his wife looked eagerly at each other.  "No,' said
Caderousse, "we are not rich enough to lose , francs.'
"As you please, my dear sir,' said the, jeweller "I had,
however, as you see, brought you the money in bright coin.'
And he drew from his pocket a handful of gold, and held it
sparkling before the dazzled eyes of the innkeeper, and in
the other hand he held a packet of banknotes.
"There was evidently a severe struggle in the mind of
Caderousse it was plain that the small shagreen case, which
he turned over and over in his hand, did not seem to him
commensurate in value to the enormous sum which fascinated
his gaze. He turned towards his wife. "What do you think of
this?' he asked in a low voice.  "Let him have it  let
him have it,' she said. "If he returns to Beaucaire without
the diamond, he will inform against us, and, as he says, who
knows if we shall ever again see the Abbe Busoni?  in all
probability we shall never see him.'  "Well, then, so I
will' said Caderousse "so you may have the diamond for
, francs. But my wife wants a gold chain, and I want a
pair of silver buckles.' The jeweller drew from his pocket a
long flat box, which contained several samples of the
articles demanded. "Here,' he said, "I am very
straightforward in my dealings  take your choice.' The
woman selected a gold chain worth about five louis, and the
husband a pair of buckles, worth perhaps fifteen francs. 
"I hope you will not complain now?' said the jeweller.
""The abbe told me it was worth , francs,' muttered
Caderousse. "Come, come  give it to me What a strange
fellow you are,' said the jeweller, taking the diamond from
his hand. "I give you , francs  that is, , livres
of income,  a fortune such as I wish I had myself, and you
are not satisfied'  "And the five and forty thousand
francs,' inquired Caderousse in a hoarse voice, "where are
they? Come  let us see them.'  "Here they are,' replied
the jeweller, and he counted out upon the table ,
francs in gold, and , francs in banknotes.
""Wait while I light the lamp,' said La Carconte "it is
growing dark, and there may be some mistake.' In fact, night
had come on during this conversation, and with night the
storm which had been threatening for the last halfhour. The
thunder growled in the distance but it was apparently not
heard by the jeweller, Caderousse, or La Carconte, absorbed
as they were all three with the demon of gain. I myself
felt a strange kind of fascination at the sight of all this
gold and all these banknotes it seemed to me that I was in
a dream, and, as it always happens in a dream, I felt myself
riveted to the spot. Caderousse counted and again counted
the gold and the notes, then handed them to his wife, who
counted and counted them again in her turn. During this
time, the jeweller made the diamond play and sparkle in the
lamplight, and the gem threw out jets of light which made
him unmindful of those which  precursors of the storm 
began to play in at the windows. "Well,' inquired the
jeweller, "is the cash all right?'
""Yes,' said Caderousse. "Give me the pocketbook, La
Carconte, and find a bag somewhere.'
"La Carconte went to a cupboard, and returned with an old
leathern pocketbook and a bag. From the former she took
some greasy letters, and put in their place the banknotes,
and from the bag took two or three crowns of six livres
each, which, in all probability, formed the entire fortune
of the miserable couple. "There,' said Caderousse "and now,
although you have wronged us of perhaps , francs, will
you have your supper with us? I invite you with goodwill.'
"Thank you,' replied the jeweller, "it must be getting
late, and I must return to Beaucaire  my wife will be
getting uneasy.' He drew out his watch, and exclaimed,
"Morbleu, nearly nine o'clock  why, I shall not get back
to Beaucaire before midnight Goodnight, my friends. If the
Abbe Busoni should by any accident return, think of me.' 
"In another week you will have left Beaucaire.' remarked
Caderousse, "for the fair ends in a few days.'  "True, but
that makes no difference. Write to me at Paris, to M.
Joannes, in the Palais Royal, arcade Pierre, No. . I will
make the journey on purpose to see him, if it is worth
while.' At this moment there was a tremendous clap of
thunder, accompanied by a flash of lightning so vivid, that
it quite eclipsed the light of the lamp.
""See here,' exclaimed Caderousse. "You cannot think of
going out in such weather as this.'  "Oh, I am not afraid
of thunder,' said the jeweller.  "And then there are
robbers,' said La Carconte. "The road is never very safe
during fair time.'  "Oh, as to the robbers,' said Joannes,
"here is something for them,' and he drew from his pocket a
pair of small pistols, loaded to the muzzle. "Here,' said
he, "are dogs who bark and bite at the same time, they are
for the two first who shall have a longing for your diamond,
Friend Caderousse.'
"Caderousse and his wife again interchanged a meaning look.
It seemed as though they were both inspired at the same time
with some horrible thought. "Well, then, a good journey to
you,' said Caderousse.  "Thanks,' replied the jeweller. He
then took his cane, which he had placed against an old
cupboard, and went out. At the moment when he opened the
door, such a gust of wind came in that the lamp was nearly
extinguished. "Oh,' said he, "this is very nice weather, and
two leagues to go in such a storm.'  "Remain,' said
Caderousse. "You can sleep here.'  "Yes do stay,' added
La Carconte in a tremulous voice "we will take every care
of you.'  "No I must sleep at Beaucaire. So, once more,
goodnight.' Caderousse followed him slowly to the
threshold. "I can see neither heaven nor earth,' said the
jeweller, who was outside the door. "Do I turn to the right,
or to the left hand?'  "To the right,' said Caderousse.
"You cannot go wrong  the road is bordered by trees on
both sides.'  "Good  all right,' said a voice almost
lost in the distance. "Close the door,' said La Carconte "I
do not like open doors when it thunders.'  "Particularly
when there is money in the house, eh?' answered Caderousse,
doublelocking the door.
"He came into the room, went to the cupboard, took out the
bag and pocketbook, and both began, for the third time, to
count their gold and banknotes. I never saw such an
expression of cupidity as the flickering lamp revealed in
those two countenances. The woman, especially, was hideous
her usual feverish tremulousness was intensified, her
countenance had become livid, and her eyes resembled burning
coals. "Why,' she inquired in a hoarse voice, "did you
invite him to sleep here tonight?'  "Why?' said
Caderousse with a shudder "why, that he might not have the
trouble of returning to Beaucaire.'  "Ah,' responded the
woman, with an expression impossible to describe "I thought
it was for something else.'  "Woman, woman  why do you
have such ideas?' cried Caderousse "or, if you have them,
why don't you keep them to yourself?'  "Well,' said La
Carconte, after a moment's pause, "you are not a man.' 
"What do you mean?' added Caderousse.  "If you had been a
man, you would not have let him go from here.'  "Woman'
"Or else he should not have reached Beaucaire.' 
"Woman'  "The road takes a turn  he is obliged to
follow it  while alongside of the canal there is a shorter
road.'  "Woman  you offend the good God. There 
listen' And at this moment there was a tremendous peal of
thunder, while the livid lightning illumined the room, and
the thunder, rolling away in the distance, seemed to
withdraw unwillingly from the cursed abode. "Mercy' said
Caderousse, crossing himself.
At the same moment, and in the midst of the terrifying
silence which usually follows a clap of thunder, they heard
a knocking at the door. Caderousse and his wife started and
looked aghast at each other. "Who's there?' cried
Caderousse, rising, and drawing up in a heap the gold and
notes scattered over the table, and which he covered with
his two hands.  "It is I,' shouted a voice.  "And who
are you?'  "Eh, pardieu, Joannes, the jeweller.'  "Well,
and you said I offended the good God,' said La Carconte with
a horrid smile. "Why, the good God sends him back again.'
Caderousse sank pale and breathless into his chair. La
Carconte, on the contrary, rose, and going with a firm step
towards the door, opened it, saying, as she did so  "Come
in, dear M. Joannes.'  "Ma foi,' said the jeweller,
drenched with rain, "I am not destined to return to
Beaucaire tonight. The shortest follies are best, my dear
Caderousse. You offered me hospitality, and I accept it, and
have returned to sleep beneath your friendly roof.'
Caderousse stammered out something, while he wiped away the
sweat that started to his brow. La Carconte doublelocked
the door behind the jeweller.
Chapter 
The Rain of Blood.
"As the jeweller returned to the apartment, he cast around
him a scrutinizing glance  but there was nothing to excite
suspicion, if it did not exist, or to confirm it, if it were
already awakened. Caderousse's hands still grasped the gold
and banknotes, and La Carconte called up her sweetest
smiles while welcoming the reappearance of their guest.
"Well, well,' said the jeweller, "you seem, my good friends,
to have had some fears respecting the accuracy of your
money, by counting it over so carefully directly I was
gone.'  "Oh, no,' answered Caderousse, "that was not my
reason, I can assure you but the circumstances by which we
have become possessed of this wealth are so unexpected, as
to make us scarcely credit our good fortune, and it is only
by placing the actual proof of our riches before our eyes
that we can persuade ourselves that the whole affair is not
a dream.' The jeweller smiled.  "Have you any other guests
in your house?' inquired he.  "Nobody but ourselves,'
replied Caderousse "the fact is, we do not lodge travellers
indeed, our tavern is so near the town, that nobody would
think of stopping here.  "Then I am afraid I shall very
much inconvenience you.'  "Inconvenience us? Not at all,
my dear sir,' said La Carconte in her most gracious manner.
"Not at all, I assure you.'  "But where will you manage to
stow me?'  "In the chamber overhead.'  "Surely that is
where you yourselves sleep?'  "Never mind that we have a
second bed in the adjoining room.' Caderousse stared at his
wife with much astonishment.
"The jeweller, meanwhile, was humming a song as he stood
warming his back at the fire La Carconte had kindled to dry
the wet garments of her guest and this done, she next
occupied herself in arranging his supper, by spreading a
napkin at the end of the table, and placing on it the
slender remains of their dinner, to which she added three or
four freshlaid eggs. Caderousse had once more parted with
his treasure  the banknotes were replaced in the
pocketbook, the gold put back into the bag, and the whole
carefully locked in the cupboard. He then began pacing the
room with a pensive and gloomy air, glancing from time to
time at the jeweller, who stood reeking with the steam from
his wet clothes, and merely changing his place on the warm
hearth, to enable the whole of his garments to be dried.
""There,' said La Carconte, as she placed a bottle of wine
on the table, "supper is ready whenever you are.'  "And
you?' asked Joannes.  "I don't want any supper,' said
Caderousse.  "We dined so very late,' hastily interposed
La Carconte.  "Then it seems I am to eat alone,' remarked
the jeweller.  "Oh, we shall have the pleasure of waiting
upon you,' answered La Carconte, with an eager attention she
was not accustomed to manifest even to guests who paid for
what they took.
"From time to time Caderousse darted on his wife keen,
searching glances, but rapid as the lightning flash. The
storm still continued. "There, there,' said La Carconte "do
you hear that? upon my word, you did well to come back.' 
"Nevertheless,' replied the jeweller, "if by the time I have
finished my supper the tempest has at all abated, I shall
make another start.'  "It's the mistral,' said Caderousse,
"and it will be sure to last till tomorrow morning.' He
sighed heavily.  "Well,' said the jeweller, as he placed
himself at table, "all I can say is, so much the worse for
those who are abroad.'  "Yes,' chimed in La Carconte,
"they will have a wretched night of it.'
"The jeweller began eating his supper, and the woman, who
was ordinarily so querulous and indifferent to all who
approached her, was suddenly transformed into the most
smiling and attentive hostess. Had the unhappy man on whom
she lavished her assiduities been previously acquainted with
her, so sudden an alteration might well have excited
suspicion in his mind, or at least have greatly astonished
him. Caderousse, meanwhile, continued to pace the room in
gloomy silence, sedulously avoiding the sight of his guest
but as soon as the stranger had completed his repast, the
agitated innkeeper went eagerly to the door and opened it.
"I believe the storm is over,' said he. But as if to
contradict his statement, at that instant a violent clap of
thunder seemed to shake the house to its very foundation,
while a sudden gust of wind, mingled with rain, extinguished
the lamp he held in his hand. Trembling and awestruck,
Caderousse hastily shut the door and returned to his guest,
while La Carconte lighted a candle by the smouldering ashes
that glimmered on the hearth. "You must be tired,' said she
to the jeweller "I have spread a pair of white sheets on
your bed go up when you are ready, and sleep well.'
"Joannes stayed for a while to see whether the storm seemed
to abate in its fury, but a brief space of time sufficed to
assure him that, instead of diminishing, the violence of the
rain and thunder momentarily increased resigning himself,
therefore, to what seemed inevitable, he bade his host
goodnight, and mounted the stairs. He passed over my head
and I heard the flooring creak beneath his footsteps. The
quick, eager glance of La Carconte followed him as he
ascended, while Caderousse, on the contrary, turned his
back, and seemed most anxiously to avoid even glancing at
him.
"All these circumstances did not strike me as painfully at
the time as they have since done in fact, all that had
happened with the exception of the story of the diamond,
which certainly did wear an air of improbability, appeared
natural enough, and called for neither apprehension nor
mistrust but, worn out as I was with fatigue, and fully
purposing to proceed onwards directly the tempest abated, I
determined to obtain a few hours' sleep. Overhead I could
accurately distinguish every movement of the jeweller, who,
after making the best arrangements in his power for passing
a comfortable night, threw himself on his bed, and I could
hear it creak and groan beneath his weight. Insensibly my
eyelids grew heavy, deep sleep stole over me, and having no
suspicion of anything wrong, I sought not to shake it off. I
looked into the kitchen once more and saw Caderousse sitting
by the side of a long table upon one of the low wooden
stools which in country places are frequently used instead
of chairs his back was turned towards me, so that I could
not see the expression of his countenance  neither should
I have been able to do so had he been placed differently, as
his head was buried between his two hands. La Carconte
continued to gaze on him for some time, then shrugging her
shoulders, she took her seat immediately opposite to him. At
this moment the expiring embers threw up a fresh flame from
the kindling of a piece of wood that lay near, and a bright
light flashed over the room. La Carconte still kept her eyes
fixed on her husband, but as he made no sign of changing his
position, she extended her hard, bony hand, and touched him
on the forehead.
"Caderousse shuddered. The woman's lips seemed to move, as
though she were talking but because she merely spoke in an
undertone, or my senses were dulled by sleep, I did not
catch a word she uttered. Confused sights and sounds seemed
to float before me, and gradually I fell into a deep, heavy
slumber. How long I had been in this unconscious state I
know not, when I was suddenly aroused by the report of a
pistol, followed by a fearful cry. Weak and tottering
footsteps resounded across the chamber above me, and the
next instant a dull, heavy weight seemed to fall powerless
on the staircase. I had not yet fully recovered
consciousness, when again I heard groans, mingled with
halfstifled cries, as if from persons engaged in a deadly
struggle. A cry more prolonged than the others and ending in
a series of groans effectually roused me from my drowsy
lethargy. Hastily raising myself on one arm, I looked
around, but all was dark and it seemed to me as if the rain
must have penetrated through the flooring of the room above,
for some kind of moisture appeared to fall, drop by drop,
upon my forehead, and when I passed my hand across my brow,
I felt that it was wet and clammy.
"To the fearful noises that had awakened me had succeeded
the most perfect silence  unbroken, save by the footsteps
of a man walking about in the chamber above. The staircase
creaked, he descended into the room below, approached the
fire and lit a candle. The man was Caderousse  he was pale
and his shirt was all blood. Having obtained the light, he
hurried upstairs again, and once more I heard his rapid and
uneasy footsteps. A moment later he came down again, holding
in his hand the small shagreen case, which he opened, to
assure himself it contained the diamond,  seemed to
hesitate as to which pocket he should put it in, then, as if
dissatisfied with the security of either pocket, he
deposited it in his red handkerchief, which he carefully
rolled round his head. After this he took from his cupboard
the banknotes and gold he had put there, thrust the one
into the pocket of his trousers, and the other into that of
his waistcoat, hastily tied up a small bundle of linen, and
rushing towards the door, disappeared in the darkness of the
night.
"Then all became clear and manifest to me, and I reproached
myself with what had happened, as though I myself had done
the guilty deed. I fancied that I still heard faint moans,
and imagining that the unfortunate jeweller might not be
quite dead, I determined to go to his relief, by way of
atoning in some slight degree, not for the crime I had
committed, but for that which I had not endeavored to
prevent. For this purpose I applied all the strength I
possessed to force an entrance from the cramped spot in
which I lay to the adjoining room. The poorly fastened
boards which alone divided me from it yielded to my efforts,
and I found myself in the house. Hastily snatching up the
lighted candle, I hurried to the staircase about midway a
body was lying quite across the stairs. It was that of La
Carconte. The pistol I had heard had doubtless been fired at
her. The shot had frightfully lacerated her throat, leaving
two gaping wounds from which, as well as the mouth, the
blood was pouring in floods. She was stone dead. I strode
past her, and ascended to the sleeping chamber, which
presented an appearance of the wildest disorder. The
furniture had been knocked over in the deadly struggle that
had taken place there, and the sheets, to which the
unfortunate jeweller had doubtless clung, were dragged
across the room. The murdered man lay on the floor, his head
leaning against the wall, and about him was a pool of blood
which poured forth from three large wounds in his breast
there was a fourth gash, in which a long table knife was
plunged up to the handle.
"I stumbled over some object I stooped to examine  it was
the second pistol, which had not gone off, probably from the
powder being wet. I approached the jeweller, who was not
quite dead, and at the sound of my footsteps and the
creaking of the floor, he opened his eyes, fixed them on me
with an anxious and inquiring gaze, moved his lips as though
trying to speak, then, overcome by the effort, fell back and
expired. This appalling sight almost bereft me of my senses,
and finding that I could no longer be of service to any one
in the house, my only desire was to fly. I rushed towards
the staircase, clutching my hair, and uttering a groan of
horror. Upon reaching the room below, I found five or six
customhouse officers, and two or three gendarmes  all
heavily armed. They threw themselves upon me. I made no
resistance I was no longer master of my senses. When I
strove to speak, a few inarticulate sounds alone escaped my
lips.
"As I noticed the significant manner in which the whole
party pointed to my bloodstained garments, I involuntarily
surveyed myself, and then I discovered that the thick warm
drops that had so bedewed me as I lay beneath the staircase
must have been the blood of La Carconte. I pointed to the
spot where I had concealed myself. "What does he mean?'
asked a gendarme. One of the officers went to the place I
directed. "He means,' replied the man upon his return, "that
he got in that way' and he showed the hole I had made when
I broke through.
"Then I saw that they took me for the assassin. I recovered
force and energy enough to free myself from the hands of
those who held me, while I managed to stammer forth  "I
did not do it Indeed, indeed I did not' A couple of
gendarmes held the muzzles of their carbines against my
breast.  "Stir but a step,' said they, "and you are a dead
man.'  "Why should you threaten me with death,' cried I,
"when I have already declared my innocence?'  "Tush,
tush,' cried the men "keep your innocent stories to tell to
the judge at Nimes. Meanwhile, come along with us and the
best advice we can give you is to do so unresistingly.'
Alas, resistance was far from my thoughts. I was utterly
overpowered by surprise and terror and without a word I
suffered myself to be handcuffed and tied to a horse's tail,
and thus they took me to Nimes.
"I had been tracked by a customsofficer, who had lost sight
of me near the tavern feeling certain that I intended to
pass the night there, he had returned to summon his
comrades, who just arrived in time to hear the report of the
pistol, and to take me in the midst of such circumstantial
proofs of my guilt as rendered all hopes of proving my
innocence utterly futile. One only chance was left me, that
of beseeching the magistrate before whom I was taken to
cause every inquiry to be made for the Abbe Busoni, who had
stopped at the inn of the Pont du Gard on that morning. If
Caderousse had invented the story relative to the diamond,
and there existed no such person as the Abbe Busoni, then,
indeed, I was lost past redemption, or, at least, my life
hung upon the feeble chance of Caderousse himself being
apprehended and confessing the whole truth. Two months
passed away in hopeless expectation on my part, while I must
do the magistrate the justice to say that he used every
means to obtain information of the person I declared could
exculpate me if he would. Caderousse still evaded all
pursuit, and I had resigned myself to what seemed my
inevitable fate. My trial was to come on at the approaching
assizes when, on the th of September  that is to say,
precisely three months and five days after the events which
had perilled my life  the Abbe Busoni, whom I never
ventured to believe I should see, presented himself at the
prison doors, saying he understood one of the prisoners
wished to speak to him he added, that having learned at
Marseilles the particulars of my imprisonment, he hastened
to comply with my desire. You may easily imagine with what
eagerness I welcomed him, and how minutely I related the
whole of what I had seen and heard. I felt some degree of
nervousness as I entered upon the history of the diamond,
but, to my inexpressible astonishment, he confirmed it in
every particular, and to my equal surprise, he seemed to
place entire belief in all I said. And then it was that, won
by his mild charity, seeing that he was acquainted with all
the habits and customs of my own country, and considering
also that pardon for the only crime of which I was really
guilty might come with a double power from lips so
benevolent and kind, I besought him to receive my
confession, under the seal of which I recounted the Auteuil
affair in all its details, as well as every other
transaction of my life. That which I had done by the impulse
of my best feelings produced the same effect as though it
had been the result of calculation. My voluntary confession
of the assassination at Auteuil proved to him that I had not
committed that of which I stood accused. When he quitted me,
he bade me be of good courage, and to rely upon his doing
all in his power to convince my judges of my innocence.
"I had speedy proofs that the excellent abbe was engaged in
my behalf, for the rigors of my imprisonment were alleviated
by many trifling though acceptable indulgences, and I was
told that my trial was to be postponed to the assizes
following those now being held. In the interim it pleased
providence to cause the apprehension of Caderousse, who was
discovered in some distant country, and brought back to
France, where he made a full confession, refusing to make
the fact of his wife's having suggested and arranged the
murder any excuse for his own guilt. The wretched man was
sentenced to the galleys for life, and I was immediately set
at liberty."
"And then it was, I presume," said Monte Cristo "that you
came to me as the bearer of a letter from the Abbe Busoni?"
"It was, your excellency the benevolent abbe took an
evident interest in all that concerned me.
""Your mode of life as a smuggler,' said he to me one day,
"will be the ruin of you if you get out, don't take it up
again.'  "But how,' inquired I, "am I to maintain myself
and my poor sister?'
""A person, whose confessor I am,' replied he, "and who
entertains a high regard for me, applied to me a short time
since to procure him a confidential servant. Would you like
such a post? If so, I will give you a letter of introduction
to him.'  "Oh, father,' I exclaimed, "you are very good.'
""But you must swear solemnly that I shall never have reason
to repent my recommendation.' I extended my hand, and was
about to pledge myself by any promise he would dictate, but
he stopped me. "It is unnecessary for you to bind yourself
by any vow,' said he "I know and admire the Corsican nature
too well to fear you. Here, take this,' continued he, after
rapidly writing the few lines I brought to your excellency,
and upon receipt of which you deigned to receive me into
your service, and proudly I ask whether your excellency has
ever had cause to repent having done so?"
"No," replied the count "I take pleasure in saying that you
have served me faithfully, Bertuccio but you might have
shown more confidence in me."
"I, your excellency?"
"Yes you. How comes it, that having both a sister and an
adopted son, you have never spoken to me of either?"
"Alas, I have still to recount the most distressing period
of my life. Anxious as you may suppose I was to behold and
comfort my dear sister, I lost no time in hastening to
Corsica, but when I arrived at Rogliano I found a house of
mourning, the consequences of a scene so horrible that the
neighbors remember and speak of it to this day. Acting by my
advice, my poor sister had refused to comply with the
unreasonable demands of Benedetto, who was continually
tormenting her for money, as long as he believed there was a
sou left in her possession. One morning that he had demanded
money, threatening her with the severest consequences if she
did not supply him with what he desired, he disappeared and
remained away all day, leaving the kindhearted Assunta, who
loved him as if he were her own child, to weep over his
conduct and bewail his absence. Evening came, and still,
with all the patient solicitude of a mother, she watched for
his return.
"As the eleventh hour struck, he entered with a swaggering
air, attended by two of the most dissolute and reckless of
his boon companions. She stretched out her arms to him, but
they seized hold of her, and one of the three  none other
than the accursed Benedetto exclaimed,  "Put her to
torture and she'll soon tell us where her money is.'
"It unfortunately happened that our neighbor, Vasilio, was
at Bastia, leaving no person in his house but his wife no
human creature beside could hear or see anything that took
place within our dwelling. Two held poor Assunta, who,
unable to conceive that any harm was intended to her, smiled
in the face of those who were soon to become her
executioners. The third proceeded to barricade the doors and
windows, then returned, and the three united in stifling the
cries of terror incited by the sight of these preparations,
and then dragged Assunta feet foremost towards the brazier,
expecting to wring from her an avowal of where her supposed
treasure was secreted. In the struggle her clothes caught
fire, and they were obliged to let go their hold in order to
preserve themselves from sharing the same fate. Covered with
flames, Assunta rushed wildly to the door, but it was
fastened she flew to the windows, but they were also
secured then the neighbors heard frightful shrieks it was
Assunta calling for help. The cries died away in groans, and
next morning, as soon as Vasilio's wife could muster up
courage to venture abroad, she caused the door of our
dwelling to be opened by the public authorities, when
Assunta, although dreadfully burnt, was found still
breathing every drawer and closet in the house had been
forced open, and the money stolen. Benedetto never again
appeared at Rogliano, neither have I since that day either
seen or heard anything concerning him.
"It was subsequently to these dreadful events that I waited
on your excellency, to whom it would have been folly to have
mentioned Benedetto, since all trace of him seemed entirely
lost or of my sister, since she was dead."
"And in what light did you view the occurrence?" inquired
Monte Cristo.
"As a punishment for the crime I had committed," answered
Bertuccio. "Oh, those Villeforts are an accursed race"
"Truly they are," murmured the count in a lugubrious tone.
"And now," resumed Bertuccio, "your excellency may, perhaps,
be able to comprehend that this place, which I revisit for
the first time  this garden, the actual scene of my crime
must have given rise to reflections of no very agreeable
nature, and produced that gloom and depression of spirits
which excited the notice of your excellency, who was pleased
to express a desire to know the cause. At this instant a
shudder passes over me as I reflect that possibly I am now
standing on the very grave in which lies M. de Villefort, by
whose hand the ground was dug to receive the corpse of his
child."
"Everything is possible," said Monte Cristo, rising from the
bench on which he had been sitting "even," he added in an
inaudible voice, "even that the procureur be not dead. The
Abbe Busoni did right to send you to me," he went on in his
ordinary tone, "and you have done well in relating to me the
whole of your history, as it will prevent my forming any
erroneous opinions concerning you in future. As for that
Benedetto, who so grossly belied his name, have you never
made any effort to trace out whither he has gone, or what
has become of him?"
"No far from wishing to learn whither he has betaken
himself, I should shun the possibility of meeting him as I
would a wild beast. Thank God, I have never heard his name
mentioned by any person, and I hope and believe he is dead."
"Do not think so, Bertuccio," replied the count "for the
wicked are not so easily disposed of, for God seems to have
them under his special watchcare to make of them
instruments of his vengeance."
"So be it," responded Bertuccio, "all I ask of heaven is
that I may never see him again. And now, your excellency,"
he added, bowing his head, "you know everything  you are
my judge on earth, as the Almighty is in heaven have you
for me no words of consolation?"
"My good friend, I can only repeat the words addressed to
you by the Abbe Busoni. Villefort merited punishment for
what he had done to you, and, perhaps, to others. Benedetto,
if still living, will become the instrument of divine
retribution in some way or other, and then be duly punished
in his turn. As far as you yourself are concerned, I see but
one point in which you are really guilty. Ask yourself,
wherefore, after rescuing the infant from its living grave,
you did not restore it to its mother? There was the crime,
Bertuccio  that was where you became really culpable."
"True, excellency, that was the crime, the real crime, for
in that I acted like a coward. My first duty, directly I had
succeeded in recalling the babe to life, was to restore it
to its mother but, in order to do so, I must have made
close and careful inquiry, which would, in all probability,
have led to my own apprehension and I clung to life, partly
on my sister's account, and partly from that feeling of
pride inborn in our hearts of desiring to come off untouched
and victorious in the execution of our vengeance. Perhaps,
too, the natural and instinctive love of life made me wish
to avoid endangering my own. And then, again, I am not as
brave and courageous as was my poor brother." Bertuccio hid
his face in his hands as he uttered these words, while Monte
Cristo fixed on him a look of inscrutable meaning. After a
brief silence, rendered still more solemn by the time and
place, the count said, in a tone of melancholy wholly unlike
his usual manner, "In order to bring this conversation to a
fitting termination the last we shall ever hold upon this
subject, I will repeat to you some words I have heard from
the lips of the Abbe Busoni. For all evils there are two
remedies  time and silence. And now leave me, Monsieur
Bertuccio, to walk alone here in the garden. The very
circumstances which inflict on you, as a principal in the
tragic scene enacted here, such painful emotions, are to me,
on the contrary, a source of something like contentment, and
serve but to enhance the value of this dwelling in my
estimation. The chief beauty of trees consists in the deep
shadow of their umbrageous boughs, while fancy pictures a
moving multitude of shapes and forms flitting and passing
beneath that shade. Here I have a garden laid out in such a
way as to afford the fullest scope for the imagination, and
furnished with thickly grown trees, beneath whose leafy
screen a visionary like myself may conjure up phantoms at
will. This to me, who expected but to find a blank enclosure
surrounded by a straight wall, is, I assure you, a most
agreeable surprise. I have no fear of ghosts, and I have
never heard it said that so much harm had been done by the
dead during six thousand years as is wrought by the living
in a single day. Retire within, Bertuccio, and tranquillize
your mind. Should your confessor be less indulgent to you in
your dying moments than you found the Abbe Busoni, send for
me, if I am still on earth, and I will soothe your ears with
words that shall effectually calm and soothe your parting
soul ere it goes forth to traverse the ocean called
eternity."
Bertuccio bowed respectfully, and turned away, sighing
heavily. Monte Cristo, left alone, took three or four steps
onwards, and murmured, "Here, beneath this planetree, must
have been where the infant's grave was dug. There is the
little door opening into the garden. At this corner is the
private staircase communicating with the sleeping apartment.
There will be no necessity for me to make a note of these
particulars, for there, before my eyes, beneath my feet, all
around me, I have the plan sketched with all the living
reality of truth." After making the tour of the garden a
second time, the count reentered his carriage, while
Bertuccio, who perceived the thoughtful expression of his
master's features, took his seat beside the driver without
uttering a word. The carriage proceeded rapidly towards
Paris.
That same evening, upon reaching his abode in the Champs
Elysees, the Count of Monte Cristo went over the whole
building with the air of one long acquainted with each nook
or corner. Nor, although preceding the party, did he once
mistake one door for another, or commit the smallest error
when choosing any particular corridor or staircase to
conduct him to a place or suite of rooms he desired to
visit. Ali was his principal attendant during this nocturnal
survey. Having given various orders to Bertuccio relative to
the improvements and alterations he desired to make in the
house, the Count, drawing out his watch, said to the
attentive Nubian, "It is halfpast eleven o'clock Haidee
will soon he here. Have the French attendants been summoned
to await her coming?" Ali extended his hands towards the
apartments destined for the fair Greek, which were so
effectually concealed by means of a tapestried entrance,
that it would have puzzled the most curious to have divined
their existence. Ali, having pointed to the apartments, held
up three fingers of his right hand, and then, placing it
beneath his head, shut his eyes, and feigned to sleep. "I
understand," said Monte Cristo, well acquainted with Ali's
pantomime "you mean to tell me that three female attendants
await their new mistress in her sleepingchamber." Ali, with
considerable animation, made a sign in the affirmative.
"Madame will be tired tonight," continued Monte Cristo,
"and will, no doubt, wish to rest. Desire the French
attendants not to weary her with questions, but merely to
pay their respectful duty and retire. You will also see that
the Greek servants hold no communication with those of this
country." He bowed. Just at that moment voices were heard
hailing the concierge. The gate opened, a carriage rolled
down the avenue, and stopped at the steps. The count hastily
descended, presented himself at the already opened carriage
door, and held out his hand to a young woman, completely
enveloped in a green silk mantle heavily embroidered with
gold. She raised the hand extended towards her to her lips,
and kissed it with a mixture of love and respect. Some few
words passed between them in that sonorous language in which
Homer makes his gods converse. The young woman spoke with an
expression of deep tenderness, while the count replied with
an air of gentle gravity. Preceded by Ali, who carried a
rosecolored flambeau in his hand, the newcomer, who was no
other than the lovely Greek who had been Monte Cristo's
companion in Italy, was conducted to her apartments, while
the count retired to the pavilion reserved for himself. In
another hour every light in the house was extinguished, and
it might have been thought that all its inmates slept.
Chapter 
Unlimited Credit.
About two o'clock the following day a calash, drawn by a
pair of magnificent English horses, stopped at the door of
Monte Cristo and a person, dressed in a blue coat, with
buttons of a similar color, a white waistcoat, over which
was displayed a massive gold chain, brown trousers, and a
quantity of black hair descending so low over his eyebrows
as to leave it doubtful whether it were not artificial so
little did its jetty glossiness assimilate with the deep
wrinkles stamped on his features  a person, in a word,
who, although evidently past fifty, desired to be taken for
not more than forty, bent forwards from the carriage door,
on the panels of which were emblazoned the armorial bearings
of a baron, and directed his groom to inquire at the
porter's lodge whether the Count of Monte Cristo resided
there, and if he were within. While waiting, the occupant of
the carriage surveyed the house, the garden as far as he
could distinguish it, and the livery of servants who passed
to and fro, with an attention so close as to be somewhat
impertinent. His glance was keen but showed cunning rather
than intelligence his lips were straight, and so thin that,
as they closed, they were drawn in over the teeth his
cheekbones were broad and projecting, a neverfailing proof
of audacity and craftiness while the flatness of his
forehead, and the enlargement of the back of his skull,
which rose much higher than his large and coarsely shaped
ears, combined to form a physiognomy anything but
prepossessing, save in the eyes of such as considered that
the owner of so splendid an equipage must needs be all that
was admirable and enviable, more especially when they gazed
on the enormous diamond that glittered in his shirt, and the
red ribbon that depended from his buttonhole.
The groom, in obedience to his orders, tapped at the window
of the porter's lodge, saying, "Pray, does not the Count of
Monte Cristo live here?"
"His excellency does reside here," replied the concierge
"but"  added he, glancing an inquiring look at Ali. Ali
returned a sign in the negative. "But what?" asked the
groom.
"His excellency does not receive visitors today."
"Then here is my master's card,  the Baron Danglars. You
will take it to the count, and say that, although in haste
to attend the Chamber, my master came out of his way to have
the honor of calling upon him."
"I never speak to his excellency," replied the concierge
"the valet de chambre will carry your message." The groom
returned to the carriage. "Well?" asked Danglars. The man,
somewhat crestfallen by the rebuke he had received,
repeated what the concierge had said. "Bless me," murmured
Baron Danglars, "this must surely be a prince instead of a
count by their styling him "excellency,' and only venturing
to address him by the medium of his valet de chambre.
However, it does not signify he has a letter of credit on
me, so I must see him when he requires his money."
Then, throwing himself back in his carriage, Danglars called
out to his coachman, in a voice that might be heard across
the road, "To the Chamber of Deputies."
Apprised in time of the visit paid him, Monte Cristo had,
from behind the blinds of his pavilion, as minutely observed
the baron, by means of an excellent lorgnette, as Danglars
himself had scrutinized the house, garden, and servants.
"That fellow has a decidedly bad countenance," said the
count in a tone of disgust, as he shut up his glass into its
ivory case. "How comes it that all do not retreat in
aversion at sight of that flat, receding, serpentlike
forehead, round, vultureshaped head, and sharphooked nose,
like the beak of a buzzard? Ali," cried he, striking at the
same time on the brazen gong. Ali appeared. "Summon
Bertuccio," said the count. Almost immediately Bertuccio
entered the apartment. "Did your excellency desire to see
me?" inquired he. "I did," replied the count. "You no doubt
observed the horses standing a few minutes since at the
door?"
"Certainly, your excellency. I noticed them for their
remarkable beauty."
"Then how comes it," said Monte Cristo with a frown, "that,
when I desired you to purchase for me the finest pair of
horses to be found in Paris, there is another pair, fully as
fine as mine, not in my stables?" At the look of
displeasure, added to the angry tone in which the count
spoke, Ali turned pale and held down his head. "It is not
your fault, my good Ali," said the count in the Arabic
language, and with a gentleness none would have thought him
capable of showing, either in voice or face  "it is not
your fault. You do not understand the points of English
horses." The countenance of poor Ali recovered its serenity.
"Permit me to assure your excellency," said Bertuccio, "that
the horses you speak of were not to be sold when I purchased
yours." Monte Cristo shrugged his shoulders. "It seems, sir
steward," said he, "that you have yet to learn that all
things are to be sold to such as care to pay the price."
"His excellency is not, perhaps, aware that M. Danglars gave
, francs for his horses?"
"Very well. Then offer him double that sum a banker never
loses an opportunity of doubling his capital."
"Is your excellency really in earnest?" inquired the
steward. Monte Cristo regarded the person who durst presume
to doubt his words with the look of one equally surprised
and displeased. "I have to pay a visit this evening,"
replied he. "I desire that these horses, with completely new
harness, may be at the door with my carriage." Bertuccio
bowed, and was about to retire but when he reached the
door, he paused, and then said, "At what o'clock does your
excellency wish the carriage and horses to be ready?"
"At five o'clock," replied the count.
"I beg your excellency's pardon," interposed the steward in
a deprecating manner, "for venturing to observe that it is
already two o'clock."
"I am perfectly aware of that fact," answered Monte Cristo
calmly. Then, turning towards Ali, he said, "Let all the
horses in my stables be led before the windows of your young
lady, that she may select those she prefers for her
carriage. Request her also to oblige me by saying whether it
is her pleasure to dine with me if so, let dinner be served
in her apartments. Now, leave me, and desire my valet de
chambre to come hither." Scarcely had Ali disappeared when
the valet entered the chamber. "Monsieur Baptistin," said
the count, "you have been in my service one year, the time I
generally give myself to judge of the merits or demerits of
those about me. You suit me very well." Baptistin bowed low.
"It only remains for me to know whether I also suit you?"
"Oh, your excellency" exclaimed Baptistin eagerly.
"Listen, if you please, till I have finished speaking,"
replied Monte Cristo. "You receive , francs per annum
for your services here  more than many a brave subaltern,
who continually risks his life for his country, obtains. You
live in a manner far superior to many clerks who work ten
times harder than you do for their money. Then, though
yourself a servant, you have other servants to wait upon
you, take care of your clothes, and see that your linen is
duly prepared for you. Again, you make a profit upon each
article you purchase for my toilet, amounting in the course
of a year to a sum equalling your wages."
"Nay, indeed, your excellency."
"I am not condemning you for this, Monsieur Baptistin but
let your profits end here. It would be long indeed ere you
would find so lucrative a post as that you have now the good
fortune to fill. I neither illuse nor illtreat my servants
by word or action. An error I readily forgive, but wilful
negligence or forgetfulness, never. My commands are
ordinarily short, clear, and precise and I would rather be
obliged to repeat my words twice, or even three times, than
they should be misunderstood. I am rich enough to know
whatever I desire to know, and I can promise you I am not
wanting in curiosity. If, then, I should learn that you had
taken upon yourself to speak of me to any one favorably or
unfavorably, to comment on my actions, or watch my conduct,
that very instant you would quit my service. You may now
retire. I never caution my servants a second time 
remember that." Baptistin bowed, and was proceeding towards
the door. "I forgot to mention to you," said the count,
"that I lay yearly aside a certain sum for each servant in
my establishment those whom I am compelled to dismiss lose
as a matter of course all participation in this money,
while their portion goes to the fund accumulating for those
domestics who remain with me, and among whom it will be
divided at my death. You have been in my service a year,
your fund has already begun to accumulate  let it continue
to do so."
This address, delivered in the presence of Ali, who, not
understanding one word of the language in which it was
spoken, stood wholly unmoved, produced an effect on M.
Baptistin only to be conceived by such as have occasion to
study the character and disposition of French domestics. "I
assure your excellency," said he, "that at least it shall be
my study to merit your approbation in all things, and I will
take M. Ali as my model."
"By no means," replied the count in the most frigid tones
"Ali has many faults mixed with most excellent qualities. He
cannot possibly serve you as a pattern for your conduct, not
being, as you are, a paid servant, but a mere slave  a
dog, who, should he fail in his duty towards me, I should
not discharge from my service, but kill." Baptistin opened
his eyes with astonishment.
"You seem incredulous," said Monte Cristo, who repeated to
Ali in the Arabic language what he had just been saying to
Baptistin in French. The Nubian smiled assentingly to his
master's words, then, kneeling on one knee, respectfully
kissed the hand of the count. This corroboration of the
lesson he had just received put the finishing stroke to the
wonder and stupefaction of M. Baptistin. The count then
motioned the valet de chambre to retire, and to Ali to
follow to his study, where they conversed long and earnestly
together. As the hand of the clock pointed to five the count
struck thrice upon his gong. When Ali was wanted one stroke
was given, two summoned Baptistin, and three Bertuccio. The
steward entered. "My horses," said Monte Cristo.
"They are at the door harnessed to the carriage as your
excellency desired. Does your excellency wish me to
accompany him?"
"No, the coachman, Ali, and Baptistin will go." The count
descended to the door of his mansion, and beheld his
carriage drawn by the very pair of horses he had so much
admired in the morning as the property of Danglars. As he
passed them he said  "They are extremely handsome
certainly, and you have done well to purchase them, although
you were somewhat remiss not to have procured them sooner."
"Indeed, your excellency, I had very considerable difficulty
in obtaining them, and, as it is, they have cost an enormous
price."
"Does the sum you gave for them make the animals less
beautiful," inquired the count, shrugging his shoulders.
"Nay, if your excellency is satisfied, it is all that I
could wish. Whither does your excellency desire to be
driven?"
"To the residence of Baron Danglars, Rue de la Chaussee
d'Antin." This conversation had passed as they stood upon
the terrace, from which a flight of stone steps led to the
carriagedrive. As Bertuccio, with a respectful bow, was
moving away, the count called him back. "I have another
commission for you, M. Bertuccio," said he "I am desirous
of having an estate by the seaside in Normandy  for
instance, between Havre and Boulogne. You see I give you a
wide range. It will be absolutely necessary that the place
you may select have a small harbor, creek, or bay, into
which my corvette can enter and remain at anchor. She draws
only fifteen feet. She must be kept in constant readiness to
sail immediately I think proper to give the signal. Make the
requisite inquiries for a place of this description, and
when you have met with an eligible spot, visit it, and if it
possess the advantages desired, purchase it at once in your
own name. The corvette must now, I think, be on her way to
Fecamp, must she not?"
"Certainly, your excellency I saw her put to sea the same
evening we quitted Marseilles."
"And the yacht."
"Was ordered to remain at Martigues."
"'Tis well. I wish you to write from time to time to the
captains in charge of the two vessels so as to keep them on
the alert."
"And the steamboat?"
"She is at Chalons?"
"Yes."
"The same orders for her as for the two sailing vessels."
"Very good."
"When you have purchased the estate I desire, I want
constant relays of horses at ten leagues apart along the
northern and southern road."
"Your excellency may depend upon me." The Count made a
gesture of satisfaction, descended the terrace steps, and
sprang into his carriage, which was whirled along swiftly to
the banker's house. Danglars was engaged at that moment,
presiding over a railroad committee. But the meeting was
nearly concluded when the name of his visitor was announced.
As the count's title sounded on his ear he rose, and
addressing his colleagues, who were members of one or the
other Chamber, he said,  "Gentlemen, pardon me for leaving
you so abruptly but a most ridiculous circumstance has
occurred, which is this,  Thomson  French, the Roman
bankers, have sent to me a certain person calling himself
the Count of Monte Cristo, and have given him an unlimited
credit with me. I confess this is the drollest thing I have
ever met with in the course of my extensive foreign
transactions, and you may readily suppose it has greatly
roused my curiosity. I took the trouble this morning to call
on the pretended count  if he were a real count he
wouldn't be so rich. But, would you believe it, "He was not
receiving.' So the master of Monte Cristo gives himself airs
befitting a great millionaire or a capricious beauty. I made
inquiries, and found that the house in the Champs Elysees is
his own property, and certainly it was very decently kept
up. But," pursued Danglars with one of his sinister smiles,
"an order for unlimited credit calls for something like
caution on the part of the banker to whom that order is
given. I am very anxious to see this man. I suspect a hoax
is intended, but the instigators of it little knew whom they
had to deal with. "They laugh best who laugh last'"
Having delivered himself of this pompous address, uttered
with a degree of energy that left the baron almost out of
breath, he bowed to the assembled party and withdrew to his
drawingroom, whose sumptuous furnishings of white and gold
had caused a great sensation in the Chaussee d'Antin. It was
to this apartment he had desired his guest to be shown, with
the purpose of overwhelming him at the sight of so much
luxury. He found the count standing before some copies of
Albano and Fattore that had been passed off to the banker as
originals but which, mere copies as they were, seemed to
feel their degradation in being brought into juxtaposition
with the gaudy colors that covered the ceiling. The count
turned round as he heard the entrance of Danglars into the
room. With a slight inclination of the head, Danglars signed
to the count to be seated, pointing significantly to a
gilded armchair, covered with white satin embroidered with
gold. The count sat down. "I have the honor, I presume, of
addressing M. de Monte Cristo."
The count bowed. "And I of speaking to Baron Danglars,
chevalier of the Legion of Honor, and member of the Chamber
of Deputies?"
Monte Cristo repeated all the titles he had read on the
baron's card.
Danglars felt the irony and compressed his lips. "You will,
I trust, excuse me, monsieur, for not calling you by your
title when I first addressed you," he said, "but you are
aware that we are living under a popular form of government,
and that I am myself a representative of the liberties of
the people."
"So much so," replied Monte Cristo, "that while you call
yourself baron you are not willing to call anybody else
count."
"Upon my word, monsieur," said Danglars with affected
carelessness, "I attach no sort of value to such empty
distinctions but the fact is, I was made baron, and also
chevalier of the Legion of Honor, in return for services
rendered, but" 
"But you have discarded your titles after the example set
you by Messrs. de Montmorency and Lafayette? That was a
noble example to follow, monsieur."
"Why," replied Danglars, "not entirely so with the
servants,  you understand."
"I see to your domestics you are "my lord,' the journalists
style you "monsieur,' while your constituents call you
"citizen.' These are distinctions very suitable under a
constitutional government. I understand perfectly." Again
Danglars bit his lips he saw that he was no match for Monte
Cristo in an argument of this sort, and he therefore
hastened to turn to subjects more congenial.
"Permit me to inform you, Count," said he, bowing, "that I
have received a letter of advice from Thomson  French, of
Rome."
"I am glad to hear it, baron,  for I must claim the
privilege of addressing you after the manner of your
servants. I have acquired the bad habit of calling persons
by their titles from living in a country where barons are
still barons by right of birth. But as regards the letter of
advice, I am charmed to find that it has reached you that
will spare me the troublesome and disagreeable task of
coming to you for money myself. You have received a regular
letter of advice?"
"Yes," said Danglars, "but I confess I didn't quite
comprehend its meaning."
"Indeed?"
"And for that reason I did myself the honor of calling upon
you, in order to beg for an explanation."
"Go on, monsieur. Here I am, ready to give you any
explanation you desire."
"Why," said Danglers, "in the letter  I believe I have it
about me"  here he felt in his breastpocket  "yes, here
it is. Well, this letter gives the Count of Monte Cristo
unlimited credit on our house."
"Well, baron, what is there difficult to understand about
that?"
"Merely the term unlimited  nothing else, certainly."
"Is not that word known in France? The people who wrote are
AngloGermans, you know."
"Oh, as for the composition of the letter, there is nothing
to be said but as regards the competency of the document, I
certainly have doubts."
"Is it possible?" asked the count, assuming all air and tone
of the utmost simplicity and candor. "Is it possible that
Thomson  French are not looked upon as safe and solvent
bankers? Pray tell me what you think, baron, for I feel
uneasy, I can assure you, having some considerable property
in their hands."
"Thomson  French are perfectly solvent," replied Danglars,
with an almost mocking smile "but the word unlimited, in
financial affairs, is so extremely vague."
"Is, in fact, unlimited," said Monte Cristo.
"Precisely what I was about to say," cried Danglars. "Now
what is vague is doubtful and it was a wise man who said,
"when in doubt, keep out.'"
"Meaning to say," rejoined Monte Cristo, "that however
Thomson  French may be inclined to commit acts of
imprudence and folly, the Baron Danglars is not disposed to
follow their example."
"Not at all."
"Plainly enough. Messrs. Thomson  French set no bounds to
their engagements while those of M. Danglars have their
limits he is a wise man, according to his own showing."
"Monsieur," replied the banker, drawing himself up with a
haughty air, "the extent of my resources has never yet been
questioned."
"It seems, then, reserved for me," said Monte Cristo coldly,
"to be the first to do so."
"By what right, sir?"
"By right of the objections you have raised, and the
explanations you have demanded, which certainly must have
some motive."
Once more Danglars bit his lips. It was the second time he
had been worsted, and this time on his own ground. His
forced politeness sat awkwardly upon him, and approached
almost to impertinence. Monte Cristo on the contrary,
preserved a graceful suavity of demeanor, aided by a certain
degree of simplicity he could assume at pleasure, and thus
possessed the advantage.
"Well, sir," resumed Danglars, after a brief silence, "I
will endeavor to make myself understood, by requesting you
to inform me for what sum you propose to draw upon me?"
"Why, truly," replied Monte Cristo, determined not to lose
an inch of the ground he had gained, "my reason for desiring
an "unlimited' credit was precisely because I did not know
how much money I might need."
The banker thought the time had come for him to take the
upper hand. So throwing himself back in his armchair, he
said, with an arrogant and purseproud air,  "Let me beg
of you not to hesitate in naming your wishes you will then
be convinced that the resources of the house of Danglars,
however limited, are still equal to meeting the largest
demands and were you even to require a million" 
"I beg your pardon," interposed Monte Cristo.
"I said a million," replied Danglars, with the confidence of
ignorance.
"But could I do with a million?" retorted the count. "My
dear sir, if a trifle like that could suffice me, I should
never have given myself the trouble of opening an account. A
million? Excuse my smiling when you speak of a sum I am in
the habit of carrying in my pocketbook or dressingcase."
And with these words Monte Cristo took from his pocket a
small case containing his visitingcards, and drew forth two
orders on the treasury for , francs each, payable at
sight to the bearer. A man like Danglars was wholly
inaccessible to any gentler method of correction. The effect
of the present revelation was stunning he trembled and was
on the verge of apoplexy. The pupils of his eyes, as he
gazed at Monte Cristo dilated horribly.
"Come, come," said Monte Cristo, "confess honestly that you
have not perfect confidence in Thomson  French. I
understand, and foreseeing that such might be the case, I
took, in spite of my ignorance of affairs, certain
precautions. See, here are two similar letters to that you
have yourself received one from the house of Arstein 
Eskeles of Vienna, to Baron Rothschild, the other drawn by
Baring of London, upon M. Laffitte. Now, sir, you have but
to say the word, and I will spare you all uneasiness by
presenting my letter of credit to one or other of these two
firms." The blow had struck home, and Danglars was entirely
vanquished with a trembling hand he took the two letters
from the count, who held them carelessly between finger and
thumb, and proceeded to scrutinize the signatures, with a
minuteness that the count might have regarded as insulting,
had it not suited his present purpose to mislead the banker.
"Oh, sir," said Danglars, after he had convinced himself of
the authenticity of the documents he held, and rising as if
to salute the power of gold personified in the man before
him,  "three letters of unlimited credit I can be no
longer mistrustful, but you must pardon me, my dear count,
for confessing to some degree of astonishment."
"Nay," answered Monte Cristo, with the most gentlemanly air,
"'tis not for such trifling sums as these that your banking
house is to be incommoded. Then, you can let me have some
money, can you not?"
"Whatever you say, my dear count I am at your orders."
"Why," replied Monte Cristo, "since we mutually understand
each other  for such I presume is the case?" Danglars
bowed assentingly. "You are quite sure that not a lurking
doubt or suspicion lingers in your mind?"
"Oh, my dear count," exclaimed Danglars, "I never for an
instant entertained such a feeling towards you."
"No, you merely wished to be convinced, nothing more but
now that we have come to so clear an understanding, and that
all distrust and suspicion are laid at rest, we may as well
fix a sum as the probable expenditure of the first year,
suppose we say six millions to" 
"Six millions" gasped Danglars  "so be it."
"Then, if I should require more," continued Monte Cristo in
a careless manner, "why, of course, I should draw upon you
but my present intention is not to remain in France more
than a year, and during that period I scarcely think I shall
exceed the sum I mentioned. However, we shall see. Be kind
enough, then, to send me , francs tomorrow. I shall
be at home till midday, or if not, I will leave a receipt
with my steward."
"The money you desire shall be at your house by ten o'clock
tomorrow morning, my dear count," replied Danglars. "How
would you like to have it? in gold, silver, or notes?"
"Half in gold, and the other half in banknotes, if you
please," said the count, rising from his seat.
"I must confess to you, count," said Danglars, "that I have
hitherto imagined myself acquainted with the degree of all
the great fortunes of Europe, and still wealth such as yours
has been wholly unknown to me. May I presume to ask whether
you have long possessed it?"
"It has been in the family a very long while," returned
Monte Cristo, "a sort of treasure expressly forbidden to be
touched for a certain period of years, during which the
accumulated interest has doubled the capital. The period
appointed by the testator for the disposal of these riches
occurred only a short time ago, and they have only been
employed by me within the last few years. Your ignorance on
the subject, therefore, is easily accounted for. However,
you will be better informed as to me and my possessions ere
long." And the count, while pronouncing these latter words,
accompanied them with one of those ghastly smiles that used
to strike terror into poor Franz d'Epinay.
"With your tastes, and means of gratifying them," continued
Danglars, "you will exhibit a splendor that must effectually
put us poor miserable millionaires quite in the shade. If I
mistake not you are an admirer of paintings, at least I
judged so from the attention you appeared to be bestowing on
mine when I entered the room. If you will permit me, I shall
be happy to show you my picture gallery, composed entirely
of works by the ancient masters  warranted as such. Not a
modern picture among them. I cannot endure the modern school
of painting."
"You are perfectly right in objecting to them, for this one
great fault  that they have not yet had time to become
old."
"Or will you allow me to show you several fine statues by
Thorwaldsen, Bartoloni, and Canova?  all foreign artists,
for, as you may perceive, I think but very indifferently of
our French sculptors."
"You have a right to be unjust to them, monsieur they are
your compatriots."
"But all this may come later, when we shall be better known
to each other. For the present, I will confine myself if
perfectly agreeable to you to introducing you to the
Baroness Danglars  excuse my impatience, my dear count,
but a client like you is almost like a member of the
family." Monte Cristo bowed, in sign that he accepted the
proffered honor Danglars rang and was answered by a servant
in a showy livery. "Is the baroness at home?" inquired
Danglars.
"Yes, my lord," answered the man.
"And alone?"
"No, my lord, madame has visitors."
"Have you any objection to meet any persons who may be with
madame, or do you desire to preserve a strict incognito?"
"No, indeed," replied Monte Cristo with a smile, "I do not
arrogate to myself the right of so doing."
"And who is with madame?  M. Debray?" inquired Danglars,
with an air of indulgence and goodnature that made Monte
Cristo smile, acquainted as he was with the secrets of the
banker's domestic life.
"Yes, my lord," replied the servant, "M. Debray is with
madame." Danglars nodded his head then, turning to Monte
Cristo, said, "M. Lucien Debray is an old friend of ours,
and private secretary to the Minister of the Interior. As
for my wife, I must tell you, she lowered herself by
marrying me, for she belongs to one of the most ancient
families in France. Her maiden name was De Servieres, and
her first husband was Colonel the Marquis of Nargonne."
"I have not the honor of knowing Madame Danglars but I have
already met M. Lucien Debray."
"Ah, indeed?" said Danglars "and where was that?"
"At the house of M. de Morcerf."
"Ah, ha, you are acquainted with the young viscount, are
you?"
"We were together a good deal during the Carnival at Rome."
"True, true," cried Danglars. "Let me see have I not heard
talk of some strange adventure with bandits or thieves hid
in ruins, and of his having had a miraculous escape? I
forget how, but I know he used to amuse my wife and daughter
by telling them about it after his return from Italy."
"Her ladyship is waiting to receive you, gentlemen," said
the servant, who had gone to inquire the pleasure of his
mistress. "With your permission," said Danglars, bowing, "I
will precede you, to show you the way."
"By all means," replied Monte Cristo "I follow you."
Chapter 
The Dappled Grays.
The baron, followed by the count, traversed a long series of
apartments, in which the prevailing characteristics were
heavy magnificence and the gaudiness of ostentatious wealth,
until he reached the boudoir of Madame Danglars  a small
octagonalshaped room, hung with pink satin, covered with
white Indian muslin. The chairs were of ancient workmanship
and materials over the doors were painted sketches of
shepherds and shepherdesses, after the style and manner of
Boucher and at each side pretty medallions in crayons,
harmonizing well with the furnishings of this charming
apartment, the only one throughout the great mansion in
which any distinctive taste prevailed. The truth was, it had
been entirely overlooked in the plan arranged and followed
out by M. Danglars and his architect, who had been selected
to aid the baron in the great work of improvement solely
because he was the most fashionable and celebrated decorator
of the day. The decorations of the boudoir had then been
left entirely to Madame Danglars and Lucien Debray. M.
Danglars, however, while possessing a great admiration for
the antique, as it was understood during the time of the
Directory, entertained the most sovereign contempt for the
simple elegance of his wife's favorite sittingroom, where,
by the way, he was never permitted to intrude, unless,
indeed, he excused his own appearance by ushering in some
more agreeable visitor than himself and even then he had
rather the air and manner of a person who was himself
introduced, than that of being the presenter of another, his
reception being cordial or frigid, in proportion as the
person who accompanied him chanced to please or displease
the baroness.
Madame Danglars who, although past the first bloom of
youth, was still strikingly handsome was now seated at the
piano, a most elaborate piece of cabinet and inlaid work,
while Lucien Debray, standing before a small worktable, was
turning over the pages of an album. Lucien had found time,
preparatory to the count's arrival, to relate many
particulars respecting him to Madame Danglars. It will be
remembered that Monte Cristo had made a lively impression on
the minds of all the party assembled at the breakfast given
by Albert de Morcerf and although Debray was not in the
habit of yielding to such feelings, he had never been able
to shake off the powerful influence excited in his mind by
the impressive look and manner of the count, consequently
the description given by Lucien to the baroness bore the
highlycolored tinge of his own heated imagination. Already
excited by the wonderful stories related of the count by De
Morcerf, it is no wonder that Madame Danglars eagerly
listened to, and fully credited, all the additional
circumstances detailed by Debray. This posing at the piano
and over the album was only a little ruse adopted by way of
precaution. A most gracious welcome and unusual smile were
bestowed on M. Danglars the count, in return for his
gentlemanly bow, received a formal though graceful courtesy,
while Lucien exchanged with the count a sort of distant
recognition, and with Danglars a free and easy nod.
"Baroness," said Danglars, "give me leave to present to you
the Count of Monte Cristo, who has been most warmly
recommended to me by my correspondents at Rome. I need but
mention one fact to make all the ladies in Paris court his
notice, and that is, that he has come to take up his abode
in Paris for a year, during which brief period he proposes
to spend six millions of money. That means balls, dinners,
and lawn parties without end, in all of which I trust the
count will remember us, as he may depend upon it we shall
him, in our own humble entertainments." In spite of the
gross flattery and coarseness of this address, Madame
Danglars could not forbear gazing with considerable interest
on a man capable of expending six millions in twelve months,
and who had selected Paris for the scene of his princely
extravagance. "And when did you arrive here?" inquired she.
"Yesterday morning, madame."
"Coming, as usual, I presume, from the extreme end of the
globe? Pardon me  at least, such I have heard is your
custom."
"Nay, madame. This time I have merely come from Cadiz."
"You have selected a most unfavorable moment for your first
visit. Paris is a horrible place in summer. Balls, parties,
and fetes are over the Italian opera is in London the
French opera everywhere except in Paris. As for the Theatre
Francais, you know, of course, that it is nowhere. The only
amusements left us are the indifferent races at the Champ de
Mars and Satory. Do you propose entering any horses at
either of these races, count?"
"I shall do whatever they do at Paris, madame, if I have the
good fortune to find some one who will initiate me into the
prevalent ideas of amusement."
"Are you fond of horses, count?"
"I have passed a considerable part of my life in the East,
madame, and you are doubtless aware that the Orientals value
only two things  the fine breeding of their horses and the
beauty of their women."
"Nay, count," said the baroness, "it would have been
somewhat more gallant to have placed the ladies first."
"You see, madame, how rightly I spoke when I said I required
a preceptor to guide me in all my sayings and doings here."
At this instant the favorite attendant of Madame Danglars
entered the boudoir approaching her mistress, she spoke
some words in an undertone. Madame Danglars turned very
pale, then exclaimed,  "I cannot believe it the thing is
impossible."
"I assure you, madame," replied the woman, "it is as I have
said." Turning impatiently towards her husband, Madame
Danglars demanded, "Is this true?"
"Is what true, madame?" inquired Danglars, visibly agitated.
"What my maid tells me."
"But what does she tell you?"
"That when my coachman was about to harness the horses to my
carriage, he discovered that they had been removed from the
stables without his knowledge. I desire to know what is the
meaning of this?"
"Be kind enough, madame, to listen to me," said Danglars.
"Oh, yes I will listen, monsieur, for I am most curious to
hear what explanation you will give. These two gentlemen
shall decide between us but, first, I will state the case
to them. Gentlemen," continued the baroness, "among the ten
horses in the stables of Baron Danglars, are two that belong
exclusively to me  a pair of the handsomest and most
spirited creatures to be found in Paris. But to you, at
least, M. Debray, I need not give a further description,
because to you my beautiful pair of dappled grays were well
known. Well, I had promised Madame de Villefort the loan of
my carriage to drive tomorrow to the Bois but when my
coachman goes to fetch the grays from the stables they are
gone  positively gone. No doubt M. Danglars has sacrificed
them to the selfish consideration of gaining some thousands
of paltry francs. Oh, what a detestable crew they are, these
mercenary speculators"
"Madame," replied Danglars, "the horses were not
sufficiently quiet for you they were scarcely four years
old, and they made me extremely uneasy on your account."
"Nonsense," retorted the baroness "you could not have
entertained any alarm on the subject, because you are
perfectly well aware that I have had for a month in my
service the very best coachman in Paris. But, perhaps, you
have disposed of the coachman as well as the horses?"
"My dear love, pray do not say any more about them, and I
promise you another pair exactly like them in appearance,
only more quiet and steady." The baroness shrugged her
shoulders with an air of ineffable contempt, while her
husband, affecting not to observe this unconjugal gesture,
turned towards Monte Cristo and said,  "Upon my word,
count, I am quite sorry not to have met you sooner. You are
setting up an establishment, of course?"
"Why, yes," replied the count.
"I should have liked to have made you the offer of these
horses. I have almost given them away, as it is but, as I
before said, I was anxious to get rid of them upon any
terms. They were only fit for a young man."
"I am much obliged by your kind intentions towards me," said
Monte Cristo "but this morning I purchased a very excellent
pair of carriagehorses, and I do not think they were dear.
There they are. Come, M. Debray, you are a connoisseur, I
believe, let me have your opinion upon them." As Debray
walked towards the window, Danglars approached his wife. "I
could not tell you before others," said he in a low tone,
"the reason of my parting with the horses but a most
enormous price was offered me this morning for them. Some
madman or fool, bent upon ruining himself as fast as he can,
actually sent his steward to me to purchase them at any
cost and the fact is, I have gained , francs by the
sale of them. Come, don't look so angry, and you shall have
, francs of the money to do what you like with, and
Eugenie shall have ,. There, what do you think now of
the affair? Wasn't I right to part with the horses?" Madame
Danglars surveyed her husband with a look of withering
contempt.
"Great heavens?" suddenly exclaimed Debray.
"What is it?" asked the baroness.
"I cannot be mistaken there are your horses The very
animals we were speaking of, harnessed to the count's
carriage"
"My dappled grays?" demanded the baroness, springing to the
window. "'Tis indeed they" said she. Danglars looked
absolutely stupefied. "How very singular," cried Monte
Cristo with wellfeigned astonishment.
"I cannot believe it," murmured the banker. Madame Danglars
whispered a few words in the ear of Debray, who approached
Monte Cristo, saying, "The baroness wishes to know what you
paid her husband for the horses."
"I scarcely know," replied the count "it was a little
surprise prepared for me by my steward, and cost me  well,
somewhere about , francs." Debray conveyed the count's
reply to the baroness. Poor Danglars looked so crestfallen
and discomfited that Monte Cristo assumed a pitying air
towards him. "See," said the count, "how very ungrateful
women are. Your kind attention, in providing for the safety
of the baroness by disposing of the horses, does not seem to
have made the least impression on her. But so it is a woman
will often, from mere wilfulness, prefer that which is
dangerous to that which is safe. Therefore, in my opinion,
my dear baron, the best and easiest way is to leave them to
their fancies, and allow them to act as they please, and
then, if any mischief follows, why, at least, they have no
one to blame but themselves." Danglars made no reply he was
occupied in anticipations of the coming scene between
himself and the baroness, whose frowning brow, like that of
Olympic Jove, predicted a storm. Debray, who perceived the
gathering clouds, and felt no desire to witness the
explosion of Madame Danglars' rage, suddenly recollected an
appointment, which compelled him to take his leave while
Monte Cristo, unwilling by prolonging his stay to destroy
the advantages he hoped to obtain, made a farewell bow and
departed, leaving Danglars to endure the angry reproaches of
his wife.
"Excellent," murmured Monte Cristo to himself, as he came
away. "All has gone according to my wishes. The domestic
peace of this family is henceforth in my hands. Now, then,
to play another masterstroke, by which I shall gain the
heart of both husband and wife  delightful Still," added
he, "amid all this, I have not yet been presented to
Mademoiselle Eugenie Danglars, whose acquaintance I should
have been glad to make. But," he went on with his peculiar
smile, "I am here in Paris, and have plenty of time before
me  by and by will do for that." With these reflections he
entered his carriage and returned home. Two hours
afterwards, Madame Danglars received a most flattering
epistle from the count, in which he entreated her to receive
back her favorite "dappled grays," protesting that he could
not endure the idea of making his entry into the Parisian
world of fashion with the knowledge that his splendid
equipage had been obtained at the price of a lovely woman's
regrets. The horses were sent back wearing the same harness
she had seen on them in the morning only, by the count's
orders, in the centre of each rosette that adorned either
side of their heads, had been fastened a large diamond.
To Danglars Monte Cristo also wrote, requesting him to
excuse the whimsical gift of a capricious millionaire, and
to beg the baroness to pardon the Eastern fashion adopted in
the return of the horses.
During the evening, Monte Cristo quitted Paris for Auteuil,
accompanied by Ali. The following day, about three o'clock,
a single blow struck on the gong summoned Ali to the
presence of the count. "Ali," observed his master, as the
Nubian entered the chamber, "you have frequently explained
to me how more than commonly skilful you are in throwing the
lasso, have you not?" Ali drew himself up proudly, and then
returned a sign in the affirmative. "I thought I did not
mistake. With your lasso you could stop an ox?" Again Ali
repeated his affirmative gesture. "Or a tiger?" Ali bowed
his head in token of assent. "A lion even?" Ali sprung
forwards, imitating the action of one throwing the lasso,
then of a strangled lion.
"I understand," said Monte Cristo "you wish to tell me you
have hunted the lion?" Ali smiled with triumphant pride as
he signified that he had indeed both chased and captured
many lions. "But do you believe you could arrest the
progress of two horses rushing forwards with ungovernable
fury?" The Nubian smiled. "It is well," said Monte Cristo.
"Then listen to me. Ere long a carriage will dash past here,
drawn by the pair of dappled gray horses you saw me with
yesterday now, at the risk of your own life, you must
manage to stop those horses before my door."
Ali descended to the street, and marked a straight line on
the pavement immediately at the entrance of the house, and
then pointed out the line he had traced to the count, who
was watching him. The count patted him gently on the
shoulder, his usual mode of praising Ali, who, pleased and
gratified with the commission assigned him, walked calmly
towards a projecting stone forming the angle of the street
and house, and, seating himself thereon, began to smoke his
chibouque, while Monte Cristo reentered his dwelling,
perfectly assured of the success of his plan. Still, as five
o'clock approached, and the carriage was momentarily
expected by the count, the indication of more than common
impatience and uneasiness might be observed in his manner.
He stationed himself in a room commanding a view of the
street, pacing the chamber with restless steps, stopping
merely to listen from time to time for the sound of
approaching wheels, then to cast an anxious glance on Ali
but the regularity with which the Nubian puffed forth the
smoke of his chibouque proved that he at least was wholly
absorbed in the enjoyment of his favorite occupation.
Suddenly a distant sound of rapidly advancing wheels was
heard, and almost immediately a carriage appeared, drawn by
a pair of wild, ungovernable horses, while the terrified
coachman strove in vain to restrain their furious speed.
In the vehicle was a young woman and a child of about seven
or eight clasped in each other's arms. Terror seemed to have
deprived them even of the power of uttering a cry. The
carriage creaked and rattled as it flew over the rough
stones, and the slightest obstacle under the wheels would
have caused disaster but it kept on in the middle of the
road, and those who saw it pass uttered cries of terror.
Ali suddenly cast aside his chibouque, drew the lasso from
his pocket, threw it so skilfully as to catch the forelegs
of the near horse in its triple fold, and suffered himself
to be dragged on for a few steps by the violence of the
shock, then the animal fell over on the pole, which snapped,
and therefore prevented the other horse from pursuing its
way. Gladly availing himself of this opportunity, the
coachman leaped from his box but Ali had promptly seized
the nostrils of the second horse, and held them in his iron
grasp, till the beast, snorting with pain, sunk beside his
companion. All this was achieved in much less time than is
occupied in the recital. The brief space had, however, been
sufficient for a man, followed by a number of servants, to
rush from the house before which the accident had occurred,
and, as the coachman opened the door of the carriage, to
take from it a lady who was convulsively grasping the
cushions with one hand, while with the other she pressed to
her bosom the young boy, who had lost consciousness.
Monte Cristo carried them both to the salon, and deposited
them on a sofa. "Compose yourself, madame," said he "all
danger is over." The woman looked up at these words, and,
with a glance far more expressive than any entreaties could
have been, pointed to her child, who still continued
insensible. "I understand the nature of your alarms,
madame," said the count, carefully examining the child, "but
I assure you there is not the slightest occasion for
uneasiness your little charge has not received the least
injury his insensibility is merely the effects of terror,
and will soon pass."
"Are you quite sure you do not say so to tranquillize my
fears? See how deadly pale he is My child, my darling
Edward speak to your mother  open your dear eyes and look
on me once again Oh, sir, in pity send for a physician my
whole fortune shall not be thought too much for the recovery
of my boy."
With a calm smile and a gentle wave of the hand, Monte
Cristo signed to the distracted mother to lay aside her
apprehensions then, opening a casket that stood near, he
drew forth a phial of Bohemian glass incrusted with gold,
containing a liquid of the color of blood, of which he let
fall a single drop on the child's lips. Scarcely had it
reached them, ere the boy, though still pale as marble,
opened his eyes, and eagerly gazed around him. At this, the
delight of the mother was almost frantic. "Where am I?"
exclaimed she "and to whom am I indebted for so happy a
termination to my late dreadful alarm?"
"Madame," answered the count, "you are under the roof of one
who esteems himself most fortunate in having been able to
save you from a further continuance of your sufferings."
"My wretched curiosity has brought all this about," pursued
the lady. "All Paris rung with the praises of Madame
Danglars' beautiful horses, and I had the folly to desire to
know whether they really merited the high praise given to
them."
"Is it possible," exclaimed the count with wellfeigned
astonishment, "that these horses belong to the baroness?"
"They do, indeed. May I inquire if you are acquainted with
Madame Danglars?"
"I have that honor and my happiness at your escape from the
danger that threatened you is redoubled by the consciousness
that I have been the unwilling and the unintentional cause
of all the peril you have incurred. I yesterday purchased
these horses of the baron but as the baroness evidently
regretted parting with them, I ventured to send them back to
her, with a request that she would gratify me by accepting
them from my hands."
"You are, then, doubtless, the Count of Monte Cristo, of
whom Hermine has talked to me so much?"
"You have rightly guessed, madame," replied the count.
"And I am Madame Heloise de Villefort." The count bowed with
the air of a person who hears a name for the first time.
"How grateful will M. de Villefort be for all your goodness
how thankfully will he acknowledge that to you alone he owes
the existence of his wife and child Most certainly, but for
the prompt assistance of your intrepid servant, this dear
child and myself must both have perished."
"Indeed, I still shudder at the fearful danger you were
placed in."
"I trust you will allow me to recompense worthily the
devotion of your man."
"I beseech you, madame," replied Monte Cristo "not to spoil
Ali, either by too great praise or rewards. I cannot allow
him to acquire the habit of expecting to be recompensed for
every trifling service he may render. Ali is my slave, and
in saving your life he was but discharging his duty to me."
"Nay," interposed Madame de Villefort, on whom the
authoritative style adopted by the count made a deep
impression, "nay, but consider that to preserve my life he
has risked his own."
"His life, madame, belongs not to him it is mine, in return
for my having myself saved him from death." Madame de
Villefort made no further reply her mind was utterly
absorbed in the contemplation of the person who, from the
first instant she saw him, had made so powerful an
impression on her. During the evident preoccupation of
Madame de Villefort, Monte Cristo scrutinized the features
and appearance of the boy she kept folded in her arms,
lavishing on him the most tender endearments. The child was
small for his age, and unnaturally pale. A mass of straight
black hair, defying all attempts to train or curl it, fell
over his projecting forehead, and hung down to his
shoulders, giving increased vivacity to eyes already
sparkling with a youthful love of mischief and fondness for
every forbidden enjoyment. His mouth was large, and the
lips, which had not yet regained their color, were
particularly thin in fact, the deep and crafty look, giving
a predominant expression to the child's face, belonged
rather to a boy of twelve or fourteen than to one so young.
His first movement was to free himself by a violent push
from the encircling arms of his mother, and to rush forward
to the casket from whence the count had taken the phial of
elixir then, without asking permission of any one, he
proceeded, in all the wilfulness of a spoiled child
unaccustomed to restrain either whims or caprices, to pull
the corks out of all the bottles.
"Touch nothing, my little friend," cried the count eagerly
"some of those liquids are not only dangerous to taste, but
even to inhale."
Madame de Villefort became very pale, and, seizing her son's
arm, drew him anxiously toward her but, once satisfied of
his safety, she also cast a brief but expressive glance on
the casket, which was not lost upon the count. At this
moment Ali entered. At sight of him Madame de Villefort
uttered an expression of pleasure, and, holding the child
still closer towards her, she said, "Edward, dearest, do you
see that good man? He has shown very great courage and
resolution, for he exposed his own life to stop the horses
that were running away with us, and would certainly have
dashed the carriage to pieces. Thank him, then, my child, in
your very best manner for, had he not come to our aid,
neither you nor I would have been alive to speak our
thanks." The child stuck out his lips and turned away his
head in a disdainful manner, saying, "He's too ugly."
The count smiled as if the child bade fair to realize his
hopes, while Madame de Villefort reprimanded her son with a
gentleness and moderation very far from conveying the least
idea of a fault having been committed. "This lady," said the
Count, speaking to Ali in the Arabic language, "is desirous
that her son should thank you for saving both their lives
but the boy refuses, saying you are too ugly." Ali turned
his intelligent countenance towards the boy, on whom he
gazed without any apparent emotion but the spasmodic
working of the nostrils showed to the practiced eye of Monte
Cristo that the Arab had been wounded to the heart.
"Will you permit me to inquire," said Madame de Villefort,
as she arose to take her leave, "whether you usually reside
here?"
"No, I do not," replied Monte Cristo "it is a small place I
have purchased quite lately. My place of abode is No. ,
Avenue des Champs Elysees but I see you have quite
recovered from your fright, and are, no doubt, desirous of
returning home. Anticipating your wishes, I have desired the
same horses you came with to be put to one of my carriages,
and Ali, he whom you think so very ugly," continued he,
addressing the boy with a smiling air, "will have the honor
of driving you home, while your coachman remains here to
attend to the necessary repairs of your calash. As soon as
that important business is concluded, I will have a pair of
my own horses harnessed to convey it direct to Madame
Danglars."
"I dare not return with those dreadful horses," said Madame
de Villefort.
"You will see," replied Monte Cristo, "that they will be as
different as possible in the hands of Ali. With him they
will be gentle and docile as lambs." Ali had, indeed, given
proof of this for, approaching the animals, who had been
got upon their legs with considerable difficulty, he rubbed
their foreheads and nostrils with a sponge soaked in
aromatic vinegar, and wiped off the sweat and foam that
covered their mouths. Then, commencing a loud whistling
noise, he rubbed them well all over their bodies for several
minutes then, undisturbed by the noisy crowd collected
round the broken carriage, Ali quietly harnessed the
pacified animals to the count's chariot, took the reins in
his hands, and mounted the box, when to the utter
astonishment of those who had witnessed the ungovernable
spirit and maddened speed of the same horses, he was
actually compelled to apply his whip in no very gentle
manner before he could induce them to start and even then
all that could be obtained from the celebrated "dappled
grays," now changed into a couple of dull, sluggish, stupid
brutes, was a slow, pottering pace, kept up with so much
difficulty that Madame de Villefort was more than two hours
returning to her residence in the Faubourg St. Honore.
Scarcely had the first congratulations upon her marvellous
escape been gone through when she wrote the following letter
to Madame Danglars 
Dear Hermine,  I have just had a wonderful escape from the
most imminent danger, and I owe my safety to the very Count
of Monte Cristo we were talking about yesterday, but whom I
little expected to see today. I remember how unmercifully I
laughed at what I considered your eulogistic and exaggerated
praises of him but I have now ample cause to admit that
your enthusiastic description of this wonderful man fell far
short of his merits. Your horses got as far as Ranelagh,
when they darted forward like mad things, and galloped away
at so fearful a rate, that there seemed no other prospect
for myself and my poor Edward but that of being dashed to
pieces against the first object that impeded their progress,
when a strangelooking man,  an Arab, a negro, or a
Nubian, at least a black of some nation or other  at a
signal from the count, whose domestic he is, suddenly seized
and stopped the infuriated animals, even at the risk of
being trampled to death himself and certainly he must have
had a most wonderful escape. The count then hastened to us,
and took us into his house, where he speedily recalled my
poor Edward to life. He sent us home in his own carriage.
Yours will be returned to you tomorrow. You will find your
horses in bad condition, from the results of this accident
they seem thoroughly stupefied, as if sulky and vexed at
having been conquered by man. The count, however, his
commissioned me to assure you that two or three days' rest,
with plenty of barley for their sole food during that time,
will bring them back to as fine, that is as terrifying, a
condition as they were in yesterday. Adieu I cannot return
you many thanks for the drive of yesterday but, after all,
I ought not to blame you for the misconduct of your horses,
more especially as it procured me the pleasure of an
introduction to the Count of Monte Cristo,  and certainly
that illustrious personage, apart from the millions he is
said to be so very anxious to dispose of, seemed to me one
of those curiously interesting problems I, for one, delight
in solving at any risk, even if it were to necessitate
another drive to the Bois behind your horses. Edward endured
the accident with miraculous courage  he did not utter a
single cry, but fell lifeless into my arms nor did a tear
fall from his eyes after it was over. I doubt not you will
consider these praises the result of blind maternal
affection, but there is a soul of iron in that delicate,
fragile body. Valentine sends many affectionate remembrances
to your dear Eugenie. I embrace you with all my heart.
Heloise de Villefort.
P.S.  Do pray contrive some means for me to meet the Count
of Monte Cristo at your house. I must and will see him
again. I have just made M. de Villefort promise to call on
him, and I hope the visit will be returned.
That night the adventure at Auteuil was talked of
everywhere. Albert related it to his mother ChateauRenaud
recounted it at the Jockey Club, and Debray detailed it at
length in the salons of the minister even Beauchamp
accorded twenty lines in his journal to the relation of the
count's courage and gallantry, thereby celebrating him as
the greatest hero of the day in the eyes of all the feminine
members of the aristocracy. Vast was the crowd of visitors
and inquiring friends who left their names at the residence
of Madame de Villefort, with the design of renewing their
visit at the right moment, of hearing from her lips all the
interesting circumstances of this most romantic adventure.
As for M. de Villefort, he fulfilled the predictions of
Heloise to the letter,  donned his dress suit, drew on a
pair of white gloves, ordered the servants to attend the
carriage dressed in their full livery, and drove that same
night to No.  in the Avenue des ChampsElysees.
Chapter 
Ideology.
If the Count of Monte Cristo had been for a long time
familiar with the ways of Parisian society, he would have
appreciated better the significance of the step which M. de
Villefort had taken. Standing well at court, whether the
king regnant was of the older or younger branch, whether the
government was doctrinaire liberal, or conservative looked
upon by all as a man of talent, since those who have never
experienced a political check are generally so regarded
hated by many, but warmly supported by others, without being
really liked by anybody, M. de Villefort held a high
position in the magistracy, and maintained his eminence like
a Harlay or a Mole. His drawingroom, under the regenerating
influence of a young wife and a daughter by his first
marriage, scarcely eighteen, was still one of the
wellregulated Paris salons where the worship of traditional
customs and the observance of rigid etiquette were carefully
maintained. A freezing politeness, a strict fidelity to
government principles, a profound contempt for theories and
theorists, a deepseated hatred of ideality,  these were
the elements of private and public life displayed by M. de
Villefort.
He was not only a magistrate, he was almost a diplomatist.
His relations with the former court, of which he always
spoke with dignity and respect, made him respected by the
new one, and he knew so many things, that not only was he
always carefully considered, but sometimes consulted.
Perhaps this would not have been so had it been possible to
get rid of M. de Villefort but, like the feudal barons who
rebelled against their sovereign, he dwelt in an impregnable
fortress. This fortress was his post as king's attorney, all
the advantages of which he exploited with marvellous skill,
and which he would not have resigned but to be made deputy,
and thus to replace neutrality by opposition. Ordinarily M.
de Villefort made and returned very few visits. His wife
visited for him, and this was the received thing in the
world, where the weighty and multifarious occupations of the
magistrate were accepted as an excuse for what was really
only calculated pride, a manifestation of professed
superiority  in fact, the application of the axiom,
"Pretend to think well of yourself, and the world will think
well of you," an axiom a hundred times more useful in
society nowadays than that of the Greeks, "Know thyself," a
knowledge for which, in our days, we have substituted the
less difficult and more advantageous science of knowing
others.
To his friends M. de Villefort was a powerful protector to
his enemies, he was a silent, but bitter opponent for those
who were neither the one nor the other, he was a statue of
the lawmade man. He had a haughty bearing, a look either
steady and impenetrable or insolently piercing and
inquisitorial. Four successive revolutions had built and
cemented the pedestal upon which his fortune was based. M.
de Villefort had the reputation of being the least curious
and the least wearisome man in France. He gave a ball every
year, at which he appeared for a quarter of an hour only, 
that is to say, five and forty minutes less than the king is
visible at his balls. He was never seen at the theatres, at
concerts, or in any place of public resort. Occasionally,
but seldom, he played at whist, and then care was taken to
select partners worthy of him  sometimes they were
ambassadors, sometimes archbishops, or sometimes a prince,
or a president, or some dowager duchess. Such was the man
whose carriage had just now stopped before the Count of
Monte Cristo's door. The valet de chambre announced M. de
Villefort at the moment when the count, leaning over a large
table, was tracing on a map the route from St. Petersburg to
China.
The procureur entered with the same grave and measured step
he would have employed in entering a court of justice. He
was the same man, or rather the development of the same man,
whom we have heretofore seen as assistant attorney at
Marseilles. Nature, according to her way, had made no
deviation in the path he had marked out for himself. From
being slender he had now become meagre once pale, he was
now yellow his deepset eyes were hollow, and the gold
spectacles shielding his eyes seemed to be an integral
portion of his face. He dressed entirely in black, with the
exception of his white tie, and his funeral appearance was
only mitigated by the slight line of red ribbon which passed
almost imperceptibly through his buttonhole, and appeared
like a streak of blood traced with a delicate brush.
Although master of himself, Monte Cristo, scrutinized with
irrepressible curiosity the magistrate whose salute he
returned, and who, distrustful by habit, and especially
incredulous as to social prodigies, was much more despised
to look upon "the noble stranger," as Monte Cristo was
already called, as an adventurer in search of new fields, or
an escaped criminal, rather than as a prince of the Holy
See, or a sultan of the Thousand and One Nights.
"Sir," said Villefort, in the squeaky tone assumed by
magistrates in their oratorical periods, and of which they
cannot, or will not, divest themselves in society, "sir, the
signal service which you yesterday rendered to my wife and
son has made it a duty for me to offer you my thanks. I have
come, therefore, to discharge this duty, and to express to
you my overwhelming gratitude." And as he said this, the
"eye severe" of the magistrate had lost nothing of its
habitual arrogance. He spoke in a voice of the
procureurgeneral, with the rigid inflexibility of neck and
shoulders which caused his flatterers to say as we have
before observed that he was the living statue of the law.
"Monsieur," replied the count, with a chilling air, "I am
very happy to have been the means of preserving a son to his
mother, for they say that the sentiment of maternity is the
most holy of all and the good fortune which occurred to me,
monsieur, might have enabled you to dispense with a duty
which, in its discharge, confers an undoubtedly great honor
for I am aware that M. de Villefort is not usually lavish of
the favor which he now bestows on me,  a favor which,
however estimable, is unequal to the satisfaction which I
have in my own consciousness." Villefort, astonished at this
reply, which he by no means expected, started like a soldier
who feels the blow levelled at him over the armor he wears,
and a curl of his disdainful lip indicated that from that
moment he noted in the tablets of his brain that the Count
of Monte Cristo was by no means a highly bred gentleman. He
glanced around. in order to seize on something on which the
conversation might turn, and seemed to fall easily on a
topic. He saw the map which Monte Cristo had been examining
when he entered, and said, "You seem geographically engaged,
sir? It is a rich study for you, who, as I learn, have seen
as many lands as are delineated on this map."
"Yes, sir," replied the count "I have sought to make of the
human race, taken in the mass, what you practice every day
on individuals  a physiological study. I have believed it
was much easier to descend from the whole to a part than to
ascend from a part to the whole. It is an algebraic axiom,
which makes us proceed from a known to an unknown quantity,
and not from an unknown to a known but sit down, sir, I beg
of you."
Monte Cristo pointed to a chair, which the procureur was
obliged to take the trouble to move forwards himself, while
the count merely fell back into his own, on which he had
been kneeling when M. Villefort entered. Thus the count was
halfway turned towards his visitor, having his back towards
the window, his elbow resting on the geographical chart
which furnished the theme of conversation for the moment, 
a conversation which assumed, as in the case of the
interviews with Danglars and Morcerf, a turn analogous to
the persons, if not to the situation. "Ah, you
philosophize," replied Villefort, after a moment's silence,
during which, like a wrestler who encounters a powerful
opponent, he took breath "well, sir, really, if, like you,
I had nothing else to do, I should seek a more amusing
occupation."
"Why, in truth, sir," was Monte Cristo's reply, "man is but
an ugly caterpillar for him who studies him through a solar
microscope but you said, I think, that I had nothing else
to do. Now, really, let me ask, sir, have you?  do you
believe you have anything to do? or to speak in plain terms,
do you really think that what you do deserves being called
anything?"
Villefort's astonishment redoubled at this second thrust so
forcibly made by his strange adversary. It was a long time
since the magistrate had heard a paradox so strong, or
rather, to say the truth more exactly, it was the first time
he had ever heard of it. The procureur exerted himself to
reply. "Sir," he responded, "you are a stranger, and I
believe you say yourself that a portion of your life has
been spent in Oriental countries, so you are not aware how
human justice, so expeditions in barbarous countries, takes
with us a prudent and wellstudied course."
"Oh, yes  yes, I do, sir it is the pede claudo of the
ancients. I know all that, for it is with the justice of all
countries especially that I have occupied myself  it is
with the criminal procedure of all nations that I have
compared natural justice, and I must say, sir, that it is
the law of primitive nations, that is, the law of
retaliation, that I have most frequently found to be
according to the law of God."
"If this law were adopted, sir," said the procureur, "it
would greatly simplify our legal codes, and in that case the
magistrates would not as you just observed have much to
do."
"It may, perhaps, come to this in time," observed Monte
Cristo "you know that human inventions march from the
complex to the simple, and simplicity is always perfection."
"In the meanwhile," continued the magistrate, "our codes are
in full force, with all their contradictory enactments
derived from Gallic customs, Roman laws, and Frank usages
the knowledge of all which, you will agree, is not to be
acquired without extended labor it needs tedious study to
acquire this knowledge, and, when acquired, a strong power
of brain to retain it."
"I agree with you entirely, sir but all that even you know
with respect to the French code, I know, not only in
reference to that code, but as regards the codes of all
nations. The English, Turkish, Japanese, Hindu laws, are as
familiar to me as the French laws, and thus I was right,
when I said to you, that relatively you know that
everything is relative, sir  that relatively to what I
have done, you have very little to do but that relatively
to all I have learned, you have yet a great deal to learn."
"But with what motive have you learned all this?" inquired
Villefort, in astonishment. Monte Cristo smiled. "Really,
sir," he observed, "I see that in spite of the reputation
which you have acquired as a superior man, you look at
everything from the material and vulgar view of society,
beginning with man, and ending with man  that is to say,
in the most restricted, most narrow view which it is
possible for human understanding to embrace."
"Pray, sir, explain yourself," said Villefort, more and more
astonished, "I really do  not  understand you 
perfectly."
"I say, sir, that with the eyes fixed on the social
organization of nations, you see only the springs of the
machine, and lose sight of the sublime workman who makes
them act I say that you do not recognize before you and
around you any but those officeholders whose commissions
have been signed by a minister or king and that the men
whom God has put above those officeholders, ministers, and
kings, by giving them a mission to follow out, instead of a
post to fill  I say that they escape your narrow, limited
field of observation. It is thus that human weakness fails,
from its debilitated and imperfect organs. Tobias took the
angel who restored him to light for an ordinary young man.
The nations took Attila, who was doomed to destroy them, for
a conqueror similar to other conquerors, and it was
necessary for both to reveal their missions, that they might
be known and acknowledged one was compelled to say, "I am
the angel of the Lord' and the other, "I am the hammer of
God,' in order that the divine essence in both might be
revealed."
"Then," said Villefort, more and more amazed, and really
supposing he was speaking to a mystic or a madman, "you
consider yourself as one of those extraordinary beings whom
you have mentioned?"
"And why not?" said Monte Cristo coldly.
"Your pardon, sir," replied Villefort, quite astounded, "but
you will excuse me if, when I presented myself to you, I was
unaware that I should meet with a person whose knowledge and
understanding so far surpass the usual knowledge and
understanding of men. It is not usual with us corrupted
wretches of civilization to find gentlemen like yourself,
possessors, as you are, of immense fortune  at least, so
it is said  and I beg you to observe that I do not
inquire, I merely repeat  it is not usual, I say, for
such privileged and wealthy beings to waste their time in
speculations on the state of society, in philosophical
reveries, intended at best to console those whom fate has
disinherited from the goods of this world."
"Really, sir," retorted the count, "have you attained the
eminent situation in which you are, without having admitted,
or even without having met with exceptions? and do you never
use your eyes, which must have acquired so much finesse and
certainty, to divine, at a glance, the kind of man by whom
you are confronted? Should not a magistrate be not merely
the best administrator of the law, but the most crafty
expounder of the chicanery of his profession, a steel probe
to search hearts, a touchstone to try the gold which in each
soul is mingled with more or less of alloy?"
"Sir," said Villefort, "upon my word, you overcome me. I
really never heard a person speak as you do."
"Because you remain eternally encircled in a round of
general conditions, and have never dared to raise your wings
into those upper spheres which God has peopled with
invisible or exceptional beings."
"And you allow then, sir, that spheres exist, and that these
marked and invisible beings mingle amongst us?"
"Why should they not? Can you see the air you breathe, and
yet without which you could not for a moment exist?"
"Then we do not see those beings to whom you allude?"
"Yes, we do you see them whenever God pleases to allow them
to assume a material form. You touch them, come in contact
with them, speak to them, and they reply to you."
"Ah," said Villefort, smiling, "I confess I should like to
be warned when one of these beings is in contact with me."
"You have been served as you desire, monsieur, for you were
warned just now, and I now again warn you."
"Then you yourself are one of these marked beings?"
"Yes, monsieur, I believe so for until now, no man has
found himself in a position similar to mine. The dominions
of kings are limited either by mountains or rivers, or a
change of manners, or an alteration of language. My kingdom
is bounded only by the world, for I am not an Italian, or a
Frenchman, or a Hindu, or an American, or a Spaniard  I am
a cosmopolite. No country can say it saw my birth. God alone
knows what country will see me die. I adopt all customs,
speak all languages. You believe me to be a Frenchman, for I
speak French with the same facility and purity as yourself.
Well, Ali, my Nubian, believes me to be an Arab Bertuccio,
my steward, takes me for a Roman Haidee, my slave, thinks
me a Greek. You may, therefore, comprehend, that being of no
country, asking no protection from any government,
acknowledging no man as my brother, not one of the scruples
that arrest the powerful, or the obstacles which paralyze
the weak, paralyzes or arrests me. I have only two
adversaries  I will not say two conquerors, for with
perseverance I subdue even them,  they are time and
distance. There is a third, and the most terrible  that is
my condition as a mortal being. This alone can stop me in my
onward career, before I have attained the goal at which I
aim, for all the rest I have reduced to mathematical terms.
What men call the chances of fate  namely, ruin, change,
circumstances  I have fully anticipated, and if any of
these should overtake me, yet it will not overwhelm me.
Unless I die, I shall always be what I am, and therefore it
is that I utter the things you have never heard, even from
the mouths of kings  for kings have need, and other
persons have fear of you. For who is there who does not say
to himself, in a society as incongruously organized as ours,
"Perhaps some day I shall have to do with the king's
attorney'?"
"But can you not say that, sir? The moment you become an
inhabitant of France, you are naturally subjected to the
French law."
"I know it sir," replied Monte Cristo "but when I visit a
country I begin to study, by all the means which are
available, the men from whom I may have anything to hope or
to fear, till I know them as well as, perhaps better than,
they know themselves. It follows from this, that the king's
attorney, be he who he may, with whom I should have to deal,
would assuredly be more embarrassed than I should."
"That is to say," replied Villefort with hesitation, "that
human nature being weak, every man, according to your creed,
has committed faults."
"Faults or crimes," responded Monte Cristo with a negligent
air.
"And that you alone, amongst the men whom you do not
recognize as your brothers  for you have said so,"
observed Villefort in a tone that faltered somewhat  "you
alone are perfect."
"No, not perfect," was the count's reply "only
impenetrable, that's all. But let us leave off this strain,
sir, if the tone of it is displeasing to you I am no more
disturbed by your justice than are you by my secondsight."
"No, no,  by no means," said Villefort, who was afraid of
seeming to abandon his ground. "No by your brilliant and
almost sublime conversation you have elevated me above the
ordinary level we no longer talk, we rise to dissertation.
But you know how the theologians in their collegiate chairs,
and philosophers in their controversies, occasionally say
cruel truths let us suppose for the moment that we are
theologizing in a social way, or even philosophically, and I
will say to you, rude as it may seem, "My brother, you
sacrifice greatly to pride you may be above others, but
above you there is God.'"
"Above us all, sir," was Monte Cristo's response, in a tone
and with an emphasis so deep that Villefort involuntarily
shuddered. "I have my pride for men  serpents always ready
to threaten every one who would pass without crushing them
under foot. But I lay aside that pride before God, who has
taken me from nothing to make me what I am."
"Then, count, I admire you," said Villefort, who, for the
first time in this strange conversation, used the
aristocratic form to the unknown personage, whom, until now,
he had only called monsieur. "Yes, and I say to you, if you
are really strong, really superior, really pious, or
impenetrable, which you were right in saying amounts to the
same thing  then be proud, sir, for that is the
characteristic of predominance. Yet you have unquestionably
some ambition."
"I have, sir."
"And what may it be?"
"I too, as happens to every man once in his life, have been
taken by Satan into the highest mountain in the earth, and
when there he showed me all the kingdoms of the world, and
as he said before, so said he to me, "Child of earth, what
wouldst thou have to make thee adore me?' I reflected long,
for a gnawing ambition had long preyed upon me, and then I
replied, "Listen,  I have always heard of providence, and
yet I have never seen him, or anything that resembles him,
or which can make me believe that he exists. I wish to be
providence myself, for I feel that the most beautiful,
noblest, most sublime thing in the world, is to recompense
and punish.' Satan bowed his head, and groaned. "You
mistake,' he said, "providence does exist, only you have
never seen him, because the child of God is as invisible as
the parent. You have seen nothing that resembles him,
because he works by secret springs, and moves by hidden
ways. All I can do for you is to make you one of the agents
of that providence.' The bargain was concluded. I may
sacrifice my soul, but what matters it?" added Monte Cristo.
"If the thing were to do again, I would again do it."
Villefort looked at Monte Cristo with extreme amazement.
"Count," he inquired, "have you any relations?"
"No, sir, I am alone in the world."
"So much the worse."
"Why?" asked Monte Cristo.
"Because then you might witness a spectacle calculated to
break down your pride. You say you fear nothing but death?"
"I did not say that I feared it I only said that death
alone could check the execution of my plans."
"And old age?"
"My end will be achieved before I grow old."
"And madness?"
"I have been nearly mad and you know the axiom,  non bis
in idem. It is an axiom of criminal law, and, consequently,
you understand its full application."
"Sir," continued Villefort, "there is something to fear
besides death, old age, and madness. For instance, there is
apoplexy  that lightningstroke which strikes but does not
destroy you, and yet which brings everything to an end. You
are still yourself as now, and yet you are yourself no
longer you who, like Ariel, verge on the angelic, are but
an inert mass, which, like Caliban, verges on the brutal
and this is called in human tongues, as I tell you, neither
more nor less than apoplexy. Come, if so you will, count,
and continue this conversation at my house, any day you may
be willing to see an adversary capable of understanding and
anxious to refute you, and I will show you my father, M.
Noirtier de Villefort, one of the most fiery Jacobins of the
French Revolution that is to say, he had the most
remarkable audacity, seconded by a most powerful
organization  a man who has not, perhaps, like yourself
seen all the kingdoms of the earth, but who has helped to
overturn one of the greatest in fact, a man who believed
himself, like you, one of the envoys, not of God, but of a
supreme being not of providence, but of fate. Well, sir,
the rupture of a bloodvessel on the lobe of the brain has
destroyed all this, not in a day, not in an hour, but in a
second. M. Noirtier, who, on the previous night, was the old
Jacobin, the old senator, the old Carbonaro, laughing at the
guillotine, the cannon, and the dagger  M. Noirtier,
playing with revolutions  M. Noirtier, for whom France was
a vast chessboard, from which pawns, rooks, knights, and
queens were to disappear, so that the king was checkmated 
M. Noirtier, the redoubtable, was the next morning "poor M.
Noirtier,' the helpless old man, at the tender mercies of
the weakest creature in the household, that is, his
grandchild, Valentine a dumb and frozen carcass, in fact,
living painlessly on, that time may be given for his frame
to decompose without his consciousness of its decay."
"Alas, sir," said Monte Cristo "this spectacle is neither
strange to my eye nor my thought. I am something of a
physician, and have, like my fellows, sought more than once
for the soul in living and in dead matter yet, like
providence, it has remained invisible to my eyes, although
present to my heart. A hundred writers since Socrates,
Seneca, St. Augustine, and Gall, have made, in verse and
prose, the comparison you have made, and yet I can well
understand that a father's sufferings may effect great
changes in the mind of a son. I will call on you, sir, since
you bid me contemplate, for the advantage of my pride, this
terrible spectacle, which must have been so great a source
of sorrow to your family."
"It would have been so unquestionably, had not God given me
so large a compensation. In contrast with the old man, who
is dragging his way to the tomb, are two children just
entering into life  Valentine, the daughter by my first
wife  Mademoiselle Renee de SaintMeran  and Edward, the
boy whose life you have this day saved."
"And what is your deduction from this compensation, sir?"
inquired Monte Cristo.
"My deduction is," replied Villefort, "that my father, led
away by his passions, has committed some fault unknown to
human justice, but marked by the justice of God. That God,
desirous in his mercy to punish but one person, has visited
this justice on him alone." Monte Cristo with a smile on his
lips, uttered in the depths of his soul a groan which would
have made Villefort fly had he but heard it. "Adieu, sir,"
said the magistrate, who had risen from his seat "I leave
you, bearing a remembrance of you  a remembrance of
esteem, which I hope will not be disagreeable to you when
you know me better for I am not a man to bore my friends,
as you will learn. Besides, you have made an eternal friend
of Madame de Villefort." The count bowed, and contented
himself with seeing Villefort to the door of his cabinet,
the procureur being escorted to his carriage by two footmen,
who, on a signal from their master, followed him with every
mark of attention. When he had gone, Monte Cristo breathed a
profound sigh, and said,  "Enough of this poison, let me
now seek the antidote." Then sounding his bell, he said to
Ali, who entered, "I am going to madam's chamber  have the
carriage ready at one o'clock."
Chapter 
Haidee.
It will be recollected that the new, or rather old,
acquaintances of the Count of Monte Cristo, residing in the
Rue Meslay, were no other than Maximilian, Julie, and
Emmanuel. The very anticipations of delight to be enjoyed in
his forthcoming visits  the bright, pure gleam of heavenly
happiness it diffused over the almost deadly warfare in
which he had voluntarily engaged, illumined his whole
countenance with a look of ineffable joy and calmness, as,
immediately after Villefort's departure, his thoughts flew
back to the cheering prospect before him, of tasting, at
least, a brief respite from the fierce and stormy passions
of his mind. Even Ali, who had hastened to obey the Count's
summons, went forth from his master's presence in charmed
amazement at the unusual animation and pleasure depicted on
features ordinarily so stern and cold while, as though
dreading to put to flight the agreeable ideas hovering over
his patron's meditations, whatever they were, the faithful
Nubian walked on tiptoe towards the door, holding his
breath, lest its faintest sound should dissipate his
master's happy reverie.
It was noon, and Monte Cristo had set apart one hour to be
passed in the apartments of Haidee, as though his oppressed
spirit could not all at once admit the feeling of pure and
unmixed joy, but required a gradual succession of calm and
gentle emotions to prepare his mind to receive full and
perfect happiness, in the same manner as ordinary natures
demand to be inured by degrees to the reception of strong or
violent sensations. The young Greek, as we have already
said, occupied apartments wholly unconnected with those of
the count. The rooms had been fitted up in strict accordance
with Oriental ideas the floors were covered with the
richest carpets Turkey could produce the walls hung with
brocaded silk of the most magnificent designs and texture
while around each chamber luxurious divans were placed, with
piles of soft and yielding cushions, that needed only to be
arranged at the pleasure or convenience of such as sought
repose. Haidee and three French maids, and one who was a
Greek. The first three remained constantly in a small
waitingroom, ready to obey the summons of a small golden
bell, or to receive the orders of the Romaic slave, who knew
just enough French to be able to transmit her mistress's
wishes to the three other waitingwomen the latter had
received most peremptory instructions from Monte Cristo to
treat Haidee with all the deference they would observe to a
queen.
The young girl herself generally passed her time in the
chamber at the farther end of her apartments. This was a
sort of boudoir, circular, and lighted only from the roof,
which consisted of rosecolored glass. Haidee was reclining
upon soft downy cushions, covered with blue satin spotted
with silver her head, supported by one of her exquisitely
moulded arms, rested on the divan immediately behind her,
while the other was employed in adjusting to her lips the
coral tube of a rich narghile, through whose flexible pipe
she drew the smoke fragrant by its passage through perfumed
water. Her attitude, though perfectly natural for an Eastern
woman would, in a European, have been deemed too full of
coquettish straining after effect. Her dress, which was that
of the women of Epirus, consisted of a pair of white satin
trousers, embroidered with pink roses, displaying feet so
exquisitely formed and so delicately fair, that they might
well have been taken for Parian marble, had not the eye been
undeceived by their movements as they constantly shifted in
and out of a pair of little slippers with upturned toes,
beautifully ornamented with gold and pearls. She wore a blue
and whitestriped vest, with long open sleeves, trimmed with
silver loops and buttons of pearls, and a sort of bodice,
which, closing only from the centre to the waist, exhibited
the whole of the ivory throat and upper part of the bosom
it was fastened with three magnificent diamond clasps. The
junction of the bodice and drawers was entirely concealed by
one of the manycolored scarfs, whose brilliant hues and
rich silken fringe have rendered them so precious in the
eyes of Parisian belles. Tilted on one side of her head she
had a small cap of goldcolored silk, embroidered with
pearls while on the other a purple rose mingled its glowing
colors with the luxuriant masses of her hair, of which the
blackness was so intense that it was tinged with blue. The
extreme beauty of the countenance, that shone forth in
loveliness that mocked the vain attempts of dress to augment
it, was peculiarly and purely Grecian there were the large,
dark, melting eyes, the finely formed nose, the coral lips,
and pearly teeth, that belonged to her race and country.
And, to complete the whole, Haidee was in the very
springtide and fulness of youthful charms  she had not yet
numbered more than twenty summers.
Monte Cristo summoned the Greek attendant, and bade her
inquire whether it would be agreeable to her mistress to
receive his visit. Haidee's only reply was to direct her
servant by a sign to withdraw the tapestried curtain that
hung before the door of her boudoir, the framework of the
opening thus made serving as a sort of border to the
graceful tableau presented by the young girl's picturesque
attitude and appearance. As Monte Cristo approached, she
leaned upon the elbow of the arm that held the narghile, and
extending to him her other hand, said, with a smile of
captivating sweetness, in the sonorous language spoken by
the women of Athens and Sparta, "Why demand permission ere
you enter? Are you no longer my master, or have I ceased to
be your slave?" Monte Cristo returned her smile. "Haidee,"
said he, "you well know."
"Why do you address me so coldly  so distantly?" asked the
young Greek. "Have I by any means displeased you? Oh, if so,
punish me as you will but do not  do not speak to me in
tones and manner so formal and constrained."
"Haidee," replied the count, "you know that you are now in
France, and are free."
"Free to do what?" asked the young girl.
"Free to leave me."
"Leave you? Why should I leave you?"
"That is not for me to say but we are now about to mix in
society  to visit and be visited."
"I don't wish to see anybody but you."
"And should you see one whom you could prefer, I would not
be so unjust" 
"I have never seen any one I preferred to you, and I have
never loved any one but you and my father."
"My poor child," replied Monte Cristo, "that is merely
because your father and myself are the only men who have
ever talked to you."
"I don't want anybody else to talk to me. My father said I
was his "joy'  you style me your "love,'  and both of
you have called me "my child.'"
"Do you remember your father, Haidee?" The young Greek
smiled. "He is here, and here," said she, touching her eyes
and her heart. "And where am I?" inquired Monte Cristo
laughingly.
"You?" cried she, with tones of thrilling tenderness, "you
are everywhere" Monte Cristo took the delicate hand of the
young girl in his, and was about to raise it to his lips,
when the simple child of nature hastily withdrew it, and
presented her cheek. "You now understand, Haidee," said the
count, "that from this moment you are absolutely free that
here you exercise unlimited sway, and are at liberty to lay
aside or continue the costume of your country, as it may
suit your inclination. Within this mansion you are absolute
mistress of your actions, and may go abroad or remain in
your apartments as may seem most agreeable to you. A
carriage waits your orders, and Ali and Myrtho will
accompany you whithersoever you desire to go. There is but
one favor I would entreat of you."
"Speak."
"Guard carefully the secret of your birth. Make no allusion
to the past nor upon any occasion be induced to pronounce
the names of your illustrious father or illfated mother."
"I have already told you, my lord, that I shall see no one."
"It is possible, Haidee, that so perfect a seclusion, though
conformable with the habits and customs of the East, may not
be practicable in Paris. Endeavor, then, to accustom
yourself to our manner of living in these northern climes as
you did to those of Rome, Florence, Milan, and Madrid it
may be useful to you one of these days, whether you remain
here or return to the East." The young girl raised her
tearful eyes towards Monte Cristo as she said with touching
earnestness, "Whether we return to the East, you mean to
say, my lord, do you not?"
"My child," returned Monte Cristo "you know full well that
whenever we part, it will be no fault or wish of mine the
tree forsakes not the flower  the flower falls from the
tree."
"My lord," replied Haidee, "I never will leave you, for I am
sure I could not exist without you."
"My poor girl, in ten years I shall be old, and you will be
still young."
"My father had a long white beard, but I loved him he was
sixty years old, but to me he was handsomer than all the
fine youths I saw."
"Then tell me, Haidee, do you believe you shall be able to
accustom yourself to our present mode of life?"
"Shall I see you?"
"Every day."
"Then what do you fear, my lord?"
"You might find it dull."
"No, my lord. In the morning, I shall rejoice in the
prospect of your coming, and in the evening dwell with
delight on the happiness I have enjoyed in your presence
then too, when alone, I can call forth mighty pictures of
the past, see vast horizons bounded only by the towering
mountains of Pindus and Olympus. Oh, believe me, that when
three great passions, such as sorrow, love, and gratitude
fill the heart, ennui can find no place."
"You are a worthy daughter of Epirus, Haidee, and your
charming and poetical ideas prove well your descent from
that race of goddesses who claim your country as their
birthplace. Depend on my care to see that your youth is not
blighted, or suffered to pass away in ungenial solitude and
of this be well assured, that if you love me as a father, I
love you as a child."
"You are wrong, my lord. The love I have for you is very
different from the love I had for my father. My father died,
but I did not die. If you were to die, I should die too."
The Count, with a smile of profound tenderness, extended his
hand, and she carried it to her lips. Monte Cristo, thus
attuned to the interview he proposed to hold with Morrel and
his family, departed, murmuring as he went these lines of
Pindar, "Youth is a flower of which love is the fruit happy
is he who, after having watched its silent growth, is
permitted to gather and call it his own." The carriage was
prepared according to orders, and stepping lightly into it,
the count drove off at his usual rapid pace.
Chapter 
The Morrel Family.
In a very few minutes the count reached No.  in the Rue
Meslay. The house was of white stone, and in a small court
before it were two small beds full of beautiful flowers. In
the concierge that opened the gate the count recognized
Cocles but as he had but one eye, and that eye had become
somewhat dim in the course of nine years, Cocles did not
recognize the count. The carriages that drove up to the door
were compelled to turn, to avoid a fountain that played in a
basin of rockwork,  an ornament that had excited the
jealousy of the whole quarter, and had gained for the place
the appellation of "The Little Versailles." It is needless
to add that there were gold and silver fish in the basin.
The house, with kitchens and cellars below, had above the
groundfloor, two stories and attics. The whole of the
property, consisting of an immense workshop, two pavilions
at the bottom of the garden, and the garden itself, had been
purchased by Emmanuel, who had seen at a glance that he
could make of it a profitable speculation. He had reserved
the house and half the garden, and building a wall between
the garden and the workshops, had let them upon lease with
the pavilions at the bottom of the garden. So that for a
trifling sum he was as well lodged, and as perfectly shut
out from observation, as the inhabitants of the finest
mansion in the Faubourg St. Germain. The breakfastroom was
finished in oak the salon in mahogany, and the furnishings
were of blue velvet the bedroom was in citronwood and green
damask. There was a study for Emmanuel, who never studied,
and a musicroom for Julie, who never played. The whole of
the second story was set apart for Maximilian it was
precisely similar to his sister's apartments, except that
for the breakfastparlor he had a billiardroom, where he
received his friends. He was superintending the grooming of
his horse, and smoking his cigar at the entrance of the
garden, when the count's carriage stopped at the gate.
Cocles opened the gate, and Baptistin, springing from the
box, inquired whether Monsieur and Madame Herbault and
Monsieur Maximilian Morrel would see his excellency the
Count of Monte Cristo. "The Count of Monte Cristo?" cried
Morrel, throwing away his cigar and hastening to the
carriage "I should think we would see him. Ah, a thousand
thanks, count, for not having forgotten your promise." And
the young officer shook the count's hand so warmly, that
Monte Cristo could not be mistaken as to the sincerity of
his joy, and he saw that he had been expected with
impatience, and was received with pleasure. "Come, come,"
said Maximilian, "I will serve as your guide such a man as
you are ought not to be introduced by a servant. My sister
is in the garden plucking the dead roses my brother is
reading his two papers, the Presse and the Debats, within
six steps of her for wherever you see Madame Herbault, you
have only to look within a circle of four yards and you will
find M. Emmanuel, and "reciprocally,' as they say at the
Polytechnic School." At the sound of their steps a young
woman of twenty to five and twenty, dressed in a silk
morning gown, and busily engaged in plucking the dead leaves
off a noisette rosetree, raised her head. This was Julie,
who had become, as the clerk of the house of Thomson 
French had predicted, Madame Emmanuel Herbault. She uttered
a cry of surprise at the sight of a stranger, and Maximilian
began to laugh. "Don't disturb yourself, Julie," said he.
"The count has only been two or three days in Paris, but he
already knows what a fashionable woman of the Marais is, and
if he does not, you will show him."
"Ah, monsieur," returned Julie, "it is treason in my brother
to bring you thus, but he never has any regard for his poor
sister. Penelon, Penelon" An old man, who was digging
busily at one of the beds, stuck his spade in the earth, and
approached, cap in hand, striving to conceal a quid of
tobacco he had just thrust into his cheek. A few locks of
gray mingled with his hair, which was still thick and
matted, while his bronzed features and determined glance
well suited an old sailor who had braved the heat of the
equator and the storms of the tropics. "I think you hailed
me, Mademoiselle Julie?" said he. Penelon had still
preserved the habit of calling his master's daughter
"Mademoiselle Julie," and had never been able to change the
name to Madame Herbault. "Penelon," replied Julie, "go and
inform M. Emmanuel of this gentleman's visit, and Maximilian
will conduct him to the salon." Then, turning to Monte
Cristo,  "I hope you will permit me to leave you for a few
minutes," continued she and without awaiting any reply,
disappeared behind a clump of trees, and escaped to the
house by a lateral alley.
"I am sorry to see," observed Monte Cristo to Morrel, "that
I cause no small disturbance in your house."
"Look there," said Maximilian, laughing "there is her
husband changing his jacket for a coat. I assure you, you
are well known in the Rue Meslay."
"Your family appears to be a very happy one," said the
count, as if speaking to himself.
"Oh, yes, I assure you, count, they want nothing that can
render them happy they are young and cheerful, they are
tenderly attached to each other, and with twentyfive
thousand francs a year they fancy themselves as rich as
Rothschild."
"Five and twenty thousand francs is not a large sum,
however," replied Monte Cristo, with a tone so sweet and
gentle, that it went to Maximilian's heart like the voice of
a father "but they will not be content with that. Your
brotherinlaw is a barrister? a doctor?"
"He was a merchant, monsieur, and had succeeded to the
business of my poor father. M. Morrel, at his death, left
, francs, which were divided between my sister and
myself, for we were his only children. Her husband, who,
when he married her, had no other patrimony than his noble
probity, his firstrate ability, and his spotless
reputation, wished to possess as much as his wife. He
labored and toiled until he had amassed , francs six
years sufficed to achieve this object. Oh, I assure you,
sir, it was a touching spectacle to see these young
creatures, destined by their talents for higher stations,
toiling together, and through their unwillingness to change
any of the customs of their paternal house, taking six years
to accomplish what less scrupulous people would have
effected in two or three. Marseilles resounded with their
wellearned praises. At last, one day, Emmanuel came to his
wife, who had just finished making up the accounts. "Julie,'
said he to her, "Cocles has just given me the last rouleau
of a hundred francs that completes the , francs we
had fixed as the limits of our gains. Can you content
yourself with the small fortune which we shall possess for
the future? Listen to me. Our house transacts business to
the amount of a million a year, from which we derive an
income of , francs. We can dispose of the business, if
we please, in an hour, for I have received a letter from M.
Delaunay, in which he offers to purchase the goodwill of
the house, to unite with his own, for , francs. Advise
me what I had better do.'  "Emmanuel,' returned my sister,
"the house of Morrel can only be carried on by a Morrel. Is
it not worth , francs to save our father's name from
the chances of evil fortune and failure?'  "I thought so,'
replied Emmanuel "but I wished to have your advice.' 
"This is my counsel  Our accounts are made up and our
bills paid all we have to do is to stop the issue of any
more, and close our office.' This was done instantly. It was
three o'clock at a quarter past, a merchant presented
himself to insure two ships it was a clear profit of ,
francs. "Monsieur,' said Emmanuel, "have the goodness to
address yourself to M. Delaunay. We have quitted business.'
"How long?' inquired the astonished merchant. "A quarter
of an hour,' was the reply. And this is the reason,
monsieur," continued Maximilian, "of my sister and
brotherinlaw having only , francs a year."
Maximilian had scarcely finished his story, during which the
count's heart had swelled within him, when Emmanuel entered
wearing a hat and coat. He saluted the count with the air of
a man who is aware of the rank of his guest then, after
having led Monte Cristo around the little garden, he
returned to the house. A large vase of Japan porcelain,
filled with flowers that loaded the air with their perfume,
stood in the salon. Julie, suitably dressed, and her hair
arranged she had accomplished this feat in less than ten
minutes, received the count on his entrance. The songs of
the birds were heard in an aviary hard by, and the branches
of laburnums and rose acacias formed an exquisite framework
to the blue velvet curtains. Everything in this charming
retreat, from the warble of the birds to the smile of the
mistress, breathed tranquillity and repose. The count had
felt the influence of this happiness from the moment he
entered the house, and he remained silent and pensive,
forgetting that he was expected to renew the conversation,
which had ceased after the first salutations had been
exchanged. The silence became almost painful when, by a
violent effort, tearing himself from his pleasing reverie 
"Madame," said he at length, "I pray you to excuse my
emotion, which must astonish you who are only accustomed to
the happiness I meet here but contentment is so new a sight
to me, that I could never be weary of looking at yourself
and your husband."
"We are very happy, monsieur," replied Julie "but we have
also known unhappiness, and few have ever undergone more
bitter sufferings than ourselves." The Count's features
displayed an expression of the most intense curiosity.
"Oh, all this is a family history, as ChateauRenaud told
you the other day," observed Maximilian. "This humble
picture would have but little interest for you, accustomed
as you are to behold the pleasures and the misfortunes of
the wealthy and industrious but such as we are, we have
experienced bitter sorrows."
"And God has poured balm into your wounds, as he does into
those of all who are in affliction?" said Monte Cristo
inquiringly.
"Yes, count," returned Julie, "we may indeed say he has, for
he has done for us what he grants only to his chosen he
sent us one of his angels." The count's cheeks became
scarlet, and he coughed, in order to have an excuse for
putting his handkerchief to his mouth. "Those born to
wealth, and who have the means of gratifying every wish,"
said Emmanuel, "know not what is the real happiness of life,
just as those who have been tossed on the stormy waters of
the ocean on a few frail planks can alone realize the
blessings of fair weather."
Monte Cristo rose, and without making any answer for the
tremulousness of his voice would have betrayed his emotion
walked up and down the apartment with a slow step.
"Our magnificence makes you smile, count," said Maximilian,
who had followed him with his eyes. "No, no," returned Monte
Cristo, pale as death, pressing one hand on his heart to
still its throbbings, while with the other he pointed to a
crystal cover, beneath which a silken purse lay on a black
velvet cushion. "I was wondering what could be the
significance of this purse, with the paper at one end and
the large diamond at the other."
"Count," replied Maximilian, with an air of gravity, "those
are our most precious family treasures."
"The stone seems very brilliant," answered the count.
"Oh, my brother does not allude to its value, although it
has been estimated at , francs he means, that the
articles contained in this purse are the relics of the angel
I spoke of just now."
"This I do not comprehend and yet I may not ask for an
explanation, madame," replied Monte Cristo bowing. "Pardon
me, I had no intention of committing an indiscretion."
"Indiscretion,  oh, you make us happy by giving us an
excuse for expatiating on this subject. If we wanted to
conceal the noble action this purse commemorates, we should
not expose it thus to view. Oh, would we could relate it
everywhere, and to every one, so that the emotion of our
unknown benefactor might reveal his presence."
"Ah, really," said Monte Cristo in a halfstifled voice.
"Monsieur," returned Maximilian, raising the glass cover,
and respectfully kissing the silken purse, "this has touched
the hand of a man who saved my father from suicide, us from
ruin, and our name from shame and disgrace,  a man by
whose matchless benevolence we poor children, doomed to want
and wretchedness, can at present hear every one envying our
happy lot. This letter" as he spoke, Maximilian drew a
letter from the purse and gave it to the count  "this
letter was written by him the day that my father had taken a
desperate resolution, and this diamond was given by the
generous unknown to my sister as her dowry." Monte Cristo
opened the letter, and read it with an indescribable feeling
of delight. It was the letter written as our readers know
to Julie, and signed "Sinbad the Sailor." "Unknown you say,
is the man who rendered you this service  unknown to you?"
"Yes we have never had the happiness of pressing his hand,"
continued Maximilian. "We have supplicated heaven in vain to
grant us this favor, but the whole affair has had a
mysterious meaning that we cannot comprehend  we have been
guided by an invisible hand,  a hand as powerful as that
of an enchanter."
"Oh," cried Julie, "I have not lost all hope of some day
kissing that hand, as I now kiss the purse which he has
touched. Four years ago, Penelon was at Trieste  Penelon,
count, is the old sailor you saw in the garden, and who,
from quartermaster, has become gardener  Penelon, when he
was at Trieste, saw on the quay an Englishman, who was on
the point of embarking on board a yacht, and he recognized
him as the person who called on my father the fifth of June,
, and who wrote me this letter on the fifth of
September. He felt convinced of his identity, but he did not
venture to address him."
"An Englishman," said Monte Cristo, who grew uneasy at the
attention with which Julie looked at him. "An Englishman you
say?"
"Yes," replied Maximilian, "an Englishman, who represented
himself as the confidential clerk of the house of Thomson 
French, at Rome. It was this that made me start when you
said the other day, at M. de Morcerf's, that Messrs. Thomson
 French were your bankers. That happened, as I told you, in
. For God's sake, tell me, did you know this
Englishman?"
"But you tell me, also, that the house of Thomson  French
have constantly denied having rendered you this service?"
"Yes."
"Then is it not probable that this Englishman may be some
one who, grateful for a kindness your father had shown him,
and which he himself had forgotten, has taken this method of
requiting the obligation?"
"Everything is possible in this affair, even a miracle."
"What was his name?" asked Monte Cristo.
"He gave no other name," answered Julie, looking earnestly
at the count, "than that at the end of his letter  "Sinbad
the Sailor.'"
"Which is evidently not his real name, but a fictitious
one."
Then, noticing that Julie was struck with the sound of his
voice, 
"Tell me," continued he, "was he not about my height,
perhaps a little taller, with his chin imprisoned, as it
were, in a high cravat his coat closely buttoned up, and
constantly taking out his pencil?"
"Oh, do you then know him?" cried Julie, whose eyes sparkled
with joy.
"No," returned Monte Cristo "I only guessed. I knew a Lord
Wilmore, who was constantly doing actions of this kind."
"Without revealing himself?"
"He was an eccentric being, and did not believe in the
existence of gratitude."
"Oh, heaven," exclaimed Julie, clasping her hands, "in what
did he believe, then?"
"He did not credit it at the period which I knew him," said
Monte Cristo, touched to the heart by the accents of Julie's
voice "but, perhaps, since then he has had proofs that
gratitude does exist."
"And do you know this gentleman, monsieur?" inquired
Emmanuel.
"Oh, if you do know him," cried Julie, "can you tell us
where he is  where we can find him? Maximilian  Emmanuel
if we do but discover him, he must believe in the
gratitude of the heart" Monte Cristo felt tears start into
his eyes, and he again walked hastily up and down the room.
"In the name of heaven," said Maximilian, "if you know
anything of him, tell us what it is."
"Alas," cried Monte Cristo, striving to repress his emotion,
"if Lord Wilmore was your unknown benefactor, I fear you
will never see him again. I parted from him two years ago at
Palermo, and he was then on the point of setting out for the
most remote regions so that I fear he will never return."
"Oh, monsieur, this is cruel of you," said Julie, much
affected and the young lady's eyes swam with tears.
"Madame," replied Monte Cristo gravely, and gazing earnestly
on the two liquid pearls that trickled down Julie's cheeks,
"had Lord Wilmore seen what I now see, he would become
attached to life, for the tears you shed would reconcile him
to mankind" and he held out his hand to Julie, who gave him
hers, carried away by the look and accent of the count.
"But," continued she, "Lord Wilmore had a family or friends,
he must have known some one, can we not  "
"Oh, it is useless to inquire," returned the count
"perhaps, after all, he was not the man you seek for. He was
my friend he had no secrets from me, and if this had been
so he would have confided in me."
"And he told you nothing?"
"Not a word."
"Nothing that would lead you to suppose?"
"Nothing."
"And yet you spoke of him at once."
"Ah, in such a case one supposes" 
"Sister, sister," said Maximilian, coming to the count's
aid, "monsieur is quite right. Recollect what our excellent
father so often told us, "It was no Englishman that thus
saved us.'" Monte Cristo started. "What did your father tell
you, M. Morrel?" said he eagerly.
"My father thought that this action had been miraculously
performed  he believed that a benefactor had arisen from
the grave to save us. Oh, it was a touching superstition,
monsieur, and although I did not myself believe it, I would
not for the world have destroyed my father's faith. How
often did he muse over it and pronounce the name of a dear
friend  a friend lost to him forever and on his
deathbed, when the near approach of eternity seemed to have
illumined his mind with supernatural light, this thought,
which had until then been but a doubt, became a conviction,
and his last words were, "Maximilian, it was Edmond
Dantes'" At these words the count's paleness, which had for
some time been increasing, became alarming he could not
speak he looked at his watch like a man who has forgotten
the hour, said a few hurried words to Madame Herbault, and
pressing the hands of Emmanuel and Maximilian,  "Madame,"
said he, "I trust you will allow me to visit you
occasionally I value your friendship, and feel grateful to
you for your welcome, for this is the first time for many
years that I have thus yielded to my feelings" and he
hastily quitted the apartment.
"This Count of Monte Cristo is a strange man," said
Emmanuel.
"Yes," answered Maximilian, "but I feel sure he has an
excellent heart, and that he likes us."
"His voice went to my heart," observed Julie "and two or
three times I fancied that I had heard it before."
Chapter 
Pyramus and Thisbe.
About twothirds of the way along the Faubourg SaintHonore,
and in the rear of one of the most imposing mansions in this
rich neighborhood, where the various houses vie with each
other for elegance of design and magnificence of
construction, extended a large garden, where the
widespreading chestnuttrees raised their heads high above
the walls in a solid rampart, and with the coming of every
spring scattered a shower of delicate pink and white
blossoms into the large stone vases that stood upon the two
square pilasters of a curiously wrought iron gate, that
dated from the time of Louis XII. This noble entrance,
however, in spite of its striking appearance and the
graceful effect of the geraniums planted in the two vases,
as they waved their variegated leaves in the wind and
charmed the eye with their scarlet bloom, had fallen into
utter disuse. The proprietors of the mansion had many years
before thought it best to confine themselves to the
possession of the house itself, with its thickly planted
courtyard, opening into the Faubourg SaintHonore, and to
the garden shut in by this gate, which formerly communicated
with a fine kitchengarden of about an acre. For the demon
of speculation drew a line, or in other words projected a
street, at the farther side of the kitchengarden. The
street was laid out, a name was chosen and posted up on an
iron plate, but before construction was begun, it occurred
to the possessor of the property that a handsome sum might
be obtained for the ground then devoted to fruits and
vegetables, by building along the line of the proposed
street, and so making it a branch of communication with the
Faubourg SaintHonore itself, one of the most important
thoroughfares in the city of Paris.
In matters of speculation, however, though "man proposes,"
"money disposes." From some such difficulty the newly named
street died almost in birth, and the purchaser of the
kitchengarden, having paid a high price for it, and being
quite unable to find any one willing to take his bargain off
his hands without a considerable loss, yet still clinging to
the belief that at some future day he should obtain a sum
for it that would repay him, not only for his past outlay,
but also the interest upon the capital locked up in his new
acquisition, contented himself with letting the ground
temporarily to some marketgardeners, at a yearly rental of
 francs. And so, as we have said, the iron gate leading
into the kitchengarden had been closed up and left to the
rust, which bade fair before long to eat off its hinges,
while to prevent the ignoble glances of the diggers and
delvers of the ground from presuming to sully the
aristocratic enclosure belonging to the mansion, the gate
had been boarded up to a height of six feet. True, the
planks were not so closely adjusted but that a hasty peep
might be obtained through their interstices but the strict
decorum and rigid propriety of the inhabitants of the house
left no grounds for apprehending that advantage would be
taken of that circumstance.
Horticulture seemed, however, to have been abandoned in the
deserted kitchengarden and where cabbages, carrots,
radishes, pease, and melons had once flourished, a scanty
crop of lucerne alone bore evidence of its being deemed
worthy of cultivation. A small, low door gave egress from
the walled space we have been describing into the projected
street, the ground having been abandoned as unproductive by
its various renters, and had now fallen so completely in
general estimation as to return not even the onehalf per
cent it had originally paid. Towards the house the
chestnuttrees we have before mentioned rose high above the
wall, without in any way affecting the growth of other
luxuriant shrubs and flowers that eagerly dressed forward to
fill up the vacant spaces, as though asserting their right
to enjoy the boon of light and air. At one corner, where the
foliage became so thick as almost to shut out day, a large
stone bench and sundry rustic seats indicated that this
sheltered spot was either in general favor or particular use
by some inhabitant of the house, which was faintly
discernible through the dense mass of verdure that partially
concealed it, though situated but a hundred paces off.
Whoever had selected this retired portion of the grounds as
the boundary of a walk, or as a place for meditation, was
abundantly justified in the choice by the absence of all
glare, the cool, refreshing shade, the screen it afforded
from the scorching rays of the sun, that found no entrance
there even during the burning days of hottest summer, the
incessant and melodious warbling of birds, and the entire
removal from either the noise of the street or the bustle of
the mansion. On the evening of one of the warmest days
spring had yet bestowed on the inhabitants of Paris, might
be seen negligently thrown upon the stone bench, a book, a
parasol, and a workbasket, from which hung a partly
embroidered cambric handkerchief, while at a little distance
from these articles was a young woman, standing close to the
iron gate, endeavoring to discern something on the other
side by means of the openings in the planks,  the
earnestness of her attitude and the fixed gaze with which
she seemed to seek the object of her wishes, proving how
much her feelings were interested in the matter. At that
instant the little sidegate leading from the waste ground
to the street was noiselessly opened, and a tall, powerful
young man appeared. He was dressed in a common gray blouse
and velvet cap, but his carefully arranged hair, beard and
mustache, all of the richest and glossiest black, ill
accorded with his plebeian attire. After casting a rapid
glance around him, in order to assure himself that he was
unobserved, he entered by the small gate, and, carefully
closing and securing it after him, proceeded with a hurried
step towards the barrier.
At the sight of him she expected, though probably not in
such a costume, the young woman started in terror, and was
about to make a hasty retreat. But the eye of love had
already seen, even through the narrow chinks of the wooden
palisades, the movement of the white robe, and observed the
fluttering of the blue sash. Pressing his lips close to the
planks, he exclaimed, "Don't be alarmed, Valentine  it is
I" Again the timid girl found courage to return to the
gate, saying, as she did so, "And why do you come so late
today? It is almost dinnertime, and I had to use no little
diplomacy to get rid of my watchful motherinlaw, my
toodevoted maid, and my troublesome brother, who is always
teasing me about coming to work at my embroidery, which I am
in a fair way never to get done. So pray excuse yourself as
well as you can for having made me wait, and, after that,
tell me why I see you in a dress so singular that at first I
did not recognize you."
"Dearest Valentine," said the young man, "the difference
between our respective stations makes me fear to offend you
by speaking of my love, but yet I cannot find myself in your
presence without longing to pour forth my soul, and tell you
how fondly I adore you. If it be but to carry away with me
the recollection of such sweet moments, I could even thank
you for chiding me, for it leaves me a gleam of hope, that
if you did not expect me and that indeed would be worse
than vanity to suppose, at least I was in your thoughts.
You asked me the cause of my being late, and why I come
disguised. I will candidly explain the reason of both, and I
trust to your goodness to pardon me. I have chosen a trade."
"A trade? Oh, Maximilian, how can you jest at a time when we
have such deep cause for uneasiness?"
"Heaven keep me from jesting with that which is far dearer
to me than life itself But listen to me, Valentine, and I
will tell you all about it. I became weary of ranging fields
and scaling walls, and seriously alarmed at the idea
suggested by you, that if caught hovering about here your
father would very likely have me sent to prison as a thief.
That would compromise the honor of the French army, to say
nothing of the fact that the continual presence of a captain
of Spahis in a place where no warlike projects could be
supposed to account for it might well create surprise so I
have become a gardener, and, consequently, adopted the
costume of my calling."
"What excessive nonsense you talk, Maximilian"
"Nonsense? Pray do not call what I consider the wisest
action of my life by such a name. Consider, by becoming a
gardener I effectually screen our meetings from all
suspicion or danger."
"I beseech of you, Maximilian, to cease trifling, and tell
me what you really mean."
"Simply, that having ascertained that the piece of ground on
which I stand was to let, I made application for it, was
readily accepted by the proprietor, and am now master of
this fine crop of lucerne. Think of that, Valentine There
is nothing now to prevent my building myself a little hut on
my plantation, and residing not twenty yards from you. Only
imagine what happiness that would afford me. I can scarcely
contain myself at the bare idea. Such felicity seems above
all price  as a thing impossible and unattainable. But
would you believe that I purchase all this delight, joy, and
happiness, for which I would cheerfully have surrendered ten
years of my life, at the small cost of  francs per annum,
paid quarterly? Henceforth we have nothing to fear. I am on
my own ground, and have an undoubted right to place a ladder
against the wall, and to look over when I please, without
having any apprehensions of being taken off by the police as
a suspicious character. I may also enjoy the precious
privilege of assuring you of my fond, faithful, and
unalterable affection, whenever you visit your favorite
bower, unless, indeed, it offends your pride to listen to
professions of love from the lips of a poor workingman, clad
in a blouse and cap." A faint cry of mingled pleasure and
surprise escaped from the lips of Valentine, who almost
instantly said, in a saddened tone, as though some envious
cloud darkened the joy which illumined her heart, "Alas, no,
Maximilian, this must not be, for many reasons. We should
presume too much on our own strength, and, like others,
perhaps, be led astray by our blind confidence in each
other's prudence."
"How can you for an instant entertain so unworthy a thought,
dear Valentine? Have I not, from the first blessed hour of
our acquaintance, schooled all my words and actions to your
sentiments and ideas? And you have, I am sure, the fullest
confidence in my honor. When you spoke to me of experiencing
a vague and indefinite sense of coming danger, I placed
myself blindly and devotedly at your service, asking no
other reward than the pleasure of being useful to you and
have I ever since, by word or look, given you cause of
regret for having selected me from the numbers that would
willingly have sacrificed their lives for you? You told me,
my dear Valentine, that you were engaged to M. d'Epinay, and
that your father was resolved upon completing the match, and
that from his will there was no appeal, as M. de Villefort
was never known to change a determination once formed. I
kept in the background, as you wished, and waited, not for
the decision of your heart or my own, but hoping that
providence would graciously interpose in our behalf, and
order events in our favor. But what cared I for delays or
difficulties, Valentine, as long as you confessed that you
loved me, and took pity on me? If you will only repeat that
avowal now and then, I can endure anything."
"Ah, Maximilian, that is the very thing that makes you so
bold, and which renders me at once so happy and unhappy,
that I frequently ask myself whether it is better for me to
endure the harshness of my motherinlaw, and her blind
preference for her own child, or to be, as I now am,
insensible to any pleasure save such as I find in these
meetings, so fraught with danger to both."
"I will not admit that word," returned the young man "it is
at once cruel and unjust. Is it possible to find a more
submissive slave than myself? You have permitted me to
converse with you from time to time, Valentine, but
forbidden my ever following you in your walks or elsewhere
have I not obeyed? And since I found means to enter this
enclosure to exchange a few words with you through this gate
to be close to you without really seeing you  have I
ever asked so much as to touch the hem of your gown or tried
to pass this barrier which is but a trifle to one of my
youth and strength? Never has a complaint or a murmur
escaped me. I have been bound by my promises as rigidly as
any knight of olden times. Come, come, dearest Valentine,
confess that what I say is true, lest I be tempted to call
you unjust."
"It is true," said Valentine, as she passed the end of her
slender fingers through a small opening in the planks, and
permitted Maximilian to press his lips to them, "and you are
a true and faithful friend but still you acted from motives
of selfinterest, my dear Maximilian, for you well knew that
from the moment in which you had manifested an opposite
spirit all would have been ended between us. You promised to
bestow on me the friendly affection of a brother. For I have
no friend but yourself upon earth, who am neglected and
forgotten by my father, harassed and persecuted by my
motherinlaw, and left to the sole companionship of a
paralyzed and speechless old man, whose withered hand can no
longer press mine, and who can speak to me with the eye
alone, although there still lingers in his heart the warmest
tenderness for his poor grandchild. Oh, how bitter a fate is
mine, to serve either as a victim or an enemy to all who are
stronger than myself, while my only friend and supporter is
a living corpse Indeed, indeed, Maximilian, I am very
miserable, and if you love me it must be out of pity."
"Valentine," replied the young man, deeply affected, "I will
not say you are all I love in the world, for I dearly prize
my sister and brotherinlaw but my affection for them is
calm and tranquil, in no manner resembling what I feel for
you. When I think of you my heart beats fast, the blood
burns in my veins, and I can hardly breathe but I solemnly
promise you to restrain all this ardor, this fervor and
intensity of feeling, until you yourself shall require me to
render them available in serving or assisting you. M. Franz
is not expected to return home for a year to come, I am
told in that time many favorable and unforeseen chances may
befriend us. Let us, then, hope for the best hope is so
sweet a comforter. Meanwhile, Valentine, while reproaching
me with selfishness, think a little what you have been to me
the beautiful but cold resemblance of a marble Venus.
What promise of future reward have you made me for all the
submission and obedience I have evinced?  none whatever.
What granted me?  scarcely more. You tell me of M. Franz
d'Epinay, your betrothed lover, and you shrink from the idea
of being his wife but tell me, Valentine, is there no other
sorrow in your heart? You see me devoted to you, body and
soul, my life and each warm drop that circles round my heart
are consecrated to your service you know full well that my
existence is bound up in yours  that were I to lose you I
would not outlive the hour of such crushing misery yet you
speak with calmness of the prospect of your being the wife
of another Oh, Valentine, were I in your place, and did I
feel conscious, as you do, of being worshipped, adored, with
such a love as mine, a hundred times at least should I have
passed my hand between these iron bars, and said, "Take this
hand, dearest Maximilian, and believe that, living or dead,
I am yours  yours only, and forever'" The poor girl made
no reply, but her lover could plainly hear her sobs and
tears. A rapid change took place in the young man's
feelings. "Dearest, dearest Valentine," exclaimed he,
"forgive me if I have offended you, and forget the words I
spoke if they have unwittingly caused you pain."
"No, Maximilian, I am not offended," answered she, "but do
you not see what a poor, helpless being I am, almost a
stranger and an outcast in my father's house, where even he
is seldom seen whose will has been thwarted, and spirits
broken, from the age of ten years, beneath the iron rod so
sternly held over me oppressed, mortified, and persecuted,
day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute, no person has
cared for, even observed my sufferings, nor have I ever
breathed one word on the subject save to yourself. Outwardly
and in the eyes of the world, I am surrounded by kindness
and affection but the reverse is the case. The general
remark is, "Oh, it cannot be expected that one of so stern a
character as M. Villefort could lavish the tenderness some
fathers do on their daughters. What though she has lost her
own mother at a tender age, she has had the happiness to
find a second mother in Madame de Villefort.' The world,
however, is mistaken my father abandons me from utter
indifference, while my motherinlaw detests me with a
hatred so much the more terrible because it is veiled
beneath a continual smile."
"Hate you, sweet Valentine," exclaimed the young man "how
is it possible for any one to do that?"
"Alas," replied the weeping girl, "I am obliged to own that
my motherinlaw's aversion to me arises from a very natural
source  her overweening love for her own child, my brother
Edward."
"But why should it?"
"I do not know but, though unwilling to introduce money
matters into our present conversation, I will just say this
much  that her extreme dislike to me has its origin there
and I much fear she envies me the fortune I enjoy in right
of my mother, and which will be more than doubled at the
death of M. and Mme. de SaintMeran, whose sole heiress I
am. Madame de Villefort has nothing of her own, and hates me
for being so richly endowed. Alas, how gladly would I
exchange the half of this wealth for the happiness of at
least sharing my father's love. God knows, I would prefer
sacrificing the whole, so that it would obtain me a happy
and affectionate home."
"Poor Valentine"
"I seem to myself as though living a life of bondage, yet at
the same time am so conscious of my own weakness that I fear
to break the restraint in which I am held, lest I fall
utterly helpless. Then, too, my father is not a person whose
orders may be infringed with impunity protected as he is by
his high position and firmly established reputation for
talent and unswerving integrity, no one could oppose him he
is allpowerful even with the king he would crush you at a
word. Dear Maximilian, believe me when I assure you that if
I do not attempt to resist my father's commands it is more
on your account than my own."
"But why, Valentine, do you persist in anticipating the
worst,  why picture so gloomy a future?"
"Because I judge it from the past."
"Still, consider that although I may not be, strictly
speaking, what is termed an illustrious match for you, I am,
for many reasons, not altogether so much beneath your
alliance. The days when such distinctions were so nicely
weighed and considered no longer exist in France, and the
first families of the monarchy have intermarried with those
of the empire. The aristocracy of the lance has allied
itself with the nobility of the cannon. Now I belong to this
lastnamed class and certainly my prospects of military
preferment are most encouraging as well as certain. My
fortune, though small, is free and unfettered, and the
memory of my late father is respected in our country,
Valentine, as that of the most upright and honorable
merchant of the city I say our country, because you were
born not far from Marseilles."
"Don't speak of Marseilles, I beg of you, Maximilian that
one word brings back my mother to my recollection  my
angel mother, who died too soon for myself and all who knew
her but who, after watching over her child during the brief
period allotted to her in this world, now, I fondly hope,
watches from her home in heaven. Oh, if my mother were still
living, there would be nothing to fear, Maximilian, for I
would tell her that I loved you, and she would protect us."
"I fear, Valentine," replied the lover, "that were she
living I should never have had the happiness of knowing you
you would then have been too happy to have stooped from your
grandeur to bestow a thought on me."
"Now it is you who are unjust, Maximilian," cried Valentine
"but there is one thing I wish to know."
"And what is that?" inquired the young man, perceiving that
Valentine hesitated.
"Tell me truly, Maximilian, whether in former days, when our
fathers dwelt at Marseilles, there was ever any
misunderstanding between them?"
"Not that I am aware of," replied the young man, "unless,
indeed, any illfeeling might have arisen from their being
of opposite parties  your father was, as you know, a
zealous partisan of the Bourbons, while mine was wholly
devoted to the emperor there could not possibly be any
other difference between them. But why do you ask?"
"I will tell you," replied the young girl, "for it is but
right you should know. Well, on the day when your
appointment as an officer of the Legion of honor was
announced in the papers, we were all sitting with my
grandfather, M. Noirtier M. Danglars was there also  you
recollect M. Danglars, do you not, Maximilian, the banker,
whose horses ran away with my motherinlaw and little
brother, and very nearly killed them? While the rest of the
company were discussing the approaching marriage of
Mademoiselle Danglars, I was reading the paper to my
grandfather but when I came to the paragraph about you,
although I had done nothing else but read it over to myself
all the morning you know you had told me all about it the
previous evening, I felt so happy, and yet so nervous, at
the idea of speaking your name aloud, and before so many
people, that I really think I should have passed it over,
but for the fear that my doing so might create suspicions as
to the cause of my silence so I summoned up all my courage,
and read it as firmly and as steadily as I could."
"Dear Valentine"
"Well, would you believe it? directly my father caught the
sound of your name he turned round quite hastily, and, like
a poor silly thing, I was so persuaded that every one must
be as much affected as myself by the utterance of your name,
that I was not surprised to see my father start, and almost
tremble but I even thought though that surely must have
been a mistake that M. Danglars trembled too."
""Morrel, Morrel,' cried my father, "stop a bit' then
knitting his brows into a deep frown, he added, "surely this
cannot be one of the Morrel family who lived at Marseilles,
and gave us so much trouble from their violent Bonapartism
I mean about the year .'  "Yes,' replied M.
Danglars, "I believe he is the son of the old shipowner.'"
"Indeed," answered Maximilian "and what did your father say
then, Valentine?"
"Oh, such a dreadful thing, that I don't dare to tell you."
"Always tell me everything," said Maximilian with a smile.
""Ah,' continued my father, still frowning, "their idolized
emperor treated these madmen as they deserved he called
them "food for powder,' which was precisely all they were
good for and I am delighted to see that the present
government have adopted this salutary principle with all its
pristine vigor if Algiers were good for nothing but to
furnish the means of carrying so admirable an idea into
practice, it would be an acquisition well worthy of
struggling to obtain. Though it certainly does cost France
somewhat dear to assert her rights in that uncivilized
country.'"
"Brutal politics, I must confess." said Maximilian "but
don't attach any serious importance, dear, to what your
father said. My father was not a bit behind yours in that
sort of talk. "Why,' said he, "does not the emperor, who has
devised so many clever and efficient modes of improving the
art of war, organize a regiment of lawyers, judges and legal
practitioners, sending them in the hottest fire the enemy
could maintain, and using them to save better men?' You see,
my dear, that for picturesque expression and generosity of
spirit there is not much to choose between the language of
either party. But what did M. Danglars say to this outburst
on the part of the procureur?"
"Oh, he laughed, and in that singular manner so peculiar to
himself  halfmalicious, halfferocious he almost
immediately got up and took his leave then, for the first
time, I observed the agitation of my grandfather, and I must
tell you, Maximilian, that I am the only person capable of
discerning emotion in his paralyzed frame. And I suspected
that the conversation that had been carried on in his
presence for they always say and do what they like before
the dear old man, without the smallest regard for his
feelings had made a strong impression on his mind for,
naturally enough, it must have pained him to hear the
emperor he so devotedly loved and served spoken of in that
depreciating manner."
"The name of M. Noirtier," interposed Maximilian, "is
celebrated throughout Europe he was a statesman of high
standing, and you may or may not know, Valentine, that he
took a leading part in every Bonapartist conspiracy set on
foot during the restoration of the Bourbons."
"Oh, I have often heard whispers of things that seem to me
most strange  the father a Bonapartist, the son a
Royalist what can have been the reason of so singular a
difference in parties and politics? But to resume my story
I turned towards my grandfather, as though to question him
as to the cause of his emotion he looked expressively at
the newspaper I had been reading. "What is the matter, dear
grandfather?' said I, "are you pleased?' He gave me a sign
in the affirmative. "With what my father said just now?' He
returned a sign in the negative. "Perhaps you liked what M.
Danglars said?' Another sign in the negative. "Oh, then, you
were glad to hear that M. Morrel I didn't dare to say
Maximilian had been made an officer of the Legion of
Honor?' He signified assent only think of the poor old
man's being so pleased to think that you, who were a perfect
stranger to him, had been made an officer of the Legion of
Honor Perhaps it was a mere whim on his part, for he is
falling, they say, into second childhood, but I love him for
showing so much interest in you."
"How singular," murmured Maximilian "your father hates me,
while your grandfather, on the contrary  What strange
feelings are aroused by politics."
"Hush," cried Valentine, suddenly "some one is coming"
Maximilian leaped at one bound into his crop of lucerne,
which he began to pull up in the most ruthless way, under
the pretext of being occupied in weeding it.
"Mademoiselle, mademoiselle" exclaimed a voice from behind
the trees. "Madame is searching for you everywhere there is
a visitor in the drawingroom."
"A visitor?" inquired Valentine, much agitated "who is it?"
"Some grand personage  a prince I believe they said  the
Count of Monte Cristo."
"I will come directly," cried Valentine aloud. The name of
Monte Cristo sent an electric shock through the young man on
the other side of the iron gate, to whom Valentine's "I am
coming" was the customary signal of farewell. "Now, then,"
said Maximilian, leaning on the handle of his spade, "I
would give a good deal to know how it comes about that the
Count of Monte Cristo is acquainted with M. de Villefort."
Chapter 
Toxicology.
It was really the Count of Monte Cristo who had just arrived
at Madame de Villefort's for the purpose of returning the
procureur's visit, and at his name, as may be easily
imagined, the whole house was in confusion. Madame de
Villefort, who was alone in her drawingroom when the count
was announced, desired that her son might be brought thither
instantly to renew his thanks to the count and Edward, who
heard this great personage talked of for two whole days,
made all possible haste to come to him, not from obedience
to his mother, or out of any feeling of gratitude to the
count, but from sheer curiosity, and that some chance remark
might give him the opportunity for making one of the
impertinent speeches which made his mother say,  "Oh, that
naughty child But I can't be severe with him, he is really
so bright."
After the usual civilities, the count inquired after M. de
Villefort. "My husband dines with the chancellor," replied
the young lady "he has just gone, and I am sure he'll be
exceedingly sorry not to have had the pleasure of seeing you
before he went." Two visitors who were there when the count
arrived, having gazed at him with all their eyes, retired
after that reasonable delay which politeness admits and
curiosity requires. "What is your sister Valentine doing?"
inquired Madame de Villefort of Edward "tell some one to
bid her come here, that I may have the honor of introducing
her to the count."
"You have a daughter, then, madame?" inquired the count
"very young, I presume?"
"The daughter of M. de Villefort by his first marriage,"
replied the young wife, "a fine wellgrown girl."
"But melancholy," interrupted Master Edward, snatching the
feathers out of the tail of a splendid parroquet that was
screaming on its gilded perch, in order to make a plume for
his hat. Madame de Villefort merely cried,  "Be still,
Edward" She then added,  "This young madcap is, however,
very nearly right, and merely reechoes what he has heard me
say with pain a hundred times for Mademoiselle de Villefort
is, in spite of all we can do to rouse her, of a melancholy
disposition and taciturn habit, which frequently injure the
effect of her beauty. But what detains her? Go, Edward, and
see."
"Because they are looking for her where she is not to be
found."
"And where are they looking for her?"
"With grandpapa Noirtier."
"And do you think she is not there?"
"No, no, no, no, no, she is not there," replied Edward,
singing his words.
"And where is she, then? If you know, why don't you tell?"
"She is under the big chestnuttree," replied the spoiled
brat, as he gave, in spite of his mother's commands, live
flies to the parrot, which seemed keenly to relish such
fare. Madame de Villefort stretched out her hand to ring,
intending to direct her waitingmaid to the spot where she
would find Valentine, when the young lady herself entered
the apartment. She appeared much dejected and any person
who considered her attentively might have observed the
traces of recent tears in her eyes.
Valentine, whom we have in the rapid march of our narrative
presented to our readers without formally introducing her,
was a tall and graceful girl of nineteen, with bright
chestnut hair, deep blue eyes, and that reposeful air of
quiet distinction which characterized her mother. Her white
and slender fingers, her pearly neck, her cheeks tinted with
varying hues reminded one of the lovely Englishwomen who
have been so poetically compared in their manner to the
gracefulness of a swan. She entered the apartment, and
seeing near her stepmother the stranger of whom she had
already heard so much, saluted him without any girlish
awkwardness, or even lowering her eyes, and with an elegance
that redoubled the count's attention. He rose to return the
salutation. "Mademoiselle de Villefort, my daughterinlaw,"
said Madame de Villefort to Monte Cristo, leaning back on
her sofa and motioning towards Valentine with her hand. "And
M. de Monte Cristo, King of China, Emperor of CochinChina,"
said the young imp, looking slyly towards his sister.
Madame de Villefort at this really did turn pale, and was
very nearly angry with this household plague, who answered
to the name of Edward but the count, on the contrary,
smiled, and appeared to look at the boy complacently, which
caused the maternal heart to bound again with joy and
enthusiasm.
"But, madame," replied the count, continuing the
conversation, and looking by turns at Madame de Villefort
and Valentine, "have I not already had the honor of meeting
yourself and mademoiselle before? I could not help thinking
so just now the idea came over my mind, and as mademoiselle
entered the sight of her was an additional ray of light
thrown on a confused remembrance excuse the remark."
"I do not think it likely, sir Mademoiselle de Villefort is
not very fond of society, and we very seldom go out," said
the young lady.
"Then it was not in society that I met with mademoiselle or
yourself, madame, or this charming little merry boy.
Besides, the Parisian world is entirely unknown to me, for,
as I believe I told you, I have been in Paris but very few
days. No,  but, perhaps, you will permit me to call to
mind  stay" The Count placed his hand on his brow as if
to collect his thoughts. "No  it was somewhere  away
from here  it was  I do not know  but it appears that
this recollection is connected with a lovely sky and some
religious fete mademoiselle was holding flowers in her
hand, the interesting boy was chasing a beautiful peacock in
a garden, and you, madame, were under the trellis of some
arbor. Pray come to my aid, madame do not these
circumstances appeal to your memory?"
"No, indeed," replied Madame de Villefort "and yet it
appears to me, sir, that if I had met you anywhere, the
recollection of you must have been imprinted on my memory."
"Perhaps the count saw us in Italy," said Valentine timidly.
"Yes, in Italy it was in Italy most probably," replied
Monte Cristo "you have travelled then in Italy,
mademoiselle?"
"Yes madame and I were there two years ago. The doctors,
anxious for my lungs, had prescribed the air of Naples. We
went by Bologna, Perugia, and Rome."
"Ah, yes  true, mademoiselle," exclaimed Monte Cristo as
if this simple explanation was sufficient to revive the
recollection he sought. "It was at Perugia on Corpus Christi
Day, in the garden of the Hotel des Postes, when chance
brought us together you, Madame de Villefort, and her son
I now remember having had the honor of meeting you."
"I perfectly well remember Perugia, sir, and the Hotel des
Postes, and the festival of which you speak," said Madame de
Villefort, "but in vain do I tax my memory, of whose
treachery I am ashamed, for I really do not recall to mind
that I ever had the pleasure of seeing you before."
"It is strange, but neither do I recollect meeting with
you," observed Valentine, raising her beautiful eyes to the
count.
"But I remember it perfectly," interposed the darling
Edward.
"I will assist your memory, madame," continued the count
"the day had been burning hot you were waiting for horses,
which were delayed in consequence of the festival.
Mademoiselle was walking in the shade of the garden, and
your son disappeared in pursuit of the peacock."
"And I caught it, mamma, don't you remember?" interposed
Edward, "and I pulled three such beautiful feathers out of
his tail."
"You, madame, remained under the arbor do you not remember,
that while you were seated on a stone bench, and while, as I
told you, Mademoiselle de Villefort and your young son were
absent, you conversed for a considerable time with
somebody?"
"Yes, in truth, yes," answered the young lady, turning very
red, "I do remember conversing with a person wrapped in a
long woollen mantle he was a medical man, I think."
"Precisely so, madame this man was myself for a fortnight
I had been at that hotel, during which period I had cured my
valet de chambre of a fever, and my landlord of the
jaundice, so that I really acquired a reputation as a
skilful physician. We discoursed a long time, madame, on
different subjects of Perugino, of Raffaelle, of manners,
customs, of the famous aquatofana, of which they had told
you, I think you said, that certain individuals in Perugia
had preserved the secret."
"Yes, true," replied Madame de Villefort, somewhat uneasily,
"I remember now."
"I do not recollect now all the various subjects of which we
discoursed, madame," continued the count with perfect
calmness "but I perfectly remember that, falling into the
error which others had entertained respecting me, you
consulted me as to the health of Mademoiselle de Villefort."
"Yes, really, sir, you were in fact a medical man," said
Madame de Villefort, "since you had cured the sick."
"Moliere or Beaumarchais would reply to you, madame, that it
was precisely because I was not, that I had cured my
patients for myself, I am content to say to you that I have
studied chemistry and the natural sciences somewhat deeply,
but still only as an amateur, you understand."  At this
moment the clock struck six. "It is six o'clock," said
Madame de Villefort, evidently agitated. "Valentine, will
you not go and see if your grandpapa will have his dinner?"
Valentine rose, and saluting the count, left the apartment
without speaking.
"Oh, madame," said the count, when Valentine had left the
room, "was it on my account that you sent Mademoiselle de
Villefort away?"
"By no means," replied the young lady quickly "but this is
the hour when we usually give M. Noirtier the unwelcome meal
that sustains his pitiful existence. You are aware, sir, of
the deplorable condition of my husband's father?"
"Yes, madame, M. de Villefort spoke of it to me  a
paralysis, I think."
"Alas, yes the poor old gentleman is entirely helpless the
mind alone is still active in this human machine, and that
is faint and flickering, like the light of a lamp about to
expire. But excuse me, sir, for talking of our domestic
misfortunes I interrupted you at the moment when you were
telling me that you were a skilful chemist."
"No, madame, I did not say as much as that," replied the
count with a smile "quite the contrary. I have studied
chemistry because, having determined to live in eastern
climates I have been desirous of following the example of
King Mithridates."
"Mithridates rex Ponticus," said the young scamp, as he tore
some beautiful portraits out of a splendid album, "the
individual who took cream in his cup of poison every morning
at breakfast."
"Edward, you naughty boy," exclaimed Madame de Villefort,
snatching the mutilated book from the urchin's grasp, "you
are positively past bearing you really disturb the
conversation go, leave us, and join your sister Valentine
in dear grandpapa Noirtier's room."
"The album," said Edward sulkily.
"What do you mean?  the album"
"I want the album."
"How dare you tear out the drawings?"
"Oh, it amuses me."
"Go  go at once."
"I won't go unless you give me the album," said the boy,
seating himself doggedly in an armchair, according to his
habit of never giving way.
"Take it, then, and pray disturb us no longer," said Madame
de Villefort, giving the album to Edward, who then went
towards the door, led by his mother. The count followed her
with his eyes.
"Let us see if she shuts the door after him," he muttered.
Madame de Villefort closed the door carefully after the
child, the count appearing not to notice her then casting a
scrutinizing glance around the chamber, the young wife
returned to her chair, in which she seated herself. "Allow
me to observe, madame," said the count, with that kind tone
he could assume so well, "you are really very severe with
that dear clever child."
"Oh, sometimes severity is quite necessary," replied Madame
de Villefort, with all a mother's real firmness.
"It was his Cornelius Nepos that Master Edward was repeating
when he referred to King Mithridates," continued the count,
"and you interrupted him in a quotation which proves that
his tutor has by no means neglected him, for your son is
really advanced for his years."
"The fact is, count," answered the mother, agreeably
flattered, "he has great aptitude, and learns all that is
set before him. He has but one fault, he is somewhat wilful
but really, on referring for the moment to what he said, do
you truly believe that Mithridates used these precautions,
and that these precautions were efficacious?"
"I think so, madame, because I myself have made use of them,
that I might not be poisoned at Naples, at Palermo, and at
Smyrna  that is to say, on three several occasions when,
but for these precautions, I must have lost my life."
"And your precautions were successful?"
"Completely so."
"Yes, I remember now your mentioning to me at Perugia
something of this sort."
"Indeed?" said the count with an air of surprise, remarkably
well counterfeited "I really did not remember."
"I inquired of you if poisons acted equally, and with the
same effect, on men of the North as on men of the South and
you answered me that the cold and sluggish habits of the
North did not present the same aptitude as the rich and
energetic temperaments of the natives of the South."
"And that is the case," observed Monte Cristo. "I have seen
Russians devour, without being visibly inconvenienced,
vegetable substances which would infallibly have killed a
Neapolitan or an Arab."
"And you really believe the result would be still more sure
with us than in the East, and in the midst of our fogs and
rains a man would habituate himself more easily than in a
warm latitude to this progressive absorption of poison?"
"Certainly it being at the same time perfectly understood
that he should have been duly fortified against the poison
to which he had not been accustomed."
"Yes, I understand that and how would you habituate
yourself, for instance, or rather, how did you habituate
yourself to it?"
"Oh, very easily. Suppose you knew beforehand the poison
that would be made use of against you suppose the poison
was, for instance, brucine" 
"Brucine is extracted from the false angostura is it not?"
inquired Madame de Villefort.
"Precisely, madame," replied Monte Cristo "but I perceive I
have not much to teach you. Allow me to compliment you on
your knowledge such learning is very rare among ladies."
 Brucoea ferruginea.
"Oh, I am aware of that," said Madame de Villefort "but I
have a passion for the occult sciences, which speak to the
imagination like poetry, and are reducible to figures, like
an algebraic equation but go on, I beg of you what you say
interests me to the greatest degree."
"Well," replied Monte Cristo "suppose, then, that this
poison was brucine, and you were to take a milligramme the
first day, two milligrammes the second day, and so on. Well,
at the end of ten days you would have taken a centigramme,
at the end of twenty days, increasing another milligramme,
you would have taken three hundred centigrammes that is to
say, a dose which you would support without inconvenience,
and which would be very dangerous for any other person who
had not taken the same precautions as yourself. Well, then,
at the end of a month, when drinking water from the same
carafe, you would kill the person who drank with you,
without your perceiving, otherwise than from slight
inconvenience, that there was any poisonous substance
mingled with this water."
"Do you know any other counterpoisons?"
"I do not."
"I have often read, and read again, the history of
Mithridates," said Madame de Villefort in a tone of
reflection, "and had always considered it a fable."
"No, madame, contrary to most history, it is true but what
you tell me, madame, what you inquire of me, is not the
result of a chance query, for two years ago you asked me the
same questions, and said then, that for a very long time
this history of Mithridates had occupied your mind."
"True, sir. The two favorite studies of my youth were botany
and mineralogy, and subsequently, when I learned that the
use of simples frequently explained the whole history of a
people, and the entire life of individuals in the East, as
flowers betoken and symbolize a love affair, I have
regretted that I was not a man, that I might have been a
Flamel, a Fontana, or a Cabanis."
"And the more, madame," said Monte Cristo, "as the Orientals
do not confine themselves, as did Mithridates, to make a
cuirass of his poisons, but they also made them a dagger.
Science becomes, in their hands, not only a defensive
weapon, but still more frequently an offensive one the one
serves against all their physical sufferings, the other
against all their enemies. With opium, belladonna, brucaea,
snakewood, and the cherrylaurel, they put to sleep all who
stand in their way. There is not one of those women,
Egyptian, Turkish, or Greek, whom here you call "good
women,' who do not know how, by means of chemistry, to
stupefy a doctor, and in psychology to amaze a confessor."
"Really," said Madame de Villefort, whose eyes sparkled with
strange fire at this conversation.
"Oh, yes, indeed, madame," continued Monte Cristo, "the
secret dramas of the East begin with a love philtre and end
with a death potion  begin with paradise and end with 
hell. There are as many elixirs of every kind as there are
caprices and peculiarities in the physical and moral nature
of humanity and I will say further  the art of these
chemists is capable with the utmost precision to accommodate
and proportion the remedy and the bane to yearnings for love
or desires for vengeance."
"But, sir," remarked the young woman, "these Eastern
societies, in the midst of which you have passed a portion
of your existence, are as fantastic as the tales that come
from their strange land. A man can easily be put out of the
way there, then it is, indeed, the Bagdad and Bassora of
the "Thousand and One Nights.' The sultans and viziers who
rule over society there, and who constitute what in France
we call the government, are really HarounalRaschids and
Giaffars, who not only pardon a poisoner, but even make him
a prime minister, if his crime has been an ingenious one,
and who, under such circumstances, have the whole story
written in letters of gold, to divert their hours of
idleness and ennui."
"By no means, madame the fanciful exists no longer in the
East. There, disguised under other names, and concealed
under other costumes, are police agents, magistrates,
attorneysgeneral, and bailiffs. They hang, behead, and
impale their criminals in the most agreeable possible
manner but some of these, like clever rogues, have
contrived to escape human justice, and succeed in their
fraudulent enterprises by cunning stratagems. Amongst us a
simpleton, possessed by the demon of hate or cupidity, who
has an enemy to destroy, or some near relation to dispose
of, goes straight to the grocer's or druggist's, gives a
false name, which leads more easily to his detection than
his real one, and under the pretext that the rats prevent
him from sleeping, purchases five or six grammes of arsenic
if he is really a cunning fellow, he goes to five or six
different druggists or grocers, and thereby becomes only
five or six times more easily traced  then, when he has
acquired his specific, he administers duly to his enemy, or
near kinsman, a dose of arsenic which would make a mammoth
or mastodon burst, and which, without rhyme or reason, makes
his victim utter groans which alarm the entire neighborhood.
Then arrive a crowd of policemen and constables. They fetch
a doctor, who opens the dead body, and collects from the
entrails and stomach a quantity of arsenic in a spoon. Next
day a hundred newspapers relate the fact, with the names of
the victim and the murderer. The same evening the grocer or
grocers, druggist or druggists, come and say, "It was I who
sold the arsenic to the gentleman' and rather than not
recognize the guilty purchaser, they will recognize twenty.
Then the foolish criminal is taken, imprisoned,
interrogated, confronted, confounded, condemned, and cut off
by hemp or steel or if she be a woman of any consideration,
they lock her up for life. This is the way in which you
Northerns understand chemistry, madame. Desrues was,
however, I must confess, more skilful."
"What would you have, sir?" said the lady, laughing "we do
what we can. All the world has not the secret of the Medicis
or the Borgias."
"Now," replied the count, shrugging his shoulders, "shall I
tell you the cause of all these stupidities? It is because,
at your theatres, by what at least I could judge by reading
the pieces they play, they see persons swallow the contents
of a phial, or suck the button of a ring, and fall dead
instantly. Five minutes afterwards the curtain falls, and
the spectators depart. They are ignorant of the consequences
of the murder they see neither the police commissary with
his badge of office, nor the corporal with his four men and
so the poor fools believe that the whole thing is as easy as
lying. But go a little way from France  go either to
Aleppo or Cairo, or only to Naples or Rome, and you will see
people passing by you in the streets  people erect,
smiling, and freshcolored, of whom Asmodeus, if you were
holding on by the skirt of his mantle, would say, "That man
was poisoned three weeks ago he will be a dead man in a
month.'"
"Then," remarked Madame de Villefort, "they have again
discovered the secret of the famous aquatofana that they
said was lost at Perugia."
"Ah, but madame, does mankind ever lose anything? The arts
change about and make a tour of the world things take a
different name, and the vulgar do not follow them  that is
all but there is always the same result. Poisons act
particularly on some organ or another  one on the stomach,
another on the brain, another on the intestines. Well, the
poison brings on a cough, the cough an inflammation of the
lungs, or some other complaint catalogued in the book of
science, which, however, by no means precludes it from being
decidedly mortal and if it were not, would be sure to
become so, thanks to the remedies applied by foolish
doctors, who are generally bad chemists, and which will act
in favor of or against the malady, as you please and then
there is a human being killed according to all the rules of
art and skill, and of whom justice learns nothing, as was
said by a terrible chemist of my acquaintance, the worthy
Abbe Adelmonte of Taormina, in Sicily, who has studied these
national phenomena very profoundly."
"It is quite frightful, but deeply interesting," said the
young lady, motionless with attention. "I thought, I must
confess, that these tales, were inventions of the Middle
Ages."
"Yes, no doubt, but improved upon by ours. What is the use
of time, rewards of merit, medals, crosses, Monthyon prizes,
if they do not lead society towards more complete
perfection? Yet man will never be perfect until he learns to
create and destroy he does know how to destroy, and that is
half the battle."
"So," added Madame de Villefort, constantly returning to her
object, "the poisons of the Borgias, the Medicis, the Renes,
the Ruggieris, and later, probably, that of Baron de Trenck,
whose story has been so misused by modern drama and romance"
"Were objects of art, madame, and nothing more," replied the
count. "Do you suppose that the real savant addresses
himself stupidly to the mere individual? By no means.
Science loves eccentricities, leaps and bounds, trials of
strength, fancies, if I may be allowed so to term them.
Thus, for instance, the excellent Abbe Adelmonte, of whom I
spoke just now, made in this way some marvellous
experiments."
"Really?"
"Yes I will mention one to you. He had a remarkably fine
garden, full of vegetables, flowers, and fruit. From amongst
these vegetables he selected the most simple  a cabbage,
for instance. For three days he watered this cabbage with a
distillation of arsenic on the third, the cabbage began to
droop and turn yellow. At that moment he cut it. In the eyes
of everybody it seemed fit for table, and preserved its
wholesome appearance. It was only poisoned to the Abbe
Adelmonte. He then took the cabbage to the room where he had
rabbits  for the Abbe Adelmonte had a collection of
rabbits, cats, and guineapigs, fully as fine as his
collection of vegetables, flowers, and fruit. Well, the Abbe
Adelmonte took a rabbit, and made it eat a leaf of the
cabbage. The rabbit died. What magistrate would find, or
even venture to insinuate, anything against this? What
procureur has ever ventured to draw up an accusation against
M. Magendie or M. Flourens, in consequence of the rabbits,
cats, and guineapigs they have killed?  not one. So,
then, the rabbit dies, and justice takes no notice. This
rabbit dead, the Abbe Adelmonte has its entrails taken out
by his cook and thrown on the dunghill on this dunghill is
a hen, who, pecking these intestines, is in her turn taken
ill, and dies next day. At the moment when she is struggling
in the convulsions of death, a vulture is flying by there
are a good many vultures in Adelmonte's country this bird
darts on the dead fowl, and carries it away to a rock, where
it dines off its prey. Three days afterwards, this poor
vulture, which has been very much indisposed since that
dinner, suddenly feels very giddy while flying aloft in the
clouds, and falls heavily into a fishpond. The pike, eels,
and carp eat greedily always, as everybody knows  well,
they feast on the vulture. Now suppose that next day, one of
these eels, or pike, or carp, poisoned at the fourth remove,
is served up at your table. Well, then, your guest will be
poisoned at the fifth remove, and die, at the end of eight
or ten days, of pains in the intestines, sickness, or
abscess of the pylorus. The doctors open the body and say
with an air of profound learning, "The subject has died of a
tumor on the liver, or of typhoid fever'"
"But," remarked Madame de Villefort, "all these
circumstances which you link thus to one another may be
broken by the least accident the vulture may not see the
fowl, or may fall a hundred yards from the fishpond."
"Ah, that is where the art comes in. To be a great chemist
in the East, one must direct chance and this is to be
achieved."  Madame de Villefort was in deep thought, yet
listened attentively. "But," she exclaimed, suddenly,
"arsenic is indelible, indestructible in whatsoever way it
is absorbed, it will be found again in the body of the
victim from the moment when it has been taken in sufficient
quantity to cause death."
"Precisely so," cried Monte Cristo  "precisely so and
this is what I said to my worthy Adelmonte. He reflected,
smiled, and replied to me by a Sicilian proverb, which I
believe is also a French proverb, "My son, the world was not
made in a day  but in seven. Return on Sunday.' On the
Sunday following I did return to him. Instead of having
watered his cabbage with arsenic, he had watered it this
time with a solution of salts, having their basis in
strychnine, strychnos colubrina, as the learned term it.
Now, the cabbage had not the slightest appearance of disease
in the world, and the rabbit had not the smallest distrust
yet, five minutes afterwards, the rabbit was dead. The fowl
pecked at the rabbit, and the next day was a dead hen. This
time we were the vultures so we opened the bird, and this
time all special symptoms had disappeared, there were only
general symptoms. There was no peculiar indication in any
organ  an excitement of the nervous system  that was it
a case of cerebral congestion  nothing more. The fowl had
not been poisoned  she had died of apoplexy. Apoplexy is a
rare disease among fowls, I believe, but very common among
men." Madame de Villefort appeared more and more thoughtful.
"It is very fortunate," she observed, "that such substances
could only be prepared by chemists otherwise, all the world
would be poisoning each other."
"By chemists and persons who have a taste for chemistry,"
said Monte Cristo carelessly.
"And then," said Madame de Villefort, endeavoring by a
struggle, and with effort, to get away from her thoughts,
"however skilfully it is prepared, crime is always crime,
and if it avoid human scrutiny, it does not escape the eye
of God. The Orientals are stronger than we are in cases of
conscience, and, very prudently, have no hell  that is the
point."
"Really, madame, this is a scruple which naturally must
occur to a pure mind like yours, but which would easily
yield before sound reasoning. The bad side of human thought
will always be defined by the paradox of Jean Jacques
Rousseau,  you remember,  the mandarin who is killed
five hundred leagues off by raising the tip of the finger.
Man's whole life passes in doing these things, and his
intellect is exhausted by reflecting on them. You will find
very few persons who will go and brutally thrust a knife in
the heart of a fellowcreature, or will administer to him,
in order to remove him from the surface of the globe on
which we move with life and animation, that quantity of
arsenic of which we just now talked. Such a thing is really
out of rule  eccentric or stupid. To attain such a point,
the blood must be heated to thirtysix degrees, the pulse
be, at least, at ninety, and the feelings excited beyond the
ordinary limit. But suppose one pass, as is permissible in
philology, from the word itself to its softened synonym,
then, instead of committing an ignoble assassination you
make an "elimination' you merely and simply remove from
your path the individual who is in your way, and that
without shock or violence, without the display of the
sufferings which, in the case of becoming a punishment, make
a martyr of the victim, and a butcher, in every sense of the
word, of him who inflicts them. Then there will be no blood,
no groans, no convulsions, and above all, no consciousness
of that horrid and compromising moment of accomplishing the
act,  then one escapes the clutch of the human law, which
says, "Do not disturb society' This is the mode in which
they manage these things, and succeed in Eastern climes,
where there are grave and phlegmatic persons who care very
little for the questions of time in conjunctures of
importance."
"Yet conscience remains," remarked Madame de Villefort in an
agitated voice, and with a stifled sigh.
"Yes," answered Monte Cristo "happily, yes, conscience does
remain and if it did not, how wretched we should be After
every action requiring exertion, it is conscience that saves
us, for it supplies us with a thousand good excuses, of
which we alone are judges and these reasons, howsoever
excellent in producing sleep, would avail us but very little
before a tribunal, when we were tried for our lives. Thus
Richard III., for instance, was marvellously served by his
conscience after the putting away of the two children of
Edward IV. in fact, he could say, "These two children of a
cruel and persecuting king, who have inherited the vices of
their father, which I alone could perceive in their juvenile
propensities  these two children are impediments in my way
of promoting the happiness of the English people, whose
unhappiness they the children would infallibly have
caused.' Thus was Lady Macbeth served by her conscience,
when she sought to give her son, and not her husband
whatever Shakespeare may say, a throne. Ah, maternal love
is a great virtue, a powerful motive  so powerful that it
excuses a multitude of things, even if, after Duncan's
death, Lady Macbeth had been at all pricked by her
conscience."
Madame de Villefort listened with avidity to these appalling
maxims and horrible paradoxes, delivered by the count with
that ironical simplicity which was peculiar to him. After a
moment's silence, the lady inquired, "Do you know, my dear
count," she said, "that you are a very terrible reasoner,
and that you look at the world through a somewhat
distempered medium? Have you really measured the world by
scrutinies, or through alembics and crucibles? For you must
indeed be a great chemist, and the elixir you administered
to my son, which recalled him to life almost
instantaneously" 
"Oh, do not place any reliance on that, madame one drop of
that elixir sufficed to recall life to a dying child, but
three drops would have impelled the blood into his lungs in
such a way as to have produced most violent palpitations
six would have suspended his respiration, and caused syncope
more serious than that in which he was ten would have
destroyed him. You know, madame, how suddenly I snatched him
from those phials which he so imprudently touched?"
"Is it then so terrible a poison?"
"Oh, no. In the first place, let us agree that the word
poison does not exist, because in medicine use is made of
the most violent poisons, which become, according as they
are employed, most salutary remedies."
"What, then, is it?"
"A skilful preparation of my friend's the worthy Abbe
Adelmonte, who taught me the use of it."
"Oh," observed Madame de Villefort, "it must be an admirable
antispasmodic."
"Perfect, madame, as you have seen," replied the count "and
I frequently make use of it  with all possible prudence
though, be it observed," he added with a smile of
intelligence.
"Most assuredly," responded Madame de Villefort in the same
tone. "As for me, so nervous, and so subject to fainting
fits, I should require a Doctor Adelmonte to invent for me
some means of breathing freely and tranquillizing my mind,
in the fear I have of dying some fine day of suffocation. In
the meanwhile, as the thing is difficult to find in France,
and your abbe is not probably disposed to make a journey to
Paris on my account, I must continue to use Monsieur
Planche's antispasmodics and mint and Hoffman's drops are
among my favorite remedies. Here are some lozenges which I
have made up on purpose they are compounded doubly strong."
Monte Cristo opened the tortoiseshell box, which the lady
presented to him, and inhaled the odor of the lozenges with
the air of an amateur who thoroughly appreciated their
composition. "They are indeed exquisite," he said "but as
they are necessarily submitted to the process of deglutition
a function which it is frequently impossible for a
fainting person to accomplish  I prefer my own specific."
"Undoubtedly, and so should I prefer it, after the effects I
have seen produced but of course it is a secret, and I am
not so indiscreet as to ask it of you."
"But I," said Monte Cristo, rising as he spoke  "I am
gallant enough to offer it you."
"How kind you are."
"Only remember one thing  a small dose is a remedy, a
large one is poison. One drop will restore life, as you have
seen five or six will inevitably kill, and in a way the
more terrible inasmuch as, poured into a glass of wine, it
would not in the slightest degree affect its flavor. But I
say no more, madame it is really as if I were prescribing
for you." The clock struck halfpast six, and a lady was
announced, a friend of Madame de Villefort, who came to dine
with her.
"If I had had the honor of seeing you for the third or
fourth time, count, instead of only for the second," said
Madame de Villefort "if I had had the honor of being your
friend, instead of only having the happiness of being under
an obligation to you, I should insist on detaining you to
dinner, and not allow myself to be daunted by a first
refusal."
"A thousand thanks, madame," replied Monte Cristo "but I
have an engagement which I cannot break. I have promised to
escort to the Academie a Greek princess of my acquaintance
who has never seen your grand opera, and who relies on me to
conduct her thither."
"Adieu, then, sir, and do not forget the prescription."
"Ah, in truth, madame, to do that I must forget the hour's
conversation I have had with you, which is indeed
impossible." Monte Cristo bowed, and left the house. Madame
de Villefort remained immersed in thought. "He is a very
strange man," she said, "and in my opinion is himself the
Adelmonte he talks about." As to Monte Cristo the result had
surpassed his utmost expectations. "Good," said he, as he
went away "this is a fruitful soil, and I feel certain that
the seed sown will not be cast on barren ground." Next
morning, faithful to his promise, he sent the prescription
requested.
Chapter 
Robert le Diable.
The pretext of an opera engagement was so much the more
feasible, as there chanced to be on that very night a more
than ordinary attraction at the Academie Royale. Levasseur,
who had been suffering under severe illness, made his
reappearance in the character of Bertrand, and, as usual,
the announcement of the most admired production of the
favorite composer of the day had attracted a brilliant and
fashionable audience. Morcerf, like most other young men of
rank and fortune, had his orchestra stall, with the
certainty of always finding a seat in at least a dozen of
the principal boxes occupied by persons of his acquaintance
he had, moreover, his right of entry into the omnibus box.
ChateauRenaud rented a stall beside his own, while
Beauchamp, as a journalist, had unlimited range all over the
theatre. It happened that on this particular night the
minister's box was placed at the disposal of Lucien Debray,
who offered it to the Comte de Morcerf, who again, upon his
mother's rejection of it, sent it to Danglars, with an
intimation that he should probably do himself the honor of
joining the baroness and her daughter during the evening, in
the event of their accepting the box in question. The ladies
received the offer with too much pleasure to dream of a
refusal. To no class of persons is the presentation of a
gratuitous operabox more acceptable than to the wealthy
millionaire, who still hugs economy while boasting of
carrying a king's ransom in his waistcoat pocket.
Danglars had, however, protested against showing himself in
a ministerial box, declaring that his political principles,
and his parliamentary position as member of the opposition
party would not permit him so to commit himself the
baroness had, therefore, despatched a note to Lucien Debray,
bidding him call for them, it being wholly impossible for
her to go alone with Eugenie to the opera. There is no
gainsaying the fact that a very unfavorable construction
would have been put upon the circumstance if the two women
had gone without escort, while the addition of a third, in
the person of her mother's admitted lover, enabled
Mademoiselle Danglars to defy malice and illnature. One
must take the world as one finds it.
The curtain rose, as usual, to an almost empty house, it
being one of the absurdities of Parisian fashion never to
appear at the opera until after the beginning of the
performance, so that the first act is generally played
without the slightest attention being paid to it, that part
of the audience already assembled being too much occupied in
observing the fresh arrivals, while nothing is heard but the
noise of opening and shutting doors, and the buzz of
conversation. "Surely," said Albert, as the door of a box on
the first circle opened, "that must be the Countess G."
"And who is the Countess G ?" inquired ChateauRenaud.
"What a question Now, do you know, baron, I have a great
mind to pick a quarrel with you for asking it as if all the
world did not know who the Countess G was."
"Ah, to be sure," replied ChateauRenaud "the lovely
Venetian, is it not?"
"Herself." At this moment the countess perceived Albert, and
returned his salutation with a smile. "You know her, it
seems?" said ChateauRenaud.
"Franz introduced me to her at Rome," replied Albert.
"Well, then, will you do as much for me in Paris as Franz
did for you in Rome?"
"With pleasure."
There was a cry of "Shut up" from the audience. This
manifestation on the part of the spectators of their wish to
be allowed to hear the music, produced not the slightest
effect on the two young men, who continued their
conversation. "The countess was present at the races in the
ChampdeMars," said ChateauRenaud.
"Today?"
"Yes."
"Bless me, I quite forgot the races. Did you bet?"
"Oh, merely a paltry fifty louis."
"And who was the winner?"
"Nautilus. I staked on him."
"But there were three races, were there not?"
"Yes there was the prize given by the Jockey Club  a gold
cup, you know  and a very singular circumstance occurred
about that race."
"What was it?"
"Oh, shut up" again interposed some of the audience.
"Why, it was won by a horse and rider utterly unknown on the
course."
"Is that possible?"
"True as day. The fact was, nobody had observed a horse
entered by the name of Vampa, or that of a jockey styled
Job, when, at the last moment, a splendid roan, mounted by a
jockey about as big as your fist, presented themselves at
the startingpost. They were obliged to stuff at least
twenty pounds weight of shot in the small rider's pockets,
to make him weight but with all that he outstripped Ariel
and Barbare, against whom he ran, by at least three whole
lengths."
"And was it not found out at last to whom the horse and
jockey belonged?"
"No."
"You say that the horse was entered under the name of
Vampa?"
"Exactly that was the title."
"Then," answered Albert, "I am better informed than you are,
and know who the owner of that horse was."
"Shut up, there" cried the pit in chorus. And this time the
tone and manner in which the command was given, betokened
such growing hostility that the two young men perceived, for
the first time, that the mandate was addressed to them.
Leisurely turning round, they calmly scrutinized the various
countenances around them, as though demanding some one
person who would take upon himself the responsibility of
what they deemed excessive impertinence but as no one
responded to the challenge, the friends turned again to the
front of the theatre, and affected to busy themselves with
the stage. At this moment the door of the minister's box
opened, and Madame Danglars, accompanied by her daughter,
entered, escorted by Lucien Debray, who assiduously
conducted them to their seats.
"Ha, ha," said ChateauRenaud, "here comes some friends of
yours, viscount What are you looking at there? don't you
see they are trying to catch your eye?" Albert turned round,
just in time to receive a gracious wave of the fan from the
baroness as for Mademoiselle Eugenie, she scarcely
vouchsafed to waste the glances of her large black eyes even
upon the business of the stage. "I tell you what, my dear
fellow," said ChateauRenaud, "I cannot imagine what
objection you can possibly have to Mademoiselle Danglars 
that is, setting aside her want of ancestry and somewhat
inferior rank, which by the way I don't think you care very
much about. Now, barring all that, I mean to say she is a
deuced fine girl"
"Handsome, certainly," replied Albert, "but not to my taste,
which I confess, inclines to something softer, gentler, and
more feminine."
"Ah, well," exclaimed ChateauRenaud, who because he had
seen his thirtieth summer fancied himself duly warranted in
assuming a sort of paternal air with his more youthful
friend, "you young people are never satisfied why, what
would you have more? your parents have chosen you a bride
built on the model of Diana, the huntress, and yet you are
not content."
"No, for that very resemblance affrights me I should have
liked something more in the manner of the Venus of Milo or
Capua but this chaseloving Diana continually surrounded by
her nymphs gives me a sort of alarm lest she should some day
bring on me the fate of Actaeon."
And, indeed, it required but one glance at Mademoiselle
Danglars to comprehend the justness of Morcerf's remark 
she was beautiful, but her beauty was of too marked and
decided a character to please a fastidious taste her hair
was raven black, but its natural waves seemed somewhat
rebellious her eyes, of the same color as her hair, were
surmounted by wellarched brows, whose great defect,
however, consisted in an almost habitual frown, while her
whole physiognomy wore that expression of firmness and
decision so little in accordance with the gentler attributes
of her sex  her nose was precisely what a sculptor would
have chosen for a chiselled Juno. Her mouth, which might
have been found fault with as too large, displayed teeth of
pearly whiteness, rendered still more conspicuous by the
brilliant carmine of her lips, contrasting vividly with her
naturally pale complexion. But that which completed the
almost masculine look Morcerf found so little to his taste,
was a dark mole, of much larger dimensions than these freaks
of nature generally are, placed just at the corner of her
mouth and the effect tended to increase the expression of
selfdependence that characterized her countenance. The rest
of Mademoiselle Eugenie's person was in perfect keeping with
the head just described she, indeed, reminded one of Diana,
as ChateauRenaud observed, but her bearing was more haughty
and resolute. As regarded her attainments, the only fault to
be found with them was the same that a fastidious
connoisseur might have found with her beauty, that they were
somewhat too erudite and masculine for so young a person.
She was a perfect linguist, a firstrate artist, wrote
poetry, and composed music to the study of the latter she
professed to be entirely devoted, following it with an
indefatigable perseverance, assisted by a schoolfellow,  a
young woman without fortune whose talent promised to develop
into remarkable powers as a singer. It was rumored that she
was an object of almost paternal interest to one of the
principal composers of the day, who excited her to spare no
pains in the cultivation of her voice, which might hereafter
prove a source of wealth and independence. But this counsel
effectually decided Mademoiselle Danglars never to commit
herself by being seen in public with one destined for a
theatrical life and acting upon this principle, the
banker's daughter, though perfectly willing to allow
Mademoiselle Louise d'Armilly that was the name of the
young virtuosa to practice with her through the day, took
especial care not to be seen in her company. Still, though
not actually received at the Hotel Danglars in the light of
an acknowledged friend, Louise was treated with far more
kindness and consideration than is usually bestowed on a
governess.
The curtain fell almost immediately after the entrance of
Madame Danglars into her box, the band quitted the orchestra
for the accustomed halfhour's interval allowed between the
acts, and the audience were left at liberty to promenade the
salon or lobbies, or to pay and receive visits in their
respective boxes. Morcerf and ChateauRenaud were amongst
the first to avail themselves of this permission. For an
instant the idea struck Madame Danglars that this eagerness
on the part of the young viscount arose from his impatience
to join her party, and she whispered her expectations to her
daughter, that Albert was hurrying to pay his respects to
them. Mademoiselle Eugenie, however, merely returned a
dissenting movement of the head, while, with a cold smile,
she directed the attention of her mother to an opposite box
on the first circle, in which sat the Countess G , and
where Morcerf had just made his appearance. "So we meet
again, my travelling friend, do we?" cried the countess,
extending her hand to him with all the warmth and cordiality
of an old acquaintance "it was really very good of you to
recognize me so quickly, and still more so to bestow your
first visit on me."
"Be assured," replied Albert, "that if I had been aware of
your arrival in Paris, and had known your address, I should
have paid my respects to you before this. Allow me to
introduce my friend, Baron de ChateauRenaud, one of the few
true gentlemen now to be found in France, and from whom I
have just learned that you were a spectator of the races in
the ChampdeMars, yesterday." ChateauRenaud bowed to the
countess.
"So you were at the races, baron?" inquired the countess
eagerly.
"Yes, madame."
"Well, then," pursued Madame G with considerable
animation, "you can probably tell me who won the Jockey Club
stakes?"
"I am sorry to say I cannot," replied the baron "and I was
just asking the same question of Albert."
"Are you very anxious to know, countess?" asked Albert.
"To know what?"
"The name of the owner of the winning horse?"
"Excessively only imagine  but do tell me, viscount,
whether you really are acquainted with it or no?"
"I beg your pardon, madame, but you were about to relate
some story, were you not? You said, "only imagine,'  and
then paused. Pray continue."
"Well, then, listen. You must know I felt so interested in
the splendid roan horse, with his elegant little rider, so
tastefully dressed in a pink satin jacket and cap, that I
could not help praying for their success with as much
earnestness as though the half of my fortune were at stake
and when I saw them outstrip all the others, and come to the
winningpost in such gallant style, I actually clapped my
hands with joy. Imagine my surprise, when, upon returning
home, the first object I met on the staircase was the
identical jockey in the pink jacket I concluded that, by
some singular chance, the owner of the winning horse must
live in the same hotel as myself but, as I entered my
apartments, I beheld the very gold cup awarded as a prize to
the unknown horse and rider. Inside the cup was a small
piece of paper, on which were written these words  "From
Lord Ruthven to Countess G .'"
"Precisely I was sure of it," said Morcerf.
"Sure of what?"
"That the owner of the horse was Lord Ruthven himself."
"What Lord Ruthven do you mean?"
"Why, our Lord Ruthven  the Vampire of the Salle
Argentino"
"Is it possible?" exclaimed the countess "is he here in
Paris?"
"To be sure,  why not?"
"And you visit him?  meet him at your own house and
elsewhere?"
"I assure you he is my most intimate friend, and M. de
ChateauRenaud has also the honor of his acquaintance."
"But why are you so sure of his being the winner of the
Jockey Club prize?"
"Was not the winning horse entered by the name of Vampa?"
"What of that?"
"Why, do you not recollect the name of the celebrated bandit
by whom I was made prisoner?"
"Oh, yes."
"And from whose hands the count extricated me in so
wonderful a manner?"
"To be sure, I remember it all now."
"He called himself Vampa. You see, it's evident where the
count got the name."
"But what could have been his motive for sending the cup to
me?"
"In the first place, because I had spoken much of you to
him, as you may believe and in the second, because he
delighted to see a countrywoman take so lively an interest
in his success."
"I trust and hope you never repeated to the count all the
foolish remarks we used to make about him?"
"I should not like to affirm upon oath that I have not.
Besides, his presenting you the cup under the name of Lord
Ruthven" 
"Oh, but that is dreadful Why, the man must owe me a
fearful grudge."
"Does his action appear like that of an enemy?"
"No certainly not."
"Well, then" 
"And so he is in Paris?"
"Yes."
"And what effect does he produce?"
"Why," said Albert, "he was talked about for a week then
the coronation of the queen of England took place, followed
by the theft of Mademoiselle Mars's diamonds and so people
talked of something else."
"My good fellow," said ChateauRenaud, "the count is your
friend and you treat him accordingly. Do not believe what
Albert is telling you, countess so far from the sensation
excited in the Parisian circles by the appearance of the
Count of Monte Cristo having abated, I take upon myself to
declare that it is as strong as ever. His first astounding
act upon coming amongst us was to present a pair of horses,
worth , francs, to Madame Danglars his second, the
almost miraculous preservation of Madame de Villefort's
life now it seems that he has carried off the prize awarded
by the Jockey Club. I therefore maintain, in spite of
Morcerf, that not only is the count the object of interest
at this present moment, but also that he will continue to be
so for a month longer if he pleases to exhibit an
eccentricity of conduct which, after all, may be his
ordinary mode of existence."
"Perhaps you are right," said Morcerf "meanwhile, who is in
the Russian ambassador's box?"
"Which box do you mean?" asked the countess.
"The one between the pillars on the first tier  it seems
to have been fitted up entirely afresh."
"Did you observe any one during the first act?" asked
ChateauRenaud.
"Where?"
"In that box."
"No," replied the countess, "it was certainly empty during
the first act" then, resuming the subject of their previous
conversation, she said, "And so you really believe it was
your mysterious Count of Monte Cristo that gained the
prize?"
"I am sure of it."
"And who afterwards sent the cup to me?"
"Undoubtedly."
"But I don't know him," said the countess "I have a great
mind to return it."
"Do no such thing, I beg of you he would only send you
another, formed of a magnificent sapphire, or hollowed out
of a gigantic ruby. It is his way, and you must take him as
you find him." At this moment the bell rang to announce the
drawing up of the curtain for the second act. Albert rose to
return to his place. "Shall I see you again?" asked the
countess. "At the end of the next act, with your permission,
I will come and inquire whether there is anything I can do
for you in Paris?"
"Pray take notice," said the countess, "that my present
residence is  Rue de Rivoli, and that I am at home to my
friends every Saturday evening. So now, you are both
forewarned." The young men bowed, and quitted the box. Upon
reaching their stalls, they found the whole of the audience
in the parterre standing up and directing their gaze towards
the box formerly possessed by the Russian ambassador. A man
of from thirtyfive to forty years of age, dressed in deep
black, had just entered, accompanied by a young woman
dressed after the Eastern style. The lady was surpassingly
beautiful, while the rich magnificence of her attire drew
all eyes upon her. "Hullo," said Albert "it is Monte Cristo
and his Greek"
The strangers were, indeed, no other than the count and
Haidee. In a few moments the young girl had attracted the
attention of the whole house, and even the occupants of the
boxes leaned forward to scrutinize her magnificent diamonds.
The second act passed away during one continued buzz of
voices  one deep whisper  intimating that some great and
universally interesting event had occurred all eyes, all
thoughts, were occupied with the young and beautiful woman,
whose gorgeous apparel and splendid jewels made a most
extraordinary spectacle. Upon this occasion an unmistakable
sign from Madame Danglars intimated her desire to see Albert
in her box directly the curtain fell on the second act, and
neither the politeness nor good taste of Morcerf would
permit his neglecting an invitation so unequivocally given.
At the close of the act he therefore went to the baroness.
Having bowed to the two ladies, he extended his hand to
Debray. By the baroness he was most graciously welcomed,
while Eugenie received him with her accustomed coldness.
"My dear fellow," said Debray, "you have come in the nick of
time. There is madame overwhelming me with questions
respecting the count she insists upon it that I can tell
her his birth, education, and parentage, where he came from,
and whither he is going. Being no disciple of Cagliostro, I
was wholly unable to do this so, by way of getting out of
the scrape, I said, "Ask Morcerf he has got the whole
history of his beloved Monte Cristo at his fingers' ends'
whereupon the baroness signified her desire to see you."
"Is it not almost incredible," said Madame Danglars, "that a
person having at least half a million of secretservice
money at his command, should possess so little information?"
"Let me assure you, madame," said Lucien, "that had I really
the sum you mention at my disposal, I would employ it more
profitably than in troubling myself to obtain particulars
respecting the Count of Monte Cristo, whose only merit in my
eyes consists in his being twice as rich as a nabob.
However, I have turned the business over to Morcerf, so pray
settle it with him as may be most agreeable to you for my
own part, I care nothing about the count or his mysterious
doings."
"I am very sure no nabob would have sent me a pair of horses
worth , francs, wearing on their heads four diamonds
valued at , francs each."
"He seems to have a mania for diamonds," said Morcerf,
smiling, "and I verily believe that, like Potemkin, he keeps
his pockets filled, for the sake of strewing them along the
road, as Tom Thumb did his flint stones."
"Perhaps he has discovered some mine," said Madame Danglars.
"I suppose you know he has an order for unlimited credit on
the baron's banking establishment?"
"I was not aware of it," replied Albert, "but I can readily
believe it."
"And, further, that he stated to M. Danglars his intention
of only staying a year in Paris, during which time he
proposed to spend six millions.
"He must be the Shah of Persia, travelling incog."
"Have you noticed the remarkable beauty of the young woman,
M. Lucien?" inquired Eugenie.
"I really never met with one woman so ready to do justice to
the charms of another as yourself," responded Lucien,
raising his lorgnette to his eye. "A most lovely creature,
upon my soul" was his verdict.
"Who is this young person, M. de Morcerf?" inquired Eugenie
"does anybody know?"
"Mademoiselle," said Albert, replying to this direct appeal,
"I can give you very exact information on that subject, as
well as on most points relative to the mysterious person of
whom we are now conversing  the young woman is a Greek."
"So I should suppose by her dress if you know no more than
that, every one here is as wellinformed as yourself."
"I am extremely sorry you find me so ignorant a cicerone,"
replied Morcerf, "but I am reluctantly obliged to confess, I
have nothing further to communicate  yes, stay, I do know
one thing more, namely, that she is a musician, for one day
when I chanced to be breakfasting with the count, I heard
the sound of a guzla  it is impossible that it could have
been touched by any other finger than her own."
"Then your count entertains visitors, does he?" asked Madame
Danglars.
"Indeed he does, and in a most lavish manner, I can assure
you."
"I must try and persuade M. Danglars to invite him to a ball
or dinner, or something of the sort, that he may be
compelled to ask us in return."
"What," said Debray, laughing "do you really mean you would
go to his house?"
"Why not? my husband could accompany me."
"But do you know this mysterious count is a bachelor?"
"You have ample proof to the contrary, if you look
opposite," said the baroness, as she laughingly pointed to
the beautiful Greek.
"No, no" exclaimed Debray "that girl is not his wife he
told us himself she was his slave. Do you not recollect,
Morcerf, his telling us so at your breakfast?"
"Well, then," said the baroness, "if slave she be, she has
all the air and manner of a princess."
"Of the "Arabian Nights'?"
"If you like but tell me, my dear Lucien, what it is that
constitutes a princess. Why, diamonds  and she is covered
with them."
"To me she seems overloaded," observed Eugenie "she would
look far better if she wore fewer, and we should then be
able to see her finely formed throat and wrists."
"See how the artist peeps out" exclaimed Madame Danglars.
"My poor Eugenie, you must conceal your passion for the fine
arts."
"I admire all that is beautiful," returned the young lady.
"What do you think of the count?" inquired Debray "he is
not much amiss, according to my ideas of good looks."
"The count," repeated Eugenie, as though it had not occurred
to her to observe him sooner "the count?  oh, he is so
dreadfully pale."
"I quite agree with you," said Morcerf "and the secret of
that very pallor is what we want to find out. The Countess
G insists upon it that he is a vampire."
"Then the Countess G has returned to Paris, has she?"
inquired the baroness.
"Is that she, mamma?" asked Eugenie "almost opposite to us,
with that profusion of beautiful light hair?"
"Yes," said Madame Danglars, "that is she. Shall I tell you
what you ought to do, Morcerf?"
"Command me, madame."
"Well, then, you should go and bring your Count of Monte
Cristo to us."
"What for?" asked Eugenie.
"What for? Why, to converse with him, of course. Have you
really no desire to meet him?"
"None whatever," replied Eugenie.
"Strange child," murmured the baroness.
"He will very probably come of his own accord," said
Morcerf. "There do you see, madame, he recognizes you, and
bows." The baroness returned the salute in the most smiling
and graceful manner.
"Well," said Morcerf, "I may as well be magnanimous, and
tear myself away to forward your wishes. Adieu I will go
and try if there are any means of speaking to him."
"Go straight to his box that will be the simplest plan."
"But I have never been presented."
"Presented to whom?"
"To the beautiful Greek."
"You say she is only a slave?"
"While you assert that she is a queen, or at least a
princess. No I hope that when he sees me leave you, he will
come out."
"That is possible  go."
"I am going," said Albert, as he made his parting bow. Just
as he was passing the count's box, the door opened, and
Monte Cristo came forth. After giving some directions to
Ali, who stood in the lobby, the count took Albert's arm.
Carefully closing the box door, Ali placed himself before
it, while a crowd of spectators assembled round the Nubian.
"Upon my word," said Monte Cristo, "Paris is a strange city,
and the Parisians a very singular people. See that cluster
of persons collected around poor Ali, who is as much
astonished as themselves really one might suppose he was
the only Nubian they had ever beheld. Now I can promise you,
that a Frenchman might show himself in public, either in
Tunis, Constantinople, Bagdad, or Cairo, without being
treated in that way."
"That shows that the Eastern nations have too much good
sense to waste their time and attention on objects
undeserving of either. However, as far as Ali is concerned,
I can assure you, the interest he excites is merely from the
circumstance of his being your attendant  you, who are at
this moment the most celebrated and fashionable person in
Paris."
"Really? and what has procured me so fluttering a
distinction?"
"What? why, yourself, to be sure You give away horses worth
a thousand louis you save the lives of ladies of high rank
and beauty under the name of Major Brack you run
thoroughbreds ridden by tiny urchins not larger than
marmots then, when you have carried off the golden trophy
of victory, instead of setting any value on it, you give it
to the first handsome woman you think of"
"And who has filled your head with all this nonsense?"
"Why, in the first place, I heard it from Madame Danglars,
who, by the by, is dying to see you in her box, or to have
you seen there by others secondly, I learned it from
Beauchamp's journal and thirdly, from my own imagination.
Why, if you sought concealment, did you call your horse
Vampa?"
"That was an oversight, certainly," replied the count "but
tell me, does the Count of Morcerf never visit the Opera? I
have been looking for him, but without success."
"He will be here tonight."
"In what part of the house?"
"In the baroness's box, I believe."
"That charming young woman with her is her daughter?"
"Yes."
"I congratulate you." Morcerf smiled. "We will discuss that
subject at length some future time," said he. "But what do
you think of the music?"
"What music?"
"Why, the music you have been listening to."
"Oh, it is well enough as the production of a human
composer, sung by featherless bipeds, to quote the late
Diogenes."
"From which it would seem, my dear count, that you can at
pleasure enjoy the seraphic strains that proceed from the
seven choirs of paradise?"
"You are right, in some degree when I wish to listen to
sounds more exquisitely attuned to melody than mortal ear
ever yet listened to, I go to sleep."
"Then sleep here, my dear count. The conditions are
favorable what else was opera invented for?"
"No, thank you. Your orchestra is too noisy. To sleep after
the manner I speak of, absolute calm and silence are
necessary, and then a certain preparation" 
"I know  the famous hashish"
"Precisely. So, my dear viscount, whenever you wish to be
regaled with music come and sup with me."
"I have already enjoyed that treat when breakfasting with
you," said Morcerf.
"Do you mean at Rome?"
"I do."
"Ah, then, I suppose you heard Haidee's guzla the poor
exile frequently beguiles a weary hour in playing over to me
the airs of her native land." Morcerf did not pursue the
subject, and Monte Cristo himself fell into a silent
reverie. The bell rang at this moment for the rising of the
curtain. "You will excuse my leaving you," said the count,
turning in the direction of his box.
"What? Are you going?"
"Pray, say everything that is kind to Countess G on the
part of her friend the Vampire."
"And what message shall I convey to the baroness"
"That, with her permission, I shall do myself the honor of
paying my respects in the course of the evening."
The third act had begun and during its progress the Count
of Morcerf, according to his promise, made his appearance in
the box of Madame Danglars. The Count of Morcerf was not a
person to excite either interest or curiosity in a place of
public amusement his presence, therefore, was wholly
unnoticed, save by the occupants of the box in which he had
just seated himself. The quick eye of Monte Cristo however,
marked his coming and a slight though meaning smile passed
over his lips. Haidee, whose soul seemed centred in the
business of the stage, like all unsophisticated natures,
delighted in whatever addressed itself to the eye or ear.
The third act passed off as usual. Mesdemoiselles Noblet,
Julie, and Leroux executed the customary pirouettes Robert
duly challenged the Prince of Granada and the royal father
of the princess Isabella, taking his daughter by the hand,
swept round the stage with majestic strides, the better to
display the rich folds of his velvet robe and mantle. After
which the curtain again fell, and the spectators poured
forth from the theatre into the lobbies and salon. The count
left his box, and a moment later was saluting the Baronne
Danglars, who could not restrain a cry of mingled pleasure
and surprise. "You are welcome, count" she exclaimed, as he
entered. "I have been most anxious to see you, that I might
repeat orally the thanks writing can so ill express."
"Surely so trifling a circumstance cannot deserve a place in
your remembrance. Believe me, madame, I had entirely
forgotten it."
"But it is not so easy to forget, monsieur, that the very
next day after your princely gift you saved the life of my
dear friend, Madame de Villefort, which was endangered by
the very animals your generosity restored to me."
"This time, at least, I do not deserve your thanks. It was
Ali, my Nubian slave, who rendered this service to Madame de
Villefort."
"Was it Ali," asked the Count of Morcerf, "who rescued my
son from the hands of bandits?"
"No, count," replied Monte Cristo taking the hand held out
to him by the general "in this instance I may fairly and
freely accept your thanks but you have already tendered
them, and fully discharged your debt  if indeed there
existed one  and I feel almost mortified to find you still
reverting to the subject. May I beg of you, baroness, to
honor me with an introduction to your daughter?"
"Oh, you are no stranger  at least not by name," replied
Madame Danglars, "and the last two or three days we have
really talked of nothing but you. Eugenie," continued the
baroness, turning towards her daughter, "this is the Count
of Monte Cristo." The Count bowed, while Mademoiselle
Danglars bent her head slightly. "You have a charming young
person with you tonight, count," said Eugenie. "Is she your
daughter?"
"No, mademoiselle," said Monte Cristo, astonished at the
coolness and freedom of the question. "She is a poor
unfortunate Greek left under my care."
"And what is her name?"
"Haidee," replied Monte Cristo.
"A Greek?" murmured the Count of Morcerf.
"Yes, indeed, count," said Madame Danglars "and tell me,
did you ever see at the court of Ali Tepelini, whom you so
gloriously and valiantly served, a more exquisite beauty or
richer costume?"
"Did I hear rightly, monsieur," said Monte Cristo "that you
served at Yanina?"
"I was inspectorgeneral of the pasha's troops," replied
Morcerf "and it is no secret that I owe my fortune, such as
it is, to the liberality of the illustrious Albanese chief."
"But look" exclaimed Madame Danglars.
"Where?" stammered Morcerf.
"There," said Monte Cristo placing his arms around the
count, and leaning with him over the front of the box, just
as Haidee, whose eyes were occupied in examining the theatre
in search of her guardian, perceived his pale features close
to Morcerf's face. It was as if the young girl beheld the
head of Medusa. She bent forwards as though to assure
herself of the reality of what she saw, then, uttering a
faint cry, threw herself back in her seat. The sound was
heard by the people about Ali, who instantly opened the
boxdoor. "Why, count," exclaimed Eugenie, "what has
happened to your ward? she seems to have been taken suddenly
ill."
"Very probably," answered the count. "But do not be alarmed
on her account. Haidee's nervous system is delicately
organized, and she is peculiarly susceptible to the odors
even of flowers  nay, there are some which cause her to
faint if brought into her presence. However," continued
Monte Cristo, drawing a small phial from his pocket, "I have
an infallible remedy." So saying, he bowed to the baroness
and her daughter, exchanged a parting shake of the hand with
Debray and the count, and left Madame Danglars' box. Upon
his return to Haidee he found her still very pale. As soon
as she saw him she seized his hand her own hands were moist
and icy cold. "Who was it you were talking with over there?"
she asked.
"With the Count of Morcerf," answered Monte Cristo. "He
tells me he served your illustrious father, and that he owes
his fortune to him."
"Wretch" exclaimed Haidee, her eyes flashing with rage "he
sold my father to the Turks, and the fortune he boasts of
was the price of his treachery Did not you know that, my
dear lord?"
"Something of this I heard in Epirus," said Monte Cristo
"but the particulars are still unknown to me. You shall
relate them to me, my child. They are, no doubt, both
curious and interesting."
"Yes, yes but let us go. I feel as though it would kill me
to remain long near that dreadful man." So saying, Haidee
arose, and wrapping herself in her burnoose of white
cashmire embroidered with pearls and coral, she hastily
quitted the box at the moment when the curtain was rising
upon the fourth act.
"Do you observe," said the Countess G to Albert, who
had returned to her side, "that man does nothing like other
people he listens most devoutly to the third act of "Robert
le Diable,' and when the fourth begins, takes his
departure."
Chapter 
A Flurry in Stocks.
Some days after this meeting, Albert de Morcerf visited the
Count of Monte Cristo at his house in the Champs Elysees,
which had already assumed that palacelike appearance which
the count's princely fortune enabled him to give even to his
most temporary residences. He came to renew the thanks of
Madame Danglars which had been already conveyed to the count
through the medium of a letter, signed "Baronne Danglars,
nee Hermine de Servieux." Albert was accompanied by Lucien
Debray, who, joining in his friend's conversation, added
some passing compliments, the source of which the count's
talent for finesse easily enabled him to guess. He was
convinced that Lucien's visit was due to a double feeling of
curiosity, the larger half of which sentiment emanated from
the Rue de la Chaussee d'Antin. In short, Madame Danglars,
not being able personally to examine in detail the domestic
economy and household arrangements of a man who gave away
horses worth , francs and who went to the opera with a
Greek slave wearing diamonds to the amount of a million of
money, had deputed those eyes, by which she was accustomed
to see, to give her a faithful account of the mode of life
of this incomprehensible person. But the count did not
appear to suspect that there could be the slightest
connection between Lucien's visit and the curiosity of the
baroness.
"You are in constant communication with the Baron Danglars?"
the count inquired of Albert de Morcerf.
"Yes, count, you know what I told you?"
"All remains the same, then, in that quarter?"
"It is more than ever a settled thing," said Lucien,  and,
considering that this remark was all that he was at that
time called upon to make, he adjusted the glass to his eye,
and biting the top of his gold headed cane, began to make
the tour of the apartment, examining the arms and the
pictures.
"Ah," said Monte Cristo "I did not expect that the affair
would be so promptly concluded."
"Oh, things take their course without our assistance. While
we are forgetting them, they are falling into their
appointed order and when, again, our attention is directed
to them, we are surprised at the progress they have made
towards the proposed end. My father and M. Danglars served
together in Spain, my father in the army and M. Danglars in
the commissariat department. It was there that my father,
ruined by the revolution, and M. Danglars, who never had
possessed any patrimony, both laid the foundations of their
different fortunes."
"Yes," said Monte Cristo "I think M. Danglars mentioned that
in a visit which I paid him and," continued he, casting a
sideglance at Lucien, who was turning over the leaves of an
album, "Mademoiselle Eugenie is pretty  I think I remember
that to be her name."
"Very pretty, or rather, very beautiful," replied Albert,
"but of that style of beauty which I do not appreciate I am
an ungrateful fellow."
"You speak as if you were already her husband."
"Ah," returned Albert, in his turn looking around to see
what Lucien was doing.
"Really," said Monte Cristo, lowering his voice, "you do not
appear to me to be very enthusiastic on the subject of this
marriage."
"Mademoiselle Danglars is too rich for me," replied Morcerf,
"and that frightens me."
"Bah," exclaimed Monte Cristo, "that's a fine reason to
give. Are you not rich yourself?"
"My father's income is about , francs per annum and he
will give me, perhaps, ten or twelve thousand when I marry."
"That, perhaps, might not be considered a large sum, in
Paris especially," said the count "but everything does not
depend on wealth, and it is a fine thing to have a good
name, and to occupy a high station in society. Your name is
celebrated, your position magnificent and then the Comte de
Morcerf is a soldier, and it is pleasing to see the
integrity of a Bayard united to the poverty of a Duguesclin
disinterestedness is the brightest ray in which a noble
sword can shine. As for me, I consider the union with
Mademoiselle Danglars a most suitable one she will enrich
you, and you will ennoble her." Albert shook his head, and
looked thoughtful. "There is still something else," said he.
"I confess," observed Monte Cristo, "that I have some
difficulty in comprehending your objection to a young lady
who is both rich and beautiful."
"Oh," said Morcerf, "this repugnance, if repugnance it may
be called, is not all on my side."
"Whence can it arise, then? for you told me your father
desired the marriage."
"It is my mother who dissents she has a clear and
penetrating judgment, and does not smile on the proposed
union. I cannot account for it, but she seems to entertain
some prejudice against the Danglars."
"Ah," said the count, in a somewhat forced tone, "that may
be easily explained the Comtesse de Morcerf, who is
aristocracy and refinement itself, does not relish the idea
of being allied by your marriage with one of ignoble birth
that is natural enough."
"I do not know if that is her reason," said Albert, "but one
thing I do know, that if this marriage be consummated, it
will render her quite miserable. There was to have been a
meeting six weeks ago in order to talk over and settle the
affair but I had such a sudden attack of indisposition" 
"Real?" interrupted the count, smiling.
"Oh, real enough, from anxiety doubtless,  at any rate
they postponed the matter for two months. There is no hurry,
you know. I am not yet twentyone, and Eugenie is only
seventeen but the two months expire next week. It must be
done. My dear count, you cannot imagine how my mind is
harassed. How happy you are in being exempt from all this"
"Well, and why should not you be free, too? What prevents
you from being so?"
"Oh, it will be too great a disappointment to my father if I
do not marry Mademoiselle Danglars."
"Marry her then," said the count, with a significant shrug
of the shoulders.
"Yes," replied Morcerf, "but that will plunge my mother into
positive grief."
"Then do not marry her," said the count.
"Well, I shall see. I will try and think over what is the
best thing to be done you will give me your advice, will
you not, and if possible extricate me from my unpleasant
position? I think, rather than give pain to my dear mother,
I would run the risk of offending the count." Monte Cristo
turned away he seemed moved by this last remark. "Ah," said
he to Debray, who had thrown himself into an easychair at
the farthest extremity of the salon, and who held a pencil
in his right hand and an account book in his left, "what are
you doing there? Are you making a sketch after Poussin?"
"Oh, no," was the tranquil response "I am too fond of art
to attempt anything of that sort. I am doing a little sum in
arithmetic."
"In arithmetic?"
"Yes I am calculating  by the way, Morcerf, that
indirectly concerns you  I am calculating what the house
of Danglars must have gained by the last rise in Haiti
bonds from  they have risen to  in three days, and
the prudent banker had purchased at  therefore he must
have made , livres."
"That is not his biggest scoop," said Morcerf "did he not
make a million in Spaniards this last year?"
"My dear fellow," said Lucien, "here is the Count of Monte
Cristo, who will say to you, as the Italians do, 
""Danaro e santita,
Meta della meta.'
 "Money and sanctity,
Each in a moiety.
"When they tell me such things, I only shrug my shoulders
and say nothing."
"But you were speaking of Haitians?" said Monte Cristo.
"Ah, Haitians,  that is quite another thing Haitians are
the ecarte of French stockjobbing. We may like bouillotte,
delight in whist, be enraptured with boston, and yet grow
tired of them all but we always come back to ecarte  it
is not only a game, it is a horsd'oeuvre M. Danglars sold
yesterday at , and pockets , francs. Had he but
waited till today, the price would have fallen to , and
instead of gaining , francs, he would have lost  or
"And what has caused the sudden fall from  to ?" asked
Monte Cristo. "I am profoundly ignorant of all these
stockjobbing intrigues."
"Because," said Albert, laughing, "one piece of news follows
another, and there is often great dissimilarity between
them."
"Ah," said the count, "I see that M. Danglars is accustomed
to play at gaining or losing , francs in a day he
must be enormously rich."
"It is not he who plays" exclaimed Lucien "it is Madame
Danglars she is indeed daring."
"But you who are a reasonable being, Lucien, and who know
how little dependence is to be placed on the news, since you
are at the fountainhead, surely you ought to prevent it,"
said Morcerf, with a smile.
"How can I, if her husband fails in controlling her?" asked
Lucien "you know the character of the baroness  no one
has any influence with her, and she does precisely what she
pleases."
"Ah, if I were in your place"  said Albert.
"Well?"
"I would reform her it would be rendering a service to her
future soninlaw."
"How would you set about it?"
"Ah, that would be easy enough  I would give her a
lesson."
"A lesson?"
"Yes. Your position as secretary to the minister renders
your authority great on the subject of political news you
never open your mouth but the stockbrokers immediately
stenograph your words. Cause her to lose a hundred thousand
francs, and that would teach her prudence."
"I do not understand," stammered Lucien.
"It is very clear, notwithstanding," replied the young man,
with an artlessness wholly free from affectation "tell her
some fine morning an unheardof piece of intelligence 
some telegraphic despatch, of which you alone are in
possession for instance, that Henri IV. was seen yesterday
at Gabrielle's. That would boom the market she will buy
heavily, and she will certainly lose when Beauchamp
announces the following day, in his gazette, "The report
circulated by some usually wellinformed persons that the
king was seen yesterday at Gabrielle's house, is totally
without foundation. We can positively assert that his
majesty did not quit the PontNeuf.'" Lucien half smiled.
Monte Cristo, although apparently indifferent, had not lost
one word of this conversation, and his penetrating eye had
even read a hidden secret in the embarrassed manner of the
secretary. This embarrassment had completely escaped Albert,
but it caused Lucien to shorten his visit he was evidently
ill at ease. The count, in taking leave of him, said
something in a low voice, to which he answered, "Willingly,
count I accept." The count returned to young Morcerf.
"Do you not think, on reflection," said he to him, "that you
have done wrong in thus speaking of your motherinlaw in
the presence of M. Debray?"
"My dear count," said Morcerf, "I beg of you not to apply
that title so prematurely."
"Now, speaking without any exaggeration, is your mother
really so very much averse to this marriage?"
"So much so that the baroness very rarely comes to the
house, and my mother, has not, I think, visited Madame
Danglars twice in her whole life."
"Then," said the count, "I am emboldened to speak openly to
you. M. Danglars is my banker M. de Villefort has
overwhelmed me with politeness in return for a service which
a casual piece of good fortune enabled me to render him. I
predict from all this an avalanche of dinners and routs.
Now, in order not to presume on this, and also to be
beforehand with them, I have, if agreeable to you, thought
of inviting M. and Madame Danglars, and M. and Madame de
Villefort, to my countryhouse at Auteuil. If I were to
invite you and the Count and Countess of Morcerf to this
dinner, I should give it the appearance of being a
matrimonial meeting, or at least Madame de Morcerf would
look upon the affair in that light, especially if Baron
Danglars did me the honor to bring his daughter. In that
case your mother would hold me in aversion, and I do not at
all wish that on the contrary, I desire to stand high in
her esteem."
"Indeed, count," said Morcerf, "I thank you sincerely for
having used so much candor towards me, and I gratefully
accept the exclusion which you propose. You say you desire
my mother's good opinion I assure you it is already yours
to a very unusual extent."
"Do you think so?" said Monte Cristo, with interest.
"Oh, I am sure of it we talked of you an hour after you
left us the other day. But to return to what we were saying.
If my mother could know of this attention on your part 
and I will venture to tell her  I am sure that she will be
most grateful to you it is true that my father will be
equally angry." The count laughed. "Well," said he to
Morcerf, "but I think your father will not be the only angry
one M. and Madame Danglars will think me a very
illmannered person. They know that I am intimate with you
that you are, in fact one of the oldest of my Parisian
acquaintances  and they will not find you at my house
they will certainly ask me why I did not invite you. Be sure
to provide yourself with some previous engagement which
shall have a semblance of probability, and communicate the
fact to me by a line in writing. You know that with bankers
nothing but a written document will be valid."
"I will do better than that," said Albert "my mother is
wishing to go to the seaside  what day is fixed for your
dinner?"
"Saturday."
"This is Tuesday  well, tomorrow evening we leave, and
the day after we shall be at Treport. Really, count, you
have a delightful way of setting people at their ease."
"Indeed, you give me more credit than I deserve I only wish
to do what will be agreeable to you, that is all."
"When shall you send your invitations?"
"This very day."
"Well, I will immediately call on M. Danglars, and tell him
that my mother and myself must leave Paris tomorrow. I have
not seen you, consequently I know nothing of your dinner."
"How foolish you are Have you forgotten that M. Debray has
just seen you at my house?"
"Ah, true,"
"Fix it this way. I have seen you, and invited you without
any ceremony, when you instantly answered that it would be
impossible for you to accept, as you were going to Treport."
"Well, then, that is settled but you will come and call on
my mother before tomorrow?"
"Before tomorrow?  that will be a difficult matter to
arrange, besides, I shall just be in the way of all the
preparations for departure."
"Well, you can do better. You were only a charming man
before, but, if you accede to my proposal, you will be
adorable."
"What must I do to attain such sublimity?"
"You are today free as air  come and dine with me we
shall be a small party  only yourself, my mother, and I.
You have scarcely seen my mother you shall have an
opportunity of observing her more closely. She is a
remarkable woman, and I only regret that there does not
exist another like her, about twenty years younger in that
case, I assure you, there would very soon be a Countess and
Viscountess of Morcerf. As to my father, you will not see
him he is officially engaged, and dines with the chief
referendary. We will talk over our travels and you, who
have seen the whole world, will relate your adventures 
you shall tell us the history of the beautiful Greek who was
with you the other night at the Opera, and whom you call
your slave, and yet treat like a princess. We will talk
Italian and Spanish. Come, accept my invitation, and my
mother will thank you."
"A thousand thanks," said the count, "your invitation is
most gracious, and I regret exceedingly that it is not in my
power to accept it. I am not so much at liberty as you
suppose on the contrary, I have a most important
engagement."
"Ah, take care, you were teaching me just now how, in case
of an invitation to dinner, one might creditably make an
excuse. I require the proof of a preengagement. I am not a
banker, like M. Danglars, but I am quite as incredulous as
he is."
"I am going to give you a proof," replied the count, and he
rang the bell.
"Humph," said Morcerf, "this is the second time you have
refused to dine with my mother it is evident that you wish
to avoid her." Monte Cristo started. "Oh, you do not mean
that," said he "besides, here comes the confirmation of my
assertion." Baptistin entered, and remained standing at the
door. "I had no previous knowledge of your visit, had I?"
"Indeed, you are such an extraordinary person, that I would
not answer for it."
"At all events, I could not guess that you would invite me
to dinner."
"Probably not."
"Well, listen, Baptistin, what did I tell you this morning
when I called you into my laboratory?"
"To close the door against visitors as soon as the clock
struck five," replied the valet.
"What then?"
"Ah, my dear count," said Albert.
"No, no, I wish to do away with that mysterious reputation
that you have given me, my dear viscount it is tiresome to
be always acting Manfred. I wish my life to be free and
open. Go on, Baptistin."
"Then to admit no one except Major Bartolomeo Cavalcanti and
his son."
"You hear  Major Bartolomeo Cavalcanti  a man who ranks
amongst the most ancient nobility of Italy, whose name Dante
has celebrated in the tenth canto of "The Inferno,' you
remember it, do you not? Then there is his son, Andrea, a
charming young man, about your own age, viscount, bearing
the same title as yourself, and who is making his entry into
the Parisian world, aided by his father's millions. The
major will bring his son with him this evening, the contino,
as we say in Italy he confides him to my care. If he proves
himself worthy of it, I will do what I can to advance his
interests. You will assist me in the work, will you not?"
"Most undoubtedly. This Major Cavalcanti is an old friend of
yours, then?"
"By no means. He is a perfect nobleman, very polite, modest,
and agreeable, such as may be found constantly in Italy,
descendants of very ancient families. I have met him several
times at Florence, Bologna and Lucca, and he has now
communicated to me the fact of his arrival in Paris. The
acquaintances one makes in travelling have a sort of claim
on one they everywhere expect to receive the same attention
which you once paid them by chance, as though the civilities
of a passing hour were likely to awaken any lasting interest
in favor of the man in whose society you may happen to be
thrown in the course of your journey. This good Major
Cavalcanti is come to take a second view of Paris, which he
only saw in passing through in the time of the Empire, when
he was on his way to Moscow. I shall give him a good dinner,
he will confide his son to my care, I will promise to watch
over him, I shall let him follow in whatever path his folly
may lead him, and then I shall have done my part."
"Certainly I see you are a model Mentor," said Albert
"Goodby, we shall return on Sunday. By the way, I have
received news of Franz."
"Have you? Is he still amusing himself in Italy?"
"I believe so however, he regrets your absence extremely.
He says you were the sun of Rome, and that without you all
appears dark and cloudy I do not know if he does not even
go so far as to say that it rains."
"His opinion of me is altered for the better, then?"
"No, he still persists in looking upon you as the most
incomprehensible and mysterious of beings."
"He is a charming young man," said Monte Cristo "and I felt
a lively interest in him the very first evening of my
introduction, when I met him in search of a supper, and
prevailed upon him to accept a portion of mine. He is, I
think, the son of General d'Epinay?"
"He is."
"The same who was so shamefully assassinated in ?"
"By the Bonapartists."
"Yes. Really I like him extremely is there not also a
matrimonial engagement contemplated for him?"
"Yes, he is to marry Mademoiselle de Villefort."
"Indeed?"
"And you know I am to marry Mademoiselle Danglars," said
Albert, laughing.
"You smile."
"Yes."
"Why do you do so?"
"I smile because there appears to me to be about as much
inclination for the consummation of the engagement in
question as there is for my own. But really, my dear count,
we are talking as much of women as they do of us it is
unpardonable." Albert rose.
"Are you going?"
"Really, that is a good idea  two hours have I been
boring you to death with my company, and then you, with the
greatest politeness, ask me if I am going. Indeed, count,
you are the most polished man in the world. And your
servants, too, how very well behaved they are there is
quite a style about them. Monsieur Baptistin especially I
could never get such a man as that. My servants seem to
imitate those you sometimes see in a play, who, because they
have only a word or two to say, aquit themselves in the most
awkward manner possible. Therefore, if you part with M.
Baptistin, give me the refusal of him."
"By all means."
"That is not all give my compliments to your illustrious
Luccanese, Cavalcante of the Cavalcanti and if by any
chance he should be wishing to establish his son, find him a
wife very rich, very noble on her mother's side at least,
and a baroness in right of her father, I will help you in
the search."
"Ah, ha you will do as much as that, will you?"
"Yes."
"Well, really, nothing is certain in this world."
"Oh, count, what a service you might render me I should
like you a hundred times better if, by your intervention, I
could manage to remain a bachelor, even were it only for ten
years."
"Nothing is impossible," gravely replied Monte Cristo and
taking leave of Albert, he returned into the house, and
struck the gong three times. Bertuccio appeared. "Monsieur
Bertuccio, you understand that I intend entertaining company
on Saturday at Auteuil." Bertuccio slightly started. "I
shall require your services to see that all be properly
arranged. It is a beautiful house, or at all events may be
made so."
"There must be a good deal done before it can deserve that
title, your excellency, for the tapestried hangings are very
old."
"Let them all be taken away and changed, then, with the
exception of the sleepingchamber which is hung with red
damask you will leave that exactly as it is." Bertuccio
bowed. "You will not touch the garden either as to the
yard, you may do what you please with it I should prefer
that being altered beyond all recognition."
"I will do everything in my power to carry out your wishes,
your excellency. I should be glad, however, to receive your
excellency's commands concerning the dinner."
"Really, my dear M. Bertuccio," said the count, "since you
have been in Paris, you have become quite nervous, and
apparently out of your element you no longer seem to
understand me."
"But surely your excellency will be so good as to inform me
whom you are expecting to receive?"
"I do not yet know myself, neither is it necessary that you
should do so. "Lucullus dines with Lucullus,' that is quite
sufficient." Bertuccio bowed, and left the room.
Chapter 
Major Cavalcanti.
Both the count and Baptistin had told the truth when they
announced to Morcerf the proposed visit of the major, which
had served Monte Cristo as a pretext for declining Albert's
invitation. Seven o'clock had just struck, and M. Bertuccio,
according to the command which had been given him, had two
hours before left for Auteuil, when a cab stopped at the
door, and after depositing its occupant at the gate,
immediately hurried away, as if ashamed of its employment.
The visitor was about fiftytwo years of age, dressed in one
of the green surtouts, ornamented with black frogs, which
have so long maintained their popularity all over Europe. He
wore trousers of blue cloth, boots tolerably clean, but not
of the brightest polish, and a little too thick in the
soles, buckskin gloves, a hat somewhat resembling in shape
those usually worn by the gendarmes, and a black cravat
striped with white, which, if the proprietor had not worn it
of his own free will, might have passed for a halter, so
much did it resemble one. Such was the picturesque costume
of the person who rang at the gate, and demanded if it was
not at No.  in the Avenue des ChampsElysees that the
Count of Monte Cristo lived, and who, being answered by the
porter in the affirmative, entered, closed the gate after
him, and began to ascend the steps.
The small and angular head of this man, his white hair and
thick gray mustaches, caused him to be easily recognized by
Baptistin, who had received an exact description of the
expected visitor, and who was awaiting him in the hall.
Therefore, scarcely had the stranger time to pronounce his
name before the count was apprised of his arrival. He was
ushered into a simple and elegant drawingroom, and the
count rose to meet him with a smiling air. "Ah, my dear sir,
you are most welcome I was expecting you."
"Indeed," said the Italian, "was your excellency then aware
of my visit?"
"Yes I had been told that I should see you today at seven
o'clock."
"Then you have received full information concerning my
arrival?"
"Of course."
"Ah, so much the better, I feared this little precaution
might have been forgotten."
"What precaution?"
"That of informing you beforehand of my coming."
"Oh, no, it has not."
"But you are sure you are not mistaken."
"Very sure."
"It really was I whom your excellency expected at seven
o'clock this evening?"
"I will prove it to you beyond a doubt."
"Oh, no, never mind that," said the Italian "it is not
worth the trouble."
"Yes, yes," said Monte Cristo. His visitor appeared slightly
uneasy. "Let me see," said the count "are you not the
Marquis Bartolomeo Cavalcanti?"
"Bartolomeo Cavalcanti," joyfully replied the Italian "yes,
I am really he."
"Exmajor in the Austrian service?"
"Was I a major?" timidly asked the old soldier.
"Yes," said Monte Cristo "you were a major that is the
title the French give to the post which you filled in
Italy."
"Very good," said the major, "I do not demand more, you
understand" 
"Your visit here today is not of your own suggestion, is
it?" said Monte Cristo.
"No, certainly not."
"You were sent by some other person?"
"Yes."
"By the excellent Abbe Busoni?"
"Exactly so," said the delighted major.
"And you have a letter?"
"Yes, there it is."
"Give it me, then" and Monte Cristo took the letter, which
he opened and read. The major looked at the count with his
large staring eyes, and then took a survey of the apartment,
but his gaze almost immediately reverted to the proprietor
of the room. "Yes, yes, I see. "Major Cavalcanti, a worthy
patrician of Lucca, a descendant of the Cavalcanti of
Florence,'" continued Monte Cristo, reading aloud,
""possessing an income of half a million.'" Monte Cristo
raised his eyes from the paper, and bowed. "Half a million,"
said he, "magnificent"
"Half a million, is it?" said the major.
"Yes, in so many words and it must be so, for the abbe
knows correctly the amount of all the largest fortunes in
Europe."
"Be it half a million, then but on my word of honor, I had
no idea that it was so much."
"Because you are robbed by your steward. You must make some
reformation in that quarter."
"You have opened my eyes," said the Italian gravely "I will
show the gentlemen the door." Monte Cristo resumed the
perusal of the letter 
""And who only needs one thing more to make him happy.'"
"Yes, indeed but one" said the major with a sigh.
""Which is to recover a lost and adored son.'"
"A lost and adored son"
""Stolen away in his infancy, either by an enemy of his
noble family or by the gypsies.'"
"At the age of five years" said the major with a deep sigh,
and raising his eye to heaven.
"Unhappy father," said Monte Cristo. The count continued 
""I have given him renewed life and hope, in the assurance
that you have the power of restoring the son whom he has
vainly sought for fifteen years.'" The major looked at the
count with an indescribable expression of anxiety. "I have
the power of so doing," said Monte Cristo. The major
recovered his selfpossession. "So, then," said he, "the
letter was true to the end?"
"Did you doubt it, my dear Monsieur Bartolomeo?"
"No, indeed certainly not a good man, a man holding
religious office, as does the Abbe Busoni, could not
condescend to deceive or play off a joke but your
excellency has not read all."
"Ah, true," said Monte Cristo "there is a postscript."
"Yes, yes," repeated the major, "yes  there  is  a 
postscript."
""In order to save Major Cavalcanti the trouble of drawing
on his banker, I send him a draft for , francs to defray
his travelling expenses, and credit on you for the further
sum of , francs, which you still owe me.'" The major
awaited the conclusion of the postscript, apparently with
great anxiety. "Very good," said the count.
"He said "very good,'" muttered the major, "then  sir" 
replied he.
"Then what?" asked Monte Cristo.
"Then the postscript" 
"Well what of the postscript?"
"Then the postscript is as favorably received by you as the
rest of the letter?"
"Certainly the Abbe Busoni and myself have a small account
open between us. I do not remember if it is exactly ,
francs, which I am still owing him, but I dare say we shall
not dispute the difference. You attached great importance,
then, to this postscript, my dear Monsieur Cavalcanti?"
"I must explain to you," said the major, "that, fully
confiding in the signature of the Abbe Busoni, I had not
provided myself with any other funds so that if this
resource had failed me, I should have found myself very
unpleasantly situated in Paris."
"Is it possible that a man of your standing should be
embarrassed anywhere?" said Monte Cristo.
"Why, really I know no one," said the major.
"But then you yourself are known to others?"
"Yes, I am known, so that" 
"Proceed, my dear Monsieur Cavalcanti."
"So that you will remit to me these , francs?"
"Certainly, at your first request." The major's eyes dilated
with pleasing astonishment. "But sit down," said Monte
Cristo "really I do not know what I have been thinking of
I have positively kept you standing for the last quarter
of an hour."
"Don't mention it." The major drew an armchair towards him,
and proceeded to seat himself.
"Now," said the count, "what will you take  a glass of
port, sherry, or Alicante?"
"Alicante, if you please it is my favorite wine."
"I have some that is very good. You will take a biscuit with
it, will you not?"
"Yes, I will take a biscuit, as you are so obliging."
Monte Cristo rang Baptistin appeared. The count advanced to
meet him. "Well?" said he in a low voice. "The young man is
here," said the valet de chambre in the same tone.
"Into what room did you take him?"
"Into the blue drawingroom, according to your excellency's
orders."
"That's right now bring the Alicante and some biscuits."
Baptistin left the room. "Really," said the major, "I am
quite ashamed of the trouble I am giving you."
"Pray don't mention such a thing," said the count. Baptistin
reentered with glasses, wine, and biscuits. The count
filled one glass, but in the other he only poured a few
drops of the rubycolored liquid. The bottle was covered
with spiders' webs, and all the other signs which indicate
the age of wine more truly than do wrinkles on a man's face.
The major made a wise choice he took the full glass and a
biscuit. The count told Baptistin to leave the plate within
reach of his guest, who began by sipping the Alicante with
an expression of great satisfaction, and then delicately
steeped his biscuit in the wine.
"So, sir, you lived at Lucca, did you? You were rich, noble,
held in great esteem  had all that could render a man
happy?"
"All," said the major, hastily swallowing his biscuit,
"positively all."
"And yet there was one thing wanting in order to complete
your happiness?"
"Only one thing," said the Italian.
"And that one thing, your lost child."
"Ah," said the major, taking a second biscuit, "that
consummation of my happiness was indeed wanting." The worthy
major raised his eyes to heaven and sighed.
"Let me hear, then," said the count, "who this deeply
regretted son was for I always understood you were a
bachelor."
"That was the general opinion, sir," said the major, "and I"
"Yes," replied the count, "and you confirmed the report. A
youthful indiscretion, I suppose, which you were anxious to
conceal from the world at large?" The major recovered
himself, and resumed his usual calm manner, at the same time
casting his eyes down, either to give himself time to
compose his countenance, or to assist his imagination, all
the while giving an underlook at the count, the protracted
smile on whose lips still announced the same polite
curiosity. "Yes," said the major, "I did wish this fault to
be hidden from every eye."
"Not on your own account, surely," replied Monte Cristo
"for a man is above that sort of thing?"
"Oh, no, certainly not on my own account," said the major
with a smile and a shake of the head.
"But for the sake of the mother?" said the count.
"Yes, for the mother's sake  his poor mother" cried the
major, taking a third biscuit.
"Take some more wine, my dear Cavalcanti," said the count,
pouring out for him a second glass of Alicante "your
emotion has quite overcome you."
"His poor mother," murmured the major, trying to get the
lachrymal gland in operation, so as to moisten the corner of
his eye with a false tear.
"She belonged to one of the first families in Italy, I
think, did she not?"
"She was of a noble family of Fiesole, count."
"And her name was" 
"Do you desire to know her name?" 
"Oh," said Monte Cristo "it would be quite superfluous for
you to tell me, for I already know it."
"The count knows everything," said the Italian, bowing.
"Oliva Corsinari, was it not?"
"Oliva Corsinari."
"A marchioness?"
"A marchioness."
"And you married her at last, notwithstanding the opposition
of her family?"
"Yes, that was the way it ended."
"And you have doubtless brought all your papers with you?"
said Monte Cristo.
"What papers?"
"The certificate of your marriage with Oliva Corsinari, and
the register of your child's birth."
"The register of my child's birth?"
"The register of the birth of Andrea Cavalcanti  of your
son is not his name Andrea?"
"I believe so," said the major.
"What? You believe so?"
"I dare not positively assert it, as he has been lost for so
long a time."
"Well, then," said Monte Cristo "you have all the documents
with you?"
"Your excellency, I regret to say that, not knowing it was
necessary to come provided with these papers, I neglected to
bring them."
"That is unfortunate," returned Monte Cristo.
"Were they, then, so necessary?"
"They were indispensable."
The major passed his hand across his brow. "Ah, per Bacco,
indispensable, were they?"
"Certainly they were supposing there were to be doubts
raised as to the validity of your marriage or the legitimacy
of your child?"
"True," said the major, "there might be doubts raised."
"In that case your son would be very unpleasantly situated."
"It would be fatal to his interests."
"It might cause him to fail in some desirable matrimonial
alliance."
"O peccato"
"You must know that in France they are very particular on
these points it is not sufficient, as in Italy, to go to
the priest and say, "We love each other, and want you to
marry us.' Marriage is a civil affair in France, and in
order to marry in an orthodox manner you must have papers
which undeniably establish your identity."
"That is the misfortune You see I have not these necessary
papers."
"Fortunately, I have them, though," said Monte Cristo.
"You?"
"Yes."
"You have them?"
"I have them."
"Ah, indeed?" said the major, who, seeing the object of his
journey frustrated by the absence of the papers, feared also
that his forgetfulness might give rise to some difficulty
concerning the , francs  "ah, indeed, that is a
fortunate circumstance yes, that really is lucky, for it
never occurred to me to bring them."
"I do not at all wonder at it  one cannot think of
everything but, happily, the Abbe Busoni thought for you."
"He is an excellent person."
"He is extremely prudent and thoughtful"
"He is an admirable man," said the major "and he sent them
to you?"
"Here they are."
The major clasped his hands in token of admiration. "You
married Oliva Corsinari in the church of San Paolo del
MonteCattini here is the priest's certificate."
"Yes indeed, there it is truly," said the Italian, looking
on with astonishment.
"And here is Andrea Cavalcanti's baptismal register, given
by the curate of Saravezza."
"All quite correct."
"Take these documents, then they do not concern me. You
will give them to your son, who will, of course, take great
care of them."
"I should think so, indeed If he were to lose them" 
"Well, and if he were to lose them?" said Monte Cristo.
"In that case," replied the major, "it would be necessary to
write to the curate for duplicates, and it would be some
time before they could be obtained."
"It would be a difficult matter to arrange," said Monte
Cristo.
"Almost an impossibility," replied the major.
"I am very glad to see that you understand the value of
these papers."
"I regard them as invaluable."
"Now," said Monte Cristo "as to the mother of the young man"
"As to the mother of the young man"  repeated the Italian,
with anxiety.
"As regards the Marchesa Corsinari" 
"Really," said the major, "difficulties seem to thicken upon
us will she be wanted in any way?"
"No, sir," replied Monte Cristo "besides, has she not" 
"Yes, sir," said the major, "she has" 
"Paid the last debt of nature?"
"Alas, yes," returned the Italian.
"I knew that," said Monte Cristo "she has been dead these
ten years."
"And I am still mourning her loss," exclaimed the major,
drawing from his pocket a checked handkerchief, and
alternately wiping first the left and then the right eye.
"What would you have?" said Monte Cristo "we are all
mortal. Now, you understand, my dear Monsieur Cavalcanti,
that it is useless for you to tell people in France that you
have been separated from your son for fifteen years. Stories
of gypsies, who steal children, are not at all in vogue in
this part of the world, and would not be believed. You sent
him for his education to a college in one of the provinces,
and now you wish him to complete his education in the
Parisian world. That is the reason which has induced you to
leave Via Reggio, where you have lived since the death of
your wife. That will be sufficient."
"You think so?"
"Certainly."
"Very well, then."
"If they should hear of the separation" 
"Ah, yes what could I say?"
"That an unfaithful tutor, bought over by the enemies of
your family" 
"By the Corsinari?"
"Precisely. Had stolen away this child, in order that your
name might become extinct."
"That is reasonable, since he is an only son."
"Well, now that all is arranged, do not let these newly
awakened remembrances be forgotten. You have, doubtless,
already guessed that I was preparing a surprise for you?"
"An agreeable one?" asked the Italian.
"Ah, I see the eye of a father is no more to be deceived
than his heart."
"Hum" said the major.
"Some one has told you the secret or, perhaps, you guessed
that he was here."
"That who was here?"
"Your child  your son  your Andrea"
"I did guess it," replied the major with the greatest
possible coolness. "Then he is here?"
"He is," said Monte Cristo "when the valet de chambre came
in just now, he told me of his arrival."
"Ah, very well, very well," said the major, clutching the
buttons of his coat at each exclamation.
"My dear sir," said Monte Cristo, "I understand your
emotion you must have time to recover yourself. I will, in
the meantime, go and prepare the young man for this
muchdesired interview, for I presume that he is not less
impatient for it than yourself."
"I should quite imagine that to be the case," said
Cavalcanti.
"Well, in a quarter of an hour he shall be with you."
"You will bring him, then? You carry your goodness so far as
even to present him to me yourself?"
"No I do not wish to come between a father and son. Your
interview will be private. But do not be uneasy even if the
powerful voice of nature should be silent, you cannot well
mistake him he will enter by this door. He is a fine young
man, of fair complexion  a little too fair, perhaps 
pleasing in manners but you will see and judge for
yourself."
"By the way," said the major, "you know I have only the
, francs which the Abbe Busoni sent me this sum I have
expended upon travelling expenses, and" 
"And you want money that is a matter of course, my dear M.
Cavalcanti. Well, here are , francs on account."
The major's eyes sparkled brilliantly.
"It is , francs which I now owe you," said Monte
Cristo.
"Does your excellency wish for a receipt?" said the major,
at the same time slipping the money into the inner pocket of
his coat.
"For what?" said the count.
"I thought you might want it to show the Abbe Busoni."
"Well, when you receive the remaining ,, you shall give
me a receipt in full. Between honest men such excessive
precaution is, I think, quite unnecessary."
"Yes, so it is, between perfectly upright people."
"One word more," said Monte Cristo.
"Say on."
"You will permit me to make one remark?"
"Certainly pray do so."
"Then I should advise you to leave off wearing that style of
dress."
"Indeed," said the major, regarding himself with an air of
complete satisfaction.
"Yes. It may be worn at Via Reggio but that costume,
however elegant in itself, has long been out of fashion in
Paris."
"That's unfortunate."
"Oh, if you really are attached to your old mode of dress
you can easily resume it when you leave Paris."
"But what shall I wear?"
"What you find in your trunks."
"In my trunks? I have but one portmanteau."
"I dare say you have nothing else with you. What is the use
of boring one's self with so many things? Besides an old
soldier always likes to march with as little baggage as
possible."
"That is just the case  precisely so."
"But you are a man of foresight and prudence, therefore you
sent your luggage on before you. It has arrived at the Hotel
des Princes, Rue de Richelieu. It is there you are to take
up your quarters."
"Then, in these trunks" 
"I presume you have given orders to your valet de chambre to
put in all you are likely to need,  your plain clothes and
your uniform. On grand occasions you must wear your uniform
that will look very well. Do not forget your crosses. They
still laugh at them in France, and yet always wear them, for
all that."
"Very well, very well," said the major, who was in ecstasy
at the attention paid him by the count.
"Now," said Monte Cristo, "that you have fortified yourself
against all painful excitement, prepare yourself, my dear M.
Cavalcanti, to meet your lost Andrea." Saying which Monte
Cristo bowed, and disappeared behind the tapestry, leaving
the major fascinated beyond expression with the delightful
reception which he had received at the hands of the count.
Chapter 
Andrea Cavalcanti.
The Count of Monte Cristo entered the adjoining room, which
Baptistin had designated as the drawingroom, and found
there a young man, of graceful demeanor and elegant
appearance, who had arrived in a cab about half an hour
previously. Baptistin had not found any difficulty in
recognizing the person who presented himself at the door for
admittance. He was certainly the tall young man with light
hair, red beard, black eyes, and brilliant complexion, whom
his master had so particularly described to him. When the
count entered the room the young man was carelessly
stretched on a sofa, tapping his boot with the goldheaded
cane which he held in his hand. On perceiving the count he
rose quickly. "The Count of Monte Cristo, I believe?" said
he.
"Yes, sir, and I think I have the honor of addressing Count
Andrea Cavalcanti?"
"Count Andrea Cavalcanti," repeated the young man,
accompanying his words with a bow.
"You are charged with a letter of introduction addressed to
me, are you not?" said the count.
"I did not mention that, because the signature seemed to me
so strange."
"The letter signed "Sinbad the Sailor,' is it not?"
"Exactly so. Now, as I have never known any Sinbad, with the
exception of the one celebrated in the "Thousand and One
Nights'" 
"Well, it is one of his descendants, and a great friend of
mine he is a very rich Englishman, eccentric almost to
insanity, and his real name is Lord Wilmore."
"Ah, indeed? Then that explains everything that is
extraordinary," said Andrea. "He is, then, the same
Englishman whom I met  at  ah  yes, indeed. Well,
monsieur, I am at your service."
"If what you say be true," replied the count, smiling,
"perhaps you will be kind enough to give me some account of
yourself and your family?"
"Certainly, I will do so," said the young man, with a
quickness which gave proof of his ready invention. "I am as
you have said the Count Andrea Cavalcanti, son of Major
Bartolomeo Cavalcanti, a descendant of the Cavalcanti whose
names are inscribed in the golden book at Florence. Our
family, although still rich for my father's income amounts
to half a million, has experienced many misfortunes, and I
myself was, at the age of five years, taken away by the
treachery of my tutor, so that for fifteen years I have not
seen the author of my existence. Since I have arrived at
years of discretion and become my own master, I have been
constantly seeking him, but all in vain. At length I
received this letter from your friend, which states that my
father is in Paris, and authorizes me to address myself to
you for information respecting him."
"Really, all you have related to me is exceedingly
interesting," said Monte Cristo, observing the young man
with a gloomy satisfaction "and you have done well to
conform in everything to the wishes of my friend Sinbad for
your father is indeed here, and is seeking you."
The count from the moment of first entering the
drawingroom, had not once lost sight of the expression of
the young man's countenance he had admired the assurance of
his look and the firmness of his voice but at these words,
so natural in themselves, "Your father is indeed here, and
is seeking you," young Andrea started, and exclaimed, "My
father? Is my father here?"
"Most undoubtedly," replied Monte Cristo "your father,
Major Bartolomeo Cavalcanti." The expression of terror
which, for the moment, had overspread the features of the
young man, had now disappeared. "Ah, yes, that is the name,
certainly. Major Bartolomeo Cavalcanti. And you really mean
to say monsieur, that my dear father is here?"
"Yes, sir and I can even add that I have only just left his
company. The history which he related to me of his lost son
touched me to the quick indeed, his griefs, hopes, and
fears on that subject might furnish material for a most
touching and pathetic poem. At length, he one day received a
letter, stating that the abductors of his son now offered to
restore him, or at least to give notice where he might be
found, on condition of receiving a large sum of money, by
way of ransom. Your father did not hesitate an instant, and
the sum was sent to the frontier of Piedmont, with a
passport signed for Italy. You were in the south of France,
I think?"
"Yes," replied Andrea, with an embarrassed air, "I was in
the south of France."
"A carriage was to await you at Nice?"
"Precisely so and it conveyed me from Nice to Genoa, from
Genoa to Turin, from Turin to Chambery, from Chambery to
PontdeBeauvoisin, and from PontdeBeauvoisin to Paris."
"Indeed? Then your father ought to have met with you on the
road, for it is exactly the same route which he himself
took, and that is how we have been able to trace your
journey to this place."
"But," said Andrea, "if my father had met me, I doubt if he
would have recognized me I must be somewhat altered since
he last saw me."
"Oh, the voice of nature," said Monte Cristo.
"True," interrupted the young man, "I had not looked upon it
in that light."
"Now," replied Monte Cristo "there is only one source of
uneasiness left in your father's mind, which is this  he
is anxious to know how you have been employed during your
long absence from him, how you have been treated by your
persecutors, and if they have conducted themselves towards
you with all the deference due to your rank. Finally, he is
anxious to see if you have been fortunate enough to escape
the bad moral influence to which you have been exposed, and
which is infinitely more to be dreaded than any physical
suffering he wishes to discover if the fine abilities with
which nature had endowed you have been weakened by want of
culture and, in short, whether you consider yourself
capable of resuming and retaining in the world the high
position to which your rank entitles you."
"Sir" exclaimed the young man, quite astounded, "I hope no
false report" 
"As for myself, I first heard you spoken of by my friend
Wilmore, the philanthropist. I believe he found you in some
unpleasant position, but do not know of what nature, for I
did not ask, not being inquisitive. Your misfortunes engaged
his sympathies, so you see you must have been interesting.
He told me that he was anxious to restore you to the
position which you had lost, and that he would seek your
father until he found him. He did seek, and has found him,
apparently, since he is here now and, finally, my friend
apprised me of your coming, and gave me a few other
instructions relative to your future fortune. I am quite
aware that my friend Wilmore is peculiar, but he is sincere,
and as rich as a goldmine, consequently, he may indulge his
eccentricities without any fear of their ruining him, and I
have promised to adhere to his instructions. Now, sir, pray
do not be offended at the question I am about to put to you,
as it comes in the way of my duty as your patron. I would
wish to know if the misfortunes which have happened to you
misfortunes entirely beyond your control, and which in no
degree diminish my regard for you  I would wish to know if
they have not, in some measure, contributed to render you a
stranger to the world in which your fortune and your name
entitle you to make a conspicuous figure?"
"Sir," returned the young man, with a reassurance of manner,
"make your mind easy on this score. Those who took me from
my father, and who always intended, sooner or later, to sell
me again to my original proprietor, as they have now done,
calculated that, in order to make the most of their bargain,
it would be politic to leave me in possession of all my
personal and hereditary worth, and even to increase the
value, if possible. I have, therefore, received a very good
education, and have been treated by these kidnappers very
much as the slaves were treated in Asia Minor, whose masters
made them grammarians, doctors, and philosophers, in order
that they might fetch a higher price in the Roman market."
Monte Cristo smiled with satisfaction it appeared as if he
had not expected so much from M. Andrea Cavalcanti.
"Besides," continued the young man, "if there did appear
some defect in education, or offence against the established
forms of etiquette, I suppose it would be excused, in
consideration of the misfortunes which accompanied my birth,
and followed me through my youth."
"Well," said Monte Cristo in an indifferent tone, "you will
do as you please, count, for you are the master of your own
actions, and are the person most concerned in the matter,
but if I were you, I would not divulge a word of these
adventures. Your history is quite a romance, and the world,
which delights in romances in yellow covers, strangely
mistrusts those which are bound in living parchment, even
though they be gilded like yourself. This is the kind of
difficulty which I wished to represent to you, my dear
count. You would hardly have recited your touching history
before it would go forth to the world, and be deemed
unlikely and unnatural. You would be no longer a lost child
found, but you would be looked upon as an upstart, who had
sprung up like a mushroom in the night. You might excite a
little curiosity, but it is not every one who likes to be
made the centre of observation and the subject of unpleasant
remark."
"I agree with you, monsieur," said the young man, turning
pale, and, in spite of himself, trembling beneath the
scrutinizing look of his companion, "such consequences would
be extremely unpleasant."
"Nevertheless, you must not exaggerate the evil," said Monte
Cristo, "for by endeavoring to avoid one fault you will fall
into another. You must resolve upon one simple and single
line of conduct, and for a man of your intelligence, this
plan is as easy as it is necessary you must form honorable
friendships, and by that means counteract the prejudice
which may attach to the obscurity of your former life."
Andrea visibly changed countenance. "I would offer myself as
your surety and friendly adviser," said Monte Cristo, "did I
not possess a moral distrust of my best friends, and a sort
of inclination to lead others to doubt them too therefore,
in departing from this rule, I should as the actors say be
playing a part quite out of my line, and should, therefore,
run the risk of being hissed, which would be an act of
folly."
"However, your excellency," said Andrea, "in consideration
of Lord Wilmore, by whom I was recommended to you  "
"Yes, certainly," interrupted Monte Cristo "but Lord
Wilmore did not omit to inform me, my dear M. Andrea, that
the season of your youth was rather a stormy one. Ah," said
the count, watching Andrea's countenance, "I do not demand
any confession from you it is precisely to avoid that
necessity that your father was sent for from Lucca. You
shall soon see him. He is a little stiff and pompous in his
manner, and he is disfigured by his uniform but when it
becomes known that he has been for eighteen years in the
Austrian service, all that will be pardoned. We are not
generally very severe with the Austrians. In short, you will
find your father a very presentable person, I assure you."
"Ah, sir, you have given me confidence it is so long since
we were separated, that I have not the least remembrance of
him, and, besides, you know that in the eyes of the world a
large fortune covers all defects."
"He is a millionaire  his income is , francs."
"Then," said the young man, with anxiety, "I shall be sure
to be placed in an agreeable position."
"One of the most agreeable possible, my dear sir he will
allow you an income of , livres per annum during the
whole time of your stay in Paris."
"Then in that case I shall always choose to remain there."
"You cannot control circumstances, my dear sir "man
proposes, and God disposes.'" Andrea sighed. "But," said he,
"so long as I do remain in Paris, and nothing forces me to
quit it, do you mean to tell me that I may rely on receiving
the sum you just now mentioned to me?"
"You may."
"Shall I receive it from my father?" asked Andrea, with some
uneasiness.
"Yes, you will receive it from your father personally, but
Lord Wilmore will be the security for the money. He has, at
the request of your father, opened an account of ,
francs a month at M. Danglars', which is one of the safest
banks in Paris."
"And does my father mean to remain long in Paris?" asked
Andrea.
"Only a few days," replied Monte Cristo. "His service does
not allow him to absent himself more than two or three weeks
together."
"Ah, my dear father" exclaimed Andrea, evidently charmed
with the idea of his speedy departure.
"Therefore," said Monte Cristo feigning to mistake his
meaning  "therefore I will not, for another instant,
retard the pleasure of your meeting. Are you prepared to
embrace your worthy father?"
"I hope you do not doubt it."
"Go, then, into the drawingroom, my young friend, where you
will find your father awaiting you." Andrea made a low bow
to the count, and entered the adjoining room. Monte Cristo
watched him till he disappeared, and then touched a spring
in a panel made to look like a picture, which, in sliding
partly from the frame, discovered to view a small opening,
so cleverly contrived that it revealed all that was passing
in the drawingroom now occupied by Cavalcanti and Andrea.
The young man closed the door behind him, and advanced
towards the major, who had risen when he heard steps
approaching him. "Ah, my dear father" said Andrea in a loud
voice, in order that the count might hear him in the next
room, "is it really you?"
"How do you do, my dear son?" said the major gravely.
"After so many years of painful separation," said Andrea, in
the same tone of voice, and glancing towards the door, "what
a happiness it is to meet again"
"Indeed it is, after so long a separation."
"Will you not embrace me, sir?" said Andrea.
"If you wish it, my son," said the major and the two men
embraced each other after the fashion of actors on the
stage that is to say, each rested his head on the other's
shoulder.
"Then we are once more reunited?" said Andrea.
"Once more," replied the major.
"Never more to be separated?"
"Why, as to that  I think, my dear son, you must be by
this time so accustomed to France as to look upon it almost
as a second country."
"The fact is," said the young man, "that I should be
exceedingly grieved to leave it."
"As for me, you must know I cannot possibly live out of
Lucca therefore I shall return to Italy as soon as I can."
"But before you leave France, my dear father, I hope you
will put me in possession of the documents which will be
necessary to prove my descent."
"Certainly I am come expressly on that account it has cost
me much trouble to find you, but I had resolved on giving
them into your hands, and if I had to recommence my search,
it would occupy all the few remaining years of my life."
"Where are these papers, then?"
"Here they are."
Andrea seized the certificate of his father's marriage and
his own baptismal register, and after having opened them
with all the eagerness which might be expected under the
circumstances, he read them with a facility which proved
that he was accustomed to similar documents, and with an
expression which plainly denoted an unusual interest in the
contents. When he had perused the documents, an indefinable
expression of pleasure lighted up his countenance, and
looking at the major with a most peculiar smile, he said, in
very excellent Tuscan,  "Then there is no longer any such
thing, in Italy as being condemned to the galleys?" The
major drew himself up to his full height.
"Why?  what do you mean by that question?"
"I mean that if there were, it would be impossible to draw
up with impunity two such deeds as these. In France, my dear
sir, half such a piece of effrontery as that would cause you
to be quickly despatched to Toulon for five years, for
change of air."
"Will you be good enough to explain your meaning?" said the
major, endeavoring as much as possible to assume an air of
the greatest majesty.
"My dear M. Cavalcanti," said Andrea, taking the major by
the arm in a confidential manner, "how much are you paid for
being my father?" The major was about to speak, when Andrea
continued, in a low voice.
"Nonsense, I am going to set you an example of confidence,
they give me , francs a year to be your son
consequently, you can understand that it is not at all
likely I shall ever deny my parent." The major looked
anxiously around him. "Make yourself easy, we are quite
alone," said Andrea "besides, we are conversing in
Italian."
"Well, then," replied the major, "they paid me , francs
down."
"Monsieur Cavalcanti," said Andrea, "do you believe in fairy
tales?"
"I used not to do so, but I really feel now almost obliged
to have faith in them."
"You have, then, been induced to alter your opinion you
have had some proofs of their truth?" The major drew from
his pocket a handful of gold. "Most palpable proofs," said
he, "as you may perceive."
"You think, then, that I may rely on the count's promises?"
"Certainly I do."
"You are sure he will keep his word with me?"
"To the letter, but at the same time, remember, we must
continue to play our respective parts. I, as a tender
father" 
"And I as a dutiful son, as they choose that I shall be
descended from you."
"Whom do you mean by they?"
"Ma foi, I can hardly tell, but I was alluding to those who
wrote the letter you received one, did you not?"
"Yes."
"From whom?"
"From a certain Abbe Busoni."
"Have you any knowledge of him?"
"No, I have never seen him."
"What did he say in the letter?"
"You will promise not to betray me?"
"Rest assured of that you well know that our interests are
the same."
"Then read for yourself" and the major gave a letter into
the young man's hand. Andrea read in a low voice 
"You are poor a miserable old age awaits you. Would you
like to become rich, or at least independent? Set out
immediately for Paris, and demand of the Count of Monte
Cristo, Avenue des Champs Elysees, No. , the son whom you
had by the Marchesa Corsinari, and who was taken from you at
five years of age. This son is named Andrea Cavalcanti. In
order that you may not doubt the kind intention of the
writer of this letter, you will find enclosed an order for
, francs, payable in Florence, at Signor Gozzi's also a
letter of introduction to the Count of Monte Cristo, on whom
I give you a draft of , francs. Remember to go to the
count on the th May at seven o'clock in the evening.
Signed
"Abbe Busoni."
"It is the same."
"What do you mean?" said the major.
"I was going to say that I received a letter almost to the
same effect."
"You?"
"Yes."
"From the Abbe Busoni?"
"No."
"From whom, then?"
"From an Englishman, called Lord Wilmore, who takes the name
of Sinbad the Sailor."
"And of whom you have no more knowledge than I of the Abbe
Busoni?"
"You are mistaken there I am ahead of you."
"You have seen him, then?"
"Yes, once."
"Where?"
"Ah, that is just what I cannot tell you if I did, I should
make you as wise as myself, which it is not my intention to
do."
"And what did the letter contain?"
"Read it."
""You are poor, and your future prospects are dark and
gloomy. Do you wish for a name? should you like to be rich,
and your own master?'"
"Ma foi," said the young man "was it possible there could
be two answers to such a question?"
"Take the postchaise which you will find waiting at the
Porte de Genes, as you enter Nice pass through Turin,
Chambery, and PontdeBeauvoisin. Go to the Count of Monte
Cristo, Avenue des Champs Elysees, on the th of May, at
seven o'clock in the evening, and demand of him your father.
You are the son of the Marchese Cavalcanti and the Marchesa
Oliva Corsinari. The marquis will give you some papers which
will certify this fact, and authorize you to appear under
that name in the Parisian world. As to your rank, an annual
income of , livres will enable you to support it
admirably. I enclose a draft for , livres, payable on M.
Ferrea, banker at Nice, and also a letter of introduction to
the Count of Monte Cristo, whom I have directed to supply
all your wants.
"Sinbad the Sailor."
"Humph," said the major "very good. You have seen the
count, you say?"
"I have only just left him "
"And has he conformed to all that the letter specified?"
"He has."
"Do you understand it?"
"Not in the least."
"There is a dupe somewhere."
"At all events, it is neither you nor I."
"Certainly not."
"Well, then" 
"Why, it does not much concern us, do you think it does?"
"No I agree with you there. We must play the game to the
end, and consent to be blindfold."
"Ah, you shall see I promise you I will sustain my part to
admiration."
"I never once doubted your doing so." Monte Cristo chose
this moment for reentering the drawingroom. On hearing the
sound of his footsteps, the two men threw themselves in each
other's arms, and while they were in the midst of this
embrace, the count entered. "Well, marquis," said Monte
Cristo, "you appear to be in no way disappointed in the son
whom your good fortune has restored to you."
"Ah, your excellency, I am overwhelmed with delight."
"And what are your feelings?" said Monte Cristo, turning to
the young man.
"As for me, my heart is overflowing with happiness."
"Happy father, happy son" said the count.
"There is only one thing which grieves me," observed the
major, "and that is the necessity for my leaving Paris so
soon."
"Ah, my dear M. Cavalcanti, I trust you will not leave
before I have had the honor of presenting you to some of my
friends."
"I am at your service, sir," replied the major.
"Now, sir," said Monte Cristo, addressing Andrea, "make your
confession."
"To whom?"
"Tell M. Cavalcanti something of the state of your
finances."
"Ma foi, monsieur, you have touched upon a tender chord."
"Do you hear what he says, major?"
"Certainly I do."
"But do you understand?"
"I do."
"Your son says he requires money."
"Well, what would you have me do?" said the major.
"You should furnish him with some of course," replied Monte
Cristo.
"I?"
"Yes, you," said the count, at the same time advancing
towards Andrea, and slipping a packet of banknotes into the
young man's hand.
"What is this?"
"It is from your father."
"From my father?"
"Yes did you not tell him just now that you wanted money?
Well, then, he deputes me to give you this."
"Am I to consider this as part of my income on account?"
"No, it is for the first expenses of your settling in
Paris."
"Ah, how good my dear father is"
"Silence," said Monte Cristo "he does not wish you to know
that it comes from him."
"I fully appreciate his delicacy," said Andrea, cramming the
notes hastily into his pocket.
"And now, gentlemen, I wish you goodmorning," said Monte
Cristo.
"And when shall we have the honor of seeing you again, your
excellency?" asked Cavalcanti.
"Ah," said Andrea, "when may we hope for that pleasure?"
"On Saturday, if you will  Yes.  Let me see  Saturday
I am to dine at my country house, at Auteuil, on that
day, Rue de la Fontaine, No. . Several persons are
invited, and among others, M. Danglars, your banker. I will
introduce you to him, for it will be necessary he should
know you, as he is to pay your money."
"Full dress?" said the major, half aloud.
"Oh, yes, certainly," said the count "uniform, cross,
kneebreeches."
"And how shall I be dressed?" demanded Andrea.
"Oh, very simply black trousers, patent leather boots,
white waistcoat, either a black or blue coat, and a long
cravat. Go to Blin or Veronique for your clothes. Baptistin
will tell you where, if you do not know their address. The
less pretension there is in your attire, the better will be
the effect, as you are a rich man. If you mean to buy any
horses, get them of Devedeux, and if you purchase a phaeton,
go to Baptiste for it."
"At what hour shall we come?" asked the young man.
"About halfpast six."
"We will be with you at that time," said the major. The two
Cavalcanti bowed to the count, and left the house. Monte
Cristo went to the window, and saw them crossing the street,
arm in arm. "There go two miscreants" said he, "it is a
pity they are not really related"  then, after an instant
of gloomy reflection, "Come, I will go to see the Morrels,"
said he "I think that disgust is even more sickening than
hatred."
Chapter 
In the Lucerne Patch.
Our readers must now allow us to transport them again to the
enclosure surrounding M. de Villefort's house, and, behind
the gate, half screened from view by the large
chestnuttrees, which on all sides spread their luxuriant
branches, we shall find some people of our acquaintance.
This time Maximilian was the first to arrive. He was
intently watching for a shadow to appear among the trees,
and awaiting with anxiety the sound of a light step on the
gravel walk. At length, the longdesired sound was heard,
and instead of one figure, as he had expected, he perceived
that two were approaching him. The delay had been occasioned
by a visit from Madame Danglars and Eugenie, which had been
prolonged beyond the time at which Valentine was expected.
That she might not appear to fail in her promise to
Maximilian, she proposed to Mademoiselle Danglars that they
should take a walk in the garden, being anxious to show that
the delay, which was doubtless a cause of vexation to him,
was not occasioned by any neglect on her part. The young
man, with the intuitive perception of a lover, quickly
understood the circumstances in which she was involuntarily
placed, and he was comforted. Besides, although she avoided
coming within speaking distance, Valentine arranged so that
Maximilian could see her pass and repass, and each time she
went by, she managed, unperceived by her companion, to cast
an expressive look at the young man, which seemed to say,
"Have patience You see it is not my fault." And Maximilian
was patient, and employed himself in mentally contrasting
the two girls,  one fair, with soft languishing eyes, a
figure gracefully bending like a weeping willow the other a
brunette, with a fierce and haughty expression, and as
straight as a poplar. It is unnecessary to state that, in
the eyes of the young man, Valentine did not suffer by the
contrast. In about half an hour the girls went away, and
Maximilian understood that Mademoiselle Danglars' visit had
at last come to an end. In a few minutes Valentine
reentered the garden alone. For fear that any one should be
observing her return, she walked slowly and instead of
immediately directing her steps towards the gate, she seated
herself on a bench, and, carefully casting her eyes around,
to convince herself that she was not watched, she presently
arose, and proceeded quickly to join Maximilian.
"Goodevening, Valentine," said a wellknown voice.
"Goodevening, Maximilian I know I have kept you waiting,
but you saw the cause of my delay."
"Yes, I recognized Mademoiselle Danglars. I was not aware
that you were so intimate with her."
"Who told you we were intimate, Maximilian?"
"No one, but you appeared to be so. From the manner in which
you walked and talked together, one would have thought you
were two schoolgirls telling your secrets to each other."
"We were having a confidential conversation," returned
Valentine "she was owning to me her repugnance to the
marriage with M. de Morcerf and I, on the other hand, was
confessing to her how wretched it made me to think of
marrying M. d'Epinay."
"Dear Valentine"
"That will account to you for the unreserved manner which
you observed between me and Eugenie, as in speaking of the
man whom I could not love, my thoughts involuntarily
reverted to him on whom my affections were fixed."
"Ah, how good you are to say so, Valentine You possess a
quality which can never belong to Mademoiselle Danglars. It
is that indefinable charm which is to a woman what perfume
is to the flower and flavor to the fruit, for the beauty of
either is not the only quality we seek."
"It is your love which makes you look upon everything in
that light."
"No, Valentine, I assure you such is not the case. I was
observing you both when you were walking in the garden, and,
on my honor, without at all wishing to depreciate the beauty
of Mademoiselle Danglars, I cannot understand how any man
can really love her."
"The fact is, Maximilian, that I was there, and my presence
had the effect of rendering you unjust in your comparison."
"No but tell me  it is a question of simple curiosity,
and which was suggested by certain ideas passing in my mind
relative to Mademoiselle Danglars" 
"I dare say it is something disparaging which you are going
to say. It only proves how little indulgence we may expect
from your sex," interrupted Valentine.
"You cannot, at least, deny that you are very harsh judges
of each other."
"If we are so, it is because we generally judge under the
influence of excitement. But return to your question."
"Does Mademoiselle Danglars object to this marriage with M.
de Morcerf on account of loving another?"
"I told you I was not on terms of strict intimacy with
Eugenie."
"Yes, but girls tell each other secrets without being
particularly intimate own, now, that you did question her
on the subject. Ah, I see you are smiling."
"If you are already aware of the conversation that passed,
the wooden partition which interposed between us and you has
proved but a slight security."
"Come, what did she say?"
"She told me that she loved no one," said Valentine "that
she disliked the idea of being married that she would
infinitely prefer leading an independent and unfettered
life and that she almost wished her father might lose his
fortune, that she might become an artist, like her friend,
Mademoiselle Louise d'Armilly."
"Ah, you see" 
"Well, what does that prove?" asked Valentine.
"Nothing," replied Maximilian.
"Then why did you smile?"
"Why, you know very well that you are reflecting on
yourself, Valentine."
"Do you want me to go away?"
"Ah, no, no. But do not let us lose time you are the
subject on which I wish to speak."
"True, we must be quick, for we have scarcely ten minutes
more to pass together."
"Ma foi," said Maximilian, in consternation.
"Yes, you are right I am but a poor friend to you. What a
life I cause you to lead, poor Maximilian, you who are
formed for happiness I bitterly reproach myself, I assure
you."
"Well, what does it signify, Valentine, so long as I am
satisfied, and feel that even this long and painful suspense
is amply repaid by five minutes of your society, or two
words from your lips? And I have also a deep conviction that
heaven would not have created two hearts, harmonizing as
ours do, and almost miraculously brought us together, to
separate us at last."
"Those are kind and cheering words. You must hope for us
both, Maximilian that will make me at least partly happy."
"But why must you leave me so soon?"
"I do not know particulars. I can only tell you that Madame
de Villefort sent to request my presence, as she had a
communication to make on which a part of my fortune
depended. Let them take my fortune, I am already too rich
and, perhaps, when they have taken it, they will leave me in
peace and quietness. You would love me as much if I were
poor, would you not, Maximilian?"
"Oh, I shall always love you. What should I care for either
riches or poverty, if my Valentine was near me, and I felt
certain that no one could deprive me of her? But do you not
fear that this communication may relate to your marriage?"
"I do not think that is the case."
"However it may be, Valentine, you must not be alarmed. I
assure you that, as long as I live, I shall never love any
one else"
"You think to reassure me when you say that, Maximilian."
"Pardon me, you are right. I am a brute. But I was going to
tell you that I met M. de Morcerf the other day."
"Well?"
"Monsieur Franz is his friend, you know."
"What then?"
"Monsieur de Morcerf has received a letter from Franz,
announcing his immediate return." Valentine turned pale, and
leaned her hand against the gate. "Ah heavens, if it were
that But no, the communication would not come through
Madame de Villefort."
"Why not?"
"Because  I scarcely know why  but it has appeared as if
Madame de Villefort secretly objected to the marriage,
although she did not choose openly to oppose it."
"Is it so? Then I feel as if I could adore Madame de
Villefort."
"Do not be in such a hurry to do that," said Valentine, with
a sad smile.
"If she objects to your marrying M. d'Epinay, she would be
all the more likely to listen to any other proposition."
"No, Maximilian, it is not suitors to which Madame de
Villefort objects, it is marriage itself."
"Marriage? If she dislikes that so much, why did she ever
marry herself?"
"You do not understand me, Maximilian. About a year ago, I
talked of retiring to a convent. Madame de Villefort, in
spite of all the remarks which she considered it her duty to
make, secretly approved of the proposition, my father
consented to it at her instigation, and it was only on
account of my poor grandfather that I finally abandoned the
project. You can form no idea of the expression of that old
man's eye when he looks at me, the only person in the world
whom he loves, and, I had almost said, by whom he is beloved
in return. When he learned my resolution, I shall never
forget the reproachful look which he cast on me, and the
tears of utter despair which chased each other down his
lifeless cheeks. Ah, Maximilian, I experienced, at that
moment, such remorse for my intention, that, throwing myself
at his feet, I exclaimed,  "Forgive me, pray forgive me,
my dear grandfather they may do what they will with me, I
will never leave you.' When I had ceased speaking, he
thankfully raised his eyes to heaven, but without uttering a
word. Ah, Maximilian, I may have much to suffer, but I feel
as if my grandfather's look at that moment would more than
compensate for all."
"Dear Valentine, you are a perfect angel, and I am sure I do
not know what I  sabring right and left among the Bedouins
can have done to merit your being revealed to me, unless,
indeed, heaven took into consideration the fact that the
victims of my sword were infidels. But tell me what interest
Madame de Villefort can have in your remaining unmarried?"
"Did I not tell you just now that I was rich, Maximilian 
too rich? I possess nearly , livres in right of my
mother my grandfather and my grandmother, the Marquis and
Marquise de SaintMeran, will leave me as much, and M.
Noirtier evidently intends making me his heir. My brother
Edward, who inherits nothing from his mother, will,
therefore, be poor in comparison with me. Now, if I had
taken the veil, all this fortune would have descended to my
father, and, in reversion, to his son."
"Ah, how strange it seems that such a young and beautiful
woman should be so avaricious."
"It is not for herself that she is so, but for her son, and
what you regard as a vice becomes almost a virtue when
looked at in the light of maternal love."
"But could you not compromise matters, and give up a portion
of your fortune to her son?"
"How could I make such a proposition, especially to a woman
who always professes to be so entirely disinterested?"
"Valentine, I have always regarded our love in the light of
something sacred consequently, I have covered it with the
veil of respect, and hid it in the innermost recesses of my
soul. No human being, not even my sister, is aware of its
existence. Valentine, will you permit me to make a confidant
of a friend and reveal to him the love I bear you?"
Valentine started. "A friend, Maximilian and who is this
friend? I tremble to give my permission."
"Listen, Valentine. Have you never experienced for any one
that sudden and irresistible sympathy which made you feel as
if the object of it had been your old and familiar friend,
though, in reality, it was the first time you had ever met?
Nay, further, have you never endeavored to recall the time,
place, and circumstances of your former intercourse, and
failing in this attempt, have almost believed that your
spirits must have held converse with each other in some
state of being anterior to the present, and that you are
only now occupied in a reminiscence of the past?"
"Yes."
"Well, that is precisely the feeling which I experienced
when I first saw that extraordinary man."
"Extraordinary, did you say?"
"Yes."
"You have known him for some time, then?"
"Scarcely longer than eight or ten days."
"And do you call a man your friend whom you have only known
for eight or ten days? Ah, Maximilian, I had hoped you set a
higher value on the title of friend."
"Your logic is most powerful, Valentine, but say what you
will, I can never renounce the sentiment which has
instinctively taken possession of my mind. I feel as if it
were ordained that this man should be associated with all
the good which the future may have in store for me, and
sometimes it really seems as if his eye was able to see what
was to come, and his hand endowed with the power of
directing events according to his own will."
"He must be a prophet, then," said Valentine, smiling.
"Indeed," said Maximilian, "I have often been almost tempted
to attribute to him the gift of prophecy at all events, he
has a wonderful power of foretelling any future good."
"Ah," said Valentine in a mournful tone, "do let me see this
man, Maximilian he may tell me whether I shall ever be
loved sufficiently to make amends for all I have suffered."
"My poor girl, you know him already."
"I know him?"
"Yes it was he who saved the life of your stepmother and
her son."
"The Count of Monte Cristo?"
"The same."
"Ah," cried Valentine, "he is too much the friend of Madame
de Villefort ever to be mine."
"The friend of Madame de Villefort It cannot be surely,
Valentine, you are mistaken?"
"No, indeed, I am not for I assure you, his power over our
household is almost unlimited. Courted by my stepmother,
who regards him as the epitome of human wisdom admired by
my father, who says he has never before heard such sublime
ideas so eloquently expressed idolized by Edward, who,
notwithstanding his fear of the count's large black eyes,
runs to meet him the moment he arrives, and opens his hand,
in which he is sure to find some delightful present,  M.
de Monte Cristo appears to exert a mysterious and almost
uncontrollable influence over all the members of our
family."
"If such be the case, my dear Valentine, you must yourself
have felt, or at all events will soon feel, the effects of
his presence. He meets Albert de Morcerf in Italy  it is
to rescue him from the hands of the banditti he introduces
himself to Madame Danglars  it is that he may give her a
royal present your stepmother and her son pass before his
door  it is that his Nubian may save them from
destruction. This man evidently possesses the power of
influencing events, both as regards men and things. I never
saw more simple tastes united to greater magnificence. His
smile is so sweet when he addresses me, that I forget it
ever can be bitter to others. Ah, Valentine, tell me, if he
ever looked on you with one of those sweet smiles? if so,
depend on it, you will be happy."
"Me?" said the young girl, "he never even glances at me on
the contrary, if I accidentally cross his path, he appears
rather to avoid me. Ah, he is not generous, neither does he
possess that supernatural penetration which you attribute to
him, for if he did, he would have perceived that I was
unhappy and if he had been generous, seeing me sad and
solitary, he would have used his influence to my advantage,
and since, as you say, he resembles the sun, he would have
warmed my heart with one of his lifegiving rays. You say he
loves you, Maximilian how do you know that he does? All
would pay deference to an officer like you, with a fierce
mustache and a long sabre, but they think they may crush a
poor weeping girl with impunity."
"Ah, Valentine, I assure you you are mistaken."
"If it were otherwise  if he treated me diplomatically 
that is to say, like a man who wishes, by some means or
other, to obtain a footing in the house, so that he may
ultimately gain the power of dictating to its occupants 
he would, if it had been but once, have honored me with the
smile which you extol so loudly but no, he saw that I was
unhappy, he understood that I could be of no use to him, and
therefore paid no attention to me whatever. Who knows but
that, in order to please Madame de Villefort and my father,
he may not persecute me by every means in his power? It is
not just that he should despise me so, without any reason.
Ah, forgive me," said Valentine, perceiving the effect which
her words were producing on Maximilian "I have done wrong,
for I have given utterance to thoughts concerning that man
which I did not even know existed in my heart. I do not deny
the influence of which you speak, or that I have not myself
experienced it, but with me it has been productive of evil
rather than good."
"Well, Valentine," said Morrel with a sigh, "we will not
discuss the matter further. I will not make a confidant of
him."
"Alas," said Valentine, "I see that I have given you pain. I
can only say how sincerely I ask pardon for having griefed
you. But, indeed, I am not prejudiced beyond the power of
conviction. Tell me what this Count of Monte Cristo has done
for you."
"I own that your question embarrasses me, Valentine, for I
cannot say that the count has rendered me any ostensible
service. Still, as I have already told you I have an
instinctive affection for him, the source of which I cannot
explain to you. Has the sun done anything for me? No he
warms me with his rays, and it is by his light that I see
you  nothing more. Has such and such a perfume done
anything for me? No its odor charms one of my senses 
that is all I can say when I am asked why I praise it. My
friendship for him is as strange and unaccountable as his
for me. A secret voice seems to whisper to me that there
must be something more than chance in this unexpected
reciprocity of friendship. In his most simple actions, as
well as in his most secret thoughts, I find a relation to my
own. You will perhaps smile at me when I tell you that, ever
since I have known this man, I have involuntarily
entertained the idea that all the good fortune which his
befallen me originated from him. However, I have managed to
live thirty years without this protection, you will say but
I will endeavor a little to illustrate my meaning. He
invited me to dine with him on Saturday, which was a very
natural thing for him to do. Well, what have I learned
since? That your mother and M. de Villefort are both coming
to this dinner. I shall meet them there, and who knows what
future advantages may result from the interview? This may
appear to you to be no unusual combination of circumstances
nevertheless, I perceive some hidden plot in the arrangement
something, in fact, more than is apparent on a casual
view of the subject. I believe that this singular man, who
appears to fathom the motives of every one, has purposely
arranged for me to meet M. and Madame de Villefort, and
sometimes, I confess, I have gone so far as to try to read
in his eyes whether he was in possession of the secret of
our love."
"My good friend," said Valentine, "I should take you for a
visionary, and should tremble for your reason, if I were
always to hear you talk in a strain similar to this. Is it
possible that you can see anything more than the merest
chance in this meeting? Pray reflect a little. My father,
who never goes out, has several times been on the point of
refusing this invitation Madame de Villefort, on the
contrary, is burning with the desire of seeing this
extraordinary nabob in his own house, therefore, she has
with great difficulty prevailed on my father to accompany
her. No, no it is as I have said, Maximilian,  there is
no one in the world of whom I can ask help but yourself and
my grandfather, who is little better than a corpse."
"I see that you are right, logically speaking," said
Maximilian "but the gentle voice which usually has such
power over me fails to convince me today."
"I feel the same as regards yourself." said Valentine "and
I own that, if you have no stronger proof to give me" 
"I have another," replied Maximilian "but I fear you will
deem it even more absurd than the first."
"So much the worse," said Valentine, smiling.
"It is, nevertheless, conclusive to my mind. My ten years of
service have also confirmed my ideas on the subject of
sudden inspirations, for I have several times owed my life
to a mysterious impulse which directed me to move at once
either to the right or to the left, in order to escape the
ball which killed the comrade fighting by my side, while it
left me unharmed."
"Dear Maximilian, why not attribute your escape to my
constant prayers for your safety? When you are away, I no
longer pray for myself, but for you."
"Yes, since you have known me," said Morrel, smiling "but
that cannot apply to the time previous to our acquaintance,
Valentine."
"You are very provoking, and will not give me credit for
anything but let me hear this second proof, which you
yourself own to be absurd."
"Well, look through this opening, and you will see the
beautiful new horse which I rode here."
"Ah, what a beautiful creature" cried Valentine "why did
you not bring him close to the gate, so that I could talk to
him and pat him?"
"He is, as you see, a very valuable animal," said
Maximilian. "You know that my means are limited, and that I
am what would be designated a man of moderate pretensions.
Well, I went to a horse dealer's, where I saw this
magnificent horse, which I have named Medeah. I asked the
price they told me it was , francs. I was, therefore,
obliged to give it up, as you may imagine, but I own I went
away with rather a heavy heart, for the horse had looked at
me affectionately, had rubbed his head against me and, when
I mounted him, had pranced in the most delightful way
imaginable, so that I was altogether fascinated with him.
The same evening some friends of mine visited me,  M. de
ChateauRenaud, M. Debray, and five or six other choice
spirits, whom you do not know, even by name. They proposed a
game of bouillotte. I never play, for I am not rich enough
to afford to lose, or sufficiently poor to desire to gain.
But I was at my own house, you understand, so there was
nothing to be done but to send for the cards, which I did.
"Just as they were sitting down to table, M. de Monte Cristo
arrived. He took his seat amongst them they played, and I
won. I am almost ashamed to say that my gains amounted to
, francs. We separated at midnight. I could not defer my
pleasure, so I took a cabriolet and drove to the horse
dealer's. Feverish and excited, I rang at the door. The
person who opened it must have taken me for a madman, for I
rushed at once to the stable. Medeah was standing at the
rack, eating his hay. I immediately put on the saddle and
bridle, to which operation he lent himself with the best
grace possible then, putting the , francs into the
hands of the astonished dealer, I proceeded to fulfil my
intention of passing the night in riding in the Champs
Elysees. As I rode by the count's house I perceived a light
in one of the windows, and fancied I saw the shadow of his
figure moving behind the curtain. Now, Valentine, I firmly
believe that he knew of my wish to possess this horse, and
that he lost expressly to give me the means of procuring
him."
"My dear Maximilian, you are really too fanciful you will
not love even me long. A man who accustoms himself to live
in such a world of poetry and imagination must find far too
little excitement in a common, everyday sort of attachment
such as ours. But they are calling me. Do you hear?"
"Ah, Valentine," said Maximilian, "give me but one finger
through this opening in the grating, one finger, the
littlest finger of all, that I may have the happiness of
kissing it."
"Maximilian, we said we would be to each other as two
voices, two shadows."
"As you will, Valentine."
"Shall you be happy if I do what you wish?"
"Oh, yes" Valentine mounted on a bench, and passed not only
her finger but her whole hand through the opening.
Maximilian uttered a cry of delight, and, springing
forwards, seized the hand extended towards him, and
imprinted on it a fervent and impassioned kiss. The little
hand was then immediately withdrawn, and the young man saw
Valentine hurrying towards the house, as though she were
almost terrified at her own sensations.
Chapter 
M. Noirtier de Villefort.
We will now relate what was passing in the house of the
king's attorney after the departure of Madame Danglars and
her daughter, and during the time of the conversation
between Maximilian and Valentine, which we have just
detailed. M. de Villefort entered his father's room,
followed by Madame de Villefort. Both of the visitors, after
saluting the old man and speaking to Barrois, a faithful
servant, who had been twentyfive years in his service, took
their places on either side of the paralytic.
M. Noirtier was sitting in an armchair, which moved upon
casters, in which he was wheeled into the room in the
morning, and in the same way drawn out again at night. He
was placed before a large glass, which reflected the whole
apartment, and so, without any attempt to move, which would
have been impossible, he could see all who entered the room
and everything which was going on around him. M. Noirtier,
although almost as immovable as a corpse, looked at the
newcomers with a quick and intelligent expression,
perceiving at once, by their ceremonious courtesy, that they
were come on business of an unexpected and official
character. Sight and hearing were the only senses remaining,
and they, like two solitary sparks, remained to animate the
miserable body which seemed fit for nothing but the grave
it was only, however, by means of one of these senses that
he could reveal the thoughts and feelings that still
occupied his mind, and the look by which he gave expression
to his inner life was like the distant gleam of a candle
which a traveller sees by night across some desert place,
and knows that a living being dwells beyond the silence and
obscurity. Noirtier's hair was long and white, and flowed
over his shoulders while in his eyes, shaded by thick black
lashes, was concentrated, as it often happens with an organ
which is used to the exclusion of the others, all the
activity, address, force, and intelligence which were
formerly diffused over his whole body and so although the
movement of the arm, the sound of the voice, and the agility
of the body, were wanting, the speaking eye sufficed for
all. He commanded with it it was the medium through which
his thanks were conveyed. In short, his whole appearance
produced on the mind the impression of a corpse with living
eyes, and nothing could be more startling than to observe
the expression of anger or joy suddenly lighting up these
organs, while the rest of the rigid and marblelike features
were utterly deprived of the power of participation. Three
persons only could understand this language of the poor
paralytic these were Villefort, Valentine, and the old
servant of whom we have already spoken. But as Villefort saw
his father but seldom, and then only when absolutely
obliged, and as he never took any pains to please or gratify
him when he was there, all the old man's happiness was
centred in his granddaughter. Valentine, by means of her
love, her patience, and her devotion, had learned to read in
Noirtier's look all the varied feelings which were passing
in his mind. To this dumb language, which was so
unintelligible to others, she answered by throwing her whole
soul into the expression of her countenance, and in this
manner were the conversations sustained between the blooming
girl and the helpless invalid, whose body could scarcely be
called a living one, but who, nevertheless, possessed a fund
of knowledge and penetration, united with a will as powerful
as ever although clogged by a body rendered utterly
incapable of obeying its impulses. Valentine had solved the
problem, and was able easily to understand his thoughts, and
to convey her own in return, and, through her untiring and
devoted assiduity, it was seldom that, in the ordinary
transactions of everyday life, she failed to anticipate the
wishes of the living, thinking mind, or the wants of the
almost inanimate body. As to the servant, he had, as we have
said, been with his master for five and twenty years,
therefore he knew all his habits, and it was seldom that
Noirtier found it necessary to ask for anything, so prompt
was he in administering to all the necessities of the
invalid. Villefort did not need the help of either Valentine
or the domestic in order to carry on with his father the
strange conversation which he was about to begin. As we have
said, he perfectly understood the old man's vocabulary, and
if he did not use it more often, it was only indifference
and ennui which prevented him from so doing. He therefore
allowed Valentine to go into the garden, sent away Barrois,
and after having seated himself at his father's right hand,
while Madame de Villefort placed herself on the left, he
addressed him thus 
"I trust you will not be displeased, sir, that Valentine has
not come with us, or that I dismissed Barrois, for our
conference will be one which could not with propriety be
carried on in the presence of either. Madame de Villefort
and I have a communication to make to you."
Noirtier's face remained perfectly passive during this long
preamble, while, on the contrary, Villefort's eye was
endeavoring to penetrate into the inmost recesses of the old
man's heart.
"This communication," continued the procureur, in that cold
and decisive tone which seemed at once to preclude all
discussion, "will, we are sure, meet with your approbation."
The eye of the invalid still retained that vacancy of
expression which prevented his son from obtaining any
knowledge of the feelings which were passing in his mind he
listened, nothing more. "Sir," resumed Villefort, "we are
thinking of marrying Valentine." Had the old man's face been
moulded in wax it could not have shown less emotion at this
news than was now to be traced there. "The marriage will
take place in less than three months," said Villefort.
Noirtier's eye still retained its inanimate expression.
Madame de Villefort now took her part in the conversation
and added,  "We thought this news would possess an
interest for you, sir, who have always entertained a great
affection for Valentine it therefore only now remains for
us to tell you the name of the young man for whom she is
destined. It is one of the most desirable connections which
could possibly be formed he possesses fortune, a high rank
in society, and every personal qualification likely to
render Valentine supremely happy,  his name, moreover,
cannot be wholly unknown to you. It is M. Franz de Quesnel,
Baron d'Epinay."
While his wife was speaking, Villefort had narrowly watched
the old man's countenance. When Madame de Villefort
pronounced the name of Franz, the pupil of M. Noirtier's eye
began to dilate, and his eyelids trembled with the same
movement that may be perceived on the lips of an individual
about to speak, and he darted a lightning glance at Madame
de Villefort and his son. The procureur, who knew the
political hatred which had formerly existed between M.
Noirtier and the elder d'Epinay, well understood the
agitation and anger which the announcement had produced
but, feigning not to perceive either, he immediately resumed
the narrative begun by his wife. "Sir," said he, "you are
aware that Valentine is about to enter her nineteenth year,
which renders it important that she should lose no time in
forming a suitable alliance. Nevertheless, you have not been
forgotten in our plans, and we have fully ascertained
beforehand that Valentine's future husband will consent, not
to live in this house, for that might not be pleasant for
the young people, but that you should live with them so
that you and Valentine, who are so attached to each other,
would not be separated, and you would be able to pursue
exactly the same course of life which you have hitherto
done, and thus, instead of losing, you will be a gainer by
the change, as it will secure to you two children instead of
one, to watch over and comfort you."
Noirtier's look was furious it was very evident that
something desperate was passing in the old man's mind, for a
cry of anger and grief rose in his throat, and not being
able to find vent in utterance, appeared almost to choke
him, for his face and lips turned quite purple with the
struggle. Villefort quietly opened a window, saying, "It is
very warm, and the heat affects M. Noirtier." He then
returned to his place, but did not sit down. "This
marriage," added Madame de Villefort, "is quite agreeable to
the wishes of M. d'Epinay and his family besides, he had no
relations nearer than an uncle and aunt, his mother having
died at his birth, and his father having been assassinated
in , that is to say, when he was but two years old it
naturally followed that the child was permitted to choose
his own pursuits, and he has, therefore, seldom acknowledged
any other authority but that of his own will."
"That assassination was a mysterious affair," said
Villefort, "and the perpetrators have hitherto escaped
detection, although suspicion has fallen on the head of more
than one person." Noirtier made such an effort that his lips
expanded into a smile.
"Now," continued Villefort, "those to whom the guilt really
belongs, by whom the crime was committed, on whose heads the
justice of man may probably descend here, and the certain
judgment of God hereafter, would rejoice in the opportunity
thus afforded of bestowing such a peaceoffering as
Valentine on the son of him whose life they so ruthlessly
destroyed." Noirtier had succeeded in mastering his emotion
more than could have been deemed possible with such an
enfeebled and shattered frame. "Yes, I understand," was the
reply contained in his look and this look expressed a
feeling of strong indignation, mixed with profound contempt.
Villefort fully understood his father's meaning, and
answered by a slight shrug of his shoulders. He then
motioned to his wife to take leave. "Now sir," said Madame
de Villefort, "I must bid you farewell. Would you like me to
send Edward to you for a short time?"
It had been agreed that the old man should express his
approbation by closing his eyes, his refusal by winking them
several times, and if he had some desire or feeling to
express, he raised them to heaven. If he wanted Valentine,
he closed his right eye only, and if Barrois, the left. At
Madame de Villefort's proposition he instantly winked his
eyes. Provoked by a complete refusal, she bit her lip and
said, "Then shall I send Valentine to you?" The old man
closed his eyes eagerly, thereby intimating that such was
his wish. M. and Madame de Villefort bowed and left the
room, giving orders that Valentine should be summoned to her
grandfather's presence, and feeling sure that she would have
much to do to restore calmness to the perturbed spirit of
the invalid. Valentine, with a color still heightened by
emotion, entered the room just after her parents had quitted
it. One look was sufficient to tell her that her grandfather
was suffering, and that there was much on his mind which he
was wishing to communicate to her. "Dear grandpapa," cried
she, "what has happened? They have vexed you, and you are
angry?" The paralytic closed his eyes in token of assent.
"Who has displeased you? Is it my father?"
"No."
"Madame de Villefort?"
"No."
"Me?" The former sign was repeated. "Are you displeased with
me?" cried Valentine in astonishment. M. Noirtier again
closed his eyes. "And what have I done, dear grandpapa, that
you should be angry with me?" cried Valentine.
There was no answer, and she continued. "I have not seen you
all day. Has any one been speaking to you against me?"
"Yes," said the old man's look, with eagerness.
"Let me think a moment. I do assure you, grandpapa  Ah 
M. and Madame de Villefort have just left this room, have
they not?"
"Yes."
"And it was they who told you something which made you
angry? What was it then? May I go and ask them, that I may
have the opportunity of making my peace with you?"
"No, no," said Noirtier's look.
"Ah, you frighten me. What can they have said?" and she
again tried to think what it could be.
"Ah, I know," said she, lowering her voice and going close
to the old man. "They have been speaking of my marriage, 
have they not?"
"Yes," replied the angry look.
"I understand you are displeased at the silence I have
preserved on the subject. The reason of it was, that they
had insisted on my keeping the matter a secret, and begged
me not to tell you anything of it. They did not even
acquaint me with their intentions, and I only discovered
them by chance, that is why I have been so reserved with
you, dear grandpapa. Pray forgive me." But there was no look
calculated to reassure her all it seemed to say was, "It is
not only your reserve which afflicts me."
"What is it, then?" asked the young girl. "Perhaps you think
I shall abandon you, dear grandpapa, and that I shall forget
you when I am married?"
"No."
"They told you, then, that M. d'Epinay consented to our all
living together?"
"Yes."
"Then why are you still vexed and grieved?" The old man's
eyes beamed with an expression of gentle affection. "Yes, I
understand," said Valentine "it is because you love me."
The old man assented. "And you are afraid I shall be
unhappy?"
"Yes."
"You do not like M. Franz?" The eyes repeated several times,
"No, no, no."
"Then you are vexed with the engagement?"
"Yes."
"Well, listen," said Valentine, throwing herself on her
knees, and putting her arm round her grandfather's neck, "I
am vexed, too, for I do not love M. Franz d'Epinay." An
expression of intense joy illumined the old man's eyes.
"When I wished to retire into a convent, you remember how
angry you were with me?" A tear trembled in the eye of the
invalid. "Well," continued Valentine, "the reason of my
proposing it was that I might escape this hateful marriage,
which drives me to despair." Noirtier's breathing came thick
and short. "Then the idea of this marriage really grieves
you too? Ah, if you could but help me  if we could both
together defeat their plan But you are unable to oppose
them,  you, whose mind is so quick, and whose will is so
firm are nevertheless, as weak and unequal to the contest as
I am myself. Alas, you, who would have been such a powerful
protector to me in the days of your health and strength, can
now only sympathize in my joys and sorrows, without being
able to take any active part in them. However, this is much,
and calls for gratitude and heaven has not taken away all my
blessings when it leaves me your sympathy and kindness."
At these words there appeared in Noirtier's eye an
expression of such deep meaning that the young girl thought
she could read these words there "You are mistaken I can
still do much for you."
"Do you think you can help me, dear grandpapa?" said
Valentine.
"Yes." Noirtier raised his eyes, it was the sign agreed on
between him and Valentine when he wanted anything.
"What is it you want, dear grandpapa?" said Valentine, and
she endeavored to recall to mind all the things which he
would be likely to need and as the ideas presented
themselves to her mind, she repeated them aloud, then, 
finding that all her efforts elicited nothing but a constant
"No,"  she said, "Come, since this plan does not answer, I
will have recourse to another." She then recited all the
letters of the alphabet from A down to N. When she arrived
at that letter the paralytic made her understand that she
had spoken the initial letter of the thing he wanted. "Ah,"
said Valentine, "the thing you desire begins with the letter
N it is with N that we have to do, then. Well, let me see,
what can you want that begins with N? Na  Ne  Ni  No"
"Yes, yes, yes," said the old man's eye.
"Ah, it is No, then?"
"Yes." Valentine fetched a dictionary, which she placed on a
desk before Noirtier she opened it, and, seeing that the
odd man's eye was thoroughly fixed on its pages, she ran her
finger quickly up and down the columns. During the six years
which had passed since Noirtier first fell into this sad
state, Valentine's powers of invention had been too often
put to the test not to render her expert in devising
expedients for gaining a knowledge of his wishes, and the
constant practice had so perfected her in the art that she
guessed the old man's meaning as quickly as if he himself
had been able to seek for what he wanted. At the word
"Notary," Noirtier made a sign to her to stop. "Notary,"
said she, "do you want a notary, dear grandpapa?" The old
man again signified that it was a notary he desired.
"You would wish a notary to be sent for then?" said
Valentine.
"Yes."
"Shall my father be informed of your wish?"
"Yes."
"Do you wish the notary to be sent for immediately?"
"Yes."
"Then they shall go for him directly, dear grandpapa. Is
that all you want?"
"Yes." Valentine rang the bell, and ordered the servant to
tell Monsieur or Madame de Villefort that they were
requested to come to M. Noirtier's room. "Are you satisfied
now?" inquired Valentine.
"Yes."
"I am sure you are it is not very difficult to discover
that,"  and the young girl smiled on her grandfather, as
if he had been a child. M. de Villefort entered, followed by
Barrois. "What do you want me for, sir?" demanded he of the
paralytic.
"Sir," said Valentine, "my grandfather wishes for a notary."
At this strange and unexpected demand M. de Villefort and
his father exchanged looks. "Yes," motioned the latter, with
a firmness which seemed to declare that with the help of
Valentine and his old servant, who both knew what his wishes
were, he was quite prepared to maintain the contest. "Do you
wish for a notary?" asked Villefort.
"Yes."
"What to do?"
Noirtier made no answer. "What do you want with a notary?"
again repeated Villefort. The invalid's eye remained fixed,
by which expression he intended to intimate that his
resolution was unalterable. "Is it to do us some ill turn?
Do you think it is worth while?" said Villefort.
"Still," said Barrois, with the freedom and fidelity of an
old servant, "if M. Noirtier asks for a notary, I suppose he
really wishes for a notary therefore I shall go at once and
fetch one." Barrois acknowledged no master but Noirtier, and
never allowed his desires in any way to be contradicted.
"Yes, I do want a notary," motioned the old man, shutting
his eyes with a look of defiance, which seemed to say, "and
I should like to see the person who dares to refuse my
request."
"You shall have a notary, as you absolutely wish for one,
sir," said Villefort "but I shall explain to him your state
of health, and make excuses for you, for the scene cannot
fail of being a most ridiculous one."
"Never mind that," said Barrois "I shall go and fetch a
notary, nevertheless,"  and the old servant departed
triumphantly on his mission.
Chapter 
The Will.
As soon as Barrois had left the room, Noirtier looked at
Valentine with a malicious expression that said many things.
The young girl perfectly understood the look, and so did
Villefort, for his countenance became clouded, and he
knitted his eyebrows angrily. He took a seat, and quietly
awaited the arrival of the notary. Noirtier saw him seat
himself with an appearance of perfect indifference, at the
same time giving a side look at Valentine, which made her
understand that she also was to remain in the room.
Threequarters of an hour after, Barrois returned, bringing
the notary with him. "Sir," said Villefort, after the first
salutations were over, "you were sent for by M. Noirtier,
whom you see here. All his limbs have become completely
paralysed, he has lost his voice also, and we ourselves find
much trouble in endeavoring to catch some fragments of his
meaning." Noirtier cast an appealing look on Valentine,
which look was at once so earnest and imperative, that she
answered immediately. "Sir," said she, "I perfectly
understand my grandfather's meaning at all times."
"That is quite true," said Barrois "and that is what I told
the gentleman as we walked along."
"Permit me," said the notary, turning first to Villefort and
then to Valentine  "permit me to state that the case in
question is just one of those in which a public officer like
myself cannot proceed to act without thereby incurring a
dangerous responsibility. The first thing necessary to
render an act valid is, that the notary should be thoroughly
convinced that he has faithfully interpreted the will and
wishes of the person dictating the act. Now I cannot be sure
of the approbation or disapprobation of a client who cannot
speak, and as the object of his desire or his repugnance
cannot be clearly proved to me, on account of his want of
speech, my services here would be quite useless, and cannot
be legally exercised." The notary then prepared to retire.
An imperceptible smile of triumph was expressed on the lips
of the procureur. Noirtier looked at Valentine with an
expression so full of grief, that she arrested the departure
of the notary. "Sir," said she, "the language which I speak
with my grandfather may be easily learnt, and I can teach
you in a few minutes, to understand it almost as well as I
can myself. Will you tell me what you require, in order to
set your conscience quite at ease on the subject?"
"In order to render an act valid, I must be certain of the
approbation or disapprobation of my client. Illness of body
would not affect the validity of the deed, but sanity of
mind is absolutely requisite."
"Well, sir, by the help of two signs, with which I will
acquaint you presently, you may ascertain with perfect
certainty that my grandfather is still in the full
possession of all his mental faculties. M. Noirtier, being
deprived of voice and motion, is accustomed to convey his
meaning by closing his eyes when he wishes to signify "yes,'
and to wink when he means "no.' You now know quite enough to
enable you to converse with M. Noirtier  try." Noirtier
gave Valentine such a look of tenderness and gratitude that
it was comprehended even by the notary himself. "You have
heard and understood what your granddaughter has been
saying, sir, have you?" asked the notary. Noirtier closed
his eyes. "And you approve of what she said  that is to
say, you declare that the signs which she mentioned are
really those by means of which you are accustomed to convey
your thoughts?"
"Yes."
"It was you who sent for me?"
"Yes."
"To make your will?"
"Yes."
"And you do not wish me to go away without fulfilling your
original intentions?" The old man winked violently. "Well,
sir," said the young girl, "do you understand now, and is
your conscience perfectly at rest on the subject?" But
before the notary could answer, Villefort had drawn him
aside. "Sir," said he, "do you suppose for a moment that a
man can sustain a physical shock, such as M. Noirtier has
received, without any detriment to his mental faculties?"
"It is not exactly that, sir," said the notary, "which makes
me uneasy, but the difficulty will be in wording his
thoughts and intentions, so as to be able to get his
answers."
"You must see that to be an utter impossibility," said
Villefort. Valentine and the old man heard this
conversation, and Noirtier fixed his eye so earnestly on
Valentine that she felt bound to answer to the look.
"Sir," said she, "that need not make you uneasy, however
difficult it may at first sight appear to be. I can discover
and explain to you my grandfather's thoughts, so as to put
an end to all your doubts and fears on the subject. I have
now been six years with M. Noirtier, and let him tell you if
ever once, during that time, he has entertained a thought
which he was unable to make me understand."
"No," signed the old man.
"Let us try what we can do, then," said the notary. "You
accept this young lady as your interpreter, M. Noirtier?"
"Yes."
"Well, sir, what do you require of me, and what document is
it that you wish to be drawn up?" Valentine named all the
letters of the alphabet until she came to W. At this letter
the eloquent eye of Noirtier gave her notice that she was to
stop. "It is very evident that it is the letter W which M.
Noirtier wants," said the notary. "Wait," said Valentine
and, turning to her grandfather, she repeated, "Wa  We 
Wi"  The old man stopped her at the last syllable.
Valentine then took the dictionary, and the notary watched
her while she turned over the pages. She passed her finger
slowly down the columns, and when she came to the word
"Will," M. Noirtier's eye bade her stop. "Will," said the
notary "it is very evident that M. Noirtier is desirous of
making his will."
"Yes, yes, yes," motioned the invalid.
"Really, sir, you must allow that this is most
extraordinary," said the astonished notary, turning to M. de
Villefort. "Yes," said the procureur, "and I think the will
promises to be yet more extraordinary, for I cannot see how
it is to be drawn up without the intervention of Valentine,
and she may, perhaps, be considered as too much interested
in its contents to allow of her being a suitable interpreter
of the obscure and illdefined wishes of her grandfather."
"No, no, no," replied the eye of the paralytic.
"What?" said Villefort, "do you mean to say that Valentine
is not interested in your will?"
"No."
"Sir," said the notary, whose interest had been greatly
excited, and who had resolved on publishing far and wide the
account of this extraordinary and picturesque scene, "what
appeared so impossible to me an hour ago, has now become
quite easy and practicable, and this may be a perfectly
valid will, provided it be read in the presence of seven
witnesses, approved by the testator, and sealed by the
notary in the presence of the witnesses. As to the time, it
will not require very much more than the generality of
wills. There are certain forms necessary to be gone through,
and which are always the same. As to the details, the
greater part will be furnished afterwards by the state in
which we find the affairs of the testator, and by yourself,
who, having had the management of them, can doubtless give
full information on the subject. But besides all this, in
order that the instrument may not be contested, I am anxious
to give it the greatest possible authenticity, therefore,
one of my colleagues will help me, and, contrary to custom,
will assist in the dictation of the testament. Are you
satisfied, sir?" continued the notary, addressing the old
man.
"Yes," looked the invalid, his eye beaming with delight at
the ready interpretation of his meaning.
"What is he going to do?" thought Villefort, whose position
demanded much reserve, but who was longing to know what his
father's intentions were. He left the room to give orders
for another notary to be sent, but Barrois, who had heard
all that passed, had guessed his master's wishes, and had
already gone to fetch one. The procureur then told his wife
to come up. In the course of a quarter of an hour every one
had assembled in the chamber of the paralytic the second
notary had also arrived. A few words sufficed for a mutual
understanding between the two officers of the law. They read
to Noirtier the formal copy of a will, in order to give him
an idea of the terms in which such documents are generally
couched then, in order to test the capacity of the
testator, the first notary said, turning towards him, 
"When an individual makes his will, it is generally in favor
or in prejudice of some person."
"Yes."
"Have you an exact idea of the amount of your fortune?"
"Yes."
"I will name to you several sums which will increase by
gradation you will stop me when I reach the one
representing the amount of your own possessions?"
"Yes." There was a kind of solemnity in this interrogation.
Never had the struggle between mind and matter been more
apparent than now, and if it was not a sublime, it was, at
least, a curious spectacle. They had formed a circle round
the invalid the second notary was sitting at a table,
prepared for writing, and his colleague was standing before
the testator in the act of interrogating him on the subject
to which we have alluded. "Your fortune exceeds ,
francs, does it not?" asked he. Noirtier made a sign that it
did. "Do you possess , francs?" inquired the notary.
Noirtier's eye remained immovable. "Five hundred thousand?"
The same expression continued. "Six hundred thousand 
,  ,  ,?" Noirtier stopped him at the
lastnamed sum. "You are then in possession of ,
francs?" asked the notary. "Yes."
"In landed property?"
"No."
"In stock?"
"Yes."
"The stock is in your own hands?" The look which M. Noirtier
cast on Barrois showed that there was something wanting
which he knew where to find. The old servant left the room,
and presently returned, bringing with him a small casket.
"Do you permit us to open this casket?" asked the notary.
Noirtier gave his assent. They opened it, and found ,
francs in bank scrip. The first notary handed over each
note, as he examined it, to his colleague.
The total amount was found to be as M. Noirtier had stated.
"It is all as he has said it is very evident that the mind
still retains its full force and vigor." Then, turning
towards the paralytic, he said, "You possess, then, ,
francs of capital, which, according to the manner in which
you have invested it, ought to bring in an income of about
, livres?"
"Yes."
"To whom do you desire to leave this fortune?"
"Oh," said Madame de Villefort, "there is not much doubt on
that subject. M. Noirtier tenderly loves his granddaughter,
Mademoiselle de Villefort it is she who has nursed and
tended him for six years, and has, by her devoted attention,
fully secured the affection, I had almost said the
gratitude, of her grandfather, and it is but just that she
should reap the fruit of her devotion." The eye of Noirtier
clearly showed by its expression that he was not deceived by
the false assent given by Madame de Villefort's words and
manner to the motives which she supposed him to entertain.
"Is it, then, to Mademoiselle Valentine de Villefort that
you leave these , francs?" demanded the notary,
thinking he had only to insert this clause, but waiting
first for the assent of Noirtier, which it was necessary
should be given before all the witnesses of this singular
scene. Valentine, when her name was made the subject of
discussion, had stepped back, to escape unpleasant
observation her eyes were cast down, and she was crying.
The old man looked at her for an instant with an expression
of the deepest tenderness, then, turning towards the notary,
he significantly winked his eye in token of dissent.
"What," said the notary, "do you not intend making
Mademoiselle Valentine de Villefort your residuary legatee?"
"No."
"You are not making any mistake, are you?" said the notary
"you really mean to declare that such is not your
intention?"
"No," repeated Noirtier "No." Valentine raised her head,
struck dumb with astonishment. It was not so much the
conviction that she was disinherited that caused her grief,
but her total inability to account for the feelings which
had provoked her grandfather to such an act. But Noirtier
looked at her with so much affectionate tenderness that she
exclaimed, "Oh, grandpapa, I see now that it is only your
fortune of which you deprive me you still leave me the love
which I have always enjoyed."
"Ah, yes, most assuredly," said the eyes of the paralytic,
for he closed them with an expression which Valentine could
not mistake. "Thank you, thank you," murmured she. The old
man's declaration that Valentine was not the destined
inheritor of his fortune had excited the hopes of Madame de
Villefort she gradually approached the invalid, and said
"Then, doubtless, dear M. Noirtier, you intend leaving your
fortune to your grandson, Edward de Villefort?" The winking
of the eyes which answered this speech was most decided and
terrible, and expressed a feeling almost amounting to
hatred.
"No?" said the notary "then, perhaps, it is to your son, M.
de Villefort?"
"No." The two notaries looked at each other in mute
astonishment and inquiry as to what were the real intentions
of the testator. Villefort and his wife both grew red, one
from shame, the other from anger.
"What have we all done, then, dear grandpapa?" said
Valentine "you no longer seem to love any of us?" The old
man's eyes passed rapidly from Villefort and his wife, and
rested on Valentine with a look of unutterable fondness.
"Well," said she "if you love me, grandpapa, try and bring
that love to bear upon your actions at this present moment.
You know me well enough to be quite sure that I have never
thought of your fortune besides, they say I am already rich
in right of my mother  too rich, even. Explain yourself,
then." Noirtier fixed his intelligent eyes on Valentine's
hand. "My hand?" said she.
"Yes."
"Her hand" exclaimed every one.
"Oh, gentlemen, you see it is all useless, and that my
father's mind is really impaired," said Villefort.
"Ah," cried Valentine suddenly, "I understand. It is my
marriage you mean, is it not, dear grandpapa?"
"Yes, yes, yes," signed the paralytic, casting on Valentine
a look of joyful gratitude for having guessed his meaning.
"You are angry with us all on account of this marriage, are
you not?"
"Yes?"
"Really, this is too absurd," said Villefort.
"Excuse me, sir," replied the notary "on the contrary, the
meaning of M. Noirtier is quite evident to me, and I can
quite easily connect the train of ideas passing in his
mind."
"You do not wish me to marry M. Franz d'Epinay?" observed
Valentine.
"I do not wish it," said the eye of her grandfather. "And
you disinherit your granddaughter," continued the notary,
"because she has contracted an engagement contrary to your
wishes?"
"Yes."
"So that, but for this marriage, she would have been your
heir?"
"Yes." There was a profound silence. The two notaries were
holding a consultation as to the best means of proceeding
with the affair. Valentine was looking at her grandfather
with a smile of intense gratitude, and Villefort was biting
his lips with vexation, while Madame de Villefort could not
succeed in repressing an inward feeling of joy, which, in
spite of herself, appeared in her whole countenance. "But,"
said Villefort, who was the first to break the silence, "I
consider that I am the best judge of the propriety of the
marriage in question. I am the only person possessing the
right to dispose of my daughter's hand. It is my wish that
she should marry M. Franz d'Epinay  and she shall marry
him." Valentine sank weeping into a chair.
"Sir," said the notary, "how do you intend disposing of your
fortune in case Mademoiselle de Villefort still determines
on marrying M. Franz?" The old man gave no answer. "You
will, of course, dispose of it in some way or other?"
"Yes."
"In favor of some member of your family?"
"No."
"Do you intend devoting it to charitable purposes, then?"
pursued the notary.
"Yes."
"But," said the notary, "you are aware that the law does not
allow a son to be entirely deprived of his patrimony?"
"Yes."
"You only intend, then, to dispose of that part of your
fortune which the law allows you to subtract from the
inheritance of your son?" Noirtier made no answer. "Do you
still wish to dispose of all?"
"Yes."
"But they will contest the will after your death?"
"No."
"My father knows me," replied Villefort "he is quite sure
that his wishes will be held sacred by me besides, he
understands that in my position I cannot plead against the
poor." The eye of Noirtier beamed with triumph. "What do you
decide on, sir?" asked the notary of Villefort.
"Nothing, sir it is a resolution which my father has taken
and I know he never alters his mind. I am quite resigned.
These , francs will go out of the family in order to
enrich some hospital but it is ridiculous thus to yield to
the caprices of an old man, and I shall, therefore, act
according to my conscience." Having said this, Villefort
quitted the room with his wife, leaving his father at
liberty to do as he pleased. The same day the will was made,
the witnesses were brought, it was approved by the old man,
sealed in the presence of all and given in charge to M.
Deschamps, the family notary.
Chapter 
The Telegraph.
M. and Madame de Villefort found on their return that the
Count of Monte Cristo, who had come to visit them in their
absence, had been ushered into the drawingroom, and was
still awaiting them there. Madame de Villefort, who had not
yet sufficiently recovered from her late emotion to allow of
her entertaining visitors so immediately, retired to her
bedroom, while the procureur, who could better depend upon
himself, proceeded at once to the salon. Although M. de
Villefort flattered himself that, to all outward view, he
had completely masked the feelings which were passing in his
mind, he did not know that the cloud was still lowering on
his brow, so much so that the count, whose smile was
radiant, immediately noticed his sombre and thoughtful air.
"Ma foi," said Monte Cristo, after the first compliments
were over, "what is the matter with you, M. de Villefort?
Have I arrived at the moment when you were drawing up an
indictment for a capital crime?" Villefort tried to smile.
"No, count," he replied, "I am the only victim in this case.
It is I who lose my cause, and it is illluck, obstinacy,
and folly which have caused it to be decided against me."
"To what do you refer?" said Monte Cristo with wellfeigned
interest. "Have you really met with some great misfortune?"
"Oh, no, monsieur," said Villefort with a bitter smile "it
is only a loss of money which I have sustained  nothing
worth mentioning, I assure you."
"True," said Monte Cristo, "the loss of a sum of money
becomes almost immaterial with a fortune such as you
possess, and to one of your philosophic spirit."
"It is not so much the loss of the money that vexes me,"
said Villefort, "though, after all, , francs are worth
regretting but I am the more annoyed with this fate,
chance, or whatever you please to call the power which has
destroyed my hopes and my fortune, and may blast the
prospects of my child also, as it is all occasioned by an
old man relapsed into second childhood."
"What do you say?" said the count ", francs? It is
indeed a sum which might be regretted even by a philosopher.
And who is the cause of all this annoyance?"
"My father, as I told you."
"M. Noirtier? But I thought you told me he had become
entirely paralyzed, and that all his faculties were
completely destroyed?"
"Yes, his bodily faculties, for he can neither move nor
speak, nevertheless he thinks, acts, and wills in the manner
I have described. I left him about five minutes ago, and he
is now occupied in dictating his will to two notaries."
"But to do this he must have spoken?"
"He has done better than that  he has made himself
understood."
"How was such a thing possible?"
"By the help of his eyes, which are still full of life, and,
as you perceive, possess the power of inflicting mortal
injury."
"My dear," said Madame de Villefort, who had just entered
the room, "perhaps you exaggerate the evil."
"Goodmorning, madame," said the count, bowing. Madame de
Villefort acknowledged the salutation with one of her most
gracious smiles. "What is this that M. de Villefort has been
telling me?" demanded Monte Cristo "and what
incomprehensible misfortune" 
"Incomprehensible is not the word," interrupted the
procureur, shrugging his shoulders. "It is an old man's
caprice."
"And is there no means of making him revoke his decision?"
"Yes," said Madame de Villefort "and it is still entirely
in the power of my husband to cause the will, which is now
in prejudice of Valentine, to be altered in her favor." The
count, who perceived that M. and Madame de Villefort were
beginning to speak in parables, appeared to pay no attention
to the conversation, and feigned to be busily engaged in
watching Edward, who was mischievously pouring some ink into
the bird's waterglass. "My dear," said Villefort, in answer
to his wife, "you know I have never been accustomed to play
the patriarch in my family, nor have I ever considered that
the fate of a universe was to be decided by my nod.
Nevertheless, it is necessary that my will should be
respected in my family, and that the folly of an old man and
the caprice of a child should not be allowed to overturn a
project which I have entertained for so many years. The
Baron d'Epinay was my friend, as you know, and an alliance
with his son is the most suitable thing that could possibly
be arranged."
"Do you think," said Madame de Villefort, "that Valentine is
in league with him? She has always been opposed to this
marriage, and I should not be at all surprised if what we
have just seen and heard is nothing but the execution of a
plan concerted between them."
"Madame," said Villefort, "believe me, a fortune of ,
francs is not so easily renounced."
"She could, nevertheless, make up her mind to renounce the
world, sir, since it is only about a year ago that she
herself proposed entering a convent."
"Never mind," replied Villefort "I say that this marriage
shall be consummated."
"Notwithstanding your father's wishes to the contrary?" said
Madame de Villefort, selecting a new point of attack. "That
is a serious thing." Monte Cristo, who pretended not to be
listening, heard however, every word that was said.
"Madame," replied Villefort "I can truly say that I have
always entertained a high respect for my father, because, to
the natural feeling of relationship was added the
consciousness of his moral superiority. The name of father
is sacred in two senses he should be reverenced as the
author of our being and as a master whom we ought to obey.
But, under the present circumstances, I am justified in
doubting the wisdom of an old man who, because he hated the
father, vents his anger on the son. It would be ridiculous
in me to regulate my conduct by such caprices. I shall still
continue to preserve the same respect toward M. Noirtier I
will suffer, without complaint, the pecuniary deprivation to
which he has subjected me but I shall remain firm in my
determination, and the world shall see which party has
reason on his side. Consequently I shall marry my daughter
to the Baron Franz d'Epinay, because I consider it would be
a proper and eligible match for her to make, and, in short,
because I choose to bestow my daughter's hand on whomever I
please."
"What?" said the count, the approbation of whose eye
Villefort had frequently solicited during this speech.
"What? Do you say that M. Noirtier disinherits Mademoiselle
de Villefort because she is going to marry M. le Baron Franz
d'Epinay?"
"Yes, sir, that is the reason," said Villefort, shrugging
his shoulders.
"The apparent reason, at least," said Madame de Villefort.
"The real reason, madame, I can assure you I know my
father."
"But I want to know in what way M. d'Epinay can have
displeased your father more than any other person?"
"I believe I know M. Franz d'Epinay," said the count "is he
not the son of General de Quesnel, who was created Baron
d'Epinay by Charles X.?"
"The same," said Villefort.
"Well, but he is a charming young man, according to my
ideas."
"He is, which makes me believe that it is only an excuse of
M. Noirtier to prevent his granddaughter marrying old men
are always so selfish in their affection," said Madame de
Villefort.
"But," said Monte Cristo "do you not know any cause for this
hatred?"
"Ah, ma foi, who is to know?"
"Perhaps it is some political difference?"
"My father and the Baron d'Epinay lived in the stormy times
of which I only saw the ending," said Villefort.
"Was not your father a Bonapartist?" asked Monte Cristo "I
think I remember that you told me something of that kind."
"My father has been a Jacobin more than anything else," said
Villefort, carried by his emotion beyond the bounds of
prudence "and the senator's robe, which Napoleon cast on
his shoulders, only served to disguise the old man without
in any degree changing him. When my father conspired, it was
not for the emperor, it was against the Bourbons for M.
Noirtier possessed this peculiarity, he never projected any
Utopian schemes which could never be realized, but strove
for possibilities, and he applied to the realization of
these possibilities the terrible theories of The Mountain,
theories that never shrank from any means that were
deemed necessary to bring about the desired result."
"Well," said Monte Cristo, "it is just as I thought it was
politics which brought Noirtier and M. d'Epinay into
personal contact. Although General d'Epinay served under
Napoleon, did he not still retain royalist sentiments? And
was he not the person who was assassinated one evening on
leaving a Bonapartist meeting to which he had been invited
on the supposition that he favored the cause of the
emperor?" Villefort looked at the count almost with terror.
"Am I mistaken, then?" said Monte Cristo.
"No, sir, the facts were precisely what you have stated,"
said Madame de Villefort "and it was to prevent the renewal
of old feuds that M. de Villefort formed the idea of uniting
in the bonds of affection the two children of these
inveterate enemies."
"It was a sublime and charitable thought," said Monte
Cristo, "and the whole world should applaud it. It would be
noble to see Mademoiselle Noirtier de Villefort assuming the
title of Madame Franz d'Epinay." Villefort shuddered and
looked at Monte Cristo as if he wished to read in his
countenance the real feelings which had dictated the words
he had just uttered. But the count completely baffled the
procureur, and prevented him from discovering anything
beneath the nevervarying smile he was so constantly in the
habit of assuming. "Although," said Villefort, "it will be a
serious thing for Valentine to lose her grandfather's
fortune, I do not think that M. d'Epinay will be frightened
at this pecuniary loss. He will, perhaps, hold me in greater
esteem than the money itself, seeing that I sacrifice
everything in order to keep my word with him. Besides, he
knows that Valentine is rich in right of her mother, and
that she will, in all probability, inherit the fortune of M.
and Madame de SaintMeran, her mother's parents, who both
love her tenderly."
"And who are fully as well worth loving and tending as M.
Noirtier," said Madame de Villefort "besides, they are to
come to Paris in about a month, and Valentine, after the
affront she has received, need not consider it necessary to
continue to bury herself alive by being shut up with M.
Noirtier." The count listened with satisfaction to this tale
of wounded selflove and defeated ambition. "But it seems to
me," said Monte Cristo, "and I must begin by asking your
pardon for what I am about to say, that if M. Noirtier
disinherits Mademoiselle de Villefort because she is going
to marry a man whose father he detested, he cannot have the
same cause of complaint against this dear Edward."
"True," said Madame de Villefort, with an intonation of
voice which it is impossible to describe "is it not unjust
shamefully unjust? Poor Edward is as much M. Noirtier's
grandchild as Valentine, and yet, if she had not been going
to marry M. Franz, M. Noirtier would have left her all his
money and supposing Valentine to be disinherited by her
grandfather, she will still be three times richer than he."
The count listened and said no more. "Count," said
Villefort, "we will not entertain you any longer with our
family misfortunes. It is true that my patrimony will go to
endow charitable institutions, and my father will have
deprived me of my lawful inheritance without any reason for
doing so, but I shall have the satisfaction of knowing that
I have acted like a man of sense and feeling. M. d'Epinay,
to whom I had promised the interest of this sum, shall
receive it, even if I endure the most cruel privations."
"However," said Madame de Villefort, returning to the one
idea which incessantly occupied her mind, "perhaps it would
be better to explain this unlucky affair to M. d'Epinay, in
order to give him the opportunity of himself renouncing his
claim to the hand of Mademoiselle de Villefort."
"Ah, that would be a great pity," said Villefort.
"A great pity," said Monte Cristo.
"Undoubtedly," said Villefort, moderating the tones of his
voice, "a marriage once concerted and then broken off,
throws a sort of discredit on a young lady then again, the
old reports, which I was so anxious to put an end to, will
instantly gain ground. No, it will all go well M. d'Epinay,
if he is an honorable man, will consider himself more than
ever pledged to Mademoiselle de Villefort, unless he were
actuated by a decided feeling of avarice, but that is
impossible."
"I agree with M. de Villefort," said Monte Cristo, fixing
his eyes on Madame de Villefort "and if I were sufficiently
intimate with him to allow of giving my advice, I would
persuade him, since I have been told M. d'Epinay is coming
back, to settle this affair at once beyond all possibility
of revocation. I will answer for the success of a project
which will reflect so much honor on M. de Villefort." The
procureur arose, delighted with the proposition, but his
wife slightly changed color. "Well, that is all that I
wanted, and I will be guided by a counsellor such as you
are," said he, extending his hand to Monte Cristo.
"Therefore let every one here look upon what has passed
today as if it had not happened, and as though we had never
thought of such a thing as a change in our original plans."
"Sir," said the count, "the world, unjust as it is, will be
pleased with your resolution your friends will be proud of
you, and M. d'Epinay, even if he took Mademoiselle de
Villefort without any dowry, which he will not do, would be
delighted with the idea of entering a family which could
make such sacrifices in order to keep a promise and fulfil a
duty." At the conclusion of these words, the count rose to
depart. "Are you going to leave us, count?" said Madame de
Villefort.
"I am sorry to say I must do so, madame, I only came to
remind you of your promise for Saturday."
"Did you fear that we should forget it?"
"You are very good, madame, but M. de Villefort has so many
important and urgent occupations."
"My husband has given me his word, sir," said Madame de
Villefort "you have just seen him resolve to keep it when
he has everything to lose, and surely there is more reason
for his doing so where he has everything to gain."
"And," said Villefort, "is it at your house in the
ChampsElysees that you receive your visitors?"
"No," said Monte Cristo, "which is precisely the reason
which renders your kindness more meritorious,  it is in
the country."
"In the country?"
"Yes."
"Where is it, then? Near Paris, is it not?"
"Very near, only half a league from the Barriers,  it is
at Auteuil."
"At Auteuil?" said Villefort "true, Madame de Villefort
told me you lived at Auteuil, since it was to your house
that she was taken. And in what part of Auteuil do you
reside?"
"Rue de la Fontaine."
"Rue de la Fontaine" exclaimed Villefort in an agitated
tone "at what number?"
"No. ."
"Then," cried Villefort, "was it you who bought M. de
SaintMeran's house"
"Did it belong to M. de SaintMeran?" demanded Monte Cristo.
"Yes," replied Madame de Villefort "and, would you believe
it, count" 
"Believe what?"
"You think this house pretty, do you not?"
"I think it charming."
"Well, my husband would never live in it."
"Indeed?" returned Monte Cristo, "that is a prejudice on
your part, M. de Villefort, for which I am quite at a loss
to account."
"I do not like Auteuil, sir," said the procureur, making an
evident effort to appear calm.
"But I hope you will not carry your antipathy so far as to
deprive me of the pleasure of your company, sir," said Monte
Cristo.
"No, count,  I hope  I assure you I shall do my best,"
stammered Villefort.
"Oh," said Monte Cristo, "I allow of no excuse. On Saturday,
at six o'clock. I shall be expecting you, and if you fail to
come, I shall think  for how do I know to the contrary? 
that this house, which his remained uninhabited for twenty
years, must have some gloomy tradition or dreadful legend
connected with it."
"I will come, count,  I will be sure to come," said
Villefort eagerly.
"Thank you," said Monte Cristo "now you must permit me to
take my leave of you."
"You said before that you were obliged to leave us,
monsieur," said Madame de Villefort, "and you were about to
tell us why when your attention was called to some other
subject."
"Indeed madame," said Monte Cristo "I scarcely know if I
dare tell you where I am going."
"Nonsense say on."
"Well, then, it is to see a thing on which I have sometimes
mused for hours together."
"What is it?"
"A telegraph. So now I have told my secret."
"A telegraph?" repeated Madame de Villefort.
"Yes, a telegraph. I had often seen one placed at the end of
a road on a hillock, and in the light of the sun its black
arms, bending in every direction, always reminded me of the
claws of an immense beetle, and I assure you it was never
without emotion that I gazed on it, for I could not help
thinking how wonderful it was that these various signs
should be made to cleave the air with such precision as to
convey to the distance of three hundred leagues the ideas
and wishes of a man sitting at a table at one end of the
line to another man similarly placed at the opposite
extremity, and all this effected by a simple act of volition
on the part of the sender of the message. I began to think
of genii, sylphs, gnomes, in short, of all the ministers of
the occult sciences, until I laughed aloud at the freaks of
my own imagination. Now, it never occurred to me to wish for
a nearer inspection of these large insects, with their long
black claws, for I always feared to find under their stone
wings some little human genius fagged to death with cabals,
factions, and government intrigues. But one fine day I
learned that the mover of this telegraph was only a poor
wretch, hired for twelve hundred francs a year, and employed
all day, not in studying the heavens like an astronomer, or
in gazing on the water like an angler, or even in enjoying
the privilege of observing the country around him, but all
his monotonous life was passed in watching his
whitebellied, blackclawed fellow insect, four or five
leagues distant from him. At length I felt a desire to study
this living chrysalis more closely, and to endeavor to
understand the secret part played by these insectactors
when they occupy themselves simply with pulling different
pieces of string."
"And are you going there?"
"I am."
"What telegraph do you intend visiting? that of the home
department, or of the observatory?"
"Oh, no I should find there people who would force me to
understand things of which I would prefer to remain
ignorant, and who would try to explain to me, in spite of
myself, a mystery which even they do not understand. Ma foi,
I should wish to keep my illusions concerning insects
unimpaired it is quite enough to have those dissipated
which I had formed of my fellowcreatures. I shall,
therefore, not visit either of these telegraphs, but one in
the open country where I shall find a goodnatured
simpleton, who knows no more than the machine he is employed
to work."
"You are a singular man," said Villefort.
"What line would you advise me to study?"
"The one that is most in use just at this time."
"The Spanish one, you mean, I suppose?"
"Yes should you like a letter to the minister that they
might explain to you" 
"No," said Monte Cristo "since, as I told you before, I do
not wish to comprehend it. The moment I understand it there
will no longer exist a telegraph for me it will be nothing
more than a sign from M. Duchatel, or from M. Montalivet,
transmitted to the prefect of Bayonne, mystified by two
Greek words, tele, graphein. It is the insect with black
claws, and the awful word which I wish to retain in my
imagination in all its purity and all its importance."
"Go then for in the course of two hours it will be dark,
and you will not be able to see anything."
"Ma foi, you frighten me. Which is the nearest way?
Bayonne?"
"Yes the road to Bayonne."
"And afterwards the road to Chatillon?"
"Yes."
"By the tower of Montlhery, you mean?"
"Yes."
"Thank you. Goodby. On Saturday I will tell you my
impressions concerning the telegraph." At the door the count
was met by the two notaries, who had just completed the act
which was to disinherit Valentine, and who were leaving
under the conviction of having done a thing which could not
fail of redounding considerably to their credit.
Chapter 
How a Gardener may get rid of the Dormice that eat His
Peaches.
Not on the same night, as he had intended, but the next
morning, the Count of Monte Cristo went out by the Barrier
d'Enfer, taking the road to Orleans. Leaving the village of
Linas, without stopping at the telegraph, which flourished
its great bony arms as he passed, the count reached the
tower of Montlhery, situated, as every one knows, upon the
highest point of the plain of that name. At the foot of the
hill the count dismounted and began to ascend by a little
winding path, about eighteen inches wide when he reached
the summit he found himself stopped by a hedge, upon which
green fruit had succeeded to red and white flowers.
Monte Cristo looked for the entrance to the enclosure, and
was not long in finding a little wooden gate, working on
willow hinges, and fastened with a nail and string. The
count soon mastered the mechanism, the gate opened, and he
then found himself in a little garden, about twenty feet
long by twelve wide, bounded on one side by part of the
hedge, which contained the ingenious contrivance we have
called a gate, and on the other by the old tower, covered
with ivy and studded with wallflowers. No one would have
thought in looking at this old, weatherbeaten,
floraldecked tower which might be likened to an elderly
dame dressed up to receive her grandchildren at a birthday
feast that it would have been capable of telling strange
things, if,  in addition to the menacing ears which the
proverb says all walls are provided with,  it had also a
voice. The garden was crossed by a path of red gravel, edged
by a border of thick box, of many years' growth, and of a
tone and color that would have delighted the heart of
Delacroix, our modern Rubens. This path was formed in the
shape of the figure of , thus, in its windings, making a
walk of sixty feet in a garden of only twenty.
Never had Flora, the fresh and smiling goddess of gardeners,
been honored with a purer or more scrupulous worship than
that which was paid to her in this little enclosure. In
fact, of the twenty rosetrees which formed the parterre,
not one bore the mark of the slug, nor were there evidences
anywhere of the clustering aphis which is so destructive to
plants growing in a damp soil. And yet it was not because
the damp had been excluded from the garden the earth, black
as soot, the thick foliage of the trees betrayed its
presence besides, had natural humidity been wanting, it
could have been immediately supplied by artificial means,
thanks to a tank of water, sunk in one of the corners of the
garden, and upon which were stationed a frog and a toad,
who, from antipathy, no doubt, always remained on the two
opposite sides of the basin. There was not a blade of grass
to be seen in the paths, or a weed in the flowerbeds no
fine lady ever trained and watered her geraniums, her cacti,
and her rhododendrons, with more pains than this hitherto
unseen gardener bestowed upon his little enclosure. Monte
Cristo stopped after having closed the gate and fastened the
string to the nail, and cast a look around.
"The man at the telegraph," said he, "must either engage a
gardener or devote himself passionately to agriculture."
Suddenly he struck against something crouching behind a
wheelbarrow filled with leaves the something rose, uttering
an exclamation of astonishment, and Monte Cristo found
himself facing a man about fifty years old, who was plucking
strawberries, which he was placing upon grape leaves. He had
twelve leaves and about as many strawberries, which, on
rising suddenly, he let fall from his hand. "You are
gathering your crop, sir?" said Monte Cristo, smiling.
"Excuse me, sir," replied the man, raising his hand to his
cap "I am not up there, I know, but I have only just come
down."
"Do not let me interfere with you in anything, my friend,"
said the count "gather your strawberries, if, indeed, there
are any left."
"I have ten left," said the man, "for here are eleven, and I
had twentyone, five more than last year. But I am not
surprised the spring has been warm this year, and
strawberries require heat, sir. This is the reason that,
instead of the sixteen I had last year, I have this year,
you see, eleven, already plucked  twelve, thirteen,
fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen. Ah, I miss
three, they were here last night, sir  I am sure they were
here  I counted them. It must be the Mere Simon's son who
has stolen them I saw him strolling about here this
morning. Ah, the young rascal  stealing in a garden  he
does not know where that may lead him to."
"Certainly, it is wrong," said Monte Cristo, "but you should
take into consideration the youth and greediness of the
delinquent."
"Of course," said the gardener, "but that does not make it
the less unpleasant. But, sir, once more I beg pardon
perhaps you are an officer that I am detaining here." And he
glanced timidly at the count's blue coat.
"Calm yourself, my friend," said the count, with the smile
which he made at will either terrible or benevolent, and
which now expressed only the kindliest feeling "I am not an
inspector, but a traveller, brought here by a curiosity he
half repents of, since he causes you to lose your time."
"Ah, my time is not valuable," replied the man with a
melancholy smile. "Still it belongs to government, and I
ought not to waste it but, having received the signal that
I might rest for an hour" here he glanced at the sundial,
for there was everything in the enclosure of Montlhery, even
a sundial, "and having ten minutes before me, and my
strawberries being ripe, when a day longer  bytheby,
sir, do you think dormice eat them?"
"Indeed, I should think not," replied Monte Cristo "dormice
are bad neighbors for us who do not eat them preserved, as
the Romans did."
"What? Did the Romans eat them?" said the gardener  "ate
dormice?"
"I have read so in Petronius," said the count.
"Really? They can't be nice, though they do say "as fat as a
dormouse.' It is not a wonder they are fat, sleeping all
day, and only waking to eat all night. Listen. Last year I
had four apricots  they stole one, I had one nectarine,
only one  well, sir, they ate half of it on the wall a
splendid nectarine  I never ate a better."
"You ate it?"
"That is to say, the half that was left  you understand
it was exquisite, sir. Ah, those gentlemen never choose the
worst morsels like Mere Simon's son, who has not chosen the
worst strawberries. But this year," continued the
horticulturist, "I'll take care it shall not happen, even if
I should be forced to sit by the whole night to watch when
the strawberries are ripe." Monte Cristo had seen enough.
Every man has a devouring passion in his heart, as every
fruit has its worm that of the telegraph man was
horticulture. He began gathering the grapeleaves which
screened the sun from the grapes, and won the heart of the
gardener. "Did you come here, sir, to see the telegraph?" he
said.
"Yes, if it isn't contrary to the rules."
"Oh, no," said the gardener "not in the least, since there
is no danger that anyone can possibly understand what we are
saying."
"I have been told," said the count, "that you do not always
yourselves understand the signals you repeat."
"That is true, sir, and that is what I like best," said the
man, smiling.
"Why do you like that best?"
"Because then I have no responsibility. I am a machine then,
and nothing else, and so long as I work, nothing more is
required of me."
"Is it possible," said Monte Cristo to himself, "that I can
have met with a man that has no ambition? That would spoil
my plans."
"Sir," said the gardener, glancing at the sundial, "the ten
minutes are almost up I must return to my post. Will you go
up with me?"
"I follow you." Monte Cristo entered the tower, which was
divided into three stories. The tower contained implements,
such as spades, rakes, wateringpots, hung against the wall
this was all the furniture. The second was the man's
conventional abode, or rather sleepingplace it contained a
few poor articles of household furniture  a bed, a table,
two chairs, a stone pitcher  and some dry herbs, hung up
to the ceiling, which the count recognized as sweet pease,
and of which the good man was preserving the seeds he had
labelled them with as much care as if he had been master
botanist in the Jardin des Plantes.
"Does it require much study to learn the art of
telegraphing?" asked Monte Cristo.
"The study does not take long it was acting as a
supernumerary that was so tedious."
"And what is the pay?"
"A thousand francs, sir."
"It is nothing."
"No but then we are lodged, as you perceive."
Monte Cristo looked at the room. They passed to the third
story it was the telegraph room. Monte Cristo looked in
turn at the two iron handles by which the machine was
worked. "It is very interesting," he said, "but it must be
very tedious for a lifetime."
"Yes. At first my neck was cramped with looking at it, but
at the end of a year I became used to it and then we have
our hours of recreation, and our holidays."
"Holidays?"
"Yes."
"When?"
"When we have a fog."
"Ah, to be sure."
"Those are indeed holidays to me I go into the garden, I
plant, I prune, I trim, I kill the insects all day long."
"How long have you been here?"
"Ten years, and five as a supernumerary make fifteen."
"You are  "
"Fiftyfive years old."
"How long must you have served to claim the pension?"
"Oh, sir, twentyfive years."
"And how much is the pension?"
"A hundred crowns."
"Poor humanity" murmured Monte Cristo.
"What did you say, sir?" asked the man.
"I was saying it was very interesting."
"What was?"
"All you were showing me. And you really understand none of
these signals?"
"None at all."
"And have you never tried to understand them?"
"Never. Why should I?"
"But still there are some signals only addressed to you."
"Certainly."
"And do you understand them?"
"They are always the same."
"And they mean  "
"Nothing new You have an hour or Tomorrow."
"This is simple enough," said the count "but look, is not
your correspondent putting itself in motion?"
"Ah, yes thank you, sir."
"And what is it saying  anything you understand?"
"Yes it asks if I am ready."
"And you reply?"
"By the same sign, which, at the same time, tells my
righthand correspondent that I am ready, while it gives
notice to my lefthand correspondent to prepare in his
turn."
"It is very ingenious," said the count.
"You will see," said the man proudly "in five minutes he
will speak."
"I have, then, five minutes," said Monte Cristo to himself
"it is more time than I require. My dear sir, will you allow
me to ask you a question?"
"What is it, sir?"
"You are fond of gardening?"
"Passionately."
"And you would be pleased to have, instead of this terrace
of twenty feet, an enclosure of two acres?"
"Sir, I should make a terrestrial paradise of it."
"You live badly on your thousand francs?"
"Badly enough but yet I do live."
"Yes but you have a wretchedly small garden."
"True, the garden is not large."
"And, then, such as it is, it is filled with dormice, who
eat everything."
"Ah, they are my scourges."
"Tell me, should you have the misfortune to turn your head
while your righthand correspondent was telegraphing" 
"I should not see him."
"Then what would happen?"
"I could not repeat the signals."
"And then?"
"Not having repeated them, through negligence, I should be
fined."
"How much?"
"A hundred francs."
"The tenth of your income  that would be fine work."
"Ah," said the man.
"Has it ever happened to you?" said Monte Cristo.
"Once, sir, when I was grafting a rosetree."
"Well, suppose you were to alter a signal, and substitute
another?"
"Ah, that is another case I should be turned off, and lose
my pension."
"Three hundred francs?"
"A hundred crowns, yes, sir so you see that I am not likely
to do any of these things."
"Not even for fifteen years' wages? Come, it is worth
thinking about?"
"For fifteen thousand francs?"
"Yes."
"Sir, you alarm me."
"Nonsense."
"Sir, you are tempting me?"
"Just so fifteen thousand francs, do you understand?"
"Sir, let me see my righthand correspondent."
"On the contrary, do not look at him, but at this."
"What is it?"
"What? Do you not know these bits of paper?"
"Banknotes"
"Exactly there are fifteen of them."
"And whose are they?"
"Yours, if you like."
"Mine?" exclaimed the man, halfsuffocated.
"Yes yours  your own property."
"Sir, my righthand correspondent is signalling."
"Let him signal."
"Sir, you have distracted me I shall be fined."
"That will cost you a hundred francs you see it is your
interest to take my banknotes."
"Sir, my righthand correspondent redoubles his signals he
is impatient."
"Never mind  take these" and the count placed the packet
in the man's hands. "Now this is not all," he said "you
cannot live upon your fifteen thousand francs."
"I shall still have my place."
"No, you will lose it, for you are going to alter your
correspondent's message."
"Oh, sir, what are you proposing?"
"A jest."
"Sir, unless you force me" 
"I think I can effectually force you" and Monte Cristo drew
another packet from his pocket. "Here are ten thousand more
francs," he said, "with the fifteen thousand already in your
pocket, they will make twentyfive thousand. With five
thousand you can buy a pretty little house with two acres of
land the remaining twenty thousand will bring you in a
thousand francs a year."
"A garden with two acres of land"
"And a thousand francs a year."
"Oh, heavens"
"Come, take them," and Monte Cristo forced the banknotes
into his hand.
"What am I to do?"
"Nothing very difficult."
"But what is it?"
"To repeat these signs." Monte Cristo took a paper from his
pocket, upon which were drawn three signs, with numbers to
indicate the order in which they were to be worked.
"There, you see it will not take long."
"Yes but" 
"Do this, and you will have nectarines and all the rest."
The shot told red with fever, while the large drops fell
from his brow, the man executed, one after the other, the
three signs given by the count, in spite of the frightful
contortions of the righthand correspondent, who, not
understanding the change, began to think the gardener had
gone mad. As to the lefthand one, he conscientiously
repeated the same signals, which were finally transmitted to
the Minister of the Interior. "Now you are rich," said Monte
Cristo.
"Yes," replied the man, "but at what a price"
"Listen, friend," said Monte Cristo. "I do not wish to cause
you any remorse believe me, then, when I swear to you that
you have wronged no man, but on the contrary have benefited
mankind." The man looked at the banknotes, felt them,
counted them, turned pale, then red, then rushed into his
room to drink a glass of water, but he had no time to reach
the waterjug, and fainted in the midst of his dried herbs.
Five minutes after the new telegram reached the minister,
Debray had the horses put to his carriage, and drove to
Danglars' house.
"Has your husband any Spanish bonds?" he asked of the
baroness.
"I think so, indeed He has six millions' worth."
"He must sell them at whatever price."
"Why?"
"Because Don Carlos has fled from Bourges, and has returned
to Spain."
"How do you know?" Debray shrugged his shoulders. "The idea
of asking how I hear the news," he said. The baroness did
not wait for a repetition she ran to her husband, who
immediately hastened to his agent, and ordered him to sell
at any price. When it was seen that Danglars sold, the
Spanish funds fell directly. Danglars lost five hundred
thousand francs but he rid himself of all his Spanish
shares. The same evening the following was read in Le
Messager
"[By telegraph.] The king, Don Carlos, has escaped the
vigilance of his guardians at Bourges, and has returned to
Spain by the Catalonian frontier. Barcelona has risen in his
favor."
All that evening nothing was spoken of but the foresight of
Danglars, who had sold his shares, and of the luck of the
stockjobber, who only lost five hundred thousand francs by
such a blow. Those who had kept their shares, or bought
those of Danglars, looked upon themselves as ruined, and
passed a very bad night. Next morning Le Moniteur contained
the following
"It was without any foundation that Le Messager yesterday
announced the flight of Don Carlos and the revolt of
Barcelona. The king Don Carlos has not left Bourges, and
the peninsula is in the enjoyment of profound peace. A
telegraphic signal, improperly interpreted, owing to the
fog, was the cause of this error."
The funds rose one per cent higher than before they had
fallen. This, reckoning his loss, and what he had missed
gaining, made the difference of a million to Danglars.
"Good," said Monte Cristo to Morrel, who was at his house
when the news arrived of the strange reverse of fortune of
which Danglars had been the victim, "I have just made a
discovery for twentyfive thousand francs, for which I would
have paid a hundred thousand."
"What have you discovered?" asked Morrel.
"I have just discovered how a gardener may get rid of the
dormice that eat his peaches."
Chapter 
Ghosts.
At first sight the exterior of the house at Auteuil gave no
indications of splendor, nothing one would expect from the
destined residence of the magnificent Count of Monte Cristo
but this simplicity was according to the will of its master,
who positively ordered nothing to be altered outside. The
splendor was within. Indeed, almost before the door opened,
the scene changed. M. Bertuccio had outdone himself in the
taste displayed in furnishing, and in the rapidity with
which it was executed. It is told that the Duc d'Antin
removed in a single night a whole avenue of trees that
annoyed Louis XIV. in three days M. Bertuccio planted an
entirely bare court with poplars, large spreading sycamores
to shade the different parts of the house, and in the
foreground, instead of the usual pavingstones, half hidden
by the grass, there extended a lawn but that morning laid
down, and upon which the water was yet glistening. For the
rest, the orders had been issued by the count he himself
had given a plan to Bertuccio, marking the spot where each
tree was to be planted, and the shape and extent of the lawn
which was to take the place of the pavingstones. Thus the
house had become unrecognizable, and Bertuccio himself
declared that he scarcely knew it, encircled as it was by a
framework of trees. The overseer would not have objected,
while he was about it, to have made some improvements in the
garden, but the count had positively forbidden it to be
touched. Bertuccio made amends, however, by loading the
antechambers, staircases, and mantlepieces with flowers.
What, above all, manifested the shrewdness of the steward,
and the profound science of the master, the one in carrying
out the ideas of the other, was that this house which
appeared only the night before so sad and gloomy,
impregnated with that sickly smell one can almost fancy to
be the smell of time, had in a single day acquired the
aspect of life, was scented with its master's favorite
perfumes, and had the very light regulated according to his
wish. When the count arrived, he had under his touch his
books and arms, his eyes rested upon his favorite pictures
his dogs, whose caresses he loved, welcomed him in the
antechamber the birds, whose songs delighted him, cheered
him with their music and the house, awakened from its long
sleep, like the sleeping beauty in the wood, lived, sang,
and bloomed like the houses we have long cherished, and in
which, when we are forced to leave them, we leave a part of
our souls. The servants passed gayly along the fine
courtyard some, belonging to the kitchens, gliding down
the stairs, restored but the previous day, as if they had
always inhabited the house others filling the coachhouses,
where the equipages, encased and numbered, appeared to have
been installed for the last fifty years and in the stables
the horses replied with neighs to the grooms, who spoke to
them with much more respect than many servants pay their
masters.
The library was divided into two parts on either side of the
wall, and contained upwards of two thousand volumes one
division was entirely devoted to novels, and even the volume
which had been published but the day before was to be seen
in its place in all the dignity of its red and gold binding.
On the other side of the house, to match with the library,
was the conservatory, ornamented with rare flowers, that
bloomed in china jars and in the midst of the greenhouse,
marvellous alike to sight and smell, was a billiardtable
which looked as if it had been abandoned during the past
hour by players who had left the balls on the cloth. One
chamber alone had been respected by the magnificent
Bertuccio. Before this room, to which you could ascend by
the grand, and go out by the back staircase, the servants
passed with curiosity, and Bertuccio with terror. At five
o'clock precisely, the count arrived before the house at
Auteuil, followed by Ali. Bertuccio was awaiting this
arrival with impatience, mingled with uneasiness he hoped
for some compliments, while, at the same time, he feared to
have frowns. Monte Cristo descended into the courtyard,
walked all over the house, without giving any sign of
approbation or pleasure, until he entered his bedroom,
situated on the opposite side to the closed room then he
approached a little piece of furniture, made of rosewood,
which he had noticed at a previous visit. "That can only be
to hold gloves," he said.
"Will your excellency deign to open it?" said the delighted
Bertuccio, "and you will find gloves in it." Elsewhere the
count found everything he required  smellingbottles,
cigars, knickknacks.
"Good," he said and M. Bertuccio left enraptured, so great,
so powerful, and real was the influence exercised by this
man over all who surrounded him. At precisely six o'clock
the clatter of horses' hoofs was heard at the entrance door
it was our captain of Spahis, who had arrived on Medeah. "I
am sure I am the first," cried Morrel "I did it on purpose
to have you a minute to myself, before every one came. Julie
and Emmanuel have a thousand things to tell you. Ah, really
this is magnificent But tell me, count, will your people
take care of my horse?"
"Do not alarm yourself, my dear Maximilian  they
understand."
"I mean, because he wants petting. If you had seen at what a
pace he came  like the wind"
"I should think so,  a horse that cost , francs" said
Monte Cristo, in the tone which a father would use towards a
son.
"Do you regret them?" asked Morrel, with his open laugh.
"I? Certainly not," replied the count. "No I should only
regret if the horse had not proved good."
"It is so good, that I have distanced M. de ChateauRenaud,
one of the best riders in France, and M. Debray, who both
mount the minister's Arabians and close on their heels are
the horses of Madame Danglars, who always go at six leagues
an hour."
"Then they follow you?" asked Monte Cristo.
"See, they are here." And at the same minute a carriage with
smoking horses, accompanied by two mounted gentlemen,
arrived at the gate, which opened before them. The carriage
drove round, and stopped at the steps, followed by the
horsemen. The instant Debray had touched the ground, he was
at the carriagedoor. He offered his hand to the baroness,
who, descending, took it with a peculiarity of manner
imperceptible to every one but Monte Cristo. But nothing
escaped the count's notice, and he observed a little note,
passed with the facility that indicates frequent practice,
from the hand of Madame Danglars to that of the minister's
secretary. After his wife the banker descended, as pale as
though he had issued from his tomb instead of his carriage.
Madame Danglars threw a rapid and inquiring glance which
could only be interpreted by Monte Cristo, around the
courtyard, over the peristyle, and across the front of the
house, then, repressing a slight emotion, which must have
been seen on her countenance if she had not kept her color,
she ascended the steps, saying to Morrel, "Sir, if you were
a friend of mine, I should ask you if you would sell your
horse."
Morrel smiled with an expression very like a grimace, and
then turned round to Monte Cristo, as if to ask him to
extricate him from his embarrassment. The count understood
him. "Ah, madame," he said, "why did you not make that
request of me?"
"With you, sir," replied the baroness, "one can wish for
nothing, one is so sure to obtain it. If it were so with M.
Morrel" 
"Unfortunately," replied the count, "I am witness that M.
Morrel cannot give up his horse, his honor being engaged in
keeping it."
"How so?"
"He laid a wager he would tame Medeah in the space of six
months. You understand now that if he were to get rid of the
animal before the time named, he would not only lose his
bet, but people would say he was afraid and a brave captain
of Spahis cannot risk this, even to gratify a pretty woman,
which is, in my opinion, one of the most sacred obligations
in the world."
"You see my position, madame," said Morrel, bestowing a
grateful smile on Monte Cristo.
"It seems to me," said Danglars, in his coarse tone,
illconcealed by a forced smile, "that you have already got
horses enough." Madame Danglars seldom allowed remarks of
this kind to pass unnoticed, but, to the surprise of the
young people, she pretended not to hear it, and said
nothing. Monte Cristo smiled at her unusual humility, and
showed her two immense porcelain jars, over which wound
marine plants, of a size and delicacy that nature alone
could produce. The baroness was astonished. "Why," said she,
"you could plant one of the chestnuttrees in the Tuileries
inside How can such enormous jars have been manufactured?"
"Ah, madame," replied Monte Cristo, "you must not ask of us,
the manufacturers of fine porcelain, such a question. It is
the work of another age, constructed by the genii of earth
and water."
"How so?  at what period can that have been?"
"I do not know I have only heard that an emperor of China
had an oven built expressly, and that in this oven twelve
jars like this were successively baked. Two broke, from the
heat of the fire the other ten were sunk three hundred
fathoms deep into the sea. The sea, knowing what was
required of her, threw over them her weeds, encircled them
with coral, and encrusted them with shells the whole was
cemented by two hundred years beneath these almost
impervious depths, for a revolution carried away the emperor
who wished to make the trial, and only left the documents
proving the manufacture of the jars and their descent into
the sea. At the end of two hundred years the documents were
found, and they thought of bringing up the jars. Divers
descended in machines, made expressly on the discovery, into
the bay where they were thrown but of ten three only
remained, the rest having been broken by the waves. I am
fond of these jars, upon which, perhaps, misshapen,
frightful monsters have fixed their cold, dull eyes, and in
which myriads of small fish have slept, seeking a refuge
from the pursuit of their enemies." Meanwhile, Danglars, who
had cared little for curiosities, was mechanically tearing
off the blossoms of a splendid orangetree, one after
another. When he had finished with the orangetree, he began
at the cactus but this, not being so easily plucked as the
orangetree, pricked him dreadfully. He shuddered, and
rubbed his eyes as though awaking from a dream.
"Sir," said Monte Cristo to him, "I do not recommend my
pictures to you, who possess such splendid paintings but,
nevertheless, here are two by Hobbema, a Paul Potter, a
Mieris, two by Gerard Douw, a Raphael, a Vandyke, a
Zurbaran, and two or three by Murillo, worth looking at."
"Stay," said Debray "I recognize this Hobbema."
"Ah, indeed"
"Yes it was proposed for the Museum."
"Which, I believe, does not contain one?" said Monte Cristo.
"No and yet they refused to buy it."
"Why?" said ChateauRenaud.
"You pretend not to know,  because government was not rich
enough."
"Ah, pardon me," said ChateauRenaud "I have heard of these
things every day during the last eight years, and I cannot
understand them yet."
"You will, by and by," said Debray.
"I think not," replied ChateauRenaud.
"Major Bartolomeo Cavalcanti and Count Andrea Cavalcanti,"
announced Baptistin. A black satin stock, fresh from the
maker's hands, gray moustaches, a bold eye, a major's
uniform, ornamented with three medals and five crosses  in
fact, the thorough bearing of an old soldier  such was the
appearance of Major Bartolomeo Cavalcanti, that tender
father with whom we are already acquainted. Close to him,
dressed in entirely new clothes, advanced smilingly Count
Andrea Cavalcanti, the dutiful son, whom we also know. The
three young people were talking together. On the entrance of
the newcomers, their eyes glanced from father to son, and
then, naturally enough, rested on the latter, whom they
began criticising. "Cavalcanti" said Debray. "A fine name,"
said Morrel.
"Yes," said ChateauRenaud, "these Italians are well named
and badly dressed."
"You are fastidious, ChateauRenaud," replied Debray "those
clothes are well cut and quite new."
"That is just what I find fault with. That gentleman appears
to be well dressed for the first time in his life."
"Who are those gentlemen?" asked Danglars of Monte Cristo.
"You heard  Cavalcanti."
"That tells me their name, and nothing else."
"Ah, true. You do not know the Italian nobility the
Cavalcanti are all descended from princes."
"Have they any fortune?"
"An enormous one."
"What do they do?"
"Try to spend it all. They have some business with you, I
think, from what they told me the day before yesterday. I,
indeed, invited them here today on your account. I will
introduce you to them."
"But they appear to speak French with a very pure accent,"
said Danglars.
"The son has been educated in a college in the south I
believe near Marseilles. You will find him quite
enthusiastic."
"Upon what subject?" asked Madame Danglars.
"The French ladies, madame. He has made up his mind to take
a wife from Paris."
"A fine idea that of his," said Danglars, shrugging his
shoulders. Madame Danglars looked at her husband with an
expression which, at any other time, would have indicated a
storm, but for the second time she controlled herself. "The
baron appears thoughtful today," said Monte Cristo to her
"are they going to put him in the ministry?"
"Not yet, I think. More likely he has been speculating on
the Bourse, and has lost money."
"M. and Madame de Villefort," cried Baptistin. They entered.
M. de Villefort, notwithstanding his selfcontrol, was
visibly affected, and when Monte Cristo touched his hand, he
felt it tremble. "Certainly, women alone know how to
dissimulate," said Monte Cristo to himself, glancing at
Madame Danglars, who was smiling on the procureur, and
embracing his wife. After a short time, the count saw
Bertuccio, who, until then, had been occupied on the other
side of the house, glide into an adjoining room. He went to
him. "What do you want, M. Bertuccio?" said he.
"Your excellency has not stated the number of guests."
"Ah, true."
"How many covers?"
"Count for yourself."
"Is every one here, your excellency?"
"Yes."
Bertuccio glanced through the door, which was ajar. The
count watched him. "Good heavens" he exclaimed.
"What is the matter?" said the count.
"That woman  that woman"
"Which?"
"The one with a white dress and so many diamonds  the fair
one."
"Madame Danglars?"
"I do not know her name but it is she, sir, it is she"
"Whom do you mean?"
"The woman of the garden  she that was enciente  she
who was walking while she waited for"  Bertuccio stood at
the open door, with his eyes starting and his hair on end.
"Waiting for whom?" Bertuccio, without answering, pointed to
Villefort with something of the gesture Macbeth uses to
point out Banquo. "Oh, oh," he at length muttered, "do you
see?"
"What? Who?"
"Him"
"Him  M. de Villefort, the king's attorney? Certainly I
see him."
"Then I did not kill him?"
"Really, I think you are going mad, good Bertuccio," said
the count.
"Then he is not dead?"
"No you see plainly he is not dead. Instead of striking
between the sixth and seventh left ribs, as your countrymen
do, you must have struck higher or lower, and life is very
tenacious in these lawyers, or rather there is no truth in
anything you have told me  it was a fright of the
imagination, a dream of your fancy. You went to sleep full
of thoughts of vengeance they weighed heavily upon your
stomach you had the nightmare  that's all. Come, calm
yourself, and reckon them up  M. and Madame de Villefort,
two M. and Madame Danglars, four M. de ChateauRenaud, M.
Debray, M. Morrel, seven Major Bartolomeo Cavalcanti,
eight."
"Eight" repeated Bertuccio.
"Stop You are in a shocking hurry to be off  you forget
one of my guests. Lean a little to the left. Stay look at
M. Andrea Cavalcanti, the young man in a black coat, looking
at Murillo's Madonna now he is turning." This time
Bertuccio would have uttered an exclamation, had not a look
from Monte Cristo silenced him. "Benedetto?" he muttered
"fatality"
"Halfpast six o'clock has just struck, M. Bertuccio," said
the count severely "I ordered dinner at that hour, and I do
not like to wait" and he returned to his guests, while
Bertuccio, leaning against the wall, succeeded in reaching
the diningroom. Five minutes afterwards the doors of the
drawingroom were thrown open, and Bertuccio appearing said,
with a violent effort, "The dinner waits."
The Count of Monte Cristo offered his arm to Madame de
Villefort. "M. de Villefort," he said, "will you conduct the
Baroness Danglars?"
Villefort complied, and they passed on to the diningroom.
Chapter 
The Dinner.
It was evident that one sentiment affected all the guests on
entering the diningroom. Each one asked what strange
influence had brought them to this house, and yet
astonished, even uneasy though they were, they still felt
that they would not like to be absent. The recent events,
the solitary and eccentric position of the count, his
enormous, nay, almost incredible fortune, should have made
men cautious, and have altogether prevented ladies visiting
a house where there was no one of their own sex to receive
them and yet curiosity had been enough to lead them to
overleap the bounds of prudence and decorum. And all
present, even including Cavalcanti and his son,
notwithstanding the stiffness of the one and the
carelessness of the other, were thoughtful, on finding
themselves assembled at the house of this incomprehensible
man. Madame Danglars had started when Villefort, on the
count's invitation, offered his arm and Villefort felt that
his glance was uneasy beneath his gold spectacles, when he
felt the arm of the baroness press upon his own. None of
this had escaped the count, and even by this mere contact of
individuals the scene had already acquired considerable
interest for an observer. M. de Villefort had on the right
hand Madame Danglars, on his left Morrel. The count was
seated between Madame de Villefort and Danglars the other
seats were filled by Debray, who was placed between the two
Cavalcanti, and by ChateauRenaud, seated between Madame de
Villefort and Morrel.
The repast was magnificent Monte Cristo had endeavored
completely to overturn the Parisian ideas, and to feed the
curiosity as much as the appetite of his guests. It was an
Oriental feast that he offered to them, but of such a kind
as the Arabian fairies might be supposed to prepare. Every
delicious fruit that the four quarters of the globe could
provide was heaped in vases from China and jars from Japan.
Rare birds, retaining their most brilliant plumage, enormous
fish, spread upon massive silver dishes, together with every
wine produced in the Archipelago, Asia Minor, or the Cape,
sparkling in bottles, whose grotesque shape seemed to give
an additional flavor to the draught,  all these, like one
of the displays with which Apicius of old gratified his
guests, passed in review before the eyes of the astonished
Parisians, who understood that it was possible to expend a
thousand louis upon a dinner for ten persons, but only on
the condition of eating pearls, like Cleopatra, or drinking
refined gold, like Lorenzo de' Medici.
Monte Cristo noticed the general astonishment, and began
laughing and joking about it. "Gentlemen," he said, "you
will admit that, when arrived at a certain degree of
fortune, the superfluities of life are all that can be
desired and the ladies will allow that, after having risen
to a certain eminence of position, the ideal alone can be
more exalted. Now, to follow out this reasoning, what is the
marvellous?  that which we do not understand. What is it
that we really desire?  that which we cannot obtain. Now,
to see things which I cannot understand, to procure
impossibilities, these are the study of my life. I gratify
my wishes by two means  my will and my money. I take as
much interest in the pursuit of some whim as you do, M.
Danglars, in promoting a new railway line you, M. de
Villefort, in condemning a culprit to death you, M. Debray,
in pacifying a kingdom you, M. de ChateauRenaud, in
pleasing a woman and you, Morrel, in breaking a horse that
no one can ride. For example, you see these two fish one
brought fifty leagues beyond St. Petersburg, the other five
leagues from Naples. Is it not amusing to see them both on
the same table?"
"What are the two fish?" asked Danglars.
"M. ChateauRenaud, who has lived in Russia, will tell you
the name of one, and Major Cavalcanti, who is an Italian,
will tell you the name of the other."
"This one is, I think, a sterlet," said ChateauRenaud.
"And that one, if I mistake not, a lamprey."
"Just so. Now, M. Danglars, ask these gentlemen where they
are caught."
"Starlets," said ChateauRenaud, "are only found in the
Volga."
"And," said Cavalcanti, "I know that Lake Fusaro alone
supplies lampreys of that size."
"Exactly one comes from the Volga, and the other from Lake
Fusaro."
"Impossible" cried all the guests simultaneously.
"Well, this is just what amuses me," said Monte Cristo. "I
am like Nero  cupitor impossibilium and that is what is
amusing you at this moment. This fish, which seems so
exquisite to you, is very likely no better than perch or
salmon but it seemed impossible to procure it, and here it
is."
"But how could you have these fish brought to France?"
"Oh, nothing more easy. Each fish was brought over in a cask
one filled with river herbs and weeds, the other with
rushes and lake plants they were placed in a wagon built on
purpose, and thus the sterlet lived twelve days, the lamprey
eight, and both were alive when my cook seized them, killing
one with milk and the other with wine. You do not believe
me, M. Danglars"
"I cannot help doubting," answered Danglars with his stupid
smile.
"Baptistin," said the count, "have the other fish brought in
the sterlet and the lamprey which came in the other
casks, and which are yet alive." Danglars opened his
bewildered eyes the company clapped their hands. Four
servants carried in two casks covered with aquatic plants,
and in each of which was breathing a fish similar to those
on the table.
"But why have two of each sort?" asked Danglars.
"Merely because one might have died," carelessly answered
Monte Cristo.
"You are certainly an extraordinary man," said Danglars
"and philosophers may well say it is a fine thing to be
rich."
"And to have ideas," added Madame Danglars.
"Oh, do not give me credit for this, madame it was done by
the Romans, who much esteemed them, and Pliny relates that
they sent slaves from Ostia to Rome, who carried on their
heads fish which he calls the mulus, and which, from the
description, must probably be the goldfish. It was also
considered a luxury to have them alive, it being an amusing
sight to see them die, for, when dying, they change color
three or four times, and like the rainbow when it
disappears, pass through all the prismatic shades, after
which they were sent to the kitchen. Their agony formed part
of their merit  if they were not seen alive, they were
despised when dead."
"Yes," said Debray, "but then Ostia is only a few leagues
from Rome."
"True," said Monte Cristo "but what would be the use of
living eighteen hundred years after Lucullus, if we can do
no better than he could?" The two Cavalcanti opened their
enormous eyes, but had the good sense not to say anything.
"All this is very extraordinary," said ChateauRenaud
"still, what I admire the most, I confess, is the marvellous
promptitude with which your orders are executed. Is it not
true that you only bought this house five or six days ago?"
"Certainly not longer."
"Well, I am sure it is quite transformed since last week. If
I remember rightly, it had another entrance, and the
courtyard was paved and empty while today we have a
splendid lawn, bordered by trees which appear to be a
hundred years old."
"Why not? I am fond of grass and shade," said Monte Cristo.
"Yes," said Madame de Villefort, "the door was towards the
road before, and on the day of my miraculous escape you
brought me into the house from the road, I remember."
"Yes, madame," said Monte Cristo "but I preferred having an
entrance which would allow me to see the Bois de Boulogne
over my gate."
"In four days," said Morrel "it is extraordinary"
"Indeed," said ChateauRenaud, "it seems quite miraculous to
make a new house out of an old one for it was very old, and
dull too. I recollect coming for my mother to look at it
when M. de SaintMeran advertised it for sale two or three
years ago."
"M. de SaintMeran?" said Madame de Villefort "then this
house belonged to M. de SaintMeran before you bought it?"
"It appears so," replied Monte Cristo.
"Is it possible that you do not know of whom you purchased
it?"
"Quite so my steward transacts all this business for me."
"It is certainly ten years since the house had been
occupied," said ChateauRenaud, "and it was quite melancholy
to look at it, with the blinds closed, the doors locked, and
the weeds in the court. Really, if the house had not
belonged to the fatherinlaw of the procureur, one might
have thought it some accursed place where a horrible crime
had been committed." Villefort, who had hitherto not tasted
the three or four glasses of rare wine which were placed
before him, here took one, and drank it off. Monte Cristo
allowed a short time to elapse, and then said, "It is
singular, baron, but the same idea came across me the first
time I came here it looked so gloomy I should never have
bought it if my steward had not taken the matter into his
own hands. Perhaps the fellow had been bribed by the
notary."
"It is probable," stammered out Villefort, trying to smile
"but I can assure you that I had nothing to do with any such
proceeding. This house is part of Valentine's
marriageportion, and M. de SaintMeran wished to sell it
for if it had remained another year or two uninhabited it
would have fallen to ruin." It was Morrel's turn to become
pale.
"There was, above all, one room," continued Monte Cristo,
"very plain in appearance, hung with red damask, which, I
know not why, appeared to me quite dramatic."
"Why so?" said Danglars "why dramatic?"
"Can we account for instinct?" said Monte Cristo. "Are there
not some places where we seem to breathe sadness?  why, we
cannot tell. It is a chain of recollections  an idea which
carries you back to other times, to other places  which,
very likely, have no connection with the present time and
place. And there is something in this room which reminds me
forcibly of the chamber of the Marquise de Ganges or
Desdemona. Stay, since we have finished dinner, I will show
it to you, and then we will take coffee in the garden. After
dinner, the play." Monte Cristo looked inquiringly at his
guests. Madame de Villefort rose, Monte Cristo did the same,
and the rest followed their example. Villefort and Madame
Danglars remained for a moment, as if rooted to their seats
they questioned each other with vague and stupid glances.
"Did you hear?" said Madame Danglars.
 Elisabeth de Rossan, Marquise de Ganges, was one of the
famous women of the court of Louis XIV. where she was known
as "La Belle Provencale." She was the widow of the Marquise
de Castellane when she married de Ganges, and having the
misfortune to excite the enmity of her new brothersinlaw,
was forced by them to take poison and they finished her off
with pistol and dagger.  Ed.
"We must go," replied Villefort, offering his arm. The
others, attracted by curiosity, were already scattered in
different parts of the house for they thought the visit
would not be limited to the one room, and that, at the same
time, they would obtain a view of the rest of the building,
of which Monte Cristo had created a palace. Each one went
out by the open doors. Monte Cristo waited for the two who
remained then, when they had passed, he brought up the
rear, and on his face was a smile, which, if they could have
understood it, would have alarmed them much more than a
visit to the room they were about to enter. They began by
walking through the apartments, many of which were fitted up
in the Eastern style, with cushions and divans instead of
beds, and pipes instead of furniture. The drawingrooms were
decorated with the rarest pictures by the old masters, the
boudoirs hung with draperies from China, of fanciful colors,
fantastic design, and wonderful texture. At length they
arrived at the famous room. There was nothing particular
about it, excepting that, although daylight had disappeared,
it was not lighted, and everything in it was oldfashioned,
while the rest of the rooms had been redecorated. These two
causes were enough to give it a gloomy aspect. "Oh." cried
Madame de Villefort, "it is really frightful." Madame
Danglars tried to utter a few words, but was not heard. Many
observations were made, the import of which was a unanimous
opinion that there was something sinister about the room.
"Is it not so?" asked Monte Cristo. "Look at that large
clumsy bed, hung with such gloomy, bloodcolored drapery
And those two crayon portraits, that have faded from the
dampness do they not seem to say, with their pale lips and
staring eyes, "We have seen'?" Villefort became livid
Madame Danglars fell into a long seat placed near the
chimney. "Oh," said Madame de Villefort, smiling, "are you
courageous enough to sit down upon the very seat perhaps
upon which the crime was committed?" Madame Danglars rose
suddenly.
"And then," said Monte Cristo, "this is not all."
"What is there more?" said Debray, who had not failed to
notice the agitation of Madame Danglars.
"Ah, what else is there?" said Danglars "for, at present, I
cannot say that I have seen anything extraordinary. What do
you say, M. Cavalcanti?"
"Ah," said he, "we have at Pisa, Ugolino's tower at
Ferrara, Tasso's prison at Rimini, the room of Francesca
and Paolo."
"Yes, but you have not this little staircase," said Monte
Cristo, opening a door concealed by the drapery. "Look at
it, and tell me what you think of it."
"What a wickedlooking, crooked staircase," said
ChateauRenaud with a smile.
"I do not know whether the wine of Chios produces
melancholy, but certainly everything appears to me black in
this house," said Debray.
Ever since Valentine's dowry had been mentioned, Morrel had
been silent and sad. "Can you imagine," said Monte Cristo,
"some Othello or Abbe de Ganges, one stormy, dark night,
descending these stairs step by step, carrying a load, which
he wishes to hide from the sight of man, if not from God?"
Madame Danglars half fainted on the arm of Villefort, who
was obliged to support himself against the wall. "Ah,
madame," cried Debray, "what is the matter with you? how
pale you look"
"It is very evident what is the matter with her," said
Madame de Villefort "M. de Monte Cristo is relating
horrible stories to us, doubtless intending to frighten us
to death."
"Yes," said Villefort, "really, count, you frighten the
ladies."
"What is the matter?" asked Debray, in a whisper, of Madame
Danglars.
"Nothing," she replied with a violent effort. "I want air,
that is all."
"Will you come into the garden?" said Debray, advancing
towards the back staircase.
"No, no," she answered, "I would rather remain here."
"Are you really frightened, madame?" said Monte Cristo.
"Oh, no, sir," said Madame Danglars "but you suppose scenes
in a manner which gives them the appearance of reality."
"Ah, yes," said Monte Cristo smiling "it is all a matter of
imagination. Why should we not imagine this the apartment of
an honest mother? And this bed with red hangings, a bed
visited by the goddess Lucina? And that mysterious
staircase, the passage through which, not to disturb their
sleep, the doctor and nurse pass, or even the father
carrying the sleeping child?" Here Madame Danglars, instead
of being calmed by the soft picture, uttered a groan and
fainted. "Madame Danglars is ill," said Villefort "it would
be better to take her to her carriage."
"Oh, mon Dieu," said Monte Cristo, "and I have forgotten my
smellingbottle"
"I have mine," said Madame de Villefort and she passed over
to Monte Cristo a bottle full of the same kind of red liquid
whose good properties the count had tested on Edward.
"Ah," said Monte Cristo, taking it from her hand.
"Yes," she said, "at your advice I have made the trial."
"And have you succeeded?"
"I think so."
Madame Danglars was carried into the adjoining room Monte
Cristo dropped a very small portion of the red liquid upon
her lips she returned to consciousness. "Ah," she cried,
"what a frightful dream"
Villefort pressed her hand to let her know it was not a
dream. They looked for M. Danglars, but, as he was not
especially interested in poetical ideas, he had gone into
the garden, and was talking with Major Cavalcanti on the
projected railway from Leghorn to Florence. Monte Cristo
seemed in despair. He took the arm of Madame Danglars, and
conducted her into the garden, where they found Danglars
taking coffee between the Cavalcanti. "Really, madame," he
said, "did I alarm you much?"
"Oh, no, sir," she answered "but you know, things impress
us differently, according to the mood of our minds."
Villefort forced a laugh. "And then, you know," he said, "an
idea, a supposition, is sufficient."
"Well," said Monte Cristo, "you may believe me if you like,
but it is my opinion that a crime has been committed in this
house."
"Take care," said Madame de Villefort, "the king's attorney
is here."
"Ah," replied Monte Cristo, "since that is the case, I will
take advantage of his presence to make my declaration."
"Your declaration?" said Villefort.
"Yes, before witnesses."
"Oh, this is very interesting," said Debray "if there
really has been a crime, we will investigate it."
"There has been a crime," said Monte Cristo. "Come this way,
gentlemen come, M. Villefort, for a declaration to be
available, should be made before the competent authorities."
He then took Villefort's arm, and, at the same time, holding
that of Madame Danglars under his own, he dragged the
procureur to the plantaintree, where the shade was
thickest. All the other guests followed. "Stay," said Monte
Cristo, "here, in this very spot" and he stamped upon the
ground, "I had the earth dug up and fresh mould put in, to
refresh these old trees well, my man, digging, found a box,
or rather, the ironwork of a box, in the midst of which was
the skeleton of a newly born infant." Monte Cristo felt the
arm of Madame Danglars stiffen, while that of Villefort
trembled. "A newly born infant," repeated Debray "this
affair becomes serious"
"Well," said ChateauRenaud, "I was not wrong just now then,
when I said that houses had souls and faces like men, and
that their exteriors carried the impress of their
characters. This house was gloomy because it was remorseful
it was remorseful because it concealed a crime."
"Who said it was a crime?" asked Villefort, with a last
effort.
"How? is it not a crime to bury a living child in a garden?"
cried Monte Cristo. "And pray what do you call such an
action?"
"But who said it was buried alive?"
"Why bury it there if it were dead? This garden has never
been a cemetery."
"What is done to infanticides in this country?" asked Major
Cavalcanti innocently.
"Oh, their heads are soon cut off," said Danglars.
"Ah, indeed?" said Cavalcanti.
"I think so am I not right, M. de Villefort?" asked Monte
Cristo.
"Yes, count," replied Villefort, in a voice now scarcely
human.
Monte Cristo, seeing that the two persons for whom he had
prepared this scene could scarcely endure it, and not
wishing to carry it too far, said, "Come, gentlemen,  some
coffee, we seem to have forgotten it," and he conducted the
guests back to the table on the lawn.
"Indeed, count," said Madame Danglars, "I am ashamed to own
it, but all your frightful stories have so upset me, that I
must beg you to let me sit down" and she fell into a chair.
Monte Cristo bowed, and went to Madame de Villefort. "I
think Madame Danglars again requires your bottle," he said.
But before Madame de Villefort could reach her friend the
procureur had found time to whisper to Madame Danglars, "I
must speak to you."
"When?"
"Tomorrow."
"Where?"
"In my office, or in the court, if you like,  that is the
surest place."
"I will be there."  At this moment Madame de Villefort
approached. "Thanks, my dear friend," said Madame Danglars,
trying to smile "it is over now, and I am much better."
Chapter 
The Beggar.
The evening passed on Madame de Villefort expressed a
desire to return to Paris, which Madame Danglars had not
dared to do, notwithstanding the uneasiness she experienced.
On his wife's request, M. de Villefort was the first to give
the signal of departure. He offered a seat in his landau to
Madame Danglars, that she might be under the care of his
wife. As for M. Danglars, absorbed in an interesting
conversation with M. Cavalcanti, he paid no attention to
anything that was passing. While Monte Cristo had begged the
smellingbottle of Madame de Villefort, he had noticed the
approach of Villefort to Madame Danglars, and he soon
guessed all that had passed between them, though the words
had been uttered in so low a voice as hardly to be heard by
Madame Danglars. Without opposing their arrangements, he
allowed Morrel, ChateauRenaud, and Debray to leave on
horseback, and the ladies in M. de Villefort's carriage.
Danglars, more and more delighted with Major Cavalcanti, had
offered him a seat in his carriage. Andrea Cavalcanti found
his tilbury waiting at the door the groom, in every respect
a caricature of the English fashion, was standing on tiptoe
to hold a large irongray horse.
Andrea had spoken very little during dinner he was an
intelligent lad, and he feared to utter some absurdity
before so many grand people, amongst whom, with dilating
eyes, he saw the king's attorney. Then he had been seized
upon by Danglars, who, with a rapid glance at the
stiffnecked old major and his modest son, and taking into
consideration the hospitality of the count, made up his mind
that he was in the society of some nabob come to Paris to
finish the worldly education of his heir. He contemplated
with unspeakable delight the large diamond which shone on
the major's little finger for the major, like a prudent
man, in case of any accident happening to his banknotes,
had immediately converted them into an available asset.
Then, after dinner, on the pretext of business, he
questioned the father and son upon their mode of living and
the father and son, previously informed that it was through
Danglars the one was to receive his , francs and the
other , livres annually, were so full of affability
that they would have shaken hands even with the banker's
servants, so much did their gratitude need an object to
expend itself upon. One thing above all the rest heightened
the respect, nay almost the veneration, of Danglars for
Cavalcanti. The latter, faithful to the principle of Horace,
nil admirari, had contented himself with showing his
knowledge by declaring in what lake the best lampreys were
caught. Then he had eaten some without saying a word more
Danglars, therefore, concluded that such luxuries were
common at the table of the illustrious descendant of the
Cavalcanti, who most likely in Lucca fed upon trout brought
from Switzerland, and lobsters sent from England, by the
same means used by the count to bring the lampreys from Lake
Fusaro, and the sterlet from the Volga. Thus it was with
much politeness of manner that he heard Cavalcanti pronounce
these words, "Tomorrow, sir, I shall have the honor of
waiting upon you on business."
"And I, sir," said Danglars, "shall be most happy to receive
you." Upon which he offered to take Cavalcanti in his
carriage to the Hotel des Princes, if it would not be
depriving him of the company of his son. To this Cavalcanti
replied by saying that for some time past his son had lived
independently of him, that he had his own horses and
carriages, and that not having come together, it would not
be difficult for them to leave separately. The major seated
himself, therefore, by the side of Danglars, who was more
and more charmed with the ideas of order and economy which
ruled this man, and yet who, being able to allow his son
, francs a year, might be supposed to possess a fortune
of , or , livres.
As for Andrea, he began, by way of showing off, to scold his
groom, who, instead of bringing the tilbury to the steps of
the house, had taken it to the outer door, thus giving him
the trouble of walking thirty steps to reach it. The groom
heard him with humility, took the bit of the impatient
animal with his left hand, and with the right held out the
reins to Andrea, who, taking them from him, rested his
polished boot lightly on the step. At that moment a hand
touched his shoulder. The young man turned round, thinking
that Danglars or Monte Cristo had forgotten something they
wished to tell him, and had returned just as they were
starting. But instead of either of these, he saw nothing but
a strange face, sunburnt, and encircled by a beard, with
eyes brilliant as carbuncles, and a smile upon the mouth
which displayed a perfect set of white teeth, pointed and
sharp as the wolf's or jackal's. A red handkerchief
encircled his gray head torn and filthy garments covered
his large bony limbs, which seemed as though, like those of
a skeleton, they would rattle as he walked and the hand
with which he leaned upon the young man's shoulder, and
which was the first thing Andrea saw, seemed of gigantic
size. Did the young man recognize that face by the light of
the lantern in his tilbury, or was he merely struck with the
horrible appearance of his interrogator? We cannot say but
only relate the fact that he shuddered and stepped back
suddenly. "What do you want of me?" he asked.
"Pardon me, my friend, if I disturb you," said the man with
the red handkerchief, "but I want to speak to you."
"You have no right to beg at night," said the groom,
endeavoring to rid his master of the troublesome intruder.
"I am not begging, my fine fellow," said the unknown to the
servant, with so ironical an expression of the eye, and so
frightful a smile, that he withdrew "I only wish to say two
or three words to your master, who gave me a commission to
execute about a fortnight ago."
"Come," said Andrea, with sufficient nerve for his servant
not to perceive his agitation, "what do you want? Speak
quickly, friend."
The man said, in a low voice "I wish  I wish you to spare
me the walk back to Paris. I am very tired, and as I have
not eaten so good a dinner as you, I can scarcely stand."
The young man shuddered at this strange familiarity. "Tell
me," he said  "tell me what you want?"
"Well, then, I want you to take me up in your fine carriage,
and carry me back." Andrea turned pale, but said nothing.
"Yes," said the man, thrusting his hands into his pockets,
and looking impudently at the youth "I have taken the whim
into my head do you understand, Master Benedetto?"
At this name, no doubt, the young man reflected a little,
for he went towards his groom, saying, "This man is right I
did indeed charge him with a commission, the result of which
he must tell me walk to the barrier, there take a cab, that
you may not be too late." The surprised groom retired. "Let
me at least reach a shady spot," said Andrea.
"Oh, as for that, I'll take you to a splendid place," said
the man with the handkerchief and taking the horse's bit he
led the tilbury where it was certainly impossible for any
one to witness the honor that Andrea conferred upon him.
"Don't think I want the glory of riding in your fine
carriage," said he "oh, no, it's only because I am tired,
and also because I have a little business to talk over with
you."
"Come, step in," said the young man. It was a pity this
scene had not occurred in daylight, for it was curious to
see this rascal throwing himself heavily down on the cushion
beside the young and elegant driver of the tilbury. Andrea
drove past the last house in the village without saying a
word to his companion, who smiled complacently, as though
wellpleased to find himself travelling in so comfortable a
vehicle. Once out of Auteuil, Andrea looked around, in order
to assure himself that he could neither be seen nor heard,
and then, stopping the horse and crossing his arms before
the man, he asked,  "Now, tell me why you come to disturb
my tranquillity?"
"Let me ask you why you deceived me?"
"How have I deceived you?"
""How,' do you ask? When we parted at the Pont du Var, you
told me you were going to travel through Piedmont and
Tuscany but instead of that, you come to Paris."
"How does that annoy you?"
"It does not on the contrary, I think it will answer my
purpose."
"So," said Andrea, "you are speculating upon me?"
"What fine words he uses"
"I warn you, Master Caderousse, that you are mistaken."
"Well, well, don't be angry, my boy you know well enough
what it is to be unfortunate and misfortunes make us
jealous. I thought you were earning a living in Tuscany or
Piedmont by acting as facchino or cicerone, and I pitied you
sincerely, as I would a child of my own. You know I always
did call you my child."
"Come, come, what then?"
"Patience  patience"
"I am patient, but go on."
"All at once I see you pass through the barrier with a
groom, a tilbury, and fine new clothes. You must have
discovered a mine, or else become a stockbroker."
"So that, as you confess, you are jealous?"
"No, I am pleased  so pleased that I wished to
congratulate you but as I am not quite properly dressed, I
chose my opportunity, that I might not compromise you."
"Yes, and a fine opportunity you have chosen" exclaimed
Andrea "you speak to me before my servant."
"How can I help that, my boy? I speak to you when I can
catch you. You have a quick horse, a light tilbury, you are
naturally as slippery as an eel if I had missed you
tonight, I might not have had another chance."
"You see, I do not conceal myself."
"You are lucky I wish I could say as much, for I do conceal
myself and then I was afraid you would not recognize me,
but you did," added Caderousse with his unpleasant smile.
"It was very polite of you."
"Come," said Andrea, "what do you want?"
"You do not speak affectionately to me, Benedetto, my old
friend, that is not right  take care, or I may become
troublesome." This menace smothered the young man's passion.
He urged the horse again into a trot. "You should not speak
so to an old friend like me, Caderousse, as you said just
now you are a native of Marseilles, I am" 
"Do you know then now what you are?"
"No, but I was brought up in Corsica you are old and
obstinate, I am young and wilful. Between people like us
threats are out of place, everything should be amicably
arranged. Is it my fault if fortune, which has frowned on
you, has been kind to me?"
"Fortune has been kind to you, then? Your tilbury, your
groom, your clothes, are not then hired? Good, so much the
better," said Caderousse, his eyes sparkling with avarice.
"Oh, you knew that well enough before speaking to me," said
Andrea, becoming more and more excited. "If I had been
wearing a handkerchief like yours on my head, rags on my
back, and wornout shoes on my feet, you would not have
known me."
"You wrong me, my boy now I have found you, nothing
prevents my being as welldressed as any one, knowing, as I
do, the goodness of your heart. If you have two coats you
will give me one of them. I used to divide my soup and beans
with you when you were hungry."
"True," said Andrea.
"What an appetite you used to have Is it as good now?"
"Oh, yes," replied Andrea, laughing.
"How did you come to be dining with that prince whose house
you have just left?"
"He is not a prince simply a count."
"A count, and a rich one too, eh?"
"Yes but you had better not have anything to say to him,
for he is not a very goodtempered gentleman."
"Oh, be easy I have no design upon your count, and you
shall have him all to yourself. But," said Caderousse, again
smiling with the disagreeable expression he had before
assumed, "you must pay for it  you understand?"
"Well, what do you want?"
"I think that with a hundred francs a month" 
"Well?"
"I could live" 
"Upon a hundred francs"
"Come  you understand me but that with" 
"With?"
"With a hundred and fifty francs I should be quite happy."
"Here are two hundred," said Andrea and he placed ten gold
louis in the hand of Caderousse.
"Good" said Caderousse.
"Apply to the steward on the first day of every month, and
you will receive the same sum."
"There now, again you degrade me."
"How so?"
"By making me apply to the servants, when I want to transact
business with you alone."
"Well, be it so, then. Take it from me then, and so long at
least as I receive my income, you shall be paid yours."
"Come, come I always said you were a fine fellow, and it is
a blessing when good fortune happens to such as you. But
tell me all about it?"
"Why do you wish to know?" asked Cavalcanti.
"What? do you again defy me?"
"No the fact is, I have found my father."
"What? a real father?"
"Yes, so long as he pays me" 
"You'll honor and believe him  that's right. What is his
name?"
"Major Cavalcanti."
"Is he pleased with you?"
"So far I have appeared to answer his purpose."
"And who found this father for you?"
"The Count of Monte Cristo."
"The man whose house you have just left?"
"Yes."
"I wish you would try and find me a situation with him as
grandfather, since he holds the moneychest"
"Well, I will mention you to him. Meanwhile, what are you
going to do?"
"I?"
"Yes, you."
"It is very kind of you to trouble yourself about me."
"Since you interest yourself in my affairs, I think it is
now my turn to ask you some questions."
"Ah, true. Well I shall rent a room in some respectable
house, wear a decent coat, shave every day, and go and read
the papers in a cafe. Then, in the evening, I shall go to
the theatre I shall look like some retired baker. That is
what I want."
"Come, if you will only put this scheme into execution, and
be steady, nothing could be better."
"Do you think so, M. Bossuet? And you  what will you
become? A peer of France?"
"Ah," said Andrea, "who knows?"
"Major Cavalcanti is already one, perhaps but then,
hereditary rank is abolished."
"No politics, Caderousse. And now that you have all you
want, and that we understand each other, jump down from the
tilbury and disappear."
"Not at all, my good friend."
"How? Not at all?"
"Why, just think for a moment with this red handkerchief on
my head, with scarcely any shoes, no papers, and ten gold
napoleons in my pocket, without reckoning what was there
before  making in all about two hundred francs,  why, I
should certainly be arrested at the barriers. Then, to
justify myself, I should say that you gave me the money
this would cause inquiries, it would be found that I left
Toulon without giving due notice, and I should then be
escorted back to the shores of the Mediterranean. Then I
should become simply No. , and goodby to my dream of
resembling the retired baker No, no, my boy I prefer
remaining honorably in the capital." Andrea scowled.
Certainly, as he had himself owned, the reputed son of Major
Cavalcanti was a wilful fellow. He drew up for a minute,
threw a rapid glance around him, and then his hand fell
instantly into his pocket, where it began playing with a
pistol. But, meanwhile, Caderousse, who had never taken his
eyes off his companion, passed his hand behind his back, and
opened a long Spanish knife, which he always carried with
him, to be ready in case of need. The two friends, as we
see, were worthy of and understood one another. Andrea's
hand left his pocket inoffensively, and was carried up to
the red mustache, which it played with for some time. "Good
Caderousse," he said, "how happy you will be."
"I will do my best," said the innkeeper of the Pont du
Gard, shutting up his knife.
"Well, then, we will go into Paris. But how will you pass
through the barrier without exciting suspicion? It seems to
me that you are in more danger riding than on foot."
"Wait," said Caderousse, "we shall see." He then took the
greatcoat with the large collar, which the groom had left
behind in the tilbury, and put it on his back then he took
off Cavalcanti's hat, which he placed upon his own head, and
finally he assumed the careless attitude of a servant whose
master drives himself.
"But, tell me," said Andrea, "am I to remain bareheaded?"
"Pooh," said Caderousse "it is so windy that your hat can
easily appear to have blown off."
"Come, come enough of this," said Cavalcanti.
"What are you waiting for?" said Caderousse. "I hope I am
not the cause."
"Hush," said Andrea. They passed the barrier without
accident. At the first cross street Andrea stopped his
horse, and Caderousse leaped out.
"Well" said Andrea,  "my servant's coat and my hat?"
"Ah," said Caderousse, "you would not like me to risk taking
cold?"
"But what am I to do?"
"You? Oh, you are young while I am beginning to get old. Au
revoir, Benedetto" and running into a court, he
disappeared. "Alas," said Andrea, sighing, "one cannot be
completely happy in this world"
Chapter 
A Conjugal Scene.
At the Place Louis XV. the three young people separated 
that is to say, Morrel went to the Boulevards,
ChateauRenaud to the Pont de la Revolution, and Debray to
the Quai. Most probably Morrel and ChateauRenaud returned
to their "domestic hearths," as they say in the gallery of
the Chamber in wellturned speeches, and in the theatre of
the Rue Richelieu in wellwritten pieces but it was not the
case with Debray. When he reached the wicket of the Louvre,
he turned to the left, galloped across the Carrousel, passed
through the Rue SaintRoch, and, issuing from the Rue de la
Michodiere, he arrived at M. Danglars' door just at the same
time that Villefort's landau, after having deposited him and
his wife at the Faubourg St. Honore, stopped to leave the
baroness at her own house. Debray, with the air of a man
familiar with the house, entered first into the court, threw
his bridle into the hands of a footman, and returned to the
door to receive Madame Danglars, to whom he offered his arm,
to conduct her to her apartments. The gate once closed, and
Debray and the baroness alone in the court, he asked, 
"What was the matter with you, Hermine? and why were you so
affected at that story, or rather fable, which the count
related?"
"Because I have been in such shocking spirits all the
evening, my friend," said the baroness.
"No, Hermine," replied Debray "you cannot make me believe
that on the contrary, you were in excellent spirits when
you arrived at the count's. M. Danglars was disagreeable,
certainly, but I know how much you care for his illhumor.
Some one has vexed you I will allow no one to annoy you."
"You are deceived, Lucien, I assure you," replied Madame
Danglars "and what I have told you is really the case,
added to the illhumor you remarked, but which I did not
think it worth while to allude to." It was evident that
Madame Danglars was suffering from that nervous irritability
which women frequently cannot account for even to
themselves or that, as Debray had guessed, she had
experienced some secret agitation that she would not
acknowledge to any one. Being a man who knew that the former
of these symptoms was one of the inherent penalties of
womanhood, he did not then press his inquiries, but waited
for a more appropriate opportunity when he should again
interrogate her, or receive an avowal proprio motu. At the
door of her apartment the baroness met Mademoiselle
Cornelie, her confidential maid. "What is my daughter
doing?" asked Madame Danglars.
"She practiced all the evening, and then went to bed,"
replied Mademoiselle Cornelie.
"Yet I think I hear her piano."
"It is Mademoiselle Louise d'Armilly, who is playing while
Mademoiselle Danglars is in bed."
"Well," said Madame Danglars, "come and undress me." They
entered the bedroom. Debray stretched himself upon a large
couch, and Madame Danglars passed into her dressingroom
with Mademoiselle Cornelie. "My dear M. Lucien," said Madame
Danglars through the door, "you are always complaining that
Eugenie will not address a word to you."
"Madame," said Lucien, playing with a little dog, who,
recognizing him as a friend of the house, expected to be
caressed, "I am not the only one who makes similar
complaints, I think I heard Morcerf say that he could not
extract a word from his betrothed."
"True," said Madame Danglars "yet I think this will all
pass off, and that you will one day see her enter your
study."
"My study?"
"At least that of the minister."
"Why so"
"To ask for an engagement at the Opera. Really, I never saw
such an infatuation for music it is quite ridiculous for a
young lady of fashion." Debray smiled. "Well," said he, "let
her come, with your consent and that of the baron, and we
will try and give her an engagement, though we are very poor
to pay such talent as hers."
"Go, Cornelie," said Madame Danglars, "I do not require you
any longer."
Cornelie obeyed, and the next minute Madame Danglars left
her room in a charming loose dress, and came and sat down
close to Debray. Then she began thoughtfully to caress the
little spaniel. Lucien looked at her for a moment in
silence. "Come, Hermine," he said, after a short time,
"answer candidly,  something vexes you  is it not so?"
"Nothing," answered the baroness.
And yet, as she could scarcely breathe, she rose and went
towards a lookingglass. "I am frightful tonight," she
said. Debray rose, smiling, and was about to contradict the
baroness upon this latter point, when the door opened
suddenly. M. Danglars appeared Debray reseated himself. At
the noise of the door Madame Danglars turned round, and
looked upon her husband with an astonishment she took no
trouble to conceal. "Goodevening, madame," said the banker
"goodevening, M. Debray."
Probably the baroness thought this unexpected visit
signified a desire to make up for the sharp words he had
uttered during the day. Assuming a dignified air, she turned
round to Debray, without answering her husband. "Read me
something, M. Debray," she said. Debray, who was slightly
disturbed at this visit, recovered himself when he saw the
calmness of the baroness, and took up a book marked by a
motherofpearl knife inlaid with gold. "Excuse me," said
the banker, "but you will tire yourself, baroness, by such
late hours, and M. Debray lives some distance from here."
Debray was petrified, not only to hear Danglars speak so
calmly and politely, but because it was apparent that
beneath outward politeness there really lurked a determined
spirit of opposition to anything his wife might wish to do.
The baroness was also surprised, and showed her astonishment
by a look which would doubtless have had some effect upon
her husband if he had not been intently occupied with the
paper, where he was looking to see the closing stock
quotations. The result was, that the proud look entirely
failed of its purpose.
"M. Lucien," said the baroness, "I assure you I have no
desire to sleep, and that I have a thousand things to tell
you this evening, which you must listen to, even though you
slept while hearing me."
"I am at your service, madame," replied Lucien coldly.
"My dear M. Debray," said the banker, "do not kill yourself
tonight listening to the follies of Madame Danglars, for
you can hear them as well tomorrow but I claim tonight
and will devote it, if you will allow me, to talk over some
serious matters with my wife." This time the blow was so
well aimed, and hit so directly, that Lucien and the
baroness were staggered, and they interrogated each other
with their eyes, as if to seek help against this aggression,
but the irresistible will of the master of the house
prevailed, and the husband was victorious.
"Do not think I wish to turn you out, my dear Debray,"
continued Danglars "oh, no, not at all. An unexpected
occurrence forces me to ask my wife to have a little
conversation with me it is so rarely I make such a request,
I am sure you cannot grudge it to me." Debray muttered
something, bowed and went out, knocking himself against the
edge of the door, like Nathan in "Athalie."
"It is extraordinary," he said, when the door was closed
behind him, "how easily these husbands, whom we ridicule,
gain an advantage over us."
Lucien having left, Danglars took his place on the sofa,
closed the open book, and placing himself in a dreadfully
dictatorial attitude, he began playing with the dog but the
animal, not liking him as well as Debray, and attempting to
bite him, Danglars seized him by the skin of his neck and
threw him upon a couch on the other side of the room. The
animal uttered a cry during the transit, but, arrived at its
destination, it crouched behind the cushions, and stupefied
at such unusual treatment remained silent and motionless.
"Do you know, sir," asked the baroness, "that you are
improving? Generally you are only rude, but tonight you are
brutal."
"It is because I am in a worse humor than usual," replied
Danglars. Hermine looked at the banker with supreme disdain.
These glances frequently exasperated the pride of Danglars,
but this evening he took no notice of them.
"And what have I to do with your illhumor?" said the
baroness, irritated at the impassibility of her husband "do
these things concern me? Keep your illhumor at home in your
money boxes, or, since you have clerks whom you pay, vent it
upon them."
"Not so," replied Danglars "your advice is wrong, so I
shall not follow it. My money boxes are my Pactolus, as, I
think, M. Demoustier says, and I will not retard its course,
or disturb its calm. My clerks are honest men, who earn my
fortune, whom I pay much below their deserts, if I may value
them according to what they bring in therefore I shall not
get into a passion with them those with whom I will be in a
passion are those who eat my dinners, mount my horses, and
exhaust my fortune."
"And pray who are the persons who exhaust your fortune?
Explain yourself more clearly, I beg, sir."
"Oh, make yourself easy  I am not speaking riddles, and
you will soon know what I mean. The people who exhaust my
fortune are those who draw out , francs in the course
of an hour."
"I do not understand you, sir," said the baroness, trying to
disguise the agitation of her voice and the flush of her
face. "You understand me perfectly, on the contrary," said
Danglars "but, if you will persist, I will tell you that I
have just lost , francs upon the Spanish loan."
"And pray," asked the baroness, "am I responsible for this
loss?"
"Why not?"
"Is it my fault you have lost , francs?"
"Certainly it is not mine."
"Once for all, sir," replied the baroness sharply, "I tell
you I will not hear cash named it is a style of language I
never heard in the house of my parents or in that of my
first husband."
"Oh, I can well believe that, for neither of them was worth
a penny."
"The better reason for my not being conversant with the
slang of the bank, which is here dinning in my ears from
morning to night that noise of jingling crowns, which are
constantly being counted and recounted, is odious to me. I
only know one thing I dislike more, which is the sound of
your voice."
"Really?" said Danglars. "Well, this surprises me, for I
thought you took the liveliest interest in all my affairs"
"I? What could put such an idea into your head?"
"Yourself."
"Ah?  what next?"
"Most assuredly."
"I should like to know upon what occasion?"
"Oh, mon Dieu, that is very easily done. Last February you
were the first who told me of the Haitian funds. You had
dreamed that a ship had entered the harbor at Havre, that
this ship brought news that a payment we had looked upon as
lost was going to be made. I know how clearsighted your
dreams are I therefore purchased immediately as many shares
as I could of the Haitian debt, and I gained , francs
by it, of which , have been honestly paid to you. You
spent it as you pleased that was your business. In March
there was a question about a grant to a railway. Three
companies presented themselves, each offering equal
securities. You told me that your instinct,  and although
you pretend to know nothing about speculations, I think on
the contrary, that your comprehension is very clear upon
certain affairs,  well, you told me that your instinct led
you to believe the grant would be given to the company
called the Southern. I bought two thirds of the shares of
that company as you had foreseen, the shares trebled in
value, and I picked up a million, from which , francs
were paid to you for pinmoney. How have you spent this
, francs?  it is no business of mine."
"When are you coming to the point?" cried the baroness,
shivering with anger and impatience.
"Patience, madame, I am coming to it."
"That's fortunate."
"In April you went to dine at the minister's. You heard a
private conversation respecting Spanish affairs  on the
expulsion of Don Carlos. I bought some Spanish shares. The
expulsion took place and I pocketed , francs the day
Charles V. repassed the Bidassoa. Of these , francs
you took , crowns. They were yours, you disposed of
them according to your fancy, and I asked no questions but
it is not the less true that you have this year received
, livres."
"Well, sir, and what then?"
"Ah, yes, it was just after this that you spoiled
everything."
"Really, your manner of speaking" 
"It expresses my meaning, and that is all I want. Well,
three days after that you talked politics with M. Debray,
and you fancied from his words that Don Carlos had returned
to Spain. Well, I sold my shares, the news got out, and I no
longer sold  I gave them away, next day I find the news
was false, and by this false report I have lost ,
francs."
"Well?"
"Well, since I gave you a fourth of my gains, I think you
owe me a fourth of my losses the fourth of , francs
is , francs."
"What you say is absurd, and I cannot see why M. Debray's
name is mixed up in this affair."
"Because if you do not possess the , francs I reclaim,
you must have lent them to your friends, and M. Debray is
one of your friends."
"For shame" exclaimed the baroness.
"Oh, let us have no gestures, no screams, no modern drama,
or you will oblige me to tell you that I see Debray leave
here, pocketing the whole of the , livres you have
handed over to him this year, while he smiles to himself,
saying that he has found what the most skilful players have
never discovered  that is, a roulette where he wins
without playing, and is no loser when he loses." The
baroness became enraged. "Wretch" she cried, "will you dare
to tell me you did not know what you now reproach me with?"
"I do not say that I did know it, and I do not say that I
did not know it. I merely tell you to look into my conduct
during the last four years that we have ceased to be husband
and wife, and see whether it has not always been consistent.
Some time after our rupture, you wished to study music,
under the celebrated baritone who made such a successful
appearance at the Theatre Italien at the same time I felt
inclined to learn dancing of the danseuse who acquired such
a reputation in London. This cost me, on your account and
mine, , francs. I said nothing, for we must have peace
in the house and , francs for a lady and gentleman to
be properly instructed in music and dancing are not too
much. Well, you soon become tired of singing, and you take a
fancy to study diplomacy with the minister's secretary. You
understand, it signifies nothing to me so long as you pay
for your lessons out of your own cashbox. But today I find
you are drawing on mine, and that your apprenticeship may
cost me , francs per month. Stop there, madame, for
this cannot last. Either the diplomatist must give his
lessons gratis, and I will tolerate him, or he must never
set his foot again in my house  do you understand,
madame?"
"Oh, this is too much," cried Hermine, choking, "you are
worse than despicable."
"But," continued Danglars, "I find you did not even pause
there" 
"Insults"
"You are right let us leave these facts alone, and reason
coolly. I have never interfered in your affairs excepting
for your good treat me in the same way. You say you have
nothing to do with my cashbox. Be it so. Do as you like
with your own, but do not fill or empty mine. Besides, how
do I know that this was not a political trick, that the
minister enraged at seeing me in the opposition, and jealous
of the popular sympathy I excite, has not concerted with M.
Debray to ruin me?"
"A probable thing"
"Why not? Who ever heard of such an occurrence as this?  a
false telegraphic despatch  it is almost impossible for
wrong signals to be made as they were in the last two
telegrams. It was done on purpose for me  I am sure of
it."
"Sir," said the baroness humbly, "are you not aware that the
man employed there was dismissed, that they talked of going
to law with him, that orders were issued to arrest him and
that this order would have been put into execution if he had
not escaped by flight, which proves that he was either mad
or guilty? It was a mistake."
"Yes, which made fools laugh, which caused the minister to
have a sleepless night, which has caused the minister's
secretaries to blacken several sheets of paper, but which
has cost me , francs."
"But, sir," said Hermine suddenly, "if all this is, as you
say, caused by M. Debray, why, instead of going direct to
him, do you come and tell me of it? Why, to accuse the man,
do you address the woman?"
"Do I know M. Debray?  do I wish to know him?  do I wish
to know that he gives advice?  do I wish to follow it? 
do I speculate? No you do all this, not I."
"Still it seems to me, that as you profit by it  "
Danglars shrugged his shoulders. "Foolish creature," he
exclaimed. "Women fancy they have talent because they have
managed two or three intrigues without being the talk of
Paris But know that if you had even hidden your
irregularities from your husband, who has but the
commencement of the art  for generally husbands will not
see  you would then have been but a faint imitation of
most of your friends among the women of the world. But it
has not been so with me,  I see, and always have seen,
during the last sixteen years. You may, perhaps, have hidden
a thought but not a step, not an action, not a fault, has
escaped me, while you flattered yourself upon your address,
and firmly believed you had deceived me. What has been the
result?  that, thanks to my pretended ignorance, there is
none of your friends, from M. de Villefort to M. Debray, who
has not trembled before me. There is not one who has not
treated me as the master of the house,  the only title I
desire with respect to you there is not one, in fact, who
would have dared to speak of me as I have spoken of them
this day. I will allow you to make me hateful, but I will
prevent your rendering me ridiculous, and, above all, I
forbid you to ruin me."
The baroness had been tolerably composed until the name of
Villefort had been pronounced but then she became pale,
and, rising, as if touched by a spring, she stretched out
her hands as though conjuring an apparition she then took
two or three steps towards her husband, as though to tear
the secret from him, of which he was ignorant, or which he
withheld from some odious calculation,  odious, as all his
calculations were. "M. de Villefort  What do you mean?"
"I mean that M. de Nargonne, your first husband, being
neither a philosopher nor a banker, or perhaps being both,
and seeing there was nothing to be got out of a king's
attorney, died of grief or anger at finding, after an
absence of nine months, that you had been enceinte six. I am
brutal,  I not only allow it, but boast of it it is one
of the reasons of my success in commercial business. Why did
he kill himself instead of you? Because he had no cash to
save. My life belongs to my cash. M. Debray has made me lose
, francs let him bear his share of the loss, and we
will go on as before if not, let him become bankrupt for
the , livres, and do as all bankrupts do  disappear.
He is a charming fellow, I allow, when his news is correct
but when it is not, there are fifty others in the world who
would do better than he."
Madame Danglars was rooted to the spot she made a violent
effort to reply to this last attack, but she fell upon a
chair thinking of Villefort, of the dinner scene, of the
strange series of misfortunes which had taken place in her
house during the last few days, and changed the usual calm
of her establishment to a scene of scandalous debate.
Danglars did not even look at her, though she did her best
to faint. He shut the bedroom door after him, without adding
another word, and returned to his apartments and when
Madame Danglars recovered from her halffainting condition,
she could almost believe that she had had a disagreeable
dream.
Chapter 
Matrimonial Projects.
The day following this scene, at the hour the banker usually
chose to pay a visit to Madame Danglars on his way to his
office, his coupe did not appear. At this time, that is,
about halfpast twelve, Madame Danglars ordered her
carriage, and went out. Danglars, hidden behind a curtain,
watched the departure he had been waiting for. He gave
orders that he should be informed as soon as Madame Danglars
appeared but at two o'clock she had not returned. He then
called for his horses, drove to the Chamber, and inscribed
his name to speak against the budget. From twelve to two
o'clock Danglars had remained in his study, unsealing his
dispatches, and becoming more and more sad every minute,
heaping figure upon figure, and receiving, among other
visits, one from Major Cavalcanti, who, as stiff and exact
as ever, presented himself precisely at the hour named the
night before, to terminate his business with the banker. On
leaving the Chamber, Danglars, who had shown violent marks
of agitation during the sitting, and been more bitter than
ever against the ministry, reentered his carriage, and told
the coachman to drive to the Avenue des ChampsElysees, No.
Monte Cristo was at home only he was engaged with some one
and begged Danglars to wait for a moment in the
drawingroom. While the banker was waiting in the anteroom,
the door opened, and a man dressed as an abbe and doubtless
more familiar with the house than he was, came in and
instead of waiting, merely bowed, passed on to the farther
apartments, and disappeared. A minute after the door by
which the priest had entered reopened, and Monte Cristo
appeared. "Pardon me," said he, "my dear baron, but one of
my friends, the Abbe Busoni, whom you perhaps saw pass by,
has just arrived in Paris not having seen him for a long
time, I could not make up my mind to leave him sooner, so I
hope this will be sufficient reason for my having made you
wait."
"Nay," said Danglars, "it is my fault I have chosen my
visit at a wrong time, and will retire."
"Not at all on the contrary, be seated but what is the
matter with you? You look careworn really, you alarm me.
Melancholy in a capitalist, like the appearance of a comet,
presages some misfortune to the world."
"I have been in illluck for several days," said Danglars,
"and I have heard nothing but bad news."
"Ah, indeed?" said Monte Cristo. "Have you had another fall
at the Bourse?"
"No I am safe for a few days at least. I am only annoyed
about a bankrupt of Trieste."
"Really? Does it happen to be Jacopo Manfredi?"
"Exactly so. Imagine a man who has transacted business with
me for I don't know how long, to the amount of , or
, francs during the year. Never a mistake or delay 
a fellow who paid like a prince. Well, I was a million in
advance with him, and now my fine Jacopo Manfredi suspends
payment"
"Really?"
"It is an unheardof fatality. I draw upon him for ,
francs, my bills are returned unpaid, and, more than that, I
hold bills of exchange signed by him to the value of ,
francs, payable at his correspondent's in Paris at the end
of this month. Today is the th. I present them but my
correspondent has disappeared. This, with my Spanish
affairs, made a pretty end to the month."
"Then you really lost by that affair in Spain?"
"Yes only , francs out of my cashbox  nothing
more"
"Why, how could you make such a mistake  such an old
stager?"
"Oh, it is all my wife's fault. She dreamed Don Carlos had
returned to Spain she believes in dreams. It is magnetism,
she says, and when she dreams a thing it is sure to happen,
she assures me. On this conviction I allow her to speculate,
she having her bank and her stockbroker she speculated and
lost. It is true she speculates with her own money, not
mine nevertheless, you can understand that when ,
francs leave the wife's pocket, the husband always finds it
out. But do you mean to say you have not heard of this? Why,
the thing has made a tremendous noise."
"Yes, I heard it spoken of, but I did not know the details,
and then no one can be more ignorant than I am of the
affairs in the Bourse."
"Then you do not speculate?"
"I?  How could I speculate when I already have so much
trouble in regulating my income? I should be obliged,
besides my steward, to keep a clerk and a boy. But touching
these Spanish affairs, I think that the baroness did not
dream the whole of the Don Carlos matter. The papers said
something about it, did they not?"
"Then you believe the papers?"
"I?  not the least in the world only I fancied that the
honest Messager was an exception to the rule, and that it
only announced telegraphic despatches."
"Well, that's what puzzles me," replied Danglars "the news
of the return of Don Carlos was brought by telegraph."
"So that," said Monte Cristo, "you have lost nearly
,, francs this month."
"Not nearly, indeed that is exactly my loss."
"Diable," said Monte Cristo compassionately, "it is a hard
blow for a thirdrate fortune."
"Thirdrate," said Danglars, rather humble, "what do you
mean by that?"
"Certainly," continued Monte Cristo, "I make three
assortments in fortune  firstrate, secondrate, and
thirdrate fortunes. I call those firstrate which are
composed of treasures one possesses under one's hand, such
as mines, lands, and funded property, in such states as
France, Austria, and England, provided these treasures and
property form a total of about a hundred millions I call
those secondrate fortunes, that are gained by manufacturing
enterprises, jointstock companies, viceroyalties, and
principalities, not drawing more than ,, francs, the
whole forming a capital of about fifty millions finally, I
call those thirdrate fortunes, which are composed of a
fluctuating capital, dependent upon the will of others, or
upon chances which a bankruptcy involves or a false telegram
shakes, such as banks, speculations of the day  in fact,
all operations under the influence of greater or less
mischances, the whole bringing in a real or fictitious
capital of about fifteen millions. I think this is about
your position, is it not?"
"Confound it, yes" replied Danglars.
"The result, then, of six more such months as this would be
to reduce the thirdrate house to despair."
"Oh," said Danglars, becoming very pale, how you are running
on"
"Let us imagine seven such months," continued Monte Cristo,
in the same tone. "Tell me, have you ever thought that seven
times ,, francs make nearly twelve millions? No, you
have not  well, you are right, for if you indulged in
such reflections, you would never risk your principal, which
is to the speculator what the skin is to civilized man. We
have our clothes, some more splendid than others,  this is
our credit but when a man dies he has only his skin in the
same way, on retiring from business, you have nothing but
your real principal of about five or six millions, at the
most for thirdrate fortunes are never more than a fourth
of what they appear to be, like the locomotive on a railway,
the size of which is magnified by the smoke and steam
surrounding it. Well, out of the five or six millions which
form your real capital, you have just lost nearly two
millions, which must, of course, in the same degree diminish
your credit and fictitious fortune to follow out my simile,
your skin has been opened by bleeding, and this if repeated
three or four times will cause death  so pay attention to
it, my dear Monsieur Danglars. Do you want money? Do you
wish me to lend you some?"
"What a bad calculator you are" exclaimed Danglars, calling
to his assistance all his philosophy and dissimulation. "I
have made money at the same time by speculations which have
succeeded. I have made up the loss of blood by nutrition. I
lost a battle in Spain, I have been defeated in Trieste, but
my naval army in India will have taken some galleons, and my
Mexican pioneers will have discovered some mine."
"Very good, very good But the wound remains and will reopen
at the first loss."
"No, for I am only embarked in certainties," replied
Danglars, with the air of a mountebank sounding his own
praises "to involve me, three governments must crumble to
dust."
"Well, such things have been."
"That there should be a famine"
"Recollect the seven fat and the seven lean kine."
"Or, that the sea should become dry, as in the days of
Pharaoh, and even then my vessels would become caravans."
"So much the better. I congratulate you, my dear M.
Danglars," said Monte Cristo "I see I was deceived, and
that you belong to the class of secondrate fortunes."
"I think I may aspire to that honor," said Danglars with a
smile, which reminded Monte Cristo of the sickly moons which
bad artists are so fond of daubing into their pictures of
ruins. "But, while we are speaking of business," Danglars
added, pleased to find an opportunity of changing the
subject, "tell me what I am to do for M. Cavalcanti."
"Give him money, if he is recommended to you, and the
recommendation seems good."
"Excellent he presented himself this morning with a bond of
, francs, payable at sight, on you, signed by Busoni,
and returned by you to me, with your indorsement  of
course, I immediately counted him over the forty
banknotes."
Monte Cristo nodded his head in token of assent. "But that
is not all," continued Danglars "he has opened an account
with my house for his son."
"May I ask how much he allows the young man?"
"Five thousand francs per month."
"Sixty thousand francs per year. I thought I was right in
believing that Cavalcanti to be a stingy fellow. How can a
young man live upon , francs a month?"
"But you understand that if the young man should want a few
thousands more" 
"Do not advance it the father will never repay it. You do
not know these ultramontane millionaires they are regular
misers. And by whom were they recommended to you?"
"Oh, by the house of Fenzi, one of the best in Florence."
"I do not mean to say you will lose, but, nevertheless, mind
you hold to the terms of the agreement."
"Would you not trust the Cavalcanti?"
"I? oh, I would advance six millions on his signature. I was
only speaking in reference to the secondrate fortunes we
were mentioning just now."
"And with all this, how unassuming he is I should never
have taken him for anything more than a mere major."
"And you would have flattered him, for certainly, as you
say, he has no manner. The first time I saw him he appeared
to me like an old lieutenant who had grown mouldy under his
epaulets. But all the Italians are the same they are like
old Jews when they are not glittering in Oriental splendor."
"The young man is better," said Danglars.
"Yes a little nervous, perhaps, but, upon the whole, he
appeared tolerable. I was uneasy about him."
"Why?"
"Because you met him at my house, just after his
introduction into the world, as they told me. He has been
travelling with a very severe tutor, and had never been to
Paris before."
"Ah, I believe noblemen marry amongst themselves, do they
not?" asked Danglars carelessly "they like to unite their
fortunes."
"It is usual, certainly but Cavalcanti is an original who
does nothing like other people. I cannot help thinking that
he has brought his son to France to choose a wife."
"Do you think so?"
"I am sure of it."
"And you have heard his fortune mentioned?"
"Nothing else was talked of only some said he was worth
millions, and others that he did not possess a farthing."
"And what is your opinion?"
"I ought not to influence you, because it is only my own
personal impression."
"Well, and it is that" 
"My opinion is, that all these old podestas, these ancient
condottieri,  for the Cavalcanti have commanded armies and
governed provinces,  my opinion, I say, is, that they have
buried their millions in corners, the secret of which they
have transmitted only to their eldest sons, who have done
the same from generation to generation and the proof of
this is seen in their yellow and dry appearance, like the
florins of the republic, which, from being constantly gazed
upon, have become reflected in them."
"Certainly," said Danglars, "and this is further supported
by the fact of their not possessing an inch of land."
"Very little, at least I know of none which Cavalcanti
possesses, excepting his palace in Lucca."
"Ah, he has a palace?" said Danglars, laughing "come, that
is something."
"Yes and more than that, he lets it to the Minister of
Finance while he lives in a simple house. Oh, as I told you
before, I think the old fellow is very close."
"Come, you do not flatter him."
"I scarcely know him I think I have seen him three times in
my life all I know relating to him is through Busoni and
himself. He was telling me this morning that, tired of
letting his property lie dormant in Italy, which is a dead
nation, he wished to find a method, either in France or
England, of multiplying his millions, but remember, that
though I place great confidence in Busoni, I am not
responsible for this."
"Never mind accept my thanks for the client you have sent
me. It is a fine name to inscribe on my ledgers, and my
cashier was quite proud of it when I explained to him who
the Cavalcanti were. By the way, this is merely a simple
question, when this sort of people marry their sons, do they
give them any fortune?"
"Oh, that depends upon circumstances. I know an Italian
prince, rich as a gold mine, one of the noblest families in
Tuscany, who, when his sons married according to his wish,
gave them millions and when they married against his
consent, merely allowed them thirty crowns a month. Should
Andrea marry according to his father's views, he will,
perhaps, give him one, two, or three millions. For example,
supposing it were the daughter of a banker, he might take an
interest in the house of the fatherinlaw of his son then
again, if he disliked his choice, the major takes the key,
doublelocks his coffer, and Master Andrea would be obliged
to live like the sons of a Parisian family, by shuffling
cards or rattling the dice."
"Ah, that boy will find out some Bavarian or Peruvian
princess he will want a crown and an immense fortune."
"No these grand lords on the other side of the Alps
frequently marry into plain families like Jupiter, they
like to cross the race. But do you wish to marry Andrea, my
dear M. Danglars, that you are asking so many questions?"
"Ma foi," said Danglars, "it would not be a bad speculation,
I fancy, and you know I am a speculator."
"You are not thinking of Mademoiselle Danglars, I hope you
would not like poor Andrea to have his throat cut by
Albert?"
"Albert," repeated Danglars, shrugging his shoulders "ah,
well he would care very little about it, I think."
"But he is betrothed to your daughter, I believe?"
"Well, M. de Morcerf and I have talked about this marriage,
but Madame de Morcerf and Albert" 
"You do not mean to say that it would not be a good match?"
"Indeed, I imagine that Mademoiselle Danglars is as good as
M. de Morcerf."
"Mademoiselle Danglars' fortune will be great, no doubt,
especially if the telegraph should not make any more
mistakes."
"Oh, I do not mean her fortune only but tell me" 
"What?"
"Why did you not invite M. and Madame de Morcerf to your
dinner?"
"I did so, but he excused himself on account of Madame de
Morcerf being obliged to go to Dieppe for the benefit of sea
air."
"Yes, yes," said Danglars, laughing, "it would do her a
great deal of good."
"Why so?"
"Because it is the air she always breathed in her youth."
Monte Cristo took no notice of this illnatured remark.
"But still, if Albert be not so rich as Mademoiselle
Danglars," said the count, "you must allow that he has a
fine name?"
"So he has but I like mine as well."
"Certainly your name is popular, and does honor to the
title they have adorned it with but you are too intelligent
not to know that according to a prejudice, too firmly rooted
to be exterminated, a nobility which dates back five
centuries is worth more than one that can only reckon twenty
years."
"And for this very reason," said Danglars with a smile,
which he tried to make sardonic, "I prefer M. Andrea
Cavalcanti to M. Albert de Morcerf."
"Still, I should not think the Morcerfs would yield to the
Cavalcanti?"
"The Morcerfs  Stay, my dear count," said Danglars "you
are a man of the world, are you not?"
"I think so."
"And you understand heraldry?"
"A little."
"Well, look at my coatofarms, it is worth more than
Morcerf's."
"Why so?"
"Because, though I am not a baron by birth, my real name is,
at least, Danglars."
"Well, what then?"
"While his name is not Morcerf."
"How?  not Morcerf?"
"Not the least in the world."
"Go on."
"I have been made a baron, so that I actually am one he
made himself a count, so that he is not one at all."
"Impossible"
"Listen my dear count M. de Morcerf has been my friend, or
rather my acquaintance, during the last thirty years. You
know I have made the most of my arms, though I never forgot
my origin."
"A proof of great humility or great pride," said Monte
Cristo.
"Well, when I was a clerk, Morcerf was a mere fisherman."
"And then he was called" 
"Fernand."
"Only Fernand?"
"Fernand Mondego."
"You are sure?"
"Pardieu, I have bought enough fish of him to know his
name."
"Then, why did you think of giving your daughter to him?"
"Because Fernand and Danglars, being both parvenus, both
having become noble, both rich, are about equal in worth,
excepting that there have been certain things mentioned of
him that were never said of me."
"What?"
"Oh, nothing"
"Ah, yes what you tell me recalls to mind something about
the name of Fernand Mondego. I have heard that name in
Greece."
"In conjunction with the affairs of Ali Pasha?"
"Exactly so."
"This is the mystery," said Danglars. "I acknowledge I would
have given anything to find it out."
"It would be very easy if you much wished it?"
"How so?"
"Probably you have some correspondent in Greece?"
"I should think so."
"At Yanina?"
"Everywhere."
"Well, write to your correspondent in Yanina, and ask him
what part was played by a Frenchman named Fernand Mondego in
the catastrophe of Ali Tepelini."
"You are right," exclaimed Danglars, rising quickly, "I will
write today."
"Do so."
"I will."
"And if you should hear of anything very scandalous" 
"I will communicate it to you."
"You will oblige me." Danglars rushed out of the room, and
made but one leap into his coupe.
Chapter 
At the Office of the King's Attorney.
Let us leave the banker driving his horses at their fullest
speed, and follow Madame Danglars in her morning excursion.
We have said that at halfpast twelve o'clock Madame
Danglars had ordered her horses, and had left home in the
carriage. She directed her course towards the Faubourg Saint
Germain, went down the Rue Mazarine, and stopped at the
Passage du PontNeuf. She descended, and went through the
passage. She was very plainly dressed, as would be the case
with a woman of taste walking in the morning. At the Rue
Guenegaud she called a cab, and directed the driver to go to
the Rue de Harlay. As soon as she was seated in the vehicle,
she drew from her pocket a very thick black veil, which she
tied on to her straw bonnet. She then replaced the bonnet,
and saw with pleasure, in a little pocketmirror, that her
white complexion and brilliant eyes were alone visible. The
cab crossed the PontNeuf and entered the Rue de Harlay by
the Place Dauphine the driver was paid as the door opened,
and stepping lightly up the stairs Madame Danglars soon
reached the Salle des PasPerdus.
There was a great deal going on that morning, and many
businesslike persons at the Palais businesslike persons
pay very little attention to women, and Madame Danglars
crossed the hall without exciting any more attention than
any other woman calling upon her lawyer. There was a great
press of people in M. de Villefort's antechamber, but
Madame Danglars had no occasion even to pronounce her name.
The instant she appeared the doorkeeper rose, came to her,
and asked her whether she was not the person with whom the
procureur had made an appointment and on her affirmative
answer being given, he conducted her by a private passage to
M. de Villefort's office. The magistrate was seated in an
armchair, writing, with his back towards the door he did
not move as he heard it open, and the doorkeeper pronounce
the words, "Walk in, madame," and then reclose it but no
sooner had the man's footsteps ceased, than he started up,
drew the bolts, closed the curtains, and examined every
corner of the room. Then, when he had assured himself that
he could neither be seen nor heard, and was consequently
relieved of doubts, he said,  "Thanks, madame,  thanks
for your punctuality" and he offered a chair to Madame
Danglars, which she accepted, for her heart beat so
violently that she felt nearly suffocated.
"It is a long time, madame," said the procureur, describing
a halfcircle with his chair, so as to place himself exactly
opposite to Madame Danglars,  "it is a long time since I
had the pleasure of speaking alone with you, and I regret
that we have only now met to enter upon a painful
conversation."
"Nevertheless, sir, you see I have answered your first
appeal, although certainly the conversation must be much
more painful for me than for you." Villefort smiled
bitterly.
"It is true, then," he said, rather uttering his thoughts
aloud than addressing his companion,  "it is true, then,
that all our actions leave their traces  some sad, others
bright  on our paths it is true that every step in our
lives is like the course of an insect on the sands  it
leaves its track Alas, to many the path is traced by
tears."
"Sir," said Madame Danglars, "you can feel for my emotion,
can you not? Spare me, then, I beseech you. When I look at
this room,  whence so many guilty creatures have departed,
trembling and ashamed, when I look at that chair before
which I now sit trembling and ashamed,  oh, it requires
all my reason to convince me that I am not a very guilty
woman and you a menacing judge." Villefort dropped his head
and sighed. "And I," he said, "I feel that my place is not
in the judge's seat, but on the prisoner's stool."
"You?" said Madame Danglars.
"Yes, I."
"I think, sir, you exaggerate your situation," said Madame
Danglars, whose beautiful eyes sparkled for a moment. "The
paths of which you were just speaking have been traced by
all young men of ardent imaginations. Besides the pleasure,
there is always remorse from the indulgence of our passions,
and, after all, what have you men to fear from all this? the
world excuses, and notoriety ennobles you."
"Madame," replied Villefort, "you know that I am no
hypocrite, or, at least, that I never deceive without a
reason. If my brow be severe, it is because many misfortunes
have clouded it if my heart be petrified, it is that it
might sustain the blows it has received. I was not so in my
youth, I was not so on the night of the betrothal, when we
were all seated around a table in the Rue du Cours at
Marseilles. But since then everything has changed in and
about me I am accustomed to brave difficulties, and, in the
conflict to crush those who, by their own free will, or by
chance, voluntarily or involuntarily, interfere with me in
my career. It is generally the case that what we most
ardently desire is as ardently withheld from us by those who
wish to obtain it, or from whom we attempt to snatch it.
Thus, the greater number of a man's errors come before him
disguised under the specious form of necessity then, after
error has been committed in a moment of excitement, of
delirium, or of fear, we see that we might have avoided and
escaped it. The means we might have used, which we in our
blindness could not see, then seem simple and easy, and we
say, "Why did I not do this, instead of that?' Women, on the
contrary, are rarely tormented with remorse for the
decision does not come from you,  your misfortunes are
generally imposed upon you, and your faults the results of
others' crimes."
"In any case, sir, you will allow," replied Madame Danglars,
"that, even if the fault were alone mine, I last night
received a severe punishment for it."
"Poor thing," said Villefort, pressing her hand, "it was too
severe for your strength, for you were twice overwhelmed,
and yet" 
"Well?"
"Well, I must tell you. Collect all your courage, for you
have not yet heard all."
"Ah," exclaimed Madame Danglars, alarmed, "what is there
more to hear?"
"You only look back to the past, and it is, indeed, bad
enough. Well, picture to yourself a future more gloomy still
certainly frightful, perhaps sanguinary." The baroness
knew how calm Villefort naturally was, and his present
excitement frightened her so much that she opened her mouth
to scream, but the sound died in her throat. "How has this
terrible past been recalled?" cried Villefort "how is it
that it has escaped from the depths of the tomb and the
recesses of our hearts, where it was buried, to visit us
now, like a phantom, whitening our cheeks and flushing our
brows with shame?"
"Alas," said Hermine, "doubtless it is chance."
"Chance?" replied Villefort "No, no, madame, there is no
such thing as chance."
"Oh, yes has not a fatal chance revealed all this? Was it
not by chance the Count of Monte Cristo bought that house?
Was it not by chance he caused the earth to be dug up? Is it
not by chance that the unfortunate child was disinterred
under the trees?  that poor innocent offspring of mine,
which I never even kissed, but for whom I wept many, many
tears. Ah, my heart clung to the count when he mentioned the
dear spoil found beneath the flowers."
"Well, no, madame,  this is the terrible news I have to
tell you," said Villefort in a hollow voice  "no, nothing
was found beneath the flowers there was no child
disinterred  no. You must not weep, no, you must not
groan, you must tremble"
"What can you mean?" asked Madame Danglars, shuddering.
"I mean that M. de Monte Cristo, digging underneath these
trees, found neither skeleton nor chest, because neither of
them was there"
"Neither of them there?" repeated Madame Danglars, her
staring, wideopen eyes expressing her alarm.
"Neither of them there" she again said, as though striving
to impress herself with the meaning of the words which
escaped her.
"No," said Villefort, burying his face in his hands, "no, a
hundred times no"
"Then you did not bury the poor child there, sir? Why did
you deceive me? Where did you place it? tell me  where?"
"There But listen to me  listen  and you will pity me
who has for twenty years alone borne the heavy burden of
grief I am about to reveal, without casting the least
portion upon you."
"Oh, you frighten me But speak I will listen."
"You recollect that sad night, when you were halfexpiring
on that bed in the red damask room, while I, scarcely less
agitated than you, awaited your delivery. The child was
born, was given to me  motionless, breathless, voiceless
we thought it dead." Madame Danglars moved rapidly, as
though she would spring from her chair, but Villefort
stopped, and clasped his hands as if to implore her
attention. "We thought it dead," he repeated "I placed it
in the chest, which was to take the place of a coffin I
descended to the garden, I dug a hole, and then flung it
down in haste. Scarcely had I covered it with earth, when
the arm of the Corsican was stretched towards me I saw a
shadow rise, and, at the same time, a flash of light. I felt
pain I wished to cry out, but an icy shiver ran through my
veins and stifled my voice I fell lifeless, and fancied
myself killed. Never shall I forget your sublime courage,
when, having returned to consciousness, I dragged myself to
the foot of the stairs, and you, almost dying yourself, came
to meet me. We were obliged to keep silent upon the dreadful
catastrophe. You had the fortitude to regain the house,
assisted by your nurse. A duel was the pretext for my wound.
Though we scarcely expected it, our secret remained in our
own keeping alone. I was taken to Versailles for three
months I struggled with death at last, as I seemed to cling
to life, I was ordered to the South. Four men carried me
from Paris to Chalons, walking six leagues a day Madame de
Villefort followed the litter in her carriage. At Chalons I
was put upon the Saone, thence I passed on to the Rhone,
whence I descended, merely with the current, to Arles at
Arles I was again placed on my litter, and continued my
journey to Marseilles. My recovery lasted six months. I
never heard you mentioned, and I did not dare inquire for
you. When I returned to Paris, I learned that you, the widow
of M. de Nargonne, had married M. Danglars.
"What was the subject of my thoughts from the time
consciousness returned to me? Always the same  always the
child's corpse, coming every night in my dreams, rising from
the earth, and hovering over the grave with menacing look
and gesture. I inquired immediately on my return to Paris
the house had not been inhabited since we left it, but it
had just been let for nine years. I found the tenant. I
pretended that I disliked the idea that a house belonging to
my wife's father and mother should pass into the hands of
strangers. I offered to pay them for cancelling the lease
they demanded , francs. I would have given ,  I
would have given ,. I had the money with me I made the
tenant sign the deed of resilition, and when I had obtained
what I so much wanted, I galloped to Auteuil.
"No one had entered the house since I had left it. It was
five o'clock in the afternoon I ascended into the red room,
and waited for night. There all the thoughts which had
disturbed me during my year of constant agony came back with
double force. The Corsican, who had declared the vendetta
against me, who had followed me from Nimes to Paris, who had
hid himself in the garden, who had struck me, had seen me
dig the grave, had seen me inter the child,  he might
become acquainted with your person,  nay, he might even
then have known it. Would he not one day make you pay for
keeping this terrible secret? Would it not be a sweet
revenge for him when he found that I had not died from the
blow of his dagger? It was therefore necessary, before
everything else, and at all risks, that I should cause all
traces of the past to disappear  that I should destroy
every material vestige too much reality would always remain
in my recollection. It was for this I had annulled the lease
it was for this I had come  it was for this I was
waiting. Night arrived I allowed it to become quite dark. I
was without a light in that room when the wind shook all
the doors, behind which I continually expected to see some
spy concealed, I trembled. I seemed everywhere to hear your
moans behind me in the bed, and I dared not turn around. My
heart beat so violently that I feared my wound would open.
At length, one by one, all the noises in the neighborhood
ceased. I understood that I had nothing to fear, that I
should neither be seen nor heard, so I decided upon
descending to the garden.
"Listen, Hermine I consider myself as brave as most men,
but when I drew from my breast the little key of the
staircase, which I had found in my coat  that little key
we both used to cherish so much, which you wished to have
fastened to a golden ring  when I opened the door, and saw
the pale moon shedding a long stream of white light on the
spiral staircase like a spectre, I leaned against the wall,
and nearly shrieked. I seemed to be going mad. At last I
mastered my agitation. I descended the staircase step by
step the only thing I could not conquer was a strange
trembling in my knees. I grasped the railings if I had
relaxed my hold for a moment, I should have fallen. I
reached the lower door. Outside this door a spade was placed
against the wall I took it, and advanced towards the
thicket. I had provided myself with a dark lantern. In the
middle of the lawn I stopped to light it, then I continued
my path.
"It was the end of November, all the verdure of the garden
had disappeared, the trees were nothing more than skeletons
with their long bony arms, and the dead leaves sounded on
the gravel under my feet. My terror overcame me to such a
degree as I approached the thicket, that I took a pistol
from my pocket and armed myself. I fancied continually that
I saw the figure of the Corsican between the branches. I
examined the thicket with my dark lantern it was empty. I
looked carefully around I was indeed alone,  no noise
disturbed the silence but the owl, whose piercing cry seemed
to be calling up the phantoms of the night. I tied my
lantern to a forked branch I had noticed a year before at
the precise spot where I stopped to dig the hole.
"The grass had grown very thickly there during the summer,
and when autumn arrived no one had been there to mow it.
Still one place where the grass was thin attracted my
attention it evidently was there I had turned up the
ground. I went to work. The hour, then, for which I had been
waiting during the last year had at length arrived. How I
worked, how I hoped, how I struck every piece of turf,
thinking to find some resistance to my spade But no, I
found nothing, though I had made a hole twice as large as
the first. I thought I had been deceived  had mistaken the
spot. I turned around, I looked at the trees, I tried to
recall the details which had struck me at the time. A cold,
sharp wind whistled through the leafless branches, and yet
the drops fell from my forehead. I recollected that I was
stabbed just as I was trampling the ground to fill up the
hole while doing so I had leaned against a laburnum behind
me was an artificial rockery, intended to serve as a
restingplace for persons walking in the garden in falling,
my hand, relaxing its hold of the laburnum, felt the
coldness of the stone. On my right I saw the tree, behind me
the rock. I stood in the same attitude, and threw myself
down. I rose, and again began digging and enlarging the
hole still I found nothing, nothing  the chest was no
longer there"
"The chest no longer there?" murmured Madame Danglars,
choking with fear.
"Think not I contented myself with this one effort,"
continued Villefort. "No I searched the whole thicket. I
thought the assassin, having discovered the chest, and
supposing it to be a treasure, had intended carrying it off,
but, perceiving his error, had dug another hole, and
deposited it there but I could find nothing. Then the idea
struck me that he had not taken these precautions, and had
simply thrown it in a corner. In the last case I must wait
for daylight to renew my search. I remained the room and
waited."
"Oh, heavens"
When daylight dawned I went down again. My first visit was
to the thicket. I hoped to find some traces which had
escaped me in the darkness. I had turned up the earth over a
surface of more than twenty feet square, and a depth of two
feet. A laborer would not have done in a day what occupied
me an hour. But I could find nothing  absolutely nothing.
Then I renewed the search. Supposing it had been thrown
aside, it would probably be on the path which led to the
little gate but this examination was as useless as the
first, and with a bursting heart I returned to the thicket,
which now contained no hope for me."
"Oh," cried Madame Danglars, "it was enough to drive you
mad"
"I hoped for a moment that it might," said Villefort "but
that happiness was denied me. However, recovering my
strength and my ideas, "Why,' said I, "should that man have
carried away the corpse?'"
"But you said," replied Madame Danglars, "he would require
it as a proof."
"Ah, no, madame, that could not be. Dead bodies are not kept
a year they are shown to a magistrate, and the evidence is
taken. Now, nothing of the kind has happened."
"What then?" asked Hermine, trembling violently.
"Something more terrible, more fatal, more alarming for us
the child was, perhaps, alive, and the assassin may have
saved it"
Madame Danglars uttered a piercing cry, and, seizing
Villefort's hands, exclaimed, "My child was alive?" said
she "you buried my child alive? You were not certain my
child was dead, and you buried it? Ah" 
Madame Danglars had risen, and stood before the procureur,
whose hands she wrung in her feeble grasp. "I know not I
merely suppose so, as I might suppose anything else,"
replied Villefort with a look so fixed, it indicated that
his powerful mind was on the verge of despair and madness.
"Ah, my child, my poor child" cried the baroness, falling
on her chair, and stifling her sobs in her handkerchief.
Villefort, becoming somewhat reassured, perceived that to
avert the maternal storm gathering over his head, he must
inspire Madame Danglars with the terror he felt. "You
understand, then, that if it were so," said he, rising in
his turn, and approaching the baroness, to speak to her in a
lower tone, "we are lost. This child lives, and some one
knows it lives  some one is in possession of our secret
and since Monte Cristo speaks before us of a child
disinterred, when that child could not be found, it is he
who is in possession of our secret."
"Just God, avenging God" murmured Madame Danglars.
Villefort's only answer was a stifled groan.
"But the child  the child, sir?" repeated the agitated
mother.
"How I have searched for him," replied Villefort, wringing
his hands "how I have called him in my long sleepless
nights how I have longed for royal wealth to purchase a
million of secrets from a million of men, and to find mine
among them At last, one day, when for the hundredth time I
took up my spade, I asked myself again and again what the
Corsican could have done with the child. A child encumbers a
fugitive perhaps, on perceiving it was still alive, he had
thrown it into the river."
"Impossible" cried Madame Danglars "a man may murder
another out of revenge, but he would not deliberately drown
a child."
"Perhaps," continued Villefort, "he had put it in the
foundling hospital."
"Oh, yes, yes," cried the baroness "my child is there"
"I ran to the hospital, and learned that the same night 
the night of the th of September  a child had been
brought there, wrapped in part of a fine linen napkin,
purposely torn in half. This portion of the napkin was
marked with half a baron's crown, and the letter H."
"Truly, truly," said Madame Danglars, "all my linen is
marked thus Monsieur de Nargonne was a baronet, and my name
is Hermine. Thank God, my child was not then dead"
"No, it was not dead."
"And you can tell me so without fearing to make me die of
joy? Where is the child?" Villefort shrugged his shoulders.
"Do I know?" said he "and do you believe that if I knew I
would relate to you all its trials and all its adventures as
would a dramatist or a novel writer? Alas, no, I know not. A
woman, about six months after, came to claim it with the
other half of the napkin. This woman gave all the requisite
particulars, and it was intrusted to her."
"But you should have inquired for the woman you should have
traced her."
"And what do you think I did? I feigned a criminal process,
and employed all the most acute bloodhounds and skilful
agents in search of her. They traced her to Chalons, and
there they lost her."
"They lost her?"
"Yes, forever." Madame Danglars had listened to this recital
with a sigh, a tear, or a shriek for every detail. "And this
is all?" said she "and you stopped there?"
"Oh, no," said Villefort "I never ceased to search and to
inquire. However, the last two or three years I had allowed
myself some respite. But now I will begin with more
perseverance and fury than ever, since fear urges me, not my
conscience."
"But," replied Madame Danglars, "the Count of Monte Cristo
can know nothing, or he would not seek our society as he
does."
"Oh, the wickedness of man is very great," said Villefort,
"since it surpasses the goodness of God. Did you observe
that man's eyes while he was speaking to us?"
"No."
"But have you ever watched him carefully?"
"Doubtless he is capricious, but that is all one thing
alone struck me,  of all the exquisite things he placed
before us, he touched nothing. I might have suspected he was
poisoning us."
"And you see you would have been deceived."
"Yes, doubtless."
"But believe me, that man has other projects. For that
reason I wished to see you, to speak to you, to warn you
against every one, but especially against him. Tell me,"
cried Villefort, fixing his eyes more steadfastly on her
than he had ever done before, "did you ever reveal to any
one our connection?"
"Never, to any one."
"You understand me," replied Villefort, affectionately
"when I say any one,  pardon my urgency,  to any one
living I mean?"
"Yes, yes, I understand very well," ejaculated the baroness
"never, I swear to you."
"Were you ever in the habit of writing in the evening what
had transpired in the morning? Do you keep a journal?"
"No, my life has been passed in frivolity I wish to forget
it myself."
"Do you talk in your sleep?"
"I sleep soundly, like a child do you not remember?" The
color mounted to the baroness's face, and Villefort turned
awfully pale.
"It is true," said he, in so low a tone that he could hardly
be heard.
"Well?" said the baroness.
"Well, I understand what I now have to do," replied
Villefort. "In less than one week from this time I will
ascertain who this M. de Monte Cristo is, whence he comes,
where he goes, and why he speaks in our presence of children
that have been disinterred in a garden." Villefort
pronounced these words with an accent which would have made
the count shudder had he heard him. Then he pressed the hand
the baroness reluctantly gave him, and led her respectfully
back to the door. Madame Danglars returned in another cab to
the passage, on the other side of which she found her
carriage, and her coachman sleeping peacefully on his box
while waiting for her.
Chapter 
A Summer Ball.
The same day during the interview between Madame Danglars
and the procureur, a travellingcarriage entered the Rue du
Helder, passed through the gateway of No. , and stopped in
the yard. In a moment the door was opened, and Madame de
Morcerf alighted, leaning on her son's arm. Albert soon left
her, ordered his horses, and having arranged his toilet,
drove to the Champs Elysees, to the house of Monte Cristo.
The count received him with his habitual smile. It was a
strange thing that no one ever appeared to advance a step in
that man's favor. Those who would, as it were, force a
passage to his heart, found an impassable barrier. Morcerf,
who ran towards him with open arms, was chilled as he drew
near, in spite of the friendly smile, and simply held out
his hand. Monte Cristo shook it coldly, according to his
invariable practice. "Here I am, dear count."
"Welcome home again."
"I arrived an hour since."
"From Dieppe?"
"No, from Treport."
"Indeed?"
"And I have come at once to see you."
"That is extremely kind of you," said Monte Cristo with a
tone of perfect indifference.
"And what is the news?"
"You should not ask a stranger, a foreigner, for news."
"I know it, but in asking for news, I mean, have you done
anything for me?"
"Had you commissioned me?" said Monte Cristo, feigning
uneasiness.
"Come, come," said Albert, "do not assume so much
indifference. It is said, sympathy travels rapidly, and when
at Treport, I felt the electric shock you have either been
working for me or thinking of me."
"Possibly," said Monte Cristo, "I have indeed thought of
you, but the magnetic wire I was guiding acted, indeed,
without my knowledge."
"Indeed? Pray tell me how it happened?"
"Willingly. M. Danglars dined with me."
"I know it to avoid meeting him, my mother and I left
town."
"But he met here M. Andrea Cavalcanti."
"Your Italian prince?"
"Not so fast M. Andrea only calls himself count."
"Calls himself, do you say?"
"Yes, calls himself."
"Is he not a count?"
"What can I know of him? He calls himself so. I, of course,
give him the same title, and every one else does likewise."
"What a strange man you are What next? You say M. Danglars
dined here?"
"Yes, with Count Cavalcanti, the marquis his father, Madame
Danglars, M. and Madame de Villefort,  charming people, 
M. Debray, Maximilian Morrel, and M. de ChateauRenaud."
"Did they speak of me?"
"Not a word."
"So much the worse."
"Why so? I thought you wished them to forget you?"
"If they did not speak of me, I am sure they thought about
me, and I am in despair."
"How will that affect you, since Mademoiselle Danglars was
not among the number here who thought of you? Truly, she
might have thought of you at home."
"I have no fear of that or, if she did, it was only in the
same way in which I think of her."
"Touching sympathy So you hate each other?" said the count.
"Listen," said Morcerf  "if Mademoiselle Danglars were
disposed to take pity on my supposed martyrdom on her
account, and would dispense with all matrimonial formalities
between our two families, I am ready to agree to the
arrangement. In a word, Mademoiselle Danglars would make a
charming mistress  but a wife  diable"
"And this," said Monte Cristo, "is your opinion of your
intended spouse?"
"Yes it is rather unkind, I acknowledge, but it is true.
But as this dream cannot be realized, since Mademoiselle
Danglars must become my lawful wife, live perpetually with
me, sing to me, compose verses and music within ten paces of
me, and that for my whole life, it frightens me. One may
forsake a mistress, but a wife,  good heavens There she
must always be and to marry Mademoiselle Danglars would be
awful."
"You are difficult to please, viscount."
"Yes, for I often wish for what is impossible."
"What is that?"
"To find such a wife as my father found." Monte Cristo
turned pale, and looked at Albert, while playing with some
magnificent pistols.
"Your father was fortunate, then?" said he.
"You know my opinion of my mother, count look at her, 
still beautiful, witty, more charming than ever. For any
other son to have stayed with his mother for four days at
Treport, it would have been a condescension or a martyrdom,
while I return, more contented, more peaceful  shall I say
more poetic  than if I had taken Queen Mab or Titania as
my companion."
"That is an overwhelming demonstration, and you would make
every one vow to live a single life."
"Such are my reasons for not liking to marry Mademoiselle
Danglars. Have you ever noticed how much a thing is
heightened in value when we obtain possession of it? The
diamond which glittered in the window at Marle's or Fossin's
shines with more splendor when it is our own but if we are
compelled to acknowledge the superiority of another, and
still must retain the one that is inferior, do you not know
what we have to endure?"
"Worldling," murmured the count.
"Thus I shall rejoice when Mademoiselle Eugenie perceives I
am but a pitiful atom, with scarcely as many hundred
thousand francs as she has millions." Monte Cristo smiled.
"One plan occurred to me," continued Albert "Franz likes
all that is eccentric I tried to make him fall in love with
Mademoiselle Danglars but in spite of four letters, written
in the most alluring style, he invariably answered "My
eccentricity may be great, but it will not make me break my
promise.'"
"That is what I call devoted friendship, to recommend to
another one whom you would not marry yourself." Albert
smiled.  "Apropos," continued he, "Franz is coming soon,
but it will not interest you you dislike him, I think?"
"I?" said Monte Cristo "my dear Viscount, how have you
discovered that I did not like M. Franz I like every one."
"And you include me in the expression every one  many
thanks"
"Let us not mistake," said Monte Cristo "I love every one
as God commands us to love our neighbor, as Christians but
I thoroughly hate but a few. Let us return to M. Franz
d'Epinay. Did you say he was coming?"
"Yes summoned by M. de Villefort, who is apparently as
anxious to get Mademoiselle Valentine married as M. Danglars
is to see Mademoiselle Eugenie settled. It must be a very
irksome office to be the father of a grownup daughter it
seems to make one feverish, and to raise one's pulse to
ninety beats a minute until the deed is done."
"But M. d'Epinay, unlike you, bears his misfortune
patiently."
"Still more, he talks seriously about the matter, puts on a
white tie, and speaks of his family. He entertains a very
high opinion of M. and Madame de Villefort."
"Which they deserve, do they not?"
"I believe they do. M. de Villefort has always passed for a
severe but a just man."
"There is, then, one," said Monte Cristo, "whom you do not
condemn like poor Danglars?"
"Because I am not compelled to marry his daughter perhaps,"
replied Albert, laughing.
"Indeed, my dear sir," said Monte Cristo, "you are
revoltingly foppish."
"I foppish? how do you mean?"
"Yes pray take a cigar, and cease to defend yourself, and
to struggle to escape marrying Mademoiselle Danglars. Let
things take their course perhaps you may not have to
retract."
"Bah," said Albert, staring.
"Doubtless, my dear viscount, you will not be taken by
force and seriously, do you wish to break off your
engagement?"
"I would give a hundred thousand francs to be able to do
so."
"Then make yourself quite easy. M. Danglars would give
double that sum to attain the same end."
"Am I, indeed, so happy?" said Albert, who still could not
prevent an almost imperceptible cloud passing across his
brow. "But, my dear count, has M. Danglars any reason?"
"Ah, there is your proud and selfish nature. You would
expose the selflove of another with a hatchet, but you
shrink if your own is attacked with a needle."
"But yet M. Danglars appeared" 
"Delighted with you, was he not? Well, he is a man of bad
taste, and is still more enchanted with another. I know not
whom look and judge for yourself."
"Thank you, I understand. But my mother  no, not my
mother I mistake  my father intends giving a ball."
"A ball at this season?"
"Summer balls are fashionable."
"If they were not, the countess has only to wish it, and
they would become so."
"You are right You know they are select affairs those who
remain in Paris in July must be true Parisians. Will you
take charge of our invitation to Messieurs Cavalcanti?"
"When will it take place?"
"On Saturday."
"M. Cavalcanti's father will be gone."
"But the son will be here will you invite young M.
Cavalcanti?"
"I do not know him, viscount."
"You do not know him?"
"No, I never saw him until a few days since, and am not
responsible for him."
"But you receive him at your house?"
"That is another thing he was recommended to me by a good
abbe, who may be deceived. Give him a direct invitation, but
do not ask me to present him. If he were afterwards to marry
Mademoiselle Danglars, you would accuse me of intrigue, and
would be challenging me,  besides, I may not be there
myself."
"Where?"
"At your ball."
"Why should you not be there?"
"Because you have not yet invited me."
"But I come expressly for that purpose."
"You are very kind, but I may be prevented."
"If I tell you one thing, you will be so amiable as to set
aside all impediments."
"Tell me what it is."
"My mother begs you to come."
"The Comtesse de Morcerf?" said Monte Cristo, starting.
"Ah, count," said Albert, "I assure you Madame de Morcerf
speaks freely to me, and if you have not felt those
sympathetic fibres of which I spoke just now thrill within
you, you must be entirely devoid of them, for during the
last four days we have spoken of no one else."
"You have talked of me?"
"Yes, that is the penalty of being a living puzzle"
"Then I am also a puzzle to your mother? I should have
thought her too reasonable to be led by imagination."
"A problem, my dear count, for every one  for my mother as
well as others much studied, but not solved, you still
remain an enigma, do not fear. My mother is only astonished
that you remain so long unsolved. I believe, while the
Countess G takes you for Lord Ruthven, my mother
imagines you to be Cagliostro or the Count SaintGermain.
The first opportunity you have, confirm her in her opinion
it will be easy for you, as you have the philosophy of the
one and the wit of the other."
"I thank you for the warning," said the count "I shall
endeavor to be prepared for all suppositions."
"You will, then, come on Saturday?"
"Yes, since Madame de Morcerf invites me."
"You are very kind."
"Will M. Danglars be there?"
"He has already been invited by my father. We shall try to
persuade the great d'Aguesseau, M. de Villefort, to come,
but have not much hope of seeing him."
""Never despair of anything,' says the proverb."
 Magistrate and orator of great eloquence  chancellor of
France under Louis XV.
"Do you dance, count?"
"I dance?"
"Yes, you it would not be astonishing."
"That is very well before one is over forty. No, I do not
dance, but I like to see others do so. Does Madame de
Morcerf dance?"
"Never you can talk to her, she so delights in your
conversation."
"Indeed?"
"Yes, truly and I assure you. You are the only man of whom
I have heard her speak with interest." Albert rose and took
his hat the count conducted him to the door. "I have one
thing to reproach myself with," said he, stopping Albert on
the steps. "What is it?"
"I have spoken to you indiscreetly about Danglars."
"On the contrary, speak to me always in the same strain
about him."
"I am glad to be reassured on that point. Apropos, when do
you aspect M. d'Epinay?"
"Five or six days hence at the latest."
"And when is he to be married?"
"Immediately on the arrival of M. and Madame de
SaintMeran."
"Bring him to see me. Although you say I do not like him, I
assure you I shall be happy to see him."
"I will obey your orders, my lord."
"Goodby."
"Until Saturday, when I may expect you, may I not?"
"Yes, I promised you." The Count watched Albert, waving his
hand to him. When he had mounted his phaeton, Monte Cristo
turned, and seeing Bertuccio, "What news?" said he. "She
went to the Palais," replied the steward.
"Did she stay long there?"
"An hour and a half."
"Did she return home?"
"Directly."
"Well, my dear Bertuccio," said the count, "I now advise you
to go in quest of the little estate I spoke to you of in
Normandy." Bertuccio bowed, and as his wishes were in
perfect harmony with the order he had received, he started
the same evening.
Chapter 
The Inquiry.
M. de Villefort kept the promise he had made to Madame
Danglars, to endeavor to find out how the Count of Monte
Cristo had discovered the history of the house at Auteuil.
He wrote the same day for the required information to M. de
Boville, who, from having been an inspector of prisons, was
promoted to a high office in the police and the latter
begged for two days time to ascertain exactly who would be
most likely to give him full particulars. At the end of the
second day M. de Villefort received the following note 
"The person called the Count of Monte Cristo is an intimate
acquaintance of Lord Wilmore, a rich foreigner, who is
sometimes seen in Paris and who is there at this moment he
is also known to the Abbe Busoni, a Sicilian priest, of high
repute in the East, where he has done much good."
M. de Villefort replied by ordering the strictest inquiries
to be made respecting these two persons his orders were
executed, and the following evening he received these
details 
"The abbe, who was in Paris only for a month, inhabited a
small twostoried house behind SaintSulpice there were two
rooms on each floor and he was the only tenant. The two
lower rooms consisted of a diningroom, with a table,
chairs, and sideboard of walnut,  and a wainscoted
parlor, without ornaments, carpet, or timepiece. It was
evident that the abbe limited himself to objects of strict
necessity. He preferred to use the sittingroom upstairs,
which was more library than parlor, and was furnished with
theological books and parchments, in which he delighted to
bury himself for months at a time, according to his valet de
chambre. His valet looked at the visitors through a sort of
wicket and if their faces were unknown to him or displeased
him, he replied that the abbe was not in Paris, an answer
which satisfied most persons, because the abbe was known to
be a great traveller. Besides, whether at home or not,
whether in Paris or Cairo, the abbe always left something to
give away, which the valet distributed through this wicket
in his master's name. The other room near the library was a
bedroom. A bed without curtains, four armchairs, and a
couch, covered with yellow Utrecht velvet, composed, with a
prieDieu, all its furniture. Lord Wilmore resided in Rue
FontaineSaintGeorge. He was one of those English tourists
who consume a large fortune in travelling. He hired the
apartment in which he lived furnished, passed only a few
hours in the day there, and rarely slept there. One of his
peculiarities was never to speak a word of French, which he
however wrote with great facility."
The day after this important information had been given to
the king's attorney, a man alighted from a carriage at the
corner of the Rue Ferou, and rapping at an olivegreen door,
asked if the Abbe Busoni were within. "No, he went out early
this morning," replied the valet.
"I might not always be content with that answer," replied
the visitor, "for I come from one to whom everyone must be
at home. But have the kindness to give the Abbe Busoni" 
"I told you he was not at home," repeated the valet. "Then
on his return give him that card and this sealed paper. Will
he be at home at eight o'clock this evening?"
"Doubtless, unless he is at work, which is the same as if he
were out."
"I will come again at that time," replied the visitor, who
then retired.
At the appointed hour the same man returned in the same
carriage, which, instead of stopping this time at the end of
the Rue Ferou, drove up to the green door. He knocked, and
it opened immediately to admit him. From the signs of
respect the valet paid him, he saw that his note had
produced a good effect. "Is the abbe at home?" asked he.
"Yes he is at work in his library, but he expects you,
sir," replied the valet. The stranger ascended a rough
staircase, and before a table, illumined by a lamp whose
light was concentrated by a large shade while the rest of
the apartment was in partial darkness, he perceived the abbe
in a monk's dress, with a cowl on his head such as was used
by learned men of the Middle Ages. "Have I the honor of
addressing the Abbe Busoni?" asked the visitor.
"Yes, sir," replied the abbe "and you are the person whom
M. de Boville, formerly an inspector of prisons, sends to me
from the prefect of police?"
"Exactly, sir."
"One of the agents appointed to secure the safety of Paris?"
"Yes, sir" replied the stranger with a slight hesitation,
and blushing.
The abbe replaced the large spectacles, which covered not
only his eyes but his temples, and sitting down motioned to
his visitor to do the same. "I am at your service, sir,"
said the abbe, with a marked Italian accent.
"The mission with which I am charged, sir," replied the
visitor, speaking with hesitation, "is a confidential one on
the part of him who fulfils it, and him by whom he is
employed." The abbe bowed. "Your probity," replied the
stranger, "is so well known to the prefect that he wishes as
a magistrate to ascertain from you some particulars
connected with the public safety, to ascertain which I am
deputed to see you. It is hoped that no ties of friendship
or humane consideration will induce you to conceal the
truth."
"Provided, sir, the particulars you wish for do not
interfere with my scruples or my conscience. I am a priest,
sir, and the secrets of confession, for instance, must
remain between me and God, and not between me and human
justice."
"Do not alarm yourself, monsieur, we will duly respect your
conscience."
At this moment the abbe pressed down his side of the shade
and so raised it on the other, throwing a bright light on
the stranger's face, while his own remained obscured.
"Excuse me, abbe," said the envoy of the prefect of the
police, "but the light tries my eyes very much." The abbe
lowered the shade. "Now, sir, I am listening  go on."
"I will come at once to the point. Do you know the Count of
Monte Cristo?"
"You mean Monsieur Zaccone, I presume?"
"Zaccone?  is not his name Monte Cristo?"
"Monte Cristo is the name of an estate, or, rather, of a
rock, and not a family name."
"Well, be it so  let us not dispute about words and since
M. de Monte Cristo and M. Zaccone are the same" 
"Absolutely the same."
"Let us speak of M. Zaccone."
"Agreed."
"I asked you if you knew him?"
"Extremely well."
"Who is he?"
"The son of a rich shipbuilder in Malta."
"I know that is the report but, as you are aware, the
police does not content itself with vague reports."
"However," replied the abbe, with an affable smile, "when
that report is in accordance with the truth, everybody must
believe it, the police as well as all the rest."
"Are you sure of what you assert?"
"What do you mean by that question?"
"Understand, sir, I do not in the least suspect your
veracity I ask if you are certain of it?"
"I knew his father, M. Zaccone."
"Ah, indeed?"
"And when a child I often played with the son in the
timberyards."
"But whence does he derive the title of count?"
"You are aware that may be bought."
"In Italy?"
"Everywhere."
"And his immense riches, whence does he procure them?"
"They may not be so very great."
"How much do you suppose he possesses?"
"From one hundred and fifty to two hundred thousand livres
per annum."
"That is reasonable," said the visitor "I have heard he had
three or four millions."
"Two hundred thousand per annum would make four millions of
capital."
"But I was told he had four millions per annum?"
"That is not probable."
"Do you know this Island of Monte Cristo?"
"Certainly, every one who has come from Palermo, Naples, or
Rome to France by sea must know it, since he has passed
close to it and must have seen it."
"I am told it is a delightful place?"
"It is a rock."
"And why has the count bought a rock?"
"For the sake of being a count. In Italy one must have
territorial possessions to be a count."
"You have, doubtless, heard the adventures of M. Zaccone's
youth?"
"The father's?"
"No, the son's."
"I know nothing certain at that period of his life, I lost
sight of my young comrade."
"Was he in the wars?"
"I think he entered the service."
"In what branch?"
"In the navy."
"Are you not his confessor?"
"No, sir I believe he is a Lutheran."
"A Lutheran?"
"I say, I believe such is the case, I do not affirm it
besides, liberty of conscience is established in France."
"Doubtless, and we are not now inquiring into his creed, but
his actions in the name of the prefect of police, I ask you
what you know of him.
"He passes for a very charitable man. Our holy father, the
pope, has made him a knight of Jesus Christ for the services
he rendered to the Christians in the East he has five or
six rings as testimonials from Eastern monarchs of his
services."
"Does he wear them?"
"No, but he is proud of them he is better pleased with
rewards given to the benefactors of man than to his
destroyers."
"He is a Quaker then?"
"Exactly, he is a Quaker, with the exception of the peculiar
dress."
"Has he any friends?"
"Yes, every one who knows him is his friend."
"But has he any enemies?"
"One only."
"What is his name?"
"Lord Wilmore."
"Where is he?"
"He is in Paris just now."
"Can he give me any particulars?"
"Important ones he was in India with Zaccone."
"Do you know his abode?"
"It's somewhere in the Chaussee d'Antin but I know neither
the street nor the number."
"Are you at variance with the Englishman?"
"I love Zaccone, and he hates him we are consequently not
friends."
"Do you think the Count of Monte Cristo had ever been in
France before he made this visit to Paris?"
"To that question I can answer positively no, sir, he had
not, because he applied to me six months ago for the
particulars he required, and as I did not know when I might
again come to Paris, I recommended M. Cavalcanti to him."
"Andrea?"
"No, Bartolomeo, his father."
"Now, sir, I have but one question more to ask, and I charge
you, in the name of honor, of humanity, and of religion, to
answer me candidly."
"What is it, sir?"
"Do you know with what design M. de Monte Cristo purchased a
house at Auteuil?"
"Certainly, for he told me."
"What is it, sir?"
"To make a lunatic asylum of it, similar to that founded by
the Count of Pisani at Palermo. Do you know about that
institution?"
"I have heard of it."
"It is a magnificent charity." Having said this, the abbe
bowed to imply he wished to pursue his studies. The visitor
either understood the abbe's meaning, or had no more
questions to ask he arose, and the abbe accompanied him to
the door. "You are a great almsgiver," said the visitor,
"and although you are said to be rich, I will venture to
offer you something for your poor people will you accept my
offering?"
"I thank you, sir I am only jealous in one thing, and that
is that the relief I give should be entirely from my own
resources."
"However" 
"My resolution, sir, is unchangeable, but you have only to
search for yourself and you will find, alas, but too many
objects upon whom to exercise your benevolence." The abbe
once more bowed as he opened the door, the stranger bowed
and took his leave, and the carriage conveyed him straight
to the house of M. de Villefort. An hour afterwards the
carriage was again ordered, and this time it went to the Rue
FontaineSaintGeorge, and stopped at No. , where Lord
Wilmore lived. The stranger had written to Lord Wilmore,
requesting an interview, which the latter had fixed for ten
o'clock. As the envoy of the prefect of police arrived ten
minutes before ten, he was told that Lord Wilmore, who was
precision and punctuality personified, was not yet come in,
but that he would be sure to return as the clock struck.
The visitor was introduced into the drawingroom, which was
like all other furnished drawingrooms. A mantlepiece, with
two modern Sevres vases, a timepiece representing Cupid with
his bent bow, a mirror with an engraving on each side  one
representing Homer carrying his guide, the other, Belisarius
begging  a grayish paper red and black tapestry  such
was the appearance of Lord Wilmore's drawingroom. It was
illuminated by lamps with groundglass shades which gave
only a feeble light, as if out of consideration for the
envoy's weak sight. After ten minutes' expectation the clock
struck ten at the fifth stroke the door opened and Lord
Wilmore appeared. He was rather above the middle height,
with thin reddish whiskers, light complexion and light hair,
turning rather gray. He was dressed with all the English
peculiarity, namely, in a blue coat, with gilt buttons and
high collar, in the fashion of , a white kerseymere
waistcoat, and nankeen pantaloons, three inches too short,
but which were prevented by straps from slipping up to the
knee. His first remark on entering was,  "You know, sir, I
do not speak French?"
"I know you do not like to converse in our language,"
replied the envoy. "But you may use it," replied Lord
Wilmore "I understand it."
"And I," replied the visitor, changing his idiom, "know
enough of English to keep up the conversation. Do not put
yourself to the slightest inconvenience."
"Aw?" said Lord Wilmore, with that tone which is only known
to natives of Great Britain.
The envoy presented his letter of introduction, which the
latter read with English coolness, and having finished, 
"I understand," said he, "perfectly."
Then began the questions, which were similar to those which
had been addressed to the Abbe Busoni. But as Lord Wilmore,
in the character of the count's enemy, was less restrained
in his answers, they were more numerous he described the
youth of Monte Cristo, who he said, at ten years of age,
entered the service of one of the petty sovereigns of India
who make war on the English. It was there Wilmore had first
met him and fought against him and in that war Zaccone had
been taken prisoner, sent to England, and consigned to the
hulks, whence he had escaped by swimming. Then began his
travels, his duels, his caprices then the insurrection in
Greece broke out, and he had served in the Grecian ranks.
While in that service he had discovered a silver mine in the
mountains of Thessaly, but he had been careful to conceal it
from every one. After the battle of Navarino, when the Greek
government was consolidated, he asked of King Otho a mining
grant for that district, which was given him. Hence that
immense fortune, which, in Lord Wilmore's opinion, possibly
amounted to one or two millions per annum,  a precarious
fortune, which might be momentarily lost by the failure of
the mine.
"But," asked the visitor, "do you know why he came to
France?"
"He is speculating in railways," said Lord Wilmore, "and as
he is an expert chemist and physicist, he has invented a new
system of telegraphy, which he is seeking to bring to
perfection."
"How much does he spend yearly?" asked the prefect.
"Not more than five or six hundred thousand francs," said
Lord Wilmore "he is a miser." Hatred evidently inspired the
Englishman, who, knowing no other reproach to bring on the
count, accused him of avarice. "Do you know his house at
Auteuil?"
"Certainly."
"What do you know respecting it?"
"Do you wish to know why he bought it?"
"Yes."
"The count is a speculator, who will certainly ruin himself
in experiments. He supposes there is in the neighborhood of
the house he has bought a mineral spring equal to those at
Bagneres, Luchon, and Cauterets. He is going to turn his
house into a Badhaus, as the Germans term it. He has already
dug up all the garden two or three times to find the famous
spring, and, being unsuccessful, he will soon purchase all
the contiguous houses. Now, as I dislike him, and hope his
railway, his electric telegraph, or his search for baths,
will ruin him, I am watching for his discomfiture, which
must soon take place."
"What was the cause of your quarrel?"
"When he was in England he seduced the wife of one of my
friends."
"Why do you not seek revenge?"
"I have already fought three duels with him," said the
Englishman, "the first with the pistol, the second with the
sword, and the third with the sabre."
"And what was the result of those duels?"
"The first time, he broke my arm the second, he wounded me
in the breast and the third time, made this large wound."
The Englishman turned down his shirtcollar, and showed a
scar, whose redness proved it to be a recent one. "So that,
you see, there is a deadly feud between us."
"But," said the envoy, "you do not go about it in the right
way to kill him, if I understand you correctly."
"Aw?" said the Englishman, "I practice shooting every day,
and every other day Grisier comes to my house."
This was all the visitor wished to ascertain, or, rather,
all the Englishman appeared to know. The agent arose, and
having bowed to Lord Wilmore, who returned his salutation
with the stiff politeness of the English, he retired. Lord
Wilmore, having heard the door close after him, returned to
his bedroom, where with one hand he pulled off his light
hair, his red whiskers, his false jaw, and his wound, to
resume the black hair, dark complexion, and pearly teeth of
the Count of Monte Cristo. It was M. de Villefort, and not
the prefect, who returned to the house of M. de Villefort.
The procureur felt more at ease, although he had learned
nothing really satisfactory, and, for the first time since
the dinnerparty at Auteuil, he slept soundly.
Chapter 
The Ball.
It was in the warmest days of July, when in due course of
time the Saturday arrived upon which the ball was to take
place at M. de Morcerf's. It was ten o'clock at night the
branches of the great trees in the garden of the count's
house stood out boldly against the azure canopy of heaven,
which was studded with golden stars, but where the last
fleeting clouds of a vanishing storm yet lingered. From the
apartments on the groundfloor might be heard the sound of
music, with the whirl of the waltz and galop, while
brilliant streams of light shone through the openings of the
Venetian blinds. At this moment the garden was only occupied
by about ten servants, who had just received orders from
their mistress to prepare the supper, the serenity of the
weather continuing to increase. Until now, it had been
undecided whether the supper should take place in the
diningroom, or under a long tent erected on the lawn, but
the beautiful blue sky, studded with stars, had settled the
question in favor of the lawn. The gardens were illuminated
with colored lanterns, according to the Italian custom, and,
as is usual in countries where the luxuries of the table 
the rarest of all luxuries in their complete form  are
well understood, the suppertable was loaded with waxlights
and flowers.
At the time the Countess of Morcerf returned to the rooms,
after giving her orders, many guests were arriving, more
attracted by the charming hospitality of the countess than
by the distinguished position of the count for, owing to
the good taste of Mercedes, one was sure of finding some
devices at her entertainment worthy of describing, or even
copying in case of need. Madame Danglars, in whom the events
we have related had caused deep anxiety, had hesitated about
going to Madame de Morcerf's, when during the morning her
carriage happened to meet that of Villefort. The latter made
a sign, and when the carriages had drawn close together,
said,  "You are going to Madame de Morcerf's, are you
not?"
"No," replied Madame Danglars, "I am too ill."
"You are wrong," replied Villefort, significantly "it is
important that you should be seen there."
"Do you think so?" asked the baroness.
"I do."
"In that case I will go." And the two carriages passed on
towards their different destinations. Madame Danglars
therefore came, not only beautiful in person, but radiant
with splendor she entered by one door at the time when
Mercedes appeared at the door. The countess took Albert to
meet Madame Danglars. He approached, paid her some well
merited compliments on her toilet, and offered his arm to
conduct her to a seat. Albert looked around him. "You are
looking for my daughter?" said the baroness, smiling.
"I confess it," replied Albert. "Could you have been so
cruel as not to bring her?"
"Calm yourself. She has met Mademoiselle de Villefort, and
has taken her arm see, they are following us, both in white
dresses, one with a bouquet of camellias, the other with one
of myosotis. But tell me" 
"Well, what do you wish to know?"
"Will not the Count of Monte Cristo be here tonight?"
"Seventeen" replied Albert.
"What do you mean?"
"I only mean that the count seems the rage," replied the
viscount, smiling, "and that you are the seventeenth person
that has asked me the same question. The count is in
fashion I congratulate him upon it."
"And have you replied to every one as you have to me?"
"Ah, to be sure, I have not answered you be satisfied, we
shall have this "lion' we are among the privileged ones."
"Were you at the opera yesterday?"
"No."
"He was there."
"Ah, indeed? And did the eccentric person commit any new
originality?"
"Can he be seen without doing so? Elssler was dancing in the
"Diable Boiteux' the Greek princess was in ecstasies. After
the cachucha he placed a magnificent ring on the stem of a
bouquet, and threw it to the charming danseuse, who, in the
third act, to do honor to the gift, reappeared with it on
her finger. And the Greek princess,  will she be here?"
"No, you will be deprived of that pleasure her position in
the count's establishment is not sufficiently understood."
"Wait leave me here, and go and speak to Madame de
Villefort, who is trying to attract your attention."
Albert bowed to Madame Danglars, and advanced towards Madame
de Villefort, whose lips opened as he approached. "I wager
anything," said Albert, interrupting her, "that I know what
you were about to say."
"Well, what is it?"
"If I guess rightly, will you confess it?"
"Yes."
"On your honor?"
"On my honor."
"You were going to ask me if the Count of Monte Cristo had
arrived, or was expected."
"Not at all. It is not of him that I am now thinking. I was
going to ask you if you had received any news of Monsieur
Franz."
"Yes,  yesterday."
"What did he tell you?"
"That he was leaving at the same time as his letter."
"Well, now then, the count?"
"The count will come, of that you may be satisfied."
"You know that he has another name besides Monte Cristo?"
"No, I did not know it."
"Monte Cristo is the name of an island, and he has a family name."
"I never heard it."
"Well, then, I am better informed than you his name is Zaccone."
"It is possible."
"He is a Maltese."
"That is also possible.
"The son of a shipowner."
"Really, you should relate all this aloud, you would have
the greatest success."
"He served in India, discovered a mine in Thessaly, and
comes to Paris to establish a mineral watercure at
Auteuil."
"Well, I'm sure," said Morcerf, "this is indeed news Am I
allowed to repeat it?"
"Yes, but cautiously, tell one thing at a time, and do not
say I told you."
"Why so?"
"Because it is a secret just discovered."
"By whom?"
"The police."
"Then the news originated" 
"At the prefect's last night. Paris, you can understand, is
astonished at the sight of such unusual splendor, and the
police have made inquiries."
"Well, well Nothing more is wanting than to arrest the
count as a vagabond, on the pretext of his being too rich."
"Indeed, that doubtless would have happened if his
credentials had not been so favorable."
"Poor count And is he aware of the danger he has been in?"
"I think not."
"Then it will be but charitable to inform him. When he
arrives, I will not fail to do so."
Just then, a handsome young man, with bright eyes, black
hair, and glossy mustache, respectfully bowed to Madame de
Villefort. Albert extended his hand. "Madame," said Albert,
"allow me to present to you M. Maximilian Morrel, captain of
Spahis, one of our best, and, above all, of our bravest
officers."
"I have already had the pleasure of meeting this gentleman
at Auteuil, at the house of the Count of Monte Cristo,"
replied Madame de Villefort, turning away with marked
coldness of manner. This answer, and especially the tone in
which it was uttered, chilled the heart of poor Morrel. But
a recompense was in store for him turning around, he saw
near the door a beautiful fair face, whose large blue eyes
were, without any marked expression, fixed upon him, while
the bouquet of myosotis was gently raised to her lips.
The salutation was so well understood that Morrel, with the
same expression in his eyes, placed his handkerchief to his
mouth and these two living statues, whose hearts beat so
violently under their marble aspect, separated from each
other by the whole length of the room, forgot themselves for
a moment, or rather forgot the world in their mutual
contemplation. They might have remained much longer lost in
one another, without any one noticing their abstraction. The
Count of Monte Cristo had just entered.
We have already said that there was something in the count
which attracted universal attention wherever he appeared. It
was not the coat, unexceptional in its cut, though simple
and unornamented it was not the plain white waistcoat it
was not the trousers, that displayed the foot so perfectly
formed  it was none of these things that attracted the
attention,  it was his pale complexion, his waving black
hair, his calm and serene expression, his dark and
melancholy eye, his mouth, chiselled with such marvellous
delicacy, which so easily expressed such high disdain, 
these were what fixed the attention of all upon him. Many
men might have been handsomer, but certainly there could be
none whose appearance was more significant, if the
expression may be used. Everything about the count seemed to
have its meaning, for the constant habit of thought which he
had acquired had given an ease and vigor to the expression
of his face, and even to the most trifling gesture, scarcely
to be understood. Yet the Parisian world is so strange, that
even all this might not have won attention had there not
been connected with it a mysterious story gilded by an
immense fortune.
Meanwhile he advanced through the assemblage of guests under
a battery of curious glances towards Madame de Morcerf, who,
standing before a mantlepiece ornamented with flowers, had
seen his entrance in a lookingglass placed opposite the
door, and was prepared to receive him. She turned towards
him with a serene smile just at the moment he was bowing to
her. No doubt she fancied the count would speak to her,
while on his side the count thought she was about to address
him but both remained silent, and after a mere bow, Monte
Cristo directed his steps to Albert, who received him
cordially. "Have you seen my mother?" asked Albert.
"I have just had the pleasure," replied the count "but I
have not seen your father."
"See, he is down there, talking politics with that little
group of great geniuses."
"Indeed?" said Monte Cristo "and so those gentlemen down
there are men of great talent. I should not have guessed it.
And for what kind of talent are they celebrated? You know
there are different sorts."
"That tall, harshlooking man is very learned, he
discovered, in the neighborhood of Rome, a kind of lizard
with a vertebra more than lizards usually have, and he
immediately laid his discovery before the Institute. The
thing was discussed for a long time, but finally decided in
his favor. I can assure you the vertebra made a great noise
in the learned world, and the gentleman, who was only a
knight of the Legion of Honor, was made an officer."
"Come," said Monte Cristo, "this cross seems to me to be
wisely awarded. I suppose, had he found another additional
vertebra, they would have made him a commander."
"Very likely," said Albert.
"And who can that person be who has taken it into his head
to wrap himself up in a blue coat embroidered with green?"
"Oh, that coat is not his own idea it is the Republic's,
which deputed David to devise a uniform for the
Academicians."
 Louis David, a famous French painter.
"Indeed?" said Monte Cristo "so this gentleman is an
Academician?"
"Within the last week he has been made one of the learned
assembly."
"And what is his especial talent?"
"His talent? I believe he thrusts pins through the heads of
rabbits, he makes fowls eat madder, and punches the spinal
marrow out of dogs with whalebone."
"And he is made a member of the Academy of Sciences for
this?"
"No of the French Academy."
"But what has the French Academy to do with all this?"
"I was going to tell you. It seems" 
"That his experiments have very considerably advanced the
cause of science, doubtless?"
"No that his style of writing is very good."
"This must be very flattering to the feelings of the rabbits
into whose heads he has thrust pins, to the fowls whose
bones he has dyed red, and to the dogs whose spinal marrow
he has punched out?"
Albert laughed.
"And the other one?" demanded the count.
"That one?"
"Yes, the third."
"The one in the dark blue coat?"
"Yes."
"He is a colleague of the count, and one of the most active
opponents to the idea of providing the Chamber of Peers with
a uniform. He was very successful upon that question. He
stood badly with the Liberal papers, but his noble
opposition to the wishes of the court is now getting him
into favor with the journalists. They talk of making him an
ambassador."
"And what are his claims to the peerage?"
"He has composed two or three comic operas, written four or
five articles in the Siecle, and voted five or six years on
the ministerial side."
"Bravo, Viscount," said Monte Cristo, smiling "you are a
delightful cicerone. And now you will do me a favor, will
you not?"
"What is it?"
"Do not introduce me to any of these gentlemen and should
they wish it, you will warn me." Just then the count felt
his arm pressed. He turned round it was Danglars.
"Ah, is it you, baron?" said he.
"Why do you call me baron?" said Danglars "you know that I
care nothing for my title. I am not like you, viscount you
like your title, do you not?"
"Certainly," replied Albert, "seeing that without my title I
should be nothing while you, sacrificing the baron, would
still remain the millionaire."
"Which seems to me the finest title under the royalty of
July," replied Danglars.
"Unfortunately," said Monte Cristo, "one's title to a
millionaire does not last for life, like that of baron, peer
of France, or Academician for example, the millionaires
Franck  Poulmann, of Frankfort, who have just become
bankrupts."
"Indeed?" said Danglars, becoming pale.
"Yes I received the news this evening by a courier. I had
about a million in their hands, but, warned in time, I
withdrew it a month ago."
"Ah, mon Dieu," exclaimed Danglars, "they have drawn on me
for , francs"
"Well, you can throw out the draft their signature is worth
five per cent."
"Yes, but it is too late," said Danglars, "I have honored
their bills."
"Then," said Monte Cristo, "here are , francs gone
after" 
"Hush, do not mention these things," said Danglars then,
approaching Monte Cristo, he added, "especially before young
M. Cavalcanti" after which he smiled, and turned towards
the young man in question. Albert had left the count to
speak to his mother, Danglars to converse with young
Cavalcanti Monte Cristo was for an instant alone. Meanwhile
the heat became excessive. The footmen were hastening
through the rooms with waiters loaded with ices. Monte
Cristo wiped the perspiration from his forehead, but drew
back when the waiter was presented to him he took no
refreshment. Madame de Morcerf did not lose sight of Monte
Cristo she saw that he took nothing, and even noticed his
gesture of refusal.
"Albert," she asked, "did you notice that?"
"What, mother?"
"That the count has never been willing to partake of food
under the roof of M. de Morcerf."
"Yes but then he breakfasted with me  indeed, he made his
first appearance in the world on that occasion."
"But your house is not M. de Morcerf's," murmured Mercedes
"and since he has been here I have watched him."
"Well?"
"Well, he has taken nothing yet."
"The count is very temperate." Mercedes smiled sadly.
"Approach him," said she, "and when the next waiter passes,
insist upon his taking something."
"But why, mother?"
"Just to please me, Albert," said Mercedes. Albert kissed
his mother's hand, and drew near the count. Another salver
passed, loaded like the preceding ones she saw Albert
attempt to persuade the count, but he obstinately refused.
Albert rejoined his mother she was very pale.
"Well," said she, "you see he refuses?"
"Yes but why need this annoy you?"
"You know, Albert, women are singular creatures. I should
like to have seen the count take something in my house, if
only an ice. Perhaps he cannot reconcile himself to the
French style of living, and might prefer something else."
"Oh, no I have seen him eat of everything in Italy no
doubt he does not feel inclined this evening."
"And besides," said the countess, "accustomed as he is to
burning climates, possibly he does not feel the heat as we
do."
"I do not think that, for he has complained of feeling
almost suffocated, and asked why the Venetian blinds were
not opened as well as the windows."
"In a word," said Mercedes, "it was a way of assuring me
that his abstinence was intended." And she left the room. A
minute afterwards the blinds were thrown open, and through
the jessamine and clematis that overhung the window one
could see the garden ornamented with lanterns, and the
supper laid under the tent. Dancers, players, talkers, all
uttered an exclamation of joy  every one inhaled with
delight the breeze that floated in. At the same time
Mercedes reappeared, paler than before, but with that
imperturbable expression of countenance which she sometimes
wore. She went straight to the group of which her husband
formed the centre. "Do not detain those gentlemen here,
count," she said "they would prefer, I should think, to
breathe in the garden rather than suffocate here, since they
are not playing."
"Ah," said a gallant old general, who, in , had sung
"Partant pour la Syrie,"  "we will not go alone to the
garden."
"Then," said Mercedes, "I will lead the way." Turning
towards Monte Cristo, she added, "count, will you oblige me
with your arm?" The count almost staggered at these simple
words then he fixed his eyes on Mercedes. It was only a
momentary glance, but it seemed to the countess to have
lasted for a century, so much was expressed in that one
look. He offered his arm to the countess she took it, or
rather just touched it with her little hand, and they
together descended the steps, lined with rhododendrons and
camellias. Behind them, by another outlet, a group of about
twenty persons rushed into the garden with loud exclamations
of delight.
Chapter 
Bread and Salt.
Madame de Morcerf entered an archway of trees with her
companion. It led through a grove of lindens to a
conservatory.
"It was too warm in the room, was it not, count?" she asked.
"Yes, madame and it was an excellent idea of yours to open
the doors and the blinds." As he ceased speaking, the count
felt the hand of Mercedes tremble. "But you," he said, "with
that light dress, and without anything to cover you but that
gauze scarf, perhaps you feel cold?"
"Do you know where I am leading you?" said the countess,
without replying to the question.
"No, madame," replied Monte Cristo "but you see I make no
resistance."
"We are going to the greenhouse that you see at the other
end of the grove."
The count looked at Mercedes as if to interrogate her, but
she continued to walk on in silence, and he refrained from
speaking. They reached the building, ornamented with
magnificent fruits, which ripen at the beginning of July in
the artificial temperature which takes the place of the sun,
so frequently absent in our climate. The countess left the
arm of Monte Cristo, and gathered a bunch of Muscatel
grapes. "See, count," she said, with a smile so sad in its
expression that one could almost detect the tears on her
eyelids  "see, our French grapes are not to be compared, I
know, with yours of Sicily and Cyprus, but you will make
allowance for our northern sun." The count bowed, but
stepped back. "Do you refuse?" said Mercedes, in a tremulous
voice. "Pray excuse me, madame," replied Monte Cristo, "but
I never eat Muscatel grapes."
Mercedes let them fall, and sighed. A magnificent peach was
hanging against an adjoining wall, ripened by the same
artificial heat. Mercedes drew near, and plucked the fruit.
"Take this peach, then," she said. The count again refused.
"What, again?" she exclaimed, in so plaintive an accent that
it seemed to stifle a sob "really, you pain me."
A long silence followed the peach, like the grapes, fell to
the ground. "Count," added Mercedes with a supplicating
glance, "there is a beautiful Arabian custom, which makes
eternal friends of those who have together eaten bread and
salt under the same roof."
"I know it, madame," replied the count "but we are in
France, and not in Arabia, and in France eternal friendships
are as rare as the custom of dividing bread and salt with
one another."
"But," said the countess, breathlessly, with her eyes fixed
on Monte Cristo, whose arm she convulsively pressed with
both hands, "we are friends, are we not?"
The count became pale as death, the blood rushed to his
heart, and then again rising, dyed his cheeks with crimson
his eyes swam like those of a man suddenly dazzled.
"Certainly, we are friends," he replied "why should we not
be?" The answer was so little like the one Mercedes desired,
that she turned away to give vent to a sigh, which sounded
more like a groan. "Thank you," she said. And they walked on
again. They went the whole length of the garden without
uttering a word. "Sir," suddenly exclaimed the countess,
after their walk had continued ten minutes in silence, "is
it true that you have seen so much, travelled so far, and
suffered so deeply?"
"I have suffered deeply, madame," answered Monte Cristo.
"But now you are happy?"
"Doubtless," replied the count, "since no one hears me
complain."
"And your present happiness, has it softened your heart?"
"My present happiness equals my past misery," said the
count.
"Are you not married?" asked the countess. "I married?"
exclaimed Monte Cristo, shuddering "who could have told you
so?"
"No one told me you were, but you have frequently been seen
at the opera with a young and lovely woman."
"She is a slave whom I bought at Constantinople, madame, the
daughter of a prince. I have adopted her as my daughter,
having no one else to love in the world."
"You live alone, then?"
"I do."
"You have no sister  no son  no father?"
"I have no one."
"How can you exist thus without any one to attach you to
life?"
"It is not my fault, madame. At Malta, I loved a young girl,
was on the point of marrying her, when war came and carried
me away. I thought she loved me well enough to wait for me,
and even to remain faithful to my memory. When I returned
she was married. This is the history of most men who have
passed twenty years of age. Perhaps my heart was weaker than
the hearts of most men, and I suffered more than they would
have done in my place that is all." The countess stopped
for a moment, as if gasping for breath. "Yes," she said,
"and you have still preserved this love in your heart  one
can only love once  and did you ever see her again?"
"Never."
"Never?"
"I never returned to the country where she lived."
"To Malta?"
"Yes Malta."
"She is, then, now at Malta?"
"I think so."
"And have you forgiven her for all she has made you suffer?"
"Her,  yes."
"But only her do you then still hate those who separated
you?"
"I hate them? Not at all why should I?" The countess placed
herself before Monte Cristo, still holding in her hand a
portion of the perfumed grapes. "Take some," she said.
"Madame, I never eat Muscatel grapes," replied Monte Cristo,
as if the subject had not been mentioned before. The
countess dashed the grapes into the nearest thicket, with a
gesture of despair. "Inflexible man" she murmured. Monte
Cristo remained as unmoved as if the reproach had not been
addressed to him. Albert at this moment ran in. "Oh,
mother," he exclaimed, "such a misfortune his happened"
"What? What has happened?" asked the countess, as though
awakening from a sleep to the realities of life "did you
say a misfortune? Indeed, I should expect misfortunes."
"M. de Villefort is here."
"Well?"
"He comes to fetch his wife and daughter."
"Why so?"
"Because Madame de SaintMeran is just arrived in Paris,
bringing the news of M. de SaintMeran's death, which took
place on the first stage after he left Marseilles. Madame de
Villefort, who was in very good spirits, would neither
believe nor think of the misfortune, but Mademoiselle
Valentine, at the first words, guessed the whole truth,
notwithstanding all the precautions of her father the blow
struck her like a thunderbolt, and she fell senseless."
"And how was M. de SaintMeran related to Mademoiselle de
Villefort?" said the count.
"He was her grandfather on the mother's side. He was coming
here to hasten her marriage with Franz."
"Ah, indeed?"
"So Franz must wait. Why was not M. de SaintMeran also
grandfather to Mademoiselle Danglars?"
"Albert, Albert," said Madame de Morcerf, in a tone of mild
reproof, "what are you saying? Ah, count, he esteems you so
highly, tell him that he has spoken amiss." And she took two
or three steps forward. Monte Cristo watched her with an air
so thoughtful, and so full of affectionate admiration, that
she turned back and grasped his hand at the same time she
seized that of her son, and joined them together.
"We are friends are we not?" she asked.
"Oh, madame, I do not presume to call myself your friend,
but at all times I am your most respectful servant." The
countess left with an indescribable pang in her heart, and
before she had taken ten steps the count saw her raise her
handkerchief to her eyes. "Do not my mother and you agree?"
asked Albert, astonished.
"On the contrary," replied the count, "did you not hear her
declare that we were friends?" They reentered the
drawingroom, which Valentine and Madame de Villefort had
just quitted. It is perhaps needless to add that Morrel
departed almost at the same time.
Chapter 
Madame de SaintMeran.
A gloomy scene had indeed just passed at the house of M. de
Villefort. After the ladies had departed for the ball,
whither all the entreaties of Madame de Villefort had failed
in persuading him to accompany them, the procureur had shut
himself up in his study, according to his custom, with a
heap of papers calculated to alarm any one else, but which
generally scarcely satisfied his inordinate desires. But
this time the papers were a mere matter of form. Villefort
had secluded himself, not to study, but to reflect and with
the door locked and orders given that he should not be
disturbed excepting for important business, he sat down in
his armchair and began to ponder over the events, the
remembrance of which had during the last eight days filled
his mind with so many gloomy thoughts and bitter
recollections. Then, instead of plunging into the mass of
documents piled before him, he opened the drawer of his
desk, touched a spring, and drew out a parcel of cherished
memoranda, amongst which he had carefully arranged, in
characters only known to himself, the names of all those
who, either in his political career, in money matters, at
the bar, or in his mysterious love affairs, had become his
enemies.
Their number was formidable, now that he had begun to fear,
and yet these names, powerful though they were, had often
caused him to smile with the same kind of satisfaction
experienced by a traveller who from the summit of a mountain
beholds at his feet the craggy eminences, the almost
impassable paths, and the fearful chasms, through which he
has so perilously climbed. When he had run over all these
names in his memory, again read and studied them, commenting
meanwhile upon his lists, he shook his head.
"No," he murmured, "none of my enemies would have waited so
patiently and laboriously for so long a space of time, that
they might now come and crush me with this secret.
Sometimes, as Hamlet says 
"Foul deeds will rise,
Tho' all the earth o'erwhelm them to men's eyes'
but, like a phosphoric light, they rise but to mislead. The
story has been told by the Corsican to some priest, who in
his turn has repeated it. M. de Monte Cristo may have heard
it, and to enlighten himself  but why should he wish to
enlighten himself upon the subject?" asked Villefort, after
a moment's reflection, "what interest can this M. de Monte
Cristo or M. Zaccone,  son of a shipowner of Malta,
discoverer of a mine in Thessaly, now visiting Paris for the
first time,  what interest, I say, can he take in
discovering a gloomy, mysterious, and useless fact like
this? However, among all the incoherent details given to me
by the Abbe Busoni and by Lord Wilmore, by that friend and
that enemy, one thing appears certain and clear in my
opinion  that in no period, in no case, in no
circumstance, could there have been any contact between him
and me."
But Villefort uttered words which even he himself did not
believe. He dreaded not so much the revelation, for he could
reply to or deny its truth  he cared little for that
mene, tekel, upharsin, which appeared suddenly in letters of
blood upon the wall  but what he was really anxious for
was to discover whose hand had traced them. While he was
endeavoring to calm his fears,  and instead of dwelling
upon the political future that had so often been the subject
of his ambitious dreams, was imagining a future limited to
the enjoyments of home, in fear of awakening the enemy that
had so long slept,  the noise of a carriage sounded in the
yard, then he heard the steps of an aged person ascending
the stairs, followed by tears and lamentations, such as
servants always give vent to when they wish to appear
interested in their master's grief. He drew back the bolt of
his door, and almost directly an old lady entered,
unannounced, carrying her shawl on her arm, and her bonnet
in her hand. The white hair was thrown back from her yellow
forehead, and her eyes, already sunken by the furrows of
age, now almost disappeared beneath the eyelids swollen with
grief. "Oh, sir," she said "oh, sir, what a misfortune I
shall die of it oh, yes, I shall certainly die of it"
And then, falling upon the chair nearest the door, she burst
into a paroxysm of sobs. The servants, standing in the
doorway, not daring to approach nearer, were looking at
Noirtier's old servant, who had heard the noise from his
master's room, and run there also, remaining behind the
others. Villefort rose, and ran towards his motherinlaw,
for it was she.
"Why, what can have happened?" he exclaimed, "what has thus
disturbed you? Is M. de SaintMeran with you?"
"M. de SaintMeran is dead," answered the old marchioness,
without preface and without expression she appeared to be
stupefied. Villefort drew back, and clasping his hands
together, exclaimed  "Dead  so suddenly?"
"A week ago," continued Madame de SaintMeran, "we went out
together in the carriage after dinner. M. de SaintMeran had
been unwell for some days still, the idea of seeing our
dear Valentine again inspired him with courage, and
notwithstanding his illness he would leave. At six leagues
from Marseilles, after having eaten some of the lozenges he
is accustomed to take, he fell into such a deep sleep, that
it appeared to me unnatural still I hesitated to wake him,
although I fancied that his face was flushed, and that the
veins of his temples throbbed more violently than usual.
However, as it became dark, and I could no longer see, I
fell asleep I was soon aroused by a piercing shriek, as
from a person suffering in his dreams, and he suddenly threw
his head back violently. I called the valet, I stopped the
postilion, I spoke to M. de SaintMeran, I applied my
smellingsalts but all was over, and I arrived at Aix by
the side of a corpse." Villefort stood with his mouth half
open, quite stupefied.
"Of course you sent for a doctor?"
"Immediately but, as I have told you, it was too late."
"Yes but then he could tell of what complaint the poor
marquis had died."
"Oh, yes, sir, he told me it appears to have been an
apoplectic stroke."
"And what did you do then?"
"M. de SaintMeran had always expressed a desire, in case
his death happened during his absence from Paris, that his
body might be brought to the family vault. I had him put
into a leaden coffin, and I am preceding him by a few days."
"Oh, my poor mother," said Villefort, "to have such duties
to perform at your age after such a blow"
"God has supported me through all and then, my dear
marquis, he would certainly have done everything for me that
I performed for him. It is true that since I left him, I
seem to have lost my senses. I cannot cry at my age they
say that we have no more tears,  still I think that when
one is in trouble one should have the power of weeping.
Where is Valentine, sir? It is on her account I am here I
wish to see Valentine." Villefort thought it would be
terrible to reply that Valentine was at a ball so he only
said that she had gone out with her stepmother, and that
she should be fetched. "This instant, sir  this instant, I
beseech you" said the old lady. Villefort placed the arm of
Madame de SaintMeran within his own, and conducted her to
his apartment. "Rest yourself, mother," he said.
The marchioness raised her head at this word, and beholding
the man who so forcibly reminded her of her deeplyregretted
child, who still lived for her in Valentine, she felt
touched at the name of mother, and bursting into tears, she
fell on her knees before an armchair, where she buried her
venerable head. Villefort left her to the care of the women,
while old Barrois ran, halfscared, to his master for
nothing frightens old people so much as when death relaxes
its vigilance over them for a moment in order to strike some
other old person. Then, while Madame de SaintMeran remained
on her knees, praying fervently, Villefort sent for a cab,
and went himself to fetch his wife and daughter from Madame
de Morcerf's. He was so pale when he appeared at the door of
the ballroom, that Valentine ran to him, saying 
"Oh, father, some misfortune has happened"
"Your grandmamma has just arrived, Valentine," said M. de
Villefort.
"And grandpapa?" inquired the young girl, trembling with
apprehension. M. de Villefort only replied by offering his
arm to his daughter. It was just in time, for Valentine's
head swam, and she staggered Madame de Villefort instantly
hastened to her assistance, and aided her husband in
dragging her to the carriage, saying  "What a singular
event Who could have thought it? Ah, yes, it is indeed
strange" And the wretched family departed, leaving a cloud
of sadness hanging over the rest of the evening. At the foot
of the stairs, Valentine found Barrois awaiting her.
"M. Noirtier wishes to see you tonight, he said, in an
undertone.
"Tell him I will come when I leave my dear grandmamma," she
replied, feeling, with true delicacy, that the person to
whom she could be of the most service just then was Madame
de SaintMeran. Valentine found her grandmother in bed
silent caresses, heartwrung sobs, broken sighs, burning
tears, were all that passed in this sad interview, while
Madame de Villefort, leaning on her husband's arm,
maintained all outward forms of respect, at least towards
the poor widow. She soon whispered to her husband, "I think
it would be better for me to retire, with your permission,
for the sight of me appears still to afflict your
motherinlaw." Madame de SaintMeran heard her. "Yes, yes,"
she said softly to Valentine, "let her leave but do you
stay." Madame de Villefort left, and Valentine remained
alone beside the bed, for the procureur, overcome with
astonishment at the unexpected death, had followed his wife.
Meanwhile, Barrois had returned for the first time to old
Noirtier, who having heard the noise in the house, had, as
we have said, sent his old servant to inquire the cause on
his return, his quick intelligent eye interrogated the
messenger. "Alas, sir," exclaimed Barrois, "a great
misfortune has happened. Madame de SaintMeran has arrived,
and her husband is dead"
M. de SaintMeran and Noirtier had never been on strict
terms of friendship still, the death of one old man always
considerably affects another. Noirtier let his head fall
upon his chest, apparently overwhelmed and thoughtful then
he closed one eye, in token of inquiry. "Mademoiselle
Valentine?" Noirtier nodded his head. "She is at the ball,
as you know, since she came to say goodby to you in full
dress." Noirtier again closed his left eye. "Do you wish to
see her?" Noirtier again made an affirmative sign. "Well,
they have gone to fetch her, no doubt, from Madame de
Morcerf's I will await her return, and beg her to come up
here. Is that what you wish for?"
"Yes," replied the invalid.
Barrois, therefore, as we have seen, watched for Valentine,
and informed her of her grandfather's wish. Consequently,
Valentine came up to Noirtier, on leaving Madame de
SaintMeran, who in the midst of her grief had at last
yielded to fatigue and fallen into a feverish sleep. Within
reach of her hand they placed a small table upon which stood
a bottle of orangeade, her usual beverage, and a glass.
Then, as we have said, the young girl left the bedside to
see M. Noirtier. Valentine kissed the old man, who looked at
her with such tenderness that her eyes again filled with
tears, whose sources he thought must be exhausted. The old
gentleman continued to dwell upon her with the same
expression. "Yes, yes," said Valentine, "you mean that I
have yet a kind grandfather left, do you not." The old man
intimated that such was his meaning. "Ah, yes, happily I
have," replied Valentine. "Without that, what would become
of me?"
It was one o'clock in the morning. Barrois, who wished to go
to bed himself, observed that after such sad events every
one stood in need of rest. Noirtier would not say that the
only rest he needed was to see his child, but wished her
goodnight, for grief and fatigue had made her appear quite
ill. The next morning she found her grandmother in bed the
fever had not abated, on the contrary her eyes glistened and
she appeared to be suffering from violent nervous
irritability. "Oh, dear grandmamma, are you worse?"
exclaimed Valentine, perceiving all these signs of
agitation.
"No, my child, no," said Madame de SaintMeran "but I was
impatiently waiting for your arrival, that I might send for
your father."
"My father?" inquired Valentine, uneasily.
"Yes, I wish to speak to him." Valentine durst not oppose
her grandmother's wish, the cause of which she did not know,
and an instant afterwards Villefort entered. "Sir," said
Madame de SaintMeran, without using any circumlocution, and
as if fearing she had no time to lose, "you wrote to me
concerning the marriage of this child?"
"Yes, madame," replied Villefort, "it is not only projected
but arranged."
"Your intended soninlaw is named M. Franz d'Epinay?"
"Yes, madame."
"Is he not the son of General d'Epinay who was on our side,
and who was assassinated some days before the usurper
returned from the Island of Elba?"
"The same."
"Does he not dislike the idea of marrying the granddaughter
of a Jacobin?"
"Our civil dissensions are now happily extinguished,
mother," said Villefort "M. d'Epinay was quite a child when
his father died, he knows very little of M. Noirtier, and
will meet him, if not with pleasure, at least with
indifference."
"Is it a suitable match?"
"In every respect."
"And the young man?"
"Is regarded with universal esteem."
"You approve of him?"
"He is one of the most wellbred young men I know." During
the whole of this conversation Valentine had remained
silent. "Well, sir," said Madame de SaintMeran, after a few
minutes' reflection, "I must hasten the marriage, for I have
but a short time to live."
"You, madame?" "You, dear mamma?" exclaimed M. de Villefort
and Valentine at the same time.
"I know what I am saying," continued the marchioness "I
must hurry you, so that, as she has no mother, she may at
least have a grandmother to bless her marriage. I am all
that is left to her belonging to my poor Renee, whom you
have so soon forgotten, sir."
"Ah, madame," said Villefort, "you forget that I was obliged
to give a mother to my child."
"A stepmother is never a mother, sir. But this is not to the
purpose,  our business concerns Valentine, let us leave
the dead in peace."
All this was said with such exceeding rapidity, that there
was something in the conversation that seemed like the
beginning of delirium.
"It shall be as you wish, madame," said Villefort "more
especially since your wishes coincide with mine, and as soon
as M. d'Epinay arrives in Paris" 
"My dear grandmother," interrupted Valentine, "consider
decorum  the recent death. You would not have me marry
under such sad auspices?"
"My child," exclaimed the old lady sharply, "let us hear
none of the conventional objections that deter weak minds
from preparing for the future. I also was married at the
deathbed of my mother, and certainly I have not been less
happy on that account."
"Still that idea of death, madame," said Villefort.
"Still?  Always I tell you I am going to die  do you
understand? Well, before dying, I wish to see my soninlaw.
I wish to tell him to make my child happy I wish to read in
his eyes whether he intends to obey me  in fact, I will
know him  I will" continued the old lady, with a fearful
expression, "that I may rise from the depths of my grave to
find him, if he should not fulfil his duty"
"Madame," said Villefort, "you must lay aside these exalted
ideas, which almost assume the appearance of madness. The
dead, once buried in their graves, rise no more."
"And I tell you, sir, that you are mistaken. This night I
have had a fearful sleep. It seemed as though my soul were
already hovering over my body, my eyes, which I tried to
open, closed against my will, and what will appear
impossible above all to you, sir, I saw, with my eyes shut,
in the spot where you are now standing, issuing from that
corner where there is a door leading into Madame Villefort's
dressingroom  I saw, I tell you, silently enter, a white
figure." Valentine screamed. "It was the fever that
disturbed you, madame," said Villefort.
"Doubt, if you please, but I am sure of what I say. I saw a
white figure, and as if to prevent my discrediting the
testimony of only one of my senses, I heard my glass removed
the same which is there now on the table."
"Oh, dear mother, it was a dream."
"So little was it a dream, that I stretched my hand towards
the bell but when I did so, the shade disappeared my maid
then entered with a light."
"But she saw no one?"
"Phantoms are visible to those only who ought to see them.
It was the soul of my husband  Well, if my husband's soul
can come to me, why should not my soul reappear to guard my
granddaughter? the tie is even more direct, it seems to me."
"Oh, madame," said Villefort, deeply affected, in spite of
himself, "do not yield to those gloomy thoughts you will
long live with us, happy, loved, and honored, and we will
make you forget" 
"Never, never, never," said the marchioness. "When does M.
d'Epinay return?"
"We expect him every moment."
"It is well. As soon as he arrives inform me. We must be
expeditious. And then I also wish to see a notary, that I
may be assured that all our property returns to Valentine."
"Ah, grandmamma," murmured Valentine, pressing her lips on
the burning brow, "do you wish to kill me? Oh, how feverish
you are we must not send for a notary, but for a doctor."
"A doctor?" said she, shrugging her shoulders, "I am not
ill I am thirsty  that is all."
"What are you drinking, dear grandmamma?"
"The same as usual, my dear, my glass is there on the table
give it to me, Valentine." Valentine poured the orangeade
into a glass and gave it to her grandmother with a certain
degree of dread, for it was the same glass she fancied that
had been touched by the spectre. The marchioness drained the
glass at a single draught, and then turned on her pillow,
repeating,  "The notary, the notary"
M. de Villefort left the room, and Valentine seated herself
at the bedside of her grandmother. The poor child appeared
herself to require the doctor she had recommended to her
aged relative. A bright spot burned in either cheek, her
respiration was short and difficult, and her pulse beat with
feverish excitement. She was thinking of the despair of
Maximilian, when he should be informed that Madame de
SaintMeran, instead of being an ally, was unconsciously
acting as his enemy. More than once she thought of revealing
all to her grandmother, and she would not have hesitated a
moment, if Maximilian Morrel had been named Albert de
Morcerf or Raoul de ChateauRenaud but Morrel was of
plebeian extraction, and Valentine knew how the haughty
Marquise de SaintMeran despised all who were not noble. Her
secret had each time been repressed when she was about to
reveal it, by the sad conviction that it would be useless to
do so for, were it once discovered by her father and
mother, all would be lost. Two hours passed thus Madame de
SaintMeran was in a feverish sleep, and the notary had
arrived. Though his coming was announced in a very low tone,
Madame de SaintMeran arose from her pillow. "The notary"
she exclaimed, "let him come in."
The notary, who was at the door, immediately entered. "Go,
Valentine," said Madame de SaintMeran, "and leave me with
this gentleman."
"But, grandmamma" 
"Leave me  go" The young girl kissed her grandmother, and
left with her handkerchief to her eyes at the door she
found the valet de chambre, who told her that the doctor was
waiting in the diningroom. Valentine instantly ran down.
The doctor was a friend of the family, and at the same time
one of the cleverest men of the day, and very fond of
Valentine, whose birth he had witnessed. He had himself a
daughter about her age, but whose life was one continued
source of anxiety and fear to him from her mother having
been consumptive.
"Oh," said Valentine, "we have been waiting for you with
such impatience, dear M. d'Avrigny. But, first of all, how
are Madeleine and Antoinette?" Madeleine was the daughter of
M. d'Avrigny, and Antoinette his niece. M. d'Avrigny smiled
sadly. "Antoinette is very well," he said, "and Madeleine
tolerably so. But you sent for me, my dear child. It is not
your father or Madame de Villefort who is ill. As for you,
although we doctors cannot divest our patients of nerves, I
fancy you have no further need of me than to recommend you
not to allow your imagination to take too wide a field."
Valentine colored. M. d'Avrigny carried the science of
divination almost to a miraculous extent, for he was one of
the physicians who always work upon the body through the
mind. "No," she replied, "it is for my poor grandmother. You
know the calamity that has happened to us, do you not?"
"I know nothing." said M. d'Avrigny.
"Alas," said Valentine, restraining her tears, "my
grandfather is dead."
"M. de SaintMeran?"
"Yes."
"Suddenly?"
"From an apoplectic stroke."
"An apoplectic stroke?" repeated the doctor.
"Yes, and my poor grandmother fancies that her husband, whom
she never left, has called her, and that she must go and
join him. Oh, M. d'Avrigny, I beseech you, do something for
her"
"Where is she?"
"In her room with the notary."
"And M. Noirtier?"
"Just as he was, his mind perfectly clear, but the same
incapability of moving or speaking."
"And the same love for you  eh, my dear child?"
"Yes," said Valentine, "he was very fond of me."
"Who does not love you?" Valentine smiled sadly. "What are
your grandmother's symptoms?"
"An extreme nervous excitement and a strangely agitated
sleep she fancied this morning in her sleep that her soul
was hovering above her body, which she at the same time
watched. It must have been delirium she fancies, too, that
she saw a phantom enter her chamber and even heard the noise
it made on touching her glass."
"It is singular," said the doctor "I was not aware that
Madame de SaintMeran was subject to such hallucinations."
"It is the first time I ever saw her in this condition,"
said Valentine "and this morning she frightened me so that
I thought her mad and my father, who you know is a
strongminded man, himself appeared deeply impressed."
"We will go and see," said the doctor "what you tell me
seems very strange." The notary here descended, and
Valentine was informed that her grandmother was alone. "Go
upstairs," she said to the doctor.
"And you?"
"Oh, I dare not  she forbade my sending for you and, as
you say, I am myself agitated, feverish and out of sorts. I
will go and take a turn in the garden to recover myself."
The doctor pressed Valentine's hand, and while he visited
her grandmother, she descended the steps. We need not say
which portion of the garden was her favorite walk. After
remaining for a short time in the parterre surrounding the
house, and gathering a rose to place in her waist or hair,
she turned into the dark avenue which led to the bench then
from the bench she went to the gate. As usual, Valentine
strolled for a short time among her flowers, but without
gathering them. The mourning in her heart forbade her
assuming this simple ornament, though she had not yet had
time to put on the outward semblance of woe. She then turned
towards the avenue. As she advanced she fancied she heard a
voice speaking her name. She stopped astonished, then the
voice reached her ear more distinctly, and she recognized it
to be that of Maximilian.
Chapter 
The Promise.
It was, indeed, Maximilian Morrel, who had passed a wretched
existence since the previous day. With the instinct peculiar
to lovers he had anticipated after the return of Madame de
SaintMeran and the death of the marquis, that something
would occur at M. de Villefort's in connection with his
attachment for Valentine. His presentiments were realized,
as we shall see, and his uneasy forebodings had goaded him
pale and trembling to the gate under the chestnuttrees.
Valentine was ignorant of the cause of this sorrow and
anxiety, and as it was not his accustomed hour for visiting
her, she had gone to the spot simply by accident or perhaps
through sympathy. Morrel called her, and she ran to the
gate. "You here at this hour?" said she. "Yes, my poor
girl," replied Morrel "I come to bring and to hear bad
tidings."
"This is, indeed, a house of mourning," said Valentine
"speak, Maximilian, although the cup of sorrow seems already
full."
"Dear Valentine," said Morrel, endeavoring to conceal his
own emotion, "listen, I entreat you what I am about to say
is very serious. When are you to be married?"
"I will tell you all," said Valentine "from you I have
nothing to conceal. This morning the subject was introduced,
and my dear grandmother, on whom I depended as my only
support, not only declared herself favorable to it, but is
so anxious for it, that they only await the arrival of M.
d'Epinay, and the following day the contract will be
signed." A deep sigh escaped the young man, who gazed long
and mournfully at her he loved. "Alas," replied he, "it is
dreadful thus to hear my condemnation from your own lips.
The sentence is passed, and, in a few hours, will be
executed it must be so, and I will not endeavor to prevent
it. But, since you say nothing remains but for M. d'Epinay
to arrive that the contract may be signed, and the following
day you will be his, tomorrow you will be engaged to M.
d'Epinay, for he came this morning to Paris." Valentine
uttered a cry.
"I was at the house of Monte Cristo an hour since," said
Morrel "we were speaking, he of the sorrow your family had
experienced, and I of your grief, when a carriage rolled
into the courtyard. Never, till then, had I placed any
confidence in presentiments, but now I cannot help believing
them, Valentine. At the sound of that carriage I shuddered
soon I heard steps on the staircase, which terrified me as
much as the footsteps of the commander did Don Juan. The
door at last opened Albert de Morcerf entered first, and I
began to hope my fears were vain, when, after him, another
young man advanced, and the count exclaimed  "Ah, here is
the Baron Franz d'Epinay' I summoned all my strength and
courage to my support. Perhaps I turned pale and trembled,
but certainly I smiled and five minutes after I left,
without having heard one word that had passed."
"Poor Maximilian" murmured Valentine.
"Valentine, the time has arrived when you must answer me.
And remember my life depends on your answer. What do you
intend doing?" Valentine held down her head she was
overwhelmed.
"Listen," said Morrel "it is not the first time you have
contemplated our present position, which is a serious and
urgent one I do not think it is a moment to give way to
useless sorrow leave that for those who like to suffer at
their leisure and indulge their grief in secret. There are
such in the world, and God will doubtless reward them in
heaven for their resignation on earth, but those who mean to
contend must not lose one precious moment, but must return
immediately the blow which fortune strikes. Do you intend to
struggle against our illfortune? Tell me, Valentine for it
is that I came to know."
Valentine trembled, and looked at him with amazement. The
idea of resisting her father, her grandmother, and all the
family, had never occurred to her. "What do you say,
Maximilian?" asked Valentine. "What do you mean by a
struggle? Oh, it would be a sacrilege. What? I resist my
father's order, and my dying grandmother's wish?
Impossible" Morrel started. "You are too noble not to
understand me, and you understand me so well that you
already yield, dear Maximilian. No, no I shall need all my
strength to struggle with myself and support my grief in
secret, as you say. But to grieve my father  to disturb my
grandmother's last moments  never"
"You are right," said Morrel, calmly.
"In what a tone you speak" cried Valentine.
"I speak as one who admires you, mademoiselle."
"Mademoiselle," cried Valentine "mademoiselle Oh, selfish
man,  he sees me in despair, and pretends he cannot
understand me"
"You mistake  I understand you perfectly. You will not
oppose M. Villefort, you will not displease the marchioness,
and tomorrow you will sign the contract which will bind you
to your husband."
"But, mon Dieu, tell me, how can I do otherwise?"
"Do not appeal to me, mademoiselle I shall be a bad judge
in such a case my selfishness will blind me," replied
Morrel, whose low voice and clinched hands announced his
growing desperation.
"What would you have proposed, Maximilian, had you found me
willing to accede?"
"It is not for me to say."
"You are wrong you must advise me what to do."
"Do you seriously ask my advice, Valentine?"
"Certainly, dear Maximilian, for if it is good, I will
follow it you know my devotion to you."
"Valentine," said Morrel pushing aside a loose plank, "give
me your hand in token of forgiveness of my anger my senses
are confused, and during the last hour the most extravagant
thoughts have passed through my brain. Oh, if you refuse my
advice" 
"What do you advise?" said Valentine, raising her eyes to
heaven and sighing. "I am free," replied Maximilian, "and
rich enough to support you. I swear to make you my lawful
wife before my lips even shall have approached your
forehead."
"You make me tremble" said the young girl.
"Follow me," said Morrel "I will take you to my sister, who
is worthy also to be yours. We will embark for Algiers, for
England, for America, or, if your prefer it, retire to the
country and only return to Paris when our friends have
reconciled your family." Valentine shook her head. "I feared
it, Maximilian," said she "it is the counsel of a madman,
and I should be more mad than you, did I not stop you at
once with the word "Impossible, impossible'"
"You will then submit to what fate decrees for you without
even attempting to contend with it?" said Morrel
sorrowfully. "Yes,  if I die"
"Well, Valentine," resumed Maximilian, "I can only say again
that you are right. Truly, it is I who am mad, and you prove
to me that passion blinds the most wellmeaning. I
appreciate your calm reasoning. It is then understood that
tomorrow you will be irrevocably promised to M. Franz
d'Epinay, not only by that theatrical formality invented to
heighten the effect of a comedy called the signature of the
contract, but your own will?"
"Again you drive me to despair, Maximilian," said Valentine,
"again you plunge the dagger into the wound What would you
do, tell me, if your sister listened to such a proposition?"
"Mademoiselle," replied Morrel with a bitter smile, "I am
selfish  you have already said so  and as a selfish man
I think not of what others would do in my situation, but of
what I intend doing myself. I think only that I have known
you not a whole year. From the day I first saw you, all my
hopes of happiness have been in securing your affection. One
day you acknowledged that you loved me, and since that day
my hope of future happiness has rested on obtaining you, for
to gain you would be life to me. Now, I think no more I say
only that fortune has turned against me  I had thought to
gain heaven, and now I have lost it. It is an everyday
occurrence for a gambler to lose not only what he possesses
but also what he has not." Morrel pronounced these words
with perfect calmness Valentine looked at him a moment with
her large, scrutinizing eyes, endeavoring not to let Morrel
discover the grief which struggled in her heart. "But, in a
word, what are you going to do?" asked she.
"I am going to have the honor of taking my leave of you,
mademoiselle, solemnly assuring you that I wish your life
may be so calm, so happy, and so fully occupied, that there
may be no place for me even in your memory."
"Oh" murmured Valentine.
"Adieu, Valentine, adieu" said Morrel, bowing.
"Where are you going?" cried the young girl, extending her
hand through the opening, and seizing Maximilian by his
coat, for she understood from her own agitated feelings that
her lover's calmness could not be real "where are you
going?"
"I am going, that I may not bring fresh trouble into your
family and to set an example which every honest and devoted
man, situated as I am, may follow."
"Before you leave me, tell me what you are going to do,
Maximilian." The young man smiled sorrowfully. "Speak,
speak" said Valentine "I entreat you."
"Has your resolution changed, Valentine?"
"It cannot change, unhappy man you know it must not" cried
the young girl. "Then adieu, Valentine" Valentine shook the
gate with a strength of which she could not have been
supposed to be possessed, as Morrel was going away, and
passing both her hands through the opening, she clasped and
wrung them. "I must know what you mean to do" said she.
"Where are you going?"
"Oh, fear not," said Maximilian, stopping at a short
distance, "I do not intend to render another man responsible
for the rigorous fate reserved for me. Another might
threaten to seek M. Franz, to provoke him, and to fight with
him all that would be folly. What has M. Franz to do with
it? He saw me this morning for the first time, and has
already forgotten he has seen me. He did not even know I
existed when it was arranged by your two families that you
should be united. I have no enmity against M. Franz, and
promise you the punishment shall not fall on him."
"On whom, then  on me?"
"On you? Valentine Oh, heaven forbid Woman is sacred the
woman one loves is holy."
"On yourself, then, unhappy man on yourself?"
"I am the only guilty person, am I not?' said Maximilian.
"Maximilian" said Valentine, "Maximilian, come back, I
entreat you" He drew near with his sweet smile, and but for
his paleness one might have thought him in his usual happy
mood. "Listen, my dear, my adored Valentine," said he in his
melodious and grave tone "those who, like us, have never
had a thought for which we need blush before the world, such
may read each other's hearts. I never was romantic, and am
no melancholy hero. I imitate neither Manfred nor Anthony
but without words, protestations, or vows, my life has
entwined itself with yours you leave me, and you are right
in doing so,  I repeat it, you are right but in losing
you, I lose my life.
"The moment you leave me, Valentine, I am alone in the
world. My sister is happily married her husband is only my
brotherinlaw, that is, a man whom the ties of social life
alone attach to me no one then longer needs my useless
life. This is what I shall do I will wait until the very
moment you are married, for I will not lose the shadow of
one of those unexpected chances which are sometimes reserved
for us, since M. Franz may, after all, die before that time,
a thunderbolt may fall even on the altar as you approach it,
nothing appears impossible to one condemned to die, and
miracles appear quite reasonable when his escape from death
is concerned. I will, then, wait until the last moment, and
when my misery is certain, irremediable, hopeless, I will
write a confidential letter to my brotherinlaw, another to
the prefect of police, to acquaint them with my intention,
and at the corner of some wood, on the brink of some abyss,
on the bank of some river, I will put an end to my
existence, as certainly as I am the son of the most honest
man who ever lived in France."
Valentine trembled convulsively she loosened her hold of
the gate, her arms fell by her side, and two large tears
rolled down her cheeks. The young man stood before her,
sorrowful and resolute. "Oh, for pity's sake," said she,
"you will live, will you not?"
"No, on my honor," said Maximilian "but that will not
affect you. You have done your duty, and your conscience
will be at rest." Valentine fell on her knees, and pressed
her almost bursting heart. "Maximilian," said she,
"Maximilian, my friend, my brother on earth, my true husband
in heaven, I entreat you, do as I do, live in suffering
perhaps we may one day be united."
"Adieu, Valentine," repeated Morrel.
"My God," said Valentine, raising both her hands to heaven
with a sublime expression, "I have done my utmost to remain
a submissive daughter I have begged, entreated, implored
he has regarded neither my prayers, my entreaties, nor my
tears. It is done," cried she, willing away her tears, and
resuming her firmness, "I am resolved not to die of remorse,
but rather of shame. Live, Maximilian, and I will be yours.
Say when shall it be? Speak, command, I will obey." Morrel,
who had already gone some few steps away, again returned,
and pale with joy extended both hands towards Valentine
through the opening. "Valentine," said he, "dear Valentine,
you must not speak thus  rather let me die. Why should I
obtain you by violence, if our love is mutual? Is it from
mere humanity you bid me live? I would then rather die."
"Truly," murmured Valentine, "who on this earth cares for
me, if he does not? Who has consoled me in my sorrow but he?
On whom do my hopes rest? On whom does my bleeding heart
repose? On him, on him, always on him Yes, you are right,
Maximilian, I will follow you. I will leave the paternal
home, I will give up all. Oh, ungrateful girl that I am,"
cried Valentine, sobbing, "I will give up all, even my dear
old grandfather, whom I had nearly forgotten."
"No," said Maximilian, "you shall not leave him. M. Noirtier
has evinced, you say, a kind feeling towards me. Well,
before you leave, tell him all his consent would be your
justification in God's sight. As soon as we are married, he
shall come and live with us, instead of one child, he shall
have two. You have told me how you talk to him and how he
answers you I shall very soon learn that language by signs,
Valentine, and I promise you solemnly, that instead of
despair, it is happiness that awaits us."
"Oh, see, Maximilian, see the power you have over me, you
almost make me believe you and yet, what you tell me is
madness, for my father will curse me  he is inflexible 
he will never pardon me. Now listen to me, Maximilian if by
artifice, by entreaty, by accident  in short, if by any
means I can delay this marriage, will you wait?"
"Yes, I promise you, as faithfully as you have promised me
that this horrible marriage shall not take place, and that
if you are dragged before a magistrate or a priest, you will
refuse."
"I promise you by all that is most sacred to me in the
world, namely, by my mother."
"We will wait, then," said Morrel.
"Yes, we will wait," replied Valentine, who revived at these
words "there are so many things which may save unhappy
beings such as we are."
"I rely on you, Valentine," said Morrel "all you do will be
well done only if they disregard your prayers, if your
father and Madame de SaintMeran insist that M. d'Epinay
should be called tomorrow to sign the contract" 
"Then you have my promise, Maximilian."
"Instead of signing" 
"I will go to you, and we will fly but from this moment
until then, let us not tempt providence, let us not see each
other. It is a miracle, it is a providence that we have not
been discovered. If we were surprised, if it were known that
we met thus, we should have no further resource."
"You are right, Valentine but how shall I ascertain?"
"From the notary, M. Deschamps."
"I know him."
"And for myself  I will write to you, depend on me. I
dread this marriage, Maximilian, as much as you."
"Thank you, my adored Valentine, thank you that is enough.
When once I know the hour, I will hasten to this spot, you
can easily get over this fence with my assistance, a
carriage will await us at the gate, in which you will
accompany me to my sister's there living, retired or
mingling in society, as you wish, we shall be enabled to use
our power to resist oppression, and not suffer ourselves to
be put to death like sheep, which only defend themselves by
sighs."
"Yes," said Valentine, "I will now acknowledge you are
right, Maximilian and now are you satisfied with your
betrothal?" said the young girl sorrowfully.
"My adored Valentine, words cannot express one half of my
satisfaction." Valentine had approached, or rather, had
placed her lips so near the fence, that they nearly touched
those of Morrel, which were pressed against the other side
of the cold and inexorable barrier. "Adieu, then, till we
meet again," said Valentine, tearing herself away. "I shall
hear from you?"
"Yes."
"Thanks, thanks, dear love, adieu" The sound of a kiss was
heard, and Valentine fled through the avenue. Morrel
listened to catch the last sound of her dress brushing the
branches, and of her footstep on the gravel, then raised his
eyes with an ineffable smile of thankfulness to heaven for
being permitted to be thus loved, and then also disappeared.
The young man returned home and waited all the evening and
all the next day without getting any message. It was only on
the following day, at about ten o'clock in the morning, as
he was starting to call on M. Deschamps, the notary, that he
received from the postman a small billet, which he knew to
be from Valentine, although he had not before seen her
writing. It was to this effect 
Tears, entreaties, prayers, have availed me nothing.
Yesterday, for two hours, I was at the church of
SaintPhillippe du Roule, and for two hours I prayed most
fervently. Heaven is as inflexible as man, and the signature
of the contract is fixed for this evening at nine o'clock. I
have but one promise and but one heart to give that promise
is pledged to you, that heart is also yours. This evening,
then, at a quarter to nine at the gate.
Your betrothed,
Valentine de Villefort.
P.S.  My poor grandmother gets worse and worse yesterday
her fever amounted to delirium today her delirium is
almost madness. You will be very kind to me, will you not,
Morrel, to make me forget my sorrow in leaving her thus? I
think it is kept a secret from grandpapa Noirtier, that the
contract is to be signed this evening.
Morrel went also to the notary, who confirmed the news that
the contract was to be signed that evening. Then he went to
call on Monte Cristo and heard still more. Franz had been to
announce the ceremony, and Madame de Villefort had also
written to beg the count to excuse her not inviting him the
death of M. de SaintMeran and the dangerous illness of his
widow would cast a gloom over the meeting which she would
regret should be shared by the count whom she wished every
happiness. The day before Franz had been presented to Madame
de SaintMeran, who had left her bed to receive him, but had
been obliged to return to it immediately after. It is easy
to suppose that Morrel's agitation would not escape the
count's penetrating eye. Monte Cristo was more affectionate
than ever,  indeed, his manner was so kind that several
times Morrel was on the point of telling him all. But he
recalled the promise he had made to Valentine, and kept his
secret.
The young man read Valentine's letter twenty times in the
course of the day. It was her first, and on what an
occasion Each time he read it he renewed his vow to make
her happy. How great is the power of a woman who has made so
courageous a resolution What devotion does she deserve from
him for whom she has sacrificed everything How ought she
really to be supremely loved She becomes at once a queen
and a wife, and it is impossible to thank and love her
sufficiently. Morrel longed intensely for the moment when he
should hear Valentine say, "Here I am, Maximilian come and
help me." He had arranged everything for her escape two
ladders were hidden in the cloverfield a cabriolet was
ordered for Maximilian alone, without a servant, without
lights at the turning of the first street they would light
the lamps, as it would be foolish to attract the notice of
the police by too many precautions. Occasionally he
shuddered he thought of the moment when, from the top of
that wall, he should protect the descent of his dear
Valentine, pressing in his arms for the first time her of
whom he had yet only kissed the delicate hand.
When the afternoon arrived and he felt that the hour was
drawing near, he wished for solitude, his agitation was
extreme a simple question from a friend would have
irritated him. He shut himself in his room, and tried to
read, but his eye glanced over the page without
understanding a word, and he threw away the book, and for
the second time sat down to sketch his plan, the ladders and
the fence. At length the hour drew near. Never did a man
deeply in love allow the clocks to go on peacefully. Morrel
tormented his so effectually that they struck eight at
halfpast six. He then said, "It is time to start the
signature was indeed fixed to take place at nine o'clock,
but perhaps Valentine will not wait for that." Consequently,
Morrel, having left the Rue Meslay at halfpast eight by his
timepiece, entered the cloverfield while the clock of
SaintPhillippe du Roule was striking eight. The horse and
cabriolet were concealed behind a small ruin, where Morrel
had often waited.
The night gradually drew on, and the foliage in the garden
assumed a deeper hue. Then Morrel came out from his
hidingplace with a beating heart, and looked through the
small opening in the gate there was yet no one to be seen.
The clock struck halfpast eight, and still another
halfhour was passed in waiting, while Morrel walked to and
fro, and gazed more and more frequently through the opening.
The garden became darker still, but in the darkness he
looked in vain for the white dress, and in the silence he
vainly listened for the sound of footsteps. The house, which
was discernible through the trees, remained in darkness, and
gave no indication that so important an event as the
signature of a marriagecontract was going on. Morrel looked
at his watch, which wanted a quarter to ten but soon the
same clock he had already heard strike two or three times
rectified the error by striking halfpast nine.
This was already half an hour past the time Valentine had
fixed. It was a terrible moment for the young man. The
slightest rustling of the foliage, the least whistling of
the wind, attracted his attention, and drew the perspiration
to his brow then he tremblingly fixed his ladder, and, not
to lose a moment, placed his foot on the first step. Amidst
all these alternations of hope and fear, the clock struck
ten. "It is impossible," said Maximilian, "that the signing
of a contract should occupy so long a time without
unexpected interruptions. I have weighed all the chances,
calculated the time required for all the forms something
must have happened." And then he walked rapidly to and fro,
and pressed his burning forehead against the fence. Had
Valentine fainted? or had she been discovered and stopped in
her flight? These were the only obstacles which appeared
possible to the young man.
The idea that her strength had failed her in attempting to
escape, and that she had fainted in one of the paths, was
the one that most impressed itself upon his mind. "In that
case," said he, "I should lose her, and by my own fault." He
dwelt on this idea for a moment, then it appeared reality.
He even thought he could perceive something on the ground at
a distance he ventured to call, and it seemed to him that
the wind wafted back an almost inarticulate sigh. At last
the halfhour struck. It was impossible to wait longer, his
temples throbbed violently, his eyes were growing dim he
passed one leg over the wall, and in a moment leaped down on
the other side. He was on Villefort's premises  had
arrived there by scaling the wall. What might be the
consequences? However, he had not ventured thus far to draw
back. He followed a short distance close under the wall,
then crossed a path, hid entered a clump of trees. In a
moment he had passed through them, and could see the house
distinctly. Then Morrel saw that he had been right in
believing that the house was not illuminated. Instead of
lights at every window, as is customary on days of ceremony,
he saw only a gray mass, which was veiled also by a cloud,
which at that moment obscured the moon's feeble light. A
light moved rapidly from time to time past three windows of
the second floor. These three windows were in Madame de
SaintMeran's room. Another remained motionless behind some
red curtains which were in Madame de Villefort's bedroom.
Morrel guessed all this. So many times, in order to follow
Valentine in thought at every hour in the day, had he made
her describe the whole house, that without having seen it he
knew it all.
This darkness and silence alarmed Morrel still more than
Valentine's absence had done. Almost mad with grief, and
determined to venture everything in order to see Valentine
once more, and be certain of the misfortune he feared,
Morrel gained the edge of the clump of trees, and was going
to pass as quickly as possible through the flowergarden,
when the sound of a voice, still at some distance, but which
was borne upon the wind, reached him.
At this sound, as he was already partially exposed to view,
he stepped back and concealed himself completely, remaining
perfectly motionless. He had formed his resolution. If it
was Valentine alone, he would speak as she passed if she
was accompanied, and he could not speak, still he should see
her, and know that she was safe if they were strangers, he
would listen to their conversation, and might understand
something of this hitherto incomprehensible mystery. The
moon had just then escaped from behind the cloud which had
concealed it, and Morrel saw Villefort come out upon the
steps, followed by a gentleman in black. They descended, and
advanced towards the clump of trees, and Morrel soon
recognized the other gentleman as Doctor d'Avrigny.
The young man, seeing them approach, drew back mechanically,
until he found himself stopped by a sycamoretree in the
centre of the clump there he was compelled to remain. Soon
the two gentlemen stopped also.
"Ah, my dear doctor," said the procureur, "heaven declares
itself against my house What a dreadful death  what a
blow Seek not to console me alas, nothing can alleviate so
great a sorrow  the wound is too deep and too fresh Dead,
dead" The cold sweat sprang to the young man's brow, and
his teeth chattered. Who could be dead in that house, which
Villefort himself had called accursed? "My dear M. de
Villefort," replied the doctor, with a tone which redoubled
the terror of the young man, "I have not led you here to
console you on the contrary" 
"What can you mean?" asked the procureur, alarmed.
"I mean that behind the misfortune which has just happened
to you, there is another, perhaps, still greater."
"Can it be possible?" murmured Villefort, clasping his
hands. "What are you going to tell me?"
"Are we quite alone, my friend?"
"Yes, quite but why all these precautions?"
"Because I have a terrible secret to communicate to you,"
said the doctor. "Let us sit down."
Villefort fell, rather than seated himself The doctor stood
before him, with one hand placed on his shoulder. Morrel,
horrified, supported his head with one hand, and with the
other pressed his heart, lest its beatings should be heard.
"Dead, dead" repeated he within himself and he felt as if
he were also dying.
"Speak, doctor  I am listening," said Villefort "strike
I am prepared for everything"
"Madame de SaintMeran was, doubtless, advancing in years,
but she enjoyed excellent health." Morrel began again to
breathe freely, which he had not done during the last ten
minutes.
"Grief has consumed her," said Villefort  "yes, grief,
doctor After living forty years with the marquis" 
"It is not grief, my dear Villefort," said the doctor
"grief may kill, although it rarely does, and never in a
day, never in an hour, never in ten minutes." Villefort
answered nothing, he simply raised his head, which had been
cast down before, and looked at the doctor with amazement.
"Were you present during the last struggle?" asked M.
d'Avrigny.
"I was," replied the procureur "you begged me not to
leave."
"Did you notice the symptoms of the disease to which Madame
de SaintMeran has fallen a victim?"
"I did. Madame de SaintMeran had three successive attacks,
at intervals of some minutes, each one more serious than the
former. When you arrived, Madame de SaintMeran had already
been panting for breath some minutes she then had a fit,
which I took to be simply a nervous attack, and it was only
when I saw her raise herself in the bed, and her limbs and
neck appear stiffened, that I became really alarmed. Then I
understood from your countenance there was more to fear than
I had thought. This crisis past, I endeavored to catch your
eye, but could not. You held her hand  you were feeling
her pulse  and the second fit came on before you had
turned towards me. This was more terrible than the first
the same nervous movements were repeated, and the mouth
contracted and turned purple."
"And at the third she expired."
"At the end of the first attack I discovered symptoms of
tetanus you confirmed my opinion."
"Yes, before others," replied the doctor "but now we are
alone" 
"What are you going to say? Oh, spare me"
"That the symptoms of tetanus and poisoning by vegetable
substances are the same." M. de Villefort started from his
seat, then in a moment fell down again, silent and
motionless. Morrel knew not if he were dreaming or awake.
"Listen," said the doctor "I know the full importance of the
statement I have just made, and the disposition of the man
to whom I have made it."
"Do you speak to me as a magistrate or as a friend?" asked
Villefort.
"As a friend, and only as a friend, at this moment. The
similarity in the symptoms of tetanus and poisoning by
vegetable substances is so great, that were I obliged to
affirm by oath what I have now stated, I should hesitate I
therefore repeat to you, I speak not to a magistrate, but to
a friend. And to that friend I say. "During the
threequarters of an hour that the struggle continued, I
watched the convulsions and the death of Madame de
SaintMeran, and am thoroughly convinced that not only did
her death proceed from poison, but I could also specify the
poison.'"
"Can it be possible?"
"The symptoms are marked, do you see?  sleep broken by
nervous spasms, excitation of the brain, torpor of the nerve
centres. Madame de SaintMeran succumbed to a powerful dose
of brucine or of strychnine, which by some mistake, perhaps,
has been given to her." Villefort seized the doctor's hand.
"Oh, it is impossible," said he, "I must be dreaming It is
frightful to hear such things from such a man as you Tell
me, I entreat you, my dear doctor, that you may be
deceived."
"Doubtless I may, but" 
"But?"
"But I do not think so."
"Have pity on me doctor So many dreadful things have
happened to me lately that I am on the verge of madness."
"Has any one besides me seen Madame de SaintMeran?"
"No."
"Has anything been sent for from a chemist's that I have not
examined?"
"Nothing."
"Had Madame de SaintMeran any enemies?"
"Not to my knowledge."
"Would her death affect any one's interest?"
"It could not indeed, my daughter is her only heiress 
Valentine alone. Oh, if such a thought could present itself,
I would stab myself to punish my heart for having for one
instant harbored it."
"Indeed, my dear friend," said M. d'Avrigny, "I would not
accuse any one I speak only of an accident, you understand,
of a mistake,  but whether accident or mistake, the
fact is there it is on my conscience and compels me to
speak aloud to you. Make inquiry."
"Of whom?  how?  of what?"
"May not Barrois, the old servant, have made a mistake, and
have given Madame de SaintMeran a dose prepared for his
master?"
"For my father?"
"Yes."
"But how could a dose prepared for M. Noirtier poison Madame
de SaintMeran?"
"Nothing is more simple. You know poisons become remedies in
certain diseases, of which paralysis is one. For instance,
having tried every other remedy to restore movement and
speech to M. Noirtier, I resolved to try one last means, and
for three months I have been giving him brucine so that in
the last dose I ordered for him there were six grains. This
quantity, which is perfectly safe to administer to the
paralyzed frame of M. Noirtier, which has become gradually
accustomed to it, would be sufficient to kill another
person."
"My dear doctor, there is no communication between M.
Noirtier's apartment and that of Madame de SaintMeran, and
Barrois never entered my motherinlaw's room. In short,
doctor although I know you to be the most conscientious man
in the world, and although I place the utmost reliance in
you, I want, notwithstanding my conviction, to believe this
axiom, errare humanum est."
"Is there one of my brethren in whom you have equal
confidence with myself?"
"Why do you ask me that?  what do you wish?"
"Send for him I will tell him what I have seen, and we will
consult together, and examine the body."
"And you will find traces of poison?"
"No, I did not say of poison, but we can prove what was the
state of the body we shall discover the cause of her sudden
death, and we shall say, "Dear Villefort, if this thing has
been caused by negligence, watch over your servants if from
hatred, watch your enemies.'"
"What do you propose to me, d'Avrigny?" said Villefort in
despair "so soon as another is admitted into our secret, an
inquest will become necessary and an inquest in my house 
impossible Still," continued the procureur, looking at the
doctor with uneasiness, "if you wish it  if you demand it,
why then it shall be done. But, doctor, you see me already
so grieved  how can I introduce into my house so much
scandal, after so much sorrow? My wife and my daughter would
die of it And I, doctor  you know a man does not arrive
at the post I occupy  one has not been king's attorney
twentyfive years without having amassed a tolerable number
of enemies mine are numerous. Let this affair be talked of,
it will be a triumph for them, which will make them rejoice,
and cover me with shame. Pardon me, doctor, these worldly
ideas were you a priest I should not dare tell you that,
but you are a man, and you know mankind. Doctor, pray recall
your words you have said nothing, have you?"
"My dear M. de Villefort," replied the doctor, "my first
duty is to humanity. I would have saved Madame de
SaintMeran, if science could have done it but she is dead
and my duty regards the living. Let us bury this terrible
secret in the deepest recesses of our hearts I am willing,
if any one should suspect this, that my silence on the
subject should be imputed to my ignorance. Meanwhile, sir,
watch always  watch carefully, for perhaps the evil may
not stop here. And when you have found the culprit, if you
find him, I will say to you, "You are a magistrate, do as
you will'"
"I thank you, doctor," said Villefort with indescribable
joy "I never had a better friend than you." And, as if he
feared Doctor d'Avrigny would recall his promise, he hurried
him towards the house.
When they were gone, Morrel ventured out from under the
trees, and the moon shone upon his face, which was so pale
it might have been taken for that of a ghost. "I am
manifestly protected in a most wonderful, but most terrible
manner," said he "but Valentine, poor girl, how will she
bear so much sorrow?"
As he thought thus, he looked alternately at the window with
red curtains and the three windows with white curtains. The
light had almost disappeared from the former doubtless
Madame de Villefort had just put out her lamp, and the
nightlamp alone reflected its dull light on the window. At
the extremity of the building, on the contrary, he saw one
of the three windows open. A waxlight placed on the
mantlepiece threw some of its pale rays without, and a
shadow was seen for one moment on the balcony. Morrel
shuddered he thought he heard a sob.
It cannot be wondered at that his mind, generally so
courageous, but now disturbed by the two strongest human
passions, love and fear, was weakened even to the indulgence
of superstitious thoughts. Although it was impossible that
Valentine should see him, hidden as he was, he thought he
heard the shadow at the window call him his disturbed mind
told him so. This double error became an irresistible
reality, and by one of the incomprehensible transports of
youth, he bounded from his hidingplace, and with two
strides, at the risk of being seen, at the risk of alarming
Valentine, at the risk of being discovered by some
exclamation which might escape the young girl, he crossed
the flowergarden, which by the light of the moon resembled
a large white lake, and having passed the rows of
orangetrees which extended in front of the house, he
reached the step, ran quickly up and pushed the door, which
opened without offering any resistance. Valentine had not
seen him. Her eyes, raised towards heaven, were watching a
silvery cloud gliding over the azure, its form that of a
shadow mounting towards heaven. Her poetic and excited mind
pictured it as the soul of her grandmother.
Meanwhile, Morrel had traversed the anteroom and found the
staircase, which, being carpeted, prevented his approach
being heard, and he had regained that degree of confidence
that the presence of M. de Villefort even would not have
alarmed him. He was quite prepared for any such encounter.
He would at once approach Valentine's father and acknowledge
all, begging Villefort to pardon and sanction the love which
united two fond and loving hearts. Morrel was mad. Happily
he did not meet any one. Now, especially, did he find the
description Valentine had given of the interior of the house
useful to him he arrived safely at the top of the
staircase, and while he was feeling his way, a sob indicated
the direction he was to take. He turned back, a door partly
open enabled him to see his road, and to hear the voice of
one in sorrow. He pushed the door open and entered. At the
other end of the room, under a white sheet which covered it,
lay the corpse, still more alarming to Morrel since the
account he had so unexpectedly overheard. By its side, on
her knees, and with her head buried in the cushion of an
easychair, was Valentine, trembling and sobbing, her hands
extended above her head, clasped and stiff. She had turned
from the window, which remained open, and was praying in
accents that would have affected the most unfeeling her
words were rapid, incoherent, unintelligible, for the
burning weight of grief almost stopped her utterance. The
moon shining through the open blinds made the lamp appear to
burn paler, and cast a sepulchral hue over the whole scene.
Morrel could not resist this he was not exemplary for
piety, he was not easily impressed, but Valentine suffering,
weeping, wringing her hands before him, was more than he
could bear in silence. He sighed, and whispered a name, and
the head bathed in tears and pressed on the velvet cushion
of the chair  a head like that of a Magdalen by Correggio
was raised and turned towards him. Valentine perceived
him without betraying the least surprise. A heart
overwhelmed with one great grief is insensible to minor
emotions. Morrel held out his hand to her. Valentine, as her
only apology for not having met him, pointed to the corpse
under the sheet, and began to sob again. Neither dared for
some time to speak in that room. They hesitated to break the
silence which death seemed to impose at length Valentine
ventured.
"My friend," said she, "how came you here? Alas, I would say
you are welcome, had not death opened the way for you into
this house."
"Valentine," said Morrel with a trembling voice, "I had
waited since halfpast eight, and did not see you come I
became uneasy, leaped the wall, found my way through the
garden, when voices conversing about the fatal event" 
"What voices ?" asked Valentine. Morrel shuddered as he
thought of the conversation of the doctor and M. de
Villefort, and he thought he could see through the sheet the
extended hands, the stiff neck, and the purple lips.
"Your servants," said he, "who were repeating the whole of
the sorrowful story from them I learned it all."
"But it was risking the failure of our plan to come up here,
love."
"Forgive me," replied Morrel "I will go away."
"No," said Valentine, "you might meet some one stay."
"But if any one should come here" 
The young girl shook her head. "No one will come," said she
"do not fear, there is our safeguard," pointing to the bed.
"But what has become of M. d'Epinay?" replied Morrel.
"M. Franz arrived to sign the contract just as my dear
grandmother was dying."
"Alas," said Morrel with a feeling of selfish joy for he
thought this death would cause the wedding to be postponed
indefinitely. "But what redoubles my sorrow," continued the
young girl, as if this feeling was to receive its immediate
punishment, "is that the poor old lady, on her deathbed,
requested that the marriage might take place as soon as
possible she also, thinking to protect me, was acting
against me."
"Hark" said Morrel. They both listened steps were
distinctly heard in the corridor and on the stairs.
"It is my father, who has just left his study."
"To accompany the doctor to the door," added Morrel.
"How do you know it is the doctor?" asked Valentine,
astonished.
"I imagined it must be," said Morrel. Valentine looked at
the young man they heard the street door close, then M. de
Villefort locked the garden door, and returned upstairs. He
stopped a moment in the anteroom, as if hesitating whether
to turn to his own apartment or into Madame de
SaintMeran's Morrel concealed himself behind a door
Valentine remained motionless, grief seeming to deprive her
of all fear. M. de Villefort passed on to his own room.
"Now," said Valentine, "you can neither go out by the front
door nor by the garden." Morrel looked at her with
astonishment. "There is but one way left you that is safe,"
said she "it is through my grandfather's room." She rose,
"Come," she added.  "Where?" asked Maximilian.
"To my grandfather's room."
"I in M. Noirtier's apartment?"
"Yes."
"Can you mean it, Valentine?"
"I have long wished it he is my only remaining friend and
we both need his help,  come."
"Be careful, Valentine," said Morrel, hesitating to comply
with the young girl's wishes "I now see my error  I acted
like a madman in coming in here. Are you sure you are more
reasonable?"
"Yes," said Valentine "and I have but one scruple,  that
of leaving my dear grandmother's remains, which I had
undertaken to watch."
"Valentine," said Morrel, "death is in itself sacred."
"Yes," said Valentine "besides, it will not be for long."
She then crossed the corridor, and led the way down a narrow
staircase to M. Noirtier's room Morrel followed her on
tiptoe at the door they found the old servant. "Barrois,"
said Valentine, "shut the door, and let no one come in." She
passed first. Noirtier, seated in his chair, and listening
to every sound, was watching the door he saw Valentine, and
his eye brightened. There was something grave and solemn in
the approach of the young girl which struck the old man, and
immediately his bright eye began to interrogate. "Dear
grandfather." said she hurriedly, "you know poor grandmamma
died an hour since, and now I have no friend in the world
but you." His expressive eyes evinced the greatest
tenderness. "To you alone, then, may I confide my sorrows
and my hopes?" The paralytic motioned "Yes." Valentine took
Maximilian's hand. "Look attentively, then, at this
gentleman." The old man fixed his scrutinizing gaze with
slight astonishment on Morrel. "It is M. Maximilian Morrel,"
said she "the son of that good merchant of Marseilles, whom
you doubtless recollect."
"Yes," said the old man. "He brings an irreproachable name,
which Maximilian is likely to render glorious, since at
thirty years of age he is a captain, an officer of the
Legion of Honor." The old man signified that he recollected
him. "Well, grandpapa," said Valentine, kneeling before him,
and pointing to Maximilian, "I love him, and will be only
his were I compelled to marry another, I would destroy
myself."
The eyes of the paralytic expressed a multitude of
tumultuous thoughts. "You like M. Maximilian Morrel, do you
not, grandpapa?" asked Valentine.
"Yes."
"And you will protect us, who are your children, against the
will of my father?"  Noirtier cast an intelligent glance
at Morrel, as if to say, "perhaps I may." Maximilian
understood him.
"Mademoiselle," said he, "you have a sacred duty to fulfil
in your deceased grandmother's room, will you allow me the
honor of a few minutes' conversation with M. Noirtier?"
"That is it," said the old man's eye. Then he looked
anxiously at Valentine.
"Do you fear he will not understand?"
"Yes."
"Oh, we have so often spoken of you, that he knows exactly
how I talk to you." Then turning to Maximilian, with an
adorable smile although shaded by sorrow,  "He knows
everything I know," said she.
Valentine arose, placed a chair for Morrel, requested
Barrois not to admit any one, and having tenderly embraced
her grandfather, and sorrowfully taken leave of Morrel, she
went away. To prove to Noirtier that he was in Valentine's
confidence and knew all their secrets, Morrel took the
dictionary, a pen, and some paper, and placed them all on a
table where there was a light.
"But first," said Morrel, "allow me, sir, to tell you who I
am, how much I love Mademoiselle Valentine, and what are my
designs respecting her." Noirtier made a sign that he would
listen.
It was an imposing sight to witness this old man, apparently
a mere useless burden, becoming the sole protector, support,
and adviser of the lovers who were both young, beautiful,
and strong. His remarkably noble and austere expression
struck Morrel, who began his story with trembling. He
related the manner in which he had become acquainted with
Valentine, and how he had loved her, and that Valentine, in
her solitude and her misfortune, had accepted the offer of
his devotion. He told him his birth, his position, his
fortune, and more than once, when he consulted the look of
the paralytic, that look answered, "That is good, proceed."
"And now," said Morrel, when he had finished the first part
of his recital, "now I have told you of my love and my
hopes, may I inform you of my intentions?"
"Yes," signified the old man.
"This was our resolution a cabriolet was in waiting at the
gate, in which I intended to carry off Valentine to my
sister's house, to marry her, and to wait respectfully M. de
Villefort's pardon."
"No," said Noirtier.
"We must not do so?"
"No."
"You do not sanction our project?"
"No."
"There is another way," said Morrel. The old man's
interrogative eye said, "What?"
"I will go," continued Maximilian, "I will seek M. Franz
d'Epinay  I am happy to be able to mention this in
Mademoiselle de Villefort's absence  and will conduct
myself toward him so as to compel him to challenge me."
Noirtier's look continued to interrogate. "You wish to know
what I will do?"
"Yes."
"I will find him, as I told you. I will tell him the ties
which bind me to Mademoiselle Valentine if he be a sensible
man, he will prove it by renouncing of his own accord the
hand of his betrothed, and will secure my friendship, and
love until death if he refuse, either through interest or
ridiculous pride, after I have proved to him that he would
be forcing my wife from me, that Valentine loves me, and
will have no other, I will fight with him, give him every
advantage, and I shall kill him, or he will kill me if I am
victorious, he will not marry Valentine, and if I die, I am
very sure Valentine will not marry him." Noirtier watched,
with indescribable pleasure, this noble and sincere
countenance, on which every sentiment his tongue uttered was
depicted, adding by the expression of his fine features all
that coloring adds to a sound and faithful drawing. Still,
when Morrel had finished, he shut his eyes several times,
which was his manner of saying "No."
"No?" said Morrel "you disapprove of this second project,
as you did of the first?"
"I do," signified the old man.
"But what then must be done?" asked Morrel. "Madame de
SaintMeran's last request was, that the marriage might not
be delayed must I let things take their course?" Noirtier
did not move. "I understand," said Morrel "I am to wait."
"Yes."
"But delay may ruin our plan, sir," replied the young man.
"Alone, Valentine has no power she will be compelled to
submit. I am here almost miraculously, and can scarcely hope
for so good an opportunity to occur again. Believe me, there
are only the two plans I have proposed to you forgive my
vanity, and tell me which you prefer. Do you authorize
Mademoiselle Valentine to intrust herself to my honor?"
"No."
"Do you prefer I should seek M. d'Epinay?"
"No."
"Whence then will come the help we need  from chance?"
resumed Morrel.
"No."
"From you?"
"Yes."
"You thoroughly understand me, sir? Pardon my eagerness, for
my life depends on your answer. Will our help come from
you?"
"Yes."
"You are sure of it?"
"Yes." There was so much firmness in the look which gave
this answer, no one could, at any rate, doubt his will, if
they did his power. "Oh, thank you a thousand times But
how, unless a miracle should restore your speech, your
gesture, your movement, how can you, chained to that
armchair, dumb and motionless, oppose this marriage?" A
smile lit up the old man's face, a strange smile of the eyes
in a paralyzed face. "Then I must wait?" asked the young
man.
"Yes."
"But the contract?" The same smile returned. "Will you
assure me it shall not be signed?"
"Yes," said Noirtier.
"The contract shall not be signed" cried Morrel. "Oh,
pardon me, sir I can scarcely realize so great a happiness.
Will they not sign it?"
"No," said the paralytic. Notwithstanding that assurance,
Morrel still hesitated. This promise of an impotent old man
was so strange that, instead of being the result of the
power of his will, it might emanate from enfeebled organs.
Is it not natural that the madman, ignorant of his folly,
should attempt things beyond his power? The weak man talks
of burdens he can raise, the timid of giants he can
confront, the poor of treasures he spends, the most humble
peasant, in the height of his pride, calls himself Jupiter.
Whether Noirtier understood the young man's indecision, or
whether he had not full confidence in his docility, he
looked uneasily at him. "What do you wish, sir?" asked
Morrel "that I should renew my promise of remaining
tranquil?" Noirtier's eye remained fixed and firm, as if to
imply that a promise did not suffice then it passed from
his face to his hands.
"Shall I swear to you, sir?" asked Maximilian.
"Yes?" said the paralytic with the same solemnity. Morrel
understood that the old man attached great importance to an
oath. He extended his hand.
"I swear to you, on my honor," said he, "to await your
decision respecting the course I am to pursue with M.
d'Epinay."
"That is right," said the old man.
"Now," said Morrel, "do you wish me to retire?"
"Yes."
"Without seeing Mademoiselle Valentine?"
"Yes."
Morrel made a sign that he was ready to obey. "But," said
he, "first allow me to embrace you as your daughter did just
now." Noirtier's expression could not be understood. The
young man pressed his lips on the same spot, on the old
man's forehead, where Valentine's had been. Then he bowed a
second time and retired. He found outside the door the old
servant, to whom Valentine had given directions. Morrel was
conducted along a dark passage, which led to a little door
opening on the garden, soon found the spot where he had
entered, with the assistance of the shrubs gained the top of
the wall, and by his ladder was in an instant in the
cloverfield where his cabriolet was still waiting for him.
He got in it, and thoroughly wearied by so many emotions,
arrived about midnight in the Rue Meslay, threw himself on
his bed and slept soundly.
Chapter 
The Villefort Family Vault.
Two days after, a considerable crowd was assembled, towards
ten o'clock in the morning, around the door of M. de
Villefort's house, and a long file of mourningcoaches and
private carriages extended along the Faubourg SaintHonore
and the Rue de la Pepiniere. Among them was one of a very
singular form, which appeared to have come from a distance.
It was a kind of covered wagon, painted black, and was one
of the first to arrive. Inquiry was made, and it was
ascertained that, by a strange coincidence, this carriage
contained the corpse of the Marquis de SaintMeran, and that
those who had come thinking to attend one funeral would
follow two. Their number was great. The Marquis de
SaintMeran, one of the most zealous and faithful
dignitaries of Louis XVIII. and King Charles X., had
preserved a great number of friends, and these, added to the
personages whom the usages of society gave Villefort a claim
on, formed a considerable body.
Due information was given to the authorities, and permission
obtained that the two funerals should take place at the same
time. A second hearse, decked with the same funereal pomp,
was brought to M. de Villefort's door, and the coffin
removed into it from the postwagon. The two bodies were to
be interred in the cemetery of PerelaChaise, where M. de
Villefort had long since had a tomb prepared for the
reception of his family. The remains of poor Renee were
already deposited there, and now, after ten years of
separation, her father and mother were to be reunited with
her. The Parisians, always curious, always affected by
funereal display, looked on with religious silence while the
splendid procession accompanied to their last abode two of
the number of the old aristocracy  the greatest protectors
of commerce and sincere devotees to their principles. In one
of the mourningcoaches Beauchamp, Debray, and
ChateauRenaud were talking of the very sudden death of the
marchioness. "I saw Madame de SaintMeran only last year at
Marseilles, when I was coming back from Algiers," said
ChateauRenaud "she looked like a woman destined to live to
be a hundred years old, from her apparent sound health and
great activity of mind and body. How old was she?"
"Franz assured me," replied Albert, "that she was sixtysix
years old. But she has not died of old age, but of grief it
appears that since the death of the marquis, which affected
her very deeply, she has not completely recovered her
reason."
"But of what disease, then, did she die?" asked Debray.
"It is said to have been a congestion of the brain, or
apoplexy, which is the same thing, is it not?"
"Nearly."
"It is difficult to believe that it was apoplexy," said
Beauchamp. "Madame de SaintMeran, whom I once saw, was
short, of slender form, and of a much more nervous than
sanguine temperament grief could hardly produce apoplexy in
such a constitution as that of Madame de SaintMeran."
"At any rate," said Albert, "whatever disease or doctor may
have killed her, M. de Villefort, or rather, Mademoiselle
Valentine,  or, still rather, our friend Franz, inherits a
magnificent fortune, amounting, I believe, to , livres
per annum."
"And this fortune will be doubled at the death of the old
Jacobin, Noirtier."
"That is a tenacious old grandfather," said Beauchamp.
"Tenacem propositi virum. I think he must have made an
agreement with death to outlive all his heirs, and he
appears likely to succeed. He resembles the old
Conventionalist of ', who said to Napoleon, in , "You
bend because your empire is a young stem, weakened by rapid
growth. Take the Republic for a tutor let us return with
renewed strength to the battlefield, and I promise you
, soldiers, another Marengo, and a second Austerlitz.
Ideas do not become extinct, sire they slumber sometimes,
but only revive the stronger before they sleep entirely.'
Ideas and men appeared the same to him. One thing only
puzzles me, namely, how Franz d'Epinay will like a
grandfather who cannot be separated from his wife. But where
is Franz?"
"In the first carriage, with M. de Villefort, who considers
him already as one of the family."
Such was the conversation in almost all the carriages these
two sudden deaths, so quickly following each other,
astonished every one, but no one suspected the terrible
secret which M. d'Avrigny had communicated, in his nocturnal
walk to M. de Villefort. They arrived in about an hour at
the cemetery the weather was mild, but dull, and in harmony
with the funeral ceremony. Among the groups which flocked
towards the family vault, ChateauRenaud recognized Morrel,
who had come alone in a cabriolet, and walked silently along
the path bordered with yewtrees. "You here?" said
ChateauRenaud, passing his arms through the young
captain's "are you a friend of Villefort's? How is it that
I have never met you at his house?"
"I am no acquaintance of M. de Villefort's." answered
Morrel, "but I was of Madame de SaintMeran." Albert came up
to them at this moment with Franz.
"The time and place are but illsuited for an introduction."
said Albert "but we are not superstitious. M. Morrel, allow
me to present to you M. Franz d'Epinay, a delightful
travelling companion, with whom I made the tour of Italy. My
dear Franz, M. Maximilian Morrel, an excellent friend I have
acquired in your absence, and whose name you will hear me
mention every time I make any allusion to affection, wit, or
amiability." Morrel hesitated for a moment he feared it
would be hypocritical to accost in a friendly manner the man
whom he was tacitly opposing, but his oath and the gravity
of the circumstances recurred to his memory he struggled to
conceal his emotion and bowed to Franz. "Mademoiselle de
Villefort is in deep sorrow, is she not?" said Debray to
Franz.
"Extremely," replied he "she looked so pale this morning, I
scarcely knew her." These apparently simple words pierced
Morrel to the heart. This man had seen Valentine, and spoken
to her The young and highspirited officer required all his
strength of mind to resist breaking his oath. He took the
arm of ChateauRenaud, and turned towards the vault, where
the attendants had already placed the two coffins. "This is
a magnificent habitation," said Beauchamp, looking towards
the mausoleum "a summer and winter palace. You will, in
turn, enter it, my dear d'Epinay, for you will soon be
numbered as one of the family. I, as a philosopher, should
like a little countryhouse, a cottage down there under the
trees, without so many freestones over my poor body. In
dying, I will say to those around me what Voltaire wrote to
Piron "Eo rus, and all will be over.' But come, Franz, take
courage, your wife is an heiress."
"Indeed, Beauchamp, you are unbearable. Politics has made
you laugh at everything, and political men have made you
disbelieve everything. But when you have the honor of
associating with ordinary men, and the pleasure of leaving
politics for a moment, try to find your affectionate heart,
which you leave with your stick when you go to the Chamber."
"But tell me," said Beauchamp, "what is life? Is it not a
hall in Death's anteroom?"
"I am prejudiced against Beauchamp," said Albert, drawing
Franz away, and leaving the former to finish his
philosophical dissertation with Debray. The Villefort vault
formed a square of white stones, about twenty feet high an
interior partition separated the two families, and each
apartment had its entrance door. Here were not, as in other
tombs, ignoble drawers, one above another, where thrift
bestows its dead and labels them like specimens in a museum
all that was visible within the bronze gates was a
gloomylooking room, separated by a wall from the vault
itself. The two doors before mentioned were in the middle of
this wall, and enclosed the Villefort and SaintMeran
coffins. There grief might freely expend itself without
being disturbed by the trifling loungers who came from a
picnic party to visit PerelaChaise, or by lovers who make
it their rendezvous.
The two coffins were placed on trestles previously prepared
for their reception in the righthand crypt belonging to the
SaintMeran family. Villefort, Franz, and a few near
relatives alone entered the sanctuary.
As the religious ceremonies had all been performed at the
door, and there was no address given, the party all
separated ChateauRenaud, Albert, and Morrel, went one way,
and Debray and Beauchamp the other. Franz remained with M.
de Villefort at the gate of the cemetery Morrel made an
excuse to wait he saw Franz and M. de Villefort get into
the same mourning coach, and thought this meeting forboded
evil. He then returned to Paris, and although in the same
carriage with ChateauRenaud and Albert, he did not hear one
word of their conversation. As Franz was about to take leave
of M. de Villefort, "When shall I see you again?" said the
latter.
"At what time you please, sir," replied Franz.
"As soon as possible."
"I am at your command, sir shall we return together?"
"If not unpleasant to you."
"On the contrary, I shall feel much pleasure." Thus, the
future father and soninlaw stepped into the same carriage,
and Morrel, seeing them pass, became uneasy. Villefort and
Franz returned to the Faubourg SaintHonore. The procureur,
without going to see either his wife or his daughter, went
at once to his study, and, offering the young man a chair,
"M. d'Epinay," said he, "allow me to remind you at this
moment,  which is perhaps not so illchosen as at first
sight may appear, for obedience to the wishes of the
departed is the first offering which should be made at their
tomb,  allow me then to remind you of the wish expressed
by Madame de SaintMeran on her deathbed, that Valentine's
wedding might not be deferred. You know the affairs of the
deceased are in perfect order, and her will bequeaths to
Valentine the entire property of the SaintMeran family the
notary showed me the documents yesterday, which will enable
us to draw up the contract immediately. You may call on the
notary, M. Deschamps, Place Beauveau, Faubourg SaintHonore,
and you have my authority to inspect those deeds."
"Sir," replied M. d'Epinay, "it is not, perhaps, the moment
for Mademoiselle Valentine, who is in deep distress, to
think of a husband indeed, I fear" 
"Valentine will have no greater pleasure than that of
fulfilling her grandmother's last injunctions there will be
no obstacle from that quarter, I assure you."
"In that case," replied Franz, "as I shall raise none, you
may make arrangements when you please I have pledged my
word, and shall feel pleasure and happiness in adhering to
it."
"Then," said Villefort, "nothing further is required. The
contract was to have been signed three days since we shall
find it all ready, and can sign it today."
"But the mourning?" said Franz, hesitating.
"Don't be uneasy on that score," replied Villefort "no
ceremony will be neglected in my house. Mademoiselle de
Villefort may retire during the prescribed three months to
her estate of SaintMeran I say hers, for she inherits it
today. There, after a few days, if you like, the civil
marriage shall be celebrated without pomp or ceremony.
Madame de SaintMeran wished her daughter should be married
there. When that is over, you, sir, can return to Paris,
while your wife passes the time of her mourning with her
motherinlaw."
"As you please, sir," said Franz.
"Then," replied M. de Villefort, "have the kindness to wait
half an hour Valentine shall come down into the
drawingroom. I will send for M. Deschamps we will read and
sign the contract before we separate, and this evening
Madame de Villefort shall accompany Valentine to her
estate, where we will rejoin them in a week."
"Sir," said Franz, "I have one request to make."
"What is it?"
"I wish Albert de Morcerf and Raoul de ChateauRenaud to be
present at this signature you know they are my witnesses."
"Half an hour will suffice to apprise them will you go for
them yourself, or shall you send?"
"I prefer going, sir."
"I shall expect you, then, in half an hour, baron, and
Valentine will be ready." Franz bowed and left the room.
Scarcely had the door closed, when M. de Villefort sent to
tell Valentine to be ready in the drawingroom in half an
hour, as he expected the notary and M. d'Epinay and his
witnesses. The news caused a great sensation throughout the
house Madame de Villefort would not believe it, and
Valentine was thunderstruck. She looked around for help, and
would have gone down to her grandfather's room, but on the
stairs she met M. de Villefort, who took her arm and led her
into the drawingroom. In the anteroom, Valentine met
Barrois, and looked despairingly at the old servant. A
moment later, Madame de Villefort entered the drawingroom
with her little Edward. It was evident that she had shared
the grief of the family, for she was pale and looked
fatigued. She sat down, took Edward on her knees, and from
time to time pressed this child, on whom her affections
appeared centred, almost convulsively to her bosom. Two
carriages were soon heard to enter the court yard. One was
the notary's the other, that of Franz and his friends. In a
moment the whole party was assembled. Valentine was so pale
one might trace the blue veins from her temples, round her
eyes and down her cheeks. Franz was deeply affected.
ChateauRenaud and Albert looked at each other with
amazement the ceremony which was just concluded had not
appeared more sorrowful than did that which was about to
begin. Madame de Villefort had placed herself in the shadow
behind a velvet curtain, and as she constantly bent over her
child, it was difficult to read the expression of her face.
M. de Villefort was, as usual, unmoved.
The notary, after having according to the customary method
arranged the papers on the table, taken his place in an
armchair, and raised his spectacles, turned towards Franz
"Are you M. Franz de Quesnel, baron d'Epinay?" asked he,
although he knew it perfectly.
"Yes, sir," replied Franz. The notary bowed. "I have, then,
to inform you, sir, at the request of M. de Villefort, that
your projected marriage with Mademoiselle de Villefort has
changed the feeling of M. Noirtier towards his grandchild,
and that he disinherits her entirely of the fortune he would
have left her. Let me hasten to add," continued he, "that
the testator, having only the right to alienate a part of
his fortune, and having alienated it all, the will will not
bear scrutiny, and is declared null and void."
"Yes." said Villefort "but I warn M. d'Epinay, that during
my lifetime my father's will shall never be questioned, my
position forbidding any doubt to be entertained."
"Sir," said Franz, "I regret much that such a question has
been raised in the presence of Mademoiselle Valentine I
have never inquired the amount of her fortune, which,
however limited it may be, exceeds mine. My family has
sought consideration in this alliance with M. de Villefort
all I seek is happiness." Valentine imperceptibly thanked
him, while two silent tears rolled down her cheeks.
"Besides, sir," said Villefort, addressing himself to his
future soninlaw, "excepting the loss of a portion of your
hopes, this unexpected will need not personally wound you
M. Noirtier's weakness of mind sufficiently explains it. It
is not because Mademoiselle Valentine is going to marry you
that he is angry, but because she will marry, a union with
any other would have caused him the same sorrow. Old age is
selfish, sir, and Mademoiselle de Villefort has been a
faithful companion to M. Noirtier, which she cannot be when
she becomes the Baroness d'Epinay. My father's melancholy
state prevents our speaking to him on any subjects, which
the weakness of his mind would incapacitate him from
understanding, and I am perfectly convinced that at the
present time, although, he knows that his granddaughter is
going to be married, M. Noirtier has even forgotten the name
of his intended grandson." M. de Villefort had scarcely said
this, when the door opened, and Barrois appeared.
"Gentlemen," said he, in a tone strangely firm for a servant
speaking to his masters under such solemn circumstances, 
"gentlemen, M. Noirtier de Villefort wishes to speak
immediately to M. Franz de Quesnel, baron d'Epinay" he, as
well as the notary, that there might be no mistake in the
person, gave all his titles to the bridegroom elect.
Villefort started, Madame de Villefort let her son slip from
her knees, Valentine rose, pale and dumb as a statue. Albert
and ChateauRenaud exchanged a second look, more full of
amazement than the first. The notary looked at Villefort.
"It is impossible," said the procureur. "M. d'Epinay cannot
leave the drawingroom at present."
"It is at this moment," replied Barrois with the same
firmness, "that M. Noirtier, my master, wishes to speak on
important subjects to M. Franz d'Epinay."
"Grandpapa Noirtier can speak now, then," said Edward, with
his habitual quickness. However, his remark did not make
Madame de Villefort even smile, so much was every mind
engaged, and so solemn was the situation. Astonishment was
at its height. Something like a smile was perceptible on
Madame de Villefort's countenance. Valentine instinctively
raised her eyes, as if to thank heaven.
"Pray go, Valentine," said M. de Villefort, "and see what
this new fancy of your grandfather's is." Valentine rose
quickly, and was hastening joyfully towards the door, when
M. de Villefort altered his intention.
"Stop," said he "I will go with you."
"Excuse me, sir," said Franz, "since M. Noirtier sent for
me, I am ready to attend to his wish besides, I shall be
happy to pay my respects to him, not having yet had the
honor of doing so."
"Pray, sir," said Villefort with marked uneasiness, "do not
disturb yourself."
"Forgive me, sir," said Franz in a resolute tone. "I would
not lose this opportunity of proving to M. Noirtier how
wrong it would be of him to encourage feelings of dislike to
me, which I am determined to conquer, whatever they may be,
by my devotion." And without listening to Villefort he
arose, and followed Valentine, who was running downstairs
with the joy of a shipwrecked mariner who finds a rock to
cling to. M. de Villefort followed them. ChateauRenaud and
Morcerf exchanged a third look of still increasing wonder.
Chapter 
A Signed Statement.
Noirtier was prepared to receive them, dressed in black, and
installed in his armchair. When the three persons he
expected had entered, he looked at the door, which his valet
immediately closed.
"Listen," whispered Villefort to Valentine, who could not
conceal her joy "if M. Noirtier wishes to communicate
anything which would delay your marriage, I forbid you to
understand him." Valentine blushed, but did not answer.
Villefort, approaching Noirtier  "Here is M. Franz
d'Epinay," said he "you requested to see him. We have all
wished for this interview, and I trust it will convince you
how illformed are your objections to Valentine's marriage."
Noirtier answered only by a look which made Villefort's
blood run cold. He motioned to Valentine to approach. In a
moment, thanks to her habit of conversing with her
grandfather, she understood that he asked for a key. Then
his eye was fixed on the drawer of a small chest between the
windows. She opened the drawer, and found a key and,
understanding that was what he wanted, again watched his
eyes, which turned toward an old secretary which had been
neglected for many years and was supposed to contain nothing
but useless documents. "Shall I open the secretary?" asked
Valentine.
"Yes," said the old man.
"And the drawers?"
"Yes."
"Those at the side?"
"No."
"The middle one?"
"Yes." Valentine opened it and drew out a bundle of papers.
"Is that what you wish for?" asked she.
"No."
She took successively all the other papers out till the
drawer was empty. "But there are no more," said she.
Noirtier's eye was fixed on the dictionary. "Yes, I
understand, grandfather," said the young girl.
He pointed to each letter of the alphabet. At the letter S
the old man stopped her. She opened, and found the word
"secret."
"Ah, is there a secret spring?" said Valentine.
"Yes," said Noirtier.
"And who knows it?" Noirtier looked at the door where the
servant had gone out. "Barrois?" said she.
"Yes."
"Shall I call him?"
"Yes."
Valentine went to the door, and called Barrois. Villefort's
impatience during this scene made the perspiration roll from
his forehead, and Franz was stupefied. The old servant came.
"Barrois," said Valentine, "my grandfather has told me to
open that drawer in the secretary, but there is a secret
spring in it, which you know  will you open it?"
Barrois looked at the old man. "Obey," said Noirtier's
intelligent eye. Barrois touched a spring, the false bottom
came out, and they saw a bundle of papers tied with a black
string.
"Is that what you wish for?" said Barrois.
"Yes."
"Shall I give these papers to M. de Villefort?"
"No."
"To Mademoiselle Valentine?"
"No."
"To M. Franz d'Epinay?"
"Yes."
Franz, astonished, advanced a step. "To me, sir?" said he.
"Yes." Franz took them from Barrois and casting a glance at
the cover, read 
""To be given, after my death, to General Durand, who shall
bequeath the packet to his son, with an injunction to
preserve it as containing an important document.'
"Well, sir," asked Franz, "what do you wish me to do with
this paper?"
"To preserve it, sealed up as it is, doubtless," said the
procureur.
"No," replied Noirtier eagerly.
"Do you wish him to read it?" said Valentine.
"Yes," replied the old man. "You understand, baron, my
grandfather wishes you to read this paper," said Valentine.
"Then let us sit down," said Villefort impatiently, "for it
will take some time."
"Sit down," said the old man. Villefort took a chair, but
Valentine remained standing by her father's side, and Franz
before him, holding the mysterious paper in his hand.
"Read," said the old man. Franz untied it, and in the midst
of the most profound silence read
""Extract from the Report of a meeting of the Bonapartist
Club in the Rue SaintJacques, held February th, .'"
Franz stopped. "February th, " said he "it is the day
my father was murdered." Valentine and Villefort were dumb
the eye of the old man alone seemed to say clearly, "Go on."
"But it was on leaving this club," said he, "my father
disappeared." Noirtier's eye continued to say, "Read." He
resumed 
""The undersigned Louis Jacques Beaurepaire,
lieutenantcolonel of artillery, Etienne Duchampy, general
of brigade, and Claude Lecharpal, keeper of woods and
forests, Declare, that on the th of February, a letter
arrived from the Island of Elba, recommending to the
kindness and the confidence of the Bonapartist Club, General
Flavien de Quesnel, who having served the emperor from 
to  was supposed to be devoted to the interests of the
Napoleon dynasty, notwithstanding the title of baron which
Louis XVIII. had just granted to him with his estate of
Epinay.
""A note was in consequence addressed to General de Quesnel,
begging him to be present at the meeting next day, the th.
The note indicated neither the street nor the number of the
house where the meeting was to be held it bore no
signature, but it announced to the general that some one
would call for him if he would be ready at nine o'clock. The
meetings were always held from that time till midnight. At
nine o'clock the president of the club presented himself
the general was ready, the president informed him that one
of the conditions of his introduction was that he should be
eternally ignorant of the place of meeting, and that he
would allow his eyes to be bandaged, swearing that he would
not endeavor to take off the bandage. General de Quesnel
accepted the condition, and promised on his honor not to
seek to discover the road they took. The general's carriage
was ready, but the president told him it was impossible for
him to use it, since it was useless to blindfold the master
if the coachman knew through what streets he went. "What
must be done then?" asked the general.  "I have my
carriage here," said the president.
"""Have you, then, so much confidence in your servant that
you can intrust him with a secret you will not allow me to
know?"
"""Our coachman is a member of the club," said the
president "we shall be driven by a StateCouncillor."
"""Then we run another risk," said the general, laughing,
"that of being upset." We insert this joke to prove that the
general was not in the least compelled to attend the
meeting, but that he came willingly. When they were seated
in the carriage the president reminded the general of his
promise to allow his eyes to be bandaged, to which he made
no opposition. On the road the president thought he saw the
general make an attempt to remove the handkerchief, and
reminded him of his oath. "Sure enough," said the general.
The carriage stopped at an alley leading out of the Rue
SaintJacques. The general alighted, leaning on the arm of
the president, of whose dignity he was not aware,
considering him simply as a member of the club they went
through the alley, mounted a flight of stairs, and entered
the assemblyroom.
"""The deliberations had already begun. The members,
apprised of the sort of presentation which was to be made
that evening, were all in attendance. When in the middle of
the room the general was invited to remove his bandage, he
did so immediately, and was surprised to see so many
wellknown faces in a society of whose existence he had till
then been ignorant. They questioned him as to his
sentiments, but he contented himself with answering, that
the letters from the Island of Elba ought to have informed
them'" 
Franz interrupted himself by saying, "My father was a
royalist they need not have asked his sentiments, which
were well known."
"And hence," said Villefort, "arose my affection for your
father, my dear M. Franz. Opinions held in common are a
ready bond of union."
"Read again," said the old man. Franz continued 
""The president then sought to make him speak more
explicitly, but M. de Quesnel replied that he wished first
to know what they wanted with him. He was then informed of
the contents of the letter from the Island of Elba, in which
he was recommended to the club as a man who would be likely
to advance the interests of their party. One paragraph spoke
of the return of Bonaparte and promised another letter and
further details, on the arrival of the Pharaon belonging to
the shipbuilder Morrel, of Marseilles, whose captain was
entirely devoted to the emperor. During all this time, the
general, on whom they thought to have relied as on a
brother, manifested evidently signs of discontent and
repugnance. When the reading was finished, he remained
silent, with knitted brows.
"""Well," asked the president, "what do you say to this
letter, general?"
"""I say that it is too soon after declaring myself for
Louis XVIII. to break my vow in behalf of the exemperor."
This answer was too clear to permit of any mistake as to his
sentiments. "General," said the president, "we acknowledge
no King Louis XVIII., or an exemperor, but his majesty the
emperor and king, driven from France, which is his kingdom,
by violence and treason."
"""Excuse me, gentlemen," said the general "you may not
acknowledge Louis XVIII., but I do, as he has made me a
baron and a fieldmarshal, and I shall never forget that for
these two titles I am indebted to his happy return to
France."
"""Sir," said the president, rising with gravity, "be
careful what you say your words clearly show us that they
are deceived concerning you in the Island of Elba, and have
deceived us The communication has been made to you in
consequence of the confidence placed in you, and which does
you honor. Now we discover our error a title and promotion
attach you to the government we wish to overturn. We will
not constrain you to help us we enroll no one against his
conscience, but we will compel you to act generously, even
if you are not disposed to do so."
"""You would call acting generously, knowing your conspiracy
and not informing against you, that is what I should call
becoming your accomplice. You see I am more candid than
you."'"
"Ah, my father" said Franz, interrupting himself. "I
understand now why they murdered him." Valentine could not
help casting one glance towards the young man, whose filial
enthusiasm it was delightful to behold. Villefort walked to
and fro behind them. Noirtier watched the expression of each
one, and preserved his dignified and commanding attitude.
Franz returned to the manuscript, and continued 
"""Sir," said the president, "you have been invited to join
this assembly  you were not forced here it was proposed
to you to come blindfolded  you accepted. When you
complied with this twofold request you well knew we did not
wish to secure the throne of Louis XVIII., or we should not
take so much care to avoid the vigilance of the police. It
would be conceding too much to allow you to put on a mask to
aid you in the discovery of our secret, and then to remove
it that you may ruin those who have confided in you. No, no,
you must first say if you declare yourself for the king of a
day who now reigns, or for his majesty the emperor."
"""I am a royalist," replied the general "I have taken the
oath of allegiance to Louis XVIII., and I will adhere to
it." These words were followed by a general murmur, and it
was evident that several of the members were discussing the
propriety of making the general repent of his rashness.
""The president again arose, and having imposed silence,
said,  "Sir, you are too serious and too sensible a man
not to understand the consequences of our present situation,
and your candor has already dictated to us the conditions
which remain for us to offer you." The general, putting his
hand on his sword, exclaimed,  "If you talk of honor, do
not begin by disavowing its laws, and impose nothing by
violence."
"""And you, sir," continued the president, with a calmness
still more terrible than the general's anger, "I advise you
not to touch your sword." The general looked around him with
slight uneasiness however he did not yield, but calling up
all his fortitude, said,  "I will not swear."
"""Then you must die," replied the president calmly. M.
d'Epinay became very pale he looked round him a second
time, several members of the club were whispering, and
getting their arms from under their cloaks. "General," said
the president, "do not alarm yourself you are among men of
honor who will use every means to convince you before
resorting to the last extremity, but as you have said, you
are among conspirators, you are in possession of our secret,
and you must restore it to us." A significant silence
followed these words, and as the general did not reply, 
"Close the doors," said the president to the doorkeeper.
""The same deadly silence succeeded these words. Then the
general advanced, and making a violent effort to control his
feelings,  "I have a son," said he, "and I ought to think
of him, finding myself among assassins."
"""General," said the chief of the assembly, "one man may
insult fifty  it is the privilege of weakness. But he does
wrong to use his privilege. Follow my advice, swear, and do
not insult." The general, again daunted by the superiority
of the chief, hesitated a moment then advancing to the
president's desk,  "What is the form, said he.
"""It is this  "I swear by my honor not to reveal to any
one what I have seen and heard on the th of February, ,
between nine and ten o'clock in the evening and I plead
guilty of death should I ever violate this oath.'" The
general appeared to be affected by a nervous tremor, which
prevented his answering for some moments then, overcoming
his manifest repugnance, he pronounced the required oath,
but in so low a tone as to be scarcely audible to the
majority of the members, who insisted on his repeating it
clearly and distinctly, which he did.
"""Now am I at liberty to retire?" said the general. The
president rose, appointed three members to accompany him,
and got into the carriage with the general after bandaging
his eyes. One of those three members was the coachman who
had driven them there. The other members silently dispersed.
"Where do you wish to be taken?" asked the president. 
"Anywhere out of your presence," replied M. d'Epinay.
"Beware, sir," replied the president, "you are no longer in
the assembly, and have only to do with individuals do not
insult them unless you wish to be held responsible." But
instead of listening, M. d'Epinay went on,  "You are still
as brave in your carriage as in your assembly because you
are still four against one." The president stopped the
coach. They were at that part of the Quai des Ormes where
the steps lead down to the river. "Why do you stop here?"
asked d'Epinay.
"""Because, sir," said the president, "you have insulted a
man, and that man will not go one step farther without
demanding honorable reparation."
"""Another method of assassination?" said the general,
shrugging his shoulders.
"""Make no noise, sir, unless you wish me to consider you as
one of the men of whom you spoke just now as cowards, who
take their weakness for a shield. You are alone, one alone
shall answer you you have a sword by your side, I have one
in my cane you have no witness, one of these gentlemen will
serve you. Now, if you please, remove your bandage." The
general tore the handkerchief from his eyes. "At last," said
he, "I shall know with whom I have to do." They opened the
door and the four men alighted.'"
Franz again interrupted himself, and wiped the cold drops
from his brow there was something awful in hearing the son
read aloud in trembling pallor these details of his father's
death, which had hitherto been a mystery. Valentine clasped
her hands as if in prayer. Noirtier looked at Villefort with
an almost sublime expression of contempt and pride. Franz
continued 
""It was, as we said, the fifth of February. For three days
the mercury had been five or six degrees below freezing and
the steps were covered with ice. The general was stout and
tall, the president offered him the side of the railing to
assist him in getting down. The two witnesses followed. It
was a dark night. The ground from the steps to the river was
covered with snow and hoarfrost, the water of the river
looked black and deep. One of the seconds went for a lantern
in a coalbarge near, and by its light they examined the
weapons. The president's sword, which was simply, as he had
said, one he carried in his cane, was five inches shorter
than the general's, and had no guard. The general proposed
to cast lots for the swords, but the president said it was
he who had given the provocation, and when he had given it
he had supposed each would use his own arms. The witnesses
endeavored to insist, but the president bade them be silent.
The lantern was placed on the ground, the two adversaries
took their stations, and the duel began. The light made the
two swords appear like flashes of lightning as for the men,
they were scarcely perceptible, the darkness was so great.
""General d'Epinay passed for one of the best swordsmen in
the army, but he was pressed so closely in the onset that he
missed his aim and fell. The witnesses thought he was dead,
but his adversary, who knew he had not struck him, offered
him the assistance of his hand to rise. The circumstance
irritated instead of calming the general, and he rushed on
his adversary. But his opponent did not allow his guard to
be broken. He received him on his sword and three times the
general drew back on finding himself too closely engaged,
and then returned to the charge. At the third he fell again.
They thought he slipped, as at first, and the witnesses,
seeing he did not move, approached and endeavored to raise
him, but the one who passed his arm around the body found it
was moistened with blood. The general, who had almost
fainted, revived. "Ah," said he, "they have sent some
fencingmaster to fight with me." The president, without
answering, approached the witness who held the lantern, and
raising his sleeve, showed him two wounds he had received in
his arm then opening his coat, and unbuttoning his
waistcoat, displayed his side, pierced with a third wound.
Still he had not even uttered a sigh. General d'Epinay died
five minutes after.'"
Franz read these last words in a voice so choked that they
were hardly audible, and then stopped, passing his hand over
his eyes as if to dispel a cloud but after a moment's
silence, he continued 
""The president went up the steps, after pushing his sword
into his cane a track of blood on the snow marked his
course. He had scarcely arrived at the top when he heard a
heavy splash in the water  it was the general's body,
which the witnesses had just thrown into the river after
ascertaining that he was dead. The general fell, then, in a
loyal duel, and not in ambush as it might have been
reported. In proof of this we have signed this paper to
establish the truth of the facts, lest the moment should
arrive when either of the actors in this terrible scene
should be accused of premeditated murder or of infringement
of the laws of honor.
""Signed, Beaurepaire, Deschamps, and Lecharpal.'"
When Franz had finished reading this account, so dreadful
for a son when Valentine, pale with emotion, had wiped away
a tear when Villefort, trembling, and crouched in a corner,
had endeavored to lessen the storm by supplicating glances
at the implacable old man,  "Sir," said d'Epinay to
Noirtier, "since you are well acquainted with all these
details, which are attested by honorable signatures, 
since you appear to take some interest in me, although you
have only manifested it hitherto by causing me sorrow,
refuse me not one final satisfaction  tell me the name of
the president of the club, that I may at least know who
killed my father." Villefort mechanically felt for the
handle of the door Valentine, who understood sooner than
anyone her grandfather's answer, and who had often seen two
scars upon his right arm, drew back a few steps.
"Mademoiselle," said Franz, turning towards Valentine,
"unite your efforts with mine to find out the name of the
man who made me an orphan at two years of age." Valentine
remained dumb and motionless.
"Hold, sir," said Villefort, "do not prolong this dreadful
scene. The names have been purposely concealed my father
himself does not know who this president was, and if he
knows, he cannot tell you proper names are not in the
dictionary."
"Oh, misery," cried Franz "the only hope which sustained me
and enabled me to read to the end was that of knowing, at
least, the name of him who killed my father Sir, sir,"
cried he, turning to Noirtier, "do what you can  make me
understand in some way"
"Yes," replied Noirtier.
"Oh, mademoiselle,  mademoiselle" cried Franz, "your
grandfather says he can indicate the person. Help me, 
lend me your assistance" Noirtier looked at the dictionary.
Franz took it with a nervous trembling, and repeated the
letters of the alphabet successively, until he came to M. At
that letter the old man signified "Yes."
"M," repeated Franz. The young man's finger, glided over the
words, but at each one Noirtier answered by a negative sign.
Valentine hid her head between her hands. At length, Franz
arrived at the word MYSELF.
"Yes"
"You?" cried Franz, whose hair stood on end "you, M.
Noirtier  you killed my father?"
"Yes" replied Noirtier, fixing a majestic look on the young
man. Franz fell powerless on a chair Villefort opened the
door and escaped, for the idea had entered his mind to
stifle the little remaining life in the heart of this
terrible old man.
Chapter 
Progress of Cavalcanti the Younger.
Meanwhile M. Cavalcanti the elder had returned to his
service, not in the army of his majesty the Emperor of
Austria, but at the gamingtable of the baths of Lucca, of
which he was one of the most assiduous courtiers. He had
spent every farthing that had been allowed for his journey
as a reward for the majestic and solemn manner in which he
had maintained his assumed character of father. M. Andrea at
his departure inherited all the papers which proved that he
had indeed the honor of being the son of the Marquis
Bartolomeo and the Marchioness Oliva Corsinari. He was now
fairly launched in that Parisian society which gives such
ready access to foreigners, and treats them, not as they
really are, but as they wish to be considered. Besides, what
is required of a young man in Paris? To speak its language
tolerably, to make a good appearance, to be a good gamester,
and to pay in cash. They are certainly less particular with
a foreigner than with a Frenchman. Andrea had, then, in a
fortnight, attained a very fair position. He was called
count, he was said to possess , livres per annum and
his father's immense riches, buried in the quarries of
Saravezza, were a constant theme. A learned man, before whom
the last circumstance was mentioned as a fact, declared he
had seen the quarries in question, which gave great weight
to assertions hitherto somewhat doubtful, but which now
assumed the garb of reality.
Such was the state of society in Paris at the period we
bring before our readers, when Monte Cristo went one evening
to pay M. Danglars a visit. M. Danglars was out, but the
count was asked to go and see the baroness, and he accepted
the invitation. It was never without a nervous shudder,
since the dinner at Auteuil, and the events which followed
it, that Madame Danglars heard Monte Cristo's name
announced. If he did not come, the painful sensation became
most intense if, on the contrary, he appeared, his noble
countenance, his brilliant eyes, his amiability, his polite
attention even towards Madame Danglars, soon dispelled every
impression of fear. It appeared impossible to the baroness
that a man of such delightfully pleasing manners should
entertain evil designs against her besides, the most
corrupt minds only suspect evil when it would answer some
interested end  useless injury is repugnant to every mind.
When Monte Cristo entered the boudoir,  to which we have
already once introduced our readers, and where the baroness
was examining some drawings, which her daughter passed to
her after having looked at them with M. Cavalcanti,  his
presence soon produced its usual effect, and it was with
smiles that the baroness received the count, although she
had been a little disconcerted at the announcement of his
name. The latter took in the whole scene at a glance.
The baroness was partially reclining on a sofa, Eugenie sat
near her, and Cavalcanti was standing. Cavalcanti, dressed
in black, like one of Goethe's heroes, with varnished shoes
and white silk openworked stockings, passed a white and
tolerably nicelooking hand through his light hair, and so
displayed a sparkling diamond, that in spite of Monte
Cristo's advice the vain young man had been unable to resist
putting on his little finger. This movement was accompanied
by killing glances at Mademoiselle Danglars, and by sighs
launched in the same direction. Mademoiselle Danglars was
still the same  cold, beautiful, and satirical. Not one of
these glances, nor one sigh, was lost on her they might
have been said to fall on the shield of Minerva, which some
philosophers assert protected sometimes the breast of
Sappho. Eugenie bowed coldly to the count, and availed
herself of the first moment when the conversation became
earnest to escape to her study, whence very soon two
cheerful and noisy voices being heard in connection with
occasional notes of the piano assured Monte Cristo that
Mademoiselle Danglars preferred to his society and to that
of M. Cavalcanti the company of Mademoiselle Louise
d'Armilly, her singing teacher.
It was then, especially while conversing with Madame
Danglars, and apparently absorbed by the charm of the
conversation, that the count noticed M. Andrea Cavalcanti's
solicitude, his manner of listening to the music at the door
he dared not pass, and of manifesting his admiration. The
banker soon returned. His first look was certainly directed
towards Monte Cristo, but the second was for Andrea. As for
his wife, he bowed to her, as some husbands do to their
wives, but in a way that bachelors will never comprehend,
until a very extensive code is published on conjugal life.
"Have not the ladies invited you to join them at the piano?"
said Danglars to Andrea. "Alas, no, sir," replied Andrea
with a sigh, still more remarkable than the former ones.
Danglars immediately advanced towards the door and opened
it.
The two young ladies were seen seated on the same chair, at
the piano, accompanying themselves, each with one hand, a
fancy to which they had accustomed themselves, and performed
admirably. Mademoiselle d'Armilly, whom they then perceived
through the open doorway, formed with Eugenie one of the
tableaux vivants of which the Germans are so fond. She was
somewhat beautiful, and exquisitely formed  a little
fairylike figure, with large curls falling on her neck,
which was rather too long, as Perugino sometimes makes his
Virgins, and her eyes dull from fatigue. She was said to
have a weak chest, and like Antonia in the "Cremona Violin,"
she would die one day while singing. Monte Cristo cast one
rapid and curious glance round this sanctum it was the
first time he had ever seen Mademoiselle d'Armilly, of whom
he had heard much. "Well," said the banker to his daughter,
"are we then all to be excluded?" He then led the young man
into the study, and either by chance or manoeuvre the door
was partially closed after Andrea, so that from the place
where they sat neither the Count nor the baroness could see
anything but as the banker had accompanied Andrea, Madame
Danglars appeared to take no notice of it.
The count soon heard Andrea's voice, singing a Corsican
song, accompanied by the piano. While the count smiled at
hearing this song, which made him lose sight of Andrea in
the recollection of Benedetto, Madame Danglars was boasting
to Monte Cristo of her husband's strength of mind, who that
very morning had lost three or four hundred thousand francs
by a failure at Milan. The praise was well deserved, for had
not the count heard it from the baroness, or by one of those
means by which he knew everything, the baron's countenance
would not have led him to suspect it. "Hem," thought Monte
Cristo, "he begins to conceal his losses a month since he
boasted of them." Then aloud,  "Oh, madame, M. Danglars is
so skilful, he will soon regain at the Bourse what he loses
elsewhere."
"I see that you participate in a prevalent error," said
Madame Danglars. "What is it?" said Monte Cristo.
"That M. Danglars speculates, whereas he never does."
"Truly, madame, I recollect M. Debray told me  apropos,
what is become of him? I have seen nothing of him the last
three or four days."
"Nor I," said Madame Danglars "but you began a sentence,
sir, and did not finish."
"Which?"
"M. Debray had told you" 
"Ah, yes he told me it was you who sacrificed to the demon
of speculation."
"I was once very fond of it, but I do not indulge now."
"Then you are wrong, madame. Fortune is precarious and if I
were a woman and fate had made me a banker's wife, whatever
might be my confidence in my husband's good fortune, still
in speculation you know there is great risk. Well, I would
secure for myself a fortune independent of him, even if I
acquired it by placing my interests in hands unknown to
him." Madame Danglars blushed, in spite of all her efforts.
"Stay," said Monte Cristo, as though he had not observed her
confusion, "I have heard of a lucky hit that was made
yesterday on the Neapolitan bonds."
"I have none  nor have I ever possessed any but really we
have talked long enough of money, count, we are like two
stockbrokers have you heard how fate is persecuting the
poor Villeforts?"
"What has happened?" said the count, simulating total
ignorance.
"You know the Marquis of SaintMeran died a few days after
he had set out on his journey to Paris, and the marchioness
a few days after her arrival?"
"Yes," said Monte Cristo, "I have heard that but, as
Claudius said to Hamlet, "it is a law of nature their
fathers died before them, and they mourned their loss they
will die before their children, who will, in their turn,
grieve for them.'"
"But that is not all."
"Not all"
"No they were going to marry their daughter" 
"To M. Franz d'Epinay. Is it broken off?"
"Yesterday morning, it appears, Franz declined the honor."
"Indeed? And is the reason known?"
"No."
"How extraordinary And how does M. de Villefort bear it?"
"As usual. Like a philosopher." Danglars returned at this
moment alone. "Well," said the baroness, "do you leave M.
Cavalcanti with your daughter?"
"And Mademoiselle d'Armilly," said the banker "do you
consider her no one?" Then, turning to Monte Cristo, he
said, "Prince Cavalcanti is a charming young man, is he not?
But is he really a prince?"
"I will not answer for it," said Monte Cristo. "His father
was introduced to me as a marquis, so he ought to be a
count but I do not think he has much claim to that title."
"Why?" said the banker. "If he is a prince, he is wrong not
to maintain his rank I do not like any one to deny his
origin."
"Oh, you are a thorough democrat," said Monte Cristo,
smiling.
"But do you see to what you are exposing yourself?" said the
baroness. "If, perchance, M. de Morcerf came, he would find
M. Cavalcanti in that room, where he, the betrothed of
Eugenie, has never been admitted."
"You may well say, perchance," replied the banker "for he
comes so seldom, it would seem only chance that brings him."
"But should he come and find that young man with your
daughter, he might be displeased."
"He? You are mistaken. M. Albert would not do us the honor
to be jealous he does not like Eugenie sufficiently.
Besides, I care not for his displeasure."
"Still, situated as we are" 
"Yes, do you know how we are situated? At his mother's ball
he danced once with Eugenie, and M. Cavalcanti three times,
and he took no notice of it." The valet announced the
Vicomte Albert de Morcerf. The baroness rose hastily, and
was going into the study, when Danglars stopped her. "Let
her alone," said he. She looked at him in amazement. Monte
Cristo appeared to be unconscious of what passed. Albert
entered, looking very handsome and in high spirits. He bowed
politely to the baroness, familiarly to Danglars, and
affectionately to Monte Cristo. Then turning to the
baroness "May I ask how Mademoiselle Danglars is?" said he.
"She is quite well," replied Danglars quickly "she is at
the piano with M. Cavalcanti." Albert retained his calm and
indifferent manner he might feel perhaps annoyed, but he
knew Monte Cristo's eye was on him. "M. Cavalcanti has a
fine tenor voice," said he, "and Mademoiselle Eugenie a
splendid soprano, and then she plays the piano like
Thalberg. The concert must be a delightful one."
"They suit each other remarkably well," said Danglars.
Albert appeared not to notice this remark, which was,
however, so rude that Madame Danglars blushed.
"I, too," said the young man, "am a musician  at least, my
masters used to tell me so but it is strange that my voice
never would suit any other, and a soprano less than any."
Danglars smiled, and seemed to say, "It is of no
consequence." Then, hoping doubtless to effect his purpose,
he said,  "The prince and my daughter were universally
admired yesterday. You were not of the party, M. de
Morcerf?"
"What prince?" asked Albert. "Prince Cavalcanti," said
Danglars, who persisted in giving the young man that title.
"Pardon me," said Albert, "I was not aware that he was a
prince. And Prince Cavalcanti sang with Mademoiselle Eugenie
yesterday? It must have been charming, indeed. I regret not
having heard them. But I was unable to accept your
invitation, having promised to accompany my mother to a
German concert given by the Baroness of ChateauRenaud."
This was followed by rather an awkward silence. "May I also
be allowed," said Morcerf, "to pay my respects to
Mademoiselle Danglars?" "Wait a moment," said the banker,
stopping the young man "do you hear that delightful
cavatina? Ta, ta, ta, ti, ta, ti, ta, ta it is charming,
let them finish  one moment. Bravo, bravi, brava" The
banker was enthusiastic in his applause.
"Indeed," said Albert, "it is exquisite it is impossible to
understand the music of his country better than Prince
Cavalcanti does. You said prince, did you not? But he can
easily become one, if he is not already it is no uncommon
thing in Italy. But to return to the charming musicians 
you should give us a treat, Danglars, without telling them
there is a stranger. Ask them to sing one more song it is
so delightful to hear music in the distance, when the
musicians are unrestrained by observation."
Danglars was quite annoyed by the young man's indifference.
He took Monte Cristo aside. "What do you think of our
lover?" said he.
"He appears cool. But, then your word is given."
"Yes, doubtless I have promised to give my daughter to a man
who loves her, but not to one who does not. See him there,
cold as marble and proud like his father. If he were rich,
if he had Cavalcanti's fortune, that might be pardoned. Ma
foi, I haven't consulted my daughter but if she has good
taste" 
"Oh," said Monte Cristo, "my fondness may blind me, but I
assure you I consider Morcerf a charming young man who will
render your daughter happy and will sooner or later attain a
certain amount of distinction, and his father's position is
good."
"Hem," said Danglars.
"Why do you doubt?"
"The past  that obscurity on the past."
"But that does not affect the son."
"Very true."
"Now, I beg of you, don't go off your head. It's a month now
that you have been thinking of this marriage, and you must
see that it throws some responsibility on me, for it was at
my house you met this young Cavalcanti, whom I do not really
know at all."
"But I do."
"Have you made inquiry?"
"Is there any need of that Does not his appearance speak
for him? And he is very rich."
"I am not so sure of that."
"And yet you said he had money."
"Fifty thousand livres  a mere trifle."
"He is well educated."
"Hem," said Monte Cristo in his turn.
"He is a musician."
"So are all Italians."
"Come, count, you do not do that young man justice."
"Well, I acknowledge it annoys me, knowing your connection
with the Morcerf family, to see him throw himself in the
way." Danglars burst out laughing. "What a Puritan you are"
said he "that happens every day."
"But you cannot break it off in this way the Morcerfs are
depending on this union."
"Indeed."
"Positively."
"Then let them explain themselves you should give the
father a hint, you are so intimate with the family."
"I?  where the devil did you find out that?"
"At their ball it was apparent enough. Why, did not the
countess, the proud Mercedes, the disdainful Catalane, who
will scarcely open her lips to her oldest acquaintances,
take your arm, lead you into the garden, into the private
walks, and remain there for half an hour?"
"Ah, baron, baron," said Albert, "you are not listening 
what barbarism in a megalomaniac like you"
"Oh, don't worry about me, Sir Mocker," said Danglars then
turning to the count he said, "but will you undertake to
speak to the father?"
"Willingly, if you wish it."
"But let it be done explicitly and positively. If he demands
my daughter let him fix the day  declare his conditions
in short, let us either understand each other, or quarrel.
You understand  no more delay."
"Yes. sir, I will give my attention to the subject."
"I do not say that I await with pleasure his decision, but I
do await it. A banker must, you know, be a slave to his
promise." And Danglars sighed as M. Cavalcanti had done half
an hour before. "Bravi, bravo, brava" cried Morcerf,
parodying the banker, as the selection came to an end.
Danglars began to look suspiciously at Morcerf, when some
one came and whispered a few words to him. "I shall soon
return," said the banker to Monte Cristo "wait for me. I
shall, perhaps, have something to say to you." And he went
out.
The baroness took advantage of her husband's absence to push
open the door of her daughter's study, and M. Andrea, who
was sitting before the piano with Mademoiselle Eugenie,
started up like a jackinthebox. Albert bowed with a smile
to Mademoiselle Danglars, who did not appear in the least
disturbed, and returned his bow with her usual coolness.
Cavalcanti was evidently embarrassed he bowed to Morcerf,
who replied with the most impertinent look possible. Then
Albert launched out in praise of Mademoiselle Danglars'
voice, and on his regret, after what he had just heard, that
he had been unable to be present the previous evening.
Cavalcanti, being left alone, turned to Monte Cristo.
"Come," said Madame Danglars, "leave music and compliments,
and let us go and take tea."
"Come, Louise," said Mademoiselle Danglars to her friend.
They passed into the next drawingroom, where tea was
prepared. Just as they were beginning, in the English
fashion, to leave the spoons in their cups, the door again
opened and Danglars entered, visibly agitated. Monte Cristo
observed it particularly, and by a look asked the banker for
an explanation. "I have just received my courier from
Greece," said Danglars.
"Ah, yes," said the count "that was the reason of your
running away from us."
"Yes."
"How is King Otho getting on?" asked Albert in the most
sprightly tone. Danglars cast another suspicious look
towards him without answering, and Monte Cristo turned away
to conceal the expression of pity which passed over his
features, but which was gone in a moment. "We shall go
together, shall we not?" said Albert to the count.
"If you like," replied the latter. Albert could not
understand the banker's look, and turning to Monte Cristo,
who understood it perfectly,  "Did you see," said he, "how
he looked at me?"
"Yes," said the count "but did you think there was anything
particular in his look?"
"Indeed, I did and what does he mean by his news from
Greece?"
"How can I tell you?"
"Because I imagine you have correspondents in that country."
Monte Cristo smiled significantly.
"Stop," said Albert, "here he comes. I shall compliment
Mademoiselle Danglars on her cameo, while the father talks
to you."
"If you compliment her at all, let it be on her voice, at
least," said Monte Cristo.
"No, every one would do that."
"My dear viscount, you are dreadfully impertinent." Albert
advanced towards Eugenie, smiling. Meanwhile, Danglars,
stooping to Monte Cristo's ear, "Your advice was excellent,"
said he "there is a whole history connected with the names
Fernand and Yanina."
"Indeed?" said Monte Cristo.
"Yes, I will tell you all but take away the young man I
cannot endure his presence."
"He is going with me. Shall I send the father to you?"
"Immediately."
"Very well." The count made a sign to Albert and they bowed
to the ladies, and took their leave, Albert perfectly
indifferent to Mademoiselle Danglars' contempt, Monte Cristo
reiterating his advice to Madame Danglars on the prudence a
banker's wife should exercise in providing for the future.
M. Cavalcanti remained master of the field.
Chapter 
Haidee.
Scarcely had the count's horses cleared the angle of the
boulevard, than Albert, turning towards the count, burst
into a loud fit of laughter  much too loud in fact not to
give the idea of its being rather forced and unnatural.
"Well," said he, "I will ask you the same question which
Charles IX. put to Catherine de Medicis, after the massacre
of Saint Bartholomew, "How have I played my little part?'"
"To what do you allude?" asked Monte Cristo.
"To the installation of my rival at M. Danglars'."
"What rival?"
"Ma foi, what rival? Why, your protege, M. Andrea
Cavalcanti"
"Ah, no joking, viscount, if you please I do not patronize
M. Andrea  at least, not as concerns M. Danglars."
"And you would be to blame for not assisting him, if the
young man really needed your help in that quarter, but,
happily for me, he can dispense with it."
"What, do you think he is paying his addresses?"
"I am certain of it his languishing looks and modulated
tones when addressing Mademoiselle Danglars fully proclaim
his intentions. He aspires to the hand of the proud
Eugenie."
"What does that signify, so long as they favor your suit?"
"But it is not the case, my dear count on the contrary. I
am repulsed on all sides."
"What"
"It is so indeed Mademoiselle Eugenie scarcely answers me,
and Mademoiselle d'Armilly, her confidant, does not speak to
me at all."
"But the father has the greatest regard possible for you,"
said Monte Cristo.
"He? Oh, no, he has plunged a thousand daggers into my
heart, tragedyweapons, I own, which instead of wounding
sheathe their points in their own handles, but daggers which
he nevertheless believed to be real and deadly."
"Jealousy indicates affection."
"True but I am not jealous."
"He is."
"Of whom?  of Debray?"
"No, of you."
"Of me? I will engage to say that before a week is past the
door will be closed against me."
"You are mistaken, my dear viscount."
"Prove it to me."
"Do you wish me to do so?"
"Yes."
"Well, I am charged with the commission of endeavoring to
induce the Comte de Morcerf to make some definite
arrangement with the baron."
"By whom are you charged?"
"By the baron himself."
"Oh," said Albert with all the cajolery of which he was
capable. "You surely will not do that, my dear count?"
"Certainly I shall, Albert, as I have promised to do it."
"Well," said Albert, with a sigh, "it seems you are
determined to marry me."
"I am determined to try and be on good terms with everybody,
at all events," said Monte Cristo. "But apropos of Debray,
how is it that I have not seen him lately at the baron's
house?"
"There has been a misunderstanding."
"What, with the baroness?"
"No, with the baron."
"Has he perceived anything?"
"Ah, that is a good joke"
"Do you think he suspects?" said Monte Cristo with charming
artlessness.
"Where have you come from, my dear count?" said Albert.
"From Congo, if you will."
"It must be farther off than even that."
"But what do I know of your Parisian husbands?"
"Oh, my dear count, husbands are pretty much the same
everywhere an individual husband of any country is a pretty
fair specimen of the whole race."
"But then, what can have led to the quarrel between Danglars
and Debray? They seemed to understand each other so well,"
said Monte Cristo with renewed energy.
"Ah, now you are trying to penetrate into the mysteries of
Isis, in which I am not initiated. When M. Andrea Cavalcanti
has become one of the family, you can ask him that
question." The carriage stopped. "Here we are," said Monte
Cristo "it is only halfpast ten o'clock, come in."
"Certainly I will."
"My carriage shall take you back."
"No, thank you I gave orders for my coupe to follow me."
"There it is, then," said Monte Cristo, as he stepped out of
the carriage. They both went into the house the
drawingroom was lighted up  they went in there. "You will
make tea for us, Baptistin," said the count. Baptistin left
the room without waiting to answer, and in two seconds
reappeared, bringing on a waiter all that his master had
ordered, ready prepared, and appearing to have sprung from
the ground, like the repasts which we read of in fairy
tales. "Really, my dear count," said Morcerf. "what I admire
in you is, not so much your riches, for perhaps there are
people even wealthier than yourself, nor is it only your
wit, for Beaumarchais might have possessed as much,  but
it is your manner of being served, without any questions, in
a moment, in a second it is as if they guessed what you
wanted by your manner of ringing, and made a point of
keeping everything you can possibly desire in constant
readiness."
"What you say is perhaps true they know my habits. For
instance, you shall see how do you wish to occupy yourself
during teatime?"
"Ma foi, I should like to smoke."
Monte Cristo took the gong and struck it once. In about the
space of a second a private door opened, and Ali appeared,
bringing two chibouques filled with excellent latakia. "It
is quite wonderful," said Albert.
"Oh no, it is as simple as possible," replied Monte Cristo.
"Ali knows I generally smoke while I am taking my tea or
coffee he has heard that I ordered tea, and he also knows
that I brought you home with me when I summoned him he
naturally guessed the reason of my doing so, and as he comes
from a country where hospitality is especially manifested
through the medium of smoking, he naturally concludes that
we shall smoke in company, and therefore brings two
chibouques instead of one  and now the mystery is solved."
"Certainly you give a most commonplace air to your
explanation, but it is not the less true that you  Ah, but
what do I hear?" and Morcerf inclined his head towards the
door, through which sounds seemed to issue resembling those
of a guitar.
"Ma foi, my dear viscount, you are fated to hear music this
evening you have only escaped from Mademoiselle Danglars'
piano, to be attacked by Haidee's guzla."
"Haidee  what an adorable name Are there, then, really
women who bear the name of Haidee anywhere but in Byron's
poems?"
"Certainly there are. Haidee is a very uncommon name in
France, but is common enough in Albania and Epirus it is as
it you said, for example, Chastity, Modesty, Innocence, 
it is a kind of baptismal name, as you Parisians call it."
"Oh, that is charming," said Albert, "how I should like to
hear my countrywomen called Mademoiselle Goodness,
Mademoiselle Silence, Mademoiselle Christian Charity Only
think, then, if Mademoiselle Danglars, instead of being
called ClaireMarieEugenie, had been named Mademoiselle
ChastityModestyInnocence Danglars what a fine effect that
would have produced on the announcement of her marriage"
"Hush," said the count, "do not joke in so loud a tone
Haidee may hear you, perhaps."
"And you think she would be angry?"
"No, certainly not," said the count with a haughty
expression.
"She is very amiable, then, is she not?" said Albert.
"It is not to be called amiability, it is her duty a slave
does not dictate to a master."
"Come you are joking yourself now. Are there any more
slaves to be had who bear this beautiful name?"
"Undoubtedly."
"Really, count, you do nothing, and have nothing like other
people. The slave of the Count of Monte Cristo Why, it is a
rank of itself in France, and from the way in which you
lavish money, it is a place that must be worth a hundred
thousand francs a year."
"A hundred thousand francs The poor girl originally
possessed much more than that she was born to treasures in
comparison with which those recorded in the "Thousand and
One Nights' would seem but poverty."
"She must be a princess then."
"You are right and she is one of the greatest in her
country too."
"I thought so. But how did it happen that such a great
princess became a slave?"
"How was it that Dionysius the Tyrant became a schoolmaster?
The fortune of war, my dear viscount,  the caprice of
fortune that is the way in which these things are to be
accounted for."
"And is her name a secret?"
"As regards the generality of mankind it is but not for
you, my dear viscount, who are one of my most intimate
friends, and on whose silence I feel I may rely, if I
consider it necessary to enjoin it  may I not do so?"
"Certainly on my word of honor."
"You know the history of the pasha of Yanina, do you not?"
"Of Ali Tepelini? Oh, yes it was in his service that my
father made his fortune."
"True, I had forgotten that."
 Ali Pasha, "The Lion," was born at Tepelini, an Albanian
village at the foot of the Klissoura Mountains, in . By
diplomacy and success in arms he became almost supreme ruler
of Albania, Epirus, and adjacent territory. Having aroused
the enmity of the Sultan, he was proscribed and put to death
by treachery in , at the age of eighty.  Ed.
"Well, what is Haidee to Ali Tepelini?"
"Merely his daughter."
"What? the daughter of Ali Pasha?"
"Of Ali Pasha and the beautiful Vasiliki."
"And your slave?"
"Ma foi, yes."
"But how did she become so?"
"Why, simply from the circumstance of my having bought her
one day, as I was passing through the market at
Constantinople."
"Wonderful Really, my dear count, you seem to throw a sort
of magic influence over all in which you are concerned when
I listen to you, existence no longer seems reality, but a
waking dream. Now, I am perhaps going to make an imprudent
and thoughtless request, but" 
"Say on."
"But, since you go out with Haidee, and sometimes even take
her to the opera" 
"Well?"
"I think I may venture to ask you this favor."
"You may venture to ask me anything."
"Well then, my dear count, present me to your princess."
"I will do so but on two conditions."
"I accept them at once."
"The first is, that you will never tell any one that I have
granted the interview."
"Very well," said Albert, extending his hand "I swear I
will not."
"The second is, that you will not tell her that your father
ever served hers."
"I give you my oath that I will not."
"Enough, viscount you will remember those two vows, will
you not? But I know you to be a man of honor." The count
again struck the gong. Ali reappeared. "Tell Haidee," said
he, "that I will take coffee with her, and give her to
understand that I desire permission to present one of my
friends to her." Ali bowed and left the room. "Now,
understand me," said the count, "no direct questions, my
dear Morcerf if you wish to know anything, tell me, and I
will ask her."
"Agreed." Ali reappeared for the third time, and drew back
the tapestried hanging which concealed the door, to signify
to his master and Albert that they were at liberty to pass
on. "Let us go in," said Monte Cristo.
Albert passed his hand through his hair, and curled his
mustache, then, having satisfied himself as to his personal
appearance, followed the count into the room, the latter
having previously resumed his hat and gloves. Ali was
stationed as a kind of advanced guard, and the door was kept
by the three French attendants, commanded by Myrtho. Haidee
was awaiting her visitors in the first room of her
apartments, which was the drawingroom. Her large eyes were
dilated with surprise and expectation, for it was the first
time that any man, except Monte Cristo, had been accorded an
entrance into her presence. She was sitting on a sofa placed
in an angle of the room, with her legs crossed under her in
the Eastern fashion, and seemed to have made for herself, as
it were, a kind of nest in the rich Indian silks which
enveloped her. Near her was the instrument on which she had
just been playing it was elegantly fashioned, and worthy of
its mistress. On perceiving Monte Cristo, she arose and
welcomed him with a smile peculiar to herself, expressive at
once of the most implicit obedience and also of the deepest
love. Monte Cristo advanced towards her and extended his
hand, which she as usual raised to her lips.
Albert had proceeded no farther than the door, where he
remained rooted to the spot, being completely fascinated by
the sight of such surpassing beauty, beheld as it was for
the first time, and of which an inhabitant of more northern
climes could form no adequate idea.
"Whom do you bring?" asked the young girl in Romaic, of
Monte Cristo "is it a friend, a brother, a simple
acquaintance, or an enemy."
"A friend," said Monte Cristo in the same language.
"What is his name?"
"Count Albert it is the same man whom I rescued from the
hands of the banditti at Rome."
"In what language would you like me to converse with him?"
Monte Cristo turned to Albert. "Do you know modern Greek,"
asked he.
"Alas, no," said Albert "nor even ancient Greek, my dear
count never had Homer or Plato a more unworthy scholar than
myself."
"Then," said Haidee, proving by her remark that she had
quite understood Monte Cristo's question and Albert's
answer, "then I will speak either in French or Italian, if
my lord so wills it."
Monte Cristo reflected one instant. "You will speak in
Italian," said he. Then, turning towards Albert,  "It is a
pity you do not understand either ancient or modern Greek,
both of which Haidee speaks so fluently the poor child will
be obliged to talk to you in Italian, which will give you
but a very false idea of her powers of conversation." The
count made a sign to Haidee to address his visitor. "Sir,"
she said to Morcerf, "you are most welcome as the friend of
my lord and master." This was said in excellent Tuscan, and
with that soft Roman accent which makes the language of
Dante as sonorous as that of Homer. Then, turning to Ali,
she directed him to bring coffee and pipes, and when he had
left the room to execute the orders of his young mistress
she beckoned Albert to approach nearer to her. Monte Cristo
and Morcerf drew their seats towards a small table, on which
were arranged music, drawings, and vases of flowers. Ali
then entered bringing coffee and chibouques as to M.
Baptistin, this portion of the building was interdicted to
him. Albert refused the pipe which the Nubian offered him.
"Oh, take it  take it," said the count "Haidee is almost
as civilized as a Parisian the smell of an Havana is
disagreeable to her, but the tobacco of the East is a most
delicious perfume, you know."
Ali left the room. The cups of coffee were all prepared,
with the addition of sugar, which had been brought for
Albert. Monte Cristo and Haidee took the beverage in the
original Arabian manner, that is to say, without sugar.
Haidee took the porcelain cup in her little slender fingers
and conveyed it to her mouth with all the innocent
artlessness of a child when eating or drinking something
which it likes. At this moment two women entered, bringing
salvers filled with ices and sherbet, which they placed on
two small tables appropriated to that purpose. "My dear
host, and you, signora," said Albert, in Italian, "excuse my
apparent stupidity. I am quite bewildered, and it is natural
that it should be so. Here I am in the heart of Paris but a
moment ago I heard the rumbling of the omnibuses and the
tinkling of the bells of the lemonadesellers, and now I
feel as if I were suddenly transported to the East not such
as I have seen it, but such as my dreams have painted it.
Oh, signora, if I could but speak Greek, your conversation,
added to the fairyscene which surrounds me, would furnish
an evening of such delight as it would be impossible for me
ever to forget."
"I speak sufficient Italian to enable me to converse with
you, sir," said Haidee quietly "and if you like what is
Eastern, I will do my best to secure the gratification of
your tastes while you are here."
"On what subject shall I converse with her?" said Albert, in
a low tone to Monte Cristo.
"Just what you please you may speak of her country and of
her youthful reminiscences, or if you like it better you can
talk of Rome, Naples, or Florence."
"Oh," said Albert, "it is of no use to be in the company of
a Greek if one converses just in the same style as with a
Parisian let me speak to her of the East."
"Do so then, for of all themes which you could choose that
will be the most agreeable to her taste." Albert turned
towards Haidee. "At what age did you leave Greece, signora?"
asked he.
"I left it when I was but five years old," replied Haidee.
"And have you any recollection of your country?"
"When I shut my eyes and think, I seem to see it all again.
The mind can see as well as the body. The body forgets
sometimes  but the mind never forgets."
"And how far back into the past do your recollections
extend?"
"I could scarcely walk when my mother, who was called
Vasiliki, which means royal," said the young girl, tossing
her head proudly, "took me by the hand, and after putting in
our purse all the money we possessed, we went out, both
covered with veils, to solicit alms for the prisoners,
saying, "He who giveth to the poor lendeth to the Lord.'
Then when our purse was full we returned to the palace, and
without saying a word to my father, we sent it to the
convent, where it was divided amongst the prisoners."
"And how old were you at that time?"
"I was three years old," said Haidee.
"Then you remember everything that went on about you from
the time when you were three years old?" said Albert.
"Everything."
"Count," said Albert, in a low tone to Monte Cristo, "do
allow the signora to tell me something of her history. You
prohibited my mentioning my father's name to her, but
perhaps she will allude to him of her own accord in the
course of the recital, and you have no idea how delighted I
should be to hear our name pronounced by such beautiful
lips." Monte Cristo turned to Haidee, and with an expression
of countenance which commanded her to pay the most implicit
attention to his words, he said in Greek,  "Tell us the
fate of your father but neither the name of the traitor nor
the treason." Haidee sighed deeply, and a shade of sadness
clouded her beautiful brow.
"What are you saying to her?" said Morcerf in an undertone.
"I again reminded her that you were a friend, and that she
need not conceal anything from you."
"Then," said Albert, "this pious pilgrimage in behalf of the
prisoners was your first remembrance what is the next?"
"Oh, then I remember as if it were but yesterday sitting
under the shade of some sycamoretrees, on the borders of a
lake, in the waters of which the trembling foliage was
reflected as in a mirror. Under the oldest and thickest of
these trees, reclining on cushions, sat my father my mother
was at his feet, and I, childlike, amused myself by playing
with his long white beard which descended to his girdle, or
with the diamondhilt of the scimitar attached to his
girdle. Then from time to time there came to him an Albanian
who said something to which I paid no attention, but which
he always answered in the same tone of voice, either "Kill,'
or "Pardon.'"
"It is very strange," said Albert, "to hear such words
proceed from the mouth of any one but an actress on the
stage, and one needs constantly to be saying to one's self,
"This is no fiction, it is all reality,' in order to believe
it. And how does France appear in your eyes, accustomed as
they have been to gaze on such enchanted scenes?"
"I think it is a fine country," said Haidee, "but I see
France as it really is, because I look on it with the eyes
of a woman whereas my own country, which I can only judge
of from the impression produced on my childish mind, always
seems enveloped in a vague atmosphere, which is luminous or
otherwise, according as my remembrances of it are sad or
joyous."
"So young," said Albert, forgetting at the moment the
Count's command that he should ask no questions of the slave
herself, "is it possible that you can have known what
suffering is except by name?"
Haidee turned her eyes towards Monte Cristo, who, making at
the same time some imperceptible sign, murmured,  "Go on."
"Nothing is ever so firmly impressed on the mind as the
memory of our early childhood, and with the exception of the
two scenes I have just described to you, all my earliest
reminiscences are fraught with deepest sadness."
"Speak, speak, signora," said Albert, "I am listening with
the most intense delight and interest to all you say."
Haidee answered his remark with a melancholy smile. "You
wish me, then, to relate the history of my past sorrows?"
said she.
"I beg you to do so," replied Albert.
"Well, I was but four years old when one night I was
suddenly awakened by my mother. We were in the palace of
Yanina she snatched me from the cushions on which I was
sleeping, and on opening my eyes I saw hers filled with
tears. She took me away without speaking. When I saw her
weeping I began to cry too. "Hush, child' said she. At
other times in spite of maternal endearments or threats, I
had with a child's caprice been accustomed to indulge my
feelings of sorrow or anger by crying as much as I felt
inclined but on this occasion there was an intonation of
such extreme terror in my mother's voice when she enjoined
me to silence, that I ceased crying as soon as her command
was given. She bore me rapidly away.
"I saw then that we were descending a large staircase
around us were all my mother's servants carrying trunks,
bags, ornaments, jewels, purses of gold, with which they
were hurrying away in the greatest distraction.
"Behind the women came a guard of twenty men armed with long
guns and pistols, and dressed in the costume which the
Greeks have assumed since they have again become a nation.
You may imagine there was something startling and ominous,"
said Haidee, shaking her head and turning pale at the mere
remembrance of the scene, "in this long file of slaves and
women only halfaroused from sleep, or at least so they
appeared to me, who was myself scarcely awake. Here and
there on the walls of the staircase, were reflected gigantic
shadows, which trembled in the flickering light of the
pinetorches till they seemed to reach to the vaulted roof
above.
""Quick' said a voice at the end of the gallery. This voice
made every one bow before it, resembling in its effect the
wind passing over a field of wheat, by its superior strength
forcing every ear to yield obeisance. As for me, it made me
tremble. This voice was that of my father. He came last,
clothed in his splendid robes and holding in his hand the
carbine which your emperor presented him. He was leaning on
the shoulder of his favorite Selim, and he drove us all
before him, as a shepherd would his straggling flock. My
father," said Haidee, raising her head, "was that
illustrious man known in Europe under the name of Ali
Tepelini, pasha of Yanina, and before whom Turkey trembled."
Albert, without knowing why, started on hearing these words
pronounced with such a haughty and dignified accent it
appeared to him as if there was something supernaturally
gloomy and terrible in the expression which gleamed from the
brilliant eyes of Haidee at this moment she appeared like a
Pythoness evoking a spectre, as she recalled to his mind the
remembrance of the fearful death of this man, to the news of
which all Europe had listened with horror. "Soon," said
Haidee, "we halted on our march, and found ourselves on the
borders of a lake. My mother pressed me to her throbbing
heart, and at the distance of a few paces I saw my father,
who was glancing anxiously around. Four marble steps led
down to the water's edge, and below them was a boat floating
on the tide.
"From where we stood I could see in the middle of the lake a
large blank mass it was the kiosk to which we were going.
This kiosk appeared to me to be at a considerable distance,
perhaps on account of the darkness of the night, which
prevented any object from being more than partially
discerned. We stepped into the boat. I remember well that
the oars made no noise whatever in striking the water, and
when I leaned over to ascertain the cause I saw that they
were muffled with the sashes of our Palikares. Besides the
rowers, the boat contained only the women, my father,
mother, Selim, and myself. The Palikares had remained on the
shore of the lake, ready to cover our retreat they were
kneeling on the lowest of the marble steps, and in that
manner intended making a rampart of the three others, in
case of pursuit. Our bark flew before the wind. "Why does
the boat go so fast?' asked I of my mother.
 Greek militiamen in the war for independence.  Ed.
""Silence, child Hush, we are flying' I did not
understand. Why should my father fly?  he, the
allpowerful  he, before whom others were accustomed to
fly  he, who had taken for his device, "They hate me then
they fear me' It was, indeed, a flight which my father was
trying to effect. I have been told since that the garrison
of the castle of Yanina, fatigued with long service" 
Here Haidee cast a significant glance at Monte Cristo, whose
eyes had been riveted on her countenance during the whole
course of her narrative. The young girl then continued,
speaking slowly, like a person who is either inventing or
suppressing some feature of the history which he is
relating. "You were saying, signora," said Albert, who was
paying the most implicit attention to the recital, "that the
garrison of Yanina, fatigued with long service" 
"Had treated with the Serasker Koorshid, who had been sent
by the sultan to gain possession of the person of my father
it was then that Ali Tepelini  after having sent to the
sultan a French officer in whom he reposed great confidence
resolved to retire to the asylum which he had long before
prepared for himself, and which he called kataphygion, or
the refuge."
"And this officer," asked Albert, "do you remember his name,
signora?" Monte Cristo exchanged a rapid glance with the
young girl, which was quite unperceived by Albert. "No,"
said she, "I do not remember it just at this moment but if
it should occur to me presently, I will tell you." Albert
was on the point of pronouncing his father's name, when
Monte Cristo gently held up his finger in token of reproach
the young man recollected his promise, and was silent.
 A Turkish pasha in command of the troops of a province. 
Ed.
"It was towards this kiosk that we were rowing. A
groundfloor, ornamented with arabesques, bathing its
terraces in the water, and another floor, looking on the
lake, was all which was visible to the eye. But beneath the
groundfloor, stretching out into the island, was a large
subterranean cavern, to which my mother, myself, and the
women were conducted. In this place were together ,
pouches and  barrels the pouches contained ,, of
money in gold, and the barrels were filled with ,
pounds of gunpowder.
"Near the barrels stood Selim, my father's favorite, whom I
mentioned to you just now. He stood watch day and night with
a lance provided with a lighted slowmatch in his hand, and
he had orders to blow up everything  kiosk, guards, women,
gold, and Ali Tepelini himself  at the first signal given
by my father. I remember well that the slaves, convinced of
the precarious tenure on which they held their lives, passed
whole days and nights in praying, crying, and groaning. As
for me, I can never forget the pale complexion and black
eyes of the young soldier, and whenever the angel of death
summons me to another world, I am quite sure I shall
recognize Selim. I cannot tell you how long we remained in
this state at that period I did not even know what time
meant. Sometimes, but very rarely, my father summoned me and
my mother to the terrace of the palace these were hours of
recreation for me, as I never saw anything in the dismal
cavern but the gloomy countenances of the slaves and Selim's
fiery lance. My father was endeavoring to pierce with his
eager looks the remotest verge of the horizon, examining
attentively every black speck which appeared on the lake,
while my mother, reclining by his side, rested her head on
his shoulder, and I played at his feet, admiring everything
I saw with that unsophisticated innocence of childhood which
throws a charm round objects insignificant in themselves,
but which in its eyes are invested with the greatest
importance. The heights of Pindus towered above us the
castle of Yanina rose white and angular from the blue waters
of the lake, and the immense masses of black vegetation
which, viewed in the distance, gave the idea of lichens
clinging to the rocks, were in reality gigantic firtrees
and myrtles.
"One morning my father sent for us my mother had been
crying all the night, and was very wretched we found the
pasha calm, but paler than usual. "Take courage, Vasiliki,'
said he "today arrives the firman of the master, and my
fate will be decided. If my pardon be complete, we shall
return triumphant to Yanina if the news be inauspicious, we
must fly this night.'  "But supposing our enemy should not
allow us to do so?' said my mother. "Oh, make yourself easy
on that head,' said Ali, smiling "Selim and his flaming
lance will settle that matter. They would be glad to see me
dead, but they would not like themselves to die with me.'
"My mother only answered by sighs to consolations which she
knew did not come from my father's heart. She prepared the
iced water which he was in the habit of constantly drinking,
for since his sojourn at the kiosk he had been parched by
the most violent fever,  after which she anointed his
white beard with perfumed oil, and lighted his chibouque,
which he sometimes smoked for hours together, quietly
watching the wreaths of vapor that ascended in spiral clouds
and gradually melted away in the surrounding atmosphere.
Presently he made such a sudden movement that I was
paralyzed with fear. Then, without taking his eyes from the
object which had first attracted his attention, he asked for
his telescope. My mother gave it him, and as she did so,
looked whiter than the marble against which she leaned. I
saw my father's hand tremble. "A boat  two  three'
murmured my, father  "four' He then arose, seizing his
arms and priming his pistols. "Vasiliki,' said he to my
mother, trembling perceptibly, "the instant approaches which
will decide everything. In the space of half an hour we
shall know the emperor's answer. Go into the cavern with
Haidee.'  "I will not quit you,' said Vasiliki "if you
die, my lord, I will die with you.'  "Go to Selim' cried
my father. "Adieu, my lord,' murmured my mother, determining
quietly to await the approach of death. "Take away
Vasiliki' said my father to his Palikares.
"As for me, I had been forgotten in the general confusion I
ran toward Ali Tepelini he saw me hold out my arms to him,
and he stooped down and pressed my forehead with his lips.
Oh, how distinctly I remember that kiss  it was the last
he ever gave me, and I feel as if it were still warm on my
forehead. On descending, we saw through the latticework
several boats which were gradually becoming more distinct to
our view. At first they appeared like black specks, and now
they looked like birds skimming the surface of the waves.
During this time, in the kiosk at my father's feet, were
seated twenty Palikares, concealed from view by an angle of
the wall and watching with eager eyes the arrival of the
boats. They were armed with their long guns inlaid with
motherofpearl and silver, and cartridges in great numbers
were lying scattered on the floor. My father looked at his
watch, and paced up and down with a countenance expressive
of the greatest anguish. This was the scene which presented
itself to my view as I quitted my father after that last
kiss. My mother and I traversed the gloomy passage leading
to the cavern. Selim was still at his post, and smiled sadly
on us as we entered. We fetched our cushions from the other
end of the cavern, and sat down by Selim. In great dangers
the devoted ones cling to each other and, young as I was, I
quite understood that some imminent danger was hanging over
our heads."
Albert had often heard  not from his father, for he never
spoke on the subject, but from strangers  the description
of the last moments of the vizier of Yanina he had read
different accounts of his death, but the story seemed to
acquire fresh meaning from the voice and expression of the
young girl, and her sympathetic accent and the melancholy
expression of her countenance at once charmed and horrified
him. As to Haidee, these terrible reminiscences seemed to
have overpowered her for a moment, for she ceased speaking,
her head leaning on her hand like a beautiful flower bowing
beneath the violence of the storm and her eyes gazing on
vacancy indicated that she was mentally contemplating the
green summit of the Pindus and the blue waters of the lake
of Yanina, which, like a magic mirror, seemed to reflect the
sombre picture which she sketched. Monte Cristo looked at
her with an indescribable expression of interest and pity.
"Go on," said the count in the Romaic language.
Haidee looked up abruptly, as if the sonorous tones of Monte
Cristo's voice had awakened her from a dream and she
resumed her narrative. "It was about four o'clock in the
afternoon, and although the day was brilliant outofdoors,
we were enveloped in the gloomy darkness of the cavern. One
single, solitary light was burning there, and it appeared
like a star set in a heaven of blackness it was Selim's
flaming lance. My mother was a Christian, and she prayed.
Selim repeated from time to time the sacred words "God is
great' However, my mother had still some hope. As she was
coming down, she thought she recognized the French officer
who had been sent to Constantinople, and in whom my father
placed so much confidence for he knew that all the soldiers
of the French emperor were naturally noble and generous. She
advanced some steps towards the staircase, and listened.
"They are approaching,' said she "perhaps they bring us
peace and liberty'  "What do you fear, Vasiliki?' said
Selim, in a voice at once so gentle and yet so proud. "If
they do not bring us peace, we will give them war if they
do not bring life, we will give them death.' And he renewed
the flame of his lance with a gesture which made one think
of Dionysus of Crete. But I, being only a little child, was
terrified by this undaunted courage, which appeared to me
both ferocious and senseless, and I recoiled with horror
from the idea of the frightful death amidst fire and flames
which probably awaited us.
 The god of fruitfulness in Grecian mythology. In Crete he
was supposed to be slain in winter with the decay of
vegetation and to revive in the spring. Haidee's learned
reference is to the behavior of an actor in the Dionysian
festivals.  Ed.
"My mother experienced the same sensations, for I felt her
tremble. "Mamma, mamma,' said I, "are we really to be
killed?' And at the sound of my voice the slaves redoubled
their cries and prayers and lamentations. "My child,' said
Vasiliki, "may God preserve you from ever wishing for that
death which today you so much dread' Then, whispering to
Selim, she asked what were her master's orders. "If he send
me his poniard, it will signify that the emperor's
intentions are not favorable, and I am to set fire to the
powder if, on the contrary, he send me his ring, it will be
a sign that the emperor pardons him, and I am to extinguish
the match and leave the magazine untouched.'  "My friend,'
said my mother, "when your master's orders arrive, if it is
the poniard which he sends, instead of despatching us by
that horrible death which we both so much dread, you will
mercifully kill us with this same poniard, will you not?' 
"Yes, Vasiliki,' replied Selim tranquilly.
"Suddenly we heard loud cries and, listening, discerned
that they were cries of joy. The name of the French officer
who had been sent to Constantinople resounded on all sides
amongst our Palikares it was evident that he brought the
answer of the emperor, and that it was favorable."
"And do you not remember the Frenchman's name?" said
Morcerf, quite ready to aid the memory of the narrator.
Monte Cristo made a sign to him to be silent.
"I do not recollect it," said Haidee.
"The noise increased steps were heard approaching nearer
and nearer they were descending the steps leading to the
cavern. Selim made ready his lance. Soon a figure appeared
in the gray twilight at the entrance of the cave, formed by
the reflection of the few rays of daylight which had found
their way into this gloomy retreat. "Who are you?' cried
Selim. "But whoever you may be, I charge you not to advance
another step.'  "Long live the emperor' said the figure.
"He grants a full pardon to the Vizier Ali, and not only
gives him his life, but restores to him his fortune and his
possessions.' My mother uttered a cry of joy, and clasped me
to her bosom. "Stop,' said Selim, seeing that she was about
to go out "you see I have not yet received the ring,' 
"True,' said my mother. And she fell on her knees, at the
same time holding me up towards heaven, as if she desired,
while praying to God in my behalf, to raise me actually to
his presence."
And for the second time Haidee stopped, overcome by such
violent emotion that the perspiration stood upon her pale
brow, and her stifled voice seemed hardly able to find
utterance, so parched and dry were her throat and lips.
Monte Cristo poured a little iced water into a glass, and
presented it to her, saying with a mildness in which was
also a shade of command,  "Courage."
Haidee dried her eyes, and continued "By this time our
eyes, habituated to the darkness, had recognized the
messenger of the pasha,  it was a friend. Selim had also
recognized him, but the brave young man only acknowledged
one duty, which was to obey. "In whose name do you come?'
said he to him. "I come in the name of our master, Ali
Tepelini.'  "If you come from Ali himself,' said Selim,
"you know what you were charged to remit to me?'  "Yes,'
said the messenger, "and I bring you his ring.' At these
words he raised his hand above his head, to show the token
but it was too far off, and there was not light enough to
enable Selim, where he was standing, to distinguish and
recognize the object presented to his view. "I do not see
what you have in your hand,' said Selim. "Approach then,'
said the messenger, "or I will come nearer to you, if you
prefer it.'  "I will agree to neither one nor the other,'
replied the young soldier "place the object which I desire
to see in the ray of light which shines there, and retire
while I examine it.'  "Be it so,' said the envoy and he
retired, after having first deposited the token agreed on in
the place pointed out to him by Selim.
"Oh, how our hearts palpitated for it did, indeed, seem to
be a ring which was placed there. But was it my father's
ring? that was the question. Selim, still holding in his
hand the lighted match, walked towards the opening in the
cavern, and, aided by the faint light which streamed in
through the mouth of the cave, picked up the token.
""It is well,' said he, kissing it "it is my master's
ring' And throwing the match on the ground, he trampled on
it and extinguished it. The messenger uttered a cry of joy
and clapped his hands. At this signal four soldiers of the
Serasker Koorshid suddenly appeared, and Selim fell, pierced
by five blows. Each man had stabbed him separately, and,
intoxicated by their crime, though still pale with fear,
they sought all over the cavern to discover if there was any
fear of fire, after which they amused themselves by rolling
on the bags of gold. At this moment my mother seized me in
her arms, and hurrying noiselessly along numerous turnings
and windings known only to ourselves, she arrived at a
private staircase of the kiosk, where was a scene of
frightful tumult and confusion. The lower rooms were
entirely filled with Koorshid's troops that is to say, with
our enemies. Just as my mother was on the point of pushing
open a small door, we heard the voice of the pasha sounding
in a loud and threatening tone. My mother applied her eye to
the crack between the boards I luckily found a small
opening which afforded me a view of the apartment and what
was passing within. "What do you want?' said my father to
some people who were holding a paper inscribed with
characters of gold. "What we want,' replied one, "is to
communicate to you the will of his highness. Do you see this
firman?'  "I do,' said my father. "Well, read it he
demands your head.'
"My father answered with a loud laugh, which was more
frightful than even threats would have been, and he had not
ceased when two reports of a pistol were heard he had fired
them himself, and had killed two men. The Palikares, who
were prostrated at my father's feet, now sprang up and
fired, and the room was filled with fire and smoke. At the
same instant the firing began on the other side, and the
balls penetrated the boards all round us. Oh, how noble did
the grand vizier my father look at that moment, in the midst
of the flying bullets, his scimitar in his hand, and his
face blackened with the powder of his enemies and how he
terrified them, even then, and made them fly before him
"Selim, Selim' cried he, "guardian of the fire, do your
duty'  "Selim is dead,' replied a voice which seemed to
come from the depths of the earth, "and you are lost, Ali'
At the same moment an explosion was heard, and the flooring
of the room in which my father was sitting was suddenly torn
up and shivered to atoms  the troops were firing from
underneath. Three or four Palikares fell with their bodies
literally ploughed with wounds.
"My father howled aloud, plunged his fingers into the holes
which the balls had made, and tore up one of the planks
entire. But immediately through this opening twenty more
shots were fired, and the flame, rushing up like fire from
the crater of a volcano, soon reached the tapestry, which it
quickly devoured. In the midst of all this frightful tumult
and these terrific cries, two reports, fearfully distinct,
followed by two shrieks more heartrending than all, froze me
with terror. These two shots had mortally wounded my father,
and it was he who had given utterance to these frightful
cries. However, he remained standing, clinging to a window.
My mother tried to force the door, that she might go and die
with him, but it was fastened on the inside. All around him
were lying the Palikares, writhing in convulsive agonies,
while two or three who were only slightly wounded were
trying to escape by springing from the windows. At this
crisis the whole flooring suddenly gave way, my father fell
on one knee, and at the same moment twenty hands were thrust
forth, armed with sabres, pistols, and poniards  twenty
blows were instantaneously directed against one man, and my
father disappeared in a whirlwind of fire and smoke kindled
by these demons, and which seemed like hell itself opening
beneath his feet. I felt myself fall to the ground, my
mother had fainted."
Haidee's arms fell by her side, and she uttered a deep
groan, at the same time looking towards the count as if to
ask if he were satisfied with her obedience to his commands.
Monte Cristo arose and approached her, took her hand, and
said to her in Romaic, "Calm yourself, my dear child, and
take courage in remembering that there is a God who will
punish traitors."
"It is a frightful story, count," said Albert, terrified at
the paleness of Haidee's countenance, "and I reproach myself
now for having been so cruel and thoughtless in my request."
"Oh, it is nothing," said Monte Cristo. Then, patting the
young girl on the head, he continued, "Haidee is very
courageous, and she sometimes even finds consolation in the
recital of her misfortunes."
"Because, my lord," said Haidee eagerly, "my miseries recall
to me the remembrance of your goodness."
Albert looked at her with curiosity, for she had not yet
related what he most desired to know,  how she had become
the slave of the count. Haidee saw at a glance the same
expression pervading the countenances of her two auditors
she exclaimed, "When my mother recovered her senses we were
before the serasker. "Kill,' said she, "but spare the honor
of the widow of Ali.'  "It is not to me to whom you must
address yourself,' said Koorshid.
""To whom, then?'  "To your new master.'
""Who and where is he?'  "He is here.'
"And Koorshid pointed out one who had more than any
contributed to the death of my father," said Haidee, in a
tone of chastened anger. "Then," said Albert, "you became
the property of this man?"
"No," replied Haidee, "he did not dare to keep us, so we
were sold to some slavemerchants who were going to
Constantinople. We traversed Greece, and arrived half dead
at the imperial gates. They were surrounded by a crowd of
people, who opened a way for us to pass, when suddenly my
mother, having looked closely at an object which was
attracting their attention, uttered a piercing cry and fell
to the ground, pointing as she did so to a head which was
placed over the gates, and beneath which were inscribed
these words
""This is the head of Ali Tepelini Pasha of Yanina.' I cried
bitterly, and tried to raise my mother from the earth, but
she was dead I was taken to the slavemarket, and was
purchased by a rich Armenian. He caused me to be instructed,
gave me masters, and when I was thirteen years of age he
sold me to the Sultan Mahmood."
"Of whom I bought her," said Monte Cristo, "as I told you,
Albert, with the emerald which formed a match to the one I
had made into a box for the purpose of holding my hashish
pills."
"Oh, you are good, you are great, my lord" said Haidee,
kissing the count's hand, "and I am very fortunate in
belonging to such a master" Albert remained quite
bewildered with all that he had seen and heard. "Come,
finish your cup of coffee," said Monte Cristo "the history
is ended."
Chapter 
We hear From Yanina.
If Valentine could have seen the trembling step and agitated
countenance of Franz when he quitted the chamber of M.
Noirtier, even she would have been constrained to pity him.
Villefort had only just given utterance to a few incoherent
sentences, and then retired to his study, where he received
about two hours afterwards the following letter 
"After all the disclosures which were made this morning, M.
Noirtier de Villefort must see the utter impossibility of
any alliance being formed between his family and that of M.
Franz d'Epinay. M. d'Epinay must say that he is shocked and
astonished that M. de Villefort, who appeared to be aware of
all the circumstances detailed this morning, should not have
anticipated him in this announcement."
No one who had seen the magistrate at this moment, so
thoroughly unnerved by the recent inauspicious combination
of circumstances, would have supposed for an instant that he
had anticipated the annoyance although it certainly never
had occurred to him that his father would carry candor, or
rather rudeness, so far as to relate such a history. And in
justice to Villefort, it must be understood that M.
Noirtier, who never cared for the opinion of his son on any
subject, had always omitted to explain the affair to
Villefort, so that he had all his life entertained the
belief that General de Quesnel, or the Baron d'Epinay, as he
was alternately styled, according as the speaker wished to
identify him by his own family name, or by the title which
had been conferred on him, fell the victim of assassination,
and not that he was killed fairly in a duel. This harsh
letter, coming as it did from a man generally so polite and
respectful, struck a mortal blow at the pride of Villefort.
Hardly had he read the letter, when his wife entered. The
sudden departure of Franz, after being summoned by M.
Noirtier, had so much astonished every one, that the
position of Madame de Villefort, left alone with the notary
and the witnesses, became every moment more embarrassing.
Determined to bear it no longer, she arose and left the
room saying she would go and make some inquiries into the
cause of his sudden disappearance.
M. de Villefort's communications on the subject were very
limited and concise he told her, in fact, that an
explanation had taken place between M. Noirtier, M.
d'Epinay, and himself, and that the marriage of Valentine
and Franz would consequently be broken off. This was an
awkward and unpleasant thing to have to report to those who
were awaiting her return in the chamber of her
fatherinlaw. She therefore contented herself with saying
that M. Noirtier having at the commencement of the
discussion been attacked by a sort of apoplectic fit, the
affair would necessarily be deferred for some days longer.
This news, false as it was following so singularly in the
train of the two similar misfortunes which had so recently
occurred, evidently astonished the auditors, and they
retired without a word. During this time Valentine, at once
terrified and happy, after having embraced and thanked the
feeble old man for thus breaking with a single blow the
chain which she had been accustomed to consider as
irrefragable, asked leave to retire to her own room, in
order to recover her composure. Noirtier looked the
permission which she solicited. But instead of going to her
own room, Valentine, having once gained her liberty, entered
the gallery, and, opening a small door at the end of it.
found herself at once in the garden.
In the midst of all the strange events which had crowded one
on the other, an indefinable sentiment of dread had taken
possession of Valentine's mind. She expected every moment
that she should see Morrel appear, pale and trembling, to
forbid the signing of the contract, like the Laird of
Ravenswood in "The Bride of Lammermoor." It was high time
for her to make her appearance at the gate, for Maximilian
had long awaited her coming. He had half guessed what was
going on when he saw Franz quit the cemetery with M. de
Villefort. He followed M. d'Epinay, saw him enter,
afterwards go out, and then reenter with Albert and
ChateauRenaud. He had no longer any doubts as to the nature
of the conference he therefore quickly went to the gate in
the cloverpatch, prepared to hear the result of the
proceedings, and very certain that Valentine would hasten to
him the first moment she should be set at liberty. He was
not mistaken peering through the crevices of the wooden
partition, he soon discovered the young girl, who cast aside
all her usual precautions and walked at once to the barrier.
The first glance which Maximilian directed towards her
entirely reassured him, and the first words she spoke made
his heart bound with delight.
"We are saved" said Valentine. "Saved?" repeated Morrel,
not being able to conceive such intense happiness "by
whom?"
"By my grandfather. Oh, Morrel, pray love him for all his
goodness to us" Morrel swore to love him with all his soul
and at that moment he could safely promise to do so, for he
felt as though it were not enough to love him merely as a
friend or even as a father. "But tell me, Valentine, how has
it all been effected? What strange means has he used to
compass this blessed end?"
Valentine was on the point of relating all that had passed,
but she suddenly remembered that in doing so she must reveal
a terrible secret which concerned others as well as her
grandfather, and she said, "At some future time I will tell
you all about it."
"But when will that be?"
"When I am your wife."
The conversation had now turned upon a topic so pleasing to
Morrel, that he was ready to accede to anything that
Valentine thought fit to propose, and he likewise felt that
a piece of intelligence such as he just heard ought to be
more than sufficient to content him for one day. However, he
would not leave without the promise of seeing Valentine
again the next night. Valentine promised all that Morrel
required of her, and certainly it was less difficult now for
her to believe that she should marry Maximilian than it was
an hour ago to assure herself that she should not marry
Franz. During the time occupied by the interview we have
just detailed, Madame de Villefort had gone to visit M.
Noirtier. The old man looked at her with that stern and
forbidding expression with which he was accustomed to
receive her.
"Sir," said she, "it is superfluous for me to tell you that
Valentine's marriage is broken off, since it was here that
the affair was concluded." Noirtier's countenance remained
immovable. "But one thing I can tell you, of which I do not
think you are aware that is, that I have always been
opposed to this marriage, and that the contract was entered
into entirely without my consent or approbation." Noirtier
regarded his daughterinlaw with the look of a man desiring
an explanation. "Now that this marriage, which I know you so
much disliked, is done away with, I come to you on an errand
which neither M. de Villefort nor Valentine could
consistently undertake." Noirtier's eyes demanded the nature
of her mission. "I come to entreat you, sir," continued
Madame de Villefort, "as the only one who has the right of
doing so, inasmuch as I am the only one who will receive no
personal benefit from the transaction,  I come to entreat
you to restore, not your love, for that she has always
possessed, but to restore your fortune to your
granddaughter."
There was a doubtful expression in Noirtier's eyes he was
evidently trying to discover the motive of this proceeding,
and he could not succeed in doing so. "May I hope, sir,"
said Madame de Villefort, "that your intentions accord with
my request?" Noirtier made a sign that they did. "In that
case, sir," rejoined Madame de Villefort, "I will leave you
overwhelmed with gratitude and happiness at your prompt
acquiescence to my wishes." She then bowed to M. Noirtier
and retired.
The next day M. Noirtier sent for the notary the first will
was torn up and a second made, in which he left the whole of
his fortune to Valentine, on condition that she should never
be separated from him. It was then generally reported that
Mademoiselle de Villefort, the heiress of the marquis and
marchioness of SaintMeran, had regained the good graces of
her grandfather, and that she would ultimately be in
possession of an income of , livres.
While all the proceedings relative to the dissolution of the
marriagecontract were being carried on at the house of M.
de Villefort, Monte Cristo had paid his visit to the Count
of Morcerf, who, in order to lose no time in responding to
M. Danglars' wishes, and at the same time to pay all due
deference to his position in society, donned his uniform of
lieutenantgeneral, which he ornamented with all his
crosses, and thus attired, ordered his finest horses and
drove to the Rue de la Chausse d'Antin.
Danglars was balancing his monthly accounts, and it was
perhaps not the most favorable moment for finding him in his
best humor. At the first sight of his old friend, Danglars
assumed his majestic air, and settled himself in his
easychair. Morcerf, usually so stiff and formal, accosted
the banker in an affable and smiling manner, and, feeling
sure that the overture he was about make would be well
received, he did not consider it necessary to adopt any
manoeuvres in order to gain his end, but went at once
straight to the point.
"Well, baron," said he, "here I am at last some time has
elapsed since our plans were formed, and they are not yet
executed." Morcerf paused at these words, quietly waiting
till the cloud should have dispersed which had gathered on
the brow of Danglars, and which he attributed to his
silence but, on the contrary, to his great surprise, it
grew darker and darker. "To what do you allude, monsieur?"
said Danglars as if he were trying in vain to guess at the
possible meaning of the general's words.
"Ah," said Morcerf, "I see you are a stickler for forms, my
dear sir, and you would remind me that the ceremonial rites
should not be omitted. Ma foi, I beg your pardon, but as I
have but one son, and it is the first time I have ever
thought of marrying him, I am still serving my
apprenticeship, you know come, I will reform." And Morcerf
with a forced smile arose, and, making a low bow to M.
Danglars, said "Baron, I have the honor of asking of you
the hand of Mademoiselle Eugenie Danglars for my son, the
Vicomte Albert de Morcerf."
But Danglars, instead of receiving this address in the
favorable manner which Morcerf had expected, knit his brow,
and without inviting the count, who was still standing, to
take a seat, he said "Monsieur, it will be necessary to
reflect before I give you an answer."
"To reflect?" said Morcerf, more and more astonished "have
you not had enough time for reflection during the eight
years which have elapsed since this marriage was first
discussed between us?"
"Count," said the banker, "things are constantly occurring
in the world to induce us to lay aside our most established
opinions, or at all events to cause us to remodel them
according to the change of circumstances, which may have
placed affairs in a totally different light to that in which
we at first viewed them."
"I do not understand you, baron," said Morcerf.
"What I mean to say is this, sir,  that during the last
fortnight unforeseen circumstances have occurred" 
"Excuse me," said Morcerf, "but is it a play we are acting?"
"A play?"
"Yes, for it is like one pray let us come more to the
point, and endeavor thoroughly to understand each other."
"That is quite my desire."
"You have seen M. de Monte Cristo have you not?"
"I see him very often," said Danglars, drawing himself up
"he is a particular friend of mine."
"Well, in one of your late conversations with him, you said
that I appeared to be forgetful and irresolute concerning
this marriage, did you not?"
"I did say so."
"Well, here I am, proving at once that I am really neither
the one nor the other, by entreating you to keep your
promise on that score."
Danglars did not answer. "Have you so soon changed your
mind," added Morcerf, "or have you only provoked my request
that you may have the pleasure of seeing me humbled?"
Danglars, seeing that if he continued the conversation in
the same tone in which he had begun it, the whole thing
might turn out to his own disadvantage, turned to Morcerf,
and said "Count, you must doubtless be surprised at my
reserve, and I assure you it costs me much to act in such a
manner towards you but, believe me when I say that
imperative necessity has imposed the painful task upon me."
"These are all so many empty words, my dear sir," said
Morcerf "they might satisfy a new acquaintance, but the
Comte de Morcerf does not rank in that list and when a man
like him comes to another, recalls to him his plighted word,
and this man fails to redeem the pledge, he has at least a
right to exact from him a good reason for so doing."
Danglars was a coward, but did not wish to appear so he was
piqued at the tone which Morcerf had just assumed. "I am not
without a good reason for my conduct," replied the banker.
"What do you mean to say?"
"I mean to say that I have a good reason, but that it is
difficult to explain."
"You must be aware, at all events, that it is impossible for
me to understand motives before they are explained to me
but one thing at least is clear, which is, that you decline
allying yourself with my family."
"No, sir," said Danglars "I merely suspend my decision,
that is all."
"And do you really flatter yourself that I shall yield to
all your caprices, and quietly and humbly await the time of
again being received into your good graces?"
"Then, count, if you will not wait, we must look upon these
projects as if they had never been entertained." The count
bit his lips till the blood almost started, to prevent the
ebullition of anger which his proud and irritable temper
scarcely allowed him to restrain understanding, however,
that in the present state of things the laugh would
decidedly be against him, he turned from the door, towards
which he had been directing his steps, and again confronted
the banker. A cloud settled on his brow, evincing decided
anxiety and uneasiness, instead of the expression of
offended pride which had lately reigned there. "My dear
Danglars," said Morcerf, "we have been acquainted for many
years, and consequently we ought to make some allowance for
each other's failings. You owe me an explanation, and really
it is but fair that I should know what circumstance has
occurred to deprive my son of your favor."
"It is from no personal illfeeling towards the viscount,
that is all I can say, sir," replied Danglars, who resumed
his insolent manner as soon as he perceived that Morcerf was
a little softened and calmed down. "And towards whom do you
bear this personal illfeeling, then?" said Morcerf, turning
pale with anger. The expression of the count's face had not
remained unperceived by the banker he fixed on him a look
of greater assurance than before, and said "You may,
perhaps, be better satisfied that I should not go farther
into particulars."
A tremor of suppressed rage shook the whole frame of the
count, and making a violent effort over himself, he said "I
have a right to insist on your giving me an explanation. Is
it Madame de Morcerf who has displeased you? Is it my
fortune which you find insufficient? Is it because my
opinions differ from yours?"
"Nothing of the kind, sir," replied Danglars "if such had
been the case, I only should have been to blame, inasmuch as
I was aware of all these things when I made the engagement.
No, do not seek any longer to discover the reason. I really
am quite ashamed to have been the cause of your undergoing
such severe selfexamination let us drop the subject, and
adopt the middle course of delay, which implies neither a
rupture nor an engagement. Ma foi, there is no hurry. My
daughter is only seventeen years old, and your son
twentyone. While we wait, time will be progressing, events
will succeed each other things which in the evening look
dark and obscure, appear but too clearly in the light of
morning, and sometimes the utterance of one word, or the
lapse of a single day, will reveal the most cruel
calumnies."
"Calumnies, did you say, sir?" cried Morcerf, turning livid
with rage. "Does any one dare to slander me?"
"Monsieur, I told you that I considered it best to avoid all
explanation."
"Then, sir, I am patiently to submit to your refusal?"
"Yes, sir, although I assure you the refusal is as painful
for me to give as it is for you to receive, for I had
reckoned on the honor of your alliance, and the breaking off
of a marriage contract always injures the lady more than the
gentleman."
"Enough, sir," said Morcerf, "we will speak no more on the
subject." And clutching his gloves in anger, he left the
apartment. Danglars observed that during the whole
conversation Morcerf had never once dared to ask if it was
on his own account that Danglars recalled his word. That
evening he had a long conference with several friends and
M. Cavalcanti, who had remained in the drawingroom with the
ladies, was the last to leave the banker's house.
The next morning, as soon as he awoke, Danglars asked for
the newspapers they were brought to him he laid aside
three or four, and at last fixed on the Impartial, the paper
of which Beauchamp was the chief editor. He hastily tore off
the cover, opened the journal with nervous precipitation,
passed contemptuously over the Paris jottings, and arriving
at the miscellaneous intelligence, stopped with a malicious
smile, at a paragraph headed "We hear from Yanina." "Very
good," observed Danglars, after having read the paragraph
"here is a little article on Colonel Fernand, which, if I am
not mistaken, would render the explanation which the Comte
de Morcerf required of me perfectly unnecessary."
At the same moment, that is, at nine o'clock in the morning,
Albert de Morcerf, dressed in a black coat buttoned up to
his chin, might have been seen walking with a quick and
agitated step in the direction of Monte Cristo's house in
the Champs Elysees. When he presented himself at the gate
the porter informed him that the Count had gone out about
half an hour previously. "Did he take Baptistin with him?"
"No, my lord."
"Call him, then I wish to speak to him." The concierge went
to seek the valet de chambre, and returned with him in an
instant.
"My good friend," said Albert, "I beg pardon for my
intrusion, but I was anxious to know from your own mouth if
your master was really out or not."
"He is really out, sir," replied Baptistin.
"Out, even to me?"
"I know how happy my master always is to receive the
vicomte," said Baptistin "and I should therefore never
think of including him in any general order."
"You are right and now I wish to see him on an affair of
great importance. Do you think it will be long before he
comes in?"
"No, I think not, for he ordered his breakfast at ten
o'clock."
"Well, I will go and take a turn in the Champs Elysees, and
at ten o'clock I will return here meanwhile, if the count
should come in, will you beg him not to go out again without
seeing me?"
"You may depend on my doing so, sir," said Baptistin.
Albert left the cab in which he had come at the count's
door, intending to take a turn on foot. As he was passing
the Allee des Veuves, he thought he saw the count's horses
standing at Gosset's shootinggallery he approached, and
soon recognized the coachman. "Is the count shooting in the
gallery?" said Morcerf.
"Yes, sir," replied the coachman. While he was speaking,
Albert had heard the report of two or three pistolshots. He
entered, and on his way met the waiter. "Excuse me, my
lord," said the lad "but will you have the kindness to wait
a moment?"
"What for, Philip?" asked Albert, who, being a constant
visitor there, did not understand this opposition to his
entrance.
"Because the person who is now in the gallery prefers being
alone, and never practices in the presence of any one."
"Not even before you, Philip? Then who loads his pistol?"
"His servant."
"A Nubian?"
"A negro."
"It is he, then."
"Do you know this gentleman?"
"Yes, and I am come to look for him he is a friend of
mine."
"Oh, that is quite another thing, then. I will go
immediately and inform him of your arrival." And Philip,
urged by his own curiosity, entered the gallery a second
afterwards, Monte Cristo appeared on the threshold. "I ask
your pardon, my dear count," said Albert, "for following you
here, and I must first tell you that it was not the fault of
your servants that I did so I alone am to blame for the
indiscretion. I went to your house, and they told me you
were out, but that they expected you home at ten o'clock to
breakfast. I was walking about in order to pass away the
time till ten o'clock, when I caught sight of your carriage
and horses."
"What you have just said induces me to hope that you intend
breakfasting with me."
"No, thank you, I am thinking of other things besides
breakfast just now perhaps we may take that meal at a later
hour and in worse company."
"What on earth are you talking of?"
"I am to fight today."
"For what?"
"I am going to fight" 
"Yes, I understand that, but what is the quarrel? People
fight for all sorts of reasons, you know."
"I fight in the cause of honor."
"Ah, that is something serious."
"So serious, that I come to beg you to render me a service."
"What is it?"
"To be my second."
"That is a serious matter, and we will not discuss it here
let us speak of nothing till we get home. Ali, bring me some
water." The count turned up his sleeves, and passed into the
little vestibule where the gentlemen were accustomed to wash
their hands after shooting. "Come in, my lord," said Philip
in a low tone, "and I will show you something droll."
Morcerf entered, and in place of the usual target, he saw
some playingcards fixed against the wall. At a distance
Albert thought it was a complete suit, for he counted from
the ace to the ten. "Ah, ha," said Albert, "I see you were
preparing for a game of cards."
"No," said the count, "I was making a suit."
"How?" said Albert.
"Those are really aces and twos which you see, but my shots
have turned them into threes, fives, sevens, eights, nines,
and tens." Albert approached. In fact, the bullets had
actually pierced the cards in the exact places which the
painted signs would otherwise have occupied, the lines and
distances being as regularly kept as if they had been ruled
with pencil. "Diable," said Morcerf.
"What would you have, my dear viscount?" said Monte Cristo,
wiping his hands on the towel which Ali had brought him "I
must occupy my leisure moments in some way or other. But
come, I am waiting for you." Both men entered Monte Cristo's
carriage, which in the course of a few minutes deposited
them safely at No. . Monte Cristo took Albert into his
study, and pointing to a seat, placed another for himself.
"Now let us talk the matter over quietly," said the count.
"You see I am perfectly composed," said Albert.
"With whom are you going to fight?"
"With Beauchamp."
"One of your friends"
"Of course it is always with friends that one fights."
"I suppose you have some cause of quarrel?"
"I have."
"What has he done to you?"
"There appeared in his journal last night  but wait, and
read for yourself." And Albert handed over the paper to the
count, who read as follows 
"A correspondent at Yanina informs us of a fact of which
until now we had remained in ignorance. The castle which
formed the protection of the town was given up to the Turks
by a French officer named Fernand, in whom the grand vizier,
Ali Tepelini, had reposed the greatest confidence."
"Well," said Monte Cristo, "what do you see in that to annoy
you?"
"What do I see in it?"
"Yes what does it signify to you if the castle of Yanina
was given up by a French officer?"
"It signifies to my father, the Count of Morcerf, whose
Christian name is Fernand"
"Did your father serve under Ali Pasha?"
"Yes that is to say, he fought for the independence of the
Greeks, and hence arises the calumny."
"Oh, my dear viscount, do talk reason"
"I do not desire to do otherwise."
"Now, just tell me who the devil should know in France that
the officer Fernand and the Count of Morcerf are one and the
same person? and who cares now about Yanina, which was taken
as long ago as the year  or ?"
"That just shows the meanness of this slander. They have
allowed all this time to elapse, and then all of a sudden
rake up events which have been forgotten to furnish
materials for scandal, in order to tarnish the lustre of our
high position. I inherit my father's name, and I do not
choose that the shadow of disgrace should darken it. I am
going to Beauchamp, in whose journal this paragraph appears,
and I shall insist on his retracting the assertion before
two witnesses."
"Beauchamp will never retract."
"Then he must fight."
"No he will not, for he will tell you, what is very true,
that perhaps there were fifty officers in the Greek army
bearing the same name."
"We will fight, nevertheless. I will efface that blot on my
father's character. My father, who was such a brave soldier,
whose career was so brilliant" 
"Oh, well, he will add, "We are warranted in believing that
this Fernand is not the illustrious Count of Morcerf, who
also bears the same Christian name.'"
"I am determined not to be content with anything short of an
entire retractation."
"And you intend to make him do it in the presence of two
witnesses, do you?"
"Yes."
"You do wrong."
"Which means, I suppose, that you refuse the service which I
asked of you?"
"You know my theory regarding duels I told you my opinion
on that subject, if you remember, when we were at Rome."
"Nevertheless, my dear count, I found you this morning
engaged in an occupation but little consistent with the
notions you profess to entertain."
"Because, my dear fellow, you understand one must never be
eccentric. If one's lot is cast among fools, it is necessary
to study folly. I shall perhaps find myself one day called
out by some harebrained scamp, who has no more real cause of
quarrel with me than you have with Beauchamp he may take me
to task for some foolish trifle or other, he will bring his
witnesses, or will insult me in some public place, and I am
expected to kill him for all that."
"You admit that you would fight, then? Well, if so, why do
you object to my doing so?"
"I do not say that you ought not to fight, I only say that a
duel is a serious thing, and ought not to be undertaken
without due reflection."
"Did he reflect before he insulted my father?"
"If he spoke hastily, and owns that he did so, you ought to
be satisfied."
"Ah, my dear count, you are far too indulgent."
"And you are far too exacting. Supposing, for instance, and
do not be angry at what I am going to say" 
"Well."
"Supposing the assertion to be really true?"
"A son ought not to submit to such a stain on his father's
honor."
"Ma foi, we live in times when there is much to which we
must submit."
"That is precisely the fault of the age."
"And do you undertake to reform it?"
"Yes, as far as I am personally concerned."
"Well, you the?? indeed exacting, my dear fellow"
"Yes, I own it."
"Are you quite impervious to good advice?"
"Not when it comes from a friend."
"And do you account me that title?"
"Certainly I do."
"Well, then, before going to Beauchamp with your witnesses,
seek further information on the subject."
"From whom?"
"From Haidee."
"Why, what can be the use of mixing a woman up in the
affair?  what can she do in it?"
"She can declare to you, for example, that your father had
no hand whatever in the defeat and death of the vizier or
if by chance he had, indeed, the misfortune to" 
"I have told you, my dear count, that I would not for one
moment admit of such a proposition."
"You reject this means of information, then?"
"I do  most decidedly."
"Then let me offer one more word of advice."
"Do so, then, but let it be the last."
"You do not wish to hear it, perhaps?"
"On the contrary, I request it."
"Do not take any witnesses with you when you go to Beauchamp
visit him alone."
"That would be contrary to all custom."
"Your case is not an ordinary one."
"And what is your reason for advising me to go alone?"
"Because then the affair will rest between you and
Beauchamp."
"Explain yourself."
"I will do so. If Beauchamp be disposed to retract, you
ought at least to give him the opportunity of doing it of
his own free will,  the satisfaction to you will be the
same. If, on the contrary, he refuses to do so, it will then
be quite time enough to admit two strangers into your
secret."
"They will not be strangers, they will be friends."
"Ah, but the friends of today are the enemies of tomorrow
Beauchamp, for instance."
"So you recommend" 
"I recommend you to be prudent."
"Then you advise me to go alone to Beauchamp?"
"I do, and I will tell you why. When you wish to obtain some
concession from a man's selflove, you must avoid even the
appearance of wishing to wound it."
"I believe you are right."
"I am glad of it."
"Then I will go alone."
"Go but you would do better still by not going at all."
"That is impossible."
"Do so, then it will be a wiser plan than the first which
you proposed."
"But if, in spite of all my precautions, I am at last
obliged to fight, will you not be my second?"
"My dear viscount," said Monte Cristo gravely, "you must
have seen before today that at all times and in all places
I have been at your disposal, but the service which you have
just demanded of me is one which it is out of my power to
render you."
"Why?"
"Perhaps you may know at some future period, and in the mean
time I request you to excuse my declining to put you in
possession of my reasons."
"Well, I will have Franz and ChateauRenaud they will be
the very men for it."
"Do so, then."
"But if I do fight, you will surely not object to giving me
a lesson or two in shooting and fencing?"
"That, too, is impossible."
"What a singular being you are  you will not interfere in
anything."
"You are right  that is the principle on which I wish to
act."
"We will say no more about it, then. Goodby, count."
Morcerf took his hat, and left the room. He found his
carriage at the door, and doing his utmost to restrain his
anger he went at once to find Beauchamp, who was in his
office. It was a gloomy, dustylooking apartment, such as
journalists' offices have always been from time immemorial.
The servant announced M. Albert de Morcerf. Beauchamp
repeated the name to himself, as though he could scarcely
believe that he had heard aright, and then gave orders for
him to be admitted. Albert entered. Beauchamp uttered an
exclamation of surprise on seeing his friend leap over and
trample under foot all the newspapers which were strewed
about the room. "This way, this way, my dear Albert" said
he, holding out his hand to the young man. "Are you out of
your senses, or do you come peaceably to take breakfast with
me? Try and find a seat  there is one by that geranium,
which is the only thing in the room to remind me that there
are other leaves in the world besides leaves of paper."
"Beauchamp," said Albert, "it is of your journal that I come
to speak."
"Indeed? What do you wish to say about it?"
"I desire that a statement contained in it should be
rectified."
"To what do you refer? But pray sit down."
"Thank you," said Albert, with a cold and formal bow.
"Will you now have the kindness to explain the nature of the
statement which has displeased you?"
"An announcement has been made which implicates the honor of
a member of my family."
"What is it?" said Beauchamp, much surprised "surely you
must be mistaken."
"The story sent you from Yanina."
"Yanina?"
"Yes really you appear to be totally ignorant of the cause
which brings me here."
"Such is really the case, I assure you, upon my honor
Baptiste, give me yesterday's paper," cried Beauchamp.
"Here, I have brought mine with me," replied Albert.
Beauchamp took the paper, and read the article to which
Albert pointed in an undertone. "You see it is a serious
annoyance," said Morcerf, when Beauchamp had finished the
perusal of the paragraph. "Is the officer referred to a
relation of yours, then?" demanded the journalist.
"Yes," said Albert, blushing.
"Well, what do you wish me to do for you?" said Beauchamp
mildly.
"My dear Beauchamp, I wish you to contradict this
statement." Beauchamp looked at Albert with a benevolent
expression.
"Come," said he, "this matter will want a good deal of
talking over a retractation is always a serious thing, you
know. Sit down, and I will read it again." Albert resumed
his seat, and Beauchamp read, with more attention than at
first, the lines denounced by his friend. "Well," said
Albert in a determined tone, "you see that your paper his
insulted a member of my family, and I insist on a
retractation being made."
"You insist?"
"Yes, I insist."
"Permit me to remind you that you are not in the Chamber, my
dear Viscount."
"Nor do I wish to be there," replied the young man, rising.
"I repeat that I am determined to have the announcement of
yesterday contradicted. You have known me long enough,"
continued Albert, biting his lips convulsively, for he saw
that Beauchamp's anger was beginning to rise,  "you have
been my friend, and therefore sufficiently intimate with me
to be aware that I am likely to maintain my resolution on
this point."
"If I have been your friend, Morcerf, your present manner of
speaking would almost lead me to forget that I ever bore
that title. But wait a moment, do not let us get angry, or
at least not yet. You are irritated and vexed  tell me how
this Fernand is related to you?"
"He is merely my father," said Albert  "M. Fernand
Mondego, Count of Morcerf, an old soldier who has fought in
twenty battles and whose honorable scars they would denounce
as badges of disgrace."
"Is it your father?" said Beauchamp "that is quite another
thing. Then can well understand your indignation, my dear
Albert. I will look at it again" and he read the paragraph
for the third time, laying a stress on each word as he
proceeded. "But the paper nowhere identifies this Fernand
with your father."
"No but the connection will be seen by others, and
therefore I will have the article contradicted." At the
words "I will," Beauchamp steadily raised his eyes to
Albert's countenance, and then as gradually lowering them,
he remained thoughtful for a few moments. "You will retract
this assertion, will you not, Beauchamp?" said Albert with
increased though stifled anger.
"Yes," replied Beauchamp.
"Immediately?" said Albert.
"When I am convinced that the statement is false."
"What?"
"The thing is worth looking into, and I will take pains to
investigate the matter thoroughly."
"But what is there to investigate, sir?" said Albert,
enraged beyond measure at Beauchamp's last remark. "If you
do not believe that it is my father, say so immediately and
if, on the contrary, you believe it to be him, state your
reasons for doing so." Beauchamp looked at Albert with the
smile which was so peculiar to him, and which in its
numerous modifications served to express every varied
emotion of his mind. "Sir," replied he, "if you came to me
with the idea of demanding satisfaction, you should have
gone at once to the point, and not have entertained me with
the idle conversation to which I have been patiently
listening for the last half hour. Am I to put this
construction on your visit?"
"Yes, if you will not consent to retract that infamous
calumny."
"Wait a moment  no threats, if you please, M. Fernand
Mondego, Vicomte de Morcerf I never allow them from my
enemies, and therefore shall not put up with them from my
friends. You insist on my contradicting the article relating
to General Fernand, an article with which, I assure you on
my word of honor, I had nothing whatever to do?"
"Yes, I insist on it," said Albert, whose mind was beginning
to get bewildered with the excitement of his feelings.
"And if I refuse to retract, you wish to fight, do you?"
said Beauchamp in a calm tone.
"Yes," replied Albert, raising his voice.
"Well," said Beauchamp, "here is my answer, my dear sir. The
article was not inserted by me  I was not even aware of
it but you have, by the step you have taken, called my
attention to the paragraph in question, and it will remain
until it shall be either contradicted or confirmed by some
one who has a right to do so."
"Sir," said Albert, rising, "I will do myself the honor of
sending my seconds to you, and you will be kind enough to
arrange with them the place of meeting and the weapons."
"Certainly, my dear sir."
"And this evening, if you please, or tomorrow at the
latest, we will meet."
"No, no, I will be on the ground at the proper time but in
my opinion and I have a right to dictate the preliminaries,
as it is I who have received the provocation  in my
opinion the time ought not to be yet. I know you to be well
skilled in the management of the sword, while I am only
moderately so I know, too, that you are a good marksman 
there we are about equal. I know that a duel between us two
would be a serious affair, because you are brave, and I am
brave also. I do not therefore wish either to kill you, or
to be killed myself without a cause. Now, I am going to put
a question to you, and one very much to the purpose too. Do
you insist on this retractation so far as to kill me if I do
not make it, although I have repeated more than once, and
affirmed on my honor, that I was ignorant of the thing with
which you charge me, and although I still declare that it is
impossible for any one but you to recognize the Count of
Morcerf under the name of Fernand?"
"I maintain my original resolution."
"Very well, my dear sir then I consent to cut throats with
you. But I require three weeks' preparation at the end of
that time I shall come and say to you, "The assertion is
false, and I retract it,' or "The assertion is true,' when I
shall immediately draw the sword from its sheath, or the
pistols from the case, whichever you please."
"Three weeks" cried Albert "they will pass as slowly as
three centuries when I am all the time suffering dishonor."
"Had you continued to remain on amicable terms with me, I
should have said, "Patience, my friend' but you have
constituted yourself my enemy, therefore I say, "What does
that signify to me, sir?'"
"Well, let it be three weeks then," said Morcerf "but
remember, at the expiration of that time no delay or
subterfuge will justify you in" 
"M. Albert de Morcerf," said Beauchamp, rising in his turn,
"I cannot throw you out of window for three weeks  that is
to say, for twentyfour days to come  nor have you any
right to split my skull open till that time has elapsed.
Today is the th of August the st of September will,
therefore, be the conclusion of the term agreed on, and till
that time arrives  and it is the advice of a gentleman
which I am about to give you  till then we will refrain
from growling and barking like two dogs chained within sight
of each other." When he had concluded his speech, Beauchamp
bowed coldly to Albert, turned his back upon him, and went
to the pressroom.
Albert vented his anger on a pile of newspapers, which he
sent flying all over the office by switching them violently
with his stick after which ebullition he departed  not,
however, without walking several times to the door of the
pressroom, as if he had half a mind to enter. While Albert
was lashing the front of his carriage in the same manner
that he had the newspapers which were the innocent agents of
his discomfiture, as he was crossing the barrier he
perceived Morrel, who was walking with a quick step and a
bright eye. He was passing the Chinese Baths, and appeared
to have come from the direction of the Porte SaintMartin,
and to be going towards the Madeleine. "Ah," said Morcerf,
"there goes a happy man" And it so happened Albert was not
mistaken in his opinion.
Chapter 
The Lemonade.
Morrel was, in fact, very happy. M. Noirtier had just sent
for him, and he was in such haste to know the reason of his
doing so that he had not stopped to take a cab, placing
infinitely more dependence on his own two legs than on the
four legs of a cabhorse. He had therefore set off at a
furious rate from the Rue Meslay, and was hastening with
rapid strides in the direction of the Faubourg SaintHonore.
Morrel advanced with a firm, manly tread, and poor Barrois
followed him as he best might. Morrel was only thirtyone,
Barrois was sixty years of age Morrel was deeply in love,
and Barrois was dying with heat and exertion. These two men,
thus opposed in age and interests, resembled two parts of a
triangle, presenting the extremes of separation, yet
nevertheless possessing their point of union. This point of
union was Noirtier, and it was he who had just sent for
Morrel, with the request that the latter would lose no time
in coming to him  a command which Morrel obeyed to the
letter, to the great discomfiture of Barrois. On arriving at
the house, Morrel was not even out of breath, for love lends
wings to our desires but Barrois, who had long forgotten
what it was to love, was sorely fatigued by the expedition
he had been constrained to use.
The old servant introduced Morrel by a private entrance,
closed the door of the study, and soon the rustling of a
dress announced the arrival of Valentine. She looked
marvellously beautiful in her deep mourning dress, and
Morrel experienced such intense delight in gazing upon her
that he felt as if he could almost have dispensed with the
conversation of her grandfather. But the easychair of the
old man was heard rolling along the floor, and he soon made
his appearance in the room. Noirtier acknowledged by a look
of extreme kindness and benevolence the thanks which Morrel
lavished on him for his timely intervention on behalf of
Valentine and himself  an intervention which had saved
them from despair. Morrel then cast on the invalid an
interrogative look as to the new favor which he designed to
bestow on him. Valentine was sitting at a little distance
from them, timidly awaiting the moment when she should be
obliged to speak. Noirtier fixed his eyes on her. "Am I to
say what you told me?" asked Valentine. Noirtier made a sign
that she was to do so.
"Monsieur Morrel," said Valentine to the young man, who was
regarding her with the most intense interest, "my
grandfather, M. Noirtier, had a thousand things to say,
which he told me three days ago and now, he has sent for
you, that I may repeat them to you. I will repeat them,
then and since he has chosen me as his interpreter, I will
be faithful to the trust, and will not alter a word of his
intentions."
"Oh, I am listening with the greatest impatience," replied
the young man "speak, I beg of you." Valentine cast down
her eyes this was a good omen for Morrel, for he knew that
nothing but happiness could have the power of thus
overcoming Valentine. "My grandfather intends leaving this
house," said she, "and Barrois is looking out suitable
apartments for him in another."
"But you, Mademoiselle de Villefort,  you, who are
necessary to M. Noirtier's happiness" 
"I?" interrupted Valentine "I shall not leave my
grandfather,  that is an understood thing between us. My
apartment will be close to his. Now, M. de Villefort must
either give his consent to this plan or his refusal in the
first case, I shall leave directly, and in the second, I
shall wait till I am of age, which will be in about ten
months. Then I shall be free, I shall have an independent
fortune, and" 
"And what?" demanded Morrel.
"And with my grandfather's consent I shall fulfil the
promise which I have made you." Valentine pronounced these
last few words in such a low tone, that nothing but Morrel's
intense interest in what she was saying could have enabled
him to hear them. "Have I not explained your wishes,
grandpapa?" said Valentine, addressing Noirtier. "Yes,"
looked the old man.  "Once under my grandfather's roof, M.
Morrel can visit me in the presence of my good and worthy
protector, if we still feel that the union we contemplated
will be likely to insure our future comfort and happiness
in that case I shall expect M. Morrel to come and claim me
at my own hands. But, alas, I have heard it said that hearts
inflamed by obstacles to their desire grew cold in time of
security I trust we shall never find it so in our
experience"
"Oh," cried Morrel, almost tempted to throw himself on his
knees before Noirtier and Valentine, and to adore them as
two superior beings, "what have I ever done in my life to
merit such unbounded happiness?"
"Until that time," continued the young girl in a calm and
selfpossessed tone of voice, "we will conform to
circumstances, and be guided by the wishes of our friends,
so long as those wishes do not tend finally to separate us
in a word, and I repeat it, because it expresses all I wish
to convey,  we will wait."
"And I swear to make all the sacrifices which this word
imposes, sir," said Morrel, "not only with resignation, but
with cheerfulness."
"Therefore," continued Valentine, looking playfully at
Maximilian, "no more inconsiderate actions  no more rash
projects for you surely would not wish to compromise one
who from this day regards herself as destined, honorably and
happily, to bear your name?"
Morrel looked obedience to her commands. Noirtier regarded
the lovers with a look of ineffable tenderness, while
Barrois, who had remained in the room in the character of a
man privileged to know everything that passed, smiled on the
youthful couple as he wiped the perspiration from his bald
forehead. "How hot you look, my good Barrois," said
Valentine.
"Ah, I have been running very fast, mademoiselle, but I must
do M. Morrel the justice to say that he ran still faster."
Noirtier directed their attention to a waiter, on which was
placed a decanter containing lemonade and a glass. The
decanter was nearly full, with the exception of a little,
which had been already drunk by M. Noirtier.
"Come, Barrois," said the young girl, "take some of this
lemonade I see you are coveting a good draught of it."
"The fact is, mademoiselle," said Barrois, "I am dying with
thirst, and since you are so kind as to offer it me, I
cannot say I should at all object to drinking your health in
a glass of it."
"Take some, then, and come back immediately." Barrois took
away the waiter, and hardly was he outside the door, which
in his haste he forgot to shut, than they saw him throw back
his head and empty to the very dregs the glass which
Valentine had filled. Valentine and Morrel were exchanging
their adieux in the presence of Noirtier when a ring was
heard at the doorbell. It was the signal of a visit.
Valentine looked at her watch.
"It is past noon," said she, "and today is Saturday I dare
say it is the doctor, grandpapa." Noirtier looked his
conviction that she was right in her supposition. "He will
come in here, and M. Morrel had better go,  do you not
think so, grandpapa?"
"Yes," signed the old man.
"Barrois," cried Valentine, "Barrois"
"I am coming, mademoiselle," replied he. "Barrois will open
the door for you," said Valentine, addressing Morrel. "And
now remember one thing, Monsieur Officer, that my
grandfather commands you not to take any rash or illadvised
step which would be likely to compromise our happiness."
"I promised him to wait," replied Morrel "and I will wait."
At this moment Barrois entered. "Who rang?" asked Valentine.
"Doctor d'Avrigny," said Barrois, staggering as if he would
fall.
"What is the matter, Barrois?" said Valentine. The old man
did not answer, but looked at his master with wild staring
eyes, while with his cramped hand he grasped a piece of
furniture to enable him to stand upright. "He is going to
fall" cried Morrel. The rigors which had attacked Barrois
gradually increased, the features of the face became quite
altered, and the convulsive movement of the muscles appeared
to indicate the approach of a most serious nervous disorder.
Noirtier, seeing Barrois in this pitiable condition, showed
by his looks all the various emotions of sorrow and sympathy
which can animate the heart of man. Barrois made some steps
towards his master.
"Ah, sir," said he, "tell me what is the matter with me. I
am suffering  I cannot see. A thousand fiery darts are
piercing my brain. Ah, don't touch me, pray don't." By this
time his haggard eyes had the appearance of being ready to
start from their sockets his head fell back, and the lower
extremities of the body began to stiffen. Valentine uttered
a cry of horror Morrel took her in his arms, as if to
defend her from some unknown danger. "M. d'Avrigny, M.
d'Avrigny," cried she, in a stifled voice. "Help, help"
Barrois turned round and with a great effort stumbled a few
steps, then fell at the feet of Noirtier, and resting his
hand on the knee of the invalid, exclaimed, "My master, my
good master" At this moment M. de Villefort, attracted by
the noise, appeared on the threshold. Morrel relaxed his
hold of Valentine, and retreating to a distant corner of the
room remained half hidden behind a curtain. Pale as if he
had been gazing on a serpent, he fixed his terrified eye on
the agonized sufferer.
Noirtier, burning with impatience and terror, was in despair
at his utter inability to help his old domestic, whom he
regarded more in the light of a friend than a servant. One
might by the fearful swelling of the veins of his forehead
and the contraction of the muscles round the eye, trace the
terrible conflict which was going on between the living
energetic mind and the inanimate and helpless body. Barrois,
his features convulsed, his eyes suffused with blood, and
his head thrown back, was lying at full length, beating the
floor with his hands, while his legs had become so stiff,
that they looked as if they would break rather than bend. A
slight appearance of foam was visible around the mouth, and
he breathed painfully, and with extreme difficulty.
Villefort seemed stupefied with astonishment, and remained
gazing intently on the scene before him without uttering a
word. He had not seen Morrel. After a moment of dumb
contemplation, during which his face became pale and his
hair seemed to stand on end, he sprang towards the door,
crying out, "Doctor, doctor come instantly, pray come"
"Madame, madame" cried Valentine, calling her stepmother,
and running upstairs to meet her "come quick, quick 
and bring your bottle of smellingsalts with you."
"What is the matter?" said Madame de Villefort in a harsh
and constrained tone.
"Oh, come, come"
"But where is the doctor?" exclaimed Villefort "where is
he?" Madame de Villefort now deliberately descended the
staircase. In one hand she held her handkerchief, with which
she appeared to be wiping her face, and in the other a
bottle of English smellingsalts. Her first look on entering
the room was at Noirtier, whose face, independent of the
emotion which such a scene could not fail of producing,
proclaimed him to be in possession of his usual health her
second glance was at the dying man. She turned pale, and her
eye passed quickly from the servant and rested on the
master.
"In the name of heaven, madame," said Villefort, "where is
the doctor? He was with you just now. You see this is a fit
of apoplexy, and he might be saved if he could but be bled"
"Has he eaten anything lately?" asked Madame de Villefort,
eluding her husband's question. "Madame," replied Valentine,
"he has not even breakfasted. He has been running very fast
on an errand with which my grandfather charged him, and when
he returned, took nothing but a glass of lemonade."
"Ah," said Madame de Villefort, "why did he not take wine?
Lemonade was a very bad thing for him."
"Grandpapa's bottle of lemonade was standing just by his
side poor Barrois was very thirsty, and was thankful to
drink anything he could find." Madame de Villefort started.
Noirtier looked at her with a glance of the most profound
scrutiny. "He has such a short neck," said she. "Madame,"
said Villefort, "I ask where is M. d'Avrigny? In God's name
answer me"
"He is with Edward, who is not quite well," replied Madame
de Villefort, no longer being able to avoid answering.
Villefort rushed upstairs to fetch him. "Take this," said
Madame de Villefort, giving her smellingbottle to
Valentine. "They will, no doubt, bleed him therefore I will
retire, for I cannot endure the sight of blood" and she
followed her husband upstairs. Morrel now emerged from his
hidingplace, where he had remained quite unperceived, so
great had been the general confusion. "Go away as quick as
you can, Maximilian," said Valentine, "and stay till I send
for you. Go."
Morrel looked towards Noirtier for permission to retire. The
old man, who had preserved all his usual coolness, made a
sign to him to do so. The young man pressed Valentine's hand
to his lips, and then left the house by a back staircase. At
the same moment that he quitted the room, Villefort and the
doctor entered by an opposite door. Barrois was now showing
signs of returning consciousness. The crisis seemed past, a
low moaning was heard, and he raised himself on one knee.
D'Avrigny and Villefort laid him on a couch. "What do you
prescribe, doctor?" demanded Villefort. "Give me some water
and ether. You have some in the house, have you not?"
"Yes."
"Send for some oil of turpentine and tartar emetic."
Villefort immediately despatched a messenger. "And now let
every one retire."
"Must I go too?" asked Valentine timidly.
"Yes, mademoiselle, you especially," replied the doctor
abruptly.
Valentine looked at M. d'Avrigny with astonishment, kissed
her grandfather on the forehead, and left the room. The
doctor closed the door after her with a gloomy air. "Look,
look, doctor," said Villefort, "he is quite coming round
again I really do not think, after all, it is anything of
consequence." M. d'Avrigny answered by a melancholy smile.
"How do you feel, Barrois?" asked he. "A little better,
sir."
"Will you drink some of this ether and water?"
"I will try but don't touch me."
"Why not?"
"Because I feel that if you were only to touch me with the
tip of your finger the fit would return."
"Drink."
Barrois took the glass, and, raising it to his purple lips,
took about half of the liquid offered him. "Where do you
suffer?" asked the doctor.
"Everywhere. I feel cramps over my whole body."
"Do you find any dazzling sensation before the eyes?"
"Yes."
"Any noise in the ears?"
"Frightful."
"When did you first feel that?"
"Just now."
"Suddenly?"
"Yes, like a clap of thunder."
"Did you feel nothing of it yesterday or the day before?"
"Nothing."
"No drowsiness?"
"None."
"What have you eaten today?"
"I have eaten nothing I only drank a glass of my master's
lemonade  that's all" and Barrois turned towards
Noirtier, who, immovably fixed in his armchair, was
contemplating this terrible scene without allowing a word or
a movement to escape him.
"Where is this lemonade?" asked the doctor eagerly.
"Downstairs in the decanter."
"Whereabouts downstairs?"
"In the kitchen."
"Shall I go and fetch it, doctor?" inquired Villefort.
"No, stay here and try to make Barrois drink the rest of
this glass of ether and water. I will go myself and fetch
the lemonade." D'Avrigny bounded towards the door, flew down
the back staircase, and almost knocked down Madame de
Villefort, in his haste, who was herself going down to the
kitchen. She cried out, but d'Avrigny paid no attention to
her possessed with but one idea, he cleared the last four
steps with a bound, and rushed into the kitchen, where he
saw the decanter about three parts empty still standing on
the waiter, where it had been left. He darted upon it as an
eagle would seize upon its prey. Panting with loss of
breath, he returned to the room he had just left. Madame de
Villefort was slowly ascending the steps which led to her
room. "Is this the decanter you spoke of?" asked d'Avrigny.
"Yes, doctor."
"Is this the same lemonade of which you partook?"
"I believe so."
"What did it taste like?"
"It had a bitter taste."
The doctor poured some drops of the lemonade into the palm
of his hand, put his lips to it, and after having rinsed his
mouth as a man does when he is tasting wine, he spat the
liquor into the fireplace.
"It is no doubt the same," said he. "Did you drink some too,
M. Noirtier?"
"Yes."
"And did you also discover a bitter taste?"
"Yes."
"Oh, doctor," cried Barrois, "the fit is coming on again.
Oh, do something for me." The doctor flew to his patient.
"That emetic, Villefort  see if it is coming." Villefort
sprang into the passage, exclaiming, "The emetic the
emetic  is it come yet?" No one answered. The most
profound terror reigned throughout the house. "If I had
anything by means of which I could inflate the lungs," said
d'Avrigny, looking around him, "perhaps I might prevent
suffocation. But there is nothing which would do 
nothing" "Oh, sir," cried Barrois, "are you going to let me
die without help? Oh, I am dying Oh, save me"
"A pen, a pen" said the doctor. There was one lying on the
table he endeavored to introduce it into the mouth of the
patient, who, in the midst of his convulsions, was making
vain attempts to vomit but the jaws were so clinched that
the pen could not pass them. This second attack was much
more violent than the first, and he had slipped from the
couch to the ground, where he was writhing in agony. The
doctor left him in this paroxysm, knowing that he could do
nothing to alleviate it, and, going up to Noirtier, said
abruptly, "How do you find yourself?  well?"
"Yes."
"Have you any weight on the chest or does your stomach feel
light and comfortable  eh?"
"Yes."
"Then you feel pretty much as you generally do after you
have had the dose which I am accustomed to give you every
Sunday?"
"Yes."
"Did Barrois make your lemonade?"
"Yes."
"Was it you who asked him to drink some of it?"
"No."
"Was it M. de Villefort?"
"No."
"Madame?"
"No."
"It was your granddaughter, then, was it not?"
"Yes." A groan from Barrois, accompanied by a yawn which
seemed to crack the very jawbones, attracted the attention
of M. d'Avrigny he left M. Noirtier, and returned to the
sick man. "Barrois," said the doctor, "can you speak?"
Barrois muttered a few unintelligible words. "Try and make
an effort to do so, my good man." said d'Avrigny. Barrois
reopened his bloodshot eyes. "Who made the lemonade?"
"I did."
"Did you bring it to your master directly it was made?"
"No."
"You left it somewhere, then, in the meantime?"
"Yes I left it in the pantry, because I was called away."
"Who brought it into this room, then?"
"Mademoiselle Valentine." D'Avrigny struck his forehead with
his hand. "Gracious heaven," exclaimed he. "Doctor, doctor"
cried Barrois, who felt another fit coming.
"Will they never bring that emetic?" asked the doctor.
"Here is a glass with one already prepared," said Villefort,
entering the room.
"Who prepared it?"
"The chemist who came here with me."
"Drink it," said the doctor to Barrois. "Impossible, doctor
it is too late my throat is closing up. I am choking Oh,
my heart Ah, my head  Oh, what agony  Shall I suffer
like this long?"
"No, no, friend," replied the doctor, "you will soon cease
to suffer."
"Ah, I understand you," said the unhappy man. "My God, have
mercy upon me" and, uttering a fearful cry, Barrois fell
back as if he had been struck by lightning. D'Avrigny put
his hand to his heart, and placed a glass before his lips.
"Well?" said Villefort. "Go to the kitchen and get me some
syrup of violets." Villefort went immediately. "Do not be
alarmed, M. Noirtier," said d'Avrigny "I am going to take
my patient into the next room to bleed him this sort of
attack is very frightful to witness."
And taking Barrois under the arms, he dragged him into an
adjoining room but almost immediately he returned to fetch
the lemonade. Noirtier closed lids right eye. "You want
Valentine, do you not? I will tell them to send her to you."
Villefort returned, and d'Avrigny met him in the passage.
"Well, how is he now?" asked he. "Come in here," said
d'Avrigny, and he took him into the chamber where the sick
man lay. "Is he still in a fit?" said the procureur.
"He is dead."
Villefort drew back a few steps, and, clasping his hands,
exclaimed, with real amazement and sympathy, "Dead?  and
so soon too"
"Yes, it is very soon," said the doctor, looking at the
corpse before him "but that ought not to astonish you
Monsieur and Madame de SaintMeran died as soon. People die
very suddenly in your house, M. de Villefort."
"What?" cried the magistrate, with an accent of horror and
consternation, "are you still harping on that terrible
idea?"
"Still, sir and I shall always do so," replied d'Avrigny,
"for it has never for one instant ceased to retain
possession of my mind and that you may be quite sure I am
not mistaken this time, listen well to what I am going to
say, M. de Villefort." The magistrate trembled convulsively.
"There is a poison which destroys life almost without
leaving any perceptible traces. I know it well I have
studied it in all its forms and in the effects which it
produces. I recognized the presence of this poison in the
case of poor Barrois as well as in that of Madame de
SaintMeran. There is a way of detecting its presence. It
restores the blue color of litmuspaper reddened by an acid,
and it turns syrup of violets green. We have no
litmuspaper, but, see, here they come with the syrup of
violets."
The doctor was right steps were heard in the passage. M.
d'Avrigny opened the door, and took from the hands of the
chambermaid a cup which contained two or three spoonfuls of
the syrup, he then carefully closed the door. "Look," said
he to the procureur, whose heart beat so loudly that it
might almost be heard, "here is in this cup some syrup of
violets, and this decanter contains the remainder of the
lemonade of which M. Noirtier and Barrois partook. If the
lemonade be pure and inoffensive, the syrup will retain its
color if, on the contrary, the lemonade be drugged with
poison, the syrup will become green. Look closely"
The doctor then slowly poured some drops of the lemonade
from the decanter into the cup, and in an instant a light
cloudy sediment began to form at the bottom of the cup this
sediment first took a blue shade, then from the color of
sapphire it passed to that of opal, and from opal to
emerald. Arrived at this last hue, it changed no more. The
result of the experiment left no doubt whatever on the mind.
"The unfortunate Barrois has been poisoned," said d'Avrigny,
"and I will maintain this assertion before God and man."
Villefort said nothing, but he clasped his hands, opened his
haggard eyes, and, overcome with his emotion, sank into a
chair.
Chapter 
The Accusation.
M. D'Avrigny soon restored the magistrate to consciousness,
who had looked like a second corpse in that chamber of
death. "Oh, death is in my house" cried Villefort.
"Say, rather, crime" replied the doctor.
"M. d'Avrigny," cried Villefort, "I cannot tell you all I
feel at this moment,  terror, grief, madness."
"Yes," said M. d'Avrigny, with an imposing calmness, "but I
think it is now time to act. I think it is time to stop this
torrent of mortality. I can no longer bear to be in
possession of these secrets without the hope of seeing the
victims and society generally revenged." Villefort cast a
gloomy look around him. "In my house," murmured he, "in my
house"
"Come, magistrate," said M. d'Avrigny, "show yourself a man
as an interpreter of the law, do honor to your profession by
sacrificing your selfish interests to it."
"You make me shudder, doctor. Do you talk of a sacrifice?"
"I do."
"Do you then suspect any one?"
"I suspect no one death raps at your door  it enters 
it goes, not blindfolded, but circumspectly, from room to
room. Well, I follow its course, I track its passage I
adopt the wisdom of the ancients, and feel my way, for my
friendship for your family and my respect for you are as a
twofold bandage over my eyes well" 
"Oh, speak, speak, doctor I shall have courage."
"Well, sir, you have in your establishment, or in your
family, perhaps, one of the frightful monstrosities of which
each century produces only one. Locusta and Agrippina,
living at the same time, were an exception, and proved the
determination of providence to effect the entire ruin of the
Roman empire, sullied by so many crimes. Brunehilde and
Fredegonde were the results of the painful struggle of
civilization in its infancy, when man was learning to
control mind, were it even by an emissary from the realms of
darkness. All these women had been, or were, beautiful. The
same flower of innocence had flourished, or was still
flourishing, on their brow, that is seen on the brow of the
culprit in your house." Villefort shrieked, clasped his
hands, and looked at the doctor with a supplicating air. But
the latter went on without pity 
""Seek whom the crime will profit,' says an axiom of
jurisprudence."
"Doctor," cried Villefort, "alas, doctor, how often has
man's justice been deceived by those fatal words. I know not
why, but I feel that this crime" 
"You acknowledge, then, the existence of the crime?"
"Yes, I see too plainly that it does exist. But it seems
that it is intended to affect me personally. I fear an
attack myself, after all these disasters."
"Oh, man," murmured d'Avrigny, "the most selfish of all
animals, the most personal of all creatures, who believes
the earth turns, the sun shines, and death strikes for him
alone,  an ant cursing God from the top of a blade of
grass And have those who have lost their lives lost
nothing?  M. de SaintMeran, Madame de SaintMeran, M.
Noirtier" 
"How? M. Noirtier?"
"Yes think you it was the poor servant's life was coveted?
No, no like Shakespeare's "Polonius,' he died for another.
It was Noirtier the lemonade was intended for  it is
Noirtier, logically speaking, who drank it. The other drank
it only by accident, and, although Barrois is dead, it was
Noirtier whose death was wished for."
"But why did it not kill my father?"
"I told you one evening in the garden after Madame de
SaintMeran's death  because his system is accustomed to
that very poison, and the dose was trifling to him, which
would be fatal to another because no one knows, not even
the assassin, that, for the last twelve months, I have given
M. Noirtier brucine for his paralytic affection, while the
assassin is not ignorant, for he has proved that brucine is
a violent poison."
"Oh, have pity  have pity" murmured Villefort, wringing
his hands.
"Follow the culprit's steps he first kills M. de
SaintMeran" 
"O doctor"
"I would swear to it what I heard of his symptoms agrees
too well with what I have seen in the other cases."
Villefort ceased to contend he only groaned. "He first
kills M. de SaintMeran," repeated the doctor, "then Madame
de SaintMeran,  a double fortune to inherit." Villefort
wiped the perspiration from his forehead. "Listen
attentively."
"Alas," stammered Villefort, "I do not lose a single word."
"M. Noirtier," resumed M. d'Avrigny in the same pitiless
tone,  "M. Noirtier had once made a will against you 
against your family  in favor of the poor, in fact M.
Noirtier is spared, because nothing is expected from him.
But he has no sooner destroyed his first will and made a
second, than, for fear he should make a third, he is struck
down. The will was made the day before yesterday, I believe
you see there has been no time lost."
"Oh, mercy, M. d'Avrigny"
"No mercy, sir The physician has a sacred mission on earth
and to fulfil it he begins at the source of life, and goes
down to the mysterious darkness of the tomb. When crime has
been committed, and God, doubtless in anger, turns away his
face, it is for the physician to bring the culprit to
justice."
"Have mercy on my child, sir," murmured Villefort.
"You see it is yourself who have first named her  you, her
father."
"Have pity on Valentine Listen  it is impossible I would
as willingly accuse myself Valentine, whose heart is pure
as a diamond or a lily."
"No pity, procureur the crime is fragrant. Mademoiselle
herself packed all the medicines which were sent to M. de
SaintMeran and M. de SaintMeran is dead. Mademoiselle de
Villefort prepared all the cooling draughts which Madame de
SaintMeran took, and Madame de SaintMeran is dead.
Mademoiselle de Villefort took from the hands of Barrois,
who was sent out, the lemonade which M. Noirtier had every
morning, and he has escaped by a miracle. Mademoiselle de
Villefort is the culprit  she is the poisoner To you, as
the king's attorney, I denounce Mademoiselle de Villefort,
do your duty."
"Doctor, I resist no longer  I can no longer defend myself
I believe you but, for pity's sake, spare my life, my
honor"
"M. de Villefort," replied the doctor, with increased
vehemence, "there are occasions when I dispense with all
foolish human circumspection. If your daughter had committed
only one crime, and I saw her meditating another, I would
say "Warn her, punish her, let her pass the remainder of her
life in a convent, weeping and praying.' If she had
committed two crimes, I would say, "Here, M. de Villefort,
is a poison that the prisoner is not acquainted with,  one
that has no known antidote, quick as thought, rapid as
lightning, mortal as the thunderbolt give her that poison,
recommending her soul to God, and save your honor and your
life, for it is yours she aims at and I can picture her
approaching your pillow with her hypocritical smiles and her
sweet exhortations. Woe to you, M. de Villefort, if you do
not strike first' This is what I would say had she only
killed two persons but she has seen three deaths,  has
contemplated three murdered persons,  has knelt by three
corpses To the scaffold with the poisoner  to the
scaffold Do you talk of your honor? Do what I tell you, and
immortality awaits you"
Villefort fell on his knees. "Listen," said he "I have not
the strength of mind you have, or rather that which you
would not have, if instead of my daughter Valentine your
daughter Madeleine were concerned." The doctor turned pale.
"Doctor, every son of woman is born to suffer and to die I
am content to suffer and to await death."
"Beware," said M. d'Avrigny, "it may come slowly you will
see it approach after having struck your father, your wife,
perhaps your son."
Villefort, suffocating, pressed the doctor's arm. "Listen,"
cried he "pity me  help me No, my daughter is not
guilty. If you drag us both before a tribunal I will still
say, "No, my daughter is not guilty  there is no crime in
my house. I will not acknowledge a crime in my house for
when crime enters a dwelling, it is like death  it does
not come alone.' Listen. What does it signify to you if I am
murdered? Are you my friend? Are you a man? Have you a
heart? No, you are a physician Well, I tell you I will not
drag my daughter before a tribunal, and give her up to the
executioner The bare idea would kill me  would drive me
like a madman to dig my heart out with my fingernails And
if you were mistaken, doctor  if it were not my daughter
if I should come one day, pale as a spectre, and say to
you, "Assassin, you have killed my child'  hold  if
that should happen, although I am a Christian, M. d'Avrigny,
I should kill myself."
"Well," said the doctor, after a moment's silence, "I will
wait." Villefort looked at him as if he had doubted his
words. "Only," continued M. d'Avrigny, with a slow and
solemn tone, "if any one falls ill in your house, if you
feel yourself attacked, do not send for me, for I will come
no more. I will consent to share this dreadful secret with
you, but I will not allow shame and remorse to grow and
increase in my conscience, as crime and misery will in your
house."
"Then you abandon me, doctor?"
"Yes, for I can follow you no farther, and I only stop at
the foot of the scaffold. Some further discovery will be
made, which will bring this dreadful tragedy to a close.
Adieu."
"I entreat you, doctor"
"All the horrors that disturb my thoughts make your house
odious and fatal. Adieu, sir."
"One word  one single word more, doctor You go, leaving
me in all the horror of my situation, after increasing it by
what you have revealed to me. But what will be reported of
the sudden death of the poor old servant?"
"True," said M. d'Avrigny "we will return." The doctor went
out first, followed by M. de Villefort. The terrified
servants were on the stairs and in the passage where the
doctor would pass. "Sir," said d'Avrigny to Villefort, so
loud that all might hear, "poor Barrois has led too
sedentary a life of late accustomed formerly to ride on
horseback, or in the carriage, to the four corners of
Europe, the monotonous walk around that armchair has killed
him  his blood has thickened. He was stout, had a short,
thick neck he was attacked with apoplexy, and I was called
in too late. By the way," added he in a low tone, "take care
to throw away that cup of syrup of violets in the ashes."
The doctor, without shaking hands with Villefort, without
adding a word to what he had said, went out, amid the tears
and lamentations of the whole household. The same evening
all Villefort's servants, who had assembled in the kitchen,
and had a long consultation, came to tell Madame de
Villefort that they wished to leave. No entreaty, no
proposition of increased wages, could induce them to remain
to every argument they replied, "We must go, for death is in
this house." They all left, in spite of prayers and
entreaties, testifying their regret at leaving so good a
master and mistress, and especially Mademoiselle Valentine,
so good, so kind, and so gentle. Villefort looked at
Valentine as they said this. She was in tears, and, strange
as it was, in spite of the emotions he felt at the sight of
these tears, he looked also at Madame de Villefort, and it
appeared to him as if a slight gloomy smile had passed over
her thin lips, like a meteor seen passing inauspiciously
between two clouds in a stormy sky.
Chapter 
The Room of the Retired Baker.
The evening of the day on which the Count of Morcerf had
left Danglars' house with feelings of shame and anger at the
rejection of the projected alliance, M. Andrea Cavalcanti,
with curled hair, mustaches in perfect order, and white
gloves which fitted admirably, had entered the courtyard of
the banker's house in La Chaussee d'Antin. He had not been
more than ten minutes in the drawingroom before he drew
Danglars aside into the recess of a bowwindow, and, after
an ingenious preamble, related to him all his anxieties and
cares since his noble father's departure. He acknowledged
the extreme kindness which had been shown him by the
banker's family, in which he had been received as a son, and
where, besides, his warmest affections had found an object
on which to centre in Mademoiselle Danglars. Danglars
listened with the most profound attention he had expected
this declaration for the last two or three days, and when at
last it came his eyes glistened as much as they had lowered
on listening to Morcerf. He would not, however, yield
immediately to the young man's request, but made a few
conscientious objections. "Are you not rather young, M.
Andrea, to think of marrying?"
"I think not, sir," replied M. Cavalcanti "in Italy the
nobility generally marry young. Life is so uncertain, that
we ought to secure happiness while it is within our reach."
"Well, sir," said Danglars, "in case your proposals, which
do me honor, are accepted by my wife and daughter, by whom
shall the preliminary arrangements be settled? So important
a negotiation should, I think, be conducted by the
respective fathers of the young people."
"Sir, my father is a man of great foresight and prudence.
Thinking that I might wish to settle in France, he left me
at his departure, together with the papers establishing my
identity, a letter promising, if he approved of my choice,
, livres per annum from the day I was married. So far
as I can judge, I suppose this to be a quarter of my
father's revenue."
"I," said Danglars, "have always intended giving my daughter
, francs as her dowry she is, besides, my sole
heiress."
"All would then be easily arranged if the baroness and her
daughter are willing. We should command an annuity of
, livres. Supposing, also, I should persuade the
marquis to give me my capital, which is not likely, but
still is possible, we would place these two or three
millions in your hands, whose talent might make it realize
ten per cent."
"I never give more than four per cent, and generally only
three and a half but to my soninlaw I would give five,
and we would share the profit."
"Very good, fatherinlaw," said Cavalcanti, yielding to his
lowborn nature, which would escape sometimes through the
aristocratic gloss with which he sought to conceal it.
Correcting himself immediately, he said, "Excuse me, sir
hope alone makes me almost mad,  what will not reality
do?"
"But," said Danglars,  who, on his part, did not perceive
how soon the conversation, which was at first disinterested,
was turning to a business transaction,  "there is,
doubtless, a part of your fortune your father could not
refuse you?"
"Which?" asked the young man.
"That you inherit from your mother."
"Truly, from my mother, Leonora Corsinari."
"How much may it amount to?"
"Indeed, sir," said Andrea, "I assure you I have never given
the subject a thought, but I suppose it must have been at
least two millions." Danglars felt as much overcome with joy
as the miser who finds a lost treasure, or as the
shipwrecked mariner who feels himself on solid ground
instead of in the abyss which he expected would swallow him
up.
"Well, sir," said Andrea, bowing to the banker respectfully,
"may I hope?"
"You may not only hope," said Danglars, "but consider it a
settled thing, if no obstacle arises on your part."
"I am, indeed, rejoiced," said Andrea.
"But," said Danglars thoughtfully, "how is it that your
patron, M. de Monte Cristo, did not make his proposal for
you?" Andrea blushed imperceptibly. "I have just left the
count, sir," said he "he is, doubtless, a delightful man
but inconceivably peculiar in his ideas. He esteems me
highly. He even told me he had not the slightest doubt that
my father would give me the capital instead of the interest
of my property. He has promised to use his influence to
obtain it for me but he also declared that he never had
taken on himself the responsibility of making proposals for
another, and he never would. I must, however, do him the
justice to add that he assured me if ever he had regretted
the repugnance he felt to such a step it was on this
occasion, because he thought the projected union would be a
happy and suitable one. Besides, if he will do nothing
officially, he will answer any questions you propose to him.
And now," continued he, with one of his most charming
smiles, "having finished talking to the fatherinlaw, I
must address myself to the banker."
"And what may you have to say to him?" said Danglars,
laughing in his turn.
"That the day after tomorrow I shall have to draw upon you
for about four thousand francs but the count, expecting my
bachelor's revenue could not suffice for the coming month's
outlay, has offered me a draft for twenty thousand francs.
It bears his signature, as you see, which is
allsufficient."
"Bring me a million such as that," said Danglars, "I shall
be well pleased," putting the draft in his pocket. "Fix your
own hour for tomorrow, and my cashier shall call on you
with a check for eighty thousand francs."
"At ten o'clock then, if you please I should like it early,
as I am going into the country tomorrow."
"Very well, at ten o'clock you are still at the Hotel des
Princes?"
"Yes."
The following morning, with the banker's usual punctuality,
the eighty thousand francs were placed in the young man's
hands as he was on the point of starting, after having left
two hundred francs for Caderousse. He went out chiefly to
avoid this dangerous enemy, and returned as late as possible
in the evening. But scarcely had be stepped out of his
carriage when the porter met him with a parcel in his hand.
"Sir," said he, "that man has been here."
"What man?" said Andrea carelessly, apparently forgetting
him whom he but too well recollected.
"Him to whom your excellency pays that little annuity."
"Oh," said Andrea, "my father's old servant. Well, you gave
him the two hundred francs I had left for him?"
"Yes, your excellency." Andrea had expressed a wish to be
thus addressed. "But," continued the porter, "he would not
take them." Andrea turned pale, but as it was dark his
pallor was not perceptible. "What? he would not take them?"
said he with slight emotion.
"No, he wished to speak to your excellency I told him you
were gone out, and after some dispute he believed me and
gave me this letter, which he had brought with him already
sealed."
"Give it me," said Andrea, and he read by the light of his
carriagelamp,  "You know where I live I expect you
tomorrow morning at nine o'clock."
Andrea examined it carefully, to ascertain if the letter had
been opened, or if any indiscreet eyes had seen its
contents but it was so carefully folded, that no one could
have read it, and the seal was perfect. "Very well," said
he. "Poor man, he is a worthy creature." He left the porter
to ponder on these words, not knowing which most to admire,
the master or the servant. "Take out the horses quickly, and
come up to me," said Andrea to his groom. In two seconds the
young man had reached his room and burnt Caderousse's
letter. The servant entered just as he had finished. "You
are about my height, Pierre," said he.
"I have that honor, your excellency."
"You had a new livery yesterday?"
"Yes, sir."
"I have an engagement with a pretty little girl for this
evening, and do not wish to be known lend me your livery
till tomorrow. I may sleep, perhaps, at an inn." Pierre
obeyed. Five minutes after, Andrea left the hotel,
completely disguised, took a cabriolet, and ordered the
driver to take him to the Cheval Rouge, at Picpus. The next
morning he left that inn as he had left the Hotel des
Princes, without being noticed, walked down the Faubourg St.
Antoine, along the boulevard to Rue Menilmontant, and
stopping at the door of the third house on the left looked
for some one of whom to make inquiry in the porter's
absence. "For whom are you looking, my fine fellow?" asked
the fruiteress on the opposite side.
"Monsieur Pailletin, if you please, my good woman," replied
Andrea.
"A retired baker?" asked the fruiteress.
"Exactly."
"He lives at the end of the yard, on the left, on the third
story." Andrea went as she directed him, and on the third
floor he found a hare's paw, which, by the hasty ringing of
the bell, it was evident he pulled with considerable
illtemper. A moment after Caderousse's face appeared at the
grating in the door. "Ah, you are punctual," said he, as he
drew back the door.
"Confound you and your punctuality" said Andrea, throwing
himself into a chair in a manner which implied that he would
rather have flung it at the head of his host.
"Come, come, my little fellow, don't be angry. See, I have
thought about you  look at the good breakfast we are going
to have nothing but what you are fond of." Andrea, indeed,
inhaled the scent of something cooking which was not
unwelcome to him, hungry as he was it was that mixture of
fat and garlic peculiar to provincial kitchens of an
inferior order, added to that of dried fish, and above all,
the pungent smell of musk and cloves. These odors escaped
from two deep dishes which were covered and placed on a
stove, and from a copper pan placed in an old iron pot. In
an adjoining room Andrea saw also a tolerably clean table
prepared for two, two bottles of wine sealed, the one with
green, the other with yellow, a supply of brandy in a
decanter, and a measure of fruit in a cabbageleaf, cleverly
arranged on an earthenware plate.
"What do you think of it, my little fellow?" said
Caderousse. "Ay, that smells good You know I used to be a
famous cook do you recollect how you used to lick your
fingers? You were among the first who tasted any of my
dishes, and I think you relished them tolerably." While
speaking, Caderousse went on peeling a fresh supply of
onions.
"But," said Andrea, illtemperedly, "by my faith, if it was
only to breakfast with you, that you disturbed me, I wish
the devil had taken you"
"My boy," said Caderousse sententiously, "one can talk while
eating. And then, you ungrateful being, you are not pleased
to see an old friend? I am weeping with joy." He was truly
crying, but it would have been difficult to say whether joy
or the onions produced the greatest effect on the lachrymal
glands of the old innkeeper of the PontduGard. "Hold your
tongue, hypocrite," said Andrea "you love me"
"Yes, I do, or may the devil take me. I know it is a
weakness," said Caderousse, "but it overpowers me."
"And yet it has not prevented your sending for me to play me
some trick."
"Come," said Caderousse, wiping his large knife on his
apron, "if I did not like you, do you think I should endure
the wretched life you lead me? Think for a moment. You have
your servant's clothes on  you therefore keep a servant I
have none, and am obliged to prepare my own meals. You abuse
my cookery because you dine at the table d'hote of the Hotel
des Princes, or the Cafe de Paris. Well, I too could keep a
servant I too could have a tilbury I too could dine where
I like but why do I not? Because I would not annoy my
little Benedetto. Come, just acknowledge that I could, eh?"
This address was accompanied by a look which was by no means
difficult to understand. "Well," said Andrea, "admitting
your love, why do you want me to breakfast with you?"
"That I may have the pleasure of seeing you, my little
fellow."
"What is the use of seeing me after we have made all our
arrangements?"
"Eh, dear friend," said Caderousse, "are wills ever made
without codicils? But you first came to breakfast, did you
not? Well, sit down, and let us begin with these pilchards,
and this fresh butter which I have put on some vineleaves
to please you, wicked one. Ah, yes you look at my room, my
four straw chairs, my images, three francs each. But what do
you expect? This is not the Hotel des Princes."
"Come, you are growing discontented, you are no longer
happy you, who only wish to live like a retired baker."
Caderousse sighed. "Well, what have you to say? you have
seen your dream realized."
"I can still say it is a dream a retired baker, my poor
Benedetto, is rich  he has an annuity."
"Well, you have an annuity."
"I have?"
"Yes, since I bring you your two hundred francs." Caderousse
shrugged his shoulders. "It is humiliating," said he, "thus
to receive money given grudgingly, an uncertain supply
which may soon fail. You see I am obliged to economize, in
case your prosperity should cease. Well, my friend, fortune
is inconstant, as the chaplain of the regiment said. I know
your prosperity is great, you rascal you are to marry the
daughter of Danglars."
"What? of Danglars?"
"Yes, to be sure must I say Baron Danglars? I might as well
say Count Benedetto. He was an old friend of mine and if he
had not so bad a memory he ought to invite me to your
wedding, seeing he came to mine. Yes, yes, to mine gad, he
was not so proud then,  he was an underclerk to the good
M. Morrel. I have dined many times with him and the Count of
Morcerf, so you see I have some high connections and were I
to cultivate them a little, we might meet in the same
drawingrooms."
"Come, your jealousy represents everything to you in the
wrong light."
"That is all very fine, Benedetto mio, but I know what I am
saying. Perhaps I may one day put on my best coat, and
presenting myself at the great gate, introduce myself.
Meanwhile let us sit down and eat." Caderousse set the
example and attacked the breakfast with good appetite,
praising each dish he set before his visitor. The latter
seemed to have resigned himself he drew the corks, and
partook largely of the fish with the garlic and fat. "Ah,
mate," said Caderousse, "you are getting on better terms
with your old landlord"
"Faith, yes," replied Andrea, whose hunger prevailed over
every other feeling.
"So you like it, you rogue?"
"So much that I wonder how a man who can cook thus can
complain of hard living."
"Do you see," said Caderousse, "all my happiness is marred
by one thought?"
"What is that?"
"That I am dependent on another, I who have always gained my
own livelihood honestly."
"Do not let that disturb you, I have enough for two."
"No, truly you may believe me if you will at the end of
every month I am tormented by remorse."
"Good Caderousse"
"So much so, that yesterday I would not take the two hundred
francs."
"Yes, you wished to speak to me but was it indeed remorse,
tell me?"
"True remorse and, besides, an idea had struck me." Andrea
shuddered he always did so at Caderousse's ideas. "It is
miserable  do you see?  always to wait till the end of
the month.  "Oh," said Andrea philosophically, determined
to watch his companion narrowly, "does not life pass in
waiting? Do I, for instance, fare better? Well, I wait
patiently, do I not?"
"Yes because instead of expecting two hundred wretched
francs, you expect five or six thousand, perhaps ten,
perhaps even twelve, for you take care not to let any one
know the utmost. Down there, you always had little presents
and Christmasboxes which you tried to hide from your poor
friend Caderousse. Fortunately he is a cunning fellow, that
friend Caderousse."
"There you are beginning again to ramble, to talk again and
again of the past But what is the use of teasing me with
going all over that again?"
"Ah, you are only one and twenty, and can forget the past I
am fifty, and am obliged to recollect it. But let us return
to business."
"Yes."
"I was going to say, if I were in your place" 
"Well."
"I would realize" 
"How would you realize?"
"I would ask for six months' in advance, under pretence of
being able to purchase a farm, then with my six months I
would decamp."
"Well, well," said Andrea, "that isn't a bad idea."
"My dear friend," said Caderousse, "eat of my bread, and
take my advice you will be none the worse off, physically
or morally."
"But," said Andrea, "why do you not act on the advice you
gave me? Why do you not realize a six months', a year's
advance even, and retire to Brussels? Instead of living the
retired baker, you might live as a bankrupt, using his
privileges that would be very good."
"But how the devil would you have me retire on twelve
hundred francs?"
"Ah, Caderousse," said Andrea, "how covetous you are Two
months ago you were dying with hunger."
"The appetite grows by what it feeds on," said Caderousse,
grinning and showing his teeth, like a monkey laughing or a
tiger growling. "And," added he, biting off with his large
white teeth an enormous mouthful of bread, "I have formed a
plan." Caderousse's plans alarmed Andrea still more than his
ideas ideas were but the germ, the plan was reality. "Let
me see your plan I dare say it is a pretty one."
"Why not? Who formed the plan by which we left the
establishment of M   eh? was it not I? and it was no
bad one I believe, since here we are"
"I do not say," replied Andrea, "that you never make a good
one but let us see your plan."
"Well," pursued Caderousse, "can you without expending one
sou, put me in the way of getting fifteen thousand francs?
No, fifteen thousand are not enough,  I cannot again
become an honest man with less than thirty thousand francs."
"No," replied Andrea, dryly, "no, I cannot."
"I do not think you understand me," replied Caderousse,
calmly "I said without your laying out a sou."
"Do you want me to commit a robbery, to spoil all my good
fortune  and yours with mine  and both of us to be
dragged down there again?"
"It would make very little difference to me," said
Caderousse, "if I were retaken, I am a poor creature to live
alone, and sometimes pine for my old comrades not like you,
heartless creature, who would be glad never to see them
again." Andrea did more than tremble this time, he turned
pale.
"Come, Caderousse, no nonsense" said he.
"Don't alarm yourself, my little Benedetto, but just point
out to me some means of gaining those thirty thousand francs
without your assistance, and I will contrive it."
"Well, I'll see  I'll try to contrive some way," said
Andrea.
"Meanwhile you will raise my monthly allowance to five
hundred francs, my little fellow? I have a fancy, and mean
to get a housekeeper."
"Well, you shall have your five hundred francs," said
Andrea "but it is very hard for me, my poor Caderousse 
you take advantage" 
"Bah," said Caderousse, "when you have access to countless
stores." One would have said Andrea anticipated his
companion's words, so did his eye flash like lightning, but
it was but for a moment. "True," he replied, "and my
protector is very kind."
"That dear protector," said Caderousse "and how much does
he give you monthly?"
"Five thousand francs."
"As many thousands as you give me hundreds Truly, it is
only bastards who are thus fortunate. Five thousand francs
per month What the devil can you do with all that?"
"Oh, it is no trouble to spend that and I am like you, I
want capital."
"Capital?  yes  I understand  every one would like
capital."
"Well, and I shall get it."
"Who will give it to you  your prince?"
"Yes, my prince. But unfortunately I must wait."
"You must wait for what?" asked Caderousse.
"For his death."
"The death of your prince?"
"Yes."
"How so?"
"Because he has made his will in my favor."
"Indeed?"
"On my honor."
"For how much?"
"For five hundred thousand."
"Only that? It's little enough."
"But so it is."
"No it cannot be"
"Are you my friend, Caderousse?"
"Yes, in life or death."
"Well, I will tell you a secret."
"What is it?"
"But remember" 
"Ah, pardieu, mute as a carp."
"Well, I think"  Andrea stopped and looked around.
"You think? Do not fear pardieu, we are alone."
"I think I have discovered my father."
"Your true father?"
"Yes."
"Not old Cavalcanti?"
"No, for he has gone again the true one, as you say."
"And that father is" 
"Well, Caderousse, it is Monte Cristo."
"Bah"
"Yes, you understand, that explains all. He cannot
acknowledge me openly, it appears, but he does it through M.
Cavalcanti, and gives him fifty thousand francs for it."
"Fifty thousand francs for being your father? I would have
done it for half that, for twenty thousand, for fifteen
thousand why did you not think of me, ungrateful man?"
"Did I know anything about it, when it was all done when I
was down there?"
"Ah, truly? And you say that by his will" 
"He leaves me five hundred thousand livres."
"Are you sure of it?"
"He showed it me but that is not all  there is a codicil,
as I said just now."
"Probably."
"And in that codicil he acknowledges me."
"Oh, the good father, the brave father, the very honest
father" said Caderousse, twirling a plate in the air
between his two hands.
"Now say if I conceal anything from you?"
"No, and your confidence makes you honorable in my opinion
and your princely father, is he rich, very rich?"
"Yes, he is that he does not himself know the amount of his
fortune."
"Is it possible?"
"It is evident enough to me, who am always at his house. The
other day a banker's clerk brought him fifty thousand francs
in a portfolio about the size of your plate yesterday his
banker brought him a hundred thousand francs in gold."
Caderousse was filled with wonder the young man's words
sounded to him like metal, and he thought he could hear the
rushing of cascades of louis. "And you go into that house?"
cried he briskly.
"When I like."
Caderousse was thoughtful for a moment. It was easy to
perceive he was revolving some unfortunate idea in his mind.
Then suddenly,  "How I should like to see all that," cried
he "how beautiful it must be"
"It is, in fact, magnificent," said Andrea.
"And does he not live in the ChampsElysees?"
"Yes, No. ."
"Ah," said Caderousse, "No. ."
"Yes, a fine house standing alone, between a courtyard and
a garden,  you must know it."
"Possibly but it is not the exterior I care for, it is the
interior. What beautiful furniture there must be in it"
"Have you ever seen the Tuileries?"
"No."
"Well, it surpasses that."
"It must be worth one's while to stoop, Andrea, when that
good M. Monte Cristo lets fall his purse."
"It is not worth while to wait for that," said Andrea
"money is as plentiful in that house as fruit in an
orchard."
"But you should take me there one day with you."
"How can I? On what plea?"
"You are right but you have made my mouth water. I must
absolutely see it I shall find a way."
"No nonsense, Caderousse"
"I will offer myself as floorpolisher."
"The rooms are all carpeted."
"Well, then, I must be contented to imagine it."
"That is the best plan, believe me."
"Try, at least, to give me an idea of what it is."
"How can I?"
"Nothing is easier. Is it large?"
"Middling."
"How is it arranged?"
"Faith, I should require pen, ink, and paper to make a
plan."
"They are all here," said Caderousse, briskly. He fetched
from an old secretary a sheet of white paper and pen and
ink. "Here," said Caderousse, "draw me all that on the
paper, my boy." Andrea took the pen with an imperceptible
smile and began. "The house, as I said, is between the court
and the garden in this way, do you see?" Andrea drew the
garden, the court and the house.
"High walls?"
"Not more than eight or ten feet."
"That is not prudent," said Caderousse.
"In the court are orangetrees in pots, turf, and clumps of
flowers."
"And no steeltraps?"
"No."
"The stables?"
"Are on either side of the gate, which you see there." And
Andrea continued his plan.
"Let us see the ground floor," said Caderousse.
"On the groundfloor, diningroom, two drawingrooms,
billiardroom, staircase in the hall, and a little back
staircase."
"Windows?"
"Magnificent windows, so beautiful, so large, that I believe
a man of your size should pass through each frame."
"Why the devil have they any stairs with such windows?"
"Luxury has everything."
"But shutters?"
"Yes, but they are never used. That Count of Monte Cristo is
an original, who loves to look at the sky even at night."
"And where do the servants sleep?"
"Oh, they have a house to themselves. Picture to yourself a
pretty coachhouse at the righthand side where the ladders
are kept. Well, over that coachhouse are the servants'
rooms, with bells corresponding with the different
apartments."
"Ah, diable  bells did you say?"
"What do you mean?"
"Oh. nothing I only say they cost a load of money to hang,
and what is the use of them, I should like to know?"
"There used to be a dog let loose in the yard at night, but
it has been taken to the house at Auteuil, to that you went
to, you know."
"Yes."
"I was saying to him only yesterday, "You are imprudent,
Monsieur Count for when you go to Auteuil and take your
servants the house is left unprotected.' Well,' said he,
"what next?' "Well, next, some day you will be robbed.'"
"What did he answer?"
"He quietly said, "What do I care if I am?'"
"Andrea, he has some secretary with a spring."
"How do you know?"
"Yes, which catches the thief in a trap and plays a tune. I
was told there were such at the last exhibition."
"He has simply a mahogany secretary, in which the key is
always kept."
"And he is not robbed?"
"No his servants are all devoted to him."
"There ought to be some money in that secretary?"
"There may be. No one knows what there is."
"And where is it?"
"On the first floor."
"Sketch me the plan of that floor, as you have done of the
ground floor, my boy."
"That is very simple." Andrea took the pen. "On the first
story, do you see, there is the anteroom and the
drawingroom to the right of the drawingroom, a library
and a study to the left, a bedroom and a dressingroom. The
famous secretary is in the dressingroom."
"Is there a window in the dressingroom?"
"Two,  one here and one there." Andrea sketched two
windows in the room, which formed an angle on the plan, and
appeared as a small square added to the rectangle of the
bedroom. Caderousse became thoughtful. "Does he often go to
Auteuil?" added he.
"Two or three times a week. Tomorrow, for instance, he is
going to spend the day and night there."
"Are you sure of it?"
"He has invited me to dine there."
"There's a life for you," said Caderousse "a town house and
a country house."
"That is what it is to be rich."
"And shall you dine there?"
"Probably."
"When you dine there, do you sleep there?"
"If I like I am at home there." Caderousse looked at the
young man, as if to get at the truth from the bottom of his
heart. But Andrea drew a cigarcase from his pocket, took a
havana, quietly lit it, and began smoking. "When do you want
your twelve hundred francs?" said he to Caderousse.
"Now, if you have them." Andrea took five and twenty louis
from his pocket.
"Yellow boys?" said Caderousse "no, I thank you."
"Oh, you despise them."
"On the contrary, I esteem them, but will not have them."
"You can change them, idiot gold is worth five sous."
"Exactly and he who changes them will follow friend
Caderousse, lay hands on him, and demand what farmers pay
him their rent in gold. No nonsense, my good fellow silver
simply, round coins with the head of some monarch or other
on them. Anybody may possess a fivefranc piece."
"But do you suppose I carry five hundred francs about with
me? I should want a porter."
"Well, leave them with your porter he is to be trusted. I
will call for them."
"Today?"
"No, tomorrow I shall not have time to day."
"Well, tomorrow I will leave them when I go to Auteuil."
"May I depend on it?"
"Certainly."
"Because I shall secure my housekeeper on the strength of
it."
"Now see here, will that be all? Eh? And will you not
torment me any more?"
"Never." Caderousse had become so gloomy that Andrea feared
he should be obliged to notice the change. He redoubled his
gayety and carelessness. "How sprightly you are," said
Caderousse "One would say you were already in possession of
your property."
"No, unfortunately but when I do obtain it" 
"Well?"
"I shall remember old friends, I can tell you that."
"Yes, since you have such a good memory."
"What do you want? It looks as if you were trying to fleece
me?"
"I? What an idea I, who am going to give you another piece
of good advice."
"What is it?"
"To leave behind you the diamond you have on your finger. We
shall both get into trouble. You will ruin both yourself and
me by your folly."
"How so?" said Andrea.
"How? You put on a livery, you disguise yourself as a
servant, and yet keep a diamond on your finger worth four or
five thousand francs."
"You guess well."
"I know something of diamonds I have had some."
"You do well to boast of it," said Andrea, who, without
becoming angry, as Caderousse feared, at this new extortion,
quietly resigned the ring. Caderousse looked so closely at
it that Andrea well knew that he was examining to see if all
the edges were perfect.
"It is a false diamond," said Caderousse.
"You are joking now," replied Andrea.
"Do not be angry, we can try it." Caderousse went to the
window, touched the glass with it, and found it would cut.
"Confiteor," said Caderousse, putting the diamond on his
little finger "I was mistaken but those thieves of
jewellers imitate so well that it is no longer worth while
to rob a jeweller's shop  it is another branch of industry
paralyzed."
"Have you finished?" said Andrea,  "do you want anything
more?  will you have my waistcoat or my hat? Make free,
now you have begun."
"No you are, after all, a good companion I will not detain
you, and will try to cure myself of my ambition."
"But take care the same thing does not happen to you in
selling the diamond you feared with the gold."
"I shall not sell it  do not fear."
"Not at least till the day after tomorrow," thought the
young man.
"Happy rogue," said Caderousse "you are going to find your
servants, your horses, your carriage, and your betrothed"
"Yes," said Andrea.
"Well, I hope you will make a handsome weddingpresent the
day you marry Mademoiselle Danglars."
"I have already told you it is a fancy you have taken in
your head."
"What fortune has she?"
"But I tell you" 
"A million?" Andrea shrugged his shoulders.
"Let it be a million," said Caderousse "you can never have
so much as I wish you."
"Thank you," said the young man.
"Oh, I wish it you with all my heart" added Caderousse with
his hoarse laugh. "Stop, let me show you the way."
"It is not worth while."
"Yes, it is."
"Why?"
"Because there is a little secret, a precaution I thought it
desirable to take, one of Huret  Fitchet's locks, revised
and improved by Gaspard Caderousse I will manufacture you a
similar one when you are a capitalist."
"Thank you," said Andrea "I will let you know a week
beforehand." They parted. Caderousse remained on the landing
until he had not only seen Andrea go down the three stories,
but also cross the court. Then he returned hastily, shut his
door carefully, and began to study, like a clever architect,
the plan Andrea had left him.
"Dear Benedetto," said he, "I think he will not be sorry to
inherit his fortune, and he who hastens the day when he can
touch his five hundred thousand will not be his worst
friend."
Chapter 
The Burglary.
The day following that on which the conversation we have
related took place, the Count of Monte Cristo set out for
Auteuil, accompanied by Ali and several attendants, and also
taking with him some horses whose qualities he was desirous
of ascertaining. He was induced to undertake this journey,
of which the day before he had not even thought and which
had not occurred to Andrea either, by the arrival of
Bertuccio from Normandy with intelligence respecting the
house and sloop. The house was ready, and the sloop which
had arrived a week before lay at anchor in a small creek
with her crew of six men, who had observed all the requisite
formalities and were ready again to put to sea.
The count praised Bertuccio's zeal, and ordered him to
prepare for a speedy departure, as his stay in France would
not be prolonged more than a month. "Now," said he, "I may
require to go in one night from Paris to Treport let eight
fresh horses be in readiness on the road, which will enable
me to go fifty leagues in ten hours."
"Your highness had already expressed that wish," said
Bertuccio, "and the horses are ready. I have bought them,
and stationed them myself at the most desirable posts, that
is, in villages, where no one generally stops."
"That's well," said Monte Cristo "I remain here a day or
two  arrange accordingly." As Bertuccio was leaving the
room to give the requisite orders, Baptistin opened the
door he held a letter on a silver waiter.
"What are you doing here?" asked the count, seeing him
covered with dust "I did not send for you, I think?"
Baptistin, without answering, approached the count, and
presented the letter. "Important and urgent," said he. The
count opened the letter, and read 
"M. de Monte Cristo is apprised that this night a man will
enter his house in the ChampsElysees with the intention of
carrying off some papers supposed to be in the secretary in
the dressingroom. The count's wellknown courage will
render unnecessary the aid of the police, whose interference
might seriously affect him who sends this advice. The count,
by any opening from the bedroom, or by concealing himself in
the dressingroom, would be able to defend his property
himself. Many attendants or apparent precautions would
prevent the villain from the attempt, and M. de Monte Cristo
would lose the opportunity of discovering an enemy whom
chance has revealed to him who now sends this warning to the
count,  a warning he might not be able to send another
time, if this first attempt should fail and another be
made."
The count's first idea was that this was an artifice  a
gross deception, to draw his attention from a minor danger
in order to expose him to a greater. He was on the point of
sending the letter to the commissary of police,
notwithstanding the advice of his anonymous friend, or
perhaps because of that advice, when suddenly the idea
occurred to him that it might be some personal enemy, whom
he alone should recognize and over whom, if such were the
case, he alone would gain any advantage, as Fiesco had done
over the Moor who would have killed him. We know the Count's
vigorous and daring mind, denying anything to be impossible,
with that energy which marks the great man. From his past
life, from his resolution to shrink from nothing, the count
had acquired an inconceivable relish for the contests in
which he had engaged, sometimes against nature, that is to
say, against God, and sometimes against the world, that is,
against the devil.
 The Genoese conspirator.
"They do not want my papers," said Monte Cristo, "they want
to kill me they are no robbers, but assassins. I will not
allow the prefect of police to interfere with my private
affairs. I am rich enough, forsooth, to distribute his
authority on this occasion." The count recalled Baptistin,
who had left the room after delivering the letter. "Return
to Paris," said he "assemble the servants who remain there.
I want all my household at Auteuil."
"But will no one remain in the house, my lord?" asked
Baptistin.
"Yes, the porter."
"My lord will remember that the lodge is at a distance from
the house."
"Well?"
"The house might be stripped without his hearing the least
noise."
"By whom?"
"By thieves."
"You are a fool, M. Baptistin. Thieves might strip the house
it would annoy me less than to be disobeyed." Baptistin
bowed.
"You understand me?" said the count. "Bring your comrades
here, one and all but let everything remain as usual, only
close the shutters of the ground floor."
"And those of the second floor?"
"You know they are never closed. Go"
The count signified his intention of dining alone, and that
no one but Ali should attend him. Having dined with his
usual tranquillity and moderation, the count, making a
signal to Ali to follow him, went out by the sidegate and
on reaching the Bois de Boulogne turned, apparently without
design towards Paris and at twilight found himself opposite
his house in the ChampsElysees. All was dark one solitary,
feeble light was burning in the porter's lodge, about forty
paces distant from the house, as Baptistin had said. Monte
Cristo leaned against a tree, and with that scrutinizing
glance which was so rarely deceived, looked up and down the
avenue, examined the passersby, and carefully looked down
the neighboring streets, to see that no one was concealed.
Ten minutes passed thus, and he was convinced that no one
was watching him. He hastened to the sidedoor with Ali,
entered hurriedly, and by the servants' staircase, of which
he had the key, gained his bedroom without opening or
disarranging a single curtain, without even the porter
having the slightest suspicion that the house, which he
supposed empty, contained its chief occupant.
Arrived in his bedroom, the count motioned to Ali to stop
then he passed into the dressingroom, which he examined.
Everything appeared as usual  the precious secretary in
its place, and the key in the secretary. He double locked
it, took the key, returned to the bedroom door, removed the
double staple of the bolt, and went in. Meanwhile Ali had
procured the arms the count required  namely, a short
carbine and a pair of doublebarrelled pistols, with which
as sure an aim might be taken as with a singlebarrelled
one. Thus armed, the count held the lives of five men in his
hands. It was about halfpast nine. The count and Ali ate in
haste a crust of bread and drank a glass of Spanish wine
then Monte Cristo slipped aside one of the movable panels,
which enabled him to see into the adjoining room. He had
within his reach his pistols and carbine, and Ali, standing
near him, held one of the small Arabian hatchets, whose form
has not varied since the Crusades. Through one of the
windows of the bedroom, on a line with that in the
dressingroom, the count could see into the street.
Two hours passed thus. It was intensely dark still Ali,
thanks to his wild nature, and the count, thanks doubtless
to his long confinement, could distinguish in the darkness
the slightest movement of the trees. The little light in the
lodge had long been extinct. It might be expected that the
attack, if indeed an attack was projected, would be made
from the staircase of the ground floor, and not from a
window in Monte Cristo's opinion, the villains sought his
life, not his money. It would be his bedroom they would
attack, and they must reach it by the back staircase, or by
the window in the dressingroom. The clock of the Invalides
struck a quarter to twelve the west wind bore on its
moistened gusts the doleful vibration of the three strokes.
As the last stroke died away, the count thought he heard a
slight noise in the dressingroom this first sound, or
rather this first grinding, was followed by a second, then a
third at the fourth, the count knew what to expect. A firm
and wellpractised hand was engaged in cutting the four
sides of a pane of glass with a diamond. The count felt his
heart beat more rapidly. Inured as men may be to danger,
forewarned as they may be of peril, they understand, by the
fluttering of the heart and the shuddering of the frame, the
enormous difference between a dream and a reality, between
the project and the execution. However, Monte Cristo only
made a sign to apprise Ali, who, understanding that danger
was approaching from the other side, drew nearer to his
master. Monte Cristo was eager to ascertain the strength and
number of his enemies.
The window whence the noise proceeded was opposite the
opening by which the count could see into the dressingroom.
He fixed his eyes on that window  he distinguished a
shadow in the darkness then one of the panes became quite
opaque, as if a sheet of paper were stuck on the outside,
then the square cracked without falling. Through the opening
an arm was passed to find the fastening, then a second the
window turned on its hinges, and a man entered. He was
alone.
"That's a daring rascal," whispered the count.
At that moment Ali touched him slightly on the shoulder. He
turned Ali pointed to the window of the room in which they
were, facing the street. "I see" said he, "there are two of
them one does the work while the other stands guard." He
made a sign to Ali not to lose sight of the man in the
street, and turned to the one in the dressingroom.
The glasscutter had entered, and was feeling his way, his
arms stretched out before him. At last he appeared to have
made himself familiar with his surroundings. There were two
doors he bolted them both.
When he drew near to the bedroom door, Monte Cristo expected
that he was coming in, and raised one of his pistols but he
simply heard the sound of the bolts sliding in their copper
rings. It was only a precaution. The nocturnal visitor,
ignorant of the fact that the count had removed the staples,
might now think himself at home, and pursue his purpose with
full security. Alone and free to act as he wished, the man
then drew from his pocket something which the count could
not discern, placed it on a stand, then went straight to the
secretary, felt the lock, and contrary to his expectation
found that the key was missing. But the glasscutter was a
prudent man who had provided for all emergencies. The count
soon heard the rattling of a bunch of skeleton keys, such as
the locksmith brings when called to force a lock, and which
thieves call nightingales, doubtless from the music of their
nightly song when they grind against the bolt. "Ah, ha,"
whispered Monte Cristo with a smile of disappointment, "he
is only a thief."
But the man in the dark could not find the right key. He
reached the instrument he had placed on the stand, touched a
spring, and immediately a pale light, just bright enough to
render objects distinct, was reflected on his hands and
countenance. "By heavens," exclaimed Monte Cristo, starting
back, "it is" 
Ali raised his hatchet. "Don't stir," whispered Monte
Cristo, "and put down your hatchet we shall require no
arms." Then he added some words in a low tone, for the
exclamation which surprise had drawn from the count, faint
as it had been, had startled the man who remained in the
pose of the old knifegrinder. It was an order the count had
just given, for immediately Ali went noiselessly, and
returned, bearing a black dress and a threecornered hat.
Meanwhile Monte Cristo had rapidly taken off his greatcoat,
waistcoat, and shirt, and one might distinguish by the
glimmering through the open panel that he wore a pliant
tunic of steel mail, of which the last in France, where
daggers are no longer dreaded, was worn by King Louis XVI.,
who feared the dagger at his breast, and whose head was
cleft with a hatchet. The tunic soon disappeared under a
long cassock, as did his hair under a priest's wig the
threecornered hat over this effectually transformed the
count into an abbe.
The man, hearing nothing more, stood erect, and while Monte
Cristo was completing his disguise had advanced straight to
the secretary, whose lock was beginning to crack under his
nightingale.
"Try again," whispered the count, who depended on the secret
spring, which was unknown to the picklock, clever as he
might be  "try again, you have a few minutes' work there."
And he advanced to the window. The man whom he had seen
seated on a fence had got down, and was still pacing the
street but, strange as it appeared, he cared not for those
who might pass from the avenue of the ChampsElysees or by
the Faubourg St. Honore his attention was engrossed with
what was passing at the count's, and his only aim appeared
to be to discern every movement in the dressingroom.
Monte Cristo suddenly struck his finger on his forehead and
a smile passed over his lips then drawing near to Ali, he
whispered, 
"Remain here, concealed in the dark, and whatever noise you
hear, whatever passes, only come in or show yourself if I
call you." Ali bowed in token of strict obedience. Monte
Cristo then drew a lighted taper from a closet, and when the
thief was deeply engaged with his lock, silently opened the
door, taking care that the light should shine directly on
his face. The door opened so quietly that the thief heard no
sound but, to his astonishment, the room was suddenly
illuminated. He turned.
"Ah, goodevening, my dear M. Caderousse," said Monte
Cristo "what are you doing here, at such an hour?"
"The Abbe Busoni" exclaimed Caderousse and, not knowing
how this strange apparition could have entered when he had
bolted the doors, he let fall his bunch of keys, and
remained motionless and stupefied. The count placed himself
between Caderousse and the window, thus cutting off from the
thief his only chance of retreat. "The Abbe Busoni"
repeated Caderousse, fixing his haggard gaze on the count.
"Yes, undoubtedly, the Abbe Busoni himself," replied Monte
Cristo. "And I am very glad you recognize me, dear M.
Caderousse it proves you have a good memory, for it must be
about ten years since we last met." This calmness of Busoni,
combined with his irony and boldness, staggered Caderousse.
"The abbe, the abbe" murmured he, clinching his fists, and
his teeth chattering.
"So you would rob the Count of Monte Cristo?" continued the
false abbe.
"Reverend sir," murmured Caderousse, seeking to regain the
window, which the count pitilessly blocked  "reverend sir,
I don't know  believe me  I take my oath" 
"A pane of glass out," continued the count, "a dark lantern,
a bunch of false keys, a secretary half forced  it is
tolerably evident" 
Caderousse was choking he looked around for some corner to
hide in, some way of escape.
"Come, come," continued the count, "I see you are still the
same,  an assassin."
"Reverend sir, since you know everything, you know it was
not I  it was La Carconte that was proved at the trial,
since I was only condemned to the galleys."
"Is your time, then, expired, since I find you in a fair way
to return there?"
"No, reverend sir I have been liberated by some one."
"That some one has done society a great kindness."
"Ah," said Caderousse, "I had promised" 
"And you are breaking your promise" interrupted Monte
Cristo.
"Alas, yes" said Caderousse very uneasily.
"A bad relapse, that will lead you, if I mistake not, to the
Place de Greve. So much the worse, so much the worse 
diavolo, as they say in my country."
"Reverend sir, I am impelled" 
"Every criminal says the same thing."
"Poverty" 
"Pshaw" said Busoni disdainfully "poverty may make a man
beg, steal a loaf of bread at a baker's door, but not cause
him to open a secretary in a house supposed to be inhabited.
And when the jeweller Johannes had just paid you ,
francs for the diamond I had given you, and you killed him
to get the diamond and the money both, was that also
poverty?"
"Pardon, reverend sir," said Caderousse "you have saved my
life once, save me again"
"That is but poor encouragement."
"Are you alone, reverend sir, or have you there soldiers
ready to seize me?"
"I am alone," said the abbe, "and I will again have pity on
you, and will let you escape, at the risk of the fresh
miseries my weakness may lead to, if you tell me the truth."
"Ah, reverend sir," cried Caderousse, clasping his hands,
and drawing nearer to Monte Cristo, "I may indeed say you
are my deliverer"
"You mean to say you have been freed from confinement?"
"Yes, that is true, reverend sir."
"Who was your liberator?"
"An Englishman."
"What was his name?"
"Lord Wilmore."
"I know him I shall know if you lie."
"Ah, reverend sir, I tell you the simple truth."
"Was this Englishman protecting you?"
"No, not me, but a young Corsican, my companion."
"What was this young Corsican's name?"
"Benedetto."
"Is that his Christian name?"
"He had no other he was a foundling."
"Then this young man escaped with you?"
"He did."
"In what way?"
"We were working at St. Mandrier, near Toulon. Do you know
St. Mandrier?"
"I do."
"In the hour of rest, between noon and one o'clock" 
"Galleyslaves having a nap after dinner We may well pity
the poor fellows" said the abbe.
"Nay," said Caderousse, "one can't always work  one is not
a dog."
"So much the better for the dogs," said Monte Cristo.
"While the rest slept, then, we went away a short distance
we severed our fetters with a file the Englishman had given
us, and swam away."
"And what is become of this Benedetto?"
"I don't know."
"You ought to know."
"No, in truth we parted at Hyeres." And, to give more
weight to his protestation, Caderousse advanced another step
towards the abbe, who remained motionless in his place, as
calm as ever, and pursuing his interrogation. "You lie,"
said the Abbe Busoni, with a tone of irresistible authority.
"Reverend sir"
"You lie This man is still your friend, and you, perhaps,
make use of him as your accomplice."
"Oh, reverend sir"
"Since you left Toulon what have you lived on? Answer me"
"On what I could get."
"You lie," repeated the abbe a third time, with a still more
imperative tone. Caderousse, terrified, looked at the count.
"You have lived on the money he has given you."
"True," said Caderousse "Benedetto has become the son of a
great lord."
"How can he be the son of a great lord?"
"A natural son."
"And what is that great lord's name?"
"The Count of Monte Cristo, the very same in whose house we
are."
"Benedetto the count's son?" replied Monte Cristo,
astonished in his turn.
"Well, I should think so, since the count has found him a
false father  since the count gives him four thousand
francs a month, and leaves him , francs in his will."
"Ah, yes," said the factitious abbe, who began to
understand "and what name does the young man bear
meanwhile?"
"Andrea Cavalcanti."
"Is it, then, that young man whom my friend the Count of
Monte Cristo has received into his house, and who is going
to marry Mademoiselle Danglars?"
"Exactly."
"And you suffer that, you wretch  you, who know his life
and his crime?"
"Why should I stand in a comrade's way?" said Caderousse.
"You are right it is not you who should apprise M.
Danglars, it is I."
"Do not do so, reverend sir."
"Why not?"
"Because you would bring us to ruin."
"And you think that to save such villains as you I will
become an abettor of their plot, an accomplice in their
crimes?"
"Reverend sir," said Caderousse, drawing still nearer.
"I will expose all."
"To whom?"
"To M. Danglars."
"By heaven" cried Caderousse, drawing from his waistcoat an
open knife, and striking the count in the breast, "you shall
disclose nothing, reverend sir" To Caderousse's great
astonishment, the knife, instead of piercing the count's
breast, flew back blunted. At the same moment the count
seized with his left hand the assassin's wrist, and wrung it
with such strength that the knife fell from his stiffened
fingers, and Caderousse uttered a cry of pain. But the
count, disregarding his cry, continued to wring the bandit's
wrist, until, his arm being dislocated, he fell first on his
knees, then flat on the floor. The count then placed his
foot on his head, saying, "I know not what restrains me from
crushing thy skull, rascal."
"Ah, mercy  mercy" cried Caderousse. The count withdrew
his foot. "Rise" said he. Caderousse rose.
"What a wrist you have, reverend sir" said Caderousse.
stroking his arm, all bruised by the fleshy pincers which
had held it "what a wrist"
"Silence God gives me strength to overcome a wild beast
like you in the name of that God I act,  remember that,
wretch,  and to spare thee at this moment is still serving
him."
"Oh" said Caderousse, groaning with pain.
"Take this pen and paper, and write what I dictate."
"I don't know how to write, reverend sir."
"You lie Take this pen, and write" Caderousse, awed by the
superior power of the abbe, sat down and wrote 
Sir,  The man whom you are receiving at your house, and to
whom you intend to marry your daughter, is a felon who
escaped with me from confinement at Toulon. He was No. ,
and I No. . He was called Benedetto, but he is ignorant of
his real name, having never known his parents.
"Sign it" continued the count.
"But would you ruin me?"
"If I sought your ruin, fool, I should drag you to the first
guardhouse besides, when that note is delivered, in all
probability you will have no more to fear. Sign it, then"
Caderousse signed it. "The address, "To monsieur the Baron
Danglars, banker, Rue de la Chaussee d'Antin.'" Caderousse
wrote the address. The abbe took the note. "Now," said he,
"that suffices  begone"
"Which way?"
"The way you came."
"You wish me to get out at that window?"
"You got in very well."
"Oh, you have some design against me, reverend sir."
"Idiot what design can I have?"
"Why, then, not let me out by the door?"
"What would be the advantage of waking the porter?" 
"Ah, reverend sir, tell me, do you wish me dead?"
"I wish what God wills."
"But swear that you will not strike me as I go down."
"Cowardly fool"
"What do you intend doing with me?"
"I ask you what can I do? I have tried to make you a happy
man, and you have turned out a murderer."
"Oh, monsieur," said Caderousse, "make one more attempt 
try me once more"
"I will," said the count. "Listen  you know if I may be
relied on."
"Yes," said Caderousse.
"If you arrive safely at home" 
"What have I to fear, except from you?"
"If you reach your home safely, leave Paris, leave France,
and wherever you may be, so long as you conduct yourself
well, I will send you a small annuity for, if you return
home safely, then" 
"Then?" asked Caderousse, shuddering.
"Then I shall believe God has forgiven you, and I will
forgive you too."
"As true as I am a Christian," stammered Caderousse, "you
will make me die of fright"
"Now begone," said the count, pointing to the window.
Caderousse, scarcely yet relying on this promise, put his
legs out of the window and stood on the ladder. "Now go
down," said the abbe, folding his arms. Understanding he had
nothing more to fear from him, Caderousse began to go down.
Then the count brought the taper to the window, that it
might be seen in the ChampsElysees that a man was getting
out of the window while another held a light.
"What are you doing, reverend sir? Suppose a watchman should
pass?" And he blew out the light. He then descended, but it
was only when he felt his foot touch the ground that he was
satisfied of his safety.
Monte Cristo returned to his bedroom, and, glancing rapidly
from the garden to the street, he saw first Caderousse, who
after walking to the end of the garden, fixed his ladder
against the wall at a different part from where he came in.
The count then looking over into the street, saw the man who
appeared to be waiting run in the same direction, and place
himself against the angle of the wall where Caderousse would
come over. Caderousse climbed the ladder slowly, and looked
over the coping to see if the street was quiet. No one could
be seen or heard. The clock of the Invalides struck one.
Then Caderousse sat astride the coping, and drawing up his
ladder passed it over the wall then he began to descend, or
rather to slide down by the two stanchions, which he did
with an ease which proved how accustomed he was to the
exercise. But, once started, he could not stop. In vain did
he see a man start from the shadow when he was halfway down
in vain did he see an arm raised as he touched the
ground. Before he could defend himself that arm struck him
so violently in the back that he let go the ladder, crying,
"Help" A second blow struck him almost immediately in the
side, and he fell, calling, "Help, murder" Then, as he
rolled on the ground, his adversary seized him by the hair,
and struck him a third blow in the chest. This time
Caderousse endeavored to call again, but he could only utter
a groan, and he shuddered as the blood flowed from his three
wounds. The assassin, finding that he no longer cried out,
lifted his head up by the hair his eyes were closed, and
the mouth was distorted. The murderer, supposing him dead,
let fall his head and disappeared. Then Caderousse, feeling
that he was leaving him, raised himself on his elbow, and
with a dying voice cried with great effort, "Murder I am
dying Help, reverend sir,  help"
This mournful appeal pierced the darkness. The door of the
backstaircase opened, then the sidegate of the garden, and
Ali and his master were on the spot with lights.
Chapter 
The Hand of God.
Caderousse continued to call piteously, "Help, reverend sir,
help"
"What is the matter?" asked Monte Cristo.
"Help," cried Caderousse "I am murdered"
"We are here  take courage."
"Ah, it's all over You are come too late  you are come to
see me die. What blows, what blood" He fainted. Ali and his
master conveyed the wounded man into a room. Monte Cristo
motioned to Ali to undress him, and he then examined his
dreadful wounds. "My God" he exclaimed, "thy vengeance is
sometimes delayed, but only that it may fall the more
effectually." Ali looked at his master for further
instructions. "Bring here immediately the king's attorney,
M. de Villefort, who lives in the Faubourg St. Honore. As
you pass the lodge, wake the porter, and send him for a
surgeon." Ali obeyed, leaving the abbe alone with
Caderousse, who had not yet revived.
When the wretched man again opened his eyes, the count
looked at him with a mournful expression of pity, and his
lips moved as if in prayer. "A surgeon, reverend sir  a
surgeon" said Caderousse.
"I have sent for one," replied the abbe.
"I know he cannot save my life, but he may strengthen me to
give my evidence."
"Against whom?"
"Against my murderer."
"Did you recognize him?"
"Yes it was Benedetto."
"The young Corsican?"
"Himself."
"Your comrade?"
"Yes. After giving me the plan of this house, doubtless
hoping I should kill the count and he thus become his heir,
or that the count would kill me and I should be out of his
way, he waylaid me, and has murdered me."
"I have also sent for the procureur."
"He will not come in time I feel my life fast ebbing."
"Wait a moment," said Monte Cristo. He left the room, and
returned in five minutes with a phial. The dying man's eyes
were all the time riveted on the door, through which he
hoped succor would arrive. "Hasten, reverend sir, hasten I
shall faint again" Monte Cristo approached, and dropped on
his purple lips three or four drops of the contents of the
phial. Caderousse drew a deep breath. "Oh," said he, "that
is life to me more, more"
"Two drops more would kill you," replied the abbe.
"Oh, send for some one to whom I can denounce the wretch"
"Shall I write your deposition? You can sign it."
"Yes yes," said Caderousse and his eyes glistened at the
thought of this posthumous revenge. Monte Cristo wrote 
"I die, murdered by the Corsican Benedetto, my comrade in
the galleys at Toulouse, No. ."
"Quick, quick" said Caderousse, "or I shall be unable to
sign it."
Monte Cristo gave the pen to Caderousse, who collected all
his strength, signed it, and fell back on his bed, saying
"You will relate all the rest, reverend sir you will say he
calls himself Andrea Cavalcanti. He lodges at the Hotel des
Princes. Oh, I am dying" He again fainted. The abbe made
him smell the contents of the phial, and he again opened his
eyes. His desire for revenge had not forsaken him.
"Ah, you will tell all I have said, will you not, reverend
sir?"
"Yes, and much more."
"What more will you say?"
"I will say he had doubtless given you the plan of this
house, in the hope the count would kill you. I will say,
likewise, he had apprised the count, by a note, of your
intention, and, the count being absent, I read the note and
sat up to await you."
"And he will be guillotined, will be not?" said Caderousse.
"Promise me that, and I will die with that hope."
"I will say," continued the count, "that he followed and
watched you the whole time, and when he saw you leave the
house, ran to the angle of the wall to conceal himself."
"Did you see all that?"
"Remember my words "If you return home safely, I shall
believe God has forgiven you, and I will forgive you also.'"
"And you did not warn me" cried Caderousse, raising himself
on his elbows. "You knew I should be killed on leaving this
house, and did not warn me"
"No for I saw God's justice placed in the hands of
Benedetto, and should have thought it sacrilege to oppose
the designs of providence."
"God's justice Speak not of it, reverend sir. If God were
just, you know how many would be punished who now escape."
"Patience," said the abbe, in a tone which made the dying
man shudder "have patience" Caderousse looked at him with
amazement. "Besides," said the abbe, "God is merciful to
all, as he has been to you he is first a father, then a
judge."
"Do you then believe in God?" said Caderousse.
"Had I been so unhappy as not to believe in him until now,"
said Monte Cristo, "I must believe on seeing you."
Caderousse raised his clinched hands towards heaven.
"Listen," said the abbe, extending his hand over the wounded
man, as if to command him to believe "this is what the God
in whom, on your deathbed, you refuse to believe, has done
for you  he gave you health, strength, regular employment,
even friends  a life, in fact, which a man might enjoy
with a calm conscience. Instead of improving these gifts,
rarely granted so abundantly, this has been your course 
you have given yourself up to sloth and drunkenness, and in
a fit of intoxication have ruined your best friend."
"Help" cried Caderousse "I require a surgeon, not a
priest perhaps I am not mortally wounded  I may not die
perhaps they can yet save my life."
"Your wounds are so far mortal that, without the three drops
I gave you, you would now be dead. Listen, then."
"Ah," murmured Caderousse, "what a strange priest you are
you drive the dying to despair, instead of consoling them."
"Listen," continued the abbe. "When you had betrayed your
friend God began not to strike, but to warn you. Poverty
overtook you. You had already passed half your life in
coveting that which you might have honorably acquired and
already you contemplated crime under the excuse of want,
when God worked a miracle in your behalf, sending you, by my
hands, a fortune  brilliant, indeed, for you, who had
never possessed any. But this unexpected, unhopedfor,
unheardof fortune sufficed you no longer when you once
possessed it you wished to double it, and how?  by a
murder You succeeded, and then God snatched it from you,
and brought you to justice."
"It was not I who wished to kill the Jew," said Caderousse
"it was La Carconte."
"Yes," said Monte Cristo, "and God,  I cannot say in
justice, for his justice would have slain you,  but God,
in his mercy, spared your life."
"Pardieu, to transport me for life, how merciful"
"You thought it a mercy then, miserable wretch The coward
who feared death rejoiced at perpetual disgrace for like
all galleyslaves, you said, "I may escape from prison, I
cannot from the grave.' And you said truly the way was
opened for you unexpectedly. An Englishman visited Toulon,
who had vowed to rescue two men from infamy, and his choice
fell on you and your companion. You received a second
fortune, money and tranquillity were restored to you, and
you, who had been condemned to a felon's life, might live as
other men. Then, wretched creature, then you tempted God a
third time. "I have not enough,' you said, when you had more
than you before possessed, and you committed a third crime,
without reason, without excuse. God is wearied he has
punished you." Caderousse was fast sinking. "Give me drink,"
said he "I thirst  I burn" Monte Cristo gave him a glass
of water. "And yet that villain, Benedetto, will escape"
"No one, I tell you, will escape Benedetto will be
punished."
"Then, you, too, will be punished, for you did not do your
duty as a priest  you should have prevented Benedetto from
killing me."
"I?" said the count, with a smile which petrified the dying
man, "when you had just broken your knife against the coat
of mail which protected my breast Yet perhaps if I had
found you humble and penitent, I might have prevented
Benedetto from killing you but I found you proud and
bloodthirsty, and I left you in the hands of God."
"I do not believe there is a God," howled Caderousse "you
do not believe it you lie  you lie"
"Silence," said the abbe "you will force the last drop of
blood from your veins. What you do not believe in God when
he is striking you dead? you will not believe in him, who
requires but a prayer, a word, a tear, and he will forgive?
God, who might have directed the assassin's dagger so as to
end your career in a moment, has given you this quarter of
an hour for repentance. Reflect, then, wretched man, and
repent."
"No," said Caderousse, "no I will not repent. There is no
God there is no providence  all comes by chance." 
"There is a providence there is a God," said Monte Cristo,
"of whom you are a striking proof, as you lie in utter
despair, denying him, while I stand before you, rich, happy,
safe and entreating that God in whom you endeavor not to
believe, while in your heart you still believe in him."
"But who are you, then?" asked Caderousse, fixing his dying
eyes on the count. "Look well at me" said Monte Cristo,
putting the light near his face. "Well, the abbe  the Abbe
Busoni." Monte Cristo took off the wig which disfigured him,
and let fall his black hair, which added so much to the
beauty of his pallid features. "Oh?" said Caderousse,
thunderstruck, "but for that black hair, I should say you
were the Englishman, Lord Wilmore."
"I am neither the Abbe Busoni nor Lord Wilmore," said Monte
Cristo "think again,  do you not recollect me?" Those was
a magic effect in the count's words, which once more revived
the exhausted powers of the miserable man. "Yes, indeed,"
said he "I think I have seen you and known you formerly."
"Yes, Caderousse, you have seen me you knew me once."
"Who, then, are you? and why, if you knew me, do you let me
die?"
"Because nothing can save you your wounds are mortal. Had
it been possible to save you, I should have considered it
another proof of God's mercy, and I would again have
endeavored to restore you, I swear by my father's tomb."
"By your father's tomb" said Caderousse, supported by a
supernatural power, and halfraising himself to see more
distinctly the man who had just taken the oath which all men
hold sacred "who, then, are you?" The count had watched the
approach of death. He knew this was the last struggle. He
approached the dying man, and, leaning over him with a calm
and melancholy look, he whispered, "I am  I am"  And his
almost closed lips uttered a name so low that the count
himself appeared afraid to hear it. Caderousse, who had
raised himself on his knees, and stretched out his arm,
tried to draw back, then clasping his hands, and raising
them with a desperate effort, "O my God, my God" said he,
"pardon me for having denied thee thou dost exist, thou art
indeed man's father in heaven, and his judge on earth. My
God, my Lord, I have long despised thee Pardon me, my God
receive me, O my Lord" Caderousse sighed deeply, and fell
back with a groan. The blood no longer flowed from his
wounds. He was dead.
"One" said the count mysteriously, his eyes fixed on the
corpse, disfigured by so awful a death. Ten minutes
afterwards the surgeon and the procureur arrived, the one
accompanied by the porter, the other by Ali, and were
received by the Abbe Busoni, who was praying by the side of
the corpse.
Chapter 
Beauchamp.
The daring attempt to rob the count was the topic of
conversation throughout Paris for the next fortnight. The
dying man had signed a deposition declaring Benedetto to be
the assassin. The police had orders to make the strictest
search for the murderer. Caderousse's knife, dark lantern,
bunch of keys, and clothing, excepting the waistcoat, which
could not be found, were deposited at the registry the
corpse was conveyed to the morgue. The count told every one
that this adventure had happened during his absence at
Auteuil, and that he only knew what was related by the Abbe
Busoni, who that evening, by mere chance, had requested to
pass the night in his house, to examine some valuable books
in his library. Bertuccio alone turned pale whenever
Benedetto's name was mentioned in his presence, but there
was no reason why any one should notice his doing so.
Villefort, being called on to prove the crime, was preparing
his brief with the same ardor that he was accustomed to
exercise when required to speak in criminal cases.
But three weeks had already passed, and the most diligent
search had been unsuccessful the attempted robbery and the
murder of the robber by his comrade were almost forgotten in
anticipation of the approaching marriage of Mademoiselle
Danglars to the Count Andrea Cavalcanti. It was expected
that this wedding would shortly take place, as the young man
was received at the banker's as the betrothed. Letters had
been despatched to M. Cavalcanti, as the count's father, who
highly approved of the union, regretted his inability to
leave Parma at that time, and promised a wedding gift of a
hundred and fifty thousand livres. It was agreed that the
three millions should be intrusted to Danglars to invest
some persons had warned the young man of the circumstances
of his future fatherinlaw, who had of late sustained
repeated losses but with sublime disinterestedness and
confidence the young man refused to listen, or to express a
single doubt to the baron. The baron adored Count Andrea
Cavalcanti not so Mademoiselle Eugenie Danglars. With an
instinctive hatred of matrimony, she suffered Andrea's
attentions in order to get rid of Morcerf but when Andrea
urged his suit, she betrayed an entire dislike to him. The
baron might possibly have perceived it, but, attributing it
to a caprice, feigned ignorance.
The delay demanded by Beauchamp had nearly expired. Morcerf
appreciated the advice of Monte Cristo to let things die
away of their own accord. No one had taken up the remark
about the general, and no one had recognized in the officer
who betrayed the castle of Yanina the noble count in the
House of Peers. Albert, however felt no less insulted the
few lines which had irritated him were certainly intended as
an insult. Besides, the manner in which Beauchamp had closed
the conference left a bitter recollection in his heart. He
cherished the thought of the duel, hoping to conceal its
true cause even from his seconds. Beauchamp had not been
seen since the day he visited Albert, and those of whom the
latter inquired always told him he was out on a journey
which would detain him some days. Where he was no one knew.
One morning Albert was awakened by his valet de chambre, who
announced Beauchamp. Albert rubbed his eyes, ordered his
servant to introduce him into the small smokingroom on the
groundfloor, dressed himself quickly, and went down. He
found Beauchamp pacing the room on perceiving him Beauchamp
stopped. "Your arrival here, without waiting my visit at
your house today, looks well, sir," said Albert. "Tell me,
may I shake hands with you, saying, "Beauchamp, acknowledge
you have injured me, and retain my friendship,' or must I
simply propose to you a choice of arms?"
"Albert," said Beauchamp, with a look of sorrow which
stupefied the young man, "let us first sit down and talk."
"Rather, sir, before we sit down, I must demand your
answer."
"Albert," said the journalist, "these are questions which it
is difficult to answer."
"I will facilitate it by repeating the question, "Will you,
or will you not, retract?'"
"Morcerf, it is not enough to answer "yes' or "no' to
questions which concern the honor, the social interest, and
the life of such a man as Lieutenantgeneral the Count of
Morcerf, peer of France."
"What must then be done?"
"What I have done, Albert. I reasoned thus  money, time,
and fatigue are nothing compared with the reputation and
interests of a whole family probabilities will not suffice,
only facts will justify a deadly combat with a friend. If I
strike with the sword, or discharge the contents of a pistol
at man with whom, for three years, I have been on terms of
intimacy, I must, at least, know why I do so I must meet
him with a heart at ease, and that quiet conscience which a
man needs when his own arm must save his life."
"Well," said Morcerf, impatiently, "what does all this
mean?"
"It means that I have just returned from Yanina."
"From Yanina?"
"Yes."
"Impossible"
"Here is my passport examine the visa  Geneva, Milan,
Venice, Trieste, Delvino, Yanina. Will you believe the
government of a republic, a kingdom, and an empire?" Albert
cast his eyes on the passport, then raised them in
astonishment to Beauchamp. "You have been to Yanina?" said
he.
"Albert, had you been a stranger, a foreigner, a simple
lord, like that Englishman who came to demand satisfaction
three or four months since, and whom I killed to get rid of,
I should not have taken this trouble but I thought this
mark of consideration due to you. I took a week to go,
another to return, four days of quarantine, and fortyeight
hours to stay there that makes three weeks. I returned last
night, and here I am."
"What circumlocution How long you are before you tell me
what I most wish to know?"
"Because, in truth, Albert" 
"You hesitate?"
"Yes,  I fear."
"You fear to acknowledge that your correspondent his
deceived you? Oh, no selflove, Beauchamp. Acknowledge it,
Beauchamp your courage cannot be doubted."
"Not so," murmured the journalist "on the contrary" 
Albert turned frightfully pale he endeavored to speak, but
the words died on his lips. "My friend," said Beauchamp, in
the most affectionate tone, "I should gladly make an
apology but, alas," 
"But what?"
"The paragraph was correct, my friend."
"What? That French officer" 
"Yes."
"Fernand?"
"Yes."
"The traitor who surrendered the castle of the man in whose
service he was" 
"Pardon me, my friend, that man was your father" Albert
advanced furiously towards Beauchamp, but the latter
restrained him more by a mild look than by his extended
hand.
"My friend," said he, "here is a proof of it."
Albert opened the paper, it was an attestation of four
notable inhabitants of Yanina, proving that Colonel Fernand
Mondego, in the service of Ali Tepelini, had surrendered the
castle for two million crowns. The signatures were perfectly
legal. Albert tottered and fell overpowered in a chair. It
could no longer be doubted the family name was fully given.
After a moment's mournful silence, his heart overflowed, and
he gave way to a flood of tears. Beauchamp, who had watched
with sincere pity the young man's paroxysm of grief,
approached him. "Now, Albert," said he, "you understand me
do you not? I wished to see all, and to judge of
everything for myself, hoping the explanation would be in
your father's favor, and that I might do him justice. But,
on the contrary, the particulars which are given prove that
Fernand Mondego, raised by Ali Pasha to the rank of
governorgeneral, is no other than Count Fernand of Morcerf
then, recollecting the honor you had done me, in admitting
me to your friendship, I hastened to you."
Albert, still extended on the chair, covered his face with
both hands, as if to prevent the light from reaching him. "I
hastened to you," continued Beauchamp, "to tell you, Albert,
that in this changing age, the faults of a father cannot
revert upon his children. Few have passed through this
revolutionary period, in the midst of which we were born,
without some stain of infamy or blood to soil the uniform of
the soldier, or the gown of the magistrate. Now I have these
proofs, Albert, and I am in your confidence, no human power
can force me to a duel which your own conscience would
reproach you with as criminal, but I come to offer you what
you can no longer demand of me. Do you wish these proofs,
these attestations, which I alone possess, to be destroyed?
Do you wish this frightful secret to remain with us?
Confided to me, it shall never escape my lips say, Albert,
my friend, do you wish it?"
Albert threw himself on Beauchamp's neck. "Ah, noble
fellow" cried he.
"Take these," said Beauchamp, presenting the papers to
Albert.
Albert seized them with a convulsive hand, tore them in
pieces, and trembling lest the least vestige should escape
and one day appear to confront him, he approached the
waxlight, always kept burning for cigars, and burned every
fragment. "Dear, excellent friend," murmured Albert, still
burning the papers.
"Let all be forgotten as a sorrowful dream," said Beauchamp
"let it vanish as the last sparks from the blackened paper,
and disappear as the smoke from those silent ashes."
"Yes, yes," said Albert, "and may there remain only the
eternal friendship which I promised to my deliverer, which
shall be transmitted to our children's children, and shall
always remind me that I owe my life and the honor of my name
to you,  for had this been known, oh, Beauchamp, I should
have destroyed myself or,  no, my poor mother I could
not have killed her by the same blow,  I should have fled
from my country."
"Dear Albert," said Beauchamp. But this sudden and
factitious joy soon forsook the young man, and was succeeded
by a still greater grief.
"Well," said Beauchamp, "what still oppresses you, my
friend?"
"I am brokenhearted," said Albert. "Listen, Beauchamp I
cannot thus, in a moment relinquish the respect, the
confidence, and pride with which a father's untarnished name
inspires a son. Oh, Beauchamp, Beauchamp, how shall I now
approach mine? Shall I draw back my forehead from his
embrace, or withhold my hand from his? I am the most
wretched of men. Ah, my mother, my poor mother" said
Albert, gazing through his tears at his mother's portrait
"if you know this, how much must you suffer"
"Come," said Beauchamp, taking both his hands, "take
courage, my friend."
"But how came that first note to be inserted in your
journal? Some unknown enemy  an invisible foe  has done
this."
"The more must you fortify yourself, Albert. Let no trace of
emotion be visible on your countenance, bear your grief as
the cloud bears within it ruin and death  a fatal secret,
known only when the storm bursts. Go, my friend, reserve
your strength for the moment when the crash shall come."
"You think, then, all is not over yet?" said Albert,
horrorstricken.
"I think nothing, my friend but all things are possible. By
the way" 
"What?" said Albert, seeing that Beauchamp hesitated.
"Are you going to marry Mademoiselle Danglars?"
"Why do you ask me now?"
"Because the rupture or fulfilment of this engagement is
connected with the person of whom we were speaking."
"How?" said Albert, whose brow reddened "you think M.
Danglars" 
"I ask you only how your engagement stands? Pray put no
construction on my words I do not mean they should convey,
and give them no undue weight."
"No." said Albert, "the engagement is broken off."
"Well," said Beauchamp. Then, seeing the young man was about
to relapse into melancholy, "Let us go out, Albert," said
he "a ride in the wood in the phaeton, or on horseback,
will refresh you we will then return to breakfast, and you
shall attend to your affairs, and I to mine."
"Willingly," said Albert "but let us walk. I think a little
exertion would do me good." The two friends walked out on
the fortress. When arrived at the Madeleine,  "Since we
are out," said Beauchamp, "let us call on M. de Monte
Cristo he is admirably adapted to revive one's spirits,
because he never interrogates, and in my opinion those who
ask no questions are the best comforters."
"Gladly," said Albert "I love him  let us call."
Chapter 
The Journey.
Monte Cristo uttered a joyful exclamation on seeing the
young men together. "Ah, ha" said he, "I hope all is over,
explained and settled."
"Yes," said Beauchamp "the absurd reports have died away,
and should they be renewed, I would be the first to oppose
them so let us speak no more of it."
"Albert will tell you," replied the count "that I gave him
the same advice. Look," added he. "I am finishing the most
execrable morning's work."
"What is it?" said Albert "arranging your papers,
apparently."
"My papers, thank God, no,  my papers are all in capital
order, because I have none but M. Cavalcanti's."
"M. Cavalcanti's?" asked Beauchamp.
"Yes do you not know that this is a young man whom the
count is introducing?" said Morcerf.
"Let us not misunderstand each other," replied Monte Cristo
"I introduce no one, and certainly not M. Cavalcanti."
"And who," said Albert with a forced smile, "is to marry
Mademoiselle Danglars instead of me, which grieves me
cruelly."
"What? Cavalcanti is going to marry Mademoiselle Danglars?"
asked Beauchamp.
"Certainly do you come from the end of the world?" said
Monte Cristo "you, a journalist, the husband of renown? It
is the talk of all Paris."
"And you, count, have made this match?" asked Beauchamp.
"I? Silence, purveyor of gossip, do not spread that report.
I make a match? No, you do not know me I have done all in
my power to oppose it."
"Ah, I understand," said Beauchamp, "on our friend Albert's
account."
"On my account?" said the young man "oh, no, indeed, the
count will do me the justice to assert that I have, on the
contrary, always entreated him to break off my engagement,
and happily it is ended. The count pretends I have not him
to thank  so be it  I will erect an altar Deo ignoto."
"Listen," said Monte Cristo "I have had little to do with
it, for I am at variance both with the fatherinlaw and the
young man there is only Mademoiselle Eugenie, who appears
but little charmed with the thoughts of matrimony, and who,
seeing how little I was disposed to persuade her to renounce
her dear liberty, retains any affection for me."
"And do you say this wedding is at hand?"
"Oh, yes, in spite of all I could say. I do not know the
young man he is said to be of good family and rich, but I
never trust to vague assertions. I have warned M. Danglars
of it till I am tired, but he is fascinated with his
Luccanese. I have even informed him of a circumstance I
consider very serious the young man was either charmed by
his nurse, stolen by gypsies, or lost by his tutor, I
scarcely know which. But I do know his father lost sight of
him for more than ten years what he did during these ten
years, God only knows. Well, all that was useless. They have
commissioned me to write to the major to demand papers, and
here they are. I send them, but like Pilate  washing my
hands."
"And what does Mademoiselle d'Armilly say to you for robbing
her of her pupil?"
"Oh, well, I don't know but I understand that she is going
to Italy. Madame Danglars asked me for letters of
recommendation for the impresari I gave her a few lines for
the director of the Valle Theatre, who is under some
obligation to me. But what is the matter, Albert? you look
dull are you, after all, unconsciously in love with
Mademoiselle Eugenie?"
"I am not aware of it," said Albert, smiling sorrowfully.
Beauchamp turned to look at some paintings. "But," continued
Monte Cristo, "you are not in your usual spirits?"
"I have a dreadful headache," said Albert.
"Well, my dear viscount," said Monte Cristo, "I have an
infallible remedy to propose to you."
"What is that?" asked the young man.
"A change."
"Indeed?" said Albert.
"Yes and as I am just now excessively annoyed, I shall go
from home. Shall we go together?"
"You annoyed, count?" said Beauchamp "and by what?"
"Ah, you think very lightly of it I should like to see you
with a brief preparing in your house."
"What brief?"
"The one M. de Villefort is preparing against my amiable
assassin  some brigand escaped from the gallows
apparently."
"True," said Beauchamp "I saw it in the paper. Who is this
Caderousse?"
"Some provincial, it appears. M. de Villefort heard of him
at Marseilles, and M. Danglars recollects having seen him.
Consequently, the procureur is very active in the affair,
and the prefect of police very much interested and, thanks
to that interest, for which I am very grateful, they send me
all the robbers of Paris and the neighborhood, under
pretence of their being Caderousse's murderers, so that in
three months, if this continue, every robber and assassin in
France will have the plan of my house at his fingers' end. I
am resolved to desert them and go to some remote corner of
the earth, and shall be happy if you will accompany me,
viscount."
"Willingly."
"Then it is settled?"
"Yes, but where?"
"I have told you, where the air is pure, where every sound
soothes, where one is sure to be humbled, however proud may
be his nature. I love that humiliation, I, who am master of
the universe, as was Augustus."
"But where are you really going?"
"To sea, viscount you know I am a sailor. I was rocked when
an infant in the arms of old ocean, and on the bosom of the
beautiful Amphitrite I have sported with the green mantle
of the one and the azure robe of the other I love the sea
as a mistress, and pine if I do not often see her."
"Let us go, count."
"To sea?"
"Yes."
"You accept my proposal?"
"I do."
"Well, Viscount, there will be in my courtyard this evening
a good travelling britzka, with four posthorses, in which
one may rest as in a bed. M. Beauchamp, it holds four very
well, will you accompany us?"
"Thank you, I have just returned from sea."
"What? you have been to sea?"
"Yes I have just made a little excursion to the Borromean
Islands."
 Lake Maggiore.
"What of that? come with us," said Albert.
"No, dear Morcerf you know I only refuse when the thing is
impossible. Besides, it is important," added he in a low
tone, "that I should remain in Paris just now to watch the
paper."
"Ah, you are a good and an excellent friend," said Albert
"yes, you are right watch, watch, Beauchamp, and try to
discover the enemy who made this disclosure." Albert and
Beauchamp parted, the last pressure of their hands
expressing what their tongues could not before a stranger.
"Beauchamp is a worthy fellow," said Monte Cristo, when the
journalist was gone "is he not, Albert?"
"Yes, and a sincere friend I love him devotedly. But now we
are alone,  although it is immaterial to me,  where are
we going?"
"Into Normandy, if you like."
"Delightful shall we be quite retired? have no society, no
neighbors?"
"Our companions will be ridinghorses, dogs to hunt with,
and a fishingboat."
"Exactly what I wish for I will apprise my mother of my
intention, and return to you."
"But shall you be allowed to go into Normandy?"
"I may go where I please."
"Yes, I am aware you may go alone, since I once met you in
Italy  but to accompany the mysterious Monte Cristo?"
"You forget, count, that I have often told you of the deep
interest my mother takes in you."
""Woman is fickle.' said Francis I. "woman is like a wave
of the sea,' said Shakespeare both the great king and the
great poet ought to have known woman's nature well."
"Woman's, yes my mother is not woman, but a woman."
"As I am only a humble foreigner, you must pardon me if I do
not understand all the subtle refinements of your language."
"What I mean to say is, that my mother is not quick to give
her confidence, but when she does she never changes."
"Ah, yes, indeed," said Monte Cristo with a sigh "and do
you think she is in the least interested in me?"
"I repeat it, you must really be a very strange and superior
man, for my mother is so absorbed by the interest you have
excited, that when I am with her she speaks of no one else."
"And does she try to make you dislike me?"
"On the contrary, she often says, "Morcerf, I believe the
count has a noble nature try to gain his esteem.'"
"Indeed?" said Monte Cristo, sighing.
"You see, then," said Albert, "that instead of opposing, she
will encourage me."
"Adieu, then, until five o'clock be punctual, and we shall
arrive at twelve or one."
"At Treport?"
"Yes or in the neighborhood."
"But can we travel fortyeight leagues in eight hours?"
"Easily," said Monte Cristo.
"You are certainly a prodigy you will soon not only surpass
the railway, which would not be very difficult in France,
but even the telegraph."
"But, viscount, since we cannot perform the journey in less
than seven or eight hours, do not keep me waiting."
"Do not fear, I have little to prepare." Monte Cristo smiled
as he nodded to Albert, then remained a moment absorbed in
deep meditation. But passing his hand across his forehead as
if to dispel his revery, he rang the bell twice and
Bertuccio entered. "Bertuccio," said he, "I intend going
this evening to Normandy, instead of tomorrow or the next
day. You will have sufficient time before five o'clock
despatch a messenger to apprise the grooms at the first
station. M. de Morcerf will accompany me." Bertuccio obeyed
and despatched a courier to Pontoise to say the
travellingcarriage would arrive at six o'clock. From
Pontoise another express was sent to the next stage, and in
six hours all the horses stationed on the road were ready.
Before his departure, the count went to Haidee's apartments,
told her his intention, and resigned everything to her care.
Albert was punctual. The journey soon became interesting
from its rapidity, of which Morcerf had formed no previous
idea. "Truly," said Monte Cristo, "with your posthorses
going at the rate of two leagues an hour, and that absurd
law that one traveller shall not pass another without
permission, so that an invalid or illtempered traveller may
detain those who are well and active, it is impossible to
move I escape this annoyance by travelling with my own
postilion and horses do I not, Ali?"
The count put his head out of the window and whistled, and
the horses appeared to fly. The carriage rolled with a
thundering noise over the pavement, and every one turned to
notice the dazzling meteor. Ali, smiling, repeated the
sound, grasped the reins with a firm hand, and spurred his
horses, whose beautiful manes floated in the breeze. This
child of the desert was in his element, and with his black
face and sparkling eyes appeared, in the cloud of dust he
raised, like the genius of the simoom and the god of the
hurricane. "I never knew till now the delight of speed,"
said Morcerf, and the last cloud disappeared from his brow
"but where the devil do you get such horses? Are they made
to order?"
"Precisely," said the count "six years since I bought a
horse in Hungary remarkable for its swiftness. The
thirtytwo that we shall use tonight are its progeny they
are all entirely black, with the exception of a star upon
the forehead."
"That is perfectly admirable but what do you do, count,
with all these horses?"
"You see, I travel with them."
"But you are not always travelling."
"When I no longer require them, Bertuccio will sell them,
and he expects to realize thirty or forty thousand francs by
the sale."
"But no monarch in Europe will be wealthy enough to purchase
them."
"Then he will sell them to some Eastern vizier, who will
empty his coffers to purchase them, and refill them by
applying the bastinado to his subjects."
"Count, may I suggest one idea to you?"
"Certainly."
"It is that, next to you, Bertuccio must be the richest
gentleman in Europe."
"You are mistaken, viscount I believe he has not a franc in
his possession."
"Then he must be a wonder. My dear count, if you tell me
many more marvellous things, I warn you I shall not believe
them."
"I countenance nothing that is marvellous, M. Albert. Tell
me, why does a steward rob his master?"
"Because, I suppose, it is his nature to do so, for the love
of robbing."
"You are mistaken it is because he has a wife and family,
and ambitious desires for himself and them. Also because he
is not sure of always retaining his situation, and wishes to
provide for the future. Now, M. Bertuccio is alone in the
world he uses my property without accounting for the use he
makes of it he is sure never to leave my service."
"Why?"
"Because I should never get a better."
"Probabilities are deceptive."
"But I deal in certainties he is the best servant over whom
one has the power of life and death."
"Do you possess that right over Bertuccio?"
"Yes."
There are words which close a conversation with an iron
door such was the count's "yes." The whole journey was
performed with equal rapidity the thirtytwo horses,
dispersed over seven stages, brought them to their
destination in eight hours. At midnight they arrived at the
gate of a beautiful park. The porter was in attendance he
had been apprised by the groom of the last stage of the
count's approach. At half past two in the morning Morcerf
was conducted to his apartments, where a bath and supper
were prepared. The servant who had travelled at the back of
the carriage waited on him Baptistin, who rode in front,
attended the count. Albert bathed, took his supper, and went
to bed. All night he was lulled by the melancholy noise of
the surf. On rising, he went to his window, which opened on
a terrace, having the sea in front, and at the back a pretty
park bounded by a small forest. In a creek lay a little
sloop, with a narrow keel and high masts, bearing on its
flag the Monte Cristo arms which were a mountain on a sea
azure, with a cross gules on the shield. Around the schooner
lay a number of small fishingboats belonging to the
fishermen of the neighboring village, like humble subjects
awaiting orders from their queen. There, as in every spot
where Monte Cristo stopped, if but for two days, luxury
abounded and life went on with the utmost ease.
Albert found in his anteroom two guns, with all the
accoutrements for hunting a lofty room on the groundfloor
containing all the ingenious instruments the English 
eminent in piscatory pursuits, since they are patient and
sluggish  have invented for fishing. The day passed in
pursuing those exercises in which Monte Cristo excelled.
They killed a dozen pheasants in the park, as many trout in
the stream, dined in a summerhouse overlooking the ocean,
and took tea in the library.
Towards the evening of the third day. Albert, completely
exhausted with the exercise which invigorated Monte Cristo,
was sleeping in an armchair near the window, while the
count was designing with his architect the plan of a
conservatory in his house, when the sound of a horse at full
speed on the high road made Albert look up. He was
disagreeably surprised to see his own valet de chambre, whom
he had not brought, that he might not inconvenience Monte
Cristo.
"Florentin here" cried he, starting up "is my mother ill?"
And he hastened to the door. Monte Cristo watched and saw
him approach the valet, who drew a small sealed parcel from
his pocket, containing a newspaper and a letter. "From whom
is this?" said he eagerly. "From M. Beauchamp," replied
Florentin.
"Did he send you?"
"Yes, sir he sent for me to his house, gave me money for my
journey, procured a horse, and made me promise not to stop
till I had reached you, I have come in fifteen hours."
Albert opened the letter with fear, uttered a shriek on
reading the first line, and seized the paper. His sight was
dimmed, his legs sank under him, and he would have fallen
had not Florentin supported him.
"Poor young man," said Monte Cristo in a low voice "it is
then true that the sin of the father shall fall on the
children to the third and fourth generation." Meanwhile
Albert had revived, and, continuing to read, he threw back
his head, saying, "Florentin, is your horse fit to return
immediately?"
"It is a poor lame posthorse."
"In what state was the house when you left?"
"All was quiet, but on returning from M. Beauchamp's, I
found madame in tears she had sent for me to know when you
would return. I told her my orders from M. Beauchamp she
first extended her arms to prevent me, but after a moment's
reflection, "Yes, go, Florentin,' said she, "and may he come
quickly.'"
"Yes, my mother," said Albert, "I will return, and woe to
the infamous wretch But first of all I must get there."
He went back to the room where he had left Monte Cristo.
Five minutes had sufficed to make a complete transformation
in his appearance. His voice had become rough and hoarse
his face was furrowed with wrinkles his eyes burned under
the blueveined lids, and he tottered like a drunken man.
"Count," said he, "I thank you for your hospitality, which I
would gladly have enjoyed longer but I must return to
Paris."
"What has happened?"
"A great misfortune, more important to me than life. Don't
question me, I beg of you, but lend me a horse."
"My stables are at your command, viscount but you will kill
yourself by riding on horseback. Take a postchaise or a
carriage."
"No, it would delay me, and I need the fatigue you warn me
of it will do me good." Albert reeled as if he had been
shot, and fell on a chair near the door. Monte Cristo did
not see this second manifestation of physical exhaustion he
was at the window, calling, "Ali, a horse for M. de Morcerf
quick he is in a hurry" These words restored Albert he
darted from the room, followed by the count. "Thank you"
cried he, throwing himself on his horse. "Return as soon as
you can, Florentin. Must I use any password to procure a
horse?"
"Only dismount another will be immediately saddled." Albert
hesitated a moment. "You may think my departure strange and
foolish," said the young man "you do not know how a
paragraph in a newspaper may exasperate one. Read that,"
said he, "when I am gone, that you may not be witness of my
anger."
While the count picked up the paper he put spurs to his
horse, which leaped in astonishment at such an unusual
stimulus, and shot away with the rapidity of an arrow. The
count watched him with a feeling of compassion, and when he
had completely disappeared, read as follows 
"The French officer in the service of Ali Pasha of Yanina
alluded to three weeks since in the Impartial, who not only
surrendered the castle of Yanina, but sold his benefactor to
the Turks, styled himself truly at that time Fernand, as our
esteemed contemporary states but he has since added to his
Christian name a title of nobility and a family name. He now
calls himself the Count of Morcerf, and ranks among the
peers."
Thus the terrible secret, which Beauchamp had so generously
destroyed, appeared again like an armed phantom and another
paper, deriving its information from some malicious source,
had published two days after Albert's departure for Normandy
the few lines which had rendered the unfortunate young man
almost crazy.
Chapter 
The Trial.
At eight o'clock in the morning Albert had arrived at
Beauchamp's door. The valet de chambre had received orders
to usher him in at once. Beauchamp was in his bath. "Here I
am," said Albert.
"Well, my poor friend," replied Beauchamp, "I expected you."
"I need not say I think you are too faithful and too kind to
have spoken of that painful circumstance. Your having sent
for me is another proof of your affection. So, without
losing time, tell me, have you the slightest idea whence
this terrible blow proceeds?"
"I think I have some clew."
"But first tell me all the particulars of this shameful
plot." Beauchamp proceeded to relate to the young man, who
was overwhelmed with shame and grief, the following facts.
Two days previously, the article had appeared in another
paper besides the Impartial, and, what was more serious, one
that was well known as a government paper. Beauchamp was
breakfasting when he read the paragraph. He sent immediately
for a cabriolet, and hastened to the publisher's office.
Although professing diametrically opposite principles from
those of the editor of the other paper, Beauchamp  as it
sometimes, we may say often, happens  was his intimate
friend. The editor was reading, with apparent delight, a
leading article in the same paper on beetsugar, probably a
composition of his own.
"Ah, pardieu," said Beauchamp, "with the paper in your hand,
my friend, I need not tell you the cause of my visit."
"Are you interested in the sugar question?" asked the editor
of the ministerial paper.
"No," replied Beauchamp, "I have not considered the
question a totally different subject interests me."
"What is it?"
"The article relative to Morcerf."
"Indeed? Is it not a curious affair?"
"So curious, that I think you are running a great risk of a
prosecution for defamation of character."
"Not at all we have received with the information all the
requisite proofs, and we are quite sure M. de Morcerf will
not raise his voice against us besides, it is rendering a
service to one's country to denounce these wretched
criminals who are unworthy of the honor bestowed on them."
Beauchamp was thunderstruck. "Who, then, has so correctly
informed you?" asked he "for my paper, which gave the first
information on the subject, has been obliged to stop for
want of proof and yet we are more interested than you in
exposing M. de Morcerf, as he is a peer of France, and we
are of the opposition."
"Oh, that is very simple we have not sought to scandalize.
This news was brought to us. A man arrived yesterday from
Yanina, bringing a formidable array of documents and when
we hesitated to publish the accusatory article, he told us
it should be inserted in some other paper."
Beauchamp understood that nothing remained but to submit,
and left the office to despatch a courier to Morcerf. But he
had been unable to send to Albert the following particulars,
as the events had transpired after the messenger's
departure namely, that the same day a great agitation was
manifest in the House of Peers among the usually calm
members of that dignified assembly. Every one had arrived
almost before the usual hour, and was conversing on the
melancholy event which was to attract the attention of the
public towards one of their most illustrious colleagues.
Some were perusing the article, others making comments and
recalling circumstances which substantiated the charges
still more. The Count of Morcerf was no favorite with his
colleagues. Like all upstarts, he had had recourse to a
great deal of haughtiness to maintain his position. The true
nobility laughed at him, the talented repelled him, and the
honorable instinctively despised him. He was, in fact, in
the unhappy position of the victim marked for sacrifice the
finger of God once pointed at him, every one was prepared to
raise the hue and cry.
The Count of Morcerf alone was ignorant of the news. He did
not take in the paper containing the defamatory article, and
had passed the morning in writing letters and in trying a
horse. He arrived at his usual hour, with a proud look and
insolent demeanor he alighted, passed through the
corridors, and entered the house without observing the
hesitation of the doorkeepers or the coolness of his
colleagues. Business had already been going on for half an
hour when he entered. Every one held the accusing paper,
but, as usual, no one liked to take upon himself the
responsibility of the attack. At length an honorable peer,
Morcerf's acknowledged enemy, ascended the tribune with that
solemnity which announced that the expected moment had
arrived. There was an impressive silence Morcerf alone knew
not why such profound attention was given to an orator who
was not always listened to with so much complacency. The
count did not notice the introduction, in which the speaker
announced that his communication would be of that vital
importance that it demanded the undivided attention of the
House but at the mention of Yanina and Colonel Fernand, he
turned so frightfully pale that every member shuddered and
fixed his eyes upon him. Moral wounds have this peculiarity,
they may be hidden, but they never close always painful,
always ready to bleed when touched, they remain fresh and
open in the heart.
The article having been read during the painful hush that
followed, a universal shudder pervaded the assembly, and
immediately the closest attention was given to the orator as
he resumed his remarks. He stated his scruples and the
difficulties of the case it was the honor of M. de Morcerf,
and that of the whole House, he proposed to defend, by
provoking a debate on personal questions, which are always
such painful themes of discussion. He concluded by calling
for an investigation, which might dispose of the calumnious
report before it had time to spread, and restore M. de
Morcerf to the position he had long held in public opinion.
Morcerf was so completely overwhelmed by this great and
unexpected calamity that he could scarcely stammer a few
words as he looked around on the assembly. This timidity,
which might proceed from the astonishment of innocence as
well as the shame of guilt, conciliated some in his favor
for men who are truly generous are always ready to
compassionate when the misfortune of their enemy surpasses
the limits of their hatred.
The president put it to the vote, and it was decided that
the investigation should take place. The count was asked
what time he required to prepare his defence. Morcerf's
courage had revived when he found himself alive after this
horrible blow. "My lords," answered he, "it is not by time I
could repel the attack made on me by enemies unknown to me,
and, doubtless, hidden in obscurity it is immediately, and
by a thunderbolt, that I must repel the flash of lightning
which, for a moment, startled me. Oh, that I could, instead
of taking up this defence, shed my last drop of blood to
prove to my noble colleagues that I am their equal in
worth." These words made a favorable impression on behalf of
the accused. "I demand, then, that the examination shall
take place as soon as possible, and I will furnish the house
with all necessary information."
"What day do you fix?" asked the president.
"Today I am at your service," replied the count. The
president rang the bell. "Does the House approve that the
examination should take place today?"
"Yes," was the unanimous answer.
A committee of twelve members was chosen to examine the
proofs brought forward by Morcerf. The investigation would
begin at eight o'clock that evening in the committeeroom,
and if postponement were necessary, the proceedings would be
resumed each evening at the same hour. Morcerf asked leave
to retire he had to collect the documents he had long been
preparing against this storm, which his sagacity had
foreseen.
Albert listened, trembling now with hope, then with anger,
and then again with shame, for from Beauchamp's confidence
he knew his father was guilty, and he asked himself how,
since he was guilty, he could prove his innocence. Beauchamp
hesitated to continue his narrative. "What next?" asked
Albert.
"What next? My friend, you impose a painful task on me. Must
you know all?"
"Absolutely and rather from your lips than another's."
"Muster up all your courage, then, for never have you
required it more." Albert passed his hand over his forehead,
as if to try his strength, as a man who is preparing to
defend his life proves his shield and bends his sword. He
thought himself strong enough, for he mistook fever for
energy. "Go on," said he.
"The evening arrived all Paris was in expectation. Many
said your father had only to show himself to crush the
charge against him many others said he would not appear
while some asserted that they had seen him start for
Brussels and others went to the policeoffice to inquire if
he had taken out a passport. I used all my influence with
one of the committee, a young peer of my acquaintance, to
get admission to one of the galleries. He called for me at
seven o'clock, and, before any one had arrived, asked one of
the doorkeepers to place me in a box. I was concealed by a
column, and might witness the whole of the terrible scene
which was about to take place. At eight o'clock all were in
their places, and M. de Morcerf entered at the last stroke.
He held some papers in his hand his countenance was calm,
and his step firm, and he was dressed with great care in his
military uniform, which was buttoned completely up to the
chin. His presence produced a good effect. The committee was
made up of Liberals, several of whom came forward to shake
hands with him."
Albert felt his heart bursting at these particulars, but
gratitude mingled with his sorrow he would gladly have
embraced those who had given his father this proof of esteem
at a moment when his honor was so powerfully attacked. "At
this moment one of the doorkeepers brought in a letter for
the president. "You are at liberty to speak, M. de Morcerf,'
said the president, as he unsealed the letter and the count
began his defence, I assure you, Albert, in a most eloquent
and skilful manner. He produced documents proving that the
Vizier of Yanina had up to the last moment honored him with
his entire confidence, since he had interested him with a
negotiation of life and death with the emperor. He produced
the ring, his mark of authority, with which Ali Pasha
generally sealed his letters, and which the latter had given
him, that he might, on his return at any hour of the day or
night, gain access to the presence, even in the harem.
Unfortunately, the negotiation failed, and when he returned
to defend his benefactor, he was dead. "But,' said the
count, "so great was Ali Pasha's confidence, that on his
deathbed he resigned his favorite mistress and her daughter
to my care.'" Albert started on hearing these words the
history of Haidee recurred to him, and he remembered what
she had said of that message and the ring, and the manner in
which she had been sold and made a slave. "And what effect
did this discourse produce?" anxiously inquired Albert. "I
acknowledge it affected me, and, indeed, all the committee
also," said Beauchamp.
"Meanwhile, the president carelessly opened the letter which
had been brought to him but the first lines aroused his
attention he read them again and again, and fixing his eyes
on M. de Morcerf, "Count,' said he, "you have said that the
Vizier of Yanina confided his wife and daughter to your
care?'  "Yes, sir,' replied Morcerf "but in that, like
all the rest, misfortune pursued me. On my return, Vasiliki
and her daughter Haidee had disappeared.'  "Did you know
them?'  "My intimacy with the pasha and his unlimited
confidence had gained me an introduction to them, and I had
seen them above twenty times.'
""Have you any idea what became of them?'  "Yes, sir I
heard they had fallen victims to their sorrow, and, perhaps,
to their poverty. I was not rich my life was in constant
danger I could not seek them, to my great regret.' The
president frowned imperceptibly. "Gentlemen,' said he, "you
have heard the Comte de Morcerf's defence. Can you, sir,
produce any witnesses to the truth of what you have
asserted?'  "Alas, no, monsieur,' replied the count "all
those who surrounded the vizier, or who knew me at his
court, are either dead or gone away, I know not where. I
believe that I alone, of all my countrymen, survived that
dreadful war. I have only the letters of Ali Tepelini, which
I have placed before you the ring, a token of his
goodwill, which is here and, lastly, the most convincing
proof I can offer, after an anonymous attack, and that is
the absence of any witness against my veracity and the
purity of my military life.' A murmur of approbation ran
through the assembly and at this moment, Albert, had
nothing more transpired, your father's cause had been
gained. It only remained to put it to the vote, when the
president resumed "Gentlemen and you, monsieur,  you will
not be displeased, I presume, to listen to one who calls
himself a very important witness, and who has just presented
himself. He is, doubtless, come to prove the perfect
innocence of our colleague. Here is a letter I have just
received on the subject shall it be read, or shall it be
passed over? and shall we take no notice of this incident?'
M. de Morcerf turned pale, and clinched his hands on the
papers he held. The committee decided to hear the letter
the count was thoughtful and silent. The president read 
""Mr. President,  I can furnish the committee of inquiry
into the conduct of the LieutenantGeneral the Count of
Morcerf in Epirus and in Macedonia with important
particulars.'
"The president paused, and the count turned pale. The
president looked at his auditors. "Proceed,' was heard on
all sides. The president resumed 
""I was on the spot at the death of Ali Pasha. I was present
during his last moments. I know what is become of Vasiliki
and Haidee. I am at the command of the committee, and even
claim the honor of being heard. I shall be in the lobby when
this note is delivered to you.'
""And who is this witness, or rather this enemy?' asked the
count, in a tone in which there was a visible alteration.
"We shall know, sir,' replied the president. "Is the
committee willing to hear this witness?'  "Yes, yes,' they
all said at once. The doorkeeper was called. "Is there any
one in the lobby?' said the president.
""Yes, sir.'  "Who is it?'  "A woman, accompanied by a
servant.' Every one looked at his neighbor. "Bring her in,'
said the president. Five minutes after the doorkeeper again
appeared all eyes were fixed on the door, and I," said
Beauchamp, "shared the general expectation and anxiety.
Behind the doorkeeper walked a woman enveloped in a large
veil, which completely concealed her. It was evident, from
her figure and the perfumes she had about her, that she was
young and fastidious in her tastes, but that was all. The
president requested her to throw aside her veil, and it was
then seen that she was dressed in the Grecian costume, and
was remarkably beautiful."
"Ah," said Albert, "it was she."
"Who?"
"Haidee."
"Who told you that?"
"Alas, I guess it. But go on, Beauchamp. You see I am calm
and strong. And yet we must be drawing near the disclosure."
"M. de Morcerf," continued Beauchamp, "looked at this woman
with surprise and terror. Her lips were about to pass his
sentence of life or death. To the committee the adventure
was so extraordinary and curious, that the interest they had
felt for the count's safety became now quite a secondary
matter. The president himself advanced to place a seat for
the young lady but she declined availing herself of it. As
for the count, he had fallen on his chair it was evident
that his legs refused to support him.
""Madame,' said the president, "you have engaged to furnish
the committee with some important particulars respecting the
affair at Yanina, and you have stated that you were an
eyewitness of the event.'  "I was, indeed,' said the
stranger, with a tone of sweet melancholy, and with the
sonorous voice peculiar to the East.
""But allow me to say that you must have been very young
then.'  "I was four years old but as those events deeply
concerned me, not a single detail has escaped my memory.' 
"In what manner could these events concern you? and who are
you, that they should have made so deep an impression on
you?'  "On them depended my father's life,' replied she.
"I am Haidee, the daughter of Ali Tepelini, pasha of Yanina,
and of Vasiliki, his beloved wife.'
"The blush of mingled pride and modesty which suddenly
suffused the cheeks of the young woman, the brilliancy of
her eye, and her highly important communication, produced an
indescribable effect on the assembly. As for the count, he
could not have been more overwhelmed if a thunderbolt had
fallen at his feet and opened an immense gulf before him.
"Madame,' replied the president, bowing with profound
respect, "allow me to ask one question it shall be the
last Can you prove the authenticity of what you have now
stated?'  "I can, sir,' said Haidee, drawing from under
her veil a satin satchel highly perfumed "for here is the
register of my birth, signed by my father and his principal
officers, and that of my baptism, my father having consented
to my being brought up in my mother's faith,  this latter
has been sealed by the grand primate of Macedonia and
Epirus and lastly and perhaps the most important, the
record of the sale of my person and that of my mother to the
Armenian merchant ElKobbir, by the French officer, who, in
his infamous bargain with the Porte, had reserved as his
part of the booty the wife and daughter of his benefactor,
whom he sold for the sum of four hundred thousand francs.' A
greenish pallor spread over the count's cheeks, and his eyes
became bloodshot at these terrible imputations, which were
listened to by the assembly with ominous silence.
"Haidee, still calm, but with a calmness more dreadful than
the anger of another would have been, handed to the
president the record of her sale, written in Arabic. It had
been supposed some of the papers might be in the Arabian,
Romaic, or Turkish language, and the interpreter of the
House was in attendance. One of the noble peers, who was
familiar with the Arabic language, having studied it during
the famous Egyptian campaign, followed with his eye as the
translator read aloud 
""I, ElKobbir, a slavemerchant, and purveyor of the harem
of his highness, acknowledge having received for
transmission to the sublime emperor, from the French lord,
the Count of Monte Cristo, an emerald valued at eight
hundred thousand francs as the ransom of a young Christian
slave of eleven years of age, named Haidee, the acknowledged
daughter of the late lord Ali Tepelini, pasha of Yanina, and
of Vasiliki, his favorite she having been sold to me seven
years previously, with her mother, who had died on arriving
at Constantinople, by a French colonel in the service of the
Vizier Ali Tepelini, named Fernand Mondego. The
abovementioned purchase was made on his highness's account,
whose mandate I had, for the sum of four hundred thousand
francs.
""Given at Constantinople, by authority of his highness, in
the year  of the Hegira.
""Signed ElKobbir.'
""That this record should have all due authority, it shall
bear the imperial seal, which the vendor is bound to have
affixed to it.'
"Near the merchant's signature there was, indeed, the seal
of the sublime emperor. A dreadful silence followed the
reading of this document the count could only stare, and
his gaze, fixed as if unconsciously on Haidee, seemed one of
fire and blood. "Madame,' said the president, "may reference
be made to the Count of Monte Cristo, who is now, I believe,
in Paris?'  "Sir,' replied Haidee, "the Count of Monte
Cristo, my fosterfather, has been in Normandy the last
three days.'
""Who, then, has counselled you to take this step, one for
which the court is deeply indebted to you, and which is
perfectly natural, considering your birth and your
misfortunes?'  "Sir,' replied Haidee, "I have been led to
take this step from a feeling of respect and grief. Although
a Christian, may God forgive me, I have always sought to
revenge my illustrious father. Since I set my foot in
France, and knew the traitor lived in Paris, I have watched
carefully. I live retired in the house of my noble
protector, but I do it from choice. I love retirement and
silence, because I can live with my thoughts and
recollections of past days. But the Count of Monte Cristo
surrounds me with every paternal care, and I am ignorant of
nothing which passes in the world. I learn all in the
silence of my apartments,  for instance, I see all the
newspapers, every periodical, as well as every new piece of
music and by thus watching the course of the life of
others, I learned what had transpired this morning in the
House of Peers, and what was to take place this evening
then I wrote.'
""Then,' remarked the president, "the Count of Monte Cristo
knows nothing of your present proceedings?'  "He is quite
unaware of them, and I have but one fear, which is that he
should disapprove of what I have done. But it is a glorious
day for me,' continued the young girl, raising her ardent
gaze to heaven, "that on which I find at last an opportunity
of avenging my father'
"The count had not uttered one word the whole of this time.
His colleagues looked at him, and doubtless pitied his
prospects, blighted under the perfumed breath of a woman.
His misery was depicted in sinister lines on his
countenance. "M. de Morcerf,' said the president, "do you
recognize this lady as the daughter of Ali Tepelini, pasha
of Yanina?'  "No,' said Morcerf, attempting to rise, "it
is a base plot, contrived by my enemies.' Haidee, whose eyes
had been fixed on the door, as if expecting some one, turned
hastily, and, seeing the count standing, shrieked, "You do
not know me?' said she. "Well, I fortunately recognize you
You are Fernand Mondego, the French officer who led the
troops of my noble father It is you who surrendered the
castle of Yanina It is you who, sent by him to
Constantinople, to treat with the emperor for the life or
death of your benefactor, brought back a false mandate
granting full pardon It is you who, with that mandate,
obtained the pasha's ring, which gave you authority over
Selim, the firekeeper It is you who stabbed Selim. It is
you who sold us, my mother and me, to the merchant,
ElKobbir Assassin, assassin, assassin, you have still on
your brow your master's blood Look, gentlemen, all'
"These words had been pronounced with such enthusiasm and
evident truth, that every eye was fixed on the count's
forehead, and he himself passed his hand across it, as if he
felt Ali's blood still lingering there. "You positively
recognize M. de Morcerf as the officer, Fernand Mondego?' 
"Indeed I do' cried Haidee. "Oh, my mother, it was you who
said, "You were free, you had a beloved father, you were
destined to be almost a queen. Look well at that man it is
he who raised your father's head on the point of a spear it
is he who sold us it is he who forsook us Look well at his
right hand, on which he has a large wound if you forgot his
features, you would know him by that hand, into which fell,
one by one, the gold pieces of the merchant ElKobbir" I
know him Ah, let him say now if he does not recognize me'
Each word fell like a dagger on Morcerf, and deprived him of
a portion of his energy as she uttered the last, he hid his
mutilated hand hastily in his bosom, and fell back on his
seat, overwhelmed by wretchedness and despair. This scene
completely changed the opinion of the assembly respecting
the accused count.
""Count of Morcerf,' said the president, "do not allow
yourself to be cast down answer. The justice of the court
is supreme and impartial as that of God it will not suffer
you to be trampled on by your enemies without giving you an
opportunity of defending yourself. Shall further inquiries
be made? Shall two members of the House be sent to Yanina?
Speak' Morcerf did not reply. Then all the members looked
at each other with terror. They knew the count's energetic
and violent temper it must be, indeed, a dreadful blow
which would deprive him of courage to defend himself. They
expected that his stupefied silence would be followed by a
fiery outburst. "Well,' asked the president, "what is your
decision?'
""I have no reply to make,' said the count in a low tone.
""Has the daughter of Ali Tepelini spoken the truth?' said
the president. "Is she, then, the terrible witness to whose
charge you dare not plead "Not guilty"? Have you really
committed the crimes of which you are accused?' The count
looked around him with an expression which might have
softened tigers, but which could not disarm his judges. Then
he raised his eyes towards the ceiling, but withdrew then,
immediately, as if he feared the roof would open and reveal
to his distressed view that second tribunal called heaven,
and that other judge named God. Then, with a hasty movement,
he tore open his coat, which seemed to stifle him, and flew
from the room like a madman his footstep was heard one
moment in the corridor, then the rattling of his
carriagewheels as he was driven rapidly away. "Gentlemen,'
said the president, when silence was restored, "is the Count
of Morcerf convicted of felony, treason, and conduct
unbecoming a member of this House?'  "Yes,' replied all
the members of the committee of inquiry with a unanimous
voice.
"Haidee had remained until the close of the meeting. She
heard the count's sentence pronounced without betraying an
expression of joy or pity then drawing her veil over her
face she bowed majestically to the councillors, and left
with that dignified step which Virgil attributes to his
goddesses."
Chapter 
The Challenge.
"Then," continued Beauchamp, "I took advantage of the
silence and the darkness to leave the house without being
seen. The usher who had introduced me was waiting for me at
the door, and he conducted me through the corridors to a
private entrance opening into the Rue de Vaugirard. I left
with mingled feelings of sorrow and delight. Excuse me,
Albert,  sorrow on your account, and delight with that
noble girl, thus pursuing paternal vengeance. Yes, Albert,
from whatever source the blow may have proceeded  it may
be from an enemy, but that enemy is only the agent of
providence." Albert held his head between his hands he
raised his face, red with shame and bathed in tears, and
seizing Beauchamp's arm, "My friend," said he, "my life is
ended. I cannot calmly say with you, "Providence has struck
the blow' but I must discover who pursues me with this
hatred, and when I have found him I shall kill him, or he
will kill me. I rely on your friendship to assist me,
Beauchamp, if contempt has not banished it from your heart."
"Contempt, my friend? How does this misfortune affect you?
No, happily that unjust prejudice is forgotten which made
the son responsible for the father's actions. Review your
life, Albert although it is only just beginning, did a
lovely summer's day ever dawn with greater purity than has
marked the commencement of your career? No, Albert, take my
advice. You are young and rich  leave Paris  all is soon
forgotten in this great Babylon of excitement and changing
tastes. You will return after three or four years with a
Russian princess for a bride, and no one will think more of
what occurred yesterday than if it had happened sixteen
years ago."
"Thank you, my dear Beauchamp, thank you for the excellent
feeling which prompts your advice but it cannot be. I have
told you my wish, or rather my determination. You understand
that, interested as I am in this affair, I cannot see it in
the same light as you do. What appears to you to emanate
from a celestial source, seems to me to proceed from one far
less pure. Providence appears to me to have no share in this
affair and happily so, for instead of the invisible,
impalpable agent of celestial rewards and punishments, I
shall find one both palpable and visible, on whom I shall
revenge myself, I assure you, for all I have suffered during
the last month. Now, I repeat, Beauchamp, I wish to return
to human and material existence, and if you are still the
friend you profess to be, help me to discover the hand that
struck the blow."
"Be it so," said Beauchamp "if you must have me descend to
earth, I submit and if you will seek your enemy, I will
assist you, and I will engage to find him, my honor being
almost as deeply interested as yours."
"Well, then, you understand, Beauchamp, that we begin our
search immediately. Each moment's delay is an eternity for
me. The calumniator is not yet punished, and he may hope
that he will not be but, on my honor, it he thinks so, he
deceives himself."
"Well, listen, Morcerf."
"Ah, Beauchamp, I see you know something already you will
restore me to life."
"I do not say there is any truth in what I am going to tell
you, but it is, at least, a ray of light in a dark night by
following it we may, perhaps, discover something more
certain."
"Tell me satisfy my impatience."
"Well, I will tell you what I did not like to mention on my
return from Yanina."
"Say on."
"I went, of course, to the chief banker of the town to make
inquiries. At the first word, before I had even mentioned
your father's name" 
""Ah,' said he. "I guess what brings you here.'
""How, and why?'
""Because a fortnight since I was questioned on the same
subject.'
""By whom?'  "By a Paris banker, my correspondent.'
""Whose name is' 
""Danglars.'"
"He" cried Albert "yes, it is indeed he who has so long
pursued my father with jealous hatred. He, the man who would
be popular, cannot forgive the Count of Morcerf for being
created a peer and this marriage broken off without a
reason being assigned  yes, it is all from the same
cause."
"Make inquiries, Albert, but do not be angry without reason
make inquiries, and if it be true" 
"Oh, yes, if it be true," cried the young man, "he shall pay
me all I have suffered."
"Beware, Morcerf, he is already an old man."
"I will respect his age as he has respected the honor of my
family if my father had offended him, why did he not attack
him personally? Oh, no, he was afraid to encounter him face
to face."
"I do not condemn you, Albert I only restrain you. Act
prudently."
"Oh, do not fear besides, you will accompany me. Beauchamp,
solemn transactions should be sanctioned by a witness.
Before this day closes, if M. Danglars is guilty, he shall
cease to live, or I shall die. Pardieu, Beauchamp, mine
shall be a splendid funeral"
"When such resolutions are made, Albert, they should be
promptly executed. Do you wish to go to M. Danglars? Let us
go immediately." They sent for a cabriolet. On entering the
banker's mansion, they perceived the phaeton and servant of
M. Andrea Cavalcanti. "Ah, parbleu, that's good," said
Albert, with a gloomy tone. "If M. Danglars will not fight
with me, I will kill his soninlaw Cavalcanti will
certainly fight." The servant announced the young man but
the banker, recollecting what had transpired the day before,
did not wish him admitted. It was, however, too late Albert
had followed the footman, and, hearing the order given,
forced the door open, and followed by Beauchamp found
himself in the banker's study. "Sir," cried the latter, "am
I no longer at liberty to receive whom I choose in my house?
You appear to forget yourself sadly."
"No, sir," said Albert, coldly "there are circumstances in
which one cannot, except through cowardice,  I offer you
that refuge,  refuse to admit certain persons at least."
"What is your errand, then, with me, sir?"
"I mean," said Albert, drawing near, and without apparently
noticing Cavalcanti, who stood with his back towards the
fireplace  "I mean to propose a meeting in some retired
corner where no one will interrupt us for ten minutes that
will be sufficient  where two men having met, one of them
will remain on the ground." Danglars turned pale Cavalcanti
moved a step forward, and Albert turned towards him. "And
you, too," said he, "come, if you like, monsieur you have a
claim, being almost one of the family, and I will give as
many rendezvous of that kind as I can find persons willing
to accept them." Cavalcanti looked at Danglars with a
stupefied air, and the latter, making an effort, arose and
stepped between the two young men. Albert's attack on Andrea
had placed him on a different footing, and he hoped this
visit had another cause than that he had at first supposed.
"Indeed, sir," said he to Albert, "if you are come to
quarrel with this gentleman because I have preferred him to
you, I shall resign the case to the king's attorney."
"You mistake, sir," said Morcerf with a gloomy smile "I am
not referring in the least to matrimony, and I only
addressed myself to M. Cavalcanti because he appeared
disposed to interfere between us. In one respect you are
right, for I am ready to quarrel with every one today but
you have the first claim, M. Danglars."
"Sir," replied Danglars, pale with anger and fear, "I warn
you, when I have the misfortune to meet with a mad dog, I
kill it and far from thinking myself guilty of a crime, I
believe I do society a kindness. Now, if you are mad and try
to bite me, I will kill you without pity. Is it my fault
that your father has dishonored himself?"
"Yes, miserable wretch" cried Morcerf, "it is your fault."
Danglars retreated a few steps. "My fault?" said he "you
must be mad What do I know of the Grecian affair? Have I
travelled in that country? Did I advise your father to sell
the castle of Yanina  to betray" 
"Silence" said Albert, with a thundering voice. "No it is
not you who have directly made this exposure and brought
this sorrow on us, but you hypocritically provoked it."
"I?"
"Yes you How came it known?"
"I suppose you read it in the paper in the account from
Yanina?"
"Who wrote to Yanina?"
"To Yanina?"
"Yes. Who wrote for particulars concerning my father?"
"I imagine any one may write to Yanina."
"But one person only wrote"
"One only?"
"Yes and that was you"
"I, doubtless, wrote. It appears to me that when about to
marry your daughter to a young man, it is right to make some
inquiries respecting his family it is not only a right, but
a duty."
"You wrote, sir, knowing what answer you would receive."
"I, indeed? I assure you," cried Danglars, with a confidence
and security proceeding less from fear than from the
interest he really felt for the young man, "I solemnly
declare to you, that I should never have thought of writing
to Yanina, did I know anything of Ali Pasha's misfortunes."
"Who, then, urged you to write? Tell me."
"Pardieu, it was the most simple thing in the world. I was
speaking of your father's past history. I said the origin of
his fortune remained obscure. The person to whom I addressed
my scruples asked me where your father had acquired his
property? I answered, "In Greece.'  "Then,' said he,
"write to Yanina.'"
"And who thus advised you?"
"No other than your friend, Monte Cristo."
"The Count of Monte Cristo told you to write to Yanina?"
"Yes and I wrote, and will show you my correspondence, if
you like." Albert and Beauchamp looked at each other. "Sir,"
said Beauchamp, who had not yet spoken, "you appear to
accuse the count, who is absent from Paris at this moment,
and cannot justify himself."
"I accuse no one, sir," said Danglars "I relate, and I will
repeat before the count what I have said to you."
"Does the count know what answer you received?"
"Yes I showed it to him."
"Did he know my father's Christian name was Fernand, and his
family name Mondego?"
"Yes, I had told him that long since, and I did only what
any other would have done in my circumstances, and perhaps
less. When, the day after the arrival of this answer, your
father came by the advice of Monte Cristo to ask my
daughter's hand for you, I decidedly refused him, but
without any explanation or exposure. In short, why should I
have any more to do with the affair? How did the honor or
disgrace of M. de Morcerf affect me? It neither increased
nor decreased my income."
Albert felt the blood mounting to his brow there was no
doubt upon the subject. Danglars defended himself with the
baseness, but at the same time with the assurance, of a man
who speaks the truth, at least in part, if not wholly  not
for conscience' sake, but through fear. Besides, what was
Morcerf seeking? It was not whether Danglars or Monte Cristo
was more or less guilty it was a man who would answer for
the offence, whether trifling or serious it was a man who
would fight, and it was evident Danglars would not fight.
And, in addition to this, everything forgotten or
unperceived before presented itself now to his recollection.
Monte Cristo knew everything, as he had bought the daughter
of Ali Pasha and, knowing everything, he had advised
Danglars to write to Yanina. The answer known, he had
yielded to Albert's wish to be introduced to Haidee, and
allowed the conversation to turn on the death of Ali, and
had not opposed Haidee's recital but having, doubtless,
warned the young girl, in the few Romaic words he spoke to
her, not to implicate Morcerf's father. Besides, had he not
begged of Morcerf not to mention his father's name before
Haidee? Lastly, he had taken Albert to Normandy when he knew
the final blow was near. There could be no doubt that all
had been calculated and previously arranged Monte Cristo
then was in league with his father's enemies. Albert took
Beauchamp aside, and communicated these ideas to him.
"You are right," said the latter "M. Danglars has only been
a secondary agent in this sad affair, and it is of M. de
Monte Cristo that you must demand an explanation." Albert
turned. "Sir," said he to Danglars, "understand that I do
not take a final leave of you I must ascertain if your
insinuations are just, and am going now to inquire of the
Count of Monte Cristo." He bowed to the banker, and went out
with Beauchamp, without appearing to notice Cavalcanti.
Danglars accompanied him to the door, where he again assured
Albert that no motive of personal hatred had influenced him
against the Count of Morcerf.
Chapter 
The Insult.
At the banker's door Beauchamp stopped Morcerf. "Listen,"
said he "just now I told you it was of M. de Monte Cristo
you must demand an explanation."
"Yes and we are going to his house."
"Reflect, Morcerf, one moment before you go."
"On what shall I reflect?"
"On the importance of the step you are taking."
"Is it more serious than going to M. Danglars?"
"Yes M. Danglars is a moneylover, and those who love
money, you know, think too much of what they risk to be
easily induced to fight a duel. The other is, on the
contrary, to all appearance a true nobleman but do you not
fear to find him a bully?"
"I only fear one thing namely, to find a man who will not
fight."
"Do not be alarmed," said Beauchamp "he will meet you. My
only fear is that he will be too strong for you."
"My friend," said Morcerf, with a sweet smile, "that is what
I wish. The happiest thing that could occur to me, would be
to die in my father's stead that would save us all."
"Your mother would die of grief."
"My poor mother" said Albert, passing his hand across his
eyes, "I know she would but better so than die of shame."
"Are you quite decided, Albert?"
"Yes let us go."
"But do you think we shall find the count at home?"
"He intended returning some hours after me, and doubtless he
is now at home." They ordered the driver to take them to No.
 ChampsElysees. Beauchamp wished to go in alone, but
Albert observed that as this was an unusual circumstance he
might be allowed to deviate from the usual etiquette in
affairs of honor. The cause which the young man espoused was
one so sacred that Beauchamp had only to comply with all his
wishes he yielded and contented himself with following
Morcerf. Albert sprang from the porter's lodge to the steps.
He was received by Baptistin. The count had, indeed, just
arrived, but he was in his bath, and had forbidden that any
one should be admitted. "But after his bath?" asked Morcerf.
"My master will go to dinner."
"And after dinner?"
"He will sleep an hour."
"Then?"
"He is going to the opera."
"Are you sure of it?" asked Albert.
"Quite, sir my master has ordered his horses at eight
o'clock precisely."
"Very good," replied Albert "that is all I wished to know."
Then, turning towards Beauchamp, "If you have anything to
attend to, Beauchamp, do it directly if you have any
appointment for this evening, defer it till tomorrow. I
depend on you to accompany me to the opera and if you can,
bring ChateauRenaud with you."
Beauchamp availed himself of Albert's permission, and left
him, promising to call for him at a quarter before eight. On
his return home, Albert expressed his wish to Franz Debray,
and Morrel, to see them at the opera that evening. Then he
went to see his mother, who since the events of the day
before had refused to see any one, and had kept her room. He
found her in bed, overwhelmed with grief at this public
humiliation. The sight of Albert produced the effect which
might naturally be expected on Mercedes she pressed her
son's hand and sobbed aloud, but her tears relieved her.
Albert stood one moment speechless by the side of his
mother's bed. It was evident from his pale face and knit
brows that his resolution to revenge himself was growing
weaker. "My dear mother," said he, "do you know if M. de
Morcerf has any enemy?" Mercedes started she noticed that
the young man did not say "my father." "My son," she said,
"persons in the count's situation have many secret enemies.
Those who are known are not the most dangerous."
"I know it, and appeal to your penetration. You are of so
superior a mind, nothing escapes you."
"Why do you say so?"
"Because, for instance, you noticed on the evening of the
ball we gave, that M. de Monte Cristo would eat nothing in
our house." Mercedes raised herself on her feverish arm. "M.
de Monte Cristo" she exclaimed "and how is he connected
with the question you asked me?"
"You know, mother, M. de Monte Cristo is almost an Oriental,
and it is customary with the Orientals to secure full
liberty for revenge by not eating or drinking in the houses
of their enemies."
"Do you say M. de Monte Cristo is our enemy?" replied
Mercedes, becoming paler than the sheet which covered her.
"Who told you so? Why, you are mad, Albert M. de Monte
Cristo has only shown us kindness. M. de Monte Cristo saved
your life you yourself presented him to us. Oh, I entreat
you, my son, if you had entertained such an idea, dispel it
and my counsel to you  nay, my prayer  is to retain his
friendship."
"Mother," replied the young man, "you have especial reasons
for telling me to conciliate that man."
"I?" said Mercedes, blushing as rapidly as she had turned
pale, and again becoming paler than ever.
"Yes, doubtless and is it not that he may never do us any
harm?" Mercedes shuddered, and, fixing on her son a
scrutinizing gaze, "You speak strangely," said she to
Albert, "and you appear to have some singular prejudices.
What has the count done? Three days since you were with him
in Normandy only three days since we looked on him as our
best friend."
An ironical smile passed over Albert's lips. Mercedes saw it
and with the double instinct of woman and mother guessed
all but as she was prudent and strongminded she concealed
both her sorrows and her fears. Albert was silent an
instant after, the countess resumed "You came to inquire
after my health I will candidly acknowledge that I am not
well. You should install yourself here, and cheer my
solitude. I do not wish to be left alone."
"Mother," said the young man, "you know how gladly I would
obey your wish, but an urgent and important affair obliges
me to leave you for the whole evening."
"Well," replied Mercedes, sighing, "go, Albert I will not
make you a slave to your filial piety." Albert pretended he
did not hear, bowed to his mother, and quitted her. Scarcely
had he shut her door, when Mercedes called a confidential
servant, and ordered him to follow Albert wherever he should
go that evening, and to come and tell her immediately what
he observed. Then she rang for her lady's maid, and, weak as
she was, she dressed, in order to be ready for whatever
might happen. The footman's mission was an easy one. Albert
went to his room, and dressed with unusual care. At ten
minutes to eight Beauchamp arrived he had seen
ChateauRenaud, who had promised to be in the orchestra
before the curtain was raised. Both got into Albert's coupe
and, as the young man had no reason to conceal where he was
going, he called aloud, "To the opera." In his impatience he
arrived before the beginning of the performance.
ChateauRenaud was at his post apprised by Beauchamp of the
circumstances, he required no explanation from Albert. The
conduct of the son in seeking to avenge his father was so
natural that ChateauRenaud did not seek to dissuade him,
and was content with renewing his assurances of devotion.
Debray was not yet come, but Albert knew that he seldom lost
a scene at the opera. Albert wandered about the theatre
until the curtain was drawn up. He hoped to meet with M. de
Monte Cristo either in the lobby or on the stairs. The bell
summoned him to his seat, and he entered the orchestra with
ChateauRenaud and Beauchamp. But his eyes scarcely quitted
the box between the columns, which remained obstinately
closed during the whole of the first act. At last, as Albert
was looking at his watch for about the hundredth time, at
the beginning of the second act the door opened, and Monte
Cristo entered, dressed in black, and, leaning over the
front of the box, looked around the pit. Morrel followed
him, and looked also for his sister and brother inlaw he
soon discovered them in another box, and kissed his hand to
them.
The count, in his survey of the pit, encountered a pale face
and threatening eyes, which evidently sought to gain his
attention. He recognized Albert, but thought it better not
to notice him, as he looked so angry and discomposed.
Without communicating his thoughts to his companion, he sat
down, drew out his operaglass, and looked another way.
Although apparently not noticing Albert, he did not,
however, lose sight of him, and when the curtain fell at the
end of the second act, he saw him leave the orchestra with
his two friends. Then his head was seen passing at the back
of the boxes, and the count knew that the approaching storm
was intended to fall on him. He was at the moment conversing
cheerfully with Morrel, but he was well prepared for what
might happen. The door opened, and Monte Cristo, turning
round, saw Albert, pale and trembling, followed by Beauchamp
and ChateauRenaud.
"Well," cried he, with that benevolent politeness which
distinguished his salutation from the common civilities of
the world, "my cavalier has attained his object.
Goodevening, M. de Morcerf." The countenance of this man,
who possessed such extraordinary control over his feelings,
expressed the most perfect cordiality. Morrel only then
recollected the letter he had received from the viscount, in
which, without assigning any reason, he begged him to go to
the opera, but he understood that something terrible was
brooding.
"We are not come here, sir, to exchange hypocritical
expressions of politeness, or false professions of
friendship," said Albert, "but to demand an explanation."
The young man's trembling voice was scarcely audible. "An
explanation at the opera?" said the count, with that calm
tone and penetrating eye which characterize the man who
knows his cause is good. "Little acquainted as I am with the
habits of Parisians, I should not have thought this the
place for such a demand."
"Still, if people will shut themselves up," said Albert,
"and cannot be seen because they are bathing, dining, or
asleep, we must avail ourselves of the opportunity whenever
they are to be seen."
"I am not difficult of access, sir for yesterday, if my
memory does not deceive me, you were at my house."
"Yesterday I was at your house, sir," said the young man
"because then I knew not who you were." In pronouncing these
words Albert had raised his voice so as to be heard by those
in the adjoining boxes and in the lobby. Thus the attention
of many was attracted by this altercation. "Where are you
come from, sir? You do not appear to be in the possession of
your senses."
"Provided I understand your perfidy, sir, and succeed in
making you understand that I will be revenged, I shall be
reasonable enough," said Albert furiously.
"I do not understand you, sir," replied Monte Cristo "and
if I did, your tone is too high. I am at home here, and I
alone have a right to raise my voice above another's. Leave
the box, sir" Monte Cristo pointed towards the door with
the most commanding dignity. "Ah, I shall know how to make
you leave your home" replied Albert, clasping in his
convulsed grasp the glove, which Monte Cristo did not lose
sight of.
"Well, well," said Monte Cristo quietly, "I see you wish to
quarrel with me but I would give you one piece of advice,
which you will do well to keep in mind. It is in poor taste
to make a display of a challenge. Display is not becoming to
every one, M. de Morcerf."
At this name a murmur of astonishment passed around the
group of spectators of this scene. They had talked of no one
but Morcerf the whole day. Albert understood the allusion in
a moment, and was about to throw his glove at the count,
when Morrel seized his hand, while Beauchamp and
ChateauRenaud, fearing the scene would surpass the limits
of a challenge, held him back. But Monte Cristo, without
rising, and leaning forward in his chair, merely stretched
out his arm and, taking the damp, crushed glove from the
clinched hand of the young man, "Sir," said he in a solemn
tone, "I consider your glove thrown, and will return it to
you wrapped around a bullet. Now leave me or I will summon
my servants to throw you out at the door."
Wild, almost unconscious, and with eyes inflamed, Albert
stepped back, and Morrel closed the door. Monte Cristo took
up his glass again as if nothing had happened his face was
like marble, and his heart was like bronze. Morrel
whispered, "What have you done to him?"
"I? Nothing  at least personally," said Monte Cristo.
"But there must be some cause for this strange scene."
"The Count of Morcerf's adventure exasperates the young
man."
"Have you anything to do with it?"
"It was through Haidee that the Chamber was informed of his
father's treason."
"Indeed?" said Morrel. "I had been told, but would not
credit it, that the Grecian slave I have seen with you here
in this very box was the daughter of Ali Pasha."
"It is true, nevertheless."
"Then," said Morrel, "I understand it all, and this scene
was premeditated."
"How so?"
"Yes. Albert wrote to request me to come to the opera,
doubtless that I might be a witness to the insult he meant
to offer you."
"Probably," said Monte Cristo with his imperturbable
tranquillity.
"But what shall you do with him?"
"With whom?"
"With Albert."
"What shall I do with Albert? As certainly, Maximilian, as I
now press your hand, I shall kill him before ten o'clock
tomorrow morning." Morrel, in his turn, took Monte Cristo's
hand in both of his, and he shuddered to feel how cold and
steady it was.
"Ah, Count," said he, "his father loves him so much"
"Do not speak to me of that," said Monte Cristo, with the
first movement of anger he had betrayed "I will make him
suffer." Morrel, amazed, let fall Monte Cristo's hand.
"Count, count" said he.
"Dear Maximilian," interrupted the count, "listen how
adorably Duprez is singing that line, 
"O Mathilde idole de mon ame'
"I was the first to discover Duprez at Naples, and the first
to applaud him. Bravo, bravo" Morrel saw it was useless to
say more, and refrained. The curtain, which had risen at the
close of the scene with Albert, again fell, and a rap was
heard at the door.
"Come in," said Monte Cristo with a voice that betrayed not
the least emotion and immediately Beauchamp appeared.
"Goodevening, M. Beauchamp," said Monte Cristo, as if this
was the first time he had seen the journalist that evening
"be seated."
Beauchamp bowed, and, sitting down, "Sir," said he, "I just
now accompanied M. de Morcerf, as you saw."
"And that means," replied Monte Cristo, laughing, "that you
had, probably, just dined together. I am happy to see, M.
Beauchamp, that you are more sober than he was."
"Sir," said M. Beauchamp, "Albert was wrong, I acknowledge,
to betray so much anger, and I come, on my own account, to
apologize for him. And having done so, entirely on my own
account, be it understood, I would add that I believe you
too gentlemanly to refuse giving him some explanation
concerning your connection with Yanina. Then I will add two
words about the young Greek girl." Monte Cristo motioned him
to be silent. "Come," said he, laughing, "there are all my
hopes about to be destroyed."
"How so?" asked Beauchamp.
"Doubtless you wish to make me appear a very eccentric
character. I am, in your opinion, a Lara, a Manfred, a Lord
Ruthven then, just as I am arriving at the climax, you
defeat your own end, and seek to make an ordinary man of me.
You bring me down to your own level, and demand
explanations Indeed, M. Beauchamp, it is quite laughable."
"Yet," replied Beauchamp haughtily, "there are occasions
when probity commands" 
"M. Beauchamp," interposed this strange man, "the Count of
Monte Cristo bows to none but the Count of Monte Cristo
himself. Say no more, I entreat you. I do what I please, M.
Beauchamp, and it is always well done."
"Sir," replied the young man, "honest men are not to be paid
with such coin. I require honorable guaranties."
"I am, sir, a living guaranty," replied Monte Cristo,
motionless, but with a threatening look "we have both blood
in our veins which we wish to shed  that is our mutual
guaranty. Tell the viscount so, and that tomorrow, before
ten o'clock, I shall see what color his is."
"Then I have only to make arrangements for the duel," said
Beauchamp.
"It is quite immaterial to me," said Monte Cristo, "and it
was very unnecessary to disturb me at the opera for such a
trifle. In France people fight with the sword or pistol, in
the colonies with the carbine, in Arabia with the dagger.
Tell your client that, although I am the insulted party, in
order to carry out my eccentricity, I leave him the choice
of arms, and will accept without discussion, without
dispute, anything, even combat by drawing lots, which is
always stupid, but with me different from other people, as I
am sure to gain."
"Sure to gain" repeated Beauchamp, looking with amazement
at the count.
"Certainly," said Monte Cristo, slightly shrugging his
shoulders "otherwise I would not fight with M. de Morcerf.
I shall kill him  I cannot help it. Only by a single line
this evening at my house let me know the arms and the hour
I do not like to be kept waiting."
"Pistols, then, at eight o'clock, in the Bois de Vincennes,"
said Beauchamp, quite disconcerted, not knowing if he was
dealing with an arrogant braggadocio or a supernatural
being.
"Very well, sir," said Monte Cristo. "Now all that is
settled, do let me see the performance, and tell your friend
Albert not to come any more this evening he will hurt
himself with all his illchosen barbarisms let him go home
and go to sleep." Beauchamp left the box, perfectly amazed.
"Now," said Monte Cristo, turning towards Morrel, "I may
depend upon you, may I not?"
"Certainly," said Morrel, "I am at your service, count
still" 
"What?"
"It is desirable I should know the real cause."
"That is to say, you would rather not?"
"No."
"The young man himself is acting blindfolded, and knows not
the true cause, which is known only to God and to me but I
give you my word, Morrel, that God, who does know it, will
be on our side."
"Enough," said Morrel "who is your second witness?"
"I know no one in Paris, Morrel, on whom I could confer that
honor besides you and your brother Emmanuel. Do you think
Emmanuel would oblige me?"
"I will answer for him, count."
"Well? that is all I require. Tomorrow morning, at seven
o'clock, you will be with me, will you not?"
"We will."
"Hush, the curtain is rising. Listen I never lose a note of
this opera if I can avoid it the music of William Tell is
so sweet."
Chapter 
A Nocturnal Interview.
Monte Cristo waited, according to his usual custom, until
Duprez had sung his famous "Suivezmoi" then he rose and
went out. Morrel took leave of him at the door, renewing his
promise to be with him the next morning at seven o'clock,
and to bring Emmanuel. Then he stepped into his coupe, calm
and smiling, and was at home in five minutes. No one who
knew the count could mistake his expression when, on
entering, he said, "Ali, bring me my pistols with the ivory
cross."
Ali brought the box to his master, who examined the weapons
with a solicitude very natural to a man who is about to
intrust his life to a little powder and shot. These were
pistols of an especial pattern, which Monte Cristo had had
made for target practice in his own room. A cap was
sufficient to drive out the bullet, and from the adjoining
room no one would have suspected that the count was, as
sportsmen would say, keeping his hand in. He was just taking
one up and looking for the point to aim at on a little iron
plate which served him as a target, when his study door
opened, and Baptistin entered. Before he had spoken a word,
the count saw in the next room a veiled woman, who had
followed closely after Baptistin, and now, seeing the count
with a pistol in his hand and swords on the table, rushed
in. Baptistin looked at his master, who made a sign to him,
and he went out, closing the door after him. "Who are you,
madame?" said the count to the veiled woman.
The stranger cast one look around her, to be certain that
they were quite alone then bending as if she would have
knelt, and joining her hands, she said with an accent of
despair, "Edmond, you will not kill my son?" The count
retreated a step, uttered a slight exclamation, and let fall
the pistol he held. "What name did you pronounce then,
Madame de Morcerf?" said he. "Yours" cried she, throwing
back her veil,  "yours, which I alone, perhaps, have not
forgotten. Edmond, it is not Madame de Morcerf who is come
to you, it is Mercedes."
"Mercedes is dead, madame," said Monte Cristo "I know no
one now of that name."
"Mercedes lives, sir, and she remembers, for she alone
recognized you when she saw you, and even before she saw
you, by your voice, Edmond,  by the simple sound of your
voice and from that moment she has followed your steps,
watched you, feared you, and she needs not to inquire what
hand has dealt the blow which now strikes M. de Morcerf."
"Fernand, do you mean?" replied Monte Cristo, with bitter
irony "since we are recalling names, let us remember them
all." Monte Cristo had pronounced the name of Fernand with
such an expression of hatred that Mercedes felt a thrill of
horror run through every vein. "You see, Edmond, I am not
mistaken, and have cause to say, "Spare my son'"
"And who told you, madame, that I have any hostile
intentions against your son?"
"No one, in truth but a mother has twofold sight. I guessed
all I followed him this evening to the opera, and,
concealed in a parquet box, have seen all."
"If you have seen all, madame, you know that the son of
Fernand has publicly insulted me," said Monte Cristo with
awful calmness.
"Oh, for pity's sake"
"You have seen that he would have thrown his glove in my
face if Morrel, one of my friends, had not stopped him."
"Listen to me, my son has also guessed who you are,  he
attributes his father's misfortunes to you."
"Madame, you are mistaken, they are not misfortunes,  it
is a punishment. It is not I who strike M. de Morcerf it is
providence which punishes him."
"And why do you represent providence?" cried Mercedes. "Why
do you remember when it forgets? What are Yanina and its
vizier to you, Edmond? What injury his Fernand Mondego done
you in betraying Ali Tepelini?"
"Ah, madame," replied Monte Cristo, "all this is an affair
between the French captain and the daughter of Vasiliki. It
does not concern me, you are right and if I have sworn to
revenge myself, it is not on the French captain, or the
Count of Morcerf, but on the fisherman Fernand, the husband
of Mercedes the Catalane."
"Ah, sir" cried the countess, "how terrible a vengeance for
a fault which fatality made me commit  for I am the only
culprit, Edmond, and if you owe revenge to any one, it is to
me, who had not fortitude to bear your absence and my
solitude."
"But," exclaimed Monte Cristo, "why was I absent? And why
were you alone?"
"Because you had been arrested, Edmond, and were a
prisoner."
"And why was I arrested? Why was I a prisoner?"
"I do not know," said Mercedes. "You do not, madame at
least, I hope not. But I will tell you. I was arrested and
became a prisoner because, under the arbor of La Reserve,
the day before I was to marry you, a man named Danglars
wrote this letter, which the fisherman Fernand himself
posted." Monte Cristo went to a secretary, opened a drawer
by a spring, from which he took a paper which had lost its
original color, and the ink of which had become of a rusty
hue  this he placed in the hands of Mercedes. It was
Danglars' letter to the king's attorney, which the Count of
Monte Cristo, disguised as a clerk from the house of Thomson
 French, had taken from the file against Edmond Dantes, on
the day he had paid the two hundred thousand francs to M. de
Boville. Mercedes read with terror the following lines 
"The king's attorney is informed by a friend to the throne
and religion that one Edmond Dantes, second in command on
board the Pharaon, this day arrived from Smyrna, after
having touched at Naples and PortoFerrajo, is the bearer of
a letter from Murat to the usurper, and of another letter
from the usurper to the Bonapartist club in Paris. Ample
corroboration of this statement may be obtained by arresting
the abovementioned Edmond Dantes, who either carries the
letter for Paris about with him, or has it at his father's
abode. Should it not be found in possession of either father
or son, then it will assuredly be discovered in the cabin
belonging to the said Dantes on board the Pharaon."
"How dreadful" said Mercedes, passing her hand across her
brow, moist with perspiration "and that letter" 
"I bought it for two hundred thousand francs, madame," said
Monte Cristo "but that is a trifle, since it enables me to
justify myself to you."
"And the result of that letter" 
"You well know, madame, was my arrest but you do not know
how long that arrest lasted. You do not know that I remained
for fourteen years within a quarter of a league of you, in a
dungeon in the Chateau d'If. You do not know that every day
of those fourteen years I renewed the vow of vengeance which
I had made the first day and yet I was not aware that you
had married Fernand, my calumniator, and that my father had
died of hunger"
"Can it be?" cried Mercedes, shuddering.
"That is what I heard on leaving my prison fourteen years
after I had entered it and that is why, on account of the
living Mercedes and my deceased father, I have sworn to
revenge myself on Fernand, and  I have revenged myself."
"And you are sure the unhappy Fernand did that?"
"I am satisfied, madame, that he did what I have told you
besides, that is not much more odious than that a Frenchman
by adoption should pass over to the English that a Spaniard
by birth should have fought against the Spaniards that a
stipendiary of Ali should have betrayed and murdered Ali.
Compared with such things, what is the letter you have just
read?  a lover's deception, which the woman who has
married that man ought certainly to forgive but not so the
lover who was to have married her. Well, the French did not
avenge themselves on the traitor, the Spaniards did not
shoot the traitor, Ali in his tomb left the traitor
unpunished but I, betrayed, sacrificed, buried, have risen
from my tomb, by the grace of God, to punish that man. He
sends me for that purpose, and here I am." The poor woman's
head and arms fell her legs bent under her, and she fell on
her knees. "Forgive, Edmond, forgive for my sake, who love
you still"
The dignity of the wife checked the fervor of the lover and
the mother. Her forehead almost touched the carpet, when the
count sprang forward and raised her. Then seated on a chair,
she looked at the manly countenance of Monte Cristo, on
which grief and hatred still impressed a threatening
expression. "Not crush that accursed race?" murmured he
"abandon my purpose at the moment of its accomplishment?
Impossible, madame, impossible"
"Edmond," said the poor mother, who tried every means, "when
I call you Edmond, why do you not call me Mercedes?"
"Mercedes" repeated Monte Cristo "Mercedes Well yes, you
are right that name has still its charms, and this is the
first time for a long period that I have pronounced it so
distinctly. Oh, Mercedes, I have uttered your name with the
sigh of melancholy, with the groan of sorrow, with the last
effort of despair I have uttered it when frozen with cold,
crouched on the straw in my dungeon I have uttered it,
consumed with heat, rolling on the stone floor of my prison.
Mercedes, I must revenge myself, for I suffered fourteen
years,  fourteen years I wept, I cursed now I tell you,
Mercedes, I must revenge myself."
The count, fearing to yield to the entreaties of her he had
so ardently loved, called his sufferings to the assistance
of his hatred. "Revenge yourself, then, Edmond," cried the
poor mother "but let your vengeance fall on the culprits,
on him, on me, but not on my son"
"It is written in the good book," said Monte Cristo, "that
the sins of the fathers shall fall upon their children to
the third and fourth generation. Since God himself dictated
those words to his prophet, why should I seek to make myself
better than God?"
"Edmond," continued Mercedes, with her arms extended towards
the count, "since I first knew you, I have adored your name,
have respected your memory. Edmond, my friend, do not compel
me to tarnish that noble and pure image reflected
incessantly on the mirror of my heart. Edmond, if you knew
all the prayers I have addressed to God for you while I
thought you were living and since I have thought you must be
dead Yes, dead, alas I imagined your dead body buried at
the foot of some gloomy tower, or cast to the bottom of a
pit by hateful jailers, and I wept What could I do for you,
Edmond, besides pray and weep? Listen for ten years I
dreamed each night the same dream. I had been told that you
had endeavored to escape that you had taken the place of
another prisoner that you had slipped into the winding
sheet of a dead body that you had been thrown alive from
the top of the Chateau d'If, and that the cry you uttered as
you dashed upon the rocks first revealed to your jailers
that they were your murderers. Well, Edmond, I swear to you,
by the head of that son for whom I entreat your pity, 
Edmond, for ten years I saw every night every detail of that
frightful tragedy, and for ten years I heard every night the
cry which awoke me, shuddering and cold. And I, too, Edmond
oh believe me  guilty as I was  oh, yes, I, too,
have suffered much"
"Have you known what it is to have your father starve to
death in your absence?" cried Monte Cristo, thrusting his
hands into his hair "have you seen the woman you loved
giving her hand to your rival, while you were perishing at
the bottom of a dungeon?"
"No," interrupted Mercedes, "but I have seen him whom I
loved on the point of murdering my son." Mercedes uttered
these words with such deep anguish, with an accent of such
intense despair, that Monte Cristo could not restrain a sob.
The lion was daunted the avenger was conquered. "What do
you ask of me?" said he,  "your son's life? Well, he shall
live" Mercedes uttered a cry which made the tears start
from Monte Cristo's eyes but these tears disappeared almost
instantaneously, for, doubtless, God had sent some angel to
collect them  far more precious were they in his eyes than
the richest pearls of Guzerat and Ophir.
"Oh," said she, seizing the count's hand and raising it to
her lips "oh, thank you, thank you, Edmond Now you are
exactly what I dreamt you were,  the man I always loved.
Oh, now I may say so"
"So much the better," replied Monte Cristo "as that poor
Edmond will not have long to be loved by you. Death is about
to return to the tomb, the phantom to retire in darkness."
"What do you say, Edmond?"
"I say, since you command me, Mercedes, I must die."
"Die? and why so? Who talks of dying? Whence have you these
ideas of death?"
"You do not suppose that, publicly outraged in the face of a
whole theatre, in the presence of your friends and those of
your son  challenged by a boy who will glory in my
forgiveness as if it were a victory  you do not suppose
that I can for one moment wish to live. What I most loved
after you, Mercedes, was myself, my dignity, and that
strength which rendered me superior to other men that
strength was my life. With one word you have crushed it, and
I die."
"But the duel will not take place, Edmond, since you
forgive?"
"It will take place," said Monte Cristo, in a most solemn
tone "but instead of your son's blood to stain the ground,
mine will flow." Mercedes shrieked, and sprang towards Monte
Cristo, but, suddenly stopping, "Edmond," said she, "there
is a God above us, since you live and since I have seen you
again I trust to him from my heart. While waiting his
assistance I trust to your word you have said that my son
should live, have you not?"
"Yes, madame, he shall live," said Monte Cristo, surprised
that without more emotion Mercedes had accepted the heroic
sacrifice he made for her. Mercedes extended her hand to the
count.
"Edmond," said she, and her eyes were wet with tears while
looking at him to whom she spoke, "how noble it is of you,
how great the action you have just performed, how sublime to
have taken pity on a poor woman who appealed to you with
every chance against her, Alas, I am grown old with grief
more than with years, and cannot now remind my Edmond by a
smile, or by a look, of that Mercedes whom he once spent so
many hours in contemplating. Ah, believe me, Edmond, as I
told you, I too have suffered much I repeat, it is
melancholy to pass one's life without having one joy to
recall, without preserving a single hope but that proves
that all is not yet over. No, it is not finished I feel it
by what remains in my heart. Oh, I repeat it, Edmond what
you have just done is beautiful  it is grand it is
sublime."
"Do you say so now, Mercedes?  then what would you say if
you knew the extent of the sacrifice I make to you? Suppose
that the Supreme Being, after having created the world and
fertilized chaos, had paused in the work to spare an angel
the tears that might one day flow for mortal sins from her
immortal eyes suppose that when everything was in readiness
and the moment had come for God to look upon his work and
see that it was good  suppose he had snuffed out the sun
and tossed the world back into eternal night  then  even
then, Mercedes, you could not imagine what I lose in
sacrificing my life at this moment." Mercedes looked at the
count in a way which expressed at the same time her
astonishment, her admiration, and her gratitude. Monte
Cristo pressed his forehead on his burning hands, as if his
brain could no longer bear alone the weight of its thoughts.
"Edmond," said Mercedes, "I have but one word more to say to
you." The count smiled bitterly. "Edmond," continued she,
"you will see that if my face is pale, if my eyes are dull,
if my beauty is gone if Mercedes, in short, no longer
resembles her former self in her features, you will see that
her heart is still the same. Adieu, then, Edmond I have
nothing more to ask of heaven  I have seen you again, and
have found you as noble and as great as formerly you were.
Adieu, Edmond, adieu, and thank you."
But the count did not answer. Mercedes opened the door of
the study and had disappeared before he had recovered from
the painful and profound revery into which his thwarted
vengeance had plunged him. The clock of the Invalides struck
one when the carriage which conveyed Madame de Morcerf away
rolled on the pavement of the ChampsElysees, and made Monte
Cristo raise his head. "What a fool I was," said he, "not to
tear my heart out on the day when I resolved to avenge
myself"
Chapter 
The Meeting.
After Mercedes had left Monte Cristo, he fell into profound
gloom. Around him and within him the flight of thought
seemed to have stopped his energetic mind slumbered, as the
body does after extreme fatigue. "What?" said he to himself,
while the lamp and the wax lights were nearly burnt out, and
the servants were waiting impatiently in the anteroom
"what? this edifice which I have been so long preparing,
which I have reared with so much care and toil, is to be
crushed by a single touch, a word, a breath Yes, this self,
of whom I thought so much, of whom I was so proud, who had
appeared so worthless in the dungeons of the Chateau d'If,
and whom I had succeeded in making so great, will be but a
lump of clay tomorrow. Alas, it is not the death of the
body I regret for is not the destruction of the vital
principle, the repose to which everything is tending, to
which every unhappy being aspires,  is not this the repose
of matter after which I so long sighed, and which I was
seeking to attain by the painful process of starvation when
Faria appeared in my dungeon? What is death for me? One step
farther into rest,  two, perhaps, into silence.
"No, it is not existence, then, that I regret, but the ruin
of projects so slowly carried out, so laboriously framed.
Providence is now opposed to them, when I most thought it
would be propitious. It is not God's will that they should
be accomplished. This burden, almost as heavy as a world,
which I had raised, and I had thought to bear to the end,
was too great for my strength, and I was compelled to lay it
down in the middle of my career. Oh, shall I then, again
become a fatalist, whom fourteen years of despair and ten of
hope had rendered a believer in providence? And all this 
all this, because my heart, which I thought dead, was only
sleeping because it has awakened and has begun to beat
again, because I have yielded to the pain of the emotion
excited in my breast by a woman's voice. Yet," continued the
count, becoming each moment more absorbed in the
anticipation of the dreadful sacrifice for the morrow, which
Mercedes had accepted, "yet, it is impossible that so
nobleminded a woman should thus through selfishness consent
to my death when I am in the prime of life and strength it
is impossible that she can carry to such a point maternal
love, or rather delirium. There are virtues which become
crimes by exaggeration. No, she must have conceived some
pathetic scene she will come and throw herself between us
and what would be sublime here will there appear
ridiculous." The blush of pride mounted to the count's
forehead as this thought passed through his mind.
"Ridiculous?" repeated he "and the ridicule will fall on
me. I ridiculous? No, I would rather die."
By thus exaggerating to his own mind the anticipated
illfortune of the next day, to which he had condemned
himself by promising Mercedes to spare her son, the count at
last exclaimed, "Folly, folly, folly  to carry generosity
so far as to put myself up as a mark for that young man to
aim at. He will never believe that my death was suicide and
yet it is important for the honor of my memory,  and this
surely is not vanity, but a justifiable pride,  it is
important the world should know that I have consented, by my
free will, to stop my arm, already raised to strike, and
that with the arm which has been so powerful against others
I have struck myself. It must be it shall be."
Seizing a pen, he drew a paper from a secret drawer in his
desk, and wrote at the bottom of the document which was no
other than his will, made since his arrival in Paris a sort
of codicil, clearly explaining the nature of his death. "I
do this, O my God," said he, with his eyes raised to heaven,
"as much for thy honor as for mine. I have during ten years
considered myself the agent of thy vengeance, and other
wretches, like Morcerf, Danglars, Villefort, even Morcerf
himself, must not imagine that chance has freed them from
their enemy. Let them know, on the contrary, that their
punishment, which had been decreed by providence, is only
delayed by my present determination, and although they
escape it in this world, it awaits them in another, and that
they are only exchanging time for eternity."
While he was thus agitated by gloomy uncertainties, 
wretched waking dreams of grief,  the first rays of
morning pierced his windows, and shone upon the pale blue
paper on which he had just inscribed his justification of
providence. It was just five o'clock in the morning when a
slight noise like a stifled sigh reached his ear. He turned
his head, looked around him, and saw no one but the sound
was repeated distinctly enough to convince him of its
reality.
He arose, and quietly opening the door of the drawingroom,
saw Haidee, who had fallen on a chair, with her arms hanging
down and her beautiful head thrown back. She had been
standing at the door, to prevent his going out without
seeing her, until sleep, which the young cannot resist, had
overpowered her frame, wearied as she was with watching. The
noise of the door did not awaken her, and Monte Cristo gazed
at her with affectionate regret. "She remembered that she
had a son," said he "and I forgot I had a daughter." Then,
shaking his head sorrowfully, "Poor Haidee," said he "she
wished to see me, to speak to me she has feared or guessed
something. Oh, I cannot go without taking leave of her I
cannot die without confiding her to some one." He quietly
regained his seat, and wrote under the other lines 
"I bequeath to Maximilian Morrel, captain of Spahis,  and
son of my former patron, Pierre Morrel, shipowner at
Marseilles,  the sum of twenty millions, a part of which
may be offered to his sister Julia and brotherinlaw
Emmanuel, if he does not fear this increase of fortune may
mar their happiness. These twenty millions are concealed in
my grotto at Monte Cristo, of which Bertuccio knows the
secret. If his heart is free, and he will marry Haidee, the
daughter of Ali Pasha of Yanina, whom I have brought up with
the love of a father, and who has shown the love and
tenderness of a daughter for me, he will thus accomplish my
last wish. This will has already constituted Haidee heiress
of the rest of my fortune, consisting of lands, funds in
England, Austria, and Holland, furniture in my different
palaces and houses, and which without the twenty millions
and the legacies to my servants, may still amount to sixty
millions."
He was finishing the last line when a cry behind him made
him start, and the pen fell from his hand. "Haidee," said
he, "did you read it?"
"Oh, my lord," said she, "why are you writing thus at such
an hour? Why are you bequeathing all your fortune to me? Are
you going to leave me?"
"I am going on a journey, dear child," said Monte Cristo,
with an expression of infinite tenderness and melancholy
"and if any misfortune should happen to me"
The count stopped. "Well?" asked the young girl, with an
authoritative tone the count had never observed before, and
which startled him. "Well, if any misfortune happen to me,"
replied Monte Cristo, "I wish my daughter to be happy."
Haidee smiled sorrowfully, and shook her head. "Do you think
of dying, my lord?" said she.
"The wise man, my child, has said, "It is good to think of
death.'"
"Well, if you die," said she, "bequeath your fortune to
others, for if you die I shall require nothing" and, taking
the paper, she tore it in four pieces, and threw it into the
middle of the room. Then, the effort having exhausted her
strength, she fell not asleep this time, but fainting on the
floor. The count leaned over her and raised her in his arms
and seeing that sweet pale face, those lovely eyes closed,
that beautiful form motionless and to all appearance
lifeless, the idea occurred to him for the first time, that
perhaps she loved him otherwise than as a daughter loves a
father.
"Alas," murmured he, with intense suffering, "I might, then,
have been happy yet." Then he carried Haidee to her room,
resigned her to the care of her attendants, and returning to
his study, which he shut quickly this time, he again copied
the destroyed will. As he was finishing, the sound of a
cabriolet entering the yard was heard. Monte Cristo
approached the window, and saw Maximilian and Emmanuel
alight. "Good," said he "it was time,"  and he sealed his
will with three seals. A moment afterwards he heard a noise
in the drawingroom, and went to open the door himself.
Morrel was there he had come twenty minutes before the time
appointed. "I am perhaps come too soon, count," said he,
"but I frankly acknowledge that I have not closed my eyes
all night, nor has any one in my house. I need to see you
strong in your courageous assurance, to recover myself."
Monte Cristo could not resist this proof of affection he
not only extended his hand to the young man, but flew to him
with open arms. "Morrel," said he, "it is a happy day for
me, to feel that I am beloved by such a man as you.
Goodmorning, Emmanuel you will come with me then,
Maximilian?"
"Did you doubt it?" said the young captain.
"But if I were wrong" 
"I watched you during the whole scene of that challenge
yesterday I have been thinking of your firmness all night,
and I said to myself that justice must be on your side, or
man's countenance is no longer to be relied on."
"But, Morrel, Albert is your friend?"
"Simply an acquaintance, sir."
"You met on the same day you first saw me?"
"Yes, that is true but I should not have recollected it if
you had not reminded me."
"Thank you, Morrel." Then ringing the bell once, "Look."
said he to Ali, who came immediately, "take that to my
solicitor. It is my will, Morrel. When I am dead, you will
go and examine it."
"What?" said Morrel, "you dead?"
"Yes must I not be prepared for everything, dear friend?
But what did you do yesterday after you left me?"
"I went to Tortoni's, where, as I expected, I found
Beauchamp and ChateauRenaud. I own I was seeking them."
"Why, when all was arranged?"
"Listen, count the affair is serious and unavoidable."
"Did you doubt it"
"No the offence was public, and every one is already
talking of it."
"Well?"
"Well, I hoped to get an exchange of arms,  to substitute
the sword for the pistol the pistol is blind."
"Have you succeeded?" asked Monte Cristo quickly, with an
imperceptible gleam of hope.
"No for your skill with the sword is so well known."
"Ah?  who has betrayed me?"
"The skilful swordsman whom you have conquered."
"And you failed?"
"They positively refused."
"Morrel," said the count, "have you ever seen me fire a
pistol?"
"Never."
"Well, we have time look." Monte Cristo took the pistols he
held in his hand when Mercedes entered, and fixing an ace of
clubs against the iron plate, with four shots he
successively shot off the four sides of the club. At each
shot Morrel turned pale. He examined the bullets with which
Monte Cristo performed this dexterous feat, and saw that
they were no larger than buckshot. "It is astonishing," said
he. "Look, Emmanuel." Then turning towards Monte Cristo,
"Count," said he, "in the name of all that is dear to you, I
entreat you not to kill Albert  the unhappy youth has a
mother."
"You are right," said Monte Cristo "and I have none." These
words were uttered in a tone which made Morrel shudder. "You
are the offended party, count."
"Doubtless what does that imply?"
"That you will fire first."
"I fire first?"
"Oh, I obtained, or rather claimed that we had conceded
enough for them to yield us that."
"And at what distance?"
"Twenty paces." A smile of terrible import passed over the
count's lips. "Morrel," said he, "do not forget what you
have just seen."
"The only chance for Albert's safety, then, will arise from
your emotion."
"I suffer from emotion?" said Monte Cristo.
"Or from your generosity, my friend to so good a marksman
as you are, I may say what would appear absurd to another."
"What is that?"
"Break his arm  wound him  but do not kill him."
"I will tell you, Morrel," said the count, "that I do not
need entreating to spare the life of M. de Morcerf he shall
be so well spared, that he will return quietly with his two
friends, while I" 
"And you?"
"That will be another thing I shall be brought home."
"No, no," cried Maximilian, quite unable to restrain his
feelings.
"As I told you, my dear Morrel, M. de Morcerf will kill me."
Morrel looked at him in utter amazement. "But what has
happened, then, since last evening, count?"
"The same thing that happened to Brutus the night before the
battle of Philippi I have seen a ghost."
"And that ghost" 
"Told me, Morrel, that I had lived long enough." Maximilian
and Emmanuel looked at each other. Monte Cristo drew out his
watch. "Let us go," said he "it is five minutes past seven,
and the appointment was for eight o'clock." A carriage was
in readiness at the door. Monte Cristo stepped into it with
his two friends. He had stopped a moment in the passage to
listen at a door, and Maximilian and Emmanuel, who had
considerately passed forward a few steps, thought they heard
him answer by a sigh to a sob from within. As the clock
struck eight they drove up to the place of meeting. "We are
first," said Morrel, looking out of the window. "Excuse me,
sir," said Baptistin, who had followed his master with
indescribable terror, "but I think I see a carriage down
there under the trees."
Monte Cristo sprang lightly from the carriage, and offered
his hand to assist Emmanuel and Maximilian. The latter
retained the count's hand between his. "I like," said he,
"to feel a hand like this, when its owner relies on the
goodness of his cause."
"It seems to me," said Emmanuel, "that I see two young men
down there, who are evidently, waiting." Monte Cristo drew
Morrel a step or two behind his brotherinlaw.
"Maximilian," said he, "are your affections disengaged?"
Morrel looked at Monte Cristo with astonishment. "I do not
seek your confidence, my dear friend. I only ask you a
simple question answer it  that is all I require."
"I love a young girl, count."
"Do you love her much?"
"More than my life."
"Another hope defeated" said the count. Then, with a sigh,
"Poor Haidee" murmured he.
"To tell the truth, count, if I knew less of you, I should
think that you were less brave than you are."
"Because I sigh when thinking of some one I am leaving?
Come, Morrel, it is not like a soldier to be so bad a judge
of courage. Do I regret life? What is it to me, who have
passed twenty years between life and death? Moreover, do not
alarm yourself, Morrel this weakness, if it is such, is
betrayed to you alone. I know the world is a drawingroom,
from which we must retire politely and honestly that is,
with a bow, and our debts of honor paid."
"That is to the purpose. Have you brought your arms?"
"I?  what for? I hope these gentlemen have theirs."
"I will inquire," said Morrel.
"Do but make no treaty  you understand me?"
"You need not fear." Morrel advanced towards Beauchamp and
ChateauRenaud, who, seeing his intention, came to meet him.
The three young men bowed to each other courteously, if not
affably.
"Excuse me, gentlemen," said Morrel, "but I do not see M. de
Morcerf."
"He sent us word this morning," replied ChateauRenaud,
"that he would meet us on the ground."
"Ah," said Morrel. Beauchamp pulled out his watch. "It is
only five minutes past eight," said he to Morrel "there is
not much time lost yet."
"Oh, I made no allusion of that kind," replied Morrel.
"There is a carriage coming," said ChateauRenaud. It
advanced rapidly along one of the avenues leading towards
the open space where they were assembled. "You are doubtless
provided with pistols, gentlemen? M. de Monte Cristo yields
his right of using his."
"We had anticipated this kindness on the part of the count,"
said Beauchamp, "and I have brought some weapons which I
bought eight or ten days since, thinking to want them on a
similar occasion. They are quite new, and have not yet been
used. Will you examine them."
"Oh, M. Beauchamp, if you assure me that M. de Morcerf does
not know these pistols, you may readily believe that your
word will be quite sufficient."
"Gentlemen," said ChateauRenaud, "it is not Morcerf coming
in that carriage  faith, it is Franz and Debray" The two
young men he announced were indeed approaching. "What chance
brings you here, gentlemen?" said ChateauRenaud, shaking
hands with each of them. "Because," said Debray, "Albert
sent this morning to request us to come." Beauchamp and
ChateauRenaud exchanged looks of astonishment. "I think I
understand his reason," said Morrel.
"What is it?"
"Yesterday afternoon I received a letter from M. de Morcerf,
begging me to attend the opera."
"And I," said Debray.
"And I also," said Franz.
"And we, too," added Beauchamp and ChateauRenaud.
"Having wished you all to witness the challenge, he now
wishes you to be present at the combat."
"Exactly so," said the young men "you have probably guessed
right."
"But, after all these arrangements, he does not come
himself," said ChateauRenaud. "Albert is ten minutes after
time."
"There he comes," said Beauchamp, "on horseback, at full
gallop, followed by a servant."
"How imprudent," said ChateauRenaud, "to come on horseback
to fight a duel with pistols, after all the instructions I
had given him."
"And besides," said Beauchamp, "with a collar above his
cravat, an open coat and white waistcoat Why has he not
painted a spot upon his heart?  it would have been more
simple." Meanwhile Albert had arrived within ten paces of
the group formed by the five young men. He jumped from his
horse, threw the bridle on his servant's arms, and joined
them. He was pale, and his eyes were red and swollen it was
evident that he had not slept. A shade of melancholy gravity
overspread his countenance, which was not natural to him. "I
thank you, gentlemen," said he, "for having complied with my
request I feel extremely grateful for this mark of
friendship." Morrel had stepped back as Morcerf approached,
and remained at a short distance. "And to you also, M.
Morrel, my thanks are due. Come, there cannot be too many."
"Sir," said Maximilian, "you are not perhaps aware that I am
M. de Monte Cristo's friend?"
"I was not sure, but I thought it might be so. So much the
better the more honorable men there are here the better I
shall be satisfied."
"M. Morrel," said ChateauRenaud, "will you apprise the
Count of Monte Cristo that M. de Morcerf is arrived, and we
are at his disposal?" Morrel was preparing to fulfil his
commission. Beauchamp had meanwhile drawn the box of pistols
from the carriage. "Stop, gentlemen," said Albert "I have
two words to say to the Count of Monte Cristo."
"In private?" asked Morrel.
"No, sir before all who are here."
Albert's witnesses looked at each other. Franz and Debray
exchanged some words in a whisper, and Morrel, rejoiced at
this unexpected incident, went to fetch the count, who was
walking in a retired path with Emmanuel. "What does he want
with me?" said Monte Cristo.
"I do not know, but he wishes to speak to you."
"Ah?" said Monte Cristo, "I trust he is not going to tempt
me by some fresh insult"
"I do not think that such is his intention," said Morrel.
The count advanced, accompanied by Maximilian and Emmanuel.
His calm and serene look formed a singular contrast to
Albert's griefstricken face, who approached also, followed
by the other four young men. When at three paces distant
from each other, Albert and the count stopped.
"Approach, gentlemen," said Albert "I wish you not to lose
one word of what I am about to have the honor of saying to
the Count of Monte Cristo, for it must be repeated by you to
all who will listen to it, strange as it may appear to you."
"Proceed, sir," said the count.
"Sir," said Albert, at first with a tremulous voice, but
which gradually became firmer, "I reproached you with
exposing the conduct of M. de Morcerf in Epirus, for guilty
as I knew he was, I thought you had no right to punish him
but I have since learned that you had that right. It is not
Fernand Mondego's treachery towards Ali Pasha which induces
me so readily to excuse you, but the treachery of the
fisherman Fernand towards you, and the almost unheardof
miseries which were its consequences and I say, and
proclaim it publicly, that you were justified in revenging
yourself on my father, and I, his son, thank you for not
using greater severity."
Had a thunderbolt fallen in the midst of the spectators of
this unexpected scene, it would not have surprised them more
than did Albert's declaration. As for Monte Cristo, his eyes
slowly rose towards heaven with an expression of infinite
gratitude. He could not understand how Albert's fiery
nature, of which he had seen so much among the Roman
bandits, had suddenly stooped to this humiliation. He
recognized the influence of Mercedes, and saw why her noble
heart had not opposed the sacrifice she knew beforehand
would be useless. "Now, sir," said Albert, "if you think my
apology sufficient, pray give me your hand. Next to the
merit of infallibility which you appear to possess, I rank
that of candidly acknowledging a fault. But this confession
concerns me only. I acted well as a man, but you have acted
better than man. An angel alone could have saved one of us
from death  that angel came from heaven, if not to make us
friends which, alas, fatality renders impossible, at least
to make us esteem each other."
Monte Cristo, with moistened eye, heaving breast, and lips
half open, extended to Albert a hand which the latter
pressed with a sentiment resembling respectful fear.
"Gentlemen," said he, "M. de Monte Cristo receives my
apology. I had acted hastily towards him. Hasty actions are
generally bad ones. Now my fault is repaired. I hope the
world will not call me cowardly for acting as my conscience
dictated. But if any one should entertain a false opinion of
me," added he, drawing himself up as if he would challenge
both friends and enemies, "I shall endeavor to correct his
mistake."
"What happened during the night?" asked Beauchamp of
ChateauRenaud "we appear to make a very sorry figure
here."
"In truth, what Albert has just done is either very
despicable or very noble," replied the baron.
"What can it mean?" said Debray to Franz. "The Count of
Monte Cristo acts dishonorably to M. de Morcerf, and is
justified by his son Had I ten Yaninas in my family, I
should only consider myself the more bound to fight ten
times." As for Monte Cristo, his head was bent down, his
arms were powerless. Bowing under the weight of twentyfour
years' reminiscences, he thought not of Albert, of
Beauchamp, of ChateauRenaud, or of any of that group but
he thought of that courageous woman who had come to plead
for her son's life, to whom he had offered his, and who had
now saved it by the revelation of a dreadful family secret,
capable of destroying forever in that young man's heart
every feeling of filial piety.
"Providence still," murmured he "now only am I fully
convinced of being the emissary of God"
Chapter 
Mother and Son.
The Count of Monte Cristo bowed to the five young men with a
melancholy and dignified smile, and got into his carriage
with Maximilian and Emmanuel. Albert, Beauchamp, and
ChateauRenaud remained alone. Albert looked at his two
friends, not timidly, but in a way that appeared to ask
their opinion of what he had just done.
"Indeed, my dear friend," said Beauchamp first, who had
either the most feeling or the least dissimulation, "allow
me to congratulate you this is a very unhopedfor
conclusion of a very disagreeable affair."
Albert remained silent and wrapped in thought.
ChateauRenaud contented himself with tapping his boot with
his flexible cane. "Are we not going?" said he, after this
embarrassing silence. "When you please," replied Beauchamp
"allow me only to compliment M. de Morcerf, who has given
proof today of rare chivalric generosity."
"Oh, yes," said ChateauRenaud.
"It is magnificent," continued Beauchamp, "to be able to
exercise so much selfcontrol"
"Assuredly as for me, I should have been incapable of it,"
said ChateauRenaud, with most significant coolness.
"Gentlemen," interrupted Albert, "I think you did not
understand that something very serious had passed between M.
de Monte Cristo and myself."
"Possibly, possibly," said Beauchamp immediately "but every
simpleton would not be able to understand your heroism, and
sooner or later you will find yourself compelled to explain
it to them more energetically than would be convenient to
your bodily health and the duration of your life. May I give
you a friendly counsel? Set out for Naples, the Hague, or
St. Petersburg  calm countries, where the point of honor
is better understood than among our hotheaded Parisians.
Seek quietude and oblivion, so that you may return peaceably
to France after a few years. Am I not right, M. de
ChateauRenaud?"
"That is quite my opinion," said the gentleman "nothing
induces serious duels so much as a duel forsworn."
"Thank you, gentlemen," replied Albert, with a smile of
indifference "I shall follow your advice  not because you
give it, but because I had before intended to quit France. I
thank you equally for the service you have rendered me in
being my seconds. It is deeply engraved on my heart, and,
after what you have just said, I remember that only."
ChateauRenaud and Beauchamp looked at each other the
impression was the same on both of them, and the tone in
which Morcerf had just expressed his thanks was so
determined that the position would have become embarrassing
for all if the conversation had continued.
"Goodby, Albert," said Beauchamp suddenly, carelessly
extending his hand to the young man. The latter did not
appear to arouse from his lethargy in fact, he did not
notice the offered hand. "Goodby," said ChateauRenaud in
his turn, keeping his little cane in his left hand, and
saluting with his right. Albert's lips scarcely whispered
"Goodby," but his look was more explicit it expressed a
whole poem of restrained anger, proud disdain, and generous
indignation. He preserved his melancholy and motionless
position for some time after his two friends had regained
their carriage then suddenly unfastening his horse from the
little tree to which his servant had tied it, he mounted and
galloped off in the direction of Paris.
In a quarter of an hour he was entering the house in the Rue
du Helder. As he alighted, he thought he saw his father's
pale face behind the curtain of the count's bedroom. Albert
turned away his head with a sigh, and went to his own
apartments. He cast one lingering look on all the luxuries
which had rendered life so easy and so happy since his
infancy he looked at the pictures, whose faces seemed to
smile, and the landscapes, which appeared painted in
brighter colors. Then he took away his mother's portrait,
with its oaken frame, leaving the gilt frame from which he
took it black and empty. Then he arranged all his beautiful
Turkish arms, his fine English guns, his Japanese china, his
cups mounted in silver, his artistic bronzes by Feucheres
and Barye examined the cupboards, and placed the key in
each threw into a drawer of his secretary, which he left
open, all the pocketmoney he had about him, and with it the
thousand fancy jewels from his vases and his jewelboxes
then he made an exact inventory of everything, and placed it
in the most conspicuous part of the table, after putting
aside the books and papers which had collected there.
At the beginning of this work, his servant, notwithstanding
orders to the contrary, came to his room. "What do you
want?" asked he, with a more sorrowful than angry tone.
"Pardon me, sir," replied the valet "you had forbidden me
to disturb you, but the Count of Morcerf has called me."
"Well" said Albert.
"I did not like to go to him without first seeing you."
"Why?"
"Because the count is doubtless aware that I accompanied you
to the meeting this morning."
"It is probable," said Albert.
"And since he has sent for me, it is doubtless to question
me on what happened there. What must I answer?"
"The truth."
"Then I shall say the duel did not take place?"
"You will say I apologized to the Count of Monte Cristo.
Go."
The valet bowed and retired, and Albert returned to his
inventory. As he was finishing this work, the sound of
horses prancing in the yard, and the wheels of a carriage
shaking his window, attracted his attention. He approached
the window, and saw his father get into it, and drive away.
The door was scarcely closed when Albert bent his steps to
his mother's room and, no one being there to announce him,
he advanced to her bedchamber, and distressed by what he
saw and guessed, stopped for one moment at the door. As if
the same idea had animated these two beings, Mercedes was
doing the same in her apartments that he had just done in
his. Everything was in order,  laces, dresses, jewels,
linen, money, all were arranged in the drawers, and the
countess was carefully collecting the keys. Albert saw all
these preparations and understood them, and exclaiming, "My
mother" he threw his arms around her neck.
The artist who could have depicted the expression of these
two countenances would certainly have made of them a
beautiful picture. All these proofs of an energetic
resolution, which Albert did not fear on his own account,
alarmed him for his mother. "What are you doing?" asked he.
"What were you doing?" replied she.
"Oh, my mother" exclaimed Albert, so overcome he could
scarcely speak "it is not the same with you and me  you
cannot have made the same resolution I have, for I have come
to warn you that I bid adieu to your house, and  and to
you."
"I also," replied Mercedes, "am going, and I acknowledge I
had depended on your accompanying me have I deceived
myself?"
"Mother," said Albert with firmness. "I cannot make you
share the fate I have planned for myself. I must live
henceforth without rank and fortune, and to begin this hard
apprenticeship I must borrow from a friend the loaf I shall
eat until I have earned one. So, my dear mother, I am going
at once to ask Franz to lend me the small sum I shall
require to supply my present wants."
"You, my poor child, suffer poverty and hunger? Oh, do not
say so it will break my resolutions."
"But not mine, mother," replied Albert. "I am young and
strong I believe I am courageous, and since yesterday I
have learned the power of will. Alas, my dear mother, some
have suffered so much, and yet live, and have raised a new
fortune on the ruin of all the promises of happiness which
heaven had made them  on the fragments of all the hope
which God had given them I have seen that, mother I know
that from the gulf in which their enemies have plunged them
they have risen with so much vigor and glory that in their
turn they have ruled their former conquerors, and have
punished them. No. mother from this moment I have done with
the past, and accept nothing from it  not even a name,
because you can understand that your son cannot bear the
name of a man who ought to blush for it before another."
"Albert, my child," said Mercedes, "if I had a stronger
heart that is the counsel I would have given you your
conscience has spoken when my voice became too weak listen
to its dictates. You had friends, Albert break off their
acquaintance. But do not despair you have life before you,
my dear Albert, for you are yet scarcely twentytwo years
old and as a pure heart like yours wants a spotless name,
take my father's  it was Herrera. I am sure, my dear
Albert, whatever may be your career, you will soon render
that name illustrious. Then, my son, return to the world
still more brilliant because of your former sorrows and if
I am wrong, still let me cherish these hopes, for I have no
future to look forward to. For me the grave opens when I
pass the threshold of this house."
"I will fulfil all your wishes, my dear mother," said the
young man. "Yes, I share your hopes the anger of heaven
will not pursue us, since you are pure and I am innocent.
But, since our resolution is formed, let us act promptly. M.
de Morcerf went out about half an hour ago the opportunity
is favorable to avoid an explanation."
"I am ready, my son," said Mercedes. Albert ran to fetch a
carriage. He recollected that there was a small furnished
house to let in the Rue de Saints Peres, where his mother
would find a humble but decent lodging, and thither he
intended conducting the countess. As the carriage stopped at
the door, and Albert was alighting, a man approached and
gave him a letter. Albert recognized the bearer. "From the
count," said Bertuccio. Albert took the letter, opened, and
read it, then looked round for Bertuccio, but he was gone.
He returned to Mercedes with tears in his eyes and heaving
breast, and without uttering a word he gave her the letter.
Mercedes read 
Albert,  While showing you that I have discovered your
plans, I hope also to convince you of my delicacy. You are
free, you leave the count's house, and you take your mother
to your home but reflect, Albert, you owe her more than
your poor noble heart can pay her. Keep the struggle for
yourself, bear all the suffering, but spare her the trial of
poverty which must accompany your first efforts for she
deserves not even the shadow of the misfortune which has
this day fallen on her, and providence is not willing that
the innocent should suffer for the guilty. I know you are
going to leave the Rue du Helder without taking anything
with you. Do not seek to know how I discovered it I know it
that is sufficient.
Now, listen, Albert. Twentyfour years ago I returned, proud
and joyful, to my country. I had a betrothed, Albert, a
lovely girl whom I adored, and I was bringing to my
betrothed a hundred and fifty louis, painfully amassed by
ceaseless toil. This money was for her I destined it for
her, and, knowing the treachery of the sea I buried our
treasure in the little garden of the house my father lived
in at Marseilles, on the Allees de Meillan. Your mother,
Albert, knows that poor house well. A short time since I
passed through Marseilles, and went to see the old place,
which revived so many painful recollections and in the
evening I took a spade and dug in the corner of the garden
where I had concealed my treasure. The iron box was there 
no one had touched it  under a beautiful figtree my
father had planted the day I was born, which overshadowed
the spot. Well, Albert, this money, which was formerly
designed to promote the comfort and tranquillity of the
woman I adored, may now, through strange and painful
circumstances, be devoted to the same purpose. Oh, feel for
me, who could offer millions to that poor woman, but who
return her only the piece of black bread forgotten under my
poor roof since the day I was torn from her I loved. You are
a generous man, Albert, but perhaps you may be blinded by
pride or resentment if you refuse me, if you ask another
for what I have a right to offer you, I will say it is
ungenerous of you to refuse the life of your mother at the
hands of a man whose father was allowed by your father to
die in all the horrors of poverty and despair.
Albert stood pale and motionless to hear what his mother
would decide after she had finished reading this letter.
Mercedes turned her eyes with an ineffable look towards
heaven. "I accept it," said she "he has a right to pay the
dowry, which I shall take with me to some convent" Putting
the letter in her bosom, she took her son's arm, and with a
firmer step than she even herself expected she went
downstairs.
Chapter 
The Suicide.
Meanwhile Monte Cristo had also returned to town with
Emmanuel and Maximilian. Their return was cheerful. Emmanuel
did not conceal his joy at the peaceful termination of the
affair, and was loud in his expressions of delight. Morrel,
in a corner of the carriage, allowed his brotherinlaw's
gayety to expend itself in words, while he felt equal inward
joy, which, however, betrayed itself only in his
countenance. At the Barriere du Trone they met Bertuccio,
who was waiting there, motionless as a sentinel at his post.
Monte Cristo put his head out of the window, exchanged a few
words with him in a low tone, and the steward disappeared.
"Count," said Emmanuel, when they were at the end of the
Place Royale, "put me down at my door, that my wife may not
have a single moment of needless anxiety on my account or
yours."
"If it were not ridiculous to make a display of our triumph,
I would invite the count to our house besides that, he
doubtless has some trembling heart to comfort. So we will
take leave of our friend, and let him hasten home."
"Stop a moment," said Monte Cristo "do not let me lose both
my companions. Return, Emmanuel, to your charming wife, and
present my best compliments to her and do you, Morrel,
accompany me to the Champs Elysees."
"Willingly," said Maximilian "particularly as I have
business in that quarter."
"Shall we wait breakfast for you?" asked Emmanuel.
"No," replied the young man. The door was closed, and the
carriage proceeded. "See what good fortune I brought you"
said Morrel, when he was alone with the count. "Have you not
thought so?"
"Yes," said Monte Cristo "for that reason I wished to keep
you near me."
"It is miraculous" continued Morrel, answering his own
thoughts.
"What?" said Monte Cristo.
"What has just happened."
"Yes," said the Count, "you are right  it is miraculous."
"For Albert is brave," resumed Morrel.
"Very brave," said Monte Cristo "I have seen him sleep with
a sword suspended over his head."
"And I know he has fought two duels," said Morrel. "How can
you reconcile that with his conduct this morning?"
"All owing to your influence," replied Monte Cristo,
smiling.
"It is well for Albert he is not in the army," said Morrel.
"Why?"
"An apology on the ground" said the young captain, shaking
his head.
"Come," said the count mildly, "do not entertain the
prejudices of ordinary men, Morrel Acknowledge, that if
Albert is brave, he cannot be a coward he must then have
had some reason for acting as he did this morning, and
confess that his conduct is more heroic than otherwise."
"Doubtless, doubtless," said Morrel "but I shall say, like
the Spaniard, "He has not been so brave today as he was
yesterday.'"
"You will breakfast with me, will you not, Morrel?" said the
count, to turn the conversation.
"No I must leave you at ten o'clock."
"Your engagement was for breakfast, then?" said the count.
Morrel smiled, and shook his head. "Still you must breakfast
somewhere."
"But if I am not hungry?" said the young man.
"Oh," said the count, "I only know two things which destroy
the appetite,  grief  and as I am happy to see you very
cheerful, it is not that  and love. Now after what you
told me this morning of your heart, I may believe" 
"Well, count," replied Morrel gayly, "I will not dispute
it."
"But you will not make me your confidant, Maximilian?" said
the count, in a tone which showed how gladly he would have
been admitted to the secret.
"I showed you this morning that I had a heart, did I not,
count?" Monte Cristo only answered by extending his hand to
the young man. "Well," continued the latter, "since that
heart is no longer with you in the Bois de Vincennes, it is
elsewhere, and I must go and find it."
"Go," said the count deliberately "go, dear friend, but
promise me if you meet with any obstacle to remember that I
have some power in this world, that I am happy to use that
power in the behalf of those I love, and that I love you,
Morrel."
"I will remember it," said the young man, "as selfish
children recollect their parents when they want their aid.
When I need your assistance, and the moment arrives, I will
come to you, count."
"Well, I rely upon your promise. Goodby, then."
"Goodby, till we meet again." They had arrived in the
Champs Elysees. Monte Cristo opened the carriagedoor,
Morrel sprang out on the pavement, Bertuccio was waiting on
the steps. Morrel disappeared down the Avenue de Marigny,
and Monte Cristo hastened to join Bertuccio.
"Well?" asked he.
"She is going to leave her house," said the steward.
"And her son?"
"Florentin, his valet, thinks he is going to do the same."
"Come this way." Monte Cristo took Bertuccio into his study,
wrote the letter we have seen, and gave it to the steward.
"Go," said he quickly. "But first, let Haidee be informed
that I have returned."
"Here I am," said the young girl, who at the sound of the
carriage had run downstairs and whose face was radiant with
joy at seeing the count return safely. Bertuccio left. Every
transport of a daughter finding a father, all the delight of
a mistress seeing an adored lover, were felt by Haidee
during the first moments of this meeting, which she had so
eagerly expected. Doubtless, although less evident, Monte
Cristo's joy was not less intense. Joy to hearts which have
suffered long is like the dew on the ground after a long
drought both the heart and the ground absorb that
beneficent moisture falling on them, and nothing is
outwardly apparent.
Monte Cristo was beginning to think, what he had not for a
long time dared to believe, that there were two Mercedes in
the world, and he might yet be happy. His eye, elate with
happiness, was reading eagerly the tearful gaze of Haidee,
when suddenly the door opened. The count knit his brow. "M.
de Morcerf" said Baptistin, as if that name sufficed for
his excuse. In fact, the count's face brightened.
"Which," asked he, "the viscount or the count?"
"The count."
"Oh," exclaimed Haidee, "is it not yet over?"
"I know not if it is finished, my beloved child," said Monte
Cristo, taking the young girl's hands "but I do know you
have nothing more to fear."
"But it is the wretched" 
"That man cannot injure me, Haidee," said Monte Cristo "it
was his son alone that there was cause to fear."
"And what I have suffered," said the young girl, "you shall
never know, my lord." Monte Cristo smiled. "By my father's
tomb," said he, extending his hand over the head of the
young girl, "I swear to you, Haidee, that if any misfortune
happens, it will not be to me."
"I believe you, my lord, as implicitly as if God had spoken
to me," said the young girl, presenting her forehead to him.
Monte Cristo pressed on that pure beautiful forehead a kiss
which made two hearts throb at once, the one violently, the
other heavily. "Oh," murmured the count, "shall I then be
permitted to love again? Ask M. de Morcerf into the
drawingroom," said he to Baptistin, while he led the
beautiful Greek girl to a private staircase.
We must explain this visit, which although expected by Monte
Cristo, is unexpected to our readers. While Mercedes, as we
have said, was making a similar inventory of her property to
Albert's, while she was arranging her jewels, shutting her
drawers, collecting her keys, to leave everything in perfect
order, she did not perceive a pale and sinister face at a
glass door which threw light into the passage, from which
everything could be both seen and heard. He who was thus
looking, without being heard or seen, probably heard and saw
all that passed in Madame de Morcerf's apartments. From that
glass door the palefaced man went to the count's bedroom
and raised with a constricted hand the curtain of a window
overlooking the courtyard. He remained there ten minutes,
motionless and dumb, listening to the beating of his own
heart. For him those ten minutes were very long. It was then
Albert, returning from his meeting with the count, perceived
his father watching for his arrival behind a curtain, and
turned aside. The count's eye expanded he knew Albert had
insulted the count dreadfully, and that in every country in
the world such an insult would lead to a deadly duel. Albert
returned safely  then the count was revenged.
An indescribable ray of joy illumined that wretched
countenance like the last ray of the sun before it
disappears behind the clouds which bear the aspect, not of a
downy couch, but of a tomb. But as we have said, he waited
in vain for his son to come to his apartment with the
account of his triumph. He easily understood why his son did
not come to see him before he went to avenge his father's
honor but when that was done, why did not his son come and
throw himself into his arms?
It was then, when the count could not see Albert, that he
sent for his servant, who he knew was authorized not to
conceal anything from him. Ten minutes afterwards, General
Morcerf was seen on the steps in a black coat with a
military collar, black pantaloons, and black gloves. He had
apparently given previous orders, for as he reached the
bottom step his carriage came from the coachhouse ready for
him. The valet threw into the carriage his military cloak,
in which two swords were wrapped, and, shutting the door, he
took his seat by the side of the coachman. The coachman
stooped down for his orders.
"To the Champs Elysees," said the general "the Count of
Monte Cristo's. Hurry" The horses bounded beneath the whip
and in five minutes they stopped before the count's door. M.
de Morcerf opened the door himself, and as the carriage
rolled away he passed up the walk, rang, and entered the
open door with his servant.
A moment afterwards, Baptistin announced the Count of
Morcerf to Monte Cristo, and the latter, leading Haidee
aside, ordered that Morcerf be asked into the drawingroom.
The general was pacing the room the third time when, in
turning, he perceived Monte Cristo at the door. "Ah, it is
M. de Morcerf," said Monte Cristo quietly "I thought I had
not heard aright."
"Yes, it is I," said the count, whom a frightful contraction
of the lips prevented from articulating freely.
"May I know the cause which procures me the pleasure of
seeing M. de Morcerf so early?"
"Had you not a meeting with my son this morning?" asked the
general.
"I had," replied the count.
"And I know my son had good reasons to wish to fight with
you, and to endeavor to kill you."
"Yes, sir, he had very good ones but you see that in spite
of them he has not killed me, and did not even fight."
"Yet he considered you the cause of his father's dishonor,
the cause of the fearful ruin which has fallen on my house."
"It is true, sir," said Monte Cristo with his dreadful
calmness "a secondary cause, but not the principal."
"Doubtless you made, then, some apology or explanation?"
"I explained nothing, and it is he who apologized to me."
"But to what do you attribute this conduct?"
"To the conviction, probably, that there was one more guilty
than I."
"And who was that?"
"His father."
"That may be," said the count, turning pale "but you know
the guilty do not like to find themselves convicted."
"I know it, and I expected this result."
"You expected my son would be a coward?" cried the count.
"M. Albert de Morcerf is no coward" said Monte Cristo.
"A man who holds a sword in his hand, and sees a mortal
enemy within reach of that sword, and does not fight, is a
coward Why is he not here that I may tell him so?"
"Sir." replied Monte Cristo coldly, "I did not expect that
you had come here to relate to me your little family
affairs. Go and tell M. Albert that, and he may know what to
answer you."
"Oh, no, no," said the general, smiling faintly, "I did not
come for that purpose you are right. I came to tell you
that I also look upon you as my enemy. I came to tell you
that I hate you instinctively that it seems as if I had
always known you, and always hated you and, in short, since
the young people of the present day will not fight, it
remains for us to do so. Do you think so, sir?"
"Certainly. And when I told you I had foreseen the result,
it is the honor of your visit I alluded to."
"So much the better. Are you prepared?"
"Yes, sir."
"You know that we shall fight till one of us is dead," said
the general, whose teeth were clinched with rage. "Until one
of us dies," repeated Monte Cristo, moving his head slightly
up and down.
"Let us start, then we need no witnesses."
"Very true," said Monte Cristo "it is unnecessary, we know
each other so well"
"On the contrary," said the count, "we know so little of
each other."
"Indeed?" said Monte Cristo, with the same indomitable
coolness "let us see. Are you not the soldier Fernand who
deserted on the eve of the battle of Waterloo? Are you not
the Lieutenant Fernand who served as guide and spy to the
French army in Spain? Are you not the Captain Fernand who
betrayed, sold, and murdered his benefactor, Ali? And have
not all these Fernands, united, made LieutenantGeneral, the
Count of Morcerf, peer of France?"
"Oh," cried the general, as it branded with a hot iron,
"wretch,  to reproach me with my shame when about,
perhaps, to kill me No, I did not say I was a stranger to
you. I know well, demon, that you have penetrated into the
darkness of the past, and that you have read, by the light
of what torch I know not, every page of my life but perhaps
I may be more honorable in my shame than you under your
pompous coverings. No  no, I am aware you know me but I
know you only as an adventurer sewn up in gold and
jewellery. You call yourself in Paris the Count of Monte
Cristo in Italy, Sinbad the Sailor in Malta, I forget
what. But it is your real name I want to know, in the midst
of your hundred names, that I may pronounce it when we meet
to fight, at the moment when I plunge my sword through your
heart."
The Count of Monte Cristo turned dreadfully pale his eye
seemed to burn with a devouring fire. He leaped towards a
dressingroom near his bedroom, and in less than a moment,
tearing off his cravat, his coat and waistcoat, he put on a
sailor's jacket and hat, from beneath which rolled his long
black hair. He returned thus, formidable and implacable,
advancing with his arms crossed on his breast, towards the
general, who could not understand why he had disappeared,
but who on seeing him again, and feeling his teeth chatter
and his legs sink under him, drew back, and only stopped
when he found a table to support his clinched hand.
"Fernand," cried he, "of my hundred names I need only tell
you one, to overwhelm you But you guess it now, do you not?
or, rather, you remember it? For, notwithstanding all my
sorrows and my tortures, I show you today a face which the
happiness of revenge makes young again  a face you must
often have seen in your dreams since your marriage with
Mercedes, my betrothed"
The general, with his head thrown back, hands extended, gaze
fixed, looked silently at this dreadful apparition then
seeking the wall to support him, he glided along close to it
until he reached the door, through which he went out
backwards, uttering this single mournful, lamentable,
distressing cry,  "Edmond Dantes" Then, with sighs which
were unlike any human sound, he dragged himself to the door,
reeled across the courtyard, and falling into the arms of
his valet, he said in a voice scarcely intelligible, 
"Home, home." The fresh air and the shame he felt at having
exposed himself before his servants, partly recalled his
senses, but the ride was short, and as he drew near his
house all his wretchedness revived. He stopped at a short
distance from the house and alighted.
The door was wide open, a hackneycoach was standing in the
middle of the yard  a strange sight before so noble a
mansion the count looked at it with terror, but without
daring to inquire its meaning, he rushed towards his
apartment. Two persons were coming down the stairs he had
only time to creep into an alcove to avoid them. It was
Mercedes leaning on her son's arm and leaving the house.
They passed close by the unhappy being, who, concealed
behind the damask curtain, almost felt Mercedes dress brush
past him, and his son's warm breath, pronouncing these
words,  "Courage, mother Come, this is no longer our
home" The words died away, the steps were lost in the
distance. The general drew himself up, clinging to the
curtain he uttered the most dreadful sob which ever escaped
from the bosom of a father abandoned at the same time by his
wife and son. He soon heard the clatter of the iron step of
the hackneycoach, then the coachman's voice, and then the
rolling of the heavy vehicle shook the windows. He darted to
his bedroom to see once more all he had loved in the world
but the hackneycoach drove on and the head of neither
Mercedes nor her son appeared at the window to take a last
look at the house or the deserted father and husband. And at
the very moment when the wheels of that coach crossed the
gateway a report was heard, and a thick smoke escaped
through one of the panes of the window, which was broken by
the explosion.
Chapter 
Valentine.
We may easily conceive where Morrel's appointment was. On
leaving Monte Cristo he walked slowly towards Villefort's
we say slowly, for Morrel had more than half an hour to
spare to go five hundred steps, but he had hastened to take
leave of Monte Cristo because he wished to be alone with his
thoughts. He knew his time well  the hour when Valentine
was giving Noirtier his breakfast, and was sure not to be
disturbed in the performance of this pious duty. Noirtier
and Valentine had given him leave to go twice a week, and he
was now availing himself of that permission. He had arrived
Valentine was expecting him. Uneasy and almost crazed, she
seized his hand and led him to her grandfather. This
uneasiness, amounting almost to frenzy, arose from the
report Morcerf's adventure had made in the world, for the
affair at the opera was generally known. No one at
Villefort's doubted that a duel would ensue from it.
Valentine, with her woman's instinct, guessed that Morrel
would be Monte Cristo's second, and from the young man's
wellknown courage and his great affection for the count,
she feared that he would not content himself with the
passive part assigned to him. We may easily understand how
eagerly the particulars were asked for, given, and received
and Morrel could read an indescribable joy in the eyes of
his beloved, when she knew that the termination of this
affair was as happy as it was unexpected.
"Now," said Valentine, motioning to Morrel to sit down near
her grandfather, while she took her seat on his footstool,
"now let us talk about our own affairs. You know,
Maximilian, grandpapa once thought of leaving this house,
and taking an apartment away from M. de Villefort's."
"Yes," said Maximilian, "I recollect the project, of which I
highly approved."
"Well," said Valentine, "you may approve again, for
grandpapa is again thinking of it."
"Bravo," said Maximilian.
"And do you know," said Valentine, "what reason grandpapa
gives for leaving this house." Noirtier looked at Valentine
to impose silence, but she did not notice him her looks,
her eyes, her smile, were all for Morrel.
"Oh, whatever may be M. Noirtier's reason," answered Morrel,
"I can readily believe it to be a good one."
"An excellent one," said Valentine. "He pretends the air of
the Faubourg St. Honore is not good for me."
"Indeed?" said Morrel "in that M. Noirtier may be right
you have not seemed to be well for the last fortnight."
"Not very," said Valentine. "And grandpapa has become my
physician, and I have the greatest confidence in him,
because he knows everything."
"Do you then really suffer?" asked Morrel quickly.
"Oh, it must not be called suffering I feel a general
uneasiness, that is all. I have lost my appetite, and my
stomach feels as if it were struggling to get accustomed to
something." Noirtier did not lose a word of what Valentine
said. "And what treatment do you adopt for this singular
complaint?"
"A very simple one," said Valentine. "I swallow every
morning a spoonful of the mixture prepared for my
grandfather. When I say one spoonful, I began by one  now
I take four. Grandpapa says it is a panacea." Valentine
smiled, but it was evident that she suffered.
Maximilian, in his devotedness, gazed silently at her. She
was very beautiful, but her usual pallor had increased her
eyes were more brilliant than ever, and her hands, which
were generally white like motherofpearl, now more
resembled wax, to which time was adding a yellowish hue.
From Valentine the young man looked towards Noirtier. The
latter watched with strange and deep interest the young
girl, absorbed by her affection, and he also, like Morrel,
followed those traces of inward suffering which was so
little perceptible to a common observer that they escaped
the notice of every one but the grandfather and the lover.
"But," said Morrel, "I thought this mixture, of which you
now take four spoonfuls, was prepared for M. Noirtier?"
"I know it is very bitter," said Valentine "so bitter, that
all I drink afterwards appears to have the same taste."
Noirtier looked inquiringly at his granddaughter. "Yes,
grandpapa," said Valentine "it is so. Just now, before I
came down to you, I drank a glass of sugared water I left
half, because it seemed so bitter." Noirtier turned pale,
and made a sign that he wished to speak. Valentine rose to
fetch the dictionary. Noirtier watched her with evident
anguish. In fact, the blood was rushing to the young girl's
head already, her cheeks were becoming red. "Oh," cried she,
without losing any of her cheerfulness, "this is singular I
can't see Did the sun shine in my eyes?" And she leaned
against the window.
"The sun is not shining," said Morrel, more alarmed by
Noirtier's expression than by Valentine's indisposition. He
ran towards her. The young girl smiled. "Cheer up," said she
to Noirtier. "Do not be alarmed, Maximilian it is nothing,
and has already passed away. But listen Do I not hear a
carriage in the courtyard?" She opened Noirtier's door, ran
to a window in the passage, and returned hastily. "Yes,"
said she, "it is Madame Danglars and her daughter, who have
come to call on us. Goodby  I must run away, for they
would send here for me, or, rather, farewell till I see you
again. Stay with grandpapa, Maximilian I promise you not to
persuade them to stay."
Morrel watched her as she left the room he heard her ascend
the little staircase which led both to Madame de Villefort's
apartments and to hers. As soon as she was gone, Noirtier
made a sign to Morrel to take the dictionary. Morrel obeyed
guided by Valentine, he had learned how to understand the
old man quickly. Accustomed, however, as he was to the work,
he had to repeat most of the letters of the alphabet and to
find every word in the dictionary, so that it was ten
minutes before the thought of the old man was translated by
these words, "Fetch the glass of water and the decanter from
Valentine's room."
Morrel rang immediately for the servant who had taken
Barrois's situation, and in Noirtier's name gave that order.
The servant soon returned. The decanter and the glass were
completely empty. Noirtier made a sign that he wished to
speak. "Why are the glass and decanter empty?" asked he
"Valentine said she only drank half the glassful." The
translation of this new question occupied another five
minutes. "I do not know," said the servant, "but the
housemaid is in Mademoiselle Valentine's room perhaps she
has emptied them."
"Ask her," said Morrel, translating Noirtier's thought this
time by his look. The servant went out, but returned almost
immediately. "Mademoiselle Valentine passed through the room
to go to Madame de Villefort's," said he "and in passing,
as she was thirsty, she drank what remained in the glass as
for the decanter, Master Edward had emptied that to make a
pond for his ducks." Noirtier raised his eyes to heaven, as
a gambler does who stakes his all on one stroke. From that
moment the old man's eyes were fixed on the door, and did
not quit it.
It was indeed Madame Danglars and her daughter whom
Valentine had seen they had been ushered into Madame de
Villefort's room, who had said she would receive them there.
That is why Valentine passed through her room, which was on
a level with Valentine's, and only separated from it by
Edward's. The two ladies entered the drawingroom with that
sort of official stiffness which preludes a formal
communication. Among worldly people manner is contagious.
Madame de Villefort received them with equal solemnity.
Valentine entered at this moment, and the formalities were
resumed. "My dear friend," said the baroness, while the two
young people were shaking hands, "I and Eugenie are come to
be the first to announce to you the approaching marriage of
my daughter with Prince Cavalcanti." Danglars kept up the
title of prince. The popular banker found that it answered
better than count. "Allow me to present you my sincere
congratulations," replied Madame de Villefort. "Prince
Cavalcanti appears to be a young man of rare qualities."
"Listen," said the baroness, smiling "speaking to you as a
friend I can say that the prince does not yet appear all he
will be. He has about him a little of that foreign manner by
which French persons recognize, at first sight, the Italian
or German nobleman. Besides, he gives evidence of great
kindness of disposition, much keenness of wit, and as to
suitability, M. Danglars assures me that his fortune is
majestic  that is his word."
"And then," said Eugenie, while turning over the leaves of
Madame de Villefort's album, "add that you have taken a
great fancy to the young man."
"And," said Madame de Villefort, "I need not ask you if you
share that fancy."
"I?" replied Eugenie with her usual candor. "Oh, not the
least in the world, madame My wish was not to confine
myself to domestic cares, or the caprices of any man, but to
be an artist, and consequently free in heart, in person, and
in thought." Eugenie pronounced these words with so firm a
tone that the color mounted to Valentine's cheeks. The timid
girl could not understand that vigorous nature which
appeared to have none of the timidities of woman.
"At any rate," said she, "since I am to be married whether I
will or not, I ought to be thankful to providence for having
released me from my engagement with M. Albert de Morcerf, or
I should this day have been the wife of a dishonored man."
"It is true," said the baroness, with that strange
simplicity sometimes met with among fashionable ladies, and
of which plebeian intercourse can never entirely deprive
them,  "it is very true that had not the Morcerfs
hesitated, my daughter would have married Monsieur Albert.
The general depended much on it he even came to force M.
Danglars. We have had a narrow escape."
"But," said Valentine, timidly, "does all the father's shame
revert upon the son? Monsieur Albert appears to me quite
innocent of the treason charged against the general."
"Excuse me," said the implacable young girl, "Monsieur
Albert claims and well deserves his share. It appears that
after having challenged M. de Monte Cristo at the Opera
yesterday, he apologized on the ground today."
"Impossible," said Madame de Villefort.
"Ah, my dear friend," said Madame Danglars, with the same
simplicity we before noticed, "it is a fact. I heard it from
M. Debray, who was present at the explanation." Valentine
also knew the truth, but she did not answer. A single word
had reminded her that Morrel was expecting her in M.
Noirtier's room. Deeply engaged with a sort of inward
contemplation, Valentine had ceased for a moment to join in
the conversation. She would, indeed, have found it
impossible to repeat what had been said the last few
minutes, when suddenly Madame Danglars' hand, pressed on her
arm, aroused her from her lethargy.
"What is it?" said she, starting at Madame Danglars' touch
as she would have done from an electric shock. "It is, my
dear Valentine," said the baroness, "that you are,
doubtless, suffering."
"I?" said the young girl, passing her hand across her
burning forehead.
"Yes, look at yourself in that glass you have turned pale
and then red successively, three or four times in one
minute."
"Indeed," cried Eugenie, "you are very pale"
"Oh, do not be alarmed I have been so for many days."
Artless as she was, the young girl knew that this was an
opportunity to leave, and besides, Madame de Villefort came
to her assistance. "Retire, Valentine," said she "you are
really suffering, and these ladies will excuse you drink a
glass of pure water, it will restore you." Valentine kissed
Eugenie, bowed to Madame Danglars, who had already risen to
take her leave, and went out. "That poor child," said Madame
de Villefort when Valentine was gone, "she makes me very
uneasy, and I should not be astonished if she had some
serious illness."
Meanwhile, Valentine, in a sort of excitement which she
could not quite understand, had crossed Edward's room
without noticing some trick of the child, and through her
own had reached the little staircase. She was within three
steps of the bottom she already heard Morrel's voice, when
suddenly a cloud passed over her eyes, her stiffened foot
missed the step, her hands had no power to hold the
baluster, and falling against the wall she lost her balance
wholly and toppled to the floor. Morrel bounded to the door,
opened it, and found Valentine stretched out at the bottom
of the stairs. Quick as a flash, he raised her in his arms
and placed her in a chair. Valentine opened her eyes.
"Oh, what a clumsy thing I am," said she with feverish
volubility "I don't know my way. I forgot there were three
more steps before the landing."
"You have hurt yourself, perhaps," said Morrel. "What can I
do for you, Valentine?" Valentine looked around her she saw
the deepest terror depicted in Noirtier's eyes. "Don't
worry, dear grandpapa," said she, endeavoring to smile "it
is nothing  it is nothing I was giddy, that is all."
"Another attack of giddiness," said Morrel, clasping his
hands. "Oh, attend to it, Valentine, I entreat you."
"But no," said Valentine,  "no, I tell you it is all past,
and it was nothing. Now, let me tell you some news Eugenie
is to be married in a week, and in three days there is to be
a grand feast, a betrothal festival. We are all invited, my
father, Madame de Villefort, and I  at least, I understood
it so."
"When will it be our turn to think of these things? Oh,
Valentine, you who have so much influence over your
grandpapa, try to make him answer  Soon."
"And do you," said Valentine, "depend on me to stimulate the
tardiness and arouse the memory of grandpapa?"
"Yes," cried Morrel, "make haste. So long as you are not
mine, Valentine, I shall always think I may lose you."
"Oh," replied Valentine with a convulsive movement, "oh,
indeed, Maximilian, you are too timid for an officer, for a
soldier who, they say, never knows fear. Ah, ha, ha" she
burst into a forced and melancholy laugh, her arms stiffened
and twisted, her head fell back on her chair, and she
remained motionless. The cry of terror which was stopped on
Noirtier's lips, seemed to start from his eyes. Morrel
understood it he knew he must call assistance. The young
man rang the bell violently the housemaid who had been in
Mademoiselle Valentine's room, and the servant who had
replaced Barrois, ran in at the same moment. Valentine was
so pale, so cold, so inanimate that without listening to
what was said to them they were seized with the fear which
pervaded that house, and they flew into the passage crying
for help. Madame Danglars and Eugenie were going out at that
moment they heard the cause of the disturbance. "I told you
so" exclaimed Madame de Villefort. "Poor child"
Chapter 
Maximilian's Avowal.
At the same moment M. de Villefort's voice was heard calling
from his study, "What is the matter?" Morrel looked at
Noirtier who had recovered his selfcommand, and with a
glance indicated the closet where once before under somewhat
similar circumstances, he had taken refuge. He had only time
to get his hat and throw himself breathless into the closet
when the procureur's footstep was heard in the passage.
Villefort sprang into the room, ran to Valentine, and took
her in his arms. "A physician, a physician,  M.
d'Avrigny" cried Villefort "or rather I will go for him
myself." He flew from the apartment, and Morrel at the same
moment darted out at the other door. He had been struck to
the heart by a frightful recollection  the conversation he
had heard between the doctor and Villefort the night of
Madame de SaintMeran's death, recurred to him these
symptoms, to a less alarming extent, were the same which had
preceded the death of Barrois. At the same time Monte
Cristo's voice seemed to resound in his ear with the words
he had heard only two hours before, "Whatever you want,
Morrel, come to me I have great power." More rapidly than
thought, he darted down the Rue Matignon, and thence to the
Avenue des Champs Elysees.
Meanwhile M. de Villefort arrived in a hired cabriolet at M.
d'Avrigny's door. He rang so violently that the porter was
alarmed. Villefort ran upstairs without saying a word. The
porter knew him, and let him pass, only calling to him, "In
his study, Monsieur Procureur  in his study" Villefort
pushed, or rather forced, the door open. "Ah," said the
doctor, "is it you?"
"Yes," said Villefort, closing the door after him, "it is I,
who am come in my turn to ask you if we are quite alone.
Doctor, my house is accursed"
"What?" said the latter with apparent coolness, but with
deep emotion, "have you another invalid?"
"Yes, doctor," cried Villefort, clutching his hair, "yes"
D'Avrigny's look implied, "I told you it would be so." Then
he slowly uttered these words, "Who is now dying in your
house? What new victim is going to accuse you of weakness
before God?" A mournful sob burst from Villefort's heart he
approached the doctor, and seizing his arm,  "Valentine,"
said he, "it is Valentine's turn"
"Your daughter?" cried d'Avrigny with grief and surprise.
"You see you were deceived," murmured the magistrate "come
and see her, and on her bed of agony entreat her pardon for
having suspected her."
"Each time you have applied to me," said the doctor, "it has
been too late still I will go. But let us make haste, sir
with the enemies you have to do with there is no time to be
lost."
"Oh, this time, doctor, you shall not have to reproach me
with weakness. This time I will know the assassin, and will
pursue him."
"Let us try first to save the victim before we think of
revenging her," said d'Avrigny. "Come." The same cabriolet
which had brought Villefort took them back at full speed,
and at this moment Morrel rapped at Monte Cristo's door. The
count was in his study and was reading with an angry look
something which Bertuccio had brought in haste. Hearing the
name of Morrel, who had left him only two hours before, the
count raised his head, arose, and sprang to meet him. "What
is the matter, Maximilian?" asked he "you are pale, and the
perspiration rolls from your forehead." Morrel fell into a
chair. "Yes," said he, "I came quickly I wanted to speak to
you."
"Are all your family well?" asked the count, with an
affectionate benevolence, whose sincerity no one could for a
moment doubt.
"Thank you, count  thank you," said the young man,
evidently embarrassed how to begin the conversation "yes,
every one in my family is well."
"So much the better yet you have something to tell me?"
replied the count with increased anxiety.
"Yes," said Morrel, "it is true I have but now left a house
where death has just entered, to run to you."
"Are you then come from M. de Morcerf's?" asked Monte
Cristo.
"No," said Morrel "is some one dead in his house?"
"The general has just blown his brains out," replied Monte
Cristo with great coolness.
"Oh, what a dreadful event" cried Maximilian.
"Not for the countess, or for Albert," said Monte Cristo "a
dead father or husband is better than a dishonored one, 
blood washes out shame."
"Poor countess," said Maximilian, "I pity her very much she
is so noble a woman"
"Pity Albert also, Maximilian for believe me he is the
worthy son of the countess. But let us return to yourself.
You have hastened to me  can I have the happiness of being
useful to you?"
"Yes, I need your help that is I thought like a madman that
you could lend me your assistance in a case where God alone
can succor me."
"Tell me what it is," replied Monte Cristo.
"Oh," said Morrel, "I know not, indeed, if I may reveal this
secret to mortal ears, but fatality impels me, necessity
constrains me, count"  Morrel hesitated. "Do you think I
love you?" said Monte Cristo, taking the young man's hand
affectionately in his.
"Oh, you encourage me, and something tells me there,"
placing his hand on his heart, "that I ought to have no
secret from you."
"You are right, Morrel God is speaking to your heart, and
your heart speaks to you. Tell me what it says."
"Count, will you allow me to send Baptistin to inquire after
some one you know?"
"I am at your service, and still more my servants."
"Oh, I cannot live if she is not better."
"Shall I ring for Baptistin?"
"No, I will go and speak to him myself." Morrel went out,
called Baptistin, and whispered a few words to him. The
valet ran directly. "Well, have you sent?" asked Monte
Cristo, seeing Morrel return.
"Yes, and now I shall be more calm."
"You know I am waiting," said Monte Cristo, smiling.
"Yes, and I will tell you. One evening I was in a garden a
clump of trees concealed me no one suspected I was there.
Two persons passed near me  allow me to conceal their
names for the present they were speaking in an undertone,
and yet I was so interested in what they said that I did not
lose a single word."
"This is a gloomy introduction, if I may judge from your
pallor and shuddering, Morrel."
"Oh, yes, very gloomy, my friend. Some one had just died in
the house to which that garden belonged. One of the persons
whose conversation I overheard was the master of the house
the other, the physician. The former was confiding to the
latter his grief and fear, for it was the second time within
a month that death had suddenly and unexpectedly entered
that house which was apparently destined to destruction by
some exterminating angel, as an object of God's anger."
"Ah, indeed?" said Monte Cristo, looking earnestly at the
young man, and by an imperceptible movement turning his
chair, so that he remained in the shade while the light fell
full on Maximilian's face. "Yes," continued Morrel, "death
had entered that house twice within one month."
"And what did the doctor answer?" asked Monte Cristo.
"He replied  he replied, that the death was not a natural
one, and must be attributed" 
"To what?"
"To poison."
"Indeed?" said Monte Cristo with a slight cough which in
moments of extreme emotion helped him to disguise a blush,
or his pallor, or the intense interest with which he
listened "indeed, Maximilian, did you hear that?"
"Yes, my dear count, I heard it and the doctor added that
if another death occurred in a similar way he must appeal to
justice." Monte Cristo listened, or appeared to do so, with
the greatest calmness. "Well," said Maximilian, "death came
a third time, and neither the master of the house nor the
doctor said a word. Death is now, perhaps, striking a fourth
blow. Count, what am I bound to do, being in possession of
this secret?"
"My dear friend," said Monte Cristo, "you appear to be
relating an adventure which we all know by heart. I know the
house where you heard it, or one very similar to it a house
with a garden, a master, a physician, and where there have
been three unexpected and sudden deaths. Well, I have not
intercepted your confidence, and yet I know all that as well
as you, and I have no conscientious scruples. No, it does
not concern me. You say an exterminating angel appears to
have devoted that house to God's anger  well, who says
your supposition is not reality? Do not notice things which
those whose interest it is to see them pass over. If it is
God's justice, instead of his anger, which is walking
through that house, Maximilian, turn away your face and let
his justice accomplish its purpose." Morrel shuddered. There
was something mournful, solemn, and terrible in the count's
manner. "Besides," continued he, in so changed a tone that
no one would have supposed it was the same person speaking
"besides, who says that it will begin again?"
"It has returned, count," exclaimed Morrel "that is why I
hastened to you."
"Well, what do you wish me to do? Do you wish me, for
instance, to give information to the procureur?" Monte
Cristo uttered the last words with so much meaning that
Morrel, starting up, cried out, "You know of whom I speak,
count, do you not?"
"Perfectly well, my good friend and I will prove it to you
by putting the dots to the "i,' or rather by naming the
persons. You were walking one evening in M. de Villefort's
garden from what you relate, I suppose it to have been the
evening of Madame de SaintMeran's death. You heard M. de
Villefort talking to M. d'Avrigny about the death of M. de
SaintMeran, and that no less surprising, of the countess.
M. d'Avrigny said he believed they both proceeded from
poison and you, honest man, have ever since been asking
your heart and sounding your conscience to know if you ought
to expose or conceal this secret. Why do you torment them?
"Conscience, what hast thou to do with me?' as Sterne said.
My dear fellow, let them sleep on, if they are asleep let
them grow pale in their drowsiness, if they are disposed to
do so, and pray do you remain in peace, who have no remorse
to disturb you." Deep grief was depicted on Morrel's
features he seized Monte Cristo's hand. "But it is
beginning again, I say"
"Well," said the Count, astonished at his perseverance,
which he could not understand, and looking still more
earnestly at Maximilian, "let it begin again,  it is like
the house of the Atreidae God has condemned them, and they
must submit to their punishment. They will all disappear,
like the fabrics children build with cards, and which fall,
one by one, under the breath of their builder, even if there
are two hundred of them. Three months since it was M. de
SaintMeran Madame de SaintMeran two months since the
other day it was Barrois today, the old Noirtier, or young
Valentine."
 In the old Greek legend the Atreidae, or children of
Atreus, were doomed to punishment because of the abominable
crime of their father. The Agamemnon of Aeschylus is based
on this legend.
"You knew it?" cried Morrel, in such a paroxysm of terror
that Monte Cristo started,  he whom the falling heavens
would have found unmoved "you knew it, and said nothing?"
"And what is it to me?" replied Monte Cristo, shrugging his
shoulders "do I know those people? and must I lose the one
to save the other? Faith, no, for between the culprit and
the victim I have no choice."
"But I," cried Morrel, groaning with sorrow, "I love her"
"You love?  whom?" cried Monte Cristo, starting to his
feet, and seizing the two hands which Morrel was raising
towards heaven.
"I love most fondly  I love madly  I love as a man who
would give his lifeblood to spare her a tear  I love
Valentine de Villefort, who is being murdered at this
moment Do you understand me? I love her and I ask God and
you how I can save her?" Monte Cristo uttered a cry which
those only can conceive who have heard the roar of a wounded
lion. "Unhappy man," cried he, wringing his hands in his
turn "you love Valentine,  that daughter of an accursed
race" Never had Morrel witnessed such an expression 
never had so terrible an eye flashed before his face 
never had the genius of terror he had so often seen, either
on the battlefield or in the murderous nights of Algeria,
shaken around him more dreadful fire. He drew back
terrified.
As for Monte Cristo, after this ebullition he closed his
eyes as if dazzled by internal light. In a moment he
restrained himself so powerfully that the tempestuous
heaving of his breast subsided, as turbulent and foaming
waves yield to the sun's genial influence when the cloud has
passed. This silence, selfcontrol, and struggle lasted
about twenty seconds, then the count raised his pallid face.
"See," said he, "my dear friend, how God punishes the most
thoughtless and unfeeling men for their indifference, by
presenting dreadful scenes to their view. I, who was looking
on, an eager and curious spectator,  I, who was watching
the working of this mournful tragedy,  I, who like a
wicked angel was laughing at the evil men committed
protected by secrecy a secret is easily kept by the rich
and powerful, I am in my turn bitten by the serpent whose
tortuous course I was watching, and bitten to the heart"
Morrel groaned. "Come, come," continued the count,
"complaints are unavailing, be a man, be strong, be full of
hope, for I am here and will watch over you." Morrel shook
his head sorrowfully. "I tell you to hope. Do you understand
me?" cried Monte Cristo. "Remember that I never uttered a
falsehood and am never deceived. It is twelve o'clock,
Maximilian thank heaven that you came at noon rather than
in the evening, or tomorrow morning. Listen, Morrel  it
is noon if Valentine is not now dead, she will not die."
"How so?" cried Morrel, "when I left her dying?" Monte
Cristo pressed his hands to his forehead. What was passing
in that brain, so loaded with dreadful secrets? What does
the angel of light or the angel of darkness say to that
mind, at once implacable and generous? God only knows.
Monte Cristo raised his head once more, and this time he was
calm as a child awaking from its sleep. "Maximilian," said
he, "return home. I command you not to stir  attempt
nothing, not to let your countenance betray a thought, and I
will send you tidings. Go."
"Oh, count, you overwhelm me with that coolness. Have you,
then, power against death? Are you superhuman? Are you an
angel?" And the young man, who had never shrunk from danger,
shrank before Monte Cristo with indescribable terror. But
Monte Cristo looked at him with so melancholy and sweet a
smile, that Maximilian felt the tears filling his eyes. "I
can do much for you, my friend," replied the count. "Go I
must be alone." Morrel, subdued by the extraordinary
ascendancy Monte Cristo exercised over everything around
him, did not endeavor to resist it. He pressed the count's
hand and left. He stopped one moment at the door for
Baptistin, whom he saw in the Rue Matignon, and who was
running.
Meanwhile, Villefort and d'Avrigny had made all possible
haste, Valentine had not revived from her fainting fit on
their arrival, and the doctor examined the invalid with all
the care the circumstances demanded, and with an interest
which the knowledge of the secret intensified twofold.
Villefort, closely watching his countenance and his lips,
awaited the result of the examination. Noirtier, paler than
even the young girl, more eager than Villefort for the
decision, was watching also intently and affectionately. At
last d'Avrigny slowly uttered these words  "she is still
alive"
"Still?" cried Villefort "oh, doctor, what a dreadful word
is that."
"Yes," said the physician, "I repeat it she is still alive,
and I am astonished at it."
"But is she safe?" asked the father.
"Yes, since she lives." At that moment d'Avrigny's glance
met Noirtier's eye. It glistened with such extraordinary
joy, so rich and full of thought, that the physician was
struck. He placed the young girl again on the chair,  her
lips were scarcely discernible, they were so pale and white,
as well as her whole face,  and remained motionless,
looking at Noirtier, who appeared to anticipate and commend
all he did. "Sir," said d'Avrigny to Villefort, "call
Mademoiselle Valentine's maid, if you please." Villefort
went himself to find her and d'Avrigny approached Noirtier.
"Have you something to tell me?" asked he. The old man
winked his eyes expressively, which we may remember was his
only way of expressing his approval.
"Privately?"
"Yes."
"Well, I will remain with you." At this moment Villefort
returned, followed by the lady's maid and after her came
Madame de Villefort.
"What is the matter, then, with this dear child? she has
just left me, and she complained of being indisposed, but I
did not think seriously of it." The young woman with tears
in her eyes and every mark of affection of a true mother,
approached Valentine and took her hand. D'Avrigny continued
to look at Noirtier he saw the eyes of the old man dilate
and become round, his cheeks turn pale and tremble the
perspiration stood in drops upon his forehead. "Ah," said
he, involuntarily following Noirtier's eyes, which were
fixed on Madame de Villefort, who repeated,  "This poor
child would be better in bed. Come, Fanny, we will put her
to bed." M. d'Avrigny, who saw that would be a means of his
remaining alone with Noirtier, expressed his opinion that it
was the best thing that could be done but he forbade that
anything should be given to her except what he ordered.
They carried Valentine away she had revived, but could
scarcely move or speak, so shaken was her frame by the
attack. She had, however, just power to give one parting
look to her grandfather, who in losing her seemed to be
resigning his very soul. D'Avrigny followed the invalid,
wrote a prescription, ordered Villefort to take a cabriolet,
go in person to a chemist's to get the prescribed medicine,
bring it himself, and wait for him in his daughter's room.
Then, having renewed his injunction not to give Valentine
anything, he went down again to Noirtier, shut the doors
carefully, and after convincing himself that no one was
listening,  "Do you," said he, "know anything of this
young lady's illness?"
"Yes," said the old man.
"We have no time to lose I will question, and do you answer
me." Noirtier made a sign that he was ready to answer. "Did
you anticipate the accident which has happened to your
granddaughter?"
"Yes." D'Avrigny reflected a moment then approaching
Noirtier,  "Pardon what I am going to say," added he, "but
no indication should be neglected in this terrible
situation. Did you see poor Barrois die?" Noirtier raised
his eyes to heaven. "Do you know of what he died" asked
d'Avrigny, placing his hand on Noirtier's shoulder.
"Yes," replied the old man.
"Do you think he died a natural death?" A sort of smile was
discernible on the motionless lips of Noirtier.
"Then you have thought that Barrois was poisoned?"
"Yes."
"Do you think the poison he fell a victim to was intended
for him?"
"No."
"Do you think the same hand which unintentionally struck
Barrois has now attacked Valentine?"
"Yes."
"Then will she die too?" asked d'Avrigny, fixing his
penetrating gaze on Noirtier. He watched the effect of this
question on the old man. "No," replied he with an air of
triumph which would have puzzled the most clever diviner.
"Then you hope?" said d'Avrigny, with surprise.
"Yes."
"What do you hope?" The old man made him understand with his
eyes that he could not answer. "Ah, yes, it is true,"
murmured d'Avrigny. Then, turning to Noirtier,  "Do you
hope the assassin will be tried?"
"No."
"Then you hope the poison will take no effect on Valentine?"
"Yes."
"It is no news to you," added d'Avrigny, "to tell you that
an attempt has been made to poison her?" The old man made a
sign that he entertained no doubt upon the subject. "Then
how do you hope Valentine will escape?" Noirtier kept his
eyes steadfastly fixed on the same spot. D'Avrigny followed
the direction and saw that they were fixed on a bottle
containing the mixture which he took every morning. "Ah,
indeed?" said d'Avrigny, struck with a sudden thought, "has
it occurred to you"  Noirtier did not let him finish.
"Yes," said he. "To prepare her system to resist poison?"
"Yes."
"By accustoming her by degrees" 
"Yes, yes, yes," said Noirtier, delighted to be understood.
"Of course. I had told you that there was brucine in the
mixture I give you."
"Yes."
"And by accustoming her to that poison, you have endeavored
to neutralize the effect of a similar poison?" Noirtier's
joy continued. "And you have succeeded," exclaimed
d'Avrigny. "Without that precaution Valentine would have
died before assistance could have been procured. The dose
has been excessive, but she has only been shaken by it and
this time, at any rate, Valentine will not die." A
superhuman joy expanded the old man's eyes, which were
raised towards heaven with an expression of infinite
gratitude. At this moment Villefort returned. "Here,
doctor," said he, "is what you sent me for."
"Was this prepared in your presence?"
"Yes," replied the procureur.
"Have you not let it go out of your hands?"
"No." D'Avrigny took the bottle, poured some drops of the
mixture it contained in the hollow of his hand, and
swallowed them. "Well," said he, "let us go to Valentine I
will give instructions to every one, and you, M. de
Villefort, will yourself see that no one deviates from
them."
At the moment when d'Avrigny was returning to Valentine's
room, accompanied by Villefort, an Italian priest, of
serious demeanor and calm and firm tone, hired for his use
the house adjoining the hotel of M. de Villefort. No one
knew how the three former tenants of that house left it.
About two hours afterwards its foundation was reported to be
unsafe but the report did not prevent the new occupant
establishing himself there with his modest furniture the
same day at five o'clock. The lease was drawn up for three,
six, or nine years by the new tenant, who, according to the
rule of the proprietor, paid six months in advance. This new
tenant, who, as we have said, was an Italian, was called Il
Signor Giacomo Busoni. Workmen were immediately called in,
and that same night the passengers at the end of the
faubourg saw with surprise that carpenters and masons were
occupied in repairing the lower part of the tottering house.
Chapter 
Father and Daughter.
We saw in a preceding chapter how Madame Danglars went
formally to announce to Madame de Villefort the approaching
marriage of Eugenie Danglars and M. Andrea Cavalcanti. This
announcement, which implied or appeared to imply, the
approval of all the persons concerned in this momentous
affair, had been preceded by a scene to which our readers
must be admitted. We beg them to take one step backward, and
to transport themselves, the morning of that day of great
catastrophes, into the showy, gilded salon we have before
shown them, and which was the pride of its owner, Baron
Danglars. In this room, at about ten o'clock in the morning,
the banker himself had been walking to and fro for some
minutes thoughtfully and in evident uneasiness, watching
both doors, and listening to every sound. When his patience
was exhausted, he called his valet. "Etienne," said he, "see
why Mademoiselle Eugenie has asked me to meet her in the
drawingroom, and why she makes me wait so long."
Having given this vent to his illhumor, the baron became
more calm Mademoiselle Danglars had that morning requested
an interview with her father, and had fixed on the gilded
drawingroom as the spot. The singularity of this step, and
above all its formality, had not a little surprised the
banker, who had immediately obeyed his daughter by repairing
first to the drawingroom. Etienne soon returned from his
errand. "Mademoiselle's lady's maid says, sir, that
mademoiselle is finishing her toilette, and will be here
shortly."
Danglars nodded, to signify that he was satisfied. To the
world and to his servants Danglars assumed the character of
the goodnatured man and the indulgent father. This was one
of his parts in the popular comedy he was performing,  a
makeup he had adopted and which suited him about as well as
the masks worn on the classic stage by paternal actors, who
seen from one side, were the image of geniality, and from
the other showed lips drawn down in chronic illtemper. Let
us hasten to say that in private the genial side descended
to the level of the other, so that generally the indulgent
man disappeared to give place to the brutal husband and
domineering father. "Why the devil does that foolish girl,
who pretends to wish to speak to me, not come into my study?
and why on earth does she want to speak to me at all?"
He was turning this thought over in his brain for the
twentieth time, when the door opened and Eugenie appeared,
attired in a figured black satin dress, her hair dressed and
gloves on, as if she were going to the Italian Opera. "Well,
Eugenie, what is it you want with me? and why in this solemn
drawingroom when the study is so comfortable?"
"I quite understand why you ask, sir," said Eugenie, making
a sign that her father might be seated, "and in fact your
two questions suggest fully the theme of our conversation. I
will answer them both, and contrary to the usual method, the
last first, because it is the least difficult. I have chosen
the drawingroom, sir, as our place of meeting, in order to
avoid the disagreeable impressions and influences of a
banker's study. Those gilded cashbooks, drawers locked like
gates of fortresses, heaps of bankbills, come from I know
not where, and the quantities of letters from England,
Holland, Spain, India, China, and Peru, have generally a
strange influence on a father's mind, and make him forget
that there is in the world an interest greater and more
sacred than the good opinion of his correspondents. I have,
therefore, chosen this drawingroom, where you see, smiling
and happy in their magnificent frames, your portrait, mine,
my mother's, and all sorts of rural landscapes and touching
pastorals. I rely much on external impressions perhaps,
with regard to you, they are immaterial, but I should be no
artist if I had not some fancies."
"Very well," replied M. Danglars, who had listened to all
this preamble with imperturbable coolness, but without
understanding a word, since like every man burdened with
thoughts of the past, he was occupied with seeking the
thread of his own ideas in those of the speaker.
"There is, then, the second point cleared up, or nearly so,"
said Eugenie, without the least confusion, and with that
masculine pointedness which distinguished her gesture and
her language "and you appear satisfied with the
explanation. Now, let us return to the first. You ask me why
I have requested this interview I will tell you in two
words, sir I will not marry count Andrea Cavalcanti."
Danglars leaped from his chair and raised his eyes and arms
towards heaven.
"Yes, indeed, sir," continued Eugenie, still quite calm
"you are astonished, I see for since this little affair
began, I have not manifested the slightest opposition, and
yet I am always sure, when the opportunity arrives, to
oppose a determined and absolute will to people who have not
consulted me, and things which displease me. However, this
time, my tranquillity, or passiveness as philosophers say,
proceeded from another source it proceeded from a wish,
like a submissive and devoted daughter" a slight smile was
observable on the purple lips of the young girl, "to
practice obedience."
"Well?" asked Danglars.
"Well, sir," replied Eugenie, "I have tried to the very last
and now that the moment has come, I feel in spite of all my
efforts that it is impossible."
"But," said Danglars, whose weak mind was at first quite
overwhelmed with the weight of this pitiless logic, marking
evident premeditation and force of will, "what is your
reason for this refusal, Eugenie? what reason do you
assign?"
"My reason?" replied the young girl. "Well, it is not that
the man is more ugly, more foolish, or more disagreeable
than any other no, M. Andrea Cavalcanti may appear to those
who look at men's faces and figures as a very good specimen
of his kind. It is not, either, that my heart is less
touched by him than any other that would be a schoolgirl's
reason, which I consider quite beneath me. I actually love
no one, sir you know it, do you not? I do not then see why,
without real necessity, I should encumber my life with a
perpetual companion. Has not some sage said, "Nothing too
much'? and another, "I carry all my effects with me'? I have
been taught these two aphorisms in Latin and in Greek one
is, I believe, from Phaedrus, and the other from Bias. Well,
my dear father, in the shipwreck of life  for life is an
eternal shipwreck of our hopes  I cast into the sea my
useless encumbrance, that is all, and I remain with my own
will, disposed to live perfectly alone, and consequently
perfectly free."
"Unhappy girl, unhappy girl" murmured Danglars, turning
pale, for he knew from long experience the solidity of the
obstacle he had so suddenly encountered.
"Unhappy girl," replied Eugenie, "unhappy girl, do you say,
sir? No, indeed the exclamation appears quite theatrical
and affected. Happy, on the contrary, for what am I in want
of The world calls me beautiful. It is something to be well
received. I like a favorable reception it expands the
countenance, and those around me do not then appear so ugly.
I possess a share of wit, and a certain relative
sensibility, which enables me to draw from life in general,
for the support of mine, all I meet with that is good, like
the monkey who cracks the nut to get at its contents. I am
rich, for you have one of the first fortunes in France. I am
your only daughter, and you are not so exacting as the
fathers of the Porte SaintMartin and Gaiete, who disinherit
their daughters for not giving them grandchildren. Besides,
the provident law has deprived you of the power to
disinherit me, at least entirely, as it has also of the
power to compel me to marry Monsieur This or Monsieur That.
And so  being, beautiful, witty, somewhat talented, as the
comic operas say, and rich  and that is happiness, sir 
why do you call me unhappy?"
Danglars, seeing his daughter smiling, and proud even to
insolence, could not entirely repress his brutal feelings,
but they betrayed themselves only by an exclamation. Under
the fixed and inquiring gaze levelled at him from under
those beautiful black eyebrows, he prudently turned away,
and calmed himself immediately, daunted by the power of a
resolute mind. "Truly, my daughter," replied he with a
smile, "you are all you boast of being, excepting one thing
I will not too hastily tell you which, but would rather
leave you to guess it." Eugenie looked at Danglars, much
surprised that one flower of her crown of pride, with which
she had so superbly decked herself, should be disputed. "My
daughter," continued the banker, "you have perfectly
explained to me the sentiments which influence a girl like
you, who is determined she will not marry now it remains
for me to tell you the motives of a father like me, who has
decided that his daughter shall marry." Eugenie bowed, not
as a submissive daughter, but as an adversary prepared for a
discussion.
"My daughter," continued Danglars, "when a father asks his
daughter to choose a husband, he has always some reason for
wishing her to marry. Some are affected with the mania of
which you spoke just now, that of living again in their
grandchildren. This is not my weakness, I tell you at once
family joys have no charm for me. I may acknowledge this to
a daughter whom I know to be philosophical enough to
understand my indifference, and not to impute it to me as a
crime."
"This is not to the purpose," said Eugenie "let us speak
candidly, sir I admire candor."
"Oh," said Danglars, "I can, when circumstances render it
desirable, adopt your system, although it may not be my
general practice. I will therefore proceed. I have proposed
to you to marry, not for your sake, for indeed I did not
think of you in the least at the moment you admire candor,
and will now be satisfied, I hope but because it suited me
to marry you as soon as possible, on account of certain
commercial speculations I am desirous of entering into."
Eugenie became uneasy.
"It is just as I tell you, I assure you, and you must not be
angry with me, for you have sought this disclosure. I do not
willingly enter into arithmetical explanations with an
artist like you, who fears to enter my study lest she should
imbibe disagreeable or antipoetic impressions and
sensations. But in that same banker's study, where you very
willingly presented yourself yesterday to ask for the
thousand francs I give you monthly for pocketmoney, you
must know, my dear young lady, that many things may be
learned, useful even to a girl who will not marry. There one
may learn, for instance, what, out of regard to your nervous
susceptibility, I will inform you of in the drawingroom,
namely, that the credit of a banker is his physical and
moral life that credit sustains him as breath animates the
body and M. de Monte Cristo once gave me a lecture on that
subject, which I have never forgotten. There we may learn
that as credit sinks, the body becomes a corpse, and this is
what must happen very soon to the banker who is proud to own
so good a logician as you for his daughter." But Eugenie,
instead of stooping, drew herself up under the blow.
"Ruined?" said she.
"Exactly, my daughter that is precisely what I mean," said
Danglars, almost digging his nails into his breast, while he
preserved on his harsh features the smile of the heartless
though clever man "ruined  yes, that is it."
"Ah" said Eugenie.
"Yes, ruined Now it is revealed, this secret so full of
horror, as the tragic poet says. Now, my daughter, learn
from my lips how you may alleviate this misfortune, so far
as it will affect you."
"Oh," cried Eugenie, "you are a bad physiognomist, if you
imagine I deplore on my own account the catastrophe of which
you warn me. I ruined? and what will that signify to me?
Have I not my talent left? Can I not, like Pasta, Malibran,
Grisi, acquire for myself what you would never have given
me, whatever might have been your fortune, a hundred or a
hundred and fifty thousand livres per annum, for which I
shall be indebted to no one but myself and which, instead
of being given as you gave me those poor twelve thousand
francs, with sour looks and reproaches for my prodigality,
will be accompanied with acclamations, with bravos, and with
flowers? And if I do not possess that talent, which your
smiles prove to me you doubt, should I not still have that
ardent love of independence, which will be a substitute for
wealth, and which in my mind supersedes even the instinct of
selfpreservation? No, I grieve not on my own account, I
shall always find a resource my books, my pencils, my
piano, all the things which cost but little, and which I
shall be able to procure, will remain my own.
"Do you think that I sorrow for Madame Danglars? Undeceive
yourself again either I am greatly mistaken, or she has
provided against the catastrophe which threatens you, and,
which will pass over without affecting her. She has taken
care for herself,  at least I hope so,  for her
attention has not been diverted from her projects by
watching over me. She has fostered my independence by
professedly indulging my love for liberty. Oh, no, sir from
my childhood I have seen too much, and understood too much,
of what has passed around me, for misfortune to have an
undue power over me. From my earliest recollections, I have
been beloved by no one  so much the worse that has
naturally led me to love no one  so much the better  now
you have my profession of faith."
"Then," said Danglars, pale with anger, which was not at all
due to offended paternal love,  "then, mademoiselle, you
persist in your determination to accelerate my ruin?"
"Your ruin? I accelerate your ruin? What do you mean? I do
not understand you."
"So much the better, I have a ray of hope left listen."
"I am all attention," said Eugenie, looking so earnestly at
her father that it was an effort for the latter to endure
her unrelenting gaze.
"M. Cavalcanti," continued Danglars, "is about to marry you,
and will place in my hands his fortune, amounting to three
million livres."
"That is admirable" said Eugenie with sovereign contempt,
smoothing her gloves out one upon the other.
"You think I shall deprive you of those three millions,"
said Danglars "but do not fear it. They are destined to
produce at least ten. I and a brother banker have obtained a
grant of a railway, the only industrial enterprise which in
these days promises to make good the fabulous prospects that
Law once held out to the eternally deluded Parisians, in the
fantastic Mississippi scheme. As I look at it, a millionth
part of a railway is worth fully as much as an acre of waste
land on the banks of the Ohio. We make in our case a
deposit, on a mortgage, which is an advance, as you see,
since we gain at least ten, fifteen, twenty, or a hundred
livres' worth of iron in exchange for our money. Well,
within a week I am to deposit four millions for my share
the four millions, I promise you, will produce ten or
twelve."
"But during my visit to you the day before yesterday, sir,
which you appear to recollect so well," replied Eugenie, "I
saw you arranging a deposit  is not that the term?  of
five millions and a half you even pointed it out to me in
two drafts on the treasury, and you were astonished that so
valuable a paper did not dazzle my eyes like lightning."
"Yes, but those five millions and a half are not mine, and
are only a proof of the great confidence placed in me my
title of popular banker has gained me the confidence of
charitable institutions, and the five millions and a half
belong to them at any other time I should not have
hesitated to make use of them, but the great losses I have
recently sustained are well known, and, as I told you, my
credit is rather shaken. That deposit may be at any moment
withdrawn, and if I had employed it for another purpose, I
should bring on me a disgraceful bankruptcy. I do not
despise bankruptcies, believe me, but they must be those
which enrich, not those which ruin. Now, if you marry M.
Cavalcanti, and I get the three millions, or even if it is
thought I am going to get them, my credit will be restored,
and my fortune, which for the last month or two has been
swallowed up in gulfs which have been opened in my path by
an inconceivable fatality, will revive. Do you understand
me?"
"Perfectly you pledge me for three millions, do you not?"
"The greater the amount, the more flattering it is to you
it gives you an idea of your value."
"Thank you. One word more, sir do you promise me to make
what use you can of the report of the fortune M. Cavalcanti
will bring without touching the money? This is no act of
selfishness, but of delicacy. I am willing to help rebuild
your fortune, but I will not be an accomplice in the ruin of
others."
"But since I tell you," cried Danglars, "that with these
three million" 
"Do you expect to recover your position, sir, without
touching those three million?"
"I hope so, if the marriage should take place and confirm my
credit."
"Shall you be able to pay M. Cavalcanti the five hundred
thousand francs you promise for my dowry?"
"He shall receive them on returning from the mayor's."
 The performance of the civil marriage.
"Very well"
"What next? what more do you want?"
"I wish to know if, in demanding my signature, you leave me
entirely free in my person?"
"Absolutely."
"Then, as I said before, sir,  very well I am ready to
marry M. Cavalcanti."
"But what are you up to?"
"Ah, that is my affair. What advantage should I have over
you, if knowing your secret I were to tell you mine?"
Danglars bit his lips. "Then," said he, "you are ready to
pay the official visits, which are absolutely
indispensable?"
"Yes," replied Eugenie.
"And to sign the contract in three days?"
"Yes."
"Then, in my turn, I also say, very well" Danglars pressed
his daughter's hand in his. But, extraordinary to relate,
the father did not say, "Thank you, my child," nor did the
daughter smile at her father. "Is the conference ended?"
asked Eugenie, rising. Danglars motioned that he had nothing
more to say. Five minutes afterwards the piano resounded to
the touch of Mademoiselle d'Armilly's fingers, and
Mademoiselle Danglars was singing Brabantio's malediction on
Desdemona. At the end of the piece Etienne entered, and
announced to Eugenie that the horses were in the carriage,
and that the baroness was waiting for her to pay her visits.
We have seen them at Villefort's they proceeded then on
their course.
Chapter 
The Contract.
Three days after the scene we have just described, namely
towards five o'clock in the afternoon of the day fixed for
the signature of the contract between Mademoiselle Eugenie
Danglars and Andrea Cavalcanti,  whom the banker persisted
in calling prince,  a fresh breeze was stirring the leaves
in the little garden in front of the Count of Monte Cristo's
house, and the count was preparing to go out. While his
horses were impatiently pawing the ground,  held in by the
coachman, who had been seated a quarter of an hour on his
box,  the elegant phaeton with which we are familiar
rapidly turned the angle of the entrancegate, and cast out
on the doorsteps M. Andrea Cavalcanti, as decked up and gay
as if he were going to marry a princess. He inquired after
the count with his usual familiarity, and ascending lightly
to the second story met him at the top of the stairs. The
count stopped on seeing the young man. As for Andrea, he was
launched, and when he was once launched nothing stopped him.
"Ah, good morning, my dear count," said he. "Ah, M. Andrea,"
said the latter, with his halfjesting tone "how do you
do."
"Charmingly, as you see. I am come to talk to you about a
thousand things but, first tell me, were you going out or
just returned?"
"I was going out, sir."
"Then, in order not to hinder you, I will get up with you if
you please in your carriage, and Tom shall follow with my
phaeton in tow."
"No," said the count, with an imperceptible smile of
contempt, for he had no wish to be seen in the young man's
society,  "no I prefer listening to you here, my dear M.
Andrea we can chat better indoors, and there is no
coachman to overhear our conversation." The count returned
to a small drawingroom on the first floor, sat down, and
crossing his legs motioned to the young man to take a seat
also. Andrea assumed his gayest manner. "You know, my dear
count," said he, "the ceremony is to take place this
evening. At nine o'clock the contract is to be signed at my
fatherinlaw's."
"Ah, indeed?" said Monte Cristo.
"What is it news to you? Has not M. Danglars informed you
of the ceremony?"
"Oh, yes," said the count "I received a letter from him
yesterday, but I do not think the hour was mentioned."
"Possibly my fatherinlaw trusted to its general
notoriety."
"Well," said Monte Cristo, "you are fortunate, M.
Cavalcanti it is a most suitable alliance you are
contracting, and Mademoiselle Danglars is a handsome girl."
"Yes, indeed she is," replied Cavalcanti, in a very modest
tone.
"Above all, she is very rich,  at least, I believe so,"
said Monte Cristo.
"Very rich, do you think?" replied the young man.
"Doubtless it is said M. Danglars conceals at least half of
his fortune."
"And he acknowledges fifteen or twenty millions," said
Andrea with a look sparkling with joy.
"Without reckoning," added Monte Cristo, "that he is on the
eve of entering into a sort of speculation already in vogue
in the United States and in England, but quite novel in
France."
"Yes, yes, I know what you mean,  the railway, of which he
has obtained the grant, is it not?"
"Precisely it is generally believed he will gain ten
millions by that affair."
"Ten millions Do you think so? It is magnificent" said
Cavalcanti, who was quite confounded at the metallic sound
of these golden words. "Without reckoning," replied Monte
Cristo, "that all his fortune will come to you, and justly
too, since Mademoiselle Danglars is an only daughter.
Besides, your own fortune, as your father assured me, is
almost equal to that of your betrothed. But enough of money
matters. Do you know, M. Andrea, I think you have managed
this affair rather skilfully?"
"Not badly, by any means," said the young man "I was born
for a diplomatist."
"Well, you must become a diplomatist diplomacy, you know,
is something that is not to be acquired it is instinctive.
Have you lost your heart?"
"Indeed, I fear it," replied Andrea, in the tone in which he
had heard Dorante or Valere reply to Alceste at the Theatre
Francais.
"Is your love returned?"
 In Moliere's comedy, Le Misanthrope.
"I suppose so," said Andrea with a triumphant smile, "since
I am accepted. But I must not forget one grand point."
"Which?"
"That I have been singularly assisted."
"Nonsense."
"I have, indeed."
"By circumstances?"
"No by you."
"By me? Not at all, prince," said Monte Cristo laying a
marked stress on the title, "what have I done for you? Are
not your name, your social position, and your merit
sufficient?"
"No," said Andrea,  "no it is useless for you to say so,
count. I maintain that the position of a man like you has
done more than my name, my social position, and my merit."
"You are completely mistaken, sir," said Monte Cristo
coldly, who felt the perfidious manoeuvre of the young man,
and understood the bearing of his words "you only acquired
my protection after the influence and fortune of your father
had been ascertained for, after all, who procured for me,
who had never seen either you or your illustrious father,
the pleasure of your acquaintance?  two of my good
friends, Lord Wilmore and the Abbe Busoni. What encouraged
me not to become your surety, but to patronize you?  your
father's name, so well known in Italy and so highly honored.
Personally, I do not know you." This calm tone and perfect
ease made Andrea feel that he was, for the moment,
restrained by a more muscular hand than his own, and that
the restraint could not be easily broken through.
"Oh, then my father has really a very large fortune, count?"
"It appears so, sir," replied Monte Cristo.
"Do you know if the marriage settlement he promised me has
come?"
"I have been advised of it."
"But the three millions?"
"The three millions are probably on the road."
"Then I shall really have them?"
"Oh, well," said the count, "I do not think you have yet
known the want of money." Andrea was so surprised that he
pondered the matter for a moment. Then, arousing from his
revery,  "Now, sir, I have one request to make to you,
which you will understand, even if it should be disagreeable
to you."
"Proceed," said Monte Cristo.
"I have formed an acquaintance, thanks to my good fortune,
with many noted persons, and have, at least for the moment,
a crowd of friends. But marrying, as I am about to do,
before all Paris, I ought to be supported by an illustrious
name, and in the absence of the paternal hand some powerful
one ought to lead me to the altar now, my father is not
coming to Paris, is he? He is old, covered with wounds, and
suffers dreadfully, he says, in travelling."
"Indeed?"
"Well, I am come to ask a favor of you."
"Of me?"
"Yes, of you."
"And pray what may it be?"
"Well, to take his part."
"Ah, my dear sir What?  after the varied relations I have
had the happiness to sustain towards you, can it be that you
know me so little as to ask such a thing? Ask me to lend you
half a million and, although such a loan is somewhat rare,
on my honor, you would annoy me less Know, then, what I
thought I had already told you, that in participation in
this world's affairs, more especially in their moral
aspects, the Count of Monte Cristo has never ceased to
entertain the scruples and even the superstitions of the
East. I, who have a seraglio at Cairo, one at Smyrna, and
one at Constantinople, preside at a wedding?  never"
"Then you refuse me?"
"Decidedly and were you my son or my brother I would refuse
you in the same way."
"But what must be done?" said Andrea, disappointed.
"You said just now that you had a hundred friends."
"Very true, but you introduced me at M. Danglars'."
"Not at all Let us recall the exact facts. You met him at a
dinner party at my house, and you introduced yourself at his
house that is a totally different affair."
"Yes, but, by my marriage, you have forwarded that."
"I?  not in the least, I beg you to believe. Recollect
what I told you when you asked me to propose you. "Oh, I
never make matches, my dear prince, it is my settled
principle.'" Andrea bit his lips.
"But, at least, you will be there?"
"Will all Paris be there?"
"Oh, certainly."
"Well, like all Paris, I shall be there too," said the
count.
"And will you sign the contract?"
"I see no objection to that my scruples do not go thus
far."
"Well, since you will grant me no more, I must be content
with what you give me. But one word more, count."
"What is it?"
"Advice."
"Be careful advice is worse than a service."
"Oh, you can give me this without compromising yourself."
"Tell me what it is."
"Is my wife's fortune five hundred thousand livres?"
"That is the sum M. Danglars himself announced."
"Must I receive it, or leave it in the hands of the notary?"
"This is the way such affairs are generally arranged when it
is wished to do them stylishly Your two solicitors appoint
a meeting, when the contract is signed, for the next or the
following day then they exchange the two portions, for
which they each give a receipt then, when the marriage is
celebrated, they place the amount at your disposal as the
chief member of the alliance."
"Because," said Andrea, with a certain illconcealed
uneasiness, "I thought I heard my fatherinlaw say that he
intended embarking our property in that famous railway
affair of which you spoke just now."
"Well," replied Monte Cristo, "it will be the way, everybody
says, of trebling your fortune in twelve months. Baron
Danglars is a good father, and knows how to calculate."
"In that case," said Andrea, "everything is all right,
excepting your refusal, which quite grieves me."
"You must attribute it only to natural scruples under
similar circumstances."
"Well," said Andrea, "let it be as you wish. This evening,
then, at nine o'clock."
"Adieu till then." Notwithstanding a slight resistance on
the part of Monte Cristo, whose lips turned pale, but who
preserved his ceremonious smile, Andrea seized the count's
hand, pressed it, jumped into his phaeton, and disappeared.
The four or five remaining hours before nine o'clock
arrived, Andrea employed in riding, paying visits, 
designed to induce those of whom he had spoken to appear at
the banker's in their gayest equipages,  dazzling them by
promises of shares in schemes which have since turned every
brain, and in which Danglars was just taking the initiative.
In fact, at halfpast eight in the evening the grand salon,
the gallery adjoining, and the three other drawingrooms on
the same floor, were filled with a perfumed crowd, who
sympathized but little in the event, but who all
participated in that love of being present wherever there is
anything fresh to be seen. An Academician would say that the
entertainments of the fashionable world are collections of
flowers which attract inconstant butterflies, famished bees,
and buzzing drones.
No one could deny that the rooms were splendidly
illuminated the light streamed forth on the gilt mouldings
and the silk hangings and all the bad taste of decorations,
which had only their richness to boast of, shone in its
splendor. Mademoiselle Eugenie was dressed with elegant
simplicity in a figured white silk dress, and a white rose
half concealed in her jet black hair was her only ornament,
unaccompanied by a single jewel. Her eyes, however, betrayed
that perfect confidence which contradicted the girlish
simplicity of this modest attire. Madame Danglars was
chatting at a short distance with Debray, Beauchamp, and
ChateauRenaud.
Debray was admitted to the house for this grand ceremony,
but on the same plane with every one else, and without any
particular privilege. M. Danglars, surrounded by deputies
and men connected with the revenue, was explaining a new
theory of taxation which he intended to adopt when the
course of events had compelled the government to call him
into the ministry. Andrea, on whose arm hung one of the most
consummate dandies of the opera, was explaining to him
rather cleverly, since he was obliged to be bold to appear
at ease, his future projects, and the new luxuries he meant
to introduce to Parisian fashions with his hundred and
seventyfive thousand livres per annum.
The crowd moved to and fro in the rooms like an ebb and flow
of turquoises, rubies, emeralds, opals, and diamonds. As
usual, the oldest women were the most decorated, and the
ugliest the most conspicuous. If there was a beautiful lily,
or a sweet rose, you had to search for it, concealed in some
corner behind a mother with a turban, or an aunt with a bird
of paradise.
At each moment, in the midst of the crowd, the buzzing, and
the laughter, the doorkeeper's voice was heard announcing
some name well known in the financial department, respected
in the army, or illustrious in the literary world, and which
was acknowledged by a slight movement in the different
groups. But for one whose privilege it was to agitate that
ocean of human waves, how many were received with a look of
indifference or a sneer of disdain At the moment when the
hand of the massive timepiece, representing Endymion
asleep, pointed to nine on its golden face, and the hammer,
the faithful type of mechanical thought, struck nine times,
the name of the Count of Monte Cristo resounded in its turn,
and as if by an electric shock all the assembly turned
towards the door.
The count was dressed in black and with his habitual
simplicity his white waistcoat displayed his expansive
noble chest and his black stock was singularly noticeable
because of its contrast with the deadly paleness of his
face. His only jewellery was a chain, so fine that the
slender gold thread was scarcely perceptible on his white
waistcoat. A circle was immediately formed around the door.
The count perceived at one glance Madame Danglars at one end
of the drawingroom, M. Danglars at the other, and Eugenie
in front of him. He first advanced towards the baroness, who
was chatting with Madame de Villefort, who had come alone,
Valentine being still an invalid and without turning aside,
so clear was the road left for him, he passed from the
baroness to Eugenie, whom he complimented in such rapid and
measured terms, that the proud artist was quite struck. Near
her was Mademoiselle Louise d'Armilly, who thanked the count
for the letters of introduction he had so kindly given her
for Italy, which she intended immediately to make use of. On
leaving these ladies he found himself with Danglars, who had
advanced to meet him.
Having accomplished these three social duties, Monte Cristo
stopped, looking around him with that expression peculiar to
a certain class, which seems to say, "I have done my duty,
now let others do theirs." Andrea, who was in an adjoining
room, had shared in the sensation caused by the arrival of
Monte Cristo, and now came forward to pay his respects to
the count. He found him completely surrounded all were
eager to speak to him, as is always the case with those
whose words are few and weighty. The solicitors arrived at
this moment and arranged their scrawled papers on the velvet
cloth embroidered with gold which covered the table prepared
for the signature it was a gilt table supported on lions'
claws. One of the notaries sat down, the other remained
standing. They were about to proceed to the reading of the
contract, which half Paris assembled was to sign. All took
their places, or rather the ladies formed a circle, while
the gentlemen more indifferent to the restraints of what
Boileau calls the "energetic style" commented on the
feverish agitation of Andrea, on M. Danglars' riveted
attention, Eugenie's composure, and the light and sprightly
manner in which the baroness treated this important affair.
The contract was read during a profound silence. But as soon
as it was finished, the buzz was redoubled through all the
drawingrooms the brilliant sums, the rolling millions
which were to be at the command of the two young people, and
which crowned the display of the wedding presents and the
young lady's diamonds, which had been made in a room
entirely appropriated for that purpose, had exercised to the
full their delusions over the envious assembly. Mademoiselle
Danglars' charms were heightened in the opinion of the young
men, and for the moment seemed to outvie the sun in
splendor. As for the ladies, it is needless to say that
while they coveted the millions, they thought they did not
need them for themselves, as they were beautiful enough
without them. Andrea, surrounded by his friends,
complimented, flattered, beginning to believe in the reality
of his dream, was almost bewildered. The notary solemnly
took the pen, flourished it above his head, and said,
"Gentlemen, we are about to sign the contract."
The baron was to sign first, then the representative of M.
Cavalcanti, senior, then the baroness, afterwards the
"future couple," as they are styled in the abominable
phraseology of legal documents. The baron took the pen and
signed, then the representative. The baroness approached,
leaning on Madame de Villefort's arm. "My dear," said she,
as she took the pen, "is it not vexatious? An unexpected
incident, in the affair of murder and theft at the Count of
Monte Cristo's, in which he nearly fell a victim, deprives
us of the pleasure of seeing M. de Villefort."
"Indeed?" said M. Danglars, in the same tone in which he
would have said, "Oh, well, what do I care?"
"As a matter of fact," said Monte Cristo, approaching, "I am
much afraid that I am the involuntary cause of his absence."
"What, you, count?" said Madame Danglars, signing "if you
are, take care, for I shall never forgive you." Andrea
pricked up his ears.
"But it is not my fault, as I shall endeavor to prove."
Every one listened eagerly Monte Cristo who so rarely
opened his lips, was about to speak. "You remember," said
the count, during the most profound silence, "that the
unhappy wretch who came to rob me died at my house the
supposition is that he was stabbed by his accomplice, on
attempting to leave it."
"Yes," said Danglars.
"In order that his wounds might be examined he was
undressed, and his clothes were thrown into a corner, where
the police picked them up, with the exception of the
waistcoat, which they overlooked." Andrea turned pale, and
drew towards the door he saw a cloud rising in the horizon,
which appeared to forebode a coming storm.
"Well, this waistcoat was discovered today, covered with
blood, and with a hole over the heart." The ladies screamed,
and two or three prepared to faint. "It was brought to me.
No one could guess what the dirty rag could be I alone
suspected that it was the waistcoat of the murdered man. My
valet, in examining this mournful relic, felt a paper in the
pocket and drew it out it was a letter addressed to you,
baron."
"To me?" cried Danglars.
"Yes, indeed, to you I succeeded in deciphering your name
under the blood with which the letter was stained," replied
Monte Cristo, amid the general outburst of amazement.
"But," asked Madame Danglars, looking at her husband with
uneasiness, "how could that prevent M. de Villefort" 
"In this simple way, madame," replied Monte Cristo "the
waistcoat and the letter were both what is termed
circumstantial evidence I therefore sent them to the king's
attorney. You understand, my dear baron, that legal methods
are the safest in criminal cases it was, perhaps, some plot
against you." Andrea looked steadily at Monte Cristo and
disappeared in the second drawingroom.
"Possibly," said Danglars "was not this murdered man an old
galleyslave?"
"Yes," replied the count "a felon named Caderousse."
Danglars turned slightly pale Andrea reached the anteroom
beyond the little drawingroom.
"But go on signing," said Monte Cristo "I perceive that my
story has caused a general emotion, and I beg to apologize
to you, baroness, and to Mademoiselle Danglars." The
baroness, who had signed, returned the pen to the notary.
"Prince Cavalcanti," said the latter "Prince Cavalcanti,
where are you?"
"Andrea, Andrea," repeated several young people, who were
already on sufficiently intimate terms with him to call him
by his Christian name.
"Call the prince inform him that it is his turn to sign,"
cried Danglars to one of the floorkeepers.
But at the same instant the crowd of guests rushed in alarm
into the principal salon as if some frightful monster had
entered the apartments, quaerens quem devoret. There was,
indeed, reason to retreat, to be alarmed, and to scream. An
officer was placing two soldiers at the door of each
drawingroom, and was advancing towards Danglars, preceded
by a commissary of police, girded with his scarf. Madame
Danglars uttered a scream and fainted. Danglars, who thought
himself threatened certain consciences are never calm, 
Danglars even before his guests showed a countenance of
abject terror.
"What is the matter, sir?" asked Monte Cristo, advancing to
meet the commissioner.
"Which of you gentlemen," asked the magistrate, without
replying to the count, "answers to the name of Andrea
Cavalcanti?" A cry of astonishment was heard from all parts
of the room. They searched they questioned. "But who then
is Andrea Cavalcanti?" asked Danglars in amazement.
"A galleyslave, escaped from confinement at Toulon."
"And what crime has he committed?"
"He is accused," said the commissary with his inflexible
voice, "of having assassinated the man named Caderousse, his
former companion in prison, at the moment he was making his
escape from the house of the Count of Monte Cristo." Monte
Cristo cast a rapid glance around him. Andrea was gone.
Chapter 
The Departure for Belgium.
A few minutes after the scene of confusion produced in the
salons of M. Danglars by the unexpected appearance of the
brigade of soldiers, and by the disclosure which had
followed, the mansion was deserted with as much rapidity as
if a case of plague or of cholera morbus had broken out
among the guests. In a few minutes, through all the doors,
down all the staircases, by every exit, every one hastened
to retire, or rather to fly for it was a situation where
the ordinary condolences,  which even the best friends are
so eager to offer in great catastrophes,  were seen to be
utterly futile. There remained in the banker's house only
Danglars, closeted in his study, and making his statement to
the officer of gendarmes Madame Danglars, terrified, in the
boudoir with which we are acquainted and Eugenie, who with
haughty air and disdainful lip had retired to her room with
her inseparable companion, Mademoiselle Louise d'Armilly. As
for the numerous servants more numerous that evening than
usual, for their number was augmented by cooks and butlers
from the Cafe de Paris, venting on their employers their
anger at what they termed the insult to which they had been
subjected, they collected in groups in the hall, in the
kitchens, or in their rooms, thinking very little of their
duty, which was thus naturally interrupted. Of all this
household, only two persons deserve our notice these are
Mademoiselle Eugenie Danglars and Mademoiselle Louise
d'Armilly.
The betrothed had retired, as we said, with haughty air,
disdainful lip, and the demeanor of an outraged queen,
followed by her companion, who was paler and more disturbed
than herself. On reaching her room Eugenie locked her door,
while Louise fell on a chair. "Ah, what a dreadful thing,"
said the young musician "who would have suspected it? M.
Andrea Cavalcanti a murderer  a galleyslave escaped  a
convict" An ironical smile curled the lip of Eugenie. "In
truth I was fated," said she. "I escaped the Morcerf only to
fall into the Cavalcanti."
"Oh, do not confound the two, Eugenie."
"Hold your tongue The men are all infamous, and I am happy
to be able now to do more than detest them  I despise
them."
"What shall we do?" asked Louise.
"What shall we do?"
"Yes."
"Why, the same we had intended doing three days since  set
off."
"What?  although you are not now going to be married, you
intend still" 
"Listen, Louise. I hate this life of the fashionable world,
always ordered, measured, ruled, like our musicpaper. What
I have always wished for, desired, and coveted, is the life
of an artist, free and independent, relying only on my own
resources, and accountable only to myself. Remain here? What
for?  that they may try, a month hence, to marry me again
and to whom?  M. Debray, perhaps, as it was once proposed.
No, Louise, no This evening's adventure will serve for my
excuse. I did not seek one, I did not ask for one. God sends
me this, and I hail it joyfully"
"How strong and courageous you are" said the fair, frail
girl to her brunette companion.
"Did you not yet know me? Come, Louise, let us talk of our
affairs. The postchaise" 
"Was happily bought three days since."
"Have you had it sent where we are to go for it?"
"Yes."
"Our passport?"
"Here it is."
And Eugenie, with her usual precision, opened a printed
paper, and read, 
"M. Leon d'Armilly, twenty years of age profession, artist
hair black, eyes black travelling with his sister."
"Capital How did you get this passport?"
"When I went to ask M. de Monte Cristo for letters to the
directors of the theatres at Rome and Naples, I expressed my
fears of travelling as a woman he perfectly understood
them, and undertook to procure for me a man's passport, and
two days after I received this, to which I have added with
my own hand, "travelling with his sister.'"
"Well," said Eugenie cheerfully, "we have then only to pack
up our trunks we shall start the evening of the signing of
the contract, instead of the evening of the wedding  that
is all."
"But consider the matter seriously, Eugenie"
"Oh, I am done with considering I am tired of hearing only
of market reports, of the end of the month, of the rise and
fall of Spanish funds, of Haitian bonds. Instead of that,
Louise  do you understand?  air, liberty, melody of
birds, plains of Lombardy, Venetian canals, Roman palaces,
the Bay of Naples. How much have we, Louise?" The young girl
to whom this question was addressed drew from an inlaid
secretary a small portfolio with a lock, in which she
counted twentythree banknotes.
"Twentythree thousand francs," said she.
"And as much, at least, in pearls, diamonds, and jewels,"
said Eugenie. "We are rich. With fortyfive thousand francs
we can live like princesses for two years, and comfortably
for four but before six months  you with your music, and
I with my voice  we shall double our capital. Come, you
shall take charge of the money, I of the jewelbox so that
if one of us had the misfortune to lose her treasure, the
other would still have hers left. Now, the portmanteau 
let us make haste  the portmanteau"
"Stop" said Louise, going to listen at Madame Danglars'
door.
"What do you fear?"
"That we may be discovered."
"The door is locked."
"They may tell us to open it."
"They may if they like, but we will not."
"You are a perfect Amazon, Eugenie" And the two young girls
began to heap into a trunk all the things they thought they
should require. "There now," said Eugenie, "while I change
my costume do you lock the portmanteau." Louise pressed with
all the strength of her little hands on the top of the
portmanteau. "But I cannot," said she "I am not strong
enough do you shut it."
"Ah, you do well to ask," said Eugenie, laughing "I forgot
that I was Hercules, and you only the pale Omphale" And the
young girl, kneeling on the top, pressed the two parts of
the portmanteau together, and Mademoiselle d'Armilly passed
the bolt of the padlock through. When this was done, Eugenie
opened a drawer, of which she kept the key, and took from it
a wadded violet silk travelling cloak. "Here," said she,
"you see I have thought of everything with this cloak you
will not be cold."
"But you?"
"Oh, I am never cold, you know Besides, with these men's
clothes" 
"Will you dress here?"
"Certainly."
"Shall you have time?"
"Do not be uneasy, you little coward All our servants are
busy, discussing the grand affair. Besides, what is there
astonishing, when you think of the grief I ought to be in,
that I shut myself up?  tell me"
"No, truly  you comfort me."
"Come and help me."
From the same drawer she took a man's complete costume, from
the boots to the coat, and a provision of linen, where there
was nothing superfluous, but every requisite. Then, with a
promptitude which indicated that this was not the first time
she had amused herself by adopting the garb of the opposite
sex, Eugenie drew on the boots and pantaloons, tied her
cravat, buttoned her waistcoat up to the throat, and put on
a coat which admirably fitted her beautiful figure. "Oh,
that is very good  indeed, it is very good" said Louise,
looking at her with admiration "but that beautiful black
hair, those magnificent braids, which made all the ladies
sigh with envy,  will they go under a man's hat like the
one I see down there?"
"You shall see," said Eugenie. And with her left hand
seizing the thick mass, which her long fingers could
scarcely grasp, she took in her right hand a pair of long
scissors, and soon the steel met through the rich and
splendid hair, which fell in a cluster at her feet as she
leaned back to keep it from her coat. Then she grasped the
front hair, which she also cut off, without expressing the
least regret on the contrary, her eyes sparkled with
greater pleasure than usual under her ebony eyebrows. "Oh,
the magnificent hair" said Louise, with regret.
"And am I not a hundred times better thus?" cried Eugenie,
smoothing the scattered curls of her hair, which had now
quite a masculine appearance "and do you not think me
handsomer so?"
"Oh, you are beautiful  always beautiful" cried Louise.
"Now, where are you going?"
"To Brussels, if you like it is the nearest frontier. We
can go to Brussels, Liege, AixlaChapelle then up the
Rhine to Strasburg. We will cross Switzerland, and go down
into Italy by the SaintGothard. Will that do?"
"Yes."
"What are you looking at?"
"I am looking at you indeed you are adorable like that One
would say you were carrying me off."
"And they would be right, pardieu"
"Oh, I think you swore, Eugenie." And the two young girls,
whom every one might have thought plunged in grief, the one
on her own account, the other from interest in her friend,
burst out laughing, as they cleared away every visible trace
of the disorder which had naturally accompanied the
preparations for their escape. Then, having blown out the
lights, the two fugitives, looking and listening eagerly,
with outstretched necks, opened the door of a dressingroom
which led by a side staircase down to the yard,  Eugenie
going first, and holding with one arm the portmanteau, which
by the opposite handle Mademoiselle d'Armilly scarcely
raised with both hands. The yard was empty the clock was
striking twelve. The porter was not yet gone to bed. Eugenie
approached softly, and saw the old man sleeping soundly in
an armchair in his lodge. She returned to Louise, took up
the portmanteau, which she had placed for a moment on the
ground, and they reached the archway under the shadow of the
wall.
Eugenie concealed Louise in an angle of the gateway, so that
if the porter chanced to awake he might see but one person.
Then placing herself in the full light of the lamp which lit
the yard,  "Gate" cried she, with her finest contralto
voice, and rapping at the window.
The porter got up as Eugenie expected, and even advanced
some steps to recognize the person who was going out, but
seeing a young man striking his boot impatiently with his
ridingwhip, he opened it immediately. Louise slid through
the halfopen gate like a snake, and bounded lightly
forward. Eugenie, apparently calm, although in all
probability her heart beat somewhat faster than usual, went
out in her turn. A porter was passing and they gave him the
portmanteau then the two young girls, having told him to
take it to No. , Rue de la Victoire, walked behind this
man, whose presence comforted Louise. As for Eugenie, she
was as strong as a Judith or a Delilah. They arrived at the
appointed spot. Eugenie ordered the porter to put down the
portmanteau, gave him some pieces of money, and having
rapped at the shutter sent him away. The shutter where
Eugenie had rapped was that of a little laundress, who had
been previously warned, and was not yet gone to bed. She
opened the door.
"Mademoiselle," said Eugenie, "let the porter get the
postchaise from the coachhouse, and fetch some posthorses
from the hotel. Here are five francs for his trouble."
"Indeed," said Louise, "I admire you, and I could almost say
respect you." The laundress looked on in astonishment, but
as she had been promised twenty louis, she made no remark.
In a quarter of an hour the porter returned with a postboy
and horses, which were harnessed, and put in the postchaise
in a minute, while the porter fastened the portmanteau on
with the assistance of a cord and strap. "Here is the
passport," said the postilion, "which way are we going,
young gentleman?"
"To Fontainebleau," replied Eugenie with an almost masculine
voice.
"What do you say?" said Louise.
"I am giving them the slip," said Eugenie "this woman to
whom we have given twenty louis may betray us for forty we
will soon alter our direction." And the young girl jumped
into the britzska, which was admirably arranged for sleeping
in, without scarcely touching the step. "You are always
right," said the music teacher, seating herself by the side
of her friend.
A quarter of an hour afterwards the postilion, having been
put in the right road, passed with a crack of his whip
through the gateway of the Barriere SaintMartin. "Ah," said
Louise, breathing freely, "here we are out of Paris."
"Yes, my dear, the abduction is an accomplished fact,"
replied Eugenie. "Yes, and without violence," said Louise.
"I shall bring that forward as an extenuating circumstance,"
replied Eugenie. These words were lost in the noise which
the carriage made in rolling over the pavement of La
Villette. M. Danglars no longer had a daughter.
Chapter 
The Bell and Bottle Tavern.
And now let us leave Mademoiselle Danglars and her friend
pursuing their way to Brussels, and return to poor Andrea
Cavalcanti, so inopportunely interrupted in his rise to
fortune. Notwithstanding his youth, Master Andrea was a very
skilful and intelligent boy. We have seen that on the first
rumor which reached the salon he had gradually approached
the door, and crossing two or three rooms at last
disappeared. But we have forgotten to mention one
circumstance, which nevertheless ought not to be omitted in
one of the rooms he crossed, the trousseau of the
brideelect was on exhibition. There were caskets of
diamonds, cashmere shawls, Valenciennes lace, English
veilings, and in fact all the tempting things, the bare
mention of which makes the hearts of young girls bound with
joy, and which is called the "corbeille." Now, in passing
through this room, Andrea proved himself not only to be
clever and intelligent, but also provident, for he helped
himself to the most valuable of the ornaments before him.
 Literally, "the basket," because wedding gifts were
originally brought in such a receptacle.
Furnished with this plunder, Andrea leaped with a lighter
heart from the window, intending to slip through the hands
of the gendarmes. Tall and well proportioned as an ancient
gladiator, and muscular as a Spartan, he walked for a
quarter of an hour without knowing where to direct his
steps, actuated by the sole idea of getting away from the
spot where if he lingered he knew that he would surely be
taken. Having passed through the Rue Mont Blanc, guided by
the instinct which leads thieves always to take the safest
path, he found himself at the end of the Rue Lafayette.
There he stopped, breathless and panting. He was quite
alone on one side was the vast wilderness of the
SaintLazare, on the other, Paris enshrouded in darkness.
"Am I to be captured?" he cried "no, not if I can use more
activity than my enemies. My safety is now a mere question
of speed." At this moment he saw a cab at the top of the
Faubourg Poissonniere. The dull driver, smoking his pipe,
was plodding along toward the limits of the Faubourg
SaintDenis, where no doubt he ordinarily had his station.
"Ho, friend" said Benedetto.
"What do you want, sir?" asked the driver.
"Is your horse tired?"
"Tired? oh, yes, tired enough  he has done nothing the
whole of this blessed day Four wretched fares, and twenty
sous over, making in all seven francs, are all that I have
earned, and I ought to take ten to the owner."
"Will you add these twenty francs to the seven you have?"
"With pleasure, sir twenty francs are not to be despised.
Tell me what I am to do for this."
"A very easy thing, if your horse isn't tired."
"I tell you he'll go like the wind,  only tell me which
way to drive."
"Towards the Louvres."
"Ah, I know the way  you get good sweetened rum over
there."
"Exactly so I merely wish to overtake one of my friends,
with whom I am going to hunt tomorrow at
ChapelleenServal. He should have waited for me here with a
cabriolet till halfpast eleven it is twelve, and, tired of
waiting, he must have gone on."
"It is likely."
"Well, will you try and overtake him?"
"Nothing I should like better."
"If you do not overtake him before we reach Bourget you
shall have twenty francs if not before Louvres, thirty."
"And if we do overtake him?"
"Forty," said Andrea, after a moment's hesitation, at the
end of which he remembered that he might safely promise.
"That's all right," said the man "hop in, and we're off
Whooop, la"
Andrea got into the cab, which passed rapidly through the
Faubourg SaintDenis, along the Faubourg SaintMartin,
crossed the barrier, and threaded its way through the
interminable Villette. They never overtook the chimerical
friend, yet Andrea frequently inquired of people on foot
whom he passed and at the inns which were not yet closed,
for a green cabriolet and bay horse and as there are a
great many cabriolets to be seen on the road to the Low
Countries, and as ninetenths of them are green, the
inquiries increased at every step. Every one had just seen
it pass it was only five hundred, two hundred, one hundred
steps in advance at length they reached it, but it was not
the friend. Once the cab was also passed by a calash rapidly
whirled along by two posthorses. "Ah," said Cavalcanti to
himself, "if I only had that britzska, those two good
posthorses, and above all the passport that carries them
on" And he sighed deeply. The calash contained Mademoiselle
Danglars and Mademoiselle d'Armilly. "Hurry, hurry" said
Andrea, "we must overtake him soon." And the poor horse
resumed the desperate gallop it had kept up since leaving
the barrier, and arrived steaming at Louvres.
"Certainly," said Andrea, "I shall not overtake my friend,
but I shall kill your horse, therefore I had better stop.
Here are thirty francs I will sleep at the Red Horse, and
will secure a place in the first coach. Goodnight, friend."
And Andrea, after placing six pieces of five francs each in
the man's hand, leaped lightly on to the pathway. The cabman
joyfully pocketed the sum, and turned back on his road to
Paris. Andrea pretended to go towards the Red Horse inn, but
after leaning an instant against the door, and hearing the
last sound of the cab, which was disappearing from view, he
went on his road, and with a lusty stride soon traversed the
space of two leagues. Then he rested he must be near
ChapelleenServal, where he pretended to be going. It was
not fatigue that stayed Andrea here it was that he might
form some resolution, adopt some plan. It would be
impossible to make use of a diligence, equally so to engage
posthorses to travel either way a passport was necessary.
It was still more impossible to remain in the department of
the Oise, one of the most open and strictly guarded in
France this was quite out of the question, especially to a
man like Andrea, perfectly conversant with criminal matters.
He sat down by the side of the moat, buried his face in his
hands and reflected. Ten minutes after he raised his head
his resolution was made. He threw some dust over the
topcoat, which he had found time to unhook from the
antechamber and button over his ball costume, and going to
ChapelleenServal he knocked loudly at the door of the only
inn in the place. The host opened. "My friend," said Andrea,
"I was coming from Montefontaine to Senlis, when my horse,
which is a troublesome creature, stumbled and threw me. I
must reach Compiegne tonight, or I shall cause deep anxiety
to my family. Could you let me hire a horse of you?"
An innkeeper has always a horse to let, whether it be good
or bad. The host called the stableboy, and ordered him to
saddle "Whitey," then he awoke his son, a child of seven
years, whom he ordered to ride before the gentleman and
bring back the horse. Andrea gave the innkeeper twenty
francs, and in taking them from his pocket dropped a
visiting card. This belonged to one of his friends at the
Cafe de Paris, so that the innkeeper, picking it up after
Andrea had left, was convinced that he had let his horse to
the Count of Mauleon,  Rue SaintDominique, that being the
name and address on the card. "Whitey" was not a fast
animal, but he kept up an easy, steady pace in three hours
and a half Andrea had traversed the nine leagues which
separated him from Compiegne, and four o'clock struck as he
reached the place where the coaches stop. There is an
excellent tavern at Compiegne, well remembered by those who
have ever been there. Andrea, who had often stayed there in
his rides about Paris, recollected the Bell and Bottle inn
he turned around, saw the sign by the light of a reflected
lamp, and having dismissed the child, giving him all the
small coin he had about him, he began knocking at the door,
very reasonably concluding that having now three or four
hours before him he had best fortify himself against the
fatigues of the morrow by a sound sleep and a good supper. A
waiter opened the door.
"My friend," said Andrea, "I have been dining at
SaintJeanauBois, and expected to catch the coach which
passes by at midnight, but like a fool I have lost my way,
and have been walking for the last four hours in the forest.
Show me into one of those pretty little rooms which overlook
the court, and bring me a cold fowl and a bottle of
Bordeaux." The waiter had no suspicions Andrea spoke with
perfect composure, he had a cigar in his mouth, and his
hands in the pocket of his top coat his clothes were
fashionably made, his chin smooth, his boots irreproachable
he looked merely as if he had stayed out very late, that was
all. While the waiter was preparing his room, the hostess
arose Andrea assumed his most charming smile, and asked if
he could have No. , which he had occupied on his last stay
at Compiegne. Unfortunately, No.  was engaged by a young
man who was travelling with his sister. Andrea appeared in
despair, but consoled himself when the hostess assured him
that No. , prepared for him, was situated precisely the
same as No. , and while warming his feet and chatting about
the last races at Chantilly, he waited until they announced
his room to be ready.
Andrea had not spoken without cause of the pretty rooms
looking out upon the court of the Bell Tavern, which with
its triple galleries like those of a theatre, with the
jessamine and clematis twining round the light columns,
forms one of the prettiest entrances to an inn that you can
imagine. The fowl was tender, the wine old, the fire clear
and sparkling, and Andrea was surprised to find himself
eating with as good an appetite as though nothing had
happened. Then he went to bed and almost immediately fell
into that deep sleep which is sure to visit men of twenty
years of age, even when they are torn with remorse. Now,
here we are obliged to own that Andrea ought to have felt
remorse, but that he did not. This was the plan which had
appealed to him to afford the best chance of his security.
Before daybreak he would awake, leave the inn after
rigorously paying his bill, and reaching the forest, he
would, under pretence of making studies in painting, test
the hospitality of some peasants, procure himself the dress
of a woodcutter and a hatchet, casting off the lion's skin
to assume that of the woodman then, with his hands covered
with dirt, his hair darkened by means of a leaden comb, his
complexion embrowned with a preparation for which one of his
old comrades had given him the recipe, he intended, by
following the wooded districts, to reach the nearest
frontier, walking by night and sleeping in the day in the
forests and quarries, and only entering inhabited regions to
buy a loaf from time to time.
Once past the frontier, Andrea proposed making money of his
diamonds and by uniting the proceeds to ten banknotes he
always carried about with him in case of accident, he would
then find himself possessor of about , livres, which he
philosophically considered as no very deplorable condition
after all. Moreover, he reckoned much on the interest of the
Danglars to hush up the rumor of their own misadventures.
These were the reasons which, added to the fatigue, caused
Andrea to sleep so soundly. In order that he might awaken
early he did not close the shutters, but contented himself
with bolting the door and placing on the table an unclasped
and longpointed knife, whose temper he well knew, and which
was never absent from him. About seven in the morning Andrea
was awakened by a ray of sunlight, which played, warm and
brilliant, upon his face. In all wellorganized brains, the
predominating idea  and there always is one  is sure to
be the last thought before sleeping, and the first upon
waking in the morning. Andrea had scarcely opened his eyes
when his predominating idea presented itself, and whispered
in his ear that he had slept too long. He jumped out of bed
and ran to the window. A gendarme was crossing the court. A
gendarme is one of the most striking objects in the world,
even to a man void of uneasiness but for one who has a
timid conscience, and with good cause too, the yellow, blue,
and white uniform is really very alarming.
"Why is that gendarme there?" asked Andrea of himself. Then,
all at once, he replied, with that logic which the reader
has, doubtless, remarked in him, "There is nothing
astonishing in seeing a gendarme at an inn instead of being
astonished, let me dress myself." And the youth dressed
himself with a facility his valet de chambre had failed to
rob him of during the two months of fashionable life he had
led in Paris. "Now then," said Andrea, while dressing
himself, "I'll wait till he leaves, and then I'll slip
away." And, saying this, Andrea, who had now put on his
boots and cravat, stole gently to the window, and a second
time lifted up the muslin curtain. Not only was the first
gendarme still there, but the young man now perceived a
second yellow, blue, and white uniform at the foot of the
staircase, the only one by which he could descend, while a
third, on horseback, holding a musket in his fist, was
posted as a sentinel at the great street door which alone
afforded the means of egress.
The appearance of the third gendarme settled the matter, for
a crowd of curious loungers was extended before him,
effectually blocking the entrance to the hotel. "They're
after me" was Andrea's first thought. "The devil" A pallor
overspread the young man's forehead, and he looked around
him with anxiety. His room, like all those on the same
floor, had but one outlet to the gallery in the sight of
everybody. "I am lost" was his second thought and, indeed,
for a man in Andrea's situation, an arrest meant the
assizes, trial, and death,  death without mercy or delay.
For a moment he convulsively pressed his head within his
hands, and during that brief period he became nearly mad
with terror but soon a ray of hope glimmered in the
multitude of thoughts which bewildered his mind, and a faint
smile played upon his white lips and pallid cheeks. He
looked around and saw the objects of his search upon the
chimneypiece they were a pen, ink, and paper. With forced
composure he dipped the pen in the ink, and wrote the
following lines upon a sheet of paper 
"I have no money to pay my bill, but I am not a dishonest
man I leave behind me as a pledge this pin, worth ten times
the amount. I shall be excused for leaving at daybreak, for
I was ashamed."
He then drew the pin from his cravat and placed it on the
paper. This done, instead of leaving the door fastened, he
drew back the bolts and even placed the door ajar, as though
he had left the room, forgetting to close it, and slipping
into the chimney like a man accustomed to that kind of
gymnastic exercise, having effaced the marks of his feet
upon the floor, he commenced climbing the only opening which
afforded him the means of escape. At this precise time, the
first gendarme Andrea had noticed walked upstairs, preceded
by the commissary of police, and supported by the second
gendarme who guarded the staircase and was himself
reenforced by the one stationed at the door.
Andrea was indebted for this visit to the following
circumstances. At daybreak, the telegraphs were set at work
in all directions, and almost immediately the authorities in
every district had exerted their utmost endeavors to arrest
the murderer of Caderousse. Compiegne, that royal residence
and fortified town, is well furnished with authorities,
gendarmes, and commissaries of police they therefore began
operations as soon as the telegraphic despatch arrived, and
the Bell and Bottle being the bestknown hotel in the town,
they had naturally directed their first inquiries there.
Now, besides the reports of the sentinels guarding the Hotel
de Ville, which is next door to the Bell and Bottle, it had
been stated by others that a number of travellers had
arrived during the night. The sentinel who was relieved at
six o'clock in the morning, remembered perfectly that just
as he was taking his post a few minutes past four a young
man arrived on horseback, with a little boy before him. The
young man, having dismissed the boy and horse, knocked at
the door of the hotel, which was opened, and again closed
after his entrance. This late arrival had attracted much
suspicion, and the young man being no other than Andrea, the
commissary and gendarme, who was a brigadier, directed their
steps towards his room.
They found the door ajar. "Oh, ho," said the brigadier, who
thoroughly understood the trick "a bad sign to find the
door open I would rather find it triply bolted." And,
indeed, the little note and pin upon the table confirmed, or
rather corroborated, the sad truth. Andrea had fled. We say
corroborated, because the brigadier was too experienced to
be convinced by a single proof. He glanced around, looked in
the bed, shook the curtains, opened the closets, and finally
stopped at the chimney. Andrea had taken the precaution to
leave no traces of his feet in the ashes, but still it was
an outlet, and in this light was not to be passed over
without serious investigation.
The brigadier sent for some sticks and straw, and having
filled the chimney with them, set a light to it. The fire
crackled, and the smoke ascended like the dull vapor from a
volcano but still no prisoner fell down, as they expected.
The fact was, that Andrea, at war with society ever since
his youth, was quite as deep as a gendarme, even though he
were advanced to the rank of brigadier, and quite prepared
for the fire, he had climbed out on the roof and was
crouching down against the chimneypots. At one time he
thought he was saved, for he heard the brigadier exclaim in
a loud voice, to the two gendarmes, "He is not here" But
venturing to peep, he perceived that the latter, instead of
retiring, as might have been reasonably expected upon this
announcement, were watching with increased attention.
It was now his turn to look about him the Hotel de Ville, a
massive sixteenth century building, was on his right any
one could descend from the openings in the tower, and
examine every corner of the roof below, and Andrea expected
momentarily to see the head of a gendarme appear at one of
these openings. If once discovered, he knew he would be
lost, for the roof afforded no chance of escape he
therefore resolved to descend, not through the same chimney
by which he had come up, but by a similar one conducting to
another room. He looked around for a chimney from which no
smoke issued, and having reached it, he disappeared through
the orifice without being seen by any one. At the same
minute, one of the little windows of the Hotel de Ville was
thrown open, and the head of a gendarme appeared. For an
instant it remained motionless as one of the stone
decorations of the building, then after a long sigh of
disappointment the head disappeared. The brigadier, calm and
dignified as the law he represented, passed through the
crowd, without answering the thousand questions addressed to
him, and reentered the hotel.
"Well?" asked the two gendarmes.
"Well, my boys," said the brigadier, "the brigand must
really have escaped early this morning but we will send to
the VillersCoterets and Noyon roads, and search the forest,
when we shall catch him, no doubt." The honorable
functionary had scarcely expressed himself thus, in that
intonation which is peculiar to brigadiers of the
gendarmerie, when a loud scream, accompanied by the violent
ringing of a bell, resounded through the court of the hotel.
"Ah, what is that?" cried the brigadier.
"Some traveller seems impatient," said the host. "What
number was it that rang?"
"Number ."
"Run, waiter" At this moment the screams and ringing were
redoubled. "Ah," said the brigadier, stopping the servant,
"the person who is ringing appears to want something more
than a waiter we will attend upon him with a gendarme. Who
occupies Number ?"
"The little fellow who arrived last night in a postchaise
with his sister, and who asked for an apartment with two
beds." The bell here rang for the third time, with another
shriek of anguish.
"Follow me, Mr. Commissary" said the brigadier "tread in
my steps."
"Wait an instant," said the host "Number  has two
staircases,  inside and outside."
"Good," said the brigadier. "I will take charge of the
inside one. Are the carbines loaded?"
"Yes, brigadier."
"Well, you guard the exterior, and if he attempts to fly,
fire upon him he must be a great criminal, from what the
telegraph says."
The brigadier, followed by the commissary, disappeared by
the inside staircase, accompanied by the noise which his
assertions respecting Andrea had excited in the crowd. This
is what had happened. Andrea had very cleverly managed to
descend twothirds of the chimney, but then his foot
slipped, and notwithstanding his endeavors, he came into the
room with more speed and noise than he intended. It would
have signified little had the room been empty, but
unfortunately it was occupied. Two ladies, sleeping in one
bed, were awakened by the noise, and fixing their eyes upon
the spot whence the sound proceeded, they saw a man. One of
these ladies, the fair one, uttered those terrible shrieks
which resounded through the house, while the other, rushing
to the bellrope, rang with all her strength. Andrea, as we
can see, was surrounded by misfortune.
"For pity's sake," he cried, pale and bewildered, without
seeing whom he was addressing,  "for pity's sake do not
call assistance Save me  I will not harm you."
"Andrea, the murderer" cried one of the ladies.
"Eugenie Mademoiselle Danglars" exclaimed Andrea,
stupefied.
"Help, help" cried Mademoiselle d'Armilly, taking the bell
from her companion's hand, and ringing it yet more
violently. "Save me, I am pursued" said Andrea, clasping
his hands. "For pity, for mercy's sake do not deliver me
up"
"It is too late, they are coming," said Eugenie.
"Well, conceal me somewhere you can say you were needlessly
alarmed you can turn their suspicions and save my life"
The two ladies, pressing closely to one another, and drawing
the bedclothes tightly around them, remained silent to this
supplicating voice, repugnance and fear taking possession of
their minds.
"Well, be it so," at length said Eugenie "return by the
same road you came, and we will say nothing about you,
unhappy wretch."
"Here he is, here he is" cried a voice from the landing
"here he is I see him" The brigadier had put his eye to
the keyhole, and had discovered Andrea in a posture of
entreaty. A violent blow from the butt end of the musket
burst open the lock, two more forced out the bolts, and the
broken door fell in. Andrea ran to the other door, leading
to the gallery, ready to rush out but he was stopped short,
and he stood with his body a little thrown back, pale, and
with the useless knife in his clinched hand.
"Fly, then" cried Mademoiselle d'Armilly, whose pity
returned as her fears diminished "fly"
"Or kill yourself" said Eugenie in a tone which a Vestal
in the amphitheatre would have used, when urging the
victorious gladiator to finish his vanquished adversary.
Andrea shuddered, and looked on the young girl with an
expression which proved how little he understood such
ferocious honor. "Kill myself?" he cried, throwing down his
knife "why should I do so?"
"Why, you said," answered Mademoiselle Danglars, "that you
would be condemned to die like the worst criminals."
"Bah," said Cavalcanti, crossing his arms, "one has
friends."
The brigadier advanced to him, sword in hand. "Come, come,"
said Andrea, "sheathe your sword, my fine fellow there is
no occasion to make such a fuss, since I give myself up"
and he held out his hands to be manacled. The girls looked
with horror upon this shameful metamorphosis, the man of the
world shaking off his covering and appearing as a
galleyslave. Andrea turned towards them, and with an
impertinent smile asked,  "Have you any message for your
father, Mademoiselle Danglars, for in all probability I
shall return to Paris?"
Eugenie covered her face with her hands. "Oh, ho" said
Andrea, "you need not be ashamed, even though you did post
after me. Was I not nearly your husband?"
And with this raillery Andrea went out, leaving the two
girls a prey to their own feelings of shame, and to the
comments of the crowd. An hour after they stepped into their
calash, both dressed in feminine attire. The gate of the
hotel had been closed to screen them from sight, but they
were forced, when the door was open, to pass through a
throng of curious glances and whispering voices. Eugenie
closed her eyes but though she could not see, she could
hear, and the sneers of the crowd reached her in the
carriage. "Oh, why is not the world a wilderness?" she
exclaimed, throwing herself into the arms of Mademoiselle
d'Armilly, her eyes sparkling with the same kind of rage
which made Nero wish that the Roman world had but one neck,
that he might sever it at a single blow. The next day they
stopped at the Hotel de Flandre, at Brussels. The same
evening Andrea was incarcerated in the Conciergerie.
Chapter 
The Law.
We have seen how quietly Mademoiselle Danglars and
Mademoiselle d'Armilly accomplished their transformation and
flight the fact being that every one was too much occupied
in his or her own affairs to think of theirs. We will leave
the banker contemplating the enormous magnitude of his debt
before the phantom of bankruptcy, and follow the baroness,
who after being momentarily crushed under the weight of the
blow which had struck her, had gone to seek her usual
adviser, Lucien Debray. The baroness had looked forward to
this marriage as a means of ridding her of a guardianship
which, over a girl of Eugenie's character, could not fail to
be rather a troublesome undertaking for in the tacit
relations which maintain the bond of family union, the
mother, to maintain her ascendancy over her daughter, must
never fail to be a model of wisdom and a type of perfection.
Now, Madame Danglars feared Eugenie's sagacity and the
influence of Mademoiselle d'Armilly she had frequently
observed the contemptuous expression with which her daughter
looked upon Debray,  an expression which seemed to imply
that she understood all her mother's amorous and pecuniary
relationships with the intimate secretary moreover, she saw
that Eugenie detested Debray,  not only because he was a
source of dissension and scandal under the paternal roof,
but because she had at once classed him in that catalogue of
bipeds whom Plato endeavors to withdraw from the appellation
of men, and whom Diogenes designated as animals upon two
legs without feathers.
Unfortunately, in this world of ours, each person views
things through a certain medium, and so is prevented from
seeing in the same light as others, and Madame Danglars,
therefore, very much regretted that the marriage of Eugenie
had not taken place, not only because the match was good,
and likely to insure the happiness of her child, but because
it would also set her at liberty. She ran therefore to
Debray, who, after having like the rest of Paris witnessed
the contract scene and the scandal attending it, had retired
in haste to his club, where he was chatting with some
friends upon the events which served as a subject of
conversation for threefourths of that city known as the
capital of the world.
At the precise time when Madame Danglars, dressed in black
and concealed in a long veil, was ascending the stairs
leading to Debray's apartments,  notwithstanding the
assurances of the concierge that the young man was not at
home,  Debray was occupied in repelling the insinuations
of a friend, who tried to persuade him that after the
terrible scene which had just taken place he ought, as a
friend of the family, to marry Mademoiselle Danglars and her
two millions. Debray did not defend himself very warmly, for
the idea had sometimes crossed his mind still, when he
recollected the independent, proud spirit of Eugenie, he
positively rejected it as utterly impossible, though the
same thought again continually recurred and found a
restingplace in his heart. Tea, play, and the conversation,
which had become interesting during the discussion of such
serious affairs, lasted till one o'clock in the morning.
Meanwhile Madame Danglars, veiled and uneasy, awaited the
return of Debray in the little green room, seated between
two baskets of flowers, which she had that morning sent, and
which, it must be confessed, Debray had himself arranged and
watered with so much care that his absence was half excused
in the eyes of the poor woman.
At twenty minutes of twelve, Madame Danglars, tired of
waiting, returned home. Women of a certain grade are like
prosperous grisettes in one respect, they seldom return home
after twelve o'clock. The baroness returned to the hotel
with as much caution as Eugenie used in leaving it she ran
lightly upstairs, and with an aching heart entered her
apartment, contiguous, as we know, to that of Eugenie. She
was fearful of exciting any remark, and believed firmly in
her daughter's innocence and fidelity to the paternal roof.
She listened at Eugenie's door, and hearing no sound tried
to enter, but the bolts were in place. Madame Danglars then
concluded that the young girl had been overcome with the
terrible excitement of the evening, and had gone to bed and
to sleep. She called the maid and questioned her.
"Mademoiselle Eugenie," said the maid, "retired to her
apartment with Mademoiselle d'Armilly they then took tea
together, after which they desired me to leave, saying that
they needed me no longer." Since then the maid had been
below, and like every one else she thought the young ladies
were in their own room Madame Danglars, therefore, went to
bed without a shadow of suspicion, and began to muse over
the recent events. In proportion as her memory became
clearer, the occurrences of the evening were revealed in
their true light what she had taken for confusion was a
tumult what she had regarded as something distressing, was
in reality a disgrace. And then the baroness remembered that
she had felt no pity for poor Mercedes, who had been
afflicted with as severe a blow through her husband and son.
"Eugenie," she said to herself, "is lost, and so are we. The
affair, as it will be reported, will cover us with shame
for in a society such as ours satire inflicts a painful and
incurable wound. How fortunate that Eugenie is possessed of
that strange character which has so often made me tremble"
And her glance was turned towards heaven, where a mysterious
providence disposes all things, and out of a fault, nay,
even a vice, sometimes produces a blessing. And then her
thoughts, cleaving through space like a bird in the air,
rested on Cavalcanti. This Andrea was a wretch, a robber, an
assassin, and yet his manners showed the effects of a sort
of education, if not a complete one he had been presented
to the world with the appearance of an immense fortune,
supported by an honorable name. How could she extricate
herself from this labyrinth? To whom would she apply to help
her out of this painful situation? Debray, to whom she had
run, with the first instinct of a woman towards the man she
loves, and who yet betrays her,  Debray could but give her
advice, she must apply to some one more powerful than he.
The baroness then thought of M. de Villefort. It was M. de
Villefort who had remorselessly brought misfortune into her
family, as though they had been strangers. But, no on
reflection, the procureur was not a merciless man and it
was not the magistrate, slave to his duties, but the friend,
the loyal friend, who roughly but firmly cut into the very
core of the corruption it was not the executioner, but the
surgeon, who wished to withdraw the honor of Danglars from
ignominious association with the disgraced young man they
had presented to the world as their soninlaw. And since
Villefort, the friend of Danglars, had acted in this way, no
one could suppose that he had been previously acquainted
with, or had lent himself to, any of Andrea's intrigues.
Villefort's conduct, therefore, upon reflection, appeared to
the baroness as if shaped for their mutual advantage. But
the inflexibility of the procureur should stop there she
would see him the next day, and if she could not make him
fail in his duties as a magistrate, she would, at least,
obtain all the indulgence he could allow. She would invoke
the past, recall old recollections she would supplicate him
by the remembrance of guilty, yet happy days. M. de
Villefort would stifle the affair he had only to turn his
eyes on one side, and allow Andrea to fly, and follow up the
crime under that shadow of guilt called contempt of court.
And after this reasoning she slept easily.
At nine o'clock next morning she arose, and without ringing
for her maid or giving the least sign of her activity, she
dressed herself in the same simple style as on the previous
night then running downstairs, she left the hotel, walked
to the Rue de Provence, called a cab, and drove to M. de
Villefort's house. For the last month this wretched house
had presented the gloomy appearance of a lazaretto infected
with the plague. Some of the apartments were closed within
and without the shutters were only opened to admit a
minute's air, showing the scared face of a footman, and
immediately afterwards the window would be closed, like a
gravestone falling on a sepulchre, and the neighbors would
say to each other in a low voice, "Will there be another
funeral today at the procureur's house?" Madame Danglars
involuntarily shuddered at the desolate aspect of the
mansion descending from the cab, she approached the door
with trembling knees, and rang the bell. Three times did the
bell ring with a dull, heavy sound, seeming to participate,
in the general sadness, before the concierge appeared and
peeped through the door, which he opened just wide enough to
allow his words to be heard. He saw a lady, a fashionable,
elegantly dressed lady, and yet the door remained almost
closed.
"Do you intend opening the door?" said the baroness.
"First, madame, who are you?"
"Who am I? You know me well enough."
"We no longer know any one, madame."
"You must be mad, my friend," said the baroness.
"Where do you come from?"
"Oh, this is too much"
"Madame, these are my orders excuse me. Your name?"
"The baroness Danglars you have seen me twenty times."
"Possibly, madame. And now, what do you want?"
"Oh, how extraordinary I shall complain to M. de Villefort
of the impertinence of his servants."
"Madame, this is precaution, not impertinence no one enters
here without an order from M. d'Avrigny, or without speaking
to the procureur."
"Well, I have business with the procureur."
"Is it pressing business?"
"You can imagine so, since I have not even brought my
carriage out yet. But enough of this  here is my card,
take it to your master."
"Madame will await my return?"
"Yes go." The concierge closed the door, leaving Madame
Danglars in the street. She had not long to wait directly
afterwards the door was opened wide enough to admit her, and
when she had passed through, it was again shut. Without
losing sight of her for an instant, the concierge took a
whistle from his pocket as soon as they entered the court,
and blew it. The valet de chambre appeared on the
doorsteps. "You will excuse this poor fellow, madame," he
said, as he preceded the baroness, "but his orders are
precise, and M. de Villefort begged me to tell you that he
could not act otherwise."
In the court showing his merchandise, was a tradesman who
had been admitted with the same precautions. The baroness
ascended the steps she felt herself strongly infected with
the sadness which seemed to magnify her own, and still
guided by the valet de chambre, who never lost sight of her
for an instant, she was introduced to the magistrate's
study. Preoccupied as Madame Danglars had been with the
object of her visit, the treatment she had received from
these underlings appeared to her so insulting, that she
began by complaining of it. But Villefort, raising his head,
bowed down by grief, looked up at her with so sad a smile
that her complaints died upon her lips. "Forgive my
servants," he said, "for a terror I cannot blame them for
from being suspected they have become suspicious."
Madame Danglars had often heard of the terror to which the
magistrate alluded, but without the evidence of her own
eyesight she could never have believed that the sentiment
had been carried so far. "You too, then, are unhappy?" she
said. "Yes, madame," replied the magistrate.
"Then you pity me"
"Sincerely, madame."
"And you understand what brings me here?"
"You wish to speak to me about the circumstance which has
just happened?"
"Yes, sir,  a fearful misfortune."
"You mean a mischance."
"A mischance?" repeated the baroness.
"Alas, madame," said the procureur with his imperturbable
calmness of manner, "I consider those alone misfortunes
which are irreparable."
"And do you suppose this will be forgotten?"
"Everything will be forgotten, madame," said Villefort.
"Your daughter will be married tomorrow, if not today 
in a week, if not tomorrow and I do not think you can
regret the intended husband of your daughter."
Madame Danglars gazed on Villefort, stupefied to find him so
almost insultingly calm. "Am I come to a friend?" she asked
in a tone full of mournful dignity. "You know that you are,
madame," said Villefort, whose pale cheeks became slightly
flushed as he gave her the assurance. And truly this
assurance carried him back to different events from those
now occupying the baroness and him. "Well, then, be more
affectionate, my dear Villefort," said the baroness. "Speak
to me not as a magistrate, but as a friend and when I am in
bitter anguish of spirit, do not tell me that I ought to be
gay." Villefort bowed. "When I hear misfortunes named,
madame," he said, "I have within the last few months
contracted the bad habit of thinking of my own, and then I
cannot help drawing up an egotistical parallel in my mind.
That is the reason that by the side of my misfortunes yours
appear to me mere mischances that is why my dreadful
position makes yours appear enviable. But this annoys you
let us change the subject. You were saying, madame" 
"I came to ask you, my friend," said the baroness, "what
will be done with this impostor?"
"Impostor," repeated Villefort "certainly, madame, you
appear to extenuate some cases, and exaggerate others.
Impostor, indeed  M. Andrea Cavalcanti, or rather M.
Benedetto, is nothing more nor less than an assassin"
"Sir, I do not deny the justice of your correction, but the
more severely you arm yourself against that unfortunate man,
the more deeply will you strike our family. Come, forget him
for a moment, and instead of pursuing him let him go."
"You are too late, madame the orders are issued."
"Well, should he be arrested  do they think they will
arrest him?"
"I hope so."
"If they should arrest him I know that sometimes prisoners
afford means of escape, will you leave him in prison?" 
The procureur shook his head. "At least keep him there till
my daughter be married."
"Impossible, madame justice has its formalities."
"What, even for me?" said the baroness, half jesting, half
in earnest. "For all, even for myself among the rest,"
replied Villefort.
"Ah," exclaimed the baroness, without expressing the ideas
which the exclamation betrayed. Villefort looked at her with
that piercing glance which reads the secrets of the heart.
"Yes, I know what you mean," he said "you refer to the
terrible rumors spread abroad in the world, that the deaths
which have kept me in mourning for the last three months,
and from which Valentine has only escaped by a miracle, have
not happened by natural means."
"I was not thinking of that," replied Madame Danglars
quickly. "Yes, you were thinking of it, and with justice.
You could not help thinking of it, and saying to yourself,
"you, who pursue crime so vindictively, answer now, why are
there unpunished crimes in your dwelling?'" The baroness
became pale. "You were saying this, were you not?"
"Well, I own it."
"I will answer you."
Villefort drew his armchair nearer to Madame Danglars then
resting both hands upon his desk he said in a voice more
hollow than usual "There are crimes which remain unpunished
because the criminals are unknown, and we might strike the
innocent instead of the guilty but when the culprits are
discovered" Villefort here extended his hand toward a large
crucifix placed opposite to his desk  "when they are
discovered, I swear to you, by all I hold most sacred, that
whoever they may be they shall die. Now, after the oath I
have just taken, and which I will keep, madame, dare you ask
for mercy for that wretch"
"But, sir, are you sure he is as guilty as they say?"
"Listen this is his description "Benedetto, condemned, at
the age of sixteen, for five years to the galleys for
forgery.' He promised well, as you see  first a runaway,
then an assassin."
"And who is this wretch?"
"Who can tell?  a vagabond, a Corsican."
"Has no one owned him?"
"No one his parents are unknown."
"But who was the man who brought him from Lucca?"
"Another rascal like himself, perhaps his accomplice." The
baroness clasped her hands. "Villefort," she exclaimed in
her softest and most captivating manner.
"For heaven's sake, madame," said Villefort, with a firmness
of expression not altogether free from harshness  "for
heaven's sake, do not ask pardon of me for a guilty wretch
What am I?  the law. Has the law any eyes to witness your
grief? Has the law ears to be melted by your sweet voice?
Has the law a memory for all those soft recollections you
endeavor to recall? No, madame the law has commanded, and
when it commands it strikes. You will tell me that I am a
living being, and not a code  a man, and not a volume.
Look at me, madame  look around me. Have mankind treated
me as a brother? Have they loved me? Have they spared me?
Has any one shown the mercy towards me that you now ask at
my hands? No, madame, they struck me, always struck me
"Woman, siren that you are, do you persist in fixing on me
that fascinating eye, which reminds me that I ought to
blush? Well, be it so let me blush for the faults you know,
and perhaps  perhaps for even more than those But having
sinned myself,  it may be more deeply than others,  I
never rest till I have torn the disguises from my
fellowcreatures, and found out their weaknesses. I have
always found them and more,  I repeat it with joy, with
triumph,  I have always found some proof of human
perversity or error. Every criminal I condemn seems to me
living evidence that I am not a hideous exception to the
rest. Alas, alas, alas all the world is wicked let us
therefore strike at wickedness"
Villefort pronounced these last words with a feverish rage,
which gave a ferocious eloquence to his words.
"But"' said Madame Danglars, resolving to make a last
effort, "this young man, though a murderer, is an orphan,
abandoned by everybody."
"So much the worse, or rather, so much the better it has
been so ordained that he may have none to weep his fate."
"But this is trampling on the weak, sir."
"The weakness of a murderer"
"His dishonor reflects upon us."
"Is not death in my house?"
"Oh, sir," exclaimed the baroness, "you are without pity for
others, well, then, I tell you they will have no mercy on
you"
"Be it so" said Villefort, raising his arms to heaven.
"At least, delay the trial till the next assizes we shall
then have six months before us."
"No, madame," said Villefort "instructions have been given.
There are yet five days left five days are more than I
require. Do you not think that I also long for
forgetfulness? While working night and day, I sometimes lose
all recollection of the past, and then I experience the same
sort of happiness I can imagine the dead feel still, it is
better than suffering."
"But, sir, he has fled let him escape  inaction is a
pardonable offence."
"I tell you it is too late early this morning the telegraph
was employed, and at this very minute" 
"Sir," said the valet de chambre, entering the room, "a
dragoon has brought this despatch from the minister of the
interior." Villefort seized the letter, and hastily broke
the seal. Madame Danglars trembled with fear Villefort
started with joy. "Arrested" he exclaimed "he was taken at
Compiegne, and all is over." Madame Danglars rose from her
seat, pale and cold. "Adieu, sir," she said. "Adieu,
madame," replied the king's attorney, as in an almost joyful
manner he conducted her to the door. Then, turning to his
desk, he said, striking the letter with the back of his
right hand, "Come, I had a forgery, three robberies, and two
cases of arson, I only wanted a murder, and here it is. It
will be a splendid session"
Chapter 
The Apparition.
As the procureur had told Madame Danglars, Valentine was not
yet recovered. Bowed down with fatigue, she was indeed
confined to her bed and it was in her own room, and from
the lips of Madame de Villefort, that she heard all the
strange events we have related,  we mean the flight of
Eugenie and the arrest of Andrea Cavalcanti, or rather
Benedetto, together with the accusation of murder pronounced
against him. But Valentine was so weak that this recital
scarcely produced the same effect it would have done had she
been in her usual state of health. Indeed, her brain was
only the seat of vague ideas, and confused forms, mingled
with strange fancies, alone presented themselves before her
eyes.
During the daytime Valentine's perceptions remained
tolerably clear, owing to the constant presence of M.
Noirtier, who caused himself to be carried to his
granddaughter's room, and watched her with his paternal
tenderness Villefort also, on his return from the law
courts, frequently passed an hour or two with his father and
child. At six o'clock Villefort retired to his study, at
eight M. d'Avrigny himself arrived, bringing the night
draught prepared for the young girl, and then M. Noirtier
was carried away. A nurse of the doctor's choice succeeded
them, and never left till about ten or eleven o'clock, when
Valentine was asleep. As she went downstairs she gave the
keys of Valentine's room to M. de Villefort, so that no one
could reach the sickroom excepting through that of Madame
de Villefort and little Edward.
Every morning Morrel called on Noirtier to receive news of
Valentine, and, extraordinary as it seemed, each day found
him less uneasy. Certainly, though Valentine still labored
under dreadful nervous excitement, she was better and
moreover, Monte Cristo had told him when, half distracted,
he had rushed to the count's house, that if she were not
dead in two hours she would be saved. Now four days had
elapsed, and Valentine still lived.
The nervous excitement of which we speak pursued Valentine
even in her sleep, or rather in that state of somnolence
which succeeded her waking hours it was then, in the
silence of night, in the dim light shed from the alabaster
lamp on the chimneypiece, that she saw the shadows pass and
repass which hover over the bed of sickness, and fan the
fever with their trembling wings. First she fancied she saw
her stepmother threatening her, then Morrel stretched his
arms towards her sometimes mere strangers, like the Count
of Monte Cristo came to visit her even the very furniture,
in these moments of delirium, seemed to move, and this state
lasted till about three o'clock in the morning, when a deep,
heavy slumber overcame the young girl, from which she did
not awake till daylight. On the evening of the day on which
Valentine had learned of the flight of Eugenie and the
arrest of Benedetto,  Villefort having retired as well as
Noirtier and d'Avrigny,  her thoughts wandered in a
confused maze, alternately reviewing her own situation and
the events she had just heard.
Eleven o'clock had struck. The nurse, having placed the
beverage prepared by the doctor within reach of the patient,
and locked the door, was listening with terror to the
comments of the servants in the kitchen, and storing her
memory with all the horrible stories which had for some
months past amused the occupants of the antechambers in the
house of the king's attorney. Meanwhile an unexpected scene
was passing in the room which had been so carefully locked.
Ten minutes had elapsed since the nurse had left Valentine,
who for the last hour had been suffering from the fever
which returned nightly, incapable of controlling her ideas,
was forced to yield to the excitement which exhausted itself
in producing and reproducing a succession and recurrence of
the same fancies and images. The nightlamp threw out
countless rays, each resolving itself into some strange form
to her disordered imagination, when suddenly by its
flickering light Valentine thought she saw the door of her
library, which was in the recess by the chimneypiece, open
slowly, though she in vain listened for the sound of the
hinges on which it turned.
At any other time Valentine would have seized the silken
bellpull and summoned assistance, but nothing astonished
her in her present situation. Her reason told her that all
the visions she beheld were but the children of her
imagination, and the conviction was strengthened by the fact
that in the morning no traces remained of the nocturnal
phantoms, who disappeared with the coming of daylight. From
behind the door a human figure appeared, but the girl was
too familiar with such apparitions to be alarmed, and
therefore only stared, hoping to recognize Morrel. The
figure advanced towards the bed and appeared to listen with
profound attention. At this moment a ray of light glanced
across the face of the midnight visitor.
"It is not he," she murmured, and waited, in the assurance
that this was but a dream, for the man to disappear or
assume some other form. Still, she felt her pulse, and
finding it throb violently she remembered that the best
method of dispelling such illusions was to drink, for a
draught of the beverage prepared by the doctor to allay her
fever seemed to cause a reaction of the brain, and for a
short time she suffered less. Valentine therefore reached
her hand towards the glass, but as soon as her trembling arm
left the bed the apparition advanced more quickly towards
her, and approached the young girl so closely that she
fancied she heard his breath, and felt the pressure of his
hand.
This time the illusion, or rather the reality, surpassed
anything Valentine had before experienced she began to
believe herself really alive and awake, and the belief that
her reason was this time not deceived made her shudder. The
pressure she felt was evidently intended to arrest her arm,
and she slowly withdrew it. Then the figure, from whom she
could not detach her eyes, and who appeared more protecting
than menacing, took the glass, and walking towards the
nightlight held it up, as if to test its transparency. This
did not seem sufficient the man, or rather the ghost  for
he trod so softly that no sound was heard  then poured out
about a spoonful into the glass, and drank it. Valentine
witnessed this scene with a sentiment of stupefaction. Every
minute she had expected that it would vanish and give place
to another vision but the man, instead of dissolving like a
shadow, again approached her, and said in an agitated voice,
"Now you may drink."
Valentine shuddered. It was the first time one of these
visions had ever addressed her in a living voice, and she
was about to utter an exclamation. The man placed his finger
on her lips. "The Count of Monte Cristo" she murmured.
It was easy to see that no doubt now remained in the young
girl's mind as to the reality of the scene her eyes started
with terror, her hands trembled, and she rapidly drew the
bedclothes closer to her. Still, the presence of Monte
Cristo at such an hour, his mysterious, fanciful, and
extraordinary entrance into her room through the wall, might
well seem impossibilities to her shattered reason. "Do not
call any one  do not be alarmed," said the Count "do not
let a shade of suspicion or uneasiness remain in your
breast the man standing before you, Valentine for this
time it is no ghost, is nothing more than the tenderest
father and the most respectful friend you could dream of."
Valentine could not reply the voice which indicated the
real presence of a being in the room, alarmed her so much
that she feared to utter a syllable still the expression of
her eyes seemed to inquire, "If your intentions are pure,
why are you here?" The count's marvellous sagacity
understood all that was passing in the young girl's mind.
"Listen to me," he said, "or, rather, look upon me look at
my face, paler even than usual, and my eyes, red with
weariness  for four days I have not closed them, for I
have been constantly watching you, to protect and preserve
you for Maximilian." The blood mounted rapidly to the cheeks
of Valentine, for the name just announced by the count
dispelled all the fear with which his presence had inspired
her. "Maximilian" she exclaimed, and so sweet did the sound
appear to her, that she repeated it  "Maximilian  has
he then owned all to you?"
"Everything. He told me your life was his, and I have
promised him that you shall live."
"You have promised him that I shall live?"
"Yes."
"But, sir, you spoke of vigilance and protection. Are you a
doctor?"
"Yes the best you could have at the present time, believe
me."
"But you say you have watched?" said Valentine uneasily
"where have you been?  I have not seen you." The count
extended his hand towards the library. "I was hidden behind
that door," he said, "which leads into the next house, which
I have rented." Valentine turned her eyes away, and, with an
indignant expression of pride and modest fear, exclaimed
"Sir, I think you have been guilty of an unparalleled
intrusion, and that what you call protection is more like an
insult."
"Valentine," he answered, "during my long watch over you,
all I have observed has been what people visited you, what
nourishment was prepared, and what beverage was served
then, when the latter appeared dangerous to me, I entered,
as I have now done, and substituted, in the place of the
poison, a healthful draught which, instead of producing the
death intended, caused life to circulate in your veins."
"Poison  death" exclaimed Valentine, half believing
herself under the influence of some feverish hallucination
"what are you saying, sir?"
"Hush, my child," said Monte Cristo, again placing his
finger upon her lips, "I did say poison and death. But drink
some of this" and the count took a bottle from his pocket,
containing a red liquid, of which he poured a few drops into
the glass. "Drink this, and then take nothing more
tonight." Valentine stretched out her hand, but scarcely
had she touched the glass when she drew back in fear. Monte
Cristo took the glass, drank half its contents, and then
presented it to Valentine, who smiled and swallowed the
rest. "Oh, yes," she exclaimed, "I recognize the flavor of
my nocturnal beverage which refreshed me so much, and seemed
to ease my aching brain. Thank you, sir, thank you"
"This is how you have lived during the last four nights,
Valentine," said the count. "But, oh, how I passed that
time Oh, the wretched hours I have endured  the torture
to which I have submitted when I saw the deadly poison
poured into your glass, and how I trembled lest you should
drink it before I could find time to throw it away"
"Sir," said Valentine, at the height of her terror, "you say
you endured tortures when you saw the deadly poison poured
into my glass but if you saw this, you must also have seen
the person who poured it?"
"Yes." Valentine raised herself in bed, and drew over her
chest, which appeared whiter than snow, the embroidered
cambric, still moist with the cold dews of delirium, to
which were now added those of terror. "You saw the person?"
repeated the young girl. "Yes," repeated the count.
"What you tell me is horrible, sir. You wish to make me
believe something too dreadful. What?  attempt to murder
me in my father's house, in my room, on my bed of sickness?
Oh, leave me, sir you are tempting me  you make me doubt
the goodness of providence  it is impossible, it cannot
be"
"Are you the first that this hand has stricken? Have you not
seen M. de SaintMeran, Madame de SaintMeran, Barrois, all
fall? would not M. Noirtier also have fallen a victim, had
not the treatment he has been pursuing for the last three
years neutralized the effects of the poison?"
"Oh, heaven," said Valentine "is this the reason why
grandpapa has made me share all his beverages during the
last month?"
"And have they all tasted of a slightly bitter flavor, like
that of dried orangepeel?"
"Oh, yes, yes"
"Then that explains all," said Monte Cristo. "Your
grandfather knows, then, that a poisoner lives here perhaps
he even suspects the person. He has been fortifying you, his
beloved child, against the fatal effects of the poison,
which has failed because your system was already impregnated
with it. But even this would have availed little against a
more deadly medium of death employed four days ago, which is
generally but too fatal."
"But who, then, is this assassin, this murderer?"
"Let me also ask you a question. Have you never seen any one
enter your room at night?"
"Oh, yes I have frequently seen shadows pass close to me,
approach, and disappear but I took them for visions raised
by my feverish imagination, and indeed when you entered I
thought I was under the influence of delirium."
"Then you do not know who it is that attempts your life?"
"No," said Valentine "who could desire my death?"
"You shall know it now, then," said Monte Cristo, listening.
"How do you mean?" said Valentine, looking anxiously around.
"Because you are not feverish or delirious tonight, but
thoroughly awake midnight is striking, which is the hour
murderers choose."
"Oh, heavens," exclaimed Valentine, wiping off the drops
which ran down her forehead. Midnight struck slowly and
sadly every hour seemed to strike with leaden weight upon
the heart of the poor girl. "Valentine," said the count,
"summon up all your courage still the beatings of your
heart do not let a sound escape you, and feign to be
asleep then you will see." Valentine seized the count's
hand. "I think I hear a noise," she said "leave me."
"Goodby, for the present," replied the count, walking upon
tiptoe towards the library door, and smiling with an
expression so sad and paternal that the young girl's heart
was filled with gratitude. Before closing the door he turned
around once more, and said, "Not a movement  not a word
let them think you asleep, or perhaps you may be killed
before I have the power of helping you." And with this
fearful injunction the count disappeared through the door,
which noiselessly closed after him.
Chapter 
Locusta.
Valentine was alone two other clocks, slower than that of
SaintPhilippe du Roule, struck the hour of midnight from
different directions, and excepting the rumbling of a few
carriages all was silent. Then Valentine's attention was
engrossed by the clock in her room, which marked the
seconds. She began counting them, remarking that they were
much slower than the beatings of her heart and still she
doubted,  the inoffensive Valentine could not imagine that
any one should desire her death. Why should they? To what
end? What had she done to excite the malice of an enemy?
There was no fear of her falling asleep. One terrible idea
pressed upon her mind,  that some one existed in the world
who had attempted to assassinate her, and who was about to
endeavor to do so again. Supposing this person, wearied at
the inefficacy of the poison, should, as Monte Cristo
intimated, have recourse to steel  What if the count
should have no time to run to her rescue  What if her
last moments were approaching, and she should never again
see Morrel When this terrible chain of ideas presented
itself, Valentine was nearly persuaded to ring the bell, and
call for help. But through the door she fancied she saw the
luminous eye of the count  that eye which lived in her
memory, and the recollection overwhelmed her with so much
shame that she asked herself whether any amount of gratitude
could ever repay his adventurous and devoted friendship.
Twenty minutes, twenty tedious minutes, passed thus, then
ten more, and at last the clock struck the halfhour. Just
then the sound of fingernails slightly grating against the
door of the library informed Valentine that the count was
still watching, and recommended her to do the same at the
same time, on the opposite side, that is towards Edward's
room, Valentine fancied that she heard the creaking of the
floor she listened attentively, holding her breath till she
was nearly suffocated the lock turned, and the door slowly
opened. Valentine had raised herself upon her elbow, and had
scarcely time to throw herself down on the bed and shade her
eyes with her arm then, trembling, agitated, and her heart
beating with indescribable terror, she awaited the event.
Some one approached the bed and drew back the curtains.
Valentine summoned every effort, and breathed with that
regular respiration which announces tranquil sleep.
"Valentine" said a low voice. Still silent Valentine had
promised not to awake. Then everything was still, excepting
that Valentine heard the almost noiseless sound of some
liquid being poured into the glass she had just emptied.
Then she ventured to open her eyelids, and glance over her
extended arm. She saw a woman in a white dressinggown
pouring a liquor from a phial into her glass. During this
short time Valentine must have held her breath, or moved in
some slight degree, for the woman, disturbed, stopped and
leaned over the bed, in order the better to ascertain
whether Valentine slept  it was Madame de Villefort.
On recognizing her stepmother, Valentine could not repress
a shudder, which caused a vibration in the bed. Madame de
Villefort instantly stepped back close to the wall, and
there, shaded by the bedcurtains, she silently and
attentively watched the slightest movement of Valentine. The
latter recollected the terrible caution of Monte Cristo she
fancied that the hand not holding the phial clasped a long
sharp knife. Then collecting all her remaining strength, she
forced herself to close her eyes but this simple operation
upon the most delicate organs of our frame, generally so
easy to accomplish, became almost impossible at this moment,
so much did curiosity struggle to retain the eyelid open and
learn the truth. Madame de Villefort, however, reassured by
the silence, which was alone disturbed by the regular
breathing of Valentine, again extended her hand, and half
hidden by the curtains succeeded in emptying the contents of
the phial into the glass. Then she retired so gently that
Valentine did not know she had left the room. She only
witnessed the withdrawal of the arm  the fair round arm of
a woman but twentyfive years old, and who yet spread death
around her.
It is impossible to describe the sensations experienced by
Valentine during the minute and a half Madame de Villefort
remained in the room. The grating against the librarydoor
aroused the young girl from the stupor in which she was
plunged, and which almost amounted to insensibility. She
raised her head with an effort. The noiseless door again
turned on its hinges, and the Count of Monte Cristo
reappeared. "Well," said he, "do you still doubt?"
"Oh," murmured the young girl.
"Have you seen?"
"Alas"
"Did you recognize?" Valentine groaned. "Oh, yes" she said,
"I saw, but I cannot believe"
"Would you rather die, then, and cause Maximilian's death?"
"Oh," repeated the young girl, almost bewildered, "can I not
leave the house?  can I not escape?"
"Valentine, the hand which now threatens you will pursue you
everywhere your servants will be seduced with gold, and
death will be offered to you disguised in every shape. You
will find it in the water you drink from the spring, in the
fruit you pluck from the tree."
"But did you not say that my kind grandfather's precaution
had neutralized the poison?"
"Yes, but not against a strong dose the poison will be
changed, and the quantity increased." He took the glass and
raised it to his lips. "It is already done," he said
"brucine is no longer employed, but a simple narcotic I can
recognize the flavor of the alcohol in which it has been
dissolved. If you had taken what Madame de Villefort has
poured into your glass, Valentine  Valentine  you would
have been doomed"
"But," exclaimed the young girl, "why am I thus pursued?"
"Why?  are you so kind  so good  so unsuspicious of
ill, that you cannot understand, Valentine?"
"No, I have never injured her."
"But you are rich, Valentine you have , livres a
year, and you prevent her son from enjoying these ,
livres."
"How so? The fortune is not her gift, but is inherited from
my relations."
"Certainly and that is why M. and Madame de SaintMeran
have died that is why M. Noirtier was sentenced the day he
made you his heir that is why you, in your turn, are to die
it is because your father would inherit your property,
and your brother, his only son, succeed to his."
"Edward? Poor child Are all these crimes committed on his
account?"
"Ah, then you at length understand?"
"Heaven grant that this may not be visited upon him"
"Valentine, you are an angel"
"But why is my grandfather allowed to live?"
"It was considered, that you dead, the fortune would
naturally revert to your brother, unless he were
disinherited and besides, the crime appearing useless, it
would be folly to commit it."
"And is it possible that this frightful combination of
crimes has been invented by a woman?"
"Do you recollect in the arbor of the Hotel des Postes, at
Perugia, seeing a man in a brown cloak, whom your stepmother
was questioning upon aqua tofana? Well, ever since then, the
infernal project has been ripening in her brain."
"Ah, then, indeed, sir," said the sweet girl, bathed in
tears, "I see that I am condemned to die"
"No, Valentine, for I have foreseen all their plots no,
your enemy is conquered since we know her, and you will
live, Valentine  live to be happy yourself, and to confer
happiness upon a noble heart but to insure this you must
rely on me."
"Command me, sir  what am I to do?"
"You must blindly take what I give you."
"Alas, were it only for my own sake, I should prefer to
die"
"You must not confide in any one  not even in your
father."
"My father is not engaged in this fearful plot, is he, sir?"
asked Valentine, clasping her hands.
"No and yet your father, a man accustomed to judicial
accusations, ought to have known that all these deaths have
not happened naturally it is he who should have watched
over you  he should have occupied my place  he should
have emptied that glass  he should have risen against the
assassin. Spectre against spectre" he murmured in a low
voice, as he concluded his sentence.
"Sir," said Valentine, "I will do all I can to live, for
there are two beings whose existence depends upon mine  my
grandfather and Maximilian."
"I will watch over them as I have over you."
"Well, sir, do as you will with me" and then she added, in
a low voice, "oh, heavens, what will befall me?"
"Whatever may happen, Valentine, do not be alarmed though
you suffer though you lose sight, hearing, consciousness,
fear nothing though you should awake and be ignorant where
you are, still do not fear even though you should find
yourself in a sepulchral vault or coffin. Reassure yourself,
then, and say to yourself "At this moment, a friend, a
father, who lives for my happiness and that of Maximilian,
watches over me'"
"Alas, alas, what a fearful extremity"
"Valentine, would you rather denounce your stepmother?"
"I would rather die a hundred times  oh, yes, die"
"No, you will not die but will you promise me, whatever
happens, that you will not complain, but hope?"
"I will think of Maximilian"
"You are my own darling child, Valentine I alone can save
you, and I will." Valentine in the extremity of her terror
joined her hands,  for she felt that the moment had
arrived to ask for courage,  and began to pray, and while
uttering little more than incoherent words, she forgot that
her white shoulders had no other covering than her long
hair, and that the pulsations of her heart could be seen
through the lace of her nightdress. Monte Cristo gently laid
his hand on the young girl's arm, drew the velvet coverlet
close to her throat, and said with a paternal smile,  "My
child, believe in my devotion to you as you believe in the
goodness of providence and the love of Maximilian."
Then he drew from his waistcoatpocket the little emerald
box, raised the golden lid, and took from it a pastille
about the size of a pea, which he placed in her hand. She
took it, and looked attentively on the count there was an
expression on the face of her intrepid protector which
commanded her veneration. She evidently interrogated him by
her look. "Yes," said he. Valentine carried the pastille to
her mouth, and swallowed it. "And now, my dear child, adieu
for the present. I will try and gain a little sleep, for you
are saved."
"Go," said Valentine, "whatever happens, I promise you not
to fear."
Monte Cristo for some time kept his eyes fixed on the young
girl, who gradually fell asleep, yielding to the effects of
the narcotic the count had given her. Then he took the
glass, emptied three parts of the contents in the fireplace,
that it might be supposed Valentine had taken it, and
replaced it on the table then he disappeared, after
throwing a farewell glance on Valentine, who slept with the
confidence and innocence of an angel.
Chapter 
Valentine.
The nightlight continued to burn on the chimneypiece,
exhausting the last drops of oil which floated on the
surface of the water. The globe of the lamp appeared of a
reddish hue, and the flame, brightening before it expired,
threw out the last flickerings which in an inanimate object
have been so often compared with the convulsions of a human
creature in its final agonies. A dull and dismal light was
shed over the bedclothes and curtains surrounding the young
girl. All noise in the streets had ceased, and the silence
was frightful. It was then that the door of Edward's room
opened, and a head we have before noticed appeared in the
glass opposite it was Madame de Villefort, who came to
witness the effects of the drink she had prepared. She
stopped in the doorway, listened for a moment to the
flickering of the lamp, the only sound in that deserted
room, and then advanced to the table to see if Valentine's
glass were empty. It was still about a quarter full, as we
before stated. Madame de Villefort emptied the contents into
the ashes, which she disturbed that they might the more
readily absorb the liquid then she carefully rinsed the
glass, and wiping it with her handkerchief replaced it on
the table.
If any one could have looked into the room just then he
would have noticed the hesitation with which Madame de
Villefort approached the bed and looked fixedly on
Valentine. The dim light, the profound silence, and the
gloomy thoughts inspired by the hour, and still more by her
own conscience, all combined to produce a sensation of fear
the poisoner was terrified at the contemplation of her own
work. At length she rallied, drew aside the curtain, and
leaning over the pillow gazed intently on Valentine. The
young girl no longer breathed, no breath issued through the
halfclosed teeth the white lips no longer quivered  the
eyes were suffused with a bluish vapor, and the long black
lashes rested on a cheek white as wax. Madame de Villefort
gazed upon the face so expressive even in its stillness
then she ventured to raise the coverlet and press her hand
upon the young girl's heart. It was cold and motionless. She
only felt the pulsation in her own fingers, and withdrew her
hand with a shudder. One arm was hanging out of the bed
from shoulder to elbow it was moulded after the arms of
Germain Pillon's "Graces," but the forearm seemed to be
slightly distorted by convulsion, and the hand, so
delicately formed, was resting with stiff outstretched
fingers on the framework of the bed. The nails, too, were
turning blue.
 Germain Pillon was a famous French sculptor .
His best known work is "The Three Graces," now in the
Louvre.
Madame de Villefort had no longer any doubt all was over 
she had consummated the last terrible work she had to
accomplish. There was no more to do in the room, so the
poisoner retired stealthily, as though fearing to hear the
sound of her own footsteps but as she withdrew she still
held aside the curtain, absorbed in the irresistible
attraction always exerted by the picture of death, so long
as it is merely mysterious and does not excite disgust. Just
then the lamp again flickered the noise startled Madame de
Villefort, who shuddered and dropped the curtain.
Immediately afterwards the light expired, and the room was
plunged in frightful obscurity, while the clock at that
minute struck halfpast four. Overpowered with agitation,
the poisoner succeeded in groping her way to the door, and
reached her room in an agony of fear.
The darkness lasted two hours longer then by degrees a cold
light crept through the Venetian blinds, until at length it
revealed the objects in the room. About this time the
nurse's cough was heard on the stairs and the woman entered
the room with a cup in her hand. To the tender eye of a
father or a lover, the first glance would have sufficed to
reveal Valentine's condition but to this hireling,
Valentine only appeared to sleep. "Good," she exclaimed,
approaching the table, "she has taken part of her draught
the glass is threequarters empty."
Then she went to the fireplace and lit the fire, and
although she had just left her bed, she could not resist the
temptation offered by Valentine's sleep, so she threw
herself into an armchair to snatch a little more rest. The
clock striking eight awoke her. Astonished at the prolonged
slumber of the patient, and frightened to see that the arm
was still hanging out of the bed, she advanced towards
Valentine, and for the first time noticed the white lips.
She tried to replace the arm, but it moved with a frightful
rigidity which could not deceive a sicknurse. She screamed
aloud then running to the door exclaimed,  "Help, help"
"What is the matter?" asked M. d'Avrigny, at the foot of the
stairs, it being the hour he usually visited her.
"What is it?" asked Villefort, rushing from his room.
"Doctor, do you hear them call for help?"
"Yes, yes let us hasten up it was in Valentine's room."
But before the doctor and the father could reach the room,
the servants who were on the same floor had entered, and
seeing Valentine pale and motionless on her bed, they lifted
up their hands towards heaven and stood transfixed, as
though struck by lightening. "Call Madame de Villefort 
wake Madame de Villefort" cried the procureur from the door
of his chamber, which apparently he scarcely dared to leave.
But instead of obeying him, the servants stood watching M.
d'Avrigny, who ran to Valentine, and raised her in his arms.
"What?  this one, too?" he exclaimed. "Oh, where will be
the end?" Villefort rushed into the room. "What are you
saying, doctor?" he exclaimed, raising his hands to heaven.
"I say that Valentine is dead" replied d'Avrigny, in a
voice terrible in its solemn calm.
M. de Villefort staggered and buried his head in the bed. On
the exclamation of the doctor and the cry of the father, the
servants all fled with muttered imprecations they were
heard running down the stairs and through the long passages,
then there was a rush in the court, afterwards all was
still they had, one and all, deserted the accursed house.
Just then, Madame de Villefort, in the act of slipping on
her dressinggown, threw aside the drapery and for a moment
stood motionless, as though interrogating the occupants of
the room, while she endeavored to call up some rebellious
tears. On a sudden she stepped, or rather bounded, with
outstretched arms, towards the table. She saw d'Avrigny
curiously examining the glass, which she felt certain of
having emptied during the night. It was now a third full,
just as it was when she threw the contents into the ashes.
The spectre of Valentine rising before the poisoner would
have alarmed her less. It was, indeed, the same color as the
draught she had poured into the glass, and which Valentine
had drank it was indeed the poison, which could not deceive
M. d'Avrigny, which he now examined so closely it was
doubtless a miracle from heaven, that, notwithstanding her
precautions, there should be some trace, some proof
remaining to reveal the crime. While Madame de Villefort
remained rooted to the spot like a statue of terror, and
Villefort, with his head hidden in the bedclothes, saw
nothing around him, d'Avrigny approached the window, that he
might the better examine the contents of the glass, and
dipping the tip of his finger in, tasted it. "Ah," he
exclaimed, "it is no longer brucine that is used let me see
what it is"
Then he ran to one of the cupboards in Valentine's room,
which had been transformed into a medicine closet, and
taking from its silver case a small bottle of nitric acid,
dropped a little of it into the liquor, which immediately
changed to a bloodred color. "Ah," exclaimed d'Avrigny, in
a voice in which the horror of a judge unveiling the truth
was mingled with the delight of a student making a
discovery. Madame de Villefort was overpowered, her eyes
first flashed and then swam, she staggered towards the door
and disappeared. Directly afterwards the distant sound of a
heavy weight falling on the ground was heard, but no one
paid any attention to it the nurse was engaged in watching
the chemical analysis, and Villefort was still absorbed in
grief. M. d'Avrigny alone had followed Madame de Villefort
with his eyes, and watched her hurried retreat. He lifted up
the drapery over the entrance to Edward's room, and his eye
reaching as far as Madame de Villefort's apartment, he
beheld her extended lifeless on the floor. "Go to the
assistance of Madame de Villefort," he said to the nurse.
"Madame de Villefort is ill."
"But Mademoiselle de Villefort"  stammered the nurse.
"Mademoiselle de Villefort no longer requires help," said
d'Avrigny, "since she is dead."
"Dead,  dead" groaned forth Villefort, in a paroxysm of
grief, which was the more terrible from the novelty of the
sensation in the iron heart of that man.
"Dead" repeated a third voice. "Who said Valentine was
dead?"
The two men turned round, and saw Morrel standing at the
door, pale and terrorstricken. This is what had happened.
At the usual time, Morrel had presented himself at the
little door leading to Noirtier's room. Contrary to custom,
the door was open, and having no occasion to ring he
entered. He waited for a moment in the hall and called for a
servant to conduct him to M. Noirtier but no one answered,
the servants having, as we know, deserted the house. Morrel
had no particular reason for uneasiness Monte Cristo had
promised him that Valentine should live, and so far he had
always fulfilled his word. Every night the count had given
him news, which was the next morning confirmed by Noirtier.
Still this extraordinary silence appeared strange to him,
and he called a second and third time still no answer. Then
he determined to go up. Noirtier's room was opened, like all
the rest. The first thing he saw was the old man sitting in
his armchair in his usual place, but his eyes expressed
alarm, which was confirmed by the pallor which overspread
his features.
"How are you, sir?" asked Morrel, with a sickness of heart.
"Well," answered the old man, by closing his eyes but his
appearance manifested increasing uneasiness.
"You are thoughtful, sir," continued Morrel "you want
something shall I call one of the servants?"
"Yes," replied Noirtier.
Morrel pulled the bell, but though he nearly broke the cord
no one answered. He turned towards Noirtier the pallor and
anguish expressed on his countenance momentarily increased.
"Oh," exclaimed Morrel, "why do they not come? Is any one
ill in the house?" The eyes of Noirtier seemed as though
they would start from their sockets. "What is the matter?
You alarm me. Valentine? Valentine?"
"Yes, yes," signed Noirtier. Maximilian tried to speak, but
he could articulate nothing he staggered, and supported
himself against the wainscot. Then he pointed to the door.
"Yes, yes, yes" continued the old man. Maximilian rushed up
the little staircase, while Noirtier's eyes seemed to say,
"Quicker, quicker"
In a minute the young man darted through several rooms, till
at length he reached Valentine's. There was no occasion to
push the door, it was wide open. A sob was the only sound he
heard. He saw as though in a mist, a black figure kneeling
and buried in a confused mass of white drapery. A terrible
fear transfixed him. It was then he heard a voice exclaim
"Valentine is dead" and another voice which, like an echo
repeated,  "Dead,  dead"
Chapter 
Maximilian.
Villefort rose, half ashamed of being surprised in such a
paroxysm of grief. The terrible office he had held for
twentyfive years had succeeded in making him more or less
than man. His glance, at first wandering, fixed itself upon
Morrel. "Who are you, sir," he asked, "that forget that this
is not the manner to enter a house stricken with death? Go,
sir, go" But Morrel remained motionless he could not
detach his eyes from that disordered bed, and the pale
corpse of the young girl who was lying on it. "Go  do you
hear?" said Villefort, while d'Avrigny advanced to lead
Morrel out. Maximilian stared for a moment at the corpse,
gazed all around the room, then upon the two men he opened
his mouth to speak, but finding it impossible to give
utterance to the innumerable ideas that occupied his brain,
he went out, thrusting his hands through his hair in such a
manner that Villefort and d'Avrigny, for a moment diverted
from the engrossing topic, exchanged glances, which seemed
to say,  "He is mad"
But in less than five minutes the staircase groaned beneath
an extraordinary weight. Morrel was seen carrying, with
superhuman strength, the armchair containing Noirtier
upstairs. When he reached the landing he placed the
armchair on the floor and rapidly rolled it into
Valentine's room. This could only have been accomplished by
means of unnatural strength supplied by powerful excitement.
But the most fearful spectacle was Noirtier being pushed
towards the bed, his face expressing all his meaning, and
his eyes supplying the want of every other faculty. That
pale face and flaming glance appeared to Villefort like a
frightful apparition. Each time he had been brought into
contact with his father, something terrible had happened.
"See what they have done" cried Morrel, with one hand
leaning on the back of the chair, and the other extended
towards Valentine. "See, my father, see"
Villefort drew back and looked with astonishment on the
young man, who, almost a stranger to him, called Noirtier
his father. At this moment the whole soul of the old man
seemed centred in his eyes which became bloodshot the veins
of the throat swelled his cheeks and temples became purple,
as though he was struck with epilepsy nothing was wanting
to complete this but the utterance of a cry. And the cry
issued from his pores, if we may thus speak  a cry
frightful in its silence. D'Avrigny rushed towards the old
man and made him inhale a powerful restorative.
"Sir," cried Morrel, seizing the moist hand of the
paralytic, "they ask me who I am, and what right I have to
be here. Oh, you know it, tell them, tell them" And the
young man's voice was choked by sobs. As for the old man,
his chest heaved with his panting respiration. One could
have thought that he was undergoing the agonies preceding
death. At length, happier than the young man, who sobbed
without weeping, tears glistened in the eyes of Noirtier.
"Tell them," said Morrel in a hoarse voice, "tell them that
I am her betrothed. Tell them she was my beloved, my noble
girl, my only blessing in the world. Tell them  oh, tell
them, that corpse belongs to me"
The young man overwhelmed by the weight of his anguish, fell
heavily on his knees before the bed, which his fingers
grasped with convulsive energy. D'Avrigny, unable to bear
the sight of this touching emotion, turned away and
Villefort, without seeking any further explanation, and
attracted towards him by the irresistible magnetism which
draws us towards those who have loved the people for whom we
mourn, extended his hand towards the young man. But Morrel
saw nothing he had grasped the hand of Valentine, and
unable to weep vented his agony in groans as he bit the
sheets. For some time nothing was heard in that chamber but
sobs, exclamations, and prayers. At length Villefort, the
most composed of all, spoke "Sir," said he to Maximilian,
"you say you loved Valentine, that you were betrothed to
her. I knew nothing of this engagement, of this love, yet I,
her father, forgive you, for I see that your grief is real
and deep and besides my own sorrow is too great for anger
to find a place in my heart. But you see that the angel whom
you hoped for has left this earth  she has nothing more to
do with the adoration of men. Take a last farewell, sir, of
her sad remains take the hand you expected to possess once
more within your own, and then separate yourself from her
forever. Valentine now requires only the ministrations of
the priest."
"You are mistaken, sir," exclaimed Morrel, raising himself
on one knee, his heart pierced by a more acute pang than any
he had yet felt  "you are mistaken Valentine, dying as
she has, not only requires a priest, but an avenger. You, M.
de Villefort, send for the priest I will be the avenger."
"What do you mean, sir?" asked Villefort, trembling at the
new idea inspired by the delirium of Morrel.
"I tell you, sir, that two persons exist in you the father
has mourned sufficiently, now let the procureur fulfil his
office."
The eyes of Noirtier glistened, and d'Avrigny approached.
"Gentlemen," said Morrel, reading all that passed through
the minds of the witnesses to the scene, "I know what I am
saying, and you know as well as I do what I am about to say
Valentine has been assassinated" Villefort hung his
head, d'Avrigny approached nearer, and Noirtier said "Yes"
with his eyes. "Now, sir," continued Morrel, "in these days
no one can disappear by violent means without some inquiries
being made as to the cause of her disappearance, even were
she not a young, beautiful, and adorable creature like
Valentine. Mr. Procureur," said Morrel with increasing
vehemence, "no mercy is allowed I denounce the crime it is
your place to seek the assassin." The young man's implacable
eyes interrogated Villefort, who, on his side, glanced from
Noirtier to d'Avrigny. But instead of finding sympathy in
the eyes of the doctor and his father, he only saw an
expression as inflexible as that of Maximilian. "Yes,"
indicated the old man.
"Assuredly," said d'Avrigny.
"Sir," said Villefort, striving to struggle against this
triple force and his own emotion,  "sir, you are deceived
no one commits crimes here. I am stricken by fate. It is
horrible, indeed, but no one assassinates."
The eyes of Noirtier lighted up with rage, and d'Avrigny
prepared to speak. Morrel, however, extended his arm, and
commanded silence. "And I say that murders are committed
here," said Morrel, whose voice, though lower in tone, lost
none of its terrible distinctness "I tell you that this is
the fourth victim within the last four months. I tell you,
Valentine's life was attempted by poison four days ago,
though she escaped, owing to the precautions of M. Noirtier.
I tell you that the dose has been double, the poison
changed, and that this time it has succeeded. I tell you
that you know these things as well as I do, since this
gentleman has forewarned you, both as a doctor and as a
friend."
"Oh, you rave, sir," exclaimed Villefort, in vain
endeavoring to escape the net in which he was taken.
"I rave?" said Morrel "well, then, I appeal to M. d'Avrigny
himself. Ask him, sir, if he recollects the words he uttered
in the garden of this house on the night of Madame de
SaintMeran's death. You thought yourselves alone, and
talked about that tragical death, and the fatality you
mentioned then is the same which has caused the murder of
Valentine." Villefort and d'Avrigny exchanged looks. "Yes,
yes," continued Morrel "recall the scene, for the words you
thought were only given to silence and solitude fell into my
ears. Certainly, after witnessing the culpable indolence
manifested by M. de Villefort towards his own relations, I
ought to have denounced him to the authorities then I
should not have been an accomplice to thy death, as I now
am, sweet, beloved Valentine but the accomplice shall
become the avenger. This fourth murder is apparent to all,
and if thy father abandon thee, Valentine, it is I, and I
swear it, that shall pursue the assassin." And this time, as
though nature had at least taken compassion on the vigorous
frame, nearly bursting with its own strength, the words of
Morrel were stifled in his throat his breast heaved the
tears, so long rebellious, gushed from his eyes and he
threw himself weeping on his knees by the side of the bed.
Then d'Avrigny spoke. "And I, too," he exclaimed in a low
voice, "I unite with M. Morrel in demanding justice for
crime my blood boils at the idea of having encouraged a
murderer by my cowardly concession."
"Oh, merciful heavens" murmured Villefort. Morrel raised
his head, and reading the eyes of the old man, which gleamed
with unnatural lustre,  "Stay," he said, "M. Noirtier
wishes to speak."
"Yes," indicated Noirtier, with an expression the more
terrible, from all his faculties being centred in his
glance.
"Do you know the assassin?" asked Morrel.
"Yes," replied Noirtier.
"And will you direct us?" exclaimed the young man. "Listen,
M. d'Avrigny, listen" Noirtier looked upon Morrel with one
of those melancholy smiles which had so often made Valentine
happy, and thus fixed his attention. Then, having riveted
the eyes of his interlocutor on his own, he glanced towards
the door.
"Do you wish me to leave?" said Morrel, sadly.
"Yes," replied Noirtier.
"Alas, alas, sir, have pity on me"
The old man's eyes remained fixed on the door.
"May I, at least, return?" asked Morrel.
"Yes."
"Must I leave alone?"
"No."
"Whom am I to take with me? The procureur?"
"No."
"The doctor?"
"Yes."
"You wish to remain alone with M. de Villefort?"
"Yes."
"But can he understand you?"
"Yes."
"Oh," said Villefort, inexpressibly delighted to think that
the inquiries were to be made by him alone,  "oh, be
satisfied, I can understand my father." D'Avrigny took the
young man's arm, and led him out of the room. A more than
deathlike silence then reigned in the house. At the end of a
quarter of an hour a faltering footstep was heard, and
Villefort appeared at the door of the apartment where
d'Avrigny and Morrel had been staying, one absorbed in
meditation, the other in grief. "You can come," he said, and
led them back to Noirtier. Morrel looked attentively on
Villefort. His face was livid, large drops rolled down his
face, and in his fingers he held the fragments of a quill
pen which he had torn to atoms.
"Gentlemen," he said in a hoarse voice, "give me your word
of honor that this horrible secret shall forever remain
buried amongst ourselves" The two men drew back.
"I entreat you."  continued Villefort.
"But," said Morrel, "the culprit  the murderer  the
assassin."
"Do not alarm yourself, sir justice will be done," said
Villefort. "My father has revealed the culprit's name my
father thirsts for revenge as much as you do, yet even he
conjures you as I do to keep this secret. Do you not,
father?"
"Yes," resolutely replied Noirtier. Morrel suffered an
exclamation of horror and surprise to escape him. "Oh, sir,"
said Villefort, arresting Maximilian by the arm, "if my
father, the inflexible man, makes this request, it is
because he knows, be assured, that Valentine will be
terribly revenged. Is it not so, father?" The old man made a
sign in the affirmative. Villefort continued "He knows me,
and I have pledged my word to him. Rest assured, gentlemen,
that within three days, in a less time than justice would
demand, the revenge I shall have taken for the murder of my
child will be such as to make the boldest heart tremble"
and as he spoke these words he ground his teeth, and grasped
the old man's senseless hand.
"Will this promise be fulfilled, M. Noirtier?" asked Morrel,
while d'Avrigny looked inquiringly.
"Yes," replied Noirtier with an expression of sinister joy.
"Swear, then," said Villefort, joining the hands of Morrel
and d'Avrigny, "swear that you will spare the honor of my
house, and leave me to avenge my child." D'Avrigny turned
round and uttered a very feeble "Yes," but Morrel,
disengaging his hand, rushed to the bed, and after having
pressed the cold lips of Valentine with his own, hurriedly
left, uttering a long, deep groan of despair and anguish. We
have before stated that all the servants had fled. M. de
Villefort was therefore obliged to request M. d'Avrigny to
superintend all the arrangements consequent upon a death in
a large city, more especially a death under such suspicious
circumstances.
It was something terrible to witness the silent agony, the
mute despair of Noirtier, whose tears silently rolled down
his cheeks. Villefort retired to his study, and d'Avrigny
left to summon the doctor of the mayoralty, whose office it
is to examine bodies after decease, and who is expressly
named "the doctor of the dead." M. Noirtier could not be
persuaded to quit his grandchild. At the end of a quarter of
an hour M. d'Avrigny returned with his associate they found
the outer gate closed, and not a servant remaining in the
house Villefort himself was obliged to open to them. But he
stopped on the landing he had not the courage to again
visit the death chamber. The two doctors, therefore, entered
the room alone. Noirtier was near the bed, pale, motionless,
and silent as the corpse. The district doctor approached
with the indifference of a man accustomed to spend half his
time amongst the dead he then lifted the sheet which was
placed over the face, and just unclosed the lips.
"Alas," said d'Avrigny, "she is indeed dead, poor child"
"Yes," answered the doctor laconically, dropping the sheet
he had raised. Noirtier uttered a kind of hoarse, rattling
sound the old man's eyes sparkled, and the good doctor
understood that he wished to behold his child. He therefore
approached the bed, and while his companion was dipping the
fingers with which he had touched the lips of the corpse in
chloride of lime, he uncovered the calm and pale face, which
looked like that of a sleeping angel. A tear, which appeared
in the old man's eye, expressed his thanks to the doctor.
The doctor of the dead then laid his permit on the corner of
the table, and having fulfilled his duty, was conducted out
by d'Avrigny. Villefort met them at the door of his study
having in a few words thanked the district doctor, he turned
to d'Avrigny, and said,  "And now the priest."
"Is there any particular priest you wish to pray with
Valentine?" asked d'Avrigny.
"No." said Villefort "fetch the nearest."
"The nearest," said the district doctor, "is a good Italian
abbe, who lives next door to you. Shall I call on him as I
pass?"
"D'Avrigny," said Villefort, "be so kind, I beseech you, as
to accompany this gentleman. Here is the key of the door, so
that you can go in and out as you please you will bring the
priest with you, and will oblige me by introducing him into
my child's room."
"Do you wish to see him?"
"I only wish to be alone. You will excuse me, will you not?
A priest can understand a father's grief." And M. de
Villefort, giving the key to d'Avrigny, again bade farewell
to the strange doctor, and retired to his study, where he
began to work. For some temperaments work is a remedy for
all afflictions. As the doctors entered the street, they saw
a man in a cassock standing on the threshold of the next
door. "This is the abbe of whom I spoke," said the doctor to
d'Avrigny. D'Avrigny accosted the priest. "Sir," he said,
"are you disposed to confer a great obligation on an unhappy
father who has just lost his daughter? I mean M. de
Villefort, the king's attorney."
"Ah," said the priest, in a marked Italian accent "yes, I
have heard that death is in that house."
"Then I need not tell you what kind of service he requires
of you."
"I was about to offer myself, sir," said the priest "it is
our mission to forestall our duties."
"It is a young girl."
"I know it, sir the servants who fled from the house
informed me. I also know that her name is Valentine, and I
have already prayed for her."
"Thank you, sir," said d'Avrigny "since you have commenced
your sacred office, deign to continue it. Come and watch by
the dead, and all the wretched family will be grateful to
you."
"I am going, sir and I do not hesitate to say that no
prayers will be more fervent than mine." D'Avrigny took the
priest's hand, and without meeting Villefort, who was
engaged in his study, they reached Valentine's room, which
on the following night was to be occupied by the
undertakers. On entering the room, Noirtier's eyes met those
of the abbe, and no doubt he read some particular expression
in them, for he remained in the room. D'Avrigny recommended
the attention of the priest to the living as well as to the
dead, and the abbe promised to devote his prayers to
Valentine and his attentions to Noirtier. In order,
doubtless, that he might not be disturbed while fulfilling
his sacred mission, the priest rose as soon as d'Avrigny
departed, and not only bolted the door through which the
doctor had just left, but also that leading to Madame de
Villefort's room.
Chapter 
Danglars Signature.
The next morning dawned dull and cloudy. During the night
the undertakers had executed their melancholy office, and
wrapped the corpse in the windingsheet, which, whatever may
be said about the equality of death, is at least a last
proof of the luxury so pleasing in life. This windingsheet
was nothing more than a beautiful piece of cambric, which
the young girl had bought a fortnight before. During the
evening two men, engaged for the purpose, had carried
Noirtier from Valentine's room into his own, and contrary to
all expectation there was no difficulty in withdrawing him
from his child. The Abbe Busoni had watched till daylight,
and then left without calling any one. D'Avrigny returned
about eight o'clock in the morning he met Villefort on his
way to Noirtier's room, and accompanied him to see how the
old man had slept. They found him in the large armchair,
which served him for a bed, enjoying a calm, nay, almost a
smiling sleep. They both stood in amazement at the door.
"See," said d'Avrigny to Villefort, "nature knows how to
alleviate the deepest sorrow. No one can say that M.
Noirtier did not love his child, and yet he sleeps."
"Yes, you are right," replied Villefort, surprised "he
sleeps, indeed And this is the more strange, since the
least contradiction keeps him awake all night."
"Grief has stunned him," replied d'Avrigny and they both
returned thoughtfully to the procureur's study.
"See, I have not slept," said Villefort, showing his
undisturbed bed "grief does not stun me. I have not been in
bed for two nights but then look at my desk see what I
have written during these two days and nights. I have filled
those papers, and have made out the accusation against the
assassin Benedetto. Oh, work, work,  my passion, my joy,
my delight,  it is for thee to alleviate my sorrows" and
he convulsively grasped the hand of d'Avrigny.
"Do you require my services now?" asked d'Avrigny.
"No," said Villefort "only return again at eleven o'clock
at twelve the  the  oh, heavens, my poor, poor child"
and the procureur again becoming a man, lifted up his eyes
and groaned.
"Shall you be present in the reception room?"
"No I have a cousin who has undertaken this sad office. I
shall work, doctor  when I work I forget everything." And,
indeed, no sooner had the doctor left the room, than he was
again absorbed in study. On the doorsteps d'Avrigny met the
cousin whom Villefort had mentioned, a personage as
insignificant in our story as in the world he occupied 
one of those beings designed from their birth to make
themselves useful to others. He was punctual, dressed in
black, with crape around his hat, and presented himself at
his cousin's with a face made up for the occasion, and which
he could alter as might be required. At twelve o'clock the
mourningcoaches rolled into the paved court, and the Rue du
Faubourg SaintHonore was filled with a crowd of idlers,
equally pleased to witness the festivities or the mourning
of the rich, and who rush with the same avidity to a funeral
procession as to the marriage of a duchess.
Gradually the receptionroom filled, and some of our old
friends made their appearance  we mean Debray,
ChateauRenaud, and Beauchamp, accompanied by all the
leading men of the day at the bar, in literature, or the
army, for M. de Villefort moved in the first Parisian
circles, less owing to his social position than to his
personal merit. The cousin standing at the door ushered in
the guests, and it was rather a relief to the indifferent to
see a person as unmoved as themselves, and who did not exact
a mournful face or force tears, as would have been the case
with a father, a brother, or a lover. Those who were
acquainted soon formed into little groups. One of them was
made of Debray, ChateauRenaud, and Beauchamp.
"Poor girl," said Debray, like the rest, paying an
involuntary tribute to the sad event,  "poor girl, so
young, so rich, so beautiful Could you have imagined this
scene, ChateauRenaud, when we saw her, at the most three
weeks ago, about to sign that contract?"
"Indeed, no," said ChateauRenaud  "Did you know her?"
"I spoke to her once or twice at Madame de Morcerf's, among
the rest she appeared to me charming, though rather
melancholy. Where is her stepmother? Do you know?"
"She is spending the day with the wife of the worthy
gentleman who is receiving us."
"Who is he?"
"Whom do you mean?"
"The gentleman who receives us? Is he a deputy?"
"Oh, no. I am condemned to witness those gentlemen every
day," said Beauchamp "but he is perfectly unknown to me."
"Have you mentioned this death in your paper?"
"It has been mentioned, but the article is not mine indeed,
I doubt if it will please M. Villefort, for it says that if
four successive deaths had happened anywhere else than in
the house of the king's attorney, he would have interested
himself somewhat more about it."
"Still," said ChateauRenaud, "Dr. d'Avrigny, who attends my
mother, declares he is in despair about it. But whom are you
seeking, Debray?"
"I am seeking the Count of Monte Cristo" said the young man.
"I met him on the boulevard, on my way here," said
Beauchamp. "I think he is about to leave Paris he was going
to his banker."
"His banker? Danglars is his banker, is he not?" asked
ChateauRenaud of Debray.
"I believe so," replied the secretary with slight
uneasiness. "But Monte Cristo is not the only one I miss
here I do not see Morrel."
"Morrel? Do they know him?" asked ChateauRenaud. "I think
he has only been introduced to Madame de Villefort."
"Still, he ought to have been here," said Debray "I wonder
what will be talked about tonight this funeral is the news
of the day. But hush, here comes our minister of justice he
will feel obliged to make some little speech to the cousin,"
and the three young men drew near to listen. Beauchamp told
the truth when he said that on his way to the funeral he had
met Monte Cristo, who was directing his steps towards the
Rue de la Chausse d'Antin, to M. Danglars'.
The banker saw the carriage of the count enter the court
yard, and advanced to meet him with a sad, though affable
smile. "Well," said he, extending his hand to Monte Cristo,
"I suppose you have come to sympathize with me, for indeed
misfortune has taken possession of my house. When I
perceived you, I was just asking myself whether I had not
wished harm towards those poor Morcerfs, which would have
justified the proverb of "He who wishes misfortunes to
happen to others experiences them himself.' Well, on my word
of honor, I answered, "No' I wished no ill to Morcerf he
was a little proud, perhaps, for a man who like myself has
risen from nothing but we all have our faults. Do you know,
count, that persons of our time of life  not that you
belong to the class, you are still a young man,  but as I
was saying, persons of our time of life have been very
unfortunate this year. For example, look at the puritanical
procureur, who has just lost his daughter, and in fact
nearly all his family, in so singular a manner Morcerf
dishonored and dead and then myself covered with ridicule
through the villany of Benedetto besides" 
"Besides what?" asked the Count.
"Alas, do you not know?"
"What new calamity?"
"My daughter" 
"Mademoiselle Danglars?"
"Eugenie has left us"
"Good heavens, what are you telling me?"
"The truth, my dear count. Oh, how happy you must be in not
having either wife or children"
"Do you think so?"
"Indeed I do."
"And so Mademoiselle Danglars" 
"She could not endure the insult offered to us by that
wretch, so she asked permission to travel."
"And is she gone?"
"The other night she left."
"With Madame Danglars?"
"No, with a relation. But still, we have quite lost our dear
Eugenie for I doubt whether her pride will ever allow her
to return to France."
"Still, baron," said Monte Cristo, "family griefs, or indeed
any other affliction which would crush a man whose child was
his only treasure, are endurable to a millionaire.
Philosophers may well say, and practical men will always
support the opinion, that money mitigates many trials and
if you admit the efficacy of this sovereign balm, you ought
to be very easily consoled  you, the king of finance, the
focus of immeasurable power."
Danglars looked at him askance, as though to ascertain
whether he spoke seriously. "Yes," he answered, "if a
fortune brings consolation, I ought to be consoled I am
rich."
"So rich, dear sir, that your fortune resembles the
pyramids if you wished to demolish them you could not, and
if it were possible, you would not dare" Danglars smiled at
the goodnatured pleasantry of the count. "That reminds me,"
he said, "that when you entered I was on the point of
signing five little bonds I have already signed two will
you allow me to do the same to the others?"
"Pray do so."
There was a moment's silence, during which the noise of the
banker's pen was alone heard, while Monte Cristo examined
the gilt mouldings on the ceiling. "Are they Spanish,
Haitian, or Neapolitan bonds?" said Monte Cristo. "No," said
Danglars, smiling, "they are bonds on the bank of France,
payable to bearer. Stay, count," he added, "you, who may be
called the emperor, if I claim the title of king of finance,
have you many pieces of paper of this size, each worth a
million?" The count took into his hands the papers, which
Danglars had so proudly presented to him, and read 
"To the Governor of the Bank. Please pay to my order, from
the fund deposited by me, the sum of a million, and charge
the same to my account.
"Baron Danglars."
"One, two, three, four, five," said Monte Cristo "five
millions  why what a Croesus you are"
"This is how I transact business," said Danglars.
"It is really wonderful," said the count "above all, if, as
I suppose, it is payable at sight."
"It is, indeed, said Danglars.
"It is a fine thing to have such credit really, it is only
in France these things are done. Five millions on five
little scraps of paper  it must be seen to be believed."
"You do not doubt it?"
"No"
"You say so with an accent  stay, you shall be convinced
take my clerk to the bank, and you will see him leave it
with an order on the Treasury for the same sum."
"No," said Monte Cristo folding the five notes, "most
decidedly not the thing is so curious, I will make the
experiment myself. I am credited on you for six millions. I
have drawn nine hundred thousand francs, you therefore still
owe me five millions and a hundred thousand francs. I will
take the five scraps of paper that I now hold as bonds, with
your signature alone, and here is a receipt in full for the
six millions between us. I had prepared it beforehand, for I
am much in want of money today." And Monte Cristo placed
the bonds in his pocket with one hand, while with the other
he held out the receipt to Danglars. If a thunderbolt had
fallen at the banker's feet, he could not have experienced
greater terror.
"What," he stammered, "do you mean to keep that money?
Excuse me, excuse me, but I owe this money to the charity
fund,  a deposit which I promised to pay this morning."
"Oh, well, then," said Monte Cristo, "I am not particular
about these five notes, pay me in a different form I
wished, from curiosity, to take these, that I might be able
to say that without any advice or preparation the house of
Danglars had paid me five millions without a minute's delay
it would have been remarkable. But here are your bonds pay
me differently" and he held the bonds towards Danglars, who
seized them like a vulture extending its claws to withhold
the food that is being wrested from its grasp. Suddenly he
rallied, made a violent effort to restrain himself, and then
a smile gradually widened the features of his disturbed
countenance.
"Certainly," he said, "your receipt is money."
"Oh dear, yes and if you were at Rome, the house of Thomson
 French would make no more difficulty about paying the
money on my receipt than you have just done."
"Pardon me, count, pardon me."
"Then I may keep this money?"
"Yes," said Danglars, while the perspiration started from
the roots of his hair. "Yes, keep it  keep it."
Monte Cristo replaced the notes in his pocket with that
indescribable expression which seemed to say, "Come,
reflect if you repent there is still time."
"No," said Danglars, "no, decidedly no keep my signatures.
But you know none are so formal as bankers in transacting
business I intended this money for the charity fund, and I
seemed to be robbing them if I did not pay them with these
precise bonds. How absurd  as if one crown were not as
good as another. Excuse me" and he began to laugh loudly,
but nervously.
"Certainly, I excuse you," said Monte Cristo graciously,
"and pocket them." And he placed the bonds in his
pocketbook.
"But," said Danglars, "there is still a sum of one hundred
thousand francs?"
"Oh, a mere nothing," said Monte Cristo. "The balance would
come to about that sum but keep it, and we shall be quits."
"Count." said Danglars, "are you speaking seriously?"
"I never joke with bankers," said Monte Cristo in a freezing
manner, which repelled impertinence and he turned to the
door, just as the valet de chambre announced,  "M. de
Boville, receivergeneral of the charities."
"Ma foi," said Monte Cristo "I think I arrived just in time
to obtain your signatures, or they would have been disputed
with me."
Danglars again became pale, and hastened to conduct the
count out. Monte Cristo exchanged a ceremonious bow with M.
de Boville, who was standing in the waitingroom, and who
was introduced into Danglars' room as soon as the count had
left. The count's sad face was illumined by a faint smile,
as he noticed the portfolio which the receivergeneral held
in his hand. At the door he found his carriage, and was
immediately driven to the bank. Meanwhile Danglars,
repressing all emotion, advanced to meet the
receivergeneral. We need not say that a smile of
condescension was stamped upon his lips. "Goodmorning,
creditor," said he "for I wager anything it is the creditor
who visits me."
"You are right, baron," answered M. de Boville "the
charities present themselves to you through me the widows
and orphans depute me to receive alms to the amount of five
millions from you."
"And yet they say orphans are to be pitied," said Danglars,
wishing to prolong the jest. "Poor things"
"Here I am in their name," said M. de Boville "but did you
receive my letter yesterday?"
"Yes."
"I have brought my receipt."
"My dear M. de Boville, your widows and orphans must oblige
me by waiting twentyfour hours, since M. de Monte Cristo
whom you just saw leaving here  you did see him, I think?"
"Yes well?"
"Well, M. de Monte Cristo has just carried off their five
millions."
"How so?"
"The count has an unlimited credit upon me a credit opened
by Thomson  French, of Rome he came to demand five
millions at once, which I paid him with checks on the bank.
My funds are deposited there, and you can understand that if
I draw out ten millions on the same day it will appear
rather strange to the governor. Two days will be a different
thing," said Danglars, smiling.
"Come," said Boville, with a tone of entire incredulity,
"five millions to that gentleman who just left, and who
bowed to me as though he knew me?"
"Perhaps he knows you, though you do not know him M. de
Monte Cristo knows everybody."
"Five millions"
"Here is his receipt. Believe your own eyes." M. de Boville
took the paper Danglars presented him, and read 
"Received of Baron Danglars the sum of five million one
hundred thousand francs, to be repaid on demand by the house
of Thomson  French of Rome."
"It is really true," said M. de Boville.
"Do you know the house of Thomson  French?"
"Yes, I once had business to transact with it to the amount
of , francs but since then I have not heard it
mentioned."
"It is one of the best houses in Europe," said Danglars,
carelessly throwing down the receipt on his desk.
"And he had five millions in your hands alone Why, this
Count of Monte Cristo must be a nabob?"
"Indeed I do not know what he is he has three unlimited
credits  one on me, one on Rothschild, one on Lafitte
and, you see," he added carelessly, "he has given me the
preference, by leaving a balance of , francs." M. de
Boville manifested signs of extraordinary admiration. "I
must visit him," he said, "and obtain some pious grant from
him."
"Oh, you may make sure of him his charities alone amount to
, francs a month."
"It is magnificent I will set before him the example of
Madame de Morcerf and her son."
"What example?"
"They gave all their fortune to the hospitals."
"What fortune?"
"Their own  M. de Morcerf's, who is deceased."
"For what reason?"
"Because they would not spend money so guiltily acquired."
"And what are they to live upon?"
"The mother retires into the country, and the son enters the
army."
"Well, I must confess, these are scruples."
"I registered their deed of gift yesterday."
"And how much did they possess?"
"Oh, not much  from twelve to thirteen hundred thousand
francs. But to return to our millions."
"Certainly," said Danglars, in the most natural tone in the
world. "Are you then pressed for this money?"
"Yes for the examination of our cash takes place
tomorrow."
"Tomorrow? Why did you not tell me so before? Why, it is as
good as a century At what hour does the examination take
place?"
"At two o'clock."
"Send at twelve," said Danglars, smiling. M. de Boville said
nothing, but nodded his head, and took up the portfolio.
"Now I think of it, you can do better," said Danglars.
"How do you mean?"
"The receipt of M. de Monte Cristo is as good as money take
it to Rothschild's or Lafitte's, and they will take it off
your hands at once."
"What, though payable at Rome?"
"Certainly it will only cost you a discount of , or
, francs." The receiver started back. "Ma foi," he said,
"I prefer waiting till tomorrow. What a proposition"
"I thought, perhaps," said Danglars with supreme
impertinence, "that you had a deficiency to make up?"
"Indeed," said the receiver.
"And if that were the case it would be worth while to make
some sacrifice."
"Thank you, no, sir."
"Then it will be tomorrow."
"Yes but without fail."
"Ah, you are laughing at me send tomorrow at twelve, and
the bank shall be notified."
"I will come myself."
"Better still, since it will afford me the pleasure of
seeing you." They shook hands. "By the way," said M. de
Boville, "are you not going to the funeral of poor
Mademoiselle de Villefort, which I met on my road here?"
"No," said the banker "I have appeared rather ridiculous
since that affair of Benedetto, so I remain in the
background."
"Bah, you are wrong. How were you to blame in that affair?"
"Listen  when one bears an irreproachable name, as I do,
one is rather sensitive."
"Everybody pities you, sir and, above all, Mademoiselle
Danglars"
"Poor Eugenie" said Danglars "do you know she is going to
embrace a religious life?"
"No."
"Alas, it is unhappily but too true. The day after the
event, she decided on leaving Paris with a nun of her
acquaintance they are gone to seek a very strict convent in
Italy or Spain."
"Oh, it is terrible" and M. de Boville retired with this
exclamation, after expressing acute sympathy with the
father. But he had scarcely left before Danglars, with an
energy of action those can alone understand who have seen
Robert Macaire represented by Frederic, exclaimed, 
"Fool" Then enclosing Monte Cristo's receipt in a little
pocketbook, he added  "Yes, come at twelve o'clock I
shall then be far away." Then he doublelocked his door,
emptied all his drawers, collected about fifty thousand
francs in banknotes, burned several papers, left others
exposed to view, and then commenced writing a letter which
he addressed
"To Madame la Baronne Danglars."
 Frederic Lemaitre  French actor . Robert
Macaire is the hero of two favorite melodramas  "Chien de
Montargis" and "Chien d'Aubry"  and the name is applied to
bold criminals as a term of derision.
"I will place it on her table myself tonight," he murmured.
Then taking a passport from his drawer he said,  "Good, it
is available for two months longer."
Chapter 
The Cemetery of PerelaChaise.
M. de Boville had indeed met the funeral procession which
was taking Valentine to her last home on earth. The weather
was dull and stormy, a cold wind shook the few remaining
yellow leaves from the boughs of the trees, and scattered
them among the crowd which filled the boulevards. M. de
Villefort, a true Parisian, considered the cemetery of
PerelaChaise alone worthy of receiving the mortal remains
of a Parisian family there alone the corpses belonging to
him would be surrounded by worthy associates. He had
therefore purchased a vault, which was quickly occupied by
members of his family. On the front of the monument was
inscribed "The families of SaintMeran and Villefort," for
such had been the last wish expressed by poor Renee,
Valentine's mother. The pompous procession therefore wended
its way towards PerelaChaise from the Faubourg
SaintHonore. Having crossed Paris, it passed through the
Faubourg du Temple, then leaving the exterior boulevards, it
reached the cemetery. More than fifty private carriages
followed the twenty mourningcoaches, and behind them more
than five hundred persons joined in the procession on foot.
These last consisted of all the young people whom
Valentine's death had struck like a thunderbolt, and who,
notwithstanding the raw chilliness of the season, could not
refrain from paying a last tribute to the memory of the
beautiful, chaste, and adorable girl, thus cut off in the
flower of her youth. As they left Paris, an equipage with
four horses, at full speed, was seen to draw up suddenly it
contained Monte Cristo. The count left the carriage and
mingled in the crowd who followed on foot. ChateauRenaud
perceived him and immediately alighting from his coupe,
joined him.
The count looked attentively through every opening in the
crowd he was evidently watching for some one, but his
search ended in disappointment. "Where is Morrel?" he asked
"do either of these gentlemen know where he is?"
"We have already asked that question," said ChateauRenaud,
"for none of us has seen him." The count was silent, but
continued to gaze around him. At length they arrived at the
cemetery. The piercing eye of Monte Cristo glanced through
clusters of bushes and trees, and was soon relieved from all
anxiety, for seeing a shadow glide between the yewtrees,
Monte Cristo recognized him whom he sought. One funeral is
generally very much like another in this magnificent
metropolis. Black figures are seen scattered over the long
white avenues the silence of earth and heaven is alone
broken by the noise made by the crackling branches of hedges
planted around the monuments then follows the melancholy
chant of the priests, mingled now and then with a sob of
anguish, escaping from some woman concealed behind a mass of
flowers.
The shadow Monte Cristo had noticed passed rapidly behind
the tomb of Abelard and Heloise, placed itself close to the
heads of the horses belonging to the hearse, and following
the undertaker's men, arrived with them at the spot
appointed for the burial. Each person's attention was
occupied. Monte Cristo saw nothing but the shadow, which no
one else observed. Twice the count left the ranks to see
whether the object of his interest had any concealed weapon
beneath his clothes. When the procession stopped, this
shadow was recognized as Morrel, who, with his coat buttoned
up to his throat, his face livid, and convulsively crushing
his hat between his fingers, leaned against a tree, situated
on an elevation commanding the mausoleum, so that none of
the funeral details could escape his observation. Everything
was conducted in the usual manner. A few men, the least
impressed of all by the scene, pronounced a discourse, some
deploring this premature death, others expatiating on the
grief of the father, and one very ingenious person quoting
the fact that Valentine had solicited pardon of her father
for criminals on whom the arm of justice was ready to fall
until at length they exhausted their stores of metaphor
and mournful speeches.
Monte Cristo heard and saw nothing, or rather he only saw
Morrel, whose calmness had a frightful effect on those who
knew what was passing in his heart. "See," said Beauchamp,
pointing out Morrel to Debray. "What is he doing up there?"
And they called ChateauRenaud's attention to him.
"How pale he is" said ChateauRenaud, shuddering.
"He is cold," said Debray.
"Not at all," said ChateauRenaud, slowly "I think he is
violently agitated. He is very susceptible."
"Bah," said Debray "he scarcely knew Mademoiselle de
Villefort you said so yourself."
"True. Still I remember he danced three times with her at
Madame de Morcerf's. Do you recollect that ball, count,
where you produced such an effect?"
"No, I do not," replied Monte Cristo, without even knowing
of what or to whom he was speaking, so much was he occupied
in watching Morrel, who was holding his breath with emotion.
"The discourse is over farewell, gentlemen," said the
count. And he disappeared without anyone seeing whither he
went. The funeral being over, the guests returned to Paris.
ChateauRenaud looked for a moment for Morrel but while
they were watching the departure of the count, Morrel had
quitted his post, and ChateauRenaud, failing in his search,
joined Debray and Beauchamp.
Monte Cristo concealed himself behind a large tomb and
awaited the arrival of Morrel, who by degrees approached the
tomb now abandoned by spectators and workmen. Morrel threw a
glance around, but before it reached the spot occupied by
Monte Cristo the latter had advanced yet nearer, still
unperceived. The young man knelt down. The count, with
outstretched neck and glaring eyes, stood in an attitude
ready to pounce upon Morrel upon the first occasion. Morrel
bent his head till it touched the stone, then clutching the
grating with both hands, he murmured,  "Oh, Valentine"
The count's heart was pierced by the utterance of these two
words he stepped forward, and touching the young man's
shoulder, said,  "I was looking for you, my friend." Monte
Cristo expected a burst of passion, but he was deceived, for
Morrel turning round, said calmly, 
"You see I was praying." The scrutinizing glance of the
count searched the young man from head to foot. He then
seemed more easy.
"Shall I drive you back to Paris?" he asked.
"No, thank you."
"Do you wish anything?"
"Leave me to pray." The count withdrew without opposition,
but it was only to place himself in a situation where he
could watch every movement of Morrel, who at length arose,
brushed the dust from his knees, and turned towards Paris,
without once looking back. He walked slowly down the Rue de
la Roquette. The count, dismissing his carriage, followed
him about a hundred paces behind. Maximilian crossed the
canal and entered the Rue Meslay by the boulevards. Five
minutes after the door had been closed on Morrel's entrance,
it was again opened for the count. Julie was at the entrance
of the garden, where she was attentively watching Penelon,
who, entering with zeal into his profession of gardener, was
very busy grafting some Bengal roses. "Ah, count," she
exclaimed, with the delight manifested by every member of
the family whenever he visited the Rue Meslay.
"Maximilian has just returned, has he not, madame?" asked
the count.
"Yes, I think I saw him pass but pray, call Emmanuel."
"Excuse me, madame, but I must go up to Maximilian's room
this instant," replied Monte Cristo, "I have something of
the greatest importance to tell him."
"Go, then," she said with a charming smile, which
accompanied him until he had disappeared. Monte Cristo soon
ran up the staircase conducting from the groundfloor to
Maximilian's room when he reached the landing he listened
attentively, but all was still. Like many old houses
occupied by a single family, the room door was panelled with
glass but it was locked, Maximilian was shut in, and it was
impossible to see what was passing in the room, because a
red curtain was drawn before the glass. The count's anxiety
was manifested by a bright color which seldom appeared on
the face of that imperturbable man.
"What shall I do" he uttered, and reflected for a moment
"shall I ring? No, the sound of a bell, announcing a
visitor, will but accelerate the resolution of one in
Maximilian's situation, and then the bell would be followed
by a louder noise." Monte Cristo trembled from head to foot
and as if his determination had been taken with the rapidity
of lightning, he struck one of the panes of glass with his
elbow the glass was shivered to atoms, then withdrawing the
curtain he saw Morrel, who had been writing at his desk,
bound from his seat at the noise of the broken window.
"I beg a thousand pardons," said the count, "there is
nothing the matter, but I slipped down and broke one of your
panes of glass with my elbow. Since it is opened, I will
take advantage of it to enter your room do not disturb
yourself  do not disturb yourself" And passing his hand
through the broken glass, the count opened the door. Morrel,
evidently discomposed, came to meet Monte Cristo less with
the intention of receiving him than to exclude his entry.
"Ma foi," said Monte Cristo, rubbing his elbow, "it's all
your servant's fault your stairs are so polished, it is
like walking on glass."
"Are you hurt, sir?" coldly asked Morrel.
"I believe not. But what are you about there? You were
writing."
"I?"
"Your fingers are stained with ink."
"Ah, true, I was writing. I do sometimes, soldier though I
am."
Monte Cristo advanced into the room Maximilian was obliged
to let him pass, but he followed him. "You were writing?"
said Monte Cristo with a searching look.
"I have already had the honor of telling you I was," said
Morrel.
The count looked around him. "Your pistols are beside your
desk," said Monte Cristo, pointing with his finger to the
pistols on the table.
"I am on the point of starting on a journey," replied Morrel
disdainfully.
"My friend," exclaimed Monte Cristo in a tone of exquisite
sweetness.
"Sir?"
"My friend, my dear Maximilian, do not make a hasty
resolution, I entreat you."
"I make a hasty resolution?" said Morrel, shrugging his
shoulders "is there anything extraordinary in a journey?"
"Maximilian," said the count, "let us both lay aside the
mask we have assumed. You no more deceive me with that false
calmness than I impose upon you with my frivolous
solicitude. You can understand, can you not, that to have
acted as I have done, to have broken that glass, to have
intruded on the solitude of a friend  you can understand
that, to have done all this, I must have been actuated by
real uneasiness, or rather by a terrible conviction. Morrel,
you are going to destroy yourself"
"Indeed, count," said Morrel, shuddering "what has put this
into your head?"
"I tell you that you are about to destroy yourself,"
continued the count, "and here is proof of what I say" and,
approaching the desk, he removed the sheet of paper which
Morrel had placed over the letter he had begun, and took the
latter in his hands.
Morrel rushed forward to tear it from him, but Monte Cristo
perceiving his intention, seized his wrist with his iron
grasp. "You wish to destroy yourself," said the count "you
have written it."
"Well," said Morrel, changing his expression of calmness for
one of violence  "well, and if I do intend to turn this
pistol against myself, who shall prevent me  who will dare
prevent me? All my hopes are blighted, my heart is broken,
my life a burden, everything around me is sad and mournful
earth has become distasteful to me, and human voices
distract me. It is a mercy to let me die, for if I live I
shall lose my reason and become mad. When, sir, I tell you
all this with tears of heartfelt anguish, can you reply that
I am wrong, can you prevent my putting an end to my
miserable existence? Tell me, sir, could you have the
courage to do so?"
"Yes, Morrel," said Monte Cristo, with a calmness which
contrasted strangely with the young man's excitement "yes,
I would do so."
"You?" exclaimed Morrel, with increasing anger and reproach
"you, who have deceived me with false hopes, who have
cheered and soothed me with vain promises, when I might, if
not have saved her, at least have seen her die in my arms
You, who pretend to understand everything, even the hidden
sources of knowledge,  and who enact the part of a
guardian angel upon earth, and could not even find an
antidote to a poison administered to a young girl Ah, sir,
indeed you would inspire me with pity, were you not hateful
in my eyes."
"Morrel" 
"Yes you tell me to lay aside the mask, and I will do so,
be satisfied When you spoke to me at the cemetery, I
answered you  my heart was softened when you arrived
here, I allowed you to enter. But since you abuse my
confidence, since you have devised a new torture after I
thought I had exhausted them all, then, Count of Monte
Cristo my pretended benefactor  then, Count of Monte
Cristo, the universal guardian, be satisfied, you shall
witness the death of your friend" and Morrel, with a
maniacal laugh, again rushed towards the pistols.
"And I again repeat, you shall not commit suicide."
"Prevent me, then" replied Morrel, with another struggle,
which, like the first, failed in releasing him from the
count's iron grasp.
"I will prevent you."
"And who are you, then, that arrogate to yourself this
tyrannical right over free and rational beings?"
"Who am I?" repeated Monte Cristo. "Listen I am the only
man in the world having the right to say to you, "Morrel,
your father's son shall not die today'" and Monte Cristo,
with an expression of majesty and sublimity, advanced with
arms folded toward the young man, who, involuntarily
overcome by the commanding manner of this man, recoiled a
step.
"Why do you mention my father?" stammered he "why do you
mingle a recollection of him with the affairs of today?"
"Because I am he who saved your father's life when he wished
to destroy himself, as you do today  because I am the man
who sent the purse to your young sister, and the Pharaon to
old Morrel  because I am the Edmond Dantes who nursed you,
a child, on my knees." Morrel made another step back,
staggering, breathless, crushed then all his strength give
way, and he fell prostrate at the feet of Monte Cristo. Then
his admirable nature underwent a complete and sudden
revulsion he arose, rushed out of the room and to the
stairs, exclaiming energetically, "Julie, Julie  Emmanuel,
Emmanuel"
Monte Cristo endeavored also to leave, but Maximilian would
have died rather than relax his hold of the handle of the
door, which he closed upon the count. Julie, Emmanuel, and
some of the servants, ran up in alarm on hearing the cries
of Maximilian. Morrel seized their hands, and opening the
door exclaimed in a voice choked with sobs, "On your knees
on your knees  he is our benefactor  the saviour of
our father He is" 
He would have added "Edmond Dantes," but the count seized
his arm and prevented him. Julie threw herself into the arms
of the count Emmanuel embraced him as a guardian angel
Morrel again fell on his knees, and struck the ground with
his forehead. Then the ironhearted man felt his heart swell
in his breast a flame seemed to rush from his throat to his
eyes, he bent his head and wept. For a while nothing was
heard in the room but a succession of sobs, while the
incense from their grateful hearts mounted to heaven. Julie
had scarcely recovered from her deep emotion when she rushed
out of the room, descended to the next floor, ran into the
drawingroom with childlike joy and raised the crystal globe
which covered the purse given by the unknown of the Allees
de Meillan. Meanwhile, Emmanuel in a broken voice said to
the count, "Oh, count, how could you, hearing us so often
speak of our unknown benefactor, seeing us pay such homage
of gratitude and adoration to his memory,  how could you
continue so long without discovering yourself to us? Oh, it
was cruel to us, and  dare I say it?  to you also."
"Listen, my friends," said the count  "I may call you so
since we have really been friends for the last eleven years
the discovery of this secret has been occasioned by a
great event which you must never know. I wish to bury it
during my whole life in my own bosom, but your brother
Maximilian wrested it from me by a violence he repents of
now, I am sure." Then turning around, and seeing that
Morrel, still on his knees, had thrown himself into an
armchair, be added in a low voice, pressing Emmanuel's hand
significantly, "Watch over him."
"Why so?" asked the young man, surprised.
"I cannot explain myself but watch over him." Emmanuel
looked around the room and caught sight of the pistols his
eyes rested on the weapons, and he pointed to them. Monte
Cristo bent his head. Emmanuel went towards the pistols.
"Leave them," said Monte Cristo. Then walking towards
Morrel, he took his hand the tumultuous agitation of the
young man was succeeded by a profound stupor. Julie
returned, holding the silken purse in her hands, while tears
of joy rolled down her cheeks, like dewdrops on the rose.
"Here is the relic," she said "do not think it will be less
dear to us now we are acquainted with our benefactor"
"My child," said Monte Cristo, coloring, "allow me to take
back that purse? Since you now know my face, I wish to be
remembered alone through the affection I hope you will grant
me.
"Oh," said Julie, pressing the purse to her heart, "no, no,
I beseech you do not take it, for some unhappy day you will
leave us, will you not?"
"You have guessed rightly, madame," replied Monte Cristo,
smiling "in a week I shall have left this country, where so
many persons who merit the vengeance of heaven lived
happily, while my father perished of hunger and grief."
While announcing his departure, the count fixed his eyes on
Morrel, and remarked that the words, "I shall have left this
country," had failed to rouse him from his lethargy. He then
saw that he must make another struggle against the grief of
his friend, and taking the hands of Emmanuel and Julie,
which he pressed within his own, he said with the mild
authority of a father, "My kind friends, leave me alone with
Maximilian." Julie saw the means offered of carrying off her
precious relic, which Monte Cristo had forgotten. She drew
her husband to the door. "Let us leave them," she said. The
count was alone with Morrel, who remained motionless as a
statue.
"Come," said MonteCristo, touching his shoulder with his
finger, "are you a man again, Maximilian?"
"Yes for I begin to suffer again."
The count frowned, apparently in gloomy hesitation.
"Maximilian, Maximilian," he said, "the ideas you yield to
are unworthy of a Christian."
"Oh, do not fear, my friend," said Morrel, raising his head,
and smiling with a sweet expression on the count "I shall
no longer attempt my life."
"Then we are to have no more pistols  no more despair?"
"No I have found a better remedy for my grief than either a
bullet or a knife."
"Poor fellow, what is it?"
"My grief will kill me of itself."
"My friend," said Monte Cristo, with an expression of
melancholy equal to his own, "listen to me. One day, in a
moment of despair like yours, since it led to a similar
resolution, I also wished to kill myself one day your
father, equally desperate, wished to kill himself too. If
any one had said to your father, at the moment he raised the
pistol to his head  if any one had told me, when in my
prison I pushed back the food I had not tasted for three
days  if anyone had said to either of us then, "Live 
the day will come when you will be happy, and will bless
life'  no matter whose voice had spoken, we should have
heard him with the smile of doubt, or the anguish of
incredulity,  and yet how many times has your father
blessed life while embracing you  how often have I myself"
"Ah," exclaimed Morrel, interrupting the count, "you had
only lost your liberty, my father had only lost his fortune,
but I have lost Valentine."
"Look at me," said Monte Cristo, with that expression which
sometimes made him so eloquent and persuasive  "look at
me. There are no tears in my eyes, nor is there fever in my
veins, yet I see you suffer  you, Maximilian, whom I love
as my own son. Well, does not this tell you that in grief,
as in life, there is always something to look forward to
beyond? Now, if I entreat, if I order you to live, Morrel,
it is in the conviction that one day you will thank me for
having preserved your life."
"Oh, heavens," said the young man, "oh, heavens  what are
you saying, count? Take care. But perhaps you have never
loved"
"Child" replied the count.
"I mean, as I love. You see, I have been a soldier ever
since I attained manhood. I reached the age of twentynine
without loving, for none of the feelings I before then
experienced merit the appellation of love. Well, at
twentynine I saw Valentine for two years I have loved her,
for two years I have seen written in her heart, as in a
book, all the virtues of a daughter and wife. Count, to
possess Valentine would have been a happiness too infinite,
too ecstatic, too complete, too divine for this world, since
it has been denied me but without Valentine the earth is
desolate."
"I have told you to hope," said the count.
"Then have a care, I repeat, for you seek to persuade me,
and if you succeed I should lose my reason, for I should
hope that I could again behold Valentine." The count smiled.
"My friend, my father," said Morrel with excitement, "have a
care, I again repeat, for the power you wield over me alarms
me. Weigh your words before you speak, for my eyes have
already become brighter, and my heart beats strongly be
cautious, or you will make me believe in supernatural
agencies. I must obey you, though you bade me call forth the
dead or walk upon the water."
"Hope, my friend," repeated the count.
"Ah," said Morrel, falling from the height of excitement to
the abyss of despair  "ah, you are playing with me, like
those good, or rather selfish mothers who soothe their
children with honeyed words, because their screams annoy
them. No, my friend, I was wrong to caution you do not
fear, I will bury my grief so deep in my heart, I will
disguise it so, that you shall not even care to sympathize
with me. Adieu, my friend, adieu"
"On the contrary," said the count, "after this time you must
live with me  you must not leave me, and in a week we
shall have left France behind us."
"And you still bid me hope?"
"I tell you to hope, because I have a method of curing you."
"Count, you render me sadder than before, if it be possible.
You think the result of this blow has been to produce an
ordinary grief, and you would cure it by an ordinary remedy
change of scene." And Morrel dropped his head with
disdainful incredulity. "What can I say more?" asked Monte
Cristo. "I have confidence in the remedy I propose, and only
ask you to permit me to assure you of its efficacy."
"Count, you prolong my agony."
"Then," said the count, "your feeble spirit will not even
grant me the trial I request? Come  do you know of what
the Count of Monte Cristo is capable? do you know that he
holds terrestrial beings under his control? nay, that he can
almost work a miracle? Well, wait for the miracle I hope to
accomplish, or" 
"Or?" repeated Morrel.
"Or, take care, Morrel, lest I call you ungrateful."
"Have pity on me, count"
"I feel so much pity towards you, Maximilian, that  listen
to me attentively  if I do not cure you in a month, to the
day, to the very hour, mark my words, Morrel, I will place
loaded pistols before you, and a cup of the deadliest
Italian poison  a poison more sure and prompt than that
which has killed Valentine."
"Will you promise me?"
"Yes for I am a man, and have suffered like yourself, and
also contemplated suicide indeed, often since misfortune
has left me I have longed for the delights of an eternal
sleep."
"But you are sure you will promise me this?" said Morrel,
intoxicated. "I not only promise, but swear it" said Monte
Cristo extending his hand.
"In a month, then, on your honor, if I am not consoled, you
will let me take my life into my own hands, and whatever may
happen you will not call me ungrateful?"
"In a month, to the day, the very hour and the date are
sacred, Maximilian. I do not know whether you remember that
this is the th of September it is ten years today since I
saved your father's life, who wished to die." Morrel seized
the count's hand and kissed it the count allowed him to pay
the homage he felt due to him. "In a month you will find on
the table, at which we shall be then sitting, good pistols
and a delicious draught but, on the other hand, you must
promise me not to attempt your life before that time."
"Oh, I also swear it" Monte Cristo drew the young man
towards him, and pressed him for some time to his heart.
"And now," he said, "after today, you will come and live
with me you can occupy Haidee's apartment, and my daughter
will at least be replaced by my son."
"Haidee?" said Morrel, "what has become of her?"
"She departed last night."
"To leave you?"
"To wait for me. Hold yourself ready then to join me at the
Champs Elysees, and lead me out of this house without any
one seeing my departure." Maximilian hung his head, and
obeyed with childlike reverence.
Chapter 
Dividing the Proceeds.
The apartment on the second floor of the house in the Rue
SaintGermaindesPres, where Albert de Morcerf had selected
a home for his mother, was let to a very mysterious person.
This was a man whose face the concierge himself had never
seen, for in the winter his chin was buried in one of the
large red handkerchiefs worn by gentlemen's coachmen on a
cold night, and in the summer he made a point of always
blowing his nose just as he approached the door. Contrary to
custom, this gentleman had not been watched, for as the
report ran that he was a person of high rank, and one who
would allow no impertinent interference, his incognito was
strictly respected.
His visits were tolerably regular, though occasionally he
appeared a little before or after his time, but generally,
both in summer and winter, he took possession of his
apartment about four o'clock, though he never spent the
night there. At halfpast three in the winter the fire was
lighted by the discreet servant, who had the superintendence
of the little apartment, and in the summer ices were placed
on the table at the same hour. At four o'clock, as we have
already stated, the mysterious personage arrived. Twenty
minutes afterwards a carriage stopped at the house, a lady
alighted in a black or dark blue dress, and always thickly
veiled she passed like a shadow through the lodge, and ran
upstairs without a sound escaping under the touch of her
light foot. No one ever asked her where she was going. Her
face, therefore, like that of the gentleman, was perfectly
unknown to the two concierges, who were perhaps unequalled
throughout the capital for discretion. We need not say she
stopped at the second floor. Then she tapped in a peculiar
manner at a door, which after being opened to admit her was
again fastened, and curiosity penetrated no farther. They
used the same precautions in leaving as in entering the
house. The lady always left first, and as soon as she had
stepped into her carriage, it drove away, sometimes towards
the right hand, sometimes to the left then about twenty
minutes afterwards the gentleman would also leave, buried in
his cravat or concealed by his handkerchief.
The day after Monte Cristo had called upon Danglars, the
mysterious lodger entered at ten o'clock in the morning
instead of four in the afternoon. Almost directly
afterwards, without the usual interval of time, a cab
arrived, and the veiled lady ran hastily upstairs. The door
opened, but before it could be closed, the lady exclaimed
"Oh, Lucien  oh, my friend" The concierge therefore heard
for the first time that the lodger's name was Lucien still,
as he was the very perfection of a doorkeeper, he made up
his mind not to tell his wife. "Well, what is the matter, my
dear?" asked the gentleman whose name the lady's agitation
revealed "tell me what is the matter."
"Oh, Lucien, can I confide in you?"
"Of course, you know you can do so. But what can be the
matter? Your note of this morning has completely bewildered
me. This precipitation  this unusual appointment. Come,
ease me of my anxiety, or else frighten me at once."
"Lucien, a great event has happened" said the lady,
glancing inquiringly at Lucien,  "M. Danglars left last
night"
"Left?  M. Danglars left? Where has he gone?"
"I do not know."
"What do you mean? Has he gone intending not to return?"
"Undoubtedly  at ten o'clock at night his horses took him
to the barrier of Charenton there a postchaise was waiting
for him  he entered it with his valet de chambre, saying
that he was going to Fontainebleau."
"Then what did you mean" 
"Stay  he left a letter for me."
"A letter?"
"Yes read it." And the baroness took from her pocket a
letter which she gave to Debray. Debray paused a moment
before reading, as if trying to guess its contents, or
perhaps while making up his mind how to act, whatever it
might contain. No doubt his ideas were arranged in a few
minutes, for he began reading the letter which caused so
much uneasiness in the heart of the baroness, and which ran
as follows 
"Madame and most faithful wife."
Debray mechanically stopped and looked at the baroness,
whose face became covered with blushes. "Read," she said.
Debray continued 
"When you receive this, you will no longer have a husband.
Oh, you need not be alarmed, you will only have lost him as
you have lost your daughter I mean that I shall be
travelling on one of the thirty or forty roads leading out
of France. I owe you some explanations for my conduct, and
as you are a woman that can perfectly understand me, I will
give them. Listen, then. I received this morning five
millions which I paid away almost directly afterwards
another demand for the same sum was presented to me I put
this creditor off till tomorrow and I intend leaving
today, to escape that tomorrow, which would be rather too
unpleasant for me to endure. You understand this, do you
not, my most precious wife? I say you understand this,
because you are as conversant with my affairs as I am
indeed, I think you understand them better, since I am
ignorant of what has become of a considerable portion of my
fortune, once very tolerable, while I am sure, madame, that
you know perfectly well. For women have infallible
instincts they can even explain the marvellous by an
algebraic calculation they have invented but I, who only
understand my own figures, know nothing more than that one
day these figures deceived me. Have you admired the rapidity
of my fall? Have you been slightly dazzled at the sudden
fusion of my ingots? I confess I have seen nothing but the
fire let us hope you have found some gold among the ashes.
With this consoling idea, I leave you, madame, and most
prudent wife, without any conscientious reproach for
abandoning you you have friends left, and the ashes I have
already mentioned, and above all the liberty I hasten to
restore to you. And here, madame, I must add another word of
explanation. So long as I hoped you were working for the
good of our house and for the fortune of our daughter, I
philosophically closed my eyes but as you have transformed
that house into a vast ruin I will not be the foundation of
another man's fortune. You were rich when I married you, but
little respected. Excuse me for speaking so very candidly,
but as this is intended only for ourselves, I do not see why
I should weigh my words. I have augmented our fortune, and
it has continued to increase during the last fifteen years,
till extraordinary and unexpected catastrophes have suddenly
overturned it,  without any fault of mine, I can honestly
declare. You, madame, have only sought to increase your own,
and I am convinced that you have succeeded. I leave you,
therefore, as I took you,  rich, but little respected.
Adieu I also intend from this time to work on my own
account. Accept my acknowledgments for the example you have
set me, and which I intend following.
"Your very devoted husband,
"Baron Danglars."
The baroness had watched Debray while he read this long and
painful letter, and saw him, notwithstanding his
selfcontrol, change color once or twice. When he had ended
the perusal, he folded the letter and resumed his pensive
attitude. "Well?" asked Madame Danglars, with an anxiety
easy to be understood.
"Well, madame?" unhesitatingly repeated Debray.
"With what ideas does that letter inspire you?"
"Oh, it is simple enough, madame it inspires me with the
idea that M. Danglars has left suspiciously."
"Certainly but is this all you have to say to me?"
"I do not understand you," said Debray with freezing
coldness.
"He is gone Gone, never to return"
"Oh, madame, do not think that"
"I tell you he will never return. I know his character he
is inflexible in any resolutions formed for his own
interests. If he could have made any use of me, he would
have taken me with him he leaves me in Paris, as our
separation will conduce to his benefit  therefore he has
gone, and I am free forever," added Madame Danglars, in the
same supplicating tone. Debray, instead of answering,
allowed her to remain in an attitude of nervous inquiry.
"Well?" she said at length, "do you not answer me?"
"I have but one question to ask you,  what do you intend
to do?"
"I was going to ask you," replied the baroness with a
beating heart.
"Ah, then, you wish to ask advice of me?"
"Yes I do wish to ask your advice," said Madame Danglars
with anxious expectation.
"Then if you wish to take my advice," said the young man
coldly, "I would recommend you to travel."
"To travel" she murmured.
"Certainly as M. Danglars says, you are rich, and perfectly
free. In my opinion, a withdrawal from Paris is absolutely
necessary after the double catastrophe of Mademoiselle
Danglars' broken contract and M. Danglars' disappearance.
The world will think you abandoned and poor, for the wife of
a bankrupt would never be forgiven, were she to keep up an
appearance of opulence. You have only to remain in Paris for
about a fortnight, telling the world you are abandoned, and
relating the details of this desertion to your best friends,
who will soon spread the report. Then you can quit your
house, leaving your jewels and giving up your jointure, and
every one's mouth will be filled with praises of your
disinterestedness. They will know you are deserted, and
think you also poor, for I alone know your real financial
position, and am quite ready to give up my accounts as an
honest partner." The dread with which the pale and
motionless baroness listened to this, was equalled by the
calm indifference with which Debray had spoken. "Deserted?"
she repeated "ah, yes, I am, indeed, deserted You are
right, sir, and no one can doubt my position." These were
the only words that this proud and violently enamoured woman
could utter in response to Debray.
"But then you are rich,  very rich, indeed," continued
Debray, taking out some papers from his pocketbook, which
he spread upon the table. Madame Danglars did not see them
she was engaged in stilling the beatings of her heart, and
restraining the tears which were ready to gush forth. At
length a sense of dignity prevailed, and if she did not
entirely master her agitation, she at least succeeded in
preventing the fall of a single tear. "Madame," said Debray,
"it is nearly six months since we have been associated. You
furnished a principal of , francs. Our partnership
began in the month of April. In May we commenced operations,
and in the course of the month gained , francs. In
June the profit amounted to ,. In July we added
,, francs,  it was, you know, the month of the
Spanish bonds. In August we lost , francs at the
beginning of the month, but on the th we made up for it,
and we now find that our accounts, reckoning from the first
day of partnership up to yesterday, when I closed them,
showed a capital of ,, francs, that is, ,, for
each of us. Now, madame," said Debray, delivering up his
accounts in the methodical manner of a stockbroker, "there
are still , francs, the interest of this money, in my
hands."
"But," said the baroness, "I thought you never put the money
out to interest."
"Excuse me, madame," said Debray coldly, "I had your
permission to do so, and I have made use of it. There are,
then, , francs for your share, besides the , you
furnished me to begin with, making in all ,, francs
for your portion. Now, madame, I took the precaution of
drawing out your money the day before yesterday it is not
long ago, you see, and I was in continual expectation of
being called on to deliver up my accounts. There is your
money,  half in banknotes, the other half in checks
payable to bearer. I say there, for as I did not consider my
house safe enough, or lawyers sufficiently discreet, and as
landed property carries evidence with it, and moreover since
you have no right to possess anything independent of your
husband, I have kept this sum, now your whole fortune, in a
chest concealed under that closet, and for greater security
I myself concealed it there.
"Now, madame," continued Debray, first opening the closet,
then the chest  "now, madame, here are  notes of ,
francs each, resembling, as you see, a large book bound in
iron to this I add a certificate in the funds of ,
francs then, for the odd cash, making I think about ,
francs, here is a check upon my banker, who, not being M.
Danglars, will pay you the amount, you may rest assured."
Madame Danglars mechanically took the check, the bond, and
the heap of banknotes. This enormous fortune made no great
appearance on the table. Madame Danglars, with tearless
eyes, but with her breast heaving with concealed emotion,
placed the banknotes in her bag, put the certificate and
check into her pocketbook, and then, standing pale and
mute, awaited one kind word of consolation. But she waited
in vain.
"Now, madame," said Debray, "you have a splendid fortune, an
income of about , livres a year, which is enormous for
a woman who cannot keep an establishment here for a year, at
least. You will be able to indulge all your fancies
besides, should you find your income insufficient, you can,
for the sake of the past, madame, make use of mine and I am
ready to offer you all I possess, on loan."
"Thank you, sir  thank you," replied the baroness "you
forget that what you have just paid me is much more than a
poor woman requires, who intends for some time, at least, to
retire from the world."
Debray was, for a moment, surprised, but immediately
recovering himself, he bowed with an air which seemed to
say, "As you please, madame."
Madame Danglars had until then, perhaps, hoped for
something but when she saw the careless bow of Debray, and
the glance by which it was accompanied, together with his
significant silence, she raised her head, and without
passion or violence or even hesitation, ran downstairs,
disdaining to address a last farewell to one who could thus
part from her. "Bah," said Debray, when she had left, "these
are fine projects She will remain at home, read novels, and
speculate at cards, since she can no longer do so on the
Bourse." Then taking up his account book, he cancelled with
the greatest care all the entries of the amounts he had just
paid away. "I have ,, francs remaining," he said.
"What a pity Mademoiselle de Villefort is dead She suited
me in every respect, and I would have married her." And he
calmly waited until the twenty minutes had elapsed after
Madame Danglars' departure before he left the house. During
this time he occupied himself in making figures, with his
watch by his side.
Asmodeus  that diabolical personage, who would have been
created by every fertile imagination if Le Sage had not
acquired the priority in his great masterpiece  would have
enjoyed a singular spectacle, if he had lifted up the roof
of the little house in the Rue SaintGermaindesPres, while
Debray was casting up his figures. Above the room in which
Debray had been dividing two millions and a half with Madame
Danglars was another, inhabited by persons who have played
too prominent a part in the incidents we have related for
their appearance not to create some interest. Mercedes and
Albert were in that room. Mercedes was much changed within
the last few days not that even in her days of fortune she
had ever dressed with the magnificent display which makes us
no longer able to recognize a woman when she appears in a
plain and simple attire nor indeed, had she fallen into
that state of depression where it is impossible to conceal
the garb of misery no, the change in Mercedes was that her
eye no longer sparkled, her lips no longer smiled, and there
was now a hesitation in uttering the words which formerly
sprang so fluently from her ready wit.
It was not poverty which had broken her spirit it was not a
want of courage which rendered her poverty burdensome.
Mercedes, although deposed from the exalted position she had
occupied, lost in the sphere she had now chosen, like a
person passing from a room splendidly lighted into utter
darkness, appeared like a queen, fallen from her palace to a
hovel, and who, reduced to strict necessity, could neither
become reconciled to the earthen vessels she was herself
forced to place upon the table, nor to the humble pallet
which had become her bed. The beautiful Catalane and noble
countess had lost both her proud glance and charming smile,
because she saw nothing but misery around her the walls
were hung with one of the gray papers which economical
landlords choose as not likely to show the dirt the floor
was uncarpeted the furniture attracted the attention to the
poor attempt at luxury indeed, everything offended eyes
accustomed to refinement and elegance.
Madame de Morcerf had lived there since leaving her house
the continual silence of the spot oppressed her still,
seeing that Albert continually watched her countenance to
judge the state of her feelings, she constrained herself to
assume a monotonous smile of the lips alone, which,
contrasted with the sweet and beaming expression that
usually shone from her eyes, seemed like "moonlight on a
statue,"  yielding light without warmth. Albert, too, was
ill at ease the remains of luxury prevented him from
sinking into his actual position. If he wished to go out
without gloves, his hands appeared too white if he wished
to walk through the town, his boots seemed too highly
polished. Yet these two noble and intelligent creatures,
united by the indissoluble ties of maternal and filial love,
had succeeded in tacitly understanding one another, and
economizing their stores, and Albert had been able to tell
his mother without extorting a change of countenance, 
"Mother, we have no more money."
Mercedes had never known misery she had often, in her
youth, spoken of poverty, but between want and necessity,
those synonymous words, there is a wide difference. Amongst
the Catalans, Mercedes wished for a thousand things, but
still she never really wanted any. So long as the nets were
good, they caught fish and so long as they sold their fish,
they were able to buy twine for new nets. And then, shut out
from friendship, having but one affection, which could not
be mixed up with her ordinary pursuits, she thought of
herself  of no one but herself. Upon the little she earned
she lived as well as she could now there were two to be
supported, and nothing to live upon.
Winter approached. Mercedes had no fire in that cold and
naked room  she, who was accustomed to stoves which heated
the house from the hall to the boudoir she had not even one
little flower  she whose apartment had been a conservatory
of costly exotics. But she had her son. Hitherto the
excitement of fulfilling a duty had sustained them.
Excitement, like enthusiasm, sometimes renders us
unconscious to the things of earth. But the excitement had
calmed down, and they felt themselves obliged to descend
from dreams to reality after having exhausted the ideal,
they found they must talk of the actual.
"Mother," exclaimed Albert, just as Madame Danglars was
descending the stairs, "let us reckon our riches, if you
please I want capital to build my plans upon."
"Capital  nothing" replied Mercedes with a mournful
smile.
"No, mother,  capital , francs. And I have an idea of
our leading a delightful life upon this , francs."
"Child" sighed Mercedes.
"Alas, dear mother," said the young man, "I have unhappily
spent too much of your money not to know the value of it.
These , francs are enormous, and I intend building upon
this foundation a miraculous certainty for the future."
"You say this, my dear boy but do you think we ought to
accept these , francs?" said Mercedes, coloring.
"I think so," answered Albert in a firm tone. "We will
accept them the more readily, since we have them not here
you know they are buried in the garden of the little house
in the Allees de Meillan, at Marseilles. With  francs we
can reach Marseilles."
"With  francs?  are you sure, Albert?"
"Oh, as for that, I have made inquiries respecting the
diligences and steamboats, and my calculations are made. You
will take your place in the coupe to Chalons. You see,
mother, I treat you handsomely for thirtyfive francs."
Albert then took a pen, and wrote 
Frs.
Coupe, thirtyfive francs ............................ 
From Chalons to Lyons you will go on by the steamboat
six francs ......................................... 
From Lyons to Avignon still by steamboat,
sixteen francs ....................................... 
From Avignon to Marseilles, seven franc................ 
Expenses on the road, about fifty francs ............. 
Total................................................  frs.
"Let us put down ," added Albert, smiling. "You see I am
generous, am I not, mother?"
"But you, my poor child?"
"I? do you not see that I reserve eighty francs for myself?
A young man does not require luxuries besides, I know what
travelling is."
"With a postchaise and valet de chambre?"
"Any way, mother."
"Well, be it so. But these  francs?"
"Here they are, and  more besides. See, I have sold my
watch for  francs, and the guard and seals for . How
fortunate that the ornaments were worth more than the watch.
Still the same story of superfluities Now I think we are
rich, since instead of the  francs we require for the
journey we find ourselves in possession of ."
"But we owe something in this house?"
"Thirty francs but I pay that out of my  francs,  that
is understood,  and as I require only eighty francs for my
journey, you see I am overwhelmed with luxury. But that is
not all. What do you say to this, mother?"
And Albert took out of a little pocketbook with golden
clasps, a remnant of his old fancies, or perhaps a tender
souvenir from one of the mysterious and veiled ladies who
used to knock at his little door,  Albert took out of this
pocketbook a note of , francs.
"What is this?" asked Mercedes.
"A thousand francs."
"But whence have you obtained them?"
"Listen to me, mother, and do not yield too much to
agitation." And Albert, rising, kissed his mother on both
cheeks, then stood looking at her. "You cannot imagine,
mother, how beautiful I think you" said the young man,
impressed with a profound feeling of filial love. "You are,
indeed, the most beautiful and most noble woman I ever saw"
"Dear child" said Mercedes, endeavoring in vain to restrain
a tear which glistened in the corner of her eye. "Indeed,
you only wanted misfortune to change my love for you to
admiration. I am not unhappy while I possess my son"
"Ah, just so," said Albert "here begins the trial. Do you
know the decision we have come to, mother?"
"Have we come to any?"
"Yes it is decided that you are to live at Marseilles, and
that I am to leave for Africa, where I will earn for myself
the right to use the name I now bear, instead of the one I
have thrown aside." Mercedes sighed. "Well, mother, I
yesterday engaged myself as substitute in the Spahis,"
added the young man, lowering his eyes with a certain
feeling of shame, for even he was unconscious of the
sublimity of his selfabasement. "I thought my body was my
own, and that I might sell it. I yesterday took the place of
another. I sold myself for more than I thought I was worth,"
he added, attempting to smile "I fetched , francs."
 The Spahis are French cavalry reserved for service in
Africa.
"Then these , francs"  said Mercedes, shuddering 
"Are the half of the sum, mother the other will be paid in
a year."
Mercedes raised her eyes to heaven with an expression it
would be impossible to describe, and tears, which had
hitherto been restrained, now yielded to her emotion, and
ran down her cheeks.
"The price of his blood" she murmured.
"Yes, if I am killed," said Albert, laughing. "But I assure
you, mother, I have a strong intention of defending my
person, and I never felt half so strong an inclination to
live as I do now."
"Merciful heavens"
"Besides, mother, why should you make up your mind that I am
to be killed? Has Lamoriciere, that Ney of the South, been
killed? Has Changarnier been killed? Has Bedeau been killed?
Has Morrel, whom we know, been killed? Think of your joy,
mother, when you see me return with an embroidered uniform
I declare, I expect to look magnificent in it, and chose
that regiment only from vanity." Mercedes sighed while
endeavoring to smile the devoted mother felt that she ought
not to allow the whole weight of the sacrifice to fall upon
her son. "Well, now you understand, mother" continued
Albert "here are more than , francs settled on you
upon these you can live at least two years."
"Do you think so?" said Mercedes. These words were uttered
in so mournful a tone that their real meaning did not escape
Albert he felt his heart beat, and taking his mother's hand
within his own he said, tenderly, 
"Yes, you will live"
"I shall live  then you will not leave me, Albert?"
"Mother, I must go," said Albert in a firm, calm voice "you
love me too well to wish me to remain useless and idle with
you besides, I have signed."
"You will obey your own wish and the will of heaven"
"Not my own wish, mother, but reason  necessity. Are we
not two despairing creatures? What is life to you? 
Nothing. What is life to me?  Very little without you,
mother for believe me, but for you I should have ceased to
live on the day I doubted my father and renounced his name.
Well, I will live, if you promise me still to hope and if
you grant me the care of your future prospects, you will
redouble my strength. Then I will go to the governor of
Algeria he has a royal heart, and is essentially a soldier
I will tell him my gloomy story. I will beg him to turn his
eyes now and then towards me, and if he keep his word and
interest himself for me, in six months I shall be an
officer, or dead. If I am an officer, your fortune is
certain, for I shall have money enough for both, and,
moreover, a name we shall both be proud of, since it will be
our own. If I am killed  well then mother, you can also
die, and there will be an end of our misfortunes."
"It is well," replied Mercedes, with her eloquent glance
"you are right, my love let us prove to those who are
watching our actions that we are worthy of compassion."
"But let us not yield to gloomy apprehensions," said the
young man "I assure you we are, or rather we shall be, very
happy. You are a woman at once full of spirit and
resignation I have become simple in my tastes, and am
without passion, I hope. Once in service, I shall be rich 
once in M. Dantes' house, you will be at rest. Let us
strive, I beseech you,  let us strive to be cheerful."
"Yes, let us strive, for you ought to live, and to be happy,
Albert."
"And so our division is made, mother," said the young man,
affecting ease of mind. "We can now part come, I shall
engage your passage."
"And you, my dear boy?"
"I shall stay here for a few days longer we must accustom
ourselves to parting. I want recommendations and some
information relative to Africa. I will join you again at
Marseilles."
"Well, be it so  let us part," said Mercedes, folding
around her shoulders the only shawl she had taken away, and
which accidentally happened to be a valuable black cashmere.
Albert gathered up his papers hastily, rang the bell to pay
the thirty francs he owed to the landlord, and offering his
arm to his mother, they descended the stairs. Some one was
walking down before them, and this person, hearing the
rustling of a silk dress, turned around. "Debray" muttered
Albert.
"You, Morcerf?" replied the secretary, resting on the
stairs. Curiosity had vanquished the desire of preserving
his incognito, and he was recognized. It was, indeed,
strange in this unknown spot to find the young man whose
misfortunes had made so much noise in Paris.
"Morcerf" repeated Debray. Then noticing in the dim light
the still youthful and veiled figure of Madame de Morcerf
"Pardon me," he added with a smile, "I leave you,
Albert." Albert understood his thoughts. "Mother," he said,
turning towards Mercedes, "this is M. Debray, secretary of
the minister for the interior, once a friend of mine."
"How once?" stammered Debray "what do you mean?"
"I say so, M. Debray, because I have no friends now, and I
ought not to have any. I thank you for having recognized me,
sir." Debray stepped forward, and cordially pressed the hand
of his interlocutor. "Believe me, dear Albert," he said,
with all the emotion he was capable of feeling,  "believe
me, I feel deeply for your misfortunes, and if in any way I
can serve you, I am yours."
"Thank you, sir," said Albert, smiling. "In the midst of our
misfortunes, we are still rich enough not to require
assistance from any one. We are leaving Paris, and when our
journey is paid, we shall have , francs left." The blood
mounted to the temples of Debray, who held a million in his
pocketbook, and unimaginative as he was he could not help
reflecting that the same house had contained two women, one
of whom, justly dishonored, had left it poor with ,,
francs under her cloak, while the other, unjustly stricken,
but sublime in her misfortune, was yet rich with a few
deniers. This parallel disturbed his usual politeness, the
philosophy he witnessed appalled him, he muttered a few
words of general civility and ran downstairs.
That day the minister's clerks and the subordinates had a
great deal to put up with from his illhumor. But that same
night, he found himself the possessor of a fine house,
situated on the Boulevard de la Madeleine, and an income of
, livres. The next day, just as Debray was signing the
deed, that is about five o'clock in the afternoon, Madame de
Morcerf, after having affectionately embraced her son,
entered the coupe of the diligence, which closed upon her. A
man was hidden in Lafitte's bankinghouse, behind one of the
little arched windows which are placed above each desk he
saw Mercedes enter the diligence, and he also saw Albert
withdraw. Then he passed his hand across his forehead, which
was clouded with doubt. "Alas," he exclaimed, "how can I
restore the happiness I have taken away from these poor
innocent creatures? God help me"
Chapter 
The Lions' Den.
One division of La Force, in which the most dangerous and
desperate prisoners are confined, is called the court of
SaintBernard. The prisoners, in their expressive language,
have named it the "Lions' Den," probably because the
captives possess teeth which frequently gnaw the bars, and
sometimes the keepers also. It is a prison within a prison
the walls are double the thickness of the rest. The gratings
are every day carefully examined by jailers, whose herculean
proportions and cold pitiless expression prove them to have
been chosen to reign over their subjects for their superior
activity and intelligence. The courtyard of this quarter is
enclosed by enormous walls, over which the sun glances
obliquely, when it deigns to penetrate into this gulf of
moral and physical deformity. On this paved yard are to be
seen,  pacing to and fro from morning till night, pale,
careworn, and haggard, like so many shadows,  the men whom
justice holds beneath the steel she is sharpening. There,
crouched against the side of the wall which attracts and
retains the most heat, they may be seen sometimes talking to
one another, but more frequently alone, watching the door,
which sometimes opens to call forth one from the gloomy
assemblage, or to throw in another outcast from society.
The court of SaintBernard has its own particular apartment
for the reception of guests it is a long rectangle, divided
by two upright gratings placed at a distance of three feet
from one another to prevent a visitor from shaking hands
with or passing anything to the prisoners. It is a wretched,
damp, nay, even horrible spot, more especially when we
consider the agonizing conferences which have taken place
between those iron bars. And yet, frightful though this spot
may be, it is looked upon as a kind of paradise by the men
whose days are numbered it is so rare for them to leave the
Lions' Den for any other place than the barrier
SaintJacques or the galleys
In the court which we have attempted to describe, and from
which a damp vapor was rising, a young man with his hands in
his pockets, who had excited much curiosity among the
inhabitants of the "Den," might be seen walking. The cut of
his clothes would have made him pass for an elegant man, if
those clothes had not been torn to shreds still they did
not show signs of wear, and the fine cloth, beneath the
careful hands of the prisoner, soon recovered its gloss in
the parts which were still perfect, for the wearer tried his
best to make it assume the appearance of a new coat. He
bestowed the same attention upon the cambric front of a
shirt, which had considerably changed in color since his
entrance into the prison, and he polished his varnished
boots with the corner of a handkerchief embroidered with
initials surmounted by a coronet. Some of the inmates of the
"Lions' Den" were watching the operations of the prisoner's
toilet with considerable interest. "See, the prince is
pluming himself," said one of the thieves. "He's a fine
looking fellow," said another "if he had only a comb and
hairgrease, he'd take the shine off the gentlemen in white
kids."
"His coat looks almost new, and his boots shine like a
nigger's face. It's pleasant to have such welldressed
comrades but didn't those gendarmes behave shameful? 
must 'a been jealous, to tear such clothes"
"He looks like a bigbug," said another "dresses in fine
style. And, then, to be here so young Oh, what larks"
Meanwhile the object of this hideous admiration approached
the wicket, against which one of the keepers was leaning.
"Come, sir," he said, "lend me twenty francs you will soon
be paid you run no risks with me. Remember, I have
relations who possess more millions than you have deniers.
Come, I beseech you, lend me twenty francs, so that I may
buy a dressinggown it is intolerable always to be in a
coat and boots And what a coat, sir, for a prince of the
Cavalcanti" The keeper turned his back, and shrugged his
shoulders he did not even laugh at what would have caused
any one else to do so he had heard so many utter the same
things,  indeed, he heard nothing else.
"Come," said Andrea, "you are a man void of compassion I'll
have you turned out." This made the keeper turn around, and
he burst into a loud laugh. The prisoners then approached
and formed a circle. "I tell you that with that wretched
sum," continued Andrea, "I could obtain a coat, and a room
in which to receive the illustrious visitor I am daily
expecting."
"Of course  of course," said the prisoners  "any one
can see he's a gentleman"
"Well, then, lend him the twenty francs," said the keeper,
leaning on the other shoulder "surely you will not refuse a
comrade"
"I am no comrade of these people," said the young man,
proudly, "you have no right to insult me thus."
The thieves looked at one another with low murmurs, and a
storm gathered over the head of the aristocratic prisoner,
raised less by his own words than by the manner of the
keeper. The latter, sure of quelling the tempest when the
waves became too violent, allowed them to rise to a certain
pitch that he might be revenged on the importunate Andrea,
and besides it would afford him some recreation during the
long day. The thieves had already approached Andrea, some
screaming, "La savate  La savate" a cruel operation,
which consists in cuffing a comrade who may have fallen into
disgrace, not with an old shoe, but with an ironheeled one.
Others proposed the "anguille," another kind of recreation,
in which a handkerchief is filled with sand, pebbles, and
twosous pieces, when they have them, which the wretches
beat like a flail over the head and shoulders of the unhappy
sufferer. "Let us horsewhip the fine gentleman" said
others.
 Savate an old shoe.
But Andrea, turning towards them, winked his eyes, rolled
his tongue around his cheeks, and smacked his lips in a
manner equivalent to a hundred words among the bandits when
forced to be silent. It was a Masonic sign Caderousse had
taught him. He was immediately recognized as one of them
the handkerchief was thrown down, and the ironheeled shoe
replaced on the foot of the wretch to whom it belonged. Some
voices were heard to say that the gentleman was right that
he intended to be civil, in his way, and that they would set
the example of liberty of conscience,  and the mob
retired. The keeper was so stupefied at this scene that he
took Andrea by the hands and began examining his person,
attributing the sudden submission of the inmates of the
Lions' Den to something more substantial than mere
fascination. Andrea made no resistance, although he
protested against it. Suddenly a voice was heard at the
wicket. "Benedetto" exclaimed an inspector. The keeper
relaxed his hold. "I am called," said Andrea. "To the
visitors' room" said the same voice.
"You see some one pays me a visit. Ah, my dear sir, you will
see whether a Cavalcanti is to be treated like a common
person" And Andrea, gliding through the court like a black
shadow, rushed out through the wicket, leaving his comrades,
and even the keeper, lost in wonder. Certainly a call to the
visitors' room had scarcely astonished Andrea less than
themselves, for the wily youth, instead of making use of his
privilege of waiting to be claimed on his entry into La
Force, had maintained a rigid silence. "Everything," he
said, "proves me to be under the protection of some powerful
person,  this sudden fortune, the facility with which I
have overcome all obstacles, an unexpected family and an
illustrious name awarded to me, gold showered down upon me,
and the most splendid alliances about to be entered into. An
unhappy lapse of fortune and the absence of my protector
have cast me down, certainly, but not forever. The hand
which has retreated for a while will be again stretched
forth to save me at the very moment when I shall think
myself sinking into the abyss. Why should I risk an
imprudent step? It might alienate my protector. He has two
means of extricating me from this dilemma,  the one by a
mysterious escape, managed through bribery the other by
buying off my judges with gold. I will say and do nothing
until I am convinced that he has quite abandoned me, and
then" 
Andrea had formed a plan which was tolerably clever. The
unfortunate youth was intrepid in the attack, and rude in
the defence. He had borne with the public prison, and with
privations of all sorts still, by degrees nature, or rather
custom, had prevailed, and he suffered from being naked,
dirty, and hungry. It was at this moment of discomfort that
the inspector's voice called him to the visitingroom.
Andrea felt his heart leap with joy. It was too soon for a
visit from the examining magistrate, and too late for one
from the director of the prison, or the doctor it must,
then, be the visitor he hoped for. Behind the grating of the
room into which Andrea had been led, he saw, while his eyes
dilated with surprise, the dark and intelligent face of M.
Bertuccio, who was also gazing with sad astonishment upon
the iron bars, the bolted doors, and the shadow which moved
behind the other grating.
"Ah," said Andrea, deeply affected.
"Good morning, Benedetto," said Bertuccio, with his deep,
hollow voice.
"You  you?" said the young man, looking fearfully around
him.
"Do you not recognize me, unhappy child?"
"Silence,  be silent" said Andrea, who knew the delicate
sense of hearing possessed by the walls "for heaven's sake,
do not speak so loud"
"You wish to speak with me alone, do you not?" said
Bertuccio.
"Oh, yes."
"That is well." And Bertuccio, feeling in his pocket, signed
to a keeper whom he saw through the window of the wicket.
"Read?" he said.
"What is that?" asked Andrea.
"An order to conduct you to a room, and to leave you there
to talk to me."
"Oh," cried Andrea, leaping with joy. Then he mentally
added,  "Still my unknown protector I am not forgotten.
They wish for secrecy, since we are to converse in a private
room. I understand, Bertuccio has been sent by my
protector."
The keeper spoke for a moment with an official, then opened
the iron gates and conducted Andrea to a room on the first
floor. The room was whitewashed, as is the custom in
prisons, but it looked quite brilliant to a prisoner, though
a stove, a bed, a chair, and a table formed the whole of its
sumptuous furniture. Bertuccio sat down upon the chair,
Andrea threw himself upon the bed the keeper retired.
"Now," said the steward, "what have you to tell me?"
"And you?" said Andrea.
"You speak first."
"Oh, no. You must have much to tell me, since you have come
to seek me."
"Well, be it so. You have continued your course of villany
you have robbed  you have assassinated."
"Well, I should say If you had me taken to a private room
only to tell me this, you might have saved yourself the
trouble. I know all these things. But there are some with
which, on the contrary, I am not acquainted. Let us talk of
those, if you please. Who sent you?"
"Come, come, you are going on quickly, M. Benedetto"
"Yes, and to the point. Let us dispense with useless words.
Who sends you?"
"No one."
"How did you know I was in prison?"
"I recognized you, some time since, as the insolent dandy
who so gracefully mounted his horse in the Champs Elysees."
"Oh, the Champs Elysees? Ah, yes we burn, as they say at
the game of pincette. The Champs Elysees? Come, let us talk
a little about my father."
"Who, then, am I?"
"You, sir?  you are my adopted father. But it was not you,
I presume, who placed at my disposal , francs, which I
spent in four or five months it was not you who
manufactured an Italian gentleman for my father it was not
you who introduced me into the world, and had me invited to
a certain dinner at Auteuil, which I fancy I am eating at
this moment, in company with the most distinguished people
in Paris  amongst the rest with a certain procureur, whose
acquaintance I did very wrong not to cultivate, for he would
have been very useful to me just now  it was not you, in
fact, who bailed me for one or two millions, when the fatal
discovery of my little secret took place. Come, speak, my
worthy Corsican, speak"
"What do you wish me to say?"
"I will help you. You were speaking of the Champs Elysees
just now, worthy fosterfather."
"Well?"
"Well, in the Champs Elysees there resides a very rich
gentleman."
"At whose house you robbed and murdered, did you not?"
"I believe I did."
"The Count of Monte Cristo?"
"'Tis you who have named him, as M. Racine says. Well, am I
to rush into his arms, and strain him to my heart, crying,
"My father, my father' like Monsieur Pixerecourt."
"Do not let us jest," gravely replied Bertuccio, "and dare
not to utter that name again as you have pronounced it."
 Guilbert de Pixerecourt, French dramatist .
"Bah," said Andrea, a little overcome, by the solemnity of
Bertuccio's manner, "why not?"
"Because the person who bears it is too highly favored by
heaven to be the father of such a wretch as you."
"Oh, these are fine words."
"And there will be fine doings, if you do not take care."
"Menaces  I do not fear them. I will say" 
"Do you think you are engaged with a pygmy like yourself?"
said Bertuccio, in so calm a tone, and with so steadfast a
look, that Andrea was moved to the very soul. "Do you think
you have to do with galleyslaves, or novices in the world?
Benedetto, you are fallen into terrible hands they are
ready to open for you  make use of them. Do not play with
the thunderbolt they have laid aside for a moment, but which
they can take up again instantly, if you attempt to
intercept their movements."
"My father  I will know who my father is," said the
obstinate youth "I will perish if I must, but I will know
it. What does scandal signify to me? What possessions, what
reputation, what "pull,' as Beauchamp says,  have I? You
great people always lose something by scandal,
notwithstanding your millions. Come, who is my father?"
"I came to tell you."
"Ah," cried Benedetto, his eyes sparkling with joy. Just
then the door opened, and the jailer, addressing himself to
Bertuccio, said,  "Excuse me, sir, but the examining
magistrate is waiting for the prisoner."
"And so closes our interview," said Andrea to the worthy
steward "I wish the troublesome fellow were at the devil"
"I will return tomorrow," said Bertuccio.
"Good Gendarmes, I am at your service. Ah, sir, do leave a
few crowns for me at the gate that I may have some things I
am in need of"
"It shall be done," replied Bertuccio. Andrea extended his
hand Bertuccio kept his own in his pocket, and merely
jingled a few pieces of money. "That's what I mean," said
Andrea, endeavoring to smile, quite overcome by the strange
tranquillity of Bertuccio. "Can I be deceived?" he murmured,
as he stepped into the oblong and grated vehicle which they
call "the salad basket." "Never mind, we shall see
Tomorrow, then" he added, turning towards Bertuccio.
"Tomorrow" replied the steward.
Chapter 
The Judge.
We remember that the Abbe Busoni remained alone with
Noirtier in the chamber of death, and that the old man and
the priest were the sole guardians of the young girl's body.
Perhaps it was the Christian exhortations of the abbe,
perhaps his kind charity, perhaps his persuasive words,
which had restored the courage of Noirtier, for ever since
he had conversed with the priest his violent despair had
yielded to a calm resignation which surprised all who knew
his excessive affection for Valentine. M. de Villefort had
not seen his father since the morning of the death. The
whole establishment had been changed another valet was
engaged for himself, a new servant for Noirtier, two women
had entered Madame de Villefort's service,  in fact,
everywhere, to the concierge and coachmen, new faces were
presented to the different masters of the house, thus
widening the division which had always existed between the
members of the same family.
The assizes, also, were about to begin, and Villefort, shut
up in his room, exerted himself with feverish anxiety in
drawing up the case against the murderer of Caderousse. This
affair, like all those in which the Count of Monte Cristo
had interfered, caused a great sensation in Paris. The
proofs were certainly not convincing, since they rested upon
a few words written by an escaped galleyslave on his
deathbed, and who might have been actuated by hatred or
revenge in accusing his companion. But the mind of the
procureur was made up he felt assured that Benedetto was
guilty, and he hoped by his skill in conducting this
aggravated case to flatter his selflove, which was about
the only vulnerable point left in his frozen heart.
The case was therefore prepared owing to the incessant labor
of Villefort, who wished it to be the first on the list in
the coming assizes. He had been obliged to seclude himself
more than ever, to evade the enormous number of applications
presented to him for the purpose of obtaining tickets of
admission to the court on the day of trial. And then so
short a time had elapsed since the death of poor Valentine,
and the gloom which overshadowed the house was so recent,
that no one wondered to see the father so absorbed in his
professional duties, which were the only means he had of
dissipating his grief.
Once only had Villefort seen his father it was the day
after that upon which Bertuccio had paid his second visit to
Benedetto, when the latter was to learn his father's name.
The magistrate, harassed and fatigued, had descended to the
garden of his house, and in a gloomy mood, similar to that
in which Tarquin lopped off the tallest poppies, he began
knocking off with his cane the long and dying branches of
the rosetrees, which, placed along the avenue, seemed like
the spectres of the brilliant flowers which had bloomed in
the past season. More than once he had reached that part of
the garden where the famous boarded gate stood overlooking
the deserted enclosure, always returning by the same path,
to begin his walk again, at the same pace and with the same
gesture, when he accidentally turned his eyes towards the
house, whence he heard the noisy play of his son, who had
returned from school to spend the Sunday and Monday with his
mother. While doing so, he observed M. Noirtier at one of
the open windows, where the old man had been placed that he
might enjoy the last rays of the sun which yet yielded some
heat, and was now shining upon the dying flowers and red
leaves of the creeper which twined around the balcony.
The eye of the old man was riveted upon a spot which
Villefort could scarcely distinguish. His glance was so full
of hate, of ferocity, and savage impatience, that Villefort
turned out of the path he had been pursuing, to see upon
what person this dark look was directed. Then he saw beneath
a thick clump of lindentrees, which were nearly divested of
foliage, Madame de Villefort sitting with a book in her
hand, the perusal of which she frequently interrupted to
smile upon her son, or to throw back his elastic ball, which
he obstinately threw from the drawingroom into the garden.
Villefort became pale he understood the old man's meaning.
Noirtier continued to look at the same object, but suddenly
his glance was transferred from the wife to the husband, and
Villefort himself had to submit to the searching
investigation of eyes, which, while changing their direction
and even their language, had lost none of their menacing
expression. Madame de Villefort, unconscious of the passions
that exhausted their fire over her head, at that moment held
her son's ball, and was making signs to him to reclaim it
with a kiss. Edward begged for a long while, the maternal
kiss probably not offering sufficient recompense for the
trouble he must take to obtain it however at length he
decided, leaped out of the window into a cluster of
heliotropes and daisies, and ran to his mother, his forehead
streaming with perspiration. Madame de Villefort wiped his
forehead, pressed her lips upon it, and sent him back with
the ball in one hand and some bonbons in the other.
Villefort, drawn by an irresistible attraction, like that of
the bird to the serpent, walked towards the house. As he
approached it, Noirtier's gaze followed him, and his eyes
appeared of such a fiery brightness that Villefort felt them
pierce to the depths of his heart. In that earnest look
might be read a deep reproach, as well as a terrible menace.
Then Noirtier raised his eyes to heaven, as though to remind
his son of a forgotten oath. "It is well, sir," replied
Villefort from below,  "it is well have patience but one
day longer what I have said I will do." Noirtier seemed to
be calmed by these words, and turned his eyes with
indifference to the other side. Villefort violently
unbuttoned his greatcoat, which seemed to strangle him, and
passing his livid hand across his forehead, entered his
study.
The night was cold and still the family had all retired to
rest but Villefort, who alone remained up, and worked till
five o'clock in the morning, reviewing the last
interrogatories made the night before by the examining
magistrates, compiling the depositions of the witnesses, and
putting the finishing stroke to the deed of accusation,
which was one of the most energetic and best conceived of
any he had yet delivered.
The next day, Monday, was the first sitting of the assizes.
The morning dawned dull and gloomy, and Villefort saw the
dim gray light shine upon the lines he had traced in red
ink. The magistrate had slept for a short time while the
lamp sent forth its final struggles its flickerings awoke
him, and he found his fingers as damp and purple as though
they had been dipped in blood. He opened the window a
bright yellow streak crossed the sky, and seemed to divide
in half the poplars, which stood out in black relief on the
horizon. In the cloverfields beyond the chestnuttrees, a
lark was mounting up to heaven, while pouring out her clear
morning song. The damps of the dew bathed the head of
Villefort, and refreshed his memory. "Today," he said with
an effort,  "today the man who holds the blade of justice
must strike wherever there is guilt." Involuntarily his eyes
wandered towards the window of Noirtier's room, where he had
seen him the preceding night. The curtain was drawn, and yet
the image of his father was so vivid to his mind that he
addressed the closed window as though it had been open, and
as if through the opening he had beheld the menacing old
man. "Yes," he murmured,  "yes, be satisfied."
His head dropped upon his chest, and in this position he
paced his study then he threw himself, dressed as he was,
upon a sofa, less to sleep than to rest his limbs, cramped
with cold and study. By degrees every one awoke. Villefort,
from his study, heard the successive noises which accompany
the life of a house,  the opening and shutting of doors,
the ringing of Madame de Villefort's bell, to summon the
waitingmaid, mingled with the first shouts of the child,
who rose full of the enjoyment of his age. Villefort also
rang his new valet brought him the papers, and with them a
cup of chocolate.
"What are you bringing me?" said he.
"A cup of chocolate."
"I did not ask for it. Who has paid me this attention?"
"My mistress, sir. She said you would have to speak a great
deal in the murder case, and that you should take something
to keep up your strength" and the valet placed the cup on
the table nearest to the sofa, which was, like all the rest,
covered with papers. The valet then left the room. Villefort
looked for an instant with a gloomy expression, then,
suddenly, taking it up with a nervous motion, he swallowed
its contents at one draught. It might have been thought that
he hoped the beverage would be mortal, and that he sought
for death to deliver him from a duty which he would rather
die than fulfil. He then rose, and paced his room with a
smile it would have been terrible to witness. The chocolate
was inoffensive, for M. de Villefort felt no effects. The
breakfasthour arrived, but M. de Villefort was not at
table. The valet reentered.
"Madame de Villefort wishes to remind you, sir," he said,
"that eleven o'clock has just struck, and that the trial
commences at twelve."
"Well," said Villefort, "what then?"
"Madame de Villefort is dressed she is quite ready, and
wishes to know if she is to accompany you, sir?"
"Where to?"
"To the Palais."
"What to do?"
"My mistress wishes much to be present at the trial."
"Ah," said Villefort, with a startling accent "does she
wish that?"  The man drew back and said, "If you wish to
go alone, sir, I will go and tell my mistress." Villefort
remained silent for a moment, and dented his pale cheeks
with his nails. "Tell your mistress," he at length answered,
"that I wish to speak to her, and I beg she will wait for me
in her own room."
"Yes, sir."
"Then come to dress and shave me."
"Directly, sir." The valet reappeared almost instantly,
and, having shaved his master, assisted him to dress
entirely in black. When he had finished, he said, 
"My mistress said she should expect you, sir, as soon as you
had finished dressing."
"I am going to her." And Villefort, with his papers under
his arm and hat in hand, directed his steps toward the
apartment of his wife. At the door he paused for a moment to
wipe his damp, pale brow. He then entered the room. Madame
de Villefort was sitting on an ottoman and impatiently
turning over the leaves of some newspapers and pamphlets
which young Edward, by way of amusing himself, was tearing
to pieces before his mother could finish reading them. She
was dressed to go out, her bonnet was placed beside her on a
chair, and her gloves were on her hands.
"Ah, here you are, monsieur," she said in her naturally calm
voice "but how pale you are Have you been working all
night? Why did you not come down to breakfast? Well, will
you take me, or shall I take Edward?" Madame de Villefort
had multiplied her questions in order to gain one answer,
but to all her inquiries M. de Villefort remained mute and
cold as a statue. "Edward," said Villefort, fixing an
imperious glance on the child, "go and play in the
drawingroom, my dear I wish to speak to your mamma."
Madame de Villefort shuddered at the sight of that cold
countenance, that resolute tone, and the awfully strange
preliminaries. Edward raised his head, looked at his mother,
and then, finding that she did not confirm the order, began
cutting off the heads of his leaden soldiers.
"Edward," cried M. de Villefort, so harshly that the child
started up from the floor, "do you hear me?  Go" The
child, unaccustomed to such treatment, arose, pale and
trembling it would be difficult to say whether his emotion
were caused by fear or passion. His father went up to him,
took him in his arms, and kissed his forehead. "Go," he
said "go, my child." Edward ran out. M. de Villefort went
to the door, which he closed behind the child, and bolted.
"Dear me" said the young woman, endeavoring to read her
husband's inmost thoughts, while a smile passed over her
countenance which froze the impassibility of Villefort
"what is the matter?"
"Madame, where do you keep the poison you generally use?"
said the magistrate, without any introduction, placing
himself between his wife and the door.
Madame de Villefort must have experienced something of the
sensation of a bird which, looking up, sees the murderous
trap closing over its head. A hoarse, broken tone, which was
neither a cry nor a sigh, escaped from her, while she became
deadly pale. "Monsieur," she said, "I  I do not understand
you." And, in her first paroxysm of terror, she had raised
herself from the sofa, in the next, stronger very likely
than the other, she fell down again on the cushions. "I
asked you," continued Villefort, in a perfectly calm tone,
"where you conceal the poison by the aid of which you have
killed my fatherinlaw, M. de SaintMeran, my
motherinlaw, Madame de SaintMeran, Barrois, and my
daughter Valentine."
"Ah, sir," exclaimed Madame de Villefort, clasping her
hands, "what do you say?"
"It is not for you to interrogate, but to answer."
"Is it to the judge or to the husband?" stammered Madame de
Villefort. "To the judge  to the judge, madame" It was
terrible to behold the frightful pallor of that woman, the
anguish of her look, the trembling of her whole frame. "Ah,
sir," she muttered, "ah, sir," and this was all.
"You do not answer, madame" exclaimed the terrible
interrogator. Then he added, with a smile yet more terrible
than his anger, "It is true, then you do not deny it" She
moved forward. "And you cannot deny it" added Villefort,
extending his hand toward her, as though to seize her in the
name of justice. "You have accomplished these different
crimes with impudent address, but which could only deceive
those whose affections for you blinded them. Since the death
of Madame de SaintMeran, I have known that a poisoner lived
in my house. M. d'Avrigny warned me of it. After the death
of Barrois my suspicions were directed towards an angel, 
those suspicions which, even when there is no crime, are
always alive in my heart but after the death of Valentine,
there has been no doubt in my mind, madame, and not only in
mine, but in those of others thus your crime, known by two
persons, suspected by many, will soon become public, and, as
I told you just now, you no longer speak to the husband, but
to the judge."
The young woman hid her face in her hands. "Oh, sir," she
stammered, "I beseech you, do not believe appearances."
"Are you, then, a coward?" cried Villefort, in a
contemptuous voice. "But I have always observed that
poisoners were cowards. Can you be a coward,  you who have
had the courage to witness the death of two old men and a
young girl murdered by you?"
"Sir sir"
"Can you be a coward?" continued Villefort, with increasing
excitement, "you, who could count, one by one, the minutes
of four death agonies? You, who have arranged your infernal
plans, and removed the beverages with a talent and precision
almost miraculous? Have you, then, who have calculated
everything with such nicety, have you forgotten to calculate
one thing  I mean where the revelation of your crimes will
lead you to? Oh, it is impossible  you must have saved
some surer, more subtle and deadly poison than any other,
that you might escape the punishment that you deserve. You
have done this  I hope so, at least." Madame de Villefort
stretched out her hands, and fell on her knees.
"I understand," he said, "you confess but a confession made
to the judges, a confession made at the last moment,
extorted when the crime cannot be denied, diminishes not the
punishment inflicted on the guilty"
"The punishment?" exclaimed Madame de Villefort, "the
punishment, monsieur? Twice you have pronounced that word"
"Certainly. Did you hope to escape it because you were four
times guilty? Did you think the punishment would be withheld
because you are the wife of him who pronounces it?  No,
madame, no the scaffold awaits the poisoner, whoever she
may be, unless, as I just said, the poisoner has taken the
precaution of keeping for herself a few drops of her
deadliest potion." Madame de Villefort uttered a wild cry,
and a hideous and uncontrollable terror spread over her
distorted features. "Oh, do not fear the scaffold, madame,"
said the magistrate "I will not dishonor you, since that
would be dishonor to myself no, if you have heard me
distinctly, you will understand that you are not to die on
the scaffold."
"No, I do not understand what do you mean?" stammered the
unhappy woman, completely overwhelmed. "I mean that the wife
of the first magistrate in the capital shall not, by her
infamy, soil an unblemished name that she shall not, with
one blow, dishonor her husband and her child."
"No, no  oh, no"
"Well, madame, it will be a laudable action on your part,
and I will thank you for it"
"You will thank me  for what?"
"For what you have just said."
"What did I say? Oh, my brain whirls I no longer understand
anything. Oh, my God, my God" And she rose, with her hair
dishevelled, and her lips foaming.
"Have you answered the question I put to you on entering the
room?  where do you keep the poison you generally use,
madame?" Madame de Villefort raised her arms to heaven, and
convulsively struck one hand against the other. "No, no,"
she vociferated, "no, you cannot wish that"
"What I do not wish, madame, is that you should perish on
the scaffold. Do you understand?" asked Villefort.
"Oh, mercy, mercy, monsieur"
"What I require is, that justice be done. I am on the earth
to punish, madame," he added, with a flaming glance "any
other woman, were it the queen herself, I would send to the
executioner but to you I shall be merciful. To you I will
say, "Have you not, madame, put aside some of the surest,
deadliest, most speedy poison?'"
"Oh, pardon me, sir let me live"
"She is cowardly," said Villefort.
"Reflect that I am your wife"
"You are a poisoner."
"In the name of heaven"
"No"
"In the name of the love you once bore me"
"No, no"
"In the name of our child Ah, for the sake of our child,
let me live"
"No, no, no, I tell you one day, if I allow you to live,
you will perhaps kill him, as you have the others"
"I?  I kill my boy?" cried the distracted mother, rushing
toward Villefort "I kill my son? Ha, ha, ha" and a
frightful, demoniac laugh finished the sentence, which was
lost in a hoarse rattle. Madame de Villefort fell at her
husband's feet. He approached her. "Think of it, madame," he
said "if, on my return, justice his not been satisfied, I
will denounce you with my own mouth, and arrest you with my
own hands" She listened, panting, overwhelmed, crushed her
eye alone lived, and glared horribly. "Do you understand
me?" he said. "I am going down there to pronounce the
sentence of death against a murderer. If I find you alive on
my return, you shall sleep tonight in the conciergerie."
Madame de Villefort sighed her nerves gave way, and she
sunk on the carpet. The king's attorney seemed to experience
a sensation of pity he looked upon her less severely, and,
bowing to her, said slowly, "Farewell, madame, farewell"
That farewell struck Madame de Villefort like the
executioner's knife. She fainted. The procureur went out,
after having doublelocked the door.
Chapter 
The Assizes.
The Benedetto affair, as it was called at the Palais, and by
people in general, had produced a tremendous sensation.
Frequenting the Cafe de Paris, the Boulevard de Gand, and
the Bois de Boulogne, during his brief career of splendor,
the false Cavalcanti had formed a host of acquaintances. The
papers had related his various adventures, both as the man
of fashion and the galleyslave and as every one who had
been personally acquainted with Prince Andrea Cavalcanti
experienced a lively curiosity in his fate, they all
determined to spare no trouble in endeavoring to witness the
trial of M. Benedetto for the murder of his comrade in
chains. In the eyes of many, Benedetto appeared, if not a
victim to, at least an instance of, the fallibility of the
law. M. Cavalcanti, his father, had been seen in Paris, and
it was expected that he would reappear to claim the
illustrious outcast. Many, also, who were not aware of the
circumstances attending his withdrawal from Paris, were
struck with the worthy appearance, the gentlemanly bearing,
and the knowledge of the world displayed by the old
patrician, who certainly played the nobleman very well, so
long as he said nothing, and made no arithmetical
calculations. As for the accused himself, many remembered
him as being so amiable, so handsome, and so liberal, that
they chose to think him the victim of some conspiracy, since
in this world large fortunes frequently excite the
malevolence and jealousy of some unknown enemy. Every one,
therefore, ran to the court some to witness the sight,
others to comment upon it. From seven o'clock in the morning
a crowd was stationed at the iron gates, and an hour before
the trial commenced the hall was full of the privileged.
Before the entrance of the magistrates, and indeed
frequently afterwards, a court of justice, on days when some
especial trial is to take place, resembles a drawingroom
where many persons recognize each other and converse if they
can do so without losing their seats or, if they are
separated by too great a number of lawyers, communicate by
signs.
It was one of the magnificent autumn days which make amends
for a short summer the clouds which M. de Villefort had
perceived at sunrise had all disappeared as if by magic, and
one of the softest and most brilliant days of September
shone forth in all its splendor.
Beauchamp, one of the kings of the press, and therefore
claiming the right of a throne everywhere, was eying
everybody through his monocle. He perceived ChateauRenaud
and Debray, who had just gained the good graces of a
sergeantatarms, and who had persuaded the latter to let
them stand before, instead of behind him, as they ought to
have done. The worthy sergeant had recognized the minister's
secretary and the millionnaire, and, by way of paying extra
attention to his noble neighbors, promised to keep their
places while they paid a visit to Beauchamp.
"Well," said Beauchamp, "we shall see our friend"
"Yes, indeed" replied Debray. "That worthy prince. Deuce
take those Italian princes"
"A man, too, who could boast of Dante for a genealogist, and
could reckon back to the "Divine Comedy.'"
"A nobility of the rope" said ChateauRenaud
phlegmatically.
"He will be condemned, will he not?" asked Debray of
Beauchamp.
"My dear fellow, I think we should ask you that question
you know such news much better than we do. Did you see the
president at the minister's last night?"
"Yes."
"What did he say?"
"Something which will surprise you."
"Oh, make haste and tell me, then it is a long time since
that has happened."
"Well, he told me that Benedetto, who is considered a
serpent of subtlety and a giant of cunning, is really but a
very commonplace, silly rascal, and altogether unworthy of
the experiments that will be made on his phrenological
organs after his death."
"Bah," said Beauchamp, "he played the prince very well."
"Yes, for you who detest those unhappy princes, Beauchamp,
and are always delighted to find fault with them but not
for me, who discover a gentleman by instinct, and who scent
out an aristocratic family like a very bloodhound of
heraldry."
"Then you never believed in the principality?"
"Yes.  in the principality, but not in the prince."
"Not so bad," said Beauchamp "still, I assure you, he
passed very well with many people I saw him at the
ministers' houses."
"Ah, yes," said ChateauRenaud. "The idea of thinking
ministers understand anything about princes"
"There is something in what you have just said," said
Beauchamp, laughing.
"But," said Debray to Beauchamp, "if I spoke to the
president, you must have been with the procureur."
"It was an impossibility for the last week M. de Villefort
has secluded himself. It is natural enough this strange
chain of domestic afflictions, followed by the no less
strange death of his daughter" 
"Strange? What do you mean, Beauchamp?"
"Oh, yes do you pretend that all this has been unobserved
at the minister's?" said Beauchamp, placing his eyeglass in
his eye, where he tried to make it remain.
"My dear sir," said ChateauRenaud, "allow me to tell you
that you do not understand that manoeuvre with the eyeglass
half so well as Debray. Give him a lesson, Debray."
"Stay," said Beauchamp, "surely I am not deceived."
"What is it?"
"It is she"
"Whom do you mean?"
"They said she had left."
"Mademoiselle Eugenie?" said ChateauRenaud "has she
returned?"
"No, but her mother."
"Madame Danglars? Nonsense Impossible" said
ChateauRenaud "only ten days after the flight of her
daughter, and three days from the bankruptcy of her
husband?"
Debray colored slightly, and followed with his eyes the
direction of Beauchamp's glance. "Come," he said, "it is
only a veiled lady, some foreign princess, perhaps the
mother of Cavalcanti. But you were just speaking on a very
interesting topic, Beauchamp."
"I?"
"Yes you were telling us about the extraordinary death of
Valentine."
"Ah, yes, so I was. But how is it that Madame de Villefort
is not here?"
"Poor, dear woman," said Debray, "she is no doubt occupied
in distilling balm for the hospitals, or in making cosmetics
for herself or friends. Do you know she spends two or three
thousand crowns a year in this amusement? But I wonder she
is not here. I should have been pleased to see her, for I
like her very much."
"And I hate her," said ChateauRenaud.
"Why?"
"I do not know. Why do we love? Why do we hate? I detest
her, from antipathy."
"Or, rather, by instinct."
"Perhaps so. But to return to what you were saying,
Beauchamp."
"Well, do you know why they die so multitudinously at M. de
Villefort's?"
""Multitudinously' [drv] is good," said ChateauRenaud.
"My good fellow, you'll find the word in SaintSimon."
"But the thing itself is at M. de Villefort's but let's get
back to the subject."
"Talking of that," said Debray, "Madame was making inquiries
about that house, which for the last three months has been
hung with black."
"Who is Madame?" asked ChateauRenaud.
"The minister's wife, pardieu"
"Oh, your pardon I never visit ministers I leave that to
the princes."
"Really, You were only before sparkling, but now you are
brilliant take compassion on us, or, like Jupiter, you will
wither us up."
"I will not speak again," said ChateauRenaud "pray have
compassion upon me, and do not take up every word I say."
"Come, let us endeavor to get to the end of our story,
Beauchamp I told you that yesterday Madame made inquiries
of me upon the subject enlighten me, and I will then
communicate my information to her."
"Well, gentlemen, the reason people die so multitudinously
I like the word at M. de Villefort's is that there is an
assassin in the house" The two young men shuddered, for the
same idea had more than once occurred to them. "And who is
the assassin" they asked together.
"Young Edward" A burst of laughter from the auditors did
not in the least disconcert the speaker, who continued, 
"Yes, gentlemen Edward, the infant phenomenon, who is quite
an adept in the art of killing."
"You are jesting."
"Not at all. I yesterday engaged a servant, who had just
left M. de Villefort  I intend sending him away tomorrow,
for he eats so enormously, to make up for the fast imposed
upon him by his terror in that house. Well, now listen."
"We are listening."
"It appears the dear child has obtained possession of a
bottle containing some drug, which he every now and then
uses against those who have displeased him. First, M. and
Madame de SaintMeran incurred his displeasure, so he poured
out three drops of his elixir  three drops were
sufficient then followed Barrois, the old servant of M.
Noirtier, who sometimes rebuffed this little wretch  he
therefore received the same quantity of the elixir the same
happened to Valentine, of whom he was jealous he gave her
the same dose as the others, and all was over for her as
well as the rest."
"Why, what nonsense are you telling us?" said
ChateauRenaud.
"Yes, it is an extraordinary story," said Beauchamp "is it
not?"
"It is absurd," said Debray.
"Ah," said Beauchamp, "you doubt me? Well, you can ask my
servant, or rather him who will no longer be my servant
tomorrow, it was the talk of the house."
"And this elixir, where is it? what is it?"
"The child conceals it."
"But where did he find it?"
"In his mother's laboratory."
"Does his mother then, keep poisons in her laboratory?"
"How can I tell? You are questioning me like a king's
attorney. I only repeat what I have been told, and like my
informant I can do no more. The poor devil would eat
nothing, from fear."
"It is incredible"
"No, my dear fellow, it is not at all incredible. You saw
the child pass through the Rue Richelieu last year, who
amused himself with killing his brothers and sisters by
sticking pins in their ears while they slept. The generation
who follow us are very precocious."
"Come, Beauchamp," said ChateauRenaud, "I will bet anything
you do not believe a word of all you have been telling us."
"I do not see the Count of Monte Cristo here."
"He is worn out," said Debray "besides, he could not well
appear in public, since he has been the dupe of the
Cavalcanti, who, it appears, presented themselves to him
with false letters of credit, and cheated him out of ,
francs upon the hypothesis of this principality."
"By the way, M. de ChateauRenaud," asked Beauchamp, "how is
Morrel?"
"Ma foi, I have called three times without once seeing him.
Still, his sister did not seem uneasy, and told me that
though she had not seen him for two or three days, she was
sure he was well."
"Ah, now I think of it, the Count of Monte Cristo cannot
appear in the hall," said Beauchamp.
"Why not?"
"Because he is an actor in the drama."
"Has he assassinated any one, then?"
"No, on the contrary, they wished to assassinate him. You
know that it was in leaving his house that M. de Caderousse
was murdered by his friend Benedetto. You know that the
famous waistcoat was found in his house, containing the
letter which stopped the signature of the marriagecontract.
Do you see the waistcoat? There it is, all bloodstained, on
the desk, as a testimony of the crime."
"Ah, very good."
"Hush, gentlemen, here is the court let us go back to our
places." A noise was heard in the hall the sergeant called
his two patrons with an energetic "hem" and the doorkeeper
appearing, called out with that shrill voice peculiar to his
order, ever since the days of Beaumarchais, "The court,
gentlemen"
Chapter 
The Indictment.
The judges took their places in the midst of the most
profound silence the jury took their seats M. de
Villefort, the object of unusual attention, and we had
almost said of general admiration, sat in the armchair and
cast a tranquil glance around him. Every one looked with
astonishment on that grave and severe face, whose calm
expression personal griefs had been unable to disturb, and
the aspect of a man who was a stranger to all human emotions
excited something very like terror.
"Gendarmes," said the president, "lead in the accused."
At these words the public attention became more intense, and
all eyes were turned towards the door through which
Benedetto was to enter. The door soon opened and the accused
appeared. The same impression was experienced by all
present, and no one was deceived by the expression of his
countenance. His features bore no sign of that deep emotion
which stops the beating of the heart and blanches the cheek.
His hands, gracefully placed, one upon his hat, the other in
the opening of his white waistcoat, were not at all
tremulous his eye was calm and even brilliant. Scarcely had
he entered the hall when he glanced at the whole body of
magistrates and assistants his eye rested longer on the
president, and still more so on the king's attorney. By the
side of Andrea was stationed the lawyer who was to conduct
his defence, and who had been appointed by the court, for
Andrea disdained to pay any attention to those details, to
which he appeared to attach no importance. The lawyer was a
young man with light hair whose face expressed a hundred
times more emotion than that which characterized the
prisoner.
The president called for the indictment, revised as we know,
by the clever and implacable pen of Villefort. During the
reading of this, which was long, the public attention was
continually drawn towards Andrea, who bore the inspection
with Spartan unconcern. Villefort had never been so concise
and eloquent. The crime was depicted in the most vivid
colors the former life of the prisoner, his transformation,
a review of his life from the earliest period, were set
forth with all the talent that a knowledge of human life
could furnish to a mind like that of the procureur.
Benedetto was thus forever condemned in public opinion
before the sentence of the law could be pronounced. Andrea
paid no attention to the successive charges which were
brought against him. M. de Villefort, who examined him
attentively, and who no doubt practiced upon him all the
psychological studies he was accustomed to use, in vain
endeavored to make him lower his eyes, notwithstanding the
depth and profundity of his gaze. At length the reading of
the indictment was ended.
"Accused," said the president, "your name and surname?"
Andrea arose. "Excuse me, Mr. President," he said, in a
clear voice, "but I see you are going to adopt a course of
questions through which I cannot follow you. I have an idea,
which I will explain by and by, of making an exception to
the usual form of accusation. Allow me, then, if you please,
to answer in different order, or I will not do so at all."
The astonished president looked at the jury, who in turn
looked at Villefort. The whole assembly manifested great
surprise, but Andrea appeared quite unmoved. "Your age?"
said the president "will you answer that question?"
"I will answer that question, as well as the rest, Mr.
President, but in its turn."
"Your age?" repeated the president.
"I am twentyone years old, or rather I shall be in a few
days, as I was born the night of the th of September,
." M. de Villefort, who was busy taking down some notes,
raised his head at the mention of this date. "Where were you
born?" continued the president.
"At Auteuil, near Paris." M. de Villefort a second time
raised his head, looked at Benedetto as if he had been
gazing at the head of Medusa, and became livid. As for
Benedetto, he gracefully wiped his lips with a fine cambric
pockethandkerchief. "Your profession?"
"First I was a forger," answered Andrea, as calmly as
possible "then I became a thief, and lately have become an
assassin." A murmur, or rather storm, of indignation burst
from all parts of the assembly. The judges themselves
appeared to be stupefied, and the jury manifested tokens of
disgust for cynicism so unexpected in a man of fashion. M.
de Villefort pressed his hand upon his brow, which, at first
pale, had become red and burning then he suddenly arose and
looked around as though he had lost his senses  he wanted
air.
"Are you looking for anything, Mr. Procureur?" asked
Benedetto, with his most ingratiating smile. M. de Villefort
answered nothing, but sat, or rather threw himself down
again upon his chair. "And now, prisoner, will you consent
to tell your name?" said the president. "The brutal
affectation with which you have enumerated and classified
your crimes calls for a severe reprimand on the part of the
court, both in the name of morality, and for the respect due
to humanity. You appear to consider this a point of honor,
and it may be for this reason, that you have delayed
acknowledging your name. You wished it to be preceded by all
these titles."
"It is quite wonderful, Mr. President, how entirely you have
read my thoughts," said Benedetto, in his softest voice and
most polite manner. "This is, indeed, the reason why I
begged you to alter the order of the questions." The public
astonishment had reached its height. There was no longer any
deceit or bravado in the manner of the accused. The audience
felt that a startling revelation was to follow this ominous
prelude.
"Well," said the president "your name?"
"I cannot tell you my name, since I do not know it but I
know my father's, and can tell it to you."
A painful giddiness overwhelmed Villefort great drops of
acrid sweat fell from his face upon the papers which he held
in his convulsed hand.
"Repeat your father's name," said the president. Not a
whisper, not a breath, was heard in that vast assembly
every one waited anxiously.
"My father is king's attorney," replied Andrea calmly.
"King's attorney?" said the president, stupefied, and
without noticing the agitation which spread over the face of
M. de Villefort "king's attorney?"
"Yes and if you wish to know his name, I will tell it, 
he is named Villefort." The explosion, which had been so
long restrained from a feeling of respect to the court of
justice, now burst forth like thunder from the breasts of
all present the court itself did not seek to restrain the
feelings of the audience. The exclamations, the insults
addressed to Benedetto, who remained perfectly unconcerned,
the energetic gestures, the movement of the gendarmes, the
sneers of the scum of the crowd always sure to rise to the
surface in case of any disturbance  all this lasted five
minutes, before the doorkeepers and magistrates were able
to restore silence. In the midst of this tumult the voice of
the president was heard to exclaim,  "Are you playing with
justice, accused, and do you dare set your fellowcitizens
an example of disorder which even in these times has never
been equalled?"
Several persons hurried up to M. de Villefort, who sat half
bowed over in his chair, offering him consolation,
encouragement, and protestations of zeal and sympathy. Order
was reestablished in the hall, except that a few people
still moved about and whispered to one another. A lady, it
was said, had just fainted they had supplied her with a
smellingbottle, and she had recovered. During the scene of
tumult, Andrea had turned his smiling face towards the
assembly then, leaning with one hand on the oaken rail of
the dock, in the most graceful attitude possible, he said
"Gentlemen, I assure you I had no idea of insulting the
court, or of making a useless disturbance in the presence of
this honorable assembly. They ask my age I tell it. They
ask where I was born I answer. They ask my name, I cannot
give it, since my parents abandoned me. But though I cannot
give my own name, not possessing one, I can tell them my
father's. Now I repeat, my father is named M. de Villefort,
and I am ready to prove it."
There was an energy, a conviction, and a sincerity in the
manner of the young man, which silenced the tumult. All eyes
were turned for a moment towards the procureur, who sat as
motionless as though a thunderbolt had changed him into a
corpse. "Gentlemen," said Andrea, commanding silence by his
voice and manner "I owe you the proofs and explanations of
what I have said."
"But," said the irritated president, "you called yourself
Benedetto, declared yourself an orphan, and claimed Corsica
as your country."
"I said anything I pleased, in order that the solemn
declaration I have just made should not be withheld, which
otherwise would certainly have been the case. I now repeat
that I was born at Auteuil on the night of the th of
September, , and that I am the son of the procureur, M.
de Villefort. Do you wish for any further details? I will
give them. I was born in No. , Rue de la Fontaine, in a
room hung with red damask my father took me in his arms,
telling my mother I was dead, wrapped me in a napkin marked
with an H and an N, and carried me into a garden, where he
buried me alive."
A shudder ran through the assembly when they saw that the
confidence of the prisoner increased in proportion to the
terror of M. de Villefort. "But how have you become
acquainted with all these details?" asked the president.
"I will tell you, Mr. President. A man who had sworn
vengeance against my father, and had long watched his
opportunity to kill him, had introduced himself that night
into the garden in which my father buried me. He was
concealed in a thicket he saw my father bury something in
the ground, and stabbed him then thinking the deposit might
contain some treasure he turned up the ground, and found me
still living. The man carried me to the foundling asylum,
where I was registered under the number . Three months
afterwards, a woman travelled from Rogliano to Paris to
fetch me, and having claimed me as her son, carried me away.
Thus, you see, though born in Paris, I was brought up in
Corsica."
There was a moment's silence, during which one could have
fancied the hall empty, so profound was the stillness.
"Proceed," said the president.
"Certainly, I might have lived happily amongst those good
people, who adored me, but my perverse disposition prevailed
over the virtues which my adopted mother endeavored to
instil into my heart. I increased in wickedness till I
committed crime. One day when I cursed providence for making
me so wicked, and ordaining me to such a fate, my adopted
father said to me, "Do not blaspheme, unhappy child, the
crime is that of your father, not yours,  of your father,
who consigned you to hell if you died, and to misery if a
miracle preserved you alive.' After that I ceased to
blaspheme, but I cursed my father. That is why I have
uttered the words for which you blame me that is why I have
filled this whole assembly with horror. If I have committed
an additional crime, punish me, but if you will allow that
ever since the day of my birth my fate has been sad, bitter,
and lamentable, then pity me."
"But your mother?" asked the president.
"My mother thought me dead she is not guilty. I did not
even wish to know her name, nor do I know it." Just then a
piercing cry, ending in a sob, burst from the centre of the
crowd, who encircled the lady who had before fainted, and
who now fell into a violent fit of hysterics. She was
carried out of the hall, the thick veil which concealed her
face dropped off, and Madame Danglars was recognized.
Notwithstanding his shattered nerves, the ringing sensation
in his ears, and the madness which turned his brain,
Villefort rose as he perceived her. "The proofs, the
proofs" said the president "remember this tissue of
horrors must be supported by the clearest proofs "
"The proofs?" said Benedetto, laughing "do you want
proofs?"
"Yes."
"Well, then, look at M. de Villefort, and then ask me for
proofs."
Every one turned towards the procureur, who, unable to bear
the universal gaze now riveted on him alone, advanced
staggering into the midst of the tribunal, with his hair
dishevelled and his face indented with the mark of his
nails. The whole assembly uttered a long murmur of
astonishment. "Father," said Benedetto, "I am asked for
proofs, do you wish me to give them?"
"No, no, it is useless," stammered M. de Villefort in a
hoarse voice "no, it is useless"
"How useless?" cried the president, "what do you mean?"
"I mean that I feel it impossible to struggle against this
deadly weight which crushes me. Gentlemen, I know I am in
the hands of an avenging God We need no proofs everything
relating to this young man is true." A dull, gloomy silence,
like that which precedes some awful phenomenon of nature,
pervaded the assembly, who shuddered in dismay. "What, M. de
Villefort," cried the president, "do you yield to an
hallucination? What, are you no longer in possession of your
senses? This strange, unexpected, terrible accusation has
disordered your reason. Come, recover."
The procureur dropped his head his teeth chattered like
those of a man under a violent attack of fever, and yet he
was deadly pale.
"I am in possession of all my senses, sir," he said "my
body alone suffers, as you may suppose. I acknowledge myself
guilty of all the young man has brought against me, and from
this hour hold myself under the authority of the procureur
who will succeed me."
And as he spoke these words with a hoarse, choking voice, he
staggered towards the door, which was mechanically opened by
a doorkeeper. The whole assembly were dumb with
astonishment at the revelation and confession which had
produced a catastrophe so different from that which had been
expected during the last fortnight by the Parisian world.
"Well," said Beauchamp, "let them now say that drama is
unnatural"
"Ma foi" said ChateauRenaud, "I would rather end my career
like M. de Morcerf a pistolshot seems quite delightful
compared with this catastrophe."
"And moreover, it kills," said Beauchamp.
"And to think that I had an idea of marrying his daughter,"
said Debray. "She did well to die, poor girl"
"The sitting is adjourned, gentlemen," said the president
"fresh inquiries will be made, and the case will be tried
next session by another magistrate." As for Andrea, who was
calm and more interesting than ever, he left the hall,
escorted by gendarmes, who involuntarily paid him some
attention. "Well, what do you think of this, my fine
fellow?" asked Debray of the sergeantatarms, slipping a
louis into his hand. "There will be extenuating
circumstances," he replied.
Chapter 
Expiation.
Notwithstanding the density of the crowd, M. de Villefort
saw it open before him. There is something so aweinspiring
in great afflictions that even in the worst times the first
emotion of a crowd has generally been to sympathize with the
sufferer in a great catastrophe. Many people have been
assassinated in a tumult, but even criminals have rarely
been insulted during trial. Thus Villefort passed through
the mass of spectators and officers of the Palais, and
withdrew. Though he had acknowledged his guilt, he was
protected by his grief. There are some situations which men
understand by instinct, but which reason is powerless to
explain in such cases the greatest poet is he who gives
utterance to the most natural and vehement outburst of
sorrow. Those who hear the bitter cry are as much impressed
as if they listened to an entire poem, and when the sufferer
is sincere they are right in regarding his outburst as
sublime.
It would be difficult to describe the state of stupor in
which Villefort left the Palais. Every pulse beat with
feverish excitement, every nerve was strained, every vein
swollen, and every part of his body seemed to suffer
distinctly from the rest, thus multiplying his agony a
thousandfold. He made his way along the corridors through
force of habit he threw aside his magisterial robe, not out
of deference to etiquette, but because it was an unbearable
burden, a veritable garb of Nessus, insatiate in torture.
Having staggered as far as the Rue Dauphine, he perceived
his carriage, awoke his sleeping coachman by opening the
door himself, threw himself on the cushions, and pointed
towards the Faubourg SaintHonore the carriage drove on.
The weight of his fallen fortunes seemed suddenly to crush
him he could not foresee the consequences he could not
contemplate the future with the indifference of the hardened
criminal who merely faces a contingency already familiar.
God was still in his heart. "God," he murmured, not knowing
what he said,  "God  God" Behind the event that had
overwhelmed him he saw the hand of God. The carriage rolled
rapidly onward. Villefort, while turning restlessly on the
cushions, felt something press against him. He put out his
hand to remove the object it was a fan which Madame de
Villefort had left in the carriage this fan awakened a
recollection which darted through his mind like lightning.
He thought of his wife.
"Oh" he exclaimed, as though a redhot iron were piercing
his heart. During the last hour his own crime had alone been
presented to his mind now another object, not less
terrible, suddenly presented itself. His wife He had just
acted the inexorable judge with her, he had condemned her to
death, and she, crushed by remorse, struck with terror,
covered with the shame inspired by the eloquence of his
irreproachable virtue,  she, a poor, weak woman, without
help or the power of defending herself against his absolute
and supreme will,  she might at that very moment, perhaps,
be preparing to die An hour had elapsed since her
condemnation at that moment, doubtless, she was recalling
all her crimes to her memory she was asking pardon for her
sins perhaps she was even writing a letter imploring
forgiveness from her virtuous husband  a forgiveness she
was purchasing with her death Villefort again groaned with
anguish and despair. "Ah," he exclaimed, "that woman became
criminal only from associating with me I carried the
infection of crime with me, and she has caught it as she
would the typhus fever, the cholera, the plague And yet I
have punished her  I have dared to tell her  I have 
"Repent and die' But no, she must not die she shall live,
and with me. We will flee from Paris and go as far as the
earth reaches. I told her of the scaffold oh, heavens, I
forgot that it awaits me also How could I pronounce that
word? Yes, we will fly I will confess all to her,  I will
tell her daily that I also have committed a crime  Oh,
what an alliance  the tiger and the serpent worthy wife
of such as I am She must live that my infamy may diminish
hers." And Villefort dashed open the window in front of the
carriage.
"Faster, faster" he cried, in a tone which electrified the
coachman. The horses, impelled by fear, flew towards the
house.
"Yes, yes," repeated Villefort, as he approached his home 
"yes, that woman must live she must repent, and educate my
son, the sole survivor, with the exception of the
indestructible old man, of the wreck of my house. She loves
him it was for his sake she has committed these crimes. We
ought never to despair of softening the heart of a mother
who loves her child. She will repent, and no one will know
that she has been guilty. The events which have taken place
in my house, though they now occupy the public mind, will be
forgotten in time, or if, indeed, a few enemies should
persist in remembering them, why then I will add them to my
list of crimes. What will it signify if one, two, or three
more are added? My wife and child shall escape from this
gulf, carrying treasures with them she will live and may
yet be happy, since her child, in whom all her love is
centred, will be with her. I shall have performed a good
action, and my heart will be lighter." And the procureur
breathed more freely than he had done for some time.
The carriage stopped at the door of the house. Villefort
leaped out of the carriage, and saw that his servants were
surprised at his early return he could read no other
expression on their features. Neither of them spoke to him
they merely stood aside to let him pass by, as usual,
nothing more. As he passed by M. Noirtier's room, he
perceived two figures through the halfopen door but he
experienced no curiosity to know who was visiting his
father anxiety carried him on further.
"Come," he said, as he ascended the stairs leading to his
wife's room, "nothing is changed here." He then closed the
door of the landing. "No one must disturb us," he said "I
must speak freely to her, accuse myself, and say"  he
approached the door, touched the crystal handle, which
yielded to his hand. "Not locked," he cried "that is well."
And he entered the little room in which Edward slept for
though the child went to school during the day, his mother
could not allow him to be separated from her at night. With
a single glance Villefort's eye ran through the room. "Not
here," he said "doubtless she is in her bedroom." He rushed
towards the door, found it bolted, and stopped, shuddering.
"Heloise" he cried. He fancied he heard the sound of a
piece of furniture being removed. "Heloise" he repeated.
"Who is there?" answered the voice of her he sought. He
thought that voice more feeble than usual.
"Open the door" cried Villefort. "Open it is I." But
notwithstanding this request, notwithstanding the tone of
anguish in which it was uttered, the door remained closed.
Villefort burst it open with a violent blow. At the entrance
of the room which led to her boudoir, Madame de Villefort
was standing erect, pale, her features contracted, and her
eyes glaring horribly. "Heloise, Heloise" he said, "what is
the matter? Speak" The young woman extended her stiff white
hands towards him. "It is done, monsieur," she said with a
rattling noise which seemed to tear her throat. "What more
do you want?" and she fell full length on the floor.
Villefort ran to her and seized her hand, which convulsively
clasped a crystal bottle with a golden stopper. Madame de
Villefort was dead. Villefort, maddened with horror, stepped
back to the threshhold of the door, fixing his eyes on the
corpse "My son" he exclaimed suddenly, "where is my son?
Edward, Edward" and he rushed out of the room, still
crying, "Edward, Edward" The name was pronounced in such a
tone of anguish that the servants ran up.
"Where is my son?" asked Villefort "let him be removed from
the house, that he may not see" 
"Master Edward is not downstairs, sir," replied the valet.
"Then he must be playing in the garden go and see."
"No, sir Madame de Villefort sent for him half an hour ago
he went into her room, and has not been downstairs since."
A cold perspiration burst out on Villefort's brow his legs
trembled, and his thoughts flew about madly in his brain
like the wheels of a disordered watch. "In Madame de
Villefort's room?" he murmured and slowly returned, with one
hand wiping his forehead, and with the other supporting
himself against the wall. To enter the room he must again
see the body of his unfortunate wife. To call Edward he must
reawaken the echo of that room which now appeared like a
sepulchre to speak seemed like violating the silence of the
tomb. His tongue was paralyzed in his mouth.
"Edward" he stammered  "Edward" The child did not
answer. Where, then, could he be, if he had entered his
mother's room and not since returned? He stepped forward.
The corpse of Madame de Villefort was stretched across the
doorway leading to the room in which Edward must be those
glaring eyes seemed to watch over the threshold, and the
lips bore the stamp of a terrible and mysterious irony.
Through the open door was visible a portion of the boudoir,
containing an upright piano and a blue satin couch.
Villefort stepped forward two or three paces, and beheld his
child lying  no doubt asleep  on the sofa. The unhappy
man uttered an exclamation of joy a ray of light seemed to
penetrate the abyss of despair and darkness. He had only to
step over the corpse, enter the boudoir, take the child in
his arms, and flee far, far away.
Villefort was no longer the civilized man he was a tiger
hurt unto death, gnashing his teeth in his wound. He no
longer feared realities, but phantoms. He leaped over the
corpse as if it had been a burning brazier. He took the
child in his arms, embraced him, shook him, called him, but
the child made no response. He pressed his burning lips to
the cheeks, but they were icy cold and pale he felt the
stiffened limbs he pressed his hand upon the heart, but it
no longer beat,  the child was dead. A folded paper fell
from Edward's breast. Villefort, thunderstruck, fell upon
his knees the child dropped from his arms, and rolled on
the floor by the side of its mother. He picked up the paper,
and, recognizing his wife's writing, ran his eyes rapidly
over its contents it ran as follows 
"You know that I was a good mother, since it was for my
son's sake I became criminal. A good mother cannot depart
without her son."
Villefort could not believe his eyes,  he could not
believe his reason he dragged himself towards the child's
body, and examined it as a lioness contemplates its dead
cub. Then a piercing cry escaped from his breast, and he
cried, "Still the hand of God." The presence of the two
victims alarmed him he could not bear solitude shared only
by two corpses. Until then he had been sustained by rage, by
his strength of mind, by despair, by the supreme agony which
led the Titans to scale the heavens, and Ajax to defy the
gods. He now arose, his head bowed beneath the weight of
grief, and, shaking his damp, dishevelled hair, he who had
never felt compassion for any one determined to seek his
father, that he might have some one to whom he could relate
his misfortunes,  some one by whose side he might weep. He
descended the little staircase with which we are acquainted,
and entered Noirtier's room. The old man appeared to be
listening attentively and as affectionately as his
infirmities would allow to the Abbe Busoni, who looked cold
and calm, as usual. Villefort, perceiving the abbe, passed
his hand across his brow. He recollected the call he had
made upon him after the dinner at Auteuil, and then the
visit the abbe had himself paid to his house on the day of
Valentine's death. "You here, sir" he exclaimed "do you,
then, never appear but to act as an escort to death?"
Busoni turned around, and, perceiving the excitement
depicted on the magistrate's face, the savage lustre of his
eyes, he understood that the revelation had been made at the
assizes but beyond this he was ignorant. "I came to pray
over the body of your daughter."
"And now why are you here?"
"I come to tell you that you have sufficiently repaid your
debt, and that from this moment I will pray to God to
forgive you, as I do."
"Good heavens" exclaimed Villefort, stepping back
fearfully, "surely that is not the voice of the Abbe
Busoni"
"No" The abbe threw off his wig, shook his head, and his
hair, no longer confined, fell in black masses around his
manly face.
"It is the face of the Count of Monte Cristo" exclaimed the
procureur, with a haggard expression.
"You are not exactly right, M. Procureur you must go
farther back."
"That voice, that voice  where did I first hear it?"
"You heard it for the first time at Marseilles, twentythree
years ago, the day of your marriage with Mademoiselle de
SaintMeran. Refer to your papers."
"You are not Busoni?  you are not Monte Cristo? Oh,
heavens  you are, then, some secret, implacable, and
mortal enemy I must have wronged you in some way at
Marseilles. Oh, woe to me"
"Yes you are now on the right path," said the count,
crossing his arms over his broad chest "search  search"
"But what have I done to you?" exclaimed Villefort, whose
mind was balancing between reason and insanity, in that
cloud which is neither a dream nor reality "what have I
done to you? Tell me, then Speak"
"You condemned me to a horrible, tedious death you killed
my father you deprived me of liberty, of love, and
happiness."
"Who are you, then? Who are you?"
"I am the spectre of a wretch you buried in the dungeons of
the Chateau d'If. God gave that spectre the form of the
Count of Monte Cristo when he at length issued from his
tomb, enriched him with gold and diamonds, and led him to
you"
"Ah, I recognize you  I recognize you" exclaimed the
king's attorney "you are" 
"I am Edmond Dantes"
"You are Edmond Dantes," cried Villefort, seizing the count
by the wrist "then come here" And up the stairs he dragged
Monte Cristo who, ignorant of what had happened, followed
him in astonishment, foreseeing some new catastrophe.
"There, Edmond Dantes" he said, pointing to the bodies of
his wife and child, "see, are you well avenged?" Monte
Cristo became pale at this horrible sight he felt that he
had passed beyond the bounds of vengeance, and that he could
no longer say, "God is for and with me." With an expression
of indescribable anguish he threw himself upon the body of
the child, reopened its eyes, felt its pulse, and then
rushed with him into Valentine's room, of which he
doublelocked the door. "My child," cried Villefort, "he
carries away the body of my child Oh, curses, woe, death to
you" and he tried to follow Monte Cristo but as though in
a dream he was transfixed to the spot,  his eyes glared as
though they were starting through the sockets he griped the
flesh on his chest until his nails were stained with blood
the veins of his temples swelled and boiled as though they
would burst their narrow boundary, and deluge his brain with
living fire. This lasted several minutes, until the
frightful overturn of reason was accomplished then uttering
a loud cry followed by a burst of laughter, he rushed down
the stairs.
A quarter of an hour afterwards the door of Valentine's room
opened, and Monte Cristo reappeared. Pale, with a dull eye
and heavy heart, all the noble features of that face,
usually so calm and serene, were overcast by grief. In his
arms he held the child, whom no skill had been able to
recall to life. Bending on one knee, he placed it reverently
by the side of its mother, with its head upon her breast.
Then, rising, he went out, and meeting a servant on the
stairs, he asked, "Where is M. de Villefort?"
The servant, instead of answering, pointed to the garden.
Monte Cristo ran down the steps, and advancing towards the
spot designated beheld Villefort, encircled by his servants,
with a spade in his hand, and digging the earth with fury.
"It is not here" he cried. "It is not here" And then he
moved farther on, and began again to dig.
Monte Cristo approached him, and said in a low voice, with
an expression almost humble, "Sir, you have indeed lost a
son but" 
Villefort interrupted him he had neither listened nor
heard. "Oh, I will find it," he cried "you may pretend he
is not here, but I will find him, though I dig forever"
Monte Cristo drew back in horror. "Oh," he said, "he is
mad" And as though he feared that the walls of the accursed
house would crumble around him, he rushed into the street,
for the first time doubting whether he had the right to do
as he had done. "Oh, enough of this,  enough of this," he
cried "let me save the last." On entering his house, he met
Morrel, who wandered about like a ghost awaiting the
heavenly mandate for return to the tomb. "Prepare yourself,
Maximilian," he said with a smile "we leave Paris
tomorrow."
"Have you nothing more to do there?" asked Morrel.
"No," replied Monte Cristo "God grant I may not have done
too much already."
The next day they indeed left, accompanied only by
Baptistin. Haidee had taken away Ali, and Bertuccio remained
with Noirtier.
Chapter 
The Departure.
The recent event formed the theme of conversation throughout
all Paris. Emmanuel and his wife conversed with natural
astonishment in their little apartment in the Rue Meslay
upon the three successive, sudden, and most unexpected
catastrophes of Morcerf, Danglars, and Villefort.
Maximilian, who was paying them a visit, listened to their
conversation, or rather was present at it, plunged in his
accustomed state of apathy. "Indeed," said Julie, "might we
not almost fancy, Emmanuel, that those people, so rich, so
happy but yesterday, had forgotten in their prosperity that
an evil genius  like the wicked fairies in Perrault's
stories who present themselves unbidden at a wedding or
baptism  hovered over them, and appeared all at once to
revenge himself for their fatal neglect?"
"What a dire misfortune" said Emmanuel, thinking of Morcerf
and Danglars.
"What dreadful sufferings" said Julie, remembering
Valentine, but whom, with a delicacy natural to women, she
did not name before her brother.
"If the Supreme Being has directed the fatal blow," said
Emmanuel, "it must be that he in his great goodness has
perceived nothing in the past lives of these people to merit
mitigation of their awful punishment."
"Do you not form a very rash judgment, Emmanuel?" said
Julie. "When my father, with a pistol in his hand, was once
on the point of committing suicide, had any one then said,
"This man deserves his misery,' would not that person have
been deceived?"
"Yes but your father was not allowed to fall. A being was
commissioned to arrest the fatal hand of death about to
descend on him."
Emmanuel had scarcely uttered these words when the sound of
the bell was heard, the wellknown signal given by the
porter that a visitor had arrived. Nearly at the same
instant the door was opened and the Count of Monte Cristo
appeared on the threshold. The young people uttered a cry of
joy, while Maximilian raised his head, but let it fall again
immediately. "Maximilian," said the count, without appearing
to notice the different impressions which his presence
produced on the little circle, "I come to seek you."
"To seek me?" repeated Morrel, as if awakening from a dream.
"Yes," said Monte Cristo "has it not been agreed that I
should take you with me, and did I not tell you yesterday to
prepare for departure?"
"I am ready," said Maximilian "I came expressly to wish
them farewell."
"Whither are you going, count?" asked Julie.
"In the first instance to Marseilles, madame."
"To Marseilles" exclaimed the young couple.
"Yes, and I take your brother with me."
"Oh, count." said Julie, "will you restore him to us cured
of his melancholy?"  Morrel turned away to conceal the
confusion of his countenance.
"You perceive, then, that he is not happy?" said the count.
"Yes," replied the young woman "and fear much that he finds
our home but a dull one."
"I will undertake to divert him," replied the count.
"I am ready to accompany you, sir," said Maximilian. "Adieu,
my kind friends Emmanuel  Julie  farewell"
"How farewell?" exclaimed Julie "do you leave us thus, so
suddenly, without any preparations for your journey, without
even a passport?"
"Needless delays but increase the grief of parting," said
Monte Cristo, "and Maximilian has doubtless provided himself
with everything requisite at least, I advised him to do
so."
"I have a passport, and my clothes are ready packed," said
Morrel in his tranquil but mournful manner.
"Good," said Monte Cristo, smiling "in these prompt
arrangements we recognize the order of a welldisciplined
soldier."
"And you leave us," said Julie, "at a moment's warning? you
do not give us a day  no, not even an hour before your
departure?"
"My carriage is at the door, madame, and I must be in Rome
in five days."
"But does Maximilian go to Rome?" exclaimed Emmanuel.
"I am going wherever it may please the count to take me,"
said Morrel, with a smile full of grief "I am under his
orders for the next month."
"Oh, heavens, how strangely he expresses himself, count"
said Julie.
"Maximilian goes with me," said the count, in his kindest
and most persuasive manner "therefore do not make yourself
uneasy on your brother's account."
"Once more farewell, my dear sister Emmanuel, adieu"
Morrel repeated.
"His carelessness and indifference touch me to the heart,"
said Julie. "Oh, Maximilian, Maximilian, you are certainly
concealing something from us."
"Pshaw" said Monte Cristo, "you will see him return to you
gay, smiling, and joyful."
Maximilian cast a look of disdain, almost of anger, on the
count.
"We must leave you," said Monte Cristo.
"Before you quit us, count," said Julie, "will you permit us
to express to you all that the other day" 
"Madame," interrupted the count, taking her two hands in
his, "all that you could say in words would never express
what I read in your eyes the thoughts of your heart are
fully understood by mine. Like benefactors in romances, I
should have left you without seeing you again, but that
would have been a virtue beyond my strength, because I am a
weak and vain man, fond of the tender, kind, and thankful
glances of my fellowcreatures. On the eve of departure I
carry my egotism so far as to say, "Do not forget me, my
kind friends, for probably you will never see me again.'"
"Never see you again?" exclaimed Emmanuel, while two large
tears rolled down Julie's cheeks, "never behold you again?
It is not a man, then, but some angel that leaves us, and
this angel is on the point of returning to heaven after
having appeared on earth to do good."
"Say not so," quickly returned Monte Cristo  "say not so,
my friends angels never err, celestial beings remain where
they wish to be. Fate is not more powerful than they it is
they who, on the contrary, overcome fate. No, Emmanuel, I am
but a man, and your admiration is as unmerited as your words
are sacrilegious." And pressing his lips on the hand of
Julie, who rushed into his arms, he extended his other hand
to Emmanuel then tearing himself from this abode of peace
and happiness, he made a sign to Maximilian, who followed
him passively, with the indifference which had been
perceptible in him ever since the death of Valentine had so
stunned him. "Restore my brother to peace and happiness,"
whispered Julie to Monte Cristo. And the count pressed her
hand in reply, as he had done eleven years before on the
staircase leading to Morrel's study.
"You still confide, then, in Sinbad the Sailor?" asked he,
smiling.
"Oh, yes," was the ready answer.
"Well, then, sleep in peace, and put your trust in heaven."
As we have before said, the postchaise was waiting four
powerful horses were already pawing the ground with
impatience, while Ali, apparently just arrived from a long
walk, was standing at the foot of the steps, his face bathed
in perspiration. "Well," asked the count in Arabic, "have
you been to see the old man?" Ali made a sign in the
affirmative.
"And have you placed the letter before him, as I ordered you
to do?"
The slave respectfully signalized that he had. "And what did
he say, or rather do?" Ali placed himself in the light, so
that his master might see him distinctly, and then imitating
in his intelligent manner the countenance of the old man, he
closed his eyes, as Noirtier was in the custom of doing when
saying "Yes."
"Good he accepts," said Monte Cristo. "Now let us go."
These words had scarcely escaped him, when the carriage was
on its way, and the feet of the horses struck a shower of
sparks from the pavement. Maximilian settled himself in his
corner without uttering a word. Half an hour had passed when
the carriage stopped suddenly the count had just pulled the
silken checkstring, which was fastened to Ali's finger. The
Nubian immediately descended and opened the carriage door.
It was a lovely starlight night  they had just reached the
top of the hill Villejuif, from whence Paris appears like a
sombre sea tossing its millions of phosphoric waves into
light  waves indeed more noisy, more passionate, more
changeable, more furious, more greedy, than those of the
tempestuous ocean,  waves which never rest as those of the
sea sometimes do,  waves ever dashing, ever foaming, ever
ingulfing what falls within their grasp. The count stood
alone, and at a sign from his hand, the carriage went on for
a short distance. With folded arms, he gazed for some time
upon the great city. When he had fixed his piercing look on
this modern Babylon, which equally engages the contemplation
of the religious enthusiast, the materialist, and the
scoffer,  "Great city," murmured he, inclining his head,
and joining his hands as if in prayer, "less than six months
have elapsed since first I entered thy gates. I believe that
the Spirit of God led my steps to thee and that he also
enables me to quit thee in triumph the secret cause of my
presence within thy walls I have confided alone to him who
only has had the power to read my heart. God only knows that
I retire from thee without pride or hatred, but not without
many regrets he only knows that the power confided to me
has never been made subservient to my personal good or to
any useless cause. Oh, great city, it is in thy palpitating
bosom that I have found that which I sought like a patient
miner, I have dug deep into thy very entrails to root out
evil thence. Now my work is accomplished, my mission is
terminated, now thou canst neither afford me pain nor
pleasure. Adieu, Paris, adieu"
His look wandered over the vast plain like that of some
genius of the night he passed his hand over his brow, got
into the carriage, the door was closed on him, and the
vehicle quickly disappeared down the other side of the hill
in a whirlwind of noise and dust.
Ten leagues were passed and not a single word was uttered.
Morrel was dreaming, and Monte Cristo was looking at the
dreamer.
"Morrel," said the count to him at length, "do you repent
having followed me?"
"No, count but to leave Paris" 
"If I thought happiness might await you in Paris, Morrel, I
would have left you there."
"Valentine reposes within the walls of Paris, and to leave
Paris is like losing her a second time."
"Maximilian," said the count, "the friends that we have lost
do not repose in the bosom of the earth, but are buried deep
in our hearts, and it has been thus ordained that we may
always be accompanied by them. I have two friends, who in
this way never depart from me the one who gave me being,
and the other who conferred knowledge and intelligence on
me. Their spirits live in me. I consult them when doubtful,
and if I ever do any good, it is due to their beneficent
counsels. Listen to the voice of your heart, Morrel, and ask
it whether you ought to preserve this melancholy exterior
towards me."
"My friend," said Maximilian, "the voice of my heart is very
sorrowful, and promises me nothing but misfortune."
"It is the way of weakened minds to see everything through a
black cloud. The soul forms its own horizons your soul is
darkened, and consequently the sky of the future appears
stormy and unpromising."
"That may possibly be true," said Maximilian, and he again
subsided into his thoughtful mood.
The journey was performed with that marvellous rapidity
which the unlimited power of the count ever commanded. Towns
fled from them like shadows on their path, and trees shaken
by the first winds of autumn seemed like giants madly
rushing on to meet them, and retreating as rapidly when once
reached. The following morning they arrived at Chalons,
where the count's steamboat waited for them. Without the
loss of an instant, the carriage was placed on board and the
two travellers embarked without delay. The boat was built
for speed her two paddlewheels were like two wings with
which she skimmed the water like a bird. Morrel was not
insensible to that sensation of delight which is generally
experienced in passing rapidly through the air, and the wind
which occasionally raised the hair from his forehead seemed
on the point of dispelling momentarily the clouds collected
there.
As the distance increased between the travellers and Paris,
almost superhuman serenity appeared to surround the count
he might have been taken for an exile about to revisit his
native land. Ere long Marseilles presented herself to view,
Marseilles, white, fervid, full of life and energy, 
Marseilles, the younger sister of Tyre and Carthage, the
successor to them in the empire of the Mediterranean, 
Marseilles, old, yet always young. Powerful memories were
stirred within them by the sight of the round tower, Fort
SaintNicolas, the City Hall designed by Puget, the port
with its brick quays, where they had both played in
childhood, and it was with one accord that they stopped on
the Cannebiere. A vessel was setting sail for Algiers, on
board of which the bustle usually attending departure
prevailed. The passengers and their relations crowded on the
deck, friends taking a tender but sorrowful leave of each
other, some weeping, others noisy in their grief, the whole
forming a spectacle that might be exciting even to those who
witnessed similar sights daily, but which had no power to
disturb the current of thought that had taken possession of
the mind of Maximilian from the moment he had set foot on
the broad pavement of the quay.
 Pierre Puget, the sculptorarchitect, was born at
Marseilles in .
"Here," said he, leaning heavily on the arm of Monte Cristo,
"here is the spot where my father stopped, when the
Pharaon entered the port it was here that the good old man,
whom you saved from death and dishonor, threw himself into
my arms. I yet feel his warm tears on my face, and his were
not the only tears shed, for many who witnessed our meeting
wept also." Monte Cristo gently smiled and said,  "I was
there" at the same time pointing to the corner of a street.
As he spoke, and in the very direction he indicated, a
groan, expressive of bitter grief, was heard, and a woman
was seen waving her hand to a passenger on board the vessel
about to sail. Monte Cristo looked at her with an emotion
that must have been remarked by Morrel had not his eyes been
fixed on the vessel.
"Oh, heavens" exclaimed Morrel, "I do not deceive myself 
that young man who is waving his hat, that youth in the
uniform of a lieutenant, is Albert de Morcerf"
"Yes," said Monte Cristo, "I recognized him."
"How so?  you were looking the other way." the count
smiled, as he was in the habit of doing when he did not want
to make any reply, and he again turned towards the veiled
woman, who soon disappeared at the corner of the street.
Turning to his friend,  "Dear Maximilian," said the count,
"have you nothing to do in this land?"
"I have to weep over the grave of my father," replied Morrel
in a broken voice.
"Well, then, go,  wait for me there, and I will soon join
you."
"You leave me, then?"
"Yes I also have a pious visit to pay."
Morrel allowed his hand to fall into that which the count
extended to him then with an inexpressibly sorrowful
inclination of the head he quitted the count and bent his
steps to the east of the city. Monte Cristo remained on the
same spot until Maximilian was out of sight he then walked
slowly towards the Allees de Meillan to seek out a small
house with which our readers were made familiar at the
beginning of this story. It yet stood, under the shade of
the fine avenue of limetrees, which forms one of the most
frequent walks of the idlers of Marseilles, covered by an
immense vine, which spreads its aged and blackened branches
over the stone front, burnt yellow by the ardent sun of the
south. Two stone steps worn away by the friction of many
feet led to the door, which was made of three planks the
door had never been painted or varnished, so great cracks
yawned in it during the dry season to close again when the
rains came on. The house, with all its crumbling antiquity
and apparent misery, was yet cheerful and picturesque, and
was the same that old Dantes formerly inhabited  the only
difference being that the old man occupied merely the
garret, while the whole house was now placed at the command
of Mercedes by the count.
The woman whom the count had seen leave the ship with so
much regret entered this house she had scarcely closed the
door after her when Monte Cristo appeared at the corner of a
street, so that he found and lost her again almost at the
same instant. The worn out steps were old acquaintances of
his he knew better than any one else how to open that
weatherbeaten door with the large headed nail which served
to raise the latch within. He entered without knocking, or
giving any other intimation of his presence, as if he had
been a friend or the master of the place. At the end of a
passage paved with bricks, was a little garden, bathed in
sunshine, and rich in warmth and light. In this garden
Mercedes had found, at the place indicated by the count, the
sum of money which he, through a sense of delicacy, had
described as having been placed there twentyfour years
previously. The trees of the garden were easily seen from
the steps of the streetdoor. Monte Cristo, on stepping into
the house, heard a sigh that was almost a deep sob he
looked in the direction whence it came, and there under an
arbor of Virginia jessamine, with its thick foliage and
beautiful long purple flowers, he saw Mercedes seated, with
her head bowed, and weeping bitterly. She had raised her
veil, and with her face hidden by her hands was giving free
scope to the sighs and tears which had been so long
restrained by the presence of her son. Monte Cristo advanced
a few steps, which were heard on the gravel. Mercedes raised
her head, and uttered a cry of terror on beholding a man
before her.
 The Carolina  not Virginia  jessamine, gelsemium
sempervirens properly speaking not a jessamine at all has
yellow blossoms. The reference is no doubt to the Wistaria
frutescens.  Ed.
"Madame," said the count, "it is no longer in my power to
restore you to happiness, but I offer you consolation will
you deign to accept it as coming from a friend?"
"I am, indeed, most wretched," replied Mercedes. "Alone in
the world, I had but my son, and he has left me"
"He possesses a noble heart, madame," replied the count,
"and he has acted rightly. He feels that every man owes a
tribute to his country some contribute their talents,
others their industry these devote their blood, those their
nightly labors, to the same cause. Had he remained with you,
his life must have become a hateful burden, nor would he
have participated in your griefs. He will increase in
strength and honor by struggling with adversity, which he
will convert into prosperity. Leave him to build up the
future for you, and I venture to say you will confide it to
safe hands."
"Oh," replied the wretched woman, mournfully shaking her
head, "the prosperity of which you speak, and which, from
the bottom of my heart, I pray God in his mercy to grant
him, I can never enjoy. The bitter cup of adversity has been
drained by me to the very dregs, and I feel that the grave
is not far distant. You have acted kindly, count, in
bringing me back to the place where I have enjoyed so much
bliss. I ought to meet death on the same spot where
happiness was once all my own."
"Alas," said Monte Cristo, "your words sear and embitter my
heart, the more so as you have every reason to hate me. I
have been the cause of all your misfortunes but why do you
pity, instead of blaming me? You render me still more
unhappy" 
"Hate you, blame you  you, Edmond Hate, reproach, the man
that has spared my son's life For was it not your fatal and
sanguinary intention to destroy that son of whom M. de
Morcerf was so proud? Oh, look at me closely, and discover
if you can even the semblance of a reproach in me." The
count looked up and fixed his eyes on Mercedes, who arose
partly from her seat and extended both her hands towards
him. "Oh, look at me," continued she, with a feeling of
profound melancholy, "my eyes no longer dazzle by their
brilliancy, for the time has long fled since I used to smile
on Edmond Dantes, who anxiously looked out for me from the
window of yonder garret, then inhabited by his old father.
Years of grief have created an abyss between those days and
the present. I neither reproach you nor hate you, my friend.
Oh, no, Edmond, it is myself that I blame, myself that I
hate Oh, miserable creature that I am" cried she, clasping
her hands, and raising her eyes to heaven. "I once possessed
piety, innocence, and love, the three ingredients of the
happiness of angels, and now what am I?" Monte Cristo
approached her, and silently took her hand. "No," said she,
withdrawing it gently  "no, my friend, touch me not. You
have spared me, yet of all those who have fallen under your
vengeance I was the most guilty. They were influenced by
hatred, by avarice, and by selflove but I was base, and
for want of courage acted against my judgment. Nay, do not
press my hand, Edmond you are thinking, I am sure, of some
kind speech to console me, but do not utter it to me,
reserve it for others more worthy of your kindness. See"
and she exposed her face completely to view  "see,
misfortune has silvered my hair, my eyes have shed so many
tears that they are encircled by a rim of purple, and my
brow is wrinkled. You, Edmond, on the contrary,  you are
still young, handsome, dignified it is because you have had
faith because you have had strength, because you have had
trust in God, and God has sustained you. But as for me, I
have been a coward I have denied God and he has abandoned
me."
Mercedes burst into tears her woman's heart was breaking
under its load of memories. Monte Cristo took her hand and
imprinted a kiss on it but she herself felt that it was a
kiss of no greater warmth than he would have bestowed on the
hand of some marble statue of a saint. "It often happens,"
continued she, "that a first fault destroys the prospects of
a whole life. I believed you dead why did I survive you?
What good has it done me to mourn for you eternally in the
secret recesses of my heart?  only to make a woman of
thirtynine look like a woman of fifty. Why, having
recognized you, and I the only one to do so  why was I
able to save my son alone? Ought I not also to have rescued
the man that I had accepted for a husband, guilty though he
were? Yet I let him die What do I say? Oh, merciful
heavens, was I not accessory to his death by my supine
insensibility, by my contempt for him, not remembering, or
not willing to remember, that it was for my sake he had
become a traitor and a perjurer? In what am I benefited by
accompanying my son so far, since I now abandon him, and
allow him to depart alone to the baneful climate of Africa?
Oh, I have been base, cowardly, I tell you I have abjured
my affections, and like all renegades I am of evil omen to
those who surround me"
"No, Mercedes," said Monte Cristo, "no you judge yourself
with too much severity. You are a nobleminded woman, and it
was your grief that disarmed me. Still I was but an agent,
led on by an invisible and offended Deity, who chose not to
withhold the fatal blow that I was destined to hurl. I take
that God to witness, at whose feet I have prostrated myself
daily for the last ten years, that I would have sacrificed
my life to you, and with my life the projects that were
indissolubly linked with it. But  and I say it with some
pride, Mercedes  God needed me, and I lived. Examine the
past and the present, and endeavor to dive into futurity,
and then say whether I am not a divine instrument. The most
dreadful misfortunes, the most frightful sufferings, the
abandonment of all those who loved me, the persecution of
those who did not know me, formed the trials of my youth
when suddenly, from captivity, solitude, misery, I was
restored to light and liberty, and became the possessor of a
fortune so brilliant, so unbounded, so unheardof, that I
must have been blind not to be conscious that God had
endowed me with it to work out his own great designs. From
that time I looked upon this fortune as something confided
to me for an especial purpose. Not a thought was given to a
life which you once, Mercedes, had the power to render
blissful not one hour of peaceful calm was mine but I felt
myself driven on like an exterminating angel. Like
adventurous captains about to embark on some enterprise full
of danger, I laid in my provisions, I loaded my weapons, I
collected every means of attack and defence I inured my
body to the most violent exercises, my soul to the bitterest
trials I taught my arm to slay, my eyes to behold
excruciating sufferings, and my mouth to smile at the most
horrid spectacles. Goodnatured, confiding, and forgiving as
I had been, I became revengeful, cunning, and wicked, or
rather, immovable as fate. Then I launched out into the path
that was opened to me. I overcame every obstacle, and
reached the goal but woe to those who stood in my pathway"
"Enough," said Mercedes "enough, Edmond Believe me, that
she who alone recognized you has been the only one to
comprehend you and had she crossed your path, and you had
crushed her like glass, still, Edmond, still she must have
admired you Like the gulf between me and the past, there is
an abyss between you, Edmond, and the rest of mankind and I
tell you freely that the comparison I draw between you and
other men will ever be one of my greatest tortures. No,
there is nothing in the world to resemble you in worth and
goodness But we must say farewell, Edmond, and let us
part."
"Before I leave you, Mercedes, have you no request to make?"
said the count.
"I desire but one thing in this world, Edmond,  the
happiness of my son."
"Pray to the Almighty to spare his life, and I will take
upon myself to promote his happiness."
"Thank you, Edmond."
"But have you no request to make for yourself, Mercedes?"
"For myself I want nothing. I live, as it were, between two
graves. One is that of Edmond Dantes, lost to me long, long
since. He had my love That word ill becomes my faded lip
now, but it is a memory dear to my heart, and one that I
would not lose for all that the world contains. The other
grave is that of the man who met his death from the hand of
Edmond Dantes. I approve of the deed, but I must pray for
the dead."
"Your son shall be happy, Mercedes," repeated the count.
"Then I shall enjoy as much happiness as this world can
possibly confer."
"But what are your intentions?"
"To say that I shall live here, like the Mercedes of other
times, gaining my bread by labor, would not be true, nor
would you believe me. I have no longer the strength to do
anything but to spend my days in prayer. However, I shall
have no occasion to work, for the little sum of money buried
by you, and which I found in the place you mentioned, will
be sufficient to maintain me. Rumor will probably be busy
respecting me, my occupations, my manner of living  that
will signify but little."
"Mercedes," said the count, "I do not say it to blame you,
but you made an unnecessary sacrifice in relinquishing the
whole of the fortune amassed by M. de Morcerf half of it at
least by right belonged to you, in virtue of your vigilance
and economy."
"I perceive what you are intending to propose to me but I
cannot accept it, Edmond  my son would not permit it."
"Nothing shall be done without the full approbation of
Albert de Morcerf. I will make myself acquainted with his
intentions and will submit to them. But if he be willing to
accept my offers, will you oppose them?"
"You well know, Edmond, that I am no longer a reasoning
creature I have no will, unless it be the will never to
decide. I have been so overwhelmed by the many storms that
have broken over my head, that I am become passive in the
hands of the Almighty, like a sparrow in the talons of an
eagle. I live, because it is not ordained for me to die. If
succor be sent to me, I will accept it."
"Ah, madame," said Monte Cristo, "you should not talk thus
It is not so we should evince our resignation to the will of
heaven on the contrary, we are all free agents."
"Alas" exclaimed Mercedes, "if it were so, if I possessed
freewill, but without the power to render that will
efficacious, it would drive me to despair." Monte Cristo
dropped his head and shrank from the vehemence of her grief.
"Will you not even say you will see me again?" he asked.
"On the contrary, we shall meet again," said Mercedes,
pointing to heaven with solemnity. "I tell you so to prove
to you that I still hope." And after pressing her own
trembling hand upon that of the count, Mercedes rushed up
the stairs and disappeared. Monte Cristo slowly left the
house and turned towards the quay. But Mercedes did not
witness his departure, although she was seated at the little
window of the room which had been occupied by old Dantes.
Her eyes were straining to see the ship which was carrying
her son over the vast sea but still her voice involuntarily
murmured softly, "Edmond, Edmond, Edmond"
Chapter 
The Past.
The count departed with a sad heart from the house in which
he had left Mercedes, probably never to behold her again.
Since the death of little Edward a great change had taken
place in Monte Cristo. Having reached the summit of his
vengeance by a long and tortuous path, he saw an abyss of
doubt yawning before him. More than this, the conversation
which had just taken place between Mercedes and himself had
awakened so many recollections in his heart that he felt it
necessary to combat with them. A man of the count's
temperament could not long indulge in that melancholy which
can exist in common minds, but which destroys superior ones.
He thought he must have made an error in his calculations if
he now found cause to blame himself.
"I cannot have deceived myself," he said "I must look upon
the past in a false light. What" he continued, "can I have
been following a false path?  can the end which I proposed
be a mistaken end?  can one hour have sufficed to prove to
an architect that the work upon which he founded all his
hopes was an impossible, if not a sacrilegious, undertaking?
I cannot reconcile myself to this idea  it would madden
me. The reason why I am now dissatisfied is that I have not
a clear appreciation of the past. The past, like the country
through which we walk, becomes indistinct as we advance. My
position is like that of a person wounded in a dream he
feels the wound, though he cannot recollect when he received
it. Come, then, thou regenerate man, thou extravagant
prodigal, thou awakened sleeper, thou allpowerful
visionary, thou invincible millionaire,  once again review
thy past life of starvation and wretchedness, revisit the
scenes where fate and misfortune conducted, and where
despair received thee. Too many diamonds, too much gold and
splendor, are now reflected by the mirror in which Monte
Cristo seeks to behold Dantes. Hide thy diamonds, bury thy
gold, shroud thy splendor, exchange riches for poverty,
liberty for a prison, a living body for a corpse" As he
thus reasoned, Monte Cristo walked down the Rue de la
Caisserie. It was the same through which, twentyfour years
ago, he had been conducted by a silent and nocturnal guard
the houses, today so smiling and animated, were on that
night dark, mute, and closed. "And yet they were the same,"
murmured Monte Cristo, "only now it is broad daylight
instead of night it is the sun which brightens the place,
and makes it appear so cheerful."
He proceeded towards the quay by the Rue SaintLaurent, and
advanced to the Consigne it was the point where he had
embarked. A pleasureboat with striped awning was going by.
Monte Cristo called the owner, who immediately rowed up to
him with the eagerness of a boatman hoping for a good fare.
The weather was magnificent, and the excursion a treat.
The sun, red and flaming, was sinking into the embrace of
the welcoming ocean. The sea, smooth as crystal, was now and
then disturbed by the leaping of fish, which were pursued by
some unseen enemy and sought for safety in another element
while on the extreme verge of the horizon might be seen the
fishermen's boats, white and graceful as the seagull, or
the merchant vessels bound for Corsica or Spain.
But notwithstanding the serene sky, the gracefully formed
boats, and the golden light in which the whole scene was
bathed, the Count of Monte Cristo, wrapped in his cloak,
could think only of this terrible voyage, the details of
which were one by one recalled to his memory. The solitary
light burning at the Catalans that first sight of the
Chateau d'If, which told him whither they were leading him
the struggle with the gendarmes when he wished to throw
himself overboard his despair when he found himself
vanquished, and the sensation when the muzzle of the carbine
touched his forehead  all these were brought before him in
vivid and frightful reality. Like the streams which the heat
of the summer has dried up, and which after the autumnal
storms gradually begin oozing drop by drop, so did the count
feel his heart gradually fill with the bitterness which
formerly nearly overwhelmed Edmond Dantes. Clear sky,
swiftflitting boats, and brilliant sunshine disappeared
the heavens were hung with black, and the gigantic structure
of the Chateau d'If seemed like the phantom of a mortal
enemy. As they reached the shore, the count instinctively
shrunk to the extreme end of the boat, and the owner was
obliged to call out, in his sweetest tone of voice, "Sir, we
are at the landing."
Monte Cristo remembered that on that very spot, on the same
rock, he had been violently dragged by the guards, who
forced him to ascend the slope at the points of their
bayonets. The journey had seemed very long to Dantes, but
Monte Cristo found it equally short. Each stroke of the oar
seemed to awaken a new throng of ideas, which sprang up with
the flying spray of the sea.
There had been no prisoners confined in the Chateau d'If
since the revolution of July it was only inhabited by a
guard, kept there for the prevention of smuggling. A
concierge waited at the door to exhibit to visitors this
monument of curiosity, once a scene of terror. The count
inquired whether any of the ancient jailers were still
there but they had all been pensioned, or had passed on to
some other employment. The concierge who attended him had
only been there since . He visited his own dungeon. He
again beheld the dull light vainly endeavoring to penetrate
the narrow opening. His eyes rested upon the spot where had
stood his bed, since then removed, and behind the bed the
new stones indicated where the breach made by the Abbe Faria
had been. Monte Cristo felt his limbs tremble he seated
himself upon a log of wood.
"Are there any stories connected with this prison besides
the one relating to the poisoning of Mirabeau?" asked the
count "are there any traditions respecting these dismal
abodes,  in which it is difficult to believe men can ever
have imprisoned their fellowcreatures?"
"Yes, sir indeed, the jailer Antoine told me one connected
with this very dungeon."
Monte Cristo shuddered Antoine had been his jailer. He had
almost forgotten his name and face, but at the mention of
the name he recalled his person as he used to see it, the
face encircled by a beard, wearing the brown jacket, the
bunch of keys, the jingling of which he still seemed to
hear. The count turned around, and fancied he saw him in the
corridor, rendered still darker by the torch carried by the
concierge. "Would you like to hear the story, sir?"
"Yes relate it," said Monte Cristo, pressing his hand to
his heart to still its violent beatings he felt afraid of
hearing his own history.
"This dungeon," said the concierge, "was, it appears, some
time ago occupied by a very dangerous prisoner, the more so
since he was full of industry. Another person was confined
in the Chateau at the same time, but he was not wicked, he
was only a poor mad priest."
"Ah, indeed?  mad" repeated Monte Cristo "and what was
his mania?"
"He offered millions to any one who would set him at
liberty."
Monte Cristo raised his eyes, but he could not see the
heavens there was a stone veil between him and the
firmament. He thought that there had been no less thick a
veil before the eyes of those to whom Faria offered the
treasures. "Could the prisoners see each other?" he asked.
"Oh, no, sir, it was expressly forbidden but they eluded
the vigilance of the guards, and made a passage from one
dungeon to the other."
"And which of them made this passage?"
"Oh, it must have been the young man, certainly, for he was
strong and industrious, while the abbe was aged and weak
besides, his mind was too vacillating to allow him to carry
out an idea."
"Blind fools" murmured the count.
"However, be that as it may, the young man made a tunnel,
how or by what means no one knows but he made it, and there
is the evidence yet remaining of his work. Do you see it?"
and the man held the torch to the wall.
"Ah, yes I see," said the count, in a voice hoarse from
emotion.
"The result was that the two men communicated with one
another how long they did so, nobody knows. One day the old
man fell ill and died. Now guess what the young one did?"
"Tell me."
"He carried off the corpse, which he placed in his own bed
with its face to the wall then he entered the empty
dungeon, closed the entrance, and slipped into the sack
which had contained the dead body. Did you ever hear of such
an idea?" Monte Cristo closed his eyes, and seemed again to
experience all the sensations he had felt when the coarse
canvas, yet moist with the cold dews of death, had touched
his face. The jailer continued "Now this was his project.
He fancied that they buried the dead at the Chateau d'If,
and imagining they would not expend much labor on the grave
of a prisoner, he calculated on raising the earth with his
shoulders, but unfortunately their arrangements at the
Chateau frustrated his projects. They never buried the dead
they merely attached a heavy cannonball to the feet, and
then threw them into the sea. This is what was done. The
young man was thrown from the top of the rock the corpse
was found on the bed next day, and the whole truth was
guessed, for the men who performed the office then mentioned
what they had not dared to speak of before, that at the
moment the corpse was thrown into the deep, they heard a
shriek, which was almost immediately stifled by the water in
which it disappeared." The count breathed with difficulty
the cold drops ran down his forehead, and his heart was full
of anguish.
"No," he muttered, "the doubt I felt was but the
commencement of forgetfulness but here the wound reopens,
and the heart again thirsts for vengeance. And the
prisoner," he continued aloud, "was he ever heard of
afterwards?"
"Oh, no of course not. You can understand that one of two
things must have happened he must either have fallen flat,
in which case the blow, from a height of ninety feet, must
have killed him instantly, or he must have fallen upright,
and then the weight would have dragged him to the bottom,
where he remained  poor fellow"
"Then you pity him?" said the count.
"Ma foi, yes though he was in his own element."
"What do you mean?"
"The report was that he had been a naval officer, who had
been confined for plotting with the Bonapartists."
"Great is truth," muttered the count, "fire cannot burn, nor
water drown it Thus the poor sailor lives in the
recollection of those who narrate his history his terrible
story is recited in the chimneycorner, and a shudder is
felt at the description of his transit through the air to be
swallowed by the deep." Then, the count added aloud, "Was
his name ever known?"
"Oh, yes but only as No. ."
"Oh, Villefort, Villefort," murmured the count, "this scene
must often have haunted thy sleepless hours"
"Do you wish to see anything more, sir?" said the concierge.
"Yes, especially if you will show me the poor abbe's room."
"Ah  No. ."
"Yes No. ." repeated the count, who seemed to hear the
voice of the abbe answering him in those very words through
the wall when asked his name.
"Come, sir."
"Wait," said Monte Cristo, "I wish to take one final glance
around this room."
"This is fortunate," said the guide "I have forgotten the
other key."
"Go and fetch it."
"I will leave you the torch, sir."
"No, take it away I can see in the dark."
"Why, you are like No. . They said he was so accustomed to
darkness that he could see a pin in the darkest corner of
his dungeon."
"He spent fourteen years to arrive at that," muttered the
count.
The guide carried away the torch. The count had spoken
correctly. Scarcely had a few seconds elapsed, ere he saw
everything as distinctly as by daylight. Then he looked
around him, and really recognized his dungeon.
"Yes," he said, "there is the stone upon which I used to
sit there is the impression made by my shoulders on the
wall there is the mark of my blood made when one day I
dashed my head against the wall. Oh, those figures, how well
I remember them I made them one day to calculate the age of
my father, that I might know whether I should find him still
living, and that of Mercedes, to know if I should find her
still free. After finishing that calculation, I had a
minute's hope. I did not reckon upon hunger and infidelity"
and a bitter laugh escaped the count. He saw in fancy the
burial of his father, and the marriage of Mercedes. On the
other side of the dungeon he perceived an inscription, the
white letters of which were still visible on the green wall.
""O God,'" he read, ""preserve my memory' Oh, yes," he
cried, "that was my only prayer at last I no longer begged
for liberty, but memory I dreaded to become mad and
forgetful. O God, thou hast preserved my memory I thank
thee, I thank thee" At this moment the light of the torch
was reflected on the wall the guide was coming Monte
Cristo went to meet him.
"Follow me, sir" and without ascending the stairs the guide
conducted him by a subterraneous passage to another
entrance. There, again, Monte Cristo was assailed by a
multitude of thoughts. The first thing that met his eye was
the meridian, drawn by the abbe on the wall, by which he
calculated the time then he saw the remains of the bed on
which the poor prisoner had died. The sight of this, instead
of exciting the anguish experienced by the count in the
dungeon, filled his heart with a soft and grateful
sentiment, and tears fell from his eyes.
"This is where the mad abbe was kept, sir, and that is where
the young man entered "and the guide pointed to the
opening, which had remained unclosed. "From the appearance
of the stone," he continued, "a learned gentleman discovered
that the prisoners might have communicated together for ten
years. Poor things Those must have been ten weary years."
Dantes took some louis from his pocket, and gave them to the
man who had twice unconsciously pitied him. The guide took
them, thinking them merely a few pieces of little value but
the light of the torch revealed their true worth. "Sir," he
said, "you have made a mistake you have given me gold."
"I know it." The concierge looked upon the count with
surprise. "Sir," he cried, scarcely able to believe his good
fortune  "sir, I cannot understand your generosity"
"Oh, it is very simple, my good fellow I have been a
sailor, and your story touched me more than it would
others."
"Then, sir, since you are so liberal, I ought to offer you
something."
"What have you to offer to me, my friend? Shells?
Strawwork? Thank you"
"No, sir, neither of those something connected with this
story."
"Really? What is it?"
"Listen," said the guide "I said to myself, "Something is
always left in a cell inhabited by one prisoner for fifteen
years,' so I began to sound the wall."
"Ah," cried Monte Cristo, remembering the abbe's two
hidingplaces.
"After some search, I found that the floor gave a hollow
sound near the head of the bed, and at the hearth."
"Yes," said the count, "yes."
"I raised the stones, and found" 
"A ropeladder and some tools?"
"How do you know that?" asked the guide in astonishment.
"I do not know  I only guess it, because that sort of
thing is generally found in prisoners' cells."
"Yes, sir, a ropeladder and tools."
"And have you them yet?"
"No, sir I sold them to visitors, who considered them great
curiosities but I have still something left."
"What is it?" asked the count, impatiently.
"A sort of book, written upon strips of cloth."
"Go and fetch it, my good fellow and if it be what I hope,
you will do well."
"I will run for it, sir" and the guide went out. Then the
count knelt down by the side of the bed, which death had
converted into an altar. "Oh, second father," he exclaimed,
"thou who hast given me liberty, knowledge, riches thou
who, like beings of a superior order to ourselves, couldst
understand the science of good and evil if in the depths of
the tomb there still remain something within us which can
respond to the voice of those who are left on earth if
after death the soul ever revisit the places where we have
lived and suffered,  then, noble heart, sublime soul, then
I conjure thee by the paternal love thou didst bear me, by
the filial obedience I vowed to thee, grant me some sign,
some revelation Remove from me the remains of doubt, which,
if it change not to conviction, must become remorse" The
count bowed his head, and clasped his hands together.
"Here, sir," said a voice behind him.
Monte Cristo shuddered, and arose. The concierge held out
the strips of cloth upon which the Abbe Faria had spread the
riches of his mind. The manuscript was the great work by the
Abbe Faria upon the kingdoms of Italy. The count seized it
hastily, his eyes immediately fell upon the epigraph, and he
read, ""Thou shalt tear out the dragons' teeth, and shall
trample the lions under foot, saith the Lord.'"
"Ah," he exclaimed, "here is my answer. Thanks, father,
thanks." And feeling in his pocket, he took thence a small
pocketbook, which contained ten banknotes, each of ,
francs.
"Here," he said, "take this pocketbook."
"Do you give it to me?"
"Yes but only on condition that you will not open it till I
am gone" and placing in his breast the treasure he had just
found, which was more valuable to him than the richest
jewel, he rushed out of the corridor, and reaching his boat,
cried, "To Marseilles" Then, as he departed, he fixed his
eyes upon the gloomy prison. "Woe," he cried, "to those who
confined me in that wretched prison and woe to those who
forgot that I was there" As he repassed the Catalans, the
count turned around and burying his head in his cloak
murmured the name of a woman. The victory was complete
twice he had overcome his doubts. The name he pronounced, in
a voice of tenderness, amounting almost to love, was that of
Haidee.
On landing, the count turned towards the cemetery, where he
felt sure of finding Morrel. He, too, ten years ago, had
piously sought out a tomb, and sought it vainly. He, who
returned to France with millions, had been unable to find
the grave of his father, who had perished from hunger.
Morrel had indeed placed a cross over the spot, but it had
fallen down and the gravedigger had burnt it, as he did all
the old wood in the churchyard. The worthy merchant had been
more fortunate. Dying in the arms of his children, he had
been by them laid by the side of his wife, who had preceded
him in eternity by two years. Two large slabs of marble, on
which were inscribed their names, were placed on either side
of a little enclosure, railed in, and shaded by four
cypresstrees. Morrel was leaning against one of these,
mechanically fixing his eyes on the graves. His grief was so
profound that he was nearly unconscious. "Maximilian," said
the count, "you should not look on the graves, but there"
and he pointed upwards.
"The dead are everywhere," said Morrel "did you not
yourself tell me so as we left Paris?"
"Maximilian," said the count, "you asked me during the
journey to allow you to remain some days at Marseilles. Do
you still wish to do so?"
"I have no wishes, count only I fancy I could pass the time
less painfully here than anywhere else."
"So much the better, for I must leave you but I carry your
word with me, do I not?"
"Ah, count, I shall forget it."
"No, you will not forget it, because you are a man of honor,
Morrel, because you have taken an oath, and are about to do
so again."
"Oh, count, have pity upon me. I am so unhappy."
"I have known a man much more unfortunate than you, Morrel."
"Impossible"
"Alas," said Monte Cristo, "it is the infirmity of our
nature always to believe ourselves much more unhappy than
those who groan by our sides"
"What can be more wretched than the man who has lost all he
loved and desired in the world?"
"Listen, Morrel, and pay attention to what I am about to
tell you. I knew a man who like you had fixed all his hopes
of happiness upon a woman. He was young, he had an old
father whom he loved, a betrothed bride whom he adored. He
was about to marry her, when one of the caprices of fate, 
which would almost make us doubt the goodness of providence,
if that providence did not afterwards reveal itself by
proving that all is but a means of conducting to an end, 
one of those caprices deprived him of his mistress, of the
future of which he had dreamed for in his blindness he
forgot he could only read the present, and cast him into a
dungeon."
"Ah," said Morrel, "one quits a dungeon in a week, a month,
or a year."
"He remained there fourteen years, Morrel," said the count,
placing his hand on the young man's shoulder. Maximilian
shuddered.
"Fourteen years" he muttered  "Fourteen years" repeated
the count. "During that time he had many moments of despair.
He also, Morrel, like you, considered himself the unhappiest
of men."
"Well?" asked Morrel.
"Well, at the height of his despair God assisted him through
human means. At first, perhaps, he did not recognize the
infinite mercy of the Lord, but at last he took patience and
waited. One day he miraculously left the prison,
transformed, rich, powerful. His first cry was for his
father but that father was dead."
"My father, too, is dead," said Morrel.
"Yes but your father died in your arms, happy, respected,
rich, and full of years his father died poor, despairing,
almost doubtful of providence and when his son sought his
grave ten years afterwards, his tomb had disappeared, and no
one could say, "There sleeps the father you so well loved.'"
"Oh" exclaimed Morrel.
"He was, then, a more unhappy son than you, Morrel, for he
could not even find his father's grave."
"But then he had the woman he loved still remaining?"
"You are deceived, Morrel, that woman" 
"She was dead?"
"Worse than that, she was faithless, and had married one of
the persecutors of her betrothed. You see, then, Morrel,
that he was a more unhappy lover than you."
"And has he found consolation?"
"He has at least found peace."
"And does he ever expect to be happy?"
"He hopes so, Maximilian." The young man's head fell on his
breast.
"You have my promise," he said, after a minute's pause,
extending his hand to Monte Cristo. "Only remember" 
"On the th of October, Morrel, I shall expect you at the
Island of Monte Cristo. On the th a yacht will wait for you
in the port of Bastia, it will be called the Eurus. You will
give your name to the captain, who will bring you to me. It
is understood  is it not?"
"But, count, do you remember that the th of October" 
"Child," replied the count, "not to know the value of a
man's word I have told you twenty times that if you wish to
die on that day, I will assist you. Morrel, farewell"
"Do you leave me?"
"Yes I have business in Italy. I leave you alone with your
misfortunes, and with hope, Maximilian."
"When do you leave?"
"Immediately the steamer waits, and in an hour I shall be
far from you. Will you accompany me to the harbor,
Maximilian?"
"I am entirely yours, count." Morrel accompanied the count
to the harbor. The white steam was ascending like a plume of
feathers from the black chimney. The steamer soon
disappeared, and in an hour afterwards, as the count had
said, was scarcely distinguishable in the horizon amidst the
fogs of the night.
Chapter 
Peppino.
At the same time that the steamer disappeared behind Cape
Morgion, a man travelling post on the road from Florence to
Rome had just passed the little town of Aquapendente. He was
travelling fast enough to cover a great deal of ground
without exciting suspicion. This man was dressed in a
greatcoat, or rather a surtout, a little worse for the
journey, but which exhibited the ribbon of the Legion of
Honor still fresh and brilliant, a decoration which also
ornamented the under coat. He might be recognized, not only
by these signs, but also from the accent with which he spoke
to the postilion, as a Frenchman. Another proof that he was
a native of the universal country was apparent in the fact
of his knowing no other Italian words than the terms used in
music, and which like the "goddam" of Figaro, served all
possible linguistic requirements. "Allegro" he called out
to the postilions at every ascent. "Moderato" he cried as
they descended. And heaven knows there are hills enough
between Rome and Florence by the way of Aquapendente These
two words greatly amused the men to whom they were
addressed. On reaching La Storta, the point from whence Rome
is first visible, the traveller evinced none of the
enthusiastic curiosity which usually leads strangers to
stand up and endeavor to catch sight of the dome of St.
Peter's, which may be seen long before any other object is
distinguishable. No, he merely drew a pocketbook from his
pocket, and took from it a paper folded in four, and after
having examined it in a manner almost reverential, he said
"Good I have it still"
The carriage entered by the Porto del Popolo, turned to the
left, and stopped at the Hotel d'Espagne. Old Pastrini, our
former acquaintance, received the traveller at the door, hat
in hand. The traveller alighted, ordered a good dinner, and
inquired the address of the house of Thomson  French, which
was immediately given to him, as it was one of the most
celebrated in Rome. It was situated in the Via dei Banchi,
near St. Peter's. In Rome, as everywhere else, the arrival
of a postchaise is an event. Ten young descendants of
Marius and the Gracchi, barefooted and out at elbows, with
one hand resting on the hip and the other gracefully curved
above the head, stared at the traveller, the postchaise,
and the horses to these were added about fifty little
vagabonds from the Papal States, who earned a pittance by
diving into the Tiber at high water from the bridge of St.
Angelo. Now, as these street Arabs of Rome, more fortunate
than those of Paris, understand every language, more
especially the French, they heard the traveller order an
apartment, a dinner, and finally inquire the way to the
house of Thomson  French. The result was that when the
newcomer left the hotel with the cicerone, a man detached
himself from the rest of the idlers, and without having been
seen by the traveller, and appearing to excite no attention
from the guide, followed the stranger with as much skill as
a Parisian police agent would have used.
The Frenchman had been so impatient to reach the house of
Thomson  French that he would not wait for the horses to be
harnessed, but left word for the carriage to overtake him on
the road, or to wait for him at the bankers' door. He
reached it before the carriage arrived. The Frenchman
entered, leaving in the anteroom his guide, who immediately
entered into conversation with two or three of the
industrious idlers who are always to be found in Rome at the
doors of bankinghouses, churches, museums, or theatres.
With the Frenchman, the man who had followed him entered
too the Frenchman knocked at the inner door, and entered
the first room his shadow did the same.
"Messrs. Thomson  French?" inquired the stranger.
An attendant arose at a sign from a confidential clerk at
the first desk. "Whom shall I announce?" said the attendant.
"Baron Danglars."
"Follow me," said the man. A door opened, through which the
attendant and the baron disappeared. The man who had
followed Danglars sat down on a bench. The clerk continued
to write for the next five minutes the man preserved
profound silence, and remained perfectly motionless. Then
the pen of the clerk ceased to move over the paper he
raised his head, and appearing to be perfectly sure of
privacy,  "Ah, ha," he said, "here you are, Peppino"
"Yes," was the laconic reply. "You have found out that there
is something worth having about this large gentleman?"
"There is no great merit due to me, for we were informed of
it."
"You know his business here, then."
"Pardieu, he has come to draw, but I don't know how much"
"You will know presently, my friend."
"Very well, only do not give me false information as you did
the other day."
"What do you mean?  of whom do you speak? Was it the
Englishman who carried off , crowns from here the other
day?"
"No he really had , crowns, and we found them. I mean
the Russian prince, who you said had , livres, and we
only found ,."
"You must have searched badly."
"Luigi Vampa himself searched."
"Indeed? But you must let me make my observations, or the
Frenchman will transact his business without my knowing the
sum." Peppino nodded, and taking a rosary from his pocket
began to mutter a few prayers while the clerk disappeared
through the same door by which Danglars and the attendant
had gone out. At the expiration of ten minutes the clerk
returned with a beaming countenance. "Well?" asked Peppino
of his friend.
"Joy, joy  the sum is large"
"Five or six millions, is it not?"
"Yes, you know the amount."
"On the receipt of the Count of Monte Cristo?"
"Why, how came you to be so well acquainted with all this?"
"I told you we were informed beforehand."
"Then why do you apply to me?"
"That I may be sure I have the right man."
"Yes, it is indeed he. Five millions  a pretty sum, eh,
Peppino?"
"Hush  here is our man" The clerk seized his pen, and
Peppino his beads one was writing and the other praying
when the door opened. Danglars looked radiant with joy the
banker accompanied him to the door. Peppino followed
Danglars.
According to the arrangements, the carriage was waiting at
the door. The guide held the door open. Guides are useful
people, who will turn their hands to anything. Danglars
leaped into the carriage like a young man of twenty. The
cicerone reclosed the door, and sprang up by the side of the
coachman. Peppino mounted the seat behind.
"Will your excellency visit St. Peter's?" asked the
cicerone.
"I did not come to Rome to see," said Danglars aloud then
he added softly, with an avaricious smile, "I came to
touch" and he rapped his pocketbook, in which he had just
placed a letter.
"Then your excellency is going" 
"To the hotel."
"Casa Pastrini" said the cicerone to the coachman, and the
carriage drove rapidly on. Ten minutes afterwards the baron
entered his apartment, and Peppino stationed himself on the
bench outside the door of the hotel, after having whispered
something in the ear of one of the descendants of Marius and
the Gracchi whom we noticed at the beginning of the chapter,
who immediately ran down the road leading to the Capitol at
his fullest speed. Danglars was tired and sleepy he
therefore went to bed, placing his pocketbook under his
pillow. Peppino had a little spare time, so he had a game of
mora with the facchini, lost three crowns, and then to
console himself drank a bottle of Orvieto.
The next morning Danglars awoke late, though he went to bed
so early he had not slept well for five or six nights, even
if he had slept at all. He breakfasted heartily, and caring
little, as he said, for the beauties of the Eternal City,
ordered posthorses at noon. But Danglars had not reckoned
upon the formalities of the police and the idleness of the
postingmaster. The horses only arrived at two o'clock, and
the cicerone did not bring the passport till three. All
these preparations had collected a number of idlers round
the door of Signor Pastrini's the descendants of Marius and
the Gracchi were also not wanting. The baron walked
triumphantly through the crowd, who for the sake of gain
styled him "your excellency." As Danglars had hitherto
contented himself with being called a baron, he felt rather
flattered at the title of excellency, and distributed a
dozen silver coins among the beggars, who were ready, for
twelve more, to call him "your highness."
"Which road?" asked the postilion in Italian. "The Ancona
road," replied the baron. Signor Pastrini interpreted the
question and answer, and the horses galloped off. Danglars
intended travelling to Venice, where he would receive one
part of his fortune, and then proceeding to Vienna, where he
would find the rest, he meant to take up his residence in
the latter town, which he had been told was a city of
pleasure.
He had scarcely advanced three leagues out of Rome when
daylight began to disappear. Danglars had not intended
starting so late, or he would have remained he put his head
out and asked the postilion how long it would be before they
reached the next town. "Non capisco" do not understand,
was the reply. Danglars bent his head, which he meant to
imply, "Very well." The carriage again moved on. "I will
stop at the first postinghouse," said Danglars to himself.
He still felt the same selfsatisfaction which he had
experienced the previous evening, and which had procured him
so good a night's rest. He was luxuriously stretched in a
good English calash, with double springs he was drawn by
four good horses, at full gallop he knew the relay to be at
a distance of seven leagues. What subject of meditation
could present itself to the banker, so fortunately become
bankrupt?
Danglars thought for ten minutes about his wife in Paris
another ten minutes about his daughter travelling with
Mademoiselle d'Armilly the same period was given to his
creditors, and the manner in which he intended spending
their money and then, having no subject left for
contemplation, he shut his eyes, and fell asleep. Now and
then a jolt more violent than the rest caused him to open
his eyes then he felt that he was still being carried with
great rapidity over the same country, thickly strewn with
broken aqueducts, which looked like granite giants petrified
while running a race. But the night was cold, dull, and
rainy, and it was much more pleasant for a traveller to
remain in the warm carriage than to put his head out of the
window to make inquiries of a postilion whose only answer
was "Non capisco."
Danglars therefore continued to sleep, saying to himself
that he would be sure to awake at the postinghouse. The
carriage stopped. Danglars fancied that they had reached the
longdesired point he opened his eyes and looked through
the window, expecting to find himself in the midst of some
town, or at least village but he saw nothing except what
seemed like a ruin, where three or four men went and came
like shadows. Danglars waited a moment, expecting the
postilion to come and demand payment with the termination of
his stage. He intended taking advantage of the opportunity
to make fresh inquiries of the new conductor but the horses
were unharnessed, and others put in their places, without
any one claiming money from the traveller. Danglars,
astonished, opened the door but a strong hand pushed him
back, and the carriage rolled on. The baron was completely
roused. "Eh?" he said to the postilion, "eh, mio caro?"
This was another little piece of Italian the baron had
learned from hearing his daughter sing Italian duets with
Cavalcanti. But mio caro did not reply. Danglars then opened
the window.
"Come, my friend," he said, thrusting his hand through the
opening, "where are we going?"
"Dentro la testa" answered a solemn and imperious voice,
accompanied by a menacing gesture. Danglars thought dentro
la testa meant, "Put in your head" He was making rapid
progress in Italian. He obeyed, not without some uneasiness,
which, momentarily increasing, caused his mind, instead of
being as unoccupied as it was when he began his journey, to
fill with ideas which were very likely to keep a traveller
awake, more especially one in such a situation as Danglars.
His eyes acquired that quality which in the first moment of
strong emotion enables them to see distinctly, and which
afterwards fails from being too much taxed. Before we are
alarmed, we see correctly when we are alarmed, we see
double and when we have been alarmed, we see nothing but
trouble. Danglars observed a man in a cloak galloping at the
right hand of the carriage.
"Some gendarme" he exclaimed. "Can I have been intercepted
by French telegrams to the pontifical authorities?" He
resolved to end his anxiety. "Where are you taking me?" he
asked. "Dentro la testa," replied the same voice, with the
same menacing accent.
Danglars turned to the left another man on horseback was
galloping on that side. "Decidedly," said Danglars, with the
perspiration on his forehead, "I must be under arrest." And
he threw himself back in the calash, not this time to sleep,
but to think. Directly afterwards the moon rose. He then saw
the great aqueducts, those stone phantoms which he had
before remarked, only then they were on the right hand, now
they were on the left. He understood that they had described
a circle, and were bringing him back to Rome. "Oh,
unfortunate" he cried, "they must have obtained my arrest."
The carriage continued to roll on with frightful speed. An
hour of terror elapsed, for every spot they passed showed
that they were on the road back. At length he saw a dark
mass, against which it seemed as if the carriage was about
to dash but the vehicle turned to one side, leaving the
barrier behind and Danglars saw that it was one of the
ramparts encircling Rome.
"Mon dieu" cried Danglars, "we are not returning to Rome
then it is not justice which is pursuing me Gracious
heavens another idea presents itself  what if they should
be" 
His hair stood on end. He remembered those interesting
stories, so little believed in Paris, respecting Roman
bandits he remembered the adventures that Albert de Morcerf
had related when it was intended that he should marry
Mademoiselle Eugenie. "They are robbers, perhaps," he
muttered. Just then the carriage rolled on something harder
than gravel road. Danglars hazarded a look on both sides of
the road, and perceived monuments of a singular form, and
his mind now recalled all the details Morcerf had related,
and comparing them with his own situation, he felt sure that
he must be on the Appian Way. On the left, in a sort of
valley, he perceived a circular excavation. It was
Caracalla's circus. On a word from the man who rode at the
side of the carriage, it stopped. At the same time the door
was opened. "Scendi" exclaimed a commanding voice. Danglars
instantly descended although he did not yet speak Italian,
he understood it very well. More dead than alive, he looked
around him. Four men surrounded him, besides the postilion.
"Di qua," said one of the men, descending a little path
leading out of the Appian Way. Danglars followed his guide
without opposition, and had no occasion to turn around to
see whether the three others were following him. Still it
appeared as though they were stationed at equal distances
from one another, like sentinels. After walking for about
ten minutes, during which Danglars did not exchange a single
word with his guide, he found himself between a hillock and
a clump of high weeds three men, standing silent, formed a
triangle, of which he was the centre. He wished to speak,
but his tongue refused to move. "Avanti" said the same
sharp and imperative voice.
This time Danglars had double reason to understand, for if
the word and gesture had not explained the speaker's
meaning, it was clearly expressed by the man walking behind
him, who pushed him so rudely that he struck against the
guide. This guide was our friend Peppino, who dashed into
the thicket of high weeds, through a path which none but
lizards or polecats could have imagined to be an open road.
Peppino stopped before a pit overhung by thick hedges the
pit, half open, afforded a passage to the young man, who
disappeared like the evil spirits in the fairy tales. The
voice and gesture of the man who followed Danglars ordered
him to do the same. There was no longer any doubt, the
bankrupt was in the hands of Roman banditti. Danglars
acquitted himself like a man placed between two dangerous
positions, and who is rendered brave by fear.
Notwithstanding his large stomach, certainly not intended to
penetrate the fissures of the Campagna, he slid down like
Peppino, and closing his eyes fell upon his feet. As he
touched the ground, he opened his eyes. The path was wide,
but dark. Peppino, who cared little for being recognized now
that he was in his own territories, struck a light and lit a
torch. Two other men descended after Danglars forming the
rearguard, and pushing Danglars whenever he happened to
stop, they came by a gentle declivity to the intersection of
two corridors. The walls were hollowed out in sepulchres,
one above the other, and which seemed in contrast with the
white stones to open their large dark eyes, like those which
we see on the faces of the dead. A sentinel struck the rings
of his carbine against his left hand. "Who comes there?" he
cried.
"A friend, a friend" said Peppino "but where is the
captain?"
"There," said the sentinel, pointing over his shoulder to a
spacious crypt, hollowed out of the rock, the lights from
which shone into the passage through the large arched
openings. "Fine spoil, captain, fine spoil" said Peppino in
Italian, and taking Danglars by the collar of his coat he
dragged him to an opening resembling a door, through which
they entered the apartment which the captain appeared to
have made his dwellingplace.
"Is this the man?" asked the captain, who was attentively
reading Plutarch's "Life of Alexander."
"Himself, captain  himself."
"Very well, show him to me." At this rather impertinent
order, Peppino raised his torch to the face of Danglars, who
hastily withdrew that he might not have his eyelashes burnt.
His agitated features presented the appearance of pale and
hideous terror. "The man is tired," said the captain,
"conduct him to his bed."
"Oh," murmured Danglars," that bed is probably one of the
coffins hollowed in the wall, and the sleep I shall enjoy
will be death from one of the poniards I see glistening in
the darkness."
From their beds of dried leaves or wolfskins at the back of
the chamber now arose the companions of the man who had been
found by Albert de Morcerf reading "Caesar's Commentaries,"
and by Danglars studying the "Life of Alexander." The banker
uttered a groan and followed his guide he neither
supplicated nor exclaimed. He no longer possessed strength,
will, power, or feeling he followed where they led him. At
length he found himself at the foot of a staircase, and he
mechanically lifted his foot five or six times. Then a low
door was opened before him, and bending his head to avoid
striking his forehead he entered a small room cut out of the
rock. The cell was clean, though empty, and dry, though
situated at an immeasurable distance under the earth. A bed
of dried grass covered with goatskins was placed in one
corner. Danglars brightened up on beholding it, fancying
that it gave some promise of safety. "Oh, God be praised,"
he said "it is a real bed"
"Ecco" said the guide, and pushing Danglars into the cell,
he closed the door upon him. A bolt grated and Danglars was
a prisoner. If there had been no bolt, it would have been
impossible for him to pass through the midst of the garrison
who held the catacombs of St. Sebastian, encamped round a
master whom our readers must have recognized as the famous
Luigi Vampa. Danglars, too, had recognized the bandit, whose
existence he would not believe when Albert de Morcerf
mentioned him in Paris and not only did he recognize him,
but the cell in which Albert had been confined, and which
was probably kept for the accommodation of strangers. These
recollections were dwelt upon with some pleasure by
Danglars, and restored him to some degree of tranquillity.
Since the bandits had not despatched him at once, he felt
that they would not kill him at all. They had arrested him
for the purpose of robbery, and as he had only a few louis
about him, he doubted not he would be ransomed. He
remembered that Morcerf had been taxed at , crowns, and
as he considered himself of much greater importance than
Morcerf he fixed his own price at , crowns. Eight
thousand crowns amounted to , livres he would then
have about ,, francs left. With this sum he could
manage to keep out of difficulties. Therefore, tolerably
secure in being able to extricate himself from his position,
provided he were not rated at the unreasonable sum of
,, francs, he stretched himself on his bed, and after
turning over two or three times, fell asleep with the
tranquillity of the hero whose life Luigi Vampa was
studying.
Chapter 
Luigi Vampa's Bill of Fare.
We awake from every sleep except the one dreaded by
Danglars. He awoke. To a Parisian accustomed to silken
curtains, walls hung with velvet drapery, and the soft
perfume of burning wood, the white smoke of which diffuses
itself in graceful curves around the room, the appearance of
the whitewashed cell which greeted his eyes on awakening
seemed like the continuation of some disagreeable dream. But
in such a situation a single moment suffices to change the
strongest doubt into certainty. "Yes, yes," he murmured, "I
am in the hands of the brigands of whom Albert de Morcerf
spoke." His first idea was to breathe, that he might know
whether he was wounded. He borrowed this from "Don Quixote,"
the only book he had ever read, but which he still slightly
remembered.
"No," he cried, "they have not wounded, but perhaps they
have robbed me" and he thrust his hands into his pockets.
They were untouched the hundred louis he had reserved for
his journey from Rome to Venice were in his trousers pocket,
and in that of his greatcoat he found the little notecase
containing his letter of credit for ,, francs.
"Singular bandits" he exclaimed "they have left me my
purse and pocketbook. As I was saying last night, they
intend me to be ransomed. Hallo, here is my watch Let me
see what time it is." Danglars' watch, one of Breguet's
repeaters, which he had carefully wound up on the previous
night, struck half past five. Without this, Danglars would
have been quite ignorant of the time, for daylight did not
reach his cell. Should he demand an explanation from the
bandits, or should he wait patiently for them to propose it?
The last alternative seemed the most prudent, so he waited
until twelve o'clock. During all this time a sentinel, who
had been relieved at eight o'clock, had been watching his
door. Danglars suddenly felt a strong inclination to see the
person who kept watch over him. He had noticed that a few
rays, not of daylight, but from a lamp, penetrated through
the illjoined planks of the door he approached just as the
brigand was refreshing himself with a mouthful of brandy,
which, owing to the leathern bottle containing it, sent
forth an odor which was extremely unpleasant to Danglars.
"Faugh" he exclaimed, retreating to the farther corner of
his cell.
At twelve this man was replaced by another functionary, and
Danglars, wishing to catch sight of his new guardian,
approached the door again. He was an athletic, gigantic
bandit, with large eyes, thick lips, and a flat nose his
red hair fell in dishevelled masses like snakes around his
shoulders. "Ah, ha," cried Danglars, "this fellow is more
like an ogre than anything else however, I am rather too
old and tough to be very good eating" We see that Danglars
was collected enough to jest at the same time, as though to
disprove the ogreish propensities, the man took some black
bread, cheese, and onions from his wallet, which he began
devouring voraciously. "May I be hanged," said Danglars,
glancing at the bandit's dinner through the crevices of the
door,  "may I be hanged if I can understand how people can
eat such filth" and he withdrew to seat himself upon his
goatskin, which reminded him of the smell of the brandy.
But the mysteries of nature are incomprehensible, and there
are certain invitations contained in even the coarsest food
which appeal very irresistibly to a fasting stomach.
Danglars felt his own not to be very well supplied just
then, and gradually the man appeared less ugly, the bread
less black, and the cheese more fresh, while those dreadful
vulgar onions recalled to his mind certain sauces and
sidedishes, which his cook prepared in a very superior
manner whenever he said, "Monsieur Deniseau, let me have a
nice little fricassee today." He got up and knocked on the
door the bandit raised his head. Danglars knew that he was
heard, so he redoubled his blows. "Che cosa?" asked the
bandit. "Come, come," said Danglars, tapping his fingers
against the door, "I think it is quite time to think of
giving me something to eat" But whether he did not
understand him, or whether he had received no orders
respecting the nourishment of Danglars, the giant, without
answering, went on with his dinner. Danglars' feelings were
hurt, and not wishing to put himself under obligations to
the brute, the banker threw himself down again on his
goatskin and did not breathe another word.
Four hours passed by and the giant was replaced by another
bandit. Danglars, who really began to experience sundry
gnawings at the stomach, arose softly, again applied his eye
to the crack of the door, and recognized the intelligent
countenance of his guide. It was, indeed, Peppino who was
preparing to mount guard as comfortably as possible by
seating himself opposite to the door, and placing between
his legs an earthen pan, containing chickpease stewed with
bacon. Near the pan he also placed a pretty little basket of
Villetri grapes and a flask of Orvieto. Peppino was
decidedly an epicure. Danglars watched these preparations
and his mouth watered. "Come," he said to himself, "let me
try if he will be more tractable than the other" and he
tapped gently at the door. "On y va," coming exclaimed
Peppino, who from frequenting the house of Signor Pastrini
understood French perfectly in all its idioms.
Danglars immediately recognized him as the man who had
called out in such a furious manner, "Put in your head" But
this was not the time for recrimination, so he assumed his
most agreeable manner and said with a gracious smile, 
"Excuse me, sir, but are they not going to give me any
dinner?"
"Does your excellency happen to be hungry?"
"Happen to be hungry,  that's pretty good, when I haven't
eaten for twentyfour hours" muttered Danglars. Then he
added aloud, "Yes, sir, I am hungry  very hungry."
"What would your excellency like?" and Peppino placed his
pan on the ground, so that the steam rose directly under the
nostrils of Danglars. "Give your orders."
"Have you kitchens here?"
"Kitchens?  of course  complete ones."
"And cooks?"
"Excellent"
"Well, a fowl, fish, game,  it signifies little, so that I
eat."
"As your excellency pleases. You mentioned a fowl, I think?"
"Yes, a fowl." Peppino, turning around, shouted, "A fowl for
his excellency" His voice yet echoed in the archway when a
handsome, graceful, and halfnaked young man appeared,
bearing a fowl in a silver dish on his head, without the
assistance of his hands. "I could almost believe myself at
the Cafe de Paris," murmured Danglars.
"Here, your excellency," said Peppino, taking the fowl from
the young bandit and placing it on the wormeaten table,
which with the stool and the goatskin bed formed the entire
furniture of the cell. Danglars asked for a knife and fork.
"Here, excellency," said Peppino, offering him a little
blunt knife and a boxwood fork. Danglars took the knife in
one hand and the fork in the other, and was about to cut up
the fowl. "Pardon me, excellency," said Peppino, placing his
hand on the banker's shoulder "people pay here before they
eat. They might not be satisfied, and" 
"Ah, ha," thought Danglars, "this is not so much like Paris,
except that I shall probably be skinned Never mind, I'll
fix that all right. I have always heard how cheap poultry is
in Italy I should think a fowl is worth about twelve sous
at Rome.  There," he said, throwing a louis down. Peppino
picked up the louis, and Danglars again prepared to carve
the fowl. "Stay a moment, your excellency," said Peppino,
rising "you still owe me something."
"I said they would skin me," thought Danglars but resolving
to resist the extortion, he said, "Come, how much do I owe
you for this fowl?"
"Your excellency has given me a louis on account."
"A louis on account for a fowl?"
"Certainly and your excellency now owes me , louis."
Danglars opened his enormous eyes on hearing this gigantic
joke. "Come, come, this is very droll  very amusing  I
allow but, as I am very hungry, pray allow me to eat. Stay,
here is another louis for you."
"Then that will make only , louis more," said Peppino
with the same indifference. "I shall get them all in time."
"Oh, as for that," said Danglars, angry at this prolongation
of the jest,  "as for that you won't get them at all. Go
to the devil You do not know with whom you have to deal"
Peppino made a sign, and the youth hastily removed the fowl.
Danglars threw himself upon his goatskin, and Peppino,
reclosing the door, again began eating his pease and bacon.
Though Danglars could not see Peppino, the noise of his
teeth allowed no doubt as to his occupation. He was
certainly eating, and noisily too, like an illbred man.
"Brute" said Danglars. Peppino pretended not to hear him,
and without even turning his head continued to eat slowly.
Danglars' stomach felt so empty, that it seemed as if it
would be impossible ever to fill it again still he had
patience for another halfhour, which appeared to him like a
century. He again arose and went to the door. "Come, sir, do
not keep me starving here any longer, but tell me what they
want."
"Nay, your excellency, it is you who should tell us what you
want. Give your orders, and we will execute them."
"Then open the door directly." Peppino obeyed. "Now look
here, I want something to eat To eat  do you hear?"
"Are you hungry?"
"Come, you understand me."
"What would your excellency like to eat?"
"A piece of dry bread, since the fowls are beyond all price
in this accursed place."
"Bread? Very well. Hallo, there, some bread" he called. The
youth brought a small loaf. "How much?" asked Danglars.
"Four thousand nine hundred and ninetyeight louis," said
Peppino "You have paid two louis in advance."
"What? One hundred thousand francs for a loaf?"
"One hundred thousand francs," repeated Peppino.
"But you only asked , francs for a fowl"
"We have a fixed price for all our provisions. It signifies
nothing whether you eat much or little  whether you have
ten dishes or one  it is always the same price."
"What, still keeping up this silly jest? My dear fellow, it
is perfectly ridiculous  stupid You had better tell me at
once that you intend starving me to death."
"Oh, dear, no, your excellency, unless you intend to commit
suicide. Pay and eat."
"And what am I to pay with, brute?" said Danglars, enraged.
"Do you suppose I carry , francs in my pocket?"
"Your excellency has ,, francs in your pocket that
will be fifty fowls at , francs apiece, and half a
fowl for the ,."
Danglars shuddered. The bandage fell from his eyes, and he
understood the joke, which he did not think quite so stupid
as he had done just before. "Come," he said, "if I pay you
the , francs, will you be satisfied, and allow me to
eat at my ease?"
"Certainly," said Peppino.
"But how can I pay them?"
"Oh, nothing easier you have an account open with Messrs.
Thomson  French, Via dei Banchi, Rome give me a draft for
, louis on these gentlemen, and our banker shall take
it." Danglars thought it as well to comply with a good
grace, so he took the pen, ink, and paper Peppino offered
him, wrote the draft, and signed it. "Here," he said, "here
is a draft at sight."
"And here is your fowl." Danglars sighed while he carved the
fowl it appeared very thin for the price it had cost. As
for Peppino, he examined the paper attentively, put it into
his pocket, and continued eating his pease.
Chapter 
The Pardon.
The next day Danglars was again hungry certainly the air of
that dungeon was very provocative of appetite. The prisoner
expected that he would be at no expense that day, for like
an economical man he had concealed half of his fowl and a
piece of the bread in the corner of his cell. But he had no
sooner eaten than he felt thirsty he had forgotten that. He
struggled against his thirst till his tongue clave to the
roof of his mouth then, no longer able to resist, he called
out. The sentinel opened the door it was a new face. He
thought it would be better to transact business with his old
acquaintance, so he sent for Peppino. "Here I am, your
excellency," said Peppino, with an eagerness which Danglars
thought favorable to him. "What do you want?"
"Something to drink."
"Your excellency knows that wine is beyond all price near
Rome."
"Then give me water," cried Danglars, endeavoring to parry
the blow.
"Oh, water is even more scarce than wine, your excellency,
there has been such a drought."
"Come," thought Danglars, "it is the same old story." And
while he smiled as he attempted to regard the affair as a
joke, he felt his temples get moist with perspiration.
"Come, my friend," said Danglars, seeing that he made no
impression on Peppino, "you will not refuse me a glass of
wine?"
"I have already told you that we do not sell at retail."
"Well, then, let me have a bottle of the least expensive."
"They are all the same price."
"And what is that?"
"Twentyfive thousand francs a bottle."
"Tell me," cried Danglars, in a tone whose bitterness
Harpagon alone has been capable of revealing  "tell me
that you wish to despoil me of all it will be sooner over
than devouring me piecemeal."
 The miser in Moliere's comedy of "L'Avare."  Ed.
"It is possible such may be the master's intention."
"The master?  who is he?"
"The person to whom you were conducted yesterday."
"Where is he?"
"Here."
"Let me see him."
"Certainly." And the next moment Luigi Vampa appeared before
Danglars.
"You sent for me?" he said to the prisoner.
"Are you, sir, the chief of the people who brought me here?"
"Yes, your excellency. What then?"
"How much do you require for my ransom?"
"Merely the ,, you have about you." Danglars felt a
dreadful spasm dart through his heart. "But this is all I
have left in the world," he said, "out of an immense
fortune. If you deprive me of that, take away my life also."
"We are forbidden to shed your blood."
"And by whom are you forbidden?"
"By him we obey."
"You do, then, obey some one?"
"Yes, a chief."
"I thought you said you were the chief?"
"So I am of these men but there is another over me."
"And did your superior order you to treat me in this way?"
"Yes."
"But my purse will be exhausted."
"Probably."
"Come," said Danglars, "will you take a million?"
"No."
"Two millions?  three?  four? Come, four? I will give
them to you on condition that you let me go."
"Why do you offer me ,, for what is worth ,,?
This is a kind of usury, banker, that I do not understand."
"Take all, then  take all, I tell you, and kill me"
"Come, come, calm yourself. You will excite your blood, and
that would produce an appetite it would require a million a
day to satisfy. Be more economical."
"But when I have no more money left to pay you?" asked the
infuriated Danglars.
"Then you must suffer hunger."
"Suffer hunger?" said Danglars, becoming pale.
"Most likely," replied Vampa coolly.
"But you say you do not wish to kill me?"
"No."
"And yet you will let me perish with hunger?"
"Ah, that is a different thing."
"Well, then, wretches," cried Danglars, "I will defy your
infamous calculations  I would rather die at once You may
torture, torment, kill me, but you shall not have my
signature again"
"As your excellency pleases," said Vampa, as he left the
cell. Danglars, raving, threw himself on the goatskin. Who
could these men be? Who was the invisible chief? What could
be his intentions towards him? And why, when every one else
was allowed to be ransomed, might he not also be? Oh, yes
certainly a speedy, violent death would be a fine means of
deceiving these remorseless enemies, who appeared to pursue
him with such incomprehensible vengeance. But to die? For
the first time in his life, Danglars contemplated death with
a mixture of dread and desire the time had come when the
implacable spectre, which exists in the mind of every human
creature, arrested his attention and called out with every
pulsation of his heart, "Thou shalt die"
Danglars resembled a timid animal excited in the chase
first it flies, then despairs, and at last, by the very
force of desperation, sometimes succeeds in eluding its
pursuers. Danglars meditated an escape but the walls were
solid rock, a man was sitting reading at the only outlet to
the cell, and behind that man shapes armed with guns
continually passed. His resolution not to sign lasted two
days, after which he offered a million for some food. They
sent him a magnificent supper, and took his million.
From this time the prisoner resolved to suffer no longer,
but to have everything he wanted. At the end of twelve days,
after having made a splendid dinner, he reckoned his
accounts, and found that he had only , francs left.
Then a strange reaction took place he who had just
abandoned ,, endeavored to save the , francs he
had left, and sooner than give them up he resolved to enter
again upon a life of privation  he was deluded by the
hopefulness that is a premonition of madness. He who for so
long a time had forgotten God, began to think that miracles
were possible  that the accursed cavern might be
discovered by the officers of the Papal States, who would
release him that then he would have , remaining, which
would be sufficient to save him from starvation and finally
he prayed that this sum might be preserved to him, and as he
prayed he wept. Three days passed thus, during which his
prayers were frequent, if not heartfelt. Sometimes he was
delirious, and fancied he saw an old man stretched on a
pallet he, also, was dying of hunger.
On the fourth, he was no longer a man, but a living corpse.
He had picked up every crumb that had been left from his
former meals, and was beginning to eat the matting which
covered the floor of his cell. Then he entreated Peppino, as
he would a guardian angel, to give him food he offered him
, francs for a mouthful of bread. But Peppino did not
answer. On the fifth day he dragged himself to the door of
the cell.
"Are you not a Christian?" he said, falling on his knees.
"Do you wish to assassinate a man who, in the eyes of
heaven, is a brother? Oh, my former friends, my former
friends" he murmured, and fell with his face to the ground.
Then rising in despair, he exclaimed, "The chief, the
chief"
"Here I am," said Vampa, instantly appearing "what do you
want?"
"Take my last gold," muttered Danglars, holding out his
pocketbook, "and let me live here I ask no more for
liberty  I only ask to live"
"Then you suffer a great deal?"
"Oh, yes, yes, cruelly"
"Still, there have been men who suffered more than you."
"I do not think so."
"Yes those who have died of hunger."
Danglars thought of the old man whom, in his hours of
delirium, he had seen groaning on his bed. He struck his
forehead on the ground and groaned. "Yes," he said, "there
have been some who have suffered more than I have, but then
they must have been martyrs at least."
"Do you repent?" asked a deep, solemn voice, which caused
Danglars' hair to stand on end. His feeble eyes endeavored
to distinguish objects, and behind the bandit he saw a man
enveloped in a cloak, half lost in the shadow of a stone
column.
"Of what must I repent?" stammered Danglars.
"Of the evil you have done," said the voice.
"Oh, yes oh, yes, I do indeed repent." And he struck his
breast with his emaciated fist.
"Then I forgive you," said the man, dropping his cloak, and
advancing to the light.
"The Count of Monte Cristo" said Danglars, more pale from
terror than he had been just before from hunger and misery.
"You are mistaken  I am not the Count of Monte Cristo."
"Then who are you?"
"I am he whom you sold and dishonored  I am he whose
betrothed you prostituted  I am he upon whom you trampled
that you might raise yourself to fortune  I am he whose
father you condemned to die of hunger  I am he whom you
also condemned to starvation, and who yet forgives you,
because he hopes to be forgiven  I am Edmond Dantes"
Danglars uttered a cry, and fell prostrate. "Rise," said the
count, "your life is safe the same good fortune has not
happened to your accomplices  one is mad, the other dead.
Keep the , francs you have left  I give them to you.
The ,, you stole from the hospitals has been restored
to them by an unknown hand. And now eat and drink I will
entertain you tonight. Vampa, when this man is satisfied,
let him be free." Danglars remained prostrate while the
count withdrew when he raised his head he saw disappearing
down the passage nothing but a shadow, before which the
bandits bowed. According to the count's directions, Danglars
was waited on by Vampa, who brought him the best wine and
fruits of Italy then, having conducted him to the road, and
pointed to the postchaise, left him leaning against a tree.
He remained there all night, not knowing where he was. When
daylight dawned he saw that he was near a stream he was
thirsty, and dragged himself towards it. As he stooped down
to drink, he saw that his hair had become entirely white.
Chapter 
The Fifth of October.
It was about six o'clock in the evening an opalcolored
light, through which an autumnal sun shed its golden rays,
descended on the blue ocean. The heat of the day had
gradually decreased, and a light breeze arose, seeming like
the respiration of nature on awakening from the burning
siesta of the south. A delicious zephyr played along the
coasts of the Mediterranean, and wafted from shore to shore
the sweet perfume of plants, mingled with the fresh smell of
the sea.
A light yacht, chaste and elegant in its form, was gliding
amidst the first dews of night over the immense lake,
extending from Gibraltar to the Dardanelles, and from Tunis
to Venice. The vessel resembled a swan with its wings opened
towards the wind, gliding on the water. It advanced swiftly
and gracefully, leaving behind it a glittering stretch of
foam. By degrees the sun disappeared behind the western
horizon but as though to prove the truth of the fanciful
ideas in heathen mythology, its indiscreet rays reappeared
on the summit of every wave, as if the god of fire had just
sunk upon the bosom of Amphitrite, who in vain endeavored to
hide her lover beneath her azure mantle. The yacht moved
rapidly on, though there did not appear to be sufficient
wind to ruffle the curls on the head of a young girl.
Standing on the prow was a tall man, of a dark complexion,
who saw with dilating eyes that they were approaching a dark
mass of land in the shape of a cone, which rose from the
midst of the waves like the hat of a Catalan. "Is that Monte
Cristo?" asked the traveller, to whose orders the yacht was
for the time submitted, in a melancholy voice.
"Yes, your excellency," said the captain, "we have reached
it."
"We have reached it" repeated the traveller in an accent of
indescribable sadness. Then he added, in a low tone, "Yes
that is the haven." And then he again plunged into a train
of thought, the character of which was better revealed by a
sad smile, than it would have been by tears. A few minutes
afterwards a flash of light, which was extinguished
instantly, was seen on the land, and the sound of firearms
reached the yacht.
"Your excellency," said the captain, "that was the land
signal, will you answer yourself?"
"What signal?" The captain pointed towards the island, up
the side of which ascended a volume of smoke, increasing as
it rose. "Ah, yes," he said, as if awaking from a dream.
"Give it to me."
The captain gave him a loaded carbine the traveller slowly
raised it, and fired in the air. Ten minutes afterwards, the
sails were furled, and they cast anchor about a hundred
fathoms from the little harbor. The gig was already lowered,
and in it were four oarsmen and a coxswain. The traveller
descended, and instead of sitting down at the stern of the
boat, which had been decorated with a blue carpet for his
accommodation, stood up with his arms crossed. The rowers
waited, their oars half lifted out of the water, like birds
drying their wings.
"Give way," said the traveller. The eight oars fell into the
sea simultaneously without splashing a drop of water, and
the boat, yielding to the impulsion, glided forward. In an
instant they found themselves in a little harbor, formed in
a natural creek the boat grounded on the fine sand.
"Will your excellency be so good as to mount the shoulders
of two of our men, they will carry you ashore?" The young
man answered this invitation with a gesture of indifference,
and stepped out of the boat the sea immediately rose to his
waist. "Ah, your excellency," murmured the pilot, "you
should not have done so our master will scold us for it."
The young man continued to advance, following the sailors,
who chose a firm footing. Thirty strides brought them to dry
land the young man stamped on the ground to shake off the
wet, and looked around for some one to show him his road,
for it was quite dark. Just as he turned, a hand rested on
his shoulder, and a voice which made him shudder exclaimed,
"Goodevening, Maximilian you are punctual, thank you"
"Ah, is it you, count?" said the young man, in an almost
joyful accent, pressing Monte Cristo's hand with both his
own.
"Yes you see I am as exact as you are. But you are
dripping, my dear fellow you must change your clothes, as
Calypso said to Telemachus. Come, I have a habitation
prepared for you in which you will soon forget fatigue and
cold." Monte Cristo perceived that the young man had turned
around indeed, Morrel saw with surprise that the men who
had brought him had left without being paid, or uttering a
word. Already the sound of their oars might be heard as they
returned to the yacht.
"Oh, yes," said the count, "you are looking for the
sailors."
"Yes, I paid them nothing, and yet they are gone."
"Never mind that, Maximilian," said Monte Cristo, smiling.
"I have made an agreement with the navy, that the access to
my island shall be free of all charge. I have made a
bargain." Morrel looked at the count with surprise. "Count,"
he said, "you are not the same here as in Paris."
"How so?"
"Here you laugh." The count's brow became clouded. "You are
right to recall me to myself, Maximilian," he said "I was
delighted to see you again, and forgot for the moment that
all happiness is fleeting."
"Oh, no, no, count," cried Maximilian, seizing the count's
hands, "pray laugh be happy, and prove to me, by your
indifference, that life is endurable to sufferers. Oh, how
charitable, kind, and good you are you affect this gayety
to inspire me with courage."
"You are wrong, Morrel I was really happy."
"Then you forget me, so much the better."
"How so?"
"Yes for as the gladiator said to the emperor, when he
entered the arena, "He who is about to die salutes you.'"
"Then you are not consoled?" asked the count, surprised.
"Oh," exclaimed Morrel, with a glance full of bitter
reproach, "do you think it possible that I could be?"
"Listen," said the count. "Do you understand the meaning of
my words? You cannot take me for a commonplace man, a mere
rattle, emitting a vague and senseless noise. When I ask you
if you are consoled, I speak to you as a man for whom the
human heart has no secrets. Well, Morrel, let us both
examine the depths of your heart. Do you still feel the same
feverish impatience of grief which made you start like a
wounded lion? Have you still that devouring thirst which can
only be appeased in the grave? Are you still actuated by the
regret which drags the living to the pursuit of death or
are you only suffering from the prostration of fatigue and
the weariness of hope deferred? Has the loss of memory
rendered it impossible for you to weep? Oh, my dear friend,
if this be the case,  if you can no longer weep, if your
frozen heart be dead, if you put all your trust in God,
then, Maximilian, you are consoled  do not complain."
"Count," said Morrel, in a firm and at the same time soft
voice, "listen to me, as to a man whose thoughts are raised
to heaven, though he remains on earth I come to die in the
arms of a friend. Certainly, there are people whom I love. I
love my sister Julie,  I love her husband Emmanuel but I
require a strong mind to smile on my last moments. My sister
would be bathed in tears and fainting I could not bear to
see her suffer. Emmanuel would tear the weapon from my hand,
and alarm the house with his cries. You, count, who are more
than mortal, will, I am sure, lead me to death by a pleasant
path, will you not?"
"My friend," said the count, "I have still one doubt,  are
you weak enough to pride yourself upon your sufferings?"
"No, indeed,  I am calm," said Morrel, giving his hand to
the count "my pulse does not beat slower or faster than
usual. No, I feel that I have reached the goal, and I will
go no farther. You told me to wait and hope do you know
what you did, unfortunate adviser? I waited a month, or
rather I suffered for a month I did hope man is a poor
wretched creature, I did hope. What I cannot tell, 
something wonderful, an absurdity, a miracle,  of what
nature he alone can tell who has mingled with our reason
that folly we call hope. Yes, I did wait  yes, I did hope,
count, and during this quarter of an hour we have been
talking together, you have unconsciously wounded, tortured
my heart, for every word you have uttered proved that there
was no hope for me. Oh, count, I shall sleep calmly,
deliciously in the arms of death." Morrel uttered these
words with an energy which made the count shudder. "My
friend," continued Morrel, "you named the fifth of October
as the end of the period of waiting,  today is the fifth
of October," he took out his watch, "it is now nine o'clock,
I have yet three hours to live."
"Be it so," said the count, "come." Morrel mechanically
followed the count, and they had entered the grotto before
he perceived it. He felt a carpet under his feet, a door
opened, perfumes surrounded him, and a brilliant light
dazzled his eyes. Morrel hesitated to advance he dreaded
the enervating effect of all that he saw. Monte Cristo drew
him in gently. "Why should we not spend the last three hours
remaining to us of life, like those ancient Romans, who when
condemned by Nero, their emperor and heir, sat down at a
table covered with flowers, and gently glided into death,
amid the perfume of heliotropes and roses?" Morrel smiled.
"As you please," he said "death is always death,  that is
forgetfulness, repose, exclusion from life, and therefore
from grief." He sat down, and Monte Cristo placed himself
opposite to him. They were in the marvellous diningroom
before described, where the statues had baskets on their
heads always filled with fruits and flowers. Morrel had
looked carelessly around, and had probably noticed nothing.
"Let us talk like men," he said, looking at the count.
"Go on"
"Count," said Morrel, "you are the epitome of all human
knowledge, and you seem like a being descended from a wiser
and more advanced world than ours."
"There is something true in what you say," said the count,
with that smile which made him so handsome "I have
descended from a planet called grief."
"I believe all you tell me without questioning its meaning
for instance, you told me to live, and I did live you told
me to hope, and I almost did so. I am almost inclined to ask
you, as though you had experienced death, "is it painful to
die?'"
Monte Cristo looked upon Morrel with indescribable
tenderness. "Yes," he said, "yes, doubtless it is painful,
if you violently break the outer covering which obstinately
begs for life. If you plunge a dagger into your flesh, if
you insinuate a bullet into your brain, which the least
shock disorders,  then certainly, you will suffer pain,
and you will repent quitting a life for a repose you have
bought at so dear a price."
"Yes I know that there is a secret of luxury and pain in
death, as well as in life the only thing is to understand
it."
"You have spoken truly, Maximilian according to the care we
bestow upon it, death is either a friend who rocks us gently
as a nurse, or an enemy who violently drags the soul from
the body. Some day, when the world is much older, and when
mankind will be masters of all the destructive powers in
nature, to serve for the general good of humanity when
mankind, as you were just saying, have discovered the
secrets of death, then that death will become as sweet and
voluptuous as a slumber in the arms of your beloved."
"And if you wished to die, you would choose this death,
count?"
"Yes."
Morrel extended his hand. "Now I understand," he said, "why
you had me brought here to this desolate spot, in the midst
of the ocean, to this subterranean palace it was because
you loved me, was it not, count? It was because you loved me
well enough to give me one of those sweet means of death of
which we were speaking a death without agony, a death which
allows me to fade away while pronouncing Valentine's name
and pressing your hand."
"Yes, you have guessed rightly, Morrel," said the count,
"that is what I intended."
"Thanks the idea that tomorrow I shall no longer suffer, is
sweet to my heart."
"Do you then regret nothing?"
"No," replied Morrel.
"Not even me?" asked the count with deep emotion. Morrel's
clear eye was for the moment clouded, then it shone with
unusual lustre, and a large tear rolled down his cheek.
"What," said the count, "do you still regret anything in the
world, and yet die?"
"Oh, I entreat you," exclaimed Morrel in a low voice, "do
not speak another word, count do not prolong my
punishment." The count fancied that he was yielding, and
this belief revived the horrible doubt that had overwhelmed
him at the Chateau d'If. "I am endeavoring," he thought, "to
make this man happy I look upon this restitution as a
weight thrown into the scale to balance the evil I have
wrought. Now, supposing I am deceived, supposing this man
has not been unhappy enough to merit happiness. Alas, what
would become of me who can only atone for evil by doing
good?" Then he said aloud "Listen, Morrel, I see your grief
is great, but still you do not like to risk your soul."
Morrel smiled sadly. "Count," he said, "I swear to you my
soul is no longer my own."
"Maximilian, you know I have no relation in the world. I
have accustomed myself to regard you as my son well, then,
to save my son, I will sacrifice my life, nay, even my
fortune."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean, that you wish to quit life because you do not
understand all the enjoyments which are the fruits of a
large fortune. Morrel, I possess nearly a hundred millions
and I give them to you with such a fortune you can attain
every wish. Are you ambitious? Every career is open to you.
Overturn the world, change its character, yield to mad
ideas, be even criminal  but live."
"Count, I have your word," said Morrel coldly then taking
out his watch, he added, "It is halfpast eleven."
"Morrel, can you intend it in my house, under my very eyes?"
"Then let me go," said Maximilian, "or I shall think you did
not love me for my own sake, but for yours" and he arose.
"It is well," said Monte Cristo whose countenance brightened
at these words "you wish  you are inflexible. Yes, as you
said, you are indeed wretched and a miracle alone can cure
you. Sit down, Morrel, and wait."
Morrel obeyed the count arose, and unlocking a closet with
a key suspended from his gold chain, took from it a little
silver casket, beautifully carved and chased, the corners of
which represented four bending figures, similar to the
Caryatides, the forms of women, symbols of the angels
aspiring to heaven. He placed the casket on the table then
opening it took out a little golden box, the top of which
flew open when touched by a secret spring. This box
contained an unctuous substance partly solid, of which it
was impossible to discover the color, owing to the
reflection of the polished gold, sapphires, rubies,
emeralds, which ornamented the box. It was a mixed mass of
blue, red, and gold. The count took out a small quantity of
this with a gilt spoon, and offered it to Morrel, fixing a
long steadfast glance upon him. It was then observable that
the substance was greenish.
"This is what you asked for," he said, "and what I promised
to give you."
"I thank you from the depths of my heart," said the young
man, taking the spoon from the hands of Monte Cristo. The
count took another spoon, and again dipped it into the
golden box. "What are you going to do, my friend?" asked
Morrel, arresting his hand.
"Well, the fact is, Morrel, I was thinking that I too am
weary of life, and since an opportunity presents itself" 
"Stay" said the young man. "You who love, and are beloved
you, who have faith and hope,  oh, do not follow my
example. In your case it would be a crime. Adieu, my noble
and generous friend, adieu I will go and tell Valentine
what you have done for me." And slowly, though without any
hesitation, only waiting to press the count's hand
fervently, he swallowed the mysterious substance offered by
Monte Cristo. Then they were both silent. Ali, mute and
attentive, brought the pipes and coffee, and disappeared. By
degrees, the light of the lamps gradually faded in the hands
of the marble statues which held them, and the perfumes
appeared less powerful to Morrel. Seated opposite to him,
Monte Cristo watched him in the shadow, and Morrel saw
nothing but the bright eyes of the count. An overpowering
sadness took possession of the young man, his hands relaxed
their hold, the objects in the room gradually lost their
form and color, and his disturbed vision seemed to perceive
doors and curtains open in the walls.
"Friend," he cried, "I feel that I am dying thanks" He
made a last effort to extend his hand, but it fell powerless
beside him. Then it appeared to him that Monte Cristo
smiled, not with the strange and fearful expression which
had sometimes revealed to him the secrets of his heart, but
with the benevolent kindness of a father for a child. At the
same time the count appeared to increase in stature, his
form, nearly double its usual height, stood out in relief
against the red tapestry, his black hair was thrown back,
and he stood in the attitude of an avenging angel. Morrel,
overpowered, turned around in the armchair a delicious
torpor permeated every vein. A change of ideas presented
themselves to his brain, like a new design on the
kaleidoscope. Enervated, prostrate, and breathless, he
became unconscious of outward objects he seemed to be
entering that vague delirium preceding death. He wished once
again to press the count's hand, but his own was immovable.
He wished to articulate a last farewell, but his tongue lay
motionless and heavy in his throat, like a stone at the
mouth of a sepulchre. Involuntarily his languid eyes closed,
and still through his eyelashes a wellknown form seemed to
move amid the obscurity with which he thought himself
enveloped.
The count had just opened a door. Immediately a brilliant
light from the next room, or rather from the palace
adjoining, shone upon the room in which he was gently
gliding into his last sleep. Then he saw a woman of
marvellous beauty appear on the threshold of the door
separating the two rooms. Pale, and sweetly smiling, she
looked like an angel of mercy conjuring the angel of
vengeance. "Is it heaven that opens before me?" thought the
dying man "that angel resembles the one I have lost." Monte
Cristo pointed out Morrel to the young woman, who advanced
towards him with clasped hands and a smile upon her lips.
"Valentine, Valentine" he mentally ejaculated but his lips
uttered no sound, and as though all his strength were
centred in that internal emotion, he sighed and closed his
eyes. Valentine rushed towards him his lips again moved.
"He is calling you," said the count "he to whom you have
confided your destiny  he from whom death would have
separated you, calls you to him. Happily, I vanquished
death. Henceforth, Valentine, you will never again be
separated on earth, since he has rushed into death to find
you. Without me, you would both have died. May God accept my
atonement in the preservation of these two existences"
Valentine seized the count's hand, and in her irresistible
impulse of joy carried it to her lips.
"Oh, thank me again" said the count "tell me till you are
weary, that I have restored you to happiness you do not
know how much I require this assurance."
"Oh, yes, yes, I thank you with all my heart," said
Valentine "and if you doubt the sincerity of my gratitude,
oh, then, ask Haidee ask my beloved sister Haidee, who ever
since our departure from France, has caused me to wait
patiently for this happy day, while talking to me of you."
"You then love Haidee?" asked Monte Cristo with an emotion
he in vain endeavored to dissimulate.
"Oh, yes, with all my soul."
"Well, then, listen, Valentine," said the count "I have a
favor to ask of you."
"Of me? Oh, am I happy enough for that?"
"Yes you have called Haidee your sister,  let her become
so indeed, Valentine render her all the gratitude you fancy
that you owe to me protect her, for" the count's voice was
thick with emotion "henceforth she will be alone in the
world."
"Alone in the world" repeated a voice behind the count,
"and why?"
Monte Cristo turned around Haidee was standing pale,
motionless, looking at the count with an expression of
fearful amazement.
"Because tomorrow, Haidee, you will be free you will then
assume your proper position in society, for I will not allow
my destiny to overshadow yours. Daughter of a prince, I
restore to you the riches and name of your father."
Haidee became pale, and lifting her transparent hands to
heaven, exclaimed in a voice stifled with tears, "Then you
leave me, my lord?"
"Haidee, Haidee, you are young and beautiful forget even my
name, and be happy."
"It is well," said Haidee "your order shall be executed, my
lord I will forget even your name, and be happy." And she
stepped back to retire.
"Oh, heavens," exclaimed Valentine, who was supporting the
head of Morrel on her shoulder, "do you not see how pale she
is? Do you not see how she suffers?"
Haidee answered with a heartrending expression, "Why should
he understand this, my sister? He is my master, and I am his
slave he has the right to notice nothing."
The count shuddered at the tones of a voice which penetrated
the inmost recesses of his heart his eyes met those of the
young girl and he could not bear their brilliancy. "Oh,
heavens," exclaimed Monte Cristo, "can my suspicions be
correct? Haidee, would it please you not to leave me?"
"I am young," gently replied Haidee "I love the life you
have made so sweet to me, and I should be sorry to die."
"You mean, then, that if I leave you, Haidee" 
"I should die yes, my lord."
"Do you then love me?"
"Oh, Valentine, he asks if I love him. Valentine, tell him
if you love Maximilian." The count felt his heart dilate and
throb he opened his arms, and Haidee, uttering a cry,
sprang into them. "Oh, yes," she cried, "I do love you I
love you as one loves a father, brother, husband I love you
as my life, for you are the best, the noblest of created
beings"
"Let it be, then, as you wish, sweet angel God has
sustained me in my struggle with my enemies, and has given
me this reward he will not let me end my triumph in
suffering I wished to punish myself, but he has pardoned
me. Love me then, Haidee Who knows? perhaps your love will
make me forget all that I do not wish to remember."
"What do you mean, my lord?"
"I mean that one word from you has enlightened me more than
twenty years of slow experience I have but you in the
world, Haidee through you I again take hold on life,
through you I shall suffer, through you rejoice."
"Do you hear him, Valentine?" exclaimed Haidee "he says
that through me he will suffer  through me, who would
yield my life for his." The count withdrew for a moment.
"Have I discovered the truth?" he said "but whether it be
for recompense or punishment, I accept my fate. Come,
Haidee, come" and throwing his arm around the young girl's
waist, he pressed the hand of Valentine, and disappeared.
An hour had nearly passed, during which Valentine,
breathless and motionless, watched steadfastly over Morrel.
At length she felt his heart beat, a faint breath played
upon his lips, a slight shudder, announcing the return of
life, passed through the young man's frame. At length his
eyes opened, but they were at first fixed and
expressionless then sight returned, and with it feeling and
grief. "Oh," he cried, in an accent of despair, "the count
has deceived me I am yet living" and extending his hand
towards the table, he seized a knife.
"Dearest," exclaimed Valentine, with her adorable smile,
"awake, and look at me" Morrel uttered a loud exclamation,
and frantic, doubtful, dazzled, as though by a celestial
vision, he fell upon his knees.
The next morning at daybreak, Valentine and Morrel were
walking arminarm on the seashore, Valentine relating how
Monte Cristo had appeared in her room, explained everything,
revealed the crime, and, finally, how he had saved her life
by enabling her to simulate death. They had found the door
of the grotto opened, and gone forth on the azure dome of
heaven still glittered a few remaining stars. Morrel soon
perceived a man standing among the rocks, apparently
awaiting a sign from them to advance, and pointed him out to
Valentine. "Ah, it is Jacopo," she said, "the captain of the
yacht" and she beckoned him towards them.
"Do you wish to speak to us?" asked Morrel.
"I have a letter to give you from the count."
"From the count" murmured the two young people.
"Yes read it." Morrel opened the letter, and read 
"My Dear Maximilian, 
"There is a felucca for you at anchor. Jacopo will carry you
to Leghorn, where Monsieur Noirtier awaits his
granddaughter, whom he wishes to bless before you lead her
to the altar. All that is in this grotto, my friend, my
house in the Champs Elysees, and my chateau at Treport, are
the marriage gifts bestowed by Edmond Dantes upon the son of
his old master, Morrel. Mademoiselle de Villefort will share
them with you for I entreat her to give to the poor the
immense fortune reverting to her from her father, now a
madman, and her brother who died last September with his
mother. Tell the angel who will watch over your future
destiny, Morrel, to pray sometimes for a man, who like Satan
thought himself for an instant equal to God, but who now
acknowledges with Christian humility that God alone
possesses supreme power and infinite wisdom. Perhaps those
prayers may soften the remorse he feels in his heart. As for
you, Morrel, this is the secret of my conduct towards you.
There is neither happiness nor misery in the world there is
only the comparison of one state with another, nothing more.
He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience
supreme happiness. We must have felt what it is to die,
Morrel, that we may appreciate the enjoyments of living.
"Live, then, and be happy, beloved children of my heart, and
never forget that until the day when God shall deign to
reveal the future to man, all human wisdom is summed up in
these two words,  "Wait and hope.' Your friend,
"Edmond Dantes, Count of Monte Cristo."
During the perusal of this letter, which informed Valentine
for the first time of the madness of her father and the
death of her brother, she became pale, a heavy sigh escaped
from her bosom, and tears, not the less painful because they
were silent, ran down her cheeks her happiness cost her
very dear. Morrel looked around uneasily. "But," he said,
"the count's generosity is too overwhelming Valentine will
be satisfied with my humble fortune. Where is the count,
friend? Lead me to him." Jacopo pointed towards the horizon.
"What do you mean?" asked Valentine. "Where is the count? 
where is Haidee?"
"Look" said Jacopo.
The eyes of both were fixed upon the spot indicated by the
sailor, and on the blue line separating the sky from the
Mediterranean Sea, they perceived a large white sail.
"Gone," said Morrel "gone  adieu, my friend  adieu, my
father"
"Gone," murmured Valentine "adieu, my sweet Haidee 
adieu, my sister"
"Who can say whether we shall ever see them again?" said
Morrel with tearful eyes.
"Darling," replied Valentine, "has not the count just told
us that all human wisdom is summed up in two words?  "Wait
and hope.'"
End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Count of Monte Cristo by Dumas
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 START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, PRIDE AND PREJUDICE 
Pride and Prejudice
by Jane Austen
Chapter 
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in
possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
However little known the feelings or views of such a man may
be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well
fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered
the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.
"My dear Mr. Bennet," said his lady to him one day, "have you
heard that Netherfield Park is let at last?"
Mr. Bennet replied that he had not.
"But it is," returned she "for Mrs. Long has just been here, and
she told me all about it."
Mr. Bennet made no answer.
"Do you not want to know who has taken it?" cried his wife
impatiently.
"You want to tell me, and I have no objection to hearing it."
This was invitation enough.
"Why, my dear, you must know, Mrs. Long says that Netherfield
is taken by a young man of large fortune from the north of
England that he came down on Monday in a chaise and four to
see the place, and was so much delighted with it, that he agreed
with Mr. Morris immediately that he is to take possession
before Michaelmas, and some of his servants are to be in the
house by the end of next week."
"What is his name?"
"Bingley."
"Is he married or single?"
"Oh Single, my dear, to be sure A single man of large
fortune four or five thousand a year. What a fine thing for our
girls"
"How so? How can it affect them?"
"My dear Mr. Bennet," replied his wife, "how can you be so
tiresome You must know that I am thinking of his marrying
one of them."
"Is that his design in settling here?"
"Design Nonsense, how can you talk so But it is very likely
that he may fall in love with one of them, and therefore you
must visit him as soon as he comes."
"I see no occasion for that. You and the girls may go, or you
may send them by themselves, which perhaps will be still
better, for as you are as handsome as any of them, Mr. Bingley
may like you the best of the party."
"My dear, you flatter me. I certainly have had my share of
beauty, but I do not pretend to be anything extraordinary now.
When a woman has five grownup daughters, she ought to give
over thinking of her own beauty."
"In such cases, a woman has not often much beauty to think of."
"But, my dear, you must indeed go and see Mr. Bingley when
he comes into the neighbourhood."
"It is more than I engage for, I assure you."
"But consider your daughters. Only think what an establishment
it would be for one of them. Sir William and Lady Lucas are
determined to go, merely on that account, for in general, you
know, they visit no newcomers. Indeed you must go, for it will
be impossible for us to visit him if you do not."
"You are overscrupulous, surely. I dare say Mr. Bingley will
be very glad to see you and I will send a few lines by you to
assure him of my hearty consent to his marrying whichever he
chooses of the girls though I must throw in a good word for
my little Lizzy."
"I desire you will do no such thing. Lizzy is not a bit better
than the others and I am sure she is not half so handsome as
Jane, nor half so goodhumoured as Lydia. But you are always
giving her the preference."
"They have none of them much to recommend them," replied he
"they are all silly and ignorant like other girls but Lizzy
has something more of quickness than her sisters."
"Mr. Bennet, how can you abuse your own children in such a
way? You take delight in vexing me. You have no compassion
for my poor nerves."
"You mistake me, my dear. I have a high respect for your
nerves. They are my old friends. I have heard you mention
them with consideration these last twenty years at least."
"Ah, you do not know what I suffer."
"But I hope you will get over it, and live to see many young
men of four thousand a year come into the neighbourhood."
"It will be no use to us, if twenty such should come, since
you will not visit them."
"Depend upon it, my dear, that when there are twenty, I will
visit them all."
Mr. Bennet was so odd a mixture of quick parts, sarcastic humour,
reserve, and caprice, that the experience of threeandtwenty
years had been insufficient to make his wife understand his
character. Her mind was less difficult to develop. She was a
woman of mean understanding, little information, and uncertain
temper. When she was discontented, she fancied herself nervous.
The business of her life was to get her daughters married its
solace was visiting and news.
Chapter 
Mr. Bennet was among the earliest of those who waited on Mr.
Bingley. He had always intended to visit him, though to the last
always assuring his wife that he should not go and till the
evening after the visit was paid she had no knowledge of it.
It was then disclosed in the following manner. Observing his
second daughter employed in trimming a hat, he suddenly
addressed her with
"I hope Mr. Bingley will like it, Lizzy."
"We are not in a way to know what Mr. Bingley likes," said
her mother resentfully, "since we are not to visit."
"But you forget, mamma," said Elizabeth, "that we shall meet
him at the assemblies, and that Mrs. Long promised to introduce
him."
"I do not believe Mrs. Long will do any such thing. She has two
nieces of her own. She is a selfish, hypocritical woman, and I
have no opinion of her."
"No more have I," said Mr. Bennet "and I am glad to find that
you do not depend on her serving you."
Mrs. Bennet deigned not to make any reply, but, unable to
contain herself, began scolding one of her daughters.
"Don't keep coughing so, Kitty, for Heaven's sake Have a little
compassion on my nerves. You tear them to pieces."
"Kitty has no discretion in her coughs," said her father "she
times them ill."
"I do not cough for my own amusement," replied Kitty fretfully.
"When is your next ball to be, Lizzy?"
"Tomorrow fortnight."
"Aye, so it is," cried her mother, "and Mrs. Long does not come
back till the day before so it will be impossible for her to
introduce him, for she will not know him herself."
"Then, my dear, you may have the advantage of your friend, and
introduce Mr. Bingley to her."
"Impossible, Mr. Bennet, impossible, when I am not acquainted
with him myself how can you be so teasing?"
"I honour your circumspection. A fortnight's acquaintance is
certainly very little. One cannot know what a man really is by
the end of a fortnight. But if we do not venture somebody else
will and after all, Mrs. Long and her daughters must stand their
chance and, therefore, as she will think it an act of kindness,
if you decline the office, I will take it on myself."
The girls stared at their father. Mrs. Bennet said only,
"Nonsense, nonsense"
"What can be the meaning of that emphatic exclamation?" cried
he. "Do you consider the forms of introduction, and the stress
that is laid on them, as nonsense? I cannot quite agree with
you there. What say you, Mary? For you are a young lady of
deep reflection, I know, and read great books and make extracts."
Mary wished to say something sensible, but knew not how.
"While Mary is adjusting her ideas," he continued, "let us return
to Mr. Bingley."
"I am sick of Mr. Bingley," cried his wife.
"I am sorry to hear that but why did not you tell me that
before? If I had known as much this morning I certainly would
not have called on him. It is very unlucky but as I have
actually paid the visit, we cannot escape the acquaintance now."
The astonishment of the ladies was just what he wished that of
Mrs. Bennet perhaps surpassing the rest though, when the first
tumult of joy was over, she began to declare that it was what she
had expected all the while.
"How good it was in you, my dear Mr. Bennet But I knew I should
persuade you at last. I was sure you loved your girls too well
to neglect such an acquaintance. Well, how pleased I am and it
is such a good joke, too, that you should have gone this morning
and never said a word about it till now."
"Now, Kitty, you may cough as much as you choose," said Mr.
Bennet and, as he spoke, he left the room, fatigued with the
raptures of his wife.
"What an excellent father you have, girls" said she, when the
door was shut. "I do not know how you will ever make him
amends for his kindness or me, either, for that matter. At our
time of life it is not so pleasant, I can tell you, to be making
new acquaintances every day but for your sakes, we would do
anything. Lydia, my love, though you are the youngest, I dare
say Mr. Bingley will dance with you at the next ball."
"Oh" said Lydia stoutly, "I am not afraid for though I am the
youngest, I'm the tallest."
The rest of the evening was spent in conjecturing how soon he
would return Mr. Bennet's visit, and determining when they
should ask him to dinner.
Chapter 
Not all that Mrs. Bennet, however, with the assistance of her
five daughters, could ask on the subject, was sufficient to draw
from her husband any satisfactory description of Mr. Bingley.
They attacked him in various wayswith barefaced questions,
ingenious suppositions, and distant surmises but he eluded the
skill of them all, and they were at last obliged to accept the
secondhand intelligence of their neighbour, Lady Lucas. Her
report was highly favourable. Sir William had been delighted
with him. He was quite young, wonderfully handsome, extremely
agreeable, and, to crown the whole, he meant to be at the next
assembly with a large party. Nothing could be more delightful
To be fond of dancing was a certain step towards falling in love
and very lively hopes of Mr. Bingley's heart were entertained.
"If I can but see one of my daughters happily settled at
Netherfield," said Mrs. Bennet to her husband, "and all the
others equally well married, I shall have nothing to wish for."
In a few days Mr. Bingley returned Mr. Bennet's visit, and sat
about ten minutes with him in his library. He had entertained
hopes of being admitted to a sight of the young ladies, of
whose beauty he had heard much but he saw only the father.
The ladies were somewhat more fortunate, for they had the
advantage of ascertaining from an upper window that he wore
a blue coat, and rode a black horse.
An invitation to dinner was soon afterwards dispatched and
already had Mrs. Bennet planned the courses that were to do
credit to her housekeeping, when an answer arrived which
deferred it all. Mr. Bingley was obliged to be in town the
following day, and, consequently, unable to accept the honour
of their invitation, etc. Mrs. Bennet was quite disconcerted.
She could not imagine what business he could have in town so
soon after his arrival in Hertfordshire and she began to fear
that he might be always flying about from one place to another,
and never settled at Netherfield as he ought to be. Lady Lucas
quieted her fears a little by starting the idea of his being gone
to London only to get a large party for the ball and a report
soon followed that Mr. Bingley was to bring twelve ladies and
seven gentlemen with him to the assembly. The girls grieved
over such a number of ladies, but were comforted the day
before the ball by hearing, that instead of twelve he brought
only six with him from Londonhis five sisters and a cousin.
And when the party entered the assembly room it consisted of
only five altogetherMr. Bingley, his two sisters, the husband
of the eldest, and another young man.
Mr. Bingley was goodlooking and gentlemanlike he had a pleasant
countenance, and easy, unaffected manners. His sisters were fine
women, with an air of decided fashion. His brotherinlaw, Mr.
Hurst, merely looked the gentleman but his friend Mr. Darcy soon
drew the attention of the room by his fine, tall person, handsome
features, noble mien, and the report which was in general
circulation within five minutes after his entrance, of his having
ten thousand a year. The gentlemen pronounced him to be a fine
figure of a man, the ladies declared he was much handsomer than
Mr. Bingley, and he was looked at with great admiration for about
half the evening, till his manners gave a disgust which turned
the tide of his popularity for he was discovered to be proud
to be above his company, and above being pleased and not all his
large estate in Derbyshire could then save him from having a most
forbidding, disagreeable countenance, and being unworthy to be
compared with his friend.
Mr. Bingley had soon made himself acquainted with all the
principal people in the room he was lively and unreserved,
danced every dance, was angry that the ball closed so early,
and talked of giving one himself at Netherfield. Such amiable
qualities must speak for themselves. What a contrast between
him and his friend Mr. Darcy danced only once with Mrs. Hurst
and once with Miss Bingley, declined being introduced to any
other lady, and spent the rest of the evening in walking about
the room, speaking occasionally to one of his own party. His
character was decided. He was the proudest, most disagreeable
man in the world, and everybody hoped that he would never come
there again. Amongst the most violent against him was Mrs.
Bennet, whose dislike of his general behaviour was sharpened
into particular resentment by his having slighted one of her
daughters.
Elizabeth Bennet had been obliged, by the scarcity of gentlemen,
to sit down for two dances and during part of that time,
Mr. Darcy had been standing near enough for her to hear a
conversation between him and Mr. Bingley, who came from the
dance for a few minutes, to press his friend to join it.
"Come, Darcy," said he, "I must have you dance. I hate to see
you standing about by yourself in this stupid manner. You had
much better dance."
"I certainly shall not. You know how I detest it, unless I am
particularly acquainted with my partner. At such an assembly as
this it would be insupportable. Your sisters are engaged, and
there is not another woman in the room whom it would not be a
punishment to me to stand up with."
"I would not be so fastidious as you are," cried Mr. Bingley,
"for a kingdom Upon my honour, I never met with so many
pleasant girls in my life as I have this evening and there are
several of them you see uncommonly pretty."
"You are dancing with the only handsome girl in the room,"
said Mr. Darcy, looking at the eldest Miss Bennet.
"Oh She is the most beautiful creature I ever beheld But
there is one of her sisters sitting down just behind you, who is
very pretty, and I dare say very agreeable. Do let me ask my
partner to introduce you."
"Which do you mean?" and turning round he looked for a
moment at Elizabeth, till catching her eye, he withdrew his own
and coldly said "She is tolerable, but not handsome enough to
tempt me I am in no humour at present to give consequence
to young ladies who are slighted by other men. You had better
return to your partner and enjoy her smiles, for you are wasting
your time with me."
Mr. Bingley followed his advice. Mr. Darcy walked off and
Elizabeth remained with no very cordial feelings toward him.
She told the story, however, with great spirit among her friends
for she had a lively, playful disposition, which delighted in
anything ridiculous.
The evening altogether passed off pleasantly to the whole
family. Mrs. Bennet had seen her eldest daughter much
admired by the Netherfield party. Mr. Bingley had danced with
her twice, and she had been distinguished by his sisters. Jane
was as much gratified by this as her mother could be, though in
a quieter way. Elizabeth felt Jane's pleasure. Mary had heard
herself mentioned to Miss Bingley as the most accomplished
girl in the neighbourhood and Catherine and Lydia had been
fortunate enough never to be without partners, which was all
that they had yet learnt to care for at a ball. They returned,
therefore, in good spirits to Longbourn, the village where they
lived, and of which they were the principal inhabitants. They
found Mr. Bennet still up. With a book he was regardless of
time and on the present occasion he had a good deal of
curiosity as to the events of an evening which had raised such
splendid expectations. He had rather hoped that his wife's
views on the stranger would be disappointed but he soon
found out that he had a different story to hear.
"Oh my dear Mr. Bennet," as she entered the room, "we have
had a most delightful evening, a most excellent ball. I wish you
had been there. Jane was so admired, nothing could be like it.
Everybody said how well she looked and Mr. Bingley thought
her quite beautiful, and danced with her twice Only think of
that, my dear he actually danced with her twice and she was
the only creature in the room that he asked a second time.
First of all, he asked Miss Lucas. I was so vexed to see him
stand up with her But, however, he did not admire her at all
indeed, nobody can, you know and he seemed quite struck with
Jane as she was going down the dance. So he inquired who she
was, and got introduced, and asked her for the two next. Then
the two third he danced with Miss King, and the two fourth with
Maria Lucas, and the two fifth with Jane again, and the two
sixth with Lizzy, and the Boulanger"
"If he had had any compassion for me," cried her husband
impatiently, "he would not have danced half so much For God's
sake, say no more of his partners. O that he had sprained
his ankle in the first place"
"Oh my dear, I am quite delighted with him. He is so
excessively handsome And his sisters are charming women.
I never in my life saw anything more elegant than their dresses.
I dare say the lace upon Mrs. Hurst's gown"
Here she was interrupted again. Mr. Bennet protested against
any description of finery. She was therefore obliged to seek
another branch of the subject, and related, with much bitterness
of spirit and some exaggeration, the shocking rudeness of Mr.
Darcy.
"But I can assure you," she added, "that Lizzy does not lose
much by not suiting his fancy for he is a most disagreeable,
horrid man, not at all worth pleasing. So high and so conceited
that there was no enduring him He walked here, and he walked
there, fancying himself so very great Not handsome enough to
dance with I wish you had been there, my dear, to have given
him one of your setdowns. I quite detest the man."
Chapter 
When Jane and Elizabeth were alone, the former, who had been
cautious in her praise of Mr. Bingley before, expressed to her
sister just how very much she admired him.
"He is just what a young man ought to be," said she, "sensible,
goodhumoured, lively and I never saw such happy mannersso
much ease, with such perfect good breeding"
"He is also handsome," replied Elizabeth, "which a young man
ought likewise to be, if he possibly can. His character is thereby
complete."
"I was very much flattered by his asking me to dance a second
time. I did not expect such a compliment."
"Did not you? I did for you. But that is one great difference
between us. Compliments always take you by surprise, and
me never. What could be more natural than his asking you
again? He could not help seeing that you were about five times
as pretty as every other woman in the room. No thanks to his
gallantry for that. Well, he certainly is very agreeable, and I
give you leave to like him. You have liked many a stupider
person."
"Dear Lizzy"
"Oh you are a great deal too apt, you know, to like people in
general. You never see a fault in anybody. All the world are
good and agreeable in your eyes. I never heard you speak ill of
a human being in your life."
"I would not wish to be hasty in censuring anyone but I always
speak what I think."
"I know you do and it is that which makes the wonder. With your
good sense, to be so honestly blind to the follies and nonsense
of others Affectation of candour is common enoughone meets
with it everywhere. But to be candid without ostentation or
designto take the good of everybody's character and make it
still better, and say nothing of the badbelongs to you alone.
And so you like this man's sisters, too, do you? Their manners
are not equal to his."
"Certainly notat first. But they are very pleasing women when
you converse with them. Miss Bingley is to live with her
brother, and keep his house and I am much mistaken if we shall
not find a very charming neighbour in her."
Elizabeth listened in silence, but was not convinced their
behaviour at the assembly had not been calculated to please in
general and with more quickness of observation and less pliancy
of temper than her sister, and with a judgement too unassailed by
any attention to herself, she was very little disposed to approve
them. They were in fact very fine ladies not deficient in good
humour when they were pleased, nor in the power of making
themselves agreeable when they chose it, but proud and
conceited. They were rather handsome, had been educated in
one of the first private seminaries in town, had a fortune of
twenty thousand pounds, were in the habit of spending more
than they ought, and of associating with people of rank, and
were therefore in every respect entitled to think well of
themselves, and meanly of others. They were of a respectable
family in the north of England a circumstance more deeply
impressed on their memories than that their brother's fortune
and their own had been acquired by trade.
Mr. Bingley inherited property to the amount of nearly a
hundred thousand pounds from his father, who had intended to
purchase an estate, but did not live to do it. Mr. Bingley
intended it likewise, and sometimes made choice of his county
but as he was now provided with a good house and the liberty of
a manor, it was doubtful to many of those who best knew the
easiness of his temper, whether he might not spend the
remainder of his days at Netherfield, and leave the next
generation to purchase.
His sisters were anxious for his having an estate of his own but,
though he was now only established as a tenant, Miss Bingley
was by no means unwilling to preside at his tablenor was Mrs.
Hurst, who had married a man of more fashion than fortune, less
disposed to consider his house as her home when it suited her.
Mr. Bingley had not been of age two years, when he was tempted
by an accidental recommendation to look at Netherfield House.
He did look at it, and into it for halfanhourwas pleased with
the situation and the principal rooms, satisfied with what the
owner said in its praise, and took it immediately.
Between him and Darcy there was a very steady friendship, in
spite of great opposition of character. Bingley was endeared to
Darcy by the easiness, openness, and ductility of his temper,
though no disposition could offer a greater contrast to his own,
and though with his own he never appeared dissatisfied. On the
strength of Darcy's regard, Bingley had the firmest reliance, and
of his judgement the highest opinion. In understanding, Darcy
was the superior. Bingley was by no means deficient, but Darcy
was clever. He was at the same time haughty, reserved, and
fastidious, and his manners, though wellbred, were not inviting.
In that respect his friend had greatly the advantage. Bingley was
sure of being liked wherever he appeared, Darcy was continually
giving offense.
The manner in which they spoke of the Meryton assembly was
sufficiently characteristic. Bingley had never met with more
pleasant people or prettier girls in his life everybody had been
most kind and attentive to him there had been no formality, no
stiffness he had soon felt acquainted with all the room and, as
to Miss Bennet, he could not conceive an angel more beautiful.
Darcy, on the contrary, had seen a collection of people in whom
there was little beauty and no fashion, for none of whom he had
felt the smallest interest, and from none received either attention
or pleasure. Miss Bennet he acknowledged to be pretty, but she
smiled too much.
Mrs. Hurst and her sister allowed it to be sobut still they
admired her and liked her, and pronounced her to be a sweet
girl, and one whom they would not object to know more of.
Miss Bennet was therefore established as a sweet girl, and their
brother felt authorized by such commendation to think of her as
he chose.
Chapter 
Within a short walk of Longbourn lived a family with whom
the Bennets were particularly intimate. Sir William Lucas
had been formerly in trade in Meryton, where he had made a
tolerable fortune, and risen to the honour of knighthood by an
address to the king during his mayoralty. The distinction had
perhaps been felt too strongly. It had given him a disgust
to his business, and to his residence in a small market town
and, in quitting them both, he had removed with his family
to a house about a mile from Meryton, denominated from that
period Lucas Lodge, where he could think with pleasure of his
own importance, and, unshackled by business, occupy himself
solely in being civil to all the world. For, though elated by his
rank, it did not render him supercilious on the contrary, he was
all attention to everybody. By nature inoffensive, friendly, and
obliging, his presentation at St. James's had made him courteous.
Lady Lucas was a very good kind of woman, not too clever to
be a valuable neighbour to Mrs. Bennet. They had several
children. The eldest of them, a sensible, intelligent young
woman, about twentyseven, was Elizabeth's intimate friend.
That the Miss Lucases and the Miss Bennets should meet to
talk over a ball was absolutely necessary and the morning after
the assembly brought the former to Longbourn to hear and to
communicate.
"You began the evening well, Charlotte," said Mrs. Bennet with
civil selfcommand to Miss Lucas. "You were Mr. Bingley's
first choice."
"Yes but he seemed to like his second better."
"Oh you mean Jane, I suppose, because he danced with her
twice. To be sure that did seem as if he admired herindeed
I rather believe he didI heard something about itbut I
hardly know whatsomething about Mr. Robinson."
"Perhaps you mean what I overheard between him and Mr. Robinson
did not I mention it to you? Mr. Robinson's asking him how he
liked our Meryton assemblies, and whether he did not think there
were a great many pretty women in the room, and which he thought
the prettiest? and his answering immediately to the last
question 'Oh the eldest Miss Bennet, beyond a doubt there
cannot be two opinions on that point.'"
"Upon my word Well, that is very decided indeedthat does
seem as ifbut, however, it may all come to nothing, you know."
"My overhearings were more to the purpose than yours, Eliza,"
said Charlotte. "Mr. Darcy is not so well worth listening to
as his friend, is he?poor Elizato be only just tolerable."
"I beg you would not put it into Lizzy's head to be vexed by
his illtreatment, for he is such a disagreeable man, that it
would be quite a misfortune to be liked by him. Mrs. Long
told me last night that he sat close to her for halfanhour
without once opening his lips."
"Are you quite sure, ma'am?is not there a little mistake?"
said Jane. "I certainly saw Mr. Darcy speaking to her."
"Ayebecause she asked him at last how he liked Netherfield,
and he could not help answering her but she said he seemed
quite angry at being spoke to."
"Miss Bingley told me," said Jane, "that he never speaks much,
unless among his intimate acquaintances. With them he is
remarkably agreeable."
"I do not believe a word of it, my dear. If he had been so very
agreeable, he would have talked to Mrs. Long. But I can guess
how it was everybody says that he is eat up with pride, and I
dare say he had heard somehow that Mrs. Long does not keep
a carriage, and had come to the ball in a hack chaise."
"I do not mind his not talking to Mrs. Long," said Miss Lucas,
"but I wish he had danced with Eliza."
"Another time, Lizzy," said her mother, "I would not dance
with him, if I were you."
"I believe, ma'am, I may safely promise you never to dance
with him."
"His pride," said Miss Lucas, "does not offend me so much as
pride often does, because there is an excuse for it. One cannot
wonder that so very fine a young man, with family, fortune,
everything in his favour, should think highly of himself. If I
may so express it, he has a right to be proud."
"That is very true," replied Elizabeth, "and I could easily
forgive his pride, if he had not mortified mine."
"Pride," observed Mary, who piqued herself upon the solidity
of her reflections, "is a very common failing, I believe. By
all that I have ever read, I am convinced that it is very common
indeed that human nature is particularly prone to it, and
that there are very few of us who do not cherish a feeling of
selfcomplacency on the score of some quality or other, real
or imaginary. Vanity and pride are different things, though
the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud
without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of
ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us."
"If I were as rich as Mr. Darcy," cried a young Lucas, who
came with his sisters, "I should not care how proud I was. I
would keep a pack of foxhounds, and drink a bottle of wine a
day."
"Then you would drink a great deal more than you ought," said
Mrs. Bennet "and if I were to see you at it, I should take away
your bottle directly."
The boy protested that she should not she continued to declare
that she would, and the argument ended only with the visit.
Chapter 
The ladies of Longbourn soon waited on those of Netherfield.
The visit was soon returned in due form. Miss Bennet's
pleasing manners grew on the goodwill of Mrs. Hurst and Miss
Bingley and though the mother was found to be intolerable,
and the younger sisters not worth speaking to, a wish of
being better acquainted with them was expressed towards
the two eldest. By Jane, this attention was received with the
greatest pleasure, but Elizabeth still saw superciliousness in
their treatment of everybody, hardly excepting even her sister,
and could not like them though their kindness to Jane, such as it
was, had a value as arising in all probability from the influence
of their brother's admiration. It was generally evident
whenever they met, that he did admire her and to her it was
equally evident that Jane was yielding to the preference which
she had begun to entertain for him from the first, and was in a
way to be very much in love but she considered with pleasure
that it was not likely to be discovered by the world in general,
since Jane united, with great strength of feeling, a composure
of temper and a uniform cheerfulness of manner which would
guard her from the suspicions of the impertinent. She
mentioned this to her friend Miss Lucas.
"It may perhaps be pleasant," replied Charlotte, "to be able to
impose on the public in such a case but it is sometimes a
disadvantage to be so very guarded. If a woman conceals her
affection with the same skill from the object of it, she may lose
the opportunity of fixing him and it will then be but poor
consolation to believe the world equally in the dark. There is
so much of gratitude or vanity in almost every attachment, that
it is not safe to leave any to itself. We can all begin freelya
slight preference is natural enough but there are very few of us
who have heart enough to be really in love without encouragement.
In nine cases out of ten a women had better show more affection
than she feels. Bingley likes your sister undoubtedly but he
may never do more than like her, if she does not help him on."
"But she does help him on, as much as her nature will allow.
If I can perceive her regard for him, he must be a simpleton,
indeed, not to discover it too."
"Remember, Eliza, that he does not know Jane's disposition as
you do."
"But if a woman is partial to a man, and does not endeavour to
conceal it, he must find it out."
"Perhaps he must, if he sees enough of her. But, though
Bingley and Jane meet tolerably often, it is never for many
hours together and, as they always see each other in large
mixed parties, it is impossible that every moment should be
employed in conversing together. Jane should therefore make
the most of every halfhour in which she can command his
attention. When she is secure of him, there will be more leisure
for falling in love as much as she chooses."
"Your plan is a good one," replied Elizabeth, "where nothing is
in question but the desire of being well married, and if I were
determined to get a rich husband, or any husband, I dare say I
should adopt it. But these are not Jane's feelings she is not
acting by design. As yet, she cannot even be certain of the
degree of her own regard nor of its reasonableness. She has
known him only a fortnight. She danced four dances with him
at Meryton she saw him one morning at his own house, and
has since dined with him in company four times. This is not
quite enough to make her understand his character."
"Not as you represent it. Had she merely dined with him, she
might only have discovered whether he had a good appetite but
you must remember that four evenings have also been spent
togetherand four evenings may do a great deal."
"Yes these four evenings have enabled them to ascertain that
they both like Vingtun better than Commerce but with respect
to any other leading characteristic, I do not imagine that much
has been unfolded."
"Well," said Charlotte, "I wish Jane success with all my heart
and if she were married to him tomorrow, I should think she
had as good a chance of happiness as if she were to be studying
his character for a twelvemonth. Happiness in marriage is
entirely a matter of chance. If the dispositions of the parties
are ever so well known to each other or ever so similar beforehand,
it does not advance their felicity in the least. They always
continue to grow sufficiently unlike afterwards to have their
share of vexation and it is better to know as little as possible
of the defects of the person with whom you are to pass your life."
"You make me laugh, Charlotte but it is not sound. You know
it is not sound, and that you would never act in this way
yourself."
Occupied in observing Mr. Bingley's attentions to her sister,
Elizabeth was far from suspecting that she was herself becoming
an object of some interest in the eyes of his friend. Mr. Darcy
had at first scarcely allowed her to be pretty he had looked at
her without admiration at the ball and when they next met, he
looked at her only to criticise. But no sooner had he made it
clear to himself and his friends that she hardly had a good feature
in her face, than he began to find it was rendered uncommonly
intelligent by the beautiful expression of her dark eyes. To this
discovery succeeded some others equally mortifying. Though he
had detected with a critical eye more than one failure of perfect
symmetry in her form, he was forced to acknowledge her figure
to be light and pleasing and in spite of his asserting that her
manners were not those of the fashionable world, he was caught
by their easy playfulness. Of this she was perfectly unaware
to her he was only the man who made himself agreeable nowhere,
and who had not thought her handsome enough to dance with.
He began to wish to know more of her, and as a step towards
conversing with her himself, attended to her conversation with
others. His doing so drew her notice. It was at Sir William
Lucas's, where a large party were assembled.
"What does Mr. Darcy mean," said she to Charlotte, "by
listening to my conversation with Colonel Forster?"
"That is a question which Mr. Darcy only can answer."
"But if he does it any more I shall certainly let him know that I
see what he is about. He has a very satirical eye, and if I do not
begin by being impertinent myself, I shall soon grow afraid of
him."
On his approaching them soon afterwards, though without
seeming to have any intention of speaking, Miss Lucas defied
her friend to mention such a subject to him which immediately
provoking Elizabeth to do it, she turned to him and said
"Did you not think, Mr. Darcy, that I expressed myself
uncommonly well just now, when I was teasing Colonel Forster
to give us a ball at Meryton?"
"With great energy but it is always a subject which makes a lady
energetic."
"You are severe on us."
"It will be her turn soon to be teased," said Miss Lucas. "I
am going to open the instrument, Eliza, and you know what
follows."
"You are a very strange creature by way of a friendalways
wanting me to play and sing before anybody and everybody
If my vanity had taken a musical turn, you would have been
invaluable but as it is, I would really rather not sit down
before those who must be in the habit of hearing the very best
performers." On Miss Lucas's persevering, however, she added,
"Very well, if it must be so, it must." And gravely glancing at
Mr. Darcy, "There is a fine old saying, which everybody here is of
course familiar with 'Keep your breath to cool your porridge'
and I shall keep mine to swell my song."
Her performance was pleasing, though by no means capital.
After a song or two, and before she could reply to the entreaties
of several that she would sing again, she was eagerly succeeded
at the instrument by her sister Mary, who having, in consequence
of being the only plain one in the family, worked hard for
knowledge and accomplishments, was always impatient for
display.
Mary had neither genius nor taste and though vanity had given
her application, it had given her likewise a pedantic air and
conceited manner, which would have injured a higher degree of
excellence than she had reached. Elizabeth, easy and unaffected,
had been listened to with much more pleasure, though not
playing half so well and Mary, at the end of a long concerto,
was glad to purchase praise and gratitude by Scotch and Irish
airs, at the request of her younger sisters, who, with some of the
Lucases, and two or three officers, joined eagerly in dancing at
one end of the room.
Mr. Darcy stood near them in silent indignation at such a mode
of passing the evening, to the exclusion of all conversation, and
was too much engrossed by his thoughts to perceive that Sir
William Lucas was his neighbour, till Sir William thus began
"What a charming amusement for young people this is, Mr. Darcy
There is nothing like dancing after all. I consider it as one
of the first refinements of polished society."
"Certainly, sir and it has the advantage also of being in vogue
amongst the less polished societies of the world. Every savage
can dance."
Sir William only smiled. "Your friend performs delightfully," he
continued after a pause, on seeing Bingley join the group "and I
doubt not that you are an adept in the science yourself, Mr.
Darcy."
"You saw me dance at Meryton, I believe, sir."
"Yes, indeed, and received no inconsiderable pleasure from the
sight. Do you often dance at St. James's?"
"Never, sir."
"Do you not think it would be a proper compliment to the
place?"
"It is a compliment which I never pay to any place if I can
avoid it."
"You have a house in town, I conclude?"
Mr. Darcy bowed.
"I had once had some thought of fixing in town myselffor I am
fond of superior society but I did not feel quite certain that the
air of London would agree with Lady Lucas."
He paused in hopes of an answer but his companion was not
disposed to make any and Elizabeth at that instant moving
towards them, he was struck with the action of doing a very
gallant thing, and called out to her
"My dear Miss Eliza, why are you not dancing? Mr. Darcy, you
must allow me to present this young lady to you as a very
desirable partner. You cannot refuse to dance, I am sure when
so much beauty is before you." And, taking her hand, he would
have given it to Mr. Darcy who, though extremely surprised,
was not unwilling to receive it, when she instantly drew back,
and said with some discomposure to Sir William
"Indeed, sir, I have not the least intention of dancing. I entreat
you not to suppose that I moved this way in order to beg for a
partner."
Mr. Darcy, with grave propriety, requested to be allowed the
honour of her hand, but in vain. Elizabeth was determined nor
did Sir William at all shake her purpose by his attempt at
persuasion.
"You excel so much in the dance, Miss Eliza, that it is cruel to
deny me the happiness of seeing you and though this gentleman
dislikes the amusement in general, he can have no objection, I
am sure, to oblige us for one halfhour."
"Mr. Darcy is all politeness," said Elizabeth, smiling.
"He is, indeed but, considering the inducement, my dear Miss
Eliza, we cannot wonder at his complaisancefor who would
object to such a partner?"
Elizabeth looked archly, and turned away. Her resistance had
not injured her with the gentleman, and he was thinking of her
with some complacency, when thus accosted by Miss Bingley
"I can guess the subject of your reverie."
"I should imagine not."
"You are considering how insupportable it would be to pass many
evenings in this mannerin such society and indeed I am quite
of your opinion. I was never more annoyed The insipidity, and
yet the noisethe nothingness, and yet the selfimportance of all
those people What would I give to hear your strictures on them"
"You conjecture is totally wrong, I assure you. My mind was
more agreeably engaged. I have been meditating on the very
great pleasure which a pair of fine eyes in the face of a pretty
woman can bestow."
Miss Bingley immediately fixed her eyes on his face, and desired
he would tell her what lady had the credit of inspiring such
reflections. Mr. Darcy replied with great intrepidity
"Miss Elizabeth Bennet."
"Miss Elizabeth Bennet" repeated Miss Bingley. "I am all
astonishment. How long has she been such a favourite?and
pray, when am I to wish you joy?"
"That is exactly the question which I expected you to ask. A
lady's imagination is very rapid it jumps from admiration to
love, from love to matrimony, in a moment. I knew you would
be wishing me joy."
"Nay, if you are serious about it, I shall consider the matter is
absolutely settled. You will be having a charming motherinlaw,
indeed and, of course, she will always be at Pemberley with you."
He listened to her with perfect indifference while she chose to
entertain herself in this manner and as his composure convinced
her that all was safe, her wit flowed long.
Chapter 
Mr. Bennet's property consisted almost entirely in an estate of
two thousand a year, which, unfortunately for his daughters, was
entailed, in default of heirs male, on a distant relation and their
mother's fortune, though ample for her situation in life, could
but ill supply the deficiency of his. Her father had been an
attorney in Meryton, and had left her four thousand pounds.
She had a sister married to a Mr. Phillips, who had been a clerk
to their father and succeeded him in the business, and a brother
settled in London in a respectable line of trade.
The village of Longbourn was only one mile from Meryton a
most convenient distance for the young ladies, who were usually
tempted thither three or four times a week, to pay their duty to
their aunt and to a milliner's shop just over the way. The two
youngest of the family, Catherine and Lydia, were particularly
frequent in these attentions their minds were more vacant than
their sisters', and when nothing better offered, a walk to
Meryton was necessary to amuse their morning hours and
furnish conversation for the evening and however bare of news
the country in general might be, they always contrived to learn
some from their aunt. At present, indeed, they were well
supplied both with news and happiness by the recent arrival of
a militia regiment in the neighbourhood it was to remain the
whole winter, and Meryton was the headquarters.
Their visits to Mrs. Phillips were now productive of the most
interesting intelligence. Every day added something to their
knowledge of the officers' names and connections. Their
lodgings were not long a secret, and at length they began to
know the officers themselves. Mr. Phillips visited them all, and
this opened to his nieces a store of felicity unknown before.
They could talk of nothing but officers and Mr. Bingley's large
fortune, the mention of which gave animation to their mother,
was worthless in their eyes when opposed to the regimentals of
an ensign.
After listening one morning to their effusions on this subject, Mr.
Bennet coolly observed
"From all that I can collect by your manner of talking, you must
be two of the silliest girls in the country. I have suspected it
some time, but I am now convinced."
Catherine was disconcerted, and made no answer but Lydia,
with perfect indifference, continued to express her admiration of
Captain Carter, and her hope of seeing him in the course of the
day, as he was going the next morning to London.
"I am astonished, my dear," said Mrs. Bennet, "that you should
be so ready to think your own children silly. If I wished to think
slightingly of anybody's children, it should not be of my own,
however."
"If my children are silly, I must hope to be always sensible of it."
"Yesbut as it happens, they are all of them very clever."
"This is the only point, I flatter myself, on which we do not
agree. I had hoped that our sentiments coincided in every
particular, but I must so far differ from you as to think our two
youngest daughters uncommonly foolish."
"My dear Mr. Bennet, you must not expect such girls to have
the sense of their father and mother. When they get to our age, I
dare say they will not think about officers any more than we do.
I remember the time when I liked a red coat myself very welland,
indeed, so I do still at my heart and if a smart young colonel,
with five or six thousand a year, should want one of my girls I
shall not say nay to him and I thought Colonel Forster looked
very becoming the other night at Sir William's in his regimentals."
"Mamma," cried Lydia, "my aunt says that Colonel Forster and
Captain Carter do not go so often to Miss Watson's as they did
when they first came she sees them now very often standing in
Clarke's library."
Mrs. Bennet was prevented replying by the entrance of the
footman with a note for Miss Bennet it came from Netherfield,
and the servant waited for an answer. Mrs. Bennet's eyes
sparkled with pleasure, and she was eagerly calling out, while
her daughter read,
"Well, Jane, who is it from? What is it about? What does he
say? Well, Jane, make haste and tell us make haste, my love."
"It is from Miss Bingley," said Jane, and then read it aloud.
"MY DEAR FRIEND,
"If you are not so compassionate as to dine today with Louisa
and me, we shall be in danger of hating each other for the rest
of our lives, for a whole day's teteatete between two women
can never end without a quarrel. Come as soon as you can on
receipt of this. My brother and the gentlemen are to dine with
the officers.Yours ever,
"CAROLINE BINGLEY"
"With the officers" cried Lydia. "I wonder my aunt did not tell
us of that."
"Dining out," said Mrs. Bennet, "that is very unlucky."
"Can I have the carriage?" said Jane.
"No, my dear, you had better go on horseback, because it seems
likely to rain and then you must stay all night."
"That would be a good scheme," said Elizabeth, "if you were
sure that they would not offer to send her home."
"Oh but the gentlemen will have Mr. Bingley's chaise to go to
Meryton, and the Hursts have no horses to theirs."
"I had much rather go in the coach."
"But, my dear, your father cannot spare the horses, I am sure.
They are wanted in the farm, Mr. Bennet, are they not?"
"They are wanted in the farm much oftener than I can get them."
"But if you have got them today," said Elizabeth, "my mother's
purpose will be answered."
She did at last extort from her father an acknowledgment that
the horses were engaged. Jane was therefore obliged to go on
horseback, and her mother attended her to the door with many
cheerful prognostics of a bad day. Her hopes were answered
Jane had not been gone long before it rained hard. Her sisters
were uneasy for her, but her mother was delighted. The rain
continued the whole evening without intermission Jane certainly
could not come back.
"This was a lucky idea of mine, indeed" said Mrs. Bennet more
than once, as if the credit of making it rain were all her own. Till
the next morning, however, she was not aware of all the felicity
of her contrivance. Breakfast was scarcely over when a servant
from Netherfield brought the following note for Elizabeth
"MY DEAREST LIZZY,
"I find myself very unwell this morning, which, I suppose, is to
be imputed to my getting wet through yesterday. My kind friends
will not hear of my returning till I am better. They insist also
on my seeing Mr. Jonestherefore do not be alarmed if you should
hear of his having been to meand, excepting a sore throat and
headache, there is not much the matter with me.Yours, etc."
"Well, my dear," said Mr. Bennet, when Elizabeth had read the
note aloud, "if your daughter should have a dangerous fit of
illnessif she should die, it would be a comfort to know that it
was all in pursuit of Mr. Bingley, and under your orders."
"Oh I am not afraid of her dying. People do not die of little
trifling colds. She will be taken good care of. As long as she
stays there, it is all very well. I would go and see her if I could
have the carriage."
Elizabeth, feeling really anxious, was determined to go to her,
though the carriage was not to be had and as she was no
horsewoman, walking was her only alternative. She declared her
resolution.
"How can you be so silly," cried her mother, "as to think of such
a thing, in all this dirt You will not be fit to be seen when you
get there."
"I shall be very fit to see Janewhich is all I want."
"Is this a hint to me, Lizzy," said her father, "to send for
the horses?"
"No, indeed, I do not wish to avoid the walk. The distance is
nothing when one has a motive only three miles. I shall be back
by dinner."
"I admire the activity of your benevolence," observed Mary, "but
every impulse of feeling should be guided by reason and, in my
opinion, exertion should always be in proportion to what is
required."
"We will go as far as Meryton with you," said Catherine and
Lydia. Elizabeth accepted their company, and the three young
ladies set off together.
"If we make haste," said Lydia, as they walked along, "perhaps
we may see something of Captain Carter before he goes."
In Meryton they parted the two youngest repaired to the lodgings of
one of the officers' wives, and Elizabeth continued her walk alone,
crossing field after field at a quick pace, jumping over stiles
and springing over puddles with impatient activity, and finding
herself at last within view of the house, with weary ankles, dirty
stockings, and a face glowing with the warmth of exercise.
She was shown into the breakfastparlour, where all but Jane
were assembled, and where her appearance created a great deal
of surprise. That she should have walked three miles so early
in the day, in such dirty weather, and by herself, was almost
incredible to Mrs. Hurst and Miss Bingley and Elizabeth was
convinced that they held her in contempt for it. She was
received, however, very politely by them and in their brother's
manners there was something better than politeness there was
good humour and kindness. Mr. Darcy said very little, and Mr.
Hurst nothing at all. The former was divided between admiration
of the brilliancy which exercise had given to her complexion,
and doubt as to the occasion's justifying her coming so far
alone. The latter was thinking only of his breakfast.
Her inquiries after her sister were not very favourably answered.
Miss Bennet had slept ill, and though up, was very feverish, and
not well enough to leave her room. Elizabeth was glad to be
taken to her immediately and Jane, who had only been withheld
by the fear of giving alarm or inconvenience from expressing in
her note how much she longed for such a visit, was delighted at
her entrance. She was not equal, however, to much conversation,
and when Miss Bingley left them together, could attempt little
besides expressions of gratitude for the extraordinary kindness
she was treated with. Elizabeth silently attended her.
When breakfast was over they were joined by the sisters and
Elizabeth began to like them herself, when she saw how much
affection and solicitude they showed for Jane. The apothecary
came, and having examined his patient, said, as might be
supposed, that she had caught a violent cold, and that they must
endeavour to get the better of it advised her to return to bed,
and promised her some draughts. The advice was followed
readily, for the feverish symptoms increased, and her head ached
acutely. Elizabeth did not quit her room for a moment nor were
the other ladies often absent the gentlemen being out, they had,
in fact, nothing to do elsewhere.
When the clock struck three, Elizabeth felt that she must go, and
very unwillingly said so. Miss Bingley offered her the carriage,
and she only wanted a little pressing to accept it, when Jane
testified such concern in parting with her, that Miss Bingley was
obliged to convert the offer of the chaise to an invitation to
remain at Netherfield for the present. Elizabeth most thankfully
consented, and a servant was dispatched to Longbourn to
acquaint the family with her stay and bring back a supply of
clothes.
Chapter 
At five o'clock the two ladies retired to dress, and at halfpast
six Elizabeth was summoned to dinner. To the civil inquiries
which then poured in, and amongst which she had the pleasure
of distinguishing the much superior solicitude of Mr. Bingley's,
she could not make a very favourable answer. Jane was by no
means better. The sisters, on hearing this, repeated three or four
times how much they were grieved, how shocking it was to have
a bad cold, and how excessively they disliked being ill
themselves and then thought no more of the matter and their
indifference towards Jane when not immediately before them
restored Elizabeth to the enjoyment of all her former dislike.
Their brother, indeed, was the only one of the party whom she
could regard with any complacency. His anxiety for Jane was
evident, and his attentions to herself most pleasing, and
they prevented her feeling herself so much an intruder as she
believed she was considered by the others. She had very little
notice from any but him. Miss Bingley was engrossed by Mr.
Darcy, her sister scarcely less so and as for Mr. Hurst, by
whom Elizabeth sat, he was an indolent man, who lived only to
eat, drink, and play at cards who, when he found her to prefer
a plain dish to a ragout, had nothing to say to her.
When dinner was over, she returned directly to Jane, and Miss
Bingley began abusing her as soon as she was out of the room.
Her manners were pronounced to be very bad indeed, a mixture
of pride and impertinence she had no conversation, no style, no
beauty. Mrs. Hurst thought the same, and added
"She has nothing, in short, to recommend her, but being an
excellent walker. I shall never forget her appearance this
morning. She really looked almost wild."
"She did, indeed, Louisa. I could hardly keep my countenance.
Very nonsensical to come at all Why must she be scampering
about the country, because her sister had a cold? Her hair, so
untidy, so blowsy"
"Yes, and her petticoat I hope you saw her petticoat, six inches
deep in mud, I am absolutely certain and the gown which had
been let down to hide it not doing its office."
"Your picture may be very exact, Louisa," said Bingley "but
this was all lost upon me. I thought Miss Elizabeth Bennet
looked remarkably well when she came into the room this
morning. Her dirty petticoat quite escaped my notice."
"You observed it, Mr. Darcy, I am sure," said Miss Bingley
"and I am inclined to think that you would not wish to see
your sister make such an exhibition."
"Certainly not."
"To walk three miles, or four miles, or five miles, or whatever it
is, above her ankles in dirt, and alone, quite alone What could
she mean by it? It seems to me to show an abominable sort of
conceited independence, a most countrytown indifference to
decorum."
"It shows an affection for her sister that is very pleasing," said
Bingley.
"I am afraid, Mr. Darcy," observed Miss Bingley in a half
whisper, "that this adventure has rather affected your
admiration of her fine eyes."
"Not at all," he replied "they were brightened by the exercise."
A short pause followed this speech, and Mrs. Hurst began again
"I have a excessive regard for Miss Jane Bennet, she is really
a very sweet girl, and I wish with all my heart she were well
settled. But with such a father and mother, and such low
connections, I am afraid there is no chance of it."
"I think I have heard you say that their uncle is an attorney on
Meryton."
"Yes and they have another, who lives somewhere near Cheapside."
"That is capital," added her sister, and they both laughed heartily.
"If they had uncles enough to fill all Cheapside," cried
Bingley, "it would not make them one jot less agreeable."
"But it must very materially lessen their chance of marrying men
of any consideration in the world," replied Darcy.
To this speech Bingley made no answer but his sisters gave it
their hearty assent, and indulged their mirth for some time at the
expense of their dear friend's vulgar relations.
With a renewal of tenderness, however, they returned to her
room on leaving the diningparlour, and sat with her till
summoned to coffee. She was still very poorly, and Elizabeth
would not quit her at all, till late in the evening, when she had
the comfort of seeing her sleep, and when it seemed to her rather
right than pleasant that she should go downstairs herself. On
entering the drawingroom she found the whole party at loo, and
was immediately invited to join them but suspecting them to be
playing high she declined it, and making her sister the excuse,
said she would amuse herself for the short time she could stay
below, with a book. Mr. Hurst looked at her with astonishment.
"Do you prefer reading to cards?" said he "that is rather
singular."
"Miss Eliza Bennet," said Miss Bingley, "despises cards. She is
a great reader, and has no pleasure in anything else."
"I deserve neither such praise nor such censure," cried Elizabeth
"I am not a great reader, and I have pleasure in many things."
"In nursing your sister I am sure you have pleasure," said Bingley
"and I hope it will be soon increased by seeing her quite well."
Elizabeth thanked him from her heart, and then walked towards
the table where a few books were lying. He immediately offered
to fetch her othersall that his library afforded.
"And I wish my collection were larger for your benefit and my
own credit but I am an idle fellow, and though I have not many,
I have more than I ever looked into."
Elizabeth assured him that she could suit herself perfectly with
those in the room.
"I am astonished," said Miss Bingley, "that my father should
have left so small a collection of books. What a delightful library
you have at Pemberley, Mr. Darcy"
"It ought to be good," he replied, "it has been the work of many
generations."
"And then you have added so much to it yourself, you are
always buying books."
"I cannot comprehend the neglect of a family library in such days
as these."
"Neglect I am sure you neglect nothing that can add to the
beauties of that noble place. Charles, when you build your
house, I wish it may be half as delightful as Pemberley."
"I wish it may."
"But I would really advise you to make your purchase in that
neighbourhood, and take Pemberley for a kind of model. There
is not a finer county in England than Derbyshire."
"With all my heart I will buy Pemberley itself if Darcy will
sell it."
"I am talking of possibilities, Charles."
"Upon my word, Caroline, I should think it more possible to get
Pemberley by purchase than by imitation."
Elizabeth was so much caught with what passed, as to leave her
very little attention for her book and soon laying it wholly
aside, she drew near the cardtable, and stationed herself
between Mr. Bingley and his eldest sister, to observe the game.
"Is Miss Darcy much grown since the spring?" said Miss
Bingley "will she be as tall as I am?"
"I think she will. She is now about Miss Elizabeth Bennet's
height, or rather taller."
"How I long to see her again I never met with anybody who
delighted me so much. Such a countenance, such manners And
so extremely accomplished for her age Her performance on the
pianoforte is exquisite."
"It is amazing to me," said Bingley, "how young ladies can have
patience to be so very accomplished as they all are."
"All young ladies accomplished My dear Charles, what do you mean?"
"Yes, all of them, I think. They all paint tables, cover screens,
and net purses. I scarcely know anyone who cannot do all this,
and I am sure I never heard a young lady spoken of for the first
time, without being informed that she was very accomplished."
"Your list of the common extent of accomplishments," said Darcy,
"has too much truth. The word is applied to many a woman who
deserves it no otherwise than by netting a purse or covering
a screen. But I am very far from agreeing with you in your
estimation of ladies in general. I cannot boast of knowing
more than halfadozen, in the whole range of my acquaintance,
that are really accomplished."
"Nor I, I am sure," said Miss Bingley.
"Then," observed Elizabeth, "you must comprehend a great deal
in your idea of an accomplished woman."
"Yes, I do comprehend a great deal in it."
"Oh certainly," cried his faithful assistant, "no one can be really
esteemed accomplished who does not greatly surpass what is
usually met with. A woman must have a thorough knowledge of
music, singing, drawing, dancing, and the modern languages, to
deserve the word and besides all this, she must possess a certain
something in her air and manner of walking, the tone of her
voice, her address and expressions, or the word will be but
halfdeserved."
"All this she must possess," added Darcy, "and to all this she
must yet add something more substantial, in the improvement of
her mind by extensive reading."
"I am no longer surprised at your knowing only six accomplished
women. I rather wonder now at your knowing any."
"Are you so severe upon your own sex as to doubt the possibility
of all this?"
"I never saw such a woman. I never saw such capacity, and
taste, and application, and elegance, as you describe united."
Mrs. Hurst and Miss Bingley both cried out against the injustice
of her implied doubt, and were both protesting that they knew
many women who answered this description, when Mr. Hurst
called them to order, with bitter complaints of their inattention
to what was going forward. As all conversation was thereby at
an end, Elizabeth soon afterwards left the room.
"Elizabeth Bennet," said Miss Bingley, when the door was
closed on her, "is one of those young ladies who seek to
recommend themselves to the other sex by undervaluing their
own and with many men, I dare say, it succeeds. But, in my
opinion, it is a paltry device, a very mean art."
"Undoubtedly," replied Darcy, to whom this remark was chiefly
addressed, "there is a meanness in all the arts which ladies
sometimes condescend to employ for captivation. Whatever
bears affinity to cunning is despicable."
Miss Bingley was not so entirely satisfied with this reply as to
continue the subject.
Elizabeth joined them again only to say that her sister was worse,
and that she could not leave her. Bingley urged Mr. Jones being
sent for immediately while his sisters, convinced that no country
advice could be of any service, recommended an express to town for
one of the most eminent physicians. This she would not hear of
but she was not so unwilling to comply with their brother's
proposal and it was settled that Mr. Jones should be sent for
early in the morning, if Miss Bennet were not decidedly better.
Bingley was quite uncomfortable his sisters declared that they
were miserable. They solaced their wretchedness, however, by
duets after supper, while he could find no better relief to his
feelings than by giving his housekeeper directions that every
attention might be paid to the sick lady and her sister.
Chapter 
Elizabeth passed the chief of the night in her sister's room, and
in the morning had the pleasure of being able to send a tolerable
answer to the inquiries which she very early received from Mr.
Bingley by a housemaid, and some time afterwards from the two
elegant ladies who waited on his sisters. In spite of this
amendment, however, she requested to have a note sent to Longbourn,
desiring her mother to visit Jane, and form her own judgement of
her situation. The note was immediately dispatched, and its
contents as quickly complied with. Mrs. Bennet, accompanied by
her two youngest girls, reached Netherfield soon after the family
breakfast.
Had she found Jane in any apparent danger, Mrs. Bennet would
have been very miserable but being satisfied on seeing her that
her illness was not alarming, she had no wish of her recovering
immediately, as her restoration to health would probably remove
her from Netherfield. She would not listen, therefore, to her
daughter's proposal of being carried home neither did the
apothecary, who arrived about the same time, think it at all
advisable. After sitting a little while with Jane, on Miss
Bingley's appearance and invitation, the mother and three
daughter all attended her into the breakfast parlour. Bingley met
them with hopes that Mrs. Bennet had not found Miss Bennet
worse than she expected.
"Indeed I have, sir," was her answer. "She is a great deal too
ill to be moved. Mr. Jones says we must not think of moving her.
We must trespass a little longer on your kindness."
"Removed" cried Bingley. "It must not be thought of. My
sister, I am sure, will not hear of her removal."
"You may depend upon it, Madam," said Miss Bingley, with cold
civility, "that Miss Bennet will receive every possible attention
while she remains with us."
Mrs. Bennet was profuse in her acknowledgments.
"I am sure," she added, "if it was not for such good friends I do
not know what would become of her, for she is very ill indeed,
and suffers a vast deal, though with the greatest patience in the
world, which is always the way with her, for she has, without
exception, the sweetest temper I have ever met with. I often tell
my other girls they are nothing to her. You have a sweet room
here, Mr. Bingley, and a charming prospect over the gravel walk.
I do not know a place in the country that is equal to Netherfield.
You will not think of quitting it in a hurry, I hope, though you
have but a short lease."
"Whatever I do is done in a hurry," replied he "and therefore if I
should resolve to quit Netherfield, I should probably be off in
five minutes. At present, however, I consider myself as quite
fixed here."
"That is exactly what I should have supposed of you," said
Elizabeth.
"You begin to comprehend me, do you?" cried he, turning
towards her.
"Oh yesI understand you perfectly."
"I wish I might take this for a compliment but to be so easily
seen through I am afraid is pitiful."
"That is as it happens. It does not follow that a deep, intricate
character is more or less estimable than such a one as yours."
"Lizzy," cried her mother, "remember where you are, and do not
run on in the wild manner that you are suffered to do at home."
"I did not know before," continued Bingley immediately, "that
you were a studier of character. It must be an amusing study."
"Yes, but intricate characters are the most amusing. They
have at least that advantage."
"The country," said Darcy, "can in general supply but a few
subjects for such a study. In a country neighbourhood you move
in a very confined and unvarying society."
"But people themselves alter so much, that there is something
new to be observed in them for ever."
"Yes, indeed," cried Mrs. Bennet, offended by his manner of
mentioning a country neighbourhood. "I assure you there is
quite as much of that going on in the country as in town."
Everybody was surprised, and Darcy, after looking at her for a
moment, turned silently away. Mrs. Bennet, who fancied she
had gained a complete victory over him, continued her triumph.
"I cannot see that London has any great advantage over the
country, for my part, except the shops and public places. The
country is a vast deal pleasanter, is it not, Mr. Bingley?"
"When I am in the country," he replied, "I never wish to leave it
and when I am in town it is pretty much the same. They have
each their advantages, and I can be equally happy in either."
"Ayethat is because you have the right disposition. But that
gentleman," looking at Darcy, "seemed to think the country was
nothing at all."
"Indeed, Mamma, you are mistaken," said Elizabeth, blushing for
her mother. "You quite mistook Mr. Darcy. He only meant that
there was not such a variety of people to be met with in the
country as in the town, which you must acknowledge to be
true."
"Certainly, my dear, nobody said there were but as to not
meeting with many people in this neighbourhood, I believe
there are few neighbourhoods larger. I know we dine with
fourandtwenty families."
Nothing but concern for Elizabeth could enable Bingley to keep
his countenance. His sister was less delicate, and directed her
eyes towards Mr. Darcy with a very expressive smile. Elizabeth,
for the sake of saying something that might turn her mother's
thoughts, now asked her if Charlotte Lucas had been at
Longbourn since her coming away.
"Yes, she called yesterday with her father. What an agreeable
man Sir William is, Mr. Bingley, is not he? So much the man of
fashion So genteel and easy He had always something to say
to everybody. That is my idea of good breeding and those
persons who fancy themselves very important, and never open
their mouths, quite mistake the matter."
"Did Charlotte dine with you?"
"No, she would go home. I fancy she was wanted about the
mincepies. For my part, Mr. Bingley, I always keep servants
that can do their own work my daughters are brought up very
differently. But everybody is to judge for themselves, and the
Lucases are a very good sort of girls, I assure you. It is a pity
they are not handsome Not that I think Charlotte so very
plainbut then she is our particular friend."
"She seems a very pleasant young woman."
"Oh dear, yes but you must own she is very plain. Lady Lucas
herself has often said so, and envied me Jane's beauty. I do not
like to boast of my own child, but to be sure, Janeone does
not often see anybody better looking. It is what everybody says.
I do not trust my own partiality. When she was only fifteen,
there was a man at my brother Gardiner's in town so much in
love with her that my sisterinlaw was sure he would make her
an offer before we came away. But, however, he did not.
Perhaps he thought her too young. However, he wrote some
verses on her, and very pretty they were."
"And so ended his affection," said Elizabeth impatiently. "There
has been many a one, I fancy, overcome in the same way. I
wonder who first discovered the efficacy of poetry in driving
away love"
"I have been used to consider poetry as the food of love," said
Darcy.
"Of a fine, stout, healthy love it may. Everything nourishes
what is strong already. But if it be only a slight, thin sort of
inclination, I am convinced that one good sonnet will starve it
entirely away."
Darcy only smiled and the general pause which ensued made
Elizabeth tremble lest her mother should be exposing herself
again. She longed to speak, but could think of nothing to say
and after a short silence Mrs. Bennet began repeating her thanks
to Mr. Bingley for his kindness to Jane, with an apology for
troubling him also with Lizzy. Mr. Bingley was unaffectedly
civil in his answer, and forced his younger sister to be civil
also, and say what the occasion required. She performed her
part indeed without much graciousness, but Mrs. Bennet was
satisfied, and soon afterwards ordered her carriage. Upon this
signal, the youngest of her daughters put herself forward. The
two girls had been whispering to each other during the whole
visit, and the result of it was, that the youngest should tax
Mr. Bingley with having promised on his first coming into the
country to give a ball at Netherfield.
Lydia was a stout, wellgrown girl of fifteen, with a fine
complexion and goodhumoured countenance a favourite with her
mother, whose affection had brought her into public at an early
age. She had high animal spirits, and a sort of natural
selfconsequence, which the attention of the officers, to whom
her uncle's good dinners, and her own easy manners recommended
her, had increased into assurance. She was very equal,
therefore, to address Mr. Bingley on the subject of the ball, and
abruptly reminded him of his promise adding, that it would be
the most shameful thing in the world if he did not keep it. His
answer to this sudden attack was delightful to their mother's ear
"I am perfectly ready, I assure you, to keep my engagement and
when your sister is recovered, you shall, if you please, name the
very day of the ball. But you would not wish to be dancing
when she is ill."
Lydia declared herself satisfied. "Oh yesit would be much
better to wait till Jane was well, and by that time most likely
Captain Carter would be at Meryton again. And when you have
given your ball," she added, "I shall insist on their giving one
also. I shall tell Colonel Forster it will be quite a shame if he
does not."
Mrs. Bennet and her daughters then departed, and Elizabeth
returned instantly to Jane, leaving her own and her relations'
behaviour to the remarks of the two ladies and Mr. Darcy the
latter of whom, however, could not be prevailed on to join in
their censure of her, in spite of all Miss Bingley's witticisms on
fine eyes.
Chapter 
The day passed much as the day before had done. Mrs. Hurst
and Miss Bingley had spent some hours of the morning with the
invalid, who continued, though slowly, to mend and in the
evening Elizabeth joined their party in the drawingroom. The
lootable, however, did not appear. Mr. Darcy was writing, and
Miss Bingley, seated near him, was watching the progress of his
letter and repeatedly calling off his attention by messages to
his sister. Mr. Hurst and Mr. Bingley were at piquet, and Mrs.
Hurst was observing their game.
Elizabeth took up some needlework, and was sufficiently
amused in attending to what passed between Darcy and his
companion. The perpetual commendations of the lady, either on
his handwriting, or on the evenness of his lines, or on the length
of his letter, with the perfect unconcern with which her praises
were received, formed a curious dialogue, and was exactly in
union with her opinion of each.
"How delighted Miss Darcy will be to receive such a letter"
He made no answer.
"You write uncommonly fast."
"You are mistaken. I write rather slowly."
"How many letters you must have occasion to write in the
course of a year Letters of business, too How odious I should
think them"
"It is fortunate, then, that they fall to my lot instead of yours."
"Pray tell your sister that I long to see her."
"I have already told her so once, by your desire."
"I am afraid you do not like your pen. Let me mend it for you.
I mend pens remarkably well."
"Thank youbut I always mend my own."
"How can you contrive to write so even?"
He was silent.
"Tell your sister I am delighted to hear of her improvement on
the harp and pray let her know that I am quite in raptures with
her beautiful little design for a table, and I think it infinitely
superior to Miss Grantley's."
"Will you give me leave to defer your raptures till I write again?
At present I have not room to do them justice."
"Oh it is of no consequence. I shall see her in January. But do
you always write such charming long letters to her, Mr. Darcy?"
"They are generally long but whether always charming it is not
for me to determine."
"It is a rule with me, that a person who can write a long letter
with ease, cannot write ill."
"That will not do for a compliment to Darcy, Caroline," cried
her brother, "because he does not write with ease. He studies
too much for words of four syllables. Do not you, Darcy?"
"My style of writing is very different from yours."
"Oh" cried Miss Bingley, "Charles writes in the most careless
way imaginable. He leaves out half his words, and blots the
rest."
"My ideas flow so rapidly that I have not time to express
themby which means my letters sometimes convey no ideas
at all to my correspondents."
"Your humility, Mr. Bingley," said Elizabeth, "must disarm
reproof."
"Nothing is more deceitful," said Darcy, "than the appearance of
humility. It is often only carelessness of opinion, and sometimes
an indirect boast."
"And which of the two do you call my little recent piece of
modesty?"
"The indirect boast for you are really proud of your defects in
writing, because you consider them as proceeding from a
rapidity of thought and carelessness of execution, which, if not
estimable, you think at least highly interesting. The power of
doing anything with quickness is always prized much by the
possessor, and often without any attention to the imperfection of
the performance. When you told Mrs. Bennet this morning that
if you ever resolved upon quitting Netherfield you should be
gone in five minutes, you meant it to be a sort of panegyric, of
compliment to yourselfand yet what is there so very laudable
in a precipitance which must leave very necessary business
undone, and can be of no real advantage to yourself or anyone
else?"
"Nay," cried Bingley, "this is too much, to remember at night all
the foolish things that were said in the morning. And yet, upon
my honour, I believe what I said of myself to be true, and I
believe it at this moment. At least, therefore, I did not assume
the character of needless precipitance merely to show off before
the ladies."
"I dare say you believed it but I am by no means convinced that
you would be gone with such celerity. Your conduct would be
quite as dependent on chance as that of any man I know and if,
as you were mounting your horse, a friend were to say, 'Bingley,
you had better stay till next week,' you would probably do it,
you would probably not goand at another word, might stay a
month."
"You have only proved by this," cried Elizabeth, "that Mr.
Bingley did not do justice to his own disposition. You have
shown him off now much more than he did himself."
"I am exceedingly gratified," said Bingley, "by your converting
what my friend says into a compliment on the sweetness of my
temper. But I am afraid you are giving it a turn which that
gentleman did by no means intend for he would certainly think
better of me, if under such a circumstance I were to give a flat
denial, and ride off as fast as I could."
"Would Mr. Darcy then consider the rashness of your original
intentions as atoned for by your obstinacy in adhering to it?"
"Upon my word, I cannot exactly explain the matter Darcy must
speak for himself."
"You expect me to account for opinions which you choose to
call mine, but which I have never acknowledged. Allowing the
case, however, to stand according to your representation, you
must remember, Miss Bennet, that the friend who is supposed to
desire his return to the house, and the delay of his plan, has
merely desired it, asked it without offering one argument in
favour of its propriety."
"To yield readilyeasilyto the persuasion of a friend is
no merit with you."
"To yield without conviction is no compliment to the understanding
of either."
"You appear to me, Mr. Darcy, to allow nothing for the
influence of friendship and affection. A regard for the requester
would often make one readily yield to a request, without waiting
for arguments to reason one into it. I am not particularly
speaking of such a case as you have supposed about Mr.
Bingley. We may as well wait, perhaps, till the circumstance
occurs before we discuss the discretion of his behaviour
thereupon. But in general and ordinary cases between friend and
friend, where one of them is desired by the other to change a
resolution of no very great moment, should you think ill of that
person for complying with the desire, without waiting to be
argued into it?"
"Will it not be advisable, before we proceed on this subject, to
arrange with rather more precision the degree of importance
which is to appertain to this request, as well as the degree of
intimacy subsisting between the parties?"
"By all means," cried Bingley "let us hear all the particulars,
not forgetting their comparative height and size for that will
have more weight in the argument, Miss Bennet, than you may be
aware of. I assure you, that if Darcy were not such a great tall
fellow, in comparison with myself, I should not pay him half so
much deference. I declare I do not know a more awful object
than Darcy, on particular occasions, and in particular places at
his own house especially, and of a Sunday evening, when he has
nothing to do."
Mr. Darcy smiled but Elizabeth thought she could perceive that
he was rather offended, and therefore checked her laugh. Miss
Bingley warmly resented the indignity he had received, in an
expostulation with her brother for talking such nonsense.
"I see your design, Bingley," said his friend. "You dislike an
argument, and want to silence this."
"Perhaps I do. Arguments are too much like disputes. If you and
Miss Bennet will defer yours till I am out of the room, I shall
be very thankful and then you may say whatever you like of me."
"What you ask," said Elizabeth, "is no sacrifice on my side and
Mr. Darcy had much better finish his letter."
Mr. Darcy took her advice, and did finish his letter.
When that business was over, he applied to Miss Bingley and
Elizabeth for an indulgence of some music. Miss Bingley moved
with some alacrity to the pianoforte and, after a polite request
that Elizabeth would lead the way which the other as politely
and more earnestly negatived, she seated herself.
Mrs. Hurst sang with her sister, and while they were thus
employed, Elizabeth could not help observing, as she turned
over some musicbooks that lay on the instrument, how frequently
Mr. Darcy's eyes were fixed on her. She hardly knew how to
suppose that she could be an object of admiration to so great a
man and yet that he should look at her because he disliked her,
was still more strange. She could only imagine, however, at last
that she drew his notice because there was something more wrong
and reprehensible, according to his ideas of right, than in any
other person present. The supposition did not pain her. She
liked him too little to care for his approbation.
After playing some Italian songs, Miss Bingley varied the charm
by a lively Scotch air and soon afterwards Mr. Darcy, drawing
near Elizabeth, said to her
"Do not you feel a great inclination, Miss Bennet, to seize such
an opportunity of dancing a reel?"
She smiled, but made no answer. He repeated the question, with
some surprise at her silence.
"Oh" said she, "I heard you before, but I could not immediately
determine what to say in reply. You wanted me, I know, to say
'Yes,' that you might have the pleasure of despising my taste
but I always delight in overthrowing those kind of schemes,
and cheating a person of their premeditated contempt. I have,
therefore, made up my mind to tell you, that I do not want to
dance a reel at alland now despise me if you dare."
"Indeed I do not dare."
Elizabeth, having rather expected to affront him, was amazed at
his gallantry but there was a mixture of sweetness and archness
in her manner which made it difficult for her to affront anybody
and Darcy had never been so bewitched by any woman as he
was by her. He really believed, that were it not for the
inferiority of her connections, he should be in some danger.
Miss Bingley saw, or suspected enough to be jealous and her
great anxiety for the recovery of her dear friend Jane received
some assistance from her desire of getting rid of Elizabeth.
She often tried to provoke Darcy into disliking her guest, by
talking of their supposed marriage, and planning his happiness in
such an alliance.
"I hope," said she, as they were walking together in the
shrubbery the next day, "you will give your motherinlaw a few
hints, when this desirable event takes place, as to the advantage
of holding her tongue and if you can compass it, do cure the
younger girls of running after officers. And, if I may mention so
delicate a subject, endeavour to check that little something,
bordering on conceit and impertinence, which your lady
possesses."
"Have you anything else to propose for my domestic felicity?"
"Oh yes. Do let the portraits of your uncle and aunt Phillips be
placed in the gallery at Pemberley. Put them next to your
greatuncle the judge. They are in the same profession, you
know, only in different lines. As for your Elizabeth's picture, you
must not have it taken, for what painter could do justice to those
beautiful eyes?"
"It would not be easy, indeed, to catch their expression, but their
colour and shape, and the eyelashes, so remarkably fine, might
be copied."
At that moment they were met from another walk by Mrs. Hurst
and Elizabeth herself.
"I did not know that you intended to walk," said Miss Bingley,
in some confusion, lest they had been overheard.
"You used us abominably ill," answered Mrs. Hurst, "running
away without telling us that you were coming out."
Then taking the disengaged arm of Mr. Darcy, she left Elizabeth
to walk by herself. The path just admitted three. Mr. Darcy felt
their rudeness, and immediately said
"This walk is not wide enough for our party. We had better go
into the avenue."
But Elizabeth, who had not the least inclination to remain with
them, laughingly answered
"No, no stay where you are. You are charmingly grouped, and
appear to uncommon advantage. The picturesque would be
spoilt by admitting a fourth. Goodbye."
She then ran gaily off, rejoicing as she rambled about, in the
hope of being at home again in a day or two. Jane was already
so much recovered as to intend leaving her room for a couple of
hours that evening.
Chapter 
When the ladies removed after dinner, Elizabeth ran up to her
sister, and seeing her well guarded from cold, attended her into
the drawingroom, where she was welcomed by her two friends
with many professions of pleasure and Elizabeth had never seen
them so agreeable as they were during the hour which passed
before the gentlemen appeared. Their powers of conversation
were considerable. They could describe an entertainment with
accuracy, relate an anecdote with humour, and laugh at their
acquaintance with spirit.
But when the gentlemen entered, Jane was no longer the first
object Miss Bingley's eyes were instantly turned toward Darcy,
and she had something to say to him before he had advanced
many steps. He addressed himself to Miss Bennet, with a polite
congratulation Mr. Hurst also made her a slight bow, and said
he was "very glad" but diffuseness and warmth remained for
Bingley's salutation. He was full of joy and attention. The first
halfhour was spent in piling up the fire, lest she should suffer
from the change of room and she removed at his desire to the
other side of the fireplace, that she might be further from the
door. He then sat down by her, and talked scarcely to anyone
else. Elizabeth, at work in the opposite corner, saw it all with
great delight.
When tea was over, Mr. Hurst reminded his sisterinlaw of the
cardtablebut in vain. She had obtained private intelligence
that Mr. Darcy did not wish for cards and Mr. Hurst soon found
even his open petition rejected. She assured him that no one
intended to play, and the silence of the whole party on the
subject seemed to justify her. Mr. Hurst had therefore nothing
to do, but to stretch himself on one of the sofas and go to
sleep. Darcy took up a book Miss Bingley did the same and
Mrs. Hurst, principally occupied in playing with her bracelets
and rings, joined now and then in her brother's conversation
with Miss Bennet.
Miss Bingley's attention was quite as much engaged in watching
Mr. Darcy's progress through his book, as in reading her own
and she was perpetually either making some inquiry, or looking
at his page. She could not win him, however, to any conversation
he merely answered her question, and read on. At length, quite
exhausted by the attempt to be amused with her own book, which
she had only chosen because it was the second volume of his,
she gave a great yawn and said, "How pleasant it is to spend an
evening in this way I declare after all there is no enjoyment
like reading How much sooner one tires of anything than of a
book When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if
I have not an excellent library."
No one made any reply. She then yawned again, threw aside her
book, and cast her eyes round the room in quest for some
amusement when hearing her brother mentioning a ball to Miss
Bennet, she turned suddenly towards him and said
"By the bye, Charles, are you really serious in meditating a dance
at Netherfield? I would advise you, before you determine on it,
to consult the wishes of the present party I am much mistaken if
there are not some among us to whom a ball would be rather a
punishment than a pleasure."
"If you mean Darcy," cried her brother, "he may go to bed, if he
chooses, before it beginsbut as for the ball, it is quite a settled
thing and as soon as Nicholls has made white soup enough, I
shall send round my cards."
"I should like balls infinitely better," she replied, "if they
were carried on in a different manner but there is something
insufferably tedious in the usual process of such a meeting. It
would surely be much more rational if conversation instead of
dancing were made the order of the day."
"Much more rational, my dear Caroline, I dare say, but it would
not be near so much like a ball."
Miss Bingley made no answer, and soon afterwards she got up
and walked about the room. Her figure was elegant, and she
walked well but Darcy, at whom it was all aimed, was still
inflexibly studious. In the desperation of her feelings, she
resolved on one effort more, and, turning to Elizabeth, said
"Miss Eliza Bennet, let me persuade you to follow my example,
and take a turn about the room. I assure you it is very
refreshing after sitting so long in one attitude."
Elizabeth was surprised, but agreed to it immediately. Miss
Bingley succeeded no less in the real object of her civility
Mr. Darcy looked up. He was as much awake to the novelty of
attention in that quarter as Elizabeth herself could be, and
unconsciously closed his book. He was directly invited to join
their party, but he declined it, observing that he could imagine
but two motives for their choosing to walk up and down the
room together, with either of which motives his joining them
would interfere. "What could he mean? She was dying to know
what could be his meaning?"and asked Elizabeth whether she
could at all understand him?
"Not at all," was her answer "but depend upon it, he means to
be severe on us, and our surest way of disappointing him will be
to ask nothing about it."
Miss Bingley, however, was incapable of disappointing Mr.
Darcy in anything, and persevered therefore in requiring an
explanation of his two motives.
"I have not the smallest objection to explaining them," said he,
as soon as she allowed him to speak. "You either choose this
method of passing the evening because you are in each other's
confidence, and have secret affairs to discuss, or because you are
conscious that your figures appear to the greatest advantage in
walking if the first, I would be completely in your way, and if
the second, I can admire you much better as I sit by the fire."
"Oh shocking" cried Miss Bingley. "I never heard anything so
abominable. How shall we punish him for such a speech?"
"Nothing so easy, if you have but the inclination," said Elizabeth.
"We can all plague and punish one another. Tease himlaugh
at him. Intimate as you are, you must know how it is to be
done."
"But upon my honour, I do not. I do assure you that my
intimacy has not yet taught me that. Tease calmness of
manner and presence of mind No, nofeel he may defy us
there. And as to laughter, we will not expose ourselves, if you
please, by attempting to laugh without a subject. Mr. Darcy may
hug himself."
"Mr. Darcy is not to be laughed at" cried Elizabeth. "That is
an uncommon advantage, and uncommon I hope it will continue, for
it would be a great loss to me to have many such acquaintances.
I dearly love a laugh."
"Miss Bingley," said he, "has given me more credit than can be.
The wisest and the best of mennay, the wisest and best of their
actionsmay be rendered ridiculous by a person whose first
object in life is a joke."
"Certainly," replied Elizabeth"there are such people, but I
hope I am not one of them. I hope I never ridicule what is
wise and good. Follies and nonsense, whims and
inconsistencies, do divert me, I own, and I laugh at them
whenever I can. But these, I suppose, are precisely what you
are without."
"Perhaps that is not possible for anyone. But it has been the
study of my life to avoid those weaknesses which often expose a
strong understanding to ridicule."
"Such as vanity and pride."
"Yes, vanity is a weakness indeed. But pridewhere there is a
real superiority of mind, pride will be always under good
regulation."
Elizabeth turned away to hide a smile.
"Your examination of Mr. Darcy is over, I presume," said Miss
Bingley "and pray what is the result?"
"I am perfectly convinced by it that Mr. Darcy has no defect.
He owns it himself without disguise."
"No," said Darcy, "I have made no such pretension. I have
faults enough, but they are not, I hope, of understanding.
My temper I dare not vouch for. It is, I believe, too little
yieldingcertainly too little for the convenience of the world.
I cannot forget the follies and vices of other so soon as I ought,
nor their offenses against myself. My feelings are not puffed
about with every attempt to move them. My temper would perhaps be
called resentful. My good opinion once lost, is lost forever."
"That is a failing indeed" cried Elizabeth. "Implacable
resentment is a shade in a character. But you have chosen your
fault well. I really cannot laugh at it. You are safe from me."
"There is, I believe, in every disposition a tendency to some
particular evila natural defect, which not even the best
education can overcome."
"And your defect is to hate everybody."
"And yours," he replied with a smile, "is willfully to
misunderstand them."
"Do let us have a little music," cried Miss Bingley, tired of a
conversation in which she had no share. "Louisa, you will not
mind my waking Mr. Hurst?"
Her sister had not the smallest objection, and the pianoforte was
opened and Darcy, after a few moments' recollection, was not
sorry for it. He began to feel the danger of paying Elizabeth too
much attention.
Chapter 
In consequence of an agreement between the sisters, Elizabeth
wrote the next morning to their mother, to beg that the carriage
might be sent for them in the course of the day. But Mrs.
Bennet, who had calculated on her daughters remaining at
Netherfield till the following Tuesday, which would exactly
finish Jane's week, could not bring herself to receive them with
pleasure before. Her answer, therefore, was not propitious, at
least not to Elizabeth's wishes, for she was impatient to get
home. Mrs. Bennet sent them word that they could not possibly
have the carriage before Tuesday and in her postscript it was
added, that if Mr. Bingley and his sister pressed them to stay
longer, she could spare them very well. Against staying longer,
however, Elizabeth was positively resolvednor did she much
expect it would be asked and fearful, on the contrary, as being
considered as intruding themselves needlessly long, she urged
Jane to borrow Mr. Bingley's carriage immediately, and at
length it was settled that their original design of leaving
Netherfield that morning should be mentioned, and the request
made.
The communication excited many professions of concern and
enough was said of wishing them to stay at least till the
following day to work on Jane and till the morrow their going
was deferred. Miss Bingley was then sorry that she had
proposed the delay, for her jealousy and dislike of one sister
much exceeded her affection for the other.
The master of the house heard with real sorrow that they were
to go so soon, and repeatedly tried to persuade Miss Bennet that
it would not be safe for herthat she was not enough recovered
but Jane was firm where she felt herself to be right.
To Mr. Darcy it was welcome intelligenceElizabeth had been
at Netherfield long enough. She attracted him more than he
likedand Miss Bingley was uncivil to her, and more teasing
than usual to himself. He wisely resolved to be particularly
careful that no sign of admiration should now escape him,
nothing that could elevate her with the hope of influencing his
felicity sensible that if such an idea had been suggested,
his behaviour during the last day must have material weight in
confirming or crushing it. Steady to his purpose, he scarcely
spoke ten words to her through the whole of Saturday, and
though they were at one time left by themselves for halfanhour,
he adhered most conscientiously to his book, and would not
even look at her.
On Sunday, after morning service, the separation, so agreeable
to almost all, took place. Miss Bingley's civility to Elizabeth
increased at last very rapidly, as well as her affection for Jane
and when they parted, after assuring the latter of the pleasure
it would always give her to see her either at Longbourn or
Netherfield, and embracing her most tenderly, she even shook
hands with the former. Elizabeth took leave of the whole party
in the liveliest of spirits.
They were not welcomed home very cordially by their mother.
Mrs. Bennet wondered at their coming, and thought them very
wrong to give so much trouble, and was sure Jane would have
caught cold again. But their father, though very laconic in his
expressions of pleasure, was really glad to see them he had felt
their importance in the family circle. The evening conversation,
when they were all assembled, had lost much of its animation,
and almost all its sense by the absence of Jane and Elizabeth.
They found Mary, as usual, deep in the study of thoroughbass
and human nature and had some extracts to admire, and some
new observations of threadbare morality to listen to. Catherine
and Lydia had information for them of a different sort. Much
had been done and much had been said in the regiment since the
preceding Wednesday several of the officers had dined lately
with their uncle, a private had been flogged, and it had actually
been hinted that Colonel Forster was going to be married.
Chapter 
"I hope, my dear," said Mr. Bennet to his wife, as they were
at breakfast the next morning, "that you have ordered a good
dinner today, because I have reason to expect an addition to
our family party."
"Who do you mean, my dear? I know of nobody that is coming,
I am sure, unless Charlotte Lucas should happen to call inand
I hope my dinners are good enough for her. I do not believe
she often sees such at home."
"The person of whom I speak is a gentleman, and a stranger."
Mrs. Bennet's eyes sparkled. "A gentleman and a stranger It is
Mr. Bingley, I am sure Well, I am sure I shall be extremely glad
to see Mr. Bingley. Butgood Lord how unlucky There is not
a bit of fish to be got today. Lydia, my love, ring the bellI
must speak to Hill this moment."
"It is not Mr. Bingley," said her husband "it is a person whom
I never saw in the whole course of my life."
This roused a general astonishment and he had the pleasure of
being eagerly questioned by his wife and his five daughters at
once.
After amusing himself some time with their curiosity, he thus
explained
"About a month ago I received this letter and about a fortnight
ago I answered it, for I thought it a case of some delicacy, and
requiring early attention. It is from my cousin, Mr. Collins, who,
when I am dead, may turn you all out of this house as soon as he
pleases."
"Oh my dear," cried his wife, "I cannot bear to hear that
mentioned. Pray do not talk of that odious man. I do think it is
the hardest thing in the world, that your estate should be entailed
away from your own children and I am sure, if I had been you, I
should have tried long ago to do something or other about it."
Jane and Elizabeth tried to explain to her the nature of an entail.
They had often attempted to do it before, but it was a subject
on which Mrs. Bennet was beyond the reach of reason, and she
continued to rail bitterly against the cruelty of settling an
estate away from a family of five daughters, in favour of a man
whom nobody cared anything about.
"It certainly is a most iniquitous affair," said Mr. Bennet,
"and nothing can clear Mr. Collins from the guilt of inheriting
Longbourn. But if you will listen to his letter, you may perhaps
be a little softened by his manner of expressing himself."
"No, that I am sure I shall not and I think it is very impertinent
of him to write to you at all, and very hypocritical. I hate such
false friends. Why could he not keep on quarreling with you, as
his father did before him?"
"Why, indeed he does seem to have had some filial scruples on
that head, as you will hear."
"Hunsford, near Westerham, Kent,
th October.
"Dear Sir,
"The disagreement subsisting between yourself and my late
honoured father always gave me much uneasiness, and since I
have had the misfortune to lose him, I have frequently wished
to heal the breach but for some time I was kept back by my own
doubts, fearing lest it might seem disrespectful to his memory
for me to be on good terms with anyone with whom it had always
pleased him to be at variance.'There, Mrs. Bennet.'My
mind, however, is now made up on the subject, for having
received ordination at Easter, I have been so fortunate as to
be distinguished by the patronage of the Right Honourable Lady
Catherine de Bourgh, widow of Sir Lewis de Bourgh, whose
bounty and beneficence has preferred me to the valuable rectory
of this parish, where it shall be my earnest endeavour to demean
myself with grateful respect towards her ladyship, and be ever
ready to perform those rites and ceremonies which are instituted
by the Church of England. As a clergyman, moreover, I feel it
my duty to promote and establish the blessing of peace in all
families within the reach of my influence and on these
grounds I flatter myself that my present overtures are highly
commendable, and that the circumstance of my being next in the
entail of Longbourn estate will be kindly overlooked on your
side, and not lead you to reject the offered olivebranch.
I cannot be otherwise than concerned at being the means of
injuring your amiable daughters, and beg leave to apologise for
it, as well as to assure you of my readiness to make them every
possible amendsbut of this hereafter. If you should have
no objection to receive me into your house, I propose myself
the satisfaction of waiting on you and your family, Monday,
November th, by four o'clock, and shall probably trespass on
your hospitality till the Saturday se'ennight following, which I
can do without any inconvenience, as Lady Catherine is far from
objecting to my occasional absence on a Sunday, provided that
some other clergyman is engaged to do the duty of the day.I
remain, dear sir, with respectful compliments to your lady and
daughters, your wellwisher and friend,
"WILLIAM COLLINS"
"At four o'clock, therefore, we may expect this peacemaking
gentleman," said Mr. Bennet, as he folded up the letter. "He
seems to be a most conscientious and polite young man, upon
my word, and I doubt not will prove a valuable acquaintance,
especially if Lady Catherine should be so indulgent as to let
him come to us again."
"There is some sense in what he says about the girls, however,
and if he is disposed to make them any amends, I shall not be
the person to discourage him."
"Though it is difficult," said Jane, "to guess in what way he can
mean to make us the atonement he thinks our due, the wish is
certainly to his credit."
Elizabeth was chiefly struck by his extraordinary deference for
Lady Catherine, and his kind intention of christening, marrying,
and burying his parishioners whenever it were required.
"He must be an oddity, I think," said she. "I cannot make him
out.There is something very pompous in his style.And what
can he mean by apologising for being next in the entail?We
cannot suppose he would help it if he could.Could he be a
sensible man, sir?"
"No, my dear, I think not. I have great hopes of finding him
quite the reverse. There is a mixture of servility and
selfimportance in his letter, which promises well. I am
impatient to see him."
"In point of composition," said Mary, "the letter does not seem
defective. The idea of the olivebranch perhaps is not wholly
new, yet I think it is well expressed."
To Catherine and Lydia, neither the letter nor its writer were
in any degree interesting. It was next to impossible that their
cousin should come in a scarlet coat, and it was now some
weeks since they had received pleasure from the society of a
man in any other colour. As for their mother, Mr. Collins's
letter had done away much of her illwill, and she was preparing
to see him with a degree of composure which astonished her
husband and daughters.
Mr. Collins was punctual to his time, and was received with
great politeness by the whole family. Mr. Bennet indeed said
little but the ladies were ready enough to talk, and Mr. Collins
seemed neither in need of encouragement, nor inclined to be
silent himself. He was a tall, heavylooking young man of
fiveandtwenty. His air was grave and stately, and his
manners were very formal. He had not been long seated before
he complimented Mrs. Bennet on having so fine a family of
daughters said he had heard much of their beauty, but that in
this instance fame had fallen short of the truth and added,
that he did not doubt her seeing them all in due time disposed
of in marriage. This gallantry was not much to the taste of
some of his hearers but Mrs. Bennet, who quarreled with no
compliments, answered most readily.
"You are very kind, I am sure and I wish with all my heart it
may prove so, for else they will be destitute enough. Things are
settled so oddly."
"You allude, perhaps, to the entail of this estate."
"Ah sir, I do indeed. It is a grievous affair to my poor girls,
you must confess. Not that I mean to find fault with you, for
such things I know are all chance in this world. There is no
knowing how estates will go when once they come to be entailed."
"I am very sensible, madam, of the hardship to my fair cousins,
and could say much on the subject, but that I am cautious of
appearing forward and precipitate. But I can assure the young
ladies that I come prepared to admire them. At present I will
not say more but, perhaps, when we are better acquainted"
He was interrupted by a summons to dinner and the girls smiled
on each other. They were not the only objects of Mr. Collins's
admiration. The hall, the diningroom, and all its furniture,
were examined and praised and his commendation of everything
would have touched Mrs. Bennet's heart, but for the mortifying
supposition of his viewing it all as his own future property.
The dinner too in its turn was highly admired and he begged to
know to which of his fair cousins the excellency of its cooking
was owing. But he was set right there by Mrs. Bennet, who
assured him with some asperity that they were very well able to
keep a good cook, and that her daughters had nothing to do in
the kitchen. He begged pardon for having displeased her. In a
softened tone she declared herself not at all offended but he
continued to apologise for about a quarter of an hour.
Chapter 
During dinner, Mr. Bennet scarcely spoke at all but when the
servants were withdrawn, he thought it time to have some
conversation with his guest, and therefore started a subject in
which he expected him to shine, by observing that he seemed
very fortunate in his patroness. Lady Catherine de Bourgh's
attention to his wishes, and consideration for his comfort,
appeared very remarkable. Mr. Bennet could not have chosen
better. Mr. Collins was eloquent in her praise. The subject
elevated him to more than usual solemnity of manner, and with a
most important aspect he protested that "he had never in his life
witnessed such behaviour in a person of ranksuch affability
and condescension, as he had himself experienced from Lady
Catherine. She had been graciously pleased to approve of both
of the discourses which he had already had the honour of
preaching before her. She had also asked him twice to dine at
Rosings, and had sent for him only the Saturday before, to make
up her pool of quadrille in the evening. Lady Catherine was
reckoned proud by many people he knew, but he had never
seen anything but affability in her. She had always spoken to
him as she would to any other gentleman she made not the
smallest objection to his joining in the society of the
neighbourhood nor to his leaving the parish occasionally for a
week or two, to visit his relations. She had even condescended
to advise him to marry as soon as he could, provided he chose
with discretion and had once paid him a visit in his humble
parsonage, where she had perfectly approved all the alterations
he had been making, and had even vouchsafed to suggest some
herselfsome shelves in the closet upstairs."
"That is all very proper and civil, I am sure," said Mrs. Bennet,
"and I dare say she is a very agreeable woman. It is a pity that
great ladies in general are not more like her. Does she live near
you, sir?"
"The garden in which stands my humble abode is separated only
by a lane from Rosings Park, her ladyship's residence."
"I think you said she was a widow, sir? Has she any family?"
"She has only one daughter, the heiress of Rosings, and of very
extensive property."
"Ah" said Mrs. Bennet, shaking her head, "then she is better off
than many girls. And what sort of young lady is she? Is she
handsome?"
"She is a most charming young lady indeed. Lady Catherine
herself says that, in point of true beauty, Miss de Bourgh is far
superior to the handsomest of her sex, because there is that in
her features which marks the young lady of distinguished birth.
She is unfortunately of a sickly constitution, which has prevented
her from making that progress in many accomplishments which
she could not have otherwise failed of, as I am informed by the
lady who superintended her education, and who still resides with
them. But she is perfectly amiable, and often condescends to
drive by my humble abode in her little phaeton and ponies."
"Has she been presented? I do not remember her name among
the ladies at court."
"Her indifferent state of health unhappily prevents her being
in town and by that means, as I told Lady Catherine one day,
has deprived the British court of its brightest ornaments.
Her ladyship seemed pleased with the idea and you may imagine
that I am happy on every occasion to offer those little
delicate compliments which are always acceptable to ladies.
I have more than once observed to Lady Catherine, that her
charming daughter seemed born to be a duchess, and that the
most elevated rank, instead of giving her consequence, would
be adorned by her. These are the kind of little things which
please her ladyship, and it is a sort of attention which I
conceive myself peculiarly bound to pay."
"You judge very properly," said Mr. Bennet, "and it is happy for
you that you possess the talent of flattering with delicacy. May I
ask whether these pleasing attentions proceed from the impulse
of the moment, or are the result of previous study?"
"They arise chiefly from what is passing at the time, and though
I sometimes amuse myself with suggesting and arranging such
little elegant compliments as may be adapted to ordinary occasions,
I always wish to give them as unstudied an air as possible."
Mr. Bennet's expectations were fully answered. His cousin was
as absurd as he had hoped, and he listened to him with the
keenest enjoyment, maintaining at the same time the most
resolute composure of countenance, and, except in an occasional
glance at Elizabeth, requiring no partner in his pleasure.
By teatime, however, the dose had been enough, and Mr.
Bennet was glad to take his guest into the drawingroom again,
and, when tea was over, glad to invite him to read aloud to the
ladies. Mr. Collins readily assented, and a book was produced
but, on beholding it for everything announced it to be from a
circulating library, he started back, and begging pardon,
protested that he never read novels. Kitty stared at him, and
Lydia exclaimed. Other books were produced, and after some
deliberation he chose Fordyce's Sermons. Lydia gaped as he
opened the volume, and before he had, with very monotonous
solemnity, read three pages, she interrupted him with
"Do you know, mamma, that my uncle Phillips talks of turning
away Richard and if he does, Colonel Forster will hire him. My
aunt told me so herself on Saturday. I shall walk to Meryton
tomorrow to hear more about it, and to ask when Mr. Denny
comes back from town."
Lydia was bid by her two eldest sisters to hold her tongue but
Mr. Collins, much offended, laid aside his book, and said
"I have often observed how little young ladies are interested by
books of a serious stamp, though written solely for their benefit.
It amazes me, I confess for, certainly, there can be nothing so
advantageous to them as instruction. But I will no longer
importune my young cousin."
Then turning to Mr. Bennet, he offered himself as his antagonist
at backgammon. Mr. Bennet accepted the challenge, observing
that he acted very wisely in leaving the girls to their own trifling
amusements. Mrs. Bennet and her daughters apologised most
civilly for Lydia's interruption, and promised that it should not
occur again, if he would resume his book but Mr. Collins, after
assuring them that he bore his young cousin no illwill, and
should never resent her behaviour as any affront, seated himself
at another table with Mr. Bennet, and prepared for backgammon.
Chapter 
Mr. Collins was not a sensible man, and the deficiency of nature
had been but little assisted by education or society the greatest
part of his life having been spent under the guidance of an
illiterate and miserly father and though he belonged to one of
the universities, he had merely kept the necessary terms, without
forming at it any useful acquaintance. The subjection in which
his father had brought him up had given him originally great
humility of manner but it was now a good deal counteracted by
the selfconceit of a weak head, living in retirement, and the
consequential feelings of early and unexpected prosperity. A
fortunate chance had recommended him to Lady Catherine de
Bourgh when the living of Hunsford was vacant and the respect
which he felt for her high rank, and his veneration for her as his
patroness, mingling with a very good opinion of himself, of his
authority as a clergyman, and his right as a rector, made him
altogether a mixture of pride and obsequiousness,
selfimportance and humility.
Having now a good house and a very sufficient income, he
intended to marry and in seeking a reconciliation with the
Longbourn family he had a wife in view, as he meant to choose
one of the daughters, if he found them as handsome and amiable
as they were represented by common report. This was his plan
of amendsof atonementfor inheriting their father's estate
and he thought it an excellent one, full of eligibility and
suitableness, and excessively generous and disinterested on his
own part.
His plan did not vary on seeing them. Miss Bennet's lovely face
confirmed his views, and established all his strictest notions of
what was due to seniority and for the first evening she was his
settled choice. The next morning, however, made an alteration
for in a quarter of an hour's teteatete with Mrs. Bennet before
breakfast, a conversation beginning with his parsonagehouse,
and leading naturally to the avowal of his hopes, that a mistress
might be found for it at Longbourn, produced from her, amid
very complaisant smiles and general encouragement, a caution
against the very Jane he had fixed on. "As to her younger
daughters, she could not take upon her to sayshe could not
positively answerbut she did not know of any prepossession
her eldest daughter, she must just mentionshe felt it
incumbent on her to hint, was likely to be very soon engaged."
Mr. Collins had only to change from Jane to Elizabethand it
was soon donedone while Mrs. Bennet was stirring the fire.
Elizabeth, equally next to Jane in birth and beauty, succeeded
her of course.
Mrs. Bennet treasured up the hint, and trusted that she might
soon have two daughters married and the man whom she could
not bear to speak of the day before was now high in her good
graces.
Lydia's intention of walking to Meryton was not forgotten
every sister except Mary agreed to go with her and Mr. Collins
was to attend them, at the request of Mr. Bennet, who was most
anxious to get rid of him, and have his library to himself for
thither Mr. Collins had followed him after breakfast and there he
would continue, nominally engaged with one of the largest folios
in the collection, but really talking to Mr. Bennet, with little
cessation, of his house and garden at Hunsford. Such doings
discomposed Mr. Bennet exceedingly. In his library he had been
always sure of leisure and tranquillity and though prepared, as
he told Elizabeth, to meet with folly and conceit in every other
room of the house, he was used to be free from them there his
civility, therefore, was most prompt in inviting Mr. Collins to
join his daughters in their walk and Mr. Collins, being in fact
much better fitted for a walker than a reader, was extremely
pleased to close his large book, and go.
In pompous nothings on his side, and civil assents on that of
his cousins, their time passed till they entered Meryton. The
attention of the younger ones was then no longer to be gained by
him. Their eyes were immediately wandering up in the street in
quest of the officers, and nothing less than a very smart bonnet
indeed, or a really new muslin in a shop window, could recall
them.
But the attention of every lady was soon caught by a young man,
whom they had never seen before, of most gentlemanlike
appearance, walking with another officer on the other side of the
way. The officer was the very Mr. Denny concerning whose
return from London Lydia came to inquire, and he bowed as
they passed. All were struck with the stranger's air, all
wondered who he could be and Kitty and Lydia, determined if
possible to find out, led the way across the street, under pretense
of wanting something in an opposite shop, and fortunately had
just gained the pavement when the two gentlemen, turning back,
had reached the same spot. Mr. Denny addressed them directly,
and entreated permission to introduce his friend, Mr. Wickham,
who had returned with him the day before from town, and he
was happy to say had accepted a commission in their corps.
This was exactly as it should be for the young man wanted only
regimentals to make him completely charming. His appearance
was greatly in his favour he had all the best part of beauty, a
fine countenance, a good figure, and very pleasing address. The
introduction was followed up on his side by a happy readiness of
conversationa readiness at the same time perfectly correct and
unassuming and the whole party were still standing and talking
together very agreeably, when the sound of horses drew their
notice, and Darcy and Bingley were seen riding down the street.
On distinguishing the ladies of the group, the two gentlemen
came directly towards them, and began the usual civilities.
Bingley was the principal spokesman, and Miss Bennet the
principal object. He was then, he said, on his way to Longbourn
on purpose to inquire after her. Mr. Darcy corroborated it with
a bow, and was beginning to determine not to fix his eyes on
Elizabeth, when they were suddenly arrested by the sight of the
stranger, and Elizabeth happening to see the countenance of
both as they looked at each other, was all astonishment at the
effect of the meeting. Both changed colour, one looked white,
the other red. Mr. Wickham, after a few moments, touched his
hata salutation which Mr. Darcy just deigned to return. What
could be the meaning of it? It was impossible to imagine it was
impossible not to long to know.
In another minute, Mr. Bingley, but without seeming to have
noticed what passed, took leave and rode on with his friend.
Mr. Denny and Mr. Wickham walked with the young ladies to
the door of Mr. Phillip's house, and then made their bows, in
spite of Miss Lydia's pressing entreaties that they should come
in, and even in spite of Mrs. Phillips's throwing up the parlour
window and loudly seconding the invitation.
Mrs. Phillips was always glad to see her nieces and the two
eldest, from their recent absence, were particularly welcome, and
she was eagerly expressing her surprise at their sudden return
home, which, as their own carriage had not fetched them, she
should have known nothing about, if she had not happened to
see Mr. Jones's shopboy in the street, who had told her that
they were not to send any more draughts to Netherfield because
the Miss Bennets were come away, when her civility was
claimed towards Mr. Collins by Jane's introduction of him. She
received him with her very best politeness, which he returned
with as much more, apologising for his intrusion, without any
previous acquaintance with her, which he could not help
flattering himself, however, might be justified by his relationship
to the young ladies who introduced him to her notice. Mrs.
Phillips was quite awed by such an excess of good breeding but
her contemplation of one stranger was soon put to an end by
exclamations and inquiries about the other of whom, however,
she could only tell her nieces what they already knew, that Mr.
Denny had brought him from London, and that he was to have a
lieutenant's commission in the shire. She had been watching
him the last hour, she said, as he walked up and down the street,
and had Mr. Wickham appeared, Kitty and Lydia would certainly
have continued the occupation, but unluckily no one passed
windows now except a few of the officers, who, in comparison
with the stranger, were become "stupid, disagreeable fellows."
Some of them were to dine with the Phillipses the next day, and
their aunt promised to make her husband call on Mr. Wickham,
and give him an invitation also, if the family from Longbourn
would come in the evening. This was agreed to, and Mrs.
Phillips protested that they would have a nice comfortable noisy
game of lottery tickets, and a little bit of hot supper afterwards.
The prospect of such delights was very cheering, and they parted
in mutual good spirits. Mr. Collins repeated his apologies in
quitting the room, and was assured with unwearying civility that
they were perfectly needless.
As they walked home, Elizabeth related to Jane what she had
seen pass between the two gentlemen but though Jane would
have defended either or both, had they appeared to be in the
wrong, she could no more explain such behaviour than her sister.
Mr. Collins on his return highly gratified Mrs. Bennet by
admiring Mrs. Phillips's manners and politeness. He protested
that, except Lady Catherine and her daughter, he had never seen
a more elegant woman for she had not only received him with
the utmost civility, but even pointedly included him in her
invitation for the next evening, although utterly unknown to her
before. Something, he supposed, might be attributed to his
connection with them, but yet he had never met with so much
attention in the whole course of his life.
Chapter 
As no objection was made to the young people's engagement
with their aunt, and all Mr. Collins's scruples of leaving Mr.
and Mrs. Bennet for a single evening during his visit were most
steadily resisted, the coach conveyed him and his five cousins
at a suitable hour to Meryton and the girls had the pleasure of
hearing, as they entered the drawingroom, that Mr. Wickham
had accepted their uncle's invitation, and was then in the house.
When this information was given, and they had all taken their
seats, Mr. Collins was at leisure to look around him and admire,
and he was so much struck with the size and furniture of the
apartment, that he declared he might almost have supposed
himself in the small summer breakfast parlour at Rosings a
comparison that did not at first convey much gratification but
when Mrs. Phillips understood from him what Rosings was, and
who was its proprietorwhen she had listened to the description
of only one of Lady Catherine's drawingrooms, and found that
the chimneypiece alone had cost eight hundred pounds, she felt
all the force of the compliment, and would hardly have resented
a comparison with the housekeeper's room.
In describing to her all the grandeur of Lady Catherine and her
mansion, with occasional digressions in praise of his own humble
abode, and the improvements it was receiving, he was happily
employed until the gentlemen joined them and he found in
Mrs. Phillips a very attentive listener, whose opinion of
his consequence increased with what she heard, and who was
resolving to retail it all among her neighbours as soon as she
could. To the girls, who could not listen to their cousin,
and who had nothing to do but to wish for an instrument, and
examine their own indifferent imitations of china on the
mantelpiece, the interval of waiting appeared very long. It was
over at last, however. The gentlemen did approach, and when
Mr. Wickham walked into the room, Elizabeth felt that she had
neither been seeing him before, nor thinking of him since, with
the smallest degree of unreasonable admiration. The officers of
the shire were in general a very creditable, gentlemanlike
set, and the best of them were of the present party but Mr.
Wickham was as far beyond them all in person, countenance, air,
and walk, as they were superior to the broadfaced, stuffy
uncle Phillips, breathing port wine, who followed them into
the room.
Mr. Wickham was the happy man towards whom almost every
female eye was turned, and Elizabeth was the happy woman by
whom he finally seated himself and the agreeable manner in
which he immediately fell into conversation, though it was only
on its being a wet night, made her feel that the commonest,
dullest, most threadbare topic might be rendered interesting by
the skill of the speaker.
With such rivals for the notice of the fair as Mr. Wickham and
the officers, Mr. Collins seemed to sink into insignificance to
the young ladies he certainly was nothing but he had still at
intervals a kind listener in Mrs. Phillips, and was by her
watchfulness, most abundantly supplied with coffee and muffin.
When the cardtables were placed, he had the opportunity of
obliging her in turn, by sitting down to whist.
"I know little of the game at present," said he, "but I shall be
glad to improve myself, for in my situation in life" Mrs. Phillips
was very glad for his compliance, but could not wait for his
reason.
Mr. Wickham did not play at whist, and with ready delight was he
received at the other table between Elizabeth and Lydia. At first
there seemed danger of Lydia's engrossing him entirely, for she
was a most determined talker but being likewise extremely fond
of lottery tickets, she soon grew too much interested in the
game, too eager in making bets and exclaiming after prizes to
have attention for anyone in particular. Allowing for the
common demands of the game, Mr. Wickham was therefore at leisure
to talk to Elizabeth, and she was very willing to hear him,
though what she chiefly wished to hear she could not hope to be
toldthe history of his acquaintance with Mr. Darcy. She dared
not even mention that gentleman. Her curiosity, however, was
unexpectedly relieved. Mr. Wickham began the subject himself.
He inquired how far Netherfield was from Meryton and, after
receiving her answer, asked in a hesitating manner how long
Mr. Darcy had been staying there.
"About a month," said Elizabeth and then, unwilling to let the
subject drop, added, "He is a man of very large property in
Derbyshire, I understand."
"Yes," replied Mr. Wickham "his estate there is a noble one.
A clear ten thousand per annum. You could not have met with a
person more capable of giving you certain information on that
head than myself, for I have been connected with his family in
a particular manner from my infancy."
Elizabeth could not but look surprised.
"You may well be surprised, Miss Bennet, at such an assertion,
after seeing, as you probably might, the very cold manner of our
meeting yesterday. Are you much acquainted with Mr. Darcy?"
"As much as I ever wish to be," cried Elizabeth very warmly.
"I have spent four days in the same house with him, and I think
him very disagreeable."
"I have no right to give my opinion," said Wickham, "as to his
being agreeable or otherwise. I am not qualified to form one. I
have known him too long and too well to be a fair judge. It is
impossible for me to be impartial. But I believe your opinion
of him would in general astonishand perhaps you would not
express it quite so strongly anywhere else. Here you are in your
own family."
"Upon my word, I say no more here than I might say in any
house in the neighbourhood, except Netherfield. He is not at all
liked in Hertfordshire. Everybody is disgusted with his pride.
You will not find him more favourably spoken of by anyone."
"I cannot pretend to be sorry," said Wickham, after a short
interruption, "that he or that any man should not be estimated
beyond their deserts but with him I believe it does not often
happen. The world is blinded by his fortune and consequence,
or frightened by his high and imposing manners, and sees him
only as he chooses to be seen."
"I should take him, even on my slight acquaintance, to be an
illtempered man." Wickham only shook his head.
"I wonder," said he, at the next opportunity of speaking,
"whether he is likely to be in this country much longer."
"I do not at all know but I heard nothing of his going away
when I was at Netherfield. I hope your plans in favour of the
shire will not be affected by his being in the neighbourhood."
"Oh noit is not for me to be driven away by Mr. Darcy. If
he wishes to avoid seeing me, he must go. We are not on
friendly terms, and it always gives me pain to meet him, but I
have no reason for avoiding him but what I might proclaim
before all the world, a sense of very great illusage, and most
painful regrets at his being what he is. His father, Miss Bennet,
the late Mr. Darcy, was one of the best men that ever breathed,
and the truest friend I ever had and I can never be in company
with this Mr. Darcy without being grieved to the soul by a
thousand tender recollections. His behaviour to myself has been
scandalous but I verily believe I could forgive him anything and
everything, rather than his disappointing the hopes and
disgracing the memory of his father."
Elizabeth found the interest of the subject increase, and listened
with all her heart but the delicacy of it prevented further inquiry.
Mr. Wickham began to speak on more general topics, Meryton,
the neighbourhood, the society, appearing highly pleased with all
that he had yet seen, and speaking of the latter with gentle but
very intelligible gallantry.
"It was the prospect of constant society, and good society," he
added, "which was my chief inducement to enter the shire.
I knew it to be a most respectable, agreeable corps, and my
friend Denny tempted me further by his account of their
present quarters, and the very great attentions and excellent
acquaintances Meryton had procured them. Society, I own, is
necessary to me. I have been a disappointed man, and my spirits
will not bear solitude. I must have employment and society.
A military life is not what I was intended for, but circumstances
have now made it eligible. The church ought to have been
my professionI was brought up for the church, and I should at
this time have been in possession of a most valuable living, had
it pleased the gentleman we were speaking of just now."
"Indeed"
"Yesthe late Mr. Darcy bequeathed me the next presentation
of the best living in his gift. He was my godfather, and
excessively attached to me. I cannot do justice to his kindness.
He meant to provide for me amply, and thought he had done it
but when the living fell, it was given elsewhere."
"Good heavens" cried Elizabeth "but how could that be?
How could his will be disregarded? Why did you not seek legal
redress?"
"There was just such an informality in the terms of the bequest
as to give me no hope from law. A man of honour could not have
doubted the intention, but Mr. Darcy chose to doubt itor to
treat it as a merely conditional recommendation, and to assert that
I had forfeited all claim to it by extravagance, imprudencein
short anything or nothing. Certain it is, that the living became
vacant two years ago, exactly as I was of an age to hold it, and
that it was given to another man and no less certain is it, that
I cannot accuse myself of having really done anything to deserve
to lose it. I have a warm, unguarded temper, and I may have
spoken my opinion of him, and to him, too freely. I can recall
nothing worse. But the fact is, that we are very different sort
of men, and that he hates me."
"This is quite shocking He deserves to be publicly disgraced."
"Some time or other he will bebut it shall not be by me.
Till I can forget his father, I can never defy or expose him."
Elizabeth honoured him for such feelings, and thought him
handsomer than ever as he expressed them.
"But what," said she, after a pause, "can have been his motive?
What can have induced him to behave so cruelly?"
"A thorough, determined dislike of mea dislike which I cannot
but attribute in some measure to jealousy. Had the late Mr.
Darcy liked me less, his son might have borne with me better
but his father's uncommon attachment to me irritated him, I
believe, very early in life. He had not a temper to bear the sort of
competition in which we stoodthe sort of preference which
was often given me."
"I had not thought Mr. Darcy so bad as thisthough I have
never liked him. I had not thought so very ill of him. I had
supposed him to be despising his fellowcreatures in general, but
did not suspect him of descending to such malicious revenge,
such injustice, such inhumanity as this."
After a few minutes' reflection, however, she continued,
"I do remember his boasting one day, at Netherfield, of the
implacability of his resentments, of his having an unforgiving
temper. His disposition must be dreadful."
"I will not trust myself on the subject," replied Wickham "I
can hardly be just to him."
Elizabeth was again deep in thought, and after a time exclaimed,
"To treat in such a manner the godson, the friend, the favourite
of his father" She could have added, "A young man, too,
like you, whose very countenance may vouch for your being
amiable"but she contented herself with, "and one, too, who
had probably been his companion from childhood, connected
together, as I think you said, in the closest manner"
"We were born in the same parish, within the same park the
greatest part of our youth was passed together inmates of the
same house, sharing the same amusements, objects of the same
parental care. My father began life in the profession which
your uncle, Mr. Phillips, appears to do so much credit tobut
he gave up everything to be of use to the late Mr. Darcy and
devoted all his time to the care of the Pemberley property.
He was most highly esteemed by Mr. Darcy, a most intimate,
confidential friend. Mr. Darcy often acknowledged himself
to be under the greatest obligations to my father's active
superintendence, and when, immediately before my father's
death, Mr. Darcy gave him a voluntary promise of providing for
me, I am convinced that he felt it to be as much a debt of
gratitude to him, as of his affection to myself."
"How strange" cried Elizabeth. "How abominable I wonder
that the very pride of this Mr. Darcy has not made him just to
you If from no better motive, that he should not have been too
proud to be dishonestfor dishonesty I must call it."
"It is wonderful," replied Wickham, "for almost all his actions
may be traced to pride and pride had often been his best friend.
It has connected him nearer with virtue than with any other
feeling. But we are none of us consistent, and in his behaviour
to me there were stronger impulses even than pride."
"Can such abominable pride as his have ever done him good?"
"Yes. It has often led him to be liberal and generous, to give his
money freely, to display hospitality, to assist his tenants, and
relieve the poor. Family pride, and filial pridefor he is very
proud of what his father washave done this. Not to appear to
disgrace his family, to degenerate from the popular qualities, or
lose the influence of the Pemberley House, is a powerful motive.
He has also brotherly pride, which, with some brotherly
affection, makes him a very kind and careful guardian of his
sister, and you will hear him generally cried up as the most
attentive and best of brothers."
"What sort of girl is Miss Darcy?"
He shook his head. "I wish I could call her amiable. It gives
me pain to speak ill of a Darcy. But she is too much like her
brothervery, very proud. As a child, she was affectionate
and pleasing, and extremely fond of me and I have devoted hours
and hours to her amusement. But she is nothing to me now.
She is a handsome girl, about fifteen or sixteen, and, I
understand, highly accomplished. Since her father's death,
her home has been London, where a lady lives with her, and
superintends her education."
After many pauses and many trials of other subjects, Elizabeth
could not help reverting once more to the first, and saying
"I am astonished at his intimacy with Mr. Bingley How can Mr.
Bingley, who seems good humour itself, and is, I really believe,
truly amiable, be in friendship with such a man? How can they
suit each other? Do you know Mr. Bingley?"
"Not at all."
"He is a sweettempered, amiable, charming man. He cannot
know what Mr. Darcy is."
"Probably not but Mr. Darcy can please where he chooses. He
does not want abilities. He can be a conversible companion if he
thinks it worth his while. Among those who are at all his equals
in consequence, he is a very different man from what he is to the
less prosperous. His pride never deserts him but with the rich
he is liberalminded, just, sincere, rational, honourable, and
perhaps agreeableallowing something for fortune and figure."
The whist party soon afterwards breaking up, the players
gathered round the other table and Mr. Collins took his station
between his cousin Elizabeth and Mrs. Phillips. The usual
inquiries as to his success was made by the latter. It had not
been very great he had lost every point but when Mrs. Phillips
began to express her concern thereupon, he assured her with
much earnest gravity that it was not of the least importance, that
he considered the money as a mere trifle, and begged that she
would not make herself uneasy.
"I know very well, madam," said he, "that when persons sit down
to a cardtable, they must take their chances of these things, and
happily I am not in such circumstances as to make five shillings
any object. There are undoubtedly many who could not say the
same, but thanks to Lady Catherine de Bourgh, I am removed
far beyond the necessity of regarding little matters."
Mr. Wickham's attention was caught and after observing Mr.
Collins for a few moments, he asked Elizabeth in a low voice
whether her relation was very intimately acquainted with the
family of de Bourgh.
"Lady Catherine de Bourgh," she replied, "has very lately given
him a living. I hardly know how Mr. Collins was first
introduced to her notice, but he certainly has not known her
long."
"You know of course that Lady Catherine de Bourgh and Lady
Anne Darcy were sisters consequently that she is aunt to the
present Mr. Darcy."
"No, indeed, I did not. I knew nothing at all of Lady Catherine's
connections. I never heard of her existence till the day before
yesterday."
"Her daughter, Miss de Bourgh, will have a very large fortune,
and it is believed that she and her cousin will unite the two
estates."
This information made Elizabeth smile, as she thought of poor
Miss Bingley. Vain indeed must be all her attentions, vain and
useless her affection for his sister and her praise of himself,
if he were already selfdestined for another.
"Mr. Collins," said she, "speaks highly both of Lady Catherine
and her daughter but from some particulars that he has related
of her ladyship, I suspect his gratitude misleads him, and that in
spite of her being his patroness, she is an arrogant, conceited
woman."
"I believe her to be both in a great degree," replied Wickham
"I have not seen her for many years, but I very well remember that
I never liked her, and that her manners were dictatorial and
insolent. She has the reputation of being remarkably sensible
and clever but I rather believe she derives part of her abilities
from her rank and fortune, part from her authoritative manner,
and the rest from the pride for her nephew, who chooses that
everyone connected with him should have an understanding of
the first class."
Elizabeth allowed that he had given a very rational account of it,
and they continued talking together, with mutual satisfaction
till supper put an end to cards, and gave the rest of the ladies
their share of Mr. Wickham's attentions. There could be no
conversation in the noise of Mrs. Phillips's supper party, but
his manners recommended him to everybody. Whatever he said,
was said well and whatever he did, done gracefully. Elizabeth
went away with her head full of him. She could think of nothing
but of Mr. Wickham, and of what he had told her, all the way
home but there was not time for her even to mention his name
as they went, for neither Lydia nor Mr. Collins were once silent.
Lydia talked incessantly of lottery tickets, of the fish she had
lost and the fish she had won and Mr. Collins in describing the
civility of Mr. and Mrs. Phillips, protesting that he did not in
the least regard his losses at whist, enumerating all the dishes
at supper, and repeatedly fearing that he crowded his cousins,
had more to say than he could well manage before the carriage
stopped at Longbourn House.
Chapter 
Elizabeth related to Jane the next day what had passed between
Mr. Wickham and herself. Jane listened with astonishment and
concern she knew not how to believe that Mr. Darcy could be
so unworthy of Mr. Bingley's regard and yet, it was not in her
nature to question the veracity of a young man of such amiable
appearance as Wickham. The possibility of his having endured
such unkindness, was enough to interest all her tender feelings
and nothing remained therefore to be done, but to think well of
them both, to defend the conduct of each, and throw into the
account of accident or mistake whatever could not be otherwise
explained.
"They have both," said she, "been deceived, I dare say, in some
way or other, of which we can form no idea. Interested people
have perhaps misrepresented each to the other. It is, in short,
impossible for us to conjecture the causes or circumstances
which may have alienated them, without actual blame on either
side."
"Very true, indeed and now, my dear Jane, what have you got
to say on behalf of the interested people who have probably been
concerned in the business? Do clear them too, or we shall be
obliged to think ill of somebody."
"Laugh as much as you choose, but you will not laugh me out of
my opinion. My dearest Lizzy, do but consider in what a
disgraceful light it places Mr. Darcy, to be treating his father's
favourite in such a manner, one whom his father had promised to
provide for. It is impossible. No man of common humanity, no
man who had any value for his character, could be capable of it.
Can his most intimate friends be so excessively deceived in him?
Oh no."
"I can much more easily believe Mr. Bingley's being imposed on,
than that Mr. Wickham should invent such a history of himself
as he gave me last night names, facts, everything mentioned
without ceremony. If it be not so, let Mr. Darcy contradict it.
Besides, there was truth in his looks."
"It is difficult indeedit is distressing. One does not know what
to think."
"I beg your pardon one knows exactly what to think."
But Jane could think with certainty on only one pointthat Mr.
Bingley, if he had been imposed on, would have much to suffer
when the affair became public.
The two young ladies were summoned from the shrubbery,
where this conversation passed, by the arrival of the very
persons of whom they had been speaking Mr. Bingley and his
sisters came to give their personal invitation for the
longexpected ball at Netherfield, which was fixed for the
following Tuesday. The two ladies were delighted to see their
dear friend again, called it an age since they had met, and
repeatedly asked what she had been doing with herself since
their separation. To the rest of the family they paid little
attention avoiding Mrs. Bennet as much as possible, saying not
much to Elizabeth, and nothing at all to the others. They were
soon gone again, rising from their seats with an activity which
took their brother by surprise, and hurrying off as if eager to
escape from Mrs. Bennet's civilities.
The prospect of the Netherfield ball was extremely agreeable to
every female of the family. Mrs. Bennet chose to consider it as
given in compliment to her eldest daughter, and was particularly
flattered by receiving the invitation from Mr. Bingley himself,
instead of a ceremonious card. Jane pictured to herself a happy
evening in the society of her two friends, and the attentions of
her brother and Elizabeth thought with pleasure of dancing a
great deal with Mr. Wickham, and of seeing a confirmation of
everything in Mr. Darcy's look and behavior. The happiness
anticipated by Catherine and Lydia depended less on any single
event, or any particular person, for though they each, like
Elizabeth, meant to dance half the evening with Mr. Wickham,
he was by no means the only partner who could satisfy them, and
a ball was, at any rate, a ball. And even Mary could assure her
family that she had no disinclination for it.
"While I can have my mornings to myself," said she, "it is
enoughI think it is no sacrifice to join occasionally in evening
engagements. Society has claims on us all and I profess myself
one of those who consider intervals of recreation and amusement
as desirable for everybody."
Elizabeth's spirits were so high on this occasion, that though she
did not often speak unnecessarily to Mr. Collins, she could not
help asking him whether he intended to accept Mr. Bingley's
invitation, and if he did, whether he would think it proper to join
in the evening's amusement and she was rather surprised to find
that he entertained no scruple whatever on that head, and was
very far from dreading a rebuke either from the Archbishop, or
Lady Catherine de Bourgh, by venturing to dance.
"I am by no means of the opinion, I assure you," said he, "that
a ball of this kind, given by a young man of character, to
respectable people, can have any evil tendency and I am so
far from objecting to dancing myself, that I shall hope to be
honoured with the hands of all my fair cousins in the course of
the evening and I take this opportunity of soliciting yours, Miss
Elizabeth, for the two first dances especially, a preference which
I trust my cousin Jane will attribute to the right cause, and not
to any disrespect for her."
Elizabeth felt herself completely taken in. She had fully
proposed being engaged by Mr. Wickham for those very dances
and to have Mr. Collins instead her liveliness had never been
worse timed. There was no help for it, however. Mr. Wickham's
happiness and her own were perforce delayed a little longer,
and Mr. Collins's proposal accepted with as good a grace as she
could. She was not the better pleased with his gallantry from
the idea it suggested of something more. It now first struck
her, that she was selected from among her sisters as worthy of
being mistress of Hunsford Parsonage, and of assisting to form
a quadrille table at Rosings, in the absence of more eligible
visitors. The idea soon reached to conviction, as she observed
his increasing civilities toward herself, and heard his
frequent attempt at a compliment on her wit and vivacity and
though more astonished than gratified herself by this effect
of her charms, it was not long before her mother gave her to
understand that the probability of their marriage was extremely
agreeable to her. Elizabeth, however, did not choose to take
the hint, being well aware that a serious dispute must be the
consequence of any reply. Mr. Collins might never make the
offer, and till he did, it was useless to quarrel about him.
If there had not been a Netherfield ball to prepare for and talk
of, the younger Miss Bennets would have been in a very pitiable
state at this time, for from the day of the invitation, to the day
of the ball, there was such a succession of rain as prevented their
walking to Meryton once. No aunt, no officers, no news could
be sought afterthe very shoeroses for Netherfield were got
by proxy. Even Elizabeth might have found some trial of her
patience in weather which totally suspended the improvement of
her acquaintance with Mr. Wickham and nothing less than a
dance on Tuesday, could have made such a Friday, Saturday,
Sunday, and Monday endurable to Kitty and Lydia.
Chapter 
Till Elizabeth entered the drawingroom at Netherfield, and
looked in vain for Mr. Wickham among the cluster of red coats
there assembled, a doubt of his being present had never occurred
to her. The certainty of meeting him had not been checked by
any of those recollections that might not unreasonably have
alarmed her. She had dressed with more than usual care, and
prepared in the highest spirits for the conquest of all that
remained unsubdued of his heart, trusting that it was not more
than might be won in the course of the evening. But in an
instant arose the dreadful suspicion of his being purposely
omitted for Mr. Darcy's pleasure in the Bingleys' invitation
to the officers and though this was not exactly the case, the
absolute fact of his absence was pronounced by his friend Denny,
to whom Lydia eagerly applied, and who told them that Wickham
had been obliged to go to town on business the day before, and
was not yet returned adding, with a significant smile, "I do not
imagine his business would have called him away just now, if he
had not wanted to avoid a certain gentleman here."
This part of his intelligence, though unheard by Lydia, was
caught by Elizabeth, and, as it assured her that Darcy was not
less answerable for Wickham's absence than if her first surmise
had been just, every feeling of displeasure against the former
was so sharpened by immediate disappointment, that she could
hardly reply with tolerable civility to the polite inquiries
which he directly afterwards approached to make. Attendance,
forbearance, patience with Darcy, was injury to Wickham. She
was resolved against any sort of conversation with him, and
turned away with a degree of illhumour which she could not
wholly surmount even in speaking to Mr. Bingley, whose blind
partiality provoked her.
But Elizabeth was not formed for illhumour and though every
prospect of her own was destroyed for the evening, it could not
dwell long on her spirits and having told all her griefs to
Charlotte Lucas, whom she had not seen for a week, she was
soon able to make a voluntary transition to the oddities of her
cousin, and to point him out to her particular notice. The first
two dances, however, brought a return of distress they were
dances of mortification. Mr. Collins, awkward and solemn,
apologising instead of attending, and often moving wrong
without being aware of it, gave her all the shame and misery
which a disagreeable partner for a couple of dances can give.
The moment of her release from him was ecstasy.
She danced next with an officer, and had the refreshment of
talking of Wickham, and of hearing that he was universally liked.
When those dances were over, she returned to Charlotte Lucas,
and was in conversation with her, when she found herself
suddenly addressed by Mr. Darcy who took her so much by surprise
in his application for her hand, that, without knowing what she
did, she accepted him. He walked away again immediately, and
she was left to fret over her own want of presence of mind
Charlotte tried to console her
"I dare say you will find him very agreeable."
"Heaven forbid That would be the greatest misfortune of all
To find a man agreeable whom one is determined to hate Do not
wish me such an evil."
When the dancing recommenced, however, and Darcy approached to
claim her hand, Charlotte could not help cautioning her in a
whisper, not to be a simpleton, and allow her fancy for Wickham
to make her appear unpleasant in the eyes of a man ten times his
consequence. Elizabeth made no answer, and took her place in
the set, amazed at the dignity to which she was arrived in being
allowed to stand opposite to Mr. Darcy, and reading in her
neighbours' looks, their equal amazement in beholding it. They
stood for some time without speaking a word and she began to
imagine that their silence was to last through the two dances,
and at first was resolved not to break it till suddenly
fancying that it would be the greater punishment to her partner
to oblige him to talk, she made some slight observation on the
dance. He replied, and was again silent. After a pause of
some minutes, she addressed him a second time with"It is
your turn to say something now, Mr. Darcy. I talked about
the dance, and you ought to make some sort of remark on the
size of the room, or the number of couples."
He smiled, and assured her that whatever she wished him to say
should be said.
"Very well. That reply will do for the present. Perhaps by and
by I may observe that private balls are much pleasanter than
public ones. But now we may be silent."
"Do you talk by rule, then, while you are dancing?"
"Sometimes. One must speak a little, you know. It would look
odd to be entirely silent for half an hour together and yet for
the advantage of some, conversation ought to be so arranged, as
that they may have the trouble of saying as little as possible."
"Are you consulting your own feelings in the present case, or do
you imagine that you are gratifying mine?"
"Both," replied Elizabeth archly "for I have always seen a great
similarity in the turn of our minds. We are each of an unsocial,
taciturn disposition, unwilling to speak, unless we expect to say
something that will amaze the whole room, and be handed down
to posterity with all the eclat of a proverb."
"This is no very striking resemblance of your own character,
I am sure," said he. "How near it may be to mine, I cannot
pretend to say. You think it a faithful portrait undoubtedly."
"I must not decide on my own performance."
He made no answer, and they were again silent till they had gone
down the dance, when he asked her if she and her sisters did not
very often walk to Meryton. She answered in the affirmative,
and, unable to resist the temptation, added, "When you met us
there the other day, we had just been forming a new acquaintance."
The effect was immediate. A deeper shade of hauteur overspread
his features, but he said not a word, and Elizabeth, though
blaming herself for her own weakness, could not go on. At
length Darcy spoke, and in a constrained manner said, "Mr.
Wickham is blessed with such happy manners as may ensure his
making friendswhether he may be equally capable of retaining
them, is less certain."
"He has been so unlucky as to lose your friendship," replied
Elizabeth with emphasis, "and in a manner which he is likely to
suffer from all his life."
Darcy made no answer, and seemed desirous of changing the
subject. At that moment, Sir William Lucas appeared close to
them, meaning to pass through the set to the other side of the
room but on perceiving Mr. Darcy, he stopped with a bow of
superior courtesy to compliment him on his dancing and his
partner.
"I have been most highly gratified indeed, my dear sir. Such
very superior dancing is not often seen. It is evident that you
belong to the first circles. Allow me to say, however, that your
fair partner does not disgrace you, and that I must hope to have
this pleasure often repeated, especially when a certain desirable
event, my dear Eliza glancing at her sister and Bingley shall
take place. What congratulations will then flow in I appeal to
Mr. Darcybut let me not interrupt you, sir. You will not
thank me for detaining you from the bewitching converse of that
young lady, whose bright eyes are also upbraiding me."
The latter part of this address was scarcely heard by Darcy
but Sir William's allusion to his friend seemed to strike him
forcibly, and his eyes were directed with a very serious
expression towards Bingley and Jane, who were dancing together.
Recovering himself, however, shortly, he turned to his partner,
and said, "Sir William's interruption has made me forget what
we were talking of."
"I do not think we were speaking at all. Sir William could not
have interrupted two people in the room who had less to say for
themselves. We have tried two or three subjects already without
success, and what we are to talk of next I cannot imagine."
"What think you of books?" said he, smiling.
"Booksoh no. I am sure we never read the same, or not with
the same feelings."
"I am sorry you think so but if that be the case, there can at
least be no want of subject. We may compare our different
opinions."
"NoI cannot talk of books in a ballroom my head is always
full of something else."
"The present always occupies you in such scenesdoes it?"
said he, with a look of doubt.
"Yes, always," she replied, without knowing what she said,
for her thoughts had wandered far from the subject, as soon
afterwards appeared by her suddenly exclaiming, "I remember
hearing you once say, Mr. Darcy, that you hardly ever forgave,
that your resentment once created was unappeasable. You are
very cautious, I suppose, as to its being created."
"I am," said he, with a firm voice.
"And never allow yourself to be blinded by prejudice?"
"I hope not."
"It is particularly incumbent on those who never change their
opinion, to be secure of judging properly at first."
"May I ask to what these questions tend?"
"Merely to the illustration of your character," said she,
endeavouring to shake off her gravity. "I am trying to make
it out."
"And what is your success?"
She shook her head. "I do not get on at all. I hear such
different accounts of you as puzzle me exceedingly."
"I can readily believe," answered he gravely, "that reports may
vary greatly with respect to me and I could wish, Miss Bennet,
that you were not to sketch my character at the present moment,
as there is reason to fear that the performance would reflect no
credit on either."
"But if I do not take your likeness now, I may never have
another opportunity."
"I would by no means suspend any pleasure of yours," he coldly
replied. She said no more, and they went down the other dance
and parted in silence and on each side dissatisfied, though not
to an equal degree, for in Darcy's breast there was a tolerable
powerful feeling towards her, which soon procured her pardon,
and directed all his anger against another.
They had not long separated, when Miss Bingley came towards
her, and with an expression of civil disdain accosted her
"So, Miss Eliza, I hear you are quite delighted with George
Wickham Your sister has been talking to me about him, and
asking me a thousand questions and I find that the young man
quite forgot to tell you, among his other communication, that
he was the son of old Wickham, the late Mr. Darcy's steward.
Let me recommend you, however, as a friend, not to give implicit
confidence to all his assertions for as to Mr. Darcy's using
him ill, it is perfectly false for, on the contrary, he has
always been remarkably kind to him, though George Wickham has
treated Mr. Darcy in a most infamous manner. I do not know the
particulars, but I know very well that Mr. Darcy is not in the
least to blame, that he cannot bear to hear George Wickham
mentioned, and that though my brother thought that he could not
well avoid including him in his invitation to the officers, he
was excessively glad to find that he had taken himself out of the
way. His coming into the country at all is a most insolent thing,
indeed, and I wonder how he could presume to do it. I pity you,
Miss Eliza, for this discovery of your favourite's guilt but
really, considering his descent, one could not expect much better."
"His guilt and his descent appear by your account to be the
same," said Elizabeth angrily "for I have heard you accuse him
of nothing worse than of being the son of Mr. Darcy's steward,
and of that, I can assure you, he informed me himself."
"I beg your pardon," replied Miss Bingley, turning away with a
sneer. "Excuse my interferenceit was kindly meant."
"Insolent girl" said Elizabeth to herself. "You are much
mistaken if you expect to influence me by such a paltry attack
as this. I see nothing in it but your own wilful ignorance and
the malice of Mr. Darcy." She then sought her eldest sister, who
has undertaken to make inquiries on the same subject of Bingley.
Jane met her with a smile of such sweet complacency, a glow of
such happy expression, as sufficiently marked how well she was
satisfied with the occurrences of the evening. Elizabeth instantly
read her feelings, and at that moment solicitude for Wickham,
resentment against his enemies, and everything else, gave way
before the hope of Jane's being in the fairest way for happiness.
"I want to know," said she, with a countenance no less smiling
than her sister's, "what you have learnt about Mr. Wickham.
But perhaps you have been too pleasantly engaged to think of
any third person in which case you may be sure of my pardon."
"No," replied Jane, "I have not forgotten him but I have nothing
satisfactory to tell you. Mr. Bingley does not know the whole of
his history, and is quite ignorant of the circumstances which have
principally offended Mr. Darcy but he will vouch for the good
conduct, the probity, and honour of his friend, and is perfectly
convinced that Mr. Wickham has deserved much less attention
from Mr. Darcy than he has received and I am sorry to say by
his account as well as his sister's, Mr. Wickham is by no means a
respectable young man. I am afraid he has been very imprudent,
and has deserved to lose Mr. Darcy's regard."
"Mr. Bingley does not know Mr. Wickham himself?"
"No he never saw him till the other morning at Meryton."
"This account then is what he has received from Mr. Darcy.
I am satisfied. But what does he say of the living?"
"He does not exactly recollect the circumstances, though he has
heard them from Mr. Darcy more than once, but he believes that
it was left to him conditionally only."
"I have not a doubt of Mr. Bingley's sincerity," said Elizabeth
warmly "but you must excuse my not being convinced by
assurances only. Mr. Bingley's defense of his friend was a very
able one, I dare say but since he is unacquainted with several
parts of the story, and has learnt the rest from that friend
himself, I shall venture to still think of both gentlemen as I
did before."
She then changed the discourse to one more gratifying to each,
and on which there could be no difference of sentiment.
Elizabeth listened with delight to the happy, though modest
hopes which Jane entertained of Mr. Bingley's regard, and said
all in her power to heighten her confidence in it. On their being
joined by Mr. Bingley himself, Elizabeth withdrew to Miss
Lucas to whose inquiry after the pleasantness of her last partner
she had scarcely replied, before Mr. Collins came up to them,
and told her with great exultation that he had just been so
fortunate as to make a most important discovery.
"I have found out," said he, "by a singular accident, that there
is now in the room a near relation of my patroness. I happened
to overhear the gentleman himself mentioning to the young lady who
does the honours of the house the names of his cousin Miss de
Bourgh, and of her mother Lady Catherine. How wonderfully these
sort of things occur Who would have thought of my meeting with,
perhaps, a nephew of Lady Catherine de Bourgh in this assembly
I am most thankful that the discovery is made in time for me to
pay my respects to him, which I am now going to do, and trust
he will excuse my not having done it before. My total ignorance
of the connection must plead my apology."
"You are not going to introduce yourself to Mr. Darcy"
"Indeed I am. I shall entreat his pardon for not having done it
earlier. I believe him to be Lady Catherine's nephew. It will
be in my power to assure him that her ladyship was quite well
yesterday se'nnight."
Elizabeth tried hard to dissuade him from such a scheme,
assuring him that Mr. Darcy would consider his addressing him
without introduction as an impertinent freedom, rather than a
compliment to his aunt that it was not in the least necessary
there should be any notice on either side and that if it were,
it must belong to Mr. Darcy, the superior in consequence, to
begin the acquaintance. Mr. Collins listened to her with the
determined air of following his own inclination, and, when she
ceased speaking, replied thus
"My dear Miss Elizabeth, I have the highest opinion in the world
in your excellent judgement in all matters within the scope of
your understanding but permit me to say, that there must be a
wide difference between the established forms of ceremony amongst
the laity, and those which regulate the clergy for, give me
leave to observe that I consider the clerical office as equal in
point of dignity with the highest rank in the kingdomprovided
that a proper humility of behaviour is at the same time
maintained. You must therefore allow me to follow the dictates
of my conscience on this occasion, which leads me to perform what
I look on as a point of duty. Pardon me for neglecting to profit
by your advice, which on every other subject shall be my constant
guide, though in the case before us I consider myself more fitted
by education and habitual study to decide on what is right than
a young lady like yourself." And with a low bow he left her to
attack Mr. Darcy, whose reception of his advances she eagerly
watched, and whose astonishment at being so addressed was very
evident. Her cousin prefaced his speech with a solemn bow and
though she could not hear a word of it, she felt as if hearing
it all, and saw in the motion of his lips the words "apology,"
"Hunsford," and "Lady Catherine de Bourgh." It vexed her to
see him expose himself to such a man. Mr. Darcy was eyeing him
with unrestrained wonder, and when at last Mr. Collins allowed
him time to speak, replied with an air of distant civility. Mr.
Collins, however, was not discouraged from speaking again, and
Mr. Darcy's contempt seemed abundantly increasing with the length
of his second speech, and at the end of it he only made him a
slight bow, and moved another way. Mr. Collins then returned
to Elizabeth.
"I have no reason, I assure you," said he, "to be dissatisfied
with my reception. Mr. Darcy seemed much pleased with the
attention. He answered me with the utmost civility, and even
paid me the compliment of saying that he was so well convinced
of Lady Catherine's discernment as to be certain she could never
bestow a favour unworthily. It was really a very handsome
thought. Upon the whole, I am much pleased with him."
As Elizabeth had no longer any interest of her own to pursue,
she turned her attention almost entirely on her sister and Mr.
Bingley and the train of agreeable reflections which her
observations gave birth to, made her perhaps almost as happy as
Jane. She saw her in idea settled in that very house, in all the
felicity which a marriage of true affection could bestow and she
felt capable, under such circumstances, of endeavouring even to
like Bingley's two sisters. Her mother's thoughts she plainly
saw were bent the same way, and she determined not to venture
near her, lest she might hear too much. When they sat down to
supper, therefore, she considered it a most unlucky perverseness
which placed them within one of each other and deeply was she
vexed to find that her mother was talking to that one person
Lady Lucas freely, openly, and of nothing else but her
expectation that Jane would soon be married to Mr. Bingley. It
was an animating subject, and Mrs. Bennet seemed incapable of
fatigue while enumerating the advantages of the match. His
being such a charming young man, and so rich, and living but
three miles from them, were the first points of selfgratulation
and then it was such a comfort to think how fond the two sisters
were of Jane, and to be certain that they must desire the
connection as much as she could do. It was, moreover, such a
promising thing for her younger daughters, as Jane's marrying so
greatly must throw them in the way of other rich men and lastly,
it was so pleasant at her time of life to be able to consign her
single daughters to the care of their sister, that she might not
be obliged to go into company more than she liked. It was
necessary to make this circumstance a matter of pleasure,
because on such occasions it is the etiquette but no one was less
likely than Mrs. Bennet to find comfort in staying home at any
period of her life. She concluded with many good wishes that
Lady Lucas might soon be equally fortunate, though evidently
and triumphantly believing there was no chance of it.
In vain did Elizabeth endeavour to check the rapidity of her
mother's words, or persuade her to describe her felicity in a
less audible whisper for, to her inexpressible vexation, she
could perceive that the chief of it was overheard by Mr. Darcy,
who sat opposite to them. Her mother only scolded her for
being nonsensical.
"What is Mr. Darcy to me, pray, that I should be afraid of him?
I am sure we owe him no such particular civility as to be obliged
to say nothing he may not like to hear."
"For heaven's sake, madam, speak lower. What advantage can
it be for you to offend Mr. Darcy? You will never recommend
yourself to his friend by so doing"
Nothing that she could say, however, had any influence. Her
mother would talk of her views in the same intelligible tone.
Elizabeth blushed and blushed again with shame and vexation.
She could not help frequently glancing her eye at Mr. Darcy,
though every glance convinced her of what she dreaded for
though he was not always looking at her mother, she was
convinced that his attention was invariably fixed by her.
The expression of his face changed gradually from indignant
contempt to a composed and steady gravity.
At length, however, Mrs. Bennet had no more to say and Lady
Lucas, who had been long yawning at the repetition of delights
which she saw no likelihood of sharing, was left to the comforts
of cold ham and chicken. Elizabeth now began to revive. But
not long was the interval of tranquillity for, when supper was
over, singing was talked of, and she had the mortification of
seeing Mary, after very little entreaty, preparing to oblige the
company. By many significant looks and silent entreaties, did
she endeavour to prevent such a proof of complaisance, but in
vain Mary would not understand them such an opportunity of
exhibiting was delightful to her, and she began her song.
Elizabeth's eyes were fixed on her with most painful sensations,
and she watched her progress through the several stanzas with
an impatience which was very ill rewarded at their close for
Mary, on receiving, amongst the thanks of the table, the hint of
a hope that she might be prevailed on to favour them again, after
the pause of half a minute began another. Mary's powers were
by no means fitted for such a display her voice was weak, and
her manner affected. Elizabeth was in agonies. She looked at
Jane, to see how she bore it but Jane was very composedly
talking to Bingley. She looked at his two sisters, and saw
them making signs of derision at each other, and at Darcy, who
continued, however, imperturbably grave. She looked at her
father to entreat his interference, lest Mary should be singing all
night. He took the hint, and when Mary had finished her second
song, said aloud, "That will do extremely well, child. You have
delighted us long enough. Let the other young ladies have time
to exhibit."
Mary, though pretending not to hear, was somewhat disconcerted
and Elizabeth, sorry for her, and sorry for her father's speech,
was afraid her anxiety had done no good. Others of the party
were now applied to.
"If I," said Mr. Collins, "were so fortunate as to be able to sing,
I should have great pleasure, I am sure, in obliging the company
with an air for I consider music as a very innocent diversion,
and perfectly compatible with the profession of a clergyman. I do
not mean, however, to assert that we can be justified in devoting
too much of our time to music, for there are certainly other things
to be attended to. The rector of a parish has much to do. In the
first place, he must make such an agreement for tithes as may be
beneficial to himself and not offensive to his patron. He must
write his own sermons and the time that remains will not be too
much for his parish duties, and the care and improvement of his
dwelling, which he cannot be excused from making as comfortable
as possible. And I do not think it of light importance that he
should have attentive and conciliatory manner towards everybody,
especially towards those to whom he owes his preferment. I
cannot acquit him of that duty nor could I think well of the
man who should omit an occasion of testifying his respect
towards anybody connected with the family." And with a bow to
Mr. Darcy, he concluded his speech, which had been spoken so
loud as to be heard by half the room. Many staredmany smiled
but no one looked more amused than Mr. Bennet himself, while
his wife seriously commended Mr. Collins for having spoken so
sensibly, and observed in a halfwhisper to Lady Lucas, that he
was a remarkably clever, good kind of young man.
To Elizabeth it appeared that, had her family made an agreement
to expose themselves as much as they could during the
evening, it would have been impossible for them to play their
parts with more spirit or finer success and happy did she think
it for Bingley and her sister that some of the exhibition had
escaped his notice, and that his feelings were not of a sort to
be much distressed by the folly which he must have witnessed.
That his two sisters and Mr. Darcy, however, should have such
an opportunity of ridiculing her relations, was bad enough, and
she could not determine whether the silent contempt of the
gentleman, or the insolent smiles of the ladies, were more
intolerable.
The rest of the evening brought her little amusement. She was
teased by Mr. Collins, who continued most perseveringly by her
side, and though he could not prevail on her to dance with him
again, put it out of her power to dance with others. In vain
did she entreat him to stand up with somebody else, and offer to
introduce him to any young lady in the room. He assured her,
that as to dancing, he was perfectly indifferent to it that his
chief object was by delicate attentions to recommend himself to
her and that he should therefore make a point of remaining close
to her the whole evening. There was no arguing upon such a
project. She owed her greatest relief to her friend Miss Lucas,
who often joined them, and goodnaturedly engaged Mr. Collins's
conversation to herself.
She was at least free from the offense of Mr. Darcy's further
notice though often standing within a very short distance of her,
quite disengaged, he never came near enough to speak. She felt
it to be the probable consequence of her allusions to Mr. Wickham,
and rejoiced in it.
The Longbourn party were the last of all the company to depart,
and, by a manoeuvre of Mrs. Bennet, had to wait for their
carriage a quarter of an hour after everybody else was gone,
which gave them time to see how heartily they were wished
away by some of the family. Mrs. Hurst and her sister scarcely
opened their mouths, except to complain of fatigue, and were
evidently impatient to have the house to themselves. They
repulsed every attempt of Mrs. Bennet at conversation, and by
so doing threw a languor over the whole party, which was very
little relieved by the long speeches of Mr. Collins, who was
complimenting Mr. Bingley and his sisters on the elegance of
their entertainment, and the hospitality and politeness which had
marked their behaviour to their guests. Darcy said nothing at all.
Mr. Bennet, in equal silence, was enjoying the scene. Mr.
Bingley and Jane were standing together, a little detached from
the rest, and talked only to each other. Elizabeth preserved as
steady a silence as either Mrs. Hurst or Miss Bingley and even
Lydia was too much fatigued to utter more than the occasional
exclamation of "Lord, how tired I am" accompanied by a
violent yawn.
When at length they arose to take leave, Mrs. Bennet was most
pressingly civil in her hope of seeing the whole family soon
at Longbourn, and addressed herself especially to Mr. Bingley,
to assure him how happy he would make them by eating a family
dinner with them at any time, without the ceremony of a formal
invitation. Bingley was all grateful pleasure, and he readily
engaged for taking the earliest opportunity of waiting on her,
after his return from London, whither he was obliged to go the
next day for a short time.
Mrs. Bennet was perfectly satisfied, and quitted the house under
the delightful persuasion that, allowing for the necessary
preparations of settlements, new carriages, and wedding clothes,
she should undoubtedly see her daughter settled at Netherfield in
the course of three or four months. Of having another daughter
married to Mr. Collins, she thought with equal certainty, and
with considerable, though not equal, pleasure. Elizabeth was the
least dear to her of all her children and though the man and the
match were quite good enough for her, the worth of each was
eclipsed by Mr. Bingley and Netherfield.
Chapter 
The next day opened a new scene at Longbourn. Mr. Collins
made his declaration in form. Having resolved to do it without
loss of time, as his leave of absence extended only to the
following Saturday, and having no feelings of diffidence to make
it distressing to himself even at the moment, he set about it
in a very orderly manner, with all the observances, which
he supposed a regular part of the business. On finding Mrs.
Bennet, Elizabeth, and one of the younger girls together, soon
after breakfast, he addressed the mother in these words
"May I hope, madam, for your interest with your fair daughter
Elizabeth, when I solicit for the honour of a private audience
with her in the course of this morning?"
Before Elizabeth had time for anything but a blush of surprise,
Mrs. Bennet answered instantly, "Oh dearyescertainly. I
am sure Lizzy will be very happyI am sure she can have no
objection. Come, Kitty, I want you upstairs." And, gathering
her work together, she was hastening away, when Elizabeth
called out
"Dear madam, do not go. I beg you will not go. Mr. Collins
must excuse me. He can have nothing to say to me that anybody
need not hear. I am going away myself."
"No, no, nonsense, Lizzy. I desire you to stay where you are."
And upon Elizabeth's seeming really, with vexed and embarrassed
looks, about to escape, she added "Lizzy, I insist upon your
staying and hearing Mr. Collins."
Elizabeth would not oppose such an injunctionand a moment's
consideration making her also sensible that it would be wisest to
get it over as soon and as quietly as possible, she sat down again
and tried to conceal, by incessant employment the feelings which
were divided between distress and diversion. Mrs. Bennet and Kitty
walked off, and as soon as they were gone, Mr. Collins began.
"Believe me, my dear Miss Elizabeth, that your modesty, so far
from doing you any disservice, rather adds to your other
perfections. You would have been less amiable in my eyes had
there not been this little unwillingness but allow me to assure
you, that I have your respected mother's permission for this
address. You can hardly doubt the purport of my discourse,
however your natural delicacy may lead you to dissemble my
attentions have been too marked to be mistaken. Almost as soon
as I entered the house, I singled you out as the companion of
my future life. But before I am run away with by my feelings on
this subject, perhaps it would be advisable for me to state my
reasons for marryingand, moreover, for coming into Hertfordshire
with the design of selecting a wife, as I certainly did."
The idea of Mr. Collins, with all his solemn composure, being
run away with by his feelings, made Elizabeth so near laughing,
that she could not use the short pause he allowed in any attempt
to stop him further, and he continued
"My reasons for marrying are, first, that I think it a right
thing for every clergyman in easy circumstances like myself to
set the example of matrimony in his parish secondly, that I am
convinced that it will add very greatly to my happiness and
thirdlywhich perhaps I ought to have mentioned earlier, that
it is the particular advice and recommendation of the very noble
lady whom I have the honour of calling patroness. Twice has
she condescended to give me her opinion unasked too on this
subject and it was but the very Saturday night before I left
Hunsfordbetween our pools at quadrille, while Mrs. Jenkinson
was arranging Miss de Bourgh's footstool, that she said, 'Mr.
Collins, you must marry. A clergyman like you must marry.
Choose properly, choose a gentlewoman for my sake and for
your own, let her be an active, useful sort of person, not brought
up high, but able to make a small income go a good way. This is
my advice. Find such a woman as soon as you can, bring her to
Hunsford, and I will visit her.' Allow me, by the way, to
observe, my fair cousin, that I do not reckon the notice and
kindness of Lady Catherine de Bourgh as among the least of the
advantages in my power to offer. You will find her manners
beyond anything I can describe and your wit and vivacity, I
think, must be acceptable to her, especially when tempered with
the silence and respect which her rank will inevitably excite.
Thus much for my general intention in favour of matrimony
it remains to be told why my views were directed towards
Longbourn instead of my own neighbourhood, where I can
assure you there are many amiable young women. But the fact
is, that being, as I am, to inherit this estate after the death of
your honoured father who, however, may live many years
longer, I could not satisfy myself without resolving to choose a
wife from among his daughters, that the loss to them might be as
little as possible, when the melancholy event takes placewhich,
however, as I have already said, may not be for several years.
This has been my motive, my fair cousin, and I flatter myself it
will not sink me in your esteem. And now nothing remains
for me but to assure you in the most animated language of the
violence of my affection. To fortune I am perfectly indifferent,
and shall make no demand of that nature on your father, since I
am well aware that it could not be complied with and that one
thousand pounds in the four per cents, which will not be yours
till after your mother's decease, is all that you may ever be
entitled to. On that head, therefore, I shall be uniformly silent
and you may assure yourself that no ungenerous reproach shall
ever pass my lips when we are married."
It was absolutely necessary to interrupt him now.
"You are too hasty, sir," she cried. "You forget that I have
made no answer. Let me do it without further loss of time.
Accept my thanks for the compliment you are paying me. I am
very sensible of the honour of your proposals, but it is
impossible for me to do otherwise than to decline them."
"I am not now to learn," replied Mr. Collins, with a formal wave
of the hand, "that it is usual with young ladies to reject the
addresses of the man whom they secretly mean to accept, when
he first applies for their favour and that sometimes the refusal
is repeated a second, or even a third time. I am therefore by no
means discouraged by what you have just said, and shall hope to
lead you to the altar ere long."
"Upon my word, sir," cried Elizabeth, "your hope is a rather
extraordinary one after my declaration. I do assure you that I
am not one of those young ladies if such young ladies there are
who are so daring as to risk their happiness on the chance of
being asked a second time. I am perfectly serious in my refusal.
You could not make me happy, and I am convinced that I am
the last woman in the world who could make you so. Nay, were
your friend Lady Catherine to know me, I am persuaded she
would find me in every respect ill qualified for the situation."
"Were it certain that Lady Catherine would think so," said Mr.
Collins very gravely"but I cannot imagine that her ladyship
would at all disapprove of you. And you may be certain when I
have the honour of seeing her again, I shall speak in the very
highest terms of your modesty, economy, and other amiable
qualification."
"Indeed, Mr. Collins, all praise of me will be unnecessary.
You must give me leave to judge for myself, and pay me the
compliment of believing what I say. I wish you very happy and
very rich, and by refusing your hand, do all in my power to
prevent your being otherwise. In making me the offer, you must
have satisfied the delicacy of your feelings with regard to my
family, and may take possession of Longbourn estate whenever
it falls, without any selfreproach. This matter may be
considered, therefore, as finally settled." And rising as she
thus spoke, she would have quitted the room, had Mr. Collins
not thus addressed her
"When I do myself the honour of speaking to you next on the
subject, I shall hope to receive a more favourable answer than
you have now given me though I am far from accusing you of
cruelty at present, because I know it to be the established
custom of your sex to reject a man on the first application, and
perhaps you have even now said as much to encourage my suit
as would be consistent with the true delicacy of the female
character."
"Really, Mr. Collins," cried Elizabeth with some warmth, "you
puzzle me exceedingly. If what I have hitherto said can appear
to you in the form of encouragement, I know not how to express
my refusal in such a way as to convince you of its being one."
"You must give me leave to flatter myself, my dear cousin, that
your refusal of my addresses is merely words of course. My
reasons for believing it are briefly these It does not appear
to me that my hand is unworthy your acceptance, or that the
establishment I can offer would be any other than highly
desirable. My situation in life, my connections with the family
of de Bourgh, and my relationship to your own, are circumstances
highly in my favour and you should take it into further
consideration, that in spite of your manifold attractions, it is
by no means certain that another offer of marriage may ever be
made you. Your portion is unhappily so small that it will in
all likelihood undo the effects of your loveliness and amiable
qualifications. As I must therefore conclude that you are not
serious in your rejection of me, I shall choose to attribute it
to your wish of increasing my love by suspense, according to the
usual practice of elegant females."
"I do assure you, sir, that I have no pretensions whatever to that
kind of elegance which consists in tormenting a respectable man.
I would rather be paid the compliment of being believed sincere.
I thank you again and again for the honour you have done me in
your proposals, but to accept them is absolutely impossible. My
feelings in every respect forbid it. Can I speak plainer? Do not
consider me now as an elegant female, intending to plague you,
but as a rational creature, speaking the truth from her heart."
"You are uniformly charming" cried he, with an air of awkward
gallantry "and I am persuaded that when sanctioned by the
express authority of both your excellent parents, my proposals
will not fail of being acceptable."
To such perseverance in wilful selfdeception Elizabeth would
make no reply, and immediately and in silence withdrew
determined, if he persisted in considering her repeated
refusals as flattering encouragement, to apply to her father,
whose negative might be uttered in such a manner as to be
decisive, and whose behavior at least could not be mistaken
for the affectation and coquetry of an elegant female.
Chapter 
Mr. Collins was not left long to the silent contemplation of his
successful love for Mrs. Bennet, having dawdled about in the
vestibule to watch for the end of the conference, no sooner saw
Elizabeth open the door and with quick step pass her towards
the staircase, than she entered the breakfastroom, and
congratulated both him and herself in warm terms on the happy
prospect or their nearer connection. Mr. Collins received and
returned these felicitations with equal pleasure, and then
proceeded to relate the particulars of their interview, with the
result of which he trusted he had every reason to be satisfied,
since the refusal which his cousin had steadfastly given him
would naturally flow from her bashful modesty and the genuine
delicacy of her character.
This information, however, startled Mrs. Bennet she would
have been glad to be equally satisfied that her daughter had
meant to encourage him by protesting against his proposals,
but she dared not believe it, and could not help saying so.
"But, depend upon it, Mr. Collins," she added, "that Lizzy shall
be brought to reason. I will speak to her about it directly.
She is a very headstrong, foolish girl, and does not know her
own interest but I will make her know it."
"Pardon me for interrupting you, madam," cried Mr. Collins
"but if she is really headstrong and foolish, I know not whether
she would altogether be a very desirable wife to a man in my
situation, who naturally looks for happiness in the marriage
state. If therefore she actually persists in rejecting my suit,
perhaps it were better not to force her into accepting me,
because if liable to such defects of temper, she could not
contribute much to my felicity."
"Sir, you quite misunderstand me," said Mrs. Bennet, alarmed.
"Lizzy is only headstrong in such matters as these. In everything
else she is as goodnatured a girl as ever lived. I will go
directly to Mr. Bennet, and we shall very soon settle it with her,
I am sure."
She would not give him time to reply, but hurrying instantly to
her husband, called out as she entered the library, "Oh Mr.
Bennet, you are wanted immediately we are all in an uproar.
You must come and make Lizzy marry Mr. Collins, for she vows
she will not have him, and if you do not make haste he will
change his mind and not have her."
Mr. Bennet raised his eyes from his book as she entered, and
fixed them on her face with a calm unconcern which was not in
the least altered by her communication.
"I have not the pleasure of understanding you," said he, when
she had finished her speech. "Of what are you talking?"
"Of Mr. Collins and Lizzy. Lizzy declares she will not have
Mr. Collins, and Mr. Collins begins to say that he will not
have Lizzy."
"And what am I to do on the occasion? It seems an hopeless
business."
"Speak to Lizzy about it yourself. Tell her that you insist upon
her marrying him."
"Let her be called down. She shall hear my opinion."
Mrs. Bennet rang the bell, and Miss Elizabeth was summoned to
the library.
"Come here, child," cried her father as she appeared. "I have
sent for you on an affair of importance. I understand that Mr.
Collins has made you an offer of marriage. Is it true?" Elizabeth
replied that it was. "Very welland this offer of marriage you
have refused?"
"I have, sir."
"Very well. We now come to the point. Your mother insists
upon your accepting it. Is it not so, Mrs. Bennet?"
"Yes, or I will never see her again."
"An unhappy alternative is before you, Elizabeth. From this day
you must be a stranger to one of your parents. Your mother will
never see you again if you do not marry Mr. Collins, and I will
never see you again if you do."
Elizabeth could not but smile at such a conclusion of such a
beginning, but Mrs. Bennet, who had persuaded herself that her
husband regarded the affair as she wished, was excessively
disappointed.
"What do you mean, Mr. Bennet, in talking this way? You
promised me to insist upon her marrying him."
"My dear," replied her husband, "I have two small favours to
request. First, that you will allow me the free use of my
understanding on the present occasion and secondly, of my
room. I shall be glad to have the library to myself as soon as
may be."
Not yet, however, in spite of her disappointment in her husband,
did Mrs. Bennet give up the point. She talked to Elizabeth again
and again coaxed and threatened her by turns. She endeavoured
to secure Jane in her interest but Jane, with all possible
mildness, declined interfering and Elizabeth, sometimes with
real earnestness, and sometimes with playful gaiety, replied to
her attacks. Though her manner varied, however, her determination
never did.
Mr. Collins, meanwhile, was meditating in solitude on what had
passed. He thought too well of himself to comprehend on what
motives his cousin could refuse him and though his pride was
hurt, he suffered in no other way. His regard for her was quite
imaginary and the possibility of her deserving her mother's
reproach prevented his feeling any regret.
While the family were in this confusion, Charlotte Lucas came to
spend the day with them. She was met in the vestibule by Lydia,
who, flying to her, cried in a half whisper, "I am glad you are
come, for there is such fun here What do you think has
happened this morning? Mr. Collins has made an offer to Lizzy,
and she will not have him."
Charlotte hardly had time to answer, before they were joined by
Kitty, who came to tell the same news and no sooner had they
entered the breakfastroom, where Mrs. Bennet was alone, than
she likewise began on the subject, calling on Miss Lucas for her
compassion, and entreating her to persuade her friend Lizzy to
comply with the wishes of all her family. "Pray do, my dear
Miss Lucas," she added in a melancholy tone, "for nobody is on
my side, nobody takes part with me. I am cruelly used, nobody
feels for my poor nerves."
Charlotte's reply was spared by the entrance of Jane and
Elizabeth.
"Aye, there she comes," continued Mrs. Bennet, "looking as
unconcerned as may be, and caring no more for us than if we
were at York, provided she can have her own way. But I tell
you, Miss Lizzyif you take it into your head to go on refusing
every offer of marriage in this way, you will never get a husband
at alland I am sure I do not know who is to maintain you
when your father is dead. I shall not be able to keep youand
so I warn you. I have done with you from this very day. I told
you in the library, you know, that I should never speak to you
again, and you will find me as good as my word. I have no
pleasure in talking to undutiful children. Not that I have much
pleasure, indeed, in talking to anybody. People who suffer as
I do from nervous complaints can have no great inclination for
talking. Nobody can tell what I suffer But it is always so.
Those who do not complain are never pitied."
Her daughters listened in silence to this effusion, sensible
that any attempt to reason with her or soothe her would only
increase the irritation. She talked on, therefore, without
interruption from any of them, till they were joined by Mr.
Collins, who entered the room with an air more stately than
usual, and on perceiving whom, she said to the girls, "Now, I do
insist upon it, that you, all of you, hold your tongues, and
let me and Mr. Collins have a little conversation together."
Elizabeth passed quietly out of the room, Jane and Kitty
followed, but Lydia stood her ground, determined to hear all she
could and Charlotte, detained first by the civility of Mr. Collins,
whose inquiries after herself and all her family were very minute,
and then by a little curiosity, satisfied herself with walking to
the window and pretending not to hear. In a doleful voice Mrs.
Bennet began the projected conversation "Oh Mr. Collins"
"My dear madam," replied he, "let us be for ever silent on this
point. Far be it from me," he presently continued, in a voice that
marked his displeasure, "to resent the behaviour of your daughter.
Resignation to inevitable evils is the evil duty of us all the
peculiar duty of a young man who has been so fortunate as I
have been in early preferment and I trust I am resigned.
Perhaps not the less so from feeling a doubt of my positive
happiness had my fair cousin honoured me with her hand for I
have often observed that resignation is never so perfect as when
the blessing denied begins to lose somewhat of its value in our
estimation. You will not, I hope, consider me as showing any
disrespect to your family, my dear madam, by thus withdrawing
my pretensions to your daughter's favour, without having paid
yourself and Mr. Bennet the compliment of requesting you to
interpose your authority in my behalf. My conduct may, I fear,
be objectionable in having accepted my dismission from your
daughter's lips instead of your own. But we are all liable to
error. I have certainly meant well through the whole affair. My
object has been to secure an amiable companion for myself, with
due consideration for the advantage of all your family, and if
my manner has been at all reprehensible, I here beg leave to
apologise."
Chapter 
The discussion of Mr. Collins's offer was now nearly at an end,
and Elizabeth had only to suffer from the uncomfortable feelings
necessarily attending it, and occasionally from some peevish
allusions of her mother. As for the gentleman himself, his
feelings were chiefly expressed, not by embarrassment or
dejection, or by trying to avoid her, but by stiffness of manner
and resentful silence. He scarcely ever spoke to her, and the
assiduous attentions which he had been so sensible of himself
were transferred for the rest of the day to Miss Lucas, whose
civility in listening to him was a seasonable relief to them all,
and especially to her friend.
The morrow produced no abatement of Mrs. Bennet's illhumour
or ill health. Mr. Collins was also in the same state of angry
pride. Elizabeth had hoped that his resentment might shorten his
visit, but his plan did not appear in the least affected by it.
He was always to have gone on Saturday, and to Saturday he meant
to stay.
After breakfast, the girls walked to Meryton to inquire if Mr.
Wickham were returned, and to lament over his absence from
the Netherfield ball. He joined them on their entering the town,
and attended them to their aunt's where his regret and vexation,
and the concern of everybody, was well talked over. To
Elizabeth, however, he voluntarily acknowledged that the
necessity of his absence had been selfimposed.
"I found," said he, "as the time drew near that I had better not
meet Mr. Darcy that to be in the same room, the same party
with him for so many hours together, might be more than I could
bear, and that scenes might arise unpleasant to more than
myself."
She highly approved his forbearance, and they had leisure for a
full discussion of it, and for all the commendation which they
civilly bestowed on each other, as Wickham and another officer
walked back with them to Longbourn, and during the walk he
particularly attended to her. His accompanying them was a
double advantage she felt all the compliment it offered to
herself, and it was most acceptable as an occasion of introducing
him to her father and mother.
Soon after their return, a letter was delivered to Miss Bennet
it came from Netherfield. The envelope contained a sheet of
elegant, little, hotpressed paper, well covered with a lady's fair,
flowing hand and Elizabeth saw her sister's countenance change
as she read it, and saw her dwelling intently on some particular
passages. Jane recollected herself soon, and putting the letter
away, tried to join with her usual cheerfulness in the general
conversation but Elizabeth felt an anxiety on the subject which
drew off her attention even from Wickham and no sooner had
he and his companion taken leave, than a glance from Jane
invited her to follow her upstairs. When they had gained their
own room, Jane, taking out the letter, said
"This is from Caroline Bingley what it contains has surprised me
a good deal. The whole party have left Netherfield by this time,
and are on their way to townand without any intention of coming
back again. You shall hear what she says."
She then read the first sentence aloud, which comprised the
information of their having just resolved to follow their brother
to town directly, and of their meaning to dine in Grosvenor
Street, where Mr. Hurst had a house. The next was in these
words "I do not pretend to regret anything I shall leave in
Hertfordshire, except your society, my dearest friend but we
will hope, at some future period, to enjoy many returns of that
delightful intercourse we have known, and in the meanwhile may
lessen the pain of separation by a very frequent and most
unreserved correspondence. I depend on you for that." To
these highflown expressions Elizabeth listened with all the
insensibility of distrust and though the suddenness of their
removal surprised her, she saw nothing in it really to lament
it was not to be supposed that their absence from Netherfield
would prevent Mr. Bingley's being there and as to the loss of
their society, she was persuaded that Jane must cease to regard
it, in the enjoyment of his.
"It is unlucky," said she, after a short pause, "that you should
not be able to see your friends before they leave the country.
But may we not hope that the period of future happiness to
which Miss Bingley looks forward may arrive earlier than she is
aware, and that the delightful intercourse you have known as
friends will be renewed with yet greater satisfaction as sisters?
Mr. Bingley will not be detained in London by them."
"Caroline decidedly says that none of the party will return into
Hertfordshire this winter. I will read it to you"
"When my brother left us yesterday, he imagined that the
business which took him to London might be concluded in three
or four days but as we are certain it cannot be so, and at the
same time convinced that when Charles gets to town he will be
in no hurry to leave it again, we have determined on following
him thither, that he may not be obliged to spend his vacant hours
in a comfortless hotel. Many of my acquaintances are already
there for the winter I wish that I could hear that you, my dearest
friend, had any intention of making one of the crowdbut of
that I despair. I sincerely hope your Christmas in Hertfordshire
may abound in the gaieties which that season generally brings,
and that your beaux will be so numerous as to prevent your
feeling the loss of the three of whom we shall deprive you."
"It is evident by this," added Jane, "that he comes back no more
this winter."
"It is only evident that Miss Bingley does not mean that he
should."
"Why will you think so? It must be his own doing. He is his
own master. But you do not know all. I will read you the
passage which particularly hurts me. I will have no reserves
from you."
"Mr. Darcy is impatient to see his sister and, to confess the
truth, we are scarcely less eager to meet her again. I really do
not think Georgiana Darcy has her equal for beauty, elegance,
and accomplishments and the affection she inspires in Louisa
and myself is heightened into something still more interesting,
from the hope we dare entertain of her being hereafter our
sister. I do not know whether I ever before mentioned to you
my feelings on this subject but I will not leave the country
without confiding them, and I trust you will not esteem them
unreasonable. My brother admires her greatly already he will
have frequent opportunity now of seeing her on the most
intimate footing her relations all wish the connection as much as
his own and a sister's partiality is not misleading me, I think,
when I call Charles most capable of engaging any woman's
heart. With all these circumstances to favour an attachment, and
nothing to prevent it, am I wrong, my dearest Jane, in indulging
the hope of an event which will secure the happiness of so many?"
"What do you think of this sentence, my dear Lizzy?" said
Jane as she finished it. "Is it not clear enough? Does it not
expressly declare that Caroline neither expects nor wishes me to
be her sister that she is perfectly convinced of her brother's
indifference and that if she suspects the nature of my feelings
for him, she means most kindly to put me on my guard? Can
there be any other opinion on the subject?"
"Yes, there can for mine is totally different. Will you hear it?"
"Most willingly."
"You shall have it in a few words. Miss Bingley sees that her
brother is in love with you, and wants him to marry Miss Darcy.
She follows him to town in hope of keeping him there, and tries
to persuade you that he does not care about you."
Jane shook her head.
"Indeed, Jane, you ought to believe me. No one who has ever
seen you together can doubt his affection. Miss Bingley, I am
sure, cannot. She is not such a simpleton. Could she have seen
half as much love in Mr. Darcy for herself, she would have
ordered her wedding clothes. But the case is this We are not
rich enough or grand enough for them and she is the more
anxious to get Miss Darcy for her brother, from the notion that
when there has been one intermarriage, she may have less
trouble in achieving a second in which there is certainly some
ingenuity, and I dare say it would succeed, if Miss de Bourgh
were out of the way. But, my dearest Jane, you cannot seriously
imagine that because Miss Bingley tells you her brother greatly
admires Miss Darcy, he is in the smallest degree less sensible
of your merit than when he took leave of you on Tuesday, or
that it will be in her power to persuade him that, instead of
being in love with you, he is very much in love with her friend."
"If we thought alike of Miss Bingley," replied Jane, "your
representation of all this might make me quite easy. But I know
the foundation is unjust. Caroline is incapable of wilfully
deceiving anyone and all that I can hope in this case is that
she is deceiving herself."
"That is right. You could not have started a more happy idea,
since you will not take comfort in mine. Believe her to be
deceived, by all means. You have now done your duty by her,
and must fret no longer."
"But, my dear sister, can I be happy, even supposing the best, in
accepting a man whose sisters and friends are all wishing him to
marry elsewhere?"
"You must decide for yourself," said Elizabeth "and if, upon
mature deliberation, you find that the misery of disobliging his
two sisters is more than equivalent to the happiness of being his
wife, I advise you by all means to refuse him."
"How can you talk so?" said Jane, faintly smiling. "You must
know that though I should be exceedingly grieved at their
disapprobation, I could not hesitate."
"I did not think you would and that being the case, I cannot
consider your situation with much compassion."
"But if he returns no more this winter, my choice will never be
required. A thousand things may arise in six months"
The idea of his returning no more Elizabeth treated with the
utmost contempt. It appeared to her merely the suggestion of
Caroline's interested wishes, and she could not for a moment
suppose that those wishes, however openly or artfully spoken,
could influence a young man so totally independent of everyone.
She represented to her sister as forcibly as possible what she
felt on the subject, and had soon the pleasure of seeing its
happy effect. Jane's temper was not desponding, and she was
gradually led to hope, though the diffidence of affection
sometimes overcame the hope, that Bingley would return to
Netherfield and answer every wish of her heart.
They agreed that Mrs. Bennet should only hear of the departure
of the family, without being alarmed on the score of the
gentleman's conduct but even this partial communication gave
her a great deal of concern, and she bewailed it as exceedingly
unlucky that the ladies should happen to go away just as they
were all getting so intimate together. After lamenting it,
however, at some length, she had the consolation that Mr.
Bingley would be soon down again and soon dining at Longbourn,
and the conclusion of all was the comfortable declaration,
that though he had been invited only to a family dinner, she
would take care to have two full courses.
Chapter 
The Bennets were engaged to dine with the Lucases and again
during the chief of the day was Miss Lucas so kind as to listen
to Mr. Collins. Elizabeth took an opportunity of thanking her.
"It keeps him in good humour," said she, "and I am more obliged
to you than I can express." Charlotte assured her friend of
her satisfaction in being useful, and that it amply repaid her
for the little sacrifice of her time. This was very amiable,
but Charlotte's kindness extended farther than Elizabeth had
any conception of its object was nothing else than to secure
her from any return of Mr. Collins's addresses, by engaging
them towards herself. Such was Miss Lucas's scheme and
appearances were so favourable, that when they parted at night,
she would have felt almost secure of success if he had not been
to leave Hertfordshire so very soon. But here she did injustice
to the fire and independence of his character, for it led
him to escape out of Longbourn House the next morning with
admirable slyness, and hasten to Lucas Lodge to throw himself
at her feet. He was anxious to avoid the notice of his cousins,
from a conviction that if they saw him depart, they could not
fail to conjecture his design, and he was not willing to have
the attempt known till its success might be known likewise for
though feeling almost secure, and with reason, for Charlotte had
been tolerably encouraging, he was comparatively diffident since
the adventure of Wednesday. His reception, however, was of
the most flattering kind. Miss Lucas perceived him from an
upper window as he walked towards the house, and instantly set
out to meet him accidentally in the lane. But little had she
dared to hope that so much love and eloquence awaited her there.
In as short a time as Mr. Collins's long speeches would allow,
everything was settled between them to the satisfaction of both
and as they entered the house he earnestly entreated her to name
the day that was to make him the happiest of men and though
such a solicitation must be waived for the present, the lady felt
no inclination to trifle with his happiness. The stupidity with
which he was favoured by nature must guard his courtship from
any charm that could make a woman wish for its continuance
and Miss Lucas, who accepted him solely from the pure and
disinterested desire of an establishment, cared not how soon
that establishment were gained.
Sir William and Lady Lucas were speedily applied to for their
consent and it was bestowed with a most joyful alacrity. Mr.
Collins's present circumstances made it a most eligible match for
their daughter, to whom they could give little fortune and his
prospects of future wealth were exceedingly fair. Lady Lucas
began directly to calculate, with more interest than the
matter had ever excited before, how many years longer Mr.
Bennet was likely to live and Sir William gave it as his decided
opinion, that whenever Mr. Collins should be in possession of the
Longbourn estate, it would be highly expedient that both he and
his wife should make their appearance at St. James's. The whole
family, in short, were properly overjoyed on the occasion.
The younger girls formed hopes of coming out a year or two
sooner than they might otherwise have done and the boys were
relieved from their apprehension of Charlotte's dying an old
maid. Charlotte herself was tolerably composed. She had
gained her point, and had time to consider of it. Her reflections
were in general satisfactory. Mr. Collins, to be sure, was
neither sensible nor agreeable his society was irksome, and his
attachment to her must be imaginary. But still he would be her
husband. Without thinking highly either of men or matrimony,
marriage had always been her object it was the only provision
for welleducated young women of small fortune, and however
uncertain of giving happiness, must be their pleasantest
preservative from want. This preservative she had now
obtained and at the age of twentyseven, without having ever
been handsome, she felt all the good luck of it. The least
agreeable circumstance in the business was the surprise it must
occasion to Elizabeth Bennet, whose friendship she valued
beyond that of any other person. Elizabeth would wonder, and
probably would blame her and though her resolution was not to
be shaken, her feelings must be hurt by such a disapprobation.
She resolved to give her the information herself, and therefore
charged Mr. Collins, when he returned to Longbourn to dinner,
to drop no hint of what had passed before any of the family. A
promise of secrecy was of course very dutifully given, but it
could not be kept without difficulty for the curiosity excited
by his long absence burst forth in such very direct questions on
his return as required some ingenuity to evade, and he was at the
same time exercising great selfdenial, for he was longing to
publish his prosperous love.
As he was to begin his journey too early on the morrow to see
any of the family, the ceremony of leavetaking was performed
when the ladies moved for the night and Mrs. Bennet, with
great politeness and cordiality, said how happy they should be
to see him at Longbourn again, whenever his engagements might
allow him to visit them.
"My dear madam," he replied, "this invitation is particularly
gratifying, because it is what I have been hoping to receive and
you may be very certain that I shall avail myself of it as soon
as possible."
They were all astonished and Mr. Bennet, who could by no
means wish for so speedy a return, immediately said
"But is there not danger of Lady Catherine's disapprobation
here, my good sir? You had better neglect your relations than
run the risk of offending your patroness."
"My dear sir," replied Mr. Collins, "I am particularly obliged
to you for this friendly caution, and you may depend upon my not
taking so material a step without her ladyship's concurrence."
"You cannot be too much upon your guard. Risk anything
rather than her displeasure and if you find it likely to be raised
by your coming to us again, which I should think exceedingly
probable, stay quietly at home, and be satisfied that we shall
take no offence."
"Believe me, my dear sir, my gratitude is warmly excited by
such affectionate attention and depend upon it, you will speedily
receive from me a letter of thanks for this, and for every other
mark of your regard during my stay in Hertfordshire. As for my
fair cousins, though my absence may not be long enough to
render it necessary, I shall now take the liberty of wishing them
health and happiness, not excepting my cousin Elizabeth."
With proper civilities the ladies then withdrew all of them
equally surprised that he meditated a quick return. Mrs. Bennet
wished to understand by it that he thought of paying his
addresses to one of her younger girls, and Mary might have been
prevailed on to accept him. She rated his abilities much higher
than any of the others there was a solidity in his reflections
which often struck her, and though by no means so clever as
herself, she thought that if encouraged to read and improve
himself by such an example as hers, he might become a very
agreeable companion. But on the following morning, every
hope of this kind was done away. Miss Lucas called soon after
breakfast, and in a private conference with Elizabeth related the
event of the day before.
The possibility of Mr. Collins's fancying himself in love with her
friend had once occurred to Elizabeth within the last day or two
but that Charlotte could encourage him seemed almost as far
from possibility as she could encourage him herself, and her
astonishment was consequently so great as to overcome at first
the bounds of decorum, and she could not help crying out
"Engaged to Mr. Collins My dear Charlotteimpossible"
The steady countenance which Miss Lucas had commanded in
telling her story, gave way to a momentary confusion here on
receiving so direct a reproach though, as it was no more than
she expected, she soon regained her composure, and calmly
replied
"Why should you be surprised, my dear Eliza? Do you think it
incredible that Mr. Collins should be able to procure any
woman's good opinion, because he was not so happy as to
succeed with you?"
But Elizabeth had now recollected herself, and making a strong
effort for it, was able to assure with tolerable firmness that the
prospect of their relationship was highly grateful to her, and
that she wished her all imaginable happiness.
"I see what you are feeling," replied Charlotte. "You must be
surprised, very much surprisedso lately as Mr. Collins was
wishing to marry you. But when you have had time to think it
over, I hope you will be satisfied with what I have done. I am
not romantic, you know I never was. I ask only a comfortable
home and considering Mr. Collins's character, connection, and
situation in life, I am convinced that my chance of happiness
with him is as fair as most people can boast on entering the
marriage state."
Elizabeth quietly answered "Undoubtedly" and after an
awkward pause, they returned to the rest of the family.
Charlotte did not stay much longer, and Elizabeth was then left
to reflect on what she had heard. It was a long time before she
became at all reconciled to the idea of so unsuitable a match.
The strangeness of Mr. Collins's making two offers of marriage
within three days was nothing in comparison of his being now
accepted. She had always felt that Charlotte's opinion of
matrimony was not exactly like her own, but she had not
supposed it to be possible that, when called into action, she
would have sacrificed every better feeling to worldly advantage.
Charlotte the wife of Mr. Collins was a most humiliating picture
And to the pang of a friend disgracing herself and sunk in her
esteem, was added the distressing conviction that it was
impossible for that friend to be tolerably happy in the lot
she had chosen.
Chapter 
Elizabeth was sitting with her mother and sisters, reflecting on
what she had heard, and doubting whether she was authorised to
mention it, when Sir William Lucas himself appeared, sent by his
daughter, to announce her engagement to the family. With many
compliments to them, and much selfgratulation on the prospect
of a connection between the houses, he unfolded the matterto
an audience not merely wondering, but incredulous for Mrs.
Bennet, with more perseverance than politeness, protested he
must be entirely mistaken and Lydia, always unguarded and
often uncivil, boisterously exclaimed
"Good Lord Sir William, how can you tell such a story? Do not
you know that Mr. Collins wants to marry Lizzy?"
Nothing less than the complaisance of a courtier could have
borne without anger such treatment but Sir William's good
breeding carried him through it all and though he begged leave
to be positive as to the truth of his information, he listened
to all their impertinence with the most forbearing courtesy.
Elizabeth, feeling it incumbent on her to relieve him from so
unpleasant a situation, now put herself forward to confirm his
account, by mentioning her prior knowledge of it from Charlotte
herself and endeavoured to put a stop to the exclamations of her
mother and sisters by the earnestness of her congratulations to
Sir William, in which she was readily joined by Jane, and by
making a variety of remarks on the happiness that might be
expected from the match, the excellent character of Mr. Collins,
and the convenient distance of Hunsford from London.
Mrs. Bennet was in fact too much overpowered to say a great
deal while Sir William remained but no sooner had he left them
than her feelings found a rapid vent. In the first place, she
persisted in disbelieving the whole of the matter secondly, she
was very sure that Mr. Collins had been taken in thirdly, she
trusted that they would never be happy together and fourthly,
that the match might be broken off. Two inferences, however,
were plainly deduced from the whole one, that Elizabeth was
the real cause of the mischief and the other that she herself had
been barbarously misused by them all and on these two points
she principally dwelt during the rest of the day. Nothing could
console and nothing could appease her. Nor did that day wear
out her resentment. A week elapsed before she could see
Elizabeth without scolding her, a month passed away before she
could speak to Sir William or Lady Lucas without being rude,
and many months were gone before she could at all forgive their
daughter.
Mr. Bennet's emotions were much more tranquil on the occasion,
and such as he did experience he pronounced to be of a most
agreeable sort for it gratified him, he said, to discover that
Charlotte Lucas, whom he had been used to think tolerably
sensible, was as foolish as his wife, and more foolish than his
daughter
Jane confessed herself a little surprised at the match but she
said less of her astonishment than of her earnest desire for their
happiness nor could Elizabeth persuade her to consider it as
improbable. Kitty and Lydia were far from envying Miss Lucas,
for Mr. Collins was only a clergyman and it affected them in no
other way than as a piece of news to spread at Meryton.
Lady Lucas could not be insensible of triumph on being able to
retort on Mrs. Bennet the comfort of having a daughter well
married and she called at Longbourn rather oftener than usual
to say how happy she was, though Mrs. Bennet's sour looks and
illnatured remarks might have been enough to drive happiness
away.
Between Elizabeth and Charlotte there was a restraint which
kept them mutually silent on the subject and Elizabeth felt
persuaded that no real confidence could ever subsist between
them again. Her disappointment in Charlotte made her turn with
fonder regard to her sister, of whose rectitude and delicacy
she was sure her opinion could never be shaken, and for whose
happiness she grew daily more anxious, as Bingley had now been
gone a week and nothing more was heard of his return.
Jane had sent Caroline an early answer to her letter, and was
counting the days till she might reasonably hope to hear again.
The promised letter of thanks from Mr. Collins arrived on
Tuesday, addressed to their father, and written with all the
solemnity of gratitude which a twelvemonth's abode in the
family might have prompted. After discharging his conscience
on that head, he proceeded to inform them, with many rapturous
expressions, of his happiness in having obtained the affection of
their amiable neighbour, Miss Lucas, and then explained that it
was merely with the view of enjoying her society that he had
been so ready to close with their kind wish of seeing him again
at Longbourn, whither he hoped to be able to return on Monday
fortnight for Lady Catherine, he added, so heartily approved
his marriage, that she wished it to take place as soon as possible,
which he trusted would be an unanswerable argument with his
amiable Charlotte to name an early day for making him the
happiest of men.
Mr. Collins's return into Hertfordshire was no longer a matter
of pleasure to Mrs. Bennet. On the contrary, she was as much
disposed to complain of it as her husband. It was very strange
that he should come to Longbourn instead of to Lucas Lodge it
was also very inconvenient and exceedingly troublesome. She
hated having visitors in the house while her health was so
indifferent, and lovers were of all people the most disagreeable.
Such were the gentle murmurs of Mrs. Bennet, and they gave way
only to the greater distress of Mr. Bingley's continued absence.
Neither Jane nor Elizabeth were comfortable on this subject.
Day after day passed away without bringing any other tidings of
him than the report which shortly prevailed in Meryton of his
coming no more to Netherfield the whole winter a report which
highly incensed Mrs. Bennet, and which she never failed to
contradict as a most scandalous falsehood.
Even Elizabeth began to fearnot that Bingley was indifferentbut
that his sisters would be successful in keeping him away.
Unwilling as she was to admit an idea so destructive of Jane's
happiness, and so dishonorable to the stability of her lover, she
could not prevent its frequently occurring. The united efforts of
his two unfeeling sisters and of his overpowering friend, assisted
by the attractions of Miss Darcy and the amusements of London
might be too much, she feared, for the strength of his attachment.
As for Jane, her anxiety under this suspense was, of course,
more painful than Elizabeth's, but whatever she felt she was
desirous of concealing, and between herself and Elizabeth,
therefore, the subject was never alluded to. But as no such
delicacy restrained her mother, an hour seldom passed in which
she did not talk of Bingley, express her impatience for his arrival,
or even require Jane to confess that if he did not come back she
would think herself very ill used. It needed all Jane's steady
mildness to bear these attacks with tolerable tranquillity.
Mr. Collins returned most punctually on Monday fortnight, but
his reception at Longbourn was not quite so gracious as it had
been on his first introduction. He was too happy, however, to
need much attention and luckily for the others, the business
of lovemaking relieved them from a great deal of his company.
The chief of every day was spent by him at Lucas Lodge, and he
sometimes returned to Longbourn only in time to make an
apology for his absence before the family went to bed.
Mrs. Bennet was really in a most pitiable state. The very
mention of anything concerning the match threw her into an
agony of illhumour, and wherever she went she was sure of
hearing it talked of. The sight of Miss Lucas was odious to
her. As her successor in that house, she regarded her with
jealous abhorrence. Whenever Charlotte came to see them,
she concluded her to be anticipating the hour of possession
and whenever she spoke in a low voice to Mr. Collins, was
convinced that they were talking of the Longbourn estate, and
resolving to turn herself and her daughters out of the house,
as soon as Mr. Bennet were dead. She complained bitterly of
all this to her husband.
"Indeed, Mr. Bennet," said she, "it is very hard to think that
Charlotte Lucas should ever be mistress of this house, that I
should be forced to make way for her, and live to see her take
her place in it"
"My dear, do not give way to such gloomy thoughts. Let us
hope for better things. Let us flatter ourselves that I may be
the survivor."
This was not very consoling to Mrs. Bennet, and therefore, instead
of making any answer, she went on as before.
"I cannot bear to think that they should have all this estate.
If it was not for the entail, I should not mind it."
"What should not you mind?"
"I should not mind anything at all."
"Let us be thankful that you are preserved from a state of such
insensibility."
"I never can be thankful, Mr. Bennet, for anything about the
entail. How anyone could have the conscience to entail away an
estate from one's own daughters, I cannot understand and all
for the sake of Mr. Collins too Why should he have it more
than anybody else?"
"I leave it to yourself to determine," said Mr. Bennet.
Chapter 
Miss Bingley's letter arrived, and put an end to doubt. The very
first sentence conveyed the assurance of their being all settled
in London for the winter, and concluded with her brother's regret
at not having had time to pay his respects to his friends in
Hertfordshire before he left the country.
Hope was over, entirely over and when Jane could attend to the
rest of the letter, she found little, except the professed affection
of the writer, that could give her any comfort. Miss Darcy's
praise occupied the chief of it. Her many attractions were again
dwelt on, and Caroline boasted joyfully of their increasing
intimacy, and ventured to predict the accomplishment of the
wishes which had been unfolded in her former letter. She wrote
also with great pleasure of her brother's being an inmate of Mr.
Darcy's house, and mentioned with raptures some plans of the
latter with regard to new furniture.
Elizabeth, to whom Jane very soon communicated the chief of
all this, heard it in silent indignation. Her heart was divided
between concern for her sister, and resentment against all others.
To Caroline's assertion of her brother's being partial to Miss
Darcy she paid no credit. That he was really fond of Jane, she
doubted no more than she had ever done and much as she had
always been disposed to like him, she could not think without
anger, hardly without contempt, on that easiness of temper, that
want of proper resolution, which now made him the slave of his
designing friends, and led him to sacrifice of his own happiness
to the caprice of their inclination. Had his own happiness,
however, been the only sacrifice, he might have been allowed to
sport with it in whatever manner he thought best, but her sister's
was involved in it, as she thought he must be sensible himself.
It was a subject, in short, on which reflection would be long
indulged, and must be unavailing. She could think of nothing
else and yet whether Bingley's regard had really died away, or
were suppressed by his friends' interference whether he had
been aware of Jane's attachment, or whether it had escaped his
observation whatever were the case, though her opinion of him
must be materially affected by the difference, her sister's
situation remained the same, her peace equally wounded.
A day or two passed before Jane had courage to speak of her
feelings to Elizabeth but at last, on Mrs. Bennet's leaving them
together, after a longer irritation than usual about Netherfield
and its master, she could not help saying
"Oh, that my dear mother had more command over herself She
can have no idea of the pain she gives me by her continual
reflections on him. But I will not repine. It cannot last long.
He will be forgot, and we shall all be as we were before."
Elizabeth looked at her sister with incredulous solicitude, but
said nothing.
"You doubt me," cried Jane, slightly colouring "indeed, you
have no reason. He may live in my memory as the most amiable
man of my acquaintance, but that is all. I have nothing either
to hope or fear, and nothing to reproach him with. Thank God I
have not that pain. A little time, thereforeI shall certainly
try to get the better."
With a stronger voice she soon added, "I have this comfort
immediately, that it has not been more than an error of fancy on
my side, and that it has done no harm to anyone but myself."
"My dear Jane" exclaimed Elizabeth, "you are too good. Your
sweetness and disinterestedness are really angelic I do not know
what to say to you. I feel as if I had never done you justice, or
loved you as you deserve."
Miss Bennet eagerly disclaimed all extraordinary merit, and
threw back the praise on her sister's warm affection.
"Nay," said Elizabeth, "this is not fair. You wish to think all
the world respectable, and are hurt if I speak ill of anybody. I
only want to think you perfect, and you set yourself against it.
Do not be afraid of my running into any excess, of my encroaching
on your privilege of universal goodwill. You need not. There
are few people whom I really love, and still fewer of whom I think
well. The more I see of the world, the more am I dissatisfied
with it and every day confirms my belief of the inconsistency of
all human characters, and of the little dependence that can be
placed on the appearance of merit or sense. I have met with two
instances lately, one I will not mention the other is Charlotte's
marriage. It is unaccountable In every view it is unaccountable"
"My dear Lizzy, do not give way to such feelings as these. They
will ruin your happiness. You do not make allowance enough
for difference of situation and temper. Consider Mr. Collins's
respectability, and Charlotte's steady, prudent character.
Remember that she is one of a large family that as to fortune,
it is a most eligible match and be ready to believe, for
everybody's sake, that she may feel something like regard and
esteem for our cousin."
"To oblige you, I would try to believe almost anything, but no
one else could be benefited by such a belief as this for were I
persuaded that Charlotte had any regard for him, I should only
think worse of her understanding than I now do of her heart.
My dear Jane, Mr. Collins is a conceited, pompous, narrowminded,
silly man you know he is, as well as I do and you must feel,
as well as I do, that the woman who married him cannot have a
proper way of thinking. You shall not defend her, though it is
Charlotte Lucas. You shall not, for the sake of one individual,
change the meaning of principle and integrity, nor endeavour to
persuade yourself or me, that selfishness is prudence, and
insensibility of danger security for happiness."
"I must think your language too strong in speaking of both,"
replied Jane "and I hope you will be convinced of it by seeing
them happy together. But enough of this. You alluded to
something else. You mentioned two instances. I cannot
misunderstand you, but I entreat you, dear Lizzy, not to pain
me by thinking that person to blame, and saying your opinion
of him is sunk. We must not be so ready to fancy ourselves
intentionally injured. We must not expect a lively young man to
be always so guarded and circumspect. It is very often nothing
but our own vanity that deceives us. Women fancy admiration
means more than it does."
"And men take care that they should."
"If it is designedly done, they cannot be justified but I have no
idea of there being so much design in the world as some persons
imagine."
"I am far from attributing any part of Mr. Bingley's conduct to
design," said Elizabeth "but without scheming to do wrong, or
to make others unhappy, there may be error, and there may be
misery. Thoughtlessness, want of attention to other people's
feelings, and want of resolution, will do the business."
"And do you impute it to either of those?"
"Yes to the last. But if I go on, I shall displease you by saying
what I think of persons you esteem. Stop me whilst you can."
"You persist, then, in supposing his sisters influence him?"
"Yes, in conjunction with his friend."
"I cannot believe it. Why should they try to influence him?
They can only wish his happiness and if he is attached to me,
no other woman can secure it."
"Your first position is false. They may wish many things besides
his happiness they may wish his increase of wealth and
consequence they may wish him to marry a girl who has all the
importance of money, great connections, and pride."
"Beyond a doubt, they do wish him to choose Miss Darcy,"
replied Jane "but this may be from better feelings than you are
supposing. They have known her much longer than they have
known me no wonder if they love her better. But, whatever
may be their own wishes, it is very unlikely they should have
opposed their brother's. What sister would think herself at
liberty to do it, unless there were something very objectionable?
If they believed him attached to me, they would not try to part
us if he were so, they could not succeed. By supposing such
an affection, you make everybody acting unnaturally and wrong,
and me most unhappy. Do not distress me by the idea. I am not
ashamed of having been mistakenor, at least, it is light, it
is nothing in comparison of what I should feel in thinking ill
of him or his sisters. Let me take it in the best light, in
the light in which it may be understood."
Elizabeth could not oppose such a wish and from this time
Mr. Bingley's name was scarcely ever mentioned between them.
Mrs. Bennet still continued to wonder and repine at his returning
no more, and though a day seldom passed in which Elizabeth did
not account for it clearly, there was little chance of her ever
considering it with less perplexity. Her daughter endeavoured
to convince her of what she did not believe herself, that his
attentions to Jane had been merely the effect of a common and
transient liking, which ceased when he saw her no more but
though the probability of the statement was admitted at the time,
she had the same story to repeat every day. Mrs. Bennet's best
comfort was that Mr. Bingley must be down again in the
summer.
Mr. Bennet treated the matter differently. "So, Lizzy," said he
one day, "your sister is crossed in love, I find. I congratulate
her. Next to being married, a girl likes to be crossed a little in
love now and then. It is something to think of, and it gives her a
sort of distinction among her companions. When is your turn to
come? You will hardly bear to be long outdone by Jane. Now is
your time. Here are officers enough in Meryton to disappoint all
the young ladies in the country. Let Wickham be your man. He
is a pleasant fellow, and would jilt you creditably."
"Thank you, sir, but a less agreeable man would satisfy me. We
must not all expect Jane's good fortune."
"True," said Mr. Bennet, "but it is a comfort to think that
whatever of that kind may befall you, you have an affectionate
mother who will make the most of it."
Mr. Wickham's society was of material service in dispelling the
gloom which the late perverse occurrences had thrown on many
of the Longbourn family. They saw him often, and to his other
recommendations was now added that of general unreserve.
The whole of what Elizabeth had already heard, his claims on
Mr. Darcy, and all that he had suffered from him, was now
openly acknowledged and publicly canvassed and everybody
was pleased to know how much they had always disliked Mr.
Darcy before they had known anything of the matter.
Miss Bennet was the only creature who could suppose there might
be any extenuating circumstances in the case, unknown to the
society of Hertfordshire her mild and steady candour always
pleaded for allowances, and urged the possibility of mistakesbut
by everybody else Mr. Darcy was condemned as the worst of men.
Chapter 
After a week spent in professions of love and schemes of felicity,
Mr. Collins was called from his amiable Charlotte by the arrival
of Saturday. The pain of separation, however, might be
alleviated on his side, by preparations for the reception of his
bride as he had reason to hope, that shortly after his return into
Hertfordshire, the day would be fixed that was to make him the
happiest of men. He took leave of his relations at Longbourn
with as much solemnity as before wished his fair cousins health
and happiness again, and promised their father another letter of
thanks.
On the following Monday, Mrs. Bennet had the pleasure of
receiving her brother and his wife, who came as usual to spend
the Christmas at Longbourn. Mr. Gardiner was a sensible,
gentlemanlike man, greatly superior to his sister, as well by
nature as education. The Netherfield ladies would have had
difficulty in believing that a man who lived by trade, and within
view of his own warehouses, could have been so wellbred and
agreeable. Mrs. Gardiner, who was several years younger than
Mrs. Bennet and Mrs. Phillips, was an amiable, intelligent,
elegant woman, and a great favourite with all her Longbourn
nieces. Between the two eldest and herself especially, there
subsisted a particular regard. They had frequently been staying
with her in town.
The first part of Mrs. Gardiner's business on her arrival was to
distribute her presents and describe the newest fashions. When
this was done she had a less active part to play. It became her
turn to listen. Mrs. Bennet had many grievances to relate, and
much to complain of. They had all been very illused since she
last saw her sister. Two of her girls had been upon the point of
marriage, and after all there was nothing in it.
"I do not blame Jane," she continued, "for Jane would have got
Mr. Bingley if she could. But Lizzy Oh, sister It is very hard
to think that she might have been Mr. Collins's wife by this time,
had it not been for her own perverseness. He made her an offer
in this very room, and she refused him. The consequence of it is,
that Lady Lucas will have a daughter married before I have, and
that the Longbourn estate is just as much entailed as ever. The
Lucases are very artful people indeed, sister. They are all for
what they can get. I am sorry to say it of them, but so it is.
It makes me very nervous and poorly, to be thwarted so in my own
family, and to have neighbours who think of themselves before
anybody else. However, your coming just at this time is the
greatest of comforts, and I am very glad to hear what you tell us,
of long sleeves."
Mrs. Gardiner, to whom the chief of this news had been given
before, in the course of Jane and Elizabeth's correspondence
with her, made her sister a slight answer, and, in compassion to
her nieces, turned the conversation.
When alone with Elizabeth afterwards, she spoke more on the
subject. "It seems likely to have been a desirable match for
Jane," said she. "I am sorry it went off. But these things
happen so often A young man, such as you describe Mr. Bingley,
so easily falls in love with a pretty girl for a few weeks, and
when accident separates them, so easily forgets her, that these
sort of inconsistencies are very frequent."
"An excellent consolation in its way," said Elizabeth, "but it will
not do for us. We do not suffer by accident. It does not often
happen that the interference of friends will persuade a young
man of independent fortune to think no more of a girl whom he
was violently in love with only a few days before."
"But that expression of 'violently in love' is so hackneyed,
so doubtful, so indefinite, that it gives me very little idea.
It is as often applied to feelings which arise from a halfhour's
acquaintance, as to a real, strong attachment. Pray, how
violent was Mr. Bingley's love?"
"I never saw a more promising inclination he was growing quite
inattentive to other people, and wholly engrossed by her. Every
time they met, it was more decided and remarkable. At his own
ball he offended two or three young ladies, by not asking them to
dance and I spoke to him twice myself, without receiving an answer.
Could there be finer symptoms? Is not general incivility the very
essence of love?"
"Oh, yesof that kind of love which I suppose him to have felt.
Poor Jane I am sorry for her, because, with her disposition, she
may not get over it immediately. It had better have happened to
you, Lizzy you would have laughed yourself out of it sooner.
But do you think she would be prevailed upon to go back with
us? Change of scene might be of serviceand perhaps a little
relief from home may be as useful as anything."
Elizabeth was exceedingly pleased with this proposal, and felt
persuaded of her sister's ready acquiescence.
"I hope," added Mrs. Gardiner, "that no consideration with
regard to this young man will influence her. We live in so
different a part of town, all our connections are so different, and,
as you well know, we go out so little, that it is very improbable
that they should meet at all, unless he really comes to see her."
"And that is quite impossible for he is now in the custody of
his friend, and Mr. Darcy would no more suffer him to call on
Jane in such a part of London My dear aunt, how could you
think of it? Mr. Darcy may perhaps have heard of such a
place as Gracechurch Street, but he would hardly think a
month's ablution enough to cleanse him from its impurities, were
he once to enter it and depend upon it, Mr. Bingley never stirs
without him."
"So much the better. I hope they will not meet at all. But does
not Jane correspond with his sister? She will not be able to
help calling."
"She will drop the acquaintance entirely."
But in spite of the certainty in which Elizabeth affected to place
this point, as well as the still more interesting one of Bingley's
being withheld from seeing Jane, she felt a solicitude on the
subject which convinced her, on examination, that she did not
consider it entirely hopeless. It was possible, and sometimes she
thought it probable, that his affection might be reanimated, and
the influence of his friends successfully combated by the more
natural influence of Jane's attractions.
Miss Bennet accepted her aunt's invitation with pleasure and
the Bingleys were no otherwise in her thoughts at the same time,
than as she hoped by Caroline's not living in the same house
with her brother, she might occasionally spend a morning with
her, without any danger of seeing him.
The Gardiners stayed a week at Longbourn and what with the
Phillipses, the Lucases, and the officers, there was not a day
without its engagement. Mrs. Bennet had so carefully provided
for the entertainment of her brother and sister, that they did
not once sit down to a family dinner. When the engagement was
for home, some of the officers always made part of itof
which officers Mr. Wickham was sure to be one and on these
occasion, Mrs. Gardiner, rendered suspicious by Elizabeth's
warm commendation, narrowly observed them both. Without
supposing them, from what she saw, to be very seriously in love,
their preference of each other was plain enough to make her a
little uneasy and she resolved to speak to Elizabeth on the
subject before she left Hertfordshire, and represent to her the
imprudence of encouraging such an attachment.
To Mrs. Gardiner, Wickham had one means of affording pleasure,
unconnected with his general powers. About ten or a dozen years
ago, before her marriage, she had spent a considerable time in
that very part of Derbyshire to which he belonged. They had,
therefore, many acquaintances in common and though Wickham had
been little there since the death of Darcy's father, it was yet
in his power to give her fresher intelligence of her former
friends than she had been in the way of procuring.
Mrs. Gardiner had seen Pemberley, and known the late Mr. Darcy
by character perfectly well. Here consequently was an
inexhaustible subject of discourse. In comparing her recollection
of Pemberley with the minute description which Wickham could
give, and in bestowing her tribute of praise on the character of
its late possessor, she was delighting both him and herself. On
being made acquainted with the present Mr. Darcy's treatment
of him, she tried to remember some of that gentleman's reputed
disposition when quite a lad which might agree with it, and was
confident at last that she recollected having heard Mr.
Fitzwilliam Darcy formerly spoken of as a very proud, illnatured
boy.
Chapter 
Mrs. Gardiner's caution to Elizabeth was punctually and kindly
given on the first favourable opportunity of speaking to her
alone after honestly telling her what she thought, she thus went
on
"You are too sensible a girl, Lizzy, to fall in love merely because
you are warned against it and, therefore, I am not afraid of
speaking openly. Seriously, I would have you be on your guard.
Do not involve yourself or endeavour to involve him in an
affection which the want of fortune would make so very
imprudent. I have nothing to say against him he is a most
interesting young man and if he had the fortune he ought to
have, I should think you could not do better. But as it is, you
must not let your fancy run away with you. You have sense, and
we all expect you to use it. Your father would depend on
your resolution and good conduct, I am sure. You must not
disappoint your father."
"My dear aunt, this is being serious indeed."
"Yes, and I hope to engage you to be serious likewise."
"Well, then, you need not be under any alarm. I will take care
of myself, and of Mr. Wickham too. He shall not be in love with
me, if I can prevent it."
"Elizabeth, you are not serious now."
"I beg your pardon, I will try again. At present I am not in
love with Mr. Wickham no, I certainly am not. But he is, beyond
all comparison, the most agreeable man I ever sawand if he
becomes really attached to meI believe it will be better that
he should not. I see the imprudence of it. Oh that abominable
Mr. Darcy My father's opinion of me does me the greatest
honour, and I should be miserable to forfeit it. My father,
however, is partial to Mr. Wickham. In short, my dear aunt,
I should be very sorry to be the means of making any of you
unhappy but since we see every day that where there is
affection, young people are seldom withheld by immediate want
of fortune from entering into engagements with each other, how
can I promise to be wiser than so many of my fellowcreatures
if I am tempted, or how am I even to know that it would be
wisdom to resist? All that I can promise you, therefore, is not
to be in a hurry. I will not be in a hurry to believe myself his
first object. When I am in company with him, I will not be
wishing. In short, I will do my best."
"Perhaps it will be as well if you discourage his coming here so
very often. At least, you should not remind your mother of
inviting him."
"As I did the other day," said Elizabeth with a conscious smile
"very true, it will be wise in me to refrain from that. But do
not imagine that he is always here so often. It is on your
account that he has been so frequently invited this week. You
know my mother's ideas as to the necessity of constant company
for her friends. But really, and upon my honour, I will try to do
what I think to be the wisest and now I hope you are satisfied."
Her aunt assured her that she was, and Elizabeth having thanked
her for the kindness of her hints, they parted a wonderful
instance of advice being given on such a point, without being
resented.
Mr. Collins returned into Hertfordshire soon after it had been
quitted by the Gardiners and Jane but as he took up his abode
with the Lucases, his arrival was no great inconvenience to Mrs.
Bennet. His marriage was now fast approaching, and she was at
length so far resigned as to think it inevitable, and even
repeatedly to say, in an illnatured tone, that she "wished they
might be happy." Thursday was to be the wedding day, and on
Wednesday Miss Lucas paid her farewell visit and when she
rose to take leave, Elizabeth, ashamed of her mother's
ungracious and reluctant good wishes, and sincerely affected
herself, accompanied her out of the room. As they went
downstairs together, Charlotte said
"I shall depend on hearing from you very often, Eliza."
"That you certainly shall."
"And I have another favour to ask you. Will you come and see
me?"
"We shall often meet, I hope, in Hertfordshire."
"I am not likely to leave Kent for some time. Promise me,
therefore, to come to Hunsford."
Elizabeth could not refuse, though she foresaw little pleasure
in the visit.
"My father and Maria are coming to me in March," added
Charlotte, "and I hope you will consent to be of the party.
Indeed, Eliza, you will be as welcome as either of them."
The wedding took place the bride and bridegroom set off for
Kent from the church door, and everybody had as much to say,
or to hear, on the subject as usual. Elizabeth soon heard from
her friend and their correspondence was as regular and frequent
as it had ever been that it should be equally unreserved was
impossible. Elizabeth could never address her without feeling
that all the comfort of intimacy was over, and though determined
not to slacken as a correspondent, it was for the sake of what
had been, rather than what was. Charlotte's first letters were
received with a good deal of eagerness there could not but be
curiosity to know how she would speak of her new home, how
she would like Lady Catherine, and how happy she would dare
pronounce herself to be though, when the letters were read,
Elizabeth felt that Charlotte expressed herself on every point
exactly as she might have foreseen. She wrote cheerfully,
seemed surrounded with comforts, and mentioned nothing which
she could not praise. The house, furniture, neighbourhood, and
roads, were all to her taste, and Lady Catherine's behaviour
was most friendly and obliging. It was Mr. Collins's picture
of Hunsford and Rosings rationally softened and Elizabeth
perceived that she must wait for her own visit there to know the
rest.
Jane had already written a few lines to her sister to announce
their safe arrival in London and when she wrote again, Elizabeth
hoped it would be in her power to say something of the
Bingleys.
Her impatience for this second letter was as well rewarded as
impatience generally is. Jane had been a week in town without
either seeing or hearing from Caroline. She accounted for it,
however, by supposing that her last letter to her friend from
Longbourn had by some accident been lost.
"My aunt," she continued, "is going tomorrow into that part of
the town, and I shall take the opportunity of calling in Grosvenor
Street."
She wrote again when the visit was paid, and she had seen Miss
Bingley. "I did not think Caroline in spirits," were her words,
"but she was very glad to see me, and reproached me for giving
her no notice of my coming to London. I was right, therefore,
my last letter had never reached her. I inquired after their
brother, of course. He was well, but so much engaged with Mr.
Darcy that they scarcely ever saw him. I found that Miss Darcy
was expected to dinner. I wish I could see her. My visit was
not long, as Caroline and Mrs. Hurst were going out. I dare say
I shall see them soon here."
Elizabeth shook her head over this letter. It convinced her that
accident only could discover to Mr. Bingley her sister's being in
town.
Four weeks passed away, and Jane saw nothing of him. She
endeavoured to persuade herself that she did not regret it but
she could no longer be blind to Miss Bingley's inattention. After
waiting at home every morning for a fortnight, and inventing
every evening a fresh excuse for her, the visitor did at last
appear but the shortness of her stay, and yet more, the alteration
of her manner would allow Jane to deceive herself no longer.
The letter which she wrote on this occasion to her sister will
prove what she felt.
"My dearest Lizzy will, I am sure, be incapable of triumphing in
her better judgement, at my expense, when I confess myself to
have been entirely deceived in Miss Bingley's regard for me.
But, my dear sister, though the event has proved you right, do
not think me obstinate if I still assert that, considering what
her behaviour was, my confidence was as natural as your suspicion.
I do not at all comprehend her reason for wishing to be intimate
with me but if the same circumstances were to happen again, I
am sure I should be deceived again. Caroline did not return my
visit till yesterday and not a note, not a line, did I receive
in the meantime. When she did come, it was very evident that she
had no pleasure in it she made a slight, formal apology, for not
calling before, said not a word of wishing to see me again, and
was in every respect so altered a creature, that when she went
away I was perfectly resolved to continue the acquaintance no
longer. I pity, though I cannot help blaming her. She was very
wrong in singling me out as she did I can safely say that every
advance to intimacy began on her side. But I pity her, because
she must feel that she has been acting wrong, and because I am
very sure that anxiety for her brother is the cause of it. I need
not explain myself farther and though we know this anxiety to
be quite needless, yet if she feels it, it will easily account
for her behaviour to me and so deservedly dear as he is to his
sister, whatever anxiety she must feel on his behalf is natural
and amiable. I cannot but wonder, however, at her having any
such fears now, because, if he had at all cared about me, we
must have met, long ago. He knows of my being in town, I am
certain, from something she said herself and yet it would seem,
by her manner of talking, as if she wanted to persuade herself
that he is really partial to Miss Darcy. I cannot understand it.
If I were not afraid of judging harshly, I should be almost
tempted to say that there is a strong appearance of duplicity in
all this. But I will endeavour to banish every painful thought,
and think only of what will make me happyyour affection, and
the invariable kindness of my dear uncle and aunt. Let me hear
from you very soon. Miss Bingley said something of his never
returning to Netherfield again, of giving up the house, but not
with any certainty. We had better not mention it. I am extremely
glad that you have such pleasant accounts from our friends at
Hunsford. Pray go to see them, with Sir William and Maria. I am
sure you will be very comfortable there.Yours, etc."
This letter gave Elizabeth some pain but her spirits returned as
she considered that Jane would no longer be duped, by the sister
at least. All expectation from the brother was now absolutely
over. She would not even wish for a renewal of his attentions.
His character sunk on every review of it and as a punishment for
him, as well as a possible advantage to Jane, she seriously hoped
he might really soon marry Mr. Darcy's sister, as by Wickham's
account, she would make him abundantly regret what he had
thrown away.
Mrs. Gardiner about this time reminded Elizabeth of her promise
concerning that gentleman, and required information and
Elizabeth had such to send as might rather give contentment to
her aunt than to herself. His apparent partiality had subsided,
his attentions were over, he was the admirer of some one else.
Elizabeth was watchful enough to see it all, but she could see it
and write of it without material pain. Her heart had been but
slightly touched, and her vanity was satisfied with believing that
she would have been his only choice, had fortune permitted it.
The sudden acquisition of ten thousand pounds was the most
remarkable charm of the young lady to whom he was now rendering
himself agreeable but Elizabeth, less clearsighted perhaps in
this case than in Charlotte's, did not quarrel with him for his
wish of independence. Nothing, on the contrary, could be more
natural and while able to suppose that it cost him a few struggles
to relinquish her, she was ready to allow it a wise and desirable
measure for both, and could very sincerely wish him happy.
All this was acknowledged to Mrs. Gardiner and after relating
the circumstances, she thus went on "I am now convinced, my
dear aunt, that I have never been much in love for had I really
experienced that pure and elevating passion, I should at present
detest his very name, and wish him all manner of evil. But my
feelings are not only cordial towards him they are even
impartial towards Miss King. I cannot find out that I hate her at
all, or that I am in the least unwilling to think her a very good
sort of girl. There can be no love in all this. My watchfulness
has been effectual and though I certainly should be a more
interesting object to all my acquaintances were I distractedly
in love with him, I cannot say that I regret my comparative
insignificance. Importance may sometimes be purchased too
dearly. Kitty and Lydia take his defection much more to heart
than I do. They are young in the ways of the world, and not
yet open to the mortifying conviction that handsome young men
must have something to live on as well as the plain."
Chapter 
With no greater events than these in the Longbourn family, and
otherwise diversified by little beyond the walks to Meryton,
sometimes dirty and sometimes cold, did January and February
pass away. March was to take Elizabeth to Hunsford. She had
not at first thought very seriously of going thither but Charlotte,
she soon found, was depending on the plan and she gradually
learned to consider it herself with greater pleasure as well as
greater certainty. Absence had increased her desire of seeing
Charlotte again, and weakened her disgust of Mr. Collins. There
was novelty in the scheme, and as, with such a mother and such
uncompanionable sisters, home could not be faultless, a little
change was not unwelcome for its own sake. The journey
would moreover give her a peep at Jane and, in short, as the
time drew near, she would have been very sorry for any delay.
Everything, however, went on smoothly, and was finally settled
according to Charlotte's first sketch. She was to accompany Sir
William and his second daughter. The improvement of spending
a night in London was added in time, and the plan became
perfect as plan could be.
The only pain was in leaving her father, who would certainly
miss her, and who, when it came to the point, so little liked her
going, that he told her to write to him, and almost promised to
answer her letter.
The farewell between herself and Mr. Wickham was perfectly
friendly on his side even more. His present pursuit could not
make him forget that Elizabeth had been the first to excite and to
deserve his attention, the first to listen and to pity, the first
to be admired and in his manner of bidding her adieu, wishing
her every enjoyment, reminding her of what she was to expect in
Lady Catherine de Bourgh, and trusting their opinion of hertheir
opinion of everybodywould always coincide, there was a solicitude,
an interest which she felt must ever attach her to him with a most
sincere regard and she parted from him convinced that, whether
married or single, he must always be her model of the amiable and
pleasing.
Her fellowtravellers the next day were not of a kind to make her
think him less agreeable. Sir William Lucas, and his daughter
Maria, a goodhumoured girl, but as emptyheaded as himself,
had nothing to say that could be worth hearing, and were
listened to with about as much delight as the rattle of the chaise.
Elizabeth loved absurdities, but she had known Sir William's too
long. He could tell her nothing new of the wonders of his
presentation and knighthood and his civilities were worn out,
like his information.
It was a journey of only twentyfour miles, and they began it so
early as to be in Gracechurch Street by noon. As they drove
to Mr. Gardiner's door, Jane was at a drawingroom window
watching their arrival when they entered the passage she was
there to welcome them, and Elizabeth, looking earnestly in her
face, was pleased to see it healthful and lovely as ever. On the
stairs were a troop of little boys and girls, whose eagerness for
their cousin's appearance would not allow them to wait in the
drawingroom, and whose shyness, as they had not seen her for
a twelvemonth, prevented their coming lower. All was joy and
kindness. The day passed most pleasantly away the morning in
bustle and shopping, and the evening at one of the theatres.
Elizabeth then contrived to sit by her aunt. Their first object was
her sister and she was more grieved than astonished to hear, in
reply to her minute inquiries, that though Jane always struggled
to support her spirits, there were periods of dejection. It was
reasonable, however, to hope that they would not continue long.
Mrs. Gardiner gave her the particulars also of Miss Bingley's
visit in Gracechurch Street, and repeated conversations
occurring at different times between Jane and herself, which
proved that the former had, from her heart, given up the
acquaintance.
Mrs. Gardiner then rallied her niece on Wickham's desertion,
and complimented her on bearing it so well.
"But my dear Elizabeth," she added, "what sort of girl is Miss
King? I should be sorry to think our friend mercenary."
"Pray, my dear aunt, what is the difference in matrimonial
affairs, between the mercenary and the prudent motive? Where
does discretion end, and avarice begin? Last Christmas you
were afraid of his marrying me, because it would be imprudent
and now, because he is trying to get a girl with only ten
thousand pounds, you want to find out that he is mercenary."
"If you will only tell me what sort of girl Miss King is, I shall
know what to think."
"She is a very good kind of girl, I believe. I know no harm of
her."
"But he paid her not the smallest attention till her grandfather's
death made her mistress of this fortune."
"Nowhat should he? If it were not allowable for him to gain
my affections because I had no money, what occasion could
there be for making love to a girl whom he did not care about,
and who was equally poor?"
"But there seems an indelicacy in directing his attentions
towards her so soon after this event."
"A man in distressed circumstances has not time for all those
elegant decorums which other people may observe. If she does
not object to it, why should we?"
"Her not objecting does not justify him. It only shows her
being deficient in something herselfsense or feeling."
"Well," cried Elizabeth, "have it as you choose. He shall be
mercenary, and she shall be foolish."
"No, Lizzy, that is what I do not choose. I should be sorry,
you know, to think ill of a young man who has lived so long in
Derbyshire."
"Oh if that is all, I have a very poor opinion of young men
who live in Derbyshire and their intimate friends who live
in Hertfordshire are not much better. I am sick of them all.
Thank Heaven I am going tomorrow where I shall find a man
who has not one agreeable quality, who has neither manner nor
sense to recommend him. Stupid men are the only ones worth
knowing, after all."
"Take care, Lizzy that speech savours strongly of disappointment."
Before they were separated by the conclusion of the play, she
had the unexpected happiness of an invitation to accompany her
uncle and aunt in a tour of pleasure which they proposed taking
in the summer.
"We have not determined how far it shall carry us," said Mrs.
Gardiner, "but, perhaps, to the Lakes."
No scheme could have been more agreeable to Elizabeth, and
her acceptance of the invitation was most ready and grateful.
"Oh, my dear, dear aunt," she rapturously cried, "what delight
what felicity You give me fresh life and vigour. Adieu to
disappointment and spleen. What are young men to rocks and
mountains? Oh what hours of transport we shall spend And
when we do return, it shall not be like other travellers,
without being able to give one accurate idea of anything. We
will know where we have gonewe will recollect what we have
seen. Lakes, mountains, and rivers shall not be jumbled together
in our imaginations nor when we attempt to describe any
particular scene, will we begin quarreling about its relative
situation. Let our first effusions be less insupportable than
those of the generality of travellers."
Chapter 
Every object in the next day's journey was new and interesting
to Elizabeth and her spirits were in a state of enjoyment for
she had seen her sister looking so well as to banish all fear for
her health, and the prospect of her northern tour was a constant
source of delight.
When they left the high road for the lane to Hunsford, every eye
was in search of the Parsonage, and every turning expected to
bring it in view. The palings of Rosings Park was their boundary
on one side. Elizabeth smiled at the recollection of all that she
had heard of its inhabitants.
At length the Parsonage was discernible. The garden sloping to
the road, the house standing in it, the green pales, and the laurel
hedge, everything declared they were arriving. Mr. Collins and
Charlotte appeared at the door, and the carriage stopped at the
small gate which led by a short gravel walk to the house, amidst
the nods and smiles of the whole party. In a moment they were
all out of the chaise, rejoicing at the sight of each other.
Mrs. Collins welcomed her friend with the liveliest pleasure,
and Elizabeth was more and more satisfied with coming when she
found herself so affectionately received. She saw instantly that
her cousin's manners were not altered by his marriage his formal
civility was just what it had been, and he detained her some
minutes at the gate to hear and satisfy his inquiries after
all her family. They were then, with no other delay than his
pointing out the neatness of the entrance, taken into the house
and as soon as they were in the parlour, he welcomed them a
second time, with ostentatious formality to his humble abode,
and punctually repeated all his wife's offers of refreshment.
Elizabeth was prepared to see him in his glory and she could
not help in fancying that in displaying the good proportion of
the room, its aspect and its furniture, he addressed himself
particularly to her, as if wishing to make her feel what she
had lost in refusing him. But though everything seemed neat
and comfortable, she was not able to gratify him by any sigh of
repentance, and rather looked with wonder at her friend that
she could have so cheerful an air with such a companion. When
Mr. Collins said anything of which his wife might reasonably be
ashamed, which certainly was not unseldom, she involuntarily
turned her eye on Charlotte. Once or twice she could discern
a faint blush but in general Charlotte wisely did not hear.
After sitting long enough to admire every article of furniture in
the room, from the sideboard to the fender, to give an account
of their journey, and of all that had happened in London, Mr.
Collins invited them to take a stroll in the garden, which was
large and well laid out, and to the cultivation of which he
attended himself. To work in this garden was one of his most
respectable pleasures and Elizabeth admired the command of
countenance with which Charlotte talked of the healthfulness of
the exercise, and owned she encouraged it as much as possible.
Here, leading the way through every walk and cross walk, and
scarcely allowing them an interval to utter the praises he asked
for, every view was pointed out with a minuteness which left
beauty entirely behind. He could number the fields in every
direction, and could tell how many tress there were in the most
distant clump. But of all the views which his garden, or which
the country or kingdom could boast, none were to be compared
with the prospect of Rosings, afforded by an opening in the trees
that bordered the park nearly opposite the front of his house. It
was a handsome modern building, well situated on rising ground.
From his garden, Mr. Collins would have led them round his two
meadows but the ladies, not having shoes to encounter the
remains of a white frost, turned back and while Sir William
accompanied him, Charlotte took her sister and friend over the
house, extremely well pleased, probably, to have the opportunity
of showing it without her husband's help. It was rather small,
but well built and convenient and everything was fitted up and
arranged with a neatness and consistency of which Elizabeth
gave Charlotte all the credit. When Mr. Collins could be
forgotten, there was really an air of great comfort throughout,
and by Charlotte's evident enjoyment of it, Elizabeth supposed
he must be often forgotten.
She had already learnt that Lady Catherine was still in the
country. It was spoken of again while they were at dinner,
when Mr. Collins joining in, observed
"Yes, Miss Elizabeth, you will have the honour of seeing Lady
Catherine de Bourgh on the ensuing Sunday at church, and I
need not say you will be delighted with her. She is all affability
and condescension, and I doubt not but you will be honoured
with some portion of her notice when service is over. I have
scarcely any hesitation in saying she will include you and my
sister Maria in every invitation with which she honours us during
your stay here. Her behaviour to my dear Charlotte is charming.
We dine at Rosings twice every week, and are never allowed to
walk home. Her ladyship's carriage is regularly ordered for us.
I should say, one of her ladyship's carriages, for she has
several."
"Lady Catherine is a very respectable, sensible woman indeed,"
added Charlotte, "and a most attentive neighbour."
"Very true, my dear, that is exactly what I say. She is the sort
of woman whom one cannot regard with too much deference."
The evening was spent chiefly in talking over Hertfordshire
news, and telling again what had already been written and when
it closed, Elizabeth, in the solitude of her chamber, had to
meditate upon Charlotte's degree of contentment, to understand
her address in guiding, and composure in bearing with, her
husband, and to acknowledge that it was all done very well. She
had also to anticipate how her visit would pass, the quiet tenor
of their usual employments, the vexatious interruptions of Mr.
Collins, and the gaieties of their intercourse with Rosings.
A lively imagination soon settled it all.
About the middle of the next day, as she was in her room getting
ready for a walk, a sudden noise below seemed to speak the
whole house in confusion and, after listening a moment, she
heard somebody running upstairs in a violent hurry, and calling
loudly after her. She opened the door and met Maria in the
landing place, who, breathless with agitation, cried out
"Oh, my dear Eliza pray make haste and come into the diningroom,
for there is such a sight to be seen I will not tell you what
it is. Make haste, and come down this moment."
Elizabeth asked questions in vain Maria would tell her nothing
more, and down they ran into the diningroom, which fronted
the lane, in quest of this wonder It was two ladies stopping in
a low phaeton at the garden gate.
"And is this all?" cried Elizabeth. "I expected at least that the
pigs were got into the garden, and here is nothing but Lady
Catherine and her daughter."
"La my dear," said Maria, quite shocked at the mistake, "it is
not Lady Catherine. The old lady is Mrs. Jenkinson, who lives
with them the other is Miss de Bourgh. Only look at her. She
is quite a little creature. Who would have thought that she could
be so thin and small?"
"She is abominably rude to keep Charlotte out of doors in all this
wind. Why does she not come in?"
"Oh, Charlotte says she hardly ever does. It is the greatest of
favours when Miss de Bourgh comes in."
"I like her appearance," said Elizabeth, struck with other ideas.
"She looks sickly and cross. Yes, she will do for him very well.
She will make him a very proper wife."
Mr. Collins and Charlotte were both standing at the gate in
conversation with the ladies and Sir William, to Elizabeth's
high diversion, was stationed in the doorway, in earnest
contemplation of the greatness before him, and constantly
bowing whenever Miss de Bourgh looked that way.
At length there was nothing more to be said the ladies drove on,
and the others returned into the house. Mr. Collins no sooner
saw the two girls than he began to congratulate them on their
good fortune, which Charlotte explained by letting them know
that the whole party was asked to dine at Rosings the next day.
Chapter 
Mr. Collins's triumph, in consequence of this invitation, was
complete. The power of displaying the grandeur of his patroness
to his wondering visitors, and of letting them see her civility
towards himself and his wife, was exactly what he had wished
for and that an opportunity of doing it should be given so soon,
was such an instance of Lady Catherine's condescension, as he
knew not how to admire enough.
"I confess," said he, "that I should not have been at all surprised
by her ladyship's asking us on Sunday to drink tea and spend the
evening at Rosings. I rather expected, from my knowledge of
her affability, that it would happen. But who could have
foreseen such an attention as this? Who could have imagined
that we should receive an invitation to dine there an invitation,
moreover, including the whole party so immediately after your
arrival"
"I am the less surprised at what has happened," replied Sir
William, "from that knowledge of what the manners of the great
really are, which my situation in life has allowed me to acquire.
About the court, such instances of elegant breeding are not
uncommon."
Scarcely anything was talked of the whole day or next morning
but their visit to Rosings. Mr. Collins was carefully instructing
them in what they were to expect, that the sight of such rooms,
so many servants, and so splendid a dinner, might not wholly
overpower them.
When the ladies were separating for the toilette, he said to
Elizabeth
"Do not make yourself uneasy, my dear cousin, about your
apparel. Lady Catherine is far from requiring that elegance of
dress in us which becomes herself and her daughter. I would
advise you merely to put on whatever of your clothes is superior
to the restthere is no occasion for anything more. Lady
Catherine will not think the worse of you for being simply
dressed. She likes to have the distinction of rank preserved."
While they were dressing, he came two or three times to their
different doors, to recommend their being quick, as Lady
Catherine very much objected to be kept waiting for her dinner.
Such formidable accounts of her ladyship, and her manner of
living, quite frightened Maria Lucas who had been little used to
company, and she looked forward to her introduction at Rosings
with as much apprehension as her father had done to his
presentation at St. James's.
As the weather was fine, they had a pleasant walk of about half
a mile across the park. Every park has its beauty and its
prospects and Elizabeth saw much to be pleased with, though
she could not be in such raptures as Mr. Collins expected the
scene to inspire, and was but slightly affected by his enumeration
of the windows in front of the house, and his relation of what the
glazing altogether had originally cost Sir Lewis de Bourgh.
When they ascended the steps to the hall, Maria's alarm was
every moment increasing, and even Sir William did not look
perfectly calm. Elizabeth's courage did not fail her. She had
heard nothing of Lady Catherine that spoke her awful from any
extraordinary talents or miraculous virtue, and the mere
stateliness of money or rank she thought she could witness
without trepidation.
From the entrancehall, of which Mr. Collins pointed out, with a
rapturous air, the fine proportion and the finished ornaments,
they followed the servants through an antechamber, to the room
where Lady Catherine, her daughter, and Mrs. Jenkinson were
sitting. Her ladyship, with great condescension, arose to receive
them and as Mrs. Collins had settled it with her husband that the
office of introduction should be hers, it was performed in a
proper manner, without any of those apologies and thanks which
he would have thought necessary.
In spite of having been at St. James's Sir William was so
completely awed by the grandeur surrounding him, that he had
but just courage enough to make a very low bow, and take his
seat without saying a word and his daughter, frightened almost
out of her senses, sat on the edge of her chair, not knowing
which way to look. Elizabeth found herself quite equal to the
scene, and could observe the three ladies before her composedly.
Lady Catherine was a tall, large woman, with stronglymarked
features, which might once have been handsome. Her air was
not conciliating, nor was her manner of receiving them such as
to make her visitors forget their inferior rank. She was not
rendered formidable by silence but whatever she said was
spoken in so authoritative a tone, as marked her selfimportance,
and brought Mr. Wickham immediately to Elizabeth's mind and
from the observation of the day altogether, she believed Lady
Catherine to be exactly what he represented.
When, after examining the mother, in whose countenance and
deportment she soon found some resemblance of Mr. Darcy, she
turned her eyes on the daughter, she could almost have joined
in Maria's astonishment at her being so thin and so small. There
was neither in figure nor face any likeness between the ladies.
Miss de Bourgh was pale and sickly her features, though not
plain, were insignificant and she spoke very little, except in
a low voice, to Mrs. Jenkinson, in whose appearance there was
nothing remarkable, and who was entirely engaged in listening to
what she said, and placing a screen in the proper direction before
her eyes.
After sitting a few minutes, they were all sent to one of the
windows to admire the view, Mr. Collins attending them to
point out its beauties, and Lady Catherine kindly informing
them that it was much better worth looking at in the summer.
The dinner was exceedingly handsome, and there were all the
servants and all the articles of plate which Mr. Collins had
promised and, as he had likewise foretold, he took his seat at
the bottom of the table, by her ladyship's desire, and looked as
if he felt that life could furnish nothing greater. He carved,
and ate, and praised with delighted alacrity and every dish was
commended, first by him and then by Sir William, who was now
enough recovered to echo whatever his soninlaw said, in a
manner which Elizabeth wondered Lady Catherine could bear.
But Lady Catherine seemed gratified by their excessive admiration,
and gave most gracious smiles, especially when any dish on the
table proved a novelty to them. The party did not supply much
conversation. Elizabeth was ready to speak whenever there was
an opening, but she was seated between Charlotte and Miss de
Bourghthe former of whom was engaged in listening to Lady
Catherine, and the latter said not a word to her all dinnertime.
Mrs. Jenkinson was chiefly employed in watching how little Miss
de Bourgh ate, pressing her to try some other dish, and fearing
she was indisposed. Maria thought speaking out of the question,
and the gentlemen did nothing but eat and admire.
When the ladies returned to the drawingroom, there was little
to be done but to hear Lady Catherine talk, which she did
without any intermission till coffee came in, delivering her
opinion on every subject in so decisive a manner, as proved
that she was not used to have her judgement controverted. She
inquired into Charlotte's domestic concerns familiarly and
minutely, gave her a great deal of advice as to the management
of them all told her how everything ought to be regulated in so
small a family as hers, and instructed her as to the care of her
cows and her poultry. Elizabeth found that nothing was beneath
this great lady's attention, which could furnish her with an
occasion of dictating to others. In the intervals of her discourse
with Mrs. Collins, she addressed a variety of questions to Maria
and Elizabeth, but especially to the latter, of whose connections
she knew the least, and who she observed to Mrs. Collins was a
very genteel, pretty kind of girl. She asked her, at different
times, how many sisters she had, whether they were older or
younger than herself, whether any of them were likely to be
married, whether they were handsome, where they had been
educated, what carriage her father kept, and what had been her
mother's maiden name? Elizabeth felt all the impertinence of her
questions but answered them very composedly. Lady Catherine
then observed,
"Your father's estate is entailed on Mr. Collins, I think. For
your sake," turning to Charlotte, "I am glad of it but otherwise I
see no occasion for entailing estates from the female line. It was
not thought necessary in Sir Lewis de Bourgh's family. Do you
play and sing, Miss Bennet?"
"A little."
"Oh thensome time or other we shall be happy to hear you.
Our instrument is a capital one, probably superior toYou
shall try it some day. Do your sisters play and sing?"
"One of them does."
"Why did not you all learn? You ought all to have learned. The
Miss Webbs all play, and their father has not so good an income
as yours. Do you draw?"
"No, not at all."
"What, none of you?"
"Not one."
"That is very strange. But I suppose you had no opportunity.
Your mother should have taken you to town every spring for the
benefit of masters."
"My mother would have had no objection, but my father hates
London."
"Has your governess left you?"
"We never had any governess."
"No governess How was that possible? Five daughters brought
up at home without a governess I never heard of such a thing.
Your mother must have been quite a slave to your education."
Elizabeth could hardly help smiling as she assured her that had
not been the case.
"Then, who taught you? who attended to you? Without a
governess, you must have been neglected."
"Compared with some families, I believe we were but such of us
as wished to learn never wanted the means. We were always
encouraged to read, and had all the masters that were necessary.
Those who chose to be idle, certainly might."
"Aye, no doubt but that is what a governess will prevent, and
if I had known your mother, I should have advised her most
strenuously to engage one. I always say that nothing is to be
done in education without steady and regular instruction, and
nobody but a governess can give it. It is wonderful how many
families I have been the means of supplying in that way. I am
always glad to get a young person well placed out. Four nieces
of Mrs. Jenkinson are most delightfully situated through my
means and it was but the other day that I recommended another
young person, who was merely accidentally mentioned to me,
and the family are quite delighted with her. Mrs. Collins, did I
tell you of Lady Metcalf's calling yesterday to thank me? She
finds Miss Pope a treasure. 'Lady Catherine,' said she, 'you
have given me a treasure.' Are any of your younger sisters out,
Miss Bennet?"
"Yes, ma'am, all."
"All What, all five out at once? Very odd And you only
the second. The younger ones out before the elder ones are
married Your younger sisters must be very young?"
"Yes, my youngest is not sixteen. Perhaps she is full young to
be much in company. But really, ma'am, I think it would be
very hard upon younger sisters, that they should not have their
share of society and amusement, because the elder may not have
the means or inclination to marry early. The lastborn has as
good a right to the pleasures of youth at the first. And to be
kept back on such a motive I think it would not be very likely
to promote sisterly affection or delicacy of mind."
"Upon my word," said her ladyship, "you give your opinion very
decidedly for so young a person. Pray, what is your age?"
"With three younger sisters grown up," replied Elizabeth,
smiling, "your ladyship can hardly expect me to own it."
Lady Catherine seemed quite astonished at not receiving a direct
answer and Elizabeth suspected herself to be the first creature
who had ever dared to trifle with so much dignified impertinence.
"You cannot be more than twenty, I am sure, therefore you need
not conceal your age."
"I am not oneandtwenty."
When the gentlemen had joined them, and tea was over, the
cardtables were placed. Lady Catherine, Sir William, and Mr.
and Mrs. Collins sat down to quadrille and as Miss de Bourgh
chose to play at cassino, the two girls had the honour of
assisting Mrs. Jenkinson to make up her party. Their table was
superlatively stupid. Scarcely a syllable was uttered that did
not relate to the game, except when Mrs. Jenkinson expressed her
fears of Miss de Bourgh's being too hot or too cold, or having
too much or too little light. A great deal more passed at the
other table. Lady Catherine was generally speakingstating
the mistakes of the three others, or relating some anecdote of
herself. Mr. Collins was employed in agreeing to everything
her ladyship said, thanking her for every fish he won, and
apologising if he thought he won too many. Sir William did not
say much. He was storing his memory with anecdotes and noble
names.
When Lady Catherine and her daughter had played as long as
they chose, the tables were broken up, the carriage was offered
to Mrs. Collins, gratefully accepted and immediately ordered.
The party then gathered round the fire to hear Lady Catherine
determine what weather they were to have on the morrow. From
these instructions they were summoned by the arrival of the
coach and with many speeches of thankfulness on Mr. Collins's
side and as many bows on Sir William's they departed. As soon
as they had driven from the door, Elizabeth was called on by her
cousin to give her opinion of all that she had seen at Rosings,
which, for Charlotte's sake, she made more favourable than it
really was. But her commendation, though costing her some
trouble, could by no means satisfy Mr. Collins, and he was very
soon obliged to take her ladyship's praise into his own hands.
Chapter 
Sir William stayed only a week at Hunsford, but his visit was
long enough to convince him of his daughter's being most
comfortably settled, and of her possessing such a husband and
such a neighbour as were not often met with. While Sir William
was with them, Mr. Collins devoted his morning to driving him
out in his gig, and showing him the country but when he went
away, the whole family returned to their usual employments, and
Elizabeth was thankful to find that they did not see more of
her cousin by the alteration, for the chief of the time between
breakfast and dinner was now passed by him either at work in
the garden or in reading and writing, and looking out of the
window in his own bookroom, which fronted the road. The
room in which the ladies sat was backwards. Elizabeth had at
first rather wondered that Charlotte should not prefer the
diningparlour for common use it was a better sized room, and
had a more pleasant aspect but she soon saw that her friend
had an excellent reason for what she did, for Mr. Collins would
undoubtedly have been much less in his own apartment, had they
sat in one equally lively and she gave Charlotte credit for
the arrangement.
From the drawingroom they could distinguish nothing in the
lane, and were indebted to Mr. Collins for the knowledge of
what carriages went along, and how often especially Miss de
Bourgh drove by in her phaeton, which he never failed coming
to inform them of, though it happened almost every day. She
not unfrequently stopped at the Parsonage, and had a few
minutes' conversation with Charlotte, but was scarcely ever
prevailed upon to get out.
Very few days passed in which Mr. Collins did not walk to
Rosings, and not many in which his wife did not think it
necessary to go likewise and till Elizabeth recollected that
there might be other family livings to be disposed of, she could
not understand the sacrifice of so many hours. Now and then
they were honoured with a call from her ladyship, and nothing
escaped her observation that was passing in the room during
these visits. She examined into their employments, looked at
their work, and advised them to do it differently found fault
with the arrangement of the furniture or detected the housemaid
in negligence and if she accepted any refreshment, seemed to do
it only for the sake of finding out that Mrs. Collins's joints of
meat were too large for her family.
Elizabeth soon perceived, that though this great lady was not in
commission of the peace of the county, she was a most active
magistrate in her own parish, the minutest concerns of which
were carried to her by Mr. Collins and whenever any of the
cottagers were disposed to be quarrelsome, discontented, or
too poor, she sallied forth into the village to settle their
differences, silence their complaints, and scold them into
harmony and plenty.
The entertainment of dining at Rosings was repeated about twice
a week and, allowing for the loss of Sir William, and there being
only one cardtable in the evening, every such entertainment was
the counterpart of the first. Their other engagements were few,
as the style of living in the neighbourhood in general was beyond
Mr. Collins's reach. This, however, was no evil to Elizabeth,
and upon the whole she spent her time comfortably enough
there were halfhours of pleasant conversation with Charlotte,
and the weather was so fine for the time of year that she had
often great enjoyment out of doors. Her favourite walk, and
where she frequently went while the others were calling on Lady
Catherine, was along the open grove which edged that side of
the park, where there was a nice sheltered path, which no one
seemed to value but herself, and where she felt beyond the reach
of Lady Catherine's curiosity.
In this quiet way, the first fortnight of her visit soon passed
away. Easter was approaching, and the week preceding it was
to bring an addition to the family at Rosings, which in so small
a circle must be important. Elizabeth had heard soon after her
arrival that Mr. Darcy was expected there in the course of a few
weeks, and though there were not many of her acquaintances whom
she did not prefer, his coming would furnish one comparatively
new to look at in their Rosings parties, and she might be amused
in seeing how hopeless Miss Bingley's designs on him were, by
his behaviour to his cousin, for whom he was evidently destined
by Lady Catherine, who talked of his coming with the greatest
satisfaction, spoke of him in terms of the highest admiration,
and seemed almost angry to find that he had already been
frequently seen by Miss Lucas and herself.
His arrival was soon known at the Parsonage for Mr. Collins
was walking the whole morning within view of the lodges
opening into Hunsford Lane, in order to have the earliest
assurance of it, and after making his bow as the carriage turned
into the Park, hurried home with the great intelligence. On the
following morning he hastened to Rosings to pay his respects.
There were two nephews of Lady Catherine to require them, for
Mr. Darcy had brought with him a Colonel Fitzwilliam, the
younger son of his uncle Lord , and, to the great surprise
of all the party, when Mr. Collins returned, the gentleman
accompanied him. Charlotte had seen them from her husband's
room, crossing the road, and immediately running into the other,
told the girls what an honour they might expect, adding
"I may thank you, Eliza, for this piece of civility. Mr. Darcy
would never have come so soon to wait upon me."
Elizabeth had scarcely time to disclaim all right to the
compliment, before their approach was announced by the
doorbell, and shortly afterwards the three gentlemen entered
the room. Colonel Fitzwilliam, who led the way, was about
thirty, not handsome, but in person and address most truly the
gentleman. Mr. Darcy looked just as he had been used to look
in Hertfordshirepaid his compliments, with his usual reserve,
to Mrs. Collins, and whatever might be his feelings toward her
friend, met her with every appearance of composure. Elizabeth
merely curtseyed to him without saying a word.
Colonel Fitzwilliam entered into conversation directly with
the readiness and ease of a wellbred man, and talked very
pleasantly but his cousin, after having addressed a slight
observation on the house and garden to Mrs. Collins, sat for
some time without speaking to anybody. At length, however,
his civility was so far awakened as to inquire of Elizabeth after
the health of her family. She answered him in the usual way,
and after a moment's pause, added
"My eldest sister has been in town these three months. Have
you never happened to see her there?"
She was perfectly sensible that he never had but she wished
to see whether he would betray any consciousness of what had
passed between the Bingleys and Jane, and she thought he
looked a little confused as he answered that he had never been
so fortunate as to meet Miss Bennet. The subject was pursued
no farther, and the gentlemen soon afterwards went away.
Chapter 
Colonel Fitzwilliam's manners were very much admired at the
Parsonage, and the ladies all felt that he must add considerably
to the pleasures of their engagements at Rosings. It was some
days, however, before they received any invitation thitherfor
while there were visitors in the house, they could not be
necessary and it was not till Easterday, almost a week after the
gentlemen's arrival, that they were honoured by such an
attention, and then they were merely asked on leaving church to
come there in the evening. For the last week they had seen very
little of Lady Catherine or her daughter. Colonel Fitzwilliam had
called at the Parsonage more than once during the time, but Mr.
Darcy they had seen only at church.
The invitation was accepted of course, and at a proper hour they
joined the party in Lady Catherine's drawingroom. Her ladyship
received them civilly, but it was plain that their company was by
no means so acceptable as when she could get nobody else and
she was, in fact, almost engrossed by her nephews, speaking to
them, especially to Darcy, much more than to any other person
in the room.
Colonel Fitzwilliam seemed really glad to see them anything
was a welcome relief to him at Rosings and Mrs. Collins's
pretty friend had moreover caught his fancy very much. He now
seated himself by her, and talked so agreeably of Kent and
Hertfordshire, of travelling and staying at home, of new books
and music, that Elizabeth had never been half so well entertained
in that room before and they conversed with so much spirit and
flow, as to draw the attention of Lady Catherine herself, as well
as of Mr. Darcy. His eyes had been soon and repeatedly turned
towards them with a look of curiosity and that her ladyship,
after a while, shared the feeling, was more openly acknowledged,
for she did not scruple to call out
"What is that you are saying, Fitzwilliam? What is it you are
talking of? What are you telling Miss Bennet? Let me hear
what it is."
"We are speaking of music, madam," said he, when no longer
able to avoid a reply.
"Of music Then pray speak aloud. It is of all subjects my
delight. I must have my share in the conversation if you are
speaking of music. There are few people in England, I suppose,
who have more true enjoyment of music than myself, or a better
natural taste. If I had ever learnt, I should have been a great
proficient. And so would Anne, if her health had allowed her to
apply. I am confident that she would have performed delightfully.
How does Georgiana get on, Darcy?"
Mr. Darcy spoke with affectionate praise of his sister's
proficiency.
"I am very glad to hear such a good account of her," said Lady
Catherine "and pray tell her from me, that she cannot expect to
excel if she does not practice a good deal."
"I assure you, madam," he replied, "that she does not need such
advice. She practises very constantly."
"So much the better. It cannot be done too much and when I
next write to her, I shall charge her not to neglect it on any
account. I often tell young ladies that no excellence in music
is to be acquired without constant practice. I have told Miss
Bennet several times, that she will never play really well unless
she practises more and though Mrs. Collins has no instrument,
she is very welcome, as I have often told her, to come to Rosings
every day, and play on the pianoforte in Mrs. Jenkinson's room.
She would be in nobody's way, you know, in that part of the house."
Mr. Darcy looked a little ashamed of his aunt's illbreeding, and
made no answer.
When coffee was over, Colonel Fitzwilliam reminded Elizabeth
of having promised to play to him and she sat down directly to
the instrument. He drew a chair near her. Lady Catherine
listened to half a song, and then talked, as before, to her other
nephew till the latter walked away from her, and making with
his usual deliberation towards the pianoforte stationed himself
so as to command a full view of the fair performer's countenance.
Elizabeth saw what he was doing, and at the first convenient
pause, turned to him with an arch smile, and said
"You mean to frighten me, Mr. Darcy, by coming in all this state
to hear me? I will not be alarmed though your sister does play
so well. There is a stubbornness about me that never can bear to
be frightened at the will of others. My courage always rises at
every attempt to intimidate me."
"I shall not say you are mistaken," he replied, "because you
could not really believe me to entertain any design of alarming
you and I have had the pleasure of your acquaintance long
enough to know that you find great enjoyment in occasionally
professing opinions which in fact are not your own."
Elizabeth laughed heartily at this picture of herself, and said to
Colonel Fitzwilliam, "Your cousin will give you a very pretty
notion of me, and teach you not to believe a word I say. I am
particularly unlucky in meeting with a person so able to expose
my real character, in a part of the world where I had hoped to
pass myself off with some degree of credit. Indeed, Mr. Darcy,
it is very ungenerous in you to mention all that you knew to my
disadvantage in Hertfordshireand, give me leave to say, very
impolitic toofor it is provoking me to retaliate, and such
things may come out as will shock your relations to hear."
"I am not afraid of you," said he, smilingly.
"Pray let me hear what you have to accuse him of," cried
Colonel Fitzwilliam. "I should like to know how he behaves
among strangers."
"You shall hear thenbut prepare yourself for something very
dreadful. The first time of my ever seeing him in Hertfordshire,
you must know, was at a balland at this ball, what do you
think he did? He danced only four dances, though gentlemen
were scarce and, to my certain knowledge, more than one
young lady was sitting down in want of a partner. Mr. Darcy,
you cannot deny the fact."
"I had not at that time the honour of knowing any lady in the
assembly beyond my own party."
"True and nobody can ever be introduced in a ballroom. Well,
Colonel Fitzwilliam, what do I play next? My fingers wait your
orders."
"Perhaps," said Darcy, "I should have judged better, had I
sought an introduction but I am illqualified to recommend
myself to strangers."
"Shall we ask your cousin the reason of this?" said Elizabeth,
still addressing Colonel Fitzwilliam. "Shall we ask him why a
man of sense and education, and who has lived in the world, is
ill qualified to recommend himself to strangers?"
"I can answer your question," said Fitzwilliam, "without
applying to him. It is because he will not give himself the
trouble."
"I certainly have not the talent which some people possess," said
Darcy, "of conversing easily with those I have never seen before.
I cannot catch their tone of conversation, or appear interested
in their concerns, as I often see done."
"My fingers," said Elizabeth, "do not move over this instrument
in the masterly manner which I see so many women's do. They
have not the same force or rapidity, and do not produce the
same expression. But then I have always supposed it to be my
own faultbecause I will not take the trouble of practising.
It is not that I do not believe my fingers as capable as any
other woman's of superior execution."
Darcy smiled and said, "You are perfectly right. You have
employed your time much better. No one admitted to the
privilege of hearing you can think anything wanting. We neither
of us perform to strangers."
Here they were interrupted by Lady Catherine, who called out to
know what they were talking of. Elizabeth immediately began
playing again. Lady Catherine approached, and, after listening
for a few minutes, said to Darcy
"Miss Bennet would not play at all amiss if she practised more,
and could have the advantage of a London master. She has a
very good notion of fingering, though her taste is not equal to
Anne's. Anne would have been a delightful performer, had her
health allowed her to learn."
Elizabeth looked at Darcy to see how cordially he assented to
his cousin's praise but neither at that moment nor at any other
could she discern any symptom of love and from the whole of
his behaviour to Miss de Bourgh she derived this comfort for
Miss Bingley, that he might have been just as likely to marry
her, had she been his relation.
Lady Catherine continued her remarks on Elizabeth's performance,
mixing with them many instructions on execution and taste.
Elizabeth received them with all the forbearance of civility,
and, at the request of the gentlemen, remained at the instrument
till her ladyship's carriage was ready to take them all home.
Chapter 
Elizabeth was sitting by herself the next morning, and writing to
Jane while Mrs. Collins and Maria were gone on business into
the village, when she was startled by a ring at the door, the
certain signal of a visitor. As she had heard no carriage, she
thought it not unlikely to be Lady Catherine, and under that
apprehension was putting away her halffinished letter that she
might escape all impertinent questions, when the door opened,
and, to her very great surprise, Mr. Darcy, and Mr. Darcy only,
entered the room.
He seemed astonished too on finding her alone, and apologised
for his intrusion by letting her know that he had understood all
the ladies were to be within.
They then sat down, and when her inquiries after Rosings were
made, seemed in danger of sinking into total silence. It was
absolutely necessary, therefore, to think of something, and in
this emergence recollecting when she had seen him last in
Hertfordshire, and feeling curious to know what he would say
on the subject of their hasty departure, she observed
"How very suddenly you all quitted Netherfield last November,
Mr. Darcy It must have been a most agreeable surprise to Mr.
Bingley to see you all after him so soon for, if I recollect right,
he went but the day before. He and his sisters were well, I hope,
when you left London?"
"Perfectly so, I thank you."
She found that she was to receive no other answer, and, after a
short pause added
"I think I have understood that Mr. Bingley has not much idea of
ever returning to Netherfield again?"
"I have never heard him say so but it is probable that he may
spend very little of his time there in the future. He has many
friends, and is at a time of life when friends and engagements are
continually increasing."
"If he means to be but little at Netherfield, it would be better for
the neighbourhood that he should give up the place entirely, for
then we might possibly get a settled family there. But, perhaps,
Mr. Bingley did not take the house so much for the convenience
of the neighbourhood as for his own, and we must expect him to
keep it or quit it on the same principle."
"I should not be surprised," said Darcy, "if he were to give it up
as soon as any eligible purchase offers."
Elizabeth made no answer. She was afraid of talking longer of
his friend and, having nothing else to say, was now determined
to leave the trouble of finding a subject to him.
He took the hint, and soon began with, "This seems a very
comfortable house. Lady Catherine, I believe, did a great deal to
it when Mr. Collins first came to Hunsford."
"I believe she didand I am sure she could not have bestowed
her kindness on a more grateful object."
"Mr. Collins appears to be very fortunate in his choice of a wife."
"Yes, indeed, his friends may well rejoice in his having met with
one of the very few sensible women who would have accepted
him, or have made him happy if they had. My friend has an
excellent understandingthough I am not certain that I consider
her marrying Mr. Collins as the wisest thing she ever did. She
seems perfectly happy, however, and in a prudential light it is
certainly a very good match for her."
"It must be very agreeable for her to be settled within so easy a
distance of her own family and friends."
"An easy distance, do you call it? It is nearly fifty miles."
"And what is fifty miles of good road? Little more than half a
day's journey. Yes, I call it a very easy distance."
"I should never have considered the distance as one of the
advantages of the match," cried Elizabeth. "I should never
have said Mrs. Collins was settled near her family."
"It is a proof of your own attachment to Hertfordshire.
Anything beyond the very neighbourhood of Longbourn, I
suppose, would appear far."
As he spoke there was a sort of smile which Elizabeth fancied
she understood he must be supposing her to be thinking of Jane
and Netherfield, and she blushed as she answered
"I do not mean to say that a woman may not be settled too near
her family. The far and the near must be relative, and depend on
many varying circumstances. Where there is fortune to make the
expenses of travelling unimportant, distance becomes no evil.
But that is not the case here. Mr. and Mrs. Collins have a
comfortable income, but not such a one as will allow of frequent
journeysand I am persuaded my friend would not call herself
near her family under less than half the present distance."
Mr. Darcy drew his chair a little towards her, and said, "You
cannot have a right to such very strong local attachment.
You cannot have been always at Longbourn."
Elizabeth looked surprised. The gentleman experienced some
change of feeling he drew back his chair, took a newspaper
from the table, and glancing over it, said, in a colder voice
"Are you pleased with Kent?"
A short dialogue on the subject of the country ensued, on either
side calm and conciseand soon put an end to by the entrance
of Charlotte and her sister, just returned from her walk. The
teteatete surprised them. Mr. Darcy related the mistake which
had occasioned his intruding on Miss Bennet, and after sitting a
few minutes longer without saying much to anybody, went away.
"What can be the meaning of this?" said Charlotte, as soon as he
was gone. "My dear, Eliza, he must be in love with you, or he
would never have called us in this familiar way."
But when Elizabeth told of his silence it did not seem very
likely, even to Charlotte's wishes, to be the case and after
various conjectures, they could at last only suppose his visit to
proceed from the difficulty of finding anything to do, which was
the more probable from the time of year. All field sports were
over. Within doors there was Lady Catherine, books, and a
billiardtable, but gentlemen cannot always be within doors and
in the nearness of the Parsonage, or the pleasantness of the walk
to it, or of the people who lived in it, the two cousins found a
temptation from this period of walking thither almost every day.
They called at various times of the morning, sometimes
separately, sometimes together, and now and then accompanied
by their aunt. It was plain to them all that Colonel Fitzwilliam
came because he had pleasure in their society, a persuasion
which of course recommended him still more and Elizabeth was
reminded by her own satisfaction in being with him, as well as by
his evident admiration of her, of her former favourite George
Wickham and though, in comparing them, she saw there was
less captivating softness in Colonel Fitzwilliam's manners, she
believed he might have the best informed mind.
But why Mr. Darcy came so often to the Parsonage, it was more
difficult to understand. It could not be for society, as he
frequently sat there ten minutes together without opening his
lips and when he did speak, it seemed the effect of necessity
rather than of choicea sacrifice to propriety, not a pleasure
to himself. He seldom appeared really animated. Mrs. Collins
knew not what to make of him. Colonel Fitzwilliam's occasionally
laughing at his stupidity, proved that he was generally different,
which her own knowledge of him could not have told her and as
she would liked to have believed this change the effect of love,
and the object of that love her friend Eliza, she set herself
seriously to work to find it out. She watched him whenever they
were at Rosings, and whenever he came to Hunsford but without
much success. He certainly looked at her friend a great deal,
but the expression of that look was disputable. It was an
earnest, steadfast gaze, but she often doubted whether there
were much admiration in it, and sometimes it seemed nothing but
absence of mind.
She had once or twice suggested to Elizabeth the possibility of
his being partial to her, but Elizabeth always laughed at the idea
and Mrs. Collins did not think it right to press the subject, from
the danger of raising expectations which might only end in
disappointment for in her opinion it admitted not of a doubt,
that all her friend's dislike would vanish, if she could suppose
him to be in her power.
In her kind schemes for Elizabeth, she sometimes planned her
marrying Colonel Fitzwilliam. He was beyond comparison the
most pleasant man he certainly admired her, and his situation in
life was most eligible but, to counterbalance these advantages,
Mr. Darcy had considerable patronage in the church, and his
cousin could have none at all.
Chapter 
More than once did Elizabeth, in her ramble within the park,
unexpectedly meet Mr. Darcy. She felt all the perverseness of
the mischance that should bring him where no one else was brought,
and, to prevent its ever happening again, took care to inform him
at first that it was a favourite haunt of hers. How it could occur
a second time, therefore, was very odd Yet it did, and even a
third. It seemed like wilful illnature, or a voluntary penance,
for on these occasions it was not merely a few formal inquiries
and an awkward pause and then away, but he actually thought it
necessary to turn back and walk with her. He never said a great
deal, nor did she give herself the trouble of talking or of
listening much but it struck her in the course of their third
rencontre that he was asking some odd unconnected questionsabout
her pleasure in being at Hunsford, her love of solitary walks, and
her opinion of Mr. and Mrs. Collins's happiness and that in
speaking of Rosings and her not perfectly understanding the house,
he seemed to expect that whenever she came into Kent again she
would be staying there too. His words seemed to imply it. Could
he have Colonel Fitzwilliam in his thoughts? She supposed, if he
meant anything, he must mean an allusion to what might arise in
that quarter. It distressed her a little, and she was quite glad
to find herself at the gate in the pales opposite the Parsonage.
She was engaged one day as she walked, in perusing Jane's last
letter, and dwelling on some passages which proved that Jane
had not written in spirits, when, instead of being again surprised
by Mr. Darcy, she saw on looking up that Colonel Fitzwilliam
was meeting her. Putting away the letter immediately and
forcing a smile, she said
"I did not know before that you ever walked this way."
"I have been making the tour of the park," he replied, "as I
generally do every year, and intend to close it with a call at the
Parsonage. Are you going much farther?"
"No, I should have turned in a moment."
And accordingly she did turn, and they walked towards the
Parsonage together.
"Do you certainly leave Kent on Saturday?" said she.
"Yesif Darcy does not put it off again. But I am at his
disposal. He arranges the business just as he pleases."
"And if not able to please himself in the arrangement, he has
at least pleasure in the great power of choice. I do not know
anybody who seems more to enjoy the power of doing what he
likes than Mr. Darcy."
"He likes to have his own way very well," replied Colonel
Fitzwilliam. "But so we all do. It is only that he has better
means of having it than many others, because he is rich, and
many others are poor. I speak feelingly. A younger son, you
know, must be inured to selfdenial and dependence."
"In my opinion, the younger son of an earl can know very
little of either. Now seriously, what have you ever known of
selfdenial and dependence? When have you been prevented by
want of money from going wherever you chose, or procuring
anything you had a fancy for?"
"These are home questionsand perhaps I cannot say that I
have experienced many hardships of that nature. But in matters
of greater weight, I may suffer from want of money. Younger
sons cannot marry where they like."
"Unless where they like women of fortune, which I think they
very often do."
"Our habits of expense make us too dependent, and there are not
many in my rank of life who can afford to marry without some
attention to money."
"Is this," thought Elizabeth, "meant for me?" and she coloured
at the idea but, recovering herself, said in a lively tone, "And
pray, what is the usual price of an earl's younger son? Unless
the elder brother is very sickly, I suppose you would not ask
above fifty thousand pounds."
He answered her in the same style, and the subject dropped. To
interrupt a silence which might make him fancy her affected with
what had passed, she soon afterwards said
"I imagine your cousin brought you down with him chiefly for
the sake of having someone at his disposal. I wonder he does
not marry, to secure a lasting convenience of that kind. But,
perhaps, his sister does as well for the present, and, as she is
under his sole care, he may do what he likes with her."
"No," said Colonel Fitzwilliam, "that is an advantage which he
must divide with me. I am joined with him in the guardianship
of Miss Darcy."
"Are you indeed? And pray what sort of guardians do you
make? Does your charge give you much trouble? Young ladies
of her age are sometimes a little difficult to manage, and if she
has the true Darcy spirit, she may like to have her own way."
As she spoke she observed him looking at her earnestly and
the manner in which he immediately asked her why she supposed
Miss Darcy likely to give them any uneasiness, convinced her
that she had somehow or other got pretty near the truth. She
directly replied
"You need not be frightened. I never heard any harm of her and
I dare say she is one of the most tractable creatures in the world.
She is a very great favourite with some ladies of my acquaintance,
Mrs. Hurst and Miss Bingley. I think I have heard you say that
you know them."
"I know them a little. Their brother is a pleasant gentlemanlike
manhe is a great friend of Darcy's."
"Oh yes," said Elizabeth drily "Mr. Darcy is uncommonly kind
to Mr. Bingley, and takes a prodigious deal of care of him."
"Care of him Yes, I really believe Darcy does take care of
him in those points where he most wants care. From something
that he told me in our journey hither, I have reason to think
Bingley very much indebted to him. But I ought to beg his
pardon, for I have no right to suppose that Bingley was the
person meant. It was all conjecture."
"What is it you mean?"
"It is a circumstance which Darcy could not wish to be generally
known, because if it were to get round to the lady's family, it
would be an unpleasant thing."
"You may depend upon my not mentioning it."
"And remember that I have not much reason for supposing it
to be Bingley. What he told me was merely this that he
congratulated himself on having lately saved a friend from
the inconveniences of a most imprudent marriage, but without
mentioning names or any other particulars, and I only suspected
it to be Bingley from believing him the kind of young man to get
into a scrape of that sort, and from knowing them to have been
together the whole of last summer."
"Did Mr. Darcy give you reasons for this interference?"
"I understood that there were some very strong objections
against the lady."
"And what arts did he use to separate them?"
"He did not talk to me of his own arts," said Fitzwilliam, smiling.
"He only told me what I have now told you."
Elizabeth made no answer, and walked on, her heart swelling
with indignation. After watching her a little, Fitzwilliam asked
her why she was so thoughtful.
"I am thinking of what you have been telling me," said she.
"Your cousin's conduct does not suit my feelings. Why was he
to be the judge?"
"You are rather disposed to call his interference officious?"
"I do not see what right Mr. Darcy had to decide on the
propriety of his friend's inclination, or why, upon his own
judgement alone, he was to determine and direct in what manner
his friend was to be happy. But," she continued, recollecting
herself, "as we know none of the particulars, it is not fair to
condemn him. It is not to be supposed that there was much
affection in the case."
"That is not an unnatural surmise," said Fitzwilliam, "but it is a
lessening of the honour of my cousin's triumph very sadly."
This was spoken jestingly but it appeared to her so just a picture
of Mr. Darcy, that she would not trust herself with an answer,
and therefore, abruptly changing the conversation talked on
indifferent matters until they reached the Parsonage. There, shut
into her own room, as soon as their visitor left them, she could
think without interruption of all that she had heard. It was not
to be supposed that any other people could be meant than those
with whom she was connected. There could not exist in the
world two men over whom Mr. Darcy could have such boundless
influence. That he had been concerned in the measures taken to
separate Bingley and Jane she had never doubted but she had
always attributed to Miss Bingley the principal design and
arrangement of them. If his own vanity, however, did not mislead
him, he was the cause, his pride and caprice were the cause, of
all that Jane had suffered, and still continued to suffer. He
had ruined for a while every hope of happiness for the most
affectionate, generous heart in the world and no one could say
how lasting an evil he might have inflicted.
"There were some very strong objections against the lady,"
were Colonel Fitzwilliam's words and those strong objections
probably were, her having one uncle who was a country attorney,
and another who was in business in London.
"To Jane herself," she exclaimed, "there could be no possibility
of objection all loveliness and goodness as she isher
understanding excellent, her mind improved, and her manners
captivating. Neither could anything be urged against my father,
who, though with some peculiarities, has abilities Mr. Darcy
himself need not disdain, and respectability which he will
probably never each." When she thought of her mother, her
confidence gave way a little but she would not allow that any
objections there had material weight with Mr. Darcy, whose
pride, she was convinced, would receive a deeper wound from
the want of importance in his friend's connections, than from
their want of sense and she was quite decided, at last, that he
had been partly governed by this worst kind of pride, and partly
by the wish of retaining Mr. Bingley for his sister.
The agitation and tears which the subject occasioned, brought on
a headache and it grew so much worse towards the evening,
that, added to her unwillingness to see Mr. Darcy, it determined
her not to attend her cousins to Rosings, where they were
engaged to drink tea. Mrs. Collins, seeing that she was really
unwell, did not press her to go and as much as possible
prevented her husband from pressing her but Mr. Collins could
not conceal his apprehension of Lady Catherine's being rather
displeased by her staying at home.
Chapter 
When they were gone, Elizabeth, as if intending to exasperate
herself as much as possible against Mr. Darcy, chose for her
employment the examination of all the letters which Jane had
written to her since her being in Kent. They contained no actual
complaint, nor was there any revival of past occurrences, or any
communication of present suffering. But in all, and in almost
every line of each, there was a want of that cheerfulness which
had been used to characterise her style, and which, proceeding
from the serenity of a mind at ease with itself and kindly
disposed towards everyone, had been scarcely ever clouded.
Elizabeth noticed every sentence conveying the idea of uneasiness,
with an attention which it had hardly received on the first
perusal. Mr. Darcy's shameful boast of what misery he had been
able to inflict, gave her a keener sense of her sister's
sufferings. It was some consolation to think that his visit
to Rosings was to end on the day after the nextand, a still
greater, that in less than a fortnight she should herself be with
Jane again, and enabled to contribute to the recovery of her
spirits, by all that affection could do.
She could not think of Darcy's leaving Kent without remembering
that his cousin was to go with him but Colonel Fitzwilliam had
made it clear that he had no intentions at all, and agreeable
as he was, she did not mean to be unhappy about him.
While settling this point, she was suddenly roused by the sound
of the doorbell, and her spirits were a little fluttered by the
idea of its being Colonel Fitzwilliam himself, who had once
before called late in the evening, and might now come to inquire
particularly after her. But this idea was soon banished, and
her spirits were very differently affected, when, to her utter
amazement, she saw Mr. Darcy walk into the room. In an
hurried manner he immediately began an inquiry after her health,
imputing his visit to a wish of hearing that she were better.
She answered him with cold civility. He sat down for a few
moments, and then getting up, walked about the room. Elizabeth
was surprised, but said not a word. After a silence of
several minutes, he came towards her in an agitated manner,
and thus began
"In vain I have struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not
be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire
and love you."
Elizabeth's astonishment was beyond expression. She stared,
coloured, doubted, and was silent. This he considered sufficient
encouragement and the avowal of all that he felt, and had long
felt for her, immediately followed. He spoke well but there
were feelings besides those of the heart to be detailed and he
was not more eloquent on the subject of tenderness than of pride.
His sense of her inferiorityof its being a degradationof the
family obstacles which had always opposed to inclination, were
dwelt on with a warmth which seemed due to the consequence he
was wounding, but was very unlikely to recommend his suit.
In spite of her deeplyrooted dislike, she could not be insensible
to the compliment of such a man's affection, and though her
intentions did not vary for an instant, she was at first sorry for
the pain he was to receive till, roused to resentment by his
subsequent language, she lost all compassion in anger. She
tried, however, to compose herself to answer him with patience,
when he should have done. He concluded with representing to
her the strength of that attachment which, in spite of all his
endeavours, he had found impossible to conquer and with
expressing his hope that it would now be rewarded by her
acceptance of his hand. As he said this, she could easily
see that he had no doubt of a favourable answer. He spoke of
apprehension and anxiety, but his countenance expressed real
security. Such a circumstance could only exasperate farther,
and, when he ceased, the colour rose into her cheeks, and she
said
"In such cases as this, it is, I believe, the established mode
to express a sense of obligation for the sentiments avowed,
however unequally they may be returned. It is natural that
obligation should be felt, and if I could feel gratitude, I would
now thank you. But I cannotI have never desired your good
opinion, and you have certainly bestowed it most unwillingly. I
am sorry to have occasioned pain to anyone. It has been most
unconsciously done, however, and I hope will be of short
duration. The feelings which, you tell me, have long prevented
the acknowledgment of your regard, can have little difficulty in
overcoming it after this explanation."
Mr. Darcy, who was leaning against the mantelpiece with his
eyes fixed on her face, seemed to catch her words with no less
resentment than surprise. His complexion became pale with
anger, and the disturbance of his mind was visible in every
feature. He was struggling for the appearance of composure,
and would not open his lips till he believed himself to have
attained it. The pause was to Elizabeth's feelings dreadful.
At length, with a voice of forced calmness, he said
"And this is all the reply which I am to have the honour of
expecting I might, perhaps, wish to be informed why, with so
little endeavour at civility, I am thus rejected. But it is of
small importance."
"I might as well inquire," replied she, "why with so evident a
desire of offending and insulting me, you chose to tell me that
you liked me against your will, against your reason, and even
against your character? Was not this some excuse for incivility,
if I was uncivil? But I have other provocations. You know I
have. Had not my feelings decided against youhad they been
indifferent, or had they even been favourable, do you think that
any consideration would tempt me to accept the man who has
been the means of ruining, perhaps for ever, the happiness of a
most beloved sister?"
As she pronounced these words, Mr. Darcy changed colour but
the emotion was short, and he listened without attempting
to interrupt her while she continued
"I have every reason in the world to think ill of you. No motive
can excuse the unjust and ungenerous part you acted there.
You dare not, you cannot deny, that you have been the principal,
if not the only means of dividing them from each otherof
exposing one to the censure of the world for caprice and
instability, and the other to its derision for disappointed hopes,
and involving them both in misery of the acutest kind."
She paused, and saw with no slight indignation that he was
listening with an air which proved him wholly unmoved by any
feeling of remorse. He even looked at her with a smile of
affected incredulity.
"Can you deny that you have done it?" she repeated.
With assumed tranquillity he then replied "I have no wish of
denying that I did everything in my power to separate my friend
from your sister, or that I rejoice in my success. Towards him
I have been kinder than towards myself."
Elizabeth disdained the appearance of noticing this civil
reflection, but its meaning did not escape, nor was it likely to
conciliate her.
"But it is not merely this affair," she continued, "on which my
dislike is founded. Long before it had taken place my opinion
of you was decided. Your character was unfolded in the recital
which I received many months ago from Mr. Wickham. On this
subject, what can you have to say? In what imaginary act
of friendship can you here defend yourself? or under what
misrepresentation can you here impose upon others?"
"You take an eager interest in that gentleman's concerns," said
Darcy, in a less tranquil tone, and with a heightened colour.
"Who that knows what his misfortunes have been, can help
feeling an interest in him?"
"His misfortunes" repeated Darcy contemptuously "yes, his
misfortunes have been great indeed."
"And of your infliction," cried Elizabeth with energy. "You
have reduced him to his present state of povertycomparative
poverty. You have withheld the advantages which you must
know to have been designed for him. You have deprived the
best years of his life of that independence which was no less his
due than his desert. You have done all this and yet you can
treat the mention of his misfortune with contempt and ridicule."
"And this," cried Darcy, as he walked with quick steps across
the room, "is your opinion of me This is the estimation in
which you hold me I thank you for explaining it so fully. My
faults, according to this calculation, are heavy indeed But
perhaps," added he, stopping in his walk, and turning towards
her, "these offenses might have been overlooked, had not your
pride been hurt by my honest confession of the scruples that had
long prevented my forming any serious design. These bitter
accusations might have been suppressed, had I, with greater
policy, concealed my struggles, and flattered you into the belief
of my being impelled by unqualified, unalloyed inclination by
reason, by reflection, by everything. But disguise of every sort
is my abhorrence. Nor am I ashamed of the feelings I related.
They were natural and just. Could you expect me to rejoice in
the inferiority of your connections?to congratulate myself on
the hope of relations, whose condition in life is so decidedly
beneath my own?"
Elizabeth felt herself growing more angry every moment yet she
tried to the utmost to speak with composure when she said
"You are mistaken, Mr. Darcy, if you suppose that the mode of
your declaration affected me in any other way, than as it spared
the concern which I might have felt in refusing you, had you
behaved in a more gentlemanlike manner."
She saw him start at this, but he said nothing, and she continued
"You could not have made the offer of your hand in any possible
way that would have tempted me to accept it."
Again his astonishment was obvious and he looked at her with
an expression of mingled incredulity and mortification. She went
on
"From the very beginningfrom the first moment, I may almost
sayof my acquaintance with you, your manners, impressing me
with the fullest belief of your arrogance, your conceit, and your
selfish disdain of the feelings of others, were such as to form the
groundwork of disapprobation on which succeeding events have
built so immovable a dislike and I had not known you a month
before I felt that you were the last man in the world whom I
could ever be prevailed on to marry."
"You have said quite enough, madam. I perfectly comprehend
your feelings, and have now only to be ashamed of what my own
have been. Forgive me for having taken up so much of your
time, and accept my best wishes for your health and happiness."
And with these words he hastily left the room, and Elizabeth
heard him the next moment open the front door and quit the
house.
The tumult of her mind, was now painfully great. She knew not
how to support herself, and from actual weakness sat down and
cried for halfanhour. Her astonishment, as she reflected on
what had passed, was increased by every review of it. That she
should receive an offer of marriage from Mr. Darcy That he
should have been in love with her for so many months So much
in love as to wish to marry her in spite of all the objections
which had made him prevent his friend's marrying her sister,
and which must appear at least with equal force in his own
casewas almost incredible It was gratifying to have inspired
unconsciously so strong an affection. But his pride, his
abominable pridehis shameless avowal of what he had done with
respect to Janehis unpardonable assurance in acknowledging,
though he could not justify it, and the unfeeling manner in
which he had mentioned Mr. Wickham, his cruelty towards whom
he had not attempted to deny, soon overcame the pity which the
consideration of his attachment had for a moment excited. She
continued in very agitated reflections till the sound of Lady
Catherine's carriage made her feel how unequal she was to
encounter Charlotte's observation, and hurried her away to
her room.
Chapter 
Elizabeth awoke the next morning to the same thoughts and
meditations which had at length closed her eyes. She could
not yet recover from the surprise of what had happened it was
impossible to think of anything else and, totally indisposed
for employment, she resolved, soon after breakfast, to indulge
herself in air and exercise. She was proceeding directly to her
favourite walk, when the recollection of Mr. Darcy's sometimes
coming there stopped her, and instead of entering the park, she
turned up the lane, which led farther from the turnpikeroad.
The park paling was still the boundary on one side, and she
soon passed one of the gates into the ground.
After walking two or three times along that part of the lane, she
was tempted, by the pleasantness of the morning, to stop at the
gates and look into the park. The five weeks which she had now
passed in Kent had made a great difference in the country, and
every day was adding to the verdure of the early trees. She was
on the point of continuing her walk, when she caught a glimpse
of a gentleman within the sort of grove which edged the park
he was moving that way and, fearful of its being Mr. Darcy,
she was directly retreating. But the person who advanced was
now near enough to see her, and stepping forward with eagerness,
pronounced her name. She had turned away but on hearing
herself called, though in a voice which proved it to be Mr.
Darcy, she moved again towards the gate. He had by that time
reached it also, and, holding out a letter, which she instinctively
took, said, with a look of haughty composure, "I have been
walking in the grove some time in the hope of meeting you. Will
you do me the honour of reading that letter?" And then, with a
slight bow, turned again into the plantation, and was soon out of
sight.
With no expectation of pleasure, but with the strongest curiosity,
Elizabeth opened the letter, and, to her still increasing wonder,
perceived an envelope containing two sheets of letterpaper,
written quite through, in a very close hand. The envelope itself
was likewise full. Pursuing her way along the lane, she then
began it. It was dated from Rosings, at eight o'clock in the
morning, and was as follows
"Be not alarmed, madam, on receiving this letter, by the
apprehension of its containing any repetition of those sentiments
or renewal of those offers which were last night so disgusting to
you. I write without any intention of paining you, or humbling
myself, by dwelling on wishes which, for the happiness of both,
cannot be too soon forgotten and the effort which the formation
and the perusal of this letter must occasion, should have been
spared, had not my character required it to be written and read.
You must, therefore, pardon the freedom with which I demand
your attention your feelings, I know, will bestow it unwillingly,
but I demand it of your justice.
"Two offenses of a very different nature, and by no means of
equal magnitude, you last night laid to my charge. The first
mentioned was, that, regardless of the sentiments of either, I had
detached Mr. Bingley from your sister, and the other, that I had,
in defiance of various claims, in defiance of honour and
humanity, ruined the immediate prosperity and blasted the
prospects of Mr. Wickham. Wilfully and wantonly to have
thrown off the companion of my youth, the acknowledged
favourite of my father, a young man who had scarcely any other
dependence than on our patronage, and who had been brought
up to expect its exertion, would be a depravity, to which the
separation of two young persons, whose affection could be the
growth of only a few weeks, could bear no comparison. But
from the severity of that blame which was last night so liberally
bestowed, respecting each circumstance, I shall hope to be in the
future secured, when the following account of my actions and
their motives has been read. If, in the explanation of them,
which is due to myself, I am under the necessity of relating
feelings which may be offensive to yours, I can only say that I
am sorry. The necessity must be obeyed, and further apology
would be absurd.
"I had not been long in Hertfordshire, before I saw, in common
with others, that Bingley preferred your elder sister to any other
young woman in the country. But it was not till the evening of
the dance at Netherfield that I had any apprehension of his
feeling a serious attachment. I had often seen him in love before.
At that ball, while I had the honour of dancing with you, I was
first made acquainted, by Sir William Lucas's accidental
information, that Bingley's attentions to your sister had given
rise to a general expectation of their marriage. He spoke of it
as a certain event, of which the time alone could be undecided.
From that moment I observed my friend's behaviour attentively
and I could then perceive that his partiality for Miss Bennet
was beyond what I had ever witnessed in him. Your sister I
also watched. Her look and manners were open, cheerful, and
engaging as ever, but without any symptom of peculiar regard,
and I remained convinced from the evening's scrutiny, that
though she received his attentions with pleasure, she did not
invite them by any participation of sentiment. If you have not
been mistaken here, I must have been in error. Your superior
knowledge of your sister must make the latter probable. If it be
so, if I have been misled by such error to inflict pain on her,
your resentment has not been unreasonable. But I shall not scruple
to assert, that the serenity of your sister's countenance and air
was such as might have given the most acute observer a conviction
that, however amiable her temper, her heart was not likely to be
easily touched. That I was desirous of believing her indifferent
is certainbut I will venture to say that my investigation and
decisions are not usually influenced by my hopes or fears. I did
not believe her to be indifferent because I wished it I believed
it on impartial conviction, as truly as I wished it in reason.
My objections to the marriage were not merely those which I last
night acknowledged to have the utmost force of passion to put
aside, in my own case the want of connection could not be so
great an evil to my friend as to me. But there were other causes
of repugnance causes which, though still existing, and existing
to an equal degree in both instances, I had myself endeavoured
to forget, because they were not immediately before me. These
causes must be stated, though briefly. The situation of
your mother's family, though objectionable, was nothing in
comparison to that total want of propriety so frequently, so
almost uniformly betrayed by herself, by your three younger
sisters, and occasionally even by your father. Pardon me. It
pains me to offend you. But amidst your concern for the defects
of your nearest relations, and your displeasure at this
representation of them, let it give you consolation to consider
that, to have conducted yourselves so as to avoid any share of
the like censure, is praise no less generally bestowed on you and
your elder sister, than it is honourable to the sense and
disposition of both. I will only say farther that from what passed
that evening, my opinion of all parties was confirmed, and every
inducement heightened which could have led me before, to
preserve my friend from what I esteemed a most unhappy
connection. He left Netherfield for London, on the day
following, as you, I am certain, remember, with the design of
soon returning.
"The part which I acted is now to be explained. His sisters'
uneasiness had been equally excited with my own our coincidence
of feeling was soon discovered, and, alike sensible that no time
was to be lost in detaching their brother, we shortly resolved
on joining him directly in London. We accordingly wentand
there I readily engaged in the office of pointing out to my
friend the certain evils of such a choice. I described, and
enforced them earnestly. But, however this remonstrance might
have staggered or delayed his determination, I do not suppose
that it would ultimately have prevented the marriage, had it not
been seconded by the assurance that I hesitated not in giving, of
your sister's indifference. He had before believed her to return
his affection with sincere, if not with equal regard. But Bingley
has great natural modesty, with a stronger dependence on my
judgement than on his own. To convince him, therefore, that he
had deceived himself, was no very difficult point. To persuade
him against returning into Hertfordshire, when that conviction
had been given, was scarcely the work of a moment. I cannot
blame myself for having done thus much. There is but one part
of my conduct in the whole affair on which I do not reflect with
satisfaction it is that I condescended to adopt the measures of
art so far as to conceal from him your sister's being in town. I
knew it myself, as it was known to Miss Bingley but her brother
is even yet ignorant of it. That they might have met without ill
consequence is perhaps probable but his regard did not appear
to me enough extinguished for him to see her without some danger.
Perhaps this concealment, this disguise was beneath me it is
done, however, and it was done for the best. On this subject
I have nothing more to say, no other apology to offer. If I
have wounded your sister's feelings, it was unknowingly done and
though the motives which governed me may to you very naturally
appear insufficient, I have not yet learnt to condemn them.
"With respect to that other, more weighty accusation, of having
injured Mr. Wickham, I can only refute it by laying before you
the whole of his connection with my family. Of what he has
particularly accused me I am ignorant but of the truth of
what I shall relate, I can summon more than one witness of
undoubted veracity.
"Mr. Wickham is the son of a very respectable man, who had for
many years the management of all the Pemberley estates, and
whose good conduct in the discharge of his trust naturally
inclined my father to be of service to him and on George
Wickham, who was his godson, his kindness was therefore
liberally bestowed. My father supported him at school, and
afterwards at Cambridgemost important assistance, as his own
father, always poor from the extravagance of his wife, would
have been unable to give him a gentleman's education. My
father was not only fond of this young man's society, whose
manner were always engaging he had also the highest opinion of
him, and hoping the church would be his profession, intended to
provide for him in it. As for myself, it is many, many years since
I first began to think of him in a very different manner. The
vicious propensitiesthe want of principle, which he was careful
to guard from the knowledge of his best friend, could not escape
the observation of a young man of nearly the same age with
himself, and who had opportunities of seeing him in unguarded
moments, which Mr. Darcy could not have. Here again I shall
give you painto what degree you only can tell. But whatever
may be the sentiments which Mr. Wickham has created, a
suspicion of their nature shall not prevent me from unfolding
his real characterit adds even another motive.
"My excellent father died about five years ago and his attachment
to Mr. Wickham was to the last so steady, that in his will he
particularly recommended it to me, to promote his advancement in
the best manner that his profession might allowand if he took
orders, desired that a valuable family living might be his as soon
as it became vacant. There was also a legacy of one thousand
pounds. His own father did not long survive mine, and within half
a year from these events, Mr. Wickham wrote to inform me that,
having finally resolved against taking orders, he hoped I should
not think it unreasonable for him to expect some more immediate
pecuniary advantage, in lieu of the preferment, by which he could
not be benefited. He had some intention, he added, of studying
law, and I must be aware that the interest of one thousand pounds
would be a very insufficient support therein. I rather wished,
than believed him to be sincere but, at any rate, was perfectly
ready to accede to his proposal. I knew that Mr. Wickham
ought not to be a clergyman the business was therefore soon
settledhe resigned all claim to assistance in the church, were
it possible that he could ever be in a situation to receive it,
and accepted in return three thousand pounds. All connection
between us seemed now dissolved. I thought too ill of him to
invite him to Pemberley, or admit his society in town. In town
I believe he chiefly lived, but his studying the law was a mere
pretence, and being now free from all restraint, his life was a
life of idleness and dissipation. For about three years I heard
little of him but on the decease of the incumbent of the living
which had been designed for him, he applied to me again by letter
for the presentation. His circumstances, he assured me, and I
had no difficulty in believing it, were exceedingly bad. He had
found the law a most unprofitable study, and was now absolutely
resolved on being ordained, if I would present him to the living
in questionof which he trusted there could be little doubt, as
he was well assured that I had no other person to provide for,
and I could not have forgotten my revered father's intentions.
You will hardly blame me for refusing to comply with this entreaty,
or for resisting every repetition to it. His resentment was in
proportion to the distress of his circumstancesand he was
doubtless as violent in his abuse of me to others as in his
reproaches to myself. After this period every appearance of
acquaintance was dropped. How he lived I know not. But last
summer he was again most painfully obtruded on my notice.
"I must now mention a circumstance which I would wish to
forget myself, and which no obligation less than the present
should induce me to unfold to any human being. Having said
thus much, I feel no doubt of your secrecy. My sister, who is
more than ten years my junior, was left to the guardianship of
my mother's nephew, Colonel Fitzwilliam, and myself. About a
year ago, she was taken from school, and an establishment
formed for her in London and last summer she went with the
lady who presided over it, to Ramsgate and thither also went
Mr. Wickham, undoubtedly by design for there proved to have
been a prior acquaintance between him and Mrs. Younge, in
whose character we were most unhappily deceived and by
her connivance and aid, he so far recommended himself to
Georgiana, whose affectionate heart retained a strong impression
of his kindness to her as a child, that she was persuaded to
believe herself in love, and to consent to an elopement. She was
then but fifteen, which must be her excuse and after stating her
imprudence, I am happy to add, that I owed the knowledge of it
to herself. I joined them unexpectedly a day or two before the
intended elopement, and then Georgiana, unable to support the
idea of grieving and offending a brother whom she almost
looked up to as a father, acknowledged the whole to me. You
may imagine what I felt and how I acted. Regard for my sister's
credit and feelings prevented any public exposure but I wrote
to Mr. Wickham, who left the place immediately, and Mrs. Younge
was of course removed from her charge. Mr. Wickham's chief
object was unquestionably my sister's fortune, which is thirty
thousand pounds but I cannot help supposing that the hope of
revenging himself on me was a strong inducement. His revenge
would have been complete indeed.
"This, madam, is a faithful narrative of every event in which
we have been concerned together and if you do not absolutely
reject it as false, you will, I hope, acquit me henceforth
of cruelty towards Mr. Wickham. I know not in what manner,
under what form of falsehood he had imposed on you but his
success is not perhaps to be wondered at. Ignorant as you
previously were of everything concerning either, detection
could not be in your power, and suspicion certainly not in
your inclination.
"You may possibly wonder why all this was not told you last
night but I was not then master enough of myself to know what
could or ought to be revealed. For the truth of everything here
related, I can appeal more particularly to the testimony of
Colonel Fitzwilliam, who, from our near relationship and
constant intimacy, and, still more, as one of the executors of
my father's will, has been unavoidably acquainted with every
particular of these transactions. If your abhorrence of me
should make my assertions valueless, you cannot be prevented
by the same cause from confiding in my cousin and that there
may be the possibility of consulting him, I shall endeavour to
find some opportunity of putting this letter in your hands in
the course of the morning. I will only add, God bless you.
"FITZWILLIAM DARCY"
Chapter 
If Elizabeth, when Mr. Darcy gave her the letter, did not expect
it to contain a renewal of his offers, she had formed no
expectation at all of its contents. But such as they were, it
may well be supposed how eagerly she went through them, and what
a contrariety of emotion they excited. Her feelings as she
read were scarcely to be defined. With amazement did she first
understand that he believed any apology to be in his power and
steadfastly was she persuaded, that he could have no explanation
to give, which a just sense of shame would not conceal. With a
strong prejudice against everything he might say, she began his
account of what had happened at Netherfield. She read with an
eagerness which hardly left her power of comprehension, and
from impatience of knowing what the next sentence might bring,
was incapable of attending to the sense of the one before her
eyes. His belief of her sister's insensibility she instantly
resolved to be false and his account of the real, the worst
objections to the match, made her too angry to have any wish of
doing him justice. He expressed no regret for what he had done
which satisfied her his style was not penitent, but haughty.
It was all pride and insolence.
But when this subject was succeeded by his account of Mr.
Wickhamwhen she read with somewhat clearer attention a
relation of events which, if true, must overthrow every cherished
opinion of his worth, and which bore so alarming an affinity to
his own history of himselfher feelings were yet more acutely
painful and more difficult of definition. Astonishment,
apprehension, and even horror, oppressed her. She wished to
discredit it entirely, repeatedly exclaiming, "This must be false
This cannot be This must be the grossest falsehood"and
when she had gone through the whole letter, though scarcely
knowing anything of the last page or two, put it hastily away,
protesting that she would not regard it, that she would never
look in it again.
In this perturbed state of mind, with thoughts that could rest on
nothing, she walked on but it would not do in half a minute the
letter was unfolded again, and collecting herself as well as she
could, she again began the mortifying perusal of all that related
to Wickham, and commanded herself so far as to examine the
meaning of every sentence. The account of his connection with
the Pemberley family was exactly what he had related himself
and the kindness of the late Mr. Darcy, though she had not
before known its extent, agreed equally well with his own
words. So far each recital confirmed the other but when she
came to the will, the difference was great. What Wickham had
said of the living was fresh in her memory, and as she recalled
his very words, it was impossible not to feel that there was gross
duplicity on one side or the other and, for a few moments, she
flattered herself that her wishes did not err. But when she
read and reread with the closest attention, the particulars
immediately following of Wickham's resigning all pretensions to
the living, of his receiving in lieu so considerable a sum as
three thousand pounds, again was she forced to hesitate. She
put down the letter, weighed every circumstance with what she
meant to be impartialitydeliberated on the probability of each
statementbut with little success. On both sides it was only
assertion. Again she read on but every line proved more clearly
that the affair, which she had believed it impossible that any
contrivance could so represent as to render Mr. Darcy's conduct
in it less than infamous, was capable of a turn which must make
him entirely blameless throughout the whole.
The extravagance and general profligacy which he scrupled not
to lay at Mr. Wickham's charge, exceedingly shocked her the
more so, as she could bring no proof of its injustice. She had
never heard of him before his entrance into the shire Militia,
in which he had engaged at the persuasion of the young man
who, on meeting him accidentally in town, had there renewed a
slight acquaintance. Of his former way of life nothing had been
known in Hertfordshire but what he told himself. As to his real
character, had information been in her power, she had never felt
a wish of inquiring. His countenance, voice, and manner had
established him at once in the possession of every virtue. She
tried to recollect some instance of goodness, some distinguished
trait of integrity or benevolence, that might rescue him from the
attacks of Mr. Darcy or at least, by the predominance of virtue,
atone for those casual errors under which she would endeavour
to class what Mr. Darcy had described as the idleness and vice
of many years' continuance. But no such recollection befriended
her. She could see him instantly before her, in every charm of
air and address but she could remember no more substantial
good than the general approbation of the neighbourhood, and
the regard which his social powers had gained him in the mess.
After pausing on this point a considerable while, she once more
continued to read. But, alas the story which followed, of his
designs on Miss Darcy, received some confirmation from what
had passed between Colonel Fitzwilliam and herself only the
morning before and at last she was referred for the truth of
every particular to Colonel Fitzwilliam himselffrom whom she
had previously received the information of his near concern in
all his cousin's affairs, and whose character she had no reason
to question. At one time she had almost resolved on applying
to him, but the idea was checked by the awkwardness of the
application, and at length wholly banished by the conviction
that Mr. Darcy would never have hazarded such a proposal, if
he had not been well assured of his cousin's corroboration.
She perfectly remembered everything that had passed in
conversation between Wickham and herself, in their first evening
at Mr. Phillips's. Many of his expressions were still fresh in
her memory. She was now struck with the impropriety of such
communications to a stranger, and wondered it had escaped her
before. She saw the indelicacy of putting himself forward as
he had done, and the inconsistency of his professions with his
conduct. She remembered that he had boasted of having no fear
of seeing Mr. Darcythat Mr. Darcy might leave the country,
but that he should stand his ground yet he had avoided the
Netherfield ball the very next week. She remembered also that,
till the Netherfield family had quitted the country, he had told
his story to no one but herself but that after their removal it
had been everywhere discussed that he had then no reserves, no
scruples in sinking Mr. Darcy's character, though he had assured
her that respect for the father would always prevent his exposing
the son.
How differently did everything now appear in which he was
concerned His attentions to Miss King were now the consequence
of views solely and hatefully mercenary and the mediocrity of
her fortune proved no longer the moderation of his wishes, but
his eagerness to grasp at anything. His behaviour to herself
could now have had no tolerable motive he had either been
deceived with regard to her fortune, or had been gratifying his
vanity by encouraging the preference which she believed she had
most incautiously shown. Every lingering struggle in his favour
grew fainter and fainter and in farther justification of Mr.
Darcy, she could not but allow Mr. Bingley, when questioned
by Jane, had long ago asserted his blamelessness in the affair
that proud and repulsive as were his manners, she had never, in
the whole course of their acquaintancean acquaintance which
had latterly brought them much together, and given her a sort of
intimacy with his waysseen anything that betrayed him to be
unprincipled or unjustanything that spoke him of irreligious
or immoral habits that among his own connections he was
esteemed and valuedthat even Wickham had allowed him
merit as a brother, and that she had often heard him speak so
affectionately of his sister as to prove him capable of some
amiable feeling that had his actions been what Mr. Wickham
represented them, so gross a violation of everything right could
hardly have been concealed from the world and that friendship
between a person capable of it, and such an amiable man as Mr.
Bingley, was incomprehensible.
She grew absolutely ashamed of herself. Of neither Darcy nor
Wickham could she think without feeling she had been blind,
partial, prejudiced, absurd.
"How despicably I have acted" she cried "I, who have prided
myself on my discernment I, who have valued myself on my
abilities who have often disdained the generous candour of my
sister, and gratified my vanity in useless or blameable mistrust
How humiliating is this discovery Yet, how just a humiliation
Had I been in love, I could not have been more wretchedly blind
But vanity, not love, has been my folly. Pleased with the
preference of one, and offended by the neglect of the other,
on the very beginning of our acquaintance, I have courted
prepossession and ignorance, and driven reason away, where
either were concerned. Till this moment I never knew myself."
From herself to Janefrom Jane to Bingley, her thoughts were
in a line which soon brought to her recollection that Mr. Darcy's
explanation there had appeared very insufficient, and she read
it again. Widely different was the effect of a second perusal.
How could she deny that credit to his assertions in one instance,
which she had been obliged to give in the other? He declared
himself to be totally unsuspicious of her sister's attachment
and she could not help remembering what Charlotte's opinion
had always been. Neither could she deny the justice of his
description of Jane. She felt that Jane's feelings, though fervent,
were little displayed, and that there was a constant complacency
in her air and manner not often united with great sensibility.
When she came to that part of the letter in which her family were
mentioned in terms of such mortifying, yet merited reproach, her
sense of shame was severe. The justice of the charge struck her
too forcibly for denial, and the circumstances to which he
particularly alluded as having passed at the Netherfield ball,
and as confirming all his first disapprobation, could not have
made a stronger impression on his mind than on hers.
The compliment to herself and her sister was not unfelt. It
soothed, but it could not console her for the contempt which had
thus been selfattracted by the rest of her family and as she
considered that Jane's disappointment had in fact been the work
of her nearest relations, and reflected how materially the credit
of both must be hurt by such impropriety of conduct, she felt
depressed beyond anything she had ever known before.
After wandering along the lane for two hours, giving way to
every variety of thoughtreconsidering events, determining
probabilities, and reconciling herself, as well as she could, to
a change so sudden and so important, fatigue, and a recollection
of her long absence, made her at length return home and she
entered the house with the wish of appearing cheerful as usual,
and the resolution of repressing such reflections as must make
her unfit for conversation.
She was immediately told that the two gentlemen from Rosings
had each called during her absence Mr. Darcy, only for a few
minutes, to take leavebut that Colonel Fitzwilliam had been
sitting with them at least an hour, hoping for her return, and
almost resolving to walk after her till she could be found.
Elizabeth could but just affect concern in missing him she
really rejoiced at it. Colonel Fitzwilliam was no longer an
object she could think only of her letter.
Chapter 
The two gentlemen left Rosings the next morning, and Mr.
Collins having been in waiting near the lodges, to make them
his parting obeisance, was able to bring home the pleasing
intelligence, of their appearing in very good health, and in as
tolerable spirits as could be expected, after the melancholy scene
so lately gone through at Rosings. To Rosings he then hastened,
to console Lady Catherine and her daughter and on his return
brought back, with great satisfaction, a message from her
ladyship, importing that she felt herself so dull as to make
her very desirous of having them all to dine with her.
Elizabeth could not see Lady Catherine without recollecting that,
had she chosen it, she might by this time have been presented to
her as her future niece nor could she think, without a smile, of
what her ladyship's indignation would have been. "What would
she have said? how would she have behaved?" were questions with
which she amused herself.
Their first subject was the diminution of the Rosings party.
"I assure you, I feel it exceedingly," said Lady Catherine "I
believe no one feels the loss of friends so much as I do. But
I am particularly attached to these young men, and know them to
be so much attached to me They were excessively sorry to go
But so they always are. The dear Colonel rallied his spirits
tolerably till just at last but Darcy seemed to feel it most
acutely, more, I think, than last year. His attachment to
Rosings certainly increases."
Mr. Collins had a compliment, and an allusion to throw in here,
which were kindly smiled on by the mother and daughter.
Lady Catherine observed, after dinner, that Miss Bennet seemed
out of spirits, and immediately accounting for it by herself,
by supposing that she did not like to go home again so soon,
she added
"But if that is the case, you must write to your mother and beg
that you may stay a little longer. Mrs. Collins will be very glad
of your company, I am sure."
"I am much obliged to your ladyship for your kind invitation,"
replied Elizabeth, "but it is not in my power to accept it.
I must be in town next Saturday."
"Why, at that rate, you will have been here only six weeks. I
expected you to stay two months. I told Mrs. Collins so before
you came. There can be no occasion for your going so soon.
Mrs. Bennet could certainly spare you for another fortnight."
"But my father cannot. He wrote last week to hurry my return."
"Oh your father of course may spare you, if your mother can.
Daughters are never of so much consequence to a father. And if
you will stay another month complete, it will be in my power
to take one of you as far as London, for I am going there early
in June, for a week and as Dawson does not object to the
barouchebox, there will be very good room for one of youand
indeed, if the weather should happen to be cool, I should not
object to taking you both, as you are neither of you large."
"You are all kindness, madam but I believe we must abide by
our original plan."
Lady Catherine seemed resigned. "Mrs. Collins, you must send
a servant with them. You know I always speak my mind, and I
cannot bear the idea of two young women travelling post by
themselves. It is highly improper. You must contrive to send
somebody. I have the greatest dislike in the world to that sort
of thing. Young women should always be properly guarded and
attended, according to their situation in life. When my niece
Georgiana went to Ramsgate last summer, I made a point of her
having two menservants go with her. Miss Darcy, the daughter
of Mr. Darcy, of Pemberley, and Lady Anne, could not have
appeared with propriety in a different manner. I am excessively
attentive to all those things. You must send John with the young
ladies, Mrs. Collins. I am glad it occurred to me to mention it
for it would really be discreditable to you to let them go
alone."
"My uncle is to send a servant for us."
"Oh Your uncle He keeps a manservant, does he? I am very
glad you have somebody who thinks of these things. Where
shall you change horses? Oh Bromley, of course. If you
mention my name at the Bell, you will be attended to."
Lady Catherine had many other questions to ask respecting their
journey, and as she did not answer them all herself, attention was
necessary, which Elizabeth believed to be lucky for her or, with
a mind so occupied, she might have forgotten where she was.
Reflection must be reserved for solitary hours whenever she
was alone, she gave way to it as the greatest relief and not a
day went by without a solitary walk, in which she might indulge
in all the delight of unpleasant recollections.
Mr. Darcy's letter she was in a fair way of soon knowing by
heart. She studied every sentence and her feelings towards its
writer were at times widely different. When she remembered the
style of his address, she was still full of indignation but when
she considered how unjustly she had condemned and upbraided him,
her anger was turned against herself and his disappointed
feelings became the object of compassion. His attachment
excited gratitude, his general character respect but she could
not approve him nor could she for a moment repent her refusal,
or feel the slightest inclination ever to see him again. In
her own past behaviour, there was a constant source of vexation
and regret and in the unhappy defects of her family, a subject
of yet heavier chagrin. They were hopeless of remedy. Her father,
contented with laughing at them, would never exert himself to
restrain the wild giddiness of his youngest daughters and her
mother, with manners so far from right herself, was entirely
insensible of the evil. Elizabeth had frequently united with Jane
in an endeavour to check the imprudence of Catherine and Lydia
but while they were supported by their mother's indulgence, what
chance could there be of improvement? Catherine, weakspirited,
irritable, and completely under Lydia's guidance, had been always
affronted by their advice and Lydia, selfwilled and careless,
would scarcely give them a hearing. They were ignorant, idle, and
vain. While there was an officer in Meryton, they would flirt
with him and while Meryton was within a walk of Longbourn, they
would be going there forever.
Anxiety on Jane's behalf was another prevailing concern and
Mr. Darcy's explanation, by restoring Bingley to all her former
good opinion, heightened the sense of what Jane had lost. His
affection was proved to have been sincere, and his conduct
cleared of all blame, unless any could attach to the implicitness
of his confidence in his friend. How grievous then was the
thought that, of a situation so desirable in every respect, so
replete with advantage, so promising for happiness, Jane had
been deprived, by the folly and indecorum of her own family
When to these recollections was added the development of Wickham's
character, it may be easily believed that the happy spirits which
had seldom been depressed before, were now so much affected as to
make it almost impossible for her to appear tolerably cheerful.
Their engagements at Rosings were as frequent during the last
week of her stay as they had been at first. The very last evening
was spent there and her ladyship again inquired minutely into
the particulars of their journey, gave them directions as to the
best method of packing, and was so urgent on the necessity of
placing gowns in the only right way, that Maria thought herself
obliged, on her return, to undo all the work of the morning, and
pack her trunk afresh.
When they parted, Lady Catherine, with great condescension,
wished them a good journey, and invited them to come to
Hunsford again next year and Miss de Bourgh exerted herself
so far as to curtsey and hold out her hand to both.
Chapter 
On Saturday morning Elizabeth and Mr. Collins met for breakfast
a few minutes before the others appeared and he took the
opportunity of paying the parting civilities which he deemed
indispensably necessary.
"I know not, Miss Elizabeth," said he, "whether Mrs. Collins has
yet expressed her sense of your kindness in coming to us but I
am very certain you will not leave the house without receiving
her thanks for it. The favor of your company has been much
felt, I assure you. We know how little there is to tempt anyone
to our humble abode. Our plain manner of living, our small
rooms and few domestics, and the little we see of the world,
must make Hunsford extremely dull to a young lady like
yourself but I hope you will believe us grateful for the
condescension, and that we have done everything in our power
to prevent your spending your time unpleasantly."
Elizabeth was eager with her thanks and assurances of happiness.
She had spent six weeks with great enjoyment and the pleasure
of being with Charlotte, and the kind attentions she had received,
must make her feel the obliged. Mr. Collins was gratified, and
with a more smiling solemnity replied
"It gives me great pleasure to hear that you have passed your
time not disagreeably. We have certainly done our best and
most fortunately having it in our power to introduce you to very
superior society, and, from our connection with Rosings, the
frequent means of varying the humble home scene, I think we
may flatter ourselves that your Hunsford visit cannot have been
entirely irksome. Our situation with regard to Lady Catherine's
family is indeed the sort of extraordinary advantage and blessing
which few can boast. You see on what a footing we are. You
see how continually we are engaged there. In truth I must
acknowledge that, with all the disadvantages of this humble
parsonage, I should not think anyone abiding in it an object of
compassion, while they are sharers of our intimacy at Rosings."
Words were insufficient for the elevation of his feelings and
he was obliged to walk about the room, while Elizabeth tried to
unite civility and truth in a few short sentences.
"You may, in fact, carry a very favourable report of us into
Hertfordshire, my dear cousin. I flatter myself at least that you
will be able to do so. Lady Catherine's great attentions to Mrs.
Collins you have been a daily witness of and altogether I trust
it does not appear that your friend has drawn an unfortunatebut
on this point it will be as well to be silent. Only let me
assure you, my dear Miss Elizabeth, that I can from my heart most
cordially wish you equal felicity in marriage. My dear Charlotte
and I have but one mind and one way of thinking. There is in
everything a most remarkable resemblance of character and ideas
between us. We seem to have been designed for each other."
Elizabeth could safely say that it was a great happiness where
that was the case, and with equal sincerity could add, that she
firmly believed and rejoiced in his domestic comforts. She was
not sorry, however, to have the recital of them interrupted by
the lady from whom they sprang. Poor Charlotte it was
melancholy to leave her to such society But she had chosen it
with her eyes open and though evidently regretting that her
visitors were to go, she did not seem to ask for compassion.
Her home and her housekeeping, her parish and her poultry, and
all their dependent concerns, had not yet lost their charms.
At length the chaise arrived, the trunks were fastened on, the
parcels placed within, and it was pronounced to be ready. After
an affectionate parting between the friends, Elizabeth was
attended to the carriage by Mr. Collins, and as they walked
down the garden he was commissioning her with his best
respects to all her family, not forgetting his thanks for the
kindness he had received at Longbourn in the winter, and his
compliments to Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner, though unknown. He
then handed her in, Maria followed, and the door was on the
point of being closed, when he suddenly reminded them, with
some consternation, that they had hitherto forgotten to leave
any message for the ladies at Rosings.
"But," he added, "you will of course wish to have your humble
respects delivered to them, with your grateful thanks for their
kindness to you while you have been here."
Elizabeth made no objection the door was then allowed to be
shut, and the carriage drove off.
"Good gracious" cried Maria, after a few minutes' silence, "it
seems but a day or two since we first came and yet how many
things have happened"
"A great many indeed," said her companion with a sigh.
"We have dined nine times at Rosings, besides drinking tea there
twice How much I shall have to tell"
Elizabeth added privately, "And how much I shall have to conceal"
Their journey was performed without much conversation, or any
alarm and within four hours of their leaving Hunsford they
reached Mr. Gardiner's house, where they were to remain a few
days.
Jane looked well, and Elizabeth had little opportunity of
studying her spirits, amidst the various engagements which the
kindness of her aunt had reserved for them. But Jane was to go
home with her, and at Longbourn there would be leisure enough
for observation.
It was not without an effort, meanwhile, that she could wait
even for Longbourn, before she told her sister of Mr. Darcy's
proposals. To know that she had the power of revealing what
would so exceedingly astonish Jane, and must, at the same time,
so highly gratify whatever of her own vanity she had not yet
been able to reason away, was such a temptation to openness
as nothing could have conquered but the state of indecision
in which she remained as to the extent of what she should
communicate and her fear, if she once entered on the subject,
of being hurried into repeating something of Bingley which
might only grieve her sister further.
Chapter 
It was the second week in May, in which the three young ladies
set out together from Gracechurch Street for the town of ,
in Hertfordshire and, as they drew near the appointed inn where
Mr. Bennet's carriage was to meet them, they quickly perceived,
in token of the coachman's punctuality, both Kitty and Lydia
looking out of a diningroom upstairs. These two girls had been
above an hour in the place, happily employed in visiting an
opposite milliner, watching the sentinel on guard, and dressing a
salad and cucumber.
After welcoming their sisters, they triumphantly displayed a table
set out with such cold meat as an inn larder usually affords,
exclaiming, "Is not this nice? Is not this an agreeable surprise?"
"And we mean to treat you all," added Lydia, "but you must lend
us the money, for we have just spent ours at the shop out there."
Then, showing her purchases"Look here, I have bought this bonnet.
I do not think it is very pretty but I thought I might as well
buy it as not. I shall pull it to pieces as soon as I get home,
and see if I can make it up any better."
And when her sisters abused it as ugly, she added, with perfect
unconcern, "Oh but there were two or three much uglier in the
shop and when I have bought some prettiercoloured satin to
trim it with fresh, I think it will be very tolerable. Besides,
it will not much signify what one wears this summer, after the
shire have left Meryton, and they are going in a fortnight."
"Are they indeed" cried Elizabeth, with the greatest satisfaction.
"They are going to be encamped near Brighton and I do so
want papa to take us all there for the summer It would be such
a delicious scheme and I dare say would hardly cost anything at
all. Mamma would like to go too of all things Only think what
a miserable summer else we shall have"
"Yes," thought Elizabeth, "that would be a delightful scheme
indeed, and completely do for us at once. Good Heaven
Brighton, and a whole campful of soldiers, to us, who have been
overset already by one poor regiment of militia, and the monthly
balls of Meryton"
"Now I have got some news for you," said Lydia, as they sat down
at table. "What do you think? It is excellent newscapital
newsand about a certain person we all like"
Jane and Elizabeth looked at each other, and the waiter was told
he need not stay. Lydia laughed, and said
"Aye, that is just like your formality and discretion. You
thought the waiter must not hear, as if he cared I dare say he
often hears worse things said than I am going to say. But he is
an ugly fellow I am glad he is gone. I never saw such a long
chin in my life. Well, but now for my news it is about dear
Wickham too good for the waiter, is it not? There is no danger
of Wickham's marrying Mary King. There's for you She is gone
down to her uncle at Liverpool gone to stay. Wickham is safe."
"And Mary King is safe" added Elizabeth "safe from a
connection imprudent as to fortune."
"She is a great fool for going away, if she liked him."
"But I hope there is no strong attachment on either side,"
said Jane.
"I am sure there is not on his. I will answer for it, he never
cared three straws about herwho could about such a nasty
little freckled thing?"
Elizabeth was shocked to think that, however incapable of
such coarseness of expression herself, the coarseness of the
sentiment was little other than her own breast had harboured
and fancied liberal
As soon as all had ate, and the elder ones paid, the carriage was
ordered and after some contrivance, the whole party, with all
their boxes, workbags, and parcels, and the unwelcome addition
of Kitty's and Lydia's purchases, were seated in it.
"How nicely we are all crammed in," cried Lydia. "I am glad I
bought my bonnet, if it is only for the fun of having another
bandbox Well, now let us be quite comfortable and snug, and
talk and laugh all the way home. And in the first place, let
us hear what has happened to you all since you went away. Have
you seen any pleasant men? Have you had any flirting? I was
in great hopes that one of you would have got a husband before
you came back. Jane will be quite an old maid soon, I declare.
She is almost threeandtwenty Lord, how ashamed I should be of
not being married before threeandtwenty My aunt Phillips wants
you so to get husbands, you can't think. She says Lizzy had
better have taken Mr. Collins but I do not think there would
have been any fun in it. Lord how I should like to be married
before any of you and then I would chaperon you about to all
the balls. Dear me we had such a good piece of fun the other
day at Colonel Forster's. Kitty and me were to spend the day
there, and Mrs. Forster promised to have a little dance in the
evening by the bye, Mrs. Forster and me are such friends and
so she asked the two Harringtons to come, but Harriet was ill,
and so Pen was forced to come by herself and then, what do you
think we did? We dressed up Chamberlayne in woman's clothes on
purpose to pass for a lady, only think what fun Not a soul
knew of it, but Colonel and Mrs. Forster, and Kitty and me,
except my aunt, for we were forced to borrow one of her gowns
and you cannot imagine how well he looked When Denny, and
Wickham, and Pratt, and two or three more of the men came in,
they did not know him in the least. Lord how I laughed and
so did Mrs. Forster. I thought I should have died. And that
made the men suspect something, and then they soon found out
what was the matter."
With such kinds of histories of their parties and good jokes, did
Lydia, assisted by Kitty's hints and additions, endeavour to
amuse her companions all the way to Longbourn. Elizabeth
listened as little as she could, but there was no escaping the
frequent mention of Wickham's name.
Their reception at home was most kind. Mrs. Bennet rejoiced to
see Jane in undiminished beauty and more than once during
dinner did Mr. Bennet say voluntarily to Elizabeth
"I am glad you are come back, Lizzy."
Their party in the diningroom was large, for almost all the
Lucases came to meet Maria and hear the news and various
were the subjects that occupied them Lady Lucas was inquiring
of Maria, after the welfare and poultry of her eldest daughter
Mrs. Bennet was doubly engaged, on one hand collecting an
account of the present fashions from Jane, who sat some way
below her, and, on the other, retailing them all to the younger
Lucases and Lydia, in a voice rather louder than any other
person's, was enumerating the various pleasures of the morning
to anybody who would hear her.
"Oh Mary," said she, "I wish you had gone with us, for we had
such fun As we went along, Kitty and I drew up the blinds,
and pretended there was nobody in the coach and I should have
gone so all the way, if Kitty had not been sick and when we got
to the George, I do think we behaved very handsomely, for we
treated the other three with the nicest cold luncheon in the
world, and if you would have gone, we would have treated you
too. And then when we came away it was such fun I thought
we never should have got into the coach. I was ready to die
of laughter. And then we were so merry all the way home we
talked and laughed so loud, that anybody might have heard us
ten miles off"
To this Mary very gravely replied, "Far be it from me, my dear
sister, to depreciate such pleasures They would doubtless be
congenial with the generality of female minds. But I confess
they would have no charms for meI should infinitely prefer a
book."
But of this answer Lydia heard not a word. She seldom listened
to anybody for more than half a minute, and never attended to
Mary at all.
In the afternoon Lydia was urgent with the rest of the girls
to walk to Meryton, and to see how everybody went on but
Elizabeth steadily opposed the scheme. It should not be said
that the Miss Bennets could not be at home half a day before
they were in pursuit of the officers. There was another reason
too for her opposition. She dreaded seeing Mr. Wickham again,
and was resolved to avoid it as long as possible. The comfort
to her of the regiment's approaching removal was indeed beyond
expression. In a fortnight they were to goand once gone, she
hoped there could be nothing more to plague her on his account.
She had not been many hours at home before she found that the
Brighton scheme, of which Lydia had given them a hint at the inn,
was under frequent discussion between her parents. Elizabeth
saw directly that her father had not the smallest intention of
yielding but his answers were at the same time so vague and
equivocal, that her mother, though often disheartened, had never
yet despaired of succeeding at last.
Chapter 
Elizabeth's impatience to acquaint Jane with what had happened
could no longer be overcome and at length, resolving to
suppress every particular in which her sister was concerned,
and preparing her to be surprised, she related to her the next
morning the chief of the scene between Mr. Darcy and herself.
Miss Bennet's astonishment was soon lessened by the strong
sisterly partiality which made any admiration of Elizabeth appear
perfectly natural and all surprise was shortly lost in other
feelings. She was sorry that Mr. Darcy should have delivered his
sentiments in a manner so little suited to recommend them but
still more was she grieved for the unhappiness which her sister's
refusal must have given him.
"His being so sure of succeeding was wrong," said she, "and
certainly ought not to have appeared but consider how much it
must increase his disappointment"
"Indeed," replied Elizabeth, "I am heartily sorry for him but he
has other feelings, which will probably soon drive away his
regard for me. You do not blame me, however, for refusing him?"
"Blame you Oh, no."
"But you blame me for having spoken so warmly of Wickham?"
"NoI do not know that you were wrong in saying what you
did."
"But you will know it, when I tell you what happened the very
next day."
She then spoke of the letter, repeating the whole of its contents
as far as they concerned George Wickham. What a stroke was
this for poor Jane who would willingly have gone through the
world without believing that so much wickedness existed in the
whole race of mankind, as was here collected in one individual.
Nor was Darcy's vindication, though grateful to her feelings,
capable of consoling her for such discovery. Most earnestly did
she labour to prove the probability of error, and seek to clear the
one without involving the other.
"This will not do," said Elizabeth "you never will be able to
make both of them good for anything. Take your choice, but
you must be satisfied with only one. There is but such a quantity
of merit between them just enough to make one good sort of
man and of late it has been shifting about pretty much. For my
part, I am inclined to believe it all Darcy's but you shall do
as you choose."
It was some time, however, before a smile could be extorted
from Jane.
"I do not know when I have been more shocked," said she.
"Wickham so very bad It is almost past belief. And poor Mr.
Darcy Dear Lizzy, only consider what he must have suffered.
Such a disappointment and with the knowledge of your ill
opinion, too and having to relate such a thing of his sister
It is really too distressing. I am sure you must feel it so."
"Oh no, my regret and compassion are all done away by seeing
you so full of both. I know you will do him such ample justice,
that I am growing every moment more unconcerned and indifferent.
Your profusion makes me saving and if you lament over him much
longer, my heart will be as light as a feather."
"Poor Wickham there is such an expression of goodness in his
countenance such an openness and gentleness in his manner"
"There certainly was some great mismanagement in the education
of those two young men. One has got all the goodness, and the
other all the appearance of it."
"I never thought Mr. Darcy so deficient in the appearance
of it as you used to do."
"And yet I meant to be uncommonly clever in taking so decided
a dislike to him, without any reason. It is such a spur to one's
genius, such an opening for wit, to have a dislike of that kind.
One may be continually abusive without saying anything just but
one cannot always be laughing at a man without now and then
stumbling on something witty."
"Lizzy, when you first read that letter, I am sure you could not
treat the matter as you do now."
"Indeed, I could not. I was uncomfortable enough, I may say
unhappy. And with no one to speak to about what I felt, no
Jane to comfort me and say that I had not been so very weak and
vain and nonsensical as I knew I had Oh how I wanted you"
"How unfortunate that you should have used such very strong
expressions in speaking of Wickham to Mr. Darcy, for now they
do appear wholly undeserved."
"Certainly. But the misfortune of speaking with bitterness
is a most natural consequence of the prejudices I had been
encouraging. There is one point on which I want your advice.
I want to be told whether I ought, or ought not, to make our
acquaintances in general understand Wickham's character."
Miss Bennet paused a little, and then replied, "Surely there can
be no occasion for exposing him so dreadfully. What is your
opinion?"
"That it ought not to be attempted. Mr. Darcy has not
authorised me to make his communication public. On the
contrary, every particular relative to his sister was meant to
be kept as much as possible to myself and if I endeavour to
undeceive people as to the rest of his conduct, who will believe
me? The general prejudice against Mr. Darcy is so violent, that
it would be the death of half the good people in Meryton to
attempt to place him in an amiable light. I am not equal to it.
Wickham will soon be gone and therefore it will not signify to
anyone here what he really is. Some time hence it will be all
found out, and then we may laugh at their stupidity in not
knowing it before. At present I will say nothing about it."
"You are quite right. To have his errors made public might ruin
him for ever. He is now, perhaps, sorry for what he has done,
and anxious to reestablish a character. We must not make him
desperate."
The tumult of Elizabeth's mind was allayed by this conversation.
She had got rid of two of the secrets which had weighed on her
for a fortnight, and was certain of a willing listener in Jane,
whenever she might wish to talk again of either. But there was
still something lurking behind, of which prudence forbade the
disclosure. She dared not relate the other half of Mr. Darcy's
letter, nor explain to her sister how sincerely she had been
valued by her friend. Here was knowledge in which no one
could partake and she was sensible that nothing less than a
perfect understanding between the parties could justify her in
throwing off this last encumbrance of mystery. "And then," said
she, "if that very improbable event should ever take place, I
shall merely be able to tell what Bingley may tell in a much more
agreeable manner himself. The liberty of communication cannot
be mine till it has lost all its value"
She was now, on being settled at home, at leisure to observe the
real state of her sister's spirits. Jane was not happy. She still
cherished a very tender affection for Bingley. Having never even
fancied herself in love before, her regard had all the warmth of
first attachment, and, from her age and disposition, greater
steadiness than most first attachments often boast and so
fervently did she value his remembrance, and prefer him to every
other man, that all her good sense, and all her attention to the
feelings of her friends, were requisite to check the indulgence of
those regrets which must have been injurious to her own health
and their tranquillity.
"Well, Lizzy," said Mrs. Bennet one day, "what is your opinion
now of this sad business of Jane's? For my part, I am
determined never to speak of it again to anybody. I told my
sister Phillips so the other day. But I cannot find out that Jane
saw anything of him in London. Well, he is a very undeserving
young manand I do not suppose there's the least chance in the
world of her ever getting him now. There is no talk of his
coming to Netherfield again in the summer and I have inquired
of everybody, too, who is likely to know."
"I do not believe he will ever live at Netherfield any more."
"Oh well it is just as he chooses. Nobody wants him to come.
Though I shall always say he used my daughter extremely ill and
if I was her, I would not have put up with it. Well, my comfort
is, I am sure Jane will die of a broken heart and then he will
be sorry for what he has done."
But as Elizabeth could not receive comfort from any such
expectation, she made no answer.
"Well, Lizzy," continued her mother, soon afterwards, "and so
the Collinses live very comfortable, do they? Well, well, I only
hope it will last. And what sort of table do they keep? Charlotte
is an excellent manager, I dare say. If she is half as sharp as
her mother, she is saving enough. There is nothing extravagant in
their housekeeping, I dare say."
"No, nothing at all."
"A great deal of good management, depend upon it. Yes, yes.
they will take care not to outrun their income. They will
never be distressed for money. Well, much good may it do
them And so, I suppose, they often talk of having Longbourn
when your father is dead. They look upon it as quite their own,
I dare say, whenever that happens."
"It was a subject which they could not mention before me."
"No it would have been strange if they had but I make no
doubt they often talk of it between themselves. Well, if they
can be easy with an estate that is not lawfully their own, so
much the better. I should be ashamed of having one that was
only entailed on me."
Chapter 
The first week of their return was soon gone. The second began.
It was the last of the regiment's stay in Meryton, and all the
young ladies in the neighbourhood were drooping apace. The
dejection was almost universal. The elder Miss Bennets alone
were still able to eat, drink, and sleep, and pursue the usual
course of their employments. Very frequently were they
reproached for this insensibility by Kitty and Lydia, whose
own misery was extreme, and who could not comprehend such
hardheartedness in any of the family.
"Good Heaven what is to become of us? What are we to do?"
would they often exclaim in the bitterness of woe. "How can
you be smiling so, Lizzy?"
Their affectionate mother shared all their grief she remembered
what she had herself endured on a similar occasion, fiveandtwenty
years ago.
"I am sure," said she, "I cried for two days together when
Colonel Miller's regiment went away. I thought I should have
broken my heart."
"I am sure I shall break mine," said Lydia.
"If one could but go to Brighton" observed Mrs. Bennet.
"Oh, yesif one could but go to Brighton But papa is so
disagreeable."
"A little seabathing would set me up forever."
"And my aunt Phillips is sure it would do me a great deal of
good," added Kitty.
Such were the kind of lamentations resounding perpetually
through Longbourn House. Elizabeth tried to be diverted by
them but all sense of pleasure was lost in shame. She felt anew
the justice of Mr. Darcy's objections and never had she been so
much disposed to pardon his interference in the views of his
friend.
But the gloom of Lydia's prospect was shortly cleared away for
she received an invitation from Mrs. Forster, the wife of the
colonel of the regiment, to accompany her to Brighton. This
invaluable friend was a very young woman, and very lately
married. A resemblance in good humour and good spirits had
recommended her and Lydia to each other, and out of their
three months' acquaintance they had been intimate two.
The rapture of Lydia on this occasion, her adoration of Mrs.
Forster, the delight of Mrs. Bennet, and the mortification of
Kitty, are scarcely to be described. Wholly inattentive to her
sister's feelings, Lydia flew about the house in restless ecstasy,
calling for everyone's congratulations, and laughing and talking
with more violence than ever whilst the luckless Kitty continued
in the parlour repined at her fate in terms as unreasonable as her
accent was peevish.
"I cannot see why Mrs. Forster should not ask me as well as
Lydia," said she, "Though I am not her particular friend. I
have just as much right to be asked as she has, and more too,
for I am two years older."
In vain did Elizabeth attempt to make her reasonable, and Jane
to make her resigned. As for Elizabeth herself, this invitation
was so far from exciting in her the same feelings as in her mother
and Lydia, that she considered it as the death warrant of all
possibility of common sense for the latter and detestable as such
a step must make her were it known, she could not help secretly
advising her father not to let her go. She represented to him all
the improprieties of Lydia's general behaviour, the little
advantage she could derive from the friendship of such a woman
as Mrs. Forster, and the probability of her being yet more
imprudent with such a companion at Brighton, where the
temptations must be greater than at home. He heard her
attentively, and then said
"Lydia will never be easy until she has exposed herself in some
public place or other, and we can never expect her to do it with
so little expense or inconvenience to her family as under the
present circumstances."
"If you were aware," said Elizabeth, "of the very great
disadvantage to us all which must arise from the public notice
of Lydia's unguarded and imprudent mannernay, which has
already arisen from it, I am sure you would judge differently in
the affair."
"Already arisen?" repeated Mr. Bennet. "What, has she
frightened away some of your lovers? Poor little Lizzy But do
not be cast down. Such squeamish youths as cannot bear to be
connected with a little absurdity are not worth a regret. Come,
let me see the list of pitiful fellows who have been kept aloof
by Lydia's folly."
"Indeed you are mistaken. I have no such injuries to resent.
It is not of particular, but of general evils, which I am now
complaining. Our importance, our respectability in the world must
be affected by the wild volatility, the assurance and disdain of
all restraint which mark Lydia's character. Excuse me, for I must
speak plainly. If you, my dear father, will not take the trouble
of checking her exuberant spirits, and of teaching her that her
present pursuits are not to be the business of her life, she will
soon be beyond the reach of amendment. Her character will be
fixed, and she will, at sixteen, be the most determined flirt that
ever made herself or her family ridiculous a flirt, too, in the
worst and meanest degree of flirtation without any attraction
beyond youth and a tolerable person and, from the ignorance and
emptiness of her mind, wholly unable to ward off any portion of
that universal contempt which her rage for admiration will excite.
In this danger Kitty also is comprehended. She will follow wherever
Lydia leads. Vain, ignorant, idle, and absolutely uncontrolled
Oh my dear father, can you suppose it possible that they will not
be censured and despised wherever they are known, and that their
sisters will not be often involved in the disgrace?"
Mr. Bennet saw that her whole heart was in the subject, and
affectionately taking her hand said in reply
"Do not make yourself uneasy, my love. Wherever you and Jane
are known you must be respected and valued and you will not
appear to less advantage for having a couple ofor I may say,
threevery silly sisters. We shall have no peace at Longbourn
if Lydia does not go to Brighton. Let her go, then. Colonel
Forster is a sensible man, and will keep her out of any real
mischief and she is luckily too poor to be an object of prey
to anybody. At Brighton she will be of less importance even as
a common flirt than she has been here. The officers will find
women better worth their notice. Let us hope, therefore, that
her being there may teach her her own insignificance. At any
rate, she cannot grow many degrees worse, without authorising
us to lock her up for the rest of her life."
With this answer Elizabeth was forced to be content but her
own opinion continued the same, and she left him disappointed
and sorry. It was not in her nature, however, to increase her
vexations by dwelling on them. She was confident of having
performed her duty, and to fret over unavoidable evils, or
augment them by anxiety, was no part of her disposition.
Had Lydia and her mother known the substance of her conference
with her father, their indignation would hardly have found
expression in their united volubility. In Lydia's imagination,
a visit to Brighton comprised every possibility of earthly
happiness. She saw, with the creative eye of fancy, the streets
of that gay bathingplace covered with officers. She saw
herself the object of attention, to tens and to scores of them
at present unknown. She saw all the glories of the campits
tents stretched forth in beauteous uniformity of lines, crowded
with the young and the gay, and dazzling with scarlet and, to
complete the view, she saw herself seated beneath a tent, tenderly
flirting with at least six officers at once.
Had she known her sister sought to tear her from such prospects
and such realities as these, what would have been her sensations?
They could have been understood only by her mother, who might
have felt nearly the same. Lydia's going to Brighton was all
that consoled her for her melancholy conviction of her husband's
never intending to go there himself.
But they were entirely ignorant of what had passed and their
raptures continued, with little intermission, to the very day of
Lydia's leaving home.
Elizabeth was now to see Mr. Wickham for the last time.
Having been frequently in company with him since her return,
agitation was pretty well over the agitations of formal partiality
entirely so. She had even learnt to detect, in the very gentleness
which had first delighted her, an affectation and a sameness to
disgust and weary. In his present behaviour to herself,
moreover, she had a fresh source of displeasure, for the
inclination he soon testified of renewing those intentions which
had marked the early part of their acquaintance could only serve,
after what had since passed, to provoke her. She lost all concern
for him in finding herself thus selected as the object of such idle
and frivolous gallantry and while she steadily repressed it, could
not but feel the reproof contained in his believing, that however
long, and for whatever cause, his attentions had been withdrawn,
her vanity would be gratified, and her preference secured at any
time by their renewal.
On the very last day of the regiment's remaining at Meryton, he
dined, with other of the officers, at Longbourn and so little
was Elizabeth disposed to part from him in good humour, that on
his making some inquiry as to the manner in which her time had
passed at Hunsford, she mentioned Colonel Fitzwilliam's and
Mr. Darcy's having both spent three weeks at Rosings, and
asked him, if he was acquainted with the former.
He looked surprised, displeased, alarmed but with a moment's
recollection and a returning smile, replied, that he had formerly
seen him often and, after observing that he was a very
gentlemanlike man, asked her how she had liked him. Her
answer was warmly in his favour. With an air of indifference he
soon afterwards added
"How long did you say he was at Rosings?"
"Nearly three weeks."
"And you saw him frequently?"
"Yes, almost every day."
"His manners are very different from his cousin's."
"Yes, very different. But I think Mr. Darcy improves upon
acquaintance."
"Indeed" cried Mr. Wickham with a look which did not escape
her. "And pray, may I ask?" But checking himself, he added,
in a gayer tone, "Is it in address that he improves? Has he
deigned to add aught of civility to his ordinary style?for I
dare not hope," he continued in a lower and more serious tone,
"that he is improved in essentials."
"Oh, no" said Elizabeth. "In essentials, I believe, he is very
much what he ever was."
While she spoke, Wickham looked as if scarcely knowing
whether to rejoice over her words, or to distrust their meaning.
There was a something in her countenance which made him listen
with an apprehensive and anxious attention, while she added
"When I said that he improved on acquaintance, I did not mean
that his mind or his manners were in a state of improvement, but
that, from knowing him better, his disposition was better
understood."
Wickham's alarm now appeared in a heightened complexion and
agitated look for a few minutes he was silent, till, shaking
off his embarrassment, he turned to her again, and said in the
gentlest of accents
"You, who so well know my feeling towards Mr. Darcy, will
readily comprehend how sincerely I must rejoice that he is
wise enough to assume even the appearance of what is right.
His pride, in that direction, may be of service, if not to himself,
to many others, for it must only deter him from such foul
misconduct as I have suffered by. I only fear that the sort of
cautiousness to which you, I imagine, have been alluding, is
merely adopted on his visits to his aunt, of whose good opinion
and judgement he stands much in awe. His fear of her has
always operated, I know, when they were together and a good
deal is to be imputed to his wish of forwarding the match with
Miss de Bourgh, which I am certain he has very much at heart."
Elizabeth could not repress a smile at this, but she answered only
by a slight inclination of the head. She saw that he wanted to
engage her on the old subject of his grievances, and she was in
no humour to indulge him. The rest of the evening passed with
the appearance, on his side, of usual cheerfulness, but with
no further attempt to distinguish Elizabeth and they parted at
last with mutual civility, and possibly a mutual desire of never
meeting again.
When the party broke up, Lydia returned with Mrs. Forster to
Meryton, from whence they were to set out early the next
morning. The separation between her and her family was rather
noisy than pathetic. Kitty was the only one who shed tears but
she did weep from vexation and envy. Mrs. Bennet was diffuse
in her good wishes for the felicity of her daughter, and
impressive in her injunctions that she should not miss the
opportunity of enjoying herself as much as possibleadvice
which there was every reason to believe would be well attended
to and in the clamorous happiness of Lydia herself in bidding
farewell, the more gentle adieus of her sisters were uttered
without being heard.
Chapter 
Had Elizabeth's opinion been all drawn from her own family,
she could not have formed a very pleasing opinion of conjugal
felicity or domestic comfort. Her father, captivated by youth
and beauty, and that appearance of good humour which youth
and beauty generally give, had married a woman whose weak
understanding and illiberal mind had very early in their marriage
put an end to all real affection for her. Respect, esteem, and
confidence had vanished for ever and all his views of domestic
happiness were overthrown. But Mr. Bennet was not of a
disposition to seek comfort for the disappointment which his
own imprudence had brought on, in any of those pleasures which
too often console the unfortunate for their folly or their vice.
He was fond of the country and of books and from these tastes had
arisen his principal enjoyments. To his wife he was very little
otherwise indebted, than as her ignorance and folly had
contributed to his amusement. This is not the sort of happiness
which a man would in general wish to owe to his wife but
where other powers of entertainment are wanting, the true
philosopher will derive benefit from such as are given.
Elizabeth, however, had never been blind to the impropriety of
her father's behaviour as a husband. She had always seen it with
pain but respecting his abilities, and grateful for his affectionate
treatment of herself, she endeavoured to forget what she could
not overlook, and to banish from her thoughts that continual
breach of conjugal obligation and decorum which, in exposing
his wife to the contempt of her own children, was so highly
reprehensible. But she had never felt so strongly as now the
disadvantages which must attend the children of so unsuitable a
marriage, nor ever been so fully aware of the evils arising from
so illjudged a direction of talents talents, which, rightly used,
might at least have preserved the respectability of his daughters,
even if incapable of enlarging the mind of his wife.
When Elizabeth had rejoiced over Wickham's departure she
found little other cause for satisfaction in the loss of the
regiment. Their parties abroad were less varied than before, and
at home she had a mother and sister whose constant repinings at
the dullness of everything around them threw a real gloom over
their domestic circle and, though Kitty might in time regain her
natural degree of sense, since the disturbers of her brain were
removed, her other sister, from whose disposition greater evil
might be apprehended, was likely to be hardened in all her
folly and assurance by a situation of such double danger as a
wateringplace and a camp. Upon the whole, therefore, she
found, what has been sometimes found before, that an event
to which she had been looking with impatient desire did not,
in taking place, bring all the satisfaction she had promised
herself. It was consequently necessary to name some other
period for the commencement of actual felicityto have some
other point on which her wishes and hopes might be fixed, and
by again enjoying the pleasure of anticipation, console herself for
the present, and prepare for another disappointment. Her tour
to the Lakes was now the object of her happiest thoughts it was
her best consolation for all the uncomfortable hours which the
discontentedness of her mother and Kitty made inevitable and
could she have included Jane in the scheme, every part of it
would have been perfect.
"But it is fortunate," thought she, "that I have something to wish
for. Were the whole arrangement complete, my disappointment
would be certain. But here, by carrying with me one ceaseless
source of regret in my sister's absence, I may reasonably hope to
have all my expectations of pleasure realised. A scheme of
which every part promises delight can never be successful and
general disappointment is only warded off by the defence of
some little peculiar vexation."
When Lydia went away she promised to write very often and
very minutely to her mother and Kitty but her letters were
always long expected, and always very short. Those to her
mother contained little else than that they were just returned
from the library, where such and such officers had attended
them, and where she had seen such beautiful ornaments as made
her quite wild that she had a new gown, or a new parasol, which
she would have described more fully, but was obliged to leave
off in a violent hurry, as Mrs. Forster called her, and they were
going off to the camp and from her correspondence with her
sister, there was still less to be learntfor her letters to
Kitty, though rather longer, were much too full of lines under the
words to be made public.
After the first fortnight or three weeks of her absence, health,
good humour, and cheerfulness began to reappear at Longbourn.
Everything wore a happier aspect. The families who had been in
town for the winter came back again, and summer finery and
summer engagements arose. Mrs. Bennet was restored to her
usual querulous serenity and, by the middle of June, Kitty was
so much recovered as to be able to enter Meryton without tears
an event of such happy promise as to make Elizabeth hope that
by the following Christmas she might be so tolerably reasonable
as not to mention an officer above once a day, unless, by some
cruel and malicious arrangement at the War Office, another
regiment should be quartered in Meryton.
The time fixed for the beginning of their northern tour was now
fast approaching, and a fortnight only was wanting of it, when
a letter arrived from Mrs. Gardiner, which at once delayed its
commencement and curtailed its extent. Mr. Gardiner would be
prevented by business from setting out till a fortnight later in
July, and must be in London again within a month, and as that
left too short a period for them to go so far, and see so much
as they had proposed, or at least to see it with the leisure and
comfort they had built on, they were obliged to give up the
Lakes, and substitute a more contracted tour, and, according
to the present plan, were to go no farther northwards than
Derbyshire. In that county there was enough to be seen to
occupy the chief of their three weeks and to Mrs. Gardiner it
had a peculiarly strong attraction. The town where she had
formerly passed some years of her life, and where they were now
to spend a few days, was probably as great an object of her
curiosity as all the celebrated beauties of Matlock, Chatsworth,
Dovedale, or the Peak.
Elizabeth was excessively disappointed she had set her heart on
seeing the Lakes, and still thought there might have been time
enough. But it was her business to be satisfiedand certainly
her temper to be happy and all was soon right again.
With the mention of Derbyshire there were many ideas connected.
It was impossible for her to see the word without thinking of
Pemberley and its owner. "But surely," said she, "I may enter
his county without impunity, and rob it of a few petrified spars
without his perceiving me."
The period of expectation was now doubled. Four weeks were to
pass away before her uncle and aunt's arrival. But they did pass
away, and Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner, with their four children, did
at length appear at Longbourn. The children, two girls of six
and eight years old, and two younger boys, were to be left under
the particular care of their cousin Jane, who was the general
favourite, and whose steady sense and sweetness of temper exactly
adapted her for attending to them in every wayteaching them,
playing with them, and loving them.
The Gardiners stayed only one night at Longbourn, and set off
the next morning with Elizabeth in pursuit of novelty and
amusement. One enjoyment was certainthat of suitableness
of companions a suitableness which comprehended health and
temper to bear inconveniencescheerfulness to enhance every
pleasureand affection and intelligence, which might supply
it among themselves if there were disappointments abroad.
It is not the object of this work to give a description of
Derbyshire, nor of any of the remarkable places through which
their route thither lay Oxford, Blenheim, Warwick, Kenilworth,
Birmingham, etc. are sufficiently known. A small part of
Derbyshire is all the present concern. To the little town of
Lambton, the scene of Mrs. Gardiner's former residence, and
where she had lately learned some acquaintance still remained,
they bent their steps, after having seen all the principal wonders
of the country and within five miles of Lambton, Elizabeth
found from her aunt that Pemberley was situated. It was not in
their direct road, nor more than a mile or two out of it. In
talking over their route the evening before, Mrs. Gardiner
expressed an inclination to see the place again. Mr. Gardiner
declared his willingness, and Elizabeth was applied to for her
approbation.
"My love, should not you like to see a place of which you have
heard so much?" said her aunt "a place, too, with which so
many of your acquaintances are connected. Wickham passed all
his youth there, you know."
Elizabeth was distressed. She felt that she had no business at
Pemberley, and was obliged to assume a disinclination for seeing
it. She must own that she was tired of seeing great houses after
going over so many, she really had no pleasure in fine carpets or
satin curtains.
Mrs. Gardiner abused her stupidity. "If it were merely a fine
house richly furnished," said she, "I should not care about it
myself but the grounds are delightful. They have some of the
finest woods in the country."
Elizabeth said no morebut her mind could not acquiesce.
The possibility of meeting Mr. Darcy, while viewing the place,
instantly occurred. It would be dreadful She blushed at the
very idea, and thought it would be better to speak openly to
her aunt than to run such a risk. But against this there were
objections and she finally resolved that it could be the last
resource, if her private inquiries to the absence of the family
were unfavourably answered.
Accordingly, when she retired at night, she asked the chambermaid
whether Pemberley were not a very fine place? what was the name
of its proprietor? and, with no little alarm, whether the family
were down for the summer? A most welcome negative followed the
last questionand her alarms now being removed, she was at
leisure to feel a great deal of curiosity to see the house herself
and when the subject was revived the next morning, and she was
again applied to, could readily answer, and with a proper air of
indifference, that she had not really any dislike to the scheme.
To Pemberley, therefore, they were to go.
Chapter 
Elizabeth, as they drove along, watched for the first appearance
of Pemberley Woods with some perturbation and when at
length they turned in at the lodge, her spirits were in a high
flutter.
The park was very large, and contained great variety of ground.
They entered it in one of its lowest points, and drove for some
time through a beautiful wood stretching over a wide extent.
Elizabeth's mind was too full for conversation, but she saw and
admired every remarkable spot and point of view. They
gradually ascended for halfamile, and then found themselves
at the top of a considerable eminence, where the wood ceased,
and the eye was instantly caught by Pemberley House, situated
on the opposite side of a valley, into which the road with some
abruptness wound. It was a large, handsome stone building,
standing well on rising ground, and backed by a ridge of high
woody hills and in front, a stream of some natural importance
was swelled into greater, but without any artificial appearance.
Its banks were neither formal nor falsely adorned. Elizabeth
was delighted. She had never seen a place for which nature
had done more, or where natural beauty had been so little
counteracted by an awkward taste. They were all of them warm
in their admiration and at that moment she felt that to be
mistress of Pemberley might be something
They descended the hill, crossed the bridge, and drove to the
door and, while examining the nearer aspect of the house, all
her apprehension of meeting its owner returned. She dreaded
lest the chambermaid had been mistaken. On applying to see
the place, they were admitted into the hall and Elizabeth, as
they waited for the housekeeper, had leisure to wonder at her
being where she was.
The housekeeper came a respectablelooking elderly woman,
much less fine, and more civil, than she had any notion of
finding her. They followed her into the diningparlour.
It was a large, well proportioned room, handsomely fitted up.
Elizabeth, after slightly surveying it, went to a window to enjoy
its prospect. The hill, crowned with wood, which they had
descended, receiving increased abruptness from the distance,
was a beautiful object. Every disposition of the ground was
good and she looked on the whole scene, the river, the trees
scattered on its banks and the winding of the valley, as far as
she could trace it, with delight. As they passed into other
rooms these objects were taking different positions but from
every window there were beauties to be seen. The rooms were
lofty and handsome, and their furniture suitable to the fortune
of its proprietor but Elizabeth saw, with admiration of his taste,
that it was neither gaudy nor uselessly fine with less of
splendour, and more real elegance, than the furniture of Rosings.
"And of this place," thought she, "I might have been mistress
With these rooms I might now have been familiarly acquainted
Instead of viewing them as a stranger, I might have rejoiced
in them as my own, and welcomed to them as visitors my uncle
and aunt. But no,"recollecting herself"that could never
be my uncle and aunt would have been lost to me I should not
have been allowed to invite them."
This was a lucky recollectionit saved her from something
very like regret.
She longed to inquire of the housekeeper whether her master
was really absent, but had not the courage for it. At length
however, the question was asked by her uncle and she turned
away with alarm, while Mrs. Reynolds replied that he was,
adding, "But we expect him tomorrow, with a large party of
friends." How rejoiced was Elizabeth that their own journey
had not by any circumstance been delayed a day
Her aunt now called her to look at a picture. She approached
and saw the likeness of Mr. Wickham, suspended, amongst
several other miniatures, over the mantelpiece. Her aunt asked
her, smilingly, how she liked it. The housekeeper came forward,
and told them it was a picture of a young gentleman, the son of
her late master's steward, who had been brought up by him at
his own expense. "He is now gone into the army," she added
"but I am afraid he has turned out very wild."
Mrs. Gardiner looked at her niece with a smile, but Elizabeth
could not return it.
"And that," said Mrs. Reynolds, pointing to another of the
miniatures, "is my masterand very like him. It was drawn at
the same time as the otherabout eight years ago."
"I have heard much of your master's fine person," said Mrs.
Gardiner, looking at the picture "it is a handsome face.
But, Lizzy, you can tell us whether it is like or not."
Mrs. Reynolds respect for Elizabeth seemed to increase on this
intimation of her knowing her master.
"Does that young lady know Mr. Darcy?"
Elizabeth coloured, and said "A little."
"And do not you think him a very handsome gentleman, ma'am?"
"Yes, very handsome."
"I am sure I know none so handsome but in the gallery
upstairs you will see a finer, larger picture of him than this.
This room was my late master's favourite room, and these
miniatures are just as they used to be then. He was very fond
of them."
This accounted to Elizabeth for Mr. Wickham's being among them.
Mrs. Reynolds then directed their attention to one of Miss Darcy,
drawn when she was only eight years old.
"And is Miss Darcy as handsome as her brother?" said Mrs. Gardiner.
"Oh yesthe handsomest young lady that ever was seen and
so accomplishedShe plays and sings all day long. In the next
room is a new instrument just come down for hera present
from my master she comes here tomorrow with him."
Mr. Gardiner, whose manners were very easy and pleasant,
encouraged her communicativeness by his questions and remarks
Mrs. Reynolds, either by pride or attachment, had evidently
great pleasure in talking of her master and his sister.
"Is your master much at Pemberley in the course of the year?"
"Not so much as I could wish, sir but I dare say he may spend
half his time here and Miss Darcy is always down for the
summer months."
"Except," thought Elizabeth, "when she goes to Ramsgate."
"If your master would marry, you might see more of him."
"Yes, sir but I do not know when that will be. I do not
know who is good enough for him."
Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner smiled. Elizabeth could not help saying,
"It is very much to his credit, I am sure, that you should think
so."
"I say no more than the truth, and everybody will say that
knows him," replied the other. Elizabeth thought this was
going pretty far and she listened with increasing astonishment
as the housekeeper added, "I have never known a cross word
from him in my life, and I have known him ever since he was
four years old."
This was praise, of all others most extraordinary, most opposite
to her ideas. That he was not a goodtempered man had been
her firmest opinion. Her keenest attention was awakened she
longed to hear more, and was grateful to her uncle for saying
"There are very few people of whom so much can be said. You
are lucky in having such a master."
"Yes, sir, I know I am. If I were to go through the world, I
could not meet with a better. But I have always observed, that
they who are goodnatured when children, are goodnatured
when they grow up and he was always the sweetesttempered,
most generoushearted boy in the world."
Elizabeth almost stared at her. "Can this be Mr. Darcy?"
thought she.
"His father was an excellent man," said Mrs. Gardiner.
"Yes, ma'am, that he was indeed and his son will be just like
himjust as affable to the poor."
Elizabeth listened, wondered, doubted, and was impatient for
more. Mrs. Reynolds could interest her on no other point. She
related the subjects of the pictures, the dimensions of the rooms,
and the price of the furniture, in vain, Mr. Gardiner, highly
amused by the kind of family prejudice to which he attributed
her excessive commendation of her master, soon led again to
the subject and she dwelt with energy on his many merits as
they proceeded together up the great staircase.
"He is the best landlord, and the best master," said she, "that
ever lived not like the wild young men nowadays, who think of
nothing but themselves. There is not one of his tenants or
servants but will give him a good name. Some people call him
proud but I am sure I never saw anything of it. To my fancy, it
is only because he does not rattle away like other young men."
"In what an amiable light does this place him" thought
Elizabeth.
"This fine account of him," whispered her aunt as they walked,
"is not quite consistent with his behaviour to our poor friend."
"Perhaps we might be deceived."
"That is not very likely our authority was too good."
On reaching the spacious lobby above they were shown into a
very pretty sittingroom, lately fitted up with greater elegance
and lightness than the apartments below and were informed that
it was but just done to give pleasure to Miss Darcy, who had
taken a liking to the room when last at Pemberley.
"He is certainly a good brother," said Elizabeth, as she walked
towards one of the windows.
Mrs. Reynolds anticipated Miss Darcy's delight, when she
should enter the room. "And this is always the way with him,"
she added. "Whatever can give his sister any pleasure is sure
to be done in a moment. There is nothing he would not do for
her."
The picturegallery, and two or three of the principal bedrooms,
were all that remained to be shown. In the former were many
good paintings but Elizabeth knew nothing of the art and from
such as had been already visible below, she had willingly turned
to look at some drawings of Miss Darcy's, in crayons, whose
subjects were usually more interesting, and also more intelligible.
In the gallery there were many family portraits, but they could
have little to fix the attention of a stranger. Elizabeth walked
in quest of the only face whose features would be known to her.
At last it arrested herand she beheld a striking resemblance
to Mr. Darcy, with such a smile over the face as she remembered
to have sometimes seen when he looked at her. She stood
several minutes before the picture, in earnest contemplation,
and returned to it again before they quitted the gallery. Mrs.
Reynolds informed them that it had been taken in his father's
lifetime.
There was certainly at this moment, in Elizabeth's mind, a more
gentle sensation towards the original than she had ever felt at
the height of their acquaintance. The commendation bestowed
on him by Mrs. Reynolds was of no trifling nature. What praise
is more valuable than the praise of an intelligent servant? As a
brother, a landlord, a master, she considered how many people's
happiness were in his guardianshiphow much of pleasure or
pain was it in his power to bestowhow much of good or evil
must be done by him Every idea that had been brought forward
by the housekeeper was favourable to his character, and as she
stood before the canvas on which he was represented, and fixed
his eyes upon herself, she thought of his regard with a deeper
sentiment of gratitude than it had ever raised before she
remembered its warmth, and softened its impropriety of
expression.
When all of the house that was open to general inspection had
been seen, they returned downstairs, and, taking leave of the
housekeeper, were consigned over to the gardener, who met
them at the halldoor.
As they walked across the hall towards the river, Elizabeth
turned back to look again her uncle and aunt stopped also, and
while the former was conjecturing as to the date of the building,
the owner of it himself suddenly came forward from the road,
which led behind it to the stables.
They were within twenty yards of each other, and so abrupt was
his appearance, that it was impossible to avoid his sight. Their
eyes instantly met, and the cheeks of both were overspread with
the deepest blush. He absolutely started, and for a moment
seemed immovable from surprise but shortly recovering himself,
advanced towards the party, and spoke to Elizabeth, if not in
terms of perfect composure, at least of perfect civility.
She had instinctively turned away but stopping on his approach,
received his compliments with an embarrassment impossible to
be overcome. Had his first appearance, or his resemblance to
the picture they had just been examining, been insufficient
to assure the other two that they now saw Mr. Darcy, the
gardener's expression of surprise, on beholding his master,
must immediately have told it. They stood a little aloof while
he was talking to their niece, who, astonished and confused,
scarcely dared lift her eyes to his face, and knew not what
answer she returned to his civil inquiries after her family.
Amazed at the alteration of his manner since they last parted,
every sentence that he uttered was increasing her embarrassment
and every idea of the impropriety of her being found there
recurring to her mind, the few minutes in which they continued
were some of the most uncomfortable in her life. Nor did he
seem much more at ease when he spoke, his accent had none of
its usual sedateness and he repeated his inquiries as to the
time of her having left Longbourn, and of her having stayed in
Derbyshire, so often, and in so hurried a way, as plainly spoke
the distraction of his thoughts.
At length every idea seemed to fail him and, after standing a
few moments without saying a word, he suddenly recollected
himself, and took leave.
The others then joined her, and expressed admiration of his
figure but Elizabeth heard not a word, and wholly engrossed
by her own feelings, followed them in silence. She was
overpowered by shame and vexation. Her coming there was
the most unfortunate, the most illjudged thing in the world
How strange it must appear to him In what a disgraceful light
might it not strike so vain a man It might seem as if she
had purposely thrown herself in his way again Oh why did she
come? Or, why did he thus come a day before he was expected?
Had they been only ten minutes sooner, they should have been
beyond the reach of his discrimination for it was plain that
he was that moment arrivedthat moment alighted from his
horse or his carriage. She blushed again and again over the
perverseness of the meeting. And his behaviour, so strikingly
alteredwhat could it mean? That he should even speak to her
was amazingbut to speak with such civility, to inquire after
her family Never in her life had she seen his manners so little
dignified, never had he spoken with such gentleness as on this
unexpected meeting. What a contrast did it offer to his last
address in Rosings Park, when he put his letter into her hand
She knew not what to think, or how to account for it.
They had now entered a beautiful walk by the side of the water,
and every step was bringing forward a nobler fall of ground, or
a finer reach of the woods to which they were approaching but
it was some time before Elizabeth was sensible of any of it
and, though she answered mechanically to the repeated appeals
of her uncle and aunt, and seemed to direct her eyes to such
objects as they pointed out, she distinguished no part of
the scene. Her thoughts were all fixed on that one spot of
Pemberley House, whichever it might be, where Mr. Darcy then
was. She longed to know what at the moment was passing in
his mindin what manner he thought of her, and whether, in
defiance of everything, she was still dear to him. Perhaps he
had been civil only because he felt himself at ease yet there
had been that in his voice which was not like ease. Whether he
had felt more of pain or of pleasure in seeing her she could
not tell, but he certainly had not seen her with composure.
At length, however, the remarks of her companions on her
absence of mind aroused her, and she felt the necessity of
appearing more like herself.
They entered the woods, and bidding adieu to the river for a
while, ascended some of the higher grounds when, in spots where
the opening of the trees gave the eye power to wander, were many
charming views of the valley, the opposite hills, with the long
range of woods overspreading many, and occasionally part of the
stream. Mr. Gardiner expressed a wish of going round the whole
park, but feared it might be beyond a walk. With a triumphant
smile they were told that it was ten miles round. It settled the
matter and they pursued the accustomed circuit which brought
them again, after some time, in a descent among hanging woods,
to the edge of the water, and one of its narrowest parts. They
crossed it by a simple bridge, in character with the general air
of the scene it was a spot less adorned than any they had yet
visited and the valley, here contracted into a glen, allowed
room only for the stream, and a narrow walk amidst the rough
coppicewood which bordered it. Elizabeth longed to explore its
windings but when they had crossed the bridge, and perceived
their distance from the house, Mrs. Gardiner, who was not a
great walker, could go no farther, and thought only of returning
to the carriage as quickly as possible. Her niece was, therefore,
obliged to submit, and they took their way towards the house on
the opposite side of the river, in the nearest direction but
their progress was slow, for Mr. Gardiner, though seldom able to
indulge the taste, was very fond of fishing, and was so much
engaged in watching the occasional appearance of some trout in
the water, and talking to the man about them, that he advanced
but little. Whilst wandering on in this slow manner, they were
again surprised, and Elizabeth's astonishment was quite equal to
what it had been at first, by the sight of Mr. Darcy approaching
them, and at no great distance. The walk here being here less
sheltered than on the other side, allowed them to see him before
they met. Elizabeth, however astonished, was at least more
prepared for an interview than before, and resolved to appear
and to speak with calmness, if he really intended to meet them.
For a few moments, indeed, she felt that he would probably strike
into some other path. The idea lasted while a turning in the
walk concealed him from their view the turning past, he was
immediately before them. With a glance, she saw that he had lost
none of his recent civility and, to imitate his politeness, she
began, as they met, to admire the beauty of the place but she
had not got beyond the words "delightful," and "charming," when
some unlucky recollections obtruded, and she fancied that praise
of Pemberley from her might be mischievously construed. Her
colour changed, and she said no more.
Mrs. Gardiner was standing a little behind and on her pausing,
he asked her if she would do him the honour of introducing him
to her friends. This was a stroke of civility for which she
was quite unprepared and she could hardly suppress a smile at
his being now seeking the acquaintance of some of those very
people against whom his pride had revolted in his offer to
herself. "What will be his surprise," thought she, "when he
knows who they are? He takes them now for people of fashion."
The introduction, however, was immediately made and as she
named their relationship to herself, she stole a sly look at
him, to see how he bore it, and was not without the expectation
of his decamping as fast as he could from such disgraceful
companions. That he was surprised by the connection was
evident he sustained it, however, with fortitude, and so far
from going away, turned his back with them, and entered into
conversation with Mr. Gardiner. Elizabeth could not but be
pleased, could not but triumph. It was consoling that he should
know she had some relations for whom there was no need to
blush. She listened most attentively to all that passed between
them, and gloried in every expression, every sentence of her
uncle, which marked his intelligence, his taste, or his good
manners.
The conversation soon turned upon fishing and she heard Mr.
Darcy invite him, with the greatest civility, to fish there as often
as he chose while he continued in the neighbourhood, offering
at the same time to supply him with fishing tackle, and pointing
out those parts of the stream where there was usually most
sport. Mrs. Gardiner, who was walking arminarm with
Elizabeth, gave her a look expressive of wonder. Elizabeth
said nothing, but it gratified her exceedingly the compliment
must be all for herself. Her astonishment, however, was
extreme, and continually was she repeating, "Why is he so
altered? From what can it proceed? It cannot be for meit
cannot be for my sake that his manners are thus softened. My
reproofs at Hunsford could not work such a change as this.
It is impossible that he should still love me."
After walking some time in this way, the two ladies in front,
the two gentlemen behind, on resuming their places, after
descending to the brink of the river for the better inspection of
some curious waterplant, there chanced to be a little alteration.
It originated in Mrs. Gardiner, who, fatigued by the exercise of
the morning, found Elizabeth's arm inadequate to her support, and
consequently preferred her husband's. Mr. Darcy took her place
by her niece, and they walked on together. After a short silence,
the lady first spoke. She wished him to know that she had
been assured of his absence before she came to the place, and
accordingly began by observing, that his arrival had been very
unexpected"for your housekeeper," she added, "informed us that
you would certainly not be here till tomorrow and indeed, before
we left Bakewell, we understood that you were not immediately
expected in the country." He acknowledged the truth of it all,
and said that business with his steward had occasioned his coming
forward a few hours before the rest of the party with whom he
had been travelling. "They will join me early tomorrow," he
continued, "and among them are some who will claim an acquaintance
with youMr. Bingley and his sisters."
Elizabeth answered only by a slight bow. Her thoughts were
instantly driven back to the time when Mr. Bingley's name had
been the last mentioned between them and, if she might judge
by his complexion, his mind was not very differently engaged.
"There is also one other person in the party," he continued after
a pause, "who more particularly wishes to be known to you.
Will you allow me, or do I ask too much, to introduce my sister
to your acquaintance during your stay at Lambton?"
The surprise of such an application was great indeed it was too
great for her to know in what manner she acceded to it. She
immediately felt that whatever desire Miss Darcy might have of
being acquainted with her must be the work of her brother, and,
without looking farther, it was satisfactory it was gratifying to
know that his resentment had not made him think really ill of her.
They now walked on in silence, each of them deep in thought.
Elizabeth was not comfortable that was impossible but she was
flattered and pleased. His wish of introducing his sister to her
was a compliment of the highest kind. They soon outstripped the
others, and when they had reached the carriage, Mr. and Mrs.
Gardiner were half a quarter of a mile behind.
He then asked her to walk into the housebut she declared
herself not tired, and they stood together on the lawn. At
such a time much might have been said, and silence was very
awkward. She wanted to talk, but there seemed to be an
embargo on every subject. At last she recollected that she had
been travelling, and they talked of Matlock and Dove Dale with
great perseverance. Yet time and her aunt moved slowlyand
her patience and her ideas were nearly worn our before the
teteatete was over. On Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner's coming up
they were all pressed to go into the house and take some
refreshment but this was declined, and they parted on each
side with utmost politeness. Mr. Darcy handed the ladies into
the carriage and when it drove off, Elizabeth saw him walking
slowly towards the house.
The observations of her uncle and aunt now began and each of
them pronounced him to be infinitely superior to anything they
had expected. "He is perfectly well behaved, polite, and
unassuming," said her uncle.
"There is something a little stately in him, to be sure," replied
her aunt, "but it is confined to his air, and is not unbecoming.
I can now say with the housekeeper, that though some people may
call him proud, I have seen nothing of it."
"I was never more surprised than by his behaviour to us. It was
more than civil it was really attentive and there was no
necessity for such attention. His acquaintance with Elizabeth
was very trifling."
"To be sure, Lizzy," said her aunt, "he is not so handsome as
Wickham or, rather, he has not Wickham's countenance, for
his features are perfectly good. But how came you to tell me
that he was so disagreeable?"
Elizabeth excused herself as well as she could said that she had
liked him better when they had met in Kent than before, and that
she had never seen him so pleasant as this morning.
"But perhaps he may be a little whimsical in his civilities,"
replied her uncle. "Your great men often are and therefore I
shall not take him at his word, as he might change his mind
another day, and warn me off his grounds."
Elizabeth felt that they had entirely misunderstood his character,
but said nothing.
"From what we have seen of him," continued Mrs. Gardiner, "I
really should not have thought that he could have behaved in so
cruel a way by anybody as he has done by poor Wickham. He
has not an illnatured look. On the contrary, there is something
pleasing about his mouth when he speaks. And there is something
of dignity in his countenance that would not give one an
unfavourable idea of his heart. But, to be sure, the good lady
who showed us his house did give him a most flaming character
I could hardly help laughing aloud sometimes. But he is a
liberal master, I suppose, and that in the eye of a servant
comprehends every virtue."
Elizabeth here felt herself called on to say something in
vindication of his behaviour to Wickham and therefore gave
them to understand, in as guarded a manner as she could, that
by what she had heard from his relations in Kent, his actions
were capable of a very different construction and that his
character was by no means so faulty, nor Wickham's so amiable,
as they had been considered in Hertfordshire. In confirmation
of this, she related the particulars of all the pecuniary
transactions in which they had been connected, without actually
naming her authority, but stating it to be such as might be
relied on.
Mrs. Gardiner was surprised and concerned but as they were
now approaching the scene of her former pleasures, every idea
gave way to the charm of recollection and she was too much
engaged in pointing out to her husband all the interesting spots
in its environs to think of anything else. Fatigued as she had
been by the morning's walk they had no sooner dined than she
set off again in quest of her former acquaintance, and the
evening was spent in the satisfactions of a intercourse renewed
after many years' discontinuance.
The occurrences of the day were too full of interest to leave
Elizabeth much attention for any of these new friends and she
could do nothing but think, and think with wonder, of Mr.
Darcy's civility, and, above all, of his wishing her to be
acquainted with his sister.
Chapter 
Elizabeth had settled it that Mr. Darcy would bring his sister
to visit her the very day after her reaching Pemberley and was
consequently resolved not to be out of sight of the inn the whole
of that morning. But her conclusion was false for on the very
morning after their arrival at Lambton, these visitors came.
They had been walking about the place with some of their new
friends, and were just returning to the inn to dress themselves
for dining with the same family, when the sound of a carriage
drew them to a window, and they saw a gentleman and a lady
in a curricle driving up the street. Elizabeth immediately
recognizing the livery, guessed what it meant, and imparted no
small degree of her surprise to her relations by acquainting
them with the honour which she expected. Her uncle and aunt
were all amazement and the embarrassment of her manner as
she spoke, joined to the circumstance itself, and many of the
circumstances of the preceding day, opened to them a new idea
on the business. Nothing had ever suggested it before, but they
felt that there was no other way of accounting for such attentions
from such a quarter than by supposing a partiality for their
niece. While these newlyborn notions were passing in their heads,
the perturbation of Elizabeth's feelings was at every moment
increasing. She was quite amazed at her own discomposure but
amongst other causes of disquiet, she dreaded lest the partiality
of the brother should have said too much in her favour and, more
than commonly anxious to please, she naturally suspected that
every power of pleasing would fail her.
She retreated from the window, fearful of being seen and as
she walked up and down the room, endeavouring to compose
herself, saw such looks of inquiring surprise in her uncle and
aunt as made everything worse.
Miss Darcy and her brother appeared, and this formidable
introduction took place. With astonishment did Elizabeth see
that her new acquaintance was at least as much embarrassed as
herself. Since her being at Lambton, she had heard that Miss
Darcy was exceedingly proud but the observation of a very few
minutes convinced her that she was only exceedingly shy. She
found it difficult to obtain even a word from her beyond a
monosyllable.
Miss Darcy was tall, and on a larger scale than Elizabeth
and, though little more than sixteen, her figure was formed,
and her appearance womanly and graceful. She was less handsome
than her brother but there was sense and good humour in her
face, and her manners were perfectly unassuming and gentle.
Elizabeth, who had expected to find in her as acute and
unembarrassed an observer as ever Mr. Darcy had been, was
much relieved by discerning such different feelings.
They had not long been together before Mr. Darcy told her that
Bingley was also coming to wait on her and she had barely time
to express her satisfaction, and prepare for such a visitor, when
Bingley's quick step was heard on the stairs, and in a moment he
entered the room. All Elizabeth's anger against him had been
long done away but had she still felt any, it could hardly have
stood its ground against the unaffected cordiality with which he
expressed himself on seeing her again. He inquired in a friendly,
though general way, after her family, and looked and spoke with
the same goodhumoured ease that he had ever done.
To Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner he was scarcely a less interesting
personage than to herself. They had long wished to see him.
The whole party before them, indeed, excited a lively attention.
The suspicions which had just arisen of Mr. Darcy and their niece
directed their observation towards each with an earnest though
guarded inquiry and they soon drew from those inquiries the full
conviction that one of them at least knew what it was to love.
Of the lady's sensations they remained a little in doubt but that
the gentleman was overflowing with admiration was evident enough.
Elizabeth, on her side, had much to do. She wanted to
ascertain the feelings of each of her visitors she wanted to
compose her own, and to make herself agreeable to all and in
the latter object, where she feared most to fail, she was most
sure of success, for those to whom she endeavoured to give
pleasure were prepossessed in her favour. Bingley was ready,
Georgiana was eager, and Darcy determined, to be pleased.
In seeing Bingley, her thoughts naturally flew to her sister
and, oh how ardently did she long to know whether any of his were
directed in a like manner. Sometimes she could fancy that he
talked less than on former occasions, and once or twice pleased
herself with the notion that, as he looked at her, he was trying
to trace a resemblance. But, though this might be imaginary,
she could not be deceived as to his behaviour to Miss Darcy, who
had been set up as a rival to Jane. No look appeared on either
side that spoke particular regard. Nothing occurred between
them that could justify the hopes of his sister. On this point
she was soon satisfied and two or three little circumstances
occurred ere they parted, which, in her anxious interpretation,
denoted a recollection of Jane not untinctured by tenderness,
and a wish of saying more that might lead to the mention of her,
had he dared. He observed to her, at a moment when the others
were talking together, and in a tone which had something of real
regret, that it "was a very long time since he had had the
pleasure of seeing her" and, before she could reply, he added,
"It is above eight months. We have not met since the th of
November, when we were all dancing together at Netherfield."
Elizabeth was pleased to find his memory so exact and he
afterwards took occasion to ask her, when unattended to by
any of the rest, whether all her sisters were at Longbourn.
There was not much in the question, nor in the preceding
remark but there was a look and a manner which gave them
meaning.
It was not often that she could turn her eyes on Mr. Darcy
himself but, whenever she did catch a glimpse, she saw an
expression of general complaisance, and in all that he said
she heard an accent so removed from hauteur or disdain of his
companions, as convinced her that the improvement of manners
which she had yesterday witnessed however temporary its
existence might prove, had at least outlived one day. When she
saw him thus seeking the acquaintance and courting the good
opinion of people with whom any intercourse a few months ago
would have been a disgracewhen she saw him thus civil, not
only to herself, but to the very relations whom he had openly
disdained, and recollected their last lively scene in Hunsford
Parsonagethe difference, the change was so great, and struck
so forcibly on her mind, that she could hardly restrain her
astonishment from being visible. Never, even in the company
of his dear friends at Netherfield, or his dignified relations
at Rosings, had she seen him so desirous to please, so free
from selfconsequence or unbending reserve, as now, when no
importance could result from the success of his endeavours, and
when even the acquaintance of those to whom his attentions
were addressed would draw down the ridicule and censure of
the ladies both of Netherfield and Rosings.
Their visitors stayed with them above halfanhour and when
they arose to depart, Mr. Darcy called on his sister to join him
in expressing their wish of seeing Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner, and
Miss Bennet, to dinner at Pemberley, before they left the
country. Miss Darcy, though with a diffidence which marked
her little in the habit of giving invitations, readily obeyed.
Mrs. Gardiner looked at her niece, desirous of knowing how she,
whom the invitation most concerned, felt disposed as to its
acceptance, but Elizabeth had turned away her head. Presuming
however, that this studied avoidance spoke rather a momentary
embarrassment than any dislike of the proposal, and seeing in
her husband, who was fond of society, a perfect willingness to
accept it, she ventured to engage for her attendance, and the
day after the next was fixed on.
Bingley expressed great pleasure in the certainty of seeing
Elizabeth again, having still a great deal to say to her, and many
inquiries to make after all their Hertfordshire friends. Elizabeth,
construing all this into a wish of hearing her speak of her sister,
was pleased, and on this account, as well as some others, found
herself, when their visitors left them, capable of considering
the last halfhour with some satisfaction, though while it was
passing, the enjoyment of it had been little. Eager to be alone,
and fearful of inquiries or hints from her uncle and aunt, she
stayed with them only long enough to hear their favourable
opinion of Bingley, and then hurried away to dress.
But she had no reason to fear Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner's curiosity
it was not their wish to force her communication. It was evident
that she was much better acquainted with Mr. Darcy than they
had before any idea of it was evident that he was very much in
love with her. They saw much to interest, but nothing to justify
inquiry.
Of Mr. Darcy it was now a matter of anxiety to think well and,
as far as their acquaintance reached, there was no fault to find.
They could not be untouched by his politeness and had they
drawn his character from their own feelings and his servant's
report, without any reference to any other account, the circle
in Hertfordshire to which he was known would not have recognized
it for Mr. Darcy. There was now an interest, however, in
believing the housekeeper and they soon became sensible that
the authority of a servant who had known him since he was four
years old, and whose own manners indicated respectability, was
not to be hastily rejected. Neither had anything occurred in
the intelligence of their Lambton friends that could materially
lessen its weight. They had nothing to accuse him of but pride
pride he probably had, and if not, it would certainly be imputed
by the inhabitants of a small markettown where the family did
not visit. It was acknowledged, however, that he was a liberal
man, and did much good among the poor.
With respect to Wickham, the travellers soon found that he was
not held there in much estimation for though the chief of his
concerns with the son of his patron were imperfectly understood,
it was yet a wellknown fact that, on his quitting Derbyshire,
he had left many debts behind him, which Mr. Darcy afterwards
discharged.
As for Elizabeth, her thoughts were at Pemberley this evening
more than the last and the evening, though as it passed it
seemed long, was not long enough to determine her feelings
towards one in that mansion and she lay awake two whole
hours endeavouring to make them out. She certainly did not
hate him. No hatred had vanished long ago, and she had
almost as long been ashamed of ever feeling a dislike against
him, that could be so called. The respect created by the
conviction of his valuable qualities, though at first unwillingly
admitted, had for some time ceased to be repugnant to her
feeling and it was now heightened into somewhat of a friendlier
nature, by the testimony so highly in his favour, and bringing
forward his disposition in so amiable a light, which yesterday
had produced. But above all, above respect and esteem, there
was a motive within her of goodwill which could not be
overlooked. It was gratitude gratitude, not merely for having
once loved her, but for loving her still well enough to forgive
all the petulance and acrimony of her manner in rejecting him, and
all the unjust accusations accompanying her rejection. He who,
she had been persuaded, would avoid her as his greatest enemy,
seemed, on this accidental meeting, most eager to preserve the
acquaintance, and without any indelicate display of regard, or
any peculiarity of manner, where their two selves only were
concerned, was soliciting the good opinion of her friends,
and bent on making her known to his sister. Such a change
in a man of so much pride exciting not only astonishment but
gratitudefor to love, ardent love, it must be attributed and
as such its impression on her was of a sort to be encouraged, as
by no means unpleasing, though it could not be exactly defined.
She respected, she esteemed, she was grateful to him, she felt
a real interest in his welfare and she only wanted to know how
far she wished that welfare to depend upon herself, and how far
it would be for the happiness of both that she should employ the
power, which her fancy told her she still possessed, of bringing
on her the renewal of his addresses.
It had been settled in the evening between the aunt and the
niece, that such a striking civility as Miss Darcy's in coming to
see them on the very day of her arrival at Pemberley, for she
had reached it only to a late breakfast, ought to be imitated,
though it could not be equalled, by some exertion of politeness
on their side and, consequently, that it would be highly
expedient to wait on her at Pemberley the following morning.
They were, therefore, to go. Elizabeth was pleased though
when she asked herself the reason, she had very little to say in
reply.
Mr. Gardiner left them soon after breakfast. The fishing scheme
had been renewed the day before, and a positive engagement
made of his meeting some of the gentlemen at Pemberley before
noon.
Chapter 
Convinced as Elizabeth now was that Miss Bingley's dislike of
her had originated in jealousy, she could not help feeling how
unwelcome her appearance at Pemberley must be to her, and
was curious to know with how much civility on that lady's side
the acquaintance would now be renewed.
On reaching the house, they were shown through the hall into
the saloon, whose northern aspect rendered it delightful for
summer. Its windows opening to the ground, admitted a most
refreshing view of the high woody hills behind the house,
and of the beautiful oaks and Spanish chestnuts which were
scattered over the intermediate lawn.
In this house they were received by Miss Darcy, who was
sitting there with Mrs. Hurst and Miss Bingley, and the lady
with whom she lived in London. Georgiana's reception of them
was very civil, but attended with all the embarrassment which,
though proceeding from shyness and the fear of doing wrong,
would easily give to those who felt themselves inferior the
belief of her being proud and reserved. Mrs. Gardiner and her
niece, however, did her justice, and pitied her.
By Mrs. Hurst and Miss Bingley they were noticed only by a
curtsey and, on their being seated, a pause, awkward as such
pauses must always be, succeeded for a few moments. It was
first broken by Mrs. Annesley, a genteel, agreeablelooking
woman, whose endeavour to introduce some kind of discourse
proved her to be more truly wellbred than either of the others
and between her and Mrs. Gardiner, with occasional help from
Elizabeth, the conversation was carried on. Miss Darcy looked
as if she wished for courage enough to join in it and sometimes
did venture a short sentence when there was least danger of its
being heard.
Elizabeth soon saw that she was herself closely watched by Miss
Bingley, and that she could not speak a word, especially to Miss
Darcy, without calling her attention. This observation would not
have prevented her from trying to talk to the latter, had they
not been seated at an inconvenient distance but she was not sorry
to be spared the necessity of saying much. Her own thoughts
were employing her. She expected every moment that some of the
gentlemen would enter the room. She wished, she feared that
the master of the house might be amongst them and whether
she wished or feared it most, she could scarcely determine.
After sitting in this manner a quarter of an hour without hearing
Miss Bingley's voice, Elizabeth was roused by receiving from
her a cold inquiry after the health of her family. She answered
with equal indifference and brevity, and the others said no more.
The next variation which their visit afforded was produced by
the entrance of servants with cold meat, cake, and a variety of
all the finest fruits in season but this did not take place till
after many a significant look and smile from Mrs. Annesley to
Miss Darcy had been given, to remind her of her post. There was
now employment for the whole partyfor though they could not all
talk, they could all eat and the beautiful pyramids of grapes,
nectarines, and peaches soon collected them round the table.
While thus engaged, Elizabeth had a fair opportunity of deciding
whether she most feared or wished for the appearance of Mr.
Darcy, by the feelings which prevailed on his entering the room
and then, though but a moment before she had believed her
wishes to predominate, she began to regret that he came.
He had been some time with Mr. Gardiner, who, with two or
three other gentlemen from the house, was engaged by the river,
and had left him only on learning that the ladies of the family
intended a visit to Georgiana that morning. No sooner did he
appear than Elizabeth wisely resolved to be perfectly easy and
unembarrassed a resolution the more necessary to be made, but
perhaps not the more easily kept, because she saw that the
suspicions of the whole party were awakened against them, and
that there was scarcely an eye which did not watch his
behaviour when he first came into the room. In no countenance
was attentive curiosity so strongly marked as in Miss Bingley's,
in spite of the smiles which overspread her face whenever she
spoke to one of its objects for jealousy had not yet made her
desperate, and her attentions to Mr. Darcy were by no means
over. Miss Darcy, on her brother's entrance, exerted herself
much more to talk, and Elizabeth saw that he was anxious for
his sister and herself to get acquainted, and forwarded as much
as possible, every attempt at conversation on either side. Miss
Bingley saw all this likewise and, in the imprudence of anger,
took the first opportunity of saying, with sneering civility
"Pray, Miss Eliza, are not the shire Militia removed from
Meryton? They must be a great loss to your family."
In Darcy's presence she dared not mention Wickham's name
but Elizabeth instantly comprehended that he was uppermost in
her thoughts and the various recollections connected with him
gave her a moment's distress but exerting herself vigorously to
repel the illnatured attack, she presently answered the question
in a tolerably detached tone. While she spoke, an involuntary
glance showed her Darcy, with a heightened complexion,
earnestly looking at her, and his sister overcome with confusion,
and unable to lift up her eyes. Had Miss Bingley known what
pain she was then giving her beloved friend, she undoubtedly
would have refrained from the hint but she had merely intended
to discompose Elizabeth by bringing forward the idea of a man
to whom she believed her partial, to make her betray a sensibility
which might injure her in Darcy's opinion, and, perhaps, to
remind the latter of all the follies and absurdities by which
some part of her family were connected with that corps. Not a
syllable had ever reached her of Miss Darcy's meditated
elopement. To no creature had it been revealed, where secrecy
was possible, except to Elizabeth and from all Bingley's
connections her brother was particularly anxious to conceal it,
from the very wish which Elizabeth had long ago attributed to
him, of their becoming hereafter her own. He had certainly
formed such a plan, and without meaning that it should effect
his endeavour to separate him from Miss Bennet, it is probable
that it might add something to his lively concern for the welfare
of his friend.
Elizabeth's collected behaviour, however, soon quieted his
emotion and as Miss Bingley, vexed and disappointed, dared
not approach nearer to Wickham, Georgiana also recovered in
time, though not enough to be able to speak any more. Her
brother, whose eye she feared to meet, scarcely recollected her
interest in the affair, and the very circumstance which had
been designed to turn his thoughts from Elizabeth seemed to
have fixed them on her more and more cheerfully.
Their visit did not continue long after the question and answer
above mentioned and while Mr. Darcy was attending them to
their carriage Miss Bingley was venting her feelings in criticisms
on Elizabeth's person, behaviour, and dress. But Georgiana
would not join her. Her brother's recommendation was enough
to ensure her favour his judgement could not err. And he had
spoken in such terms of Elizabeth as to leave Georgiana without
the power of finding her otherwise than lovely and amiable.
When Darcy returned to the saloon, Miss Bingley could not help
repeating to him some part of what she had been saying to his
sister.
"How very ill Miss Eliza Bennet looks this morning, Mr. Darcy,"
she cried "I never in my life saw anyone so much altered as she
is since the winter. She is grown so brown and coarse Louisa
and I were agreeing that we should not have known her again."
However little Mr. Darcy might have liked such an address, he
contented himself with coolly replying that he perceived no
other alteration than her being rather tanned, no miraculous
consequence of travelling in the summer.
"For my own part," she rejoined, "I must confess that I never
could see any beauty in her. Her face is too thin her
complexion has no brilliancy and her features are not at all
handsome. Her nose wants characterthere is nothing marked
in its lines. Her teeth are tolerable, but not out of the common
way and as for her eyes, which have sometimes been called so
fine, I could never see anything extraordinary in them. They
have a sharp, shrewish look, which I do not like at all and in her
air altogether there is a selfsufficiency without fashion, which
is intolerable."
Persuaded as Miss Bingley was that Darcy admired Elizabeth,
this was not the best method of recommending herself but
angry people are not always wise and in seeing him at last look
somewhat nettled, she had all the success she expected. He was
resolutely silent, however, and, from a determination of making
him speak, she continued
"I remember, when we first knew her in Hertfordshire, how
amazed we all were to find that she was a reputed beauty and I
particularly recollect your saying one night, after they had been
dining at Netherfield, 'She a beautyI should as soon call her
mother a wit.' But afterwards she seemed to improve on you,
and I believe you thought her rather pretty at one time."
"Yes," replied Darcy, who could contain himself no longer,
"but that was only when I first saw her, for it is many months
since I have considered her as one of the handsomest women of
my acquaintance."
He then went away, and Miss Bingley was left to all the
satisfaction of having forced him to say what gave no one any
pain but herself.
Mrs. Gardiner and Elizabeth talked of all that had occurred during
their visit, as they returned, except what had particularly
interested them both. The look and behaviour of everybody they
had seen were discussed, except of the person who had mostly
engaged their attention. They talked of his sister, his friends,
his house, his fruitof everything but himself yet Elizabeth
was longing to know what Mrs. Gardiner thought of him, and Mrs.
Gardiner would have been highly gratified by her niece's beginning
the subject.
Chapter 
Elizabeth had been a good deal disappointed in not finding a
letter from Jane on their first arrival at Lambton and this
disappointment had been renewed on each of the mornings that
had now been spent there but on the third her repining was
over, and her sister justified, by the receipt of two letters
from her at once, on one of which was marked that it had been
missent elsewhere. Elizabeth was not surprised at it, as Jane
had written the direction remarkably ill.
They had just been preparing to walk as the letters came in
and her uncle and aunt, leaving her to enjoy them in quiet, set
off by themselves. The one missent must first be attended to
it had been written five days ago. The beginning contained an
account of all their little parties and engagements, with such
news as the country afforded but the latter half, which was
dated a day later, and written in evident agitation, gave more
important intelligence. It was to this effect
"Since writing the above, dearest Lizzy, something has occurred
of a most unexpected and serious nature but I am afraid of
alarming yoube assured that we are all well. What I have to
say relates to poor Lydia. An express came at twelve last night,
just as we were all gone to bed, from Colonel Forster, to
inform us that she was gone off to Scotland with one of his
officers to own the truth, with Wickham Imagine our surprise.
To Kitty, however, it does not seem so wholly unexpected. I
am very, very sorry. So imprudent a match on both sides But
I am willing to hope the best, and that his character has been
misunderstood. Thoughtless and indiscreet I can easily believe
him, but this step and let us rejoice over it marks nothing bad
at heart. His choice is disinterested at least, for he must know
my father can give her nothing. Our poor mother is sadly
grieved. My father bears it better. How thankful am I that we
never let them know what has been said against him we must
forget it ourselves. They were off Saturday night about twelve,
as is conjectured, but were not missed till yesterday morning at
eight. The express was sent off directly. My dear Lizzy, they
must have passed within ten miles of us. Colonel Forster gives
us reason to expect him here soon. Lydia left a few lines for
his wife, informing her of their intention. I must conclude, for
I cannot be long from my poor mother. I am afraid you will not
be able to make it out, but I hardly know what I have written."
Without allowing herself time for consideration, and scarcely
knowing what she felt, Elizabeth on finishing this letter instantly
seized the other, and opening it with the utmost impatience, read
as follows it had been written a day later than the conclusion of
the first.
"By this time, my dearest sister, you have received my hurried
letter I wish this may be more intelligible, but though not
confined for time, my head is so bewildered that I cannot answer
for being coherent. Dearest Lizzy, I hardly know what I would
write, but I have bad news for you, and it cannot be delayed.
Imprudent as the marriage between Mr. Wickham and our poor
Lydia would be, we are now anxious to be assured it has taken
place, for there is but too much reason to fear they are not gone
to Scotland. Colonel Forster came yesterday, having left
Brighton the day before, not many hours after the express.
Though Lydia's short letter to Mrs. F. gave them to understand
that they were going to Gretna Green, something was dropped
by Denny expressing his belief that W. never intended to go
there, or to marry Lydia at all, which was repeated to Colonel
F., who, instantly taking the alarm, set off from B. intending to
trace their route. He did trace them easily to Clapham, but no
further for on entering that place, they removed into a hackney
coach, and dismissed the chaise that brought them from Epsom.
All that is known after this is, that they were seen to continue
the London road. I know not what to think. After making every
possible inquiry on that side London, Colonel F. came on into
Hertfordshire, anxiously renewing them at all the turnpikes, and
at the inns in Barnet and Hatfield, but without any successno
such people had been seen to pass through. With the kindest
concern he came on to Longbourn, and broke his apprehensions
to us in a manner most creditable to his heart. I am sincerely
grieved for him and Mrs. F., but no one can throw any blame
on them. Our distress, my dear Lizzy, is very great. My father
and mother believe the worst, but I cannot think so ill of him.
Many circumstances might make it more eligible for them to be
married privately in town than to pursue their first plan
and even if he could form such a design against a young woman
of Lydia's connections, which is not likely, can I suppose her
so lost to everything? Impossible I grieve to find, however,
that Colonel F. is not disposed to depend upon their marriage
he shook his head when I expressed my hopes, and said he feared
W. was not a man to be trusted. My poor mother is really ill,
and keeps her room. Could she exert herself, it would be better
but this is not to be expected. And as to my father, I never in
my life saw him so affected. Poor Kitty has anger for having
concealed their attachment but as it was a matter of confidence,
one cannot wonder. I am truly glad, dearest Lizzy, that you
have been spared something of these distressing scenes but
now, as the first shock is over, shall I own that I long for
your return? I am not so selfish, however, as to press for it,
if inconvenient. Adieu I take up my pen again to do what I
have just told you I would not but circumstances are such that
I cannot help earnestly begging you all to come here as soon as
possible. I know my dear uncle and aunt so well, that I am not
afraid of requesting it, though I have still something more to
ask of the former. My father is going to London with Colonel
Forster instantly, to try to discover her. What he means to do
I am sure I know not but his excessive distress will not allow
him to pursue any measure in the best and safest way, and
Colonel Forster is obliged to be at Brighton again tomorrow
evening. In such an exigence, my uncle's advice and assistance
would be everything in the world he will immediately comprehend
what I must feel, and I rely upon his goodness."
"Oh where, where is my uncle?" cried Elizabeth, darting from
her seat as she finished the letter, in eagerness to follow him,
without losing a moment of the time so precious but as she
reached the door it was opened by a servant, and Mr. Darcy
appeared. Her pale face and impetuous manner made him start,
and before he could recover himself to speak, she, in whose
mind every idea was superseded by Lydia's situation, hastily
exclaimed, "I beg your pardon, but I must leave you. I must
find Mr. Gardiner this moment, on business that cannot be
delayed I have not an instant to lose."
"Good God what is the matter?" cried he, with more feeling
than politeness then recollecting himself, "I will not detain you
a minute but let me, or let the servant go after Mr. and Mrs.
Gardiner. You are not well enough you cannot go yourself."
Elizabeth hesitated, but her knees trembled under her and she
felt how little would be gained by her attempting to pursue them.
Calling back the servant, therefore, she commissioned him,
though in so breathless an accent as made her almost unintelligible,
to fetch his master and mistress home instantly.
On his quitting the room she sat down, unable to support
herself, and looking so miserably ill, that it was impossible
for Darcy to leave her, or to refrain from saying, in a tone
of gentleness and commiseration, "Let me call your maid. Is
there nothing you could take to give you present relief? A
glass of wine shall I get you one? You are very ill."
"No, I thank you," she replied, endeavouring to recover herself.
"There is nothing the matter with me. I am quite well I am
only distressed by some dreadful news which I have just
received from Longbourn."
She burst into tears as she alluded to it, and for a few minutes
could not speak another word. Darcy, in wretched suspense,
could only say something indistinctly of his concern, and
observe her in compassionate silence. At length she spoke
again. "I have just had a letter from Jane, with such dreadful
news. It cannot be concealed from anyone. My younger sister
has left all her friendshas eloped has thrown herself into
the power ofof Mr. Wickham. They are gone off together from
Brighton. You know him too well to doubt the rest. She has
no money, no connections, nothing that can tempt him toshe
is lost for ever."
Darcy was fixed in astonishment. "When I consider," she added
in a yet more agitated voice, "that I might have prevented it
I, who knew what he was. Had I but explained some part of
it onlysome part of what I learnt, to my own family Had his
character been known, this could not have happened. But it is
allall too late now."
"I am grieved indeed," cried Darcy "grievedshocked. But is
it certainabsolutely certain?"
"Oh, yes They left Brighton together on Sunday night, and
were traced almost to London, but not beyond they are
certainly not gone to Scotland."
"And what has been done, what has been attempted, to recover
her?"
"My father is gone to London, and Jane has written to beg my
uncle's immediate assistance and we shall be off, I hope, in
halfanhour. But nothing can be doneI know very well that
nothing can be done. How is such a man to be worked on? How
are they even to be discovered? I have not the smallest hope.
It is every way horrible"
Darcy shook his head in silent acquiescence.
"When my eyes were opened to his real characterOh had I
known what I ought, what I dared to do But I knew notI
was afraid of doing too much. Wretched, wretched mistake"
Darcy made no answer. He seemed scarcely to hear her, and
was walking up and down the room in earnest meditation, his
brow contracted, his air gloomy. Elizabeth soon observed, and
instantly understood it. Her power was sinking everything
must sink under such a proof of family weakness, such an
assurance of the deepest disgrace. She could neither wonder
nor condemn, but the belief of his selfconquest brought nothing
consolatory to her bosom, afforded no palliation of her
distress. It was, on the contrary, exactly calculated to make
her understand her own wishes and never had she so honestly felt
that she could have loved him, as now, when all love must be vain.
But self, though it would intrude, could not engross her.
Lydiathe humiliation, the misery she was bringing on them all,
soon swallowed up every private care and covering her face with
her handkerchief, Elizabeth was soon lost to everything else
and, after a pause of several minutes, was only recalled to a
sense of her situation by the voice of her companion, who, in a
manner which, though it spoke compassion, spoke likewise restraint,
said, "I am afraid you have been long desiring my absence, nor
have I anything to plead in excuse of my stay, but real, though
unavailing concern. Would to Heaven that anything could be
either said or done on my part that might offer consolation to
such distress But I will not torment you with vain wishes, which
may seem purposely to ask for your thanks. This unfortunate
affair will, I fear, prevent my sister's having the pleasure of
seeing you at Pemberley today."
"Oh, yes. Be so kind as to apologise for us to Miss Darcy. Say
that urgent business calls us home immediately. Conceal the
unhappy truth as long as it is possible, I know it cannot be long."
He readily assured her of his secrecy again expressed his sorrow
for her distress, wished it a happier conclusion than there was
at present reason to hope, and leaving his compliments for her
relations, with only one serious, parting look, went away.
As he quitted the room, Elizabeth felt how improbable it was
that they should ever see each other again on such terms of
cordiality as had marked their several meetings in Derbyshire
and as she threw a retrospective glance over the whole of their
acquaintance, so full of contradictions and varieties, sighed
at the perverseness of those feelings which would now have
promoted its continuance, and would formerly have rejoiced in
its termination.
If gratitude and esteem are good foundations of affection,
Elizabeth's change of sentiment will be neither improbable nor
faulty. But if otherwiseif regard springing from such sources
is unreasonable or unnatural, in comparison of what is so often
described as arising on a first interview with its object, and even
before two words have been exchanged, nothing can be said in
her defence, except that she had given somewhat of a trial to the
latter method in her partiality for Wickham, and that its ill
success might, perhaps, authorise her to seek the other less
interesting mode of attachment. Be that as it may, she saw him
go with regret and in this early example of what Lydia's infamy
must produce, found additional anguish as she reflected on that
wretched business. Never, since reading Jane's second letter,
had she entertained a hope of Wickham's meaning to marry her.
No one but Jane, she thought, could flatter herself with such an
expectation. Surprise was the least of her feelings on this
development. While the contents of the first letter remained in
her mind, she was all surpriseall astonishment that Wickham
should marry a girl whom it was impossible he could marry
for money and how Lydia could ever have attached him had
appeared incomprehensible. But now it was all too natural. For
such an attachment as this she might have sufficient charms and
though she did not suppose Lydia to be deliberately engaging in
an elopement without the intention of marriage, she had no
difficulty in believing that neither her virtue nor her
understanding would preserve her from falling an easy prey.
She had never perceived, while the regiment was in Hertfordshire,
that Lydia had any partiality for him but she was convinced that
Lydia wanted only encouragement to attach herself to anybody.
Sometimes one officer, sometimes another, had been her favourite,
as their attentions raised them in her opinion. Her affections
had continually been fluctuating but never without an object.
The mischief of neglect and mistaken indulgence towards such a
girloh how acutely did she now feel it
She was wild to be at hometo hear, to see, to be upon the
spot to share with Jane in the cares that must now fall wholly
upon her, in a family so deranged, a father absent, a mother
incapable of exertion, and requiring constant attendance and
though almost persuaded that nothing could be done for Lydia,
her uncle's interference seemed of the utmost importance, and
till he entered the room her impatience was severe. Mr. and
Mrs. Gardiner had hurried back in alarm, supposing by the
servant's account that their niece was taken suddenly ill but
satisfying them instantly on that head, she eagerly communicated
the cause of their summons, reading the two letters aloud, and
dwelling on the postscript of the last with trembling energy,
though Lydia had never been a favourite with them, Mr. and
Mrs. Gardiner could not but be deeply afflicted. Not Lydia
only, but all were concerned in it and after the first
exclamations of surprise and horror, Mr. Gardiner promised
every assistance in his power. Elizabeth, though expecting no
less, thanked him with tears of gratitude and all three being
actuated by one spirit, everything relating to their journey was
speedily settled. They were to be off as soon as possible. "But
what is to be done about Pemberley?" cried Mrs. Gardiner.
"John told us Mr. Darcy was here when you sent for us was it
so?"
"Yes and I told him we should not be able to keep our
engagement. That is all settled."
"What is all settled?" repeated the other, as she ran into her
room to prepare. "And are they upon such terms as for her to
disclose the real truth? Oh, that I knew how it was"
But wishes were vain, or at least could only serve to amuse her
in the hurry and confusion of the following hour. Had Elizabeth
been at leisure to be idle, she would have remained certain that
all employment was impossible to one so wretched as herself
but she had her share of business as well as her aunt, and
amongst the rest there were notes to be written to all their
friends at Lambton, with false excuses for their sudden
departure. An hour, however, saw the whole completed and
Mr. Gardiner meanwhile having settled his account at the inn,
nothing remained to be done but to go and Elizabeth, after all
the misery of the morning, found herself, in a shorter space of
time than she could have supposed, seated in the carriage, and
on the road to Longbourn.
Chapter 
"I have been thinking it over again, Elizabeth," said her uncle,
as they drove from the town "and really, upon serious
consideration, I am much more inclined than I was to judge as
your eldest sister does on the matter. It appears to me so very
unlikely that any young man should form such a design against
a girl who is by no means unprotected or friendless, and who
was actually staying in his colonel's family, that I am strongly
inclined to hope the best. Could he expect that her friends
would not step forward? Could he expect to be noticed again
by the regiment, after such an affront to Colonel Forster? His
temptation is not adequate to the risk"
"Do you really think so?" cried Elizabeth, brightening up for a
moment.
"Upon my word," said Mrs. Gardiner, "I begin to be of your
uncle's opinion. It is really too great a violation of decency,
honour, and interest, for him to be guilty of. I cannot think
so very ill of Wickham. Can you yourself, Lizzy, so wholly give
him up, as to believe him capable of it?"
"Not, perhaps, of neglecting his own interest but of every other
neglect I can believe him capable. If, indeed, it should be so
But I dare not hope it. Why should they not go on to Scotland
if that had been the case?"
"In the first place," replied Mr. Gardiner, "there is no absolute
proof that they are not gone to Scotland."
"Oh but their removing from the chaise into a hackney coach is
such a presumption And, besides, no traces of them were to be
found on the Barnet road."
"Well, thensupposing them to be in London. They may be there,
though for the purpose of concealment, for no more exceptional
purpose. It is not likely that money should be very abundant on
either side and it might strike them that they could be more
economically, though less expeditiously, married in London
than in Scotland."
"But why all this secrecy? Why any fear of detection? Why must
their marriage be private? Oh, no, nothis is not likely.
His most particular friend, you see by Jane's account, was
persuaded of his never intending to marry her. Wickham will
never marry a woman without some money. He cannot afford
it. And what claims has Lydiawhat attraction has she beyond
youth, health, and good humour that could make him, for her
sake, forego every chance of benefiting himself by marrying
well? As to what restraint the apprehensions of disgrace in the
corps might throw on a dishonourable elopement with her, I am
not able to judge for I know nothing of the effects that such a
step might produce. But as to your other objection, I am afraid
it will hardly hold good. Lydia has no brothers to step forward
and he might imagine, from my father's behaviour, from his
indolence and the little attention he has ever seemed to give
to what was going forward in his family, that he would do as
little, and think as little about it, as any father could do,
in such a matter."
"But can you think that Lydia is so lost to everything but love
of him as to consent to live with him on any terms other than
marriage?"
"It does seem, and it is most shocking indeed," replied Elizabeth,
with tears in her eyes, "that a sister's sense of decency and
virtue in such a point should admit of doubt. But, really,
I know not what to say. Perhaps I am not doing her justice.
But she is very young she has never been taught to think
on serious subjects and for the last halfyear, nay, for a
twelvemonthshe has been given up to nothing but amusement
and vanity. She has been allowed to dispose of her time in the
most idle and frivolous manner, and to adopt any opinions that
came in her way. Since the shire were first quartered in
Meryton, nothing but love, flirtation, and officers have been
in her head. She has been doing everything in her power by
thinking and talking on the subject, to give greaterwhat shall
I call it? susceptibility to her feelings which are naturally
lively enough. And we all know that Wickham has every charm of
person and address that can captivate a woman."
"But you see that Jane," said her aunt, "does not think so very
ill of Wickham as to believe him capable of the attempt."
"Of whom does Jane ever think ill? And who is there, whatever
might be their former conduct, that she would think capable of
such an attempt, till it were proved against them? But Jane
knows, as well as I do, what Wickham really is. We both know
that he has been profligate in every sense of the word that he
has neither integrity nor honour that he is as false and
deceitful as he is insinuating."
"And do you really know all this?" cried Mrs. Gardiner, whose
curiosity as to the mode of her intelligence was all alive.
"I do indeed," replied Elizabeth, colouring. "I told you, the
other day, of his infamous behaviour to Mr. Darcy and you
yourself, when last at Longbourn, heard in what manner he
spoke of the man who had behaved with such forbearance and
liberality towards him. And there are other circumstances which
I am not at libertywhich it is not worth while to relate but
his lies about the whole Pemberley family are endless. From what
he said of Miss Darcy I was thoroughly prepared to see a proud,
reserved, disagreeable girl. Yet he knew to the contrary himself.
He must know that she was as amiable and unpretending as we
have found her."
"But does Lydia know nothing of this? can she be ignorant of
what you and Jane seem so well to understand?"
"Oh, yesthat, that is the worst of all. Till I was in Kent,
and saw so much both of Mr. Darcy and his relation Colonel
Fitzwilliam, I was ignorant of the truth myself. And when I
returned home, the shire was to leave Meryton in a week or
fortnight's time. As that was the case, neither Jane, to whom
I related the whole, nor I, thought it necessary to make our
knowledge public for of what use could it apparently be to any
one, that the good opinion which all the neighbourhood had of
him should then be overthrown? And even when it was settled
that Lydia should go with Mrs. Forster, the necessity of opening
her eyes to his character never occurred to me. That she could
be in any danger from the deception never entered my head.
That such a consequence as this could ensue, you may easily
believe, was far enough from my thoughts."
"When they all removed to Brighton, therefore, you had no
reason, I suppose, to believe them fond of each other?"
"Not the slightest. I can remember no symptom of affection on
either side and had anything of the kind been perceptible, you
must be aware that ours is not a family on which it could be
thrown away. When first he entered the corps, she was ready
enough to admire him but so we all were. Every girl in or
near Meryton was out of her senses about him for the first
two months but he never distinguished her by any particular
attention and, consequently, after a moderate period of
extravagant and wild admiration, her fancy for him gave
way, and others of the regiment, who treated her with more
distinction, again became her favourites."
It may be easily believed, that however little of novelty could be
added to their fears, hopes, and conjectures, on this interesting
subject, by its repeated discussion, no other could detain them
from it long, during the whole of the journey. From Elizabeth's
thoughts it was never absent. Fixed there by the keenest of all
anguish, selfreproach, she could find no interval of ease or
forgetfulness.
They travelled as expeditiously as possible, and, sleeping one
night on the road, reached Longbourn by dinner time the next
day. It was a comfort to Elizabeth to consider that Jane could
not have been wearied by long expectations.
The little Gardiners, attracted by the sight of a chaise, were
standing on the steps of the house as they entered the paddock
and, when the carriage drove up to the door, the joyful surprise
that lighted up their faces, and displayed itself over their whole
bodies, in a variety of capers and frisks, was the first pleasing
earnest of their welcome.
Elizabeth jumped out and, after giving each of them a hasty
kiss, hurried into the vestibule, where Jane, who came running
down from her mother's apartment, immediately met her.
Elizabeth, as she affectionately embraced her, whilst tears filled
the eyes of both, lost not a moment in asking whether anything
had been heard of the fugitives.
"Not yet," replied Jane. "But now that my dear uncle is come,
I hope everything will be well."
"Is my father in town?"
"Yes, he went on Tuesday, as I wrote you word."
"And have you heard from him often?"
"We have heard only twice. He wrote me a few lines on
Wednesday to say that he had arrived in safety, and to give me
his directions, which I particularly begged him to do. He merely
added that he should not write again till he had something of
importance to mention."
"And my motherhow is she? How are you all?"
"My mother is tolerably well, I trust though her spirits are
greatly shaken. She is upstairs and will have great satisfaction
in seeing you all. She does not yet leave her dressingroom.
Mary and Kitty, thank Heaven, are quite well."
"But youhow are you?" cried Elizabeth. "You look pale.
How much you must have gone through"
Her sister, however, assured her of her being perfectly well
and their conversation, which had been passing while Mr. and
Mrs. Gardiner were engaged with their children, was now put an
end to by the approach of the whole party. Jane ran to her uncle
and aunt, and welcomed and thanked them both, with alternate
smiles and tears.
When they were all in the drawingroom, the questions which
Elizabeth had already asked were of course repeated by the
others, and they soon found that Jane had no intelligence
to give. The sanguine hope of good, however, which the
benevolence of her heart suggested had not yet deserted her
she still expected that it would all end well, and that every
morning would bring some letter, either from Lydia or her
father, to explain their proceedings, and, perhaps, announce
their marriage.
Mrs. Bennet, to whose apartment they all repaired, after a few
minutes' conversation together, received them exactly as might
be expected with tears and lamentations of regret, invectives
against the villainous conduct of Wickham, and complaints of
her own sufferings and illusage blaming everybody but the
person to whose illjudging indulgence the errors of her
daughter must principally be owing.
"If I had been able," said she, "to carry my point in going to
Brighton, with all my family, this would not have happened
but poor dear Lydia had nobody to take care of her. Why did
the Forsters ever let her go out of their sight? I am sure there
was some great neglect or other on their side, for she is not the
kind of girl to do such a thing if she had been well looked after.
I always thought they were very unfit to have the charge of her
but I was overruled, as I always am. Poor dear child And
now here's Mr. Bennet gone away, and I know he will fight
Wickham, wherever he meets him and then he will be killed, and
what is to become of us all? The Collinses will turn us out
before he is cold in his grave, and if you are not kind to us,
brother, I do not know what we shall do."
They all exclaimed against such terrific ideas and Mr. Gardiner,
after general assurances of his affection for her and all her
family, told her that he meant to be in London the very next day,
and would assist Mr. Bennet in every endeavour for recovering
Lydia.
"Do not give way to useless alarm," added he "though it is
right to be prepared for the worst, there is no occasion to look
on it as certain. It is not quite a week since they left Brighton.
In a few days more we may gain some news of them and till we
know that they are not married, and have no design of marrying,
do not let us give the matter over as lost. As soon as I get to
town I shall go to my brother, and make him come home with
me to Gracechurch Street and then we may consult together as
to what is to be done."
"Oh my dear brother," replied Mrs. Bennet, "that is exactly
what I could most wish for. And now do, when you get to
town, find them out, wherever they may be and if they are
not married already, make them marry. And as for wedding
clothes, do not let them wait for that, but tell Lydia she
shall have as much money as she chooses to buy them, after they
are married. And, above all, keep Mr. Bennet from fighting.
Tell him what a dreadful state I am in, that I am frighted out
of my witsand have such tremblings, such flutterings, all
over mesuch spasms in my side and pains in my head, and
such beatings at heart, that I can get no rest by night nor by
day. And tell my dear Lydia not to give any directions about
her clothes till she has seen me, for she does not know which
are the best warehouses. Oh, brother, how kind you are I
know you will contrive it all."
But Mr. Gardiner, though he assured her again of his earnest
endeavours in the cause, could not avoid recommending moderation
to her, as well in her hopes as her fear and after talking with
her in this manner till dinner was on the table, they all left
her to vent all her feelings on the housekeeper, who attended
in the absence of her daughters.
Though her brother and sister were persuaded that there was no
real occasion for such a seclusion from the family, they did not
attempt to oppose it, for they knew that she had not prudence
enough to hold her tongue before the servants, while they
waited at table, and judged it better that one only of the
household, and the one whom they could most trust should
comprehend all her fears and solicitude on the subject.
In the diningroom they were soon joined by Mary and Kitty,
who had been too busily engaged in their separate apartments
to make their appearance before. One came from her books,
and the other from her toilette. The faces of both, however,
were tolerably calm and no change was visible in either, except
that the loss of her favourite sister, or the anger which she had
herself incurred in this business, had given more of fretfulness
than usual to the accents of Kitty. As for Mary, she was
mistress enough of herself to whisper to Elizabeth, with a
countenance of grave reflection, soon after they were seated
at table
"This is a most unfortunate affair, and will probably be much
talked of. But we must stem the tide of malice, and pour into
the wounded bosoms of each other the balm of sisterly consolation."
Then, perceiving in Elizabeth no inclination of replying, she
added, "Unhappy as the event must be for Lydia, we may draw
from it this useful lesson that loss of virtue in a female is
irretrievable that one false step involves her in endless ruin
that her reputation is no less brittle than it is beautiful and
that she cannot be too much guarded in her behaviour towards the
undeserving of the other sex."
Elizabeth lifted up her eyes in amazement, but was too much
oppressed to make any reply. Mary, however, continued to
console herself with such kind of moral extractions from the
evil before them.
In the afternoon, the two elder Miss Bennets were able to be
for halfanhour by themselves and Elizabeth instantly availed
herself of the opportunity of making any inquiries, which Jane
was equally eager to satisfy. After joining in general
lamentations over the dreadful sequel of this event, which
Elizabeth considered as all but certain, and Miss Bennet could
not assert to be wholly impossible, the former continued the
subject, by saying, "But tell me all and everything about it
which I have not already heard. Give me further particulars.
What did Colonel Forster say? Had they no apprehension of
anything before the elopement took place? They must have seen
them together for ever."
"Colonel Forster did own that he had often suspected some
partiality, especially on Lydia's side, but nothing to give him any
alarm. I am so grieved for him His behaviour was attentive and
kind to the utmost. He was coming to us, in order to assure us
of his concern, before he had any idea of their not being gone to
Scotland when that apprehension first got abroad, it hastened
his journey."
"And was Denny convinced that Wickham would not marry? Did
he know of their intending to go off? Had Colonel Forster
seen Denny himself?"
"Yes but, when questioned by him, Denny denied knowing
anything of their plans, and would not give his real opinion
about it. He did not repeat his persuasion of their not
marryingand from that, I am inclined to hope, he might
have been misunderstood before."
"And till Colonel Forster came himself, not one of you
entertained a doubt, I suppose, of their being really married?"
"How was it possible that such an idea should enter our brains?
I felt a little uneasya little fearful of my sister's happiness
with him in marriage, because I knew that his conduct had not been
always quite right. My father and mother knew nothing of that
they only felt how imprudent a match it must be. Kitty then
owned, with a very natural triumph on knowing more than the
rest of us, that in Lydia's last letter she had prepared her for
such a step. She had known, it seems, of their being in love with
each other, many weeks."
"But not before they went to Brighton?"
"No, I believe not."
"And did Colonel Forster appear to think well of Wickham
himself? Does he know his real character?"
"I must confess that he did not speak so well of Wickham as he
formerly did. He believed him to be imprudent and extravagant.
And since this sad affair has taken place, it is said that he
left Meryton greatly in debt but I hope this may be false."
"Oh, Jane, had we been less secret, had we told what we knew
of him, this could not have happened"
"Perhaps it would have been better," replied her sister. "But to
expose the former faults of any person without knowing what
their present feelings were, seemed unjustifiable. We acted with
the best intentions."
"Could Colonel Forster repeat the particulars of Lydia's note to
his wife?"
"He brought it with him for us to see."
Jane then took it from her pocketbook, and gave it to Elizabeth.
These were the contents
"MY DEAR HARRIET,
"You will laugh when you know where I am gone, and I cannot
help laughing myself at your surprise tomorrow morning, as
soon as I am missed. I am going to Gretna Green, and if you
cannot guess with who, I shall think you a simpleton, for there
is but one man in the world I love, and he is an angel. I should
never be happy without him, so think it no harm to be off. You
need not send them word at Longbourn of my going, if you do
not like it, for it will make the surprise the greater, when I
write to them and sign my name 'Lydia Wickham.' What a good
joke it will be I can hardly write for laughing. Pray make
my excuses to Pratt for not keeping my engagement, and dancing
with him tonight. Tell him I hope he will excuse me when he
knows all and tell him I will dance with him at the next ball
we meet, with great pleasure. I shall send for my clothes when
I get to Longbourn but I wish you would tell Sally to mend a
great slit in my worked muslin gown before they are packed up.
Goodbye. Give my love to Colonel Forster. I hope you will
drink to our good journey.
"Your affectionate friend,
"LYDIA BENNET."
"Oh thoughtless, thoughtless Lydia" cried Elizabeth when she
had finished it. "What a letter is this, to be written at such
a moment But at least it shows that she was serious on the
subject of their journey. Whatever he might afterwards
persuade her to, it was not on her side a scheme of infamy.
My poor father how he must have felt it"
"I never saw anyone so shocked. He could not speak a word
for full ten minutes. My mother was taken ill immediately,
and the whole house in such confusion"
"Oh Jane," cried Elizabeth, "was there a servant belonging to it
who did not know the whole story before the end of the day?"
"I do not know. I hope there was. But to be guarded at such a
time is very difficult. My mother was in hysterics, and though
I endeavoured to give her every assistance in my power, I am
afraid I did not do so much as I might have done But the
horror of what might possibly happen almost took from me
my faculties."
"Your attendance upon her has been too much for you. You do
not look well. Oh that I had been with you you have had
every care and anxiety upon yourself alone."
"Mary and Kitty have been very kind, and would have shared in
every fatigue, I am sure but I did not think it right for either
of them. Kitty is slight and delicate and Mary studies so much,
that her hours of repose should not be broken in on. My aunt
Phillips came to Longbourn on Tuesday, after my father went
away and was so good as to stay till Thursday with me. She
was of great use and comfort to us all. And Lady Lucas has
been very kind she walked here on Wednesday morning to
condole with us, and offered her services, or any of her
daughters', if they should be of use to us."
"She had better have stayed at home," cried Elizabeth "perhaps
she meant well, but, under such a misfortune as this, one
cannot see too little of one's neighbours. Assistance is
impossible condolence insufferable. Let them triumph over us
at a distance, and be satisfied."
She then proceeded to inquire into the measures which her
father had intended to pursue, while in town, for the recovery
of his daughter.
"He meant I believe," replied Jane, "to go to Epsom, the place
where they last changed horses, see the postilions and try if
anything could be made out from them. His principal object
must be to discover the number of the hackney coach which
took them from Clapham. It had come with a fare from London
and as he thought that the circumstance of a gentleman and lady's
removing from one carriage into another might be remarked he
meant to make inquiries at Clapham. If he could anyhow discover
at what house the coachman had before set down his fare, he
determined to make inquiries there, and hoped it might not be
impossible to find out the stand and number of the coach. I do
not know of any other designs that he had formed but he was in
such a hurry to be gone, and his spirits so greatly discomposed,
that I had difficulty in finding out even so much as this."
Chapter 
The whole party were in hopes of a letter from Mr. Bennet the
next morning, but the post came in without bringing a single line
from him. His family knew him to be, on all common occasions,
a most negligent and dilatory correspondent but at such a time
they had hoped for exertion. They were forced to conclude that
he had no pleasing intelligence to send but even of that they
would have been glad to be certain. Mr. Gardiner had waited
only for the letters before he set off.
When he was gone, they were certain at least of receiving
constant information of what was going on, and their uncle
promised, at parting, to prevail on Mr. Bennet to return to
Longbourn, as soon as he could, to the great consolation of his
sister, who considered it as the only security for her husband's
not being killed in a duel.
Mrs. Gardiner and the children were to remain in Hertfordshire
a few days longer, as the former thought her presence might be
serviceable to her nieces. She shared in their attendance on
Mrs. Bennet, and was a great comfort to them in their hours of
freedom. Their other aunt also visited them frequently, and
always, as she said, with the design of cheering and heartening
them upthough, as she never came without reporting some
fresh instance of Wickham's extravagance or irregularity, she
seldom went away without leaving them more dispirited than
she found them.
All Meryton seemed striving to blacken the man who, but three
months before, had been almost an angel of light. He was
declared to be in debt to every tradesman in the place, and his
intrigues, all honoured with the title of seduction, had been
extended into every tradesman's family. Everybody declared
that he was the wickedest young man in the world and everybody
began to find out that they had always distrusted the appearance
of his goodness. Elizabeth, though she did not credit above
half of what was said, believed enough to make her former
assurance of her sister's ruin more certain and even Jane,
who believed still less of it, became almost hopeless, more
especially as the time was now come when, if they had gone to
Scotland, which she had never before entirely despaired of,
they must in all probability have gained some news of them.
Mr. Gardiner left Longbourn on Sunday on Tuesday his wife
received a letter from him it told them that, on his arrival,
he had immediately found out his brother, and persuaded him to
come to Gracechurch Street that Mr. Bennet had been to
Epsom and Clapham, before his arrival, but without gaining
any satisfactory information and that he was now determined
to inquire at all the principal hotels in town, as Mr. Bennet
thought it possible they might have gone to one of them, on
their first coming to London, before they procured lodgings.
Mr. Gardiner himself did not expect any success from this
measure, but as his brother was eager in it, he meant to assist
him in pursuing it. He added that Mr. Bennet seemed wholly
disinclined at present to leave London and promised to write
again very soon. There was also a postscript to this effect
"I have written to Colonel Forster to desire him to find out,
if possible, from some of the young man's intimates in the
regiment, whether Wickham has any relations or connections
who would be likely to know in what part of town he has now
concealed himself. If there were anyone that one could apply
to with a probability of gaining such a clue as that, it might be
of essential consequence. At present we have nothing to guide
us. Colonel Forster will, I dare say, do everything in his power
to satisfy us on this head. But, on second thoughts, perhaps,
Lizzy could tell us what relations he has now living, better than
any other person."
Elizabeth was at no loss to understand from whence this
deference to her authority proceeded but it was not in her
power to give any information of so satisfactory a nature as the
compliment deserved. She had never heard of his having had
any relations, except a father and mother, both of whom had
been dead many years. It was possible, however, that some of
his companions in the shire might be able to give more
information and though she was not very sanguine in expecting
it, the application was a something to look forward to.
Every day at Longbourn was now a day of anxiety but the most
anxious part of each was when the post was expected. The
arrival of letters was the grand object of every morning's
impatience. Through letters, whatever of good or bad was to
be told would be communicated, and every succeeding day was
expected to bring some news of importance.
But before they heard again from Mr. Gardiner, a letter arrived
for their father, from a different quarter, from Mr. Collins
which, as Jane had received directions to open all that came for
him in his absence, she accordingly read and Elizabeth, who
knew what curiosities his letters always were, looked over her,
and read it likewise. It was as follows
"MY DEAR SIR,
"I feel myself called upon, by our relationship, and my situation
in life, to condole with you on the grievous affliction you are now
suffering under, of which we were yesterday informed by a letter
from Hertfordshire. Be assured, my dear sir, that Mrs. Collins
and myself sincerely sympathise with you and all your respectable
family, in your present distress, which must be of the bitterest
kind, because proceeding from a cause which no time can remove.
No arguments shall be wanting on my part that can alleviate so
severe a misfortuneor that may comfort you, under a circumstance
that must be of all others the most afflicting to a parent's mind.
The death of your daughter would have been a blessing in comparison
of this. And it is the more to be lamented, because there is
reason to suppose as my dear Charlotte informs me, that this
licentiousness of behaviour in your daughter has proceeded from
a faulty degree of indulgence though, at the same time, for the
consolation of yourself and Mrs. Bennet, I am inclined to think
that her own disposition must be naturally bad, or she could not
be guilty of such an enormity, at so early an age. Howsoever that
may be, you are grievously to be pitied in which opinion I am not
only joined by Mrs. Collins, but likewise by Lady Catherine and
her daughter, to whom I have related the affair. They agree with
me in apprehending that this false step in one daughter will be
injurious to the fortunes of all the others for who, as Lady
Catherine herself condescendingly says, will connect themselves
with such a family? And this consideration leads me moreover
to reflect, with augmented satisfaction, on a certain event
of last November for had it been otherwise, I must have been
involved in all your sorrow and disgrace. Let me then advise you,
dear sir, to console yourself as much as possible, to throw off
your unworthy child from your affection for ever, and leave her
to reap the fruits of her own heinous offense.
"I am, dear sir, etc., etc."
Mr. Gardiner did not write again till he had received an answer
from Colonel Forster and then he had nothing of a pleasant
nature to send. It was not known that Wickham had a single
relationship with whom he kept up any connection, and it
was certain that he had no near one living. His former
acquaintances had been numerous but since he had been in the
militia, it did not appear that he was on terms of particular
friendship with any of them. There was no one, therefore, who
could be pointed out as likely to give any news of him. And
in the wretched state of his own finances, there was a very
powerful motive for secrecy, in addition to his fear of discovery
by Lydia's relations, for it had just transpired that he had
left gaming debts behind him to a very considerable amount.
Colonel Forster believed that more than a thousand pounds
would be necessary to clear his expenses at Brighton. He owed
a good deal in town, but his debts of honour were still more
formidable. Mr. Gardiner did not attempt to conceal these
particulars from the Longbourn family. Jane heard them with
horror. "A gamester" she cried. "This is wholly unexpected.
I had not an idea of it."
Mr. Gardiner added in his letter, that they might expect to see
their father at home on the following day, which was Saturday.
Rendered spiritless by the illsuccess of all their endeavours, he
had yielded to his brotherinlaw's entreaty that he would return
to his family, and leave it to him to do whatever occasion might
suggest to be advisable for continuing their pursuit. When Mrs.
Bennet was told of this, she did not express so much satisfaction
as her children expected, considering what her anxiety for his
life had been before.
"What, is he coming home, and without poor Lydia?" she cried.
"Sure he will not leave London before he has found them. Who
is to fight Wickham, and make him marry her, if he comes away?"
As Mrs. Gardiner began to wish to be at home, it was settled
that she and the children should go to London, at the same time
that Mr. Bennet came from it. The coach, therefore, took them
the first stage of their journey, and brought its master back
to Longbourn.
Mrs. Gardiner went away in all the perplexity about Elizabeth
and her Derbyshire friend that had attended her from that part
of the world. His name had never been voluntarily mentioned
before them by her niece and the kind of halfexpectation which
Mrs. Gardiner had formed, of their being followed by a letter
from him, had ended in nothing. Elizabeth had received none
since her return that could come from Pemberley.
The present unhappy state of the family rendered any other
excuse for the lowness of her spirits unnecessary nothing,
therefore, could be fairly conjectured from that, though
Elizabeth, who was by this time tolerably well acquainted with
her own feelings, was perfectly aware that, had she known
nothing of Darcy, she could have borne the dread of Lydia's
infamy somewhat better. It would have spared her, she thought,
one sleepless night out of two.
When Mr. Bennet arrived, he had all the appearance of his usual
philosophic composure. He said as little as he had ever been in
the habit of saying made no mention of the business that had
taken him away, and it was some time before his daughters had
courage to speak of it.
It was not till the afternoon, when he had joined them at tea,
that Elizabeth ventured to introduce the subject and then, on
her briefly expressing her sorrow for what he must have
endured, he replied, "Say nothing of that. Who should suffer
but myself? It has been my own doing, and I ought to feel it."
"You must not be too severe upon yourself," replied Elizabeth.
"You may well warn me against such an evil. Human nature is
so prone to fall into it No, Lizzy, let me once in my life
feel how much I have been to blame. I am not afraid of being
overpowered by the impression. It will pass away soon enough."
"Do you suppose them to be in London?"
"Yes where else can they be so well concealed?"
"And Lydia used to want to go to London," added Kitty.
"She is happy then," said her father drily "and her residence
there will probably be of some duration."
Then after a short silence he continued
"Lizzy, I bear you no illwill for being justified in your advice
to me last May, which, considering the event, shows some
greatness of mind."
They were interrupted by Miss Bennet, who came to fetch her
mother's tea.
"This is a parade," he cried, "which does one good it gives such
an elegance to misfortune Another day I will do the same I
will sit in my library, in my nightcap and powdering gown, and
give as much trouble as I can or, perhaps, I may defer it till
Kitty runs away."
"I am not going to run away, papa," said Kitty fretfully. "If I
should ever go to Brighton, I would behave better than Lydia."
"You go to Brighton. I would not trust you so near it as
Eastbourne for fifty pounds No, Kitty, I have at last learnt to
be cautious, and you will feel the effects of it. No officer is ever
to enter into my house again, nor even to pass through the
village. Balls will be absolutely prohibited, unless you stand up
with one of your sisters. And you are never to stir out of doors
till you can prove that you have spent ten minutes of every day
in a rational manner."
Kitty, who took all these threats in a serious light, began to cry.
"Well, well," said he, "do not make yourself unhappy. If you
are a good girl for the next ten years, I will take you to a review
at the end of them."
Chapter 
Two days after Mr. Bennet's return, as Jane and Elizabeth were
walking together in the shrubbery behind the house, they saw
the housekeeper coming towards them, and, concluding that she
came to call them to their mother, went forward to meet her
but, instead of the expected summons, when they approached
her, she said to Miss Bennet, "I beg your pardon, madam, for
interrupting you, but I was in hopes you might have got some
good news from town, so I took the liberty of coming to ask."
"What do you mean, Hill? We have heard nothing from town."
"Dear madam," cried Mrs. Hill, in great astonishment, "don't
you know there is an express come for master from Mr. Gardiner?
He has been here this halfhour, and master has had a letter."
Away ran the girls, too eager to get in to have time for speech.
They ran through the vestibule into the breakfastroom from
thence to the library their father was in neither and they
were on the point of seeking him upstairs with their mother,
when they were met by the butler, who said
"If you are looking for my master, ma'am, he is walking
towards the little copse."
Upon this information, they instantly passed through the hall
once more, and ran across the lawn after their father, who was
deliberately pursuing his way towards a small wood on one side
of the paddock.
Jane, who was not so light nor so much in the habit of running
as Elizabeth, soon lagged behind, while her sister, panting for
breath, came up with him, and eagerly cried out
"Oh, papa, what newswhat news? Have you heard from my
uncle?"
"Yes I have had a letter from him by express."
"Well, and what news does it bringgood or bad?"
"What is there of good to be expected?" said he, taking the
letter from his pocket. "But perhaps you would like to read it."
Elizabeth impatiently caught it from his hand. Jane now came up.
"Read it aloud," said their father, "for I hardly know myself what
it is about."
"Gracechurch Street, Monday,
August .
"MY DEAR BROTHER,
"At last I am able to send you some tidings of my niece, and
such as, upon the whole, I hope it will give you satisfaction.
Soon after you left me on Saturday, I was fortunate enough to
find out in what part of London they were. The particulars I
reserve till we meet it is enough to know they are discovered.
I have seen them both"
"Then it is as I always hoped," cried Jane "they are married"
Elizabeth read on
"I have seen them both. They are not married, nor can I find
there was any intention of being so but if you are willing to
perform the engagements which I have ventured to make on your
side, I hope it will not be long before they are. All that is
required of you is, to assure to your daughter, by settlement,
her equal share of the five thousand pounds secured among your
children after the decease of yourself and my sister and,
moreover, to enter into an engagement of allowing her, during
your life, one hundred pounds per annum. These are conditions
which, considering everything, I had no hesitation in complying
with, as far as I thought myself privileged, for you. I shall
send this by express, that no time may be lost in bringing me
your answer. You will easily comprehend, from these particulars,
that Mr. Wickham's circumstances are not so hopeless as they
are generally believed to be. The world has been deceived in
that respect and I am happy to say there will be some little
money, even when all his debts are discharged, to settle on my
niece, in addition to her own fortune. If, as I conclude will
be the case, you send me full powers to act in your name
throughout the whole of this business, I will immediately give
directions to Haggerston for preparing a proper settlement.
There will not be the smallest occasion for your coming to town
again therefore stay quiet at Longbourn, and depend on my
diligence and care. Send back your answer as fast as you can,
and be careful to write explicitly. We have judged it best that
my niece should be married from this house, of which I hope
you will approve. She comes to us today. I shall write again
as soon as anything more is determined on. Yours, etc.,
"EDW. GARDINER."
"Is it possible?" cried Elizabeth, when she had finished. "Can it
be possible that he will marry her?"
"Wickham is not so undeserving, then, as we thought him," said
her sister. "My dear father, I congratulate you."
"And have you answered the letter?" cried Elizabeth.
"No but it must be done soon."
Most earnestly did she then entreaty him to lose no more time
before he wrote.
"Oh my dear father," she cried, "come back and write immediately.
Consider how important every moment is in such a case."
"Let me write for you," said Jane, "if you dislike the trouble
yourself."
"I dislike it very much," he replied "but it must be done."
And so saying, he turned back with them, and walked towards
the house.
"And may I ask" said Elizabeth "but the terms, I suppose,
must be complied with."
"Complied with I am only ashamed of his asking so little."
"And they must marry Yet he is such a man"
"Yes, yes, they must marry. There is nothing else to be done.
But there are two things that I want very much to know one is,
how much money your uncle has laid down to bring it about
and the other, how am I ever to pay him."
"Money My uncle" cried Jane, "what do you mean, sir?"
"I mean, that no man in his senses would marry Lydia on so
slight a temptation as one hundred a year during my life, and
fifty after I am gone."
"That is very true," said Elizabeth "though it had not occurred
to me before. His debts to be discharged, and something still
to remain Oh it must be my uncle's doings Generous, good
man, I am afraid he has distressed himself. A small sum could
not do all this."
"No," said her father "Wickham's a fool if he takes her with a
farthing less than ten thousand pounds. I should be sorry to
think so ill of him, in the very beginning of our relationship."
"Ten thousand pounds Heaven forbid How is half such a
sum to be repaid?"
Mr. Bennet made no answer, and each of them, deep in thought,
continued silent till they reached the house. Their father then
went on to the library to write, and the girls walked into the
breakfastroom.
"And they are really to be married" cried Elizabeth, as soon
as they were by themselves. "How strange this is And for
this we are to be thankful. That they should marry, small as
is their chance of happiness, and wretched as is his character,
we are forced to rejoice. Oh, Lydia"
"I comfort myself with thinking," replied Jane, "that he certainly
would not marry Lydia if he had not a real regard for her.
Though our kind uncle has done something towards clearing
him, I cannot believe that ten thousand pounds, or anything like
it, has been advanced. He has children of his own, and may
have more. How could he spare half ten thousand pounds?"
"If he were ever able to learn what Wickham's debts have been,"
said Elizabeth, "and how much is settled on his side on our
sister, we shall exactly know what Mr. Gardiner has done for
them, because Wickham has not sixpence of his own. The
kindness of my uncle and aunt can never be requited. Their
taking her home, and affording her their personal protection
and countenance, is such a sacrifice to her advantage as years
of gratitude cannot enough acknowledge. By this time she
is actually with them If such goodness does not make her
miserable now, she will never deserve to be happy What a
meeting for her, when she first sees my aunt"
"We must endeavour to forget all that has passed on either side,"
said Jane "I hope and trust they will yet be happy. His
consenting to marry her is a proof, I will believe, that he is
come to a right way of thinking. Their mutual affection will
steady them and I flatter myself they will settle so quietly,
and live in so rational a manner, as may in time make their
past imprudence forgotten."
"Their conduct has been such," replied Elizabeth, "as neither
you, nor I, nor anybody can ever forget. It is useless to talk
of it."
It now occurred to the girls that their mother was in all
likelihood perfectly ignorant of what had happened. They went
to the library, therefore, and asked their father whether he
would not wish them to make it known to her. He was writing
and, without raising his head, coolly replied
"Just as you please."
"May we take my uncle's letter to read to her?"
"Take whatever you like, and get away."
Elizabeth took the letter from his writingtable, and they went
upstairs together. Mary and Kitty were both with Mrs. Bennet
one communication would, therefore, do for all. After a slight
preparation for good news, the letter was read aloud. Mrs.
Bennet could hardly contain herself. As soon as Jane had read
Mr. Gardiner's hope of Lydia's being soon married, her joy
burst forth, and every following sentence added to its
exuberance. She was now in an irritation as violent from
delight, as she had ever been fidgety from alarm and vexation.
To know that her daughter would be married was enough. She
was disturbed by no fear for her felicity, nor humbled by any
remembrance of her misconduct.
"My dear, dear Lydia" she cried. "This is delightful indeed
She will be married I shall see her again She will be married
at sixteen My good, kind brother I knew how it would be. I
knew he would manage everything How I long to see her and
to see dear Wickham too But the clothes, the wedding clothes
I will write to my sister Gardiner about them directly. Lizzy,
my dear, run down to your father, and ask him how much he will
give her. Stay, stay, I will go myself. Ring the bell, Kitty, for
Hill. I will put on my things in a moment. My dear, dear Lydia
How merry we shall be together when we meet"
Her eldest daughter endeavoured to give some relief to the
violence of these transports, by leading her thoughts to the
obligations which Mr. Gardiner's behaviour laid them all under.
"For we must attribute this happy conclusion," she added, "in a
great measure to his kindness. We are persuaded that he has
pledged himself to assist Mr. Wickham with money."
"Well," cried her mother, "it is all very right who should do it
but her own uncle? If he had not had a family of his own, I and
my children must have had all his money, you know and it is the
first time we have ever had anything from him, except a few
presents. Well I am so happy In a short time I shall have
a daughter married. Mrs. Wickham How well it sounds And
she was only sixteen last June. My dear Jane, I am in such a
flutter, that I am sure I can't write so I will dictate, and you
write for me. We will settle with your father about the money
afterwards but the things should be ordered immediately."
She was then proceeding to all the particulars of calico,
muslin, and cambric, and would shortly have dictated some very
plentiful orders, had not Jane, though with some difficulty,
persuaded her to wait till her father was at leisure to be
consulted. One day's delay, she observed, would be of small
importance and her mother was too happy to be quite so
obstinate as usual. Other schemes, too, came into her head.
"I will go to Meryton," said she, "as soon as I am dressed, and
tell the good, good news to my sister Philips. And as I come
back, I can call on Lady Lucas and Mrs. Long. Kitty, run down
and order the carriage. An airing would do me a great deal of
good, I am sure. Girls, can I do anything for you in Meryton?
Oh Here comes Hill My dear Hill, have you heard the good
news? Miss Lydia is going to be married and you shall all have
a bowl of punch to make merry at her wedding."
Mrs. Hill began instantly to express her joy. Elizabeth received
her congratulations amongst the rest, and then, sick of this folly,
took refuge in her own room, that she might think with freedom.
Poor Lydia's situation must, at best, be bad enough but that
it was no worse, she had need to be thankful. She felt it so
and though, in looking forward, neither rational happiness nor
worldly prosperity could be justly expected for her sister, in
looking back to what they had feared, only two hours ago, she
felt all the advantages of what they had gained.
Chapter 
Mr. Bennet had very often wished before this period of his life
that, instead of spending his whole income, he had laid by an
annual sum for the better provision of his children, and of his
wife, if she survived him. He now wished it more than ever.
Had he done his duty in that respect, Lydia need not have been
indebted to her uncle for whatever of honour or credit could
now be purchased for her. The satisfaction of prevailing on
one of the most worthless young men in Great Britain to be her
husband might then have rested in its proper place.
He was seriously concerned that a cause of so little advantage
to anyone should be forwarded at the sole expense of his
brotherinlaw, and he was determined, if possible, to find out
the extent of his assistance, and to discharge the obligation
as soon as he could.
When first Mr. Bennet had married, economy was held to be
perfectly useless, for, of course, they were to have a son. The
son was to join in cutting off the entail, as soon as he should
be of age, and the widow and younger children would by that
means be provided for. Five daughters successively entered the
world, but yet the son was to come and Mrs. Bennet, for many
years after Lydia's birth, had been certain that he would. This
event had at last been despaired of, but it was then too late to
be saving. Mrs. Bennet had no turn for economy, and her
husband's love of independence had alone prevented their
exceeding their income.
Five thousand pounds was settled by marriage articles on Mrs.
Bennet and the children. But in what proportions it should be
divided amongst the latter depended on the will of the parents.
This was one point, with regard to Lydia, at least, which was
now to be settled, and Mr. Bennet could have no hesitation in
acceding to the proposal before him. In terms of grateful
acknowledgment for the kindness of his brother, though
expressed most concisely, he then delivered on paper his perfect
approbation of all that was done, and his willingness to fulfil
the engagements that had been made for him. He had never before
supposed that, could Wickham be prevailed on to marry his
daughter, it would be done with so little inconvenience to
himself as by the present arrangement. He would scarcely be
ten pounds a year the loser by the hundred that was to be paid
them for, what with her board and pocket allowance, and the
continual presents in money which passed to her through her
mother's hands, Lydia's expenses had been very little within
that sum.
That it would be done with such trifling exertion on his side,
too, was another very welcome surprise for his wish at present
was to have as little trouble in the business as possible. When
the first transports of rage which had produced his activity in
seeking her were over, he naturally returned to all his former
indolence. His letter was soon dispatched for, though dilatory
in undertaking business, he was quick in its execution. He
begged to know further particulars of what he was indebted to
his brother, but was too angry with Lydia to send any message
to her.
The good news spread quickly through the house, and with
proportionate speed through the neighbourhood. It was borne
in the latter with decent philosophy. To be sure, it would
have been more for the advantage of conversation had Miss Lydia
Bennet come upon the town or, as the happiest alternative,
been secluded from the world, in some distant farmhouse.
But there was much to be talked of in marrying her and the
goodnatured wishes for her welldoing which had proceeded
before from all the spiteful old ladies in Meryton lost but a
little of their spirit in this change of circumstances, because
with such an husband her misery was considered certain.
It was a fortnight since Mrs. Bennet had been downstairs but on
this happy day she again took her seat at the head of her table,
and in spirits oppressively high. No sentiment of shame gave
a damp to her triumph. The marriage of a daughter, which had
been the first object of her wishes since Jane was sixteen, was
now on the point of accomplishment, and her thoughts and her
words ran wholly on those attendants of elegant nuptials, fine
muslins, new carriages, and servants. She was busily searching
through the neighbourhood for a proper situation for her
daughter, and, without knowing or considering what their
income might be, rejected many as deficient in size and
importance.
"Haye Park might do," said she, "if the Gouldings could quit itor
the great house at Stoke, if the drawingroom were larger but
Ashworth is too far off I could not bear to have her ten miles
from me and as for Pulvis Lodge, the attics are dreadful."
Her husband allowed her to talk on without interruption while
the servants remained. But when they had withdrawn, he said
to her "Mrs. Bennet, before you take any or all of these houses
for your son and daughter, let us come to a right understanding.
Into one house in this neighbourhood they shall never have
admittance. I will not encourage the impudence of either,
by receiving them at Longbourn."
A long dispute followed this declaration but Mr. Bennet was
firm. It soon led to another and Mrs. Bennet found, with
amazement and horror, that her husband would not advance a
guinea to buy clothes for his daughter. He protested that she
should receive from him no mark of affection whatever on the
occasion. Mrs. Bennet could hardly comprehend it. That his
anger could be carried to such a point of inconceivable
resentment as to refuse his daughter a privilege without which
her marriage would scarcely seem valid, exceeded all she could
believe possible. She was more alive to the disgrace which her
want of new clothes must reflect on her daughter's nuptials, than
to any sense of shame at her eloping and living with Wickham a
fortnight before they took place.
Elizabeth was now most heartily sorry that she had, from the
distress of the moment, been led to make Mr. Darcy acquainted
with their fears for her sister for since her marriage would
so shortly give the proper termination to the elopement, they
might hope to conceal its unfavourable beginning from all those
who were not immediately on the spot.
She had no fear of its spreading farther through his means.
There were few people on whose secrecy she would have more
confidently depended but, at the same time, there was no one
whose knowledge of a sister's frailty would have mortified her
so muchnot, however, from any fear of disadvantage from it
individually to herself, for, at any rate, there seemed a gulf
impassable between them. Had Lydia's marriage been concluded
on the most honourable terms, it was not to be supposed that
Mr. Darcy would connect himself with a family where, to every
other objection, would now be added an alliance and relationship
of the nearest kind with a man whom he so justly scorned.
From such a connection she could not wonder that he would shrink.
The wish of procuring her regard, which she had assured herself
of his feeling in Derbyshire, could not in rational expectation
survive such a blow as this. She was humbled, she was grieved
she repented, though she hardly knew of what. She became jealous
of his esteem, when she could no longer hope to be benefited by it.
She wanted to hear of him, when there seemed the least chance of
gaining intelligence. She was convinced that she could have been
happy with him, when it was no longer likely they should meet.
What a triumph for him, as she often thought, could he know
that the proposals which she had proudly spurned only four
months ago, would now have been most gladly and gratefully
received He was as generous, she doubted not, as the most
generous of his sex but while he was mortal, there must be a
triumph.
She began now to comprehend that he was exactly the man
who, in disposition and talents, would most suit her. His
understanding and temper, though unlike her own, would have
answered all her wishes. It was an union that must have been
to the advantage of both by her ease and liveliness, his mind
might have been softened, his manners improved and from his
judgement, information, and knowledge of the world, she must
have received benefit of greater importance.
But no such happy marriage could now teach the admiring
multitude what connubial felicity really was. An union of a
different tendency, and precluding the possibility of the
other, was soon to be formed in their family.
How Wickham and Lydia were to be supported in tolerable
independence, she could not imagine. But how little of
permanent happiness could belong to a couple who were only
brought together because their passions were stronger than
their virtue, she could easily conjecture.
Mr. Gardiner soon wrote again to his brother. To Mr. Bennet's
acknowledgments he briefly replied, with assurance of his
eagerness to promote the welfare of any of his family and
concluded with entreaties that the subject might never be
mentioned to him again. The principal purport of his letter was
to inform them that Mr. Wickham had resolved on quitting the
militia.
"It was greatly my wish that he should do so," he added, "as
soon as his marriage was fixed on. And I think you will agree
with me, in considering the removal from that corps as highly
advisable, both on his account and my niece's. It is Mr. Wickham's
intention to go into the regulars and among his former friends,
there are still some who are able and willing to assist him in
the army. He has the promise of an ensigncy in General 's
regiment, now quartered in the North. It is an advantage to have
it so far from this part of the kingdom. He promises fairly and
I hope among different people, where they may each have a character
to preserve, they will both be more prudent. I have written to
Colonel Forster, to inform him of our present arrangements, and to
request that he will satisfy the various creditors of Mr. Wickham
in and near Brighton, with assurances of speedy payment, for which
I have pledged myself. And will you give yourself the trouble of
carrying similar assurances to his creditors in Meryton, of whom
I shall subjoin a list according to his information? He has
given in all his debts I hope at least he has not deceived us.
Haggerston has our directions, and all will be completed in a week.
They will then join his regiment, unless they are first invited to
Longbourn and I understand from Mrs. Gardiner, that my niece is
very desirous of seeing you all before she leaves the South. She
is well, and begs to be dutifully remembered to you and your
mother.Yours, etc.,
"E. GARDINER."
Mr. Bennet and his daughters saw all the advantages of Wickham's
removal from the shire as clearly as Mr. Gardiner could do.
But Mrs. Bennet was not so well pleased with it. Lydia's being
settled in the North, just when she had expected most pleasure and
pride in her company, for she had by no means given up her plan
of their residing in Hertfordshire, was a severe disappointment
and, besides, it was such a pity that Lydia should be taken from
a regiment where she was acquainted with everybody, and had so
many favourites.
"She is so fond of Mrs. Forster," said she, "it will be quite
shocking to send her away And there are several of the young
men, too, that she likes very much. The officers may not be so
pleasant in General's regiment."
His daughter's request, for such it might be considered, of being
admitted into her family again before she set off for the North,
received at first an absolute negative. But Jane and Elizabeth,
who agreed in wishing, for the sake of their sister's feelings and
consequence, that she should be noticed on her marriage by her
parents, urged him so earnestly yet so rationally and so mildly,
to receive her and her husband at Longbourn, as soon as they
were married, that he was prevailed on to think as they thought,
and act as they wished. And their mother had the satisfaction
of knowing that she would be able to show her married daughter
in the neighbourhood before she was banished to the North. When
Mr. Bennet wrote again to his brother, therefore, he sent his
permission for them to come and it was settled, that as soon
as the ceremony was over, they should proceed to Longbourn.
Elizabeth was surprised, however, that Wickham should consent
to such a scheme, and had she consulted only her own inclination,
any meeting with him would have been the last object of her wishes.
Chapter 
Their sister's wedding day arrived and Jane and Elizabeth felt
for her probably more than she felt for herself. The carriage
was sent to meet them at , and they were to return in it
by dinnertime. Their arrival was dreaded by the elder Miss
Bennets, and Jane more especially, who gave Lydia the feelings
which would have attended herself, had she been the culprit,
and was wretched in the thought of what her sister must endure.
They came. The family were assembled in the breakfast room to
receive them. Smiles decked the face of Mrs. Bennet as the
carriage drove up to the door her husband looked impenetrably
grave her daughters, alarmed, anxious, uneasy.
Lydia's voice was heard in the vestibule the door was thrown
open, and she ran into the room. Her mother stepped forwards,
embraced her, and welcomed her with rapture gave her hand,
with an affectionate smile, to Wickham, who followed his lady
and wished them both joy with an alacrity which shewed no doubt
of their happiness.
Their reception from Mr. Bennet, to whom they then turned, was
not quite so cordial. His countenance rather gained in austerity
and he scarcely opened his lips. The easy assurance of the
young couple, indeed, was enough to provoke him. Elizabeth was
disgusted, and even Miss Bennet was shocked. Lydia was Lydia
still untamed, unabashed, wild, noisy, and fearless. She turned
from sister to sister, demanding their congratulations and when
at length they all sat down, looked eagerly round the room, took
notice of some little alteration in it, and observed, with a
laugh, that it was a great while since she had been there.
Wickham was not at all more distressed than herself, but his
manners were always so pleasing, that had his character and his
marriage been exactly what they ought, his smiles and his easy
address, while he claimed their relationship, would have
delighted them all. Elizabeth had not before believed him
quite equal to such assurance but she sat down, resolving
within herself to draw no limits in future to the impudence of
an impudent man. She blushed, and Jane blushed but the
cheeks of the two who caused their confusion suffered no
variation of colour.
There was no want of discourse. The bride and her mother could
neither of them talk fast enough and Wickham, who happened to
sit near Elizabeth, began inquiring after his acquaintance in
that neighbourhood, with a good humoured ease which she felt
very unable to equal in her replies. They seemed each of them
to have the happiest memories in the world. Nothing of the
past was recollected with pain and Lydia led voluntarily to
subjects which her sisters would not have alluded to for the
world.
"Only think of its being three months," she cried, "since I
went away it seems but a fortnight I declare and yet there
have been things enough happened in the time. Good gracious
when I went away, I am sure I had no more idea of being married
till I came back again though I thought it would be very good
fun if I was."
Her father lifted up his eyes. Jane was distressed. Elizabeth
looked expressively at Lydia but she, who never heard nor saw
anything of which she chose to be insensible, gaily continued,
"Oh mamma, do the people hereabouts know I am married
today? I was afraid they might not and we overtook William
Goulding in his curricle, so I was determined he should know
it, and so I let down the sideglass next to him, and took off
my glove, and let my hand just rest upon the window frame, so
that he might see the ring, and then I bowed and smiled like
anything."
Elizabeth could bear it no longer. She got up, and ran out of
the room and returned no more, till she heard them passing
through the hall to the dining parlour. She then joined them
soon enough to see Lydia, with anxious parade, walk up to her
mother's right hand, and hear her say to her eldest sister,
"Ah Jane, I take your place now, and you must go lower,
because I am a married woman."
It was not to be supposed that time would give Lydia that
embarrassment from which she had been so wholly free at first.
Her ease and good spirits increased. She longed to see Mrs.
Phillips, the Lucases, and all their other neighbours, and to
hear herself called "Mrs. Wickham" by each of them and in the
mean time, she went after dinner to show her ring, and boast
of being married, to Mrs. Hill and the two housemaids.
"Well, mamma," said she, when they were all returned to the
breakfast room, "and what do you think of my husband? Is not
he a charming man? I am sure my sisters must all envy me. I
only hope they may have half my good luck. They must all go to
Brighton. That is the place to get husbands. What a pity it
is, mamma, we did not all go."
"Very true and if I had my will, we should. But my dear
Lydia, I don't at all like your going such a way off. Must
it be so?"
"Oh, lord yesthere is nothing in that. I shall like it
of all things. You and papa, and my sisters, must come down
and see us. We shall be at Newcastle all the winter, and I
dare say there will be some balls, and I will take care to get
good partners for them all."
"I should like it beyond anything" said her mother.
"And then when you go away, you may leave one or two of my
sisters behind you and I dare say I shall get husbands for
them before the winter is over."
"I thank you for my share of the favour," said Elizabeth
"but I do not particularly like your way of getting husbands."
Their visitors were not to remain above ten days with them.
Mr. Wickham had received his commission before he left London,
and he was to join his regiment at the end of a fortnight.
No one but Mrs. Bennet regretted that their stay would be so
short and she made the most of the time by visiting about with
her daughter, and having very frequent parties at home. These
parties were acceptable to all to avoid a family circle was
even more desirable to such as did think, than such as did not.
Wickham's affection for Lydia was just what Elizabeth had
expected to find it not equal to Lydia's for him. She had
scarcely needed her present observation to be satisfied, from
the reason of things, that their elopement had been brought on
by the strength of her love, rather than by his and she would
have wondered why, without violently caring for her, he chose
to elope with her at all, had she not felt certain that his
flight was rendered necessary by distress of circumstances
and if that were the case, he was not the young man to resist
an opportunity of having a companion.
Lydia was exceedingly fond of him. He was her dear Wickham on
every occasion no one was to be put in competition with him.
He did every thing best in the world and she was sure he would
kill more birds on the first of September, than any body else
in the country.
One morning, soon after their arrival, as she was sitting with
her two elder sisters, she said to Elizabeth
"Lizzy, I never gave you an account of my wedding, I believe.
You were not by, when I told mamma and the others all about it.
Are not you curious to hear how it was managed?"
"No really," replied Elizabeth "I think there cannot be too
little said on the subject."
"La You are so strange But I must tell you how it went off.
We were married, you know, at St. Clement's, because Wickham's
lodgings were in that parish. And it was settled that we
should all be there by eleven o'clock. My uncle and aunt and
I were to go together and the others were to meet us at the
church. Well, Monday morning came, and I was in such a fuss
I was so afraid, you know, that something would happen to put
it off, and then I should have gone quite distracted. And
there was my aunt, all the time I was dressing, preaching and
talking away just as if she was reading a sermon. However, I
did not hear above one word in ten, for I was thinking, you may
suppose, of my dear Wickham. I longed to know whether he would
be married in his blue coat."
"Well, and so we breakfasted at ten as usual I thought it
would never be over for, by the bye, you are to understand,
that my uncle and aunt were horrid unpleasant all the time I
was with them. If you'll believe me, I did not once put my
foot out of doors, though I was there a fortnight. Not one
party, or scheme, or anything. To be sure London was rather
thin, but, however, the Little Theatre was open. Well, and so
just as the carriage came to the door, my uncle was called away
upon business to that horrid man Mr. Stone. And then, you
know, when once they get together, there is no end of it.
Well, I was so frightened I did not know what to do, for my
uncle was to give me away and if we were beyond the hour, we
could not be married all day. But, luckily, he came back again
in ten minutes' time, and then we all set out. However, I
recollected afterwards that if he had been prevented going,
the wedding need not be put off, for Mr. Darcy might have done
as well."
"Mr. Darcy" repeated Elizabeth, in utter amazement.
"Oh, yeshe was to come there with Wickham, you know. But
gracious me I quite forgot I ought not to have said a word
about it. I promised them so faithfully What will Wickham
say? It was to be such a secret"
"If it was to be secret," said Jane, "say not another word on
the subject. You may depend upon my seeking no further."
"Oh certainly," said Elizabeth, though burning with curiosity
"we will ask you no questions."
"Thank you," said Lydia, "for if you did, I should certainly
tell you all, and then Wickham would be angry."
On such encouragement to ask, Elizabeth was forced to put it
out of her power, by running away.
But to live in ignorance on such a point was impossible or at
least it was impossible not to try for information. Mr. Darcy
had been at her sister's wedding. It was exactly a scene, and
exactly among people, where he had apparently least to do, and
least temptation to go. Conjectures as to the meaning of it,
rapid and wild, hurried into her brain but she was satisfied
with none. Those that best pleased her, as placing his conduct
in the noblest light, seemed most improbable. She could not
bear such suspense and hastily seizing a sheet of paper, wrote
a short letter to her aunt, to request an explanation of what
Lydia had dropt, if it were compatible with the secrecy which
had been intended.
"You may readily comprehend," she added, "what my curiosity
must be to know how a person unconnected with any of us, and
comparatively speaking a stranger to our family, should have
been amongst you at such a time. Pray write instantly, and
let me understand itunless it is, for very cogent reasons,
to remain in the secrecy which Lydia seems to think necessary
and then I must endeavour to be satisfied with ignorance."
"Not that I shall, though," she added to herself, as she
finished the letter "and my dear aunt, if you do not tell me
in an honourable manner, I shall certainly be reduced to tricks
and stratagems to find it out."
Jane's delicate sense of honour would not allow her to speak to
Elizabeth privately of what Lydia had let fall Elizabeth was
glad of ittill it appeared whether her inquiries would
receive any satisfaction, she had rather be without a confidante.
Chapter 
Elizabeth had the satisfaction of receiving an answer to her
letter as soon as she possibly could. She was no sooner in
possession of it than, hurrying into the little copse, where
she was least likely to be interrupted, she sat down on one of
the benches and prepared to be happy for the length of the
letter convinced her that it did not contain a denial.
"Gracechurch street, Sept. .
"MY DEAR NIECE,
"I have just received your letter, and shall devote this whole
morning to answering it, as I foresee that a little writing
will not comprise what I have to tell you. I must confess
myself surprised by your application I did not expect it from
you. Don't think me angry, however, for I only mean to let
you know that I had not imagined such inquiries to be necessary
on your side. If you do not choose to understand me, forgive
my impertinence. Your uncle is as much surprised as I amand
nothing but the belief of your being a party concerned would
have allowed him to act as he has done. But if you are really
innocent and ignorant, I must be more explicit.
"On the very day of my coming home from Longbourn, your uncle had a
most unexpected visitor. Mr. Darcy called, and was shut up with him
several hours. It was all over before I arrived so my curiosity was
not so dreadfully racked as your's seems to have been. He came to
tell Mr. Gardiner that he had found out where your sister and
Mr. Wickham were, and that he had seen and talked with them both
Wickham repeatedly, Lydia once. From what I can collect, he left
Derbyshire only one day after ourselves, and came to town with the
resolution of hunting for them. The motive professed was his
conviction of its being owing to himself that Wickham's worthlessness
had not been so well known as to make it impossible for any young
woman of character to love or confide in him. He generously imputed
the whole to his mistaken pride, and confessed that he had before
thought it beneath him to lay his private actions open to the world.
His character was to speak for itself. He called it, therefore, his
duty to step forward, and endeavour to remedy an evil which had been
brought on by himself. If he had another motive, I am sure it would
never disgrace him. He had been some days in town, before he was able
to discover them but he had something to direct his search, which was
more than we had and the consciousness of this was another reason for
his resolving to follow us.
"There is a lady, it seems, a Mrs. Younge, who was some time ago
governess to Miss Darcy, and was dismissed from her charge on some
cause of disapprobation, though he did not say what. She then took a
large house in Edwardstreet, and has since maintained herself by
letting lodgings. This Mrs. Younge was, he knew, intimately
acquainted with Wickham and he went to her for intelligence of him as
soon as he got to town. But it was two or three days before he could
get from her what he wanted. She would not betray her trust, I
suppose, without bribery and corruption, for she really did know where
her friend was to be found. Wickham indeed had gone to her on their
first arrival in London, and had she been able to receive them into
her house, they would have taken up their abode with her. At length,
however, our kind friend procured the wishedfor direction. They were
in  street. He saw Wickham, and afterwards insisted on seeing
Lydia. His first object with her, he acknowledged, had been to
persuade her to quit her present disgraceful situation, and return to
her friends as soon as they could be prevailed on to receive her,
offering his assistance, as far as it would go. But he found Lydia
absolutely resolved on remaining where she was. She cared for none of
her friends she wanted no help of his she would not hear of leaving
Wickham. She was sure they should be married some time or other, and
it did not much signify when. Since such were her feelings, it only
remained, he thought, to secure and expedite a marriage, which, in his
very first conversation with Wickham, he easily learnt had never been
his design. He confessed himself obliged to leave the regiment, on
account of some debts of honour, which were very pressing and
scrupled not to lay all the illconsequences of Lydia's flight on her
own folly alone. He meant to resign his commission immediately and
as to his future situation, he could conjecture very little about it.
He must go somewhere, but he did not know where, and he knew he should
have nothing to live on.
"Mr. Darcy asked him why he had not married your sister at once.
Though Mr. Bennet was not imagined to be very rich, he would have been
able to do something for him, and his situation must have been
benefited by marriage. But he found, in reply to this question, that
Wickham still cherished the hope of more effectually making his
fortune by marriage in some other country. Under such circumstances,
however, he was not likely to be proof against the temptation of
immediate relief.
"They met several times, for there was much to be discussed.
Wickham of course wanted more than he could get but at length
was reduced to be reasonable.
"Every thing being settled between them, Mr. Darcy's next step was to
make your uncle acquainted with it, and he first called in Gracechurch
street the evening before I came home. But Mr. Gardiner could not be
seen, and Mr. Darcy found, on further inquiry, that your father was
still with him, but would quit town the next morning. He did not
judge your father to be a person whom he could so properly consult as
your uncle, and therefore readily postponed seeing him till after the
departure of the former. He did not leave his name, and till the next
day it was only known that a gentleman had called on business.
"On Saturday he came again. Your father was gone, your uncle at home,
and, as I said before, they had a great deal of talk together.
"They met again on Sunday, and then I saw him too. It was not all
settled before Monday as soon as it was, the express was sent off to
Longbourn. But our visitor was very obstinate. I fancy, Lizzy, that
obstinacy is the real defect of his character, after all. He has been
accused of many faults at different times, but this is the true one.
Nothing was to be done that he did not do himself though I am sure
and I do not speak it to be thanked, therefore say nothing about it,
your uncle would most readily have settled the whole.
"They battled it together for a long time, which was more than either
the gentleman or lady concerned in it deserved. But at last your
uncle was forced to yield, and instead of being allowed to be of use
to his niece, was forced to put up with only having the probable
credit of it, which went sorely against the grain and I really
believe your letter this morning gave him great pleasure, because it
required an explanation that would rob him of his borrowed feathers,
and give the praise where it was due. But, Lizzy, this must go no
farther than yourself, or Jane at most.
"You know pretty well, I suppose, what has been done for the young
people. His debts are to be paid, amounting, I believe, to
considerably more than a thousand pounds, another thousand in addition
to her own settled upon her, and his commission purchased. The reason
why all this was to be done by him alone, was such as I have given
above. It was owing to him, to his reserve and want of proper
consideration, that Wickham's character had been so misunderstood, and
consequently that he had been received and noticed as he was. Perhaps
there was some truth in this though I doubt whether his reserve, or
anybody's reserve, can be answerable for the event. But in spite of
all this fine talking, my dear Lizzy, you may rest perfectly assured
that your uncle would never have yielded, if we had not given him
credit for another interest in the affair.
"When all this was resolved on, he returned again to his friends, who
were still staying at Pemberley but it was agreed that he should be
in London once more when the wedding took place, and all money matters
were then to receive the last finish.
"I believe I have now told you every thing. It is a relation which you
tell me is to give you great surprise I hope at least it will not
afford you any displeasure. Lydia came to us and Wickham had
constant admission to the house. He was exactly what he had been,
when I knew him in Hertfordshire but I would not tell you how little
I was satisfied with her behaviour while she staid with us, if I had
not perceived, by Jane's letter last Wednesday, that her conduct on
coming home was exactly of a piece with it, and therefore what I now
tell you can give you no fresh pain. I talked to her repeatedly in
the most serious manner, representing to her all the wickedness of
what she had done, and all the unhappiness she had brought on her
family. If she heard me, it was by good luck, for I am sure she did
not listen. I was sometimes quite provoked, but then I recollected my
dear Elizabeth and Jane, and for their sakes had patience with her.
"Mr. Darcy was punctual in his return, and as Lydia informed you,
attended the wedding. He dined with us the next day, and was to leave
town again on Wednesday or Thursday. Will you be very angry with me,
my dear Lizzy, if I take this opportunity of saying what I was never
bold enough to say before how much I like him. His behaviour to us
has, in every respect, been as pleasing as when we were in Derbyshire.
His understanding and opinions all please me he wants nothing but a
little more liveliness, and that, if he marry prudently, his wife
may teach him. I thought him very slyhe hardly ever mentioned your
name. But slyness seems the fashion.
"Pray forgive me if I have been very presuming, or at least do not
punish me so far as to exclude me from P. I shall never be quite
happy till I have been all round the park. A low phaeton, with a nice
little pair of ponies, would be the very thing.
"But I must write no more. The children have been wanting me this half
hour.
"Yours, very sincerely,
"M. GARDINER."
The contents of this letter threw Elizabeth into a flutter
of spirits, in which it was difficult to determine whether
pleasure or pain bore the greatest share. The vague and
unsettled suspicions which uncertainty had produced of what
Mr. Darcy might have been doing to forward her sister's match,
which she had feared to encourage as an exertion of goodness
too great to be probable, and at the same time dreaded to be
just, from the pain of obligation, were proved beyond their
greatest extent to be true He had followed them purposely to
town, he had taken on himself all the trouble and mortification
attendant on such a research in which supplication had been
necessary to a woman whom he must abominate and despise, and
where he was reduced to meet, frequently meet, reason with,
persuade, and finally bribe, the man whom he always most wished
to avoid, and whose very name it was punishment to him to
pronounce. He had done all this for a girl whom he could
neither regard nor esteem. Her heart did whisper that he had
done it for her. But it was a hope shortly checked by other
considerations, and she soon felt that even her vanity was
insufficient, when required to depend on his affection for her
for a woman who had already refused himas able to overcome
a sentiment so natural as abhorrence against relationship with
Wickham. Brotherinlaw of Wickham Every kind of pride must
revolt from the connection. He had, to be sure, done much.
She was ashamed to think how much. But he had given a reason
for his interference, which asked no extraordinary stretch of
belief. It was reasonable that he should feel he had been wrong
he had liberality, and he had the means of exercising it and
though she would not place herself as his principal inducement,
she could, perhaps, believe that remaining partiality for her
might assist his endeavours in a cause where her peace of mind
must be materially concerned. It was painful, exceedingly
painful, to know that they were under obligations to a person
who could never receive a return. They owed the restoration of
Lydia, her character, every thing, to him. Oh how heartily
did she grieve over every ungracious sensation she had ever
encouraged, every saucy speech she had ever directed towards him.
For herself she was humbled but she was proud of him. Proud
that in a cause of compassion and honour, he had been able to get
the better of himself. She read over her aunt's commendation
of him again and again. It was hardly enough but it pleased
her. She was even sensible of some pleasure, though mixed with
regret, on finding how steadfastly both she and her uncle had
been persuaded that affection and confidence subsisted between
Mr. Darcy and herself.
She was roused from her seat, and her reflections, by some
one's approach and before she could strike into another path,
she was overtaken by Wickham.
"I am afraid I interrupt your solitary ramble, my dear sister?"
said he, as he joined her.
"You certainly do," she replied with a smile "but it does not
follow that the interruption must be unwelcome."
"I should be sorry indeed, if it were. We were always good
friends and now we are better."
"True. Are the others coming out?"
"I do not know. Mrs. Bennet and Lydia are going in the
carriage to Meryton. And so, my dear sister, I find, from
our uncle and aunt, that you have actually seen Pemberley."
She replied in the affirmative.
"I almost envy you the pleasure, and yet I believe it would
be too much for me, or else I could take it in my way to
Newcastle. And you saw the old housekeeper, I suppose? Poor
Reynolds, she was always very fond of me. But of course she
did not mention my name to you."
"Yes, she did."
"And what did she say?"
"That you were gone into the army, and she was afraid had
not turned out well. At such a distance as that, you
know, things are strangely misrepresented."
"Certainly," he replied, biting his lips. Elizabeth hoped she
had silenced him but he soon afterwards said
"I was surprised to see Darcy in town last month. We passed
each other several times. I wonder what he can be doing
there."
"Perhaps preparing for his marriage with Miss de Bourgh," said
Elizabeth. "It must be something particular, to take him there
at this time of year."
"Undoubtedly. Did you see him while you were at Lambton?
I thought I understood from the Gardiners that you had."
"Yes he introduced us to his sister."
"And do you like her?"
"Very much."
"I have heard, indeed, that she is uncommonly improved within
this year or two. When I last saw her, she was not very
promising. I am very glad you liked her. I hope she will turn
out well."
"I dare say she will she has got over the most trying age."
"Did you go by the village of Kympton?"
"I do not recollect that we did."
"I mention it, because it is the living which I ought to have
had. A most delightful placeExcellent Parsonage House
It would have suited me in every respect."
"How should you have liked making sermons?"
"Exceedingly well. I should have considered it as part of my
duty, and the exertion would soon have been nothing. One ought
not to repinebut, to be sure, it would have been such a
thing for me The quiet, the retirement of such a life would
have answered all my ideas of happiness But it was not to be.
Did you ever hear Darcy mention the circumstance, when you were
in Kent?"
"I have heard from authority, which I thought as good,
that it was left you conditionally only, and at the will of the
present patron."
"You have. Yes, there was something in that I told you so
from the first, you may remember."
"I did hear, too, that there was a time, when sermonmaking
was not so palatable to you as it seems to be at present that
you actually declared your resolution of never taking orders,
and that the business had been compromised accordingly."
"You did and it was not wholly without foundation. You may
remember what I told you on that point, when first we talked
of it."
They were now almost at the door of the house, for she
had walked fast to get rid of him and unwilling, for her
sister's sake, to provoke him, she only said in reply, with
a goodhumoured smile
"Come, Mr. Wickham, we are brother and sister, you know.
Do not let us quarrel about the past. In future, I hope we
shall be always of one mind."
She held out her hand he kissed it with affectionate gallantry,
though he hardly knew how to look, and they entered the house.
Chapter 
Mr. Wickham was so perfectly satisfied with this conversation
that he never again distressed himself, or provoked his dear
sister Elizabeth, by introducing the subject of it and she was
pleased to find that she had said enough to keep him quiet.
The day of his and Lydia's departure soon came, and Mrs. Bennet
was forced to submit to a separation, which, as her husband by
no means entered into her scheme of their all going to
Newcastle, was likely to continue at least a twelvemonth.
"Oh my dear Lydia," she cried, "when shall we meet again?"
"Oh, lord I don't know. Not these two or three years,
perhaps."
"Write to me very often, my dear."
"As often as I can. But you know married women have never much
time for writing. My sisters may write to me. They will
have nothing else to do."
Mr. Wickham's adieus were much more affectionate than his
wife's. He smiled, looked handsome, and said many pretty
things.
"He is as fine a fellow," said Mr. Bennet, as soon as they were
out of the house, "as ever I saw. He simpers, and smirks, and
makes love to us all. I am prodigiously proud of him. I defy
even Sir William Lucas himself to produce a more valuable
soninlaw."
The loss of her daughter made Mrs. Bennet very dull for
several days.
"I often think," said she, "that there is nothing so bad as
parting with one's friends. One seems so forlorn without
them."
"This is the consequence, you see, Madam, of marrying a daughter,"
said Elizabeth. "It must make you better satisfied that your
other four are single."
"It is no such thing. Lydia does not leave me because she is
married, but only because her husband's regiment happens to be
so far off. If that had been nearer, she would not have gone
so soon."
But the spiritless condition which this event threw her into
was shortly relieved, and her mind opened again to the
agitation of hope, by an article of news which then began to be
in circulation. The housekeeper at Netherfield had received
orders to prepare for the arrival of her master, who was coming
down in a day or two, to shoot there for several weeks.
Mrs. Bennet was quite in the fidgets. She looked at Jane, and
smiled and shook her head by turns.
"Well, well, and so Mr. Bingley is coming down, sister,"
for Mrs. Phillips first brought her the news. "Well, so
much the better. Not that I care about it, though. He is
nothing to us, you know, and I am sure I never want to
see him again. But, however, he is very welcome to come
to Netherfield, if he likes it. And who knows what may
happen? But that is nothing to us. You know, sister, we
agreed long ago never to mention a word about it. And so,
is it quite certain he is coming?"
"You may depend on it," replied the other, "for Mrs. Nicholls
was in Meryton last night I saw her passing by, and went out
myself on purpose to know the truth of it and she told me that
it was certain true. He comes down on Thursday at the latest,
very likely on Wednesday. She was going to the butcher's, she
told me, on purpose to order in some meat on Wednesday, and she
has got three couple of ducks just fit to be killed."
Miss Bennet had not been able to hear of his coming without
changing colour. It was many months since she had mentioned
his name to Elizabeth but now, as soon as they were alone
together, she said
"I saw you look at me today, Lizzy, when my aunt told us of
the present report and I know I appeared distressed. But
don't imagine it was from any silly cause. I was only confused
for the moment, because I felt that I should be looked at.
I do assure you that the news does not affect me either with
pleasure or pain. I am glad of one thing, that he comes alone
because we shall see the less of him. Not that I am afraid of
myself, but I dread other people's remarks."
Elizabeth did not know what to make of it. Had she not seen
him in Derbyshire, she might have supposed him capable of
coming there with no other view than what was acknowledged but
she still thought him partial to Jane, and she wavered as to
the greater probability of his coming there with his friend's
permission, or being bold enough to come without it.
"Yet it is hard," she sometimes thought, "that this poor man
cannot come to a house which he has legally hired, without
raising all this speculation I will leave him to himself."
In spite of what her sister declared, and really believed to be
her feelings in the expectation of his arrival, Elizabeth could
easily perceive that her spirits were affected by it. They
were more disturbed, more unequal, than she had often seen them.
The subject which had been so warmly canvassed between their
parents, about a twelvemonth ago, was now brought forward
again.
"As soon as ever Mr. Bingley comes, my dear," said Mrs. Bennet,
"you will wait on him of course."
"No, no. You forced me into visiting him last year, and
promised, if I went to see him, he should marry one of my
daughters. But it ended in nothing, and I will not be sent on
a fool's errand again."
His wife represented to him how absolutely necessary such an
attention would be from all the neighbouring gentlemen, on his
returning to Netherfield.
"'Tis an etiquette I despise," said he. "If he wants our
society, let him seek it. He knows where we live. I will not
spend my hours in running after my neighbours every time they
go away and come back again."
"Well, all I know is, that it will be abominably rude if you do
not wait on him. But, however, that shan't prevent my asking
him to dine here, I am determined. We must have Mrs. Long and
the Gouldings soon. That will make thirteen with ourselves, so
there will be just room at table for him."
Consoled by this resolution, she was the better able to bear
her husband's incivility though it was very mortifying to know
that her neighbours might all see Mr. Bingley, in consequence
of it, before they did. As the day of his arrival drew near
"I begin to be sorry that he comes at all," said Jane to her
sister. "It would be nothing I could see him with perfect
indifference, but I can hardly bear to hear it thus perpetually
talked of. My mother means well but she does not know, no one
can know, how much I suffer from what she says. Happy shall I
be, when his stay at Netherfield is over"
"I wish I could say anything to comfort you," replied Elizabeth
"but it is wholly out of my power. You must feel it and the
usual satisfaction of preaching patience to a sufferer is denied
me, because you have always so much."
Mr. Bingley arrived. Mrs. Bennet, through the assistance of
servants, contrived to have the earliest tidings of it, that
the period of anxiety and fretfulness on her side might be as
long as it could. She counted the days that must intervene
before their invitation could be sent hopeless of seeing
him before. But on the third morning after his arrival in
Hertfordshire, she saw him, from her dressingroom window,
enter the paddock and ride towards the house.
Her daughters were eagerly called to partake of her joy. Jane
resolutely kept her place at the table but Elizabeth, to
satisfy her mother, went to the windowshe looked,she
saw Mr. Darcy with him, and sat down again by her sister.
"There is a gentleman with him, mamma," said Kitty "who can it be?"
"Some acquaintance or other, my dear, I suppose I am sure I
do not know."
"La" replied Kitty, "it looks just like that man that used to
be with him before. Mr. what'shisname. That tall, proud
man."
"Good gracious Mr. Darcyand so it does, I vow. Well,
any friend of Mr. Bingley's will always be welcome here, to be
sure but else I must say that I hate the very sight of him."
Jane looked at Elizabeth with surprise and concern. She knew
but little of their meeting in Derbyshire, and therefore felt
for the awkwardness which must attend her sister, in seeing him
almost for the first time after receiving his explanatory
letter. Both sisters were uncomfortable enough. Each felt
for the other, and of course for themselves and their mother
talked on, of her dislike of Mr. Darcy, and her resolution
to be civil to him only as Mr. Bingley's friend, without
being heard by either of them. But Elizabeth had sources of
uneasiness which could not be suspected by Jane, to whom she
had never yet had courage to shew Mrs. Gardiner's letter, or
to relate her own change of sentiment towards him. To Jane,
he could be only a man whose proposals she had refused, and
whose merit she had undervalued but to her own more extensive
information, he was the person to whom the whole family were
indebted for the first of benefits, and whom she regarded
herself with an interest, if not quite so tender, at least
as reasonable and just as what Jane felt for Bingley. Her
astonishment at his comingat his coming to Netherfield, to
Longbourn, and voluntarily seeking her again, was almost equal
to what she had known on first witnessing his altered behaviour
in Derbyshire.
The colour which had been driven from her face, returned for
half a minute with an additional glow, and a smile of delight
added lustre to her eyes, as she thought for that space of time
that his affection and wishes must still be unshaken. But she
would not be secure.
"Let me first see how he behaves," said she "it will then be
early enough for expectation."
She sat intently at work, striving to be composed, and without
daring to lift up her eyes, till anxious curiosity carried them
to the face of her sister as the servant was approaching the
door. Jane looked a little paler than usual, but more sedate
than Elizabeth had expected. On the gentlemen's appearing, her
colour increased yet she received them with tolerable ease,
and with a propriety of behaviour equally free from any symptom
of resentment or any unnecessary complaisance.
Elizabeth said as little to either as civility would allow, and
sat down again to her work, with an eagerness which it did not
often command. She had ventured only one glance at Darcy. He
looked serious, as usual and, she thought, more as he had been
used to look in Hertfordshire, than as she had seen him at
Pemberley. But, perhaps he could not in her mother's presence
be what he was before her uncle and aunt. It was a painful,
but not an improbable, conjecture.
Bingley, she had likewise seen for an instant, and in that
short period saw him looking both pleased and embarrassed. He
was received by Mrs. Bennet with a degree of civility which
made her two daughters ashamed, especially when contrasted with
the cold and ceremonious politeness of her curtsey and address
to his friend.
Elizabeth, particularly, who knew that her mother owed to the
latter the preservation of her favourite daughter from
irremediable infamy, was hurt and distressed to a most painful
degree by a distinction so ill applied.
Darcy, after inquiring of her how Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner did, a
question which she could not answer without confusion, said
scarcely anything. He was not seated by her perhaps that
was the reason of his silence but it had not been so in
Derbyshire. There he had talked to her friends, when he could
not to herself. But now several minutes elapsed without
bringing the sound of his voice and when occasionally, unable
to resist the impulse of curiosity, she raised he eyes to his
face, she as often found him looking at Jane as at herself, and
frequently on no object but the ground. More thoughtfulness
and less anxiety to please, than when they last met, were
plainly expressed. She was disappointed, and angry with
herself for being so.
"Could I expect it to be otherwise" said she. "Yet why did
he come?"
She was in no humour for conversation with anyone but himself
and to him she had hardly courage to speak.
She inquired after his sister, but could do no more.
"It is a long time, Mr. Bingley, since you went away," said
Mrs. Bennet.
He readily agreed to it.
"I began to be afraid you would never come back again. People
did say you meant to quit the place entirely at Michaelmas
but, however, I hope it is not true. A great many changes have
happened in the neighbourhood, since you went away. Miss Lucas
is married and settled. And one of my own daughters. I suppose
you have heard of it indeed, you must have seen it in the
papers. It was in The Times and The Courier, I know though
it was not put in as it ought to be. It was only said, 'Lately,
George Wickham, Esq. to Miss Lydia Bennet,' without there being
a syllable said of her father, or the place where she lived, or
anything. It was my brother Gardiner's drawing up too, and I
wonder how he came to make such an awkward business of it. Did
you see it?"
Bingley replied that he did, and made his congratulations.
Elizabeth dared not lift up her eyes. How Mr. Darcy looked,
therefore, she could not tell.
"It is a delightful thing, to be sure, to have a daughter
well married," continued her mother, "but at the same time,
Mr. Bingley, it is very hard to have her taken such a way from
me. They are gone down to Newcastle, a place quite northward,
it seems, and there they are to stay I do not know how long.
His regiment is there for I suppose you have heard of his
leaving the shire, and of his being gone into the regulars.
Thank Heaven he has some friends, though perhaps not so
many as he deserves."
Elizabeth, who knew this to be levelled at Mr. Darcy, was
in such misery of shame, that she could hardly keep her seat.
It drew from her, however, the exertion of speaking, which
nothing else had so effectually done before and she asked
Bingley whether he meant to make any stay in the country at
present. A few weeks, he believed.
"When you have killed all your own birds, Mr. Bingley,"
said her mother, "I beg you will come here, and shoot as
many as you please on Mr. Bennet's manor. I am sure he
will be vastly happy to oblige you, and will save all the
best of the covies for you."
Elizabeth's misery increased, at such unnecessary, such
officious attention Were the same fair prospect to arise at
present as had flattered them a year ago, every thing, she was
persuaded, would be hastening to the same vexatious conclusion.
At that instant, she felt that years of happiness could not
make Jane or herself amends for moments of such painful
confusion.
"The first wish of my heart," said she to herself, "is never
more to be in company with either of them. Their society can
afford no pleasure that will atone for such wretchedness as
this Let me never see either one or the other again"
Yet the misery, for which years of happiness were to offer no
compensation, received soon afterwards material relief, from
observing how much the beauty of her sister rekindled the
admiration of her former lover. When first he came in, he had
spoken to her but little but every five minutes seemed to be
giving her more of his attention. He found her as handsome as
she had been last year as good natured, and as unaffected,
though not quite so chatty. Jane was anxious that no difference
should be perceived in her at all, and was really persuaded that
she talked as much as ever. But her mind was so busily engaged,
that she did not always know when she was silent.
When the gentlemen rose to go away, Mrs. Bennet was mindful of
her intended civility, and they were invited and engaged to
dine at Longbourn in a few days time.
"You are quite a visit in my debt, Mr. Bingley," she added,
"for when you went to town last winter, you promised to take
a family dinner with us, as soon as you returned. I have not
forgot, you see and I assure you, I was very much disappointed
that you did not come back and keep your engagement."
Bingley looked a little silly at this reflection, and said
something of his concern at having been prevented by business.
They then went away.
Mrs. Bennet had been strongly inclined to ask them to stay and
dine there that day but, though she always kept a very good
table, she did not think anything less than two courses could
be good enough for a man on whom she had such anxious designs,
or satisfy the appetite and pride of one who had ten thousand a
year.
Chapter 
As soon as they were gone, Elizabeth walked out to recover
her spirits or in other words, to dwell without interruption
on those subjects that must deaden them more. Mr. Darcy's
behaviour astonished and vexed her.
"Why, if he came only to be silent, grave, and indifferent,"
said she, "did he come at all?"
She could settle it in no way that gave her pleasure.
"He could be still amiable, still pleasing, to my uncle and
aunt, when he was in town and why not to me? If he fears me,
why come hither? If he no longer cares for me, why silent?
Teasing, teasing, man I will think no more about him."
Her resolution was for a short time involuntarily kept by
the approach of her sister, who joined her with a cheerful
look, which showed her better satisfied with their visitors,
than Elizabeth.
"Now," said she, "that this first meeting is over, I feel
perfectly easy. I know my own strength, and I shall never be
embarrassed again by his coming. I am glad he dines here on
Tuesday. It will then be publicly seen that, on both sides,
we meet only as common and indifferent acquaintance."
"Yes, very indifferent indeed," said Elizabeth, laughingly.
"Oh, Jane, take care."
"My dear Lizzy, you cannot think me so weak, as to be in danger
now?"
"I think you are in very great danger of making him as much
in love with you as ever."
They did not see the gentlemen again till Tuesday and
Mrs. Bennet, in the meanwhile, was giving way to all the
happy schemes, which the good humour and common politeness
of Bingley, in half an hour's visit, had revived.
On Tuesday there was a large party assembled at Longbourn
and the two who were most anxiously expected, to the credit of
their punctuality as sportsmen, were in very good time. When
they repaired to the diningroom, Elizabeth eagerly watched to
see whether Bingley would take the place, which, in all their
former parties, had belonged to him, by her sister. Her
prudent mother, occupied by the same ideas, forbore to invite
him to sit by herself. On entering the room, he seemed to
hesitate but Jane happened to look round, and happened to
smile it was decided. He placed himself by her.
Elizabeth, with a triumphant sensation, looked towards his
friend. He bore it with noble indifference, and she would have
imagined that Bingley had received his sanction to be happy,
had she not seen his eyes likewise turned towards Mr. Darcy,
with an expression of halflaughing alarm.
His behaviour to her sister was such, during dinner time, as
showed an admiration of her, which, though more guarded than
formerly, persuaded Elizabeth, that if left wholly to himself,
Jane's happiness, and his own, would be speedily secured.
Though she dared not depend upon the consequence, she yet
received pleasure from observing his behaviour. It gave her
all the animation that her spirits could boast for she was in
no cheerful humour. Mr. Darcy was almost as far from her as
the table could divide them. He was on one side of her mother.
She knew how little such a situation would give pleasure to
either, or make either appear to advantage. She was not near
enough to hear any of their discourse, but she could see how
seldom they spoke to each other, and how formal and cold was
their manner whenever they did. Her mother's ungraciousness,
made the sense of what they owed him more painful to Elizabeth's
mind and she would, at times, have given anything to be
privileged to tell him that his kindness was neither unknown
nor unfelt by the whole of the family.
She was in hopes that the evening would afford some opportunity
of bringing them together that the whole of the visit would
not pass away without enabling them to enter into something
more of conversation than the mere ceremonious salutation
attending his entrance. Anxious and uneasy, the period which
passed in the drawingroom, before the gentlemen came, was
wearisome and dull to a degree that almost made her uncivil.
She looked forward to their entrance as the point on which all
her chance of pleasure for the evening must depend.
"If he does not come to me, then," said she, "I shall give
him up for ever."
The gentlemen came and she thought he looked as if he would
have answered her hopes but, alas the ladies had crowded
round the table, where Miss Bennet was making tea, and
Elizabeth pouring out the coffee, in so close a confederacy
that there was not a single vacancy near her which would admit
of a chair. And on the gentlemen's approaching, one of the
girls moved closer to her than ever, and said, in a whisper
"The men shan't come and part us, I am determined. We want
none of them do we?"
Darcy had walked away to another part of the room. She
followed him with her eyes, envied everyone to whom he spoke,
had scarcely patience enough to help anybody to coffee and
then was enraged against herself for being so silly
"A man who has once been refused How could I ever be foolish
enough to expect a renewal of his love? Is there one among the
sex, who would not protest against such a weakness as a second
proposal to the same woman? There is no indignity so abhorrent
to their feelings"
She was a little revived, however, by his bringing back his
coffee cup himself and she seized the opportunity of saying
"Is your sister at Pemberley still?"
"Yes, she will remain there till Christmas."
"And quite alone? Have all her friends left her?"
"Mrs. Annesley is with her. The others have been gone on to
Scarborough, these three weeks."
She could think of nothing more to say but if he wished to
converse with her, he might have better success. He stood by
her, however, for some minutes, in silence and, at last, on
the young lady's whispering to Elizabeth again, he walked away.
When the teathings were removed, and the cardtables placed,
the ladies all rose, and Elizabeth was then hoping to be soon
joined by him, when all her views were overthrown by seeing him
fall a victim to her mother's rapacity for whist players, and
in a few moments after seated with the rest of the party. She
now lost every expectation of pleasure. They were confined for
the evening at different tables, and she had nothing to hope,
but that his eyes were so often turned towards her side of the
room, as to make him play as unsuccessfully as herself.
Mrs. Bennet had designed to keep the two Netherfield gentlemen
to supper but their carriage was unluckily ordered before any
of the others, and she had no opportunity of detaining them.
"Well girls," said she, as soon as they were left to themselves,
"What say you to the day? I think every thing has passed off
uncommonly well, I assure you. The dinner was as well dressed
as any I ever saw. The venison was roasted to a turnand
everybody said they never saw so fat a haunch. The soup was
fifty times better than what we had at the Lucases' last week
and even Mr. Darcy acknowledged, that the partridges were
remarkably well done and I suppose he has two or three French
cooks at least. And, my dear Jane, I never saw you look in
greater beauty. Mrs. Long said so too, for I asked her whether
you did not. And what do you think she said besides? 'Ah Mrs.
Bennet, we shall have her at Netherfield at last.' She did
indeed. I do think Mrs. Long is as good a creature as ever
livedand her nieces are very pretty behaved girls, and not
at all handsome I like them prodigiously."
Mrs. Bennet, in short, was in very great spirits she had seen
enough of Bingley's behaviour to Jane, to be convinced that she
would get him at last and her expectations of advantage to her
family, when in a happy humour, were so far beyond reason, that
she was quite disappointed at not seeing him there again the
next day, to make his proposals.
"It has been a very agreeable day," said Miss Bennet to
Elizabeth. "The party seemed so well selected, so suitable
one with the other. I hope we may often meet again."
Elizabeth smiled.
"Lizzy, you must not do so. You must not suspect me. It
mortifies me. I assure you that I have now learnt to enjoy
his conversation as an agreeable and sensible young man,
without having a wish beyond it. I am perfectly satisfied,
from what his manners now are, that he never had any design
of engaging my affection. It is only that he is blessed
with greater sweetness of address, and a stronger desire of
generally pleasing, than any other man."
"You are very cruel," said her sister, "you will not let me
smile, and are provoking me to it every moment."
"How hard it is in some cases to be believed"
"And how impossible in others"
"But why should you wish to persuade me that I feel more than I
acknowledge?"
"That is a question which I hardly know how to answer. We all
love to instruct, though we can teach only what is not worth
knowing. Forgive me and if you persist in indifference, do
not make me your confidante."
Chapter 
A few days after this visit, Mr. Bingley called again, and
alone. His friend had left him that morning for London, but
was to return home in ten days time. He sat with them above an
hour, and was in remarkably good spirits. Mrs. Bennet invited
him to dine with them but, with many expressions of concern,
he confessed himself engaged elsewhere.
"Next time you call," said she, "I hope we shall be more
lucky."
He should be particularly happy at any time, etc. etc. and if
she would give him leave, would take an early opportunity of
waiting on them.
"Can you come tomorrow?"
Yes, he had no engagement at all for tomorrow and her
invitation was accepted with alacrity.
He came, and in such very good time that the ladies were none
of them dressed. In ran Mrs. Bennet to her daughter's room, in
her dressing gown, and with her hair half finished, crying out
"My dear Jane, make haste and hurry down. He is comeMr.
Bingley is come. He is, indeed. Make haste, make haste.
Here, Sarah, come to Miss Bennet this moment, and help her
on with her gown. Never mind Miss Lizzy's hair."
"We will be down as soon as we can," said Jane "but I dare say
Kitty is forwarder than either of us, for she went up stairs
half an hour ago."
"Oh hang Kitty what has she to do with it? Come be quick,
be quick Where is your sash, my dear?"
But when her mother was gone, Jane would not be prevailed on to
go down without one of her sisters.
The same anxiety to get them by themselves was visible again
in the evening. After tea, Mr. Bennet retired to the library,
as was his custom, and Mary went up stairs to her instrument.
Two obstacles of the five being thus removed, Mrs. Bennet
sat looking and winking at Elizabeth and Catherine for a
considerable time, without making any impression on them.
Elizabeth would not observe her and when at last Kitty did,
she very innocently said, "What is the matter mamma? What do
you keep winking at me for? What am I to do?"
"Nothing child, nothing. I did not wink at you." She then sat
still five minutes longer but unable to waste such a precious
occasion, she suddenly got up, and saying to Kitty, "Come here,
my love, I want to speak to you," took her out of the room.
Jane instantly gave a look at Elizabeth which spoke her
distress at such premeditation, and her entreaty that she
would not give in to it. In a few minutes, Mrs. Bennet
halfopened the door and called out
"Lizzy, my dear, I want to speak with you."
Elizabeth was forced to go.
"We may as well leave them by themselves you know" said her
mother, as soon as she was in the hall. "Kitty and I are going
upstairs to sit in my dressingroom."
Elizabeth made no attempt to reason with her mother, but
remained quietly in the hall, till she and Kitty were out of
sight, then returned into the drawingroom.
Mrs. Bennet's schemes for this day were ineffectual. Bingley
was every thing that was charming, except the professed lover
of her daughter. His ease and cheerfulness rendered him a
most agreeable addition to their evening party and he bore
with the illjudged officiousness of the mother, and heard all
her silly remarks with a forbearance and command of countenance
particularly grateful to the daughter.
He scarcely needed an invitation to stay supper and before he
went away, an engagement was formed, chiefly through his own
and Mrs. Bennet's means, for his coming next morning to shoot
with her husband.
After this day, Jane said no more of her indifference.
Not a word passed between the sisters concerning Bingley
but Elizabeth went to bed in the happy belief that all must
speedily be concluded, unless Mr. Darcy returned within the
stated time. Seriously, however, she felt tolerably persuaded
that all this must have taken place with that gentleman's
concurrence.
Bingley was punctual to his appointment and he and Mr. Bennet
spent the morning together, as had been agreed on. The latter
was much more agreeable than his companion expected. There was
nothing of presumption or folly in Bingley that could provoke
his ridicule, or disgust him into silence and he was more
communicative, and less eccentric, than the other had ever seen
him. Bingley of course returned with him to dinner and in the
evening Mrs. Bennet's invention was again at work to get every
body away from him and her daughter. Elizabeth, who had a
letter to write, went into the breakfast room for that purpose
soon after tea for as the others were all going to sit down to
cards, she could not be wanted to counteract her mother's
schemes.
But on returning to the drawingroom, when her letter was
finished, she saw, to her infinite surprise, there was
reason to fear that her mother had been too ingenious for
her. On opening the door, she perceived her sister and
Bingley standing together over the hearth, as if engaged in
earnest conversation and had this led to no suspicion, the
faces of both, as they hastily turned round and moved away
from each other, would have told it all. Their situation
was awkward enough but her's she thought was still worse.
Not a syllable was uttered by either and Elizabeth was on
the point of going away again, when Bingley, who as well as
the other had sat down, suddenly rose, and whispering a few
words to her sister, ran out of the room.
Jane could have no reserves from Elizabeth, where confidence
would give pleasure and instantly embracing her, acknowledged,
with the liveliest emotion, that she was the happiest creature
in the world.
"'Tis too much" she added, "by far too much. I do not
deserve it. Oh why is not everybody as happy?"
Elizabeth's congratulations were given with a sincerity, a
warmth, a delight, which words could but poorly express. Every
sentence of kindness was a fresh source of happiness to Jane.
But she would not allow herself to stay with her sister, or say
half that remained to be said for the present.
"I must go instantly to my mother" she cried. "I would not on
any account trifle with her affectionate solicitude or allow
her to hear it from anyone but myself. He is gone to my
father already. Oh Lizzy, to know that what I have to relate
will give such pleasure to all my dear family how shall I
bear so much happiness"
She then hastened away to her mother, who had purposely broken
up the card party, and was sitting up stairs with Kitty.
Elizabeth, who was left by herself, now smiled at the rapidity
and ease with which an affair was finally settled, that had
given them so many previous months of suspense and vexation.
"And this," said she, "is the end of all his friend's anxious
circumspection of all his sister's falsehood and contrivance
the happiest, wisest, most reasonable end"
In a few minutes she was joined by Bingley, whose conference
with her father had been short and to the purpose.
"Where is your sister?" said he hastily, as he opened the door.
"With my mother up stairs. She will be down in a moment,
I dare say."
He then shut the door, and, coming up to her, claimed the good
wishes and affection of a sister. Elizabeth honestly and
heartily expressed her delight in the prospect of their
relationship. They shook hands with great cordiality and
then, till her sister came down, she had to listen to all he
had to say of his own happiness, and of Jane's perfections
and in spite of his being a lover, Elizabeth really believed
all his expectations of felicity to be rationally founded,
because they had for basis the excellent understanding, and
superexcellent disposition of Jane, and a general similarity
of feeling and taste between her and himself.
It was an evening of no common delight to them all the
satisfaction of Miss Bennet's mind gave a glow of such sweet
animation to her face, as made her look handsomer than ever.
Kitty simpered and smiled, and hoped her turn was coming soon.
Mrs. Bennet could not give her consent or speak her approbation
in terms warm enough to satisfy her feelings, though she talked
to Bingley of nothing else for half an hour and when Mr.
Bennet joined them at supper, his voice and manner plainly
showed how really happy he was.
Not a word, however, passed his lips in allusion to it, till
their visitor took his leave for the night but as soon as he
was gone, he turned to his daughter, and said
"Jane, I congratulate you. You will be a very happy woman."
Jane went to him instantly, kissed him, and thanked him for his
goodness.
"You are a good girl" he replied, "and I have great pleasure
in thinking you will be so happily settled. I have not a doubt
of your doing very well together. Your tempers are by no means
unlike. You are each of you so complying, that nothing will
ever be resolved on so easy, that every servant will cheat
you and so generous, that you will always exceed your income."
"I hope not so. Imprudence or thoughtlessness in money matters
would be unpardonable in me."
"Exceed their income My dear Mr. Bennet," cried his wife,
"what are you talking of? Why, he has four or five thousand a
year, and very likely more." Then addressing her daughter,
"Oh my dear, dear Jane, I am so happy I am sure I shan't
get a wink of sleep all night. I knew how it would be. I
always said it must be so, at last. I was sure you could not
be so beautiful for nothing I remember, as soon as ever I saw
him, when he first came into Hertfordshire last year, I thought
how likely it was that you should come together. Oh he is
the handsomest young man that ever was seen"
Wickham, Lydia, were all forgotten. Jane was beyond competition
her favourite child. At that moment, she cared for no other. Her
younger sisters soon began to make interest with her for objects
of happiness which she might in future be able to dispense.
Mary petitioned for the use of the library at Netherfield and
Kitty begged very hard for a few balls there every winter.
Bingley, from this time, was of course a daily visitor at
Longbourn coming frequently before breakfast, and always
remaining till after supper unless when some barbarous
neighbour, who could not be enough detested, had given him
an invitation to dinner which he thought himself obliged to
accept.
Elizabeth had now but little time for conversation with her
sister for while he was present, Jane had no attention to
bestow on anyone else but she found herself considerably
useful to both of them in those hours of separation that must
sometimes occur. In the absence of Jane, he always attached
himself to Elizabeth, for the pleasure of talking of her and
when Bingley was gone, Jane constantly sought the same means
of relief.
"He has made me so happy," said she, one evening, "by telling
me that he was totally ignorant of my being in town last
spring I had not believed it possible."
"I suspected as much," replied Elizabeth. "But how did he
account for it?"
"It must have been his sister's doing. They were certainly no
friends to his acquaintance with me, which I cannot wonder at,
since he might have chosen so much more advantageously in many
respects. But when they see, as I trust they will, that their
brother is happy with me, they will learn to be contented, and
we shall be on good terms again though we can never be what we
once were to each other."
"That is the most unforgiving speech," said Elizabeth, "that
I ever heard you utter. Good girl It would vex me, indeed,
to see you again the dupe of Miss Bingley's pretended regard."
"Would you believe it, Lizzy, that when he went to town last
November, he really loved me, and nothing but a persuasion of
my being indifferent would have prevented his coming down
again"
"He made a little mistake to be sure but it is to the credit
of his modesty."
This naturally introduced a panegyric from Jane on his
diffidence, and the little value he put on his own good
qualities. Elizabeth was pleased to find that he had not
betrayed the interference of his friend for, though Jane had
the most generous and forgiving heart in the world, she knew
it was a circumstance which must prejudice her against him.
"I am certainly the most fortunate creature that ever existed"
cried Jane. "Oh Lizzy, why am I thus singled from my family,
and blessed above them all If I could but see you as happy
If there were but such another man for you"
"If you were to give me forty such men, I never could be so
happy as you. Till I have your disposition, your goodness,
I never can have your happiness. No, no, let me shift for
myself and, perhaps, if I have very good luck, I may meet
with another Mr. Collins in time."
The situation of affairs in the Longbourn family could not be
long a secret. Mrs. Bennet was privileged to whisper it to
Mrs. Phillips, and she ventured, without any permission, to do
the same by all her neighbours in Meryton.
The Bennets were speedily pronounced to be the luckiest family
in the world, though only a few weeks before, when Lydia had
first run away, they had been generally proved to be marked out
for misfortune.
Chapter 
One morning, about a week after Bingley's engagement with
Jane had been formed, as he and the females of the family
were sitting together in the diningroom, their attention
was suddenly drawn to the window, by the sound of a carriage
and they perceived a chaise and four driving up the lawn.
It was too early in the morning for visitors, and besides, the
equipage did not answer to that of any of their neighbours.
The horses were post and neither the carriage, nor the livery
of the servant who preceded it, were familiar to them. As it
was certain, however, that somebody was coming, Bingley
instantly prevailed on Miss Bennet to avoid the confinement of
such an intrusion, and walk away with him into the shrubbery.
They both set off, and the conjectures of the remaining three
continued, though with little satisfaction, till the door was
thrown open and their visitor entered. It was Lady Catherine
de Bourgh.
They were of course all intending to be surprised but their
astonishment was beyond their expectation and on the part of
Mrs. Bennet and Kitty, though she was perfectly unknown to
them, even inferior to what Elizabeth felt.
She entered the room with an air more than usually ungracious,
made no other reply to Elizabeth's salutation than a slight
inclination of the head, and sat down without saying a word.
Elizabeth had mentioned her name to her mother on her ladyship's
entrance, though no request of introduction had been made.
Mrs. Bennet, all amazement, though flattered by having a
guest of such high importance, received her with the utmost
politeness. After sitting for a moment in silence, she said
very stiffly to Elizabeth,
"I hope you are well, Miss Bennet. That lady, I suppose,
is your mother."
Elizabeth replied very concisely that she was.
"And that I suppose is one of your sisters."
"Yes, madam," said Mrs. Bennet, delighted to speak to a Lady
Catherine. "She is my youngest girl but one. My youngest of
all is lately married, and my eldest is somewhere about the
grounds, walking with a young man who, I believe, will soon
become a part of the family."
"You have a very small park here," returned Lady Catherine
after a short silence.
"It is nothing in comparison of Rosings, my lady, I dare say
but I assure you it is much larger than Sir William Lucas's."
"This must be a most inconvenient sitting room for the evening,
in summer the windows are full west."
Mrs. Bennet assured her that they never sat there after dinner,
and then added
"May I take the liberty of asking your ladyship whether you
left Mr. and Mrs. Collins well."
"Yes, very well. I saw them the night before last."
Elizabeth now expected that she would produce a letter for
her from Charlotte, as it seemed the only probable motive for
her calling. But no letter appeared, and she was completely
puzzled.
Mrs. Bennet, with great civility, begged her ladyship to take
some refreshment but Lady Catherine very resolutely, and not
very politely, declined eating anything and then, rising up,
said to Elizabeth,
"Miss Bennet, there seemed to be a prettyish kind of a little
wilderness on one side of your lawn. I should be glad to take
a turn in it, if you will favour me with your company."
"Go, my dear," cried her mother, "and show her ladyship about
the different walks. I think she will be pleased with the
hermitage."
Elizabeth obeyed, and running into her own room for her
parasol, attended her noble guest downstairs. As they passed
through the hall, Lady Catherine opened the doors into the
diningparlour and drawingroom, and pronouncing them, after
a short survey, to be decent looking rooms, walked on.
Her carriage remained at the door, and Elizabeth saw that her
waitingwoman was in it. They proceeded in silence along the
gravel walk that led to the copse Elizabeth was determined to
make no effort for conversation with a woman who was now more
than usually insolent and disagreeable.
"How could I ever think her like her nephew?" said she, as she
looked in her face.
As soon as they entered the copse, Lady Catherine began in the
following manner
"You can be at no loss, Miss Bennet, to understand the reason
of my journey hither. Your own heart, your own conscience,
must tell you why I come."
Elizabeth looked with unaffected astonishment.
"Indeed, you are mistaken, Madam. I have not been at all able
to account for the honour of seeing you here."
"Miss Bennet," replied her ladyship, in an angry tone, "you
ought to know, that I am not to be trifled with. But however
insincere you may choose to be, you shall not find me so.
My character has ever been celebrated for its sincerity and
frankness, and in a cause of such moment as this, I shall
certainly not depart from it. A report of a most alarming
nature reached me two days ago. I was told that not only your
sister was on the point of being most advantageously married,
but that you, that Miss Elizabeth Bennet, would, in all
likelihood, be soon afterwards united to my nephew, my own
nephew, Mr. Darcy. Though I know it must be a scandalous
falsehood, though I would not injure him so much as to suppose
the truth of it possible, I instantly resolved on setting off
for this place, that I might make my sentiments known to you."
"If you believed it impossible to be true," said Elizabeth,
colouring with astonishment and disdain, "I wonder you took the
trouble of coming so far. What could your ladyship propose by
it?"
"At once to insist upon having such a report universally
contradicted."
"Your coming to Longbourn, to see me and my family," said
Elizabeth coolly, "will be rather a confirmation of it if,
indeed, such a report is in existence."
"If Do you then pretend to be ignorant of it? Has it not
been industriously circulated by yourselves? Do you not know
that such a report is spread abroad?"
"I never heard that it was."
"And can you likewise declare, that there is no foundation
for it?"
"I do not pretend to possess equal frankness with your ladyship.
You may ask questions which I shall not choose to answer."
"This is not to be borne. Miss Bennet, I insist on being
satisfied. Has he, has my nephew, made you an offer of
marriage?"
"Your ladyship has declared it to be impossible."
"It ought to be so it must be so, while he retains the use of
his reason. But your arts and allurements may, in a moment
of infatuation, have made him forget what he owes to himself
and to all his family. You may have drawn him in."
"If I have, I shall be the last person to confess it."
"Miss Bennet, do you know who I am? I have not been accustomed
to such language as this. I am almost the nearest relation he has
in the world, and am entitled to know all his dearest concerns."
"But you are not entitled to know mine nor will such behaviour
as this, ever induce me to be explicit."
"Let me be rightly understood. This match, to which you have
the presumption to aspire, can never take place. No, never.
Mr. Darcy is engaged to my daughter. Now what have you to say?"
"Only this that if he is so, you can have no reason to suppose
he will make an offer to me."
Lady Catherine hesitated for a moment, and then replied
"The engagement between them is of a peculiar kind. From their
infancy, they have been intended for each other. It was the
favourite wish of his mother, as well as of her's. While in
their cradles, we planned the union and now, at the moment
when the wishes of both sisters would be accomplished in their
marriage, to be prevented by a young woman of inferior birth,
of no importance in the world, and wholly unallied to the
family Do you pay no regard to the wishes of his friends?
To his tacit engagement with Miss de Bourgh? Are you lost to
every feeling of propriety and delicacy? Have you not heard
me say that from his earliest hours he was destined for his
cousin?"
"Yes, and I had heard it before. But what is that to me? If
there is no other objection to my marrying your nephew, I shall
certainly not be kept from it by knowing that his mother and
aunt wished him to marry Miss de Bourgh. You both did as much
as you could in planning the marriage. Its completion depended
on others. If Mr. Darcy is neither by honour nor inclination
confined to his cousin, why is not he to make another choice?
And if I am that choice, why may not I accept him?"
"Because honour, decorum, prudence, nay, interest, forbid it.
Yes, Miss Bennet, interest for do not expect to be noticed
by his family or friends, if you wilfully act against the
inclinations of all. You will be censured, slighted, and
despised, by everyone connected with him. Your alliance will
be a disgrace your name will never even be mentioned by any
of us."
"These are heavy misfortunes," replied Elizabeth. "But the
wife of Mr. Darcy must have such extraordinary sources of
happiness necessarily attached to her situation, that she
could, upon the whole, have no cause to repine."
"Obstinate, headstrong girl I am ashamed of you Is this
your gratitude for my attentions to you last spring? Is
nothing due to me on that score? Let us sit down. You are to
understand, Miss Bennet, that I came here with the determined
resolution of carrying my purpose nor will I be dissuaded
from it. I have not been used to submit to any person's whims.
I have not been in the habit of brooking disappointment."
"That will make your ladyship's situation at present more
pitiable but it will have no effect on me."
"I will not be interrupted. Hear me in silence. My daughter
and my nephew are formed for each other. They are descended,
on the maternal side, from the same noble line and, on the
father's, from respectable, honourable, and ancientthough
untitledfamilies. Their fortune on both sides is splendid.
They are destined for each other by the voice of every member
of their respective houses and what is to divide them?
The upstart pretensions of a young woman without family,
connections, or fortune. Is this to be endured But it
must not, shall not be. If you were sensible of your own
good, you would not wish to quit the sphere in which you
have been brought up."
"In marrying your nephew, I should not consider myself as
quitting that sphere. He is a gentleman I am a gentleman's
daughter so far we are equal."
"True. You are a gentleman's daughter. But who was your
mother? Who are your uncles and aunts? Do not imagine me
ignorant of their condition."
"Whatever my connections may be," said Elizabeth, "if your
nephew does not object to them, they can be nothing to you."
"Tell me once for all, are you engaged to him?"
Though Elizabeth would not, for the mere purpose of obliging
Lady Catherine, have answered this question, she could not but
say, after a moment's deliberation
"I am not."
Lady Catherine seemed pleased.
"And will you promise me, never to enter into such an engagement?"
"I will make no promise of the kind."
"Miss Bennet I am shocked and astonished. I expected to find a
more reasonable young woman. But do not deceive yourself into
a belief that I will ever recede. I shall not go away till you
have given me the assurance I require."
"And I certainly never shall give it. I am not to be intimidated
into anything so wholly unreasonable. Your ladyship wants
Mr. Darcy to marry your daughter but would my giving you the
wishedfor promise make their marriage at all more probable?
Supposing him to be attached to me, would my refusing to accept
his hand make him wish to bestow it on his cousin? Allow me to
say, Lady Catherine, that the arguments with which you have
supported this extraordinary application have been as frivolous
as the application was illjudged. You have widely mistaken my
character, if you think I can be worked on by such persuasions
as these. How far your nephew might approve of your interference
in his affairs, I cannot tell but you have certainly no right
to concern yourself in mine. I must beg, therefore, to be
importuned no farther on the subject."
"Not so hasty, if you please. I have by no means done.
To all the objections I have already urged, I have still
another to add. I am no stranger to the particulars of your
youngest sister's infamous elopement. I know it all that
the young man's marrying her was a patchedup business, at the
expence of your father and uncles. And is such a girl to be
my nephew's sister? Is her husband, is the son of his late
father's steward, to be his brother? Heaven and earthof
what are you thinking? Are the shades of Pemberley to be
thus polluted?"
"You can now have nothing further to say," she resentfully
answered. "You have insulted me in every possible method.
I must beg to return to the house."
And she rose as she spoke. Lady Catherine rose also, and they
turned back. Her ladyship was highly incensed.
"You have no regard, then, for the honour and credit of my
nephew Unfeeling, selfish girl Do you not consider that
a connection with you must disgrace him in the eyes of
everybody?"
"Lady Catherine, I have nothing further to say. You know my
sentiments."
"You are then resolved to have him?"
"I have said no such thing. I am only resolved to act in that
manner, which will, in my own opinion, constitute my happiness,
without reference to you, or to any person so wholly unconnected
with me."
"It is well. You refuse, then, to oblige me. You refuse to
obey the claims of duty, honour, and gratitude. You are
determined to ruin him in the opinion of all his friends,
and make him the contempt of the world."
"Neither duty, nor honour, nor gratitude," replied Elizabeth,
"have any possible claim on me, in the present instance. No
principle of either would be violated by my marriage with
Mr. Darcy. And with regard to the resentment of his family, or
the indignation of the world, if the former were excited by his
marrying me, it would not give me one moment's concernand
the world in general would have too much sense to join in the
scorn."
"And this is your real opinion This is your final resolve
Very well. I shall now know how to act. Do not imagine, Miss
Bennet, that your ambition will ever be gratified. I came to
try you. I hoped to find you reasonable but, depend upon it,
I will carry my point."
In this manner Lady Catherine talked on, till they were at the
door of the carriage, when, turning hastily round, she added,
"I take no leave of you, Miss Bennet. I send no compliments to
your mother. You deserve no such attention. I am most
seriously displeased."
Elizabeth made no answer and without attempting to persuade
her ladyship to return into the house, walked quietly into it
herself. She heard the carriage drive away as she proceeded
up stairs. Her mother impatiently met her at the door of the
dressingroom, to ask why Lady Catherine would not come in
again and rest herself.
"She did not choose it," said her daughter, "she would go."
"She is a very finelooking woman and her calling here was
prodigiously civil for she only came, I suppose, to tell us
the Collinses were well. She is on her road somewhere, I dare
say, and so, passing through Meryton, thought she might as well
call on you. I suppose she had nothing particular to say to
you, Lizzy?"
Elizabeth was forced to give into a little falsehood here
for to acknowledge the substance of their conversation was
impossible.
Chapter 
The discomposure of spirits which this extraordinary visit
threw Elizabeth into, could not be easily overcome nor
could she, for many hours, learn to think of it less than
incessantly. Lady Catherine, it appeared, had actually taken
the trouble of this journey from Rosings, for the sole purpose
of breaking off her supposed engagement with Mr. Darcy. It was
a rational scheme, to be sure but from what the report of
their engagement could originate, Elizabeth was at a loss to
imagine till she recollected that his being the intimate
friend of Bingley, and her being the sister of Jane, was
enough, at a time when the expectation of one wedding made
everybody eager for another, to supply the idea. She had not
herself forgotten to feel that the marriage of her sister must
bring them more frequently together. And her neighbours at
Lucas Lodge, therefore for through their communication with
the Collinses, the report, she concluded, had reached lady
Catherine, had only set that down as almost certain and
immediate, which she had looked forward to as possible at
some future time.
In revolving Lady Catherine's expressions, however, she could
not help feeling some uneasiness as to the possible consequence
of her persisting in this interference. From what she had said
of her resolution to prevent their marriage, it occurred to
Elizabeth that she must meditate an application to her nephew
and how he might take a similar representation of the evils
attached to a connection with her, she dared not pronounce.
She knew not the exact degree of his affection for his aunt, or
his dependence on her judgment, but it was natural to suppose
that he thought much higher of her ladyship than she could
do and it was certain that, in enumerating the miseries of a
marriage with one, whose immediate connections were so unequal
to his own, his aunt would address him on his weakest side.
With his notions of dignity, he would probably feel that the
arguments, which to Elizabeth had appeared weak and ridiculous,
contained much good sense and solid reasoning.
If he had been wavering before as to what he should do, which
had often seemed likely, the advice and entreaty of so near a
relation might settle every doubt, and determine him at once to
be as happy as dignity unblemished could make him. In that
case he would return no more. Lady Catherine might see him in
her way through town and his engagement to Bingley of coming
again to Netherfield must give way.
"If, therefore, an excuse for not keeping his promise should
come to his friend within a few days," she added, "I shall
know how to understand it. I shall then give over every
expectation, every wish of his constancy. If he is satisfied
with only regretting me, when he might have obtained my
affections and hand, I shall soon cease to regret him at all."
The surprise of the rest of the family, on hearing who their
visitor had been, was very great but they obligingly satisfied
it, with the same kind of supposition which had appeased
Mrs. Bennet's curiosity and Elizabeth was spared from much
teasing on the subject.
The next morning, as she was going downstairs, she was met by
her father, who came out of his library with a letter in his
hand.
"Lizzy," said he, "I was going to look for you come into my
room."
She followed him thither and her curiosity to know what he
had to tell her was heightened by the supposition of its being
in some manner connected with the letter he held. It suddenly
struck her that it might be from Lady Catherine and she
anticipated with dismay all the consequent explanations.
She followed her father to the fire place, and they both sat
down. He then said,
"I have received a letter this morning that has astonished me
exceedingly. As it principally concerns yourself, you ought
to know its contents. I did not know before, that I had two
daughters on the brink of matrimony. Let me congratulate you
on a very important conquest."
The colour now rushed into Elizabeth's cheeks in the instantaneous
conviction of its being a letter from the nephew, instead of the
aunt and she was undetermined whether most to be pleased that
he explained himself at all, or offended that his letter was not
rather addressed to herself when her father continued
"You look conscious. Young ladies have great penetration in
such matters as these but I think I may defy even your
sagacity, to discover the name of your admirer. This letter
is from Mr. Collins."
"From Mr. Collins and what can he have to say?"
"Something very much to the purpose of course. He begins with
congratulations on the approaching nuptials of my eldest daughter,
of which, it seems, he has been told by some of the goodnatured,
gossiping Lucases. I shall not sport with your impatience, by
reading what he says on that point. What relates to yourself, is
as follows 'Having thus offered you the sincere congratulations
of Mrs. Collins and myself on this happy event, let me now add
a short hint on the subject of another of which we have been
advertised by the same authority. Your daughter Elizabeth, it is
presumed, will not long bear the name of Bennet, after her elder
sister has resigned it, and the chosen partner of her fate may be
reasonably looked up to as one of the most illustrious personages
in this land.'
"Can you possibly guess, Lizzy, who is meant by this?" 'This
young gentleman is blessed, in a peculiar way, with every thing
the heart of mortal can most desire,splendid property,
noble kindred, and extensive patronage. Yet in spite of all
these temptations, let me warn my cousin Elizabeth, and
yourself, of what evils you may incur by a precipitate closure
with this gentleman's proposals, which, of course, you will be
inclined to take immediate advantage of.'
"Have you any idea, Lizzy, who this gentleman is? But now it
comes out
"'My motive for cautioning you is as follows. We have reason to
imagine that his aunt, Lady Catherine de Bourgh, does not look
on the match with a friendly eye.'
"Mr. Darcy, you see, is the man Now, Lizzy, I think I
have surprised you. Could he, or the Lucases, have pitched
on any man within the circle of our acquaintance, whose name
would have given the lie more effectually to what they related?
Mr. Darcy, who never looks at any woman but to see a blemish,
and who probably never looked at you in his life It is
admirable"
Elizabeth tried to join in her father's pleasantry, but could
only force one most reluctant smile. Never had his wit been
directed in a manner so little agreeable to her.
"Are you not diverted?"
"Oh yes. Pray read on."
"'After mentioning the likelihood of this marriage to her ladyship
last night, she immediately, with her usual condescension,
expressed what she felt on the occasion when it became apparent,
that on the score of some family objections on the part of my
cousin, she would never give her consent to what she termed so
disgraceful a match. I thought it my duty to give the speediest
intelligence of this to my cousin, that she and her noble
admirer may be aware of what they are about, and not run
hastily into a marriage which has not been properly sanctioned.'
Mr. Collins moreover adds, 'I am truly rejoiced that my cousin
Lydia's sad business has been so well hushed up, and am only
concerned that their living together before the marriage took
place should be so generally known. I must not, however,
neglect the duties of my station, or refrain from declaring my
amazement at hearing that you received the young couple into
your house as soon as they were married. It was an encouragement
of vice and had I been the rector of Longbourn, I should very
strenuously have opposed it. You ought certainly to forgive them,
as a Christian, but never to admit them in your sight, or allow
their names to be mentioned in your hearing.' That is his notion
of Christian forgiveness The rest of his letter is only about
his dear Charlotte's situation, and his expectation of a young
olivebranch. But, Lizzy, you look as if you did not enjoy it.
You are not going to be missish, I hope, and pretend to be
affronted at an idle report. For what do we live, but to make
sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?"
"Oh" cried Elizabeth, "I am excessively diverted. But it is
so strange"
"Yesthat is what makes it amusing. Had they fixed on any other
man it would have been nothing but his perfect indifference,
and your pointed dislike, make it so delightfully absurd Much
as I abominate writing, I would not give up Mr. Collins's
correspondence for any consideration. Nay, when I read a letter
of his, I cannot help giving him the preference even over Wickham,
much as I value the impudence and hypocrisy of my soninlaw.
And pray, Lizzy, what said Lady Catherine about this report?
Did she call to refuse her consent?"
To this question his daughter replied only with a laugh and
as it had been asked without the least suspicion, she was not
distressed by his repeating it. Elizabeth had never been
more at a loss to make her feelings appear what they were not.
It was necessary to laugh, when she would rather have cried.
Her father had most cruelly mortified her, by what he said of
Mr. Darcy's indifference, and she could do nothing but wonder
at such a want of penetration, or fear that perhaps, instead
of his seeing too little, she might have fancied too much.
Chapter 
Instead of receiving any such letter of excuse from his friend,
as Elizabeth half expected Mr. Bingley to do, he was able to
bring Darcy with him to Longbourn before many days had passed
after Lady Catherine's visit. The gentlemen arrived early
and, before Mrs. Bennet had time to tell him of their having
seen his aunt, of which her daughter sat in momentary dread,
Bingley, who wanted to be alone with Jane, proposed their
all walking out. It was agreed to. Mrs. Bennet was not in
the habit of walking Mary could never spare time but the
remaining five set off together. Bingley and Jane, however,
soon allowed the others to outstrip them. They lagged behind,
while Elizabeth, Kitty, and Darcy were to entertain each other.
Very little was said by either Kitty was too much afraid of
him to talk Elizabeth was secretly forming a desperate
resolution and perhaps he might be doing the same.
They walked towards the Lucases, because Kitty wished to call
upon Maria and as Elizabeth saw no occasion for making it a
general concern, when Kitty left them she went boldly on with
him alone. Now was the moment for her resolution to be
executed, and, while her courage was high, she immediately
said
"Mr. Darcy, I am a very selfish creature and, for the sake of
giving relief to my own feelings, care not how much I may be
wounding your's. I can no longer help thanking you for your
unexampled kindness to my poor sister. Ever since I have
known it, I have been most anxious to acknowledge to you how
gratefully I feel it. Were it known to the rest of my family,
I should not have merely my own gratitude to express."
"I am sorry, exceedingly sorry," replied Darcy, in a tone of
surprise and emotion, "that you have ever been informed of what
may, in a mistaken light, have given you uneasiness. I did not
think Mrs. Gardiner was so little to be trusted."
"You must not blame my aunt. Lydia's thoughtlessness first
betrayed to me that you had been concerned in the matter and,
of course, I could not rest till I knew the particulars. Let
me thank you again and again, in the name of all my family,
for that generous compassion which induced you to take so much
trouble, and bear so many mortifications, for the sake of
discovering them."
"If you will thank me," he replied, "let it be for yourself
alone. That the wish of giving happiness to you might add
force to the other inducements which led me on, I shall not
attempt to deny. But your family owe me nothing. Much as
I respect them, I believe I thought only of you."
Elizabeth was too much embarrassed to say a word. After a
short pause, her companion added, "You are too generous to
trifle with me. If your feelings are still what they were
last April, tell me so at once. My affections and wishes
are unchanged, but one word from you will silence me on this
subject for ever."
Elizabeth, feeling all the more than common awkwardness and
anxiety of his situation, now forced herself to speak and
immediately, though not very fluently, gave him to understand
that her sentiments had undergone so material a change, since
the period to which he alluded, as to make her receive with
gratitude and pleasure his present assurances. The happiness
which this reply produced, was such as he had probably never
felt before and he expressed himself on the occasion as
sensibly and as warmly as a man violently in love can be
supposed to do. Had Elizabeth been able to encounter his
eye, she might have seen how well the expression of heartfelt
delight, diffused over his face, became him but, though she
could not look, she could listen, and he told her of feelings,
which, in proving of what importance she was to him, made his
affection every moment more valuable.
They walked on, without knowing in what direction. There was
too much to be thought, and felt, and said, for attention to
any other objects. She soon learnt that they were indebted
for their present good understanding to the efforts of his
aunt, who did call on him in her return through London,
and there relate her journey to Longbourn, its motive, and
the substance of her conversation with Elizabeth dwelling
emphatically on every expression of the latter which, in her
ladyship's apprehension, peculiarly denoted her perverseness
and assurance in the belief that such a relation must assist
her endeavours to obtain that promise from her nephew which
she had refused to give. But, unluckily for her ladyship,
its effect had been exactly contrariwise.
"It taught me to hope," said he, "as I had scarcely ever allowed
myself to hope before. I knew enough of your disposition to
be certain that, had you been absolutely, irrevocably decided
against me, you would have acknowledged it to Lady Catherine,
frankly and openly."
Elizabeth coloured and laughed as she replied, "Yes, you know
enough of my frankness to believe me capable of that.
After abusing you so abominably to your face, I could have no
scruple in abusing you to all your relations."
"What did you say of me, that I did not deserve? For, though
your accusations were illfounded, formed on mistaken premises,
my behaviour to you at the time had merited the severest
reproof. It was unpardonable. I cannot think of it without
abhorrence."
"We will not quarrel for the greater share of blame annexed to
that evening," said Elizabeth. "The conduct of neither, if
strictly examined, will be irreproachable but since then, we
have both, I hope, improved in civility."
"I cannot be so easily reconciled to myself. The recollection
of what I then said, of my conduct, my manners, my expressions
during the whole of it, is now, and has been many months,
inexpressibly painful to me. Your reproof, so well applied, I
shall never forget 'had you behaved in a more gentlemanlike
manner.' Those were your words. You know not, you can
scarcely conceive, how they have tortured methough it was
some time, I confess, before I was reasonable enough to allow
their justice."
"I was certainly very far from expecting them to make so strong
an impression. I had not the smallest idea of their being ever
felt in such a way."
"I can easily believe it. You thought me then devoid of
every proper feeling, I am sure you did. The turn of your
countenance I shall never forget, as you said that I could
not have addressed you in any possible way that would induce
you to accept me."
"Oh do not repeat what I then said. These recollections
will not do at all. I assure you that I have long been most
heartily ashamed of it."
Darcy mentioned his letter. "Did it," said he, "did it soon
make you think better of me? Did you, on reading it, give any
credit to its contents?"
She explained what its effect on her had been, and how gradually
all her former prejudices had been removed.
"I knew," said he, "that what I wrote must give you pain,
but it was necessary. I hope you have destroyed the letter.
There was one part especially, the opening of it, which I
should dread your having the power of reading again. I can
remember some expressions which might justly make you hate me."
"The letter shall certainly be burnt, if you believe it
essential to the preservation of my regard but, though we have
both reason to think my opinions not entirely unalterable, they
are not, I hope, quite so easily changed as that implies."
"When I wrote that letter," replied Darcy, "I believed myself
perfectly calm and cool, but I am since convinced that it was
written in a dreadful bitterness of spirit."
"The letter, perhaps, began in bitterness, but it did not end
so. The adieu is charity itself. But think no more of the
letter. The feelings of the person who wrote, and the person
who received it, are now so widely different from what they
were then, that every unpleasant circumstance attending it
ought to be forgotten. You must learn some of my philosophy.
Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure."
"I cannot give you credit for any philosophy of the kind.
Your retrospections must be so totally void of reproach, that
the contentment arising from them is not of philosophy, but,
what is much better, of innocence. But with me, it is not
so. Painful recollections will intrude which cannot, which
ought not, to be repelled. I have been a selfish being all my
life, in practice, though not in principle. As a child I was
taught what was right, but I was not taught to correct my
temper. I was given good principles, but left to follow them
in pride and conceit. Unfortunately an only son for many
years an only child, I was spoilt by my parents, who, though
good themselves my father, particularly, all that was
benevolent and amiable, allowed, encouraged, almost taught me
to be selfish and overbearing to care for none beyond my own
family circle to think meanly of all the rest of the world
to wish at least to think meanly of their sense and worth
compared with my own. Such I was, from eight to eight and
twenty and such I might still have been but for you, dearest,
loveliest Elizabeth What do I not owe you You taught me a
lesson, hard indeed at first, but most advantageous. By you,
I was properly humbled. I came to you without a doubt of my
reception. You showed me how insufficient were all my
pretensions to please a woman worthy of being pleased."
"Had you then persuaded yourself that I should?"
"Indeed I had. What will you think of my vanity? I believed
you to be wishing, expecting my addresses."
"My manners must have been in fault, but not intentionally,
I assure you. I never meant to deceive you, but my spirits
might often lead me wrong. How you must have hated me after
that evening?"
"Hate you I was angry perhaps at first, but my anger soon
began to take a proper direction."
"I am almost afraid of asking what you thought of me, when we
met at Pemberley. You blamed me for coming?"
"No indeed I felt nothing but surprise."
"Your surprise could not be greater than mine in being
noticed by you. My conscience told me that I deserved no
extraordinary politeness, and I confess that I did not expect
to receive more than my due."
"My object then," replied Darcy, "was to show you, by every
civility in my power, that I was not so mean as to resent the
past and I hoped to obtain your forgiveness, to lessen your
ill opinion, by letting you see that your reproofs had been
attended to. How soon any other wishes introduced themselves
I can hardly tell, but I believe in about half an hour after
I had seen you."
He then told her of Georgiana's delight in her acquaintance,
and of her disappointment at its sudden interruption which
naturally leading to the cause of that interruption, she soon
learnt that his resolution of following her from Derbyshire in
quest of her sister had been formed before he quitted the inn,
and that his gravity and thoughtfulness there had arisen from
no other struggles than what such a purpose must comprehend.
She expressed her gratitude again, but it was too painful a
subject to each, to be dwelt on farther.
After walking several miles in a leisurely manner, and too busy
to know anything about it, they found at last, on examining
their watches, that it was time to be at home.
"What could become of Mr. Bingley and Jane" was a wonder
which introduced the discussion of their affairs. Darcy
was delighted with their engagement his friend had given
him the earliest information of it.
"I must ask whether you were surprised?" said Elizabeth.
"Not at all. When I went away, I felt that it would soon
happen."
"That is to say, you had given your permission. I guessed as
much." And though he exclaimed at the term, she found that it
had been pretty much the case.
"On the evening before my going to London," said he, "I made a
confession to him, which I believe I ought to have made long
ago. I told him of all that had occurred to make my former
interference in his affairs absurd and impertinent. His
surprise was great. He had never had the slightest suspicion.
I told him, moreover, that I believed myself mistaken in
supposing, as I had done, that your sister was indifferent to
him and as I could easily perceive that his attachment to her
was unabated, I felt no doubt of their happiness together."
Elizabeth could not help smiling at his easy manner of
directing his friend.
"Did you speak from your own observation," said she, "when
you told him that my sister loved him, or merely from my
information last spring?"
"From the former. I had narrowly observed her during the two
visits which I had lately made here and I was convinced of her
affection."
"And your assurance of it, I suppose, carried immediate
conviction to him."
"It did. Bingley is most unaffectedly modest. His diffidence
had prevented his depending on his own judgment in so anxious
a case, but his reliance on mine made every thing easy. I
was obliged to confess one thing, which for a time, and not
unjustly, offended him. I could not allow myself to conceal
that your sister had been in town three months last winter,
that I had known it, and purposely kept it from him. He was
angry. But his anger, I am persuaded, lasted no longer than
he remained in any doubt of your sister's sentiments. He has
heartily forgiven me now."
Elizabeth longed to observe that Mr. Bingley had been a most
delightful friend so easily guided that his worth was
invaluable but she checked herself. She remembered that he
had yet to learn to be laughed at, and it was rather too early
to begin. In anticipating the happiness of Bingley, which of
course was to be inferior only to his own, he continued the
conversation till they reached the house. In the hall they
parted.
Chapter 
"My dear Lizzy, where can you have been walking to?" was a
question which Elizabeth received from Jane as soon as she
entered their room, and from all the others when they sat down
to table. She had only to say in reply, that they had wandered
about, till she was beyond her own knowledge. She coloured as
she spoke but neither that, nor anything else, awakened a
suspicion of the truth.
The evening passed quietly, unmarked by anything extraordinary.
The acknowledged lovers talked and laughed, the unacknowledged
were silent. Darcy was not of a disposition in which happiness
overflows in mirth and Elizabeth, agitated and confused, rather
knew that she was happy than felt herself to be so for, besides
the immediate embarrassment, there were other evils before her.
She anticipated what would be felt in the family when her
situation became known she was aware that no one liked him but
Jane and even feared that with the others it was a dislike
which not all his fortune and consequence might do away.
At night she opened her heart to Jane. Though suspicion was
very far from Miss Bennet's general habits, she was absolutely
incredulous here.
"You are joking, Lizzy. This cannot beengaged to Mr. Darcy
No, no, you shall not deceive me. I know it to be impossible."
"This is a wretched beginning indeed My sole dependence was
on you and I am sure nobody else will believe me, if you do
not. Yet, indeed, I am in earnest. I speak nothing but the
truth. He still loves me, and we are engaged."
Jane looked at her doubtingly. "Oh, Lizzy it cannot be.
I know how much you dislike him."
"You know nothing of the matter. That is all to be forgot.
Perhaps I did not always love him so well as I do now. But in
such cases as these, a good memory is unpardonable. This is
the last time I shall ever remember it myself."
Miss Bennet still looked all amazement. Elizabeth again, and
more seriously assured her of its truth.
"Good Heaven can it be really so Yet now I must believe
you," cried Jane. "My dear, dear Lizzy, I wouldI do
congratulate youbut are you certain? forgive the question
are you quite certain that you can be happy with him?"
"There can be no doubt of that. It is settled between us
already, that we are to be the happiest couple in the world.
But are you pleased, Jane? Shall you like to have such a
brother?"
"Very, very much. Nothing could give either Bingley or
myself more delight. But we considered it, we talked of it as
impossible. And do you really love him quite well enough?
Oh, Lizzy do anything rather than marry without affection.
Are you quite sure that you feel what you ought to do?"
"Oh, yes You will only think I feel more than I ought to
do, when I tell you all."
"What do you mean?"
"Why, I must confess that I love him better than I do Bingley.
I am afraid you will be angry."
"My dearest sister, now be serious. I want to talk very
seriously. Let me know every thing that I am to know, without
delay. Will you tell me how long you have loved him?"
"It has been coming on so gradually, that I hardly know when it
began. But I believe I must date it from my first seeing his
beautiful grounds at Pemberley."
Another entreaty that she would be serious, however, produced
the desired effect and she soon satisfied Jane by her solemn
assurances of attachment. When convinced on that article, Miss
Bennet had nothing further to wish.
"Now I am quite happy," said she, "for you will be as happy as
myself. I always had a value for him. Were it for nothing but
his love of you, I must always have esteemed him but now, as
Bingley's friend and your husband, there can be only Bingley
and yourself more dear to me. But Lizzy, you have been very
sly, very reserved with me. How little did you tell me of what
passed at Pemberley and Lambton I owe all that I know of it
to another, not to you."
Elizabeth told her the motives of her secrecy. She had been
unwilling to mention Bingley and the unsettled state of her
own feelings had made her equally avoid the name of his friend.
But now she would no longer conceal from her his share in
Lydia's marriage. All was acknowledged, and half the night
spent in conversation.
"Good gracious" cried Mrs. Bennet, as she stood at a window
the next morning, "if that disagreeable Mr. Darcy is not coming
here again with our dear Bingley What can he mean by being so
tiresome as to be always coming here? I had no notion but he
would go ashooting, or something or other, and not disturb us
with his company. What shall we do with him? Lizzy, you must
walk out with him again, that he may not be in Bingley's way."
Elizabeth could hardly help laughing at so convenient a
proposal yet was really vexed that her mother should be
always giving him such an epithet.
As soon as they entered, Bingley looked at her so expressively,
and shook hands with such warmth, as left no doubt of his good
information and he soon afterwards said aloud, "Mrs. Bennet,
have you no more lanes hereabouts in which Lizzy may lose her
way again today?"
"I advise Mr. Darcy, and Lizzy, and Kitty," said Mrs. Bennet,
"to walk to Oakham Mount this morning. It is a nice long walk,
and Mr. Darcy has never seen the view."
"It may do very well for the others," replied Mr. Bingley "but
I am sure it will be too much for Kitty. Won't it, Kitty?"
Kitty owned that she had rather stay at home. Darcy professed
a great curiosity to see the view from the Mount, and Elizabeth
silently consented. As she went up stairs to get ready,
Mrs. Bennet followed her, saying
"I am quite sorry, Lizzy, that you should be forced to have
that disagreeable man all to yourself. But I hope you will not
mind it it is all for Jane's sake, you know and there is no
occasion for talking to him, except just now and then. So, do
not put yourself to inconvenience."
During their walk, it was resolved that Mr. Bennet's consent
should be asked in the course of the evening. Elizabeth
reserved to herself the application for her mother's. She
could not determine how her mother would take it sometimes
doubting whether all his wealth and grandeur would be enough
to overcome her abhorrence of the man. But whether she were
violently set against the match, or violently delighted with
it, it was certain that her manner would be equally ill adapted
to do credit to her sense and she could no more bear that
Mr. Darcy should hear the first raptures of her joy, than the
first vehemence of her disapprobation.
In the evening, soon after Mr. Bennet withdrew to the library,
she saw Mr. Darcy rise also and follow him, and her agitation
on seeing it was extreme. She did not fear her father's
opposition, but he was going to be made unhappy and that it
should be through her meansthat she, his favourite child,
should be distressing him by her choice, should be filling him
with fears and regrets in disposing of herwas a wretched
reflection, and she sat in misery till Mr. Darcy appeared
again, when, looking at him, she was a little relieved by his
smile. In a few minutes he approached the table where she was
sitting with Kitty and, while pretending to admire her work
said in a whisper, "Go to your father, he wants you in the
library." She was gone directly.
Her father was walking about the room, looking grave and
anxious. "Lizzy," said he, "what are you doing? Are you out
of your senses, to be accepting this man? Have not you always
hated him?"
How earnestly did she then wish that her former opinions had
been more reasonable, her expressions more moderate It would
have spared her from explanations and professions which it was
exceedingly awkward to give but they were now necessary, and
she assured him, with some confusion, of her attachment to
Mr. Darcy.
"Or, in other words, you are determined to have him. He is
rich, to be sure, and you may have more fine clothes and fine
carriages than Jane. But will they make you happy?"
"Have you any other objection," said Elizabeth, "than your
belief of my indifference?"
"None at all. We all know him to be a proud, unpleasant sort
of man but this would be nothing if you really liked him."
"I do, I do like him," she replied, with tears in her eyes,
"I love him. Indeed he has no improper pride. He is perfectly
amiable. You do not know what he really is then pray do not
pain me by speaking of him in such terms."
"Lizzy," said her father, "I have given him my consent.
He is the kind of man, indeed, to whom I should never dare
refuse anything, which he condescended to ask. I now give it
to you, if you are resolved on having him. But let me advise
you to think better of it. I know your disposition, Lizzy.
I know that you could be neither happy nor respectable, unless
you truly esteemed your husband unless you looked up to him
as a superior. Your lively talents would place you in the
greatest danger in an unequal marriage. You could scarcely
escape discredit and misery. My child, let me not have the
grief of seeing you unable to respect your partner in life.
You know not what you are about."
Elizabeth, still more affected, was earnest and solemn in her
reply and at length, by repeated assurances that Mr. Darcy was
really the object of her choice, by explaining the gradual
change which her estimation of him had undergone, relating her
absolute certainty that his affection was not the work of a
day, but had stood the test of many months' suspense, and
enumerating with energy all his good qualities, she did conquer
her father's incredulity, and reconcile him to the match.
"Well, my dear," said he, when she ceased speaking, "I have no
more to say. If this be the case, he deserves you. I could
not have parted with you, my Lizzy, to anyone less worthy."
To complete the favourable impression, she then told him what
Mr. Darcy had voluntarily done for Lydia. He heard her with
astonishment.
"This is an evening of wonders, indeed And so, Darcy did
every thing made up the match, gave the money, paid the
fellow's debts, and got him his commission So much the
better. It will save me a world of trouble and economy.
Had it been your uncle's doing, I must and would have paid
him but these violent young lovers carry every thing their
own way. I shall offer to pay him tomorrow he will rant
and storm about his love for you, and there will be an end
of the matter."
He then recollected her embarrassment a few days before, on his
reading Mr. Collins's letter and after laughing at her some
time, allowed her at last to gosaying, as she quitted the
room, "If any young men come for Mary or Kitty, send them in,
for I am quite at leisure."
Elizabeth's mind was now relieved from a very heavy weight
and, after half an hour's quiet reflection in her own room,
she was able to join the others with tolerable composure.
Every thing was too recent for gaiety, but the evening passed
tranquilly away there was no longer anything material to
be dreaded, and the comfort of ease and familiarity would
come in time.
When her mother went up to her dressingroom at night, she
followed her, and made the important communication. Its effect
was most extraordinary for on first hearing it, Mrs. Bennet
sat quite still, and unable to utter a syllable. Nor was it
under many, many minutes that she could comprehend what she
heard though not in general backward to credit what was for
the advantage of her family, or that came in the shape of a
lover to any of them. She began at length to recover, to
fidget about in her chair, get up, sit down again, wonder,
and bless herself.
"Good gracious Lord bless me only think dear me
Mr. Darcy Who would have thought it And is it really true?
Oh my sweetest Lizzy how rich and how great you will be
What pinmoney, what jewels, what carriages you will have
Jane's is nothing to itnothing at all. I am so pleasedso
happy. Such a charming manso handsome so tallOh, my
dear Lizzy pray apologise for my having disliked him so much
before. I hope he will overlook it. Dear, dear Lizzy. A house
in town Every thing that is charming Three daughters
married Ten thousand a year Oh, Lord What will become of
me. I shall go distracted."
This was enough to prove that her approbation need not be
doubted and Elizabeth, rejoicing that such an effusion was
heard only by herself, soon went away. But before she had
been three minutes in her own room, her mother followed her.
"My dearest child," she cried, "I can think of nothing else
Ten thousand a year, and very likely more 'Tis as good as a
Lord And a special licence. You must and shall be married
by a special licence. But my dearest love, tell me what dish
Mr. Darcy is particularly fond of, that I may have it tomorrow."
This was a sad omen of what her mother's behaviour to the
gentleman himself might be and Elizabeth found that, though in
the certain possession of his warmest affection, and secure of
her relations' consent, there was still something to be wished
for. But the morrow passed off much better than she expected
for Mrs. Bennet luckily stood in such awe of her intended
soninlaw that she ventured not to speak to him, unless it was
in her power to offer him any attention, or mark her deference
for his opinion.
Elizabeth had the satisfaction of seeing her father taking
pains to get acquainted with him and Mr. Bennet soon assured
her that he was rising every hour in his esteem.
"I admire all my three sonsinlaw highly," said he. "Wickham,
perhaps, is my favourite but I think I shall like your husband
quite as well as Jane's."
Chapter 
Elizabeth's spirits soon rising to playfulness again, she
wanted Mr. Darcy to account for his having ever fallen in love
with her. "How could you begin?" said she. "I can comprehend
your going on charmingly, when you had once made a beginning
but what could set you off in the first place?"
"I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look, or the
words, which laid the foundation. It is too long ago. I was
in the middle before I knew that I had begun."
"My beauty you had early withstood, and as for my mannersmy
behaviour to you was at least always bordering on the uncivil,
and I never spoke to you without rather wishing to give you pain
than not. Now be sincere did you admire me for my impertinence?"
"For the liveliness of your mind, I did."
"You may as well call it impertinence at once. It was very
little less. The fact is, that you were sick of civility, of
deference, of officious attention. You were disgusted with
the women who were always speaking, and looking, and thinking
for your approbation alone. I roused, and interested you,
because I was so unlike them. Had you not been really
amiable, you would have hated me for it but in spite of the
pains you took to disguise yourself, your feelings were always
noble and just and in your heart, you thoroughly despised the
persons who so assiduously courted you. ThereI have saved
you the trouble of accounting for it and really, all things
considered, I begin to think it perfectly reasonable. To be
sure, you knew no actual good of mebut nobody thinks of
that when they fall in love."
"Was there no good in your affectionate behaviour to Jane while
she was ill at Netherfield?"
"Dearest Jane who could have done less for her? But make a
virtue of it by all means. My good qualities are under your
protection, and you are to exaggerate them as much as possible
and, in return, it belongs to me to find occasions for teasing
and quarrelling with you as often as may be and I shall begin
directly by asking you what made you so unwilling to come to
the point at last. What made you so shy of me, when you first
called, and afterwards dined here? Why, especially, when you
called, did you look as if you did not care about me?"
"Because you were grave and silent, and gave me no encouragement."
"But I was embarrassed."
"And so was I."
"You might have talked to me more when you came to dinner."
"A man who had felt less, might."
"How unlucky that you should have a reasonable answer to give,
and that I should be so reasonable as to admit it But I
wonder how long you would have gone on, if you had been left
to yourself. I wonder when you would have spoken, if I
had not asked you My resolution of thanking you for your
kindness to Lydia had certainly great effect. Too much, I am
afraid for what becomes of the moral, if our comfort springs
from a breach of promise? for I ought not to have mentioned
the subject. This will never do."
"You need not distress yourself. The moral will be perfectly
fair. Lady Catherine's unjustifiable endeavours to separate us
were the means of removing all my doubts. I am not indebted
for my present happiness to your eager desire of expressing
your gratitude. I was not in a humour to wait for any opening
of your's. My aunt's intelligence had given me hope, and I was
determined at once to know every thing."
"Lady Catherine has been of infinite use, which ought to make
her happy, for she loves to be of use. But tell me, what did
you come down to Netherfield for? Was it merely to ride to
Longbourn and be embarrassed? or had you intended any more
serious consequence?"
"My real purpose was to see you, and to judge, if I could,
whether I might ever hope to make you love me. My avowed one,
or what I avowed to myself, was to see whether your sister were
still partial to Bingley, and if she were, to make the
confession to him which I have since made."
"Shall you ever have courage to announce to Lady Catherine
what is to befall her?"
"I am more likely to want more time than courage, Elizabeth.
But it ought to be done, and if you will give me a sheet of paper,
it shall be done directly."
"And if I had not a letter to write myself, I might sit by you
and admire the evenness of your writing, as another young lady
once did. But I have an aunt, too, who must not be longer
neglected."
From an unwillingness to confess how much her intimacy with
Mr. Darcy had been overrated, Elizabeth had never yet
answered Mrs. Gardiner's long letter but now, having that
to communicate which she knew would be most welcome, she was
almost ashamed to find that her uncle and aunt had already lost
three days of happiness, and immediately wrote as follows
"I would have thanked you before, my dear aunt, as I ought
to have done, for your long, kind, satisfactory, detail of
particulars but to say the truth, I was too cross to write.
You supposed more than really existed. But now suppose as
much as you choose give a loose rein to your fancy, indulge your
imagination in every possible flight which the subject will
afford, and unless you believe me actually married, you cannot
greatly err. You must write again very soon, and praise him a
great deal more than you did in your last. I thank you, again
and again, for not going to the Lakes. How could I be so silly
as to wish it Your idea of the ponies is delightful. We will
go round the Park every day. I am the happiest creature in the
world. Perhaps other people have said so before, but not one
with such justice. I am happier even than Jane she only
smiles, I laugh. Mr. Darcy sends you all the love in the world
that he can spare from me. You are all to come to Pemberley at
Christmas. Yours, etc."
Mr. Darcy's letter to Lady Catherine was in a different style
and still different from either was what Mr. Bennet sent to
Mr. Collins, in reply to his last.
"DEAR SIR,
"I must trouble you once more for congratulations. Elizabeth
will soon be the wife of Mr. Darcy. Console Lady Catherine
as well as you can. But, if I were you, I would stand by the
nephew. He has more to give.
"Yours sincerely, etc."
Miss Bingley's congratulations to her brother, on his approaching
marriage, were all that was affectionate and insincere. She
wrote even to Jane on the occasion, to express her delight, and
repeat all her former professions of regard. Jane was not
deceived, but she was affected and though feeling no reliance
on her, could not help writing her a much kinder answer than
she knew was deserved.
The joy which Miss Darcy expressed on receiving similar
information, was as sincere as her brother's in sending it.
Four sides of paper were insufficient to contain all her
delight, and all her earnest desire of being loved by her
sister.
Before any answer could arrive from Mr. Collins, or any
congratulations to Elizabeth from his wife, the Longbourn
family heard that the Collinses were come themselves to Lucas
Lodge. The reason of this sudden removal was soon evident.
Lady Catherine had been rendered so exceedingly angry by
the contents of her nephew's letter, that Charlotte, really
rejoicing in the match, was anxious to get away till the
storm was blown over. At such a moment, the arrival of
her friend was a sincere pleasure to Elizabeth, though in
the course of their meetings she must sometimes think the
pleasure dearly bought, when she saw Mr. Darcy exposed to all
the parading and obsequious civility of her husband. He bore
it, however, with admirable calmness. He could even listen to
Sir William Lucas, when he complimented him on carrying away
the brightest jewel of the country, and expressed his hopes of
their all meeting frequently at St. James's, with very decent
composure. If he did shrug his shoulders, it was not till Sir
William was out of sight.
Mrs. Phillips's vulgarity was another, and perhaps a greater,
tax on his forbearance and though Mrs. Phillips, as well as
her sister, stood in too much awe of him to speak with the
familiarity which Bingley's good humour encouraged, yet,
whenever she did speak, she must be vulgar. Nor was her
respect for him, though it made her more quiet, at all likely
to make her more elegant. Elizabeth did all she could to
shield him from the frequent notice of either, and was ever
anxious to keep him to herself, and to those of her family with
whom he might converse without mortification and though the
uncomfortable feelings arising from all this took from the
season of courtship much of its pleasure, it added to the hope
of the future and she looked forward with delight to the time
when they should be removed from society so little pleasing to
either, to all the comfort and elegance of their family party
at Pemberley.
Chapter 
Happy for all her maternal feelings was the day on which
Mrs. Bennet got rid of her two most deserving daughters.
With what delighted pride she afterwards visited Mrs. Bingley,
and talked of Mrs. Darcy, may be guessed. I wish I could say,
for the sake of her family, that the accomplishment of her
earnest desire in the establishment of so many of her children
produced so happy an effect as to make her a sensible, amiable,
wellinformed woman for the rest of her life though perhaps it
was lucky for her husband, who might not have relished domestic
felicity in so unusual a form, that she still was occasionally
nervous and invariably silly.
Mr. Bennet missed his second daughter exceedingly his
affection for her drew him oftener from home than anything
else could do. He delighted in going to Pemberley, especially
when he was least expected.
Mr. Bingley and Jane remained at Netherfield only a twelvemonth.
So near a vicinity to her mother and Meryton relations was not
desirable even to his easy temper, or her affectionate heart.
The darling wish of his sisters was then gratified he bought
an estate in a neighbouring county to Derbyshire, and Jane and
Elizabeth, in addition to every other source of happiness, were
within thirty miles of each other.
Kitty, to her very material advantage, spent the chief of her
time with her two elder sisters. In society so superior to
what she had generally known, her improvement was great. She
was not of so ungovernable a temper as Lydia and, removed from
the influence of Lydia's example, she became, by proper
attention and management, less irritable, less ignorant, and
less insipid. From the further disadvantage of Lydia's society
she was of course carefully kept, and though Mrs. Wickham
frequently invited her to come and stay with her, with the
promise of balls and young men, her father would never consent
to her going.
Mary was the only daughter who remained at home and she was
necessarily drawn from the pursuit of accomplishments by
Mrs. Bennet's being quite unable to sit alone. Mary was
obliged to mix more with the world, but she could still
moralize over every morning visit and as she was no longer
mortified by comparisons between her sisters' beauty and her
own, it was suspected by her father that she submitted to
the change without much reluctance.
As for Wickham and Lydia, their characters suffered no
revolution from the marriage of her sisters. He bore with
philosophy the conviction that Elizabeth must now become
acquainted with whatever of his ingratitude and falsehood
had before been unknown to her and in spite of every thing,
was not wholly without hope that Darcy might yet be prevailed
on to make his fortune. The congratulatory letter which
Elizabeth received from Lydia on her marriage, explained to
her that, by his wife at least, if not by himself, such a
hope was cherished. The letter was to this effect
"MY DEAR LIZZY,
"I wish you joy. If you love Mr. Darcy half as well as I do my
dear Wickham, you must be very happy. It is a great comfort to
have you so rich, and when you have nothing else to do, I hope
you will think of us. I am sure Wickham would like a place at
court very much, and I do not think we shall have quite money
enough to live upon without some help. Any place would do, of
about three or four hundred a year but however, do not speak
to Mr. Darcy about it, if you had rather not.
"Yours, etc."
As it happened that Elizabeth had much rather not, she
endeavoured in her answer to put an end to every entreaty
and expectation of the kind. Such relief, however, as it
was in her power to afford, by the practice of what might be
called economy in her own private expences, she frequently
sent them. It had always been evident to her that such an
income as theirs, under the direction of two persons so
extravagant in their wants, and heedless of the future, must
be very insufficient to their support and whenever they
changed their quarters, either Jane or herself were sure of
being applied to for some little assistance towards discharging
their bills. Their manner of living, even when the restoration
of peace dismissed them to a home, was unsettled in the
extreme. They were always moving from place to place in quest
of a cheap situation, and always spending more than they ought.
His affection for her soon sunk into indifference her's lasted
a little longer and in spite of her youth and her manners, she
retained all the claims to reputation which her marriage had
given her.
Though Darcy could never receive him at Pemberley, yet, for
Elizabeth's sake, he assisted him further in his profession.
Lydia was occasionally a visitor there, when her husband was
gone to enjoy himself in London or Bath and with the Bingleys
they both of them frequently staid so long, that even Bingley's
good humour was overcome, and he proceeded so far as to talk
of giving them a hint to be gone.
Miss Bingley was very deeply mortified by Darcy's marriage but
as she thought it advisable to retain the right of visiting at
Pemberley, she dropt all her resentment was fonder than ever
of Georgiana, almost as attentive to Darcy as heretofore, and
paid off every arrear of civility to Elizabeth.
Pemberley was now Georgiana's home and the attachment of the
sisters was exactly what Darcy had hoped to see. They were able
to love each other even as well as they intended. Georgiana had
the highest opinion in the world of Elizabeth though at first
she often listened with an astonishment bordering on alarm at
her lively, sportive, manner of talking to her brother. He, who
had always inspired in herself a respect which almost overcame
her affection, she now saw the object of open pleasantry. Her
mind received knowledge which had never before fallen in her way.
By Elizabeth's instructions, she began to comprehend that a woman
may take liberties with her husband which a brother will not
always allow in a sister more than ten years younger than himself.
Lady Catherine was extremely indignant on the marriage of her
nephew and as she gave way to all the genuine frankness of her
character in her reply to the letter which announced its
arrangement, she sent him language so very abusive, especially
of Elizabeth, that for some time all intercourse was at an end.
But at length, by Elizabeth's persuasion, he was prevailed on
to overlook the offence, and seek a reconciliation and, after
a little further resistance on the part of his aunt, her
resentment gave way, either to her affection for him, or her
curiosity to see how his wife conducted herself and she
condescended to wait on them at Pemberley, in spite of that
pollution which its woods had received, not merely from the
presence of such a mistress, but the visits of her uncle and
aunt from the city.
With the Gardiners, they were always on the most intimate
terms. Darcy, as well as Elizabeth, really loved them and
they were both ever sensible of the warmest gratitude towards
the persons who, by bringing her into Derbyshire, had been the
means of uniting them.
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SENSE AND SENSIBILITY
by Jane Austen
CHAPTER 
The family of Dashwood had long been settled in Sussex.
Their estate was large, and their residence was at Norland Park,
in the centre of their property, where, for many generations,
they had lived in so respectable a manner as to engage
the general good opinion of their surrounding acquaintance.
The late owner of this estate was a single man, who lived
to a very advanced age, and who for many years of his life,
had a constant companion and housekeeper in his sister.
But her death, which happened ten years before his own,
produced a great alteration in his home for to supply
her loss, he invited and received into his house the family
of his nephew Mr. Henry Dashwood, the legal inheritor
of the Norland estate, and the person to whom he intended
to bequeath it. In the society of his nephew and niece,
and their children, the old Gentleman's days were
comfortably spent. His attachment to them all increased.
The constant attention of Mr. and Mrs. Henry Dashwood
to his wishes, which proceeded not merely from interest,
but from goodness of heart, gave him every degree of solid
comfort which his age could receive and the cheerfulness
of the children added a relish to his existence.
By a former marriage, Mr. Henry Dashwood had one
son by his present lady, three daughters. The son,
a steady respectable young man, was amply provided
for by the fortune of his mother, which had been large,
and half of which devolved on him on his coming of age.
By his own marriage, likewise, which happened soon afterwards,
he added to his wealth. To him therefore the succession
to the Norland estate was not so really important as to
his sisters for their fortune, independent of what might
arise to them from their father's inheriting that property,
could be but small. Their mother had nothing, and their
father only seven thousand pounds in his own disposal
for the remaining moiety of his first wife's fortune was
also secured to her child, and he had only a lifeinterest
in it.
The old gentleman died his will was read, and
like almost every other will, gave as much disappointment
as pleasure. He was neither so unjust, nor so ungrateful,
as to leave his estate from his nephewbut he left it to him
on such terms as destroyed half the value of the bequest.
Mr. Dashwood had wished for it more for the sake of his
wife and daughters than for himself or his sonbut to
his son, and his son's son, a child of four years old,
it was secured, in such a way, as to leave to himself
no power of providing for those who were most dear
to him, and who most needed a provision by any charge
on the estate, or by any sale of its valuable woods.
The whole was tied up for the benefit of this child, who,
in occasional visits with his father and mother at Norland,
had so far gained on the affections of his uncle,
by such attractions as are by no means unusual in children
of two or three years old an imperfect articulation,
an earnest desire of having his own way, many cunning tricks,
and a great deal of noise, as to outweigh all the value
of all the attention which, for years, he had received
from his niece and her daughters. He meant not to
be unkind, however, and, as a mark of his affection
for the three girls, he left them a thousand pounds apiece.
Mr. Dashwood's disappointment was, at first, severe
but his temper was cheerful and sanguine and he might
reasonably hope to live many years, and by living economically,
lay by a considerable sum from the produce of an estate
already large, and capable of almost immediate improvement.
But the fortune, which had been so tardy in coming, was his
only one twelvemonth. He survived his uncle no longer
and ten thousand pounds, including the late legacies,
was all that remained for his widow and daughters.
His son was sent for as soon as his danger was known,
and to him Mr. Dashwood recommended, with all the strength
and urgency which illness could command, the interest
of his motherinlaw and sisters.
Mr. John Dashwood had not the strong feelings of the
rest of the family but he was affected by a recommendation
of such a nature at such a time, and he promised to do
every thing in his power to make them comfortable.
His father was rendered easy by such an assurance,
and Mr. John Dashwood had then leisure to consider how
much there might prudently be in his power to do for them.
He was not an illdisposed young man, unless to
be rather cold hearted and rather selfish is to be
illdisposed but he was, in general, well respected
for he conducted himself with propriety in the discharge
of his ordinary duties. Had he married a more amiable woman,
he might have been made still more respectable than he
washe might even have been made amiable himself for he
was very young when he married, and very fond of his wife.
But Mrs. John Dashwood was a strong caricature of himself
more narrowminded and selfish.
When he gave his promise to his father, he meditated
within himself to increase the fortunes of his sisters
by the present of a thousand pounds apiece. He then
really thought himself equal to it. The prospect of four
thousand ayear, in addition to his present income,
besides the remaining half of his own mother's fortune,
warmed his heart, and made him feel capable of generosity.
"Yes, he would give them three thousand pounds it would
be liberal and handsome It would be enough to make
them completely easy. Three thousand pounds he could
spare so considerable a sum with little inconvenience."
He thought of it all day long, and for many days successively,
and he did not repent.
No sooner was his father's funeral over, than Mrs. John
Dashwood, without sending any notice of her intention to her
motherinlaw, arrived with her child and their attendants.
No one could dispute her right to come the house was
her husband's from the moment of his father's decease
but the indelicacy of her conduct was so much the greater,
and to a woman in Mrs. Dashwood's situation, with only
common feelings, must have been highly unpleasing
but in HER mind there was a sense of honor so keen,
a generosity so romantic, that any offence of the kind,
by whomsoever given or received, was to her a source
of immoveable disgust. Mrs. John Dashwood had never
been a favourite with any of her husband's family
but she had had no opportunity, till the present,
of shewing them with how little attention to the comfort
of other people she could act when occasion required it.
So acutely did Mrs. Dashwood feel this ungracious
behaviour, and so earnestly did she despise her
daughterinlaw for it, that, on the arrival of the latter,
she would have quitted the house for ever, had not the
entreaty of her eldest girl induced her first to reflect
on the propriety of going, and her own tender love for all
her three children determined her afterwards to stay,
and for their sakes avoid a breach with their brother.
Elinor, this eldest daughter, whose advice was
so effectual, possessed a strength of understanding,
and coolness of judgment, which qualified her,
though only nineteen, to be the counsellor of her mother,
and enabled her frequently to counteract, to the advantage
of them all, that eagerness of mind in Mrs. Dashwood
which must generally have led to imprudence. She had
an excellent hearther disposition was affectionate,
and her feelings were strong but she knew how to govern
them it was a knowledge which her mother had yet to learn
and which one of her sisters had resolved never to be taught.
Marianne's abilities were, in many respects,
quite equal to Elinor's. She was sensible and clever
but eager in everything her sorrows, her joys, could have
no moderation. She was generous, amiable, interesting she
was everything but prudent. The resemblance between
her and her mother was strikingly great.
Elinor saw, with concern, the excess of her
sister's sensibility but by Mrs. Dashwood it was valued
and cherished. They encouraged each other now in the
violence of their affliction. The agony of grief
which overpowered them at first, was voluntarily renewed,
was sought for, was created again and again. They gave
themselves up wholly to their sorrow, seeking increase
of wretchedness in every reflection that could afford it,
and resolved against ever admitting consolation
in future. Elinor, too, was deeply afflicted but still
she could struggle, she could exert herself. She could
consult with her brother, could receive her sisterinlaw
on her arrival, and treat her with proper attention
and could strive to rouse her mother to similar exertion,
and encourage her to similar forbearance.
Margaret, the other sister, was a goodhumored,
welldisposed girl but as she had already imbibed
a good deal of Marianne's romance, without having
much of her sense, she did not, at thirteen, bid fair
to equal her sisters at a more advanced period of life.
CHAPTER 
Mrs. John Dashwood now installed herself mistress
of Norland and her mother and sistersinlaw were degraded
to the condition of visitors. As such, however, they were
treated by her with quiet civility and by her husband
with as much kindness as he could feel towards anybody
beyond himself, his wife, and their child. He really
pressed them, with some earnestness, to consider Norland
as their home and, as no plan appeared so eligible
to Mrs. Dashwood as remaining there till she could
accommodate herself with a house in the neighbourhood,
his invitation was accepted.
A continuance in a place where everything reminded
her of former delight, was exactly what suited her mind.
In seasons of cheerfulness, no temper could be more cheerful
than hers, or possess, in a greater degree, that sanguine
expectation of happiness which is happiness itself.
But in sorrow she must be equally carried away by her fancy,
and as far beyond consolation as in pleasure she was
beyond alloy.
Mrs. John Dashwood did not at all approve of what her
husband intended to do for his sisters. To take three
thousand pounds from the fortune of their dear little boy
would be impoverishing him to the most dreadful degree.
She begged him to think again on the subject. How could
he answer it to himself to rob his child, and his only
child too, of so large a sum? And what possible claim
could the Miss Dashwoods, who were related to him only by
half blood, which she considered as no relationship at all,
have on his generosity to so large an amount. It was very
well known that no affection was ever supposed to exist
between the children of any man by different marriages
and why was he to ruin himself, and their poor little Harry,
by giving away all his money to his half sisters?
"It was my father's last request to me," replied
her husband, "that I should assist his widow and daughters."
"He did not know what he was talking of, I dare say
ten to one but he was lightheaded at the time.
Had he been in his right senses, he could not have thought
of such a thing as begging you to give away half your
fortune from your own child."
"He did not stipulate for any particular sum,
my dear Fanny he only requested me, in general terms,
to assist them, and make their situation more comfortable
than it was in his power to do. Perhaps it would
have been as well if he had left it wholly to myself.
He could hardly suppose I should neglect them.
But as he required the promise, I could not do less
than give it at least I thought so at the time.
The promise, therefore, was given, and must be performed.
Something must be done for them whenever they leave Norland
and settle in a new home."
"Well, then, LET something be done for them
but THAT something need not be three thousand pounds.
Consider," she added, "that when the money is once
parted with, it never can return. Your sisters will marry,
and it will be gone for ever. If, indeed, it could
be restored to our poor little boy"
"Why, to be sure," said her husband, very gravely,
"that would make great difference. The time may come when
Harry will regret that so large a sum was parted with.
If he should have a numerous family, for instance, it would
be a very convenient addition."
"To be sure it would."
"Perhaps, then, it would be better for all parties,
if the sum were diminished one half.Five hundred pounds
would be a prodigious increase to their fortunes"
"Oh beyond anything great What brother on earth
would do half so much for his sisters, even if REALLY
his sisters And as it isonly half bloodBut you
have such a generous spirit"
"I would not wish to do any thing mean," he replied.
"One had rather, on such occasions, do too much than
too little. No one, at least, can think I have not
done enough for them even themselves, they can hardly
expect more."
"There is no knowing what THEY may expect,"
said the lady, "but we are not to think of their
expectations the question is, what you can afford to do."
"Certainlyand I think I may afford to give them five
hundred pounds apiece. As it is, without any addition
of mine, they will each have about three thousand pounds
on their mother's deatha very comfortable fortune
for any young woman."
"To be sure it is and, indeed, it strikes me that
they can want no addition at all. They will have ten
thousand pounds divided amongst them. If they marry,
they will be sure of doing well, and if they do not,
they may all live very comfortably together on the interest
of ten thousand pounds."
"That is very true, and, therefore, I do not know whether,
upon the whole, it would not be more advisable to do
something for their mother while she lives, rather than
for themsomething of the annuity kind I mean.My sisters
would feel the good effects of it as well as herself.
A hundred a year would make them all perfectly comfortable."
His wife hesitated a little, however, in giving
her consent to this plan.
"To be sure," said she, "it is better than parting with
fifteen hundred pounds at once. But, then, if Mrs. Dashwood
should live fifteen years we shall be completely taken in."
"Fifteen years my dear Fanny her life cannot
be worth half that purchase."
"Certainly not but if you observe, people always
live for ever when there is an annuity to be paid them
and she is very stout and healthy, and hardly forty.
An annuity is a very serious business it comes over
and over every year, and there is no getting rid
of it. You are not aware of what you are doing.
I have known a great deal of the trouble of annuities
for my mother was clogged with the payment of three
to old superannuated servants by my father's will,
and it is amazing how disagreeable she found it.
Twice every year these annuities were to be paid and then
there was the trouble of getting it to them and then one
of them was said to have died, and afterwards it turned
out to be no such thing. My mother was quite sick of it.
Her income was not her own, she said, with such perpetual
claims on it and it was the more unkind in my father,
because, otherwise, the money would have been entirely at
my mother's disposal, without any restriction whatever.
It has given me such an abhorrence of annuities, that I am
sure I would not pin myself down to the payment of one for
all the world."
"It is certainly an unpleasant thing," replied Mr. Dashwood,
"to have those kind of yearly drains on one's income.
One's fortune, as your mother justly says, is NOT one's own.
To be tied down to the regular payment of such a sum,
on every rent day, is by no means desirable it takes away
one's independence."
"Undoubtedly and after all you have no thanks for it.
They think themselves secure, you do no more than what
is expected, and it raises no gratitude at all. If I were you,
whatever I did should be done at my own discretion entirely.
I would not bind myself to allow them any thing yearly.
It may be very inconvenient some years to spare a hundred,
or even fifty pounds from our own expenses."
"I believe you are right, my love it will be better
that there should by no annuity in the case whatever I
may give them occasionally will be of far greater assistance
than a yearly allowance, because they would only enlarge
their style of living if they felt sure of a larger income,
and would not be sixpence the richer for it at the end
of the year. It will certainly be much the best way.
A present of fifty pounds, now and then, will prevent
their ever being distressed for money, and will, I think,
be amply discharging my promise to my father."
"To be sure it will. Indeed, to say the truth,
I am convinced within myself that your father had no idea
of your giving them any money at all. The assistance
he thought of, I dare say, was only such as might be
reasonably expected of you for instance, such as looking
out for a comfortable small house for them, helping them
to move their things, and sending them presents of fish
and game, and so forth, whenever they are in season.
I'll lay my life that he meant nothing farther indeed,
it would be very strange and unreasonable if he did.
Do but consider, my dear Mr. Dashwood, how excessively
comfortable your motherinlaw and her daughters may live
on the interest of seven thousand pounds, besides the
thousand pounds belonging to each of the girls, which brings
them in fifty pounds a year apiece, and, of course,
they will pay their mother for their board out of it.
Altogether, they will have five hundred ayear amongst them,
and what on earth can four women want for more than
that?They will live so cheap Their housekeeping will
be nothing at all. They will have no carriage, no horses,
and hardly any servants they will keep no company,
and can have no expenses of any kind Only conceive
how comfortable they will be Five hundred a year I am
sure I cannot imagine how they will spend half of it
and as to your giving them more, it is quite absurd to think
of it. They will be much more able to give YOU something."
"Upon my word," said Mr. Dashwood, "I believe you
are perfectly right. My father certainly could mean
nothing more by his request to me than what you say.
I clearly understand it now, and I will strictly fulfil
my engagement by such acts of assistance and kindness
to them as you have described. When my mother removes
into another house my services shall be readily given
to accommodate her as far as I can. Some little present
of furniture too may be acceptable then."
"Certainly," returned Mrs. John Dashwood. "But, however,
ONE thing must be considered. When your father and mother
moved to Norland, though the furniture of Stanhill
was sold, all the china, plate, and linen was saved,
and is now left to your mother. Her house will therefore
be almost completely fitted up as soon as she takes it."
"That is a material consideration undoubtedly.
A valuable legacy indeed And yet some of the plate would
have been a very pleasant addition to our own stock here."
"Yes and the set of breakfast china is twice
as handsome as what belongs to this house. A great
deal too handsome, in my opinion, for any place THEY
can ever afford to live in. But, however, so it is.
Your father thought only of THEM. And I must say this
that you owe no particular gratitude to him, nor attention
to his wishes for we very well know that if he could,
he would have left almost everything in the world to THEM."
This argument was irresistible. It gave to his
intentions whatever of decision was wanting before and he
finally resolved, that it would be absolutely unnecessary,
if not highly indecorous, to do more for the widow
and children of his father, than such kind of neighbourly
acts as his own wife pointed out.
CHAPTER 
Mrs. Dashwood remained at Norland several months
not from any disinclination to move when the sight of every
well known spot ceased to raise the violent emotion which it
produced for a while for when her spirits began to revive,
and her mind became capable of some other exertion than that
of heightening its affliction by melancholy remembrances,
she was impatient to be gone, and indefatigable in her inquiries
for a suitable dwelling in the neighbourhood of Norland
for to remove far from that beloved spot was impossible.
But she could hear of no situation that at once answered
her notions of comfort and ease, and suited the prudence
of her eldest daughter, whose steadier judgment rejected
several houses as too large for their income, which her
mother would have approved.
Mrs. Dashwood had been informed by her husband of the
solemn promise on the part of his son in their favour,
which gave comfort to his last earthly reflections.
She doubted the sincerity of this assurance no more than he
had doubted it himself, and she thought of it for her daughters'
sake with satisfaction, though as for herself she was
persuaded that a much smaller provision than L would
support her in affluence. For their brother's sake, too,
for the sake of his own heart, she rejoiced and she
reproached herself for being unjust to his merit before,
in believing him incapable of generosity. His attentive
behaviour to herself and his sisters convinced her that
their welfare was dear to him, and, for a long time,
she firmly relied on the liberality of his intentions.
The contempt which she had, very early in their acquaintance,
felt for her daughterinlaw, was very much increased
by the farther knowledge of her character, which half
a year's residence in her family afforded and perhaps
in spite of every consideration of politeness or maternal
affection on the side of the former, the two ladies might
have found it impossible to have lived together so long,
had not a particular circumstance occurred to give
still greater eligibility, according to the opinions
of Mrs. Dashwood, to her daughters' continuance at Norland.
This circumstance was a growing attachment between
her eldest girl and the brother of Mrs. John Dashwood,
a gentlemanlike and pleasing young man, who was introduced
to their acquaintance soon after his sister's establishment
at Norland, and who had since spent the greatest part
of his time there.
Some mothers might have encouraged the intimacy from
motives of interest, for Edward Ferrars was the eldest son
of a man who had died very rich and some might have repressed
it from motives of prudence, for, except a trifling sum,
the whole of his fortune depended on the will of his mother.
But Mrs. Dashwood was alike uninfluenced by either consideration.
It was enough for her that he appeared to be amiable,
that he loved her daughter, and that Elinor returned
the partiality. It was contrary to every doctrine of
her's that difference of fortune should keep any couple
asunder who were attracted by resemblance of disposition
and that Elinor's merit should not be acknowledged
by every one who knew her, was to her comprehension impossible.
Edward Ferrars was not recommended to their good
opinion by any peculiar graces of person or address.
He was not handsome, and his manners required intimacy
to make them pleasing. He was too diffident to do justice
to himself but when his natural shyness was overcome,
his behaviour gave every indication of an open,
affectionate heart. His understanding was good,
and his education had given it solid improvement.
But he was neither fitted by abilities nor disposition
to answer the wishes of his mother and sister, who longed
to see him distinguishedasthey hardly knew what.
They wanted him to make a fine figure in the world in some
manner or other. His mother wished to interest him in
political concerns, to get him into parliament, or to see
him connected with some of the great men of the day.
Mrs. John Dashwood wished it likewise but in the mean while,
till one of these superior blessings could be attained, it would
have quieted her ambition to see him driving a barouche.
But Edward had no turn for great men or barouches.
All his wishes centered in domestic comfort and the quiet
of private life. Fortunately he had a younger brother
who was more promising.
Edward had been staying several weeks in the house
before he engaged much of Mrs. Dashwood's attention
for she was, at that time, in such affliction as rendered
her careless of surrounding objects. She saw only that he
was quiet and unobtrusive, and she liked him for it.
He did not disturb the wretchedness of her mind by
illtimed conversation. She was first called to observe
and approve him farther, by a reflection which Elinor
chanced one day to make on the difference between him
and his sister. It was a contrast which recommended him
most forcibly to her mother.
"It is enough," said she "to say that he is unlike
Fanny is enough. It implies everything amiable.
I love him already."
"I think you will like him," said Elinor, "when you
know more of him."
"Like him" replied her mother with a smile.
"I feel no sentiment of approbation inferior to love."
"You may esteem him."
"I have never yet known what it was to separate
esteem and love."
Mrs. Dashwood now took pains to get acquainted with him.
Her manners were attaching, and soon banished his reserve.
She speedily comprehended all his merits the persuasion
of his regard for Elinor perhaps assisted her penetration
but she really felt assured of his worth and even that
quietness of manner, which militated against all her
established ideas of what a young man's address ought to be,
was no longer uninteresting when she knew his heart to be
warm and his temper affectionate.
No sooner did she perceive any symptom of love
in his behaviour to Elinor, than she considered their
serious attachment as certain, and looked forward
to their marriage as rapidly approaching.
"In a few months, my dear Marianne." said she,
"Elinor will, in all probability be settled for life.
We shall miss her but SHE will be happy."
"Oh Mamma, how shall we do without her?"
"My love, it will be scarcely a separation.
We shall live within a few miles of each other, and shall
meet every day of our lives. You will gain a brother,
a real, affectionate brother. I have the highest opinion
in the world of Edward's heart. But you look grave,
Marianne do you disapprove your sister's choice?"
"Perhaps," said Marianne, "I may consider it
with some surprise. Edward is very amiable, and I love
him tenderly. But yethe is not the kind of young
manthere is something wantinghis figure is not striking
it has none of that grace which I should expect
in the man who could seriously attach my sister.
His eyes want all that spirit, that fire, which at once
announce virtue and intelligence. And besides all this,
I am afraid, Mamma, he has no real taste. Music seems
scarcely to attract him, and though he admires Elinor's
drawings very much, it is not the admiration of a person
who can understand their worth. It is evident, in spite of
his frequent attention to her while she draws, that in fact
he knows nothing of the matter. He admires as a lover,
not as a connoisseur. To satisfy me, those characters
must be united. I could not be happy with a man whose
taste did not in every point coincide with my own.
He must enter into all my feelings the same books,
the same music must charm us both. Oh mama, how spiritless,
how tame was Edward's manner in reading to us last night
I felt for my sister most severely. Yet she bore it
with so much composure, she seemed scarcely to notice it.
I could hardly keep my seat. To hear those beautiful lines
which have frequently almost driven me wild, pronounced
with such impenetrable calmness, such dreadful indifference"
"He would certainly have done more justice to
simple and elegant prose. I thought so at the time
but you WOULD give him Cowper."
"Nay, Mamma, if he is not to be animated by Cowper
but we must allow for difference of taste. Elinor has
not my feelings, and therefore she may overlook it, and
be happy with him. But it would have broke MY heart,
had I loved him, to hear him read with so little sensibility.
Mama, the more I know of the world, the more am I convinced
that I shall never see a man whom I can really love.
I require so much He must have all Edward's virtues,
and his person and manners must ornament his goodness
with every possible charm."
"Remember, my love, that you are not seventeen.
It is yet too early in life to despair of such a happiness.
Why should you be less fortunate than your mother? In
one circumstance only, my Marianne, may your destiny be
different from her's"
CHAPTER 
"What a pity it is, Elinor," said Marianne,
"that Edward should have no taste for drawing."
"No taste for drawing" replied Elinor, "why should
you think so? He does not draw himself, indeed, but he has
great pleasure in seeing the performances of other people,
and I assure you he is by no means deficient in natural taste,
though he has not had opportunities of improving it.
Had he ever been in the way of learning, I think he would
have drawn very well. He distrusts his own judgment
in such matters so much, that he is always unwilling
to give his opinion on any picture but he has an innate
propriety and simplicity of taste, which in general
direct him perfectly right."
Marianne was afraid of offending, and said no more
on the subject but the kind of approbation which Elinor
described as excited in him by the drawings of other
people, was very far from that rapturous delight, which,
in her opinion, could alone be called taste. Yet, though
smiling within herself at the mistake, she honoured
her sister for that blind partiality to Edward which produced it.
"I hope, Marianne," continued Elinor, "you do not
consider him as deficient in general taste. Indeed, I think
I may say that you cannot, for your behaviour to him
is perfectly cordial, and if THAT were your opinion,
I am sure you could never be civil to him."
Marianne hardly knew what to say. She would
not wound the feelings of her sister on any account,
and yet to say what she did not believe was impossible.
At length she replied
"Do not be offended, Elinor, if my praise of him
is not in every thing equal to your sense of his merits.
I have not had so many opportunities of estimating the minuter
propensities of his mind, his inclinations and tastes,
as you have but I have the highest opinion in the world
of his goodness and sense. I think him every thing that is
worthy and amiable."
"I am sure," replied Elinor, with a smile,
"that his dearest friends could not be dissatisfied
with such commendation as that. I do not perceive
how you could express yourself more warmly."
Marianne was rejoiced to find her sister so easily pleased.
"Of his sense and his goodness," continued Elinor,
"no one can, I think, be in doubt, who has seen him
often enough to engage him in unreserved conversation.
The excellence of his understanding and his principles
can be concealed only by that shyness which too often
keeps him silent. You know enough of him to do justice
to his solid worth. But of his minuter propensities,
as you call them you have from peculiar circumstances
been kept more ignorant than myself. He and I have
been at times thrown a good deal together, while you
have been wholly engrossed on the most affectionate
principle by my mother. I have seen a great deal of him,
have studied his sentiments and heard his opinion on
subjects of literature and taste and, upon the whole,
I venture to pronounce that his mind is wellinformed,
enjoyment of books exceedingly great, his imagination lively,
his observation just and correct, and his taste delicate
and pure. His abilities in every respect improve
as much upon acquaintance as his manners and person.
At first sight, his address is certainly not striking
and his person can hardly be called handsome, till the
expression of his eyes, which are uncommonly good,
and the general sweetness of his countenance, is perceived.
At present, I know him so well, that I think him
really handsome or at least, almost so. What say you,
Marianne?"
"I shall very soon think him handsome, Elinor, if I
do not now. When you tell me to love him as a brother,
I shall no more see imperfection in his face, than I now do
in his heart."
Elinor started at this declaration, and was sorry for
the warmth she had been betrayed into, in speaking of him.
She felt that Edward stood very high in her opinion.
She believed the regard to be mutual but she required
greater certainty of it to make Marianne's conviction
of their attachment agreeable to her. She knew that
what Marianne and her mother conjectured one moment,
they believed the nextthat with them, to wish was to hope,
and to hope was to expect. She tried to explain the real
state of the case to her sister.
"I do not attempt to deny," said she, "that I think
very highly of himthat I greatly esteem, that I like him."
Marianne here burst forth with indignation
"Esteem him Like him Coldhearted Elinor Oh
worse than coldhearted Ashamed of being otherwise.
Use those words again, and I will leave the room this moment."
Elinor could not help laughing. "Excuse me,"
said she "and be assured that I meant no offence to you,
by speaking, in so quiet a way, of my own feelings.
Believe them to be stronger than I have declared
believe them, in short, to be such as his merit, and the
suspicionthe hope of his affection for me may warrant,
without imprudence or folly. But farther than this you must
not believe. I am by no means assured of his regard for me.
There are moments when the extent of it seems doubtful
and till his sentiments are fully known, you cannot wonder
at my wishing to avoid any encouragement of my own partiality,
by believing or calling it more than it is. In my heart
I feel littlescarcely any doubt of his preference.
But there are other points to be considered besides
his inclination. He is very far from being independent.
What his mother really is we cannot know but, from Fanny's
occasional mention of her conduct and opinions, we have
never been disposed to think her amiable and I am very
much mistaken if Edward is not himself aware that there
would be many difficulties in his way, if he were to wish
to marry a woman who had not either a great fortune or
high rank."
Marianne was astonished to find how much the imagination
of her mother and herself had outstripped the truth.
"And you really are not engaged to him" said she.
"Yet it certainly soon will happen. But two advantages
will proceed from this delay. I shall not lose you so soon,
and Edward will have greater opportunity of improving
that natural taste for your favourite pursuit which must
be so indispensably necessary to your future felicity.
Oh if he should be so far stimulated by your genius as to
learn to draw himself, how delightful it would be"
Elinor had given her real opinion to her sister.
She could not consider her partiality for Edward
in so prosperous a state as Marianne had believed it.
There was, at times, a want of spirits about him which,
if it did not denote indifference, spoke of something almost
as unpromising. A doubt of her regard, supposing him
to feel it, need not give him more than inquietude.
It would not be likely to produce that dejection of mind
which frequently attended him. A more reasonable cause
might be found in the dependent situation which forbade
the indulgence of his affection. She knew that his mother
neither behaved to him so as to make his home comfortable
at present, nor to give him any assurance that he might form
a home for himself, without strictly attending to her views
for his aggrandizement. With such a knowledge as this,
it was impossible for Elinor to feel easy on the subject.
She was far from depending on that result of his preference
of her, which her mother and sister still considered
as certain. Nay, the longer they were together the more
doubtful seemed the nature of his regard and sometimes,
for a few painful minutes, she believed it to be no more
than friendship.
But, whatever might really be its limits, it was enough,
when perceived by his sister, to make her uneasy,
and at the same time, which was still more common,
to make her uncivil. She took the first opportunity of
affronting her motherinlaw on the occasion, talking to
her so expressively of her brother's great expectations,
of Mrs. Ferrars's resolution that both her sons should
marry well, and of the danger attending any young woman
who attempted to DRAW HIM IN that Mrs. Dashwood could
neither pretend to be unconscious, nor endeavor to be calm.
She gave her an answer which marked her contempt,
and instantly left the room, resolving that, whatever might
be the inconvenience or expense of so sudden a removal,
her beloved Elinor should not be exposed another week
to such insinuations.
In this state of her spirits, a letter was delivered
to her from the post, which contained a proposal
particularly well timed. It was the offer of a small house,
on very easy terms, belonging to a relation of her own,
a gentleman of consequence and property in Devonshire.
The letter was from this gentleman himself, and written
in the true spirit of friendly accommodation.
He understood that she was in need of a dwelling
and though the house he now offered her was merely a cottage,
he assured her that everything should be done to it which
she might think necessary, if the situation pleased her.
He earnestly pressed her, after giving the particulars
of the house and garden, to come with her daughters to
Barton Park, the place of his own residence, from whence
she might judge, herself, whether Barton Cottage, for the
houses were in the same parish, could, by any alteration,
be made comfortable to her. He seemed really anxious to
accommodate them and the whole of his letter was written
in so friendly a style as could not fail of giving pleasure
to his cousin more especially at a moment when she was
suffering under the cold and unfeeling behaviour of her
nearer connections. She needed no time for deliberation
or inquiry. Her resolution was formed as she read.
The situation of Barton, in a county so far distant from
Sussex as Devonshire, which, but a few hours before,
would have been a sufficient objection to outweigh every
possible advantage belonging to the place, was now its
first recommendation. To quit the neighbourhood of Norland
was no longer an evil it was an object of desire
it was a blessing, in comparison of the misery of continuing
her daughterinlaw's guest and to remove for ever
from that beloved place would be less painful than to
inhabit or visit it while such a woman was its mistress.
She instantly wrote Sir John Middleton her acknowledgment
of his kindness, and her acceptance of his proposal
and then hastened to shew both letters to her daughters,
that she might be secure of their approbation before her
answer were sent.
Elinor had always thought it would be more prudent
for them to settle at some distance from Norland,
than immediately amongst their present acquaintance.
On THAT head, therefore, it was not for her to oppose
her mother's intention of removing into Devonshire.
The house, too, as described by Sir John, was on so
simple a scale, and the rent so uncommonly moderate,
as to leave her no right of objection on either point
and, therefore, though it was not a plan which brought
any charm to her fancy, though it was a removal from
the vicinity of Norland beyond her wishes, she made
no attempt to dissuade her mother from sending a letter
of acquiescence.
CHAPTER 
No sooner was her answer dispatched, than Mrs. Dashwood
indulged herself in the pleasure of announcing to her
soninlaw and his wife that she was provided with a house,
and should incommode them no longer than till every thing were
ready for her inhabiting it. They heard her with surprise.
Mrs. John Dashwood said nothing but her husband civilly
hoped that she would not be settled far from Norland.
She had great satisfaction in replying that she was going
into Devonshire.Edward turned hastily towards her,
on hearing this, and, in a voice of surprise and concern,
which required no explanation to her, repeated,
"Devonshire Are you, indeed, going there? So far from hence
And to what part of it?" She explained the situation.
It was within four miles northward of Exeter.
"It is but a cottage," she continued, "but I hope
to see many of my friends in it. A room or two can
easily be added and if my friends find no difficulty
in travelling so far to see me, I am sure I will find
none in accommodating them."
She concluded with a very kind invitation to
Mr. and Mrs. John Dashwood to visit her at Barton
and to Edward she gave one with still greater affection.
Though her late conversation with her daughterinlaw had
made her resolve on remaining at Norland no longer than
was unavoidable, it had not produced the smallest effect
on her in that point to which it principally tended.
To separate Edward and Elinor was as far from being her
object as ever and she wished to show Mrs. John Dashwood,
by this pointed invitation to her brother, how totally she
disregarded her disapprobation of the match.
Mr. John Dashwood told his mother again and again
how exceedingly sorry he was that she had taken a house at
such a distance from Norland as to prevent his being of any
service to her in removing her furniture. He really felt
conscientiously vexed on the occasion for the very exertion
to which he had limited the performance of his promise to
his father was by this arrangement rendered impracticable.
The furniture was all sent around by water. It chiefly
consisted of household linen, plate, china, and books,
with a handsome pianoforte of Marianne's. Mrs. John
Dashwood saw the packages depart with a sigh she could
not help feeling it hard that as Mrs. Dashwood's income
would be so trifling in comparison with their own,
she should have any handsome article of furniture.
Mrs. Dashwood took the house for a twelvemonth it was
ready furnished, and she might have immediate possession.
No difficulty arose on either side in the agreement and she
waited only for the disposal of her effects at Norland,
and to determine her future household, before she set
off for the west and this, as she was exceedingly rapid
in the performance of everything that interested her,
was soon done.The horses which were left her by her husband
had been sold soon after his death, and an opportunity
now offering of disposing of her carriage, she agreed
to sell that likewise at the earnest advice of her
eldest daughter. For the comfort of her children, had she
consulted only her own wishes, she would have kept it
but the discretion of Elinor prevailed. HER wisdom
too limited the number of their servants to three
two maids and a man, with whom they were speedily provided
from amongst those who had formed their establishment
at Norland.
The man and one of the maids were sent off immediately
into Devonshire, to prepare the house for their mistress's
arrival for as Lady Middleton was entirely unknown
to Mrs. Dashwood, she preferred going directly to the
cottage to being a visitor at Barton Park and she relied
so undoubtingly on Sir John's description of the house,
as to feel no curiosity to examine it herself till she
entered it as her own. Her eagerness to be gone from Norland
was preserved from diminution by the evident satisfaction
of her daughterinlaw in the prospect of her removal
a satisfaction which was but feebly attempted to be concealed
under a cold invitation to her to defer her departure.
Now was the time when her soninlaw's promise to his
father might with particular propriety be fulfilled.
Since he had neglected to do it on first coming to
the estate, their quitting his house might be looked
on as the most suitable period for its accomplishment.
But Mrs. Dashwood began shortly to give over every
hope of the kind, and to be convinced, from the general
drift of his discourse, that his assistance extended no
farther than their maintenance for six months at Norland.
He so frequently talked of the increasing expenses
of housekeeping, and of the perpetual demands upon his purse,
which a man of any consequence in the world was beyond
calculation exposed to, that he seemed rather to stand
in need of more money himself than to have any design of
giving money away.
In a very few weeks from the day which brought Sir
John Middleton's first letter to Norland, every thing was
so far settled in their future abode as to enable
Mrs. Dashwood and her daughters to begin their journey.
Many were the tears shed by them in their last
adieus to a place so much beloved. "Dear, dear Norland"
said Marianne, as she wandered alone before the house,
on the last evening of their being there "when shall I cease
to regret youwhen learn to feel a home elsewhereOh
happy house, could you know what I suffer in now viewing
you from this spot, from whence perhaps I may view
you no moreAnd you, ye wellknown treesbut you
will continue the same.No leaf will decay because we
are removed, nor any branch become motionless although we
can observe you no longerNo you will continue the same
unconscious of the pleasure or the regret you occasion,
and insensible of any change in those who walk under your
shadeBut who will remain to enjoy you?"
CHAPTER 
The first part of their journey was performed in too
melancholy a disposition to be otherwise than tedious
and unpleasant. But as they drew towards the end of it,
their interest in the appearance of a country which they
were to inhabit overcame their dejection, and a view of
Barton Valley as they entered it gave them cheerfulness.
It was a pleasant fertile spot, well wooded, and rich
in pasture. After winding along it for more than a mile,
they reached their own house. A small green court was
the whole of its demesne in front and a neat wicket gate
admitted them into it.
As a house, Barton Cottage, though small, was comfortable
and compact but as a cottage it was defective, for the
building was regular, the roof was tiled, the window
shutters were not painted green, nor were the walls covered
with honeysuckles. A narrow passage led directly through
the house into the garden behind. On each side of the
entrance was a sitting room, about sixteen feet square
and beyond them were the offices and the stairs.
Four bedrooms and two garrets formed the rest of the house.
It had not been built many years and was in good repair.
In comparison of Norland, it was poor and small indeedbut
the tears which recollection called forth as they entered
the house were soon dried away. They were cheered
by the joy of the servants on their arrival, and each
for the sake of the others resolved to appear happy.
It was very early in September the season was fine,
and from first seeing the place under the advantage
of good weather, they received an impression in its
favour which was of material service in recommending
it to their lasting approbation.
The situation of the house was good. High hills rose
immediately behind, and at no great distance on each side
some of which were open downs, the others cultivated and woody.
The village of Barton was chiefly on one of these hills,
and formed a pleasant view from the cottage windows.
The prospect in front was more extensive it commanded the
whole of the valley, and reached into the country beyond.
The hills which surrounded the cottage terminated
the valley in that direction under another name,
and in another course, it branched out again between two
of the steepest of them.
With the size and furniture of the house Mrs. Dashwood
was upon the whole well satisfied for though her former
style of life rendered many additions to the latter
indispensable, yet to add and improve was a delight to her
and she had at this time ready money enough to supply all
that was wanted of greater elegance to the apartments.
"As for the house itself, to be sure," said she, "it is
too small for our family, but we will make ourselves
tolerably comfortable for the present, as it is too late
in the year for improvements. Perhaps in the spring,
if I have plenty of money, as I dare say I shall, we may
think about building. These parlors are both too small
for such parties of our friends as I hope to see often
collected here and I have some thoughts of throwing the
passage into one of them with perhaps a part of the other,
and so leave the remainder of that other for an entrance
this, with a new drawing room which may be easily added,
and a bedchamber and garret above, will make it a very snug
little cottage. I could wish the stairs were handsome.
But one must not expect every thing though I suppose it
would be no difficult matter to widen them. I shall see
how much I am beforehand with the world in the spring,
and we will plan our improvements accordingly."
In the mean time, till all these alterations could
be made from the savings of an income of five hundred
ayear by a woman who never saved in her life, they were
wise enough to be contented with the house as it was
and each of them was busy in arranging their particular
concerns, and endeavoring, by placing around them books
and other possessions, to form themselves a home.
Marianne's pianoforte was unpacked and properly disposed of
and Elinor's drawings were affixed to the walls of their
sitting room.
In such employments as these they were interrupted
soon after breakfast the next day by the entrance of
their landlord, who called to welcome them to Barton,
and to offer them every accommodation from his own house
and garden in which theirs might at present be deficient.
Sir John Middleton was a good looking man about forty.
He had formerly visited at Stanhill, but it was too long
for his young cousins to remember him. His countenance
was thoroughly goodhumoured and his manners were
as friendly as the style of his letter. Their arrival
seemed to afford him real satisfaction, and their comfort
to be an object of real solicitude to him. He said much
of his earnest desire of their living in the most sociable
terms with his family, and pressed them so cordially
to dine at Barton Park every day till they were better
settled at home, that, though his entreaties were carried
to a point of perseverance beyond civility, they could
not give offence. His kindness was not confined to words
for within an hour after he left them, a large basket
full of garden stuff and fruit arrived from the park,
which was followed before the end of the day by a present
of game. He insisted, moreover, on conveying all their
letters to and from the post for them, and would not be
denied the satisfaction of sending them his newspaper
every day.
Lady Middleton had sent a very civil message by him,
denoting her intention of waiting on Mrs. Dashwood as soon as
she could be assured that her visit would be no inconvenience
and as this message was answered by an invitation
equally polite, her ladyship was introduced to them the next day.
They were, of course, very anxious to see a person on
whom so much of their comfort at Barton must depend and the
elegance of her appearance was favourable to their wishes.
Lady Middleton was not more than six or seven and twenty
her face was handsome, her figure tall and striking,
and her address graceful. Her manners had all the elegance
which her husband's wanted. But they would have been
improved by some share of his frankness and warmth
and her visit was long enough to detract something from
their first admiration, by shewing that, though perfectly
wellbred, she was reserved, cold, and had nothing to say
for herself beyond the most commonplace inquiry or remark.
Conversation however was not wanted, for Sir John
was very chatty, and Lady Middleton had taken the wise
precaution of bringing with her their eldest child, a fine
little boy about six years old, by which means there was
one subject always to be recurred to by the ladies in case
of extremity, for they had to enquire his name and age,
admire his beauty, and ask him questions which his mother
answered for him, while he hung about her and held
down his head, to the great surprise of her ladyship,
who wondered at his being so shy before company, as he
could make noise enough at home. On every formal visit
a child ought to be of the party, by way of provision
for discourse. In the present case it took up ten minutes
to determine whether the boy were most like his father
or mother, and in what particular he resembled either,
for of course every body differed, and every body was
astonished at the opinion of the others.
An opportunity was soon to be given to the Dashwoods
of debating on the rest of the children, as Sir John
would not leave the house without securing their promise
of dining at the park the next day.
CHAPTER 
Barton Park was about half a mile from the cottage.
The ladies had passed near it in their way along the valley,
but it was screened from their view at home by the
projection of a hill. The house was large and handsome
and the Middletons lived in a style of equal hospitality
and elegance. The former was for Sir John's gratification,
the latter for that of his lady. They were scarcely
ever without some friends staying with them in the house,
and they kept more company of every kind than any other
family in the neighbourhood. It was necessary to the
happiness of both for however dissimilar in temper
and outward behaviour, they strongly resembled each other
in that total want of talent and taste which confined
their employments, unconnected with such as society produced,
within a very narrow compass. Sir John was a sportsman,
Lady Middleton a mother. He hunted and shot, and she
humoured her children and these were their only resources.
Lady Middleton had the advantage of being able to spoil her
children all the year round, while Sir John's independent
employments were in existence only half the time.
Continual engagements at home and abroad, however,
supplied all the deficiencies of nature and education
supported the good spirits of Sir John, and gave exercise
to the good breeding of his wife.
Lady Middleton piqued herself upon the elegance
of her table, and of all her domestic arrangements
and from this kind of vanity was her greatest enjoyment
in any of their parties. But Sir John's satisfaction
in society was much more real he delighted in collecting
about him more young people than his house would hold,
and the noisier they were the better was he pleased.
He was a blessing to all the juvenile part of the neighbourhood,
for in summer he was for ever forming parties to eat cold
ham and chicken out of doors, and in winter his private
balls were numerous enough for any young lady who was not
suffering under the unsatiable appetite of fifteen.
The arrival of a new family in the country was always
a matter of joy to him, and in every point of view he was
charmed with the inhabitants he had now procured for his
cottage at Barton. The Miss Dashwoods were young, pretty,
and unaffected. It was enough to secure his good opinion
for to be unaffected was all that a pretty girl could
want to make her mind as captivating as her person.
The friendliness of his disposition made him happy in
accommodating those, whose situation might be considered,
in comparison with the past, as unfortunate. In showing
kindness to his cousins therefore he had the real satisfaction
of a good heart and in settling a family of females only
in his cottage, he had all the satisfaction of a sportsman
for a sportsman, though he esteems only those of his sex who
are sportsmen likewise, is not often desirous of encouraging
their taste by admitting them to a residence within his own
manor.
Mrs. Dashwood and her daughters were met at the door
of the house by Sir John, who welcomed them to Barton
Park with unaffected sincerity and as he attended them
to the drawing room repeated to the young ladies the concern
which the same subject had drawn from him the day before,
at being unable to get any smart young men to meet them.
They would see, he said, only one gentleman there
besides himself a particular friend who was staying at
the park, but who was neither very young nor very gay.
He hoped they would all excuse the smallness of the party,
and could assure them it should never happen so again.
He had been to several families that morning in hopes
of procuring some addition to their number, but it
was moonlight and every body was full of engagements.
Luckily Lady Middleton's mother had arrived at Barton
within the last hour, and as she was a very cheerful
agreeable woman, he hoped the young ladies would not find
it so very dull as they might imagine. The young ladies,
as well as their mother, were perfectly satisfied with
having two entire strangers of the party, and wished for
no more.
Mrs. Jennings, Lady Middleton's mother, was a
goodhumoured, merry, fat, elderly woman, who talked a
great deal, seemed very happy, and rather vulgar. She was full
of jokes and laughter, and before dinner was over had said
many witty things on the subject of lovers and husbands
hoped they had not left their hearts behind them in Sussex,
and pretended to see them blush whether they did or not.
Marianne was vexed at it for her sister's sake, and turned
her eyes towards Elinor to see how she bore these attacks,
with an earnestness which gave Elinor far more pain than
could arise from such commonplace raillery as Mrs. Jennings's.
Colonel Brandon, the friend of Sir John, seemed no
more adapted by resemblance of manner to be his friend,
than Lady Middleton was to be his wife, or Mrs. Jennings
to be Lady Middleton's mother. He was silent and grave.
His appearance however was not unpleasing, in spite
of his being in the opinion of Marianne and Margaret
an absolute old bachelor, for he was on the wrong side
of five and thirty but though his face was not handsome,
his countenance was sensible, and his address was
particularly gentlemanlike.
There was nothing in any of the party which could
recommend them as companions to the Dashwoods but the cold
insipidity of Lady Middleton was so particularly repulsive,
that in comparison of it the gravity of Colonel Brandon,
and even the boisterous mirth of Sir John and his
motherinlaw was interesting. Lady Middleton seemed
to be roused to enjoyment only by the entrance of her
four noisy children after dinner, who pulled her about,
tore her clothes, and put an end to every kind of discourse
except what related to themselves.
In the evening, as Marianne was discovered to be musical,
she was invited to play. The instrument was unlocked,
every body prepared to be charmed, and Marianne,
who sang very well, at their request went through the
chief of the songs which Lady Middleton had brought into
the family on her marriage, and which perhaps had lain
ever since in the same position on the pianoforte,
for her ladyship had celebrated that event by giving
up music, although by her mother's account, she had
played extremely well, and by her own was very fond of it.
Marianne's performance was highly applauded.
Sir John was loud in his admiration at the end of every song,
and as loud in his conversation with the others while every
song lasted. Lady Middleton frequently called him to order,
wondered how any one's attention could be diverted from music
for a moment, and asked Marianne to sing a particular song
which Marianne had just finished. Colonel Brandon alone,
of all the party, heard her without being in raptures.
He paid her only the compliment of attention and she felt
a respect for him on the occasion, which the others had
reasonably forfeited by their shameless want of taste.
His pleasure in music, though it amounted not to that
ecstatic delight which alone could sympathize with her own,
was estimable when contrasted against the horrible
insensibility of the others and she was reasonable enough
to allow that a man of five and thirty might well have
outlived all acuteness of feeling and every exquisite
power of enjoyment. She was perfectly disposed to make
every allowance for the colonel's advanced state of life
which humanity required.
CHAPTER 
Mrs. Jennings was a widow with an ample jointure.
She had only two daughters, both of whom she had lived
to see respectably married, and she had now therefore
nothing to do but to marry all the rest of the world.
In the promotion of this object she was zealously active,
as far as her ability reached and missed no opportunity
of projecting weddings among all the young people
of her acquaintance. She was remarkably quick in the
discovery of attachments, and had enjoyed the advantage
of raising the blushes and the vanity of many a young
lady by insinuations of her power over such a young man
and this kind of discernment enabled her soon after her
arrival at Barton decisively to pronounce that Colonel
Brandon was very much in love with Marianne Dashwood.
She rather suspected it to be so, on the very first
evening of their being together, from his listening
so attentively while she sang to them and when the visit
was returned by the Middletons' dining at the cottage,
the fact was ascertained by his listening to her again.
It must be so. She was perfectly convinced of it.
It would be an excellent match, for HE was rich, and SHE
was handsome. Mrs. Jennings had been anxious to see
Colonel Brandon well married, ever since her connection
with Sir John first brought him to her knowledge
and she was always anxious to get a good husband for every
pretty girl.
The immediate advantage to herself was by no means
inconsiderable, for it supplied her with endless jokes
against them both. At the park she laughed at the colonel,
and in the cottage at Marianne. To the former her
raillery was probably, as far as it regarded only himself,
perfectly indifferent but to the latter it was at
first incomprehensible and when its object was understood,
she hardly knew whether most to laugh at its absurdity,
or censure its impertinence, for she considered it as an
unfeeling reflection on the colonel's advanced years,
and on his forlorn condition as an old bachelor.
Mrs. Dashwood, who could not think a man five years
younger than herself, so exceedingly ancient as he appeared
to the youthful fancy of her daughter, ventured to clear
Mrs. Jennings from the probability of wishing to throw
ridicule on his age.
"But at least, Mamma, you cannot deny the absurdity
of the accusation, though you may not think it intentionally
illnatured. Colonel Brandon is certainly younger than
Mrs. Jennings, but he is old enough to be MY father
and if he were ever animated enough to be in love,
must have long outlived every sensation of the kind.
It is too ridiculous When is a man to be safe from such wit,
if age and infirmity will not protect him?"
"Infirmity" said Elinor, "do you call Colonel Brandon
infirm? I can easily suppose that his age may appear much
greater to you than to my mother but you can hardly
deceive yourself as to his having the use of his limbs"
"Did not you hear him complain of the rheumatism?
and is not that the commonest infirmity of declining life?"
"My dearest child," said her mother, laughing,
"at this rate you must be in continual terror of MY decay
and it must seem to you a miracle that my life has been
extended to the advanced age of forty."
"Mamma, you are not doing me justice. I know very well
that Colonel Brandon is not old enough to make his friends
yet apprehensive of losing him in the course of nature.
He may live twenty years longer. But thirtyfive has
nothing to do with matrimony."
"Perhaps," said Elinor, "thirtyfive and seventeen had
better not have any thing to do with matrimony together.
But if there should by any chance happen to be a woman
who is single at seven and twenty, I should not think
Colonel Brandon's being thirtyfive any objection to his
marrying HER."
"A woman of seven and twenty," said Marianne,
after pausing a moment, "can never hope to feel or inspire
affection again, and if her home be uncomfortable,
or her fortune small, I can suppose that she might
bring herself to submit to the offices of a nurse,
for the sake of the provision and security of a wife.
In his marrying such a woman therefore there would be
nothing unsuitable. It would be a compact of convenience,
and the world would be satisfied. In my eyes it would
be no marriage at all, but that would be nothing.
To me it would seem only a commercial exchange, in which
each wished to be benefited at the expense of the other."
"It would be impossible, I know," replied Elinor,
"to convince you that a woman of seven and twenty could
feel for a man of thirtyfive anything near enough
to love, to make him a desirable companion to her.
But I must object to your dooming Colonel Brandon and
his wife to the constant confinement of a sick chamber,
merely because he chanced to complain yesterday a
very cold damp day of a slight rheumatic feel in one
of his shoulders."
"But he talked of flannel waistcoats," said Marianne
"and with me a flannel waistcoat is invariably connected
with aches, cramps, rheumatisms, and every species of
ailment that can afflict the old and the feeble."
"Had he been only in a violent fever, you would not
have despised him half so much. Confess, Marianne, is not
there something interesting to you in the flushed cheek,
hollow eye, and quick pulse of a fever?"
Soon after this, upon Elinor's leaving the room,
"Mamma," said Marianne, "I have an alarm on the subject
of illness which I cannot conceal from you. I am sure
Edward Ferrars is not well. We have now been here almost
a fortnight, and yet he does not come. Nothing but real
indisposition could occasion this extraordinary delay.
What else can detain him at Norland?"
"Had you any idea of his coming so soon?"
said Mrs. Dashwood. "I had none. On the contrary,
if I have felt any anxiety at all on the subject, it has
been in recollecting that he sometimes showed a want
of pleasure and readiness in accepting my invitation,
when I talked of his coming to Barton. Does Elinor
expect him already?"
"I have never mentioned it to her, but of course
she must."
"I rather think you are mistaken, for when I
was talking to her yesterday of getting a new grate
for the spare bedchamber, she observed that there
was no immediate hurry for it, as it was not likely
that the room would be wanted for some time."
"How strange this is what can be the meaning of it
But the whole of their behaviour to each other has been
unaccountable How cold, how composed were their last
adieus How languid their conversation the last evening
of their being together In Edward's farewell there was no
distinction between Elinor and me it was the good wishes
of an affectionate brother to both. Twice did I leave
them purposely together in the course of the last morning,
and each time did he most unaccountably follow me out
of the room. And Elinor, in quitting Norland and Edward,
cried not as I did. Even now her selfcommand is invariable.
When is she dejected or melancholy? When does she try
to avoid society, or appear restless and dissatisfied
in it?"
CHAPTER 
The Dashwoods were now settled at Barton with tolerable
comfort to themselves. The house and the garden, with all
the objects surrounding them, were now become familiar,
and the ordinary pursuits which had given to Norland
half its charms were engaged in again with far greater
enjoyment than Norland had been able to afford, since the
loss of their father. Sir John Middleton, who called
on them every day for the first fortnight, and who was
not in the habit of seeing much occupation at home,
could not conceal his amazement on finding them always employed.
Their visitors, except those from Barton Park,
were not many for, in spite of Sir John's urgent entreaties
that they would mix more in the neighbourhood, and repeated
assurances of his carriage being always at their service,
the independence of Mrs. Dashwood's spirit overcame the
wish of society for her children and she was resolute
in declining to visit any family beyond the distance
of a walk. There were but few who could be so classed
and it was not all of them that were attainable.
About a mile and a half from the cottage, along the narrow
winding valley of Allenham, which issued from that of Barton,
as formerly described, the girls had, in one of their
earliest walks, discovered an ancient respectable looking
mansion which, by reminding them a little of Norland,
interested their imagination and made them wish to be
better acquainted with it. But they learnt, on enquiry,
that its possessor, an elderly lady of very good character,
was unfortunately too infirm to mix with the world,
and never stirred from home.
The whole country about them abounded in beautiful walks.
The high downs which invited them from almost every window
of the cottage to seek the exquisite enjoyment of air
on their summits, were a happy alternative when the dirt
of the valleys beneath shut up their superior beauties
and towards one of these hills did Marianne and Margaret
one memorable morning direct their steps, attracted by the
partial sunshine of a showery sky, and unable longer to bear
the confinement which the settled rain of the two preceding
days had occasioned. The weather was not tempting enough
to draw the two others from their pencil and their book,
in spite of Marianne's declaration that the day would
be lastingly fair, and that every threatening cloud would
be drawn off from their hills and the two girls set off
together.
They gaily ascended the downs, rejoicing in their own
penetration at every glimpse of blue sky and when they
caught in their faces the animating gales of a high
southwesterly wind, they pitied the fears which had prevented
their mother and Elinor from sharing such delightful sensations.
"Is there a felicity in the world," said Marianne,
"superior to this?Margaret, we will walk here at least
two hours."
Margaret agreed, and they pursued their way against
the wind, resisting it with laughing delight for about
twenty minutes longer, when suddenly the clouds united over
their heads, and a driving rain set full in their face.
Chagrined and surprised, they were obliged, though unwillingly,
to turn back, for no shelter was nearer than their own house.
One consolation however remained for them, to which the
exigence of the moment gave more than usual propriety
it was that of running with all possible speed down the steep
side of the hill which led immediately to their garden gate.
They set off. Marianne had at first the advantage,
but a false step brought her suddenly to the ground
and Margaret, unable to stop herself to assist her,
was involuntarily hurried along, and reached the bottom
in safety.
A gentleman carrying a gun, with two pointers
playing round him, was passing up the hill and within
a few yards of Marianne, when her accident happened.
He put down his gun and ran to her assistance. She had
raised herself from the ground, but her foot had been
twisted in her fall, and she was scarcely able to stand.
The gentleman offered his services and perceiving that her
modesty declined what her situation rendered necessary,
took her up in his arms without farther delay, and carried
her down the hill. Then passing through the garden,
the gate of which had been left open by Margaret, he bore her
directly into the house, whither Margaret was just arrived,
and quitted not his hold till he had seated her in a chair
in the parlour.
Elinor and her mother rose up in amazement at
their entrance, and while the eyes of both were fixed
on him with an evident wonder and a secret admiration
which equally sprung from his appearance, he apologized
for his intrusion by relating its cause, in a manner
so frank and so graceful that his person, which was
uncommonly handsome, received additional charms from his voice
and expression. Had he been even old, ugly, and vulgar,
the gratitude and kindness of Mrs. Dashwood would
have been secured by any act of attention to her child
but the influence of youth, beauty, and elegance,
gave an interest to the action which came home to her feelings.
She thanked him again and again and, with a sweetness
of address which always attended her, invited him to
be seated. But this he declined, as he was dirty and wet.
Mrs. Dashwood then begged to know to whom she was obliged.
His name, he replied, was Willoughby, and his present
home was at Allenham, from whence he hoped she would
allow him the honour of calling tomorrow to enquire
after Miss Dashwood. The honour was readily granted,
and he then departed, to make himself still more interesting,
in the midst of a heavy rain.
His manly beauty and more than common gracefulness
were instantly the theme of general admiration,
and the laugh which his gallantry raised against Marianne
received particular spirit from his exterior attractions.
Marianne herself had seen less of his person that the rest,
for the confusion which crimsoned over her face, on his
lifting her up, had robbed her of the power of regarding
him after their entering the house. But she had seen
enough of him to join in all the admiration of the others,
and with an energy which always adorned her praise.
His person and air were equal to what her fancy had ever
drawn for the hero of a favourite story and in his carrying
her into the house with so little previous formality, there
was a rapidity of thought which particularly recommended
the action to her. Every circumstance belonging to him
was interesting. His name was good, his residence was in
their favourite village, and she soon found out that of all
manly dresses a shootingjacket was the most becoming.
Her imagination was busy, her reflections were pleasant,
and the pain of a sprained ankle was disregarded.
Sir John called on them as soon as the next interval
of fair weather that morning allowed him to get out
of doors and Marianne's accident being related to him,
he was eagerly asked whether he knew any gentleman
of the name of Willoughby at Allenham.
"Willoughby" cried Sir John "what, is HE
in the country? That is good news however I will
ride over tomorrow, and ask him to dinner on Thursday."
"You know him then," said Mrs. Dashwood.
"Know him to be sure I do. Why, he is down here
every year."
"And what sort of a young man is he?"
"As good a kind of fellow as ever lived, I assure you.
A very decent shot, and there is not a bolder rider
in England."
"And is that all you can say for him?" cried Marianne,
indignantly. "But what are his manners on more intimate
acquaintance? What his pursuits, his talents, and genius?"
Sir John was rather puzzled.
"Upon my soul," said he, "I do not know much about him
as to all THAT. But he is a pleasant, good humoured fellow,
and has got the nicest little black bitch of a pointer
I ever saw. Was she out with him today?"
But Marianne could no more satisfy him as to the
colour of Mr. Willoughby's pointer, than he could
describe to her the shades of his mind.
"But who is he?" said Elinor. "Where does he come
from? Has he a house at Allenham?"
On this point Sir John could give more certain intelligence
and he told them that Mr. Willoughby had no property
of his own in the country that he resided there only
while he was visiting the old lady at Allenham Court,
to whom he was related, and whose possessions he was
to inherit adding, "Yes, yes, he is very well worth
catching I can tell you, Miss Dashwood he has a pretty
little estate of his own in Somersetshire besides
and if I were you, I would not give him up to my
younger sister, in spite of all this tumbling down hills.
Miss Marianne must not expect to have all the men to herself.
Brandon will be jealous, if she does not take care."
"I do not believe," said Mrs. Dashwood, with a
good humoured smile, "that Mr. Willoughby will be incommoded
by the attempts of either of MY daughters towards what
you call CATCHING him. It is not an employment to which
they have been brought up. Men are very safe with us,
let them be ever so rich. I am glad to find, however,
from what you say, that he is a respectable young man,
and one whose acquaintance will not be ineligible."
"He is as good a sort of fellow, I believe,
as ever lived," repeated Sir John. "I remember
last Christmas at a little hop at the park, he danced
from eight o'clock till four, without once sitting down."
"Did he indeed?" cried Marianne with sparkling eyes,
"and with elegance, with spirit?"
"Yes and he was up again at eight to ride to covert."
"That is what I like that is what a young man ought
to be. Whatever be his pursuits, his eagerness in them
should know no moderation, and leave him no sense of fatigue."
"Aye, aye, I see how it will be," said Sir John, "I see
how it will be. You will be setting your cap at him now,
and never think of poor Brandon."
"That is an expression, Sir John," said Marianne,
warmly, "which I particularly dislike. I abhor every
commonplace phrase by which wit is intended and 'setting
one's cap at a man,' or 'making a conquest,' are the most
odious of all. Their tendency is gross and illiberal
and if their construction could ever be deemed clever,
time has long ago destroyed all its ingenuity."
Sir John did not much understand this reproof
but he laughed as heartily as if he did, and then replied,
"Ay, you will make conquests enough, I dare say,
one way or other. Poor Brandon he is quite smitten already,
and he is very well worth setting your cap at, I can
tell you, in spite of all this tumbling about and spraining
of ankles."
CHAPTER 
Marianne's preserver, as Margaret, with more elegance
than precision, styled Willoughby, called at the cottage
early the next morning to make his personal enquiries.
He was received by Mrs. Dashwood with more than politeness
with a kindness which Sir John's account of him and her own
gratitude prompted and every thing that passed during
the visit tended to assure him of the sense, elegance,
mutual affection, and domestic comfort of the family
to whom accident had now introduced him. Of their
personal charms he had not required a second interview
to be convinced.
Miss Dashwood had a delicate complexion,
regular features, and a remarkably pretty figure.
Marianne was still handsomer. Her form, though not so
correct as her sister's, in having the advantage of height,
was more striking and her face was so lovely, that when
in the common cant of praise, she was called a beautiful girl,
truth was less violently outraged than usually happens.
Her skin was very brown, but, from its transparency,
her complexion was uncommonly brilliant her features
were all good her smile was sweet and attractive
and in her eyes, which were very dark, there was a life,
a spirit, an eagerness, which could hardily be seen
without delight. From Willoughby their expression was at
first held back, by the embarrassment which the remembrance
of his assistance created. But when this passed away,
when her spirits became collected, when she saw that to the
perfect goodbreeding of the gentleman, he united frankness
and vivacity, and above all, when she heard him declare,
that of music and dancing he was passionately fond,
she gave him such a look of approbation as secured the
largest share of his discourse to herself for the rest
of his stay.
It was only necessary to mention any favourite
amusement to engage her to talk. She could not be
silent when such points were introduced, and she
had neither shyness nor reserve in their discussion.
They speedily discovered that their enjoyment of dancing
and music was mutual, and that it arose from a general
conformity of judgment in all that related to either.
Encouraged by this to a further examination of his opinions,
she proceeded to question him on the subject of books
her favourite authors were brought forward and dwelt
upon with so rapturous a delight, that any young man of
five and twenty must have been insensible indeed, not to
become an immediate convert to the excellence of such works,
however disregarded before. Their taste was strikingly alike.
The same books, the same passages were idolized by each
or if any difference appeared, any objection arose,
it lasted no longer than till the force of her arguments
and the brightness of her eyes could be displayed.
He acquiesced in all her decisions, caught all her enthusiasm
and long before his visit concluded, they conversed
with the familiarity of a longestablished acquaintance.
"Well, Marianne," said Elinor, as soon as he had left them,
"for ONE morning I think you have done pretty well.
You have already ascertained Mr. Willoughby's opinion in
almost every matter of importance. You know what he thinks
of Cowper and Scott you are certain of his estimating
their beauties as he ought, and you have received every
assurance of his admiring Pope no more than is proper.
But how is your acquaintance to be long supported, under such
extraordinary despatch of every subject for discourse?
You will soon have exhausted each favourite topic.
Another meeting will suffice to explain his sentiments
on picturesque beauty, and second marriages, and then
you can have nothing farther to ask."
"Elinor," cried Marianne, "is this fair? is this
just? are my ideas so scanty? But I see what you mean.
I have been too much at my ease, too happy, too frank.
I have erred against every commonplace notion of decorum
I have been open and sincere where I ought to have
been reserved, spiritless, dull, and deceitfulhad
I talked only of the weather and the roads, and had I
spoken only once in ten minutes, this reproach would have
been spared."
"My love," said her mother, "you must not be offended
with Elinorshe was only in jest. I should scold
her myself, if she were capable of wishing to check
the delight of your conversation with our new friend."
Marianne was softened in a moment.
Willoughby, on his side, gave every proof of his
pleasure in their acquaintance, which an evident wish
of improving it could offer. He came to them every day.
To enquire after Marianne was at first his excuse but the
encouragement of his reception, to which every day gave
greater kindness, made such an excuse unnecessary before it
had ceased to be possible, by Marianne's perfect recovery.
She was confined for some days to the house but never had
any confinement been less irksome. Willoughby was a young
man of good abilities, quick imagination, lively spirits,
and open, affectionate manners. He was exactly formed
to engage Marianne's heart, for with all this, he joined
not only a captivating person, but a natural ardour
of mind which was now roused and increased by the example
of her own, and which recommended him to her affection
beyond every thing else.
His society became gradually her most exquisite enjoyment.
They read, they talked, they sang together his musical
talents were considerable and he read with all the
sensibility and spirit which Edward had unfortunately wanted.
In Mrs. Dashwood's estimation he was as faultless
as in Marianne's and Elinor saw nothing to censure in him
but a propensity, in which he strongly resembled and peculiarly
delighted her sister, of saying too much what he thought on
every occasion, without attention to persons or circumstances.
In hastily forming and giving his opinion of other people,
in sacrificing general politeness to the enjoyment
of undivided attention where his heart was engaged,
and in slighting too easily the forms of worldly propriety,
he displayed a want of caution which Elinor could not approve,
in spite of all that he and Marianne could say in its support.
Marianne began now to perceive that the desperation
which had seized her at sixteen and a half, of ever
seeing a man who could satisfy her ideas of perfection,
had been rash and unjustifiable. Willoughby was all
that her fancy had delineated in that unhappy hour
and in every brighter period, as capable of attaching her
and his behaviour declared his wishes to be in that respect
as earnest, as his abilities were strong.
Her mother too, in whose mind not one speculative
thought of their marriage had been raised, by his prospect
of riches, was led before the end of a week to hope and
expect it and secretly to congratulate herself on having
gained two such sonsinlaw as Edward and Willoughby.
Colonel Brandon's partiality for Marianne, which had
so early been discovered by his friends, now first became
perceptible to Elinor, when it ceased to be noticed
by them. Their attention and wit were drawn off to his
more fortunate rival and the raillery which the other
had incurred before any partiality arose, was removed
when his feelings began really to call for the ridicule
so justly annexed to sensibility. Elinor was obliged,
though unwillingly, to believe that the sentiments which
Mrs. Jennings had assigned him for her own satisfaction,
were now actually excited by her sister and that however
a general resemblance of disposition between the parties
might forward the affection of Mr. Willoughby, an equally
striking opposition of character was no hindrance to the
regard of Colonel Brandon. She saw it with concern
for what could a silent man of five and thirty hope,
when opposed to a very lively one of five and twenty? and as
she could not even wish him successful, she heartily wished
him indifferent. She liked himin spite of his gravity
and reserve, she beheld in him an object of interest.
His manners, though serious, were mild and his reserve
appeared rather the result of some oppression of spirits
than of any natural gloominess of temper. Sir John
had dropped hints of past injuries and disappointments,
which justified her belief of his being an unfortunate man,
and she regarded him with respect and compassion.
Perhaps she pitied and esteemed him the more
because he was slighted by Willoughby and Marianne,
who, prejudiced against him for being neither lively
nor young, seemed resolved to undervalue his merits.
"Brandon is just the kind of man," said Willoughby
one day, when they were talking of him together,
"whom every body speaks well of, and nobody cares about
whom all are delighted to see, and nobody remembers
to talk to."
"That is exactly what I think of him," cried Marianne.
"Do not boast of it, however," said Elinor, "for it
is injustice in both of you. He is highly esteemed
by all the family at the park, and I never see him myself
without taking pains to converse with him."
"That he is patronised by YOU," replied Willoughby,
"is certainly in his favour but as for the esteem
of the others, it is a reproach in itself. Who would
submit to the indignity of being approved by such a woman
as Lady Middleton and Mrs. Jennings, that could command
the indifference of any body else?"
"But perhaps the abuse of such people as yourself
and Marianne will make amends for the regard of Lady
Middleton and her mother. If their praise is censure,
your censure may be praise, for they are not more undiscerning,
than you are prejudiced and unjust."
"In defence of your protege you can even be saucy."
"My protege, as you call him, is a sensible man
and sense will always have attractions for me.
Yes, Marianne, even in a man between thirty and forty.
He has seen a great deal of the world has been abroad,
has read, and has a thinking mind. I have found him
capable of giving me much information on various subjects
and he has always answered my inquiries with readiness of
goodbreeding and good nature."
"That is to say," cried Marianne contemptuously,
"he has told you, that in the East Indies the climate is hot,
and the mosquitoes are troublesome."
"He WOULD have told me so, I doubt not, had I made
any such inquiries, but they happened to be points
on which I had been previously informed."
"Perhaps," said Willoughby, "his observations may
have extended to the existence of nabobs, gold mohrs,
and palanquins."
"I may venture to say that HIS observations
have stretched much further than your candour.
But why should you dislike him?"
"I do not dislike him. I consider him, on the contrary,
as a very respectable man, who has every body's good word,
and nobody's notice who, has more money than he can spend,
more time than he knows how to employ, and two new coats
every year."
"Add to which," cried Marianne, "that he has
neither genius, taste, nor spirit. That his understanding
has no brilliancy, his feelings no ardour, and his voice
no expression."
"You decide on his imperfections so much in the mass,"
replied Elinor, "and so much on the strength of your
own imagination, that the commendation I am able to give
of him is comparatively cold and insipid. I can only
pronounce him to be a sensible man, wellbred, wellinformed,
of gentle address, and, I believe, possessing an amiable heart."
"Miss Dashwood," cried Willoughby, "you are now using
me unkindly. You are endeavouring to disarm me by reason,
and to convince me against my will. But it will not do.
You shall find me as stubborn as you can be artful. I have
three unanswerable reasons for disliking Colonel Brandon
he threatened me with rain when I wanted it to be fine
he has found fault with the hanging of my curricle,
and I cannot persuade him to buy my brown mare. If it
will be any satisfaction to you, however, to be told,
that I believe his character to be in other respects
irreproachable, I am ready to confess it. And in return
for an acknowledgment, which must give me some pain,
you cannot deny me the privilege of disliking him as much
as ever."
CHAPTER 
Little had Mrs. Dashwood or her daughters imagined
when they first came into Devonshire, that so many
engagements would arise to occupy their time as shortly
presented themselves, or that they should have such frequent
invitations and such constant visitors as to leave them little
leisure for serious employment. Yet such was the case.
When Marianne was recovered, the schemes of amusement at home
and abroad, which Sir John had been previously forming,
were put into execution. The private balls at the park
then began and parties on the water were made and
accomplished as often as a showery October would allow.
In every meeting of the kind Willoughby was included
and the ease and familiarity which naturally attended
these parties were exactly calculated to give increasing
intimacy to his acquaintance with the Dashwoods, to afford
him opportunity of witnessing the excellencies of Marianne,
of marking his animated admiration of her, and of receiving,
in her behaviour to himself, the most pointed assurance
of her affection.
Elinor could not be surprised at their attachment.
She only wished that it were less openly shewn and once
or twice did venture to suggest the propriety of some
selfcommand to Marianne. But Marianne abhorred all
concealment where no real disgrace could attend unreserve
and to aim at the restraint of sentiments which were not
in themselves illaudable, appeared to her not merely
an unnecessary effort, but a disgraceful subjection
of reason to commonplace and mistaken notions.
Willoughby thought the same and their behaviour at
all times, was an illustration of their opinions.
When he was present she had no eyes for any one else.
Every thing he did, was right. Every thing he said, was clever.
If their evenings at the park were concluded with cards,
he cheated himself and all the rest of the party to get
her a good hand. If dancing formed the amusement
of the night, they were partners for half the time
and when obliged to separate for a couple of dances,
were careful to stand together and scarcely spoke a word
to any body else. Such conduct made them of course
most exceedingly laughed at but ridicule could not shame,
and seemed hardly to provoke them.
Mrs. Dashwood entered into all their feelings with
a warmth which left her no inclination for checking this
excessive display of them. To her it was but the natural
consequence of a strong affection in a young and ardent mind.
This was the season of happiness to Marianne.
Her heart was devoted to Willoughby, and the fond attachment
to Norland, which she brought with her from Sussex,
was more likely to be softened than she had thought it
possible before, by the charms which his society bestowed
on her present home.
Elinor's happiness was not so great. Her heart was not
so much at ease, nor her satisfaction in their amusements
so pure. They afforded her no companion that could make
amends for what she had left behind, nor that could teach
her to think of Norland with less regret than ever.
Neither Lady Middleton nor Mrs. Jennings could supply
to her the conversation she missed although the latter
was an everlasting talker, and from the first had regarded
her with a kindness which ensured her a large share of
her discourse. She had already repeated her own history
to Elinor three or four times and had Elinor's memory been
equal to her means of improvement, she might have known
very early in their acquaintance all the particulars of
Mr. Jenning's last illness, and what he said to his wife
a few minutes before he died. Lady Middleton was more
agreeable than her mother only in being more silent.
Elinor needed little observation to perceive that her
reserve was a mere calmness of manner with which sense
had nothing to do. Towards her husband and mother she
was the same as to them and intimacy was therefore
neither to be looked for nor desired. She had nothing
to say one day that she had not said the day before.
Her insipidity was invariable, for even her spirits were
always the same and though she did not oppose the parties
arranged by her husband, provided every thing were conducted
in style and her two eldest children attended her,
she never appeared to receive more enjoyment from them
than she might have experienced in sitting at home
and so little did her presence add to the pleasure
of the others, by any share in their conversation,
that they were sometimes only reminded of her being
amongst them by her solicitude about her troublesome boys.
In Colonel Brandon alone, of all her new acquaintance,
did Elinor find a person who could in any degree claim the
respect of abilities, excite the interest of friendship,
or give pleasure as a companion. Willoughby was out
of the question. Her admiration and regard, even her
sisterly regard, was all his own but he was a lover
his attentions were wholly Marianne's, and a far less
agreeable man might have been more generally pleasing.
Colonel Brandon, unfortunately for himself, had no such
encouragement to think only of Marianne, and in conversing
with Elinor he found the greatest consolation for the
indifference of her sister.
Elinor's compassion for him increased, as she had reason
to suspect that the misery of disappointed love had already
been known to him. This suspicion was given by some words
which accidently dropped from him one evening at the park,
when they were sitting down together by mutual consent,
while the others were dancing. His eyes were fixed
on Marianne, and, after a silence of some minutes,
he said, with a faint smile, "Your sister, I understand,
does not approve of second attachments."
"No," replied Elinor, "her opinions are all romantic."
"Or rather, as I believe, she considers them
impossible to exist."
"I believe she does. But how she contrives it
without reflecting on the character of her own father,
who had himself two wives, I know not. A few years
however will settle her opinions on the reasonable basis
of common sense and observation and then they may be
more easy to define and to justify than they now are,
by any body but herself."
"This will probably be the case," he replied
"and yet there is something so amiable in the prejudices
of a young mind, that one is sorry to see them give way
to the reception of more general opinions."
"I cannot agree with you there," said Elinor.
"There are inconveniences attending such feelings
as Marianne's, which all the charms of enthusiasm and
ignorance of the world cannot atone for. Her systems have
all the unfortunate tendency of setting propriety at nought
and a better acquaintance with the world is what I look
forward to as her greatest possible advantage."
After a short pause he resumed the conversation
by saying,
"Does your sister make no distinction in her objections
against a second attachment? or is it equally criminal
in every body? Are those who have been disappointed
in their first choice, whether from the inconstancy
of its object, or the perverseness of circumstances,
to be equally indifferent during the rest of their lives?"
"Upon my word, I am not acquainted with the minutiae
of her principles. I only know that I never yet heard her
admit any instance of a second attachment's being pardonable."
"This," said he, "cannot hold but a change,
a total change of sentimentsNo, no, do not desire it
for when the romantic refinements of a young mind
are obliged to give way, how frequently are they
succeeded by such opinions as are but too common, and too
dangerous I speak from experience. I once knew a lady
who in temper and mind greatly resembled your sister,
who thought and judged like her, but who from an inforced
changefrom a series of unfortunate circumstances"
Here he stopt suddenly appeared to think that he had said
too much, and by his countenance gave rise to conjectures,
which might not otherwise have entered Elinor's head.
The lady would probably have passed without suspicion,
had he not convinced Miss Dashwood that what concerned
her ought not to escape his lips. As it was,
it required but a slight effort of fancy to connect his
emotion with the tender recollection of past regard.
Elinor attempted no more. But Marianne, in her place,
would not have done so little. The whole story would
have been speedily formed under her active imagination
and every thing established in the most melancholy order
of disastrous love.
CHAPTER 
As Elinor and Marianne were walking together the
next morning the latter communicated a piece of news
to her sister, which in spite of all that she knew
before of Marianne's imprudence and want of thought,
surprised her by its extravagant testimony of both.
Marianne told her, with the greatest delight, that
Willoughby had given her a horse, one that he had bred
himself on his estate in Somersetshire, and which was
exactly calculated to carry a woman. Without considering
that it was not in her mother's plan to keep any horse,
that if she were to alter her resolution in favour of
this gift, she must buy another for the servant, and
keep a servant to ride it, and after all, build a stable
to receive them, she had accepted the present without
hesitation, and told her sister of it in raptures.
"He intends to send his groom into Somersetshire
immediately for it," she added, "and when it arrives we
will ride every day. You shall share its use with me.
Imagine to yourself, my dear Elinor, the delight of a gallop
on some of these downs."
Most unwilling was she to awaken from such a dream of
felicity to comprehend all the unhappy truths which attended
the affair and for some time she refused to submit to them.
As to an additional servant, the expense would be a trifle
Mamma she was sure would never object to it and any horse
would do for HIM he might always get one at the park
as to a stable, the merest shed would be sufficient.
Elinor then ventured to doubt the propriety of her receiving
such a present from a man so little, or at least so lately
known to her. This was too much.
"You are mistaken, Elinor," said she warmly,
"in supposing I know very little of Willoughby.
I have not known him long indeed, but I am much better
acquainted with him, than I am with any other creature
in the world, except yourself and mama. It is not
time or opportunity that is to determine intimacy
it is disposition alone. Seven years would be insufficient
to make some people acquainted with each other, and seven
days are more than enough for others. I should hold
myself guilty of greater impropriety in accepting a horse
from my brother, than from Willoughby. Of John I know
very little, though we have lived together for years
but of Willoughby my judgment has long been formed."
Elinor thought it wisest to touch that point no more.
She knew her sister's temper. Opposition on so tender a
subject would only attach her the more to her own opinion.
But by an appeal to her affection for her mother,
by representing the inconveniences which that indulgent
mother must draw on herself, if as would probably be
the case she consented to this increase of establishment,
Marianne was shortly subdued and she promised not to
tempt her mother to such imprudent kindness by mentioning
the offer, and to tell Willoughby when she saw him next,
that it must be declined.
She was faithful to her word and when Willoughby
called at the cottage, the same day, Elinor heard her
express her disappointment to him in a low voice, on
being obliged to forego the acceptance of his present.
The reasons for this alteration were at the same time related,
and they were such as to make further entreaty on his
side impossible. His concern however was very apparent
and after expressing it with earnestness, he added,
in the same low voice,"But, Marianne, the horse is
still yours, though you cannot use it now. I shall keep
it only till you can claim it. When you leave Barton
to form your own establishment in a more lasting home,
Queen Mab shall receive you."
This was all overheard by Miss Dashwood and in the
whole of the sentence, in his manner of pronouncing it,
and in his addressing her sister by her Christian name alone,
she instantly saw an intimacy so decided, a meaning
so direct, as marked a perfect agreement between them.
From that moment she doubted not of their being engaged
to each other and the belief of it created no other surprise
than that she, or any of their friends, should be left
by tempers so frank, to discover it by accident.
Margaret related something to her the next day,
which placed this matter in a still clearer light.
Willoughby had spent the preceding evening with them,
and Margaret, by being left some time in the parlour
with only him and Marianne, had had opportunity
for observations, which, with a most important face,
she communicated to her eldest sister, when they were
next by themselves.
"Oh, Elinor" she cried, "I have such a secret to
tell you about Marianne. I am sure she will be married
to Mr. Willoughby very soon."
"You have said so," replied Elinor, "almost every
day since they first met on Highchurch Down and they
had not known each other a week, I believe, before you
were certain that Marianne wore his picture round her neck
but it turned out to be only the miniature of our great uncle."
"But indeed this is quite another thing. I am sure
they will be married very soon, for he has got a lock
of her hair."
"Take care, Margaret. It may be only the hair
of some great uncle of HIS."
"But, indeed, Elinor, it is Marianne's. I am almost
sure it is, for I saw him cut it off. Last night
after tea, when you and mama went out of the room,
they were whispering and talking together as fast as
could be, and he seemed to be begging something of her,
and presently he took up her scissors and cut off a long
lock of her hair, for it was all tumbled down her back
and he kissed it, and folded it up in a piece of white paper
and put it into his pocketbook."
For such particulars, stated on such authority,
Elinor could not withhold her credit nor was she disposed
to it, for the circumstance was in perfect unison with
what she had heard and seen herself.
Margaret's sagacity was not always displayed in a
way so satisfactory to her sister. When Mrs. Jennings
attacked her one evening at the park, to give the name
of the young man who was Elinor's particular favourite,
which had been long a matter of great curiosity to her,
Margaret answered by looking at her sister, and saying,
"I must not tell, may I, Elinor?"
This of course made every body laugh and Elinor
tried to laugh too. But the effort was painful.
She was convinced that Margaret had fixed on a person
whose name she could not bear with composure to become
a standing joke with Mrs. Jennings.
Marianne felt for her most sincerely but she did
more harm than good to the cause, by turning very red
and saying in an angry manner to Margaret,
"Remember that whatever your conjectures may be,
you have no right to repeat them."
"I never had any conjectures about it," replied Margaret
"it was you who told me of it yourself."
This increased the mirth of the company, and Margaret
was eagerly pressed to say something more.
"Oh pray, Miss Margaret, let us know all about it,"
said Mrs. Jennings. "What is the gentleman's name?"
"I must not tell, ma'am. But I know very well what it is
and I know where he is too."
"Yes, yes, we can guess where he is at his own house
at Norland to be sure. He is the curate of the parish
I dare say."
"No, THAT he is not. He is of no profession at all."
"Margaret," said Marianne with great warmth,
"you know that all this is an invention of your own,
and that there is no such person in existence."
"Well, then, he is lately dead, Marianne, for I
am sure there was such a man once, and his name begins
with an F."
Most grateful did Elinor feel to Lady Middleton
for observing, at this moment, "that it rained very hard,"
though she believed the interruption to proceed less from
any attention to her, than from her ladyship's great dislike
of all such inelegant subjects of raillery as delighted
her husband and mother. The idea however started by her,
was immediately pursued by Colonel Brandon, who was
on every occasion mindful of the feelings of others
and much was said on the subject of rain by both of them.
Willoughby opened the pianoforte, and asked Marianne
to sit down to it and thus amidst the various endeavours
of different people to quit the topic, it fell to the ground.
But not so easily did Elinor recover from the alarm into
which it had thrown her.
A party was formed this evening for going on the
following day to see a very fine place about twelve miles
from Barton, belonging to a brotherinlaw of Colonel Brandon,
without whose interest it could not be seen, as the proprietor,
who was then abroad, had left strict orders on that head.
The grounds were declared to be highly beautiful,
and Sir John, who was particularly warm in their praise,
might be allowed to be a tolerable judge, for he had
formed parties to visit them, at least, twice every summer
for the last ten years. They contained a noble piece
of water a sail on which was to a form a great part of
the morning's amusement cold provisions were to be taken,
open carriages only to be employed, and every thing
conducted in the usual style of a complete party of pleasure.
To some few of the company it appeared rather
a bold undertaking, considering the time of year,
and that it had rained every day for the last fortnight
and Mrs. Dashwood, who had already a cold, was persuaded
by Elinor to stay at home.
CHAPTER 
Their intended excursion to Whitwell turned out
very different from what Elinor had expected. She was
prepared to be wet through, fatigued, and frightened
but the event was still more unfortunate, for they did
not go at all.
By ten o'clock the whole party was assembled at
the park, where they were to breakfast. The morning
was rather favourable, though it had rained all night,
as the clouds were then dispersing across the sky,
and the sun frequently appeared. They were all in high
spirits and good humour, eager to be happy, and determined
to submit to the greatest inconveniences and hardships
rather than be otherwise.
While they were at breakfast the letters were brought in.
Among the rest there was one for Colonel Brandonhe
took it, looked at the direction, changed colour,
and immediately left the room.
"What is the matter with Brandon?" said Sir John.
Nobody could tell.
"I hope he has had no bad news," said Lady Middleton.
"It must be something extraordinary that could make Colonel
Brandon leave my breakfast table so suddenly."
In about five minutes he returned.
"No bad news, Colonel, I hope" said Mrs. Jennings,
as soon as he entered the room.
"None at all, ma'am, I thank you."
"Was it from Avignon? I hope it is not to say
that your sister is worse."
"No, ma'am. It came from town, and is merely
a letter of business."
"But how came the hand to discompose you so much,
if it was only a letter of business? Come, come,
this won't do, Colonel so let us hear the truth of it."
"My dear madam," said Lady Middleton, "recollect what
you are saying."
"Perhaps it is to tell you that your cousin Fanny
is married?" said Mrs. Jennings, without attending
to her daughter's reproof.
"No, indeed, it is not."
"Well, then, I know who it is from, Colonel. And I
hope she is well."
"Whom do you mean, ma'am?" said he, colouring a little.
"Oh you know who I mean."
"I am particularly sorry, ma'am," said he,
addressing Lady Middleton, "that I should receive this
letter today, for it is on business which requires
my immediate attendance in town."
"In town" cried Mrs. Jennings. "What can you
have to do in town at this time of year?"
"My own loss is great," he continued, "in being obliged
to leave so agreeable a party but I am the more concerned,
as I fear my presence is necessary to gain your admittance
at Whitwell."
What a blow upon them all was this
"But if you write a note to the housekeeper, Mr. Brandon,"
said Marianne, eagerly, "will it not be sufficient?"
He shook his head.
"We must go," said Sir John."It shall not be put
off when we are so near it. You cannot go to town till
tomorrow, Brandon, that is all."
"I wish it could be so easily settled. But it
is not in my power to delay my journey for one day"
"If you would but let us know what your business is,"
said Mrs. Jennings, "we might see whether it could be put
off or not."
"You would not be six hours later," said Willoughby,
"if you were to defer your journey till our return."
"I cannot afford to lose ONE hour."
Elinor then heard Willoughby say, in a low voice to Marianne,
"There are some people who cannot bear a party of pleasure.
Brandon is one of them. He was afraid of catching cold
I dare say, and invented this trick for getting out of it.
I would lay fifty guineas the letter was of his own writing."
"I have no doubt of it," replied Marianne.
"There is no persuading you to change your mind,
Brandon, I know of old," said Sir John, "when once you
are determined on anything. But, however, I hope you
will think better of it. Consider, here are the two Miss
Careys come over from Newton, the three Miss Dashwoods
walked up from the cottage, and Mr. Willoughby got up
two hours before his usual time, on purpose to go to Whitwell."
Colonel Brandon again repeated his sorrow at being
the cause of disappointing the party but at the same
time declared it to be unavoidable.
"Well, then, when will you come back again?"
"I hope we shall see you at Barton," added her ladyship,
"as soon as you can conveniently leave town and we must
put off the party to Whitwell till you return."
"You are very obliging. But it is so uncertain,
when I may have it in my power to return, that I dare
not engage for it at all."
"Oh he must and shall come back," cried Sir John.
"If he is not here by the end of the week, I shall go
after him."
"Ay, so do, Sir John," cried Mrs. Jennings, "and then
perhaps you may find out what his business is."
"I do not want to pry into other men's concerns.
I suppose it is something he is ashamed of."
Colonel Brandon's horses were announced.
"You do not go to town on horseback, do you?"
added Sir John.
"No. Only to Honiton. I shall then go post."
"Well, as you are resolved to go, I wish you
a good journey. But you had better change your mind."
"I assure you it is not in my power."
He then took leave of the whole party.
"Is there no chance of my seeing you and your sisters
in town this winter, Miss Dashwood?"
"I am afraid, none at all."
"Then I must bid you farewell for a longer time
than I should wish to do."
To Marianne, he merely bowed and said nothing.
"Come Colonel," said Mrs. Jennings, "before you go,
do let us know what you are going about."
He wished her a good morning, and, attended by Sir John,
left the room.
The complaints and lamentations which politeness
had hitherto restrained, now burst forth universally
and they all agreed again and again how provoking it was
to be so disappointed.
"I can guess what his business is, however,"
said Mrs. Jennings exultingly.
"Can you, ma'am?" said almost every body.
"Yes it is about Miss Williams, I am sure."
"And who is Miss Williams?" asked Marianne.
"What do not you know who Miss Williams is? I am
sure you must have heard of her before. She is a relation
of the Colonel's, my dear a very near relation. We will
not say how near, for fear of shocking the young ladies."
Then, lowering her voice a little, she said to Elinor,
"She is his natural daughter."
"Indeed"
"Oh, yes and as like him as she can stare.
I dare say the Colonel will leave her all his fortune."
When Sir John returned, he joined most heartily
in the general regret on so unfortunate an event
concluding however by observing, that as they were
all got together, they must do something by way of
being happy and after some consultation it was agreed,
that although happiness could only be enjoyed at Whitwell,
they might procure a tolerable composure of mind by driving
about the country. The carriages were then ordered
Willoughby's was first, and Marianne never looked
happier than when she got into it. He drove through
the park very fast, and they were soon out of sight
and nothing more of them was seen till their return,
which did not happen till after the return of all the rest.
They both seemed delighted with their drive but said
only in general terms that they had kept in the lanes,
while the others went on the downs.
It was settled that there should be a dance in the evening,
and that every body should be extremely merry all day long.
Some more of the Careys came to dinner, and they had the
pleasure of sitting down nearly twenty to table, which Sir
John observed with great contentment. Willoughby took
his usual place between the two elder Miss Dashwoods.
Mrs. Jennings sat on Elinor's right hand and they had not
been long seated, before she leant behind her and Willoughby,
and said to Marianne, loud enough for them both to hear,
"I have found you out in spite of all your tricks.
I know where you spent the morning."
Marianne coloured, and replied very hastily,
"Where, pray?"
"Did not you know," said Willoughby, "that we had
been out in my curricle?"
"Yes, yes, Mr. Impudence, I know that very well,
and I was determined to find out WHERE you had been to.
I hope you like your house, Miss Marianne. It is a very
large one, I know and when I come to see you, I hope you
will have newfurnished it, for it wanted it very much
when I was there six years ago."
Marianne turned away in great confusion.
Mrs. Jennings laughed heartily and Elinor found that in her
resolution to know where they had been, she had actually
made her own woman enquire of Mr. Willoughby's groom
and that she had by that method been informed that they
had gone to Allenham, and spent a considerable time there
in walking about the garden and going all over the house.
Elinor could hardly believe this to be true,
as it seemed very unlikely that Willoughby should propose,
or Marianne consent, to enter the house while Mrs. Smith was
in it, with whom Marianne had not the smallest acquaintance.
As soon as they left the diningroom, Elinor enquired
of her about it and great was her surprise when she
found that every circumstance related by Mrs. Jennings
was perfectly true. Marianne was quite angry with her
for doubting it.
"Why should you imagine, Elinor, that we did not
go there, or that we did not see the house? Is not it
what you have often wished to do yourself?"
"Yes, Marianne, but I would not go while Mrs. Smith
was there, and with no other companion than Mr. Willoughby."
"Mr. Willoughby however is the only person who can
have a right to shew that house and as he went in an open
carriage, it was impossible to have any other companion.
I never spent a pleasanter morning in my life."
"I am afraid," replied Elinor, "that the pleasantness
of an employment does not always evince its propriety."
"On the contrary, nothing can be a stronger proof
of it, Elinor for if there had been any real impropriety
in what I did, I should have been sensible of it at
the time, for we always know when we are acting wrong,
and with such a conviction I could have had no pleasure."
"But, my dear Marianne, as it has already exposed you
to some very impertinent remarks, do you not now begin
to doubt the discretion of your own conduct?"
"If the impertinent remarks of Mrs. Jennings are
to be the proof of impropriety in conduct, we are all
offending every moment of our lives. I value not her
censure any more than I should do her commendation.
I am not sensible of having done anything wrong in walking
over Mrs. Smith's grounds, or in seeing her house.
They will one day be Mr. Willoughby's, and"
"If they were one day to be your own, Marianne,
you would not be justified in what you have done."
She blushed at this hint but it was even visibly
gratifying to her and after a ten minutes' interval of
earnest thought, she came to her sister again, and said
with great good humour, "Perhaps, Elinor, it WAS rather
illjudged in me to go to Allenham but Mr. Willoughby wanted
particularly to shew me the place and it is a charming house,
I assure you.There is one remarkably pretty sitting room
up stairs of a nice comfortable size for constant use,
and with modern furniture it would be delightful.
It is a corner room, and has windows on two sides.
On one side you look across the bowlinggreen, behind
the house, to a beautiful hanging wood, and on the other you
have a view of the church and village, and, beyond them,
of those fine bold hills that we have so often admired.
I did not see it to advantage, for nothing could be
more forlorn than the furniture,but if it were newly
fitted upa couple of hundred pounds, Willoughby says,
would make it one of the pleasantest summerrooms
in England."
Could Elinor have listened to her without interruption
from the others, she would have described every room
in the house with equal delight.
CHAPTER 
The sudden termination of Colonel Brandon's visit
at the park, with his steadiness in concealing its cause,
filled the mind, and raised the wonder of Mrs. Jennings
for two or three days she was a great wonderer, as every
one must be who takes a very lively interest in all the
comings and goings of all their acquaintance. She wondered,
with little intermission what could be the reason of it
was sure there must be some bad news, and thought over
every kind of distress that could have befallen him,
with a fixed determination that he should not escape
them all.
"Something very melancholy must be the matter,
I am sure," said she. "I could see it in his face.
Poor man I am afraid his circumstances may be bad.
The estate at Delaford was never reckoned more than two thousand
a year, and his brother left everything sadly involved.
I do think he must have been sent for about money matters,
for what else can it be? I wonder whether it is so.
I would give anything to know the truth of it. Perhaps it
is about Miss Williams and, by the bye, I dare say it is,
because he looked so conscious when I mentioned her.
May be she is ill in town nothing in the world more likely,
for I have a notion she is always rather sickly.
I would lay any wager it is about Miss Williams.
It is not so very likely he should be distressed in
his circumstances NOW, for he is a very prudent man,
and to be sure must have cleared the estate by this time.
I wonder what it can be May be his sister is worse
at Avignon, and has sent for him over. His setting off
in such a hurry seems very like it. Well, I wish him out
of all his trouble with all my heart, and a good wife into
the bargain."
So wondered, so talked Mrs. Jennings. Her opinion
varying with every fresh conjecture, and all seeming
equally probable as they arose. Elinor, though she felt
really interested in the welfare of Colonel Brandon,
could not bestow all the wonder on his going so suddenly
away, which Mrs. Jennings was desirous of her feeling
for besides that the circumstance did not in her opinion
justify such lasting amazement or variety of speculation,
her wonder was otherwise disposed of. It was engrossed
by the extraordinary silence of her sister and Willoughby
on the subject, which they must know to be peculiarly
interesting to them all. As this silence continued,
every day made it appear more strange and more incompatible
with the disposition of both. Why they should not openly
acknowledge to her mother and herself, what their constant
behaviour to each other declared to have taken place,
Elinor could not imagine.
She could easily conceive that marriage might not
be immediately in their power for though Willoughby
was independent, there was no reason to believe him rich.
His estate had been rated by Sir John at about six or seven
hundred a year but he lived at an expense to which that income
could hardly be equal, and he had himself often complained
of his poverty. But for this strange kind of secrecy
maintained by them relative to their engagement, which
in fact concealed nothing at all, she could not account
and it was so wholly contradictory to their general
opinions and practice, that a doubt sometimes entered
her mind of their being really engaged, and this doubt
was enough to prevent her making any inquiry of Marianne.
Nothing could be more expressive of attachment
to them all, than Willoughby's behaviour. To Marianne
it had all the distinguishing tenderness which a lover's
heart could give, and to the rest of the family it was the
affectionate attention of a son and a brother. The cottage
seemed to be considered and loved by him as his home
many more of his hours were spent there than at Allenham
and if no general engagement collected them at the park,
the exercise which called him out in the morning was
almost certain of ending there, where the rest of the day
was spent by himself at the side of Marianne, and by his
favourite pointer at her feet.
One evening in particular, about a week after
Colonel Brandon left the country, his heart seemed
more than usually open to every feeling of attachment
to the objects around him and on Mrs. Dashwood's
happening to mention her design of improving the cottage
in the spring, he warmly opposed every alteration
of a place which affection had established as perfect with him.
"What" he exclaimed"Improve this dear cottage
No. THAT I will never consent to. Not a stone must
be added to its walls, not an inch to its size,
if my feelings are regarded."
"Do not be alarmed," said Miss Dashwood,
"nothing of the kind will be done for my mother
will never have money enough to attempt it."
"I am heartily glad of it," he cried. "May she
always be poor, if she can employ her riches no better."
"Thank you, Willoughby. But you may be assured that I
would not sacrifice one sentiment of local attachment
of yours, or of any one whom I loved, for all the improvements
in the world. Depend upon it that whatever unemployed
sum may remain, when I make up my accounts in the spring,
I would even rather lay it uselessly by than dispose
of it in a manner so painful to you. But are you really
so attached to this place as to see no defect in it?"
"I am," said he. "To me it is faultless. Nay, more,
I consider it as the only form of building in which happiness
is attainable, and were I rich enough I would instantly pull
Combe down, and build it up again in the exact plan of this
cottage."
"With dark narrow stairs and a kitchen that smokes,
I suppose," said Elinor.
"Yes," cried he in the same eager tone, "with all
and every thing belonging to itin no one convenience
or INconvenience about it, should the least variation
be perceptible. Then, and then only, under such a roof, I
might perhaps be as happy at Combe as I have been at Barton."
"I flatter myself," replied Elinor, "that even under
the disadvantage of better rooms and a broader staircase,
you will hereafter find your own house as faultless as you
now do this."
"There certainly are circumstances," said Willoughby,
"which might greatly endear it to me but this place will
always have one claim of my affection, which no other can
possibly share."
Mrs. Dashwood looked with pleasure at Marianne,
whose fine eyes were fixed so expressively on Willoughby,
as plainly denoted how well she understood him.
"How often did I wish," added he, "when I was at
Allenham this time twelvemonth, that Barton cottage were
inhabited I never passed within view of it without admiring
its situation, and grieving that no one should live in it.
How little did I then think that the very first news
I should hear from Mrs. Smith, when I next came into
the country, would be that Barton cottage was taken and I
felt an immediate satisfaction and interest in the event,
which nothing but a kind of prescience of what happiness I
should experience from it, can account for. Must it not have
been so, Marianne?" speaking to her in a lowered voice.
Then continuing his former tone, he said, "And yet this
house you would spoil, Mrs. Dashwood? You would rob it
of its simplicity by imaginary improvement and this dear
parlour in which our acquaintance first began, and in which
so many happy hours have been since spent by us together,
you would degrade to the condition of a common entrance,
and every body would be eager to pass through the room
which has hitherto contained within itself more real
accommodation and comfort than any other apartment of
the handsomest dimensions in the world could possibly afford."
Mrs. Dashwood again assured him that no alteration
of the kind should be attempted.
"You are a good woman," he warmly replied.
"Your promise makes me easy. Extend it a little farther,
and it will make me happy. Tell me that not only your
house will remain the same, but that I shall ever find
you and yours as unchanged as your dwelling and that you
will always consider me with the kindness which has made
everything belonging to you so dear to me."
The promise was readily given, and Willoughby's
behaviour during the whole of the evening declared
at once his affection and happiness.
"Shall we see you tomorrow to dinner?" said Mrs. Dashwood,
when he was leaving them. "I do not ask you to come in
the morning, for we must walk to the park, to call on Lady
Middleton."
He engaged to be with them by four o'clock.
CHAPTER 
Mrs. Dashwood's visit to Lady Middleton took place
the next day, and two of her daughters went with her
but Marianne excused herself from being of the party,
under some trifling pretext of employment and her mother,
who concluded that a promise had been made by Willoughby
the night before of calling on her while they were absent,
was perfectly satisfied with her remaining at home.
On their return from the park they found Willoughby's
curricle and servant in waiting at the cottage,
and Mrs. Dashwood was convinced that her conjecture
had been just. So far it was all as she had foreseen
but on entering the house she beheld what no foresight
had taught her to expect. They were no sooner in the
passage than Marianne came hastily out of the parlour
apparently in violent affliction, with her handkerchief
at her eyes and without noticing them ran up stairs.
Surprised and alarmed they proceeded directly into the room
she had just quitted, where they found only Willoughby,
who was leaning against the mantelpiece with his back
towards them. He turned round on their coming in,
and his countenance shewed that he strongly partook
of the emotion which overpowered Marianne.
"Is anything the matter with her?" cried Mrs. Dashwood
as she entered"is she ill?"
"I hope not," he replied, trying to look cheerful
and with a forced smile presently added, "It is I who may
rather expect to be illfor I am now suffering under a
very heavy disappointment"
"Disappointment?"
"Yes, for I am unable to keep my engagement with you.
Mrs. Smith has this morning exercised the privilege
of riches upon a poor dependent cousin, by sending me on
business to London. I have just received my dispatches,
and taken my farewell of Allenham and by way of exhilaration
I am now come to take my farewell of you."
"To Londonand are you going this morning?"
"Almost this moment."
"This is very unfortunate. But Mrs. Smith must
be obligedand her business will not detain you from
us long I hope."
He coloured as he replied, "You are very kind, but I
have no idea of returning into Devonshire immediately.
My visits to Mrs. Smith are never repeated within
the twelvemonth."
"And is Mrs. Smith your only friend? Is Allenham the only
house in the neighbourhood to which you will be welcome?
For shame, Willoughby, can you wait for an invitation here?"
His colour increased and with his eyes fixed
on the ground he only replied, "You are too good."
Mrs. Dashwood looked at Elinor with surprise.
Elinor felt equal amazement. For a few moments every one
was silent. Mrs. Dashwood first spoke.
"I have only to add, my dear Willoughby, that at
Barton cottage you will always be welcome for I will not
press you to return here immediately, because you only
can judge how far THAT might be pleasing to Mrs. Smith
and on this head I shall be no more disposed to question
your judgment than to doubt your inclination."
"My engagements at present," replied Willoughby,
confusedly, "are of such a naturethatI dare not flatter
myself"
He stopt. Mrs. Dashwood was too much astonished
to speak, and another pause succeeded. This was broken
by Willoughby, who said with a faint smile, "It is folly
to linger in this manner. I will not torment myself
any longer by remaining among friends whose society
it is impossible for me now to enjoy."
He then hastily took leave of them all and left
the room. They saw him step into his carriage,
and in a minute it was out of sight.
Mrs. Dashwood felt too much for speech, and instantly
quitted the parlour to give way in solitude to the concern
and alarm which this sudden departure occasioned.
Elinor's uneasiness was at least equal to her mother's.
She thought of what had just passed with anxiety and distrust.
Willoughby's behaviour in taking leave of them, his
embarrassment,
and affectation of cheerfulness, and, above all, his
unwillingness
to accept her mother's invitation, a backwardness so unlike a
lover,
so unlike himself, greatly disturbed her. One moment she feared
that no serious design had ever been formed on his side and the
next that some unfortunate quarrel had taken place between him
and
her sisterthe distress in which Marianne had quitted the room
was such as a serious quarrel could most reasonably account for,
though when she considered what Marianne's love for him was,
a quarrel seemed almost impossible.
But whatever might be the particulars of their separation,
her sister's affliction was indubitable and she thought
with the tenderest compassion of that violent sorrow
which Marianne was in all probability not merely giving
way to as a relief, but feeding and encouraging as a duty.
In about half an hour her mother returned, and though
her eyes were red, her countenance was not uncheerful.
"Our dear Willoughby is now some miles from Barton, Elinor,"
said she, as she sat down to work, "and with how heavy a heart
does he travel?"
"It is all very strange. So suddenly to be gone It
seems but the work of a moment. And last night he was
with us so happy, so cheerful, so affectionate? And now,
after only ten minutes noticeGone too without intending
to returnSomething more than what he owned to us must
have happened. He did not speak, he did not behave
like himself. YOU must have seen the difference as well as I.
What can it be? Can they have quarrelled? Why else should he
have shewn such unwillingness to accept your invitation here?"
"It was not inclination that he wanted, Elinor I could
plainly see THAT. He had not the power of accepting it.
I have thought it all over I assure you, and I can
perfectly account for every thing that at first seemed
strange to me as well as to you."
"Can you, indeed"
"Yes. I have explained it to myself in the most
satisfactory waybut you, Elinor, who love to doubt
where you canit will not satisfy YOU, I know but you
shall not talk ME out of my trust in it. I am persuaded
that Mrs. Smith suspects his regard for Marianne,
disapproves of it, perhaps because she has other views
for him, and on that account is eager to get him away
and that the business which she sends him off to transact
is invented as an excuse to dismiss him. This is what I
believe to have happened. He is, moreover, aware that she
DOES disapprove the connection, he dares not therefore
at present confess to her his engagement with Marianne,
and he feels himself obliged, from his dependent situation,
to give into her schemes, and absent himself from
Devonshire for a while. You will tell me, I know,
that this may or may NOT have happened but I will listen
to no cavil, unless you can point out any other method
of understanding the affair as satisfactory at this.
And now, Elinor, what have you to say?"
"Nothing, for you have anticipated my answer."
"Then you would have told me, that it might or might not
have happened. Oh, Elinor, how incomprehensible are your
feelings You had rather take evil upon credit than good.
You had rather look out for misery for Marianne, and guilt
for poor Willoughby, than an apology for the latter.
You are resolved to think him blameable, because he took
leave of us with less affection than his usual behaviour
has shewn. And is no allowance to be made for inadvertence,
or for spirits depressed by recent disappointment? Are
no probabilities to be accepted, merely because they
are not certainties? Is nothing due to the man whom we
have all such reason to love, and no reason in the world
to think ill of? To the possibility of motives unanswerable
in themselves, though unavoidably secret for a while? And,
after all, what is it you suspect him of?"
"I can hardly tell myself. But suspicion of
something unpleasant is the inevitable consequence
of such an alteration as we just witnessed in him.
There is great truth, however, in what you have now urged
of the allowances which ought to be made for him, and it
is my wish to be candid in my judgment of every body.
Willoughby may undoubtedly have very sufficient
reasons for his conduct, and I will hope that he has.
But it would have been more like Willoughby to acknowledge
them at once. Secrecy may be advisable but still I
cannot help wondering at its being practiced by him."
"Do not blame him, however, for departing from
his character, where the deviation is necessary.
But you really do admit the justice of what I have said
in his defence?I am happyand he is acquitted."
"Not entirely. It may be proper to conceal their
engagement if they ARE engaged from Mrs. Smith
and if that is the case, it must be highly expedient
for Willoughby to be but little in Devonshire at present.
But this is no excuse for their concealing it from us."
"Concealing it from us my dear child, do you accuse
Willoughby and Marianne of concealment? This is strange
indeed, when your eyes have been reproaching them every day
for incautiousness."
"I want no proof of their affection," said Elinor
"but of their engagement I do."
"I am perfectly satisfied of both."
"Yet not a syllable has been said to you on the
subject, by either of them."
"I have not wanted syllables where actions have
spoken so plainly. Has not his behaviour to Marianne
and to all of us, for at least the last fortnight,
declared that he loved and considered her as his future wife,
and that he felt for us the attachment of the nearest
relation? Have we not perfectly understood each other?
Has not my consent been daily asked by his looks, his manner,
his attentive and affectionate respect? My Elinor,
is it possible to doubt their engagement? How could
such a thought occur to you? How is it to be supposed
that Willoughby, persuaded as he must be of your
sister's love, should leave her, and leave her perhaps
for months, without telling her of his affectionthat
they should part without a mutual exchange of confidence?"
"I confess," replied Elinor, "that every circumstance
except ONE is in favour of their engagement
but that ONE is the total silence of both on the subject,
and with me it almost outweighs every other."
"How strange this is You must think wretchedly indeed
of Willoughby, if, after all that has openly passed between them,
you can doubt the nature of the terms on which they are together.
Has he been acting a part in his behaviour to your sister
all this time? Do you suppose him really indifferent to her?"
"No, I cannot think that. He must and does love her
I am sure."
"But with a strange kind of tenderness, if he can
leave her with such indifference, such carelessness
of the future, as you attribute to him."
"You must remember, my dear mother, that I have never
considered this matter as certain. I have had my doubts,
I confess but they are fainter than they were, and they
may soon be entirely done away. If we find they correspond,
every fear of mine will be removed."
"A mighty concession indeed If you were to see
them at the altar, you would suppose they were going to
be married. Ungracious girl But I require no such proof.
Nothing in my opinion has ever passed to justify doubt
no secrecy has been attempted all has been uniformly open
and unreserved. You cannot doubt your sister's wishes.
It must be Willoughby therefore whom you suspect. But why?
Is he not a man of honour and feeling? Has there been any
inconsistency on his side to create alarm? can he be deceitful?"
"I hope not, I believe not," cried Elinor.
"I love Willoughby, sincerely love him and suspicion of his
integrity cannot be more painful to yourself than to me.
It has been involuntary, and I will not encourage it.
I was startled, I confess, by the alteration in his
manners this morninghe did not speak like himself,
and did not return your kindness with any cordiality.
But all this may be explained by such a situation of his
affairs as you have supposed. He had just parted from
my sister, had seen her leave him in the greatest affliction
and if he felt obliged, from a fear of offending Mrs. Smith,
to resist the temptation of returning here soon, and yet
aware that by declining your invitation, by saying
that he was going away for some time, he should seem
to act an ungenerous, a suspicious part by our family,
he might well be embarrassed and disturbed. In such a case,
a plain and open avowal of his difficulties would have been
more to his honour I think, as well as more consistent
with his general characterbut I will not raise objections
against any one's conduct on so illiberal a foundation,
as a difference in judgment from myself, or a deviation from
what I may think right and consistent."
"You speak very properly. Willoughby certainly does
not deserve to be suspected. Though WE have not known
him long, he is no stranger in this part of the world
and who has ever spoken to his disadvantage? Had he been
in a situation to act independently and marry immediately,
it might have been odd that he should leave us without
acknowledging everything to me at once but this is not the case.
It is an engagement in some respects not prosperously begun,
for their marriage must be at a very uncertain distance
and even secrecy, as far as it can be observed, may now
be very advisable."
They were interrupted by the entrance of Margaret
and Elinor was then at liberty to think over the representations
of her mother, to acknowledge the probability of many,
and hope for the justice of all.
They saw nothing of Marianne till dinner time,
when she entered the room and took her place at the table
without saying a word. Her eyes were red and swollen
and it seemed as if her tears were even then restrained
with difficulty. She avoided the looks of them all,
could neither eat nor speak, and after some time, on her
mother's silently pressing her hand with tender compassion,
her small degree of fortitude was quite overcome, she burst
into tears and left the room.
This violent oppression of spirits continued the
whole evening. She was without any power, because she
was without any desire of command over herself.
The slightest mention of anything relative to Willoughby
overpowered her in an instant and though her family
were most anxiously attentive to her comfort, it was
impossible for them, if they spoke at all, to keep clear
of every subject which her feelings connected with him.
CHAPTER 
Marianne would have thought herself very inexcusable
had she been able to sleep at all the first night
after parting from Willoughby. She would have been
ashamed to look her family in the face the next morning,
had she not risen from her bed in more need of repose
than when she lay down in it. But the feelings which
made such composure a disgrace, left her in no danger
of incurring it. She was awake the whole night, and she
wept the greatest part of it. She got up with a headache,
was unable to talk, and unwilling to take any nourishment
giving pain every moment to her mother and sisters,
and forbidding all attempt at consolation from either.
Her sensibility was potent enough
When breakfast was over she walked out by herself,
and wandered about the village of Allenham, indulging the
recollection of past enjoyment and crying over the present
reverse for the chief of the morning.
The evening passed off in the equal indulgence of feeling.
She played over every favourite song that she had been used
to play to Willoughby, every air in which their voices
had been oftenest joined, and sat at the instrument gazing
on every line of music that he had written out for her,
till her heart was so heavy that no farther sadness
could be gained and this nourishment of grief was every
day applied. She spent whole hours at the pianoforte
alternately singing and crying her voice often totally
suspended by her tears. In books too, as well as in music,
she courted the misery which a contrast between the past
and present was certain of giving. She read nothing
but what they had been used to read together.
Such violence of affliction indeed could not be supported
for ever it sunk within a few days into a calmer melancholy
but these employments, to which she daily recurred,
her solitary walks and silent meditations, still produced
occasional effusions of sorrow as lively as ever.
No letter from Willoughby came and none seemed expected
by Marianne. Her mother was surprised, and Elinor again
became uneasy. But Mrs. Dashwood could find explanations
whenever she wanted them, which at least satisfied herself.
"Remember, Elinor," said she, "how very often Sir John
fetches our letters himself from the post, and carries them
to it. We have already agreed that secrecy may be necessary,
and we must acknowledge that it could not be maintained if
their correspondence were to pass through Sir John's hands."
Elinor could not deny the truth of this, and she tried
to find in it a motive sufficient for their silence.
But there was one method so direct, so simple, and in
her opinion so eligible of knowing the real state
of the affair, and of instantly removing all mystery,
that she could not help suggesting it to her mother.
"Why do you not ask Marianne at once," said she,
"whether she is or she is not engaged to Willoughby? From you,
her mother, and so kind, so indulgent a mother, the question
could not give offence. It would be the natural result
of your affection for her. She used to be all unreserve,
and to you more especially."
"I would not ask such a question for the world.
Supposing it possible that they are not engaged,
what distress would not such an enquiry inflict At any
rate it would be most ungenerous. I should never deserve
her confidence again, after forcing from her a confession
of what is meant at present to be unacknowledged to any one.
I know Marianne's heart I know that she dearly loves me,
and that I shall not be the last to whom the affair is made
known,
when circumstances make the revealment of it eligible.
I would not attempt to force the confidence of any one
of a child much less because a sense of duty would prevent
the denial which her wishes might direct."
Elinor thought this generosity overstrained,
considering her sister's youth, and urged the matter farther,
but in vain common sense, common care, common prudence,
were all sunk in Mrs. Dashwood's romantic delicacy.
It was several days before Willoughby's name
was mentioned before Marianne by any of her family
Sir John and Mrs. Jennings, indeed, were not so nice
their witticisms added pain to many a painful hour
but one evening, Mrs. Dashwood, accidentally taking up a
volume of Shakespeare, exclaimed,
"We have never finished Hamlet, Marianne our dear
Willoughby went away before we could get through it.
We will put it by, that when he comes again...But it may
be months, perhaps, before THAT happens."
"Months" cried Marianne, with strong surprise.
"Nonor many weeks."
Mrs. Dashwood was sorry for what she had said
but it gave Elinor pleasure, as it produced a reply
from Marianne so expressive of confidence in Willoughby
and knowledge of his intentions.
One morning, about a week after his leaving the country,
Marianne was prevailed on to join her sisters in their
usual walk, instead of wandering away by herself.
Hitherto she had carefully avoided every companion in
her rambles. If her sisters intended to walk on the downs,
she directly stole away towards the lanes if they talked
of the valley, she was as speedy in climbing the hills,
and could never be found when the others set off.
But at length she was secured by the exertions of Elinor,
who greatly disapproved such continual seclusion. They walked
along the road through the valley, and chiefly in silence,
for Marianne's MIND could not be controlled, and Elinor,
satisfied with gaining one point, would not then attempt more.
Beyond the entrance of the valley, where the country,
though still rich, was less wild and more open, a long
stretch of the road which they had travelled on first coming
to Barton, lay before them and on reaching that point,
they stopped to look around them, and examine a prospect
which formed the distance of their view from the cottage,
from a spot which they had never happened to reach in any
of their walks before.
Amongst the objects in the scene, they soon discovered
an animated one it was a man on horseback riding towards them.
In a few minutes they could distinguish him to be a gentleman
and in a moment afterwards Marianne rapturously exclaimed,
"It is he it is indeedI know it is"and was
hastening to meet him, when Elinor cried out,
"Indeed, Marianne, I think you are mistaken. It is
not Willoughby. The person is not tall enough for him,
and has not his air."
"He has, he has," cried Marianne, "I am sure he has.
His air, his coat, his horse. I knew how soon he would come."
She walked eagerly on as she spoke and Elinor,
to screen Marianne from particularity, as she felt almost
certain of its not being Willoughby, quickened her
pace and kept up with her. They were soon within
thirty yards of the gentleman. Marianne looked again
her heart sunk within her and abruptly turning round,
she was hurrying back, when the voices of both her sisters
were raised to detain her a third, almost as well known
as Willoughby's, joined them in begging her to stop,
and she turned round with surprise to see and welcome
Edward Ferrars.
He was the only person in the world who could
at that moment be forgiven for not being Willoughby
the only one who could have gained a smile from her
but she dispersed her tears to smile on HIM, and in her
sister's happiness forgot for a time her own disappointment.
He dismounted, and giving his horse to his servant,
walked back with them to Barton, whither he was purposely
coming to visit them.
He was welcomed by them all with great cordiality,
but especially by Marianne, who showed more warmth of
regard in her reception of him than even Elinor herself.
To Marianne, indeed, the meeting between Edward and her sister
was but a continuation of that unaccountable coldness which she
had often observed at Norland in their mutual behaviour.
On Edward's side, more particularly, there was a deficiency
of all that a lover ought to look and say on such an occasion.
He was confused, seemed scarcely sensible of pleasure
in seeing them, looked neither rapturous nor gay,
said little but what was forced from him by questions,
and distinguished Elinor by no mark of affection.
Marianne saw and listened with increasing surprise.
She began almost to feel a dislike of Edward and it ended,
as every feeling must end with her, by carrying back her
thoughts to Willoughby, whose manners formed a contrast
sufficiently striking to those of his brother elect.
After a short silence which succeeded the first
surprise and enquiries of meeting, Marianne asked
Edward if he came directly from London. No, he had
been in Devonshire a fortnight.
"A fortnight" she repeated, surprised at his being
so long in the same county with Elinor without seeing
her before.
He looked rather distressed as he added, that he
had been staying with some friends near Plymouth.
"Have you been lately in Sussex?" said Elinor.
"I was at Norland about a month ago."
"And how does dear, dear Norland look?" cried Marianne.
"Dear, dear Norland," said Elinor, "probably looks
much as it always does at this time of the year.
The woods and walks thickly covered with dead leaves."
"Oh," cried Marianne, "with what transporting sensation
have I formerly seen them fall How have I delighted,
as I walked, to see them driven in showers about me
by the wind What feelings have they, the season, the air
altogether inspired Now there is no one to regard them.
They are seen only as a nuisance, swept hastily off,
and driven as much as possible from the sight."
"It is not every one," said Elinor, "who has your
passion for dead leaves."
"No my feelings are not often shared, not often
understood. But SOMETIMES they are."As she said this,
she sunk into a reverie for a few momentsbut rousing
herself again, "Now, Edward," said she, calling his attention
to the prospect, "here is Barton valley. Look up to it,
and be tranquil if you can. Look at those hills
Did you ever see their equals? To the left is Barton park,
amongst those woods and plantations. You may see the end
of the house. And there, beneath that farthest hill,
which rises with such grandeur, is our cottage."
"It is a beautiful country," he replied "but these
bottoms must be dirty in winter."
"How can you think of dirt, with such objects before you?"
"Because," replied he, smiling, "among the rest of the
objects before me, I see a very dirty lane."
"How strange" said Marianne to herself as she walked on.
"Have you an agreeable neighbourhood here? Are the
Middletons pleasant people?"
"No, not all," answered Marianne "we could not
be more unfortunately situated."
"Marianne," cried her sister, "how can you say so? How can
you be so unjust? They are a very respectable family, Mr.
Ferrars
and towards us have behaved in the friendliest manner. Have you
forgot, Marianne, how many pleasant days we have owed to them?"
"No," said Marianne, in a low voice, "nor how many
painful moments."
Elinor took no notice of this and directing
her attention to their visitor, endeavoured to support
something like discourse with him, by talking of their
present residence, its conveniences, c. extorting from him
occasional questions and remarks. His coldness and reserve
mortified her severely she was vexed and half angry
but resolving to regulate her behaviour to him by the past
rather than the present, she avoided every appearance
of resentment or displeasure, and treated him as she
thought he ought to be treated from the family connection.
CHAPTER 
Mrs. Dashwood was surprised only for a moment at
seeing him for his coming to Barton was, in her opinion,
of all things the most natural. Her joy and expression
of regard long outlived her wonder. He received the kindest
welcome from her and shyness, coldness, reserve could not
stand against such a reception. They had begun to fail him
before he entered the house, and they were quite overcome
by the captivating manners of Mrs. Dashwood. Indeed a man
could not very well be in love with either of her daughters,
without extending the passion to her and Elinor had the
satisfaction of seeing him soon become more like himself.
His affections seemed to reanimate towards them all,
and his interest in their welfare again became perceptible.
He was not in spirits, however he praised their house,
admired its prospect, was attentive, and kind but still
he was not in spirits. The whole family perceived it,
and Mrs. Dashwood, attributing it to some want of liberality
in his mother, sat down to table indignant against all
selfish parents.
"What are Mrs. Ferrars's views for you at present, Edward?"
said she, when dinner was over and they had drawn round
the fire "are you still to be a great orator in spite of
yourself?"
"No. I hope my mother is now convinced that I have
no more talents than inclination for a public life"
"But how is your fame to be established? for famous you
must be to satisfy all your family and with no inclination
for expense, no affection for strangers, no profession,
and no assurance, you may find it a difficult matter."
"I shall not attempt it. I have no wish to be
distinguished and have every reason to hope I never shall.
Thank Heaven I cannot be forced into genius and eloquence."
"You have no ambition, I well know. Your wishes
are all moderate."
"As moderate as those of the rest of the world,
I believe. I wish as well as every body else to be
perfectly happy but, like every body else it must be
in my own way. Greatness will not make me so."
"Strange that it would" cried Marianne. "What have
wealth or grandeur to do with happiness?"
"Grandeur has but little," said Elinor, "but wealth
has much to do with it."
"Elinor, for shame" said Marianne, "money can only
give happiness where there is nothing else to give it.
Beyond a competence, it can afford no real satisfaction,
as far as mere self is concerned."
"Perhaps," said Elinor, smiling, "we may come
to the same point. YOUR competence and MY wealth
are very much alike, I dare say and without them,
as the world goes now, we shall both agree that every
kind of external comfort must be wanting. Your ideas
are only more noble than mine. Come, what is your competence?"
"About eighteen hundred or two thousand a year
not more than THAT."
Elinor laughed. "TWO thousand a year ONE is my
wealth I guessed how it would end."
"And yet two thousand ayear is a very moderate income,"
said Marianne. "A family cannot well be maintained on
a smaller. I am sure I am not extravagant in my demands.
A proper establishment of servants, a carriage, perhaps two,
and hunters, cannot be supported on less."
Elinor smiled again, to hear her sister describing
so accurately their future expenses at Combe Magna.
"Hunters" repeated Edward"but why must you have
hunters? Every body does not hunt."
Marianne coloured as she replied, "But most people do."
"I wish," said Margaret, striking out a novel thought,
"that somebody would give us all a large fortune apiece"
"Oh that they would" cried Marianne, her eyes
sparkling with animation, and her cheeks glowing
with the delight of such imaginary happiness.
"We are all unanimous in that wish, I suppose,"
said Elinor, "in spite of the insufficiency of wealth."
"Oh dear" cried Margaret, "how happy I should be
I wonder what I should do with it"
Marianne looked as if she had no doubt on that point.
"I should be puzzled to spend so large a fortune myself,"
said Mrs. Dashwood, "if my children were all to be rich
my help."
"You must begin your improvements on this house,"
observed Elinor, "and your difficulties will soon vanish."
"What magnificent orders would travel from this family
to London," said Edward, "in such an event What a happy
day for booksellers, musicsellers, and printshops You,
Miss Dashwood, would give a general commission for every
new print of merit to be sent youand as for Marianne,
I know her greatness of soul, there would not be music enough
in London to content her. And booksThomson, Cowper,
Scottshe would buy them all over and over again she
would buy up every copy, I believe, to prevent their
falling into unworthy hands and she would have every
book that tells her how to admire an old twisted tree.
Should not you, Marianne? Forgive me, if I am very saucy.
But I was willing to shew you that I had not forgot our
old disputes."
"I love to be reminded of the past, Edwardwhether it
be melancholy or gay, I love to recall itand you
will never offend me by talking of former times.
You are very right in supposing how my money would be
spentsome of it, at leastmy loose cash would certainly
be employed in improving my collection of music and books."
"And the bulk of your fortune would be laid out
in annuities on the authors or their heirs."
"No, Edward, I should have something else to do
with it."
"Perhaps, then, you would bestow it as a reward on that
person who wrote the ablest defence of your favourite maxim,
that no one can ever be in love more than once in their
lifeyour opinion on that point is unchanged, I presume?"
"Undoubtedly. At my time of life opinions are tolerably fixed.
It is not likely that I should now see or hear any thing to
change them."
"Marianne is as steadfast as ever, you see," said Elinor,
"she is not at all altered."
"She is only grown a little more grave than she was."
"Nay, Edward," said Marianne, "you need not reproach me.
You are not very gay yourself."
"Why should you think so" replied he, with a sigh.
"But gaiety never was a part of MY character."
"Nor do I think it a part of Marianne's," said Elinor
"I should hardly call her a lively girlshe is very earnest,
very eager in all she doessometimes talks a great deal
and always with animationbut she is not often really merry."
"I believe you are right," he replied, "and yet I
have always set her down as a lively girl."
"I have frequently detected myself in such kind of mistakes,"
said Elinor, "in a total misapprehension of character in some
point or other fancying people so much more gay or grave,
or ingenious or stupid than they really are, and I can
hardly tell why or in what the deception originated.
Sometimes one is guided by what they say of themselves,
and very frequently by what other people say of them,
without giving oneself time to deliberate and judge."
"But I thought it was right, Elinor," said Marianne,
"to be guided wholly by the opinion of other people.
I thought our judgments were given us merely to be subservient
to those of neighbours. This has always been your doctrine,
I am sure."
"No, Marianne, never. My doctrine has never aimed
at the subjection of the understanding. All I have
ever attempted to influence has been the behaviour.
You must not confound my meaning. I am guilty, I confess,
of having often wished you to treat our acquaintance
in general with greater attention but when have I advised
you to adopt their sentiments or to conform to their
judgment in serious matters?"
"You have not been able to bring your sister over to your
plan of general civility," said Edward to Elinor, "Do you gain
no ground?"
"Quite the contrary," replied Elinor,
looking expressively at Marianne.
"My judgment," he returned, "is all on your side
of the question but I am afraid my practice is much
more on your sister's. I never wish to offend, but I
am so foolishly shy, that I often seem negligent,
when I am only kept back by my natural awkwardness.
I have frequently thought that I must have been intended
by nature to be fond of low company, I am so little at
my ease among strangers of gentility"
"Marianne has not shyness to excuse any inattention
of hers," said Elinor.
"She knows her own worth too well for false shame,"
replied Edward. "Shyness is only the effect of a sense
of inferiority in some way or other. If I could persuade
myself that my manners were perfectly easy and graceful,
I should not be shy."
"But you would still be reserved," said Marianne,
"and that is worse."
Edward started"Reserved Am I reserved, Marianne?"
"Yes, very."
"I do not understand you," replied he, colouring.
"Reservedhow, in what manner? What am I to tell you?
What can you suppose?"
Elinor looked surprised at his emotion but trying
to laugh off the subject, she said to him, "Do not you
know my sister well enough to understand what she means?
Do not you know she calls every one reserved who does not
talk as fast, and admire what she admires as rapturously
as herself?"
Edward made no answer. His gravity and thoughtfulness
returned on him in their fullest extentand he sat
for some time silent and dull.
CHAPTER 
Elinor saw, with great uneasiness the low spirits
of her friend. His visit afforded her but a very
partial satisfaction, while his own enjoyment in it
appeared so imperfect. It was evident that he was unhappy
she wished it were equally evident that he still
distinguished her by the same affection which once
she had felt no doubt of inspiring but hitherto the
continuance of his preference seemed very uncertain
and the reservedness of his manner towards her contradicted
one moment what a more animated look had intimated the preceding
one.
He joined her and Marianne in the breakfastroom
the next morning before the others were down and Marianne,
who was always eager to promote their happiness as far
as she could, soon left them to themselves. But before she
was half way upstairs she heard the parlour door open, and,
turning round, was astonished to see Edward himself come out.
"I am going into the village to see my horses,"
said he, "as you are not yet ready for breakfast I shall
be back again presently."
Edward returned to them with fresh admiration
of the surrounding country in his walk to the village,
he had seen many parts of the valley to advantage
and the village itself, in a much higher situation than
the cottage, afforded a general view of the whole, which had
exceedingly pleased him. This was a subject which ensured
Marianne's attention, and she was beginning to describe
her own admiration of these scenes, and to question him more
minutely on the objects that had particularly struck him,
when Edward interrupted her by saying, "You must not
enquire too far, Marianneremember I have no knowledge
in the picturesque, and I shall offend you by my ignorance
and want of taste if we come to particulars. I shall call
hills steep, which ought to be bold surfaces strange
and uncouth, which ought to be irregular and rugged
and distant objects out of sight, which ought only to be
indistinct through the soft medium of a hazy atmosphere.
You must be satisfied with such admiration as I can
honestly give. I call it a very fine countrythe
hills are steep, the woods seem full of fine timber,
and the valley looks comfortable and snugwith rich
meadows and several neat farm houses scattered here
and there. It exactly answers my idea of a fine country,
because it unites beauty with utilityand I dare say it
is a picturesque one too, because you admire it I can
easily believe it to be full of rocks and promontories,
grey moss and brush wood, but these are all lost on me.
I know nothing of the picturesque."
"I am afraid it is but too true," said Marianne
"but why should you boast of it?"
"I suspect," said Elinor, "that to avoid one kind
of affectation, Edward here falls into another. Because he
believes many people pretend to more admiration of the beauties
of nature than they really feel, and is disgusted with
such pretensions, he affects greater indifference and less
discrimination in viewing them himself than he possesses.
He is fastidious and will have an affectation of his own."
"It is very true," said Marianne, "that admiration
of landscape scenery is become a mere jargon.
Every body pretends to feel and tries to describe with
the taste and elegance of him who first defined what
picturesque beauty was. I detest jargon of every kind,
and sometimes I have kept my feelings to myself,
because I could find no language to describe them
in but what was worn and hackneyed out of all sense and meaning."
"I am convinced," said Edward, "that you really feel
all the delight in a fine prospect which you profess
to feel. But, in return, your sister must allow me
to feel no more than I profess. I like a fine prospect,
but not on picturesque principles. I do not like crooked,
twisted, blasted trees. I admire them much more if they
are tall, straight, and flourishing. I do not like ruined,
tattered cottages. I am not fond of nettles or thistles,
or heath blossoms. I have more pleasure in a snug
farmhouse than a watchtowerand a troop of tidy,
happy villages please me better than the finest banditti
in the world."
Marianne looked with amazement at Edward,
with compassion at her sister. Elinor only laughed.
The subject was continued no farther and Marianne
remained thoughtfully silent, till a new object suddenly
engaged her attention. She was sitting by Edward, and
in taking his tea from Mrs. Dashwood, his hand passed
so directly before her, as to make a ring, with a plait
of hair in the centre, very conspicuous on one of his fingers.
"I never saw you wear a ring before, Edward," she cried.
"Is that Fanny's hair? I remember her promising to give
you some. But I should have thought her hair had been darker."
Marianne spoke inconsiderately what she really felt
but when she saw how much she had pained Edward, her own
vexation at her want of thought could not be surpassed
by his. He coloured very deeply, and giving a momentary
glance at Elinor, replied, "Yes it is my sister's hair.
The setting always casts a different shade on it,
you know."
Elinor had met his eye, and looked conscious likewise.
That the hair was her own, she instantaneously felt as
well satisfied as Marianne the only difference in their
conclusions was, that what Marianne considered as a free
gift from her sister, Elinor was conscious must have been
procured by some theft or contrivance unknown to herself.
She was not in a humour, however, to regard it as an affront,
and affecting to take no notice of what passed,
by instantly talking of something else, she internally
resolved henceforward to catch every opportunity of eyeing
the hair and of satisfying herself, beyond all doubt,
that it was exactly the shade of her own.
Edward's embarrassment lasted some time, and it
ended in an absence of mind still more settled.
He was particularly grave the whole morning.
Marianne severely censured herself for what she had said
but her own forgiveness might have been more speedy,
had she known how little offence it had given her sister.
Before the middle of the day, they were visited by Sir
John and Mrs. Jennings, who, having heard of the arrival
of a gentleman at the cottage, came to take a survey
of the guest. With the assistance of his motherinlaw,
Sir John was not long in discovering that the name of
Ferrars began with an F. and this prepared a future mine
of raillery against the devoted Elinor, which nothing but
the newness of their acquaintance with Edward could have
prevented from being immediately sprung. But, as it was,
she only learned, from some very significant looks, how far
their penetration, founded on Margaret's instructions, extended.
Sir John never came to the Dashwoods without either
inviting them to dine at the park the next day, or to drink
tea with them that evening. On the present occasion,
for the better entertainment of their visitor, towards
whose amusement he felt himself bound to contribute,
he wished to engage them for both.
"You MUST drink tea with us to night," said he,
"for we shall be quite aloneand tomorrow you must
absolutely dine with us, for we shall be a large party."
Mrs. Jennings enforced the necessity. "And who knows
but you may raise a dance," said she. "And that will
tempt YOU, Miss Marianne."
"A dance" cried Marianne. "Impossible Who is to dance?"
"Who why yourselves, and the Careys, and Whitakers
to be sure.What you thought nobody could dance
because a certain person that shall be nameless is gone"
"I wish with all my soul," cried Sir John,
"that Willoughby were among us again."
This, and Marianne's blushing, gave new suspicions
to Edward. "And who is Willoughby?" said he, in a low voice,
to Miss Dashwood, by whom he was sitting.
She gave him a brief reply. Marianne's countenance
was more communicative. Edward saw enough to comprehend,
not only the meaning of others, but such of Marianne's
expressions as had puzzled him before and when their
visitors left them, he went immediately round her, and said,
in a whisper, "I have been guessing. Shall I tell you
my guess?"
"What do you mean?"
"Shall I tell you."
"Certainly."
"Well then I guess that Mr. Willoughby hunts."
Marianne was surprised and confused, yet she could
not help smiling at the quiet archness of his manner,
and after a moment's silence, said,
"Oh, Edward How can you?But the time will come
I hope...I am sure you will like him."
"I do not doubt it," replied he, rather astonished
at her earnestness and warmth for had he not imagined it
to be a joke for the good of her acquaintance in general,
founded only on a something or a nothing between Mr. Willoughby
and herself, he would not have ventured to mention it.
CHAPTER 
Edward remained a week at the cottage he was earnestly
pressed by Mrs. Dashwood to stay longer but, as if he
were bent only on selfmortification, he seemed resolved
to be gone when his enjoyment among his friends was at
the height. His spirits, during the last two or three days,
though still very unequal, were greatly improvedhe grew
more and more partial to the house and environsnever
spoke of going away without a sighdeclared his time
to be wholly disengagedeven doubted to what place he
should go when he left thembut still, go he must.
Never had any week passed so quicklyhe could hardly
believe it to be gone. He said so repeatedly other things
he said too, which marked the turn of his feelings and gave
the lie to his actions. He had no pleasure at Norland
he detested being in town but either to Norland or London,
he must go. He valued their kindness beyond any thing,
and his greatest happiness was in being with them.
Yet, he must leave them at the end of a week, in spite
of their wishes and his own, and without any restraint
on his time.
Elinor placed all that was astonishing in this
way of acting to his mother's account and it was
happy for her that he had a mother whose character
was so imperfectly known to her, as to be the general
excuse for every thing strange on the part of her son.
Disappointed, however, and vexed as she was, and sometimes
displeased with his uncertain behaviour to herself,
she was very well disposed on the whole to regard his actions
with all the candid allowances and generous qualifications,
which had been rather more painfully extorted from her,
for Willoughby's service, by her mother. His want of spirits,
of openness, and of consistency, were most usually
attributed to his want of independence, and his better
knowledge of Mrs. Ferrars's disposition and designs.
The shortness of his visit, the steadiness of his purpose
in leaving them, originated in the same fettered inclination,
the same inevitable necessity of temporizing with his mother.
The old wellestablished grievance of duty against will,
parent against child, was the cause of all. She would have
been glad to know when these difficulties were to cease,
this opposition was to yield,when Mrs. Ferrars would
be reformed, and her son be at liberty to be happy.
But from such vain wishes she was forced to turn for comfort
to the renewal of her confidence in Edward's affection,
to the remembrance of every mark of regard in look or word
which fell from him while at Barton, and above all
to that flattering proof of it which he constantly wore
round his finger.
"I think, Edward," said Mrs. Dashwood, as they were
at breakfast the last morning, "you would be a happier man
if you had any profession to engage your time and give
an interest to your plans and actions. Some inconvenience
to your friends, indeed, might result from ityou
would not be able to give them so much of your time.
But with a smile you would be materially benefited
in one particular at leastyou would know where to go
when you left them."
"I do assure you," he replied, "that I have long
thought on this point, as you think now. It has been,
and is, and probably will always be a heavy misfortune
to me, that I have had no necessary business to engage me,
no profession to give me employment, or afford me any
thing like independence. But unfortunately my own nicety,
and the nicety of my friends, have made me what I am,
an idle, helpless being. We never could agree in our
choice of a profession. I always preferred the church,
as I still do. But that was not smart enough for my family.
They recommended the army. That was a great deal
too smart for me. The law was allowed to be genteel
enough many young men, who had chambers in the Temple,
made a very good appearance in the first circles,
and drove about town in very knowing gigs. But I had
no inclination for the law, even in this less abstruse
study of it, which my family approved. As for the navy,
it had fashion on its side, but I was too old when the
subject was first started to enter itand, at length,
as there was no necessity for my having any profession
at all, as I might be as dashing and expensive without
a red coat on my back as with one, idleness was pronounced
on the whole to be most advantageous and honourable,
and a young man of eighteen is not in general so earnestly
bent on being busy as to resist the solicitations of his
friends to do nothing. I was therefore entered at Oxford
and have been properly idle ever since."
"The consequence of which, I suppose, will be,"
said Mrs. Dashwood, "since leisure has not promoted
your own happiness, that your sons will be brought up
to as many pursuits, employments, professions, and trades
as Columella's."
"They will be brought up," said he, in a serious accent,
"to be as unlike myself as is possible. In feeling,
in action, in condition, in every thing."
"Come, come this is all an effusion of immediate
want of spirits, Edward. You are in a melancholy humour,
and fancy that any one unlike yourself must be happy.
But remember that the pain of parting from friends
will be felt by every body at times, whatever be their
education or state. Know your own happiness. You want
nothing but patienceor give it a more fascinating name,
call it hope. Your mother will secure to you, in time,
that independence you are so anxious for it is her duty,
and it will, it must ere long become her happiness to
prevent your whole youth from being wasted in discontent.
How much may not a few months do?"
"I think," replied Edward, "that I may defy many
months to produce any good to me."
This desponding turn of mind, though it could not
be communicated to Mrs. Dashwood, gave additional pain
to them all in the parting, which shortly took place,
and left an uncomfortable impression on Elinor's
feelings especially, which required some trouble and time
to subdue. But as it was her determination to subdue it,
and to prevent herself from appearing to suffer more than
what all her family suffered on his going away, she did
not adopt the method so judiciously employed by Marianne,
on a similar occasion, to augment and fix her sorrow,
by seeking silence, solitude and idleness. Their means
were as different as their objects, and equally suited
to the advancement of each.
Elinor sat down to her drawingtable as soon as he
was out of the house, busily employed herself the whole day,
neither sought nor avoided the mention of his name,
appeared to interest herself almost as much as ever in the
general concerns of the family, and if, by this conduct,
she did not lessen her own grief, it was at least prevented
from unnecessary increase, and her mother and sisters
were spared much solicitude on her account.
Such behaviour as this, so exactly the reverse
of her own, appeared no more meritorious to Marianne,
than her own had seemed faulty to her. The business
of selfcommand she settled very easilywith strong
affections it was impossible, with calm ones it could
have no merit. That her sister's affections WERE calm,
she dared not deny, though she blushed to acknowledge it
and of the strength of her own, she gave a very striking proof,
by still loving and respecting that sister, in spite
of this mortifying conviction.
Without shutting herself up from her family,
or leaving the house in determined solitude to avoid them,
or lying awake the whole night to indulge meditation,
Elinor found every day afforded her leisure enough
to think of Edward, and of Edward's behaviour, in every
possible variety which the different state of her spirits
at different times could produce,with tenderness,
pity, approbation, censure, and doubt. There were moments
in abundance, when, if not by the absence of her mother
and sisters, at least by the nature of their employments,
conversation was forbidden among them, and every effect
of solitude was produced. Her mind was inevitably
at liberty her thoughts could not be chained elsewhere
and the past and the future, on a subject so interesting,
must be before her, must force her attention, and engross
her memory, her reflection, and her fancy.
From a reverie of this kind, as she sat at her
drawingtable, she was roused one morning, soon after
Edward's leaving them, by the arrival of company.
She happened to be quite alone. The closing of the
little gate, at the entrance of the green court in front
of the house, drew her eyes to the window, and she saw
a large party walking up to the door. Amongst them
were Sir John and Lady Middleton and Mrs. Jennings,
but there were two others, a gentleman and lady, who were
quite unknown to her. She was sitting near the window,
and as soon as Sir John perceived her, he left the rest
of the party to the ceremony of knocking at the door,
and stepping across the turf, obliged her to open the
casement to speak to him, though the space was so short
between the door and the window, as to make it hardly
possible to speak at one without being heard at the other.
"Well," said he, "we have brought you some strangers.
How do you like them?"
"Hush they will hear you."
"Never mind if they do. It is only the Palmers.
Charlotte is very pretty, I can tell you. You may see her
if you look this way."
As Elinor was certain of seeing her in a couple
of minutes, without taking that liberty, she begged
to be excused.
"Where is Marianne? Has she run away because we
are come? I see her instrument is open."
"She is walking, I believe."
They were now joined by Mrs. Jennings, who had not
patience enough to wait till the door was opened before
she told HER story. She came hallooing to the window,
"How do you do, my dear? How does Mrs. Dashwood do?
And where are your sisters? What all alone you
will be glad of a little company to sit with you.
I have brought my other son and daughter to see you.
Only think of their coming so suddenly I thought I heard
a carriage last night, while we were drinking our tea,
but it never entered my head that it could be them.
I thought of nothing but whether it might not be Colonel
Brandon come back again so I said to Sir John, I do think
I hear a carriage perhaps it is Colonel Brandon come
back again"
Elinor was obliged to turn from her, in the middle
of her story, to receive the rest of the party Lady
Middleton introduced the two strangers Mrs. Dashwood
and Margaret came down stairs at the same time, and they
all sat down to look at one another, while Mrs. Jennings
continued her story as she walked through the passage
into the parlour, attended by Sir John.
Mrs. Palmer was several years younger than Lady
Middleton, and totally unlike her in every respect.
She was short and plump, had a very pretty face,
and the finest expression of good humour in it that could
possibly be. Her manners were by no means so elegant
as her sister's, but they were much more prepossessing.
She came in with a smile, smiled all the time of her visit,
except when she laughed, and smiled when she went away.
Her husband was a grave looking young man of five or six
and twenty, with an air of more fashion and sense than
his wife, but of less willingness to please or be pleased.
He entered the room with a look of selfconsequence,
slightly bowed to the ladies, without speaking a word,
and, after briefly surveying them and their apartments,
took up a newspaper from the table, and continued to read it
as long as he staid.
Mrs. Palmer, on the contrary, who was strongly endowed
by nature with a turn for being uniformly civil and happy,
was hardly seated before her admiration of the parlour
and every thing in it burst forth.
"Well what a delightful room this is I never
saw anything so charming Only think, Mamma, how it
is improved since I was here last I always thought it
such a sweet place, ma'am turning to Mrs. Dashwood
but you have made it so charming Only look, sister,
how delightful every thing is How I should like such
a house for myself Should not you, Mr. Palmer?"
Mr. Palmer made her no answer, and did not even raise
his eyes from the newspaper.
"Mr. Palmer does not hear me," said she, laughing
"he never does sometimes. It is so ridiculous"
This was quite a new idea to Mrs. Dashwood she had
never been used to find wit in the inattention of any one,
and could not help looking with surprise at them both.
Mrs. Jennings, in the meantime, talked on as loud
as she could, and continued her account of their surprise,
the evening before, on seeing their friends, without
ceasing till every thing was told. Mrs. Palmer laughed
heartily at the recollection of their astonishment,
and every body agreed, two or three times over, that it
had been quite an agreeable surprise.
"You may believe how glad we all were to see them,"
added Mrs. Jennings, leaning forward towards Elinor,
and speaking in a low voice as if she meant to be heard
by no one else, though they were seated on different sides
of the room "but, however, I can't help wishing they had
not travelled quite so fast, nor made such a long journey
of it, for they came all round by London upon account
of some business, for you know nodding significantly and
pointing to her daughter it was wrong in her situation.
I wanted her to stay at home and rest this morning,
but she would come with us she longed so much to see
you all"
Mrs. Palmer laughed, and said it would not do her
any harm.
"She expects to be confined in February,"
continued Mrs. Jennings.
Lady Middleton could no longer endure such a conversation,
and therefore exerted herself to ask Mr. Palmer if there
was any news in the paper.
"No, none at all," he replied, and read on.
"Here comes Marianne," cried Sir John. "Now, Palmer,
you shall see a monstrous pretty girl."
He immediately went into the passage, opened the front door,
and ushered her in himself. Mrs. Jennings asked her,
as soon as she appeared, if she had not been to Allenham
and Mrs. Palmer laughed so heartily at the question,
as to show she understood it. Mr. Palmer looked up
on her entering the room, stared at her some minutes,
and then returned to his newspaper. Mrs. Palmer's eye
was now caught by the drawings which hung round the room.
She got up to examine them.
"Oh dear, how beautiful these are Well how delightful
Do but look, mama, how sweet I declare they are quite charming
I could look at them for ever." And then sitting down again,
she very soon forgot that there were any such things in the room.
When Lady Middleton rose to go away, Mr. Palmer
rose also, laid down the newspaper, stretched himself
and looked at them all around.
"My love, have you been asleep?" said his wife, laughing.
He made her no answer and only observed, after again
examining the room, that it was very low pitched,
and that the ceiling was crooked. He then made his bow,
and departed with the rest.
Sir John had been very urgent with them all to
spend the next day at the park. Mrs. Dashwood, who did
not chuse to dine with them oftener than they dined
at the cottage, absolutely refused on her own account
her daughters might do as they pleased. But they had no
curiosity to see how Mr. and Mrs. Palmer ate their dinner,
and no expectation of pleasure from them in any other way.
They attempted, therefore, likewise, to excuse themselves
the weather was uncertain, and not likely to be good.
But Sir John would not be satisfiedthe carriage should
be sent for them and they must come. Lady Middleton too,
though she did not press their mother, pressed them.
Mrs. Jennings and Mrs. Palmer joined their entreaties, all
seemed equally anxious to avoid a family party and the young
ladies were obliged to yield.
"Why should they ask us?" said Marianne, as soon as they
were gone. "The rent of this cottage is said to be low
but we have it on very hard terms, if we are to dine
at the park whenever any one is staying either with them,
or with us."
"They mean no less to be civil and kind to us now,"
said Elinor, "by these frequent invitations, than by
those which we received from them a few weeks ago.
The alteration is not in them, if their parties are grown
tedious and dull. We must look for the change elsewhere."
CHAPTER 
As the Miss Dashwoods entered the drawingroom of the park
the next day, at one door, Mrs. Palmer came running in at
the other, looking as good humoured and merry as before.
She took them all most affectionately by the hand,
and expressed great delight in seeing them again.
"I am so glad to see you" said she, seating herself
between Elinor and Marianne, "for it is so bad a day I was
afraid you might not come, which would be a shocking thing,
as we go away again tomorrow. We must go, for the Westons
come to us next week you know. It was quite a sudden thing
our coming at all, and I knew nothing of it till the carriage
was coming to the door, and then Mr. Palmer asked me if I
would go with him to Barton. He is so droll He never
tells me any thing I am so sorry we cannot stay longer
however we shall meet again in town very soon, I hope."
They were obliged to put an end to such an expectation.
"Not go to town" cried Mrs. Palmer, with a laugh,
"I shall be quite disappointed if you do not. I could
get the nicest house in world for you, next door to ours,
in Hanoversquare. You must come, indeed. I am sure
I shall be very happy to chaperon you at any time till
I am confined, if Mrs. Dashwood should not like to go
into public."
They thanked her but were obliged to resist all
her entreaties.
"Oh, my love," cried Mrs. Palmer to her husband,
who just then entered the room"you must help me to
persuade the Miss Dashwoods to go to town this winter."
Her love made no answer and after slightly bowing
to the ladies, began complaining of the weather.
"How horrid all this is" said he. "Such weather
makes every thing and every body disgusting. Dullness
is as much produced within doors as without, by rain.
It makes one detest all one's acquaintance. What the
devil does Sir John mean by not having a billiard room
in his house? How few people know what comfort is Sir
John is as stupid as the weather."
The rest of the company soon dropt in.
"I am afraid, Miss Marianne," said Sir John, "you have
not been able to take your usual walk to Allenham today."
Marianne looked very grave and said nothing.
"Oh, don't be so sly before us," said Mrs. Palmer
"for we know all about it, I assure you and I admire your
taste very much, for I think he is extremely handsome.
We do not live a great way from him in the country, you know.
Not above ten miles, I dare say."
"Much nearer thirty," said her husband.
"Ah, well there is not much difference.
I never was at his house but they say it is a sweet
pretty place."
"As vile a spot as I ever saw in my life,"
said Mr. Palmer.
Marianne remained perfectly silent, though her
countenance betrayed her interest in what was said.
"Is it very ugly?" continued Mrs. Palmer"then it
must be some other place that is so pretty I suppose."
When they were seated in the dining room, Sir John
observed with regret that they were only eight all together.
"My dear," said he to his lady, "it is very provoking
that we should be so few. Why did not you ask the Gilberts
to come to us today?"
"Did not I tell you, Sir John, when you spoke to me
about it before, that it could not be done? They dined
with us last."
"You and I, Sir John," said Mrs. Jennings,
"should not stand upon such ceremony."
"Then you would be very illbred," cried Mr. Palmer.
"My love you contradict every body," said his wife
with her usual laugh. "Do you know that you are quite rude?"
"I did not know I contradicted any body in calling
your mother illbred."
"Ay, you may abuse me as you please," said the goodnatured
old lady, "you have taken Charlotte off my hands, and cannot
give her back again. So there I have the whip hand of you."
Charlotte laughed heartily to think that her
husband could not get rid of her and exultingly said,
she did not care how cross he was to her, as they must
live together. It was impossible for any one to be more
thoroughly goodnatured, or more determined to be happy
than Mrs. Palmer. The studied indifference, insolence,
and discontent of her husband gave her no pain
and when he scolded or abused her, she was highly diverted.
"Mr. Palmer is so droll" said she, in a whisper,
to Elinor. "He is always out of humour."
Elinor was not inclined, after a little observation,
to give him credit for being so genuinely and unaffectedly
illnatured or illbred as he wished to appear.
His temper might perhaps be a little soured by finding,
like many others of his sex, that through some unaccountable
bias in favour of beauty, he was the husband of a very silly
woman,but she knew that this kind of blunder was too
common for any sensible man to be lastingly hurt by it.
It was rather a wish of distinction, she believed,
which produced his contemptuous treatment of every body,
and his general abuse of every thing before him.
It was the desire of appearing superior to other people.
The motive was too common to be wondered at but the means,
however they might succeed by establishing his superiority
in illbreeding, were not likely to attach any one to him
except his wife.
"Oh, my dear Miss Dashwood," said Mrs. Palmer soon afterwards,
"I have got such a favour to ask of you and your sister.
Will you come and spend some time at Cleveland this
Christmas? Now, pray do,and come while the Westons are
with us. You cannot think how happy I shall be It will
be quite delightfulMy love," applying to her husband,
"don't you long to have the Miss Dashwoods come to Cleveland?"
"Certainly," he replied, with a sneer"I came
into Devonshire with no other view."
"There now,"said his lady, "you see Mr. Palmer
expects you so you cannot refuse to come."
They both eagerly and resolutely declined her invitation.
"But indeed you must and shall come. I am sure you
will like it of all things. The Westons will be with us,
and it will be quite delightful. You cannot think
what a sweet place Cleveland is and we are so gay now,
for Mr. Palmer is always going about the country canvassing
against the election and so many people came to dine
with us that I never saw before, it is quite charming But,
poor fellow it is very fatiguing to him for he is forced
to make every body like him."
Elinor could hardly keep her countenance as she
assented to the hardship of such an obligation.
"How charming it will be," said Charlotte, "when he
is in Parliamentwon't it? How I shall laugh It will
be so ridiculous to see all his letters directed to him
with an M.P.But do you know, he says, he will never frank
for me? He declares he won't. Don't you, Mr. Palmer?"
Mr. Palmer took no notice of her.
"He cannot bear writing, you know," she continued
"he says it is quite shocking."
"No," said he, "I never said any thing so irrational.
Don't palm all your abuses of languages upon me."
"There now you see how droll he is. This is always
the way with him Sometimes he won't speak to me for half
a day together, and then he comes out with something
so drollall about any thing in the world."
She surprised Elinor very much as they returned
into the drawingroom, by asking her whether she did
not like Mr. Palmer excessively.
"Certainly," said Elinor "he seems very agreeable."
"WellI am so glad you do. I thought you would,
he is so pleasant and Mr. Palmer is excessively pleased
with you and your sisters I can tell you, and you can't
think how disappointed he will be if you don't come
to Cleveland.I can't imagine why you should object
to it."
Elinor was again obliged to decline her invitation
and by changing the subject, put a stop to her entreaties.
She thought it probable that as they lived in the
same county, Mrs. Palmer might be able to give some
more particular account of Willoughby's general
character, than could be gathered from the Middletons'
partial acquaintance with him and she was eager to gain
from any one, such a confirmation of his merits as might
remove the possibility of fear from Marianne. She began
by inquiring if they saw much of Mr. Willoughby at Cleveland,
and whether they were intimately acquainted with him.
"Oh dear, yes I know him extremely well,"
replied Mrs. Palmer"Not that I ever spoke
to him, indeed but I have seen him for ever in town.
Somehow or other I never happened to be staying at Barton
while he was at Allenham. Mama saw him here once before
but I was with my uncle at Weymouth. However, I dare say
we should have seen a great deal of him in Somersetshire,
if it had not happened very unluckily that we should never
have been in the country together. He is very little
at Combe, I believe but if he were ever so much there,
I do not think Mr. Palmer would visit him, for he is
in the opposition, you know, and besides it is such a
way off. I know why you inquire about him, very well
your sister is to marry him. I am monstrous glad of it,
for then I shall have her for a neighbour you know."
"Upon my word," replied Elinor, "you know much
more of the matter than I do, if you have any reason
to expect such a match."
"Don't pretend to deny it, because you know it is
what every body talks of. I assure you I heard of it
in my way through town."
"My dear Mrs. Palmer"
"Upon my honour I did.I met Colonel Brandon
Monday morning in Bondstreet, just before we left town,
and he told me of it directly."
"You surprise me very much. Colonel Brandon tell
you of it Surely you must be mistaken. To give such
intelligence to a person who could not be interested in it,
even if it were true, is not what I should expect Colonel
Brandon to do."
"But I do assure you it was so, for all that,
and I will tell you how it happened. When we met him,
he turned back and walked with us and so we began talking
of my brother and sister, and one thing and another,
and I said to him, 'So, Colonel, there is a new family
come to Barton cottage, I hear, and mama sends me word
they are very pretty, and that one of them is going to be
married to Mr. Willoughby of Combe Magna. Is it true,
pray? for of course you must know, as you have been in
Devonshire so lately.'"
"And what did the Colonel say?"
"Ohhe did not say much but he looked as if he
knew it to be true, so from that moment I set it down
as certain. It will be quite delightful, I declare
When is it to take place?"
"Mr. Brandon was very well I hope?"
"Oh yes, quite well and so full of your praises,
he did nothing but say fine things of you."
"I am flattered by his commendation. He seems
an excellent man and I think him uncommonly pleasing."
"So do I.He is such a charming man, that it
is quite a pity he should be so grave and so dull.
Mamma says HE was in love with your sister too.
I assure you it was a great compliment if he was, for he
hardly ever falls in love with any body."
"Is Mr. Willoughby much known in your part
of Somersetshire?" said Elinor.
"Oh yes, extremely well that is, I do not believe
many people are acquainted with him, because Combe Magna
is so far off but they all think him extremely agreeable
I assure you. Nobody is more liked than Mr. Willoughby
wherever he goes, and so you may tell your sister.
She is a monstrous lucky girl to get him, upon my honour
not but that he is much more lucky in getting her,
because she is so very handsome and agreeable, that nothing
can be good enough for her. However, I don't think
her hardly at all handsomer than you, I assure you
for I think you both excessively pretty, and so does
Mr. Palmer too I am sure, though we could not get him
to own it last night."
Mrs. Palmer's information respecting Willoughby
was not very material but any testimony in his favour,
however small, was pleasing to her.
"I am so glad we are got acquainted at last,"
continued Charlotte."And now I hope we shall always be
great friends. You can't think how much I longed to see you
It is so delightful that you should live at the cottage
Nothing can be like it, to be sure And I am so glad
your sister is going to be well married I hope you will
be a great deal at Combe Magna. It is a sweet place,
by all accounts."
"You have been long acquainted with Colonel Brandon,
have not you?"
"Yes, a great while ever since my sister married.
He was a particular friend of Sir John's. I believe,"
she added in a low voice, "he would have been very
glad to have had me, if he could. Sir John and Lady
Middleton wished it very much. But mama did not think
the match good enough for me, otherwise Sir John would
have mentioned it to the Colonel, and we should have been
married immediately."
"Did not Colonel Brandon know of Sir John's proposal
to your mother before it was made? Had he never owned
his affection to yourself?"
"Oh, no but if mama had not objected to it,
I dare say he would have liked it of all things.
He had not seen me then above twice, for it was before
I left school. However, I am much happier as I am.
Mr. Palmer is the kind of man I like."
CHAPTER 
The Palmers returned to Cleveland the next day,
and the two families at Barton were again left to entertain
each other. But this did not last long Elinor had hardly
got their last visitors out of her head, had hardly done
wondering at Charlotte's being so happy without a cause,
at Mr. Palmer's acting so simply, with good abilities,
and at the strange unsuitableness which often existed between
husband and wife, before Sir John's and Mrs. Jennings's
active zeal in the cause of society, procured her some
other new acquaintance to see and observe.
In a morning's excursion to Exeter, they had met with
two young ladies, whom Mrs. Jennings had the satisfaction
of discovering to be her relations, and this was enough
for Sir John to invite them directly to the park,
as soon as their present engagements at Exeter were over.
Their engagements at Exeter instantly gave way before
such an invitation, and Lady Middleton was thrown into
no little alarm on the return of Sir John, by hearing
that she was very soon to receive a visit from two girls
whom she had never seen in her life, and of whose elegance,
whose tolerable gentility even, she could have no proof
for the assurances of her husband and mother on that subject
went for nothing at all. Their being her relations too
made it so much the worse and Mrs. Jennings's attempts
at consolation were therefore unfortunately founded,
when she advised her daughter not to care about their being
so fashionable because they were all cousins and must put
up with one another. As it was impossible, however, now to
prevent their coming, Lady Middleton resigned herself to the
idea of it, with all the philosophy of a wellbred woman,
contenting herself with merely giving her husband a gentle
reprimand on the subject five or six times every day.
The young ladies arrived their appearance was by
no means ungenteel or unfashionable. Their dress was
very smart, their manners very civil, they were delighted
with the house, and in raptures with the furniture,
and they happened to be so doatingly fond of children
that Lady Middleton's good opinion was engaged in their
favour before they had been an hour at the Park.
She declared them to be very agreeable girls indeed,
which for her ladyship was enthusiastic admiration.
Sir John's confidence in his own judgment rose with this
animated praise, and he set off directly for the cottage
to tell the Miss Dashwoods of the Miss Steeles' arrival,
and to assure them of their being the sweetest girls
in the world. From such commendation as this, however,
there was not much to be learned Elinor well knew
that the sweetest girls in the world were to be met
with in every part of England, under every possible
variation of form, face, temper and understanding.
Sir John wanted the whole family to walk to the Park directly
and look at his guests. Benevolent, philanthropic man It
was painful to him even to keep a third cousin to himself.
"Do come now," said he"pray comeyou must comeI
declare you shall comeYou can't think how you will
like them. Lucy is monstrous pretty, and so good humoured
and agreeable The children are all hanging about her already,
as if she was an old acquaintance. And they both long
to see you of all things, for they have heard at Exeter
that you are the most beautiful creatures in the world
and I have told them it is all very true, and a great
deal more. You will be delighted with them I am sure.
They have brought the whole coach full of playthings
for the children. How can you be so cross as not to come?
Why they are your cousins, you know, after a fashion.
YOU are my cousins, and they are my wife's, so you must
be related."
But Sir John could not prevail. He could only obtain
a promise of their calling at the Park within a day or two,
and then left them in amazement at their indifference,
to walk home and boast anew of their attractions to the
Miss Steeles, as he had been already boasting of the Miss
Steeles to them.
When their promised visit to the Park and consequent
introduction to these young ladies took place, they found
in the appearance of the eldest, who was nearly thirty,
with a very plain and not a sensible face, nothing to admire
but in the other, who was not more than two or three
and twenty, they acknowledged considerable beauty her
features were pretty, and she had a sharp quick eye,
and a smartness of air, which though it did not give
actual elegance or grace, gave distinction to her person.
Their manners were particularly civil, and Elinor soon
allowed them credit for some kind of sense, when she
saw with what constant and judicious attention they
were making themselves agreeable to Lady Middleton.
With her children they were in continual raptures,
extolling their beauty, courting their notice, and humouring
their whims and such of their time as could be spared from
the importunate demands which this politeness made on it,
was spent in admiration of whatever her ladyship was doing,
if she happened to be doing any thing, or in taking patterns
of some elegant new dress, in which her appearance
the day before had thrown them into unceasing delight.
Fortunately for those who pay their court through
such foibles, a fond mother, though, in pursuit of praise
for her children, the most rapacious of human beings,
is likewise the most credulous her demands are exorbitant
but she will swallow any thing and the excessive
affection and endurance of the Miss Steeles towards
her offspring were viewed therefore by Lady Middleton
without the smallest surprise or distrust. She saw with
maternal complacency all the impertinent encroachments
and mischievous tricks to which her cousins submitted.
She saw their sashes untied, their hair pulled about
their ears, their workbags searched, and their knives
and scissors stolen away, and felt no doubt of its being
a reciprocal enjoyment. It suggested no other surprise
than that Elinor and Marianne should sit so composedly by,
without claiming a share in what was passing.
"John is in such spirits today" said she, on his
taking Miss Steeles's pocket handkerchief, and throwing
it out of window"He is full of monkey tricks."
And soon afterwards, on the second boy's violently
pinching one of the same lady's fingers, she fondly observed,
"How playful William is"
"And here is my sweet little Annamaria," she added,
tenderly caressing a little girl of three years old,
who had not made a noise for the last two minutes
"And she is always so gentle and quietNever was there
such a quiet little thing"
But unfortunately in bestowing these embraces,
a pin in her ladyship's head dress slightly scratching
the child's neck, produced from this pattern of gentleness
such violent screams, as could hardly be outdone by any
creature professedly noisy. The mother's consternation
was excessive but it could not surpass the alarm of the
Miss Steeles, and every thing was done by all three,
in so critical an emergency, which affection could suggest
as likely to assuage the agonies of the little sufferer.
She was seated in her mother's lap, covered with kisses,
her wound bathed with lavenderwater, by one of the
Miss Steeles, who was on her knees to attend her,
and her mouth stuffed with sugar plums by the other.
With such a reward for her tears, the child was too wise
to cease crying. She still screamed and sobbed lustily,
kicked her two brothers for offering to touch her, and all
their united soothings were ineffectual till Lady Middleton
luckily remembering that in a scene of similar distress
last week, some apricot marmalade had been successfully
applied for a bruised temple, the same remedy was eagerly
proposed for this unfortunate scratch, and a slight
intermission of screams in the young lady on hearing it,
gave them reason to hope that it would not be rejected.
She was carried out of the room therefore in her
mother's arms, in quest of this medicine, and as the
two boys chose to follow, though earnestly entreated
by their mother to stay behind, the four young ladies
were left in a quietness which the room had not known for
many hours.
"Poor little creatures" said Miss Steele, as soon
as they were gone. "It might have been a very sad accident."
"Yet I hardly know how," cried Marianne, "unless it
had been under totally different circumstances.
But this is the usual way of heightening alarm, where there
is nothing to be alarmed at in reality."
"What a sweet woman Lady Middleton is" said Lucy Steele.
Marianne was silent it was impossible for her to say
what she did not feel, however trivial the occasion
and upon Elinor therefore the whole task of telling lies
when politeness required it, always fell. She did her
best when thus called on, by speaking of Lady Middleton
with more warmth than she felt, though with far less than
Miss Lucy.
"And Sir John too," cried the elder sister,
"what a charming man he is"
Here too, Miss Dashwood's commendation, being only
simple and just, came in without any eclat. She merely
observed that he was perfectly good humoured and friendly.
"And what a charming little family they have I
never saw such fine children in my life.I declare I
quite doat upon them already, and indeed I am always
distractedly fond of children."
"I should guess so," said Elinor, with a smile,
"from what I have witnessed this morning."
"I have a notion," said Lucy, "you think the little
Middletons rather too much indulged perhaps they may be the
outside of enough but it is so natural in Lady Middleton
and for my part, I love to see children full of life
and spirits I cannot bear them if they are tame and quiet."
"I confess," replied Elinor, "that while I am at
Barton Park, I never think of tame and quiet children
with any abhorrence."
A short pause succeeded this speech, which was first
broken by Miss Steele, who seemed very much disposed
for conversation, and who now said rather abruptly,
"And how do you like Devonshire, Miss Dashwood? I suppose
you were very sorry to leave Sussex."
In some surprise at the familiarity of this question,
or at least of the manner in which it was spoken,
Elinor replied that she was.
"Norland is a prodigious beautiful place, is not it?"
added Miss Steele.
"We have heard Sir John admire it excessively,"
said Lucy, who seemed to think some apology necessary
for the freedom of her sister.
"I think every one MUST admire it," replied Elinor,
"who ever saw the place though it is not to be supposed
that any one can estimate its beauties as we do."
"And had you a great many smart beaux there? I
suppose you have not so many in this part of the world
for my part, I think they are a vast addition always."
"But why should you think," said Lucy, looking ashamed
of her sister, "that there are not as many genteel young
men in Devonshire as Sussex?"
"Nay, my dear, I'm sure I don't pretend to say that there
an't. I'm sure there's a vast many smart beaux in Exeter
but you know, how could I tell what smart beaux there
might be about Norland and I was only afraid the Miss
Dashwoods might find it dull at Barton, if they had not
so many as they used to have. But perhaps you young ladies
may not care about the beaux, and had as lief be without
them as with them. For my part, I think they are vastly
agreeable, provided they dress smart and behave civil.
But I can't bear to see them dirty and nasty. Now there's
Mr. Rose at Exeter, a prodigious smart young man,
quite a beau, clerk to Mr. Simpson, you know, and yet if you
do but meet him of a morning, he is not fit to be seen.
I suppose your brother was quite a beau, Miss Dashwood,
before he married, as he was so rich?"
"Upon my word," replied Elinor, "I cannot tell you,
for I do not perfectly comprehend the meaning of the word.
But this I can say, that if he ever was a beau before
he married, he is one still for there is not the smallest
alteration in him."
"Oh dear one never thinks of married men's being
beauxthey have something else to do."
"Lord Anne," cried her sister, "you can talk of
nothing but beauxyou will make Miss Dashwood believe you
think of nothing else." And then to turn the discourse,
she began admiring the house and the furniture.
This specimen of the Miss Steeles was enough.
The vulgar freedom and folly of the eldest left
her no recommendation, and as Elinor was not blinded
by the beauty, or the shrewd look of the youngest,
to her want of real elegance and artlessness, she left
the house without any wish of knowing them better.
Not so the Miss Steeles.They came from Exeter, well
provided with admiration for the use of Sir John Middleton,
his family, and all his relations, and no niggardly
proportion was now dealt out to his fair cousins, whom they
declared to be the most beautiful, elegant, accomplished,
and agreeable girls they had ever beheld, and with whom
they were particularly anxious to be better acquainted.
And to be better acquainted therefore, Elinor soon found
was their inevitable lot, for as Sir John was entirely
on the side of the Miss Steeles, their party would be
too strong for opposition, and that kind of intimacy
must be submitted to, which consists of sitting an hour
or two together in the same room almost every day.
Sir John could do no more but he did not know that any
more was required to be together was, in his opinion,
to be intimate, and while his continual schemes for their
meeting were effectual, he had not a doubt of their being
established friends.
To do him justice, he did every thing in his power
to promote their unreserve, by making the Miss Steeles
acquainted with whatever he knew or supposed of his cousins'
situations in the most delicate particulars,and Elinor
had not seen them more than twice, before the eldest of
them wished her joy on her sister's having been so lucky
as to make a conquest of a very smart beau since she
came to Barton.
"'Twill be a fine thing to have her married so young
to be sure," said she, "and I hear he is quite a beau,
and prodigious handsome. And I hope you may have as good
luck yourself soon,but perhaps you may have a friend
in the corner already."
Elinor could not suppose that Sir John would be more
nice in proclaiming his suspicions of her regard for Edward,
than he had been with respect to Marianne indeed it was
rather his favourite joke of the two, as being somewhat
newer and more conjectural and since Edward's visit,
they had never dined together without his drinking to her
best affections with so much significancy and so many nods
and winks, as to excite general attention. The letter F
had been likewise invariably brought forward, and found
productive of such countless jokes, that its character
as the wittiest letter in the alphabet had been long
established with Elinor.
The Miss Steeles, as she expected, had now all the
benefit of these jokes, and in the eldest of them they
raised a curiosity to know the name of the gentleman
alluded to, which, though often impertinently expressed,
was perfectly of a piece with her general inquisitiveness
into the concerns of their family. But Sir John did not
sport long with the curiosity which he delighted to raise,
for he had at least as much pleasure in telling the name,
as Miss Steele had in hearing it.
"His name is Ferrars," said he, in a very audible whisper
"but pray do not tell it, for it's a great secret."
"Ferrars" repeated Miss Steele "Mr. Ferrars is
the happy man, is he? What your sisterinlaw's brother,
Miss Dashwood? a very agreeable young man to be sure
I know him very well."
"How can you say so, Anne?" cried Lucy, who generally
made an amendment to all her sister's assertions.
"Though we have seen him once or twice at my uncle's, it
is rather too much to pretend to know him very well."
Elinor heard all this with attention and surprise.
"And who was this uncle? Where did he live? How came
they acquainted?" She wished very much to have the subject
continued, though she did not chuse to join in it herself
but nothing more of it was said, and for the first time
in her life, she thought Mrs. Jennings deficient either
in curiosity after petty information, or in a disposition
to communicate it. The manner in which Miss Steele had
spoken of Edward, increased her curiosity for it struck
her as being rather illnatured, and suggested the suspicion
of that lady's knowing, or fancying herself to know something
to his disadvantage.But her curiosity was unavailing,
for no farther notice was taken of Mr. Ferrars's name by
Miss Steele when alluded to, or even openly mentioned by Sir
John.
CHAPTER 
Marianne, who had never much toleration for any
thing like impertinence, vulgarity, inferiority of parts,
or even difference of taste from herself, was at
this time particularly illdisposed, from the state
of her spirits, to be pleased with the Miss Steeles,
or to encourage their advances and to the invariable
coldness of her behaviour towards them, which checked every
endeavour at intimacy on their side, Elinor principally
attributed that preference of herself which soon became
evident in the manners of both, but especially of Lucy,
who missed no opportunity of engaging her in conversation,
or of striving to improve their acquaintance by an easy
and frank communication of her sentiments.
Lucy was naturally clever her remarks were often
just and amusing and as a companion for half an hour
Elinor frequently found her agreeable but her powers
had received no aid from education she was ignorant
and illiterate and her deficiency of all mental improvement,
her want of information in the most common particulars,
could not be concealed from Miss Dashwood, in spite of her
constant endeavour to appear to advantage. Elinor saw,
and pitied her for, the neglect of abilities which education
might have rendered so respectable but she saw, with less
tenderness of feeling, the thorough want of delicacy,
of rectitude, and integrity of mind, which her attentions,
her assiduities, her flatteries at the Park betrayed
and she could have no lasting satisfaction in the company
of a person who joined insincerity with ignorance
whose want of instruction prevented their meeting
in conversation on terms of equality, and whose conduct
toward others made every shew of attention and deference
towards herself perfectly valueless.
"You will think my question an odd one, I dare say,"
said Lucy to her one day, as they were walking together
from the park to the cottage"but pray, are you
personally acquainted with your sisterinlaw's mother,
Mrs. Ferrars?"
Elinor DID think the question a very odd one,
and her countenance expressed it, as she answered that she
had never seen Mrs. Ferrars.
"Indeed" replied Lucy "I wonder at that, for I
thought you must have seen her at Norland sometimes.
Then, perhaps, you cannot tell me what sort of a woman
she is?"
"No," returned Elinor, cautious of giving her real
opinion of Edward's mother, and not very desirous
of satisfying what seemed impertinent curiosity
"I know nothing of her."
"I am sure you think me very strange, for enquiring
about her in such a way," said Lucy, eyeing Elinor attentively
as she spoke "but perhaps there may be reasonsI wish
I might venture but however I hope you will do me the justice
of believing that I do not mean to be impertinent."
Elinor made her a civil reply, and they walked on
for a few minutes in silence. It was broken by Lucy,
who renewed the subject again by saying, with some
hesitation,
"I cannot bear to have you think me impertinently curious.
I am sure I would rather do any thing in the world than be
thought so by a person whose good opinion is so well worth
having as yours. And I am sure I should not have the smallest
fear of trusting YOU indeed, I should be very glad of your
advice how to manage in such and uncomfortable situation
as I am but, however, there is no occasion to trouble YOU.
I am sorry you do not happen to know Mrs. Ferrars."
"I am sorry I do NOT," said Elinor, in great astonishment,
"if it could be of any use to YOU to know my opinion of her.
But really I never understood that you were at all connected
with that family, and therefore I am a little surprised,
I confess, at so serious an inquiry into her character."
"I dare say you are, and I am sure I do not at all
wonder at it. But if I dared tell you all, you would not be
so much surprised. Mrs. Ferrars is certainly nothing to me
at presentbut the time MAY comehow soon it will come
must depend upon herselfwhen we may be very intimately
connected."
She looked down as she said this, amiably bashful,
with only one side glance at her companion to observe its
effect on her.
"Good heavens" cried Elinor, "what do you mean?
Are you acquainted with Mr. Robert Ferrars? Can you be?"
And she did not feel much delighted with the idea of such
a sisterinlaw.
"No," replied Lucy, "not to Mr. ROBERT FerrarsI
never saw him in my life but," fixing her eyes upon Elinor,
"to his eldest brother."
What felt Elinor at that moment? Astonishment,
that would have been as painful as it was strong, had not
an immediate disbelief of the assertion attended it.
She turned towards Lucy in silent amazement, unable to divine
the reason or object of such a declaration and though
her complexion varied, she stood firm in incredulity,
and felt in no danger of an hysterical fit, or a swoon.
"You may well be surprised," continued Lucy
"for to be sure you could have had no idea of it before
for I dare say he never dropped the smallest hint of it
to you or any of your family because it was always meant
to be a great secret, and I am sure has been faithfully
kept so by me to this hour. Not a soul of all my relations
know of it but Anne, and I never should have mentioned
it to you, if I had not felt the greatest dependence
in the world upon your secrecy and I really thought my
behaviour in asking so many questions about Mrs. Ferrars
must seem so odd, that it ought to be explained.
And I do not think Mr. Ferrars can be displeased,
when he knows I have trusted you, because I know he has
the highest opinion in the world of all your family,
and looks upon yourself and the other Miss Dashwoods quite
as his own sisters."She paused.
Elinor for a few moments remained silent.
Her astonishment at what she heard was at first too
great for words but at length forcing herself to speak,
and to speak cautiously, she said, with calmness of manner,
which tolerably well concealed her surprise and solicitude
"May I ask if your engagement is of long standing?"
"We have been engaged these four years."
"Four years"
"Yes."
Elinor, though greatly shocked, still felt unable
to believe it.
"I did not know," said she, "that you were even
acquainted till the other day."
"Our acquaintance, however, is of many years date.
He was under my uncle's care, you know, a considerable while."
"Your uncle"
"Yes Mr. Pratt. Did you never hear him talk
of Mr. Pratt?"
"I think I have," replied Elinor, with an exertion
of spirits, which increased with her increase of emotion.
"He was four years with my uncle, who lives at Longstaple,
near Plymouth. It was there our acquaintance begun,
for my sister and me was often staying with my uncle,
and it was there our engagement was formed, though not till
a year after he had quitted as a pupil but he was almost
always with us afterwards. I was very unwilling to enter
into it, as you may imagine, without the knowledge and
approbation of his mother but I was too young, and loved
him too well, to be so prudent as I ought to have been.
Though you do not know him so well as me, Miss Dashwood,
you must have seen enough of him to be sensible he is
very capable of making a woman sincerely attached to him."
"Certainly," answered Elinor, without knowing what
she said but after a moment's reflection, she added,
with revived security of Edward's honour and love,
and her companion's falsehood"Engaged to Mr. Edward
FerrarsI confess myself so totally surprised at
what you tell me, that reallyI beg your pardon
but surely there must be some mistake of person or name.
We cannot mean the same Mr. Ferrars."
"We can mean no other," cried Lucy, smiling. "Mr. Edward
Ferrars, the eldest son of Mrs. Ferrars, of Park Street,
and brother of your sisterinlaw, Mrs. John Dashwood,
is the person I mean you must allow that I am not likely
to be deceived as to the name of the man on who all my happiness
depends."
"It is strange," replied Elinor, in a most painful perplexity,
"that I should never have heard him even mention your name."
"No considering our situation, it was not strange.
Our first care has been to keep the matter secret.
You knew nothing of me, or my family, and, therefore,
there could be no OCCASION for ever mentioning my name
to you and, as he was always particularly afraid of his
sister's suspecting any thing, THAT was reason enough
for his not mentioning it."
She was silent.Elinor's security sunk but her
selfcommand did not sink with it.
"Four years you have been engaged," said she
with a firm voice.
"Yes and heaven knows how much longer we may have
to wait. Poor Edward It puts him quite out of heart."
Then taking a small miniature from her pocket, she added,
"To prevent the possibility of mistake, be so good as to look
at this face. It does not do him justice, to be sure,
but yet I think you cannot be deceived as to the person
it was drew for.I have had it above these three years."
She put it into her hands as she spoke and when Elinor
saw the painting, whatever other doubts her fear of a
too hasty decision, or her wish of detecting falsehood
might suffer to linger in her mind, she could have none of
its being Edward's face. She returned it almost instantly,
acknowledging the likeness.
"I have never been able," continued Lucy, "to give
him my picture in return, which I am very much vexed at,
for he has been always so anxious to get it But I am
determined to set for it the very first opportunity."
"You are quite in the right," replied Elinor calmly.
They then proceeded a few paces in silence. Lucy spoke first.
"I am sure," said she, "I have no doubt in the world
of your faithfully keeping this secret, because you must
know of what importance it is to us, not to have it reach
his mother for she would never approve of it, I dare say.
I shall have no fortune, and I fancy she is an exceeding
proud woman."
"I certainly did not seek your confidence," said Elinor
"but you do me no more than justice in imagining that I
may be depended on. Your secret is safe with me
but pardon me if I express some surprise at so unnecessary
a communication. You must at least have felt that my
being acquainted with it could not add to its safety."
As she said this, she looked earnestly at Lucy,
hoping to discover something in her countenance perhaps the
falsehood of the greatest part of what she had been saying
but Lucy's countenance suffered no change.
"I was afraid you would think I was taking a great
liberty with you," said she, "in telling you all this.
I have not known you long to be sure, personally at least,
but I have known you and all your family by description
a great while and as soon as I saw you, I felt almost as if
you was an old acquaintance. Besides in the present case,
I really thought some explanation was due to you after my
making such particular inquiries about Edward's mother
and I am so unfortunate, that I have not a creature whose
advice I can ask. Anne is the only person that knows of it,
and she has no judgment at all indeed, she does me a great
deal more harm than good, for I am in constant fear of her
betraying me. She does not know how to hold her tongue,
as you must perceive, and I am sure I was in the greatest
fright in the world t'other day, when Edward's name was
mentioned by Sir John, lest she should out with it all.
You can't think how much I go through in my mind from
it altogether. I only wonder that I am alive after what
I have suffered for Edward's sake these last four years.
Every thing in such suspense and uncertainty and seeing
him so seldomwe can hardly meet above twice ayear.
I am sure I wonder my heart is not quite broke."
Here she took out her handkerchief but Elinor did
not feel very compassionate.
"Sometimes." continued Lucy, after wiping her eyes,
"I think whether it would not be better for us both
to break off the matter entirely." As she said this,
she looked directly at her companion. "But then
at other times I have not resolution enough for it.
I cannot bear the thoughts of making him so miserable,
as I know the very mention of such a thing would do.
And on my own account tooso dear as he is to meI don't
think I could be equal to it. What would you advise
me to do in such a case, Miss Dashwood? What would you
do yourself?"
"Pardon me," replied Elinor, startled by the question
"but I can give you no advice under such circumstances.
Your own judgment must direct you."
"To be sure," continued Lucy, after a few minutes
silence on both sides, "his mother must provide for him
sometime or other but poor Edward is so cast down by it
Did you not think him dreadful lowspirited when he was at
Barton? He was so miserable when he left us at Longstaple,
to go to you, that I was afraid you would think him quite ill."
"Did he come from your uncle's, then, when he visited us?"
"Oh, yes he had been staying a fortnight with us.
Did you think he came directly from town?"
"No," replied Elinor, most feelingly sensible of
every fresh circumstance in favour of Lucy's veracity
"I remember he told us, that he had been staying
a fortnight with some friends near Plymouth."
She remembered too, her own surprise at the time,
at his mentioning nothing farther of those friends,
at his total silence with respect even to their names.
"Did not you think him sadly out of spirits?"
repeated Lucy.
"We did, indeed, particularly so when he first arrived."
"I begged him to exert himself for fear you
should suspect what was the matter but it made him
so melancholy, not being able to stay more than a
fortnight with us, and seeing me so much affected.
Poor fellowI am afraid it is just the same with him now
for he writes in wretched spirits. I heard from him just
before I left Exeter" taking a letter from her pocket
and carelessly showing the direction to Elinor.
"You know his hand, I dare say, a charming one it is
but that is not written so well as usual.He was tired,
I dare say, for he had just filled the sheet to me as full
as possible."
Elinor saw that it WAS his hand, and she could doubt
no longer. This picture, she had allowed herself to believe,
might have been accidentally obtained it might not have
been Edward's gift but a correspondence between them
by letter, could subsist only under a positive engagement,
could be authorised by nothing else for a few moments, she
was almost overcomeher heart sunk within her, and she could
hardly stand but exertion was indispensably necessary
and she struggled so resolutely against the oppression
of her feelings, that her success was speedy, and for
the time complete.
"Writing to each other," said Lucy, returning the
letter into her pocket, "is the only comfort we have
in such long separations. Yes, I have one other comfort
in his picture, but poor Edward has not even THAT.
If he had but my picture, he says he should be easy.
I gave him a lock of my hair set in a ring when he was at
Longstaple last, and that was some comfort to him, he said,
but not equal to a picture. Perhaps you might notice
the ring when you saw him?"
"I did," said Elinor, with a composure of voice,
under which was concealed an emotion and distress beyond
any thing she had ever felt before. She was mortified,
shocked, confounded.
Fortunately for her, they had now reached the cottage,
and the conversation could be continued no farther.
After sitting with them a few minutes, the Miss Steeles
returned to the Park, and Elinor was then at liberty
to think and be wretched.
[At this point in the first and second editions, Volume  ends.]
CHAPTER 
However small Elinor's general dependence on
Lucy's veracity might be, it was impossible for her
on serious reflection to suspect it in the present case,
where no temptation could be answerable to the folly
of inventing a falsehood of such a description. What Lucy
had asserted to be true, therefore, Elinor could not,
dared not longer doubt supported as it was too on every
side by such probabilities and proofs, and contradicted
by nothing but her own wishes. Their opportunity of
acquaintance in the house of Mr. Pratt was a foundation
for the rest, at once indisputable and alarming and Edward's
visit near Plymouth, his melancholy state of mind,
his dissatisfaction at his own prospects, his uncertain
behaviour towards herself, the intimate knowledge of the
Miss Steeles as to Norland and their family connections,
which had often surprised her, the picture, the letter,
the ring, formed altogether such a body of evidence,
as overcame every fear of condemning him unfairly,
and established as a fact, which no partiality could
set aside, his illtreatment of herself.Her resentment
of such behaviour, her indignation at having been its dupe,
for a short time made her feel only for herself
but other ideas, other considerations, soon arose.
Had Edward been intentionally deceiving her? Had he feigned
a regard for her which he did not feel? Was his engagement
to Lucy an engagement of the heart? No whatever it might
once have been, she could not believe it such at present.
His affection was all her own. She could not be deceived
in that. Her mother, sisters, Fanny, all had been
conscious of his regard for her at Norland it was not
an illusion of her own vanity. He certainly loved her.
What a softener of the heart was this persuasion How much
could it not tempt her to forgive He had been blamable,
highly blamable, in remaining at Norland after he first
felt her influence over him to be more than it ought
to be. In that, he could not be defended but if he
had injured her, how much more had he injured himself
if her case were pitiable, his was hopeless.
His imprudence had made her miserable for a while but it
seemed to have deprived himself of all chance of ever
being otherwise. She might in time regain tranquillity
but HE, what had he to look forward to? Could he
ever be tolerably happy with Lucy Steele could he,
were his affection for herself out of the question,
with his integrity, his delicacy, and wellinformed mind,
be satisfied with a wife like herilliterate, artful,
and selfish?
The youthful infatuation of nineteen would naturally
blind him to every thing but her beauty and good nature
but the four succeeding yearsyears, which if rationally
spent, give such improvement to the understanding, must
have opened his eyes to her defects of education,
while the same period of time, spent on her side
in inferior society and more frivolous pursuits,
had perhaps robbed her of that simplicity which might
once have given an interesting character to her beauty.
If in the supposition of his seeking to marry herself,
his difficulties from his mother had seemed great,
how much greater were they now likely to be, when
the object of his engagement was undoubtedly inferior
in connections, and probably inferior in fortune to herself.
These difficulties, indeed, with a heart so alienated
from Lucy, might not press very hard upon his patience
but melancholy was the state of the person by whom the
expectation of family opposition and unkindness, could
be felt as a relief
As these considerations occurred to her in painful
succession, she wept for him, more than for herself.
Supported by the conviction of having done nothing to
merit her present unhappiness, and consoled by the belief
that Edward had done nothing to forfeit her esteem,
she thought she could even now, under the first smart
of the heavy blow, command herself enough to guard every
suspicion of the truth from her mother and sisters.
And so well was she able to answer her own expectations,
that when she joined them at dinner only two hours
after she had first suffered the extinction of all her
dearest hopes, no one would have supposed from the
appearance of the sisters, that Elinor was mourning
in secret over obstacles which must divide her for ever
from the object of her love, and that Marianne was
internally dwelling on the perfections of a man, of whose
whole heart she felt thoroughly possessed, and whom she
expected to see in every carriage which drove near their house.
The necessity of concealing from her mother and
Marianne, what had been entrusted in confidence to herself,
though it obliged her to unceasing exertion, was no
aggravation of Elinor's distress. On the contrary
it was a relief to her, to be spared the communication
of what would give such affliction to them, and to be
saved likewise from hearing that condemnation of Edward,
which would probably flow from the excess of their partial
affection for herself, and which was more than she felt
equal to support.
From their counsel, or their conversation, she knew
she could receive no assistance, their tenderness and
sorrow must add to her distress, while her selfcommand
would neither receive encouragement from their example
nor from their praise. She was stronger alone,
and her own good sense so well supported her, that her
firmness was as unshaken, her appearance of cheerfulness
as invariable, as with regrets so poignant and so fresh,
it was possible for them to be.
Much as she had suffered from her first conversation
with Lucy on the subject, she soon felt an earnest wish
of renewing it and this for more reasons than one.
She wanted to hear many particulars of their engagement
repeated again, she wanted more clearly to understand
what Lucy really felt for Edward, whether there were any
sincerity in her declaration of tender regard for him,
and she particularly wanted to convince Lucy, by her
readiness to enter on the matter again, and her calmness
in conversing on it, that she was no otherwise interested
in it than as a friend, which she very much feared
her involuntary agitation, in their morning discourse,
must have left at least doubtful. That Lucy was disposed
to be jealous of her appeared very probable it was plain
that Edward had always spoken highly in her praise,
not merely from Lucy's assertion, but from her venturing
to trust her on so short a personal acquaintance,
with a secret so confessedly and evidently important.
And even Sir John's joking intelligence must have had
some weight. But indeed, while Elinor remained so well
assured within herself of being really beloved by Edward,
it required no other consideration of probabilities
to make it natural that Lucy should be jealous
and that she was so, her very confidence was a proof.
What other reason for the disclosure of the affair could
there be, but that Elinor might be informed by it of Lucy's
superior claims on Edward, and be taught to avoid him
in future? She had little difficulty in understanding thus
much of her rival's intentions, and while she was firmly
resolved to act by her as every principle of honour and
honesty directed, to combat her own affection for Edward
and to see him as little as possible she could not deny
herself the comfort of endeavouring to convince Lucy
that her heart was unwounded. And as she could now have
nothing more painful to hear on the subject than had already
been told, she did not mistrust her own ability of going
through a repetition of particulars with composure.
But it was not immediately that an opportunity
of doing so could be commanded, though Lucy was as well
disposed as herself to take advantage of any that occurred
for the weather was not often fine enough to allow
of their joining in a walk, where they might most easily
separate themselves from the others and though they
met at least every other evening either at the park
or cottage, and chiefly at the former, they could
not be supposed to meet for the sake of conversation.
Such a thought would never enter either Sir John or Lady
Middleton's head and therefore very little leisure
was ever given for a general chat, and none at all for
particular discourse. They met for the sake of eating,
drinking, and laughing together, playing at cards,
or consequences, or any other game that was sufficiently noisy.
One or two meetings of this kind had taken place,
without affording Elinor any chance of engaging Lucy
in private, when Sir John called at the cottage one morning,
to beg, in the name of charity, that they would all
dine with Lady Middleton that day, as he was obliged
to attend the club at Exeter, and she would otherwise be
quite alone, except her mother and the two Miss Steeles.
Elinor, who foresaw a fairer opening for the point she
had in view, in such a party as this was likely to be,
more at liberty among themselves under the tranquil
and wellbred direction of Lady Middleton than when
her husband united them together in one noisy purpose,
immediately accepted the invitation Margaret, with her
mother's permission, was equally compliant, and Marianne,
though always unwilling to join any of their parties,
was persuaded by her mother, who could not bear to have her
seclude herself from any chance of amusement, to go likewise.
The young ladies went, and Lady Middleton was happily
preserved from the frightful solitude which had threatened her.
The insipidity of the meeting was exactly such as Elinor
had expected it produced not one novelty of thought
or expression, and nothing could be less interesting
than the whole of their discourse both in the dining
parlour and drawing room to the latter, the children
accompanied them, and while they remained there, she was
too well convinced of the impossibility of engaging Lucy's
attention to attempt it. They quitted it only with the
removal of the teathings. The cardtable was then placed,
and Elinor began to wonder at herself for having ever
entertained a hope of finding time for conversation
at the park. They all rose up in preparation for a round game.
"I am glad," said Lady Middleton to Lucy,
"you are not going to finish poor little Annamaria's
basket this evening for I am sure it must hurt your
eyes to work filigree by candlelight. And we will make
the dear little love some amends for her disappointment
tomorrow, and then I hope she will not much mind it."
This hint was enough, Lucy recollected herself instantly
and replied, "Indeed you are very much mistaken,
Lady Middleton I am only waiting to know whether you can
make your party without me, or I should have been at my
filigree already. I would not disappoint the little angel
for all the world and if you want me at the cardtable now,
I am resolved to finish the basket after supper."
"You are very good, I hope it won't hurt your eyes
will you ring the bell for some working candles?
My poor little girl would be sadly disappointed, I know,
if the basket was not finished tomorrow, for though I
told her it certainly would not, I am sure she depends
upon having it done."
Lucy directly drew her work table near her
and reseated herself with an alacrity and cheerfulness
which seemed to infer that she could taste no greater
delight than in making a filigree basket for a spoilt child.
Lady Middleton proposed a rubber of Casino to the others.
No one made any objection but Marianne, who with her usual
inattention to the forms of general civility, exclaimed,
"Your Ladyship will have the goodness to excuse MEyou
know I detest cards. I shall go to the pianoforte
I have not touched it since it was tuned." And without
farther ceremony, she turned away and walked to the instrument.
Lady Middleton looked as if she thanked heaven
that SHE had never made so rude a speech.
"Marianne can never keep long from that instrument
you know, ma'am," said Elinor, endeavouring to smooth
away the offence "and I do not much wonder at it for it
is the very best toned pianoforte I ever heard."
The remaining five were now to draw their cards.
"Perhaps," continued Elinor, "if I should happen
to cut out, I may be of some use to Miss Lucy Steele,
in rolling her papers for her and there is so much still
to be done to the basket, that it must be impossible
I think for her labour singly, to finish it this evening.
I should like the work exceedingly, if she would allow
me a share in it."
"Indeed I shall be very much obliged to you
for your help," cried Lucy, "for I find there is more
to be done to it than I thought there was and it would
be a shocking thing to disappoint dear Annamaria after all."
"Oh that would be terrible, indeed," said Miss Steele
"Dear little soul, how I do love her"
"You are very kind," said Lady Middleton to Elinor
"and as you really like the work, perhaps you will be
as well pleased not to cut in till another rubber,
or will you take your chance now?"
Elinor joyfully profited by the first of these proposals,
and thus by a little of that address which Marianne
could never condescend to practise, gained her own end,
and pleased Lady Middleton at the same time. Lucy made room
for her with ready attention, and the two fair rivals were
thus seated side by side at the same table, and, with the
utmost harmony, engaged in forwarding the same work.
The pianoforte at which Marianne, wrapped up in her own
music and her own thoughts, had by this time forgotten
that any body was in the room besides herself, was luckily
so near them that Miss Dashwood now judged she might safely,
under the shelter of its noise, introduce the interesting
subject, without any risk of being heard at the cardtable.
CHAPTER 
In a firm, though cautious tone, Elinor thus began.
"I should be undeserving of the confidence you have
honoured me with, if I felt no desire for its continuance,
or no farther curiosity on its subject. I will
not apologize therefore for bringing it forward again."
"Thank you," cried Lucy warmly, "for breaking
the ice you have set my heart at ease by it for I was
somehow or other afraid I had offended you by what I
told you that Monday."
"Offended me How could you suppose so? Believe me,"
and Elinor spoke it with the truest sincerity,
"nothing could be farther from my intention than to give
you such an idea. Could you have a motive for the trust,
that was not honourable and flattering to me?"
"And yet I do assure you," replied Lucy, her little
sharp eyes full of meaning, "there seemed to me to be
a coldness and displeasure in your manner that made me
quite uncomfortable. I felt sure that you was angry with me
and have been quarrelling with myself ever since, for having
took such a liberty as to trouble you with my affairs.
But I am very glad to find it was only my own fancy,
and that you really do not blame me. If you knew what a
consolation it was to me to relieve my heart speaking to you
of what I am always thinking of every moment of my life,
your compassion would make you overlook every thing else
I am sure."
"Indeed, I can easily believe that it was a very great
relief to you, to acknowledge your situation to me, and be
assured that you shall never have reason to repent it.
Your case is a very unfortunate one you seem to me to
be surrounded with difficulties, and you will have need
of all your mutual affection to support you under them.
Mr. Ferrars, I believe, is entirely dependent on his mother."
"He has only two thousand pounds of his own it would
be madness to marry upon that, though for my own part,
I could give up every prospect of more without a sigh.
I have been always used to a very small income, and could
struggle with any poverty for him but I love him too well
to be the selfish means of robbing him, perhaps, of all that
his mother might give him if he married to please her.
We must wait, it may be for many years. With almost every
other man in the world, it would be an alarming prospect
but Edward's affection and constancy nothing can deprive me of
I know."
"That conviction must be every thing to you
and he is undoubtedly supported by the same trust in your's.
If the strength of your reciprocal attachment had failed,
as between many people, and under many circumstances
it naturally would during a four years' engagement,
your situation would have been pitiable, indeed."
Lucy here looked up but Elinor was careful
in guarding her countenance from every expression
that could give her words a suspicious tendency.
"Edward's love for me," said Lucy, "has been pretty
well put to the test, by our long, very long absence
since we were first engaged, and it has stood the trial
so well, that I should be unpardonable to doubt it now.
I can safely say that he has never gave me one moment's
alarm on that account from the first."
Elinor hardly knew whether to smile or sigh
at this assertion.
Lucy went on. "I am rather of a jealous temper too
by nature, and from our different situations in life,
from his being so much more in the world than me, and our
continual separation, I was enough inclined for suspicion,
to have found out the truth in an instant, if there had been
the slightest alteration in his behaviour to me when we met,
or any lowness of spirits that I could not account for,
or if he had talked more of one lady than another,
or seemed in any respect less happy at Longstaple than he
used to be. I do not mean to say that I am particularly
observant or quicksighted in general, but in such a case
I am sure I could not be deceived."
"All this," thought Elinor, "is very pretty
but it can impose upon neither of us."
"But what," said she after a short silence,
"are your views? or have you none but that of waiting for
Mrs. Ferrars's death, which is a melancholy and shocking
extremity?Is her son determined to submit to this,
and to all the tediousness of the many years of suspense
in which it may involve you, rather than run the risk
of her displeasure for a while by owning the truth?"
"If we could be certain that it would be only
for a while But Mrs. Ferrars is a very headstrong
proud woman, and in her first fit of anger upon hearing
it, would very likely secure every thing to Robert,
and the idea of that, for Edward's sake, frightens away
all my inclination for hasty measures."
"And for your own sake too, or you are carrying
your disinterestedness beyond reason."
Lucy looked at Elinor again, and was silent.
"Do you know Mr. Robert Ferrars?" asked Elinor.
"Not at allI never saw him but I fancy he
is very unlike his brothersilly and a great coxcomb."
"A great coxcomb" repeated Miss Steele, whose ear had
caught those words by a sudden pause in Marianne's music.
"Oh, they are talking of their favourite beaux, I dare say."
"No sister," cried Lucy, "you are mistaken there, our
favourite beaux are NOT great coxcombs."
"I can answer for it that Miss Dashwood's is not,"
said Mrs. Jennings, laughing heartily "for he is one
of the modestest, prettiest behaved young men I ever saw
but as for Lucy, she is such a sly little creature,
there is no finding out who SHE likes."
"Oh," cried Miss Steele, looking significantly round
at them, "I dare say Lucy's beau is quite as modest
and pretty behaved as Miss Dashwood's."
Elinor blushed in spite of herself. Lucy bit her lip,
and looked angrily at her sister. A mutual silence took
place for some time. Lucy first put an end to it by saying
in a lower tone, though Marianne was then giving them
the powerful protection of a very magnificent concerto
"I will honestly tell you of one scheme which has
lately come into my head, for bringing matters to bear
indeed I am bound to let you into the secret, for you
are a party concerned. I dare say you have seen enough
of Edward to know that he would prefer the church to every
other profession now my plan is that he should take
orders as soon as he can, and then through your interest,
which I am sure you would be kind enough to use out of
friendship for him, and I hope out of some regard to me,
your brother might be persuaded to give him Norland living
which I understand is a very good one, and the present
incumbent not likely to live a great while. That would
be enough for us to marry upon, and we might trust to time
and chance for the rest."
"I should always be happy," replied Elinor, "to show
any mark of my esteem and friendship for Mr. Ferrars
but do you not perceive that my interest on such an
occasion would be perfectly unnecessary? He is brother
to Mrs. John DashwoodTHAT must be recommendation enough
to her husband."
"But Mrs. John Dashwood would not much approve
of Edward's going into orders."
"Then I rather suspect that my interest would
do very little."
They were again silent for many minutes. At length
Lucy exclaimed with a deep sigh,
"I believe it would be the wisest way to put an end
to the business at once by dissolving the engagement.
We seem so beset with difficulties on every side,
that though it would make us miserable for a time,
we should be happier perhaps in the end. But you will
not give me your advice, Miss Dashwood?"
"No," answered Elinor, with a smile, which concealed
very agitated feelings, "on such a subject I certainly
will not. You know very well that my opinion would have
no weight with you, unless it were on the side of your wishes."
"Indeed you wrong me," replied Lucy, with great
solemnity "I know nobody of whose judgment I think
so highly as I do of yours and I do really believe,
that if you was to say to me, 'I advise you by all means
to put an end to your engagement with Edward Ferrars,
it will be more for the happiness of both of you,'
I should resolve upon doing it immediately."
Elinor blushed for the insincerity of Edward's
future wife, and replied, "This compliment would effectually
frighten me from giving any opinion on the subject
had I formed one. It raises my influence much too high
the power of dividing two people so tenderly attached
is too much for an indifferent person."
"'Tis because you are an indifferent person," said Lucy,
with some pique, and laying a particular stress on those words,
"that your judgment might justly have such weight with me.
If you could be supposed to be biased in any respect
by your own feelings, your opinion would not be worth having."
Elinor thought it wisest to make no answer to this,
lest they might provoke each other to an unsuitable increase
of ease and unreserve and was even partly determined
never to mention the subject again. Another pause
therefore of many minutes' duration, succeeded this speech,
and Lucy was still the first to end it.
"Shall you be in town this winter, Miss Dashwood?"
said she with all her accustomary complacency.
"Certainly not."
"I am sorry for that," returned the other,
while her eyes brightened at the information,
"it would have gave me such pleasure to meet you there
But I dare say you will go for all that. To be sure,
your brother and sister will ask you to come to them."
"It will not be in my power to accept their invitation
if they do."
"How unlucky that is I had quite depended upon
meeting you there. Anne and me are to go the latter end
of January to some relations who have been wanting us to
visit them these several years But I only go for the sake
of seeing Edward. He will be there in February, otherwise
London would have no charms for me I have not spirits for it."
Elinor was soon called to the cardtable by the
conclusion of the first rubber, and the confidential
discourse of the two ladies was therefore at an end,
to which both of them submitted without any reluctance,
for nothing had been said on either side to make them
dislike each other less than they had done before
and Elinor sat down to the card table with the melancholy
persuasion that Edward was not only without affection
for the person who was to be his wife but that he had
not even the chance of being tolerably happy in marriage,
which sincere affection on HER side would have given,
for selfinterest alone could induce a woman to keep a man
to an engagement, of which she seemed so thoroughly aware
that he was weary.
From this time the subject was never revived by Elinor,
and when entered on by Lucy, who seldom missed an opportunity
of introducing it, and was particularly careful to inform
her confidante, of her happiness whenever she received a letter
from Edward, it was treated by the former with calmness
and caution, and dismissed as soon as civility would allow
for she felt such conversations to be an indulgence which
Lucy did not deserve, and which were dangerous to herself.
The visit of the Miss Steeles at Barton Park was
lengthened far beyond what the first invitation implied.
Their favour increased they could not be spared
Sir John would not hear of their going and in spite
of their numerous and long arranged engagements in Exeter,
in spite of the absolute necessity of returning to fulfill
them immediately, which was in full force at the end
of every week, they were prevailed on to stay nearly two
months at the park, and to assist in the due celebration
of that festival which requires a more than ordinary
share of private balls and large dinners to proclaim
its importance.
CHAPTER 
Though Mrs. Jennings was in the habit of spending a large
portion of the year at the houses of her children and friends,
she was not without a settled habitation of her own.
Since the death of her husband, who had traded with success
in a less elegant part of the town, she had resided every
winter in a house in one of the streets near Portman Square.
Towards this home, she began on the approach of January
to turn her thoughts, and thither she one day abruptly,
and very unexpectedly by them, asked the elder Misses
Dashwood to accompany her. Elinor, without observing
the varying complexion of her sister, and the animated look
which spoke no indifference to the plan, immediately gave
a grateful but absolute denial for both, in which she
believed herself to be speaking their united inclinations.
The reason alleged was their determined resolution
of not leaving their mother at that time of the year.
Mrs. Jennings received the refusal with some surprise,
and repeated her invitation immediately.
"Oh, Lord I am sure your mother can spare you
very well, and I DO beg you will favour me with
your company, for I've quite set my heart upon it.
Don't fancy that you will be any inconvenience to me,
for I shan't put myself at all out of my way for you.
It will only be sending Betty by the coach, and I
hope I can afford THAT. We three shall be able to go
very well in my chaise and when we are in town,
if you do not like to go wherever I do, well and good,
you may always go with one of my daughters. I am sure
your mother will not object to it for I have had such
good luck in getting my own children off my hands that she
will think me a very fit person to have the charge of you
and if I don't get one of you at least well married
before I have done with you, it shall not be my fault.
I shall speak a good word for you to all the young men,
you may depend upon it."
"I have a notion," said Sir John, "that Miss Marianne
would not object to such a scheme, if her elder sister
would come into it. It is very hard indeed that she
should not have a little pleasure, because Miss Dashwood
does not wish it. So I would advise you two, to set off
for town, when you are tired of Barton, without saying
a word to Miss Dashwood about it."
"Nay," cried Mrs. Jennings, "I am sure I shall be
monstrous glad of Miss Marianne's company, whether Miss
Dashwood will go or not, only the more the merrier say I,
and I thought it would be more comfortable for them to
be together because, if they got tired of me, they might talk
to one another, and laugh at my old ways behind my back.
But one or the other, if not both of them, I must have.
Lord bless me how do you think I can live poking by myself,
I who have been always used till this winter to have
Charlotte with me. Come, Miss Marianne, let us strike
hands upon the bargain, and if Miss Dashwood will change
her mind by and bye, why so much the better."
"I thank you, ma'am, sincerely thank you," said Marianne,
with warmth "your invitation has insured my gratitude for ever,
and it would give me such happiness, yes, almost the greatest
happiness I am capable of, to be able to accept it.
But my mother, my dearest, kindest mother,I feel the
justice of what Elinor has urged, and if she were to be
made less happy, less comfortable by our absenceOh no,
nothing should tempt me to leave her. It should not,
must not be a struggle."
Mrs. Jennings repeated her assurance that Mrs. Dashwood
could spare them perfectly well and Elinor, who now
understood her sister, and saw to what indifference to
almost every thing else she was carried by her eagerness
to be with Willoughby again, made no farther direct
opposition to the plan, and merely referred it to her
mother's decision, from whom however she scarcely expected
to receive any support in her endeavour to prevent a visit,
which she could not approve of for Marianne, and which
on her own account she had particular reasons to avoid.
Whatever Marianne was desirous of, her mother would be eager
to promoteshe could not expect to influence the latter
to cautiousness of conduct in an affair respecting which she
had never been able to inspire her with distrust and she
dared not explain the motive of her own disinclination
for going to London. That Marianne, fastidious as she was,
thoroughly acquainted with Mrs. Jennings' manners,
and invariably disgusted by them, should overlook every
inconvenience of that kind, should disregard whatever
must be most wounding to her irritable feelings, in her
pursuit of one object, was such a proof, so strong,
so full, of the importance of that object to her, as Elinor,
in spite of all that had passed, was not prepared to witness.
On being informed of the invitation, Mrs. Dashwood,
persuaded that such an excursion would be productive
of much amusement to both her daughters, and perceiving
through all her affectionate attention to herself,
how much the heart of Marianne was in it, would not hear
of their declining the offer upon HER account insisted on
their both accepting it directly and then began to foresee,
with her usual cheerfulness, a variety of advantages that
would accrue to them all, from this separation.
"I am delighted with the plan," she cried,
"it is exactly what I could wish. Margaret and I shall
be as much benefited by it as yourselves. When you
and the Middletons are gone, we shall go on so quietly
and happily together with our books and our music You
will find Margaret so improved when you come back again
I have a little plan of alteration for your bedrooms too,
which may now be performed without any inconvenience
to any one. It is very right that you SHOULD go to town
I would have every young woman of your condition in life
acquainted with the manners and amusements of London.
You will be under the care of a motherly good sort
of woman, of whose kindness to you I can have no doubt.
And in all probability you will see your brother,
and whatever may be his faults, or the faults of his wife,
when I consider whose son he is, I cannot bear to have you so
wholly estranged from each other."
"Though with your usual anxiety for our happiness,"
said Elinor, "you have been obviating every impediment
to the present scheme which occurred to you, there is
still one objection which, in my opinion, cannot be so
easily removed."
Marianne's countenance sunk.
"And what," said Mrs. Dashwood, "is my dear prudent
Elinor going to suggest? What formidable obstacle is she
now to bring forward? Do let me hear a word about the
expense of it."
"My objection is this though I think very well of
Mrs. Jennings's heart, she is not a woman whose society
can afford us pleasure, or whose protection will give
us consequence."
"That is very true," replied her mother, "but of
her society, separately from that of other people,
you will scarcely have any thing at all, and you will
almost always appear in public with Lady Middleton."
"If Elinor is frightened away by her dislike of
Mrs. Jennings," said Marianne, "at least it need not prevent
MY accepting her invitation. I have no such scruples,
and I am sure I could put up with every unpleasantness
of that kind with very little effort."
Elinor could not help smiling at this display of
indifference towards the manners of a person, to whom she
had often had difficulty in persuading Marianne to behave
with tolerable politeness and resolved within herself,
that if her sister persisted in going, she would
go likewise, as she did not think it proper that Marianne
should be left to the sole guidance of her own judgment,
or that Mrs. Jennings should be abandoned to the mercy
of Marianne for all the comfort of her domestic hours.
To this determination she was the more easily reconciled,
by recollecting that Edward Ferrars, by Lucy's account,
was not to be in town before February and that
their visit, without any unreasonable abridgement,
might be previously finished.
"I will have you BOTH go," said Mrs. Dashwood
"these objections are nonsensical. You will have much
pleasure in being in London, and especially in being together
and if Elinor would ever condescend to anticipate enjoyment,
she would foresee it there from a variety of sources
she would, perhaps, expect some from improving her
acquaintance with her sisterinlaw's family."
Elinor had often wished for an opportunity of
attempting to weaken her mother's dependence on the
attachment of Edward and herself, that the shock might
be less when the whole truth were revealed, and now
on this attack, though almost hopeless of success,
she forced herself to begin her design by saying,
as calmly as she could, "I like Edward Ferrars very much,
and shall always be glad to see him but as to the rest
of the family, it is a matter of perfect indifference
to me, whether I am ever known to them or not."
Mrs. Dashwood smiled, and said nothing.
Marianne lifted up her eyes in astonishment, and Elinor
conjectured that she might as well have held her tongue.
After very little farther discourse, it was finally
settled that the invitation should be fully accepted.
Mrs. Jennings received the information with a great
deal of joy, and many assurances of kindness and care
nor was it a matter of pleasure merely to her. Sir John
was delighted for to a man, whose prevailing anxiety
was the dread of being alone, the acquisition of two,
to the number of inhabitants in London, was something.
Even Lady Middleton took the trouble of being delighted,
which was putting herself rather out of her way
and as for the Miss Steeles, especially Lucy, they had
never been so happy in their lives as this intelligence
made them.
Elinor submitted to the arrangement which counteracted
her wishes with less reluctance than she had expected
to feel. With regard to herself, it was now a matter
of unconcern whether she went to town or not, and when
she saw her mother so thoroughly pleased with the plan,
and her sister exhilarated by it in look, voice, and manner,
restored to all her usual animation, and elevated to more
than her usual gaiety, she could not be dissatisfied
with the cause, and would hardly allow herself to distrust
the consequence.
Marianne's joy was almost a degree beyond happiness,
so great was the perturbation of her spirits and her
impatience to be gone. Her unwillingness to quit her
mother was her only restorative to calmness and at the
moment of parting her grief on that score was excessive.
Her mother's affliction was hardly less, and Elinor
was the only one of the three, who seemed to consider
the separation as any thing short of eternal.
Their departure took place in the first week in January.
The Middletons were to follow in about a week. The Miss
Steeles kept their station at the park, and were to quit
it only with the rest of the family.
CHAPTER 
Elinor could not find herself in the carriage with Mrs. Jennings,
and beginning a journey to London under her protection,
and as her guest, without wondering at her own situation,
so short had their acquaintance with that lady been,
so wholly unsuited were they in age and disposition,
and so many had been her objections against such a measure
only a few days before But these objections had all,
with that happy ardour of youth which Marianne and her mother
equally shared, been overcome or overlooked and Elinor,
in spite of every occasional doubt of Willoughby's constancy,
could not witness the rapture of delightful expectation
which filled the whole soul and beamed in the eyes
of Marianne, without feeling how blank was her own prospect,
how cheerless her own state of mind in the comparison,
and how gladly she would engage in the solicitude of
Marianne's situation to have the same animating object
in view, the same possibility of hope. A short, a very
short time however must now decide what Willoughby's
intentions were in all probability he was already in town.
Marianne's eagerness to be gone declared her dependence
on finding him there and Elinor was resolved not only upon
gaining every new light as to his character which her
own observation or the intelligence of others could give her,
but likewise upon watching his behaviour to her sister
with such zealous attention, as to ascertain what he was
and what he meant, before many meetings had taken place.
Should the result of her observations be unfavourable,
she was determined at all events to open the eyes
of her sister should it be otherwise, her exertions
would be of a different natureshe must then learn
to avoid every selfish comparison, and banish every regret
which might lessen her satisfaction in the happiness of Marianne.
They were three days on their journey, and Marianne's
behaviour as they travelled was a happy specimen of what
future complaisance and companionableness to Mrs. Jennings
might be expected to be. She sat in silence almost all
the way, wrapt in her own meditations, and scarcely ever
voluntarily speaking, except when any object of picturesque
beauty within their view drew from her an exclamation
of delight exclusively addressed to her sister. To atone
for this conduct therefore, Elinor took immediate possession
of the post of civility which she had assigned herself,
behaved with the greatest attention to Mrs. Jennings,
talked with her, laughed with her, and listened to her
whenever she could and Mrs. Jennings on her side
treated them both with all possible kindness, was solicitous
on every occasion for their ease and enjoyment, and only
disturbed that she could not make them choose their own
dinners at the inn, nor extort a confession of their
preferring salmon to cod, or boiled fowls to veal cutlets.
They reached town by three o'clock the third day, glad to
be released, after such a journey, from the confinement
of a carriage, and ready to enjoy all the luxury of a good fire.
The house was handsome, and handsomely fitted up,
and the young ladies were immediately put in possession
of a very comfortable apartment. It had formerly
been Charlotte's, and over the mantelpiece still hung
a landscape in coloured silks of her performance,
in proof of her having spent seven years at a great school
in town to some effect.
As dinner was not to be ready in less than two
hours from their arrival, Elinor determined to employ
the interval in writing to her mother, and sat down for
that purpose. In a few moments Marianne did the same.
"I am writing home, Marianne," said Elinor "had not you
better defer your letter for a day or two?"
"I am NOT going to write to my mother,"
replied Marianne, hastily, and as if wishing to avoid
any farther inquiry. Elinor said no more it immediately
struck her that she must then be writing to Willoughby
and the conclusion which as instantly followed was,
that, however mysteriously they might wish to conduct
the affair, they must be engaged. This conviction,
though not entirely satisfactory, gave her pleasure,
and she continued her letter with greater alacrity.
Marianne's was finished in a very few minutes
in length it could be no more than a note it was then
folded up, sealed, and directed with eager rapidity.
Elinor thought she could distinguish a large W in
the direction and no sooner was it complete than Marianne,
ringing the bell, requested the footman who answered it
to get that letter conveyed for her to the twopenny post.
This decided the matter at once.
Her spirits still continued very high but there
was a flutter in them which prevented their giving much
pleasure to her sister, and this agitation increased as
the evening drew on. She could scarcely eat any dinner,
and when they afterwards returned to the drawing room,
seemed anxiously listening to the sound of every carriage.
It was a great satisfaction to Elinor that Mrs. Jennings,
by being much engaged in her own room, could see little
of what was passing. The tea things were brought in,
and already had Marianne been disappointed more than once
by a rap at a neighbouring door, when a loud one was suddenly
heard which could not be mistaken for one at any other house,
Elinor felt secure of its announcing Willoughby's approach,
and Marianne, starting up, moved towards the door.
Every thing was silent this could not be borne many seconds
she opened the door, advanced a few steps towards the stairs,
and after listening half a minute, returned into the room
in all the agitation which a conviction of having heard
him would naturally produce in the ecstasy of her
feelings at that instant she could not help exclaiming,
"Oh, Elinor, it is Willoughby, indeed it is" and seemed
almost ready to throw herself into his arms, when Colonel
Brandon appeared.
It was too great a shock to be borne with calmness,
and she immediately left the room. Elinor was disappointed too
but at the same time her regard for Colonel Brandon ensured
his welcome with her and she felt particularly hurt that
a man so partial to her sister should perceive that she
experienced nothing but grief and disappointment in seeing him.
She instantly saw that it was not unnoticed by him,
that he even observed Marianne as she quitted the room,
with such astonishment and concern, as hardly left him
the recollection of what civility demanded towards herself.
"Is your sister ill?" said he.
Elinor answered in some distress that she was,
and then talked of headaches, low spirits, and over fatigues
and of every thing to which she could decently attribute
her sister's behaviour.
He heard her with the most earnest attention,
but seeming to recollect himself, said no more on the subject,
and began directly to speak of his pleasure at seeing them
in London, making the usual inquiries about their journey,
and the friends they had left behind.
In this calm kind of way, with very little interest
on either side, they continued to talk, both of them out
of spirits, and the thoughts of both engaged elsewhere.
Elinor wished very much to ask whether Willoughby were
then in town, but she was afraid of giving him pain
by any enquiry after his rival and at length, by way
of saying something, she asked if he had been in London
ever since she had seen him last. "Yes," he replied,
with some embarrassment, "almost ever since I have been
once or twice at Delaford for a few days, but it has never
been in my power to return to Barton."
This, and the manner in which it was said,
immediately brought back to her remembrance all the
circumstances of his quitting that place, with the
uneasiness and suspicions they had caused to Mrs. Jennings,
and she was fearful that her question had implied
much more curiosity on the subject than she had ever felt.
Mrs. Jennings soon came in. "Oh Colonel," said she,
with her usual noisy cheerfulness, "I am monstrous glad
to see yousorry I could not come beforebeg your
pardon, but I have been forced to look about me a little,
and settle my matters for it is a long while since I
have been at home, and you know one has always a world
of little odd things to do after one has been away for
any time and then I have had Cartwright to settle with
Lord, I have been as busy as a bee ever since dinner
But pray, Colonel, how came you to conjure out that I should
be in town today?"
"I had the pleasure of hearing it at Mr. Palmer's,
where I have been dining."
"Oh, you did well, and how do they all do at their
house? How does Charlotte do? I warrant you she is a fine
size by this time."
"Mrs. Palmer appeared quite well, and I am commissioned
to tell you, that you will certainly see her tomorrow."
"Ay, to be sure, I thought as much. Well, Colonel,
I have brought two young ladies with me, you seethat is,
you see but one of them now, but there is another somewhere.
Your friend, Miss Marianne, toowhich you will not be
sorry to hear. I do not know what you and Mr. Willoughby
will do between you about her. Ay, it is a fine thing
to be young and handsome. Well I was young once, but I
never was very handsomeworse luck for me. However, I got
a very good husband, and I don't know what the greatest
beauty can do more. Ah poor man he has been dead
these eight years and better. But Colonel, where have
you been to since we parted? And how does your business
go on? Come, come, let's have no secrets among friends."
He replied with his accustomary mildness to all
her inquiries, but without satisfying her in any.
Elinor now began to make the tea, and Marianne was
obliged to appear again.
After her entrance, Colonel Brandon became
more thoughtful and silent than he had been before,
and Mrs. Jennings could not prevail on him to stay long.
No other visitor appeared that evening, and the ladies
were unanimous in agreeing to go early to bed.
Marianne rose the next morning with recovered spirits
and happy looks. The disappointment of the evening before
seemed forgotten in the expectation of what was to happen
that day. They had not long finished their breakfast before
Mrs. Palmer's barouche stopped at the door, and in a few
minutes she came laughing into the room so delighted
to see them all, that it was hard to say whether she
received most pleasure from meeting her mother or the Miss
Dashwoods again. So surprised at their coming to town,
though it was what she had rather expected all along
so angry at their accepting her mother's invitation
after having declined her own, though at the same time
she would never have forgiven them if they had not come
"Mr. Palmer will be so happy to see you,"
said she "What do you think he said when he heard
of your coming with Mamma? I forget what it was now,
but it was something so droll"
After an hour or two spent in what her mother called
comfortable chat, or in other words, in every variety of inquiry
concerning all their acquaintance on Mrs. Jennings's side,
and in laughter without cause on Mrs. Palmer's, it was
proposed by the latter that they should all accompany
her to some shops where she had business that morning,
to which Mrs. Jennings and Elinor readily consented,
as having likewise some purchases to make themselves
and Marianne, though declining it at first was induced
to go likewise.
Wherever they went, she was evidently always on
the watch. In Bond Street especially, where much of
their business lay, her eyes were in constant inquiry
and in whatever shop the party were engaged, her mind was
equally abstracted from every thing actually before them,
from all that interested and occupied the others.
Restless and dissatisfied every where, her sister could
never obtain her opinion of any article of purchase,
however it might equally concern them both she received
no pleasure from anything was only impatient to be at
home again, and could with difficulty govern her vexation
at the tediousness of Mrs. Palmer, whose eye was caught
by every thing pretty, expensive, or new who was wild
to buy all, could determine on none, and dawdled away her
time in rapture and indecision.
It was late in the morning before they returned home
and no sooner had they entered the house than Marianne flew
eagerly up stairs, and when Elinor followed, she found
her turning from the table with a sorrowful countenance,
which declared that no Willoughby had been there.
"Has no letter been left here for me since we went out?"
said she to the footman who then entered with the parcels.
She was answered in the negative. "Are you quite sure
of it?" she replied. "Are you certain that no servant,
no porter has left any letter or note?"
The man replied that none had.
"How very odd" said she, in a low and disappointed
voice, as she turned away to the window.
"How odd, indeed" repeated Elinor within herself,
regarding her sister with uneasiness. "If she had not
known him to be in town she would not have written to him,
as she did she would have written to Combe Magna
and if he is in town, how odd that he should neither
come nor write Oh my dear mother, you must be wrong
in permitting an engagement between a daughter so young,
a man so little known, to be carried on in so doubtful,
so mysterious a manner I long to inquire and how will MY
interference be borne."
She determined, after some consideration, that if
appearances continued many days longer as unpleasant as they
now were, she would represent in the strongest manner
to her mother the necessity of some serious enquiry into the
affair.
Mrs. Palmer and two elderly ladies of Mrs. Jennings's
intimate acquaintance, whom she had met and invited
in the morning, dined with them. The former left them
soon after tea to fulfill her evening engagements
and Elinor was obliged to assist in making a whist table
for the others. Marianne was of no use on these occasions,
as she would never learn the game but though her time
was therefore at her own disposal, the evening was by no
means more productive of pleasure to her than to Elinor,
for it was spent in all the anxiety of expectation and the
pain of disappointment. She sometimes endeavoured for a
few minutes to read but the book was soon thrown aside,
and she returned to the more interesting employment
of walking backwards and forwards across the room,
pausing for a moment whenever she came to the window,
in hopes of distinguishing the longexpected rap.
CHAPTER 
"If this open weather holds much longer," said Mrs. Jennings,
when they met at breakfast the following morning,
"Sir John will not like leaving Barton next week
'tis a sad thing for sportsmen to lose a day's pleasure.
Poor souls I always pity them when they do they seem
to take it so much to heart."
"That is true," cried Marianne, in a cheerful voice,
and walking to the window as she spoke, to examine the day.
"I had not thought of that. This weather will keep many
sportsmen in the country."
It was a lucky recollection, all her good spirits were
restored by it. "It is charming weather for THEM indeed,"
she continued, as she sat down to the breakfast table
with a happy countenance. "How much they must enjoy
it But" with a little return of anxiety "it cannot
be expected to last long. At this time of the year,
and after such a series of rain, we shall certainly
have very little more of it. Frosts will soon set in,
and in all probability with severity. In another day
or two perhaps this extreme mildness can hardly last
longernay, perhaps it may freeze tonight"
"At any rate," said Elinor, wishing to prevent
Mrs. Jennings from seeing her sister's thoughts as clearly
as she did, "I dare say we shall have Sir John and Lady
Middleton in town by the end of next week."
"Ay, my dear, I'll warrant you we do. Mary always
has her own way."
"And now," silently conjectured Elinor, "she will
write to Combe by this day's post."
But if she DID, the letter was written and sent away
with a privacy which eluded all her watchfulness to ascertain
the fact. Whatever the truth of it might be, and far
as Elinor was from feeling thorough contentment about it,
yet while she saw Marianne in spirits, she could not be
very uncomfortable herself. And Marianne was in spirits
happy in the mildness of the weather, and still happier
in her expectation of a frost.
The morning was chiefly spent in leaving cards at
the houses of Mrs. Jennings's acquaintance to inform
them of her being in town and Marianne was all the time
busy in observing the direction of the wind, watching the
variations of the sky and imagining an alteration in the air.
"Don't you find it colder than it was in the morning,
Elinor? There seems to me a very decided difference.
I can hardly keep my hands warm even in my muff. It was
not so yesterday, I think. The clouds seem parting too,
the sun will be out in a moment, and we shall have a
clear afternoon."
Elinor was alternately diverted and pained
but Marianne persevered, and saw every night in the
brightness of the fire, and every morning in the appearance
of the atmosphere, the certain symptoms of approaching frost.
The Miss Dashwoods had no greater reason to be
dissatisfied with Mrs. Jennings's style of living, and set
of acquaintance, than with her behaviour to themselves,
which was invariably kind. Every thing in her household
arrangements was conducted on the most liberal plan,
and excepting a few old city friends, whom, to Lady
Middleton's regret, she had never dropped, she visited
no one to whom an introduction could at all discompose
the feelings of her young companions. Pleased to find
herself more comfortably situated in that particular than
she had expected, Elinor was very willing to compound
for the want of much real enjoyment from any of their
evening parties, which, whether at home or abroad,
formed only for cards, could have little to amuse her.
Colonel Brandon, who had a general invitation
to the house, was with them almost every day he came
to look at Marianne and talk to Elinor, who often derived
more satisfaction from conversing with him than from any
other daily occurrence, but who saw at the same time
with much concern his continued regard for her sister.
She feared it was a strengthening regard. It grieved her
to see the earnestness with which he often watched Marianne,
and his spirits were certainly worse than when at Barton.
About a week after their arrival, it became
certain that Willoughby was also arrived. His card
was on the table when they came in from the morning's drive.
"Good God" cried Marianne, "he has been here while
we were out." Elinor, rejoiced to be assured of his
being in London, now ventured to say, "Depend upon it,
he will call again tomorrow." But Marianne seemed
hardly to hear her, and on Mrs. Jenning's entrance,
escaped with the precious card.
This event, while it raised the spirits of Elinor,
restored to those of her sister all, and more than all,
their former agitation. From this moment her mind was
never quiet the expectation of seeing him every hour
of the day, made her unfit for any thing. She insisted
on being left behind, the next morning, when the others
went out.
Elinor's thoughts were full of what might be passing
in Berkeley Street during their absence but a moment's
glance at her sister when they returned was enough to
inform her, that Willoughby had paid no second visit there.
A note was just then brought in, and laid on the table,
"For me" cried Marianne, stepping hastily forward.
"No, ma'am, for my mistress."
But Marianne, not convinced, took it instantly up.
"It is indeed for Mrs. Jennings how provoking"
"You are expecting a letter, then?" said Elinor,
unable to be longer silent.
"Yes, a littlenot much."
After a short pause. "You have no confidence
in me, Marianne."
"Nay, Elinor, this reproach from YOUyou who have
confidence in no one"
"Me" returned Elinor in some confusion "indeed,
Marianne, I have nothing to tell."
"Nor I," answered Marianne with energy, "our situations
then are alike. We have neither of us any thing to tell
you, because you do not communicate, and I, because
I conceal nothing."
Elinor, distressed by this charge of reserve in herself,
which she was not at liberty to do away, knew not how,
under such circumstances, to press for greater openness
in Marianne.
Mrs. Jennings soon appeared, and the note being
given her, she read it aloud. It was from Lady Middleton,
announcing their arrival in Conduit Street the night before,
and requesting the company of her mother and cousins
the following evening. Business on Sir John's part,
and a violent cold on her own, prevented their calling
in Berkeley Street. The invitation was accepted
but when the hour of appointment drew near, necessary as
it was in common civility to Mrs. Jennings, that they
should both attend her on such a visit, Elinor had some
difficulty in persuading her sister to go, for still
she had seen nothing of Willoughby and therefore was
not more indisposed for amusement abroad, than unwilling
to run the risk of his calling again in her absence.
Elinor found, when the evening was over,
that disposition is not materially altered by a change
of abode, for although scarcely settled in town,
Sir John had contrived to collect around him, nearly twenty
young people, and to amuse them with a ball. This was
an affair, however, of which Lady Middleton did not approve.
In the country, an unpremeditated dance was very allowable
but in London, where the reputation of elegance was more
important and less easily attained, it was risking too much
for the gratification of a few girls, to have it known that
Lady Middleton had given a small dance of eight or nine couple,
with two violins, and a mere sideboard collation.
Mr. and Mrs. Palmer were of the party from the former,
whom they had not seen before since their arrival in town,
as he was careful to avoid the appearance of any attention
to his motherinlaw, and therefore never came near her,
they received no mark of recognition on their entrance.
He looked at them slightly, without seeming to know
who they were, and merely nodded to Mrs. Jennings from
the other side of the room. Marianne gave one glance
round the apartment as she entered it was enoughHE
was not thereand she sat down, equally illdisposed
to receive or communicate pleasure. After they had been
assembled about an hour, Mr. Palmer sauntered towards
the Miss Dashwoods to express his surprise on seeing them
in town, though Colonel Brandon had been first informed
of their arrival at his house, and he had himself said
something very droll on hearing that they were to come.
"I thought you were both in Devonshire," said he.
"Did you?" replied Elinor.
"When do you go back again?"
"I do not know." And thus ended their discourse.
Never had Marianne been so unwilling to dance
in her life, as she was that evening, and never so much
fatigued by the exercise. She complained of it
as they returned to Berkeley Street.
"Aye, aye," said Mrs. Jennings, "we know the reason
of all that very well if a certain person who shall
be nameless, had been there, you would not have been a
bit tired and to say the truth it was not very pretty
of him not to give you the meeting when he was invited."
"Invited" cried Marianne.
"So my daughter Middleton told me, for it seems Sir
John met him somewhere in the street this morning."
Marianne said no more, but looked exceedingly hurt.
Impatient in this situation to be doing something
that might lead to her sister's relief, Elinor resolved
to write the next morning to her mother, and hoped
by awakening her fears for the health of Marianne,
to procure those inquiries which had been so long delayed
and she was still more eagerly bent on this measure
by perceiving after breakfast on the morrow, that Marianne
was again writing to Willoughby, for she could not suppose
it to be to any other person.
About the middle of the day, Mrs. Jennings went out by
herself on business, and Elinor began her letter directly,
while Marianne, too restless for employment, too anxious
for conversation, walked from one window to the other,
or sat down by the fire in melancholy meditation.
Elinor was very earnest in her application to her mother,
relating all that had passed, her suspicions of
Willoughby's inconstancy, urging her by every plea
of duty and affection to demand from Marianne an account
of her real situation with respect to him.
Her letter was scarcely finished, when a rap
foretold a visitor, and Colonel Brandon was announced.
Marianne, who had seen him from the window, and who hated
company of any kind, left the room before he entered it.
He looked more than usually grave, and though expressing
satisfaction at finding Miss Dashwood alone, as if he
had somewhat in particular to tell her, sat for some
time without saying a word. Elinor, persuaded that he
had some communication to make in which her sister
was concerned, impatiently expected its opening.
It was not the first time of her feeling the same kind
of conviction for, more than once before, beginning with
the observation of "your sister looks unwell today,"
or "your sister seems out of spirits," he had appeared
on the point, either of disclosing, or of inquiring,
something particular about her. After a pause of several
minutes, their silence was broken, by his asking her
in a voice of some agitation, when he was to congratulate
her on the acquisition of a brother? Elinor was not
prepared for such a question, and having no answer ready,
was obliged to adopt the simple and common expedient,
of asking what he meant? He tried to smile as he replied,
"your sister's engagement to Mr. Willoughby is very generally
known."
"It cannot be generally known," returned Elinor,
"for her own family do not know it."
He looked surprised and said, "I beg your pardon,
I am afraid my inquiry has been impertinent but I had not
supposed any secrecy intended, as they openly correspond,
and their marriage is universally talked of."
"How can that be? By whom can you have heard
it mentioned?"
"By manyby some of whom you know nothing, by others
with whom you are most intimate, Mrs. Jennings, Mrs. Palmer,
and the Middletons. But still I might not have believed it,
for where the mind is perhaps rather unwilling to
be convinced, it will always find something to support
its doubts, if I had not, when the servant let me in today,
accidentally seen a letter in his hand, directed to
Mr. Willoughby in your sister's writing. I came to inquire,
but I was convinced before I could ask the question.
Is every thing finally settled? Is it impossible to?
But I have no right, and I could have no chance of succeeding.
Excuse me, Miss Dashwood. I believe I have been wrong
in saying so much, but I hardly know what to do, and on
your prudence I have the strongest dependence. Tell me
that it is all absolutely resolved on, that any attempt,
that in short concealment, if concealment be possible,
is all that remains."
These words, which conveyed to Elinor a direct avowal
of his love for her sister, affected her very much.
She was not immediately able to say anything, and even
when her spirits were recovered, she debated for a short
time, on the answer it would be most proper to give.
The real state of things between Willoughby and her sister
was so little known to herself, that in endeavouring
to explain it, she might be as liable to say too much
as too little. Yet as she was convinced that Marianne's
affection for Willoughby, could leave no hope of Colonel
Brandon's success, whatever the event of that affection
might be, and at the same time wished to shield her conduct
from censure, she thought it most prudent and kind,
after some consideration, to say more than she really knew
or believed. She acknowledged, therefore, that though
she had never been informed by themselves of the terms
on which they stood with each other, of their mutual
affection she had no doubt, and of their correspondence
she was not astonished to hear.
He listened to her with silent attention, and on
her ceasing to speak, rose directly from his seat,
and after saying in a voice of emotion, "to your sister
I wish all imaginable happiness to Willoughby that he
may endeavour to deserve her,"took leave, and went away.
Elinor derived no comfortable feelings from this
conversation, to lessen the uneasiness of her mind on
other points she was left, on the contrary, with a
melancholy impression of Colonel Brandon's unhappiness,
and was prevented even from wishing it removed,
by her anxiety for the very event that must confirm it.
CHAPTER 
Nothing occurred during the next three or four days,
to make Elinor regret what she had done, in applying
to her mother for Willoughby neither came nor wrote.
They were engaged about the end of that time to attend
Lady Middleton to a party, from which Mrs. Jennings was
kept away by the indisposition of her youngest daughter
and for this party, Marianne, wholly dispirited,
careless of her appearance, and seeming equally indifferent
whether she went or staid, prepared, without one look
of hope or one expression of pleasure. She sat by the
drawingroom fire after tea, till the moment of Lady
Middleton's arrival, without once stirring from her seat,
or altering her attitude, lost in her own thoughts,
and insensible of her sister's presence and when at
last they were told that Lady Middleton waited for them
at the door, she started as if she had forgotten that
any one was expected.
They arrived in due time at the place of destination,
and as soon as the string of carriages before them
would allow, alighted, ascended the stairs, heard their
names announced from one landingplace to another in an
audible voice, and entered a room splendidly lit up,
quite full of company, and insufferably hot. When they had
paid their tribute of politeness by curtsying to the lady
of the house, they were permitted to mingle in the crowd,
and take their share of the heat and inconvenience, to
which their arrival must necessarily add. After some time
spent in saying little or doing less, Lady Middleton sat
down to Cassino, and as Marianne was not in spirits for
moving about, she and Elinor luckily succeeding to chairs,
placed themselves at no great distance from the table.
They had not remained in this manner long, before Elinor
perceived Willoughby, standing within a few yards
of them, in earnest conversation with a very fashionable
looking young woman. She soon caught his eye, and he
immediately bowed, but without attempting to speak to her,
or to approach Marianne, though he could not but see her
and then continued his discourse with the same lady.
Elinor turned involuntarily to Marianne, to see whether
it could be unobserved by her. At that moment she first
perceived him, and her whole countenance glowing with
sudden delight, she would have moved towards him instantly,
had not her sister caught hold of her.
"Good heavens" she exclaimed, "he is therehe
is thereOh why does he not look at me? why cannot
I speak to him?"
"Pray, pray be composed," cried Elinor, "and do
not betray what you feel to every body present.
Perhaps he has not observed you yet."
This however was more than she could believe herself
and to be composed at such a moment was not only beyond
the reach of Marianne, it was beyond her wish. She sat
in an agony of impatience which affected every feature.
At last he turned round again, and regarded them both
she started up, and pronouncing his name in a tone
of affection, held out her hand to him. He approached,
and addressing himself rather to Elinor than Marianne,
as if wishing to avoid her eye, and determined not to
observe her attitude, inquired in a hurried manner after
Mrs. Dashwood, and asked how long they had been in town.
Elinor was robbed of all presence of mind by such an address,
and was unable to say a word. But the feelings of her sister
were instantly expressed. Her face was crimsoned over,
and she exclaimed, in a voice of the greatest emotion,
"Good God Willoughby, what is the meaning of this?
Have you not received my letters? Will you not shake
hands with me?"
He could not then avoid it, but her touch seemed
painful to him, and he held her hand only for a moment.
During all this time he was evidently struggling for composure.
Elinor watched his countenance and saw its expression
becoming more tranquil. After a moment's pause, he spoke
with calmness.
"I did myself the honour of calling in Berkeley
Street last Tuesday, and very much regretted that I was
not fortunate enough to find yourselves and Mrs. Jennings
at home. My card was not lost, I hope."
"But have you not received my notes?" cried Marianne
in the wildest anxiety. "Here is some mistake I am
suresome dreadful mistake. What can be the meaning
of it? Tell me, Willoughby for heaven's sake tell me,
what is the matter?"
He made no reply his complexion changed and all his
embarrassment returned but as if, on catching the eye
of the young lady with whom he had been previously talking,
he felt the necessity of instant exertion, he recovered
himself again, and after saying, "Yes, I had the pleasure
of receiving the information of your arrival in town,
which you were so good as to send me," turned hastily away
with a slight bow and joined his friend.
Marianne, now looking dreadfully white, and unable
to stand, sunk into her chair, and Elinor, expecting every
moment to see her faint, tried to screen her from the
observation of others, while reviving her with lavender water.
"Go to him, Elinor," she cried, as soon as she
could speak, "and force him to come to me. Tell him
I must see him againmust speak to him instantly.
I cannot restI shall not have a moment's peace till this
is explainedsome dreadful misapprehension or other.
Oh go to him this moment."
"How can that be done? No, my dearest Marianne,
you must wait. This is not the place for explanations.
Wait only till tomorrow."
With difficulty however could she prevent her
from following him herself and to persuade her to check
her agitation, to wait, at least, with the appearance
of composure, till she might speak to him with more privacy
and more effect, was impossible for Marianne continued
incessantly to give way in a low voice to the misery
of her feelings, by exclamations of wretchedness.
In a short time Elinor saw Willoughby quit the room by the
door towards the staircase, and telling Marianne that he
was gone, urged the impossibility of speaking to him again
that evening, as a fresh argument for her to be calm.
She instantly begged her sister would entreat Lady
Middleton to take them home, as she was too miserable
to stay a minute longer.
Lady Middleton, though in the middle of a rubber,
on being informed that Marianne was unwell, was too
polite to object for a moment to her wish of going away,
and making over her cards to a friend, they departed
as soon the carriage could be found. Scarcely a word
was spoken during their return to Berkeley Street.
Marianne was in a silent agony, too much oppressed even
for tears but as Mrs. Jennings was luckily not come home,
they could go directly to their own room, where hartshorn
restored her a little to herself. She was soon undressed
and in bed, and as she seemed desirous of being alone,
her sister then left her, and while she waited the return
of Mrs. Jennings, had leisure enough for thinking over
the past.
That some kind of engagement had subsisted
between Willoughby and Marianne she could not doubt,
and that Willoughby was weary of it, seemed equally clear
for however Marianne might still feed her own wishes,
SHE could not attribute such behaviour to mistake
or misapprehension of any kind. Nothing but a thorough
change of sentiment could account for it. Her indignation
would have been still stronger than it was, had she
not witnessed that embarrassment which seemed to speak
a consciousness of his own misconduct, and prevented
her from believing him so unprincipled as to have been
sporting with the affections of her sister from the first,
without any design that would bear investigation.
Absence might have weakened his regard, and convenience
might have determined him to overcome it, but that such
a regard had formerly existed she could not bring herself
to doubt.
As for Marianne, on the pangs which so unhappy a meeting
must already have given her, and on those still more
severe which might await her in its probable consequence,
she could not reflect without the deepest concern.
Her own situation gained in the comparison for while she
could ESTEEM Edward as much as ever, however they might be
divided in future, her mind might be always supported.
But every circumstance that could embitter such an evil
seemed uniting to heighten the misery of Marianne
in a final separation from Willoughbyin an immediate
and irreconcilable rupture with him.
CHAPTER 
Before the housemaid had lit their fire the next day,
or the sun gained any power over a cold, gloomy morning
in January, Marianne, only half dressed, was kneeling
against one of the windowseats for the sake of all
the little light she could command from it, and writing
as fast as a continual flow of tears would permit her.
In this situation, Elinor, roused from sleep by her agitation
and sobs, first perceived her and after observing her
for a few moments with silent anxiety, said, in a tone
of the most considerate gentleness,
"Marianne, may I ask?"
"No, Elinor," she replied, "ask nothing you will
soon know all."
The sort of desperate calmness with which this was said,
lasted no longer than while she spoke, and was immediately
followed by a return of the same excessive affliction.
It was some minutes before she could go on with her letter,
and the frequent bursts of grief which still obliged her,
at intervals, to withhold her pen, were proofs enough of her
feeling how more than probable it was that she was writing
for the last time to Willoughby.
Elinor paid her every quiet and unobtrusive attention
in her power and she would have tried to sooth and
tranquilize her still more, had not Marianne entreated her,
with all the eagerness of the most nervous irritability,
not to speak to her for the world. In such circumstances,
it was better for both that they should not be long together
and the restless state of Marianne's mind not only prevented
her from remaining in the room a moment after she was dressed,
but requiring at once solitude and continual change of place,
made her wander about the house till breakfast time, avoiding
the sight of every body.
At breakfast she neither ate, nor attempted to eat
any thing and Elinor's attention was then all employed,
not in urging her, not in pitying her, nor in appearing
to regard her, but in endeavouring to engage Mrs. Jenning's
notice entirely to herself.
As this was a favourite meal with Mrs. Jennings,
it lasted a considerable time, and they were just setting
themselves, after it, round the common working table, when a
letter was delivered to Marianne, which she eagerly caught
from the servant, and, turning of a deathlike paleness,
instantly ran out of the room. Elinor, who saw as plainly
by this, as if she had seen the direction, that it must
come from Willoughby, felt immediately such a sickness
at heart as made her hardly able to hold up her head,
and sat in such a general tremour as made her fear it
impossible to escape Mrs. Jenning's notice. That good lady,
however, saw only that Marianne had received a letter
from Willoughby, which appeared to her a very good joke,
and which she treated accordingly, by hoping, with a laugh,
that she would find it to her liking. Of Elinor's distress,
she was too busily employed in measuring lengths of worsted
for her rug, to see any thing at all and calmly continuing
her talk, as soon as Marianne disappeared, she said,
"Upon my word, I never saw a young woman so
desperately in love in my life MY girls were nothing
to her, and yet they used to be foolish enough but as
for Miss Marianne, she is quite an altered creature.
I hope, from the bottom of my heart, he won't keep her
waiting much longer, for it is quite grievous to see her
look so ill and forlorn. Pray, when are they to be married?"
Elinor, though never less disposed to speak than at
that moment, obliged herself to answer such an attack
as this, and, therefore, trying to smile, replied, "And have
you really, Ma'am, talked yourself into a persuasion
of my sister's being engaged to Mr. Willoughby? I thought
it had been only a joke, but so serious a question seems
to imply more and I must beg, therefore, that you will not
deceive yourself any longer. I do assure you that nothing
would surprise me more than to hear of their being going
to be married."
"For shame, for shame, Miss Dashwood how can you
talk so? Don't we all know that it must be a match, that
they were over head and ears in love with each other from
the first moment they met? Did not I see them together
in Devonshire every day, and all day long and did not I
know that your sister came to town with me on purpose
to buy wedding clothes? Come, come, this won't do.
Because you are so sly about it yourself, you think nobody
else has any senses but it is no such thing, I can tell you,
for it has been known all over town this ever so long.
I tell every body of it and so does Charlotte."
"Indeed, Ma'am," said Elinor, very seriously,
"you are mistaken. Indeed, you are doing a very unkind thing
in spreading the report, and you will find that you have
though you will not believe me now."
Mrs. Jennings laughed again, but Elinor had not
spirits to say more, and eager at all events to know
what Willoughby had written, hurried away to their room,
where, on opening the door, she saw Marianne stretched on
the bed, almost choked by grief, one letter in her hand,
and two or three others laying by her. Elinor drew near,
but without saying a word and seating herself on the bed,
took her hand, kissed her affectionately several times,
and then gave way to a burst of tears, which at first
was scarcely less violent than Marianne's. The latter,
though unable to speak, seemed to feel all the tenderness
of this behaviour, and after some time thus spent in
joint affliction, she put all the letters into Elinor's hands
and then covering her face with her handkerchief,
almost screamed with agony. Elinor, who knew that such grief,
shocking as it was to witness it, must have its course,
watched by her till this excess of suffering had somewhat
spent itself, and then turning eagerly to Willoughby's letter,
read as follows
"Bond Street, January.
"MY DEAR MADAM,
"I have just had the honour of receiving your
letter, for which I beg to return my sincere
acknowledgments. I am much concerned to find there
was anything in my behaviour last night that did
not meet your approbation and though I am quite at
a loss to discover in what point I could be so
unfortunate as to offend you, I entreat your
forgiveness of what I can assure you to have been
perfectly unintentional. I shall never reflect on
my former acquaintance with your family in Devonshire
without the most grateful pleasure, and flatter
myself it will not be broken by any mistake or
misapprehension of my actions. My esteem for your
whole family is very sincere but if I have been so
unfortunate as to give rise to a belief of more than
I felt, or meant to express, I shall reproach myself
for not having been more guarded in my professions
of that esteem. That I should ever have meant more
you will allow to be impossible, when you understand
that my affections have been long engaged elsewhere,
and it will not be many weeks, I believe, before
this engagement is fulfilled. It is with great
regret that I obey your commands in returning the
letters with which I have been honoured from you,
and the lock of hair, which you so obligingly bestowed
on me.
"I am, dear Madam,
"Your most obedient
"humble servant,
"JOHN WILLOUGHBY."
With what indignation such a letter as this must
be read by Miss Dashwood, may be imagined. Though aware,
before she began it, that it must bring a confession
of his inconstancy, and confirm their separation for ever,
she was not aware that such language could be suffered
to announce it nor could she have supposed Willoughby
capable of departing so far from the appearance of every
honourable and delicate feelingso far from the common
decorum of a gentleman, as to send a letter so impudently
cruel a letter which, instead of bringing with his desire
of a release any professions of regret, acknowledged no
breach of faith, denied all peculiar affection whatever
a letter of which every line was an insult, and which
proclaimed its writer to be deep in hardened villainy.
She paused over it for some time with indignant
astonishment then read it again and again but every
perusal only served to increase her abhorrence of the man,
and so bitter were her feelings against him, that she
dared not trust herself to speak, lest she might wound
Marianne still deeper by treating their disengagement,
not as a loss to her of any possible good but as an
escape from the worst and most irremediable of all
evils, a connection, for life, with an unprincipled man,
as a deliverance the most real, a blessing the most important.
In her earnest meditations on the contents of the letter,
on the depravity of that mind which could dictate it,
and probably, on the very different mind of a very different
person, who had no other connection whatever with the affair
than what her heart gave him with every thing that passed,
Elinor forgot the immediate distress of her sister,
forgot that she had three letters on her lap yet unread,
and so entirely forgot how long she had been in the room,
that when on hearing a carriage drive up to the door,
she went to the window to see who could be coming so
unreasonably early, she was all astonishment to perceive
Mrs. Jennings's chariot, which she knew had not been
ordered till one. Determined not to quit Marianne,
though hopeless of contributing, at present, to her ease,
she hurried away to excuse herself from attending
Mrs. Jennings, on account of her sister being indisposed.
Mrs. Jennings, with a thoroughly goodhumoured concern
for its cause, admitted the excuse most readily, and Elinor,
after seeing her safe off, returned to Marianne, whom she
found attempting to rise from the bed, and whom she reached
just in time to prevent her from falling on the floor,
faint and giddy from a long want of proper rest and food
for it was many days since she had any appetite, and many
nights since she had really slept and now, when her
mind was no longer supported by the fever of suspense,
the consequence of all this was felt in an aching head,
a weakened stomach, and a general nervous faintness.
A glass of wine, which Elinor procured for her directly,
made her more comfortable, and she was at last able to express
some sense of her kindness, by saying,
"Poor Elinor how unhappy I make you"
"I only wish," replied her sister, "there were
any thing I COULD do, which might be of comfort to you."
This, as every thing else would have been,
was too much for Marianne, who could only exclaim,
in the anguish of her heart, "Oh Elinor, I am miserable,
indeed," before her voice was entirely lost in sobs.
Elinor could no longer witness this torrent
of unresisted grief in silence.
"Exert yourself, dear Marianne," she cried,
"if you would not kill yourself and all who love you.
Think of your mother think of her misery while YOU suffer
for her sake you must exert yourself."
"I cannot, I cannot," cried Marianne "leave me,
leave me, if I distress you leave me, hate me, forget me
but do not torture me so. Oh how easy for those,
who have no sorrow of their own to talk of exertion Happy,
happy Elinor, YOU cannot have an idea of what I suffer."
"Do you call ME happy, Marianne? Ah if you knewAnd
can you believe me to be so, while I see you so wretched"
"Forgive me, forgive me," throwing her arms round
her sister's neck "I know you feel for me I know what
a heart you have but yet you areyou must be happy
Edward loves youwhat, oh what, can do away such happiness
as that?"
"Many, many circumstances," said Elinor, solemnly.
"No, no, no," cried Marianne wildly, "he loves you,
and only you. You CAN have no grief."
"I can have no pleasure while I see you in this state."
"And you will never see me otherwise. Mine is
a misery which nothing can do away."
"You must not talk so, Marianne. Have you no
comforts? no friends? Is your loss such as leaves
no opening for consolation? Much as you suffer now,
think of what you would have suffered if the discovery
of his character had been delayed to a later period
if your engagement had been carried on for months and months,
as it might have been, before he chose to put an end to it.
Every additional day of unhappy confidence, on your side,
would have made the blow more dreadful."
"Engagement" cried Marianne, "there has been
no engagement."
"No engagement"
"No, he is not so unworthy as you believe him.
He has broken no faith with me."
"But he told you that he loved you."
"Yesnonever absolutely. It was every day implied,
but never professedly declared. Sometimes I thought it
had beenbut it never was."
"Yet you wrote to him?"
"Yescould that be wrong after all that had passed?
But I cannot talk."
Elinor said no more, and turning again to the three
letters which now raised a much stronger curiosity
than before, directly ran over the contents of all.
The first, which was what her sister had sent him
on their arrival in town, was to this effect.
Berkeley Street, January.
"How surprised you will be, Willoughby, on
receiving this and I think you will feel something
more than surprise, when you know that I am in town.
An opportunity of coming hither, though with Mrs.
Jennings, was a temptation we could not resist.
I wish you may receive this in time to come here
tonight, but I will not depend on it. At any rate
I shall expect you tomorrow. For the present, adieu.
"M.D."
Her second note, which had been written on the morning
after the dance at the Middletons', was in these words
"I cannot express my disappointment in having
missed you the day before yesterday, nor my astonishment
at not having received any answer to a note which
I sent you above a week ago. I have been expecting
to hear from you, and still more to see you, every
hour of the day. Pray call again as soon as possible,
and explain the reason of my having expected this
in vain. You had better come earlier another time,
because we are generally out by one. We were last
night at Lady Middleton's, where there was a dance.
I have been told that you were asked to be of the
party. But could it be so? You must be very much
altered indeed since we parted, if that could be
the case, and you not there. But I will not suppose
this possible, and I hope very soon to receive your
personal assurance of its being otherwise.
"M.D."
The contents of her last note to him were these
"What am I to imagine, Willoughby, by your
behaviour last night? Again I demand an explanation
of it. I was prepared to meet you with the pleasure
which our separation naturally produced, with the
familiarity which our intimacy at Barton appeared
to me to justify. I was repulsed indeed I have
passed a wretched night in endeavouring to excuse
a conduct which can scarcely be called less than
insulting but though I have not yet been able to
form any reasonable apology for your behaviour,
I am perfectly ready to hear your justification of
it. You have perhaps been misinformed, or purposely
deceived, in something concerning me, which may have
lowered me in your opinion. Tell me what it is,
explain the grounds on which you acted, and I shall
be satisfied, in being able to satisfy you. It
would grieve me indeed to be obliged to think ill
of you but if I am to do it, if I am to learn that
you are not what we have hitherto believed you, that
your regard for us all was insincere, that your
behaviour to me was intended only to deceive, let
it be told as soon as possible. My feelings are at
present in a state of dreadful indecision I wish
to acquit you, but certainty on either side will be
ease to what I now suffer. If your sentiments are
no longer what they were, you will return my notes,
and the lock of my hair which is in your possession.
"M.D."
That such letters, so full of affection and confidence,
could have been so answered, Elinor, for Willoughby's sake,
would have been unwilling to believe. But her condemnation
of him did not blind her to the impropriety of their
having been written at all and she was silently grieving
over the imprudence which had hazarded such unsolicited
proofs of tenderness, not warranted by anything preceding,
and most severely condemned by the event, when Marianne,
perceiving that she had finished the letters, observed to
her that they contained nothing but what any one would
have written in the same situation.
"I felt myself," she added, "to be as solemnly
engaged to him, as if the strictest legal covenant
had bound us to each other."
"I can believe it," said Elinor "but unfortunately
he did not feel the same."
"He DID feel the same, Elinorfor weeks and weeks he
felt it. I know he did. Whatever may have changed him now, and
nothing but the blackest art employed against me can have done
it, I was once as dear to him as my own soul could wish.
This lock of hair, which now he can so readily give up,
was begged of me with the most earnest supplication.
Had you seen his look, his manner, had you heard his voice
at that moment Have you forgot the last evening of our
being together at Barton? The morning that we parted
too When he told me that it might be many weeks before
we met againhis distresscan I ever forget his distress?"
For a moment or two she could say no more
but when this emotion had passed away, she added,
in a firmer tone,
"Elinor, I have been cruelly used but not by Willoughby."
"Dearest Marianne, who but himself? By whom can he
have been instigated?"
"By all the world, rather than by his own heart.
I could rather believe every creature of my acquaintance
leagued together to ruin me in his opinion, than believe
his nature capable of such cruelty. This woman of whom he
writeswhoever she beor any one, in short, but your own
dear self, mama, and Edward, may have been so barbarous
to bely me. Beyond you three, is there a creature
in the world whom I would not rather suspect of evil
than Willoughby, whose heart I know so well?"
Elinor would not contend, and only replied,
"Whoever may have been so detestably your enemy, let them
be cheated of their malignant triumph, my dear sister,
by seeing how nobly the consciousness of your own
innocence and good intentions supports your spirits.
It is a reasonable and laudable pride which resists
such malevolence."
"No, no," cried Marianne, "misery such as mine has
no pride. I care not who knows that I am wretched.
The triumph of seeing me so may be open to all the world.
Elinor, Elinor, they who suffer little may be proud and
independent as they likemay resist insult, or return
mortificationbut I cannot. I must feelI must be
wretchedand they are welcome to enjoy the consciousness
of it that can."
"But for my mother's sake and mine"
"I would do more than for my own. But to appear
happy when I am so miserableOh who can require it?"
Again they were both silent. Elinor was employed
in walking thoughtfully from the fire to the window,
from the window to the fire, without knowing that she
received warmth from one, or discerning objects through
the other and Marianne, seated at the foot of the bed,
with her head leaning against one of its posts,
again took up Willoughby's letter, and, after shuddering
over every sentence, exclaimed
"It is too much Oh, Willoughby, Willoughby, could this
be yours Cruel, cruelnothing can acquit you. Elinor,
nothing can. Whatever he might have heard against me
ought he not to have suspended his belief? ought he not to
have told me of it, to have given me the power of clearing
myself? 'The lock of hair, repeating it from the letter,
which you so obligingly bestowed on me'That is unpardonable.
Willoughby, where was your heart when you wrote those words?
Oh, barbarously insolentElinor, can he be justified?"
"No, Marianne, in no possible way."
"And yet this womanwho knows what her art may
have been?how long it may have been premeditated,
and how deeply contrived by herWho is she?Who can
she be?Whom did I ever hear him talk of as young and
attractive among his female acquaintance?Oh no one,
no onehe talked to me only of myself."
Another pause ensued Marianne was greatly agitated,
and it ended thus.
"Elinor, I must go home. I must go and comfort mama.
Can not we be gone tomorrow?"
"Tomorrow, Marianne"
"Yes, why should I stay here? I came only for
Willoughby's sakeand now who cares for me? Who regards me?"
"It would be impossible to go tomorrow. We owe
Mrs. Jennings much more than civility and civility of
the commonest kind must prevent such a hasty removal as that."
"Well then, another day or two, perhaps but I cannot
stay here long, I cannot stay to endure the questions
and remarks of all these people. The Middletons and
Palmershow am I to bear their pity? The pity of such
a woman as Lady Middleton Oh, what would HE say to that"
Elinor advised her to lie down again, and for a
moment she did so but no attitude could give her ease
and in restless pain of mind and body she moved from one
posture to another, till growing more and more hysterical,
her sister could with difficulty keep her on the bed at all,
and for some time was fearful of being constrained to call
for assistance. Some lavender drops, however, which she
was at length persuaded to take, were of use and from
that time till Mrs. Jennings returned, she continued
on the bed quiet and motionless.
CHAPTER 
Mrs. Jennings came immediately to their room on her return,
and without waiting to have her request of admittance answered,
opened the door and walked in with a look of real concern.
"How do you do my dear?"said she in a voice of great
compassion to Marianne, who turned away her face without
attempting to answer.
"How is she, Miss Dashwood?Poor thing she looks very bad.
No wonder. Ay, it is but too true. He is to be married
very soona goodfornothing fellow I have no patience
with him. Mrs. Taylor told me of it half an hour ago,
and she was told it by a particular friend of Miss
Grey herself, else I am sure I should not have believed it
and I was almost ready to sink as it was. Well, said I,
all I can say is, that if this be true, he has used
a young lady of my acquaintance abominably ill, and I
wish with all my soul his wife may plague his heart out.
And so I shall always say, my dear, you may depend on it.
I have no notion of men's going on in this way and if ever
I meet him again, I will give him such a dressing as he
has not had this many a day. But there is one comfort,
my dear Miss Marianne he is not the only young man
in the world worth having and with your pretty face
you will never want admirers. Well, poor thing I won't
disturb her any longer, for she had better have her cry
out at once and have done with. The Parrys and Sandersons
luckily are coming tonight you know, and that will amuse her."
She then went away, walking on tiptoe out of the room,
as if she supposed her young friend's affliction could
be increased by noise.
Marianne, to the surprise of her sister,
determined on dining with them. Elinor even advised
her against it. But "no, she would go down she could
bear it very well, and the bustle about her would
be less." Elinor, pleased to have her governed for a
moment by such a motive, though believing it hardly
possible that she could sit out the dinner, said no more
and adjusting her dress for her as well as she could,
while Marianne still remained on the bed, was ready
to assist her into the dining room as soon as they were
summoned to it.
When there, though looking most wretchedly,
she ate more and was calmer than her sister had expected.
Had she tried to speak, or had she been conscious of half
Mrs. Jennings's wellmeant but illjudged attentions
to her, this calmness could not have been maintained
but not a syllable escaped her lips and the abstraction
of her thoughts preserved her in ignorance of every thing
that was passing before her.
Elinor, who did justice to Mrs. Jennings's kindness,
though its effusions were often distressing, and sometimes
almost ridiculous, made her those acknowledgments,
and returned her those civilities, which her sister could
not make or return for herself. Their good friend saw
that Marianne was unhappy, and felt that every thing
was due to her which might make her at all less so.
She treated her therefore, with all the indulgent fondness
of a parent towards a favourite child on the last day of
its holidays. Marianne was to have the best place by the fire,
was to be tempted to eat by every delicacy in the house,
and to be amused by the relation of all the news of the day.
Had not Elinor, in the sad countenance of her sister,
seen a check to all mirth, she could have been entertained
by Mrs. Jennings's endeavours to cure a disappointment in love,
by a variety of sweetmeats and olives, and a good fire.
As soon, however, as the consciousness of all this was
forced by continual repetition on Marianne, she could
stay no longer. With a hasty exclamation of Misery,
and a sign to her sister not to follow her, she directly got
up and hurried out of the room.
"Poor soul" cried Mrs. Jennings, as soon as she was gone,
"how it grieves me to see her And I declare if she is
not gone away without finishing her wine And the dried
cherries too Lord nothing seems to do her any good.
I am sure if I knew of any thing she would like, I would
send all over the town for it. Well, it is the oddest
thing to me, that a man should use such a pretty girl
so ill But when there is plenty of money on one side,
and next to none on the other, Lord bless you they care
no more about such things"
"The lady thenMiss Grey I think you called her
is very rich?"
"Fifty thousand pounds, my dear. Did you ever see
her? a smart, stylish girl they say, but not handsome.
I remember her aunt very well, Biddy Henshawe she married
a very wealthy man. But the family are all rich together.
Fifty thousand pounds and by all accounts, it won't come
before it's wanted for they say he is all to pieces.
No wonder dashing about with his curricle and hunters
Well, it don't signify talking but when a young man,
be who he will, comes and makes love to a pretty girl,
and promises marriage, he has no business to fly off
from his word only because he grows poor, and a richer
girl is ready to have him. Why don't he, in such a case,
sell his horses, let his house, turn off his servants,
and make a thorough reform at once? I warrant you,
Miss Marianne would have been ready to wait till matters
came round. But that won't do nowadays nothing in the
way of pleasure can ever be given up by the young men of
this age."
"Do you know what kind of a girl Miss Grey is?
Is she said to be amiable?"
"I never heard any harm of her indeed I hardly ever
heard her mentioned except that Mrs. Taylor did say
this morning, that one day Miss Walker hinted to her,
that she believed Mr. and Mrs. Ellison would not be sorry
to have Miss Grey married, for she and Mrs. Ellison could
never agree."
"And who are the Ellisons?"
"Her guardians, my dear. But now she is of age
and may choose for herself and a pretty choice she has
madeWhat now," after pausing a moment"your poor sister
is gone to her own room, I suppose, to moan by herself.
Is there nothing one can get to comfort her? Poor dear,
it seems quite cruel to let her be alone. Well, byandby we
shall have a few friends, and that will amuse her a little.
What shall we play at? She hates whist I know but is there
no round game she cares for?"
"Dear ma'am, this kindness is quite unnecessary.
Marianne, I dare say, will not leave her room again
this evening. I shall persuade her if I can to go
early to bed, for I am sure she wants rest."
"Aye, I believe that will be best for her. Let her name
her own supper, and go to bed. Lord no wonder she has
been looking so bad and so cast down this last week or two,
for this matter I suppose has been hanging over her head as
long as that. And so the letter that came today finished it
Poor soul I am sure if I had had a notion of it,
I would not have joked her about it for all my money.
But then you know, how should I guess such a thing? I made
sure of its being nothing but a common love letter, and
you know young people like to be laughed at about them. Lord
how concerned Sir John and my daughters will be when they
hear it If I had my senses about me I might have called
in Conduit Street in my way home, and told them of it.
But I shall see them tomorrow."
"It would be unnecessary I am sure, for you to caution
Mrs. Palmer and Sir John against ever naming Mr. Willoughby,
or making the slightest allusion to what has passed,
before my sister. Their own goodnature must point out
to them the real cruelty of appearing to know any thing
about it when she is present and the less that may ever
be said to myself on the subject, the more my feelings
will be spared, as you my dear madam will easily believe."
"Oh Lord yes, that I do indeed. It must be terrible
for you to hear it talked of and as for your sister,
I am sure I would not mention a word about it to her
for the world. You saw I did not all dinner time.
No more would Sir John, nor my daughters, for they are
all very thoughtful and considerate especially if I
give them a hint, as I certainly will. For my part,
I think the less that is said about such things, the better,
the sooner 'tis blown over and forgot. And what does
talking ever do you know?"
"In this affair it can only do harm more so
perhaps than in many cases of a similar kind, for it
has been attended by circumstances which, for the sake
of every one concerned in it, make it unfit to become
the public conversation. I must do THIS justice to
Mr. Willoughbyhe has broken no positive engagement
with my sister."
"Law, my dear Don't pretend to defend him.
No positive engagement indeed after taking her all
over Allenham House, and fixing on the very rooms they
were to live in hereafter"
Elinor, for her sister's sake, could not press the
subject farther, and she hoped it was not required of her
for Willoughby's since, though Marianne might lose much,
he could gain very little by the enforcement of the real truth.
After a short silence on both sides, Mrs. Jennings,
with all her natural hilarity, burst forth again.
"Well, my dear, 'tis a true saying about an illwind,
for it will be all the better for Colonel Brandon.
He will have her at last aye, that he will. Mind me,
now, if they an't married by Midsummer. Lord how he'll
chuckle over this news I hope he will come tonight.
It will be all to one a better match for your sister.
Two thousand a year without debt or drawbackexcept
the little lovechild, indeed aye, I had forgot her
but she may be 'prenticed out at a small cost, and then
what does it signify? Delaford is a nice place, I can
tell you exactly what I call a nice old fashioned place,
full of comforts and conveniences quite shut in with great
garden walls that are covered with the best fruittrees
in the country and such a mulberry tree in one corner
Lord how Charlotte and I did stuff the only time we
were there Then, there is a dovecote, some delightful
stewponds, and a very pretty canal and every thing,
in short, that one could wish for and, moreover, it is
close to the church, and only a quarter of a mile from
the turnpikeroad, so 'tis never dull, for if you only
go and sit up in an old yew arbour behind the house,
you may see all the carriages that pass along.
Oh 'tis a nice place A butcher hard by in the village,
and the parsonagehouse within a stone's throw.
To my fancy, a thousand times prettier than Barton Park,
where they are forced to send three miles for their meat,
and have not a neighbour nearer than your mother.
Well, I shall spirit up the Colonel as soon as I can.
One shoulder of mutton, you know, drives another down.
If we CAN but put Willoughby out of her head"
"Ay, if we can do THAT, Ma'am," said Elinor,
"we shall do very well with or without Colonel Brandon."
And then rising, she went away to join Marianne,
whom she found, as she expected, in her own room, leaning,
in silent misery, over the small remains of a fire,
which, till Elinor's entrance, had been her only light.
"You had better leave me," was all the notice
that her sister received from her.
"I will leave you," said Elinor, "if you will go
to bed." But this, from the momentary perverseness
of impatient suffering, she at first refused to do.
Her sister's earnest, though gentle persuasion, however,
soon softened her to compliance, and Elinor saw her
lay her aching head on the pillow, and as she hoped,
in a way to get some quiet rest before she left her.
In the drawingroom, whither she then repaired,
she was soon joined by Mrs. Jennings, with a wineglass,
full of something, in her hand.
"My dear," said she, entering, "I have just recollected
that I have some of the finest old Constantia wine in the
house that ever was tasted, so I have brought a glass of it
for your sister. My poor husband how fond he was of it
Whenever he had a touch of his old colicky gout, he said
it did him more good than any thing else in the world.
Do take it to your sister."
"Dear Ma'am," replied Elinor, smiling at the difference
of the complaints for which it was recommended, "how good
you are But I have just left Marianne in bed, and, I hope,
almost asleep and as I think nothing will be of so much
service to her as rest, if you will give me leave,
I will drink the wine myself."
Mrs. Jennings, though regretting that she had not been
five minutes earlier, was satisfied with the compromise
and Elinor, as she swallowed the chief of it, reflected,
that though its effects on a colicky gout were, at present,
of little importance to her, its healing powers,
on a disappointed heart might be as reasonably tried
on herself as on her sister.
Colonel Brandon came in while the party were at tea,
and by his manner of looking round the room for Marianne,
Elinor immediately fancied that he neither expected
nor wished to see her there, and, in short, that he
was already aware of what occasioned her absence.
Mrs. Jennings was not struck by the same thought
for soon after his entrance, she walked across the room
to the teatable where Elinor presided, and whispered
"The Colonel looks as grave as ever you see. He knows
nothing of it do tell him, my dear."
He shortly afterwards drew a chair close to her's,
and, with a look which perfectly assured her of his
good information, inquired after her sister.
"Marianne is not well," said she. "She has been
indisposed all day, and we have persuaded her to go to bed."
"Perhaps, then," he hesitatingly replied, "what I
heard this morning may bethere may be more truth in it
than I could believe possible at first."
"What did you hear?"
"That a gentleman, whom I had reason to thinkin short,
that a man, whom I KNEW to be engagedbut how shall I
tell you? If you know it already, as surely you must,
I may be spared."
"You mean," answered Elinor, with forced calmness,
"Mr. Willoughby's marriage with Miss Grey. Yes, we DO
know it all. This seems to have been a day of general
elucidation, for this very morning first unfolded it to us.
Mr. Willoughby is unfathomable Where did you hear it?"
"In a stationer's shop in Pall Mall, where I
had business. Two ladies were waiting for their carriage,
and one of them was giving the other an account of the
intended match, in a voice so little attempting concealment,
that it was impossible for me not to hear all. The name
of Willoughby, John Willoughby, frequently repeated,
first caught my attention and what followed was a positive
assertion that every thing was now finally settled
respecting his marriage with Miss Greyit was no longer
to be a secretit would take place even within a few weeks,
with many particulars of preparations and other matters.
One thing, especially, I remember, because it served
to identify the man still moreas soon as the ceremony
was over, they were to go to Combe Magna, his seat
in Somersetshire. My astonishmentbut it would be
impossible to describe what I felt. The communicative
lady I learnt, on inquiry, for I stayed in the shop
till they were gone, was a Mrs. Ellison, and that, as I
have been since informed, is the name of Miss Grey's guardian."
"It is. But have you likewise heard that Miss Grey
has fifty thousand pounds? In that, if in any thing,
we may find an explanation."
"It may be so but Willoughby is capableat least
I think"he stopped a moment then added in a voice
which seemed to distrust itself, "And your sister
how did she"
"Her sufferings have been very severe. I have
only to hope that they may be proportionately short.
It has been, it is a most cruel affliction. Till yesterday,
I believe, she never doubted his regard and even now,
perhapsbut I am almost convinced that he never was
really attached to her. He has been very deceitful and,
in some points, there seems a hardness of heart about him."
"Ah" said Colonel Brandon, "there is, indeed But
your sister does notI think you said soshe does
not consider quite as you do?"
"You know her disposition, and may believe how eagerly
she would still justify him if she could."
He made no answer and soon afterwards, by the removal
of the teathings, and the arrangement of the card parties,
the subject was necessarily dropped. Mrs. Jennings, who had
watched them with pleasure while they were talking, and who
expected to see the effect of Miss Dashwood's communication,
in such an instantaneous gaiety on Colonel Brandon's side,
as might have become a man in the bloom of youth, of hope
and happiness, saw him, with amazement, remain the whole
evening more serious and thoughtful than usual.
CHAPTER 
From a night of more sleep than she had expected,
Marianne awoke the next morning to the same consciousness
of misery in which she had closed her eyes.
Elinor encouraged her as much as possible to talk
of what she felt and before breakfast was ready, they had
gone through the subject again and again and with the same
steady conviction and affectionate counsel on Elinor's side,
the same impetuous feelings and varying opinions on
Marianne's, as before. Sometimes she could believe
Willoughby to be as unfortunate and as innocent as herself,
and at others, lost every consolation in the impossibility
of acquitting him. At one moment she was absolutely
indifferent to the observation of all the world, at another
she would seclude herself from it for ever, and at a third
could resist it with energy. In one thing, however,
she was uniform, when it came to the point, in avoiding,
where it was possible, the presence of Mrs. Jennings,
and in a determined silence when obliged to endure it.
Her heart was hardened against the belief of Mrs. Jennings's
entering into her sorrows with any compassion.
"No, no, no, it cannot be," she cried
"she cannot feel. Her kindness is not sympathy
her goodnature is not tenderness. All that she wants
is gossip, and she only likes me now because I supply it."
Elinor had not needed this to be assured of the injustice
to which her sister was often led in her opinion of others,
by the irritable refinement of her own mind, and the too
great importance placed by her on the delicacies of a
strong sensibility, and the graces of a polished manner.
Like half the rest of the world, if more than half there
be that are clever and good, Marianne, with excellent
abilities and an excellent disposition, was neither
reasonable nor candid. She expected from other people
the same opinions and feelings as her own, and she judged
of their motives by the immediate effect of their actions
on herself. Thus a circumstance occurred, while the
sisters were together in their own room after breakfast,
which sunk the heart of Mrs. Jennings still lower
in her estimation because, through her own weakness,
it chanced to prove a source of fresh pain to herself,
though Mrs. Jennings was governed in it by an impulse
of the utmost goodwill.
With a letter in her outstretched hand, and countenance
gaily smiling, from the persuasion of bringing comfort,
she entered their room, saying,
"Now, my dear, I bring you something that I am sure
will do you good."
Marianne heard enough. In one moment her imagination
placed before her a letter from Willoughby, full of tenderness
and contrition, explanatory of all that had passed, satisfactory,
convincing and instantly followed by Willoughby himself,
rushing eagerly into the room to inforce, at her feet,
by the eloquence of his eyes, the assurances of his letter.
The work of one moment was destroyed by the next.
The hand writing of her mother, never till then unwelcome,
was before her and, in the acuteness of the disappointment
which followed such an ecstasy of more than hope,
she felt as if, till that instant, she had never suffered.
The cruelty of Mrs. Jennings no language, within
her reach in her moments of happiest eloquence,
could have expressed and now she could reproach her
only by the tears which streamed from her eyes with
passionate violencea reproach, however, so entirely
lost on its object, that after many expressions of pity,
she withdrew, still referring her to the letter of comfort.
But the letter, when she was calm enough to read it,
brought little comfort. Willoughby filled every page.
Her mother, still confident of their engagement, and relying
as warmly as ever on his constancy, had only been roused
by Elinor's application, to intreat from Marianne greater
openness towards them both and this, with such tenderness
towards her, such affection for Willoughby, and such
a conviction of their future happiness in each other,
that she wept with agony through the whole of it.
All her impatience to be at home again now returned
her mother was dearer to her than ever dearer through
the very excess of her mistaken confidence in Willoughby,
and she was wildly urgent to be gone. Elinor, unable herself
to determine whether it were better for Marianne to be
in London or at Barton, offered no counsel of her own
except of patience till their mother's wishes could be known
and at length she obtained her sister's consent to wait
for that knowledge.
Mrs. Jennings left them earlier than usual for she
could not be easy till the Middletons and Palmers were able
to grieve as much as herself and positively refusing
Elinor's offered attendance, went out alone for the rest
of the morning. Elinor, with a very heavy heart, aware of
the pain she was going to communicate, and perceiving,
by Marianne's letter, how ill she had succeeded in laying
any foundation for it, then sat down to write her mother
an account of what had passed, and entreat her directions
for the future while Marianne, who came into the drawingroom
on Mrs. Jennings's going away, remained fixed at the table
where Elinor wrote, watching the advancement of her pen,
grieving over her for the hardship of such a task,
and grieving still more fondly over its effect on her mother.
In this manner they had continued about a quarter
of an hour, when Marianne, whose nerves could not then
bear any sudden noise, was startled by a rap at the door.
"Who can this be?" cried Elinor. "So early too I
thought we HAD been safe."
Marianne moved to the window
"It is Colonel Brandon" said she, with vexation.
"We are never safe from HIM."
"He will not come in, as Mrs. Jennings is from home."
"I will not trust to THAT," retreating to her own room.
"A man who has nothing to do with his own time has no
conscience in his intrusion on that of others."
The event proved her conjecture right, though it
was founded on injustice and error for Colonel Brandon
DID come in and Elinor, who was convinced that
solicitude for Marianne brought him thither, and who saw
THAT solicitude in his disturbed and melancholy look,
and in his anxious though brief inquiry after her,
could not forgive her sister for esteeming him so lightly.
"I met Mrs. Jennings in Bond Street," said he,
after the first salutation, "and she encouraged me
to come on and I was the more easily encouraged,
because I thought it probable that I might find you alone,
which I was very desirous of doing. My objectmy
wishmy sole wish in desiring itI hope, I believe
it isis to be a means of giving comfortno, I must
not say comfortnot present comfortbut conviction,
lasting conviction to your sister's mind. My regard for her,
for yourself, for your motherwill you allow me to prove it,
by relating some circumstances which nothing but a VERY
sincere regardnothing but an earnest desire of being
usefulI think I am justifiedthough where so many hours
have been spent in convincing myself that I am right,
is there not some reason to fear I may be wrong?"
He stopped.
"I understand you," said Elinor. "You have something
to tell me of Mr. Willoughby, that will open his character
farther. Your telling it will be the greatest act of friendship
that can be shewn Marianne. MY gratitude will be insured
immediately by any information tending to that end, and HERS
must be gained by it in time. Pray, pray let me hear it."
"You shall and, to be brief, when I quitted Barton
last October,but this will give you no ideaI must go
farther back. You will find me a very awkward narrator,
Miss Dashwood I hardly know where to begin. A short
account of myself, I believe, will be necessary, and it
SHALL be a short one. On such a subject," sighing heavily,
"can I have little temptation to be diffuse."
He stopt a moment for recollection, and then,
with another sigh, went on.
"You have probably entirely forgotten a conversation
it is not to be supposed that it could make any impression
on youa conversation between us one evening at Barton
Parkit was the evening of a dancein which I alluded
to a lady I had once known, as resembling, in some measure,
your sister Marianne."
"Indeed," answered Elinor, "I have NOT forgotten it."
He looked pleased by this remembrance, and added,
"If I am not deceived by the uncertainty, the partiality
of tender recollection, there is a very strong resemblance
between them, as well in mind as person. The same warmth
of heart, the same eagerness of fancy and spirits.
This lady was one of my nearest relations, an orphan from
her infancy, and under the guardianship of my father.
Our ages were nearly the same, and from our earliest years
we were playfellows and friends. I cannot remember the
time when I did not love Eliza and my affection for her,
as we grew up, was such, as perhaps, judging from my
present forlorn and cheerless gravity, you might think me
incapable of having ever felt. Her's, for me, was, I believe,
fervent as the attachment of your sister to Mr. Willoughby
and it was, though from a different cause, no less unfortunate.
At seventeen she was lost to me for ever. She was
marriedmarried against her inclination to my brother.
Her fortune was large, and our family estate much encumbered.
And this, I fear, is all that can be said for the
conduct of one, who was at once her uncle and guardian.
My brother did not deserve her he did not even love her.
I had hoped that her regard for me would support her
under any difficulty, and for some time it did but at
last the misery of her situation, for she experienced
great unkindness, overcame all her resolution, and though
she had promised me that nothingbut how blindly I
relate I have never told you how this was brought on.
We were within a few hours of eloping together for Scotland.
The treachery, or the folly, of my cousin's maid betrayed us.
I was banished to the house of a relation far distant,
and she was allowed no liberty, no society, no amusement,
till my father's point was gained. I had depended on her
fortitude too far, and the blow was a severe one
but had her marriage been happy, so young as I then was,
a few months must have reconciled me to it, or at least
I should not have now to lament it. This however
was not the case. My brother had no regard for her
his pleasures were not what they ought to have been,
and from the first he treated her unkindly. The consequence
of this, upon a mind so young, so lively, so inexperienced
as Mrs. Brandon's, was but too natural. She resigned
herself at first to all the misery of her situation
and happy had it been if she had not lived to overcome those
regrets which the remembrance of me occasioned. But can we
wonder that, with such a husband to provoke inconstancy,
and without a friend to advise or restrain her for
my father lived only a few months after their marriage,
and I was with my regiment in the East Indies she
should fall? Had I remained in England, perhapsbut I
meant to promote the happiness of both by removing
from her for years, and for that purpose had procured
my exchange. The shock which her marriage had given me,"
he continued, in a voice of great agitation, "was of
trifling weightwas nothing to what I felt when I heard,
about two years afterwards, of her divorce. It was
THAT which threw this gloom,even now the recollection
of what I suffered"
He could say no more, and rising hastily walked for a few
minutes about the room. Elinor, affected by his relation,
and still more by his distress, could not speak. He saw
her concern, and coming to her, took her hand, pressed it,
and kissed it with grateful respect. A few minutes more
of silent exertion enabled him to proceed with composure.
"It was nearly three years after this unhappy
period before I returned to England. My first care,
when I DID arrive, was of course to seek for her
but the search was as fruitless as it was melancholy.
I could not trace her beyond her first seducer, and there
was every reason to fear that she had removed from him
only to sink deeper in a life of sin. Her legal allowance
was not adequate to her fortune, nor sufficient for her
comfortable maintenance, and I learnt from my brother that
the power of receiving it had been made over some months
before to another person. He imagined, and calmly could he
imagine it, that her extravagance, and consequent distress,
had obliged her to dispose of it for some immediate relief.
At last, however, and after I had been six months in England,
I DID find her. Regard for a former servant of my own,
who had since fallen into misfortune, carried me to visit
him in a spunginghouse, where he was confined for debt
and there, the same house, under a similar confinement,
was my unfortunate sister. So alteredso fadedworn
down by acute suffering of every kind hardly could I
believe the melancholy and sickly figure before me,
to be the remains of the lovely, blooming, healthful girl,
on whom I had once doted. What I endured in so beholding
herbut I have no right to wound your feelings by attempting
to describe itI have pained you too much already.
That she was, to all appearance, in the last stage
of a consumption, wasyes, in such a situation it was
my greatest comfort. Life could do nothing for her,
beyond giving time for a better preparation for death
and that was given. I saw her placed in comfortable lodgings,
and under proper attendants I visited her every day
during the rest of her short life I was with her in her
last moments."
Again he stopped to recover himself and Elinor
spoke her feelings in an exclamation of tender concern,
at the fate of his unfortunate friend.
"Your sister, I hope, cannot be offended," said he,
"by the resemblance I have fancied between her and my
poor disgraced relation. Their fates, their fortunes,
cannot be the same and had the natural sweet
disposition of the one been guarded by a firmer mind,
or a happier marriage, she might have been all that you
will live to see the other be. But to what does all this
lead? I seem to have been distressing you for nothing.
Ah Miss Dashwooda subject such as thisuntouched
for fourteen yearsit is dangerous to handle it at all
I WILL be more collectedmore concise. She left to my care
her only child, a little girl, the offspring of her first
guilty connection, who was then about three years old.
She loved the child, and had always kept it with her.
It was a valued, a precious trust to me and gladly
would I have discharged it in the strictest sense,
by watching over her education myself, had the nature
of our situations allowed it but I had no family, no home
and my little Eliza was therefore placed at school.
I saw her there whenever I could, and after the death of my
brother, which happened about five years ago, and which
left to me the possession of the family property, she
visited me at Delaford. I called her a distant relation
but I am well aware that I have in general been suspected
of a much nearer connection with her. It is now three
years ago she had just reached her fourteenth year,
that I removed her from school, to place her under the care
of a very respectable woman, residing in Dorsetshire,
who had the charge of four or five other girls of about
the same time of life and for two years I had every reason
to be pleased with her situation. But last February,
almost a twelvemonth back, she suddenly disappeared.
I had allowed her, imprudently, as it has since turned
out, at her earnest desire, to go to Bath with one of
her young friends, who was attending her father there
for his health. I knew him to be a very good sort of man,
and I thought well of his daughterbetter than she deserved,
for, with a most obstinate and illjudged secrecy,
she would tell nothing, would give no clue, though she
certainly knew all. He, her father, a wellmeaning,
but not a quicksighted man, could really, I believe,
give no information for he had been generally confined
to the house, while the girls were ranging over the town
and making what acquaintance they chose and he tried
to convince me, as thoroughly as he was convinced himself,
of his daughter's being entirely unconcerned in the business.
In short, I could learn nothing but that she was gone
all the rest, for eight long months, was left to conjecture.
What I thought, what I feared, may be imagined and what I
suffered too."
"Good heavens" cried Elinor, "could it becould
Willoughby"
"The first news that reached me of her," he continued,
"came in a letter from herself, last October.
It was forwarded to me from Delaford, and I received it
on the very morning of our intended party to Whitwell
and this was the reason of my leaving Barton so suddenly,
which I am sure must at the time have appeared strange
to every body, and which I believe gave offence to some.
Little did Mr. Willoughby imagine, I suppose, when his
looks censured me for incivility in breaking up the party,
that I was called away to the relief of one whom he
had made poor and miserable but HAD he known it,
what would it have availed? Would he have been less
gay or less happy in the smiles of your sister? No,
he had already done that, which no man who CAN feel
for another would do. He had left the girl whose
youth and innocence he had seduced, in a situation of
the utmost distress, with no creditable home, no help,
no friends, ignorant of his address He had left her,
promising to return he neither returned, nor wrote,
nor relieved her."
"This is beyond every thing" exclaimed Elinor.
"His character is now before you expensive, dissipated,
and worse than both. Knowing all this, as I have now
known it many weeks, guess what I must have felt on seeing
your sister as fond of him as ever, and on being assured
that she was to marry him guess what I must have felt
for all your sakes. When I came to you last week and
found you alone, I came determined to know the truth
though irresolute what to do when it WAS known.
My behaviour must have seemed strange to you then
but now you will comprehend it. To suffer you all to be
so deceived to see your sisterbut what could I do?
I had no hope of interfering with success and sometimes
I thought your sister's influence might yet reclaim him.
But now, after such dishonorable usage, who can tell what
were his designs on her. Whatever they may have been,
however, she may now, and hereafter doubtless WILL
turn with gratitude towards her own condition, when she
compares it with that of my poor Eliza, when she considers
the wretched and hopeless situation of this poor girl,
and pictures her to herself, with an affection for him so strong,
still as strong as her own, and with a mind tormented
by selfreproach, which must attend her through life.
Surely this comparison must have its use with her.
She will feel her own sufferings to be nothing. They
proceed from no misconduct, and can bring no disgrace.
On the contrary, every friend must be made still more
her friend by them. Concern for her unhappiness,
and respect for her fortitude under it, must strengthen
every attachment. Use your own discretion, however,
in communicating to her what I have told you. You must
know best what will be its effect but had I not seriously,
and from my heart believed it might be of service,
might lessen her regrets, I would not have suffered
myself to trouble you with this account of my family
afflictions, with a recital which may seem to have been
intended to raise myself at the expense of others."
Elinor's thanks followed this speech with grateful
earnestness attended too with the assurance of her
expecting material advantage to Marianne, from the
communication of what had passed.
"I have been more pained," said she, "by her
endeavors to acquit him than by all the rest for it
irritates her mind more than the most perfect conviction
of his unworthiness can do. Now, though at first she
will suffer much, I am sure she will soon become easier.
Have you," she continued, after a short silence,
"ever seen Mr. Willoughby since you left him at Barton?"
"Yes," he replied gravely, "once I have. One meeting
was unavoidable."
Elinor, startled by his manner, looked at him anxiously,
saying,
"What? have you met him to"
"I could meet him no other way. Eliza had confessed
to me, though most reluctantly, the name of her lover
and when he returned to town, which was within a fortnight
after myself, we met by appointment, he to defend,
I to punish his conduct. We returned unwounded,
and the meeting, therefore, never got abroad."
Elinor sighed over the fancied necessity of this
but to a man and a soldier she presumed not to censure it.
"Such," said Colonel Brandon, after a pause,
"has been the unhappy resemblance between the fate of mother
and daughter and so imperfectly have I discharged my trust"
"Is she still in town?"
"No as soon as she recovered from her lyingin,
for I found her near her delivery, I removed her and her
child into the country, and there she remains."
Recollecting, soon afterwards, that he was probably
dividing Elinor from her sister, he put an end to his visit,
receiving from her again the same grateful acknowledgments,
and leaving her full of compassion and esteem for him.
CHAPTER 
When the particulars of this conversation were repeated
by Miss Dashwood to her sister, as they very soon were,
the effect on her was not entirely such as the former
had hoped to see. Not that Marianne appeared to distrust
the truth of any part of it, for she listened to it all
with the most steady and submissive attention, made neither
objection nor remark, attempted no vindication of Willoughby,
and seemed to shew by her tears that she felt it to
be impossible. But though this behaviour assured Elinor
that the conviction of this guilt WAS carried home to
her mind, though she saw with satisfaction the effect of it,
in her no longer avoiding Colonel Brandon when he called,
in her speaking to him, even voluntarily speaking,
with a kind of compassionate respect, and though she
saw her spirits less violently irritated than before,
she did not see her less wretched. Her mind did become
settled, but it was settled in a gloomy dejection.
She felt the loss of Willoughby's character yet more heavily
than she had felt the loss of his heart his seduction and
desertion of Miss Williams, the misery of that poor girl,
and the doubt of what his designs might ONCE have been
on herself, preyed altogether so much on her spirits,
that she could not bring herself to speak of what she felt
even to Elinor and, brooding over her sorrows in silence,
gave more pain to her sister than could have been communicated
by the most open and most frequent confession of them.
To give the feelings or the language of Mrs. Dashwood
on receiving and answering Elinor's letter would be only
to give a repetition of what her daughters had already felt
and said of a disappointment hardly less painful than
Marianne's, and an indignation even greater than Elinor's.
Long letters from her, quickly succeeding each other,
arrived to tell all that she suffered and thought
to express her anxious solicitude for Marianne, and entreat
she would bear up with fortitude under this misfortune.
Bad indeed must the nature of Marianne's affliction be,
when her mother could talk of fortitude mortifying
and humiliating must be the origin of those regrets,
which SHE could wish her not to indulge
Against the interest of her own individual comfort,
Mrs. Dashwood had determined that it would be better for
Marianne to be any where, at that time, than at Barton,
where every thing within her view would be bringing back
the past in the strongest and most afflicting manner,
by constantly placing Willoughby before her, such as
she had always seen him there. She recommended it to
her daughters, therefore, by all means not to shorten their
visit to Mrs. Jennings the length of which, though never
exactly fixed, had been expected by all to comprise at least
five or six weeks. A variety of occupations, of objects,
and of company, which could not be procured at Barton,
would be inevitable there, and might yet, she hoped,
cheat Marianne, at times, into some interest beyond herself,
and even into some amusement, much as the ideas of both
might now be spurned by her.
From all danger of seeing Willoughby again,
her mother considered her to be at least equally safe
in town as in the country, since his acquaintance must
now be dropped by all who called themselves her friends.
Design could never bring them in each other's way
negligence could never leave them exposed to a surprise
and chance had less in its favour in the crowd of London
than even in the retirement of Barton, where it might
force him before her while paying that visit at Allenham
on his marriage, which Mrs. Dashwood, from foreseeing at
first as a probable event, had brought herself to expect
as a certain one.
She had yet another reason for wishing her children
to remain where they were a letter from her soninlaw
had told her that he and his wife were to be in town
before the middle of February, and she judged it right
that they should sometimes see their brother.
Marianne had promised to be guided by her mother's opinion,
and she submitted to it therefore without opposition,
though it proved perfectly different from what she wished
and expected, though she felt it to be entirely wrong,
formed on mistaken grounds, and that by requiring her
longer continuance in London it deprived her of the only
possible alleviation of her wretchedness, the personal
sympathy of her mother, and doomed her to such society and
such scenes as must prevent her ever knowing a moment's rest.
But it was a matter of great consolation to her,
that what brought evil to herself would bring good to
her sister and Elinor, on the other hand, suspecting that
it would not be in her power to avoid Edward entirely,
comforted herself by thinking, that though their longer
stay would therefore militate against her own happiness,
it would be better for Marianne than an immediate return
into Devonshire.
Her carefulness in guarding her sister from ever
hearing Willoughby's name mentioned, was not thrown away.
Marianne, though without knowing it herself, reaped all
its advantage for neither Mrs. Jennings, nor Sir John,
nor even Mrs. Palmer herself, ever spoke of him before her.
Elinor wished that the same forbearance could have extended
towards herself, but that was impossible, and she was
obliged to listen day after day to the indignation of them all.
Sir John, could not have thought it possible.
"A man of whom he had always had such reason to think well
Such a goodnatured fellow He did not believe there was a
bolder rider in England It was an unaccountable business.
He wished him at the devil with all his heart. He would
not speak another word to him, meet him where he might,
for all the world No, not if it were to be by the side
of Barton covert, and they were kept watching for two
hours together. Such a scoundrel of a fellow such
a deceitful dog It was only the last time they met
that he had offered him one of Folly's puppies and this
was the end of it"
Mrs. Palmer, in her way, was equally angry.
"She was determined to drop his acquaintance immediately,
and she was very thankful that she had never been acquainted
with him at all. She wished with all her heart Combe
Magna was not so near Cleveland but it did not signify,
for it was a great deal too far off to visit she hated
him so much that she was resolved never to mention
his name again, and she should tell everybody she saw,
how goodfornothing he was."
The rest of Mrs. Palmer's sympathy was shewn in procuring
all the particulars in her power of the approaching marriage,
and communicating them to Elinor. She could soon tell
at what coachmaker's the new carriage was building,
by what painter Mr. Willoughby's portrait was drawn,
and at what warehouse Miss Grey's clothes might be seen.
The calm and polite unconcern of Lady Middleton
on the occasion was a happy relief to Elinor's spirits,
oppressed as they often were by the clamorous kindness
of the others. It was a great comfort to her to be sure
of exciting no interest in ONE person at least among their
circle of friends a great comfort to know that there
was ONE who would meet her without feeling any curiosity
after particulars, or any anxiety for her sister's health.
Every qualification is raised at times, by the
circumstances of the moment, to more than its real value
and she was sometimes worried down by officious condolence
to rate goodbreeding as more indispensable to comfort
than goodnature.
Lady Middleton expressed her sense of the affair
about once every day, or twice, if the subject occurred
very often, by saying, "It is very shocking, indeed"
and by the means of this continual though gentle vent,
was able not only to see the Miss Dashwoods from the
first without the smallest emotion, but very soon
to see them without recollecting a word of the matter
and having thus supported the dignity of her own sex,
and spoken her decided censure of what was wrong
in the other, she thought herself at liberty to attend
to the interest of her own assemblies, and therefore
determined though rather against the opinion of Sir John
that as Mrs. Willoughby would at once be a woman of elegance
and fortune, to leave her card with her as soon as she married.
Colonel Brandon's delicate, unobtrusive enquiries
were never unwelcome to Miss Dashwood. He had abundantly
earned the privilege of intimate discussion of her
sister's disappointment, by the friendly zeal with
which he had endeavoured to soften it, and they always
conversed with confidence. His chief reward for the
painful exertion of disclosing past sorrows and present
humiliations, was given in the pitying eye with which
Marianne sometimes observed him, and the gentleness
of her voice whenever though it did not often happen
she was obliged, or could oblige herself to speak to him.
THESE assured him that his exertion had produced an
increase of goodwill towards himself, and THESE gave
Elinor hopes of its being farther augmented hereafter
but Mrs. Jennings, who knew nothing of all this, who knew
only that the Colonel continued as grave as ever, and that
she could neither prevail on him to make the offer himself,
nor commission her to make it for him, began, at the
end of two days, to think that, instead of Midsummer,
they would not be married till Michaelmas, and by the
end of a week that it would not be a match at all.
The good understanding between the Colonel and Miss
Dashwood seemed rather to declare that the honours
of the mulberrytree, the canal, and the yew arbour,
would all be made over to HER and Mrs. Jennings had,
for some time ceased to think at all of Mrs. Ferrars.
Early in February, within a fortnight from the
receipt of Willoughby's letter, Elinor had the painful
office of informing her sister that he was married.
She had taken care to have the intelligence conveyed
to herself, as soon as it was known that the ceremony
was over, as she was desirous that Marianne should not
receive the first notice of it from the public papers,
which she saw her eagerly examining every morning.
She received the news with resolute composure
made no observation on it, and at first shed no tears
but after a short time they would burst out, and for the
rest of the day, she was in a state hardly less pitiable
than when she first learnt to expect the event.
The Willoughbys left town as soon as they were married
and Elinor now hoped, as there could be no danger
of her seeing either of them, to prevail on her sister,
who had never yet left the house since the blow first fell,
to go out again by degrees as she had done before.
About this time the two Miss Steeles, lately arrived
at their cousin's house in Bartlett's Buildings,
Holburn, presented themselves again before their more
grand relations in Conduit and Berkeley Streets
and were welcomed by them all with great cordiality.
Elinor only was sorry to see them. Their presence
always gave her pain, and she hardly knew how to make
a very gracious return to the overpowering delight of Lucy
in finding her STILL in town.
"I should have been quite disappointed if I had not
found you here STILL," said she repeatedly, with a strong
emphasis on the word. "But I always thought I SHOULD.
I was almost sure you would not leave London yet awhile
though you TOLD me, you know, at Barton, that you should
not stay above a MONTH. But I thought, at the time,
that you would most likely change your mind when it came
to the point. It would have been such a great pity
to have went away before your brother and sister came.
And now to be sure you will be in no hurry to be gone.
I am amazingly glad you did not keep to YOUR WORD."
Elinor perfectly understood her, and was forced
to use all her selfcommand to make it appear that she
did NOT.
"Well, my dear," said Mrs. Jennings, "and how did
you travel?"
"Not in the stage, I assure you," replied Miss Steele,
with quick exultation "we came post all the way, and had
a very smart beau to attend us. Dr. Davies was coming
to town, and so we thought we'd join him in a postchaise
and he behaved very genteelly, and paid ten or twelve
shillings more than we did."
"Oh, oh" cried Mrs. Jennings "very pretty,
indeed and the Doctor is a single man, I warrant you."
"There now," said Miss Steele, affectedly simpering,
"everybody laughs at me so about the Doctor, and I
cannot think why. My cousins say they are sure I have
made a conquest but for my part I declare I never think
about him from one hour's end to another. 'Lord here
comes your beau, Nancy,' my cousin said t'other day,
when she saw him crossing the street to the house.
My beau, indeed said II cannot think who you mean.
The Doctor is no beau of mine."
"Aye, aye, that is very pretty talkingbut it won't do
the Doctor is the man, I see."
"No, indeed" replied her cousin, with affected earnestness,
"and I beg you will contradict it, if you ever hear it talked
of."
Mrs. Jennings directly gave her the gratifying
assurance that she certainly would NOT, and Miss Steele
was made completely happy.
"I suppose you will go and stay with your brother
and sister, Miss Dashwood, when they come to town,"
said Lucy, returning, after a cessation of hostile hints,
to the charge.
"No, I do not think we shall."
"Oh, yes, I dare say you will."
Elinor would not humour her by farther opposition.
"What a charming thing it is that Mrs. Dashwood can
spare you both for so long a time together"
"Long a time, indeed" interposed Mrs. Jennings.
"Why, their visit is but just begun"
Lucy was silenced.
"I am sorry we cannot see your sister, Miss Dashwood,"
said Miss Steele. "I am sorry she is not well"
for Marianne had left the room on their arrival.
"You are very good. My sister will be equally
sorry to miss the pleasure of seeing you but she has
been very much plagued lately with nervous headaches,
which make her unfit for company or conversation."
"Oh, dear, that is a great pity but such old
friends as Lucy and meI think she might see US
and I am sure we would not speak a word."
Elinor, with great civility, declined the proposal.
Her sister was perhaps laid down upon the bed, or in her
dressing gown, and therefore not able to come to them.
"Oh, if that's all," cried Miss Steele, "we can
just as well go and see HER."
Elinor began to find this impertinence too much for
her temper but she was saved the trouble of checking it,
by Lucy's sharp reprimand, which now, as on many occasions,
though it did not give much sweetness to the manners
of one sister, was of advantage in governing those of
the other.
CHAPTER 
After some opposition, Marianne yielded to her
sister's entreaties, and consented to go out with her
and Mrs. Jennings one morning for half an hour. She
expressly conditioned, however, for paying no visits,
and would do no more than accompany them to Gray's in
Sackville Street, where Elinor was carrying on a negotiation
for the exchange of a few oldfashioned jewels of her mother.
When they stopped at the door, Mrs. Jennings recollected
that there was a lady at the other end of the street
on whom she ought to call and as she had no business
at Gray's, it was resolved, that while her young friends
transacted their's, she should pay her visit and
return for them.
On ascending the stairs, the Miss Dashwoods found
so many people before them in the room, that there was
not a person at liberty to tend to their orders and they
were obliged to wait. All that could be done was, to sit
down at that end of the counter which seemed to promise the
quickest succession one gentleman only was standing there,
and it is probable that Elinor was not without hope
of exciting his politeness to a quicker despatch.
But the correctness of his eye, and the delicacy
of his taste, proved to be beyond his politeness.
He was giving orders for a toothpickcase for himself,
and till its size, shape, and ornaments were determined,
all of which, after examining and debating for a quarter
of an hour over every toothpickcase in the shop,
were finally arranged by his own inventive fancy, he had
no leisure to bestow any other attention on the two ladies,
than what was comprised in three or four very broad stares
a kind of notice which served to imprint on Elinor
the remembrance of a person and face, of strong,
natural, sterling insignificance, though adorned in
the first style of fashion.
Marianne was spared from the troublesome feelings
of contempt and resentment, on this impertinent examination
of their features, and on the puppyism of his manner
in deciding on all the different horrors of the different
toothpickcases presented to his inspection, by remaining
unconscious of it all for she was as well able to collect
her thoughts within herself, and be as ignorant of what was
passing around her, in Mr. Gray's shop, as in her own bedroom.
At last the affair was decided. The ivory,
the gold, and the pearls, all received their appointment,
and the gentleman having named the last day on which his
existence could be continued without the possession of the
toothpickcase, drew on his gloves with leisurely care,
and bestowing another glance on the Miss Dashwoods, but such
a one as seemed rather to demand than express admiration,
walked off with a happy air of real conceit and affected
indifference.
Elinor lost no time in bringing her business forward,
was on the point of concluding it, when another gentleman
presented himself at her side. She turned her eyes towards
his face, and found him with some surprise to be her brother.
Their affection and pleasure in meeting was just enough
to make a very creditable appearance in Mr. Gray's shop.
John Dashwood was really far from being sorry to see
his sisters again it rather gave them satisfaction
and his inquiries after their mother were respectful
and attentive.
Elinor found that he and Fanny had been in town
two days.
"I wished very much to call upon you yesterday,"
said he, "but it was impossible, for we were obliged
to take Harry to see the wild beasts at Exeter Exchange
and we spent the rest of the day with Mrs. Ferrars.
Harry was vastly pleased. THIS morning I had fully intended
to call on you, if I could possibly find a spare half hour,
but one has always so much to do on first coming to town.
I am come here to bespeak Fanny a seal. But tomorrow I
think I shall certainly be able to call in Berkeley Street,
and be introduced to your friend Mrs. Jennings.
I understand she is a woman of very good fortune.
And the Middletons too, you must introduce me to THEM.
As my motherinlaw's relations, I shall be happy to show
them every respect. They are excellent neighbours to you in
the country, I understand."
"Excellent indeed. Their attention to our comfort,
their friendliness in every particular, is more than I
can express."
"I am extremely glad to hear it, upon my word
extremely glad indeed. But so it ought to be they are
people of large fortune, they are related to you, and
every civility and accommodation that can serve to make
your situation pleasant might be reasonably expected.
And so you are most comfortably settled in your little cottage
and want for nothing Edward brought us a most charming
account of the place the most complete thing of its kind,
he said, that ever was, and you all seemed to enjoy it beyond
any thing. It was a great satisfaction to us to hear it,
I assure you."
Elinor did feel a little ashamed of her brother
and was not sorry to be spared the necessity of answering him,
by the arrival of Mrs. Jennings's servant, who came to tell
her that his mistress waited for them at the door.
Mr. Dashwood attended them down stairs, was introduced
to Mrs. Jennings at the door of her carriage, and repeating
his hope of being able to call on them the next day,
took leave.
His visit was duly paid. He came with a pretence at
an apology from their sisterinlaw, for not coming too
"but she was so much engaged with her mother, that really
she had no leisure for going any where." Mrs. Jennings,
however, assured him directly, that she should not stand
upon ceremony, for they were all cousins, or something
like it, and she should certainly wait on Mrs. John
Dashwood very soon, and bring her sisters to see her.
His manners to THEM, though calm, were perfectly kind
to Mrs. Jennings, most attentively civil and on Colonel
Brandon's coming in soon after himself, he eyed him with a
curiosity which seemed to say, that he only wanted to know
him to be rich, to be equally civil to HIM.
After staying with them half an hour, he asked
Elinor to walk with him to Conduit Street, and introduce
him to Sir John and Lady Middleton. The weather was
remarkably fine, and she readily consented. As soon
as they were out of the house, his enquiries began.
"Who is Colonel Brandon? Is he a man of fortune?"
"Yes he has very good property in Dorsetshire."
"I am glad of it. He seems a most gentlemanlike man
and I think, Elinor, I may congratulate you on the prospect
of a very respectable establishment in life."
"Me, brother what do you mean?"
"He likes you. I observed him narrowly, and am
convinced of it. What is the amount of his fortune?"
"I believe about two thousand a year."
"Two thousand ayear" and then working himself
up to a pitch of enthusiastic generosity, he added,
"Elinor, I wish with all my heart it were TWICE as much,
for your sake."
"Indeed I believe you," replied Elinor "but I am
very sure that Colonel Brandon has not the smallest wish
of marrying ME."
"You are mistaken, Elinor you are very much mistaken.
A very little trouble on your side secures him.
Perhaps just at present he may be undecided the smallness
of your fortune may make him hang back his friends
may all advise him against it. But some of those little
attentions and encouragements which ladies can so easily
give will fix him, in spite of himself. And there can be
no reason why you should not try for him. It is not to be
supposed that any prior attachment on your sidein short,
you know as to an attachment of that kind, it is quite
out of the question, the objections are insurmountable
you have too much sense not to see all that. Colonel Brandon
must be the man and no civility shall be wanting on
my part to make him pleased with you and your family.
It is a match that must give universal satisfaction.
In short, it is a kind of thing that"lowering his voice
to an important whisper"will be exceedingly welcome
to ALL PARTIES." Recollecting himself, however, he added,
"That is, I mean to sayyour friends are all truly
anxious to see you well settled Fanny particularly,
for she has your interest very much at heart, I assure you.
And her mother too, Mrs. Ferrars, a very goodnatured woman,
I am sure it would give her great pleasure she said as much
the other day."
Elinor would not vouchsafe any answer.
"It would be something remarkable, now," he continued,
"something droll, if Fanny should have a brother and I
a sister settling at the same time. And yet it is not
very unlikely."
"Is Mr. Edward Ferrars," said Elinor, with resolution,
"going to be married?"
"It is not actually settled, but there is such
a thing in agitation. He has a most excellent mother.
Mrs. Ferrars, with the utmost liberality, will come forward,
and settle on him a thousand a year, if the match
takes place. The lady is the Hon. Miss Morton, only daughter
of the late Lord Morton, with thirty thousand pounds.
A very desirable connection on both sides, and I have not
a doubt of its taking place in time. A thousand ayear
is a great deal for a mother to give away, to make over
for ever but Mrs. Ferrars has a noble spirit. To give
you another instance of her liberalityThe other day,
as soon as we came to town, aware that money could
not be very plenty with us just now, she put banknotes
into Fanny's hands to the amount of two hundred pounds.
And extremely acceptable it is, for we must live at a great
expense while we are here."
He paused for her assent and compassion and she
forced herself to say,
"Your expenses both in town and country must certainly
be considerable but your income is a large one."
"Not so large, I dare say, as many people suppose.
I do not mean to complain, however it is undoubtedly
a comfortable one, and I hope will in time be better.
The enclosure of Norland Common, now carrying on,
is a most serious drain. And then I have made a little
purchase within this half year East Kingham Farm,
you must remember the place, where old Gibson used to live.
The land was so very desirable for me in every respect,
so immediately adjoining my own property, that I felt it
my duty to buy it. I could not have answered it to my
conscience to let it fall into any other hands. A man must
pay for his convenience and it HAS cost me a vast deal
of money."
"More than you think it really and intrinsically worth."
"Why, I hope not that. I might have sold it again,
the next day, for more than I gave but, with regard to the
purchasemoney, I might have been very unfortunate indeed
for the stocks were at that time so low, that if I had not
happened to have the necessary sum in my banker's hands,
I must have sold out to very great loss."
Elinor could only smile.
"Other great and inevitable expenses too we have
had on first coming to Norland. Our respected father,
as you well know, bequeathed all the Stanhill effects
that remained at Norland and very valuable they were
to your mother. Far be it from me to repine at his
doing so he had an undoubted right to dispose of his
own property as he chose, but, in consequence of it,
we have been obliged to make large purchases of linen,
china, c. to supply the place of what was taken away.
You may guess, after all these expenses, how very far we
must be from being rich, and how acceptable Mrs. Ferrars's
kindness is."
"Certainly," said Elinor "and assisted by her liberality,
I hope you may yet live to be in easy circumstances."
"Another year or two may do much towards it,"
he gravely replied "but however there is still a great
deal to be done. There is not a stone laid of Fanny's
greenhouse, and nothing but the plan of the flowergarden
marked out."
"Where is the greenhouse to be?"
"Upon the knoll behind the house. The old
walnut trees are all come down to make room for it.
It will be a very fine object from many parts of the park,
and the flowergarden will slope down just before it,
and be exceedingly pretty. We have cleared away all the old
thorns that grew in patches over the brow."
Elinor kept her concern and her censure to herself
and was very thankful that Marianne was not present,
to share the provocation.
Having now said enough to make his poverty clear,
and to do away the necessity of buying a pair of earrings
for each of his sisters, in his next visit at Gray's
his thoughts took a cheerfuller turn, and he began to
congratulate Elinor on having such a friend as Mrs. Jennings.
"She seems a most valuable woman indeedHer house,
her style of living, all bespeak an exceeding good income
and it is an acquaintance that has not only been
of great use to you hitherto, but in the end may prove
materially advantageous.Her inviting you to town is
certainly a vast thing in your favour and indeed, it
speaks altogether so great a regard for you, that in all
probability when she dies you will not be forgotten.
She must have a great deal to leave."
"Nothing at all, I should rather suppose for she has
only her jointure, which will descend to her children."
"But it is not to be imagined that she lives up to
her income. Few people of common prudence will do THAT
and whatever she saves, she will be able to dispose of."
"And do you not think it more likely that she
should leave it to her daughters, than to us?"
"Her daughters are both exceedingly well married,
and therefore I cannot perceive the necessity of her
remembering them farther. Whereas, in my opinion, by her
taking so much notice of you, and treating you in this
kind of way, she has given you a sort of claim on her
future consideration, which a conscientious woman would
not disregard. Nothing can be kinder than her behaviour
and she can hardly do all this, without being aware
of the expectation it raises."
"But she raises none in those most concerned.
Indeed, brother, your anxiety for our welfare and prosperity
carries you too far."
"Why, to be sure," said he, seeming to recollect himself,
"people have little, have very little in their power.
But, my dear Elinor, what is the matter with Marianne?
she looks very unwell, has lost her colour, and is grown
quite thin. Is she ill?"
"She is not well, she has had a nervous complaint
on her for several weeks."
"I am sorry for that. At her time of life,
any thing of an illness destroys the bloom for ever
Her's has been a very short one She was as handsome a girl
last September, as I ever saw and as likely to attract
the man. There was something in her style of beauty,
to please them particularly. I remember Fanny used to say
that she would marry sooner and better than you did
not but what she is exceedingly fond of YOU, but so it
happened to strike her. She will be mistaken, however.
I question whether Marianne NOW, will marry a man worth
more than five or six hundred ayear, at the utmost,
and I am very much deceived if YOU do not do better.
Dorsetshire I know very little of Dorsetshire but, my dear
Elinor, I shall be exceedingly glad to know more of it
and I think I can answer for your having Fanny and myself
among the earliest and best pleased of your visitors."
Elinor tried very seriously to convince him that
there was no likelihood of her marrying Colonel Brandon
but it was an expectation of too much pleasure to himself
to be relinquished, and he was really resolved on seeking
an intimacy with that gentleman, and promoting the marriage
by every possible attention. He had just compunction
enough for having done nothing for his sisters himself,
to be exceedingly anxious that everybody else should
do a great deal and an offer from Colonel Brandon,
or a legacy from Mrs. Jennings, was the easiest means
of atoning for his own neglect.
They were lucky enough to find Lady Middleton
at home, and Sir John came in before their visit ended.
Abundance of civilities passed on all sides. Sir John
was ready to like anybody, and though Mr. Dashwood did
not seem to know much about horses, he soon set him
down as a very goodnatured fellow while Lady Middleton
saw enough of fashion in his appearance to think his
acquaintance worth having and Mr. Dashwood went away
delighted with both.
"I shall have a charming account to carry
to Fanny," said he, as he walked back with his sister.
"Lady Middleton is really a most elegant woman Such
a woman as I am sure Fanny will be glad to know.
And Mrs. Jennings too, an exceedingly wellbehaved woman,
though not so elegant as her daughter. Your sister need
not have any scruple even of visiting HER, which, to say
the truth, has been a little the case, and very naturally
for we only knew that Mrs. Jennings was the widow of a man
who had got all his money in a low way and Fanny and
Mrs. Ferrars were both strongly prepossessed, that neither
she nor her daughters were such kind of women as Fanny
would like to associate with. But now I can carry her
a most satisfactory account of both."
CHAPTER 
Mrs. John Dashwood had so much confidence in her
husband's judgment, that she waited the very next day
both on Mrs. Jennings and her daughter and her
confidence was rewarded by finding even the former,
even the woman with whom her sisters were staying,
by no means unworthy her notice and as for Lady Middleton,
she found her one of the most charming women in the world
Lady Middleton was equally pleased with Mrs. Dashwood.
There was a kind of cold hearted selfishness on both sides,
which mutually attracted them and they sympathised
with each other in an insipid propriety of demeanor,
and a general want of understanding.
The same manners, however, which recommended Mrs. John
Dashwood to the good opinion of Lady Middleton did not suit
the fancy of Mrs. Jennings, and to HER she appeared nothing
more than a little proudlooking woman of uncordial address,
who met her husband's sisters without any affection,
and almost without having anything to say to them
for of the quarter of an hour bestowed on Berkeley Street,
she sat at least seven minutes and a half in silence.
Elinor wanted very much to know, though she did
not chuse to ask, whether Edward was then in town
but nothing would have induced Fanny voluntarily
to mention his name before her, till able to tell her
that his marriage with Miss Morton was resolved on,
or till her husband's expectations on Colonel Brandon
were answered because she believed them still so very
much attached to each other, that they could not be too
sedulously divided in word and deed on every occasion.
The intelligence however, which SHE would not give,
soon flowed from another quarter. Lucy came very shortly
to claim Elinor's compassion on being unable to see Edward,
though he had arrived in town with Mr. and Mrs. Dashwood.
He dared not come to Bartlett's Buildings for fear
of detection, and though their mutual impatience to meet,
was not to be told, they could do nothing at present
but write.
Edward assured them himself of his being in town,
within a very short time, by twice calling in Berkeley Street.
Twice was his card found on the table, when they returned
from their morning's engagements. Elinor was pleased
that he had called and still more pleased that she had
missed him.
The Dashwoods were so prodigiously delighted
with the Middletons, that, though not much in the habit
of giving anything, they determined to give them
a dinner and soon after their acquaintance began,
invited them to dine in Harley Street, where they had
taken a very good house for three months. Their sisters
and Mrs. Jennings were invited likewise, and John Dashwood
was careful to secure Colonel Brandon, who, always glad
to be where the Miss Dashwoods were, received his eager
civilities with some surprise, but much more pleasure.
They were to meet Mrs. Ferrars but Elinor could not learn
whether her sons were to be of the party. The expectation
of seeing HER, however, was enough to make her interested
in the engagement for though she could now meet Edward's
mother without that strong anxiety which had once promised
to attend such an introduction, though she could now see
her with perfect indifference as to her opinion of herself,
her desire of being in company with Mrs. Ferrars,
her curiosity to know what she was like, was as lively as ever.
The interest with which she thus anticipated the
party, was soon afterwards increased, more powerfully
than pleasantly, by her hearing that the Miss Steeles
were also to be at it.
So well had they recommended themselves to Lady Middleton,
so agreeable had their assiduities made them to her,
that though Lucy was certainly not so elegant, and her
sister not even genteel, she was as ready as Sir John
to ask them to spend a week or two in Conduit Street
and it happened to be particularly convenient to the Miss
Steeles, as soon as the Dashwoods' invitation was known,
that their visit should begin a few days before the party
took place.
Their claims to the notice of Mrs. John Dashwood,
as the nieces of the gentleman who for many years had
had the care of her brother, might not have done much,
however, towards procuring them seats at her table
but as Lady Middleton's guests they must be welcome and Lucy,
who had long wanted to be personally known to the family,
to have a nearer view of their characters and her own
difficulties, and to have an opportunity of endeavouring
to please them, had seldom been happier in her life,
than she was on receiving Mrs. John Dashwood's card.
On Elinor its effect was very different. She began
immediately to determine, that Edward who lived with
his mother, must be asked as his mother was, to a party
given by his sister and to see him for the first time,
after all that passed, in the company of Lucyshe hardly
knew how she could bear it
These apprehensions, perhaps, were not founded
entirely on reason, and certainly not at all on truth.
They were relieved however, not by her own recollection,
but by the good will of Lucy, who believed herself to be
inflicting a severe disappointment when she told her
that Edward certainly would not be in Harley Street on Tuesday,
and even hoped to be carrying the pain still farther
by persuading her that he was kept away by the extreme
affection for herself, which he could not conceal when they
were together.
The important Tuesday came that was to introduce
the two young ladies to this formidable motherinlaw.
"Pity me, dear Miss Dashwood" said Lucy, as they
walked up the stairs togetherfor the Middletons arrived
so directly after Mrs. Jennings, that they all followed
the servant at the same time"There is nobody here but
you, that can feel for me.I declare I can hardly stand.
Good graciousIn a moment I shall see the person that all
my happiness depends onthat is to be my mother"
Elinor could have given her immediate relief
by suggesting the possibility of its being Miss Morton's mother,
rather than her own, whom they were about to behold
but instead of doing that, she assured her, and with
great sincerity, that she did pity herto the utter
amazement of Lucy, who, though really uncomfortable herself,
hoped at least to be an object of irrepressible envy to Elinor.
Mrs. Ferrars was a little, thin woman, upright,
even to formality, in her figure, and serious,
even to sourness, in her aspect. Her complexion was sallow
and her features small, without beauty, and naturally
without expression but a lucky contraction of the brow
had rescued her countenance from the disgrace of insipidity,
by giving it the strong characters of pride and ill nature.
She was not a woman of many words for, unlike people
in general, she proportioned them to the number of
her ideas and of the few syllables that did escape her,
not one fell to the share of Miss Dashwood, whom she eyed
with the spirited determination of disliking her at all events.
Elinor could not NOW be made unhappy by this behaviour.
A few months ago it would have hurt her exceedingly but it
was not in Mrs. Ferrars' power to distress her by it now
and the difference of her manners to the Miss Steeles,
a difference which seemed purposely made to humble her more,
only amused her. She could not but smile to see the graciousness
of both mother and daughter towards the very person
for Lucy was particularly distinguishedwhom of all others,
had they known as much as she did, they would have been most
anxious to mortify while she herself, who had comparatively
no power to wound them, sat pointedly slighted by both.
But while she smiled at a graciousness so misapplied,
she could not reflect on the meanspirited folly from
which it sprung, nor observe the studied attentions
with which the Miss Steeles courted its continuance,
without thoroughly despising them all four.
Lucy was all exultation on being so honorably
distinguished and Miss Steele wanted only to be teazed
about Dr. Davies to be perfectly happy.
The dinner was a grand one, the servants were numerous,
and every thing bespoke the Mistress's inclination
for show, and the Master's ability to support it.
In spite of the improvements and additions which were
making to the Norland estate, and in spite of its owner
having once been within some thousand pounds of being
obliged to sell out at a loss, nothing gave any symptom
of that indigence which he had tried to infer from it
no poverty of any kind, except of conversation, appeared
but there, the deficiency was considerable. John Dashwood
had not much to say for himself that was worth hearing,
and his wife had still less. But there was no peculiar
disgrace in this for it was very much the case with
the chief of their visitors, who almost all laboured
under one or other of these disqualifications for being
agreeableWant of sense, either natural or improvedwant
of elegancewant of spiritsor want of temper.
When the ladies withdrew to the drawingroom
after dinner, this poverty was particularly evident,
for the gentlemen HAD supplied the discourse with some
varietythe variety of politics, inclosing land,
and breaking horsesbut then it was all over and one
subject only engaged the ladies till coffee came in,
which was the comparative heights of Harry Dashwood,
and Lady Middleton's second son William, who were nearly
of the same age.
Had both the children been there, the affair might
have been determined too easily by measuring them at once
but as Harry only was present, it was all conjectural
assertion on both sides and every body had a right to
be equally positive in their opinion, and to repeat it
over and over again as often as they liked.
The parties stood thus
The two mothers, though each really convinced that
her own son was the tallest, politely decided in favour
of the other.
The two grandmothers, with not less partiality,
but more sincerity, were equally earnest in support
of their own descendant.
Lucy, who was hardly less anxious to please one parent
than the other, thought the boys were both remarkably tall
for their age, and could not conceive that there could
be the smallest difference in the world between them
and Miss Steele, with yet greater address gave it,
as fast as she could, in favour of each.
Elinor, having once delivered her opinion on
William's side, by which she offended Mrs. Ferrars and
Fanny still more, did not see the necessity of enforcing
it by any farther assertion and Marianne, when called
on for her's, offended them all, by declaring that she
had no opinion to give, as she had never thought about it.
Before her removing from Norland, Elinor had painted
a very pretty pair of screens for her sisterinlaw,
which being now just mounted and brought home,
ornamented her present drawing room and these screens,
catching the eye of John Dashwood on his following
the other gentlemen into the room, were officiously
handed by him to Colonel Brandon for his admiration.
"These are done by my eldest sister," said he "and you,
as a man of taste, will, I dare say, be pleased with them.
I do not know whether you have ever happened to see any
of her performances before, but she is in general reckoned
to draw extremely well."
The Colonel, though disclaiming all pretensions
to connoisseurship, warmly admired the screens, as he
would have done any thing painted by Miss Dashwood
and on the curiosity of the others being of course excited,
they were handed round for general inspection.
Mrs. Ferrars, not aware of their being Elinor's work,
particularly requested to look at them and after they had
received gratifying testimony of Lady Middletons's approbation,
Fanny presented them to her mother, considerately informing
her, at the same time, that they were done by Miss Dashwood.
"Hum"said Mrs. Ferrars"very pretty,"and without
regarding them at all, returned them to her daughter.
Perhaps Fanny thought for a moment that her mother
had been quite rude enough,for, colouring a little,
she immediately said,
"They are very pretty, ma'aman't they?" But then again,
the dread of having been too civil, too encouraging herself,
probably came over her, for she presently added,
"Do you not think they are something in Miss
Morton's style of painting, Ma'am?She DOES paint most
delightfullyHow beautifully her last landscape is done"
"Beautifully indeed But SHE does every thing well."
Marianne could not bear this.She was already
greatly displeased with Mrs. Ferrars and such illtimed
praise of another, at Elinor's expense, though she
had not any notion of what was principally meant by it,
provoked her immediately to say with warmth,
"This is admiration of a very particular kind
what is Miss Morton to us?who knows, or who cares,
for her?it is Elinor of whom WE think and speak."
And so saying, she took the screens out of her
sisterinlaw's hands, to admire them herself as they
ought to be admired.
Mrs. Ferrars looked exceedingly angry, and drawing
herself up more stiffly than ever, pronounced in retort
this bitter philippic, "Miss Morton is Lord Morton's daughter."
Fanny looked very angry too, and her husband was
all in a fright at his sister's audacity. Elinor was
much more hurt by Marianne's warmth than she had been
by what produced it but Colonel Brandon's eyes, as they
were fixed on Marianne, declared that he noticed only
what was amiable in it, the affectionate heart which could
not bear to see a sister slighted in the smallest point.
Marianne's feelings did not stop here. The cold
insolence of Mrs. Ferrars's general behaviour to her sister,
seemed, to her, to foretell such difficulties and distresses
to Elinor, as her own wounded heart taught her to think
of with horror and urged by a strong impulse of
affectionate sensibility, she moved after a moment,
to her sister's chair, and putting one arm round her neck,
and one cheek close to hers, said in a low, but eager,
voice,
"Dear, dear Elinor, don't mind them. Don't let them
make YOU unhappy."
She could say no more her spirits were quite overcome,
and hiding her face on Elinor's shoulder, she burst
into tears. Every body's attention was called, and almost
every body was concerned.Colonel Brandon rose up and went
to them without knowing what he did.Mrs. Jennings,
with a very intelligent "Ah poor dear," immediately gave
her her salts and Sir John felt so desperately enraged
against the author of this nervous distress, that he
instantly changed his seat to one close by Lucy Steele,
and gave her, in a whisper, a brief account of the whole
shocking affair.
In a few minutes, however, Marianne was recovered
enough to put an end to the bustle, and sit down among
the rest though her spirits retained the impression
of what had passed, the whole evening.
"Poor Marianne" said her brother to Colonel Brandon,
in a low voice, as soon as he could secure his attention,
"She has not such good health as her sister,she is very
nervous,she has not Elinor's constitutionand one must
allow that there is something very trying to a young woman
who HAS BEEN a beauty in the loss of her personal attractions.
You would not think it perhaps, but Marianne WAS remarkably
handsome a few months ago quite as handsome as Elinor.
Now you see it is all gone."
CHAPTER 
Elinor's curiosity to see Mrs. Ferrars was satisfied.
She had found in her every thing that could tend to make
a farther connection between the families undesirable.
She had seen enough of her pride, her meanness, and her
determined prejudice against herself, to comprehend all
the difficulties that must have perplexed the engagement,
and retarded the marriage, of Edward and herself, had he been
otherwise freeand she had seen almost enough to be thankful
for her OWN sake, that one greater obstacle preserved her
from suffering under any other of Mrs. Ferrars's creation,
preserved her from all dependence upon her caprice, or any
solicitude for her good opinion. Or at least, if she did not
bring herself quite to rejoice in Edward's being fettered
to Lucy, she determined, that had Lucy been more amiable,
she OUGHT to have rejoiced.
She wondered that Lucy's spirits could be so very much
elevated by the civility of Mrs. Ferrarsthat her interest
and her vanity should so very much blind her as to make
the attention which seemed only paid her because she was
NOT ELINOR, appear a compliment to herselfor to allow
her to derive encouragement from a preference only given her,
because her real situation was unknown. But that it was so,
had not only been declared by Lucy's eyes at the time,
but was declared over again the next morning more openly,
for at her particular desire, Lady Middleton set her down
in Berkeley Street on the chance of seeing Elinor alone,
to tell her how happy she was.
The chance proved a lucky one, for a message from
Mrs. Palmer soon after she arrived, carried Mrs. Jennings away.
"My dear friend," cried Lucy, as soon as they were
by themselves, "I come to talk to you of my happiness.
Could anything be so flattering as Mrs. Ferrars's way
of treating me yesterday? So exceeding affable as she
wasYou know how I dreaded the thoughts of seeing her
but the very moment I was introduced, there was such an
affability in her behaviour as really should seem to say,
she had quite took a fancy to me. Now was not it so?
You saw it all and was not you quite struck with it?"
"She was certainly very civil to you."
"CivilDid you see nothing but only civility?
I saw a vast deal more. Such kindness as fell to the share
of nobody but meNo pride, no hauteur, and your sister
just the sameall sweetness and affability"
Elinor wished to talk of something else, but Lucy still
pressed her to own that she had reason for her happiness
and Elinor was obliged to go on.
"Undoubtedly, if they had known your engagement,"
said she, "nothing could be more flattering than their
treatment of youbut as that was not the case"
"I guessed you would say so"replied Lucy
quickly"but there was no reason in the world why
Mrs. Ferrars should seem to like me, if she did not,
and her liking me is every thing. You shan't talk me
out of my satisfaction. I am sure it will all end well,
and there will be no difficulties at all, to what I
used to think. Mrs. Ferrars is a charming woman,
and so is your sister. They are both delightful women,
indeedI wonder I should never hear you say how agreeable
Mrs. Dashwood was"
To this Elinor had no answer to make, and did not
attempt any.
"Are you ill, Miss Dashwood?you seem lowyou
don't speaksure you an't well."
"I never was in better health."
"I am glad of it with all my heart but really you did
not look it. I should be sorry to have YOU ill you, that have
been the greatest comfort to me in the worldHeaven
knows what I should have done without your friendship."
Elinor tried to make a civil answer, though doubting
her own success. But it seemed to satisfy Lucy, for she
directly replied,
"Indeed I am perfectly convinced of your regard
for me, and next to Edward's love, it is the greatest
comfort I have.Poor EdwardBut now there is one
good thing, we shall be able to meet, and meet pretty often,
for Lady Middleton's delighted with Mrs. Dashwood,
so we shall be a good deal in Harley Street, I dare say,
and Edward spends half his time with his sisterbesides,
Lady Middleton and Mrs. Ferrars will visit now
and Mrs. Ferrars and your sister were both so good to say
more than once, they should always be glad to see me.
They are such charming womenI am sure if ever you
tell your sister what I think of her, you cannot speak
too high."
But Elinor would not give her any encouragement
to hope that she SHOULD tell her sister. Lucy continued.
"I am sure I should have seen it in a moment,
if Mrs. Ferrars had took a dislike to me. If she had only
made me a formal courtesy, for instance, without saying
a word, and never after had took any notice of me,
and never looked at me in a pleasant wayyou know
what I meanif I had been treated in that forbidding
sort of way, I should have gave it all up in despair.
I could not have stood it. For where she DOES dislike,
I know it is most violent."
Elinor was prevented from making any reply to this
civil triumph, by the door's being thrown open, the servant's
announcing Mr. Ferrars, and Edward's immediately walking in.
It was a very awkward moment and the countenance of each
shewed that it was so. They all looked exceedingly foolish
and Edward seemed to have as great an inclination to walk
out of the room again, as to advance farther into it.
The very circumstance, in its unpleasantest form,
which they would each have been most anxious to avoid,
had fallen on them.They were not only all three together,
but were together without the relief of any other person.
The ladies recovered themselves first. It was not Lucy's
business to put herself forward, and the appearance of
secrecy must still be kept up. She could therefore only
LOOK her tenderness, and after slightly addressing him,
said no more.
But Elinor had more to do and so anxious was she,
for his sake and her own, to do it well, that she
forced herself, after a moment's recollection,
to welcome him, with a look and manner that were almost easy,
and almost open and another struggle, another effort still
improved them. She would not allow the presence of Lucy,
nor the consciousness of some injustice towards herself,
to deter her from saying that she was happy to see him,
and that she had very much regretted being from home,
when he called before in Berkeley Street. She would
not be frightened from paying him those attentions which,
as a friend and almost a relation, were his due, by the
observant eyes of Lucy, though she soon perceived them
to be narrowly watching her.
Her manners gave some reassurance to Edward, and he
had courage enough to sit down but his embarrassment still
exceeded that of the ladies in a proportion, which the case
rendered reasonable, though his sex might make it rare
for his heart had not the indifference of Lucy's, nor
could his conscience have quite the ease of Elinor's.
Lucy, with a demure and settled air, seemed determined
to make no contribution to the comfort of the others,
and would not say a word and almost every thing that WAS
said, proceeded from Elinor, who was obliged to volunteer
all the information about her mother's health, their coming
to town, c. which Edward ought to have inquired about,
but never did.
Her exertions did not stop here for she soon
afterwards felt herself so heroically disposed as
to determine, under pretence of fetching Marianne,
to leave the others by themselves and she really did it,
and THAT in the handsomest manner, for she loitered away
several minutes on the landingplace, with the most
highminded fortitude, before she went to her sister.
When that was once done, however, it was time for the raptures
of Edward to cease for Marianne's joy hurried her into
the drawingroom immediately. Her pleasure in seeing him
was like every other of her feelings, strong in itself,
and strongly spoken. She met him with a hand that would
be taken, and a voice that expressed the affection of a sister.
"Dear Edward" she cried, "this is a moment of great
happinessThis would almost make amends for every thing?"
Edward tried to return her kindness as it deserved,
but before such witnesses he dared not say half what he
really felt. Again they all sat down, and for a moment
or two all were silent while Marianne was looking with the
most speaking tenderness, sometimes at Edward and sometimes
at Elinor, regretting only that their delight in each
other should be checked by Lucy's unwelcome presence.
Edward was the first to speak, and it was to notice
Marianne's altered looks, and express his fear of her
not finding London agree with her.
"Oh, don't think of me" she replied with spirited
earnestness, though her eyes were filled with tears
as she spoke, "don't think of MY health. Elinor is well,
you see. That must be enough for us both."
This remark was not calculated to make Edward or
Elinor more easy, nor to conciliate the good will of Lucy,
who looked up at Marianne with no very benignant expression.
"Do you like London?" said Edward, willing to say
any thing that might introduce another subject.
"Not at all. I expected much pleasure in it,
but I have found none. The sight of you, Edward, is the
only comfort it has afforded and thank Heaven you
are what you always were"
She pausedno one spoke.
"I think, Elinor," she presently added, "we must
employ Edward to take care of us in our return to Barton.
In a week or two, I suppose, we shall be going and, I trust,
Edward will not be very unwilling to accept the charge."
Poor Edward muttered something, but what it was,
nobody knew, not even himself. But Marianne, who saw
his agitation, and could easily trace it to whatever
cause best pleased herself, was perfectly satisfied,
and soon talked of something else.
"We spent such a day, Edward, in Harley Street
yesterday So dull, so wretchedly dullBut I have much
to say to you on that head, which cannot be said now."
And with this admirable discretion did she defer
the assurance of her finding their mutual relatives more
disagreeable than ever, and of her being particularly
disgusted with his mother, till they were more in private.
"But why were you not there, Edward?Why did you
not come?"
"I was engaged elsewhere."
"Engaged But what was that, when such friends
were to be met?"
"Perhaps, Miss Marianne," cried Lucy, eager to take
some revenge on her, "you think young men never stand
upon engagements, if they have no mind to keep them,
little as well as great."
Elinor was very angry, but Marianne seemed entirely
insensible of the sting for she calmly replied,
"Not so, indeed for, seriously speaking, I am very
sure that conscience only kept Edward from Harley Street.
And I really believe he HAS the most delicate conscience
in the world the most scrupulous in performing
every engagement, however minute, and however it
may make against his interest or pleasure. He is the
most fearful of giving pain, of wounding expectation,
and the most incapable of being selfish, of any body
I ever saw. Edward, it is so, and I will say it.
What are you never to hear yourself praisedThen you
must be no friend of mine for those who will accept
of my love and esteem, must submit to my open commendation."
The nature of her commendation, in the present case,
however, happened to be particularly illsuited to the
feelings of two thirds of her auditors, and was so very
unexhilarating to Edward, that he very soon got up to go away.
"Going so soon" said Marianne "my dear Edward,
this must not be."
And drawing him a little aside, she whispered
her persuasion that Lucy could not stay much longer.
But even this encouragement failed, for he would go
and Lucy, who would have outstaid him, had his visit lasted
two hours, soon afterwards went away.
"What can bring her here so often?" said Marianne,
on her leaving them. "Could not she see that we wanted
her gonehow teazing to Edward"
"Why so?we were all his friends, and Lucy has been
the longest known to him of any. It is but natural
that he should like to see her as well as ourselves."
Marianne looked at her steadily, and said, "You know,
Elinor, that this is a kind of talking which I cannot bear.
If you only hope to have your assertion contradicted,
as I must suppose to be the case, you ought to recollect
that I am the last person in the world to do it.
I cannot descend to be tricked out of assurances, that are
not really wanted."
She then left the room and Elinor dared not follow
her to say more, for bound as she was by her promise
of secrecy to Lucy, she could give no information that
would convince Marianne and painful as the consequences
of her still continuing in an error might be, she was
obliged to submit to it. All that she could hope, was
that Edward would not often expose her or himself to the
distress of hearing Marianne's mistaken warmth, nor to the
repetition of any other part of the pain that had attended
their recent meetingand this she had every reason to expect.
CHAPTER 
Within a few days after this meeting, the newspapers
announced to the world, that the lady of Thomas Palmer,
Esq. was safely delivered of a son and heir a very
interesting and satisfactory paragraph, at least to all
those intimate connections who knew it before.
This event, highly important to Mrs. Jennings's happiness,
produced a temporary alteration in the disposal of her time,
and influenced, in a like degree, the engagements
of her young friends for as she wished to be as much
as possible with Charlotte, she went thither every morning
as soon as she was dressed, and did not return till late
in the evening and the Miss Dashwoods, at the particular
request of the Middletons, spent the whole of every day,
in every day in Conduit Street. For their own comfort
they would much rather have remained, at least all
the morning, in Mrs. Jennings's house but it was not
a thing to be urged against the wishes of everybody.
Their hours were therefore made over to Lady Middleton
and the two Miss Steeles, by whom their company, in fact
was as little valued, as it was professedly sought.
They had too much sense to be desirable companions
to the former and by the latter they were considered with
a jealous eye, as intruding on THEIR ground, and sharing
the kindness which they wanted to monopolize. Though nothing
could be more polite than Lady Middleton's behaviour to
Elinor and Marianne, she did not really like them at all.
Because they neither flattered herself nor her children,
she could not believe them goodnatured and because they
were fond of reading, she fancied them satirical perhaps
without exactly knowing what it was to be satirical
but THAT did not signify. It was censure in common use,
and easily given.
Their presence was a restraint both on her and on Lucy.
It checked the idleness of one, and the business of the other.
Lady Middleton was ashamed of doing nothing before them,
and the flattery which Lucy was proud to think of
and administer at other times, she feared they would despise
her for offering. Miss Steele was the least discomposed
of the three, by their presence and it was in their power
to reconcile her to it entirely. Would either of them
only have given her a full and minute account of the whole
affair between Marianne and Mr. Willoughby, she would
have thought herself amply rewarded for the sacrifice
of the best place by the fire after dinner, which their
arrival occasioned. But this conciliation was not granted
for though she often threw out expressions of pity for her
sister to Elinor, and more than once dropt a reflection
on the inconstancy of beaux before Marianne, no effect
was produced, but a look of indifference from the former,
or of disgust in the latter. An effort even yet lighter
might have made her their friend. Would they only have
laughed at her about the Doctor But so little were they,
anymore than the others, inclined to oblige her,
that if Sir John dined from home, she might spend a whole
day without hearing any other raillery on the subject,
than what she was kind enough to bestow on herself.
All these jealousies and discontents, however, were so
totally unsuspected by Mrs. Jennings, that she thought
it a delightful thing for the girls to be together
and generally congratulated her young friends every night,
on having escaped the company of a stupid old woman so long.
She joined them sometimes at Sir John's, sometimes
at her own house but wherever it was, she always came
in excellent spirits, full of delight and importance,
attributing Charlotte's well doing to her own care, and ready
to give so exact, so minute a detail of her situation,
as only Miss Steele had curiosity enough to desire.
One thing DID disturb her and of that she made her
daily complaint. Mr. Palmer maintained the common,
but unfatherly opinion among his sex, of all infants being alike
and though she could plainly perceive, at different times,
the most striking resemblance between this baby and every
one of his relations on both sides, there was no convincing
his father of it no persuading him to believe that it
was not exactly like every other baby of the same age
nor could he even be brought to acknowledge the simple
proposition of its being the finest child in the world.
I come now to the relation of a misfortune,
which about this time befell Mrs. John Dashwood.
It so happened that while her two sisters with
Mrs. Jennings were first calling on her in Harley Street,
another of her acquaintance had dropt ina circumstance
in itself not apparently likely to produce evil to her.
But while the imaginations of other people will carry
them away to form wrong judgments of our conduct,
and to decide on it by slight appearances, one's happiness
must in some measure be always at the mercy of chance.
In the present instance, this lastarrived lady allowed
her fancy to so far outrun truth and probability,
that on merely hearing the name of the Miss Dashwoods,
and understanding them to be Mr. Dashwood's sisters,
she immediately concluded them to be staying in Harley Street
and this misconstruction produced within a day
or two afterwards, cards of invitation for them
as well as for their brother and sister, to a small
musical party at her house. The consequence of which was,
that Mrs. John Dashwood was obliged to submit not only
to the exceedingly great inconvenience of sending her
carriage for the Miss Dashwoods, but, what was still worse,
must be subject to all the unpleasantness of appearing
to treat them with attention and who could tell that they
might not expect to go out with her a second time? The power
of disappointing them, it was true, must always be her's.
But that was not enough for when people are determined
on a mode of conduct which they know to be wrong, they feel
injured by the expectation of any thing better from them.
Marianne had now been brought by degrees, so much
into the habit of going out every day, that it was become
a matter of indifference to her, whether she went or not
and she prepared quietly and mechanically for every
evening's engagement, though without expecting the smallest
amusement from any, and very often without knowing,
till the last moment, where it was to take her.
To her dress and appearance she was grown so perfectly
indifferent, as not to bestow half the consideration on it,
during the whole of her toilet, which it received from
Miss Steele in the first five minutes of their being
together, when it was finished. Nothing escaped HER minute
observation and general curiosity she saw every thing,
and asked every thing was never easy till she knew the price
of every part of Marianne's dress could have guessed the
number of her gowns altogether with better judgment than
Marianne herself, and was not without hopes of finding out
before they parted, how much her washing cost per week,
and how much she had every year to spend upon herself.
The impertinence of these kind of scrutinies, moreover,
was generally concluded with a compliment, which
though meant as its douceur, was considered by Marianne
as the greatest impertinence of all for after undergoing
an examination into the value and make of her gown,
the colour of her shoes, and the arrangement of her hair,
she was almost sure of being told that upon "her word
she looked vastly smart, and she dared to say she would
make a great many conquests."
With such encouragement as this, was she dismissed
on the present occasion, to her brother's carriage
which they were ready to enter five minutes after it
stopped at the door, a punctuality not very agreeable
to their sisterinlaw, who had preceded them to the house
of her acquaintance, and was there hoping for some delay
on their part that might inconvenience either herself
or her coachman.
The events of this evening were not very remarkable.
The party, like other musical parties, comprehended a
great many people who had real taste for the performance,
and a great many more who had none at all and the performers
themselves were, as usual, in their own estimation,
and that of their immediate friends, the first private
performers in England.
As Elinor was neither musical, nor affecting to be so,
she made no scruple of turning her eyes from the grand
pianoforte, whenever it suited her, and unrestrained even
by the presence of a harp, and violoncello, would fix
them at pleasure on any other object in the room. In one
of these excursive glances she perceived among a group
of young men, the very he, who had given them a lecture
on toothpickcases at Gray's. She perceived him soon
afterwards looking at herself, and speaking familiarly
to her brother and had just determined to find out his
name from the latter, when they both came towards her,
and Mr. Dashwood introduced him to her as Mr. Robert Ferrars.
He addressed her with easy civility, and twisted
his head into a bow which assured her as plainly as
words could have done, that he was exactly the coxcomb
she had heard him described to be by Lucy. Happy had
it been for her, if her regard for Edward had depended
less on his own merit, than on the merit of his nearest
relations For then his brother's bow must have given
the finishing stroke to what the illhumour of his mother
and sister would have begun. But while she wondered
at the difference of the two young men, she did not find
that the emptiness of conceit of the one, put her out
of all charity with the modesty and worth of the other.
Why they WERE different, Robert exclaimed to her himself
in the course of a quarter of an hour's conversation
for, talking of his brother, and lamenting the extreme
GAUCHERIE which he really believed kept him from mixing
in proper society, he candidly and generously attributed it
much less to any natural deficiency, than to the misfortune
of a private education while he himself, though probably
without any particular, any material superiority
by nature, merely from the advantage of a public school,
was as well fitted to mix in the world as any other man.
"Upon my soul," he added, "I believe it is nothing more
and so I often tell my mother, when she is grieving
about it. 'My dear Madam,' I always say to her, 'you must
make yourself easy. The evil is now irremediable,
and it has been entirely your own doing. Why would
you be persuaded by my uncle, Sir Robert, against your
own judgment, to place Edward under private tuition,
at the most critical time of his life? If you had only sent
him to Westminster as well as myself, instead of sending
him to Mr. Pratt's, all this would have been prevented.'
This is the way in which I always consider the matter,
and my mother is perfectly convinced of her error."
Elinor would not oppose his opinion, because,
whatever might be her general estimation of the advantage
of a public school, she could not think of Edward's
abode in Mr. Pratt's family, with any satisfaction.
"You reside in Devonshire, I think,"was his
next observation, "in a cottage near Dawlish."
Elinor set him right as to its situation
and it seemed rather surprising to him that anybody
could live in Devonshire, without living near Dawlish.
He bestowed his hearty approbation however on their
species of house.
"For my own part," said he, "I am excessively fond
of a cottage there is always so much comfort, so much
elegance about them. And I protest, if I had any money
to spare, I should buy a little land and build one myself,
within a short distance of London, where I might drive
myself down at any time, and collect a few friends
about me, and be happy. I advise every body who is going
to build, to build a cottage. My friend Lord Courtland
came to me the other day on purpose to ask my advice,
and laid before me three different plans of Bonomi's.
I was to decide on the best of them. 'My dear Courtland,'
said I, immediately throwing them all into the fire, 'do not
adopt either of them, but by all means build a cottage.'
And that I fancy, will be the end of it.
"Some people imagine that there can be no accommodations,
no space in a cottage but this is all a mistake.
I was last month at my friend Elliott's, near Dartford.
Lady Elliott wished to give a dance. 'But how can it
be done?' said she 'my dear Ferrars, do tell me how it
is to be managed. There is not a room in this cottage
that will hold ten couple, and where can the supper be?'
I immediately saw that there could be no difficulty in it,
so I said, 'My dear Lady Elliott, do not be uneasy.
The dining parlour will admit eighteen couple with ease
cardtables may be placed in the drawingroom the library
may be open for tea and other refreshments and let the
supper be set out in the saloon.' Lady Elliott was delighted
with the thought. We measured the diningroom, and found
it would hold exactly eighteen couple, and the affair
was arranged precisely after my plan. So that, in fact,
you see, if people do but know how to set about it,
every comfort may be as well enjoyed in a cottage
as in the most spacious dwelling."
Elinor agreed to it all, for she did not think
he deserved the compliment of rational opposition.
As John Dashwood had no more pleasure in music than his
eldest sister, his mind was equally at liberty to fix on
any thing else and a thought struck him during the evening,
which he communicated to his wife, for her approbation,
when they got home. The consideration of Mrs. Dennison's
mistake,
in supposing his sisters their guests, had suggested the
propriety of their being really invited to become such,
while Mrs. Jenning's engagements kept her from home.
The expense would be nothing, the inconvenience not more
and it was altogether an attention which the delicacy
of his conscience pointed out to be requisite to its
complete enfranchisement from his promise to his father.
Fanny was startled at the proposal.
"I do not see how it can be done," said she,
"without affronting Lady Middleton, for they spend every day
with her otherwise I should be exceedingly glad to do it.
You know I am always ready to pay them any attention
in my power, as my taking them out this evening shews.
But they are Lady Middleton's visitors. How can I ask them
away from her?"
Her husband, but with great humility, did not see
the force of her objection. "They had already spent a week
in this manner in Conduit Street, and Lady Middleton
could not be displeased at their giving the same number
of days to such near relations."
Fanny paused a moment, and then, with fresh vigor, said,
"My love I would ask them with all my heart, if it
was in my power. But I had just settled within myself
to ask the Miss Steeles to spend a few days with us.
They are very well behaved, good kind of girls and I think
the attention is due to them, as their uncle did so very
well by Edward. We can ask your sisters some other year,
you know but the Miss Steeles may not be in town any more.
I am sure you will like them indeed, you DO like them,
you know, very much already, and so does my mother and they
are such favourites with Harry"
Mr. Dashwood was convinced. He saw the necessity
of inviting the Miss Steeles immediately, and his conscience
was pacified by the resolution of inviting his sisters
another year at the same time, however, slyly suspecting
that another year would make the invitation needless,
by bringing Elinor to town as Colonel Brandon's wife,
and Marianne as THEIR visitor.
Fanny, rejoicing in her escape, and proud of the ready
wit that had procured it, wrote the next morning to Lucy,
to request her company and her sister's, for some days,
in Harley Street, as soon as Lady Middleton could spare them.
This was enough to make Lucy really and reasonably happy.
Mrs. Dashwood seemed actually working for her, herself
cherishing all her hopes, and promoting all her views
Such an opportunity of being with Edward and his family was,
above all things, the most material to her interest,
and such an invitation the most gratifying to her
feelings It was an advantage that could not be too
gratefully acknowledged, nor too speedily made use of
and the visit to Lady Middleton, which had not before had
any precise limits, was instantly discovered to have been
always meant to end in two days' time.
When the note was shown to Elinor, as it was within ten
minutes after its arrival, it gave her, for the first time,
some share in the expectations of Lucy for such a mark
of uncommon kindness, vouchsafed on so short an acquaintance,
seemed to declare that the goodwill towards her arose
from something more than merely malice against herself
and might be brought, by time and address, to do
every thing that Lucy wished. Her flattery had already
subdued the pride of Lady Middleton, and made an entry
into the close heart of Mrs. John Dashwood and these
were effects that laid open the probability of greater.
The Miss Steeles removed to Harley Street, and all
that reached Elinor of their influence there, strengthened
her expectation of the event. Sir John, who called on
them more than once, brought home such accounts of the
favour they were in, as must be universally striking.
Mrs. Dashwood had never been so much pleased with any
young women in her life, as she was with them had given
each of them a needle book made by some emigrant
called Lucy by her Christian name and did not know
whether she should ever be able to part with them.
[At this point in the first and second editions, Volume II ended.]
CHAPTER 
Mrs. Palmer was so well at the end of a fortnight,
that her mother felt it no longer necessary to give up
the whole of her time to her and, contenting herself with
visiting her once or twice a day, returned from that period
to her own home, and her own habits, in which she found
the Miss Dashwoods very ready to resume their former share.
About the third or fourth morning after their
being thus resettled in Berkeley Street, Mrs. Jennings,
on returning from her ordinary visit to Mrs. Palmer,
entered the drawingroom, where Elinor was sitting
by herself, with an air of such hurrying importance
as prepared her to hear something wonderful and giving her
time only to form that idea, began directly to justify it,
by saying,
"Lord my dear Miss Dashwood have you heard the news?"
"No, ma'am. What is it?"
"Something so strange But you shall hear it all.
When I got to Mr. Palmer's, I found Charlotte quite
in a fuss about the child. She was sure it was very
illit cried, and fretted, and was all over pimples.
So I looked at it directly, and, 'Lord my dear,'
says I, 'it is nothing in the world, but the red gum'
and nurse said just the same. But Charlotte, she would
not be satisfied, so Mr. Donavan was sent for and luckily
he happened to just come in from Harley Street, so he
stepped over directly, and as soon as ever he saw the child,
be said just as we did, that it was nothing in the world
but the red gum, and then Charlotte was easy. And so,
just as he was going away again, it came into my head,
I am sure I do not know how I happened to think of it,
but it came into my head to ask him if there was any news.
So upon that, he smirked, and simpered, and looked grave,
and seemed to know something or other, and at last he
said in a whisper, 'For fear any unpleasant report
should reach the young ladies under your care as to their
sister's indisposition, I think it advisable to say,
that I believe there is no great reason for alarm I hope
Mrs. Dashwood will do very well.'"
"What is Fanny ill?"
"That is exactly what I said, my dear. 'Lord' says I,
'is Mrs. Dashwood ill?' So then it all came out and the
long and the short of the matter, by all I can learn,
seems to be this. Mr. Edward Ferrars, the very young
man I used to joke with you about but however, as it
turns out, I am monstrous glad there was never any thing
in it, Mr. Edward Ferrars, it seems, has been engaged
above this twelvemonth to my cousin LucyThere's for you,
my dearAnd not a creature knowing a syllable of the matter,
except NancyCould you have believed such a thing possible?
There is no great wonder in their liking one another
but that matters should be brought so forward between them,
and nobody suspect itTHAT is strangeI never happened
to see them together, or I am sure I should have found it
out directly. Well, and so this was kept a great secret,
for fear of Mrs. Ferrars, and neither she nor your
brother or sister suspected a word of the matter
till this very morning, poor Nancy, who, you know, is a
wellmeaning creature, but no conjurer, popt it all out.
'Lord' thinks she to herself, 'they are all so fond
of Lucy, to be sure they will make no difficulty about it'
and so, away she went to your sister, who was sitting all
alone at her carpetwork, little suspecting what was to
comefor she had just been saying to your brother, only five
minutes before, that she thought to make a match between
Edward and some Lord's daughter or other, I forget who.
So you may think what a blow it was to all her vanity
and pride. She fell into violent hysterics immediately,
with such screams as reached your brother's ears,
as he was sitting in his own dressingroom down stairs,
thinking about writing a letter to his steward in the country.
So up he flew directly, and a terrible scene took place,
for Lucy was come to them by that time, little dreaming
what was going on. Poor soul I pity HER. And I must say,
I think she was used very hardly for your sister scolded
like any fury, and soon drove her into a fainting fit.
Nancy, she fell upon her knees, and cried bitterly
and your brother, he walked about the room, and said
he did not know what to do. Mrs. Dashwood declared
they should not stay a minute longer in the house,
and your brother was forced to go down upon HIS knees too,
to persuade her to let them stay till they had packed
up their clothes. THEN she fell into hysterics again,
and he was so frightened that he would send for Mr. Donavan,
and Mr. Donavan found the house in all this uproar.
The carriage was at the door ready to take my poor
cousins away, and they were just stepping in as he
came off poor Lucy in such a condition, he says,
she could hardly walk and Nancy, she was almost as bad.
I declare, I have no patience with your sister and I hope,
with all my heart, it will be a match in spite of her.
Lord what a taking poor Mr. Edward will be in when he
hears of it To have his love used so scornfully for
they say he is monstrous fond of her, as well he may.
I should not wonder, if he was to be in the greatest
passionand Mr. Donavan thinks just the same. He and I
had a great deal of talk about it and the best of all is,
that he is gone back again to Harley Street, that he may
be within call when Mrs. Ferrars is told of it, for she
was sent for as soon as ever my cousins left the house,
for your sister was sure SHE would be in hysterics too
and so she may, for what I care. I have no pity for
either of them. I have no notion of people's making
such a todo about money and greatness. There is no
reason on earth why Mr. Edward and Lucy should not marry
for I am sure Mrs. Ferrars may afford to do very well
by her son, and though Lucy has next to nothing herself,
she knows better than any body how to make the most
of every thing I dare say, if Mrs. Ferrars would only
allow him five hundred ayear, she would make as good
an appearance with it as any body else would with eight.
Lord how snug they might live in such another cottage
as yoursor a little biggerwith two maids, and two men
and I believe I could help them to a housemaid, for my
Betty has a sister out of place, that would fit them
exactly."
Here Mrs. Jennings ceased, and as Elinor had had
time enough to collect her thoughts, she was able
to give such an answer, and make such observations,
as the subject might naturally be supposed to produce.
Happy to find that she was not suspected of any extraordinary
interest in it that Mrs. Jennings as she had of late
often hoped might be the case had ceased to imagine her
at all attached to Edward and happy above all the rest,
in the absence of Marianne, she felt very well able
to speak of the affair without embarrassment, and to
give her judgment, as she believed, with impartiality
on the conduct of every one concerned in it.
She could hardly determine what her own expectation
of its event really was though she earnestly tried
to drive away the notion of its being possible to end
otherwise at last, than in the marriage of Edward and Lucy.
What Mrs. Ferrars would say and do, though there could
not be a doubt of its nature, she was anxious to hear
and still more anxious to know how Edward would
conduct himself. For HIM she felt much compassion
for Lucy very littleand it cost her some pains to procure
that littlefor the rest of the party none at all.
As Mrs. Jennings could talk on no other subject,
Elinor soon saw the necessity of preparing Marianne for
its discussion. No time was to be lost in undeceiving her,
in making her acquainted with the real truth, and in
endeavouring to bring her to hear it talked of by others,
without betraying that she felt any uneasiness for her sister,
or any resentment against Edward.
Elinor's office was a painful one.She was going
to remove what she really believed to be her sister's
chief consolation,to give such particulars of Edward as she
feared would ruin him for ever in her good opinion,and
to make Marianne, by a resemblance in their situations,
which to HER fancy would seem strong, feel all her own
disappointment over again. But unwelcome as such a task
must be, it was necessary to be done, and Elinor therefore
hastened to perform it.
She was very far from wishing to dwell on her own
feelings, or to represent herself as suffering much,
any otherwise than as the selfcommand she had practised
since her first knowledge of Edward's engagement, might
suggest a hint of what was practicable to Marianne.
Her narration was clear and simple and though it could
not be given without emotion, it was not accompanied
by violent agitation, nor impetuous grief.THAT belonged
rather to the hearer, for Marianne listened with horror,
and cried excessively. Elinor was to be the comforter
of others in her own distresses, no less than in theirs
and all the comfort that could be given by assurances
of her own composure of mind, and a very earnest
vindication of Edward from every charge but of imprudence,
was readily offered.
But Marianne for some time would give credit to neither.
Edward seemed a second Willoughby and acknowledging
as Elinor did, that she HAD loved him most sincerely,
could she feel less than herself As for Lucy Steele,
she considered her so totally unamiable, so absolutely
incapable of attaching a sensible man, that she could
not be persuaded at first to believe, and afterwards
to pardon, any former affection of Edward for her.
She would not even admit it to have been natural
and Elinor left her to be convinced that it was so,
by that which only could convince her, a better knowledge
of mankind.
Her first communication had reached no farther than
to state the fact of the engagement, and the length of time
it had existed.Marianne's feelings had then broken in,
and put an end to all regularity of detail and for some
time all that could be done was to soothe her distress,
lessen her alarms, and combat her resentment. The first
question on her side, which led to farther particulars,
was,
"How long has this been known to you, Elinor? has
he written to you?"
"I have known it these four months. When Lucy
first came to Barton Park last November, she told me
in confidence of her engagement."
At these words, Marianne's eyes expressed the astonishment
which her lips could not utter. After a pause of wonder,
she exclaimed
"Four monthsHave you known of this four months?"
Elinor confirmed it.
"Whatwhile attending me in all my misery, has this
been on your heart?And I have reproached you for being
happy"
"It was not fit that you should then know how much
I was the reverse"
"Four months"cried Marianne again."So calm
so cheerfulhow have you been supported?"
"By feeling that I was doing my duty.My promise to
Lucy, obliged me to be secret. I owed it to her, therefore,
to avoid giving any hint of the truth and I owed it to my
family and friends, not to create in them a solicitude about me,
which it could not be in my power to satisfy."
Marianne seemed much struck.
"I have very often wished to undeceive yourself and my
mother," added Elinor "and once or twice I have attempted it
but without betraying my trust, I never could have convinced
you."
"Four monthsand yet you loved him"
"Yes. But I did not love only himand while the comfort
of others was dear to me, I was glad to spare them from knowing
how much I felt. Now, I can think and speak of it with
little emotion. I would not have you suffer on my account
for I assure you I no longer suffer materially myself.
I have many things to support me. I am not conscious of having
provoked the disappointment by any imprudence of my own,
I have borne it as much as possible without spreading
it farther. I acquit Edward of essential misconduct.
I wish him very happy and I am so sure of his always
doing his duty, that though now he may harbour some regret,
in the end he must become so. Lucy does not want sense,
and that is the foundation on which every thing good may
be built.And after all, Marianne, after all that is
bewitching in the idea of a single and constant attachment,
and all that can be said of one's happiness depending
entirely on any particular person, it is not meantit
is not fitit is not possible that it should be so.
Edward will marry Lucy he will marry a woman superior
in person and understanding to half her sex and time
and habit will teach him to forget that he ever thought
another superior to HER."
"If such is your way of thinking," said Marianne,
"if the loss of what is most valued is so easily
to be made up by something else, your resolution,
your selfcommand, are, perhaps, a little less to be
wondered at.They are brought more within my comprehension."
"I understand you.You do not suppose that I have ever
felt much.For four months, Marianne, I have had all this
hanging on my mind, without being at liberty to speak
of it to a single creature knowing that it would make
you and my mother most unhappy whenever it were explained
to you, yet unable to prepare you for it in the least.
It was told me,it was in a manner forced on me by the
very person herself, whose prior engagement ruined all
my prospects and told me, as I thought, with triumph.
This person's suspicions, therefore, I have had to oppose,
by endeavouring to appear indifferent where I have been most
deeply interestedand it has not been only onceI have
had her hopes and exultation to listen to again and again.
I have known myself to be divided from Edward for ever,
without hearing one circumstance that could make me less
desire the connection.Nothing has proved him unworthy
nor has anything declared him indifferent to me.
I have had to contend against the unkindness of his sister,
and the insolence of his mother and have suffered the
punishment of an attachment, without enjoying its advantages.
And all this has been going on at a time, when, as you
know too well, it has not been my only unhappiness.
If you can think me capable of ever feelingsurely you
may suppose that I have suffered NOW. The composure
of mind with which I have brought myself at present
to consider the matter, the consolation that I have been
willing to admit, have been the effect of constant and
painful exertionthey did not spring up of themselves
they did not occur to relieve my spirits at first.
No, Marianne.THEN, if I had not been bound to silence,
perhaps nothing could have kept me entirelynot even what I
owed to my dearest friendsfrom openly shewing that I was
VERY unhappy."
Marianne was quite subdued.
"Oh Elinor," she cried, "you have made me hate
myself for ever.How barbarous have I been to you
you, who have been my only comfort, who have borne with me
in all my misery, who have seemed to be only suffering
for meIs this my gratitude?Is this the only return I
can make you?Because your merit cries out upon myself,
I have been trying to do it away."
The tenderest caresses followed this confession.
In such a frame of mind as she was now in, Elinor had
no difficulty in obtaining from her whatever promise
she required and at her request, Marianne engaged
never to speak of the affair to any one with the least
appearance of bitternessto meet Lucy without betraying
the smallest increase of dislike to herand even to see
Edward himself, if chance should bring them together,
without any diminution of her usual cordiality.
These were great concessionsbut where Marianne felt
that she had injured, no reparation could be too much
for her to make.
She performed her promise of being discreet,
to admiration.She attended to all that Mrs. Jennings
had to say upon the subject, with an unchanging complexion,
dissented from her in nothing, and was heard three
times to say, "Yes, ma'am."She listened to her praise
of Lucy with only moving from one chair to another,
and when Mrs. Jennings talked of Edward's affection,
it cost her only a spasm in her throat.Such advances
towards heroism in her sister, made Elinor feel equal
to any thing herself.
The next morning brought a farther trial of it,
in a visit from their brother, who came with a most serious
aspect to talk over the dreadful affair, and bring them
news of his wife.
"You have heard, I suppose," said he with great solemnity,
as soon as he was seated, "of the very shocking discovery
that took place under our roof yesterday."
They all looked their assent it seemed too awful
a moment for speech.
"Your sister," he continued, "has suffered dreadfully.
Mrs. Ferrars tooin short it has been a scene of such
complicated distressbut I will hope that the storm may
be weathered without our being any of us quite overcome.
Poor Fanny she was in hysterics all yesterday.
But I would not alarm you too much. Donavan says there
is nothing materially to be apprehended her constitution
is a good one, and her resolution equal to any thing.
She has borne it all, with the fortitude of an angel
She says she never shall think well of anybody again
and one cannot wonder at it, after being so deceived
meeting with such ingratitude, where so much kindness
had been shewn, so much confidence had been placed It
was quite out of the benevolence of her heart, that she
had asked these young women to her house merely because
she thought they deserved some attention, were harmless,
wellbehaved girls, and would be pleasant companions
for otherwise we both wished very much to have invited you
and Marianne to be with us, while your kind friend there,
was attending her daughter. And now to be so rewarded
'I wish, with all my heart,' says poor Fanny in her
affectionate way, 'that we had asked your sisters instead
of them.'"
Here he stopped to be thanked which being done,
he went on.
"What poor Mrs. Ferrars suffered, when first Fanny
broke it to her, is not to be described. While she with
the truest affection had been planning a most eligible
connection for him, was it to be supposed that he could
be all the time secretly engaged to another personsuch
a suspicion could never have entered her head If she
suspected ANY prepossession elsewhere, it could not be
in THAT quarter. 'THERE, to be sure,' said she, 'I might
have thought myself safe.' She was quite in an agony.
We consulted together, however, as to what should be done,
and at last she determined to send for Edward.
He came. But I am sorry to relate what ensued.
All that Mrs. Ferrars could say to make him put an end
to the engagement, assisted too as you may well suppose
by my arguments, and Fanny's entreaties, was of
no avail. Duty, affection, every thing was disregarded.
I never thought Edward so stubborn, so unfeeling before.
His mother explained to him her liberal designs, in case
of his marrying Miss Morton told him she would settle on
him the Norfolk estate, which, clear of landtax, brings
in a good thousand ayear offered even, when matters
grew desperate, to make it twelve hundred and in opposition
to this, if he still persisted in this low connection,
represented to him the certain penury that must attend
the match. His own two thousand pounds she protested
should be his all she would never see him again and so far
would she be from affording him the smallest assistance,
that if he were to enter into any profession with a view
of better support, she would do all in her power to prevent
him advancing in it."
Here Marianne, in an ecstasy of indignation,
clapped her hands together, and cried, "Gracious God
can this be possible"
"Well may you wonder, Marianne," replied her brother,
"at the obstinacy which could resist such arguments as these.
Your exclamation is very natural."
Marianne was going to retort, but she remembered
her promises, and forbore.
"All this, however," he continued, "was urged in vain.
Edward said very little but what he did say, was in
the most determined manner. Nothing should prevail on
him to give up his engagement. He would stand to it,
cost him what it might."
"Then," cried Mrs. Jennings with blunt sincerity,
no longer able to be silent, "he has acted like an honest
man I beg your pardon, Mr. Dashwood, but if he had
done otherwise, I should have thought him a rascal.
I have some little concern in the business, as well
as yourself, for Lucy Steele is my cousin, and I believe
there is not a better kind of girl in the world, nor one
who more deserves a good husband."
John Dashwood was greatly astonished but his nature
was calm, not open to provocation, and he never wished
to offend anybody, especially anybody of good fortune.
He therefore replied, without any resentment,
"I would by no means speak disrespectfully of any
relation of yours, madam. Miss Lucy Steele is, I dare say,
a very deserving young woman, but in the present case
you know, the connection must be impossible.
And to have entered into a secret engagement with a
young man under her uncle's care, the son of a woman
especially of such very large fortune as Mrs. Ferrars,
is perhaps, altogether a little extraordinary. In short,
I do not mean to reflect upon the behaviour of any person
whom you have a regard for, Mrs. Jennings. We all wish
her extremely happy and Mrs. Ferrars's conduct throughout
the whole, has been such as every conscientious, good mother,
in like circumstances, would adopt. It has been dignified
and liberal. Edward has drawn his own lot, and I fear
it will be a bad one."
Marianne sighed out her similar apprehension
and Elinor's heart wrung for the feelings of Edward,
while braving his mother's threats, for a woman who could
not reward him.
"Well, sir," said Mrs. Jennings, "and how did it end?"
"I am sorry to say, ma'am, in a most unhappy rupture
Edward is dismissed for ever from his mother's notice.
He left her house yesterday, but where he is gone, or whether
he is still in town, I do not know for WE of course can
make no inquiry."
"Poor young manand what is to become of him?"
"What, indeed, ma'am It is a melancholy consideration.
Born to the prospect of such affluence I cannot conceive
a situation more deplorable. The interest of two thousand
poundshow can a man live on it?and when to that is added
the recollection, that he might, but for his own folly,
within three months have been in the receipt of two
thousand, five hundred ayear for Miss Morton has
thirty thousand pounds, I cannot picture to myself
a more wretched condition. We must all feel for him
and the more so, because it is totally out of our power
to assist him."
"Poor young man" cried Mrs. Jennings, "I am sure
he should be very welcome to bed and board at my house
and so I would tell him if I could see him. It is not fit
that he should be living about at his own charge now,
at lodgings and taverns."
Elinor's heart thanked her for such kindness towards Edward,
though she could not forbear smiling at the form of it.
"If he would only have done as well by himself,"
said John Dashwood, "as all his friends were disposed to do
by him, he might now have been in his proper situation,
and would have wanted for nothing. But as it is, it must
be out of anybody's power to assist him. And there is one
thing more preparing against him, which must be worse than
allhis mother has determined, with a very natural kind
of spirit, to settle THAT estate upon Robert immediately,
which might have been Edward's, on proper conditions.
I left her this morning with her lawyer, talking over
the business."
"Well" said Mrs. Jennings, "that is HER revenge.
Everybody has a way of their own. But I don't think mine
would be, to make one son independent, because another had
plagued me."
Marianne got up and walked about the room.
"Can anything be more galling to the spirit of a man,"
continued John, "than to see his younger brother in
possession of an estate which might have been his own?
Poor Edward I feel for him sincerely."
A few minutes more spent in the same kind of effusion,
concluded his visit and with repeated assurances to his
sisters that he really believed there was no material
danger in Fanny's indisposition, and that they need
not therefore be very uneasy about it, he went away
leaving the three ladies unanimous in their sentiments
on the present occasion, as far at least as it regarded
Mrs. Ferrars's conduct, the Dashwoods', and Edward's.
Marianne's indignation burst forth as soon as he
quitted the room and as her vehemence made reserve
impossible in Elinor, and unnecessary in Mrs. Jennings,
they all joined in a very spirited critique upon the party.
CHAPTER 
Mrs. Jennings was very warm in her praise of Edward's
conduct, but only Elinor and Marianne understood its
true merit. THEY only knew how little he had had to tempt
him to be disobedient, and how small was the consolation,
beyond the consciousness of doing right, that could
remain to him in the loss of friends and fortune.
Elinor gloried in his integrity and Marianne forgave all
his offences in compassion for his punishment. But though
confidence between them was, by this public discovery,
restored to its proper state, it was not a subject on
which either of them were fond of dwelling when alone.
Elinor avoided it upon principle, as tending to fix still
more upon her thoughts, by the too warm, too positive
assurances of Marianne, that belief of Edward's continued
affection for herself which she rather wished to do away
and Marianne's courage soon failed her, in trying
to converse upon a topic which always left her more
dissatisfied with herself than ever, by the comparison
it necessarily produced between Elinor's conduct and her own.
She felt all the force of that comparison but not
as her sister had hoped, to urge her to exertion now
she felt it with all the pain of continual selfreproach,
regretted most bitterly that she had never exerted
herself before but it brought only the torture of penitence,
without the hope of amendment. Her mind was so much weakened
that she still fancied present exertion impossible,
and therefore it only dispirited her more.
Nothing new was heard by them, for a day or two afterwards,
of affairs in Harley Street, or Bartlett's Buildings.
But though so much of the matter was known to them already,
that Mrs. Jennings might have had enough to do in spreading
that knowledge farther, without seeking after more,
she had resolved from the first to pay a visit of comfort
and inquiry to her cousins as soon as she could
and nothing but the hindrance of more visitors than usual,
had prevented her going to them within that time.
The third day succeeding their knowledge of the
particulars, was so fine, so beautiful a Sunday as to draw
many to Kensington Gardens, though it was only the second
week in March. Mrs. Jennings and Elinor were of the number
but Marianne, who knew that the Willoughbys were again
in town, and had a constant dread of meeting them,
chose rather to stay at home, than venture into so public
a place.
An intimate acquaintance of Mrs. Jennings joined
them soon after they entered the Gardens, and Elinor was
not sorry that by her continuing with them, and engaging
all Mrs. Jennings's conversation, she was herself left
to quiet reflection. She saw nothing of the Willoughbys,
nothing of Edward, and for some time nothing of anybody
who could by any chance whether grave or gay, be interesting
to her. But at last she found herself with some surprise,
accosted by Miss Steele, who, though looking rather shy,
expressed great satisfaction in meeting them, and on receiving
encouragement from the particular kindness of Mrs. Jennings,
left her own party for a short time, to join their's.
Mrs. Jennings immediately whispered to Elinor,
"Get it all out of her, my dear. She will tell you
any thing if you ask. You see I cannot leave Mrs. Clarke."
It was lucky, however, for Mrs. Jennings's curiosity
and Elinor's too, that she would tell any thing WITHOUT
being asked for nothing would otherwise have been learnt.
"I am so glad to meet you" said Miss Steele,
taking her familiarly by the arm"for I wanted to see you
of all things in the world." And then lowering her voice,
"I suppose Mrs. Jennings has heard all about it.
Is she angry?"
"Not at all, I believe, with you."
"That is a good thing. And Lady Middleton, is SHE angry?"
"I cannot suppose it possible that she should."
"I am monstrous glad of it. Good gracious I have
had such a time of it I never saw Lucy in such a rage
in my life. She vowed at first she would never trim me
up a new bonnet, nor do any thing else for me again,
so long as she lived but now she is quite come to,
and we are as good friends as ever. Look, she made me
this bow to my hat, and put in the feather last night.
There now, YOU are going to laugh at me too. But why
should not I wear pink ribbons? I do not care if it IS
the Doctor's favourite colour. I am sure, for my part,
I should never have known he DID like it better than
any other colour, if he had not happened to say so.
My cousins have been so plaguing me I declare sometimes
I do not know which way to look before them."
She had wandered away to a subject on which Elinor
had nothing to say, and therefore soon judged it expedient
to find her way back again to the first.
"Well, but Miss Dashwood," speaking triumphantly,
"people may say what they chuse about Mr. Ferrars's
declaring he would not have Lucy, for it is no such thing
I can tell you and it is quite a shame for such illnatured
reports to be spread abroad. Whatever Lucy might think
about it herself, you know, it was no business of other
people to set it down for certain."
"I never heard any thing of the kind hinted at before,
I assure you," said Elinor.
"Oh, did not you? But it WAS said, I know, very well,
and by more than one for Miss Godby told Miss Sparks,
that nobody in their senses could expect Mr. Ferrars
to give up a woman like Miss Morton, with thirty thousand
pounds to her fortune, for Lucy Steele that had
nothing at all and I had it from Miss Sparks myself.
And besides that, my cousin Richard said himself,
that when it came to the point he was afraid Mr. Ferrars
would be off and when Edward did not come near us
for three days, I could not tell what to think myself
and I believe in my heart Lucy gave it up all for lost
for we came away from your brother's Wednesday,
and we saw nothing of him not all Thursday, Friday,
and Saturday, and did not know what was become of him.
Once Lucy thought to write to him, but then her spirits
rose against that. However this morning he came just
as we came home from church and then it all came out,
how he had been sent for Wednesday to Harley Street,
and been talked to by his mother and all of them,
and how he had declared before them all that he loved
nobody but Lucy, and nobody but Lucy would he have.
And how he had been so worried by what passed,
that as soon as he had went away from his mother's house,
he had got upon his horse, and rid into the country,
some where or other and how he had stayed about at an inn
all Thursday and Friday, on purpose to get the better
of it. And after thinking it all over and over again,
he said, it seemed to him as if, now he had no fortune,
and no nothing at all, it would be quite unkind to keep
her on to the engagement, because it must be for her loss,
for he had nothing but two thousand pounds, and no hope
of any thing else and if he was to go into orders,
as he had some thoughts, he could get nothing but a curacy,
and how was they to live upon that?He could not bear
to think of her doing no better, and so he begged,
if she had the least mind for it, to put an end to the
matter directly, and leave him shift for himself.
I heard him say all this as plain as could possibly be.
And it was entirely for HER sake, and upon HER account,
that he said a word about being off, and not upon his own.
I will take my oath he never dropt a syllable of being
tired of her, or of wishing to marry Miss Morton, or any
thing like it. But, to be sure, Lucy would not give
ear to such kind of talking so she told him directly
with a great deal about sweet and love, you know,
and all thatOh, la one can't repeat such kind of things
you knowshe told him directly, she had not the least
mind in the world to be off, for she could live with him
upon a trifle, and how little so ever he might have,
she should be very glad to have it all, you know,
or something of the kind. So then he was monstrous happy,
and talked on some time about what they should do,
and they agreed he should take orders directly,
and they must wait to be married till he got a living.
And just then I could not hear any more, for my cousin
called from below to tell me Mrs. Richardson was come in
her coach, and would take one of us to Kensington Gardens
so I was forced to go into the room and interrupt them,
to ask Lucy if she would like to go, but she did not
care to leave Edward so I just run up stairs and put
on a pair of silk stockings and came off with the Richardsons."
"I do not understand what you mean by interrupting them,"
said Elinor "you were all in the same room together,
were not you?"
"No, indeed, not us. La Miss Dashwood, do you
think people make love when any body else is by? Oh,
for shameTo be sure you must know better than that.
Laughing affectedly.No, no they were shut up in the
drawingroom together, and all I heard was only by listening
at the door."
"How" cried Elinor "have you been repeating to me
what you only learnt yourself by listening at the door?
I am sorry I did not know it before for I certainly
would not have suffered you to give me particulars of a
conversation which you ought not to have known yourself.
How could you behave so unfairly by your sister?"
"Oh, la there is nothing in THAT. I only stood at
the door, and heard what I could. And I am sure Lucy would
have done just the same by me for a year or two back,
when Martha Sharpe and I had so many secrets together,
she never made any bones of hiding in a closet, or behind
a chimneyboard, on purpose to hear what we said."
Elinor tried to talk of something else but Miss
Steele could not be kept beyond a couple of minutes,
from what was uppermost in her mind.
"Edward talks of going to Oxford soon," said she
"but now he is lodging at No. , Pall Mall. What an
illnatured woman his mother is, an't she? And your
brother and sister were not very kind However,
I shan't say anything against them to YOU and to be sure
they did send us home in their own chariot, which
was more than I looked for. And for my part, I was all
in a fright for fear your sister should ask us for the
huswifes she had gave us a day or two before but, however,
nothing was said about them, and I took care to keep mine
out of sight. Edward have got some business at Oxford,
he says so he must go there for a time and after THAT,
as soon as he can light upon a Bishop, he will be ordained.
I wonder what curacy he will getGood gracious
giggling as she spoke I'd lay my life I know what
my cousins will say, when they hear of it. They will
tell me I should write to the Doctor, to get Edward
the curacy of his new living. I know they will but I am
sure I would not do such a thing for all the world.
'La' I shall say directly, 'I wonder how you could think
of such a thing? I write to the Doctor, indeed'"
"Well," said Elinor, "it is a comfort to be prepared
against the worst. You have got your answer ready."
Miss Steele was going to reply on the same subject,
but the approach of her own party made another more necessary.
"Oh, la here come the Richardsons. I had a vast deal
more to say to you, but I must not stay away from them not
any longer. I assure you they are very genteel people.
He makes a monstrous deal of money, and they keep their
own coach. I have not time to speak to Mrs. Jennings about
it myself, but pray tell her I am quite happy to hear she
is not in anger against us, and Lady Middleton the same
and if anything should happen to take you and your
sister away, and Mrs. Jennings should want company,
I am sure we should be very glad to come and stay with her
for as long a time as she likes. I suppose Lady Middleton
won't ask us any more this bout. Goodby I am sorry
Miss Marianne was not here. Remember me kindly to her.
La if you have not got your spotted muslin onI wonder
you was not afraid of its being torn."
Such was her parting concern for after this, she had
time only to pay her farewell compliments to Mrs. Jennings,
before her company was claimed by Mrs. Richardson
and Elinor was left in possession of knowledge which
might feed her powers of reflection some time, though she
had learnt very little more than what had been already
foreseen and foreplanned in her own mind. Edward's marriage
with Lucy was as firmly determined on, and the time
of its taking place remained as absolutely uncertain,
as she had concluded it would beevery thing depended,
exactly after her expectation, on his getting that preferment,
of which, at present, there seemed not the smallest chance.
As soon as they returned to the carriage,
Mrs. Jennings was eager for information but as Elinor
wished to spread as little as possible intelligence
that had in the first place been so unfairly obtained,
she confined herself to the brief repetition of such
simple particulars, as she felt assured that Lucy,
for the sake of her own consequence, would choose
to have known. The continuance of their engagement,
and the means that were able to be taken for promoting
its end, was all her communication and this produced
from Mrs. Jennings the following natural remark.
"Wait for his having a livingay, we all know how
THAT will endthey will wait a twelvemonth, and finding
no good comes of it, will set down upon a curacy of fifty
pounds ayear, with the interest of his two thousand pounds,
and what little matter Mr. Steele and Mr. Pratt can
give her.Then they will have a child every year and
Lord help 'em how poor they will beI must see
what I can give them towards furnishing their house.
Two maids and two men, indeedas I talked of t'other
day.No, no, they must get a stout girl of all works.
Betty's sister would never do for them NOW."
The next morning brought Elinor a letter by the
twopenny post from Lucy herself. It was as follows
"Bartlett's Building, March.
"I hope my dear Miss Dashwood will excuse the
liberty I take of writing to her but I know your
friendship for me will make you pleased to hear such
a good account of myself and my dear Edward, after
all the troubles we have went through lately,
therefore will make no more apologies, but proceed
to say that, thank God though we have suffered
dreadfully, we are both quite well now, and as happy
as we must always be in one another's love. We have
had great trials, and great persecutions, but
however, at the same time, gratefully acknowledge
many friends, yourself not the least among them,
whose great kindness I shall always thankfully
remember, as will Edward too, who I have told of
it. I am sure you will be glad to hear, as likewise
dear Mrs. Jennings, I spent two happy hours with
him yesterday afternoon, he would not hear of our
parting, though earnestly did I, as I thought my
duty required, urge him to it for prudence sake,
and would have parted for ever on the spot, would
he consent to it but he said it should never be,
he did not regard his mother's anger, while he could
have my affections our prospects are not very
bright, to be sure, but we must wait, and hope for
the best he will be ordained shortly and should
it ever be in your power to recommend him to any
body that has a living to bestow, am very sure you
will not forget us, and dear Mrs. Jennings too,
trust she will speak a good word for us to Sir John,
or Mr. Palmer, or any friend that may be able to
assist us.Poor Anne was much to blame for what
she did, but she did it for the best, so I say
nothing hope Mrs. Jennings won't think it too much
trouble to give us a call, should she come this way
any morning, 'twould be a great kindness, and my
cousins would be proud to know her.My paper reminds
me to conclude and begging to be most gratefully
and respectfully remembered to her, and to Sir John,
and Lady Middleton, and the dear children, when you
chance to see them, and love to Miss Marianne,
"I am, c."
As soon as Elinor had finished it, she performed
what she concluded to be its writer's real design,
by placing it in the hands of Mrs. Jennings, who read it
aloud with many comments of satisfaction and praise.
"Very well indeedhow prettily she writesaye,
that was quite proper to let him be off if he would.
That was just like Lucy.Poor soul I wish I COULD get
him a living, with all my heart.She calls me dear
Mrs. Jennings, you see. She is a goodhearted girl
as ever lived.Very well upon my word. That sentence
is very prettily turned. Yes, yes, I will go and see her,
sure enough. How attentive she is, to think of every
bodyThank you, my dear, for shewing it me. It is
as pretty a letter as ever I saw, and does Lucy's head
and heart great credit."
CHAPTER 
The Miss Dashwoods had now been rather more than
two months in town, and Marianne's impatience to be gone
increased every day. She sighed for the air, the liberty,
the quiet of the country and fancied that if any place
could give her ease, Barton must do it. Elinor was hardly
less anxious than herself for their removal, and only so much
less bent on its being effected immediately, as that she
was conscious of the difficulties of so long a journey,
which Marianne could not be brought to acknowledge.
She began, however, seriously to turn her thoughts towards
its accomplishment, and had already mentioned their wishes
to their kind hostess, who resisted them with all the
eloquence of her goodwill, when a plan was suggested,
which, though detaining them from home yet a few weeks
longer, appeared to Elinor altogether much more eligible
than any other. The Palmers were to remove to Cleveland
about the end of March, for the Easter holidays
and Mrs. Jennings, with both her friends, received a very
warm invitation from Charlotte to go with them. This would
not, in itself, have been sufficient for the delicacy of
Miss Dashwoodbut it was inforced with so much real
politeness by Mr. Palmer himself, as, joined to the very
great amendment of his manners towards them since her
sister had been known to be unhappy, induced her to accept
it with pleasure.
When she told Marianne what she had done, however,
her first reply was not very auspicious.
"Cleveland"she cried, with great agitation.
"No, I cannot go to Cleveland."
"You forget," said Elinor gently, "that its situation
is not...that it is not in the neighbourhood of..."
"But it is in Somersetshire.I cannot go
into Somersetshire.There, where I looked forward
to going...No, Elinor, you cannot expect me to go there."
Elinor would not argue upon the propriety of overcoming
such feelingsshe only endeavoured to counteract them by
working on othersrepresented it, therefore, as a measure
which would fix the time of her returning to that dear mother,
whom she so much wished to see, in a more eligible,
more comfortable manner, than any other plan could do,
and perhaps without any greater delay. From Cleveland,
which was within a few miles of Bristol, the distance to
Barton was not beyond one day, though a long day's journey
and their mother's servant might easily come there to attend
them down and as there could be no occasion of their
staying above a week at Cleveland, they might now be at
home in little more than three weeks' time. As Marianne's
affection for her mother was sincere, it must triumph
with little difficulty, over the imaginary evils she had started.
Mrs. Jennings was so far from being weary of her guest,
that she pressed them very earnestly to return with her again
from Cleveland. Elinor was grateful for the attention,
but it could not alter her design and their mother's
concurrence being readily gained, every thing relative
to their return was arranged as far as it could be
and Marianne found some relief in drawing up a statement
of the hours that were yet to divide her from Barton.
"Ah Colonel, I do not know what you and I shall
do without the Miss Dashwoods"was Mrs. Jennings's
address to him when he first called on her, after their
leaving her was settled"for they are quite resolved
upon going home from the Palmersand how forlorn we
shall be, when I come backLord we shall sit and gape
at one another as dull as two cats."
Perhaps Mrs. Jennings was in hopes, by this vigorous
sketch of their future ennui, to provoke him to make
that offer, which might give himself an escape from it
and if so, she had soon afterwards good reason to think
her object gained for, on Elinor's moving to the window
to take more expeditiously the dimensions of a print,
which she was going to copy for her friend, he followed
her to it with a look of particular meaning, and conversed
with her there for several minutes. The effect of his
discourse on the lady too, could not escape her observation,
for though she was too honorable to listen, and had even
changed her seat, on purpose that she might NOT hear,
to one close by the piano forte on which Marianne
was playing, she could not keep herself from seeing
that Elinor changed colour, attended with agitation,
and was too intent on what he said to pursue her employment.
Still farther in confirmation of her hopes, in the interval
of Marianne's turning from one lesson to another,
some words of the Colonel's inevitably reached her ear,
in which he seemed to be apologising for the badness
of his house. This set the matter beyond a doubt.
She wondered, indeed, at his thinking it necessary
to do so but supposed it to be the proper etiquette.
What Elinor said in reply she could not distinguish,
but judged from the motion of her lips, that she did
not think THAT any material objectionand Mrs. Jennings
commended her in her heart for being so honest.
They then talked on for a few minutes longer without her
catching a syllable, when another lucky stop in Marianne's
performance brought her these words in the Colonel's calm voice,
"I am afraid it cannot take place very soon."
Astonished and shocked at so unloverlike a speech,
she was almost ready to cry out, "Lord what should
hinder it?"but checking her desire, confined herself
to this silent ejaculation.
"This is very strangesure he need not wait to be older."
This delay on the Colonel's side, however, did not
seem to offend or mortify his fair companion in the least,
for on their breaking up the conference soon afterwards,
and moving different ways, Mrs. Jennings very plainly heard
Elinor say, and with a voice which shewed her to feel what she said,
"I shall always think myself very much obliged to you."
Mrs. Jennings was delighted with her gratitude,
and only wondered that after hearing such a sentence,
the Colonel should be able to take leave of them, as he
immediately did, with the utmost sangfroid, and go away
without making her any replyShe had not thought her old
friend could have made so indifferent a suitor.
What had really passed between them was to this effect.
"I have heard," said he, with great compassion,
"of the injustice your friend Mr. Ferrars has suffered
from his family for if I understand the matter right,
he has been entirely cast off by them for persevering
in his engagement with a very deserving young woman.
Have I been rightly informed?Is it so?"
Elinor told him that it was.
"The cruelty, the impolitic cruelty,"he replied,
with great feeling,"of dividing, or attempting to divide,
two young people long attached to each other, is terrible.
Mrs. Ferrars does not know what she may be doingwhat
she may drive her son to. I have seen Mr. Ferrars two
or three times in Harley Street, and am much pleased
with him. He is not a young man with whom one can
be intimately acquainted in a short time, but I have
seen enough of him to wish him well for his own sake,
and as a friend of yours, I wish it still more.
I understand that he intends to take orders. Will you
be so good as to tell him that the living of Delaford,
now just vacant, as I am informed by this day's post,
is his, if he think it worth his acceptancebut THAT,
perhaps, so unfortunately circumstanced as he is now,
it may be nonsense to appear to doubt I only wish it
were more valuable. It is a rectory, but a small one
the late incumbent, I believe, did not make more than
 L per annum, and though it is certainly capable
of improvement, I fear, not to such an amount as
to afford him a very comfortable income. Such as it is,
however, my pleasure in presenting him to it,
will be very great. Pray assure him of it."
Elinor's astonishment at this commission could
hardly have been greater, had the Colonel been really
making her an offer of his hand. The preferment,
which only two days before she had considered as hopeless
for Edward, was already provided to enable him to marry
and SHE, of all people in the world, was fixed on to
bestow itHer emotion was such as Mrs. Jennings had
attributed to a very different causebut whatever minor
feelings less pure, less pleasing, might have a share
in that emotion, her esteem for the general benevolence,
and her gratitude for the particular friendship,
which together prompted Colonel Brandon to this act,
were strongly felt, and warmly expressed. She thanked him
for it with all her heart, spoke of Edward's principles and
disposition with that praise which she knew them to deserve
and promised to undertake the commission with pleasure,
if it were really his wish to put off so agreeable an office
to another. But at the same time, she could not help
thinking that no one could so well perform it as himself.
It was an office in short, from which, unwilling to give
Edward the pain of receiving an obligation from HER,
she would have been very glad to be spared herself
but Colonel Brandon, on motives of equal delicacy,
declining it likewise, still seemed so desirous of its being
given through her means, that she would not on any account
make farther opposition. Edward, she believed, was still in
town,
and fortunately she had heard his address from Miss Steele.
She could undertake therefore to inform him of it,
in the course of the day. After this had been settled,
Colonel Brandon began to talk of his own advantage
in securing so respectable and agreeable a neighbour,
and THEN it was that he mentioned with regret, that the
house was small and indifferentan evil which Elinor,
as Mrs. Jennings had supposed her to do, made very light of,
at least as far as regarded its size.
"The smallness of the house," said she,
"I cannot imagine any inconvenience to them,
for it will be in proportion to their family and income."
By which the Colonel was surprised to find that SHE
was considering Mr. Ferrars's marriage as the certain
consequence of the presentation for he did not suppose it
possible that Delaford living could supply such an income,
as anybody in his style of life would venture to settle on
and he said so.
"This little rectory CAN do no more than make Mr. Ferrars
comfortable as a bachelor it cannot enable him to marry.
I am sorry to say that my patronage ends with this
and my interest is hardly more extensive. If, however,
by an unforeseen chance it should be in my power to serve
him farther, I must think very differently of him
from what I now do, if I am not as ready to be useful
to him then as I sincerely wish I could be at present.
What I am now doing indeed, seems nothing at all,
since it can advance him so little towards what must
be his principal, his only object of happiness.
His marriage must still be a distant goodat least,
I am afraid it cannot take place very soon."
Such was the sentence which, when misunderstood,
so justly offended the delicate feelings of Mrs. Jennings
but after this narration of what really passed between
Colonel Brandon and Elinor, while they stood at the window,
the gratitude expressed by the latter on their parting, may
perhaps appear in general, not less reasonably excited,
nor less properly worded than if it had arisen from
an offer of marriage.
CHAPTER 
"Well, Miss Dashwood," said Mrs. Jennings,
sagaciously smiling, as soon as the gentleman had withdrawn,
"I do not ask you what the Colonel has been saying to you
for though, upon my honour, I TRIED to keep out of hearing,
I could not help catching enough to understand his business.
And I assure you I never was better pleased in my life,
and I wish you joy of it with all my heart."
"Thank you, ma'am," said Elinor. "It is a matter
of great joy to me and I feel the goodness of Colonel
Brandon most sensibly. There are not many men who would
act as he has done. Few people who have so compassionate
a heart I never was more astonished in my life."
"Lord my dear, you are very modest. I an't the least
astonished at it in the world, for I have often thought
of late, there was nothing more likely to happen."
"You judged from your knowledge of the Colonel's
general benevolence but at least you could not foresee
that the opportunity would so very soon occur."
"Opportunity" repeated Mrs. Jennings"Oh as to that,
when a man has once made up his mind to such a thing,
somehow or other he will soon find an opportunity.
Well, my dear, I wish you joy of it again and again
and if ever there was a happy couple in the world, I think
I shall soon know where to look for them."
"You mean to go to Delaford after them I suppose,"
said Elinor, with a faint smile.
"Aye, my dear, that I do, indeed. And as to the house
being a bad one, I do not know what the Colonel would be at,
for it is as good a one as ever I saw."
"He spoke of its being out of repair."
"Well, and whose fault is that? why don't he repair it?
who should do it but himself?"
They were interrupted by the servant's coming in to
announce the carriage being at the door and Mrs. Jennings
immediately preparing to go, said,
"Well, my dear, I must be gone before I have had half
my talk out. But, however, we may have it all over in
the evening for we shall be quite alone. I do not ask
you to go with me, for I dare say your mind is too full
of the matter to care for company and besides, you must
long to tell your sister all about it."
Marianne had left the room before the conversation began.
"Certainly, ma'am, I shall tell Marianne of it
but I shall not mention it at present to any body else."
"Oh very well," said Mrs. Jennings rather disappointed.
"Then you would not have me tell it to Lucy, for I think
of going as far as Holborn today."
"No, ma'am, not even Lucy if you please.
One day's delay will not be very material and till I
have written to Mr. Ferrars, I think it ought not to be
mentioned to any body else. I shall do THAT directly.
It is of importance that no time should be lost with him,
for he will of course have much to do relative to
his ordination."
This speech at first puzzled Mrs. Jennings exceedingly.
Why Mr. Ferrars was to have been written to about it
in such a hurry, she could not immediately comprehend.
A few moments' reflection, however, produced a very happy idea,
and she exclaimed
"Oh, hoI understand you. Mr. Ferrars is to be
the man. Well, so much the better for him. Ay, to be sure,
he must be ordained in readiness and I am very glad
to find things are so forward between you. But, my dear,
is not this rather out of character? Should not the Colonel
write himself?sure, he is the proper person."
Elinor did not quite understand the beginning of
Mrs. Jennings's speech, neither did she think it worth
inquiring into and therefore only replied to its conclusion.
"Colonel Brandon is so delicate a man, that he rather
wished any one to announce his intentions to Mr. Ferrars
than himself."
"And so YOU are forced to do it. Well THAT is an odd
kind of delicacy However, I will not disturb you seeing
her preparing to write. You know your own concerns best.
So goodby, my dear. I have not heard of any thing to
please me so well since Charlotte was brought to bed."
And away she went but returning again in a moment,
"I have just been thinking of Betty's sister, my dear.
I should be very glad to get her so good a mistress.
But whether she would do for a lady's maid, I am sure I
can't tell. She is an excellent housemaid, and works
very well at her needle. However, you will think of all
that at your leisure."
"Certainly, ma'am," replied Elinor, not hearing
much of what she said, and more anxious to be alone,
than to be mistress of the subject.
How she should beginhow she should express
herself in her note to Edward, was now all her concern.
The particular circumstances between them made
a difficulty of that which to any other person would
have been the easiest thing in the world but she
equally feared to say too much or too little, and sat
deliberating over her paper, with the pen in her hand,
till broken in on by the entrance of Edward himself.
He had met Mrs. Jennings at the door in her way to
the carriage, as he came to leave his farewell card and she,
after apologising for not returning herself, had obliged
him to enter, by saying that Miss Dashwood was above,
and wanted to speak with him on very particular business.
Elinor had just been congratulating herself,
in the midst of her perplexity, that however difficult it
might be to express herself properly by letter, it was
at least preferable to giving the information by word
of mouth, when her visitor entered, to force her upon this
greatest exertion of all. Her astonishment and confusion
were very great on his so sudden appearance. She had
not seen him before since his engagement became public,
and therefore not since his knowing her to be acquainted
with it which, with the consciousness of what she
had been thinking of, and what she had to tell him,
made her feel particularly uncomfortable for some minutes.
He too was much distressed and they sat down together
in a most promising state of embarrassment.Whether he
had asked her pardon for his intrusion on first coming
into the room, he could not recollect but determining
to be on the safe side, he made his apology in form
as soon as he could say any thing, after taking a chair.
"Mrs. Jennings told me," said he, "that you wished
to speak with me, at least I understood her soor I
certainly should not have intruded on you in such a manner
though at the same time, I should have been extremely
sorry to leave London without seeing you and your sister
especially as it will most likely be some timeit
is not probable that I should soon have the pleasure
of meeting you again. I go to Oxford tomorrow."
"You would not have gone, however," said Elinor,
recovering herself, and determined to get over what she
so much dreaded as soon as possible, "without receiving
our good wishes, even if we had not been able to give them
in person. Mrs. Jennings was quite right in what she said.
I have something of consequence to inform you of,
which I was on the point of communicating by paper.
I am charged with a most agreeable office breathing
rather faster than usual as she spoke. Colonel Brandon,
who was here only ten minutes ago, has desired me to say,
that understanding you mean to take orders, he has
great pleasure in offering you the living of Delaford
now just vacant, and only wishes it were more valuable.
Allow me to congratulate you on having so respectable
and welljudging a friend, and to join in his wish that
the livingit is about two hundred ayearwere much
more considerable, and such as might better enable you
toas might be more than a temporary accommodation to
yourselfsuch, in short, as might establish all your views
of happiness."
What Edward felt, as he could not say it himself,
it cannot be expected that any one else should say for him.
He LOOKED all the astonishment which such unexpected,
such unthoughtof information could not fail of exciting
but he said only these two words,
"Colonel Brandon"
"Yes," continued Elinor, gathering more resolution,
as some of the worst was over, "Colonel Brandon means
it as a testimony of his concern for what has lately
passedfor the cruel situation in which the unjustifiable
conduct of your family has placed youa concern
which I am sure Marianne, myself, and all your friends,
must share and likewise as a proof of his high esteem
for your general character, and his particular approbation
of your behaviour on the present occasion."
"Colonel Brandon give ME a livingCan it be possible?"
"The unkindness of your own relations has made you
astonished to find friendship any where."
"No," replied be, with sudden consciousness, "not to
find it in YOU for I cannot be ignorant that to you,
to your goodness, I owe it all.I feel itI would express
it if I couldbut, as you well know, I am no orator."
"You are very much mistaken. I do assure you
that you owe it entirely, at least almost entirely,
to your own merit, and Colonel Brandon's discernment
of it. I have had no hand in it. I did not even know,
till I understood his design, that the living was vacant
nor had it ever occurred to me that he might have
had such a living in his gift. As a friend of mine,
of my family, he may, perhapsindeed I know he HAS,
still greater pleasure in bestowing it but, upon my word,
you owe nothing to my solicitation."
Truth obliged her to acknowledge some small share
in the action, but she was at the same time so unwilling
to appear as the benefactress of Edward, that she acknowledged
it with hesitation which probably contributed to fix
that suspicion in his mind which had recently entered it.
For a short time he sat deep in thought, after Elinor had ceased
to speakat last, and as if it were rather an effort, he said,
"Colonel Brandon seems a man of great worth and respectability.
I have always heard him spoken of as such, and your brother
I know esteems him highly. He is undoubtedly a sensible man,
and in his manners perfectly the gentleman."
"Indeed," replied Elinor, "I believe that you will find him,
on farther acquaintance, all that you have heard him to be,
and as you will be such very near neighbours for I understand
the parsonage is almost close to the mansionhouse,
it is particularly important that he SHOULD be all this."
Edward made no answer but when she had turned
away her head, gave her a look so serious, so earnest,
so uncheerful, as seemed to say, that he might hereafter wish
the distance between the parsonage and the mansionhouse
much greater.
"Colonel Brandon, I think, lodges in St. James Street,"
said he, soon afterwards, rising from his chair.
Elinor told him the number of the house.
"I must hurry away then, to give him those thanks
which you will not allow me to give YOU to assure him
that he has made me a veryan exceedingly happy man."
Elinor did not offer to detain him and they parted,
with a very earnest assurance on HER side of her unceasing
good wishes for his happiness in every change of situation
that might befall him on HIS, with rather an attempt to
return the same good will, than the power of expressing it.
"When I see him again," said Elinor to herself,
as the door shut him out, "I shall see him the husband
of Lucy."
And with this pleasing anticipation, she sat down
to reconsider the past, recall the words and endeavour
to comprehend all the feelings of Edward and, of course,
to reflect on her own with discontent.
When Mrs. Jennings came home, though she returned
from seeing people whom she had never seen before,
and of whom therefore she must have a great deal to say,
her mind was so much more occupied by the important secret
in her possession, than by anything else, that she
reverted to it again as soon as Elinor appeared.
"Well, my dear," she cried, "I sent you up to the
young man. Did not I do right?And I suppose you had
no great difficultyYou did not find him very unwilling
to accept your proposal?"
"No, ma'am THAT was not very likely."
"Well, and how soon will he be ready?For it seems
all to depend upon that."
"Really," said Elinor, "I know so little of these kind
of forms, that I can hardly even conjecture as to the time,
or the preparation necessary but I suppose two or three
months will complete his ordination."
"Two or three months" cried Mrs. Jennings "Lord my dear,
how calmly you talk of it and can the Colonel wait two
or three months Lord bless meI am sure it would put ME
quite out of patienceAnd though one would be very glad
to do a kindness by poor Mr. Ferrars, I do think it is
not worth while to wait two or three months for him.
Sure somebody else might be found that would do as well
somebody that is in orders already."
"My dear ma'am," said Elinor, "what can you be thinking of?
Why, Colonel Brandon's only object is to be of use to Mr. Ferrars."
"Lord bless you, my dearSure you do not mean to persuade
me that the Colonel only marries you for the sake of giving
ten guineas to Mr. Ferrars"
The deception could not continue after this
and an explanation immediately took place, by which both
gained considerable amusement for the moment, without any
material loss of happiness to either, for Mrs. Jennings
only exchanged one form of delight for another, and still
without forfeiting her expectation of the first.
"Aye, aye, the parsonage is but a small one," said she,
after the first ebullition of surprise and satisfaction
was over, "and very likely MAY be out of repair but to hear
a man apologising, as I thought, for a house that to my
knowledge has five sitting rooms on the groundfloor, and I
think the housekeeper told me could make up fifteen beds
and to you too, that had been used to live in Barton cottage
It seems quite ridiculous. But, my dear, we must
touch up the Colonel to do some thing to the parsonage,
and make it comfortable for them, before Lucy goes to it."
"But Colonel Brandon does not seem to have any idea
of the living's being enough to allow them to marry."
"The Colonel is a ninny, my dear because he has two
thousand ayear himself, he thinks that nobody else can marry
on less. Take my word for it, that, if I am alive, I shall
be paying a visit at Delaford Parsonage before Michaelmas
and I am sure I shan't go if Lucy an't there."
Elinor was quite of her opinion, as to the probability
of their not waiting for any thing more.
CHAPTER 
Edward, having carried his thanks to Colonel Brandon,
proceeded with his happiness to Lucy and such was the
excess of it by the time he reached Bartlett's Buildings,
that she was able to assure Mrs. Jennings, who called
on her again the next day with her congratulations,
that she had never seen him in such spirits before
in her life.
Her own happiness, and her own spirits, were at
least very certain and she joined Mrs. Jennings most
heartily in her expectation of their being all comfortably
together in Delaford Parsonage before Michaelmas.
So far was she, at the same time, from any backwardness
to give Elinor that credit which Edward WOULD give her,
that she spoke of her friendship for them both with the most
grateful warmth, was ready to own all their obligation
to her, and openly declared that no exertion for their
good on Miss Dashwood's part, either present or future,
would ever surprise her, for she believed her capable of
doing any thing in the world for those she really valued.
As for Colonel Brandon, she was not only ready to worship
him as a saint, but was moreover truly anxious that
he should be treated as one in all worldly concerns
anxious that his tithes should be raised to the utmost
and scarcely resolved to avail herself, at Delaford,
as far as she possibly could, of his servants, his carriage,
his cows, and his poultry.
It was now above a week since John Dashwood had
called in Berkeley Street, and as since that time no notice
had been taken by them of his wife's indisposition,
beyond one verbal enquiry, Elinor began to feel it
necessary to pay her a visit.This was an obligation,
however, which not only opposed her own inclination,
but which had not the assistance of any encouragement
from her companions. Marianne, not contented with
absolutely refusing to go herself, was very urgent
to prevent her sister's going at all and Mrs. Jennings,
though her carriage was always at Elinor's service,
so very much disliked Mrs. John Dashwood, that not even her
curiosity to see how she looked after the late discovery,
nor her strong desire to affront her by taking Edward's part,
could overcome her unwillingness to be in her company again.
The consequence was, that Elinor set out by herself
to pay a visit, for which no one could really have
less inclination, and to run the risk of a teteatete
with a woman, whom neither of the others had so much
reason to dislike.
Mrs. Dashwood was denied but before the carriage could
turn from the house, her husband accidentally came out.
He expressed great pleasure in meeting Elinor, told her
that he had been just going to call in Berkeley Street,
and, assuring her that Fanny would be very glad to see her,
invited her to come in.
They walked up stairs in to the drawingroom.Nobody was there.
"Fanny is in her own room, I suppose," said he"I
will go to her presently, for I am sure she will not
have the least objection in the world to seeing YOU.
Very far from it, indeed. NOW especially there
cannot bebut however, you and Marianne were always
great favourites.Why would not Marianne come?"
Elinor made what excuse she could for her.
"I am not sorry to see you alone," he replied,
"for I have a good deal to say to you. This living
of Colonel Brandon'scan it be true?has he really given
it to Edward?I heard it yesterday by chance, and was
coming to you on purpose to enquire farther about it."
"It is perfectly true.Colonel Brandon has given
the living of Delaford to Edward."
"ReallyWell, this is very astonishingno
relationshipno connection between themand now
that livings fetch such a pricewhat was the value of this?"
"About two hundred a year."
"Very welland for the next presentation to a living
of that valuesupposing the late incumbent to have
been old and sickly, and likely to vacate it soonhe
might have got I dare sayfourteen hundred pounds.
And how came he not to have settled that matter before this
person's death?NOW indeed it would be too late to sell it,
but a man of Colonel Brandon's senseI wonder he should
be so improvident in a point of such common, such natural,
concernWell, I am convinced that there is a vast deal
of inconsistency in almost every human character. I suppose,
howeveron recollectionthat the case may probably be THIS.
Edward is only to hold the living till the person to whom
the Colonel has really sold the presentation, is old enough
to take it.Aye, aye, that is the fact, depend upon it."
Elinor contradicted it, however, very positively
and by relating that she had herself been employed
in conveying the offer from Colonel Brandon to Edward,
and, therefore, must understand the terms on which it
was given, obliged him to submit to her authority.
"It is truly astonishing"he cried, after hearing
what she said"what could be the Colonel's motive?"
"A very simple oneto be of use to Mr. Ferrars."
"Well, well whatever Colonel Brandon may be,
Edward is a very lucky man.You will not mention the matter
to Fanny, however, for though I have broke it to her,
and she bears it vastly well,she will not like to hear
it much talked of."
Elinor had some difficulty here to refrain from observing,
that she thought Fanny might have borne with composure,
an acquisition of wealth to her brother, by which neither
she nor her child could be possibly impoverished.
"Mrs. Ferrars," added he, lowering his voice to the
tone becoming so important a subject, "knows nothing
about it at present, and I believe it will be best to
keep it entirely concealed from her as long as may be.
When the marriage takes place, I fear she must hear
of it all."
"But why should such precaution be used?Though
it is not to be supposed that Mrs. Ferrars can have
the smallest satisfaction in knowing that her son has
money enough to live upon,for THAT must be quite
out of the question yet why, upon her late behaviour,
is she supposed to feel at all?She has done with her
son, she cast him off for ever, and has made all those
over whom she had any influence, cast him off likewise.
Surely, after doing so, she cannot be imagined liable
to any impression of sorrow or of joy on his account
she cannot be interested in any thing that befalls him.
She would not be so weak as to throw away the comfort
of a child, and yet retain the anxiety of a parent"
"Ah Elinor," said John, "your reasoning is very good,
but it is founded on ignorance of human nature.
When Edward's unhappy match takes place, depend upon it
his mother will feel as much as if she had never discarded him
and, therefore every circumstance that may accelerate that
dreadful event, must be concealed from her as much as possible.
Mrs. Ferrars can never forget that Edward is her son."
"You surprise me I should think it must nearly
have escaped her memory by THIS time."
"You wrong her exceedingly. Mrs. Ferrars is one
of the most affectionate mothers in the world."
Elinor was silent.
"We think NOW,"said Mr. Dashwood, after a short pause,
"of ROBERT'S marrying Miss Morton."
Elinor, smiling at the grave and decisive importance
of her brother's tone, calmly replied,
"The lady, I suppose, has no choice in the affair."
"Choicehow do you mean?"
"I only mean that I suppose, from your manner
of speaking, it must be the same to Miss Morton whether
she marry Edward or Robert."
"Certainly, there can be no difference for Robert
will now to all intents and purposes be considered
as the eldest sonand as to any thing else, they are
both very agreeable young men I do not know that one
is superior to the other."
Elinor said no more, and John was also for a short
time silent.His reflections ended thus.
"Of ONE thing, my dear sister," kindly taking her hand,
and speaking in an awful whisper,"I may assure you
and I WILL do it, because I know it must gratify you.
I have good reason to thinkindeed I have it from the
best authority, or I should not repeat it, for otherwise
it would be very wrong to say any thing about itbut
I have it from the very best authoritynot that I ever
precisely heard Mrs. Ferrars say it herselfbut her
daughter DID, and I have it from herThat in short,
whatever objections there might be against a certaina
certain connectionyou understand meit would have been
far preferable to her, it would not have given her half
the vexation that THIS does. I was exceedingly pleased
to hear that Mrs. Ferrars considered it in that light
a very gratifying circumstance you know to us all.
'It would have been beyond comparison,' she said, 'the least
evil of the two, and she would be glad to compound NOW
for nothing worse.' But however, all that is quite out
of the questionnot to be thought of or mentioned
as to any attachment you knowit never could beall
that is gone by. But I thought I would just tell you
of this, because I knew how much it must please you.
Not that you have any reason to regret, my dear Elinor. There
is no doubt of your doing exceedingly wellquite as well,
or better, perhaps, all things considered. Has Colonel
Brandon been with you lately?"
Elinor had heard enough, if not to gratify her vanity,
and raise her selfimportance, to agitate her nerves
and fill her mindand she was therefore glad to be
spared from the necessity of saying much in reply herself,
and from the danger of hearing any thing more from
her brother, by the entrance of Mr. Robert Ferrars.
After a few moments' chat, John Dashwood, recollecting that
Fanny was yet uninformed of her sister's being there,
quitted the room in quest of her and Elinor was left
to improve her acquaintance with Robert, who, by the
gay unconcern, the happy selfcomplacency of his manner
while enjoying so unfair a division of his mother's love
and liberality, to the prejudice of his banished brother,
earned only by his own dissipated course of life, and that
brother's integrity, was confirming her most unfavourable
opinion of his head and heart.
They had scarcely been two minutes by themselves,
before he began to speak of Edward for he, too, had heard
of the living, and was very inquisitive on the subject.
Elinor repeated the particulars of it, as she had given them
to John and their effect on Robert, though very different,
was not less striking than it had been on HIM. He laughed
most immoderately. The idea of Edward's being a clergyman,
and living in a small parsonagehouse, diverted him
beyond measureand when to that was added the fanciful
imagery of Edward reading prayers in a white surplice,
and publishing the banns of marriage between John Smith and
Mary Brown, he could conceive nothing more ridiculous.
Elinor, while she waited in silence and immovable
gravity, the conclusion of such folly, could not restrain
her eyes from being fixed on him with a look that spoke
all the contempt it excited. It was a look, however,
very well bestowed, for it relieved her own feelings, and gave
no intelligence to him. He was recalled from wit to wisdom,
not by any reproof of her's, but by his own sensibility.
"We may treat it as a joke," said he, at last,
recovering from the affected laugh which had considerably
lengthened out the genuine gaiety of the moment"but, upon
my soul, it is a most serious business. Poor Edward
he is ruined for ever. I am extremely sorry for it
for I know him to be a very goodhearted creature as
wellmeaning a fellow perhaps, as any in the world.
You must not judge of him, Miss Dashwood, from YOUR
slight acquaintance.Poor EdwardHis manners are certainly
not the happiest in nature.But we are not all born,
you know, with the same powers,the same address.
Poor fellowto see him in a circle of strangers
to be sure it was pitiable enoughbut upon my soul,
I believe he has as good a heart as any in the kingdom
and I declare and protest to you I never was so shocked in my
life, as when it all burst forth. I could not believe it.
My mother was the first person who told me of it
and I, feeling myself called on to act with resolution,
immediately said to her, 'My dear madam, I do not know
what you may intend to do on the occasion, but as for myself,
I must say, that if Edward does marry this young woman,
I never will see him again.' That was what I said immediately.
I was most uncommonly shocked, indeedPoor Edwardhe has
done for himself completelyshut himself out for ever from
all decent societybut, as I directly said to my mother,
I am not in the least surprised at it from his style
of education, it was always to be expected. My poor mother
was half frantic."
"Have you ever seen the lady?"
"Yes once, while she was staying in this house,
I happened to drop in for ten minutes and I saw
quite enough of her. The merest awkward country girl,
without style, or elegance, and almost without beauty.
I remember her perfectly. Just the kind of girl I
should suppose likely to captivate poor Edward.
I offered immediately, as soon as my mother related
the affair to me, to talk to him myself, and dissuade
him from the match but it was too late THEN, I found,
to do any thing, for unluckily, I was not in the way
at first, and knew nothing of it till after the breach
had taken place, when it was not for me, you know,
to interfere. But had I been informed of it a few
hours earlierI think it is most probablethat something
might have been hit on. I certainly should have represented
it to Edward in a very strong light. 'My dear fellow,'
I should have said, 'consider what you are doing.
You are making a most disgraceful connection, and such a one
as your family are unanimous in disapproving.' I cannot
help thinking, in short, that means might have been found.
But now it is all too late. He must be starved, you know
that is certain absolutely starved."
He had just settled this point with great composure,
when the entrance of Mrs. John Dashwood put an end to the
subject.
But though SHE never spoke of it out of her own family,
Elinor could see its influence on her mind, in the something
like confusion of countenance with which she entered,
and an attempt at cordiality in her behaviour to herself.
She even proceeded so far as to be concerned to find
that Elinor and her sister were so soon to leave town,
as she had hoped to see more of theman exertion
in which her husband, who attended her into the room,
and hung enamoured over her accents, seemed to distinguish
every thing that was most affectionate and graceful.
CHAPTER 
One other short call in Harley Street, in which Elinor
received her brother's congratulations on their travelling
so far towards Barton without any expense, and on Colonel
Brandon's being to follow them to Cleveland in a day or two,
completed the intercourse of the brother and sisters
in townand a faint invitation from Fanny, to come
to Norland whenever it should happen to be in their way,
which of all things was the most unlikely to occur,
with a more warm, though less public, assurance, from John
to Elinor, of the promptitude with which he should come
to see her at Delaford, was all that foretold any meeting
in the country.
It amused her to observe that all her friends seemed
determined to send her to Delaforda place, in which,
of all others, she would now least chuse to visit,
or wish to reside for not only was it considered as
her future home by her brother and Mrs. Jennings, but even Lucy,
when they parted, gave her a pressing invitation to visit her there.
Very early in April, and tolerably early in the day,
the two parties from Hanover Square and Berkeley Street set
out from their respective homes, to meet, by appointment,
on the road. For the convenience of Charlotte and her child,
they were to be more than two days on their journey,
and Mr. Palmer, travelling more expeditiously with Colonel Brandon,
was to join them at Cleveland soon after their arrival.
Marianne, few as had been her hours of comfort
in London, and eager as she had long been to quit it,
could not, when it came to the point, bid adieu to
the house in which she had for the last time enjoyed
those hopes, and that confidence, in Willoughby,
which were now extinguished for ever, without great pain.
Nor could she leave the place in which Willoughby remained,
busy in new engagements, and new schemes, in which SHE
could have no share, without shedding many tears.
Elinor's satisfaction, at the moment of removal,
was more positive. She had no such object for her lingering
thoughts to fix on, she left no creature behind, from whom
it would give her a moment's regret to be divided for ever,
she was pleased to be free herself from the persecution
of Lucy's friendship, she was grateful for bringing
her sister away unseen by Willoughby since his marriage,
and she looked forward with hope to what a few months
of tranquility at Barton might do towards restoring
Marianne's peace of mind, and confirming her own.
Their journey was safely performed. The second
day brought them into the cherished, or the prohibited,
county of Somerset, for as such was it dwelt on by turns
in Marianne's imagination and in the forenoon of the third
they drove up to Cleveland.
Cleveland was a spacious, modernbuilt house,
situated on a sloping lawn. It had no park, but the
pleasuregrounds were tolerably extensive and like
every other place of the same degree of importance,
it had its open shrubbery, and closer wood walk,
a road of smooth gravel winding round a plantation,
led to the front, the lawn was dotted over with timber,
the house itself was under the guardianship of the fir,
the mountainash, and the acacia, and a thick screen of
them altogether, interspersed with tall Lombardy poplars,
shut out the offices.
Marianne entered the house with a heart swelling
with emotion from the consciousness of being only eighty
miles from Barton, and not thirty from Combe Magna
and before she had been five minutes within its walls,
while the others were busily helping Charlotte to show
her child to the housekeeper, she quitted it again,
stealing away through the winding shrubberies, now just
beginning to be in beauty, to gain a distant eminence
where, from its Grecian temple, her eye, wandering over
a wide tract of country to the southeast, could fondly
rest on the farthest ridge of hills in the horizon,
and fancy that from their summits Combe Magna might be seen.
In such moments of precious, invaluable misery,
she rejoiced in tears of agony to be at Cleveland
and as she returned by a different circuit to the house,
feeling all the happy privilege of country liberty,
of wandering from place to place in free and luxurious solitude,
she resolved to spend almost every hour of every day
while she remained with the Palmers, in the indulgence of
such solitary rambles.
She returned just in time to join the others
as they quitted the house, on an excursion through its
more immediate premises and the rest of the morning was
easily whiled away, in lounging round the kitchen garden,
examining the bloom upon its walls, and listening to the
gardener's lamentations upon blights, in dawdling through
the greenhouse, where the loss of her favourite plants,
unwarily exposed, and nipped by the lingering frost,
raised the laughter of Charlotte,and in visiting her
poultryyard, where, in the disappointed hopes of her
dairymaid, by hens forsaking their nests, or being
stolen by a fox, or in the rapid decrease of a promising
young brood, she found fresh sources of merriment.
The morning was fine and dry, and Marianne,
in her plan of employment abroad, had not calculated
for any change of weather during their stay at Cleveland.
With great surprise therefore, did she find herself prevented
by a settled rain from going out again after dinner.
She had depended on a twilight walk to the Grecian temple,
and perhaps all over the grounds, and an evening merely
cold or damp would not have deterred her from it
but a heavy and settled rain even SHE could not fancy dry
or pleasant weather for walking.
Their party was small, and the hours passed quietly away.
Mrs. Palmer had her child, and Mrs. Jennings her carpetwork
they talked of the friends they had left behind,
arranged Lady Middleton's engagements, and wondered
whether Mr. Palmer and Colonel Brandon would get farther
than Reading that night. Elinor, however little concerned
in it, joined in their discourse and Marianne, who had
the knack of finding her way in every house to the library,
however it might be avoided by the family in general,
soon procured herself a book.
Nothing was wanting on Mrs. Palmer's side that constant
and friendly good humour could do, to make them feel
themselves welcome. The openness and heartiness of her
manner more than atoned for that want of recollection
and elegance which made her often deficient in the forms
of politeness her kindness, recommended by so pretty
a face, was engaging her folly, though evident
was not disgusting, because it was not conceited
and Elinor could have forgiven every thing but her laugh.
The two gentlemen arrived the next day to a very
late dinner, affording a pleasant enlargement of the party,
and a very welcome variety to their conversation, which a
long morning of the same continued rain had reduced very low.
Elinor had seen so little of Mr. Palmer, and in that
little had seen so much variety in his address to her
sister and herself, that she knew not what to expect
to find him in his own family. She found him, however,
perfectly the gentleman in his behaviour to all his visitors,
and only occasionally rude to his wife and her mother
she found him very capable of being a pleasant companion,
and only prevented from being so always, by too great
an aptitude to fancy himself as much superior to people
in general, as he must feel himself to be to Mrs. Jennings
and Charlotte. For the rest of his character and habits,
they were marked, as far as Elinor could perceive,
with no traits at all unusual in his sex and time of life.
He was nice in his eating, uncertain in his hours
fond of his child, though affecting to slight it
and idled away the mornings at billiards, which ought
to have been devoted to business. She liked him, however,
upon the whole, much better than she had expected, and in
her heart was not sorry that she could like him no more
not sorry to be driven by the observation of his Epicurism,
his selfishness, and his conceit, to rest with complacency
on the remembrance of Edward's generous temper, simple taste,
and diffident feelings.
Of Edward, or at least of some of his concerns,
she now received intelligence from Colonel Brandon,
who had been into Dorsetshire lately and who,
treating her at once as the disinterested friend
of Mr. Ferrars, and the kind of confidant of himself,
talked to her a great deal of the parsonage at Delaford,
described its deficiencies, and told her what he meant
to do himself towards removing them.His behaviour
to her in this, as well as in every other particular,
his open pleasure in meeting her after an absence
of only ten days, his readiness to converse with her,
and his deference for her opinion, might very well
justify Mrs. Jennings's persuasion of his attachment,
and would have been enough, perhaps, had not Elinor still,
as from the first, believed Marianne his real favourite,
to make her suspect it herself. But as it was,
such a notion had scarcely ever entered her head,
except by Mrs. Jennings's suggestion and she could
not help believing herself the nicest observer of the
twoshe watched his eyes, while Mrs. Jennings thought
only of his behaviourand while his looks of anxious
solicitude on Marianne's feeling, in her head and throat,
the beginning of a heavy cold, because unexpressed by words,
entirely escaped the latter lady's observationSHE could
discover in them the quick feelings, and needless alarm
of a lover.
Two delightful twilight walks on the third and fourth
evenings of her being there, not merely on the dry gravel
of the shrubbery, but all over the grounds, and especially
in the most distant parts of them, where there was something
more of wildness than in the rest, where the trees were
the oldest, and the grass was the longest and wettest,
hadassisted by the still greater imprudence of sitting
in her wet shoes and stockingsgiven Marianne a cold
so violent as, though for a day or two trifled with
or denied, would force itself by increasing ailments on
the concern of every body, and the notice of herself.
Prescriptions poured in from all quarters, and as usual,
were all declined. Though heavy and feverish, with a pain
in her limbs, and a cough, and a sore throat, a good night's
rest was to cure her entirely and it was with difficulty
that Elinor prevailed on her, when she went to bed,
to try one or two of the simplest of the remedies.
CHAPTER 
Marianne got up the next morning at her usual time
to every inquiry replied that she was better, and tried to
prove herself so, by engaging in her accustomary employments.
But a day spent in sitting shivering over the fire
with a book in her hand, which she was unable to read,
or in lying, weary and languid, on a sofa, did not speak
much in favour of her amendment and when, at last,
she went early to bed, more and more indisposed, Colonel
Brandon was only astonished at her sister's composure,
who, though attending and nursing her the whole day,
against Marianne's inclination, and forcing proper medicines
on her at night, trusted, like Marianne, to the certainty
and efficacy of sleep, and felt no real alarm.
A very restless and feverish night, however,
disappointed the expectation of both and when Marianne,
after persisting in rising, confessed herself unable
to sit up, and returned voluntarily to her bed,
Elinor was very ready to adopt Mrs. Jennings's advice,
of sending for the Palmers' apothecary.
He came, examined his patient, and though encouraging
Miss Dashwood to expect that a very few days would restore
her sister to health, yet, by pronouncing her disorder
to have a putrid tendency, and allowing the word "infection"
to pass his lips, gave instant alarm to Mrs. Palmer,
on her baby's account. Mrs. Jennings, who had been inclined
from the first to think Marianne's complaint more serious
than Elinor, now looked very grave on Mr. Harris's report,
and confirming Charlotte's fears and caution, urged the
necessity of her immediate removal with her infant
and Mr. Palmer, though treating their apprehensions as idle,
found the anxiety and importunity of his wife too great
to be withstood. Her departure, therefore, was fixed on
and within an hour after Mr. Harris's arrival, she set off,
with her little boy and his nurse, for the house of a
near relation of Mr. Palmer's, who lived a few miles
on the other side of Bath whither her husband promised,
at her earnest entreaty, to join her in a day or two
and whither she was almost equally urgent with her
mother to accompany her. Mrs. Jennings, however, with a
kindness of heart which made Elinor really love her,
declared her resolution of not stirring from Cleveland
as long as Marianne remained ill, and of endeavouring,
by her own attentive care, to supply to her the place
of the mother she had taken her from and Elinor found her
on every occasion a most willing and active helpmate,
desirous to share in all her fatigues, and often by her
better experience in nursing, of material use.
Poor Marianne, languid and low from the nature
of her malady, and feeling herself universally ill,
could no longer hope that tomorrow would find her recovered
and the idea of what tomorrow would have produced,
but for this unlucky illness, made every ailment severe
for on that day they were to have begun their journey home
and, attended the whole way by a servant of Mrs. Jennings,
were to have taken their mother by surprise on the
following forenoon. The little she said was all in
lamentation of this inevitable delay though Elinor tried
to raise her spirits, and make her believe, as she THEN
really believed herself, that it would be a very short one.
The next day produced little or no alteration in the
state of the patient she certainly was not better, and,
except that there was no amendment, did not appear worse.
Their party was now farther reduced for Mr. Palmer,
though very unwilling to go as well from real humanity
and goodnature, as from a dislike of appearing to be
frightened away by his wife, was persuaded at last
by Colonel Brandon to perform his promise of following her
and while he was preparing to go, Colonel Brandon himself,
with a much greater exertion, began to talk of going
likewise.Here, however, the kindness of Mrs. Jennings
interposed most acceptably for to send the Colonel away
while his love was in so much uneasiness on her sister's
account, would be to deprive them both, she thought,
of every comfort and therefore telling him at once
that his stay at Cleveland was necessary to herself,
that she should want him to play at piquet of an evening,
while Miss Dashwood was above with her sister, c. she
urged him so strongly to remain, that he, who was gratifying
the first wish of his own heart by a compliance, could not
long even affect to demur especially as Mrs. Jennings's
entreaty was warmly seconded by Mr. Palmer, who seemed
to feel a relief to himself, in leaving behind him a person
so well able to assist or advise Miss Dashwood in any emergence.
Marianne was, of course, kept in ignorance of all
these arrangements. She knew not that she had been
the means of sending the owners of Cleveland away,
in about seven days from the time of their arrival.
It gave her no surprise that she saw nothing
of Mrs. Palmer and as it gave her likewise no concern,
she never mentioned her name.
Two days passed away from the time of Mr. Palmer's departure,
and her situation continued, with little variation,
the same. Mr. Harris, who attended her every day,
still talked boldly of a speedy recovery, and Miss Dashwood
was equally sanguine but the expectation of the others
was by no means so cheerful. Mrs. Jennings had determined
very early in the seizure that Marianne would never
get over it, and Colonel Brandon, who was chiefly
of use in listening to Mrs. Jennings's forebodings,
was not in a state of mind to resist their influence.
He tried to reason himself out of fears, which the different
judgment of the apothecary seemed to render absurd
but the many hours of each day in which he was left
entirely alone, were but too favourable for the admission
of every melancholy idea, and he could not expel from
his mind the persuasion that he should see Marianne no more.
On the morning of the third day however, the gloomy
anticipations of both were almost done away for when
Mr. Harris arrived, he declared his patient materially better.
Her pulse was much stronger, and every symptom more favourable
than on the preceding visit. Elinor, confirmed in every
pleasant hope, was all cheerfulness rejoicing that
in her letters to her mother, she had pursued her own
judgment rather than her friend's, in making very light
of the indisposition which delayed them at Cleveland
and almost fixing on the time when Marianne would be
able to travel.
But the day did not close so auspiciously as it began.
Towards the evening Marianne became ill again, growing
more heavy, restless, and uncomfortable than before.
Her sister, however, still sanguine, was willing to
attribute the change to nothing more than the fatigue
of having sat up to have her bed made and carefully
administering the cordials prescribed, saw her, with
satisfaction, sink at last into a slumber, from which
she expected the most beneficial effects. Her sleep,
though not so quiet as Elinor wished to see it,
lasted a considerable time and anxious to observe
the result of it herself, she resolved to sit with her
during the whole of it. Mrs. Jennings, knowing nothing
of any change in the patient, went unusually early to bed
her maid, who was one of the principal nurses, was recreating
herself in the housekeeper's room, and Elinor remained
alone with Marianne.
The repose of the latter became more and more disturbed
and her sister, who watched, with unremitting attention
her continual change of posture, and heard the frequent
but inarticulate sounds of complaint which passed her lips,
was almost wishing to rouse her from so painful a slumber,
when Marianne, suddenly awakened by some accidental noise
in the house, started hastily up, and, with feverish wildness,
cried out,
"Is mama coming?"
"Not yet," cried the other, concealing her terror,
and assisting Marianne to lie down again, "but she will
be here, I hope, before it is long. It is a great way,
you know, from hence to Barton."
"But she must not go round by London," cried Marianne,
in the same hurried manner. "I shall never see her,
if she goes by London."
Elinor perceived with alarm that she was not
quite herself, and, while attempting to soothe her,
eagerly felt her pulse. It was lower and quicker than ever
and Marianne, still talking wildly of mama, her alarm
increased so rapidly, as to determine her on sending
instantly for Mr. Harris, and despatching a messenger
to Barton for her mother. To consult with Colonel Brandon
on the best means of effecting the latter, was a thought
which immediately followed the resolution of its performance
and as soon she had rung up the maid to take her place
by her sister, she hastened down to the drawingroom,
where she knew he was generally to be found at a much
later hour than the present.
It was no time for hesitation. Her fears and her
difficulties were immediately before him. Her fears,
he had no courage, no confidence to attempt the removal of
he listened to them in silent despondencebut her
difficulties were instantly obviated, for with a readiness
that seemed to speak the occasion, and the service
prearranged in his mind, he offered himself as the
messenger who should fetch Mrs. Dashwood. Elinor made no
resistance that was not easily overcome. She thanked him
with brief, though fervent gratitude, and while he went
to hurry off his servant with a message to Mr. Harris, and
an order for posthorses directly, she wrote a few lines
to her mother.
The comfort of such a friend at that moment as Colonel
Brandonor such a companion for her mother,how gratefully
was it felta companion whose judgment would guide,
whose attendance must relieve, and whose friendship might
soothe heras far as the shock of such a summons COULD
be lessened to her, his presence, his manners, his assistance,
would lessen it.
HE, meanwhile, whatever he might feel, acted with all
the firmness of a collected mind, made every necessary
arrangement with the utmost despatch, and calculated
with exactness the time in which she might look for
his return. Not a moment was lost in delay of any kind.
The horses arrived, even before they were expected,
and Colonel Brandon only pressing her hand with a look
of solemnity, and a few words spoken too low to reach her ear,
hurried into the carriage. It was then about twelve
o'clock, and she returned to her sister's apartment to wait
for the arrival of the apothecary, and to watch by her
the rest of the night. It was a night of almost equal
suffering to both. Hour after hour passed away in sleepless
pain and delirium on Marianne's side, and in the most
cruel anxiety on Elinor's, before Mr. Harris appeared.
Her apprehensions once raised, paid by their excess for all
her former security and the servant who sat up with her,
for she would not allow Mrs. Jennings to be called,
only tortured her more, by hints of what her mistress
had always thought.
Marianne's ideas were still, at intervals,
fixed incoherently on her mother, and whenever she
mentioned her name, it gave a pang to the heart of
poor Elinor, who, reproaching herself for having trifled
with so many days of illness, and wretched for some
immediate relief, fancied that all relief might soon
be in vain, that every thing had been delayed too long,
and pictured to herself her suffering mother arriving
too late to see this darling child, or to see her rational.
She was on the point of sending again for Mr. Harris,
or if HE could not come, for some other advice,
when the formerbut not till after five o'clockarrived.
His opinion, however, made some little amends for his delay,
for though acknowledging a very unexpected and unpleasant
alteration in his patient, he would not allow the danger
to be material, and talked of the relief which a fresh
mode of treatment must procure, with a confidence which,
in a lesser degree, was communicated to Elinor. He promised
to call again in the course of three or four hours,
and left both the patient and her anxious attendant more
composed than he had found them.
With strong concern, and with many reproaches for not
being called to their aid, did Mrs. Jennings hear in the
morning of what had passed. Her former apprehensions,
now with greater reason restored, left her no doubt of
the event and though trying to speak comfort to Elinor,
her conviction of her sister's danger would not allow her
to offer the comfort of hope. Her heart was really grieved.
The rapid decay, the early death of a girl so young,
so lovely as Marianne, must have struck a less interested
person with concern. On Mrs. Jennings's compassion
she had other claims. She had been for three months
her companion, was still under her care, and she was
known to have been greatly injured, and long unhappy.
The distress of her sister too, particularly a favourite,
was before herand as for their mother, when Mrs. Jennings
considered that Marianne might probably be to HER what
Charlotte was to herself, her sympathy in HER sufferings
was very sincere.
Mr. Harris was punctual in his second visit
but he came to be disappointed in his hopes of what the
last would produce. His medicines had failedthe fever
was unabated and Marianne only more quietnot more
herselfremained in a heavy stupor. Elinor, catching all,
and more than all, his fears in a moment, proposed to call
in further advice. But he judged it unnecessary he had
still something more to try, some more fresh application,
of whose success he was as confident as the last, and his
visit concluded with encouraging assurances which reached
the ear, but could not enter the heart of Miss Dashwood.
She was calm, except when she thought of her mother
but she was almost hopeless and in this state she continued
till noon, scarcely stirring from her sister's bed,
her thoughts wandering from one image of grief,
one suffering friend to another, and her spirits oppressed
to the utmost by the conversation of Mrs. Jennings,
who scrupled not to attribute the severity and danger
of this attack to the many weeks of previous indisposition
which Marianne's disappointment had brought on.
Elinor felt all the reasonableness of the idea, and it
gave fresh misery to her reflections.
About noon, however, she beganbut with a cautiona
dread of disappointment which for some time kept her silent,
even to her friendto fancy, to hope she could perceive
a slight amendment in her sister's pulseshe waited,
watched, and examined it again and againand at last,
with an agitation more difficult to bury under exterior calmness,
than all her foregoing distress, ventured to communicate
her hopes. Mrs. Jennings, though forced, on examination,
to acknowledge a temporary revival, tried to keep her
young friend from indulging a thought of its continuance
and Elinor, conning over every injunction of distrust,
told herself likewise not to hope. But it was too late.
Hope had already entered and feeling all its anxious flutter,
she bent over her sister to watchshe hardly knew for what.
Half an hour passed away, and the favourable symptom
yet blessed her. Others even arose to confirm it.
Her breath, her skin, her lips, all flattered Elinor
with signs of amendment and Marianne fixed her eyes on
her with a rational, though languid, gaze. Anxiety and
hope now oppressed her in equal degrees, and left her no
moment of tranquillity till the arrival of Mr. Harris at
four o'clockwhen his assurances, his felicitations on
a recovery in her sister even surpassing his expectation,
gave her confidence, comfort, and tears of joy.
Marianne was in every respect materially better,
and he declared her entirely out of danger. Mrs. Jennings,
perhaps satisfied with the partial justification of her
forebodings which had been found in their late alarm,
allowed herself to trust in his judgment, and admitted,
with unfeigned joy, and soon with unequivocal cheerfulness,
the probability of an entire recovery.
Elinor could not be cheerful. Her joy was of a
different kind, and led to any thing rather than to gaiety.
Marianne restored to life, health, friends, and to her
doting mother, was an idea to fill her heart with sensations
of exquisite comfort, and expand it in fervent gratitude
but it lead to no outward demonstrations of joy, no words,
no smiles. All within Elinor's breast was satisfaction,
silent and strong.
She continued by the side of her sister, with little
intermission the whole afternoon, calming every fear,
satisfying every inquiry of her enfeebled spirits,
supplying every succour, and watching almost every look and
every breath. The possibility of a relapse would of course,
in some moments, occur to remind her of what anxiety was
but when she saw, on her frequent and minute examination,
that every symptom of recovery continued, and saw Marianne
at six o'clock sink into a quiet, steady, and to all
appearance comfortable, sleep, she silenced every doubt.
The time was now drawing on, when Colonel Brandon
might be expected back. At ten o'clock, she trusted,
or at least not much later her mother would be relieved
from the dreadful suspense in which she must now be
travelling towards them. The Colonel, tooperhaps scarcely
less an object of pityOhhow slow was the progress
of time which yet kept them in ignorance
At seven o'clock, leaving Marianne still sweetly asleep,
she joined Mrs. Jennings in the drawingroom to tea.
Of breakfast she had been kept by her fears, and of
dinner by their sudden reverse, from eating much
and the present refreshment, therefore, with such feelings
of content as she brought to it, was particularly welcome.
Mrs. Jennings would have persuaded her, at its conclusion,
to take some rest before her mother's arrival, and allow HER to
take her place by Marianne but Elinor had no sense of fatigue,
no capability of sleep at that moment about her, and she was
not to be kept away from her sister an unnecessary instant.
Mrs. Jennings therefore attending her up stairs into the
sick chamber, to satisfy herself that all continued right,
left her there again to her charge and her thoughts,
and retired to her own room to write letters and sleep.
The night was cold and stormy. The wind roared
round the house, and the rain beat against the windows
but Elinor, all happiness within, regarded it not.
Marianne slept through every blast and the travellers
they had a rich reward in store, for every present inconvenience.
The clock struck eight. Had it been ten,
Elinor would have been convinced that at that moment
she heard a carriage driving up to the house
and so strong was the persuasion that she DID, in spite
of the ALMOST impossibility of their being already come,
that she moved into the adjoining dressingcloset and
opened a window shutter, to be satisfied of the truth.
She instantly saw that her ears had not deceived her.
The flaring lamps of a carriage were immediately in view.
By their uncertain light she thought she could discern it
to be drawn by four horses and this, while it told the
excess of her poor mother's alarm, gave some explanation
to such unexpected rapidity.
Never in her life had Elinor found it so difficult
to be calm, as at that moment. The knowledge of what her
mother must be feeling as the carriage stopt at the door
of her doubther dreadperhaps her despairand
of what SHE had to tellwith such knowledge it was
impossible to be calm. All that remained to be done
was to be speedy and, therefore staying only till
she could leave Mrs. Jennings's maid with her sister,
she hurried down stairs.
The bustle in the vestibule, as she passed along
an inner lobby, assured her that they were already
in the house. She rushed to the drawingroom,she
entered it,and saw only Willoughby.
CHAPTER 
Elinor, starting back with a look of horror at
the sight of him, obeyed the first impulse of her heart
in turning instantly to quit the room, and her hand
was already on the lock, when its action was suspended
by his hastily advancing, and saying, in a voice rather
of command than supplication,
"Miss Dashwood, for half an hourfor ten minutes
I entreat you to stay."
"No, sir," she replied with firmness, "I shall NOT stay.
Your business cannot be with ME. The servants, I suppose,
forgot to tell you that Mr. Palmer was not in the house."
"Had they told me," he cried with vehemence,
"that Mr. Palmer and all his relations were at the devil,
it would not have turned me from the door. My business
is with you, and only you."
"With me"in the utmost amazement"well, sir,
be quickand if you canless violent."
"Sit down, and I will be both."
She hesitated she knew not what to do. The possibility
of Colonel Brandon's arriving and finding her there,
came across her. But she had promised to hear him,
and her curiosity no less than her honor was engaged.
After a moment's recollection, therefore, concluding that
prudence required dispatch, and that her acquiescence would
best promote it, she walked silently towards the table,
and sat down. He took the opposite chair, and for half
a minute not a word was said by either.
"Pray be quick, sir,"said Elinor, impatiently
"I have no time to spare."
He was sitting in an attitude of deep meditation,
and seemed not to hear her.
"Your sister," said he, with abruptness, a moment
afterwards"is out of danger. I heard it from the servant.
God be praisedBut is it true? is it really true?"
Elinor would not speak. He repeated the inquiry with
yet greater eagerness.
"For God's sake tell me, is she out of danger, or is she not?"
"We hope she is."
He rose up, and walked across the room.
"Had I known as much half an hour agoBut
since I AM here,"speaking with a forced vivacity as he
returned to his seat"what does it signify?For once,
Miss Dashwoodit will be the last time, perhapslet us
be cheerful together.I am in a fine mood for gaiety.
Tell me honestly"a deeper glow overspreading his cheeks
"do you think me most a knave or a fool?"
Elinor looked at him with greater astonishment than ever.
She began to think that he must be in liquorthe
strangeness of such a visit, and of such manners,
seemed no otherwise intelligible and with this impression
she immediately rose, saying,
"Mr. Willoughby, I advise you at present to return
to CombeI am not at leisure to remain with you longer.
Whatever your business may be with me, will it be better
recollected and explained tomorrow."
"I understand you," he replied, with an expressive smile,
and a voice perfectly calm "yes, I am very drunk.
A pint of porter with my cold beef at Marlborough was
enough to overset me."
"At Marlborough"cried Elinor, more and more at
a loss to understand what he would be at.
"Yes,I left London this morning at eight o'clock,
and the only ten minutes I have spent out of my chaise
since that time procured me a nuncheon at Marlborough."
The steadiness of his manner, and the intelligence
of his eye as he spoke, convincing Elinor, that whatever
other unpardonable folly might bring him to Cleveland,
he was not brought there by intoxication, she said,
after a moment's recollection,
"Mr. Willoughby, you OUGHT to feel, and I certainly
DOthat after what has passedyour coming here in
this manner, and forcing yourself upon my notice,
requires a very particular excuse.What is it,
that you mean by it?"
"I mean,"said he, with serious energy"if I can,
to make you hate me one degree less than you do NOW.
I mean to offer some kind of explanation, some kind
of apology, for the past to open my whole heart to you,
and by convincing you, that though I have been always
a blockhead, I have not been always a rascal, to obtain
something like forgiveness from Mafrom your sister."
"Is this the real reason of your coming?"
"Upon my soul it is,"was his answer, with a warmth
which brought all the former Willoughby to her remembrance,
and in spite of herself made her think him sincere.
"If that is all, you may be satisfied already,
for Marianne DOESshe has LONG forgiven you."
"Has she?"he cried, in the same eager tone.
"Then she has forgiven me before she ought to have done it.
But she shall forgive me again, and on more reasonable
grounds.NOW will you listen to me?"
Elinor bowed her assent.
"I do not know," said he, after a pause of expectation
on her side, and thoughtfulness on his own,"how YOU
may have accounted for my behaviour to your sister,
or what diabolical motive you may have imputed to me.
Perhaps you will hardly think the better of me,it is
worth the trial however, and you shall hear every thing.
When I first became intimate in your family, I had no
other intention, no other view in the acquaintance
than to pass my time pleasantly while I was obliged to remain
in Devonshire, more pleasantly than I had ever done before.
Your sister's lovely person and interesting manners
could not but please me and her behaviour to me almost
from the first, was of a kindIt is astonishing,
when I reflect on what it was, and what SHE was, that my
heart should have been so insensible But at first
I must confess, my vanity only was elevated by it.
Careless of her happiness, thinking only of my own amusement,
giving way to feelings which I had always been too much
in the habit of indulging, I endeavoured, by every means
in my power, to make myself pleasing to her, without any
design of returning her affection."
Miss Dashwood, at this point, turning her eyes on him
with the most angry contempt, stopped him, by saying,
"It is hardly worth while, Mr. Willoughby,
for you to relate, or for me to listen any longer.
Such a beginning as this cannot be followed by any thing.
Do not let me be pained by hearing any thing more on
the subject."
"I insist on you hearing the whole of it," he replied,
"My fortune was never large, and I had always been expensive,
always in the habit of associating with people of better
income than myself. Every year since my coming of age,
or even before, I believe, had added to my debts and though
the death of my old cousin, Mrs. Smith, was to set me free
yet that event being uncertain, and possibly far distant,
it had been for some time my intention to reestablish my
circumstances by marrying a woman of fortune. To attach
myself to your sister, therefore, was not a thing to be
thought ofand with a meanness, selfishness, cruelty
which no indignant, no contemptuous look, even of yours,
Miss Dashwood, can ever reprobate too muchI was acting
in this manner, trying to engage her regard, without a
thought of returning it.But one thing may be said
for me even in that horrid state of selfish vanity,
I did not know the extent of the injury I meditated,
because I did not THEN know what it was to love.
But have I ever known it?Well may it be doubted for, had I
really loved, could I have sacrificed my feelings to vanity,
to avarice?or, what is more, could I have sacrificed hers?
But I have done it. To avoid a comparative poverty,
which her affection and her society would have deprived
of all its horrors, I have, by raising myself to affluence,
lost every thing that could make it a blessing."
"You did then," said Elinor, a little softened,
"believe yourself at one time attached to her?"
"To have resisted such attractions, to have withstood
such tendernessIs there a man on earth who could have
done it?Yes, I found myself, by insensible degrees,
sincerely fond of her and the happiest hours of my life
were what I spent with her when I felt my intentions
were strictly honourable, and my feelings blameless.
Even THEN, however, when fully determined on paying
my addresses to her, I allowed myself most improperly
to put off, from day to day, the moment of doing it,
from an unwillingness to enter into an engagement
while my circumstances were so greatly embarrassed.
I will not reason herenor will I stop for YOU to expatiate
on the absurdity, and the worse than absurdity, of scrupling
to engage my faith where my honour was already bound.
The event has proved, that I was a cunning fool,
providing with great circumspection for a possible
opportunity of making myself contemptible and wretched
for ever. At last, however, my resolution was taken,
and I had determined, as soon as I could engage her alone,
to justify the attentions I had so invariably paid her,
and openly assure her of an affection which I had already
taken such pains to display. But in the interimin the
interim of the very few hours that were to pass, before I
could have an opportunity of speaking with her in private
a circumstance occurredan unlucky circumstance, to ruin
all my resolution, and with it all my comfort. A discovery
took place,"here he hesitated and looked down."Mrs. Smith
had somehow or other been informed, I imagine by some
distant relation, whose interest it was to deprive me of
her favour, of an affair, a connectionbut I need not
explain myself farther," he added, looking at her with an
heightened colour and an enquiring eye"your particular
intimacyyou have probably heard the whole story long ago."
"I have," returned Elinor, colouring likewise,
and hardening her heart anew against any compassion for him,
"I have heard it all. And how you will explain away any
part of your guilt in that dreadful business, I confess
is beyond my comprehension."
"Remember," cried Willoughby, "from whom you received
the account. Could it be an impartial one? I acknowledge
that her situation and her character ought to have been
respected by me. I do not mean to justify myself, but at
the same time cannot leave you to suppose that I have nothing
to urgethat because she was injured she was irreproachable,
and because I was a libertine, SHE must be a saint.
If the violence of her passions, the weakness of her
understandingI do not mean, however, to defend myself.
Her affection for me deserved better treatment, and I often,
with great selfreproach, recall the tenderness which,
for a very short time, had the power of creating any return.
I wishI heartily wish it had never been. But I have injured
more than herself and I have injured one, whose affection
for memay I say it? was scarcely less warm than hers
and whose mindOh how infinitely superior"
"Your indifference, however, towards that unfortunate
girlI must say it, unpleasant to me as the discussion
of such a subject may well beyour indifference is no
apology for your cruel neglect of her. Do not think yourself
excused by any weakness, any natural defect of understanding
on her side, in the wanton cruelty so evident on yours.
You must have known, that while you were enjoying yourself
in Devonshire pursuing fresh schemes, always gay,
always happy, she was reduced to the extremest indigence."
"But, upon my soul, I did NOT know it," he warmly
replied "I did not recollect that I had omitted to give
her my direction and common sense might have told her
how to find it out."
"Well, sir, and what said Mrs. Smith?"
"She taxed me with the offence at once, and my confusion
may be guessed. The purity of her life, the formality
of her notions, her ignorance of the worldevery thing
was against me. The matter itself I could not deny,
and vain was every endeavour to soften it. She was
previously disposed, I believe, to doubt the morality of my
conduct in general, and was moreover discontented with
the very little attention, the very little portion of my
time that I had bestowed on her, in my present visit.
In short, it ended in a total breach. By one measure I
might have saved myself. In the height of her morality,
good woman she offered to forgive the past, if I would
marry Eliza. That could not beand I was formally
dismissed from her favour and her house. The night
following this affairI was to go the next morning
was spent by me in deliberating on what my future conduct
should be. The struggle was greatbut it ended too soon.
My affection for Marianne, my thorough conviction of her
attachment to meit was all insufficient to outweigh
that dread of poverty, or get the better of those false
ideas of the necessity of riches, which I was naturally
inclined to feel, and expensive society had increased.
I had reason to believe myself secure of my present wife,
if I chose to address her, and I persuaded myself to think
that nothing else in common prudence remained for me to do.
A heavy scene however awaited me, before I could leave
DevonshireI was engaged to dine with you on that very day
some apology was therefore necessary for my breaking
this engagement. But whether I should write this apology,
or deliver it in person, was a point of long debate.
To see Marianne, I felt, would be dreadful, and I even doubted
whether I could see her again, and keep to my resolution.
In that point, however, I undervalued my own magnanimity,
as the event declared for I went, I saw her, and saw
her miserable, and left her miserableand left her hoping
never to see her again."
"Why did you call, Mr. Willoughby?" said Elinor,
reproachfully "a note would have answered every purpose.
Why was it necessary to call?"
"It was necessary to my own pride. I could not bear
to leave the country in a manner that might lead you,
or the rest of the neighbourhood, to suspect any part
of what had really passed between Mrs. Smith and myself
and I resolved therefore on calling at the cottage,
in my way to Honiton. The sight of your dear sister,
however, was really dreadful and, to heighten the matter,
I found her alone. You were all gone I do not know where.
I had left her only the evening before, so fully,
so firmly resolved within my self on doing right
A few hours were to have engaged her to me for ever
and I remember how happy, how gay were my spirits, as I
walked from the cottage to Allenham, satisfied with myself,
delighted with every body But in this, our last interview
of friendship, I approached her with a sense of guilt
that almost took from me the power of dissembling.
Her sorrow, her disappointment, her deep regret, when I told
her that I was obliged to leave Devonshire so immediatelyI
never shall forget itunited too with such reliance,
such confidence in meOh, Godwhat a hardhearted
rascal I was"
They were both silent for a few moments.
Elinor first spoke.
"Did you tell her that you should soon return?"
"I do not know what I told her," he replied, impatiently
"less than was due to the past, beyond a doubt, and in all
likelihood much more than was justified by the future.
I cannot think of it.It won't do.Then came your dear mother
to torture me farther, with all her kindness and confidence.
Thank Heaven it DID torture me. I was miserable.
Miss Dashwood, you cannot have an idea of the comfort it
gives me to look back on my own misery. I owe such a grudge
to myself for the stupid, rascally folly of my own heart,
that all my past sufferings under it are only triumph and
exultation to me now. Well, I went, left all that I loved,
and went to those to whom, at best, I was only indifferent.
My journey to towntravelling with my own horses,
and therefore so tediouslyno creature to speak tomy
own reflections so cheerfulwhen I looked forward
every thing so invitingwhen I looked back at Barton,
the picture so soothingoh, it was a blessed journey"
He stopped.
"Well, sir," said Elinor, who, though pitying him,
grew impatient for his departure, "and this is all?"
"Ahno,have you forgot what passed in town?
That infamous letterDid she shew it you?"
"Yes, I saw every note that passed."
"When the first of hers reached me as it immediately did,
for I was in town the whole time, what I felt is
in the common phrase, not to be expressed in a more
simple oneperhaps too simple to raise any emotion
my feelings were very, very painful.Every line, every word
wasin the hackneyed metaphor which their dear writer,
were she here, would forbida dagger to my heart.
To know that Marianne was in town wasin the same language
a thunderbolt.Thunderbolts and daggerswhat a reproof
would she have given meher taste, her opinionsI believe
they are better known to me than my own,and I am sure
they are dearer."
Elinor's heart, which had undergone many changes
in the course of this extraordinary conversation,
was now softened againyet she felt it her duty to check
such ideas in her companion as the last.
"This is not right, Mr. Willoughby.Remember that
you are married. Relate only what in your conscience
you think necessary for me to hear."
"Marianne's note, by assuring me that I was still
as dear to her as in former days, that in spite of the many,
many weeks we had been separated, she was as constant
in her own feelings, and as full of faith in the constancy
of mine as ever, awakened all my remorse. I say awakened,
because time and London, business and dissipation,
had in some measure quieted it, and I had been growing
a fine hardened villain, fancying myself indifferent to her,
and chusing to fancy that she too must have become
indifferent to me talking to myself of our past attachment
as a mere idle, trifling business, shrugging up my shoulders
in proof of its being so, and silencing every reproach,
overcoming every scruple, by secretly saying now and then,
'I shall be heartily glad to hear she is well married.'
But this note made me know myself better. I felt that
she was infinitely dearer to me than any other woman
in the world, and that I was using her infamously.
But every thing was then just settled between Miss Grey
and me. To retreat was impossible. All that I had to do,
was to avoid you both. I sent no answer to Marianne,
intending by that to preserve myself from her farther notice
and for some time I was even determined not to call in
Berkeley Streetbut at last, judging it wiser to affect
the air of a cool, common acquaintance than anything else,
I watched you all safely out of the house one morning,
and left my name."
"Watched us out of the house"
"Even so. You would be surprised to hear how often
I watched you, how often I was on the point of falling
in with you. I have entered many a shop to avoid your sight,
as the carriage drove by. Lodging as I did in Bond Street,
there was hardly a day in which I did not catch a glimpse
of one or other of you and nothing but the most constant
watchfulness on my side, a most invariably prevailing
desire to keep out of your sight, could have separated us
so long. I avoided the Middletons as much as possible,
as well as everybody else who was likely to prove
an acquaintance in common. Not aware of their being
in town, however, I blundered on Sir John, I believe,
the first day of his coming, and the day after I had called
at Mrs. Jennings's. He asked me to a party, a dance at his
house in the evening.Had he NOT told me as an inducement
that you and your sister were to be there, I should have
felt it too certain a thing, to trust myself near him.
The next morning brought another short note from Marianne
still affectionate, open, artless, confidingeverything
that could make MY conduct most hateful. I could not
answer it. I triedbut could not frame a sentence.
But I thought of her, I believe, every moment of the day.
If you CAN pity me, Miss Dashwood, pity my situation as it
was THEN. With my head and heart full of your sister,
I was forced to play the happy lover to another womanThose
three or four weeks were worse than all. Well, at last,
as I need not tell you, you were forced on me and what a
sweet figure I cutwhat an evening of agony it was
Marianne, beautiful as an angel on one side, calling me
Willoughby in such a toneOh, Godholding out her hand
to me, asking me for an explanation, with those bewitching
eyes fixed in such speaking solicitude on my faceand
Sophia, jealous as the devil on the other hand, looking
all that wasWell, it does not signify it is over now.
Such an eveningI ran away from you all as soon as I could
but not before I had seen Marianne's sweet face as white
as death.THAT was the last, last look I ever had of her
the last manner in which she appeared to me. It was a horrid
sightyet when I thought of her today as really dying,
it was a kind of comfort to me to imagine that I knew
exactly how she would appear to those, who saw her last
in this world. She was before me, constantly before me,
as I travelled, in the same look and hue."
A short pause of mutual thoughtfulness succeeded.
Willoughby first rousing himself, broke it thus
"Well, let me make haste and be gone. Your sister
is certainly better, certainly out of danger?"
"We are assured of it."
"Your poor mother, toodoting on Marianne."
"But the letter, Mr. Willoughby, your own letter
have you any thing to say about that?"
"Yes, yes, THAT in particular. Your sister
wrote to me again, you know, the very next morning.
You saw what she said. I was breakfasting at the
Ellisons,and her letter, with some others, was brought
to me there from my lodgings. It happened to catch
Sophia's eye before it caught mineand its size,
the elegance of the paper, the handwriting altogether,
immediately gave her a suspicion. Some vague report had
reached her before of my attachment to some young lady
in Devonshire, and what had passed within her observation
the preceding evening had marked who the young lady was,
and made her more jealous than ever. Affecting that air
of playfulness, therefore, which is delightful in a woman
one loves, she opened the letter directly, and read
its contents. She was well paid for her impudence.
She read what made her wretched. Her wretchedness I could
have borne, but her passionher maliceAt all events it
must be appeased. And, in shortwhat do you think of my
wife's style of letterwriting?delicatetender
truly femininewas it not?"
"Your wifeThe letter was in your own handwriting."
"Yes, but I had only the credit of servilely copying
such sentences as I was ashamed to put my name to.
The original was all her ownher own happy thoughts
and gentle diction. But what could I dowe were engaged,
every thing in preparation, the day almost fixedBut I am
talking like a fool. PreparationdayIn honest words,
her money was necessary to me, and in a situation like
mine, any thing was to be done to prevent a rupture.
And after all, what did it signify to my character
in the opinion of Marianne and her friends, in what language
my answer was couched?It must have been only to one end.
My business was to declare myself a scoundrel, and whether
I did it with a bow or a bluster was of little importance.
'I am ruined for ever in their opinion' said I to
myself'I am shut out for ever from their society,
they already think me an unprincipled fellow, this letter
will only make them think me a blackguard one.' Such were
my reasonings, as, in a sort of desperate carelessness,
I copied my wife's words, and parted with the last relics
of Marianne. Her three notesunluckily they were all
in my pocketbook, or I should have denied their existence,
and hoarded them for everI was forced to put them up,
and could not even kiss them. And the lock of hairthat too
I had always carried about me in the same pocketbook,
which was now searched by Madam with the most ingratiating
virulence,the dear lockall, every memento was torn from me."
"You are very wrong, Mr. Willoughby, very blamable,"
said Elinor, while her voice, in spite of herself,
betrayed her compassionate emotion "you ought not to speak
in this way, either of Mrs. Willoughby or my sister.
You had made your own choice. It was not forced on you.
Your wife has a claim to your politeness, to your respect,
at least. She must be attached to you, or she would not
have married you. To treat her with unkindness, to speak
of her slightingly is no atonement to Mariannenor can I
suppose it a relief to your own conscience."
"Do not talk to me of my wife," said he with a heavy sigh.
"She does not deserve your compassion.She knew I had no
regard for her when we married.Well, married we were,
and came down to Combe Magna to be happy, and afterwards
returned to town to be gay.And now do you pity me,
Miss Dashwood?or have I said all this to no purpose?
Am Ibe it only one degreeam I less guilty in your opinion
than I was before?My intentions were not always wrong.
Have I explained away any part of my guilt?"
"Yes, you have certainly removed somethinga little.
You have proved yourself, on the whole, less faulty than
I had believed you. You have proved your heart less wicked,
much less wicked. But I hardly knowthe misery that
you have inflictedI hardly know what could have made
it worse."
"Will you repeat to your sister when she is recovered,
what I have been telling you?Let me be a little lightened
too in her opinion as well as in yours. You tell me that
she has forgiven me already. Let me be able to fancy that
a better knowledge of my heart, and of my present feelings,
will draw from her a more spontaneous, more natural, more
gentle, less dignified, forgiveness. Tell her of my misery
and my penitencetell her that my heart was never inconstant
to her, and if you will, that at this moment she is dearer
to me than ever."
"I will tell her all that is necessary to what may
comparatively be called, your justification. But you have
not explained to me the particular reason of your coming now,
nor how you heard of her illness."
"Last night, in Drury Lane lobby, I ran against Sir
John Middleton, and when he saw who I wasfor the first
time these two monthshe spoke to me.That he had cut
me ever since my marriage, I had seen without surprise
or resentment. Now, however, his goodnatured, honest,
stupid soul, full of indignation against me, and concern
for your sister, could not resist the temptation of telling
me what he knew ought tothough probably he did not
think it WOULDvex me horridly. As bluntly as he could
speak it, therefore, he told me that Marianne Dashwood
was dying of a putrid fever at Clevelanda letter that
morning received from Mrs. Jennings declared her danger
most imminentthe Palmers are all gone off in a fright,
c.I was too much shocked to be able to pass myself
off as insensible even to the undiscerning Sir John.
His heart was softened in seeing mine suffer and so much
of his illwill was done away, that when we parted,
he almost shook me by the hand while he reminded me of an
old promise about a pointer puppy. What I felt on hearing
that your sister was dyingand dying too, believing me
the greatest villain upon earth, scorning, hating me
in her latest momentsfor how could I tell what horrid
projects might not have been imputed? ONE person I
was sure would represent me as capable of any thing
What I felt was dreadfulMy resolution was soon made,
and at eight o'clock this morning I was in my carriage.
Now you know all."
Elinor made no answer. Her thoughts were silently fixed
on the irreparable injury which too early an independence
and its consequent habits of idleness, dissipation, and luxury,
had made in the mind, the character, the happiness,
of a man who, to every advantage of person and talents,
united a disposition naturally open and honest, and a
feeling, affectionate temper. The world had made him
extravagant and vainExtravagance and vanity had made him
coldhearted and selfish. Vanity, while seeking its own
guilty triumph at the expense of another, had involved
him in a real attachment, which extravagance, or at least
its offspring, necessity, had required to be sacrificed.
Each faulty propensity in leading him to evil, had led
him likewise to punishment. The attachment, from which
against honour, against feeling, against every better interest
he had outwardly torn himself, now, when no longer allowable,
governed every thought and the connection, for the sake
of which he had, with little scruple, left her sister
to misery, was likely to prove a source of unhappiness
to himself of a far more incurable nature. From a reverie
of this kind she was recalled at the end of some minutes
by Willoughby, who, rousing himself from a reverie at least
equally painful, started up in preparation for going, and said
"There is no use in staying here I must be off."
"Are you going back to town?"
"Noto Combe Magna. I have business there
from thence to town in a day or two. Good bye."
He held out his hand. She could not refuse to give
him hers'she pressed it with affection.
"And you DO think something better of me than
you did?"said he, letting it fall, and leaning against
the mantelpiece as if forgetting he was to go.
Elinor assured him that she didthat she forgave,
pitied, wished him wellwas even interested in his
happinessand added some gentle counsel as to the behaviour
most likely to promote it. His answer was not very encouraging.
"As to that," said he, "I must rub through the world
as well as I can. Domestic happiness is out of the question.
If, however, I am allowed to think that you and yours feel
an interest in my fate and actions, it may be the meansit
may put me on my guardat least, it may be something to
live for. Marianne to be sure is lost to me for ever.
Were I even by any blessed chance at liberty again"
Elinor stopped him with a reproof.
"Well,"he replied"once more good bye. I shall
now go away and live in dread of one event."
"What do you mean?"
"Your sister's marriage."
"You are very wrong. She can never be more lost
to you than she is now."
"But she will be gained by some one else. And if
that some one should be the very he whom, of all others,
I could least bearbut I will not stay to rob myself
of all your compassionate goodwill, by shewing
that where I have most injured I can least forgive.
Good bye,God bless you"
And with these words, he almost ran out of the room.
CHAPTER 
Elinor, for some time after he left her, for some time
even after the sound of his carriage had died away, remained
too much oppressed by a crowd of ideas, widely differing in
themselves, but of which sadness was the general result,
to think even of her sister.
Willoughby, he, whom only half an hour ago she had
abhorred as the most worthless of men, Willoughby, in spite
of all his faults, excited a degree of commiseration
for the sufferings produced by them, which made her
think of him as now separated for ever from her family,
with a tenderness, a regret, rather in proportion, as she
soon acknowledged within herselfto his wishes than to
his merits. She felt that his influence over her mind
was heightened by circumstances which ought not in reason
to have weight by that person of uncommon attraction,
that open, affectionate, and lively manner which it
was no merit to possess and by that still ardent love
for Marianne, which it was not even innocent to indulge.
But she felt that it was so, long, long before she could
feel his influence less.
When at last she returned to the unconscious Marianne,
she found her just awaking, refreshed by so long and sweet
a sleep to the extent of her hopes. Elinor's heart was full.
The past, the present, the future, Willoughby's visit,
Marianne's safety, and her mother's expected arrival,
threw her altogether into an agitation of spirits
which kept off every indication of fatigue, and made
her only fearful of betraying herself to her sister.
Short was the time, however, in which that fear could
affect her, for within half an hour after Willoughby's
leaving the house, she was again called down stairs
by the sound of another carriage.Eager to save her
mother from every unnecessary moment's horrible suspense,
she ran immediately into the hall, and reached the outward
door just in time to receive and support her as she entered it.
Mrs. Dashwood, whose terror as they drew near the
house had produced almost the conviction of Marianne's
being no more, had no voice to inquire after her,
no voice even for Elinor but SHE, waiting neither for
salutation nor inquiry, instantly gave the joyful relief
and her mother, catching it with all her usual warmth,
was in a moment as much overcome by her happiness, as she
had been before by her fears. She was supported into
the drawingroom between her daughter and her friend
and there, shedding tears of joy, though still unable
to speak, embraced Elinor again and again, turning from her
at intervals to press Colonel Brandon's hand, with a look
which spoke at once her gratitude, and her conviction
of his sharing with herself in the bliss of the moment.
He shared it, however, in a silence even greater than her own.
As soon as Mrs. Dashwood had recovered herself,
to see Marianne was her first desire and in two minutes she
was with her beloved child, rendered dearer to her than ever
by absence, unhappiness, and danger. Elinor's delight,
as she saw what each felt in the meeting, was only checked
by an apprehension of its robbing Marianne of farther sleep
but Mrs. Dashwood could be calm, could be even prudent,
when the life of a child was at stake, and Marianne,
satisfied in knowing her mother was near her, and conscious
of being too weak for conversation, submitted readily to the
silence and quiet prescribed by every nurse around her.
Mrs. Dashwood WOULD sit up with her all night and Elinor,
in compliance with her mother's entreaty, went to bed.
But the rest, which one night entirely sleepless,
and many hours of the most wearing anxiety seemed to
make requisite, was kept off by irritation of spirits.
Willoughby, "poor Willoughby," as she now allowed
herself to call him, was constantly in her thoughts she
would not but have heard his vindication for the world,
and now blamed, now acquitted herself for having judged him
so harshly before. But her promise of relating it to her
sister was invariably painful. She dreaded the performance
of it, dreaded what its effect on Marianne might be
doubted whether after such an explanation she could ever
be happy with another and for a moment wished Willoughby
a widower. Then, remembering Colonel Brandon, reproved herself,
felt that to HIS sufferings and his constancy far more
than to his rival's, the reward of her sister was due,
and wished any thing rather than Mrs. Willoughby's death.
The shock of Colonel Brandon's errand at Barton had been
much softened to Mrs. Dashwood by her own previous alarm
for so great was her uneasiness about Marianne, that she
had already determined to set out for Cleveland on that
very day, without waiting for any further intelligence,
and had so far settled her journey before his arrival,
that the Careys were then expected every moment to fetch
Margaret away, as her mother was unwilling to take her
where there might be infection.
Marianne continued to mend every day, and the brilliant
cheerfulness of Mrs. Dashwood's looks and spirits proved
her to be, as she repeatedly declared herself, one of
the happiest women in the world. Elinor could not hear
the declaration, nor witness its proofs without sometimes
wondering whether her mother ever recollected Edward.
But Mrs. Dashwood, trusting to the temperate account
of her own disappointment which Elinor had sent her,
was led away by the exuberance of her joy to think only
of what would increase it. Marianne was restored to her
from a danger in which, as she now began to feel,
her own mistaken judgment in encouraging the unfortunate
attachment to Willoughby, had contributed to place her
and in her recovery she had yet another source of joy
unthought of by Elinor. It was thus imparted to her,
as soon as any opportunity of private conference
between them occurred.
"At last we are alone. My Elinor, you do not yet
know all my happiness. Colonel Brandon loves Marianne.
He has told me so himself."
Her daughter, feeling by turns both pleased and pained,
surprised and not surprised, was all silent attention.
"You are never like me, dear Elinor, or I should
wonder at your composure now. Had I sat down to wish
for any possible good to my family, I should have fixed
on Colonel Brandon's marrying one of you as the object
most desirable. And I believe Marianne will be the most
happy with him of the two."
Elinor was half inclined to ask her reason for thinking so,
because satisfied that none founded on an impartial
consideration of their age, characters, or feelings,
could be givenbut her mother must always be carried
away by her imagination on any interesting subject,
and therefore instead of an inquiry, she passed it off with a
smile.
"He opened his whole heart to me yesterday as we travelled.
It came out quite unawares, quite undesignedly. I, you may
well believe, could talk of nothing but my childhe could
not conceal his distress I saw that it equalled my own,
and he perhaps, thinking that mere friendship, as the world
now goes, would not justify so warm a sympathyor rather,
not thinking at all, I supposegiving way to irresistible
feelings, made me acquainted with his earnest, tender, constant,
affection for Marianne. He has loved her, my Elinor, ever since
the first moment of seeing her."
Here, however, Elinor perceived,not the language,
not the professions of Colonel Brandon, but the natural
embellishments of her mother's active fancy, which fashioned
every thing delightful to her as it chose.
"His regard for her, infinitely surpassing anything
that Willoughby ever felt or feigned, as much more warm,
as more sincere or constantwhich ever we are to call it
has subsisted through all the knowledge of dear Marianne's
unhappy prepossession for that worthless young manand
without selfishnesswithout encouraging a hopecould
he have seen her happy with anotherSuch a noble mind
such openness, such sincerityno one can be deceived
in HIM."
"Colonel Brandon's character," said Elinor,
"as an excellent man, is well established."
"I know it is"replied her mother seriously, "or
after such a warning, I should be the last to encourage
such affection, or even to be pleased by it. But his coming
for me as he did, with such active, such ready friendship,
is enough to prove him one of the worthiest of men."
"His character, however," answered Elinor, "does not rest
on ONE act of kindness, to which his affection for Marianne,
were humanity out of the case, would have prompted him.
To Mrs. Jennings, to the Middletons, he has been long
and intimately known they equally love and respect him
and even my own knowledge of him, though lately acquired,
is very considerable and so highly do I value and esteem him,
that if Marianne can be happy with him, I shall be as ready
as yourself to think our connection the greatest blessing
to us in the world. What answer did you give him?Did you
allow him to hope?"
"Oh my love, I could not then talk of hope to him
or to myself. Marianne might at that moment be dying.
But he did not ask for hope or encouragement. His was
an involuntary confidence, an irrepressible effusion
to a soothing friendnot an application to a parent.
Yet after a time I DID say, for at first I was quite
overcomethat if she lived, as I trusted she might,
my greatest happiness would lie in promoting their marriage
and since our arrival, since our delightful security,
I have repeated it to him more fully, have given him every
encouragement in my power. Time, a very little time,
I tell him, will do everythingMarianne's heart is
not to be wasted for ever on such a man as Willoughby.
His own merits must soon secure it."
"To judge from the Colonel's spirits, however,
you have not yet made him equally sanguine."
"No.He thinks Marianne's affection too deeply
rooted for any change in it under a great length of time,
and even supposing her heart again free, is too diffident
of himself to believe, that with such a difference of age
and disposition he could ever attach her. There, however,
he is quite mistaken. His age is only so much beyond
hers as to be an advantage, as to make his character and
principles fixedand his disposition, I am well convinced,
is exactly the very one to make your sister happy.
And his person, his manners too, are all in his favour.
My partiality does not blind me he certainly is not
so handsome as Willoughbybut at the same time,
there is something much more pleasing in his countenance.
There was always a something,if you remember,in Willoughby's
eyes at times, which I did not like."
Elinor could NOT remember itbut her mother,
without waiting for her assent, continued,
"And his manners, the Colonel's manners are not only
more pleasing to me than Willoughby's ever were, but they
are of a kind I well know to be more solidly attaching
to Marianne. Their gentleness, their genuine attention
to other people, and their manly unstudied simplicity
is much more accordant with her real disposition, than
the livelinessoften artificial, and often illtimed
of the other. I am very sure myself, that had Willoughby
turned out as really amiable, as he has proved himself
the contrary, Marianne would yet never have been so happy
with HIM, as she will be with Colonel Brandon."
She paused.Her daughter could not quite agree
with her, but her dissent was not heard, and therefore
gave no offence.
"At Delaford, she will be within an easy distance of me,"
added Mrs. Dashwood, "even if I remain at Barton and in all
probability,for I hear it is a large village,indeed there
certainly MUST be some small house or cottage close by,
that would suit us quite as well as our present situation."
Poor Elinorhere was a new scheme for getting
her to Delafordbut her spirit was stubborn.
"His fortune toofor at my time of life you know,
everybody cares about THATand though I neither know
nor desire to know, what it really is, I am sure it must be
a good one."
Here they were interrupted by the entrance of a
third person, and Elinor withdrew to think it all over
in private, to wish success to her friend, and yet
in wishing it, to feel a pang for Willoughby.
CHAPTER 
Marianne's illness, though weakening in its kind,
had not been long enough to make her recovery slow
and with youth, natural strength, and her mother's presence
in aid, it proceeded so smoothly as to enable her to remove,
within four days after the arrival of the latter,
into Mrs. Palmer's dressingroom. When there, at her own
particular request, for she was impatient to pour forth
her thanks to him for fetching her mother, Colonel Brandon
was invited to visit her.
His emotion on entering the room, in seeing her altered
looks, and in receiving the pale hand which she immediately
held out to him, was such, as, in Elinor's conjecture,
must arise from something more than his affection for Marianne,
or the consciousness of its being known to others
and she soon discovered in his melancholy eye and varying
complexion as he looked at her sister, the probable
recurrence of many past scenes of misery to his mind,
brought back by that resemblance between Marianne and Eliza
already acknowledged, and now strengthened by the hollow eye,
the sickly skin, the posture of reclining weakness,
and the warm acknowledgment of peculiar obligation.
Mrs. Dashwood, not less watchful of what passed than
her daughter, but with a mind very differently influenced,
and therefore watching to very different effect,
saw nothing in the Colonel's behaviour but what arose
from the most simple and selfevident sensations, while in
the actions and words of Marianne she persuaded herself
to think that something more than gratitude already dawned.
At the end of another day or two, Marianne growing
visibly stronger every twelve hours, Mrs. Dashwood,
urged equally by her own and her daughter's wishes,
began to talk of removing to Barton. On HER measures
depended those of her two friends Mrs. Jennings could
not quit Cleveland during the Dashwoods' stay and Colonel
Brandon was soon brought, by their united request,
to consider his own abode there as equally determinate,
if not equally indispensable. At his and Mrs. Jennings's
united request in return, Mrs. Dashwood was prevailed
on to accept the use of his carriage on her journey back,
for the better accommodation of her sick child and the Colonel,
at the joint invitation of Mrs. Dashwood and Mrs. Jennings,
whose active goodnature made her friendly and hospitable
for other people as well as herself, engaged with pleasure
to redeem it by a visit at the cottage, in the course
of a few weeks.
The day of separation and departure arrived
and Marianne, after taking so particular and lengthened
a leave of Mrs. Jennings, one so earnestly grateful, so full
of respect and kind wishes as seemed due to her own heart
from a secret acknowledgment of past inattention, and bidding
Colonel Brandon farewell with a cordiality of a friend,
was carefully assisted by him into the carriage, of which he
seemed anxious that she should engross at least half.
Mrs. Dashwood and Elinor then followed, and the others
were left by themselves, to talk of the travellers,
and feel their own dullness, till Mrs. Jennings was summoned
to her chaise to take comfort in the gossip of her maid
for the loss of her two young companions and Colonel Brandon
immediately afterwards took his solitary way to Delaford.
The Dashwoods were two days on the road, and Marianne
bore her journey on both, without essential fatigue.
Every thing that the most zealous affection, the most
solicitous care could do to render her comfortable,
was the office of each watchful companion, and each
found their reward in her bodily ease, and her calmness
of spirits. To Elinor, the observation of the latter
was particularly grateful. She, who had seen her week
after week so constantly suffering, oppressed by anguish
of heart which she had neither courage to speak of,
nor fortitude to conceal, now saw with a joy, which no other
could equally share, an apparent composure of mind, which,
in being the result as she trusted of serious reflection,
must eventually lead her to contentment and cheerfulness.
As they approached Barton, indeed, and entered
on scenes of which every field and every tree brought
some peculiar, some painful recollection, she grew silent
and thoughtful, and turning away her face from their notice,
sat earnestly gazing through the window. But here,
Elinor could neither wonder nor blame and when she saw,
as she assisted Marianne from the carriage, that she
had been crying, she saw only an emotion too natural
in itself to raise any thing less tender than pity,
and in its unobtrusiveness entitled to praise. In the
whole of her subsequent manner, she traced the direction
of a mind awakened to reasonable exertion for no sooner
had they entered their common sittingroom, than Marianne
turned her eyes around it with a look of resolute firmness,
as if determined at once to accustom herself to the sight
of every object with which the remembrance of Willoughby could
be connected.She said little, but every sentence aimed
at cheerfulness, and though a sigh sometimes escaped her,
it never passed away without the atonement of a smile.
After dinner she would try her pianoforte. She went to it
but the music on which her eye first rested was an opera,
procured for her by Willoughby, containing some of their
favourite duets, and bearing on its outward leaf her own name
in his handwriting.That would not do.She shook her head,
put the music aside, and after running over the keys
for a minute, complained of feebleness in her fingers,
and closed the instrument again declaring however with firmness
as she did so, that she should in future practice much.
The next morning produced no abatement in these
happy symptoms. On the contrary, with a mind and body
alike strengthened by rest, she looked and spoke with
more genuine spirit, anticipating the pleasure of
Margaret's return, and talking of the dear family party
which would then be restored, of their mutual pursuits
and cheerful society, as the only happiness worth a wish.
"When the weather is settled, and I have recovered
my strength," said she, "we will take long walks together
every day. We will walk to the farm at the edge of the down,
and see how the children go on we will walk to Sir John's
new plantations at Barton Cross, and the Abbeyland
and we will often go the old ruins of the Priory,
and try to trace its foundations as far as we are told
they once reached. I know we shall be happy. I know
the summer will pass happily away. I mean never to be
later in rising than six, and from that time till dinner
I shall divide every moment between music and reading.
I have formed my plan, and am determined to enter on a course
of serious study. Our own library is too well known to me,
to be resorted to for any thing beyond mere amusement.
But there are many works well worth reading at the Park
and there are others of more modern production which I
know I can borrow of Colonel Brandon. By reading only six
hours aday, I shall gain in the course of a twelvemonth
a great deal of instruction which I now feel myself to want."
Elinor honoured her for a plan which originated
so nobly as this though smiling to see the same eager
fancy which had been leading her to the extreme of languid
indolence and selfish repining, now at work in introducing
excess into a scheme of such rational employment and virtuous
selfcontrol. Her smile however changed to a sigh when she
remembered that promise to Willoughby was yet unfulfilled,
and feared she had that to communicate which might again
unsettle the mind of Marianne, and ruin at least for a time
this fair prospect of busy tranquillity. Willing therefore
to delay the evil hour, she resolved to wait till her
sister's health were more secure, before she appointed it.
But the resolution was made only to be broken.
Marianne had been two or three days at home, before
the weather was fine enough for an invalid like herself
to venture out. But at last a soft, genial morning appeared
such as might tempt the daughter's wishes and the
mother's confidence and Marianne, leaning on Elinor's arm,
was authorised to walk as long as she could without fatigue,
in the lane before the house.
The sisters set out at a pace, slow as the feebleness
of Marianne in an exercise hitherto untried since her
illness requiredand they had advanced only so far
beyond the house as to admit a full view of the hill,
the important hill behind, when pausing with her eyes
turned towards it, Marianne calmly said,
"There, exactly there,"pointing with one hand,
"on that projecting mound,there I fell and there
I first saw Willoughby."
Her voice sunk with the word, but presently reviving she added,
"I am thankful to find that I can look with so little pain
on the spotshall we ever talk on that subject, Elinor?"
hesitatingly it was said."Or will it be wrong?I can talk
of it now, I hope, as I ought to do."
Elinor tenderly invited her to be open.
"As for regret," said Marianne, "I have done with that,
as far as HE is concerned. I do not mean to talk to you
of what my feelings have been for him, but what they
are NOW.At present, if I could be satisfied on one point,
if I could be allowed to think that he was not ALWAYS
acting a part, not ALWAYS deceiving mebut above all,
if I could be assured that he never was so VERY wicked
as my fears have sometimes fancied him, since the story
of that unfortunate girl"
She stopt. Elinor joyfully treasured her words
as she answered,
"If you could be assured of that, you think you
should be easy."
"Yes. My peace of mind is doubly involved in it
for not only is it horrible to suspect a person, who has
been what HE has been to ME, of such designs,but what must
it make me appear to myself?What in a situation like mine,
but a most shamefully unguarded affection could expose
me to"
"How then," asked her sister, "would you account
for his behaviour?"
"I would suppose him,Oh, how gladly would I suppose him,
only fickle, very, very fickle."
Elinor said no more. She was debating within herself
on the eligibility of beginning her story directly,
or postponing it till Marianne were in stronger health
and they crept on for a few minutes in silence.
"I am not wishing him too much good," said Marianne
at last with a sigh, "when I wish his secret reflections
may be no more unpleasant than my own. He will suffer
enough in them."
"Do you compare your conduct with his?"
"No. I compare it with what it ought to have been
I compare it with yours."
"Our situations have borne little resemblance."
"They have borne more than our conduct.Do not,
my dearest Elinor, let your kindness defend what I know
your judgment must censure. My illness has made me think
It has given me leisure and calmness for serious recollection.
Long before I was enough recovered to talk, I was perfectly
able to reflect. I considered the past I saw in my
own behaviour, since the beginning of our acquaintance
with him last autumn, nothing but a series of imprudence
towards myself, and want of kindness to others.
I saw that my own feelings had prepared my sufferings,
and that my want of fortitude under them had almost led
me to the grave. My illness, I well knew, had been
entirely brought on by myself by such negligence of my
own health, as I had felt even at the time to be wrong.
Had I died,it would have been selfdestruction. I
did not know my danger till the danger was removed
but with such feelings as these reflections gave me,
I wonder at my recovery,wonder that the very eagerness
of my desire to live, to have time for atonement to my God,
and to you all, did not kill me at once. Had I died,
in what peculiar misery should I have left you, my nurse,
my friend, my sisterYou, who had seen all the fretful
selfishness of my latter days who had known all the
murmurings of my heartHow should I have lived in YOUR
remembranceMy mother too How could you have consoled
herI cannot express my own abhorrence of myself.
Whenever I looked towards the past, I saw some duty neglected,
or some failing indulged. Every body seemed injured by me.
The kindness, the unceasing kindness of Mrs. Jennings,
I had repaid with ungrateful contempt. To the Middletons,
to the Palmers, the Steeles, to every common acquaintance even,
I had been insolent and unjust with a heart hardened
against their merits, and a temper irritated by their
very attention.To John, to Fanny,yes, even to them,
little as they deserve, I had given less than their due.
But you,you above all, above my mother, had been wronged
by me. I, and only I, knew your heart and its sorrows
yet to what did it influence me?not to any compassion
that could benefit you or myself.Your example was
before me but to what avail?Was I more considerate
of you and your comfort? Did I imitate your forbearance,
or lessen your restraints, by taking any part in those
offices of general complaisance or particular gratitude
which you had hitherto been left to discharge alone?No
not less when I knew you to be unhappy, than when I
had believed you at ease, did I turn away from every
exertion of duty or friendship scarcely allowing sorrow
to exist but with me, regretting only THAT heart
which had deserted and wronged me, and leaving you,
for or I professed an unbounded affection, to be miserable
for my sake."
Here ceased the rapid flow of her selfreproving spirit
and Elinor, impatient to soothe, though too honest
to flatter, gave her instantly that praise and support
which her frankness and her contrition so well deserved.
Marianne pressed her hand and replied,
"You are very good.The future must be my proof.
I have laid down my plan, and if I am capable of adhering
to itmy feelings shall be governed and my temper improved.
They shall no longer worry others, nor torture myself.
I shall now live solely for my family. You, my mother,
and Margaret, must henceforth be all the world to me
you will share my affections entirely between you.
From you, from my home, I shall never again have the smallest
incitement to move and if I do mix in other society,
it will be only to shew that my spirit is humbled,
my heart amended, and that I can practise the civilities,
the lesser duties of life, with gentleness and forbearance.
As for Willoughbyto say that I shall soon or that I shall
ever forget him, would be idle. His remembrance can be overcome
by no change of circumstances or opinions. But it shall
be regulated, it shall be checked by religion, by reason,
by constant employment."
She pausedand added in a low voice, "If I could
but know HIS heart, everything would become easy."
Elinor, who had now been for some time reflecting
on the propriety or impropriety of speedily hazarding
her narration, without feeling at all nearer decision than
at first, heard this and perceiving that as reflection
did nothing, resolution must do all, soon found herself
leading to the fact.
She managed the recital, as she hoped, with address
prepared her anxious listener with caution related simply
and honestly the chief points on which Willoughby
grounded his apology did justice to his repentance,
and softened only his protestations of present regard.
Marianne said not a word.She trembled, her eyes
were fixed on the ground, and her lips became whiter
than even sickness had left them. A thousand inquiries
sprung up from her heart, but she dared not urge one.
She caught every syllable with panting eagerness her hand,
unknowingly to herself, closely pressed her sister's, and
tears covered her cheeks.
Elinor, dreading her being tired, led her towards home
and till they reached the door of the cottage,
easily conjecturing what her curiosity must be
though no question was suffered to speak it, talked of
nothing but Willoughby, and their conversation together
and was carefully minute in every particular of speech
and look, where minuteness could be safely indulged.
As soon as they entered the house, Marianne with a kiss
of gratitude and these two words just articulate through
her tears, "Tell mama," withdrew from her sister and
walked slowly up stairs. Elinor would not attempt
to disturb a solitude so reasonable as what she now sought
and with a mind anxiously prearranging its result,
and a resolution of reviving the subject again,
should Marianne fail to do it, she turned into the parlour
to fulfill her parting injunction.
CHAPTER 
Mrs. Dashwood did not hear unmoved the vindication
of her former favourite. She rejoiced in his being
cleared from some part of his imputed guiltshe was
sorry for himshe wished him happy. But the feelings
of the past could not be recalled.Nothing could restore
him with a faith unbrokena character unblemished,
to Marianne. Nothing could do away the knowledge
of what the latter had suffered through his means,
nor remove the guilt of his conduct towards Eliza.
Nothing could replace him, therefore, in her former esteem,
nor injure the interests of Colonel Brandon.
Had Mrs. Dashwood, like her daughter, heard Willoughby's
story from himselfhad she witnessed his distress,
and been under the influence of his countenance and his
manner, it is probable that her compassion would have
been greater. But it was neither in Elinor's power,
nor in her wish, to rouse such feelings in another, by her
retailed explanation, as had at first been called forth
in herself. Reflection had given calmness to her judgment,
and sobered her own opinion of Willoughby's deserts
she wished, therefore, to declare only the simple truth,
and lay open such facts as were really due to his character,
without any embellishment of tenderness to lead the
fancy astray.
In the evening, when they were all three together,
Marianne began voluntarily to speak of him again
but that it was not without an effort, the restless,
unquiet thoughtfulness in which she had been for some time
previously sittingher rising colour, as she spoke,
and her unsteady voice, plainly shewed.
"I wish to assure you both," said she, "that I see
every thingas you can desire me to do."
Mrs. Dashwood would have interrupted her instantly
with soothing tenderness, had not Elinor, who really wished
to hear her sister's unbiased opinion, by an eager sign,
engaged her silence. Marianne slowly continued
"It is a great relief to mewhat Elinor told
me this morningI have now heard exactly what I
wished to hear."For some moments her voice was lost
but recovering herself, she added, and with greater
calmness than before"I am now perfectly satisfied,
I wish for no change. I never could have been happy
with him, after knowing, as sooner or later I must
have known, all this.I should have had no confidence,
no esteem. Nothing could have done it away to my feelings."
"I know itI know it," cried her mother.
"Happy with a man of libertine practicesWith one
who so injured the peace of the dearest of our friends,
and the best of menNomy Marianne has not a heart
to be made happy with such a manHer conscience, her
sensitive conscience, would have felt all that the
conscience of her husband ought to have felt."
Marianne sighed, and repeated, "I wish for no change."
"You consider the matter," said Elinor, "exactly as
a good mind and a sound understanding must consider it
and I dare say you perceive, as well as myself, not only
in this, but in many other circumstances, reason enough
to be convinced that your marriage must have involved you
in many certain troubles and disappointments, in which
you would have been poorly supported by an affection,
on his side, much less certain. Had you married,
you must have been always poor. His expensiveness is
acknowledged even by himself, and his whole conduct declares
that selfdenial is a word hardly understood by him.
His demands and your inexperience together, on a small,
very small income, must have brought on distresses which
would not be the LESS grievous to you, from having been
entirely unknown and unthought of before. YOUR sense
of honour and honesty would have led you, I know,
when aware of your situation, to attempt all the economy
that would appear to you possible and, perhaps, as long
as your frugality retrenched only on your own comfort,
you might have been suffered to practice it, but beyond that
and how little could the utmost of your single management
do to stop the ruin which had begun before your marriage?
Beyond THAT, had you endeavoured, however reasonably,
to abridge HIS enjoyments, is it not to be feared, that instead
of prevailing on feelings so selfish to consent to it,
you would have lessened your own influence on his heart,
and made him regret the connection which had involved him
in such difficulties?"
Marianne's lips quivered, and she repeated the word
"Selfish?" in a tone that implied"do you really think
him selfish?"
"The whole of his behaviour," replied Elinor,
"from the beginning to the end of the affair, has been
grounded on selfishness. It was selfishness which first
made him sport with your affections which afterwards,
when his own were engaged, made him delay the confession
of it, and which finally carried him from Barton.
His own enjoyment, or his own ease, was, in every particular,
his ruling principle."
"It is very true. MY happiness never was his object."
"At present," continued Elinor, "he regrets what he
has done. And why does he regret it?Because he finds
it has not answered towards himself. It has not made
him happy. His circumstances are now unembarrassedhe
suffers from no evil of that kind and he thinks only
that he has married a woman of a less amiable temper
than yourself. But does it follow that had he married you,
he would have been happy?The inconveniences would have
been different. He would then have suffered under the
pecuniary distresses which, because they are removed,
he now reckons as nothing. He would have had a wife
of whose temper he could make no complaint, but he would
have been always necessitousalways poor and probably
would soon have learned to rank the innumerable comforts
of a clear estate and good income as of far more importance,
even to domestic happiness, than the mere temper of a wife."
"I have not a doubt of it," said Marianne "and I
have nothing to regretnothing but my own folly."
"Rather say your mother's imprudence, my child,"
said Mrs. Dashwood "SHE must be answerable."
Marianne would not let her proceedand Elinor,
satisfied that each felt their own error, wished to avoid
any survey of the past that might weaken her sister's
spirits she, therefore, pursuing the first subject,
immediately continued,
"One observation may, I think, be fairly drawn from
the whole of the storythat all Willoughby's difficulties
have arisen from the first offence against virtue, in his
behaviour to Eliza Williams. That crime has been the origin
of every lesser one, and of all his present discontents."
Marianne assented most feelingly to the remark
and her mother was led by it to an enumeration of Colonel
Brandon's injuries and merits, warm as friendship
and design could unitedly dictate. Her daughter did
not look, however, as if much of it were heard by her.
Elinor, according to her expectation, saw on the two
or three following days, that Marianne did not continue
to gain strength as she had done but while her resolution
was unsubdued, and she still tried to appear cheerful
and easy, her sister could safely trust to the effect
of time upon her health.
Margaret returned, and the family were again all
restored to each other, again quietly settled at the cottage
and if not pursuing their usual studies with quite
so much vigour as when they first came to Barton,
at least planning a vigorous prosecution of them in future.
Elinor grew impatient for some tidings of Edward.
She had heard nothing of him since her leaving London,
nothing new of his plans, nothing certain even of his
present abode. Some letters had passed between her
and her brother, in consequence of Marianne's illness
and in the first of John's, there had been this sentence
"We know nothing of our unfortunate Edward, and can make no
enquiries on so prohibited a subject, but conclude him
to be still at Oxford" which was all the intelligence
of Edward afforded her by the correspondence, for his name
was not even mentioned in any of the succeeding letters.
She was not doomed, however, to be long in ignorance of
his measures.
Their manservant had been sent one morning to Exeter
on business and when, as he waited at table, he had
satisfied the inquiries of his mistress as to the event
of his errand, this was his voluntary communication
"I suppose you know, ma'am, that Mr. Ferrars is married."
Marianne gave a violent start, fixed her eyes
upon Elinor, saw her turning pale, and fell back in her
chair in hysterics. Mrs. Dashwood, whose eyes, as she
answered the servant's inquiry, had intuitively taken
the same direction, was shocked to perceive by Elinor's
countenance how much she really suffered, and a moment
afterwards, alike distressed by Marianne's situation,
knew not on which child to bestow her principal attention.
The servant, who saw only that Miss Marianne was
taken ill, had sense enough to call one of the maids,
who, with Mrs. Dashwood's assistance, supported her into
the other room. By that time, Marianne was rather better,
and her mother leaving her to the care of Margaret
and the maid, returned to Elinor, who, though still
much disordered, had so far recovered the use of her reason
and voice as to be just beginning an inquiry of Thomas,
as to the source of his intelligence. Mrs. Dashwood
immediately took all that trouble on herself and Elinor
had the benefit of the information without the exertion
of seeking it.
"Who told you that Mr. Ferrars was married, Thomas?"
"I see Mr. Ferrars myself, ma'am, this morning
in Exeter, and his lady too, Miss Steele as was. They was
stopping in a chaise at the door of the New London Inn,
as I went there with a message from Sally at the Park
to her brother, who is one of the postboys. I happened
to look up as I went by the chaise, and so I see directly
it was the youngest Miss Steele so I took off my hat,
and she knew me and called to me, and inquired after you,
ma'am, and the young ladies, especially Miss Marianne,
and bid me I should give her compliments and Mr. Ferrars's,
their best compliments and service, and how sorry they
was they had not time to come on and see you, but they was
in a great hurry to go forwards, for they was going further
down for a little while, but howsever, when they come back,
they'd make sure to come and see you."
"But did she tell you she was married, Thomas?"
"Yes, ma'am. She smiled, and said how she
had changed her name since she was in these parts.
She was always a very affable and freespoken young lady,
and very civil behaved. So, I made free to wish her joy."
"Was Mr. Ferrars in the carriage with her?"
"Yes, ma'am, I just see him leaning back in it,
but he did not look uphe never was a gentleman much
for talking."
Elinor's heart could easily account for his not
putting himself forward and Mrs. Dashwood probably
found the same explanation.
"Was there no one else in the carriage?"
"No, ma'am, only they two."
"Do you know where they came from?"
"They come straight from town, as Miss Lucy
Mrs. Ferrars told me."
"And are they going farther westward?"
"Yes, ma'ambut not to bide long. They will soon
be back again, and then they'd be sure and call here."
Mrs. Dashwood now looked at her daughter
but Elinor knew better than to expect them.
She recognised the whole of Lucy in the message, and was
very confident that Edward would never come near them.
She observed in a low voice, to her mother, that they
were probably going down to Mr. Pratt's, near Plymouth.
Thomas's intelligence seemed over. Elinor looked
as if she wished to hear more.
"Did you see them off, before you came away?"
"No, ma'amthe horses were just coming out, but I
could not bide any longer I was afraid of being late."
"Did Mrs. Ferrars look well?"
"Yes, ma'am, she said how she was very well
and to my mind she was always a very handsome young
ladyand she seemed vastly contented."
Mrs. Dashwood could think of no other question,
and Thomas and the tablecloth, now alike needless,
were soon afterwards dismissed. Marianne had already sent
to say, that she should eat nothing more. Mrs. Dashwood's
and Elinor's appetites were equally lost, and Margaret
might think herself very well off, that with so much
uneasiness as both her sisters had lately experienced,
so much reason as they had often had to be careless
of their meals, she had never been obliged to go without
her dinner before.
When the dessert and the wine were arranged,
and Mrs. Dashwood and Elinor were left by themselves,
they remained long together in a similarity of thoughtfulness
and silence. Mrs. Dashwood feared to hazard any remark,
and ventured not to offer consolation. She now found
that she had erred in relying on Elinor's representation
of herself and justly concluded that every thing
had been expressly softened at the time, to spare her
from an increase of unhappiness, suffering as she then
had suffered for Marianne. She found that she had been
misled by the careful, the considerate attention of
her daughter, to think the attachment, which once she
had so well understood, much slighter in reality, than
she had been wont to believe, or than it was now proved
to be. She feared that under this persuasion she had
been unjust, inattentive, nay, almost unkind, to her Elinor
that Marianne's affliction, because more acknowledged,
more immediately before her, had too much engrossed
her tenderness, and led her away to forget that in Elinor
she might have a daughter suffering almost as much,
certainly with less selfprovocation, and greater fortitude.
CHAPTER 
Elinor now found the difference between the expectation
of an unpleasant event, however certain the mind may be told
to consider it, and certainty itself. She now found, that
in spite of herself, she had always admitted a hope,
while Edward remained single, that something would occur
to prevent his marrying Lucy that some resolution of
his own, some mediation of friends, or some more eligible
opportunity of establishment for the lady, would arise
to assist the happiness of all. But he was now married
and she condemned her heart for the lurking flattery,
which so much heightened the pain of the intelligence.
That he should be married soon, before as she imagined
he could be in orders, and consequently before he could
be in possession of the living, surprised her a little
at first. But she soon saw how likely it was that Lucy,
in her selfprovident care, in her haste to secure him,
should overlook every thing but the risk of delay.
They were married, married in town, and now hastening
down to her uncle's. What had Edward felt on being within
four miles from Barton, on seeing her mother's servant,
on hearing Lucy's message
They would soon, she supposed, be settled at
Delaford.Delaford,that place in which so much
conspired to give her an interest which she wished
to be acquainted with, and yet desired to avoid.
She saw them in an instant in their parsonagehouse saw
in Lucy, the active, contriving manager, uniting at once
a desire of smart appearance with the utmost frugality,
and ashamed to be suspected of half her economical practices
pursuing her own interest in every thought, courting the
favour of Colonel Brandon, of Mrs. Jennings, and of every
wealthy friend. In Edwardshe knew not what she saw,
nor what she wished to seehappy or unhappy,nothing
pleased her she turned away her head from every sketch of him.
Elinor flattered herself that some one of their
connections in London would write to them to announce
the event, and give farther particulars,but day after
day passed off, and brought no letter, no tidings.
Though uncertain that any one were to blame, she found
fault with every absent friend. They were all thoughtless
or indolent.
"When do you write to Colonel Brandon, ma'am?"
was an inquiry which sprung from the impatience
of her mind to have something going on.
"I wrote to him, my love, last week, and rather
expect to see, than to hear from him again. I earnestly
pressed his coming to us, and should not be surprised
to see him walk in today or tomorrow, or any day."
This was gaining something, something to look forward to.
Colonel Brandon must have some information to give.
Scarcely had she so determined it, when the figure
of a man on horseback drew her eyes to the window.
He stopt at their gate. It was a gentleman, it
was Colonel Brandon himself. Now she could hear more
and she trembled in expectation of it. Butit was
NOT Colonel Brandonneither his airnor his height.
Were it possible, she must say it must be Edward.
She looked again. He had just dismountedshe could not be
mistaken,it WAS Edward. She moved away and sat down.
"He comes from Mr. Pratt's purposely to see us. I WILL be
calm I WILL be mistress of myself."
In a moment she perceived that the others were likewise
aware of the mistake. She saw her mother and Marianne
change colour saw them look at herself, and whisper
a few sentences to each other. She would have given
the world to be able to speakand to make them understand
that she hoped no coolness, no slight, would appear
in their behaviour to himbut she had no utterance,
and was obliged to leave all to their own discretion.
Not a syllable passed aloud. They all waited
in silence for the appearance of their visitor.
His footsteps were heard along the gravel path in a moment
he was in the passage, and in another he was before them.
His countenance, as he entered the room, was not
too happy, even for Elinor. His complexion was white
with agitation, and he looked as if fearful of his
reception, and conscious that he merited no kind one.
Mrs. Dashwood, however, conforming, as she trusted,
to the wishes of that daughter, by whom she then meant
in the warmth of her heart to be guided in every thing,
met with a look of forced complacency, gave him her hand,
and wished him joy.
He coloured, and stammered out an unintelligible reply.
Elinor's lips had moved with her mother's, and, when the
moment of action was over, she wished that she had shaken
hands with him too. But it was then too late, and with a
countenance meaning to be open, she sat down again
and talked of the weather.
Marianne had retreated as much as possible
out of sight, to conceal her distress and Margaret,
understanding some part, but not the whole of the case,
thought it incumbent on her to be dignified, and therefore
took a seat as far from him as she could, and maintained
a strict silence.
When Elinor had ceased to rejoice in the dryness
of the season, a very awful pause took place. It was put
an end to by Mrs. Dashwood, who felt obliged to hope that he
had left Mrs. Ferrars very well. In a hurried manner,
he replied in the affirmative.
Another pause.
Elinor resolving to exert herself, though fearing
the sound of her own voice, now said,
"Is Mrs. Ferrars at Longstaple?"
"At Longstaple" he replied, with an air of surprise.
"No, my mother is in town."
"I meant," said Elinor, taking up some work from
the table, "to inquire for Mrs. EDWARD Ferrars."
She dared not look upbut her mother and Marianne both
turned their eyes on him. He coloured, seemed perplexed,
looked doubtingly, and, after some hesitation, said,
"Perhaps you meanmy brotheryou mean Mrs.Mrs.
ROBERT Ferrars."
"Mrs. Robert Ferrars"was repeated by Marianne and her
mother in an accent of the utmost amazementand though
Elinor could not speak, even HER eyes were fixed on him
with the same impatient wonder. He rose from his seat,
and walked to the window, apparently from not knowing
what to do took up a pair of scissors that lay there,
and while spoiling both them and their sheath by cutting
the latter to pieces as he spoke, said, in a hurried voice,
"Perhaps you do not knowyou may not have heard
that my brother is lately married toto the youngestto
Miss Lucy Steele."
His words were echoed with unspeakable astonishment
by all but Elinor, who sat with her head leaning over
her work, in a state of such agitation as made her hardly
know where she was.
"Yes," said he, "they were married last week,
and are now at Dawlish."
Elinor could sit it no longer. She almost ran
out of the room, and as soon as the door was closed,
burst into tears of joy, which at first she thought would
never cease. Edward, who had till then looked any where,
rather than at her, saw her hurry away, and perhaps saw
or even heard, her emotion for immediately afterwards
he fell into a reverie, which no remarks, no inquiries,
no affectionate address of Mrs. Dashwood could penetrate,
and at last, without saying a word, quitted the room,
and walked out towards the villageleaving the others
in the greatest astonishment and perplexity on a change
in his situation, so wonderful and so suddena perplexity
which they had no means of lessening but by their
own conjectures.
CHAPTER 
Unaccountable, however, as the circumstances of his
release might appear to the whole family, it was certain
that Edward was free and to what purpose that freedom would
be employed was easily predetermined by allfor after
experiencing the blessings of ONE imprudent engagement,
contracted without his mother's consent, as he had already
done for more than four years, nothing less could be expected
of him in the failure of THAT, than the immediate contraction
of another.
His errand at Barton, in fact, was a simple one.
It was only to ask Elinor to marry himand considering
that he was not altogether inexperienced in such a question,
it might be strange that he should feel so uncomfortable
in the present case as he really did, so much in need of
encouragement and fresh air.
How soon he had walked himself into the proper
resolution, however, how soon an opportunity of exercising
it occurred, in what manner he expressed himself,
and how he was received, need not be particularly told.
This only need be saidthat when they all sat down to
table at four o'clock, about three hours after his arrival,
he had secured his lady, engaged her mother's consent,
and was not only in the rapturous profession of
the lover, but, in the reality of reason and truth,
one of the happiest of men. His situation indeed was
more than commonly joyful. He had more than the ordinary
triumph of accepted love to swell his heart, and raise
his spirits. He was released without any reproach
to himself, from an entanglement which had long formed
his misery, from a woman whom he had long ceased to love
and elevated at once to that security with another,
which he must have thought of almost with despair,
as soon as he had learnt to consider it with desire.
He was brought, not from doubt or suspense, but from
misery to happinessand the change was openly spoken
in such a genuine, flowing, grateful cheerfulness,
as his friends had never witnessed in him before.
His heart was now open to Elinor, all its weaknesses,
all its errors confessed, and his first boyish attachment
to Lucy treated with all the philosophic dignity of twentyfour.
"It was a foolish, idle inclination on my side,"
said he, "the consequence of ignorance of the world
and want of employment. Had my brother given me
some active profession when I was removed at eighteen
from the care of Mr. Pratt, I thinknay, I am sure,
it would never have happened for though I left Longstaple
with what I thought, at the time, a most unconquerable
preference for his niece, yet had I then had any pursuit,
any object to engage my time and keep me at a distance
from her for a few months, I should very soon have
outgrown the fancied attachment, especially by mixing
more with the world, as in such case I must have done.
But instead of having any thing to do, instead of having any
profession chosen for me, or being allowed to chuse any myself,
I returned home to be completely idle and for the first
twelvemonth afterwards I had not even the nominal employment,
which belonging to the university would have given me
for I was not entered at Oxford till I was nineteen.
I had therefore nothing in the world to do, but to fancy
myself in love and as my mother did not make my home
in every respect comfortable, as I had no friend,
no companion in my brother, and disliked new acquaintance,
it was not unnatural for me to be very often at Longstaple,
where I always felt myself at home, and was always sure
of a welcome and accordingly I spent the greatest part
of my time there from eighteen to nineteen Lucy appeared
everything that was amiable and obliging. She was pretty
tooat least I thought so THEN and I had seen so little
of other women, that I could make no comparisons, and see
no defects. Considering everything, therefore, I hope,
foolish as our engagement was, foolish as it has since
in every way been proved, it was not at the time an unnatural
or an inexcusable piece of folly."
The change which a few hours had wrought in the minds
and the happiness of the Dashwoods, was suchso greatas
promised them all, the satisfaction of a sleepless night.
Mrs. Dashwood, too happy to be comfortable, knew not how
to love Edward, nor praise Elinor enough, how to be enough
thankful for his release without wounding his delicacy,
nor how at once to give them leisure for unrestrained
conversation together, and yet enjoy, as she wished,
the sight and society of both.
Marianne could speak HER happiness only by tears.
Comparisons would occurregrets would ariseand her joy,
though sincere as her love for her sister, was of a kind to
give her neither spirits nor language.
But Elinorhow are HER feelings to be described?From
the moment of learning that Lucy was married to another,
that Edward was free, to the moment of his justifying
the hopes which had so instantly followed, she was every
thing by turns but tranquil. But when the second moment
had passed, when she found every doubt, every solicitude
removed, compared her situation with what so lately it
had been,saw him honourably released from his former
engagement, saw him instantly profiting by the release,
to address herself and declare an affection as tender,
as constant as she had ever supposed it to be,she
was oppressed, she was overcome by her own felicity
and happily disposed as is the human mind to be easily
familiarized with any change for the better, it required
several hours to give sedateness to her spirits, or any
degree of tranquillity to her heart.
Edward was now fixed at the cottage at least for
a weekfor whatever other claims might be made on him,
it was impossible that less than a week should be given
up to the enjoyment of Elinor's company, or suffice
to say half that was to be said of the past, the present,
and the futurefor though a very few hours spent in
the hard labor of incessant talking will despatch more
subjects than can really be in common between any two
rational creatures, yet with lovers it is different.
Between THEM no subject is finished, no communication
is even made, till it has been made at least twenty
times over.
Lucy's marriage, the unceasing and reasonable wonder
among them all, formed of course one of the earliest
discussions of the loversand Elinor's particular knowledge
of each party made it appear to her in every view, as one
of the most extraordinary and unaccountable circumstances
she had ever heard. How they could be thrown together,
and by what attraction Robert could be drawn on to marry
a girl, of whose beauty she had herself heard him speak
without any admiration,a girl too already engaged
to his brother, and on whose account that brother had been
thrown off by his familyit was beyond her comprehension
to make out. To her own heart it was a delightful affair,
to her imagination it was even a ridiculous one, but
to her reason, her judgment, it was completely a puzzle.
Edward could only attempt an explanation by supposing,
that, perhaps, at first accidentally meeting, the vanity
of the one had been so worked on by the flattery
of the other, as to lead by degrees to all the rest.
Elinor remembered what Robert had told her in Harley Street,
of his opinion of what his own mediation in his brother's
affairs might have done, if applied to in time.
She repeated it to Edward.
"THAT was exactly like Robert,"was his immediate
observation."And THAT," he presently added, "might
perhaps be in HIS head when the acquaintance between
them first began. And Lucy perhaps at first might
think only of procuring his good offices in my favour.
Other designs might afterward arise."
How long it had been carrying on between them,
however, he was equally at a loss with herself to make out
for at Oxford, where he had remained for choice ever since
his quitting London, he had had no means of hearing of her
but from herself, and her letters to the very last were
neither less frequent, nor less affectionate than usual.
Not the smallest suspicion, therefore, had ever occurred
to prepare him for what followedand when at last it
burst on him in a letter from Lucy herself, he had been
for some time, he believed, half stupified between
the wonder, the horror, and the joy of such a deliverance.
He put the letter into Elinor's hands.
"DEAR SIR,
"Being very sure I have long lost your affections,
I have thought myself at liberty to bestow my own
on another, and have no doubt of being as happy with
him as I once used to think I might be with you
but I scorn to accept a hand while the heart was
another's. Sincerely wish you happy in your choice,
and it shall not be my fault if we are not always
good friends, as our near relationship now makes
proper. I can safely say I owe you no illwill,
and am sure you will be too generous to do us any
ill offices. Your brother has gained my affections
entirely, and as we could not live without one
another, we are just returned from the altar, and
are now on our way to Dawlish for a few weeks, which
place your dear brother has great curiosity to see,
but thought I would first trouble you with these
few lines, and shall always remain,
"Your sincere wellwisher, friend, and sister,
"LUCY FERRARS.
"I have burnt all your letters, and will return
your picture the first opportunity. Please to destroy
my scrawlsbut the ring with my hair you are very
welcome to keep."
Elinor read and returned it without any comment.
"I will not ask your opinion of it as a composition,"
said Edward."For worlds would not I have had a letter
of hers seen by YOU in former days.In a sister it
is bad enough, but in a wifehow I have blushed over
the pages of her writingand I believe I may say that
since the first half year of our foolishbusinessthis
is the only letter I ever received from her, of which
the substance made me any amends for the defect of the style."
"However it may have come about," said Elinor,
after a pause,"they are certainly married. And your mother
has brought on herself a most appropriate punishment.
The independence she settled on Robert, through resentment
against you, has put it in his power to make his own choice
and she has actually been bribing one son with a thousand
ayear, to do the very deed which she disinherited the
other for intending to do. She will hardly be less hurt,
I suppose, by Robert's marrying Lucy, than she would have
been by your marrying her."
"She will be more hurt by it, for Robert always
was her favourite.She will be more hurt by it,
and on the same principle will forgive him much sooner."
In what state the affair stood at present between them,
Edward knew not, for no communication with any of his family
had yet been attempted by him. He had quitted Oxford
within four and twenty hours after Lucy's letter arrived,
and with only one object before him, the nearest road
to Barton, had had no leisure to form any scheme of conduct,
with which that road did not hold the most intimate connection.
He could do nothing till he were assured of his fate with
Miss Dashwood and by his rapidity in seeking THAT fate,
it is to be supposed, in spite of the jealousy with
which he had once thought of Colonel Brandon, in spite
of the modesty with which he rated his own deserts,
and the politeness with which he talked of his doubts,
he did not, upon the whole, expect a very cruel reception.
It was his business, however, to say that he DID, and he
said it very prettily. What he might say on the subject
a twelvemonth after, must be referred to the imagination
of husbands and wives.
That Lucy had certainly meant to deceive, to go off
with a flourish of malice against him in her message
by Thomas, was perfectly clear to Elinor and Edward himself,
now thoroughly enlightened on her character, had no
scruple in believing her capable of the utmost meanness
of wanton illnature. Though his eyes had been long opened,
even before his acquaintance with Elinor began, to her
ignorance and a want of liberality in some of her opinions
they had been equally imputed, by him, to her want
of education and till her last letter reached him,
he had always believed her to be a welldisposed,
goodhearted girl, and thoroughly attached to himself.
Nothing but such a persuasion could have prevented
his putting an end to an engagement, which, long before
the discovery of it laid him open to his mother's anger,
had been a continual source of disquiet and regret to him.
"I thought it my duty," said he, "independent of my feelings,
to give her the option of continuing the engagement or not,
when I was renounced by my mother, and stood to all
appearance without a friend in the world to assist me.
In such a situation as that, where there seemed nothing
to tempt the avarice or the vanity of any living creature,
how could I suppose, when she so earnestly, so warmly insisted
on sharing my fate, whatever it might be, that any thing
but the most disinterested affection was her inducement?
And even now, I cannot comprehend on what motive she acted,
or what fancied advantage it could be to her, to be
fettered to a man for whom she had not the smallest regard,
and who had only two thousand pounds in the world.
She could not foresee that Colonel Brandon would give me a
living."
"No but she might suppose that something would occur
in your favour that your own family might in time relent.
And at any rate, she lost nothing by continuing the engagement,
for she has proved that it fettered neither her inclination
nor her actions. The connection was certainly a
respectable one, and probably gained her consideration among
her friends and, if nothing more advantageous occurred,
it would be better for her to marry YOU than be single."
Edward was, of course, immediately convinced that
nothing could have been more natural than Lucy's conduct,
nor more selfevident than the motive of it.
Elinor scolded him, harshly as ladies always scold
the imprudence which compliments themselves, for having
spent so much time with them at Norland, when he must
have felt his own inconstancy.
"Your behaviour was certainly very wrong," said she
"becauseto say nothing of my own conviction, our relations
were all led away by it to fancy and expect WHAT, as you
were THEN situated, could never be."
He could only plead an ignorance of his own heart,
and a mistaken confidence in the force of his engagement.
"I was simple enough to think, that because my FAITH
was plighted to another, there could be no danger in my being
with you and that the consciousness of my engagement was
to keep my heart as safe and sacred as my honour. I felt
that I admired you, but I told myself it was only friendship
and till I began to make comparisons between yourself
and Lucy, I did not know how far I was got. After that,
I suppose, I WAS wrong in remaining so much in Sussex,
and the arguments with which I reconciled myself to the
expediency of it, were no better than theseThe danger
is my own I am doing no injury to anybody but myself."
Elinor smiled, and shook her head.
Edward heard with pleasure of Colonel Brandon's
being expected at the Cottage, as he really wished
not only to be better acquainted with him, but to have an
opportunity of convincing him that he no longer resented
his giving him the living of Delaford"Which, at present,"
said he, "after thanks so ungraciously delivered as mine
were on the occasion, he must think I have never forgiven
him for offering."
NOW he felt astonished himself that he had never yet
been to the place. But so little interest had be taken
in the matter, that he owed all his knowledge of the house,
garden, and glebe, extent of the parish, condition of
the land, and rate of the tithes, to Elinor herself,
who had heard so much of it from Colonel Brandon,
and heard it with so much attention, as to be entirely
mistress of the subject.
One question after this only remained undecided,
between them, one difficulty only was to be overcome.
They were brought together by mutual affection,
with the warmest approbation of their real friends
their intimate knowledge of each other seemed to make
their happiness certainand they only wanted something
to live upon. Edward had two thousand pounds, and Elinor
one, which, with Delaford living, was all that they could
call their own for it was impossible that Mrs. Dashwood
should advance anything and they were neither of them
quite enough in love to think that three hundred and fifty
pounds ayear would supply them with the comforts of life.
Edward was not entirely without hopes of some
favourable change in his mother towards him and on THAT
he rested for the residue of their income. But Elinor
had no such dependence for since Edward would still
be unable to marry Miss Morton, and his chusing herself
had been spoken of in Mrs. Ferrars's flattering language
as only a lesser evil than his chusing Lucy Steele,
she feared that Robert's offence would serve no other
purpose than to enrich Fanny.
About four days after Edward's arrival Colonel
Brandon appeared, to complete Mrs. Dashwood's satisfaction,
and to give her the dignity of having, for the first time
since her living at Barton, more company with her than
her house would hold. Edward was allowed to retain the
privilege of first comer, and Colonel Brandon therefore
walked every night to his old quarters at the Park
from whence he usually returned in the morning, early enough
to interrupt the lovers' first teteatete before breakfast.
A three weeks' residence at Delaford, where,
in his evening hours at least, he had little to do
but to calculate the disproportion between thirtysix
and seventeen, brought him to Barton in a temper of mind
which needed all the improvement in Marianne's looks,
all the kindness of her welcome, and all the encouragement
of her mother's language, to make it cheerful.
Among such friends, however, and such flattery, he did revive.
No rumour of Lucy's marriage had yet reached himhe knew
nothing of what had passed and the first hours of his
visit were consequently spent in hearing and in wondering.
Every thing was explained to him by Mrs. Dashwood,
and he found fresh reason to rejoice in what he had done
for Mr. Ferrars, since eventually it promoted the interest
of Elinor.
It would be needless to say, that the gentlemen advanced
in the good opinion of each other, as they advanced in each
other's acquaintance, for it could not be otherwise.
Their resemblance in good principles and good sense,
in disposition and manner of thinking, would probably
have been sufficient to unite them in friendship,
without any other attraction but their being in love
with two sisters, and two sisters fond of each other,
made that mutual regard inevitable and immediate,
which might otherwise have waited the effect of time
and judgment.
The letters from town, which a few days before would
have made every nerve in Elinor's body thrill with transport,
now arrived to be read with less emotion that mirth.
Mrs. Jennings wrote to tell the wonderful tale, to vent her
honest indignation against the jilting girl, and pour forth
her compassion towards poor Mr. Edward, who, she was sure,
had quite doted upon the worthless hussy, and was now,
by all accounts, almost brokenhearted, at Oxford.
"I do think," she continued, "nothing was ever carried
on so sly for it was but two days before Lucy called
and sat a couple of hours with me. Not a soul suspected
anything of the matter, not even Nancy, who, poor soul
came crying to me the day after, in a great fright
for fear of Mrs. Ferrars, as well as not knowing how to
get to Plymouth for Lucy it seems borrowed all her
money before she went off to be married, on purpose
we suppose to make a show with, and poor Nancy had not
seven shillings in the worldso I was very glad to give
her five guineas to take her down to Exeter, where she
thinks of staying three or four weeks with Mrs. Burgess,
in hopes, as I tell her, to fall in with the Doctor again.
And I must say that Lucy's crossness not to take them
along with them in the chaise is worse than all.
Poor Mr. Edward I cannot get him out of my head, but you
must send for him to Barton, and Miss Marianne must try to
comfort him."
Mr. Dashwood's strains were more solemn.
Mrs. Ferrars was the most unfortunate of womenpoor
Fanny had suffered agonies of sensibilityand he
considered the existence of each, under such a blow,
with grateful wonder. Robert's offence was unpardonable,
but Lucy's was infinitely worse. Neither of them were
ever again to be mentioned to Mrs. Ferrars and even,
if she might hereafter be induced to forgive her son,
his wife should never be acknowledged as her daughter,
nor be permitted to appear in her presence. The secrecy
with which everything had been carried on between them,
was rationally treated as enormously heightening
the crime, because, had any suspicion of it occurred
to the others, proper measures would have been taken
to prevent the marriage and he called on Elinor to join
with him in regretting that Lucy's engagement with Edward
had not rather been fulfilled, than that she should thus
be the means of spreading misery farther in the family.
He thus continued
"Mrs. Ferrars has never yet mentioned Edward's name,
which does not surprise us but, to our great astonishment,
not a line has been received from him on the occasion.
Perhaps, however, he is kept silent by his fear of offending,
and I shall, therefore, give him a hint, by a line
to Oxford, that his sister and I both think a letter
of proper submission from him, addressed perhaps to Fanny,
and by her shewn to her mother, might not be taken amiss
for we all know the tenderness of Mrs. Ferrars's heart,
and that she wishes for nothing so much as to be on good terms
with her children."
This paragraph was of some importance to the
prospects and conduct of Edward. It determined him
to attempt a reconciliation, though not exactly
in the manner pointed out by their brother and sister.
"A letter of proper submission" repeated he
"would they have me beg my mother's pardon for Robert's
ingratitude to HER, and breach of honour to ME?I can
make no submissionI am grown neither humble nor
penitent by what has passed.I am grown very happy
but that would not interest.I know of no submission
that IS proper for me to make."
"You may certainly ask to be forgiven," said Elinor,
"because you have offendedand I should think you
might NOW venture so far as to profess some concern
for having ever formed the engagement which drew on you
your mother's anger."
He agreed that he might.
"And when she has forgiven you, perhaps a little humility
may be convenient while acknowledging a second engagement,
almost as imprudent in HER eyes as the first."
He had nothing to urge against it, but still
resisted the idea of a letter of proper submission
and therefore, to make it easier to him, as he declared
a much greater willingness to make mean concessions
by word of mouth than on paper, it was resolved that,
instead of writing to Fanny, he should go to London,
and personally intreat her good offices in his favour.
"And if they really DO interest themselves," said Marianne,
in her new character of candour, "in bringing about
a reconciliation, I shall think that even John and Fanny
are not entirely without merit."
After a visit on Colonel Brandon's side of only three
or four days, the two gentlemen quitted Barton together.
They were to go immediately to Delaford, that Edward
might have some personal knowledge of his future home,
and assist his patron and friend in deciding on what
improvements were needed to it and from thence,
after staying there a couple of nights, he was to proceed
on his journey to town.
CHAPTER 
After a proper resistance on the part of Mrs. Ferrars,
just so violent and so steady as to preserve her from that
reproach which she always seemed fearful of incurring,
the reproach of being too amiable, Edward was admitted
to her presence, and pronounced to be again her son.
Her family had of late been exceedingly fluctuating.
For many years of her life she had had two sons
but the crime and annihilation of Edward a few weeks ago,
had robbed her of one the similar annihilation of Robert
had left her for a fortnight without any and now,
by the resuscitation of Edward, she had one again.
In spite of his being allowed once more to live,
however, he did not feel the continuance of his existence
secure, till he had revealed his present engagement
for the publication of that circumstance, he feared,
might give a sudden turn to his constitution, and carry
him off as rapidly as before. With apprehensive caution
therefore it was revealed, and he was listened to with
unexpected calmness. Mrs. Ferrars at first reasonably
endeavoured to dissuade him from marrying Miss Dashwood,
by every argument in her powertold him, that in Miss Morton
he would have a woman of higher rank and larger fortune
and enforced the assertion, by observing that Miss Morton
was the daughter of a nobleman with thirty thousand pounds,
while Miss Dashwood was only the daughter of a private
gentleman with no more than THREE but when she found that,
though perfectly admitting the truth of her representation,
he was by no means inclined to be guided by it,
she judged it wisest, from the experience of the past,
to submitand therefore, after such an ungracious delay
as she owed to her own dignity, and as served to prevent
every suspicion of goodwill, she issued her decree
of consent to the marriage of Edward and Elinor.
What she would engage to do towards augmenting
their income was next to be considered and here it
plainly appeared, that though Edward was now her only son,
he was by no means her eldest for while Robert was
inevitably endowed with a thousand pounds ayear,
not the smallest objection was made against Edward's taking
orders for the sake of two hundred and fifty at the utmost
nor was anything promised either for the present or in future,
beyond the ten thousand pounds, which had been given with Fanny.
It was as much, however, as was desired,
and more than was expected, by Edward and Elinor
and Mrs. Ferrars herself, by her shuffling excuses,
seemed the only person surprised at her not giving more.
With an income quite sufficient to their wants
thus secured to them, they had nothing to wait for
after Edward was in possession of the living, but the
readiness of the house, to which Colonel Brandon,
with an eager desire for the accommodation of Elinor,
was making considerable improvements and after waiting
some time for their completion, after experiencing,
as usual, a thousand disappointments and delays
from the unaccountable dilatoriness of the workmen, Elinor,
as usual, broke through the first positive resolution
of not marrying till every thing was ready, and the
ceremony took place in Barton church early in the autumn.
The first month after their marriage was spent
with their friend at the Mansionhouse from whence
they could superintend the progress of the Parsonage,
and direct every thing as they liked on the spot
could chuse papers, project shrubberies, and invent a sweep.
Mrs. Jennings's prophecies, though rather jumbled together,
were chiefly fulfilled for she was able to visit Edward
and his wife in their Parsonage by Michaelmas, and she
found in Elinor and her husband, as she really believed,
one of the happiest couples in the world. They had
in fact nothing to wish for, but the marriage of Colonel
Brandon and Marianne, and rather better pasturage for
their cows.
They were visited on their first settling by almost
all their relations and friends. Mrs. Ferrars came
to inspect the happiness which she was almost ashamed
of having authorised and even the Dashwoods were at
the expense of a journey from Sussex to do them honour.
"I will not say that I am disappointed, my dear sister,"
said John, as they were walking together one morning before
the gates of Delaford House, "THAT would be saying too much,
for certainly you have been one of the most fortunate young
women in the world, as it is. But, I confess, it would
give me great pleasure to call Colonel Brandon brother.
His property here, his place, his house, every thing is in
such respectable and excellent conditionand his woodsI
have not seen such timber any where in Dorsetshire, as there
is now standing in Delaford HangerAnd though, perhaps,
Marianne may not seem exactly the person to attract him
yet I think it would altogether be advisable for you to
have them now frequently staying with you, for as Colonel
Brandon seems a great deal at home, nobody can tell what
may happenfor, when people are much thrown together,
and see little of anybody elseand it will always be
in your power to set her off to advantage, and so forth
in short, you may as well give her a chanceYou understand
me."
But though Mrs. Ferrars DID come to see them, and always
treated them with the makebelieve of decent affection,
they were never insulted by her real favour and preference.
THAT was due to the folly of Robert, and the cunning
of his wife and it was earned by them before many months
had passed away. The selfish sagacity of the latter,
which had at first drawn Robert into the scrape,
was the principal instrument of his deliverance from it
for her respectful humility, assiduous attentions,
and endless flatteries, as soon as the smallest opening
was given for their exercise, reconciled Mrs. Ferrars
to his choice, and reestablished him completely in
her favour.
The whole of Lucy's behaviour in the affair,
and the prosperity which crowned it, therefore, may be held
forth as a most encouraging instance of what an earnest,
an unceasing attention to selfinterest, however its progress
may be apparently obstructed, will do in securing every
advantage of fortune, with no other sacrifice than that of time
and conscience. When Robert first sought her acquaintance,
and privately visited her in Bartlett's Buildings,
it was only with the view imputed to him by his brother.
He merely meant to persuade her to give up the engagement
and as there could be nothing to overcome but the affection
of both, he naturally expected that one or two interviews
would settle the matter. In that point, however,
and that only, he erredfor though Lucy soon gave him
hopes that his eloquence would convince her in TIME,
another visit, another conversation, was always wanted
to produce this conviction. Some doubts always lingered
in her mind when they parted, which could only be
removed by another half hour's discourse with himself.
His attendance was by this means secured, and the rest
followed in course. Instead of talking of Edward,
they came gradually to talk only of Robert,a subject
on which he had always more to say than on any other,
and in which she soon betrayed an interest even equal
to his own and in short, it became speedily evident
to both, that he had entirely supplanted his brother.
He was proud of his conquest, proud of tricking Edward,
and very proud of marrying privately without his
mother's consent. What immediately followed is known.
They passed some months in great happiness at Dawlish
for she had many relations and old acquaintances to
cutand he drew several plans for magnificent cottages
and from thence returning to town, procured the forgiveness
of Mrs. Ferrars, by the simple expedient of asking it,
which, at Lucy's instigation, was adopted. The forgiveness,
at first, indeed, as was reasonable, comprehended only Robert
and Lucy, who had owed his mother no duty and therefore
could have transgressed none, still remained some weeks
longer unpardoned. But perseverance in humility of conduct
and messages, in selfcondemnation for Robert's offence,
and gratitude for the unkindness she was treated with,
procured her in time the haughty notice which overcame
her by its graciousness, and led soon afterwards, by rapid
degrees, to the highest state of affection and influence.
Lucy became as necessary to Mrs. Ferrars, as either Robert
or Fanny and while Edward was never cordially forgiven
for having once intended to marry her, and Elinor,
though superior to her in fortune and birth, was spoken
of as an intruder, SHE was in every thing considered,
and always openly acknowledged, to be a favourite child.
They settled in town, received very liberal assistance
from Mrs. Ferrars, were on the best terms imaginable
with the Dashwoods and setting aside the jealousies
and illwill continually subsisting between Fanny and Lucy,
in which their husbands of course took a part, as well
as the frequent domestic disagreements between Robert and
Lucy themselves, nothing could exceed the harmony in which
they all lived together.
What Edward had done to forfeit the right of eldest
son, might have puzzled many people to find out and what
Robert had done to succeed to it, might have puzzled them
still more. It was an arrangement, however, justified in
its effects, if not in its cause for nothing ever
appeared in Robert's style of living or of talking to give
a suspicion of his regretting the extent of his income,
as either leaving his brother too little, or bringing
himself too muchand if Edward might be judged from
the ready discharge of his duties in every particular,
from an increasing attachment to his wife and his home,
and from the regular cheerfulness of his spirits,
he might be supposed no less contented with his lot,
no less free from every wish of an exchange.
Elinor's marriage divided her as little from her
family as could well be contrived, without rendering
the cottage at Barton entirely useless, for her mother
and sisters spent much more than half their time with her.
Mrs. Dashwood was acting on motives of policy as well
as pleasure in the frequency of her visits at Delaford
for her wish of bringing Marianne and Colonel Brandon together
was hardly less earnest, though rather more liberal than
what John had expressed. It was now her darling object.
Precious as was the company of her daughter to her,
she desired nothing so much as to give up its constant
enjoyment to her valued friend and to see Marianne settled at
the mansionhouse was equally the wish of Edward and Elinor.
They each felt his sorrows, and their own obligations,
and Marianne, by general consent, was to be the reward
of all.
With such a confederacy against herwith a knowledge
so intimate of his goodnesswith a conviction of his fond
attachment to herself, which at last, though long after it
was observable to everybody elseburst on herwhat could she
do?
Marianne Dashwood was born to an extraordinary fate.
She was born to discover the falsehood of her own opinions,
and to counteract, by her conduct, her most favourite maxims.
She was born to overcome an affection formed so late
in life as at seventeen, and with no sentiment
superior to strong esteem and lively friendship,
voluntarily to give her hand to anotherand THAT other,
a man who had suffered no less than herself under the
event of a former attachment, whom, two years before,
she had considered too old to be married,and who still
sought the constitutional safeguard of a flannel waistcoat
But so it was. Instead of falling a sacrifice
to an irresistible passion, as once she had fondly
flattered herself with expecting,instead of remaining
even for ever with her mother, and finding her only
pleasures in retirement and study, as afterwards in her
more calm and sober judgment she had determined on,
she found herself at nineteen, submitting to new attachments,
entering on new duties, placed in a new home, a wife,
the mistress of a family, and the patroness of a village.
Colonel Brandon was now as happy, as all those who best
loved him, believed he deserved to bein Marianne he
was consoled for every past afflictionher regard and her
society restored his mind to animation, and his spirits
to cheerfulness and that Marianne found her own happiness
in forming his, was equally the persuasion and delight
of each observing friend. Marianne could never love
by halves and her whole heart became, in time, as much
devoted to her husband, as it had once been to Willoughby.
Willoughby could not hear of her marriage without
a pang and his punishment was soon afterwards complete
in the voluntary forgiveness of Mrs. Smith, who, by stating
his marriage with a woman of character, as the source
of her clemency, gave him reason for believing that had he
behaved with honour towards Marianne, he might at once have
been happy and rich. That his repentance of misconduct,
which thus brought its own punishment, was sincere,
need not be doubtednor that he long thought of Colonel
Brandon with envy, and of Marianne with regret. But that
he was for ever inconsolable, that he fled from society,
or contracted an habitual gloom of temper, or died of a
broken heart, must not be depended onfor he did neither.
He lived to exert, and frequently to enjoy himself.
His wife was not always out of humour, nor his home
always uncomfortable and in his breed of horses and dogs,
and in sporting of every kind, he found no inconsiderable
degree of domestic felicity.
For Marianne, howeverin spite of his incivility
in surviving her losshe always retained that decided
regard which interested him in every thing that befell her,
and made her his secret standard of perfection in woman
and many a rising beauty would be slighted by him in
afterdays as bearing no comparison with Mrs. Brandon.
Mrs. Dashwood was prudent enough to remain at the cottage,
without attempting a removal to Delaford and fortunately for
Sir John and Mrs. Jennings, when Marianne was taken from them,
Margaret had reached an age highly suitable for dancing,
and not very ineligible for being supposed to have a lover.
Between Barton and Delaford, there was that constant
communication which strong family affection would
naturally dictateand among the merits and the happiness
of Elinor and Marianne, let it not be ranked as the least
considerable, that though sisters, and living almost within
sight of each other, they could live without disagreement
between themselves, or producing coolness between their husbands.
THE END
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 START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES 
Additional editing by Jose Menendez
THE ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES by SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE
I. A Scandal in Bohemia
II. The Redheaded League
III. A Case of Identity
IV. The Boscombe Valley Mystery
V. The Five Orange Pips
VI. The Man with the Twisted Lip
VII. The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle
VIII. The Adventure of the Speckled Band
IX. The Adventure of the Engineer's Thumb
X. The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor
XI. The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet
XII. The Adventure of the Copper Beeches
ADVENTURE I. A SCANDAL IN BOHEMIA
I.
To Sherlock Holmes she is always THE woman. I have seldom heard
him mention her under any other name. In his eyes she eclipses
and predominates the whole of her sex. It was not that he felt
any emotion akin to love for Irene Adler. All emotions, and that
one particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise but
admirably balanced mind. He was, I take it, the most perfect
reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen, but as a
lover he would have placed himself in a false position. He never
spoke of the softer passions, save with a gibe and a sneer. They
were admirable things for the observerexcellent for drawing the
veil from men's motives and actions. But for the trained reasoner
to admit such intrusions into his own delicate and finely
adjusted temperament was to introduce a distracting factor which
might throw a doubt upon all his mental results. Grit in a
sensitive instrument, or a crack in one of his own highpower
lenses, would not be more disturbing than a strong emotion in a
nature such as his. And yet there was but one woman to him, and
that woman was the late Irene Adler, of dubious and questionable
memory.
I had seen little of Holmes lately. My marriage had drifted us
away from each other. My own complete happiness, and the
homecentred interests which rise up around the man who first
finds himself master of his own establishment, were sufficient to
absorb all my attention, while Holmes, who loathed every form of
society with his whole Bohemian soul, remained in our lodgings in
Baker Street, buried among his old books, and alternating from
week to week between cocaine and ambition, the drowsiness of the
drug, and the fierce energy of his own keen nature. He was still,
as ever, deeply attracted by the study of crime, and occupied his
immense faculties and extraordinary powers of observation in
following out those clues, and clearing up those mysteries which
had been abandoned as hopeless by the official police. From time
to time I heard some vague account of his doings of his summons
to Odessa in the case of the Trepoff murder, of his clearing up
of the singular tragedy of the Atkinson brothers at Trincomalee,
and finally of the mission which he had accomplished so
delicately and successfully for the reigning family of Holland.
Beyond these signs of his activity, however, which I merely
shared with all the readers of the daily press, I knew little of
my former friend and companion.
One nightit was on the twentieth of March, I was
returning from a journey to a patient for I had now returned to
civil practice, when my way led me through Baker Street. As I
passed the wellremembered door, which must always be associated
in my mind with my wooing, and with the dark incidents of the
Study in Scarlet, I was seized with a keen desire to see Holmes
again, and to know how he was employing his extraordinary powers.
His rooms were brilliantly lit, and, even as I looked up, I saw
his tall, spare figure pass twice in a dark silhouette against
the blind. He was pacing the room swiftly, eagerly, with his head
sunk upon his chest and his hands clasped behind him. To me, who
knew his every mood and habit, his attitude and manner told their
own story. He was at work again. He had risen out of his
drugcreated dreams and was hot upon the scent of some new
problem. I rang the bell and was shown up to the chamber which
had formerly been in part my own.
His manner was not effusive. It seldom was but he was glad, I
think, to see me. With hardly a word spoken, but with a kindly
eye, he waved me to an armchair, threw across his case of cigars,
and indicated a spirit case and a gasogene in the corner. Then he
stood before the fire and looked me over in his singular
introspective fashion.
"Wedlock suits you," he remarked. "I think, Watson, that you have
put on seven and a half pounds since I saw you."
"Seven" I answered.
"Indeed, I should have thought a little more. Just a trifle more,
I fancy, Watson. And in practice again, I observe. You did not
tell me that you intended to go into harness."
"Then, how do you know?"
"I see it, I deduce it. How do I know that you have been getting
yourself very wet lately, and that you have a most clumsy and
careless servant girl?"
"My dear Holmes," said I, "this is too much. You would certainly
have been burned, had you lived a few centuries ago. It is true
that I had a country walk on Thursday and came home in a dreadful
mess, but as I have changed my clothes I can't imagine how you
deduce it. As to Mary Jane, she is incorrigible, and my wife has
given her notice, but there, again, I fail to see how you work it
out."
He chuckled to himself and rubbed his long, nervous hands
together.
"It is simplicity itself," said he "my eyes tell me that on the
inside of your left shoe, just where the firelight strikes it,
the leather is scored by six almost parallel cuts. Obviously they
have been caused by someone who has very carelessly scraped round
the edges of the sole in order to remove crusted mud from it.
Hence, you see, my double deduction that you had been out in vile
weather, and that you had a particularly malignant bootslitting
specimen of the London slavey. As to your practice, if a
gentleman walks into my rooms smelling of iodoform, with a black
mark of nitrate of silver upon his right forefinger, and a bulge
on the right side of his tophat to show where he has secreted
his stethoscope, I must be dull, indeed, if I do not pronounce
him to be an active member of the medical profession."
I could not help laughing at the ease with which he explained his
process of deduction. "When I hear you give your reasons," I
remarked, "the thing always appears to me to be so ridiculously
simple that I could easily do it myself, though at each
successive instance of your reasoning I am baffled until you
explain your process. And yet I believe that my eyes are as good
as yours."
"Quite so," he answered, lighting a cigarette, and throwing
himself down into an armchair. "You see, but you do not observe.
The distinction is clear. For example, you have frequently seen
the steps which lead up from the hall to this room."
"Frequently."
"How often?"
"Well, some hundreds of times."
"Then how many are there?"
"How many? I don't know."
"Quite so You have not observed. And yet you have seen. That is
just my point. Now, I know that there are seventeen steps,
because I have both seen and observed. Bytheway, since you are
interested in these little problems, and since you are good
enough to chronicle one or two of my trifling experiences, you
may be interested in this." He threw over a sheet of thick,
pinktinted notepaper which had been lying open upon the table.
"It came by the last post," said he. "Read it aloud."
The note was undated, and without either signature or address.
"There will call upon you tonight, at a quarter to eight
o'clock," it said, "a gentleman who desires to consult you upon a
matter of the very deepest moment. Your recent services to one of
the royal houses of Europe have shown that you are one who may
safely be trusted with matters which are of an importance which
can hardly be exaggerated. This account of you we have from all
quarters received. Be in your chamber then at that hour, and do
not take it amiss if your visitor wear a mask."
"This is indeed a mystery," I remarked. "What do you imagine that
it means?"
"I have no data yet. It is a capital mistake to theorize before
one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit
theories, instead of theories to suit facts. But the note itself.
What do you deduce from it?"
I carefully examined the writing, and the paper upon which it was
written.
"The man who wrote it was presumably well to do," I remarked,
endeavouring to imitate my companion's processes. "Such paper
could not be bought under half a crown a packet. It is peculiarly
strong and stiff."
"Peculiarthat is the very word," said Holmes. "It is not an
English paper at all. Hold it up to the light."
I did so, and saw a large "E" with a small "g," a "P," and a
large "G" with a small "t" woven into the texture of the paper.
"What do you make of that?" asked Holmes.
"The name of the maker, no doubt or his monogram, rather."
"Not at all. The 'G' with the small 't' stands for
'Gesellschaft,' which is the German for 'Company.' It is a
customary contraction like our 'Co.' 'P,' of course, stands for
'Papier.' Now for the 'Eg.' Let us glance at our Continental
Gazetteer." He took down a heavy brown volume from his shelves.
"Eglow, Eglonitzhere we are, Egria. It is in a Germanspeaking
countryin Bohemia, not far from Carlsbad. 'Remarkable as being
the scene of the death of Wallenstein, and for its numerous
glassfactories and papermills.' Ha, ha, my boy, what do you
make of that?" His eyes sparkled, and he sent up a great blue
triumphant cloud from his cigarette.
"The paper was made in Bohemia," I said.
"Precisely. And the man who wrote the note is a German. Do you
note the peculiar construction of the sentence'This account of
you we have from all quarters received.' A Frenchman or Russian
could not have written that. It is the German who is so
uncourteous to his verbs. It only remains, therefore, to discover
what is wanted by this German who writes upon Bohemian paper and
prefers wearing a mask to showing his face. And here he comes, if
I am not mistaken, to resolve all our doubts."
As he spoke there was the sharp sound of horses' hoofs and
grating wheels against the curb, followed by a sharp pull at the
bell. Holmes whistled.
"A pair, by the sound," said he. "Yes," he continued, glancing
out of the window. "A nice little brougham and a pair of
beauties. A hundred and fifty guineas apiece. There's money in
this case, Watson, if there is nothing else."
"I think that I had better go, Holmes."
"Not a bit, Doctor. Stay where you are. I am lost without my
Boswell. And this promises to be interesting. It would be a pity
to miss it."
"But your client"
"Never mind him. I may want your help, and so may he. Here he
comes. Sit down in that armchair, Doctor, and give us your best
attention."
A slow and heavy step, which had been heard upon the stairs and
in the passage, paused immediately outside the door. Then there
was a loud and authoritative tap.
"Come in" said Holmes.
A man entered who could hardly have been less than six feet six
inches in height, with the chest and limbs of a Hercules. His
dress was rich with a richness which would, in England, be looked
upon as akin to bad taste. Heavy bands of astrakhan were slashed
across the sleeves and fronts of his doublebreasted coat, while
the deep blue cloak which was thrown over his shoulders was lined
with flamecoloured silk and secured at the neck with a brooch
which consisted of a single flaming beryl. Boots which extended
halfway up his calves, and which were trimmed at the tops with
rich brown fur, completed the impression of barbaric opulence
which was suggested by his whole appearance. He carried a
broadbrimmed hat in his hand, while he wore across the upper
part of his face, extending down past the cheekbones, a black
vizard mask, which he had apparently adjusted that very moment,
for his hand was still raised to it as he entered. From the lower
part of the face he appeared to be a man of strong character,
with a thick, hanging lip, and a long, straight chin suggestive
of resolution pushed to the length of obstinacy.
"You had my note?" he asked with a deep harsh voice and a
strongly marked German accent. "I told you that I would call." He
looked from one to the other of us, as if uncertain which to
address.
"Pray take a seat," said Holmes. "This is my friend and
colleague, Dr. Watson, who is occasionally good enough to help me
in my cases. Whom have I the honour to address?"
"You may address me as the Count Von Kramm, a Bohemian nobleman.
I understand that this gentleman, your friend, is a man of honour
and discretion, whom I may trust with a matter of the most
extreme importance. If not, I should much prefer to communicate
with you alone."
I rose to go, but Holmes caught me by the wrist and pushed me
back into my chair. "It is both, or none," said he. "You may say
before this gentleman anything which you may say to me."
The Count shrugged his broad shoulders. "Then I must begin," said
he, "by binding you both to absolute secrecy for two years at
the end of that time the matter will be of no importance. At
present it is not too much to say that it is of such weight it
may have an influence upon European history."
"I promise," said Holmes.
"And I."
"You will excuse this mask," continued our strange visitor. "The
august person who employs me wishes his agent to be unknown to
you, and I may confess at once that the title by which I have
just called myself is not exactly my own."
"I was aware of it," said Holmes dryly.
"The circumstances are of great delicacy, and every precaution
has to be taken to quench what might grow to be an immense
scandal and seriously compromise one of the reigning families of
Europe. To speak plainly, the matter implicates the great House
of Ormstein, hereditary kings of Bohemia."
"I was also aware of that," murmured Holmes, settling himself
down in his armchair and closing his eyes.
Our visitor glanced with some apparent surprise at the languid,
lounging figure of the man who had been no doubt depicted to him
as the most incisive reasoner and most energetic agent in Europe.
Holmes slowly reopened his eyes and looked impatiently at his
gigantic client.
"If your Majesty would condescend to state your case," he
remarked, "I should be better able to advise you."
The man sprang from his chair and paced up and down the room in
uncontrollable agitation. Then, with a gesture of desperation, he
tore the mask from his face and hurled it upon the ground. "You
are right," he cried "I am the King. Why should I attempt to
conceal it?"
"Why, indeed?" murmured Holmes. "Your Majesty had not spoken
before I was aware that I was addressing Wilhelm Gottsreich
Sigismond von Ormstein, Grand Duke of CasselFelstein, and
hereditary King of Bohemia."
"But you can understand," said our strange visitor, sitting down
once more and passing his hand over his high white forehead, "you
can understand that I am not accustomed to doing such business in
my own person. Yet the matter was so delicate that I could not
confide it to an agent without putting myself in his power. I
have come incognito from Prague for the purpose of consulting
you."
"Then, pray consult," said Holmes, shutting his eyes once more.
"The facts are briefly these Some five years ago, during a
lengthy visit to Warsaw, I made the acquaintance of the wellknown
adventuress, Irene Adler. The name is no doubt familiar to you."
"Kindly look her up in my index, Doctor," murmured Holmes without
opening his eyes. For many years he had adopted a system of
docketing all paragraphs concerning men and things, so that it
was difficult to name a subject or a person on which he could not
at once furnish information. In this case I found her biography
sandwiched in between that of a Hebrew rabbi and that of a
staffcommander who had written a monograph upon the deepsea
fishes.
"Let me see" said Holmes. "Hum Born in New Jersey in the year
. Contraltohum La Scala, hum Prima donna Imperial Opera
of Warsawyes Retired from operatic stageha Living in
Londonquite so Your Majesty, as I understand, became entangled
with this young person, wrote her some compromising letters, and
is now desirous of getting those letters back."
"Precisely so. But how"
"Was there a secret marriage?"
"None."
"No legal papers or certificates?"
"None."
"Then I fail to follow your Majesty. If this young person should
produce her letters for blackmailing or other purposes, how is
she to prove their authenticity?"
"There is the writing."
"Pooh, pooh Forgery."
"My private notepaper."
"Stolen."
"My own seal."
"Imitated."
"My photograph."
"Bought."
"We were both in the photograph."
"Oh, dear That is very bad Your Majesty has indeed committed an
indiscretion."
"I was madinsane."
"You have compromised yourself seriously."
"I was only Crown Prince then. I was young. I am but thirty now."
"It must be recovered."
"We have tried and failed."
"Your Majesty must pay. It must be bought."
"She will not sell."
"Stolen, then."
"Five attempts have been made. Twice burglars in my pay ransacked
her house. Once we diverted her luggage when she travelled. Twice
she has been waylaid. There has been no result."
"No sign of it?"
"Absolutely none."
Holmes laughed. "It is quite a pretty little problem," said he.
"But a very serious one to me," returned the King reproachfully.
"Very, indeed. And what does she propose to do with the
photograph?"
"To ruin me."
"But how?"
"I am about to be married."
"So I have heard."
"To Clotilde Lothman von SaxeMeningen, second daughter of the
King of Scandinavia. You may know the strict principles of her
family. She is herself the very soul of delicacy. A shadow of a
doubt as to my conduct would bring the matter to an end."
"And Irene Adler?"
"Threatens to send them the photograph. And she will do it. I
know that she will do it. You do not know her, but she has a soul
of steel. She has the face of the most beautiful of women, and
the mind of the most resolute of men. Rather than I should marry
another woman, there are no lengths to which she would not
gonone."
"You are sure that she has not sent it yet?"
"I am sure."
"And why?"
"Because she has said that she would send it on the day when the
betrothal was publicly proclaimed. That will be next Monday."
"Oh, then we have three days yet," said Holmes with a yawn. "That
is very fortunate, as I have one or two matters of importance to
look into just at present. Your Majesty will, of course, stay in
London for the present?"
"Certainly. You will find me at the Langham under the name of the
Count Von Kramm."
"Then I shall drop you a line to let you know how we progress."
"Pray do so. I shall be all anxiety."
"Then, as to money?"
"You have carte blanche."
"Absolutely?"
"I tell you that I would give one of the provinces of my kingdom
to have that photograph."
"And for present expenses?"
The King took a heavy chamois leather bag from under his cloak
and laid it on the table.
"There are three hundred pounds in gold and seven hundred in
notes," he said.
Holmes scribbled a receipt upon a sheet of his notebook and
handed it to him.
"And Mademoiselle's address?" he asked.
"Is Briony Lodge, Serpentine Avenue, St. John's Wood."
Holmes took a note of it. "One other question," said he. "Was the
photograph a cabinet?"
"It was."
"Then, goodnight, your Majesty, and I trust that we shall soon
have some good news for you. And goodnight, Watson," he added,
as the wheels of the royal brougham rolled down the street. "If
you will be good enough to call tomorrow afternoon at three
o'clock I should like to chat this little matter over with you."
II.
At three o'clock precisely I was at Baker Street, but Holmes had
not yet returned. The landlady informed me that he had left the
house shortly after eight o'clock in the morning. I sat down
beside the fire, however, with the intention of awaiting him,
however long he might be. I was already deeply interested in his
inquiry, for, though it was surrounded by none of the grim and
strange features which were associated with the two crimes which
I have already recorded, still, the nature of the case and the
exalted station of his client gave it a character of its own.
Indeed, apart from the nature of the investigation which my
friend had on hand, there was something in his masterly grasp of
a situation, and his keen, incisive reasoning, which made it a
pleasure to me to study his system of work, and to follow the
quick, subtle methods by which he disentangled the most
inextricable mysteries. So accustomed was I to his invariable
success that the very possibility of his failing had ceased to
enter into my head.
It was close upon four before the door opened, and a
drunkenlooking groom, illkempt and sidewhiskered, with an
inflamed face and disreputable clothes, walked into the room.
Accustomed as I was to my friend's amazing powers in the use of
disguises, I had to look three times before I was certain that it
was indeed he. With a nod he vanished into the bedroom, whence he
emerged in five minutes tweedsuited and respectable, as of old.
Putting his hands into his pockets, he stretched out his legs in
front of the fire and laughed heartily for some minutes.
"Well, really" he cried, and then he choked and laughed again
until he was obliged to lie back, limp and helpless, in the
chair.
"What is it?"
"It's quite too funny. I am sure you could never guess how I
employed my morning, or what I ended by doing."
"I can't imagine. I suppose that you have been watching the
habits, and perhaps the house, of Miss Irene Adler."
"Quite so but the sequel was rather unusual. I will tell you,
however. I left the house a little after eight o'clock this
morning in the character of a groom out of work. There is a
wonderful sympathy and freemasonry among horsey men. Be one of
them, and you will know all that there is to know. I soon found
Briony Lodge. It is a bijou villa, with a garden at the back, but
built out in front right up to the road, two stories. Chubb lock
to the door. Large sittingroom on the right side, well
furnished, with long windows almost to the floor, and those
preposterous English window fasteners which a child could open.
Behind there was nothing remarkable, save that the passage window
could be reached from the top of the coachhouse. I walked round
it and examined it closely from every point of view, but without
noting anything else of interest.
"I then lounged down the street and found, as I expected, that
there was a mews in a lane which runs down by one wall of the
garden. I lent the ostlers a hand in rubbing down their horses,
and received in exchange twopence, a glass of half and half, two
fills of shag tobacco, and as much information as I could desire
about Miss Adler, to say nothing of half a dozen other people in
the neighbourhood in whom I was not in the least interested, but
whose biographies I was compelled to listen to."
"And what of Irene Adler?" I asked.
"Oh, she has turned all the men's heads down in that part. She is
the daintiest thing under a bonnet on this planet. So say the
Serpentinemews, to a man. She lives quietly, sings at concerts,
drives out at five every day, and returns at seven sharp for
dinner. Seldom goes out at other times, except when she sings.
Has only one male visitor, but a good deal of him. He is dark,
handsome, and dashing, never calls less than once a day, and
often twice. He is a Mr. Godfrey Norton, of the Inner Temple. See
the advantages of a cabman as a confidant. They had driven him
home a dozen times from Serpentinemews, and knew all about him.
When I had listened to all they had to tell, I began to walk up
and down near Briony Lodge once more, and to think over my plan
of campaign.
"This Godfrey Norton was evidently an important factor in the
matter. He was a lawyer. That sounded ominous. What was the
relation between them, and what the object of his repeated
visits? Was she his client, his friend, or his mistress? If the
former, she had probably transferred the photograph to his
keeping. If the latter, it was less likely. On the issue of this
question depended whether I should continue my work at Briony
Lodge, or turn my attention to the gentleman's chambers in the
Temple. It was a delicate point, and it widened the field of my
inquiry. I fear that I bore you with these details, but I have to
let you see my little difficulties, if you are to understand the
situation."
"I am following you closely," I answered.
"I was still balancing the matter in my mind when a hansom cab
drove up to Briony Lodge, and a gentleman sprang out. He was a
remarkably handsome man, dark, aquiline, and moustached
evidently the man of whom I had heard. He appeared to be in a
great hurry, shouted to the cabman to wait, and brushed past the
maid who opened the door with the air of a man who was thoroughly
at home.
"He was in the house about half an hour, and I could catch
glimpses of him in the windows of the sittingroom, pacing up and
down, talking excitedly, and waving his arms. Of her I could see
nothing. Presently he emerged, looking even more flurried than
before. As he stepped up to the cab, he pulled a gold watch from
his pocket and looked at it earnestly, 'Drive like the devil,' he
shouted, 'first to Gross  Hankey's in Regent Street, and then to
the Church of St. Monica in the Edgeware Road. Half a guinea if
you do it in twenty minutes'
"Away they went, and I was just wondering whether I should not do
well to follow them when up the lane came a neat little landau,
the coachman with his coat only halfbuttoned, and his tie under
his ear, while all the tags of his harness were sticking out of
the buckles. It hadn't pulled up before she shot out of the hall
door and into it. I only caught a glimpse of her at the moment,
but she was a lovely woman, with a face that a man might die for.
"'The Church of St. Monica, John,' she cried, 'and half a
sovereign if you reach it in twenty minutes.'
"This was quite too good to lose, Watson. I was just balancing
whether I should run for it, or whether I should perch behind her
landau when a cab came through the street. The driver looked
twice at such a shabby fare, but I jumped in before he could
object. 'The Church of St. Monica,' said I, 'and half a sovereign
if you reach it in twenty minutes.' It was twentyfive minutes to
twelve, and of course it was clear enough what was in the wind.
"My cabby drove fast. I don't think I ever drove faster, but the
others were there before us. The cab and the landau with their
steaming horses were in front of the door when I arrived. I paid
the man and hurried into the church. There was not a soul there
save the two whom I had followed and a surpliced clergyman, who
seemed to be expostulating with them. They were all three
standing in a knot in front of the altar. I lounged up the side
aisle like any other idler who has dropped into a church.
Suddenly, to my surprise, the three at the altar faced round to
me, and Godfrey Norton came running as hard as he could towards
me.
"'Thank God,' he cried. 'You'll do. Come Come'
"'What then?' I asked.
"'Come, man, come, only three minutes, or it won't be legal.'
"I was halfdragged up to the altar, and before I knew where I was
I found myself mumbling responses which were whispered in my ear,
and vouching for things of which I knew nothing, and generally
assisting in the secure tying up of Irene Adler, spinster, to
Godfrey Norton, bachelor. It was all done in an instant, and
there was the gentleman thanking me on the one side and the lady
on the other, while the clergyman beamed on me in front. It was
the most preposterous position in which I ever found myself in my
life, and it was the thought of it that started me laughing just
now. It seems that there had been some informality about their
license, that the clergyman absolutely refused to marry them
without a witness of some sort, and that my lucky appearance
saved the bridegroom from having to sally out into the streets in
search of a best man. The bride gave me a sovereign, and I mean
to wear it on my watchchain in memory of the occasion."
"This is a very unexpected turn of affairs," said I "and what
then?"
"Well, I found my plans very seriously menaced. It looked as if
the pair might take an immediate departure, and so necessitate
very prompt and energetic measures on my part. At the church
door, however, they separated, he driving back to the Temple, and
she to her own house. 'I shall drive out in the park at five as
usual,' she said as she left him. I heard no more. They drove
away in different directions, and I went off to make my own
arrangements."
"Which are?"
"Some cold beef and a glass of beer," he answered, ringing the
bell. "I have been too busy to think of food, and I am likely to
be busier still this evening. By the way, Doctor, I shall want
your cooperation."
"I shall be delighted."
"You don't mind breaking the law?"
"Not in the least."
"Nor running a chance of arrest?"
"Not in a good cause."
"Oh, the cause is excellent"
"Then I am your man."
"I was sure that I might rely on you."
"But what is it you wish?"
"When Mrs. Turner has brought in the tray I will make it clear to
you. Now," he said as he turned hungrily on the simple fare that
our landlady had provided, "I must discuss it while I eat, for I
have not much time. It is nearly five now. In two hours we must
be on the scene of action. Miss Irene, or Madame, rather, returns
from her drive at seven. We must be at Briony Lodge to meet her."
"And what then?"
"You must leave that to me. I have already arranged what is to
occur. There is only one point on which I must insist. You must
not interfere, come what may. You understand?"
"I am to be neutral?"
"To do nothing whatever. There will probably be some small
unpleasantness. Do not join in it. It will end in my being
conveyed into the house. Four or five minutes afterwards the
sittingroom window will open. You are to station yourself close
to that open window."
"Yes."
"You are to watch me, for I will be visible to you."
"Yes."
"And when I raise my handsoyou will throw into the room what
I give you to throw, and will, at the same time, raise the cry of
fire. You quite follow me?"
"Entirely."
"It is nothing very formidable," he said, taking a long cigar
shaped roll from his pocket. "It is an ordinary plumber's smoke
rocket, fitted with a cap at either end to make it selflighting.
Your task is confined to that. When you raise your cry of fire,
it will be taken up by quite a number of people. You may then
walk to the end of the street, and I will rejoin you in ten
minutes. I hope that I have made myself clear?"
"I am to remain neutral, to get near the window, to watch you,
and at the signal to throw in this object, then to raise the cry
of fire, and to wait you at the corner of the street."
"Precisely."
"Then you may entirely rely on me."
"That is excellent. I think, perhaps, it is almost time that I
prepare for the new role I have to play."
He disappeared into his bedroom and returned in a few minutes in
the character of an amiable and simpleminded Nonconformist
clergyman. His broad black hat, his baggy trousers, his white
tie, his sympathetic smile, and general look of peering and
benevolent curiosity were such as Mr. John Hare alone could have
equalled. It was not merely that Holmes changed his costume. His
expression, his manner, his very soul seemed to vary with every
fresh part that he assumed. The stage lost a fine actor, even as
science lost an acute reasoner, when he became a specialist in
crime.
It was a quarter past six when we left Baker Street, and it still
wanted ten minutes to the hour when we found ourselves in
Serpentine Avenue. It was already dusk, and the lamps were just
being lighted as we paced up and down in front of Briony Lodge,
waiting for the coming of its occupant. The house was just such
as I had pictured it from Sherlock Holmes' succinct description,
but the locality appeared to be less private than I expected. On
the contrary, for a small street in a quiet neighbourhood, it was
remarkably animated. There was a group of shabbily dressed men
smoking and laughing in a corner, a scissorsgrinder with his
wheel, two guardsmen who were flirting with a nursegirl, and
several welldressed young men who were lounging up and down with
cigars in their mouths.
"You see," remarked Holmes, as we paced to and fro in front of
the house, "this marriage rather simplifies matters. The
photograph becomes a doubleedged weapon now. The chances are
that she would be as averse to its being seen by Mr. Godfrey
Norton, as our client is to its coming to the eyes of his
princess. Now the question is, Where are we to find the
photograph?"
"Where, indeed?"
"It is most unlikely that she carries it about with her. It is
cabinet size. Too large for easy concealment about a woman's
dress. She knows that the King is capable of having her waylaid
and searched. Two attempts of the sort have already been made. We
may take it, then, that she does not carry it about with her."
"Where, then?"
"Her banker or her lawyer. There is that double possibility. But
I am inclined to think neither. Women are naturally secretive,
and they like to do their own secreting. Why should she hand it
over to anyone else? She could trust her own guardianship, but
she could not tell what indirect or political influence might be
brought to bear upon a business man. Besides, remember that she
had resolved to use it within a few days. It must be where she
can lay her hands upon it. It must be in her own house."
"But it has twice been burgled."
"Pshaw They did not know how to look."
"But how will you look?"
"I will not look."
"What then?"
"I will get her to show me."
"But she will refuse."
"She will not be able to. But I hear the rumble of wheels. It is
her carriage. Now carry out my orders to the letter."
As he spoke the gleam of the sidelights of a carriage came round
the curve of the avenue. It was a smart little landau which
rattled up to the door of Briony Lodge. As it pulled up, one of
the loafing men at the corner dashed forward to open the door in
the hope of earning a copper, but was elbowed away by another
loafer, who had rushed up with the same intention. A fierce
quarrel broke out, which was increased by the two guardsmen, who
took sides with one of the loungers, and by the scissorsgrinder,
who was equally hot upon the other side. A blow was struck, and
in an instant the lady, who had stepped from her carriage, was
the centre of a little knot of flushed and struggling men, who
struck savagely at each other with their fists and sticks. Holmes
dashed into the crowd to protect the lady but just as he reached
her he gave a cry and dropped to the ground, with the blood
running freely down his face. At his fall the guardsmen took to
their heels in one direction and the loungers in the other, while
a number of betterdressed people, who had watched the scuffle
without taking part in it, crowded in to help the lady and to
attend to the injured man. Irene Adler, as I will still call her,
had hurried up the steps but she stood at the top with her
superb figure outlined against the lights of the hall, looking
back into the street.
"Is the poor gentleman much hurt?" she asked.
"He is dead," cried several voices.
"No, no, there's life in him" shouted another. "But he'll be
gone before you can get him to hospital."
"He's a brave fellow," said a woman. "They would have had the
lady's purse and watch if it hadn't been for him. They were a
gang, and a rough one, too. Ah, he's breathing now."
"He can't lie in the street. May we bring him in, marm?"
"Surely. Bring him into the sittingroom. There is a comfortable
sofa. This way, please"
Slowly and solemnly he was borne into Briony Lodge and laid out
in the principal room, while I still observed the proceedings
from my post by the window. The lamps had been lit, but the
blinds had not been drawn, so that I could see Holmes as he lay
upon the couch. I do not know whether he was seized with
compunction at that moment for the part he was playing, but I
know that I never felt more heartily ashamed of myself in my life
than when I saw the beautiful creature against whom I was
conspiring, or the grace and kindliness with which she waited
upon the injured man. And yet it would be the blackest treachery
to Holmes to draw back now from the part which he had intrusted
to me. I hardened my heart, and took the smokerocket from under
my ulster. After all, I thought, we are not injuring her. We are
but preventing her from injuring another.
Holmes had sat up upon the couch, and I saw him motion like a man
who is in need of air. A maid rushed across and threw open the
window. At the same instant I saw him raise his hand and at the
signal I tossed my rocket into the room with a cry of "Fire" The
word was no sooner out of my mouth than the whole crowd of
spectators, well dressed and illgentlemen, ostlers, and
servantmaidsjoined in a general shriek of "Fire" Thick clouds
of smoke curled through the room and out at the open window. I
caught a glimpse of rushing figures, and a moment later the voice
of Holmes from within assuring them that it was a false alarm.
Slipping through the shouting crowd I made my way to the corner
of the street, and in ten minutes was rejoiced to find my
friend's arm in mine, and to get away from the scene of uproar.
He walked swiftly and in silence for some few minutes until we
had turned down one of the quiet streets which lead towards the
Edgeware Road.
"You did it very nicely, Doctor," he remarked. "Nothing could
have been better. It is all right."
"You have the photograph?"
"I know where it is."
"And how did you find out?"
"She showed me, as I told you she would."
"I am still in the dark."
"I do not wish to make a mystery," said he, laughing. "The matter
was perfectly simple. You, of course, saw that everyone in the
street was an accomplice. They were all engaged for the evening."
"I guessed as much."
"Then, when the row broke out, I had a little moist red paint in
the palm of my hand. I rushed forward, fell down, clapped my hand
to my face, and became a piteous spectacle. It is an old trick."
"That also I could fathom."
"Then they carried me in. She was bound to have me in. What else
could she do? And into her sittingroom, which was the very room
which I suspected. It lay between that and her bedroom, and I was
determined to see which. They laid me on a couch, I motioned for
air, they were compelled to open the window, and you had your
chance."
"How did that help you?"
"It was allimportant. When a woman thinks that her house is on
fire, her instinct is at once to rush to the thing which she
values most. It is a perfectly overpowering impulse, and I have
more than once taken advantage of it. In the case of the
Darlington substitution scandal it was of use to me, and also in
the Arnsworth Castle business. A married woman grabs at her baby
an unmarried one reaches for her jewelbox. Now it was clear to
me that our lady of today had nothing in the house more precious
to her than what we are in quest of. She would rush to secure it.
The alarm of fire was admirably done. The smoke and shouting were
enough to shake nerves of steel. She responded beautifully. The
photograph is in a recess behind a sliding panel just above the
right bellpull. She was there in an instant, and I caught a
glimpse of it as she halfdrew it out. When I cried out that it
was a false alarm, she replaced it, glanced at the rocket, rushed
from the room, and I have not seen her since. I rose, and, making
my excuses, escaped from the house. I hesitated whether to
attempt to secure the photograph at once but the coachman had
come in, and as he was watching me narrowly it seemed safer to
wait. A little overprecipitance may ruin all."
"And now?" I asked.
"Our quest is practically finished. I shall call with the King
tomorrow, and with you, if you care to come with us. We will be
shown into the sittingroom to wait for the lady, but it is
probable that when she comes she may find neither us nor the
photograph. It might be a satisfaction to his Majesty to regain
it with his own hands."
"And when will you call?"
"At eight in the morning. She will not be up, so that we shall
have a clear field. Besides, we must be prompt, for this marriage
may mean a complete change in her life and habits. I must wire to
the King without delay."
We had reached Baker Street and had stopped at the door. He was
searching his pockets for the key when someone passing said
"Goodnight, Mister Sherlock Holmes."
There were several people on the pavement at the time, but the
greeting appeared to come from a slim youth in an ulster who had
hurried by.
"I've heard that voice before," said Holmes, staring down the
dimly lit street. "Now, I wonder who the deuce that could have
been."
III.
I slept at Baker Street that night, and we were engaged upon our
toast and coffee in the morning when the King of Bohemia rushed
into the room.
"You have really got it" he cried, grasping Sherlock Holmes by
either shoulder and looking eagerly into his face.
"Not yet."
"But you have hopes?"
"I have hopes."
"Then, come. I am all impatience to be gone."
"We must have a cab."
"No, my brougham is waiting."
"Then that will simplify matters." We descended and started off
once more for Briony Lodge.
"Irene Adler is married," remarked Holmes.
"Married When?"
"Yesterday."
"But to whom?"
"To an English lawyer named Norton."
"But she could not love him."
"I am in hopes that she does."
"And why in hopes?"
"Because it would spare your Majesty all fear of future
annoyance. If the lady loves her husband, she does not love your
Majesty. If she does not love your Majesty, there is no reason
why she should interfere with your Majesty's plan."
"It is true. And yetWell I wish she had been of my own
station What a queen she would have made" He relapsed into a
moody silence, which was not broken until we drew up in
Serpentine Avenue.
The door of Briony Lodge was open, and an elderly woman stood
upon the steps. She watched us with a sardonic eye as we stepped
from the brougham.
"Mr. Sherlock Holmes, I believe?" said she.
"I am Mr. Holmes," answered my companion, looking at her with a
questioning and rather startled gaze.
"Indeed My mistress told me that you were likely to call. She
left this morning with her husband by the  train from Charing
Cross for the Continent."
"What" Sherlock Holmes staggered back, white with chagrin and
surprise. "Do you mean that she has left England?"
"Never to return."
"And the papers?" asked the King hoarsely. "All is lost."
"We shall see." He pushed past the servant and rushed into the
drawingroom, followed by the King and myself. The furniture was
scattered about in every direction, with dismantled shelves and
open drawers, as if the lady had hurriedly ransacked them before
her flight. Holmes rushed at the bellpull, tore back a small
sliding shutter, and, plunging in his hand, pulled out a
photograph and a letter. The photograph was of Irene Adler
herself in evening dress, the letter was superscribed to
"Sherlock Holmes, Esq. To be left till called for." My friend
tore it open and we all three read it together. It was dated at
midnight of the preceding night and ran in this way
"MY DEAR MR. SHERLOCK HOLMES,You really did it very well. You
took me in completely. Until after the alarm of fire, I had not a
suspicion. But then, when I found how I had betrayed myself, I
began to think. I had been warned against you months ago. I had
been told that if the King employed an agent it would certainly
be you. And your address had been given me. Yet, with all this,
you made me reveal what you wanted to know. Even after I became
suspicious, I found it hard to think evil of such a dear, kind
old clergyman. But, you know, I have been trained as an actress
myself. Male costume is nothing new to me. I often take advantage
of the freedom which it gives. I sent John, the coachman, to
watch you, ran up stairs, got into my walkingclothes, as I call
them, and came down just as you departed.
"Well, I followed you to your door, and so made sure that I was
really an object of interest to the celebrated Mr. Sherlock
Holmes. Then I, rather imprudently, wished you goodnight, and
started for the Temple to see my husband.
"We both thought the best resource was flight, when pursued by
so formidable an antagonist so you will find the nest empty when
you call tomorrow. As to the photograph, your client may rest in
peace. I love and am loved by a better man than he. The King may
do what he will without hindrance from one whom he has cruelly
wronged. I keep it only to safeguard myself, and to preserve a
weapon which will always secure me from any steps which he might
take in the future. I leave a photograph which he might care to
possess and I remain, dear Mr. Sherlock Holmes,
"Very truly yours,
"IRENE NORTON, ne ADLER."
"What a womanoh, what a woman" cried the King of Bohemia, when
we had all three read this epistle. "Did I not tell you how quick
and resolute she was? Would she not have made an admirable queen?
Is it not a pity that she was not on my level?"
"From what I have seen of the lady she seems indeed to be on a
very different level to your Majesty," said Holmes coldly. "I am
sorry that I have not been able to bring your Majesty's business
to a more successful conclusion."
"On the contrary, my dear sir," cried the King "nothing could be
more successful. I know that her word is inviolate. The
photograph is now as safe as if it were in the fire."
"I am glad to hear your Majesty say so."
"I am immensely indebted to you. Pray tell me in what way I can
reward you. This ring" He slipped an emerald snake ring from
his finger and held it out upon the palm of his hand.
"Your Majesty has something which I should value even more
highly," said Holmes.
"You have but to name it."
"This photograph"
The King stared at him in amazement.
"Irene's photograph" he cried. "Certainly, if you wish it."
"I thank your Majesty. Then there is no more to be done in the
matter. I have the honour to wish you a very goodmorning." He
bowed, and, turning away without observing the hand which the
King had stretched out to him, he set off in my company for his
chambers.
And that was how a great scandal threatened to affect the kingdom
of Bohemia, and how the best plans of Mr. Sherlock Holmes were
beaten by a woman's wit. He used to make merry over the
cleverness of women, but I have not heard him do it of late. And
when he speaks of Irene Adler, or when he refers to her
photograph, it is always under the honourable title of the woman.
ADVENTURE II. THE REDHEADED LEAGUE
I had called upon my friend, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, one day in the
autumn of last year and found him in deep conversation with a
very stout, floridfaced, elderly gentleman with fiery red hair.
With an apology for my intrusion, I was about to withdraw when
Holmes pulled me abruptly into the room and closed the door
behind me.
"You could not possibly have come at a better time, my dear
Watson," he said cordially.
"I was afraid that you were engaged."
"So I am. Very much so."
"Then I can wait in the next room."
"Not at all. This gentleman, Mr. Wilson, has been my partner and
helper in many of my most successful cases, and I have no
doubt that he will be of the utmost use to me in yours also."
The stout gentleman half rose from his chair and gave a bob of
greeting, with a quick little questioning glance from his small
fatencircled eyes.
"Try the settee," said Holmes, relapsing into his armchair and
putting his fingertips together, as was his custom when in
judicial moods. "I know, my dear Watson, that you share my love
of all that is bizarre and outside the conventions and humdrum
routine of everyday life. You have shown your relish for it by
the enthusiasm which has prompted you to chronicle, and, if you
will excuse my saying so, somewhat to embellish so many of my own
little adventures."
"Your cases have indeed been of the greatest interest to me," I
observed.
"You will remember that I remarked the other day, just before we
went into the very simple problem presented by Miss Mary
Sutherland, that for strange effects and extraordinary
combinations we must go to life itself, which is always far more
daring than any effort of the imagination."
"A proposition which I took the liberty of doubting."
"You did, Doctor, but none the less you must come round to my
view, for otherwise I shall keep on piling fact upon fact on you
until your reason breaks down under them and acknowledges me to
be right. Now, Mr. Jabez Wilson here has been good enough to call
upon me this morning, and to begin a narrative which promises to
be one of the most singular which I have listened to for some
time. You have heard me remark that the strangest and most unique
things are very often connected not with the larger but with the
smaller crimes, and occasionally, indeed, where there is room for
doubt whether any positive crime has been committed. As far as I
have heard it is impossible for me to say whether the present
case is an instance of crime or not, but the course of events is
certainly among the most singular that I have ever listened to.
Perhaps, Mr. Wilson, you would have the great kindness to
recommence your narrative. I ask you not merely because my friend
Dr. Watson has not heard the opening part but also because the
peculiar nature of the story makes me anxious to have every
possible detail from your lips. As a rule, when I have heard some
slight indication of the course of events, I am able to guide
myself by the thousands of other similar cases which occur to my
memory. In the present instance I am forced to admit that the
facts are, to the best of my belief, unique."
The portly client puffed out his chest with an appearance of some
little pride and pulled a dirty and wrinkled newspaper from the
inside pocket of his greatcoat. As he glanced down the
advertisement column, with his head thrust forward and the paper
flattened out upon his knee, I took a good look at the man and
endeavoured, after the fashion of my companion, to read the
indications which might be presented by his dress or appearance.
I did not gain very much, however, by my inspection. Our visitor
bore every mark of being an average commonplace British
tradesman, obese, pompous, and slow. He wore rather baggy grey
shepherd's check trousers, a not overclean black frockcoat,
unbuttoned in the front, and a drab waistcoat with a heavy brassy
Albert chain, and a square pierced bit of metal dangling down as
an ornament. A frayed tophat and a faded brown overcoat with a
wrinkled velvet collar lay upon a chair beside him. Altogether,
look as I would, there was nothing remarkable about the man save
his blazing red head, and the expression of extreme chagrin and
discontent upon his features.
Sherlock Holmes' quick eye took in my occupation, and he shook
his head with a smile as he noticed my questioning glances.
"Beyond the obvious facts that he has at some time done manual
labour, that he takes snuff, that he is a Freemason, that he has
been in China, and that he has done a considerable amount of
writing lately, I can deduce nothing else."
Mr. Jabez Wilson started up in his chair, with his forefinger
upon the paper, but his eyes upon my companion.
"How, in the name of goodfortune, did you know all that, Mr.
Holmes?" he asked. "How did you know, for example, that I did
manual labour. It's as true as gospel, for I began as a ship's
carpenter."
"Your hands, my dear sir. Your right hand is quite a size larger
than your left. You have worked with it, and the muscles are more
developed."
"Well, the snuff, then, and the Freemasonry?"
"I won't insult your intelligence by telling you how I read that,
especially as, rather against the strict rules of your order, you
use an arcandcompass breastpin."
"Ah, of course, I forgot that. But the writing?"
"What else can be indicated by that right cuff so very shiny for
five inches, and the left one with the smooth patch near the
elbow where you rest it upon the desk?"
"Well, but China?"
"The fish that you have tattooed immediately above your right
wrist could only have been done in China. I have made a small
study of tattoo marks and have even contributed to the literature
of the subject. That trick of staining the fishes' scales of a
delicate pink is quite peculiar to China. When, in addition, I
see a Chinese coin hanging from your watchchain, the matter
becomes even more simple."
Mr. Jabez Wilson laughed heavily. "Well, I never" said he. "I
thought at first that you had done something clever, but I see
that there was nothing in it, after all."
"I begin to think, Watson," said Holmes, "that I make a mistake
in explaining. 'Omne ignotum pro magnifico,' you know, and my
poor little reputation, such as it is, will suffer shipwreck if I
am so candid. Can you not find the advertisement, Mr. Wilson?"
"Yes, I have got it now," he answered with his thick red finger
planted halfway down the column. "Here it is. This is what began
it all. You just read it for yourself, sir."
I took the paper from him and read as follows
"TO THE REDHEADED LEAGUE On account of the bequest of the late
Ezekiah Hopkins, of Lebanon, Pennsylvania, U. S. A., there is now
another vacancy open which entitles a member of the League to a
salary of  pounds a week for purely nominal services. All
redheaded men who are sound in body and mind and above the age
of twentyone years, are eligible. Apply in person on Monday, at
eleven o'clock, to Duncan Ross, at the offices of the League, 
Pope's Court, Fleet Street."
"What on earth does this mean?" I ejaculated after I had twice
read over the extraordinary announcement.
Holmes chuckled and wriggled in his chair, as was his habit when
in high spirits. "It is a little off the beaten track, isn't it?"
said he. "And now, Mr. Wilson, off you go at scratch and tell us
all about yourself, your household, and the effect which this
advertisement had upon your fortunes. You will first make a note,
Doctor, of the paper and the date."
"It is The Morning Chronicle of April , . Just two months
ago."
"Very good. Now, Mr. Wilson?"
"Well, it is just as I have been telling you, Mr. Sherlock
Holmes," said Jabez Wilson, mopping his forehead "I have a small
pawnbroker's business at Coburg Square, near the City. It's not a
very large affair, and of late years it has not done more than
just give me a living. I used to be able to keep two assistants,
but now I only keep one and I would have a job to pay him but
that he is willing to come for half wages so as to learn the
business."
"What is the name of this obliging youth?" asked Sherlock Holmes.
"His name is Vincent Spaulding, and he's not such a youth,
either. It's hard to say his age. I should not wish a smarter
assistant, Mr. Holmes and I know very well that he could better
himself and earn twice what I am able to give him. But, after
all, if he is satisfied, why should I put ideas in his head?"
"Why, indeed? You seem most fortunate in having an employ who
comes under the full market price. It is not a common experience
among employers in this age. I don't know that your assistant is
not as remarkable as your advertisement."
"Oh, he has his faults, too," said Mr. Wilson. "Never was such a
fellow for photography. Snapping away with a camera when he ought
to be improving his mind, and then diving down into the cellar
like a rabbit into its hole to develop his pictures. That is his
main fault, but on the whole he's a good worker. There's no vice
in him."
"He is still with you, I presume?"
"Yes, sir. He and a girl of fourteen, who does a bit of simple
cooking and keeps the place cleanthat's all I have in the
house, for I am a widower and never had any family. We live very
quietly, sir, the three of us and we keep a roof over our heads
and pay our debts, if we do nothing more.
"The first thing that put us out was that advertisement.
Spaulding, he came down into the office just this day eight
weeks, with this very paper in his hand, and he says
"'I wish to the Lord, Mr. Wilson, that I was a redheaded man.'
"'Why that?' I asks.
"'Why,' says he, 'here's another vacancy on the League of the
Redheaded Men. It's worth quite a little fortune to any man who
gets it, and I understand that there are more vacancies than
there are men, so that the trustees are at their wits' end what
to do with the money. If my hair would only change colour, here's
a nice little crib all ready for me to step into.'
"'Why, what is it, then?' I asked. You see, Mr. Holmes, I am a
very stayathome man, and as my business came to me instead of
my having to go to it, I was often weeks on end without putting
my foot over the doormat. In that way I didn't know much of what
was going on outside, and I was always glad of a bit of news.
"'Have you never heard of the League of the Redheaded Men?' he
asked with his eyes open.
"'Never.'
"'Why, I wonder at that, for you are eligible yourself for one
of the vacancies.'
"'And what are they worth?' I asked.
"'Oh, merely a couple of hundred a year, but the work is slight,
and it need not interfere very much with one's other
occupations.'
"Well, you can easily think that that made me prick up my ears,
for the business has not been overgood for some years, and an
extra couple of hundred would have been very handy.
"'Tell me all about it,' said I.
"'Well,' said he, showing me the advertisement, 'you can see for
yourself that the League has a vacancy, and there is the address
where you should apply for particulars. As far as I can make out,
the League was founded by an American millionaire, Ezekiah
Hopkins, who was very peculiar in his ways. He was himself
redheaded, and he had a great sympathy for all redheaded men
so when he died it was found that he had left his enormous
fortune in the hands of trustees, with instructions to apply the
interest to the providing of easy berths to men whose hair is of
that colour. From all I hear it is splendid pay and very little to
do.'
"'But,' said I, 'there would be millions of redheaded men who
would apply.'
"'Not so many as you might think,' he answered. 'You see it is
really confined to Londoners, and to grown men. This American had
started from London when he was young, and he wanted to do the
old town a good turn. Then, again, I have heard it is no use your
applying if your hair is light red, or dark red, or anything but
real bright, blazing, fiery red. Now, if you cared to apply, Mr.
Wilson, you would just walk in but perhaps it would hardly be
worth your while to put yourself out of the way for the sake of a
few hundred pounds.'
"Now, it is a fact, gentlemen, as you may see for yourselves,
that my hair is of a very full and rich tint, so that it seemed
to me that if there was to be any competition in the matter I
stood as good a chance as any man that I had ever met. Vincent
Spaulding seemed to know so much about it that I thought he might
prove useful, so I just ordered him to put up the shutters for
the day and to come right away with me. He was very willing to
have a holiday, so we shut the business up and started off for
the address that was given us in the advertisement.
"I never hope to see such a sight as that again, Mr. Holmes. From
north, south, east, and west every man who had a shade of red in
his hair had tramped into the city to answer the advertisement.
Fleet Street was choked with redheaded folk, and Pope's Court
looked like a coster's orange barrow. I should not have thought
there were so many in the whole country as were brought together
by that single advertisement. Every shade of colour they
werestraw, lemon, orange, brick, Irishsetter, liver, clay
but, as Spaulding said, there were not many who had the real
vivid flamecoloured tint. When I saw how many were waiting, I
would have given it up in despair but Spaulding would not hear
of it. How he did it I could not imagine, but he pushed and
pulled and butted until he got me through the crowd, and right up
to the steps which led to the office. There was a double stream
upon the stair, some going up in hope, and some coming back
dejected but we wedged in as well as we could and soon found
ourselves in the office."
"Your experience has been a most entertaining one," remarked
Holmes as his client paused and refreshed his memory with a huge
pinch of snuff. "Pray continue your very interesting statement."
"There was nothing in the office but a couple of wooden chairs
and a deal table, behind which sat a small man with a head that
was even redder than mine. He said a few words to each candidate
as he came up, and then he always managed to find some fault in
them which would disqualify them. Getting a vacancy did not seem
to be such a very easy matter, after all. However, when our turn
came the little man was much more favourable to me than to any of
the others, and he closed the door as we entered, so that he
might have a private word with us.
"'This is Mr. Jabez Wilson,' said my assistant, 'and he is
willing to fill a vacancy in the League.'
"'And he is admirably suited for it,' the other answered. 'He has
every requirement. I cannot recall when I have seen anything so
fine.' He took a step backward, cocked his head on one side, and
gazed at my hair until I felt quite bashful. Then suddenly he
plunged forward, wrung my hand, and congratulated me warmly on my
success.
"'It would be injustice to hesitate,' said he. 'You will,
however, I am sure, excuse me for taking an obvious precaution.'
With that he seized my hair in both his hands, and tugged until I
yelled with the pain. 'There is water in your eyes,' said he as
he released me. 'I perceive that all is as it should be. But we
have to be careful, for we have twice been deceived by wigs and
once by paint. I could tell you tales of cobbler's wax which
would disgust you with human nature.' He stepped over to the
window and shouted through it at the top of his voice that the
vacancy was filled. A groan of disappointment came up from below,
and the folk all trooped away in different directions until there
was not a redhead to be seen except my own and that of the
manager.
"'My name,' said he, 'is Mr. Duncan Ross, and I am myself one of
the pensioners upon the fund left by our noble benefactor. Are
you a married man, Mr. Wilson? Have you a family?'
"I answered that I had not.
"His face fell immediately.
"'Dear me' he said gravely, 'that is very serious indeed I am
sorry to hear you say that. The fund was, of course, for the
propagation and spread of the redheads as well as for their
maintenance. It is exceedingly unfortunate that you should be a
bachelor.'
"My face lengthened at this, Mr. Holmes, for I thought that I was
not to have the vacancy after all but after thinking it over for
a few minutes he said that it would be all right.
"'In the case of another,' said he, 'the objection might be
fatal, but we must stretch a point in favour of a man with such a
head of hair as yours. When shall you be able to enter upon your
new duties?'
"'Well, it is a little awkward, for I have a business already,'
said I.
"'Oh, never mind about that, Mr. Wilson' said Vincent Spaulding.
'I should be able to look after that for you.'
"'What would be the hours?' I asked.
"'Ten to two.'
"Now a pawnbroker's business is mostly done of an evening, Mr.
Holmes, especially Thursday and Friday evening, which is just
before payday so it would suit me very well to earn a little in
the mornings. Besides, I knew that my assistant was a good man,
and that he would see to anything that turned up.
"'That would suit me very well,' said I. 'And the pay?'
"'Is  pounds a week.'
"'And the work?'
"'Is purely nominal.'
"'What do you call purely nominal?'
"'Well, you have to be in the office, or at least in the
building, the whole time. If you leave, you forfeit your whole
position forever. The will is very clear upon that point. You
don't comply with the conditions if you budge from the office
during that time.'
"'It's only four hours a day, and I should not think of leaving,'
said I.
"'No excuse will avail,' said Mr. Duncan Ross 'neither sickness
nor business nor anything else. There you must stay, or you lose
your billet.'
"'And the work?'
"'Is to copy out the "Encyclopaedia Britannica." There is the first
volume of it in that press. You must find your own ink, pens, and
blottingpaper, but we provide this table and chair. Will you be
ready tomorrow?'
"'Certainly,' I answered.
"'Then, goodbye, Mr. Jabez Wilson, and let me congratulate you
once more on the important position which you have been fortunate
enough to gain.' He bowed me out of the room and I went home with
my assistant, hardly knowing what to say or do, I was so pleased
at my own good fortune.
"Well, I thought over the matter all day, and by evening I was in
low spirits again for I had quite persuaded myself that the
whole affair must be some great hoax or fraud, though what its
object might be I could not imagine. It seemed altogether past
belief that anyone could make such a will, or that they would pay
such a sum for doing anything so simple as copying out the
'Encyclopaedia Britannica.' Vincent Spaulding did what he could to
cheer me up, but by bedtime I had reasoned myself out of the
whole thing. However, in the morning I determined to have a look
at it anyhow, so I bought a penny bottle of ink, and with a
quillpen, and seven sheets of foolscap paper, I started off for
Pope's Court.
"Well, to my surprise and delight, everything was as right as
possible. The table was set out ready for me, and Mr. Duncan Ross
was there to see that I got fairly to work. He started me off
upon the letter A, and then he left me but he would drop in from
time to time to see that all was right with me. At two o'clock he
bade me goodday, complimented me upon the amount that I had
written, and locked the door of the office after me.
"This went on day after day, Mr. Holmes, and on Saturday the
manager came in and planked down four golden sovereigns for my
week's work. It was the same next week, and the same the week
after. Every morning I was there at ten, and every afternoon I
left at two. By degrees Mr. Duncan Ross took to coming in only
once of a morning, and then, after a time, he did not come in at
all. Still, of course, I never dared to leave the room for an
instant, for I was not sure when he might come, and the billet
was such a good one, and suited me so well, that I would not risk
the loss of it.
"Eight weeks passed away like this, and I had written about
Abbots and Archery and Armour and Architecture and Attica, and
hoped with diligence that I might get on to the B's before very
long. It cost me something in foolscap, and I had pretty nearly
filled a shelf with my writings. And then suddenly the whole
business came to an end."
"To an end?"
"Yes, sir. And no later than this morning. I went to my work as
usual at ten o'clock, but the door was shut and locked, with a
little square of cardboard hammered on to the middle of the
panel with a tack. Here it is, and you can read for yourself."
He held up a piece of white cardboard about the size of a sheet
of notepaper. It read in this fashion
THE REDHEADED LEAGUE
IS
DISSOLVED.
October , .
Sherlock Holmes and I surveyed this curt announcement and the
rueful face behind it, until the comical side of the affair so
completely overtopped every other consideration that we both
burst out into a roar of laughter.
"I cannot see that there is anything very funny," cried our
client, flushing up to the roots of his flaming head. "If you can
do nothing better than laugh at me, I can go elsewhere."
"No, no," cried Holmes, shoving him back into the chair from
which he had half risen. "I really wouldn't miss your case for
the world. It is most refreshingly unusual. But there is, if you
will excuse my saying so, something just a little funny about it.
Pray what steps did you take when you found the card upon the
door?"
"I was staggered, sir. I did not know what to do. Then I called
at the offices round, but none of them seemed to know anything
about it. Finally, I went to the landlord, who is an accountant
living on the groundfloor, and I asked him if he could tell me
what had become of the Redheaded League. He said that he had
never heard of any such body. Then I asked him who Mr. Duncan
Ross was. He answered that the name was new to him.
"'Well,' said I, 'the gentleman at No. .'
"'What, the redheaded man?'
"'Yes.'
"'Oh,' said he, 'his name was William Morris. He was a solicitor
and was using my room as a temporary convenience until his new
premises were ready. He moved out yesterday.'
"'Where could I find him?'
"'Oh, at his new offices. He did tell me the address. Yes, 
King Edward Street, near St. Paul's.'
"I started off, Mr. Holmes, but when I got to that address it was
a manufactory of artificial kneecaps, and no one in it had ever
heard of either Mr. William Morris or Mr. Duncan Ross."
"And what did you do then?" asked Holmes.
"I went home to SaxeCoburg Square, and I took the advice of my
assistant. But he could not help me in any way. He could only say
that if I waited I should hear by post. But that was not quite
good enough, Mr. Holmes. I did not wish to lose such a place
without a struggle, so, as I had heard that you were good enough
to give advice to poor folk who were in need of it, I came right
away to you."
"And you did very wisely," said Holmes. "Your case is an
exceedingly remarkable one, and I shall be happy to look into it.
From what you have told me I think that it is possible that
graver issues hang from it than might at first sight appear."
"Grave enough" said Mr. Jabez Wilson. "Why, I have lost four
pound a week."
"As far as you are personally concerned," remarked Holmes, "I do
not see that you have any grievance against this extraordinary
league. On the contrary, you are, as I understand, richer by some
 pounds, to say nothing of the minute knowledge which you have
gained on every subject which comes under the letter A. You have
lost nothing by them."
"No, sir. But I want to find out about them, and who they are,
and what their object was in playing this prankif it was a
prankupon me. It was a pretty expensive joke for them, for it
cost them two and thirty pounds."
"We shall endeavour to clear up these points for you. And, first,
one or two questions, Mr. Wilson. This assistant of yours who
first called your attention to the advertisementhow long had he
been with you?"
"About a month then."
"How did he come?"
"In answer to an advertisement."
"Was he the only applicant?"
"No, I had a dozen."
"Why did you pick him?"
"Because he was handy and would come cheap."
"At halfwages, in fact."
"Yes."
"What is he like, this Vincent Spaulding?"
"Small, stoutbuilt, very quick in his ways, no hair on his face,
though he's not short of thirty. Has a white splash of acid upon
his forehead."
Holmes sat up in his chair in considerable excitement. "I thought
as much," said he. "Have you ever observed that his ears are
pierced for earrings?"
"Yes, sir. He told me that a gipsy had done it for him when he
was a lad."
"Hum" said Holmes, sinking back in deep thought. "He is still
with you?"
"Oh, yes, sir I have only just left him."
"And has your business been attended to in your absence?"
"Nothing to complain of, sir. There's never very much to do of a
morning."
"That will do, Mr. Wilson. I shall be happy to give you an
opinion upon the subject in the course of a day or two. Today is
Saturday, and I hope that by Monday we may come to a conclusion."
"Well, Watson," said Holmes when our visitor had left us, "what
do you make of it all?"
"I make nothing of it," I answered frankly. "It is a most
mysterious business."
"As a rule," said Holmes, "the more bizarre a thing is the less
mysterious it proves to be. It is your commonplace, featureless
crimes which are really puzzling, just as a commonplace face is
the most difficult to identify. But I must be prompt over this
matter."
"What are you going to do, then?" I asked.
"To smoke," he answered. "It is quite a three pipe problem, and I
beg that you won't speak to me for fifty minutes." He curled
himself up in his chair, with his thin knees drawn up to his
hawklike nose, and there he sat with his eyes closed and his
black clay pipe thrusting out like the bill of some strange bird.
I had come to the conclusion that he had dropped asleep, and
indeed was nodding myself, when he suddenly sprang out of his
chair with the gesture of a man who has made up his mind and put
his pipe down upon the mantelpiece.
"Sarasate plays at the St. James's Hall this afternoon," he
remarked. "What do you think, Watson? Could your patients spare
you for a few hours?"
"I have nothing to do today. My practice is never very
absorbing."
"Then put on your hat and come. I am going through the City
first, and we can have some lunch on the way. I observe that
there is a good deal of German music on the programme, which is
rather more to my taste than Italian or French. It is
introspective, and I want to introspect. Come along"
We travelled by the Underground as far as Aldersgate and a short
walk took us to SaxeCoburg Square, the scene of the singular
story which we had listened to in the morning. It was a poky,
little, shabbygenteel place, where four lines of dingy
twostoried brick houses looked out into a small railedin
enclosure, where a lawn of weedy grass and a few clumps of faded
laurelbushes made a hard fight against a smokeladen and
uncongenial atmosphere. Three gilt balls and a brown board with
"JABEZ WILSON" in white letters, upon a corner house, announced
the place where our redheaded client carried on his business.
Sherlock Holmes stopped in front of it with his head on one side
and looked it all over, with his eyes shining brightly between
puckered lids. Then he walked slowly up the street, and then down
again to the corner, still looking keenly at the houses. Finally
he returned to the pawnbroker's, and, having thumped vigorously
upon the pavement with his stick two or three times, he went up
to the door and knocked. It was instantly opened by a
brightlooking, cleanshaven young fellow, who asked him to step
in.
"Thank you," said Holmes, "I only wished to ask you how you would
go from here to the Strand."
"Third right, fourth left," answered the assistant promptly,
closing the door.
"Smart fellow, that," observed Holmes as we walked away. "He is,
in my judgment, the fourth smartest man in London, and for daring
I am not sure that he has not a claim to be third. I have known
something of him before."
"Evidently," said I, "Mr. Wilson's assistant counts for a good
deal in this mystery of the Redheaded League. I am sure that you
inquired your way merely in order that you might see him."
"Not him."
"What then?"
"The knees of his trousers."
"And what did you see?"
"What I expected to see."
"Why did you beat the pavement?"
"My dear doctor, this is a time for observation, not for talk. We
are spies in an enemy's country. We know something of SaxeCoburg
Square. Let us now explore the parts which lie behind it."
The road in which we found ourselves as we turned round the
corner from the retired SaxeCoburg Square presented as great a
contrast to it as the front of a picture does to the back. It was
one of the main arteries which conveyed the traffic of the City
to the north and west. The roadway was blocked with the immense
stream of commerce flowing in a double tide inward and outward,
while the footpaths were black with the hurrying swarm of
pedestrians. It was difficult to realise as we looked at the line
of fine shops and stately business premises that they really
abutted on the other side upon the faded and stagnant square
which we had just quitted.
"Let me see," said Holmes, standing at the corner and glancing
along the line, "I should like just to remember the order of the
houses here. It is a hobby of mine to have an exact knowledge of
London. There is Mortimer's, the tobacconist, the little
newspaper shop, the Coburg branch of the City and Suburban Bank,
the Vegetarian Restaurant, and McFarlane's carriagebuilding
depot. That carries us right on to the other block. And now,
Doctor, we've done our work, so it's time we had some play. A
sandwich and a cup of coffee, and then off to violinland, where
all is sweetness and delicacy and harmony, and there are no
redheaded clients to vex us with their conundrums."
My friend was an enthusiastic musician, being himself not only a
very capable performer but a composer of no ordinary merit. All
the afternoon he sat in the stalls wrapped in the most perfect
happiness, gently waving his long, thin fingers in time to the
music, while his gently smiling face and his languid, dreamy eyes
were as unlike those of Holmes the sleuthhound, Holmes the
relentless, keenwitted, readyhanded criminal agent, as it was
possible to conceive. In his singular character the dual nature
alternately asserted itself, and his extreme exactness and
astuteness represented, as I have often thought, the reaction
against the poetic and contemplative mood which occasionally
predominated in him. The swing of his nature took him from
extreme languor to devouring energy and, as I knew well, he was
never so truly formidable as when, for days on end, he had been
lounging in his armchair amid his improvisations and his
blackletter editions. Then it was that the lust of the chase
would suddenly come upon him, and that his brilliant reasoning
power would rise to the level of intuition, until those who were
unacquainted with his methods would look askance at him as on a
man whose knowledge was not that of other mortals. When I saw him
that afternoon so enwrapped in the music at St. James's Hall I
felt that an evil time might be coming upon those whom he had set
himself to hunt down.
"You want to go home, no doubt, Doctor," he remarked as we
emerged.
"Yes, it would be as well."
"And I have some business to do which will take some hours. This
business at Coburg Square is serious."
"Why serious?"
"A considerable crime is in contemplation. I have every reason to
believe that we shall be in time to stop it. But today being
Saturday rather complicates matters. I shall want your help
tonight."
"At what time?"
"Ten will be early enough."
"I shall be at Baker Street at ten."
"Very well. And, I say, Doctor, there may be some little danger,
so kindly put your army revolver in your pocket." He waved his
hand, turned on his heel, and disappeared in an instant among the
crowd.
I trust that I am not more dense than my neighbours, but I was
always oppressed with a sense of my own stupidity in my dealings
with Sherlock Holmes. Here I had heard what he had heard, I had
seen what he had seen, and yet from his words it was evident that
he saw clearly not only what had happened but what was about to
happen, while to me the whole business was still confused and
grotesque. As I drove home to my house in Kensington I thought
over it all, from the extraordinary story of the redheaded
copier of the "Encyclopaedia" down to the visit to SaxeCoburg
Square, and the ominous words with which he had parted from me.
What was this nocturnal expedition, and why should I go armed?
Where were we going, and what were we to do? I had the hint from
Holmes that this smoothfaced pawnbroker's assistant was a
formidable mana man who might play a deep game. I tried to
puzzle it out, but gave it up in despair and set the matter aside
until night should bring an explanation.
It was a quarterpast nine when I started from home and made my
way across the Park, and so through Oxford Street to Baker
Street. Two hansoms were standing at the door, and as I entered
the passage I heard the sound of voices from above. On entering
his room I found Holmes in animated conversation with two men,
one of whom I recognised as Peter Jones, the official police
agent, while the other was a long, thin, sadfaced man, with a
very shiny hat and oppressively respectable frockcoat.
"Ha Our party is complete," said Holmes, buttoning up his
peajacket and taking his heavy hunting crop from the rack.
"Watson, I think you know Mr. Jones, of Scotland Yard? Let me
introduce you to Mr. Merryweather, who is to be our companion in
tonight's adventure."
"We're hunting in couples again, Doctor, you see," said Jones in
his consequential way. "Our friend here is a wonderful man for
starting a chase. All he wants is an old dog to help him to do
the running down."
"I hope a wild goose may not prove to be the end of our chase,"
observed Mr. Merryweather gloomily.
"You may place considerable confidence in Mr. Holmes, sir," said
the police agent loftily. "He has his own little methods, which
are, if he won't mind my saying so, just a little too theoretical
and fantastic, but he has the makings of a detective in him. It
is not too much to say that once or twice, as in that business of
the Sholto murder and the Agra treasure, he has been more nearly
correct than the official force."
"Oh, if you say so, Mr. Jones, it is all right," said the
stranger with deference. "Still, I confess that I miss my rubber.
It is the first Saturday night for sevenandtwenty years that I
have not had my rubber."
"I think you will find," said Sherlock Holmes, "that you will
play for a higher stake tonight than you have ever done yet, and
that the play will be more exciting. For you, Mr. Merryweather,
the stake will be some , pounds and for you, Jones, it will
be the man upon whom you wish to lay your hands."
"John Clay, the murderer, thief, smasher, and forger. He's a
young man, Mr. Merryweather, but he is at the head of his
profession, and I would rather have my bracelets on him than on
any criminal in London. He's a remarkable man, is young John
Clay. His grandfather was a royal duke, and he himself has been
to Eton and Oxford. His brain is as cunning as his fingers, and
though we meet signs of him at every turn, we never know where to
find the man himself. He'll crack a crib in Scotland one week,
and be raising money to build an orphanage in Cornwall the next.
I've been on his track for years and have never set eyes on him
yet."
"I hope that I may have the pleasure of introducing you tonight.
I've had one or two little turns also with Mr. John Clay, and I
agree with you that he is at the head of his profession. It is
past ten, however, and quite time that we started. If you two
will take the first hansom, Watson and I will follow in the
second."
Sherlock Holmes was not very communicative during the long drive
and lay back in the cab humming the tunes which he had heard in
the afternoon. We rattled through an endless labyrinth of gaslit
streets until we emerged into Farrington Street.
"We are close there now," my friend remarked. "This fellow
Merryweather is a bank director, and personally interested in the
matter. I thought it as well to have Jones with us also. He is
not a bad fellow, though an absolute imbecile in his profession.
He has one positive virtue. He is as brave as a bulldog and as
tenacious as a lobster if he gets his claws upon anyone. Here we
are, and they are waiting for us."
We had reached the same crowded thoroughfare in which we had
found ourselves in the morning. Our cabs were dismissed, and,
following the guidance of Mr. Merryweather, we passed down a
narrow passage and through a side door, which he opened for us.
Within there was a small corridor, which ended in a very massive
iron gate. This also was opened, and led down a flight of winding
stone steps, which terminated at another formidable gate. Mr.
Merryweather stopped to light a lantern, and then conducted us
down a dark, earthsmelling passage, and so, after opening a
third door, into a huge vault or cellar, which was piled all
round with crates and massive boxes.
"You are not very vulnerable from above," Holmes remarked as he
held up the lantern and gazed about him.
"Nor from below," said Mr. Merryweather, striking his stick upon
the flags which lined the floor. "Why, dear me, it sounds quite
hollow" he remarked, looking up in surprise.
"I must really ask you to be a little more quiet" said Holmes
severely. "You have already imperilled the whole success of our
expedition. Might I beg that you would have the goodness to sit
down upon one of those boxes, and not to interfere?"
The solemn Mr. Merryweather perched himself upon a crate, with a
very injured expression upon his face, while Holmes fell upon his
knees upon the floor and, with the lantern and a magnifying lens,
began to examine minutely the cracks between the stones. A few
seconds sufficed to satisfy him, for he sprang to his feet again
and put his glass in his pocket.
"We have at least an hour before us," he remarked, "for they can
hardly take any steps until the good pawnbroker is safely in bed.
Then they will not lose a minute, for the sooner they do their
work the longer time they will have for their escape. We are at
present, Doctoras no doubt you have divinedin the cellar of
the City branch of one of the principal London banks. Mr.
Merryweather is the chairman of directors, and he will explain to
you that there are reasons why the more daring criminals of
London should take a considerable interest in this cellar at
present."
"It is our French gold," whispered the director. "We have had
several warnings that an attempt might be made upon it."
"Your French gold?"
"Yes. We had occasion some months ago to strengthen our resources
and borrowed for that purpose , napoleons from the Bank of
France. It has become known that we have never had occasion to
unpack the money, and that it is still lying in our cellar. The
crate upon which I sit contains , napoleons packed between
layers of lead foil. Our reserve of bullion is much larger at
present than is usually kept in a single branch office, and the
directors have had misgivings upon the subject."
"Which were very well justified," observed Holmes. "And now it is
time that we arranged our little plans. I expect that within an
hour matters will come to a head. In the meantime Mr.
Merryweather, we must put the screen over that dark lantern."
"And sit in the dark?"
"I am afraid so. I had brought a pack of cards in my pocket, and
I thought that, as we were a partie carre, you might have your
rubber after all. But I see that the enemy's preparations have
gone so far that we cannot risk the presence of a light. And,
first of all, we must choose our positions. These are daring men,
and though we shall take them at a disadvantage, they may do us
some harm unless we are careful. I shall stand behind this crate,
and do you conceal yourselves behind those. Then, when I flash a
light upon them, close in swiftly. If they fire, Watson, have no
compunction about shooting them down."
I placed my revolver, cocked, upon the top of the wooden case
behind which I crouched. Holmes shot the slide across the front
of his lantern and left us in pitch darknesssuch an absolute
darkness as I have never before experienced. The smell of hot
metal remained to assure us that the light was still there, ready
to flash out at a moment's notice. To me, with my nerves worked
up to a pitch of expectancy, there was something depressing and
subduing in the sudden gloom, and in the cold dank air of the
vault.
"They have but one retreat," whispered Holmes. "That is back
through the house into SaxeCoburg Square. I hope that you have
done what I asked you, Jones?"
"I have an inspector and two officers waiting at the front door."
"Then we have stopped all the holes. And now we must be silent
and wait."
What a time it seemed From comparing notes afterwards it was but
an hour and a quarter, yet it appeared to me that the night must
have almost gone and the dawn be breaking above us. My limbs
were weary and stiff, for I feared to change my position yet my
nerves were worked up to the highest pitch of tension, and my
hearing was so acute that I could not only hear the gentle
breathing of my companions, but I could distinguish the deeper,
heavier inbreath of the bulky Jones from the thin, sighing note
of the bank director. From my position I could look over the case
in the direction of the floor. Suddenly my eyes caught the glint
of a light.
At first it was but a lurid spark upon the stone pavement. Then
it lengthened out until it became a yellow line, and then,
without any warning or sound, a gash seemed to open and a hand
appeared, a white, almost womanly hand, which felt about in the
centre of the little area of light. For a minute or more the
hand, with its writhing fingers, protruded out of the floor. Then
it was withdrawn as suddenly as it appeared, and all was dark
again save the single lurid spark which marked a chink between
the stones.
Its disappearance, however, was but momentary. With a rending,
tearing sound, one of the broad, white stones turned over upon
its side and left a square, gaping hole, through which streamed
the light of a lantern. Over the edge there peeped a cleancut,
boyish face, which looked keenly about it, and then, with a hand
on either side of the aperture, drew itself shoulderhigh and
waisthigh, until one knee rested upon the edge. In another
instant he stood at the side of the hole and was hauling after
him a companion, lithe and small like himself, with a pale face
and a shock of very red hair.
"It's all clear," he whispered. "Have you the chisel and the
bags? Great Scott Jump, Archie, jump, and I'll swing for it"
Sherlock Holmes had sprung out and seized the intruder by the
collar. The other dived down the hole, and I heard the sound of
rending cloth as Jones clutched at his skirts. The light flashed
upon the barrel of a revolver, but Holmes' hunting crop came
down on the man's wrist, and the pistol clinked upon the stone
floor.
"It's no use, John Clay," said Holmes blandly. "You have no
chance at all."
"So I see," the other answered with the utmost coolness. "I fancy
that my pal is all right, though I see you have got his
coattails."
"There are three men waiting for him at the door," said Holmes.
"Oh, indeed You seem to have done the thing very completely. I
must compliment you."
"And I you," Holmes answered. "Your redheaded idea was very new
and effective."
"You'll see your pal again presently," said Jones. "He's quicker
at climbing down holes than I am. Just hold out while I fix the
derbies."
"I beg that you will not touch me with your filthy hands,"
remarked our prisoner as the handcuffs clattered upon his wrists.
"You may not be aware that I have royal blood in my veins. Have
the goodness, also, when you address me always to say 'sir' and
'please.'"
"All right," said Jones with a stare and a snigger. "Well, would
you please, sir, march upstairs, where we can get a cab to carry
your Highness to the policestation?"
"That is better," said John Clay serenely. He made a sweeping bow
to the three of us and walked quietly off in the custody of the
detective.
"Really, Mr. Holmes," said Mr. Merryweather as we followed them
from the cellar, "I do not know how the bank can thank you or
repay you. There is no doubt that you have detected and defeated
in the most complete manner one of the most determined attempts
at bank robbery that have ever come within my experience."
"I have had one or two little scores of my own to settle with Mr.
John Clay," said Holmes. "I have been at some small expense over
this matter, which I shall expect the bank to refund, but beyond
that I am amply repaid by having had an experience which is in
many ways unique, and by hearing the very remarkable narrative of
the Redheaded League."
"You see, Watson," he explained in the early hours of the morning
as we sat over a glass of whisky and soda in Baker Street, "it
was perfectly obvious from the first that the only possible
object of this rather fantastic business of the advertisement of
the League, and the copying of the 'Encyclopaedia,' must be to get
this not overbright pawnbroker out of the way for a number of
hours every day. It was a curious way of managing it, but,
really, it would be difficult to suggest a better. The method was
no doubt suggested to Clay's ingenious mind by the colour of his
accomplice's hair. The  pounds a week was a lure which must draw
him, and what was it to them, who were playing for thousands?
They put in the advertisement, one rogue has the temporary
office, the other rogue incites the man to apply for it, and
together they manage to secure his absence every morning in the
week. From the time that I heard of the assistant having come for
half wages, it was obvious to me that he had some strong motive
for securing the situation."
"But how could you guess what the motive was?"
"Had there been women in the house, I should have suspected a
mere vulgar intrigue. That, however, was out of the question. The
man's business was a small one, and there was nothing in his
house which could account for such elaborate preparations, and
such an expenditure as they were at. It must, then, be something
out of the house. What could it be? I thought of the assistant's
fondness for photography, and his trick of vanishing into the
cellar. The cellar There was the end of this tangled clue. Then
I made inquiries as to this mysterious assistant and found that I
had to deal with one of the coolest and most daring criminals in
London. He was doing something in the cellarsomething which
took many hours a day for months on end. What could it be, once
more? I could think of nothing save that he was running a tunnel
to some other building.
"So far I had got when we went to visit the scene of action. I
surprised you by beating upon the pavement with my stick. I was
ascertaining whether the cellar stretched out in front or behind.
It was not in front. Then I rang the bell, and, as I hoped, the
assistant answered it. We have had some skirmishes, but we had
never set eyes upon each other before. I hardly looked at his
face. His knees were what I wished to see. You must yourself have
remarked how worn, wrinkled, and stained they were. They spoke of
those hours of burrowing. The only remaining point was what they
were burrowing for. I walked round the corner, saw the City and
Suburban Bank abutted on our friend's premises, and felt that I
had solved my problem. When you drove home after the concert I
called upon Scotland Yard and upon the chairman of the bank
directors, with the result that you have seen."
"And how could you tell that they would make their attempt
tonight?" I asked.
"Well, when they closed their League offices that was a sign that
they cared no longer about Mr. Jabez Wilson's presencein other
words, that they had completed their tunnel. But it was essential
that they should use it soon, as it might be discovered, or the
bullion might be removed. Saturday would suit them better than
any other day, as it would give them two days for their escape.
For all these reasons I expected them to come tonight."
"You reasoned it out beautifully," I exclaimed in unfeigned
admiration. "It is so long a chain, and yet every link rings
true."
"It saved me from ennui," he answered, yawning. "Alas I already
feel it closing in upon me. My life is spent in one long effort
to escape from the commonplaces of existence. These little
problems help me to do so."
"And you are a benefactor of the race," said I.
He shrugged his shoulders. "Well, perhaps, after all, it is of
some little use," he remarked. "'L'homme c'est rienl'oeuvre
c'est tout,' as Gustave Flaubert wrote to George Sand."
ADVENTURE III. A CASE OF IDENTITY
"My dear fellow," said Sherlock Holmes as we sat on either side
of the fire in his lodgings at Baker Street, "life is infinitely
stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We
would not dare to conceive the things which are really mere
commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that window
hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the
roofs, and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the
strange coincidences, the plannings, the crosspurposes, the
wonderful chains of events, working through generations, and
leading to the most outr results, it would make all fiction with
its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and
unprofitable."
"And yet I am not convinced of it," I answered. "The cases which
come to light in the papers are, as a rule, bald enough, and
vulgar enough. We have in our police reports realism pushed to
its extreme limits, and yet the result is, it must be confessed,
neither fascinating nor artistic."
"A certain selection and discretion must be used in producing a
realistic effect," remarked Holmes. "This is wanting in the
police report, where more stress is laid, perhaps, upon the
platitudes of the magistrate than upon the details, which to an
observer contain the vital essence of the whole matter. Depend
upon it, there is nothing so unnatural as the commonplace."
I smiled and shook my head. "I can quite understand your thinking
so." I said. "Of course, in your position of unofficial adviser
and helper to everybody who is absolutely puzzled, throughout
three continents, you are brought in contact with all that is
strange and bizarre. But here"I picked up the morning paper
from the ground"let us put it to a practical test. Here is the
first heading upon which I come. 'A husband's cruelty to his
wife.' There is half a column of print, but I know without
reading it that it is all perfectly familiar to me. There is, of
course, the other woman, the drink, the push, the blow, the
bruise, the sympathetic sister or landlady. The crudest of
writers could invent nothing more crude."
"Indeed, your example is an unfortunate one for your argument,"
said Holmes, taking the paper and glancing his eye down it. "This
is the Dundas separation case, and, as it happens, I was engaged
in clearing up some small points in connection with it. The
husband was a teetotaler, there was no other woman, and the
conduct complained of was that he had drifted into the habit of
winding up every meal by taking out his false teeth and hurling
them at his wife, which, you will allow, is not an action likely
to occur to the imagination of the average storyteller. Take a
pinch of snuff, Doctor, and acknowledge that I have scored over
you in your example."
He held out his snuffbox of old gold, with a great amethyst in
the centre of the lid. Its splendour was in such contrast to his
homely ways and simple life that I could not help commenting upon
it.
"Ah," said he, "I forgot that I had not seen you for some weeks.
It is a little souvenir from the King of Bohemia in return for my
assistance in the case of the Irene Adler papers."
"And the ring?" I asked, glancing at a remarkable brilliant which
sparkled upon his finger.
"It was from the reigning family of Holland, though the matter in
which I served them was of such delicacy that I cannot confide it
even to you, who have been good enough to chronicle one or two of
my little problems."
"And have you any on hand just now?" I asked with interest.
"Some ten or twelve, but none which present any feature of
interest. They are important, you understand, without being
interesting. Indeed, I have found that it is usually in
unimportant matters that there is a field for the observation,
and for the quick analysis of cause and effect which gives the
charm to an investigation. The larger crimes are apt to be the
simpler, for the bigger the crime the more obvious, as a rule, is
the motive. In these cases, save for one rather intricate matter
which has been referred to me from Marseilles, there is nothing
which presents any features of interest. It is possible, however,
that I may have something better before very many minutes are
over, for this is one of my clients, or I am much mistaken."
He had risen from his chair and was standing between the parted
blinds gazing down into the dull neutraltinted London street.
Looking over his shoulder, I saw that on the pavement opposite
there stood a large woman with a heavy fur boa round her neck,
and a large curling red feather in a broadbrimmed hat which was
tilted in a coquettish Duchess of Devonshire fashion over her
ear. From under this great panoply she peeped up in a nervous,
hesitating fashion at our windows, while her body oscillated
backward and forward, and her fingers fidgeted with her glove
buttons. Suddenly, with a plunge, as of the swimmer who leaves
the bank, she hurried across the road, and we heard the sharp
clang of the bell.
"I have seen those symptoms before," said Holmes, throwing his
cigarette into the fire. "Oscillation upon the pavement always
means an affaire de coeur. She would like advice, but is not sure
that the matter is not too delicate for communication. And yet
even here we may discriminate. When a woman has been seriously
wronged by a man she no longer oscillates, and the usual symptom
is a broken bell wire. Here we may take it that there is a love
matter, but that the maiden is not so much angry as perplexed, or
grieved. But here she comes in person to resolve our doubts."
As he spoke there was a tap at the door, and the boy in buttons
entered to announce Miss Mary Sutherland, while the lady herself
loomed behind his small black figure like a fullsailed
merchantman behind a tiny pilot boat. Sherlock Holmes welcomed
her with the easy courtesy for which he was remarkable, and,
having closed the door and bowed her into an armchair, he looked
her over in the minute and yet abstracted fashion which was
peculiar to him.
"Do you not find," he said, "that with your short sight it is a
little trying to do so much typewriting?"
"I did at first," she answered, "but now I know where the letters
are without looking." Then, suddenly realising the full purport
of his words, she gave a violent start and looked up, with fear
and astonishment upon her broad, goodhumoured face. "You've
heard about me, Mr. Holmes," she cried, "else how could you know
all that?"
"Never mind," said Holmes, laughing "it is my business to know
things. Perhaps I have trained myself to see what others
overlook. If not, why should you come to consult me?"
"I came to you, sir, because I heard of you from Mrs. Etherege,
whose husband you found so easy when the police and everyone had
given him up for dead. Oh, Mr. Holmes, I wish you would do as
much for me. I'm not rich, but still I have a hundred a year in
my own right, besides the little that I make by the machine, and
I would give it all to know what has become of Mr. Hosmer Angel."
"Why did you come away to consult me in such a hurry?" asked
Sherlock Holmes, with his fingertips together and his eyes to
the ceiling.
Again a startled look came over the somewhat vacuous face of Miss
Mary Sutherland. "Yes, I did bang out of the house," she said,
"for it made me angry to see the easy way in which Mr.
Windibankthat is, my fathertook it all. He would not go to
the police, and he would not go to you, and so at last, as he
would do nothing and kept on saying that there was no harm done,
it made me mad, and I just on with my things and came right away
to you."
"Your father," said Holmes, "your stepfather, surely, since the
name is different."
"Yes, my stepfather. I call him father, though it sounds funny,
too, for he is only five years and two months older than myself."
"And your mother is alive?"
"Oh, yes, mother is alive and well. I wasn't best pleased, Mr.
Holmes, when she married again so soon after father's death, and
a man who was nearly fifteen years younger than herself. Father
was a plumber in the Tottenham Court Road, and he left a tidy
business behind him, which mother carried on with Mr. Hardy, the
foreman but when Mr. Windibank came he made her sell the
business, for he was very superior, being a traveller in wines.
They got  pounds for the goodwill and interest, which wasn't
near as much as father could have got if he had been alive."
I had expected to see Sherlock Holmes impatient under this
rambling and inconsequential narrative, but, on the contrary, he
had listened with the greatest concentration of attention.
"Your own little income," he asked, "does it come out of the
business?"
"Oh, no, sir. It is quite separate and was left me by my uncle
Ned in Auckland. It is in New Zealand stock, paying  / per
cent. Two thousand five hundred pounds was the amount, but I can
only touch the interest."
"You interest me extremely," said Holmes. "And since you draw so
large a sum as a hundred a year, with what you earn into the
bargain, you no doubt travel a little and indulge yourself in
every way. I believe that a single lady can get on very nicely
upon an income of about  pounds."
"I could do with much less than that, Mr. Holmes, but you
understand that as long as I live at home I don't wish to be a
burden to them, and so they have the use of the money just while
I am staying with them. Of course, that is only just for the
time. Mr. Windibank draws my interest every quarter and pays it
over to mother, and I find that I can do pretty well with what I
earn at typewriting. It brings me twopence a sheet, and I can
often do from fifteen to twenty sheets in a day."
"You have made your position very clear to me," said Holmes.
"This is my friend, Dr. Watson, before whom you can speak as
freely as before myself. Kindly tell us now all about your
connection with Mr. Hosmer Angel."
A flush stole over Miss Sutherland's face, and she picked
nervously at the fringe of her jacket. "I met him first at the
gasfitters' ball," she said. "They used to send father tickets
when he was alive, and then afterwards they remembered us, and
sent them to mother. Mr. Windibank did not wish us to go. He
never did wish us to go anywhere. He would get quite mad if I
wanted so much as to join a Sundayschool treat. But this time I
was set on going, and I would go for what right had he to
prevent? He said the folk were not fit for us to know, when all
father's friends were to be there. And he said that I had nothing
fit to wear, when I had my purple plush that I had never so much
as taken out of the drawer. At last, when nothing else would do,
he went off to France upon the business of the firm, but we went,
mother and I, with Mr. Hardy, who used to be our foreman, and it
was there I met Mr. Hosmer Angel."
"I suppose," said Holmes, "that when Mr. Windibank came back from
France he was very annoyed at your having gone to the ball."
"Oh, well, he was very good about it. He laughed, I remember, and
shrugged his shoulders, and said there was no use denying
anything to a woman, for she would have her way."
"I see. Then at the gasfitters' ball you met, as I understand, a
gentleman called Mr. Hosmer Angel."
"Yes, sir. I met him that night, and he called next day to ask if
we had got home all safe, and after that we met himthat is to
say, Mr. Holmes, I met him twice for walks, but after that father
came back again, and Mr. Hosmer Angel could not come to the house
any more."
"No?"
"Well, you know father didn't like anything of the sort. He
wouldn't have any visitors if he could help it, and he used to
say that a woman should be happy in her own family circle. But
then, as I used to say to mother, a woman wants her own circle to
begin with, and I had not got mine yet."
"But how about Mr. Hosmer Angel? Did he make no attempt to see
you?"
"Well, father was going off to France again in a week, and Hosmer
wrote and said that it would be safer and better not to see each
other until he had gone. We could write in the meantime, and he
used to write every day. I took the letters in in the morning, so
there was no need for father to know."
"Were you engaged to the gentleman at this time?"
"Oh, yes, Mr. Holmes. We were engaged after the first walk that
we took. HosmerMr. Angelwas a cashier in an office in
Leadenhall Streetand"
"What office?"
"That's the worst of it, Mr. Holmes, I don't know."
"Where did he live, then?"
"He slept on the premises."
"And you don't know his address?"
"Noexcept that it was Leadenhall Street."
"Where did you address your letters, then?"
"To the Leadenhall Street Post Office, to be left till called
for. He said that if they were sent to the office he would be
chaffed by all the other clerks about having letters from a lady,
so I offered to typewrite them, like he did his, but he wouldn't
have that, for he said that when I wrote them they seemed to come
from me, but when they were typewritten he always felt that the
machine had come between us. That will just show you how fond he
was of me, Mr. Holmes, and the little things that he would think
of."
"It was most suggestive," said Holmes. "It has long been an axiom
of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important.
Can you remember any other little things about Mr. Hosmer Angel?"
"He was a very shy man, Mr. Holmes. He would rather walk with me
in the evening than in the daylight, for he said that he hated to
be conspicuous. Very retiring and gentlemanly he was. Even his
voice was gentle. He'd had the quinsy and swollen glands when he
was young, he told me, and it had left him with a weak throat,
and a hesitating, whispering fashion of speech. He was always
well dressed, very neat and plain, but his eyes were weak, just
as mine are, and he wore tinted glasses against the glare."
"Well, and what happened when Mr. Windibank, your stepfather,
returned to France?"
"Mr. Hosmer Angel came to the house again and proposed that we
should marry before father came back. He was in dreadful earnest
and made me swear, with my hands on the Testament, that whatever
happened I would always be true to him. Mother said he was quite
right to make me swear, and that it was a sign of his passion.
Mother was all in his favour from the first and was even fonder
of him than I was. Then, when they talked of marrying within the
week, I began to ask about father but they both said never to
mind about father, but just to tell him afterwards, and mother
said she would make it all right with him. I didn't quite like
that, Mr. Holmes. It seemed funny that I should ask his leave, as
he was only a few years older than me but I didn't want to do
anything on the sly, so I wrote to father at Bordeaux, where the
company has its French offices, but the letter came back to me on
the very morning of the wedding."
"It missed him, then?"
"Yes, sir for he had started to England just before it arrived."
"Ha that was unfortunate. Your wedding was arranged, then, for
the Friday. Was it to be in church?"
"Yes, sir, but very quietly. It was to be at St. Saviour's, near
King's Cross, and we were to have breakfast afterwards at the St.
Pancras Hotel. Hosmer came for us in a hansom, but as there were
two of us he put us both into it and stepped himself into a
fourwheeler, which happened to be the only other cab in the
street. We got to the church first, and when the fourwheeler
drove up we waited for him to step out, but he never did, and
when the cabman got down from the box and looked there was no one
there The cabman said that he could not imagine what had become
of him, for he had seen him get in with his own eyes. That was
last Friday, Mr. Holmes, and I have never seen or heard anything
since then to throw any light upon what became of him."
"It seems to me that you have been very shamefully treated," said
Holmes.
"Oh, no, sir He was too good and kind to leave me so. Why, all
the morning he was saying to me that, whatever happened, I was to
be true and that even if something quite unforeseen occurred to
separate us, I was always to remember that I was pledged to him,
and that he would claim his pledge sooner or later. It seemed
strange talk for a weddingmorning, but what has happened since
gives a meaning to it."
"Most certainly it does. Your own opinion is, then, that some
unforeseen catastrophe has occurred to him?"
"Yes, sir. I believe that he foresaw some danger, or else he
would not have talked so. And then I think that what he foresaw
happened."
"But you have no notion as to what it could have been?"
"None."
"One more question. How did your mother take the matter?"
"She was angry, and said that I was never to speak of the matter
again."
"And your father? Did you tell him?"
"Yes and he seemed to think, with me, that something had
happened, and that I should hear of Hosmer again. As he said,
what interest could anyone have in bringing me to the doors of
the church, and then leaving me? Now, if he had borrowed my
money, or if he had married me and got my money settled on him,
there might be some reason, but Hosmer was very independent about
money and never would look at a shilling of mine. And yet, what
could have happened? And why could he not write? Oh, it drives me
halfmad to think of it, and I can't sleep a wink at night." She
pulled a little handkerchief out of her muff and began to sob
heavily into it.
"I shall glance into the case for you," said Holmes, rising, "and
I have no doubt that we shall reach some definite result. Let the
weight of the matter rest upon me now, and do not let your mind
dwell upon it further. Above all, try to let Mr. Hosmer Angel
vanish from your memory, as he has done from your life."
"Then you don't think I'll see him again?"
"I fear not."
"Then what has happened to him?"
"You will leave that question in my hands. I should like an
accurate description of him and any letters of his which you can
spare."
"I advertised for him in last Saturday's Chronicle," said she.
"Here is the slip and here are four letters from him."
"Thank you. And your address?"
"No.  Lyon Place, Camberwell."
"Mr. Angel's address you never had, I understand. Where is your
father's place of business?"
"He travels for Westhouse  Marbank, the great claret importers
of Fenchurch Street."
"Thank you. You have made your statement very clearly. You will
leave the papers here, and remember the advice which I have given
you. Let the whole incident be a sealed book, and do not allow it
to affect your life."
"You are very kind, Mr. Holmes, but I cannot do that. I shall be
true to Hosmer. He shall find me ready when he comes back."
For all the preposterous hat and the vacuous face, there was
something noble in the simple faith of our visitor which
compelled our respect. She laid her little bundle of papers upon
the table and went her way, with a promise to come again whenever
she might be summoned.
Sherlock Holmes sat silent for a few minutes with his fingertips
still pressed together, his legs stretched out in front of him,
and his gaze directed upward to the ceiling. Then he took down
from the rack the old and oily clay pipe, which was to him as a
counsellor, and, having lit it, he leaned back in his chair, with
the thick blue cloudwreaths spinning up from him, and a look of
infinite languor in his face.
"Quite an interesting study, that maiden," he observed. "I found
her more interesting than her little problem, which, by the way,
is rather a trite one. You will find parallel cases, if you
consult my index, in Andover in ', and there was something of
the sort at The Hague last year. Old as is the idea, however,
there were one or two details which were new to me. But the
maiden herself was most instructive."
"You appeared to read a good deal upon her which was quite
invisible to me," I remarked.
"Not invisible but unnoticed, Watson. You did not know where to
look, and so you missed all that was important. I can never bring
you to realise the importance of sleeves, the suggestiveness of
thumbnails, or the great issues that may hang from a bootlace.
Now, what did you gather from that woman's appearance? Describe
it."
"Well, she had a slatecoloured, broadbrimmed straw hat, with a
feather of a brickish red. Her jacket was black, with black beads
sewn upon it, and a fringe of little black jet ornaments. Her
dress was brown, rather darker than coffee colour, with a little
purple plush at the neck and sleeves. Her gloves were greyish and
were worn through at the right forefinger. Her boots I didn't
observe. She had small round, hanging gold earrings, and a
general air of being fairly welltodo in a vulgar, comfortable,
easygoing way."
Sherlock Holmes clapped his hands softly together and chuckled.
"'Pon my word, Watson, you are coming along wonderfully. You have
really done very well indeed. It is true that you have missed
everything of importance, but you have hit upon the method, and
you have a quick eye for colour. Never trust to general
impressions, my boy, but concentrate yourself upon details. My
first glance is always at a woman's sleeve. In a man it is
perhaps better first to take the knee of the trouser. As you
observe, this woman had plush upon her sleeves, which is a most
useful material for showing traces. The double line a little
above the wrist, where the typewritist presses against the table,
was beautifully defined. The sewingmachine, of the hand type,
leaves a similar mark, but only on the left arm, and on the side
of it farthest from the thumb, instead of being right across the
broadest part, as this was. I then glanced at her face, and,
observing the dint of a pincenez at either side of her nose, I
ventured a remark upon short sight and typewriting, which seemed
to surprise her."
"It surprised me."
"But, surely, it was obvious. I was then much surprised and
interested on glancing down to observe that, though the boots
which she was wearing were not unlike each other, they were
really odd ones the one having a slightly decorated toecap, and
the other a plain one. One was buttoned only in the two lower
buttons out of five, and the other at the first, third, and
fifth. Now, when you see that a young lady, otherwise neatly
dressed, has come away from home with odd boots, halfbuttoned,
it is no great deduction to say that she came away in a hurry."
"And what else?" I asked, keenly interested, as I always was, by
my friend's incisive reasoning.
"I noted, in passing, that she had written a note before leaving
home but after being fully dressed. You observed that her right
glove was torn at the forefinger, but you did not apparently see
that both glove and finger were stained with violet ink. She had
written in a hurry and dipped her pen too deep. It must have been
this morning, or the mark would not remain clear upon the finger.
All this is amusing, though rather elementary, but I must go back
to business, Watson. Would you mind reading me the advertised
description of Mr. Hosmer Angel?"
I held the little printed slip to the light.
"Missing," it said, "on the morning of the fourteenth, a gentleman
named Hosmer Angel. About five ft. seven in. in height
strongly built, sallow complexion, black hair, a little bald in
the centre, bushy, black sidewhiskers and moustache tinted
glasses, slight infirmity of speech. Was dressed, when last seen,
in black frockcoat faced with silk, black waistcoat, gold Albert
chain, and grey Harris tweed trousers, with brown gaiters over
elasticsided boots. Known to have been employed in an office in
Leadenhall Street. Anybody bringing"
"That will do," said Holmes. "As to the letters," he continued,
glancing over them, "they are very commonplace. Absolutely no
clue in them to Mr. Angel, save that he quotes Balzac once. There
is one remarkable point, however, which will no doubt strike
you."
"They are typewritten," I remarked.
"Not only that, but the signature is typewritten. Look at the
neat little 'Hosmer Angel' at the bottom. There is a date, you
see, but no superscription except Leadenhall Street, which is
rather vague. The point about the signature is very suggestive
in fact, we may call it conclusive."
"Of what?"
"My dear fellow, is it possible you do not see how strongly it
bears upon the case?"
"I cannot say that I do unless it were that he wished to be able
to deny his signature if an action for breach of promise were
instituted."
"No, that was not the point. However, I shall write two letters,
which should settle the matter. One is to a firm in the City, the
other is to the young lady's stepfather, Mr. Windibank, asking
him whether he could meet us here at six o'clock tomorrow
evening. It is just as well that we should do business with the
male relatives. And now, Doctor, we can do nothing until the
answers to those letters come, so we may put our little problem
upon the shelf for the interim."
I had had so many reasons to believe in my friend's subtle powers
of reasoning and extraordinary energy in action that I felt that
he must have some solid grounds for the assured and easy
demeanour with which he treated the singular mystery which he had
been called upon to fathom. Once only had I known him to fail, in
the case of the King of Bohemia and of the Irene Adler
photograph but when I looked back to the weird business of the
Sign of Four, and the extraordinary circumstances connected with
the Study in Scarlet, I felt that it would be a strange tangle
indeed which he could not unravel.
I left him then, still puffing at his black clay pipe, with the
conviction that when I came again on the next evening I would
find that he held in his hands all the clues which would lead up
to the identity of the disappearing bridegroom of Miss Mary
Sutherland.
A professional case of great gravity was engaging my own
attention at the time, and the whole of next day I was busy at
the bedside of the sufferer. It was not until close upon six
o'clock that I found myself free and was able to spring into a
hansom and drive to Baker Street, half afraid that I might be too
late to assist at the dnouement of the little mystery. I found
Sherlock Holmes alone, however, half asleep, with his long, thin
form curled up in the recesses of his armchair. A formidable
array of bottles and testtubes, with the pungent cleanly smell
of hydrochloric acid, told me that he had spent his day in the
chemical work which was so dear to him.
"Well, have you solved it?" I asked as I entered.
"Yes. It was the bisulphate of baryta."
"No, no, the mystery" I cried.
"Oh, that I thought of the salt that I have been working upon.
There was never any mystery in the matter, though, as I said
yesterday, some of the details are of interest. The only drawback
is that there is no law, I fear, that can touch the scoundrel."
"Who was he, then, and what was his object in deserting Miss
Sutherland?"
The question was hardly out of my mouth, and Holmes had not yet
opened his lips to reply, when we heard a heavy footfall in the
passage and a tap at the door.
"This is the girl's stepfather, Mr. James Windibank," said
Holmes. "He has written to me to say that he would be here at
six. Come in"
The man who entered was a sturdy, middlesized fellow, some
thirty years of age, cleanshaven, and sallowskinned, with a
bland, insinuating manner, and a pair of wonderfully sharp and
penetrating grey eyes. He shot a questioning glance at each of
us, placed his shiny tophat upon the sideboard, and with a
slight bow sidled down into the nearest chair.
"Goodevening, Mr. James Windibank," said Holmes. "I think that
this typewritten letter is from you, in which you made an
appointment with me for six o'clock?"
"Yes, sir. I am afraid that I am a little late, but I am not
quite my own master, you know. I am sorry that Miss Sutherland
has troubled you about this little matter, for I think it is far
better not to wash linen of the sort in public. It was quite
against my wishes that she came, but she is a very excitable,
impulsive girl, as you may have noticed, and she is not easily
controlled when she has made up her mind on a point. Of course, I
did not mind you so much, as you are not connected with the
official police, but it is not pleasant to have a family
misfortune like this noised abroad. Besides, it is a useless
expense, for how could you possibly find this Hosmer Angel?"
"On the contrary," said Holmes quietly "I have every reason to
believe that I will succeed in discovering Mr. Hosmer Angel."
Mr. Windibank gave a violent start and dropped his gloves. "I am
delighted to hear it," he said.
"It is a curious thing," remarked Holmes, "that a typewriter has
really quite as much individuality as a man's handwriting. Unless
they are quite new, no two of them write exactly alike. Some
letters get more worn than others, and some wear only on one
side. Now, you remark in this note of yours, Mr. Windibank, that
in every case there is some little slurring over of the 'e,' and
a slight defect in the tail of the 'r.' There are fourteen other
characteristics, but those are the more obvious."
"We do all our correspondence with this machine at the office,
and no doubt it is a little worn," our visitor answered, glancing
keenly at Holmes with his bright little eyes.
"And now I will show you what is really a very interesting study,
Mr. Windibank," Holmes continued. "I think of writing another
little monograph some of these days on the typewriter and its
relation to crime. It is a subject to which I have devoted some
little attention. I have here four letters which purport to come
from the missing man. They are all typewritten. In each case, not
only are the 'e's' slurred and the 'r's' tailless, but you will
observe, if you care to use my magnifying lens, that the fourteen
other characteristics to which I have alluded are there as well."
Mr. Windibank sprang out of his chair and picked up his hat. "I
cannot waste time over this sort of fantastic talk, Mr. Holmes,"
he said. "If you can catch the man, catch him, and let me know
when you have done it."
"Certainly," said Holmes, stepping over and turning the key in
the door. "I let you know, then, that I have caught him"
"What where?" shouted Mr. Windibank, turning white to his lips
and glancing about him like a rat in a trap.
"Oh, it won't doreally it won't," said Holmes suavely. "There
is no possible getting out of it, Mr. Windibank. It is quite too
transparent, and it was a very bad compliment when you said that
it was impossible for me to solve so simple a question. That's
right Sit down and let us talk it over."
Our visitor collapsed into a chair, with a ghastly face and a
glitter of moisture on his brow. "Itit's not actionable," he
stammered.
"I am very much afraid that it is not. But between ourselves,
Windibank, it was as cruel and selfish and heartless a trick in a
petty way as ever came before me. Now, let me just run over the
course of events, and you will contradict me if I go wrong."
The man sat huddled up in his chair, with his head sunk upon his
breast, like one who is utterly crushed. Holmes stuck his feet up
on the corner of the mantelpiece and, leaning back with his hands
in his pockets, began talking, rather to himself, as it seemed,
than to us.
"The man married a woman very much older than himself for her
money," said he, "and he enjoyed the use of the money of the
daughter as long as she lived with them. It was a considerable
sum, for people in their position, and the loss of it would have
made a serious difference. It was worth an effort to preserve it.
The daughter was of a good, amiable disposition, but affectionate
and warmhearted in her ways, so that it was evident that with
her fair personal advantages, and her little income, she would
not be allowed to remain single long. Now her marriage would
mean, of course, the loss of a hundred a year, so what does her
stepfather do to prevent it? He takes the obvious course of
keeping her at home and forbidding her to seek the company of
people of her own age. But soon he found that that would not
answer forever. She became restive, insisted upon her rights, and
finally announced her positive intention of going to a certain
ball. What does her clever stepfather do then? He conceives an
idea more creditable to his head than to his heart. With the
connivance and assistance of his wife he disguised himself,
covered those keen eyes with tinted glasses, masked the face with
a moustache and a pair of bushy whiskers, sunk that clear voice
into an insinuating whisper, and doubly secure on account of the
girl's short sight, he appears as Mr. Hosmer Angel, and keeps off
other lovers by making love himself."
"It was only a joke at first," groaned our visitor. "We never
thought that she would have been so carried away."
"Very likely not. However that may be, the young lady was very
decidedly carried away, and, having quite made up her mind that
her stepfather was in France, the suspicion of treachery never
for an instant entered her mind. She was flattered by the
gentleman's attentions, and the effect was increased by the
loudly expressed admiration of her mother. Then Mr. Angel began
to call, for it was obvious that the matter should be pushed as
far as it would go if a real effect were to be produced. There
were meetings, and an engagement, which would finally secure the
girl's affections from turning towards anyone else. But the
deception could not be kept up forever. These pretended journeys
to France were rather cumbrous. The thing to do was clearly to
bring the business to an end in such a dramatic manner that it
would leave a permanent impression upon the young lady's mind and
prevent her from looking upon any other suitor for some time to
come. Hence those vows of fidelity exacted upon a Testament, and
hence also the allusions to a possibility of something happening
on the very morning of the wedding. James Windibank wished Miss
Sutherland to be so bound to Hosmer Angel, and so uncertain as to
his fate, that for ten years to come, at any rate, she would not
listen to another man. As far as the church door he brought her,
and then, as he could go no farther, he conveniently vanished
away by the old trick of stepping in at one door of a
fourwheeler and out at the other. I think that was the chain of
events, Mr. Windibank"
Our visitor had recovered something of his assurance while Holmes
had been talking, and he rose from his chair now with a cold
sneer upon his pale face.
"It may be so, or it may not, Mr. Holmes," said he, "but if you
are so very sharp you ought to be sharp enough to know that it is
you who are breaking the law now, and not me. I have done nothing
actionable from the first, but as long as you keep that door
locked you lay yourself open to an action for assault and illegal
constraint."
"The law cannot, as you say, touch you," said Holmes, unlocking
and throwing open the door, "yet there never was a man who
deserved punishment more. If the young lady has a brother or a
friend, he ought to lay a whip across your shoulders. By Jove"
he continued, flushing up at the sight of the bitter sneer upon
the man's face, "it is not part of my duties to my client, but
here's a hunting crop handy, and I think I shall just treat
myself to" He took two swift steps to the whip, but before he
could grasp it there was a wild clatter of steps upon the stairs,
the heavy hall door banged, and from the window we could see Mr.
James Windibank running at the top of his speed down the road.
"There's a coldblooded scoundrel" said Holmes, laughing, as he
threw himself down into his chair once more. "That fellow will
rise from crime to crime until he does something very bad, and
ends on a gallows. The case has, in some respects, been not
entirely devoid of interest."
"I cannot now entirely see all the steps of your reasoning," I
remarked.
"Well, of course it was obvious from the first that this Mr.
Hosmer Angel must have some strong object for his curious
conduct, and it was equally clear that the only man who really
profited by the incident, as far as we could see, was the
stepfather. Then the fact that the two men were never together,
but that the one always appeared when the other was away, was
suggestive. So were the tinted spectacles and the curious voice,
which both hinted at a disguise, as did the bushy whiskers. My
suspicions were all confirmed by his peculiar action in
typewriting his signature, which, of course, inferred that his
handwriting was so familiar to her that she would recognise even
the smallest sample of it. You see all these isolated facts,
together with many minor ones, all pointed in the same
direction."
"And how did you verify them?"
"Having once spotted my man, it was easy to get corroboration. I
knew the firm for which this man worked. Having taken the printed
description. I eliminated everything from it which could be the
result of a disguisethe whiskers, the glasses, the voice, and I
sent it to the firm, with a request that they would inform me
whether it answered to the description of any of their
travellers. I had already noticed the peculiarities of the
typewriter, and I wrote to the man himself at his business
address asking him if he would come here. As I expected, his
reply was typewritten and revealed the same trivial but
characteristic defects. The same post brought me a letter from
Westhouse  Marbank, of Fenchurch Street, to say that the
description tallied in every respect with that of their employ,
James Windibank. Voil tout"
"And Miss Sutherland?"
"If I tell her she will not believe me. You may remember the old
Persian saying, 'There is danger for him who taketh the tiger
cub, and danger also for whoso snatches a delusion from a woman.'
There is as much sense in Hafiz as in Horace, and as much
knowledge of the world."
ADVENTURE IV. THE BOSCOMBE VALLEY MYSTERY
We were seated at breakfast one morning, my wife and I, when the
maid brought in a telegram. It was from Sherlock Holmes and ran
in this way
"Have you a couple of days to spare? Have just been wired for from
the west of England in connection with Boscombe Valley tragedy.
Shall be glad if you will come with me. Air and scenery perfect.
Leave Paddington by the ."
"What do you say, dear?" said my wife, looking across at me.
"Will you go?"
"I really don't know what to say. I have a fairly long list at
present."
"Oh, Anstruther would do your work for you. You have been looking
a little pale lately. I think that the change would do you good,
and you are always so interested in Mr. Sherlock Holmes' cases."
"I should be ungrateful if I were not, seeing what I gained
through one of them," I answered. "But if I am to go, I must pack
at once, for I have only half an hour."
My experience of camp life in Afghanistan had at least had the
effect of making me a prompt and ready traveller. My wants were
few and simple, so that in less than the time stated I was in a
cab with my valise, rattling away to Paddington Station. Sherlock
Holmes was pacing up and down the platform, his tall, gaunt
figure made even gaunter and taller by his long grey
travellingcloak and closefitting cloth cap.
"It is really very good of you to come, Watson," said he. "It
makes a considerable difference to me, having someone with me on
whom I can thoroughly rely. Local aid is always either worthless
or else biassed. If you will keep the two corner seats I shall
get the tickets."
We had the carriage to ourselves save for an immense litter of
papers which Holmes had brought with him. Among these he rummaged
and read, with intervals of notetaking and of meditation, until
we were past Reading. Then he suddenly rolled them all into a
gigantic ball and tossed them up onto the rack.
"Have you heard anything of the case?" he asked.
"Not a word. I have not seen a paper for some days."
"The London press has not had very full accounts. I have just
been looking through all the recent papers in order to master the
particulars. It seems, from what I gather, to be one of those
simple cases which are so extremely difficult."
"That sounds a little paradoxical."
"But it is profoundly true. Singularity is almost invariably a
clue. The more featureless and commonplace a crime is, the more
difficult it is to bring it home. In this case, however, they
have established a very serious case against the son of the
murdered man."
"It is a murder, then?"
"Well, it is conjectured to be so. I shall take nothing for
granted until I have the opportunity of looking personally into
it. I will explain the state of things to you, as far as I have
been able to understand it, in a very few words.
"Boscombe Valley is a country district not very far from Ross, in
Herefordshire. The largest landed proprietor in that part is a
Mr. John Turner, who made his money in Australia and returned
some years ago to the old country. One of the farms which he
held, that of Hatherley, was let to Mr. Charles McCarthy, who was
also an exAustralian. The men had known each other in the
colonies, so that it was not unnatural that when they came to
settle down they should do so as near each other as possible.
Turner was apparently the richer man, so McCarthy became his
tenant but still remained, it seems, upon terms of perfect
equality, as they were frequently together. McCarthy had one son,
a lad of eighteen, and Turner had an only daughter of the same
age, but neither of them had wives living. They appear to have
avoided the society of the neighbouring English families and to
have led retired lives, though both the McCarthys were fond of
sport and were frequently seen at the racemeetings of the
neighbourhood. McCarthy kept two servantsa man and a girl.
Turner had a considerable household, some halfdozen at the
least. That is as much as I have been able to gather about the
families. Now for the facts.
"On June rd, that is, on Monday last, McCarthy left his house at
Hatherley about three in the afternoon and walked down to the
Boscombe Pool, which is a small lake formed by the spreading out
of the stream which runs down the Boscombe Valley. He had been
out with his servingman in the morning at Ross, and he had told
the man that he must hurry, as he had an appointment of
importance to keep at three. From that appointment he never came
back alive.
"From Hatherley Farmhouse to the Boscombe Pool is a quarter of a
mile, and two people saw him as he passed over this ground. One
was an old woman, whose name is not mentioned, and the other was
William Crowder, a gamekeeper in the employ of Mr. Turner. Both
these witnesses depose that Mr. McCarthy was walking alone. The
gamekeeper adds that within a few minutes of his seeing Mr.
McCarthy pass he had seen his son, Mr. James McCarthy, going the
same way with a gun under his arm. To the best of his belief, the
father was actually in sight at the time, and the son was
following him. He thought no more of the matter until he heard in
the evening of the tragedy that had occurred.
"The two McCarthys were seen after the time when William Crowder,
the gamekeeper, lost sight of them. The Boscombe Pool is thickly
wooded round, with just a fringe of grass and of reeds round the
edge. A girl of fourteen, Patience Moran, who is the daughter of
the lodgekeeper of the Boscombe Valley estate, was in one of the
woods picking flowers. She states that while she was there she
saw, at the border of the wood and close by the lake, Mr.
McCarthy and his son, and that they appeared to be having a
violent quarrel. She heard Mr. McCarthy the elder using very
strong language to his son, and she saw the latter raise up his
hand as if to strike his father. She was so frightened by their
violence that she ran away and told her mother when she reached
home that she had left the two McCarthys quarrelling near
Boscombe Pool, and that she was afraid that they were going to
fight. She had hardly said the words when young Mr. McCarthy came
running up to the lodge to say that he had found his father dead
in the wood, and to ask for the help of the lodgekeeper. He was
much excited, without either his gun or his hat, and his right
hand and sleeve were observed to be stained with fresh blood. On
following him they found the dead body stretched out upon the
grass beside the pool. The head had been beaten in by repeated
blows of some heavy and blunt weapon. The injuries were such as
might very well have been inflicted by the buttend of his son's
gun, which was found lying on the grass within a few paces of the
body. Under these circumstances the young man was instantly
arrested, and a verdict of 'wilful murder' having been returned
at the inquest on Tuesday, he was on Wednesday brought before the
magistrates at Ross, who have referred the case to the next
Assizes. Those are the main facts of the case as they came out
before the coroner and the policecourt."
"I could hardly imagine a more damning case," I remarked. "If
ever circumstantial evidence pointed to a criminal it does so
here."
"Circumstantial evidence is a very tricky thing," answered Holmes
thoughtfully. "It may seem to point very straight to one thing,
but if you shift your own point of view a little, you may find it
pointing in an equally uncompromising manner to something
entirely different. It must be confessed, however, that the case
looks exceedingly grave against the young man, and it is very
possible that he is indeed the culprit. There are several people
in the neighbourhood, however, and among them Miss Turner, the
daughter of the neighbouring landowner, who believe in his
innocence, and who have retained Lestrade, whom you may recollect
in connection with the Study in Scarlet, to work out the case in
his interest. Lestrade, being rather puzzled, has referred the
case to me, and hence it is that two middleaged gentlemen are
flying westward at fifty miles an hour instead of quietly
digesting their breakfasts at home."
"I am afraid," said I, "that the facts are so obvious that you
will find little credit to be gained out of this case."
"There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact," he
answered, laughing. "Besides, we may chance to hit upon some
other obvious facts which may have been by no means obvious to
Mr. Lestrade. You know me too well to think that I am boasting
when I say that I shall either confirm or destroy his theory by
means which he is quite incapable of employing, or even of
understanding. To take the first example to hand, I very clearly
perceive that in your bedroom the window is upon the righthand
side, and yet I question whether Mr. Lestrade would have noted
even so selfevident a thing as that."
"How on earth"
"My dear fellow, I know you well. I know the military neatness
which characterises you. You shave every morning, and in this
season you shave by the sunlight but since your shaving is less
and less complete as we get farther back on the left side, until
it becomes positively slovenly as we get round the angle of the
jaw, it is surely very clear that that side is less illuminated
than the other. I could not imagine a man of your habits looking
at himself in an equal light and being satisfied with such a
result. I only quote this as a trivial example of observation and
inference. Therein lies my mtier, and it is just possible that
it may be of some service in the investigation which lies before
us. There are one or two minor points which were brought out in
the inquest, and which are worth considering."
"What are they?"
"It appears that his arrest did not take place at once, but after
the return to Hatherley Farm. On the inspector of constabulary
informing him that he was a prisoner, he remarked that he was not
surprised to hear it, and that it was no more than his deserts.
This observation of his had the natural effect of removing any
traces of doubt which might have remained in the minds of the
coroner's jury."
"It was a confession," I ejaculated.
"No, for it was followed by a protestation of innocence."
"Coming on the top of such a damning series of events, it was at
least a most suspicious remark."
"On the contrary," said Holmes, "it is the brightest rift which I
can at present see in the clouds. However innocent he might be,
he could not be such an absolute imbecile as not to see that the
circumstances were very black against him. Had he appeared
surprised at his own arrest, or feigned indignation at it, I
should have looked upon it as highly suspicious, because such
surprise or anger would not be natural under the circumstances,
and yet might appear to be the best policy to a scheming man. His
frank acceptance of the situation marks him as either an innocent
man, or else as a man of considerable selfrestraint and
firmness. As to his remark about his deserts, it was also not
unnatural if you consider that he stood beside the dead body of
his father, and that there is no doubt that he had that very day
so far forgotten his filial duty as to bandy words with him, and
even, according to the little girl whose evidence is so
important, to raise his hand as if to strike him. The
selfreproach and contrition which are displayed in his remark
appear to me to be the signs of a healthy mind rather than of a
guilty one."
I shook my head. "Many men have been hanged on far slighter
evidence," I remarked.
"So they have. And many men have been wrongfully hanged."
"What is the young man's own account of the matter?"
"It is, I am afraid, not very encouraging to his supporters,
though there are one or two points in it which are suggestive.
You will find it here, and may read it for yourself."
He picked out from his bundle a copy of the local Herefordshire
paper, and having turned down the sheet he pointed out the
paragraph in which the unfortunate young man had given his own
statement of what had occurred. I settled myself down in the
corner of the carriage and read it very carefully. It ran in this
way
"Mr. James McCarthy, the only son of the deceased, was then called
and gave evidence as follows 'I had been away from home for
three days at Bristol, and had only just returned upon the
morning of last Monday, the rd. My father was absent from home at
the time of my arrival, and I was informed by the maid that he
had driven over to Ross with John Cobb, the groom. Shortly after
my return I heard the wheels of his trap in the yard, and,
looking out of my window, I saw him get out and walk rapidly out
of the yard, though I was not aware in which direction he was
going. I then took my gun and strolled out in the direction of
the Boscombe Pool, with the intention of visiting the rabbit
warren which is upon the other side. On my way I saw William
Crowder, the gamekeeper, as he had stated in his evidence but
he is mistaken in thinking that I was following my father. I had
no idea that he was in front of me. When about a hundred yards
from the pool I heard a cry of "Cooee" which was a usual signal
between my father and myself. I then hurried forward, and found
him standing by the pool. He appeared to be much surprised at
seeing me and asked me rather roughly what I was doing there. A
conversation ensued which led to high words and almost to blows,
for my father was a man of a very violent temper. Seeing that his
passion was becoming ungovernable, I left him and returned
towards Hatherley Farm. I had not gone more than  yards,
however, when I heard a hideous outcry behind me, which caused me
to run back again. I found my father expiring upon the ground,
with his head terribly injured. I dropped my gun and held him in
my arms, but he almost instantly expired. I knelt beside him for
some minutes, and then made my way to Mr. Turner's lodgekeeper,
his house being the nearest, to ask for assistance. I saw no one
near my father when I returned, and I have no idea how he came by
his injuries. He was not a popular man, being somewhat cold and
forbidding in his manners, but he had, as far as I know, no
active enemies. I know nothing further of the matter.'
"The Coroner Did your father make any statement to you before
he died?
"Witness He mumbled a few words, but I could only catch some
allusion to a rat.
"The Coroner What did you understand by that?
"Witness It conveyed no meaning to me. I thought that he was
delirious.
"The Coroner What was the point upon which you and your father
had this final quarrel?
"Witness I should prefer not to answer.
"The Coroner I am afraid that I must press it.
"Witness It is really impossible for me to tell you. I can
assure you that it has nothing to do with the sad tragedy which
followed.
"The Coroner That is for the court to decide. I need not point
out to you that your refusal to answer will prejudice your case
considerably in any future proceedings which may arise.
"Witness I must still refuse.
"The Coroner I understand that the cry of 'Cooee' was a common
signal between you and your father?
"Witness It was.
"The Coroner How was it, then, that he uttered it before he saw
you, and before he even knew that you had returned from Bristol?
"Witness with considerable confusion I do not know.
"A Juryman Did you see nothing which aroused your suspicions
when you returned on hearing the cry and found your father
fatally injured?
"Witness Nothing definite.
"The Coroner What do you mean?
"Witness I was so disturbed and excited as I rushed out into
the open, that I could think of nothing except of my father. Yet
I have a vague impression that as I ran forward something lay
upon the ground to the left of me. It seemed to me to be
something grey in colour, a coat of some sort, or a plaid perhaps.
When I rose from my father I looked round for it, but it was
gone.
"'Do you mean that it disappeared before you went for help?'
"'Yes, it was gone.'
"'You cannot say what it was?'
"'No, I had a feeling something was there.'
"'How far from the body?'
"'A dozen yards or so.'
"'And how far from the edge of the wood?'
"'About the same.'
"'Then if it was removed it was while you were within a dozen
yards of it?'
"'Yes, but with my back towards it.'
"This concluded the examination of the witness."
"I see," said I as I glanced down the column, "that the coroner
in his concluding remarks was rather severe upon young McCarthy.
He calls attention, and with reason, to the discrepancy about his
father having signalled to him before seeing him, also to his
refusal to give details of his conversation with his father, and
his singular account of his father's dying words. They are all,
as he remarks, very much against the son."
Holmes laughed softly to himself and stretched himself out upon
the cushioned seat. "Both you and the coroner have been at some
pains," said he, "to single out the very strongest points in the
young man's favour. Don't you see that you alternately give him
credit for having too much imagination and too little? Too
little, if he could not invent a cause of quarrel which would
give him the sympathy of the jury too much, if he evolved from
his own inner consciousness anything so outr as a dying
reference to a rat, and the incident of the vanishing cloth. No,
sir, I shall approach this case from the point of view that what
this young man says is true, and we shall see whither that
hypothesis will lead us. And now here is my pocket Petrarch, and
not another word shall I say of this case until we are on the
scene of action. We lunch at Swindon, and I see that we shall be
there in twenty minutes."
It was nearly four o'clock when we at last, after passing through
the beautiful Stroud Valley, and over the broad gleaming Severn,
found ourselves at the pretty little countrytown of Ross. A
lean, ferretlike man, furtive and slylooking, was waiting for
us upon the platform. In spite of the light brown dustcoat and
leatherleggings which he wore in deference to his rustic
surroundings, I had no difficulty in recognising Lestrade, of
Scotland Yard. With him we drove to the Hereford Arms where a
room had already been engaged for us.
"I have ordered a carriage," said Lestrade as we sat over a cup
of tea. "I knew your energetic nature, and that you would not be
happy until you had been on the scene of the crime."
"It was very nice and complimentary of you," Holmes answered. "It
is entirely a question of barometric pressure."
Lestrade looked startled. "I do not quite follow," he said.
"How is the glass? Twentynine, I see. No wind, and not a cloud
in the sky. I have a caseful of cigarettes here which need
smoking, and the sofa is very much superior to the usual country
hotel abomination. I do not think that it is probable that I
shall use the carriage tonight."
Lestrade laughed indulgently. "You have, no doubt, already formed
your conclusions from the newspapers," he said. "The case is as
plain as a pikestaff, and the more one goes into it the plainer
it becomes. Still, of course, one can't refuse a lady, and such a
very positive one, too. She has heard of you, and would have your
opinion, though I repeatedly told her that there was nothing
which you could do which I had not already done. Why, bless my
soul here is her carriage at the door."
He had hardly spoken before there rushed into the room one of the
most lovely young women that I have ever seen in my life. Her
violet eyes shining, her lips parted, a pink flush upon her
cheeks, all thought of her natural reserve lost in her
overpowering excitement and concern.
"Oh, Mr. Sherlock Holmes" she cried, glancing from one to the
other of us, and finally, with a woman's quick intuition,
fastening upon my companion, "I am so glad that you have come. I
have driven down to tell you so. I know that James didn't do it.
I know it, and I want you to start upon your work knowing it,
too. Never let yourself doubt upon that point. We have known each
other since we were little children, and I know his faults as no
one else does but he is too tenderhearted to hurt a fly. Such a
charge is absurd to anyone who really knows him."
"I hope we may clear him, Miss Turner," said Sherlock Holmes.
"You may rely upon my doing all that I can."
"But you have read the evidence. You have formed some conclusion?
Do you not see some loophole, some flaw? Do you not yourself
think that he is innocent?"
"I think that it is very probable."
"There, now" she cried, throwing back her head and looking
defiantly at Lestrade. "You hear He gives me hopes."
Lestrade shrugged his shoulders. "I am afraid that my colleague
has been a little quick in forming his conclusions," he said.
"But he is right. Oh I know that he is right. James never did
it. And about his quarrel with his father, I am sure that the
reason why he would not speak about it to the coroner was because
I was concerned in it."
"In what way?" asked Holmes.
"It is no time for me to hide anything. James and his father had
many disagreements about me. Mr. McCarthy was very anxious that
there should be a marriage between us. James and I have always
loved each other as brother and sister but of course he is young
and has seen very little of life yet, andandwell, he
naturally did not wish to do anything like that yet. So there
were quarrels, and this, I am sure, was one of them."
"And your father?" asked Holmes. "Was he in favour of such a
union?"
"No, he was averse to it also. No one but Mr. McCarthy was in
favour of it." A quick blush passed over her fresh young face as
Holmes shot one of his keen, questioning glances at her.
"Thank you for this information," said he. "May I see your father
if I call tomorrow?"
"I am afraid the doctor won't allow it."
"The doctor?"
"Yes, have you not heard? Poor father has never been strong for
years back, but this has broken him down completely. He has taken
to his bed, and Dr. Willows says that he is a wreck and that his
nervous system is shattered. Mr. McCarthy was the only man alive
who had known dad in the old days in Victoria."
"Ha In Victoria That is important."
"Yes, at the mines."
"Quite so at the goldmines, where, as I understand, Mr. Turner
made his money."
"Yes, certainly."
"Thank you, Miss Turner. You have been of material assistance to
me."
"You will tell me if you have any news tomorrow. No doubt you
will go to the prison to see James. Oh, if you do, Mr. Holmes, do
tell him that I know him to be innocent."
"I will, Miss Turner."
"I must go home now, for dad is very ill, and he misses me so if
I leave him. Goodbye, and God help you in your undertaking." She
hurried from the room as impulsively as she had entered, and we
heard the wheels of her carriage rattle off down the street.
"I am ashamed of you, Holmes," said Lestrade with dignity after a
few minutes' silence. "Why should you raise up hopes which you
are bound to disappoint? I am not overtender of heart, but I
call it cruel."
"I think that I see my way to clearing James McCarthy," said
Holmes. "Have you an order to see him in prison?"
"Yes, but only for you and me."
"Then I shall reconsider my resolution about going out. We have
still time to take a train to Hereford and see him tonight?"
"Ample."
"Then let us do so. Watson, I fear that you will find it very
slow, but I shall only be away a couple of hours."
I walked down to the station with them, and then wandered through
the streets of the little town, finally returning to the hotel,
where I lay upon the sofa and tried to interest myself in a
yellowbacked novel. The puny plot of the story was so thin,
however, when compared to the deep mystery through which we were
groping, and I found my attention wander so continually from the
action to the fact, that I at last flung it across the room and
gave myself up entirely to a consideration of the events of the
day. Supposing that this unhappy young man's story were
absolutely true, then what hellish thing, what absolutely
unforeseen and extraordinary calamity could have occurred between
the time when he parted from his father, and the moment when,
drawn back by his screams, he rushed into the glade? It was
something terrible and deadly. What could it be? Might not the
nature of the injuries reveal something to my medical instincts?
I rang the bell and called for the weekly county paper, which
contained a verbatim account of the inquest. In the surgeon's
deposition it was stated that the posterior third of the left
parietal bone and the left half of the occipital bone had been
shattered by a heavy blow from a blunt weapon. I marked the spot
upon my own head. Clearly such a blow must have been struck from
behind. That was to some extent in favour of the accused, as when
seen quarrelling he was face to face with his father. Still, it
did not go for very much, for the older man might have turned his
back before the blow fell. Still, it might be worth while to call
Holmes' attention to it. Then there was the peculiar dying
reference to a rat. What could that mean? It could not be
delirium. A man dying from a sudden blow does not commonly become
delirious. No, it was more likely to be an attempt to explain how
he met his fate. But what could it indicate? I cudgelled my
brains to find some possible explanation. And then the incident
of the grey cloth seen by young McCarthy. If that were true the
murderer must have dropped some part of his dress, presumably his
overcoat, in his flight, and must have had the hardihood to
return and to carry it away at the instant when the son was
kneeling with his back turned not a dozen paces off. What a
tissue of mysteries and improbabilities the whole thing was I
did not wonder at Lestrade's opinion, and yet I had so much faith
in Sherlock Holmes' insight that I could not lose hope as long
as every fresh fact seemed to strengthen his conviction of young
McCarthy's innocence.
It was late before Sherlock Holmes returned. He came back alone,
for Lestrade was staying in lodgings in the town.
"The glass still keeps very high," he remarked as he sat down.
"It is of importance that it should not rain before we are able
to go over the ground. On the other hand, a man should be at his
very best and keenest for such nice work as that, and I did not
wish to do it when fagged by a long journey. I have seen young
McCarthy."
"And what did you learn from him?"
"Nothing."
"Could he throw no light?"
"None at all. I was inclined to think at one time that he knew
who had done it and was screening him or her, but I am convinced
now that he is as puzzled as everyone else. He is not a very
quickwitted youth, though comely to look at and, I should think,
sound at heart."
"I cannot admire his taste," I remarked, "if it is indeed a fact
that he was averse to a marriage with so charming a young lady as
this Miss Turner."
"Ah, thereby hangs a rather painful tale. This fellow is madly,
insanely, in love with her, but some two years ago, when he was
only a lad, and before he really knew her, for she had been away
five years at a boardingschool, what does the idiot do but get
into the clutches of a barmaid in Bristol and marry her at a
registry office? No one knows a word of the matter, but you can
imagine how maddening it must be to him to be upbraided for not
doing what he would give his very eyes to do, but what he knows
to be absolutely impossible. It was sheer frenzy of this sort
which made him throw his hands up into the air when his father,
at their last interview, was goading him on to propose to Miss
Turner. On the other hand, he had no means of supporting himself,
and his father, who was by all accounts a very hard man, would
have thrown him over utterly had he known the truth. It was with
his barmaid wife that he had spent the last three days in
Bristol, and his father did not know where he was. Mark that
point. It is of importance. Good has come out of evil, however,
for the barmaid, finding from the papers that he is in serious
trouble and likely to be hanged, has thrown him over utterly and
has written to him to say that she has a husband already in the
Bermuda Dockyard, so that there is really no tie between them. I
think that that bit of news has consoled young McCarthy for all
that he has suffered."
"But if he is innocent, who has done it?"
"Ah who? I would call your attention very particularly to two
points. One is that the murdered man had an appointment with
someone at the pool, and that the someone could not have been his
son, for his son was away, and he did not know when he would
return. The second is that the murdered man was heard to cry
'Cooee' before he knew that his son had returned. Those are the
crucial points upon which the case depends. And now let us talk
about George Meredith, if you please, and we shall leave all
minor matters until tomorrow."
There was no rain, as Holmes had foretold, and the morning broke
bright and cloudless. At nine o'clock Lestrade called for us with
the carriage, and we set off for Hatherley Farm and the Boscombe
Pool.
"There is serious news this morning," Lestrade observed. "It is
said that Mr. Turner, of the Hall, is so ill that his life is
despaired of."
"An elderly man, I presume?" said Holmes.
"About sixty but his constitution has been shattered by his life
abroad, and he has been in failing health for some time. This
business has had a very bad effect upon him. He was an old friend
of McCarthy's, and, I may add, a great benefactor to him, for I
have learned that he gave him Hatherley Farm rent free."
"Indeed That is interesting," said Holmes.
"Oh, yes In a hundred other ways he has helped him. Everybody
about here speaks of his kindness to him."
"Really Does it not strike you as a little singular that this
McCarthy, who appears to have had little of his own, and to have
been under such obligations to Turner, should still talk of
marrying his son to Turner's daughter, who is, presumably,
heiress to the estate, and that in such a very cocksure manner,
as if it were merely a case of a proposal and all else would
follow? It is the more strange, since we know that Turner himself
was averse to the idea. The daughter told us as much. Do you not
deduce something from that?"
"We have got to the deductions and the inferences," said
Lestrade, winking at me. "I find it hard enough to tackle facts,
Holmes, without flying away after theories and fancies."
"You are right," said Holmes demurely "you do find it very hard
to tackle the facts."
"Anyhow, I have grasped one fact which you seem to find it
difficult to get hold of," replied Lestrade with some warmth.
"And that is"
"That McCarthy senior met his death from McCarthy junior and that
all theories to the contrary are the merest moonshine."
"Well, moonshine is a brighter thing than fog," said Holmes,
laughing. "But I am very much mistaken if this is not Hatherley
Farm upon the left."
"Yes, that is it." It was a widespread, comfortablelooking
building, twostoried, slateroofed, with great yellow blotches
of lichen upon the grey walls. The drawn blinds and the smokeless
chimneys, however, gave it a stricken look, as though the weight
of this horror still lay heavy upon it. We called at the door,
when the maid, at Holmes' request, showed us the boots which her
master wore at the time of his death, and also a pair of the
son's, though not the pair which he had then had. Having measured
these very carefully from seven or eight different points, Holmes
desired to be led to the courtyard, from which we all followed
the winding track which led to Boscombe Pool.
Sherlock Holmes was transformed when he was hot upon such a scent
as this. Men who had only known the quiet thinker and logician of
Baker Street would have failed to recognise him. His face flushed
and darkened. His brows were drawn into two hard black lines,
while his eyes shone out from beneath them with a steely glitter.
His face was bent downward, his shoulders bowed, his lips
compressed, and the veins stood out like whipcord in his long,
sinewy neck. His nostrils seemed to dilate with a purely animal
lust for the chase, and his mind was so absolutely concentrated
upon the matter before him that a question or remark fell
unheeded upon his ears, or, at the most, only provoked a quick,
impatient snarl in reply. Swiftly and silently he made his way
along the track which ran through the meadows, and so by way of
the woods to the Boscombe Pool. It was damp, marshy ground, as is
all that district, and there were marks of many feet, both upon
the path and amid the short grass which bounded it on either
side. Sometimes Holmes would hurry on, sometimes stop dead, and
once he made quite a little detour into the meadow. Lestrade and
I walked behind him, the detective indifferent and contemptuous,
while I watched my friend with the interest which sprang from the
conviction that every one of his actions was directed towards a
definite end.
The Boscombe Pool, which is a little reedgirt sheet of water
some fifty yards across, is situated at the boundary between the
Hatherley Farm and the private park of the wealthy Mr. Turner.
Above the woods which lined it upon the farther side we could see
the red, jutting pinnacles which marked the site of the rich
landowner's dwelling. On the Hatherley side of the pool the woods
grew very thick, and there was a narrow belt of sodden grass
twenty paces across between the edge of the trees and the reeds
which lined the lake. Lestrade showed us the exact spot at which
the body had been found, and, indeed, so moist was the ground,
that I could plainly see the traces which had been left by the
fall of the stricken man. To Holmes, as I could see by his eager
face and peering eyes, very many other things were to be read
upon the trampled grass. He ran round, like a dog who is picking
up a scent, and then turned upon my companion.
"What did you go into the pool for?" he asked.
"I fished about with a rake. I thought there might be some weapon
or other trace. But how on earth"
"Oh, tut, tut I have no time That left foot of yours with its
inward twist is all over the place. A mole could trace it, and
there it vanishes among the reeds. Oh, how simple it would all
have been had I been here before they came like a herd of buffalo
and wallowed all over it. Here is where the party with the
lodgekeeper came, and they have covered all tracks for six or
eight feet round the body. But here are three separate tracks of
the same feet." He drew out a lens and lay down upon his
waterproof to have a better view, talking all the time rather to
himself than to us. "These are young McCarthy's feet. Twice he
was walking, and once he ran swiftly, so that the soles are
deeply marked and the heels hardly visible. That bears out his
story. He ran when he saw his father on the ground. Then here are
the father's feet as he paced up and down. What is this, then? It
is the buttend of the gun as the son stood listening. And this?
Ha, ha What have we here? Tiptoes tiptoes Square, too, quite
unusual boots They come, they go, they come againof course
that was for the cloak. Now where did they come from?" He ran up
and down, sometimes losing, sometimes finding the track until we
were well within the edge of the wood and under the shadow of a
great beech, the largest tree in the neighbourhood. Holmes traced
his way to the farther side of this and lay down once more upon
his face with a little cry of satisfaction. For a long time he
remained there, turning over the leaves and dried sticks,
gathering up what seemed to me to be dust into an envelope and
examining with his lens not only the ground but even the bark of
the tree as far as he could reach. A jagged stone was lying among
the moss, and this also he carefully examined and retained. Then
he followed a pathway through the wood until he came to the
highroad, where all traces were lost.
"It has been a case of considerable interest," he remarked,
returning to his natural manner. "I fancy that this grey house on
the right must be the lodge. I think that I will go in and have a
word with Moran, and perhaps write a little note. Having done
that, we may drive back to our luncheon. You may walk to the cab,
and I shall be with you presently."
It was about ten minutes before we regained our cab and drove
back into Ross, Holmes still carrying with him the stone which he
had picked up in the wood.
"This may interest you, Lestrade," he remarked, holding it out.
"The murder was done with it."
"I see no marks."
"There are none."
"How do you know, then?"
"The grass was growing under it. It had only lain there a few
days. There was no sign of a place whence it had been taken. It
corresponds with the injuries. There is no sign of any other
weapon."
"And the murderer?"
"Is a tall man, lefthanded, limps with the right leg, wears
thicksoled shootingboots and a grey cloak, smokes Indian
cigars, uses a cigarholder, and carries a blunt penknife in his
pocket. There are several other indications, but these may be
enough to aid us in our search."
Lestrade laughed. "I am afraid that I am still a sceptic," he
said. "Theories are all very well, but we have to deal with a
hardheaded British jury."
"Nous verrons," answered Holmes calmly. "You work your own
method, and I shall work mine. I shall be busy this afternoon,
and shall probably return to London by the evening train."
"And leave your case unfinished?"
"No, finished."
"But the mystery?"
"It is solved."
"Who was the criminal, then?"
"The gentleman I describe."
"But who is he?"
"Surely it would not be difficult to find out. This is not such a
populous neighbourhood."
Lestrade shrugged his shoulders. "I am a practical man," he said,
"and I really cannot undertake to go about the country looking
for a lefthanded gentleman with a game leg. I should become the
laughingstock of Scotland Yard."
"All right," said Holmes quietly. "I have given you the chance.
Here are your lodgings. Goodbye. I shall drop you a line before
I leave."
Having left Lestrade at his rooms, we drove to our hotel, where
we found lunch upon the table. Holmes was silent and buried in
thought with a pained expression upon his face, as one who finds
himself in a perplexing position.
"Look here, Watson," he said when the cloth was cleared "just sit
down in this chair and let me preach to you for a little. I don't
know quite what to do, and I should value your advice. Light a
cigar and let me expound."
"Pray do so."
"Well, now, in considering this case there are two points about
young McCarthy's narrative which struck us both instantly,
although they impressed me in his favour and you against him. One
was the fact that his father should, according to his account,
cry 'Cooee' before seeing him. The other was his singular dying
reference to a rat. He mumbled several words, you understand, but
that was all that caught the son's ear. Now from this double
point our research must commence, and we will begin it by
presuming that what the lad says is absolutely true."
"What of this 'Cooee' then?"
"Well, obviously it could not have been meant for the son. The
son, as far as he knew, was in Bristol. It was mere chance that
he was within earshot. The 'Cooee' was meant to attract the
attention of whoever it was that he had the appointment with. But
'Cooee' is a distinctly Australian cry, and one which is used
between Australians. There is a strong presumption that the
person whom McCarthy expected to meet him at Boscombe Pool was
someone who had been in Australia."
"What of the rat, then?"
Sherlock Holmes took a folded paper from his pocket and flattened
it out on the table. "This is a map of the Colony of Victoria,"
he said. "I wired to Bristol for it last night." He put his hand
over part of the map. "What do you read?"
"ARAT," I read.
"And now?" He raised his hand.
"BALLARAT."
"Quite so. That was the word the man uttered, and of which his
son only caught the last two syllables. He was trying to utter
the name of his murderer. So and so, of Ballarat."
"It is wonderful" I exclaimed.
"It is obvious. And now, you see, I had narrowed the field down
considerably. The possession of a grey garment was a third point
which, granting the son's statement to be correct, was a
certainty. We have come now out of mere vagueness to the definite
conception of an Australian from Ballarat with a grey cloak."
"Certainly."
"And one who was at home in the district, for the pool can only
be approached by the farm or by the estate, where strangers could
hardly wander."
"Quite so."
"Then comes our expedition of today. By an examination of the
ground I gained the trifling details which I gave to that
imbecile Lestrade, as to the personality of the criminal."
"But how did you gain them?"
"You know my method. It is founded upon the observation of
trifles."
"His height I know that you might roughly judge from the length
of his stride. His boots, too, might be told from their traces."
"Yes, they were peculiar boots."
"But his lameness?"
"The impression of his right foot was always less distinct than
his left. He put less weight upon it. Why? Because he limpedhe
was lame."
"But his lefthandedness."
"You were yourself struck by the nature of the injury as recorded
by the surgeon at the inquest. The blow was struck from
immediately behind, and yet was upon the left side. Now, how can
that be unless it were by a lefthanded man? He had stood behind
that tree during the interview between the father and son. He had
even smoked there. I found the ash of a cigar, which my special
knowledge of tobacco ashes enables me to pronounce as an Indian
cigar. I have, as you know, devoted some attention to this, and
written a little monograph on the ashes of  different
varieties of pipe, cigar, and cigarette tobacco. Having found the
ash, I then looked round and discovered the stump among the moss
where he had tossed it. It was an Indian cigar, of the variety
which are rolled in Rotterdam."
"And the cigarholder?"
"I could see that the end had not been in his mouth. Therefore he
used a holder. The tip had been cut off, not bitten off, but the
cut was not a clean one, so I deduced a blunt penknife."
"Holmes," I said, "you have drawn a net round this man from which
he cannot escape, and you have saved an innocent human life as
truly as if you had cut the cord which was hanging him. I see the
direction in which all this points. The culprit is"
"Mr. John Turner," cried the hotel waiter, opening the door of
our sittingroom, and ushering in a visitor.
The man who entered was a strange and impressive figure. His
slow, limping step and bowed shoulders gave the appearance of
decrepitude, and yet his hard, deeplined, craggy features, and
his enormous limbs showed that he was possessed of unusual
strength of body and of character. His tangled beard, grizzled
hair, and outstanding, drooping eyebrows combined to give an air
of dignity and power to his appearance, but his face was of an
ashen white, while his lips and the corners of his nostrils were
tinged with a shade of blue. It was clear to me at a glance that
he was in the grip of some deadly and chronic disease.
"Pray sit down on the sofa," said Holmes gently. "You had my
note?"
"Yes, the lodgekeeper brought it up. You said that you wished to
see me here to avoid scandal."
"I thought people would talk if I went to the Hall."
"And why did you wish to see me?" He looked across at my
companion with despair in his weary eyes, as though his question
was already answered.
"Yes," said Holmes, answering the look rather than the words. "It
is so. I know all about McCarthy."
The old man sank his face in his hands. "God help me" he cried.
"But I would not have let the young man come to harm. I give you
my word that I would have spoken out if it went against him at
the Assizes."
"I am glad to hear you say so," said Holmes gravely.
"I would have spoken now had it not been for my dear girl. It
would break her heartit will break her heart when she hears
that I am arrested."
"It may not come to that," said Holmes.
"What?"
"I am no official agent. I understand that it was your daughter
who required my presence here, and I am acting in her interests.
Young McCarthy must be got off, however."
"I am a dying man," said old Turner. "I have had diabetes for
years. My doctor says it is a question whether I shall live a
month. Yet I would rather die under my own roof than in a gaol."
Holmes rose and sat down at the table with his pen in his hand
and a bundle of paper before him. "Just tell us the truth," he
said. "I shall jot down the facts. You will sign it, and Watson
here can witness it. Then I could produce your confession at the
last extremity to save young McCarthy. I promise you that I shall
not use it unless it is absolutely needed."
"It's as well," said the old man "it's a question whether I
shall live to the Assizes, so it matters little to me, but I
should wish to spare Alice the shock. And now I will make the
thing clear to you it has been a long time in the acting, but
will not take me long to tell.
"You didn't know this dead man, McCarthy. He was a devil
incarnate. I tell you that. God keep you out of the clutches of
such a man as he. His grip has been upon me these twenty years,
and he has blasted my life. I'll tell you first how I came to be
in his power.
"It was in the early ''s at the diggings. I was a young chap
then, hotblooded and reckless, ready to turn my hand at
anything I got among bad companions, took to drink, had no luck
with my claim, took to the bush, and in a word became what you
would call over here a highway robber. There were six of us, and
we had a wild, free life of it, sticking up a station from time
to time, or stopping the wagons on the road to the diggings.
Black Jack of Ballarat was the name I went under, and our party
is still remembered in the colony as the Ballarat Gang.
"One day a gold convoy came down from Ballarat to Melbourne, and
we lay in wait for it and attacked it. There were six troopers
and six of us, so it was a close thing, but we emptied four of
their saddles at the first volley. Three of our boys were killed,
however, before we got the swag. I put my pistol to the head of
the wagondriver, who was this very man McCarthy. I wish to the
Lord that I had shot him then, but I spared him, though I saw his
wicked little eyes fixed on my face, as though to remember every
feature. We got away with the gold, became wealthy men, and made
our way over to England without being suspected. There I parted
from my old pals and determined to settle down to a quiet and
respectable life. I bought this estate, which chanced to be in
the market, and I set myself to do a little good with my money,
to make up for the way in which I had earned it. I married, too,
and though my wife died young she left me my dear little Alice.
Even when she was just a baby her wee hand seemed to lead me down
the right path as nothing else had ever done. In a word, I turned
over a new leaf and did my best to make up for the past. All was
going well when McCarthy laid his grip upon me.
"I had gone up to town about an investment, and I met him in
Regent Street with hardly a coat to his back or a boot to his
foot.
"'Here we are, Jack,' says he, touching me on the arm 'we'll be
as good as a family to you. There's two of us, me and my son, and
you can have the keeping of us. If you don'tit's a fine,
lawabiding country is England, and there's always a policeman
within hail.'
"Well, down they came to the west country, there was no shaking
them off, and there they have lived rent free on my best land
ever since. There was no rest for me, no peace, no forgetfulness
turn where I would, there was his cunning, grinning face at my
elbow. It grew worse as Alice grew up, for he soon saw I was more
afraid of her knowing my past than of the police. Whatever he
wanted he must have, and whatever it was I gave him without
question, land, money, houses, until at last he asked a thing
which I could not give. He asked for Alice.
"His son, you see, had grown up, and so had my girl, and as I was
known to be in weak health, it seemed a fine stroke to him that
his lad should step into the whole property. But there I was
firm. I would not have his cursed stock mixed with mine not that
I had any dislike to the lad, but his blood was in him, and that
was enough. I stood firm. McCarthy threatened. I braved him to do
his worst. We were to meet at the pool midway between our houses
to talk it over.
"When I went down there I found him talking with his son, so I
smoked a cigar and waited behind a tree until he should be alone.
But as I listened to his talk all that was black and bitter in
me seemed to come uppermost. He was urging his son to marry my
daughter with as little regard for what she might think as if she
were a slut from off the streets. It drove me mad to think that I
and all that I held most dear should be in the power of such a
man as this. Could I not snap the bond? I was already a dying and
a desperate man. Though clear of mind and fairly strong of limb,
I knew that my own fate was sealed. But my memory and my girl
Both could be saved if I could but silence that foul tongue. I
did it, Mr. Holmes. I would do it again. Deeply as I have sinned,
I have led a life of martyrdom to atone for it. But that my girl
should be entangled in the same meshes which held me was more
than I could suffer. I struck him down with no more compunction
than if he had been some foul and venomous beast. His cry brought
back his son but I had gained the cover of the wood, though I
was forced to go back to fetch the cloak which I had dropped in
my flight. That is the true story, gentlemen, of all that
occurred."
"Well, it is not for me to judge you," said Holmes as the old man
signed the statement which had been drawn out. "I pray that we
may never be exposed to such a temptation."
"I pray not, sir. And what do you intend to do?"
"In view of your health, nothing. You are yourself aware that you
will soon have to answer for your deed at a higher court than the
Assizes. I will keep your confession, and if McCarthy is
condemned I shall be forced to use it. If not, it shall never be
seen by mortal eye and your secret, whether you be alive or
dead, shall be safe with us."
"Farewell, then," said the old man solemnly. "Your own deathbeds,
when they come, will be the easier for the thought of the peace
which you have given to mine." Tottering and shaking in all his
giant frame, he stumbled slowly from the room.
"God help us" said Holmes after a long silence. "Why does fate
play such tricks with poor, helpless worms? I never hear of such
a case as this that I do not think of Baxter's words, and say,
'There, but for the grace of God, goes Sherlock Holmes.'"
James McCarthy was acquitted at the Assizes on the strength of a
number of objections which had been drawn out by Holmes and
submitted to the defending counsel. Old Turner lived for seven
months after our interview, but he is now dead and there is
every prospect that the son and daughter may come to live happily
together in ignorance of the black cloud which rests upon their
past.
ADVENTURE V. THE FIVE ORANGE PIPS
When I glance over my notes and records of the Sherlock Holmes
cases between the years ' and ', I am faced by so many which
present strange and interesting features that it is no easy
matter to know which to choose and which to leave. Some, however,
have already gained publicity through the papers, and others have
not offered a field for those peculiar qualities which my friend
possessed in so high a degree, and which it is the object of
these papers to illustrate. Some, too, have baffled his
analytical skill, and would be, as narratives, beginnings without
an ending, while others have been but partially cleared up, and
have their explanations founded rather upon conjecture and
surmise than on that absolute logical proof which was so dear to
him. There is, however, one of these last which was so remarkable
in its details and so startling in its results that I am tempted
to give some account of it in spite of the fact that there are
points in connection with it which never have been, and probably
never will be, entirely cleared up.
The year ' furnished us with a long series of cases of greater
or less interest, of which I retain the records. Among my
headings under this one twelve months I find an account of the
adventure of the Paradol Chamber, of the Amateur Mendicant
Society, who held a luxurious club in the lower vault of a
furniture warehouse, of the facts connected with the loss of the
British barque "Sophy Anderson", of the singular adventures of the
Grice Patersons in the island of Uffa, and finally of the
Camberwell poisoning case. In the latter, as may be remembered,
Sherlock Holmes was able, by winding up the dead man's watch, to
prove that it had been wound up two hours before, and that
therefore the deceased had gone to bed within that timea
deduction which was of the greatest importance in clearing up the
case. All these I may sketch out at some future date, but none of
them present such singular features as the strange train of
circumstances which I have now taken up my pen to describe.
It was in the latter days of September, and the equinoctial gales
had set in with exceptional violence. All day the wind had
screamed and the rain had beaten against the windows, so that
even here in the heart of great, handmade London we were forced
to raise our minds for the instant from the routine of life and
to recognise the presence of those great elemental forces which
shriek at mankind through the bars of his civilisation, like
untamed beasts in a cage. As evening drew in, the storm grew
higher and louder, and the wind cried and sobbed like a child in
the chimney. Sherlock Holmes sat moodily at one side of the
fireplace crossindexing his records of crime, while I at the
other was deep in one of Clark Russell's fine seastories until
the howl of the gale from without seemed to blend with the text,
and the splash of the rain to lengthen out into the long swash of
the sea waves. My wife was on a visit to her mother's, and for a
few days I was a dweller once more in my old quarters at Baker
Street.
"Why," said I, glancing up at my companion, "that was surely the
bell. Who could come tonight? Some friend of yours, perhaps?"
"Except yourself I have none," he answered. "I do not encourage
visitors."
"A client, then?"
"If so, it is a serious case. Nothing less would bring a man out
on such a day and at such an hour. But I take it that it is more
likely to be some crony of the landlady's."
Sherlock Holmes was wrong in his conjecture, however, for there
came a step in the passage and a tapping at the door. He
stretched out his long arm to turn the lamp away from himself and
towards the vacant chair upon which a newcomer must sit.
"Come in" said he.
The man who entered was young, some twoandtwenty at the
outside, wellgroomed and trimly clad, with something of
refinement and delicacy in his bearing. The streaming umbrella
which he held in his hand, and his long shining waterproof told
of the fierce weather through which he had come. He looked about
him anxiously in the glare of the lamp, and I could see that his
face was pale and his eyes heavy, like those of a man who is
weighed down with some great anxiety.
"I owe you an apology," he said, raising his golden pincenez to
his eyes. "I trust that I am not intruding. I fear that I have
brought some traces of the storm and rain into your snug
chamber."
"Give me your coat and umbrella," said Holmes. "They may rest
here on the hook and will be dry presently. You have come up from
the southwest, I see."
"Yes, from Horsham."
"That clay and chalk mixture which I see upon your toe caps is
quite distinctive."
"I have come for advice."
"That is easily got."
"And help."
"That is not always so easy."
"I have heard of you, Mr. Holmes. I heard from Major Prendergast
how you saved him in the Tankerville Club scandal."
"Ah, of course. He was wrongfully accused of cheating at cards."
"He said that you could solve anything."
"He said too much."
"That you are never beaten."
"I have been beaten four timesthree times by men, and once by a
woman."
"But what is that compared with the number of your successes?"
"It is true that I have been generally successful."
"Then you may be so with me."
"I beg that you will draw your chair up to the fire and favour me
with some details as to your case."
"It is no ordinary one."
"None of those which come to me are. I am the last court of
appeal."
"And yet I question, sir, whether, in all your experience, you
have ever listened to a more mysterious and inexplicable chain of
events than those which have happened in my own family."
"You fill me with interest," said Holmes. "Pray give us the
essential facts from the commencement, and I can afterwards
question you as to those details which seem to me to be most
important."
The young man pulled his chair up and pushed his wet feet out
towards the blaze.
"My name," said he, "is John Openshaw, but my own affairs have,
as far as I can understand, little to do with this awful
business. It is a hereditary matter so in order to give you an
idea of the facts, I must go back to the commencement of the
affair.
"You must know that my grandfather had two sonsmy uncle Elias
and my father Joseph. My father had a small factory at Coventry,
which he enlarged at the time of the invention of bicycling. He
was a patentee of the Openshaw unbreakable tire, and his business
met with such success that he was able to sell it and to retire
upon a handsome competence.
"My uncle Elias emigrated to America when he was a young man and
became a planter in Florida, where he was reported to have done
very well. At the time of the war he fought in Jackson's army,
and afterwards under Hood, where he rose to be a colonel. When
Lee laid down his arms my uncle returned to his plantation, where
he remained for three or four years. About  or  he came
back to Europe and took a small estate in Sussex, near Horsham.
He had made a very considerable fortune in the States, and his
reason for leaving them was his aversion to the negroes, and his
dislike of the Republican policy in extending the franchise to
them. He was a singular man, fierce and quicktempered, very
foulmouthed when he was angry, and of a most retiring
disposition. During all the years that he lived at Horsham, I
doubt if ever he set foot in the town. He had a garden and two or
three fields round his house, and there he would take his
exercise, though very often for weeks on end he would never leave
his room. He drank a great deal of brandy and smoked very
heavily, but he would see no society and did not want any
friends, not even his own brother.
"He didn't mind me in fact, he took a fancy to me, for at the
time when he saw me first I was a youngster of twelve or so. This
would be in the year , after he had been eight or nine years
in England. He begged my father to let me live with him and he
was very kind to me in his way. When he was sober he used to be
fond of playing backgammon and draughts with me, and he would
make me his representative both with the servants and with the
tradespeople, so that by the time that I was sixteen I was quite
master of the house. I kept all the keys and could go where I
liked and do what I liked, so long as I did not disturb him in
his privacy. There was one singular exception, however, for he
had a single room, a lumberroom up among the attics, which was
invariably locked, and which he would never permit either me or
anyone else to enter. With a boy's curiosity I have peeped
through the keyhole, but I was never able to see more than such a
collection of old trunks and bundles as would be expected in such
a room.
"One dayit was in March, a letter with a foreign stamp
lay upon the table in front of the colonel's plate. It was not a
common thing for him to receive letters, for his bills were all
paid in ready money, and he had no friends of any sort. 'From
India' said he as he took it up, 'Pondicherry postmark What can
this be?' Opening it hurriedly, out there jumped five little
dried orange pips, which pattered down upon his plate. I began to
laugh at this, but the laugh was struck from my lips at the sight
of his face. His lip had fallen, his eyes were protruding, his
skin the colour of putty, and he glared at the envelope which he
still held in his trembling hand, 'K. K. K.' he shrieked, and
then, 'My God, my God, my sins have overtaken me'
"'What is it, uncle?' I cried.
"'Death,' said he, and rising from the table he retired to his
room, leaving me palpitating with horror. I took up the envelope
and saw scrawled in red ink upon the inner flap, just above the
gum, the letter K three times repeated. There was nothing else
save the five dried pips. What could be the reason of his
overpowering terror? I left the breakfasttable, and as I
ascended the stair I met him coming down with an old rusty key,
which must have belonged to the attic, in one hand, and a small
brass box, like a cashbox, in the other.
"'They may do what they like, but I'll checkmate them still,'
said he with an oath. 'Tell Mary that I shall want a fire in my
room today, and send down to Fordham, the Horsham lawyer.'
"I did as he ordered, and when the lawyer arrived I was asked to
step up to the room. The fire was burning brightly, and in the
grate there was a mass of black, fluffy ashes, as of burned
paper, while the brass box stood open and empty beside it. As I
glanced at the box I noticed, with a start, that upon the lid was
printed the treble K which I had read in the morning upon the
envelope.
"'I wish you, John,' said my uncle, 'to witness my will. I leave
my estate, with all its advantages and all its disadvantages, to
my brother, your father, whence it will, no doubt, descend to
you. If you can enjoy it in peace, well and good If you find you
cannot, take my advice, my boy, and leave it to your deadliest
enemy. I am sorry to give you such a twoedged thing, but I can't
say what turn things are going to take. Kindly sign the paper
where Mr. Fordham shows you.'
"I signed the paper as directed, and the lawyer took it away with
him. The singular incident made, as you may think, the deepest
impression upon me, and I pondered over it and turned it every
way in my mind without being able to make anything of it. Yet I
could not shake off the vague feeling of dread which it left
behind, though the sensation grew less keen as the weeks passed
and nothing happened to disturb the usual routine of our lives. I
could see a change in my uncle, however. He drank more than ever,
and he was less inclined for any sort of society. Most of his
time he would spend in his room, with the door locked upon the
inside, but sometimes he would emerge in a sort of drunken frenzy
and would burst out of the house and tear about the garden with a
revolver in his hand, screaming out that he was afraid of no man,
and that he was not to be cooped up, like a sheep in a pen, by
man or devil. When these hot fits were over, however, he would
rush tumultuously in at the door and lock and bar it behind him,
like a man who can brazen it out no longer against the terror
which lies at the roots of his soul. At such times I have seen
his face, even on a cold day, glisten with moisture, as though it
were new raised from a basin.
"Well, to come to an end of the matter, Mr. Holmes, and not to
abuse your patience, there came a night when he made one of those
drunken sallies from which he never came back. We found him, when
we went to search for him, face downward in a little
greenscummed pool, which lay at the foot of the garden. There
was no sign of any violence, and the water was but two feet deep,
so that the jury, having regard to his known eccentricity,
brought in a verdict of 'suicide.' But I, who knew how he winced
from the very thought of death, had much ado to persuade myself
that he had gone out of his way to meet it. The matter passed,
however, and my father entered into possession of the estate, and
of some , pounds, which lay to his credit at the bank."
"One moment," Holmes interposed, "your statement is, I foresee,
one of the most remarkable to which I have ever listened. Let me
have the date of the reception by your uncle of the letter, and
the date of his supposed suicide."
"The letter arrived on March , . His death was seven weeks
later, upon the night of May nd."
"Thank you. Pray proceed."
"When my father took over the Horsham property, he, at my
request, made a careful examination of the attic, which had been
always locked up. We found the brass box there, although its
contents had been destroyed. On the inside of the cover was a
paper label, with the initials of K. K. K. repeated upon it, and
'Letters, memoranda, receipts, and a register' written beneath.
These, we presume, indicated the nature of the papers which had
been destroyed by Colonel Openshaw. For the rest, there was
nothing of much importance in the attic save a great many
scattered papers and notebooks bearing upon my uncle's life in
America. Some of them were of the war time and showed that he had
done his duty well and had borne the repute of a brave soldier.
Others were of a date during the reconstruction of the Southern
states, and were mostly concerned with politics, for he had
evidently taken a strong part in opposing the carpetbag
politicians who had been sent down from the North.
"Well, it was the beginning of ' when my father came to live at
Horsham, and all went as well as possible with us until the
January of '. On the fourth day after the new year I heard my
father give a sharp cry of surprise as we sat together at the
breakfasttable. There he was, sitting with a newly opened
envelope in one hand and five dried orange pips in the
outstretched palm of the other one. He had always laughed at what
he called my cockandbull story about the colonel, but he looked
very scared and puzzled now that the same thing had come upon
himself.
"'Why, what on earth does this mean, John?' he stammered.
"My heart had turned to lead. 'It is K. K. K.,' said I.
"He looked inside the envelope. 'So it is,' he cried. 'Here are
the very letters. But what is this written above them?'
"'Put the papers on the sundial,' I read, peeping over his
shoulder.
"'What papers? What sundial?' he asked.
"'The sundial in the garden. There is no other,' said I 'but the
papers must be those that are destroyed.'
"'Pooh' said he, gripping hard at his courage. 'We are in a
civilised land here, and we can't have tomfoolery of this kind.
Where does the thing come from?'
"'From Dundee,' I answered, glancing at the postmark.
"'Some preposterous practical joke,' said he. 'What have I to do
with sundials and papers? I shall take no notice of such
nonsense.'
"'I should certainly speak to the police,' I said.
"'And be laughed at for my pains. Nothing of the sort.'
"'Then let me do so?'
"'No, I forbid you. I won't have a fuss made about such
nonsense.'
"It was in vain to argue with him, for he was a very obstinate
man. I went about, however, with a heart which was full of
forebodings.
"On the third day after the coming of the letter my father went
from home to visit an old friend of his, Major Freebody, who is
in command of one of the forts upon Portsdown Hill. I was glad
that he should go, for it seemed to me that he was farther from
danger when he was away from home. In that, however, I was in
error. Upon the second day of his absence I received a telegram
from the major, imploring me to come at once. My father had
fallen over one of the deep chalkpits which abound in the
neighbourhood, and was lying senseless, with a shattered skull. I
hurried to him, but he passed away without having ever recovered
his consciousness. He had, as it appears, been returning from
Fareham in the twilight, and as the country was unknown to him,
and the chalkpit unfenced, the jury had no hesitation in
bringing in a verdict of 'death from accidental causes.'
Carefully as I examined every fact connected with his death, I
was unable to find anything which could suggest the idea of
murder. There were no signs of violence, no footmarks, no
robbery, no record of strangers having been seen upon the roads.
And yet I need not tell you that my mind was far from at ease,
and that I was wellnigh certain that some foul plot had been
woven round him.
"In this sinister way I came into my inheritance. You will ask me
why I did not dispose of it? I answer, because I was well
convinced that our troubles were in some way dependent upon an
incident in my uncle's life, and that the danger would be as
pressing in one house as in another.
"It was in January, ', that my poor father met his end, and two
years and eight months have elapsed since then. During that time
I have lived happily at Horsham, and I had begun to hope that
this curse had passed away from the family, and that it had ended
with the last generation. I had begun to take comfort too soon,
however yesterday morning the blow fell in the very shape in
which it had come upon my father."
The young man took from his waistcoat a crumpled envelope, and
turning to the table he shook out upon it five little dried
orange pips.
"This is the envelope," he continued. "The postmark is
Londoneastern division. Within are the very words which were
upon my father's last message 'K. K. K.' and then 'Put the
papers on the sundial.'"
"What have you done?" asked Holmes.
"Nothing."
"Nothing?"
"To tell the truth"he sank his face into his thin, white
hands"I have felt helpless. I have felt like one of those poor
rabbits when the snake is writhing towards it. I seem to be in
the grasp of some resistless, inexorable evil, which no foresight
and no precautions can guard against."
"Tut tut" cried Sherlock Holmes. "You must act, man, or you are
lost. Nothing but energy can save you. This is no time for
despair."
"I have seen the police."
"Ah"
"But they listened to my story with a smile. I am convinced that
the inspector has formed the opinion that the letters are all
practical jokes, and that the deaths of my relations were really
accidents, as the jury stated, and were not to be connected with
the warnings."
Holmes shook his clenched hands in the air. "Incredible
imbecility" he cried.
"They have, however, allowed me a policeman, who may remain in
the house with me."
"Has he come with you tonight?"
"No. His orders were to stay in the house."
Again Holmes raved in the air.
"Why did you come to me," he cried, "and, above all, why did you
not come at once?"
"I did not know. It was only today that I spoke to Major
Prendergast about my troubles and was advised by him to come to
you."
"It is really two days since you had the letter. We should have
acted before this. You have no further evidence, I suppose, than
that which you have placed before usno suggestive detail which
might help us?"
"There is one thing," said John Openshaw. He rummaged in his coat
pocket, and, drawing out a piece of discoloured, bluetinted
paper, he laid it out upon the table. "I have some remembrance,"
said he, "that on the day when my uncle burned the papers I
observed that the small, unburned margins which lay amid the
ashes were of this particular colour. I found this single sheet
upon the floor of his room, and I am inclined to think that it
may be one of the papers which has, perhaps, fluttered out from
among the others, and in that way has escaped destruction. Beyond
the mention of pips, I do not see that it helps us much. I think
myself that it is a page from some private diary. The writing is
undoubtedly my uncle's."
Holmes moved the lamp, and we both bent over the sheet of paper,
which showed by its ragged edge that it had indeed been torn from
a book. It was headed, "March, ," and beneath were the
following enigmatical notices
"th. Hudson came. Same old platform.
"th. Set the pips on McCauley, Paramore, and
John Swain, of St. Augustine.
"th. McCauley cleared.
"th. John Swain cleared.
"th. Visited Paramore. All well."
"Thank you" said Holmes, folding up the paper and returning it
to our visitor. "And now you must on no account lose another
instant. We cannot spare time even to discuss what you have told
me. You must get home instantly and act."
"What shall I do?"
"There is but one thing to do. It must be done at once. You must
put this piece of paper which you have shown us into the brass
box which you have described. You must also put in a note to say
that all the other papers were burned by your uncle, and that
this is the only one which remains. You must assert that in such
words as will carry conviction with them. Having done this, you
must at once put the box out upon the sundial, as directed. Do
you understand?"
"Entirely."
"Do not think of revenge, or anything of the sort, at present. I
think that we may gain that by means of the law but we have our
web to weave, while theirs is already woven. The first
consideration is to remove the pressing danger which threatens
you. The second is to clear up the mystery and to punish the
guilty parties."
"I thank you," said the young man, rising and pulling on his
overcoat. "You have given me fresh life and hope. I shall
certainly do as you advise."
"Do not lose an instant. And, above all, take care of yourself in
the meanwhile, for I do not think that there can be a doubt that
you are threatened by a very real and imminent danger. How do you
go back?"
"By train from Waterloo."
"It is not yet nine. The streets will be crowded, so I trust that
you may be in safety. And yet you cannot guard yourself too
closely."
"I am armed."
"That is well. Tomorrow I shall set to work upon your case."
"I shall see you at Horsham, then?"
"No, your secret lies in London. It is there that I shall seek
it."
"Then I shall call upon you in a day, or in two days, with news
as to the box and the papers. I shall take your advice in every
particular." He shook hands with us and took his leave. Outside
the wind still screamed and the rain splashed and pattered
against the windows. This strange, wild story seemed to have come
to us from amid the mad elementsblown in upon us like a sheet
of seaweed in a galeand now to have been reabsorbed by them
once more.
Sherlock Holmes sat for some time in silence, with his head sunk
forward and his eyes bent upon the red glow of the fire. Then he
lit his pipe, and leaning back in his chair he watched the blue
smokerings as they chased each other up to the ceiling.
"I think, Watson," he remarked at last, "that of all our cases we
have had none more fantastic than this."
"Save, perhaps, the Sign of Four."
"Well, yes. Save, perhaps, that. And yet this John Openshaw seems
to me to be walking amid even greater perils than did the
Sholtos."
"But have you," I asked, "formed any definite conception as to
what these perils are?"
"There can be no question as to their nature," he answered.
"Then what are they? Who is this K. K. K., and why does he pursue
this unhappy family?"
Sherlock Holmes closed his eyes and placed his elbows upon the
arms of his chair, with his fingertips together. "The ideal
reasoner," he remarked, "would, when he had once been shown a
single fact in all its bearings, deduce from it not only all the
chain of events which led up to it but also all the results which
would follow from it. As Cuvier could correctly describe a whole
animal by the contemplation of a single bone, so the observer who
has thoroughly understood one link in a series of incidents
should be able to accurately state all the other ones, both
before and after. We have not yet grasped the results which the
reason alone can attain to. Problems may be solved in the study
which have baffled all those who have sought a solution by the
aid of their senses. To carry the art, however, to its highest
pitch, it is necessary that the reasoner should be able to
utilise all the facts which have come to his knowledge and this
in itself implies, as you will readily see, a possession of all
knowledge, which, even in these days of free education and
encyclopaedias, is a somewhat rare accomplishment. It is not so
impossible, however, that a man should possess all knowledge
which is likely to be useful to him in his work, and this I have
endeavoured in my case to do. If I remember rightly, you on one
occasion, in the early days of our friendship, defined my limits
in a very precise fashion."
"Yes," I answered, laughing. "It was a singular document.
Philosophy, astronomy, and politics were marked at zero, I
remember. Botany variable, geology profound as regards the
mudstains from any region within fifty miles of town, chemistry
eccentric, anatomy unsystematic, sensational literature and crime
records unique, violinplayer, boxer, swordsman, lawyer, and
selfpoisoner by cocaine and tobacco. Those, I think, were the
main points of my analysis."
Holmes grinned at the last item. "Well," he said, "I say now, as
I said then, that a man should keep his little brainattic
stocked with all the furniture that he is likely to use, and the
rest he can put away in the lumberroom of his library, where he
can get it if he wants it. Now, for such a case as the one which
has been submitted to us tonight, we need certainly to muster
all our resources. Kindly hand me down the letter K of the
'American Encyclopaedia' which stands upon the shelf beside you.
Thank you. Now let us consider the situation and see what may be
deduced from it. In the first place, we may start with a strong
presumption that Colonel Openshaw had some very strong reason for
leaving America. Men at his time of life do not change all their
habits and exchange willingly the charming climate of Florida for
the lonely life of an English provincial town. His extreme love
of solitude in England suggests the idea that he was in fear of
someone or something, so we may assume as a working hypothesis
that it was fear of someone or something which drove him from
America. As to what it was he feared, we can only deduce that by
considering the formidable letters which were received by himself
and his successors. Did you remark the postmarks of those
letters?"
"The first was from Pondicherry, the second from Dundee, and the
third from London."
"From East London. What do you deduce from that?"
"They are all seaports. That the writer was on board of a ship."
"Excellent. We have already a clue. There can be no doubt that
the probabilitythe strong probabilityis that the writer was
on board of a ship. And now let us consider another point. In the
case of Pondicherry, seven weeks elapsed between the threat and
its fulfilment, in Dundee it was only some three or four days.
Does that suggest anything?"
"A greater distance to travel."
"But the letter had also a greater distance to come."
"Then I do not see the point."
"There is at least a presumption that the vessel in which the man
or men are is a sailingship. It looks as if they always send
their singular warning or token before them when starting upon
their mission. You see how quickly the deed followed the sign
when it came from Dundee. If they had come from Pondicherry in a
steamer they would have arrived almost as soon as their letter.
But, as a matter of fact, seven weeks elapsed. I think that those
seven weeks represented the difference between the mailboat which
brought the letter and the sailing vessel which brought the
writer."
"It is possible."
"More than that. It is probable. And now you see the deadly
urgency of this new case, and why I urged young Openshaw to
caution. The blow has always fallen at the end of the time which
it would take the senders to travel the distance. But this one
comes from London, and therefore we cannot count upon delay."
"Good God" I cried. "What can it mean, this relentless
persecution?"
"The papers which Openshaw carried are obviously of vital
importance to the person or persons in the sailingship. I think
that it is quite clear that there must be more than one of them.
A single man could not have carried out two deaths in such a way
as to deceive a coroner's jury. There must have been several in
it, and they must have been men of resource and determination.
Their papers they mean to have, be the holder of them who it may.
In this way you see K. K. K. ceases to be the initials of an
individual and becomes the badge of a society."
"But of what society?"
"Have you never" said Sherlock Holmes, bending forward and
sinking his voice"have you never heard of the Ku Klux Klan?"
"I never have."
Holmes turned over the leaves of the book upon his knee. "Here it
is," said he presently
"'Ku Klux Klan. A name derived from the fanciful resemblance to
the sound produced by cocking a rifle. This terrible secret
society was formed by some exConfederate soldiers in the
Southern states after the Civil War, and it rapidly formed local
branches in different parts of the country, notably in Tennessee,
Louisiana, the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida. Its power was
used for political purposes, principally for the terrorising of
the negro voters and the murdering and driving from the country
of those who were opposed to its views. Its outrages were usually
preceded by a warning sent to the marked man in some fantastic
but generally recognised shapea sprig of oakleaves in some
parts, melon seeds or orange pips in others. On receiving this
the victim might either openly abjure his former ways, or might
fly from the country. If he braved the matter out, death would
unfailingly come upon him, and usually in some strange and
unforeseen manner. So perfect was the organisation of the
society, and so systematic its methods, that there is hardly a
case upon record where any man succeeded in braving it with
impunity, or in which any of its outrages were traced home to the
perpetrators. For some years the organisation flourished in spite
of the efforts of the United States government and of the better
classes of the community in the South. Eventually, in the year
, the movement rather suddenly collapsed, although there have
been sporadic outbreaks of the same sort since that date.'
"You will observe," said Holmes, laying down the volume, "that
the sudden breaking up of the society was coincident with the
disappearance of Openshaw from America with their papers. It may
well have been cause and effect. It is no wonder that he and his
family have some of the more implacable spirits upon their track.
You can understand that this register and diary may implicate
some of the first men in the South, and that there may be many
who will not sleep easy at night until it is recovered."
"Then the page we have seen"
"Is such as we might expect. It ran, if I remember right, 'sent
the pips to A, B, and C'that is, sent the society's warning to
them. Then there are successive entries that A and B cleared, or
left the country, and finally that C was visited, with, I fear, a
sinister result for C. Well, I think, Doctor, that we may let
some light into this dark place, and I believe that the only
chance young Openshaw has in the meantime is to do what I have
told him. There is nothing more to be said or to be done
tonight, so hand me over my violin and let us try to forget for
half an hour the miserable weather and the still more miserable
ways of our fellowmen."
It had cleared in the morning, and the sun was shining with a
subdued brightness through the dim veil which hangs over the
great city. Sherlock Holmes was already at breakfast when I came
down.
"You will excuse me for not waiting for you," said he "I have, I
foresee, a very busy day before me in looking into this case of
young Openshaw's."
"What steps will you take?" I asked.
"It will very much depend upon the results of my first inquiries.
I may have to go down to Horsham, after all."
"You will not go there first?"
"No, I shall commence with the City. Just ring the bell and the
maid will bring up your coffee."
As I waited, I lifted the unopened newspaper from the table and
glanced my eye over it. It rested upon a heading which sent a
chill to my heart.
"Holmes," I cried, "you are too late."
"Ah" said he, laying down his cup, "I feared as much. How was it
done?" He spoke calmly, but I could see that he was deeply moved.
"My eye caught the name of Openshaw, and the heading 'Tragedy
Near Waterloo Bridge.' Here is the account
"Between nine and ten last night PoliceConstable Cook, of the H
Division, on duty near Waterloo Bridge, heard a cry for help and
a splash in the water. The night, however, was extremely dark and
stormy, so that, in spite of the help of several passersby, it
was quite impossible to effect a rescue. The alarm, however, was
given, and, by the aid of the waterpolice, the body was
eventually recovered. It proved to be that of a young gentleman
whose name, as it appears from an envelope which was found in his
pocket, was John Openshaw, and whose residence is near Horsham.
It is conjectured that he may have been hurrying down to catch
the last train from Waterloo Station, and that in his haste and
the extreme darkness he missed his path and walked over the edge
of one of the small landingplaces for river steamboats. The body
exhibited no traces of violence, and there can be no doubt that
the deceased had been the victim of an unfortunate accident,
which should have the effect of calling the attention of the
authorities to the condition of the riverside landingstages."
We sat in silence for some minutes, Holmes more depressed and
shaken than I had ever seen him.
"That hurts my pride, Watson," he said at last. "It is a petty
feeling, no doubt, but it hurts my pride. It becomes a personal
matter with me now, and, if God sends me health, I shall set my
hand upon this gang. That he should come to me for help, and that
I should send him away to his death" He sprang from his chair
and paced about the room in uncontrollable agitation, with a
flush upon his sallow cheeks and a nervous clasping and
unclasping of his long thin hands.
"They must be cunning devils," he exclaimed at last. "How could
they have decoyed him down there? The Embankment is not on the
direct line to the station. The bridge, no doubt, was too
crowded, even on such a night, for their purpose. Well, Watson,
we shall see who will win in the long run. I am going out now"
"To the police?"
"No I shall be my own police. When I have spun the web they may
take the flies, but not before."
All day I was engaged in my professional work, and it was late in
the evening before I returned to Baker Street. Sherlock Holmes
had not come back yet. It was nearly ten o'clock before he
entered, looking pale and worn. He walked up to the sideboard,
and tearing a piece from the loaf he devoured it voraciously,
washing it down with a long draught of water.
"You are hungry," I remarked.
"Starving. It had escaped my memory. I have had nothing since
breakfast."
"Nothing?"
"Not a bite. I had no time to think of it."
"And how have you succeeded?"
"Well."
"You have a clue?"
"I have them in the hollow of my hand. Young Openshaw shall not
long remain unavenged. Why, Watson, let us put their own devilish
trademark upon them. It is well thought of"
"What do you mean?"
He took an orange from the cupboard, and tearing it to pieces he
squeezed out the pips upon the table. Of these he took five and
thrust them into an envelope. On the inside of the flap he wrote
"S. H. for J. O." Then he sealed it and addressed it to "Captain
James Calhoun, Barque 'Lone Star,' Savannah, Georgia."
"That will await him when he enters port," said he, chuckling.
"It may give him a sleepless night. He will find it as sure a
precursor of his fate as Openshaw did before him."
"And who is this Captain Calhoun?"
"The leader of the gang. I shall have the others, but he first."
"How did you trace it, then?"
He took a large sheet of paper from his pocket, all covered with
dates and names.
"I have spent the whole day," said he, "over Lloyd's registers
and files of the old papers, following the future career of every
vessel which touched at Pondicherry in January and February in
'. There were thirtysix ships of fair tonnage which were
reported there during those months. Of these, one, the 'Lone Star,'
instantly attracted my attention, since, although it was reported
as having cleared from London, the name is that which is given to
one of the states of the Union."
"Texas, I think."
"I was not and am not sure which but I knew that the ship must
have an American origin."
"What then?"
"I searched the Dundee records, and when I found that the barque
'Lone Star' was there in January, ', my suspicion became a
certainty. I then inquired as to the vessels which lay at present
in the port of London."
"Yes?"
"The 'Lone Star' had arrived here last week. I went down to the
Albert Dock and found that she had been taken down the river by
the early tide this morning, homeward bound to Savannah. I wired
to Gravesend and learned that she had passed some time ago, and
as the wind is easterly I have no doubt that she is now past the
Goodwins and not very far from the Isle of Wight."
"What will you do, then?"
"Oh, I have my hand upon him. He and the two mates, are as I
learn, the only nativeborn Americans in the ship. The others are
Finns and Germans. I know, also, that they were all three away
from the ship last night. I had it from the stevedore who has
been loading their cargo. By the time that their sailingship
reaches Savannah the mailboat will have carried this letter, and
the cable will have informed the police of Savannah that these
three gentlemen are badly wanted here upon a charge of murder."
There is ever a flaw, however, in the best laid of human plans,
and the murderers of John Openshaw were never to receive the
orange pips which would show them that another, as cunning and as
resolute as themselves, was upon their track. Very long and very
severe were the equinoctial gales that year. We waited long for
news of the "Lone Star" of Savannah, but none ever reached us. We
did at last hear that somewhere far out in the Atlantic a
shattered sternpost of a boat was seen swinging in the trough
of a wave, with the letters "L. S." carved upon it, and that is
all which we shall ever know of the fate of the "Lone Star."
ADVENTURE VI. THE MAN WITH THE TWISTED LIP
Isa Whitney, brother of the late Elias Whitney, D.D., Principal
of the Theological College of St. George's, was much addicted to
opium. The habit grew upon him, as I understand, from some
foolish freak when he was at college for having read De
Quincey's description of his dreams and sensations, he had
drenched his tobacco with laudanum in an attempt to produce the
same effects. He found, as so many more have done, that the
practice is easier to attain than to get rid of, and for many
years he continued to be a slave to the drug, an object of
mingled horror and pity to his friends and relatives. I can see
him now, with yellow, pasty face, drooping lids, and pinpoint
pupils, all huddled in a chair, the wreck and ruin of a noble
man.
One nightit was in June, 'there came a ring to my bell,
about the hour when a man gives his first yawn and glances at the
clock. I sat up in my chair, and my wife laid her needlework
down in her lap and made a little face of disappointment.
"A patient" said she. "You'll have to go out."
I groaned, for I was newly come back from a weary day.
We heard the door open, a few hurried words, and then quick steps
upon the linoleum. Our own door flew open, and a lady, clad in
some darkcoloured stuff, with a black veil, entered the room.
"You will excuse my calling so late," she began, and then,
suddenly losing her selfcontrol, she ran forward, threw her arms
about my wife's neck, and sobbed upon her shoulder. "Oh, I'm in
such trouble" she cried "I do so want a little help."
"Why," said my wife, pulling up her veil, "it is Kate Whitney.
How you startled me, Kate I had not an idea who you were when
you came in."
"I didn't know what to do, so I came straight to you." That was
always the way. Folk who were in grief came to my wife like birds
to a lighthouse.
"It was very sweet of you to come. Now, you must have some wine
and water, and sit here comfortably and tell us all about it. Or
should you rather that I sent James off to bed?"
"Oh, no, no I want the doctor's advice and help, too. It's about
Isa. He has not been home for two days. I am so frightened about
him"
It was not the first time that she had spoken to us of her
husband's trouble, to me as a doctor, to my wife as an old friend
and school companion. We soothed and comforted her by such words
as we could find. Did she know where her husband was? Was it
possible that we could bring him back to her?
It seems that it was. She had the surest information that of late
he had, when the fit was on him, made use of an opium den in the
farthest east of the City. Hitherto his orgies had always been
confined to one day, and he had come back, twitching and
shattered, in the evening. But now the spell had been upon him
eightandforty hours, and he lay there, doubtless among the
dregs of the docks, breathing in the poison or sleeping off the
effects. There he was to be found, she was sure of it, at the Bar
of Gold, in Upper Swandam Lane. But what was she to do? How could
she, a young and timid woman, make her way into such a place and
pluck her husband out from among the ruffians who surrounded him?
There was the case, and of course there was but one way out of
it. Might I not escort her to this place? And then, as a second
thought, why should she come at all? I was Isa Whitney's medical
adviser, and as such I had influence over him. I could manage it
better if I were alone. I promised her on my word that I would
send him home in a cab within two hours if he were indeed at the
address which she had given me. And so in ten minutes I had left
my armchair and cheery sittingroom behind me, and was speeding
eastward in a hansom on a strange errand, as it seemed to me at
the time, though the future only could show how strange it was to
be.
But there was no great difficulty in the first stage of my
adventure. Upper Swandam Lane is a vile alley lurking behind the
high wharves which line the north side of the river to the east
of London Bridge. Between a slopshop and a ginshop, approached
by a steep flight of steps leading down to a black gap like the
mouth of a cave, I found the den of which I was in search.
Ordering my cab to wait, I passed down the steps, worn hollow in
the centre by the ceaseless tread of drunken feet and by the
light of a flickering oillamp above the door I found the latch
and made my way into a long, low room, thick and heavy with the
brown opium smoke, and terraced with wooden berths, like the
forecastle of an emigrant ship.
Through the gloom one could dimly catch a glimpse of bodies lying
in strange fantastic poses, bowed shoulders, bent knees, heads
thrown back, and chins pointing upward, with here and there a
dark, lacklustre eye turned upon the newcomer. Out of the black
shadows there glimmered little red circles of light, now bright,
now faint, as the burning poison waxed or waned in the bowls of
the metal pipes. The most lay silent, but some muttered to
themselves, and others talked together in a strange, low,
monotonous voice, their conversation coming in gushes, and then
suddenly tailing off into silence, each mumbling out his own
thoughts and paying little heed to the words of his neighbour. At
the farther end was a small brazier of burning charcoal, beside
which on a threelegged wooden stool there sat a tall, thin old
man, with his jaw resting upon his two fists, and his elbows upon
his knees, staring into the fire.
As I entered, a sallow Malay attendant had hurried up with a pipe
for me and a supply of the drug, beckoning me to an empty berth.
"Thank you. I have not come to stay," said I. "There is a friend
of mine here, Mr. Isa Whitney, and I wish to speak with him."
There was a movement and an exclamation from my right, and
peering through the gloom, I saw Whitney, pale, haggard, and
unkempt, staring out at me.
"My God It's Watson," said he. He was in a pitiable state of
reaction, with every nerve in a twitter. "I say, Watson, what
o'clock is it?"
"Nearly eleven."
"Of what day?"
"Of Friday, June th."
"Good heavens I thought it was Wednesday. It is Wednesday. What
d'you want to frighten a chap for?" He sank his face onto his
arms and began to sob in a high treble key.
"I tell you that it is Friday, man. Your wife has been waiting
this two days for you. You should be ashamed of yourself"
"So I am. But you've got mixed, Watson, for I have only been here
a few hours, three pipes, four pipesI forget how many. But I'll
go home with you. I wouldn't frighten Katepoor little Kate.
Give me your hand Have you a cab?"
"Yes, I have one waiting."
"Then I shall go in it. But I must owe something. Find what I
owe, Watson. I am all off colour. I can do nothing for myself."
I walked down the narrow passage between the double row of
sleepers, holding my breath to keep out the vile, stupefying
fumes of the drug, and looking about for the manager. As I passed
the tall man who sat by the brazier I felt a sudden pluck at my
skirt, and a low voice whispered, "Walk past me, and then look
back at me." The words fell quite distinctly upon my ear. I
glanced down. They could only have come from the old man at my
side, and yet he sat now as absorbed as ever, very thin, very
wrinkled, bent with age, an opium pipe dangling down from between
his knees, as though it had dropped in sheer lassitude from his
fingers. I took two steps forward and looked back. It took all my
selfcontrol to prevent me from breaking out into a cry of
astonishment. He had turned his back so that none could see him
but I. His form had filled out, his wrinkles were gone, the dull
eyes had regained their fire, and there, sitting by the fire and
grinning at my surprise, was none other than Sherlock Holmes. He
made a slight motion to me to approach him, and instantly, as he
turned his face half round to the company once more, subsided
into a doddering, looselipped senility.
"Holmes" I whispered, "what on earth are you doing in this den?"
"As low as you can," he answered "I have excellent ears. If you
would have the great kindness to get rid of that sottish friend
of yours I should be exceedingly glad to have a little talk with
you."
"I have a cab outside."
"Then pray send him home in it. You may safely trust him, for he
appears to be too limp to get into any mischief. I should
recommend you also to send a note by the cabman to your wife to
say that you have thrown in your lot with me. If you will wait
outside, I shall be with you in five minutes."
It was difficult to refuse any of Sherlock Holmes' requests, for
they were always so exceedingly definite, and put forward with
such a quiet air of mastery. I felt, however, that when Whitney
was once confined in the cab my mission was practically
accomplished and for the rest, I could not wish anything better
than to be associated with my friend in one of those singular
adventures which were the normal condition of his existence. In a
few minutes I had written my note, paid Whitney's bill, led him
out to the cab, and seen him driven through the darkness. In a
very short time a decrepit figure had emerged from the opium den,
and I was walking down the street with Sherlock Holmes. For two
streets he shuffled along with a bent back and an uncertain foot.
Then, glancing quickly round, he straightened himself out and
burst into a hearty fit of laughter.
"I suppose, Watson," said he, "that you imagine that I have added
opiumsmoking to cocaine injections, and all the other little
weaknesses on which you have favoured me with your medical
views."
"I was certainly surprised to find you there."
"But not more so than I to find you."
"I came to find a friend."
"And I to find an enemy."
"An enemy?"
"Yes one of my natural enemies, or, shall I say, my natural
prey. Briefly, Watson, I am in the midst of a very remarkable
inquiry, and I have hoped to find a clue in the incoherent
ramblings of these sots, as I have done before now. Had I been
recognised in that den my life would not have been worth an
hour's purchase for I have used it before now for my own
purposes, and the rascally Lascar who runs it has sworn to have
vengeance upon me. There is a trapdoor at the back of that
building, near the corner of Paul's Wharf, which could tell some
strange tales of what has passed through it upon the moonless
nights."
"What You do not mean bodies?"
"Ay, bodies, Watson. We should be rich men if we had  pounds
for every poor devil who has been done to death in that den. It
is the vilest murdertrap on the whole riverside, and I fear that
Neville St. Clair has entered it never to leave it more. But our
trap should be here." He put his two forefingers between his
teeth and whistled shrillya signal which was answered by a
similar whistle from the distance, followed shortly by the rattle
of wheels and the clink of horses' hoofs.
"Now, Watson," said Holmes, as a tall dogcart dashed up through
the gloom, throwing out two golden tunnels of yellow light from
its side lanterns. "You'll come with me, won't you?"
"If I can be of use."
"Oh, a trusty comrade is always of use and a chronicler still
more so. My room at The Cedars is a doublebedded one."
"The Cedars?"
"Yes that is Mr. St. Clair's house. I am staying there while I
conduct the inquiry."
"Where is it, then?"
"Near Lee, in Kent. We have a sevenmile drive before us."
"But I am all in the dark."
"Of course you are. You'll know all about it presently. Jump up
here. All right, John we shall not need you. Here's half a
crown. Look out for me tomorrow, about eleven. Give her her
head. So long, then"
He flicked the horse with his whip, and we dashed away through
the endless succession of sombre and deserted streets, which
widened gradually, until we were flying across a broad
balustraded bridge, with the murky river flowing sluggishly
beneath us. Beyond lay another dull wilderness of bricks and
mortar, its silence broken only by the heavy, regular footfall of
the policeman, or the songs and shouts of some belated party of
revellers. A dull wrack was drifting slowly across the sky, and a
star or two twinkled dimly here and there through the rifts of
the clouds. Holmes drove in silence, with his head sunk upon his
breast, and the air of a man who is lost in thought, while I sat
beside him, curious to learn what this new quest might be which
seemed to tax his powers so sorely, and yet afraid to break in
upon the current of his thoughts. We had driven several miles,
and were beginning to get to the fringe of the belt of suburban
villas, when he shook himself, shrugged his shoulders, and lit up
his pipe with the air of a man who has satisfied himself that he
is acting for the best.
"You have a grand gift of silence, Watson," said he. "It makes
you quite invaluable as a companion. 'Pon my word, it is a great
thing for me to have someone to talk to, for my own thoughts are
not overpleasant. I was wondering what I should say to this dear
little woman tonight when she meets me at the door."
"You forget that I know nothing about it."
"I shall just have time to tell you the facts of the case before
we get to Lee. It seems absurdly simple, and yet, somehow I can
get nothing to go upon. There's plenty of thread, no doubt, but I
can't get the end of it into my hand. Now, I'll state the case
clearly and concisely to you, Watson, and maybe you can see a
spark where all is dark to me."
"Proceed, then."
"Some years agoto be definite, in May, there came to Lee
a gentleman, Neville St. Clair by name, who appeared to have
plenty of money. He took a large villa, laid out the grounds very
nicely, and lived generally in good style. By degrees he made
friends in the neighbourhood, and in  he married the daughter
of a local brewer, by whom he now has two children. He had no
occupation, but was interested in several companies and went into
town as a rule in the morning, returning by the  from Cannon
Street every night. Mr. St. Clair is now thirtyseven years of
age, is a man of temperate habits, a good husband, a very
affectionate father, and a man who is popular with all who know
him. I may add that his whole debts at the present moment, as far
as we have been able to ascertain, amount to  pounds s., while
he has  pounds standing to his credit in the Capital and
Counties Bank. There is no reason, therefore, to think that money
troubles have been weighing upon his mind.
"Last Monday Mr. Neville St. Clair went into town rather earlier
than usual, remarking before he started that he had two important
commissions to perform, and that he would bring his little boy
home a box of bricks. Now, by the merest chance, his wife
received a telegram upon this same Monday, very shortly after his
departure, to the effect that a small parcel of considerable
value which she had been expecting was waiting for her at the
offices of the Aberdeen Shipping Company. Now, if you are well up
in your London, you will know that the office of the company is
in Fresno Street, which branches out of Upper Swandam Lane, where
you found me tonight. Mrs. St. Clair had her lunch, started for
the City, did some shopping, proceeded to the company's office,
got her packet, and found herself at exactly  walking through
Swandam Lane on her way back to the station. Have you followed me
so far?"
"It is very clear."
"If you remember, Monday was an exceedingly hot day, and Mrs. St.
Clair walked slowly, glancing about in the hope of seeing a cab,
as she did not like the neighbourhood in which she found herself.
While she was walking in this way down Swandam Lane, she suddenly
heard an ejaculation or cry, and was struck cold to see her
husband looking down at her and, as it seemed to her, beckoning
to her from a secondfloor window. The window was open, and she
distinctly saw his face, which she describes as being terribly
agitated. He waved his hands frantically to her, and then
vanished from the window so suddenly that it seemed to her that
he had been plucked back by some irresistible force from behind.
One singular point which struck her quick feminine eye was that
although he wore some dark coat, such as he had started to town
in, he had on neither collar nor necktie.
"Convinced that something was amiss with him, she rushed down the
stepsfor the house was none other than the opium den in which
you found me tonightand running through the front room she
attempted to ascend the stairs which led to the first floor. At
the foot of the stairs, however, she met this Lascar scoundrel of
whom I have spoken, who thrust her back and, aided by a Dane, who
acts as assistant there, pushed her out into the street. Filled
with the most maddening doubts and fears, she rushed down the
lane and, by rare goodfortune, met in Fresno Street a number of
constables with an inspector, all on their way to their beat. The
inspector and two men accompanied her back, and in spite of the
continued resistance of the proprietor, they made their way to
the room in which Mr. St. Clair had last been seen. There was no
sign of him there. In fact, in the whole of that floor there was
no one to be found save a crippled wretch of hideous aspect, who,
it seems, made his home there. Both he and the Lascar stoutly
swore that no one else had been in the front room during the
afternoon. So determined was their denial that the inspector was
staggered, and had almost come to believe that Mrs. St. Clair had
been deluded when, with a cry, she sprang at a small deal box
which lay upon the table and tore the lid from it. Out there fell
a cascade of children's bricks. It was the toy which he had
promised to bring home.
"This discovery, and the evident confusion which the cripple
showed, made the inspector realise that the matter was serious.
The rooms were carefully examined, and results all pointed to an
abominable crime. The front room was plainly furnished as a
sittingroom and led into a small bedroom, which looked out upon
the back of one of the wharves. Between the wharf and the bedroom
window is a narrow strip, which is dry at low tide but is covered
at high tide with at least four and a half feet of water. The
bedroom window was a broad one and opened from below. On
examination traces of blood were to be seen upon the windowsill,
and several scattered drops were visible upon the wooden floor of
the bedroom. Thrust away behind a curtain in the front room were
all the clothes of Mr. Neville St. Clair, with the exception of
his coat. His boots, his socks, his hat, and his watchall were
there. There were no signs of violence upon any of these
garments, and there were no other traces of Mr. Neville St.
Clair. Out of the window he must apparently have gone for no
other exit could be discovered, and the ominous bloodstains upon
the sill gave little promise that he could save himself by
swimming, for the tide was at its very highest at the moment of
the tragedy.
"And now as to the villains who seemed to be immediately
implicated in the matter. The Lascar was known to be a man of the
vilest antecedents, but as, by Mrs. St. Clair's story, he was
known to have been at the foot of the stair within a very few
seconds of her husband's appearance at the window, he could
hardly have been more than an accessory to the crime. His defence
was one of absolute ignorance, and he protested that he had no
knowledge as to the doings of Hugh Boone, his lodger, and that he
could not account in any way for the presence of the missing
gentleman's clothes.
"So much for the Lascar manager. Now for the sinister cripple who
lives upon the second floor of the opium den, and who was
certainly the last human being whose eyes rested upon Neville St.
Clair. His name is Hugh Boone, and his hideous face is one which
is familiar to every man who goes much to the City. He is a
professional beggar, though in order to avoid the police
regulations he pretends to a small trade in wax vestas. Some
little distance down Threadneedle Street, upon the lefthand
side, there is, as you may have remarked, a small angle in the
wall. Here it is that this creature takes his daily seat,
crosslegged with his tiny stock of matches on his lap, and as he
is a piteous spectacle a small rain of charity descends into the
greasy leather cap which lies upon the pavement beside him. I
have watched the fellow more than once before ever I thought of
making his professional acquaintance, and I have been surprised
at the harvest which he has reaped in a short time. His
appearance, you see, is so remarkable that no one can pass him
without observing him. A shock of orange hair, a pale face
disfigured by a horrible scar, which, by its contraction, has
turned up the outer edge of his upper lip, a bulldog chin, and a
pair of very penetrating dark eyes, which present a singular
contrast to the colour of his hair, all mark him out from amid
the common crowd of mendicants and so, too, does his wit, for he
is ever ready with a reply to any piece of chaff which may be
thrown at him by the passersby. This is the man whom we now
learn to have been the lodger at the opium den, and to have been
the last man to see the gentleman of whom we are in quest."
"But a cripple" said I. "What could he have done singlehanded
against a man in the prime of life?"
"He is a cripple in the sense that he walks with a limp but in
other respects he appears to be a powerful and wellnurtured man.
Surely your medical experience would tell you, Watson, that
weakness in one limb is often compensated for by exceptional
strength in the others."
"Pray continue your narrative."
"Mrs. St. Clair had fainted at the sight of the blood upon the
window, and she was escorted home in a cab by the police, as her
presence could be of no help to them in their investigations.
Inspector Barton, who had charge of the case, made a very careful
examination of the premises, but without finding anything which
threw any light upon the matter. One mistake had been made in not
arresting Boone instantly, as he was allowed some few minutes
during which he might have communicated with his friend the
Lascar, but this fault was soon remedied, and he was seized and
searched, without anything being found which could incriminate
him. There were, it is true, some bloodstains upon his right
shirtsleeve, but he pointed to his ringfinger, which had been
cut near the nail, and explained that the bleeding came from
there, adding that he had been to the window not long before, and
that the stains which had been observed there came doubtless from
the same source. He denied strenuously having ever seen Mr.
Neville St. Clair and swore that the presence of the clothes in
his room was as much a mystery to him as to the police. As to
Mrs. St. Clair's assertion that she had actually seen her husband
at the window, he declared that she must have been either mad or
dreaming. He was removed, loudly protesting, to the
policestation, while the inspector remained upon the premises in
the hope that the ebbing tide might afford some fresh clue.
"And it did, though they hardly found upon the mudbank what they
had feared to find. It was Neville St. Clair's coat, and not
Neville St. Clair, which lay uncovered as the tide receded. And
what do you think they found in the pockets?"
"I cannot imagine."
"No, I don't think you would guess. Every pocket stuffed with
pennies and halfpennies pennies and  halfpennies. It
was no wonder that it had not been swept away by the tide. But a
human body is a different matter. There is a fierce eddy between
the wharf and the house. It seemed likely enough that the
weighted coat had remained when the stripped body had been sucked
away into the river."
"But I understand that all the other clothes were found in the
room. Would the body be dressed in a coat alone?"
"No, sir, but the facts might be met speciously enough. Suppose
that this man Boone had thrust Neville St. Clair through the
window, there is no human eye which could have seen the deed.
What would he do then? It would of course instantly strike him
that he must get rid of the telltale garments. He would seize
the coat, then, and be in the act of throwing it out, when it
would occur to him that it would swim and not sink. He has little
time, for he has heard the scuffle downstairs when the wife tried
to force her way up, and perhaps he has already heard from his
Lascar confederate that the police are hurrying up the street.
There is not an instant to be lost. He rushes to some secret
hoard, where he has accumulated the fruits of his beggary, and he
stuffs all the coins upon which he can lay his hands into the
pockets to make sure of the coat's sinking. He throws it out, and
would have done the same with the other garments had not he heard
the rush of steps below, and only just had time to close the
window when the police appeared."
"It certainly sounds feasible."
"Well, we will take it as a working hypothesis for want of a
better. Boone, as I have told you, was arrested and taken to the
station, but it could not be shown that there had ever before
been anything against him. He had for years been known as a
professional beggar, but his life appeared to have been a very
quiet and innocent one. There the matter stands at present, and
the questions which have to be solvedwhat Neville St. Clair was
doing in the opium den, what happened to him when there, where is
he now, and what Hugh Boone had to do with his disappearanceare
all as far from a solution as ever. I confess that I cannot
recall any case within my experience which looked at the first
glance so simple and yet which presented such difficulties."
While Sherlock Holmes had been detailing this singular series of
events, we had been whirling through the outskirts of the great
town until the last straggling houses had been left behind, and
we rattled along with a country hedge upon either side of us.
Just as he finished, however, we drove through two scattered
villages, where a few lights still glimmered in the windows.
"We are on the outskirts of Lee," said my companion. "We have
touched on three English counties in our short drive, starting in
Middlesex, passing over an angle of Surrey, and ending in Kent.
See that light among the trees? That is The Cedars, and beside
that lamp sits a woman whose anxious ears have already, I have
little doubt, caught the clink of our horse's feet."
"But why are you not conducting the case from Baker Street?" I
asked.
"Because there are many inquiries which must be made out here.
Mrs. St. Clair has most kindly put two rooms at my disposal, and
you may rest assured that she will have nothing but a welcome for
my friend and colleague. I hate to meet her, Watson, when I have
no news of her husband. Here we are. Whoa, there, whoa"
We had pulled up in front of a large villa which stood within its
own grounds. A stableboy had run out to the horse's head, and
springing down, I followed Holmes up the small, winding
graveldrive which led to the house. As we approached, the door
flew open, and a little blonde woman stood in the opening, clad
in some sort of light mousseline de soie, with a touch of fluffy
pink chiffon at her neck and wrists. She stood with her figure
outlined against the flood of light, one hand upon the door, one
halfraised in her eagerness, her body slightly bent, her head
and face protruded, with eager eyes and parted lips, a standing
question.
"Well?" she cried, "well?" And then, seeing that there were two
of us, she gave a cry of hope which sank into a groan as she saw
that my companion shook his head and shrugged his shoulders.
"No good news?"
"None."
"No bad?"
"No."
"Thank God for that. But come in. You must be weary, for you have
had a long day."
"This is my friend, Dr. Watson. He has been of most vital use to
me in several of my cases, and a lucky chance has made it
possible for me to bring him out and associate him with this
investigation."
"I am delighted to see you," said she, pressing my hand warmly.
"You will, I am sure, forgive anything that may be wanting in our
arrangements, when you consider the blow which has come so
suddenly upon us."
"My dear madam," said I, "I am an old campaigner, and if I were
not I can very well see that no apology is needed. If I can be of
any assistance, either to you or to my friend here, I shall be
indeed happy."
"Now, Mr. Sherlock Holmes," said the lady as we entered a
welllit diningroom, upon the table of which a cold supper had
been laid out, "I should very much like to ask you one or two
plain questions, to which I beg that you will give a plain
answer."
"Certainly, madam."
"Do not trouble about my feelings. I am not hysterical, nor given
to fainting. I simply wish to hear your real, real opinion."
"Upon what point?"
"In your heart of hearts, do you think that Neville is alive?"
Sherlock Holmes seemed to be embarrassed by the question.
"Frankly, now" she repeated, standing upon the rug and looking
keenly down at him as he leaned back in a basketchair.
"Frankly, then, madam, I do not."
"You think that he is dead?"
"I do."
"Murdered?"
"I don't say that. Perhaps."
"And on what day did he meet his death?"
"On Monday."
"Then perhaps, Mr. Holmes, you will be good enough to explain how
it is that I have received a letter from him today."
Sherlock Holmes sprang out of his chair as if he had been
galvanised.
"What" he roared.
"Yes, today." She stood smiling, holding up a little slip of
paper in the air.
"May I see it?"
"Certainly."
He snatched it from her in his eagerness, and smoothing it out
upon the table he drew over the lamp and examined it intently. I
had left my chair and was gazing at it over his shoulder. The
envelope was a very coarse one and was stamped with the Gravesend
postmark and with the date of that very day, or rather of the day
before, for it was considerably after midnight.
"Coarse writing," murmured Holmes. "Surely this is not your
husband's writing, madam."
"No, but the enclosure is."
"I perceive also that whoever addressed the envelope had to go
and inquire as to the address."
"How can you tell that?"
"The name, you see, is in perfectly black ink, which has dried
itself. The rest is of the greyish colour, which shows that
blottingpaper has been used. If it had been written straight
off, and then blotted, none would be of a deep black shade. This
man has written the name, and there has then been a pause before
he wrote the address, which can only mean that he was not
familiar with it. It is, of course, a trifle, but there is
nothing so important as trifles. Let us now see the letter. Ha
there has been an enclosure here"
"Yes, there was a ring. His signetring."
"And you are sure that this is your husband's hand?"
"One of his hands."
"One?"
"His hand when he wrote hurriedly. It is very unlike his usual
writing, and yet I know it well."
"'Dearest do not be frightened. All will come well. There is a
huge error which it may take some little time to rectify.
Wait in patience.NEVILLE.' Written in pencil upon the flyleaf
of a book, octavo size, no watermark. Hum Posted today in
Gravesend by a man with a dirty thumb. Ha And the flap has been
gummed, if I am not very much in error, by a person who had been
chewing tobacco. And you have no doubt that it is your husband's
hand, madam?"
"None. Neville wrote those words."
"And they were posted today at Gravesend. Well, Mrs. St. Clair,
the clouds lighten, though I should not venture to say that the
danger is over."
"But he must be alive, Mr. Holmes."
"Unless this is a clever forgery to put us on the wrong scent.
The ring, after all, proves nothing. It may have been taken from
him."
"No, no it is, it is his very own writing"
"Very well. It may, however, have been written on Monday and only
posted today."
"That is possible."
"If so, much may have happened between."
"Oh, you must not discourage me, Mr. Holmes. I know that all is
well with him. There is so keen a sympathy between us that I
should know if evil came upon him. On the very day that I saw him
last he cut himself in the bedroom, and yet I in the diningroom
rushed upstairs instantly with the utmost certainty that
something had happened. Do you think that I would respond to such
a trifle and yet be ignorant of his death?"
"I have seen too much not to know that the impression of a woman
may be more valuable than the conclusion of an analytical
reasoner. And in this letter you certainly have a very strong
piece of evidence to corroborate your view. But if your husband
is alive and able to write letters, why should he remain away
from you?"
"I cannot imagine. It is unthinkable."
"And on Monday he made no remarks before leaving you?"
"No."
"And you were surprised to see him in Swandam Lane?"
"Very much so."
"Was the window open?"
"Yes."
"Then he might have called to you?"
"He might."
"He only, as I understand, gave an inarticulate cry?"
"Yes."
"A call for help, you thought?"
"Yes. He waved his hands."
"But it might have been a cry of surprise. Astonishment at the
unexpected sight of you might cause him to throw up his hands?"
"It is possible."
"And you thought he was pulled back?"
"He disappeared so suddenly."
"He might have leaped back. You did not see anyone else in the
room?"
"No, but this horrible man confessed to having been there, and
the Lascar was at the foot of the stairs."
"Quite so. Your husband, as far as you could see, had his
ordinary clothes on?"
"But without his collar or tie. I distinctly saw his bare
throat."
"Had he ever spoken of Swandam Lane?"
"Never."
"Had he ever showed any signs of having taken opium?"
"Never."
"Thank you, Mrs. St. Clair. Those are the principal points about
which I wished to be absolutely clear. We shall now have a little
supper and then retire, for we may have a very busy day
tomorrow."
A large and comfortable doublebedded room had been placed at our
disposal, and I was quickly between the sheets, for I was weary
after my night of adventure. Sherlock Holmes was a man, however,
who, when he had an unsolved problem upon his mind, would go for
days, and even for a week, without rest, turning it over,
rearranging his facts, looking at it from every point of view
until he had either fathomed it or convinced himself that his
data were insufficient. It was soon evident to me that he was now
preparing for an allnight sitting. He took off his coat and
waistcoat, put on a large blue dressinggown, and then wandered
about the room collecting pillows from his bed and cushions from
the sofa and armchairs. With these he constructed a sort of
Eastern divan, upon which he perched himself crosslegged, with
an ounce of shag tobacco and a box of matches laid out in front
of him. In the dim light of the lamp I saw him sitting there, an
old briar pipe between his lips, his eyes fixed vacantly upon the
corner of the ceiling, the blue smoke curling up from him,
silent, motionless, with the light shining upon his strongset
aquiline features. So he sat as I dropped off to sleep, and so he
sat when a sudden ejaculation caused me to wake up, and I found
the summer sun shining into the apartment. The pipe was still
between his lips, the smoke still curled upward, and the room was
full of a dense tobacco haze, but nothing remained of the heap of
shag which I had seen upon the previous night.
"Awake, Watson?" he asked.
"Yes."
"Game for a morning drive?"
"Certainly."
"Then dress. No one is stirring yet, but I know where the
stableboy sleeps, and we shall soon have the trap out." He
chuckled to himself as he spoke, his eyes twinkled, and he seemed
a different man to the sombre thinker of the previous night.
As I dressed I glanced at my watch. It was no wonder that no one
was stirring. It was twentyfive minutes past four. I had hardly
finished when Holmes returned with the news that the boy was
putting in the horse.
"I want to test a little theory of mine," said he, pulling on his
boots. "I think, Watson, that you are now standing in the
presence of one of the most absolute fools in Europe. I deserve
to be kicked from here to Charing Cross. But I think I have the
key of the affair now."
"And where is it?" I asked, smiling.
"In the bathroom," he answered. "Oh, yes, I am not joking," he
continued, seeing my look of incredulity. "I have just been
there, and I have taken it out, and I have got it in this
Gladstone bag. Come on, my boy, and we shall see whether it will
not fit the lock."
We made our way downstairs as quietly as possible, and out into
the bright morning sunshine. In the road stood our horse and
trap, with the halfclad stableboy waiting at the head. We both
sprang in, and away we dashed down the London Road. A few country
carts were stirring, bearing in vegetables to the metropolis, but
the lines of villas on either side were as silent and lifeless as
some city in a dream.
"It has been in some points a singular case," said Holmes,
flicking the horse on into a gallop. "I confess that I have been
as blind as a mole, but it is better to learn wisdom late than
never to learn it at all."
In town the earliest risers were just beginning to look sleepily
from their windows as we drove through the streets of the Surrey
side. Passing down the Waterloo Bridge Road we crossed over the
river, and dashing up Wellington Street wheeled sharply to the
right and found ourselves in Bow Street. Sherlock Holmes was well
known to the force, and the two constables at the door saluted
him. One of them held the horse's head while the other led us in.
"Who is on duty?" asked Holmes.
"Inspector Bradstreet, sir."
"Ah, Bradstreet, how are you?" A tall, stout official had come
down the stoneflagged passage, in a peaked cap and frogged
jacket. "I wish to have a quiet word with you, Bradstreet."
"Certainly, Mr. Holmes. Step into my room here." It was a small,
officelike room, with a huge ledger upon the table, and a
telephone projecting from the wall. The inspector sat down at his
desk.
"What can I do for you, Mr. Holmes?"
"I called about that beggarman, Boonethe one who was charged
with being concerned in the disappearance of Mr. Neville St.
Clair, of Lee."
"Yes. He was brought up and remanded for further inquiries."
"So I heard. You have him here?"
"In the cells."
"Is he quiet?"
"Oh, he gives no trouble. But he is a dirty scoundrel."
"Dirty?"
"Yes, it is all we can do to make him wash his hands, and his
face is as black as a tinker's. Well, when once his case has been
settled, he will have a regular prison bath and I think, if you
saw him, you would agree with me that he needed it."
"I should like to see him very much."
"Would you? That is easily done. Come this way. You can leave
your bag."
"No, I think that I'll take it."
"Very good. Come this way, if you please." He led us down a
passage, opened a barred door, passed down a winding stair, and
brought us to a whitewashed corridor with a line of doors on each
side.
"The third on the right is his," said the inspector. "Here it
is" He quietly shot back a panel in the upper part of the door
and glanced through.
"He is asleep," said he. "You can see him very well."
We both put our eyes to the grating. The prisoner lay with his
face towards us, in a very deep sleep, breathing slowly and
heavily. He was a middlesized man, coarsely clad as became his
calling, with a coloured shirt protruding through the rent in his
tattered coat. He was, as the inspector had said, extremely
dirty, but the grime which covered his face could not conceal its
repulsive ugliness. A broad wheal from an old scar ran right
across it from eye to chin, and by its contraction had turned up
one side of the upper lip, so that three teeth were exposed in a
perpetual snarl. A shock of very bright red hair grew low over
his eyes and forehead.
"He's a beauty, isn't he?" said the inspector.
"He certainly needs a wash," remarked Holmes. "I had an idea that
he might, and I took the liberty of bringing the tools with me."
He opened the Gladstone bag as he spoke, and took out, to my
astonishment, a very large bathsponge.
"He he You are a funny one," chuckled the inspector.
"Now, if you will have the great goodness to open that door very
quietly, we will soon make him cut a much more respectable
figure."
"Well, I don't know why not," said the inspector. "He doesn't
look a credit to the Bow Street cells, does he?" He slipped his
key into the lock, and we all very quietly entered the cell. The
sleeper half turned, and then settled down once more into a deep
slumber. Holmes stooped to the waterjug, moistened his sponge,
and then rubbed it twice vigorously across and down the
prisoner's face.
"Let me introduce you," he shouted, "to Mr. Neville St. Clair, of
Lee, in the county of Kent."
Never in my life have I seen such a sight. The man's face peeled
off under the sponge like the bark from a tree. Gone was the
coarse brown tint Gone, too, was the horrid scar which had
seamed it across, and the twisted lip which had given the
repulsive sneer to the face A twitch brought away the tangled
red hair, and there, sitting up in his bed, was a pale,
sadfaced, refinedlooking man, blackhaired and smoothskinned,
rubbing his eyes and staring about him with sleepy bewilderment.
Then suddenly realising the exposure, he broke into a scream and
threw himself down with his face to the pillow.
"Great heavens" cried the inspector, "it is, indeed, the missing
man. I know him from the photograph."
The prisoner turned with the reckless air of a man who abandons
himself to his destiny. "Be it so," said he. "And pray what am I
charged with?"
"With making away with Mr. Neville St. Oh, come, you can't be
charged with that unless they make a case of attempted suicide of
it," said the inspector with a grin. "Well, I have been
twentyseven years in the force, but this really takes the cake."
"If I am Mr. Neville St. Clair, then it is obvious that no crime
has been committed, and that, therefore, I am illegally
detained."
"No crime, but a very great error has been committed," said
Holmes. "You would have done better to have trusted you wife."
"It was not the wife it was the children," groaned the prisoner.
"God help me, I would not have them ashamed of their father. My
God What an exposure What can I do?"
Sherlock Holmes sat down beside him on the couch and patted him
kindly on the shoulder.
"If you leave it to a court of law to clear the matter up," said
he, "of course you can hardly avoid publicity. On the other hand,
if you convince the police authorities that there is no possible
case against you, I do not know that there is any reason that the
details should find their way into the papers. Inspector
Bradstreet would, I am sure, make notes upon anything which you
might tell us and submit it to the proper authorities. The case
would then never go into court at all."
"God bless you" cried the prisoner passionately. "I would have
endured imprisonment, ay, even execution, rather than have left
my miserable secret as a family blot to my children.
"You are the first who have ever heard my story. My father was a
schoolmaster in Chesterfield, where I received an excellent
education. I travelled in my youth, took to the stage, and
finally became a reporter on an evening paper in London. One day
my editor wished to have a series of articles upon begging in the
metropolis, and I volunteered to supply them. There was the point
from which all my adventures started. It was only by trying
begging as an amateur that I could get the facts upon which to
base my articles. When an actor I had, of course, learned all the
secrets of making up, and had been famous in the greenroom for
my skill. I took advantage now of my attainments. I painted my
face, and to make myself as pitiable as possible I made a good
scar and fixed one side of my lip in a twist by the aid of a
small slip of fleshcoloured plaster. Then with a red head of
hair, and an appropriate dress, I took my station in the business
part of the city, ostensibly as a matchseller but really as a
beggar. For seven hours I plied my trade, and when I returned
home in the evening I found to my surprise that I had received no
less than s. d.
"I wrote my articles and thought little more of the matter until,
some time later, I backed a bill for a friend and had a writ
served upon me for  pounds. I was at my wit's end where to get
the money, but a sudden idea came to me. I begged a fortnight's
grace from the creditor, asked for a holiday from my employers,
and spent the time in begging in the City under my disguise. In
ten days I had the money and had paid the debt.
"Well, you can imagine how hard it was to settle down to arduous
work at  pounds a week when I knew that I could earn as much in
a day by smearing my face with a little paint, laying my cap on
the ground, and sitting still. It was a long fight between my
pride and the money, but the dollars won at last, and I threw up
reporting and sat day after day in the corner which I had first
chosen, inspiring pity by my ghastly face and filling my pockets
with coppers. Only one man knew my secret. He was the keeper of a
low den in which I used to lodge in Swandam Lane, where I could
every morning emerge as a squalid beggar and in the evenings
transform myself into a welldressed man about town. This fellow,
a Lascar, was well paid by me for his rooms, so that I knew that
my secret was safe in his possession.
"Well, very soon I found that I was saving considerable sums of
money. I do not mean that any beggar in the streets of London
could earn  pounds a yearwhich is less than my average
takingsbut I had exceptional advantages in my power of making
up, and also in a facility of repartee, which improved by
practice and made me quite a recognised character in the City.
All day a stream of pennies, varied by silver, poured in upon me,
and it was a very bad day in which I failed to take  pounds.
"As I grew richer I grew more ambitious, took a house in the
country, and eventually married, without anyone having a
suspicion as to my real occupation. My dear wife knew that I had
business in the City. She little knew what.
"Last Monday I had finished for the day and was dressing in my
room above the opium den when I looked out of my window and saw,
to my horror and astonishment, that my wife was standing in the
street, with her eyes fixed full upon me. I gave a cry of
surprise, threw up my arms to cover my face, and, rushing to my
confidant, the Lascar, entreated him to prevent anyone from
coming up to me. I heard her voice downstairs, but I knew that
she could not ascend. Swiftly I threw off my clothes, pulled on
those of a beggar, and put on my pigments and wig. Even a wife's
eyes could not pierce so complete a disguise. But then it
occurred to me that there might be a search in the room, and that
the clothes might betray me. I threw open the window, reopening
by my violence a small cut which I had inflicted upon myself in
the bedroom that morning. Then I seized my coat, which was
weighted by the coppers which I had just transferred to it from
the leather bag in which I carried my takings. I hurled it out of
the window, and it disappeared into the Thames. The other clothes
would have followed, but at that moment there was a rush of
constables up the stair, and a few minutes after I found, rather,
I confess, to my relief, that instead of being identified as Mr.
Neville St. Clair, I was arrested as his murderer.
"I do not know that there is anything else for me to explain. I
was determined to preserve my disguise as long as possible, and
hence my preference for a dirty face. Knowing that my wife would
be terribly anxious, I slipped off my ring and confided it to the
Lascar at a moment when no constable was watching me, together
with a hurried scrawl, telling her that she had no cause to
fear."
"That note only reached her yesterday," said Holmes.
"Good God What a week she must have spent"
"The police have watched this Lascar," said Inspector Bradstreet,
"and I can quite understand that he might find it difficult to
post a letter unobserved. Probably he handed it to some sailor
customer of his, who forgot all about it for some days."
"That was it," said Holmes, nodding approvingly "I have no doubt
of it. But have you never been prosecuted for begging?"
"Many times but what was a fine to me?"
"It must stop here, however," said Bradstreet. "If the police are
to hush this thing up, there must be no more of Hugh Boone."
"I have sworn it by the most solemn oaths which a man can take."
"In that case I think that it is probable that no further steps
may be taken. But if you are found again, then all must come out.
I am sure, Mr. Holmes, that we are very much indebted to you for
having cleared the matter up. I wish I knew how you reach your
results."
"I reached this one," said my friend, "by sitting upon five
pillows and consuming an ounce of shag. I think, Watson, that if
we drive to Baker Street we shall just be in time for breakfast."
VII. THE ADVENTURE OF THE BLUE CARBUNCLE
I had called upon my friend Sherlock Holmes upon the second
morning after Christmas, with the intention of wishing him the
compliments of the season. He was lounging upon the sofa in a
purple dressinggown, a piperack within his reach upon the
right, and a pile of crumpled morning papers, evidently newly
studied, near at hand. Beside the couch was a wooden chair, and
on the angle of the back hung a very seedy and disreputable
hardfelt hat, much the worse for wear, and cracked in several
places. A lens and a forceps lying upon the seat of the chair
suggested that the hat had been suspended in this manner for the
purpose of examination.
"You are engaged," said I "perhaps I interrupt you."
"Not at all. I am glad to have a friend with whom I can discuss
my results. The matter is a perfectly trivial one"he jerked his
thumb in the direction of the old hat"but there are points in
connection with it which are not entirely devoid of interest and
even of instruction."
I seated myself in his armchair and warmed my hands before his
crackling fire, for a sharp frost had set in, and the windows
were thick with the ice crystals. "I suppose," I remarked, "that,
homely as it looks, this thing has some deadly story linked on to
itthat it is the clue which will guide you in the solution of
some mystery and the punishment of some crime."
"No, no. No crime," said Sherlock Holmes, laughing. "Only one of
those whimsical little incidents which will happen when you have
four million human beings all jostling each other within the
space of a few square miles. Amid the action and reaction of so
dense a swarm of humanity, every possible combination of events
may be expected to take place, and many a little problem will be
presented which may be striking and bizarre without being
criminal. We have already had experience of such."
"So much so," I remarked, "that of the last six cases which I
have added to my notes, three have been entirely free of any
legal crime."
"Precisely. You allude to my attempt to recover the Irene Adler
papers, to the singular case of Miss Mary Sutherland, and to the
adventure of the man with the twisted lip. Well, I have no doubt
that this small matter will fall into the same innocent category.
You know Peterson, the commissionaire?"
"Yes."
"It is to him that this trophy belongs."
"It is his hat."
"No, no, he found it. Its owner is unknown. I beg that you will
look upon it not as a battered billycock but as an intellectual
problem. And, first, as to how it came here. It arrived upon
Christmas morning, in company with a good fat goose, which is, I
have no doubt, roasting at this moment in front of Peterson's
fire. The facts are these about four o'clock on Christmas
morning, Peterson, who, as you know, is a very honest fellow, was
returning from some small jollification and was making his way
homeward down Tottenham Court Road. In front of him he saw, in
the gaslight, a tallish man, walking with a slight stagger, and
carrying a white goose slung over his shoulder. As he reached the
corner of Goodge Street, a row broke out between this stranger
and a little knot of roughs. One of the latter knocked off the
man's hat, on which he raised his stick to defend himself and,
swinging it over his head, smashed the shop window behind him.
Peterson had rushed forward to protect the stranger from his
assailants but the man, shocked at having broken the window, and
seeing an officiallooking person in uniform rushing towards him,
dropped his goose, took to his heels, and vanished amid the
labyrinth of small streets which lie at the back of Tottenham
Court Road. The roughs had also fled at the appearance of
Peterson, so that he was left in possession of the field of
battle, and also of the spoils of victory in the shape of this
battered hat and a most unimpeachable Christmas goose."
"Which surely he restored to their owner?"
"My dear fellow, there lies the problem. It is true that 'For
Mrs. Henry Baker' was printed upon a small card which was tied to
the bird's left leg, and it is also true that the initials 'H.
B.' are legible upon the lining of this hat, but as there are
some thousands of Bakers, and some hundreds of Henry Bakers in
this city of ours, it is not easy to restore lost property to any
one of them."
"What, then, did Peterson do?"
"He brought round both hat and goose to me on Christmas morning,
knowing that even the smallest problems are of interest to me.
The goose we retained until this morning, when there were signs
that, in spite of the slight frost, it would be well that it
should be eaten without unnecessary delay. Its finder has carried
it off, therefore, to fulfil the ultimate destiny of a goose,
while I continue to retain the hat of the unknown gentleman who
lost his Christmas dinner."
"Did he not advertise?"
"No."
"Then, what clue could you have as to his identity?"
"Only as much as we can deduce."
"From his hat?"
"Precisely."
"But you are joking. What can you gather from this old battered
felt?"
"Here is my lens. You know my methods. What can you gather
yourself as to the individuality of the man who has worn this
article?"
I took the tattered object in my hands and turned it over rather
ruefully. It was a very ordinary black hat of the usual round
shape, hard and much the worse for wear. The lining had been of
red silk, but was a good deal discoloured. There was no maker's
name but, as Holmes had remarked, the initials "H. B." were
scrawled upon one side. It was pierced in the brim for a
hatsecurer, but the elastic was missing. For the rest, it was
cracked, exceedingly dusty, and spotted in several places,
although there seemed to have been some attempt to hide the
discoloured patches by smearing them with ink.
"I can see nothing," said I, handing it back to my friend.
"On the contrary, Watson, you can see everything. You fail,
however, to reason from what you see. You are too timid in
drawing your inferences."
"Then, pray tell me what it is that you can infer from this hat?"
He picked it up and gazed at it in the peculiar introspective
fashion which was characteristic of him. "It is perhaps less
suggestive than it might have been," he remarked, "and yet there
are a few inferences which are very distinct, and a few others
which represent at least a strong balance of probability. That
the man was highly intellectual is of course obvious upon the
face of it, and also that he was fairly welltodo within the
last three years, although he has now fallen upon evil days. He
had foresight, but has less now than formerly, pointing to a
moral retrogression, which, when taken with the decline of his
fortunes, seems to indicate some evil influence, probably drink,
at work upon him. This may account also for the obvious fact that
his wife has ceased to love him."
"My dear Holmes"
"He has, however, retained some degree of selfrespect," he
continued, disregarding my remonstrance. "He is a man who leads a
sedentary life, goes out little, is out of training entirely, is
middleaged, has grizzled hair which he has had cut within the
last few days, and which he anoints with limecream. These are
the more patent facts which are to be deduced from his hat. Also,
by the way, that it is extremely improbable that he has gas laid
on in his house."
"You are certainly joking, Holmes."
"Not in the least. Is it possible that even now, when I give you
these results, you are unable to see how they are attained?"
"I have no doubt that I am very stupid, but I must confess that I
am unable to follow you. For example, how did you deduce that
this man was intellectual?"
For answer Holmes clapped the hat upon his head. It came right
over the forehead and settled upon the bridge of his nose. "It is
a question of cubic capacity," said he "a man with so large a
brain must have something in it."
"The decline of his fortunes, then?"
"This hat is three years old. These flat brims curled at the edge
came in then. It is a hat of the very best quality. Look at the
band of ribbed silk and the excellent lining. If this man could
afford to buy so expensive a hat three years ago, and has had no
hat since, then he has assuredly gone down in the world."
"Well, that is clear enough, certainly. But how about the
foresight and the moral retrogression?"
Sherlock Holmes laughed. "Here is the foresight," said he putting
his finger upon the little disc and loop of the hatsecurer.
"They are never sold upon hats. If this man ordered one, it is a
sign of a certain amount of foresight, since he went out of his
way to take this precaution against the wind. But since we see
that he has broken the elastic and has not troubled to replace
it, it is obvious that he has less foresight now than formerly,
which is a distinct proof of a weakening nature. On the other
hand, he has endeavoured to conceal some of these stains upon the
felt by daubing them with ink, which is a sign that he has not
entirely lost his selfrespect."
"Your reasoning is certainly plausible."
"The further points, that he is middleaged, that his hair is
grizzled, that it has been recently cut, and that he uses
limecream, are all to be gathered from a close examination of the
lower part of the lining. The lens discloses a large number of
hairends, clean cut by the scissors of the barber. They all
appear to be adhesive, and there is a distinct odour of
limecream. This dust, you will observe, is not the gritty, grey
dust of the street but the fluffy brown dust of the house,
showing that it has been hung up indoors most of the time, while
the marks of moisture upon the inside are proof positive that the
wearer perspired very freely, and could therefore, hardly be in
the best of training."
"But his wifeyou said that she had ceased to love him."
"This hat has not been brushed for weeks. When I see you, my dear
Watson, with a week's accumulation of dust upon your hat, and
when your wife allows you to go out in such a state, I shall fear
that you also have been unfortunate enough to lose your wife's
affection."
"But he might be a bachelor."
"Nay, he was bringing home the goose as a peaceoffering to his
wife. Remember the card upon the bird's leg."
"You have an answer to everything. But how on earth do you deduce
that the gas is not laid on in his house?"
"One tallow stain, or even two, might come by chance but when I
see no less than five, I think that there can be little doubt
that the individual must be brought into frequent contact with
burning tallowwalks upstairs at night probably with his hat in
one hand and a guttering candle in the other. Anyhow, he never
got tallowstains from a gasjet. Are you satisfied?"
"Well, it is very ingenious," said I, laughing "but since, as
you said just now, there has been no crime committed, and no harm
done save the loss of a goose, all this seems to be rather a
waste of energy."
Sherlock Holmes had opened his mouth to reply, when the door flew
open, and Peterson, the commissionaire, rushed into the apartment
with flushed cheeks and the face of a man who is dazed with
astonishment.
"The goose, Mr. Holmes The goose, sir" he gasped.
"Eh? What of it, then? Has it returned to life and flapped off
through the kitchen window?" Holmes twisted himself round upon
the sofa to get a fairer view of the man's excited face.
"See here, sir See what my wife found in its crop" He held out
his hand and displayed upon the centre of the palm a brilliantly
scintillating blue stone, rather smaller than a bean in size, but
of such purity and radiance that it twinkled like an electric
point in the dark hollow of his hand.
Sherlock Holmes sat up with a whistle. "By Jove, Peterson" said
he, "this is treasure trove indeed. I suppose you know what you
have got?"
"A diamond, sir? A precious stone. It cuts into glass as though
it were putty."
"It's more than a precious stone. It is the precious stone."
"Not the Countess of Morcar's blue carbuncle" I ejaculated.
"Precisely so. I ought to know its size and shape, seeing that I
have read the advertisement about it in The Times every day
lately. It is absolutely unique, and its value can only be
conjectured, but the reward offered of  pounds is certainly
not within a twentieth part of the market price."
"A thousand pounds Great Lord of mercy" The commissionaire
plumped down into a chair and stared from one to the other of us.
"That is the reward, and I have reason to know that there are
sentimental considerations in the background which would induce
the Countess to part with half her fortune if she could but
recover the gem."
"It was lost, if I remember aright, at the Hotel Cosmopolitan," I
remarked.
"Precisely so, on December nd, just five days ago. John Horner,
a plumber, was accused of having abstracted it from the lady's
jewelcase. The evidence against him was so strong that the case
has been referred to the Assizes. I have some account of the
matter here, I believe." He rummaged amid his newspapers,
glancing over the dates, until at last he smoothed one out,
doubled it over, and read the following paragraph
"Hotel Cosmopolitan Jewel Robbery. John Horner, , plumber, was
brought up upon the charge of having upon the nd inst.,
abstracted from the jewelcase of the Countess of Morcar the
valuable gem known as the blue carbuncle. James Ryder,
upperattendant at the hotel, gave his evidence to the effect
that he had shown Horner up to the dressingroom of the Countess
of Morcar upon the day of the robbery in order that he might
solder the second bar of the grate, which was loose. He had
remained with Horner some little time, but had finally been
called away. On returning, he found that Horner had disappeared,
that the bureau had been forced open, and that the small morocco
casket in which, as it afterwards transpired, the Countess was
accustomed to keep her jewel, was lying empty upon the
dressingtable. Ryder instantly gave the alarm, and Horner was
arrested the same evening but the stone could not be found
either upon his person or in his rooms. Catherine Cusack, maid to
the Countess, deposed to having heard Ryder's cry of dismay on
discovering the robbery, and to having rushed into the room,
where she found matters as described by the last witness.
Inspector Bradstreet, B division, gave evidence as to the arrest
of Horner, who struggled frantically, and protested his innocence
in the strongest terms. Evidence of a previous conviction for
robbery having been given against the prisoner, the magistrate
refused to deal summarily with the offence, but referred it to
the Assizes. Horner, who had shown signs of intense emotion
during the proceedings, fainted away at the conclusion and was
carried out of court."
"Hum So much for the policecourt," said Holmes thoughtfully,
tossing aside the paper. "The question for us now to solve is the
sequence of events leading from a rifled jewelcase at one end to
the crop of a goose in Tottenham Court Road at the other. You
see, Watson, our little deductions have suddenly assumed a much
more important and less innocent aspect. Here is the stone the
stone came from the goose, and the goose came from Mr. Henry
Baker, the gentleman with the bad hat and all the other
characteristics with which I have bored you. So now we must set
ourselves very seriously to finding this gentleman and
ascertaining what part he has played in this little mystery. To
do this, we must try the simplest means first, and these lie
undoubtedly in an advertisement in all the evening papers. If
this fail, I shall have recourse to other methods."
"What will you say?"
"Give me a pencil and that slip of paper. Now, then 'Found at
the corner of Goodge Street, a goose and a black felt hat. Mr.
Henry Baker can have the same by applying at  this evening at
B, Baker Street.' That is clear and concise."
"Very. But will he see it?"
"Well, he is sure to keep an eye on the papers, since, to a poor
man, the loss was a heavy one. He was clearly so scared by his
mischance in breaking the window and by the approach of Peterson
that he thought of nothing but flight, but since then he must
have bitterly regretted the impulse which caused him to drop his
bird. Then, again, the introduction of his name will cause him to
see it, for everyone who knows him will direct his attention to
it. Here you are, Peterson, run down to the advertising agency
and have this put in the evening papers."
"In which, sir?"
"Oh, in the Globe, Star, Pall Mall, St. James's, Evening News,
Standard, Echo, and any others that occur to you."
"Very well, sir. And this stone?"
"Ah, yes, I shall keep the stone. Thank you. And, I say,
Peterson, just buy a goose on your way back and leave it here
with me, for we must have one to give to this gentleman in place
of the one which your family is now devouring."
When the commissionaire had gone, Holmes took up the stone and
held it against the light. "It's a bonny thing," said he. "Just
see how it glints and sparkles. Of course it is a nucleus and
focus of crime. Every good stone is. They are the devil's pet
baits. In the larger and older jewels every facet may stand for a
bloody deed. This stone is not yet twenty years old. It was found
in the banks of the Amoy River in southern China and is remarkable
in having every characteristic of the carbuncle, save that it is
blue in shade instead of ruby red. In spite of its youth, it has
already a sinister history. There have been two murders, a
vitriolthrowing, a suicide, and several robberies brought about
for the sake of this fortygrain weight of crystallised charcoal.
Who would think that so pretty a toy would be a purveyor to the
gallows and the prison? I'll lock it up in my strong box now and
drop a line to the Countess to say that we have it."
"Do you think that this man Horner is innocent?"
"I cannot tell."
"Well, then, do you imagine that this other one, Henry Baker, had
anything to do with the matter?"
"It is, I think, much more likely that Henry Baker is an
absolutely innocent man, who had no idea that the bird which he
was carrying was of considerably more value than if it were made
of solid gold. That, however, I shall determine by a very simple
test if we have an answer to our advertisement."
"And you can do nothing until then?"
"Nothing."
"In that case I shall continue my professional round. But I shall
come back in the evening at the hour you have mentioned, for I
should like to see the solution of so tangled a business."
"Very glad to see you. I dine at seven. There is a woodcock, I
believe. By the way, in view of recent occurrences, perhaps I
ought to ask Mrs. Hudson to examine its crop."
I had been delayed at a case, and it was a little after halfpast
six when I found myself in Baker Street once more. As I
approached the house I saw a tall man in a Scotch bonnet with a
coat which was buttoned up to his chin waiting outside in the
bright semicircle which was thrown from the fanlight. Just as I
arrived the door was opened, and we were shown up together to
Holmes' room.
"Mr. Henry Baker, I believe," said he, rising from his armchair
and greeting his visitor with the easy air of geniality which he
could so readily assume. "Pray take this chair by the fire, Mr.
Baker. It is a cold night, and I observe that your circulation is
more adapted for summer than for winter. Ah, Watson, you have
just come at the right time. Is that your hat, Mr. Baker?"
"Yes, sir, that is undoubtedly my hat."
He was a large man with rounded shoulders, a massive head, and a
broad, intelligent face, sloping down to a pointed beard of
grizzled brown. A touch of red in nose and cheeks, with a slight
tremor of his extended hand, recalled Holmes' surmise as to his
habits. His rusty black frockcoat was buttoned right up in
front, with the collar turned up, and his lank wrists protruded
from his sleeves without a sign of cuff or shirt. He spoke in a
slow staccato fashion, choosing his words with care, and gave the
impression generally of a man of learning and letters who had had
illusage at the hands of fortune.
"We have retained these things for some days," said Holmes,
"because we expected to see an advertisement from you giving your
address. I am at a loss to know now why you did not advertise."
Our visitor gave a rather shamefaced laugh. "Shillings have not
been so plentiful with me as they once were," he remarked. "I had
no doubt that the gang of roughs who assaulted me had carried off
both my hat and the bird. I did not care to spend more money in a
hopeless attempt at recovering them."
"Very naturally. By the way, about the bird, we were compelled to
eat it."
"To eat it" Our visitor half rose from his chair in his
excitement.
"Yes, it would have been of no use to anyone had we not done so.
But I presume that this other goose upon the sideboard, which is
about the same weight and perfectly fresh, will answer your
purpose equally well?"
"Oh, certainly, certainly," answered Mr. Baker with a sigh of
relief.
"Of course, we still have the feathers, legs, crop, and so on of
your own bird, so if you wish"
The man burst into a hearty laugh. "They might be useful to me as
relics of my adventure," said he, "but beyond that I can hardly
see what use the disjecta membra of my late acquaintance are
going to be to me. No, sir, I think that, with your permission, I
will confine my attentions to the excellent bird which I perceive
upon the sideboard."
Sherlock Holmes glanced sharply across at me with a slight shrug
of his shoulders.
"There is your hat, then, and there your bird," said he. "By the
way, would it bore you to tell me where you got the other one
from? I am somewhat of a fowl fancier, and I have seldom seen a
better grown goose."
"Certainly, sir," said Baker, who had risen and tucked his newly
gained property under his arm. "There are a few of us who
frequent the Alpha Inn, near the Museumwe are to be found in
the Museum itself during the day, you understand. This year our
good host, Windigate by name, instituted a goose club, by which,
on consideration of some few pence every week, we were each to
receive a bird at Christmas. My pence were duly paid, and the
rest is familiar to you. I am much indebted to you, sir, for a
Scotch bonnet is fitted neither to my years nor my gravity." With
a comical pomposity of manner he bowed solemnly to both of us and
strode off upon his way.
"So much for Mr. Henry Baker," said Holmes when he had closed the
door behind him. "It is quite certain that he knows nothing
whatever about the matter. Are you hungry, Watson?"
"Not particularly."
"Then I suggest that we turn our dinner into a supper and follow
up this clue while it is still hot."
"By all means."
It was a bitter night, so we drew on our ulsters and wrapped
cravats about our throats. Outside, the stars were shining coldly
in a cloudless sky, and the breath of the passersby blew out
into smoke like so many pistol shots. Our footfalls rang out
crisply and loudly as we swung through the doctors' quarter,
Wimpole Street, Harley Street, and so through Wigmore Street into
Oxford Street. In a quarter of an hour we were in Bloomsbury at
the Alpha Inn, which is a small publichouse at the corner of one
of the streets which runs down into Holborn. Holmes pushed open
the door of the private bar and ordered two glasses of beer from
the ruddyfaced, whiteaproned landlord.
"Your beer should be excellent if it is as good as your geese,"
said he.
"My geese" The man seemed surprised.
"Yes. I was speaking only half an hour ago to Mr. Henry Baker,
who was a member of your goose club."
"Ah yes, I see. But you see, sir, them's not our geese."
"Indeed Whose, then?"
"Well, I got the two dozen from a salesman in Covent Garden."
"Indeed? I know some of them. Which was it?"
"Breckinridge is his name."
"Ah I don't know him. Well, here's your good health landlord,
and prosperity to your house. Goodnight."
"Now for Mr. Breckinridge," he continued, buttoning up his coat
as we came out into the frosty air. "Remember, Watson that though
we have so homely a thing as a goose at one end of this chain, we
have at the other a man who will certainly get seven years' penal
servitude unless we can establish his innocence. It is possible
that our inquiry may but confirm his guilt but, in any case, we
have a line of investigation which has been missed by the police,
and which a singular chance has placed in our hands. Let us
follow it out to the bitter end. Faces to the south, then, and
quick march"
We passed across Holborn, down Endell Street, and so through a
zigzag of slums to Covent Garden Market. One of the largest
stalls bore the name of Breckinridge upon it, and the proprietor
a horseylooking man, with a sharp face and trim sidewhiskers was
helping a boy to put up the shutters.
"Goodevening. It's a cold night," said Holmes.
The salesman nodded and shot a questioning glance at my
companion.
"Sold out of geese, I see," continued Holmes, pointing at the
bare slabs of marble.
"Let you have five hundred tomorrow morning."
"That's no good."
"Well, there are some on the stall with the gasflare."
"Ah, but I was recommended to you."
"Who by?"
"The landlord of the Alpha."
"Oh, yes I sent him a couple of dozen."
"Fine birds they were, too. Now where did you get them from?"
To my surprise the question provoked a burst of anger from the
salesman.
"Now, then, mister," said he, with his head cocked and his arms
akimbo, "what are you driving at? Let's have it straight, now."
"It is straight enough. I should like to know who sold you the
geese which you supplied to the Alpha."
"Well then, I shan't tell you. So now"
"Oh, it is a matter of no importance but I don't know why you
should be so warm over such a trifle."
"Warm You'd be as warm, maybe, if you were as pestered as I am.
When I pay good money for a good article there should be an end
of the business but it's 'Where are the geese?' and 'Who did you
sell the geese to?' and 'What will you take for the geese?' One
would think they were the only geese in the world, to hear the
fuss that is made over them."
"Well, I have no connection with any other people who have been
making inquiries," said Holmes carelessly. "If you won't tell us
the bet is off, that is all. But I'm always ready to back my
opinion on a matter of fowls, and I have a fiver on it that the
bird I ate is country bred."
"Well, then, you've lost your fiver, for it's town bred," snapped
the salesman.
"It's nothing of the kind."
"I say it is."
"I don't believe it."
"D'you think you know more about fowls than I, who have handled
them ever since I was a nipper? I tell you, all those birds that
went to the Alpha were town bred."
"You'll never persuade me to believe that."
"Will you bet, then?"
"It's merely taking your money, for I know that I am right. But
I'll have a sovereign on with you, just to teach you not to be
obstinate."
The salesman chuckled grimly. "Bring me the books, Bill," said
he.
The small boy brought round a small thin volume and a great
greasybacked one, laying them out together beneath the hanging
lamp.
"Now then, Mr. Cocksure," said the salesman, "I thought that I
was out of geese, but before I finish you'll find that there is
still one left in my shop. You see this little book?"
"Well?"
"That's the list of the folk from whom I buy. D'you see? Well,
then, here on this page are the country folk, and the numbers
after their names are where their accounts are in the big ledger.
Now, then You see this other page in red ink? Well, that is a
list of my town suppliers. Now, look at that third name. Just
read it out to me."
"Mrs. Oakshott, , Brixton Road," read Holmes.
"Quite so. Now turn that up in the ledger."
Holmes turned to the page indicated. "Here you are, 'Mrs.
Oakshott, , Brixton Road, egg and poultry supplier.'"
"Now, then, what's the last entry?"
"'December nd. Twentyfour geese at s. d.'"
"Quite so. There you are. And underneath?"
"'Sold to Mr. Windigate of the Alpha, at s.'"
"What have you to say now?"
Sherlock Holmes looked deeply chagrined. He drew a sovereign from
his pocket and threw it down upon the slab, turning away with the
air of a man whose disgust is too deep for words. A few yards off
he stopped under a lamppost and laughed in the hearty, noiseless
fashion which was peculiar to him.
"When you see a man with whiskers of that cut and the 'Pink 'un'
protruding out of his pocket, you can always draw him by a bet,"
said he. "I daresay that if I had put  pounds down in front of
him, that man would not have given me such complete information
as was drawn from him by the idea that he was doing me on a
wager. Well, Watson, we are, I fancy, nearing the end of our
quest, and the only point which remains to be determined is
whether we should go on to this Mrs. Oakshott tonight, or
whether we should reserve it for tomorrow. It is clear from what
that surly fellow said that there are others besides ourselves
who are anxious about the matter, and I should"
His remarks were suddenly cut short by a loud hubbub which broke
out from the stall which we had just left. Turning round we saw a
little ratfaced fellow standing in the centre of the circle of
yellow light which was thrown by the swinging lamp, while
Breckinridge, the salesman, framed in the door of his stall, was
shaking his fists fiercely at the cringing figure.
"I've had enough of you and your geese," he shouted. "I wish you
were all at the devil together. If you come pestering me any more
with your silly talk I'll set the dog at you. You bring Mrs.
Oakshott here and I'll answer her, but what have you to do with
it? Did I buy the geese off you?"
"No but one of them was mine all the same," whined the little
man.
"Well, then, ask Mrs. Oakshott for it."
"She told me to ask you."
"Well, you can ask the King of Proosia, for all I care. I've had
enough of it. Get out of this" He rushed fiercely forward, and
the inquirer flitted away into the darkness.
"Ha this may save us a visit to Brixton Road," whispered Holmes.
"Come with me, and we will see what is to be made of this
fellow." Striding through the scattered knots of people who
lounged round the flaring stalls, my companion speedily overtook
the little man and touched him upon the shoulder. He sprang
round, and I could see in the gaslight that every vestige of
colour had been driven from his face.
"Who are you, then? What do you want?" he asked in a quavering
voice.
"You will excuse me," said Holmes blandly, "but I could not help
overhearing the questions which you put to the salesman just now.
I think that I could be of assistance to you."
"You? Who are you? How could you know anything of the matter?"
"My name is Sherlock Holmes. It is my business to know what other
people don't know."
"But you can know nothing of this?"
"Excuse me, I know everything of it. You are endeavouring to
trace some geese which were sold by Mrs. Oakshott, of Brixton
Road, to a salesman named Breckinridge, by him in turn to Mr.
Windigate, of the Alpha, and by him to his club, of which Mr.
Henry Baker is a member."
"Oh, sir, you are the very man whom I have longed to meet," cried
the little fellow with outstretched hands and quivering fingers.
"I can hardly explain to you how interested I am in this matter."
Sherlock Holmes hailed a fourwheeler which was passing. "In that
case we had better discuss it in a cosy room rather than in this
windswept marketplace," said he. "But pray tell me, before we
go farther, who it is that I have the pleasure of assisting."
The man hesitated for an instant. "My name is John Robinson," he
answered with a sidelong glance.
"No, no the real name," said Holmes sweetly. "It is always
awkward doing business with an alias."
A flush sprang to the white cheeks of the stranger. "Well then,"
said he, "my real name is James Ryder."
"Precisely so. Head attendant at the Hotel Cosmopolitan. Pray
step into the cab, and I shall soon be able to tell you
everything which you would wish to know."
The little man stood glancing from one to the other of us with
halffrightened, halfhopeful eyes, as one who is not sure
whether he is on the verge of a windfall or of a catastrophe.
Then he stepped into the cab, and in half an hour we were back in
the sittingroom at Baker Street. Nothing had been said during
our drive, but the high, thin breathing of our new companion, and
the claspings and unclaspings of his hands, spoke of the nervous
tension within him.
"Here we are" said Holmes cheerily as we filed into the room.
"The fire looks very seasonable in this weather. You look cold,
Mr. Ryder. Pray take the basketchair. I will just put on my
slippers before we settle this little matter of yours. Now, then
You want to know what became of those geese?"
"Yes, sir."
"Or rather, I fancy, of that goose. It was one bird, I imagine in
which you were interestedwhite, with a black bar across the
tail."
Ryder quivered with emotion. "Oh, sir," he cried, "can you tell
me where it went to?"
"It came here."
"Here?"
"Yes, and a most remarkable bird it proved. I don't wonder that
you should take an interest in it. It laid an egg after it was
deadthe bonniest, brightest little blue egg that ever was seen.
I have it here in my museum."
Our visitor staggered to his feet and clutched the mantelpiece
with his right hand. Holmes unlocked his strongbox and held up
the blue carbuncle, which shone out like a star, with a cold,
brilliant, manypointed radiance. Ryder stood glaring with a
drawn face, uncertain whether to claim or to disown it.
"The game's up, Ryder," said Holmes quietly. "Hold up, man, or
you'll be into the fire Give him an arm back into his chair,
Watson. He's not got blood enough to go in for felony with
impunity. Give him a dash of brandy. So Now he looks a little
more human. What a shrimp it is, to be sure"
For a moment he had staggered and nearly fallen, but the brandy
brought a tinge of colour into his cheeks, and he sat staring
with frightened eyes at his accuser.
"I have almost every link in my hands, and all the proofs which I
could possibly need, so there is little which you need tell me.
Still, that little may as well be cleared up to make the case
complete. You had heard, Ryder, of this blue stone of the
Countess of Morcar's?"
"It was Catherine Cusack who told me of it," said he in a
crackling voice.
"I seeher ladyship's waitingmaid. Well, the temptation of
sudden wealth so easily acquired was too much for you, as it has
been for better men before you but you were not very scrupulous
in the means you used. It seems to me, Ryder, that there is the
making of a very pretty villain in you. You knew that this man
Horner, the plumber, had been concerned in some such matter
before, and that suspicion would rest the more readily upon him.
What did you do, then? You made some small job in my lady's
roomyou and your confederate Cusackand you managed that he
should be the man sent for. Then, when he had left, you rifled
the jewelcase, raised the alarm, and had this unfortunate man
arrested. You then"
Ryder threw himself down suddenly upon the rug and clutched at my
companion's knees. "For God's sake, have mercy" he shrieked.
"Think of my father Of my mother It would break their hearts. I
never went wrong before I never will again. I swear it. I'll
swear it on a Bible. Oh, don't bring it into court For Christ's
sake, don't"
"Get back into your chair" said Holmes sternly. "It is very well
to cringe and crawl now, but you thought little enough of this
poor Horner in the dock for a crime of which he knew nothing."
"I will fly, Mr. Holmes. I will leave the country, sir. Then the
charge against him will break down."
"Hum We will talk about that. And now let us hear a true account
of the next act. How came the stone into the goose, and how came
the goose into the open market? Tell us the truth, for there lies
your only hope of safety."
Ryder passed his tongue over his parched lips. "I will tell you
it just as it happened, sir," said he. "When Horner had been
arrested, it seemed to me that it would be best for me to get
away with the stone at once, for I did not know at what moment
the police might not take it into their heads to search me and my
room. There was no place about the hotel where it would be safe.
I went out, as if on some commission, and I made for my sister's
house. She had married a man named Oakshott, and lived in Brixton
Road, where she fattened fowls for the market. All the way there
every man I met seemed to me to be a policeman or a detective
and, for all that it was a cold night, the sweat was pouring down
my face before I came to the Brixton Road. My sister asked me
what was the matter, and why I was so pale but I told her that I
had been upset by the jewel robbery at the hotel. Then I went
into the back yard and smoked a pipe and wondered what it would
be best to do.
"I had a friend once called Maudsley, who went to the bad, and
has just been serving his time in Pentonville. One day he had met
me, and fell into talk about the ways of thieves, and how they
could get rid of what they stole. I knew that he would be true to
me, for I knew one or two things about him so I made up my mind
to go right on to Kilburn, where he lived, and take him into my
confidence. He would show me how to turn the stone into money.
But how to get to him in safety? I thought of the agonies I had
gone through in coming from the hotel. I might at any moment be
seized and searched, and there would be the stone in my waistcoat
pocket. I was leaning against the wall at the time and looking at
the geese which were waddling about round my feet, and suddenly
an idea came into my head which showed me how I could beat the
best detective that ever lived.
"My sister had told me some weeks before that I might have the
pick of her geese for a Christmas present, and I knew that she
was always as good as her word. I would take my goose now, and in
it I would carry my stone to Kilburn. There was a little shed in
the yard, and behind this I drove one of the birdsa fine big
one, white, with a barred tail. I caught it, and prying its bill
open, I thrust the stone down its throat as far as my finger
could reach. The bird gave a gulp, and I felt the stone pass
along its gullet and down into its crop. But the creature flapped
and struggled, and out came my sister to know what was the
matter. As I turned to speak to her the brute broke loose and
fluttered off among the others.
"'Whatever were you doing with that bird, Jem?' says she.
"'Well,' said I, 'you said you'd give me one for Christmas, and I
was feeling which was the fattest.'
"'Oh,' says she, 'we've set yours aside for youJem's bird, we
call it. It's the big white one over yonder. There's twentysix
of them, which makes one for you, and one for us, and two dozen
for the market.'
"'Thank you, Maggie,' says I 'but if it is all the same to you,
I'd rather have that one I was handling just now.'
"'The other is a good three pound heavier,' said she, 'and we
fattened it expressly for you.'
"'Never mind. I'll have the other, and I'll take it now,' said I.
"'Oh, just as you like,' said she, a little huffed. 'Which is it
you want, then?'
"'That white one with the barred tail, right in the middle of the
flock.'
"'Oh, very well. Kill it and take it with you.'
"Well, I did what she said, Mr. Holmes, and I carried the bird
all the way to Kilburn. I told my pal what I had done, for he was
a man that it was easy to tell a thing like that to. He laughed
until he choked, and we got a knife and opened the goose. My
heart turned to water, for there was no sign of the stone, and I
knew that some terrible mistake had occurred. I left the bird,
rushed back to my sister's, and hurried into the back yard. There
was not a bird to be seen there.
"'Where are they all, Maggie?' I cried.
"'Gone to the dealer's, Jem.'
"'Which dealer's?'
"'Breckinridge, of Covent Garden.'
"'But was there another with a barred tail?' I asked, 'the same
as the one I chose?'
"'Yes, Jem there were two barredtailed ones, and I could never
tell them apart.'
"Well, then, of course I saw it all, and I ran off as hard as my
feet would carry me to this man Breckinridge but he had sold the
lot at once, and not one word would he tell me as to where they
had gone. You heard him yourselves tonight. Well, he has always
answered me like that. My sister thinks that I am going mad.
Sometimes I think that I am myself. And nowand now I am myself
a branded thief, without ever having touched the wealth for which
I sold my character. God help me God help me" He burst into
convulsive sobbing, with his face buried in his hands.
There was a long silence, broken only by his heavy breathing and
by the measured tapping of Sherlock Holmes' fingertips upon the
edge of the table. Then my friend rose and threw open the door.
"Get out" said he.
"What, sir Oh, Heaven bless you"
"No more words. Get out"
And no more words were needed. There was a rush, a clatter upon
the stairs, the bang of a door, and the crisp rattle of running
footfalls from the street.
"After all, Watson," said Holmes, reaching up his hand for his
clay pipe, "I am not retained by the police to supply their
deficiencies. If Horner were in danger it would be another thing
but this fellow will not appear against him, and the case must
collapse. I suppose that I am commuting a felony, but it is just
possible that I am saving a soul. This fellow will not go wrong
again he is too terribly frightened. Send him to gaol now, and
you make him a gaolbird for life. Besides, it is the season of
forgiveness. Chance has put in our way a most singular and
whimsical problem, and its solution is its own reward. If you
will have the goodness to touch the bell, Doctor, we will begin
another investigation, in which, also a bird will be the chief
feature."
VIII. THE ADVENTURE OF THE SPECKLED BAND
On glancing over my notes of the seventy odd cases in which I
have during the last eight years studied the methods of my friend
Sherlock Holmes, I find many tragic, some comic, a large number
merely strange, but none commonplace for, working as he did
rather for the love of his art than for the acquirement of
wealth, he refused to associate himself with any investigation
which did not tend towards the unusual, and even the fantastic.
Of all these varied cases, however, I cannot recall any which
presented more singular features than that which was associated
with the wellknown Surrey family of the Roylotts of Stoke Moran.
The events in question occurred in the early days of my
association with Holmes, when we were sharing rooms as bachelors
in Baker Street. It is possible that I might have placed them
upon record before, but a promise of secrecy was made at the
time, from which I have only been freed during the last month by
the untimely death of the lady to whom the pledge was given. It
is perhaps as well that the facts should now come to light, for I
have reasons to know that there are widespread rumours as to the
death of Dr. Grimesby Roylott which tend to make the matter even
more terrible than the truth.
It was early in April in the year ' that I woke one morning to
find Sherlock Holmes standing, fully dressed, by the side of my
bed. He was a late riser, as a rule, and as the clock on the
mantelpiece showed me that it was only a quarterpast seven, I
blinked up at him in some surprise, and perhaps just a little
resentment, for I was myself regular in my habits.
"Very sorry to knock you up, Watson," said he, "but it's the
common lot this morning. Mrs. Hudson has been knocked up, she
retorted upon me, and I on you."
"What is it, thena fire?"
"No a client. It seems that a young lady has arrived in a
considerable state of excitement, who insists upon seeing me. She
is waiting now in the sittingroom. Now, when young ladies wander
about the metropolis at this hour of the morning, and knock
sleepy people up out of their beds, I presume that it is
something very pressing which they have to communicate. Should it
prove to be an interesting case, you would, I am sure, wish to
follow it from the outset. I thought, at any rate, that I should
call you and give you the chance."
"My dear fellow, I would not miss it for anything."
I had no keener pleasure than in following Holmes in his
professional investigations, and in admiring the rapid
deductions, as swift as intuitions, and yet always founded on a
logical basis with which he unravelled the problems which were
submitted to him. I rapidly threw on my clothes and was ready in
a few minutes to accompany my friend down to the sittingroom. A
lady dressed in black and heavily veiled, who had been sitting in
the window, rose as we entered.
"Goodmorning, madam," said Holmes cheerily. "My name is Sherlock
Holmes. This is my intimate friend and associate, Dr. Watson,
before whom you can speak as freely as before myself. Ha I am
glad to see that Mrs. Hudson has had the good sense to light the
fire. Pray draw up to it, and I shall order you a cup of hot
coffee, for I observe that you are shivering."
"It is not cold which makes me shiver," said the woman in a low
voice, changing her seat as requested.
"What, then?"
"It is fear, Mr. Holmes. It is terror." She raised her veil as
she spoke, and we could see that she was indeed in a pitiable
state of agitation, her face all drawn and grey, with restless
frightened eyes, like those of some hunted animal. Her features
and figure were those of a woman of thirty, but her hair was shot
with premature grey, and her expression was weary and haggard.
Sherlock Holmes ran her over with one of his quick,
allcomprehensive glances.
"You must not fear," said he soothingly, bending forward and
patting her forearm. "We shall soon set matters right, I have no
doubt. You have come in by train this morning, I see."
"You know me, then?"
"No, but I observe the second half of a return ticket in the palm
of your left glove. You must have started early, and yet you had
a good drive in a dogcart, along heavy roads, before you reached
the station."
The lady gave a violent start and stared in bewilderment at my
companion.
"There is no mystery, my dear madam," said he, smiling. "The left
arm of your jacket is spattered with mud in no less than seven
places. The marks are perfectly fresh. There is no vehicle save a
dogcart which throws up mud in that way, and then only when you
sit on the lefthand side of the driver."
"Whatever your reasons may be, you are perfectly correct," said
she. "I started from home before six, reached Leatherhead at
twenty past, and came in by the first train to Waterloo. Sir, I
can stand this strain no longer I shall go mad if it continues.
I have no one to turn tonone, save only one, who cares for me,
and he, poor fellow, can be of little aid. I have heard of you,
Mr. Holmes I have heard of you from Mrs. Farintosh, whom you
helped in the hour of her sore need. It was from her that I had
your address. Oh, sir, do you not think that you could help me,
too, and at least throw a little light through the dense darkness
which surrounds me? At present it is out of my power to reward
you for your services, but in a month or six weeks I shall be
married, with the control of my own income, and then at least you
shall not find me ungrateful."
Holmes turned to his desk and, unlocking it, drew out a small
casebook, which he consulted.
"Farintosh," said he. "Ah yes, I recall the case it was
concerned with an opal tiara. I think it was before your time,
Watson. I can only say, madam, that I shall be happy to devote
the same care to your case as I did to that of your friend. As to
reward, my profession is its own reward but you are at liberty
to defray whatever expenses I may be put to, at the time which
suits you best. And now I beg that you will lay before us
everything that may help us in forming an opinion upon the
matter."
"Alas" replied our visitor, "the very horror of my situation
lies in the fact that my fears are so vague, and my suspicions
depend so entirely upon small points, which might seem trivial to
another, that even he to whom of all others I have a right to
look for help and advice looks upon all that I tell him about it
as the fancies of a nervous woman. He does not say so, but I can
read it from his soothing answers and averted eyes. But I have
heard, Mr. Holmes, that you can see deeply into the manifold
wickedness of the human heart. You may advise me how to walk amid
the dangers which encompass me."
"I am all attention, madam."
"My name is Helen Stoner, and I am living with my stepfather, who
is the last survivor of one of the oldest Saxon families in
England, the Roylotts of Stoke Moran, on the western border of
Surrey."
Holmes nodded his head. "The name is familiar to me," said he.
"The family was at one time among the richest in England, and the
estates extended over the borders into Berkshire in the north,
and Hampshire in the west. In the last century, however, four
successive heirs were of a dissolute and wasteful disposition,
and the family ruin was eventually completed by a gambler in the
days of the Regency. Nothing was left save a few acres of ground,
and the twohundredyearold house, which is itself crushed under
a heavy mortgage. The last squire dragged out his existence
there, living the horrible life of an aristocratic pauper but
his only son, my stepfather, seeing that he must adapt himself to
the new conditions, obtained an advance from a relative, which
enabled him to take a medical degree and went out to Calcutta,
where, by his professional skill and his force of character, he
established a large practice. In a fit of anger, however, caused
by some robberies which had been perpetrated in the house, he
beat his native butler to death and narrowly escaped a capital
sentence. As it was, he suffered a long term of imprisonment and
afterwards returned to England a morose and disappointed man.
"When Dr. Roylott was in India he married my mother, Mrs. Stoner,
the young widow of MajorGeneral Stoner, of the Bengal Artillery.
My sister Julia and I were twins, and we were only two years old
at the time of my mother's remarriage. She had a considerable
sum of moneynot less than  pounds a yearand this she
bequeathed to Dr. Roylott entirely while we resided with him,
with a provision that a certain annual sum should be allowed to
each of us in the event of our marriage. Shortly after our return
to England my mother diedshe was killed eight years ago in a
railway accident near Crewe. Dr. Roylott then abandoned his
attempts to establish himself in practice in London and took us
to live with him in the old ancestral house at Stoke Moran. The
money which my mother had left was enough for all our wants, and
there seemed to be no obstacle to our happiness.
"But a terrible change came over our stepfather about this time.
Instead of making friends and exchanging visits with our
neighbours, who had at first been overjoyed to see a Roylott of
Stoke Moran back in the old family seat, he shut himself up in
his house and seldom came out save to indulge in ferocious
quarrels with whoever might cross his path. Violence of temper
approaching to mania has been hereditary in the men of the
family, and in my stepfather's case it had, I believe, been
intensified by his long residence in the tropics. A series of
disgraceful brawls took place, two of which ended in the
policecourt, until at last he became the terror of the village,
and the folks would fly at his approach, for he is a man of
immense strength, and absolutely uncontrollable in his anger.
"Last week he hurled the local blacksmith over a parapet into a
stream, and it was only by paying over all the money which I
could gather together that I was able to avert another public
exposure. He had no friends at all save the wandering gipsies,
and he would give these vagabonds leave to encamp upon the few
acres of bramblecovered land which represent the family estate,
and would accept in return the hospitality of their tents,
wandering away with them sometimes for weeks on end. He has a
passion also for Indian animals, which are sent over to him by a
correspondent, and he has at this moment a cheetah and a baboon,
which wander freely over his grounds and are feared by the
villagers almost as much as their master.
"You can imagine from what I say that my poor sister Julia and I
had no great pleasure in our lives. No servant would stay with
us, and for a long time we did all the work of the house. She was
but thirty at the time of her death, and yet her hair had already
begun to whiten, even as mine has."
"Your sister is dead, then?"
"She died just two years ago, and it is of her death that I wish
to speak to you. You can understand that, living the life which I
have described, we were little likely to see anyone of our own
age and position. We had, however, an aunt, my mother's maiden
sister, Miss Honoria Westphail, who lives near Harrow, and we
were occasionally allowed to pay short visits at this lady's
house. Julia went there at Christmas two years ago, and met there
a halfpay major of marines, to whom she became engaged. My
stepfather learned of the engagement when my sister returned and
offered no objection to the marriage but within a fortnight of
the day which had been fixed for the wedding, the terrible event
occurred which has deprived me of my only companion."
Sherlock Holmes had been leaning back in his chair with his eyes
closed and his head sunk in a cushion, but he half opened his
lids now and glanced across at his visitor.
"Pray be precise as to details," said he.
"It is easy for me to be so, for every event of that dreadful
time is seared into my memory. The manorhouse is, as I have
already said, very old, and only one wing is now inhabited. The
bedrooms in this wing are on the ground floor, the sittingrooms
being in the central block of the buildings. Of these bedrooms
the first is Dr. Roylott's, the second my sister's, and the third
my own. There is no communication between them, but they all open
out into the same corridor. Do I make myself plain?"
"Perfectly so."
"The windows of the three rooms open out upon the lawn. That
fatal night Dr. Roylott had gone to his room early, though we
knew that he had not retired to rest, for my sister was troubled
by the smell of the strong Indian cigars which it was his custom
to smoke. She left her room, therefore, and came into mine, where
she sat for some time, chatting about her approaching wedding. At
eleven o'clock she rose to leave me, but she paused at the door
and looked back.
"'Tell me, Helen,' said she, 'have you ever heard anyone whistle
in the dead of the night?'
"'Never,' said I.
"'I suppose that you could not possibly whistle, yourself, in
your sleep?'
"'Certainly not. But why?'
"'Because during the last few nights I have always, about three
in the morning, heard a low, clear whistle. I am a light sleeper,
and it has awakened me. I cannot tell where it came fromperhaps
from the next room, perhaps from the lawn. I thought that I would
just ask you whether you had heard it.'
"'No, I have not. It must be those wretched gipsies in the
plantation.'
"'Very likely. And yet if it were on the lawn, I wonder that you
did not hear it also.'
"'Ah, but I sleep more heavily than you.'
"'Well, it is of no great consequence, at any rate.' She smiled
back at me, closed my door, and a few moments later I heard her
key turn in the lock."
"Indeed," said Holmes. "Was it your custom always to lock
yourselves in at night?"
"Always."
"And why?"
"I think that I mentioned to you that the doctor kept a cheetah
and a baboon. We had no feeling of security unless our doors were
locked."
"Quite so. Pray proceed with your statement."
"I could not sleep that night. A vague feeling of impending
misfortune impressed me. My sister and I, you will recollect,
were twins, and you know how subtle are the links which bind two
souls which are so closely allied. It was a wild night. The wind
was howling outside, and the rain was beating and splashing
against the windows. Suddenly, amid all the hubbub of the gale,
there burst forth the wild scream of a terrified woman. I knew
that it was my sister's voice. I sprang from my bed, wrapped a
shawl round me, and rushed into the corridor. As I opened my door
I seemed to hear a low whistle, such as my sister described, and
a few moments later a clanging sound, as if a mass of metal had
fallen. As I ran down the passage, my sister's door was unlocked,
and revolved slowly upon its hinges. I stared at it
horrorstricken, not knowing what was about to issue from it. By
the light of the corridorlamp I saw my sister appear at the
opening, her face blanched with terror, her hands groping for
help, her whole figure swaying to and fro like that of a
drunkard. I ran to her and threw my arms round her, but at that
moment her knees seemed to give way and she fell to the ground.
She writhed as one who is in terrible pain, and her limbs were
dreadfully convulsed. At first I thought that she had not
recognised me, but as I bent over her she suddenly shrieked out
in a voice which I shall never forget, 'Oh, my God Helen It was
the band The speckled band' There was something else which she
would fain have said, and she stabbed with her finger into the
air in the direction of the doctor's room, but a fresh convulsion
seized her and choked her words. I rushed out, calling loudly for
my stepfather, and I met him hastening from his room in his
dressinggown. When he reached my sister's side she was
unconscious, and though he poured brandy down her throat and sent
for medical aid from the village, all efforts were in vain, for
she slowly sank and died without having recovered her
consciousness. Such was the dreadful end of my beloved sister."
"One moment," said Holmes, "are you sure about this whistle and
metallic sound? Could you swear to it?"
"That was what the county coroner asked me at the inquiry. It is
my strong impression that I heard it, and yet, among the crash of
the gale and the creaking of an old house, I may possibly have
been deceived."
"Was your sister dressed?"
"No, she was in her nightdress. In her right hand was found the
charred stump of a match, and in her left a matchbox."
"Showing that she had struck a light and looked about her when
the alarm took place. That is important. And what conclusions did
the coroner come to?"
"He investigated the case with great care, for Dr. Roylott's
conduct had long been notorious in the county, but he was unable
to find any satisfactory cause of death. My evidence showed that
the door had been fastened upon the inner side, and the windows
were blocked by oldfashioned shutters with broad iron bars,
which were secured every night. The walls were carefully sounded,
and were shown to be quite solid all round, and the flooring was
also thoroughly examined, with the same result. The chimney is
wide, but is barred up by four large staples. It is certain,
therefore, that my sister was quite alone when she met her end.
Besides, there were no marks of any violence upon her."
"How about poison?"
"The doctors examined her for it, but without success."
"What do you think that this unfortunate lady died of, then?"
"It is my belief that she died of pure fear and nervous shock,
though what it was that frightened her I cannot imagine."
"Were there gipsies in the plantation at the time?"
"Yes, there are nearly always some there."
"Ah, and what did you gather from this allusion to a banda
speckled band?"
"Sometimes I have thought that it was merely the wild talk of
delirium, sometimes that it may have referred to some band of
people, perhaps to these very gipsies in the plantation. I do not
know whether the spotted handkerchiefs which so many of them wear
over their heads might have suggested the strange adjective which
she used."
Holmes shook his head like a man who is far from being satisfied.
"These are very deep waters," said he "pray go on with your
narrative."
"Two years have passed since then, and my life has been until
lately lonelier than ever. A month ago, however, a dear friend,
whom I have known for many years, has done me the honour to ask
my hand in marriage. His name is ArmitagePercy Armitagethe
second son of Mr. Armitage, of Crane Water, near Reading. My
stepfather has offered no opposition to the match, and we are to
be married in the course of the spring. Two days ago some repairs
were started in the west wing of the building, and my bedroom
wall has been pierced, so that I have had to move into the
chamber in which my sister died, and to sleep in the very bed in
which she slept. Imagine, then, my thrill of terror when last
night, as I lay awake, thinking over her terrible fate, I
suddenly heard in the silence of the night the low whistle which
had been the herald of her own death. I sprang up and lit the
lamp, but nothing was to be seen in the room. I was too shaken to
go to bed again, however, so I dressed, and as soon as it was
daylight I slipped down, got a dogcart at the Crown Inn, which
is opposite, and drove to Leatherhead, from whence I have come on
this morning with the one object of seeing you and asking your
advice."
"You have done wisely," said my friend. "But have you told me
all?"
"Yes, all."
"Miss Roylott, you have not. You are screening your stepfather."
"Why, what do you mean?"
For answer Holmes pushed back the frill of black lace which
fringed the hand that lay upon our visitor's knee. Five little
livid spots, the marks of four fingers and a thumb, were printed
upon the white wrist.
"You have been cruelly used," said Holmes.
The lady coloured deeply and covered over her injured wrist. "He
is a hard man," she said, "and perhaps he hardly knows his own
strength."
There was a long silence, during which Holmes leaned his chin
upon his hands and stared into the crackling fire.
"This is a very deep business," he said at last. "There are a
thousand details which I should desire to know before I decide
upon our course of action. Yet we have not a moment to lose. If
we were to come to Stoke Moran today, would it be possible for
us to see over these rooms without the knowledge of your
stepfather?"
"As it happens, he spoke of coming into town today upon some
most important business. It is probable that he will be away all
day, and that there would be nothing to disturb you. We have a
housekeeper now, but she is old and foolish, and I could easily
get her out of the way."
"Excellent. You are not averse to this trip, Watson?"
"By no means."
"Then we shall both come. What are you going to do yourself?"
"I have one or two things which I would wish to do now that I am
in town. But I shall return by the twelve o'clock train, so as to
be there in time for your coming."
"And you may expect us early in the afternoon. I have myself some
small business matters to attend to. Will you not wait and
breakfast?"
"No, I must go. My heart is lightened already since I have
confided my trouble to you. I shall look forward to seeing you
again this afternoon." She dropped her thick black veil over her
face and glided from the room.
"And what do you think of it all, Watson?" asked Sherlock Holmes,
leaning back in his chair.
"It seems to me to be a most dark and sinister business."
"Dark enough and sinister enough."
"Yet if the lady is correct in saying that the flooring and walls
are sound, and that the door, window, and chimney are impassable,
then her sister must have been undoubtedly alone when she met her
mysterious end."
"What becomes, then, of these nocturnal whistles, and what of the
very peculiar words of the dying woman?"
"I cannot think."
"When you combine the ideas of whistles at night, the presence of
a band of gipsies who are on intimate terms with this old doctor,
the fact that we have every reason to believe that the doctor has
an interest in preventing his stepdaughter's marriage, the dying
allusion to a band, and, finally, the fact that Miss Helen Stoner
heard a metallic clang, which might have been caused by one of
those metal bars that secured the shutters falling back into its
place, I think that there is good ground to think that the
mystery may be cleared along those lines."
"But what, then, did the gipsies do?"
"I cannot imagine."
"I see many objections to any such theory."
"And so do I. It is precisely for that reason that we are going
to Stoke Moran this day. I want to see whether the objections are
fatal, or if they may be explained away. But what in the name of
the devil"
The ejaculation had been drawn from my companion by the fact that
our door had been suddenly dashed open, and that a huge man had
framed himself in the aperture. His costume was a peculiar
mixture of the professional and of the agricultural, having a
black tophat, a long frockcoat, and a pair of high gaiters,
with a huntingcrop swinging in his hand. So tall was he that his
hat actually brushed the cross bar of the doorway, and his
breadth seemed to span it across from side to side. A large face,
seared with a thousand wrinkles, burned yellow with the sun, and
marked with every evil passion, was turned from one to the other
of us, while his deepset, bileshot eyes, and his high, thin,
fleshless nose, gave him somewhat the resemblance to a fierce old
bird of prey.
"Which of you is Holmes?" asked this apparition.
"My name, sir but you have the advantage of me," said my
companion quietly.
"I am Dr. Grimesby Roylott, of Stoke Moran."
"Indeed, Doctor," said Holmes blandly. "Pray take a seat."
"I will do nothing of the kind. My stepdaughter has been here. I
have traced her. What has she been saying to you?"
"It is a little cold for the time of the year," said Holmes.
"What has she been saying to you?" screamed the old man
furiously.
"But I have heard that the crocuses promise well," continued my
companion imperturbably.
"Ha You put me off, do you?" said our new visitor, taking a step
forward and shaking his huntingcrop. "I know you, you scoundrel
I have heard of you before. You are Holmes, the meddler."
My friend smiled.
"Holmes, the busybody"
His smile broadened.
"Holmes, the Scotland Yard Jackinoffice"
Holmes chuckled heartily. "Your conversation is most
entertaining," said he. "When you go out close the door, for
there is a decided draught."
"I will go when I have said my say. Don't you dare to meddle with
my affairs. I know that Miss Stoner has been here. I traced her
I am a dangerous man to fall foul of See here." He stepped
swiftly forward, seized the poker, and bent it into a curve with
his huge brown hands.
"See that you keep yourself out of my grip," he snarled, and
hurling the twisted poker into the fireplace he strode out of the
room.
"He seems a very amiable person," said Holmes, laughing. "I am
not quite so bulky, but if he had remained I might have shown him
that my grip was not much more feeble than his own." As he spoke
he picked up the steel poker and, with a sudden effort,
straightened it out again.
"Fancy his having the insolence to confound me with the official
detective force This incident gives zest to our investigation,
however, and I only trust that our little friend will not suffer
from her imprudence in allowing this brute to trace her. And now,
Watson, we shall order breakfast, and afterwards I shall walk
down to Doctors' Commons, where I hope to get some data which may
help us in this matter."
It was nearly one o'clock when Sherlock Holmes returned from his
excursion. He held in his hand a sheet of blue paper, scrawled
over with notes and figures.
"I have seen the will of the deceased wife," said he. "To
determine its exact meaning I have been obliged to work out the
present prices of the investments with which it is concerned. The
total income, which at the time of the wife's death was little
short of  pounds, is now, through the fall in agricultural
prices, not more than  pounds. Each daughter can claim an
income of  pounds, in case of marriage. It is evident,
therefore, that if both girls had married, this beauty would have
had a mere pittance, while even one of them would cripple him to
a very serious extent. My morning's work has not been wasted,
since it has proved that he has the very strongest motives for
standing in the way of anything of the sort. And now, Watson,
this is too serious for dawdling, especially as the old man is
aware that we are interesting ourselves in his affairs so if you
are ready, we shall call a cab and drive to Waterloo. I should be
very much obliged if you would slip your revolver into your
pocket. An Eley's No.  is an excellent argument with gentlemen
who can twist steel pokers into knots. That and a toothbrush
are, I think, all that we need."
At Waterloo we were fortunate in catching a train for
Leatherhead, where we hired a trap at the station inn and drove
for four or five miles through the lovely Surrey lanes. It was a
perfect day, with a bright sun and a few fleecy clouds in the
heavens. The trees and wayside hedges were just throwing out
their first green shoots, and the air was full of the pleasant
smell of the moist earth. To me at least there was a strange
contrast between the sweet promise of the spring and this
sinister quest upon which we were engaged. My companion sat in
the front of the trap, his arms folded, his hat pulled down over
his eyes, and his chin sunk upon his breast, buried in the
deepest thought. Suddenly, however, he started, tapped me on the
shoulder, and pointed over the meadows.
"Look there" said he.
A heavily timbered park stretched up in a gentle slope,
thickening into a grove at the highest point. From amid the
branches there jutted out the grey gables and high rooftree of a
very old mansion.
"Stoke Moran?" said he.
"Yes, sir, that be the house of Dr. Grimesby Roylott," remarked
the driver.
"There is some building going on there," said Holmes "that is
where we are going."
"There's the village," said the driver, pointing to a cluster of
roofs some distance to the left "but if you want to get to the
house, you'll find it shorter to get over this stile, and so by
the footpath over the fields. There it is, where the lady is
walking."
"And the lady, I fancy, is Miss Stoner," observed Holmes, shading
his eyes. "Yes, I think we had better do as you suggest."
We got off, paid our fare, and the trap rattled back on its way
to Leatherhead.
"I thought it as well," said Holmes as we climbed the stile,
"that this fellow should think we had come here as architects, or
on some definite business. It may stop his gossip.
Goodafternoon, Miss Stoner. You see that we have been as good as
our word."
Our client of the morning had hurried forward to meet us with a
face which spoke her joy. "I have been waiting so eagerly for
you," she cried, shaking hands with us warmly. "All has turned
out splendidly. Dr. Roylott has gone to town, and it is unlikely
that he will be back before evening."
"We have had the pleasure of making the doctor's acquaintance,"
said Holmes, and in a few words he sketched out what had
occurred. Miss Stoner turned white to the lips as she listened.
"Good heavens" she cried, "he has followed me, then."
"So it appears."
"He is so cunning that I never know when I am safe from him. What
will he say when he returns?"
"He must guard himself, for he may find that there is someone
more cunning than himself upon his track. You must lock yourself
up from him tonight. If he is violent, we shall take you away to
your aunt's at Harrow. Now, we must make the best use of our
time, so kindly take us at once to the rooms which we are to
examine."
The building was of grey, lichenblotched stone, with a high
central portion and two curving wings, like the claws of a crab,
thrown out on each side. In one of these wings the windows were
broken and blocked with wooden boards, while the roof was partly
caved in, a picture of ruin. The central portion was in little
better repair, but the righthand block was comparatively modern,
and the blinds in the windows, with the blue smoke curling up
from the chimneys, showed that this was where the family resided.
Some scaffolding had been erected against the end wall, and the
stonework had been broken into, but there were no signs of any
workmen at the moment of our visit. Holmes walked slowly up and
down the illtrimmed lawn and examined with deep attention the
outsides of the windows.
"This, I take it, belongs to the room in which you used to sleep,
the centre one to your sister's, and the one next to the main
building to Dr. Roylott's chamber?"
"Exactly so. But I am now sleeping in the middle one."
"Pending the alterations, as I understand. By the way, there does
not seem to be any very pressing need for repairs at that end
wall."
"There were none. I believe that it was an excuse to move me from
my room."
"Ah that is suggestive. Now, on the other side of this narrow
wing runs the corridor from which these three rooms open. There
are windows in it, of course?"
"Yes, but very small ones. Too narrow for anyone to pass
through."
"As you both locked your doors at night, your rooms were
unapproachable from that side. Now, would you have the kindness
to go into your room and bar your shutters?"
Miss Stoner did so, and Holmes, after a careful examination
through the open window, endeavoured in every way to force the
shutter open, but without success. There was no slit through
which a knife could be passed to raise the bar. Then with his
lens he tested the hinges, but they were of solid iron, built
firmly into the massive masonry. "Hum" said he, scratching his
chin in some perplexity, "my theory certainly presents some
difficulties. No one could pass these shutters if they were
bolted. Well, we shall see if the inside throws any light upon
the matter."
A small side door led into the whitewashed corridor from which
the three bedrooms opened. Holmes refused to examine the third
chamber, so we passed at once to the second, that in which Miss
Stoner was now sleeping, and in which her sister had met with her
fate. It was a homely little room, with a low ceiling and a
gaping fireplace, after the fashion of old countryhouses. A
brown chest of drawers stood in one corner, a narrow
whitecounterpaned bed in another, and a dressingtable on the
lefthand side of the window. These articles, with two small
wickerwork chairs, made up all the furniture in the room save
for a square of Wilton carpet in the centre. The boards round and
the panelling of the walls were of brown, wormeaten oak, so old
and discoloured that it may have dated from the original building
of the house. Holmes drew one of the chairs into a corner and sat
silent, while his eyes travelled round and round and up and down,
taking in every detail of the apartment.
"Where does that bell communicate with?" he asked at last
pointing to a thick bellrope which hung down beside the bed, the
tassel actually lying upon the pillow.
"It goes to the housekeeper's room."
"It looks newer than the other things?"
"Yes, it was only put there a couple of years ago."
"Your sister asked for it, I suppose?"
"No, I never heard of her using it. We used always to get what we
wanted for ourselves."
"Indeed, it seemed unnecessary to put so nice a bellpull there.
You will excuse me for a few minutes while I satisfy myself as to
this floor." He threw himself down upon his face with his lens in
his hand and crawled swiftly backward and forward, examining
minutely the cracks between the boards. Then he did the same with
the woodwork with which the chamber was panelled. Finally he
walked over to the bed and spent some time in staring at it and
in running his eye up and down the wall. Finally he took the
bellrope in his hand and gave it a brisk tug.
"Why, it's a dummy," said he.
"Won't it ring?"
"No, it is not even attached to a wire. This is very interesting.
You can see now that it is fastened to a hook just above where
the little opening for the ventilator is."
"How very absurd I never noticed that before."
"Very strange" muttered Holmes, pulling at the rope. "There are
one or two very singular points about this room. For example,
what a fool a builder must be to open a ventilator into another
room, when, with the same trouble, he might have communicated
with the outside air"
"That is also quite modern," said the lady.
"Done about the same time as the bellrope?" remarked Holmes.
"Yes, there were several little changes carried out about that
time."
"They seem to have been of a most interesting characterdummy
bellropes, and ventilators which do not ventilate. With your
permission, Miss Stoner, we shall now carry our researches into
the inner apartment."
Dr. Grimesby Roylott's chamber was larger than that of his
stepdaughter, but was as plainly furnished. A campbed, a small
wooden shelf full of books, mostly of a technical character, an
armchair beside the bed, a plain wooden chair against the wall, a
round table, and a large iron safe were the principal things
which met the eye. Holmes walked slowly round and examined each
and all of them with the keenest interest.
"What's in here?" he asked, tapping the safe.
"My stepfather's business papers."
"Oh you have seen inside, then?"
"Only once, some years ago. I remember that it was full of
papers."
"There isn't a cat in it, for example?"
"No. What a strange idea"
"Well, look at this" He took up a small saucer of milk which
stood on the top of it.
"No we don't keep a cat. But there is a cheetah and a baboon."
"Ah, yes, of course Well, a cheetah is just a big cat, and yet a
saucer of milk does not go very far in satisfying its wants, I
daresay. There is one point which I should wish to determine." He
squatted down in front of the wooden chair and examined the seat
of it with the greatest attention.
"Thank you. That is quite settled," said he, rising and putting
his lens in his pocket. "Hullo Here is something interesting"
The object which had caught his eye was a small dog lash hung on
one corner of the bed. The lash, however, was curled upon itself
and tied so as to make a loop of whipcord.
"What do you make of that, Watson?"
"It's a common enough lash. But I don't know why it should be
tied."
"That is not quite so common, is it? Ah, me it's a wicked world,
and when a clever man turns his brains to crime it is the worst
of all. I think that I have seen enough now, Miss Stoner, and
with your permission we shall walk out upon the lawn."
I had never seen my friend's face so grim or his brow so dark as
it was when we turned from the scene of this investigation. We
had walked several times up and down the lawn, neither Miss
Stoner nor myself liking to break in upon his thoughts before he
roused himself from his reverie.
"It is very essential, Miss Stoner," said he, "that you should
absolutely follow my advice in every respect."
"I shall most certainly do so."
"The matter is too serious for any hesitation. Your life may
depend upon your compliance."
"I assure you that I am in your hands."
"In the first place, both my friend and I must spend the night in
your room."
Both Miss Stoner and I gazed at him in astonishment.
"Yes, it must be so. Let me explain. I believe that that is the
village inn over there?"
"Yes, that is the Crown."
"Very good. Your windows would be visible from there?"
"Certainly."
"You must confine yourself to your room, on pretence of a
headache, when your stepfather comes back. Then when you hear him
retire for the night, you must open the shutters of your window,
undo the hasp, put your lamp there as a signal to us, and then
withdraw quietly with everything which you are likely to want
into the room which you used to occupy. I have no doubt that, in
spite of the repairs, you could manage there for one night."
"Oh, yes, easily."
"The rest you will leave in our hands."
"But what will you do?"
"We shall spend the night in your room, and we shall investigate
the cause of this noise which has disturbed you."
"I believe, Mr. Holmes, that you have already made up your mind,"
said Miss Stoner, laying her hand upon my companion's sleeve.
"Perhaps I have."
"Then, for pity's sake, tell me what was the cause of my sister's
death."
"I should prefer to have clearer proofs before I speak."
"You can at least tell me whether my own thought is correct, and
if she died from some sudden fright."
"No, I do not think so. I think that there was probably some more
tangible cause. And now, Miss Stoner, we must leave you for if
Dr. Roylott returned and saw us our journey would be in vain.
Goodbye, and be brave, for if you will do what I have told you,
you may rest assured that we shall soon drive away the dangers
that threaten you."
Sherlock Holmes and I had no difficulty in engaging a bedroom and
sittingroom at the Crown Inn. They were on the upper floor, and
from our window we could command a view of the avenue gate, and
of the inhabited wing of Stoke Moran Manor House. At dusk we saw
Dr. Grimesby Roylott drive past, his huge form looming up beside
the little figure of the lad who drove him. The boy had some
slight difficulty in undoing the heavy iron gates, and we heard
the hoarse roar of the doctor's voice and saw the fury with which
he shook his clinched fists at him. The trap drove on, and a few
minutes later we saw a sudden light spring up among the trees as
the lamp was lit in one of the sittingrooms.
"Do you know, Watson," said Holmes as we sat together in the
gathering darkness, "I have really some scruples as to taking you
tonight. There is a distinct element of danger."
"Can I be of assistance?"
"Your presence might be invaluable."
"Then I shall certainly come."
"It is very kind of you."
"You speak of danger. You have evidently seen more in these rooms
than was visible to me."
"No, but I fancy that I may have deduced a little more. I imagine
that you saw all that I did."
"I saw nothing remarkable save the bellrope, and what purpose
that could answer I confess is more than I can imagine."
"You saw the ventilator, too?"
"Yes, but I do not think that it is such a very unusual thing to
have a small opening between two rooms. It was so small that a
rat could hardly pass through."
"I knew that we should find a ventilator before ever we came to
Stoke Moran."
"My dear Holmes"
"Oh, yes, I did. You remember in her statement she said that her
sister could smell Dr. Roylott's cigar. Now, of course that
suggested at once that there must be a communication between the
two rooms. It could only be a small one, or it would have been
remarked upon at the coroner's inquiry. I deduced a ventilator."
"But what harm can there be in that?"
"Well, there is at least a curious coincidence of dates. A
ventilator is made, a cord is hung, and a lady who sleeps in the
bed dies. Does not that strike you?"
"I cannot as yet see any connection."
"Did you observe anything very peculiar about that bed?"
"No."
"It was clamped to the floor. Did you ever see a bed fastened
like that before?"
"I cannot say that I have."
"The lady could not move her bed. It must always be in the same
relative position to the ventilator and to the ropeor so we may
call it, since it was clearly never meant for a bellpull."
"Holmes," I cried, "I seem to see dimly what you are hinting at.
We are only just in time to prevent some subtle and horrible
crime."
"Subtle enough and horrible enough. When a doctor does go wrong
he is the first of criminals. He has nerve and he has knowledge.
Palmer and Pritchard were among the heads of their profession.
This man strikes even deeper, but I think, Watson, that we shall
be able to strike deeper still. But we shall have horrors enough
before the night is over for goodness' sake let us have a quiet
pipe and turn our minds for a few hours to something more
cheerful."
About nine o'clock the light among the trees was extinguished,
and all was dark in the direction of the Manor House. Two hours
passed slowly away, and then, suddenly, just at the stroke of
eleven, a single bright light shone out right in front of us.
"That is our signal," said Holmes, springing to his feet "it
comes from the middle window."
As we passed out he exchanged a few words with the landlord,
explaining that we were going on a late visit to an acquaintance,
and that it was possible that we might spend the night there. A
moment later we were out on the dark road, a chill wind blowing
in our faces, and one yellow light twinkling in front of us
through the gloom to guide us on our sombre errand.
There was little difficulty in entering the grounds, for
unrepaired breaches gaped in the old park wall. Making our way
among the trees, we reached the lawn, crossed it, and were about
to enter through the window when out from a clump of laurel
bushes there darted what seemed to be a hideous and distorted
child, who threw itself upon the grass with writhing limbs and
then ran swiftly across the lawn into the darkness.
"My God" I whispered "did you see it?"
Holmes was for the moment as startled as I. His hand closed like
a vice upon my wrist in his agitation. Then he broke into a low
laugh and put his lips to my ear.
"It is a nice household," he murmured. "That is the baboon."
I had forgotten the strange pets which the doctor affected. There
was a cheetah, too perhaps we might find it upon our shoulders
at any moment. I confess that I felt easier in my mind when,
after following Holmes' example and slipping off my shoes, I
found myself inside the bedroom. My companion noiselessly closed
the shutters, moved the lamp onto the table, and cast his eyes
round the room. All was as we had seen it in the daytime. Then
creeping up to me and making a trumpet of his hand, he whispered
into my ear again so gently that it was all that I could do to
distinguish the words
"The least sound would be fatal to our plans."
I nodded to show that I had heard.
"We must sit without light. He would see it through the
ventilator."
I nodded again.
"Do not go asleep your very life may depend upon it. Have your
pistol ready in case we should need it. I will sit on the side of
the bed, and you in that chair."
I took out my revolver and laid it on the corner of the table.
Holmes had brought up a long thin cane, and this he placed upon
the bed beside him. By it he laid the box of matches and the
stump of a candle. Then he turned down the lamp, and we were left
in darkness.
How shall I ever forget that dreadful vigil? I could not hear a
sound, not even the drawing of a breath, and yet I knew that my
companion sat openeyed, within a few feet of me, in the same
state of nervous tension in which I was myself. The shutters cut
off the least ray of light, and we waited in absolute darkness.
From outside came the occasional cry of a nightbird, and once at
our very window a long drawn catlike whine, which told us that
the cheetah was indeed at liberty. Far away we could hear the
deep tones of the parish clock, which boomed out every quarter of
an hour. How long they seemed, those quarters Twelve struck, and
one and two and three, and still we sat waiting silently for
whatever might befall.
Suddenly there was the momentary gleam of a light up in the
direction of the ventilator, which vanished immediately, but was
succeeded by a strong smell of burning oil and heated metal.
Someone in the next room had lit a darklantern. I heard a gentle
sound of movement, and then all was silent once more, though the
smell grew stronger. For half an hour I sat with straining ears.
Then suddenly another sound became audiblea very gentle,
soothing sound, like that of a small jet of steam escaping
continually from a kettle. The instant that we heard it, Holmes
sprang from the bed, struck a match, and lashed furiously with
his cane at the bellpull.
"You see it, Watson?" he yelled. "You see it?"
But I saw nothing. At the moment when Holmes struck the light I
heard a low, clear whistle, but the sudden glare flashing into my
weary eyes made it impossible for me to tell what it was at which
my friend lashed so savagely. I could, however, see that his face
was deadly pale and filled with horror and loathing. He had
ceased to strike and was gazing up at the ventilator when
suddenly there broke from the silence of the night the most
horrible cry to which I have ever listened. It swelled up louder
and louder, a hoarse yell of pain and fear and anger all mingled
in the one dreadful shriek. They say that away down in the
village, and even in the distant parsonage, that cry raised the
sleepers from their beds. It struck cold to our hearts, and I
stood gazing at Holmes, and he at me, until the last echoes of it
had died away into the silence from which it rose.
"What can it mean?" I gasped.
"It means that it is all over," Holmes answered. "And perhaps,
after all, it is for the best. Take your pistol, and we will
enter Dr. Roylott's room."
With a grave face he lit the lamp and led the way down the
corridor. Twice he struck at the chamber door without any reply
from within. Then he turned the handle and entered, I at his
heels, with the cocked pistol in my hand.
It was a singular sight which met our eyes. On the table stood a
darklantern with the shutter half open, throwing a brilliant
beam of light upon the iron safe, the door of which was ajar.
Beside this table, on the wooden chair, sat Dr. Grimesby Roylott
clad in a long grey dressinggown, his bare ankles protruding
beneath, and his feet thrust into red heelless Turkish slippers.
Across his lap lay the short stock with the long lash which we
had noticed during the day. His chin was cocked upward and his
eyes were fixed in a dreadful, rigid stare at the corner of the
ceiling. Round his brow he had a peculiar yellow band, with
brownish speckles, which seemed to be bound tightly round his
head. As we entered he made neither sound nor motion.
"The band the speckled band" whispered Holmes.
I took a step forward. In an instant his strange headgear began
to move, and there reared itself from among his hair the squat
diamondshaped head and puffed neck of a loathsome serpent.
"It is a swamp adder" cried Holmes "the deadliest snake in
India. He has died within ten seconds of being bitten. Violence
does, in truth, recoil upon the violent, and the schemer falls
into the pit which he digs for another. Let us thrust this
creature back into its den, and we can then remove Miss Stoner to
some place of shelter and let the county police know what has
happened."
As he spoke he drew the dogwhip swiftly from the dead man's lap,
and throwing the noose round the reptile's neck he drew it from
its horrid perch and, carrying it at arm's length, threw it into
the iron safe, which he closed upon it.
Such are the true facts of the death of Dr. Grimesby Roylott, of
Stoke Moran. It is not necessary that I should prolong a
narrative which has already run to too great a length by telling
how we broke the sad news to the terrified girl, how we conveyed
her by the morning train to the care of her good aunt at Harrow,
of how the slow process of official inquiry came to the
conclusion that the doctor met his fate while indiscreetly
playing with a dangerous pet. The little which I had yet to learn
of the case was told me by Sherlock Holmes as we travelled back
next day.
"I had," said he, "come to an entirely erroneous conclusion which
shows, my dear Watson, how dangerous it always is to reason from
insufficient data. The presence of the gipsies, and the use of
the word 'band,' which was used by the poor girl, no doubt, to
explain the appearance which she had caught a hurried glimpse of
by the light of her match, were sufficient to put me upon an
entirely wrong scent. I can only claim the merit that I instantly
reconsidered my position when, however, it became clear to me
that whatever danger threatened an occupant of the room could not
come either from the window or the door. My attention was
speedily drawn, as I have already remarked to you, to this
ventilator, and to the bellrope which hung down to the bed. The
discovery that this was a dummy, and that the bed was clamped to
the floor, instantly gave rise to the suspicion that the rope was
there as a bridge for something passing through the hole and
coming to the bed. The idea of a snake instantly occurred to me,
and when I coupled it with my knowledge that the doctor was
furnished with a supply of creatures from India, I felt that I
was probably on the right track. The idea of using a form of
poison which could not possibly be discovered by any chemical
test was just such a one as would occur to a clever and ruthless
man who had had an Eastern training. The rapidity with which such
a poison would take effect would also, from his point of view, be
an advantage. It would be a sharpeyed coroner, indeed, who could
distinguish the two little dark punctures which would show where
the poison fangs had done their work. Then I thought of the
whistle. Of course he must recall the snake before the morning
light revealed it to the victim. He had trained it, probably by
the use of the milk which we saw, to return to him when summoned.
He would put it through this ventilator at the hour that he
thought best, with the certainty that it would crawl down the
rope and land on the bed. It might or might not bite the
occupant, perhaps she might escape every night for a week, but
sooner or later she must fall a victim.
"I had come to these conclusions before ever I had entered his
room. An inspection of his chair showed me that he had been in
the habit of standing on it, which of course would be necessary
in order that he should reach the ventilator. The sight of the
safe, the saucer of milk, and the loop of whipcord were enough to
finally dispel any doubts which may have remained. The metallic
clang heard by Miss Stoner was obviously caused by her stepfather
hastily closing the door of his safe upon its terrible occupant.
Having once made up my mind, you know the steps which I took in
order to put the matter to the proof. I heard the creature hiss
as I have no doubt that you did also, and I instantly lit the
light and attacked it."
"With the result of driving it through the ventilator."
"And also with the result of causing it to turn upon its master
at the other side. Some of the blows of my cane came home and
roused its snakish temper, so that it flew upon the first person
it saw. In this way I am no doubt indirectly responsible for Dr.
Grimesby Roylott's death, and I cannot say that it is likely to
weigh very heavily upon my conscience."
IX. THE ADVENTURE OF THE ENGINEER'S THUMB
Of all the problems which have been submitted to my friend, Mr.
Sherlock Holmes, for solution during the years of our intimacy,
there were only two which I was the means of introducing to his
noticethat of Mr. Hatherley's thumb, and that of Colonel
Warburton's madness. Of these the latter may have afforded a
finer field for an acute and original observer, but the other was
so strange in its inception and so dramatic in its details that
it may be the more worthy of being placed upon record, even if it
gave my friend fewer openings for those deductive methods of
reasoning by which he achieved such remarkable results. The story
has, I believe, been told more than once in the newspapers, but,
like all such narratives, its effect is much less striking when
set forth en bloc in a single halfcolumn of print than when the
facts slowly evolve before your own eyes, and the mystery clears
gradually away as each new discovery furnishes a step which leads
on to the complete truth. At the time the circumstances made a
deep impression upon me, and the lapse of two years has hardly
served to weaken the effect.
It was in the summer of ', not long after my marriage, that the
events occurred which I am now about to summarise. I had returned
to civil practice and had finally abandoned Holmes in his Baker
Street rooms, although I continually visited him and occasionally
even persuaded him to forgo his Bohemian habits so far as to come
and visit us. My practice had steadily increased, and as I
happened to live at no very great distance from Paddington
Station, I got a few patients from among the officials. One of
these, whom I had cured of a painful and lingering disease, was
never weary of advertising my virtues and of endeavouring to send
me on every sufferer over whom he might have any influence.
One morning, at a little before seven o'clock, I was awakened by
the maid tapping at the door to announce that two men had come
from Paddington and were waiting in the consultingroom. I
dressed hurriedly, for I knew by experience that railway cases
were seldom trivial, and hastened downstairs. As I descended, my
old ally, the guard, came out of the room and closed the door
tightly behind him.
"I've got him here," he whispered, jerking his thumb over his
shoulder "he's all right."
"What is it, then?" I asked, for his manner suggested that it was
some strange creature which he had caged up in my room.
"It's a new patient," he whispered. "I thought I'd bring him
round myself then he couldn't slip away. There he is, all safe
and sound. I must go now, Doctor I have my dooties, just the
same as you." And off he went, this trusty tout, without even
giving me time to thank him.
I entered my consultingroom and found a gentleman seated by the
table. He was quietly dressed in a suit of heather tweed with a
soft cloth cap which he had laid down upon my books. Round one of
his hands he had a handkerchief wrapped, which was mottled all
over with bloodstains. He was young, not more than
fiveandtwenty, I should say, with a strong, masculine face but
he was exceedingly pale and gave me the impression of a man who
was suffering from some strong agitation, which it took all his
strength of mind to control.
"I am sorry to knock you up so early, Doctor," said he, "but I
have had a very serious accident during the night. I came in by
train this morning, and on inquiring at Paddington as to where I
might find a doctor, a worthy fellow very kindly escorted me
here. I gave the maid a card, but I see that she has left it upon
the sidetable."
I took it up and glanced at it. "Mr. Victor Hatherley, hydraulic
engineer, A, Victoria Street rd floor." That was the name,
style, and abode of my morning visitor. "I regret that I have
kept you waiting," said I, sitting down in my librarychair. "You
are fresh from a night journey, I understand, which is in itself
a monotonous occupation."
"Oh, my night could not be called monotonous," said he, and
laughed. He laughed very heartily, with a high, ringing note,
leaning back in his chair and shaking his sides. All my medical
instincts rose up against that laugh.
"Stop it" I cried "pull yourself together" and I poured out
some water from a caraffe.
It was useless, however. He was off in one of those hysterical
outbursts which come upon a strong nature when some great crisis
is over and gone. Presently he came to himself once more, very
weary and palelooking.
"I have been making a fool of myself," he gasped.
"Not at all. Drink this." I dashed some brandy into the water,
and the colour began to come back to his bloodless cheeks.
"That's better" said he. "And now, Doctor, perhaps you would
kindly attend to my thumb, or rather to the place where my thumb
used to be."
He unwound the handkerchief and held out his hand. It gave even
my hardened nerves a shudder to look at it. There were four
protruding fingers and a horrid red, spongy surface where the
thumb should have been. It had been hacked or torn right out from
the roots.
"Good heavens" I cried, "this is a terrible injury. It must have
bled considerably."
"Yes, it did. I fainted when it was done, and I think that I must
have been senseless for a long time. When I came to I found that
it was still bleeding, so I tied one end of my handkerchief very
tightly round the wrist and braced it up with a twig."
"Excellent You should have been a surgeon."
"It is a question of hydraulics, you see, and came within my own
province."
"This has been done," said I, examining the wound, "by a very
heavy and sharp instrument."
"A thing like a cleaver," said he.
"An accident, I presume?"
"By no means."
"What a murderous attack?"
"Very murderous indeed."
"You horrify me."
I sponged the wound, cleaned it, dressed it, and finally covered
it over with cotton wadding and carbolised bandages. He lay back
without wincing, though he bit his lip from time to time.
"How is that?" I asked when I had finished.
"Capital Between your brandy and your bandage, I feel a new man.
I was very weak, but I have had a good deal to go through."
"Perhaps you had better not speak of the matter. It is evidently
trying to your nerves."
"Oh, no, not now. I shall have to tell my tale to the police
but, between ourselves, if it were not for the convincing
evidence of this wound of mine, I should be surprised if they
believed my statement, for it is a very extraordinary one, and I
have not much in the way of proof with which to back it up and,
even if they believe me, the clues which I can give them are so
vague that it is a question whether justice will be done."
"Ha" cried I, "if it is anything in the nature of a problem
which you desire to see solved, I should strongly recommend you
to come to my friend, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, before you go to the
official police."
"Oh, I have heard of that fellow," answered my visitor, "and I
should be very glad if he would take the matter up, though of
course I must use the official police as well. Would you give me
an introduction to him?"
"I'll do better. I'll take you round to him myself."
"I should be immensely obliged to you."
"We'll call a cab and go together. We shall just be in time to
have a little breakfast with him. Do you feel equal to it?"
"Yes I shall not feel easy until I have told my story."
"Then my servant will call a cab, and I shall be with you in an
instant." I rushed upstairs, explained the matter shortly to my
wife, and in five minutes was inside a hansom, driving with my
new acquaintance to Baker Street.
Sherlock Holmes was, as I expected, lounging about his
sittingroom in his dressinggown, reading the agony column of The
Times and smoking his beforebreakfast pipe, which was composed
of all the plugs and dottles left from his smokes of the day
before, all carefully dried and collected on the corner of the
mantelpiece. He received us in his quietly genial fashion,
ordered fresh rashers and eggs, and joined us in a hearty meal.
When it was concluded he settled our new acquaintance upon the
sofa, placed a pillow beneath his head, and laid a glass of
brandy and water within his reach.
"It is easy to see that your experience has been no common one,
Mr. Hatherley," said he. "Pray, lie down there and make yourself
absolutely at home. Tell us what you can, but stop when you are
tired and keep up your strength with a little stimulant."
"Thank you," said my patient. "but I have felt another man since
the doctor bandaged me, and I think that your breakfast has
completed the cure. I shall take up as little of your valuable
time as possible, so I shall start at once upon my peculiar
experiences."
Holmes sat in his big armchair with the weary, heavylidded
expression which veiled his keen and eager nature, while I sat
opposite to him, and we listened in silence to the strange story
which our visitor detailed to us.
"You must know," said he, "that I am an orphan and a bachelor,
residing alone in lodgings in London. By profession I am a
hydraulic engineer, and I have had considerable experience of my
work during the seven years that I was apprenticed to Venner 
Matheson, the wellknown firm, of Greenwich. Two years ago,
having served my time, and having also come into a fair sum of
money through my poor father's death, I determined to start in
business for myself and took professional chambers in Victoria
Street.
"I suppose that everyone finds his first independent start in
business a dreary experience. To me it has been exceptionally so.
During two years I have had three consultations and one small
job, and that is absolutely all that my profession has brought
me. My gross takings amount to  pounds s. Every day, from
nine in the morning until four in the afternoon, I waited in my
little den, until at last my heart began to sink, and I came to
believe that I should never have any practice at all.
"Yesterday, however, just as I was thinking of leaving the
office, my clerk entered to say there was a gentleman waiting who
wished to see me upon business. He brought up a card, too, with
the name of 'Colonel Lysander Stark' engraved upon it. Close at
his heels came the colonel himself, a man rather over the middle
size, but of an exceeding thinness. I do not think that I have
ever seen so thin a man. His whole face sharpened away into nose
and chin, and the skin of his cheeks was drawn quite tense over
his outstanding bones. Yet this emaciation seemed to be his
natural habit, and due to no disease, for his eye was bright, his
step brisk, and his bearing assured. He was plainly but neatly
dressed, and his age, I should judge, would be nearer forty than
thirty.
"'Mr. Hatherley?' said he, with something of a German accent.
'You have been recommended to me, Mr. Hatherley, as being a man
who is not only proficient in his profession but is also discreet
and capable of preserving a secret.'
"I bowed, feeling as flattered as any young man would at such an
address. 'May I ask who it was who gave me so good a character?'
"'Well, perhaps it is better that I should not tell you that just
at this moment. I have it from the same source that you are both
an orphan and a bachelor and are residing alone in London.'
"'That is quite correct,' I answered 'but you will excuse me if
I say that I cannot see how all this bears upon my professional
qualifications. I understand that it was on a professional matter
that you wished to speak to me?'
"'Undoubtedly so. But you will find that all I say is really to
the point. I have a professional commission for you, but absolute
secrecy is quite essentialabsolute secrecy, you understand, and
of course we may expect that more from a man who is alone than
from one who lives in the bosom of his family.'
"'If I promise to keep a secret,' said I, 'you may absolutely
depend upon my doing so.'
"He looked very hard at me as I spoke, and it seemed to me that I
had never seen so suspicious and questioning an eye.
"'Do you promise, then?' said he at last.
"'Yes, I promise.'
"'Absolute and complete silence before, during, and after? No
reference to the matter at all, either in word or writing?'
"'I have already given you my word.'
"'Very good.' He suddenly sprang up, and darting like lightning
across the room he flung open the door. The passage outside was
empty.
"'That's all right,' said he, coming back. 'I know that clerks are
sometimes curious as to their master's affairs. Now we can talk
in safety.' He drew up his chair very close to mine and began to
stare at me again with the same questioning and thoughtful look.
"A feeling of repulsion, and of something akin to fear had begun
to rise within me at the strange antics of this fleshless man.
Even my dread of losing a client could not restrain me from
showing my impatience.
"'I beg that you will state your business, sir,' said I 'my time
is of value.' Heaven forgive me for that last sentence, but the
words came to my lips.
"'How would fifty guineas for a night's work suit you?' he asked.
"'Most admirably.'
"'I say a night's work, but an hour's would be nearer the mark. I
simply want your opinion about a hydraulic stamping machine which
has got out of gear. If you show us what is wrong we shall soon
set it right ourselves. What do you think of such a commission as
that?'
"'The work appears to be light and the pay munificent.'
"'Precisely so. We shall want you to come tonight by the last
train.'
"'Where to?'
"'To Eyford, in Berkshire. It is a little place near the borders
of Oxfordshire, and within seven miles of Reading. There is a
train from Paddington which would bring you there at about
"'Very good.'
"'I shall come down in a carriage to meet you.'
"'There is a drive, then?'
"'Yes, our little place is quite out in the country. It is a good
seven miles from Eyford Station.'
"'Then we can hardly get there before midnight. I suppose there
would be no chance of a train back. I should be compelled to stop
the night.'
"'Yes, we could easily give you a shakedown.'
"'That is very awkward. Could I not come at some more convenient
hour?'
"'We have judged it best that you should come late. It is to
recompense you for any inconvenience that we are paying to you, a
young and unknown man, a fee which would buy an opinion from the
very heads of your profession. Still, of course, if you would
like to draw out of the business, there is plenty of time to do
so.'
"I thought of the fifty guineas, and of how very useful they
would be to me. 'Not at all,' said I, 'I shall be very happy to
accommodate myself to your wishes. I should like, however, to
understand a little more clearly what it is that you wish me to
do.'
"'Quite so. It is very natural that the pledge of secrecy which
we have exacted from you should have aroused your curiosity. I
have no wish to commit you to anything without your having it all
laid before you. I suppose that we are absolutely safe from
eavesdroppers?'
"'Entirely.'
"'Then the matter stands thus. You are probably aware that
fuller'searth is a valuable product, and that it is only found
in one or two places in England?'
"'I have heard so.'
"'Some little time ago I bought a small placea very small
placewithin ten miles of Reading. I was fortunate enough to
discover that there was a deposit of fuller'searth in one of my
fields. On examining it, however, I found that this deposit was a
comparatively small one, and that it formed a link between two
very much larger ones upon the right and leftboth of them,
however, in the grounds of my neighbours. These good people were
absolutely ignorant that their land contained that which was
quite as valuable as a goldmine. Naturally, it was to my
interest to buy their land before they discovered its true value,
but unfortunately I had no capital by which I could do this. I
took a few of my friends into the secret, however, and they
suggested that we should quietly and secretly work our own little
deposit and that in this way we should earn the money which would
enable us to buy the neighbouring fields. This we have now been
doing for some time, and in order to help us in our operations we
erected a hydraulic press. This press, as I have already
explained, has got out of order, and we wish your advice upon the
subject. We guard our secret very jealously, however, and if it
once became known that we had hydraulic engineers coming to our
little house, it would soon rouse inquiry, and then, if the facts
came out, it would be goodbye to any chance of getting these
fields and carrying out our plans. That is why I have made you
promise me that you will not tell a human being that you are
going to Eyford tonight. I hope that I make it all plain?'
"'I quite follow you,' said I. 'The only point which I could not
quite understand was what use you could make of a hydraulic press
in excavating fuller'searth, which, as I understand, is dug out
like gravel from a pit.'
"'Ah' said he carelessly, 'we have our own process. We compress
the earth into bricks, so as to remove them without revealing
what they are. But that is a mere detail. I have taken you fully
into my confidence now, Mr. Hatherley, and I have shown you how I
trust you.' He rose as he spoke. 'I shall expect you, then, at
Eyford at .'
"'I shall certainly be there.'
"'And not a word to a soul.' He looked at me with a last long,
questioning gaze, and then, pressing my hand in a cold, dank
grasp, he hurried from the room.
"Well, when I came to think it all over in cool blood I was very
much astonished, as you may both think, at this sudden commission
which had been intrusted to me. On the one hand, of course, I was
glad, for the fee was at least tenfold what I should have asked
had I set a price upon my own services, and it was possible that
this order might lead to other ones. On the other hand, the face
and manner of my patron had made an unpleasant impression upon
me, and I could not think that his explanation of the
fuller'searth was sufficient to explain the necessity for my
coming at midnight, and his extreme anxiety lest I should tell
anyone of my errand. However, I threw all fears to the winds, ate
a hearty supper, drove to Paddington, and started off, having
obeyed to the letter the injunction as to holding my tongue.
"At Reading I had to change not only my carriage but my station.
However, I was in time for the last train to Eyford, and I
reached the little dimlit station after eleven o'clock. I was the
only passenger who got out there, and there was no one upon the
platform save a single sleepy porter with a lantern. As I passed
out through the wicket gate, however, I found my acquaintance of
the morning waiting in the shadow upon the other side. Without a
word he grasped my arm and hurried me into a carriage, the door
of which was standing open. He drew up the windows on either
side, tapped on the woodwork, and away we went as fast as the
horse could go."
"One horse?" interjected Holmes.
"Yes, only one."
"Did you observe the colour?"
"Yes, I saw it by the sidelights when I was stepping into the
carriage. It was a chestnut."
"Tiredlooking or fresh?"
"Oh, fresh and glossy."
"Thank you. I am sorry to have interrupted you. Pray continue
your most interesting statement."
"Away we went then, and we drove for at least an hour. Colonel
Lysander Stark had said that it was only seven miles, but I
should think, from the rate that we seemed to go, and from the
time that we took, that it must have been nearer twelve. He sat
at my side in silence all the time, and I was aware, more than
once when I glanced in his direction, that he was looking at me
with great intensity. The country roads seem to be not very good
in that part of the world, for we lurched and jolted terribly. I
tried to look out of the windows to see something of where we
were, but they were made of frosted glass, and I could make out
nothing save the occasional bright blur of a passing light. Now
and then I hazarded some remark to break the monotony of the
journey, but the colonel answered only in monosyllables, and the
conversation soon flagged. At last, however, the bumping of the
road was exchanged for the crisp smoothness of a graveldrive,
and the carriage came to a stand. Colonel Lysander Stark sprang
out, and, as I followed after him, pulled me swiftly into a porch
which gaped in front of us. We stepped, as it were, right out of
the carriage and into the hall, so that I failed to catch the
most fleeting glance of the front of the house. The instant that
I had crossed the threshold the door slammed heavily behind us,
and I heard faintly the rattle of the wheels as the carriage
drove away.
"It was pitch dark inside the house, and the colonel fumbled
about looking for matches and muttering under his breath.
Suddenly a door opened at the other end of the passage, and a
long, golden bar of light shot out in our direction. It grew
broader, and a woman appeared with a lamp in her hand, which she
held above her head, pushing her face forward and peering at us.
I could see that she was pretty, and from the gloss with which
the light shone upon her dark dress I knew that it was a rich
material. She spoke a few words in a foreign tongue in a tone as
though asking a question, and when my companion answered in a
gruff monosyllable she gave such a start that the lamp nearly
fell from her hand. Colonel Stark went up to her, whispered
something in her ear, and then, pushing her back into the room
from whence she had come, he walked towards me again with the
lamp in his hand.
"'Perhaps you will have the kindness to wait in this room for a
few minutes,' said he, throwing open another door. It was a
quiet, little, plainly furnished room, with a round table in the
centre, on which several German books were scattered. Colonel
Stark laid down the lamp on the top of a harmonium beside the
door. 'I shall not keep you waiting an instant,' said he, and
vanished into the darkness.
"I glanced at the books upon the table, and in spite of my
ignorance of German I could see that two of them were treatises
on science, the others being volumes of poetry. Then I walked
across to the window, hoping that I might catch some glimpse of
the countryside, but an oak shutter, heavily barred, was folded
across it. It was a wonderfully silent house. There was an old
clock ticking loudly somewhere in the passage, but otherwise
everything was deadly still. A vague feeling of uneasiness began
to steal over me. Who were these German people, and what were
they doing living in this strange, outoftheway place? And
where was the place? I was ten miles or so from Eyford, that was
all I knew, but whether north, south, east, or west I had no
idea. For that matter, Reading, and possibly other large towns,
were within that radius, so the place might not be so secluded,
after all. Yet it was quite certain, from the absolute stillness,
that we were in the country. I paced up and down the room,
humming a tune under my breath to keep up my spirits and feeling
that I was thoroughly earning my fiftyguinea fee.
"Suddenly, without any preliminary sound in the midst of the
utter stillness, the door of my room swung slowly open. The woman
was standing in the aperture, the darkness of the hall behind
her, the yellow light from my lamp beating upon her eager and
beautiful face. I could see at a glance that she was sick with
fear, and the sight sent a chill to my own heart. She held up one
shaking finger to warn me to be silent, and she shot a few
whispered words of broken English at me, her eyes glancing back,
like those of a frightened horse, into the gloom behind her.
"'I would go,' said she, trying hard, as it seemed to me, to
speak calmly 'I would go. I should not stay here. There is no
good for you to do.'
"'But, madam,' said I, 'I have not yet done what I came for. I
cannot possibly leave until I have seen the machine.'
"'It is not worth your while to wait,' she went on. 'You can pass
through the door no one hinders.' And then, seeing that I smiled
and shook my head, she suddenly threw aside her constraint and
made a step forward, with her hands wrung together. 'For the love
of Heaven' she whispered, 'get away from here before it is too
late'
"But I am somewhat headstrong by nature, and the more ready to
engage in an affair when there is some obstacle in the way. I
thought of my fiftyguinea fee, of my wearisome journey, and of
the unpleasant night which seemed to be before me. Was it all to
go for nothing? Why should I slink away without having carried
out my commission, and without the payment which was my due? This
woman might, for all I knew, be a monomaniac. With a stout
bearing, therefore, though her manner had shaken me more than I
cared to confess, I still shook my head and declared my intention
of remaining where I was. She was about to renew her entreaties
when a door slammed overhead, and the sound of several footsteps
was heard upon the stairs. She listened for an instant, threw up
her hands with a despairing gesture, and vanished as suddenly and
as noiselessly as she had come.
"The newcomers were Colonel Lysander Stark and a short thick man
with a chinchilla beard growing out of the creases of his double
chin, who was introduced to me as Mr. Ferguson.
"'This is my secretary and manager,' said the colonel. 'By the
way, I was under the impression that I left this door shut just
now. I fear that you have felt the draught.'
"'On the contrary,' said I, 'I opened the door myself because I
felt the room to be a little close.'
"He shot one of his suspicious looks at me. 'Perhaps we had
better proceed to business, then,' said he. 'Mr. Ferguson and I
will take you up to see the machine.'
"'I had better put my hat on, I suppose.'
"'Oh, no, it is in the house.'
"'What, you dig fuller'searth in the house?'
"'No, no. This is only where we compress it. But never mind that.
All we wish you to do is to examine the machine and to let us
know what is wrong with it.'
"We went upstairs together, the colonel first with the lamp, the
fat manager and I behind him. It was a labyrinth of an old house,
with corridors, passages, narrow winding staircases, and little
low doors, the thresholds of which were hollowed out by the
generations who had crossed them. There were no carpets and no
signs of any furniture above the ground floor, while the plaster
was peeling off the walls, and the damp was breaking through in
green, unhealthy blotches. I tried to put on as unconcerned an
air as possible, but I had not forgotten the warnings of the
lady, even though I disregarded them, and I kept a keen eye upon
my two companions. Ferguson appeared to be a morose and silent
man, but I could see from the little that he said that he was at
least a fellowcountryman.
"Colonel Lysander Stark stopped at last before a low door, which
he unlocked. Within was a small, square room, in which the three
of us could hardly get at one time. Ferguson remained outside,
and the colonel ushered me in.
"'We are now,' said he, 'actually within the hydraulic press, and
it would be a particularly unpleasant thing for us if anyone were
to turn it on. The ceiling of this small chamber is really the
end of the descending piston, and it comes down with the force of
many tons upon this metal floor. There are small lateral columns
of water outside which receive the force, and which transmit and
multiply it in the manner which is familiar to you. The machine
goes readily enough, but there is some stiffness in the working
of it, and it has lost a little of its force. Perhaps you will
have the goodness to look it over and to show us how we can set
it right.'
"I took the lamp from him, and I examined the machine very
thoroughly. It was indeed a gigantic one, and capable of
exercising enormous pressure. When I passed outside, however, and
pressed down the levers which controlled it, I knew at once by
the whishing sound that there was a slight leakage, which allowed
a regurgitation of water through one of the side cylinders. An
examination showed that one of the indiarubber bands which was
round the head of a drivingrod had shrunk so as not quite to
fill the socket along which it worked. This was clearly the cause
of the loss of power, and I pointed it out to my companions, who
followed my remarks very carefully and asked several practical
questions as to how they should proceed to set it right. When I
had made it clear to them, I returned to the main chamber of the
machine and took a good look at it to satisfy my own curiosity.
It was obvious at a glance that the story of the fuller'searth
was the merest fabrication, for it would be absurd to suppose
that so powerful an engine could be designed for so inadequate a
purpose. The walls were of wood, but the floor consisted of a
large iron trough, and when I came to examine it I could see a
crust of metallic deposit all over it. I had stooped and was
scraping at this to see exactly what it was when I heard a
muttered exclamation in German and saw the cadaverous face of the
colonel looking down at me.
"'What are you doing there?' he asked.
"I felt angry at having been tricked by so elaborate a story as
that which he had told me. 'I was admiring your fuller'searth,'
said I 'I think that I should be better able to advise you as to
your machine if I knew what the exact purpose was for which it
was used.'
"The instant that I uttered the words I regretted the rashness of
my speech. His face set hard, and a baleful light sprang up in
his grey eyes.
"'Very well,' said he, 'you shall know all about the machine.' He
took a step backward, slammed the little door, and turned the key
in the lock. I rushed towards it and pulled at the handle, but it
was quite secure, and did not give in the least to my kicks and
shoves. 'Hullo' I yelled. 'Hullo Colonel Let me out'
"And then suddenly in the silence I heard a sound which sent my
heart into my mouth. It was the clank of the levers and the swish
of the leaking cylinder. He had set the engine at work. The lamp
still stood upon the floor where I had placed it when examining
the trough. By its light I saw that the black ceiling was coming
down upon me, slowly, jerkily, but, as none knew better than
myself, with a force which must within a minute grind me to a
shapeless pulp. I threw myself, screaming, against the door, and
dragged with my nails at the lock. I implored the colonel to let
me out, but the remorseless clanking of the levers drowned my
cries. The ceiling was only a foot or two above my head, and with
my hand upraised I could feel its hard, rough surface. Then it
flashed through my mind that the pain of my death would depend
very much upon the position in which I met it. If I lay on my
face the weight would come upon my spine, and I shuddered to
think of that dreadful snap. Easier the other way, perhaps and
yet, had I the nerve to lie and look up at that deadly black
shadow wavering down upon me? Already I was unable to stand
erect, when my eye caught something which brought a gush of hope
back to my heart.
"I have said that though the floor and ceiling were of iron, the
walls were of wood. As I gave a last hurried glance around, I saw
a thin line of yellow light between two of the boards, which
broadened and broadened as a small panel was pushed backward. For
an instant I could hardly believe that here was indeed a door
which led away from death. The next instant I threw myself
through, and lay halffainting upon the other side. The panel had
closed again behind me, but the crash of the lamp, and a few
moments afterwards the clang of the two slabs of metal, told me
how narrow had been my escape.
"I was recalled to myself by a frantic plucking at my wrist, and
I found myself lying upon the stone floor of a narrow corridor,
while a woman bent over me and tugged at me with her left hand,
while she held a candle in her right. It was the same good friend
whose warning I had so foolishly rejected.
"'Come come' she cried breathlessly. 'They will be here in a
moment. They will see that you are not there. Oh, do not waste
the soprecious time, but come'
"This time, at least, I did not scorn her advice. I staggered to
my feet and ran with her along the corridor and down a winding
stair. The latter led to another broad passage, and just as we
reached it we heard the sound of running feet and the shouting of
two voices, one answering the other from the floor on which we
were and from the one beneath. My guide stopped and looked about
her like one who is at her wit's end. Then she threw open a door
which led into a bedroom, through the window of which the moon
was shining brightly.
"'It is your only chance,' said she. 'It is high, but it may be
that you can jump it.'
"As she spoke a light sprang into view at the further end of the
passage, and I saw the lean figure of Colonel Lysander Stark
rushing forward with a lantern in one hand and a weapon like a
butcher's cleaver in the other. I rushed across the bedroom,
flung open the window, and looked out. How quiet and sweet and
wholesome the garden looked in the moonlight, and it could not be
more than thirty feet down. I clambered out upon the sill, but I
hesitated to jump until I should have heard what passed between
my saviour and the ruffian who pursued me. If she were illused,
then at any risks I was determined to go back to her assistance.
The thought had hardly flashed through my mind before he was at
the door, pushing his way past her but she threw her arms round
him and tried to hold him back.
"'Fritz Fritz' she cried in English, 'remember your promise
after the last time. You said it should not be again. He will be
silent Oh, he will be silent'
"'You are mad, Elise' he shouted, struggling to break away from
her. 'You will be the ruin of us. He has seen too much. Let me
pass, I say' He dashed her to one side, and, rushing to the
window, cut at me with his heavy weapon. I had let myself go, and
was hanging by the hands to the sill, when his blow fell. I was
conscious of a dull pain, my grip loosened, and I fell into the
garden below.
"I was shaken but not hurt by the fall so I picked myself up and
rushed off among the bushes as hard as I could run, for I
understood that I was far from being out of danger yet. Suddenly,
however, as I ran, a deadly dizziness and sickness came over me.
I glanced down at my hand, which was throbbing painfully, and
then, for the first time, saw that my thumb had been cut off and
that the blood was pouring from my wound. I endeavoured to tie my
handkerchief round it, but there came a sudden buzzing in my
ears, and next moment I fell in a dead faint among the
rosebushes.
"How long I remained unconscious I cannot tell. It must have been
a very long time, for the moon had sunk, and a bright morning was
breaking when I came to myself. My clothes were all sodden with
dew, and my coatsleeve was drenched with blood from my wounded
thumb. The smarting of it recalled in an instant all the
particulars of my night's adventure, and I sprang to my feet with
the feeling that I might hardly yet be safe from my pursuers. But
to my astonishment, when I came to look round me, neither house
nor garden were to be seen. I had been lying in an angle of the
hedge close by the highroad, and just a little lower down was a
long building, which proved, upon my approaching it, to be the
very station at which I had arrived upon the previous night. Were
it not for the ugly wound upon my hand, all that had passed
during those dreadful hours might have been an evil dream.
"Half dazed, I went into the station and asked about the morning
train. There would be one to Reading in less than an hour. The
same porter was on duty, I found, as had been there when I
arrived. I inquired of him whether he had ever heard of Colonel
Lysander Stark. The name was strange to him. Had he observed a
carriage the night before waiting for me? No, he had not. Was
there a policestation anywhere near? There was one about three
miles off.
"It was too far for me to go, weak and ill as I was. I determined
to wait until I got back to town before telling my story to the
police. It was a little past six when I arrived, so I went first
to have my wound dressed, and then the doctor was kind enough to
bring me along here. I put the case into your hands and shall do
exactly what you advise."
We both sat in silence for some little time after listening to
this extraordinary narrative. Then Sherlock Holmes pulled down
from the shelf one of the ponderous commonplace books in which he
placed his cuttings.
"Here is an advertisement which will interest you," said he. "It
appeared in all the papers about a year ago. Listen to this
'Lost, on the th inst., Mr. Jeremiah Hayling, aged
twentysix, a hydraulic engineer. Left his lodgings at ten
o'clock at night, and has not been heard of since. Was
dressed in,' etc., etc. Ha That represents the last time that
the colonel needed to have his machine overhauled, I fancy."
"Good heavens" cried my patient. "Then that explains what the
girl said."
"Undoubtedly. It is quite clear that the colonel was a cool and
desperate man, who was absolutely determined that nothing should
stand in the way of his little game, like those outandout
pirates who will leave no survivor from a captured ship. Well,
every moment now is precious, so if you feel equal to it we shall
go down to Scotland Yard at once as a preliminary to starting for
Eyford."
Some three hours or so afterwards we were all in the train
together, bound from Reading to the little Berkshire village.
There were Sherlock Holmes, the hydraulic engineer, Inspector
Bradstreet, of Scotland Yard, a plainclothes man, and myself.
Bradstreet had spread an ordnance map of the county out upon the
seat and was busy with his compasses drawing a circle with Eyford
for its centre.
"There you are," said he. "That circle is drawn at a radius of
ten miles from the village. The place we want must be somewhere
near that line. You said ten miles, I think, sir."
"It was an hour's good drive."
"And you think that they brought you back all that way when you
were unconscious?"
"They must have done so. I have a confused memory, too, of having
been lifted and conveyed somewhere."
"What I cannot understand," said I, "is why they should have
spared you when they found you lying fainting in the garden.
Perhaps the villain was softened by the woman's entreaties."
"I hardly think that likely. I never saw a more inexorable face
in my life."
"Oh, we shall soon clear up all that," said Bradstreet. "Well, I
have drawn my circle, and I only wish I knew at what point upon
it the folk that we are in search of are to be found."
"I think I could lay my finger on it," said Holmes quietly.
"Really, now" cried the inspector, "you have formed your
opinion Come, now, we shall see who agrees with you. I say it is
south, for the country is more deserted there."
"And I say east," said my patient.
"I am for west," remarked the plainclothes man. "There are
several quiet little villages up there."
"And I am for north," said I, "because there are no hills there,
and our friend says that he did not notice the carriage go up
any."
"Come," cried the inspector, laughing "it's a very pretty
diversity of opinion. We have boxed the compass among us. Who do
you give your casting vote to?"
"You are all wrong."
"But we can't all be."
"Oh, yes, you can. This is my point." He placed his finger in the
centre of the circle. "This is where we shall find them."
"But the twelvemile drive?" gasped Hatherley.
"Six out and six back. Nothing simpler. You say yourself that the
horse was fresh and glossy when you got in. How could it be that
if it had gone twelve miles over heavy roads?"
"Indeed, it is a likely ruse enough," observed Bradstreet
thoughtfully. "Of course there can be no doubt as to the nature
of this gang."
"None at all," said Holmes. "They are coiners on a large scale,
and have used the machine to form the amalgam which has taken the
place of silver."
"We have known for some time that a clever gang was at work,"
said the inspector. "They have been turning out halfcrowns by
the thousand. We even traced them as far as Reading, but could
get no farther, for they had covered their traces in a way that
showed that they were very old hands. But now, thanks to this
lucky chance, I think that we have got them right enough."
But the inspector was mistaken, for those criminals were not
destined to fall into the hands of justice. As we rolled into
Eyford Station we saw a gigantic column of smoke which streamed
up from behind a small clump of trees in the neighbourhood and
hung like an immense ostrich feather over the landscape.
"A house on fire?" asked Bradstreet as the train steamed off
again on its way.
"Yes, sir" said the stationmaster.
"When did it break out?"
"I hear that it was during the night, sir, but it has got worse,
and the whole place is in a blaze."
"Whose house is it?"
"Dr. Becher's."
"Tell me," broke in the engineer, "is Dr. Becher a German, very
thin, with a long, sharp nose?"
The stationmaster laughed heartily. "No, sir, Dr. Becher is an
Englishman, and there isn't a man in the parish who has a
betterlined waistcoat. But he has a gentleman staying with him,
a patient, as I understand, who is a foreigner, and he looks as
if a little good Berkshire beef would do him no harm."
The stationmaster had not finished his speech before we were all
hastening in the direction of the fire. The road topped a low
hill, and there was a great widespread whitewashed building in
front of us, spouting fire at every chink and window, while in
the garden in front three fireengines were vainly striving to
keep the flames under.
"That's it" cried Hatherley, in intense excitement. "There is
the graveldrive, and there are the rosebushes where I lay. That
second window is the one that I jumped from."
"Well, at least," said Holmes, "you have had your revenge upon
them. There can be no question that it was your oillamp which,
when it was crushed in the press, set fire to the wooden walls,
though no doubt they were too excited in the chase after you to
observe it at the time. Now keep your eyes open in this crowd for
your friends of last night, though I very much fear that they are
a good hundred miles off by now."
And Holmes' fears came to be realised, for from that day to this
no word has ever been heard either of the beautiful woman, the
sinister German, or the morose Englishman. Early that morning a
peasant had met a cart containing several people and some very
bulky boxes driving rapidly in the direction of Reading, but
there all traces of the fugitives disappeared, and even Holmes'
ingenuity failed ever to discover the least clue as to their
whereabouts.
The firemen had been much perturbed at the strange arrangements
which they had found within, and still more so by discovering a
newly severed human thumb upon a windowsill of the second floor.
About sunset, however, their efforts were at last successful, and
they subdued the flames, but not before the roof had fallen in,
and the whole place been reduced to such absolute ruin that, save
some twisted cylinders and iron piping, not a trace remained of
the machinery which had cost our unfortunate acquaintance so
dearly. Large masses of nickel and of tin were discovered stored
in an outhouse, but no coins were to be found, which may have
explained the presence of those bulky boxes which have been
already referred to.
How our hydraulic engineer had been conveyed from the garden to
the spot where he recovered his senses might have remained
forever a mystery were it not for the soft mould, which told us a
very plain tale. He had evidently been carried down by two
persons, one of whom had remarkably small feet and the other
unusually large ones. On the whole, it was most probable that the
silent Englishman, being less bold or less murderous than his
companion, had assisted the woman to bear the unconscious man out
of the way of danger.
"Well," said our engineer ruefully as we took our seats to return
once more to London, "it has been a pretty business for me I
have lost my thumb and I have lost a fiftyguinea fee, and what
have I gained?"
"Experience," said Holmes, laughing. "Indirectly it may be of
value, you know you have only to put it into words to gain the
reputation of being excellent company for the remainder of your
existence."
X. THE ADVENTURE OF THE NOBLE BACHELOR
The Lord St. Simon marriage, and its curious termination, have
long ceased to be a subject of interest in those exalted circles
in which the unfortunate bridegroom moves. Fresh scandals have
eclipsed it, and their more piquant details have drawn the
gossips away from this fouryearold drama. As I have reason to
believe, however, that the full facts have never been revealed to
the general public, and as my friend Sherlock Holmes had a
considerable share in clearing the matter up, I feel that no
memoir of him would be complete without some little sketch of
this remarkable episode.
It was a few weeks before my own marriage, during the days when I
was still sharing rooms with Holmes in Baker Street, that he came
home from an afternoon stroll to find a letter on the table
waiting for him. I had remained indoors all day, for the weather
had taken a sudden turn to rain, with high autumnal winds, and
the Jezail bullet which I had brought back in one of my limbs as
a relic of my Afghan campaign throbbed with dull persistence.
With my body in one easychair and my legs upon another, I had
surrounded myself with a cloud of newspapers until at last,
saturated with the news of the day, I tossed them all aside and
lay listless, watching the huge crest and monogram upon the
envelope upon the table and wondering lazily who my friend's
noble correspondent could be.
"Here is a very fashionable epistle," I remarked as he entered.
"Your morning letters, if I remember right, were from a
fishmonger and a tidewaiter."
"Yes, my correspondence has certainly the charm of variety," he
answered, smiling, "and the humbler are usually the more
interesting. This looks like one of those unwelcome social
summonses which call upon a man either to be bored or to lie."
He broke the seal and glanced over the contents.
"Oh, come, it may prove to be something of interest, after all."
"Not social, then?"
"No, distinctly professional."
"And from a noble client?"
"One of the highest in England."
"My dear fellow, I congratulate you."
"I assure you, Watson, without affectation, that the status of my
client is a matter of less moment to me than the interest of his
case. It is just possible, however, that that also may not be
wanting in this new investigation. You have been reading the
papers diligently of late, have you not?"
"It looks like it," said I ruefully, pointing to a huge bundle in
the corner. "I have had nothing else to do."
"It is fortunate, for you will perhaps be able to post me up. I
read nothing except the criminal news and the agony column. The
latter is always instructive. But if you have followed recent
events so closely you must have read about Lord St. Simon and his
wedding?"
"Oh, yes, with the deepest interest."
"That is well. The letter which I hold in my hand is from Lord
St. Simon. I will read it to you, and in return you must turn
over these papers and let me have whatever bears upon the matter.
This is what he says
"'MY DEAR MR. SHERLOCK HOLMESLord Backwater tells me that I
may place implicit reliance upon your judgment and discretion. I
have determined, therefore, to call upon you and to consult you
in reference to the very painful event which has occurred in
connection with my wedding. Mr. Lestrade, of Scotland Yard, is
acting already in the matter, but he assures me that he sees no
objection to your cooperation, and that he even thinks that
it might be of some assistance. I will call at four o'clock in
the afternoon, and, should you have any other engagement at that
time, I hope that you will postpone it, as this matter is of
paramount importance. Yours faithfully, ST. SIMON.'
"It is dated from Grosvenor Mansions, written with a quill pen,
and the noble lord has had the misfortune to get a smear of ink
upon the outer side of his right little finger," remarked Holmes
as he folded up the epistle.
"He says four o'clock. It is three now. He will be here in an
hour."
"Then I have just time, with your assistance, to get clear upon
the subject. Turn over those papers and arrange the extracts in
their order of time, while I take a glance as to who our client
is." He picked a redcovered volume from a line of books of
reference beside the mantelpiece. "Here he is," said he, sitting
down and flattening it out upon his knee. "'Lord Robert Walsingham
de Vere St. Simon, second son of the Duke of Balmoral.' Hum 'Arms
Azure, three caltrops in chief over a fess sable. Born in .'
He's fortyone years of age, which is mature for marriage. Was
UnderSecretary for the colonies in a late administration. The
Duke, his father, was at one time Secretary for Foreign Affairs.
They inherit Plantagenet blood by direct descent, and Tudor on
the distaff side. Ha Well, there is nothing very instructive in
all this. I think that I must turn to you Watson, for something
more solid."
"I have very little difficulty in finding what I want," said I,
"for the facts are quite recent, and the matter struck me as
remarkable. I feared to refer them to you, however, as I knew
that you had an inquiry on hand and that you disliked the
intrusion of other matters."
"Oh, you mean the little problem of the Grosvenor Square
furniture van. That is quite cleared up nowthough, indeed, it
was obvious from the first. Pray give me the results of your
newspaper selections."
"Here is the first notice which I can find. It is in the personal
column of the Morning Post, and dates, as you see, some weeks
back 'A marriage has been arranged,' it says, 'and will, if
rumour is correct, very shortly take place, between Lord Robert
St. Simon, second son of the Duke of Balmoral, and Miss Hatty
Doran, the only daughter of Aloysius Doran. Esq., of San
Francisco, Cal., U.S.A.' That is all."
"Terse and to the point," remarked Holmes, stretching his long,
thin legs towards the fire.
"There was a paragraph amplifying this in one of the society
papers of the same week. Ah, here it is 'There will soon be a
call for protection in the marriage market, for the present
freetrade principle appears to tell heavily against our home
product. One by one the management of the noble houses of Great
Britain is passing into the hands of our fair cousins from across
the Atlantic. An important addition has been made during the last
week to the list of the prizes which have been borne away by
these charming invaders. Lord St. Simon, who has shown himself
for over twenty years proof against the little god's arrows, has
now definitely announced his approaching marriage with Miss Hatty
Doran, the fascinating daughter of a California millionaire. Miss
Doran, whose graceful figure and striking face attracted much
attention at the Westbury House festivities, is an only child,
and it is currently reported that her dowry will run to
considerably over the six figures, with expectancies for the
future. As it is an open secret that the Duke of Balmoral has
been compelled to sell his pictures within the last few years,
and as Lord St. Simon has no property of his own save the small
estate of Birchmoor, it is obvious that the Californian heiress
is not the only gainer by an alliance which will enable her to
make the easy and common transition from a Republican lady to a
British peeress.'"
"Anything else?" asked Holmes, yawning.
"Oh, yes plenty. Then there is another note in the Morning Post
to say that the marriage would be an absolutely quiet one, that it
would be at St. George's, Hanover Square, that only half a dozen
intimate friends would be invited, and that the party would
return to the furnished house at Lancaster Gate which has been
taken by Mr. Aloysius Doran. Two days laterthat is, on
Wednesday lastthere is a curt announcement that the wedding had
taken place, and that the honeymoon would be passed at Lord
Backwater's place, near Petersfield. Those are all the notices
which appeared before the disappearance of the bride."
"Before the what?" asked Holmes with a start.
"The vanishing of the lady."
"When did she vanish, then?"
"At the wedding breakfast."
"Indeed. This is more interesting than it promised to be quite
dramatic, in fact."
"Yes it struck me as being a little out of the common."
"They often vanish before the ceremony, and occasionally during
the honeymoon but I cannot call to mind anything quite so prompt
as this. Pray let me have the details."
"I warn you that they are very incomplete."
"Perhaps we may make them less so."
"Such as they are, they are set forth in a single article of a
morning paper of yesterday, which I will read to you. It is
headed, 'Singular Occurrence at a Fashionable Wedding'
"'The family of Lord Robert St. Simon has been thrown into the
greatest consternation by the strange and painful episodes which
have taken place in connection with his wedding. The ceremony, as
shortly announced in the papers of yesterday, occurred on the
previous morning but it is only now that it has been possible to
confirm the strange rumours which have been so persistently
floating about. In spite of the attempts of the friends to hush
the matter up, so much public attention has now been drawn to it
that no good purpose can be served by affecting to disregard what
is a common subject for conversation.
"'The ceremony, which was performed at St. George's, Hanover
Square, was a very quiet one, no one being present save the
father of the bride, Mr. Aloysius Doran, the Duchess of Balmoral,
Lord Backwater, Lord Eustace and Lady Clara St. Simon the
younger brother and sister of the bridegroom, and Lady Alicia
Whittington. The whole party proceeded afterwards to the house of
Mr. Aloysius Doran, at Lancaster Gate, where breakfast had been
prepared. It appears that some little trouble was caused by a
woman, whose name has not been ascertained, who endeavoured to
force her way into the house after the bridal party, alleging
that she had some claim upon Lord St. Simon. It was only after a
painful and prolonged scene that she was ejected by the butler
and the footman. The bride, who had fortunately entered the house
before this unpleasant interruption, had sat down to breakfast
with the rest, when she complained of a sudden indisposition and
retired to her room. Her prolonged absence having caused some
comment, her father followed her, but learned from her maid that
she had only come up to her chamber for an instant, caught up an
ulster and bonnet, and hurried down to the passage. One of the
footmen declared that he had seen a lady leave the house thus
apparelled, but had refused to credit that it was his mistress,
believing her to be with the company. On ascertaining that his
daughter had disappeared, Mr. Aloysius Doran, in conjunction with
the bridegroom, instantly put themselves in communication with
the police, and very energetic inquiries are being made, which
will probably result in a speedy clearing up of this very
singular business. Up to a late hour last night, however, nothing
had transpired as to the whereabouts of the missing lady. There
are rumours of foul play in the matter, and it is said that the
police have caused the arrest of the woman who had caused the
original disturbance, in the belief that, from jealousy or some
other motive, she may have been concerned in the strange
disappearance of the bride.'"
"And is that all?"
"Only one little item in another of the morning papers, but it is
a suggestive one."
"And it is"
"That Miss Flora Millar, the lady who had caused the disturbance,
has actually been arrested. It appears that she was formerly a
danseuse at the Allegro, and that she has known the bridegroom
for some years. There are no further particulars, and the whole
case is in your hands nowso far as it has been set forth in the
public press."
"And an exceedingly interesting case it appears to be. I would
not have missed it for worlds. But there is a ring at the bell,
Watson, and as the clock makes it a few minutes after four, I
have no doubt that this will prove to be our noble client. Do not
dream of going, Watson, for I very much prefer having a witness,
if only as a check to my own memory."
"Lord Robert St. Simon," announced our pageboy, throwing open
the door. A gentleman entered, with a pleasant, cultured face,
highnosed and pale, with something perhaps of petulance about
the mouth, and with the steady, wellopened eye of a man whose
pleasant lot it had ever been to command and to be obeyed. His
manner was brisk, and yet his general appearance gave an undue
impression of age, for he had a slight forward stoop and a little
bend of the knees as he walked. His hair, too, as he swept off
his very curlybrimmed hat, was grizzled round the edges and thin
upon the top. As to his dress, it was careful to the verge of
foppishness, with high collar, black frockcoat, white waistcoat,
yellow gloves, patentleather shoes, and lightcoloured gaiters.
He advanced slowly into the room, turning his head from left to
right, and swinging in his right hand the cord which held his
golden eyeglasses.
"Goodday, Lord St. Simon," said Holmes, rising and bowing. "Pray
take the basketchair. This is my friend and colleague, Dr.
Watson. Draw up a little to the fire, and we will talk this
matter over."
"A most painful matter to me, as you can most readily imagine,
Mr. Holmes. I have been cut to the quick. I understand that you
have already managed several delicate cases of this sort, sir,
though I presume that they were hardly from the same class of
society."
"No, I am descending."
"I beg pardon."
"My last client of the sort was a king."
"Oh, really I had no idea. And which king?"
"The King of Scandinavia."
"What Had he lost his wife?"
"You can understand," said Holmes suavely, "that I extend to the
affairs of my other clients the same secrecy which I promise to
you in yours."
"Of course Very right very right I'm sure I beg pardon. As to
my own case, I am ready to give you any information which may
assist you in forming an opinion."
"Thank you. I have already learned all that is in the public
prints, nothing more. I presume that I may take it as correct
this article, for example, as to the disappearance of the bride."
Lord St. Simon glanced over it. "Yes, it is correct, as far as it
goes."
"But it needs a great deal of supplementing before anyone could
offer an opinion. I think that I may arrive at my facts most
directly by questioning you."
"Pray do so."
"When did you first meet Miss Hatty Doran?"
"In San Francisco, a year ago."
"You were travelling in the States?"
"Yes."
"Did you become engaged then?"
"No."
"But you were on a friendly footing?"
"I was amused by her society, and she could see that I was
amused."
"Her father is very rich?"
"He is said to be the richest man on the Pacific slope."
"And how did he make his money?"
"In mining. He had nothing a few years ago. Then he struck gold,
invested it, and came up by leaps and bounds."
"Now, what is your own impression as to the young lady'syour
wife's character?"
The nobleman swung his glasses a little faster and stared down
into the fire. "You see, Mr. Holmes," said he, "my wife was
twenty before her father became a rich man. During that time she
ran free in a mining camp and wandered through woods or
mountains, so that her education has come from Nature rather than
from the schoolmaster. She is what we call in England a tomboy,
with a strong nature, wild and free, unfettered by any sort of
traditions. She is impetuousvolcanic, I was about to say. She
is swift in making up her mind and fearless in carrying out her
resolutions. On the other hand, I would not have given her the
name which I have the honour to bear"he gave a little stately
cough"had not I thought her to be at bottom a noble woman. I
believe that she is capable of heroic selfsacrifice and that
anything dishonourable would be repugnant to her."
"Have you her photograph?"
"I brought this with me." He opened a locket and showed us the
full face of a very lovely woman. It was not a photograph but an
ivory miniature, and the artist had brought out the full effect
of the lustrous black hair, the large dark eyes, and the
exquisite mouth. Holmes gazed long and earnestly at it. Then he
closed the locket and handed it back to Lord St. Simon.
"The young lady came to London, then, and you renewed your
acquaintance?"
"Yes, her father brought her over for this last London season. I
met her several times, became engaged to her, and have now
married her."
"She brought, I understand, a considerable dowry?"
"A fair dowry. Not more than is usual in my family."
"And this, of course, remains to you, since the marriage is a
fait accompli?"
"I really have made no inquiries on the subject."
"Very naturally not. Did you see Miss Doran on the day before the
wedding?"
"Yes."
"Was she in good spirits?"
"Never better. She kept talking of what we should do in our
future lives."
"Indeed That is very interesting. And on the morning of the
wedding?"
"She was as bright as possibleat least until after the
ceremony."
"And did you observe any change in her then?"
"Well, to tell the truth, I saw then the first signs that I had
ever seen that her temper was just a little sharp. The incident
however, was too trivial to relate and can have no possible
bearing upon the case."
"Pray let us have it, for all that."
"Oh, it is childish. She dropped her bouquet as we went towards
the vestry. She was passing the front pew at the time, and it
fell over into the pew. There was a moment's delay, but the
gentleman in the pew handed it up to her again, and it did not
appear to be the worse for the fall. Yet when I spoke to her of
the matter, she answered me abruptly and in the carriage, on our
way home, she seemed absurdly agitated over this trifling cause."
"Indeed You say that there was a gentleman in the pew. Some of
the general public were present, then?"
"Oh, yes. It is impossible to exclude them when the church is
open."
"This gentleman was not one of your wife's friends?"
"No, no I call him a gentleman by courtesy, but he was quite a
commonlooking person. I hardly noticed his appearance. But
really I think that we are wandering rather far from the point."
"Lady St. Simon, then, returned from the wedding in a less
cheerful frame of mind than she had gone to it. What did she do
on reentering her father's house?"
"I saw her in conversation with her maid."
"And who is her maid?"
"Alice is her name. She is an American and came from California
with her."
"A confidential servant?"
"A little too much so. It seemed to me that her mistress allowed
her to take great liberties. Still, of course, in America they
look upon these things in a different way."
"How long did she speak to this Alice?"
"Oh, a few minutes. I had something else to think of."
"You did not overhear what they said?"
"Lady St. Simon said something about 'jumping a claim.' She was
accustomed to use slang of the kind. I have no idea what she
meant."
"American slang is very expressive sometimes. And what did your
wife do when she finished speaking to her maid?"
"She walked into the breakfastroom."
"On your arm?"
"No, alone. She was very independent in little matters like that.
Then, after we had sat down for ten minutes or so, she rose
hurriedly, muttered some words of apology, and left the room. She
never came back."
"But this maid, Alice, as I understand, deposes that she went to
her room, covered her bride's dress with a long ulster, put on a
bonnet, and went out."
"Quite so. And she was afterwards seen walking into Hyde Park in
company with Flora Millar, a woman who is now in custody, and who
had already made a disturbance at Mr. Doran's house that
morning."
"Ah, yes. I should like a few particulars as to this young lady,
and your relations to her."
Lord St. Simon shrugged his shoulders and raised his eyebrows.
"We have been on a friendly footing for some yearsI may say on
a very friendly footing. She used to be at the Allegro. I have
not treated her ungenerously, and she had no just cause of
complaint against me, but you know what women are, Mr. Holmes.
Flora was a dear little thing, but exceedingly hotheaded and
devotedly attached to me. She wrote me dreadful letters when she
heard that I was about to be married, and, to tell the truth, the
reason why I had the marriage celebrated so quietly was that I
feared lest there might be a scandal in the church. She came to
Mr. Doran's door just after we returned, and she endeavoured to
push her way in, uttering very abusive expressions towards my
wife, and even threatening her, but I had foreseen the
possibility of something of the sort, and I had two police
fellows there in private clothes, who soon pushed her out again.
She was quiet when she saw that there was no good in making a
row."
"Did your wife hear all this?"
"No, thank goodness, she did not."
"And she was seen walking with this very woman afterwards?"
"Yes. That is what Mr. Lestrade, of Scotland Yard, looks upon as
so serious. It is thought that Flora decoyed my wife out and laid
some terrible trap for her."
"Well, it is a possible supposition."
"You think so, too?"
"I did not say a probable one. But you do not yourself look upon
this as likely?"
"I do not think Flora would hurt a fly."
"Still, jealousy is a strange transformer of characters. Pray
what is your own theory as to what took place?"
"Well, really, I came to seek a theory, not to propound one. I
have given you all the facts. Since you ask me, however, I may
say that it has occurred to me as possible that the excitement of
this affair, the consciousness that she had made so immense a
social stride, had the effect of causing some little nervous
disturbance in my wife."
"In short, that she had become suddenly deranged?"
"Well, really, when I consider that she has turned her backI
will not say upon me, but upon so much that many have aspired to
without successI can hardly explain it in any other fashion."
"Well, certainly that is also a conceivable hypothesis," said
Holmes, smiling. "And now, Lord St. Simon, I think that I have
nearly all my data. May I ask whether you were seated at the
breakfasttable so that you could see out of the window?"
"We could see the other side of the road and the Park."
"Quite so. Then I do not think that I need to detain you longer.
I shall communicate with you."
"Should you be fortunate enough to solve this problem," said our
client, rising.
"I have solved it."
"Eh? What was that?"
"I say that I have solved it."
"Where, then, is my wife?"
"That is a detail which I shall speedily supply."
Lord St. Simon shook his head. "I am afraid that it will take
wiser heads than yours or mine," he remarked, and bowing in a
stately, oldfashioned manner he departed.
"It is very good of Lord St. Simon to honour my head by putting
it on a level with his own," said Sherlock Holmes, laughing. "I
think that I shall have a whisky and soda and a cigar after all
this crossquestioning. I had formed my conclusions as to the
case before our client came into the room."
"My dear Holmes"
"I have notes of several similar cases, though none, as I
remarked before, which were quite as prompt. My whole examination
served to turn my conjecture into a certainty. Circumstantial
evidence is occasionally very convincing, as when you find a
trout in the milk, to quote Thoreau's example."
"But I have heard all that you have heard."
"Without, however, the knowledge of preexisting cases which
serves me so well. There was a parallel instance in Aberdeen some
years back, and something on very much the same lines at Munich
the year after the FrancoPrussian War. It is one of these
casesbut, hullo, here is Lestrade Goodafternoon, Lestrade
You will find an extra tumbler upon the sideboard, and there are
cigars in the box."
The official detective was attired in a peajacket and cravat,
which gave him a decidedly nautical appearance, and he carried a
black canvas bag in his hand. With a short greeting he seated
himself and lit the cigar which had been offered to him.
"What's up, then?" asked Holmes with a twinkle in his eye. "You
look dissatisfied."
"And I feel dissatisfied. It is this infernal St. Simon marriage
case. I can make neither head nor tail of the business."
"Really You surprise me."
"Who ever heard of such a mixed affair? Every clue seems to slip
through my fingers. I have been at work upon it all day."
"And very wet it seems to have made you," said Holmes laying his
hand upon the arm of the peajacket.
"Yes, I have been dragging the Serpentine."
"In heaven's name, what for?"
"In search of the body of Lady St. Simon."
Sherlock Holmes leaned back in his chair and laughed heartily.
"Have you dragged the basin of Trafalgar Square fountain?" he
asked.
"Why? What do you mean?"
"Because you have just as good a chance of finding this lady in
the one as in the other."
Lestrade shot an angry glance at my companion. "I suppose you
know all about it," he snarled.
"Well, I have only just heard the facts, but my mind is made up."
"Oh, indeed Then you think that the Serpentine plays no part in
the matter?"
"I think it very unlikely."
"Then perhaps you will kindly explain how it is that we found
this in it?" He opened his bag as he spoke, and tumbled onto the
floor a weddingdress of watered silk, a pair of white satin
shoes and a bride's wreath and veil, all discoloured and soaked
in water. "There," said he, putting a new weddingring upon the
top of the pile. "There is a little nut for you to crack, Master
Holmes."
"Oh, indeed" said my friend, blowing blue rings into the air.
"You dragged them from the Serpentine?"
"No. They were found floating near the margin by a parkkeeper.
They have been identified as her clothes, and it seemed to me
that if the clothes were there the body would not be far off."
"By the same brilliant reasoning, every man's body is to be found
in the neighbourhood of his wardrobe. And pray what did you hope
to arrive at through this?"
"At some evidence implicating Flora Millar in the disappearance."
"I am afraid that you will find it difficult."
"Are you, indeed, now?" cried Lestrade with some bitterness. "I
am afraid, Holmes, that you are not very practical with your
deductions and your inferences. You have made two blunders in as
many minutes. This dress does implicate Miss Flora Millar."
"And how?"
"In the dress is a pocket. In the pocket is a cardcase. In the
cardcase is a note. And here is the very note." He slapped it
down upon the table in front of him. "Listen to this 'You will
see me when all is ready. Come at once. F.H.M.' Now my theory all
along has been that Lady St. Simon was decoyed away by Flora
Millar, and that she, with confederates, no doubt, was
responsible for her disappearance. Here, signed with her
initials, is the very note which was no doubt quietly slipped
into her hand at the door and which lured her within their
reach."
"Very good, Lestrade," said Holmes, laughing. "You really are
very fine indeed. Let me see it." He took up the paper in a
listless way, but his attention instantly became riveted, and he
gave a little cry of satisfaction. "This is indeed important,"
said he.
"Ha you find it so?"
"Extremely so. I congratulate you warmly."
Lestrade rose in his triumph and bent his head to look. "Why," he
shrieked, "you're looking at the wrong side"
"On the contrary, this is the right side."
"The right side? You're mad Here is the note written in pencil
over here."
"And over here is what appears to be the fragment of a hotel
bill, which interests me deeply."
"There's nothing in it. I looked at it before," said Lestrade.
"'Oct. th, rooms s., breakfast s. d., cocktail s., lunch s.
d., glass sherry, d.' I see nothing in that."
"Very likely not. It is most important, all the same. As to the
note, it is important also, or at least the initials are, so I
congratulate you again."
"I've wasted time enough," said Lestrade, rising. "I believe in
hard work and not in sitting by the fire spinning fine theories.
Goodday, Mr. Holmes, and we shall see which gets to the bottom
of the matter first." He gathered up the garments, thrust them
into the bag, and made for the door.
"Just one hint to you, Lestrade," drawled Holmes before his rival
vanished "I will tell you the true solution of the matter. Lady
St. Simon is a myth. There is not, and there never has been, any
such person."
Lestrade looked sadly at my companion. Then he turned to me,
tapped his forehead three times, shook his head solemnly, and
hurried away.
He had hardly shut the door behind him when Holmes rose to put on
his overcoat. "There is something in what the fellow says about
outdoor work," he remarked, "so I think, Watson, that I must
leave you to your papers for a little."
It was after five o'clock when Sherlock Holmes left me, but I had
no time to be lonely, for within an hour there arrived a
confectioner's man with a very large flat box. This he unpacked
with the help of a youth whom he had brought with him, and
presently, to my very great astonishment, a quite epicurean
little cold supper began to be laid out upon our humble
lodginghouse mahogany. There were a couple of brace of cold
woodcock, a pheasant, a pt de foie gras pie with a group of
ancient and cobwebby bottles. Having laid out all these luxuries,
my two visitors vanished away, like the genii of the Arabian
Nights, with no explanation save that the things had been paid
for and were ordered to this address.
Just before nine o'clock Sherlock Holmes stepped briskly into the
room. His features were gravely set, but there was a light in his
eye which made me think that he had not been disappointed in his
conclusions.
"They have laid the supper, then," he said, rubbing his hands.
"You seem to expect company. They have laid for five."
"Yes, I fancy we may have some company dropping in," said he. "I
am surprised that Lord St. Simon has not already arrived. Ha I
fancy that I hear his step now upon the stairs."
It was indeed our visitor of the afternoon who came bustling in,
dangling his glasses more vigorously than ever, and with a very
perturbed expression upon his aristocratic features.
"My messenger reached you, then?" asked Holmes.
"Yes, and I confess that the contents startled me beyond measure.
Have you good authority for what you say?"
"The best possible."
Lord St. Simon sank into a chair and passed his hand over his
forehead.
"What will the Duke say," he murmured, "when he hears that one of
the family has been subjected to such humiliation?"
"It is the purest accident. I cannot allow that there is any
humiliation."
"Ah, you look on these things from another standpoint."
"I fail to see that anyone is to blame. I can hardly see how the
lady could have acted otherwise, though her abrupt method of
doing it was undoubtedly to be regretted. Having no mother, she
had no one to advise her at such a crisis."
"It was a slight, sir, a public slight," said Lord St. Simon,
tapping his fingers upon the table.
"You must make allowance for this poor girl, placed in so
unprecedented a position."
"I will make no allowance. I am very angry indeed, and I have
been shamefully used."
"I think that I heard a ring," said Holmes. "Yes, there are steps
on the landing. If I cannot persuade you to take a lenient view
of the matter, Lord St. Simon, I have brought an advocate here
who may be more successful." He opened the door and ushered in a
lady and gentleman. "Lord St. Simon," said he "allow me to
introduce you to Mr. and Mrs. Francis Hay Moulton. The lady, I
think, you have already met."
At the sight of these newcomers our client had sprung from his
seat and stood very erect, with his eyes cast down and his hand
thrust into the breast of his frockcoat, a picture of offended
dignity. The lady had taken a quick step forward and had held out
her hand to him, but he still refused to raise his eyes. It was
as well for his resolution, perhaps, for her pleading face was
one which it was hard to resist.
"You're angry, Robert," said she. "Well, I guess you have every
cause to be."
"Pray make no apology to me," said Lord St. Simon bitterly.
"Oh, yes, I know that I have treated you real bad and that I
should have spoken to you before I went but I was kind of
rattled, and from the time when I saw Frank here again I just
didn't know what I was doing or saying. I only wonder I didn't
fall down and do a faint right there before the altar."
"Perhaps, Mrs. Moulton, you would like my friend and me to leave
the room while you explain this matter?"
"If I may give an opinion," remarked the strange gentleman,
"we've had just a little too much secrecy over this business
already. For my part, I should like all Europe and America to
hear the rights of it." He was a small, wiry, sunburnt man,
cleanshaven, with a sharp face and alert manner.
"Then I'll tell our story right away," said the lady. "Frank here
and I met in ', in McQuire's camp, near the Rockies, where pa
was working a claim. We were engaged to each other, Frank and I
but then one day father struck a rich pocket and made a pile,
while poor Frank here had a claim that petered out and came to
nothing. The richer pa grew the poorer was Frank so at last pa
wouldn't hear of our engagement lasting any longer, and he took
me away to 'Frisco. Frank wouldn't throw up his hand, though so
he followed me there, and he saw me without pa knowing anything
about it. It would only have made him mad to know, so we just
fixed it all up for ourselves. Frank said that he would go and
make his pile, too, and never come back to claim me until he had
as much as pa. So then I promised to wait for him to the end of
time and pledged myself not to marry anyone else while he lived.
'Why shouldn't we be married right away, then,' said he, 'and
then I will feel sure of you and I won't claim to be your
husband until I come back?' Well, we talked it over, and he had
fixed it all up so nicely, with a clergyman all ready in waiting,
that we just did it right there and then Frank went off to seek
his fortune, and I went back to pa.
"The next I heard of Frank was that he was in Montana, and then
he went prospecting in Arizona, and then I heard of him from New
Mexico. After that came a long newspaper story about how a
miners' camp had been attacked by Apache Indians, and there was
my Frank's name among the killed. I fainted dead away, and I was
very sick for months after. Pa thought I had a decline and took
me to half the doctors in 'Frisco. Not a word of news came for a
year and more, so that I never doubted that Frank was really
dead. Then Lord St. Simon came to 'Frisco, and we came to London,
and a marriage was arranged, and pa was very pleased, but I felt
all the time that no man on this earth would ever take the place
in my heart that had been given to my poor Frank.
"Still, if I had married Lord St. Simon, of course I'd have done
my duty by him. We can't command our love, but we can our
actions. I went to the altar with him with the intention to make
him just as good a wife as it was in me to be. But you may
imagine what I felt when, just as I came to the altar rails, I
glanced back and saw Frank standing and looking at me out of the
first pew. I thought it was his ghost at first but when I looked
again there he was still, with a kind of question in his eyes, as
if to ask me whether I were glad or sorry to see him. I wonder I
didn't drop. I know that everything was turning round, and the
words of the clergyman were just like the buzz of a bee in my
ear. I didn't know what to do. Should I stop the service and make
a scene in the church? I glanced at him again, and he seemed to
know what I was thinking, for he raised his finger to his lips to
tell me to be still. Then I saw him scribble on a piece of paper,
and I knew that he was writing me a note. As I passed his pew on
the way out I dropped my bouquet over to him, and he slipped the
note into my hand when he returned me the flowers. It was only a
line asking me to join him when he made the sign to me to do so.
Of course I never doubted for a moment that my first duty was now
to him, and I determined to do just whatever he might direct.
"When I got back I told my maid, who had known him in California,
and had always been his friend. I ordered her to say nothing, but
to get a few things packed and my ulster ready. I know I ought to
have spoken to Lord St. Simon, but it was dreadful hard before
his mother and all those great people. I just made up my mind to
run away and explain afterwards. I hadn't been at the table ten
minutes before I saw Frank out of the window at the other side of
the road. He beckoned to me and then began walking into the Park.
I slipped out, put on my things, and followed him. Some woman
came talking something or other about Lord St. Simon to
meseemed to me from the little I heard as if he had a little
secret of his own before marriage alsobut I managed to get away
from her and soon overtook Frank. We got into a cab together, and
away we drove to some lodgings he had taken in Gordon Square, and
that was my true wedding after all those years of waiting. Frank
had been a prisoner among the Apaches, had escaped, came on to
'Frisco, found that I had given him up for dead and had gone to
England, followed me there, and had come upon me at last on the
very morning of my second wedding."
"I saw it in a paper," explained the American. "It gave the name
and the church but not where the lady lived."
"Then we had a talk as to what we should do, and Frank was all
for openness, but I was so ashamed of it all that I felt as if I
should like to vanish away and never see any of them againjust
sending a line to pa, perhaps, to show him that I was alive. It
was awful to me to think of all those lords and ladies sitting
round that breakfasttable and waiting for me to come back. So
Frank took my weddingclothes and things and made a bundle of
them, so that I should not be traced, and dropped them away
somewhere where no one could find them. It is likely that we
should have gone on to Paris tomorrow, only that this good
gentleman, Mr. Holmes, came round to us this evening, though how
he found us is more than I can think, and he showed us very
clearly and kindly that I was wrong and that Frank was right, and
that we should be putting ourselves in the wrong if we were so
secret. Then he offered to give us a chance of talking to Lord
St. Simon alone, and so we came right away round to his rooms at
once. Now, Robert, you have heard it all, and I am very sorry if
I have given you pain, and I hope that you do not think very
meanly of me."
Lord St. Simon had by no means relaxed his rigid attitude, but
had listened with a frowning brow and a compressed lip to this
long narrative.
"Excuse me," he said, "but it is not my custom to discuss my most
intimate personal affairs in this public manner."
"Then you won't forgive me? You won't shake hands before I go?"
"Oh, certainly, if it would give you any pleasure." He put out
his hand and coldly grasped that which she extended to him.
"I had hoped," suggested Holmes, "that you would have joined us
in a friendly supper."
"I think that there you ask a little too much," responded his
Lordship. "I may be forced to acquiesce in these recent
developments, but I can hardly be expected to make merry over
them. I think that with your permission I will now wish you all a
very goodnight." He included us all in a sweeping bow and
stalked out of the room.
"Then I trust that you at least will honour me with your
company," said Sherlock Holmes. "It is always a joy to meet an
American, Mr. Moulton, for I am one of those who believe that the
folly of a monarch and the blundering of a minister in fargone
years will not prevent our children from being some day citizens
of the same worldwide country under a flag which shall be a
quartering of the Union Jack with the Stars and Stripes."
"The case has been an interesting one," remarked Holmes when our
visitors had left us, "because it serves to show very clearly how
simple the explanation may be of an affair which at first sight
seems to be almost inexplicable. Nothing could be more natural
than the sequence of events as narrated by this lady, and nothing
stranger than the result when viewed, for instance, by Mr.
Lestrade of Scotland Yard."
"You were not yourself at fault at all, then?"
"From the first, two facts were very obvious to me, the one that
the lady had been quite willing to undergo the wedding ceremony,
the other that she had repented of it within a few minutes of
returning home. Obviously something had occurred during the
morning, then, to cause her to change her mind. What could that
something be? She could not have spoken to anyone when she was
out, for she had been in the company of the bridegroom. Had she
seen someone, then? If she had, it must be someone from America
because she had spent so short a time in this country that she
could hardly have allowed anyone to acquire so deep an influence
over her that the mere sight of him would induce her to change
her plans so completely. You see we have already arrived, by a
process of exclusion, at the idea that she might have seen an
American. Then who could this American be, and why should he
possess so much influence over her? It might be a lover it might
be a husband. Her young womanhood had, I knew, been spent in
rough scenes and under strange conditions. So far I had got
before I ever heard Lord St. Simon's narrative. When he told us
of a man in a pew, of the change in the bride's manner, of so
transparent a device for obtaining a note as the dropping of a
bouquet, of her resort to her confidential maid, and of her very
significant allusion to claimjumpingwhich in miners' parlance
means taking possession of that which another person has a prior
claim tothe whole situation became absolutely clear. She had
gone off with a man, and the man was either a lover or was a
previous husbandthe chances being in favour of the latter."
"And how in the world did you find them?"
"It might have been difficult, but friend Lestrade held
information in his hands the value of which he did not himself
know. The initials were, of course, of the highest importance,
but more valuable still was it to know that within a week he had
settled his bill at one of the most select London hotels."
"How did you deduce the select?"
"By the select prices. Eight shillings for a bed and eightpence
for a glass of sherry pointed to one of the most expensive
hotels. There are not many in London which charge at that rate.
In the second one which I visited in Northumberland Avenue, I
learned by an inspection of the book that Francis H. Moulton, an
American gentleman, had left only the day before, and on looking
over the entries against him, I came upon the very items which I
had seen in the duplicate bill. His letters were to be forwarded
to  Gordon Square so thither I travelled, and being fortunate
enough to find the loving couple at home, I ventured to give them
some paternal advice and to point out to them that it would be
better in every way that they should make their position a little
clearer both to the general public and to Lord St. Simon in
particular. I invited them to meet him here, and, as you see, I
made him keep the appointment."
"But with no very good result," I remarked. "His conduct was
certainly not very gracious."
"Ah, Watson," said Holmes, smiling, "perhaps you would not be
very gracious either, if, after all the trouble of wooing and
wedding, you found yourself deprived in an instant of wife and of
fortune. I think that we may judge Lord St. Simon very mercifully
and thank our stars that we are never likely to find ourselves in
the same position. Draw your chair up and hand me my violin, for
the only problem we have still to solve is how to while away
these bleak autumnal evenings."
XI. THE ADVENTURE OF THE BERYL CORONET
"Holmes," said I as I stood one morning in our bowwindow looking
down the street, "here is a madman coming along. It seems rather
sad that his relatives should allow him to come out alone."
My friend rose lazily from his armchair and stood with his hands
in the pockets of his dressinggown, looking over my shoulder. It
was a bright, crisp February morning, and the snow of the day
before still lay deep upon the ground, shimmering brightly in the
wintry sun. Down the centre of Baker Street it had been ploughed
into a brown crumbly band by the traffic, but at either side and
on the heapedup edges of the footpaths it still lay as white as
when it fell. The grey pavement had been cleaned and scraped, but
was still dangerously slippery, so that there were fewer
passengers than usual. Indeed, from the direction of the
Metropolitan Station no one was coming save the single gentleman
whose eccentric conduct had drawn my attention.
He was a man of about fifty, tall, portly, and imposing, with a
massive, strongly marked face and a commanding figure. He was
dressed in a sombre yet rich style, in black frockcoat, shining
hat, neat brown gaiters, and wellcut pearlgrey trousers. Yet
his actions were in absurd contrast to the dignity of his dress
and features, for he was running hard, with occasional little
springs, such as a weary man gives who is little accustomed to
set any tax upon his legs. As he ran he jerked his hands up and
down, waggled his head, and writhed his face into the most
extraordinary contortions.
"What on earth can be the matter with him?" I asked. "He is
looking up at the numbers of the houses."
"I believe that he is coming here," said Holmes, rubbing his
hands.
"Here?"
"Yes I rather think he is coming to consult me professionally. I
think that I recognise the symptoms. Ha did I not tell you?" As
he spoke, the man, puffing and blowing, rushed at our door and
pulled at our bell until the whole house resounded with the
clanging.
A few moments later he was in our room, still puffing, still
gesticulating, but with so fixed a look of grief and despair in
his eyes that our smiles were turned in an instant to horror and
pity. For a while he could not get his words out, but swayed his
body and plucked at his hair like one who has been driven to the
extreme limits of his reason. Then, suddenly springing to his
feet, he beat his head against the wall with such force that we
both rushed upon him and tore him away to the centre of the room.
Sherlock Holmes pushed him down into the easychair and, sitting
beside him, patted his hand and chatted with him in the easy,
soothing tones which he knew so well how to employ.
"You have come to me to tell your story, have you not?" said he.
"You are fatigued with your haste. Pray wait until you have
recovered yourself, and then I shall be most happy to look into
any little problem which you may submit to me."
The man sat for a minute or more with a heaving chest, fighting
against his emotion. Then he passed his handkerchief over his
brow, set his lips tight, and turned his face towards us.
"No doubt you think me mad?" said he.
"I see that you have had some great trouble," responded Holmes.
"God knows I havea trouble which is enough to unseat my
reason, so sudden and so terrible is it. Public disgrace I might
have faced, although I am a man whose character has never yet
borne a stain. Private affliction also is the lot of every man
but the two coming together, and in so frightful a form, have
been enough to shake my very soul. Besides, it is not I alone.
The very noblest in the land may suffer unless some way be found
out of this horrible affair."
"Pray compose yourself, sir," said Holmes, "and let me have a
clear account of who you are and what it is that has befallen
you."
"My name," answered our visitor, "is probably familiar to your
ears. I am Alexander Holder, of the banking firm of Holder 
Stevenson, of Threadneedle Street."
The name was indeed well known to us as belonging to the senior
partner in the second largest private banking concern in the City
of London. What could have happened, then, to bring one of the
foremost citizens of London to this most pitiable pass? We
waited, all curiosity, until with another effort he braced
himself to tell his story.
"I feel that time is of value," said he "that is why I hastened
here when the police inspector suggested that I should secure
your cooperation. I came to Baker Street by the Underground and
hurried from there on foot, for the cabs go slowly through this
snow. That is why I was so out of breath, for I am a man who
takes very little exercise. I feel better now, and I will put the
facts before you as shortly and yet as clearly as I can.
"It is, of course, well known to you that in a successful banking
business as much depends upon our being able to find remunerative
investments for our funds as upon our increasing our connection
and the number of our depositors. One of our most lucrative means
of laying out money is in the shape of loans, where the security
is unimpeachable. We have done a good deal in this direction
during the last few years, and there are many noble families to
whom we have advanced large sums upon the security of their
pictures, libraries, or plate.
"Yesterday morning I was seated in my office at the bank when a
card was brought in to me by one of the clerks. I started when I
saw the name, for it was that of none other thanwell, perhaps
even to you I had better say no more than that it was a name
which is a household word all over the earthone of the highest,
noblest, most exalted names in England. I was overwhelmed by the
honour and attempted, when he entered, to say so, but he plunged
at once into business with the air of a man who wishes to hurry
quickly through a disagreeable task.
"'Mr. Holder,' said he, 'I have been informed that you are in the
habit of advancing money.'
"'The firm does so when the security is good.' I answered.
"'It is absolutely essential to me,' said he, 'that I should have
, pounds at once. I could, of course, borrow so trifling a
sum ten times over from my friends, but I much prefer to make it
a matter of business and to carry out that business myself. In my
position you can readily understand that it is unwise to place
one's self under obligations.'
"'For how long, may I ask, do you want this sum?' I asked.
"'Next Monday I have a large sum due to me, and I shall then most
certainly repay what you advance, with whatever interest you
think it right to charge. But it is very essential to me that the
money should be paid at once.'
"'I should be happy to advance it without further parley from my
own private purse,' said I, 'were it not that the strain would be
rather more than it could bear. If, on the other hand, I am to do
it in the name of the firm, then in justice to my partner I must
insist that, even in your case, every businesslike precaution
should be taken.'
"'I should much prefer to have it so,' said he, raising up a
square, black morocco case which he had laid beside his chair.
'You have doubtless heard of the Beryl Coronet?'
"'One of the most precious public possessions of the empire,'
said I.
"'Precisely.' He opened the case, and there, imbedded in soft,
fleshcoloured velvet, lay the magnificent piece of jewellery
which he had named. 'There are thirtynine enormous beryls,' said
he, 'and the price of the gold chasing is incalculable. The
lowest estimate would put the worth of the coronet at double the
sum which I have asked. I am prepared to leave it with you as my
security.'
"I took the precious case into my hands and looked in some
perplexity from it to my illustrious client.
"'You doubt its value?' he asked.
"'Not at all. I only doubt'
"'The propriety of my leaving it. You may set your mind at rest
about that. I should not dream of doing so were it not absolutely
certain that I should be able in four days to reclaim it. It is a
pure matter of form. Is the security sufficient?'
"'Ample.'
"'You understand, Mr. Holder, that I am giving you a strong proof
of the confidence which I have in you, founded upon all that I
have heard of you. I rely upon you not only to be discreet and to
refrain from all gossip upon the matter but, above all, to
preserve this coronet with every possible precaution because I
need not say that a great public scandal would be caused if any
harm were to befall it. Any injury to it would be almost as
serious as its complete loss, for there are no beryls in the
world to match these, and it would be impossible to replace them.
I leave it with you, however, with every confidence, and I shall
call for it in person on Monday morning.'
"Seeing that my client was anxious to leave, I said no more but,
calling for my cashier, I ordered him to pay over fifty 
pound notes. When I was alone once more, however, with the
precious case lying upon the table in front of me, I could not
but think with some misgivings of the immense responsibility
which it entailed upon me. There could be no doubt that, as it
was a national possession, a horrible scandal would ensue if any
misfortune should occur to it. I already regretted having ever
consented to take charge of it. However, it was too late to alter
the matter now, so I locked it up in my private safe and turned
once more to my work.
"When evening came I felt that it would be an imprudence to leave
so precious a thing in the office behind me. Bankers' safes had
been forced before now, and why should not mine be? If so, how
terrible would be the position in which I should find myself I
determined, therefore, that for the next few days I would always
carry the case backward and forward with me, so that it might
never be really out of my reach. With this intention, I called a
cab and drove out to my house at Streatham, carrying the jewel
with me. I did not breathe freely until I had taken it upstairs
and locked it in the bureau of my dressingroom.
"And now a word as to my household, Mr. Holmes, for I wish you to
thoroughly understand the situation. My groom and my page sleep
out of the house, and may be set aside altogether. I have three
maidservants who have been with me a number of years and whose
absolute reliability is quite above suspicion. Another, Lucy
Parr, the second waitingmaid, has only been in my service a few
months. She came with an excellent character, however, and has
always given me satisfaction. She is a very pretty girl and has
attracted admirers who have occasionally hung about the place.
That is the only drawback which we have found to her, but we
believe her to be a thoroughly good girl in every way.
"So much for the servants. My family itself is so small that it
will not take me long to describe it. I am a widower and have an
only son, Arthur. He has been a disappointment to me, Mr.
Holmesa grievous disappointment. I have no doubt that I am
myself to blame. People tell me that I have spoiled him. Very
likely I have. When my dear wife died I felt that he was all I
had to love. I could not bear to see the smile fade even for a
moment from his face. I have never denied him a wish. Perhaps it
would have been better for both of us had I been sterner, but I
meant it for the best.
"It was naturally my intention that he should succeed me in my
business, but he was not of a business turn. He was wild,
wayward, and, to speak the truth, I could not trust him in the
handling of large sums of money. When he was young he became a
member of an aristocratic club, and there, having charming
manners, he was soon the intimate of a number of men with long
purses and expensive habits. He learned to play heavily at cards
and to squander money on the turf, until he had again and again
to come to me and implore me to give him an advance upon his
allowance, that he might settle his debts of honour. He tried
more than once to break away from the dangerous company which he
was keeping, but each time the influence of his friend, Sir
George Burnwell, was enough to draw him back again.
"And, indeed, I could not wonder that such a man as Sir George
Burnwell should gain an influence over him, for he has frequently
brought him to my house, and I have found myself that I could
hardly resist the fascination of his manner. He is older than
Arthur, a man of the world to his fingertips, one who had been
everywhere, seen everything, a brilliant talker, and a man of
great personal beauty. Yet when I think of him in cold blood, far
away from the glamour of his presence, I am convinced from his
cynical speech and the look which I have caught in his eyes that
he is one who should be deeply distrusted. So I think, and so,
too, thinks my little Mary, who has a woman's quick insight into
character.
"And now there is only she to be described. She is my niece but
when my brother died five years ago and left her alone in the
world I adopted her, and have looked upon her ever since as my
daughter. She is a sunbeam in my housesweet, loving, beautiful,
a wonderful manager and housekeeper, yet as tender and quiet and
gentle as a woman could be. She is my right hand. I do not know
what I could do without her. In only one matter has she ever gone
against my wishes. Twice my boy has asked her to marry him, for
he loves her devotedly, but each time she has refused him. I
think that if anyone could have drawn him into the right path it
would have been she, and that his marriage might have changed his
whole life but now, alas it is too lateforever too late
"Now, Mr. Holmes, you know the people who live under my roof, and
I shall continue with my miserable story.
"When we were taking coffee in the drawingroom that night after
dinner, I told Arthur and Mary my experience, and of the precious
treasure which we had under our roof, suppressing only the name
of my client. Lucy Parr, who had brought in the coffee, had, I am
sure, left the room but I cannot swear that the door was closed.
Mary and Arthur were much interested and wished to see the famous
coronet, but I thought it better not to disturb it.
"'Where have you put it?' asked Arthur.
"'In my own bureau.'
"'Well, I hope to goodness the house won't be burgled during the
night.' said he.
"'It is locked up,' I answered.
"'Oh, any old key will fit that bureau. When I was a youngster I
have opened it myself with the key of the boxroom cupboard.'
"He often had a wild way of talking, so that I thought little of
what he said. He followed me to my room, however, that night with
a very grave face.
"'Look here, dad,' said he with his eyes cast down, 'can you let
me have  pounds?'
"'No, I cannot' I answered sharply. 'I have been far too
generous with you in money matters.'
"'You have been very kind,' said he, 'but I must have this money,
or else I can never show my face inside the club again.'
"'And a very good thing, too' I cried.
"'Yes, but you would not have me leave it a dishonoured man,'
said he. 'I could not bear the disgrace. I must raise the money
in some way, and if you will not let me have it, then I must try
other means.'
"I was very angry, for this was the third demand during the
month. 'You shall not have a farthing from me,' I cried, on which
he bowed and left the room without another word.
"When he was gone I unlocked my bureau, made sure that my
treasure was safe, and locked it again. Then I started to go
round the house to see that all was securea duty which I
usually leave to Mary but which I thought it well to perform
myself that night. As I came down the stairs I saw Mary herself
at the side window of the hall, which she closed and fastened as
I approached.
"'Tell me, dad,' said she, looking, I thought, a little
disturbed, 'did you give Lucy, the maid, leave to go out
tonight?'
"'Certainly not.'
"'She came in just now by the back door. I have no doubt that she
has only been to the side gate to see someone, but I think that
it is hardly safe and should be stopped.'
"'You must speak to her in the morning, or I will if you prefer
it. Are you sure that everything is fastened?'
"'Quite sure, dad.'
"'Then, goodnight.' I kissed her and went up to my bedroom
again, where I was soon asleep.
"I am endeavouring to tell you everything, Mr. Holmes, which may
have any bearing upon the case, but I beg that you will question
me upon any point which I do not make clear."
"On the contrary, your statement is singularly lucid."
"I come to a part of my story now in which I should wish to be
particularly so. I am not a very heavy sleeper, and the anxiety
in my mind tended, no doubt, to make me even less so than usual.
About two in the morning, then, I was awakened by some sound in
the house. It had ceased ere I was wide awake, but it had left an
impression behind it as though a window had gently closed
somewhere. I lay listening with all my ears. Suddenly, to my
horror, there was a distinct sound of footsteps moving softly in
the next room. I slipped out of bed, all palpitating with fear,
and peeped round the corner of my dressingroom door.
"'Arthur' I screamed, 'you villain you thief How dare you
touch that coronet?'
"The gas was half up, as I had left it, and my unhappy boy,
dressed only in his shirt and trousers, was standing beside the
light, holding the coronet in his hands. He appeared to be
wrenching at it, or bending it with all his strength. At my cry
he dropped it from his grasp and turned as pale as death. I
snatched it up and examined it. One of the gold corners, with
three of the beryls in it, was missing.
"'You blackguard' I shouted, beside myself with rage. 'You have
destroyed it You have dishonoured me forever Where are the
jewels which you have stolen?'
"'Stolen' he cried.
"'Yes, thief' I roared, shaking him by the shoulder.
"'There are none missing. There cannot be any missing,' said he.
"'There are three missing. And you know where they are. Must I
call you a liar as well as a thief? Did I not see you trying to
tear off another piece?'
"'You have called me names enough,' said he, 'I will not stand it
any longer. I shall not say another word about this business,
since you have chosen to insult me. I will leave your house in
the morning and make my own way in the world.'
"'You shall leave it in the hands of the police' I cried
halfmad with grief and rage. 'I shall have this matter probed to
the bottom.'
"'You shall learn nothing from me,' said he with a passion such
as I should not have thought was in his nature. 'If you choose to
call the police, let the police find what they can.'
"By this time the whole house was astir, for I had raised my
voice in my anger. Mary was the first to rush into my room, and,
at the sight of the coronet and of Arthur's face, she read the
whole story and, with a scream, fell down senseless on the
ground. I sent the housemaid for the police and put the
investigation into their hands at once. When the inspector and a
constable entered the house, Arthur, who had stood sullenly with
his arms folded, asked me whether it was my intention to charge
him with theft. I answered that it had ceased to be a private
matter, but had become a public one, since the ruined coronet was
national property. I was determined that the law should have its
way in everything.
"'At least,' said he, 'you will not have me arrested at once. It
would be to your advantage as well as mine if I might leave the
house for five minutes.'
"'That you may get away, or perhaps that you may conceal what you
have stolen,' said I. And then, realising the dreadful position
in which I was placed, I implored him to remember that not only
my honour but that of one who was far greater than I was at
stake and that he threatened to raise a scandal which would
convulse the nation. He might avert it all if he would but tell
me what he had done with the three missing stones.
"'You may as well face the matter,' said I 'you have been caught
in the act, and no confession could make your guilt more heinous.
If you but make such reparation as is in your power, by telling
us where the beryls are, all shall be forgiven and forgotten.'
"'Keep your forgiveness for those who ask for it,' he answered,
turning away from me with a sneer. I saw that he was too hardened
for any words of mine to influence him. There was but one way for
it. I called in the inspector and gave him into custody. A search
was made at once not only of his person but of his room and of
every portion of the house where he could possibly have concealed
the gems but no trace of them could be found, nor would the
wretched boy open his mouth for all our persuasions and our
threats. This morning he was removed to a cell, and I, after
going through all the police formalities, have hurried round to
you to implore you to use your skill in unravelling the matter.
The police have openly confessed that they can at present make
nothing of it. You may go to any expense which you think
necessary. I have already offered a reward of  pounds. My
God, what shall I do I have lost my honour, my gems, and my son
in one night. Oh, what shall I do"
He put a hand on either side of his head and rocked himself to
and fro, droning to himself like a child whose grief has got
beyond words.
Sherlock Holmes sat silent for some few minutes, with his brows
knitted and his eyes fixed upon the fire.
"Do you receive much company?" he asked.
"None save my partner with his family and an occasional friend of
Arthur's. Sir George Burnwell has been several times lately. No
one else, I think."
"Do you go out much in society?"
"Arthur does. Mary and I stay at home. We neither of us care for
it."
"That is unusual in a young girl."
"She is of a quiet nature. Besides, she is not so very young. She
is fourandtwenty."
"This matter, from what you say, seems to have been a shock to
her also."
"Terrible She is even more affected than I."
"You have neither of you any doubt as to your son's guilt?"
"How can we have when I saw him with my own eyes with the coronet
in his hands."
"I hardly consider that a conclusive proof. Was the remainder of
the coronet at all injured?"
"Yes, it was twisted."
"Do you not think, then, that he might have been trying to
straighten it?"
"God bless you You are doing what you can for him and for me.
But it is too heavy a task. What was he doing there at all? If
his purpose were innocent, why did he not say so?"
"Precisely. And if it were guilty, why did he not invent a lie?
His silence appears to me to cut both ways. There are several
singular points about the case. What did the police think of the
noise which awoke you from your sleep?"
"They considered that it might be caused by Arthur's closing his
bedroom door."
"A likely story As if a man bent on felony would slam his door
so as to wake a household. What did they say, then, of the
disappearance of these gems?"
"They are still sounding the planking and probing the furniture
in the hope of finding them."
"Have they thought of looking outside the house?"
"Yes, they have shown extraordinary energy. The whole garden has
already been minutely examined."
"Now, my dear sir," said Holmes. "is it not obvious to you now
that this matter really strikes very much deeper than either you
or the police were at first inclined to think? It appeared to you
to be a simple case to me it seems exceedingly complex. Consider
what is involved by your theory. You suppose that your son came
down from his bed, went, at great risk, to your dressingroom,
opened your bureau, took out your coronet, broke off by main
force a small portion of it, went off to some other place,
concealed three gems out of the thirtynine, with such skill that
nobody can find them, and then returned with the other thirtysix
into the room in which he exposed himself to the greatest danger
of being discovered. I ask you now, is such a theory tenable?"
"But what other is there?" cried the banker with a gesture of
despair. "If his motives were innocent, why does he not explain
them?"
"It is our task to find that out," replied Holmes "so now, if
you please, Mr. Holder, we will set off for Streatham together,
and devote an hour to glancing a little more closely into
details."
My friend insisted upon my accompanying them in their expedition,
which I was eager enough to do, for my curiosity and sympathy
were deeply stirred by the story to which we had listened. I
confess that the guilt of the banker's son appeared to me to be
as obvious as it did to his unhappy father, but still I had such
faith in Holmes' judgment that I felt that there must be some
grounds for hope as long as he was dissatisfied with the accepted
explanation. He hardly spoke a word the whole way out to the
southern suburb, but sat with his chin upon his breast and his
hat drawn over his eyes, sunk in the deepest thought. Our client
appeared to have taken fresh heart at the little glimpse of hope
which had been presented to him, and he even broke into a
desultory chat with me over his business affairs. A short railway
journey and a shorter walk brought us to Fairbank, the modest
residence of the great financier.
Fairbank was a goodsized square house of white stone, standing
back a little from the road. A double carriagesweep, with a
snowclad lawn, stretched down in front to two large iron gates
which closed the entrance. On the right side was a small wooden
thicket, which led into a narrow path between two neat hedges
stretching from the road to the kitchen door, and forming the
tradesmen's entrance. On the left ran a lane which led to the
stables, and was not itself within the grounds at all, being a
public, though little used, thoroughfare. Holmes left us standing
at the door and walked slowly all round the house, across the
front, down the tradesmen's path, and so round by the garden
behind into the stable lane. So long was he that Mr. Holder and I
went into the diningroom and waited by the fire until he should
return. We were sitting there in silence when the door opened and
a young lady came in. She was rather above the middle height,
slim, with dark hair and eyes, which seemed the darker against
the absolute pallor of her skin. I do not think that I have ever
seen such deadly paleness in a woman's face. Her lips, too, were
bloodless, but her eyes were flushed with crying. As she swept
silently into the room she impressed me with a greater sense of
grief than the banker had done in the morning, and it was the
more striking in her as she was evidently a woman of strong
character, with immense capacity for selfrestraint. Disregarding
my presence, she went straight to her uncle and passed her hand
over his head with a sweet womanly caress.
"You have given orders that Arthur should be liberated, have you
not, dad?" she asked.
"No, no, my girl, the matter must be probed to the bottom."
"But I am so sure that he is innocent. You know what woman's
instincts are. I know that he has done no harm and that you will
be sorry for having acted so harshly."
"Why is he silent, then, if he is innocent?"
"Who knows? Perhaps because he was so angry that you should
suspect him."
"How could I help suspecting him, when I actually saw him with
the coronet in his hand?"
"Oh, but he had only picked it up to look at it. Oh, do, do take
my word for it that he is innocent. Let the matter drop and say
no more. It is so dreadful to think of our dear Arthur in
prison"
"I shall never let it drop until the gems are foundnever, Mary
Your affection for Arthur blinds you as to the awful consequences
to me. Far from hushing the thing up, I have brought a gentleman
down from London to inquire more deeply into it."
"This gentleman?" she asked, facing round to me.
"No, his friend. He wished us to leave him alone. He is round in
the stable lane now."
"The stable lane?" She raised her dark eyebrows. "What can he
hope to find there? Ah this, I suppose, is he. I trust, sir,
that you will succeed in proving, what I feel sure is the truth,
that my cousin Arthur is innocent of this crime."
"I fully share your opinion, and I trust, with you, that we may
prove it," returned Holmes, going back to the mat to knock the
snow from his shoes. "I believe I have the honour of addressing
Miss Mary Holder. Might I ask you a question or two?"
"Pray do, sir, if it may help to clear this horrible affair up."
"You heard nothing yourself last night?"
"Nothing, until my uncle here began to speak loudly. I heard
that, and I came down."
"You shut up the windows and doors the night before. Did you
fasten all the windows?"
"Yes."
"Were they all fastened this morning?"
"Yes."
"You have a maid who has a sweetheart? I think that you remarked
to your uncle last night that she had been out to see him?"
"Yes, and she was the girl who waited in the drawingroom, and
who may have heard uncle's remarks about the coronet."
"I see. You infer that she may have gone out to tell her
sweetheart, and that the two may have planned the robbery."
"But what is the good of all these vague theories," cried the
banker impatiently, "when I have told you that I saw Arthur with
the coronet in his hands?"
"Wait a little, Mr. Holder. We must come back to that. About this
girl, Miss Holder. You saw her return by the kitchen door, I
presume?"
"Yes when I went to see if the door was fastened for the night I
met her slipping in. I saw the man, too, in the gloom."
"Do you know him?"
"Oh, yes he is the greengrocer who brings our vegetables round.
His name is Francis Prosper."
"He stood," said Holmes, "to the left of the doorthat is to
say, farther up the path than is necessary to reach the door?"
"Yes, he did."
"And he is a man with a wooden leg?"
Something like fear sprang up in the young lady's expressive
black eyes. "Why, you are like a magician," said she. "How do you
know that?" She smiled, but there was no answering smile in
Holmes' thin, eager face.
"I should be very glad now to go upstairs," said he. "I shall
probably wish to go over the outside of the house again. Perhaps
I had better take a look at the lower windows before I go up."
He walked swiftly round from one to the other, pausing only at
the large one which looked from the hall onto the stable lane.
This he opened and made a very careful examination of the sill
with his powerful magnifying lens. "Now we shall go upstairs,"
said he at last.
The banker's dressingroom was a plainly furnished little
chamber, with a grey carpet, a large bureau, and a long mirror.
Holmes went to the bureau first and looked hard at the lock.
"Which key was used to open it?" he asked.
"That which my son himself indicatedthat of the cupboard of the
lumberroom."
"Have you it here?"
"That is it on the dressingtable."
Sherlock Holmes took it up and opened the bureau.
"It is a noiseless lock," said he. "It is no wonder that it did
not wake you. This case, I presume, contains the coronet. We must
have a look at it." He opened the case, and taking out the diadem
he laid it upon the table. It was a magnificent specimen of the
jeweller's art, and the thirtysix stones were the finest that I
have ever seen. At one side of the coronet was a cracked edge,
where a corner holding three gems had been torn away.
"Now, Mr. Holder," said Holmes, "here is the corner which
corresponds to that which has been so unfortunately lost. Might I
beg that you will break it off."
The banker recoiled in horror. "I should not dream of trying,"
said he.
"Then I will." Holmes suddenly bent his strength upon it, but
without result. "I feel it give a little," said he "but, though
I am exceptionally strong in the fingers, it would take me all my
time to break it. An ordinary man could not do it. Now, what do
you think would happen if I did break it, Mr. Holder? There would
be a noise like a pistol shot. Do you tell me that all this
happened within a few yards of your bed and that you heard
nothing of it?"
"I do not know what to think. It is all dark to me."
"But perhaps it may grow lighter as we go. What do you think,
Miss Holder?"
"I confess that I still share my uncle's perplexity."
"Your son had no shoes or slippers on when you saw him?"
"He had nothing on save only his trousers and shirt."
"Thank you. We have certainly been favoured with extraordinary
luck during this inquiry, and it will be entirely our own fault
if we do not succeed in clearing the matter up. With your
permission, Mr. Holder, I shall now continue my investigations
outside."
He went alone, at his own request, for he explained that any
unnecessary footmarks might make his task more difficult. For an
hour or more he was at work, returning at last with his feet
heavy with snow and his features as inscrutable as ever.
"I think that I have seen now all that there is to see, Mr.
Holder," said he "I can serve you best by returning to my
rooms."
"But the gems, Mr. Holmes. Where are they?"
"I cannot tell."
The banker wrung his hands. "I shall never see them again" he
cried. "And my son? You give me hopes?"
"My opinion is in no way altered."
"Then, for God's sake, what was this dark business which was
acted in my house last night?"
"If you can call upon me at my Baker Street rooms tomorrow
morning between nine and ten I shall be happy to do what I can to
make it clearer. I understand that you give me carte blanche to
act for you, provided only that I get back the gems, and that you
place no limit on the sum I may draw."
"I would give my fortune to have them back."
"Very good. I shall look into the matter between this and then.
Goodbye it is just possible that I may have to come over here
again before evening."
It was obvious to me that my companion's mind was now made up
about the case, although what his conclusions were was more than
I could even dimly imagine. Several times during our homeward
journey I endeavoured to sound him upon the point, but he always
glided away to some other topic, until at last I gave it over in
despair. It was not yet three when we found ourselves in our
rooms once more. He hurried to his chamber and was down again in
a few minutes dressed as a common loafer. With his collar turned
up, his shiny, seedy coat, his red cravat, and his worn boots, he
was a perfect sample of the class.
"I think that this should do," said he, glancing into the glass
above the fireplace. "I only wish that you could come with me,
Watson, but I fear that it won't do. I may be on the trail in
this matter, or I may be following a willo'thewisp, but I
shall soon know which it is. I hope that I may be back in a few
hours." He cut a slice of beef from the joint upon the sideboard,
sandwiched it between two rounds of bread, and thrusting this
rude meal into his pocket he started off upon his expedition.
I had just finished my tea when he returned, evidently in
excellent spirits, swinging an old elasticsided boot in his
hand. He chucked it down into a corner and helped himself to a
cup of tea.
"I only looked in as I passed," said he. "I am going right on."
"Where to?"
"Oh, to the other side of the West End. It may be some time
before I get back. Don't wait up for me in case I should be
late."
"How are you getting on?"
"Oh, so so. Nothing to complain of. I have been out to Streatham
since I saw you last, but I did not call at the house. It is a
very sweet little problem, and I would not have missed it for a
good deal. However, I must not sit gossiping here, but must get
these disreputable clothes off and return to my highly
respectable self."
I could see by his manner that he had stronger reasons for
satisfaction than his words alone would imply. His eyes twinkled,
and there was even a touch of colour upon his sallow cheeks. He
hastened upstairs, and a few minutes later I heard the slam of
the hall door, which told me that he was off once more upon his
congenial hunt.
I waited until midnight, but there was no sign of his return, so
I retired to my room. It was no uncommon thing for him to be away
for days and nights on end when he was hot upon a scent, so that
his lateness caused me no surprise. I do not know at what hour he
came in, but when I came down to breakfast in the morning there
he was with a cup of coffee in one hand and the paper in the
other, as fresh and trim as possible.
"You will excuse my beginning without you, Watson," said he, "but
you remember that our client has rather an early appointment this
morning."
"Why, it is after nine now," I answered. "I should not be
surprised if that were he. I thought I heard a ring."
It was, indeed, our friend the financier. I was shocked by the
change which had come over him, for his face which was naturally
of a broad and massive mould, was now pinched and fallen in,
while his hair seemed to me at least a shade whiter. He entered
with a weariness and lethargy which was even more painful than
his violence of the morning before, and he dropped heavily into
the armchair which I pushed forward for him.
"I do not know what I have done to be so severely tried," said
he. "Only two days ago I was a happy and prosperous man, without
a care in the world. Now I am left to a lonely and dishonoured
age. One sorrow comes close upon the heels of another. My niece,
Mary, has deserted me."
"Deserted you?"
"Yes. Her bed this morning had not been slept in, her room was
empty, and a note for me lay upon the hall table. I had said to
her last night, in sorrow and not in anger, that if she had
married my boy all might have been well with him. Perhaps it was
thoughtless of me to say so. It is to that remark that she refers
in this note
"'MY DEAREST UNCLEI feel that I have brought trouble upon you,
and that if I had acted differently this terrible misfortune
might never have occurred. I cannot, with this thought in my
mind, ever again be happy under your roof, and I feel that I must
leave you forever. Do not worry about my future, for that is
provided for and, above all, do not search for me, for it will
be fruitless labour and an illservice to me. In life or in
death, I am ever your loving,MARY.'
"What could she mean by that note, Mr. Holmes? Do you think it
points to suicide?"
"No, no, nothing of the kind. It is perhaps the best possible
solution. I trust, Mr. Holder, that you are nearing the end of
your troubles."
"Ha You say so You have heard something, Mr. Holmes you have
learned something Where are the gems?"
"You would not think  pounds apiece an excessive sum for
them?"
"I would pay ten."
"That would be unnecessary. Three thousand will cover the matter.
And there is a little reward, I fancy. Have you your checkbook?
Here is a pen. Better make it out for  pounds."
With a dazed face the banker made out the required check. Holmes
walked over to his desk, took out a little triangular piece of
gold with three gems in it, and threw it down upon the table.
With a shriek of joy our client clutched it up.
"You have it" he gasped. "I am saved I am saved"
The reaction of joy was as passionate as his grief had been, and
he hugged his recovered gems to his bosom.
"There is one other thing you owe, Mr. Holder," said Sherlock
Holmes rather sternly.
"Owe" He caught up a pen. "Name the sum, and I will pay it."
"No, the debt is not to me. You owe a very humble apology to that
noble lad, your son, who has carried himself in this matter as I
should be proud to see my own son do, should I ever chance to
have one."
"Then it was not Arthur who took them?"
"I told you yesterday, and I repeat today, that it was not."
"You are sure of it Then let us hurry to him at once to let him
know that the truth is known."
"He knows it already. When I had cleared it all up I had an
interview with him, and finding that he would not tell me the
story, I told it to him, on which he had to confess that I was
right and to add the very few details which were not yet quite
clear to me. Your news of this morning, however, may open his
lips."
"For heaven's sake, tell me, then, what is this extraordinary
mystery"
"I will do so, and I will show you the steps by which I reached
it. And let me say to you, first, that which it is hardest for me
to say and for you to hear there has been an understanding
between Sir George Burnwell and your niece Mary. They have now
fled together."
"My Mary? Impossible"
"It is unfortunately more than possible it is certain. Neither
you nor your son knew the true character of this man when you
admitted him into your family circle. He is one of the most
dangerous men in Englanda ruined gambler, an absolutely
desperate villain, a man without heart or conscience. Your niece
knew nothing of such men. When he breathed his vows to her, as he
had done to a hundred before her, she flattered herself that she
alone had touched his heart. The devil knows best what he said,
but at least she became his tool and was in the habit of seeing
him nearly every evening."
"I cannot, and I will not, believe it" cried the banker with an
ashen face.
"I will tell you, then, what occurred in your house last night.
Your niece, when you had, as she thought, gone to your room,
slipped down and talked to her lover through the window which
leads into the stable lane. His footmarks had pressed right
through the snow, so long had he stood there. She told him of the
coronet. His wicked lust for gold kindled at the news, and he
bent her to his will. I have no doubt that she loved you, but
there are women in whom the love of a lover extinguishes all
other loves, and I think that she must have been one. She had
hardly listened to his instructions when she saw you coming
downstairs, on which she closed the window rapidly and told you
about one of the servants' escapade with her woodenlegged lover,
which was all perfectly true.
"Your boy, Arthur, went to bed after his interview with you but
he slept badly on account of his uneasiness about his club debts.
In the middle of the night he heard a soft tread pass his door,
so he rose and, looking out, was surprised to see his cousin
walking very stealthily along the passage until she disappeared
into your dressingroom. Petrified with astonishment, the lad
slipped on some clothes and waited there in the dark to see what
would come of this strange affair. Presently she emerged from the
room again, and in the light of the passagelamp your son saw
that she carried the precious coronet in her hands. She passed
down the stairs, and he, thrilling with horror, ran along and
slipped behind the curtain near your door, whence he could see
what passed in the hall beneath. He saw her stealthily open the
window, hand out the coronet to someone in the gloom, and then
closing it once more hurry back to her room, passing quite close
to where he stood hid behind the curtain.
"As long as she was on the scene he could not take any action
without a horrible exposure of the woman whom he loved. But the
instant that she was gone he realised how crushing a misfortune
this would be for you, and how allimportant it was to set it
right. He rushed down, just as he was, in his bare feet, opened
the window, sprang out into the snow, and ran down the lane,
where he could see a dark figure in the moonlight. Sir George
Burnwell tried to get away, but Arthur caught him, and there was
a struggle between them, your lad tugging at one side of the
coronet, and his opponent at the other. In the scuffle, your son
struck Sir George and cut him over the eye. Then something
suddenly snapped, and your son, finding that he had the coronet
in his hands, rushed back, closed the window, ascended to your
room, and had just observed that the coronet had been twisted in
the struggle and was endeavouring to straighten it when you
appeared upon the scene."
"Is it possible?" gasped the banker.
"You then roused his anger by calling him names at a moment when
he felt that he had deserved your warmest thanks. He could not
explain the true state of affairs without betraying one who
certainly deserved little enough consideration at his hands. He
took the more chivalrous view, however, and preserved her
secret."
"And that was why she shrieked and fainted when she saw the
coronet," cried Mr. Holder. "Oh, my God what a blind fool I have
been And his asking to be allowed to go out for five minutes
The dear fellow wanted to see if the missing piece were at the
scene of the struggle. How cruelly I have misjudged him"
"When I arrived at the house," continued Holmes, "I at once went
very carefully round it to observe if there were any traces in
the snow which might help me. I knew that none had fallen since
the evening before, and also that there had been a strong frost
to preserve impressions. I passed along the tradesmen's path, but
found it all trampled down and indistinguishable. Just beyond it,
however, at the far side of the kitchen door, a woman had stood
and talked with a man, whose round impressions on one side showed
that he had a wooden leg. I could even tell that they had been
disturbed, for the woman had run back swiftly to the door, as was
shown by the deep toe and light heel marks, while Woodenleg had
waited a little, and then had gone away. I thought at the time
that this might be the maid and her sweetheart, of whom you had
already spoken to me, and inquiry showed it was so. I passed
round the garden without seeing anything more than random tracks,
which I took to be the police but when I got into the stable
lane a very long and complex story was written in the snow in
front of me.
"There was a double line of tracks of a booted man, and a second
double line which I saw with delight belonged to a man with naked
feet. I was at once convinced from what you had told me that the
latter was your son. The first had walked both ways, but the
other had run swiftly, and as his tread was marked in places over
the depression of the boot, it was obvious that he had passed
after the other. I followed them up and found they led to the
hall window, where Boots had worn all the snow away while
waiting. Then I walked to the other end, which was a hundred
yards or more down the lane. I saw where Boots had faced round,
where the snow was cut up as though there had been a struggle,
and, finally, where a few drops of blood had fallen, to show me
that I was not mistaken. Boots had then run down the lane, and
another little smudge of blood showed that it was he who had been
hurt. When he came to the highroad at the other end, I found that
the pavement had been cleared, so there was an end to that clue.
"On entering the house, however, I examined, as you remember, the
sill and framework of the hall window with my lens, and I could
at once see that someone had passed out. I could distinguish the
outline of an instep where the wet foot had been placed in coming
in. I was then beginning to be able to form an opinion as to what
had occurred. A man had waited outside the window someone had
brought the gems the deed had been overseen by your son he had
pursued the thief had struggled with him they had each tugged
at the coronet, their united strength causing injuries which
neither alone could have effected. He had returned with the
prize, but had left a fragment in the grasp of his opponent. So
far I was clear. The question now was, who was the man and who
was it brought him the coronet?
"It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the
impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the
truth. Now, I knew that it was not you who had brought it down,
so there only remained your niece and the maids. But if it were
the maids, why should your son allow himself to be accused in
their place? There could be no possible reason. As he loved his
cousin, however, there was an excellent explanation why he should
retain her secretthe more so as the secret was a disgraceful
one. When I remembered that you had seen her at that window, and
how she had fainted on seeing the coronet again, my conjecture
became a certainty.
"And who could it be who was her confederate? A lover evidently,
for who else could outweigh the love and gratitude which she must
feel to you? I knew that you went out little, and that your
circle of friends was a very limited one. But among them was Sir
George Burnwell. I had heard of him before as being a man of evil
reputation among women. It must have been he who wore those boots
and retained the missing gems. Even though he knew that Arthur
had discovered him, he might still flatter himself that he was
safe, for the lad could not say a word without compromising his
own family.
"Well, your own good sense will suggest what measures I took
next. I went in the shape of a loafer to Sir George's house,
managed to pick up an acquaintance with his valet, learned that
his master had cut his head the night before, and, finally, at
the expense of six shillings, made all sure by buying a pair of
his castoff shoes. With these I journeyed down to Streatham and
saw that they exactly fitted the tracks."
"I saw an illdressed vagabond in the lane yesterday evening,"
said Mr. Holder.
"Precisely. It was I. I found that I had my man, so I came home
and changed my clothes. It was a delicate part which I had to
play then, for I saw that a prosecution must be avoided to avert
scandal, and I knew that so astute a villain would see that our
hands were tied in the matter. I went and saw him. At first, of
course, he denied everything. But when I gave him every
particular that had occurred, he tried to bluster and took down a
lifepreserver from the wall. I knew my man, however, and I
clapped a pistol to his head before he could strike. Then he
became a little more reasonable. I told him that we would give
him a price for the stones he held pounds apiece. That
brought out the first signs of grief that he had shown. 'Why,
dash it all' said he, 'I've let them go at six hundred for the
three' I soon managed to get the address of the receiver who had
them, on promising him that there would be no prosecution. Off I
set to him, and after much chaffering I got our stones at 
pounds apiece. Then I looked in upon your son, told him that all
was right, and eventually got to my bed about two o'clock, after
what I may call a really hard day's work."
"A day which has saved England from a great public scandal," said
the banker, rising. "Sir, I cannot find words to thank you, but
you shall not find me ungrateful for what you have done. Your
skill has indeed exceeded all that I have heard of it. And now I
must fly to my dear boy to apologise to him for the wrong which I
have done him. As to what you tell me of poor Mary, it goes to my
very heart. Not even your skill can inform me where she is now."
"I think that we may safely say," returned Holmes, "that she is
wherever Sir George Burnwell is. It is equally certain, too, that
whatever her sins are, they will soon receive a more than
sufficient punishment."
XII. THE ADVENTURE OF THE COPPER BEECHES
"To the man who loves art for its own sake," remarked Sherlock
Holmes, tossing aside the advertisement sheet of the Daily
Telegraph, "it is frequently in its least important and lowliest
manifestations that the keenest pleasure is to be derived. It is
pleasant to me to observe, Watson, that you have so far grasped
this truth that in these little records of our cases which you
have been good enough to draw up, and, I am bound to say,
occasionally to embellish, you have given prominence not so much
to the many causes clbres and sensational trials in which I
have figured but rather to those incidents which may have been
trivial in themselves, but which have given room for those
faculties of deduction and of logical synthesis which I have made
my special province."
"And yet," said I, smiling, "I cannot quite hold myself absolved
from the charge of sensationalism which has been urged against my
records."
"You have erred, perhaps," he observed, taking up a glowing
cinder with the tongs and lighting with it the long cherrywood
pipe which was wont to replace his clay when he was in a
disputatious rather than a meditative mood"you have erred
perhaps in attempting to put colour and life into each of your
statements instead of confining yourself to the task of placing
upon record that severe reasoning from cause to effect which is
really the only notable feature about the thing."
"It seems to me that I have done you full justice in the matter,"
I remarked with some coldness, for I was repelled by the egotism
which I had more than once observed to be a strong factor in my
friend's singular character.
"No, it is not selfishness or conceit," said he, answering, as
was his wont, my thoughts rather than my words. "If I claim full
justice for my art, it is because it is an impersonal thinga
thing beyond myself. Crime is common. Logic is rare. Therefore it
is upon the logic rather than upon the crime that you should
dwell. You have degraded what should have been a course of
lectures into a series of tales."
It was a cold morning of the early spring, and we sat after
breakfast on either side of a cheery fire in the old room at
Baker Street. A thick fog rolled down between the lines of
duncoloured houses, and the opposing windows loomed like dark,
shapeless blurs through the heavy yellow wreaths. Our gas was lit
and shone on the white cloth and glimmer of china and metal, for
the table had not been cleared yet. Sherlock Holmes had been
silent all the morning, dipping continuously into the
advertisement columns of a succession of papers until at last,
having apparently given up his search, he had emerged in no very
sweet temper to lecture me upon my literary shortcomings.
"At the same time," he remarked after a pause, during which he
had sat puffing at his long pipe and gazing down into the fire,
"you can hardly be open to a charge of sensationalism, for out of
these cases which you have been so kind as to interest yourself
in, a fair proportion do not treat of crime, in its legal sense,
at all. The small matter in which I endeavoured to help the King
of Bohemia, the singular experience of Miss Mary Sutherland, the
problem connected with the man with the twisted lip, and the
incident of the noble bachelor, were all matters which are
outside the pale of the law. But in avoiding the sensational, I
fear that you may have bordered on the trivial."
"The end may have been so," I answered, "but the methods I hold
to have been novel and of interest."
"Pshaw, my dear fellow, what do the public, the great unobservant
public, who could hardly tell a weaver by his tooth or a
compositor by his left thumb, care about the finer shades of
analysis and deduction But, indeed, if you are trivial. I cannot
blame you, for the days of the great cases are past. Man, or at
least criminal man, has lost all enterprise and originality. As
to my own little practice, it seems to be degenerating into an
agency for recovering lost lead pencils and giving advice to
young ladies from boardingschools. I think that I have touched
bottom at last, however. This note I had this morning marks my
zeropoint, I fancy. Read it" He tossed a crumpled letter across
to me.
It was dated from Montague Place upon the preceding evening, and
ran thus
"DEAR MR. HOLMESI am very anxious to consult you as to whether
I should or should not accept a situation which has been offered
to me as governess. I shall call at halfpast ten tomorrow if I
do not inconvenience you. Yours faithfully,
"VIOLET HUNTER."
"Do you know the young lady?" I asked.
"Not I."
"It is halfpast ten now."
"Yes, and I have no doubt that is her ring."
"It may turn out to be of more interest than you think. You
remember that the affair of the blue carbuncle, which appeared to
be a mere whim at first, developed into a serious investigation.
It may be so in this case, also."
"Well, let us hope so. But our doubts will very soon be solved,
for here, unless I am much mistaken, is the person in question."
As he spoke the door opened and a young lady entered the room.
She was plainly but neatly dressed, with a bright, quick face,
freckled like a plover's egg, and with the brisk manner of a
woman who has had her own way to make in the world.
"You will excuse my troubling you, I am sure," said she, as my
companion rose to greet her, "but I have had a very strange
experience, and as I have no parents or relations of any sort
from whom I could ask advice, I thought that perhaps you would be
kind enough to tell me what I should do."
"Pray take a seat, Miss Hunter. I shall be happy to do anything
that I can to serve you."
I could see that Holmes was favourably impressed by the manner
and speech of his new client. He looked her over in his searching
fashion, and then composed himself, with his lids drooping and
his fingertips together, to listen to her story.
"I have been a governess for five years," said she, "in the
family of Colonel Spence Munro, but two months ago the colonel
received an appointment at Halifax, in Nova Scotia, and took his
children over to America with him, so that I found myself without
a situation. I advertised, and I answered advertisements, but
without success. At last the little money which I had saved began
to run short, and I was at my wit's end as to what I should do.
"There is a wellknown agency for governesses in the West End
called Westaway's, and there I used to call about once a week in
order to see whether anything had turned up which might suit me.
Westaway was the name of the founder of the business, but it is
really managed by Miss Stoper. She sits in her own little office,
and the ladies who are seeking employment wait in an anteroom,
and are then shown in one by one, when she consults her ledgers
and sees whether she has anything which would suit them.
"Well, when I called last week I was shown into the little office
as usual, but I found that Miss Stoper was not alone. A
prodigiously stout man with a very smiling face and a great heavy
chin which rolled down in fold upon fold over his throat sat at
her elbow with a pair of glasses on his nose, looking very
earnestly at the ladies who entered. As I came in he gave quite a
jump in his chair and turned quickly to Miss Stoper.
"'That will do,' said he 'I could not ask for anything better.
Capital capital' He seemed quite enthusiastic and rubbed his
hands together in the most genial fashion. He was such a
comfortablelooking man that it was quite a pleasure to look at
him.
"'You are looking for a situation, miss?' he asked.
"'Yes, sir.'
"'As governess?'
"'Yes, sir.'
"'And what salary do you ask?'
"'I had  pounds a month in my last place with Colonel Spence
Munro.'
"'Oh, tut, tut sweatingrank sweating' he cried, throwing his
fat hands out into the air like a man who is in a boiling
passion. 'How could anyone offer so pitiful a sum to a lady with
such attractions and accomplishments?'
"'My accomplishments, sir, may be less than you imagine,' said I.
'A little French, a little German, music, and drawing'
"'Tut, tut' he cried. 'This is all quite beside the question.
The point is, have you or have you not the bearing and deportment
of a lady? There it is in a nutshell. If you have not, you are
not fitted for the rearing of a child who may some day play a
considerable part in the history of the country. But if you have
why, then, how could any gentleman ask you to condescend to
accept anything under the three figures? Your salary with me,
madam, would commence at  pounds a year.'
"You may imagine, Mr. Holmes, that to me, destitute as I was,
such an offer seemed almost too good to be true. The gentleman,
however, seeing perhaps the look of incredulity upon my face,
opened a pocketbook and took out a note.
"'It is also my custom,' said he, smiling in the most pleasant
fashion until his eyes were just two little shining slits amid
the white creases of his face, 'to advance to my young ladies
half their salary beforehand, so that they may meet any little
expenses of their journey and their wardrobe.'
"It seemed to me that I had never met so fascinating and so
thoughtful a man. As I was already in debt to my tradesmen, the
advance was a great convenience, and yet there was something
unnatural about the whole transaction which made me wish to know
a little more before I quite committed myself.
"'May I ask where you live, sir?' said I.
"'Hampshire. Charming rural place. The Copper Beeches, five miles
on the far side of Winchester. It is the most lovely country, my
dear young lady, and the dearest old countryhouse.'
"'And my duties, sir? I should be glad to know what they would
be.'
"'One childone dear little romper just six years old. Oh, if
you could see him killing cockroaches with a slipper Smack
smack smack Three gone before you could wink' He leaned back
in his chair and laughed his eyes into his head again.
"I was a little startled at the nature of the child's amusement,
but the father's laughter made me think that perhaps he was
joking.
"'My sole duties, then,' I asked, 'are to take charge of a single
child?'
"'No, no, not the sole, not the sole, my dear young lady,' he
cried. 'Your duty would be, as I am sure your good sense would
suggest, to obey any little commands my wife might give, provided
always that they were such commands as a lady might with
propriety obey. You see no difficulty, heh?'
"'I should be happy to make myself useful.'
"'Quite so. In dress now, for example. We are faddy people, you
knowfaddy but kindhearted. If you were asked to wear any dress
which we might give you, you would not object to our little whim.
Heh?'
"'No,' said I, considerably astonished at his words.
"'Or to sit here, or sit there, that would not be offensive to
you?'
"'Oh, no.'
"'Or to cut your hair quite short before you come to us?'
"I could hardly believe my ears. As you may observe, Mr. Holmes,
my hair is somewhat luxuriant, and of a rather peculiar tint of
chestnut. It has been considered artistic. I could not dream of
sacrificing it in this offhand fashion.
"'I am afraid that that is quite impossible,' said I. He had been
watching me eagerly out of his small eyes, and I could see a
shadow pass over his face as I spoke.
"'I am afraid that it is quite essential,' said he. 'It is a
little fancy of my wife's, and ladies' fancies, you know, madam,
ladies' fancies must be consulted. And so you won't cut your
hair?'
"'No, sir, I really could not,' I answered firmly.
"'Ah, very well then that quite settles the matter. It is a
pity, because in other respects you would really have done very
nicely. In that case, Miss Stoper, I had best inspect a few more
of your young ladies.'
"The manageress had sat all this while busy with her papers
without a word to either of us, but she glanced at me now with so
much annoyance upon her face that I could not help suspecting
that she had lost a handsome commission through my refusal.
"'Do you desire your name to be kept upon the books?' she asked.
"'If you please, Miss Stoper.'
"'Well, really, it seems rather useless, since you refuse the
most excellent offers in this fashion,' said she sharply. 'You
can hardly expect us to exert ourselves to find another such
opening for you. Goodday to you, Miss Hunter.' She struck a gong
upon the table, and I was shown out by the page.
"Well, Mr. Holmes, when I got back to my lodgings and found
little enough in the cupboard, and two or three bills upon the
table. I began to ask myself whether I had not done a very
foolish thing. After all, if these people had strange fads and
expected obedience on the most extraordinary matters, they were
at least ready to pay for their eccentricity. Very few
governesses in England are getting  pounds a year. Besides,
what use was my hair to me? Many people are improved by wearing
it short and perhaps I should be among the number. Next day I was
inclined to think that I had made a mistake, and by the day after
I was sure of it. I had almost overcome my pride so far as to go
back to the agency and inquire whether the place was still open
when I received this letter from the gentleman himself. I have it
here and I will read it to you
"'The Copper Beeches, near Winchester.
"'DEAR MISS HUNTERMiss Stoper has very kindly given me your
address, and I write from here to ask you whether you have
reconsidered your decision. My wife is very anxious that you
should come, for she has been much attracted by my description of
you. We are willing to give  pounds a quarter, or  pounds a
year, so as to recompense you for any little inconvenience which
our fads may cause you. They are not very exacting, after all. My
wife is fond of a particular shade of electric blue and would
like you to wear such a dress indoors in the morning. You need
not, however, go to the expense of purchasing one, as we have one
belonging to my dear daughter Alice now in Philadelphia, which
would, I should think, fit you very well. Then, as to sitting
here or there, or amusing yourself in any manner indicated, that
need cause you no inconvenience. As regards your hair, it is no
doubt a pity, especially as I could not help remarking its beauty
during our short interview, but I am afraid that I must remain
firm upon this point, and I only hope that the increased salary
may recompense you for the loss. Your duties, as far as the child
is concerned, are very light. Now do try to come, and I shall
meet you with the dogcart at Winchester. Let me know your train.
Yours faithfully, JEPHRO RUCASTLE.'
"That is the letter which I have just received, Mr. Holmes, and
my mind is made up that I will accept it. I thought, however,
that before taking the final step I should like to submit the
whole matter to your consideration."
"Well, Miss Hunter, if your mind is made up, that settles the
question," said Holmes, smiling.
"But you would not advise me to refuse?"
"I confess that it is not the situation which I should like to
see a sister of mine apply for."
"What is the meaning of it all, Mr. Holmes?"
"Ah, I have no data. I cannot tell. Perhaps you have yourself
formed some opinion?"
"Well, there seems to me to be only one possible solution. Mr.
Rucastle seemed to be a very kind, goodnatured man. Is it not
possible that his wife is a lunatic, that he desires to keep the
matter quiet for fear she should be taken to an asylum, and that
he humours her fancies in every way in order to prevent an
outbreak?"
"That is a possible solutionin fact, as matters stand, it is
the most probable one. But in any case it does not seem to be a
nice household for a young lady."
"But the money, Mr. Holmes, the money"
"Well, yes, of course the pay is goodtoo good. That is what
makes me uneasy. Why should they give you  pounds a year, when
they could have their pick for  pounds? There must be some
strong reason behind."
"I thought that if I told you the circumstances you would
understand afterwards if I wanted your help. I should feel so
much stronger if I felt that you were at the back of me."
"Oh, you may carry that feeling away with you. I assure you that
your little problem promises to be the most interesting which has
come my way for some months. There is something distinctly novel
about some of the features. If you should find yourself in doubt
or in danger"
"Danger What danger do you foresee?"
Holmes shook his head gravely. "It would cease to be a danger if
we could define it," said he. "But at any time, day or night, a
telegram would bring me down to your help."
"That is enough." She rose briskly from her chair with the
anxiety all swept from her face. "I shall go down to Hampshire
quite easy in my mind now. I shall write to Mr. Rucastle at once,
sacrifice my poor hair tonight, and start for Winchester
tomorrow." With a few grateful words to Holmes she bade us both
goodnight and bustled off upon her way.
"At least," said I as we heard her quick, firm steps descending
the stairs, "she seems to be a young lady who is very well able
to take care of herself."
"And she would need to be," said Holmes gravely. "I am much
mistaken if we do not hear from her before many days are past."
It was not very long before my friend's prediction was fulfilled.
A fortnight went by, during which I frequently found my thoughts
turning in her direction and wondering what strange sidealley of
human experience this lonely woman had strayed into. The unusual
salary, the curious conditions, the light duties, all pointed to
something abnormal, though whether a fad or a plot, or whether
the man were a philanthropist or a villain, it was quite beyond
my powers to determine. As to Holmes, I observed that he sat
frequently for half an hour on end, with knitted brows and an
abstracted air, but he swept the matter away with a wave of his
hand when I mentioned it. "Data data data" he cried
impatiently. "I can't make bricks without clay." And yet he would
always wind up by muttering that no sister of his should ever
have accepted such a situation.
The telegram which we eventually received came late one night
just as I was thinking of turning in and Holmes was settling down
to one of those allnight chemical researches which he frequently
indulged in, when I would leave him stooping over a retort and a
testtube at night and find him in the same position when I came
down to breakfast in the morning. He opened the yellow envelope,
and then, glancing at the message, threw it across to me.
"Just look up the trains in Bradshaw," said he, and turned back
to his chemical studies.
The summons was a brief and urgent one.
"Please be at the Black Swan Hotel at Winchester at midday
tomorrow," it said. "Do come I am at my wit's end. HUNTER."
"Will you come with me?" asked Holmes, glancing up.
"I should wish to."
"Just look it up, then."
"There is a train at halfpast nine," said I, glancing over my
Bradshaw. "It is due at Winchester at ."
"That will do very nicely. Then perhaps I had better postpone my
analysis of the acetones, as we may need to be at our best in the
morning."
By eleven o'clock the next day we were well upon our way to the
old English capital. Holmes had been buried in the morning papers
all the way down, but after we had passed the Hampshire border he
threw them down and began to admire the scenery. It was an ideal
spring day, a light blue sky, flecked with little fleecy white
clouds drifting across from west to east. The sun was shining
very brightly, and yet there was an exhilarating nip in the air,
which set an edge to a man's energy. All over the countryside,
away to the rolling hills around Aldershot, the little red and
grey roofs of the farmsteadings peeped out from amid the light
green of the new foliage.
"Are they not fresh and beautiful?" I cried with all the
enthusiasm of a man fresh from the fogs of Baker Street.
But Holmes shook his head gravely.
"Do you know, Watson," said he, "that it is one of the curses of
a mind with a turn like mine that I must look at everything with
reference to my own special subject. You look at these scattered
houses, and you are impressed by their beauty. I look at them,
and the only thought which comes to me is a feeling of their
isolation and of the impunity with which crime may be committed
there."
"Good heavens" I cried. "Who would associate crime with these
dear old homesteads?"
"They always fill me with a certain horror. It is my belief,
Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest
alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin
than does the smiling and beautiful countryside."
"You horrify me"
"But the reason is very obvious. The pressure of public opinion
can do in the town what the law cannot accomplish. There is no
lane so vile that the scream of a tortured child, or the thud of
a drunkard's blow, does not beget sympathy and indignation among
the neighbours, and then the whole machinery of justice is ever
so close that a word of complaint can set it going, and there is
but a step between the crime and the dock. But look at these
lonely houses, each in its own fields, filled for the most part
with poor ignorant folk who know little of the law. Think of the
deeds of hellish cruelty, the hidden wickedness which may go on,
year in, year out, in such places, and none the wiser. Had this
lady who appeals to us for help gone to live in Winchester, I
should never have had a fear for her. It is the five miles of
country which makes the danger. Still, it is clear that she is
not personally threatened."
"No. If she can come to Winchester to meet us she can get away."
"Quite so. She has her freedom."
"What CAN be the matter, then? Can you suggest no explanation?"
"I have devised seven separate explanations, each of which would
cover the facts as far as we know them. But which of these is
correct can only be determined by the fresh information which we
shall no doubt find waiting for us. Well, there is the tower of
the cathedral, and we shall soon learn all that Miss Hunter has
to tell."
The Black Swan is an inn of repute in the High Street, at no
distance from the station, and there we found the young lady
waiting for us. She had engaged a sittingroom, and our lunch
awaited us upon the table.
"I am so delighted that you have come," she said earnestly. "It
is so very kind of you both but indeed I do not know what I
should do. Your advice will be altogether invaluable to me."
"Pray tell us what has happened to you."
"I will do so, and I must be quick, for I have promised Mr.
Rucastle to be back before three. I got his leave to come into
town this morning, though he little knew for what purpose."
"Let us have everything in its due order." Holmes thrust his long
thin legs out towards the fire and composed himself to listen.
"In the first place, I may say that I have met, on the whole,
with no actual illtreatment from Mr. and Mrs. Rucastle. It is
only fair to them to say that. But I cannot understand them, and
I am not easy in my mind about them."
"What can you not understand?"
"Their reasons for their conduct. But you shall have it all just
as it occurred. When I came down, Mr. Rucastle met me here and
drove me in his dogcart to the Copper Beeches. It is, as he
said, beautifully situated, but it is not beautiful in itself,
for it is a large square block of a house, whitewashed, but all
stained and streaked with damp and bad weather. There are grounds
round it, woods on three sides, and on the fourth a field which
slopes down to the Southampton highroad, which curves past about
a hundred yards from the front door. This ground in front belongs
to the house, but the woods all round are part of Lord
Southerton's preserves. A clump of copper beeches immediately in
front of the hall door has given its name to the place.
"I was driven over by my employer, who was as amiable as ever,
and was introduced by him that evening to his wife and the child.
There was no truth, Mr. Holmes, in the conjecture which seemed to
us to be probable in your rooms at Baker Street. Mrs. Rucastle is
not mad. I found her to be a silent, palefaced woman, much
younger than her husband, not more than thirty, I should think,
while he can hardly be less than fortyfive. From their
conversation I have gathered that they have been married about
seven years, that he was a widower, and that his only child by
the first wife was the daughter who has gone to Philadelphia. Mr.
Rucastle told me in private that the reason why she had left them
was that she had an unreasoning aversion to her stepmother. As
the daughter could not have been less than twenty, I can quite
imagine that her position must have been uncomfortable with her
father's young wife.
"Mrs. Rucastle seemed to me to be colourless in mind as well as
in feature. She impressed me neither favourably nor the reverse.
She was a nonentity. It was easy to see that she was passionately
devoted both to her husband and to her little son. Her light grey
eyes wandered continually from one to the other, noting every
little want and forestalling it if possible. He was kind to her
also in his bluff, boisterous fashion, and on the whole they
seemed to be a happy couple. And yet she had some secret sorrow,
this woman. She would often be lost in deep thought, with the
saddest look upon her face. More than once I have surprised her
in tears. I have thought sometimes that it was the disposition of
her child which weighed upon her mind, for I have never met so
utterly spoiled and so illnatured a little creature. He is small
for his age, with a head which is quite disproportionately large.
His whole life appears to be spent in an alternation between
savage fits of passion and gloomy intervals of sulking. Giving
pain to any creature weaker than himself seems to be his one idea
of amusement, and he shows quite remarkable talent in planning
the capture of mice, little birds, and insects. But I would
rather not talk about the creature, Mr. Holmes, and, indeed, he
has little to do with my story."
"I am glad of all details," remarked my friend, "whether they
seem to you to be relevant or not."
"I shall try not to miss anything of importance. The one
unpleasant thing about the house, which struck me at once, was
the appearance and conduct of the servants. There are only two, a
man and his wife. Toller, for that is his name, is a rough,
uncouth man, with grizzled hair and whiskers, and a perpetual
smell of drink. Twice since I have been with them he has been
quite drunk, and yet Mr. Rucastle seemed to take no notice of it.
His wife is a very tall and strong woman with a sour face, as
silent as Mrs. Rucastle and much less amiable. They are a most
unpleasant couple, but fortunately I spend most of my time in the
nursery and my own room, which are next to each other in one
corner of the building.
"For two days after my arrival at the Copper Beeches my life was
very quiet on the third, Mrs. Rucastle came down just after
breakfast and whispered something to her husband.
"'Oh, yes,' said he, turning to me, 'we are very much obliged to
you, Miss Hunter, for falling in with our whims so far as to cut
your hair. I assure you that it has not detracted in the tiniest
iota from your appearance. We shall now see how the electricblue
dress will become you. You will find it laid out upon the bed in
your room, and if you would be so good as to put it on we should
both be extremely obliged.'
"The dress which I found waiting for me was of a peculiar shade
of blue. It was of excellent material, a sort of beige, but it
bore unmistakable signs of having been worn before. It could not
have been a better fit if I had been measured for it. Both Mr.
and Mrs. Rucastle expressed a delight at the look of it, which
seemed quite exaggerated in its vehemence. They were waiting for
me in the drawingroom, which is a very large room, stretching
along the entire front of the house, with three long windows
reaching down to the floor. A chair had been placed close to the
central window, with its back turned towards it. In this I was
asked to sit, and then Mr. Rucastle, walking up and down on the
other side of the room, began to tell me a series of the funniest
stories that I have ever listened to. You cannot imagine how
comical he was, and I laughed until I was quite weary. Mrs.
Rucastle, however, who has evidently no sense of humour, never so
much as smiled, but sat with her hands in her lap, and a sad,
anxious look upon her face. After an hour or so, Mr. Rucastle
suddenly remarked that it was time to commence the duties of the
day, and that I might change my dress and go to little Edward in
the nursery.
"Two days later this same performance was gone through under
exactly similar circumstances. Again I changed my dress, again I
sat in the window, and again I laughed very heartily at the funny
stories of which my employer had an immense rpertoire, and which
he told inimitably. Then he handed me a yellowbacked novel, and
moving my chair a little sideways, that my own shadow might not
fall upon the page, he begged me to read aloud to him. I read for
about ten minutes, beginning in the heart of a chapter, and then
suddenly, in the middle of a sentence, he ordered me to cease and
to change my dress.
"You can easily imagine, Mr. Holmes, how curious I became as to
what the meaning of this extraordinary performance could possibly
be. They were always very careful, I observed, to turn my face
away from the window, so that I became consumed with the desire
to see what was going on behind my back. At first it seemed to be
impossible, but I soon devised a means. My handmirror had been
broken, so a happy thought seized me, and I concealed a piece of
the glass in my handkerchief. On the next occasion, in the midst
of my laughter, I put my handkerchief up to my eyes, and was able
with a little management to see all that there was behind me. I
confess that I was disappointed. There was nothing. At least that
was my first impression. At the second glance, however, I
perceived that there was a man standing in the Southampton Road,
a small bearded man in a grey suit, who seemed to be looking in
my direction. The road is an important highway, and there are
usually people there. This man, however, was leaning against the
railings which bordered our field and was looking earnestly up. I
lowered my handkerchief and glanced at Mrs. Rucastle to find her
eyes fixed upon me with a most searching gaze. She said nothing,
but I am convinced that she had divined that I had a mirror in my
hand and had seen what was behind me. She rose at once.
"'Jephro,' said she, 'there is an impertinent fellow upon the
road there who stares up at Miss Hunter.'
"'No friend of yours, Miss Hunter?' he asked.
"'No, I know no one in these parts.'
"'Dear me How very impertinent Kindly turn round and motion to
him to go away.'
"'Surely it would be better to take no notice.'
"'No, no, we should have him loitering here always. Kindly turn
round and wave him away like that.'
"I did as I was told, and at the same instant Mrs. Rucastle drew
down the blind. That was a week ago, and from that time I have
not sat again in the window, nor have I worn the blue dress, nor
seen the man in the road."
"Pray continue," said Holmes. "Your narrative promises to be a
most interesting one."
"You will find it rather disconnected, I fear, and there may
prove to be little relation between the different incidents of
which I speak. On the very first day that I was at the Copper
Beeches, Mr. Rucastle took me to a small outhouse which stands
near the kitchen door. As we approached it I heard the sharp
rattling of a chain, and the sound as of a large animal moving
about.
"'Look in here' said Mr. Rucastle, showing me a slit between two
planks. 'Is he not a beauty?'
"I looked through and was conscious of two glowing eyes, and of a
vague figure huddled up in the darkness.
"'Don't be frightened,' said my employer, laughing at the start
which I had given. 'It's only Carlo, my mastiff. I call him mine,
but really old Toller, my groom, is the only man who can do
anything with him. We feed him once a day, and not too much then,
so that he is always as keen as mustard. Toller lets him loose
every night, and God help the trespasser whom he lays his fangs
upon. For goodness' sake don't you ever on any pretext set your
foot over the threshold at night, for it's as much as your life
is worth.'
"The warning was no idle one, for two nights later I happened to
look out of my bedroom window about two o'clock in the morning.
It was a beautiful moonlight night, and the lawn in front of the
house was silvered over and almost as bright as day. I was
standing, rapt in the peaceful beauty of the scene, when I was
aware that something was moving under the shadow of the copper
beeches. As it emerged into the moonshine I saw what it was. It
was a giant dog, as large as a calf, tawny tinted, with hanging
jowl, black muzzle, and huge projecting bones. It walked slowly
across the lawn and vanished into the shadow upon the other side.
That dreadful sentinel sent a chill to my heart which I do not
think that any burglar could have done.
"And now I have a very strange experience to tell you. I had, as
you know, cut off my hair in London, and I had placed it in a
great coil at the bottom of my trunk. One evening, after the
child was in bed, I began to amuse myself by examining the
furniture of my room and by rearranging my own little things.
There was an old chest of drawers in the room, the two upper ones
empty and open, the lower one locked. I had filled the first two
with my linen, and as I had still much to pack away I was
naturally annoyed at not having the use of the third drawer. It
struck me that it might have been fastened by a mere oversight,
so I took out my bunch of keys and tried to open it. The very
first key fitted to perfection, and I drew the drawer open. There
was only one thing in it, but I am sure that you would never
guess what it was. It was my coil of hair.
"I took it up and examined it. It was of the same peculiar tint,
and the same thickness. But then the impossibility of the thing
obtruded itself upon me. How could my hair have been locked in
the drawer? With trembling hands I undid my trunk, turned out the
contents, and drew from the bottom my own hair. I laid the two
tresses together, and I assure you that they were identical. Was
it not extraordinary? Puzzle as I would, I could make nothing at
all of what it meant. I returned the strange hair to the drawer,
and I said nothing of the matter to the Rucastles as I felt that
I had put myself in the wrong by opening a drawer which they had
locked.
"I am naturally observant, as you may have remarked, Mr. Holmes,
and I soon had a pretty good plan of the whole house in my head.
There was one wing, however, which appeared not to be inhabited
at all. A door which faced that which led into the quarters of
the Tollers opened into this suite, but it was invariably locked.
One day, however, as I ascended the stair, I met Mr. Rucastle
coming out through this door, his keys in his hand, and a look on
his face which made him a very different person to the round,
jovial man to whom I was accustomed. His cheeks were red, his
brow was all crinkled with anger, and the veins stood out at his
temples with passion. He locked the door and hurried past me
without a word or a look.
"This aroused my curiosity, so when I went out for a walk in the
grounds with my charge, I strolled round to the side from which I
could see the windows of this part of the house. There were four
of them in a row, three of which were simply dirty, while the
fourth was shuttered up. They were evidently all deserted. As I
strolled up and down, glancing at them occasionally, Mr. Rucastle
came out to me, looking as merry and jovial as ever.
"'Ah' said he, 'you must not think me rude if I passed you
without a word, my dear young lady. I was preoccupied with
business matters.'
"I assured him that I was not offended. 'By the way,' said I,
'you seem to have quite a suite of spare rooms up there, and one
of them has the shutters up.'
"He looked surprised and, as it seemed to me, a little startled
at my remark.
"'Photography is one of my hobbies,' said he. 'I have made my
dark room up there. But, dear me what an observant young lady we
have come upon. Who would have believed it? Who would have ever
believed it?' He spoke in a jesting tone, but there was no jest
in his eyes as he looked at me. I read suspicion there and
annoyance, but no jest.
"Well, Mr. Holmes, from the moment that I understood that there
was something about that suite of rooms which I was not to know,
I was all on fire to go over them. It was not mere curiosity,
though I have my share of that. It was more a feeling of dutya
feeling that some good might come from my penetrating to this
place. They talk of woman's instinct perhaps it was woman's
instinct which gave me that feeling. At any rate, it was there,
and I was keenly on the lookout for any chance to pass the
forbidden door.
"It was only yesterday that the chance came. I may tell you that,
besides Mr. Rucastle, both Toller and his wife find something to
do in these deserted rooms, and I once saw him carrying a large
black linen bag with him through the door. Recently he has been
drinking hard, and yesterday evening he was very drunk and when
I came upstairs there was the key in the door. I have no doubt at
all that he had left it there. Mr. and Mrs. Rucastle were both
downstairs, and the child was with them, so that I had an
admirable opportunity. I turned the key gently in the lock,
opened the door, and slipped through.
"There was a little passage in front of me, unpapered and
uncarpeted, which turned at a right angle at the farther end.
Round this corner were three doors in a line, the first and third
of which were open. They each led into an empty room, dusty and
cheerless, with two windows in the one and one in the other, so
thick with dirt that the evening light glimmered dimly through
them. The centre door was closed, and across the outside of it
had been fastened one of the broad bars of an iron bed, padlocked
at one end to a ring in the wall, and fastened at the other with
stout cord. The door itself was locked as well, and the key was
not there. This barricaded door corresponded clearly with the
shuttered window outside, and yet I could see by the glimmer from
beneath it that the room was not in darkness. Evidently there was
a skylight which let in light from above. As I stood in the
passage gazing at the sinister door and wondering what secret it
might veil, I suddenly heard the sound of steps within the room
and saw a shadow pass backward and forward against the little
slit of dim light which shone out from under the door. A mad,
unreasoning terror rose up in me at the sight, Mr. Holmes. My
overstrung nerves failed me suddenly, and I turned and ranran
as though some dreadful hand were behind me clutching at the
skirt of my dress. I rushed down the passage, through the door,
and straight into the arms of Mr. Rucastle, who was waiting
outside.
"'So,' said he, smiling, 'it was you, then. I thought that it
must be when I saw the door open.'
"'Oh, I am so frightened' I panted.
"'My dear young lady my dear young lady'you cannot think how
caressing and soothing his manner was'and what has frightened
you, my dear young lady?'
"But his voice was just a little too coaxing. He overdid it. I
was keenly on my guard against him.
"'I was foolish enough to go into the empty wing,' I answered.
'But it is so lonely and eerie in this dim light that I was
frightened and ran out again. Oh, it is so dreadfully still in
there'
"'Only that?' said he, looking at me keenly.
"'Why, what did you think?' I asked.
"'Why do you think that I lock this door?'
"'I am sure that I do not know.'
"'It is to keep people out who have no business there. Do you
see?' He was still smiling in the most amiable manner.
"'I am sure if I had known'
"'Well, then, you know now. And if you ever put your foot over
that threshold again'here in an instant the smile hardened into
a grin of rage, and he glared down at me with the face of a
demon'I'll throw you to the mastiff.'
"I was so terrified that I do not know what I did. I suppose that
I must have rushed past him into my room. I remember nothing
until I found myself lying on my bed trembling all over. Then I
thought of you, Mr. Holmes. I could not live there longer without
some advice. I was frightened of the house, of the man, of the
woman, of the servants, even of the child. They were all horrible
to me. If I could only bring you down all would be well. Of
course I might have fled from the house, but my curiosity was
almost as strong as my fears. My mind was soon made up. I would
send you a wire. I put on my hat and cloak, went down to the
office, which is about half a mile from the house, and then
returned, feeling very much easier. A horrible doubt came into my
mind as I approached the door lest the dog might be loose, but I
remembered that Toller had drunk himself into a state of
insensibility that evening, and I knew that he was the only one
in the household who had any influence with the savage creature,
or who would venture to set him free. I slipped in in safety and
lay awake half the night in my joy at the thought of seeing you.
I had no difficulty in getting leave to come into Winchester this
morning, but I must be back before three o'clock, for Mr. and
Mrs. Rucastle are going on a visit, and will be away all the
evening, so that I must look after the child. Now I have told you
all my adventures, Mr. Holmes, and I should be very glad if you
could tell me what it all means, and, above all, what I should
do."
Holmes and I had listened spellbound to this extraordinary story.
My friend rose now and paced up and down the room, his hands in
his pockets, and an expression of the most profound gravity upon
his face.
"Is Toller still drunk?" he asked.
"Yes. I heard his wife tell Mrs. Rucastle that she could do
nothing with him."
"That is well. And the Rucastles go out tonight?"
"Yes."
"Is there a cellar with a good strong lock?"
"Yes, the winecellar."
"You seem to me to have acted all through this matter like a very
brave and sensible girl, Miss Hunter. Do you think that you could
perform one more feat? I should not ask it of you if I did not
think you a quite exceptional woman."
"I will try. What is it?"
"We shall be at the Copper Beeches by seven o'clock, my friend
and I. The Rucastles will be gone by that time, and Toller will,
we hope, be incapable. There only remains Mrs. Toller, who might
give the alarm. If you could send her into the cellar on some
errand, and then turn the key upon her, you would facilitate
matters immensely."
"I will do it."
"Excellent We shall then look thoroughly into the affair. Of
course there is only one feasible explanation. You have been
brought there to personate someone, and the real person is
imprisoned in this chamber. That is obvious. As to who this
prisoner is, I have no doubt that it is the daughter, Miss Alice
Rucastle, if I remember right, who was said to have gone to
America. You were chosen, doubtless, as resembling her in height,
figure, and the colour of your hair. Hers had been cut off, very
possibly in some illness through which she has passed, and so, of
course, yours had to be sacrificed also. By a curious chance you
came upon her tresses. The man in the road was undoubtedly some
friend of herspossibly her fiancand no doubt, as you wore
the girl's dress and were so like her, he was convinced from your
laughter, whenever he saw you, and afterwards from your gesture,
that Miss Rucastle was perfectly happy, and that she no longer
desired his attentions. The dog is let loose at night to prevent
him from endeavouring to communicate with her. So much is fairly
clear. The most serious point in the case is the disposition of
the child."
"What on earth has that to do with it?" I ejaculated.
"My dear Watson, you as a medical man are continually gaining
light as to the tendencies of a child by the study of the
parents. Don't you see that the converse is equally valid. I have
frequently gained my first real insight into the character of
parents by studying their children. This child's disposition is
abnormally cruel, merely for cruelty's sake, and whether he
derives this from his smiling father, as I should suspect, or
from his mother, it bodes evil for the poor girl who is in their
power."
"I am sure that you are right, Mr. Holmes," cried our client. "A
thousand things come back to me which make me certain that you
have hit it. Oh, let us lose not an instant in bringing help to
this poor creature."
"We must be circumspect, for we are dealing with a very cunning
man. We can do nothing until seven o'clock. At that hour we shall
be with you, and it will not be long before we solve the
mystery."
We were as good as our word, for it was just seven when we
reached the Copper Beeches, having put up our trap at a wayside
publichouse. The group of trees, with their dark leaves shining
like burnished metal in the light of the setting sun, were
sufficient to mark the house even had Miss Hunter not been
standing smiling on the doorstep.
"Have you managed it?" asked Holmes.
A loud thudding noise came from somewhere downstairs. "That is
Mrs. Toller in the cellar," said she. "Her husband lies snoring
on the kitchen rug. Here are his keys, which are the duplicates
of Mr. Rucastle's."
"You have done well indeed" cried Holmes with enthusiasm. "Now
lead the way, and we shall soon see the end of this black
business."
We passed up the stair, unlocked the door, followed on down a
passage, and found ourselves in front of the barricade which Miss
Hunter had described. Holmes cut the cord and removed the
transverse bar. Then he tried the various keys in the lock, but
without success. No sound came from within, and at the silence
Holmes' face clouded over.
"I trust that we are not too late," said he. "I think, Miss
Hunter, that we had better go in without you. Now, Watson, put
your shoulder to it, and we shall see whether we cannot make our
way in."
It was an old rickety door and gave at once before our united
strength. Together we rushed into the room. It was empty. There
was no furniture save a little pallet bed, a small table, and a
basketful of linen. The skylight above was open, and the prisoner
gone.
"There has been some villainy here," said Holmes "this beauty
has guessed Miss Hunter's intentions and has carried his victim
off."
"But how?"
"Through the skylight. We shall soon see how he managed it." He
swung himself up onto the roof. "Ah, yes," he cried, "here's the
end of a long light ladder against the eaves. That is how he did
it."
"But it is impossible," said Miss Hunter "the ladder was not
there when the Rucastles went away."
"He has come back and done it. I tell you that he is a clever and
dangerous man. I should not be very much surprised if this were
he whose step I hear now upon the stair. I think, Watson, that it
would be as well for you to have your pistol ready."
The words were hardly out of his mouth before a man appeared at
the door of the room, a very fat and burly man, with a heavy
stick in his hand. Miss Hunter screamed and shrunk against the
wall at the sight of him, but Sherlock Holmes sprang forward and
confronted him.
"You villain" said he, "where's your daughter?"
The fat man cast his eyes round, and then up at the open
skylight.
"It is for me to ask you that," he shrieked, "you thieves Spies
and thieves I have caught you, have I? You are in my power. I'll
serve you" He turned and clattered down the stairs as hard as he
could go.
"He's gone for the dog" cried Miss Hunter.
"I have my revolver," said I.
"Better close the front door," cried Holmes, and we all rushed
down the stairs together. We had hardly reached the hall when we
heard the baying of a hound, and then a scream of agony, with a
horrible worrying sound which it was dreadful to listen to. An
elderly man with a red face and shaking limbs came staggering out
at a side door.
"My God" he cried. "Someone has loosed the dog. It's not been
fed for two days. Quick, quick, or it'll be too late"
Holmes and I rushed out and round the angle of the house, with
Toller hurrying behind us. There was the huge famished brute, its
black muzzle buried in Rucastle's throat, while he writhed and
screamed upon the ground. Running up, I blew its brains out, and
it fell over with its keen white teeth still meeting in the great
creases of his neck. With much labour we separated them and
carried him, living but horribly mangled, into the house. We laid
him upon the drawingroom sofa, and having dispatched the sobered
Toller to bear the news to his wife, I did what I could to
relieve his pain. We were all assembled round him when the door
opened, and a tall, gaunt woman entered the room.
"Mrs. Toller" cried Miss Hunter.
"Yes, miss. Mr. Rucastle let me out when he came back before he
went up to you. Ah, miss, it is a pity you didn't let me know
what you were planning, for I would have told you that your pains
were wasted."
"Ha" said Holmes, looking keenly at her. "It is clear that Mrs.
Toller knows more about this matter than anyone else."
"Yes, sir, I do, and I am ready enough to tell what I know."
"Then, pray, sit down, and let us hear it for there are several
points on which I must confess that I am still in the dark."
"I will soon make it clear to you," said she "and I'd have done
so before now if I could ha' got out from the cellar. If there's
policecourt business over this, you'll remember that I was the
one that stood your friend, and that I was Miss Alice's friend
too.
"She was never happy at home, Miss Alice wasn't, from the time
that her father married again. She was slighted like and had no
say in anything, but it never really became bad for her until
after she met Mr. Fowler at a friend's house. As well as I could
learn, Miss Alice had rights of her own by will, but she was so
quiet and patient, she was, that she never said a word about them
but just left everything in Mr. Rucastle's hands. He knew he was
safe with her but when there was a chance of a husband coming
forward, who would ask for all that the law would give him, then
her father thought it time to put a stop on it. He wanted her to
sign a paper, so that whether she married or not, he could use
her money. When she wouldn't do it, he kept on worrying her until
she got brainfever, and for six weeks was at death's door. Then
she got better at last, all worn to a shadow, and with her
beautiful hair cut off but that didn't make no change in her
young man, and he stuck to her as true as man could be."
"Ah," said Holmes, "I think that what you have been good enough
to tell us makes the matter fairly clear, and that I can deduce
all that remains. Mr. Rucastle then, I presume, took to this
system of imprisonment?"
"Yes, sir."
"And brought Miss Hunter down from London in order to get rid of
the disagreeable persistence of Mr. Fowler."
"That was it, sir."
"But Mr. Fowler being a persevering man, as a good seaman should
be, blockaded the house, and having met you succeeded by certain
arguments, metallic or otherwise, in convincing you that your
interests were the same as his."
"Mr. Fowler was a very kindspoken, freehanded gentleman," said
Mrs. Toller serenely.
"And in this way he managed that your good man should have no
want of drink, and that a ladder should be ready at the moment
when your master had gone out."
"You have it, sir, just as it happened."
"I am sure we owe you an apology, Mrs. Toller," said Holmes, "for
you have certainly cleared up everything which puzzled us. And
here comes the country surgeon and Mrs. Rucastle, so I think,
Watson, that we had best escort Miss Hunter back to Winchester,
as it seems to me that our locus standi now is rather a
questionable one."
And thus was solved the mystery of the sinister house with the
copper beeches in front of the door. Mr. Rucastle survived, but
was always a broken man, kept alive solely through the care of
his devoted wife. They still live with their old servants, who
probably know so much of Rucastle's past life that he finds it
difficult to part from them. Mr. Fowler and Miss Rucastle were
married, by special license, in Southampton the day after their
flight, and he is now the holder of a government appointment in
the island of Mauritius. As to Miss Violet Hunter, my friend
Holmes, rather to my disappointment, manifested no further
interest in her when once she had ceased to be the centre of one
of his problems, and she is now the head of a private school at
Walsall, where I believe that she has met with considerable success.
 END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES 
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The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Complete
by Mark Twain Samuel Clemens
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Title The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Complete
Author Mark Twain Samuel Clemens
Release Date August ,  [EBook ]
Language English
Character set encoding ASCII
 START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TOM SAWYER 
Produced by David Widger. The previous edition was update by Jose
Menendez.
THE ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER
BY
MARK TWAIN
Samuel Langhorne Clemens
P R E F A C E
MOST of the adventures recorded in this book really occurred one or
two were experiences of my own, the rest those of boys who were
schoolmates of mine. Huck Finn is drawn from life Tom Sawyer also, but
not from an individualhe is a combination of the characteristics of
three boys whom I knew, and therefore belongs to the composite order of
architecture.
The odd superstitions touched upon were all prevalent among children
and slaves in the West at the period of this storythat is to say,
thirty or forty years ago.
Although my book is intended mainly for the entertainment of boys and
girls, I hope it will not be shunned by men and women on that account,
for part of my plan has been to try to pleasantly remind adults of what
they once were themselves, and of how they felt and thought and talked,
and what queer enterprises they sometimes engaged in.
THE AUTHOR.
HARTFORD, .
T O M S A W Y E R
CHAPTER I
"TOM"
No answer.
"TOM"
No answer.
"What's gone with that boy, I wonder? You TOM"
No answer.
The old lady pulled her spectacles down and looked over them about the
room then she put them up and looked out under them. She seldom or
never looked THROUGH them for so small a thing as a boy they were her
state pair, the pride of her heart, and were built for "style," not
serviceshe could have seen through a pair of stovelids just as well.
She looked perplexed for a moment, and then said, not fiercely, but
still loud enough for the furniture to hear
"Well, I lay if I get hold of you I'll"
She did not finish, for by this time she was bending down and punching
under the bed with the broom, and so she needed breath to punctuate the
punches with. She resurrected nothing but the cat.
"I never did see the beat of that boy"
She went to the open door and stood in it and looked out among the
tomato vines and "jimpson" weeds that constituted the garden. No Tom.
So she lifted up her voice at an angle calculated for distance and
shouted
"Youu TOM"
There was a slight noise behind her and she turned just in time to
seize a small boy by the slack of his roundabout and arrest his flight.
"There I might 'a' thought of that closet. What you been doing in
there?"
"Nothing."
"Nothing Look at your hands. And look at your mouth. What IS that
truck?"
"I don't know, aunt."
"Well, I know. It's jamthat's what it is. Forty times I've said if
you didn't let that jam alone I'd skin you. Hand me that switch."
The switch hovered in the airthe peril was desperate
"My Look behind you, aunt"
The old lady whirled round, and snatched her skirts out of danger. The
lad fled on the instant, scrambled up the high boardfence, and
disappeared over it.
His aunt Polly stood surprised a moment, and then broke into a gentle
laugh.
"Hang the boy, can't I never learn anything? Ain't he played me tricks
enough like that for me to be looking out for him by this time? But old
fools is the biggest fools there is. Can't learn an old dog new tricks,
as the saying is. But my goodness, he never plays them alike, two days,
and how is a body to know what's coming? He 'pears to know just how
long he can torment me before I get my dander up, and he knows if he
can make out to put me off for a minute or make me laugh, it's all down
again and I can't hit him a lick. I ain't doing my duty by that boy,
and that's the Lord's truth, goodness knows. Spare the rod and spile
the child, as the Good Book says. I'm a laying up sin and suffering for
us both, I know. He's full of the Old Scratch, but lawsame he's my
own dead sister's boy, poor thing, and I ain't got the heart to lash
him, somehow. Every time I let him off, my conscience does hurt me so,
and every time I hit him my old heart most breaks. Wellawell, man
that is born of woman is of few days and full of trouble, as the
Scripture says, and I reckon it's so. He'll play hookey this evening, 
and [ Southwestern for "afternoon"] I'll just be obleeged to make him
work, tomorrow, to punish him. It's mighty hard to make him work
Saturdays, when all the boys is having holiday, but he hates work more
than he hates anything else, and I've GOT to do some of my duty by him,
or I'll be the ruination of the child."
Tom did play hookey, and he had a very good time. He got back home
barely in season to help Jim, the small colored boy, saw nextday's
wood and split the kindlings before supperat least he was there in
time to tell his adventures to Jim while Jim did threefourths of the
work. Tom's younger brother or rather halfbrother Sid was already
through with his part of the work picking up chips, for he was a
quiet boy, and had no adventurous, troublesome ways.
While Tom was eating his supper, and stealing sugar as opportunity
offered, Aunt Polly asked him questions that were full of guile, and
very deepfor she wanted to trap him into damaging revealments. Like
many other simplehearted souls, it was her pet vanity to believe she
was endowed with a talent for dark and mysterious diplomacy, and she
loved to contemplate her most transparent devices as marvels of low
cunning. Said she
"Tom, it was middling warm in school, warn't it?"
"Yes'm."
"Powerful warm, warn't it?"
"Yes'm."
"Didn't you want to go in aswimming, Tom?"
A bit of a scare shot through Toma touch of uncomfortable suspicion.
He searched Aunt Polly's face, but it told him nothing. So he said
"No'mwell, not very much."
The old lady reached out her hand and felt Tom's shirt, and said
"But you ain't too warm now, though." And it flattered her to reflect
that she had discovered that the shirt was dry without anybody knowing
that that was what she had in her mind. But in spite of her, Tom knew
where the wind lay, now. So he forestalled what might be the next move
"Some of us pumped on our headsmine's damp yet. See?"
Aunt Polly was vexed to think she had overlooked that bit of
circumstantial evidence, and missed a trick. Then she had a new
inspiration
"Tom, you didn't have to undo your shirt collar where I sewed it, to
pump on your head, did you? Unbutton your jacket"
The trouble vanished out of Tom's face. He opened his jacket. His
shirt collar was securely sewed.
"Bother Well, go 'long with you. I'd made sure you'd played hookey
and been aswimming. But I forgive ye, Tom. I reckon you're a kind of a
singed cat, as the saying isbetter'n you look. THIS time."
She was half sorry her sagacity had miscarried, and half glad that Tom
had stumbled into obedient conduct for once.
But Sidney said
"Well, now, if I didn't think you sewed his collar with white thread,
but it's black."
"Why, I did sew it with white Tom"
But Tom did not wait for the rest. As he went out at the door he said
"Siddy, I'll lick you for that."
In a safe place Tom examined two large needles which were thrust into
the lapels of his jacket, and had thread bound about themone needle
carried white thread and the other black. He said
"She'd never noticed if it hadn't been for Sid. Confound it sometimes
she sews it with white, and sometimes she sews it with black. I wish to
geeminy she'd stick to one or t'otherI can't keep the run of 'em. But
I bet you I'll lam Sid for that. I'll learn him"
He was not the Model Boy of the village. He knew the model boy very
well thoughand loathed him.
Within two minutes, or even less, he had forgotten all his troubles.
Not because his troubles were one whit less heavy and bitter to him
than a man's are to a man, but because a new and powerful interest bore
them down and drove them out of his mind for the timejust as men's
misfortunes are forgotten in the excitement of new enterprises. This
new interest was a valued novelty in whistling, which he had just
acquired from a negro, and he was suffering to practise it undisturbed.
It consisted in a peculiar birdlike turn, a sort of liquid warble,
produced by touching the tongue to the roof of the mouth at short
intervals in the midst of the musicthe reader probably remembers how
to do it, if he has ever been a boy. Diligence and attention soon gave
him the knack of it, and he strode down the street with his mouth full
of harmony and his soul full of gratitude. He felt much as an
astronomer feels who has discovered a new planetno doubt, as far as
strong, deep, unalloyed pleasure is concerned, the advantage was with
the boy, not the astronomer.
The summer evenings were long. It was not dark, yet. Presently Tom
checked his whistle. A stranger was before hima boy a shade larger
than himself. A newcomer of any age or either sex was an impressive
curiosity in the poor little shabby village of St. Petersburg. This boy
was well dressed, toowell dressed on a weekday. This was simply
astounding. His cap was a dainty thing, his closebuttoned blue cloth
roundabout was new and natty, and so were his pantaloons. He had shoes
onand it was only Friday. He even wore a necktie, a bright bit of
ribbon. He had a citified air about him that ate into Tom's vitals. The
more Tom stared at the splendid marvel, the higher he turned up his
nose at his finery and the shabbier and shabbier his own outfit seemed
to him to grow. Neither boy spoke. If one moved, the other movedbut
only sidewise, in a circle they kept face to face and eye to eye all
the time. Finally Tom said
"I can lick you"
"I'd like to see you try it."
"Well, I can do it."
"No you can't, either."
"Yes I can."
"No you can't."
"I can."
"You can't."
"Can"
"Can't"
An uncomfortable pause. Then Tom said
"What's your name?"
"'Tisn't any of your business, maybe."
"Well I 'low I'll MAKE it my business."
"Well why don't you?"
"If you say much, I will."
"MuchmuchMUCH. There now."
"Oh, you think you're mighty smart, DON'T you? I could lick you with
one hand tied behind me, if I wanted to."
"Well why don't you DO it? You SAY you can do it."
"Well I WILL, if you fool with me."
"Oh yesI've seen whole families in the same fix."
"Smarty You think you're SOME, now, DON'T you? Oh, what a hat"
"You can lump that hat if you don't like it. I dare you to knock it
offand anybody that'll take a dare will suck eggs."
"You're a liar"
"You're another."
"You're a fighting liar and dasn't take it up."
"Awtake a walk"
"Sayif you give me much more of your sass I'll take and bounce a
rock off'n your head."
"Oh, of COURSE you will."
"Well I WILL."
"Well why don't you DO it then? What do you keep SAYING you will for?
Why don't you DO it? It's because you're afraid."
"I AIN'T afraid."
"You are."
"I ain't."
"You are."
Another pause, and more eying and sidling around each other. Presently
they were shoulder to shoulder. Tom said
"Get away from here"
"Go away yourself"
"I won't."
"I won't either."
So they stood, each with a foot placed at an angle as a brace, and
both shoving with might and main, and glowering at each other with
hate. But neither could get an advantage. After struggling till both
were hot and flushed, each relaxed his strain with watchful caution,
and Tom said
"You're a coward and a pup. I'll tell my big brother on you, and he
can thrash you with his little finger, and I'll make him do it, too."
"What do I care for your big brother? I've got a brother that's bigger
than he isand what's more, he can throw him over that fence, too."
[Both brothers were imaginary.]
"That's a lie."
"YOUR saying so don't make it so."
Tom drew a line in the dust with his big toe, and said
"I dare you to step over that, and I'll lick you till you can't stand
up. Anybody that'll take a dare will steal sheep."
The new boy stepped over promptly, and said
"Now you said you'd do it, now let's see you do it."
"Don't you crowd me now you better look out."
"Well, you SAID you'd do itwhy don't you do it?"
"By jingo for two cents I WILL do it."
The new boy took two broad coppers out of his pocket and held them out
with derision. Tom struck them to the ground. In an instant both boys
were rolling and tumbling in the dirt, gripped together like cats and
for the space of a minute they tugged and tore at each other's hair and
clothes, punched and scratched each other's nose, and covered
themselves with dust and glory. Presently the confusion took form, and
through the fog of battle Tom appeared, seated astride the new boy, and
pounding him with his fists. "Holler 'nuff" said he.
The boy only struggled to free himself. He was cryingmainly from rage.
"Holler 'nuff"and the pounding went on.
At last the stranger got out a smothered "'Nuff" and Tom let him up
and said
"Now that'll learn you. Better look out who you're fooling with next
time."
The new boy went off brushing the dust from his clothes, sobbing,
snuffling, and occasionally looking back and shaking his head and
threatening what he would do to Tom the "next time he caught him out."
To which Tom responded with jeers, and started off in high feather, and
as soon as his back was turned the new boy snatched up a stone, threw
it and hit him between the shoulders and then turned tail and ran like
an antelope. Tom chased the traitor home, and thus found out where he
lived. He then held a position at the gate for some time, daring the
enemy to come outside, but the enemy only made faces at him through the
window and declined. At last the enemy's mother appeared, and called
Tom a bad, vicious, vulgar child, and ordered him away. So he went
away but he said he "'lowed" to "lay" for that boy.
He got home pretty late that night, and when he climbed cautiously in
at the window, he uncovered an ambuscade, in the person of his aunt
and when she saw the state his clothes were in her resolution to turn
his Saturday holiday into captivity at hard labor became adamantine in
its firmness.
CHAPTER II
SATURDAY morning was come, and all the summer world was bright and
fresh, and brimming with life. There was a song in every heart and if
the heart was young the music issued at the lips. There was cheer in
every face and a spring in every step. The locusttrees were in bloom
and the fragrance of the blossoms filled the air. Cardiff Hill, beyond
the village and above it, was green with vegetation and it lay just far
enough away to seem a Delectable Land, dreamy, reposeful, and inviting.
Tom appeared on the sidewalk with a bucket of whitewash and a
longhandled brush. He surveyed the fence, and all gladness left him and
a deep melancholy settled down upon his spirit. Thirty yards of board
fence nine feet high. Life to him seemed hollow, and existence but a
burden. Sighing, he dipped his brush and passed it along the topmost
plank repeated the operation did it again compared the insignificant
whitewashed streak with the farreaching continent of unwhitewashed
fence, and sat down on a treebox discouraged. Jim came skipping out at
the gate with a tin pail, and singing Buffalo Gals. Bringing water from
the town pump had always been hateful work in Tom's eyes, before, but
now it did not strike him so. He remembered that there was company at
the pump. White, mulatto, and negro boys and girls were always there
waiting their turns, resting, trading playthings, quarrelling,
fighting, skylarking. And he remembered that although the pump was only
a hundred and fifty yards off, Jim never got back with a bucket of
water under an hourand even then somebody generally had to go after
him. Tom said
"Say, Jim, I'll fetch the water if you'll whitewash some."
Jim shook his head and said
"Can't, Mars Tom. Ole missis, she tole me I got to go an' git dis
water an' not stop foolin' roun' wid anybody. She say she spec' Mars
Tom gwine to ax me to whitewash, an' so she tole me go 'long an' 'tend
to my own businessshe 'lowed SHE'D 'tend to de whitewashin'."
"Oh, never you mind what she said, Jim. That's the way she always
talks. Gimme the bucketI won't be gone only a a minute. SHE won't
ever know."
"Oh, I dasn't, Mars Tom. Ole missis she'd take an' tar de head off'n
me. 'Deed she would."
"SHE She never licks anybodywhacks 'em over the head with her
thimbleand who cares for that, I'd like to know. She talks awful, but
talk don't hurtanyways it don't if she don't cry. Jim, I'll give you
a marvel. I'll give you a white alley"
Jim began to waver.
"White alley, Jim And it's a bully taw."
"My Dat's a mighty gay marvel, I tell you But Mars Tom I's powerful
'fraid ole missis"
"And besides, if you will I'll show you my sore toe."
Jim was only humanthis attraction was too much for him. He put down
his pail, took the white alley, and bent over the toe with absorbing
interest while the bandage was being unwound. In another moment he was
flying down the street with his pail and a tingling rear, Tom was
whitewashing with vigor, and Aunt Polly was retiring from the field
with a slipper in her hand and triumph in her eye.
But Tom's energy did not last. He began to think of the fun he had
planned for this day, and his sorrows multiplied. Soon the free boys
would come tripping along on all sorts of delicious expeditions, and
they would make a world of fun of him for having to workthe very
thought of it burnt him like fire. He got out his worldly wealth and
examined itbits of toys, marbles, and trash enough to buy an
exchange of WORK, maybe, but not half enough to buy so much as half an
hour of pure freedom. So he returned his straitened means to his
pocket, and gave up the idea of trying to buy the boys. At this dark
and hopeless moment an inspiration burst upon him Nothing less than a
great, magnificent inspiration.
He took up his brush and went tranquilly to work. Ben Rogers hove in
sight presentlythe very boy, of all boys, whose ridicule he had been
dreading. Ben's gait was the hopskipandjumpproof enough that his
heart was light and his anticipations high. He was eating an apple, and
giving a long, melodious whoop, at intervals, followed by a deeptoned
dingdongdong, dingdongdong, for he was personating a steamboat. As
he drew near, he slackened speed, took the middle of the street, leaned
far over to starboard and rounded to ponderously and with laborious
pomp and circumstancefor he was personating the Big Missouri, and
considered himself to be drawing nine feet of water. He was boat and
captain and enginebells combined, so he had to imagine himself
standing on his own hurricanedeck giving the orders and executing them
"Stop her, sir Tingalingling" The headway ran almost out, and he
drew up slowly toward the sidewalk.
"Ship up to back Tingalingling" His arms straightened and
stiffened down his sides.
"Set her back on the stabboard Tingalingling Chow chchowwow
Chow" His right hand, meantime, describing stately circlesfor it was
representing a fortyfoot wheel.
"Let her go back on the labboard Tingalingling Chowchchowchow"
The left hand began to describe circles.
"Stop the stabboard Tingalingling Stop the labboard Come ahead
on the stabboard Stop her Let your outside turn over slow
Tingalingling Chowowow Get out that headline LIVELY now
Comeout with your springlinewhat're you about there Take a turn
round that stump with the bight of it Stand by that stage, nowlet her
go Done with the engines, sir Tingalingling SH'T S'H'T SH'T"
trying the gaugecocks.
Tom went on whitewashingpaid no attention to the steamboat. Ben
stared a moment and then said "HiYI YOU'RE up a stump, ain't you"
No answer. Tom surveyed his last touch with the eye of an artist, then
he gave his brush another gentle sweep and surveyed the result, as
before. Ben ranged up alongside of him. Tom's mouth watered for the
apple, but he stuck to his work. Ben said
"Hello, old chap, you got to work, hey?"
Tom wheeled suddenly and said
"Why, it's you, Ben I warn't noticing."
"SayI'm going in aswimming, I am. Don't you wish you could? But of
course you'd druther WORKwouldn't you? Course you would"
Tom contemplated the boy a bit, and said
"What do you call work?"
"Why, ain't THAT work?"
Tom resumed his whitewashing, and answered carelessly
"Well, maybe it is, and maybe it ain't. All I know, is, it suits Tom
Sawyer."
"Oh come, now, you don't mean to let on that you LIKE it?"
The brush continued to move.
"Like it? Well, I don't see why I oughtn't to like it. Does a boy get
a chance to whitewash a fence every day?"
That put the thing in a new light. Ben stopped nibbling his apple. Tom
swept his brush daintily back and forthstepped back to note the
effectadded a touch here and therecriticised the effect againBen
watching every move and getting more and more interested, more and more
absorbed. Presently he said
"Say, Tom, let ME whitewash a little."
Tom considered, was about to consent but he altered his mind
"NonoI reckon it wouldn't hardly do, Ben. You see, Aunt Polly's
awful particular about this fenceright here on the street, you know
but if it was the back fence I wouldn't mind and SHE wouldn't. Yes,
she's awful particular about this fence it's got to be done very
careful I reckon there ain't one boy in a thousand, maybe two
thousand, that can do it the way it's got to be done."
"Nois that so? Oh come, nowlemme just try. Only just a littleI'd
let YOU, if you was me, Tom."
"Ben, I'd like to, honest injun but Aunt Pollywell, Jim wanted to
do it, but she wouldn't let him Sid wanted to do it, and she wouldn't
let Sid. Now don't you see how I'm fixed? If you was to tackle this
fence and anything was to happen to it"
"Oh, shucks, I'll be just as careful. Now lemme try. SayI'll give
you the core of my apple."
"Well, hereNo, Ben, now don't. I'm afeard"
"I'll give you ALL of it"
Tom gave up the brush with reluctance in his face, but alacrity in his
heart. And while the late steamer Big Missouri worked and sweated in
the sun, the retired artist sat on a barrel in the shade close by,
dangled his legs, munched his apple, and planned the slaughter of more
innocents. There was no lack of material boys happened along every
little while they came to jeer, but remained to whitewash. By the time
Ben was fagged out, Tom had traded the next chance to Billy Fisher for
a kite, in good repair and when he played out, Johnny Miller bought in
for a dead rat and a string to swing it withand so on, and so on,
hour after hour. And when the middle of the afternoon came, from being
a poor povertystricken boy in the morning, Tom was literally rolling
in wealth. He had besides the things before mentioned, twelve marbles,
part of a jewsharp, a piece of blue bottleglass to look through, a
spool cannon, a key that wouldn't unlock anything, a fragment of chalk,
a glass stopper of a decanter, a tin soldier, a couple of tadpoles, six
firecrackers, a kitten with only one eye, a brass doorknob, a
dogcollarbut no dogthe handle of a knife, four pieces of
orangepeel, and a dilapidated old window sash.
He had had a nice, good, idle time all the whileplenty of company
and the fence had three coats of whitewash on it If he hadn't run out
of whitewash he would have bankrupted every boy in the village.
Tom said to himself that it was not such a hollow world, after all. He
had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing itnamely,
that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only
necessary to make the thing difficult to attain. If he had been a great
and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have
comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is OBLIGED to do,
and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do. And
this would help him to understand why constructing artificial flowers
or performing on a treadmill is work, while rolling tenpins or
climbing Mont Blanc is only amusement. There are wealthy gentlemen in
England who drive fourhorse passengercoaches twenty or thirty miles
on a daily line, in the summer, because the privilege costs them
considerable money but if they were offered wages for the service,
that would turn it into work and then they would resign.
The boy mused awhile over the substantial change which had taken place
in his worldly circumstances, and then wended toward headquarters to
report.
CHAPTER III
TOM presented himself before Aunt Polly, who was sitting by an open
window in a pleasant rearward apartment, which was bedroom,
breakfastroom, diningroom, and library, combined. The balmy summer
air, the restful quiet, the odor of the flowers, and the drowsing murmur
of the bees had had their effect, and she was nodding over her knitting
for she had no company but the cat, and it was asleep in her lap. Her
spectacles were propped up on her gray head for safety. She had thought
that of course Tom had deserted long ago, and she wondered at seeing him
place himself in her power again in this intrepid way. He said "Mayn't
I go and play now, aunt?"
"What, a'ready? How much have you done?"
"It's all done, aunt."
"Tom, don't lie to meI can't bear it."
"I ain't, aunt it IS all done."
Aunt Polly placed small trust in such evidence. She went out to see
for herself and she would have been content to find twenty per cent.
of Tom's statement true. When she found the entire fence whitewashed,
and not only whitewashed but elaborately coated and recoated, and even
a streak added to the ground, her astonishment was almost unspeakable.
She said
"Well, I never There's no getting round it, you can work when you're
a mind to, Tom." And then she diluted the compliment by adding, "But
it's powerful seldom you're a mind to, I'm bound to say. Well, go 'long
and play but mind you get back some time in a week, or I'll tan you."
She was so overcome by the splendor of his achievement that she took
him into the closet and selected a choice apple and delivered it to
him, along with an improving lecture upon the added value and flavor a
treat took to itself when it came without sin through virtuous effort.
And while she closed with a happy Scriptural flourish, he "hooked" a
doughnut.
Then he skipped out, and saw Sid just starting up the outside stairway
that led to the back rooms on the second floor. Clods were handy and
the air was full of them in a twinkling. They raged around Sid like a
hailstorm and before Aunt Polly could collect her surprised faculties
and sally to the rescue, six or seven clods had taken personal effect,
and Tom was over the fence and gone. There was a gate, but as a general
thing he was too crowded for time to make use of it. His soul was at
peace, now that he had settled with Sid for calling attention to his
black thread and getting him into trouble.
Tom skirted the block, and came round into a muddy alley that led by
the back of his aunt's cowstable. He presently got safely beyond the
reach of capture and punishment, and hastened toward the public square
of the village, where two "military" companies of boys had met for
conflict, according to previous appointment. Tom was General of one of
these armies, Joe Harper a bosom friend General of the other. These
two great commanders did not condescend to fight in personthat being
better suited to the still smaller frybut sat together on an eminence
and conducted the field operations by orders delivered through
aidesdecamp. Tom's army won a great victory, after a long and
hardfought battle. Then the dead were counted, prisoners exchanged,
the terms of the next disagreement agreed upon, and the day for the
necessary battle appointed after which the armies fell into line and
marched away, and Tom turned homeward alone.
As he was passing by the house where Jeff Thatcher lived, he saw a new
girl in the gardena lovely little blueeyed creature with yellow hair
plaited into two longtails, white summer frock and embroidered
pantalettes. The freshcrowned hero fell without firing a shot. A
certain Amy Lawrence vanished out of his heart and left not even a
memory of herself behind. He had thought he loved her to distraction
he had regarded his passion as adoration and behold it was only a poor
little evanescent partiality. He had been months winning her she had
confessed hardly a week ago he had been the happiest and the proudest
boy in the world only seven short days, and here in one instant of time
she had gone out of his heart like a casual stranger whose visit is
done.
He worshipped this new angel with furtive eye, till he saw that she
had discovered him then he pretended he did not know she was present,
and began to "show off" in all sorts of absurd boyish ways, in order to
win her admiration. He kept up this grotesque foolishness for some
time but byandby, while he was in the midst of some dangerous
gymnastic performances, he glanced aside and saw that the little girl
was wending her way toward the house. Tom came up to the fence and
leaned on it, grieving, and hoping she would tarry yet awhile longer.
She halted a moment on the steps and then moved toward the door. Tom
heaved a great sigh as she put her foot on the threshold. But his face
lit up, right away, for she tossed a pansy over the fence a moment
before she disappeared.
The boy ran around and stopped within a foot or two of the flower, and
then shaded his eyes with his hand and began to look down street as if
he had discovered something of interest going on in that direction.
Presently he picked up a straw and began trying to balance it on his
nose, with his head tilted far back and as he moved from side to side,
in his efforts, he edged nearer and nearer toward the pansy finally
his bare foot rested upon it, his pliant toes closed upon it, and he
hopped away with the treasure and disappeared round the corner. But
only for a minuteonly while he could button the flower inside his
jacket, next his heartor next his stomach, possibly, for he was not
much posted in anatomy, and not hypercritical, anyway.
He returned, now, and hung about the fence till nightfall, "showing
off," as before but the girl never exhibited herself again, though Tom
comforted himself a little with the hope that she had been near some
window, meantime, and been aware of his attentions. Finally he strode
home reluctantly, with his poor head full of visions.
All through supper his spirits were so high that his aunt wondered
"what had got into the child." He took a good scolding about clodding
Sid, and did not seem to mind it in the least. He tried to steal sugar
under his aunt's very nose, and got his knuckles rapped for it. He said
"Aunt, you don't whack Sid when he takes it."
"Well, Sid don't torment a body the way you do. You'd be always into
that sugar if I warn't watching you."
Presently she stepped into the kitchen, and Sid, happy in his
immunity, reached for the sugarbowla sort of glorying over Tom which
was wellnigh unbearable. But Sid's fingers slipped and the bowl dropped
and broke. Tom was in ecstasies. In such ecstasies that he even
controlled his tongue and was silent. He said to himself that he would
not speak a word, even when his aunt came in, but would sit perfectly
still till she asked who did the mischief and then he would tell, and
there would be nothing so good in the world as to see that pet model
"catch it." He was so brimful of exultation that he could hardly hold
himself when the old lady came back and stood above the wreck
discharging lightnings of wrath from over her spectacles. He said to
himself, "Now it's coming" And the next instant he was sprawling on
the floor The potent palm was uplifted to strike again when Tom cried
out
"Hold on, now, what 'er you belting ME for?Sid broke it"
Aunt Polly paused, perplexed, and Tom looked for healing pity. But
when she got her tongue again, she only said
"Umf Well, you didn't get a lick amiss, I reckon. You been into some
other audacious mischief when I wasn't around, like enough."
Then her conscience reproached her, and she yearned to say something
kind and loving but she judged that this would be construed into a
confession that she had been in the wrong, and discipline forbade that.
So she kept silence, and went about her affairs with a troubled heart.
Tom sulked in a corner and exalted his woes. He knew that in her heart
his aunt was on her knees to him, and he was morosely gratified by the
consciousness of it. He would hang out no signals, he would take notice
of none. He knew that a yearning glance fell upon him, now and then,
through a film of tears, but he refused recognition of it. He pictured
himself lying sick unto death and his aunt bending over him beseeching
one little forgiving word, but he would turn his face to the wall, and
die with that word unsaid. Ah, how would she feel then? And he pictured
himself brought home from the river, dead, with his curls all wet, and
his sore heart at rest. How she would throw herself upon him, and how
her tears would fall like rain, and her lips pray God to give her back
her boy and she would never, never abuse him any more But he would lie
there cold and white and make no signa poor little sufferer, whose
griefs were at an end. He so worked upon his feelings with the pathos
of these dreams, that he had to keep swallowing, he was so like to
choke and his eyes swam in a blur of water, which overflowed when he
winked, and ran down and trickled from the end of his nose. And such a
luxury to him was this petting of his sorrows, that he could not bear
to have any worldly cheeriness or any grating delight intrude upon it
it was too sacred for such contact and so, presently, when his cousin
Mary danced in, all alive with the joy of seeing home again after an
agelong visit of one week to the country, he got up and moved in
clouds and darkness out at one door as she brought song and sunshine in
at the other.
He wandered far from the accustomed haunts of boys, and sought
desolate places that were in harmony with his spirit. A log raft in the
river invited him, and he seated himself on its outer edge and
contemplated the dreary vastness of the stream, wishing, the while,
that he could only be drowned, all at once and unconsciously, without
undergoing the uncomfortable routine devised by nature. Then he thought
of his flower. He got it out, rumpled and wilted, and it mightily
increased his dismal felicity. He wondered if she would pity him if she
knew? Would she cry, and wish that she had a right to put her arms
around his neck and comfort him? Or would she turn coldly away like all
the hollow world? This picture brought such an agony of pleasurable
suffering that he worked it over and over again in his mind and set it
up in new and varied lights, till he wore it threadbare. At last he
rose up sighing and departed in the darkness.
About halfpast nine or ten o'clock he came along the deserted street
to where the Adored Unknown lived he paused a moment no sound fell
upon his listening ear a candle was casting a dull glow upon the
curtain of a secondstory window. Was the sacred presence there? He
climbed the fence, threaded his stealthy way through the plants, till
he stood under that window he looked up at it long, and with emotion
then he laid him down on the ground under it, disposing himself upon
his back, with his hands clasped upon his breast and holding his poor
wilted flower. And thus he would dieout in the cold world, with no
shelter over his homeless head, no friendly hand to wipe the
deathdamps from his brow, no loving face to bend pityingly over him
when the great agony came. And thus SHE would see him when she looked
out upon the glad morning, and oh would she drop one little tear upon
his poor, lifeless form, would she heave one little sigh to see a bright
young life so rudely blighted, so untimely cut down?
The window went up, a maidservant's discordant voice profaned the
holy calm, and a deluge of water drenched the prone martyr's remains
The strangling hero sprang up with a relieving snort. There was a whiz
as of a missile in the air, mingled with the murmur of a curse, a sound
as of shivering glass followed, and a small, vague form went over the
fence and shot away in the gloom.
Not long after, as Tom, all undressed for bed, was surveying his
drenched garments by the light of a tallow dip, Sid woke up but if he
had any dim idea of making any "references to allusions," he thought
better of it and held his peace, for there was danger in Tom's eye.
Tom turned in without the added vexation of prayers, and Sid made
mental note of the omission.
CHAPTER IV
THE sun rose upon a tranquil world, and beamed down upon the peaceful
village like a benediction. Breakfast over, Aunt Polly had family
worship it began with a prayer built from the ground up of solid
courses of Scriptural quotations, welded together with a thin mortar of
originality and from the summit of this she delivered a grim chapter
of the Mosaic Law, as from Sinai.
Then Tom girded up his loins, so to speak, and went to work to "get
his verses." Sid had learned his lesson days before. Tom bent all his
energies to the memorizing of five verses, and he chose part of the
Sermon on the Mount, because he could find no verses that were shorter.
At the end of half an hour Tom had a vague general idea of his lesson,
but no more, for his mind was traversing the whole field of human
thought, and his hands were busy with distracting recreations. Mary
took his book to hear him recite, and he tried to find his way through
the fog
"Blessed are theaa"
"Poor"
"Yespoor blessed are the pooraa"
"In spirit"
"In spirit blessed are the poor in spirit, for theythey"
"THEIRS"
"For THEIRS. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom
of heaven. Blessed are they that mourn, for theythey"
"Sh"
"For theya"
"S, H, A"
"For they S, HOh, I don't know what it is"
"SHALL"
"Oh, SHALL for they shallfor they shallaashall mournaa
blessed are they that shallthey thatathey that shall mourn, for
they shallashall WHAT? Why don't you tell me, Mary?what do you
want to be so mean for?"
"Oh, Tom, you poor thickheaded thing, I'm not teasing you. I wouldn't
do that. You must go and learn it again. Don't you be discouraged, Tom,
you'll manage itand if you do, I'll give you something ever so nice.
There, now, that's a good boy."
"All right What is it, Mary, tell me what it is."
"Never you mind, Tom. You know if I say it's nice, it is nice."
"You bet you that's so, Mary. All right, I'll tackle it again."
And he did "tackle it again"and under the double pressure of
curiosity and prospective gain he did it with such spirit that he
accomplished a shining success. Mary gave him a brandnew "Barlow"
knife worth twelve and a half cents and the convulsion of delight that
swept his system shook him to his foundations. True, the knife would
not cut anything, but it was a "sureenough" Barlow, and there was
inconceivable grandeur in thatthough where the Western boys ever got
the idea that such a weapon could possibly be counterfeited to its
injury is an imposing mystery and will always remain so, perhaps. Tom
contrived to scarify the cupboard with it, and was arranging to begin
on the bureau, when he was called off to dress for Sundayschool.
Mary gave him a tin basin of water and a piece of soap, and he went
outside the door and set the basin on a little bench there then he
dipped the soap in the water and laid it down turned up his sleeves
poured out the water on the ground, gently, and then entered the
kitchen and began to wipe his face diligently on the towel behind the
door. But Mary removed the towel and said
"Now ain't you ashamed, Tom. You mustn't be so bad. Water won't hurt
you."
Tom was a trifle disconcerted. The basin was refilled, and this time
he stood over it a little while, gathering resolution took in a big
breath and began. When he entered the kitchen presently, with both eyes
shut and groping for the towel with his hands, an honorable testimony
of suds and water was dripping from his face. But when he emerged from
the towel, he was not yet satisfactory, for the clean territory stopped
short at his chin and his jaws, like a mask below and beyond this line
there was a dark expanse of unirrigated soil that spread downward in
front and backward around his neck. Mary took him in hand, and when she
was done with him he was a man and a brother, without distinction of
color, and his saturated hair was neatly brushed, and its short curls
wrought into a dainty and symmetrical general effect. [He privately
smoothed out the curls, with labor and difficulty, and plastered his
hair close down to his head for he held curls to be effeminate, and
his own filled his life with bitterness.] Then Mary got out a suit of
his clothing that had been used only on Sundays during two yearsthey
were simply called his "other clothes"and so by that we know the
size of his wardrobe. The girl "put him to rights" after he had dressed
himself she buttoned his neat roundabout up to his chin, turned his
vast shirt collar down over his shoulders, brushed him off and crowned
him with his speckled straw hat. He now looked exceedingly improved and
uncomfortable. He was fully as uncomfortable as he looked for there
was a restraint about whole clothes and cleanliness that galled him. He
hoped that Mary would forget his shoes, but the hope was blighted she
coated them thoroughly with tallow, as was the custom, and brought them
out. He lost his temper and said he was always being made to do
everything he didn't want to do. But Mary said, persuasively
"Please, Tomthat's a good boy."
So he got into the shoes snarling. Mary was soon ready, and the three
children set out for Sundayschoola place that Tom hated with his
whole heart but Sid and Mary were fond of it.
Sabbathschool hours were from nine to halfpast ten and then church
service. Two of the children always remained for the sermon
voluntarily, and the other always remained toofor stronger reasons.
The church's highbacked, uncushioned pews would seat about three
hundred persons the edifice was but a small, plain affair, with a sort
of pine board treebox on top of it for a steeple. At the door Tom
dropped back a step and accosted a Sundaydressed comrade
"Say, Billy, got a yaller ticket?"
"Yes."
"What'll you take for her?"
"What'll you give?"
"Piece of lickrish and a fishhook."
"Less see 'em."
Tom exhibited. They were satisfactory, and the property changed hands.
Then Tom traded a couple of white alleys for three red tickets, and
some small trifle or other for a couple of blue ones. He waylaid other
boys as they came, and went on buying tickets of various colors ten or
fifteen minutes longer. He entered the church, now, with a swarm of
clean and noisy boys and girls, proceeded to his seat and started a
quarrel with the first boy that came handy. The teacher, a grave,
elderly man, interfered then turned his back a moment and Tom pulled a
boy's hair in the next bench, and was absorbed in his book when the boy
turned around stuck a pin in another boy, presently, in order to hear
him say "Ouch" and got a new reprimand from his teacher. Tom's whole
class were of a patternrestless, noisy, and troublesome. When they
came to recite their lessons, not one of them knew his verses
perfectly, but had to be prompted all along. However, they worried
through, and each got his rewardin small blue tickets, each with a
passage of Scripture on it each blue ticket was pay for two verses of
the recitation. Ten blue tickets equalled a red one, and could be
exchanged for it ten red tickets equalled a yellow one for ten yellow
tickets the superintendent gave a very plainly bound Bible worth forty
cents in those easy times to the pupil. How many of my readers would
have the industry and application to memorize two thousand verses, even
for a Dore Bible? And yet Mary had acquired two Bibles in this wayit
was the patient work of two yearsand a boy of German parentage had
won four or five. He once recited three thousand verses without
stopping but the strain upon his mental faculties was too great, and
he was little better than an idiot from that day fortha grievous
misfortune for the school, for on great occasions, before company, the
superintendent as Tom expressed it had always made this boy come out
and "spread himself." Only the older pupils managed to keep their
tickets and stick to their tedious work long enough to get a Bible, and
so the delivery of one of these prizes was a rare and noteworthy
circumstance the successful pupil was so great and conspicuous for
that day that on the spot every scholar's heart was fired with a fresh
ambition that often lasted a couple of weeks. It is possible that Tom's
mental stomach had never really hungered for one of those prizes, but
unquestionably his entire being had for many a day longed for the glory
and the eclat that came with it.
In due course the superintendent stood up in front of the pulpit, with
a closed hymnbook in his hand and his forefinger inserted between its
leaves, and commanded attention. When a Sundayschool superintendent
makes his customary little speech, a hymnbook in the hand is as
necessary as is the inevitable sheet of music in the hand of a singer
who stands forward on the platform and sings a solo at a concert
though why, is a mystery for neither the hymnbook nor the sheet of
music is ever referred to by the sufferer. This superintendent was a
slim creature of thirtyfive, with a sandy goatee and short sandy hair
he wore a stiff standingcollar whose upper edge almost reached his
ears and whose sharp points curved forward abreast the corners of his
moutha fence that compelled a straight lookout ahead, and a turning
of the whole body when a side view was required his chin was propped
on a spreading cravat which was as broad and as long as a banknote,
and had fringed ends his boot toes were turned sharply up, in the
fashion of the day, like sleighrunnersan effect patiently and
laboriously produced by the young men by sitting with their toes
pressed against a wall for hours together. Mr. Walters was very earnest
of mien, and very sincere and honest at heart and he held sacred
things and places in such reverence, and so separated them from worldly
matters, that unconsciously to himself his Sundayschool voice had
acquired a peculiar intonation which was wholly absent on weekdays. He
began after this fashion
"Now, children, I want you all to sit up just as straight and pretty
as you can and give me all your attention for a minute or two. There
that is it. That is the way good little boys and girls should do. I see
one little girl who is looking out of the windowI am afraid she
thinks I am out there somewhereperhaps up in one of the trees making
a speech to the little birds. [Applausive titter.] I want to tell you
how good it makes me feel to see so many bright, clean little faces
assembled in a place like this, learning to do right and be good." And
so forth and so on. It is not necessary to set down the rest of the
oration. It was of a pattern which does not vary, and so it is familiar
to us all.
The latter third of the speech was marred by the resumption of fights
and other recreations among certain of the bad boys, and by fidgetings
and whisperings that extended far and wide, washing even to the bases
of isolated and incorruptible rocks like Sid and Mary. But now every
sound ceased suddenly, with the subsidence of Mr. Walters' voice, and
the conclusion of the speech was received with a burst of silent
gratitude.
A good part of the whispering had been occasioned by an event which
was more or less rarethe entrance of visitors lawyer Thatcher,
accompanied by a very feeble and aged man a fine, portly, middleaged
gentleman with irongray hair and a dignified lady who was doubtless
the latter's wife. The lady was leading a child. Tom had been restless
and full of chafings and repinings consciencesmitten, toohe could
not meet Amy Lawrence's eye, he could not brook her loving gaze. But
when he saw this small newcomer his soul was all ablaze with bliss in
a moment. The next moment he was "showing off" with all his might
cuffing boys, pulling hair, making facesin a word, using every art
that seemed likely to fascinate a girl and win her applause. His
exaltation had but one alloythe memory of his humiliation in this
angel's gardenand that record in sand was fast washing out, under
the waves of happiness that were sweeping over it now.
The visitors were given the highest seat of honor, and as soon as Mr.
Walters' speech was finished, he introduced them to the school. The
middleaged man turned out to be a prodigious personageno less a one
than the county judgealtogether the most august creation these
children had ever looked uponand they wondered what kind of material
he was made ofand they half wanted to hear him roar, and were half
afraid he might, too. He was from Constantinople, twelve miles awayso
he had travelled, and seen the worldthese very eyes had looked upon
the county courthousewhich was said to have a tin roof. The awe
which these reflections inspired was attested by the impressive silence
and the ranks of staring eyes. This was the great Judge Thatcher,
brother of their own lawyer. Jeff Thatcher immediately went forward, to
be familiar with the great man and be envied by the school. It would
have been music to his soul to hear the whisperings
"Look at him, Jim He's a going up there. Saylook he's a going to
shake hands with himhe IS shaking hands with him By jings, don't you
wish you was Jeff?"
Mr. Walters fell to "showing off," with all sorts of official
bustlings and activities, giving orders, delivering judgments,
discharging directions here, there, everywhere that he could find a
target. The librarian "showed off"running hither and thither with his
arms full of books and making a deal of the splutter and fuss that
insect authority delights in. The young lady teachers "showed off"
bending sweetly over pupils that were lately being boxed, lifting
pretty warning fingers at bad little boys and patting good ones
lovingly. The young gentlemen teachers "showed off" with small
scoldings and other little displays of authority and fine attention to
disciplineand most of the teachers, of both sexes, found business up
at the library, by the pulpit and it was business that frequently had
to be done over again two or three times with much seeming vexation.
The little girls "showed off" in various ways, and the little boys
"showed off" with such diligence that the air was thick with paper wads
and the murmur of scufflings. And above it all the great man sat and
beamed a majestic judicial smile upon all the house, and warmed himself
in the sun of his own grandeurfor he was "showing off," too.
There was only one thing wanting to make Mr. Walters' ecstasy
complete, and that was a chance to deliver a Bibleprize and exhibit a
prodigy. Several pupils had a few yellow tickets, but none had enough
he had been around among the star pupils inquiring. He would have given
worlds, now, to have that German lad back again with a sound mind.
And now at this moment, when hope was dead, Tom Sawyer came forward
with nine yellow tickets, nine red tickets, and ten blue ones, and
demanded a Bible. This was a thunderbolt out of a clear sky. Walters
was not expecting an application from this source for the next ten
years. But there was no getting around ithere were the certified
checks, and they were good for their face. Tom was therefore elevated
to a place with the Judge and the other elect, and the great news was
announced from headquarters. It was the most stunning surprise of the
decade, and so profound was the sensation that it lifted the new hero
up to the judicial one's altitude, and the school had two marvels to
gaze upon in place of one. The boys were all eaten up with envybut
those that suffered the bitterest pangs were those who perceived too
late that they themselves had contributed to this hated splendor by
trading tickets to Tom for the wealth he had amassed in selling
whitewashing privileges. These despised themselves, as being the dupes
of a wily fraud, a guileful snake in the grass.
The prize was delivered to Tom with as much effusion as the
superintendent could pump up under the circumstances but it lacked
somewhat of the true gush, for the poor fellow's instinct taught him
that there was a mystery here that could not well bear the light,
perhaps it was simply preposterous that this boy had warehoused two
thousand sheaves of Scriptural wisdom on his premisesa dozen would
strain his capacity, without a doubt.
Amy Lawrence was proud and glad, and she tried to make Tom see it in
her facebut he wouldn't look. She wondered then she was just a grain
troubled next a dim suspicion came and wentcame again she watched
a furtive glance told her worldsand then her heart broke, and she was
jealous, and angry, and the tears came and she hated everybody. Tom
most of all she thought.
Tom was introduced to the Judge but his tongue was tied, his breath
would hardly come, his heart quakedpartly because of the awful
greatness of the man, but mainly because he was her parent. He would
have liked to fall down and worship him, if it were in the dark. The
Judge put his hand on Tom's head and called him a fine little man, and
asked him what his name was. The boy stammered, gasped, and got it out
"Tom."
"Oh, no, not Tomit is"
"Thomas."
"Ah, that's it. I thought there was more to it, maybe. That's very
well. But you've another one I daresay, and you'll tell it to me, won't
you?"
"Tell the gentleman your other name, Thomas," said Walters, "and say
sir. You mustn't forget your manners."
"Thomas Sawyersir."
"That's it That's a good boy. Fine boy. Fine, manly little fellow.
Two thousand verses is a great manyvery, very great many. And you
never can be sorry for the trouble you took to learn them for
knowledge is worth more than anything there is in the world it's what
makes great men and good men you'll be a great man and a good man
yourself, some day, Thomas, and then you'll look back and say, It's all
owing to the precious Sundayschool privileges of my boyhoodit's all
owing to my dear teachers that taught me to learnit's all owing to
the good superintendent, who encouraged me, and watched over me, and
gave me a beautiful Biblea splendid elegant Bibleto keep and have
it all for my own, alwaysit's all owing to right bringing up That is
what you will say, Thomasand you wouldn't take any money for those
two thousand versesno indeed you wouldn't. And now you wouldn't mind
telling me and this lady some of the things you've learnedno, I know
you wouldn'tfor we are proud of little boys that learn. Now, no
doubt you know the names of all the twelve disciples. Won't you tell us
the names of the first two that were appointed?"
Tom was tugging at a buttonhole and looking sheepish. He blushed,
now, and his eyes fell. Mr. Walters' heart sank within him. He said to
himself, it is not possible that the boy can answer the simplest
questionwhy DID the Judge ask him? Yet he felt obliged to speak up
and say
"Answer the gentleman, Thomasdon't be afraid."
Tom still hung fire.
"Now I know you'll tell me," said the lady. "The names of the first
two disciples were"
"DAVID AND GOLIAH"
Let us draw the curtain of charity over the rest of the scene.
CHAPTER V
ABOUT halfpast ten the cracked bell of the small church began to
ring, and presently the people began to gather for the morning sermon.
The Sundayschool children distributed themselves about the house and
occupied pews with their parents, so as to be under supervision. Aunt
Polly came, and Tom and Sid and Mary sat with herTom being placed
next the aisle, in order that he might be as far away from the open
window and the seductive outside summer scenes as possible. The crowd
filed up the aisles the aged and needy postmaster, who had seen better
days the mayor and his wifefor they had a mayor there, among other
unnecessaries the justice of the peace the widow Douglass, fair,
smart, and forty, a generous, goodhearted soul and welltodo, her
hill mansion the only palace in the town, and the most hospitable and
much the most lavish in the matter of festivities that St. Petersburg
could boast the bent and venerable Major and Mrs. Ward lawyer
Riverson, the new notable from a distance next the belle of the
village, followed by a troop of lawnclad and ribbondecked young
heartbreakers then all the young clerks in town in a bodyfor they
had stood in the vestibule sucking their caneheads, a circling wall of
oiled and simpering admirers, till the last girl had run their gantlet
and last of all came the Model Boy, Willie Mufferson, taking as heedful
care of his mother as if she were cut glass. He always brought his
mother to church, and was the pride of all the matrons. The boys all
hated him, he was so good. And besides, he had been "thrown up to them"
so much. His white handkerchief was hanging out of his pocket behind, as
usual on Sundaysaccidentally. Tom had no handkerchief, and he looked
upon boys who had as snobs.
The congregation being fully assembled, now, the bell rang once more,
to warn laggards and stragglers, and then a solemn hush fell upon the
church which was only broken by the tittering and whispering of the
choir in the gallery. The choir always tittered and whispered all
through service. There was once a church choir that was not illbred,
but I have forgotten where it was, now. It was a great many years ago,
and I can scarcely remember anything about it, but I think it was in
some foreign country.
The minister gave out the hymn, and read it through with a relish, in
a peculiar style which was much admired in that part of the country.
His voice began on a medium key and climbed steadily up till it reached
a certain point, where it bore with strong emphasis upon the topmost
word and then plunged down as if from a springboard
Shall I be carried toe the skies, on flow'ry BEDS of ease,
Whilst others fight to win the prize, and sail thro' BLOODY seas?
He was regarded as a wonderful reader. At church "sociables" he was
always called upon to read poetry and when he was through, the ladies
would lift up their hands and let them fall helplessly in their laps,
and "wall" their eyes, and shake their heads, as much as to say, "Words
cannot express it it is too beautiful, TOO beautiful for this mortal
earth."
After the hymn had been sung, the Rev. Mr. Sprague turned himself into
a bulletinboard, and read off "notices" of meetings and societies and
things till it seemed that the list would stretch out to the crack of
dooma queer custom which is still kept up in America, even in cities,
away here in this age of abundant newspapers. Often, the less there is
to justify a traditional custom, the harder it is to get rid of it.
And now the minister prayed. A good, generous prayer it was, and went
into details it pleaded for the church, and the little children of the
church for the other churches of the village for the village itself
for the county for the State for the State officers for the United
States for the churches of the United States for Congress for the
President for the officers of the Government for poor sailors, tossed
by stormy seas for the oppressed millions groaning under the heel of
European monarchies and Oriental despotisms for such as have the light
and the good tidings, and yet have not eyes to see nor ears to hear
withal for the heathen in the far islands of the sea and closed with
a supplication that the words he was about to speak might find grace
and favor, and be as seed sown in fertile ground, yielding in time a
grateful harvest of good. Amen.
There was a rustling of dresses, and the standing congregation sat
down. The boy whose history this book relates did not enjoy the prayer,
he only endured itif he even did that much. He was restive all
through it he kept tally of the details of the prayer, unconsciously
for he was not listening, but he knew the ground of old, and the
clergyman's regular route over itand when a little trifle of new
matter was interlarded, his ear detected it and his whole nature
resented it he considered additions unfair, and scoundrelly. In the
midst of the prayer a fly had lit on the back of the pew in front of
him and tortured his spirit by calmly rubbing its hands together,
embracing its head with its arms, and polishing it so vigorously that
it seemed to almost part company with the body, and the slender thread
of a neck was exposed to view scraping its wings with its hind legs
and smoothing them to its body as if they had been coattails going
through its whole toilet as tranquilly as if it knew it was perfectly
safe. As indeed it was for as sorely as Tom's hands itched to grab for
it they did not darehe believed his soul would be instantly destroyed
if he did such a thing while the prayer was going on. But with the
closing sentence his hand began to curve and steal forward and the
instant the "Amen" was out the fly was a prisoner of war. His aunt
detected the act and made him let it go.
The minister gave out his text and droned along monotonously through
an argument that was so prosy that many a head by and by began to nod
and yet it was an argument that dealt in limitless fire and brimstone
and thinned the predestined elect down to a company so small as to be
hardly worth the saving. Tom counted the pages of the sermon after
church he always knew how many pages there had been, but he seldom knew
anything else about the discourse. However, this time he was really
interested for a little while. The minister made a grand and moving
picture of the assembling together of the world's hosts at the
millennium when the lion and the lamb should lie down together and a
little child should lead them. But the pathos, the lesson, the moral of
the great spectacle were lost upon the boy he only thought of the
conspicuousness of the principal character before the onlooking
nations his face lit with the thought, and he said to himself that he
wished he could be that child, if it was a tame lion.
Now he lapsed into suffering again, as the dry argument was resumed.
Presently he bethought him of a treasure he had and got it out. It was
a large black beetle with formidable jawsa "pinchbug," he called it.
It was in a percussioncap box. The first thing the beetle did was to
take him by the finger. A natural fillip followed, the beetle went
floundering into the aisle and lit on its back, and the hurt finger
went into the boy's mouth. The beetle lay there working its helpless
legs, unable to turn over. Tom eyed it, and longed for it but it was
safe out of his reach. Other people uninterested in the sermon found
relief in the beetle, and they eyed it too. Presently a vagrant poodle
dog came idling along, sad at heart, lazy with the summer softness and
the quiet, weary of captivity, sighing for change. He spied the beetle
the drooping tail lifted and wagged. He surveyed the prize walked
around it smelt at it from a safe distance walked around it again
grew bolder, and took a closer smell then lifted his lip and made a
gingerly snatch at it, just missing it made another, and another
began to enjoy the diversion subsided to his stomach with the beetle
between his paws, and continued his experiments grew weary at last,
and then indifferent and absentminded. His head nodded, and little by
little his chin descended and touched the enemy, who seized it. There
was a sharp yelp, a flirt of the poodle's head, and the beetle fell a
couple of yards away, and lit on its back once more. The neighboring
spectators shook with a gentle inward joy, several faces went behind
fans and handkerchiefs, and Tom was entirely happy. The dog looked
foolish, and probably felt so but there was resentment in his heart,
too, and a craving for revenge. So he went to the beetle and began a
wary attack on it again jumping at it from every point of a circle,
lighting with his forepaws within an inch of the creature, making even
closer snatches at it with his teeth, and jerking his head till his
ears flapped again. But he grew tired once more, after a while tried
to amuse himself with a fly but found no relief followed an ant
around, with his nose close to the floor, and quickly wearied of that
yawned, sighed, forgot the beetle entirely, and sat down on it. Then
there was a wild yelp of agony and the poodle went sailing up the
aisle the yelps continued, and so did the dog he crossed the house in
front of the altar he flew down the other aisle he crossed before the
doors he clamored up the homestretch his anguish grew with his
progress, till presently he was but a woolly comet moving in its orbit
with the gleam and the speed of light. At last the frantic sufferer
sheered from its course, and sprang into its master's lap he flung it
out of the window, and the voice of distress quickly thinned away and
died in the distance.
By this time the whole church was redfaced and suffocating with
suppressed laughter, and the sermon had come to a dead standstill. The
discourse was resumed presently, but it went lame and halting, all
possibility of impressiveness being at an end for even the gravest
sentiments were constantly being received with a smothered burst of
unholy mirth, under cover of some remote pewback, as if the poor
parson had said a rarely facetious thing. It was a genuine relief to
the whole congregation when the ordeal was over and the benediction
pronounced.
Tom Sawyer went home quite cheerful, thinking to himself that there
was some satisfaction about divine service when there was a bit of
variety in it. He had but one marring thought he was willing that the
dog should play with his pinchbug, but he did not think it was upright
in him to carry it off.
CHAPTER VI
MONDAY morning found Tom Sawyer miserable. Monday morning always found
him sobecause it began another week's slow suffering in school. He
generally began that day with wishing he had had no intervening
holiday, it made the going into captivity and fetters again so much
more odious.
Tom lay thinking. Presently it occurred to him that he wished he was
sick then he could stay home from school. Here was a vague
possibility. He canvassed his system. No ailment was found, and he
investigated again. This time he thought he could detect colicky
symptoms, and he began to encourage them with considerable hope. But
they soon grew feeble, and presently died wholly away. He reflected
further. Suddenly he discovered something. One of his upper front teeth
was loose. This was lucky he was about to begin to groan, as a
"starter," as he called it, when it occurred to him that if he came
into court with that argument, his aunt would pull it out, and that
would hurt. So he thought he would hold the tooth in reserve for the
present, and seek further. Nothing offered for some little time, and
then he remembered hearing the doctor tell about a certain thing that
laid up a patient for two or three weeks and threatened to make him
lose a finger. So the boy eagerly drew his sore toe from under the
sheet and held it up for inspection. But now he did not know the
necessary symptoms. However, it seemed well worth while to chance it,
so he fell to groaning with considerable spirit.
But Sid slept on unconscious.
Tom groaned louder, and fancied that he began to feel pain in the toe.
No result from Sid.
Tom was panting with his exertions by this time. He took a rest and
then swelled himself up and fetched a succession of admirable groans.
Sid snored on.
Tom was aggravated. He said, "Sid, Sid" and shook him. This course
worked well, and Tom began to groan again. Sid yawned, stretched, then
brought himself up on his elbow with a snort, and began to stare at
Tom. Tom went on groaning. Sid said
"Tom Say, Tom" [No response.] "Here, Tom TOM What is the matter,
Tom?" And he shook him and looked in his face anxiously.
Tom moaned out
"Oh, don't, Sid. Don't joggle me."
"Why, what's the matter, Tom? I must call auntie."
"Nonever mind. It'll be over by and by, maybe. Don't call anybody."
"But I must DON'T groan so, Tom, it's awful. How long you been this
way?"
"Hours. Ouch Oh, don't stir so, Sid, you'll kill me."
"Tom, why didn't you wake me sooner? Oh, Tom, DON'T It makes my
flesh crawl to hear you. Tom, what is the matter?"
"I forgive you everything, Sid. [Groan.] Everything you've ever done
to me. When I'm gone"
"Oh, Tom, you ain't dying, are you? Don't, Tomoh, don't. Maybe"
"I forgive everybody, Sid. [Groan.] Tell 'em so, Sid. And Sid, you
give my windowsash and my cat with one eye to that new girl that's
come to town, and tell her"
But Sid had snatched his clothes and gone. Tom was suffering in
reality, now, so handsomely was his imagination working, and so his
groans had gathered quite a genuine tone.
Sid flew downstairs and said
"Oh, Aunt Polly, come Tom's dying"
"Dying"
"Yes'm. Don't waitcome quick"
"Rubbage I don't believe it"
But she fled upstairs, nevertheless, with Sid and Mary at her heels.
And her face grew white, too, and her lip trembled. When she reached
the bedside she gasped out
"You, Tom Tom, what's the matter with you?"
"Oh, auntie, I'm"
"What's the matter with youwhat is the matter with you, child?"
"Oh, auntie, my sore toe's mortified"
The old lady sank down into a chair and laughed a little, then cried a
little, then did both together. This restored her and she said
"Tom, what a turn you did give me. Now you shut up that nonsense and
climb out of this."
The groans ceased and the pain vanished from the toe. The boy felt a
little foolish, and he said
"Aunt Polly, it SEEMED mortified, and it hurt so I never minded my
tooth at all."
"Your tooth, indeed What's the matter with your tooth?"
"One of them's loose, and it aches perfectly awful."
"There, there, now, don't begin that groaning again. Open your mouth.
Wellyour tooth IS loose, but you're not going to die about that.
Mary, get me a silk thread, and a chunk of fire out of the kitchen."
Tom said
"Oh, please, auntie, don't pull it out. It don't hurt any more. I wish
I may never stir if it does. Please don't, auntie. I don't want to stay
home from school."
"Oh, you don't, don't you? So all this row was because you thought
you'd get to stay home from school and go afishing? Tom, Tom, I love
you so, and you seem to try every way you can to break my old heart
with your outrageousness." By this time the dental instruments were
ready. The old lady made one end of the silk thread fast to Tom's tooth
with a loop and tied the other to the bedpost. Then she seized the
chunk of fire and suddenly thrust it almost into the boy's face. The
tooth hung dangling by the bedpost, now.
But all trials bring their compensations. As Tom wended to school
after breakfast, he was the envy of every boy he met because the gap in
his upper row of teeth enabled him to expectorate in a new and
admirable way. He gathered quite a following of lads interested in the
exhibition and one that had cut his finger and had been a centre of
fascination and homage up to this time, now found himself suddenly
without an adherent, and shorn of his glory. His heart was heavy, and
he said with a disdain which he did not feel that it wasn't anything to
spit like Tom Sawyer but another boy said, "Sour grapes" and he
wandered away a dismantled hero.
Shortly Tom came upon the juvenile pariah of the village, Huckleberry
Finn, son of the town drunkard. Huckleberry was cordially hated and
dreaded by all the mothers of the town, because he was idle and lawless
and vulgar and badand because all their children admired him so, and
delighted in his forbidden society, and wished they dared to be like
him. Tom was like the rest of the respectable boys, in that he envied
Huckleberry his gaudy outcast condition, and was under strict orders
not to play with him. So he played with him every time he got a chance.
Huckleberry was always dressed in the castoff clothes of fullgrown
men, and they were in perennial bloom and fluttering with rags. His hat
was a vast ruin with a wide crescent lopped out of its brim his coat,
when he wore one, hung nearly to his heels and had the rearward buttons
far down the back but one suspender supported his trousers the seat
of the trousers bagged low and contained nothing, the fringed legs
dragged in the dirt when not rolled up.
Huckleberry came and went, at his own free will. He slept on doorsteps
in fine weather and in empty hogsheads in wet he did not have to go to
school or to church, or call any being master or obey anybody he could
go fishing or swimming when and where he chose, and stay as long as it
suited him nobody forbade him to fight he could sit up as late as he
pleased he was always the first boy that went barefoot in the spring
and the last to resume leather in the fall he never had to wash, nor
put on clean clothes he could swear wonderfully. In a word, everything
that goes to make life precious that boy had. So thought every
harassed, hampered, respectable boy in St. Petersburg.
Tom hailed the romantic outcast
"Hello, Huckleberry"
"Hello yourself, and see how you like it."
"What's that you got?"
"Dead cat."
"Lemme see him, Huck. My, he's pretty stiff. Where'd you get him?"
"Bought him off'n a boy."
"What did you give?"
"I give a blue ticket and a bladder that I got at the slaughterhouse."
"Where'd you get the blue ticket?"
"Bought it off'n Ben Rogers two weeks ago for a hoopstick."
"Saywhat is dead cats good for, Huck?"
"Good for? Cure warts with."
"No Is that so? I know something that's better."
"I bet you don't. What is it?"
"Why, spunkwater."
"Spunkwater I wouldn't give a dern for spunkwater."
"You wouldn't, wouldn't you? D'you ever try it?"
"No, I hain't. But Bob Tanner did."
"Who told you so"
"Why, he told Jeff Thatcher, and Jeff told Johnny Baker, and Johnny
told Jim Hollis, and Jim told Ben Rogers, and Ben told a nigger, and
the nigger told me. There now"
"Well, what of it? They'll all lie. Leastways all but the nigger. I
don't know HIM. But I never see a nigger that WOULDN'T lie. Shucks Now
you tell me how Bob Tanner done it, Huck."
"Why, he took and dipped his hand in a rotten stump where the
rainwater was."
"In the daytime?"
"Certainly."
"With his face to the stump?"
"Yes. Least I reckon so."
"Did he say anything?"
"I don't reckon he did. I don't know."
"Aha Talk about trying to cure warts with spunkwater such a blame
fool way as that Why, that ain't agoing to do any good. You got to go
all by yourself, to the middle of the woods, where you know there's a
spunkwater stump, and just as it's midnight you back up against the
stump and jam your hand in and say
'Barleycorn, barleycorn, injunmeal shorts,
Spunkwater, spunkwater, swaller these warts,'
and then walk away quick, eleven steps, with your eyes shut, and then
turn around three times and walk home without speaking to anybody.
Because if you speak the charm's busted."
"Well, that sounds like a good way but that ain't the way Bob Tanner
done."
"No, sir, you can bet he didn't, becuz he's the wartiest boy in this
town and he wouldn't have a wart on him if he'd knowed how to work
spunkwater. I've took off thousands of warts off of my hands that way,
Huck. I play with frogs so much that I've always got considerable many
warts. Sometimes I take 'em off with a bean."
"Yes, bean's good. I've done that."
"Have you? What's your way?"
"You take and split the bean, and cut the wart so as to get some
blood, and then you put the blood on one piece of the bean and take and
dig a hole and bury it 'bout midnight at the crossroads in the dark of
the moon, and then you burn up the rest of the bean. You see that piece
that's got the blood on it will keep drawing and drawing, trying to
fetch the other piece to it, and so that helps the blood to draw the
wart, and pretty soon off she comes."
"Yes, that's it, Huckthat's it though when you're burying it if you
say 'Down bean off wart come no more to bother me' it's better.
That's the way Joe Harper does, and he's been nearly to Coonville and
most everywheres. But sayhow do you cure 'em with dead cats?"
"Why, you take your cat and go and get in the graveyard 'long about
midnight when somebody that was wicked has been buried and when it's
midnight a devil will come, or maybe two or three, but you can't see
'em, you can only hear something like the wind, or maybe hear 'em talk
and when they're taking that feller away, you heave your cat after 'em
and say, 'Devil follow corpse, cat follow devil, warts follow cat, I'm
done with ye' That'll fetch ANY wart."
"Sounds right. D'you ever try it, Huck?"
"No, but old Mother Hopkins told me."
"Well, I reckon it's so, then. Becuz they say she's a witch."
"Say Why, Tom, I KNOW she is. She witched pap. Pap says so his own
self. He come along one day, and he see she was awitching him, so he
took up a rock, and if she hadn't dodged, he'd a got her. Well, that
very night he rolled off'n a shed wher' he was a layin drunk, and broke
his arm."
"Why, that's awful. How did he know she was awitching him?"
"Lord, pap can tell, easy. Pap says when they keep looking at you
right stiddy, they're awitching you. Specially if they mumble. Becuz
when they mumble they're saying the Lord's Prayer backards."
"Say, Hucky, when you going to try the cat?"
"Tonight. I reckon they'll come after old Hoss Williams tonight."
"But they buried him Saturday. Didn't they get him Saturday night?"
"Why, how you talk How could their charms work till midnight?and
THEN it's Sunday. Devils don't slosh around much of a Sunday, I don't
reckon."
"I never thought of that. That's so. Lemme go with you?"
"Of courseif you ain't afeard."
"Afeard 'Tain't likely. Will you meow?"
"Yesand you meow back, if you get a chance. Last time, you kep' me
ameowing around till old Hays went to throwing rocks at me and says
'Dern that cat' and so I hove a brick through his windowbut don't
you tell."
"I won't. I couldn't meow that night, becuz auntie was watching me,
but I'll meow this time. Saywhat's that?"
"Nothing but a tick."
"Where'd you get him?"
"Out in the woods."
"What'll you take for him?"
"I don't know. I don't want to sell him."
"All right. It's a mighty small tick, anyway."
"Oh, anybody can run a tick down that don't belong to them. I'm
satisfied with it. It's a good enough tick for me."
"Sho, there's ticks a plenty. I could have a thousand of 'em if I
wanted to."
"Well, why don't you? Becuz you know mighty well you can't. This is a
pretty early tick, I reckon. It's the first one I've seen this year."
"Say, HuckI'll give you my tooth for him."
"Less see it."
Tom got out a bit of paper and carefully unrolled it. Huckleberry
viewed it wistfully. The temptation was very strong. At last he said
"Is it genuwyne?"
Tom lifted his lip and showed the vacancy.
"Well, all right," said Huckleberry, "it's a trade."
Tom enclosed the tick in the percussioncap box that had lately been
the pinchbug's prison, and the boys separated, each feeling wealthier
than before.
When Tom reached the little isolated frame schoolhouse, he strode in
briskly, with the manner of one who had come with all honest speed.
He hung his hat on a peg and flung himself into his seat with
businesslike alacrity. The master, throned on high in his great
splintbottom armchair, was dozing, lulled by the drowsy hum of study.
The interruption roused him.
"Thomas Sawyer"
Tom knew that when his name was pronounced in full, it meant trouble.
"Sir"
"Come up here. Now, sir, why are you late again, as usual?"
Tom was about to take refuge in a lie, when he saw two long tails of
yellow hair hanging down a back that he recognized by the electric
sympathy of love and by that form was THE ONLY VACANT PLACE on the
girls' side of the schoolhouse. He instantly said
"I STOPPED TO TALK WITH HUCKLEBERRY FINN"
The master's pulse stood still, and he stared helplessly. The buzz of
study ceased. The pupils wondered if this foolhardy boy had lost his
mind. The master said
"Youyou did what?"
"Stopped to talk with Huckleberry Finn."
There was no mistaking the words.
"Thomas Sawyer, this is the most astounding confession I have ever
listened to. No mere ferule will answer for this offence. Take off your
jacket."
The master's arm performed until it was tired and the stock of
switches notably diminished. Then the order followed
"Now, sir, go and sit with the girls And let this be a warning to you."
The titter that rippled around the room appeared to abash the boy, but
in reality that result was caused rather more by his worshipful awe of
his unknown idol and the dread pleasure that lay in his high good
fortune. He sat down upon the end of the pine bench and the girl
hitched herself away from him with a toss of her head. Nudges and winks
and whispers traversed the room, but Tom sat still, with his arms upon
the long, low desk before him, and seemed to study his book.
By and by attention ceased from him, and the accustomed school murmur
rose upon the dull air once more. Presently the boy began to steal
furtive glances at the girl. She observed it, "made a mouth" at him and
gave him the back of her head for the space of a minute. When she
cautiously faced around again, a peach lay before her. She thrust it
away. Tom gently put it back. She thrust it away again, but with less
animosity. Tom patiently returned it to its place. Then she let it
remain. Tom scrawled on his slate, "Please take itI got more." The
girl glanced at the words, but made no sign. Now the boy began to draw
something on the slate, hiding his work with his left hand. For a time
the girl refused to notice but her human curiosity presently began to
manifest itself by hardly perceptible signs. The boy worked on,
apparently unconscious. The girl made a sort of noncommittal attempt to
see, but the boy did not betray that he was aware of it. At last she
gave in and hesitatingly whispered
"Let me see it."
Tom partly uncovered a dismal caricature of a house with two gable
ends to it and a corkscrew of smoke issuing from the chimney. Then the
girl's interest began to fasten itself upon the work and she forgot
everything else. When it was finished, she gazed a moment, then
whispered
"It's nicemake a man."
The artist erected a man in the front yard, that resembled a derrick.
He could have stepped over the house but the girl was not
hypercritical she was satisfied with the monster, and whispered
"It's a beautiful mannow make me coming along."
Tom drew an hourglass with a full moon and straw limbs to it and
armed the spreading fingers with a portentous fan. The girl said
"It's ever so niceI wish I could draw."
"It's easy," whispered Tom, "I'll learn you."
"Oh, will you? When?"
"At noon. Do you go home to dinner?"
"I'll stay if you will."
"Goodthat's a whack. What's your name?"
"Becky Thatcher. What's yours? Oh, I know. It's Thomas Sawyer."
"That's the name they lick me by. I'm Tom when I'm good. You call me
Tom, will you?"
"Yes."
Now Tom began to scrawl something on the slate, hiding the words from
the girl. But she was not backward this time. She begged to see. Tom
said
"Oh, it ain't anything."
"Yes it is."
"No it ain't. You don't want to see."
"Yes I do, indeed I do. Please let me."
"You'll tell."
"No I won'tdeed and deed and double deed won't."
"You won't tell anybody at all? Ever, as long as you live?"
"No, I won't ever tell ANYbody. Now let me."
"Oh, YOU don't want to see"
"Now that you treat me so, I WILL see." And she put her small hand
upon his and a little scuffle ensued, Tom pretending to resist in
earnest but letting his hand slip by degrees till these words were
revealed "I LOVE YOU."
"Oh, you bad thing" And she hit his hand a smart rap, but reddened
and looked pleased, nevertheless.
Just at this juncture the boy felt a slow, fateful grip closing on his
ear, and a steady lifting impulse. In that wise he was borne across the
house and deposited in his own seat, under a peppering fire of giggles
from the whole school. Then the master stood over him during a few
awful moments, and finally moved away to his throne without saying a
word. But although Tom's ear tingled, his heart was jubilant.
As the school quieted down Tom made an honest effort to study, but the
turmoil within him was too great. In turn he took his place in the
reading class and made a botch of it then in the geography class and
turned lakes into mountains, mountains into rivers, and rivers into
continents, till chaos was come again then in the spelling class, and
got "turned down," by a succession of mere baby words, till he brought
up at the foot and yielded up the pewter medal which he had worn with
ostentation for months.
CHAPTER VII
THE harder Tom tried to fasten his mind on his book, the more his
ideas wandered. So at last, with a sigh and a yawn, he gave it up. It
seemed to him that the noon recess would never come. The air was
utterly dead. There was not a breath stirring. It was the sleepiest of
sleepy days. The drowsing murmur of the five and twenty studying
scholars soothed the soul like the spell that is in the murmur of bees.
Away off in the flaming sunshine, Cardiff Hill lifted its soft green
sides through a shimmering veil of heat, tinted with the purple of
distance a few birds floated on lazy wing high in the air no other
living thing was visible but some cows, and they were asleep. Tom's
heart ached to be free, or else to have something of interest to do to
pass the dreary time. His hand wandered into his pocket and his face
lit up with a glow of gratitude that was prayer, though he did not know
it. Then furtively the percussioncap box came out. He released the
tick and put him on the long flat desk. The creature probably glowed
with a gratitude that amounted to prayer, too, at this moment, but it
was premature for when he started thankfully to travel off, Tom turned
him aside with a pin and made him take a new direction.
Tom's bosom friend sat next him, suffering just as Tom had been, and
now he was deeply and gratefully interested in this entertainment in an
instant. This bosom friend was Joe Harper. The two boys were sworn
friends all the week, and embattled enemies on Saturdays. Joe took a
pin out of his lapel and began to assist in exercising the prisoner.
The sport grew in interest momently. Soon Tom said that they were
interfering with each other, and neither getting the fullest benefit of
the tick. So he put Joe's slate on the desk and drew a line down the
middle of it from top to bottom.
"Now," said he, "as long as he is on your side you can stir him up and
I'll let him alone but if you let him get away and get on my side,
you're to leave him alone as long as I can keep him from crossing over."
"All right, go ahead start him up."
The tick escaped from Tom, presently, and crossed the equator. Joe
harassed him awhile, and then he got away and crossed back again. This
change of base occurred often. While one boy was worrying the tick with
absorbing interest, the other would look on with interest as strong,
the two heads bowed together over the slate, and the two souls dead to
all things else. At last luck seemed to settle and abide with Joe. The
tick tried this, that, and the other course, and got as excited and as
anxious as the boys themselves, but time and again just as he would
have victory in his very grasp, so to speak, and Tom's fingers would be
twitching to begin, Joe's pin would deftly head him off, and keep
possession. At last Tom could stand it no longer. The temptation was
too strong. So he reached out and lent a hand with his pin. Joe was
angry in a moment. Said he
"Tom, you let him alone."
"I only just want to stir him up a little, Joe."
"No, sir, it ain't fair you just let him alone."
"Blame it, I ain't going to stir him much."
"Let him alone, I tell you."
"I won't"
"You shallhe's on my side of the line."
"Look here, Joe Harper, whose is that tick?"
"I don't care whose tick he ishe's on my side of the line, and you
sha'n't touch him."
"Well, I'll just bet I will, though. He's my tick and I'll do what I
blame please with him, or die"
A tremendous whack came down on Tom's shoulders, and its duplicate on
Joe's and for the space of two minutes the dust continued to fly from
the two jackets and the whole school to enjoy it. The boys had been too
absorbed to notice the hush that had stolen upon the school awhile
before when the master came tiptoeing down the room and stood over
them. He had contemplated a good part of the performance before he
contributed his bit of variety to it.
When school broke up at noon, Tom flew to Becky Thatcher, and
whispered in her ear
"Put on your bonnet and let on you're going home and when you get to
the corner, give the rest of 'em the slip, and turn down through the
lane and come back. I'll go the other way and come it over 'em the same
way."
So the one went off with one group of scholars, and the other with
another. In a little while the two met at the bottom of the lane, and
when they reached the school they had it all to themselves. Then they
sat together, with a slate before them, and Tom gave Becky the pencil
and held her hand in his, guiding it, and so created another surprising
house. When the interest in art began to wane, the two fell to talking.
Tom was swimming in bliss. He said
"Do you love rats?"
"No I hate them"
"Well, I do, tooLIVE ones. But I mean dead ones, to swing round your
head with a string."
"No, I don't care for rats much, anyway. What I like is chewinggum."
"Oh, I should say so I wish I had some now."
"Do you? I've got some. I'll let you chew it awhile, but you must give
it back to me."
That was agreeable, so they chewed it turn about, and dangled their
legs against the bench in excess of contentment.
"Was you ever at a circus?" said Tom.
"Yes, and my pa's going to take me again some time, if I'm good."
"I been to the circus three or four timeslots of times. Church ain't
shucks to a circus. There's things going on at a circus all the time.
I'm going to be a clown in a circus when I grow up."
"Oh, are you That will be nice. They're so lovely, all spotted up."
"Yes, that's so. And they get slathers of moneymost a dollar a day,
Ben Rogers says. Say, Becky, was you ever engaged?"
"What's that?"
"Why, engaged to be married."
"No."
"Would you like to?"
"I reckon so. I don't know. What is it like?"
"Like? Why it ain't like anything. You only just tell a boy you won't
ever have anybody but him, ever ever ever, and then you kiss and that's
all. Anybody can do it."
"Kiss? What do you kiss for?"
"Why, that, you know, is towell, they always do that."
"Everybody?"
"Why, yes, everybody that's in love with each other. Do you remember
what I wrote on the slate?"
"Yeyes."
"What was it?"
"I sha'n't tell you."
"Shall I tell YOU?"
"Yeyesbut some other time."
"No, now."
"No, not nowtomorrow."
"Oh, no, NOW. Please, BeckyI'll whisper it, I'll whisper it ever so
easy."
Becky hesitating, Tom took silence for consent, and passed his arm
about her waist and whispered the tale ever so softly, with his mouth
close to her ear. And then he added
"Now you whisper it to mejust the same."
She resisted, for a while, and then said
"You turn your face away so you can't see, and then I will. But you
mustn't ever tell anybodyWILL you, Tom? Now you won't, WILL you?"
"No, indeed, indeed I won't. Now, Becky."
He turned his face away. She bent timidly around till her breath
stirred his curls and whispered, "Iloveyou"
Then she sprang away and ran around and around the desks and benches,
with Tom after her, and took refuge in a corner at last, with her
little white apron to her face. Tom clasped her about her neck and
pleaded
"Now, Becky, it's all doneall over but the kiss. Don't you be afraid
of thatit ain't anything at all. Please, Becky." And he tugged at her
apron and the hands.
By and by she gave up, and let her hands drop her face, all glowing
with the struggle, came up and submitted. Tom kissed the red lips and
said
"Now it's all done, Becky. And always after this, you know, you ain't
ever to love anybody but me, and you ain't ever to marry anybody but
me, ever never and forever. Will you?"
"No, I'll never love anybody but you, Tom, and I'll never marry
anybody but youand you ain't to ever marry anybody but me, either."
"Certainly. Of course. That's PART of it. And always coming to school
or when we're going home, you're to walk with me, when there ain't
anybody lookingand you choose me and I choose you at parties, because
that's the way you do when you're engaged."
"It's so nice. I never heard of it before."
"Oh, it's ever so gay Why, me and Amy Lawrence"
The big eyes told Tom his blunder and he stopped, confused.
"Oh, Tom Then I ain't the first you've ever been engaged to"
The child began to cry. Tom said
"Oh, don't cry, Becky, I don't care for her any more."
"Yes, you do, Tomyou know you do."
Tom tried to put his arm about her neck, but she pushed him away and
turned her face to the wall, and went on crying. Tom tried again, with
soothing words in his mouth, and was repulsed again. Then his pride was
up, and he strode away and went outside. He stood about, restless and
uneasy, for a while, glancing at the door, every now and then, hoping
she would repent and come to find him. But she did not. Then he began
to feel badly and fear that he was in the wrong. It was a hard struggle
with him to make new advances, now, but he nerved himself to it and
entered. She was still standing back there in the corner, sobbing, with
her face to the wall. Tom's heart smote him. He went to her and stood a
moment, not knowing exactly how to proceed. Then he said hesitatingly
"Becky, II don't care for anybody but you."
No replybut sobs.
"Becky"pleadingly. "Becky, won't you say something?"
More sobs.
Tom got out his chiefest jewel, a brass knob from the top of an
andiron, and passed it around her so that she could see it, and said
"Please, Becky, won't you take it?"
She struck it to the floor. Then Tom marched out of the house and over
the hills and far away, to return to school no more that day. Presently
Becky began to suspect. She ran to the door he was not in sight she
flew around to the playyard he was not there. Then she called
"Tom Come back, Tom"
She listened intently, but there was no answer. She had no companions
but silence and loneliness. So she sat down to cry again and upbraid
herself and by this time the scholars began to gather again, and she
had to hide her griefs and still her broken heart and take up the cross
of a long, dreary, aching afternoon, with none among the strangers
about her to exchange sorrows with.
CHAPTER VIII
TOM dodged hither and thither through lanes until he was well out of
the track of returning scholars, and then fell into a moody jog. He
crossed a small "branch" two or three times, because of a prevailing
juvenile superstition that to cross water baffled pursuit. Half an hour
later he was disappearing behind the Douglas mansion on the summit of
Cardiff Hill, and the schoolhouse was hardly distinguishable away off
in the valley behind him. He entered a dense wood, picked his pathless
way to the centre of it, and sat down on a mossy spot under a spreading
oak. There was not even a zephyr stirring the dead noonday heat had
even stilled the songs of the birds nature lay in a trance that was
broken by no sound but the occasional faroff hammering of a
woodpecker, and this seemed to render the pervading silence and sense
of loneliness the more profound. The boy's soul was steeped in
melancholy his feelings were in happy accord with his surroundings. He
sat long with his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands,
meditating. It seemed to him that life was but a trouble, at best, and
he more than half envied Jimmy Hodges, so lately released it must be
very peaceful, he thought, to lie and slumber and dream forever and
ever, with the wind whispering through the trees and caressing the
grass and the flowers over the grave, and nothing to bother and grieve
about, ever any more. If he only had a clean Sundayschool record he
could be willing to go, and be done with it all. Now as to this girl.
What had he done? Nothing. He had meant the best in the world, and been
treated like a doglike a very dog. She would be sorry some daymaybe
when it was too late. Ah, if he could only die TEMPORARILY
But the elastic heart of youth cannot be compressed into one
constrained shape long at a time. Tom presently began to drift
insensibly back into the concerns of this life again. What if he turned
his back, now, and disappeared mysteriously? What if he went awayever
so far away, into unknown countries beyond the seasand never came
back any more How would she feel then The idea of being a clown
recurred to him now, only to fill him with disgust. For frivolity and
jokes and spotted tights were an offense, when they intruded themselves
upon a spirit that was exalted into the vague august realm of the
romantic. No, he would be a soldier, and return after long years, all
warworn and illustrious. Nobetter still, he would join the Indians,
and hunt buffaloes and go on the warpath in the mountain ranges and the
trackless great plains of the Far West, and away in the future come
back a great chief, bristling with feathers, hideous with paint, and
prance into Sundayschool, some drowsy summer morning, with a
bloodcurdling warwhoop, and sear the eyeballs of all his companions
with unappeasable envy. But no, there was something gaudier even than
this. He would be a pirate That was it NOW his future lay plain
before him, and glowing with unimaginable splendor. How his name would
fill the world, and make people shudder How gloriously he would go
plowing the dancing seas, in his long, low, blackhulled racer, the
Spirit of the Storm, with his grisly flag flying at the fore And at
the zenith of his fame, how he would suddenly appear at the old village
and stalk into church, brown and weatherbeaten, in his black velvet
doublet and trunks, his great jackboots, his crimson sash, his belt
bristling with horsepistols, his crimerusted cutlass at his side, his
slouch hat with waving plumes, his black flag unfurled, with the skull
and crossbones on it, and hear with swelling ecstasy the whisperings,
"It's Tom Sawyer the Piratethe Black Avenger of the Spanish Main"
Yes, it was settled his career was determined. He would run away from
home and enter upon it. He would start the very next morning. Therefore
he must now begin to get ready. He would collect his resources
together. He went to a rotten log near at hand and began to dig under
one end of it with his Barlow knife. He soon struck wood that sounded
hollow. He put his hand there and uttered this incantation impressively
"What hasn't come here, come What's here, stay here"
Then he scraped away the dirt, and exposed a pine shingle. He took it
up and disclosed a shapely little treasurehouse whose bottom and sides
were of shingles. In it lay a marble. Tom's astonishment was boundless
He scratched his head with a perplexed air, and said
"Well, that beats anything"
Then he tossed the marble away pettishly, and stood cogitating. The
truth was, that a superstition of his had failed, here, which he and
all his comrades had always looked upon as infallible. If you buried a
marble with certain necessary incantations, and left it alone a
fortnight, and then opened the place with the incantation he had just
used, you would find that all the marbles you had ever lost had
gathered themselves together there, meantime, no matter how widely they
had been separated. But now, this thing had actually and unquestionably
failed. Tom's whole structure of faith was shaken to its foundations.
He had many a time heard of this thing succeeding but never of its
failing before. It did not occur to him that he had tried it several
times before, himself, but could never find the hidingplaces
afterward. He puzzled over the matter some time, and finally decided
that some witch had interfered and broken the charm. He thought he
would satisfy himself on that point so he searched around till he
found a small sandy spot with a little funnelshaped depression in it.
He laid himself down and put his mouth close to this depression and
called
"Doodlebug, doodlebug, tell me what I want to know Doodlebug,
doodlebug, tell me what I want to know"
The sand began to work, and presently a small black bug appeared for a
second and then darted under again in a fright.
"He dasn't tell So it WAS a witch that done it. I just knowed it."
He well knew the futility of trying to contend against witches, so he
gave up discouraged. But it occurred to him that he might as well have
the marble he had just thrown away, and therefore he went and made a
patient search for it. But he could not find it. Now he went back to
his treasurehouse and carefully placed himself just as he had been
standing when he tossed the marble away then he took another marble
from his pocket and tossed it in the same way, saying
"Brother, go find your brother"
He watched where it stopped, and went there and looked. But it must
have fallen short or gone too far so he tried twice more. The last
repetition was successful. The two marbles lay within a foot of each
other.
Just here the blast of a toy tin trumpet came faintly down the green
aisles of the forest. Tom flung off his jacket and trousers, turned a
suspender into a belt, raked away some brush behind the rotten log,
disclosing a rude bow and arrow, a lath sword and a tin trumpet, and in
a moment had seized these things and bounded away, barelegged, with
fluttering shirt. He presently halted under a great elm, blew an
answering blast, and then began to tiptoe and look warily out, this way
and that. He said cautiouslyto an imaginary company
"Hold, my merry men Keep hid till I blow."
Now appeared Joe Harper, as airily clad and elaborately armed as Tom.
Tom called
"Hold Who comes here into Sherwood Forest without my pass?"
"Guy of Guisborne wants no man's pass. Who art thou thatthat"
"Dares to hold such language," said Tom, promptingfor they talked
"by the book," from memory.
"Who art thou that dares to hold such language?"
"I, indeed I am Robin Hood, as thy caitiff carcase soon shall know."
"Then art thou indeed that famous outlaw? Right gladly will I dispute
with thee the passes of the merry wood. Have at thee"
They took their lath swords, dumped their other traps on the ground,
struck a fencing attitude, foot to foot, and began a grave, careful
combat, "two up and two down." Presently Tom said
"Now, if you've got the hang, go it lively"
So they "went it lively," panting and perspiring with the work. By and
by Tom shouted
"Fall fall Why don't you fall?"
"I sha'n't Why don't you fall yourself? You're getting the worst of
it."
"Why, that ain't anything. I can't fall that ain't the way it is in
the book. The book says, 'Then with one backhanded stroke he slew poor
Guy of Guisborne.' You're to turn around and let me hit you in the
back."
There was no getting around the authorities, so Joe turned, received
the whack and fell.
"Now," said Joe, getting up, "you got to let me kill YOU. That's fair."
"Why, I can't do that, it ain't in the book."
"Well, it's blamed meanthat's all."
"Well, say, Joe, you can be Friar Tuck or Much the miller's son, and
lam me with a quarterstaff or I'll be the Sheriff of Nottingham and
you be Robin Hood a little while and kill me."
This was satisfactory, and so these adventures were carried out. Then
Tom became Robin Hood again, and was allowed by the treacherous nun to
bleed his strength away through his neglected wound. And at last Joe,
representing a whole tribe of weeping outlaws, dragged him sadly forth,
gave his bow into his feeble hands, and Tom said, "Where this arrow
falls, there bury poor Robin Hood under the greenwood tree." Then he
shot the arrow and fell back and would have died, but he lit on a
nettle and sprang up too gaily for a corpse.
The boys dressed themselves, hid their accoutrements, and went off
grieving that there were no outlaws any more, and wondering what modern
civilization could claim to have done to compensate for their loss.
They said they would rather be outlaws a year in Sherwood Forest than
President of the United States forever.
CHAPTER IX
AT halfpast nine, that night, Tom and Sid were sent to bed, as usual.
They said their prayers, and Sid was soon asleep. Tom lay awake and
waited, in restless impatience. When it seemed to him that it must be
nearly daylight, he heard the clock strike ten This was despair. He
would have tossed and fidgeted, as his nerves demanded, but he was
afraid he might wake Sid. So he lay still, and stared up into the dark.
Everything was dismally still. By and by, out of the stillness, little,
scarcely perceptible noises began to emphasize themselves. The ticking
of the clock began to bring itself into notice. Old beams began to
crack mysteriously. The stairs creaked faintly. Evidently spirits were
abroad. A measured, muffled snore issued from Aunt Polly's chamber. And
now the tiresome chirping of a cricket that no human ingenuity could
locate, began. Next the ghastly ticking of a deathwatch in the wall at
the bed's head made Tom shudderit meant that somebody's days were
numbered. Then the howl of a faroff dog rose on the night air, and was
answered by a fainter howl from a remoter distance. Tom was in an
agony. At last he was satisfied that time had ceased and eternity
begun he began to doze, in spite of himself the clock chimed eleven,
but he did not hear it. And then there came, mingling with his
halfformed dreams, a most melancholy caterwauling. The raising of a
neighboring window disturbed him. A cry of "Scat you devil" and the
crash of an empty bottle against the back of his aunt's woodshed
brought him wide awake, and a single minute later he was dressed and
out of the window and creeping along the roof of the "ell" on all
fours. He "meow'd" with caution once or twice, as he went then jumped
to the roof of the woodshed and thence to the ground. Huckleberry Finn
was there, with his dead cat. The boys moved off and disappeared in the
gloom. At the end of half an hour they were wading through the tall
grass of the graveyard.
It was a graveyard of the oldfashioned Western kind. It was on a
hill, about a mile and a half from the village. It had a crazy board
fence around it, which leaned inward in places, and outward the rest of
the time, but stood upright nowhere. Grass and weeds grew rank over the
whole cemetery. All the old graves were sunken in, there was not a
tombstone on the place roundtopped, wormeaten boards staggered over
the graves, leaning for support and finding none. "Sacred to the memory
of" SoandSo had been painted on them once, but it could no longer
have been read, on the most of them, now, even if there had been light.
A faint wind moaned through the trees, and Tom feared it might be the
spirits of the dead, complaining at being disturbed. The boys talked
little, and only under their breath, for the time and the place and the
pervading solemnity and silence oppressed their spirits. They found the
sharp new heap they were seeking, and ensconced themselves within the
protection of three great elms that grew in a bunch within a few feet
of the grave.
Then they waited in silence for what seemed a long time. The hooting
of a distant owl was all the sound that troubled the dead stillness.
Tom's reflections grew oppressive. He must force some talk. So he said
in a whisper
"Hucky, do you believe the dead people like it for us to be here?"
Huckleberry whispered
"I wisht I knowed. It's awful solemn like, AIN'T it?"
"I bet it is."
There was a considerable pause, while the boys canvassed this matter
inwardly. Then Tom whispered
"Say, Huckydo you reckon Hoss Williams hears us talking?"
"O' course he does. Least his sperrit does."
Tom, after a pause
"I wish I'd said Mister Williams. But I never meant any harm.
Everybody calls him Hoss."
"A body can't be too partic'lar how they talk 'bout theseyer dead
people, Tom."
This was a damper, and conversation died again.
Presently Tom seized his comrade's arm and said
"Sh"
"What is it, Tom?" And the two clung together with beating hearts.
"Sh There 'tis again Didn't you hear it?"
"I"
"There Now you hear it."
"Lord, Tom, they're coming They're coming, sure. What'll we do?"
"I dono. Think they'll see us?"
"Oh, Tom, they can see in the dark, same as cats. I wisht I hadn't
come."
"Oh, don't be afeard. I don't believe they'll bother us. We ain't
doing any harm. If we keep perfectly still, maybe they won't notice us
at all."
"I'll try to, Tom, but, Lord, I'm all of a shiver."
"Listen"
The boys bent their heads together and scarcely breathed. A muffled
sound of voices floated up from the far end of the graveyard.
"Look See there" whispered Tom. "What is it?"
"It's devilfire. Oh, Tom, this is awful."
Some vague figures approached through the gloom, swinging an
oldfashioned tin lantern that freckled the ground with innumerable
little spangles of light. Presently Huckleberry whispered with a
shudder
"It's the devils sure enough. Three of 'em Lordy, Tom, we're goners
Can you pray?"
"I'll try, but don't you be afeard. They ain't going to hurt us. 'Now
I lay me down to sleep, I'"
"Sh"
"What is it, Huck?"
"They're HUMANS One of 'em is, anyway. One of 'em's old Muff Potter's
voice."
"No'tain't so, is it?"
"I bet I know it. Don't you stir nor budge. He ain't sharp enough to
notice us. Drunk, the same as usual, likelyblamed old rip"
"All right, I'll keep still. Now they're stuck. Can't find it. Here
they come again. Now they're hot. Cold again. Hot again. Red hot
They're p'inted right, this time. Say, Huck, I know another o' them
voices it's Injun Joe."
"That's sothat murderin' halfbreed I'd druther they was devils a
dern sight. What kin they be up to?"
The whisper died wholly out, now, for the three men had reached the
grave and stood within a few feet of the boys' hidingplace.
"Here it is," said the third voice and the owner of it held the
lantern up and revealed the face of young Doctor Robinson.
Potter and Injun Joe were carrying a handbarrow with a rope and a
couple of shovels on it. They cast down their load and began to open
the grave. The doctor put the lantern at the head of the grave and came
and sat down with his back against one of the elm trees. He was so
close the boys could have touched him.
"Hurry, men" he said, in a low voice "the moon might come out at any
moment."
They growled a response and went on digging. For some time there was
no noise but the grating sound of the spades discharging their freight
of mould and gravel. It was very monotonous. Finally a spade struck
upon the coffin with a dull woody accent, and within another minute or
two the men had hoisted it out on the ground. They pried off the lid
with their shovels, got out the body and dumped it rudely on the
ground. The moon drifted from behind the clouds and exposed the pallid
face. The barrow was got ready and the corpse placed on it, covered
with a blanket, and bound to its place with the rope. Potter took out a
large springknife and cut off the dangling end of the rope and then
said
"Now the cussed thing's ready, Sawbones, and you'll just out with
another five, or here she stays."
"That's the talk" said Injun Joe.
"Look here, what does this mean?" said the doctor. "You required your
pay in advance, and I've paid you."
"Yes, and you done more than that," said Injun Joe, approaching the
doctor, who was now standing. "Five years ago you drove me away from
your father's kitchen one night, when I come to ask for something to
eat, and you said I warn't there for any good and when I swore I'd get
even with you if it took a hundred years, your father had me jailed for
a vagrant. Did you think I'd forget? The Injun blood ain't in me for
nothing. And now I've GOT you, and you got to SETTLE, you know"
He was threatening the doctor, with his fist in his face, by this
time. The doctor struck out suddenly and stretched the ruffian on the
ground. Potter dropped his knife, and exclaimed
"Here, now, don't you hit my pard" and the next moment he had
grappled with the doctor and the two were struggling with might and
main, trampling the grass and tearing the ground with their heels.
Injun Joe sprang to his feet, his eyes flaming with passion, snatched
up Potter's knife, and went creeping, catlike and stooping, round and
round about the combatants, seeking an opportunity. All at once the
doctor flung himself free, seized the heavy headboard of Williams'
grave and felled Potter to the earth with itand in the same instant
the halfbreed saw his chance and drove the knife to the hilt in the
young man's breast. He reeled and fell partly upon Potter, flooding him
with his blood, and in the same moment the clouds blotted out the
dreadful spectacle and the two frightened boys went speeding away in
the dark.
Presently, when the moon emerged again, Injun Joe was standing over
the two forms, contemplating them. The doctor murmured inarticulately,
gave a long gasp or two and was still. The halfbreed muttered
"THAT score is settleddamn you."
Then he robbed the body. After which he put the fatal knife in
Potter's open right hand, and sat down on the dismantled coffin. Three
fourfive minutes passed, and then Potter began to stir and moan. His
hand closed upon the knife he raised it, glanced at it, and let it
fall, with a shudder. Then he sat up, pushing the body from him, and
gazed at it, and then around him, confusedly. His eyes met Joe's.
"Lord, how is this, Joe?" he said.
"It's a dirty business," said Joe, without moving.
"What did you do it for?"
"I I never done it"
"Look here That kind of talk won't wash."
Potter trembled and grew white.
"I thought I'd got sober. I'd no business to drink tonight. But it's
in my head yetworse'n when we started here. I'm all in a muddle
can't recollect anything of it, hardly. Tell me, JoeHONEST, now, old
fellerdid I do it? Joe, I never meant to'pon my soul and honor, I
never meant to, Joe. Tell me how it was, Joe. Oh, it's awfuland him
so young and promising."
"Why, you two was scuffling, and he fetched you one with the headboard
and you fell flat and then up you come, all reeling and staggering
like, and snatched the knife and jammed it into him, just as he fetched
you another awful clipand here you've laid, as dead as a wedge til
now."
"Oh, I didn't know what I was adoing. I wish I may die this minute if
I did. It was all on account of the whiskey and the excitement, I
reckon. I never used a weepon in my life before, Joe. I've fought, but
never with weepons. They'll all say that. Joe, don't tell Say you
won't tell, Joethat's a good feller. I always liked you, Joe, and
stood up for you, too. Don't you remember? You WON'T tell, WILL you,
Joe?" And the poor creature dropped on his knees before the stolid
murderer, and clasped his appealing hands.
"No, you've always been fair and square with me, Muff Potter, and I
won't go back on you. There, now, that's as fair as a man can say."
"Oh, Joe, you're an angel. I'll bless you for this the longest day I
live." And Potter began to cry.
"Come, now, that's enough of that. This ain't any time for blubbering.
You be off yonder way and I'll go this. Move, now, and don't leave any
tracks behind you."
Potter started on a trot that quickly increased to a run. The
halfbreed stood looking after him. He muttered
"If he's as much stunned with the lick and fuddled with the rum as he
had the look of being, he won't think of the knife till he's gone so
far he'll be afraid to come back after it to such a place by himself
chickenheart"
Two or three minutes later the murdered man, the blanketed corpse, the
lidless coffin, and the open grave were under no inspection but the
moon's. The stillness was complete again, too.
CHAPTER X
THE two boys flew on and on, toward the village, speechless with
horror. They glanced backward over their shoulders from time to time,
apprehensively, as if they feared they might be followed. Every stump
that started up in their path seemed a man and an enemy, and made them
catch their breath and as they sped by some outlying cottages that lay
near the village, the barking of the aroused watchdogs seemed to give
wings to their feet.
"If we can only get to the old tannery before we break down"
whispered Tom, in short catches between breaths. "I can't stand it much
longer."
Huckleberry's hard pantings were his only reply, and the boys fixed
their eyes on the goal of their hopes and bent to their work to win it.
They gained steadily on it, and at last, breast to breast, they burst
through the open door and fell grateful and exhausted in the sheltering
shadows beyond. By and by their pulses slowed down, and Tom whispered
"Huckleberry, what do you reckon'll come of this?"
"If Doctor Robinson dies, I reckon hanging'll come of it."
"Do you though?"
"Why, I KNOW it, Tom."
Tom thought a while, then he said
"Who'll tell? We?"
"What are you talking about? S'pose something happened and Injun Joe
DIDN'T hang? Why, he'd kill us some time or other, just as dead sure as
we're a laying here."
"That's just what I was thinking to myself, Huck."
"If anybody tells, let Muff Potter do it, if he's fool enough. He's
generally drunk enough."
Tom said nothingwent on thinking. Presently he whispered
"Huck, Muff Potter don't know it. How can he tell?"
"What's the reason he don't know it?"
"Because he'd just got that whack when Injun Joe done it. D'you reckon
he could see anything? D'you reckon he knowed anything?"
"By hokey, that's so, Tom"
"And besides, lookaheremaybe that whack done for HIM"
"No, 'taint likely, Tom. He had liquor in him I could see that and
besides, he always has. Well, when pap's full, you might take and belt
him over the head with a church and you couldn't phase him. He says so,
his own self. So it's the same with Muff Potter, of course. But if a
man was dead sober, I reckon maybe that whack might fetch him I dono."
After another reflective silence, Tom said
"Hucky, you sure you can keep mum?"
"Tom, we GOT to keep mum. You know that. That Injun devil wouldn't
make any more of drownding us than a couple of cats, if we was to
squeak 'bout this and they didn't hang him. Now, lookahere, Tom, less
take and swear to one anotherthat's what we got to doswear to keep
mum."
"I'm agreed. It's the best thing. Would you just hold hands and swear
that we"
"Oh no, that wouldn't do for this. That's good enough for little
rubbishy common thingsspecially with gals, cuz THEY go back on you
anyway, and blab if they get in a huffbut there orter be writing
'bout a big thing like this. And blood."
Tom's whole being applauded this idea. It was deep, and dark, and
awful the hour, the circumstances, the surroundings, were in keeping
with it. He picked up a clean pine shingle that lay in the moonlight,
took a little fragment of "red keel" out of his pocket, got the moon on
his work, and painfully scrawled these lines, emphasizing each slow
downstroke by clamping his tongue between his teeth, and letting up
the pressure on the upstrokes. [See next page.]
"Huck Finn and
Tom Sawyer swears
they will keep mum
about This and They
wish They may Drop
down dead in Their
Tracks if They ever
Tell and Rot."
Huckleberry was filled with admiration of Tom's facility in writing,
and the sublimity of his language. He at once took a pin from his lapel
and was going to prick his flesh, but Tom said
"Hold on Don't do that. A pin's brass. It might have verdigrease on
it."
"What's verdigrease?"
"It's p'ison. That's what it is. You just swaller some of it once
you'll see."
So Tom unwound the thread from one of his needles, and each boy
pricked the ball of his thumb and squeezed out a drop of blood. In
time, after many squeezes, Tom managed to sign his initials, using the
ball of his little finger for a pen. Then he showed Huckleberry how to
make an H and an F, and the oath was complete. They buried the shingle
close to the wall, with some dismal ceremonies and incantations, and
the fetters that bound their tongues were considered to be locked and
the key thrown away.
A figure crept stealthily through a break in the other end of the
ruined building, now, but they did not notice it.
"Tom," whispered Huckleberry, "does this keep us from EVER telling
ALWAYS?"
"Of course it does. It don't make any difference WHAT happens, we got
to keep mum. We'd drop down deaddon't YOU know that?"
"Yes, I reckon that's so."
They continued to whisper for some little time. Presently a dog set up
a long, lugubrious howl just outsidewithin ten feet of them. The boys
clasped each other suddenly, in an agony of fright.
"Which of us does he mean?" gasped Huckleberry.
"I donopeep through the crack. Quick"
"No, YOU, Tom"
"I can'tI can't DO it, Huck"
"Please, Tom. There 'tis again"
"Oh, lordy, I'm thankful" whispered Tom. "I know his voice. It's Bull
Harbison." 
[ If Mr. Harbison owned a slave named Bull, Tom would have spoken of
him as "Harbison's Bull," but a son or a dog of that name was "Bull
Harbison."]
"Oh, that's goodI tell you, Tom, I was most scared to death I'd a
bet anything it was a STRAY dog."
The dog howled again. The boys' hearts sank once more.
"Oh, my that ain't no Bull Harbison" whispered Huckleberry. "DO, Tom"
Tom, quaking with fear, yielded, and put his eye to the crack. His
whisper was hardly audible when he said
"Oh, Huck, IT S A STRAY DOG"
"Quick, Tom, quick Who does he mean?"
"Huck, he must mean us bothwe're right together."
"Oh, Tom, I reckon we're goners. I reckon there ain't no mistake 'bout
where I'LL go to. I been so wicked."
"Dad fetch it This comes of playing hookey and doing everything a
feller's told NOT to do. I might a been good, like Sid, if I'd a tried
but no, I wouldn't, of course. But if ever I get off this time, I lay
I'll just WALLER in Sundayschools" And Tom began to snuffle a little.
"YOU bad" and Huckleberry began to snuffle too. "Consound it, Tom
Sawyer, you're just old pie, 'longside o' what I am. Oh, LORDY, lordy,
lordy, I wisht I only had half your chance."
Tom choked off and whispered
"Look, Hucky, look He's got his BACK to us"
Hucky looked, with joy in his heart.
"Well, he has, by jingoes Did he before?"
"Yes, he did. But I, like a fool, never thought. Oh, this is bully,
you know. NOW who can he mean?"
The howling stopped. Tom pricked up his ears.
"Sh What's that?" he whispered.
"Sounds likelike hogs grunting. Noit's somebody snoring, Tom."
"That IS it Where 'bouts is it, Huck?"
"I bleeve it's down at 'tother end. Sounds so, anyway. Pap used to
sleep there, sometimes, 'long with the hogs, but laws bless you, he
just lifts things when HE snores. Besides, I reckon he ain't ever
coming back to this town any more."
The spirit of adventure rose in the boys' souls once more.
"Hucky, do you das't to go if I lead?"
"I don't like to, much. Tom, s'pose it's Injun Joe"
Tom quailed. But presently the temptation rose up strong again and the
boys agreed to try, with the understanding that they would take to
their heels if the snoring stopped. So they went tiptoeing stealthily
down, the one behind the other. When they had got to within five steps
of the snorer, Tom stepped on a stick, and it broke with a sharp snap.
The man moaned, writhed a little, and his face came into the moonlight.
It was Muff Potter. The boys' hearts had stood still, and their hopes
too, when the man moved, but their fears passed away now. They tiptoed
out, through the broken weatherboarding, and stopped at a little
distance to exchange a parting word. That long, lugubrious howl rose on
the night air again They turned and saw the strange dog standing
within a few feet of where Potter was lying, and FACING Potter, with
his nose pointing heavenward.
"Oh, geeminy, it's HIM" exclaimed both boys, in a breath.
"Say, Tomthey say a stray dog come howling around Johnny Miller's
house, 'bout midnight, as much as two weeks ago and a whippoorwill
come in and lit on the banisters and sung, the very same evening and
there ain't anybody dead there yet."
"Well, I know that. And suppose there ain't. Didn't Gracie Miller fall
in the kitchen fire and burn herself terrible the very next Saturday?"
"Yes, but she ain't DEAD. And what's more, she's getting better, too."
"All right, you wait and see. She's a goner, just as dead sure as Muff
Potter's a goner. That's what the niggers say, and they know all about
these kind of things, Huck."
Then they separated, cogitating. When Tom crept in at his bedroom
window the night was almost spent. He undressed with excessive caution,
and fell asleep congratulating himself that nobody knew of his
escapade. He was not aware that the gentlysnoring Sid was awake, and
had been so for an hour.
When Tom awoke, Sid was dressed and gone. There was a late look in the
light, a late sense in the atmosphere. He was startled. Why had he not
been calledpersecuted till he was up, as usual? The thought filled
him with bodings. Within five minutes he was dressed and downstairs,
feeling sore and drowsy. The family were still at table, but they had
finished breakfast. There was no voice of rebuke but there were
averted eyes there was a silence and an air of solemnity that struck a
chill to the culprit's heart. He sat down and tried to seem gay, but it
was uphill work it roused no smile, no response, and he lapsed into
silence and let his heart sink down to the depths.
After breakfast his aunt took him aside, and Tom almost brightened in
the hope that he was going to be flogged but it was not so. His aunt
wept over him and asked him how he could go and break her old heart so
and finally told him to go on, and ruin himself and bring her gray
hairs with sorrow to the grave, for it was no use for her to try any
more. This was worse than a thousand whippings, and Tom's heart was
sorer now than his body. He cried, he pleaded for forgiveness, promised
to reform over and over again, and then received his dismissal, feeling
that he had won but an imperfect forgiveness and established but a
feeble confidence.
He left the presence too miserable to even feel revengeful toward Sid
and so the latter's prompt retreat through the back gate was
unnecessary. He moped to school gloomy and sad, and took his flogging,
along with Joe Harper, for playing hookey the day before, with the air
of one whose heart was busy with heavier woes and wholly dead to
trifles. Then he betook himself to his seat, rested his elbows on his
desk and his jaws in his hands, and stared at the wall with the stony
stare of suffering that has reached the limit and can no further go.
His elbow was pressing against some hard substance. After a long time
he slowly and sadly changed his position, and took up this object with
a sigh. It was in a paper. He unrolled it. A long, lingering, colossal
sigh followed, and his heart broke. It was his brass andiron knob
This final feather broke the camel's back.
CHAPTER XI
CLOSE upon the hour of noon the whole village was suddenly electrified
with the ghastly news. No need of the as yet undreamedof telegraph
the tale flew from man to man, from group to group, from house to
house, with little less than telegraphic speed. Of course the
schoolmaster gave holiday for that afternoon the town would have
thought strangely of him if he had not.
A gory knife had been found close to the murdered man, and it had been
recognized by somebody as belonging to Muff Potterso the story ran.
And it was said that a belated citizen had come upon Potter washing
himself in the "branch" about one or two o'clock in the morning, and
that Potter had at once sneaked offsuspicious circumstances,
especially the washing which was not a habit with Potter. It was also
said that the town had been ransacked for this "murderer" the public
are not slow in the matter of sifting evidence and arriving at a
verdict, but that he could not be found. Horsemen had departed down
all the roads in every direction, and the Sheriff "was confident" that
he would be captured before night.
All the town was drifting toward the graveyard. Tom's heartbreak
vanished and he joined the procession, not because he would not a
thousand times rather go anywhere else, but because an awful,
unaccountable fascination drew him on. Arrived at the dreadful place,
he wormed his small body through the crowd and saw the dismal
spectacle. It seemed to him an age since he was there before. Somebody
pinched his arm. He turned, and his eyes met Huckleberry's. Then both
looked elsewhere at once, and wondered if anybody had noticed anything
in their mutual glance. But everybody was talking, and intent upon the
grisly spectacle before them.
"Poor fellow" "Poor young fellow" "This ought to be a lesson to
grave robbers" "Muff Potter'll hang for this if they catch him" This
was the drift of remark and the minister said, "It was a judgment His
hand is here."
Now Tom shivered from head to heel for his eye fell upon the stolid
face of Injun Joe. At this moment the crowd began to sway and struggle,
and voices shouted, "It's him it's him he's coming himself"
"Who? Who?" from twenty voices.
"Muff Potter"
"Hallo, he's stoppedLook out, he's turning Don't let him get away"
People in the branches of the trees over Tom's head said he wasn't
trying to get awayhe only looked doubtful and perplexed.
"Infernal impudence" said a bystander "wanted to come and take a
quiet look at his work, I reckondidn't expect any company."
The crowd fell apart, now, and the Sheriff came through,
ostentatiously leading Potter by the arm. The poor fellow's face was
haggard, and his eyes showed the fear that was upon him. When he stood
before the murdered man, he shook as with a palsy, and he put his face
in his hands and burst into tears.
"I didn't do it, friends," he sobbed "'pon my word and honor I never
done it."
"Who's accused you?" shouted a voice.
This shot seemed to carry home. Potter lifted his face and looked
around him with a pathetic hopelessness in his eyes. He saw Injun Joe,
and exclaimed
"Oh, Injun Joe, you promised me you'd never"
"Is that your knife?" and it was thrust before him by the Sheriff.
Potter would have fallen if they had not caught him and eased him to
the ground. Then he said
"Something told me 't if I didn't come back and get" He shuddered
then waved his nerveless hand with a vanquished gesture and said, "Tell
'em, Joe, tell 'emit ain't any use any more."
Then Huckleberry and Tom stood dumb and staring, and heard the
stonyhearted liar reel off his serene statement, they expecting every
moment that the clear sky would deliver God's lightnings upon his head,
and wondering to see how long the stroke was delayed. And when he had
finished and still stood alive and whole, their wavering impulse to
break their oath and save the poor betrayed prisoner's life faded and
vanished away, for plainly this miscreant had sold himself to Satan and
it would be fatal to meddle with the property of such a power as that.
"Why didn't you leave? What did you want to come here for?" somebody
said.
"I couldn't help itI couldn't help it," Potter moaned. "I wanted to
run away, but I couldn't seem to come anywhere but here." And he fell
to sobbing again.
Injun Joe repeated his statement, just as calmly, a few minutes
afterward on the inquest, under oath and the boys, seeing that the
lightnings were still withheld, were confirmed in their belief that Joe
had sold himself to the devil. He was now become, to them, the most
balefully interesting object they had ever looked upon, and they could
not take their fascinated eyes from his face.
They inwardly resolved to watch him nights, when opportunity should
offer, in the hope of getting a glimpse of his dread master.
Injun Joe helped to raise the body of the murdered man and put it in a
wagon for removal and it was whispered through the shuddering crowd
that the wound bled a little The boys thought that this happy
circumstance would turn suspicion in the right direction but they were
disappointed, for more than one villager remarked
"It was within three feet of Muff Potter when it done it."
Tom's fearful secret and gnawing conscience disturbed his sleep for as
much as a week after this and at breakfast one morning Sid said
"Tom, you pitch around and talk in your sleep so much that you keep me
awake half the time."
Tom blanched and dropped his eyes.
"It's a bad sign," said Aunt Polly, gravely. "What you got on your
mind, Tom?"
"Nothing. Nothing 't I know of." But the boy's hand shook so that he
spilled his coffee.
"And you do talk such stuff," Sid said. "Last night you said, 'It's
blood, it's blood, that's what it is' You said that over and over. And
you said, 'Don't torment me soI'll tell' Tell WHAT? What is it
you'll tell?"
Everything was swimming before Tom. There is no telling what might
have happened, now, but luckily the concern passed out of Aunt Polly's
face and she came to Tom's relief without knowing it. She said
"Sho It's that dreadful murder. I dream about it most every night
myself. Sometimes I dream it's me that done it."
Mary said she had been affected much the same way. Sid seemed
satisfied. Tom got out of the presence as quick as he plausibly could,
and after that he complained of toothache for a week, and tied up his
jaws every night. He never knew that Sid lay nightly watching, and
frequently slipped the bandage free and then leaned on his elbow
listening a good while at a time, and afterward slipped the bandage
back to its place again. Tom's distress of mind wore off gradually and
the toothache grew irksome and was discarded. If Sid really managed to
make anything out of Tom's disjointed mutterings, he kept it to himself.
It seemed to Tom that his schoolmates never would get done holding
inquests on dead cats, and thus keeping his trouble present to his
mind. Sid noticed that Tom never was coroner at one of these inquiries,
though it had been his habit to take the lead in all new enterprises
he noticed, too, that Tom never acted as a witnessand that was
strange and Sid did not overlook the fact that Tom even showed a
marked aversion to these inquests, and always avoided them when he
could. Sid marvelled, but said nothing. However, even inquests went out
of vogue at last, and ceased to torture Tom's conscience.
Every day or two, during this time of sorrow, Tom watched his
opportunity and went to the little grated jailwindow and smuggled such
small comforts through to the "murderer" as he could get hold of. The
jail was a trifling little brick den that stood in a marsh at the edge
of the village, and no guards were afforded for it indeed, it was
seldom occupied. These offerings greatly helped to ease Tom's
conscience.
The villagers had a strong desire to tarandfeather Injun Joe and
ride him on a rail, for bodysnatching, but so formidable was his
character that nobody could be found who was willing to take the lead
in the matter, so it was dropped. He had been careful to begin both of
his inqueststatements with the fight, without confessing the
graverobbery that preceded it therefore it was deemed wisest not
to try the case in the courts at present.
CHAPTER XII
ONE of the reasons why Tom's mind had drifted away from its secret
troubles was, that it had found a new and weighty matter to interest
itself about. Becky Thatcher had stopped coming to school. Tom had
struggled with his pride a few days, and tried to "whistle her down the
wind," but failed. He began to find himself hanging around her father's
house, nights, and feeling very miserable. She was ill. What if she
should die There was distraction in the thought. He no longer took an
interest in war, nor even in piracy. The charm of life was gone there
was nothing but dreariness left. He put his hoop away, and his bat
there was no joy in them any more. His aunt was concerned. She began to
try all manner of remedies on him. She was one of those people who are
infatuated with patent medicines and all newfangled methods of
producing health or mending it. She was an inveterate experimenter in
these things. When something fresh in this line came out she was in a
fever, right away, to try it not on herself, for she was never ailing,
but on anybody else that came handy. She was a subscriber for all the
"Health" periodicals and phrenological frauds and the solemn ignorance
they were inflated with was breath to her nostrils. All the "rot" they
contained about ventilation, and how to go to bed, and how to get up,
and what to eat, and what to drink, and how much exercise to take, and
what frame of mind to keep one's self in, and what sort of clothing to
wear, was all gospel to her, and she never observed that her
healthjournals of the current month customarily upset everything they
had recommended the month before. She was as simplehearted and honest
as the day was long, and so she was an easy victim. She gathered
together her quack periodicals and her quack medicines, and thus armed
with death, went about on her pale horse, metaphorically speaking, with
"hell following after." But she never suspected that she was not an
angel of healing and the balm of Gilead in disguise, to the suffering
neighbors.
The water treatment was new, now, and Tom's low condition was a
windfall to her. She had him out at daylight every morning, stood him
up in the woodshed and drowned him with a deluge of cold water then
she scrubbed him down with a towel like a file, and so brought him to
then she rolled him up in a wet sheet and put him away under blankets
till she sweated his soul clean and "the yellow stains of it came
through his pores"as Tom said.
Yet notwithstanding all this, the boy grew more and more melancholy
and pale and dejected. She added hot baths, sitz baths, shower baths,
and plunges. The boy remained as dismal as a hearse. She began to
assist the water with a slim oatmeal diet and blisterplasters. She
calculated his capacity as she would a jug's, and filled him up every
day with quack curealls.
Tom had become indifferent to persecution by this time. This phase
filled the old lady's heart with consternation. This indifference must
be broken up at any cost. Now she heard of Painkiller for the first
time. She ordered a lot at once. She tasted it and was filled with
gratitude. It was simply fire in a liquid form. She dropped the water
treatment and everything else, and pinned her faith to Painkiller. She
gave Tom a teaspoonful and watched with the deepest anxiety for the
result. Her troubles were instantly at rest, her soul at peace again
for the "indifference" was broken up. The boy could not have shown a
wilder, heartier interest, if she had built a fire under him.
Tom felt that it was time to wake up this sort of life might be
romantic enough, in his blighted condition, but it was getting to have
too little sentiment and too much distracting variety about it. So he
thought over various plans for relief, and finally hit pon that of
professing to be fond of Painkiller. He asked for it so often that he
became a nuisance, and his aunt ended by telling him to help himself
and quit bothering her. If it had been Sid, she would have had no
misgivings to alloy her delight but since it was Tom, she watched the
bottle clandestinely. She found that the medicine did really diminish,
but it did not occur to her that the boy was mending the health of a
crack in the sittingroom floor with it.
One day Tom was in the act of dosing the crack when his aunt's yellow
cat came along, purring, eying the teaspoon avariciously, and begging
for a taste. Tom said
"Don't ask for it unless you want it, Peter."
But Peter signified that he did want it.
"You better make sure."
Peter was sure.
"Now you've asked for it, and I'll give it to you, because there ain't
anything mean about me but if you find you don't like it, you mustn't
blame anybody but your own self."
Peter was agreeable. So Tom pried his mouth open and poured down the
Painkiller. Peter sprang a couple of yards in the air, and then
delivered a warwhoop and set off round and round the room, banging
against furniture, upsetting flowerpots, and making general havoc.
Next he rose on his hind feet and pranced around, in a frenzy of
enjoyment, with his head over his shoulder and his voice proclaiming
his unappeasable happiness. Then he went tearing around the house again
spreading chaos and destruction in his path. Aunt Polly entered in time
to see him throw a few double summersets, deliver a final mighty
hurrah, and sail through the open window, carrying the rest of the
flowerpots with him. The old lady stood petrified with astonishment,
peering over her glasses Tom lay on the floor expiring with laughter.
"Tom, what on earth ails that cat?"
"I don't know, aunt," gasped the boy.
"Why, I never see anything like it. What did make him act so?"
"Deed I don't know, Aunt Polly cats always act so when they're having
a good time."
"They do, do they?" There was something in the tone that made Tom
apprehensive.
"Yes'm. That is, I believe they do."
"You DO?"
"Yes'm."
The old lady was bending down, Tom watching, with interest emphasized
by anxiety. Too late he divined her "drift." The handle of the telltale
teaspoon was visible under the bedvalance. Aunt Polly took it, held it
up. Tom winced, and dropped his eyes. Aunt Polly raised him by the
usual handlehis earand cracked his head soundly with her thimble.
"Now, sir, what did you want to treat that poor dumb beast so, for?"
"I done it out of pity for himbecause he hadn't any aunt."
"Hadn't any auntyou numskull. What has that got to do with it?"
"Heaps. Because if he'd had one she'd a burnt him out herself She'd a
roasted his bowels out of him 'thout any more feeling than if he was a
human"
Aunt Polly felt a sudden pang of remorse. This was putting the thing
in a new light what was cruelty to a cat MIGHT be cruelty to a boy,
too. She began to soften she felt sorry. Her eyes watered a little,
and she put her hand on Tom's head and said gently
"I was meaning for the best, Tom. And, Tom, it DID do you good."
Tom looked up in her face with just a perceptible twinkle peeping
through his gravity.
"I know you was meaning for the best, aunty, and so was I with Peter.
It done HIM good, too. I never see him get around so since"
"Oh, go 'long with you, Tom, before you aggravate me again. And you
try and see if you can't be a good boy, for once, and you needn't take
any more medicine."
Tom reached school ahead of time. It was noticed that this strange
thing had been occurring every day latterly. And now, as usual of late,
he hung about the gate of the schoolyard instead of playing with his
comrades. He was sick, he said, and he looked it. He tried to seem to
be looking everywhere but whither he really was lookingdown the road.
Presently Jeff Thatcher hove in sight, and Tom's face lighted he gazed
a moment, and then turned sorrowfully away. When Jeff arrived, Tom
accosted him and "led up" warily to opportunities for remark about
Becky, but the giddy lad never could see the bait. Tom watched and
watched, hoping whenever a frisking frock came in sight, and hating the
owner of it as soon as he saw she was not the right one. At last frocks
ceased to appear, and he dropped hopelessly into the dumps he entered
the empty schoolhouse and sat down to suffer. Then one more frock
passed in at the gate, and Tom's heart gave a great bound. The next
instant he was out, and "going on" like an Indian yelling, laughing,
chasing boys, jumping over the fence at risk of life and limb, throwing
handsprings, standing on his headdoing all the heroic things he could
conceive of, and keeping a furtive eye out, all the while, to see if
Becky Thatcher was noticing. But she seemed to be unconscious of it
all she never looked. Could it be possible that she was not aware that
he was there? He carried his exploits to her immediate vicinity came
warwhooping around, snatched a boy's cap, hurled it to the roof of the
schoolhouse, broke through a group of boys, tumbling them in every
direction, and fell sprawling, himself, under Becky's nose, almost
upsetting herand she turned, with her nose in the air, and he heard
her say "Mf some people think they're mighty smartalways showing
off"
Tom's cheeks burned. He gathered himself up and sneaked off, crushed
and crestfallen.
CHAPTER XIII
TOM'S mind was made up now. He was gloomy and desperate. He was a
forsaken, friendless boy, he said nobody loved him when they found
out what they had driven him to, perhaps they would be sorry he had
tried to do right and get along, but they would not let him since
nothing would do them but to be rid of him, let it be so and let them
blame HIM for the consequenceswhy shouldn't they? What right had the
friendless to complain? Yes, they had forced him to it at last he
would lead a life of crime. There was no choice.
By this time he was far down Meadow Lane, and the bell for school to
"take up" tinkled faintly upon his ear. He sobbed, now, to think he
should never, never hear that old familiar sound any moreit was very
hard, but it was forced on him since he was driven out into the cold
world, he must submitbut he forgave them. Then the sobs came thick
and fast.
Just at this point he met his soul's sworn comrade, Joe Harper
hardeyed, and with evidently a great and dismal purpose in his heart.
Plainly here were "two souls with but a single thought." Tom, wiping
his eyes with his sleeve, began to blubber out something about a
resolution to escape from hard usage and lack of sympathy at home by
roaming abroad into the great world never to return and ended by
hoping that Joe would not forget him.
But it transpired that this was a request which Joe had just been
going to make of Tom, and had come to hunt him up for that purpose. His
mother had whipped him for drinking some cream which he had never
tasted and knew nothing about it was plain that she was tired of him
and wished him to go if she felt that way, there was nothing for him
to do but succumb he hoped she would be happy, and never regret having
driven her poor boy out into the unfeeling world to suffer and die.
As the two boys walked sorrowing along, they made a new compact to
stand by each other and be brothers and never separate till death
relieved them of their troubles. Then they began to lay their plans.
Joe was for being a hermit, and living on crusts in a remote cave, and
dying, some time, of cold and want and grief but after listening to
Tom, he conceded that there were some conspicuous advantages about a
life of crime, and so he consented to be a pirate.
Three miles below St. Petersburg, at a point where the Mississippi
River was a trifle over a mile wide, there was a long, narrow, wooded
island, with a shallow bar at the head of it, and this offered well as
a rendezvous. It was not inhabited it lay far over toward the further
shore, abreast a dense and almost wholly unpeopled forest. So Jackson's
Island was chosen. Who were to be the subjects of their piracies was a
matter that did not occur to them. Then they hunted up Huckleberry
Finn, and he joined them promptly, for all careers were one to him he
was indifferent. They presently separated to meet at a lonely spot on
the riverbank two miles above the village at the favorite hourwhich
was midnight. There was a small log raft there which they meant to
capture. Each would bring hooks and lines, and such provision as he
could steal in the most dark and mysterious wayas became outlaws. And
before the afternoon was done, they had all managed to enjoy the sweet
glory of spreading the fact that pretty soon the town would "hear
something." All who got this vague hint were cautioned to "be mum and
wait."
About midnight Tom arrived with a boiled ham and a few trifles,
and stopped in a dense undergrowth on a small bluff overlooking the
meetingplace. It was starlight, and very still. The mighty river lay
like an ocean at rest. Tom listened a moment, but no sound disturbed the
quiet. Then he gave a low, distinct whistle. It was answered from under
the bluff. Tom whistled twice more these signals were answered in the
same way. Then a guarded voice said
"Who goes there?"
"Tom Sawyer, the Black Avenger of the Spanish Main. Name your names."
"Huck Finn the RedHanded, and Joe Harper the Terror of the Seas." Tom
had furnished these titles, from his favorite literature.
"'Tis well. Give the countersign."
Two hoarse whispers delivered the same awful word simultaneously to
the brooding night
"BLOOD"
Then Tom tumbled his ham over the bluff and let himself down after it,
tearing both skin and clothes to some extent in the effort. There was
an easy, comfortable path along the shore under the bluff, but it
lacked the advantages of difficulty and danger so valued by a pirate.
The Terror of the Seas had brought a side of bacon, and had about worn
himself out with getting it there. Finn the RedHanded had stolen a
skillet and a quantity of halfcured leaf tobacco, and had also brought
a few corncobs to make pipes with. But none of the pirates smoked or
"chewed" but himself. The Black Avenger of the Spanish Main said it
would never do to start without some fire. That was a wise thought
matches were hardly known there in that day. They saw a fire
smouldering upon a great raft a hundred yards above, and they went
stealthily thither and helped themselves to a chunk. They made an
imposing adventure of it, saying, "Hist" every now and then, and
suddenly halting with finger on lip moving with hands on imaginary
daggerhilts and giving orders in dismal whispers that if "the foe"
stirred, to "let him have it to the hilt," because "dead men tell no
tales." They knew well enough that the raftsmen were all down at the
village laying in stores or having a spree, but still that was no
excuse for their conducting this thing in an unpiratical way.
They shoved off, presently, Tom in command, Huck at the after oar and
Joe at the forward. Tom stood amidships, gloomybrowed, and with folded
arms, and gave his orders in a low, stern whisper
"Luff, and bring her to the wind"
"Ayeaye, sir"
"Steady, steadyyyy"
"Steady it is, sir"
"Let her go off a point"
"Point it is, sir"
As the boys steadily and monotonously drove the raft toward midstream
it was no doubt understood that these orders were given only for
"style," and were not intended to mean anything in particular.
"What sail's she carrying?"
"Courses, tops'ls, and flyingjib, sir."
"Send the r'yals up Lay out aloft, there, half a dozen of ye
foretopmaststuns'l Lively, now"
"Ayeaye, sir"
"Shake out that maintogalans'l Sheets and braces NOW my hearties"
"Ayeaye, sir"
"Hellumaleehard a port Stand by to meet her when she comes Port,
port NOW, men With a will Steadyyy"
"Steady it is, sir"
The raft drew beyond the middle of the river the boys pointed her
head right, and then lay on their oars. The river was not high, so
there was not more than a two or three mile current. Hardly a word was
said during the next threequarters of an hour. Now the raft was
passing before the distant town. Two or three glimmering lights showed
where it lay, peacefully sleeping, beyond the vague vast sweep of
stargemmed water, unconscious of the tremendous event that was happening.
The Black Avenger stood still with folded arms, "looking his last" upon
the scene of his former joys and his later sufferings, and wishing
"she" could see him now, abroad on the wild sea, facing peril and death
with dauntless heart, going to his doom with a grim smile on his lips.
It was but a small strain on his imagination to remove Jackson's Island
beyond eyeshot of the village, and so he "looked his last" with a
broken and satisfied heart. The other pirates were looking their last,
too and they all looked so long that they came near letting the
current drift them out of the range of the island. But they discovered
the danger in time, and made shift to avert it. About two o'clock in
the morning the raft grounded on the bar two hundred yards above the
head of the island, and they waded back and forth until they had landed
their freight. Part of the little raft's belongings consisted of an old
sail, and this they spread over a nook in the bushes for a tent to
shelter their provisions but they themselves would sleep in the open
air in good weather, as became outlaws.
They built a fire against the side of a great log twenty or thirty
steps within the sombre depths of the forest, and then cooked some
bacon in the fryingpan for supper, and used up half of the corn "pone"
stock they had brought. It seemed glorious sport to be feasting in that
wild, free way in the virgin forest of an unexplored and uninhabited
island, far from the haunts of men, and they said they never would
return to civilization. The climbing fire lit up their faces and threw
its ruddy glare upon the pillared treetrunks of their forest temple,
and upon the varnished foliage and festooning vines.
When the last crisp slice of bacon was gone, and the last allowance of
corn pone devoured, the boys stretched themselves out on the grass,
filled with contentment. They could have found a cooler place, but they
would not deny themselves such a romantic feature as the roasting
campfire.
"AIN'T it gay?" said Joe.
"It's NUTS" said Tom. "What would the boys say if they could see us?"
"Say? Well, they'd just die to be herehey, Hucky"
"I reckon so," said Huckleberry "anyways, I'm suited. I don't want
nothing better'n this. I don't ever get enough to eat, gen'allyand
here they can't come and pick at a feller and bullyrag him so."
"It's just the life for me," said Tom. "You don't have to get up,
mornings, and you don't have to go to school, and wash, and all that
blame foolishness. You see a pirate don't have to do ANYTHING, Joe,
when he's ashore, but a hermit HE has to be praying considerable, and
then he don't have any fun, anyway, all by himself that way."
"Oh yes, that's so," said Joe, "but I hadn't thought much about it,
you know. I'd a good deal rather be a pirate, now that I've tried it."
"You see," said Tom, "people don't go much on hermits, nowadays, like
they used to in old times, but a pirate's always respected. And a
hermit's got to sleep on the hardest place he can find, and put
sackcloth and ashes on his head, and stand out in the rain, and"
"What does he put sackcloth and ashes on his head for?" inquired Huck.
"I dono. But they've GOT to do it. Hermits always do. You'd have to do
that if you was a hermit."
"Dern'd if I would," said Huck.
"Well, what would you do?"
"I dono. But I wouldn't do that."
"Why, Huck, you'd HAVE to. How'd you get around it?"
"Why, I just wouldn't stand it. I'd run away."
"Run away Well, you WOULD be a nice old slouch of a hermit. You'd be
a disgrace."
The RedHanded made no response, being better employed. He had
finished gouging out a cob, and now he fitted a weed stem to it, loaded
it with tobacco, and was pressing a coal to the charge and blowing a
cloud of fragrant smokehe was in the full bloom of luxurious
contentment. The other pirates envied him this majestic vice, and
secretly resolved to acquire it shortly. Presently Huck said
"What does pirates have to do?"
Tom said
"Oh, they have just a bully timetake ships and burn them, and get
the money and bury it in awful places in their island where there's
ghosts and things to watch it, and kill everybody in the shipsmake
'em walk a plank."
"And they carry the women to the island," said Joe "they don't kill
the women."
"No," assented Tom, "they don't kill the womenthey're too noble. And
the women's always beautiful, too.
"And don't they wear the bulliest clothes Oh no All gold and silver
and di'monds," said Joe, with enthusiasm.
"Who?" said Huck.
"Why, the pirates."
Huck scanned his own clothing forlornly.
"I reckon I ain't dressed fitten for a pirate," said he, with a
regretful pathos in his voice "but I ain't got none but these."
But the other boys told him the fine clothes would come fast enough,
after they should have begun their adventures. They made him understand
that his poor rags would do to begin with, though it was customary for
wealthy pirates to start with a proper wardrobe.
Gradually their talk died out and drowsiness began to steal upon the
eyelids of the little waifs. The pipe dropped from the fingers of the
RedHanded, and he slept the sleep of the consciencefree and the
weary. The Terror of the Seas and the Black Avenger of the Spanish Main
had more difficulty in getting to sleep. They said their prayers
inwardly, and lying down, since there was nobody there with authority
to make them kneel and recite aloud in truth, they had a mind not to
say them at all, but they were afraid to proceed to such lengths as
that, lest they might call down a sudden and special thunderbolt from
heaven. Then at once they reached and hovered upon the imminent verge
of sleepbut an intruder came, now, that would not "down." It was
conscience. They began to feel a vague fear that they had been doing
wrong to run away and next they thought of the stolen meat, and then
the real torture came. They tried to argue it away by reminding
conscience that they had purloined sweetmeats and apples scores of
times but conscience was not to be appeased by such thin
plausibilities it seemed to them, in the end, that there was no
getting around the stubborn fact that taking sweetmeats was only
"hooking," while taking bacon and hams and such valuables was plain
simple stealingand there was a command against that in the Bible. So
they inwardly resolved that so long as they remained in the business,
their piracies should not again be sullied with the crime of stealing.
Then conscience granted a truce, and these curiously inconsistent
pirates fell peacefully to sleep.
CHAPTER XIV
WHEN Tom awoke in the morning, he wondered where he was. He sat up and
rubbed his eyes and looked around. Then he comprehended. It was the
cool gray dawn, and there was a delicious sense of repose and peace in
the deep pervading calm and silence of the woods. Not a leaf stirred
not a sound obtruded upon great Nature's meditation. Beaded dewdrops
stood upon the leaves and grasses. A white layer of ashes covered the
fire, and a thin blue breath of smoke rose straight into the air. Joe
and Huck still slept.
Now, far away in the woods a bird called another answered presently
the hammering of a woodpecker was heard. Gradually the cool dim gray of
the morning whitened, and as gradually sounds multiplied and life
manifested itself. The marvel of Nature shaking off sleep and going to
work unfolded itself to the musing boy. A little green worm came
crawling over a dewy leaf, lifting twothirds of his body into the air
from time to time and "sniffing around," then proceeding againfor he
was measuring, Tom said and when the worm approached him, of its own
accord, he sat as still as a stone, with his hopes rising and falling,
by turns, as the creature still came toward him or seemed inclined to
go elsewhere and when at last it considered a painful moment with its
curved body in the air and then came decisively down upon Tom's leg and
began a journey over him, his whole heart was gladfor that meant that
he was going to have a new suit of clotheswithout the shadow of a
doubt a gaudy piratical uniform. Now a procession of ants appeared,
from nowhere in particular, and went about their labors one struggled
manfully by with a dead spider five times as big as itself in its arms,
and lugged it straight up a treetrunk. A brown spotted ladybug
climbed the dizzy height of a grass blade, and Tom bent down close to
it and said, "Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home, your house is on fire,
your children's alone," and she took wing and went off to see about it
which did not surprise the boy, for he knew of old that this insect was
credulous about conflagrations, and he had practised upon its
simplicity more than once. A tumblebug came next, heaving sturdily at
its ball, and Tom touched the creature, to see it shut its legs against
its body and pretend to be dead. The birds were fairly rioting by this
time. A catbird, the Northern mocker, lit in a tree over Tom's head,
and trilled out her imitations of her neighbors in a rapture of
enjoyment then a shrill jay swept down, a flash of blue flame, and
stopped on a twig almost within the boy's reach, cocked his head to one
side and eyed the strangers with a consuming curiosity a gray squirrel
and a big fellow of the "fox" kind came skurrying along, sitting up at
intervals to inspect and chatter at the boys, for the wild things had
probably never seen a human being before and scarcely knew whether to
be afraid or not. All Nature was wide awake and stirring, now long
lances of sunlight pierced down through the dense foliage far and near,
and a few butterflies came fluttering upon the scene.
Tom stirred up the other pirates and they all clattered away with a
shout, and in a minute or two were stripped and chasing after and
tumbling over each other in the shallow limpid water of the white
sandbar. They felt no longing for the little village sleeping in the
distance beyond the majestic waste of water. A vagrant current or a
slight rise in the river had carried off their raft, but this only
gratified them, since its going was something like burning the bridge
between them and civilization.
They came back to camp wonderfully refreshed, gladhearted, and
ravenous and they soon had the campfire blazing up again. Huck found
a spring of clear cold water close by, and the boys made cups of broad
oak or hickory leaves, and felt that water, sweetened with such a
wildwood charm as that, would be a good enough substitute for coffee.
While Joe was slicing bacon for breakfast, Tom and Huck asked him to
hold on a minute they stepped to a promising nook in the riverbank
and threw in their lines almost immediately they had reward. Joe had
not had time to get impatient before they were back again with some
handsome bass, a couple of sunperch and a small catfishprovisions
enough for quite a family. They fried the fish with the bacon, and were
astonished for no fish had ever seemed so delicious before. They did
not know that the quicker a freshwater fish is on the fire after he is
caught the better he is and they reflected little upon what a sauce
openair sleeping, openair exercise, bathing, and a large ingredient
of hunger make, too.
They lay around in the shade, after breakfast, while Huck had a smoke,
and then went off through the woods on an exploring expedition. They
tramped gayly along, over decaying logs, through tangled underbrush,
among solemn monarchs of the forest, hung from their crowns to the
ground with a drooping regalia of grapevines. Now and then they came
upon snug nooks carpeted with grass and jeweled with flowers.
They found plenty of things to be delighted with, but nothing to be
astonished at. They discovered that the island was about three miles
long and a quarter of a mile wide, and that the shore it lay closest to
was only separated from it by a narrow channel hardly two hundred yards
wide. They took a swim about every hour, so it was close upon the
middle of the afternoon when they got back to camp. They were too
hungry to stop to fish, but they fared sumptuously upon cold ham, and
then threw themselves down in the shade to talk. But the talk soon
began to drag, and then died. The stillness, the solemnity that brooded
in the woods, and the sense of loneliness, began to tell upon the
spirits of the boys. They fell to thinking. A sort of undefined longing
crept upon them. This took dim shape, presentlyit was budding
homesickness. Even Finn the RedHanded was dreaming of his doorsteps
and empty hogsheads. But they were all ashamed of their weakness, and
none was brave enough to speak his thought.
For some time, now, the boys had been dully conscious of a peculiar
sound in the distance, just as one sometimes is of the ticking of a
clock which he takes no distinct note of. But now this mysterious sound
became more pronounced, and forced a recognition. The boys started,
glanced at each other, and then each assumed a listening attitude.
There was a long silence, profound and unbroken then a deep, sullen
boom came floating down out of the distance.
"What is it" exclaimed Joe, under his breath.
"I wonder," said Tom in a whisper.
"'Tain't thunder," said Huckleberry, in an awed tone, "becuz thunder"
"Hark" said Tom. "Listendon't talk."
They waited a time that seemed an age, and then the same muffled boom
troubled the solemn hush.
"Let's go and see."
They sprang to their feet and hurried to the shore toward the town.
They parted the bushes on the bank and peered out over the water. The
little steam ferryboat was about a mile below the village, drifting
with the current. Her broad deck seemed crowded with people. There were
a great many skiffs rowing about or floating with the stream in the
neighborhood of the ferryboat, but the boys could not determine what
the men in them were doing. Presently a great jet of white smoke burst
from the ferryboat's side, and as it expanded and rose in a lazy cloud,
that same dull throb of sound was borne to the listeners again.
"I know now" exclaimed Tom "somebody's drownded"
"That's it" said Huck "they done that last summer, when Bill Turner
got drownded they shoot a cannon over the water, and that makes him
come up to the top. Yes, and they take loaves of bread and put
quicksilver in 'em and set 'em afloat, and wherever there's anybody
that's drownded, they'll float right there and stop."
"Yes, I've heard about that," said Joe. "I wonder what makes the bread
do that."
"Oh, it ain't the bread, so much," said Tom "I reckon it's mostly
what they SAY over it before they start it out."
"But they don't say anything over it," said Huck. "I've seen 'em and
they don't."
"Well, that's funny," said Tom. "But maybe they say it to themselves.
Of COURSE they do. Anybody might know that."
The other boys agreed that there was reason in what Tom said, because
an ignorant lump of bread, uninstructed by an incantation, could not be
expected to act very intelligently when set upon an errand of such
gravity.
"By jings, I wish I was over there, now," said Joe.
"I do too" said Huck "I'd give heaps to know who it is."
The boys still listened and watched. Presently a revealing thought
flashed through Tom's mind, and he exclaimed
"Boys, I know who's drowndedit's us"
They felt like heroes in an instant. Here was a gorgeous triumph they
were missed they were mourned hearts were breaking on their account
tears were being shed accusing memories of unkindness to these poor
lost lads were rising up, and unavailing regrets and remorse were being
indulged and best of all, the departed were the talk of the whole
town, and the envy of all the boys, as far as this dazzling notoriety
was concerned. This was fine. It was worth while to be a pirate, after
all.
As twilight drew on, the ferryboat went back to her accustomed
business and the skiffs disappeared. The pirates returned to camp. They
were jubilant with vanity over their new grandeur and the illustrious
trouble they were making. They caught fish, cooked supper and ate it,
and then fell to guessing at what the village was thinking and saying
about them and the pictures they drew of the public distress on their
account were gratifying to look uponfrom their point of view. But
when the shadows of night closed them in, they gradually ceased to
talk, and sat gazing into the fire, with their minds evidently
wandering elsewhere. The excitement was gone, now, and Tom and Joe
could not keep back thoughts of certain persons at home who were not
enjoying this fine frolic as much as they were. Misgivings came they
grew troubled and unhappy a sigh or two escaped, unawares. By and by
Joe timidly ventured upon a roundabout "feeler" as to how the others
might look upon a return to civilizationnot right now, but
Tom withered him with derision Huck, being uncommitted as yet, joined
in with Tom, and the waverer quickly "explained," and was glad to get
out of the scrape with as little taint of chickenhearted homesickness
clinging to his garments as he could. Mutiny was effectually laid to
rest for the moment.
As the night deepened, Huck began to nod, and presently to snore. Joe
followed next. Tom lay upon his elbow motionless, for some time,
watching the two intently. At last he got up cautiously, on his knees,
and went searching among the grass and the flickering reflections flung
by the campfire. He picked up and inspected several large
semicylinders of the thin white bark of a sycamore, and finally chose
two which seemed to suit him. Then he knelt by the fire and painfully
wrote something upon each of these with his "red keel" one he rolled up
and put in his jacket pocket, and the other he put in Joe's hat and
removed it to a little distance from the owner. And he also put into the
hat certain schoolboy treasures of almost inestimable valueamong them
a lump of chalk, an Indiarubber ball, three fishhooks, and one of that
kind of marbles known as a "sure 'nough crystal." Then he tiptoed his
way cautiously among the trees till he felt that he was out of hearing,
and straightway broke into a keen run in the direction of the sandbar.
CHAPTER XV
A FEW minutes later Tom was in the shoal water of the bar, wading
toward the Illinois shore. Before the depth reached his middle he was
halfway over the current would permit no more wading, now, so he
struck out confidently to swim the remaining hundred yards. He swam
quartering upstream, but still was swept downward rather faster than he
had expected. However, he reached the shore finally, and drifted along
till he found a low place and drew himself out. He put his hand on his
jacket pocket, found his piece of bark safe, and then struck through
the woods, following the shore, with streaming garments. Shortly before
ten o'clock he came out into an open place opposite the village, and
saw the ferryboat lying in the shadow of the trees and the high bank.
Everything was quiet under the blinking stars. He crept down the bank,
watching with all his eyes, slipped into the water, swam three or four
strokes and climbed into the skiff that did "yawl" duty at the boat's
stern. He laid himself down under the thwarts and waited, panting.
Presently the cracked bell tapped and a voice gave the order to "cast
off." A minute or two later the skiff's head was standing high up,
against the boat's swell, and the voyage was begun. Tom felt happy in
his success, for he knew it was the boat's last trip for the night. At
the end of a long twelve or fifteen minutes the wheels stopped, and Tom
slipped overboard and swam ashore in the dusk, landing fifty yards
downstream, out of danger of possible stragglers.
He flew along unfrequented alleys, and shortly found himself at his
aunt's back fence. He climbed over, approached the "ell," and looked in
at the sittingroom window, for a light was burning there. There sat
Aunt Polly, Sid, Mary, and Joe Harper's mother, grouped together,
talking. They were by the bed, and the bed was between them and the
door. Tom went to the door and began to softly lift the latch then he
pressed gently and the door yielded a crack he continued pushing
cautiously, and quaking every time it creaked, till he judged he might
squeeze through on his knees so he put his head through and began,
warily.
"What makes the candle blow so?" said Aunt Polly. Tom hurried up.
"Why, that door's open, I believe. Why, of course it is. No end of
strange things now. Go 'long and shut it, Sid."
Tom disappeared under the bed just in time. He lay and "breathed"
himself for a time, and then crept to where he could almost touch his
aunt's foot.
"But as I was saying," said Aunt Polly, "he warn't BAD, so to say
only mischEEvous. Only just giddy, and harumscarum, you know. He
warn't any more responsible than a colt. HE never meant any harm, and
he was the besthearted boy that ever was"and she began to cry.
"It was just so with my Joealways full of his devilment, and up to
every kind of mischief, but he was just as unselfish and kind as he
could beand laws bless me, to think I went and whipped him for taking
that cream, never once recollecting that I throwed it out myself
because it was sour, and I never to see him again in this world, never,
never, never, poor abused boy" And Mrs. Harper sobbed as if her heart
would break.
"I hope Tom's better off where he is," said Sid, "but if he'd been
better in some ways"
"SID" Tom felt the glare of the old lady's eye, though he could not
see it. "Not a word against my Tom, now that he's gone God'll take
care of HIMnever you trouble YOURself, sir Oh, Mrs. Harper, I don't
know how to give him up I don't know how to give him up He was such a
comfort to me, although he tormented my old heart out of me, 'most."
"The Lord giveth and the Lord hath taken awayBlessed be the name of
the Lord But it's so hardOh, it's so hard Only last Saturday my
Joe busted a firecracker right under my nose and I knocked him
sprawling. Little did I know then, how soonOh, if it was to do over
again I'd hug him and bless him for it."
"Yes, yes, yes, I know just how you feel, Mrs. Harper, I know just
exactly how you feel. No longer ago than yesterday noon, my Tom took
and filled the cat full of Painkiller, and I did think the cretur
would tear the house down. And God forgive me, I cracked Tom's head
with my thimble, poor boy, poor dead boy. But he's out of all his
troubles now. And the last words I ever heard him say was to reproach"
But this memory was too much for the old lady, and she broke entirely
down. Tom was snuffling, now, himselfand more in pity of himself than
anybody else. He could hear Mary crying, and putting in a kindly word
for him from time to time. He began to have a nobler opinion of himself
than ever before. Still, he was sufficiently touched by his aunt's
grief to long to rush out from under the bed and overwhelm her with
joyand the theatrical gorgeousness of the thing appealed strongly to
his nature, too, but he resisted and lay still.
He went on listening, and gathered by odds and ends that it was
conjectured at first that the boys had got drowned while taking a swim
then the small raft had been missed next, certain boys said the
missing lads had promised that the village should "hear something"
soon the wiseheads had "put this and that together" and decided that
the lads had gone off on that raft and would turn up at the next town
below, presently but toward noon the raft had been found, lodged
against the Missouri shore some five or six miles below the village
and then hope perished they must be drowned, else hunger would have
driven them home by nightfall if not sooner. It was believed that the
search for the bodies had been a fruitless effort merely because the
drowning must have occurred in midchannel, since the boys, being good
swimmers, would otherwise have escaped to shore. This was Wednesday
night. If the bodies continued missing until Sunday, all hope would be
given over, and the funerals would be preached on that morning. Tom
shuddered.
Mrs. Harper gave a sobbing goodnight and turned to go. Then with a
mutual impulse the two bereaved women flung themselves into each
other's arms and had a good, consoling cry, and then parted. Aunt Polly
was tender far beyond her wont, in her goodnight to Sid and Mary. Sid
snuffled a bit and Mary went off crying with all her heart.
Aunt Polly knelt down and prayed for Tom so touchingly, so
appealingly, and with such measureless love in her words and her old
trembling voice, that he was weltering in tears again, long before she
was through.
He had to keep still long after she went to bed, for she kept making
brokenhearted ejaculations from time to time, tossing unrestfully, and
turning over. But at last she was still, only moaning a little in her
sleep. Now the boy stole out, rose gradually by the bedside, shaded the
candlelight with his hand, and stood regarding her. His heart was full
of pity for her. He took out his sycamore scroll and placed it by the
candle. But something occurred to him, and he lingered considering. His
face lighted with a happy solution of his thought he put the bark
hastily in his pocket. Then he bent over and kissed the faded lips, and
straightway made his stealthy exit, latching the door behind him.
He threaded his way back to the ferry landing, found nobody at large
there, and walked boldly on board the boat, for he knew she was
tenantless except that there was a watchman, who always turned in and
slept like a graven image. He untied the skiff at the stern, slipped
into it, and was soon rowing cautiously upstream. When he had pulled a
mile above the village, he started quartering across and bent himself
stoutly to his work. He hit the landing on the other side neatly, for
this was a familiar bit of work to him. He was moved to capture the
skiff, arguing that it might be considered a ship and therefore
legitimate prey for a pirate, but he knew a thorough search would be
made for it and that might end in revelations. So he stepped ashore and
entered the woods.
He sat down and took a long rest, torturing himself meanwhile to keep
awake, and then started warily down the homestretch. The night was far
spent. It was broad daylight before he found himself fairly abreast the
island bar. He rested again until the sun was well up and gilding the
great river with its splendor, and then he plunged into the stream. A
little later he paused, dripping, upon the threshold of the camp, and
heard Joe say
"No, Tom's trueblue, Huck, and he'll come back. He won't desert. He
knows that would be a disgrace to a pirate, and Tom's too proud for
that sort of thing. He's up to something or other. Now I wonder what?"
"Well, the things is ours, anyway, ain't they?"
"Pretty near, but not yet, Huck. The writing says they are if he ain't
back here to breakfast."
"Which he is" exclaimed Tom, with fine dramatic effect, stepping
grandly into camp.
A sumptuous breakfast of bacon and fish was shortly provided, and as
the boys set to work upon it, Tom recounted and adorned his
adventures. They were a vain and boastful company of heroes when the
tale was done. Then Tom hid himself away in a shady nook to sleep till
noon, and the other pirates got ready to fish and explore.
CHAPTER XVI
AFTER dinner all the gang turned out to hunt for turtle eggs on the
bar. They went about poking sticks into the sand, and when they found a
soft place they went down on their knees and dug with their hands.
Sometimes they would take fifty or sixty eggs out of one hole. They
were perfectly round white things a trifle smaller than an English
walnut. They had a famous friedegg feast that night, and another on
Friday morning.
After breakfast they went whooping and prancing out on the bar, and
chased each other round and round, shedding clothes as they went, until
they were naked, and then continued the frolic far away up the shoal
water of the bar, against the stiff current, which latter tripped their
legs from under them from time to time and greatly increased the fun.
And now and then they stooped in a group and splashed water in each
other's faces with their palms, gradually approaching each other, with
averted faces to avoid the strangling sprays, and finally gripping and
struggling till the best man ducked his neighbor, and then they all
went under in a tangle of white legs and arms and came up blowing,
sputtering, laughing, and gasping for breath at one and the same time.
When they were well exhausted, they would run out and sprawl on the
dry, hot sand, and lie there and cover themselves up with it, and by
and by break for the water again and go through the original
performance once more. Finally it occurred to them that their naked
skin represented fleshcolored "tights" very fairly so they drew a
ring in the sand and had a circuswith three clowns in it, for none
would yield this proudest post to his neighbor.
Next they got their marbles and played "knucks" and "ringtaw" and
"keeps" till that amusement grew stale. Then Joe and Huck had another
swim, but Tom would not venture, because he found that in kicking off
his trousers he had kicked his string of rattlesnake rattles off his
ankle, and he wondered how he had escaped cramp so long without the
protection of this mysterious charm. He did not venture again until he
had found it, and by that time the other boys were tired and ready to
rest. They gradually wandered apart, dropped into the "dumps," and fell
to gazing longingly across the wide river to where the village lay
drowsing in the sun. Tom found himself writing "BECKY" in the sand with
his big toe he scratched it out, and was angry with himself for his
weakness. But he wrote it again, nevertheless he could not help it. He
erased it once more and then took himself out of temptation by driving
the other boys together and joining them.
But Joe's spirits had gone down almost beyond resurrection. He was so
homesick that he could hardly endure the misery of it. The tears lay
very near the surface. Huck was melancholy, too. Tom was downhearted,
but tried hard not to show it. He had a secret which he was not ready
to tell, yet, but if this mutinous depression was not broken up soon,
he would have to bring it out. He said, with a great show of
cheerfulness
"I bet there's been pirates on this island before, boys. We'll explore
it again. They've hid treasures here somewhere. How'd you feel to light
on a rotten chest full of gold and silverhey?"
But it roused only faint enthusiasm, which faded out, with no reply.
Tom tried one or two other seductions but they failed, too. It was
discouraging work. Joe sat poking up the sand with a stick and looking
very gloomy. Finally he said
"Oh, boys, let's give it up. I want to go home. It's so lonesome."
"Oh no, Joe, you'll feel better by and by," said Tom. "Just think of
the fishing that's here."
"I don't care for fishing. I want to go home."
"But, Joe, there ain't such another swimmingplace anywhere."
"Swimming's no good. I don't seem to care for it, somehow, when there
ain't anybody to say I sha'n't go in. I mean to go home."
"Oh, shucks Baby You want to see your mother, I reckon."
"Yes, I DO want to see my motherand you would, too, if you had one.
I ain't any more baby than you are." And Joe snuffled a little.
"Well, we'll let the crybaby go home to his mother, won't we, Huck?
Poor thingdoes it want to see its mother? And so it shall. You like
it here, don't you, Huck? We'll stay, won't we?"
Huck said, "Yes"without any heart in it.
"I'll never speak to you again as long as I live," said Joe, rising.
"There now" And he moved moodily away and began to dress himself.
"Who cares" said Tom. "Nobody wants you to. Go 'long home and get
laughed at. Oh, you're a nice pirate. Huck and me ain't crybabies.
We'll stay, won't we, Huck? Let him go if he wants to. I reckon we can
get along without him, per'aps."
But Tom was uneasy, nevertheless, and was alarmed to see Joe go
sullenly on with his dressing. And then it was discomforting to see
Huck eying Joe's preparations so wistfully, and keeping up such an
ominous silence. Presently, without a parting word, Joe began to wade
off toward the Illinois shore. Tom's heart began to sink. He glanced at
Huck. Huck could not bear the look, and dropped his eyes. Then he said
"I want to go, too, Tom. It was getting so lonesome anyway, and now
it'll be worse. Let's us go, too, Tom."
"I won't You can all go, if you want to. I mean to stay."
"Tom, I better go."
"Well, go 'longwho's hendering you."
Huck began to pick up his scattered clothes. He said
"Tom, I wisht you'd come, too. Now you think it over. We'll wait for
you when we get to shore."
"Well, you'll wait a blame long time, that's all."
Huck started sorrowfully away, and Tom stood looking after him, with a
strong desire tugging at his heart to yield his pride and go along too.
He hoped the boys would stop, but they still waded slowly on. It
suddenly dawned on Tom that it was become very lonely and still. He
made one final struggle with his pride, and then darted after his
comrades, yelling
"Wait Wait I want to tell you something"
They presently stopped and turned around. When he got to where they
were, he began unfolding his secret, and they listened moodily till at
last they saw the "point" he was driving at, and then they set up a
warwhoop of applause and said it was "splendid" and said if he had
told them at first, they wouldn't have started away. He made a plausible
excuse but his real reason had been the fear that not even the secret
would keep them with him any very great length of time, and so he had
meant to hold it in reserve as a last seduction.
The lads came gayly back and went at their sports again with a will,
chattering all the time about Tom's stupendous plan and admiring the
genius of it. After a dainty egg and fish dinner, Tom said he wanted to
learn to smoke, now. Joe caught at the idea and said he would like to
try, too. So Huck made pipes and filled them. These novices had never
smoked anything before but cigars made of grapevine, and they "bit"
the tongue, and were not considered manly anyway.
Now they stretched themselves out on their elbows and began to puff,
charily, and with slender confidence. The smoke had an unpleasant
taste, and they gagged a little, but Tom said
"Why, it's just as easy If I'd a knowed this was all, I'd a learnt
long ago."
"So would I," said Joe. "It's just nothing."
"Why, many a time I've looked at people smoking, and thought well I
wish I could do that but I never thought I could," said Tom.
"That's just the way with me, hain't it, Huck? You've heard me talk
just that wayhaven't you, Huck? I'll leave it to Huck if I haven't."
"Yesheaps of times," said Huck.
"Well, I have too," said Tom "oh, hundreds of times. Once down by the
slaughterhouse. Don't you remember, Huck? Bob Tanner was there, and
Johnny Miller, and Jeff Thatcher, when I said it. Don't you remember,
Huck, 'bout me saying that?"
"Yes, that's so," said Huck. "That was the day after I lost a white
alley. No, 'twas the day before."
"ThereI told you so," said Tom. "Huck recollects it."
"I bleeve I could smoke this pipe all day," said Joe. "I don't feel
sick."
"Neither do I," said Tom. "I could smoke it all day. But I bet you
Jeff Thatcher couldn't."
"Jeff Thatcher Why, he'd keel over just with two draws. Just let him
try it once. HE'D see"
"I bet he would. And Johnny MillerI wish could see Johnny Miller
tackle it once."
"Oh, don't I" said Joe. "Why, I bet you Johnny Miller couldn't any
more do this than nothing. Just one little snifter would fetch HIM."
"'Deed it would, Joe. SayI wish the boys could see us now."
"So do I."
"Sayboys, don't say anything about it, and some time when they're
around, I'll come up to you and say, 'Joe, got a pipe? I want a smoke.'
And you'll say, kind of careless like, as if it warn't anything, you'll
say, 'Yes, I got my OLD pipe, and another one, but my tobacker ain't
very good.' And I'll say, 'Oh, that's all right, if it's STRONG
enough.' And then you'll out with the pipes, and we'll light up just as
ca'm, and then just see 'em look"
"By jings, that'll be gay, Tom I wish it was NOW"
"So do I And when we tell 'em we learned when we was off pirating,
won't they wish they'd been along?"
"Oh, I reckon not I'll just BET they will"
So the talk ran on. But presently it began to flag a trifle, and grow
disjointed. The silences widened the expectoration marvellously
increased. Every pore inside the boys' cheeks became a spouting
fountain they could scarcely bail out the cellars under their tongues
fast enough to prevent an inundation little overflowings down their
throats occurred in spite of all they could do, and sudden retchings
followed every time. Both boys were looking very pale and miserable,
now. Joe's pipe dropped from his nerveless fingers. Tom's followed.
Both fountains were going furiously and both pumps bailing with might
and main. Joe said feebly
"I've lost my knife. I reckon I better go and find it."
Tom said, with quivering lips and halting utterance
"I'll help you. You go over that way and I'll hunt around by the
spring. No, you needn't come, Huckwe can find it."
So Huck sat down again, and waited an hour. Then he found it lonesome,
and went to find his comrades. They were wide apart in the woods, both
very pale, both fast asleep. But something informed him that if they
had had any trouble they had got rid of it.
They were not talkative at supper that night. They had a humble look,
and when Huck prepared his pipe after the meal and was going to prepare
theirs, they said no, they were not feeling very wellsomething they
ate at dinner had disagreed with them.
About midnight Joe awoke, and called the boys. There was a brooding
oppressiveness in the air that seemed to bode something. The boys
huddled themselves together and sought the friendly companionship of
the fire, though the dull dead heat of the breathless atmosphere was
stifling. They sat still, intent and waiting. The solemn hush
continued. Beyond the light of the fire everything was swallowed up in
the blackness of darkness. Presently there came a quivering glow that
vaguely revealed the foliage for a moment and then vanished. By and by
another came, a little stronger. Then another. Then a faint moan came
sighing through the branches of the forest and the boys felt a fleeting
breath upon their cheeks, and shuddered with the fancy that the Spirit
of the Night had gone by. There was a pause. Now a weird flash turned
night into day and showed every little grassblade, separate and
distinct, that grew about their feet. And it showed three white,
startled faces, too. A deep peal of thunder went rolling and tumbling
down the heavens and lost itself in sullen rumblings in the distance. A
sweep of chilly air passed by, rustling all the leaves and snowing the
flaky ashes broadcast about the fire. Another fierce glare lit up the
forest and an instant crash followed that seemed to rend the treetops
right over the boys' heads. They clung together in terror, in the thick
gloom that followed. A few big raindrops fell pattering upon the
leaves.
"Quick boys, go for the tent" exclaimed Tom.
They sprang away, stumbling over roots and among vines in the dark, no
two plunging in the same direction. A furious blast roared through the
trees, making everything sing as it went. One blinding flash after
another came, and peal on peal of deafening thunder. And now a
drenching rain poured down and the rising hurricane drove it in sheets
along the ground. The boys cried out to each other, but the roaring
wind and the booming thunderblasts drowned their voices utterly.
However, one by one they straggled in at last and took shelter under
the tent, cold, scared, and streaming with water but to have company
in misery seemed something to be grateful for. They could not talk, the
old sail flapped so furiously, even if the other noises would have
allowed them. The tempest rose higher and higher, and presently the
sail tore loose from its fastenings and went winging away on the blast.
The boys seized each others' hands and fled, with many tumblings and
bruises, to the shelter of a great oak that stood upon the riverbank.
Now the battle was at its highest. Under the ceaseless conflagration of
lightning that flamed in the skies, everything below stood out in
cleancut and shadowless distinctness the bending trees, the billowy
river, white with foam, the driving spray of spumeflakes, the dim
outlines of the high bluffs on the other side, glimpsed through the
drifting cloudrack and the slanting veil of rain. Every little while
some giant tree yielded the fight and fell crashing through the younger
growth and the unflagging thunderpeals came now in earsplitting
explosive bursts, keen and sharp, and unspeakably appalling. The storm
culminated in one matchless effort that seemed likely to tear the island
to pieces, burn it up, drown it to the treetops, blow it away, and
deafen every creature in it, all at one and the same moment. It was a
wild night for homeless young heads to be out in.
But at last the battle was done, and the forces retired with weaker
and weaker threatenings and grumblings, and peace resumed her sway. The
boys went back to camp, a good deal awed but they found there was
still something to be thankful for, because the great sycamore, the
shelter of their beds, was a ruin, now, blasted by the lightnings, and
they were not under it when the catastrophe happened.
Everything in camp was drenched, the campfire as well for they were
but heedless lads, like their generation, and had made no provision
against rain. Here was matter for dismay, for they were soaked through
and chilled. They were eloquent in their distress but they presently
discovered that the fire had eaten so far up under the great log it had
been built against where it curved upward and separated itself from
the ground, that a handbreadth or so of it had escaped wetting so
they patiently wrought until, with shreds and bark gathered from the
under sides of sheltered logs, they coaxed the fire to burn again. Then
they piled on great dead boughs till they had a roaring furnace, and
were gladhearted once more. They dried their boiled ham and had a
feast, and after that they sat by the fire and expanded and glorified
their midnight adventure until morning, for there was not a dry spot to
sleep on, anywhere around.
As the sun began to steal in upon the boys, drowsiness came over them,
and they went out on the sandbar and lay down to sleep. They got
scorched out by and by, and drearily set about getting breakfast. After
the meal they felt rusty, and stiffjointed, and a little homesick once
more. Tom saw the signs, and fell to cheering up the pirates as well as
he could. But they cared nothing for marbles, or circus, or swimming,
or anything. He reminded them of the imposing secret, and raised a ray
of cheer. While it lasted, he got them interested in a new device. This
was to knock off being pirates, for a while, and be Indians for a
change. They were attracted by this idea so it was not long before
they were stripped, and striped from head to heel with black mud, like
so many zebrasall of them chiefs, of courseand then they went
tearing through the woods to attack an English settlement.
By and by they separated into three hostile tribes, and darted upon
each other from ambush with dreadful warwhoops, and killed and scalped
each other by thousands. It was a gory day. Consequently it was an
extremely satisfactory one.
They assembled in camp toward suppertime, hungry and happy but now a
difficulty arosehostile Indians could not break the bread of
hospitality together without first making peace, and this was a simple
impossibility without smoking a pipe of peace. There was no other
process that ever they had heard of. Two of the savages almost wished
they had remained pirates. However, there was no other way so with
such show of cheerfulness as they could muster they called for the pipe
and took their whiff as it passed, in due form.
And behold, they were glad they had gone into savagery, for they had
gained something they found that they could now smoke a little without
having to go and hunt for a lost knife they did not get sick enough to
be seriously uncomfortable. They were not likely to fool away this high
promise for lack of effort. No, they practised cautiously, after
supper, with right fair success, and so they spent a jubilant evening.
They were prouder and happier in their new acquirement than they would
have been in the scalping and skinning of the Six Nations. We will
leave them to smoke and chatter and brag, since we have no further use
for them at present.
CHAPTER XVII
BUT there was no hilarity in the little town that same tranquil
Saturday afternoon. The Harpers, and Aunt Polly's family, were being
put into mourning, with great grief and many tears. An unusual quiet
possessed the village, although it was ordinarily quiet enough, in all
conscience. The villagers conducted their concerns with an absent air,
and talked little but they sighed often. The Saturday holiday seemed a
burden to the children. They had no heart in their sports, and
gradually gave them up.
In the afternoon Becky Thatcher found herself moping about the
deserted schoolhouse yard, and feeling very melancholy. But she found
nothing there to comfort her. She soliloquized
"Oh, if I only had a brass andironknob again But I haven't got
anything now to remember him by." And she choked back a little sob.
Presently she stopped, and said to herself
"It was right here. Oh, if it was to do over again, I wouldn't say
thatI wouldn't say it for the whole world. But he's gone now I'll
never, never, never see him any more."
This thought broke her down, and she wandered away, with tears rolling
down her cheeks. Then quite a group of boys and girlsplaymates of
Tom's and Joe'scame by, and stood looking over the paling fence and
talking in reverent tones of how Tom did soandso the last time they
saw him, and how Joe said this and that small trifle pregnant with
awful prophecy, as they could easily see nowand each speaker
pointed out the exact spot where the lost lads stood at the time, and
then added something like "and I was astanding just sojust as I am
now, and as if you was himI was as close as thatand he smiled, just
this wayand then something seemed to go all over me, likeawful, you
knowand I never thought what it meant, of course, but I can see now"
Then there was a dispute about who saw the dead boys last in life, and
many claimed that dismal distinction, and offered evidences, more or
less tampered with by the witness and when it was ultimately decided
who DID see the departed last, and exchanged the last words with them,
the lucky parties took upon themselves a sort of sacred importance, and
were gaped at and envied by all the rest. One poor chap, who had no
other grandeur to offer, said with tolerably manifest pride in the
remembrance
"Well, Tom Sawyer he licked me once."
But that bid for glory was a failure. Most of the boys could say that,
and so that cheapened the distinction too much. The group loitered
away, still recalling memories of the lost heroes, in awed voices.
When the Sundayschool hour was finished, the next morning, the bell
began to toll, instead of ringing in the usual way. It was a very still
Sabbath, and the mournful sound seemed in keeping with the musing hush
that lay upon nature. The villagers began to gather, loitering a moment
in the vestibule to converse in whispers about the sad event. But there
was no whispering in the house only the funereal rustling of dresses
as the women gathered to their seats disturbed the silence there. None
could remember when the little church had been so full before. There
was finally a waiting pause, an expectant dumbness, and then Aunt Polly
entered, followed by Sid and Mary, and they by the Harper family, all
in deep black, and the whole congregation, the old minister as well,
rose reverently and stood until the mourners were seated in the front
pew. There was another communing silence, broken at intervals by
muffled sobs, and then the minister spread his hands abroad and prayed.
A moving hymn was sung, and the text followed "I am the Resurrection
and the Life."
As the service proceeded, the clergyman drew such pictures of the
graces, the winning ways, and the rare promise of the lost lads that
every soul there, thinking he recognized these pictures, felt a pang in
remembering that he had persistently blinded himself to them always
before, and had as persistently seen only faults and flaws in the poor
boys. The minister related many a touching incident in the lives of the
departed, too, which illustrated their sweet, generous natures, and the
people could easily see, now, how noble and beautiful those episodes
were, and remembered with grief that at the time they occurred they had
seemed rank rascalities, well deserving of the cowhide. The
congregation became more and more moved, as the pathetic tale went on,
till at last the whole company broke down and joined the weeping
mourners in a chorus of anguished sobs, the preacher himself giving way
to his feelings, and crying in the pulpit.
There was a rustle in the gallery, which nobody noticed a moment
later the church door creaked the minister raised his streaming eyes
above his handkerchief, and stood transfixed First one and then
another pair of eyes followed the minister's, and then almost with one
impulse the congregation rose and stared while the three dead boys came
marching up the aisle, Tom in the lead, Joe next, and Huck, a ruin of
drooping rags, sneaking sheepishly in the rear They had been hid in
the unused gallery listening to their own funeral sermon
Aunt Polly, Mary, and the Harpers threw themselves upon their restored
ones, smothered them with kisses and poured out thanksgivings, while
poor Huck stood abashed and uncomfortable, not knowing exactly what to
do or where to hide from so many unwelcoming eyes. He wavered, and
started to slink away, but Tom seized him and said
"Aunt Polly, it ain't fair. Somebody's got to be glad to see Huck."
"And so they shall. I'm glad to see him, poor motherless thing" And
the loving attentions Aunt Polly lavished upon him were the one thing
capable of making him more uncomfortable than he was before.
Suddenly the minister shouted at the top of his voice "Praise God
from whom all blessings flowSINGand put your hearts in it"
And they did. Old Hundred swelled up with a triumphant burst, and
while it shook the rafters Tom Sawyer the Pirate looked around upon the
envying juveniles about him and confessed in his heart that this was
the proudest moment of his life.
As the "sold" congregation trooped out they said they would almost be
willing to be made ridiculous again to hear Old Hundred sung like that
once more.
Tom got more cuffs and kisses that dayaccording to Aunt Polly's
varying moodsthan he had earned before in a year and he hardly knew
which expressed the most gratefulness to God and affection for himself.
CHAPTER XVIII
THAT was Tom's great secretthe scheme to return home with his
brother pirates and attend their own funerals. They had paddled over to
the Missouri shore on a log, at dusk on Saturday, landing five or six
miles below the village they had slept in the woods at the edge of the
town till nearly daylight, and had then crept through back lanes and
alleys and finished their sleep in the gallery of the church among a
chaos of invalided benches.
At breakfast, Monday morning, Aunt Polly and Mary were very loving to
Tom, and very attentive to his wants. There was an unusual amount of
talk. In the course of it Aunt Polly said
"Well, I don't say it wasn't a fine joke, Tom, to keep everybody
suffering 'most a week so you boys had a good time, but it is a pity
you could be so hardhearted as to let me suffer so. If you could come
over on a log to go to your funeral, you could have come over and give
me a hint some way that you warn't dead, but only run off."
"Yes, you could have done that, Tom," said Mary "and I believe you
would if you had thought of it."
"Would you, Tom?" said Aunt Polly, her face lighting wistfully. "Say,
now, would you, if you'd thought of it?"
"Iwell, I don't know. 'Twould 'a' spoiled everything."
"Tom, I hoped you loved me that much," said Aunt Polly, with a grieved
tone that discomforted the boy. "It would have been something if you'd
cared enough to THINK of it, even if you didn't DO it."
"Now, auntie, that ain't any harm," pleaded Mary "it's only Tom's
giddy wayhe is always in such a rush that he never thinks of
anything."
"More's the pity. Sid would have thought. And Sid would have come and
DONE it, too. Tom, you'll look back, some day, when it's too late, and
wish you'd cared a little more for me when it would have cost you so
little."
"Now, auntie, you know I do care for you," said Tom.
"I'd know it better if you acted more like it."
"I wish now I'd thought," said Tom, with a repentant tone "but I
dreamt about you, anyway. That's something, ain't it?"
"It ain't mucha cat does that muchbut it's better than nothing.
What did you dream?"
"Why, Wednesday night I dreamt that you was sitting over there by the
bed, and Sid was sitting by the woodbox, and Mary next to him."
"Well, so we did. So we always do. I'm glad your dreams could take
even that much trouble about us."
"And I dreamt that Joe Harper's mother was here."
"Why, she was here Did you dream any more?"
"Oh, lots. But it's so dim, now."
"Well, try to recollectcan't you?"
"Somehow it seems to me that the windthe wind blowed thethe"
"Try harder, Tom The wind did blow something. Come"
Tom pressed his fingers on his forehead an anxious minute, and then
said
"I've got it now I've got it now It blowed the candle"
"Mercy on us Go on, Tomgo on"
"And it seems to me that you said, 'Why, I believe that that door'"
"Go ON, Tom"
"Just let me study a momentjust a moment. Oh, yesyou said you
believed the door was open."
"As I'm sitting here, I did Didn't I, Mary Go on"
"And thenand thenwell I won't be certain, but it seems like as if
you made Sid go andand"
"Well? Well? What did I make him do, Tom? What did I make him do?"
"You made himyouOh, you made him shut it."
"Well, for the land's sake I never heard the beat of that in all my
days Don't tell ME there ain't anything in dreams, any more. Sereny
Harper shall know of this before I'm an hour older. I'd like to see her
get around THIS with her rubbage 'bout superstition. Go on, Tom"
"Oh, it's all getting just as bright as day, now. Next you said I
warn't BAD, only mischeevous and harumscarum, and not any more
responsible thanthanI think it was a colt, or something."
"And so it was Well, goodness gracious Go on, Tom"
"And then you began to cry."
"So I did. So I did. Not the first time, neither. And then"
"Then Mrs. Harper she began to cry, and said Joe was just the same,
and she wished she hadn't whipped him for taking cream when she'd
throwed it out her own self"
"Tom The sperrit was upon you You was a prophesyingthat's what you
was doing Land alive, go on, Tom"
"Then Sid he saidhe said"
"I don't think I said anything," said Sid.
"Yes you did, Sid," said Mary.
"Shut your heads and let Tom go on What did he say, Tom?"
"He saidI THINK he said he hoped I was better off where I was gone
to, but if I'd been better sometimes"
"THERE, d'you hear that It was his very words"
"And you shut him up sharp."
"I lay I did There must 'a' been an angel there. There WAS an angel
there, somewheres"
"And Mrs. Harper told about Joe scaring her with a firecracker, and
you told about Peter and the Painkiller"
"Just as true as I live"
"And then there was a whole lot of talk 'bout dragging the river for
us, and 'bout having the funeral Sunday, and then you and old Miss
Harper hugged and cried, and she went."
"It happened just so It happened just so, as sure as I'm asitting in
these very tracks. Tom, you couldn't told it more like if you'd 'a'
seen it And then what? Go on, Tom"
"Then I thought you prayed for meand I could see you and hear every
word you said. And you went to bed, and I was so sorry that I took and
wrote on a piece of sycamore bark, 'We ain't deadwe are only off
being pirates,' and put it on the table by the candle and then you
looked so good, laying there asleep, that I thought I went and leaned
over and kissed you on the lips."
"Did you, Tom, DID you I just forgive you everything for that" And
she seized the boy in a crushing embrace that made him feel like the
guiltiest of villains.
"It was very kind, even though it was only adream," Sid soliloquized
just audibly.
"Shut up, Sid A body does just the same in a dream as he'd do if he
was awake. Here's a big Milum apple I've been saving for you, Tom, if
you was ever found againnow go 'long to school. I'm thankful to the
good God and Father of us all I've got you back, that's longsuffering
and merciful to them that believe on Him and keep His word, though
goodness knows I'm unworthy of it, but if only the worthy ones got His
blessings and had His hand to help them over the rough places, there's
few enough would smile here or ever enter into His rest when the long
night comes. Go 'long Sid, Mary, Tomtake yourselves offyou've
hendered me long enough."
The children left for school, and the old lady to call on Mrs. Harper
and vanquish her realism with Tom's marvellous dream. Sid had better
judgment than to utter the thought that was in his mind as he left the
house. It was this "Pretty thinas long a dream as that, without any
mistakes in it"
What a hero Tom was become, now He did not go skipping and prancing,
but moved with a dignified swagger as became a pirate who felt that the
public eye was on him. And indeed it was he tried not to seem to see
the looks or hear the remarks as he passed along, but they were food
and drink to him. Smaller boys than himself flocked at his heels, as
proud to be seen with him, and tolerated by him, as if he had been the
drummer at the head of a procession or the elephant leading a menagerie
into town. Boys of his own size pretended not to know he had been away
at all but they were consuming with envy, nevertheless. They would
have given anything to have that swarthy suntanned skin of his, and his
glittering notoriety and Tom would not have parted with either for a
circus.
At school the children made so much of him and of Joe, and delivered
such eloquent admiration from their eyes, that the two heroes were not
long in becoming insufferably "stuckup." They began to tell their
adventures to hungry listenersbut they only began it was not a thing
likely to have an end, with imaginations like theirs to furnish
material. And finally, when they got out their pipes and went serenely
puffing around, the very summit of glory was reached.
Tom decided that he could be independent of Becky Thatcher now. Glory
was sufficient. He would live for glory. Now that he was distinguished,
maybe she would be wanting to "make up." Well, let hershe should see
that he could be as indifferent as some other people. Presently she
arrived. Tom pretended not to see her. He moved away and joined a group
of boys and girls and began to talk. Soon he observed that she was
tripping gayly back and forth with flushed face and dancing eyes,
pretending to be busy chasing schoolmates, and screaming with laughter
when she made a capture but he noticed that she always made her
captures in his vicinity, and that she seemed to cast a conscious eye
in his direction at such times, too. It gratified all the vicious
vanity that was in him and so, instead of winning him, it only "set
him up" the more and made him the more diligent to avoid betraying that
he knew she was about. Presently she gave over skylarking, and moved
irresolutely about, sighing once or twice and glancing furtively and
wistfully toward Tom. Then she observed that now Tom was talking more
particularly to Amy Lawrence than to any one else. She felt a sharp
pang and grew disturbed and uneasy at once. She tried to go away, but
her feet were treacherous, and carried her to the group instead. She
said to a girl almost at Tom's elbowwith sham vivacity
"Why, Mary Austin you bad girl, why didn't you come to Sundayschool?"
"I did comedidn't you see me?"
"Why, no Did you? Where did you sit?"
"I was in Miss Peters' class, where I always go. I saw YOU."
"Did you? Why, it's funny I didn't see you. I wanted to tell you about
the picnic."
"Oh, that's jolly. Who's going to give it?"
"My ma's going to let me have one."
"Oh, goody I hope she'll let ME come."
"Well, she will. The picnic's for me. She'll let anybody come that I
want, and I want you."
"That's ever so nice. When is it going to be?"
"By and by. Maybe about vacation."
"Oh, won't it be fun You going to have all the girls and boys?"
"Yes, every one that's friends to meor wants to be" and she glanced
ever so furtively at Tom, but he talked right along to Amy Lawrence
about the terrible storm on the island, and how the lightning tore the
great sycamore tree "all to flinders" while he was "standing within
three feet of it."
"Oh, may I come?" said Grace Miller.
"Yes."
"And me?" said Sally Rogers.
"Yes."
"And me, too?" said Susy Harper. "And Joe?"
"Yes."
And so on, with clapping of joyful hands till all the group had begged
for invitations but Tom and Amy. Then Tom turned coolly away, still
talking, and took Amy with him. Becky's lips trembled and the tears
came to her eyes she hid these signs with a forced gayety and went on
chattering, but the life had gone out of the picnic, now, and out of
everything else she got away as soon as she could and hid herself and
had what her sex call "a good cry." Then she sat moody, with wounded
pride, till the bell rang. She roused up, now, with a vindictive cast
in her eye, and gave her plaited tails a shake and said she knew what
SHE'D do.
At recess Tom continued his flirtation with Amy with jubilant
selfsatisfaction. And he kept drifting about to find Becky and lacerate
her with the performance. At last he spied her, but there was a sudden
falling of his mercury. She was sitting cosily on a little bench behind
the schoolhouse looking at a picturebook with Alfred Templeand so
absorbed were they, and their heads so close together over the book,
that they did not seem to be conscious of anything in the world besides.
Jealousy ran redhot through Tom's veins. He began to hate himself for
throwing away the chance Becky had offered for a reconciliation. He
called himself a fool, and all the hard names he could think of. He
wanted to cry with vexation. Amy chatted happily along, as they walked,
for her heart was singing, but Tom's tongue had lost its function. He
did not hear what Amy was saying, and whenever she paused expectantly he
could only stammer an awkward assent, which was as often misplaced as
otherwise. He kept drifting to the rear of the schoolhouse, again and
again, to sear his eyeballs with the hateful spectacle there. He could
not help it. And it maddened him to see, as he thought he saw, that
Becky Thatcher never once suspected that he was even in the land of the
living. But she did see, nevertheless and she knew she was winning her
fight, too, and was glad to see him suffer as she had suffered.
Amy's happy prattle became intolerable. Tom hinted at things he had to
attend to things that must be done and time was fleeting. But in
vainthe girl chirped on. Tom thought, "Oh, hang her, ain't I ever
going to get rid of her?" At last he must be attending to those
thingsand she said artlessly that she would be "around" when school
let out. And he hastened away, hating her for it.
"Any other boy" Tom thought, grating his teeth. "Any boy in the whole
town but that Saint Louis smarty that thinks he dresses so fine and is
aristocracy Oh, all right, I licked you the first day you ever saw
this town, mister, and I'll lick you again You just wait till I catch
you out I'll just take and"
And he went through the motions of thrashing an imaginary boy
pummelling the air, and kicking and gouging. "Oh, you do, do you? You
holler 'nough, do you? Now, then, let that learn you" And so the
imaginary flogging was finished to his satisfaction.
Tom fled home at noon. His conscience could not endure any more of
Amy's grateful happiness, and his jealousy could bear no more of the
other distress. Becky resumed her picture inspections with Alfred, but
as the minutes dragged along and no Tom came to suffer, her triumph
began to cloud and she lost interest gravity and absentmindedness
followed, and then melancholy two or three times she pricked up her
ear at a footstep, but it was a false hope no Tom came. At last she
grew entirely miserable and wished she hadn't carried it so far. When
poor Alfred, seeing that he was losing her, he did not know how, kept
exclaiming "Oh, here's a jolly one look at this" she lost patience
at last, and said, "Oh, don't bother me I don't care for them" and
burst into tears, and got up and walked away.
Alfred dropped alongside and was going to try to comfort her, but she
said
"Go away and leave me alone, can't you I hate you"
So the boy halted, wondering what he could have donefor she had said
she would look at pictures all through the nooningand she walked on,
crying. Then Alfred went musing into the deserted schoolhouse. He was
humiliated and angry. He easily guessed his way to the truththe girl
had simply made a convenience of him to vent her spite upon Tom Sawyer.
He was far from hating Tom the less when this thought occurred to him.
He wished there was some way to get that boy into trouble without much
risk to himself. Tom's spellingbook fell under his eye. Here was his
opportunity. He gratefully opened to the lesson for the afternoon and
poured ink upon the page.
Becky, glancing in at a window behind him at the moment, saw the act,
and moved on, without discovering herself. She started homeward, now,
intending to find Tom and tell him Tom would be thankful and their
troubles would be healed. Before she was half way home, however, she
had changed her mind. The thought of Tom's treatment of her when she
was talking about her picnic came scorching back and filled her with
shame. She resolved to let him get whipped on the damaged
spellingbook's account, and to hate him forever, into the bargain.
CHAPTER XIX
TOM arrived at home in a dreary mood, and the first thing his aunt
said to him showed him that he had brought his sorrows to an
unpromising market
"Tom, I've a notion to skin you alive"
"Auntie, what have I done?"
"Well, you've done enough. Here I go over to Sereny Harper, like an
old softy, expecting I'm going to make her believe all that rubbage
about that dream, when lo and behold you she'd found out from Joe that
you was over here and heard all the talk we had that night. Tom, I
don't know what is to become of a boy that will act like that. It makes
me feel so bad to think you could let me go to Sereny Harper and make
such a fool of myself and never say a word."
This was a new aspect of the thing. His smartness of the morning had
seemed to Tom a good joke before, and very ingenious. It merely looked
mean and shabby now. He hung his head and could not think of anything
to say for a moment. Then he said
"Auntie, I wish I hadn't done itbut I didn't think."
"Oh, child, you never think. You never think of anything but your own
selfishness. You could think to come all the way over here from
Jackson's Island in the night to laugh at our troubles, and you could
think to fool me with a lie about a dream but you couldn't ever think
to pity us and save us from sorrow."
"Auntie, I know now it was mean, but I didn't mean to be mean. I
didn't, honest. And besides, I didn't come over here to laugh at you
that night."
"What did you come for, then?"
"It was to tell you not to be uneasy about us, because we hadn't got
drownded."
"Tom, Tom, I would be the thankfullest soul in this world if I could
believe you ever had as good a thought as that, but you know you never
didand I know it, Tom."
"Indeed and 'deed I did, auntieI wish I may never stir if I didn't."
"Oh, Tom, don't liedon't do it. It only makes things a hundred times
worse."
"It ain't a lie, auntie it's the truth. I wanted to keep you from
grievingthat was all that made me come."
"I'd give the whole world to believe thatit would cover up a power
of sins, Tom. I'd 'most be glad you'd run off and acted so bad. But it
ain't reasonable because, why didn't you tell me, child?"
"Why, you see, when you got to talking about the funeral, I just got
all full of the idea of our coming and hiding in the church, and I
couldn't somehow bear to spoil it. So I just put the bark back in my
pocket and kept mum."
"What bark?"
"The bark I had wrote on to tell you we'd gone pirating. I wish, now,
you'd waked up when I kissed youI do, honest."
The hard lines in his aunt's face relaxed and a sudden tenderness
dawned in her eyes.
"DID you kiss me, Tom?"
"Why, yes, I did."
"Are you sure you did, Tom?"
"Why, yes, I did, auntiecertain sure."
"What did you kiss me for, Tom?"
"Because I loved you so, and you laid there moaning and I was so sorry."
The words sounded like truth. The old lady could not hide a tremor in
her voice when she said
"Kiss me again, Tomand be off with you to school, now, and don't
bother me any more."
The moment he was gone, she ran to a closet and got out the ruin of a
jacket which Tom had gone pirating in. Then she stopped, with it in her
hand, and said to herself
"No, I don't dare. Poor boy, I reckon he's lied about itbut it's a
blessed, blessed lie, there's such a comfort come from it. I hope the
LordI KNOW the Lord will forgive him, because it was such
goodheartedness in him to tell it. But I don't want to find out it's a
lie. I won't look."
She put the jacket away, and stood by musing a minute. Twice she put
out her hand to take the garment again, and twice she refrained. Once
more she ventured, and this time she fortified herself with the
thought "It's a good lieit's a good lieI won't let it grieve me."
So she sought the jacket pocket. A moment later she was reading Tom's
piece of bark through flowing tears and saying "I could forgive the
boy, now, if he'd committed a million sins"
CHAPTER XX
THERE was something about Aunt Polly's manner, when she kissed Tom,
that swept away his low spirits and made him lighthearted and happy
again. He started to school and had the luck of coming upon Becky
Thatcher at the head of Meadow Lane. His mood always determined his
manner. Without a moment's hesitation he ran to her and said
"I acted mighty mean today, Becky, and I'm so sorry. I won't ever,
ever do that way again, as long as ever I liveplease make up, won't
you?"
The girl stopped and looked him scornfully in the face
"I'll thank you to keep yourself TO yourself, Mr. Thomas Sawyer. I'll
never speak to you again."
She tossed her head and passed on. Tom was so stunned that he had not
even presence of mind enough to say "Who cares, Miss Smarty?" until the
right time to say it had gone by. So he said nothing. But he was in a
fine rage, nevertheless. He moped into the schoolyard wishing she were
a boy, and imagining how he would trounce her if she were. He presently
encountered her and delivered a stinging remark as he passed. She
hurled one in return, and the angry breach was complete. It seemed to
Becky, in her hot resentment, that she could hardly wait for school to
"take in," she was so impatient to see Tom flogged for the injured
spellingbook. If she had had any lingering notion of exposing Alfred
Temple, Tom's offensive fling had driven it entirely away.
Poor girl, she did not know how fast she was nearing trouble herself.
The master, Mr. Dobbins, had reached middle age with an unsatisfied
ambition. The darling of his desires was, to be a doctor, but poverty
had decreed that he should be nothing higher than a village
schoolmaster. Every day he took a mysterious book out of his desk and
absorbed himself in it at times when no classes were reciting. He kept
that book under lock and key. There was not an urchin in school but was
perishing to have a glimpse of it, but the chance never came. Every boy
and girl had a theory about the nature of that book but no two
theories were alike, and there was no way of getting at the facts in
the case. Now, as Becky was passing by the desk, which stood near the
door, she noticed that the key was in the lock It was a precious
moment. She glanced around found herself alone, and the next instant
she had the book in her hands. The titlepageProfessor Somebody's
ANATOMYcarried no information to her mind so she began to turn the
leaves. She came at once upon a handsomely engraved and colored
frontispiecea human figure, stark naked. At that moment a shadow fell
on the page and Tom Sawyer stepped in at the door and caught a glimpse
of the picture. Becky snatched at the book to close it, and had the
hard luck to tear the pictured page half down the middle. She thrust
the volume into the desk, turned the key, and burst out crying with
shame and vexation.
"Tom Sawyer, you are just as mean as you can be, to sneak up on a
person and look at what they're looking at."
"How could I know you was looking at anything?"
"You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Tom Sawyer you know you're
going to tell on me, and oh, what shall I do, what shall I do I'll be
whipped, and I never was whipped in school."
Then she stamped her little foot and said
"BE so mean if you want to I know something that's going to happen.
You just wait and you'll see Hateful, hateful, hateful"and she
flung out of the house with a new explosion of crying.
Tom stood still, rather flustered by this onslaught. Presently he said
to himself
"What a curious kind of a fool a girl is Never been licked in school
Shucks What's a licking That's just like a girlthey're so
thinskinned and chickenhearted. Well, of course I ain't going to tell
old Dobbins on this little fool, because there's other ways of getting
even on her, that ain't so mean but what of it? Old Dobbins will ask
who it was tore his book. Nobody'll answer. Then he'll do just the way
he always doesask first one and then t'other, and when he comes to the
right girl he'll know it, without any telling. Girls' faces always tell
on them. They ain't got any backbone. She'll get licked. Well, it's a
kind of a tight place for Becky Thatcher, because there ain't any way
out of it." Tom conned the thing a moment longer, and then added "All
right, though she'd like to see me in just such a fixlet her sweat it
out"
Tom joined the mob of skylarking scholars outside. In a few moments
the master arrived and school "took in." Tom did not feel a strong
interest in his studies. Every time he stole a glance at the girls'
side of the room Becky's face troubled him. Considering all things, he
did not want to pity her, and yet it was all he could do to help it. He
could get up no exultation that was really worthy the name. Presently
the spellingbook discovery was made, and Tom's mind was entirely full
of his own matters for a while after that. Becky roused up from her
lethargy of distress and showed good interest in the proceedings. She
did not expect that Tom could get out of his trouble by denying that he
spilt the ink on the book himself and she was right. The denial only
seemed to make the thing worse for Tom. Becky supposed she would be
glad of that, and she tried to believe she was glad of it, but she
found she was not certain. When the worst came to the worst, she had an
impulse to get up and tell on Alfred Temple, but she made an effort and
forced herself to keep stillbecause, said she to herself, "he'll tell
about me tearing the picture sure. I wouldn't say a word, not to save
his life"
Tom took his whipping and went back to his seat not at all
brokenhearted, for he thought it was possible that he had unknowingly
upset the ink on the spellingbook himself, in some skylarking bouthe
had denied it for form's sake and because it was custom, and had stuck
to the denial from principle.
A whole hour drifted by, the master sat nodding in his throne, the air
was drowsy with the hum of study. By and by, Mr. Dobbins straightened
himself up, yawned, then unlocked his desk, and reached for his book,
but seemed undecided whether to take it out or leave it. Most of the
pupils glanced up languidly, but there were two among them that watched
his movements with intent eyes. Mr. Dobbins fingered his book absently
for a while, then took it out and settled himself in his chair to read
Tom shot a glance at Becky. He had seen a hunted and helpless rabbit
look as she did, with a gun levelled at its head. Instantly he forgot
his quarrel with her. Quicksomething must be done done in a flash,
too But the very imminence of the emergency paralyzed his invention.
Goodhe had an inspiration He would run and snatch the book, spring
through the door and fly. But his resolution shook for one little
instant, and the chance was lostthe master opened the volume. If Tom
only had the wasted opportunity back again Too late. There was no help
for Becky now, he said. The next moment the master faced the school.
Every eye sank under his gaze. There was that in it which smote even
the innocent with fear. There was silence while one might count ten
the master was gathering his wrath. Then he spoke "Who tore this book?"
There was not a sound. One could have heard a pin drop. The stillness
continued the master searched face after face for signs of guilt.
"Benjamin Rogers, did you tear this book?"
A denial. Another pause.
"Joseph Harper, did you?"
Another denial. Tom's uneasiness grew more and more intense under the
slow torture of these proceedings. The master scanned the ranks of
boysconsidered a while, then turned to the girls
"Amy Lawrence?"
A shake of the head.
"Gracie Miller?"
The same sign.
"Susan Harper, did you do this?"
Another negative. The next girl was Becky Thatcher. Tom was trembling
from head to foot with excitement and a sense of the hopelessness of
the situation.
"Rebecca Thatcher" [Tom glanced at her faceit was white with terror]
"did you tearno, look me in the face" [her hands rose in appeal]
"did you tear this book?"
A thought shot like lightning through Tom's brain. He sprang to his
feet and shouted"I done it"
The school stared in perplexity at this incredible folly. Tom stood a
moment, to gather his dismembered faculties and when he stepped
forward to go to his punishment the surprise, the gratitude, the
adoration that shone upon him out of poor Becky's eyes seemed pay
enough for a hundred floggings. Inspired by the splendor of his own
act, he took without an outcry the most merciless flaying that even Mr.
Dobbins had ever administered and also received with indifference the
added cruelty of a command to remain two hours after school should be
dismissedfor he knew who would wait for him outside till his
captivity was done, and not count the tedious time as loss, either.
Tom went to bed that night planning vengeance against Alfred Temple
for with shame and repentance Becky had told him all, not forgetting
her own treachery but even the longing for vengeance had to give way,
soon, to pleasanter musings, and he fell asleep at last with Becky's
latest words lingering dreamily in his ear
"Tom, how COULD you be so noble"
CHAPTER XXI
VACATION was approaching. The schoolmaster, always severe, grew
severer and more exacting than ever, for he wanted the school to make a
good showing on "Examination" day. His rod and his ferule were seldom
idle nowat least among the smaller pupils. Only the biggest boys, and
young ladies of eighteen and twenty, escaped lashing. Mr. Dobbins'
lashings were very vigorous ones, too for although he carried, under
his wig, a perfectly bald and shiny head, he had only reached middle
age, and there was no sign of feebleness in his muscle. As the great
day approached, all the tyranny that was in him came to the surface he
seemed to take a vindictive pleasure in punishing the least
shortcomings. The consequence was, that the smaller boys spent their
days in terror and suffering and their nights in plotting revenge. They
threw away no opportunity to do the master a mischief. But he kept
ahead all the time. The retribution that followed every vengeful
success was so sweeping and majestic that the boys always retired from
the field badly worsted. At last they conspired together and hit upon a
plan that promised a dazzling victory. They swore in the signpainter's
boy, told him the scheme, and asked his help. He had his own reasons
for being delighted, for the master boarded in his father's family and
had given the boy ample cause to hate him. The master's wife would go
on a visit to the country in a few days, and there would be nothing to
interfere with the plan the master always prepared himself for great
occasions by getting pretty well fuddled, and the signpainter's boy
said that when the dominie had reached the proper condition on
Examination Evening he would "manage the thing" while he napped in his
chair then he would have him awakened at the right time and hurried
away to school.
In the fulness of time the interesting occasion arrived. At eight in
the evening the schoolhouse was brilliantly lighted, and adorned with
wreaths and festoons of foliage and flowers. The master sat throned in
his great chair upon a raised platform, with his blackboard behind him.
He was looking tolerably mellow. Three rows of benches on each side and
six rows in front of him were occupied by the dignitaries of the town
and by the parents of the pupils. To his left, back of the rows of
citizens, was a spacious temporary platform upon which were seated the
scholars who were to take part in the exercises of the evening rows of
small boys, washed and dressed to an intolerable state of discomfort
rows of gawky big boys snowbanks of girls and young ladies clad in
lawn and muslin and conspicuously conscious of their bare arms, their
grandmothers' ancient trinkets, their bits of pink and blue ribbon and
the flowers in their hair. All the rest of the house was filled with
nonparticipating scholars.
The exercises began. A very little boy stood up and sheepishly
recited, "You'd scarce expect one of my age to speak in public on the
stage," etc.accompanying himself with the painfully exact and
spasmodic gestures which a machine might have usedsupposing the
machine to be a trifle out of order. But he got through safely, though
cruelly scared, and got a fine round of applause when he made his
manufactured bow and retired.
A little shamefaced girl lisped, "Mary had a little lamb," etc.,
performed a compassioninspiring curtsy, got her meed of applause, and
sat down flushed and happy.
Tom Sawyer stepped forward with conceited confidence and soared into
the unquenchable and indestructible "Give me liberty or give me death"
speech, with fine fury and frantic gesticulation, and broke down in the
middle of it. A ghastly stagefright seized him, his legs quaked under
him and he was like to choke. True, he had the manifest sympathy of the
house but he had the house's silence, too, which was even worse than
its sympathy. The master frowned, and this completed the disaster. Tom
struggled awhile and then retired, utterly defeated. There was a weak
attempt at applause, but it died early.
"The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck" followed also "The Assyrian Came
Down," and other declamatory gems. Then there were reading exercises,
and a spelling fight. The meagre Latin class recited with honor. The
prime feature of the evening was in order, noworiginal "compositions"
by the young ladies. Each in her turn stepped forward to the edge of
the platform, cleared her throat, held up her manuscript tied with
dainty ribbon, and proceeded to read, with labored attention to
"expression" and punctuation. The themes were the same that had been
illuminated upon similar occasions by their mothers before them, their
grandmothers, and doubtless all their ancestors in the female line
clear back to the Crusades. "Friendship" was one "Memories of Other
Days" "Religion in History" "Dream Land" "The Advantages of
Culture" "Forms of Political Government Compared and Contrasted"
"Melancholy" "Filial Love" "Heart Longings," etc., etc.
A prevalent feature in these compositions was a nursed and petted
melancholy another was a wasteful and opulent gush of "fine language"
another was a tendency to lug in by the ears particularly prized words
and phrases until they were worn entirely out and a peculiarity that
conspicuously marked and marred them was the inveterate and intolerable
sermon that wagged its crippled tail at the end of each and every one
of them. No matter what the subject might be, a brainracking effort
was made to squirm it into some aspect or other that the moral and
religious mind could contemplate with edification. The glaring
insincerity of these sermons was not sufficient to compass the
banishment of the fashion from the schools, and it is not sufficient
today it never will be sufficient while the world stands, perhaps.
There is no school in all our land where the young ladies do not feel
obliged to close their compositions with a sermon and you will find
that the sermon of the most frivolous and the least religious girl in
the school is always the longest and the most relentlessly pious. But
enough of this. Homely truth is unpalatable.
Let us return to the "Examination." The first composition that was
read was one entitled "Is this, then, Life?" Perhaps the reader can
endure an extract from it
"In the common walks of life, with what delightful
emotions does the youthful mind look forward to some
anticipated scene of festivity Imagination is busy
sketching rosetinted pictures of joy. In fancy, the
voluptuous votary of fashion sees herself amid the
festive throng, 'the observed of all observers.' Her
graceful form, arrayed in snowy robes, is whirling
through the mazes of the joyous dance her eye is
brightest, her step is lightest in the gay assembly.
"In such delicious fancies time quickly glides by,
and the welcome hour arrives for her entrance into
the Elysian world, of which she has had such bright
dreams. How fairylike does everything appear to
her enchanted vision Each new scene is more charming
than the last. But after a while she finds that
beneath this goodly exterior, all is vanity, the
flattery which once charmed her soul, now grates
harshly upon her ear the ballroom has lost its
charms and with wasted health and imbittered heart,
she turns away with the conviction that earthly
pleasures cannot satisfy the longings of the soul"
And so forth and so on. There was a buzz of gratification from time to
time during the reading, accompanied by whispered ejaculations of "How
sweet" "How eloquent" "So true" etc., and after the thing had closed
with a peculiarly afflicting sermon the applause was enthusiastic.
Then arose a slim, melancholy girl, whose face had the "interesting"
paleness that comes of pills and indigestion, and read a "poem." Two
stanzas of it will do
"A MISSOURI MAIDEN'S FAREWELL TO ALABAMA
"Alabama, goodbye I love thee well
But yet for a while do I leave thee now
Sad, yes, sad thoughts of thee my heart doth swell,
And burning recollections throng my brow
For I have wandered through thy flowery woods
Have roamed and read near Tallapoosa's stream
Have listened to Tallassee's warring floods,
And wooed on Coosa's side Aurora's beam.
"Yet shame I not to bear an o'erfull heart,
Nor blush to turn behind my tearful eyes
'Tis from no stranger land I now must part,
'Tis to no strangers left I yield these sighs.
Welcome and home were mine within this State,
Whose vales I leavewhose spires fade fast from me
And cold must be mine eyes, and heart, and tete,
When, dear Alabama they turn cold on thee"
There were very few there who knew what "tete" meant, but the poem was
very satisfactory, nevertheless.
Next appeared a darkcomplexioned, blackeyed, blackhaired young
lady, who paused an impressive moment, assumed a tragic expression, and
began to read in a measured, solemn tone
"A VISION
"Dark and tempestuous was night. Around the
throne on high not a single star quivered but
the deep intonations of the heavy thunder
constantly vibrated upon the ear whilst the
terrific lightning revelled in angry mood
through the cloudy chambers of heaven, seeming
to scorn the power exerted over its terror by
the illustrious Franklin Even the boisterous
winds unanimously came forth from their mystic
homes, and blustered about as if to enhance by
their aid the wildness of the scene.
"At such a time, so dark, so dreary, for human
sympathy my very spirit sighed but instead thereof,
"'My dearest friend, my counsellor, my comforter
and guideMy joy in grief, my second bliss
in joy,' came to my side. She moved like one of
those bright beings pictured in the sunny walks
of fancy's Eden by the romantic and young, a
queen of beauty unadorned save by her own
transcendent loveliness. So soft was her step, it
failed to make even a sound, and but for the
magical thrill imparted by her genial touch, as
other unobtrusive beauties, she would have glided
away unperceivedunsought. A strange sadness
rested upon her features, like icy tears upon
the robe of December, as she pointed to the
contending elements without, and bade me contemplate
the two beings presented."
This nightmare occupied some ten pages of manuscript and wound up with
a sermon so destructive of all hope to nonPresbyterians that it took
the first prize. This composition was considered to be the very finest
effort of the evening. The mayor of the village, in delivering the
prize to the author of it, made a warm speech in which he said that it
was by far the most "eloquent" thing he had ever listened to, and that
Daniel Webster himself might well be proud of it.
It may be remarked, in passing, that the number of compositions in
which the word "beauteous" was overfondled, and human experience
referred to as "life's page," was up to the usual average.
Now the master, mellow almost to the verge of geniality, put his chair
aside, turned his back to the audience, and began to draw a map of
America on the blackboard, to exercise the geography class upon. But he
made a sad business of it with his unsteady hand, and a smothered
titter rippled over the house. He knew what the matter was, and set
himself to right it. He sponged out lines and remade them but he only
distorted them more than ever, and the tittering was more pronounced.
He threw his entire attention upon his work, now, as if determined not
to be put down by the mirth. He felt that all eyes were fastened upon
him he imagined he was succeeding, and yet the tittering continued it
even manifestly increased. And well it might. There was a garret above,
pierced with a scuttle over his head and down through this scuttle
came a cat, suspended around the haunches by a string she had a rag
tied about her head and jaws to keep her from mewing as she slowly
descended she curved upward and clawed at the string, she swung
downward and clawed at the intangible air. The tittering rose higher
and higherthe cat was within six inches of the absorbed teacher's
headdown, down, a little lower, and she grabbed his wig with her
desperate claws, clung to it, and was snatched up into the garret in an
instant with her trophy still in her possession And how the light did
blaze abroad from the master's bald patefor the signpainter's boy
had GILDED it
That broke up the meeting. The boys were avenged. Vacation had come.
NOTEThe pretended "compositions" quoted in
this chapter are taken without alteration from a
volume entitled "Prose and Poetry, by a Western
Lady"but they are exactly and precisely after
the schoolgirl pattern, and hence are much
happier than any mere imitations could be.
CHAPTER XXII
TOM joined the new order of Cadets of Temperance, being attracted by
the showy character of their "regalia." He promised to abstain from
smoking, chewing, and profanity as long as he remained a member. Now he
found out a new thingnamely, that to promise not to do a thing is the
surest way in the world to make a body want to go and do that very
thing. Tom soon found himself tormented with a desire to drink and
swear the desire grew to be so intense that nothing but the hope of a
chance to display himself in his red sash kept him from withdrawing
from the order. Fourth of July was coming but he soon gave that up
gave it up before he had worn his shackles over fortyeight hoursand
fixed his hopes upon old Judge Frazer, justice of the peace, who was
apparently on his deathbed and would have a big public funeral, since
he was so high an official. During three days Tom was deeply concerned
about the Judge's condition and hungry for news of it. Sometimes his
hopes ran highso high that he would venture to get out his regalia
and practise before the lookingglass. But the Judge had a most
discouraging way of fluctuating. At last he was pronounced upon the
mendand then convalescent. Tom was disgusted and felt a sense of
injury, too. He handed in his resignation at onceand that night the
Judge suffered a relapse and died. Tom resolved that he would never
trust a man like that again.
The funeral was a fine thing. The Cadets paraded in a style calculated
to kill the late member with envy. Tom was a free boy again, however
there was something in that. He could drink and swear, nowbut found
to his surprise that he did not want to. The simple fact that he could,
took the desire away, and the charm of it.
Tom presently wondered to find that his coveted vacation was beginning
to hang a little heavily on his hands.
He attempted a diarybut nothing happened during three days, and so
he abandoned it.
The first of all the negro minstrel shows came to town, and made a
sensation. Tom and Joe Harper got up a band of performers and were
happy for two days.
Even the Glorious Fourth was in some sense a failure, for it rained
hard, there was no procession in consequence, and the greatest man in
the world as Tom supposed, Mr. Benton, an actual United States
Senator, proved an overwhelming disappointmentfor he was not
twentyfive feet high, nor even anywhere in the neighborhood of it.
A circus came. The boys played circus for three days afterward in
tents made of rag carpetingadmission, three pins for boys, two for
girlsand then circusing was abandoned.
A phrenologist and a mesmerizer cameand went again and left the
village duller and drearier than ever.
There were some boysandgirls' parties, but they were so few and so
delightful that they only made the aching voids between ache the harder.
Becky Thatcher was gone to her Constantinople home to stay with her
parents during vacationso there was no bright side to life anywhere.
The dreadful secret of the murder was a chronic misery. It was a very
cancer for permanency and pain.
Then came the measles.
During two long weeks Tom lay a prisoner, dead to the world and its
happenings. He was very ill, he was interested in nothing. When he got
upon his feet at last and moved feebly downtown, a melancholy change
had come over everything and every creature. There had been a
"revival," and everybody had "got religion," not only the adults, but
even the boys and girls. Tom went about, hoping against hope for the
sight of one blessed sinful face, but disappointment crossed him
everywhere. He found Joe Harper studying a Testament, and turned sadly
away from the depressing spectacle. He sought Ben Rogers, and found him
visiting the poor with a basket of tracts. He hunted up Jim Hollis, who
called his attention to the precious blessing of his late measles as a
warning. Every boy he encountered added another ton to his depression
and when, in desperation, he flew for refuge at last to the bosom of
Huckleberry Finn and was received with a Scriptural quotation, his
heart broke and he crept home and to bed realizing that he alone of all
the town was lost, forever and forever.
And that night there came on a terrific storm, with driving rain,
awful claps of thunder and blinding sheets of lightning. He covered his
head with the bedclothes and waited in a horror of suspense for his
doom for he had not the shadow of a doubt that all this hubbub was
about him. He believed he had taxed the forbearance of the powers above
to the extremity of endurance and that this was the result. It might
have seemed to him a waste of pomp and ammunition to kill a bug with a
battery of artillery, but there seemed nothing incongruous about the
getting up such an expensive thunderstorm as this to knock the turf
from under an insect like himself.
By and by the tempest spent itself and died without accomplishing its
object. The boy's first impulse was to be grateful, and reform. His
second was to waitfor there might not be any more storms.
The next day the doctors were back Tom had relapsed. The three weeks
he spent on his back this time seemed an entire age. When he got abroad
at last he was hardly grateful that he had been spared, remembering how
lonely was his estate, how companionless and forlorn he was. He drifted
listlessly down the street and found Jim Hollis acting as judge in a
juvenile court that was trying a cat for murder, in the presence of her
victim, a bird. He found Joe Harper and Huck Finn up an alley eating a
stolen melon. Poor lads theylike Tomhad suffered a relapse.
CHAPTER XXIII
AT last the sleepy atmosphere was stirredand vigorously the murder
trial came on in the court. It became the absorbing topic of village
talk immediately. Tom could not get away from it. Every reference to
the murder sent a shudder to his heart, for his troubled conscience and
fears almost persuaded him that these remarks were put forth in his
hearing as "feelers" he did not see how he could be suspected of
knowing anything about the murder, but still he could not be
comfortable in the midst of this gossip. It kept him in a cold shiver
all the time. He took Huck to a lonely place to have a talk with him.
It would be some relief to unseal his tongue for a little while to
divide his burden of distress with another sufferer. Moreover, he
wanted to assure himself that Huck had remained discreet.
"Huck, have you ever told anybody aboutthat?"
"'Bout what?"
"You know what."
"Oh'course I haven't."
"Never a word?"
"Never a solitary word, so help me. What makes you ask?"
"Well, I was afeard."
"Why, Tom Sawyer, we wouldn't be alive two days if that got found out.
YOU know that."
Tom felt more comfortable. After a pause
"Huck, they couldn't anybody get you to tell, could they?"
"Get me to tell? Why, if I wanted that halfbreed devil to drownd me
they could get me to tell. They ain't no different way."
"Well, that's all right, then. I reckon we're safe as long as we keep
mum. But let's swear again, anyway. It's more surer."
"I'm agreed."
So they swore again with dread solemnities.
"What is the talk around, Huck? I've heard a power of it."
"Talk? Well, it's just Muff Potter, Muff Potter, Muff Potter all the
time. It keeps me in a sweat, constant, so's I want to hide som'ers."
"That's just the same way they go on round me. I reckon he's a goner.
Don't you feel sorry for him, sometimes?"
"Most alwaysmost always. He ain't no account but then he hain't
ever done anything to hurt anybody. Just fishes a little, to get money
to get drunk onand loafs around considerable but lord, we all do
thatleastways most of uspreachers and such like. But he's kind of
goodhe give me half a fish, once, when there warn't enough for two
and lots of times he's kind of stood by me when I was out of luck."
"Well, he's mended kites for me, Huck, and knitted hooks on to my
line. I wish we could get him out of there."
"My we couldn't get him out, Tom. And besides, 'twouldn't do any
good they'd ketch him again."
"Yesso they would. But I hate to hear 'em abuse him so like the
dickens when he never donethat."
"I do too, Tom. Lord, I hear 'em say he's the bloodiest looking
villain in this country, and they wonder he wasn't ever hung before."
"Yes, they talk like that, all the time. I've heard 'em say that if he
was to get free they'd lynch him."
"And they'd do it, too."
The boys had a long talk, but it brought them little comfort. As the
twilight drew on, they found themselves hanging about the neighborhood
of the little isolated jail, perhaps with an undefined hope that
something would happen that might clear away their difficulties. But
nothing happened there seemed to be no angels or fairies interested in
this luckless captive.
The boys did as they had often done beforewent to the cell grating
and gave Potter some tobacco and matches. He was on the ground floor
and there were no guards.
His gratitude for their gifts had always smote their consciences
beforeit cut deeper than ever, this time. They felt cowardly and
treacherous to the last degree when Potter said
"You've been mighty good to me, boysbetter'n anybody else in this
town. And I don't forget it, I don't. Often I says to myself, says I,
'I used to mend all the boys' kites and things, and show 'em where the
good fishin' places was, and befriend 'em what I could, and now they've
all forgot old Muff when he's in trouble but Tom don't, and Huck
don'tTHEY don't forget him, says I, 'and I don't forget them.' Well,
boys, I done an awful thingdrunk and crazy at the timethat's the
only way I account for itand now I got to swing for it, and it's
right. Right, and BEST, too, I reckonhope so, anyway. Well, we won't
talk about that. I don't want to make YOU feel bad you've befriended
me. But what I want to say, is, don't YOU ever get drunkthen you won't
ever get here. Stand a litter furder westsothat's it it's a prime
comfort to see faces that's friendly when a body's in such a muck of
trouble, and there don't none come here but yourn. Good friendly
facesgood friendly faces. Git up on one another's backs and let me
touch 'em. That's it. Shake handsyourn'll come through the bars, but
mine's too big. Little hands, and weakbut they've helped Muff Potter
a power, and they'd help him more if they could."
Tom went home miserable, and his dreams that night were full of
horrors. The next day and the day after, he hung about the courtroom,
drawn by an almost irresistible impulse to go in, but forcing himself
to stay out. Huck was having the same experience. They studiously
avoided each other. Each wandered away, from time to time, but the same
dismal fascination always brought them back presently. Tom kept his
ears open when idlers sauntered out of the courtroom, but invariably
heard distressing newsthe toils were closing more and more
relentlessly around poor Potter. At the end of the second day the
village talk was to the effect that Injun Joe's evidence stood firm and
unshaken, and that there was not the slightest question as to what the
jury's verdict would be.
Tom was out late, that night, and came to bed through the window. He
was in a tremendous state of excitement. It was hours before he got to
sleep. All the village flocked to the courthouse the next morning, for
this was to be the great day. Both sexes were about equally represented
in the packed audience. After a long wait the jury filed in and took
their places shortly afterward, Potter, pale and haggard, timid and
hopeless, was brought in, with chains upon him, and seated where all
the curious eyes could stare at him no less conspicuous was Injun Joe,
stolid as ever. There was another pause, and then the judge arrived and
the sheriff proclaimed the opening of the court. The usual whisperings
among the lawyers and gathering together of papers followed. These
details and accompanying delays worked up an atmosphere of preparation
that was as impressive as it was fascinating.
Now a witness was called who testified that he found Muff Potter
washing in the brook, at an early hour of the morning that the murder
was discovered, and that he immediately sneaked away. After some
further questioning, counsel for the prosecution said
"Take the witness."
The prisoner raised his eyes for a moment, but dropped them again when
his own counsel said
"I have no questions to ask him."
The next witness proved the finding of the knife near the corpse.
Counsel for the prosecution said
"Take the witness."
"I have no questions to ask him," Potter's lawyer replied.
A third witness swore he had often seen the knife in Potter's
possession.
"Take the witness."
Counsel for Potter declined to question him. The faces of the audience
began to betray annoyance. Did this attorney mean to throw away his
client's life without an effort?
Several witnesses deposed concerning Potter's guilty behavior when
brought to the scene of the murder. They were allowed to leave the
stand without being crossquestioned.
Every detail of the damaging circumstances that occurred in the
graveyard upon that morning which all present remembered so well was
brought out by credible witnesses, but none of them were crossexamined
by Potter's lawyer. The perplexity and dissatisfaction of the house
expressed itself in murmurs and provoked a reproof from the bench.
Counsel for the prosecution now said
"By the oaths of citizens whose simple word is above suspicion, we
have fastened this awful crime, beyond all possibility of question,
upon the unhappy prisoner at the bar. We rest our case here."
A groan escaped from poor Potter, and he put his face in his hands and
rocked his body softly to and fro, while a painful silence reigned in
the courtroom. Many men were moved, and many women's compassion
testified itself in tears. Counsel for the defence rose and said
"Your honor, in our remarks at the opening of this trial, we
foreshadowed our purpose to prove that our client did this fearful deed
while under the influence of a blind and irresponsible delirium
produced by drink. We have changed our mind. We shall not offer that
plea." [Then to the clerk] "Call Thomas Sawyer"
A puzzled amazement awoke in every face in the house, not even
excepting Potter's. Every eye fastened itself with wondering interest
upon Tom as he rose and took his place upon the stand. The boy looked
wild enough, for he was badly scared. The oath was administered.
"Thomas Sawyer, where were you on the seventeenth of June, about the
hour of midnight?"
Tom glanced at Injun Joe's iron face and his tongue failed him. The
audience listened breathless, but the words refused to come. After a
few moments, however, the boy got a little of his strength back, and
managed to put enough of it into his voice to make part of the house
hear
"In the graveyard"
"A little bit louder, please. Don't be afraid. You were"
"In the graveyard."
A contemptuous smile flitted across Injun Joe's face.
"Were you anywhere near Horse Williams' grave?"
"Yes, sir."
"Speak upjust a trifle louder. How near were you?"
"Near as I am to you."
"Were you hidden, or not?"
"I was hid."
"Where?"
"Behind the elms that's on the edge of the grave."
Injun Joe gave a barely perceptible start.
"Any one with you?"
"Yes, sir. I went there with"
"Waitwait a moment. Never mind mentioning your companion's name. We
will produce him at the proper time. Did you carry anything there with
you."
Tom hesitated and looked confused.
"Speak out, my boydon't be diffident. The truth is always
respectable. What did you take there?"
"Only aadead cat."
There was a ripple of mirth, which the court checked.
"We will produce the skeleton of that cat. Now, my boy, tell us
everything that occurredtell it in your own waydon't skip anything,
and don't be afraid."
Tom beganhesitatingly at first, but as he warmed to his subject his
words flowed more and more easily in a little while every sound ceased
but his own voice every eye fixed itself upon him with parted lips
and bated breath the audience hung upon his words, taking no note of
time, rapt in the ghastly fascinations of the tale. The strain upon
pent emotion reached its climax when the boy said
"and as the doctor fetched the board around and Muff Potter fell,
Injun Joe jumped with the knife and"
Crash Quick as lightning the halfbreed sprang for a window, tore his
way through all opposers, and was gone
CHAPTER XXIV
TOM was a glittering hero once morethe pet of the old, the envy of
the young. His name even went into immortal print, for the village
paper magnified him. There were some that believed he would be
President, yet, if he escaped hanging.
As usual, the fickle, unreasoning world took Muff Potter to its bosom
and fondled him as lavishly as it had abused him before. But that sort
of conduct is to the world's credit therefore it is not well to find
fault with it.
Tom's days were days of splendor and exultation to him, but his nights
were seasons of horror. Injun Joe infested all his dreams, and always
with doom in his eye. Hardly any temptation could persuade the boy to
stir abroad after nightfall. Poor Huck was in the same state of
wretchedness and terror, for Tom had told the whole story to the lawyer
the night before the great day of the trial, and Huck was sore afraid
that his share in the business might leak out, yet, notwithstanding
Injun Joe's flight had saved him the suffering of testifying in court.
The poor fellow had got the attorney to promise secrecy, but what of
that? Since Tom's harassed conscience had managed to drive him to the
lawyer's house by night and wring a dread tale from lips that had been
sealed with the dismalest and most formidable of oaths, Huck's
confidence in the human race was wellnigh obliterated.
Daily Muff Potter's gratitude made Tom glad he had spoken but nightly
he wished he had sealed up his tongue.
Half the time Tom was afraid Injun Joe would never be captured the
other half he was afraid he would be. He felt sure he never could draw
a safe breath again until that man was dead and he had seen the corpse.
Rewards had been offered, the country had been scoured, but no Injun
Joe was found. One of those omniscient and aweinspiring marvels, a
detective, came up from St. Louis, moused around, shook his head,
looked wise, and made that sort of astounding success which members of
that craft usually achieve. That is to say, he "found a clew." But you
can't hang a "clew" for murder, and so after that detective had got
through and gone home, Tom felt just as insecure as he was before.
The slow days drifted on, and each left behind it a slightly lightened
weight of apprehension.
CHAPTER XXV
THERE comes a time in every rightlyconstructed boy's life when he has
a raging desire to go somewhere and dig for hidden treasure. This
desire suddenly came upon Tom one day. He sallied out to find Joe
Harper, but failed of success. Next he sought Ben Rogers he had gone
fishing. Presently he stumbled upon Huck Finn the RedHanded. Huck
would answer. Tom took him to a private place and opened the matter to
him confidentially. Huck was willing. Huck was always willing to take a
hand in any enterprise that offered entertainment and required no
capital, for he had a troublesome superabundance of that sort of time
which is not money. "Where'll we dig?" said Huck.
"Oh, most anywhere."
"Why, is it hid all around?"
"No, indeed it ain't. It's hid in mighty particular places, Huck
sometimes on islands, sometimes in rotten chests under the end of a
limb of an old dead tree, just where the shadow falls at midnight but
mostly under the floor in ha'nted houses."
"Who hides it?"
"Why, robbers, of coursewho'd you reckon? Sundayschool
sup'rintendents?"
"I don't know. If 'twas mine I wouldn't hide it I'd spend it and have
a good time."
"So would I. But robbers don't do that way. They always hide it and
leave it there."
"Don't they come after it any more?"
"No, they think they will, but they generally forget the marks, or
else they die. Anyway, it lays there a long time and gets rusty and by
and by somebody finds an old yellow paper that tells how to find the
marksa paper that's got to be ciphered over about a week because it's
mostly signs and hy'roglyphics."
"HyroQwhich?"
"Hy'roglyphicspictures and things, you know, that don't seem to mean
anything."
"Have you got one of them papers, Tom?"
"No."
"Well then, how you going to find the marks?"
"I don't want any marks. They always bury it under a ha'nted house or
on an island, or under a dead tree that's got one limb sticking out.
Well, we've tried Jackson's Island a little, and we can try it again
some time and there's the old ha'nted house up the StillHouse branch,
and there's lots of deadlimb treesdead loads of 'em."
"Is it under all of them?"
"How you talk No"
"Then how you going to know which one to go for?"
"Go for all of 'em"
"Why, Tom, it'll take all summer."
"Well, what of that? Suppose you find a brass pot with a hundred
dollars in it, all rusty and gray, or rotten chest full of di'monds.
How's that?"
Huck's eyes glowed.
"That's bully. Plenty bully enough for me. Just you gimme the hundred
dollars and I don't want no di'monds."
"All right. But I bet you I ain't going to throw off on di'monds. Some
of 'em's worth twenty dollars apiecethere ain't any, hardly, but's
worth six bits or a dollar."
"No Is that so?"
"Cert'nlyanybody'll tell you so. Hain't you ever seen one, Huck?"
"Not as I remember."
"Oh, kings have slathers of them."
"Well, I don' know no kings, Tom."
"I reckon you don't. But if you was to go to Europe you'd see a raft
of 'em hopping around."
"Do they hop?"
"Hop?your granny No"
"Well, what did you say they did, for?"
"Shucks, I only meant you'd SEE 'emnot hopping, of coursewhat do
they want to hop for?but I mean you'd just see 'emscattered around,
you know, in a kind of a general way. Like that old humpbacked Richard."
"Richard? What's his other name?"
"He didn't have any other name. Kings don't have any but a given name."
"No?"
"But they don't."
"Well, if they like it, Tom, all right but I don't want to be a king
and have only just a given name, like a nigger. But saywhere you
going to dig first?"
"Well, I don't know. S'pose we tackle that old deadlimb tree on the
hill t'other side of StillHouse branch?"
"I'm agreed."
So they got a crippled pick and a shovel, and set out on their
threemile tramp. They arrived hot and panting, and threw themselves
down in the shade of a neighboring elm to rest and have a smoke.
"I like this," said Tom.
"So do I."
"Say, Huck, if we find a treasure here, what you going to do with your
share?"
"Well, I'll have pie and a glass of soda every day, and I'll go to
every circus that comes along. I bet I'll have a gay time."
"Well, ain't you going to save any of it?"
"Save it? What for?"
"Why, so as to have something to live on, by and by."
"Oh, that ain't any use. Pap would come back to thishyer town some
day and get his claws on it if I didn't hurry up, and I tell you he'd
clean it out pretty quick. What you going to do with yourn, Tom?"
"I'm going to buy a new drum, and a sure'nough sword, and a red
necktie and a bull pup, and get married."
"Married"
"That's it."
"Tom, youwhy, you ain't in your right mind."
"Waityou'll see."
"Well, that's the foolishest thing you could do. Look at pap and my
mother. Fight Why, they used to fight all the time. I remember, mighty
well."
"That ain't anything. The girl I'm going to marry won't fight."
"Tom, I reckon they're all alike. They'll all comb a body. Now you
better think 'bout this awhile. I tell you you better. What's the name
of the gal?"
"It ain't a gal at allit's a girl."
"It's all the same, I reckon some says gal, some says girlboth's
right, like enough. Anyway, what's her name, Tom?"
"I'll tell you some timenot now."
"All rightthat'll do. Only if you get married I'll be more lonesomer
than ever."
"No you won't. You'll come and live with me. Now stir out of this and
we'll go to digging."
They worked and sweated for half an hour. No result. They toiled
another halfhour. Still no result. Huck said
"Do they always bury it as deep as this?"
"Sometimesnot always. Not generally. I reckon we haven't got the
right place."
So they chose a new spot and began again. The labor dragged a little,
but still they made progress. They pegged away in silence for some
time. Finally Huck leaned on his shovel, swabbed the beaded drops from
his brow with his sleeve, and said
"Where you going to dig next, after we get this one?"
"I reckon maybe we'll tackle the old tree that's over yonder on
Cardiff Hill back of the widow's."
"I reckon that'll be a good one. But won't the widow take it away from
us, Tom? It's on her land."
"SHE take it away Maybe she'd like to try it once. Whoever finds one
of these hid treasures, it belongs to him. It don't make any difference
whose land it's on."
That was satisfactory. The work went on. By and by Huck said
"Blame it, we must be in the wrong place again. What do you think?"
"It is mighty curious, Huck. I don't understand it. Sometimes witches
interfere. I reckon maybe that's what's the trouble now."
"Shucks Witches ain't got no power in the daytime."
"Well, that's so. I didn't think of that. Oh, I know what the matter
is What a blamed lot of fools we are You got to find out where the
shadow of the limb falls at midnight, and that's where you dig"
"Then consound it, we've fooled away all this work for nothing. Now
hang it all, we got to come back in the night. It's an awful long way.
Can you get out?"
"I bet I will. We've got to do it tonight, too, because if somebody
sees these holes they'll know in a minute what's here and they'll go
for it."
"Well, I'll come around and maow tonight."
"All right. Let's hide the tools in the bushes."
The boys were there that night, about the appointed time. They sat in
the shadow waiting. It was a lonely place, and an hour made solemn by
old traditions. Spirits whispered in the rustling leaves, ghosts lurked
in the murky nooks, the deep baying of a hound floated up out of the
distance, an owl answered with his sepulchral note. The boys were
subdued by these solemnities, and talked little. By and by they judged
that twelve had come they marked where the shadow fell, and began to
dig. Their hopes commenced to rise. Their interest grew stronger, and
their industry kept pace with it. The hole deepened and still deepened,
but every time their hearts jumped to hear the pick strike upon
something, they only suffered a new disappointment. It was only a stone
or a chunk. At last Tom said
"It ain't any use, Huck, we're wrong again."
"Well, but we CAN'T be wrong. We spotted the shadder to a dot."
"I know it, but then there's another thing."
"What's that?".
"Why, we only guessed at the time. Like enough it was too late or too
early."
Huck dropped his shovel.
"That's it," said he. "That's the very trouble. We got to give this
one up. We can't ever tell the right time, and besides this kind of
thing's too awful, here this time of night with witches and ghosts
afluttering around so. I feel as if something's behind me all the time
and I'm afeard to turn around, becuz maybe there's others in front
awaiting for a chance. I been creeping all over, ever since I got here."
"Well, I've been pretty much so, too, Huck. They most always put in a
dead man when they bury a treasure under a tree, to look out for it."
"Lordy"
"Yes, they do. I've always heard that."
"Tom, I don't like to fool around much where there's dead people. A
body's bound to get into trouble with 'em, sure."
"I don't like to stir 'em up, either. S'pose this one here was to
stick his skull out and say something"
"Don't Tom It's awful."
"Well, it just is. Huck, I don't feel comfortable a bit."
"Say, Tom, let's give this place up, and try somewheres else."
"All right, I reckon we better."
"What'll it be?"
Tom considered awhile and then said
"The ha'nted house. That's it"
"Blame it, I don't like ha'nted houses, Tom. Why, they're a dern sight
worse'n dead people. Dead people might talk, maybe, but they don't come
sliding around in a shroud, when you ain't noticing, and peep over your
shoulder all of a sudden and grit their teeth, the way a ghost does. I
couldn't stand such a thing as that, Tomnobody could."
"Yes, but, Huck, ghosts don't travel around only at night. They won't
hender us from digging there in the daytime."
"Well, that's so. But you know mighty well people don't go about that
ha'nted house in the day nor the night."
"Well, that's mostly because they don't like to go where a man's been
murdered, anywaybut nothing's ever been seen around that house except
in the nightjust some blue lights slipping by the windowsno regular
ghosts."
"Well, where you see one of them blue lights flickering around, Tom,
you can bet there's a ghost mighty close behind it. It stands to
reason. Becuz you know that they don't anybody but ghosts use 'em."
"Yes, that's so. But anyway they don't come around in the daytime, so
what's the use of our being afeard?"
"Well, all right. We'll tackle the ha'nted house if you say sobut I
reckon it's taking chances."
They had started down the hill by this time. There in the middle of
the moonlit valley below them stood the "ha'nted" house, utterly
isolated, its fences gone long ago, rank weeds smothering the very
doorsteps, the chimney crumbled to ruin, the windowsashes vacant, a
corner of the roof caved in. The boys gazed awhile, half expecting to
see a blue light flit past a window then talking in a low tone, as
befitted the time and the circumstances, they struck far off to the
right, to give the haunted house a wide berth, and took their way
homeward through the woods that adorned the rearward side of Cardiff
Hill.
CHAPTER XXVI
ABOUT noon the next day the boys arrived at the dead tree they had
come for their tools. Tom was impatient to go to the haunted house
Huck was measurably so, alsobut suddenly said
"Lookyhere, Tom, do you know what day it is?"
Tom mentally ran over the days of the week, and then quickly lifted
his eyes with a startled look in them
"My I never once thought of it, Huck"
"Well, I didn't neither, but all at once it popped onto me that it was
Friday."
"Blame it, a body can't be too careful, Huck. We might 'a' got into an
awful scrape, tackling such a thing on a Friday."
"MIGHT Better say we WOULD There's some lucky days, maybe, but
Friday ain't."
"Any fool knows that. I don't reckon YOU was the first that found it
out, Huck."
"Well, I never said I was, did I? And Friday ain't all, neither. I had
a rotten bad dream last nightdreampt about rats."
"No Sure sign of trouble. Did they fight?"
"No."
"Well, that's good, Huck. When they don't fight it's only a sign that
there's trouble around, you know. All we got to do is to look mighty
sharp and keep out of it. We'll drop this thing for today, and play.
Do you know Robin Hood, Huck?"
"No. Who's Robin Hood?"
"Why, he was one of the greatest men that was ever in Englandand the
best. He was a robber."
"Cracky, I wisht I was. Who did he rob?"
"Only sheriffs and bishops and rich people and kings, and such like.
But he never bothered the poor. He loved 'em. He always divided up with
'em perfectly square."
"Well, he must 'a' been a brick."
"I bet you he was, Huck. Oh, he was the noblest man that ever was.
They ain't any such men now, I can tell you. He could lick any man in
England, with one hand tied behind him and he could take his yew bow
and plug a tencent piece every time, a mile and a half."
"What's a YEW bow?"
"I don't know. It's some kind of a bow, of course. And if he hit that
dime only on the edge he would set down and cryand curse. But we'll
play Robin Hoodit's nobby fun. I'll learn you."
"I'm agreed."
So they played Robin Hood all the afternoon, now and then casting a
yearning eye down upon the haunted house and passing a remark about the
morrow's prospects and possibilities there. As the sun began to sink
into the west they took their way homeward athwart the long shadows of
the trees and soon were buried from sight in the forests of Cardiff
Hill.
On Saturday, shortly after noon, the boys were at the dead tree again.
They had a smoke and a chat in the shade, and then dug a little in
their last hole, not with great hope, but merely because Tom said there
were so many cases where people had given up a treasure after getting
down within six inches of it, and then somebody else had come along and
turned it up with a single thrust of a shovel. The thing failed this
time, however, so the boys shouldered their tools and went away feeling
that they had not trifled with fortune, but had fulfilled all the
requirements that belong to the business of treasurehunting.
When they reached the haunted house there was something so weird and
grisly about the dead silence that reigned there under the baking sun,
and something so depressing about the loneliness and desolation of the
place, that they were afraid, for a moment, to venture in. Then they
crept to the door and took a trembling peep. They saw a weedgrown,
floorless room, unplastered, an ancient fireplace, vacant windows, a
ruinous staircase and here, there, and everywhere hung ragged and
abandoned cobwebs. They presently entered, softly, with quickened
pulses, talking in whispers, ears alert to catch the slightest sound,
and muscles tense and ready for instant retreat.
In a little while familiarity modified their fears and they gave the
place a critical and interested examination, rather admiring their own
boldness, and wondering at it, too. Next they wanted to look upstairs.
This was something like cutting off retreat, but they got to daring
each other, and of course there could be but one resultthey threw
their tools into a corner and made the ascent. Up there were the same
signs of decay. In one corner they found a closet that promised
mystery, but the promise was a fraudthere was nothing in it. Their
courage was up now and well in hand. They were about to go down and
begin work when
"Sh" said Tom.
"What is it?" whispered Huck, blanching with fright.
"Sh... There... Hear it?"
"Yes... Oh, my Let's run"
"Keep still Don't you budge They're coming right toward the door."
The boys stretched themselves upon the floor with their eyes to
knotholes in the planking, and lay waiting, in a misery of fear.
"They've stopped.... Nocoming.... Here they are. Don't whisper
another word, Huck. My goodness, I wish I was out of this"
Two men entered. Each boy said to himself "There's the old deaf and
dumb Spaniard that's been about town once or twice latelynever saw
t'other man before."
"T'other" was a ragged, unkempt creature, with nothing very pleasant
in his face. The Spaniard was wrapped in a serape he had bushy white
whiskers long white hair flowed from under his sombrero, and he wore
green goggles. When they came in, "t'other" was talking in a low voice
they sat down on the ground, facing the door, with their backs to the
wall, and the speaker continued his remarks. His manner became less
guarded and his words more distinct as he proceeded
"No," said he, "I've thought it all over, and I don't like it. It's
dangerous."
"Dangerous" grunted the "deaf and dumb" Spaniardto the vast
surprise of the boys. "Milksop"
This voice made the boys gasp and quake. It was Injun Joe's There was
silence for some time. Then Joe said
"What's any more dangerous than that job up yonderbut nothing's come
of it."
"That's different. Away up the river so, and not another house about.
'Twon't ever be known that we tried, anyway, long as we didn't succeed."
"Well, what's more dangerous than coming here in the daytimeanybody
would suspicion us that saw us."
"I know that. But there warn't any other place as handy after that
fool of a job. I want to quit this shanty. I wanted to yesterday, only
it warn't any use trying to stir out of here, with those infernal boys
playing over there on the hill right in full view."
"Those infernal boys" quaked again under the inspiration of this
remark, and thought how lucky it was that they had remembered it was
Friday and concluded to wait a day. They wished in their hearts they
had waited a year.
The two men got out some food and made a luncheon. After a long and
thoughtful silence, Injun Joe said
"Look here, ladyou go back up the river where you belong. Wait there
till you hear from me. I'll take the chances on dropping into this town
just once more, for a look. We'll do that 'dangerous' job after I've
spied around a little and think things look well for it. Then for
Texas We'll leg it together"
This was satisfactory. Both men presently fell to yawning, and Injun
Joe said
"I'm dead for sleep It's your turn to watch."
He curled down in the weeds and soon began to snore. His comrade
stirred him once or twice and he became quiet. Presently the watcher
began to nod his head drooped lower and lower, both men began to snore
now.
The boys drew a long, grateful breath. Tom whispered
"Now's our chancecome"
Huck said
"I can'tI'd die if they was to wake."
Tom urgedHuck held back. At last Tom rose slowly and softly, and
started alone. But the first step he made wrung such a hideous creak
from the crazy floor that he sank down almost dead with fright. He
never made a second attempt. The boys lay there counting the dragging
moments till it seemed to them that time must be done and eternity
growing gray and then they were grateful to note that at last the sun
was setting.
Now one snore ceased. Injun Joe sat up, stared aroundsmiled grimly
upon his comrade, whose head was drooping upon his kneesstirred him
up with his foot and said
"Here YOU'RE a watchman, ain't you All right, thoughnothing's
happened."
"My have I been asleep?"
"Oh, partly, partly. Nearly time for us to be moving, pard. What'll we
do with what little swag we've got left?"
"I don't knowleave it here as we've always done, I reckon. No use to
take it away till we start south. Six hundred and fifty in silver's
something to carry."
"Wellall rightit won't matter to come here once more."
"Nobut I'd say come in the night as we used to doit's better."
"Yes but look here it may be a good while before I get the right
chance at that job accidents might happen 'tain't in such a very good
place we'll just regularly bury itand bury it deep."
"Good idea," said the comrade, who walked across the room, knelt down,
raised one of the rearward hearthstones and took out a bag that
jingled pleasantly. He subtracted from it twenty or thirty dollars for
himself and as much for Injun Joe, and passed the bag to the latter,
who was on his knees in the corner, now, digging with his bowieknife.
The boys forgot all their fears, all their miseries in an instant.
With gloating eyes they watched every movement. Luckthe splendor of
it was beyond all imagination Six hundred dollars was money enough to
make half a dozen boys rich Here was treasurehunting under the
happiest auspicesthere would not be any bothersome uncertainty as to
where to dig. They nudged each other every momenteloquent nudges and
easily understood, for they simply meant"Oh, but ain't you glad NOW
we're here"
Joe's knife struck upon something.
"Hello" said he.
"What is it?" said his comrade.
"Halfrotten plankno, it's a box, I believe. Herebear a hand and
we'll see what it's here for. Never mind, I've broke a hole."
He reached his hand in and drew it out
"Man, it's money"
The two men examined the handful of coins. They were gold. The boys
above were as excited as themselves, and as delighted.
Joe's comrade said
"We'll make quick work of this. There's an old rusty pick over amongst
the weeds in the corner the other side of the fireplaceI saw it a
minute ago."
He ran and brought the boys' pick and shovel. Injun Joe took the pick,
looked it over critically, shook his head, muttered something to
himself, and then began to use it. The box was soon unearthed. It was
not very large it was iron bound and had been very strong before the
slow years had injured it. The men contemplated the treasure awhile in
blissful silence.
"Pard, there's thousands of dollars here," said Injun Joe.
"'Twas always said that Murrel's gang used to be around here one
summer," the stranger observed.
"I know it," said Injun Joe "and this looks like it, I should say."
"Now you won't need to do that job."
The halfbreed frowned. Said he
"You don't know me. Least you don't know all about that thing. 'Tain't
robbery altogetherit's REVENGE" and a wicked light flamed in his
eyes. "I'll need your help in it. When it's finishedthen Texas. Go
home to your Nance and your kids, and stand by till you hear from me."
"Wellif you say so what'll we do with thisbury it again?"
"Yes. [Ravishing delight overhead.] NO by the great Sachem, no
[Profound distress overhead.] I'd nearly forgot. That pick had fresh
earth on it [The boys were sick with terror in a moment.] What
business has a pick and a shovel here? What business with fresh earth
on them? Who brought them hereand where are they gone? Have you heard
anybody?seen anybody? What bury it again and leave them to come and
see the ground disturbed? Not exactlynot exactly. We'll take it to my
den."
"Why, of course Might have thought of that before. You mean Number
One?"
"NoNumber Twounder the cross. The other place is badtoo common."
"All right. It's nearly dark enough to start."
Injun Joe got up and went about from window to window cautiously
peeping out. Presently he said
"Who could have brought those tools here? Do you reckon they can be
upstairs?"
The boys' breath forsook them. Injun Joe put his hand on his knife,
halted a moment, undecided, and then turned toward the stairway. The
boys thought of the closet, but their strength was gone. The steps came
creaking up the stairsthe intolerable distress of the situation woke
the stricken resolution of the ladsthey were about to spring for the
closet, when there was a crash of rotten timbers and Injun Joe landed
on the ground amid the debris of the ruined stairway. He gathered
himself up cursing, and his comrade said
"Now what's the use of all that? If it's anybody, and they're up
there, let them STAY therewho cares? If they want to jump down, now,
and get into trouble, who objects? It will be dark in fifteen minutes
and then let them follow us if they want to. I'm willing. In my
opinion, whoever hove those things in here caught a sight of us and
took us for ghosts or devils or something. I'll bet they're running
yet."
Joe grumbled awhile then he agreed with his friend that what daylight
was left ought to be economized in getting things ready for leaving.
Shortly afterward they slipped out of the house in the deepening
twilight, and moved toward the river with their precious box.
Tom and Huck rose up, weak but vastly relieved, and stared after them
through the chinks between the logs of the house. Follow? Not they.
They were content to reach ground again without broken necks, and take
the townward track over the hill. They did not talk much. They were too
much absorbed in hating themselveshating the ill luck that made them
take the spade and the pick there. But for that, Injun Joe never would
have suspected. He would have hidden the silver with the gold to wait
there till his "revenge" was satisfied, and then he would have had the
misfortune to find that money turn up missing. Bitter, bitter luck that
the tools were ever brought there
They resolved to keep a lookout for that Spaniard when he should come
to town spying out for chances to do his revengeful job, and follow him
to "Number Two," wherever that might be. Then a ghastly thought
occurred to Tom.
"Revenge? What if he means US, Huck"
"Oh, don't" said Huck, nearly fainting.
They talked it all over, and as they entered town they agreed to
believe that he might possibly mean somebody elseat least that he
might at least mean nobody but Tom, since only Tom had testified.
Very, very small comfort it was to Tom to be alone in danger Company
would be a palpable improvement, he thought.
CHAPTER XXVII
THE adventure of the day mightily tormented Tom's dreams that night.
Four times he had his hands on that rich treasure and four times it
wasted to nothingness in his fingers as sleep forsook him and
wakefulness brought back the hard reality of his misfortune. As he lay
in the early morning recalling the incidents of his great adventure, he
noticed that they seemed curiously subdued and far awaysomewhat as if
they had happened in another world, or in a time long gone by. Then it
occurred to him that the great adventure itself must be a dream There
was one very strong argument in favor of this ideanamely, that the
quantity of coin he had seen was too vast to be real. He had never seen
as much as fifty dollars in one mass before, and he was like all boys
of his age and station in life, in that he imagined that all references
to "hundreds" and "thousands" were mere fanciful forms of speech, and
that no such sums really existed in the world. He never had supposed
for a moment that so large a sum as a hundred dollars was to be found
in actual money in any one's possession. If his notions of hidden
treasure had been analyzed, they would have been found to consist of a
handful of real dimes and a bushel of vague, splendid, ungraspable
dollars.
But the incidents of his adventure grew sensibly sharper and clearer
under the attrition of thinking them over, and so he presently found
himself leaning to the impression that the thing might not have been a
dream, after all. This uncertainty must be swept away. He would snatch
a hurried breakfast and go and find Huck. Huck was sitting on the
gunwale of a flatboat, listlessly dangling his feet in the water and
looking very melancholy. Tom concluded to let Huck lead up to the
subject. If he did not do it, then the adventure would be proved to
have been only a dream.
"Hello, Huck"
"Hello, yourself."
Silence, for a minute.
"Tom, if we'd 'a' left the blame tools at the dead tree, we'd 'a' got
the money. Oh, ain't it awful"
"'Tain't a dream, then, 'tain't a dream Somehow I most wish it was.
Dog'd if I don't, Huck."
"What ain't a dream?"
"Oh, that thing yesterday. I been half thinking it was."
"Dream If them stairs hadn't broke down you'd 'a' seen how much dream
it was I've had dreams enough all nightwith that patcheyed Spanish
devil going for me all through 'emrot him"
"No, not rot him. FIND him Track the money"
"Tom, we'll never find him. A feller don't have only one chance for
such a pileand that one's lost. I'd feel mighty shaky if I was to see
him, anyway."
"Well, so'd I but I'd like to see him, anywayand track him outto
his Number Two."
"Number Twoyes, that's it. I been thinking 'bout that. But I can't
make nothing out of it. What do you reckon it is?"
"I dono. It's too deep. Say, Huckmaybe it's the number of a house"
"Goody... No, Tom, that ain't it. If it is, it ain't in this
onehorse town. They ain't no numbers here."
"Well, that's so. Lemme think a minute. Hereit's the number of a
roomin a tavern, you know"
"Oh, that's the trick They ain't only two taverns. We can find out
quick."
"You stay here, Huck, till I come."
Tom was off at once. He did not care to have Huck's company in public
places. He was gone half an hour. He found that in the best tavern, No.
 had long been occupied by a young lawyer, and was still so occupied.
In the less ostentatious house, No.  was a mystery. The
tavernkeeper's young son said it was kept locked all the time, and he
never saw anybody go into it or come out of it except at night he did
not know any particular reason for this state of things had had some
little curiosity, but it was rather feeble had made the most of the
mystery by entertaining himself with the idea that that room was
"ha'nted" had noticed that there was a light in there the night before.
"That's what I've found out, Huck. I reckon that's the very No. 
we're after."
"I reckon it is, Tom. Now what you going to do?"
"Lemme think."
Tom thought a long time. Then he said
"I'll tell you. The back door of that No.  is the door that comes out
into that little close alley between the tavern and the old rattle trap
of a brick store. Now you get hold of all the doorkeys you can find,
and I'll nip all of auntie's, and the first dark night we'll go there
and try 'em. And mind you, keep a lookout for Injun Joe, because he
said he was going to drop into town and spy around once more for a
chance to get his revenge. If you see him, you just follow him and if
he don't go to that No. , that ain't the place."
"Lordy, I don't want to foller him by myself"
"Why, it'll be night, sure. He mightn't ever see youand if he did,
maybe he'd never think anything."
"Well, if it's pretty dark I reckon I'll track him. I donoI dono.
I'll try."
"You bet I'll follow him, if it's dark, Huck. Why, he might 'a' found
out he couldn't get his revenge, and be going right after that money."
"It's so, Tom, it's so. I'll foller him I will, by jingoes"
"Now you're TALKING Don't you ever weaken, Huck, and I won't."
CHAPTER XXVIII
THAT night Tom and Huck were ready for their adventure. They hung
about the neighborhood of the tavern until after nine, one watching the
alley at a distance and the other the tavern door. Nobody entered the
alley or left it nobody resembling the Spaniard entered or left the
tavern door. The night promised to be a fair one so Tom went home with
the understanding that if a considerable degree of darkness came on,
Huck was to come and "maow," whereupon he would slip out and try the
keys. But the night remained clear, and Huck closed his watch and
retired to bed in an empty sugar hogshead about twelve.
Tuesday the boys had the same ill luck. Also Wednesday. But Thursday
night promised better. Tom slipped out in good season with his aunt's
old tin lantern, and a large towel to blindfold it with. He hid the
lantern in Huck's sugar hogshead and the watch began. An hour before
midnight the tavern closed up and its lights the only ones
thereabouts were put out. No Spaniard had been seen. Nobody had
entered or left the alley. Everything was auspicious. The blackness of
darkness reigned, the perfect stillness was interrupted only by
occasional mutterings of distant thunder.
Tom got his lantern, lit it in the hogshead, wrapped it closely in the
towel, and the two adventurers crept in the gloom toward the tavern.
Huck stood sentry and Tom felt his way into the alley. Then there was a
season of waiting anxiety that weighed upon Huck's spirits like a
mountain. He began to wish he could see a flash from the lanternit
would frighten him, but it would at least tell him that Tom was alive
yet. It seemed hours since Tom had disappeared. Surely he must have
fainted maybe he was dead maybe his heart had burst under terror and
excitement. In his uneasiness Huck found himself drawing closer and
closer to the alley fearing all sorts of dreadful things, and
momentarily expecting some catastrophe to happen that would take away
his breath. There was not much to take away, for he seemed only able to
inhale it by thimblefuls, and his heart would soon wear itself out, the
way it was beating. Suddenly there was a flash of light and Tom came
tearing by him "Run" said he "run, for your life"
He needn't have repeated it once was enough Huck was making thirty
or forty miles an hour before the repetition was uttered. The boys
never stopped till they reached the shed of a deserted slaughterhouse
at the lower end of the village. Just as they got within its shelter
the storm burst and the rain poured down. As soon as Tom got his breath
he said
"Huck, it was awful I tried two of the keys, just as soft as I could
but they seemed to make such a power of racket that I couldn't hardly
get my breath I was so scared. They wouldn't turn in the lock, either.
Well, without noticing what I was doing, I took hold of the knob, and
open comes the door It warn't locked I hopped in, and shook off the
towel, and, GREAT CAESAR'S GHOST"
"Whatwhat'd you see, Tom?"
"Huck, I most stepped onto Injun Joe's hand"
"No"
"Yes He was lying there, sound asleep on the floor, with his old
patch on his eye and his arms spread out."
"Lordy, what did you do? Did he wake up?"
"No, never budged. Drunk, I reckon. I just grabbed that towel and
started"
"I'd never 'a' thought of the towel, I bet"
"Well, I would. My aunt would make me mighty sick if I lost it."
"Say, Tom, did you see that box?"
"Huck, I didn't wait to look around. I didn't see the box, I didn't
see the cross. I didn't see anything but a bottle and a tin cup on the
floor by Injun Joe yes, I saw two barrels and lots more bottles in the
room. Don't you see, now, what's the matter with that ha'nted room?"
"How?"
"Why, it's ha'nted with whiskey Maybe ALL the Temperance Taverns have
got a ha'nted room, hey, Huck?"
"Well, I reckon maybe that's so. Who'd 'a' thought such a thing? But
say, Tom, now's a mighty good time to get that box, if Injun Joe's
drunk."
"It is, that You try it"
Huck shuddered.
"Well, noI reckon not."
"And I reckon not, Huck. Only one bottle alongside of Injun Joe ain't
enough. If there'd been three, he'd be drunk enough and I'd do it."
There was a long pause for reflection, and then Tom said
"Lookyhere, Huck, less not try that thing any more till we know Injun
Joe's not in there. It's too scary. Now, if we watch every night, we'll
be dead sure to see him go out, some time or other, and then we'll
snatch that box quicker'n lightning."
"Well, I'm agreed. I'll watch the whole night long, and I'll do it
every night, too, if you'll do the other part of the job."
"All right, I will. All you got to do is to trot up Hooper Street a
block and maowand if I'm asleep, you throw some gravel at the window
and that'll fetch me."
"Agreed, and good as wheat"
"Now, Huck, the storm's over, and I'll go home. It'll begin to be
daylight in a couple of hours. You go back and watch that long, will
you?"
"I said I would, Tom, and I will. I'll ha'nt that tavern every night
for a year I'll sleep all day and I'll stand watch all night."
"That's all right. Now, where you going to sleep?"
"In Ben Rogers' hayloft. He lets me, and so does his pap's nigger man,
Uncle Jake. I tote water for Uncle Jake whenever he wants me to, and
any time I ask him he gives me a little something to eat if he can
spare it. That's a mighty good nigger, Tom. He likes me, becuz I don't
ever act as if I was above him. Sometime I've set right down and eat
WITH him. But you needn't tell that. A body's got to do things when
he's awful hungry he wouldn't want to do as a steady thing."
"Well, if I don't want you in the daytime, I'll let you sleep. I won't
come bothering around. Any time you see something's up, in the night,
just skip right around and maow."
CHAPTER XXIX
THE first thing Tom heard on Friday morning was a glad piece of news
Judge Thatcher's family had come back to town the night before. Both
Injun Joe and the treasure sunk into secondary importance for a moment,
and Becky took the chief place in the boy's interest. He saw her and
they had an exhausting good time playing "hispy" and "gullykeeper"
with a crowd of their schoolmates. The day was completed and crowned
in a peculiarly satisfactory way Becky teased her mother to appoint
the next day for the longpromised and longdelayed picnic, and she
consented. The child's delight was boundless and Tom's not more
moderate. The invitations were sent out before sunset, and straightway
the young folks of the village were thrown into a fever of preparation
and pleasurable anticipation. Tom's excitement enabled him to keep
awake until a pretty late hour, and he had good hopes of hearing Huck's
"maow," and of having his treasure to astonish Becky and the picnickers
with, next day but he was disappointed. No signal came that night.
Morning came, eventually, and by ten or eleven o'clock a giddy and
rollicking company were gathered at Judge Thatcher's, and everything
was ready for a start. It was not the custom for elderly people to mar
the picnics with their presence. The children were considered safe
enough under the wings of a few young ladies of eighteen and a few
young gentlemen of twentythree or thereabouts. The old steam ferryboat
was chartered for the occasion presently the gay throng filed up the
main street laden with provisionbaskets. Sid was sick and had to miss
the fun Mary remained at home to entertain him. The last thing Mrs.
Thatcher said to Becky, was
"You'll not get back till late. Perhaps you'd better stay all night
with some of the girls that live near the ferrylanding, child."
"Then I'll stay with Susy Harper, mamma."
"Very well. And mind and behave yourself and don't be any trouble."
Presently, as they tripped along, Tom said to Becky
"SayI'll tell you what we'll do. 'Stead of going to Joe Harper's
we'll climb right up the hill and stop at the Widow Douglas'. She'll
have icecream She has it most every daydead loads of it. And she'll
be awful glad to have us."
"Oh, that will be fun"
Then Becky reflected a moment and said
"But what will mamma say?"
"How'll she ever know?"
The girl turned the idea over in her mind, and said reluctantly
"I reckon it's wrongbut"
"But shucks Your mother won't know, and so what's the harm? All she
wants is that you'll be safe and I bet you she'd 'a' said go there if
she'd 'a' thought of it. I know she would"
The Widow Douglas' splendid hospitality was a tempting bait. It and
Tom's persuasions presently carried the day. So it was decided to say
nothing anybody about the night's programme. Presently it occurred to
Tom that maybe Huck might come this very night and give the signal. The
thought took a deal of the spirit out of his anticipations. Still he
could not bear to give up the fun at Widow Douglas'. And why should he
give it up, he reasonedthe signal did not come the night before, so
why should it be any more likely to come tonight? The sure fun of the
evening outweighed the uncertain treasure and, boylike, he determined
to yield to the stronger inclination and not allow himself to think of
the box of money another time that day.
Three miles below town the ferryboat stopped at the mouth of a woody
hollow and tied up. The crowd swarmed ashore and soon the forest
distances and craggy heights echoed far and near with shoutings and
laughter. All the different ways of getting hot and tired were gone
through with, and byandby the rovers straggled back to camp fortified
with responsible appetites, and then the destruction of the good things
began. After the feast there was a refreshing season of rest and chat
in the shade of spreading oaks. Byandby somebody shouted
"Who's ready for the cave?"
Everybody was. Bundles of candles were procured, and straightway there
was a general scamper up the hill. The mouth of the cave was up the
hillsidean opening shaped like a letter A. Its massive oaken door
stood unbarred. Within was a small chamber, chilly as an icehouse, and
walled by Nature with solid limestone that was dewy with a cold sweat.
It was romantic and mysterious to stand here in the deep gloom and look
out upon the green valley shining in the sun. But the impressiveness of
the situation quickly wore off, and the romping began again. The moment
a candle was lighted there was a general rush upon the owner of it a
struggle and a gallant defence followed, but the candle was soon
knocked down or blown out, and then there was a glad clamor of laughter
and a new chase. But all things have an end. Byandby the procession
went filing down the steep descent of the main avenue, the flickering
rank of lights dimly revealing the lofty walls of rock almost to their
point of junction sixty feet overhead. This main avenue was not more
than eight or ten feet wide. Every few steps other lofty and still
narrower crevices branched from it on either handfor McDougal's cave
was but a vast labyrinth of crooked aisles that ran into each other and
out again and led nowhere. It was said that one might wander days and
nights together through its intricate tangle of rifts and chasms, and
never find the end of the cave and that he might go down, and down,
and still down, into the earth, and it was just the samelabyrinth
under labyrinth, and no end to any of them. No man "knew" the cave.
That was an impossible thing. Most of the young men knew a portion of
it, and it was not customary to venture much beyond this known portion.
Tom Sawyer knew as much of the cave as any one.
The procession moved along the main avenue some threequarters of a
mile, and then groups and couples began to slip aside into branch
avenues, fly along the dismal corridors, and take each other by
surprise at points where the corridors joined again. Parties were able
to elude each other for the space of half an hour without going beyond
the "known" ground.
Byandby, one group after another came straggling back to the mouth
of the cave, panting, hilarious, smeared from head to foot with tallow
drippings, daubed with clay, and entirely delighted with the success of
the day. Then they were astonished to find that they had been taking no
note of time and that night was about at hand. The clanging bell had
been calling for half an hour. However, this sort of close to the day's
adventures was romantic and therefore satisfactory. When the ferryboat
with her wild freight pushed into the stream, nobody cared sixpence for
the wasted time but the captain of the craft.
Huck was already upon his watch when the ferryboat's lights went
glinting past the wharf. He heard no noise on board, for the young
people were as subdued and still as people usually are who are nearly
tired to death. He wondered what boat it was, and why she did not stop
at the wharfand then he dropped her out of his mind and put his
attention upon his business. The night was growing cloudy and dark. Ten
o'clock came, and the noise of vehicles ceased, scattered lights began
to wink out, all straggling footpassengers disappeared, the village
betook itself to its slumbers and left the small watcher alone with the
silence and the ghosts. Eleven o'clock came, and the tavern lights were
put out darkness everywhere, now. Huck waited what seemed a weary long
time, but nothing happened. His faith was weakening. Was there any use?
Was there really any use? Why not give it up and turn in?
A noise fell upon his ear. He was all attention in an instant. The
alley door closed softly. He sprang to the corner of the brick store.
The next moment two men brushed by him, and one seemed to have
something under his arm. It must be that box So they were going to
remove the treasure. Why call Tom now? It would be absurdthe men
would get away with the box and never be found again. No, he would
stick to their wake and follow them he would trust to the darkness for
security from discovery. So communing with himself, Huck stepped out
and glided along behind the men, catlike, with bare feet, allowing
them to keep just far enough ahead not to be invisible.
They moved up the river street three blocks, then turned to the left
up a crossstreet. They went straight ahead, then, until they came to
the path that led up Cardiff Hill this they took. They passed by the
old Welshman's house, halfway up the hill, without hesitating, and
still climbed upward. Good, thought Huck, they will bury it in the old
quarry. But they never stopped at the quarry. They passed on, up the
summit. They plunged into the narrow path between the tall sumach
bushes, and were at once hidden in the gloom. Huck closed up and
shortened his distance, now, for they would never be able to see him.
He trotted along awhile then slackened his pace, fearing he was
gaining too fast moved on a piece, then stopped altogether listened
no sound none, save that he seemed to hear the beating of his own
heart. The hooting of an owl came over the hillominous sound But no
footsteps. Heavens, was everything lost He was about to spring with
winged feet, when a man cleared his throat not four feet from him
Huck's heart shot into his throat, but he swallowed it again and then
he stood there shaking as if a dozen agues had taken charge of him at
once, and so weak that he thought he must surely fall to the ground. He
knew where he was. He knew he was within five steps of the stile
leading into Widow Douglas' grounds. Very well, he thought, let them
bury it there it won't be hard to find.
Now there was a voicea very low voiceInjun Joe's
"Damn her, maybe she's got companythere's lights, late as it is."
"I can't see any."
This was that stranger's voicethe stranger of the haunted house. A
deadly chill went to Huck's heartthis, then, was the "revenge" job
His thought was, to fly. Then he remembered that the Widow Douglas had
been kind to him more than once, and maybe these men were going to
murder her. He wished he dared venture to warn her but he knew he
didn't darethey might come and catch him. He thought all this and
more in the moment that elapsed between the stranger's remark and Injun
Joe's nextwhich was
"Because the bush is in your way. Nowthis waynow you see, don't
you?"
"Yes. Well, there IS company there, I reckon. Better give it up."
"Give it up, and I just leaving this country forever Give it up and
maybe never have another chance. I tell you again, as I've told you
before, I don't care for her swagyou may have it. But her husband was
rough on memany times he was rough on meand mainly he was the
justice of the peace that jugged me for a vagrant. And that ain't all.
It ain't a millionth part of it He had me HORSEWHIPPEDhorsewhipped
in front of the jail, like a niggerwith all the town looking on
HORSEWHIPPEDdo you understand? He took advantage of me and died. But
I'll take it out of HER."
"Oh, don't kill her Don't do that"
"Kill? Who said anything about killing? I would kill HIM if he was
here but not her. When you want to get revenge on a woman you don't
kill herbosh you go for her looks. You slit her nostrilsyou notch
her ears like a sow"
"By God, that's"
"Keep your opinion to yourself It will be safest for you. I'll tie
her to the bed. If she bleeds to death, is that my fault? I'll not cry,
if she does. My friend, you'll help me in this thingfor MY sake
that's why you're hereI mightn't be able alone. If you flinch, I'll
kill you. Do you understand that? And if I have to kill you, I'll kill
herand then I reckon nobody'll ever know much about who done this
business."
"Well, if it's got to be done, let's get at it. The quicker the
betterI'm all in a shiver."
"Do it NOW? And company there? Look hereI'll get suspicious of you,
first thing you know. Nowe'll wait till the lights are outthere's
no hurry."
Huck felt that a silence was going to ensuea thing still more awful
than any amount of murderous talk so he held his breath and stepped
gingerly back planted his foot carefully and firmly, after balancing,
onelegged, in a precarious way and almost toppling over, first on one
side and then on the other. He took another step back, with the same
elaboration and the same risks then another and another, anda twig
snapped under his foot His breath stopped and he listened. There was
no soundthe stillness was perfect. His gratitude was measureless. Now
he turned in his tracks, between the walls of sumach bushesturned
himself as carefully as if he were a shipand then stepped quickly but
cautiously along. When he emerged at the quarry he felt secure, and so
he picked up his nimble heels and flew. Down, down he sped, till he
reached the Welshman's. He banged at the door, and presently the heads
of the old man and his two stalwart sons were thrust from windows.
"What's the row there? Who's banging? What do you want?"
"Let me inquick I'll tell everything."
"Why, who are you?"
"Huckleberry Finnquick, let me in"
"Huckleberry Finn, indeed It ain't a name to open many doors, I
judge But let him in, lads, and let's see what's the trouble."
"Please don't ever tell I told you," were Huck's first words when he
got in. "Please don'tI'd be killed, surebut the widow's been good
friends to me sometimes, and I want to tellI WILL tell if you'll
promise you won't ever say it was me."
"By George, he HAS got something to tell, or he wouldn't act so"
exclaimed the old man "out with it and nobody here'll ever tell, lad."
Three minutes later the old man and his sons, well armed, were up the
hill, and just entering the sumach path on tiptoe, their weapons in
their hands. Huck accompanied them no further. He hid behind a great
bowlder and fell to listening. There was a lagging, anxious silence,
and then all of a sudden there was an explosion of firearms and a cry.
Huck waited for no particulars. He sprang away and sped down the hill
as fast as his legs could carry him.
CHAPTER XXX
AS the earliest suspicion of dawn appeared on Sunday morning, Huck
came groping up the hill and rapped gently at the old Welshman's door.
The inmates were asleep, but it was a sleep that was set on a
hairtrigger, on account of the exciting episode of the night. A call
came from a window
"Who's there"
Huck's scared voice answered in a low tone
"Please let me in It's only Huck Finn"
"It's a name that can open this door night or day, ladand welcome"
These were strange words to the vagabond boy's ears, and the
pleasantest he had ever heard. He could not recollect that the closing
word had ever been applied in his case before. The door was quickly
unlocked, and he entered. Huck was given a seat and the old man and his
brace of tall sons speedily dressed themselves.
"Now, my boy, I hope you're good and hungry, because breakfast will be
ready as soon as the sun's up, and we'll have a piping hot one, too
make yourself easy about that I and the boys hoped you'd turn up and
stop here last night."
"I was awful scared," said Huck, "and I run. I took out when the
pistols went off, and I didn't stop for three mile. I've come now becuz
I wanted to know about it, you know and I come before daylight becuz I
didn't want to run across them devils, even if they was dead."
"Well, poor chap, you do look as if you'd had a hard night of itbut
there's a bed here for you when you've had your breakfast. No, they
ain't dead, ladwe are sorry enough for that. You see we knew right
where to put our hands on them, by your description so we crept along
on tiptoe till we got within fifteen feet of themdark as a cellar
that sumach path wasand just then I found I was going to sneeze. It
was the meanest kind of luck I tried to keep it back, but no use
'twas bound to come, and it did come I was in the lead with my pistol
raised, and when the sneeze started those scoundrels arustling to get
out of the path, I sung out, 'Fire boys' and blazed away at the place
where the rustling was. So did the boys. But they were off in a jiffy,
those villains, and we after them, down through the woods. I judge we
never touched them. They fired a shot apiece as they started, but their
bullets whizzed by and didn't do us any harm. As soon as we lost the
sound of their feet we quit chasing, and went down and stirred up the
constables. They got a posse together, and went off to guard the river
bank, and as soon as it is light the sheriff and a gang are going to
beat up the woods. My boys will be with them presently. I wish we had
some sort of description of those rascals'twould help a good deal.
But you couldn't see what they were like, in the dark, lad, I suppose?"
"Oh yes I saw them downtown and follered them."
"Splendid Describe themdescribe them, my boy"
"One's the old deaf and dumb Spaniard that's ben around here once or
twice, and t'other's a meanlooking, ragged"
"That's enough, lad, we know the men Happened on them in the woods
back of the widow's one day, and they slunk away. Off with you, boys,
and tell the sheriffget your breakfast tomorrow morning"
The Welshman's sons departed at once. As they were leaving the room
Huck sprang up and exclaimed
"Oh, please don't tell ANYbody it was me that blowed on them Oh,
please"
"All right if you say it, Huck, but you ought to have the credit of
what you did."
"Oh no, no Please don't tell"
When the young men were gone, the old Welshman said
"They won't telland I won't. But why don't you want it known?"
Huck would not explain, further than to say that he already knew too
much about one of those men and would not have the man know that he
knew anything against him for the whole worldhe would be killed for
knowing it, sure.
The old man promised secrecy once more, and said
"How did you come to follow these fellows, lad? Were they looking
suspicious?"
Huck was silent while he framed a duly cautious reply. Then he said
"Well, you see, I'm a kind of a hard lot,least everybody says so,
and I don't see nothing agin itand sometimes I can't sleep much, on
account of thinking about it and sort of trying to strike out a new way
of doing. That was the way of it last night. I couldn't sleep, and so I
come along upstreet 'bout midnight, aturning it all over, and when I
got to that old shackly brick store by the Temperance Tavern, I backed
up agin the wall to have another think. Well, just then along comes
these two chaps slipping along close by me, with something under their
arm, and I reckoned they'd stole it. One was asmoking, and t'other one
wanted a light so they stopped right before me and the cigars lit up
their faces and I see that the big one was the deaf and dumb Spaniard,
by his white whiskers and the patch on his eye, and t'other one was a
rusty, raggedlooking devil."
"Could you see the rags by the light of the cigars?"
This staggered Huck for a moment. Then he said
"Well, I don't knowbut somehow it seems as if I did."
"Then they went on, and you"
"Follered 'emyes. That was it. I wanted to see what was upthey
sneaked along so. I dogged 'em to the widder's stile, and stood in the
dark and heard the ragged one beg for the widder, and the Spaniard
swear he'd spile her looks just as I told you and your two"
"What The DEAF AND DUMB man said all that"
Huck had made another terrible mistake He was trying his best to keep
the old man from getting the faintest hint of who the Spaniard might
be, and yet his tongue seemed determined to get him into trouble in
spite of all he could do. He made several efforts to creep out of his
scrape, but the old man's eye was upon him and he made blunder after
blunder. Presently the Welshman said
"My boy, don't be afraid of me. I wouldn't hurt a hair of your head
for all the world. NoI'd protect youI'd protect you. This Spaniard
is not deaf and dumb you've let that slip without intending it you
can't cover that up now. You know something about that Spaniard that
you want to keep dark. Now trust metell me what it is, and trust me
I won't betray you."
Huck looked into the old man's honest eyes a moment, then bent over
and whispered in his ear
"'Tain't a Spaniardit's Injun Joe"
The Welshman almost jumped out of his chair. In a moment he said
"It's all plain enough, now. When you talked about notching ears and
slitting noses I judged that that was your own embellishment, because
white men don't take that sort of revenge. But an Injun That's a
different matter altogether."
During breakfast the talk went on, and in the course of it the old man
said that the last thing which he and his sons had done, before going
to bed, was to get a lantern and examine the stile and its vicinity for
marks of blood. They found none, but captured a bulky bundle of
"Of WHAT?"
If the words had been lightning they could not have leaped with a more
stunning suddenness from Huck's blanched lips. His eyes were staring
wide, now, and his breath suspendedwaiting for the answer. The
Welshman startedstared in returnthree secondsfive secondsten
then replied
"Of burglar's tools. Why, what's the MATTER with you?"
Huck sank back, panting gently, but deeply, unutterably grateful. The
Welshman eyed him gravely, curiouslyand presently said
"Yes, burglar's tools. That appears to relieve you a good deal. But
what did give you that turn? What were YOU expecting we'd found?"
Huck was in a close placethe inquiring eye was upon himhe would
have given anything for material for a plausible answernothing
suggested itselfthe inquiring eye was boring deeper and deepera
senseless reply offeredthere was no time to weigh it, so at a venture
he uttered itfeebly
"Sundayschool books, maybe."
Poor Huck was too distressed to smile, but the old man laughed loud
and joyously, shook up the details of his anatomy from head to foot,
and ended by saying that such a laugh was money in aman's pocket,
because it cut down the doctor's bill like everything. Then he added
"Poor old chap, you're white and jadedyou ain't well a bitno
wonder you're a little flighty and off your balance. But you'll come
out of it. Rest and sleep will fetch you out all right, I hope."
Huck was irritated to think he had been such a goose and betrayed such
a suspicious excitement, for he had dropped the idea that the parcel
brought from the tavern was the treasure, as soon as he had heard the
talk at the widow's stile. He had only thought it was not the treasure,
howeverhe had not known that it wasn'tand so the suggestion of a
captured bundle was too much for his selfpossession. But on the whole
he felt glad the little episode had happened, for now he knew beyond
all question that that bundle was not THE bundle, and so his mind was
at rest and exceedingly comfortable. In fact, everything seemed to be
drifting just in the right direction, now the treasure must be still
in No. , the men would be captured and jailed that day, and he and Tom
could seize the gold that night without any trouble or any fear of
interruption.
Just as breakfast was completed there was a knock at the door. Huck
jumped for a hidingplace, for he had no mind to be connected even
remotely with the late event. The Welshman admitted several ladies and
gentlemen, among them the Widow Douglas, and noticed that groups of
citizens were climbing up the hillto stare at the stile. So the news
had spread. The Welshman had to tell the story of the night to the
visitors. The widow's gratitude for her preservation was outspoken.
"Don't say a word about it, madam. There's another that you're more
beholden to than you are to me and my boys, maybe, but he don't allow
me to tell his name. We wouldn't have been there but for him."
Of course this excited a curiosity so vast that it almost belittled
the main matterbut the Welshman allowed it to eat into the vitals of
his visitors, and through them be transmitted to the whole town, for he
refused to part with his secret. When all else had been learned, the
widow said
"I went to sleep reading in bed and slept straight through all that
noise. Why didn't you come and wake me?"
"We judged it warn't worth while. Those fellows warn't likely to come
againthey hadn't any tools left to work with, and what was the use of
waking you up and scaring you to death? My three negro men stood guard
at your house all the rest of the night. They've just come back."
More visitors came, and the story had to be told and retold for a
couple of hours more.
There was no Sabbathschool during dayschool vacation, but everybody
was early at church. The stirring event was well canvassed. News came
that not a sign of the two villains had been yet discovered. When the
sermon was finished, Judge Thatcher's wife dropped alongside of Mrs.
Harper as she moved down the aisle with the crowd and said
"Is my Becky going to sleep all day? I just expected she would be
tired to death."
"Your Becky?"
"Yes," with a startled look"didn't she stay with you last night?"
"Why, no."
Mrs. Thatcher turned pale, and sank into a pew, just as Aunt Polly,
talking briskly with a friend, passed by. Aunt Polly said
"Goodmorning, Mrs. Thatcher. Goodmorning, Mrs. Harper. I've got a
boy that's turned up missing. I reckon my Tom stayed at your house last
nightone of you. And now he's afraid to come to church. I've got to
settle with him."
Mrs. Thatcher shook her head feebly and turned paler than ever.
"He didn't stay with us," said Mrs. Harper, beginning to look uneasy.
A marked anxiety came into Aunt Polly's face.
"Joe Harper, have you seen my Tom this morning?"
"No'm."
"When did you see him last?"
Joe tried to remember, but was not sure he could say. The people had
stopped moving out of church. Whispers passed along, and a boding
uneasiness took possession of every countenance. Children were
anxiously questioned, and young teachers. They all said they had not
noticed whether Tom and Becky were on board the ferryboat on the
homeward trip it was dark no one thought of inquiring if any one was
missing. One young man finally blurted out his fear that they were
still in the cave Mrs. Thatcher swooned away. Aunt Polly fell to
crying and wringing her hands.
The alarm swept from lip to lip, from group to group, from street to
street, and within five minutes the bells were wildly clanging and the
whole town was up The Cardiff Hill episode sank into instant
insignificance, the burglars were forgotten, horses were saddled,
skiffs were manned, the ferryboat ordered out, and before the horror
was half an hour old, two hundred men were pouring down highroad and
river toward the cave.
All the long afternoon the village seemed empty and dead. Many women
visited Aunt Polly and Mrs. Thatcher and tried to comfort them. They
cried with them, too, and that was still better than words. All the
tedious night the town waited for news but when the morning dawned at
last, all the word that came was, "Send more candlesand send food."
Mrs. Thatcher was almost crazed and Aunt Polly, also. Judge Thatcher
sent messages of hope and encouragement from the cave, but they
conveyed no real cheer.
The old Welshman came home toward daylight, spattered with
candlegrease, smeared with clay, and almost worn out. He found Huck
still in the bed that had been provided for him, and delirious with
fever. The physicians were all at the cave, so the Widow Douglas came
and took charge of the patient. She said she would do her best by him,
because, whether he was good, bad, or indifferent, he was the Lord's,
and nothing that was the Lord's was a thing to be neglected. The
Welshman said Huck had good spots in him, and the widow said
"You can depend on it. That's the Lord's mark. He don't leave it off.
He never does. Puts it somewhere on every creature that comes from his
hands."
Early in the forenoon parties of jaded men began to straggle into the
village, but the strongest of the citizens continued searching. All the
news that could be gained was that remotenesses of the cavern were
being ransacked that had never been visited before that every corner
and crevice was going to be thoroughly searched that wherever one
wandered through the maze of passages, lights were to be seen flitting
hither and thither in the distance, and shoutings and pistolshots sent
their hollow reverberations to the ear down the sombre aisles. In one
place, far from the section usually traversed by tourists, the names
"BECKY  TOM" had been found traced upon the rocky wall with
candlesmoke, and near at hand a greasesoiled bit of ribbon. Mrs.
Thatcher recognized the ribbon and cried over it. She said it was the
last relic she should ever have of her child and that no other memorial
of her could ever be so precious, because this one parted latest from
the living body before the awful death came. Some said that now and
then, in the cave, a faraway speck of light would glimmer, and then a
glorious shout would burst forth and a score of men go trooping down the
echoing aisleand then a sickening disappointment always followed the
children were not there it was only a searcher's light.
Three dreadful days and nights dragged their tedious hours along, and
the village sank into a hopeless stupor. No one had heart for anything.
The accidental discovery, just made, that the proprietor of the
Temperance Tavern kept liquor on his premises, scarcely fluttered the
public pulse, tremendous as the fact was. In a lucid interval, Huck
feebly led up to the subject of taverns, and finally askeddimly
dreading the worstif anything had been discovered at the Temperance
Tavern since he had been ill.
"Yes," said the widow.
Huck started up in bed, wildeyed
"What? What was it?"
"Liquorand the place has been shut up. Lie down, childwhat a turn
you did give me"
"Only tell me just one thingonly just oneplease Was it Tom Sawyer
that found it?"
The widow burst into tears. "Hush, hush, child, hush I've told you
before, you must NOT talk. You are very, very sick"
Then nothing but liquor had been found there would have been a great
powwow if it had been the gold. So the treasure was gone forevergone
forever But what could she be crying about? Curious that she should
cry.
These thoughts worked their dim way through Huck's mind, and under the
weariness they gave him he fell asleep. The widow said to herself
"Therehe's asleep, poor wreck. Tom Sawyer find it Pity but somebody
could find Tom Sawyer Ah, there ain't many left, now, that's got hope
enough, or strength enough, either, to go on searching."
CHAPTER XXXI
NOW to return to Tom and Becky's share in the picnic. They tripped
along the murky aisles with the rest of the company, visiting the
familiar wonders of the cavewonders dubbed with rather
overdescriptive names, such as "The DrawingRoom," "The Cathedral,"
"Aladdin's Palace," and so on. Presently the hideandseek frolicking
began, and Tom and Becky engaged in it with zeal until the exertion
began to grow a trifle wearisome then they wandered down a sinuous
avenue holding their candles aloft and reading the tangled webwork of
names, dates, postoffice addresses, and mottoes with which the rocky
walls had been frescoed in candlesmoke. Still drifting along and
talking, they scarcely noticed that they were now in a part of the cave
whose walls were not frescoed. They smoked their own names under an
overhanging shelf and moved on. Presently they came to a place where a
little stream of water, trickling over a ledge and carrying a limestone
sediment with it, had, in the slowdragging ages, formed a laced and
ruffled Niagara in gleaming and imperishable stone. Tom squeezed his
small body behind it in order to illuminate it for Becky's
gratification. He found that it curtained a sort of steep natural
stairway which was enclosed between narrow walls, and at once the
ambition to be a discoverer seized him. Becky responded to his call,
and they made a smokemark for future guidance, and started upon their
quest. They wound this way and that, far down into the secret depths of
the cave, made another mark, and branched off in search of novelties to
tell the upper world about. In one place they found a spacious cavern,
from whose ceiling depended a multitude of shining stalactites of the
length and circumference of a man's leg they walked all about it,
wondering and admiring, and presently left it by one of the numerous
passages that opened into it. This shortly brought them to a bewitching
spring, whose basin was incrusted with a frostwork of glittering
crystals it was in the midst of a cavern whose walls were supported by
many fantastic pillars which had been formed by the joining of great
stalactites and stalagmites together, the result of the ceaseless
waterdrip of centuries. Under the roof vast knots of bats had packed
themselves together, thousands in a bunch the lights disturbed the
creatures and they came flocking down by hundreds, squeaking and
darting furiously at the candles. Tom knew their ways and the danger of
this sort of conduct. He seized Becky's hand and hurried her into the
first corridor that offered and none too soon, for a bat struck
Becky's light out with its wing while she was passing out of the
cavern. The bats chased the children a good distance but the fugitives
plunged into every new passage that offered, and at last got rid of the
perilous things. Tom found a subterranean lake, shortly, which
stretched its dim length away until its shape was lost in the shadows.
He wanted to explore its borders, but concluded that it would be best
to sit down and rest awhile, first. Now, for the first time, the deep
stillness of the place laid a clammy hand upon the spirits of the
children. Becky said
"Why, I didn't notice, but it seems ever so long since I heard any of
the others."
"Come to think, Becky, we are away down below themand I don't know
how far away north, or south, or east, or whichever it is. We couldn't
hear them here."
Becky grew apprehensive.
"I wonder how long we've been down here, Tom? We better start back."
"Yes, I reckon we better. P'raps we better."
"Can you find the way, Tom? It's all a mixedup crookedness to me."
"I reckon I could find itbut then the bats. If they put our candles
out it will be an awful fix. Let's try some other way, so as not to go
through there."
"Well. But I hope we won't get lost. It would be so awful" and the
girl shuddered at the thought of the dreadful possibilities.
They started through a corridor, and traversed it in silence a long
way, glancing at each new opening, to see if there was anything
familiar about the look of it but they were all strange. Every time
Tom made an examination, Becky would watch his face for an encouraging
sign, and he would say cheerily
"Oh, it's all right. This ain't the one, but we'll come to it right
away"
But he felt less and less hopeful with each failure, and presently
began to turn off into diverging avenues at sheer random, in desperate
hope of finding the one that was wanted. He still said it was "all
right," but there was such a leaden dread at his heart that the words
had lost their ring and sounded just as if he had said, "All is lost"
Becky clung to his side in an anguish of fear, and tried hard to keep
back the tears, but they would come. At last she said
"Oh, Tom, never mind the bats, let's go back that way We seem to get
worse and worse off all the time."
"Listen" said he.
Profound silence silence so deep that even their breathings were
conspicuous in the hush. Tom shouted. The call went echoing down the
empty aisles and died out in the distance in a faint sound that
resembled a ripple of mocking laughter.
"Oh, don't do it again, Tom, it is too horrid," said Becky.
"It is horrid, but I better, Becky they might hear us, you know," and
he shouted again.
The "might" was even a chillier horror than the ghostly laughter, it
so confessed a perishing hope. The children stood still and listened
but there was no result. Tom turned upon the back track at once, and
hurried his steps. It was but a little while before a certain
indecision in his manner revealed another fearful fact to Beckyhe
could not find his way back
"Oh, Tom, you didn't make any marks"
"Becky, I was such a fool Such a fool I never thought we might want
to come back NoI can't find the way. It's all mixed up."
"Tom, Tom, we're lost we're lost We never can get out of this awful
place Oh, why DID we ever leave the others"
She sank to the ground and burst into such a frenzy of crying that Tom
was appalled with the idea that she might die, or lose her reason. He
sat down by her and put his arms around her she buried her face in his
bosom, she clung to him, she poured out her terrors, her unavailing
regrets, and the far echoes turned them all to jeering laughter. Tom
begged her to pluck up hope again, and she said she could not. He fell
to blaming and abusing himself for getting her into this miserable
situation this had a better effect. She said she would try to hope
again, she would get up and follow wherever he might lead if only he
would not talk like that any more. For he was no more to blame than
she, she said.
So they moved on againaimlesslysimply at randomall they could do
was to move, keep moving. For a little while, hope made a show of
revivingnot with any reason to back it, but only because it is its
nature to revive when the spring has not been taken out of it by age
and familiarity with failure.
Byandby Tom took Becky's candle and blew it out. This economy meant
so much Words were not needed. Becky understood, and her hope died
again. She knew that Tom had a whole candle and three or four pieces in
his pocketsyet he must economize.
Byandby, fatigue began to assert its claims the children tried to
pay attention, for it was dreadful to think of sitting down when time
was grown to be so precious, moving, in some direction, in any
direction, was at least progress and might bear fruit but to sit down
was to invite death and shorten its pursuit.
At last Becky's frail limbs refused to carry her farther. She sat
down. Tom rested with her, and they talked of home, and the friends
there, and the comfortable beds and, above all, the light Becky cried,
and Tom tried to think of some way of comforting her, but all his
encouragements were grown threadbare with use, and sounded like
sarcasms. Fatigue bore so heavily upon Becky that she drowsed off to
sleep. Tom was grateful. He sat looking into her drawn face and saw it
grow smooth and natural under the influence of pleasant dreams and
byandby a smile dawned and rested there. The peaceful face reflected
somewhat of peace and healing into his own spirit, and his thoughts
wandered away to bygone times and dreamy memories. While he was deep in
his musings, Becky woke up with a breezy little laughbut it was
stricken dead upon her lips, and a groan followed it.
"Oh, how COULD I sleep I wish I never, never had waked No No, I
don't, Tom Don't look so I won't say it again."
"I'm glad you've slept, Becky you'll feel rested, now, and we'll find
the way out."
"We can try, Tom but I've seen such a beautiful country in my dream.
I reckon we are going there."
"Maybe not, maybe not. Cheer up, Becky, and let's go on trying."
They rose up and wandered along, hand in hand and hopeless. They tried
to estimate how long they had been in the cave, but all they knew was
that it seemed days and weeks, and yet it was plain that this could not
be, for their candles were not gone yet. A long time after thisthey
could not tell how longTom said they must go softly and listen for
dripping waterthey must find a spring. They found one presently, and
Tom said it was time to rest again. Both were cruelly tired, yet Becky
said she thought she could go a little farther. She was surprised to
hear Tom dissent. She could not understand it. They sat down, and Tom
fastened his candle to the wall in front of them with some clay.
Thought was soon busy nothing was said for some time. Then Becky broke
the silence
"Tom, I am so hungry"
Tom took something out of his pocket.
"Do you remember this?" said he.
Becky almost smiled.
"It's our weddingcake, Tom."
"YesI wish it was as big as a barrel, for it's all we've got."
"I saved it from the picnic for us to dream on, Tom, the way grownup
people do with weddingcakebut it'll be our"
She dropped the sentence where it was. Tom divided the cake and Becky
ate with good appetite, while Tom nibbled at his moiety. There was
abundance of cold water to finish the feast with. Byandby Becky
suggested that they move on again. Tom was silent a moment. Then he
said
"Becky, can you bear it if I tell you something?"
Becky's face paled, but she thought she could.
"Well, then, Becky, we must stay here, where there's water to drink.
That little piece is our last candle"
Becky gave loose to tears and wailings. Tom did what he could to
comfort her, but with little effect. At length Becky said
"Tom"
"Well, Becky?"
"They'll miss us and hunt for us"
"Yes, they will Certainly they will"
"Maybe they're hunting for us now, Tom."
"Why, I reckon maybe they are. I hope they are."
"When would they miss us, Tom?"
"When they get back to the boat, I reckon."
"Tom, it might be dark thenwould they notice we hadn't come?"
"I don't know. But anyway, your mother would miss you as soon as they
got home."
A frightened look in Becky's face brought Tom to his senses and he saw
that he had made a blunder. Becky was not to have gone home that night
The children became silent and thoughtful. In a moment a new burst of
grief from Becky showed Tom that the thing in his mind had struck hers
alsothat the Sabbath morning might be half spent before Mrs. Thatcher
discovered that Becky was not at Mrs. Harper's.
The children fastened their eyes upon their bit of candle and watched
it melt slowly and pitilessly away saw the half inch of wick stand
alone at last saw the feeble flame rise and fall, climb the thin
column of smoke, linger at its top a moment, and thenthe horror of
utter darkness reigned
How long afterward it was that Becky came to a slow consciousness that
she was crying in Tom's arms, neither could tell. All that they knew
was, that after what seemed a mighty stretch of time, both awoke out of
a dead stupor of sleep and resumed their miseries once more. Tom said
it might be Sunday, nowmaybe Monday. He tried to get Becky to talk,
but her sorrows were too oppressive, all her hopes were gone. Tom said
that they must have been missed long ago, and no doubt the search was
going on. He would shout and maybe some one would come. He tried it
but in the darkness the distant echoes sounded so hideously that he
tried it no more.
The hours wasted away, and hunger came to torment the captives again.
A portion of Tom's half of the cake was left they divided and ate it.
But they seemed hungrier than before. The poor morsel of food only
whetted desire.
Byandby Tom said
"SH Did you hear that?"
Both held their breath and listened. There was a sound like the
faintest, faroff shout. Instantly Tom answered it, and leading Becky
by the hand, started groping down the corridor in its direction.
Presently he listened again again the sound was heard, and apparently
a little nearer.
"It's them" said Tom "they're coming Come along, Beckywe're all
right now"
The joy of the prisoners was almost overwhelming. Their speed was
slow, however, because pitfalls were somewhat common, and had to be
guarded against. They shortly came to one and had to stop. It might be
three feet deep, it might be a hundredthere was no passing it at any
rate. Tom got down on his breast and reached as far down as he could.
No bottom. They must stay there and wait until the searchers came. They
listened evidently the distant shoutings were growing more distant a
moment or two more and they had gone altogether. The heartsinking
misery of it Tom whooped until he was hoarse, but it was of no use. He
talked hopefully to Becky but an age of anxious waiting passed and no
sounds came again.
The children groped their way back to the spring. The weary time
dragged on they slept again, and awoke famished and woestricken. Tom
believed it must be Tuesday by this time.
Now an idea struck him. There were some side passages near at hand. It
would be better to explore some of these than bear the weight of the
heavy time in idleness. He took a kiteline from his pocket, tied it to
a projection, and he and Becky started, Tom in the lead, unwinding the
line as he groped along. At the end of twenty steps the corridor ended
in a "jumpingoff place." Tom got down on his knees and felt below, and
then as far around the corner as he could reach with his hands
conveniently he made an effort to stretch yet a little farther to the
right, and at that moment, not twenty yards away, a human hand, holding
a candle, appeared from behind a rock Tom lifted up a glorious shout,
and instantly that hand was followed by the body it belonged toInjun
Joe's Tom was paralyzed he could not move. He was vastly gratified
the next moment, to see the "Spaniard" take to his heels and get
himself out of sight. Tom wondered that Joe had not recognized his
voice and come over and killed him for testifying in court. But the
echoes must have disguised the voice. Without doubt, that was it, he
reasoned. Tom's fright weakened every muscle in his body. He said to
himself that if he had strength enough to get back to the spring he
would stay there, and nothing should tempt him to run the risk of
meeting Injun Joe again. He was careful to keep from Becky what it was
he had seen. He told her he had only shouted "for luck."
But hunger and wretchedness rise superior to fears in the long run.
Another tedious wait at the spring and another long sleep brought
changes. The children awoke tortured with a raging hunger. Tom believed
that it must be Wednesday or Thursday or even Friday or Saturday, now,
and that the search had been given over. He proposed to explore another
passage. He felt willing to risk Injun Joe and all other terrors. But
Becky was very weak. She had sunk into a dreary apathy and would not be
roused. She said she would wait, now, where she was, and dieit would
not be long. She told Tom to go with the kiteline and explore if he
chose but she implored him to come back every little while and speak
to her and she made him promise that when the awful time came, he
would stay by her and hold her hand until all was over.
Tom kissed her, with a choking sensation in his throat, and made a
show of being confident of finding the searchers or an escape from the
cave then he took the kiteline in his hand and went groping down one
of the passages on his hands and knees, distressed with hunger and sick
with bodings of coming doom.
CHAPTER XXXII
TUESDAY afternoon came, and waned to the twilight. The village of St.
Petersburg still mourned. The lost children had not been found. Public
prayers had been offered up for them, and many and many a private
prayer that had the petitioner's whole heart in it but still no good
news came from the cave. The majority of the searchers had given up the
quest and gone back to their daily avocations, saying that it was plain
the children could never be found. Mrs. Thatcher was very ill, and a
great part of the time delirious. People said it was heartbreaking to
hear her call her child, and raise her head and listen a whole minute
at a time, then lay it wearily down again with a moan. Aunt Polly had
drooped into a settled melancholy, and her gray hair had grown almost
white. The village went to its rest on Tuesday night, sad and forlorn.
Away in the middle of the night a wild peal burst from the village
bells, and in a moment the streets were swarming with frantic halfclad
people, who shouted, "Turn out turn out they're found they're
found" Tin pans and horns were added to the din, the population massed
itself and moved toward the river, met the children coming in an open
carriage drawn by shouting citizens, thronged around it, joined its
homeward march, and swept magnificently up the main street roaring
huzzah after huzzah
The village was illuminated nobody went to bed again it was the
greatest night the little town had ever seen. During the first halfhour
a procession of villagers filed through Judge Thatcher's house, seized
the saved ones and kissed them, squeezed Mrs. Thatcher's hand, tried to
speak but couldn'tand drifted out raining tears all over the place.
Aunt Polly's happiness was complete, and Mrs. Thatcher's nearly so. It
would be complete, however, as soon as the messenger dispatched with
the great news to the cave should get the word to her husband. Tom lay
upon a sofa with an eager auditory about him and told the history of
the wonderful adventure, putting in many striking additions to adorn it
withal and closed with a description of how he left Becky and went on
an exploring expedition how he followed two avenues as far as his
kiteline would reach how he followed a third to the fullest stretch of
the kiteline, and was about to turn back when he glimpsed a faroff
speck that looked like daylight dropped the line and groped toward it,
pushed his head and shoulders through a small hole, and saw the broad
Mississippi rolling by And if it had only happened to be night he would
not have seen that speck of daylight and would not have explored that
passage any more He told how he went back for Becky and broke the good
news and she told him not to fret her with such stuff, for she was
tired, and knew she was going to die, and wanted to. He described how he
labored with her and convinced her and how she almost died for joy when
she had groped to where she actually saw the blue speck of daylight how
he pushed his way out at the hole and then helped her out how they sat
there and cried for gladness how some men came along in a skiff and Tom
hailed them and told them their situation and their famished condition
how the men didn't believe the wild tale at first, "because," said they,
"you are five miles down the river below the valley the cave is in"
then took them aboard, rowed to a house, gave them supper, made them
rest till two or three hours after dark and then brought them home.
Before daydawn, Judge Thatcher and the handful of searchers with him
were tracked out, in the cave, by the twine clews they had strung
behind them, and informed of the great news.
Three days and nights of toil and hunger in the cave were not to be
shaken off at once, as Tom and Becky soon discovered. They were
bedridden all of Wednesday and Thursday, and seemed to grow more and
more tired and worn, all the time. Tom got about, a little, on
Thursday, was downtown Friday, and nearly as whole as ever Saturday
but Becky did not leave her room until Sunday, and then she looked as
if she had passed through a wasting illness.
Tom learned of Huck's sickness and went to see him on Friday, but
could not be admitted to the bedroom neither could he on Saturday or
Sunday. He was admitted daily after that, but was warned to keep still
about his adventure and introduce no exciting topic. The Widow Douglas
stayed by to see that he obeyed. At home Tom learned of the Cardiff
Hill event also that the "ragged man's" body had eventually been found
in the river near the ferrylanding he had been drowned while trying
to escape, perhaps.
About a fortnight after Tom's rescue from the cave, he started off to
visit Huck, who had grown plenty strong enough, now, to hear exciting
talk, and Tom had some that would interest him, he thought. Judge
Thatcher's house was on Tom's way, and he stopped to see Becky. The
Judge and some friends set Tom to talking, and some one asked him
ironically if he wouldn't like to go to the cave again. Tom said he
thought he wouldn't mind it. The Judge said
"Well, there are others just like you, Tom, I've not the least doubt.
But we have taken care of that. Nobody will get lost in that cave any
more."
"Why?"
"Because I had its big door sheathed with boiler iron two weeks ago,
and triplelockedand I've got the keys."
Tom turned as white as a sheet.
"What's the matter, boy Here, run, somebody Fetch a glass of water"
The water was brought and thrown into Tom's face.
"Ah, now you're all right. What was the matter with you, Tom?"
"Oh, Judge, Injun Joe's in the cave"
CHAPTER XXXIII
WITHIN a few minutes the news had spread, and a dozen skiffloads of
men were on their way to McDougal's cave, and the ferryboat, well
filled with passengers, soon followed. Tom Sawyer was in the skiff that
bore Judge Thatcher.
When the cave door was unlocked, a sorrowful sight presented itself in
the dim twilight of the place. Injun Joe lay stretched upon the ground,
dead, with his face close to the crack of the door, as if his longing
eyes had been fixed, to the latest moment, upon the light and the cheer
of the free world outside. Tom was touched, for he knew by his own
experience how this wretch had suffered. His pity was moved, but
nevertheless he felt an abounding sense of relief and security, now,
which revealed to him in a degree which he had not fully appreciated
before how vast a weight of dread had been lying upon him since the day
he lifted his voice against this bloodyminded outcast.
Injun Joe's bowieknife lay close by, its blade broken in two. The
great foundationbeam of the door had been chipped and hacked through,
with tedious labor useless labor, too, it was, for the native rock
formed a sill outside it, and upon that stubborn material the knife had
wrought no effect the only damage done was to the knife itself. But if
there had been no stony obstruction there the labor would have been
useless still, for if the beam had been wholly cut away Injun Joe could
not have squeezed his body under the door, and he knew it. So he had
only hacked that place in order to be doing somethingin order to pass
the weary timein order to employ his tortured faculties. Ordinarily
one could find half a dozen bits of candle stuck around in the crevices
of this vestibule, left there by tourists but there were none now. The
prisoner had searched them out and eaten them. He had also contrived to
catch a few bats, and these, also, he had eaten, leaving only their
claws. The poor unfortunate had starved to death. In one place, near at
hand, a stalagmite had been slowly growing up from the ground for ages,
builded by the waterdrip from a stalactite overhead. The captive had
broken off the stalagmite, and upon the stump had placed a stone,
wherein he had scooped a shallow hollow to catch the precious drop
that fell once in every three minutes with the dreary regularity of a
clockticka dessertspoonful once in four and twenty hours. That drop
was falling when the Pyramids were new when Troy fell when the
foundations of Rome were laid when Christ was crucified when the
Conqueror created the British empire when Columbus sailed when the
massacre at Lexington was "news." It is falling now it will still be
falling when all these things shall have sunk down the afternoon of
history, and the twilight of tradition, and been swallowed up in the
thick night of oblivion. Has everything a purpose and a mission? Did
this drop fall patiently during five thousand years to be ready for
this flitting human insect's need? and has it another important object
to accomplish ten thousand years to come? No matter. It is many and
many a year since the hapless halfbreed scooped out the stone to catch
the priceless drops, but to this day the tourist stares longest at that
pathetic stone and that slowdropping water when he comes to see the
wonders of McDougal's cave. Injun Joe's cup stands first in the list of
the cavern's marvels even "Aladdin's Palace" cannot rival it.
Injun Joe was buried near the mouth of the cave and people flocked
there in boats and wagons from the towns and from all the farms and
hamlets for seven miles around they brought their children, and all
sorts of provisions, and confessed that they had had almost as
satisfactory a time at the funeral as they could have had at the
hanging.
This funeral stopped the further growth of one thingthe petition to
the governor for Injun Joe's pardon. The petition had been largely
signed many tearful and eloquent meetings had been held, and a
committee of sappy women been appointed to go in deep mourning and wail
around the governor, and implore him to be a merciful ass and trample
his duty under foot. Injun Joe was believed to have killed five
citizens of the village, but what of that? If he had been Satan himself
there would have been plenty of weaklings ready to scribble their names
to a pardonpetition, and drip a tear on it from their permanently
impaired and leaky waterworks.
The morning after the funeral Tom took Huck to a private place to have
an important talk. Huck had learned all about Tom's adventure from the
Welshman and the Widow Douglas, by this time, but Tom said he reckoned
there was one thing they had not told him that thing was what he
wanted to talk about now. Huck's face saddened. He said
"I know what it is. You got into No.  and never found anything but
whiskey. Nobody told me it was you but I just knowed it must 'a' ben
you, soon as I heard 'bout that whiskey business and I knowed you
hadn't got the money becuz you'd 'a' got at me some way or other and
told me even if you was mum to everybody else. Tom, something's always
told me we'd never get holt of that swag."
"Why, Huck, I never told on that tavernkeeper. YOU know his tavern
was all right the Saturday I went to the picnic. Don't you remember you
was to watch there that night?"
"Oh yes Why, it seems 'bout a year ago. It was that very night that I
follered Injun Joe to the widder's."
"YOU followed him?"
"Yesbut you keep mum. I reckon Injun Joe's left friends behind him,
and I don't want 'em souring on me and doing me mean tricks. If it
hadn't ben for me he'd be down in Texas now, all right."
Then Huck told his entire adventure in confidence to Tom, who had only
heard of the Welshman's part of it before.
"Well," said Huck, presently, coming back to the main question,
"whoever nipped the whiskey in No. , nipped the money, too, I reckon
anyways it's a goner for us, Tom."
"Huck, that money wasn't ever in No. "
"What" Huck searched his comrade's face keenly. "Tom, have you got on
the track of that money again?"
"Huck, it's in the cave"
Huck's eyes blazed.
"Say it again, Tom."
"The money's in the cave"
"Tomhonest injun, nowis it fun, or earnest?"
"Earnest, Huckjust as earnest as ever I was in my life. Will you go
in there with me and help get it out?"
"I bet I will I will if it's where we can blaze our way to it and not
get lost."
"Huck, we can do that without the least little bit of trouble in the
world."
"Good as wheat What makes you think the money's"
"Huck, you just wait till we get in there. If we don't find it I'll
agree to give you my drum and every thing I've got in the world. I
will, by jings."
"All rightit's a whiz. When do you say?"
"Right now, if you say it. Are you strong enough?"
"Is it far in the cave? I ben on my pins a little, three or four days,
now, but I can't walk more'n a mile, Tomleast I don't think I could."
"It's about five mile into there the way anybody but me would go,
Huck, but there's a mighty short cut that they don't anybody but me
know about. Huck, I'll take you right to it in a skiff. I'll float the
skiff down there, and I'll pull it back again all by myself. You
needn't ever turn your hand over."
"Less start right off, Tom."
"All right. We want some bread and meat, and our pipes, and a little
bag or two, and two or three kitestrings, and some of these
newfangled things they call lucifer matches. I tell you, many's
the time I wished I had some when I was in there before."
A trifle after noon the boys borrowed a small skiff from a citizen who
was absent, and got under way at once. When they were several miles
below "Cave Hollow," Tom said
"Now you see this bluff here looks all alike all the way down from the
cave hollowno houses, no woodyards, bushes all alike. But do you see
that white place up yonder where there's been a landslide? Well, that's
one of my marks. We'll get ashore, now."
They landed.
"Now, Huck, where we're astanding you could touch that hole I got out
of with a fishingpole. See if you can find it."
Huck searched all the place about, and found nothing. Tom proudly
marched into a thick clump of sumach bushes and said
"Here you are Look at it, Huck it's the snuggest hole in this
country. You just keep mum about it. All along I've been wanting to be
a robber, but I knew I'd got to have a thing like this, and where to
run across it was the bother. We've got it now, and we'll keep it
quiet, only we'll let Joe Harper and Ben Rogers inbecause of course
there's got to be a Gang, or else there wouldn't be any style about it.
Tom Sawyer's Gangit sounds splendid, don't it, Huck?"
"Well, it just does, Tom. And who'll we rob?"
"Oh, most anybody. Waylay peoplethat's mostly the way."
"And kill them?"
"No, not always. Hive them in the cave till they raise a ransom."
"What's a ransom?"
"Money. You make them raise all they can, off'n their friends and
after you've kept them a year, if it ain't raised then you kill them.
That's the general way. Only you don't kill the women. You shut up the
women, but you don't kill them. They're always beautiful and rich, and
awfully scared. You take their watches and things, but you always take
your hat off and talk polite. They ain't anybody as polite as robbers
you'll see that in any book. Well, the women get to loving you, and
after they've been in the cave a week or two weeks they stop crying and
after that you couldn't get them to leave. If you drove them out they'd
turn right around and come back. It's so in all the books."
"Why, it's real bully, Tom. I believe it's better'n to be a pirate."
"Yes, it's better in some ways, because it's close to home and
circuses and all that."
By this time everything was ready and the boys entered the hole, Tom
in the lead. They toiled their way to the farther end of the tunnel,
then made their spliced kitestrings fast and moved on. A few steps
brought them to the spring, and Tom felt a shudder quiver all through
him. He showed Huck the fragment of candlewick perched on a lump of
clay against the wall, and described how he and Becky had watched the
flame struggle and expire.
The boys began to quiet down to whispers, now, for the stillness and
gloom of the place oppressed their spirits. They went on, and presently
entered and followed Tom's other corridor until they reached the
"jumpingoff place." The candles revealed the fact that it was not
really a precipice, but only a steep clay hill twenty or thirty feet
high. Tom whispered
"Now I'll show you something, Huck."
He held his candle aloft and said
"Look as far around the corner as you can. Do you see that? Thereon
the big rock over yonderdone with candlesmoke."
"Tom, it's a CROSS"
"NOW where's your Number Two? 'UNDER THE CROSS,' hey? Right yonder's
where I saw Injun Joe poke up his candle, Huck"
Huck stared at the mystic sign awhile, and then said with a shaky voice
"Tom, less git out of here"
"What and leave the treasure?"
"Yesleave it. Injun Joe's ghost is round about there, certain."
"No it ain't, Huck, no it ain't. It would ha'nt the place where he
diedaway out at the mouth of the cavefive mile from here."
"No, Tom, it wouldn't. It would hang round the money. I know the ways
of ghosts, and so do you."
Tom began to fear that Huck was right. Misgivings gathered in his
mind. But presently an idea occurred to him
"Lookyhere, Huck, what fools we're making of ourselves Injun Joe's
ghost ain't a going to come around where there's a cross"
The point was well taken. It had its effect.
"Tom, I didn't think of that. But that's so. It's luck for us, that
cross is. I reckon we'll climb down there and have a hunt for that box."
Tom went first, cutting rude steps in the clay hill as he descended.
Huck followed. Four avenues opened out of the small cavern which the
great rock stood in. The boys examined three of them with no result.
They found a small recess in the one nearest the base of the rock, with
a pallet of blankets spread down in it also an old suspender, some
bacon rind, and the wellgnawed bones of two or three fowls. But there
was no moneybox. The lads searched and researched this place, but in
vain. Tom said
"He said UNDER the cross. Well, this comes nearest to being under the
cross. It can't be under the rock itself, because that sets solid on
the ground."
They searched everywhere once more, and then sat down discouraged.
Huck could suggest nothing. Byandby Tom said
"Lookyhere, Huck, there's footprints and some candlegrease on the
clay about one side of this rock, but not on the other sides. Now,
what's that for? I bet you the money IS under the rock. I'm going to
dig in the clay."
"That ain't no bad notion, Tom" said Huck with animation.
Tom's "real Barlow" was out at once, and he had not dug four inches
before he struck wood.
"Hey, Huckyou hear that?"
Huck began to dig and scratch now. Some boards were soon uncovered and
removed. They had concealed a natural chasm which led under the rock.
Tom got into this and held his candle as far under the rock as he
could, but said he could not see to the end of the rift. He proposed to
explore. He stooped and passed under the narrow way descended
gradually. He followed its winding course, first to the right, then to
the left, Huck at his heels. Tom turned a short curve, byandby, and
exclaimed
"My goodness, Huck, lookyhere"
It was the treasurebox, sure enough, occupying a snug little cavern,
along with an empty powderkeg, a couple of guns in leather cases, two
or three pairs of old moccasins, a leather belt, and some other rubbish
well soaked with the waterdrip.
"Got it at last" said Huck, ploughing among the tarnished coins with
his hand. "My, but we're rich, Tom"
"Huck, I always reckoned we'd get it. It's just too good to believe,
but we HAVE got it, sure Saylet's not fool around here. Let's snake
it out. Lemme see if I can lift the box."
It weighed about fifty pounds. Tom could lift it, after an awkward
fashion, but could not carry it conveniently.
"I thought so," he said "THEY carried it like it was heavy, that day
at the ha'nted house. I noticed that. I reckon I was right to think of
fetching the little bags along."
The money was soon in the bags and the boys took it up to the cross
rock.
"Now less fetch the guns and things," said Huck.
"No, Huckleave them there. They're just the tricks to have when we
go to robbing. We'll keep them there all the time, and we'll hold our
orgies there, too. It's an awful snug place for orgies."
"What orgies?"
"I dono. But robbers always have orgies, and of course we've got to
have them, too. Come along, Huck, we've been in here a long time. It's
getting late, I reckon. I'm hungry, too. We'll eat and smoke when we
get to the skiff."
They presently emerged into the clump of sumach bushes, looked warily
out, found the coast clear, and were soon lunching and smoking in the
skiff. As the sun dipped toward the horizon they pushed out and got
under way. Tom skimmed up the shore through the long twilight, chatting
cheerily with Huck, and landed shortly after dark.
"Now, Huck," said Tom, "we'll hide the money in the loft of the
widow's woodshed, and I'll come up in the morning and we'll count it
and divide, and then we'll hunt up a place out in the woods for it
where it will be safe. Just you lay quiet here and watch the stuff till
I run and hook Benny Taylor's little wagon I won't be gone a minute."
He disappeared, and presently returned with the wagon, put the two
small sacks into it, threw some old rags on top of them, and started
off, dragging his cargo behind him. When the boys reached the
Welshman's house, they stopped to rest. Just as they were about to move
on, the Welshman stepped out and said
"Hallo, who's that?"
"Huck and Tom Sawyer."
"Good Come along with me, boys, you are keeping everybody waiting.
Herehurry up, trot aheadI'll haul the wagon for you. Why, it's not
as light as it might be. Got bricks in it?or old metal?"
"Old metal," said Tom.
"I judged so the boys in this town will take more trouble and fool
away more time hunting up six bits' worth of old iron to sell to the
foundry than they would to make twice the money at regular work. But
that's human naturehurry along, hurry along"
The boys wanted to know what the hurry was about.
"Never mind you'll see, when we get to the Widow Douglas'."
Huck said with some apprehensionfor he was long used to being
falsely accused
"Mr. Jones, we haven't been doing nothing."
The Welshman laughed.
"Well, I don't know, Huck, my boy. I don't know about that. Ain't you
and the widow good friends?"
"Yes. Well, she's ben good friends to me, anyway."
"All right, then. What do you want to be afraid for?"
This question was not entirely answered in Huck's slow mind before he
found himself pushed, along with Tom, into Mrs. Douglas' drawingroom.
Mr. Jones left the wagon near the door and followed.
The place was grandly lighted, and everybody that was of any
consequence in the village was there. The Thatchers were there, the
Harpers, the Rogerses, Aunt Polly, Sid, Mary, the minister, the editor,
and a great many more, and all dressed in their best. The widow
received the boys as heartily as any one could well receive two such
looking beings. They were covered with clay and candlegrease. Aunt
Polly blushed crimson with humiliation, and frowned and shook her head
at Tom. Nobody suffered half as much as the two boys did, however. Mr.
Jones said
"Tom wasn't at home, yet, so I gave him up but I stumbled on him and
Huck right at my door, and so I just brought them along in a hurry."
"And you did just right," said the widow. "Come with me, boys."
She took them to a bedchamber and said
"Now wash and dress yourselves. Here are two new suits of clothes
shirts, socks, everything complete. They're Huck'sno, no thanks,
HuckMr. Jones bought one and I the other. But they'll fit both of you.
Get into them. We'll waitcome down when you are slicked up enough."
Then she left.
CHAPTER XXXIV
HUCK said "Tom, we can slope, if we can find a rope. The window ain't
high from the ground."
"Shucks what do you want to slope for?"
"Well, I ain't used to that kind of a crowd. I can't stand it. I ain't
going down there, Tom."
"Oh, bother It ain't anything. I don't mind it a bit. I'll take care
of you."
Sid appeared.
"Tom," said he, "auntie has been waiting for you all the afternoon.
Mary got your Sunday clothes ready, and everybody's been fretting about
you. Sayain't this grease and clay, on your clothes?"
"Now, Mr. Siddy, you jist 'tend to your own business. What's all this
blowout about, anyway?"
"It's one of the widow's parties that she's always having. This time
it's for the Welshman and his sons, on account of that scrape they
helped her out of the other night. And sayI can tell you something,
if you want to know."
"Well, what?"
"Why, old Mr. Jones is going to try to spring something on the people
here tonight, but I overheard him tell auntie today about it, as a
secret, but I reckon it's not much of a secret now. Everybody knows
the widow, too, for all she tries to let on she don't. Mr. Jones was
bound Huck should be herecouldn't get along with his grand secret
without Huck, you know"
"Secret about what, Sid?"
"About Huck tracking the robbers to the widow's. I reckon Mr. Jones
was going to make a grand time over his surprise, but I bet you it will
drop pretty flat."
Sid chuckled in a very contented and satisfied way.
"Sid, was it you that told?"
"Oh, never mind who it was. SOMEBODY toldthat's enough."
"Sid, there's only one person in this town mean enough to do that, and
that's you. If you had been in Huck's place you'd 'a' sneaked down the
hill and never told anybody on the robbers. You can't do any but mean
things, and you can't bear to see anybody praised for doing good ones.
Thereno thanks, as the widow says"and Tom cuffed Sid's ears and
helped him to the door with several kicks. "Now go and tell auntie if
you dareand tomorrow you'll catch it"
Some minutes later the widow's guests were at the suppertable, and a
dozen children were propped up at little sidetables in the same room,
after the fashion of that country and that day. At the proper time Mr.
Jones made his little speech, in which he thanked the widow for the
honor she was doing himself and his sons, but said that there was
another person whose modesty
And so forth and so on. He sprung his secret about Huck's share in the
adventure in the finest dramatic manner he was master of, but the
surprise it occasioned was largely counterfeit and not as clamorous and
effusive as it might have been under happier circumstances. However,
the widow made a pretty fair show of astonishment, and heaped so many
compliments and so much gratitude upon Huck that he almost forgot the
nearly intolerable discomfort of his new clothes in the entirely
intolerable discomfort of being set up as a target for everybody's gaze
and everybody's laudations.
The widow said she meant to give Huck a home under her roof and have
him educated and that when she could spare the money she would start
him in business in a modest way. Tom's chance was come. He said
"Huck don't need it. Huck's rich."
Nothing but a heavy strain upon the good manners of the company kept
back the due and proper complimentary laugh at this pleasant joke. But
the silence was a little awkward. Tom broke it
"Huck's got money. Maybe you don't believe it, but he's got lots of
it. Oh, you needn't smileI reckon I can show you. You just wait a
minute."
Tom ran out of doors. The company looked at each other with a
perplexed interestand inquiringly at Huck, who was tonguetied.
"Sid, what ails Tom?" said Aunt Polly. "Hewell, there ain't ever any
making of that boy out. I never"
Tom entered, struggling with the weight of his sacks, and Aunt Polly
did not finish her sentence. Tom poured the mass of yellow coin upon
the table and said
"Therewhat did I tell you? Half of it's Huck's and half of it's mine"
The spectacle took the general breath away. All gazed, nobody spoke
for a moment. Then there was a unanimous call for an explanation. Tom
said he could furnish it, and he did. The tale was long, but brimful of
interest. There was scarcely an interruption from any one to break the
charm of its flow. When he had finished, Mr. Jones said
"I thought I had fixed up a little surprise for this occasion, but it
don't amount to anything now. This one makes it sing mighty small, I'm
willing to allow."
The money was counted. The sum amounted to a little over twelve
thousand dollars. It was more than any one present had ever seen at one
time before, though several persons were there who were worth
considerably more than that in property.
CHAPTER XXXV
THE reader may rest satisfied that Tom's and Huck's windfall made a
mighty stir in the poor little village of St. Petersburg. So vast a
sum, all in actual cash, seemed next to incredible. It was talked
about, gloated over, glorified, until the reason of many of the
citizens tottered under the strain of the unhealthy excitement. Every
"haunted" house in St. Petersburg and the neighboring villages was
dissected, plank by plank, and its foundations dug up and ransacked for
hidden treasureand not by boys, but menpretty grave, unromantic
men, too, some of them. Wherever Tom and Huck appeared they were
courted, admired, stared at. The boys were not able to remember that
their remarks had possessed weight before but now their sayings were
treasured and repeated everything they did seemed somehow to be
regarded as remarkable they had evidently lost the power of doing and
saying commonplace things moreover, their past history was raked up
and discovered to bear marks of conspicuous originality. The village
paper published biographical sketches of the boys.
The Widow Douglas put Huck's money out at six per cent., and Judge
Thatcher did the same with Tom's at Aunt Polly's request. Each lad had
an income, now, that was simply prodigiousa dollar for every weekday
in the year and half of the Sundays. It was just what the minister got
no, it was what he was promisedhe generally couldn't collect it. A
dollar and a quarter a week would board, lodge, and school a boy in
those old simple daysand clothe him and wash him, too, for that
matter.
Judge Thatcher had conceived a great opinion of Tom. He said that no
commonplace boy would ever have got his daughter out of the cave. When
Becky told her father, in strict confidence, how Tom had taken her
whipping at school, the Judge was visibly moved and when she pleaded
grace for the mighty lie which Tom had told in order to shift that
whipping from her shoulders to his own, the Judge said with a fine
outburst that it was a noble, a generous, a magnanimous liea lie that
was worthy to hold up its head and march down through history breast to
breast with George Washington's lauded Truth about the hatchet Becky
thought her father had never looked so tall and so superb as when he
walked the floor and stamped his foot and said that. She went straight
off and told Tom about it.
Judge Thatcher hoped to see Tom a great lawyer or a great soldier some
day. He said he meant to look to it that Tom should be admitted to the
National Military Academy and afterward trained in the best law school
in the country, in order that he might be ready for either career or
both.
Huck Finn's wealth and the fact that he was now under the Widow
Douglas' protection introduced him into societyno, dragged him into
it, hurled him into itand his sufferings were almost more than he
could bear. The widow's servants kept him clean and neat, combed and
brushed, and they bedded him nightly in unsympathetic sheets that had
not one little spot or stain which he could press to his heart and know
for a friend. He had to eat with a knife and fork he had to use
napkin, cup, and plate he had to learn his book, he had to go to
church he had to talk so properly that speech was become insipid in
his mouth whithersoever he turned, the bars and shackles of
civilization shut him in and bound him hand and foot.
He bravely bore his miseries three weeks, and then one day turned up
missing. For fortyeight hours the widow hunted for him everywhere in
great distress. The public were profoundly concerned they searched
high and low, they dragged the river for his body. Early the third
morning Tom Sawyer wisely went poking among some old empty hogsheads
down behind the abandoned slaughterhouse, and in one of them he found
the refugee. Huck had slept there he had just breakfasted upon some
stolen odds and ends of food, and was lying off, now, in comfort, with
his pipe. He was unkempt, uncombed, and clad in the same old ruin of
rags that had made him picturesque in the days when he was free and
happy. Tom routed him out, told him the trouble he had been causing,
and urged him to go home. Huck's face lost its tranquil content, and
took a melancholy cast. He said
"Don't talk about it, Tom. I've tried it, and it don't work it don't
work, Tom. It ain't for me I ain't used to it. The widder's good to
me, and friendly but I can't stand them ways. She makes me get up just
at the same time every morning she makes me wash, they comb me all to
thunder she won't let me sleep in the woodshed I got to wear them
blamed clothes that just smothers me, Tom they don't seem to any air
git through 'em, somehow and they're so rotten nice that I can't set
down, nor lay down, nor roll around anywher's I hain't slid on a
cellardoor forwell, it 'pears to be years I got to go to church and
sweat and sweatI hate them ornery sermons I can't ketch a fly in
there, I can't chaw. I got to wear shoes all Sunday. The widder eats by
a bell she goes to bed by a bell she gits up by a belleverything's
so awful reg'lar a body can't stand it."
"Well, everybody does that way, Huck."
"Tom, it don't make no difference. I ain't everybody, and I can't
STAND it. It's awful to be tied up so. And grub comes too easyI don't
take no interest in vittles, that way. I got to ask to go afishing I
got to ask to go in aswimmingdern'd if I hain't got to ask to do
everything. Well, I'd got to talk so nice it wasn't no comfortI'd got
to go up in the attic and rip out awhile, every day, to git a taste in
my mouth, or I'd a died, Tom. The widder wouldn't let me smoke she
wouldn't let me yell, she wouldn't let me gape, nor stretch, nor
scratch, before folks" [Then with a spasm of special irritation and
injury]"And dad fetch it, she prayed all the time I never see such a
woman I HAD to shove, TomI just had to. And besides, that school's
going to open, and I'd a had to go to itwell, I wouldn't stand THAT,
Tom. Looky here, Tom, being rich ain't what it's cracked up to be. It's
just worry and worry, and sweat and sweat, and awishing you was dead
all the time. Now these clothes suits me, and this bar'l suits me, and
I ain't ever going to shake 'em any more. Tom, I wouldn't ever got into
all this trouble if it hadn't 'a' ben for that money now you just take
my sheer of it along with your'n, and gimme a tencenter sometimesnot
many times, becuz I don't give a dern for a thing 'thout it's tollable
hard to gitand you go and beg off for me with the widder."
"Oh, Huck, you know I can't do that. 'Tain't fair and besides if
you'll try this thing just a while longer you'll come to like it."
"Like it Yesthe way I'd like a hot stove if I was to set on it long
enough. No, Tom, I won't be rich, and I won't live in them cussed
smothery houses. I like the woods, and the river, and hogsheads, and
I'll stick to 'em, too. Blame it all just as we'd got guns, and a
cave, and all just fixed to rob, here this dern foolishness has got to
come up and spile it all"
Tom saw his opportunity
"Lookyhere, Huck, being rich ain't going to keep me back from turning
robber."
"No Oh, goodlicks are you in real deadwood earnest, Tom?"
"Just as dead earnest as I'm sitting here. But Huck, we can't let you
into the gang if you ain't respectable, you know."
Huck's joy was quenched.
"Can't let me in, Tom? Didn't you let me go for a pirate?"
"Yes, but that's different. A robber is more hightoned than what a
pirate isas a general thing. In most countries they're awful high up
in the nobilitydukes and such."
"Now, Tom, hain't you always ben friendly to me? You wouldn't shet me
out, would you, Tom? You wouldn't do that, now, WOULD you, Tom?"
"Huck, I wouldn't want to, and I DON'T want tobut what would people
say? Why, they'd say, 'Mph Tom Sawyer's Gang pretty low characters in
it' They'd mean you, Huck. You wouldn't like that, and I wouldn't."
Huck was silent for some time, engaged in a mental struggle. Finally
he said
"Well, I'll go back to the widder for a month and tackle it and see if
I can come to stand it, if you'll let me b'long to the gang, Tom."
"All right, Huck, it's a whiz Come along, old chap, and I'll ask the
widow to let up on you a little, Huck."
"Will you, Tomnow will you? That's good. If she'll let up on some of
the roughest things, I'll smoke private and cuss private, and crowd
through or bust. When you going to start the gang and turn robbers?"
"Oh, right off. We'll get the boys together and have the initiation
tonight, maybe."
"Have the which?"
"Have the initiation."
"What's that?"
"It's to swear to stand by one another, and never tell the gang's
secrets, even if you're chopped all to flinders, and kill anybody and
all his family that hurts one of the gang."
"That's gaythat's mighty gay, Tom, I tell you."
"Well, I bet it is. And all that swearing's got to be done at
midnight, in the lonesomest, awfulest place you can finda ha'nted
house is the best, but they're all ripped up now."
"Well, midnight's good, anyway, Tom."
"Yes, so it is. And you've got to swear on a coffin, and sign it with
blood."
"Now, that's something LIKE Why, it's a million times bullier than
pirating. I'll stick to the widder till I rot, Tom and if I git to be
a reg'lar ripper of a robber, and everybody talking 'bout it, I reckon
she'll be proud she snaked me in out of the wet."
CONCLUSION
SO endeth this chronicle. It being strictly a history of a BOY, it
must stop here the story could not go much further without becoming
the history of a MAN. When one writes a novel about grown people, he
knows exactly where to stopthat is, with a marriage but when he
writes of juveniles, he must stop where he best can.
Most of the characters that perform in this book still live, and are
prosperous and happy. Some day it may seem worth while to take up the
story of the younger ones again and see what sort of men and women they
turned out to be therefore it will be wisest not to reveal any of that
part of their lives at present.
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by Mark Twain Samuel Clemens
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Title Ulysses
Author James Joyce
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Ulysses by James Joyce
I 
STATELY, PLUMP BUCK MULLIGAN CAME FROM THE STAIRHEAD, bearing a bowl of
lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown,
ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He
held the bowl aloft and intoned
INTROIBO AD ALTARE DEI.
Halted, he peered down the dark winding stairs and called out coarsely
Come up, Kinch Come up, you fearful jesuit
Solemnly he came forward and mounted the round gunrest. He faced about
and blessed gravely thrice the tower, the surrounding land and the
awaking mountains. Then, catching sight of Stephen Dedalus, he bent
towards him and made rapid crosses in the air, gurgling in his throat and
shaking his head. Stephen Dedalus, displeased and sleepy, leaned his arms
on the top of the staircase and looked coldly at the shaking gurgling
face that blessed him, equine in its length, and at the light untonsured
hair, grained and hued like pale oak.
Buck Mulligan peeped an instant under the mirror and then covered
the bowl smartly.
Back to barracks he said sternly.
He added in a preacher's tone
For this, O dearly beloved, is the genuine Christine body and soul and
blood and ouns. Slow music, please. Shut your eyes, gents. One moment. A
little trouble about those white corpuscles. Silence, all.
He peered sideways up and gave a long slow whistle of call, then paused
awhile in rapt attention, his even white teeth glistening here and there
with gold points. Chrysostomos. Two strong shrill whistles answered
through the calm.
Thanks, old chap, he cried briskly. That will do nicely. Switch off the
current, will you?
He skipped off the gunrest and looked gravely at his watcher, gathering
about his legs the loose folds of his gown. The plump shadowed face and
sullen oval jowl recalled a prelate, patron of arts in the middle ages. A
pleasant smile broke quietly over his lips.
The mockery of it he said gaily. Your absurd name, an ancient Greek
He pointed his finger in friendly jest and went over to the parapet,
laughing to himself. Stephen Dedalus stepped up, followed him wearily
halfway and sat down on the edge of the gunrest, watching him still as he
propped his mirror on the parapet, dipped the brush in the bowl and
lathered cheeks and neck.
Buck Mulligan's gay voice went on.
My name is absurd too Malachi Mulligan, two dactyls. But it has a
Hellenic ring, hasn't it? Tripping and sunny like the buck himself. We
must go to Athens. Will you come if I can get the aunt to fork out twenty
quid?
He laid the brush aside and, laughing with delight, cried
Will he come? The jejune jesuit
Ceasing, he began to shave with care.
Tell me, Mulligan, Stephen said quietly.
Yes, my love?
How long is Haines going to stay in this tower?
Buck Mulligan showed a shaven cheek over his right shoulder.
God, isn't he dreadful? he said frankly. A ponderous Saxon. He thinks
you're not a gentleman. God, these bloody English Bursting with money
and indigestion. Because he comes from Oxford. You know, Dedalus, you
have the real Oxford manner. He can't make you out. O, my name for you is
the best Kinch, the knifeblade.
He shaved warily over his chin.
He was raving all night about a black panther, Stephen said. Where is
his guncase?
A woful lunatic Mulligan said. Were you in a funk?
I was, Stephen said with energy and growing fear. Out here in the dark
with a man I don't know raving and moaning to himself about shooting a
black panther. You saved men from drowning. I'm not a hero, however. If
he stays on here I am off.
Buck Mulligan frowned at the lather on his razorblade. He hopped down
from his perch and began to search his trouser pockets hastily.
Scutter he cried thickly.
He came over to the gunrest and, thrusting a hand into Stephen's upper
pocket, said
Lend us a loan of your noserag to wipe my razor.
Stephen suffered him to pull out and hold up on show by its corner a
dirty crumpled handkerchief. Buck Mulligan wiped the razorblade neatly.
Then, gazing over the handkerchief, he said
The bard's noserag A new art colour for our Irish poets snotgreen.
You can almost taste it, can't you?
He mounted to the parapet again and gazed out over Dublin bay, his fair
oakpale hair stirring slightly.
God he said quietly. Isn't the sea what Algy calls it a great sweet
mother? The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea. EPI OINOPA PONTON.
Ah, Dedalus, the Greeks I must teach you. You must read them in the
original. THALATTA THALATTA She is our great sweet mother. Come and
look.
Stephen stood up and went over to the parapet. Leaning on it he looked
down on the water and on the mailboat clearing the harbourmouth of
Kingstown.
Our mighty mother Buck Mulligan said.
He turned abruptly his grey searching eyes from the sea to Stephen's
face.
The aunt thinks you killed your mother, he said. That's why she won't
let me have anything to do with you.
Someone killed her, Stephen said gloomily.
You could have knelt down, damn it, Kinch, when your dying mother asked
you, Buck Mulligan said. I'm hyperborean as much as you. But to think of
your mother begging you with her last breath to kneel down and pray for
her. And you refused. There is something sinister in you ...
He broke off and lathered again lightly his farther cheek. A tolerant
smile curled his lips.
But a lovely mummer he murmured to himself. Kinch, the loveliest
mummer of them all
He shaved evenly and with care, in silence, seriously.
Stephen, an elbow rested on the jagged granite, leaned his palm against
his brow and gazed at the fraying edge of his shiny black coatsleeve.
Pain, that was not yet the pain of love, fretted his heart. Silently, in
a dream she had come to him after her death, her wasted body within its
loose brown graveclothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her
breath, that had bent upon him, mute, reproachful, a faint odour of
wetted ashes. Across the threadbare cuffedge he saw the sea hailed as a
great sweet mother by the wellfed voice beside him. The ring of bay and
skyline held a dull green mass of liquid. A bowl of white china had stood
beside her deathbed holding the green sluggish bile which she had torn up
from her rotting liver by fits of loud groaning vomiting.
Buck Mulligan wiped again his razorblade.
Ah, poor dogsbody he said in a kind voice. I must give you a shirt and
a few noserags. How are the secondhand breeks?
They fit well enough, Stephen answered.
Buck Mulligan attacked the hollow beneath his underlip.
The mockery of it, he said contentedly. Secondleg they should be. God
knows what poxy bowsy left them off. I have a lovely pair with a hair
stripe, grey. You'll look spiffing in them. I'm not joking, Kinch. You
look damn well when you're dressed.
Thanks, Stephen said. I can't wear them if they are grey.
He can't wear them, Buck Mulligan told his face in the mirror.
Etiquette is etiquette. He kills his mother but he can't wear grey
trousers.
He folded his razor neatly and with stroking palps of fingers felt the
smooth skin.
Stephen turned his gaze from the sea and to the plump face with its
smokeblue mobile eyes.
That fellow I was with in the Ship last night, said Buck Mulligan, says
you have g.p.i. He's up in Dottyville with Connolly Norman. General
paralysis of the insane
He swept the mirror a half circle in the air to flash the tidings abroad
in sunlight now radiant on the sea. His curling shaven lips laughed and
the edges of his white glittering teeth. Laughter seized all his strong
wellknit trunk.
Look at yourself, he said, you dreadful bard
Stephen bent forward and peered at the mirror held out to him, cleft by a
crooked crack. Hair on end. As he and others see me. Who chose this face
for me? This dogsbody to rid of vermin. It asks me too.
I pinched it out of the skivvy's room, Buck Mulligan said. It does her
all right. The aunt always keeps plainlooking servants for Malachi. Lead
him not into temptation. And her name is Ursula.
Laughing again, he brought the mirror away from Stephen's peering eyes.
The rage of Caliban at not seeing his face in a mirror, he said. If
Wilde were only alive to see you
Drawing back and pointing, Stephen said with bitterness
It is a symbol of Irish art. The cracked lookingglass of a servant.
Buck Mulligan suddenly linked his arm in Stephen's and walked with him
round the tower, his razor and mirror clacking in the pocket where he had
thrust them.
It's not fair to tease you like that, Kinch, is it? he said kindly. God
knows you have more spirit than any of them.
Parried again. He fears the lancet of my art as I fear that of his. The
cold steelpen.
Cracked lookingglass of a servant Tell that to the oxy chap downstairs
and touch him for a guinea. He's stinking with money and thinks you're
not a gentleman. His old fellow made his tin by selling jalap to Zulus or
some bloody swindle or other. God, Kinch, if you and I could only work
together we might do something for the island. Hellenise it.
Cranly's arm. His arm.
And to think of your having to beg from these swine. I'm the only one
that knows what you are. Why don't you trust me more? What have you up
your nose against me? Is it Haines? If he makes any noise here I'll bring
down Seymour and we'll give him a ragging worse than they gave Clive
Kempthorpe.
Young shouts of moneyed voices in Clive Kempthorpe's rooms. Palefaces
they hold their ribs with laughter, one clasping another. O, I shall
expire Break the news to her gently, Aubrey I shall die With slit
ribbons of his shirt whipping the air he hops and hobbles round the
table, with trousers down at heels, chased by Ades of Magdalen with the
tailor's shears. A scared calf's face gilded with marmalade. I don't want
to be debagged Don't you play the giddy ox with me
Shouts from the open window startling evening in the quadrangle. A deaf
gardener, aproned, masked with Matthew Arnold's face, pushes his mower on
the sombre lawn watching narrowly the dancing motes of grasshalms.
To ourselves ... new paganism ... omphalos.
Let him stay, Stephen said. There's nothing wrong with him except at
night.
Then what is it? Buck Mulligan asked impatiently. Cough it up. I'm
quite frank with you. What have you against me now?
They halted, looking towards the blunt cape of Bray Head that lay on the
water like the snout of a sleeping whale. Stephen freed his arm quietly.
Do you wish me to tell you? he asked.
Yes, what is it? Buck Mulligan answered. I don't remember anything.
He looked in Stephen's face as he spoke. A light wind passed his brow,
fanning softly his fair uncombed hair and stirring silver points of
anxiety in his eyes.
Stephen, depressed by his own voice, said
Do you remember the first day I went to your house after my mother's
death?
Buck Mulligan frowned quickly and said
What? Where? I can't remember anything. I remember only ideas and
sensations. Why? What happened in the name of God?
You were making tea, Stephen said, and went across the landing to get
more hot water. Your mother and some visitor came out of the drawingroom.
She asked you who was in your room.
Yes? Buck Mulligan said. What did I say? I forget.
You said, Stephen answered, O, IT'S ONLY DEDALUS WHOSE MOTHER IS
BEASTLY DEAD.
A flush which made him seem younger and more engaging rose to Buck
Mulligan's cheek.
Did I say that? he asked. Well? What harm is that?
He shook his constraint from him nervously.
And what is death, he asked, your mother's or yours or my own? You saw
only your mother die. I see them pop off every day in the Mater and
Richmond and cut up into tripes in the dissectingroom. It's a beastly
thing and nothing else. It simply doesn't matter. You wouldn't kneel down
to pray for your mother on her deathbed when she asked you. Why? Because
you have the cursed jesuit strain in you, only it's injected the wrong
way. To me it's all a mockery and beastly. Her cerebral lobes are not
functioning. She calls the doctor sir Peter Teazle and picks buttercups
off the quilt. Humour her till it's over. You crossed her last wish in
death and yet you sulk with me because I don't whinge like some hired
mute from Lalouette's. Absurd I suppose I did say it. I didn't mean to
offend the memory of your mother.
He had spoken himself into boldness. Stephen, shielding the gaping wounds
which the words had left in his heart, said very coldly
I am not thinking of the offence to my mother.
Of what then? Buck Mulligan asked.
Of the offence to me, Stephen answered.
Buck Mulligan swung round on his heel.
O, an impossible person he exclaimed.
He walked off quickly round the parapet. Stephen stood at his post,
gazing over the calm sea towards the headland. Sea and headland now grew
dim. Pulses were beating in his eyes, veiling their sight, and he felt
the fever of his cheeks.
A voice within the tower called loudly
Are you up there, Mulligan?
I'm coming, Buck Mulligan answered.
He turned towards Stephen and said
Look at the sea. What does it care about offences? Chuck Loyola, Kinch,
and come on down. The Sassenach wants his morning rashers.
His head halted again for a moment at the top of the staircase, level
with the roof
Don't mope over it all day, he said. I'm inconsequent. Give up the
moody brooding.
His head vanished but the drone of his descending voice boomed out of the
stairhead
AND NO MORE TURN ASIDE AND BROOD
UPON LOVE'S BITTER MYSTERY
FOR FERGUS RULES THE BRAZEN CARS.
Woodshadows floated silently by through the morning peace from the
stairhead seaward where he gazed. Inshore and farther out the mirror of
water whitened, spurned by lightshod hurrying feet. White breast of the
dim sea. The twining stresses, two by two. A hand plucking the
harpstrings, merging their twining chords. Wavewhite wedded words
shimmering on the dim tide.
A cloud began to cover the sun slowly, wholly, shadowing the bay in
deeper green. It lay beneath him, a bowl of bitter waters. Fergus' song
I sang it alone in the house, holding down the long dark chords. Her door
was open she wanted to hear my music. Silent with awe and pity I went to
her bedside. She was crying in her wretched bed. For those words,
Stephen love's bitter mystery.
Where now?
Her secrets old featherfans, tasselled dancecards, powdered with musk, a
gaud of amber beads in her locked drawer. A birdcage hung in the sunny
window of her house when she was a girl. She heard old Royce sing in the
pantomime of TURKO THE TERRIBLE and laughed with others when he sang
I AM THE BOY
THAT CAN ENJOY
INVISIBILITY.
Phantasmal mirth, folded away muskperfumed.
AND NO MORE TURN ASIDE AND BROOD.
Folded away in the memory of nature with her toys. Memories beset his
brooding brain. Her glass of water from the kitchen tap when she had
approached the sacrament. A cored apple, filled with brown sugar,
roasting for her at the hob on a dark autumn evening. Her shapely
fingernails reddened by the blood of squashed lice from the children's
shirts.
In a dream, silently, she had come to him, her wasted body within its
loose graveclothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her breath,
bent over him with mute secret words, a faint odour of wetted ashes.
Her glazing eyes, staring out of death, to shake and bend my soul. On me
alone. The ghostcandle to light her agony. Ghostly light on the tortured
face. Her hoarse loud breath rattling in horror, while all prayed on
their knees. Her eyes on me to strike me down. LILIATA RUTILANTIUM TE
CONFESSORUM TURMA CIRCUMDET IUBILANTIUM TE VIRGINUM CHORUS EXCIPIAT.
Ghoul Chewer of corpses
No, mother Let me be and let me live.
Kinch ahoy
Buck Mulligan's voice sang from within the tower. It came nearer up the
staircase, calling again. Stephen, still trembling at his soul's cry,
heard warm running sunlight and in the air behind him friendly words.
Dedalus, come down, like a good mosey. Breakfast is ready. Haines is
apologising for waking us last night. It's all right.
I'm coming, Stephen said, turning.
Do, for Jesus' sake, Buck Mulligan said. For my sake and for all our
sakes.
His head disappeared and reappeared.
I told him your symbol of Irish art. He says it's very clever. Touch
him for a quid, will you? A guinea, I mean.
I get paid this morning, Stephen said.
The school kip? Buck Mulligan said. How much? Four quid? Lend us one.
If you want it, Stephen said.
Four shining sovereigns, Buck Mulligan cried with delight. We'll have a
glorious drunk to astonish the druidy druids. Four omnipotent sovereigns.
He flung up his hands and tramped down the stone stairs, singing out of
tune with a Cockney accent
O, WON'T WE HAVE A MERRY TIME,
DRINKING WHISKY, BEER AND WINE
ON CORONATION,
CORONATION DAY
O, WON'T WE HAVE A MERRY TIME
ON CORONATION DAY
Warm sunshine merrying over the sea. The nickel shavingbowl shone,
forgotten, on the parapet. Why should I bring it down? Or leave it there
all day, forgotten friendship?
He went over to it, held it in his hands awhile, feeling its coolness,
smelling the clammy slaver of the lather in which the brush was stuck. So
I carried the boat of incense then at Clongowes. I am another now and yet
the same. A servant too. A server of a servant.
In the gloomy domed livingroom of the tower Buck Mulligan's gowned form
moved briskly to and fro about the hearth, hiding and revealing its
yellow glow. Two shafts of soft daylight fell across the flagged floor
from the high barbacans and at the meeting of their rays a cloud of
coalsmoke and fumes of fried grease floated, turning.
We'll be choked, Buck Mulligan said. Haines, open that door, will you?
Stephen laid the shavingbowl on the locker. A tall figure rose from the
hammock where it had been sitting, went to the doorway and pulled open
the inner doors.
Have you the key? a voice asked.
Dedalus has it, Buck Mulligan said. Janey Mack, I'm choked
He howled, without looking up from the fire
Kinch
It's in the lock, Stephen said, coming forward.
The key scraped round harshly twice and, when the heavy door had been set
ajar, welcome light and bright air entered. Haines stood at the doorway,
looking out. Stephen haled his upended valise to the table and sat down
to wait. Buck Mulligan tossed the fry on to the dish beside him. Then he
carried the dish and a large teapot over to the table, set them down
heavily and sighed with relief.
I'm melting, he said, as the candle remarked when ... But, hush Not a
word more on that subject Kinch, wake up Bread, butter, honey. Haines,
come in. The grub is ready. Bless us, O Lord, and these thy gifts.
Where's the sugar? O, jay, there's no milk.
Stephen fetched the loaf and the pot of honey and the buttercooler from
the locker. Buck Mulligan sat down in a sudden pet.
What sort of a kip is this? he said. I told her to come after eight.
We can drink it black, Stephen said thirstily. There's a lemon in the
locker.
O, damn you and your Paris fads Buck Mulligan said. I want Sandycove
milk.
Haines came in from the doorway and said quietly
That woman is coming up with the milk.
The blessings of God on you Buck Mulligan cried, jumping up from his
chair. Sit down. Pour out the tea there. The sugar is in the bag. Here, I
can't go fumbling at the damned eggs.
He hacked through the fry on the dish and slapped it out on three plates,
saying
IN NOMINE PATRIS ET FILII ET SPIRITUS SANCTI.
Haines sat down to pour out the tea.
I'm giving you two lumps each, he said. But, I say, Mulligan, you do
make strong tea, don't you?
Buck Mulligan, hewing thick slices from the loaf, said in an old woman's
wheedling voice
When I makes tea I makes tea, as old mother Grogan said. And when I
makes water I makes water.
By Jove, it is tea, Haines said.
Buck Mulligan went on hewing and wheedling
SO I DO, MRS CAHILL, says she. BEGOB, MA'AM, says Mrs Cahill, GOD SEND
YOU DON'T MAKE THEM IN THE ONE POT.
He lunged towards his messmates in turn a thick slice of bread, impaled
on his knife.
That's folk, he said very earnestly, for your book, Haines. Five lines
of text and ten pages of notes about the folk and the fishgods of
Dundrum. Printed by the weird sisters in the year of the big wind.
He turned to Stephen and asked in a fine puzzled voice, lifting his
brows
Can you recall, brother, is mother Grogan's tea and water pot spoken of
in the Mabinogion or is it in the Upanishads?
I doubt it, said Stephen gravely.
Do you now? Buck Mulligan said in the same tone. Your reasons, pray?
I fancy, Stephen said as he ate, it did not exist in or out of the
Mabinogion. Mother Grogan was, one imagines, a kinswoman of Mary Ann.
Buck Mulligan's face smiled with delight.
Charming he said in a finical sweet voice, showing his white teeth and
blinking his eyes pleasantly. Do you think she was? Quite charming
Then, suddenly overclouding all his features, he growled in a hoarsened
rasping voice as he hewed again vigorously at the loaf
FOR OLD MARY ANN
SHE DOESN'T CARE A DAMN.
BUT, HISING UP HER PETTICOATS ...
He crammed his mouth with fry and munched and droned.
The doorway was darkened by an entering form.
The milk, sir
Come in, ma'am, Mulligan said. Kinch, get the jug.
An old woman came forward and stood by Stephen's elbow.
That's a lovely morning, sir, she said. Glory be to God.
To whom? Mulligan said, glancing at her. Ah, to be sure
Stephen reached back and took the milkjug from the locker.
The islanders, Mulligan said to Haines casually, speak frequently of
the collector of prepuces.
How much, sir? asked the old woman.
A quart, Stephen said.
He watched her pour into the measure and thence into the jug rich white
milk, not hers. Old shrunken paps. She poured again a measureful and a
tilly. Old and secret she had entered from a morning world, maybe a
messenger. She praised the goodness of the milk, pouring it out.
Crouching by a patient cow at daybreak in the lush field, a witch on her
toadstool, her wrinkled fingers quick at the squirting dugs. They lowed
about her whom they knew, dewsilky cattle. Silk of the kine and poor old
woman, names given her in old times. A wandering crone, lowly form of an
immortal serving her conqueror and her gay betrayer, their common
cuckquean, a messenger from the secret morning. To serve or to upbraid,
whether he could not tell but scorned to beg her favour.
It is indeed, ma'am, Buck Mulligan said, pouring milk into their cups.
Taste it, sir, she said.
He drank at her bidding.
If we could live on good food like that, he said to her somewhat
loudly, we wouldn't have the country full of rotten teeth and rotten
guts. Living in a bogswamp, eating cheap food and the streets paved with
dust, horsedung and consumptives' spits.
Are you a medical student, sir? the old woman asked.
I am, ma'am, Buck Mulligan answered.
Look at that now, she said.
Stephen listened in scornful silence. She bows her old head to a voice
that speaks to her loudly, her bonesetter, her medicineman me she
slights. To the voice that will shrive and oil for the grave all there is
of her but her woman's unclean loins, of man's flesh made not in God's
likeness, the serpent's prey. And to the loud voice that now bids her be
silent with wondering unsteady eyes.
Do you understand what he says? Stephen asked her.
Is it French you are talking, sir? the old woman said to Haines.
Haines spoke to her again a longer speech, confidently.
Irish, Buck Mulligan said. Is there Gaelic on you?
I thought it was Irish, she said, by the sound of it. Are you from the
west, sir?
I am an Englishman, Haines answered.
He's English, Buck Mulligan said, and he thinks we ought to speak Irish
in Ireland.
Sure we ought to, the old woman said, and I'm ashamed I don't speak the
language myself. I'm told it's a grand language by them that knows.
Grand is no name for it, said Buck Mulligan. Wonderful entirely. Fill
us out some more tea, Kinch. Would you like a cup, ma'am?
No, thank you, sir, the old woman said, slipping the ring of the
milkcan on her forearm and about to go.
Haines said to her
Have you your bill? We had better pay her, Mulligan, hadn't we?
Stephen filled again the three cups.
Bill, sir? she said, halting. Well, it's seven mornings a pint at
twopence is seven twos is a shilling and twopence over and these three
mornings a quart at fourpence is three quarts is a shilling. That's a
shilling and one and two is two and two, sir.
Buck Mulligan sighed and, having filled his mouth with a crust thickly
buttered on both sides, stretched forth his legs and began to search his
trouser pockets.
Pay up and look pleasant, Haines said to him, smiling.
Stephen filled a third cup, a spoonful of tea colouring faintly the thick
rich milk. Buck Mulligan brought up a florin, twisted it round in his
fingers and cried
A miracle
He passed it along the table towards the old woman, saying
Ask nothing more of me, sweet. All I can give you I give.
Stephen laid the coin in her uneager hand.
We'll owe twopence, he said.
Time enough, sir, she said, taking the coin. Time enough. Good morning,
sir.
She curtseyed and went out, followed by Buck Mulligan's tender chant
HEART OF MY HEART, WERE IT MORE,
MORE WOULD BE LAID AT YOUR FEET.
He turned to Stephen and said
Seriously, Dedalus. I'm stony. Hurry out to your school kip and bring
us back some money. Today the bards must drink and junket. Ireland
expects that every man this day will do his duty.
That reminds me, Haines said, rising, that I have to visit your
national library today.
Our swim first, Buck Mulligan said.
He turned to Stephen and asked blandly
Is this the day for your monthly wash, Kinch?
Then he said to Haines
The unclean bard makes a point of washing once a month.
All Ireland is washed by the gulfstream, Stephen said as he let honey
trickle over a slice of the loaf.
Haines from the corner where he was knotting easily a scarf about the
loose collar of his tennis shirt spoke
I intend to make a collection of your sayings if you will let me.
Speaking to me. They wash and tub and scrub. Agenbite of inwit.
Conscience. Yet here's a spot.
That one about the cracked lookingglass of a servant being the symbol
of Irish art is deuced good.
Buck Mulligan kicked Stephen's foot under the table and said with warmth
of tone
Wait till you hear him on Hamlet, Haines.
Well, I mean it, Haines said, still speaking to Stephen. I was just
thinking of it when that poor old creature came in.
Would I make any money by it? Stephen asked.
Haines laughed and, as he took his soft grey hat from the holdfast of the
hammock, said
I don't know, I'm sure.
He strolled out to the doorway. Buck Mulligan bent across to Stephen and
said with coarse vigour
You put your hoof in it now. What did you say that for?
Well? Stephen said. The problem is to get money. From whom? From the
milkwoman or from him. It's a toss up, I think.
I blow him out about you, Buck Mulligan said, and then you come along
with your lousy leer and your gloomy jesuit jibes.
I see little hope, Stephen said, from her or from him.
Buck Mulligan sighed tragically and laid his hand on Stephen's arm.
From me, Kinch, he said.
In a suddenly changed tone he added
To tell you the God's truth I think you're right. Damn all else they
are good for. Why don't you play them as I do? To hell with them all. Let
us get out of the kip.
He stood up, gravely ungirdled and disrobed himself of his gown, saying
resignedly
Mulligan is stripped of his garments.
He emptied his pockets on to the table.
There's your snotrag, he said.
And putting on his stiff collar and rebellious tie he spoke to them,
chiding them, and to his dangling watchchain. His hands plunged and
rummaged in his trunk while he called for a clean handkerchief. God,
we'll simply have to dress the character. I want puce gloves and green
boots. Contradiction. Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I
contradict myself. Mercurial Malachi. A limp black missile flew out of
his talking hands.
And there's your Latin quarter hat, he said.
Stephen picked it up and put it on. Haines called to them from the
doorway
Are you coming, you fellows?
I'm ready, Buck Mulligan answered, going towards the door. Come out,
Kinch. You have eaten all we left, I suppose. Resigned he passed out with
grave words and gait, saying, wellnigh with sorrow
And going forth he met Butterly.
Stephen, taking his ashplant from its leaningplace, followed them out
and, as they went down the ladder, pulled to the slow iron door and
locked it. He put the huge key in his inner pocket.
At the foot of the ladder Buck Mulligan asked
Did you bring the key?
I have it, Stephen said, preceding them.
He walked on. Behind him he heard Buck Mulligan club with his heavy
bathtowel the leader shoots of ferns or grasses.
Down, sir How dare you, sir
Haines asked
Do you pay rent for this tower?
Twelve quid, Buck Mulligan said.
To the secretary of state for war, Stephen added over his shoulder.
They halted while Haines surveyed the tower and said at last
Rather bleak in wintertime, I should say. Martello you call it?
Billy Pitt had them built, Buck Mulligan said, when the French were on
the sea. But ours is the OMPHALOS.
What is your idea of Hamlet? Haines asked Stephen.
No, no, Buck Mulligan shouted in pain. I'm not equal to Thomas Aquinas
and the fiftyfive reasons he has made out to prop it up. Wait till I have
a few pints in me first.
He turned to Stephen, saying, as he pulled down neatly the peaks of his
primrose waistcoat
You couldn't manage it under three pints, Kinch, could you?
It has waited so long, Stephen said listlessly, it can wait longer.
You pique my curiosity, Haines said amiably. Is it some paradox?
Pooh Buck Mulligan said. We have grown out of Wilde and paradoxes.
It's quite simple. He proves by algebra that Hamlet's grandson is
Shakespeare's grandfather and that he himself is the ghost of his own
father.
What? Haines said, beginning to point at Stephen. He himself?
Buck Mulligan slung his towel stolewise round his neck and, bending in
loose laughter, said to Stephen's ear
O, shade of Kinch the elder Japhet in search of a father
We're always tired in the morning, Stephen said to Haines. And it is
rather long to tell.
Buck Mulligan, walking forward again, raised his hands.
The sacred pint alone can unbind the tongue of Dedalus, he said.
I mean to say, Haines explained to Stephen as they followed, this tower
and these cliffs here remind me somehow of Elsinore. THAT BEETLES O'ER
HIS BASE INTO THE SEA, ISN'T IT?
Buck Mulligan turned suddenly. for an instant towards Stephen but did not
speak. In the bright silent instant Stephen saw his own image in cheap
dusty mourning between their gay attires.
It's a wonderful tale, Haines said, bringing them to halt again.
Eyes, pale as the sea the wind had freshened, paler, firm and prudent.
The seas' ruler, he gazed southward over the bay, empty save for the
smokeplume of the mailboat vague on the bright skyline and a sail tacking
by the Muglins.
I read a theological interpretation of it somewhere, he said bemused.
The Father and the Son idea. The Son striving to be atoned with the
Father.
Buck Mulligan at once put on a blithe broadly smiling face. He looked at
them, his wellshaped mouth open happily, his eyes, from which he had
suddenly withdrawn all shrewd sense, blinking with mad gaiety. He moved a
doll's head to and fro, the brims of his Panama hat quivering, and began
to chant in a quiet happy foolish voice
I'M THE QUEEREST YOUNG FELLOW THAT EVER YOU HEARD.
MY MOTHER'S A JEW, MY FATHER'S A BIRD.
WITH JOSEPH THE JOINER I CANNOT AGREE.
SO HERE'S TO DISCIPLES AND CALVARY.
He held up a forefinger of warning.
IF ANYONE THINKS THAT I AMN'T DIVINE
HE'LL GET NO FREE DRINKS WHEN I'M MAKING THE WINE
BUT HAVE TO DRINK WATER AND WISH IT WERE PLAIN
THAT I MAKE WHEN THE WINE BECOMES WATER AGAIN.
He tugged swiftly at Stephen's ashplant in farewell and, running forward
to a brow of the cliff, fluttered his hands at his sides like fins or
wings of one about to rise in the air, and chanted
GOODBYE, NOW, GOODBYE WRITE DOWN ALL I SAID
AND TELL TOM, DIEK AND HARRY I ROSE FROM THE DEAD.
WHAT'S BRED IN THE BONE CANNOT FAIL ME TO FLY
AND OLIVET'S BREEZY ... GOODBYE, NOW, GOODBYE
He capered before them down towards the fortyfoot hole, fluttering his
winglike hands, leaping nimbly, Mercury's hat quivering in the fresh wind
that bore back to them his brief birdsweet cries.
Haines, who had been laughing guardedly, walked on beside Stephen and
said
We oughtn't to laugh, I suppose. He's rather blasphemous. I'm not a
believer myself, that is to say. Still his gaiety takes the harm out of
it somehow, doesn't it? What did he call it? Joseph the Joiner?
The ballad of joking Jesus, Stephen answered.
O, Haines said, you have heard it before?
Three times a day, after meals, Stephen said drily.
You're not a believer, are you? Haines asked. I mean, a believer in the
narrow sense of the word. Creation from nothing and miracles and a
personal God.
There's only one sense of the word, it seems to me, Stephen said.
Haines stopped to take out a smooth silver case in which twinkled a green
stone. He sprang it open with his thumb and offered it.
Thank you, Stephen said, taking a cigarette.
Haines helped himself and snapped the case to. He put it back in his
sidepocket and took from his waistcoatpocket a nickel tinderbox, sprang
it open too, and, having lit his cigarette, held the flaming spunk
towards Stephen in the shell of his hands.
Yes, of course, he said, as they went on again. Either you believe or
you don't, isn't it? Personally I couldn't stomach that idea of a
personal God. You don't stand for that, I suppose?
You behold in me, Stephen said with grim displeasure, a horrible
example of free thought.
He walked on, waiting to be spoken to, trailing his ashplant by his side.
Its ferrule followed lightly on the path, squealing at his heels. My
familiar, after me, calling, Steeeeeeeeeeeephen A wavering line along
the path. They will walk on it tonight, coming here in the dark. He wants
that key. It is mine. I paid the rent. Now I eat his salt bread. Give him
the key too. All. He will ask for it. That was in his eyes.
After all, Haines began ...
Stephen turned and saw that the cold gaze which had measured him was not
all unkind.
After all, I should think you are able to free yourself. You are your
own master, it seems to me.
I am a servant of two masters, Stephen said, an English and an Italian.
Italian? Haines said.
A crazy queen, old and jealous. Kneel down before me.
And a third, Stephen said, there is who wants me for odd jobs.
Italian? Haines said again. What do you mean?
The imperial British state, Stephen answered, his colour rising, and
the holy Roman catholic and apostolic church.
Haines detached from his underlip some fibres of tobacco before he spoke.
I can quite understand that, he said calmly. An Irishman must think
like that, I daresay. We feel in England that we have treated you rather
unfairly. It seems history is to blame.
The proud potent titles clanged over Stephen's memory the triumph of
their brazen bells ET UNAM SANCTAM CATHOLICAM ET APOSTOLICAM ECCLESIAM
the slow growth and change of rite and dogma like his own rare thoughts,
a chemistry of stars. Symbol of the apostles in the mass for pope
Marcellus, the voices blended, singing alone loud in affirmation and
behind their chant the vigilant angel of the church militant disarmed and
menaced her heresiarchs. A horde of heresies fleeing with mitres awry
Photius and the brood of mockers of whom Mulligan was one, and Arius,
warring his life long upon the consubstantiality of the Son with the
Father, and Valentine, spurning Christ's terrene body, and the subtle
African heresiarch Sabellius who held that the Father was Himself His own
Son. Words Mulligan had spoken a moment since in mockery to the stranger.
Idle mockery. The void awaits surely all them that weave the wind a
menace, a disarming and a worsting from those embattled angels of the
church, Michael's host, who defend her ever in the hour of conflict with
their lances and their shields.
Hear, hear Prolonged applause. ZUT NOM DE DIEU
Of course I'm a Britisher, Haines's voice said, and I feel as one. I
don't want to see my country fall into the hands of German jews either.
That's our national problem, I'm afraid, just now.
Two men stood at the verge of the cliff, watching businessman, boatman.
She's making for Bullock harbour.
The boatman nodded towards the north of the bay with some disdain.
There's five fathoms out there, he said. It'll be swept up that way
when the tide comes in about one. It's nine days today.
The man that was drowned. A sail veering about the blank bay waiting for
a swollen bundle to bob up, roll over to the sun a puffy face, saltwhite.
Here I am.
They followed the winding path down to the creek. Buck Mulligan stood on
a stone, in shirtsleeves, his unclipped tie rippling over his shoulder. A
young man clinging to a spur of rock near him, moved slowly frogwise his
green legs in the deep jelly of the water.
Is the brother with you, Malachi?
Down in Westmeath. With the Bannons.
Still there? I got a card from Bannon. Says he found a sweet young
thing down there. Photo girl he calls her.
Snapshot, eh? Brief exposure.
Buck Mulligan sat down to unlace his boots. An elderly man shot up near
the spur of rock a blowing red face. He scrambled up by the stones, water
glistening on his pate and on its garland of grey hair, water rilling
over his chest and paunch and spilling jets out of his black sagging
loincloth.
Buck Mulligan made way for him to scramble past and, glancing at Haines
and Stephen, crossed himself piously with his thumbnail at brow and lips
and breastbone.
Seymour's back in town, the young man said, grasping again his spur of
rock. Chucked medicine and going in for the army.
Ah, go to God Buck Mulligan said.
Going over next week to stew. You know that red Carlisle girl, Lily?
Yes.
Spooning with him last night on the pier. The father is rotto with
money.
Is she up the pole?
Better ask Seymour that.
Seymour a bleeding officer Buck Mulligan said.
He nodded to himself as he drew off his trousers and stood up, saying
tritely
Redheaded women buck like goats.
He broke off in alarm, feeling his side under his flapping shirt.
My twelfth rib is gone, he cried. I'm the UBERMENSCH. Toothless Kinch
and I, the supermen.
He struggled out of his shirt and flung it behind him to where his
clothes lay.
Are you going in here, Malachi?
Yes. Make room in the bed.
The young man shoved himself backward through the water and reached the
middle of the creek in two long clean strokes. Haines sat down on a
stone, smoking.
Are you not coming in? Buck Mulligan asked.
Later on, Haines said. Not on my breakfast.
Stephen turned away.
I'm going, Mulligan, he said.
Give us that key, Kinch, Buck Mulligan said, to keep my chemise flat.
Stephen handed him the key. Buck Mulligan laid it across his heaped
clothes.
And twopence, he said, for a pint. Throw it there.
Stephen threw two pennies on the soft heap. Dressing, undressing. Buck
Mulligan erect, with joined hands before him, said solemnly
He who stealeth from the poor lendeth to the Lord. Thus spake
Zarathustra.
His plump body plunged.
We'll see you again, Haines said, turning as Stephen walked up the path
and smiling at wild Irish.
Horn of a bull, hoof of a horse, smile of a Saxon.
The Ship, Buck Mulligan cried. Half twelve.
Good, Stephen said.
He walked along the upwardcurving path.
LILIATA RUTILANTIUM.
TURMA CIRCUMDET.
IUBILANTIUM TE VIRGINUM.
The priest's grey nimbus in a niche where he dressed discreetly. I will
not sleep here tonight. Home also I cannot go.
A voice, sweettoned and sustained, called to him from the sea. Turning
the curve he waved his hand. It called again. A sleek brown head, a
seal's, far out on the water, round.
Usurper.
You, Cochrane, what city sent for him?
Tarentum, sir.
Very good. Well?
There was a battle, sir.
Very good. Where?
The boy's blank face asked the blank window.
Fabled by the daughters of memory. And yet it was in some way if not as
memory fabled it. A phrase, then, of impatience, thud of Blake's wings of
excess. I hear the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling
masonry, and time one livid final flame. What's left us then?
I forget the place, sir.  B. C.
Asculum, Stephen said, glancing at the name and date in the gorescarred
book.
Yes, sir. And he said ANOTHER VICTORY LIKE THAT AND WE ARE DONE FOR.
That phrase the world had remembered. A dull ease of the mind. From a
hill above a corpsestrewn plain a general speaking to his officers,
leaned upon his spear. Any general to any officers. They lend ear.
You, Armstrong, Stephen said. What was the end of Pyrrhus?
End of Pyrrhus, sir?
I know, sir. Ask me, sir, Comyn said.
Wait. You, Armstrong. Do you know anything about Pyrrhus?
A bag of figrolls lay snugly in Armstrong's satchel. He curled them
between his palms at whiles and swallowed them softly. Crumbs adhered to
the tissue of his lips. A sweetened boy's breath. Welloff people, proud
that their eldest son was in the navy. Vico road, Dalkey.
Pyrrhus, sir? Pyrrhus, a pier.
All laughed. Mirthless high malicious laughter. Armstrong looked round at
his classmates, silly glee in profile. In a moment they will laugh more
loudly, aware of my lack of rule and of the fees their papas pay.
Tell me now, Stephen said, poking the boy's shoulder with the book,
what is a pier.
A pier, sir, Armstrong said. A thing out in the water. A kind of a
bridge. Kingstown pier, sir.
Some laughed again mirthless but with meaning. Two in the back bench
whispered. Yes. They knew had never learned nor ever been innocent. All.
With envy he watched their faces Edith, Ethel, Gerty, Lily. Their likes
their breaths, too, sweetened with tea and jam, their bracelets tittering
in the struggle.
Kingstown pier, Stephen said. Yes, a disappointed bridge.
The words troubled their gaze.
How, sir? Comyn asked. A bridge is across a river.
For Haines's chapbook. Noone here to hear. Tonight deftly amid wild
drink and talk, to pierce the polished mail of his mind. What then? A
jester at the court of his master, indulged and disesteemed, winning a
clement master's praise. Why had they chosen all that part? Not wholly
for the smooth caress. For them too history was a tale like any other too
often heard, their land a pawnshop.
Had Pyrrhus not fallen by a beldam's hand in Argos or Julius Caesar not
been knifed to death. They are not to be thought away. Time has branded
them and fettered they are lodged in the room of the infinite
possibilities they have ousted. But can those have been possible seeing
that they never were? Or was that only possible which came to pass?
Weave, weaver of the wind.
Tell us a story, sir.
O, do, sir. A ghoststory.
Where do you begin in this? Stephen asked, opening another book.
WEEP NO MORE, Comyn said.
Go on then, Talbot.
And the story, sir?
After, Stephen said. Go on, Talbot.
A swarthy boy opened a book and propped it nimbly under the breastwork of
his satchel. He recited jerks of verse with odd glances at the text
WEEP NO MORE, WOFUL SHEPHERDS, WEEP NO MORE
FOR LYCIDAS, YOUR SORROW, IS NOT DEAD,
SUNK THOUGH HE BE BENEATH THE WATERY FLOOR ...
It must be a movement then, an actuality of the possible as possible.
Aristotle's phrase formed itself within the gabbled verses and floated
out into the studious silence of the library of Saint Genevieve where he
had read, sheltered from the sin of Paris, night by night. By his elbow a
delicate Siamese conned a handbook of strategy. Fed and feeding brains
about me under glowlamps, impaled, with faintly beating feelers and in
my mind's darkness a sloth of the underworld, reluctant, shy of
brightness, shifting her dragon scaly folds. Thought is the thought of
thought. Tranquil brightness. The soul is in a manner all that is the
soul is the form of forms. Tranquility sudden, vast, candescent form of
forms.
Talbot repeated
THROUGH THE DEAR MIGHT OF HIM THAT WALKED THE WAVES,
THROUGH THE DEAR MIGHT ...
Turn over, Stephen said quietly. I don't see anything.
What, sir? Talbot asked simply, bending forward.
His hand turned the page over. He leaned back and went on again,
having just remembered. Of him that walked the waves. Here also over
these craven hearts his shadow lies and on the scoffer's heart and lips
and on mine. It lies upon their eager faces who offered him a coin of the
tribute. To Caesar what is Caesar's, to God what is God's. A long look
from dark eyes, a riddling sentence to be woven and woven on the church's
looms. Ay.
RIDDLE ME, RIDDLE ME, RANDY RO.
MY FATHER GAVE ME SEEDS TO SOW.
Talbot slid his closed book into his satchel.
Have I heard all? Stephen asked.
Yes, sir. Hockey at ten, sir.
Half day, sir. Thursday.
Who can answer a riddle? Stephen asked.
They bundled their books away, pencils clacking, pages rustling.
Crowding together they strapped and buckled their satchels, all gabbling
gaily
A riddle, sir? Ask me, sir.
O, ask me, sir.
A hard one, sir.
This is the riddle, Stephen said
THE COCK CREW,
THE SKY WAS BLUE
THE BELLS IN HEAVEN
WERE STRIKING ELEVEN.
'TIS TIME FOR THIS POOR SOUL
TO GO TO HEAVEN.
What is that?
What, sir?
Again, sir. We didn't hear.
Their eyes grew bigger as the lines were repeated. After a silence
Cochrane said
What is it, sir? We give it up.
Stephen, his throat itching, answered
The fox burying his grandmother under a hollybush.
He stood up and gave a shout of nervous laughter to which their cries
echoed dismay.
A stick struck the door and a voice in the corridor called
Hockey
They broke asunder, sidling out of their benches, leaping them.
Quickly they were gone and from the lumberroom came the rattle of sticks
and clamour of their boots and tongues.
Sargent who alone had lingered came forward slowly, showing an
open copybook. His thick hair and scraggy neck gave witness of
unreadiness and through his misty glasses weak eyes looked up pleading.
On his cheek, dull and bloodless, a soft stain of ink lay, dateshaped,
recent and damp as a snail's bed.
He held out his copybook. The word SUMS was written on the
headline. Beneath were sloping figures and at the foot a crooked signature
with blind loops and a blot. Cyril Sargent his name and seal.
Mr Deasy told me to write them out all again, he said, and show them to
you, sir.
Stephen touched the edges of the book. Futility.
Do you understand how to do them now? he asked.
Numbers eleven to fifteen, Sargent answered. Mr Deasy said I was to
copy them off the board, sir.
Can you do them. yourself? Stephen asked.
No, sir.
Ugly and futile lean neck and thick hair and a stain of ink, a snail's
bed. Yet someone had loved him, borne him in her arms and in her heart.
But for her the race of the world would have trampled him underfoot, a
squashed boneless snail. She had loved his weak watery blood drained from
her own. Was that then real? The only true thing in life? His mother's
prostrate body the fiery Columbanus in holy zeal bestrode. She was no
more the trembling skeleton of a twig burnt in the fire, an odour of
rosewood and wetted ashes. She had saved him from being trampled
underfoot and had gone, scarcely having been. A poor soul gone to heaven
and on a heath beneath winking stars a fox, red reek of rapine in his fur,
with merciless bright eyes scraped in the earth, listened, scraped up the
earth, listened, scraped and scraped.
Sitting at his side Stephen solved out the problem. He proves by
algebra that Shakespeare's ghost is Hamlet's grandfather. Sargent peered
askance through his slanted glasses. Hockeysticks rattled in the
lumberroom the hollow knock of a ball and calls from the field.
Across the page the symbols moved in grave morrice, in the mummery
of their letters, wearing quaint caps of squares and cubes. Give hands,
traverse, bow to partner so imps of fancy of the Moors. Gone too from
the world, Averroes and Moses Maimonides, dark men in mien and
movement, flashing in their mocking mirrors the obscure soul of the
world, a darkness shining in brightness which brightness could not
comprehend.
Do you understand now? Can you work the second for yourself?
Yes, sir.
In long shaky strokes Sargent copied the data. Waiting always for a
word of help his hand moved faithfully the unsteady symbols, a faint hue
of shame flickering behind his dull skin. AMOR MATRIS subjective and
objective genitive. With her weak blood and wheysour milk she had fed him
and hid from sight of others his swaddling bands.
Like him was I, these sloping shoulders, this gracelessness. My
childhood bends beside me. Too far for me to lay a hand there once or
lightly. Mine is far and his secret as our eyes. Secrets, silent, stony
sit in the dark palaces of both our hearts secrets weary of their
tyranny tyrants, willing to be dethroned.
The sum was done.
It is very simple, Stephen said as he stood up.
Yes, sir. Thanks, Sargent answered.
He dried the page with a sheet of thin blottingpaper and carried his
copybook back to his bench.
You had better get your stick and go out to the others, Stephen said as
he followed towards the door the boy's graceless form.
Yes, sir.
In the corridor his name was heard, called from the playfield.
Sargent
Run on, Stephen said. Mr Deasy is calling you.
He stood in the porch and watched the laggard hurry towards the
scrappy field where sharp voices were in strife. They were sorted in teams
and Mr Deasy came away stepping over wisps of grass with gaitered feet.
When he had reached the schoolhouse voices again contending called to
him. He turned his angry white moustache.
What is it now? he cried continually without listening.
Cochrane and Halliday are on the same side, sir, Stephen said.
Will you wait in my study for a moment, Mr Deasy said, till I restore
order here.
And as he stepped fussily back across the field his old man's voice
cried sternly
What is the matter? What is it now?
Their sharp voices cried about him on all sides their many forms
closed round him, the garish sunshine bleaching the honey of his illdyed
head.
Stale smoky air hung in the study with the smell of drab abraded
leather of its chairs. As on the first day he bargained with me here. As
it was in the beginning, is now. On the sideboard the tray of Stuart
coins, base treasure of a bog and ever shall be. And snug in their
spooncase of purple plush, faded, the twelve apostles having preached to
all the gentiles world without end.
A hasty step over the stone porch and in the corridor. Blowing out his
rare moustache Mr Deasy halted at the table.
First, our little financial settlement, he said.
He brought out of his coat a pocketbook bound by a leather thong. It
slapped open and he took from it two notes, one of joined halves, and laid
them carefully on the table.
Two, he said, strapping and stowing his pocketbook away.
And now his strongroom for the gold. Stephen's embarrassed hand
moved over the shells heaped in the cold stone mortar whelks and money
cowries and leopard shells and this, whorled as an emir's turban, and
this, the scallop of saint James. An old pilgrim's hoard, dead treasure,
hollow shells.
A sovereign fell, bright and new, on the soft pile of the tablecloth.
Three, Mr Deasy said, turning his little savingsbox about in his hand.
These are handy things to have. See. This is for sovereigns. This is for
shillings. Sixpences, halfcrowns. And here crowns. See.
He shot from it two crowns and two shillings.
Three twelve, he said. I think you'll find that's right.
Thank you, sir, Stephen said, gathering the money together with shy
haste and putting it all in a pocket of his trousers.
No thanks at all, Mr Deasy said. You have earned it.
Stephen's hand, free again, went back to the hollow shells. Symbols
too of beauty and of power. A lump in my pocket symbols soiled by greed
and misery.
Don't carry it like that, Mr Deasy said. You'll pull it out somewhere
and lose it. You just buy one of these machines. You'll find them very
handy.
Answer something.
Mine would be often empty, Stephen said.
The same room and hour, the same wisdom and I the same. Three
times now. Three nooses round me here. Well? I can break them in this
instant if I will.
Because you don't save, Mr Deasy said, pointing his finger. You don't
know yet what money is. Money is power. When you have lived as long as I
have. I know, I know. If youth but knew. But what does Shakespeare say?
PUT BUT MONEY IN THY PURSE.
Iago, Stephen murmured.
He lifted his gaze from the idle shells to the old man's stare.
He knew what money was, Mr Deasy said. He made money. A poet, yes,
but an Englishman too. Do you know what is the pride of the English? Do
you know what is the proudest word you will ever hear from an
Englishman's mouth?
The seas' ruler. His seacold eyes looked on the empty bay it seems
history is to blame on me and on my words, unhating.
That on his empire, Stephen said, the sun never sets.
Ba Mr Deasy cried. That's not English. A French Celt said that. He
tapped his savingsbox against his thumbnail.
I will tell you, he said solemnly, what is his proudest boast. I PAID
MY WAY.
Good man, good man.
I PAID MY WAY. I NEVER BORROWED A SHILLING IN MY LIFE. Can you feel
that? I OWE NOTHING. Can you?
Mulligan, nine pounds, three pairs of socks, one pair brogues, ties.
Curran, ten guineas. McCann, one guinea. Fred Ryan, two shillings.
Temple, two lunches. Russell, one guinea, Cousins, ten shillings, Bob
Reynolds, half a guinea, Koehler, three guineas, Mrs MacKernan, five
weeks' board. The lump I have is useless.
For the moment, no, Stephen answered.
Mr Deasy laughed with rich delight, putting back his savingsbox.
I knew you couldn't, he said joyously. But one day you must feel it. We
are a generous people but we must also be just.
I fear those big words, Stephen said, which make us so unhappy.
Mr Deasy stared sternly for some moments over the mantelpiece at
the shapely bulk of a man in tartan filibegs Albert Edward, prince of
Wales.
You think me an old fogey and an old tory, his thoughtful voice said. I
saw three generations since O'Connell's time. I remember the famine
in '. Do you know that the orange lodges agitated for repeal of the
union twenty years before O'Connell did or before the prelates of your
communion denounced him as a demagogue? You fenians forget some things.
Glorious, pious and immortal memory. The lodge of Diamond in
Armagh the splendid behung with corpses of papishes. Hoarse, masked and
armed, the planters' covenant. The black north and true blue bible.
Croppies lie down.
Stephen sketched a brief gesture.
I have rebel blood in me too, Mr Deasy said. On the spindle side. But I
am descended from sir John Blackwood who voted for the union. We are all
Irish, all kings' sons.
Alas, Stephen said.
PER VIAS RECTAS, Mr Deasy said firmly, was his motto. He voted for it
and put on his topboots to ride to Dublin from the Ards of Down to do so.
LAL THE RAL THE RA
THE ROCKY ROAD TO DUBLIN.
A gruff squire on horseback with shiny topboots. Soft day, sir John
Soft day, your honour ... Day ... Day ... Two topboots jog dangling
on to Dublin. Lal the ral the ra. Lal the ral the raddy.
That reminds me, Mr Deasy said. You can do me a favour, Mr Dedalus,
with some of your literary friends. I have a letter here for the press.
Sit down a moment. I have just to copy the end.
He went to the desk near the window, pulled in his chair twice and
read off some words from the sheet on the drum of his typewriter.
Sit down. Excuse me, he said over his shoulder, THE DICTATES OF COMMON
SENSE. Just a moment.
He peered from under his shaggy brows at the manuscript by his
elbow and, muttering, began to prod the stiff buttons of the keyboard
slowly, sometimes blowing as he screwed up the drum to erase an error.
Stephen seated himself noiselessly before the princely presence.
Framed around the walls images of vanished horses stood in homage, their
meek heads poised in air lord Hastings' Repulse, the duke of
Westminster's Shotover, the duke of Beaufort's Ceylon, PRIX DE PARIS,
. Elfin riders sat them, watchful of a sign. He saw their speeds,
backing king's colours, and shouted with the shouts of vanished crowds.
Full stop, Mr Deasy bade his keys. But prompt ventilation of this
allimportant question ...
Where Cranly led me to get rich quick, hunting his winners among
the mudsplashed brakes, amid the bawls of bookies on their pitches and
reek of the canteen, over the motley slush. Fair Rebel Fair Rebel Even
money the favourite ten to one the field. Dicers and thimbleriggers we
hurried by after the hoofs, the vying caps and jackets and past the
meatfaced woman, a butcher's dame, nuzzling thirstily her clove of orange.
Shouts rang shrill from the boys' playfield and a whirring whistle.
Again a goal. I am among them, among their battling bodies in a
medley, the joust of life. You mean that knockkneed mother's darling who
seems to be slightly crawsick? Jousts. Time shocked rebounds, shock by
shock. Jousts, slush and uproar of battles, the frozen deathspew of the
slain, a shout of spearspikes baited with men's bloodied guts.
Now then, Mr Deasy said, rising.
He came to the table, pinning together his sheets. Stephen stood up.
I have put the matter into a nutshell, Mr Deasy said. It's about the
foot and mouth disease. Just look through it. There can be no two opinions
on the matter.
May I trespass on your valuable space. That doctrine of LAISSEZ FAIRE
which so often in our history. Our cattle trade. The way of all our old
industries. Liverpool ring which jockeyed the Galway harbour scheme.
European conflagration. Grain supplies through the narrow waters of the
channel. The pluterperfect imperturbability of the department of
agriculture. Pardoned a classical allusion. Cassandra. By a woman who
was no better than she should be. To come to the point at issue.
I don't mince words, do I? Mr Deasy asked as Stephen read on.
Foot and mouth disease. Known as Koch's preparation. Serum and
virus. Percentage of salted horses. Rinderpest. Emperor's horses at
Murzsteg, lower Austria. Veterinary surgeons. Mr Henry Blackwood Price.
Courteous offer a fair trial. Dictates of common sense. Allimportant
question. In every sense of the word take the bull by the horns. Thanking
you for the hospitality of your columns.
I want that to be printed and read, Mr Deasy said. You will see at the
next outbreak they will put an embargo on Irish cattle. And it can be
cured. It is cured. My cousin, Blackwood Price, writes to me it is
regularly treated and cured in Austria by cattledoctors there. They offer
to come over here. I am trying to work up influence with the department.
Now I'm going to try publicity. I am surrounded by difficulties,
by ... intrigues by ... backstairs influence by ...
He raised his forefinger and beat the air oldly before his voice spoke.
Mark my words, Mr Dedalus, he said. England is in the hands of the
jews. In all the highest places her finance, her press. And they are the
signs of a nation's decay. Wherever they gather they eat up the nation's
vital strength. I have seen it coming these years. As sure as we are
standing here the jew merchants are already at their work of destruction.
Old England is dying.
He stepped swiftly off, his eyes coming to blue life as they passed a
broad sunbeam. He faced about and back again.
Dying, he said again, if not dead by now.
THE HARLOT'S CRY FROM STREET TO STREET
SHALL WEAVE OLD ENGLAND'S WINDINGSHEET.
His eyes open wide in vision stared sternly across the sunbeam in
which he halted.
A merchant, Stephen said, is one who buys cheap and sells dear, jew or
gentile, is he not?
They sinned against the light, Mr Deasy said gravely. And you can see
the darkness in their eyes. And that is why they are wanderers on the
earth to this day.
On the steps of the Paris stock exchange the goldskinned men quoting
prices on their gemmed fingers. Gabble of geese. They swarmed loud,
uncouth about the temple, their heads thickplotting under maladroit silk
hats. Not theirs these clothes, this speech, these gestures. Their full
slow eyes belied the words, the gestures eager and unoffending, but knew
the rancours massed about them and knew their zeal was vain. Vain patience
to heap and hoard. Time surely would scatter all. A hoard heaped by the
roadside plundered and passing on. Their eyes knew their years of
wandering and, patient, knew the dishonours of their flesh.
Who has not? Stephen said.
What do you mean? Mr Deasy asked.
He came forward a pace and stood by the table. His underjaw fell
sideways open uncertainly. Is this old wisdom? He waits to hear from me.
History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
From the playfield the boys raised a shout. A whirring whistle goal.
What if that nightmare gave you a back kick?
The ways of the Creator are not our ways, Mr Deasy said. All human
history moves towards one great goal, the manifestation of God.
Stephen jerked his thumb towards the window, saying
That is God.
Hooray Ay Whrrwhee
What? Mr Deasy asked.
A shout in the street, Stephen answered, shrugging his shoulders.
Mr Deasy looked down and held for awhile the wings of his nose
tweaked between his fingers. Looking up again he set them free.
I am happier than you are, he said. We have committed many errors and
many sins. A woman brought sin into the world. For a woman who was no
better than she should be, Helen, the runaway wife of Menelaus, ten years
the Greeks made war on Troy. A faithless wife first brought the strangers
to our shore here, MacMurrough's wife and her leman, O'Rourke, prince of
Breffni. A woman too brought Parnell low. Many errors, many failures but
not the one sin. I am a struggler now at the end of my days. But I will
fight for the right till the end.
FOR ULSTER WILL FIGHT
AND ULSTER WILL BE RIGHT.
Stephen raised the sheets in his hand.
Well, sir, he began ...
I foresee, Mr Deasy said, that you will not remain here very long at
this work. You were not born to be a teacher, I think. Perhaps I am
wrong.
A learner rather, Stephen said.
And here what will you learn more?
Mr Deasy shook his head.
Who knows? he said. To learn one must be humble. But life is the great
teacher.
Stephen rustled the sheets again.
As regards these, he began.
Yes, Mr Deasy said. You have two copies there. If you can have them
published at once.
TELEGRAPH. IRISH HOMESTEAD.
I will try, Stephen said, and let you know tomorrow. I know two editors
slightly.
That will do, Mr Deasy said briskly. I wrote last night to Mr Field,
M.P. There is a meeting of the cattletraders' association today at the
City Arms hotel. I asked him to lay my letter before the meeting. You see
if you can get it into your two papers. What are they?
THE EVENING TELEGRAPH ...
That will do, Mr Deasy said. There is no time to lose. Now I have to
answer that letter from my cousin.
Good morning, sir, Stephen said, putting the sheets in his pocket.
Thank you.
Not at all, Mr Deasy said as he searched the papers on his desk. I like
to break a lance with you, old as I am.
Good morning, sir, Stephen said again, bowing to his bent back.
He went out by the open porch and down the gravel path under the
trees, hearing the cries of voices and crack of sticks from the playfield.
The lions couchant on the pillars as he passed out through the gate
toothless terrors. Still I will help him in his fight. Mulligan will dub
me a new name the bullockbefriending bard.
Mr Dedalus
Running after me. No more letters, I hope.
Just one moment.
Yes, sir, Stephen said, turning back at the gate.
Mr Deasy halted, breathing hard and swallowing his breath.
I just wanted to say, he said. Ireland, they say, has the honour of
being the only country which never persecuted the jews. Do you know that?
No. And do you know why?
He frowned sternly on the bright air.
Why, sir? Stephen asked, beginning to smile.
Because she never let them in, Mr Deasy said solemnly.
A coughball of laughter leaped from his throat dragging after it a
rattling chain of phlegm. He turned back quickly, coughing, laughing, his
lifted arms waving to the air.
She never let them in, he cried again through his laughter as he
stamped on gaitered feet over the gravel of the path. That's why.
On his wise shoulders through the checkerwork of leaves the sun flung
spangles, dancing coins.
Ineluctable modality of the visible at least that if no more, thought
through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and
seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust
coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds in bodies. Then he
was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking his
sconce against them, sure. Go easy. Bald he was and a millionaire, MAESTRO
DI COLOR CHE SANNO. Limit of the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane,
adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers through it it is a gate, if
not a door. Shut your eyes and see.
Stephen closed his eyes to hear his boots crush crackling wrack and
shells. You are walking through it howsomever. I am, a stride at a time. A
very short space of time through very short times of space. Five, six the
NACHEINANDER. Exactly and that is the ineluctable modality of the
audible. Open your eyes. No. Jesus If I fell over a cliff that beetles
o'er his base, fell through the NEBENEINANDER ineluctably I am getting on
nicely in the dark. My ash sword hangs at my side. Tap with it they do.
My two feet in his boots are at the ends of his legs, NEBENEINANDER.
Sounds solid made by the mallet of LOS DEMIURGOS. Am I walking into
eternity along Sandymount strand? Crush, crack, crick, crick. Wild sea
money. Dominie Deasy kens them a'.
WON'T YOU COME TO SANDYMOUNT,
MADELINE THE MARE?
Rhythm begins, you see. I hear. Acatalectic tetrameter of iambs
marching. No, agallop DELINE THE MARE.
Open your eyes now. I will. One moment. Has all vanished since? If I
open and am for ever in the black adiaphane. BASTA I will see if I can
see.
See now. There all the time without you and ever shall be, world
without end.
They came down the steps from Leahy's terrace prudently,
FRAUENZIMMER and down the shelving shore flabbily, their splayed feet
sinking in the silted sand. Like me, like Algy, coming down to our mighty
mother. Number one swung lourdily her midwife's bag, the other's gamp
poked in the beach. From the liberties, out for the day. Mrs Florence
MacCabe, relict of the late Patk MacCabe, deeply lamented, of Bride
Street. One of her sisterhood lugged me squealing into life. Creation from
nothing. What has she in the bag? A misbirth with a trailing navelcord,
hushed in ruddy wool. The cords of all link back, strandentwining cable of
all flesh. That is why mystic monks. Will you be as gods? Gaze in your
OMPHALOS. Hello Kinch here. Put me on to Edenville. Aleph, alpha nought,
nought, one.
Spouse and helpmate of Adam Kadmon Heva, naked Eve. She had
no navel. Gaze. Belly without blemish, bulging big, a buckler of taut
vellum, no, whiteheaped corn, orient and immortal, standing from
everlasting to everlasting. Womb of sin.
Wombed in sin darkness I was too, made not begotten. By them, the
man with my voice and my eyes and a ghostwoman with ashes on her
breath. They clasped and sundered, did the coupler's will. From before the
ages He willed me and now may not will me away or ever. A LEX ETERNA
stays about Him. Is that then the divine substance wherein Father and Son
are consubstantial? Where is poor dear Arius to try conclusions? Warring
his life long upon the contransmagnificandjewbangtantiality. Illstarred
heresiarch' In a Greek watercloset he breathed his last euthanasia. With
beaded mitre and with crozier, stalled upon his throne, widower of a
widowed see, with upstiffed omophorion, with clotted hinderparts.
Airs romped round him, nipping and eager airs. They are coming,
waves. The whitemaned seahorses, champing, brightwindbridled, the steeds
of Mananaan.
I mustn't forget his letter for the press. And after? The Ship, half
twelve. By the way go easy with that money like a good young imbecile.
Yes, I must.
His pace slackened. Here. Am I going to aunt Sara's or not? My
consubstantial father's voice. Did you see anything of your artist brother
Stephen lately? No? Sure he's not down in Strasburg terrace with his aunt
Sally? Couldn't he fly a bit higher than that, eh? And and and and tell
us, Stephen, how is uncle Si? O, weeping God, the things I married into
De boys up in de hayloft. The drunken little costdrawer and his brother,
the cornet player. Highly respectable gondoliers And skeweyed Walter
sirring his father, no less Sir. Yes, sir. No, sir. Jesus wept and no
wonder, by Christ
I pull the wheezy bell of their shuttered cottage and wait. They take
me for a dun, peer out from a coign of vantage.
It's Stephen, sir.
Let him in. Let Stephen in.
A bolt drawn back and Walter welcomes me.
We thought you were someone else.
In his broad bed nuncle Richie, pillowed and blanketed, extends over
the hillock of his knees a sturdy forearm. Cleanchested. He has washed the
upper moiety.
Morrow, nephew.
He lays aside the lapboard whereon he drafts his bills of costs for the
eyes of master Goff and master Shapland Tandy, filing consents and
common searches and a writ of DUCES TECUM. A bogoak frame over his bald
head Wilde's REQUIESCAT. The drone of his misleading whistle brings
Walter back.
Yes, sir?
Malt for Richie and Stephen, tell mother. Where is she?
Bathing Crissie, sir.
Papa's little bedpal. Lump of love.
No, uncle Richie ...
Call me Richie. Damn your lithia water. It lowers. Whusky
Uncle Richie, really ...
Sit down or by the law Harry I'll knock you down.
Walter squints vainly for a chair.
He has nothing to sit down on, sir.
He has nowhere to put it, you mug. Bring in our chippendale chair.
Would you like a bite of something? None of your damned lawdeedaw airs
here. The rich of a rasher fried with a herring? Sure? So much the better.
We have nothing in the house but backache pills.
ALL'ERTA
He drones bars of Ferrando's ARIA DI SORTITA. The grandest number,
Stephen, in the whole opera. Listen.
His tuneful whistle sounds again, finely shaded, with rushes of the air,
his fists bigdrumming on his padded knees.
This wind is sweeter.
Houses of decay, mine, his and all. You told the Clongowes gentry
you had an uncle a judge and an uncle a general in the army. Come out of
them, Stephen. Beauty is not there. Nor in the stagnant bay of Marsh's
library where you read the fading prophecies of Joachim Abbas. For
whom? The hundredheaded rabble of the cathedral close. A hater of his
kind ran from them to the wood of madness, his mane foaming in the
moon, his eyeballs stars. Houyhnhnm, horsenostrilled. The oval equine
faces, Temple, Buck Mulligan, Foxy Campbell, Lanternjaws. Abbas father,
furious dean, what offence laid fire to their brains? Paff DESCENDE,
CALVE, UT NE AMPLIUS DECALVERIS. A garland of grey hair on his comminated
head see him me clambering down to the footpace DESCENDE, clutching a
monstrance, basiliskeyed. Get down, baldpoll A choir gives back menace
and echo, assisting about the altar's horns, the snorted Latin of
jackpriests moving burly in their albs, tonsured and oiled and gelded, fat
with the fat of kidneys of wheat.
And at the same instant perhaps a priest round the corner is elevating it.
Dringdring And two streets off another locking it into a pyx.
Dringadring And in a ladychapel another taking housel all to his own
cheek. Dringdring Down, up, forward, back. Dan Occam thought of that,
invincible doctor. A misty English morning the imp hypostasis tickled his
brain. Bringing his host down and kneeling he heard twine with his second
bell the first bell in the transept he is lifting his and, rising, heard
now I am lifting their two bells he is kneeling twang in diphthong.
Cousin Stephen, you will never be a saint. Isle of saints. You were
awfully holy, weren't you? You prayed to the Blessed Virgin that you might
not have a red nose. You prayed to the devil in Serpentine avenue that the
fubsy widow in front might lift her clothes still more from the wet
street. O SI, CERTO Sell your soul for that, do, dyed rags pinned round a
squaw. More tell me, more still On the top of the Howth tram alone
crying to the rain Naked women NAKED WOMEN What about that, eh?
What about what? What else were they invented for?
Reading two pages apiece of seven books every night, eh? I was
young. You bowed to yourself in the mirror, stepping forward to applause
earnestly, striking face. Hurray for the Goddamned idiot Hray Noone
saw tell noone. Books you were going to write with letters for titles.
Have you read his F? O yes, but I prefer Q. Yes, but W is wonderful.
O yes, W. Remember your epiphanies written on green oval leaves, deeply
deep, copies to be sent if you died to all the great libraries of the
world, including Alexandria? Someone was to read them there after a few
thousand years, a mahamanvantara. Pico della Mirandola like. Ay, very like
a whale. When one reads these strange pages of one long gone one feels
that one is at one with one who once ...
The grainy sand had gone from under his feet. His boots trod again a
damp crackling mast, razorshells, squeaking pebbles, that on the
unnumbered pebbles beats, wood sieved by the shipworm, lost Armada.
Unwholesome sandflats waited to suck his treading soles, breathing upward
sewage breath, a pocket of seaweed smouldered in seafire under a midden
of man's ashes. He coasted them, walking warily. A porterbottle stood up,
stogged to its waist, in the cakey sand dough. A sentinel isle of
dreadful thirst. Broken hoops on the shore at the land a maze of dark
cunning nets farther away chalkscrawled backdoors and on the higher beach
a dryingline with two crucified shirts. Ringsend wigwams of brown
steersmen and master mariners. Human shells.
He halted. I have passed the way to aunt Sara's. Am I not going
there? Seems not. Noone about. He turned northeast and crossed the
firmer sand towards the Pigeonhouse.
QUI VOUS A MIS DANS CETTE FICHUE POSITION?
C'EST LE PIGEON, JOSEPH.
Patrice, home on furlough, lapped warm milk with me in the bar
MacMahon. Son of the wild goose, Kevin Egan of Paris. My father's a bird,
he lapped the sweet LAIT CHAUD with pink young tongue, plump bunny's face.
Lap, LAPIN. He hopes to win in the GROS LOTS. About the nature of women he
read in Michelet. But he must send me LA VIE DE JESUS by M. Leo Taxil.
Lent it to his friend.
C'EST TORDANT, VOUS SAVEZ. MOI, JE SUIS SOCIALISTE. JE NE CROIS PAS EN
L'EXISTENCE DE DIEU. FAUT PAS LE DIRE A MON PRE.
IL CROIT?
MON PERE, OUI.
SCHLUSS. He laps.
My Latin quarter hat. God, we simply must dress the character. I
want puce gloves. You were a student, weren't you? Of what in the other
devil's name? Paysayenn. P. C. N., you know PHYSIQUES, CHIMIQUES ET
NATURELLES. Aha. Eating your groatsworth of MOU EN CIVET, fleshpots of
Egypt, elbowed by belching cabmen. Just say in the most natural tone
when I was in Paris BOUL' MICH', I used to. Yes, used to carry punched
tickets to prove an alibi if they arrested you for murder somewhere.
Justice. On the night of the seventeenth of February  the prisoner was
seen by two witnesses. Other fellow did it other me. Hat, tie, overcoat,
nose. LUI, C'EST MOI. You seem to have enjoyed yourself.
Proudly walking. Whom were you trying to walk like? Forget a
dispossessed. With mother's money order, eight shillings, the banging door
of the post office slammed in your face by the usher. Hunger toothache.
ENCORE DEUX MINUTES. Look clock. Must get. FERME. Hired dog Shoot him
to bloody bits with a bang shotgun, bits man spattered walls all brass
buttons. Bits all khrrrrklak in place clack back. Not hurt? O, that's all
right. Shake hands. See what I meant, see? O, that's all right. Shake a
shake. O, that's all only all right.
You were going to do wonders, what? Missionary to Europe after
fiery Columbanus. Fiacre and Scotus on their creepystools in heaven spilt
from their pintpots, loudlatinlaughing EUGE EUGE Pretending to speak
broken English as you dragged your valise, porter threepence, across the
slimy pier at Newhaven. COMMENT? Rich booty you brought back LE TUTU,
five tattered numbers of PANTALON BLANC ET CULOTTE ROUGE a blue
French telegram, curiosity to show
Mother dying come home father.
The aunt thinks you killed your mother. That's why she won't.
THEN HERE'S A HEALTH TO MULLIGAN'S AUNT
AND I'LL TELL YOU THE REASON WHY.
SHE ALWAYS KEPT THINGS DECENT IN
THE HANNIGAN FAMILEYE.
His feet marched in sudden proud rhythm over the sand furrows,
along by the boulders of the south wall. He stared at them proudly, piled
stone mammoth skulls. Gold light on sea, on sand, on boulders. The sun is
there, the slender trees, the lemon houses.
Paris rawly waking, crude sunlight on her lemon streets. Moist pith of
farls of bread, the froggreen wormwood, her matin incense, court the air.
Belluomo rises from the bed of his wife's lover's wife, the kerchiefed
housewife is astir, a saucer of acetic acid in her hand. In Rodot's Yvonne
and Madeleine newmake their tumbled beauties, shattering with gold teeth
CHAUSSONS of pastry, their mouths yellowed with the PUS of FLAN BRETON.
Faces of Paris men go by, their wellpleased pleasers, curled
conquistadores.
Noon slumbers. Kevin Egan rolls gunpowder cigarettes through
fingers smeared with printer's ink, sipping his green fairy as Patrice his
white. About us gobblers fork spiced beans down their gullets. UN DEMI
SETIER A jet of coffee steam from the burnished caldron. She serves me at
his beck. IL EST IRLANDAIS. HOLLANDAIS? NON FROMAGE. DEUX IRLANDAIS, NOUS,
IRLANDE, VOUS SAVEZ AH, OUI She thought you wanted a cheese HOLLANDAIS.
Your postprandial, do you know that word? Postprandial. There was a
fellow I knew once in Barcelona, queer fellow, used to call it his
postprandial. Well SLAINTE Around the slabbed tables the tangle of wined
breaths and grumbling gorges. His breath hangs over our saucestained
plates, the green fairy's fang thrusting between his lips. Of Ireland, the
Dalcassians, of hopes, conspiracies, of Arthur Griffith now, A E,
pimander, good shepherd of men. To yoke me as his yokefellow, our crimes
our common cause. You're your father's son. I know the voice. His fustian
shirt, sanguineflowered, trembles its Spanish tassels at his secrets. M.
Drumont, famous journalist, Drumont, know what he called queen
Victoria? Old hag with the yellow teeth. VIEILLE OGRESSE with the DENTS
JAUNES. Maud Gonne, beautiful woman, LA PATRIE, M. Millevoye, Felix
Faure, know how he died? Licentious men. The froeken, BONNE A TOUT FAIRE,
who rubs male nakedness in the bath at Upsala. MOI FAIRE, she said, TOUS
LES MESSIEURS. Not this MONSIEUR, I said. Most licentious custom. Bath a
most private thing. I wouldn't let my brother, not even my own brother,
most lascivious thing. Green eyes, I see you. Fang, I feel. Lascivious
people.
The blue fuse burns deadly between hands and burns clear. Loose
tobaccoshreds catch fire a flame and acrid smoke light our corner. Raw
facebones under his peep of day boy's hat. How the head centre got away,
authentic version. Got up as a young bride, man, veil, orangeblossoms,
drove out the road to Malahide. Did, faith. Of lost leaders, the betrayed,
wild escapes. Disguises, clutched at, gone, not here.
Spurned lover. I was a strapping young gossoon at that time, I tell
you. I'll show you my likeness one day. I was, faith. Lover, for her love
he prowled with colonel Richard Burke, tanist of his sept, under the walls
of Clerkenwell and, crouching, saw a flame of vengeance hurl them upward
in the fog. Shattered glass and toppling masonry. In gay Paree he hides,
Egan of Paris, unsought by any save by me. Making his day's stations, the
dingy printingcase, his three taverns, the Montmartre lair he sleeps short
night in, rue de la Goutted'Or, damascened with flyblown faces of the
gone. Loveless, landless, wifeless. She is quite nicey comfy without her
outcast man, madame in rue GitleCoeur, canary and two buck lodgers.
Peachy cheeks, a zebra skirt, frisky as a young thing's. Spurned and
undespairing. Tell Pat you saw me, won't you? I wanted to get poor Pat a
job one time. MON FILS, soldier of France. I taught him to sing THE BOYS
OF KILKENNY ARE STOUT ROARING BLADES. Know that old lay? I taught Patrice
that. Old Kilkenny saint Canice, Strongbow's castle on the Nore. Goes
like this. O, O. He takes me, Napper Tandy, by the hand.
O, O THE BOYS OF
KILKENNY ...
Weak wasting hand on mine. They have forgotten Kevin Egan, not he
them. Remembering thee, O Sion.
He had come nearer the edge of the sea and wet sand slapped his
boots. The new air greeted him, harping in wild nerves, wind of wild air
of seeds of brightness. Here, I am not walking out to the Kish lightship,
am I? He stood suddenly, his feet beginning to sink slowly in the quaking
soil. Turn back.
Turning, he scanned the shore south, his feet sinking again slowly in
new sockets. The cold domed room of the tower waits. Through the
barbacans the shafts of light are moving ever, slowly ever as my feet are
sinking, creeping duskward over the dial floor. Blue dusk, nightfall, deep
blue night. In the darkness of the dome they wait, their pushedback
chairs, my obelisk valise, around a board of abandoned platters. Who to
clear it? He has the key. I will not sleep there when this night comes.
A shut door of a silent tower, entombing theirblind bodies, the
panthersahib and his pointer. Call no answer. He lifted his feet up from
the suck and turned back by the mole of boulders. Take all, keep all. My
soul walks with me, form of forms. So in the moon's midwatches I pace the
path above the rocks, in sable silvered, hearing Elsinore's tempting
flood.
The flood is following me. I can watch it flow past from here. Get
back then by the Poolbeg road to the strand there. He climbed over the
sedge and eely oarweeds and sat on a stool of rock, resting his ashplant
in a grike.
A bloated carcass of a dog lay lolled on bladderwrack. Before him the
gunwale of a boat, sunk in sand. UN COCHE ENSABLE Louis Veuillot called
Gautier's prose. These heavy sands are language tide and wind have silted
here. And these, the stoneheaps of dead builders, a warren of weasel rats.
Hide gold there. Try it. You have some. Sands and stones. Heavy of the
past. Sir Lout's toys. Mind you don't get one bang on the ear. I'm the
bloody well gigant rolls all them bloody well boulders, bones for my
steppingstones. Feefawfum. I zmellz de bloodz odz an Iridzman.
A point, live dog, grew into sight running across the sweep of sand.
Lord, is he going to attack me? Respect his liberty. You will not be
master of others or their slave. I have my stick. Sit tight. From farther
away, walking shoreward across from the crested tide, figures, two. The
two maries. They have tucked it safe mong the bulrushes. Peekaboo. I see
you. No, the dog. He is running back to them. Who?
Galleys of the Lochlanns ran here to beach, in quest of prey, their
bloodbeaked prows riding low on a molten pewter surf. Dane vikings, torcs
of tomahawks aglitter on their breasts when Malachi wore the collar of
gold. A school of turlehide whales stranded in hot noon, spouting,
hobbling in the shallows. Then from the starving cagework city a horde of
jerkined dwarfs, my people, with flayers' knives, running, scaling,
hacking in green blubbery whalemeat. Famine, plague and slaughters. Their
blood is in me, their lusts my waves. I moved among them on the frozen
Liffey, that I, a changeling, among the spluttering resin fires. I spoke
to noone none to me.
The dog's bark ran towards him, stopped, ran back. Dog of my
enemy. I just simply stood pale, silent, bayed about. TERRIBILIA MEDITANS.
A primrose doublet, fortune's knave, smiled on my fear. For that are you
pining, the bark of their applause? Pretenders live their lives. The
Bruce's brother, Thomas Fitzgerald, silken knight, Perkin Warbeck, York's
false scion, in breeches of silk of whiterose ivory, wonder of a day, and
Lambert Simnel, with a tail of nans and sutlers, a scullion crowned. All
kings' sons. Paradise of pretenders then and now. He saved men from
drowning and you shake at a cur's yelping. But the courtiers who mocked
Guido in Or san Michele were in their own house. House of ... We don't
want any of your medieval abstrusiosities. Would you do what he did? A
boat would be near, a lifebuoy. NATURLICH, put there for you. Would you or
would you not? The man that was drowned nine days ago off Maiden's rock.
They are waiting for him now. The truth, spit it out. I would want to.
I would try. I am not a strong swimmer. Water cold soft. When I put my
face into it in the basin at Clongowes. Can't see Who's behind me? Out
quickly, quickly Do you see the tide flowing quickly in on all sides,
sheeting the lows of sand quickly, shellcocoacoloured? If I had land under
my feet. I want his life still to be his, mine to be mine. A drowning man.
His human eyes scream to me out of horror of his death. I ... With him
together down ... I could not save her. Waters bitter death lost.
A woman and a man. I see her skirties. Pinned up, I bet.
Their dog ambled about a bank of dwindling sand, trotting, sniffing
on all sides. Looking for something lost in a past life. Suddenly he made
off like a bounding hare, ears flung back, chasing the shadow of a
lowskimming gull. The man's shrieked whistle struck his limp ears. He
turned, bounded back, came nearer, trotted on twinkling shanks. On a field
tenney a buck, trippant, proper, unattired. At the lacefringe of the tide
he halted with stiff forehoofs, seawardpointed ears. His snout lifted
barked at the wavenoise, herds of seamorse. They serpented towards his
feet, curling, unfurling many crests, every ninth, breaking, plashing,
from far, from farther out, waves and waves.
Cocklepickers. They waded a little way in the water and, stooping,
soused their bags and, lifting them again, waded out. The dog yelped
running to them, reared up and pawed them, dropping on all fours, again
reared up at them with mute bearish fawning. Unheeded he kept by them as
they came towards the drier sand, a rag of wolf's tongue redpanting from
his jaws. His speckled body ambled ahead of them and then loped off at a
calf's gallop. The carcass lay on his path. He stopped, sniffed, stalked
round it, brother, nosing closer, went round it, sniffling rapidly like a
dog all over the dead dog's bedraggled fell. Dogskull, dogsniff, eyes on
the ground, moves to one great goal. Ah, poor dogsbody Here lies poor
dogsbody's body.
Tatters Out of that, you mongrel
The cry brought him skulking back to his master and a blunt bootless
kick sent him unscathed across a spit of sand, crouched in flight. He
slunk back in a curve. Doesn't see me. Along by the edge of the mole he
lolloped, dawdled, smelt a rock. and from under a cocked hindleg pissed
against it. He trotted forward and, lifting again his hindleg, pissed
quick short at an unsmelt rock. The simple pleasures of the poor. His
hindpaws then scattered the sand then his forepaws dabbled and delved.
Something he buried there, his grandmother. He rooted in the sand,
dabbling, delving and stopped to listen to the air, scraped up the sand
again with a fury of his claws, soon ceasing, a pard, a panther, got in
spousebreach, vulturing the dead.
After he woke me last night same dream or was it? Wait. Open
hallway. Street of harlots. Remember. Haroun al Raschid. I am almosting
it. That man led me, spoke. I was not afraid. The melon he had he held
against my face. Smiled creamfruit smell. That was the rule, said. In.
Come. Red carpet spread. You will see who.
Shouldering their bags they trudged, the red Egyptians. His blued
feet out of turnedup trousers slapped the clammy sand, a dull brick
muffler strangling his unshaven neck. With woman steps she followed the
ruffian and his strolling mort. Spoils slung at her back. Loose sand and
shellgrit crusted her bare feet. About her windraw face hair trailed.
Behind her lord, his helpmate, bing awast to Romeville. When night hides
her body's flaws calling under her brown shawl from an archway where dogs
have mired. Her fancyman is treating two Royal Dublins in O'Loughlin's of
Blackpitts. Buss her, wap in rogues' rum lingo, for, O, my dimber wapping
dell A shefiend's whiteness under her rancid rags. Fumbally's lane that
night the tanyard smells.
WHITE THY FAMBLES, RED THY GAN
AND THY QUARRONS DAINTY IS.
COUCH A HOGSHEAD WITH ME THEN.
IN THE DARKMANS CLIP AND KISS.
Morose delectation Aquinas tunbelly calls this, FRATE PORCOSPINO.
Unfallen Adam rode and not rutted. Call away let him THY QUARRONS DAINTY
IS. Language no whit worse than his. Monkwords, marybeads jabber on
their girdles roguewords, tough nuggets patter in their pockets.
Passing now.
A side eye at my Hamlet hat. If I were suddenly naked here as I sit? I
am not. Across the sands of all the world, followed by the sun's flaming
sword, to the west, trekking to evening lands. She trudges, schlepps,
trains, drags, trascines her load. A tide westering, moondrawn, in her
wake. Tides, myriadislanded, within her, blood not mine, OINOPA PONTON,
a winedark sea. Behold the handmaid of the moon. In sleep the wet sign
calls her hour, bids her rise. Bridebed, childbed, bed of death,
ghostcandled. OMNIS CARO AD TE VENIET. He comes, pale vampire, through
storm his eyes, his bat sails bloodying the sea, mouth to her mouth's
kiss.
Here. Put a pin in that chap, will you? My tablets. Mouth to her kiss.
No. Must be two of em. Glue em well. Mouth to her mouth's kiss.
His lips lipped and mouthed fleshless lips of air mouth to her
moomb. Oomb, allwombing tomb. His mouth moulded issuing breath,
unspeeched ooeeehah roar of cataractic planets, globed, blazing, roaring
wayawayawayawayaway. Paper. The banknotes, blast them. Old Deasy's
letter. Here. Thanking you for the hospitality tear the blank end off.
Turning his back to the sun he bent over far to a table of rock and
scribbled words. That's twice I forgot to take slips from the library
counter.
His shadow lay over the rocks as he bent, ending. Why not endless till
the farthest star? Darkly they are there behind this light, darkness
shining in the brightness, delta of Cassiopeia, worlds. Me sits there with
his augur's rod of ash, in borrowed sandals, by day beside a livid sea,
unbeheld, in violet night walking beneath a reign of uncouth stars.
I throw this ended shadow from me, manshape ineluctable, call it back.
Endless, would it be mine, form of my form? Who watches me here? Who ever
anywhere will read these written words? Signs on a white field. Somewhere
to someone in your flutiest voice. The good bishop of Cloyne took the veil
of the temple out of his shovel hat veil of space with coloured emblems
hatched on its field. Hold hard. Coloured on a flat yes, that's right.
Flat I see, then think distance, near, far, flat I see, east, back. Ah,
see now Falls back suddenly, frozen in stereoscope. Click does the trick.
You find my words dark. Darkness is in our souls do you not think?
Flutier. Our souls, shamewounded by our sins, cling to us yet more,
a woman to her lover clinging, the more the more.
She trusts me, her hand gentle, the longlashed eyes. Now where the blue
hell am I bringing her beyond the veil? Into the ineluctable modality
of the ineluctable visuality. She, she, she. What she? The virgin
at Hodges Figgis' window on Monday looking in for one of the alphabet
books you were going to write. Keen glance you gave her. Wrist through
the braided jesse of her sunshade. She lives in Leeson park with
a grief and kickshaws, a lady of letters. Talk that to someone else,
Stevie a pickmeup. Bet she wears those curse of God stays suspenders
and yellow stockings, darned with lumpy wool. Talk about apple dumplings,
PIUTTOSTO. Where are your wits?
Touch me. Soft eyes. Soft soft soft hand. I am lonely here. O, touch
me soon, now. What is that word known to all men? I am quiet here alone.
Sad too. Touch, touch me.
He lay back at full stretch over the sharp rocks, cramming the
scribbled note and pencil into a pock his hat. His hat down on his eyes.
That is Kevin Egan's movement I made, nodding for his nap, sabbath sleep.
ET VIDIT DEUS. ET ERANT VALDE BONA. Alo BONJOUR. Welcome as the flowers
in May. Under its leaf he watched through peacocktwittering lashes the
southing sun. I am caught in this burning scene. Pan's hour, the faunal
noon. Among gumheavy serpentplants, milkoozing fruits, where on the
tawny waters leaves lie wide. Pain is far.
AND NO MORE TURN ASIDE AND BROOD.
His gaze brooded on his broadtoed boots, a buck's castoffs,
NEBENEINANDER. He counted the creases of rucked leather wherein another's
foot had nested warm. The foot that beat the ground in tripudium, foot I
dislove. But you were delighted when Esther Osvalt's shoe went on you
girl I knew in Paris. TIENS, QUEL PETIT PIED Staunch friend, a brother
soul Wilde's love that dare not speak its name. His arm Cranly's arm. He
now will leave me. And the blame? As I am. As I am. All or not at all.
In long lassoes from the Cock lake the water flowed full, covering
greengoldenly lagoons of sand, rising, flowing. My ashplant will float
away. I shall wait. No, they will pass on, passing, chafing against the
low rocks, swirling, passing. Better get this job over quick. Listen a
fourworded wavespeech seesoo, hrss, rsseeiss, ooos. Vehement breath of
waters amid seasnakes, rearing horses, rocks. In cups of rocks it slops
flop, slop, slap bounded in barrels. And, spent, its speech ceases. It
flows purling, widely flowing, floating foampool, flower unfurling.
Under the upswelling tide he saw the writhing weeds lift languidly
and sway reluctant arms, hising up their petticoats, in whispering water
swaying and upturning coy silver fronds. Day by day night by night
lifted, flooded and let fall. Lord, they are weary and, whispered to,
they sigh. Saint Ambrose heard it, sigh of leaves and waves, waiting,
awaiting the fullness of their times, DIEBUS AC NOCTIBUS INIURIAS PATIENS
INGEMISCIT. To no end gathered vainly then released, forthflowing,
wending back loom of the moon. Weary too in sight of lovers, lascivious
men, a naked woman shining in her courts, she draws a toil of waters.
Five fathoms out there. Full fathom five thy father lies. At one, he
said. Found drowned. High water at Dublin bar. Driving before it a loose
drift of rubble, fanshoals of fishes, silly shells. A corpse rising
saltwhite from the undertow, bobbing a pace a pace a porpoise landward.
There he is. Hook it quick. Pull. Sunk though he be beneath the watery
floor. We have him. Easy now.
Bag of corpsegas sopping in foul brine. A quiver of minnows, fat of a
spongy titbit, flash through the slits of his buttoned trouserfly. God
becomes man becomes fish becomes barnacle goose becomes featherbed
mountain. Dead breaths I living breathe, tread dead dust, devour a urinous
offal from all dead. Hauled stark over the gunwale he breathes upward the
stench of his green grave, his leprous nosehole snoring to the sun.
A seachange this, brown eyes saltblue. Seadeath, mildest of all deaths
known to man. Old Father Ocean. PRIX DE PARIS beware of imitations. Just
you give it a fair trial. We enjoyed ourselves immensely.
Come. I thirst. Clouding over. No black clouds anywhere, are there?
Thunderstorm. Allbright he falls, proud lightning of the intellect,
LUCIFER, DICO, QUI NESCIT OCCASUM. No. My cockle hat and staff and hismy
sandal shoon. Where? To evening lands. Evening will find itself.
He took the hilt of his ashplant, lunging with it softly, dallying still.
Yes, evening will find itself in me, without me. All days make their end.
By the way next when is it Tuesday will be the longest day. Of all the
glad new year, mother, the rum tum tiddledy tum. Lawn Tennyson, gentleman
poet. GIA. For the old hag with the yellow teeth. And Monsieur Drumont,
gentleman journalist. GIA. My teeth are very bad. Why, I wonder. Feel.
That one is going too. Shells. Ought I go to a dentist, I wonder, with
that money? That one. This. Toothless Kinch, the superman. Why is that, I
wonder, or does it mean something perhaps?
My handkerchief. He threw it. I remember. Did I not take it up?
His hand groped vainly in his pockets. No, I didn't. Better buy one.
He laid the dry snot picked from his nostril on a ledge of rock,
carefully. For the rest let look who will.
Behind. Perhaps there is someone.
He turned his face over a shoulder, rere regardant. Moving through
the air high spars of a threemaster, her sails brailed up on the
crosstrees, homing, upstream, silently moving, a silent ship.
II 
Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He
liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart,
liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods' roes. Most of all he
liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of
faintly scented urine.
Kidneys were in his mind as he moved about the kitchen softly, righting
her breakfast things on the humpy tray. Gelid light and air were in the
kitchen but out of doors gentle summer morning everywhere. Made him feel
a bit peckish.
The coals were reddening.
Another slice of bread and butter three, four right. She didn't like
her plate full. Right. He turned from the tray, lifted the kettle off the
hob and set it sideways on the fire. It sat there, dull and squat, its
spout stuck out. Cup of tea soon. Good. Mouth dry. The cat walked stiffly
round a leg of the table with tail on high.
Mkgnao
O, there you are, Mr Bloom said, turning from the fire.
The cat mewed in answer and stalked again stiffly round a leg of the
table, mewing. Just how she stalks over my writingtable. Prr. Scratch my
head. Prr.
Mr Bloom watched curiously, kindly the lithe black form. Clean to see
the gloss of her sleek hide, the white button under the butt of her tail,
the green flashing eyes. He bent down to her, his hands on his knees.
Milk for the pussens, he said.
Mrkgnao the cat cried.
They call them stupid. They understand what we say better than we
understand them. She understands all she wants to. Vindictive too. Cruel.
Her nature. Curious mice never squeal. Seem to like it. Wonder what I
look like to her. Height of a tower? No, she can jump me.
Afraid of the chickens she is, he said mockingly. Afraid of the
chookchooks. I never saw such a stupid pussens as the pussens.
Cruel. Her nature. Curious mice never squeal. Seem to like it.
Mrkrgnao the cat said loudly.
She blinked up out of her avid shameclosing eyes, mewing plaintively and
long, showing him her milkwhite teeth. He watched the dark eyeslits
narrowing with greed till her eyes were green stones. Then he went to the
dresser, took the jug Hanlon's milkman had just filled for him, poured
warmbubbled milk on a saucer and set it slowly on the floor.
Gurrhr she cried, running to lap.
He watched the bristles shining wirily in the weak light as she tipped
three times and licked lightly. Wonder is it true if you clip them they
can't mouse after. Why? They shine in the dark, perhaps, the tips. Or
kind of feelers in the dark, perhaps.
He listened to her licking lap. Ham and eggs, no. No good eggs with this
drouth. Want pure fresh water. Thursday not a good day either for a
mutton kidney at Buckley's. Fried with butter, a shake of pepper. Better
a pork kidney at Dlugacz's. While the kettle is boiling. She lapped
slower, then licking the saucer clean. Why are their tongues so rough? To
lap better, all porous holes. Nothing she can eat? He glanced round him.
No.
On quietly creaky boots he went up the staircase to the hall, paused by
the bedroom door. She might like something tasty. Thin bread and butter
she likes in the morning. Still perhaps once in a way.
He said softly in the bare hall
I'm going round the corner. Be back in a minute.
And when he had heard his voice say it he added
You don't want anything for breakfast?
A sleepy soft grunt answered
Mn.
No. She didn't want anything. He heard then a warm heavy sigh, softer, as
she turned over and the loose brass quoits of the bedstead jingled. Must
get those settled really. Pity. All the way from Gibraltar. Forgotten any
little Spanish she knew. Wonder what her father gave for it. Old style.
Ah yes of course. Bought it at the governor's auction. Got a short
knock. Hard as nails at a bargain, old Tweedy. Yes, sir. At Plevna that
was. I rose from the ranks, sir, and I'm proud of it. Still he had brains
enough to make that corner in stamps. Now that was farseeing.
His hand took his hat from the peg over his initialled heavy overcoat and
his lost property office secondhand waterproof. Stamps stickyback
pictures. Daresay lots of officers are in the swim too. Course they do.
The sweated legend in the crown of his hat told him mutely Plasto's high
grade ha. He peeped quickly inside the leather headband. White slip of
paper. Quite safe.
On the doorstep he felt in his hip pocket for the latchkey. Not there. In
the trousers I left off. Must get it. Potato I have. Creaky wardrobe. No
use disturbing her. She turned over sleepily that time. He pulled the
halldoor to after him very quietly, more, till the footleaf dropped
gently over the threshold, a limp lid. Looked shut. All right till I come
back anyhow.
He crossed to the bright side, avoiding the loose cellarflap of number
seventyfive. The sun was nearing the steeple of George's church. Be a
warm day I fancy. Specially in these black clothes feel it more. Black
conducts, reflects, refracts is it?, the heat. But I couldn't go in
that light suit. Make a picnic of it. His eyelids sank quietly often as
he walked in happy warmth. Boland's breadvan delivering with trays our
daily but she prefers yesterday's loaves turnovers crisp crowns hot.
Makes you feel young. Somewhere in the east early morning set off at
dawn. Travel round in front of the sun, steal a day's march on him. Keep
it up for ever never grow a day older technically. Walk along a strand,
strange land, come to a city gate, sentry there, old ranker too, old
Tweedy's big moustaches, leaning on a long kind of a spear. Wander
through awned streets. Turbaned faces going by. Dark caves of carpet
shops, big man, Turko the terrible, seated crosslegged, smoking a coiled
pipe. Cries of sellers in the streets. Drink water scented with fennel,
sherbet. Dander along all day. Might meet a robber or two. Well, meet
him. Getting on to sundown. The shadows of the mosques among the pillars
priest with a scroll rolled up. A shiver of the trees, signal, the
evening wind. I pass on. Fading gold sky. A mother watches me from her
doorway. She calls her children home in their dark language. High wall
beyond strings twanged. Night sky, moon, violet, colour of Molly's new
garters. Strings. Listen. A girl playing one of those instruments what do
you call them dulcimers. I pass.
Probably not a bit like it really. Kind of stuff you read in the track
of the sun. Sunburst on the titlepage. He smiled, pleasing himself. What
Arthur Griffith said about the headpiece over the FREEMAN leader a
homerule sun rising up in the northwest from the laneway behind the bank
of Ireland. He prolonged his pleased smile. Ikey touch that homerule sun
rising up in the northwest.
He approached Larry O'Rourke's. From the cellar grating floated up the
flabby gush of porter. Through the open doorway the bar squirted out
whiffs of ginger, teadust, biscuitmush. Good house, however just the end
of the city traffic. For instance M'Auley's down there n. g. as
position. Of course if they ran a tramline along the North Circular from
the cattlemarket to the quays value would go up like a shot.
Baldhead over the blind. Cute old codger. No use canvassing him for an
ad. Still he knows his own business best. There he is, sure enough, my
bold Larry, leaning against the sugarbin in his shirtsleeves watching the
aproned curate swab up with mop and bucket. Simon Dedalus takes him off
to a tee with his eyes screwed up. Do you know what I'm going to tell
you? What's that, Mr O'Rourke? Do you know what? The Russians, they'd
only be an eight o'clock breakfast for the Japanese.
Stop and say a word about the funeral perhaps. Sad thing about poor
Dignam, Mr O'Rourke.
Turning into Dorset street he said freshly in greeting through the
doorway
Good day, Mr O'Rourke.
Good day to you.
Lovely weather, sir.
'Tis all that.
Where do they get the money? Coming up redheaded curates from the county
Leitrim, rinsing empties and old man in the cellar. Then, lo and behold,
they blossom out as Adam Findlaters or Dan Tallons. Then thin of the
competition. General thirst. Good puzzle would be cross Dublin without
passing a pub. Save it they can't. Off the drunks perhaps. Put down three
and carry five. What is that, a bob here and there, dribs and drabs. On
the wholesale orders perhaps. Doing a double shuffle with the town
travellers. Square it you with the boss and we'll split the job, see?
How much would that tot to off the porter in the month? Say ten barrels
of stuff. Say he got ten per cent off. O more. Fifteen. He passed Saint
Joseph's National school. Brats' clamour. Windows open. Fresh air helps
memory. Or a lilt. Ahbeesee defeegee kelomen opeecue rustyouvee
doubleyou. Boys are they? Yes. Inishturk. Inishark. Inishboffin. At their
joggerfry. Mine. Slieve Bloom.
He halted before Dlugacz's window, staring at the hanks of sausages,
polonies, black and white. Fifteen multiplied by. The figures whitened in
his mind, unsolved displeased, he let them fade. The shiny links, packed
with forcemeat, fed his gaze and he breathed in tranquilly the lukewarm
breath of cooked spicy pigs' blood.
A kidney oozed bloodgouts on the willowpatterned dish the last. He stood
by the nextdoor girl at the counter. Would she buy it too, calling the
items from a slip in her hand? Chapped washingsoda. And a pound and a
half of Denny's sausages. His eyes rested on her vigorous hips. Woods his
name is. Wonder what he does. Wife is oldish. New blood. No followers
allowed. Strong pair of arms. Whacking a carpet on the clothesline. She
does whack it, by George. The way her crooked skirt swings at each whack.
The ferreteyed porkbutcher folded the sausages he had snipped off with
blotchy fingers, sausagepink. Sound meat there like a stallfed heifer.
He took a page up from the pile of cut sheets the model farm at
Kinnereth on the lakeshore of Tiberias. Can become ideal winter
sanatorium. Moses Montefiore. I thought he was. Farmhouse, wall round it,
blurred cattle cropping. He held the page from him interesting read it
nearer, the title, the blurred cropping cattle, the page rustling. A
young white heifer. Those mornings in the cattlemarket, the beasts lowing
in their pens, branded sheep, flop and fall of dung, the breeders in
hobnailed boots trudging through the litter, slapping a palm on a
ripemeated hindquarter, there's a prime one, unpeeled switches in their
hands. He held the page aslant patiently, bending his senses and his
will, his soft subject gaze at rest. The crooked skirt swinging, whack by
whack by whack.
The porkbutcher snapped two sheets from the pile, wrapped up her prime
sausages and made a red grimace.
Now, my miss, he said.
She tendered a coin, smiling boldly, holding her thick wrist out.
Thank you, my miss. And one shilling threepence change. For you,
please?
Mr Bloom pointed quickly. To catch up and walk behind her if she went
slowly, behind her moving hams. Pleasant to see first thing in the
morning. Hurry up, damn it. Make hay while the sun shines. She stood
outside the shop in sunlight and sauntered lazily to the right. He sighed
down his nose they never understand. Sodachapped hands. Crusted toenails
too. Brown scapulars in tatters, defending her both ways. The sting of
disregard glowed to weak pleasure within his breast. For another a
constable off duty cuddling her in Eccles lane. They like them sizeable.
Prime sausage. O please, Mr Policeman, I'm lost in the wood.
Threepence, please.
His hand accepted the moist tender gland and slid it into a sidepocket.
Then it fetched up three coins from his trousers' pocket and laid them on
the rubber prickles. They lay, were read quickly and quickly slid, disc
by disc, into the till.
Thank you, sir. Another time.
A speck of eager fire from foxeyes thanked him. He withdrew his gaze
after an instant. No better not another time.
Good morning, he said, moving away.
Good morning, sir.
No sign. Gone. What matter?
He walked back along Dorset street, reading gravely. Agendath Netaim
planters' company. To purchase waste sandy tracts from Turkish government
and plant with eucalyptus trees. Excellent for shade, fuel and
construction. Orangegroves and immense melonfields north of Jaffa. You
pay eighty marks and they plant a dunam of land for you with olives,
oranges, almonds or citrons. Olives cheaper oranges need artificial
irrigation. Every year you get a sending of the crop. Your name entered
for life as owner in the book of the union. Can pay ten down and the
balance in yearly instalments. Bleibtreustrasse , Berlin, W. .
Nothing doing. Still an idea behind it.
He looked at the cattle, blurred in silver heat. Silverpowdered
olivetrees. Quiet long days pruning, ripening. Olives are packed in
jars, eh? I have a few left from Andrews. Molly spitting them out. Knows
the taste of them now. Oranges in tissue paper packed in crates. Citrons
too. Wonder is poor Citron still in Saint Kevin's parade. And Mastiansky
with the old cither. Pleasant evenings we had then. Molly in Citron's
basketchair. Nice to hold, cool waxen fruit, hold in the hand, lift it to
the nostrils and smell the perfume. Like that, heavy, sweet, wild
perfume. Always the same, year after year. They fetched high prices too,
Moisel told me. Arbutus place Pleasants street pleasant old times. Must
be without a flaw, he said. Coming all that way Spain, Gibraltar,
Mediterranean, the Levant. Crates lined up on the quayside at Jaffa, chap
ticking them off in a book, navvies handling them barefoot in soiled
dungarees. There's whatdoyoucallhim out of. How do you? Doesn't see. Chap
you know just to salute bit of a bore. His back is like that Norwegian
captain's. Wonder if I'll meet him today. Watering cart. To provoke the
rain. On earth as it is in heaven.
A cloud began to cover the sun slowly, wholly. Grey. Far.
No, not like that. A barren land, bare waste. Vulcanic lake, the dead
sea no fish, weedless, sunk deep in the earth. No wind could lift those
waves, grey metal, poisonous foggy waters. Brimstone they called it
raining down the cities of the plain Sodom, Gomorrah, Edom. All dead
names. A dead sea in a dead land, grey and old. Old now. It bore the
oldest, the first race. A bent hag crossed from Cassidy's, clutching a
naggin bottle by the neck. The oldest people. Wandered far away over all
the earth, captivity to captivity, multiplying, dying, being born
everywhere. It lay there now. Now it could bear no more. Dead an old
woman's the grey sunken cunt of the world.
Desolation.
Grey horror seared his flesh. Folding the page into his pocket he turned
into Eccles street, hurrying homeward. Cold oils slid along his veins,
chilling his blood age crusting him with a salt cloak. Well, I am here
now. Yes, I am here now. Morning mouth bad images. Got up wrong side of
the bed. Must begin again those Sandow's exercises. On the hands down.
Blotchy brown brick houses. Number eighty still unlet. Why is that?
Valuation is only twentyeight. Towers, Battersby, North, MacArthur
parlour windows plastered with bills. Plasters on a sore eye. To smell
the gentle smoke of tea, fume of the pan, sizzling butter. Be near her
ample bedwarmed flesh. Yes, yes.
Quick warm sunlight came running from Berkeley road, swiftly, in slim
sandals, along the brightening footpath. Runs, she runs to meet me, a
girl with gold hair on the wind.
Two letters and a card lay on the hallfloor. He stooped and gathered
them. Mrs Marion Bloom. His quickened heart slowed at once. Bold hand.
Mrs Marion.
Poldy
Entering the bedroom he halfclosed his eyes and walked through warm
yellow twilight towards her tousled head.
Who are the letters for?
He looked at them. Mullingar. Milly.
A letter for me from Milly, he said carefully, and a card to you. And a
letter for you.
He laid her card and letter on the twill bedspread near the curve of her
knees.
Do you want the blind up?
Letting the blind up by gentle tugs halfway his backward eye saw her
glance at the letter and tuck it under her pillow.
That do? he asked, turning.
She was reading the card, propped on her elbow.
She got the things, she said.
He waited till she had laid the card aside and curled herself back slowly
with a snug sigh.
Hurry up with that tea, she said. I'm parched.
The kettle is boiling, he said.
But he delayed to clear the chair her striped petticoat, tossed soiled
linen and lifted all in an armful on to the foot of the bed.
As he went down the kitchen stairs she called
Poldy
What?
Scald the teapot.
On the boil sure enough a plume of steam from the spout. He scalded and
rinsed out the teapot and put in four full spoons of tea, tilting the
kettle then to let the water flow in. Having set it to draw he took off
the kettle, crushed the pan flat on the live coals and watched the lump
of butter slide and melt. While he unwrapped the kidney the cat mewed
hungrily against him. Give her too much meat she won't mouse. Say they
won't eat pork. Kosher. Here. He let the bloodsmeared paper fall to her
and dropped the kidney amid the sizzling butter sauce. Pepper. He
sprinkled it through his fingers ringwise from the chipped eggcup.
Then he slit open his letter, glancing down the page and over. Thanks
new tam Mr Coghlan lough Owel picnic young student Blazes Boylan's
seaside girls.
The tea was drawn. He filled his own moustachecup, sham crown
Derby, smiling. Silly Milly's birthday gift. Only five she was then. No,
wait four. I gave her the amberoid necklace she broke. Putting pieces of
folded brown paper in the letterbox for her. He smiled, pouring.
O, MILLY BLOOM, YOU ARE MY DARLING.
YOU ARE MY LOOKINGGLASS FROM NIGHT TO MORNING.
I'D RATHER HAVE YOU WITHOUT A FARTHING
THAN KATEY KEOGH WITH HER ASS AND GARDEN.
Poor old professor Goodwin. Dreadful old case. Still he was a courteous
old chap. Oldfashioned way he used to bow Molly off the platform. And the
little mirror in his silk hat. The night Milly brought it into the
parlour. O, look what I found in professor Goodwin's hat All we laughed.
Sex breaking out even then. Pert little piece she was.
He prodded a fork into the kidney and slapped it over then fitted the
teapot on the tray. Its hump bumped as he took it up. Everything on it?
Bread and butter, four, sugar, spoon, her cream. Yes. He carried it
upstairs, his thumb hooked in the teapot handle.
Nudging the door open with his knee he carried the tray in and set it on
the chair by the bedhead.
What a time you were she said.
She set the brasses jingling as she raised herself briskly, an elbow on
the pillow. He looked calmly down on her bulk and between her large soft
bubs, sloping within her nightdress like a shegoat's udder. The warmth of
her couched body rose on the air, mingling with the fragrance of the tea
she poured.
A strip of torn envelope peeped from under the dimpled pillow. In the act
of going he stayed to straighten the bedspread.
Who was the letter from? he asked.
Bold hand. Marion.
O, Boylan, she said. He's bringing the programme.
What are you singing?
LA CI DAREM with J. C. Doyle, she said, and LOVE'S OLD SWEET SONG.
Her full lips, drinking, smiled. Rather stale smell that incense leaves
next day. Like foul flowerwater.
Would you like the window open a little?
She doubled a slice of bread into her mouth, asking
What time is the funeral?
Eleven, I think, he answered. I didn't see the paper.
Following the pointing of her finger he took up a leg of her soiled
drawers from the bed. No? Then, a twisted grey garter looped round a
stocking rumpled, shiny sole.
No that book.
Other stocking. Her petticoat.
It must have fell down, she said.
He felt here and there. VOGLIO E NON VORREI. Wonder if she pronounces
that right VOGLIO. Not in the bed. Must have slid down. He stooped and
lifted the valance. The book, fallen, sprawled against the bulge of the
orangekeyed chamberpot.
Show here, she said. I put a mark in it. There's a word I wanted to ask
you.
She swallowed a draught of tea from her cup held by nothandle and, having
wiped her fingertips smartly on the blanket, began to search the text
with the hairpin till she reached the word.
Met him what? he asked.
Here, she said. What does that mean?
He leaned downward and read near her polished thumbnail.
Metempsychosis?
Yes. Who's he when he's at home?
Metempsychosis, he said, frowning. It's Greek from the Greek. That
means the transmigration of souls.
O, rocks she said. Tell us in plain words.
He smiled, glancing askance at her mocking eyes. The same young eyes. The
first night after the charades. Dolphin's Barn. He turned over the
smudged pages. RUBY THE PRIDE OF THE RING. Hello. Illustration. Fierce
Italian with carriagewhip. Must be Ruby pride of the on the floor naked.
Sheet kindly lent. THE MONSTER MAFFEI DESISTED AND FLUNG HIS VICTIM FROM
HIM WITH AN OATH. Cruelty behind it all. Doped animals. Trapeze at
Hengler's. Had to look the other way. Mob gaping. Break your neck and
we'll break our sides. Families of them. Bone them young so they
metamspychosis. That we live after death. Our souls. That a man's soul
after he dies. Dignam's soul ...
Did you finish it? he asked.
Yes, she said. There's nothing smutty in it. Is she in love with the
first fellow all the time?
Never read it. Do you want another?
Yes. Get another of Paul de Kock's. Nice name he has.
She poured more tea into her cup, watching it flow sideways.
Must get that Capel street library book renewed or they'll write to
Kearney, my guarantor. Reincarnation that's the word.
Some people believe, he said, that we go on living in another body
after death, that we lived before. They call it reincarnation. That we
all lived before on the earth thousands of years ago or some other
planet. They say we have forgotten it. Some say they remember their past
lives.
The sluggish cream wound curdling spirals through her tea. Bette remind
her of the word metempsychosis. An example would be better. An example?
The BATH OF THE NYMPH over the bed. Given away with the Easter number of
PHOTO BITS Splendid masterpiece in art colours. Tea before you put milk
in. Not unlike her with her hair down slimmer. Three and six I gave for
the frame. She said it would look nice over the bed. Naked nymphs
Greece and for instance all the people that lived then.
He turned the pages back.
Metempsychosis, he said, is what the ancient Greeks called it. They
used to believe you could be changed into an animal or a tree, for
instance. What they called nymphs, for example.
Her spoon ceased to stir up the sugar. She gazed straight before her,
inhaling through her arched nostrils.
There's a smell of burn, she said. Did you leave anything on the fire?
The kidney he cried suddenly.
He fitted the book roughly into his inner pocket and, stubbing his toes
against the broken commode, hurried out towards the smell, stepping
hastily down the stairs with a flurried stork's legs. Pungent smoke shot
up in an angry jet from a side of the pan. By prodding a prong of the
fork under the kidney he detached it and turned it turtle on its back.
Only a little burnt. He tossed it off the pan on to a plate and let the
scanty brown gravy trickle over it.
Cup of tea now. He sat down, cut and buttered a slice of the loaf. He
shore away the burnt flesh and flung it to the cat. Then he put a forkful
into his mouth, chewing with discernment the toothsome pliant meat. Done
to a turn. A mouthful of tea. Then he cut away dies of bread, sopped one
in the gravy and put it in his mouth. What was that about some young
student and a picnic? He creased out the letter at his side, reading it
slowly as he chewed, sopping another die of bread in the gravy and
raising it to his mouth.
Dearest Papli
Thanks ever so much for the lovely birthday present. It suits me
splendid. Everyone says I am quite the belle in my new tam. I got mummy's
Iovely box of creams and am writing. They are lovely. I am getting on
swimming in the photo business now. Mr Coghlan took one of me and Mrs.
Will send when developed. We did great biz yesterday. Fair day and all
the beef to the heels were in. We are going to lough Owel on Monday with
a few friends to make a scrap picnic. Give my love to mummy and to
yourself a big kiss and thanks. I hear them at the piano downstairs.
There is to be a concert in the Greville Arms on Saturday. There is a
young student comes here some evenings named Bannon his cousins or
something are big swells and he sings Boylan's I was on the pop of
writing Blazes Boylan's song about those seaside girls. Tell him silly
Milly sends my best respects. I must now close with fondest love
Your fond daughter, MILLY.
P. S. Excuse bad writing am in hurry. Byby. M.
Fifteen yesterday. Curious, fifteenth of the month too. Her first
birthday away from home. Separation. Remember the summer morning she was
born, running to knock up Mrs Thornton in Denzille street. Jolly old
woman. Lot of babies she must have helped into the world. She knew from
the first poor little Rudy wouldn't live. Well, God is good, sir. She
knew at once. He would be eleven now if he had lived.
His vacant face stared pityingly at the postscript. Excuse bad writing.
Hurry. Piano downstairs. Coming out of her shell. Row with her in the XL
Cafe about the bracelet. Wouldn't eat her cakes or speak or look.
Saucebox. He sopped other dies of bread in the gravy and ate piece after
piece of kidney. Twelve and six a week. Not much. Still, she might do
worse. Music hall stage. Young student. He drank a draught of cooler tea
to wash down his meal. Then he read the letter again twice.
O, well she knows how to mind herself. But if not? No, nothing has
happened. Of course it might. Wait in any case till it does. A wild piece
of goods. Her slim legs running up the staircase. Destiny. Ripening now.
Vain very.
He smiled with troubled affection at the kitchen window. Day I caught her
in the street pinching her cheeks to make them red. Anemic a little. Was
given milk too long. On the ERIN'S KING that day round the Kish. Damned
old tub pitching about. Not a bit funky. Her pale blue scarf loose in the
wind with her hair.
ALL DIMPLED CHEEKS AND CURLS,
YOUR HEAD IT SIMPLY SWIRLS.
Seaside girls. Torn envelope. Hands stuck in his trousers' pockets,
jarvey off for the day, singing. Friend of the family. Swurls, he says.
Pier with lamps, summer evening, band,
THOSE GIRLS, THOSE GIRLS,
THOSE LOVELY SEASIDE GIRLS.
Milly too. Young kisses the first. Far away now past. Mrs Marion.
Reading, lying back now, counting the strands of her hair, smiling,
braiding.
A soft qualm, regret, flowed down his backbone, increasing. Will happen,
yes. Prevent. Useless can't move. Girl's sweet light lips. Will happen
too. He felt the flowing qualm spread over him. Useless to move now. Lips
kissed, kissing, kissed. Full gluey woman's lips.
Better where she is down there away. Occupy her. Wanted a dog to pass
the time. Might take a trip down there. August bank holiday, only two and
six return. Six weeks off, however. Might work a press pass. Or through
M'Coy.
The cat, having cleaned all her fur, returned to the meatstained paper,
nosed at it and stalked to the door. She looked back at him, mewing.
Wants to go out. Wait before a door sometime it will open. Let her wait.
Has the fidgets. Electric. Thunder in the air. Was washing at her ear
with her back to the fire too.
He felt heavy, full then a gentle loosening of his bowels. He stood up,
undoing the waistband of his trousers. The cat mewed to him.
Miaow he said in answer. Wait till I'm ready.
Heaviness hot day coming. Too much trouble to fag up the stairs to the
landing.
A paper. He liked to read at stool. Hope no ape comes knocking just as
I'm.
In the tabledrawer he found an old number of TITBITS. He folded it under
his armpit, went to the door and opened it. The cat went up in soft
bounds. Ah, wanted to go upstairs, curl up in a ball on the bed.
Listening, he heard her voice
Come, come, pussy. Come.
He went out through the backdoor into the garden stood to listen towards
the next garden. No sound. Perhaps hanging clothes out to dry. The maid
was in the garden. Fine morning.
He bent down to regard a lean file of spearmint growing by the wall. Make
a summerhouse here. Scarlet runners. Virginia creepers. Want to manure
the whole place over, scabby soil. A coat of liver of sulphur. All soil
like that without dung. Household slops. Loam, what is this that is? The
hens in the next garden their droppings are very good top dressing. Best
of all though are the cattle, especially when they are fed on those
oilcakes. Mulch of dung. Best thing to clean ladies' kid gloves. Dirty
cleans. Ashes too. Reclaim the whole place. Grow peas in that corner
there. Lettuce. Always have fresh greens then. Still gardens have their
drawbacks. That bee or bluebottle here Whitmonday.
He walked on. Where is my hat, by the way? Must have put it back on the
peg. Or hanging up on the floor. Funny I don't remember that. Hallstand
too full. Four umbrellas, her raincloak. Picking up the letters. Drago's
shopbell ringing. Queer I was just thinking that moment. Brown
brillantined hair over his collar. Just had a wash and brushup. Wonder
have I time for a bath this morning. Tara street. Chap in the paybox
there got away James Stephens, they say. O'Brien.
Deep voice that fellow Dlugacz has. Agendath what is it? Now, my miss.
Enthusiast.
He kicked open the crazy door of the jakes. Better be careful not to get
these trousers dirty for the funeral. He went in, bowing his head under
the low lintel. Leaving the door ajar, amid the stench of mouldy limewash
and stale cobwebs he undid his braces. Before sitting down he peered
through a chink up at the nextdoor windows. The king was in his
countinghouse. Nobody.
Asquat on the cuckstool he folded out his paper, turning its pages over
on his bared knees. Something new and easy. No great hurry. Keep it a
bit. Our prize titbit MATCHAM'S MASTERSTROKE. Written by Mr Philip
Beaufoy, Playgoers' Club, London. Payment at the rate of one guinea a
column has been made to the writer. Three and a half. Three pounds three.
Three pounds, thirteen and six.
Quietly he read, restraining himself, the first column and, yielding but
resisting, began the second. Midway, his last resistance yielding, he
allowed his bowels to ease themselves quietly as he read, reading still
patiently that slight constipation of yesterday quite gone. Hope it's not
too big bring on piles again. No, just right. So. Ah Costive. One
tabloid of cascara sagrada. Life might be so. It did not move or touch
him but it was something quick and neat. Print anything now. Silly
season. He read on, seated calm above his own rising smell. Neat
certainly. MATCHAM OFTEN THINKS OF THE MASTERSTROKE BY WHICH HE WON THE
LAUGHING WITCH WHO NOW. Begins and ends morally. HAND IN HAND. Smart. He
glanced back through what he had read and, while feeling his water flow
quietly, he envied kindly Mr Beaufoy who had written it and received
payment of three pounds, thirteen and six.
Might manage a sketch. By Mr and Mrs L. M. Bloom. Invent a story for some
proverb. Which? Time I used to try jotting down on my cuff what she said
dressing. Dislike dressing together. Nicked myself shaving. Biting her
nether lip, hooking the placket of her skirt. Timing her. .l. Did
Roberts pay you yet? .. What had Gretta Conroy on? .. What
possessed me to buy this comb? .. I'm swelled after that cabbage. A
speck of dust on the patent leather of her boot.
Rubbing smartly in turn each welt against her stockinged calf. Morning
after the bazaar dance when May's band played Ponchielli's dance of the
hours. Explain that morning hours, noon, then evening coming on, then
night hours. Washing her teeth. That was the first night. Her head
dancing. Her fansticks clicking. Is that Boylan well off? He has money.
Why? I noticed he had a good rich smell off his breath dancing. No use
humming then. Allude to it. Strange kind of music that last night. The
mirror was in shadow. She rubbed her handglass briskly on her woollen
vest against her full wagging bub. Peering into it. Lines in her eyes. It
wouldn't pan out somehow.
Evening hours, girls in grey gauze. Night hours then black with daggers
and eyemasks. Poetical idea pink, then golden, then grey, then black.
Still, true to life also. Day then the night.
He tore away half the prize story sharply and wiped himself with it. Then
he girded up his trousers, braced and buttoned himself. He pulled back
the jerky shaky door of the jakes and came forth from the gloom into the
air.
In the bright light, lightened and cooled in limb, he eyed carefully his
black trousers the ends, the knees, the houghs of the knees. What time
is the funeral? Better find out in the paper.
A creak and a dark whirr in the air high up. The bells of George's
church. They tolled the hour loud dark iron.
HEIGHO HEIGHO
HEIGHO HEIGHO
HEIGHO HEIGHO
Quarter to. There again the overtone following through the air, a third.
Poor Dignam
By lorries along sir John Rogerson's quay Mr Bloom walked soberly, past
Windmill lane, Leask's the linseed crusher, the postal telegraph office.
Could have given that address too. And past the sailors' home. He turned
from the morning noises of the quayside and walked through Lime street.
By Brady's cottages a boy for the skins lolled, his bucket of offal
linked, smoking a chewed fagbutt. A smaller girl with scars of eczema on
her forehead eyed him, listlessly holding her battered caskhoop. Tell him
if he smokes he won't grow. O let him His life isn't such a bed of
roses. Waiting outside pubs to bring da home. Come home to ma, da. Slack
hour won't be many there. He crossed Townsend street, passed the
frowning face of Bethel. El, yes house of Aleph, Beth. And past
Nichols' the undertaker. At eleven it is. Time enough. Daresay Corny
Kelleher bagged the job for O'Neill's. Singing with his eyes shut. Corny.
Met her once in the park. In the dark. What a lark. Police tout. Her name
and address she then told with my tooraloom tooraloom tay. O, surely he
bagged it. Bury him cheap in a whatyoumaycall. With my tooraloom,
tooraloom, tooraloom, tooraloom.
In Westland row he halted before the window of the Belfast and Oriental
Tea Company and read the legends of leadpapered packets choice blend,
finest quality, family tea. Rather warm. Tea. Must get some from Tom
Kernan. Couldn't ask him at a funeral, though. While his eyes still read
blandly he took off his hat quietly inhaling his hairoil and sent his
right hand with slow grace over his brow and hair. Very warm morning.
Under their dropped lids his eyes found the tiny bow of the leather
headband inside his high grade ha. Just there. His right hand came down
into the bowl of his hat. His fingers found quickly a card behind the
headband and transferred it to his waistcoat pocket.
So warm. His right hand once more more slowly went over his brow and
hair. Then he put on his hat again, relieved and read again choice
blend, made of the finest Ceylon brands. The far east. Lovely spot it
must be the garden of the world, big lazy leaves to float about on,
cactuses, flowery meads, snaky lianas they call them. Wonder is it like
that. Those Cinghalese lobbing about in the sun in DOLCE FAR NIENTE, not
doing a hand's turn all day. Sleep six months out of twelve. Too hot to
quarrel. Influence of the climate. Lethargy. Flowers of idleness. The air
feeds most. Azotes. Hothouse in Botanic gardens. Sensitive plants.
Waterlilies. Petals too tired to. Sleeping sickness in the air. Walk on
roseleaves. Imagine trying to eat tripe and cowheel. Where was the chap I
saw in that picture somewhere? Ah yes, in the dead sea floating on his
back, reading a book with a parasol open. Couldn't sink if you tried so
thick with salt. Because the weight of the water, no, the weight of the
body in the water is equal to the weight of the what? Or is it the volume
is equal to the weight? It's a law something like that. Vance in High
school cracking his fingerjoints, teaching. The college curriculum.
Cracking curriculum. What is weight really when you say the weight?
Thirtytwo feet per second per second. Law of falling bodies per second
per second. They all fall to the ground. The earth. It's the force of
gravity of the earth is the weight.
He turned away and sauntered across the road. How did she walk with her
sausages? Like that something. As he walked he took the folded FREEMAN
from his sidepocket, unfolded it, rolled it lengthwise in a baton and
tapped it at each sauntering step against his trouserleg. Careless air
just drop in to see. Per second per second. Per second for every second
it means. From the curbstone he darted a keen glance through the door of
the postoffice. Too late box. Post here. Noone. In.
He handed the card through the brass grill.
Are there any letters for me? he asked.
While the postmistress searched a pigeonhole he gazed at the recruiting
poster with soldiers of all arms on parade and held the tip of his baton
against his nostrils, smelling freshprinted rag paper. No answer
probably. Went too far last time.
The postmistress handed him back through the grill his card with a
letter. He thanked her and glanced rapidly at the typed envelope.
Henry Flower Esq,
c/o P. O. Westland Row,
City.
Answered anyhow. He slipped card and letter into his sidepocket,
reviewing again the soldiers on parade. Where's old Tweedy's regiment?
Castoff soldier. There bearskin cap and hackle plume. No, he's a
grenadier. Pointed cuffs. There he is royal Dublin fusiliers. Redcoats.
Too showy. That must be why the women go after them. Uniform. Easier to
enlist and drill. Maud Gonne's letter about taking them off O'Connell
street at night disgrace to our Irish capital. Griffith's paper is on
the same tack now an army rotten with venereal disease overseas or
halfseasover empire. Half baked they look hypnotised like. Eyes front.
Mark time. Table able. Bed ed. The King's own. Never see him dressed up
as a fireman or a bobby. A mason, yes.
He strolled out of the postoffice and turned to the right. Talk as if
that would mend matters. His hand went into his pocket and a forefinger
felt its way under the flap of the envelope, ripping it open in jerks.
Women will pay a lot of heed, I don't think. His fingers drew forth the
letter the letter and crumpled the envelope in his pocket. Something
pinned on photo perhaps. Hair? No.
M'Coy. Get rid of him quickly. Take me out of my way. Hate company when
you.
Hello, Bloom. Where are you off to?
Hello, M'Coy. Nowhere in particular.
How's the body?
Fine. How are you?
Just keeping alive, M'Coy said.
His eyes on the black tie and clothes he asked with low respect
Is there any ... no trouble I hope? I see you're ...
O, no, Mr Bloom said. Poor Dignam, you know. The funeral is today.
To be sure, poor fellow. So it is. What time?
A photo it isn't. A badge maybe.
E ... eleven, Mr Bloom answered.
I must try to get out there, M'Coy said. Eleven, is it? I only heard it
last night. Who was telling me? Holohan. You know Hoppy?
I know.
Mr Bloom gazed across the road at the outsider drawn up before the door
of the Grosvenor. The porter hoisted the valise up on the well. She stood
still, waiting, while the man, husband, brother, like her, searched his
pockets for change. Stylish kind of coat with that roll collar, warm for
a day like this, looks like blanketcloth. Careless stand of her with her
hands in those patch pockets. Like that haughty creature at the polo
match. Women all for caste till you touch the spot. Handsome is and
handsome does. Reserved about to yield. The honourable Mrs and Brutus is
an honourable man. Possess her once take the starch out of her.
I was with Bob Doran, he's on one of his periodical bends, and what do
you call him Bantam Lyons. Just down there in Conway's we were.
Doran Lyons in Conway's. She raised a gloved hand to her hair. In came
Hoppy. Having a wet. Drawing back his head and gazing far from beneath
his vailed eyelids he saw the bright fawn skin shine in the glare, the
braided drums. Clearly I can see today. Moisture about gives long sight
perhaps. Talking of one thing or another. Lady's hand. Which side will
she get up?
And he said SAD THING ABOUT OUR POOR FRIEND PADDY WHAT PADDY? I said.
POOR LITTLE PADDY DIGNAM, he said.
Off to the country Broadstone probably. High brown boots with laces
dangling. Wellturned foot. What is he foostering over that change for?
Sees me looking. Eye out for other fellow always. Good fallback. Two
strings to her bow.
WHY? I said. WHAT'S WRONG WITH HIM? I said.
Proud rich silk stockings.
Yes, Mr Bloom said.
He moved a little to the side of M'Coy's talking head. Getting up in a
minute.
WHAT'S WRONG WITH HIM? He said. HE'S DEAD, he said. And, faith, he
filled up. IS IT PADDY DIGNAM? I said. I couldn't believe it when I heard
it. I was with him no later than Friday last or Thursday was it in the
Arch. YES, he said. HE'S GONE. HE DIED ON MONDAY, POOR FELLOW. Watch
Watch Silk flash rich stockings white. Watch
A heavy tramcar honking its gong slewed between.
Lost it. Curse your noisy pugnose. Feels locked out of it. Paradise and
the peri. Always happening like that. The very moment. Girl in Eustace
street hallway Monday was it settling her garter. Her friend covering the
display of. ESPRIT DE CORPS. Well, what are you gaping at?
Yes, yes, Mr Bloom said after a dull sigh. Another gone.
One of the best, M'Coy said.
The tram passed. They drove off towards the Loop Line bridge, her rich
gloved hand on the steel grip. Flicker, flicker the laceflare of her hat
in the sun flicker, flick.
Wife well, I suppose? M'Coy's changed voice said.
O, yes, Mr Bloom said. Tiptop, thanks.
He unrolled the newspaper baton idly and read idly
WHAT IS HOME WITHOUT
PLUMTREE'S POTTED MEAT?
INCOMPLETE
WITH IT AN ABODE OF BLISS.
My missus has just got an engagement. At least it's not settled yet.
Valise tack again. By the way no harm. I'm off that, thanks.
Mr Bloom turned his largelidded eyes with unhasty friendliness.
My wife too, he said. She's going to sing at a swagger affair in the
Ulster Hall, Belfast, on the twentyfifth.
That so? M'Coy said. Glad to hear that, old man. Who's getting it up?
Mrs Marion Bloom. Not up yet. Queen was in her bedroom eating bread and.
No book. Blackened court cards laid along her thigh by sevens. Dark lady
and fair man. Letter. Cat furry black ball. Torn strip of envelope.
LOVE'S
OLD
SWEET
SONG
COMES LOOVE'S OLD ...
It's a kind of a tour, don't you see, Mr Bloom said thoughtfully.
SWEEEET SONG. There's a committee formed. Part shares and part profits.
M'Coy nodded, picking at his moustache stubble.
O, well, he said. That's good news.
He moved to go.
Well, glad to see you looking fit, he said. Meet you knocking around.
Yes, Mr Bloom said.
Tell you what, M'Coy said. You might put down my name at the funeral,
will you? I'd like to go but I mightn't be able, you see. There's a
drowning case at Sandycove may turn up and then the coroner and myself
would have to go down if the body is found. You just shove in my name if
I'm not there, will you?
I'll do that, Mr Bloom said, moving to get off. That'll be all right.
Right, M'Coy said brightly. Thanks, old man. I'd go if I possibly
could. Well, tolloll. Just C. P. M'Coy will do.
That will be done, Mr Bloom answered firmly.
Didn't catch me napping that wheeze. The quick touch. Soft mark. I'd like
my job. Valise I have a particular fancy for. Leather. Capped corners,
rivetted edges, double action lever lock. Bob Cowley lent him his for the
Wicklow regatta concert last year and never heard tidings of it from that
good day to this.
Mr Bloom, strolling towards Brunswick street, smiled. My missus has just
got an. Reedy freckled soprano. Cheeseparing nose. Nice enough in its
way for a little ballad. No guts in it. You and me, don't you know in
the same boat. Softsoaping. Give you the needle that would. Can't he hear
the difference? Think he's that way inclined a bit. Against my grain
somehow. Thought that Belfast would fetch him. I hope that smallpox up
there doesn't get worse. Suppose she wouldn't let herself be vaccinated
again. Your wife and my wife.
Wonder is he pimping after me?
Mr Bloom stood at the corner, his eyes wandering over the multicoloured
hoardings. Cantrell and Cochrane's Ginger Ale Aromatic. Clery's Summer
Sale. No, he's going on straight. Hello. LEAH tonight. Mrs Bandmann
Palmer. Like to see her again in that. HAMLET she played last night. Male
impersonator. Perhaps he was a woman. Why Ophelia committed suicide. Poor
papa How he used to talk of Kate Bateman in that. Outside the Adelphi in
London waited all the afternoon to get in. Year before I was born that
was sixtyfive. And Ristori in Vienna. What is this the right name is? By
Mosenthal it is. Rachel, is it? No. The scene he was always talking about
where the old blind Abraham recognises the voice and puts his fingers on
his face.
Nathan's voice His son's voice I hear the voice of Nathan who left his
father to die of grief and misery in my arms, who left the house of his
father and left the God of his father.
Every word is so deep, Leopold.
Poor papa Poor man I'm glad I didn't go into the room to look at his
face. That day O, dear O, dear Ffoo Well, perhaps it was best for
him.
Mr Bloom went round the corner and passed the drooping nags of the
hazard. No use thinking of it any more. Nosebag time. Wish I hadn't met
that M'Coy fellow.
He came nearer and heard a crunching of gilded oats, the gently champing
teeth. Their full buck eyes regarded him as he went by, amid the sweet
oaten reek of horsepiss. Their Eldorado. Poor jugginses Damn all they
know or care about anything with their long noses stuck in nosebags. Too
full for words. Still they get their feed all right and their doss.
Gelded too a stump of black guttapercha wagging limp between their
haunches. Might be happy all the same that way. Good poor brutes they
look. Still their neigh can be very irritating.
He drew the letter from his pocket and folded it into the newspaper he
carried. Might just walk into her here. The lane is safer.
He passed the cabman's shelter. Curious the life of drifting cabbies. All
weathers, all places, time or setdown, no will of their own. VOGLIO E
NON. Like to give them an odd cigarette. Sociable. Shout a few flying
syllables as they pass. He hummed
LA CI DAREM LA MANO
LA LA LALA LA LA.
He turned into Cumberland street and, going on some paces, halted
in the lee of the station wall. Noone. Meade's timberyard. Piled balks.
Ruins and tenements. With careful tread he passed over a hopscotch court
with its forgotten pickeystone. Not a sinner. Near the timberyard a
squatted child at marbles, alone, shooting the taw with a cunnythumb. A
wise tabby, a blinking sphinx, watched from her warm sill. Pity to disturb
them. Mohammed cut a piece out of his mantle not to wake her. Open it.
And once I played marbles when I went to that old dame's school. She liked
mignonette. Mrs Ellis's. And Mr? He opened the letter within the
newspaper.
A flower. I think it's a. A yellow flower with flattened petals. Not
annoyed then? What does she say?
Dear Henry
I got your last letter to me and thank you very much for it. I am sorry
you did not like my last letter. Why did you enclose the stamps? I am
awfully angry with you. I do wish I could punish you for that. I called
you naughty boy because I do not like that other world. Please tell me
what is the real meaning of that word? Are you not happy in your home you
poor little naughty boy? I do wish I could do something for you. Please
tell me what you think of poor me. I often think of the beautiful name you
have. Dear Henry, when will we meet? I think of you so often you have no
idea. I have never felt myself so much drawn to a man as you. I feel so
bad about. Please write me a long letter and tell me more. Remember if you
do not I will punish you. So now you know what I will do to you, you
naughty boy, if you do not wrote. O how I long to meet you. Henry dear, do
not deny my request before my patience are exhausted. Then I will tell you
all. Goodbye now, naughty darling, I have such a bad headache. today. and
write BY RETURN to your longing
Martha
P. S. Do tell me what kind of perfume does your wife use. I want to know.
He tore the flower gravely from its pinhold smelt its almost no smell
and placed it in his heart pocket. Language of flowers. They like it
because noone can hear. Or a poison bouquet to strike him down. Then
walking slowly forward he read the letter again, murmuring here and there
a word. Angry tulips with you darling manflower punish your cactus if you
don't please poor forgetmenot how I long violets to dear roses when we
soon anemone meet all naughty nightstalk wife Martha's perfume. Having
read it all he took it from the newspaper and put it back in his
sidepocket.
Weak joy opened his lips. Changed since the first letter. Wonder
did she wrote it herself. Doing the indignant a girl of good
family like me, respectable character. Could meet one Sunday after the
rosary. Thank you not having any. Usual love scrimmage. Then running
round corners. Bad as a row with Molly. Cigar has a cooling effect.
Narcotic. Go further next time. Naughty boy punish afraid of words, of
course. Brutal, why not? Try it anyhow. A bit at a time.
Fingering still the letter in his pocket he drew the pin out of it.
Common pin, eh? He threw it on the road. Out of her clothes somewhere
pinned together. Queer the number of pins they always have. No roses
without thorns.
Flat Dublin voices bawled in his head. Those two sluts that night in
the Coombe, linked together in the rain.
O, MARY LOST THE PIN OF HER DRAWERS.
SHE DIDN'T KNOW WHAT TO DO
TO KEEP IT UP
TO KEEP IT UP.
It? Them. Such a bad headache. Has her roses probably. Or sitting all day
typing. Eyefocus bad for stomach nerves. What perfume does your wife
use. Now could you make out a thing like that?
TO KEEP IT UP.
Martha, Mary. I saw that picture somewhere I forget now old master or
faked for money. He is sitting in their house, talking. Mysterious. Also
the two sluts in the Coombe would listen.
TO KEEP IT UP.
Nice kind of evening feeling. No more wandering about. Just loll there
quiet dusk let everything rip. Forget. Tell about places you have been,
strange customs. The other one, jar on her head, was getting the supper
fruit, olives, lovely cool water out of a well, stonecold like the hole in
the wall at Ashtown. Must carry a paper goblet next time I go to the
trottingmatches. She listens with big dark soft eyes. Tell her more and
more all. Then a sigh silence. Long long long rest.
Going under the railway arch he took out the envelope, tore it swiftly
in shreds and scattered them towards the road. The shreds fluttered away,
sank in the dank air a white flutter, then all sank.
Henry Flower. You could tear up a cheque for a hundred pounds in
the same way. Simple bit of paper. Lord Iveagh once cashed a sevenfigure
cheque for a million in the bank of Ireland. Shows you the money to be
made out of porter. Still the other brother lord Ardilaun has to change
his shirt four times a day, they say. Skin breeds lice or vermin. A
million pounds, wait a moment. Twopence a pint, fourpence a quart,
eightpence a gallon of porter, no, one and fourpence a gallon of porter.
One and four into twenty fifteen about. Yes, exactly. Fifteen millions of
barrels of porter.
What am I saying barrels? Gallons. About a million barrels all the same.
An incoming train clanked heavily above his head, coach after coach.
Barrels bumped in his head dull porter slopped and churned inside. The
bungholes sprang open and a huge dull flood leaked out, flowing together,
winding through mudflats all over the level land, a lazy pooling swirl of
liquor bearing along wideleaved flowers of its froth.
He had reached the open backdoor of All Hallows. Stepping into the
porch he doffed his hat, took the card from his pocket and tucked it again
behind the leather headband. Damn it. I might have tried to work M'Coy
for a pass to Mullingar.
Same notice on the door. Sermon by the very reverend John Conmee
S.J. on saint Peter Claver S.J. and the African Mission. Prayers for the
conversion of Gladstone they had too when he was almost unconscious.
The protestants are the same. Convert Dr William J. Walsh D.D. to the
true religion. Save China's millions. Wonder how they explain it to the
heathen Chinee. Prefer an ounce of opium. Celestials. Rank heresy for
them. Buddha their god lying on his side in the museum. Taking it easy
with hand under his cheek. Josssticks burning. Not like Ecce Homo. Crown
of thorns and cross. Clever idea Saint Patrick the shamrock. Chopsticks?
Conmee Martin Cunningham knows him distinguishedlooking. Sorry I
didn't work him about getting Molly into the choir instead of that Father
Farley who looked a fool but wasn't. They're taught that. He's not going
out in bluey specs with the sweat rolling off him to baptise blacks, is
he? The glasses would take their fancy, flashing. Like to see them sitting
round in a ring with blub lips, entranced, listening. Still life. Lap it
up like milk, I suppose.
The cold smell of sacred stone called him. He trod the worn steps,
pushed the swingdoor and entered softly by the rere.
Something going on some sodality. Pity so empty. Nice discreet place
to be next some girl. Who is my neighbour? Jammed by the hour to slow
music. That woman at midnight mass. Seventh heaven. Women knelt in the
benches with crimson halters round their necks, heads bowed. A batch knelt
at the altarrails. The priest went along by them, murmuring, holding the
thing in his hands. He stopped at each, took out a communion, shook a
drop or two are they in water? off it and put it neatly into her mouth.
Her hat and head sank. Then the next one. Her hat sank at once. Then the
next one a small old woman. The priest bent down to put it into her
mouth, murmuring all the time. Latin. The next one. Shut your eyes and
open your mouth. What? CORPUS body. Corpse. Good idea the Latin.
Stupefies them first. Hospice for the dying. They don't seem to chew it
only swallow it down. Rum idea eating bits of a corpse. Why the cannibals
cotton to it.
He stood aside watching their blind masks pass down the aisle, one by
one, and seek their places. He approached a bench and seated himself in
its corner, nursing his hat and newspaper. These pots we have to wear. We
ought to have hats modelled on our heads. They were about him here and
there, with heads still bowed in their crimson halters, waiting for it to
melt in their stomachs. Something like those mazzoth it's that sort of
bread unleavened shewbread. Look at them. Now I bet it makes them feel
happy. Lollipop. It does. Yes, bread of angels it's called. There's a big
idea behind it, kind of kingdom of God is within you feel. First
communicants. Hokypoky penny a lump. Then feel all like one family party,
same in the theatre, all in the same swim. They do. I'm sure of that. Not
so lonely. In our confraternity. Then come out a bit spreeish. Let off
steam. Thing is if you really believe in it. Lourdes cure, waters of
oblivion, and the Knock apparition, statues bleeding. Old fellow asleep
near that confessionbox. Hence those snores. Blind faith. Safe in the arms
of kingdom come. Lulls all pain. Wake this time next year.
He saw the priest stow the communion cup away, well in, and kneel
an instant before it, showing a large grey bootsole from under the lace
affair he had on. Suppose he lost the pin of his. He wouldn't know what to
do to. Bald spot behind. Letters on his back I.N.R.I? No I.H.S.
Molly told me one time I asked her. I have sinned or no I have suffered,
it is. And the other one? Iron nails ran in.
Meet one Sunday after the rosary. Do not deny my request. Turn up
with a veil and black bag. Dusk and the light behind her. She might be
here with a ribbon round her neck and do the other thing all the same on
the sly. Their character. That fellow that turned queen's evidence on the
invincibles he used to receive the, Carey was his name, the communion
every morning. This very church. Peter Carey, yes. No, Peter Claver I am
thinking of. Denis Carey. And just imagine that. Wife and six children
at home. And plotting that murder all the time. Those crawthumpers,
now that's a good name for them, there's always something shiftylooking
about them. They're not straight men of business either. O, no, she's
not here the flower no, no. By the way, did I tear up that envelope?
Yes under the bridge.
The priest was rinsing out the chalice then he tossed off the dregs
smartly. Wine. Makes it more aristocratic than for example if he drank
what they are used to Guinness's porter or some temperance beverage
Wheatley's Dublin hop bitters or Cantrell and Cochrane's ginger ale
aromatic. Doesn't give them any of it shew wine only the other. Cold
comfort. Pious fraud but quite right otherwise they'd have one old booser
worse than another coming along, cadging for a drink. Queer the whole
atmosphere of the. Quite right. Perfectly right that is.
Mr Bloom looked back towards the choir. Not going to be any music.
Pity. Who has the organ here I wonder? Old Glynn he knew how to make
that instrument talk, the VIBRATO fifty pounds a year they say he had in
Gardiner street. Molly was in fine voice that day, the STABAT MATER of
Rossini. Father Bernard Vaughan's sermon first. Christ or Pilate? Christ,
but don't keep us all night over it. Music they wanted. Footdrill stopped.
Could hear a pin drop. I told her to pitch her voice against that corner.
I could feel the thrill in the air, the full, the people looking up
QUIS EST HOMO.
Some of that old sacred music splendid. Mercadante seven last
words. Mozart's twelfth mass GLORIA in that. Those old popes keen on
music, on art and statues and pictures of all kinds. Palestrina for
example too. They had a gay old time while it lasted. Healthy too,
chanting, regular hours, then brew liqueurs. Benedictine. Green
Chartreuse. Still, having eunuchs in their choir that was coming it a bit
thick. What kind of voice is it? Must be curious to hear after their own
strong basses. Connoisseurs. Suppose they wouldn't feel anything after.
Kind of a placid. No worry. Fall into flesh, don't they? Gluttons, tall,
long legs. Who knows? Eunuch. One way out of it.
He saw the priest bend down and kiss the altar and then face about
and bless all the people. All crossed themselves and stood up. Mr Bloom
glanced about him and then stood up, looking over the risen hats. Stand up
at the gospel of course. Then all settled down on their knees again and he
sat back quietly in his bench. The priest came down from the altar,
holding the thing out from him, and he and the massboy answered each other
in Latin. Then the priest knelt down and began to read off a card
O God, our refuge and our strength ...
Mr Bloom put his face forward to catch the words. English. Throw
them the bone. I remember slightly. How long since your last mass?
Glorious and immaculate virgin. Joseph, her spouse. Peter and Paul. More
interesting if you understood what it was all about. Wonderful
organisation certainly, goes like clockwork. Confession. Everyone wants
to. Then I will tell you all. Penance. Punish me, please. Great weapon in
their hands. More than doctor or solicitor. Woman dying to. And I
schschschschschsch. And did you chachachachacha? And why did you? Look
down at her ring to find an excuse. Whispering gallery walls have ears.
Husband learn to his surprise. God's little joke. Then out she comes.
Repentance skindeep. Lovely shame. Pray at an altar. Hail Mary and
Holy Mary. Flowers, incense, candles melting. Hide her blushes.
Salvation army blatant imitation. Reformed prostitute will address
the meeting. How I found the Lord. Squareheaded chaps those must be
in Rome they work the whole show. And don't they rake in the money too?
Bequests also to the P.P. for the time being in his absolute discretion.
Masses for the repose of my soul to be said publicly with open doors.
Monasteries and convents. The priest in that Fermanagh will case in
the witnessbox. No browbeating him. He had his answer pat for everything.
Liberty and exaltation of our holy mother the church. The doctors of the
church they mapped out the whole theology of it.
The priest prayed
Blessed Michael, archangel, defend us in the hour of conflict. Be our
safeguard against the wickedness and snares of the devil may God restrain
him, we humbly pray and do thou, O prince of the heavenly host, by the
power of God thrust Satan down to hell and with him those other wicked
spirits who wander through the world for the ruin of souls.
The priest and the massboy stood up and walked off. All over. The
women remained behind thanksgiving.
Better be shoving along. Brother Buzz. Come around with the plate
perhaps. Pay your Easter duty.
He stood up. Hello. Were those two buttons of my waistcoat open all
the time? Women enjoy it. Never tell you. But we. Excuse, miss, there's a
whh just a whh fluff. Or their skirt behind, placket unhooked.
Glimpses of the moon. Annoyed if you don't. Why didn't you tell me
before. Still like you better untidy. Good job it wasn't farther south. He
passed, discreetly buttoning, down the aisle and out through the main door
into the light. He stood a moment unseeing by the cold black marble bowl
while before him and behind two worshippers dipped furtive hands in the
low tide of holy water. Trams a car of Prescott's dyeworks a widow in
her weeds. Notice because I'm in mourning myself. He covered himself. How
goes the time? Quarter past. Time enough yet. Better get that lotion made
up. Where is this? Ah yes, the last time. Sweny's in Lincoln place.
Chemists rarely move. Their green and gold beaconjars too heavy to stir.
Hamilton Long's, founded in the year of the flood. Huguenot churchyard
near there. Visit some day.
He walked southward along Westland row. But the recipe is in the
other trousers. O, and I forgot that latchkey too. Bore this funeral
affair. O well, poor fellow, it's not his fault. When was it I got it made
up last? Wait. I changed a sovereign I remember. First of the month it
must have been or the second. O, he can look it up in the prescriptions
book.
The chemist turned back page after page. Sandy shrivelled smell he
seems to have. Shrunken skull. And old. Quest for the philosopher's stone.
The alchemists. Drugs age you after mental excitement. Lethargy then.
Why? Reaction. A lifetime in a night. Gradually changes your character.
Living all the day among herbs, ointments, disinfectants. All his
alabaster lilypots. Mortar and pestle. Aq. Dist. Fol. Laur. Te Virid.
Smell almost cure you like the dentist's doorbell. Doctor Whack. He ought
to physic himself a bit. Electuary or emulsion. The first fellow that
picked an herb to cure himself had a bit of pluck. Simples. Want to be
careful. Enough stuff here to chloroform you. Test turns blue litmus
paper red. Chloroform. Overdose of laudanum. Sleeping draughts.
Lovephiltres. Paragoric poppysyrup bad for cough. Clogs the pores or the
phlegm. Poisons the only cures. Remedy where you least expect it. Clever
of nature.
About a fortnight ago, sir?
Yes, Mr Bloom said.
He waited by the counter, inhaling slowly the keen reek of drugs, the
dusty dry smell of sponges and loofahs. Lot of time taken up telling your
aches and pains.
Sweet almond oil and tincture of benzoin, Mr Bloom said, and then
orangeflower water ...
It certainly did make her skin so delicate white like wax.
And white wax also, he said.
Brings out the darkness of her eyes. Looking at me, the sheet up to
her eyes, Spanish, smelling herself, when I was fixing the links in my
cuffs. Those homely recipes are often the best strawberries for the
teeth nettles and rainwater oatmeal they say steeped in buttermilk.
Skinfood. One of the old queen's sons, duke of Albany was it? had only one
skin. Leopold, yes. Three we have. Warts, bunions and pimples to make it
worse. But you want a perfume too. What perfume does your? PEAU D'ESPAGNE.
That orangeflower water is so fresh. Nice smell these soaps have. Pure
curd soap. Time to get a bath round the corner. Hammam. Turkish. Massage.
Dirt gets rolled up in your navel. Nicer if a nice girl did it. Also I
think I. Yes I. Do it in the bath. Curious longing I. Water to water.
Combine business with pleasure. Pity no time for massage. Feel fresh then
all the day. Funeral be rather glum.
Yes, sir, the chemist said. That was two and nine. Have you brought a
bottle?
No, Mr Bloom said. Make it up, please. I'll call later in the day and
I'll take one of these soaps. How much are they?
Fourpence, sir.
Mr Bloom raised a cake to his nostrils. Sweet lemony wax.
I'll take this one, he said. That makes three and a penny.
Yes, sir, the chemist said. You can pay all together, sir, when you
come back.
Good, Mr Bloom said.
He strolled out of the shop, the newspaper baton under his armpit,
the coolwrappered soap in his left hand.
At his armpit Bantam Lyons' voice and hand said
Hello, Bloom. What's the best news? Is that today's? Show us a minute.
Shaved off his moustache again, by Jove Long cold upper lip. To
look younger. He does look balmy. Younger than I am.
Bantam Lyons's yellow blacknailed fingers unrolled the baton. Wants
a wash too. Take off the rough dirt. Good morning, have you used Pears'
soap? Dandruff on his shoulders. Scalp wants oiling.
I want to see about that French horse that's running today, Bantam
Lyons said. Where the bugger is it?
He rustled the pleated pages, jerking his chin on his high collar.
Barber's itch. Tight collar he'll lose his hair. Better leave him the
paper and get shut of him.
You can keep it, Mr Bloom said.
Ascot. Gold cup. Wait, Bantam Lyons muttered. Half a mo. Maximum
the second.
I was just going to throw it away, Mr Bloom said.
Bantam Lyons raised his eyes suddenly and leered weakly.
What's that? his sharp voice said.
I say you can keep it, Mr Bloom answered. I was going to throw it away
that moment.
Bantam Lyons doubted an instant, leering then thrust the outspread
sheets back on Mr Bloom's arms.
I'll risk it, he said. Here, thanks.
He sped off towards Conway's corner. God speed scut.
Mr Bloom folded the sheets again to a neat square and lodged the
soap in it, smiling. Silly lips of that chap. Betting. Regular hotbed of
it lately. Messenger boys stealing to put on sixpence. Raffle for large
tender turkey. Your Christmas dinner for threepence. Jack Fleming
embezzling to gamble then smuggled off to America. Keeps a hotel now. They
never come back. Fleshpots of Egypt.
He walked cheerfully towards the mosque of the baths. Remind you
of a mosque, redbaked bricks, the minarets. College sports today I see. He
eyed the horseshoe poster over the gate of college park cyclist doubled
up like a cod in a pot. Damn bad ad. Now if they had made it round like a
wheel. Then the spokes sports, sports, sports and the hub big college.
Something to catch the eye.
There's Hornblower standing at the porter's lodge. Keep him on
hands might take a turn in there on the nod. How do you do, Mr
Hornblower? How do you do, sir?
Heavenly weather really. If life was always like that. Cricket weather.
Sit around under sunshades. Over after over. Out. They can't play it here.
Duck for six wickets. Still Captain Culler broke a window in the Kildare
street club with a slog to square leg. Donnybrook fair more in their line.
And the skulls we were acracking when M'Carthy took the floor.
Heatwave. Won't last. Always passing, the stream of life, which in the
stream of life we trace is dearer than them all.
Enjoy a bath now clean trough of water, cool enamel, the gentle
tepid stream. This is my body.
He foresaw his pale body reclined in it at full, naked, in a womb of
warmth, oiled by scented melting soap, softly laved. He saw his trunk and
limbs riprippled over and sustained, buoyed lightly upward, lemonyellow
his navel, bud of flesh and saw the dark tangled curls of his bush
floating, floating hair of the stream around the limp father of thousands,
a languid floating flower.
Martin Cunningham, first, poked his silkhatted head into the creaking
carriage and, entering deftly, seated himself. Mr Power stepped in after
him, curving his height with care.
Come on, Simon.
After you, Mr Bloom said.
Mr Dedalus covered himself quickly and got in, saying
Yes, yes.
Are we all here now? Martin Cunningham asked. Come along, Bloom.
Mr Bloom entered and sat in the vacant place. He pulled the door to
after him and slammed it twice till it shut tight. He passed an arm
through the armstrap and looked seriously from the open carriagewindow at
the lowered blinds of the avenue. One dragged aside an old woman peeping.
Nose whiteflattened against the pane. Thanking her stars she was passed
over. Extraordinary the interest they take in a corpse. Glad to see us go
we give them such trouble coming. Job seems to suit them. Huggermugger in
corners. Slop about in slipperslappers for fear he'd wake. Then getting it
ready. Laying it out. Molly and Mrs Fleming making the bed. Pull it more
to your side. Our windingsheet. Never know who will touch you dead.
Wash and shampoo. I believe they clip the nails and the hair. Keep a bit
in an envelope. Grows all the same after. Unclean job.
All waited. Nothing was said. Stowing in the wreaths probably. I am
sitting on something hard. Ah, that soap in my hip pocket. Better shift
it out of that. Wait for an opportunity.
All waited. Then wheels were heard from in front, turning then
nearer then horses' hoofs. A jolt. Their carriage began to move, creaking
and swaying. Other hoofs and creaking wheels started behind. The blinds
of the avenue passed and number nine with its craped knocker, door ajar.
At walking pace.
They waited still, their knees jogging, till they had turned and were
passing along the tramtracks. Tritonville road. Quicker. The wheels
rattled rolling over the cobbled causeway and the crazy glasses shook
rattling in the doorframes.
What way is he taking us? Mr Power asked through both windows.
Irishtown, Martin Cunningham said. Ringsend. Brunswick street.
Mr Dedalus nodded, looking out.
That's a fine old custom, he said. I am glad to see it has not died out.
All watched awhile through their windows caps and hats lifted by
passers. Respect. The carriage swerved from the tramtrack to the smoother
road past Watery lane. Mr Bloom at gaze saw a lithe young man, clad in
mourning, a wide hat.
There's a friend of yours gone by, Dedalus, he said.
Who is that?
Your son and heir.
Where is he? Mr Dedalus said, stretching over across.
The carriage, passing the open drains and mounds of rippedup
roadway before the tenement houses, lurched round the corner and,
swerving back to the tramtrack, rolled on noisily with chattering wheels.
Mr Dedalus fell back, saying
Was that Mulligan cad with him? His FIDUS ACHATES
No, Mr Bloom said. He was alone.
Down with his aunt Sally, I suppose, Mr Dedalus said, the Goulding
faction, the drunken little costdrawer and Crissie, papa's little lump of
dung, the wise child that knows her own father.
Mr Bloom smiled joylessly on Ringsend road. Wallace Bros the
bottleworks Dodder bridge.
Richie Goulding and the legal bag. Goulding, Collis and Ward he
calls the firm. His jokes are getting a bit damp. Great card he was.
Waltzing in Stamer street with Ignatius Gallaher on a Sunday morning, the
landlady's two hats pinned on his head. Out on the rampage all night.
Beginning to tell on him now that backache of his, I fear. Wife ironing
his back. Thinks he'll cure it with pills. All breadcrumbs they are.
About six hundred per cent profit.
He's in with a lowdown crowd, Mr Dedalus snarled. That Mulligan is a
contaminated bloody doubledyed ruffian by all accounts. His name stinks
all over Dublin. But with the help of God and His blessed mother I'll make
it my business to write a letter one of those days to his mother or his
aunt or whatever she is that will open her eye as wide as a gate. I'll
tickle his catastrophe, believe you me.
He cried above the clatter of the wheels
I won't have her bastard of a nephew ruin my son. A counterjumper's
son. Selling tapes in my cousin, Peter Paul M'Swiney's. Not likely.
He ceased. Mr Bloom glanced from his angry moustache to Mr Power's
mild face and Martin Cunningham's eyes and beard, gravely shaking.
Noisy selfwilled man. Full of his son. He is right. Something to
hand on. If little Rudy had lived. See him grow up. Hear his voice in the
house. Walking beside Molly in an Eton suit. My son. Me in his eyes.
Strange feeling it would be. From me. Just a chance. Must have been that
morning in Raymond terrace she was at the window watching the two dogs
at it by the wall of the cease to do evil. And the sergeant grinning up.
She had that cream gown on with the rip she never stitched. Give us a
touch, Poldy. God, I'm dying for it. How life begins.
Got big then. Had to refuse the Greystones concert. My son inside
her. I could have helped him on in life. I could. Make him independent.
Learn German too.
Are we late? Mr Power asked.
Ten minutes, Martin Cunningham said, looking at his watch.
Molly. Milly. Same thing watered down. Her tomboy oaths. O jumping
Jupiter Ye gods and little fishes Still, she's a dear girl. Soon
be a woman. Mullingar. Dearest Papli. Young student. Yes, yes a woman
too. Life, life.
The carriage heeled over and back, their four trunks swaying.
Corny might have given us a more commodious yoke, Mr Power said.
He might, Mr Dedalus said, if he hadn't that squint troubling him. Do
you follow me?
He closed his left eye. Martin Cunningham began to brush away
crustcrumbs from under his thighs.
What is this, he said, in the name of God? Crumbs?
Someone seems to have been making a picnic party here lately, Mr Power
said.
All raised their thighs and eyed with disfavour the mildewed
buttonless leather of the seats. Mr Dedalus, twisting his nose, frowned
downward and said
Unless I'm greatly mistaken. What do you think, Martin?
It struck me too, Martin Cunningham said.
Mr Bloom set his thigh down. Glad I took that bath. Feel my feet
quite clean. But I wish Mrs Fleming had darned these socks better.
Mr Dedalus sighed resignedly.
After all, he said, it's the most natural thing in the world.
Did Tom Kernan turn up? Martin Cunningham asked, twirling the peak
of his beard gently.
Yes, Mr Bloom answered. He's behind with Ned Lambert and Hynes.
And Corny Kelleher himself? Mr Power asked.
At the cemetery, Martin Cunningham said.
I met M'Coy this morning, Mr Bloom said. He said he'd try to come.
The carriage halted short.
What's wrong?
We're stopped.
Where are we?
Mr Bloom put his head out of the window.
The grand canal, he said.
Gasworks. Whooping cough they say it cures. Good job Milly never
got it. Poor children Doubles them up black and blue in convulsions.
Shame really. Got off lightly with illnesses compared. Only measles.
Flaxseed tea. Scarlatina, influenza epidemics. Canvassing for death. Don't
miss this chance. Dogs' home over there. Poor old Athos Be good to Athos,
Leopold, is my last wish. Thy will be done. We obey them in the grave. A
dying scrawl. He took it to heart, pined away. Quiet brute. Old men's dogs
usually are.
A raindrop spat on his hat. He drew back and saw an instant of
shower spray dots over the grey flags. Apart. Curious. Like through a
colander. I thought it would. My boots were creaking I remember now.
The weather is changing, he said quietly.
A pity it did not keep up fine, Martin Cunningham said.
Wanted for the country, Mr Power said. There's the sun again coming out.
Mr Dedalus, peering through his glasses towards the veiled sun,
hurled a mute curse at the sky.
It's as uncertain as a child's bottom, he said.
We're off again.
The carriage turned again its stiff wheels and their trunks swayed
gently. Martin Cunningham twirled more quickly the peak of his beard.
Tom Kernan was immense last night, he said. And Paddy Leonard taking
him off to his face.
O, draw him out, Martin, Mr Power said eagerly. Wait till you hear him,
Simon, on Ben Dollard's singing of THE CROPPY BOY.
Immense, Martin Cunningham said pompously. HIS SINGING OF THAT SIMPLE
BALLAD, MARTIN, IS THE MOST TRENCHANT RENDERING I EVER HEARD IN THE WHOLE
COURSE OF MY EXPERIENCE.
Trenchant, Mr Power said laughing. He's dead nuts on that. And the
retrospective arrangement.
Did you read Dan Dawson's speech? Martin Cunningham asked.
I did not then, Mr Dedalus said. Where is it?
In the paper this morning.
Mr Bloom took the paper from his inside pocket. That book I must
change for her.
No, no, Mr Dedalus said quickly. Later on please.
Mr Bloom's glance travelled down the edge of the paper, scanning the
deaths Callan, Coleman, Dignam, Fawcett, Lowry, Naumann, Peake, what
Peake is that? is it the chap was in Crosbie and Alleyne's? no, Sexton,
Urbright. Inked characters fast fading on the frayed breaking paper.
Thanks to the Little Flower. Sadly missed. To the inexpressible grief of
his. Aged  after a long and tedious illness. Month's mind Quinlan.
On whose soul Sweet Jesus have mercy.
IT IS NOW A MONTH SINCE DEAR HENRY FLED
TO HIS HOME UP ABOVE IN THE SKY
WHILE HIS FAMILY WEEPS AND MOURNS HIS LOSS
HOPING SOME DAY TO MEET HIM ON HIGH.
I tore up the envelope? Yes. Where did I put her letter after I read it in
the bath? He patted his waistcoatpocket. There all right. Dear Henry fled.
Before my patience are exhausted.
National school. Meade's yard. The hazard. Only two there now.
Nodding. Full as a tick. Too much bone in their skulls. The other trotting
round with a fare. An hour ago I was passing there. The jarvies raised
their hats.
A pointsman's back straightened itself upright suddenly against a
tramway standard by Mr Bloom's window. Couldn't they invent something
automatic so that the wheel itself much handier? Well but that fellow
would lose his job then? Well but then another fellow would get a job
making the new invention?
Antient concert rooms. Nothing on there. A man in a buff suit with a
crape armlet. Not much grief there. Quarter mourning. People in law
perhaps.
They went past the bleak pulpit of saint Mark's, under the railway
bridge, past the Queen's theatre in silence. Hoardings Eugene Stratton,
Mrs Bandmann Palmer. Could I go to see LEAH tonight, I wonder. I said I.
Or the LILY OF KILLARNEY? Elster Grimes Opera Company. Big powerful
change. Wet bright bills for next week. FUN ON THE BRISTOL. Martin
Cunningham could work a pass for the Gaiety. Have to stand a drink or
two. As broad as it's long.
He's coming in the afternoon. Her songs.
Plasto's. Sir Philip Crampton's memorial fountain bust. Who was he?
How do you do? Martin Cunningham said, raising his palm to his brow
in salute.
He doesn't see us, Mr Power said. Yes, he does. How do you do?
Who? Mr Dedalus asked.
Blazes Boylan, Mr Power said. There he is airing his quiff.
Just that moment I was thinking.
Mr Dedalus bent across to salute. From the door of the Red Bank the
white disc of a straw hat flashed reply spruce figure passed.
Mr Bloom reviewed the nails of his left hand, then those of his right
hand. The nails, yes. Is there anything more in him that they she sees?
Fascination. Worst man in Dublin. That keeps him alive. They sometimes
feel what a person is. Instinct. But a type like that. My nails. I am just
looking at them well pared. And after thinking alone. Body getting a bit
softy. I would notice that from remembering. What causes that? I suppose
the skin can't contract quickly enough when the flesh falls off. But the
shape is there. The shape is there still. Shoulders. Hips. Plump. Night of
the dance dressing. Shift stuck between the cheeks behind.
He clasped his hands between his knees and, satisfied, sent his vacant
glance over their faces.
Mr Power asked
How is the concert tour getting on, Bloom?
O, very well, Mr Bloom said. I hear great accounts of it. It's a good
idea, you see ...
Are you going yourself?
Well no, Mr Bloom said. In point of fact I have to go down to the
county Clare on some private business. You see the idea is to tour the
chief towns. What you lose on one you can make up on the other.
Quite so, Martin Cunningham said. Mary Anderson is up there now.
Have you good artists?
Louis Werner is touring her, Mr Bloom said. O yes, we'll have all
topnobbers. J. C. Doyle and John MacCormack I hope and. The best, in
fact.
And MADAME, Mr Power said smiling. Last but not least.
Mr Bloom unclasped his hands in a gesture of soft politeness and
clasped them. Smith O'Brien. Someone has laid a bunch of flowers there.
Woman. Must be his deathday. For many happy returns. The carriage
wheeling by Farrell's statue united noiselessly their unresisting knees.
Oot a dullgarbed old man from the curbstone tendered his wares, his
mouth opening oot.
Four bootlaces for a penny.
Wonder why he was struck off the rolls. Had his office in Hume
street. Same house as Molly's namesake, Tweedy, crown solicitor for
Waterford. Has that silk hat ever since. Relics of old decency. Mourning
too. Terrible comedown, poor wretch Kicked about like snuff at a wake.
O'Callaghan on his last legs.
And MADAME. Twenty past eleven. Up. Mrs Fleming is in to clean.
Doing her hair, humming. VOGLIO E NON VORREI. No. VORREI E NON. Looking
at the tips of her hairs to see if they are split. MI TREMA UN POCO IL.
Beautiful on that TRE her voice is weeping tone. A thrush. A throstle.
There is a word throstle that expresses that.
His eyes passed lightly over Mr Power's goodlooking face. Greyish
over the ears. MADAME smiling. I smiled back. A smile goes a long way.
Only politeness perhaps. Nice fellow. Who knows is that true about the
woman he keeps? Not pleasant for the wife. Yet they say, who was it told
me, there is no carnal. You would imagine that would get played out pretty
quick. Yes, it was Crofton met him one evening bringing her a pound of
rumpsteak. What is this she was? Barmaid in Jury's. Or the Moira, was it?
They passed under the hugecloaked Liberator's form.
Martin Cunningham nudged Mr Power.
Of the tribe of Reuben, he said.
A tall blackbearded figure, bent on a stick, stumping round the corner
of Elvery's Elephant house, showed them a curved hand open on his spine.
In all his pristine beauty, Mr Power said.
Mr Dedalus looked after the stumping figure and said mildly
The devil break the hasp of your back
Mr Power, collapsing in laughter, shaded his face from the window as
the carriage passed Gray's statue.
We have all been there, Martin Cunningham said broadly.
His eyes met Mr Bloom's eyes. He caressed his beard, adding
Well, nearly all of us.
Mr Bloom began to speak with sudden eagerness to his companions' faces.
That's an awfully good one that's going the rounds about Reuben J and
the son.
About the boatman? Mr Power asked.
Yes. Isn't it awfully good?
What is that? Mr Dedalus asked. I didn't hear it.
There was a girl in the case, Mr Bloom began, and he determined to send
him to the Isle of Man out of harm's way but when they were both ...
What? Mr Dedalus asked. That confirmed bloody hobbledehoy is it?
Yes, Mr Bloom said. They were both on the way to the boat and he tried
to drown ...
Drown Barabbas Mr Dedalus cried. I wish to Christ he did
Mr Power sent a long laugh down his shaded nostrils.
No, Mr Bloom said, the son himself ...
Martin Cunningham thwarted his speech rudely
Reuben and the son were piking it down the quay next the river on their
way to the Isle of Man boat and the young chiseller suddenly got loose and
over the wall with him into the Liffey.
For God's sake Mr Dedalus exclaimed in fright. Is he dead?
Dead Martin Cunningham cried. Not he A boatman got a pole and
fished him out by the slack of the breeches and he was landed up to the
father on the quay more dead than alive. Half the town was there.
Yes, Mr Bloom said. But the funny part is ...
And Reuben J, Martin Cunningham said, gave the boatman a florin for
saving his son's life.
A stifled sigh came from under Mr Power's hand.
O, he did, Martin Cunningham affirmed. Like a hero. A silver florin.
Isn't it awfully good? Mr Bloom said eagerly.
One and eightpence too much, Mr Dedalus said drily.
Mr Power's choked laugh burst quietly in the carriage.
Nelson's pillar.
Eight plums a penny Eight for a penny
We had better look a little serious, Martin Cunningham said.
Mr Dedalus sighed.
Ah then indeed, he said, poor little Paddy wouldn't grudge us a laugh.
Many a good one he told himself.
The Lord forgive me Mr Power said, wiping his wet eyes with his
fingers. Poor Paddy I little thought a week ago when I saw him last and
he was in his usual health that I'd be driving after him like this. He's
gone from us.
As decent a little man as ever wore a hat, Mr Dedalus said. He went
very suddenly.
Breakdown, Martin Cunningham said. Heart.
He tapped his chest sadly.
Blazing face redhot. Too much John Barleycorn. Cure for a red
nose. Drink like the devil till it turns adelite. A lot of money he spent
colouring it.
Mr Power gazed at the passing houses with rueful apprehension.
He had a sudden death, poor fellow, he said.
The best death, Mr Bloom said.
Their wide open eyes looked at him.
No suffering, he said. A moment and all is over. Like dying in sleep.
Noone spoke.
Dead side of the street this. Dull business by day, land agents,
temperance hotel, Falconer's railway guide, civil service college, Gill's,
catholic club, the industrious blind. Why? Some reason. Sun or wind. At
night too. Chummies and slaveys. Under the patronage of the late Father
Mathew. Foundation stone for Parnell. Breakdown. Heart.
White horses with white frontlet plumes came round the Rotunda
corner, galloping. A tiny coffin flashed by. In a hurry to bury. A
mourning coach. Unmarried. Black for the married. Piebald for bachelors.
Dun for a nun.
Sad, Martin Cunningham said. A child.
A dwarf's face, mauve and wrinkled like little Rudy's was. Dwarf's
body, weak as putty, in a whitelined deal box. Burial friendly society
pays. Penny a week for a sod of turf. Our. Little. Beggar. Baby.
Meant nothing. Mistake of nature. If it's healthy it's from the mother.
If not from the man. Better luck next time.
Poor little thing, Mr Dedalus said. It's well out of it.
The carriage climbed more slowly the hill of Rutland square. Rattle
his bones. Over the stones. Only a pauper. Nobody owns.
In the midst of life, Martin Cunningham said.
But the worst of all, Mr Power said, is the man who takes his own life.
Martin Cunningham drew out his watch briskly, coughed and put it back.
The greatest disgrace to have in the family, Mr Power added.
Temporary insanity, of course, Martin Cunningham said decisively. We
must take a charitable view of it.
They say a man who does it is a coward, Mr Dedalus said.
It is not for us to judge, Martin Cunningham said.
Mr Bloom, about to speak, closed his lips again. Martin Cunningham's
large eyes. Looking away now. Sympathetic human man he is. Intelligent.
Like Shakespeare's face. Always a good word to say. They have no
mercy on that here or infanticide. Refuse christian burial. They
used to drive a stake of wood through his heart in the grave. As if it
wasn't broken already. Yet sometimes they repent too late. Found in the
riverbed clutching rushes. He looked at me. And that awful drunkard of a
wife of his. Setting up house for her time after time and then pawning the
furniture on him every Saturday almost. Leading him the life of the
damned. Wear the heart out of a stone, that. Monday morning. Start afresh.
Shoulder to the wheel. Lord, she must have looked a sight that night
Dedalus told me he was in there. Drunk about the place and capering with
Martin's umbrella.
AND THEY CALL ME THE JEWEL OF ASIA,
OF ASIA,
THE GEISHA.
He looked away from me. He knows. Rattle his bones.
That afternoon of the inquest. The redlabelled bottle on the table. The
room in the hotel with hunting pictures. Stuffy it was. Sunlight through
the slats of the Venetian blind. The coroner's sunlit ears, big and hairy.
Boots giving evidence. Thought he was asleep first. Then saw like yellow
streaks on his face. Had slipped down to the foot of the bed. Verdict
overdose. Death by misadventure. The letter. For my son Leopold.
No more pain. Wake no more. Nobody owns.
The carriage rattled swiftly along Blessington street. Over the stones.
We are going the pace, I think, Martin Cunningham said.
God grant he doesn't upset us on the road, Mr Power said.
I hope not, Martin Cunningham said. That will be a great race tomorrow
in Germany. The Gordon Bennett.
Yes, by Jove, Mr Dedalus said. That will be worth seeing, faith.
As they turned into Berkeley street a streetorgan near the Basin sent
over and after them a rollicking rattling song of the halls. Has anybody
here seen Kelly? Kay ee double ell wy. Dead March from SAUL. He's as bad
as old Antonio. He left me on my ownio. Pirouette The MATER
MISERICORDIAE. Eccles street. My house down there. Big place. Ward for
incurables there. Very encouraging. Our Lady's Hospice for the dying.
Deadhouse handy underneath. Where old Mrs Riordan died. They look
terrible the women. Her feeding cup and rubbing her mouth with the
spoon. Then the screen round her bed for her to die. Nice young student
that was dressed that bite the bee gave me. He's gone over to the lyingin
hospital they told me. From one extreme to the other. The carriage
galloped round a corner stopped.
What's wrong now?
A divided drove of branded cattle passed the windows, lowing,
slouching by on padded hoofs, whisking their tails slowly on their clotted
bony croups. Outside them and through them ran raddled sheep bleating
their fear.
Emigrants, Mr Power said.
Huuuh the drover's voice cried, his switch sounding on their flanks.
Huuuh out of that
Thursday, of course. Tomorrow is killing day. Springers. Cuffe sold
them about twentyseven quid each. For Liverpool probably. Roastbeef for
old England. They buy up all the juicy ones. And then the fifth quarter
lost all that raw stuff, hide, hair, horns. Comes to a big thing in a
year. Dead meat trade. Byproducts of the slaughterhouses for tanneries,
soap, margarine. Wonder if that dodge works now getting dicky meat off the
train at Clonsilla.
The carriage moved on through the drove.
I can't make out why the corporation doesn't run a tramline from the
parkgate to the quays, Mr Bloom said. All those animals could be taken in
trucks down to the boats.
Instead of blocking up the thoroughfare, Martin Cunningham said. Quite
right. They ought to.
Yes, Mr Bloom said, and another thing I often thought, is to have
municipal funeral trams like they have in Milan, you know. Run the line
out to the cemetery gates and have special trams, hearse and carriage and
all. Don't you see what I mean?
O, that be damned for a story, Mr Dedalus said. Pullman car and saloon
diningroom.
A poor lookout for Corny, Mr Power added.
Why? Mr Bloom asked, turning to Mr Dedalus. Wouldn't it be more
decent than galloping two abreast?
Well, there's something in that, Mr Dedalus granted.
And, Martin Cunningham said, we wouldn't have scenes like that when
the hearse capsized round Dunphy's and upset the coffin on to the road.
That was terrible, Mr Power's shocked face said, and the corpse fell
about the road. Terrible
First round Dunphy's, Mr Dedalus said, nodding. Gordon Bennett cup.
Praises be to God Martin Cunningham said piously.
Bom Upset. A coffin bumped out on to the road. Burst open. Paddy
Dignam shot out and rolling over stiff in the dust in a brown habit too
large for him. Red face grey now. Mouth fallen open. Asking what's up
now. Quite right to close it. Looks horrid open. Then the insides
decompose quickly. Much better to close up all the orifices. Yes, also.
With wax. The sphincter loose. Seal up all.
Dunphy's, Mr Power announced as the carriage turned right.
Dunphy's corner. Mourning coaches drawn up, drowning their grief.
A pause by the wayside. Tiptop position for a pub. Expect we'll pull up
here on the way back to drink his health. Pass round the consolation.
Elixir of life.
But suppose now it did happen. Would he bleed if a nail say cut him in
the knocking about? He would and he wouldn't, I suppose. Depends on
where. The circulation stops. Still some might ooze out of an artery. It
would be better to bury them in red a dark red.
In silence they drove along Phibsborough road. An empty hearse
trotted by, coming from the cemetery looks relieved.
Crossguns bridge the royal canal.
Water rushed roaring through the sluices. A man stood on his
dropping barge, between clamps of turf. On the towpath by the lock a
slacktethered horse. Aboard of the BUGABU.
Their eyes watched him. On the slow weedy waterway he had floated
on his raft coastward over Ireland drawn by a haulage rope past beds of
reeds, over slime, mudchoked bottles, carrion dogs. Athlone, Mullingar,
Moyvalley, I could make a walking tour to see Milly by the canal. Or cycle
down. Hire some old crock, safety. Wren had one the other day at the
auction but a lady's. Developing waterways. James M'Cann's hobby to row
me o'er the ferry. Cheaper transit. By easy stages. Houseboats. Camping
out. Also hearses. To heaven by water. Perhaps I will without writing.
Come as a surprise, Leixlip, Clonsilla. Dropping down lock by lock to
Dublin. With turf from the midland bogs. Salute. He lifted his brown straw
hat, saluting Paddy Dignam.
They drove on past Brian Boroimhe house. Near it now.
I wonder how is our friend Fogarty getting on, Mr Power said.
Better ask Tom Kernan, Mr Dedalus said.
How is that? Martin Cunningham said. Left him weeping, I suppose?
Though lost to sight, Mr Dedalus said, to memory dear.
The carriage steered left for Finglas road.
The stonecutter's yard on the right. Last lap. Crowded on the spit of
land silent shapes appeared, white, sorrowful, holding out calm hands,
knelt in grief, pointing. Fragments of shapes, hewn. In white silence
appealing. The best obtainable. Thos. H. Dennany, monumental builder and
sculptor.
Passed.
On the curbstone before Jimmy Geary, the sexton's, an old tramp sat,
grumbling, emptying the dirt and stones out of his huge dustbrown
yawning boot. After life's journey.
Gloomy gardens then went by one by one gloomy houses.
Mr Power pointed.
That is where Childs was murdered, he said. The last house.
So it is, Mr Dedalus said. A gruesome case. Seymour Bushe got him off.
Murdered his brother. Or so they said.
The crown had no evidence, Mr Power said.
Only circumstantial, Martin Cunningham added. That's the maxim of
the law. Better for ninetynine guilty to escape than for one innocent
person to be wrongfully condemned.
They looked. Murderer's ground. It passed darkly. Shuttered,
tenantless, unweeded garden. Whole place gone to hell. Wrongfully
condemned. Murder. The murderer's image in the eye of the murdered.
They love reading about it. Man's head found in a garden. Her clothing
consisted of. How she met her death. Recent outrage. The weapon used.
Murderer is still at large. Clues. A shoelace. The body to be exhumed.
Murder will out.
Cramped in this carriage. She mightn't like me to come that way
without letting her know. Must be careful about women. Catch them once
with their pants down. Never forgive you after. Fifteen.
The high railings of Prospect rippled past their gaze. Dark poplars,
rare white forms. Forms more frequent, white shapes thronged amid the
trees, white forms and fragments streaming by mutely, sustaining vain
gestures on the air.
The felly harshed against the curbstone stopped. Martin
Cunningham put out his arm and, wrenching back the handle, shoved the
door open with his knee. He stepped out. Mr Power and Mr Dedalus
followed.
Change that soap now. Mr Bloom's hand unbuttoned his hip pocket
swiftly and transferred the paperstuck soap to his inner handkerchief
pocket. He stepped out of the carriage, replacing the newspaper his other
hand still held.
Paltry funeral coach and three carriages. It's all the same.
Pallbearers, gold reins, requiem mass, firing a volley. Pomp of death.
Beyond the hind carriage a hawker stood by his barrow of cakes and fruit.
Simnel cakes those are, stuck together cakes for the dead. Dogbiscuits.
Who ate them? Mourners coming out.
He followed his companions. Mr Kernan and Ned Lambert followed,
Hynes walking after them. Corny Kelleher stood by the opened hearse and
took out the two wreaths. He handed one to the boy.
Where is that child's funeral disappeared to?
A team of horses passed from Finglas with toiling plodding tread,
dragging through the funereal silence a creaking waggon on which lay a
granite block. The waggoner marching at their head saluted.
Coffin now. Got here before us, dead as he is. Horse looking round at it
with his plume skeowways. Dull eye collar tight on his neck, pressing on
a bloodvessel or something. Do they know what they cart out here every
day? Must be twenty or thirty funerals every day. Then Mount Jerome for
the protestants. Funerals all over the world everywhere every minute.
Shovelling them under by the cartload doublequick. Thousands every hour.
Too many in the world.
Mourners came out through the gates woman and a girl. Leanjawed
harpy, hard woman at a bargain, her bonnet awry. Girl's face stained with
dirt and tears, holding the woman's arm, looking up at her for a sign to
cry. Fish's face, bloodless and livid.
The mutes shouldered the coffin and bore it in through the gates. So
much dead weight. Felt heavier myself stepping out of that bath. First the
stiff then the friends of the stiff. Corny Kelleher and the boy followed
with their wreaths. Who is that beside them? Ah, the brotherinlaw.
All walked after.
Martin Cunningham whispered
I was in mortal agony with you talking of suicide before Bloom.
What? Mr Power whispered. How so?
His father poisoned himself, Martin Cunningham whispered. Had the
Queen's hotel in Ennis. You heard him say he was going to Clare.
Anniversary.
O God Mr Power whispered. First I heard of it. Poisoned himself?
He glanced behind him to where a face with dark thinking eyes
followed towards the cardinal's mausoleum. Speaking.
Was he insured? Mr Bloom asked.
I believe so, Mr Kernan answered. But the policy was heavily mortgaged.
Martin is trying to get the youngster into Artane.
How many children did he leave?
Five. Ned Lambert says he'll try to get one of the girls into Todd's.
A sad case, Mr Bloom said gently. Five young children.
A great blow to the poor wife, Mr Kernan added.
Indeed yes, Mr Bloom agreed.
Has the laugh at him now.
He looked down at the boots he had blacked and polished. She had
outlived him. Lost her husband. More dead for her than for me. One must
outlive the other. Wise men say. There are more women than men in the
world. Condole with her. Your terrible loss. I hope you'll soon follow
him. For Hindu widows only. She would marry another. Him? No. Yet who
knows after. Widowhood not the thing since the old queen died. Drawn on
a guncarriage. Victoria and Albert. Frogmore memorial mourning. But in
the end she put a few violets in her bonnet. Vain in her heart of hearts.
All for a shadow. Consort not even a king. Her son was the substance.
Something new to hope for not like the past she wanted back, waiting. It
never comes. One must go first alone, under the ground and lie no more
in her warm bed.
How are you, Simon? Ned Lambert said softly, clasping hands. Haven't
seen you for a month of Sundays.
Never better. How are all in Cork's own town?
I was down there for the Cork park races on Easter Monday, Ned
Lambert said. Same old six and eightpence. Stopped with Dick Tivy.
And how is Dick, the solid man?
Nothing between himself and heaven, Ned Lambert answered.
By the holy Paul Mr Dedalus said in subdued wonder. Dick Tivy bald?
Martin is going to get up a whip for the youngsters, Ned Lambert said,
pointing ahead. A few bob a skull. Just to keep them going till the
insurance is cleared up.
Yes, yes, Mr Dedalus said dubiously. Is that the eldest boy in front?
Yes, Ned Lambert said, with the wife's brother. John Henry Menton is
behind. He put down his name for a quid.
I'll engage he did, Mr Dedalus said. I often told poor Paddy he ought
to mind that job. John Henry is not the worst in the world.
How did he lose it? Ned Lambert asked. Liquor, what?
Many a good man's fault, Mr Dedalus said with a sigh.
They halted about the door of the mortuary chapel. Mr Bloom stood
behind the boy with the wreath looking down at his sleekcombed hair and
at the slender furrowed neck inside his brandnew collar. Poor boy Was he
there when the father? Both unconscious. Lighten up at the last moment
and recognise for the last time. All he might have done. I owe three
shillings to O'Grady. Would he understand? The mutes bore the coffin into
the chapel. Which end is his head?
After a moment he followed the others in, blinking in the screened
light. The coffin lay on its bier before the chancel, four tall yellow
candles at its corners. Always in front of us. Corny Kelleher, laying a
wreath at each fore corner, beckoned to the boy to kneel. The mourners
knelt here and there in prayingdesks. Mr Bloom stood behind near the font
and, when all had knelt, dropped carefully his unfolded newspaper from his
pocket and knelt his right knee upon it. He fitted his black hat gently on
his left knee and, holding its brim, bent over piously.
A server bearing a brass bucket with something in it came out through
a door. The whitesmocked priest came after him, tidying his stole with one
hand, balancing with the other a little book against his toad's belly.
Who'll read the book? I, said the rook.
They halted by the bier and the priest began to read out of his book
with a fluent croak.
Father Coffey. I knew his name was like a coffin. DOMINENAMINE.
Bully about the muzzle he looks. Bosses the show. Muscular christian. Woe
betide anyone that looks crooked at him priest. Thou art Peter. Burst
sideways like a sheep in clover Dedalus says he will. With a belly on him
like a poisoned pup. Most amusing expressions that man finds. Hhhn burst
sideways.
NON INTRES IN JUDICIUM CUM SERVO TUO, DOMINE.
Makes them feel more important to be prayed over in Latin. Requiem
mass. Crape weepers. Blackedged notepaper. Your name on the altarlist.
Chilly place this. Want to feed well, sitting in there all the morning in
the gloom kicking his heels waiting for the next please. Eyes of a toad
too. What swells him up that way? Molly gets swelled after cabbage. Air of
the place maybe. Looks full up of bad gas. Must be an infernal lot of bad
gas round the place. Butchers, for instance they get like raw beefsteaks.
Who was telling me? Mervyn Browne. Down in the vaults of saint Werburgh's
lovely old organ hundred and fifty they have to bore a hole in the coffins
sometimes to let out the bad gas and burn it. Out it rushes blue. One
whiff of that and you're a doner.
My kneecap is hurting me. Ow. That's better.
The priest took a stick with a knob at the end of it out of the boy's
bucket and shook it over the coffin. Then he walked to the other end and
shook it again. Then he came back and put it back in the bucket. As you
were before you rested. It's all written down he has to do it.
ET NE NOS INDUCAS IN TENTATIONEM.
The server piped the answers in the treble. I often thought it would be
better to have boy servants. Up to fifteen or so. After that, of
course ...
Holy water that was, I expect. Shaking sleep out of it. He must be fed
up with that job, shaking that thing over all the corpses they trot up.
What harm if he could see what he was shaking it over. Every mortal day a
fresh batch middleaged men, old women, children, women dead in
childbirth, men with beards, baldheaded businessmen, consumptive girls
with little sparrows' breasts. All the year round he prayed the same thing
over them all and shook water on top of them sleep. On Dignam now.
IN PARADISUM.
Said he was going to paradise or is in paradise. Says that over everybody.
Tiresome kind of a job. But he has to say something.
The priest closed his book and went off, followed by the server.
Corny Kelleher opened the sidedoors and the gravediggers came in, hoisted
the coffin again, carried it out and shoved it on their cart. Corny
Kelleher gave one wreath to the boy and one to the brotherinlaw. All
followed them out of the sidedoors into the mild grey air. Mr Bloom came
last folding his paper again into his pocket. He gazed gravely at the
ground till the coffincart wheeled off to the left. The metal wheels
ground the gravel with a sharp grating cry and the pack of blunt boots
followed the trundled barrow along a lane of sepulchres.
The ree the ra the ree the ra the roo. Lord, I mustn't lilt here.
The O'Connell circle, Mr Dedalus said about him.
Mr Power's soft eyes went up to the apex of the lofty cone.
He's at rest, he said, in the middle of his people, old Dan O'. But his
heart is buried in Rome. How many broken hearts are buried here, Simon
Her grave is over there, Jack, Mr Dedalus said. I'll soon be stretched
beside her. Let Him take me whenever He likes.
Breaking down, he began to weep to himself quietly, stumbling a little
in his walk. Mr Power took his arm.
She's better where she is, he said kindly.
I suppose so, Mr Dedalus said with a weak gasp. I suppose she is in
heaven if there is a heaven.
Corny Kelleher stepped aside from his rank and allowed the mourners to
plod by.
Sad occasions, Mr Kernan began politely.
Mr Bloom closed his eyes and sadly twice bowed his head.
The others are putting on their hats, Mr Kernan said. I suppose we can
do so too. We are the last. This cemetery is a treacherous place.
They covered their heads.
The reverend gentleman read the service too quickly, don't you think?
Mr Kernan said with reproof.
Mr Bloom nodded gravely looking in the quick bloodshot eyes. Secret
eyes, secretsearching. Mason, I think not sure. Beside him again. We are
the last. In the same boat. Hope he'll say something else.
Mr Kernan added
The service of the Irish church used in Mount Jerome is simpler, more
impressive I must say.
Mr Bloom gave prudent assent. The language of course was another thing.
Mr Kernan said with solemnity
I AM THE RESURRECTION AND THE LIFE. That touches a man's inmost heart.
It does, Mr Bloom said.
Your heart perhaps but what price the fellow in the six feet by two
with his toes to the daisies? No touching that. Seat of the affections.
Broken heart. A pump after all, pumping thousands of gallons of blood
every day. One fine day it gets bunged up and there you are. Lots of
them lying around here lungs, hearts, livers. Old rusty pumps damn the
thing else. The resurrection and the life. Once you are dead you are dead.
That last day idea. Knocking them all up out of their graves. Come forth,
Lazarus And he came fifth and lost the job. Get up Last day Then every
fellow mousing around for his liver and his lights and the rest of his
traps. Find damn all of himself that morning. Pennyweight of powder in
a skull. Twelve grammes one pennyweight. Troy measure.
Corny Kelleher fell into step at their side.
Everything went off A, he said. What?
He looked on them from his drawling eye. Policeman's shoulders. With
your tooraloom tooraloom.
As it should be, Mr Kernan said.
What? Eh? Corny Kelleher said.
Mr Kernan assured him.
Who is that chap behind with Tom Kernan? John Henry Menton asked. I
know his face.
Ned Lambert glanced back.
Bloom, he said, Madame Marion Tweedy that was, is, I mean, the
soprano. She's his wife.
O, to be sure, John Henry Menton said. I haven't seen her for some time.
he was a finelooking woman. I danced with her, wait, fifteen seventeen
golden years ago, at Mat Dillon's in Roundtown. And a good armful she
was.
He looked behind through the others.
What is he? he asked. What does he do? Wasn't he in the stationery line?
I fell foul of him one evening, I remember, at bowls.
Ned Lambert smiled.
Yes, he was, he said, in Wisdom Hely's. A traveller for blottingpaper.
In God's name, John Henry Menton said, what did she marry a coon like
that for? She had plenty of game in her then.
Has still, Ned Lambert said. He does some canvassing for ads.
John Henry Menton's large eyes stared ahead.
The barrow turned into a side lane. A portly man, ambushed among
the grasses, raised his hat in homage. The gravediggers touched their
caps.
John O'Connell, Mr Power said pleased. He never forgets a friend.
Mr O'Connell shook all their hands in silence. Mr Dedalus said
I am come to pay you another visit.
My dear Simon, the caretaker answered in a low voice. I don't want your
custom at all.
Saluting Ned Lambert and John Henry Menton he walked on at Martin
Cunningham's side puzzling two long keys at his back.
Did you hear that one, he asked them, about Mulcahy from the Coombe?
I did not, Martin Cunningham said.
They bent their silk hats in concert and Hynes inclined his ear. The
caretaker hung his thumbs in the loops of his gold watchchain and spoke in
a discreet tone to their vacant smiles.
They tell the story, he said, that two drunks came out here one foggy
evening to look for the grave of a friend of theirs. They asked for
Mulcahy from the Coombe and were told where he was buried. After traipsing
about in the fog they found the grave sure enough. One of the drunks spelt
out the name Terence Mulcahy. The other drunk was blinking up at a statue
of Our Saviour the widow had got put up.
The caretaker blinked up at one of the sepulchres they passed. He
resumed
And, after blinking up at the sacred figure, NOT A BLOODY BIT LIKE THE
MAN, says he. THAT'S NOT MULCAHY, says he, WHOEVER DONE IT.
Rewarded by smiles he fell back and spoke with Corny Kelleher, accepting
the dockets given him, turning them over and scanning them as he walked.
That's all done with a purpose, Martin Cunningham explained to Hynes.
I know, Hynes said. I know that.
To cheer a fellow up, Martin Cunningham said. It's pure goodheartedness
damn the thing else.
Mr Bloom admired the caretaker's prosperous bulk. All want to be on
good terms with him. Decent fellow, John O'Connell, real good sort. Keys
like Keyes's ad no fear of anyone getting out. No passout checks. HABEAS
CORPUS. I must see about that ad after the funeral. Did I write
Ballsbridge on the envelope I took to cover when she disturbed me writing
to Martha? Hope it's not chucked in the dead letter office. Be the better
of a shave. Grey sprouting beard. That's the first sign when the hairs
come out grey. And temper getting cross. Silver threads among the grey.
Fancy being his wife. Wonder he had the gumption to propose to any girl.
Come out and live in the graveyard. Dangle that before her. It might
thrill her first. Courting death ... Shades of night hovering here with
all the dead stretched about. The shadows of the tombs when churchyards
yawn and Daniel O'Connell must be a descendant I suppose who is this used
to say he was a queer breedy man great catholic all the same like a big
giant in the dark. Will o' the wisp. Gas of graves. Want to keep her mind
off it to conceive at all. Women especially are so touchy. Tell her a
ghost story in bed to make her sleep. Have you ever seen a ghost? Well, I
have. It was a pitchdark night. The clock was on the stroke of twelve.
Still they'd kiss all right if properly keyed up. Whores in Turkish
graveyards. Learn anything if taken young. You might pick up a young
widow here. Men like that. Love among the tombstones. Romeo. Spice of
pleasure. In the midst of death we are in life. Both ends meet.
Tantalising for the poor dead. Smell of grilled beefsteaks to the
starving. Gnawing their vitals. Desire to grig people. Molly wanting to
do it at the window. Eight children he has anyway.
He has seen a fair share go under in his time, lying around him field
after field. Holy fields. More room if they buried them standing. Sitting
or kneeling you couldn't. Standing? His head might come up some day above
ground in a landslip with his hand pointing. All honeycombed the ground
must be oblong cells. And very neat he keeps it too trim grass and
edgings. His garden Major Gamble calls Mount Jerome. Well, so it is.
Ought to be flowers of sleep. Chinese cemeteries with giant poppies
growing produce the best opium Mastiansky told me. The Botanic Gardens
are just over there. It's the blood sinking in the earth gives new life.
Same idea those jews they said killed the christian boy. Every man
his price. Well preserved fat corpse, gentleman, epicure, invaluable
for fruit garden. A bargain. By carcass of William Wilkinson, auditor
and accountant, lately deceased, three pounds thirteen and six.
With thanks.
I daresay the soil would be quite fat with corpsemanure, bones, flesh,
nails. Charnelhouses. Dreadful. Turning green and pink decomposing. Rot
quick in damp earth. The lean old ones tougher. Then a kind of a tallowy
kind of a cheesy. Then begin to get black, black treacle oozing out of
them. Then dried up. Deathmoths. Of course the cells or whatever they are
go on living. Changing about. Live for ever practically. Nothing to feed
on feed on themselves.
But they must breed a devil of a lot of maggots. Soil must be simply
swirling with them. Your head it simply swurls. Those pretty little
seaside gurls. He looks cheerful enough over it. Gives him a sense of
power seeing all the others go under first. Wonder how he looks at life.
Cracking his jokes too warms the cockles of his heart. The one about the
bulletin. Spurgeon went to heaven  a.m. this morning.  p.m.
closing time. Not arrived yet. Peter. The dead themselves the men
anyhow would like to hear an odd joke or the women to know what's in
fashion. A juicy pear or ladies' punch, hot, strong and sweet. Keep out
the damp. You must laugh sometimes so better do it that way. Gravediggers
in HAMLET. Shows the profound knowledge of the human heart. Daren't joke
about the dead for two years at least. DE MORTUIS NIL NISI PRIUS. Go out
of mourning first. Hard to imagine his funeral. Seems a sort of a joke.
Read your own obituary notice they say you live longer. Gives you second
wind. New lease of life.
How many haveyou for tomorrow? the caretaker asked.
Two, Corny Kelleher said. Half ten and eleven.
The caretaker put the papers in his pocket. The barrow had ceased to
trundle. The mourners split and moved to each side of the hole, stepping
with care round the graves. The gravediggers bore the coffin and set its
nose on the brink, looping the bands round it.
Burying him. We come to bury Caesar. His ides of March or June.
He doesn't know who is here nor care.
Now who is that lankylooking galoot over there in the macintosh?
Now who is he I'd like to know? Now I'd give a trifle to know who he is.
Always someone turns up you never dreamt of. A fellow could live on his
lonesome all his life. Yes, he could. Still he'd have to get someone to
sod him after he died though he could dig his own grave. We all do. Only
man buries. No, ants too. First thing strikes anybody. Bury the dead. Say
Robinson Crusoe was true to life. Well then Friday buried him. Every
Friday buries a Thursday if you come to look at it.
O, POOR ROBINSON CRUSOE
HOW COULD YOU POSSIBLY DO SO?
Poor Dignam His last lie on the earth in his box. When you think of
them all it does seem a waste of wood. All gnawed through. They could
invent a handsome bier with a kind of panel sliding, let it down that way.
Ay but they might object to be buried out of another fellow's. They're so
particular. Lay me in my native earth. Bit of clay from the holy land.
Only a mother and deadborn child ever buried in the one coffin. I see what
it means. I see. To protect him as long as possible even in the earth. The
Irishman's house is his coffin. Embalming in catacombs, mummies the same
idea.
Mr Bloom stood far back, his hat in his hand, counting the bared
heads. Twelve. I'm thirteen. No. The chap in the macintosh is thirteen.
Death's number. Where the deuce did he pop out of? He wasn't in the
chapel, that I'll swear. Silly superstition that about thirteen.
Nice soft tweed Ned Lambert has in that suit. Tinge of purple. I had
one like that when we lived in Lombard street west. Dressy fellow he was
once. Used to change three suits in the day. Must get that grey suit of
mine turned by Mesias. Hello. It's dyed. His wife I forgot he's not
married or his landlady ought to have picked out those threads for him.
The coffin dived out of sight, eased down by the men straddled on the
gravetrestles. They struggled up and out and all uncovered. Twenty.
Pause.
If we were all suddenly somebody else.
Far away a donkey brayed. Rain. No such ass. Never see a dead one,
they say. Shame of death. They hide. Also poor papa went away.
Gentle sweet air blew round the bared heads in a whisper. Whisper.
The boy by the gravehead held his wreath with both hands staring quietly
in the black open space. Mr Bloom moved behind the portly kindly
caretaker. Wellcut frockcoat. Weighing them up perhaps to see which will
go next. Well, it is a long rest. Feel no more. It's the moment you feel.
Must be damned unpleasant. Can't believe it at first. Mistake must be
someone else. Try the house opposite. Wait, I wanted to. I haven't yet.
Then darkened deathchamber. Light they want. Whispering around you. Would
you like to see a priest? Then rambling and wandering. Delirium all you
hid all your life. The death struggle. His sleep is not natural. Press his
lower eyelid. Watching is his nose pointed is his jaw sinking are the
soles of his feet yellow. Pull the pillow away and finish it off on the
floor since he's doomed. Devil in that picture of sinner's death showing
him a woman. Dying to embrace her in his shirt. Last act of LUCIA.
SHALL I NEVERMORE BEHOLD THEE? Bam He expires. Gone at last. People
talk about you a bit forget you. Don't forget to pray for him.
Remember him in your prayers. Even Parnell. Ivy day dying out. Then
they follow dropping into a hole, one after the other.
We are praying now for the repose of his soul. Hoping you're well
and not in hell. Nice change of air. Out of the fryingpan of life into the
fire of purgatory.
Does he ever think of the hole waiting for himself? They say you do
when you shiver in the sun. Someone walking over it. Callboy's warning.
Near you. Mine over there towards Finglas, the plot I bought. Mamma,
poor mamma, and little Rudy.
The gravediggers took up their spades and flung heavy clods of clay
in on the coffin. Mr Bloom turned away his face. And if he was alive all
the time? Whew By jingo, that would be awful No, no he is dead, of
course. Of course he is dead. Monday he died. They ought to have
some law to pierce the heart and make sure or an electric clock or
a telephone in the coffin and some kind of a canvas airhole. Flag of
distress. Three days. Rather long to keep them in summer. Just as well
to get shut of them as soon as you are sure there's no.
The clay fell softer. Begin to be forgotten. Out of sight, out of mind.
The caretaker moved away a few paces and put on his hat. Had
enough of it. The mourners took heart of grace, one by one, covering
themselves without show. Mr Bloom put on his hat and saw the portly
figure make its way deftly through the maze of graves. Quietly, sure of
his ground, he traversed the dismal fields.
Hynes jotting down something in his notebook. Ah, the names. But he
knows them all. No coming to me.
I am just taking the names, Hynes said below his breath. What is your
christian name? I'm not sure.
L, Mr Bloom said. Leopold. And you might put down M'Coy's name too.
He asked me to.
Charley, Hynes said writing. I know. He was on the FREEMAN once.
So he was before he got the job in the morgue under Louis Byrne.
Good idea a postmortem for doctors. Find out what they imagine they
know. He died of a Tuesday. Got the run. Levanted with the cash of a few
ads. Charley, you're my darling. That was why he asked me to. O well,
does no harm. I saw to that, M'Coy. Thanks, old chap much obliged.
Leave him under an obligation costs nothing.
And tell us, Hynes said, do you know that fellow in the, fellow was
over there in the ...
He looked around.
Macintosh. Yes, I saw him, Mr Bloom said. Where is he now?
M'Intosh, Hynes said scribbling. I don't know who he is. Is that
his name?
He moved away, looking about him.
No, Mr Bloom began, turning and stopping. I say, Hynes
Didn't hear. What? Where has he disappeared to? Not a sign. Well of
all the. Has anybody here seen? Kay ee double ell. Become invisible. Good
Lord, what became of him?
A seventh gravedigger came beside Mr Bloom to take up an idle spade.
O, excuse me
He stepped aside nimbly.
Clay, brown, damp, began to be seen in the hole. It rose. Nearly over.
A mound of damp clods rose more, rose, and the gravediggers rested their
spades. All uncovered again for a few instants. The boy propped his wreath
against a corner the brotherinlaw his on a lump. The gravediggers put
on their caps and carried their earthy spades towards the barrow. Then
knocked the blades lightly on the turf clean. One bent to pluck from the
haft a long tuft of grass. One, leaving his mates, walked slowly on with
shouldered weapon, its blade blueglancing. Silently at the gravehead
another coiled the coffinband. His navelcord. The brotherinlaw, turning
away, placed something in his free hand. Thanks in silence. Sorry, sir
trouble. Headshake. I know that. For yourselves just.
The mourners moved away slowly without aim, by devious paths,
staying at whiles to read a name on a tomb.
Let us go round by the chief's grave, Hynes said. We have time.
Let us, Mr Power said.
They turned to the right, following their slow thoughts. With awe Mr
Power's blank voice spoke
Some say he is not in that grave at all. That the coffin was filled
with stones. That one day he will come again.
Hynes shook his head.
Parnell will never come again, he said. He's there, all that was mortal
of him. Peace to his ashes.
Mr Bloom walked unheeded along his grove by saddened angels,
crosses, broken pillars, family vaults, stone hopes praying with upcast
eyes, old Ireland's hearts and hands. More sensible to spend the money on
some charity for the living. Pray for the repose of the soul of. Does
anybody really? Plant him and have done with him. Like down a coalshoot.
Then lump them together to save time. All souls' day. Twentyseventh I'll
be at his grave. Ten shillings for the gardener. He keeps it free of
weeds. Old man himself. Bent down double with his shears clipping. Near
death's door. Who passed away. Who departed this life. As if they did it
of their own accord. Got the shove, all of them. Who kicked the bucket.
More interesting if they told you what they were. So and So, wheelwright.
I travelled for cork lino. I paid five shillings in the pound. Or a
woman's with her saucepan. I cooked good Irish stew. Eulogy in a country
churchyard it ought to be that poem of whose is it Wordsworth or Thomas
Campbell. Entered into rest the protestants put it. Old Dr Murren's.
The great physician called him home. Well it's God's acre for them.
Nice country residence. Newly plastered and painted. Ideal spot to
have a quiet smoke and read the CHURCH TIMES. Marriage ads they never
try to beautify. Rusty wreaths hung on knobs, garlands of bronzefoil.
Better value that for the money. Still, the flowers are more poetical.
The other gets rather tiresome, never withering. Expresses nothing.
Immortelles.
A bird sat tamely perched on a poplar branch. Like stuffed. Like the
wedding present alderman Hooper gave us. Hoo Not a budge out of him.
Knows there are no catapults to let fly at him. Dead animal even sadder.
SillyMilly burying the little dead bird in the kitchen matchbox, a
daisychain and bits of broken chainies on the grave.
The Sacred Heart that is showing it. Heart on his sleeve. Ought to be
sideways and red it should be painted like a real heart. Ireland was
dedicated to it or whatever that. Seems anything but pleased. Why this
infliction? Would birds come then and peck like the boy with the basket of
fruit but he said no because they ought to have been afraid of the boy.
Apollo that was.
How many All these here once walked round Dublin. Faithful departed.
As you are now so once were we.
Besides how could you remember everybody? Eyes, walk, voice. Well,
the voice, yes gramophone. Have a gramophone in every grave or keep it
in the house. After dinner on a Sunday. Put on poor old greatgrandfather.
Kraahraark Hellohellohello amawfullyglad kraark awfullygladaseeagain
hellohello amawf krpthsth. Remind you of the voice like the photograph
reminds you of the face. Otherwise you couldn't remember the face after
fifteen years, say. For instance who? For instance some fellow that died
when I was in Wisdom Hely's.
Rtststr A rattle of pebbles. Wait. Stop
He looked down intently into a stone crypt. Some animal. Wait.
There he goes.
An obese grey rat toddled along the side of the crypt, moving the
pebbles. An old stager greatgrandfather he knows the ropes. The grey
alive crushed itself in under the plinth, wriggled itself in under it.
Good hidingplace for treasure.
Who lives there? Are laid the remains of Robert Emery. Robert
Emmet was buried here by torchlight, wasn't he? Making his rounds.
Tail gone now.
One of those chaps would make short work of a fellow. Pick the
bones clean no matter who it was. Ordinary meat for them. A corpse is
meat gone bad. Well and what's cheese? Corpse of milk. I read in that
VOYAGES IN CHINA that the Chinese say a white man smells like a corpse.
Cremation better. Priests dead against it. Devilling for the other firm.
Wholesale burners and Dutch oven dealers. Time of the plague. Quicklime
feverpits to eat them. Lethal chamber. Ashes to ashes. Or bury at sea.
Where is that Parsee tower of silence? Eaten by birds. Earth, fire, water.
Drowning they say is the pleasantest. See your whole life in a flash. But
being brought back to life no. Can't bury in the air however. Out of a
flying machine. Wonder does the news go about whenever a fresh one is let
down. Underground communication. We learned that from them. Wouldn't be
surprised. Regular square feed for them. Flies come before he's well dead.
Got wind of Dignam. They wouldn't care about the smell of it. Saltwhite
crumbling mush of corpse smell, taste like raw white turnips.
The gates glimmered in front still open. Back to the world again.
Enough of this place. Brings you a bit nearer every time. Last time I was
here was Mrs Sinico's funeral. Poor papa too. The love that kills. And
even scraping up the earth at night with a lantern like that case I read
of to get at fresh buried females or even putrefied with running
gravesores. Give you the creeps after a bit. I will appear to you after
death. You will see my ghost after death. My ghost will haunt you after
death. There is another world after death named hell. I do not like that
other world she wrote. No more do I. Plenty to see and hear and feel yet.
Feel live warm beings near you. Let them sleep in their maggoty beds. They
are not going to get me this innings. Warm beds warm fullblooded life.
Martin Cunningham emerged from a sidepath, talking gravely.
Solicitor, I think. I know his face. Menton, John Henry, solicitor,
commissioner for oaths and affidavits. Dignam used to be in his office.
Mat Dillon's long ago. Jolly Mat. Convivial evenings. Cold fowl, cigars,
the Tantalus glasses. Heart of gold really. Yes, Menton. Got his rag out
that evening on the bowlinggreen because I sailed inside him. Pure fluke
of mine the bias. Why he took such a rooted dislike to me. Hate at first
sight. Molly and Floey Dillon linked under the lilactree, laughing.
Fellow always like that, mortified if women are by.
Got a dinge in the side of his hat. Carriage probably.
Excuse me, sir, Mr Bloom said beside them.
They stopped.
Your hat is a little crushed, Mr Bloom said pointing.
John Henry Menton stared at him for an instant without moving.
There, Martin Cunningham helped, pointing also. John Henry Menton took
off his hat, bulged out the dinge and smoothed the nap with care on his
coatsleeve. He clapped the hat on his head again.
It's all right now, Martin Cunningham said.
John Henry Menton jerked his head down in acknowledgment.
Thank you, he said shortly.
They walked on towards the gates. Mr Bloom, chapfallen, drew
behind a few paces so as not to overhear. Martin laying down the law.
Martin could wind a sappyhead like that round his little finger, without
his seeing it.
Oyster eyes. Never mind. Be sorry after perhaps when it dawns on him.
Get the pull over him that way.
Thank you. How grand we are this morning
IN THE HEART OF THE HIBERNIAN METROPOLIS
Before Nelson's pillar trams slowed, shunted, changed trolley, started
for Blackrock, Kingstown and Dalkey, Clonskea, Rathgar and Terenure,
Palmerston Park and upper Rathmines, Sandymount Green, Rathmines,
Ringsend and Sandymount Tower, Harold's Cross. The hoarse Dublin
United Tramway Company's timekeeper bawled them off
Rathgar and Terenure
Come on, Sandymount Green
Right and left parallel clanging ringing a doubledecker and a
singledeck moved from their railheads, swerved to the down line, glided
parallel.
Start, Palmerston Park
THE WEARER OF THE CROWN
Under the porch of the general post office shoeblacks called and
polished. Parked in North Prince's street His Majesty's vermilion
mailcars, bearing on their sides the royal initials, E. R., received
loudly flung sacks of letters, postcards, lettercards, parcels, insured
and paid, for local, provincial, British and overseas delivery.
GENTLEMEN OF THE PRESS
Grossbooted draymen rolled barrels dullthudding out of Prince's
stores and bumped them up on the brewery float. On the brewery float
bumped dullthudding barrels rolled by grossbooted draymen out of
Prince's stores.
There it is, Red Murray said. Alexander Keyes.
Just cut it out, will you? Mr Bloom said, and I'll take it round to the
TELEGRAPH office.
The door of Ruttledge's office creaked again. Davy Stephens, minute
in a large capecoat, a small felt hat crowning his ringlets, passed out
with a roll of papers under his cape, a king's courier.
Red Murray's long shears sliced out the advertisement from the
newspaper in four clean strokes. Scissors and paste.
I'll go through the printingworks, Mr Bloom said, taking the cut square.
Of course, if he wants a par, Red Murray said earnestly, a pen behind
his ear, we can do him one.
Right, Mr Bloom said with a nod. I'll rub that in.
We.
WILLIAM BRAYDEN,
ESQUIRE, OF OAKLANDS, SANDYMOUNT
Red Murray touched Mr Bloom's arm with the shears and whispered
Brayden.
Mr Bloom turned and saw the liveried porter raise his lettered cap as a
stately figure entered between the newsboards of the WEEKLY FREEMAN AND
NATIONAL PRESS and the FREEMAN'S JOURNAL AND NATIONAL PRESS. Dullthudding
Guinness's barrels. It passed statelily up the staircase, steered by an
umbrella, a solemn beardframed face. The broadcloth back ascended each
step back. All his brains are in the nape of his neck, Simon Dedalus
says. Welts of flesh behind on him. Fat folds of neck, fat, neck, fat,
neck.
Don't you think his face is like Our Saviour? Red Murray whispered.
The door of Ruttledge's office whispered ee cree. They always build
one door opposite another for the wind to. Way in. Way out.
Our Saviour beardframed oval face talking in the dusk. Mary,
Martha. Steered by an umbrella sword to the footlights Mario the tenor.
Or like Mario, Mr Bloom said.
Yes, Red Murray agreed. But Mario was said to be the picture of Our
Saviour.
Jesusmario with rougy cheeks, doublet and spindle legs. Hand on his
heart. In MARTHA.
COOME THOU LOST ONE,
COOME THOU DEAR ONE
THE CROZIER AND THE PEN
His grace phoned down twice this morning, Red Murray said gravely.
They watched the knees, legs, boots vanish. Neck.
A telegram boy stepped in nimbly, threw an envelope on the counter
and stepped off posthaste with a word
FREEMAN
Mr Bloom said slowly
Well, he is one of our saviours also.
A meek smile accompanied him as he lifted the counterflap, as he
passed in through a sidedoor and along the warm dark stairs and passage,
along the now reverberating boards. But will he save the circulation?
Thumping. Thumping.
He pushed in the glass swingdoor and entered, stepping over strewn
packing paper. Through a lane of clanking drums he made his way towards
Nannetti's reading closet.
Hynes here too account of the funeral probably. Thumping. Thump.
WITH UNFEIGNED REGRET IT IS WE ANNOUNCE THE DISSOLUTION
OF A MOST RESPECTED DUBLIN BURGESS
This morning the remains of the late Mr Patrick Dignam. Machines.
Smash a man to atoms if they got him caught. Rule the world today. His
machineries are pegging away too. Like these, got out of hand fermenting.
Working away, tearing away. And that old grey rat tearing to get in.
HOW A GREAT DAILY ORGAN IS TURNED OUT
Mr Bloom halted behind the foreman's spare body, admiring a glossy crown.
Strange he never saw his real country. Ireland my country. Member
for College green. He boomed that workaday worker tack for all it was
worth. It's the ads and side features sell a weekly, not the stale news in
the official gazette. Queen Anne is dead. Published by authority in the
year one thousand and. Demesne situate in the townland of Rosenallis,
barony of Tinnahinch. To all whom it may concern schedule pursuant to
statute showing return of number of mules and jennets exported from
Ballina. Nature notes. Cartoons. Phil Blake's weekly Pat and Bull story.
Uncle Toby's page for tiny tots. Country bumpkin's queries. Dear Mr
Editor, what is a good cure for flatulence? I'd like that part. Learn a
lot teaching others. The personal note. M. A. P. Mainly all pictures.
Shapely bathers on golden strand. World's biggest balloon. Double marriage
of sisters celebrated. Two bridegrooms laughing heartily at each other.
Cuprani too, printer. More Irish than the Irish.
The machines clanked in threefour time. Thump, thump, thump.
Now if he got paralysed there and noone knew how to stop them they'd
clank on and on the same, print it over and over and up and back.
Monkeydoodle the whole thing. Want a cool head.
Well, get it into the evening edition, councillor, Hynes said.
Soon be calling him my lord mayor. Long John is backing him, they say.
The foreman, without answering, scribbled press on a corner of the
sheet and made a sign to a typesetter. He handed the sheet silently over
the dirty glass screen.
Right thanks, Hynes said moving off.
Mr Bloom stood in his way.
If you want to draw the cashier is just going to lunch, he said,
pointing backward with his thumb.
Did you? Hynes asked.
Mm, Mr Bloom said. Look sharp and you'll catch him.
Thanks, old man, Hynes said. I'll tap him too.
He hurried on eagerly towards the FREEMAN'S JOURNAL.
Three bob I lent him in Meagher's. Three weeks. Third hint.
WE SEE THE CANVASSER AT WORK
Mr Bloom laid his cutting on Mr Nannetti's desk.
Excuse me, councillor, he said. This ad, you see. Keyes, you remember?
Mr Nannetti considered the cutting awhile and nodded.
He wants it in for July, Mr Bloom said.
The foreman moved his pencil towards it.
But wait, Mr Bloom said. He wants it changed. Keyes, you see. He wants
two keys at the top.
Hell of a racket they make. He doesn't hear it. Nannan. Iron nerves.
Maybe he understands what I.
The foreman turned round to hear patiently and, lifting an elbow,
began to scratch slowly in the armpit of his alpaca jacket.
Like that, Mr Bloom said, crossing his forefingers at the top.
Let him take that in first.
Mr Bloom, glancing sideways up from the cross he had made, saw the
foreman's sallow face, think he has a touch of jaundice, and beyond the
obedient reels feeding in huge webs of paper. Clank it. Clank it. Miles of
it unreeled. What becomes of it after? O, wrap up meat, parcels various
uses, thousand and one things.
Slipping his words deftly into the pauses of the clanking he drew
swiftly on the scarred woodwork.
HOUSE OF KEYES
Like that, see. Two crossed keys here. A circle. Then here the name.
Alexander Keyes, tea, wine and spirit merchant. So on.
Better not teach him his own business.
You know yourself, councillor, just what he wants. Then round the top
in leaded the house of keys. You see? Do you think that's a good idea?
The foreman moved his scratching hand to his lower ribs and scratched
there quietly.
The idea, Mr Bloom said, is the house of keys. You know, councillor,
the Manx parliament. Innuendo of home rule. Tourists, you know, from the
isle of Man. Catches the eye, you see. Can you do that?
I could ask him perhaps about how to pronounce that VOGLIO. But
then if he didn't know only make it awkward for him. Better not.
We can do that, the foreman said. Have you the design?
I can get it, Mr Bloom said. It was in a Kilkenny paper. He has a house
there too. I'll just run out and ask him. Well, you can do that and just a
little par calling attention. You know the usual. Highclass licensed
premises. Longfelt want. So on.
The foreman thought for an instant.
We can do that, he said. Let him give us a three months' renewal.
A typesetter brought him a limp galleypage. He began to check it
silently. Mr Bloom stood by, hearing the loud throbs of cranks, watching
the silent typesetters at their cases.
ORTHOGRAPHICAL
Want to be sure of his spelling. Proof fever. Martin Cunningham
forgot to give us his spellingbee conundrum this morning. It is amusing to
view the unpar one ar alleled embarra two ars is it? double ess ment of a
harassed pedlar while gauging au the symmetry with a y of a peeled pear
under a cemetery wall. Silly, isn't it? Cemetery put in of course on
account of the symmetry.
I should have said when he clapped on his topper. Thank you. I ought
to have said something about an old hat or something. No. I could have
said. Looks as good as new now. See his phiz then.
Sllt. The nethermost deck of the first machine jogged forward its
flyboard with sllt the first batch of quirefolded papers. Sllt. Almost
human the way it sllt to call attention. Doing its level best to speak.
That door too sllt creaking, asking to be shut. Everything speaks in its
own way. Sllt.
NOTED CHURCHMAN AN OCCASIONAL CONTRIBUTOR
The foreman handed back the galleypage suddenly, saying
Wait. Where's the archbishop's letter? It's to be repeated in the
TELEGRAPH. Where's what's his name?
He looked about him round his loud unanswering machines.
Monks, sir? a voice asked from the castingbox.
Ay. Where's Monks?
Monks
Mr Bloom took up his cutting. Time to get out.
Then I'll get the design, Mr Nannetti, he said, and you'll give it a
good place I know.
Monks
Yes, sir.
Three months' renewal. Want to get some wind off my chest first. Try
it anyhow. Rub in August good idea horseshow month. Ballsbridge.
Tourists over for the show.
A DAYFATHER
He walked on through the caseroom passing an old man, bowed,
spectacled, aproned. Old Monks, the dayfather. Queer lot of stuff he must
have put through his hands in his time obituary notices, pubs' ads,
speeches, divorce suits, found drowned. Nearing the end of his tether now.
Sober serious man with a bit in the savingsbank I'd say. Wife a good cook
and washer. Daughter working the machine in the parlour. Plain Jane, no
damn nonsense.
AND IT WAS THE FEAST OF THE PASSOVER
He stayed in his walk to watch a typesetter neatly distributing type.
Reads it backwards first. Quickly he does it. Must require some practice
that. mangiD kcirtaP. Poor papa with his hagadah book, reading
backwards with his finger to me. Pessach. Next year in Jerusalem. Dear, O
dear All that long business about that brought us out of the land of
Egypt and into the house of bondage ALLELUIA. SHEMA ISRAEL ADONAI ELOHENU.
No, that's the other. Then the twelve brothers, Jacob's sons. And then the
lamb and the cat and the dog and the stick and the water and the butcher.
And then the angel of death kills the butcher and he kills the ox and the
dog kills the cat. Sounds a bit silly till you come to look into it well.
Justice it means but it's everybody eating everyone else. That's what life
is after all. How quickly he does that job. Practice makes perfect. Seems
to see with his fingers.
Mr Bloom passed on out of the clanking noises through the gallery on
to the landing. Now am I going to tram it out all the way and then catch
him out perhaps. Better phone him up first. Number? Yes. Same as Citron's
house. Twentyeight. Twentyeight double four.
ONLY ONCE MORE THAT SOAP
He went down the house staircase. Who the deuce scrawled all over
those walls with matches? Looks as if they did it for a bet. Heavy greasy
smell there always is in those works. Lukewarm glue in Thom's next door
when I was there.
He took out his handkerchief to dab his nose. Citronlemon? Ah, the
soap I put there. Lose it out of that pocket. Putting back his
handkerchief he took out the soap and stowed it away, buttoned, into the
hip pocket of his trousers.
What perfume does your wife use? I could go home still tram
something I forgot. Just to see before dressing. No. Here. No.
A sudden screech of laughter came from the EVENING TELEGRAPH office. Know
who that is. What's up? Pop in a minute to phone. Ned Lambert it is.
He entered softly.
ERIN, GREEN GEM OF THE SILVER SEA
The ghost walks, professor MacHugh murmured softly, biscuitfully to
the dusty windowpane.
Mr Dedalus, staring from the empty fireplace at Ned Lambert's
quizzing face, asked of it sourly
Agonising Christ, wouldn't it give you a heartburn on your arse?
Ned Lambert, seated on the table, read on
OR AGAIN, NOTE THE MEANDERINGS OF SOME PURLING RILL AS IT BABBLES ON
ITS WAY, THO' QUARRELLING WITH THE STONY OBSTACLES, TO THE TUMBLING WATERS
OF NEPTUNE'S BLUE DOMAIN, 'MID MOSSY BANKS, FANNED BY GENTLEST ZEPHYRS,
PLAYED ON BY THE GLORIOUS SUNLIGHT OR 'NEATH THE SHADOWS CAST O'ER ITS
PENSIVE BOSOM BY THE OVERARCHING LEAFAGE OF THE GIANTS OF THE FOREST. What
about that, Simon? he asked over the fringe of his newspaper. How's that
for high?
Changing his drink, Mr Dedalus said.
Ned Lambert, laughing, struck the newspaper on his knees, repeating
THE PENSIVE BOSOM AND THE OVERARSING LEAFAGE. O boys O boys
And Xenophon looked upon Marathon, Mr Dedalus said, looking again
on the fireplace and to the window, and Marathon looked on the sea.
That will do, professor MacHugh cried from the window. I don't want to
hear any more of the stuff.
He ate off the crescent of water biscuit he had been nibbling and,
hungered, made ready to nibble the biscuit in his other hand.
High falutin stuff. Bladderbags. Ned Lambert is taking a day off I
see. Rather upsets a man's day, a funeral does. He has influence they say.
Old Chatterton, the vicechancellor, is his granduncle or his
greatgranduncle. Close on ninety they say. Subleader for his death written
this long time perhaps. Living to spite them. Might go first himself.
Johnny, make room for your uncle. The right honourable Hedges Eyre
Chatterton. Daresay he writes him an odd shaky cheque or two on gale days.
Windfall when he kicks out. Alleluia.
Just another spasm, Ned Lambert said.
What is it? Mr Bloom asked.
A recently discovered fragment of Cicero, professor MacHugh answered
with pomp of tone. OUR LOVELY LAND.
SHORT BUT TO THE POINT
Whose land? Mr Bloom said simply.
Most pertinent question, the professor said between his chews. With an
accent on the whose.
Dan Dawson's land Mr Dedalus said.
Is it his speech last night? Mr Bloom asked.
Ned Lambert nodded.
But listen to this, he said.
The doorknob hit Mr Bloom in the small of the back as the door was
pushed in.
Excuse me, J. J. O'Molloy said, entering.
Mr Bloom moved nimbly aside.
I beg yours, he said.
Good day, Jack.
Come in. Come in.
Good day.
How are you, Dedalus?
Well. And yourself?
J. J. O'Molloy shook his head.
SAD
Cleverest fellow at the junior bar he used to be. Decline, poor chap.
That hectic flush spells finis for a man. Touch and go with him. What's in
the wind, I wonder. Money worry.
OR AGAIN IF WE BUT CLIMB THE SERRIED MOUNTAIN PEAKS.
You're looking extra.
Is the editor to be seen? J. J. O'Molloy asked, looking towards the
inner door.
Very much so, professor MacHugh said. To be seen and heard. He's in
his sanctum with Lenehan.
J. J. O'Molloy strolled to the sloping desk and began to turn back the
pink pages of the file.
Practice dwindling. A mighthavebeen. Losing heart. Gambling. Debts
of honour. Reaping the whirlwind. Used to get good retainers from D. and
T. Fitzgerald. Their wigs to show the grey matter. Brains on their sleeve
like the statue in Glasnevin. Believe he does some literary work for the
EXPRESS with Gabriel Conroy. Wellread fellow. Myles Crawford began on
the INDEPENDENT. Funny the way those newspaper men veer about when
they get wind of a new opening. Weathercocks. Hot and cold in the same
breath. Wouldn't know which to believe. One story good till you hear the
next. Go for one another baldheaded in the papers and then all blows over.
Hail fellow well met the next moment.
Ah, listen to this for God' sake, Ned Lambert pleaded. OR AGAIN IF WE
BUT CLIMB THE SERRIED MOUNTAIN PEAKS ...
Bombast the professor broke in testily. Enough of the inflated
windbag
PEAKS, Ned Lambert went on, TOWERING HIGH ON HIGH, TO BATHE OUR SOULS,
AS IT WERE ...
Bathe his lips, Mr Dedalus said. Blessed and eternal God Yes? Is he
taking anything for it?
AS 'TWERE, IN THE PEERLESS PANORAMA OF IRELAND'S PORTFOLIO, UNMATCHED,
DESPITE THEIR WELLPRAISED PROTOTYPES IN OTHER VAUNTED PRIZE REGIONS, FOR
VERY BEAUTY, OF BOSKY GROVE AND UNDULATING PLAIN AND LUSCIOUS PASTURELAND
OF VERNAL GREEN, STEEPED IN THE TRANSCENDENT TRANSLUCENT GLOW OF OUR MILD
MYSTERIOUS IRISH TWILIGHT ...
HIS NATIVE DORIC
The moon, professor MacHugh said. He forgot Hamlet.
THAT MANTLES THE VISTA FAR AND WIDE AND WAIT TILL THE GLOWING ORB OF
THE MOON SHINE FORTH TO IRRADIATE HER SILVER EFFULGENCE ...
O Mr Dedalus cried, giving vent to a hopeless groan. Shite and onions
That'll do, Ned. Life is too short.
He took off his silk hat and, blowing out impatiently his bushy
moustache, welshcombed his hair with raking fingers.
Ned Lambert tossed the newspaper aside, chuckling with delight. An
instant after a hoarse bark of laughter burst over professor MacHugh's
unshaven blackspectacled face.
Doughy Daw he cried.
WHAT WETHERUP SAID
All very fine to jeer at it now in cold print but it goes down like hot
cake that stuff. He was in the bakery line too, wasn't he? Why they call
him Doughy Daw. Feathered his nest well anyhow. Daughter engaged to that
chap in the inland revenue office with the motor. Hooked that nicely.
Entertainments. Open house. Big blowout. Wetherup always said that. Get
a grip of them by the stomach.
The inner door was opened violently and a scarlet beaked face,
crested by a comb of feathery hair, thrust itself in. The bold blue eyes
stared about them and the harsh voice asked
What is it?
And here comes the sham squire himself professor MacHugh said grandly.
Getonouthat, you bloody old pedagogue the editor said in recognition.
Come, Ned, Mr Dedalus said, putting on his hat. I must get a drink
after that.
Drink the editor cried. No drinks served before mass.
Quite right too, Mr Dedalus said, going out. Come on, Ned.
Ned Lambert sidled down from the table. The editor's blue eyes roved
towards Mr Bloom's face, shadowed by a smile.
Will you join us, Myles? Ned Lambert asked.
MEMORABLE BATTLES RECALLED
North Cork militia the editor cried, striding to the mantelpiece. We
won every time North Cork and Spanish officers
Where was that, Myles? Ned Lambert asked with a reflective glance at
his toecaps.
In Ohio the editor shouted.
So it was, begad, Ned Lambert agreed.
Passing out he whispered to J. J. O'Molloy
Incipient jigs. Sad case.
Ohio the editor crowed in high treble from his uplifted scarlet face.
My Ohio
A perfect cretic the professor said. Long, short and long.
O, HARP EOLIAN
He took a reel of dental floss from his waistcoat pocket and, breaking
off a piece, twanged it smartly between two and two of his resonant
unwashed teeth.
Bingbang, bangbang.
Mr Bloom, seeing the coast clear, made for the inner door.
Just a moment, Mr Crawford, he said. I just want to phone about an ad.
He went in.
What about that leader this evening? professor MacHugh asked, coming
to the editor and laying a firm hand on his shoulder.
That'll be all right, Myles Crawford said more calmly. Never you fret.
Hello, Jack. That's all right.
Good day, Myles, J. J. O'Molloy said, letting the pages he held slip
limply back on the file. Is that Canada swindle case on today?
The telephone whirred inside.
Twentyeight ... No, twenty ... Double four ... Yes.
SPOT THE WINNER
Lenehan came out of the inner office with SPORT'S tissues.
Who wants a dead cert for the Gold cup? he asked. Sceptre with O.
Madden up.
He tossed the tissues on to the table.
Screams of newsboys barefoot in the hall rushed near and the door
was flung open.
Hush, Lenehan said. I hear feetstoops.
Professor MacHugh strode across the room and seized the cringing
urchin by the collar as the others scampered out of the hall and down the
steps. The tissues rustled up in the draught, floated softly in the air
blue scrawls and under the table came to earth.
It wasn't me, sir. It was the big fellow shoved me, sir.
Throw him out and shut the door, the editor said. There's a hurricane
blowing.
Lenehan began to paw the tissues up from the floor, grunting as he
stooped twice.
Waiting for the racing special, sir, the newsboy said. It was Pat
Farrell shoved me, sir.
He pointed to two faces peering in round the doorframe.
Him, sir.
Out of this with you, professor MacHugh said gruffly.
He hustled the boy out and banged the door to.
J. J. O'Molloy turned the files crackingly over, murmuring, seeking
Continued on page six, column four.
Yes, EVENING TELEGRAPH here, Mr Bloom phoned from the inner office. Is
the boss ...? Yes, TELEGRAPH ... To where? Aha Which auction rooms? ...
Aha I see ... Right. I'll catch him.
A COLLISION ENSUES
The bell whirred again as he rang off. He came in quickly and
bumped against Lenehan who was struggling up with the second tissue.
PARDON, MONSIEUR, Lenehan said, clutching him for an instant and making
a grimace.
My fault, Mr Bloom said, suffering his grip. Are you hurt? I'm in a
hurry.
Knee, Lenehan said.
He made a comic face and whined, rubbing his knee
The accumulation of the ANNO DOMINI.
Sorry, Mr Bloom said.
He went to the door and, holding it ajar, paused. J. J. O'Molloy
slapped the heavy pages over. The noise of two shrill voices, a
mouthorgan, echoed in the bare hallway from the newsboys squatted on the
doorsteps
WE ARE THE BOYS OF WEXFORD
WHO FOUGHT WITH HEART AND HAND.
EXIT BLOOM
I'm just running round to Bachelor's walk, Mr Bloom said, about this ad
of Keyes's. Want to fix it up. They tell me he's round there in Dillon's.
He looked indecisively for a moment at their faces. The editor who,
leaning against the mantelshelf, had propped his head on his hand,
suddenly stretched forth an arm amply.
Begone he said. The world is before you.
Back in no time, Mr Bloom said, hurrying out.
J. J. O'Molloy took the tissues from Lenehan's hand and read them,
blowing them apart gently, without comment.
He'll get that advertisement, the professor said, staring through his
blackrimmed spectacles over the crossblind. Look at the young scamps after
him.
Show. Where? Lenehan cried, running to the window.
A STREET CORTEGE
Both smiled over the crossblind at the file of capering newsboys in Mr
Bloom's wake, the last zigzagging white on the breeze a mocking kite, a
tail of white bowknots.
Look at the young guttersnipe behind him hue and cry, Lenehan said, and
you'll kick. O, my rib risible Taking off his flat spaugs and the walk.
Small nines. Steal upon larks.
He began to mazurka in swift caricature across the floor on sliding
feet past the fireplace to J. J. O'Molloy who placed the tissues in his
receiving hands.
What's that? Myles Crawford said with a start. Where are the other two
gone?
Who? the professor said, turning. They're gone round to the Oval for a
drink. Paddy Hooper is there with Jack Hall. Came over last night.
Come on then, Myles Crawford said. Where's my hat?
He walked jerkily into the office behind, parting the vent of his jacket,
jingling his keys in his back pocket. They jingled then in the air and
against the wood as he locked his desk drawer.
He's pretty well on, professor MacHugh said in a low voice.
Seems to be, J. J. O'Molloy said, taking out a cigarettecase in
murmuring meditation, but it is not always as it seems. Who has the most
matches?
THE CALUMET OF PEACE
He offered a cigarette to the professor and took one himself. Lenehan
promptly struck a match for them and lit their cigarettes in turn. J. J.
O'Molloy opened his case again and offered it.
THANKY VOUS, Lenehan said, helping himself.
The editor came from the inner office, a straw hat awry on his brow.
He declaimed in song, pointing sternly at professor MacHugh
'TWAS RANK AND FAME THAT TEMPTED THEE,
'TWAS EMPIRE CHARMED THY HEART.
The professor grinned, locking his long lips.
Eh? You bloody old Roman empire? Myles Crawford said.
He took a cigarette from the open case. Lenehan, lighting it for him
with quick grace, said
Silence for my brandnew riddle
IMPERIUM ROMANUM, J. J. O'Molloy said gently. It sounds nobler than
British or Brixton. The word reminds one somehow of fat in the fire.
Myles Crawford blew his first puff violently towards the ceiling.
That's it, he said. We are the fat. You and I are the fat in the fire.
We haven't got the chance of a snowball in hell.
THE GRANDEUR THAT WAS ROME
Wait a moment, professor MacHugh said, raising two quiet claws. We
mustn't be led away by words, by sounds of words. We think of Rome,
imperial, imperious, imperative.
He extended elocutionary arms from frayed stained shirtcuffs, pausing
What was their civilisation? Vast, I allow but vile. Cloacae sewers.
The Jews in the wilderness and on the mountaintop said IT IS MEET TO BE
HERE. LET US BUILD AN ALTAR TO JEHOVAH. The Roman, like the Englishman who
follows in his footsteps, brought to every new shore on which he set his
foot on our shore he never set it only his cloacal obsession. He gazed
about him in his toga and he said IT IS MEET TO BE HERE. LET US CONSTRUCT
A WATERCLOSET.
Which they accordingly did do, Lenehan said. Our old ancient ancestors,
as we read in the first chapter of Guinness's, were partial to the running
stream.
They were nature's gentlemen, J. J. O'Molloy murmured. But we have
also Roman law.
And Pontius Pilate is its prophet, professor MacHugh responded.
Do you know that story about chief baron Palles? J. J. O'Molloy asked.
It was at the royal university dinner. Everything was going
swimmingly ...
First my riddle, Lenehan said. Are you ready?
Mr O'Madden Burke, tall in copious grey of Donegal tweed, came in
from the hallway. Stephen Dedalus, behind him, uncovered as he entered.
ENTREZ, MES ENFANTS Lenehan cried.
I escort a suppliant, Mr O'Madden Burke said melodiously. Youth led by
Experience visits Notoriety.
How do you do? the editor said, holding out a hand. Come in. Your
governor is just gone.
Lenehan said to all
Silence What opera resembles a railwayline? Reflect, ponder,
excogitate, reply.
Stephen handed over the typed sheets, pointing to the title and signature.
Who? the editor asked.
Bit torn off.
Mr Garrett Deasy, Stephen said.
That old pelters, the editor said. Who tore it? Was he short taken?
ON SWIFT SAIL FLAMING
FROM STORM AND SOUTH
HE COMES, PALE VAMPIRE,
MOUTH TO MY MOUTH.
Good day, Stephen, the professor said, coming to peer over their
shoulders. Foot and mouth? Are you turned ...?
Bullockbefriending bard.
SHINDY IN WELLKNOWN RESTAURANT
Good day, sir, Stephen answered blushing. The letter is not mine. Mr
Garrett Deasy asked me to ...
O, I know him, Myles Crawford said, and I knew his wife too. The
bloodiest old tartar God ever made. By Jesus, she had the foot and mouth
disease and no mistake The night she threw the soup in the waiter's face
in the Star and Garter. Oho
A woman brought sin into the world. For Helen, the runaway wife of
Menelaus, ten years the Greeks. O'Rourke, prince of Breffni.
Is he a widower? Stephen asked.
Ay, a grass one, Myles Crawford said, his eye running down the
typescript. Emperor's horses. Habsburg. An Irishman saved his life on the
ramparts of Vienna. Don't you forget Maximilian Karl O'Donnell, graf
von Tirconnell in Ireland. Sent his heir over to make the king an Austrian
fieldmarshal now. Going to be trouble there one day. Wild geese. O yes,
every time. Don't you forget that
The moot point is did he forget it, J. J. O'Molloy said quietly,
turning a horseshoe paperweight. Saving princes is a thank you job.
Professor MacHugh turned on him.
And if not? he said.
I'll tell you how it was, Myles Crawford began. A Hungarian it was one
day ...
LOST CAUSES
NOBLE MARQUESS MENTIONED
We were always loyal to lost causes, the professor said. Success for us
is the death of the intellect and of the imagination. We were never loyal
to the successful. We serve them. I teach the blatant Latin language. I
speak the tongue of a race the acme of whose mentality is the maxim time
is money. Material domination. DOMINUS Lord Where is the spirituality?
Lord Jesus? Lord Salisbury? A sofa in a westend club. But the Greek
KYRIE ELEISON
A smile of light brightened his darkrimmed eyes, lengthened his long
lips.
The Greek he said again. KYRIOS Shining word The vowels the Semite
and the Saxon know not. KYRIE The radiance of the intellect. I ought to
profess Greek, the language of the mind. KYRIE ELEISON The closetmaker
and the cloacamaker will never be lords of our spirit. We are liege
subjects of the catholic chivalry of Europe that foundered at Trafalgar
and of the empire of the spirit, not an IMPERIUM, that went under with the
Athenian fleets at Aegospotami. Yes, yes. They went under. Pyrrhus, misled
by an oracle, made a last attempt to retrieve the fortunes of Greece.
Loyal to a lost cause.
He strode away from them towards the window.
They went forth to battle, Mr O'Madden Burke said greyly, but they
always fell.
Boohoo Lenehan wept with a little noise. Owing to a brick received in
the latter half of the MATINEE. Poor, poor, poor Pyrrhus
He whispered then near Stephen's ear
LENEHAN'S LIMERICK
THERE'S A PONDEROUS PUNDIT MACHUGH
WHO WEARS GOGGLES OF EBONY HUE.
AS HE MOSTLY SEES DOUBLE
TO WEAR THEM WHY TROUBLE?
I CAN'T SEE THE JOE MILLER. CAN YOU?
In mourning for Sallust, Mulligan says. Whose mother is beastly dead.
Myles Crawford crammed the sheets into a sidepocket.
That'll be all right, he said. I'll read the rest after. That'll be all
right.
Lenehan extended his hands in protest.
But my riddle he said. What opera is like a railwayline?
Opera? Mr O'Madden Burke's sphinx face reriddled.
Lenehan announced gladly
THE ROSE OF CASTILE. See the wheeze? Rows of cast steel. Gee
He poked Mr O'Madden Burke mildly in the spleen. Mr O'Madden Burke
fell back with grace on his umbrella, feigning a gasp.
Help he sighed. I feel a strong weakness.
Lenehan, rising to tiptoe, fanned his face rapidly with the rustling
tissues.
The professor, returning by way of the files, swept his hand across
Stephen's and Mr O'Madden Burke's loose ties.
Paris, past and present, he said. You look like communards.
Like fellows who had blown up the Bastile, J. J. O'Molloy said in quiet
mockery. Or was it you shot the lord lieutenant of Finland between you?
You look as though you had done the deed. General Bobrikoff.
OMNIUM GATHERUM
We were only thinking about it, Stephen said.
All the talents, Myles Crawford said. Law, the classics ...
The turf, Lenehan put in.
Literature, the press.
If Bloom were here, the professor said. The gentle art of advertisement.
And Madam Bloom, Mr O'Madden Burke added. The vocal muse. Dublin's
prime favourite.
Lenehan gave a loud cough.
Ahem he said very softly. O, for a fresh of breath air I caught a
cold in the park. The gate was open.
YOU CAN DO IT
The editor laid a nervous hand on Stephen's shoulder.
I want you to write something for me, he said. Something with a bite in
it. You can do it. I see it in your face. IN THE LEXICON OF YOUTH ...
See it in your face. See it in your eye. Lazy idle little schemer.
Foot and mouth disease the editor cried in scornful invective. Great
nationalist meeting in BorrisinOssory. All balls Bulldosing the public
Give them something with a bite in it. Put us all into it, damn its soul.
Father, Son and Holy Ghost and Jakes M'Carthy.
We can all supply mental pabulum, Mr O'Madden Burke said.
Stephen raised his eyes to the bold unheeding stare.
He wants you for the pressgang, J. J. O'Molloy said.
THE GREAT GALLAHER
You can do it, Myles Crawford repeated, clenching his hand in emphasis.
Wait a minute. We'll paralyse Europe as Ignatius Gallaher used to say when
he was on the shaughraun, doing billiardmarking in the Clarence. Gallaher,
that was a pressman for you. That was a pen. You know how he made his
mark? I'll tell you. That was the smartest piece of journalism ever known.
That was in eightyone, sixth of May, time of the invincibles, murder in
the Phoenix park, before you were born, I suppose. I'll show you.
He pushed past them to the files.
Look at here, he said turning. The NEW YORK WORLD cabled for a special.
Remember that time?
Professor MacHugh nodded.
NEW YORK WORLD, the editor said, excitedly pushing back his straw hat.
Where it took place. Tim Kelly, or Kavanagh I mean. Joe Brady and the
rest of them. Where SkintheGoat drove the car. Whole route, see?
SkintheGoat, Mr O'Madden Burke said. Fitzharris. He has that
cabman's shelter, they say, down there at Butt bridge. Holohan told me.
You know Holohan?
Hop and carry one, is it? Myles Crawford said.
And poor Gumley is down there too, so he told me, minding stones for
the corporation. A night watchman.
Stephen turned in surprise.
Gumley? he said. You don't say so? A friend of my father's, is it?
Never mind Gumley, Myles Crawford cried angrily. Let Gumley mind
the stones, see they don't run away. Look at here. What did Ignatius
Gallaher do? I'll tell you. Inspiration of genius. Cabled right away. Have
you WEEKLY FREEMAN of  March? Right. Have you got that?
He flung back pages of the files and stuck his finger on a point.
Take page four, advertisement for Bransome's coffee, let us say. Have
you got that? Right.
The telephone whirred.
A DISTANT VOICE
I'll answer it, the professor said, going.
B is parkgate. Good.
His finger leaped and struck point after point, vibrating.
T is viceregal lodge. C is where murder took place. K is Knockmaroon
gate.
The loose flesh of his neck shook like a cock's wattles. An illstarched
dicky jutted up and with a rude gesture he thrust it back into his
waistcoat.
Hello? EVENING TELEGRAPH here ... Hello?... Who's there? ...
Yes ... Yes ... Yes.
F to P is the route SkintheGoat drove the car for an alibi, Inchicore,
Roundtown, Windy Arbour, Palmerston Park, Ranelagh. F.A.B.P. Got that?
X is Davy's publichouse in upper Leeson street.
The professor came to the inner door.
Bloom is at the telephone, he said.
Tell him go to hell, the editor said promptly. X is Davy's publichouse,
see?
CLEVER, VERY
Clever, Lenehan said. Very.
Gave it to them on a hot plate, Myles Crawford said, the whole bloody
history.
Nightmare from which you will never awake.
I saw it, the editor said proudly. I was present. Dick Adams, the
besthearted bloody Corkman the Lord ever put the breath of life in, and
myself.
Lenehan bowed to a shape of air, announcing
Madam, I'm Adam. And Able was I ere I saw Elba.
History Myles Crawford cried. The Old Woman of Prince's street was
there first. There was weeping and gnashing of teeth over that. Out of an
advertisement. Gregor Grey made the design for it. That gave him the leg
up. Then Paddy Hooper worked Tay Pay who took him on to the STAR.
Now he's got in with Blumenfeld. That's press. That's talent. Pyatt He
was all their daddies
The father of scare journalism, Lenehan confirmed, and the
brotherinlaw of Chris Callinan.
Hello? ... Are you there? ... Yes, he's here still. Come across
yourself.
Where do you find a pressman like that now, eh? the editor cried.
He flung the pages down.
Clamn dever, Lenehan said to Mr O'Madden Burke.
Very smart, Mr O'Madden Burke said.
Professor MacHugh came from the inner office.
Talking about the invincibles, he said, did you see that some hawkers
were up before the recorder ...
O yes, J. J. O'Molloy said eagerly. Lady Dudley was walking home
through the park to see all the trees that were blown down by that cyclone
last year and thought she'd buy a view of Dublin. And it turned out to be
a commemoration postcard of Joe Brady or Number One or SkintheGoat.
Right outside the viceregal lodge, imagine
They're only in the hook and eye department, Myles Crawford said.
Psha Press and the bar Where have you a man now at the bar like those
fellows, like Whiteside, like Isaac Butt, like silvertongued O'Hagan. Eh?
Ah, bloody nonsense. Psha Only in the halfpenny place.
His mouth continued to twitch unspeaking in nervous curls of disdain.
Would anyone wish that mouth for her kiss? How do you know? Why did
you write it then?
RHYMES AND REASONS
Mouth, south. Is the mouth south someway? Or the south a mouth?
Must be some. South, pout, out, shout, drouth. Rhymes two men dressed
the same, looking the same, two by two.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .LA TUA PACE
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .CHE PARLAR TI PIACE
. . . . .MENTREM CHE IL VENTO, COME FA, SI TACE.
He saw them three by three, approaching girls, in green, in rose, in
russet, entwining, PER L'AER PERSO, in mauve, in purple, QUELLA PACIFICA
ORIAFIAMMA, gold of oriflamme, DI RIMIRAR FE PIU ARDENTI. But I old men,
penitent, leadenfooted, underdarkneath the night mouth south tomb womb.
Speak up for yourself, Mr O'Madden Burke said.
SUFFICIENT FOR THE DAY ...
J. J. O'Molloy, smiling palely, took up the gage.
My dear Myles, he said, flinging his cigarette aside, you put a false
construction on my words. I hold no brief, as at present advised, for the
third profession qua profession but your Cork legs are running away with
you. Why not bring in Henry Grattan and Flood and Demosthenes and
Edmund Burke? Ignatius Gallaher we all know and his Chapelizod boss,
Harmsworth of the farthing press, and his American cousin of the Bowery
guttersheet not to mention PADDY KELLY'S BUDGET, PUE'S OCCURRENCES and our
watchful friend THE SKIBBEREEN EAGLE. Why bring in a master of forensic
eloquence like Whiteside? Sufficient for the day is the newspaper thereof.
LINKS WITH BYGONE DAYS OF YORE
Grattan and Flood wrote for this very paper, the editor cried in his
face. Irish volunteers. Where are you now? Established . Dr Lucas.
Who have you now like John Philpot Curran? Psha
Well, J. J. O'Molloy said, Bushe K.C., for example.
Bushe? the editor said. Well, yes Bushe, yes. He has a strain of it in
his blood. Kendal Bushe or I mean Seymour Bushe.
He would have been on the bench long ago, the professor said, only
for ... But no matter.
J. J. O'Molloy turned to Stephen and said quietly and slowly
One of the most polished periods I think I ever listened to in my life
fell from the lips of Seymour Bushe. It was in that case of fratricide,
the Childs murder case. Bushe defended him.
AND IN THE PORCHES OF MINE EAR DID POUR.
By the way how did he find that out? He died in his sleep. Or the
other story, beast with two backs?
What was that? the professor asked.
ITALIA, MAGISTRA ARTIUM
He spoke on the law of evidence, J. J. O'Molloy said, of Roman justice
as contrasted with the earlier Mosaic code, the LEX TALIONIS. And he cited
the Moses of Michelangelo in the vatican.
Ha.
A few wellchosen words, Lenehan prefaced. Silence
Pause. J. J. O'Molloy took out his cigarettecase.
False lull. Something quite ordinary.
Messenger took out his matchbox thoughtfully and lit his cigar.
I have often thought since on looking back over that strange time that
it was that small act, trivial in itself, that striking of that match,
that determined the whole aftercourse of both our lives.
A POLISHED PERIOD
J. J. O'Molloy resumed, moulding his words
He said of it THAT STONY EFFIGY IN FROZEN MUSIC, HORNED AND TERRIBLE,
OF THE HUMAN FORM DIVINE, THAT ETERNAL SYMBOL OF WISDOM AND OF PROPHECY
WHICH, IF AUGHT THAT THE IMAGINATION OR THE HAND OF SCULPTOR HAS WROUGHT
IN MARBLE OF SOULTRANSFIGURED AND OF SOULTRANSFIGURING DESERVES TO LIVE,
DESERVES TO LIVE.
His slim hand with a wave graced echo and fall.
Fine Myles Crawford said at once.
The divine afflatus, Mr O'Madden Burke said.
You like it? J. J. O'Molloy asked Stephen.
Stephen, his blood wooed by grace of language and gesture, blushed.
He took a cigarette from the case. J. J. O'Molloy offered his case to
Myles Crawford. Lenehan lit their cigarettes as before and took his
trophy, saying
Muchibus thankibus.
A MAN OF HIGH MORALE
Professor Magennis was speaking to me about you, J. J. O'Molloy said to
Stephen. What do you think really of that hermetic crowd, the opal hush
poets A. E. the mastermystic? That Blavatsky woman started it. She was a
nice old bag of tricks. A. E. has been telling some yankee interviewer
that you came to him in the small hours of the morning to ask him about
planes of consciousness. Magennis thinks you must have been pulling
A. E.'s leg. He is a man of the very highest morale, Magennis.
Speaking about me. What did he say? What did he say? What did he
say about me? Don't ask.
No, thanks, professor MacHugh said, waving the cigarettecase aside.
Wait a moment. Let me say one thing. The finest display of oratory I ever
heard was a speech made by John F Taylor at the college historical
society. Mr Justice Fitzgibbon, the present lord justice of appeal, had
spoken and the paper under debate was an essay new for those days,
advocating the revival of the Irish tongue.
He turned towards Myles Crawford and said
You know Gerald Fitzgibbon. Then you can imagine the style of his
discourse.
He is sitting with Tim Healy, J. J. O'Molloy said, rumour has it, on
the Trinity college estates commission.
He is sitting with a sweet thing, Myles Crawford said, in a child's
frock. Go on. Well?
It was the speech, mark you, the professor said, of a finished orator,
full of courteous haughtiness and pouring in chastened diction I will not
say the vials of his wrath but pouring the proud man's contumely upon the
new movement. It was then a new movement. We were weak, therefore
worthless.
He closed his long thin lips an instant but, eager to be on, raised an
outspanned hand to his spectacles and, with trembling thumb and
ringfinger touching lightly the black rims, steadied them to a new focus.
IMPROMPTU
In ferial tone he addressed J. J. O'Molloy
Taylor had come there, you must know, from a sickbed. That he had
prepared his speech I do not believe for there was not even one
shorthandwriter in the hall. His dark lean face had a growth of shaggy
beard round it. He wore a loose white silk neckcloth and altogether he
looked though he was not a dying man.
His gaze turned at once but slowly from J. J. O'Molloy's towards
Stephen's face and then bent at once to the ground, seeking. His unglazed
linen collar appeared behind his bent head, soiled by his withering hair.
Still seeking, he said
When Fitzgibbon's speech had ended John F Taylor rose to reply.
Briefly, as well as I can bring them to mind, his words were these.
He raised his head firmly. His eyes bethought themselves once more.
Witless shellfish swam in the gross lenses to and fro, seeking outlet.
He began
MR CHAIRMAN, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN GREAT WAS MY ADMIRATION IN LISTENING
TO THE REMARKS ADDRESSED TO THE YOUTH OF IRELAND A MOMENT SINCE BY MY
LEARNED FRIEND. IT SEEMED TO ME THAT I HAD BEEN TRANSPORTED INTO A COUNTRY
FAR AWAY FROM THIS COUNTRY, INTO AN AGE REMOTE FROM THIS AGE, THAT I STOOD
IN ANCIENT EGYPT AND THAT I WAS LISTENING TO THE SPEECH OF SOME HIGHPRIEST
OF THAT LAND ADDRESSED TO THE YOUTHFUL MOSES.
His listeners held their cigarettes poised to hear, their smokes
ascending in frail stalks that flowered with his speech. And let our
crooked smokes. Noble words coming. Look out. Could you try your hand at
it yourself?
AND IT SEEMED TO ME THAT I HEARD THE VOICE OF THAT EGYPTIAN HIGHPRIEST
RAISED IN A TONE OF LIKE HAUGHTINESS AND LIKE PRIDE. I HEARD HIS WORDS AND
THEIR MEANING WAS REVEALED TO ME.
FROM THE FATHERS
It was revealed to me that those things are good which yet are
corrupted which neither if they were supremely good nor unless they were
good could be corrupted. Ah, curse you That's saint Augustine.
WHY WILL YOU JEWS NOT ACCEPT OUR CULTURE, OUR RELIGION AND OUR
LANGUAGE? YOU ARE A TRIBE OF NOMAD HERDSMEN WE ARE A MIGHTY PEOPLE. YOU
HAVE NO CITIES NOR NO WEALTH OUR CITIES ARE HIVES OF HUMANITY AND OUR
GALLEYS, TRIREME AND QUADRIREME, LADEN WITH ALL MANNER MERCHANDISE FURROW
THE WATERS OF THE KNOWN GLOBE. YOU HAVE BUT EMERGED FROM PRIMITIVE
CONDITIONS WE HAVE A LITERATURE, A PRIESTHOOD, AN AGELONG HISTORY AND A
POLITY.
Nile.
Child, man, effigy.
By the Nilebank the babemaries kneel, cradle of bulrushes a man
supple in combat stonehorned, stonebearded, heart of stone.
YOU PRAY TO A LOCAL AND OBSCURE IDOL OUR TEMPLES, MAJESTIC AND
MYSTERIOUS, ARE THE ABODES OF ISIS AND OSIRIS, OF HORUS AND AMMON RA.
YOURS SERFDOM, AWE AND HUMBLENESS OURS THUNDER AND THE SEAS. ISRAEL IS
WEAK AND FEW ARE HER CHILDREN EGYPT IS AN HOST AND TERRIBLE ARE HER ARMS.
VAGRANTS AND DAYLABOURERS ARE YOU CALLED THE WORLD TREMBLES AT OUR NAME.
A dumb belch of hunger cleft his speech. He lifted his voice above it
boldly
BUT, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, HAD THE YOUTHFUL MOSES LISTENED TO AND
ACCEPTED THAT VIEW OF LIFE, HAD HE BOWED HIS HEAD AND BOWED HIS WILL AND
BOWED HIS SPIRIT BEFORE THAT ARROGANT ADMONITION HE WOULD NEVER HAVE
BROUGHT THE CHOSEN PEOPLE OUT OF THEIR HOUSE OF BONDAGE, NOR FOLLOWED THE
PILLAR OF THE CLOUD BY DAY. HE WOULD NEVER HAVE SPOKEN WITH THE ETERNAL
AMID LIGHTNINGS ON SINAI'S MOUNTAINTOP NOR EVER HAVE COME DOWN WITH THE
LIGHT OF INSPIRATION SHINING IN HIS COUNTENANCE AND BEARING IN HIS ARMS
THE TABLES OF THE LAW, GRAVEN IN THE LANGUAGE OF THE OUTLAW.
He ceased and looked at them, enjoying a silence.
OMINOUSFOR HIM
J. J. O'Molloy said not without regret
And yet he died without having entered the land of promise.
A suddenatthemomentthoughfromlingeringillness
oftenpreviouslyexpectorateddemise, Lenehan added. And with a
great future behind him.
The troop of bare feet was heard rushing along the hallway and
pattering up the staircase.
That is oratory, the professor said uncontradicted. Gone with the wind.
Hosts at Mullaghmast and Tara of the kings. Miles of ears of porches.
The tribune's words, howled and scattered to the four winds. A people
sheltered within his voice. Dead noise. Akasic records of all that ever
anywhere wherever was. Love and laud him me no more.
I have money.
Gentlemen, Stephen said. As the next motion on the agenda paper may I
suggest that the house do now adjourn?
You take my breath away. It is not perchance a French compliment? Mr
O'Madden Burke asked. 'Tis the hour, methinks, when the winejug,
metaphorically speaking, is most grateful in Ye ancient hostelry.
That it be and hereby is resolutely resolved. All that are in favour
say ay, Lenehan announced. The contrary no. I declare it carried. To which
particular boosing shed? ... My casting vote is Mooney's
He led the way, admonishing
We will sternly refuse to partake of strong waters, will we not? Yes,
we will not. By no manner of means.
Mr O'Madden Burke, following close, said with an ally's lunge of his
umbrella
Lay on, Macduff
Chip of the old block the editor cried, clapping Stephen on the
shoulder. Let us go. Where are those blasted keys?
He fumbled in his pocket pulling out the crushed typesheets.
Foot and mouth. I know. That'll be all right. That'll go in. Where are
they? That's all right.
He thrust the sheets back and went into the inner office.
LET US HOPE
J. J. O'Molloy, about to follow him in, said quietly to Stephen
I hope you will live to see it published. Myles, one moment.
He went into the inner office, closing the door behind him.
Come along, Stephen, the professor said. That is fine, isn't it? It has
the prophetic vision. FUIT ILIUM The sack of windy Troy. Kingdoms of this
world. The masters of the Mediterranean are fellaheen today.
The first newsboy came pattering down the stairs at their heels and
rushed out into the street, yelling
Racing special
Dublin. I have much, much to learn.
They turned to the left along Abbey street.
I have a vision too, Stephen said.
Yes? the professor said, skipping to get into step. Crawford will
follow.
Another newsboy shot past them, yelling as he ran
Racing special
DEAR DIRTY DUBLIN
Dubliners.
Two Dublin vestals, Stephen said, elderly and pious, have lived fifty
and fiftythree years in Fumbally's lane.
Where is that? the professor asked.
Off Blackpitts, Stephen said.
Damp night reeking of hungry dough. Against the wall. Face
glistering tallow under her fustian shawl. Frantic hearts. Akasic records.
Quicker, darlint
On now. Dare it. Let there be life.
They want to see the views of Dublin from the top of Nelson's pillar.
They save up three and tenpence in a red tin letterbox moneybox. They
shake out the threepenny bits and sixpences and coax out the pennies with
the blade of a knife. Two and three in silver and one and seven in
coppers. They put on their bonnets and best clothes and take their
umbrellas for fear it may come on to rain.
Wise virgins, professor MacHugh said.
LIFE ON THE RAW
They buy one and fourpenceworth of brawn and four slices of panloaf at
the north city diningrooms in Marlborough street from Miss Kate Collins,
proprietress ... They purchase four and twenty ripe plums from a girl at
the foot of Nelson's pillar to take off the thirst of the brawn. They give
two threepenny bits to the gentleman at the turnstile and begin to waddle
slowly up the winding staircase, grunting, encouraging each other, afraid
of the dark, panting, one asking the other have you the brawn, praising
God and the Blessed Virgin, threatening to come down, peeping at the
airslits. Glory be to God. They had no idea it was that high.
Their names are Anne Kearns and Florence MacCabe. Anne Kearns
has the lumbago for which she rubs on Lourdes water, given her by a lady
who got a bottleful from a passionist father. Florence MacCabe takes a
crubeen and a bottle of double X for supper every Saturday.
Antithesis, the professor said nodding twice. Vestal virgins. I can see
them. What's keeping our friend?
He turned.
A bevy of scampering newsboys rushed down the steps, scattering in
all directions, yelling, their white papers fluttering. Hard after them
Myles Crawford appeared on the steps, his hat aureoling his scarlet face,
talking with J. J. O'Molloy.
Come along, the professor cried, waving his arm.
He set off again to walk by Stephen's side.
RETURN OF BLOOM
Yes, he said. I see them.
Mr Bloom, breathless, caught in a whirl of wild newsboys near the
offices of the IRISH CATHOLIC AND DUBLIN PENNY JOURNAL, called
Mr Crawford A moment
TELEGRAPH Racing special
What is it? Myles Crawford said, falling back a pace.
A newsboy cried in Mr Bloom's face
Terrible tragedy in Rathmines A child bit by a bellows
INTERVIEW WITH THE EDITOR
Just this ad, Mr Bloom said, pushing through towards the steps,
puffing, and taking the cutting from his pocket. I spoke with Mr Keyes
just now. He'll give a renewal for two months, he says. After he'll see.
But he wants a par to call attention in the TELEGRAPH too, the Saturday
pink. And he wants it copied if it's not too late I told councillor
Nannetti from the KILKENNY PEOPLE. I can have access to it in the national
library. House of keys, don't you see? His name is Keyes. It's a play on
the name. But he practically promised he'd give the renewal. But he wants
just a little puff. What will I tell him, Mr Crawford?
K.M.A.
Will you tell him he can kiss my arse? Myles Crawford said throwing out
his arm for emphasis. Tell him that straight from the stable.
A bit nervy. Look out for squalls. All off for a drink. Arm in arm.
Lenehan's yachting cap on the cadge beyond. Usual blarney. Wonder is
that young Dedalus the moving spirit. Has a good pair of boots on him
today. Last time I saw him he had his heels on view. Been walking in muck
somewhere. Careless chap. What was he doing in Irishtown?
Well, Mr Bloom said, his eyes returning, if I can get the design I
suppose it's worth a short par. He'd give the ad, I think. I'll tell
him ...
K.M.R.I.A.
He can kiss my royal Irish arse, Myles Crawford cried loudly over his
shoulder. Any time he likes, tell him.
While Mr Bloom stood weighing the point and about to smile he strode
on jerkily.
RAISING THE WIND
NULLA BONA, Jack, he said, raising his hand to his chin. I'm up to
here. I've been through the hoop myself. I was looking for a fellow to
back a bill for me no later than last week. Sorry, Jack. You must take the
will for the deed. With a heart and a half if I could raise the wind
anyhow.
J. J. O'Molloy pulled a long face and walked on silently. They caught
up on the others and walked abreast.
When they have eaten the brawn and the bread and wiped their twenty
fingers in the paper the bread was wrapped in they go nearer to the
railings.
Something for you, the professor explained to Myles Crawford. Two old
Dublin women on the top of Nelson's pillar.
SOME COLUMN
THAT'S WHAT WADDLER ONE SAID
That's new, Myles Crawford said. That's copy. Out for the waxies
Dargle. Two old trickies, what?
But they are afraid the pillar will fall, Stephen went on. They see the
roofs and argue about where the different churches are Rathmines' blue
dome, Adam and Eve's, saint Laurence O'Toole's. But it makes them giddy to
look so they pull up their skirts ...
THOSE SLIGHTLY RAMBUNCTIOUS FEMALES
Easy all, Myles Crawford said. No poetic licence. We're in the
archdiocese here.
And settle down on their striped petticoats, peering up at the statue
of the onehandled adulterer.
Onehandled adulterer the professor cried. I like that. I see the idea.
I see what you mean.
DAMES DONATE DUBLIN'S CITS SPEEDPILLS
VELOCITOUS AEROLITHS, BELIEF
It gives them a crick in their necks, Stephen said, and they are too
tired to look up or down or to speak. They put the bag of plums between
them and eat the plums out of it, one after another, wiping off with their
handkerchiefs the plumjuice that dribbles out of their mouths and spitting
the plumstones slowly out between the railings.
He gave a sudden loud young laugh as a close. Lenehan and Mr O'Madden
Burke, hearing, turned, beckoned and led on across towards Mooney's.
Finished? Myles Crawford said. So long as they do no worse.
SOPHIST WALLOPS HAUGHTY HELEN SQUARE ON
PROBOSCIS. SPARTANS GNASH MOLARS. ITHACANS
VOW PEN IS CHAMP.
You remind me of Antisthenes, the professor said, a disciple of
Gorgias, the sophist. It is said of him that none could tell if he were
bitterer against others or against himself. He was the son of a noble and
a bondwoman. And he wrote a book in which he took away the palm of beauty
from Argive Helen and handed it to poor Penelope.
Poor Penelope. Penelope Rich.
They made ready to cross O'Connell street.
HELLO THERE, CENTRAL
At various points along the eight lines tramcars with motionless
trolleys stood in their tracks, bound for or from Rathmines, Rathfarnham,
Blackrock, Kingstown and Dalkey, Sandymount Green, Ringsend and
Sandymount Tower, Donnybrook, Palmerston Park and Upper Rathmines,
all still, becalmed in short circuit. Hackney cars, cabs, delivery
waggons, mailvans, private broughams, aerated mineral water floats with
rattling crates of bottles, rattled, rolled, horsedrawn, rapidly.
WHAT?AND LIKEWISEWHERE?
But what do you call it? Myles Crawford asked. Where did they get the
plums?
VIRGILIAN, SAYS PEDAGOGUE.
SOPHOMORE PLUMPS FOR OLD MAN MOSES.
Call it, wait, the professor said, opening his long lips wide to
reflect. Call it, let me see. Call it DEUS NOBIS HAEC OTIA FECIT.
No, Stephen said. I call it A PISGAH SIGHT OF PALESTINE OR THE PARABLE
OF THE PLUMS.
I see, the professor said.
He laughed richly.
I see, he said again with new pleasure. Moses and the promised land. We
gave him that idea, he added to J. J. O'Molloy.
HORATIO IS CYNOSURE THIS FAIR JUNE DAY
J. J. O'Molloy sent a weary sidelong glance towards the statue and
held his peace.
I see, the professor said.
He halted on sir John Gray's pavement island and peered aloft at Nelson
through the meshes of his wry smile.
DIMINISHED DIGITS PROVE TOO TITILLATING
FOR FRISKY FRUMPS. ANNE WIMBLES, FLO
WANGLESYET CAN YOU BLAME THEM?
Onehandled adulterer, he said smiling grimly. That tickles me, I must
say.
Tickled the old ones too, Myles Crawford said, if the God Almighty's
truth was known.
Pineapple rock, lemon platt, butter scotch. A sugarsticky girl
shovelling scoopfuls of creams for a christian brother. Some school treat.
Bad for their tummies. Lozenge and comfit manufacturer to His Majesty
the King. God. Save. Our. Sitting on his throne sucking red jujubes white.
A sombre Y.M.C.A. young man, watchful among the warm sweet
fumes of Graham Lemon's, placed a throwaway in a hand of Mr Bloom.
Heart to heart talks.
Bloo ... Me? No.
Blood of the Lamb.
His slow feet walked him riverward, reading. Are you saved? All are
washed in the blood of the lamb. God wants blood victim. Birth, hymen,
martyr, war, foundation of a building, sacrifice, kidney burntoffering,
druids' altars. Elijah is coming. Dr John Alexander Dowie restorer of the
church in Zion is coming.
IS COMING IS COMING IS COMING
ALL HEARTILY WELCOME.
Paying game. Torry and Alexander last year. Polygamy. His wife will
put the stopper on that. Where was that ad some Birmingham firm the
luminous crucifix. Our Saviour. Wake up in the dead of night and see him
on the wall, hanging. Pepper's ghost idea. Iron nails ran in.
Phosphorus it must be done with. If you leave a bit of codfish for
instance. I could see the bluey silver over it. Night I went down to the
pantry in the kitchen. Don't like all the smells in it waiting to rush
out. What was it she wanted? The Malaga raisins. Thinking of Spain. Before
Rudy was born. The phosphorescence, that bluey greeny. Very good for the
brain.
From Butler's monument house corner he glanced along Bachelor's
walk. Dedalus' daughter there still outside Dillon's auctionrooms. Must be
selling off some old furniture. Knew her eyes at once from the father.
Lobbing about waiting for him. Home always breaks up when the mother
goes. Fifteen children he had. Birth every year almost. That's in their
theology or the priest won't give the poor woman the confession, the
absolution. Increase and multiply. Did you ever hear such an idea? Eat you
out of house and home. No families themselves to feed. Living on the fat
of the land. Their butteries and larders. I'd like to see them do the
black fast Yom Kippur. Crossbuns. One meal and a collation for fear he'd
collapse on the altar. A housekeeper of one of those fellows if you could
pick it out of her. Never pick it out of her. Like getting l.s.d. out of
him. Does himself well. No guests. All for number one. Watching his water.
Bring your own bread and butter. His reverence mum's the word.
Good Lord, that poor child's dress is in flitters. Underfed she looks
too. Potatoes and marge, marge and potatoes. It's after they feel it.
Proof of the pudding. Undermines the constitution.
As he set foot on O'Connell bridge a puffball of smoke plumed up
from the parapet. Brewery barge with export stout. England. Sea air sours
it, I heard. Be interesting some day get a pass through Hancock to see the
brewery. Regular world in itself. Vats of porter wonderful. Rats get in
too. Drink themselves bloated as big as a collie floating. Dead drunk on
the porter. Drink till they puke again like christians. Imagine drinking
that Rats vats. Well, of course, if we knew all the things.
Looking down he saw flapping strongly, wheeling between the gaunt
quaywalls, gulls. Rough weather outside. If I threw myself down?
Reuben J's son must have swallowed a good bellyful of that sewage. One and
eightpence too much. Hhhhm. It's the droll way he comes out with the
things. Knows how to tell a story too.
They wheeled lower. Looking for grub. Wait.
He threw down among them a crumpled paper ball. Elijah thirtytwo
feet per sec is com. Not a bit. The ball bobbed unheeded on the wake of
swells, floated under by the bridgepiers. Not such damn fools. Also the
day I threw that stale cake out of the Erin's King picked it up in the
wake fifty yards astern. Live by their wits. They wheeled, flapping.
THE HUNGRY FAMISHED GULL
FLAPS O'ER THE WATERS DULL.
That is how poets write, the similar sounds. But then Shakespeare has
no rhymes blank verse. The flow of the language it is. The thoughts.
Solemn.
HAMLET, I AM THY FATHER'S SPIRIT
DOOMED FOR A CERTAIN TIME TO WALK THE EARTH.
Two apples a penny Two for a penny
His gaze passed over the glazed apples serried on her stand.
Australians they must be this time of year. Shiny peels polishes them up
with a rag or a handkerchief.
Wait. Those poor birds.
He halted again and bought from the old applewoman two Banbury
cakes for a penny and broke the brittle paste and threw its fragments down
into the Liffey. See that? The gulls swooped silently, two, then all from
their heights, pouncing on prey. Gone. Every morsel.
Aware of their greed and cunning he shook the powdery crumb from his
hands. They never expected that. Manna. Live on fish, fishy flesh
they have, all seabirds, gulls, seagoose. Swans from Anna Liffey swim
down here sometimes to preen themselves. No accounting for tastes.
Wonder what kind is swanmeat. Robinson Crusoe had to live on them.
They wheeled flapping weakly. I'm not going to throw any more.
Penny quite enough. Lot of thanks I get. Not even a caw. They spread foot
and mouth disease too. If you cram a turkey say on chestnutmeal it tastes
like that. Eat pig like pig. But then why is it that saltwater fish are
not salty? How is that?
His eyes sought answer from the river and saw a rowboat rock at anchor
on the treacly swells lazily its plastered board.
KINO'S
TROUSERS
Good idea that. Wonder if he pays rent to the corporation. How can
you own water really? It's always flowing in a stream, never the same,
which in the stream of life we trace. Because life is a stream. All kinds
of places are good for ads. That quack doctor for the clap used to be
stuck up in all the greenhouses. Never see it now. Strictly confidential.
Dr Hy Franks. Didn't cost him a red like Maginni the dancing master self
advertisement. Got fellows to stick them up or stick them up himself for
that matter on the q. t. running in to loosen a button. Flybynight. Just
the place too. POST NO BILLS. POST  PILLS. Some chap with a dose
burning him.
If he ...?
O
Eh?
No ... No.
No, no. I don't believe it. He wouldn't surely?
No, no.
Mr Bloom moved forward, raising his troubled eyes. Think no more about
that. After one. Timeball on the ballastoffice is down. Dunsink time.
Fascinating little book that is of sir Robert Ball's. Parallax. I never
exactly understood. There's a priest. Could ask him. Par it's Greek
parallel, parallax. Met him pike hoses she called it till I told her about
the transmigration. O rocks
Mr Bloom smiled O rocks at two windows of the ballastoffice. She's
right after all. Only big words for ordinary things on account of the
sound. She's not exactly witty. Can be rude too. Blurt out what I was
thinking. Still, I don't know. She used to say Ben Dollard had a base
barreltone voice. He has legs like barrels and you'd think he was singing
into a barrel. Now, isn't that wit. They used to call him big Ben. Not
half as witty as calling him base barreltone. Appetite like an albatross.
Get outside of a baron of beef. Powerful man he was at stowing away number
one Bass. Barrel of Bass. See? It all works out.
A procession of whitesmocked sandwichmen marched slowly towards
him along the gutter, scarlet sashes across their boards. Bargains. Like
that priest they are this morning we have sinned we have suffered. He
read the scarlet letters on their five tall white hats H. E. L. Y. S.
Wisdom Hely's. Y lagging behind drew a chunk of bread from under his
foreboard, crammed it into his mouth and munched as he walked. Our staple
food. Three bob a day, walking along the gutters, street after street.
Just keep skin and bone together, bread and skilly. They are not Boyl
no, M Glade's men. Doesn't bring in any business either. I suggested
to him about a transparent showcart with two smart girls sitting
inside writing letters, copybooks, envelopes, blottingpaper. I bet that
would have caught on. Smart girls writing something catch the eye at once.
Everyone dying to know what she's writing. Get twenty of them round you
if you stare at nothing. Have a finger in the pie. Women too. Curiosity.
Pillar of salt. Wouldn't have it of course because he didn't think
of it himself first. Or the inkbottle I suggested with a false stain
of black celluloid. His ideas for ads like Plumtree's potted under
the obituaries, cold meat department. You can't lick 'em. What? Our
envelopes. Hello, Jones, where are you going? Can't stop, Robinson,
I am hastening to purchase the only reliable inkeraser KANSELL,
sold by Hely's Ltd,  Dame street. Well out of that ruck I am.
Devil of a job it was collecting accounts of those convents. Tranquilla
convent. That was a nice nun there, really sweet face. Wimple suited her
small head. Sister? Sister? I am sure she was crossed in love by her eyes.
Very hard to bargain with that sort of a woman. I disturbed her at her
devotions that morning. But glad to communicate with the outside world.
Our great day, she said. Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. Sweet name
too caramel. She knew I, I think she knew by the way she. If she had
married she would have changed. I suppose they really were short of
money. Fried everything in the best butter all the same. No lard for them.
My heart's broke eating dripping. They like buttering themselves in and
out. Molly tasting it, her veil up. Sister? Pat Claffey, the pawnbroker's
daughter. It was a nun they say invented barbed wire.
He crossed Westmoreland street when apostrophe S had plodded by.
Rover cycleshop. Those races are on today. How long ago is that? Year
Phil Gilligan died. We were in Lombard street west. Wait was in Thom's.
Got the job in Wisdom Hely's year we married. Six years. Ten years ago
ninetyfour he died yes that's right the big fire at Arnott's. Val Dillon
was lord mayor. The Glencree dinner. Alderman Robert O'Reilly emptying the
port into his soup before the flag fell. Bobbob lapping it for the inner
alderman. Couldn't hear what the band played. For what we have already
received may the Lord make us. Milly was a kiddy then. Molly had that
elephantgrey dress with the braided frogs. Mantailored with selfcovered
buttons. She didn't like it because I sprained my ankle first day she wore
choir picnic at the Sugarloaf. As if that. Old Goodwin's tall hat done up
with some sticky stuff. Flies' picnic too. Never put a dress on her back
like it. Fitted her like a glove, shoulders and hips. Just beginning to
plump it out well. Rabbitpie we had that day. People looking after her.
Happy. Happier then. Snug little room that was with the red
wallpaper. Dockrell's, one and ninepence a dozen. Milly's tubbing night.
American soap I bought elderflower. Cosy smell of her bathwater. Funny
she looked soaped all over. Shapely too. Now photography. Poor papa's
daguerreotype atelier he told me of. Hereditary taste.
He walked along the curbstone.
Stream of life. What was the name of that priestylooking chap was
always squinting in when he passed? Weak eyes, woman. Stopped in
Citron's saint Kevin's parade. Pen something. Pendennis? My memory is
getting. Pen ...? Of course it's years ago. Noise of the trams probably.
Well, if he couldn't remember the dayfather's name that he sees every day.
Bartell d'Arcy was the tenor, just coming out then. Seeing her home
after practice. Conceited fellow with his waxedup moustache. Gave her that
song WINDS THAT BLOW FROM THE SOUTH.
Windy night that was I went to fetch her there was that lodge meeting
on about those lottery tickets after Goodwin's concert in the supperroom
or oakroom of the Mansion house. He and I behind. Sheet of her music blew
out of my hand against the High school railings. Lucky it didn't. Thing
like that spoils the effect of a night for her. Professor Goodwin linking
her in front. Shaky on his pins, poor old sot. His farewell concerts.
Positively last appearance on any stage. May be for months and may be for
never. Remember her laughing at the wind, her blizzard collar up. Corner
of Harcourt road remember that gust. Brrfoo Blew up all her skirts and
her boa nearly smothered old Goodwin. She did get flushed in the wind.
Remember when we got home raking up the fire and frying up those pieces
of lap of mutton for her supper with the Chutney sauce she liked. And the
mulled rum. Could see her in the bedroom from the hearth unclamping the
busk of her stays white.
Swish and soft flop her stays made on the bed. Always warm from
her. Always liked to let her self out. Sitting there after till near two
taking out her hairpins. Milly tucked up in beddyhouse. Happy. Happy.
That was the night ...
O, Mr Bloom, how do you do?
O, how do you do, Mrs Breen?
No use complaining. How is Molly those times? Haven't seen her for ages.
In the pink, Mr Bloom said gaily. Milly has a position down in
Mullingar, you know.
Go away Isn't that grand for her?
Yes. In a photographer's there. Getting on like a house on fire. How are
all your charges?
All on the baker's list, Mrs Breen said.
How many has she? No other in sight.
You're in black, I see. You have no ...
No, Mr Bloom said. I have just come from a funeral.
Going to crop up all day, I foresee. Who's dead, when and what did
he die of? Turn up like a bad penny.
O, dear me, Mrs Breen said. I hope it wasn't any near relation.
May as well get her sympathy.
Dignam, Mr Bloom said. An old friend of mine. He died quite suddenly,
poor fellow. Heart trouble, I believe. Funeral was this morning.
YOUR FUNERAL'S TOMORROW
WHILE YOU'RE COMING THROUGH THE RYE.
DIDDLEDIDDLE DUMDUM
DIDDLEDIDDLE ...
Sad to lose the old friends, Mrs Breen's womaneyes said melancholily.
Now that's quite enough about that. Just quietly husband.
And your lord and master?
Mrs Breen turned up her two large eyes. Hasn't lost them anyhow.
O, don't be talking she said. He's a caution to rattlesnakes. He's in
there now with his lawbooks finding out the law of libel. He has me
heartscalded. Wait till I show you.
Hot mockturtle vapour and steam of newbaked jampuffs rolypoly
poured out from Harrison's. The heavy noonreek tickled the top of Mr
Bloom's gullet. Want to make good pastry, butter, best flour, Demerara
sugar, or they'd taste it with the hot tea. Or is it from her? A barefoot
arab stood over the grating, breathing in the fumes. Deaden the gnaw of
hunger that way. Pleasure or pain is it? Penny dinner. Knife and fork
chained to the table.
Opening her handbag, chipped leather. Hatpin ought to have a
guard on those things. Stick it in a chap's eye in the tram. Rummaging.
Open. Money. Please take one. Devils if they lose sixpence. Raise Cain.
Husband barging. Where's the ten shillings I gave you on Monday? Are
you feeding your little brother's family? Soiled handkerchief
medicinebottle. Pastille that was fell. What is she? ...
There must be a new moon out, she said. He's always bad then. Do you
know what he did last night?
Her hand ceased to rummage. Her eyes fixed themselves on him, wide
in alarm, yet smiling.
What? Mr Bloom asked.
Let her speak. Look straight in her eyes. I believe you. Trust me.
Woke me up in the night, she said. Dream he had, a nightmare.
Indiges.
Said the ace of spades was walking up the stairs.
The ace of spades Mr Bloom said.
She took a folded postcard from her handbag.
Read that, she said. He got it this morning.
What is it? Mr Bloom asked, taking the card. U.P.?
U.P. up, she said. Someone taking a rise out of him. It's a great shame
for them whoever he is.
Indeed it is, Mr Bloom said.
She took back the card, sighing.
And now he's going round to Mr Menton's office. He's going to take an
action for ten thousand pounds, he says.
She folded the card into her untidy bag and snapped the catch.
Same blue serge dress she had two years ago, the nap bleaching. Seen
its best days. Wispish hair over her ears. And that dowdy toque three old
grapes to take the harm out of it. Shabby genteel. She used to be a tasty
dresser. Lines round her mouth. Only a year or so older than Molly.
See the eye that woman gave her, passing. Cruel. The unfair sex.
He looked still at her, holding back behind his look his discontent.
Pungent mockturtle oxtail mulligatawny. I'm hungry too. Flakes of pastry
on the gusset of her dress daub of sugary flour stuck to her cheek.
Rhubarb tart with liberal fillings, rich fruit interior. Josie Powell that
was. In Luke Doyle's long ago. Dolphin's Barn, the charades. U.P. up.
Change the subject.
Do you ever see anything of Mrs Beaufoy? Mr Bloom asked.
Mina Purefoy? she said.
Philip Beaufoy I was thinking. Playgoers' Club. Matcham often
thinks of the masterstroke. Did I pull the chain? Yes. The last act.
Yes.
I just called to ask on the way in is she over it. She's in the lyingin
hospital in Holles street. Dr Horne got her in. She's three days bad now.
O, Mr Bloom said. I'm sorry to hear that.
Yes, Mrs Breen said. And a houseful of kids at home. It's a very stiff
birth, the nurse told me.
O, Mr Bloom said.
His heavy pitying gaze absorbed her news. His tongue clacked in
compassion. Dth Dth
I'm sorry to hear that, he said. Poor thing Three days That's terrible
for her.
Mrs Breen nodded.
She was taken bad on the Tuesday ...
Mr Bloom touched her funnybone gently, warning her
Mind Let this man pass.
A bony form strode along the curbstone from the river staring with a
rapt gaze into the sunlight through a heavystringed glass. Tight as a
skullpiece a tiny hat gripped his head. From his arm a folded dustcoat, a
stick and an umbrella dangled to his stride.
Watch him, Mr Bloom said. He always walks outside the lampposts. Watch
Who is he if it's a fair question? Mrs Breen asked. Is he dotty?
His name is Cashel Boyle O'Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell, Mr
Bloom said smiling. Watch
He has enough of them, she said. Denis will be like that one of these
days.
She broke off suddenly.
There he is, she said. I must go after him. Goodbye. Remember me to
Molly, won't you?
I will, Mr Bloom said.
He watched her dodge through passers towards the shopfronts. Denis
Breen in skimpy frockcoat and blue canvas shoes shuffled out of Harrison's
hugging two heavy tomes to his ribs. Blown in from the bay. Like old
times. He suffered her to overtake him without surprise and thrust his
dull grey beard towards her, his loose jaw wagging as he spoke earnestly.
Meshuggah. Off his chump.
Mr Bloom walked on again easily, seeing ahead of him in sunlight the
tight skullpiece, the dangling stickumbrelladustcoat. Going the two days.
Watch him Out he goes again. One way of getting on in the world. And
that other old mosey lunatic in those duds. Hard time she must have with
him.
U.P. up. I'll take my oath that's Alf Bergan or Richie Goulding.
Wrote it for a lark in the Scotch house I bet anything. Round to Menton's
office. His oyster eyes staring at the postcard. Be a feast for the gods.
He passed the IRISH TIMES. There might be other answers Iying there.
Like to answer them all. Good system for criminals. Code. At their lunch
now. Clerk with the glasses there doesn't know me. O, leave them there to
simmer. Enough bother wading through fortyfour of them. Wanted, smart
lady typist to aid gentleman in literary work. I called you naughty
darling because I do not like that other world. Please tell me what is the
meaning. Please tell me what perfume does your wife. Tell me who made the
world. The way they spring those questions on you. And the other one
Lizzie Twigg. My literary efforts have had the good fortune to meet with
the approval of the eminent poet A. E. Mr Geo. Russell. No time to do
her hair drinking sloppy tea with a book of poetry.
Best paper by long chalks for a small ad. Got the provinces now.
Cook and general, exc. cuisine, housemaid kept. Wanted live man for spirit
counter. Resp. girl R.C. wishes to hear of post in fruit or pork shop.
James Carlisle made that. Six and a half per cent dividend. Made a big
deal on Coates's shares. Ca' canny. Cunning old Scotch hunks. All the
toady news. Our gracious and popular vicereine. Bought the IRISH FIELD
now. Lady Mountcashel has quite recovered after her confinement and rode
out with the Ward Union staghounds at the enlargement yesterday at
Rathoath. Uneatable fox. Pothunters too. Fear injects juices make it
tender enough for them. Riding astride. Sit her horse like a man.
Weightcarrying huntress. No sidesaddle or pillion for her, not for Joe.
First to the meet and in at the death. Strong as a brood mare some of
those horsey women. Swagger around livery stables. Toss off a glass of
brandy neat while you'd say knife. That one at the Grosvenor this morning.
Up with her on the car wishswish. Stonewall or fivebarred gate
put her mount to it. Think that pugnosed driver did it out of spite.
Who is this she was like? O yes Mrs Miriam Dandrade that sold me
her old wraps and black underclothes in the Shelbourne hotel.
Divorced Spanish American. Didn't take a feather out of her
my handling them. As if I was her clotheshorse. Saw her in the
viceregal party when Stubbs the park ranger got me in with Whelan of the
EXPRESS. Scavenging what the quality left. High tea. Mayonnaise I poured
on the plums thinking it was custard. Her ears ought to have tingled for a
few weeks after. Want to be a bull for her. Born courtesan. No nursery
work for her, thanks.
Poor Mrs Purefoy Methodist husband. Method in his madness.
Saffron bun and milk and soda lunch in the educational dairy. Y. M. C. A.
Eating with a stopwatch, thirtytwo chews to the minute. And still his
muttonchop whiskers grew. Supposed to be well connected. Theodore's
cousin in Dublin Castle. One tony relative in every family. Hardy annuals
he presents her with. Saw him out at the Three Jolly Topers marching along
bareheaded and his eldest boy carrying one in a marketnet. The squallers.
Poor thing Then having to give the breast year after year all hours of
the night. Selfish those t.t's are. Dog in the manger. Only one lump of
sugar in my tea, if you please.
He stood at Fleet street crossing. Luncheon interval. A sixpenny at
Rowe's? Must look up that ad in the national library. An eightpenny in the
Burton. Better. On my way.
He walked on past Bolton's Westmoreland house. Tea. Tea. Tea. I forgot
to tap Tom Kernan.
Sss. Dth, dth, dth Three days imagine groaning on a bed with a
vinegared handkerchief round her forehead, her belly swollen out. Phew
Dreadful simply Child's head too big forceps. Doubled up inside her
trying to butt its way out blindly, groping for the way out. Kill me that
would. Lucky Molly got over hers lightly. They ought to invent something
to stop that. Life with hard labour. Twilight sleep idea queen Victoria
was given that. Nine she had. A good layer. Old woman that lived in a shoe
she had so many children. Suppose he was consumptive. Time someone thought
about it instead of gassing about the what was it the pensive bosom of the
silver effulgence. Flapdoodle to feed fools on. They could easily have big
establishments whole thing quite painless out of all the taxes give every
child born five quid at compound interest up to twentyone five per cent is
a hundred shillings and five tiresome pounds multiply by twenty decimal
system encourage people to put by money save hundred and ten and a bit
twentyone years want to work it out on paper come to a tidy sum more than
you think.
Not stillborn of course. They are not even registered. Trouble for
nothing.
Funny sight two of them together, their bellies out. Molly and Mrs
Moisel. Mothers' meeting. Phthisis retires for the time being, then
returns. How flat they look all of a sudden after. Peaceful eyes.
Weight off their mind. Old Mrs Thornton was a jolly old soul. All
my babies, she said. The spoon of pap in her mouth before she fed
them. O, that's nyumnyum. Got her hand crushed by old Tom Wall's son.
His first bow to the public. Head like a prize pumpkin. Snuffy Dr Murren.
People knocking them up at all hours. For God' sake, doctor. Wife in
her throes. Then keep them waiting months for their fee. To attendance
on your wife. No gratitude in people. Humane doctors, most of them.
Before the huge high door of the Irish house of parliament a flock of
pigeons flew. Their little frolic after meals. Who will we do it on? I
pick the fellow in black. Here goes. Here's good luck. Must be thrilling
from the air. Apjohn, myself and Owen Goldberg up in the trees near Goose
green playing the monkeys. Mackerel they called me.
A squad of constables debouched from College street, marching in
Indian file. Goosestep. Foodheated faces, sweating helmets, patting their
truncheons. After their feed with a good load of fat soup under their
belts. Policeman's lot is oft a happy one. They split up in groups and
scattered, saluting, towards their beats. Let out to graze. Best moment to
attack one in pudding time. A punch in his dinner. A squad of others,
marching irregularly, rounded Trinity railings making for the station.
Bound for their troughs. Prepare to receive cavalry. Prepare to receive
soup.
He crossed under Tommy Moore's roguish finger. They did right to
put him up over a urinal meeting of the waters. Ought to be places for
women. Running into cakeshops. Settle my hat straight. THERE IS NOT IN
THIS WIDE WORLD A VALLEE. Great song of Julia Morkan's. Kept her voice up
to the very last. Pupil of Michael Balfe's, wasn't she?
He gazed after the last broad tunic. Nasty customers to tackle. Jack
Power could a tale unfold father a G man. If a fellow gave them trouble
being lagged they let him have it hot and heavy in the bridewell. Can't
blame them after all with the job they have especially the young hornies.
That horsepoliceman the day Joe Chamberlain was given his degree in
Trinity he got a run for his money. My word he did His horse's hoofs
clattering after us down Abbey street. Lucky I had the presence of mind to
dive into Manning's or I was souped. He did come a wallop, by George.
Must have cracked his skull on the cobblestones. I oughtn't to have got
myself swept along with those medicals. And the Trinity jibs in their
mortarboards. Looking for trouble. Still I got to know that young Dixon
who dressed that sting for me in the Mater and now he's in Holles street
where Mrs Purefoy. Wheels within wheels. Police whistle in my ears still.
All skedaddled. Why he fixed on me. Give me in charge. Right here it
began.
Up the Boers
Three cheers for De Wet
We'll hang Joe Chamberlain on a sourapple tree.
Silly billies mob of young cubs yelling their guts out. Vinegar hill.
The Butter exchange band. Few years' time half of them magistrates and
civil servants. War comes on into the army helterskelter same fellows
used to. Whether on the scaffold high.
Never know who you're talking to. Corny Kelleher he has Harvey
Duff in his eye. Like that Peter or Denis or James Carey that blew the
gaff on the invincibles. Member of the corporation too. Egging raw youths
on to get in the know all the time drawing secret service pay from the
castle. Drop him like a hot potato. Why those plainclothes men are always
courting slaveys. Easily twig a man used to uniform. Squarepushing up
against a backdoor. Maul her a bit. Then the next thing on the menu. And
who is the gentleman does be visiting there? Was the young master saying
anything? Peeping Tom through the keyhole. Decoy duck. Hotblooded young
student fooling round her fat arms ironing.
Are those yours, Mary?
I don't wear such things ... Stop or I'll tell the missus on you.
Out half the night.
There are great times coming, Mary. Wait till you see.
Ah, gelong with your great times coming.
Barmaids too. Tobaccoshopgirls.
James Stephens' idea was the best. He knew them. Circles of ten so
that a fellow couldn't round on more than his own ring. Sinn Fein. Back
out you get the knife. Hidden hand. Stay in. The firing squad. Turnkey's
daughter got him out of Richmond, off from Lusk. Putting up in the
Buckingham Palace hotel under their very noses. Garibaldi.
You must have a certain fascination Parnell. Arthur Griffith is a
squareheaded fellow but he has no go in him for the mob. Or gas about our
lovely land. Gammon and spinach. Dublin Bakery Company's tearoom.
Debating societies. That republicanism is the best form of government.
That the language question should take precedence of the economic
question. Have your daughters inveigling them to your house. Stuff them
up with meat and drink. Michaelmas goose. Here's a good lump of thyme
seasoning under the apron for you. Have another quart of goosegrease
before it gets too cold. Halffed enthusiasts. Penny roll and a walk with
the band. No grace for the carver. The thought that the other chap pays
best sauce in the world. Make themselves thoroughly at home. Show us over
those apricots, meaning peaches. The not far distant day. Homerule sun
rising up in the northwest.
His smile faded as he walked, a heavy cloud hiding the sun slowly,
shadowing Trinity's surly front. Trams passed one another, ingoing,
outgoing, clanging. Useless words. Things go on same, day after day
squads of police marching out, back trams in, out. Those two loonies
mooching about. Dignam carted off. Mina Purefoy swollen belly on a bed
groaning to have a child tugged out of her. One born every second
somewhere. Other dying every second. Since I fed the birds five minutes.
Three hundred kicked the bucket. Other three hundred born, washing the
blood off, all are washed in the blood of the lamb, bawling maaaaaa.
Cityful passing away, other cityful coming, passing away too other
coming on, passing on. Houses, lines of houses, streets, miles of
pavements, piledup bricks, stones. Changing hands. This owner, that.
Landlord never dies they say. Other steps into his shoes when he gets
his notice to quit. They buy the place up with gold and still they
have all the gold. Swindle in it somewhere. Piled up in cities, worn
away age after age. Pyramids in sand. Built on bread and onions.
Slaves Chinese wall. Babylon. Big stones left. Round towers. Rest rubble,
sprawling suburbs, jerrybuilt. Kerwan's mushroom houses built of breeze.
Shelter, for the night.
Noone is anything.
This is the very worst hour of the day. Vitality. Dull, gloomy hate
this hour. Feel as if I had been eaten and spewed.
Provost's house. The reverend Dr Salmon tinned salmon. Well
tinned in there. Like a mortuary chapel. Wouldn't live in it if they paid
me. Hope they have liver and bacon today. Nature abhors a vacuum.
The sun freed itself slowly and lit glints of light among the silverware
opposite in Walter Sexton's window by which John Howard Parnell passed,
unseeing.
There he is the brother. Image of him. Haunting face. Now that's a
coincidence. Course hundreds of times you think of a person and don't
meet him. Like a man walking in his sleep. Noone knows him. Must be a
corporation meeting today. They say he never put on the city marshal's
uniform since he got the job. Charley Kavanagh used to come out on his
high horse, cocked hat, puffed, powdered and shaved. Look at the
woebegone walk of him. Eaten a bad egg. Poached eyes on ghost. I have a
pain. Great man's brother his brother's brother. He'd look nice on the
city charger. Drop into the D.B.C. probably for his coffee, play chess
there. His brother used men as pawns. Let them all go to pot. Afraid to
pass a remark on him. Freeze them up with that eye of his. That's the
fascination the name. All a bit touched. Mad Fanny and his other sister
Mrs Dickinson driving about with scarlet harness. Bolt upright lik
surgeon M'Ardle. Still David Sheehy beat him for south Meath.
Apply for the Chiltern Hundreds and retire into public life. The patriot's
banquet. Eating orangepeels in the park. Simon Dedalus said when they put
him in parliament that Parnell would come back from the grave and lead
him out of the house of commons by the arm.
Of the twoheaded octopus, one of whose heads is the head upon which
the ends of the world have forgotten to come while the other speaks with a
Scotch accent. The tentacles ...
They passed from behind Mr Bloom along the curbstone. Beard and
bicycle. Young woman.
And there he is too. Now that's really a coincidence second time.
Coming events cast their shadows before. With the approval of the eminent
poet, Mr Geo. Russell. That might be Lizzie Twigg with him. A. E. what
does that mean? Initials perhaps. Albert Edward, Arthur Edmund,
Alphonsus Eb Ed El Esquire. What was he saying? The ends of the world
with a Scotch accent. Tentacles octopus. Something occult symbolism.
Holding forth. She's taking it all in. Not saying a word. To aid gentleman
in literary work.
His eyes followed the high figure in homespun, beard and bicycle, a
listening woman at his side. Coming from the vegetarian. Only
weggebobbles and fruit. Don't eat a beefsteak. If you do the eyes of that
cow will pursue you through all eternity. They say it's healthier.
Windandwatery though. Tried it. Keep you on the run all day. Bad as a
bloater. Dreams all night. Why do they call that thing they gave me
nutsteak? Nutarians. Fruitarians. To give you the idea you are eating
rumpsteak. Absurd. Salty too. They cook in soda. Keep you sitting by the
tap all night.
Her stockings are loose over her ankles. I detest that so tasteless.
Those literary etherial people they are all. Dreamy, cloudy, symbolistic.
Esthetes they are. I wouldn't be surprised if it was that kind of food you
see produces the like waves of the brain the poetical. For example one of
those policemen sweating Irish stew into their shirts you couldn't squeeze
a line of poetry out of him. Don't know what poetry is even. Must be in a
certain mood.
THE DREAMY CLOUDY GULL
WAVES O'ER THE WATERS DULL.
He crossed at Nassau street corner and stood before the window of
Yeates and Son, pricing the fieldglasses. Or will I drop into old Harris's
and have a chat with young Sinclair? Wellmannered fellow. Probably at his
lunch. Must get those old glasses of mine set right. Goerz lenses six
guineas. Germans making their way everywhere. Sell on easy terms to
capture trade. Undercutting. Might chance on a pair in the railway lost
property office. Astonishing the things people leave behind them in trains
and cloakrooms. What do they be thinking about? Women too. Incredible.
Last year travelling to Ennis had to pick up that farmer's daughter's ba
and hand it to her at Limerick junction. Unclaimed money too. There's a
little watch up there on the roof of the bank to test those glasses by.
His lids came down on the lower rims of his irides. Can't see it. If you
imagine it's there you can almost see it. Can't see it.
He faced about and, standing between the awnings, held out his right
hand at arm's length towards the sun. Wanted to try that often. Yes
completely. The tip of his little finger blotted out the sun's disk. Must
be the focus where the rays cross. If I had black glasses. Interesting.
There was a lot of talk about those sunspots when we were in Lombard
street west. Looking up from the back garden. Terrific explosions they
are. There will be a total eclipse this year autumn some time.
Now that I come to think of it that ball falls at Greenwich time. It's
the clock is worked by an electric wire from Dunsink. Must go out there
some first Saturday of the month. If I could get an introduction to
professor Joly or learn up something about his family. That would do to
man always feels complimented. Flattery where least expected. Nobleman
proud to be descended from some king's mistress. His foremother. Lay it on
with a trowel. Cap in hand goes through the land. Not go in and blurt out
what you know you're not to what's parallax? Show this gentleman the
door.
Ah.
His hand fell to his side again.
Never know anything about it. Waste of time. Gasballs spinning
about, crossing each other, passing. Same old dingdong always. Gas then
solid then world then cold then dead shell drifting around, frozen
rock, like that pineapple rock. The moon. Must be a new moon out, she
said. I believe there is.
He went on by la maison Claire.
Wait. The full moon was the night we were Sunday fortnight exactly
there is a new moon. Walking down by the Tolka. Not bad for a Fairview
moon. She was humming. The young May moon she's beaming, love. He
other side of her. Elbow, arm. He. Glowworm's laamp is gleaming, love.
Touch. Fingers. Asking. Answer. Yes.
Stop. Stop. If it was it was. Must.
Mr Bloom, quickbreathing, slowlier walking passed Adam court.
With a keep quiet relief his eyes took note this is the street here
middle of the day of Bob Doran's bottle shoulders. On his annual bend,
M Coy said. They drink in order to say or do something or CHERCHEZ LA
FEMME. Up in the Coombe with chummies and streetwalkers and then the
rest of the year sober as a judge.
Yes. Thought so. Sloping into the Empire. Gone. Plain soda would do
him good. Where Pat Kinsella had his Harp theatre before Whitbred ran
the Queen's. Broth of a boy. Dion Boucicault business with his
harvestmoon face in a poky bonnet. Three Purty Maids from School. How
time flies, eh? Showing long red pantaloons under his skirts. Drinkers,
drinking, laughed spluttering, their drink against their breath. More
power, Pat. Coarse red fun for drunkards guffaw and smoke. Take off that
white hat. His parboiled eyes. Where is he now? Beggar somewhere. The harp
that once did starve us all.
I was happier then. Or was that I? Or am I now I? Twentyeight I was.
She twentythree. When we left Lombard street west something changed.
Could never like it again after Rudy. Can't bring back time. Like holding
water in your hand. Would you go back to then? Just beginning then.
Would you? Are you not happy in your home you poor little naughty boy?
Wants to sew on buttons for me. I must answer. Write it in the library.
Grafton street gay with housed awnings lured his senses. Muslin
prints, silkdames and dowagers, jingle of harnesses, hoofthuds lowringing
in the baking causeway. Thick feet that woman has in the white stockings.
Hope the rain mucks them up on her. Countrybred chawbacon. All the beef
to the heels were in. Always gives a woman clumsy feet. Molly looks out of
plumb.
He passed, dallying, the windows of Brown Thomas, silk mercers.
Cascades of ribbons. Flimsy China silks. A tilted urn poured from its
mouth a flood of bloodhued poplin lustrous blood. The huguenots brought
that here. LA CAUSA E SANTA Tara Tara. Great chorus that. Taree tara.
Must be washed in rainwater. Meyerbeer. Tara bom bom bom.
Pincushions. I'm a long time threatening to buy one. Sticking them all
over the place. Needles in window curtains.
He bared slightly his left forearm. Scrape nearly gone. Not today
anyhow. Must go back for that lotion. For her birthday perhaps.
Junejulyaugseptember eighth. Nearly three months off. Then she mightn't
like it. Women won't pick up pins. Say it cuts lo.
Gleaming silks, petticoats on slim brass rails, rays of flat silk
stockings.
Useless to go back. Had to be. Tell me all.
High voices. Sunwarm silk. Jingling harnesses. All for a woman,
home and houses, silkwebs, silver, rich fruits spicy from Jaffa. Agendath
Netaim. Wealth of the world.
A warm human plumpness settled down on his brain. His brain
yielded. Perfume of embraces all him assailed. With hungered flesh
obscurely, he mutely craved to adore.
Duke street. Here we are. Must eat. The Burton. Feel better then.
He turned Combridge's corner, still pursued. Jingling, hoofthuds.
Perfumed bodies, warm, full. All kissed, yielded in deep summer fields,
tangled pressed grass, in trickling hallways of tenements, along sofas,
creaking beds.
Jack, love
Darling
Kiss me, Reggy
My boy
Love
His heart astir he pushed in the door of the Burton restaurant. Stink
gripped his trembling breath pungent meatjuice, slush of greens. See the
animals feed.
Men, men, men.
Perched on high stools by the bar, hats shoved back, at the tables
calling for more bread no charge, swilling, wolfing gobfuls of sloppy
food, their eyes bulging, wiping wetted moustaches. A pallid suetfaced
young man polished his tumbler knife fork and spoon with his napkin. New
set of microbes. A man with an infant's saucestained napkin tucked round
him shovelled gurgling soup down his gullet. A man spitting back on his
plate halfmasticated gristle gums no teeth to chewchewchew it. Chump
chop from the grill. Bolting to get it over. Sad booser's eyes. Bitten off
more than he can chew. Am I like that? See ourselves as others see us.
Hungry man is an angry man. Working tooth and jaw. Don't O A bone That
last pagan king of Ireland Cormac in the schoolpoem choked himself at
Sletty southward of the Boyne. Wonder what he was eating. Something
galoptious. Saint Patrick converted him to Christianity. Couldn't swallow
it all however.
Roast beef and cabbage.
One stew.
Smells of men. Spaton sawdust, sweetish warmish cigarette smoke, reek of
plug, spilt beer, men's beery piss, the stale of ferment.
His gorge rose.
Couldn't eat a morsel here. Fellow sharpening knife and fork to eat
all before him, old chap picking his tootles. Slight spasm, full, chewing
the cud. Before and after. Grace after meals. Look on this picture then on
that. Scoffing up stewgravy with sopping sippets of bread. Lick it off the
plate, man Get out of this.
He gazed round the stooled and tabled eaters, tightening the wings of
his nose.
Two stouts here.
One corned and cabbage.
That fellow ramming a knifeful of cabbage down as if his life
depended on it. Good stroke. Give me the fidgets to look. Safer to eat
from his three hands. Tear it limb from limb. Second nature to him. Born
with a silver knife in his mouth. That's witty, I think. Or no. Silver
means born rich. Born with a knife. But then the allusion is lost.
An illgirt server gathered sticky clattering plates. Rock, the head
bailiff, standing at the bar blew the foamy crown from his tankard. Well
up it splashed yellow near his boot. A diner, knife and fork upright,
elbows on table, ready for a second helping stared towards the foodlift
across his stained square of newspaper. Other chap telling him something
with his mouth full. Sympathetic listener. Table talk. I munched hum un
thu Unchster Bunk un Munchday. Ha? Did you, faith?
Mr Bloom raised two fingers doubtfully to his lips. His eyes said
Not here. Don't see him.
Out. I hate dirty eaters.
He backed towards the door. Get a light snack in Davy Byrne's. Stopgap.
Keep me going. Had a good breakfast.
Roast and mashed here.
Pint of stout.
Every fellow for his own, tooth and nail. Gulp. Grub. Gulp. Gobstuff.
He came out into clearer air and turned back towards Grafton street.
Eat or be eaten. Kill Kill
Suppose that communal kitchen years to come perhaps. All trotting
down with porringers and tommycans to be filled. Devour contents in the
street. John Howard Parnell example the provost of Trinity every mother's
son don't talk of your provosts and provost of Trinity women and children
cabmen priests parsons fieldmarshals archbishops. From Ailesbury road,
Clyde road, artisans' dwellings, north Dublin union, lord mayor in his
gingerbread coach, old queen in a bathchair. My plate's empty. After you
with our incorporated drinkingcup. Like sir Philip Crampton's fountain.
Rub off the microbes with your handkerchief. Next chap rubs on a new
batch with his. Father O'Flynn would make hares of them all. Have rows
all the same. All for number one. Children fighting for the scrapings of
the pot. Want a souppot as big as the Phoenix park. Harpooning flitches
and hindquarters out of it. Hate people all round you. City Arms hotel
TABLE D'HOTE she called it. Soup, joint and sweet. Never know whose
thoughts you're chewing. Then who'd wash up all the plates and forks?
Might be all feeding on tabloids that time. Teeth getting worse and worse.
After all there's a lot in that vegetarian fine flavour of things from the
earth garlic of course it stinks after Italian organgrinders crisp of
onions mushrooms truffles. Pain to the animal too. Pluck and draw fowl.
Wretched brutes there at the cattlemarket waiting for the poleaxe to split
their skulls open. Moo. Poor trembling calves. Meh. Staggering bob. Bubble
and squeak. Butchers' buckets wobbly lights. Give us that brisket off the
hook. Plup. Rawhead and bloody bones. Flayed glasseyed sheep hung from
their haunches, sheepsnouts bloodypapered snivelling nosejam on sawdust.
Top and lashers going out. Don't maul them pieces, young one.
Hot fresh blood they prescribe for decline. Blood always needed.
Insidious. Lick it up smokinghot, thick sugary. Famished ghosts.
Ah, I'm hungry.
He entered Davy Byrne's. Moral pub. He doesn't chat. Stands a
drink now and then. But in leapyear once in four. Cashed a cheque for me
once.
What will I take now? He drew his watch. Let me see now. Shandygaff?
Hello, Bloom, Nosey Flynn said from his nook.
Hello, Flynn.
How's things?
Tiptop ... Let me see. I'll take a glass of burgundy and ... let
me see.
Sardines on the shelves. Almost taste them by looking. Sandwich?
Ham and his descendants musterred and bred there. Potted meats. What is
home without Plumtree's potted meat? Incomplete. What a stupid ad
Under the obituary notices they stuck it. All up a plumtree. Dignam's
potted meat. Cannibals would with lemon and rice. White missionary too
salty. Like pickled pork. Expect the chief consumes the parts of honour.
Ought to be tough from exercise. His wives in a row to watch the effect.
THERE WAS A RIGHT ROYAL OLD NIGGER. WHO ATE OR SOMETHING THE SOMETHINGS OF
THE REVEREND MR MACTRIGGER. With it an abode of bliss. Lord knows what
concoction. Cauls mouldy tripes windpipes faked and minced up. Puzzle
find the meat. Kosher. No meat and milk together. Hygiene that was what
they call now. Yom Kippur fast spring cleaning of inside. Peace and war
depend on some fellow's digestion. Religions. Christmas turkeys and geese.
Slaughter of innocents. Eat drink and be merry. Then casual wards full
after. Heads bandaged. Cheese digests all but itself. Mity cheese.
Have you a cheese sandwich?
Yes, sir.
Like a few olives too if they had them. Italian I prefer. Good glass of
burgundy take away that. Lubricate. A nice salad, cool as a cucumber, Tom
Kernan can dress. Puts gusto into it. Pure olive oil. Milly served me that
cutlet with a sprig of parsley. Take one Spanish onion. God made food, the
devil the cooks. Devilled crab.
Wife well?
Quite well, thanks ... A cheese sandwich, then. Gorgonzola, have you?
Yes, sir.
Nosey Flynn sipped his grog.
Doing any singing those times?
Look at his mouth. Could whistle in his own ear. Flap ears to match.
Music. Knows as much about it as my coachman. Still better tell him. Does
no harm. Free ad.
She's engaged for a big tour end of this month. You may have heard
perhaps.
No. O, that's the style. Who's getting it up?
The curate served.
How much is that?
Seven d., sir ... Thank you, sir.
Mr Bloom cut his sandwich into slender strips. MR MACTRIGGER. Easier
than the dreamy creamy stuff. HIS FIVE HUNDRED WIVES. HAD THE TIME OF
THEIR LIVES.
Mustard, sir?
Thank you.
He studded under each lifted strip yellow blobs. THEIR LIVES. I have it.
IT GREW BIGGER AND BIGGER AND BIGGER.
Getting it up? he said. Well, it's like a company idea, you see. Part
shares and part profits.
Ay, now I remember, Nosey Flynn said, putting his hand in his pocket to
scratch his groin. Who is this was telling me? Isn't Blazes Boylan mixed
up in it?
A warm shock of air heat of mustard hanched on Mr Bloom's heart.
He raised his eyes and met the stare of a bilious clock. Two. Pub clock
five minutes fast. Time going on. Hands moving. Two. Not yet.
His midriff yearned then upward, sank within him, yearned more longly,
longingly.
Wine.
He smellsipped the cordial juice and, bidding his throat strongly to
speed it, set his wineglass delicately down.
Yes, he said. He's the organiser in point of fact.
No fear no brains.
Nosey Flynn snuffled and scratched. Flea having a good square meal.
He had a good slice of luck, Jack Mooney was telling me, over that
boxingmatch Myler Keogh won again that soldier in the Portobello
barracks. By God, he had the little kipper down in the county Carlow he
was telling me ...
Hope that dewdrop doesn't come down into his glass. No, snuffled it
up.
For near a month, man, before it came off. Sucking duck eggs by God till
further orders. Keep him off the boose, see? O, by God, Blazes is a hairy
chap.
Davy Byrne came forward from the hindbar in tuckstitched
shirtsleeves, cleaning his lips with two wipes of his napkin. Herring's
blush. Whose smile upon each feature plays with such and such replete.
Too much fat on the parsnips.
And here's himself and pepper on him, Nosey Flynn said. Can you give
us a good one for the Gold cup?
I'm off that, Mr Flynn, Davy Byrne answered. I never put anything on a
horse.
You're right there, Nosey Flynn said.
Mr Bloom ate his strips of sandwich, fresh clean bread, with relish of
disgust pungent mustard, the feety savour of green cheese. Sips of his
wine soothed his palate. Not logwood that. Tastes fuller this weather with
the chill off.
Nice quiet bar. Nice piece of wood in that counter. Nicely planed.
Like the way it curves there.
I wouldn't do anything at all in that line, Davy Byrne said. It ruined
many a man, the same horses.
Vintners' sweepstake. Licensed for the sale of beer, wine and spirits
for consumption on the premises. Heads I win tails you lose.
True for you, Nosey Flynn said. Unless you're in the know. There's no
straight sport going now. Lenehan gets some good ones. He's giving
Sceptre today. Zinfandel's the favourite, lord Howard de Walden's, won at
Epsom. Morny Cannon is riding him. I could have got seven to one against
Saint Amant a fortnight before.
That so? Davy Byrne said ...
He went towards the window and, taking up the pettycash book, scanned
its pages.
I could, faith, Nosey Flynn said, snuffling. That was a rare bit of
horseflesh. Saint Frusquin was her sire. She won in a thunderstorm,
Rothschild's filly, with wadding in her ears. Blue jacket and yellow cap.
Bad luck to big Ben Dollard and his John O'Gaunt. He put me off it. Ay.
He drank resignedly from his tumbler, running his fingers down the flutes.
Ay, he said, sighing.
Mr Bloom, champing, standing, looked upon his sigh. Nosey
numbskull. Will I tell him that horse Lenehan? He knows already. Better
let him forget. Go and lose more. Fool and his money. Dewdrop coming down
again. Cold nose he'd have kissing a woman. Still they might like. Prickly
beards they like. Dogs' cold noses. Old Mrs Riordan with the rumbling
stomach's Skye terrier in the City Arms hotel. Molly fondling him in her
lap. O, the big doggybowwowsywowsy
Wine soaked and softened rolled pith of bread mustard a moment
mawkish cheese. Nice wine it is. Taste it better because I'm not thirsty.
Bath of course does that. Just a bite or two. Then about six o'clock I can.
Six. Six. Time will be gone then. She ...
Mild fire of wine kindled his veins. I wanted that badly. Felt so off
colour. His eyes unhungrily saw shelves of tins sardines, gaudy
lobsters' claws. All the odd things people pick up for food. Out of
shells, periwinkles with a pin, off trees, snails out of the ground the
French eat, out of the sea with bait on a hook. Silly fish learn nothing
in a thousand years. If you didn't know risky putting anything into your
mouth. Poisonous berries. Johnny Magories. Roundness you think good.
Gaudy colour warns you off. One fellow told another and so on. Try it on
the dog first. Led on by the smell or the look. Tempting fruit. Ice
cones. Cream. Instinct. Orangegroves for instance. Need artificial
irrigation. Bleibtreustrasse. Yes but what about oysters. Unsightly like
a clot of phlegm. Filthy shells. Devil to open them too. Who found them
out? Garbage, sewage they feed on. Fizz and Red bank oysters. Effect on
the sexual. Aphrodis. He was in the Red Bank this morning. Was he oysters
old fish at table perhaps he young flesh in bed no June has no ar no
oysters. But there are people like things high. Tainted game. Jugged
hare. First catch your hare. Chinese eating eggs fifty years old, blue
and green again. Dinner of thirty courses. Each dish harmless might mix
inside. Idea for a poison mystery. That archduke Leopold was it no yes or
was it Otto one of those Habsburgs? Or who was it used to eat the scruff
off his own head? Cheapest lunch in town. Of course aristocrats, then the
others copy to be in the fashion. Milly too rock oil and flour. Raw
pastry I like myself. Half the catch of oysters they throw back in the
sea to keep up the price. Cheap noone would buy. Caviare. Do the grand.
Hock in green glasses. Swell blowout. Lady this. Powdered bosom pearls.
The ELITE. CREME DE LA CREME. They want special dishes to pretend
they're. Hermit with a platter of pulse keep down the stings of the
flesh. Know me come eat with me. Royal sturgeon high sheriff, Coffey, the
butcher, right to venisons of the forest from his ex. Send him back the
half of a cow. Spread I saw down in the Master of the Rolls' kitchen
area. Whitehatted CHEF like a rabbi. Combustible duck. Curly cabbage A LA
DUCHESSE DE PARME. Just as well to write it on the bill of fare so you
can know what you've eaten. Too many drugs spoil the broth. I know it
myself. Dosing it with Edwards' desiccated soup. Geese stuffed silly for
them. Lobsters boiled alive. Do ptake some ptarmigan. Wouldn't mind being
a waiter in a swell hotel. Tips, evening dress, halfnaked ladies. May I
tempt you to a little more filleted lemon sole, miss Dubedat? Yes, do
bedad. And she did bedad. Huguenot name I expect that. A miss Dubedat
lived in Killiney, I remember. DU, DE LA French. Still it's the same fish
perhaps old Micky Hanlon of Moore street ripped the guts out of making
money hand over fist finger in fishes' gills can't write his name on a
cheque think he was painting the landscape with his mouth twisted.
Moooikill A Aitcha Ha ignorant as a kish of brogues, worth fifty thousand
pounds.
Stuck on the pane two flies buzzed, stuck.
Glowing wine on his palate lingered swallowed. Crushing in the winepress
grapes of Burgundy. Sun's heat it is. Seems to a secret touch telling me
memory. Touched his sense moistened remembered. Hidden under wild ferns
on Howth below us bay sleeping sky. No sound. The sky. The bay purple by
the Lion's head. Green by Drumleck. Yellowgreen towards Sutton. Fields of
undersea, the lines faint brown in grass, buried cities. Pillowed on my
coat she had her hair, earwigs in the heather scrub my hand under her
nape, you'll toss me all. O wonder Coolsoft with ointments her hand
touched me, caressed her eyes upon me did not turn away. Ravished over
her I lay, full lips full open, kissed her mouth. Yum. Softly she gave me
in my mouth the seedcake warm and chewed. Mawkish pulp her mouth had
mumbled sweetsour of her spittle. Joy I ate it joy. Young life, her
lips that gave me pouting. Soft warm sticky gumjelly lips. Flowers her
eyes were, take me, willing eyes. Pebbles fell. She lay still. A goat.
Noone. High on Ben Howth rhododendrons a nannygoat walking surefooted,
dropping currants. Screened under ferns she laughed warmfolded. Wildly I
lay on her, kissed her eyes, her lips, her stretched neck beating,
woman's breasts full in her blouse of nun's veiling, fat nipples upright.
Hot I tongued her. She kissed me. I was kissed. All yielding she tossed
my hair. Kissed, she kissed me.
Me. And me now.
Stuck, the flies buzzed.
His downcast eyes followed the silent veining of the oaken slab. Beauty
it curves curves are beauty. Shapely goddesses, Venus, Juno curves the
world admires. Can see them library museum standing in the round hall,
naked goddesses. Aids to digestion. They don't care what man looks. All
to see. Never speaking. I mean to say to fellows like Flynn. Suppose she
did Pygmalion and Galatea what would she say first? Mortal Put you in
your proper place. Quaffing nectar at mess with gods golden dishes, all
ambrosial. Not like a tanner lunch we have, boiled mutton, carrots and
turnips, bottle of Allsop. Nectar imagine it drinking electricity gods'
food. Lovely forms of women sculped Junonian. Immortal lovely. And we
stuffing food in one hole and out behind food, chyle, blood, dung,
earth, food have to feed it like stoking an engine. They have no. Never
looked. I'll look today. Keeper won't see. Bend down let something drop
see if she.
Dribbling a quiet message from his bladder came to go to do not to do
there to do. A man and ready he drained his glass to the lees and walked,
to men too they gave themselves, manly conscious, lay with men lovers, a
youth enjoyed her, to the yard.
When the sound of his boots had ceased Davy Byrne said from his book
What is this he is? Isn't he in the insurance line?
He's out of that long ago, Nosey Flynn said. He does canvassing for the
FREEMAN.
I know him well to see, Davy Byrne said. Is he in trouble?
Trouble? Nosey Flynn said. Not that I heard of. Why?
I noticed he was in mourning.
Was he? Nosey Flynn said. So he was, faith. I asked him how was all at
home. You're right, by God. So he was.
I never broach the subject, Davy Byrne said humanely, if I see a
gentleman is in trouble that way. It only brings it up fresh in their
minds.
It's not the wife anyhow, Nosey Flynn said. I met him the day before
yesterday and he coming out of that Irish farm dairy John Wyse Nolan's
wife has in Henry street with a jar of cream in his hand taking it home
to his better half. She's well nourished, I tell you. Plovers on toast.
And is he doing for the FREEMAN? Davy Byrne said.
Nosey Flynn pursed his lips.
He doesn't buy cream on the ads he picks up. You can make bacon of
that.
How so? Davy Byrne asked, coming from his book.
Nosey Flynn made swift passes in the air with juggling fingers. He
winked.
He's in the craft, he said.
Do you tell me so? Davy Byrne said.
Very much so, Nosey Flynn said. Ancient free and accepted order. He's
an excellent brother. Light, life and love, by God. They give him a leg
up. I was told that by awell, I won't say who.
Is that a fact?
O, it's a fine order, Nosey Flynn said. They stick to you when you're
down. I know a fellow was trying to get into it. But they're as close as
damn it. By God they did right to keep the women out of it.
Davy Byrne smiledyawnednodded all in one
Iiiiiichaaaaaaach
There was one woman, Nosey Flynn said, hid herself in a clock to find
out what they do be doing. But be damned but they smelt her out and swore
her in on the spot a master mason. That was one of the saint Legers of
Doneraile.
Davy Byrne, sated after his yawn, said with tearwashed eyes
And is that a fact? Decent quiet man he is. I often saw him in here and
I never once saw himyou know, over the line.
God Almighty couldn't make him drunk, Nosey Flynn said firmly. Slips
off when the fun gets too hot. Didn't you see him look at his watch? Ah,
you weren't there. If you ask him to have a drink first thing he does he
outs with the watch to see what he ought to imbibe. Declare to God he
does.
There are some like that, Davy Byrne said. He's a safe man, I'd say.
He's not too bad, Nosey Flynn said, snuffling it up. He's been known to
put his hand down too to help a fellow. Give the devil his due. O, Bloom
has his good points. But there's one thing he'll never do.
His hand scrawled a dry pen signature beside his grog.
I know, Davy Byrne said.
Nothing in black and white, Nosey Flynn said.
Paddy Leonard and Bantam Lyons came in. Tom Rochford followed frowning, a
plaining hand on his claret waistcoat.
Day, Mr Byrne.
Day, gentlemen.
They paused at the counter.
Who's standing? Paddy Leonard asked.
I'm sitting anyhow, Nosey Flynn answered.
Well, what'll it be? Paddy Leonard asked.
I'll take a stone ginger, Bantam Lyons said.
How much? Paddy Leonard cried. Since when, for God' sake? What's yours,
Tom?
How is the main drainage? Nosey Flynn asked, sipping.
For answer Tom Rochford pressed his hand to his breastbone and hiccupped.
Would I trouble you for a glass of fresh water, Mr Byrne? he said.
Certainly, sir.
Paddy Leonard eyed his alemates.
Lord love a duck, he said. Look at what I'm standing drinks to Cold
water and gingerpop Two fellows that would suck whisky off a sore leg.
He has some bloody horse up his sleeve for the Gold cup. A dead snip.
Zinfandel is it? Nosey Flynn asked.
Tom Rochford spilt powder from a twisted paper into the water set before
him.
That cursed dyspepsia, he said before drinking.
Breadsoda is very good, Davy Byrne said.
Tom Rochford nodded and drank.
Is it Zinfandel?
Say nothing Bantam Lyons winked. I'm going to plunge five bob on my
own.
Tell us if you're worth your salt and be damned to you, Paddy Leonard
said. Who gave it to you?
Mr Bloom on his way out raised three fingers in greeting.
So long Nosey Flynn said.
The others turned.
That's the man now that gave it to me, Bantam Lyons whispered.
Prrwht Paddy Leonard said with scorn. Mr Byrne, sir, we'll take two of
your small Jamesons after that and a ...
Stone ginger, Davy Byrne added civilly.
Ay, Paddy Leonard said. A suckingbottle for the baby.
Mr Bloom walked towards Dawson street, his tongue brushing his teeth
smooth. Something green it would have to be spinach, say. Then with
those Rontgen rays searchlight you could.
At Duke lane a ravenous terrier choked up a sick knuckly cud on the
cobblestones and lapped it with new zest. Surfeit. Returned with thanks
having fully digested the contents. First sweet then savoury. Mr Bloom
coasted warily. Ruminants. His second course. Their upper jaw they move.
Wonder if Tom Rochford will do anything with that invention of his?
Wasting time explaining it to Flynn's mouth. Lean people long mouths.
Ought to be a hall or a place where inventors could go in and invent
free. Course then you'd have all the cranks pestering.
He hummed, prolonging in solemn echo the closes of the bars
DON GIOVANNI, A CENAR TECO
M'INVITASTI.
Feel better. Burgundy. Good pick me up. Who distilled first? Some chap in
the blues. Dutch courage. That KILKENNY PEOPLE in the national library
now I must.
Bare clean closestools waiting in the window of William Miller, plumber,
turned back his thoughts. They could and watch it all the way down,
swallow a pin sometimes come out of the ribs years after, tour round the
body changing biliary duct spleen squirting liver gastric juice coils of
intestines like pipes. But the poor buffer would have to stand all the
time with his insides entrails on show. Science.
A CENAR TECO.
What does that TECO mean? Tonight perhaps.
DON GIOVANNI, THOU HAST ME INVITED
TO COME TO SUPPER TONIGHT,
THE RUM THE RUMDUM.
Doesn't go properly.
Keyes two months if I get Nannetti to. That'll be two pounds ten about
two pounds eight. Three Hynes owes me. Two eleven. Prescott's dyeworks
van over there. If I get Billy Prescott's ad two fifteen. Five guineas
about. On the pig's back.
Could buy one of those silk petticoats for Molly, colour of her new
garters.
Today. Today. Not think.
Tour the south then. What about English wateringplaces? Brighton,
Margate. Piers by moonlight. Her voice floating out. Those lovely seaside
girls. Against John Long's a drowsing loafer lounged in heavy thought,
gnawing a crusted knuckle. Handy man wants job. Small wages. Will eat
anything.
Mr Bloom turned at Gray's confectioner's window of unbought tarts and
passed the reverend Thomas Connellan's bookstore. WHY I LEFT THE CHURCH
OF ROME? BIRDS' NEST. Women run him. They say they used to give pauper
children soup to change to protestants in the time of the potato blight.
Society over the way papa went to for the conversion of poor jews. Same
bait. Why we left the church of Rome.
A blind stripling stood tapping the curbstone with his slender cane. No
tram in sight. Wants to cross.
Do you want to cross? Mr Bloom asked.
The blind stripling did not answer. His wallface frowned weakly. He moved
his head uncertainly.
You're in Dawson street, Mr Bloom said. Molesworth street is opposite.
Do you want to cross? There's nothing in the way.
The cane moved out trembling to the left. Mr Bloom's eye followed its
line and saw again the dyeworks' van drawn up before Drago's. Where I saw
his brillantined hair just when I was. Horse drooping. Driver in John
Long's. Slaking his drouth.
There's a van there, Mr Bloom said, but it's not moving. I'll see you
across. Do you want to go to Molesworth street?
Yes, the stripling answered. South Frederick street.
Come, Mr Bloom said.
He touched the thin elbow gently then took the limp seeing hand to guide
it forward.
Say something to him. Better not do the condescending. They mistrust what
you tell them. Pass a common remark.
The rain kept off.
No answer.
Stains on his coat. Slobbers his food, I suppose. Tastes all different
for him. Have to be spoonfed first. Like a child's hand, his hand. Like
Milly's was. Sensitive. Sizing me up I daresay from my hand. Wonder if he
has a name. Van. Keep his cane clear of the horse's legs tired drudge
get his doze. That's right. Clear. Behind a bull in front of a horse.
Thanks, sir.
Knows I'm a man. Voice.
Right now? First turn to the left.
The blind stripling tapped the curbstone and went on his way, drawing his
cane back, feeling again.
Mr Bloom walked behind the eyeless feet, a flatcut suit of herringbone
tweed. Poor young fellow How on earth did he know that van was there?
Must have felt it. See things in their forehead perhaps kind of sense of
volume. Weight or size of it, something blacker than the dark. Wonder
would he feel it if something was removed. Feel a gap. Queer idea of
Dublin he must have, tapping his way round by the stones. Could he walk
in a beeline if he hadn't that cane? Bloodless pious face like a fellow
going in to be a priest.
Penrose That was that chap's name.
Look at all the things they can learn to do. Read with their fingers.
Tune pianos. Or we are surprised they have any brains. Why we think a
deformed person or a hunchback clever if he says something we might say.
Of course the other senses are more. Embroider. Plait baskets. People
ought to help. Workbasket I could buy for Molly's birthday. Hates sewing.
Might take an objection. Dark men they call them.
Sense of smell must be stronger too. Smells on all sides, bunched
together. Each street different smell. Each person too. Then the spring,
the summer smells. Tastes? They say you can't taste wines with your eyes
shut or a cold in the head. Also smoke in the dark they say get no
pleasure.
And with a woman, for instance. More shameless not seeing. That girl
passing the Stewart institution, head in the air. Look at me. I have them
all on. Must be strange not to see her. Kind of a form in his mind's eye.
The voice, temperatures when he touches her with his fingers must almost
see the lines, the curves. His hands on her hair, for instance. Say it
was black, for instance. Good. We call it black. Then passing over her
white skin. Different feel perhaps. Feeling of white.
Postoffice. Must answer. Fag today. Send her a postal order two
shillings, half a crown. Accept my little present. Stationer's just here
too. Wait. Think over it.
With a gentle finger he felt ever so slowly the hair combed back above
his ears. Again. Fibres of fine fine straw. Then gently his finger felt
the skin of his right cheek. Downy hair there too. Not smooth enough. The
belly is the smoothest. Noone about. There he goes into Frederick
street. Perhaps to Levenston's dancing academy piano. Might be settling
my braces.
Walking by Doran's publichouse he slid his hand between his waistcoat and
trousers and, pulling aside his shirt gently, felt a slack fold of his
belly. But I know it's whitey yellow. Want to try in the dark to see.
He withdrew his hand and pulled his dress to.
Poor fellow Quite a boy. Terrible. Really terrible. What dreams would he
have, not seeing? Life a dream for him. Where is the justice being born
that way? All those women and children excursion beanfeast burned and
drowned in New York. Holocaust. Karma they call that transmigration for
sins you did in a past life the reincarnation met him pike hoses. Dear,
dear, dear. Pity, of course but somehow you can't cotton on to them
someway.
Sir Frederick Falkiner going into the freemasons' hall. Solemn as Troy.
After his good lunch in Earlsfort terrace. Old legal cronies cracking a
magnum. Tales of the bench and assizes and annals of the bluecoat school.
I sentenced him to ten years. I suppose he'd turn up his nose at that
stuff I drank. Vintage wine for them, the year marked on a dusty bottle.
Has his own ideas of justice in the recorder's court. Wellmeaning old
man. Police chargesheets crammed with cases get their percentage
manufacturing crime. Sends them to the rightabout. The devil on
moneylenders. Gave Reuben J. a great strawcalling. Now he's really what
they call a dirty jew. Power those judges have. Crusty old topers in
wigs. Bear with a sore paw. And may the Lord have mercy on your soul.
Hello, placard. Mirus bazaar. His Excellency the lord lieutenant.
Sixteenth. Today it is. In aid of funds for Mercer's hospital. THE
MESSIAH was first given for that. Yes. Handel. What about going out
there Ballsbridge. Drop in on Keyes. No use sticking to him like a
leech. Wear out my welcome. Sure to know someone on the gate.
Mr Bloom came to Kildare street. First I must. Library.
Straw hat in sunlight. Tan shoes. Turnedup trousers. It is. It is.
His heart quopped softly. To the right. Museum. Goddesses. He swerved to
the right.
Is it? Almost certain. Won't look. Wine in my face. Why did I? Too heady.
Yes, it is. The walk. Not see. Get on.
Making for the museum gate with long windy steps he lifted his eyes.
Handsome building. Sir Thomas Deane designed. Not following me?
Didn't see me perhaps. Light in his eyes.
The flutter of his breath came forth in short sighs. Quick. Cold statues
quiet there. Safe in a minute.
No. Didn't see me. After two. Just at the gate.
My heart
His eyes beating looked steadfastly at cream curves of stone. Sir Thomas
Deane was the Greek architecture.
Look for something I.
His hasty hand went quick into a pocket, took out, read unfolded Agendath
Netaim. Where did I?
Busy looking.
He thrust back quick Agendath.
Afternoon she said.
I am looking for that. Yes, that. Try all pockets. Handker. FREEMAN.
Where did I? Ah, yes. Trousers. Potato. Purse. Where?
Hurry. Walk quietly. Moment more. My heart.
His hand looking for the where did I put found in his hip pocket soap
lotion have to call tepid paper stuck. Ah soap there I yes. Gate.
Safe
Urbane, to comfort them, the quaker librarian purred
And we have, have we not, those priceless pages of WILHELM MEISTER. A
great poet on a great brother poet. A hesitating soul taking arms against
a sea of troubles, torn by conflicting doubts, as one sees in real life.
He came a step a sinkapace forward on neatsleather creaking and a step
backward a sinkapace on the solemn floor.
A noiseless attendant setting open the door but slightly made him a
noiseless beck.
Directly, said he, creaking to go, albeit lingering. The beautiful
ineffectual dreamer who comes to grief against hard facts. One always
feels that Goethe's judgments are so true. True in the larger analysis.
Twicreakingly analysis he corantoed off. Bald, most zealous by the door
he gave his large ear all to the attendant's words heard them and was
gone.
Two left.
Monsieur de la Palice, Stephen sneered, was alive fifteen minutes
before his death.
Have you found those six brave medicals, John Eglinton asked with
elder's gall, to write PARADISE LOST at your dictation? THE SORROWS OF
SATAN he calls it.
Smile. Smile Cranly's smile.
FIRST HE TICKLED HER
THEN HE PATTED HER
THEN HE PASSED THE FEMALE CATHETER.
FOR HE WAS A MEDICAL
JOLLY OLD MEDI ...
I feel you would need one more for HAMLET. Seven is dear to the mystic
mind. The shining seven W.B. calls them.
Glittereyed his rufous skull close to his greencapped desklamp sought the
face bearded amid darkgreener shadow, an ollav, holyeyed. He laughed low
a sizar's laugh of Trinity unanswered.
ORCHESTRAL SATAN, WEEPING MANY A ROOD
TEARS SUCH AS ANGELS WEEP.
ED EGLI AVEA DEL CUL FATTO TROMBETTA.
He holds my follies hostage.
Cranly's eleven true Wicklowmen to free their sireland. Gaptoothed
Kathleen, her four beautiful green fields, the stranger in her house. And
one more to hail him AVE, RABBI the Tinahely twelve. In the shadow of
the glen he cooees for them. My soul's youth I gave him, night by night.
God speed. Good hunting.
Mulligan has my telegram.
Folly. Persist.
Our young Irish bards, John Eglinton censured, have yet to create a
figure which the world will set beside Saxon Shakespeare's Hamlet though
I admire him, as old Ben did, on this side idolatry.
All these questions are purely academic, Russell oracled out of his
shadow. I mean, whether Hamlet is Shakespeare or James I or Essex.
Clergymen's discussions of the historicity of Jesus. Art has to reveal to
us ideas, formless spiritual essences. The supreme question about a work
of art is out of how deep a life does it spring. The painting of Gustave
Moreau is the painting of ideas. The deepest poetry of Shelley, the words
of Hamlet bring our minds into contact with the eternal wisdom, Plato's
world of ideas. All the rest is the speculation of schoolboys for
schoolboys.
A. E. has been telling some yankee interviewer. Wall, tarnation strike
me
The schoolmen were schoolboys first, Stephen said superpolitely.
Aristotle was once Plato's schoolboy.
And has remained so, one should hope, John Eglinton sedately said. One
can see him, a model schoolboy with his diploma under his arm.
He laughed again at the now smiling bearded face.
Formless spiritual. Father, Word and Holy Breath. Allfather, the heavenly
man. Hiesos Kristos, magician of the beautiful, the Logos who suffers in
us at every moment. This verily is that. I am the fire upon the altar. I
am the sacrificial butter.
Dunlop, Judge, the noblest Roman of them all, A.E., Arval, the Name
Ineffable, in heaven hight K.H., their master, whose identity is no
secret to adepts. Brothers of the great white lodge always watching to
see if they can help. The Christ with the bridesister, moisture of light,
born of an ensouled virgin, repentant sophia, departed to the plane of
buddhi. The life esoteric is not for ordinary person. O.P. must work off
bad karma first. Mrs Cooper Oakley once glimpsed our very illustrious
sister H.P.B.'s elemental.
O, fie Out on't PFUITEUFEL You naughtn't to look, missus, so you
naughtn't when a lady's ashowing of her elemental.
Mr Best entered, tall, young, mild, light. He bore in his hand with grace
a notebook, new, large, clean, bright.
That model schoolboy, Stephen said, would find Hamlet's musings about
the afterlife of his princely soul, the improbable, insignificant and
undramatic monologue, as shallow as Plato's.
John Eglinton, frowning, said, waxing wroth
Upon my word it makes my blood boil to hear anyone compare Aristotle
with Plato.
Which of the two, Stephen asked, would have banished me from his
commonwealth?
Unsheathe your dagger definitions. Horseness is the whatness of allhorse.
Streams of tendency and eons they worship. God noise in the street very
peripatetic. Space what you damn well have to see. Through spaces
smaller than red globules of man's blood they creepycrawl after Blake's
buttocks into eternity of which this vegetable world is but a shadow.
Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.
Mr Best came forward, amiable, towards his colleague.
Haines is gone, he said.
Is he?
I was showing him Jubainville's book. He's quite enthusiastic, don't
you know, about Hyde's LOVESONGS OF CONNACHT. I couldn't bring him in to
hear the discussion. He's gone to Gill's to buy it.
BOUND THEE FORTH, MY BOOKLET, QUICK
TO GREET THE CALLOUS PUBLIC.
WRIT, I WEEN, 'TWAS NOT MY WISH
IN LEAN UNLOVELY ENGLISH.
The peatsmoke is going to his head, John Eglinton opined.
We feel in England. Penitent thief. Gone. I smoked his baccy. Green
twinkling stone. An emerald set in the ring of the sea.
People do not know how dangerous lovesongs can be, the auric egg of
Russell warned occultly. The movements which work revolutions in the
world are born out of the dreams and visions in a peasant's heart on the
hillside. For them the earth is not an exploitable ground but the living
mother. The rarefied air of the academy and the arena produce the
sixshilling novel, the musichall song. France produces the finest flower
of corruption in Mallarme but the desirable life is revealed only to the
poor of heart, the life of Homer's Phaeacians.
From these words Mr Best turned an unoffending face to Stephen.
Mallarme, don't you know, he said, has written those wonderful prose
poems Stephen MacKenna used to read to me in Paris. The one about HAMLET.
He says IL SE PROMENE, LISANT AU LIVRE DE LUIMEME, don't you know,
READING THE BOOK OF HIMSELF. He describes HAMLET given in a French town,
don't you know, a provincial town. They advertised it.
His free hand graciously wrote tiny signs in air.
HAMLET
OU
LE DISTRAIT
PIECE DE SHAKESPEARE
He repeated to John Eglinton's newgathered frown
PIECE DE SHAKESPEARE, don't you know. It's so French. The French point
of view. HAMLET OU ...
The absentminded beggar, Stephen ended.
John Eglinton laughed.
Yes, I suppose it would be, he said. Excellent people, no doubt, but
distressingly shortsighted in some matters.
Sumptuous and stagnant exaggeration of murder.
A deathsman of the soul Robert Greene called him, Stephen said. Not for
nothing was he a butcher's son, wielding the sledded poleaxe and spitting
in his palms. Nine lives are taken off for his father's one. Our Father
who art in purgatory. Khaki Hamlets don't hesitate to shoot. The
bloodboltered shambles in act five is a forecast of the concentration
camp sung by Mr Swinburne.
Cranly, I his mute orderly, following battles from afar.
WHELPS AND DAMS OF MURDEROUS FOES WHOM NONE
BUT WE HAD SPARED ...
Between the Saxon smile and yankee yawp. The devil and the deep sea.
He will have it that HAMLET is a ghoststory, John Eglinton said for Mr
Best's behoof. Like the fat boy in Pickwick he wants to make our flesh
creep.
LIST LIST O LIST
My flesh hears him creeping, hears.
IF THOU DIDST EVER ...
What is a ghost? Stephen said with tingling energy. One who has faded
into impalpability through death, through absence, through change of
manners. Elizabethan London lay as far from Stratford as corrupt Paris
lies from virgin Dublin. Who is the ghost from LIMBO PATRUM, returning to
the world that has forgotten him? Who is King Hamlet?
John Eglinton shifted his spare body, leaning back to judge.
Lifted.
It is this hour of a day in mid June, Stephen said, begging with a
swift glance their hearing. The flag is up on the playhouse by the
bankside. The bear Sackerson growls in the pit near it, Paris garden.
Canvasclimbers who sailed with Drake chew their sausages among the
groundlings.
Local colour. Work in all you know. Make them accomplices.
Shakespeare has left the huguenot's house in Silver street and walks by
the swanmews along the riverbank. But he does not stay to feed the pen
chivying her game of cygnets towards the rushes. The swan of Avon has
other thoughts.
Composition of place. Ignatius Loyola, make haste to help me
The play begins. A player comes on under the shadow, made up in the
castoff mail of a court buck, a wellset man with a bass voice. It is the
ghost, the king, a king and no king, and the player is Shakespeare who
has studied HAMLET all the years of his life which were not vanity in
order to play the part of the spectre. He speaks the words to Burbage,
the young player who stands before him beyond the rack of cerecloth,
calling him by a name
HAMLET, I AM THY FATHER'S SPIRIT,
bidding him list. To a son he speaks, the son of his soul, the prince,
young Hamlet and to the son of his body, Hamnet Shakespeare, who has died
in Stratford that his namesake may live for ever.
Is it possible that that player Shakespeare, a ghost by absence, and in
the vesture of buried Denmark, a ghost by death, speaking his own words
to his own son's name had Hamnet Shakespeare lived he would have been
prince Hamlet's twin, is it possible, I want to know, or probable that
he did not draw or foresee the logical conclusion of those premises you
are the dispossessed son I am the murdered father your mother is the
guilty queen, Ann Shakespeare, born Hathaway?
But this prying into the family life of a great man, Russell began
impatiently.
Art thou there, truepenny?
Interesting only to the parish clerk. I mean, we have the plays. I mean
when we read the poetry of KING LEAR what is it to us how the poet lived?
As for living our servants can do that for us, Villiers de l'Isle has
said. Peeping and prying into greenroom gossip of the day, the poet's
drinking, the poet's debts. We have KING LEAR and it is immortal.
Mr Best's face, appealed to, agreed.
FLOW OVER THEM WITH YOUR WAVES AND WITH YOUR WATERS, MANANAAN,
MANANAAN MACLIR ...
How now, sirrah, that pound he lent you when you were hungry?
Marry, I wanted it.
Take thou this noble.
Go to You spent most of it in Georgina Johnson's bed, clergyman's
daughter. Agenbite of inwit.
Do you intend to pay it back?
O, yes.
When? Now?
Well ... No.
When, then?
I paid my way. I paid my way.
Steady on. He's from beyant Boyne water. The northeast corner. You owe
it.
Wait. Five months. Molecules all change. I am other I now. Other I got
pound.
Buzz. Buzz.
But I, entelechy, form of forms, am I by memory because under
everchanging forms.
I that sinned and prayed and fasted.
A child Conmee saved from pandies.
I, I and I. I.
A.E.I.O.U.
Do you mean to fly in the face of the tradition of three centuries?
John Eglinton's carping voice asked. Her ghost at least has been laid for
ever. She died, for literature at least, before she was born.
She died, Stephen retorted, sixtyseven years after she was born. She
saw him into and out of the world. She took his first embraces. She bore
his children and she laid pennies on his eyes to keep his eyelids closed
when he lay on his deathbed.
Mother's deathbed. Candle. The sheeted mirror. Who brought me into this
world lies there, bronzelidded, under few cheap flowers. LILIATA
RUTILANTIUM.
I wept alone.
John Eglinton looked in the tangled glowworm of his lamp.
The world believes that Shakespeare made a mistake, he said, and got
out of it as quickly and as best he could.
Bosh Stephen said rudely. A man of genius makes no mistakes. His
errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.
Portals of discovery opened to let in the quaker librarian,
softcreakfooted, bald, eared and assiduous.
A shrew, John Eglinton said shrewdly, is not a useful portal of
discovery, one should imagine. What useful discovery did Socrates learn
from Xanthippe?
Dialectic, Stephen answered and from his mother how to bring thoughts
into the world. What he learnt from his other wife Myrto ABSIT NOMEN,
Socratididion's Epipsychidion, no man, not a woman, will ever know. But
neither the midwife's lore nor the caudlelectures saved him from the
archons of Sinn Fein and their naggin of hemlock.
But Ann Hathaway? Mr Best's quiet voice said forgetfully. Yes, we seem
to be forgetting her as Shakespeare himself forgot her.
His look went from brooder's beard to carper's skull, to remind, to chide
them not unkindly, then to the baldpink lollard costard, guiltless though
maligned.
He had a good groatsworth of wit, Stephen said, and no truant memory.
He carried a memory in his wallet as he trudged to Romeville whistling
THE GIRL I LEFT BEHIND ME. If the earthquake did not time it we should
know where to place poor Wat, sitting in his form, the cry of hounds, the
studded bridle and her blue windows. That memory, VENUS AND ADONIS, lay
in the bedchamber of every lightoflove in London. Is Katharine the
shrew illfavoured? Hortensio calls her young and beautiful. Do you think
the writer of ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA, a passionate pilgrim, had his eyes in
the back of his head that he chose the ugliest doxy in all Warwickshire
to lie withal? Good he left her and gained the world of men. But his
boywomen are the women of a boy. Their life, thought, speech are lent
them by males. He chose badly? He was chosen, it seems to me. If others
have their will Ann hath a way. By cock, she was to blame. She put the
comether on him, sweet and twentysix. The greyeyed goddess who bends over
the boy Adonis, stooping to conquer, as prologue to the swelling act, is
a boldfaced Stratford wench who tumbles in a cornfield a lover younger
than herself.
And my turn? When?
Come
Ryefield, Mr Best said brightly, gladly, raising his new book, gladly,
brightly.
He murmured then with blond delight for all
BETWEEN THE ACRES OF THE RYE
THESE PRETTY COUNTRYFOLK WOULD LIE.
Paris the wellpleased pleaser.
A tall figure in bearded homespun rose from shadow and unveiled its
cooperative watch.
I am afraid I am due at the HOMESTEAD.
Whither away? Exploitable ground.
Are you going? John Eglinton's active eyebrows asked. Shall we see you
at Moore's tonight? Piper is coming.
Piper Mr Best piped. Is Piper back?
Peter Piper pecked a peck of pick of peck of pickled pepper.
I don't know if I can. Thursday. We have our meeting. If I can get away
in time.
Yogibogeybox in Dawson chambers. ISIS UNVEILED. Their Pali book we tried
to pawn. Crosslegged under an umbrel umbershoot he thrones an Aztec
logos, functioning on astral levels, their oversoul, mahamahatma. The
faithful hermetists await the light, ripe for chelaship, ringroundabout
him. Louis H. Victory. T. Caulfield Irwin. Lotus ladies tend them i'the
eyes, their pineal glands aglow. Filled with his god, he thrones, Buddh
under plantain. Gulfer of souls, engulfer. Hesouls, shesouls, shoals of
souls. Engulfed with wailing creecries, whirled, whirling, they bewail.
IN QUINTESSENTIAL TRIVIALITY
FOR YEARS IN THIS FLESHCASE A SHESOUL DWELT.
They say we are to have a literary surprise, the quaker librarian said,
friendly and earnest. Mr Russell, rumour has it, is gathering together a
sheaf of our younger poets' verses. We are all looking forward anxiously.
Anxiously he glanced in the cone of lamplight where three faces, lighted,
shone.
See this. Remember.
Stephen looked down on a wide headless caubeen, hung on his
ashplanthandle over his knee. My casque and sword. Touch lightly with two
index fingers. Aristotle's experiment. One or two? Necessity is that in
virtue of which it is impossible that one can be otherwise. Argal, one
hat is one hat.
Listen.
Young Colum and Starkey. George Roberts is doing the commercial part.
Longworth will give it a good puff in the EXPRESS. O, will he? I liked
Colum's DROVER. Yes, I think he has that queer thing genius. Do you think
he has genius really? Yeats admired his line AS IN WILD EARTH A GRECIAN
VASE. Did he? I hope you'll be able to come tonight. Malachi Mulligan is
coming too. Moore asked him to bring Haines. Did you hear Miss Mitchell's
joke about Moore and Martyn? That Moore is Martyn's wild oats? Awfully
clever, isn't it? They remind one of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Our
national epic has yet to be written, Dr Sigerson says. Moore is the man
for it. A knight of the rueful countenance here in Dublin. With a saffron
kilt? O'Neill Russell? O, yes, he must speak the grand old tongue. And
his Dulcinea? James Stephens is doing some clever sketches. We are
becoming important, it seems.
Cordelia. CORDOGLIO. Lir's loneliest daughter.
Nookshotten. Now your best French polish.
Thank you very much, Mr Russell, Stephen said, rising. If you will be
so kind as to give the letter to Mr Norman ...
O, yes. If he considers it important it will go in. We have so much
correspondence.
I understand, Stephen said. Thanks.
God ild you. The pigs' paper. Bullockbefriending.
Synge has promised me an article for DANA too. Are we going to be read? I
feel we are. The Gaelic league wants something in Irish. I hope you will
come round tonight. Bring Starkey.
Stephen sat down.
The quaker librarian came from the leavetakers. Blushing, his mask said
Mr Dedalus, your views are most illuminating.
He creaked to and fro, tiptoing up nearer heaven by the altitude of a
chopine, and, covered by the noise of outgoing, said low
Is it your view, then, that she was not faithful to the poet?
Alarmed face asks me. Why did he come? Courtesy or an inward light?
Where there is a reconciliation, Stephen said, there must have been
first a sundering.
Yes.
Christfox in leather trews, hiding, a runaway in blighted treeforks, from
hue and cry. Knowing no vixen, walking lonely in the chase. Women he won
to him, tender people, a whore of Babylon, ladies of justices, bully
tapsters' wives. Fox and geese. And in New Place a slack dishonoured body
that once was comely, once as sweet, as fresh as cinnamon, now her leaves
falling, all, bare, frighted of the narrow grave and unforgiven.
Yes. So you think ...
The door closed behind the outgoer.
Rest suddenly possessed the discreet vaulted cell, rest of warm and
brooding air.
A vestal's lamp.
Here he ponders things that were not what Caesar would have lived to do
had he believed the soothsayer what might have been possibilities of
the possible as possible things not known what name Achilles bore when
he lived among women.
Coffined thoughts around me, in mummycases, embalmed in spice of words.
Thoth, god of libraries, a birdgod, moonycrowned. And I heard the voice
of that Egyptian highpriest. IN PAINTED CHAMBERS LOADED WITH TILEBOOKS.
They are still. Once quick in the brains of men. Still but an itch of
death is in them, to tell me in my ear a maudlin tale, urge me to wreak
their will.
Certainly, John Eglinton mused, of all great men he is the most
enigmatic. We know nothing but that he lived and suffered. Not even so
much. Others abide our question. A shadow hangs over all the rest.
But HAMLET is so personal, isn't it? Mr Best pleaded. I mean, a kind of
private paper, don't you know, of his private life. I mean, I don't care
a button, don't you know, who is killed or who is guilty ...
He rested an innocent book on the edge of the desk, smiling his defiance.
His private papers in the original. TA AN BAD AR AN TIR. TAIM IN MO
SHAGART. Put beurla on it, littlejohn.
Quoth littlejohn Eglinton
I was prepared for paradoxes from what Malachi Mulligan told us but I
may as well warn you that if you want to shake my belief that Shakespeare
is Hamlet you have a stern task before you.
Bear with me.
Stephen withstood the bane of miscreant eyes glinting stern under
wrinkled brows. A basilisk. E QUANDO VEDE L'UOMO L'ATTOSCA. Messer
Brunetto, I thank thee for the word.
As we, or mother Dana, weave and unweave our bodies, Stephen said, from
day to day, their molecules shuttled to and fro, so does the artist weave
and unweave his image. And as the mole on my right breast is where it was
when I was born, though all my body has been woven of new stuff time
after time, so through the ghost of the unquiet father the image of the
unliving son looks forth. In the intense instant of imagination, when the
mind, Shelley says, is a fading coal, that which I was is that which I am
and that which in possibility I may come to be. So in the future, the
sister of the past, I may see myself as I sit here now but by reflection
from that which then I shall be.
Drummond of Hawthornden helped you at that stile.
Yes, Mr Best said youngly. I feel Hamlet quite young. The bitterness
might be from the father but the passages with Ophelia are surely from
the son.
Has the wrong sow by the lug. He is in my father. I am in his son.
That mole is the last to go, Stephen said, laughing.
John Eglinton made a nothing pleasing mow.
If that were the birthmark of genius, he said, genius would be a drug
in the market. The plays of Shakespeare's later years which Renan admired
so much breathe another spirit.
The spirit of reconciliation, the quaker librarian breathed.
There can be no reconciliation, Stephen said, if there has not been a
sundering.
Said that.
If you want to know what are the events which cast their shadow over
the hell of time of KING LEAR, OTHELLO, HAMLET, TROILUS AND CRESSIDA,
look to see when and how the shadow lifts. What softens the heart of a
man, shipwrecked in storms dire, Tried, like another Ulysses, Pericles,
prince of Tyre?
Head, redconecapped, buffeted, brineblinded.
A child, a girl, placed in his arms, Marina.
The leaning of sophists towards the bypaths of apocrypha is a constant
quantity, John Eglinton detected. The highroads are dreary but they lead
to the town.
Good Bacon gone musty. Shakespeare Bacon's wild oats. Cypherjugglers
going the highroads. Seekers on the great quest. What town, good masters?
Mummed in names A. E., eon Magee, John Eglinton. East of the sun, west
of the moon TIR NA NOG. Booted the twain and staved.
HOW MANY MILES TO DUBLIN?
THREE SCORE AND TEN, SIR.
WILL WE BE THERE BY CANDLELIGHT?
Mr Brandes accepts it, Stephen said, as the first play of the closing
period.
Does he? What does Mr Sidney Lee, or Mr Simon Lazarus as some aver his
name is, say of it?
Marina, Stephen said, a child of storm, Miranda, a wonder, Perdita,
that which was lost. What was lost is given back to him his daughter's
child. MY DEAREST WIFE, Pericles says, WAS LIKE THIS MAID. Will any man
love the daughter if he has not loved the mother?
The art of being a grandfather, Mr Best gan murmur. L'ART D'ETRE GRAND
Will he not see reborn in her, with the memory of his own youth added,
another image?
Do you know what you are talking about? Love, yes. Word known to all men.
Amor vero aliquid alicui bonum vult unde et ea quae concupiscimus ...
His own image to a man with that queer thing genius is the standard of
all experience, material and moral. Such an appeal will touch him. The
images of other males of his blood will repel him. He will see in them
grotesque attempts of nature to foretell or to repeat himself.
The benign forehead of the quaker librarian enkindled rosily with hope.
I hope Mr Dedalus will work out his theory for the enlightenment of the
public. And we ought to mention another Irish commentator, Mr George
Bernard Shaw. Nor should we forget Mr Frank Harris. His articles on
Shakespeare in the SATURDAY REVIEW were surely brilliant. Oddly enough he
too draws for us an unhappy relation with the dark lady of the sonnets.
The favoured rival is William Herbert, earl of Pembroke. I own that if
the poet must be rejected such a rejection would seem more in harmony
withwhat shall I say?our notions of what ought not to have been.
Felicitously he ceased and held a meek head among them, auk's egg, prize
of their fray.
He thous and thees her with grave husbandwords. Dost love, Miriam? Dost
love thy man?
That may be too, Stephen said. There's a saying of Goethe's which Mr
Magee likes to quote. Beware of what you wish for in youth because you
will get it in middle life. Why does he send to one who is a BUONAROBA, a
bay where all men ride, a maid of honour with a scandalous girlhood, a
lordling to woo for him? He was himself a lord of language and had made
himself a coistrel gentleman and he had written ROMEO AND JULIET. Why?
Belief in himself has been untimely killed. He was overborne in a
cornfield first ryefield, I should say and he will never be a victor in
his own eyes after nor play victoriously the game of laugh and lie down.
Assumed dongiovannism will not save him. No later undoing will undo the
first undoing. The tusk of the boar has wounded him there where love lies
ableeding. If the shrew is worsted yet there remains to her woman's
invisible weapon. There is, I feel in the words, some goad of the flesh
driving him into a new passion, a darker shadow of the first, darkening
even his own understanding of himself. A like fate awaits him and the two
rages commingle in a whirlpool.
They list. And in the porches of their ears I pour.
The soul has been before stricken mortally, a poison poured in the
porch of a sleeping ear. But those who are done to death in sleep cannot
know the manner of their quell unless their Creator endow their souls
with that knowledge in the life to come. The poisoning and the beast with
two backs that urged it King Hamlet's ghost could not know of were he not
endowed with knowledge by his creator. That is why the speech his lean
unlovely English is always turned elsewhere, backward. Ravisher and
ravished, what he would but would not, go with him from Lucrece's
bluecircled ivory globes to Imogen's breast, bare, with its mole
cinquespotted. He goes back, weary of the creation he has piled up to
hide him from himself, an old dog licking an old sore. But, because loss
is his gain, he passes on towards eternity in undiminished personality,
untaught by the wisdom he has written or by the laws he has revealed. His
beaver is up. He is a ghost, a shadow now, the wind by Elsinore's rocks
or what you will, the sea's voice, a voice heard only in the heart of him
who is the substance of his shadow, the son consubstantial with the
father.
Amen was responded from the doorway.
Hast thou found me, O mine enemy?
ENTR'ACTE.
A ribald face, sullen as a dean's, Buck Mulligan came forward, then
blithe in motley, towards the greeting of their smiles. My telegram.
You were speaking of the gaseous vertebrate, if I mistake not? he asked
of Stephen.
Primrosevested he greeted gaily with his doffed Panama as with a bauble.
They make him welcome. WAS DU VERLACHST WIRST DU NOCH DIENEN.
Brood of mockers Photius, pseudomalachi, Johann Most.
He Who Himself begot middler the Holy Ghost and Himself sent Himself,
Agenbuyer, between Himself and others, Who, put upon by His fiends,
stripped and whipped, was nailed like bat to barndoor, starved on
crosstree, Who let Him bury, stood up, harrowed hell, fared into heaven
and there these nineteen hundred years sitteth on the right hand of His
Own Self but yet shall come in the latter day to doom the quick and dead
when all the quick shall be dead already.
Glooria in excelsis Deo.
He lifts his hands. Veils fall. O, flowers Bells with bells with bells
aquiring.
Yes, indeed, the quaker librarian said. A most instructive discussion.
Mr Mulligan, I'll be bound, has his theory too of the play and of
Shakespeare. All sides of life should be represented.
He smiled on all sides equally.
Buck Mulligan thought, puzzled
Shakespeare? he said. I seem to know the name.
A flying sunny smile rayed in his loose features.
To be sure, he said, remembering brightly. The chap that writes like
Synge.
Mr Best turned to him.
Haines missed you, he said. Did you meet him? He'll see you after at
the D. B. C. He's gone to Gill's to buy Hyde's LOVESONGS OF CONNACHT.
I came through the museum, Buck Mulligan said. Was he here?
The bard's fellowcountrymen, John Eglinton answered, are rather tired
perhaps of our brilliancies of theorising. I hear that an actress played
Hamlet for the fourhundredandeighth time last night in Dublin. Vining
held that the prince was a woman. Has noone made him out to be an
Irishman? Judge Barton, I believe, is searching for some clues. He swears
His Highness not His Lordship by saint Patrick.
The most brilliant of all is that story of Wilde's, Mr Best said,
lifting his brilliant notebook. That PORTRAIT OF MR W. H. where he proves
that the sonnets were written by a Willie Hughes, a man all hues.
For Willie Hughes, is it not? the quaker librarian asked.
Or Hughie Wills? Mr William Himself. W. H. who am I?
I mean, for Willie Hughes, Mr Best said, amending his gloss easily. Of
course it's all paradox, don't you know, Hughes and hews and hues, the
colour, but it's so typical the way he works it out. It's the very
essence of Wilde, don't you know. The light touch.
His glance touched their faces lightly as he smiled, a blond ephebe. Tame
essence of Wilde.
You're darned witty. Three drams of usquebaugh you drank with Dan Deasy's
ducats.
How much did I spend? O, a few shillings.
For a plump of pressmen. Humour wet and dry.
Wit. You would give your five wits for youth's proud livery he pranks in.
Lineaments of gratified desire.
There be many mo. Take her for me. In pairing time. Jove, a cool ruttime
send them. Yea, turtledove her.
Eve. Naked wheatbellied sin. A snake coils her, fang in's kiss.
Do you think it is only a paradox? the quaker librarian was asking. The
mocker is never taken seriously when he is most serious.
They talked seriously of mocker's seriousness.
Buck Mulligan's again heavy face eyed Stephen awhile. Then, his head
wagging, he came near, drew a folded telegram from his pocket. His mobile
lips read, smiling with new delight.
Telegram he said. Wonderful inspiration Telegram A papal bull
He sat on a corner of the unlit desk, reading aloud joyfully
THE SENTIMENTALIST IS HE WHO WOULD ENJOY WITHOUT INCURRING THE IMMENSE
DEBTORSHIP FOR A THING DONE. Signed Dedalus. Where did you launch it
from? The kips? No. College Green. Have you drunk the four quid? The aunt
is going to call on your unsubstantial father. Telegram Malachi
Mulligan, The Ship, lower Abbey street. O, you peerless mummer O, you
priestified Kinchite
Joyfully he thrust message and envelope into a pocket but keened in a
querulous brogue
It's what I'm telling you, mister honey, it's queer and sick we were,
Haines and myself, the time himself brought it in. 'Twas murmur we did
for a gallus potion would rouse a friar, I'm thinking, and he limp with
leching. And we one hour and two hours and three hours in Connery's
sitting civil waiting for pints apiece.
He wailed
And we to be there, mavrone, and you to be unbeknownst sending us your
conglomerations the way we to have our tongues out a yard long like the
drouthy clerics do be fainting for a pussful.
Stephen laughed.
Quickly, warningfully Buck Mulligan bent down.
The tramper Synge is looking for you, he said, to murder you. He heard
you pissed on his halldoor in Glasthule. He's out in pampooties to murder
you.
Me Stephen exclaimed. That was your contribution to literature.
Buck Mulligan gleefully bent back, laughing to the dark eavesdropping
ceiling.
Murder you he laughed.
Harsh gargoyle face that warred against me over our mess of hash of
lights in rue SaintAndredesArts. In words of words for words,
palabras. Oisin with Patrick. Faunman he met in Clamart woods,
brandishing a winebottle. C'EST VENDREDI SAINT Murthering Irish. His
image, wandering, he met. I mine. I met a fool i'the forest.
Mr Lyster, an attendant said from the door ajar.
... in which everyone can find his own. So Mr Justice Madden in his
DIARY OF MASTER WILLIAM SILENCE has found the hunting terms ... Yes? What
is it?
There's a gentleman here, sir, the attendant said, coming forward and
offering a card. From the FREEMAN. He wants to see the files of the
KILKENNY PEOPLE for last year.
Certainly, certainly, certainly. Is the gentleman? ...
He took the eager card, glanced, not saw, laid down unglanced, looked,
asked, creaked, asked
Is he? ... O, there
Brisk in a galliard he was off, out. In the daylit corridor he talked
with voluble pains of zeal, in duty bound, most fair, most kind, most
honest broadbrim.
This gentleman? FREEMAN'S JOURNAL? KILKENNY PEOPLE? To be sure. Good
day, sir. KILKENNY ... We have certainly ...
A patient silhouette waited, listening.
All the leading provincial ... NORTHERN WHIG, CORK EXAMINER,
ENNISCORTHY GUARDIAN,  ... Will you please? ... Evans, conduct this
gentleman ... If you just follow the atten ... Or, please allow me ...
This way ... Please, sir ...
Voluble, dutiful, he led the way to all the provincial papers, a bowing
dark figure following his hasty heels.
The door closed.
The sheeny Buck Mulligan cried.
He jumped up and snatched the card.
What's his name? Ikey Moses? Bloom.
He rattled on
Jehovah, collector of prepuces, is no more. I found him over in the
museum where I went to hail the foamborn Aphrodite. The Greek mouth that
has never been twisted in prayer. Every day we must do homage to her.
LIFE OF LIFE, THY LIPS ENKINDLE.
Suddenly he turned to Stephen
He knows you. He knows your old fellow. O, I fear me, he is Greeker
than the Greeks. His pale Galilean eyes were upon her mesial groove.
Venus Kallipyge. O, the thunder of those loins THE GOD PURSUING THE
MAIDEN HID.
We want to hear more, John Eglinton decided with Mr Best's approval. We
begin to be interested in Mrs S. Till now we had thought of her, if at
all, as a patient Griselda, a Penelope stayathome.
Antisthenes, pupil of Gorgias, Stephen said, took the palm of beauty
from Kyrios Menelaus' brooddam, Argive Helen, the wooden mare of Troy in
whom a score of heroes slept, and handed it to poor Penelope. Twenty
years he lived in London and, during part of that time, he drew a salary
equal to that of the lord chancellor of Ireland. His life was rich. His
art, more than the art of feudalism as Walt Whitman called it, is the art
of surfeit. Hot herringpies, green mugs of sack, honeysauces, sugar of
roses, marchpane, gooseberried pigeons, ringocandies. Sir Walter Raleigh,
when they arrested him, had half a million francs on his back including a
pair of fancy stays. The gombeenwoman Eliza Tudor had underlinen enough
to vie with her of Sheba. Twenty years he dallied there between conjugial
love and its chaste delights and scortatory love and its foul pleasures.
You know Manningham's story of the burgher's wife who bade Dick Burbage
to her bed after she had seen him in RICHARD III and how Shakespeare,
overhearing, without more ado about nothing, took the cow by the horns
and, when Burbage came knocking at the gate, answered from the capon's
blankets WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR CAME BEFORE RICHARD III. And the gay
lakin, mistress Fitton, mount and cry O, and his dainty birdsnies, lady
Penelope Rich, a clean quality woman is suited for a player, and the
punks of the bankside, a penny a time.
Cours la Reine. ENCORE VINGT SOUS. NOUS FERONS DE PETITES COCHONNERIES.
MINETTE? TU VEUX?
The height of fine society. And sir William Davenant of oxford's mother
with her cup of canary for any cockcanary.
Buck Mulligan, his pious eyes upturned, prayed
Blessed Margaret Mary Anycock
And Harry of six wives' daughter. And other lady friends from neighbour
seats as Lawn Tennyson, gentleman poet, sings. But all those twenty years
what do you suppose poor Penelope in Stratford was doing behind the
diamond panes?
Do and do. Thing done. In a rosery of Fetter lane of Gerard, herbalist,
he walks, greyedauburn. An azured harebell like her veins. Lids of Juno's
eyes, violets. He walks. One life is all. One body. Do. But do. Afar, in
a reek of lust and squalor, hands are laid on whiteness.
Buck Mulligan rapped John Eglinton's desk sharply.
Whom do you suspect? he challenged.
Say that he is the spurned lover in the sonnets. Once spurned twice
spurned. But the court wanton spurned him for a lord, his dearmylove.
Love that dare not speak its name.
As an Englishman, you mean, John sturdy Eglinton put in, he loved a
lord.
Old wall where sudden lizards flash. At Charenton I watched them.
It seems so, Stephen said, when he wants to do for him, and for all
other and singular uneared wombs, the holy office an ostler does for the
stallion. Maybe, like Socrates, he had a midwife to mother as he had a
shrew to wife. But she, the giglot wanton, did not break a bedvow. Two
deeds are rank in that ghost's mind a broken vow and the dullbrained
yokel on whom her favour has declined, deceased husband's brother. Sweet
Ann, I take it, was hot in the blood. Once a wooer, twice a wooer.
Stephen turned boldly in his chair.
The burden of proof is with you not with me, he said frowning. If you
deny that in the fifth scene of HAMLET he has branded her with infamy
tell me why there is no mention of her during the thirtyfour years
between the day she married him and the day she buried him. All those
women saw their men down and under Mary, her goodman John, Ann, her poor
dear Willun, when he went and died on her, raging that he was the first
to go, Joan, her four brothers, Judith, her husband and all her sons,
Susan, her husband too, while Susan's daughter, Elizabeth, to use
granddaddy's words, wed her second, having killed her first.
O, yes, mention there is. In the years when he was living richly in royal
London to pay a debt she had to borrow forty shillings from her father's
shepherd. Explain you then. Explain the swansong too wherein he has
commended her to posterity.
He faced their silence.
To whom thus Eglinton
You mean the will.
But that has been explained, I believe, by jurists.
She was entitled to her widow's dower
At common law. His legal knowledge was great
Our judges tell us.
Him Satan fleers,
Mocker
And therefore he left out her name
From the first draft but he did not leave out
The presents for his granddaughter, for his daughters,
For his sister, for his old cronies in Stratford
And in London. And therefore when he was urged,
As I believe, to name her
He left her his
Secondbest
Bed.
PUNKT.
Leftherhis
Secondbest
Leftherhis
Bestabed
Secabest
Leftabed.
Woa
AMPLIUS. IN SOCIETATE HUMANA HOC EST MAXIME NECESSARIUM UT SIT AMICITIA
INTER MULTOS.
Saint Thomas, Stephen began ...
ORA PRO NOBIS, Monk Mulligan groaned, sinking to a chair.
There he keened a wailing rune.
POGUE MAHONE ACUSHLA MACHREE It's destroyed we are from this day
It's destroyed we are surely
All smiled their smiles.
Saint Thomas, Stephen smiling said, whose gorbellied works I enjoy
reading in the original, writing of incest from a standpoint different
from that of the new Viennese school Mr Magee spoke of, likens it in his
wise and curious way to an avarice of the emotions. He means that the
love so given to one near in blood is covetously withheld from some
stranger who, it may be, hungers for it. Jews, whom christians tax with
avarice, are of all races the most given to intermarriage. Accusations
are made in anger. The christian laws which built up the hoards of the
jews for whom, as for the lollards, storm was shelter bound their
affections too with hoops of steel. Whether these be sins or virtues old
Nobodaddy will tell us at doomsday leet. But a man who holds so tightly
to what he calls his rights over what he calls his debts will hold
tightly also to what he calls his rights over her whom he calls his wife.
No sir smile neighbour shall covet his ox or his wife or his manservant
or his maidservant or his jackass.
Or his jennyass, Buck Mulligan antiphoned.
Gentle Will is being roughly handled, gentle Mr Best said gently.
Which will? gagged sweetly Buck Mulligan. We are getting mixed.
The will to live, John Eglinton philosophised, for poor Ann, Will's
widow, is the will to die.
REQUIESCAT Stephen prayed.
WHAT OF ALL THE WILL TO DO?
IT HAS VANISHED LONG AGO ...
She lies laid out in stark stiffness in that secondbest bed, the mobled
queen, even though you prove that a bed in those days was as rare as a
motorcar is now and that its carvings were the wonder of seven parishes.
In old age she takes up with gospellers one stayed with her at New Place
and drank a quart of sack the town council paid for but in which bed he
slept it skills not to ask and heard she had a soul. She read or had
read to her his chapbooks preferring them to the MERRY WIVES and, loosing
her nightly waters on the jordan, she thought over HOOKS AND EYES FOR
BELIEVERS' BREECHES and THE MOST SPIRITUAL SNUFFBOX TO MAKE THE MOST
DEVOUT SOULS SNEEZE. Venus has twisted her lips in prayer. Agenbite of
inwit remorse of conscience. It is an age of exhausted whoredom groping
for its god.
History shows that to be true, INQUIT EGLINTONUS CHRONOLOLOGOS. The
ages succeed one another. But we have it on high authority that a man's
worst enemies shall be those of his own house and family. I feel that
Russell is right. What do we care for his wife or father? I should say
that only family poets have family lives. Falstaff was not a family man.
I feel that the fat knight is his supreme creation.
Lean, he lay back. Shy, deny thy kindred, the unco guid. Shy, supping
with the godless, he sneaks the cup. A sire in Ultonian Antrim bade it
him. Visits him here on quarter days. Mr Magee, sir, there's a gentleman
to see you. Me? Says he's your father, sir. Give me my Wordsworth. Enter
Magee Mor Matthew, a rugged rough rugheaded kern, in strossers with a
buttoned codpiece, his nether stocks bemired with clauber of ten forests,
a wand of wilding in his hand.
Your own? He knows your old fellow. The widower.
Hurrying to her squalid deathlair from gay Paris on the quayside I
touched his hand. The voice, new warmth, speaking. Dr Bob Kenny is
attending her. The eyes that wish me well. But do not know me.
A father, Stephen said, battling against hopelessness, is a necessary
evil. He wrote the play in the months that followed his father's death.
If you hold that he, a greying man with two marriageable daughters, with
thirtyfive years of life, NEL MEZZO DEL CAMMIN DI NOSTRA VITA, with fifty
of experience, is the beardless undergraduate from Wittenberg then you
must hold that his seventyyear old mother is the lustful queen. No. The
corpse of John Shakespeare does not walk the night. From hour to hour it
rots and rots. He rests, disarmed of fatherhood, having devised that
mystical estate upon his son. Boccaccio's Calandrino was the first and
last man who felt himself with child. Fatherhood, in the sense of
conscious begetting, is unknown to man. It is a mystical estate, an
apostolic succession, from only begetter to only begotten. On that
mystery and not on the madonna which the cunning Italian intellect flung
to the mob of Europe the church is founded and founded irremovably
because founded, like the world, macro and microcosm, upon the void. Upon
incertitude, upon unlikelihood. AMOR MATRIS, subjective and objective
genitive, may be the only true thing in life. Paternity may be a legal
fiction. Who is the father of any son that any son should love him or he
any son?
What the hell are you driving at?
I know. Shut up. Blast you. I have reasons.
AMPLIUS. ADHUC. ITERUM. POSTEA.
Are you condemned to do this?
They are sundered by a bodily shame so steadfast that the criminal
annals of the world, stained with all other incests and bestialities,
hardly record its breach. Sons with mothers, sires with daughters, lesbic
sisters, loves that dare not speak their name, nephews with grandmothers,
jailbirds with keyholes, queens with prize bulls. The son unborn mars
beauty born, he brings pain, divides affection, increases care. He is a
new male his growth is his father's decline, his youth his father's
envy, his friend his father's enemy.
In rue MonsieurlePrince I thought it.
What links them in nature? An instant of blind rut.
Am I a father? If I were?
Shrunken uncertain hand.
Sabellius, the African, subtlest heresiarch of all the beasts of the
field, held that the Father was Himself His Own Son. The bulldog of
Aquin, with whom no word shall be impossible, refutes him. Well if the
father who has not a son be not a father can the son who has not a father
be a son? When Rutlandbaconsouthamptonshakespeare or another poet of the
same name in the comedy of errors wrote HAMLET he was not the father of
his own son merely but, being no more a son, he was and felt himself the
father of all his race, the father of his own grandfather, the father of
his unborn grandson who, by the same token, never was born, for nature,
as Mr Magee understands her, abhors perfection.
Eglintoneyes, quick with pleasure, looked up shybrightly. Gladly
glancing, a merry puritan, through the twisted eglantine.
Flatter. Rarely. But flatter.
Himself his own father, Sonmulligan told himself. Wait. I am big with
child. I have an unborn child in my brain. Pallas Athena A play The
play's the thing Let me parturiate
He clasped his paunchbrow with both birthaiding hands.
As for his family, Stephen said, his mother's name lives in the forest
of Arden. Her death brought from him the scene with Volumnia in
CORIOLANUS. His boyson's death is the deathscene of young Arthur in KING
JOHN. Hamlet, the black prince, is Hamnet Shakespeare. Who the girls in
THE TEMPEST, in PERICLES, in WINTER'S TALE are we know. Who Cleopatra,
fleshpot of Egypt, and Cressid and Venus are we may guess. But there is
another member of his family who is recorded.
The plot thickens, John Eglinton said.
The quaker librarian, quaking, tiptoed in, quake, his mask, quake, with
haste, quake, quack.
Door closed. Cell. Day.
They list. Three. They.
I you he they.
Come, mess.
STEPHEN He had three brothers, Gilbert, Edmund, Richard. Gilbert in his
old age told some cavaliers he got a pass for nowt from Maister Gatherer
one time mass he did and he seen his brud Maister Wull the playwriter up
in Lunnon in a wrastling play wud a man on's back. The playhouse sausage
filled Gilbert's soul. He is nowhere but an Edmund and a Richard are
recorded in the works of sweet William.
MAGEEGLINJOHN Names What's in a name?
BEST That is my name, Richard, don't you know. I hope you are going to
say a good word for Richard, don't you know, for my sake.
Laughter
BUCKMULLIGAN PIANO, DIMINUENDO
Then outspoke medical Dick
To his comrade medical Davy ...
STEPHEN In his trinity of black Wills, the villain shakebags, Iago,
Richard Crookback, Edmund in KING LEAR, two bear the wicked uncles'
names. Nay, that last play was written or being written while his brother
Edmund lay dying in Southwark.
BEST I hope Edmund is going to catch it. I don't want Richard, my
name ...
Laughter
QUAKERLYSTER A TEMPO But he that filches from me my good name ...
STEPHEN STRINGENDO He has hidden his own name, a fair name, William,
in the plays, a super here, a clown there, as a painter of old Italy set
his face in a dark corner of his canvas. He has revealed it in the
sonnets where there is Will in overplus. Like John o'Gaunt his name is
dear to him, as dear as the coat and crest he toadied for, on a bend
sable a spear or steeled argent, honorificabilitudinitatibus, dearer than
his glory of greatest shakescene in the country. What's in a name? That
is what we ask ourselves in childhood when we write the name that we are
told is ours. A star, a daystar, a firedrake, rose at his birth. It shone
by day in the heavens alone, brighter than Venus in the night, and by
night it shone over delta in Cassiopeia, the recumbent constellation
which is the signature of his initial among the stars. His eyes watched
it, lowlying on the horizon, eastward of the bear, as he walked by the
slumberous summer fields at midnight returning from Shottery and from her
arms.
Both satisfied. I too.
Don't tell them he was nine years old when it was quenched.
And from her arms.
Wait to be wooed and won. Ay, meacock. Who will woo you?
Read the skies. AUTONTIMORUMENOS. BOUS STEPHANOUMENOS. Where's your
configuration? Stephen, Stephen, cut the bread even. S. D SUA DONNA.
GIA DI LUI. GELINDO RISOLVE DI NON AMARE S. D.
What is that, Mr Dedalus? the quaker librarian asked. Was it a
celestial phenomenon?
A star by night, Stephen said. A pillar of the cloud by day.
What more's to speak?
Stephen looked on his hat, his stick, his boots.
STEPHANOS, my crown. My sword. His boots are spoiling the shape of
my feet. Buy a pair. Holes in my socks. Handkerchief too.
You make good use of the name, John Eglinton allowed. Your own name
is strange enough. I suppose it explains your fantastical humour.
Me, Magee and Mulligan.
Fabulous artificer. The hawklike man. You flew. Whereto?
NewhavenDieppe, steerage passenger. Paris and back. Lapwing. Icarus.
PATER, AIT. Seabedabbled, fallen, weltering. Lapwing you are. Lapwing be.
Mr Best eagerquietly lifted his book to say
That's very interesting because that brother motive, don't you know, we
find also in the old Irish myths. Just what you say. The three brothers
Shakespeare. In Grimm too, don't you know, the fairytales. The third
brother that always marries the sleeping beauty and wins the best prize.
Best of Best brothers. Good, better, best.
The quaker librarian springhalted near.
I should like to know, he said, which brother you ... I understand you
to suggest there was misconduct with one of the brothers ... But
perhaps I am anticipating?
He caught himself in the act looked at all refrained.
An attendant from the doorway called
Mr Lyster Father Dineen wants ...
O, Father Dineen Directly.
Swiftly rectly creaking rectly rectly he was rectly gone.
John Eglinton touched the foil.
Come, he said. Let us hear what you have to say of Richard and
Edmund. You kept them for the last, didn't you?
In asking you to remember those two noble kinsmen nuncle Richie and
nuncle Edmund, Stephen answered, I feel I am asking too much perhaps. A
brother is as easily forgotten as an umbrella.
Lapwing.
Where is your brother? Apothecaries' hall. My whetstone. Him, then
Cranly, Mulligan now these. Speech, speech. But act. Act speech. They
mock to try you. Act. Be acted on.
Lapwing.
I am tired of my voice, the voice of Esau. My kingdom for a drink.
On.
You will say those names were already in the chronicles from which he
took the stuff of his plays. Why did he take them rather than others?
Richard, a whoreson crookback, misbegotten, makes love to a widowed
Ann what's in a name?, woos and wins her, a whoreson merry widow.
Richard the conqueror, third brother, came after William the conquered.
The other four acts of that play hang limply from that first. Of all his
kings Richard is the only king unshielded by Shakespeare's reverence,
the angel of the world. Why is the underplot of KING LEAR in which Edmund
figures lifted out of Sidney's ARCADIA and spatchcocked on to a Celtic
legend older than history?
That was Will's way, John Eglinton defended. We should not now
combine a Norse saga with an excerpt from a novel by George Meredith.
QUE VOULEZVOUS? Moore would say. He puts Bohemia on the seacoast and
makes Ulysses quote Aristotle.
Why? Stephen answered himself. Because the theme of the false or the
usurping or the adulterous brother or all three in one is to Shakespeare,
what the poor are not, always with him. The note of banishment,
banishment from the heart, banishment from home, sounds uninterruptedly
from THE TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA onward till Prospero breaks his staff,
buries it certain fathoms in the earth and drowns his book. It doubles
itself in the middle of his life, reflects itself in another, repeats
itself, protasis, epitasis, catastasis, catastrophe. It repeats
itself again when he is near the grave, when his married daughter
Susan, chip of the old block, is accused of adultery. But it was
the original sin that darkened his understanding, weakened his
will and left in him a strong inclination to evil. The words are
those of my lords bishops of Maynooth. An original sin and, like original
sin, committed by another in whose sin he too has sinned. It is between
the lines of his last written words, it is petrified on his tombstone
under which her four bones are not to be laid. Age has not withered it.
Beauty and peace have not done it away. It is in infinite variety
everywhere in the world he has created, in MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING, twice
in AS YOU LIKE IT, in THE TEMPEST, in HAMLET, in MEASURE FOR MEASUREand
in all the other plays which I have not read.
He laughed to free his mind from his mind's bondage.
Judge Eglinton summed up.
The truth is midway, he affirmed. He is the ghost and the prince. He is
all in all.
He is, Stephen said. The boy of act one is the mature man of act five.
All in all. In CYMBELINE, in OTHELLO he is bawd and cuckold. He acts and
is acted on. Lover of an ideal or a perversion, like Jose he kills the
real Carmen. His unremitting intellect is the hornmad Iago ceaselessly
willing that the moor in him shall suffer.
Cuckoo Cuckoo Cuck Mulligan clucked lewdly. O word of fear
Dark dome received, reverbed.
And what a character is Iago undaunted John Eglinton exclaimed.
When all is said Dumas FILS or is it Dumas PERE? is right. After God
Shakespeare has created most.
Man delights him not nor woman neither, Stephen said. He returns after
a life of absence to that spot of earth where he was born, where he has
always been, man and boy, a silent witness and there, his journey of life
ended, he plants his mulberrytree in the earth. Then dies. The motion is
ended. Gravediggers bury Hamlet PERE and Hamlet FILS. A king and a
prince at last in death, with incidental music. And, what though murdered
and betrayed, bewept by all frail tender hearts for, Dane or Dubliner,
sorrow for the dead is the only husband from whom they refuse to be
divorced. If you like the epilogue look long on it prosperous Prospero,
the good man rewarded, Lizzie, grandpa's lump of love, and nuncle Richie,
the bad man taken off by poetic justice to the place where the bad niggers
go. Strong curtain. He found in the world without as actual what was in his
world within as possible. Maeterlinck says IF SOCRATES LEAVE HIS HOUSE
TODAY HE WILL FIND THE SAGE SEATED ON HIS DOORSTEP. IF JUDAS GO FORTH
TONIGHT IT IS TO JUDAS HIS STEPS WILL TEND. Every life is many days,
day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants,
old men, young men, wives, widows, brothersinlove, but always meeting
ourselves. The playwright who wrote the folio of this world and wrote it
badly He gave us light first and the sun two days later, the lord of
things as they are whom the most Roman of catholics call DIO BOIA,
hangman god, is doubtless all in all in all of us, ostler and butcher,
and would be bawd and cuckold too but that in the economy of heaven,
foretold by Hamlet, there are no more marriages, glorified man, an
androgynous angel, being a wife unto himself.
EUREKA Buck Mulligan cried. EUREKA
Suddenly happied he jumped up and reached in a stride John Eglinton's
desk.
May I? he said. The Lord has spoken to Malachi.
He began to scribble on a slip of paper.
Take some slips from the counter going out.
Those who are married, Mr Best, douce herald, said, all save one, shall
live. The rest shall keep as they are.
He laughed, unmarried, at Eglinton Johannes, of arts a bachelor.
Unwed, unfancied, ware of wiles, they fingerponder nightly each his
variorum edition of THE TAMING OF THE SHREW.
You are a delusion, said roundly John Eglinton to Stephen. You have
brought us all this way to show us a French triangle. Do you believe your
own theory?
No, Stephen said promptly.
Are you going to write it? Mr Best asked. You ought to make it a
dialogue, don't you know, like the Platonic dialogues Wilde wrote.
John Eclecticon doubly smiled.
Well, in that case, he said, I don't see why you should expect payment
for it since you don't believe it yourself. Dowden believes there is some
mystery in HAMLET but will say no more. Herr Bleibtreu, the man Piper met
in Berlin, who is working up that Rutland theory, believes that the secret
is hidden in the Stratford monument. He is going to visit the present
duke, Piper says, and prove to him that his ancestor wrote the plays.
It will come as a surprise to his grace. But he believes his theory.
I believe, O Lord, help my unbelief. That is, help me to believe or help
me to unbelieve? Who helps to believe? EGOMEN. Who to unbelieve? Other
chap.
You are the only contributor to DANA who asks for pieces of silver. Then
I don't know about the next number. Fred Ryan wants space for an article
on economics.
Fraidrine. Two pieces of silver he lent me. Tide you over. Economics.
For a guinea, Stephen said, you can publish this interview.
Buck Mulligan stood up from his laughing scribbling, laughing and
then gravely said, honeying malice
I called upon the bard Kinch at his summer residence in upper
Mecklenburgh street and found him deep in the study of the SUMMA CONTRA
GENTILES in the company of two gonorrheal ladies, Fresh Nelly and Rosalie,
the coalquay whore.
He broke away.
Come, Kinch. Come, wandering Aengus of the birds.
Come, Kinch. You have eaten all we left. Ay. I will serve you your orts
and offals.
Stephen rose.
Life is many days. This will end.
We shall see you tonight, John Eglinton said. NOTRE AMI Moore says
Malachi Mulligan must be there.
Buck Mulligan flaunted his slip and panama.
Monsieur Moore, he said, lecturer on French letters to the youth of
Ireland. I'll be there. Come, Kinch, the bards must drink. Can you walk
straight?
Laughing, he ...
Swill till eleven. Irish nights entertainment.
Lubber ...
Stephen followed a lubber ...
One day in the national library we had a discussion. Shakes. After.
His lub back I followed. I gall his kibe.
Stephen, greeting, then all amort, followed a lubber jester, a
wellkempt head, newbarbered, out of the vaulted cell into a shattering
daylight of no thought.
What have I learned? Of them? Of me?
Walk like Haines now.
The constant readers' room. In the readers' book Cashel Boyle
O'Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell parafes his polysyllables. Item was
Hamlet mad? The quaker's pate godlily with a priesteen in booktalk.
O please do, sir ... I shall be most pleased ...
Amused Buck Mulligan mused in pleasant murmur with himself, selfnodding
A pleased bottom.
The turnstile.
Is that? ... Blueribboned hat ... Idly writing ... What? Looked? ...
The curving balustrade smoothsliding Mincius.
Puck Mulligan, panamahelmeted, went step by step, iambing, trolling
JOHN EGLINTON, MY JO, JOHN,
WHY WON'T YOU WED A WIFE?
He spluttered to the air
O, the chinless Chinaman Chin Chon Eg Lin Ton. We went over to their
playbox, Haines and I, the plumbers' hall. Our players are creating a new
art for Europe like the Greeks or M. Maeterlinck. Abbey Theatre I smell
the pubic sweat of monks.
He spat blank.
Forgot any more than he forgot the whipping lousy Lucy gave him.
And left the FEMME DE TRENTE ANS. And why no other children born? And his
first child a girl?
Afterwit. Go back.
The dour recluse still there he has his cake and the douce youngling,
minion of pleasure, Phedo's toyable fair hair.
Eh ... I just eh ... wanted ... I forgot ... he ...
Longworth and M'Curdy Atkinson were there ...
Puck Mulligan footed featly, trilling
I HARDLY HEAR THE PURLIEU CRY
OR A TOMMY TALK AS I PASS ONE BY
BEFORE MY THOUGHTS BEGIN TO RUN
ON F. M'CURDY ATKINSON,
THE SAME THAT HAD THE WOODEN LEG
AND THAT FILIBUSTERING FILIBEG
THAT NEVER DARED TO SLAKE HIS DROUTH,
MAGEE THAT HAD THE CHINLESS MOUTH.
BEING AFRAID TO MARRY ON EARTH
THEY MASTURBATED FOR ALL THEY WERE WORTH.
Jest on. Know thyself.
Halted, below me, a quizzer looks at me. I halt.
Mournful mummer, Buck Mulligan moaned. Synge has left off wearing
black to be like nature. Only crows, priests and English coal are black.
A laugh tripped over his lips.
Longworth is awfully sick, he said, after what you wrote about that old
hake Gregory. O you inquisitional drunken jewjesuit She gets you a job on
the paper and then you go and slate her drivel to Jaysus. Couldn't you do
the Yeats touch?
He went on and down, mopping, chanting with waving graceful arms
The most beautiful book that has come out of our country in my time.
One thinks of Homer.
He stopped at the stairfoot.
I have conceived a play for the mummers, he said solemnly.
The pillared Moorish hall, shadows entwined. Gone the nine men's
morrice with caps of indices.
In sweetly varying voices Buck Mulligan read his tablet
EVERYMAN HIS OWN WIFE
OR
A HONEYMOON IN THE HAND
A NATIONAL IMMORALITY IN THREE ORGASMS
BY
BALLOCKY MULLIGAN
He turned a happy patch's smirk to Stephen, saying
The disguise, I fear, is thin. But listen.
He read, MARCATO
Characters
TODY TOSTOFF a ruined Pole
CRAB a bushranger
MEDICAL DICK 
and  two birds with one stone
MEDICAL DAVY 
MOTHER GROGAN a watercarrier
FRESH NELLY
and
ROSALIE the coalquay whore.
He laughed, lolling a to and fro head, walking on, followed by Stephen
and mirthfully he told the shadows, souls of men
O, the night in the Camden hall when the daughters of Erin had to lift
their skirts to step over you as you lay in your mulberrycoloured,
multicoloured, multitudinous vomit
The most innocent son of Erin, Stephen said, for whom they ever lifted
them.
About to pass through the doorway, feeling one behind, he stood aside.
Part. The moment is now. Where then? If Socrates leave his house
today, if Judas go forth tonight. Why? That lies in space which I in time
must come to, ineluctably.
My will his will that fronts me. Seas between.
A man passed out between them, bowing, greeting.
Good day again, Buck Mulligan said.
The portico.
Here I watched the birds for augury. Aengus of the birds. They go,
they come. Last night I flew. Easily flew. Men wondered. Street of harlots
after. A creamfruit melon he held to me. In. You will see.
The wandering jew, Buck Mulligan whispered with clown's awe. Did you
see his eye? He looked upon you to lust after you. I fear thee, ancient
mariner. O, Kinch, thou art in peril. Get thee a breechpad.
Manner of Oxenford.
Day. Wheelbarrow sun over arch of bridge.
A dark back went before them, step of a pard, down, out by the
gateway, under portcullis barbs.
They followed.
Offend me still. Speak on.
Kind air defined the coigns of houses in Kildare street. No birds. Frail
from the housetops two plumes of smoke ascended, pluming, and in a flaw
of softness softly were blown.
Cease to strive. Peace of the druid priests of Cymbeline hierophantic
from wide earth an altar.
LAUD WE THE GODS
AND LET OUR CROOKED SMOKES CLIMB TO THEIR NOSTRILS
FROM OUR BLESS'D ALTARS.
The superior, the very reverend John Conmee S.J. reset his smooth
watch in his interior pocket as he came down the presbytery steps. Five to
three. Just nice time to walk to Artane. What was that boy's name again?
Dignam. Yes. VERE DIGNUM ET IUSTUM EST. Brother Swan was the person to
see. Mr Cunningham's letter. Yes. Oblige him, if possible. Good practical
catholic useful at mission time.
A onelegged sailor, swinging himself onward by lazy jerks of his
crutches, growled some notes. He jerked short before the convent of the
sisters of charity and held out a peaked cap for alms towards the very
reverend John Conmee S. J. Father Conmee blessed him in the sun for his
purse held, he knew, one silver crown.
Father Conmee crossed to Mountjoy square. He thought, but not for
long, of soldiers and sailors, whose legs had been shot off by
cannonballs, ending their days in some pauper ward, and of cardinal
Wolsey's words IF I HAD SERVED MY GOD AS I HAVE SERVED MY KING HE WOULD
NOT HAVE ABANDONED ME IN MY OLD DAYS. He walked by the treeshade of
sunnywinking leaves and towards him came the wife of Mr David Sheehy
M.P.
Very well, indeed, father. And you, father?
Father Conmee was wonderfully well indeed. He would go to Buxton
probably for the waters. And her boys, were they getting on well at
Belvedere? Was that so? Father Conmee was very glad indeed to hear that.
And Mr Sheehy himself? Still in London. The house was still sitting, to be
sure it was. Beautiful weather it was, delightful indeed. Yes, it was very
probable that Father Bernard Vaughan would come again to preach. O,
yes a very great success. A wonderful man really.
Father Conmee was very glad to see the wife of Mr David Sheehy
M.P. Iooking so well and he begged to be remembered to Mr David Sheehy
M.P. Yes, he would certainly call.
Good afternoon, Mrs Sheehy.
Father Conmee doffed his silk hat and smiled, as he took leave, at the
jet beads of her mantilla inkshining in the sun. And smiled yet again, in
going. He had cleaned his teeth, he knew, with arecanut paste.
Father Conmee walked and, walking, smiled for he thought on Father
Bernard Vaughan's droll eyes and cockney voice.
Pilate Wy don't you old back that owlin mob?
A zealous man, however. Really he was. And really did great good in.
his way. Beyond a doubt. He loved Ireland, he said, and he loved the
Irish. Of good family too would one think it? Welsh, were they not?
O, lest he forget. That letter to father provincial.
Father Conmee stopped three little schoolboys at the corner of
Mountjoy square. Yes they were from Belvedere. The little house. Aha.
And were they good boys at school? O. That was very good now. And what
was his name? Jack Sohan. And his name? Ger. Gallaher. And the other
little man? His name was Brunny Lynam. O, that was a very nice name to
have.
Father Conmee gave a letter from his breast to Master Brunny Lynam
and pointed to the red pillarbox at the corner of Fitzgibbon street.
But mind you don't post yourself into the box, little man, he said.
The boys sixeyed Father Conmee and laughed
O, sir.
Well, let me see if you can post a letter, Father Conmee said.
Master Brunny Lynam ran across the road and put Father Conmee's
letter to father provincial into the mouth of the bright red letterbox.
Father Conmee smiled and nodded and smiled and walked along Mountjoy
square east.
Mr Denis J Maginni, professor of dancing c, in silk hat, slate
frockcoat with silk facings, white kerchief tie, tight lavender trousers,
canary gloves and pointed patent boots, walking with grave deportment
most respectfully took the curbstone as he passed lady Maxwell at the
corner of Dignam's court.
Was that not Mrs M'Guinness?
Mrs M'Guinness, stately, silverhaired, bowed to Father Conmee from
the farther footpath along which she sailed. And Father Conmee smiled and
saluted. How did she do?
A fine carriage she had. Like Mary, queen of Scots, something. And to
think that she was a pawnbroker Well, now Such a ... what should he
say? ... such a queenly mien.
Father Conmee walked down Great Charles street and glanced at the
shutup free church on his left. The reverend T. R. Greene B.A. will D.V.
speak. The incumbent they called him. He felt it incumbent on him to say a
few words. But one should be charitable. Invincible ignorance. They acted
according to their lights.
Father Conmee turned the corner and walked along the North
Circular road. It was a wonder that there was not a tramline in such an
important thoroughfare. Surely, there ought to be.
A band of satchelled schoolboys crossed from Richmond street. All
raised untidy caps. Father Conmee greeted them more than once benignly.
Christian brother boys.
Father Conmee smelt incense on his right hand as he walked. Saint
Joseph's church, Portland row. For aged and virtuous females. Father
Conmee raised his hat to the Blessed Sacrament. Virtuous but occasionally
they were also badtempered.
Near Aldborough house Father Conmee thought of that spendthrift
nobleman. And now it was an office or something.
Father Conmee began to walk along the North Strand road and was
saluted by Mr William Gallagher who stood in the doorway of his shop.
Father Conmee saluted Mr William Gallagher and perceived the odours
that came from baconflitches and ample cools of butter. He passed
Grogan's the Tobacconist against which newsboards leaned and told of a
dreadful catastrophe in New York. In America those things were
continually happening. Unfortunate people to die like that, unprepared.
Still, an act of perfect contrition.
Father Conmee went by Daniel Bergin's publichouse against the
window of which two unlabouring men lounged. They saluted him and
were saluted.
Father Conmee passed H. J. O'Neill's funeral establishment where
Corny Kelleher totted figures in the daybook while he chewed a blade of
hay. A constable on his beat saluted Father Conmee and Father Conmee
saluted the constable. In Youkstetter's, the porkbutcher's, Father Conmee
observed pig's puddings, white and black and red, lie neatly curled in
tubes.
Moored under the trees of Charleville Mall Father Conmee saw a
turfbarge, a towhorse with pendent head, a bargeman with a hat of dirty
straw seated amidships, smoking and staring at a branch of poplar above
him. It was idyllic and Father Conmee reflected on the providence of the
Creator who had made turf to be in bogs whence men might dig it out and
bring it to town and hamlet to make fires in the houses of poor people.
On Newcomen bridge the very reverend John Conmee S.J. of saint
Francis Xavier's church, upper Gardiner street, stepped on to an outward
bound tram.
Off an inward bound tram stepped the reverend Nicholas Dudley
C. C. of saint Agatha's church, north William street, on to Newcomen
bridge.
At Newcomen bridge Father Conmee stepped into an outward bound
tram for he disliked to traverse on foot the dingy way past Mud Island.
Father Conmee sat in a corner of the tramcar, a blue ticket tucked
with care in the eye of one plump kid glove, while four shillings, a
sixpence and five pennies chuted from his other plump glovepalm into his
purse. Passing the ivy church he reflected that the ticket inspector
usually made his visit when one had carelessly thrown away the ticket.
The solemnity of the occupants of the car seemed to Father Conmee
excessive for a journey so short and cheap. Father Conmee liked cheerful
decorum.
It was a peaceful day. The gentleman with the glasses opposite Father
Conmee had finished explaining and looked down. His wife, Father
Conmee supposed. A tiny yawn opened the mouth of the wife of the gentleman
with the glasses. She raised her small gloved fist, yawned ever so gently,
tiptapping her small gloved fist on her opening mouth and smiled tinily,
sweetly.
Father Conmee perceived her perfume in the car. He perceived also
that the awkward man at the other side of her was sitting on the edge of
the seat.
Father Conmee at the altarrails placed the host with difficulty in the
mouth of the awkward old man who had the shaky head.
At Annesley bridge the tram halted and, when it was about to go, an
old woman rose suddenly from her place to alight. The conductor pulled
the bellstrap to stay the car for her. She passed out with her basket and
a marketnet and Father Conmee saw the conductor help her and net and
basket down and Father Conmee thought that, as she had nearly passed
the end of the penny fare, she was one of those good souls who had always
to be told twice BLESS YOU, MY CHILD, that they have been absolved, PRAY
FOR ME. But they had so many worries in life, so many cares, poor
creatures.
From the hoardings Mr Eugene Stratton grimaced with thick niggerlips at
Father Conmee.
Father Conmee thought of the souls of black and brown and yellow
men and of his sermon on saint Peter Claver S.J. and the African mission
and of the propagation of the faith and of the millions of black and brown
and yellow souls that had not received the baptism of water when their last
hour came like a thief in the night. That book by the Belgian jesuit, LE
NOMBRE DES ELUS, seemed to Father Conmee a reasonable plea. Those were
millions of human souls created by God in His Own likeness to whom the
faith had not D.V. been brought. But they were God's souls, created by
God. It seemed to Father Conmee a pity that they should all be lost, a
waste, if one might say.
At the Howth road stop Father Conmee alighted, was saluted by the
conductor and saluted in his turn.
The Malahide road was quiet. It pleased Father Conmee, road and
name. The joybells were ringing in gay Malahide. Lord Talbot de Malahide,
immediate hereditary lord admiral of Malahide and the seas adjoining.
Then came the call to arms and she was maid, wife and widow in one day.
Those were old worldish days, loyal times in joyous townlands, old times
in the barony.
Father Conmee, walking, thought of his little book OLD TIMES IN THE
BARONY and of the book that might be written about jesuit houses and of
Mary Rochfort, daughter of lord Molesworth, first countess of Belvedere.
A listless lady, no more young, walked alone the shore of lough
Ennel, Mary, first countess of Belvedere, listlessly walking in the
evening, not startled when an otter plunged. Who could know the truth?
Not the jealous lord Belvedere and not her confessor if she had not
committed adultery fully, EIACULATIO SEMINIS INTER VAS NATURALE MULIERIS,
with her husband's brother? She would half confess if she had not all
sinned as women did. Only God knew and she and he, her husband's brother.
Father Conmee thought of that tyrannous incontinence, needed
however for man's race on earth, and of the ways of God which were not
our ways.
Don John Conmee walked and moved in times of yore. He was
humane and honoured there. He bore in mind secrets confessed and he
smiled at smiling noble faces in a beeswaxed drawingroom, ceiled with full
fruit clusters. And the hands of a bride and of a bridegroom, noble to
noble, were impalmed by Don John Conmee.
It was a charming day.
The lychgate of a field showed Father Conmee breadths of cabbages,
curtseying to him with ample underleaves. The sky showed him a flock of
small white clouds going slowly down the wind. MOUTONNER, the French
said. A just and homely word.
Father Conmee, reading his office, watched a flock of muttoning
clouds over Rathcoffey. His thinsocked ankles were tickled by the stubble
of Clongowes field. He walked there, reading in the evening, and heard the
cries of the boys' lines at their play, young cries in the quiet evening.
He was their rector his reign was mild.
Father Conmee drew off his gloves and took his rededged breviary out.
An ivory bookmark told him the page.
Nones. He should have read that before lunch. But lady Maxwell had come.
Father Conmee read in secret PATER and AVE and crossed his breast.
DEUS IN ADIUTORIUM.
He walked calmly and read mutely the nones, walking and reading till
he came to RES in BEATI IMMACULATI PRINCIPIUM VERBORUM TUORUM VERITAS
IN ETERNUM OMNIA INDICIA IUSTITIAE TUAE.
A flushed young man came from a gap of a hedge and after him came
a young woman with wild nodding daisies in her hand. The young man
raised his cap abruptly the young woman abruptly bent and with slow care
detached from her light skirt a clinging twig.
Father Conmee blessed both gravely and turned a thin page of his
breviary. SIN PRINCIPES PERSECUTI SUNT ME GRATIS ET A VERBIS TUIS
FORMIDAVIT COR MEUM.
Corny Kelleher closed his long daybook and glanced with his
drooping eye at a pine coffinlid sentried in a corner. He pulled himself
erect, went to it and, spinning it on its axle, viewed its shape and brass
furnishings. Chewing his blade of hay he laid the coffinlid by and came to
the doorway. There he tilted his hatbrim to give shade to his eyes and
leaned against the doorcase, looking idly out.
Father John Conmee stepped into the Dollymount tram on
Newcomen bridge.
Corny Kelleher locked his largefooted boots and gazed, his hat
downtilted, chewing his blade of hay.
Constable C, on his beat, stood to pass the time of day.
That's a fine day, Mr Kelleher.
Ay, Corny Kelleher said.
It's very close, the constable said.
Corny Kelleher sped a silent jet of hayjuice arching from his mouth
while a generous white arm from a window in Eccles street flung forth a
coin.
What's the best news? he asked.
I seen that particular party last evening, the constable said with bated
breath.
A onelegged sailor crutched himself round MacConnell's corner,
skirting Rabaiotti's icecream car, and jerked himself up Eccles street.
Towards Larry O'Rourke, in shirtsleeves in his doorway, he growled
unamiably
FOR ENGLAND ...
He swung himself violently forward past Katey and Boody Dedalus,
halted and growled
HOME AND BEAUTY.
J. J. O'Molloy's white careworn face was told that Mr Lambert was
in the warehouse with a visitor.
A stout lady stopped, took a copper coin from her purse and dropped
it into the cap held out to her. The sailor grumbled thanks, glanced
sourly at the unheeding windows, sank his head and swung himself forward
four strides.
He halted and growled angrily
FOR ENGLAND ...
Two barefoot urchins, sucking long liquorice laces, halted near him,
gaping at his stump with their yellowslobbered mouths.
He swung himself forward in vigorous jerks, halted, lifted his head
towards a window and bayed deeply
HOME AND BEAUTY.
The gay sweet chirping whistling within went on a bar or two, ceased.
The blind of the window was drawn aside. A card UNFURNISHED APARTMENTS
slipped from the sash and fell. A plump bare generous arm shone, was seen,
held forth from a white petticoatbodice and taut shiftstraps. A woman's
hand flung forth a coin over the area railings. It fell on the path.
One of the urchins ran to it, picked it up and dropped it into the
minstrel's cap, saying
There, sir.
Katey and Boody Dedalus shoved in the door of the closesteaming
kitchen.
Did you put in the books? Boody asked.
Maggy at the range rammed down a greyish mass beneath bubbling
suds twice with her potstick and wiped her brow.
They wouldn't give anything on them, she said.
Father Conmee walked through Clongowes fields, his thinsocked
ankles tickled by stubble.
Where did you try? Boody asked.
M'Guinness's.
Boody stamped her foot and threw her satchel on the table.
Bad cess to her big face she cried.
Katey went to the range and peered with squinting eyes.
What's in the pot? she asked.
Shirts, Maggy said.
Boody cried angrily
Crickey, is there nothing for us to eat?
Katey, lifting the kettlelid in a pad of her stained skirt, asked
And what's in this?
A heavy fume gushed in answer.
Peasoup, Maggy said.
Where did you get it? Katey asked.
Sister Mary Patrick, Maggy said.
The lacquey rang his bell.
Barang
Boody sat down at the table and said hungrily
Give us it here.
Maggy poured yellow thick soup from the kettle into a bowl. Katey,
sitting opposite Boody, said quietly, as her fingertip lifted to her mouth
random crumbs
A good job we have that much. Where's Dilly?
Gone to meet father, Maggy said.
Boody, breaking big chunks of bread into the yellow soup, added
Our father who art not in heaven.
Maggy, pouring yellow soup in Katey's bowl, exclaimed
Boody For shame
A skiff, a crumpled throwaway, Elijah is coming, rode lightly down
the Liffey, under Loopline bridge, shooting the rapids where water chafed
around the bridgepiers, sailing eastward past hulls and anchorchains,
between the Customhouse old dock and George's quay.
The blond girl in Thornton's bedded the wicker basket with rustling
fibre. Blazes Boylan handed her the bottle swathed in pink tissue paper
and a small jar.
Put these in first, will you? he said.
Yes, sir, the blond girl said. And the fruit on top.
That'll do, game ball, Blazes Boylan said.
She bestowed fat pears neatly, head by tail, and among them ripe
shamefaced peaches.
Blazes Boylan walked here and there in new tan shoes about the
fruitsmelling shop, lifting fruits, young juicy crinkled and plump red
tomatoes, sniffing smells.
H. E. L. Y.'S filed before him, tallwhitehatted, past Tangier lane,
plodding towards their goal.
He turned suddenly from a chip of strawberries, drew a gold watch
from his fob and held it at its chain's length.
Can you send them by tram? Now?
A darkbacked figure under Merchants' arch scanned books on the
hawker's cart.
Certainly, sir. Is it in the city?
O, yes, Blazes Boylan said. Ten minutes.
The blond girl handed him a docket and pencil.
Will you write the address, sir?
Blazes Boylan at the counter wrote and pushed the docket to her.
Send it at once, will you? he said. It's for an invalid.
Yes, sir. I will, sir.
Blazes Boylan rattled merry money in his trousers' pocket.
What's the damage? he asked.
The blond girl's slim fingers reckoned the fruits.
Blazes Boylan looked into the cut of her blouse. A young pullet. He
took a red carnation from the tall stemglass.
This for me? he asked gallantly.
The blond girl glanced sideways at him, got up regardless, with his tie
a bit crooked, blushing.
Yes, sir, she said.
Bending archly she reckoned again fat pears and blushing peaches.
Blazes Boylan looked in her blouse with more favour, the stalk of the
red flower between his smiling teeth.
May I say a word to your telephone, missy? he asked roguishly.
MA Almidano Artifoni said.
He gazed over Stephen's shoulder at Goldsmith's knobby poll.
Two carfuls of tourists passed slowly, their women sitting fore,
gripping the handrests. Palefaces. Men's arms frankly round their stunted
forms. They looked from Trinity to the blind columned porch of the bank
of Ireland where pigeons roocoocooed.
ANCH'IO HO AVUTO DI QUESTE IDEE, Almidano Artifoni said, QUAND' ERO
GIOVINE COME LEI. EPPOI MI SONO CONVINTO CHE IL MONDO E UNA BESTIA.
PECCATO. PERCHE LA SUA VOCE ... SAREBBE UN CESPITE DI RENDITA, VIA.
INVECE, LEI SI SACRIFICA.
SACRIFIZIO INCRUENTO, Stephen said smiling, swaying his ashplant in slow
swingswong from its midpoint, lightly.
SPERIAMO, the round mustachioed face said pleasantly. MA, DIA RETTA A
ME. CI RIFLETTA.
By the stern stone hand of Grattan, bidding halt, an Inchicore tram
unloaded straggling Highland soldiers of a band.
CI RIFLETTERO, Stephen said, glancing down the solid trouserleg.
MA, SUL SERIO, EH? Almidano Artifoni said.
His heavy hand took Stephen's firmly. Human eyes. They gazed
curiously an instant and turned quickly towards a Dalkey tram.
ECCOLO, Almidano Artifoni said in friendly haste. VENGA A TROVARMI E CI
PENSI. ADDIO, CARO.
ARRIVEDERLA, MAESTRO, Stephen said, raising his hat when his hand was
freed. E GRAZIE.
DI CHE? Almidano Artifoni said. SCUSI, EH? TANTE BELLE COSE
Almidano Artifoni, holding up a baton of rolled music as a signal,
trotted on stout trousers after the Dalkey tram. In vain he trotted,
signalling in vain among the rout of barekneed gillies smuggling
implements of music through Trinity gates.
Miss Dunne hid the Capel street library copy of THE WOMAN IN WHITE
far back in her drawer and rolled a sheet of gaudy notepaper into her
typewriter.
Too much mystery business in it. Is he in love with that one, Marion?
Change it and get another by Mary Cecil Haye.
The disk shot down the groove, wobbled a while, ceased and ogled
them six.
Miss Dunne clicked on the keyboard
 June .
Five tallwhitehatted sandwichmen between Monypeny's corner and
the slab where Wolfe Tone's statue was not, eeled themselves turning
H. E. L. Y.'S and plodded back as they had come.
Then she stared at the large poster of Marie Kendall, charming soubrette,
and, listlessly lolling, scribbled on the jotter sixteens and capital
esses. Mustard hair and dauby cheeks. She's not nicelooking, is she? The
way she's holding up her bit of a skirt. Wonder will that fellow be at the
band tonight. If I could get that dressmaker to make a concertina skirt
like Susy Nagle's. They kick out grand. Shannon and all the boatclub
swells never took his eyes off her. Hope to goodness he won't keep me here
till seven.
The telephone rang rudely by her ear.
Hello. Yes, sir. No, sir. Yes, sir. I'll ring them up after five. Only
those two, sir, for Belfast and Liverpool. All right, sir. Then I can go
after six if you're not back. A quarter after. Yes, sir. Twentyseven and
six. I'll tell him. Yes one, seven, six.
She scribbled three figures on an envelope.
Mr Boylan Hello That gentleman from SPORT was in looking for you.
Mr Lenehan, yes. He said he'll be in the Ormond at four. No, sir. Yes,
sir. I'll ring them up after five.
Two pink faces turned in the flare of the tiny torch.
Who's that? Ned Lambert asked. Is that Crotty?
Ringabella and Crosshaven, a voice replied groping for foothold.
Hello, Jack, is that yourself? Ned Lambert said, raising in salute his
pliant lath among the flickering arches. Come on. Mind your steps there.
The vesta in the clergyman's uplifted hand consumed itself in a long soft
flame and was let fall. At their feet its red speck died and mouldy air
closed round them.
How interesting a refined accent said in the gloom.
Yes, sir, Ned Lambert said heartily. We are standing in the historic
council chamber of saint Mary's abbey where silken Thomas proclaimed
himself a rebel in . This is the most historic spot in all Dublin.
O'Madden Burke is going to write something about it one of these days. The
old bank of Ireland was over the way till the time of the union and the
original jews' temple was here too before they built their synagogue over
in Adelaide road. You were never here before, Jack, were you?
No, Ned.
He rode down through Dame walk, the refined accent said, if my
memory serves me. The mansion of the Kildares was in Thomas court.
That's right, Ned Lambert said. That's quite right, sir.
If you will be so kind then, the clergyman said, the next time to allow
me perhaps ...
Certainly, Ned Lambert said. Bring the camera whenever you like. I'll
get those bags cleared away from the windows. You can take it from here or
from here.
In the still faint light he moved about, tapping with his lath the piled
seedbags and points of vantage on the floor.
From a long face a beard and gaze hung on a chessboard.
I'm deeply obliged, Mr Lambert, the clergyman said. I won't trespass on
your valuable time ...
You're welcome, sir, Ned Lambert said. Drop in whenever you like. Next
week, say. Can you see?
Yes, yes. Good afternoon, Mr Lambert. Very pleased to have met you.
Pleasure is mine, sir, Ned Lambert answered.
He followed his guest to the outlet and then whirled his lath away
among the pillars. With J. J. O'Molloy he came forth slowly into Mary's
abbey where draymen were loading floats with sacks of carob and palmnut
meal, O'Connor, Wexford.
He stood to read the card in his hand.
The reverend Hugh C. Love, Rathcoffey. Present address Saint
Michael's, Sallins. Nice young chap he is. He's writing a book about the
Fitzgeralds he told me. He's well up in history, faith.
The young woman with slow care detached from her light skirt a
clinging twig.
I thought you were at a new gunpowder plot, J. J. O'Molloy said.
Ned Lambert cracked his fingers in the air.
God he cried. I forgot to tell him that one about the earl of Kildare
after he set fire to Cashel cathedral. You know that one? I'M BLOODY SORRY
I DID IT, says he, BUT I DECLARE TO GOD I THOUGHT THE ARCHBISHOP WAS
INSIDE. He mightn't like it, though. What? God, I'll tell him anyhow.
That was the great earl, the Fitzgerald Mor. Hot members they were all of
them, the Geraldines.
The horses he passed started nervously under their slack harness. He
slapped a piebald haunch quivering near him and cried
Woa, sonny
He turned to J. J. O'Molloy and asked
Well, Jack. What is it? What's the trouble? Wait awhile. Hold hard.
With gaping mouth and head far back he stood still and, after an
instant, sneezed loudly.
Chow he said. Blast you
The dust from those sacks, J. J. O'Molloy said politely.
No, Ned Lambert gasped, I caught a ... cold night before ... blast
your soul ... night before last ... and there was a hell of a lot of
draught ...
He held his handkerchief ready for the coming ...
I was ... Glasnevin this morning ... poor little ... what do you call
him ... Chow ... Mother of Moses
Tom Rochford took the top disk from the pile he clasped against his
claret waistcoat.
See? he said. Say it's turn six. In here, see. Turn Now On.
He slid it into the left slot for them. It shot down the groove, wobbled
a while, ceased, ogling them six.
Lawyers of the past, haughty, pleading, beheld pass from the
consolidated taxing office to Nisi Prius court Richie Goulding carrying
the costbag of Goulding, Collis and Ward and heard rustling from the
admiralty division of king's bench to the court of appeal an elderly
female with false teeth smiling incredulously and a black silk skirt of
great amplitude.
See? he said. See now the last one I put in is over here Turns Over.
The impact. Leverage, see?
He showed them the rising column of disks on the right.
Smart idea, Nosey Flynn said, snuffling. So a fellow coming in late can
see what turn is on and what turns are over.
See? Tom Rochford said.
He slid in a disk for himself and watched it shoot, wobble, ogle, stop
four. Turn Now On.
I'll see him now in the Ormond, Lenehan said, and sound him. One good
turn deserves another.
Do, Tom Rochford said. Tell him I'm Boylan with impatience.
Goodnight, M'Coy said abruptly. When you two begin
Nosey Flynn stooped towards the lever, snuffling at it.
But how does it work here, Tommy? he asked.
Tooraloo, Lenehan said. See you later.
He followed M'Coy out across the tiny square of Crampton court.
He's a hero, he said simply.
I know, M'Coy said. The drain, you mean.
Drain? Lenehan said. It was down a manhole.
They passed Dan Lowry's musichall where Marie Kendall, charming
soubrette, smiled on them from a poster a dauby smile.
Going down the path of Sycamore street beside the Empire musichall
Lenehan showed M'Coy how the whole thing was. One of those manholes
like a bloody gaspipe and there was the poor devil stuck down in it, half
choked with sewer gas. Down went Tom Rochford anyhow, booky's vest
and all, with the rope round him. And be damned but he got the rope round
the poor devil and the two were hauled up.
The act of a hero, he said.
At the Dolphin they halted to allow the ambulance car to gallop past
them for Jervis street.
This way, he said, walking to the right. I want to pop into Lynam's to
see Sceptre's starting price. What's the time by your gold watch and
chain?
M'Coy peered into Marcus Tertius Moses' sombre office, then at
O'Neill's clock.
After three, he said. Who's riding her?
O. Madden, Lenehan said. And a game filly she is.
While he waited in Temple bar M'Coy dodged a banana peel with
gentle pushes of his toe from the path to the gutter. Fellow might damn
easy get a nasty fall there coming along tight in the dark.
The gates of the drive opened wide to give egress to the viceregal
cavalcade.
Even money, Lenehan said returning. I knocked against Bantam Lyons in
there going to back a bloody horse someone gave him that hasn't an
earthly. Through here.
They went up the steps and under Merchants' arch. A darkbacked
figure scanned books on the hawker's cart.
There he is, Lenehan said.
Wonder what he's buying, M'Coy said, glancing behind.
LEOPOLDO OR THE BLOOM IS ON THE RYE, Lenehan said.
He's dead nuts on sales, M'Coy said. I was with him one day and he
bought a book from an old one in Liffey street for two bob. There were
fine plates in it worth double the money, the stars and the moon and
comets with long tails. Astronomy it was about.
Lenehan laughed.
I'll tell you a damn good one about comets' tails, he said. Come over in
the sun.
They crossed to the metal bridge and went along Wellington quay by
the riverwall.
Master Patrick Aloysius Dignam came out of Mangan's, late
Fehrenbach's, carrying a pound and a half of porksteaks.
There was a long spread out at Glencree reformatory, Lenehan said
eagerly. The annual dinner, you know. Boiled shirt affair. The lord mayor
was there, Val Dillon it was, and sir Charles Cameron and Dan Dawson
spoke and there was music. Bartell d'Arcy sang and Benjamin Dollard ...
I know, M'Coy broke in. My missus sang there once.
Did she? Lenehan said.
A card UNFURNISHED APARTMENTS reappeared on the windowsash of
number  Eccles street.
He checked his tale a moment but broke out in a wheezy laugh.
But wait till I tell you, he said. Delahunt of Camden street had the
catering and yours truly was chief bottlewasher. Bloom and the wife were
there. Lashings of stuff we put up port wine and sherry and curacao to
which we did ample justice. Fast and furious it was. After liquids came
solids. Cold joints galore and mince pies ...
I know, M'Coy said. The year the missus was there ...
Lenehan linked his arm warmly.
But wait till I tell you, he said. We had a midnight lunch too after all
the jollification and when we sallied forth it was blue o'clock the
morning after the night before. Coming home it was a gorgeous winter's
night on the Featherbed Mountain. Bloom and Chris Callinan were on one
side of the car and I was with the wife on the other. We started singing
glees and duets LO, THE EARLY BEAM OF MORNING. She was well primed with a
good load of Delahunt's port under her bellyband. Every jolt the bloody
car gave I had her bumping up against me. Hell's delights She has a fine
pair, God bless her. Like that.
He held his caved hands a cubit from him, frowning
I was tucking the rug under her and settling her boa all the time. Know
what I mean?
His hands moulded ample curves of air. He shut his eyes tight in
delight, his body shrinking, and blew a sweet chirp from his lips.
The lad stood to attention anyhow, he said with a sigh. She's a gamey
mare and no mistake. Bloom was pointing out all the stars and the comets
in the heavens to Chris Callinan and the jarvey the great bear and
Hercules and the dragon, and the whole jingbang lot. But, by God, I was
lost, so to speak, in the milky way. He knows them all, faith. At last she
spotted a weeny weeshy one miles away. AND WHAT STAR IS THAT, POLDY? says
she. By God, she had Bloom cornered. THAT ONE, IS IT? says Chris Callinan,
SURE THAT'S ONLY WHAT YOU MIGHT CALL A PINPRICK. By God, he wasn't far
wide of the mark.
Lenehan stopped and leaned on the riverwall, panting with soft
laughter.
I'm weak, he gasped.
M'Coy's white face smiled about it at instants and grew grave.
Lenehan walked on again. He lifted his yachtingcap and scratched his
hindhead rapidly. He glanced sideways in the sunlight at M'Coy.
He's a cultured allroundman, Bloom is, he said seriously. He's not one
of your common or garden ... you know ... There's a touch of the artist
about old Bloom.
Mr Bloom turned over idly pages of THE AWFUL DISCLOSURES OF MARIA
MONK, then of Aristotle's MASTERPIECE. Crooked botched print. Plates
infants cuddled in a ball in bloodred wombs like livers of slaughtered
cows. Lots of them like that at this moment all over the world. All
butting with their skulls to get out of it. Child born every minute
somewhere. Mrs Purefoy.
He laid both books aside and glanced at the third TALES OF THE GHETTO
by Leopold von Sacher Masoch.
That I had, he said, pushing it by.
The shopman let two volumes fall on the counter.
Them are two good ones, he said.
Onions of his breath came across the counter out of his ruined
mouth. He bent to make a bundle of the other books, hugged them against
his unbuttoned waistcoat and bore them off behind the dingy curtain.
On O'Connell bridge many persons observed the grave deportment
and gay apparel of Mr Denis J Maginni, professor of dancing c.
Mr Bloom, alone, looked at the titles. FAIR TYRANTS by James Lovebirch.
Know the kind that is. Had it? Yes.
He opened it. Thought so.
A woman's voice behind the dingy curtain. Listen the man.
No she wouldn't like that much. Got her it once.
He read the other title SWEETS OF SIN. More in her line. Let us see.
He read where his finger opened.
ALL THE DOLLARBILLS HER HUSBAND GAVE HER WERE SPENT IN THE STORES ON
WONDROUS GOWNS AND COSTLIEST FRILLIES. FOR HIM FOR RAOUL
Yes. This. Here. Try.
HER MOUTH GLUED ON HIS IN A LUSCIOUS VOLUPTUOUS KISS WHILE HIS HANDS
FELT FOR THE OPULENT CURVES INSIDE HER DESHABILLE.
Yes. Take this. The end.
YOU ARE LATE, HE SPOKE HOARSELY, EYING HER WITH A SUSPICIOUS GLARE.
THE BEAUTIFUL WOMAN THREW OFF HER SABLETRIMMED WRAP, DISPLAYING HER
QUEENLY SHOULDERS AND HEAVING EMBONPOINT. AN IMPERCEPTIBLE SMILE PLAYED
ROUND HER PERFECT LIPS AS SHE TURNED TO HIM CALMLY.
Mr Bloom read again THE BEAUTIFUL WOMAN.
Warmth showered gently over him, cowing his flesh. Flesh yielded
amply amid rumpled clothes whites of eyes swooning up. His nostrils
arched themselves for prey. Melting breast ointments FOR HIM FOR
RAOUL. Armpits' oniony sweat. Fishgluey slime HER HEAVING EMBONPOINT.
Feel Press Crushed Sulphur dung of lions
Young Young
An elderly female, no more young, left the building of the courts of
chancery, king's bench, exchequer and common pleas, having heard in the
lord chancellor's court the case in lunacy of Potterton, in the admiralty
division the summons, exparte motion, of the owners of the Lady Cairns
versus the owners of the barque Mona, in the court of appeal reservation
of judgment in the case of Harvey versus the Ocean Accident and Guarantee
Corporation.
Phlegmy coughs shook the air of the bookshop, bulging out the dingy
curtains. The shopman's uncombed grey head came out and his unshaven
reddened face, coughing. He raked his throat rudely, puked phlegm on the
floor. He put his boot on what he had spat, wiping his sole along it, and
bent, showing a rawskinned crown, scantily haired.
Mr Bloom beheld it.
Mastering his troubled breath, he said
I'll take this one.
The shopman lifted eyes bleared with old rheum.
SWEETS OF SIN, he said, tapping on it. That's a good one.
The lacquey by the door of Dillon's auctionrooms shook his handbell
twice again and viewed himself in the chalked mirror of the cabinet.
Dilly Dedalus, loitering by the curbstone, heard the beats of the bell,
the cries of the auctioneer within. Four and nine. Those lovely curtains.
Five shillings. Cosy curtains. Selling new at two guineas. Any advance on
five shillings? Going for five shillings.
The lacquey lifted his handbell and shook it
Barang
Bang of the lastlap bell spurred the halfmile wheelmen to their sprint.
J. A. Jackson, W. E. Wylie, A. Munro and H. T. Gahan, their stretched
necks wagging, negotiated the curve by the College library.
Mr Dedalus, tugging a long moustache, came round from Williams's
row. He halted near his daughter.
It's time for you, she said.
Stand up straight for the love of the lord Jesus, Mr Dedalus said. Are
you trying to imitate your uncle John, the cornetplayer, head upon
shoulder? Melancholy God
Dilly shrugged her shoulders. Mr Dedalus placed his hands on them
and held them back.
Stand up straight, girl, he said. You'll get curvature of the spine.
Do you know what you look like?
He let his head sink suddenly down and forward, hunching his
shoulders and dropping his underjaw.
Give it up, father, Dilly said. All the people are looking at you.
Mr Dedalus drew himself upright and tugged again at his moustache.
Did you get any money? Dilly asked.
Where would I get money? Mr Dedalus said. There is noone in Dublin
would lend me fourpence.
You got some, Dilly said, looking in his eyes.
How do you know that? Mr Dedalus asked, his tongue in his cheek.
Mr Kernan, pleased with the order he had booked, walked boldly
along James's street.
I know you did, Dilly answered. Were you in the Scotch house now?
I was not, then, Mr Dedalus said, smiling. Was it the little nuns
taught you to be so saucy? Here.
He handed her a shilling.
See if you can do anything with that, he said.
I suppose you got five, Dilly said. Give me more than that.
Wait awhile, Mr Dedalus said threateningly. You're like the rest of
them, are you? An insolent pack of little bitches since your poor mother
died. But wait awhile. You'll all get a short shrift and a long day from
me. Low blackguardism I'm going to get rid of you. Wouldn't care if I
was stretched out stiff. He's dead. The man upstairs is dead.
He left her and walked on. Dilly followed quickly and pulled his coat.
Well, what is it? he said, stopping.
The lacquey rang his bell behind their backs.
Barang
Curse your bloody blatant soul, Mr Dedalus cried, turning on him.
The lacquey, aware of comment, shook the lolling clapper of his bell
but feebly
Bang
Mr Dedalus stared at him.
Watch him, he said. It's instructive. I wonder will he allow us to talk.
You got more than that, father, Dilly said.
I'm going to show you a little trick, Mr Dedalus said. I'll leave you
all where Jesus left the jews. Look, there's all I have. I got two
shillings from Jack Power and I spent twopence for a shave for the
funeral.
He drew forth a handful of copper coins, nervously.
Can't you look for some money somewhere? Dilly said.
Mr Dedalus thought and nodded.
I will, he said gravely. I looked all along the gutter in O'Connell
street. I'll try this one now.
You're very funny, Dilly said, grinning.
Here, Mr Dedalus said, handing her two pennies. Get a glass of milk for
yourself and a bun or a something. I'll be home shortly.
He put the other coins in his pocket and started to walk on.
The viceregal cavalcade passed, greeted by obsequious policemen, out
of Parkgate.
I'm sure you have another shilling, Dilly said.
The lacquey banged loudly.
Mr Dedalus amid the din walked off, murmuring to himself with a
pursing mincing mouth gently
The little nuns Nice little things O, sure they wouldn't do anything
O, sure they wouldn't really Is it little sister Monica
From the sundial towards James's gate walked Mr Kernan, pleased with the
order he had booked for Pulbrook Robertson, boldly along James's street,
past Shackleton's offices. Got round him all right. How do you do, Mr
Crimmins? First rate, sir. I was afraid you might be up in your other
establishment in Pimlico. How are things going? Just keeping alive.
Lovely weather we're having. Yes, indeed. Good for the country. Those
farmers are always grumbling. I'll just take a thimbleful of your best
gin, Mr Crimmins. A small gin, sir. Yes, sir. Terrible affair that
General Slocum explosion. Terrible, terrible A thousand casualties. And
heartrending scenes. Men trampling down women and children. Most brutal
thing. What do they say was the cause? Spontaneous combustion. Most
scandalous revelation. Not a single lifeboat would float and the firehose
all burst. What I can't understand is how the inspectors ever allowed a
boat like that ... Now, you're talking straight, Mr Crimmins. You know
why? Palm oil. Is that a fact? Without a doubt. Well now, look at that.
And America they say is the land of the free. I thought we were bad here.
I smiled at him. AMERICA, I said quietly, just like that. WHAT IS IT? THE
SWEEPINGS OF EVERY COUNTRY INCLUDING OUR OWN. ISN'T THAT TRUE? That's a
fact.
Graft, my dear sir. Well, of course, where there's money going there's
always someone to pick it up.
Saw him looking at my frockcoat. Dress does it. Nothing like a dressy
appearance. Bowls them over.
Hello, Simon, Father Cowley said. How are things?
Hello, Bob, old man, Mr Dedalus answered, stopping.
Mr Kernan halted and preened himself before the sloping mirror of Peter
Kennedy, hairdresser. Stylish coat, beyond a doubt. Scott of Dawson
street. Well worth the half sovereign I gave Neary for it. Never built
under three guineas. Fits me down to the ground. Some Kildare street club
toff had it probably. John Mulligan, the manager of the Hibernian bank,
gave me a very sharp eye yesterday on Carlisle bridge as if he remembered
me.
Aham Must dress the character for those fellows. Knight of the road.
Gentleman. And now, Mr Crimmins, may we have the honour of your custom
again, sir. The cup that cheers but not inebriates, as the old saying has
it.
North wall and sir John Rogerson's quay, with hulls and anchorchains,
sailing westward, sailed by a skiff, a crumpled throwaway, rocked on the
ferrywash, Elijah is coming.
Mr Kernan glanced in farewell at his image. High colour, of course.
Grizzled moustache. Returned Indian officer. Bravely he bore his stumpy
body forward on spatted feet, squaring his shoulders. Is that Ned
Lambert's brother over the way, Sam? What? Yes. He's as like it as damn
it. No. The windscreen of that motorcar in the sun there. Just a flash
like that. Damn like him.
Aham Hot spirit of juniper juice warmed his vitals and his breath. Good
drop of gin, that was. His frocktails winked in bright sunshine to his
fat strut.
Down there Emmet was hanged, drawn and quartered. Greasy black rope. Dogs
licking the blood off the street when the lord lieutenant's wife drove by
in her noddy.
Bad times those were. Well, well. Over and done with. Great topers too.
Fourbottle men.
Let me see. Is he buried in saint Michan's? Or no, there was a midnight
burial in Glasnevin. Corpse brought in through a secret door in the wall.
Dignam is there now. Went out in a puff. Well, well. Better turn down
here. Make a detour.
Mr Kernan turned and walked down the slope of Watling street by the
corner of Guinness's visitors' waitingroom. Outside the Dublin Distillers
Company's stores an outside car without fare or jarvey stood, the reins
knotted to the wheel. Damn dangerous thing. Some Tipperary bosthoon
endangering the lives of the citizens. Runaway horse.
Denis Breen with his tomes, weary of having waited an hour in John Henry
Menton's office, led his wife over O'Connell bridge, bound for the office
of Messrs Collis and Ward.
Mr Kernan approached Island street.
Times of the troubles. Must ask Ned Lambert to lend me those
reminiscences of sir Jonah Barrington. When you look back on it all now
in a kind of retrospective arrangement. Gaming at Daly's. No cardsharping
then. One of those fellows got his hand nailed to the table by a dagger.
Somewhere here lord Edward Fitzgerald escaped from major Sirr. Stables
behind Moira house.
Damn good gin that was.
Fine dashing young nobleman. Good stock, of course. That ruffian, that
sham squire, with his violet gloves gave him away. Course they were on
the wrong side. They rose in dark and evil days. Fine poem that is
Ingram. They were gentlemen. Ben Dollard does sing that ballad
touchingly. Masterly rendition.
AT THE SIEGE OF ROSS DID MY FATHER FALL.
A cavalcade in easy trot along Pembroke quay passed, outriders leaping,
leaping in their, in their saddles. Frockcoats. Cream sunshades.
Mr Kernan hurried forward, blowing pursily.
His Excellency Too bad Just missed that by a hair. Damn it What a
pity
Stephen Dedalus watched through the webbed window the lapidary's fingers
prove a timedulled chain. Dust webbed the window and the showtrays. Dust
darkened the toiling fingers with their vulture nails. Dust slept on dull
coils of bronze and silver, lozenges of cinnabar, on rubies, leprous and
winedark stones.
Born all in the dark wormy earth, cold specks of fire, evil, lights
shining in the darkness. Where fallen archangels flung the stars of their
brows. Muddy swinesnouts, hands, root and root, gripe and wrest them.
She dances in a foul gloom where gum bums with garlic. A sailorman,
rustbearded, sips from a beaker rum and eyes her. A long and seafed
silent rut. She dances, capers, wagging her sowish haunches and her hips,
on her gross belly flapping a ruby egg.
Old Russell with a smeared shammy rag burnished again his gem, turned it
and held it at the point of his Moses' beard. Grandfather ape gloating on
a stolen hoard.
And you who wrest old images from the burial earth? The brainsick words
of sophists Antisthenes. A lore of drugs. Orient and immortal wheat
standing from everlasting to everlasting.
Two old women fresh from their whiff of the briny trudged through
Irishtown along London bridge road, one with a sanded tired umbrella, one
with a midwife's bag in which eleven cockles rolled.
The whirr of flapping leathern bands and hum of dynamos from the
powerhouse urged Stephen to be on. Beingless beings. Stop Throb always
without you and the throb always within. Your heart you sing of. I
between them. Where? Between two roaring worlds where they swirl, I.
Shatter them, one and both. But stun myself too in the blow. Shatter me
you who can. Bawd and butcher were the words. I say Not yet awhile. A
look around.
Yes, quite true. Very large and wonderful and keeps famous time. You say
right, sir. A Monday morning, 'twas so, indeed.
Stephen went down Bedford row, the handle of the ash clacking against his
shoulderblade. In Clohissey's window a faded  print of Heenan boxing
Sayers held his eye. Staring backers with square hats stood round the
roped prizering. The heavyweights in tight loincloths proposed gently
each to other his bulbous fists. And they are throbbing heroes' hearts.
He turned and halted by the slanted bookcart.
Twopence each, the huckster said. Four for sixpence.
Tattered pages. THE IRISH BEEKEEPER. LIFE AND MIRACLES OF THE CURE' OF
ARS. POCKET GUIDE TO KILLARNEY.
I might find here one of my pawned schoolprizes. STEPHANO DEDALO, ALUMNO
OPTIMO, PALMAM FERENTI.
Father Conmee, having read his little hours, walked through the hamlet of
Donnycarney, murmuring vespers.
Binding too good probably. What is this? Eighth and ninth book of Moses.
Secret of all secrets. Seal of King David. Thumbed pages read and read.
Who has passed here before me? How to soften chapped hands. Recipe for
white wine vinegar. How to win a woman's love. For me this. Say the
following talisman three times with hands folded
SE EL YILO NEBRAKADA FEMININUM AMOR ME SOLO SANKTUS AMEN.
Who wrote this? Charms and invocations of the most blessed abbot Peter
Salanka to all true believers divulged. As good as any other abbot's
charms, as mumbling Joachim's. Down, baldynoddle, or we'll wool your
wool.
What are you doing here, Stephen?
Dilly's high shoulders and shabby dress.
Shut the book quick. Don't let see.
What are you doing? Stephen said.
A Stuart face of nonesuch Charles, lank locks falling at its sides. It
glowed as she crouched feeding the fire with broken boots. I told her of
Paris. Late lieabed under a quilt of old overcoats, fingering a pinchbeck
bracelet, Dan Kelly's token. NEBRAKADA FEMININUM.
What have you there? Stephen asked.
I bought it from the other cart for a penny, Dilly said, laughing
nervously. Is it any good?
My eyes they say she has. Do others see me so? Quick, far and daring.
Shadow of my mind.
He took the coverless book from her hand. Chardenal's French primer.
What did you buy that for? he asked. To learn French?
She nodded, reddening and closing tight her lips.
Show no surprise. Quite natural.
Here, Stephen said. It's all right. Mind Maggy doesn't pawn it on you.
I suppose all my books are gone.
Some, Dilly said. We had to.
She is drowning. Agenbite. Save her. Agenbite. All against us. She will
drown me with her, eyes and hair. Lank coils of seaweed hair around me,
my heart, my soul. Salt green death.
We.
Agenbite of inwit. Inwit's agenbite.
Misery Misery
Hello, Simon, Father Cowley said. How are things?
Hello, Bob, old man, Mr Dedalus answered, stopping.
They clasped hands loudly outside Reddy and Daughter's. Father Cowley
brushed his moustache often downward with a scooping hand.
What's the best news? Mr Dedalus said.
Why then not much, Father Cowley said. I'm barricaded up, Simon, with
two men prowling around the house trying to effect an entrance.
Jolly, Mr Dedalus said. Who is it?
O, Father Cowley said. A certain gombeen man of our acquaintance.
With a broken back, is it? Mr Dedalus asked.
The same, Simon, Father Cowley answered. Reuben of that ilk. I'm just
waiting for Ben Dollard. He's going to say a word to long John to get him
to take those two men off. All I want is a little time.
He looked with vague hope up and down the quay, a big apple bulging in
his neck.
I know, Mr Dedalus said, nodding. Poor old bockedy Ben He's always
doing a good turn for someone. Hold hard
He put on his glasses and gazed towards the metal bridge an instant.
There he is, by God, he said, arse and pockets.
Ben Dollard's loose blue cutaway and square hat above large slops crossed
the quay in full gait from the metal bridge. He came towards them at an
amble, scratching actively behind his coattails.
As he came near Mr Dedalus greeted
Hold that fellow with the bad trousers.
Hold him now, Ben Dollard said.
Mr Dedalus eyed with cold wandering scorn various points of Ben Dollard's
figure. Then, turning to Father Cowley with a nod, he muttered
sneeringly
That's a pretty garment, isn't it, for a summer's day?
Why, God eternally curse your soul, Ben Dollard growled furiously, I
threw out more clothes in my time than you ever saw.
He stood beside them beaming, on them first and on his roomy clothes from
points of which Mr Dedalus flicked fluff, saying
They were made for a man in his health, Ben, anyhow.
Bad luck to the jewman that made them, Ben Dollard said. Thanks be to
God he's not paid yet.
And how is that BASSO PROFONDO, Benjamin? Father Cowley asked.
Cashel Boyle O'Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell, murmuring, glassyeyed,
strode past the Kildare street club.
Ben Dollard frowned and, making suddenly a chanter's mouth, gave forth a
deep note.
Aw he said.
That's the style, Mr Dedalus said, nodding to its drone.
What about that? Ben Dollard said. Not too dusty? What?
He turned to both.
That'll do, Father Cowley said, nodding also.
The reverend Hugh C. Love walked from the old chapterhouse of saint
Mary's abbey past James and Charles Kennedy's, rectifiers, attended by
Geraldines tall and personable, towards the Tholsel beyond the ford of
hurdles.
Ben Dollard with a heavy list towards the shopfronts led them forward,
his joyful fingers in the air.
Come along with me to the subsheriff's office, he said. I want to show
you the new beauty Rock has for a bailiff. He's a cross between Lobengula
and Lynchehaun. He's well worth seeing, mind you. Come along. I saw John
Henry Menton casually in the Bodega just now and it will cost me a fall
if I don't ... Wait awhile ... We're on the right lay, Bob, believe you
me.
For a few days tell him, Father Cowley said anxiously.
Ben Dollard halted and stared, his loud orifice open, a dangling button
of his coat wagging brightbacked from its thread as he wiped away the
heavy shraums that clogged his eyes to hear aright.
What few days? he boomed. Hasn't your landlord distrained for rent?
He has, Father Cowley said.
Then our friend's writ is not worth the paper it's printed on, Ben
Dollard said. The landlord has the prior claim. I gave him all the
particulars.  Windsor avenue. Love is the name?
That's right, Father Cowley said. The reverend Mr Love. He's a minister
in the country somewhere. But are you sure of that?
You can tell Barabbas from me, Ben Dollard said, that he can put that
writ where Jacko put the nuts.
He led Father Cowley boldly forward, linked to his bulk.
Filberts I believe they were, Mr Dedalus said, as he dropped his
glasses on his coatfront, following them.
The youngster will be all right, Martin Cunningham said, as they passed
out of the Castleyard gate.
The policeman touched his forehead.
God bless you, Martin Cunningham said, cheerily.
He signed to the waiting jarvey who chucked at the reins and set on
towards Lord Edward street.
Bronze by gold, Miss Kennedy's head by Miss Douce's head, appeared above
the crossblind of the Ormond hotel.
Yes, Martin Cunningham said, fingering his beard. I wrote to Father
Conmee and laid the whole case before him.
You could try our friend, Mr Power suggested backward.
Boyd? Martin Cunningham said shortly. Touch me not.
John Wyse Nolan, lagging behind, reading the list, came after them
quickly down Cork hill.
On the steps of the City hall Councillor Nannetti, descending, hailed
Alderman Cowley and Councillor Abraham Lyon ascending.
The castle car wheeled empty into upper Exchange street.
Look here, Martin, John Wyse Nolan said, overtaking them at the MAIL
office. I see Bloom put his name down for five shillings.
Quite right, Martin Cunningham said, taking the list. And put down the
five shillings too.
Without a second word either, Mr Power said.
Strange but true, Martin Cunningham added.
John Wyse Nolan opened wide eyes.
I'll say there is much kindness in the jew, he quoted, elegantly.
They went down Parliament street.
There's Jimmy Henry, Mr Power said, just heading for Kavanagh's.
Righto, Martin Cunningham said. Here goes.
Outside LA MAISON CLAIRE Blazes Boylan waylaid Jack Mooney's brotherin
law, humpy, tight, making for the liberties.
John Wyse Nolan fell back with Mr Power, while Martin Cunningham took the
elbow of a dapper little man in a shower of hail suit, who walked
uncertainly, with hasty steps past Micky Anderson's watches.
The assistant town clerk's corns are giving him some trouble, John Wyse
Nolan told Mr Power.
They followed round the corner towards James Kavanagh's winerooms. The
empty castle car fronted them at rest in Essex gate. Martin Cunningham,
speaking always, showed often the list at which Jimmy Henry did not
glance.
And long John Fanning is here too, John Wyse Nolan said, as large as
life.
The tall form of long John Fanning filled the doorway where he stood.
Good day, Mr Subsheriff, Martin Cunningham said, as all halted and
greeted.
Long John Fanning made no way for them. He removed his large Henry Clay
decisively and his large fierce eyes scowled intelligently over all their
faces.
Are the conscript fathers pursuing their peaceful deliberations? he
said with rich acrid utterance to the assistant town clerk.
Hell open to christians they were having, Jimmy Henry said pettishly,
about their damned Irish language. Where was the marshal, he wanted to
know, to keep order in the council chamber. And old Barlow the macebearer
laid up with asthma, no mace on the table, nothing in order, no quorum
even, and Hutchinson, the lord mayor, in Llandudno and little Lorcan
Sherlock doing LOCUM TENENS for him. Damned Irish language, language of
our forefathers.
Long John Fanning blew a plume of smoke from his lips.
Martin Cunningham spoke by turns, twirling the peak of his beard, to the
assistant town clerk and the subsheriff, while John Wyse Nolan held his
peace.
What Dignam was that? long John Fanning asked.
Jimmy Henry made a grimace and lifted his left foot.
O, my corns he said plaintively. Come upstairs for goodness' sake till
I sit down somewhere. Uff Ooo Mind
Testily he made room for himself beside long John Fanning's flank and
passed in and up the stairs.
Come on up, Martin Cunningham said to the subsheriff. I don't think you
knew him or perhaps you did, though.
With John Wyse Nolan Mr Power followed them in.
Decent little soul he was, Mr Power said to the stalwart back of long
John Fanning ascending towards long John Fanning in the mirror.
Rather lowsized. Dignam of Menton's office that was, Martin Cunningham
said.
Long John Fanning could not remember him.
Clatter of horsehoofs sounded from the air.
What's that? Martin Cunningham said.
All turned where they stood. John Wyse Nolan came down again. From the
cool shadow of the doorway he saw the horses pass Parliament street,
harness and glossy pasterns in sunlight shimmering. Gaily they went past
before his cool unfriendly eyes, not quickly. In saddles of the leaders,
leaping leaders, rode outriders.
What was it? Martin Cunningham asked, as they went on up the staircase.
The lord lieutenantgeneral and general governor of Ireland, John Wyse
Nolan answered from the stairfoot.
As they trod across the thick carpet Buck Mulligan whispered behind
his Panama to Haines
Parnell's brother. There in the corner.
They chose a small table near the window, opposite a longfaced man
whose beard and gaze hung intently down on a chessboard.
Is that he? Haines asked, twisting round in his seat.
Yes, Mulligan said. That's John Howard, his brother, our city marshal.
John Howard Parnell translated a white bishop quietly and his grey
claw went up again to his forehead whereat it rested. An instant after,
under its screen, his eyes looked quickly, ghostbright, at his foe and
fell once more upon a working corner.
I'll take a MELANGE, Haines said to the waitress.
Two MELANGES, Buck Mulligan said. And bring us some scones and butter
and some cakes as well.
When she had gone he said, laughing
We call it D.B.C. because they have damn bad cakes. O, but you missed
Dedalus on HAMLET.
Haines opened his newbought book.
I'm sorry, he said. Shakespeare is the happy huntingground of all minds
that have lost their balance.
The onelegged sailor growled at the area of  Nelson street
ENGLAND EXPECTS ...
Buck Mulligan's primrose waistcoat shook gaily to his laughter.
You should see him, he said, when his body loses its balance. Wandering
Aengus I call him.
I am sure he has an IDEE FIXE, Haines said, pinching his chin
thoughtfully with thumb and forefinger. Now I am speculating what it would
be likely to be. Such persons always have.
Buck Mulligan bent across the table gravely.
They drove his wits astray, he said, by visions of hell. He will never
capture the Attic note. The note of Swinburne, of all poets, the white
death and the ruddy birth. That is his tragedy. He can never be a poet.
The joy of creation ...
Eternal punishment, Haines said, nodding curtly. I see. I tackled him
this morning on belief. There was something on his mind, I saw. It's
rather interesting because professor Pokorny of Vienna makes an
interesting point out of that.
Buck Mulligan's watchful eyes saw the waitress come. He helped her
to unload her tray.
He can find no trace of hell in ancient Irish myth, Haines said, amid
the cheerful cups. The moral idea seems lacking, the sense of destiny, of
retribution. Rather strange he should have just that fixed idea. Does he
write anything for your movement?
He sank two lumps of sugar deftly longwise through the whipped
cream. Buck Mulligan slit a steaming scone in two and plastered butter
over its smoking pith. He bit off a soft piece hungrily.
Ten years, he said, chewing and laughing. He is going to write something
in ten years.
Seems a long way off, Haines said, thoughtfully lifting his spoon.
Still, I shouldn't wonder if he did after all.
He tasted a spoonful from the creamy cone of his cup.
This is real Irish cream I take it, he said with forbearance.
I don't want to be imposed on.
Elijah, skiff, light crumpled throwaway, sailed eastward by flanks of
ships and trawlers, amid an archipelago of corks, beyond new Wapping
street past Benson's ferry, and by the threemasted schooner ROSEVEAN from
Bridgwater with bricks.
Almidano Artifoni walked past Holles street, past Sewell's yard.
Behind him Cashel Boyle O'Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell, with
stickumbrelladustcoat dangling, shunned the lamp before Mr Law Smith's
house and, crossing, walked along Merrion square. Distantly behind him a
blind stripling tapped his way by the wall of College park.
Cashel Boyle O'Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell walked as far as
Mr Lewis Werner's cheerful windows, then turned and strode back along
Merrion square, his stickumbrelladustcoat dangling.
At the corner of Wilde's house he halted, frowned at Elijah's name
announced on the Metropolitan hall, frowned at the distant pleasance of
duke's lawn. His eyeglass flashed frowning in the sun. With ratsteeth
bared he muttered
COACTUS VOLUI.
He strode on for Clare street, grinding his fierce word.
As he strode past Mr Bloom's dental windows the sway of his
dustcoat brushed rudely from its angle a slender tapping cane and swept
onwards, having buffeted a thewless body. The blind stripling turned his
sickly face after the striding form.
God's curse on you, he said sourly, whoever you are You're blinder nor
I am, you bitch's bastard
Opposite Ruggy O'Donohoe's Master Patrick Aloysius Dignam,
pawing the pound and a half of Mangan's, late Fehrenbach's, porksteaks he
had been sent for, went along warm Wicklow street dawdling. It was too
blooming dull sitting in the parlour with Mrs Stoer and Mrs Quigley and
Mrs MacDowell and the blind down and they all at their sniffles and
sipping sups of the superior tawny sherry uncle Barney brought from
Tunney's. And they eating crumbs of the cottage fruitcake, jawing the
whole blooming time and sighing.
After Wicklow lane the window of Madame Doyle, courtdress
milliner, stopped him. He stood looking in at the two puckers stripped to
their pelts and putting up their props. From the sidemirrors two mourning
Masters Dignam gaped silently. Myler Keogh, Dublin's pet lamb, will meet
sergeantmajor Bennett, the Portobello bruiser, for a purse of fifty
sovereigns. Gob, that'd be a good pucking match to see. Myler Keogh,
that's the chap sparring out to him with the green sash. Two bar entrance,
soldiers half price. I could easy do a bunk on ma. Master Dignam on his
left turned as he turned. That's me in mourning. When is it? May the
twentysecond. Sure, the blooming thing is all over. He turned to the right
and on his right Master Dignam turned, his cap awry, his collar sticking
up. Buttoning it down, his chin lifted, he saw the image of Marie Kendall,
charming soubrette, beside the two puckers. One of them mots that do be in
the packets of fags Stoer smokes that his old fellow welted hell out of
him for one time he found out.
Master Dignam got his collar down and dawdled on. The best pucker
going for strength was Fitzsimons. One puck in the wind from that fellow
would knock you into the middle of next week, man. But the best pucker
for science was Jem Corbet before Fitzsimons knocked the stuffings out of
him, dodging and all.
In Grafton street Master Dignam saw a red flower in a toff's mouth
and a swell pair of kicks on him and he listening to what the drunk was
telling him and grinning all the time.
No Sandymount tram.
Master Dignam walked along Nassau street, shifted the porksteaks to
his other hand. His collar sprang up again and he tugged it down. The
blooming stud was too small for the buttonhole of the shirt, blooming end
to it. He met schoolboys with satchels. I'm not going tomorrow either,
stay away till Monday. He met other schoolboys. Do they notice I'm in
mourning? Uncle Barney said he'd get it into the paper tonight. Then
they'll all see it in the paper and read my name printed and pa's name.
His face got all grey instead of being red like it was and there was a
fly walking over it up to his eye. The scrunch that was when they were
screwing the screws into the coffin and the bumps when they were bringing
it downstairs.
Pa was inside it and ma crying in the parlour and uncle Barney telling
the men how to get it round the bend. A big coffin it was, and high and
heavylooking. How was that? The last night pa was boosed he was standing
on the landing there bawling out for his boots to go out to Tunney's for
to boose more and he looked butty and short in his shirt. Never see him
again. Death, that is. Pa is dead. My father is dead. He told me to be a
good son to ma. I couldn't hear the other things he said but I saw his
tongue and his teeth trying to say it better. Poor pa. That was Mr Dignam,
my father. I hope he's in purgatory now because he went to confession to
Father Conroy on Saturday night.
William Humble, earl of Dudley, and lady Dudley, accompanied by
lieutenantcolonel Heseltine, drove out after luncheon from the viceregal
lodge. In the following carriage were the honourable Mrs Paget, Miss de
Courcy and the honourable Gerald Ward A.D.C. in attendance.
The cavalcade passed out by the lower gate of Phoenix park saluted
by obsequious policemen and proceeded past Kingsbridge along the
northern quays. The viceroy was most cordially greeted on his way through
the metropolis. At Bloody bridge Mr Thomas Kernan beyond the river
greeted him vainly from afar Between Queen's and Whitworth bridges lord
Dudley's viceregal carriages passed and were unsaluted by Mr Dudley
White, B. L., M. A., who stood on Arran quay outside Mrs M. E. White's,
the pawnbroker's, at the corner of Arran street west stroking his nose
with his forefinger, undecided whether he should arrive at Phibsborough
more quickly by a triple change of tram or by hailing a car or on foot
through Smithfield, Constitution hill and Broadstone terminus. In the
porch of Four Courts Richie Goulding with the costbag of Goulding,
Collis and Ward saw him with surprise. Past Richmond bridge at the
doorstep of the office of Reuben J Dodd, solicitor, agent for the
Patriotic Insurance Company, an elderly female about to enter changed
her plan and retracing her steps by King's windows smiled credulously
on the representative of His Majesty. From its sluice in Wood quay
wall under Tom Devan's office Poddle river hung out in fealty a tongue
of liquid sewage. Above the crossblind of the Ormond hotel, gold by
bronze, Miss Kennedy's head by Miss Douce's head watched and admired.
On Ormond quay Mr Simon Dedalus, steering his way from the greenhouse
for the subsheriff's office, stood still in midstreet and brought his
hat low. His Excellency graciously returned Mr Dedalus' greeting. From
Cahill's corner the reverend Hugh C. Love, M.A., made obeisance
unperceived, mindful of lords deputies whose hands benignant
had held of yore rich advowsons. On Grattan bridge Lenehan and M'Coy,
taking leave of each other, watched the carriages go by. Passing by Roger
Greene's office and Dollard's big red printinghouse Gerty MacDowell,
carrying the Catesby's cork lino letters for her father who was laid up,
knew by the style it was the lord and lady lieutenant but she couldn't see
what Her Excellency had on because the tram and Spring's big yellow
furniture van had to stop in front of her on account of its being the lord
lieutenant. Beyond Lundy Foot's from the shaded door of Kavanagh's
winerooms John Wyse Nolan smiled with unseen coldness towards the lord
lieutenantgeneral and general governor of Ireland. The Right Honourable
William Humble, earl of Dudley, G. C. V. O., passed Micky Anderson's
all times ticking watches and Henry and James's wax smartsuited
freshcheeked models, the gentleman Henry, DERNIER CRI James. Over against
Dame gate Tom Rochford and Nosey Flynn watched the approach of the
cavalcade. Tom Rochford, seeing the eyes of lady Dudley fixed on him,
took his thumbs quickly out of the pockets of his claret waistcoat and
doffed his cap to her. A charming SOUBRETTE, great Marie Kendall, with
dauby cheeks and lifted skirt smiled daubily from her poster upon William
Humble, earl of Dudley, and upon lieutenantcolonel H. G. Heseltine, and
also upon the honourable Gerald Ward A. D. C. From the window of the
D. B. C. Buck Mulligan gaily, and Haines gravely, gazed down on the
viceregal equipage over the shoulders of eager guests, whose mass of forms
darkened the chessboard whereon John Howard Parnell looked intently. In
Fownes's street Dilly Dedalus, straining her sight upward from
Chardenal's first French primer, saw sunshades spanned and wheelspokes
spinning in the glare. John Henry Menton, filling the doorway of
Commercial Buildings, stared from winebig oyster eyes, holding a fat gold
hunter watch not looked at in his fat left hand not feeling it. Where the
foreleg of King Billy's horse pawed the air Mrs Breen plucked her
hastening husband back from under the hoofs of the outriders. She shouted
in his ear the tidings. Understanding, he shifted his tomes to his left
breast and saluted the second carriage. The honourable Gerald Ward A.D.C.,
agreeably surprised, made haste to reply. At Ponsonby's corner a jaded
white flagon H. halted and four tallhatted white flagons halted behind
him, E.L.Y'S, while outriders pranced past and carriages. Opposite
Pigott's music warerooms Mr Denis J Maginni, professor of dancing c,
gaily apparelled, gravely walked, outpassed by a viceroy and unobserved.
By the provost's wall came jauntily Blazes Boylan, stepping in tan shoes
and socks with skyblue clocks to the refrain of MY GIRL'S A YORKSHIRE
GIRL.
Blazes Boylan presented to the leaders' skyblue frontlets and high
action a skyblue tie, a widebrimmed straw hat at a rakish angle and a suit
of indigo serge. His hands in his jacket pockets forgot to salute but he
offered to the three ladies the bold admiration of his eyes and the red
flower between his lips. As they drove along Nassau street His Excellency
drew the attention of his bowing consort to the programme of music which
was being discoursed in College park. Unseen brazen highland laddies
blared and drumthumped after the CORTEGE
BUT THOUGH SHE'S A FACTORY LASS
AND WEARS NO FANCY CLOTHES.
BARAABUM.
YET I'VE A SORT OF A
YORKSHIRE RELISH FOR
MY LITTLE YORKSHIRE ROSE.
BARAABUM.
Thither of the wall the quartermile flat handicappers, M. C. Green, H.
Shrift, T. M. Patey, C. Scaife, J. B. Jeffs, G. N. Morphy, F. Stevenson,
C. Adderly and W. C. Huggard, started in pursuit. Striding past Finn's
hotel Cashel Boyle O'Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell stared through a
fierce eyeglass across the carriages at the head of Mr M. E. Solomons in
the window of the AustroHungarian viceconsulate. Deep in Leinster street
by Trinity's postern a loyal king's man, Hornblower, touched his tallyho
cap. As the glossy horses pranced by Merrion square Master Patrick
Aloysius Dignam, waiting, saw salutes being given to the gent with the
topper and raised also his new black cap with fingers greased by
porksteak paper. His collar too sprang up. The viceroy, on his way to
inaugurate the Mirus bazaar in aid of funds for Mercer's hospital,
drove with his following towards Lower Mount street. He passed a blind
stripling opposite Broadbent's. In Lower Mount street a pedestrian in a
brown macintosh, eating dry bread, passed swiftly and unscathed across the
viceroy's path. At the Royal Canal bridge, from his hoarding, Mr Eugene
Stratton, his blub lips agrin, bade all comers welcome to Pembroke
township. At Haddington road corner two sanded women halted themselves,
an umbrella and a bag in which eleven cockles rolled to view with wonder
the lord mayor and lady mayoress without his golden chain. On
Northumberland and Lansdowne roads His Excellency acknowledged punctually
salutes from rare male walkers, the salute of two small schoolboys at the
garden gate of the house said to have been admired by the late queen when
visiting the Irish capital with her husband, the prince consort, in 
and the salute of Almidano Artifoni's sturdy trousers swallowed by a
closing door.
Bronze by gold heard the hoofirons, steelyringing Imperthnthn thnthnthn.
Chips, picking chips off rocky thumbnail, chips.
Horrid And gold flushed more.
A husky fifenote blew.
Blew. Blue bloom is on the.
Goldpinnacled hair.
A jumping rose on satiny breast of satin, rose of Castile.
Trilling, trilling Idolores.
Peep Who's in the ... peepofgold?
Tink cried to bronze in pity.
And a call, pure, long and throbbing. Longindying call.
Decoy. Soft word. But look the bright stars fade. Notes chirruping
answer.
O rose Castile. The morn is breaking.
Jingle jingle jaunted jingling.
Coin rang. Clock clacked.
Avowal. SONNEZ. I could. Rebound of garter. Not leave thee. Smack. LA
CLOCHE Thigh smack. Avowal. Warm. Sweetheart, goodbye
Jingle. Bloo.
Boomed crashing chords. When love absorbs. War War The tympanum.
A sail A veil awave upon the waves.
Lost. Throstle fluted. All is lost now.
Horn. Hawhorn.
When first he saw. Alas
Full tup. Full throb.
Warbling. Ah, lure Alluring.
Martha Come
Clapclap. Clipclap. Clappyclap.
Goodgod henev erheard inall.
Deaf bald Pat brought pad knife took up.
A moonlit nightcall far, far.
I feel so sad. P. S. So lonely blooming.
Listen
The spiked and winding cold seahorn. Have you the? Each, and for other,
plash and silent roar.
Pearls when she. Liszt's rhapsodies. Hissss.
You don't?
Did not no, no believe Lidlyd. With a cock with a carra.
Black. Deepsounding. Do, Ben, do.
Wait while you wait. Hee hee. Wait while you hee.
But wait
Low in dark middle earth. Embedded ore.
Naminedamine. Preacher is he
All gone. All fallen.
Tiny, her tremulous fernfoils of maidenhair.
Amen He gnashed in fury.
Fro. To, fro. A baton cool protruding.
Bronzelydia by Minagold.
By bronze, by gold, in oceangreen of shadow. Bloom. Old Bloom.
One rapped, one tapped, with a carra, with a cock.
Pray for him Pray, good people
His gouty fingers nakkering.
Big Benaben. Big Benben.
Last rose Castile of summer left bloom I feel so sad alone.
Pwee Little wind piped wee.
True men. Lid Ker Cow De and Doll. Ay, ay. Like you men. Will lift your
tschink with tschunk.
Fff Oo
Where bronze from anear? Where gold from afar? Where hoofs?
Rrrpr. Kraa. Kraandl.
Then not till then. My eppripfftaph. Be pfrwritt.
Done.
Begin
Bronze by gold, miss Douce's head by miss Kennedy's head, over the
crossblind of the Ormond bar heard the viceregal hoofs go by, ringing
steel.
Is that her? asked miss Kennedy.
Miss Douce said yes, sitting with his ex, pearl grey and EAU DE NIL.
Exquisite contrast, miss Kennedy said.
When all agog miss Douce said eagerly
Look at the fellow in the tall silk.
Who? Where? gold asked more eagerly.
In the second carriage, miss Douce's wet lips said, laughing in the sun.
He's looking. Mind till I see.
She darted, bronze, to the backmost corner, flattening her face
against the pane in a halo of hurried breath.
Her wet lips tittered
He's killed looking back.
She laughed
O wept Aren't men frightful idiots?
With sadness.
Miss Kennedy sauntered sadly from bright light, twining a loose hair
behind an ear. Sauntering sadly, gold no more, she twisted twined a hair.
Sadly she twined in sauntering gold hair behind a curving ear.
It's them has the fine times, sadly then she said.
A man.
Bloowho went by by Moulang's pipes bearing in his breast the sweets
of sin, by Wine's antiques, in memory bearing sweet sinful words, by
Carroll's dusky battered plate, for Raoul.
The boots to them, them in the bar, them barmaids came. For them
unheeding him he banged on the counter his tray of chattering china. And
There's your teas, he said.
Miss Kennedy with manners transposed the teatray down to an
upturned lithia crate, safe from eyes, low.
What is it? loud boots unmannerly asked.
Find out, miss Douce retorted, leaving her spyingpoint.
Your BEAU, is it?
A haughty bronze replied
I'll complain to Mrs de Massey on you if I hear any more of your
impertinent insolence.
Imperthnthn thnthnthn, bootssnout sniffed rudely, as he retreated as she
threatened as he had come.
Bloom.
On her flower frowning miss Douce said
Most aggravating that young brat is. If he doesn't conduct himself I'll
wring his ear for him a yard long.
Ladylike in exquisite contrast.
Take no notice, miss Kennedy rejoined.
She poured in a teacup tea, then back in the teapot tea. They cowered
under their reef of counter, waiting on footstools, crates upturned,
waiting for their teas to draw. They pawed their blouses, both of black
satin, two and nine a yard, waiting for their teas to draw, and two and
seven.
Yes, bronze from anear, by gold from afar, heard steel from anear,
hoofs ring from afar, and heard steelhoofs ringhoof ringsteel.
Am I awfully sunburnt?
Miss bronze unbloused her neck.
No, said miss Kennedy. It gets brown after. Did you try the borax with
the cherry laurel water?
Miss Douce halfstood to see her skin askance in the barmirror
gildedlettered where hock and claret glasses shimmered and in their midst
a shell.
And leave it to my hands, she said.
Try it with the glycerine, miss Kennedy advised.
Bidding her neck and hands adieu miss Douce
Those things only bring out a rash, replied, reseated. I asked that old
fogey in Boyd's for something for my skin.
Miss Kennedy, pouring now a fulldrawn tea, grimaced and prayed
O, don't remind me of him for mercy' sake
But wait till I tell you, miss Douce entreated.
Sweet tea miss Kennedy having poured with milk plugged both two
ears with little fingers.
No, don't, she cried.
I won't listen, she cried.
But Bloom?
Miss Douce grunted in snuffy fogey's tone
For your what? says he.
Miss Kennedy unplugged her ears to hear, to speak but said, but
prayed again
Don't let me think of him or I'll expire. The hideous old wretch That
night in the Antient Concert Rooms.
She sipped distastefully her brew, hot tea, a sip, sipped, sweet tea.
Here he was, miss Douce said, cocking her bronze head three quarters,
ruffling her nosewings. Hufa Hufa
Shrill shriek of laughter sprang from miss Kennedy's throat. Miss
Douce huffed and snorted down her nostrils that quivered imperthnthn like
a snout in quest.
O shrieking, miss Kennedy cried. Will you ever forget his goggle eye?
Miss Douce chimed in in deep bronze laughter, shouting
And your other eye
Bloowhose dark eye read Aaron Figatner's name. Why do I always
think Figather? Gathering figs, I think. And Prosper Lore's huguenot name.
By Bassi's blessed virgins Bloom's dark eyes went by. Bluerobed, white
under, come to me. God they believe she is or goddess. Those today. I
could not see. That fellow spoke. A student. After with Dedalus' son. He
might be Mulligan. All comely virgins. That brings those rakes of fellows
in her white.
By went his eyes. The sweets of sin. Sweet are the sweets.
Of sin.
In a giggling peal young goldbronze voices blended, Douce with
Kennedy your other eye. They threw young heads back, bronze gigglegold,
to let freefly their laughter, screaming, your other, signals to each
other, high piercing notes.
Ah, panting, sighing, sighing, ah, fordone, their mirth died down.
Miss Kennedy lipped her cup again, raised, drank a sip and
gigglegiggled. Miss Douce, bending over the teatray, ruffled again her
nose and rolled droll fattened eyes. Again Kennygiggles, stooping, her
fair pinnacles of hair, stooping, her tortoise napecomb showed, spluttered
out of her mouth her tea, choking in tea and laughter, coughing with
choking, crying
O greasy eyes Imagine being married to a man like that she cried. With
his bit of beard
Douce gave full vent to a splendid yell, a full yell of full woman,
delight, joy, indignation.
Married to the greasy nose she yelled.
Shrill, with deep laughter, after, gold after bronze, they urged each
each to peal after peal, ringing in changes, bronzegold, goldbronze,
shrilldeep, to laughter after laughter. And then laughed more. Greasy I
knows. Exhausted, breathless, their shaken heads they laid, braided and
pinnacled by glossycombed, against the counterledge. All flushed O,
panting, sweating O, all breathless.
Married to Bloom, to greaseabloom.
O saints above miss Douce said, sighed above her jumping rose. I wished
I hadn't laughed so much. I feel all wet.
O, miss Douce miss Kennedy protested. You horrid thing
And flushed yet more you horrid, more goldenly.
By Cantwell's offices roved Greaseabloom, by Ceppi's virgins, bright
of their oils. Nannetti's father hawked those things about, wheedling at
doors as I. Religion pays. Must see him for that par. Eat first. I want.
Not yet. At four, she said. Time ever passing. Clockhands turning. On.
Where eat? The Clarence, Dolphin. On. For Raoul. Eat. If I net five
guineas with those ads. The violet silk petticoats. Not yet. The sweets
of sin.
Flushed less, still less, goldenly paled.
Into their bar strolled Mr Dedalus. Chips, picking chips off one of his
rocky thumbnails. Chips. He strolled.
O, welcome back, miss Douce.
He held her hand. Enjoyed her holidays?
Tiptop.
He hoped she had nice weather in Rostrevor.
Gorgeous, she said. Look at the holy show I am. Lying out on the strand
all day.
Bronze whiteness.
That was exceedingly naughty of you, Mr Dedalus told her and pressed
her hand indulgently. Tempting poor simple males.
Miss Douce of satin douced her arm away.
O go away she said. You're very simple, I don't think.
He was.
Well now I am, he mused. I looked so simple in the cradle they christened
me simple Simon.
You must have been a doaty, miss Douce made answer. And what did the
doctor order today?
Well now, he mused, whatever you say yourself. I think I'll trouble you
for some fresh water and a half glass of whisky.
Jingle.
With the greatest alacrity, miss Douce agreed.
With grace of alacrity towards the mirror gilt Cantrell and
Cochrane's she turned herself. With grace she tapped a measure of gold
whisky from her crystal keg. Forth from the skirt of his coat Mr Dedalus
brought pouch and pipe. Alacrity she served. He blew through the flue two
husky fifenotes.
By Jove, he mused, I often wanted to see the Mourne mountains. Must be
a great tonic in the air down there. But a long threatening comes at last,
they say. Yes. Yes.
Yes. He fingered shreds of hair, her maidenhair, her mermaid's, into
the bowl. Chips. Shreds. Musing. Mute.
None nought said nothing. Yes.
Gaily miss Douce polished a tumbler, trilling
O, IDOLORES, QUEEN OF THE EASTERN SEAS
Was Mr Lidwell in today?
In came Lenehan. Round him peered Lenehan. Mr Bloom reached Essex bridge.
Yes, Mr Bloom crossed bridge of Yessex. To Martha I must write. Buy paper.
Daly's. Girl there civil. Bloom. Old Bloom. Blue bloom is on the rye.
He was in at lunchtime, miss Douce said.
Lenehan came forward.
Was Mr Boylan looking for me?
He asked. She answered
Miss Kennedy, was Mr Boylan in while I was upstairs?
She asked. Miss voice of Kennedy answered, a second teacup poised,
her gaze upon a page
No. He was not.
Miss gaze of Kennedy, heard, not seen, read on. Lenehan round the
sandwichbell wound his round body round.
Peep Who's in the corner?
No glance of Kennedy rewarding him he yet made overtures. To mind
her stops. To read only the black ones round o and crooked ess.
Jingle jaunty jingle.
Girlgold she read and did not glance. Take no notice. She took no
notice while he read by rote a solfa fable for her, plappering flatly
Ah fox met ah stork. Said thee fox too thee stork Will you put your
bill down inn my troath and pull upp ah bone?
He droned in vain. Miss Douce turned to her tea aside.
He sighed aside
Ah me O my
He greeted Mr Dedalus and got a nod.
Greetings from the famous son of a famous father.
Who may he be? Mr Dedalus asked.
Lenehan opened most genial arms. Who?
Who may he be? he asked. Can you ask? Stephen, the youthful bard.
Dry.
Mr Dedalus, famous father, laid by his dry filled pipe.
I see, he said. I didn't recognise him for the moment. I hear he is
keeping very select company. Have you seen him lately?
He had.
I quaffed the nectarbowl with him this very day, said Lenehan. In
Mooney's EN VILLE and in Mooney's SUR MER. He had received the rhino for
the labour of his muse.
He smiled at bronze's teabathed lips, at listening lips and eyes
The ELITE of Erin hung upon his lips. The ponderous pundit, Hugh
MacHugh, Dublin's most brilliant scribe and editor and that minstrel boy
of the wild wet west who is known by the euphonious appellation of the
O'Madden Burke.
After an interval Mr Dedalus raised his grog and
That must have been highly diverting, said he. I see.
He see. He drank. With faraway mourning mountain eye. Set down
his glass.
He looked towards the saloon door.
I see you have moved the piano.
The tuner was in today, miss Douce replied, tuning it for the smoking
concert and I never heard such an exquisite player.
Is that a fact?
Didn't he, miss Kennedy? The real classical, you know. And blind too,
poor fellow. Not twenty I'm sure he was.
Is that a fact? Mr Dedalus said.
He drank and strayed away.
So sad to look at his face, miss Douce condoled.
God's curse on bitch's bastard.
Tink to her pity cried a diner's bell. To the door of the bar and
diningroom came bald Pat, came bothered Pat, came Pat, waiter of
Ormond. Lager for diner. Lager without alacrity she served.
With patience Lenehan waited for Boylan with impatience, for
jinglejaunty blazes boy.
Upholding the lid he who? gazed in the coffin coffin? at the
oblique triple piano wires. He pressed the same who pressed
indulgently her hand, soft pedalling, a triple of keys to see the
thicknesses of felt advancing, to hear the muffled hammerfall in action.
Two sheets cream vellum paper one reserve two envelopes when I was
in Wisdom Hely's wise Bloom in Daly's Henry Flower bought. Are you not
happy in your home? Flower to console me and a pin cuts lo. Means
something, language of flow. Was it a daisy? Innocence that is.
Respectable girl meet after mass. Thanks awfully muchly. Wise Bloom eyed
on the door a poster, a swaying mermaid smoking mid nice waves. Smoke
mermaids, coolest whiff of all. Hair streaming lovelorn. For some man.
For Raoul. He eyed and saw afar on Essex bridge a gay hat riding on a
jaunting car. It is. Again. Third time. Coincidence.
Jingling on supple rubbers it jaunted from the bridge to Ormond
quay. Follow. Risk it. Go quick. At four. Near now. Out.
Twopence, sir, the shopgirl dared to say.
Aha ... I was forgetting ... Excuse ...
And four.
At four she. Winsomely she on Bloohimwhom smiled. Bloo smi qui
go. Ternoon. Think you're the only pebble on the beach? Does that to all.
For men.
In drowsy silence gold bent on her page.
From the saloon a call came, long in dying. That was a tuningfork the
tuner had that he forgot that he now struck. A call again. That he now
poised that it now throbbed. You hear? It throbbed, pure, purer, softly
and softlier, its buzzing prongs. Longer in dying call.
Pat paid for diner's popcorked bottle and over tumbler, tray and
popcorked bottle ere he went he whispered, bald and bothered, with Miss
Douce.
THE BRIGHT STARS FADE ...
A voiceless song sang from within, singing
... THE MORN IS BREAKING.
A duodene of birdnotes chirruped bright treble answer under sensitive
hands. Brightly the keys, all twinkling, linked, all harpsichording,
called to a voice to sing the strain of dewy morn, of youth, of love's
leavetaking, life's, love's morn.
THE DEWDROPS PEARL ...
Lenehan's lips over the counter lisped a low whistle of decoy.
But look this way, he said, rose of Castile.
Jingle jaunted by the curb and stopped.
She rose and closed her reading, rose of Castile fretted, forlorn,
dreamily rose.
Did she fall or was she pushed? he asked her.
She answered, slighting
Ask no questions and you'll hear no lies.
Like lady, ladylike.
Blazes Boylan's smart tan shoes creaked on the barfloor where he
strode. Yes, gold from anear by bronze from afar. Lenehan heard and knew
and hailed him
See the conquering hero comes.
Between the car and window, warily walking, went Bloom,
unconquered hero. See me he might. The seat he sat on warm. Black wary
hecat walked towards Richie Goulding's legal bag, lifted aloft, saluting.
AND I FROM THEE ...
I heard you were round, said Blazes Boylan.
He touched to fair miss Kennedy a rim of his slanted straw. She
smiled on him. But sister bronze outsmiled her, preening for him her
richer hair, a bosom and a rose.
Smart Boylan bespoke potions.
What's your cry? Glass of bitter? Glass of bitter, please, and a sloegin
for me. Wire in yet?
Not yet. At four she. Who said four?
Cowley's red lugs and bulging apple in the door of the sheriff's office.
Avoid. Goulding a chance. What is he doing in the Ormond? Car waiting.
Wait.
Hello. Where off to? Something to eat? I too was just. In here. What,
Ormond? Best value in Dublin. Is that so? Diningroom. Sit tight there.
See, not be seen. I think I'll join you. Come on. Richie led on. Bloom
followed bag. Dinner fit for a prince.
Miss Douce reached high to take a flagon, stretching her satin arm,
her bust, that all but burst, so high.
O O jerked Lenehan, gasping at each stretch. O
But easily she seized her prey and led it low in triumph.
Why don't you grow? asked Blazes Boylan.
Shebronze, dealing from her oblique jar thick syrupy liquor for his
lips, looked as it flowed flower in his coat who gave him?, and
syrupped with her voice
Fine goods in small parcels.
That is to say she. Neatly she poured slowsyrupy sloe.
Here's fortune, Blazes said.
He pitched a broad coin down. Coin rang.
Hold on, said Lenehan, till I ...
Fortune, he wished, lifting his bubbled ale.
Sceptre will win in a canter, he said.
I plunged a bit, said Boylan winking and drinking. Not on my own, you
know. Fancy of a friend of mine.
Lenehan still drank and grinned at his tilted ale and at miss Douce's
lips that all but hummed, not shut, the oceansong her lips had trilled.
Idolores. The eastern seas.
Clock whirred. Miss Kennedy passed their way flower, wonder who
gave, bearing away teatray. Clock clacked.
Miss Douce took Boylan's coin, struck boldly the cashregister. It
clanged. Clock clacked. Fair one of Egypt teased and sorted in the till
and hummed and handed coins in change. Look to the west. A clack. For me.
What time is that? asked Blazes Boylan. Four?
O'clock.
Lenehan, small eyes ahunger on her humming, bust ahumming,
tugged Blazes Boylan's elbowsleeve.
Let's hear the time, he said.
The bag of Goulding, Collis, Ward led Bloom by ryebloom flowered
tables. Aimless he chose with agitated aim, bald Pat attending, a table
near the door. Be near. At four. Has he forgotten? Perhaps a trick. Not
come whet appetite. I couldn't do. Wait, wait. Pat, waiter, waited.
Sparkling bronze azure eyed Blazure's skyblue bow and eyes.
Go on, pressed Lenehan. There's noone. He never heard.
... TO FLORA'S LIPS DID HIE.
High, a high note pealed in the treble clear.
Bronzedouce communing with her rose that sank and rose sought
Blazes Boylan's flower and eyes.
Please, please.
He pleaded over returning phrases of avowal.
I COULD NOT LEAVE THEE ...
Afterwits, miss Douce promised coyly.
No, now, urged Lenehan. SONNEZLACLOCHE O do There's noone.
She looked. Quick. Miss Kenn out of earshot. Sudden bent. Two
kindling faces watched her bend.
Quavering the chords strayed from the air, found it again, lost chord,
and lost and found it, faltering.
Go on Do SONNEZ
Bending, she nipped a peak of skirt above her knee. Delayed. Taunted
them still, bending, suspending, with wilful eyes.
SONNEZ
Smack. She set free sudden in rebound her nipped elastic garter
smackwarm against her smackable a woman's warmhosed thigh.
LA CLOCHE cried gleeful Lenehan. Trained by owner. No sawdust there.
She smilesmirked supercilious wept aren't men?, but, lightward
gliding, mild she smiled on Boylan.
You're the essence of vulgarity, she in gliding said.
Boylan, eyed, eyed. Tossed to fat lips his chalice, drank off his chalice
tiny, sucking the last fat violet syrupy drops. His spellbound eyes went
after, after her gliding head as it went down the bar by mirrors, gilded
arch for ginger ale, hock and claret glasses shimmering, a spiky shell,
where it concerted, mirrored, bronze with sunnier bronze.
Yes, bronze from anearby.
... SWEETHEART, GOODBYE
I'm off, said Boylan with impatience.
He slid his chalice brisk away, grasped his change.
Wait a shake, begged Lenehan, drinking quickly. I wanted to tell you.
Tom Rochford ...
Come on to blazes, said Blazes Boylan, going.
Lenehan gulped to go.
Got the horn or what? he said. Wait. I'm coming.
He followed the hasty creaking shoes but stood by nimbly by the
threshold, saluting forms, a bulky with a slender.
How do you do, Mr Dollard?
Eh? How do? How do? Ben Dollard's vague bass answered, turning an
instant from Father Cowley's woe. He won't give you any trouble, Bob. Alf
Bergan will speak to the long fellow. We'll put a barleystraw in that
Judas Iscariot's ear this time.
Sighing Mr Dedalus came through the saloon, a finger soothing an
eyelid.
Hoho, we will, Ben Dollard yodled jollily. Come on, Simon. Give us a
ditty. We heard the piano.
Bald Pat, bothered waiter, waited for drink orders. Power for Richie.
And Bloom? Let me see. Not make him walk twice. His corns. Four now.
How warm this black is. Course nerves a bit. Refracts is it? heat. Let
me see. Cider. Yes, bottle of cider.
What's that? Mr Dedalus said. I was only vamping, man.
Come on, come on, Ben Dollard called. Begone dull care. Come, Bob.
He ambled Dollard, bulky slops, before them hold that fellow with
the hold him now into the saloon. He plumped him Dollard on the stool.
His gouty paws plumped chords. Plumped, stopped abrupt.
Bald Pat in the doorway met tealess gold returning. Bothered, he
wanted Power and cider. Bronze by the window, watched, bronze from
afar.
Jingle a tinkle jaunted.
Bloom heard a jing, a little sound. He's off. Light sob of breath Bloom
sighed on the silent bluehued flowers. Jingling. He's gone. Jingle. Hear.
Love and War, Ben, Mr Dedalus said. God be with old times.
Miss Douce's brave eyes, unregarded, turned from the crossblind,
smitten by sunlight. Gone. Pensive who knows?, smitten the smiting
light, she lowered the dropblind with a sliding cord. She drew down
pensive why did he go so quick when I? about her bronze, over the bar
where bald stood by sister gold, inexquisite contrast, contrast
inexquisite nonexquisite, slow cool dim seagreen sliding depth of shadow,
EAU DE NIL.
Poor old Goodwin was the pianist that night, Father Cowley reminded
them. There was a slight difference of opinion between himself and the
Collard grand.
There was.
A symposium all his own, Mr Dedalus said. The devil wouldn't stop him.
He was a crotchety old fellow in the primary stage of drink.
God, do you remember? Ben bulky Dollard said, turning from the
punished keyboard. And by Japers I had no wedding garment.
They laughed all three. He had no wed. All trio laughed. No wedding
garment.
Our friend Bloom turned in handy that night, Mr Dedalus said. Where's
my pipe, by the way?
He wandered back to the bar to the lost chord pipe. Bald Pat carried
two diners' drinks, Richie and Poldy. And Father Cowley laughed again.
I saved the situation, Ben, I think.
You did, averred Ben Dollard. I remember those tight trousers too. That
was a brilliant idea, Bob.
Father Cowley blushed to his brilliant purply lobes. He saved the
situa. Tight trou. Brilliant ide.
I knew he was on the rocks, he said. The wife was playing the piano in
the coffee palace on Saturdays for a very trifling consideration and who
was it gave me the wheeze she was doing the other business? Do you
remember? We had to search all Holles street to find them till the chap in
Keogh's gave us the number. Remember? Ben remembered, his broad visage
wondering.
By God, she had some luxurious operacloaks and things there.
Mr Dedalus wandered back, pipe in hand.
Merrion square style. Balldresses, by God, and court dresses. He
wouldn't take any money either. What? Any God's quantity of cocked hats
and boleros and trunkhose. What?
Ay, ay, Mr Dedalus nodded. Mrs Marion Bloom has left off clothes of all
descriptions.
Jingle jaunted down the quays. Blazes sprawled on bounding tyres.
Liver and bacon. Steak and kidney pie. Right, sir. Right, Pat.
Mrs Marion. Met him pike hoses. Smell of burn. Of Paul de Kock. Nice
name he.
What's this her name was? A buxom lassy. Marion ...
Tweedy.
Yes. Is she alive?
And kicking.
She was a daughter of ...
Daughter of the regiment.
Yes, begad. I remember the old drummajor.
Mr Dedalus struck, whizzed, lit, puffed savoury puff after
Irish? I don't know, faith. Is she, Simon?
Puff after stiff, a puff, strong, savoury, crackling.
Buccinator muscle is ... What? ... Bit rusty ... O, she is ... My
Irish Molly, O.
He puffed a pungent plumy blast.
From the rock of Gibraltar... all the way.
They pined in depth of ocean shadow, gold by the beerpull, bronze by
maraschino, thoughtful all two. Mina Kennedy,  Lismore terrace,
Drumcondra with Idolores, a queen, Dolores, silent.
Pat served, uncovered dishes. Leopold cut liverslices. As said before he
ate with relish the inner organs, nutty gizzards, fried cods' roes while
Richie Goulding, Collis, Ward ate steak and kidney, steak then kidney,
bite by bite of pie he ate Bloom ate they ate.
Bloom with Goulding, married in silence, ate. Dinners fit for princes.
By Bachelor's walk jogjaunty jingled Blazes Boylan, bachelor, in sun
in heat, mare's glossy rump atrot, with flick of whip, on bounding tyres
sprawled, warmseated, Boylan impatience, ardentbold. Horn. Have you
the? Horn. Have you the? Haw haw horn.
Over their voices Dollard bassooned attack, booming over bombarding
chords
WHEN LOVE ABSORBS MY ARDENT SOUL ...
Roll of Bensoulbenjamin rolled to the quivery loveshivery roofpanes.
War War cried Father Cowley. You're the warrior.
So I am, Ben Warrior laughed. I was thinking of your landlord. Love or
money.
He stopped. He wagged huge beard, huge face over his blunder huge.
Sure, you'd burst the tympanum of her ear, man, Mr Dedalus said
through smoke aroma, with an organ like yours.
In bearded abundant laughter Dollard shook upon the keyboard. He
would.
Not to mention another membrane, Father Cowley added. Half time,
Ben. AMOROSO MA NON TROPPO. Let me there.
Miss Kennedy served two gentlemen with tankards of cool stout. She
passed a remark. It was indeed, first gentleman said, beautiful weather.
They drank cool stout. Did she know where the lord lieutenant was going?
And heard steelhoofs ringhoof ring. No, she couldn't say. But it would be
in the paper. O, she need not trouble. No trouble. She waved about her
outspread INDEPENDENT, searching, the lord lieutenant, her pinnacles of
hair slowmoving, lord lieuten. Too much trouble, first gentleman said. O,
not in the least. Way he looked that. Lord lieutenant. Gold by bronze
heard iron steel.
............ MY ARDENT SOUL
I CARE NOT FOROR THE MORROW.
In liver gravy Bloom mashed mashed potatoes. Love and War
someone is. Ben Dollard's famous. Night he ran round to us to borrow a
dress suit for that concert. Trousers tight as a drum on him. Musical
porkers. Molly did laugh when he went out. Threw herself back across the
bed, screaming, kicking. With all his belongings on show. O saints above,
I'm drenched O, the women in the front row O, I never laughed so many
Well, of course that's what gives him the base barreltone. For instance
eunuchs. Wonder who's playing. Nice touch. Must be Cowley. Musical.
Knows whatever note you play. Bad breath he has, poor chap. Stopped.
Miss Douce, engaging, Lydia Douce, bowed to suave solicitor, George
Lidwell, gentleman, entering. Good afternoon. She gave her moist
a lady's hand to his firm clasp. Afternoon. Yes, she was back. To the
old dingdong again.
Your friends are inside, Mr Lidwell.
George Lidwell, suave, solicited, held a lydiahand.
Bloom ate liv as said before. Clean here at least. That chap in the
Burton, gummy with gristle. Noone here Goulding and I. Clean tables,
flowers, mitres of napkins. Pat to and fro. Bald Pat. Nothing to do. Best
value in Dub.
Piano again. Cowley it is. Way he sits in to it, like one together,
mutual understanding. Tiresome shapers scraping fiddles, eye on the
bowend, sawing the cello, remind you of toothache. Her high long snore.
Night we were in the box. Trombone under blowing like a grampus,
between the acts, other brass chap unscrewing, emptying spittle.
Conductor's legs too, bagstrousers, jiggedy jiggedy. Do right to hide
them.
Jiggedy jingle jaunty jaunty.
Only the harp. Lovely. Gold glowering light. Girl touched it. Poop of
a lovely. Gravy's rather good fit for a. Golden ship. Erin. The harp that
once or twice. Cool hands. Ben Howth, the rhododendrons. We are their
harps. I. He. Old. Young.
Ah, I couldn't, man, Mr Dedalus said, shy, listless.
Strongly.
Go on, blast you Ben Dollard growled. Get it out in bits.
M'APPARI, Simon, Father Cowley said.
Down stage he strode some paces, grave, tall in affliction, his long
arms outheld. Hoarsely the apple of his throat hoarsed softly. Softly he
sang to a dusty seascape there A LAST FAREWELL. A headland, a ship, a
sail upon the billows. Farewell. A lovely girl, her veil awave upon the
wind upon the headland, wind around her.
Cowley sang
M'APPARI TUTT'AMOR
IL MIO SGUARDO L'INCONTR ...
She waved, unhearing Cowley, her veil, to one departing, dear one, to
wind, love, speeding sail, return.
Go on, Simon.
Ah, sure, my dancing days are done, Ben ... Well ...
Mr Dedalus laid his pipe to rest beside the tuningfork and, sitting,
touched the obedient keys.
No, Simon, Father Cowley turned. Play it in the original. One flat.
The keys, obedient, rose higher, told, faltered, confessed, confused.
Up stage strode Father Cowley.
Here, Simon, I'll accompany you, he said. Get up.
By Graham Lemon's pineapple rock, by Elvery's elephant jingly
jogged. Steak, kidney, liver, mashed, at meat fit for princes sat princes
Bloom and Goulding. Princes at meat they raised and drank, Power and
cider.
Most beautiful tenor air ever written, Richie said SONNAMBULA. He
heard Joe Maas sing that one night. Ah, what M'Guckin Yes. In his way.
Choirboy style. Maas was the boy. Massboy. A lyrical tenor if you like.
Never forget it. Never.
Tenderly Bloom over liverless bacon saw the tightened features strain.
Backache he. Bright's bright eye. Next item on the programme. Paying the
piper. Pills, pounded bread, worth a guinea a box. Stave it off awhile.
Sings too DOWN AMONG THE DEAD MEN. Appropriate. Kidney pie. Sweets to
the. Not making much hand of it. Best value in. Characteristic of him.
Power. Particular about his drink. Flaw in the glass, fresh Vartry water.
Fecking matches from counters to save. Then squander a sovereign in dribs
and drabs. And when he's wanted not a farthing. Screwed refusing to pay
his fare. Curious types.
Never would Richie forget that night. As long as he lived never. In
the gods of the old Royal with little Peake. And when the first note.
Speech paused on Richie's lips.
Coming out with a whopper now. Rhapsodies about damn all.
Believes his own lies. Does really. Wonderful liar. But want a good
memory.
Which air is that? asked Leopold Bloom.
ALL IS LOST NOW.
Richie cocked his lips apout. A low incipient note sweet banshee murmured
all. A thrush. A throstle. His breath, birdsweet, good teeth he's
proud of, fluted with plaintive woe. Is lost. Rich sound. Two notes in one
there. Blackbird I heard in the hawthorn valley. Taking my motives he
twined and turned them. All most too new call is lost in all. Echo. How
sweet the answer. How is that done? All lost now. Mournful he whistled.
Fall, surrender, lost.
Bloom bent leopold ear, turning a fringe of doyley down under the
vase. Order. Yes, I remember. Lovely air. In sleep she went to him.
Innocence in the moon. Brave. Don't know their danger. Still hold her
back. Call name. Touch water. Jingle jaunty. Too late. She longed to go.
That's why. Woman. As easy stop the sea. Yes all is lost.
A beautiful air, said Bloom lost Leopold. I know it well.
Never in all his life had Richie Goulding.
He knows it well too. Or he feels. Still harping on his daughter. Wise
child that knows her father, Dedalus said. Me?
Bloom askance over liverless saw. Face of the all is lost. Rollicking
Richie once. Jokes old stale now. Wagging his ear. Napkinring in his eye.
Now begging letters he sends his son with. Crosseyed Walter sir I did sir.
Wouldn't trouble only I was expecting some money. Apologise.
Piano again. Sounds better than last time I heard. Tuned probably.
Stopped again.
Dollard and Cowley still urged the lingering singer out with it.
With it, Simon.
It, Simon.
Ladies and gentlemen, I am most deeply obliged by your kind
solicitations.
It, Simon.
I have no money but if you will lend me your attention I shall endeavour
to sing to you of a heart bowed down.
By the sandwichbell in screening shadow Lydia, her bronze and rose,
a lady's grace, gave and withheld as in cool glaucous EAU DE NIL Mina
to tankards two her pinnacles of gold.
The harping chords of prelude closed. A chord, longdrawn, expectant,
drew a voice away.
WHEN FIRST I SAW THAT FORM ENDEARING ...
Richie turned.
Si Dedalus' voice, he said.
Braintipped, cheek touched with flame, they listened feeling that flow
endearing flow over skin limbs human heart soul spine. Bloom signed to
Pat, bald Pat is a waiter hard of hearing, to set ajar the door of the
bar. The door of the bar. So. That will do. Pat, waiter, waited, waiting
to hear, for he was hard of hear by the door.
SORROW FROM ME SEEMED TO DEPART.
Through the hush of air a voice sang to them, low, not rain, not leaves
in murmur, like no voice of strings or reeds or whatdoyoucallthem
dulcimers touching their still ears with words, still hearts of their each
his remembered lives. Good, good to hear sorrow from them each seemed to
from both depart when first they heard. When first they saw, lost Richie
Poldy, mercy of beauty, heard from a person wouldn't expect it in the
least, her first merciful lovesoft oftloved word.
Love that is singing love's old sweet song. Bloom unwound slowly
the elastic band of his packet. Love's old sweet SONNEZ LA gold. Bloom
wound a skein round four forkfingers, stretched it, relaxed, and wound it
round his troubled double, fourfold, in octave, gyved them fast.
FULL OF HOPE AND ALL DELIGHTED ...
Tenors get women by the score. Increase their flow. Throw flower at
his feet. When will we meet? My head it simply. Jingle all delighted. He
can't sing for tall hats. Your head it simply swurls. Perfumed for him.
What perfume does your wife? I want to know. Jing. Stop. Knock. Last look
at mirror always before she answers the door. The hall. There? How do you?
I do well. There? What? Or? Phial of cachous, kissing comfits, in her
satchel. Yes? Hands felt for the opulent.
Alas the voice rose, sighing, changed loud, full, shining, proud.
BUT ALAS, 'TWAS IDLE DREAMING ...
Glorious tone he has still. Cork air softer also their brogue. Silly man
Could have made oceans of money. Singing wrong words. Wore out his
wife now sings. But hard to tell. Only the two themselves. If he doesn't
break down. Keep a trot for the avenue. His hands and feet sing too.
Drink. Nerves overstrung. Must be abstemious to sing. Jenny Lind soup
stock, sage, raw eggs, half pint of cream. For creamy dreamy.
Tenderness it welled slow, swelling, full it throbbed. That's the chat.
Ha, give Take Throb, a throb, a pulsing proud erect.
Words? Music? No it's what's behind.
Bloom looped, unlooped, noded, disnoded.
Bloom. Flood of warm jamjam lickitup secretness flowed to flow in
music out, in desire, dark to lick flow invading. Tipping her tepping her
tapping her topping her. Tup. Pores to dilate dilating. Tup. The joy the
feel the warm the. Tup. To pour o'er sluices pouring gushes. Flood, gush,
flow, joygush, tupthrob. Now Language of love.
... RAY OF HOPE IS ...
Beaming. Lydia for Lidwell squeak scarcely hear so ladylike the muse
unsqueaked a ray of hopk.
MARTHA it is. Coincidence. Just going to write. Lionel's song. Lovely
name you have. Can't write. Accept my little pres. Play on her
heartstrings pursestrings too. She's a. I called you naughty boy. Still
the name Martha. How strange Today.
The voice of Lionel returned, weaker but unwearied. It sang again to
Richie Poldy Lydia Lidwell also sang to Pat open mouth ear waiting to
wait. How first he saw that form endearing, how sorrow seemed to part,
how look, form, word charmed him Gould Lidwell, won Pat Bloom's heart.
Wish I could see his face, though. Explain better. Why the barber in
Drago's always looked my face when I spoke his face in the glass. Still
hear it better here than in the bar though farther.
EACH GRACEFUL LOOK ...
First night when first I saw her at Mat Dillon's in Terenure. Yellow,
black lace she wore. Musical chairs. We two the last. Fate. After her.
Fate.
Round and round slow. Quick round. We two. All looked. Halt. Down she
sat. All ousted looked. Lips laughing. Yellow knees.
CHARMED MY EYE ...
Singing. WAITING she sang. I turned her music. Full voice of perfume
of what perfume does your lilactrees. Bosom I saw, both full, throat
warbling. First I saw. She thanked me. Why did she me? Fate. Spanishy
eyes. Under a peartree alone patio this hour in old Madrid one side in
shadow Dolores shedolores. At me. Luring. Ah, alluring.
MARTHA AH, MARTHA
Quitting all languor Lionel cried in grief, in cry of passion dominant
to love to return with deepening yet with rising chords of harmony. In cry
of lionel loneliness that she should know, must martha feel. For only her
he waited. Where? Here there try there here all try where. Somewhere.
COOME, THOU LOST ONE
COOME, THOU DEAR ONE
Alone. One love. One hope. One comfort me. Martha, chestnote, return
COME
It soared, a bird, it held its flight, a swift pure cry, soar silver orb
it leaped serene, speeding, sustained, to come, don't spin it out too long
long breath he breath long life, soaring high, high resplendent, aflame,
crowned, high in the effulgence symbolistic, high, of the etherial bosom,
high, of the high vast irradiation everywhere all soaring all around about
the all, the endlessnessnessness ...
TO ME
Siopold
Consumed.
Come. Well sung. All clapped. She ought to. Come. To me, to him, to
her, you too, me, us.
Bravo Clapclap. Good man, Simon. Clappyclapclap. Encore
Clapclipclap clap. Sound as a bell. Bravo, Simon Clapclopclap. Encore,
enclap, said, cried, clapped all, Ben Dollard, Lydia Douce, George
Lidwell, Pat, Mina Kennedy, two gentlemen with two tankards, Cowley,
first gent with tank and bronze miss Douce and gold MJiss Mina.
Blazes Boylan's smart tan shoes creaked on the barfloor, said before.
Jingle by monuments of sir John Gray, Horatio onehandled Nelson,
reverend father Theobald Mathew, jaunted, as said before just now. Atrot,
in heat, heatseated. CLOCHE. SONNEZ LA. CLOCHE. SONNEZ LA. Slower the mare
went up the hill by the Rotunda, Rutland square. Too slow for Boylan,
blazes Boylan, impatience Boylan, joggled the mare.
An afterclang of Cowley's chords closed, died on the air made richer.
And Richie Goulding drank his Power and Leopold Bloom his cider
drank, Lidwell his Guinness, second gentleman said they would partake of
two more tankards if she did not mind. Miss Kennedy smirked, disserving,
coral lips, at first, at second. She did not mind.
Seven days in jail, Ben Dollard said, on bread and water. Then you'd
sing, Simon, like a garden thrush.
Lionel Simon, singer, laughed. Father Bob Cowley played. Mina
Kennedy served. Second gentleman paid. Tom Kernan strutted in. Lydia,
admired, admired. But Bloom sang dumb.
Admiring.
Richie, admiring, descanted on that man's glorious voice. He
remembered one night long ago. Never forget that night. Si sang 'TWAS
RANK AND FAME in Ned Lambert's 'twas. Good God he never heard in all his
life a note like that he never did THEN FALSE ONE WE HAD BETTER PART so
clear so God he never heard SINCE LOVE LIVES NOT a clinking voice lives
not ask Lambert he can tell you too.
Goulding, a flush struggling in his pale, told Mr Bloom, face of the
night, Si in Ned Lambert's, Dedalus house, sang 'TWAS RANK AND FAME.
He, Mr Bloom, listened while he, Richie Goulding, told him, Mr
Bloom, of the night he, Richie, heard him, Si Dedalus, sing 'TWAS RANK AND
FAME in his, Ned Lambert's, house.
Brothersinlaw relations. We never speak as we pass by. Rift in the
lute I think. Treats him with scorn. See. He admires him all the more. The
night Si sang. The human voice, two tiny silky chords, wonderful, more
than all others.
That voice was a lamentation. Calmer now. It's in the silence after
you feel you hear. Vibrations. Now silent air.
Bloom ungyved his crisscrossed hands and with slack fingers plucked
the slender catgut thong. He drew and plucked. It buzz, it twanged. While
Goulding talked of Barraclough's voice production, while Tom Kernan,
harking back in a retrospective sort of arrangement talked to listening
Father Cowley, who played a voluntary, who nodded as he played. While
big Ben Dollard talked with Simon Dedalus, lighting, who nodded as he
smoked, who smoked.
Thou lost one. All songs on that theme. Yet more Bloom stretched his
string. Cruel it seems. Let people get fond of each other lure them on.
Then tear asunder. Death. Explos. Knock on the head. Outtohelloutofthat.
Human life. Dignam. Ugh, that rat's tail wriggling Five bob I gave.
CORPUS PARADISUM. Corncrake croaker belly like a poisoned pup. Gone.
They sing. Forgotten. I too And one day she with. Leave her get tired.
Suffer then. Snivel. Big spanishy eyes goggling at nothing. Her
wavyavyeavyheavyeavyevyevyhair un comb'd.
Yet too much happy bores. He stretched more, more. Are you not
happy in your? Twang. It snapped.
Jingle into Dorset street.
Miss Douce withdrew her satiny arm, reproachful, pleased.
Don't make half so free, said she, till we are better acquainted.
George Lidwell told her really and truly but she did not believe.
First gentleman told Mina that was so. She asked him was that so.
And second tankard told her so. That that was so.
Miss Douce, miss Lydia, did not believe miss Kennedy, Mina, did not
believe George Lidwell, no miss Dou did not the first, the first gent
with the tank believe, no, no did not, miss Kenn Lidlydiawell the
tank.
Better write it here. Quills in the postoffice chewed and twisted.
Bald Pat at a sign drew nigh. A pen and ink. He went. A pad. He
went. A pad to blot. He heard, deaf Pat.
Yes, Mr Bloom said, teasing the curling catgut line. It certainly is.
Few lines will do. My present. All that Italian florid music is. Who is
this wrote? Know the name you know better. Take out sheet notepaper,
envelope unconcerned. It's so characteristic.
Grandest number in the whole opera, Goulding said.
It is, Bloom said.
Numbers it is. All music when you come to think. Two multiplied by two
divided by half is twice one. Vibrations chords those are. One plus two
plus six is seven. Do anything you like with figures juggling. Always find
out this equal to that. Symmetry under a cemetery wall. He doesn't see my
mourning. Callous all for his own gut. Musemathematics. And you think
you're listening to the etherial. But suppose you said it like Martha,
seven times nine minus x is thirtyfive thousand. Fall quite flat. It's on
account of the sounds it is.
Instance he's playing now. Improvising. Might be what you like, till
you hear the words. Want to listen sharp. Hard. Begin all right then hear
chords a bit off feel lost a bit. In and out of sacks, over barrels,
through wirefences, obstacle race. Time makes the tune. Question of mood
you're in. Still always nice to hear. Except scales up and down, girls
learning. Two together nextdoor neighbours. Ought to invent dummy pianos
for that. BLUMENLIED I bought for her. The name. Playing it slow, a girl,
night I came home, the girl. Door of the stables near Cecilia street.
Milly no taste. Queer because we both, I mean.
Bald deaf Pat brought quite flat pad ink. Pat set with ink pen quite
flat pad. Pat took plate dish knife fork. Pat went.
It was the only language Mr Dedalus said to Ben. He heard them as a
boy in Ringabella, Crosshaven, Ringabella, singing their barcaroles.
Queenstown harbour full of Italian ships. Walking, you know, Ben, in the
moonlight with those earthquake hats. Blending their voices. God, such
music, Ben. Heard as a boy. Cross Ringabella haven mooncarole.
Sour pipe removed he held a shield of hand beside his lips that cooed
a moonlight nightcall, clear from anear, a call from afar, replying.
Down the edge of his FREEMAN baton ranged Bloom's, your other eye,
scanning for where did I see that. Callan, Coleman, Dignam Patrick.
Heigho Heigho Fawcett. Aha Just I was looking ...
Hope he's not looking, cute as a rat. He held unfurled his FREEMAN.
Can't see now. Remember write Greek ees. Bloom dipped, Bloo mur dear
sir. Dear Henry wrote dear Mady. Got your lett and flow. Hell did I put?
Some pock or oth. It is utterl imposs. Underline IMPOSS. To write today.
Bore this. Bored Bloom tambourined gently with I am just reflecting
fingers on flat pad Pat brought.
On. Know what I mean. No, change that ee. Accep my poor litt pres
enclos. Ask her no answ. Hold on. Five Dig. Two about here. Penny the
gulls. Elijah is com. Seven Davy Byrne's. Is eight about. Say half a
crown. My poor little pres p. o. two and six. Write me a long. Do you
despise? Jingle, have you the? So excited. Why do you call me naught?
You naughty too? O, Mairy lost the string of her. Bye for today. Yes, yes,
will tell you. Want to. To keep it up. Call me that other. Other world she
wrote. My patience are exhaust. To keep it up. You must believe. Believe.
The tank. It. Is. True.
Folly am I writing? Husbands don't. That's marriage does, their
wives. Because I'm away from. Suppose. But how? She must. Keep young.
If she found out. Card in my high grade ha. No, not tell all. Useless
pain. If they don't see. Woman. Sauce for the gander.
A hackney car, number three hundred and twentyfour, driver Barton James of
number one Harmony avenue, Donnybrook, on which sat a fare, a young
gentleman, stylishly dressed in an indigoblue serge suit made by
George Robert Mesias, tailor and cutter, of number five Eden quay, and
wearing a straw hat very dressy, bought of John Plasto of number one
Great Brunswick street, hatter. Eh? This is the jingle that joggled and
jingled. By Dlugacz' porkshop bright tubes of Agendath trotted a
gallantbuttocked mare.
Answering an ad? keen Richie's eyes asked Bloom.
Yes, Mr Bloom said. Town traveller. Nothing doing, I expect.
Bloom mur best references. But Henry wrote it will excite me. You
know how. In haste. Henry. Greek ee. Better add postscript. What is he
playing now? Improvising. Intermezzo. P. S. The rum tum tum. How will
you pun? You punish me? Crooked skirt swinging, whack by. Tell me I want
to. Know. O. Course if I didn't I wouldn't ask. La la la ree. Trails off
there sad in minor. Why minor sad? Sign H. They like sad tail at end.
P. P. S. La la la ree. I feel so sad today. La ree. So lonely. Dee.
He blotted quick on pad of Pat. Envel. Address. Just copy out of
paper. Murmured Messrs Callan, Coleman and Co, limited. Henry wrote
Miss Martha Clifford
c/o P. O.
Dolphin's Barn Lane
Dublin
Blot over the other so he can't read. There. Right. Idea prize titbit.
Something detective read off blottingpad. Payment at the rate of guinea
per col. Matcham often thinks the laughing witch. Poor Mrs Purefoy. U. P
up.
Too poetical that about the sad. Music did that. Music hath charms.
Shakespeare said. Quotations every day in the year. To be or not to be.
Wisdom while you wait.
In Gerard's rosery of Fetter lane he walks, greyedauburn. One life is
all. One body. Do. But do.
Done anyhow. Postal order, stamp. Postoffice lower down. Walk
now. Enough. Barney Kiernan's I promised to meet them. Dislike that job.
House of mourning. Walk. Pat Doesn't hear. Deaf beetle he is.
Car near there now. Talk. Talk. Pat Doesn't. Settling those napkins.
Lot of ground he must cover in the day. Paint face behind on him then he'd
be two. Wish they'd sing more. Keep my mind off.
Bald Pat who is bothered mitred the napkins. Pat is a waiter hard of
his hearing. Pat is a waiter who waits while you wait. Hee hee hee hee. He
waits while you wait. Hee hee. A waiter is he. Hee hee hee hee. He waits
while you wait. While you wait if you wait he will wait while you wait.
Hee hee hee hee. Hoh. Wait while you wait.
Douce now. Douce Lydia. Bronze and rose.
She had a gorgeous, simply gorgeous, time. And look at the lovely
shell she brought.
To the end of the bar to him she bore lightly the spiked and winding
seahorn that he, George Lidwell, solicitor, might hear.
Listen she bade him.
Under Tom Kernan's ginhot words the accompanist wove music slow.
Authentic fact. How Walter Bapty lost his voice. Well, sir, the husband
took him by the throat. SCOUNDREL, said he, YOU'LL SING NO MORE LOVESONGS.
He did, faith, sir Tom. Bob Cowley wove. Tenors get wom. Cowley lay back.
Ah, now he heard, she holding it to his ear. Hear He heard.
Wonderful. She held it to her own. And through the sifted light pale gold
in contrast glided. To hear.
Tap.
Bloom through the bardoor saw a shell held at their ears. He heard
more faintly that that they heard, each for herself alone, then each for
other, hearing the plash of waves, loudly, a silent roar.
Bronze by a weary gold, anear, afar, they listened.
Her ear too is a shell, the peeping lobe there. Been to the seaside.
Lovely seaside girls. Skin tanned raw. Should have put on coldcream first
make it brown. Buttered toast. O and that lotion mustn't forget. Fever
near her mouth. Your head it simply. Hair braided over shell with
seaweed. Why do they hide their ears with seaweed hair? And Turks the
mouth, why? Her eyes over the sheet. Yashmak. Find the way in. A cave. No
admittance except on business.
The sea they think they hear. Singing. A roar. The blood it is. Souse
in the ear sometimes. Well, it's a sea. Corpuscle islands.
Wonderful really. So distinct. Again. George Lidwell held its murmur,
hearing then laid it by, gently.
What are the wild waves saying? he asked her, smiled.
Charming, seasmiling and unanswering Lydia on Lidwell smiled.
Tap.
By Larry O'Rourke's, by Larry, bold Larry O', Boylan swayed and
Boylan turned.
From the forsaken shell miss Mina glided to her tankards waiting.
No, she was not so lonely archly miss Douce's head let Mr Lidwell know.
Walks in the moonlight by the sea. No, not alone. With whom? She nobly
answered with a gentleman friend.
Bob Cowley's twinkling fingers in the treble played again. The
landlord has the prior. A little time. Long John. Big Ben. Lightly he
played a light bright tinkling measure for tripping ladies, arch and
smiling, and for their gallants, gentlemen friends. One one, one, one,
one, one two, one, three, four.
Sea, wind, leaves, thunder, waters, cows lowing, the cattlemarket,
cocks, hens don't crow, snakes hissss. There's music everywhere.
Ruttledge's door ee creaking. No, that's noise. Minuet of DON GIOVANNI
he's playing now. Court dresses of all descriptions in castle chambers
dancing. Misery. Peasants outside. Green starving faces eating
dockleaves. Nice that is. Look look, look, look, look, look you
look at us.
That's joyful I can feel. Never have written it. Why? My joy is other
joy. But both are joys. Yes, joy it must be. Mere fact of music shows you
are. Often thought she was in the dumps till she began to lilt. Then
know.
M'Coy valise. My wife and your wife. Squealing cat. Like tearing silk.
Tongue when she talks like the clapper of a bellows. They can't manage
men's intervals. Gap in their voices too. Fill me. I'm warm, dark, open.
Molly in QUIS EST HOMO Mercadante. My ear against the wall to hear. Want
a woman who can deliver the goods.
Jog jig jogged stopped. Dandy tan shoe of dandy Boylan socks
skyblue clocks came light to earth.
O, look we are so Chamber music. Could make a kind of pun on
that. It is a kind of music I often thought when she. Acoustics that is.
Tinkling. Empty vessels make most noise. Because the acoustics, the
resonance changes according as the weight of the water is equal to the law
of falling water. Like those rhapsodies of Liszt's, Hungarian, gipsyeyed.
Pearls. Drops. Rain. Diddleiddle addleaddle ooddleooddle. Hissss. Now.
Maybe now. Before.
One rapped on a door, one tapped with a knock, did he knock Paul
de Kock with a loud proud knocker with a cock carracarracarra cock.
Cockcock.
Tap.
QUI SDEGNO, Ben, said Father Cowley.
No, Ben, Tom Kernan interfered. THE CROPPY BOY. Our native Doric.
Ay do, Ben, Mr Dedalus said. Good men and true.
Do, do, they begged in one.
I'll go. Here, Pat, return. Come. He came, he came, he did not stay.
To me. How much?
What key? Six sharps?
F sharp major, Ben Dollard said.
Bob Cowley's outstretched talons griped the black deepsounding chords.
Must go prince Bloom told Richie prince. No, Richie said. Yes, must.
Got money somewhere. He's on for a razzle backache spree. Much? He
seehears lipspeech. One and nine. Penny for yourself. Here. Give him
twopence tip. Deaf, bothered. But perhaps he has wife and family waiting,
waiting Patty come home. Hee hee hee hee. Deaf wait while they wait.
But wait. But hear. Chords dark. Lugugugubrious. Low. In a cave of
the dark middle earth. Embedded ore. Lumpmusic.
The voice of dark age, of unlove, earth's fatigue made grave approach
and painful, come from afar, from hoary mountains, called on good men
and true. The priest he sought. With him would he speak a word.
Tap.
Ben Dollard's voice. Base barreltone. Doing his level best to say it.
Croak of vast manless moonless womoonless marsh. Other comedown. Big
ships' chandler's business he did once. Remember rosiny ropes, ships'
lanterns. Failed to the tune of ten thousand pounds. Now in the Iveagh
home. Cubicle number so and so. Number one Bass did that for him.
The priest's at home. A false priest's servant bade him welcome. Step
in. The holy father. With bows a traitor servant. Curlycues of chords.
Ruin them. Wreck their lives. Then build them cubicles to end their
days in. Hushaby. Lullaby. Die, dog. Little dog, die.
The voice of warning, solemn warning, told them the youth had
entered a lonely hall, told them how solemn fell his footsteps there, told
them the gloomy chamber, the vested priest sitting to shrive.
Decent soul. Bit addled now. Thinks he'll win in ANSWERS, poets'
picture puzzle. We hand you crisp five pound note. Bird sitting hatching
in a nest. Lay of the last minstrel he thought it was. See blank tee what
domestic animal? Tee dash ar most courageous mariner. Good voice he has
still. No eunuch yet with all his belongings.
Listen. Bloom listened. Richie Goulding listened. And by the door
deaf Pat, bald Pat, tipped Pat, listened. The chords harped slower.
The voice of penance and of grief came slow, embellished, tremulous.
Ben's contrite beard confessed. IN NOMINE DOMINI, in God's name he knelt.
He beat his hand upon his breast, confessing MEA CULPA.
Latin again. That holds them like birdlime. Priest with the
communion corpus for those women. Chap in the mortuary, coffin or
coffey, CORPUSNOMINE. Wonder where that rat is by now. Scrape.
Tap.
They listened. Tankards and miss Kennedy. George Lidwell, eyelid
well expressive, fullbusted satin. Kernan. Si.
The sighing voice of sorrow sang. His sins. Since Easter he had
cursed three times. You bitch's bast. And once at masstime he had gone to
play. Once by the churchyard he had passed and for his mother's rest he
had not prayed. A boy. A croppy boy.
Bronze, listening, by the beerpull gazed far away. Soulfully. Doesn't
half know I'm. Molly great dab at seeing anyone looking.
Bronze gazed far sideways. Mirror there. Is that best side of her face?
They always know. Knock at the door. Last tip to titivate.
Cockcarracarra.
What do they think when they hear music? Way to catch rattlesnakes.
Night Michael Gunn gave us the box. Tuning up. Shah of Persia liked that
best. Remind him of home sweet home. Wiped his nose in curtain too.
Custom his country perhaps. That's music too. Not as bad as it sounds.
Tootling. Brasses braying asses through uptrunks. Doublebasses helpless,
gashes in their sides. Woodwinds mooing cows. Semigrand open crocodile
music hath jaws. Woodwind like Goodwin's name.
She looked fine. Her crocus dress she wore lowcut, belongings on
show. Clove her breath was always in theatre when she bent to ask a
question. Told her what Spinoza says in that book of poor papa's.
Hypnotised, listening. Eyes like that. She bent. Chap in dresscircle
staring down into her with his operaglass for all he was worth. Beauty
of music you must hear twice. Nature woman half a look. God made the
country man the tune. Met him pike hoses. Philosophy. O rocks
All gone. All fallen. At the siege of Ross his father, at Gorey all his
brothers fell. To Wexford, we are the boys of Wexford, he would. Last of
his name and race.
I too. Last of my race. Milly young student. Well, my fault perhaps.
No son. Rudy. Too late now. Or if not? If not? If still?
He bore no hate.
Hate. Love. Those are names. Rudy. Soon I am old. Big Ben his voice
unfolded. Great voice Richie Goulding said, a flush struggling in his
pale, to Bloom soon old. But when was young?
Ireland comes now. My country above the king. She listens. Who
fears to speak of nineteen four? Time to be shoving. Looked enough.
BLESS ME, FATHER, Dollard the croppy cried. BLESS ME AND LET ME GO.
Tap.
Bloom looked, unblessed to go. Got up to kill on eighteen bob a
week. Fellows shell out the dibs. Want to keep your weathereye open. Those
girls, those lovely. By the sad sea waves. Chorusgirl's romance. Letters
read out for breach of promise. From Chickabiddy's owny Mumpsypum.
Laughter in court. Henry. I never signed it. The lovely name you.
Low sank the music, air and words. Then hastened. The false priest
rustling soldier from his cassock. A yeoman captain. They know it all by
heart. The thrill they itch for. Yeoman cap.
Tap. Tap.
Thrilled she listened, bending in sympathy to hear.
Blank face. Virgin should say or fingered only. Write something on
it page. If not what becomes of them? Decline, despair. Keeps them young.
Even admire themselves. See. Play on her. Lip blow. Body of white woman,
a flute alive. Blow gentle. Loud. Three holes, all women. Goddess I didn't
see. They want it. Not too much polite. That's why he gets them. Gold in
your pocket, brass in your face. Say something. Make her hear. With look
to look. Songs without words. Molly, that hurdygurdy boy. She knew he
meant the monkey was sick. Or because so like the Spanish. Understand
animals too that way. Solomon did. Gift of nature.
Ventriloquise. My lips closed. Think in my stom. What?
Will? You? I. Want. You. To.
With hoarse rude fury the yeoman cursed, swelling in apoplectic
bitch's bastard. A good thought, boy, to come. One hour's your time to
live, your last.
Tap. Tap.
Thrill now. Pity they feel. To wipe away a tear for martyrs that want
to, dying to, die. For all things dying, for all things born. Poor Mrs
Purefoy. Hope she's over. Because their wombs.
A liquid of womb of woman eyeball gazed under a fence of lashes,
calmly, hearing. See real beauty of the eye when she not speaks. On yonder
river. At each slow satiny heaving bosom's wave her heaving embon red
rose rose slowly sank red rose. Heartbeats her breath breath that is
life. And all the tiny tiny fernfoils trembled of maidenhair.
But look. The bright stars fade. O rose Castile. The morn. Ha.
Lidwell. For him then not for. Infatuated. I like that? See her
from here though. Popped corks, splashes of beerfroth, stacks of empties.
On the smooth jutting beerpull laid Lydia hand, lightly, plumply, leave
it to my hands. All lost in pity for croppy. Fro, to to, fro over the
polished knob she knows his eyes, my eyes, her eyes her thumb and finger
passed in pity passed, reposed and, gently touching, then slid so
smoothly, slowly down, a cool firm white enamel baton protruding through
their sliding ring.
With a cock with a carra.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
I hold this house. Amen. He gnashed in fury. Traitors swing.
The chords consented. Very sad thing. But had to be. Get out before
the end. Thanks, that was heavenly. Where's my hat. Pass by her. Can
leave that Freeman. Letter I have. Suppose she were the? No. Walk,
walk, walk. Like Cashel Boylo Connoro Coylo Tisdall Maurice Tisntdall
Farrell. Waaaaaaalk.
Well, I must be. Are you off? Yrfmstbyes. Blmstup. O'er ryehigh blue.
Ow. Bloom stood up. Soap feeling rather sticky behind. Must have
sweated music. That lotion, remember. Well, so long. High grade. Card
inside. Yes.
By deaf Pat in the doorway straining ear Bloom passed.
At Geneva barrack that young man died. At Passage was his body
laid. Dolor O, he dolores The voice of the mournful chanter called to
dolorous prayer.
By rose, by satiny bosom, by the fondling hand, by slops, by empties,
by popped corks, greeting in going, past eyes and maidenhair, bronze and
faint gold in deepseashadow, went Bloom, soft Bloom, I feel so lonely
Bloom.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
Pray for him, prayed the bass of Dollard. You who hear in peace. Breathe
a prayer, drop a tear, good men, good people. He was the croppy boy.
Scaring eavesdropping boots croppy bootsboy Bloom in the Ormond
hallway heard the growls and roars of bravo, fat backslapping, their boots
all treading, boots not the boots the boy. General chorus off for a swill
to wash it down. Glad I avoided.
Come on, Ben, Simon Dedalus cried. By God, you're as good as ever you
were.
Better, said Tomgin Kernan. Most trenchant rendition of that ballad,
upon my soul and honour It is.
Lablache, said Father Cowley.
Ben Dollard bulkily cachuchad towards the bar, mightily praisefed and all
big roseate, on heavyfooted feet, his gouty fingers nakkering castagnettes
in the air.
Big Benaben Dollard. Big Benben. Big Benben.
Rrr.
And deepmoved all, Simon trumping compassion from foghorn nose,
all laughing they brought him forth, Ben Dollard, in right good cheer.
You're looking rubicund, George Lidwell said.
Miss Douce composed her rose to wait.
Ben machree, said Mr Dedalus, clapping Ben's fat back shoulderblade.
Fit as a fiddle only he has a lot of adipose tissue concealed about his
person.
Rrrrrrrsss.
Fat of death, Simon, Ben Dollard growled.
Richie rift in the lute alone sat Goulding, Collis, Ward. Uncertainly
he waited. Unpaid Pat too.
Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.
Miss Mina Kennedy brought near her lips to ear of tankard one.
Mr Dollard, they murmured low.
Dollard, murmured tankard.
Tank one believed miss Kenn when she that doll he was she doll
the tank.
He murmured that he knew the name. The name was familiar to him,
that is to say. That was to say he had heard the name of. Dollard, was it?
Dollard, yes.
Yes, her lips said more loudly, Mr Dollard. He sang that song lovely,
murmured Mina. Mr Dollard. And THE LAST ROSE OF SUMMER was a lovely
song. Mina loved that song. Tankard loved the song that Mina.
'Tis the last rose of summer dollard left bloom felt wind wound round
inside.
Gassy thing that cider binding too. Wait. Postoffice near Reuben J's
one and eightpence too. Get shut of it. Dodge round by Greek street. Wish
I hadn't promised to meet. Freer in air. Music. Gets on your nerves.
Beerpull. Her hand that rocks the cradle rules the. Ben Howth. That rules
the world.
Far. Far. Far. Far.
Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.
Up the quay went Lionelleopold, naughty Henry with letter for
Mady, with sweets of sin with frillies for Raoul with met him pike hoses
went Poldy on.
Tap blind walked tapping by the tap the curbstone tapping, tap by tap.
Cowley, he stuns himself with it kind of drunkenness. Better give
way only half way the way of a man with a maid. Instance enthusiasts. All
ears. Not lose a demisemiquaver. Eyes shut. Head nodding in time. Dotty.
You daren't budge. Thinking strictly prohibited. Always talking shop.
Fiddlefaddle about notes.
All a kind of attempt to talk. Unpleasant when it stops because you
never know exac. Organ in Gardiner street. Old Glynn fifty quid a year.
Queer up there in the cockloft, alone, with stops and locks and keys.
Seated all day at the organ. Maunder on for hours, talking to himself or
the other fellow blowing the bellows. Growl angry, then shriek cursing
want to have wadding or something in his no don't she cried, then all of
a soft sudden wee little wee little pipy wind.
Pwee A wee little wind piped eeee. In Bloom's little wee.
Was he? Mr Dedalus said, returning with fetched pipe. I was with him
this morning at poor little Paddy Dignam's ...
Ay, the Lord have mercy on him.
By the bye there's a tuningfork in there on the ...
Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.
The wife has a fine voice. Or had. What? Lidwell asked.
O, that must be the tuner, Lydia said to Simonlionel first I saw, forgot
it when he was here.
Blind he was she told George Lidwell second I saw. And played so
exquisitely, treat to hear. Exquisite contrast bronzelid, minagold.
Shout Ben Dollard shouted, pouring. Sing out
'lldo cried Father Cowley.
Rrrrrr.
I feel I want ...
Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap
Very, Mr Dedalus said, staring hard at a headless sardine.
Under the sandwichbell lay on a bier of bread one last, one lonely, last
sardine of summer. Bloom alone.
Very, he stared. The lower register, for choice.
Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.
Bloom went by Barry's. Wish I could. Wait. That wonderworker if I
had. Twentyfour solicitors in that one house. Counted them. Litigation.
Love one another. Piles of parchment. Messrs Pick and Pocket have power
of attorney. Goulding, Collis, Ward.
But for example the chap that wallops the big drum. His vocation
Mickey Rooney's band. Wonder how it first struck him. Sitting at home
after pig's cheek and cabbage nursing it in the armchair. Rehearsing his
band part. Pom. Pompedy. Jolly for the wife. Asses' skins. Welt them
through life, then wallop after death. Pom. Wallop. Seems to be what you
call yashmak or I mean kismet. Fate.
Tap. Tap. A stripling, blind, with a tapping cane came taptaptapping
by Daly's window where a mermaid hair all streaming but he couldn't see
blew whiffs of a mermaid blind couldn't, mermaid, coolest whiff of all.
Instruments. A blade of grass, shell of her hands, then blow. Even
comb and tissuepaper you can knock a tune out of. Molly in her shift in
Lombard street west, hair down. I suppose each kind of trade made its own,
don't you see? Hunter with a horn. Haw. Have you the? CLOCHE. SONNEZ LA.
Shepherd his pipe. Pwee little wee. Policeman a whistle. Locks and keys
Sweep Four o'clock's all's well Sleep All is lost now. Drum? Pompedy.
Wait. I know. Towncrier, bumbailiff. Long John. Waken the dead. Pom.
Dignam. Poor little NOMINEDOMINE. Pom. It is music. I mean of course it's
all pom pom pom very much what they call DA CAPO. Still you can hear. As
we march, we march along, march along. Pom.
I must really. Fff. Now if I did that at a banquet. Just a question of
custom shah of Persia. Breathe a prayer, drop a tear. All the same he must
have been a bit of a natural not to see it was a yeoman cap. Muffled up.
Wonder who was that chap at the grave in the brown macin. O, the whore
of the lane
A frowsy whore with black straw sailor hat askew came glazily in the
day along the quay towards Mr Bloom. When first he saw that form
endearing? Yes, it is. I feel so lonely. Wet night in the lane. Horn. Who
had the? Heehaw shesaw. Off her beat here. What is she? Hope she. Psst
Any chance of your wash. Knew Molly. Had me decked. Stout lady does be
with you in the brown costume. Put you off your stroke, that. Appointment
we made knowing we'd never, well hardly ever. Too dear too near to home
sweet home. Sees me, does she? Looks a fright in the day. Face like dip.
Damn her. O, well, she has to live like the rest. Look in here.
In Lionel Marks's antique saleshop window haughty Henry Lionel
Leopold dear Henry Flower earnestly Mr Leopold Bloom envisaged
battered candlesticks melodeon oozing maggoty blowbags. Bargain six bob.
Might learn to play. Cheap. Let her pass. Course everything is dear if
you don't want it. That's what good salesman is. Make you buy what he
wants to sell. Chap sold me the Swedish razor he shaved me with. Wanted
to charge me for the edge he gave it. She's passing now. Six bob.
Must be the cider or perhaps the burgund.
Near bronze from anear near gold from afar they chinked their clinking
glasses all, brighteyed and gallant, before bronze Lydia's tempting
last rose of summer, rose of Castile. First Lid, De, Cow, Ker, Doll, a
fifth Lidwell, Si Dedalus, Bob Cowley, Kernan and big Ben Dollard.
Tap. A youth entered a lonely Ormond hall.
Bloom viewed a gallant pictured hero in Lionel Marks's window. Robert
Emmet's last words. Seven last words. Of Meyerbeer that is.
True men like you men.
Ay, ay, Ben.
Will lift your glass with us.
They lifted.
Tschink. Tschunk.
Tip. An unseeing stripling stood in the door. He saw not bronze. He
saw not gold. Nor Ben nor Bob nor Tom nor Si nor George nor tanks nor
Richie nor Pat. Hee hee hee hee. He did not see.
Seabloom, greaseabloom viewed last words. Softly. WHEN MY COUNTRY
TAKES HER PLACE AMONG.
Prrprr.
Must be the bur.
Fff Oo. Rrpr.
NATIONS OF THE EARTH. Noone behind. She's passed. THEN AND NOT TILL
THEN. Tram kran kran kran. Good oppor. Coming. Krandlkrankran. I'm
sure it's the burgund. Yes. One, two. LET MY EPITAPH BE. Kraaaaaa.
WRITTEN. I HAVE.
Pprrpffrrppffff.
DONE.
I was just passing the time of day with old Troy of the D. M. P. at the
corner of Arbour hill there and be damned but a bloody sweep came along
and he near drove his gear into my eye. I turned around to let him have
the weight of my tongue when who should I see dodging along Stony Batter
only Joe Hynes.
Lo, Joe, says I. How are you blowing? Did you see that bloody
chimneysweep near shove my eye out with his brush?
Soot's luck, says Joe. Who's the old ballocks you were talking to?
Old Troy, says I, was in the force. I'm on two minds not to give that
fellow in charge for obstructing the thoroughfare with his brooms and
ladders.
What are you doing round those parts? says Joe.
Devil a much, says I. There's a bloody big foxy thief beyond by the
garrison church at the corner of Chicken laneold Troy was just giving
me a wrinkle about himlifted any God's quantity of tea and sugar to pay
three bob a week said he had a farm in the county Down off a
hopofmythumb by the name of Moses Herzog over there near Heytesbury
street.
Circumcised? says Joe.
Ay, says I. A bit off the top. An old plumber named Geraghty. I'm
hanging on to his taw now for the past fortnight and I can't get a penny
out of him.
That the lay you're on now? says Joe.
Ay, says I. How are the mighty fallen Collector of bad and doubtful
debts. But that's the most notorious bloody robber you'd meet in a day's
walk and the face on him all pockmarks would hold a shower of rain. TELL
HIM, says he, I DARE HIM, says he, AND I DOUBLEDARE HIM TO SEND YOU ROUND
HERE AGAIN OR IF HE DOES, says he, I'LL HAVE HIM SUMMONSED UP BEFORE THE
COURT, SO I WILL, FOR TRADING WITHOUT A LICENCE. And he after stuffing
himself till he's fit to burst. Jesus, I had to laugh at the little jewy
getting his shirt out. HE DRINK ME MY TEAS. HE EAT ME MY SUGARS. BECAUSE
HE NO PAY ME MY MONEYS?
For nonperishable goods bought of Moses Herzog, of  Saint
Kevin's parade in the city of Dublin, Wood quay ward, merchant,
hereinafter called the vendor, and sold and delivered to Michael E.
Geraghty, esquire, of  Arbour hill in the city of Dublin, Arran quay
ward, gentleman, hereinafter called the purchaser, videlicet, five pounds
avoirdupois of first choice tea at three shillings and no pence per pound
avoirdupois and three stone avoirdupois of sugar, crushed crystal, at
threepence per pound avoirdupois, the said purchaser debtor to the said
vendor of one pound five shillings and sixpence sterling for value
received which amount shall be paid by said purchaser to said vendor in
weekly instalments every seven calendar days of three shillings and no
pence sterling and the said nonperishable goods shall not be pawned or
pledged or sold or otherwise alienated by the said purchaser but shall be
and remain and be held to be the sole and exclusive property of the said
vendor to be disposed of at his good will and pleasure until the said
amount shall have been duly paid by the said purchaser to the said vendor
in the manner herein set forth as this day hereby agreed between the said
vendor, his heirs, successors, trustees and assigns of the one part and
the said purchaser, his heirs, successors, trustees and assigns of the
other part.
Are you a strict t.t.? says Joe.
Not taking anything between drinks, says I.
What about paying our respects to our friend? says Joe.
Who? says I. Sure, he's out in John of God's off his head, poor man.
Drinking his own stuff? says Joe.
Ay, says I. Whisky and water on the brain.
Come around to Barney Kiernan's, says Joe. I want to see the citizen.
Barney mavourneen's be it, says I. Anything strange or wonderful, Joe?
Not a word, says Joe. I was up at that meeting in the City Arms.
What was that, Joe? says I.
Cattle traders, says Joe, about the foot and mouth disease. I want to
give the citizen the hard word about it.
So we went around by the Linenhall barracks and the back of the
courthouse talking of one thing or another. Decent fellow Joe when he has
it but sure like that he never has it. Jesus, I couldn't get over that
bloody foxy Geraghty, the daylight robber. For trading without a licence,
says he.
In Inisfail the fair there lies a land, the land of holy Michan. There
rises a watchtower beheld of men afar. There sleep the mighty dead as in
life they slept, warriors and princes of high renown. A pleasant land it
is in sooth of murmuring waters, fishful streams where sport the gurnard,
the plaice, the roach, the halibut, the gibbed haddock, the grilse,
the dab, the brill, the flounder, the pollock, the mixed coarse fish
generally and other denizens of the aqueous kingdom too numerous to be
enumerated. In the mild breezes of the west and of the east the lofty
trees wave in different directions their firstclass foliage, the wafty
sycamore, the Lebanonian cedar, the exalted planetree, the eugenic
eucalyptus and other ornaments of the arboreal world with which that
region is thoroughly well supplied. Lovely maidens sit in close proximity
to the roots of the lovely trees singing the most lovely songs while they
play with all kinds of lovely objects as for example golden ingots,
silvery fishes, crans of herrings, drafts of eels, codlings, creels of
fingerlings, purple seagems and playful insects. And heroes voyage from
afar to woo them, from Eblana to Slievemargy, the peerless princes of
unfettered Munster and of Connacht the just and of smooth sleek Leinster
and of Cruahan's land and of Armagh the splendid and of the noble district
of Boyle, princes, the sons of kings.
And there rises a shining palace whose crystal glittering roof is seen by
mariners who traverse the extensive sea in barks built expressly for that
purpose, and thither come all herds and fatlings and firstfruits of that
land for O'Connell Fitzsimon takes toll of them, a chieftain descended
from chieftains. Thither the extremely large wains bring foison of the
fields, flaskets of cauliflowers, floats of spinach, pineapple chunks,
Rangoon beans, strikes of tomatoes, drums of figs, drills of Swedes,
spherical potatoes and tallies of iridescent kale, York and Savoy, and
trays of onions, pearls of the earth, and punnets of mushrooms and
custard marrows and fat vetches and bere and rape and red green yellow
brown russet sweet big bitter ripe pomellated apples and chips of
strawberries and sieves of gooseberries, pulpy and pelurious, and
strawberries fit for princes and raspberries from their canes.
I dare him, says he, and I doubledare him. Come out here, Geraghty,
you notorious bloody hill and dale robber
And by that way wend the herds innumerable of bellwethers and
flushed ewes and shearling rams and lambs and stubble geese and medium
steers and roaring mares and polled calves and longwoods and storesheep
and Cuffe's prime springers and culls and sowpigs and baconhogs and the
various different varieties of highly distinguished swine and Angus
heifers and polly bulllocks of immaculate pedigree together with prime
premiated milchcows and beeves and there is ever heard a trampling,
cackling, roaring, lowing, bleating, bellowing, rumbling, grunting,
champing, chewing, of sheep and pigs and heavyhooved kine from
pasturelands of Lusk and Rush and Carrickmines and from the streamy vales
of Thomond, from the M'Gillicuddy's reeks the inaccessible and lordly
Shannon the unfathomable, and from the gentle declivities of the place of
the race of Kiar, their udders distended with superabundance of milk and
butts of butter and rennets of cheese and farmer's firkins and targets of
lamb and crannocks of corn and oblong eggs in great hundreds, various in
size, the agate with this dun.
So we turned into Barney Kiernan's and there, sure enough, was the citizen
up in the corner having a great confab with himself and that bloody
mangy mongrel, Garryowen, and he waiting for what the sky would drop
in the way of drink.
There he is, says I, in his gloryhole, with his cruiskeen lawn and his
load of papers, working for the cause.
The bloody mongrel let a grouse out of him would give you the creeps. Be
a corporal work of mercy if someone would take the life of that
bloody dog. I'm told for a fact he ate a good part of the breeches off a
constabulary man in Santry that came round one time with a blue paper
about a licence.
Stand and deliver, says he.
That's all right, citizen, says Joe. Friends here.
Pass, friends, says he.
Then he rubs his hand in his eye and says he
What's your opinion of the times?
Doing the rapparee and Rory of the hill. But, begob, Joe was equal to
the occasion.
I think the markets are on a rise, says he, sliding his hand down his
fork.
So begob the citizen claps his paw on his knee and he says
Foreign wars is the cause of it.
And says Joe, sticking his thumb in his pocket
It's the Russians wish to tyrannise.
Arrah, give over your bloody codding, Joe, says I. I've a thirst on me I
wouldn't sell for half a crown.
Give it a name, citizen, says Joe.
Wine of the country, says he.
What's yours? says Joe.
Ditto MacAnaspey, says I.
Three pints, Terry, says Joe. And how's the old heart, citizen? says he.
Never better, A CHARA, says he. What Garry? Are we going to win? Eh?
And with that he took the bloody old towser by the scruff of the neck
and, by Jesus, he near throttled him.
The figure seated on a large boulder at the foot of a round tower
was that of a broadshouldered deepchested stronglimbed frankeyed
redhaired freelyfreckled shaggybearded widemouthed largenosed
longheaded deepvoiced barekneed brawnyhanded hairylegged ruddyfaced
sinewyarmed hero. From shoulder to shoulder he measured several ells and
his rocklike mountainous knees were covered, as was likewise the rest of
his body wherever visible, with a strong growth of tawny prickly hair in
hue and toughness similar to the mountain gorse ULEX EUROPEUS. The
widewinged nostrils, from which bristles of the same tawny hue projected,
were of such capaciousness that within their cavernous obscurity the
fieldlark might easily have lodged her nest. The eyes in which a tear and
a smile strove ever for the mastery were of the dimensions of a goodsized
cauliflower. A powerful current of warm breath issued at regular intervals
from the profound cavity of his mouth while in rhythmic resonance the
loud strong hale reverberations of his formidable heart thundered
rumblingly causing the ground, the summit of the lofty tower and the still
loftier walls of the cave to vibrate and tremble.
He wore a long unsleeved garment of recently flayed oxhide reaching to the
knees in a loose kilt and this was bound about his middle by a girdle of
plaited straw and rushes. Beneath this he wore trews of deerskin, roughly
stitched with gut. His nether extremities were encased in high Balbriggan
buskins dyed in lichen purple, the feet being shod with brogues of salted
cowhide laced with the windpipe of the same beast. From his girdle hung a
row of seastones which jangled at every movement of his portentous frame
and on these were graven with rude yet striking art the tribal images of
many Irish heroes and heroines of antiquity, Cuchulin, Conn of hundred
battles, Niall of nine hostages, Brian of Kincora, the ardri Malachi, Art
MacMurragh, Shane O'Neill, Father John Murphy, Owen Roe, Patrick
Sarsfield, Red Hugh O'Donnell, Red Jim MacDermott, Soggarth Eoghan
O'Growney, Michael Dwyer, Francy Higgins, Henry Joy M'Cracken,
Goliath, Horace Wheatley, Thomas Conneff, Peg Woffington, the Village
Blacksmith, Captain Moonlight, Captain Boycott, Dante Alighieri,
Christopher Columbus, S. Fursa, S. Brendan, Marshal MacMahon,
Charlemagne, Theobald Wolfe Tone, the Mother of the Maccabees, the Last
of the Mohicans, the Rose of Castile, the Man for Galway, The Man that
Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo, The Man in the Gap, The Woman Who
Didn't, Benjamin Franklin, Napoleon Bonaparte, John L. Sullivan,
Cleopatra, Savourneen Deelish, Julius Caesar, Paracelsus, sir Thomas
Lipton, William Tell, Michelangelo Hayes, Muhammad, the Bride of
Lammermoor, Peter the Hermit, Peter the Packer, Dark Rosaleen, Patrick
W. Shakespeare, Brian Confucius, Murtagh Gutenberg, Patricio
Velasquez, Captain Nemo, Tristan and Isolde, the first Prince of Wales,
Thomas Cook and Son, the Bold Soldier Boy, Arrah na Pogue, Dick
Turpin, Ludwig Beethoven, the Colleen Bawn, Waddler Healy, Angus the
Culdee, Dolly Mount, Sidney Parade, Ben Howth, Valentine Greatrakes,
Adam and Eve, Arthur Wellesley, Boss Croker, Herodotus, Jack the
Giantkiller, Gautama Buddha, Lady Godiva, The Lily of Killarney, Balor
of the Evil Eye, the Queen of Sheba, Acky Nagle, Joe Nagle, Alessandro
Volta, Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa, Don Philip O'Sullivan Beare. A
couched spear of acuminated granite rested by him while at his feet
reposed a savage animal of the canine tribe whose stertorous gasps
announced that he was sunk in uneasy slumber, a supposition confirmed by
hoarse growls and spasmodic movements which his master repressed from time
to time by tranquilising blows of a mighty cudgel rudely fashioned out of
paleolithic stone.
So anyhow Terry brought the three pints Joe was standing and begob
the sight nearly left my eyes when I saw him land out a quid O, as true as
I'm telling you. A goodlooking sovereign.
And there's more where that came from, says he.
Were you robbing the poorbox, Joe? says I.
Sweat of my brow, says Joe. 'Twas the prudent member gave me the wheeze.
I saw him before I met you, says I, sloping around by Pill lane and
Greek street with his cod's eye counting up all the guts of the fish.
Who comes through Michan's land, bedight in sable armour? O'Bloom,
the son of Rory it is he. Impervious to fear is Rory's son he
of the prudent soul.
For the old woman of Prince's street, says the citizen, the subsidised
organ. The pledgebound party on the floor of the house. And look at this
blasted rag, says he. Look at this, says he. THE IRISH INDEPENDENT, if you
please, founded by Parnell to be the workingman's friend. Listen to the
births and deaths in the IRISH ALL FOR IRELAND INDEPENDENT, and I'll thank
you and the marriages.
And he starts reading them out
Gordon, Barnfield crescent, Exeter Redmayne of Iffley, Saint Anne's on
Sea the wife of William T Redmayne of a son. How's that, eh? Wright and
Flint, Vincent and Gillett to Rotha Marion daughter of Rosa and the late
George Alfred Gillett,  Clapham road, Stockwell, Playwood and
Ridsdale at Saint Jude's, Kensington by the very reverend Dr Forrest, dean
of Worcester. Eh? Deaths. Bristow, at Whitehall lane, London Carr, Stoke
Newington, of gastritis and heart disease Cockburn, at the Moat house,
Chepstow ...
I know that fellow, says Joe, from bitter experience.
Cockburn. Dimsey, wife of David Dimsey, late of the admiralty Miller,
Tottenham, aged eightyfive Welsh, June , at  Canning street,
Liverpool, Isabella Helen. How's that for a national press, eh, my brown
son How's that for Martin Murphy, the Bantry jobber?
Ah, well, says Joe, handing round the boose. Thanks be to God they had
the start of us. Drink that, citizen.
I will, says he, honourable person.
Health, Joe, says I. And all down the form.
Ah Ow Don't be talking I was blue mouldy for the want of that
pint. Declare to God I could hear it hit the pit of my stomach with a
click.
And lo, as they quaffed their cup of joy, a godlike messenger came
swiftly in, radiant as the eye of heaven, a comely youth and behind him
there passed an elder of noble gait and countenance, bearing the sacred
scrolls of law and with him his lady wife a dame of peerless lineage,
fairest of her race.
Little Alf Bergan popped in round the door and hid behind Barney's
snug, squeezed up with the laughing. And who was sitting up there in the
corner that I hadn't seen snoring drunk blind to the world only Bob Doran.
I didn't know what was up and Alf kept making signs out of the door. And
begob what was it only that bloody old pantaloon Denis Breen in his
bathslippers with two bloody big books tucked under his oxter and the wife
hotfoot after him, unfortunate wretched woman, trotting like a poodle. I
thought Alf would split.
Look at him, says he. Breen. He's traipsing all round Dublin with a
postcard someone sent him with U. p up on it to take a li ...
And he doubled up.
Take a what? says I.
Libel action, says he, for ten thousand pounds.
O hell says I.
The bloody mongrel began to growl that'd put the fear of God in you
seeing something was up but the citizen gave him a kick in the ribs.
BI I DHO HUSHT, says he.
Who? says Joe.
Breen, says Alf. He was in John Henry Menton's and then he went round
to Collis and Ward's and then Tom Rochford met him and sent him round
to the subsheriff's for a lark. O God, I've a pain laughing. U. p up. The
long fellow gave him an eye as good as a process and now the bloody old
lunatic is gone round to Green street to look for a G man.
When is long John going to hang that fellow in Mountjoy? says Joe.
Bergan, says Bob Doran, waking up. Is that Alf Bergan?
Yes, says Alf. Hanging? Wait till I show you. Here, Terry, give us a
pony. That bloody old fool Ten thousand pounds. You should have seen long
John's eye. U. p ...
And he started laughing.
Who are you laughing at? says Bob Doran. Is that Bergan?
Hurry up, Terry boy, says Alf.
Terence O'Ryan heard him and straightway brought him a crystal
cup full of the foamy ebon ale which the noble twin brothers Bungiveagh
and Bungardilaun brew ever in their divine alevats, cunning as the sons of
deathless Leda. For they garner the succulent berries of the hop and mass
and sift and bruise and brew them and they mix therewith sour juices and
bring the must to the sacred fire and cease not night or day from their
toil, those cunning brothers, lords of the vat.
Then did you, chivalrous Terence, hand forth, as to the manner born,
that nectarous beverage and you offered the crystal cup to him that
thirsted, the soul of chivalry, in beauty akin to the immortals.
But he, the young chief of the O'Bergan's, could ill brook to be outdone
in generous deeds but gave therefor with gracious gesture a testoon
of costliest bronze. Thereon embossed in excellent smithwork was seen the
image of a queen of regal port, scion of the house of Brunswick, Victoria
her name, Her Most Excellent Majesty, by grace of God of the United
Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and of the British dominions beyond
the sea, queen, defender of the faith, Empress of India, even she, who
bore rule, a victress over many peoples, the wellbeloved, for they knew
and loved her from the rising of the sun to the going down thereof, the
pale, the dark, the ruddy and the ethiop.
What's that bloody freemason doing, says the citizen, prowling up and
down outside?
What's that? says Joe.
Here you are, says Alf, chucking out the rhino. Talking about hanging,
I'll show you something you never saw. Hangmen's letters. Look at here.
So he took a bundle of wisps of letters and envelopes out of his pocket.
Are you codding? says I.
Honest injun, says Alf. Read them.
So Joe took up the letters.
Who are you laughing at? says Bob Doran.
So I saw there was going to be a bit of a dust Bob's a queer chap
when the porter's up in him so says I just to make talk
How's Willy Murray those times, Alf?
I don't know, says Alf I saw him just now in Capel street with Paddy
Dignam. Only I was running after that ...
You what? says Joe, throwing down the letters. With who?
With Dignam, says Alf.
Is it Paddy? says Joe.
Yes, says Alf. Why?
Don't you know he's dead? says Joe.
Paddy Dignam dead says Alf.
Ay, says Joe.
Sure I'm after seeing him not five minutes ago, says Alf, as plain as a
pikestaff.
Who's dead? says Bob Doran.
You saw his ghost then, says Joe, God between us and harm.
What? says Alf. Good Christ, only five ... What? ... And Willy Murray
with him, the two of them there near whatdoyoucallhim's ... What?
Dignam dead?
What about Dignam? says Bob Doran. Who's talking about... ?
Dead says Alf. He's no more dead than you are.
Maybe so, says Joe. They took the liberty of burying him this morning
anyhow.
Paddy? says Alf.
Ay, says Joe. He paid the debt of nature, God be merciful to him.
Good Christ says Alf.
Begob he was what you might call flabbergasted.
In the darkness spirit hands were felt to flutter and when prayer by
tantras had been directed to the proper quarter a faint but increasing
luminosity of ruby light became gradually visible, the apparition of the
etheric double being particularly lifelike owing to the discharge of jivic
rays from the crown of the head and face. Communication was effected
through the pituitary body and also by means of the orangefiery and
scarlet rays emanating from the sacral region and solar plexus. Questioned
by his earthname as to his whereabouts in the heavenworld he stated that
he was now on the path of pr l ya or return but was still submitted to
trial at the hands of certain bloodthirsty entities on the lower astral
levels. In reply to a question as to his first sensations in the great
divide beyond he stated that previously he had seen as in a glass darkly
but that those who had passed over had summit possibilities of atmic
development opened up to them. Interrogated as to whether life there
resembled our experience in the flesh he stated that he had heard from
more favoured beings now in the spirit that their abodes were equipped
with every modern home comfort such as talafana, alavatar, hatakalda,
wataklasat and that the highest adepts were steeped in waves of volupcy
of the very purest nature. Having requested a quart of buttermilk this was
brought and evidently afforded relief. Asked if he had any message
for the living he exhorted all who were still at the wrong side of Maya
to acknowledge the true path for it was reported in devanic circles that
Mars and Jupiter were out for mischief on the eastern angle where the
ram has power. It was then queried whether there were any special
desires on the part of the defunct and the reply was WE GREET YOU,
FRIENDS OF EARTH, WHO ARE STILL IN THE BODY. MIND C. K. DOESN'T PILE IT
ON. It was ascertained that the reference was to Mr Cornelius Kelleher,
manager of Messrs H. J. O'Neill's popular funeral establishment, a
personal friend of the defunct, who had been responsible for the carrying
out of the interment arrangements. Before departing he requested that it
should be told to his dear son Patsy that the other boot which he had been
looking for was at present under the commode in the return room and that
the pair should be sent to Cullen's to be soled only as the heels were
still good. He stated that this had greatly perturbed his peace of mind in
the other region and earnestly requested that his desire should be made
known.
Assurances were given that the matter would be attended to and it was
intimated that this had given satisfaction.
He is gone from mortal haunts O'Dignam, sun of our morning. Fleet
was his foot on the bracken Patrick of the beamy brow. Wail, Banba, with
your wind and wail, O ocean, with your whirlwind.
There he is again, says the citizen, staring out.
Who? says I.
Bloom, says he. He's on point duty up and down there for the last ten
minutes.
And, begob, I saw his physog do a peep in and then slidder off again.
Little Alf was knocked bawways. Faith, he was.
Good Christ says he. I could have sworn it was him.
And says Bob Doran, with the hat on the back of his poll, lowest
blackguard in Dublin when he's under the influence
Who said Christ is good?
I beg your parsnips, says Alf.
Is that a good Christ, says Bob Doran, to take away poor little Willy
Dignam?
Ah, well, says Alf, trying to pass it off. He's over all his troubles.
But Bob Doran shouts out of him.
He's a bloody ruffian, I say, to take away poor little Willy Dignam.
Terry came down and tipped him the wink to keep quiet, that they
didn't want that kind of talk in a respectable licensed premises. And Bob
Doran starts doing the weeps about Paddy Dignam, true as you're there.
The finest man, says he, snivelling, the finest purest character.
The tear is bloody near your eye. Talking through his bloody hat.
Fitter for him go home to the little sleepwalking bitch he married,
Mooney, the bumbailiff's daughter, mother kept a kip in Hardwicke street,
that used to be stravaging about the landings Bantam Lyons told me that
was stopping there at two in the morning without a stitch on her, exposing
her person, open to all comers, fair field and no favour.
The noblest, the truest, says he. And he's gone, poor little Willy, poor
little Paddy Dignam.
And mournful and with a heavy heart he bewept the extinction of that
beam of heaven.
Old Garryowen started growling again at Bloom that was skeezing
round the door.
Come in, come on, he won't eat you, says the citizen.
So Bloom slopes in with his cod's eye on the dog and he asks Terry
was Martin Cunningham there.
O, Christ M'Keown, says Joe, reading one of the letters. Listen to this,
will you?
And he starts reading out one.
 HUNTER STREET, LIVERPOOL.
TO THE HIGH SHERIFF OF DUBLIN, DUBLIN.
HONOURED SIR I BEG TO OFFER MY SERVICES IN THE ABOVEMENTIONED PAINFUL
CASE I HANGED JOE GANN IN BOOTLE JAIL ON THE  OF FEBUARY  AND I
HANGED ...
Show us, Joe, says I.
... PRIVATE ARTHUR CHACE FOR FOWL MURDER OF JESSIE TILSIT IN
PENTONVILLE PRISON AND I WAS ASSISTANT WHEN ...
Jesus, says I.
... BILLINGTON EXECUTED THE AWFUL MURDERER TOAD SMITH ...
The citizen made a grab at the letter.
Hold hard, says Joe, I HAVE A SPECIAL NACK OF PUTTING THE NOOSE ONCE IN
HE CAN'T GET OUT HOPING TO BE FAVOURED I REMAIN, HONOURED SIR, MY TERMS IS
FIVE GINNEES.
H. RUMBOLD,
MASTER BARBER.
And a barbarous bloody barbarian he is too, says the citizen.
And the dirty scrawl of the wretch, says Joe. Here, says he, take them
to hell out of my sight, Alf. Hello, Bloom, says he, what will you have?
So they started arguing about the point, Bloom saying he wouldn't
and he couldn't and excuse him no offence and all to that and then he said
well he'd just take a cigar. Gob, he's a prudent member and no mistake.
Give us one of your prime stinkers, Terry, says Joe.
And Alf was telling us there was one chap sent in a mourning card
with a black border round it.
They're all barbers, says he, from the black country that would hang
their own fathers for five quid down and travelling expenses.
And he was telling us there's two fellows waiting below to pull his
heels down when he gets the drop and choke him properly and then they
chop up the rope after and sell the bits for a few bob a skull.
In the dark land they bide, the vengeful knights of the razor. Their
deadly coil they grasp yea, and therein they lead to Erebus whatsoever
wight hath done a deed of blood for I will on nowise suffer it even so
saith the Lord.
So they started talking about capital punishment and of course Bloom
comes out with the why and the wherefore and all the codology of the
business and the old dog smelling him all the time I'm told those jewies
does have a sort of a queer odour coming off them for dogs about I don't
know what all deterrent effect and so forth and so on.
There's one thing it hasn't a deterrent effect on, says Alf.
What's that? says Joe.
The poor bugger's tool that's being hanged, says Alf.
That so? says Joe.
God's truth, says Alf. I heard that from the head warder that was in
Kilmainham when they hanged Joe Brady, the invincible. He told me when
they cut him down after the drop it was standing up in their faces like a
poker.
Ruling passion strong in death, says Joe, as someone said.
That can be explained by science, says Bloom. It's only a natural
phenomenon, don't you see, because on account of the ...
And then he starts with his jawbreakers about phenomenon and
science and this phenomenon and the other phenomenon.
The distinguished scientist Herr Professor Luitpold Blumenduft
tendered medical evidence to the effect that the instantaneous fracture of
the cervical vertebrae and consequent scission of the spinal cord would,
according to the best approved tradition of medical science, be calculated
to inevitably produce in the human subject a violent ganglionic stimulus
of the nerve centres of the genital apparatus, thereby causing the elastic
pores of the CORPORA CAVERNOSA to rapidly dilate in such a way as to
instantaneously facilitate the flow of blood to that part of the human
anatomy known as the penis or male organ resulting in the phenomenon which
has been denominated by the faculty a morbid upwards and outwards
philoprogenitive erection IN ARTICULO MORTIS PER DIMINUTIONEM CAPITIS.
So of course the citizen was only waiting for the wink of the word and
he starts gassing out of him about the invincibles and the old guard and
the men of sixtyseven and who fears to speak of ninetyeight and Joe with
him about all the fellows that were hanged, drawn and transported for the
cause by drumhead courtmartial and a new Ireland and new this, that and
the other. Talking about new Ireland he ought to go and get a new dog so
he ought. Mangy ravenous brute sniffing and sneezing all round the place
and scratching his scabs. And round he goes to Bob Doran that was
standing Alf a half one sucking up for what he could get. So of course Bob
Doran starts doing the bloody fool with him
Give us the paw Give the paw, doggy Good old doggy Give the paw
here Give us the paw
Arrah, bloody end to the paw he'd paw and Alf trying to keep him
from tumbling off the bloody stool atop of the bloody old dog and he
talking all kinds of drivel about training by kindness and thoroughbred
dog and intelligent dog give you the bloody pip. Then he starts scraping
a few bits of old biscuit out of the bottom of a Jacobs' tin he told Terry
to bring. Gob, he golloped it down like old boots and his tongue hanging
out of him a yard long for more. Near ate the tin and all, hungry bloody
mongrel.
And the citizen and Bloom having an argument about the point, the
brothers Sheares and Wolfe Tone beyond on Arbour Hill and Robert
Emmet and die for your country, the Tommy Moore touch about Sara
Curran and she's far from the land. And Bloom, of course, with his
knockmedown cigar putting on swank with his lardy face. Phenomenon
The fat heap he married is a nice old phenomenon with a back on her like a
ballalley. Time they were stopping up in the CITY ARMS pisser Burke told
me there was an old one there with a cracked loodheramaun of a nephew and
Bloom trying to get the soft side of her doing the mollycoddle playing
bezique to come in for a bit of the wampum in her will and not eating meat
of a Friday because the old one was always thumping her craw and taking
the lout out for a walk. And one time he led him the rounds of Dublin and,
by the holy farmer, he never cried crack till he brought him home as drunk
as a boiled owl and he said he did it to teach him the evils of alcohol
and by herrings, if the three women didn't near roast him, it's a queer
story, the old one, Bloom's wife and Mrs O'Dowd that kept the hotel.
Jesus, I had to laugh at pisser Burke taking them off chewing the fat.
And Bloom with his BUT DON'T YOU SEE? and BUT ON THE OTHER HAND. And sure,
more be token, the lout I'm told was in Power's after, the blender's,
round in Cope street going home footless in a cab five times in the week
after drinking his way through all the samples in the bloody
establishment. Phenomenon
The memory of the dead, says the citizen taking up his pintglass and
glaring at Bloom.
Ay, ay, says Joe.
You don't grasp my point, says Bloom. What I mean is ...
SINN FEIN says the citizen. SINN FEIN AMHAIN The friends we love are
by our side and the foes we hate before us.
The last farewell was affecting in the extreme. From the belfries far
and near the funereal deathbell tolled unceasingly while all around the
gloomy precincts rolled the ominous warning of a hundred muffled drums
punctuated by the hollow booming of pieces of ordnance. The deafening
claps of thunder and the dazzling flashes of lightning which lit up the
ghastly scene testified that the artillery of heaven had lent its
supernatural pomp to the already gruesome spectacle. A torrential rain
poured down from the floodgates of the angry heavens upon the bared heads
of the assembled multitude which numbered at the lowest computation five
hundred thousand persons. A posse of Dublin Metropolitan police
superintended by the Chief Commissioner in person maintained order in
the vast throng for whom the York street brass and reed band whiled away
the intervening time by admirably rendering on their blackdraped
instruments the matchless melody endeared to us from the cradle by
Speranza's plaintive muse. Special quick excursion trains and upholstered
charabancs had been provided for the comfort of our country cousins of
whom there were large contingents. Considerable amusement was caused
by the favourite Dublin streetsingers Lnhn and Mllgn who sang THE
NIGHT BEFORE LARRY WAS STRETCHED in their usual mirthprovoking fashion.
Our two inimitable drolls did a roaring trade with their broadsheets among
lovers of the comedy element and nobody who has a corner in his heart for
real Irish fun without vulgarity will grudge them their hardearned
pennies. The children of the Male and Female Foundling Hospital who
thronged the windows overlooking the scene were delighted with this
unexpected addition to the day's entertainment and a word of praise is due
to the Little Sisters of the Poor for their excellent idea of affording
the poor fatherless and motherless children a genuinely instructive treat.
The viceregal houseparty which included many wellknown ladies was
chaperoned by Their Excellencies to the most favourable positions on the
grandstand while the picturesque foreign delegation known as the Friends
of the Emerald Isle was accommodated on a tribune directly opposite.
The delegation, present in full force, consisted of Commendatore
Bacibaci Beninobenone the semiparalysed DOYEN of the party who had
to be assisted to his seat by the aid of a powerful steam crane,
Monsieur Pierrepaul Petitepatant, the Grandjoker Vladinmire
Pokethankertscheff, the Archjoker Leopold Rudolph von
SchwanzenbadHodenthaler, Countess Marha Viraga Kisaszony Putrapesthi,
Hiram Y. Bomboost, Count Athanatos Karamelopulos, Ali Baba Backsheesh
Rahat Lokum Effendi, Senor Hidalgo Caballero Don Pecadillo y
Palabras y Paternoster de la Malora de la Malaria, Hokopoko Harakiri,
Hi Hung Chang, Olaf Kobberkeddelsen, Mynheer Trik van Trumps,
Pan Poleaxe Paddyrisky, Goosepond Prhklstr Kratchinabritchisitch,
Borus Hupinkoff, Herr Hurhausdirektorpresident Hans ChuechliSteuerli,
Nationalgymnasiummuseumsanatoriumandsuspensoriumsordinaryprivatdocent
generalhistoryspecialprofessordoctor Kriegfried Ueberallgemein.
All the delegates without exception expressed themselves in the
strongest possible heterogeneous terms concerning the nameless
barbarity which they had been called upon to witness. An animated
altercation in which all took part ensued among the F. O. T. E. I.
as to whether the eighth or the ninth of March was the correct
date of the birth of Ireland's patron saint. In the course of the
argument cannonballs, scimitars, boomerangs, blunderbusses, stinkpots,
meatchoppers, umbrellas, catapults, knuckledusters, sandbags, lumps of pig
iron were resorted to and blows were freely exchanged. The baby
policeman, Constable MacFadden, summoned by special courier from
Booterstown, quickly restored order and with lightning promptitude
proposed the seventeenth of the month as a solution equally honourable for
both contending parties. The readywitted ninefooter's suggestion at once
appealed to all and was unanimously accepted. Constable MacFadden was
heartily congratulated by all the F.O.T.E.I., several of whom were
bleeding profusely. Commendatore Beninobenone having been extricated
from underneath the presidential armchair, it was explained by his legal
adviser Avvocato Pagamimi that the various articles secreted in his
thirtytwo pockets had been abstracted by him during the affray from the
pockets of his junior colleagues in the hope of bringing them to their
senses. The objects which included several hundred ladies' and
gentlemen's gold and silver watches were promptly restored to their
rightful owners and general harmony reigned supreme.
Quietly, unassumingly Rumbold stepped on to the scaffold in faultless
morning dress and wearing his favourite flower, the GLADIOLUS CRUENTUS.
He announced his presence by that gentle Rumboldian cough which so
many have tried unsuccessfully to imitateshort, painstaking yet withal
so characteristic of the man. The arrival of the worldrenowned headsman
was greeted by a roar of acclamation from the huge concourse, the
viceregal ladies waving their handkerchiefs in their excitement while the
even more excitable foreign delegates cheered vociferously in a medley of
cries, HOCH, BANZAI, ELJEN, ZIVIO, CHINCHIN, POLLA KRONIA, HIPHIP, VIVE,
ALLAH, amid which the ringing EVVIVA of the delegate of the land of song
a high double F recalling those piercingly lovely notes with which the
eunuch Catalani beglamoured our greatgreatgrandmothers was easily
distinguishable. It was exactly seventeen o'clock. The signal for prayer
was then promptly given by megaphone and in an instant all heads were
bared, the commendatore's patriarchal sombrero, which has been in the
possession of his family since the revolution of Rienzi, being removed by
his medical adviser in attendance, Dr Pippi. The learned prelate who
administered the last comforts of holy religion to the hero martyr when
about to pay the death penalty knelt in a most christian spirit in a pool
of rainwater, his cassock above his hoary head, and offered up to the
throne of grace fervent prayers of supplication. Hand by the block stood
the grim figure of the executioner, his visage being concealed in a
tengallon pot with two circular perforated apertures through which
his eyes glowered furiously. As he awaited the fatal signal he
tested the edge of his horrible weapon by honing it upon his
brawny forearm or decapitated in rapid succession a flock of
sheep which had been provided by the admirers of his fell but necessary
office. On a handsome mahogany table near him were neatly arranged the
quartering knife, the various finely tempered disembowelling appliances
specially supplied by the worldfamous firm of cutlers, Messrs John Round
and Sons, Sheffield, a terra cotta saucepan for the reception of the
duodenum, colon, blind intestine and appendix etc when successfully
extracted and two commodious milkjugs destined to receive the most
precious blood of the most precious victim. The housesteward of the
amalgamated cats' and dogs' home was in attendance to convey these
vessels when replenished to that beneficent institution. Quite an
excellent repast consisting of rashers and eggs, fried steak and onions,
done to a nicety, delicious hot breakfast rolls and invigorating tea had
been considerately provided by the authorities for the consumption
of the central figure of the tragedy who was in capital spirits
when prepared for death and evinced the keenest interest in the
proceedings from beginning to end but he, with an abnegation rare
in these our times, rose nobly to the occasion and expressed the
dying wish immediately acceded to that the meal should be
divided in aliquot parts among the members of the sick and indigent
roomkeepers' association as a token of his regard and esteem. The NEC and
NON PLUS ULTRA of emotion were reached when the blushing bride elect burst
her way through the serried ranks of the bystanders and flung herself upon
the muscular bosom of him who was about to be launched into eternity for
her sake. The hero folded her willowy form in a loving embrace murmuring
fondly SHEILA, MY OWN. Encouraged by this use of her christian name she
kissed passionately all the various suitable areas of his person which the
decencies of prison garb permitted her ardour to reach. She swore to him
as they mingled the salt streams of their tears that she would ever
cherish his memory, that she would never forget her hero boy who went to
his death with a song on his lips as if he were but going to a hurling
match in Clonturk park. She brought back to his recollection the happy
days of blissful childhood together on the banks of Anna Liffey when they
had indulged in the innocent pastimes of the young and, oblivious of the
dreadful present, they both laughed heartily, all the spectators,
including the venerable pastor, joining in the general merriment. That
monster audience simply rocked with delight. But anon they were overcome
with grief and clasped their hands for the last time. A fresh torrent of
tears burst from their lachrymal ducts and the vast concourse of people,
touched to the inmost core, broke into heartrending sobs, not the least
affected being the aged prebendary himself. Big strong men, officers of
the peace and genial giants of the royal Irish constabulary,
were making frank use of their handkerchiefs and it is safe to say
that there was not a dry eye in that record assemblage. A most
romantic incident occurred when a handsome young Oxford graduate,
noted for his chivalry towards the fair sex, stepped forward and,
presenting his visiting card, bankbook and genealogical tree,
solicited the hand of the hapless young lady, requesting her to
name the day, and was accepted on the spot. Every lady in the
audience was presented with a tasteful souvenir of the occasion
in the shape of a skull and crossbones brooch, a timely and generous
act which evoked a fresh outburst of emotion and when the gallant
young Oxonian the bearer, by the way, of one of the most timehonoured
names in Albion's history placed on the finger of his blushing FIANCEE
an expensive engagement ring with emeralds set in the form of a
fourleaved shamrock the excitement knew no bounds. Nay, even the stern
provostmarshal, lieutenantcolonel TomkinMaxwell ffrenchmullan Tomlinson,
who presided on the sad occasion, he who had blown a considerable number
of sepoys from the cannonmouth without flinching, could not now restrain
his natural emotion. With his mailed gauntlet he brushed away a furtive
tear and was overheard, by those privileged burghers who happened to be
in his immediate ENTOURAGE, to murmur to himself in a faltering undertone
God blimey if she aint a clinker, that there bleeding tart. Blimey it
makes me kind of bleeding cry, straight, it does, when I sees her cause I
thinks of my old mashtub what's waiting for me down Limehouse way.
So then the citizen begins talking about the Irish language and the
corporation meeting and all to that and the shoneens that can't speak
their own language and Joe chipping in because he stuck someone for
a quid and Bloom putting in his old goo with his twopenny stump that
he cadged off of Joe and talking about the Gaelic league and the
antitreating league and drink, the curse of Ireland. Antitreating
is about the size of it. Gob, he'd let you pour all manner of drink
down his throat till the Lord would call him before you'd ever
see the froth of his pint. And one night I went in with a fellow
into one of their musical evenings, song and dance about she could
get up on a truss of hay she could my Maureen Lay and there was a fellow
with a Ballyhooly blue ribbon badge spiffing out of him in Irish and a lot
of colleen bawns going about with temperance beverages and selling medals
and oranges and lemonade and a few old dry buns, gob, flahoolagh
entertainment, don't be talking. Ireland sober is Ireland free. And then
an old fellow starts blowing into his bagpipes and all the gougers
shuffling their feet to the tune the old cow died of. And one or two sky
pilots having an eye around that there was no goings on with the females,
hitting below the belt.
So howandever, as I was saying, the old dog seeing the tin was empty
starts mousing around by Joe and me. I'd train him by kindness, so I
would, if he was my dog. Give him a rousing fine kick now and again where
it wouldn't blind him.
Afraid he'll bite you? says the citizen, jeering.
No, says I. But he might take my leg for a lamppost.
So he calls the old dog over.
What's on you, Garry? says he.
Then he starts hauling and mauling and talking to him in Irish and
the old towser growling, letting on to answer, like a duet in the opera.
Such growling you never heard as they let off between them. Someone that
has nothing better to do ought to write a letter PRO BONO PUBLICO to the
papers about the muzzling order for a dog the like of that. Growling and
grousing and his eye all bloodshot from the drouth is in it and the
hydrophobia dropping out of his jaws.
All those who are interested in the spread of human culture among
the lower animals and their name is legion should make a point of not
missing the really marvellous exhibition of cynanthropy given by the
famous old Irish red setter wolfdog formerly known by the SOBRIQUET of
Garryowen and recently rechristened by his large circle of friends and
acquaintances Owen Garry. The exhibition, which is the result of years of
training by kindness and a carefully thoughtout dietary system, comprises,
among other achievements, the recitation of verse. Our greatest living
phonetic expert wild horses shall not drag it from us has left no stone
unturned in his efforts to delucidate and compare the verse recited and has
found it bears a STRIKING resemblance the italics are ours to the ranns
of ancient Celtic bards. We are not speaking so much of those delightful
lovesongs with which the writer who conceals his identity under the
graceful pseudonym of the Little Sweet Branch has familiarised the
bookloving world but rather as a contributor D. O. C. points out in an
interesting communication published by an evening contemporary of the
harsher and more personal note which is found in the satirical effusions
of the famous Raftery and of Donal MacConsidine to say nothing of a more
modern lyrist at present very much in the public eye. We subjoin a
specimen which has been rendered into English by an eminent scholar
whose name for the moment we are not at liberty to disclose though
we believe that our readers will find the topical allusion rather
more than an indication. The metrical system of the canine original,
which recalls the intricate alliterative and isosyllabic rules of
the Welsh englyn, is infinitely more complicated but we believe our
readers will agree that the spirit has been well caught. Perhaps
it should be added that the effect is greatly increased if Owen's
verse be spoken somewhat slowly and indistinctly in a tone suggestive
of suppressed rancour.
THE CURSE OF MY CURSES
SEVEN DAYS EVERY DAY
AND SEVEN DRY THURSDAYS
ON YOU, BARNEY KIERNAN,
HAS NO SUP OF WATER
TO COOL MY COURAGE,
AND MY GUTS RED ROARING
AFTER LOWRY'S LIGHTS.
So he told Terry to bring some water for the dog and, gob, you could
hear him lapping it up a mile off. And Joe asked him would he have
another.
I will, says he, A CHARA, to show there's no ill feeling.
Gob, he's not as green as he's cabbagelooking. Arsing around from
one pub to another, leaving it to your own honour, with old Giltrap's dog
and getting fed up by the ratepayers and corporators. Entertainment for
man and beast. And says Joe
Could you make a hole in another pint?
Could a swim duck? says I.
Same again, Terry, says Joe. Are you sure you won't have anything in the
way of liquid refreshment? says he.
Thank you, no, says Bloom. As a matter of fact I just wanted to meet
Martin Cunningham, don't you see, about this insurance of poor Dignam's.
Martin asked me to go to the house. You see, he, Dignam, I mean, didn't
serve any notice of the assignment on the company at the time and
nominally under the act the mortgagee can't recover on the policy.
Holy Wars, says Joe, laughing, that's a good one if old Shylock is
landed. So the wife comes out top dog, what?
Well, that's a point, says Bloom, for the wife's admirers.
Whose admirers? says Joe.
The wife's advisers, I mean, says Bloom.
Then he starts all confused mucking it up about mortgagor under the act
like the lord chancellor giving it out on the bench and for the benefit of
the wife and that a trust is created but on the other hand that Dignam
owed Bridgeman the money and if now the wife or the widow contested the
mortgagee's right till he near had the head of me addled with his
mortgagor under the act. He was bloody safe he wasn't run in himself under
the act that time as a rogue and vagabond only he had a friend in court.
Selling bazaar tickets or what do you call it royal Hungarian privileged
lottery. True as you're there. O, commend me to an israelite Royal and
privileged Hungarian robbery.
So Bob Doran comes lurching around asking Bloom to tell Mrs
Dignam he was sorry for her trouble and he was very sorry about the
funeral and to tell her that he said and everyone who knew him said that
there was never a truer, a finer than poor little Willy that's dead to tell
her. Choking with bloody foolery. And shaking Bloom's hand doing the
tragic to tell her that. Shake hands, brother. You're a rogue and I'm
another.
Let me, said he, so far presume upon our acquaintance which, however
slight it may appear if judged by the standard of mere time, is founded,
as I hope and believe, on a sentiment of mutual esteem as to request of
you this favour. But, should I have overstepped the limits of reserve
let the sincerity of my feelings be the excuse for my boldness.
No, rejoined the other, I appreciate to the full the motives which
actuate your conduct and I shall discharge the office you entrust
to me consoled by the reflection that, though the errand be one of
sorrow, this proof of your confidence sweetens in some measure the
bitterness of the cup.
Then suffer me to take your hand, said he. The goodness of your heart, I
feel sure, will dictate to you better than my inadequate words the
expressions which are most suitable to convey an emotion whose
poignancy, were I to give vent to my feelings, would deprive me even of
speech.
And off with him and out trying to walk straight. Boosed at five
o'clock. Night he was near being lagged only Paddy Leonard knew the bobby,
A. Blind to the world up in a shebeen in Bride street after closing
time, fornicating with two shawls and a bully on guard, drinking porter
out of teacups. And calling himself a Frenchy for the shawls, Joseph
Manuo, and talking against the Catholic religion, and he serving mass in
Adam and Eve's when he was young with his eyes shut, who wrote the new
testament, and the old testament, and hugging and smugging. And the two
shawls killed with the laughing, picking his pockets, the bloody
fool and he spilling the porter all over the bed and the two shawls
screeching laughing at one another. HOW IS YOUR TESTAMENT? HAVE YOU
GOT AN OLD TESTAMENT? Only Paddy was passing there, I tell you what.
Then see him of a Sunday with his little concubine of a wife, and
she wagging her tail up the aisle of the chapel with her patent boots
on her, no less, and her violets, nice as pie, doing the little lady.
Jack Mooney's sister. And the old prostitute of a mother
procuring rooms to street couples. Gob, Jack made him toe the line. Told
him if he didn't patch up the pot, Jesus, he'd kick the shite out of him.
So Terry brought the three pints.
Here, says Joe, doing the honours. Here, citizen.
SLAN LEAT, says he.
Fortune, Joe, says I. Good health, citizen.
Gob, he had his mouth half way down the tumbler already. Want a
small fortune to keep him in drinks.
Who is the long fellow running for the mayoralty, Alf? says Joe.
Friend of yours, says Alf.
Nannan? says Joe. The mimber?
I won't mention any names, says Alf.
I thought so, says Joe. I saw him up at that meeting now with William
Field, M. P., the cattle traders.
Hairy Iopas, says the citizen, that exploded volcano, the darling of all
countries and the idol of his own.
So Joe starts telling the citizen about the foot and mouth disease and
the cattle traders and taking action in the matter and the citizen sending
them all to the rightabout and Bloom coming out with his sheepdip for the
scab and a hoose drench for coughing calves and the guaranteed remedy
for timber tongue. Because he was up one time in a knacker's yard.
Walking about with his book and pencil here's my head and my heels are
coming till Joe Cuffe gave him the order of the boot for giving lip to a
grazier. Mister Knowall. Teach your grandmother how to milk ducks.
Pisser Burke was telling me in the hotel the wife used to be in rivers of
tears some times with Mrs O'Dowd crying her eyes out with her eight inches
of fat all over her. Couldn't loosen her farting strings but old cod's eye
was waltzing around her showing her how to do it. What's your programme
today? Ay. Humane methods. Because the poor animals suffer and experts
say and the best known remedy that doesn't cause pain to the animal and
on the sore spot administer gently. Gob, he'd have a soft hand under a
hen.
Ga Ga Gara. Klook Klook Klook. Black Liz is our hen. She lays eggs
for us. When she lays her egg she is so glad. Gara. Klook Klook Klook.
Then comes good uncle Leo. He puts his hand under black Liz and takes
her fresh egg. Ga ga ga ga Gara. Klook Klook Klook.
Anyhow, says Joe, Field and Nannetti are going over tonight to London
to ask about it on the floor of the house of commons.
Are you sure, says Bloom, the councillor is going? I wanted to see him,
as it happens.
Well, he's going off by the mailboat, says Joe, tonight.
That's too bad, says Bloom. I wanted particularly. Perhaps only Mr Field
is going. I couldn't phone. No. You're sure?
Nannan's going too, says Joe. The league told him to ask a question
tomorrow about the commissioner of police forbidding Irish games in the
park. What do you think of that, citizen? THE SLUAGH NA HEIREANN.
Mr Cowe Conacre Multifarnham. Nat. Arising out of the question of my
honourable friend, the member for Shillelagh, may I ask the right
honourable gentleman whether the government has issued orders that these
animals shall be slaughtered though no medical evidence is forthcoming as
to their pathological condition?
Mr Allfours Tamoshant. Con. Honourable members are already in
possession of the evidence produced before a committee of the whole house.
I feel I cannot usefully add anything to that. The answer to the
honourable member's question is in the affirmative.
Mr Orelli O'Reilly Montenotte. Nat. Have similar orders been issued for
the slaughter of human animals who dare to play Irish games in the
Phoenix park?
Mr Allfours The answer is in the negative.
Mr Cowe Conacre Has the right honourable gentleman's famous
Mitchelstown telegram inspired the policy of gentlemen on the Treasury
bench? O O
Mr Allfours I must have notice of that question.
Mr Staylewit Buncombe. Ind. Don't hesitate to shoot.
Ironical opposition cheers.
The speaker Order Order
The house rises. Cheers.
There's the man, says Joe, that made the Gaelic sports revival. There he
is sitting there. The man that got away James Stephens. The champion of
all Ireland at putting the sixteen pound shot. What was your best throw,
citizen?
NA BACLEIS, says the citizen, letting on to be modest. There was a time
I was as good as the next fellow anyhow.
Put it there, citizen, says Joe. You were and a bloody sight better.
Is that really a fact? says Alf.
Yes, says Bloom. That's well known. Did you not know that?
So off they started about Irish sports and shoneen games the like of lawn
tennis and about hurley and putting the stone and racy of the soil and
building up a nation once again and all to that. And of course Bloom had
to have his say too about if a fellow had a rower's heart violent
exercise was bad. I declare to my antimacassar if you took up a
straw from the bloody floor and if you said to Bloom LOOK AT, BLOOM.
DO YOU SEE THAT STRAW? THAT'S A STRAW. Declare to my aunt he'd talk
about it for an hour so he would and talk steady.
A most interesting discussion took place in the ancient hall of BRIAN
O'CIARNAIN'S in SRAID NA BRETAINE BHEAG, under the auspices of SLUAGH NA
HEIREANN, on the revival of ancient Gaelic sports and the importance of
physical culture, as understood in ancient Greece and ancient Rome and
ancient Ireland, for the development of the race. The venerable president
of the noble order was in the chair and the attendance was of large
dimensions. After an instructive discourse by the chairman, a magnificent
oration eloquently and forcibly expressed, a most interesting and
instructive discussion of the usual high standard of excellence
ensued as to the desirability of the revivability of the ancient
games and sports of our ancient Panceltic forefathers. The
wellknown and highly respected worker in the cause of our old
tongue, Mr Joseph M'Carthy Hynes, made an eloquent appeal for
the resuscitation of the ancient Gaelic sports and pastimes,
practised morning and evening by Finn MacCool, as calculated to revive the
best traditions of manly strength and prowess handed down to us from
ancient ages. L. Bloom, who met with a mixed reception of applause and
hisses, having espoused the negative the vocalist chairman brought the
discussion to a close, in response to repeated requests and hearty
plaudits from all parts of a bumper house, by a remarkably noteworthy
rendering of the immortal Thomas Osborne Davis' evergreen verses happily
too familiar to need recalling here A NATION ONCE AGAIN in the execution
of which the veteran patriot champion may be said without fear of
contradiction to have fairly excelled himself. The Irish CarusoGaribaldi
was in superlative form and his stentorian notes were heard to the
greatest advantage in the timehonoured anthem sung as only our citizen
can sing it. His superb highclass vocalism, which by its superquality
greatly enhanced his already international reputation, was vociferously
applauded by the large audience among which were to be noticed many
prominent members of the clergy as well as representatives of the press
and the bar and the other learned professions. The proceedings then
terminated.
Amongst the clergy present were the very rev. William Delany, S. J.,
L. L. D. the rt rev. Gerald Molloy, D. D. the rev. P. J. Kavanagh,
C. S. Sp. the rev. T. Waters, C. C. the rev. John M. Ivers, P. P. the
rev. P. J. Cleary, O. S. F. the rev. L. J. Hickey, O. P. the very rev.
Fr. Nicholas, O. S. F. C. the very rev. B. Gorman, O. D. C. the rev. T.
Maher, S. J. the very rev. James Murphy, S. J. the rev. John Lavery,
V. F. the very rev. William Doherty, D. D. the rev. Peter Fagan, O. M.
the rev. T. Brangan, O. S. A. the rev. J. Flavin, C. C. the rev. M. A.
Hackett, C. C. the rev. W. Hurley, C. C. the rt rev. Mgr M'Manus,
V. G. the rev. B. R. Slattery, O. M. I. the very rev. M. D. Scally, P.
P. the rev. F. T. Purcell, O. P. the very rev. Timothy canon Gorman,
P. P. the rev. J. Flanagan, C. C. The laity included P. Fay, T. Quirke,
etc., etc.
Talking about violent exercise, says Alf, were you at that KeoghBennett
match?
No, says Joe.
I heard So and So made a cool hundred quid over it, says Alf.
Who? Blazes? says Joe.
And says Bloom
What I meant about tennis, for example, is the agility and training the
eye.
Ay, Blazes, says Alf. He let out that Myler was on the beer to run up
the odds and he swatting all the time.
We know him, says the citizen. The traitor's son. We know what put
English gold in his pocket.
True for you, says Joe.
And Bloom cuts in again about lawn tennis and the circulation of the
blood, asking Alf
Now, don't you think, Bergan?
Myler dusted the floor with him, says Alf. Heenan and Sayers was only a
bloody fool to it. Handed him the father and mother of a beating. See the
little kipper not up to his navel and the big fellow swiping. God, he gave
him one last puck in the wind, Queensberry rules and all, made him puke
what he never ate.
It was a historic and a hefty battle when Myler and Percy were
scheduled to don the gloves for the purse of fifty sovereigns. Handicapped
as he was by lack of poundage, Dublin's pet lamb made up for it by
superlative skill in ringcraft. The final bout of fireworks was a
gruelling for both champions. The welterweight sergeantmajor had
tapped some lively claret in the previous mixup during which Keogh
had been receivergeneral of rights and lefts, the artilleryman
putting in some neat work on the pet's nose, and Myler came on
looking groggy. The soldier got to business, leading off with a
powerful left jab to which the Irish gladiator retaliated by shooting
out a stiff one flush to the point of Bennett's jaw. The redcoat
ducked but the Dubliner lifted him with a left hook, the body punch being
a fine one. The men came to handigrips. Myler quickly became busy and got
his man under, the bout ending with the bulkier man on the ropes, Myler
punishing him. The Englishman, whose right eye was nearly closed, took
his corner where he was liberally drenched with water and when the bell
went came on gamey and brimful of pluck, confident of knocking out the
fistic Eblanite in jigtime. It was a fight to a finish and the best man
for it. The two fought like tigers and excitement ran fever high. The
referee twice cautioned Pucking Percy for holding but the pet was tricky
and his footwork a treat to watch. After a brisk exchange of courtesies
during which a smart upper cut of the military man brought blood freely
from his opponent's mouth the lamb suddenly waded in all over his man and
landed a terrific left to Battling Bennett's stomach, flooring him flat.
It was a knockout clean and clever. Amid tense expectation the Portobello
bruiser was being counted out when Bennett's second Ole Pfotts Wettstein
threw in the towel and the Santry boy was declared victor to the frenzied
cheers of the public who broke through the ringropes and fairly mobbed him
with delight.
He knows which side his bread is buttered, says Alf. I hear he's running
a concert tour now up in the north.
He is, says Joe. Isn't he?
Who? says Bloom. Ah, yes. That's quite true. Yes, a kind of summer tour,
you see. Just a holiday.
Mrs B. is the bright particular star, isn't she? says Joe.
My wife? says Bloom. She's singing, yes. I think it will be a success
too.
He's an excellent man to organise. Excellent.
Hoho begob says I to myself says I. That explains the milk in the cocoanut
and absence of hair on the animal's chest. Blazes doing the tootle on the
flute. Concert tour. Dirty Dan the dodger's son off Island bridge that
sold the same horses twice over to the government to fight the Boers. Old
Whatwhat. I called about the poor and water rate, Mr Boylan. You what?
The water rate, Mr Boylan. You whatwhat? That's the bucko that'll
organise her, take my tip. 'Twixt me and you Caddareesh.
Pride of Calpe's rocky mount, the ravenhaired daughter of Tweedy.
There grew she to peerless beauty where loquat and almond scent the air.
The gardens of Alameda knew her step the garths of olives knew and
bowed. The chaste spouse of Leopold is she Marion of the bountiful
bosoms.
And lo, there entered one of the clan of the O'Molloy's, a comely hero
of white face yet withal somewhat ruddy, his majesty's counsel learned in
the law, and with him the prince and heir of the noble line of Lambert.
Hello, Ned.
Hello, Alf.
Hello, Jack.
Hello, Joe.
God save you, says the citizen.
Save you kindly, says J. J. What'll it be, Ned?
Half one, says Ned.
So J. J. ordered the drinks.
Were you round at the court? says Joe.
Yes, says J. J. He'll square that, Ned, says he.
Hope so, says Ned.
Now what were those two at? J. J. getting him off the grand jury list
and the other give him a leg over the stile. With his name in Stubbs's.
Playing cards, hobnobbing with flash toffs with a swank glass in their
eye, adrinking fizz and he half smothered in writs and garnishee orders.
Pawning his gold watch in Cummins of Francis street where noone would
know him in the private office when I was there with Pisser releasing his
boots out of the pop. What's your name, sir? Dunne, says he. Ay, and done
says I. Gob, he'll come home by weeping cross one of those days, I'm
thinking.
Did you see that bloody lunatic Breen round there? says Alf. U. p up.
Yes, says J. J. Looking for a private detective.
Ay, says Ned. And he wanted right go wrong to address the court only
Corny Kelleher got round him telling him to get the handwriting examined
first.
Ten thousand pounds, says Alf, laughing. God, I'd give anything to hear
him before a judge and jury.
Was it you did it, Alf? says Joe. The truth, the whole truth and nothing
but the truth, so help you Jimmy Johnson.
Me? says Alf. Don't cast your nasturtiums on my character.
Whatever statement you make, says Joe, will be taken down in evidence
against you.
Of course an action would lie, says J. J. It implies that he is not
COMPOS MENTIS. U. p up.
COMPOS your eye says Alf, laughing. Do you know that he's balmy?
Look at his head. Do you know that some mornings he has to get his hat on
with a shoehorn.
Yes, says J. J., but the truth of a libel is no defence to an indictment
for publishing it in the eyes of the law.
Ha ha, Alf, says Joe.
Still, says Bloom, on account of the poor woman, I mean his wife.
Pity about her, says the citizen. Or any other woman marries a half and
half.
How half and half? says Bloom. Do you mean he ...
Half and half I mean, says the citizen. A fellow that's neither fish nor
flesh.
Nor good red herring, says Joe.
That what's I mean, says the citizen. A pishogue, if you know what that
is.
Begob I saw there was trouble coming. And Bloom explaining he meant on
account of it being cruel for the wife having to go round after the
old stuttering fool. Cruelty to animals so it is to let that bloody
povertystricken Breen out on grass with his beard out tripping him,
bringing down the rain. And she with her nose cockahoop after she married
him because a cousin of his old fellow's was pewopener to the pope.
Picture of him on the wall with his Smashall Sweeney's moustaches, the
signior Brini from Summerhill, the eyetallyano, papal Zouave to the Holy
Father, has left the quay and gone to Moss street. And who was he, tell
us? A nobody, two pair back and passages, at seven shillings a week, and
he covered with all kinds of breastplates bidding defiance to the world.
And moreover, says J. J., a postcard is publication. It was held to be
sufficient evidence of malice in the testcase Sadgrove v. Hole. In my
opinion an action might lie.
Six and eightpence, please. Who wants your opinion? Let us drink
our pints in peace. Gob, we won't be let even do that much itself.
Well, good health, Jack, says Ned.
Good health, Ned, says J. J.
There he is again, says Joe.
Where? says Alf.
And begob there he was passing the door with his books under his
oxter and the wife beside him and Corny Kelleher with his wall eye looking
in as they went past, talking to him like a father, trying to sell him a
secondhand coffin.
How did that Canada swindle case go off? says Joe.
Remanded, says J. J.
One of the bottlenosed fraternity it was went by the name of James
Wought alias Saphiro alias Spark and Spiro, put an ad in the papers saying
he'd give a passage to Canada for twenty bob. What? Do you see any green
in the white of my eye? Course it was a bloody barney. What? Swindled
them all, skivvies and badhachs from the county Meath, ay, and his own
kidney too. J. J. was telling us there was an ancient Hebrew Zaretsky or
something weeping in the witnessbox with his hat on him, swearing by the
holy Moses he was stuck for two quid.
Who tried the case? says Joe.
Recorder, says Ned.
Poor old sir Frederick, says Alf, you can cod him up to the two eyes.
Heart as big as a lion, says Ned. Tell him a tale of woe about arrears
of rent and a sick wife and a squad of kids and, faith, he'll dissolve in
tears on the bench.
Ay, says Alf. Reuben J was bloody lucky he didn't clap him in the dock
the other day for suing poor little Gumley that's minding stones, for the
corporation there near Butt bridge.
And he starts taking off the old recorder letting on to cry
A most scandalous thing This poor hardworking man How many
children? Ten, did you say?
Yes, your worship. And my wife has the typhoid.
And the wife with typhoid fever Scandalous Leave the court
immediately, sir. No, sir, I'll make no order for payment. How dare you,
sir, come up before me and ask me to make an order A poor hardworking
industrious man I dismiss the case.
And whereas on the sixteenth day of the month of the oxeyed goddess and in
the third week after the feastday of the Holy and Undivided Trinity,
the daughter of the skies, the virgin moon being then in her first
quarter, it came to pass that those learned judges repaired them to the
halls of law. There master Courtenay, sitting in his own chamber,
gave his rede and master Justice Andrews, sitting without a jury
in the probate court, weighed well and pondered the claim of the
first chargeant upon the property in the matter of the will
propounded and final testamentary disposition IN RE the real and
personal estate of the late lamented Jacob Halliday, vintner, deceased,
versus Livingstone, an infant, of unsound mind, and another. And to the
solemn court of Green street there came sir Frederick the Falconer. And he
sat him there about the hour of five o'clock to administer the law of the
brehons at the commission for all that and those parts to be holden in
and for the county of the city of Dublin. And there sat with him the high
sinhedrim of the twelve tribes of Iar, for every tribe one man, of the
tribe of Patrick and of the tribe of Hugh and of the tribe of Owen and of
the tribe of Conn and of the tribe of Oscar and of the tribe of
Fergus and of the tribe of Finn and of the tribe of Dermot and of
the tribe of Cormac and of the tribe of Kevin and of the tribe of
Caolte and of the tribe of Ossian, there being in all twelve good
men and true. And he conjured them by Him who died on rood that
they should well and truly try and true deliverance make in the
issue joined between their sovereign lord the king and the prisoner at
the bar and true verdict give according to the evidence so help them God
and kiss the book. And they rose in their seats, those twelve of Iar, and
they swore by the name of Him Who is from everlasting that they would do
His rightwiseness. And straightway the minions of the law led forth from
their donjon keep one whom the sleuthhounds of justice had apprehended in
consequence of information received. And they shackled him hand and foot
and would take of him ne bail ne mainprise but preferred a charge against
him for he was a malefactor.
Those are nice things, says the citizen, coming over here to Ireland
filling the country with bugs.
So Bloom lets on he heard nothing and he starts talking with Joe, telling
him he needn't trouble about that little matter till the first but if he
would just say a word to Mr Crawford. And so Joe swore high and holy by
this and by that he'd do the devil and all.
Because, you see, says Bloom, for an advertisement you must have
repetition. That's the whole secret.
Rely on me, says Joe.
Swindling the peasants, says the citizen, and the poor of Ireland. We
want no more strangers in our house.
O, I'm sure that will be all right, Hynes, says Bloom. It's just that
Keyes, you see.
Consider that done, says Joe.
Very kind of you, says Bloom.
The strangers, says the citizen. Our own fault. We let them come in. We
brought them in. The adulteress and her paramour brought the Saxon
robbers here.
Decree NISI, says J. J.
And Bloom letting on to be awfully deeply interested in nothing, a
spider's web in the corner behind the barrel, and the citizen scowling
after him and the old dog at his feet looking up to know who to bite and
when.
A dishonoured wife, says the citizen, that's what's the cause of all our
misfortunes.
And here she is, says Alf, that was giggling over the POLICE GAZETTE
with Terry on the counter, in all her warpaint.
Give us a squint at her, says I.
And what was it only one of the smutty yankee pictures Terry
borrows off of Corny Kelleher. Secrets for enlarging your private parts.
Misconduct of society belle. Norman W. Tupper, wealthy Chicago
contractor, finds pretty but faithless wife in lap of officer Taylor.
Belle in her bloomers misconducting herself, and her fancyman feeling for
her tickles and Norman W. Tupper bouncing in with his peashooter just in
time to be late after she doing the trick of the loop with officer Taylor.
O jakers, Jenny, says Joe, how short your shirt is
There's hair, Joe, says I. Get a queer old tailend of corned beef off of
that one, what?
So anyhow in came John Wyse Nolan and Lenehan with him with a
face on him as long as a late breakfast.
Well, says the citizen, what's the latest from the scene of action? What
did those tinkers in the city hall at their caucus meeting decide about
the Irish language?
O'Nolan, clad in shining armour, low bending made obeisance to the
puissant and high and mighty chief of all Erin and did him to wit of that
which had befallen, how that the grave elders of the most obedient city,
second of the realm, had met them in the tholsel, and there, after due
prayers to the gods who dwell in ether supernal, had taken solemn counsel
whereby they might, if so be it might be, bring once more into honour
among mortal men the winged speech of the seadivided Gael.
It's on the march, says the citizen. To hell with the bloody brutal
Sassenachs and their PATOIS.
So J. J. puts in a word, doing the toff about one story was good till
you heard another and blinking facts and the Nelson policy, putting your
blind eye to the telescope and drawing up a bill of attainder to impeach a
nation, and Bloom trying to back him up moderation and botheration and
their colonies and their civilisation.
Their syphilisation, you mean, says the citizen. To hell with them The
curse of a goodfornothing God light sideways on the bloody thicklugged
sons of whores' gets No music and no art and no literature worthy of the
name. Any civilisation they have they stole from us. Tonguetied sons of
bastards' ghosts.
The European family, says J. J. ...
They're not European, says the citizen. I was in Europe with Kevin Egan
of Paris. You wouldn't see a trace of them or their language anywhere in
Europe except in a CABINET D'AISANCE.
And says John Wyse
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen.
And says Lenehan that knows a bit of the lingo
CONSPUEZ LES ANGLAIS PERFIDE ALBION
He said and then lifted he in his rude great brawny strengthy hands
the medher of dark strong foamy ale and, uttering his tribal slogan LAMH
DEARG ABU, he drank to the undoing of his foes, a race of mighty valorous
heroes, rulers of the waves, who sit on thrones of alabaster silent as the
deathless gods.
What's up with you, says I to Lenehan. You look like a fellow that had
lost a bob and found a tanner.
Gold cup, says he.
Who won, Mr Lenehan? says Terry.
THROWAWAY, says he, at twenty to one. A rank outsider. And the rest
nowhere.
And Bass's mare? says Terry.
Still running, says he. We're all in a cart. Boylan plunged two quid on
my tip SCEPTRE for himself and a lady friend.
I had half a crown myself, says Terry, on ZINFANDEL that Mr Flynn gave
me. Lord Howard de Walden's.
Twenty to one, says Lenehan. Such is life in an outhouse. THROWAWAY,
says he. Takes the biscuit, and talking about bunions. Frailty, thy name
is SCEPTRE.
So he went over to the biscuit tin Bob Doran left to see if there was
anything he could lift on the nod, the old cur after him backing his luck
with his mangy snout up. Old Mother Hubbard went to the cupboard.
Not there, my child, says he.
Keep your pecker up, says Joe. She'd have won the money only for the
other dog.
And J. J. and the citizen arguing about law and history with Bloom
sticking in an odd word.
Some people, says Bloom, can see the mote in others' eyes but they can't
see the beam in their own.
RAIMEIS, says the citizen. There's noone as blind as the fellow that
won't see, if you know what that means. Where are our missing
twenty millions of Irish should be here today instead of four,
our lost tribes? And our potteries and textiles, the finest in
the whole world And our wool that was sold in Rome in the time
of Juvenal and our flax and our damask from the looms of Antrim
and our Limerick lace, our tanneries and our white flint glass
down there by Ballybough and our Huguenot poplin that we have since
Jacquard de Lyon and our woven silk and our Foxford tweeds and ivory
raised point from the Carmelite convent in New Ross, nothing like it in
the whole wide world. Where are the Greek merchants that came through the
pillars of Hercules, the Gibraltar now grabbed by the foe of mankind, with
gold and Tyrian purple to sell in Wexford at the fair of Carmen? Read
Tacitus and Ptolemy, even Giraldus Cambrensis. Wine, peltries,
Connemara marble, silver from Tipperary, second to none, our farfamed
horses even today, the Irish hobbies, with king Philip of Spain offering
to pay customs duties for the right to fish in our waters. What do the
yellowjohns of Anglia owe us for our ruined trade and our ruined hearths?
And the beds of the Barrow and Shannon they won't deepen with millions
of acres of marsh and bog to make us all die of consumption?
As treeless as Portugal we'll be soon, says John Wyse, or Heligoland
with its one tree if something is not done to reafforest the land.
Larches, firs, all the trees of the conifer family are going fast. I was
reading a report of lord Castletown's ...
Save them, says the citizen, the giant ash of Galway and the chieftain
elm of Kildare with a fortyfoot bole and an acre of foliage. Save the
trees of Ireland for the future men of Ireland on the fair hills of
Eire, O.
Europe has its eyes on you, says Lenehan.
The fashionable international world attended EN MASSE this afternoon
at the wedding of the chevalier Jean Wyse de Neaulan, grand high chief
ranger of the Irish National Foresters, with Miss Fir Conifer of Pine
Valley. Lady Sylvester Elmshade, Mrs Barbara Lovebirch, Mrs Poll Ash,
Mrs Holly Hazeleyes, Miss Daphne Bays, Miss Dorothy Canebrake, Mrs
Clyde Twelvetrees, Mrs Rowan Greene, Mrs Helen Vinegadding, Miss
Virginia Creeper, Miss Gladys Beech, Miss Olive Garth, Miss Blanche
Maple, Mrs Maud Mahogany, Miss Myra Myrtle, Miss Priscilla
Elderflower, Miss Bee Honeysuckle, Miss Grace Poplar, Miss O Mimosa
San, Miss Rachel Cedarfrond, the Misses Lilian and Viola Lilac, Miss
Timidity Aspenall, Mrs Kitty DeweyMosse, Miss May Hawthorne, Mrs
Gloriana Palme, Mrs Liana Forrest, Mrs Arabella Blackwood and Mrs
Norma Holyoake of Oakholme Regis graced the ceremony by their
presence. The bride who was given away by her father, the M'Conifer of
the Glands, looked exquisitely charming in a creation carried out in green
mercerised silk, moulded on an underslip of gloaming grey, sashed with a
yoke of broad emerald and finished with a triple flounce of darkerhued
fringe, the scheme being relieved by bretelles and hip insertions of acorn
bronze. The maids of honour, Miss Larch Conifer and Miss Spruce Conifer,
sisters of the bride, wore very becoming costumes in the same tone, a
dainty MOTIF of plume rose being worked into the pleats in a pinstripe and
repeated capriciously in the jadegreen toques in the form of heron
feathers of paletinted coral. Senhor Enrique Flor presided at the
organ with his wellknown ability and, in addition to the prescribed
numbers of the nuptial mass, played a new and striking arrangement
of WOODMAN, SPARE THAT TREE at the conclusion of the service. On
leaving the church of Saint Fiacre IN HORTO after the papal
blessing the happy pair were subjected to a playful crossfire
of hazelnuts, beechmast, bayleaves, catkins of willow, ivytod,
hollyberries, mistletoe sprigs and quicken shoots. Mr and Mrs Wyse
Conifer Neaulan will spend a quiet honeymoon in the Black Forest.
And our eyes are on Europe, says the citizen. We had our trade with
Spain and the French and with the Flemings before those mongrels were
pupped, Spanish ale in Galway, the winebark on the winedark waterway.
And will again, says Joe.
And with the help of the holy mother of God we will again, says the
citizen, clapping his thigh. our harbours that are empty will be full
again, Queenstown, Kinsale, Galway, Blacksod Bay, Ventry in the kingdom of
Kerry, Killybegs, the third largest harbour in the wide world with a fleet
of masts of the Galway Lynches and the Cavan O'Reillys and the
O'Kennedys of Dublin when the earl of Desmond could make a treaty with
the emperor Charles the Fifth himself. And will again, says he, when the
first Irish battleship is seen breasting the waves with our own flag to
the fore, none of your Henry Tudor's harps, no, the oldest flag afloat,
the flag of the province of Desmond and Thomond, three crowns on a blue
field, the three sons of Milesius.
And he took the last swig out of the pint. Moya. All wind and piss like
a tanyard cat. Cows in Connacht have long horns. As much as his bloody
life is worth to go down and address his tall talk to the assembled
multitude in Shanagolden where he daren't show his nose with the Molly
Maguires looking for him to let daylight through him for grabbing the
holding of an evicted tenant.
Hear, hear to that, says John Wyse. What will you have?
An imperial yeomanry, says Lenehan, to celebrate the occasion.
Half one, Terry, says John Wyse, and a hands up. Terry Are you asleep?
Yes, sir, says Terry. Small whisky and bottle of Allsop. Right, sir.
Hanging over the bloody paper with Alf looking for spicy bits instead
of attending to the general public. Picture of a butting match, trying to
crack their bloody skulls, one chap going for the other with his head down
like a bull at a gate. And another one BLACK BEAST BURNED IN OMAHA, GA.
A lot of Deadwood Dicks in slouch hats and they firing at a Sambo strung
up in a tree with his tongue out and a bonfire under him. Gob, they ought
to drown him in the sea after and electrocute and crucify him to make sure
of their job.
But what about the fighting navy, says Ned, that keeps our foes at bay?
I'll tell you what about it, says the citizen. Hell upon earth it is.
Read the revelations that's going on in the papers about flogging on the
training ships at Portsmouth. A fellow writes that calls himself DISGUSTED
ONE.
So he starts telling us about corporal punishment and about the crew
of tars and officers and rearadmirals drawn up in cocked hats and the
parson with his protestant bible to witness punishment and a young lad
brought out, howling for his ma, and they tie him down on the buttend of a
gun.
A rump and dozen, says the citizen, was what that old ruffian sir John
Beresford called it but the modern God's Englishman calls it caning on the
breech.
And says John Wyse
'Tis a custom more honoured in the breach than in the observance.
Then he was telling us the master at arms comes along with a long
cane and he draws out and he flogs the bloody backside off of the poor lad
till he yells meila murder.
That's your glorious British navy, says the citizen, that bosses the
earth.
The fellows that never will be slaves, with the only hereditary chamber on
the face of God's earth and their land in the hands of a dozen gamehogs
and cottonball barons. That's the great empire they boast about of drudges
and whipped serfs.
On which the sun never rises, says Joe.
And the tragedy of it is, says the citizen, they believe it. The
unfortunate yahoos believe it.
They believe in rod, the scourger almighty, creator of hell upon earth,
and in Jacky Tar, the son of a gun, who was conceived of unholy boast,
born of the fighting navy, suffered under rump and dozen, was scarified,
flayed and curried, yelled like bloody hell, the third day he arose again
from the bed, steered into haven, sitteth on his beamend till further
orders whence he shall come to drudge for a living and be paid.
But, says Bloom, isn't discipline the same everywhere. I mean wouldn't
it be the same here if you put force against force?
Didn't I tell you? As true as I'm drinking this porter if he was at his
last gasp he'd try to downface you that dying was living.
We'll put force against force, says the citizen. We have our greater
Ireland beyond the sea. They were driven out of house and home in the
black . Their mudcabins and their shielings by the roadside were laid
low by the batteringram and the TIMES rubbed its hands and told the
whitelivered Saxons there would soon be as few Irish in Ireland as
redskins in America. Even the Grand Turk sent us his piastres. But the
Sassenach tried to starve the nation at home while the land was full of
crops that the British hyenas bought and sold in Rio de Janeiro. Ay, they
drove out the peasants in hordes. Twenty thousand of them died in the
coffinships. But those that came to the land of the free remember the
land of bondage. And they will come again and with a vengeance, no
cravens, the sons of Granuaile, the champions of Kathleen ni Houlihan.
Perfectly true, says Bloom. But my point was ...
We are a long time waiting for that day, citizen, says Ned. Since the
poor old woman told us that the French were on the sea and landed at
Killala.
Ay, says John Wyse. We fought for the royal Stuarts that reneged us
against the Williamites and they betrayed us. Remember Limerick and the
broken treatystone. We gave our best blood to France and Spain, the wild
geese. Fontenoy, eh? And Sarsfield and O'Donnell, duke of Tetuan in
Spain, and Ulysses Browne of Camus that was fieldmarshal to Maria Teresa.
But what did we ever get for it?
The French says the citizen. Set of dancing masters Do you know what
it is? They were never worth a roasted fart to Ireland. Aren't they
trying to make an ENTENTE CORDIALE now at Tay Pay's dinnerparty with
perfidious Albion? Firebrands of Europe and they always were.
CONSPUEZ LES FRANCAIS, says Lenehan, nobbling his beer.
And as for the Prooshians and the Hanoverians, says Joe, haven't we had
enough of those sausageeating bastards on the throne from George the
elector down to the German lad and the flatulent old bitch that's dead?
Jesus, I had to laugh at the way he came out with that about the old one
with the winkers on her, blind drunk in her royal palace every night of
God, old Vic, with her jorum of mountain dew and her coachman carting her
up body and bones to roll into bed and she pulling him by the whiskers
and singing him old bits of songs about EHREN ON THE RHINE and come where
the boose is cheaper.
Well, says J. J. We have Edward the peacemaker now.
Tell that to a fool, says the citizen. There's a bloody sight more pox
than pax about that boyo. Edward GuelphWettin
And what do you think, says Joe, of the holy boys, the priests and
bishops of Ireland doing up his room in Maynooth in His Satanic Majesty's
racing colours and sticking up pictures of all the horses his jockeys
rode. The earl of Dublin, no less.
They ought to have stuck up all the women he rode himself, says little
Alf.
And says J. J.
Considerations of space influenced their lordships' decision.
Will you try another, citizen? says Joe.
Yes, sir, says he. I will.
You? says Joe.
Beholden to you, Joe, says I. May your shadow never grow less.
Repeat that dose, says Joe.
Bloom was talking and talking with John Wyse and he quite excited with
his dunducketymudcoloured mug on him and his old plumeyes rolling about.
Persecution, says he, all the history of the world is full of it.
Perpetuating national hatred among nations.
But do you know what a nation means? says John Wyse.
Yes, says Bloom.
What is it? says John Wyse.
A nation? says Bloom. A nation is the same people living in the same
place.
By God, then, says Ned, laughing, if that's so I'm a nation for I'm
living in the same place for the past five years.
So of course everyone had the laugh at Bloom and says he, trying to
muck out of it
Or also living in different places.
That covers my case, says Joe.
What is your nation if I may ask? says the citizen.
Ireland, says Bloom. I was born here. Ireland.
The citizen said nothing only cleared the spit out of his gullet and,
gob, he spat a Red bank oyster out of him right in the corner.
After you with the push, Joe, says he, taking out his handkerchief to
swab himself dry.
Here you are, citizen, says Joe. Take that in your right hand and repeat
after me the following words.
The muchtreasured and intricately embroidered ancient Irish
facecloth attributed to Solomon of Droma and Manus Tomaltach og
MacDonogh, authors of the Book of Ballymote, was then carefully
produced and called forth prolonged admiration. No need to dwell on the
legendary beauty of the cornerpieces, the acme of art, wherein one can
distinctly discern each of the four evangelists in turn presenting to each
of the four masters his evangelical symbol, a bogoak sceptre, a North
American puma a far nobler king of beasts than the British article, be it
said in passing, a Kerry calf and a golden eagle from Carrantuohill. The
scenes depicted on the emunctory field, showing our ancient duns and raths
and cromlechs and grianauns and seats of learning and maledictive stones,
are as wonderfully beautiful and the pigments as delicate as when the
Sligo illuminators gave free rein to their artistic fantasy long long ago
in the time of the Barmecides. Glendalough, the lovely lakes of Killarney,
the ruins of Clonmacnois, Cong Abbey, Glen Inagh and the Twelve Pins,
Ireland's Eye, the Green Hills of Tallaght, Croagh Patrick, the brewery of
Messrs Arthur Guinness, Son and Company Limited, Lough Neagh's banks,
the vale of Ovoca, Isolde's tower, the Mapas obelisk, Sir Patrick Dun's
hospital, Cape Clear, the glen of Aherlow, Lynch's castle, the Scotch
house, Rathdown Union Workhouse at Loughlinstown, Tullamore jail,
Castleconnel rapids, Kilballymacshonakill, the cross at Monasterboice,
Jury's Hotel, S. Patrick's Purgatory, the Salmon Leap, Maynooth college
refectory, Curley's hole, the three birthplaces of the first duke of
Wellington, the rock of Cashel, the bog of Allen, the Henry Street
Warehouse, Fingal's Caveall these moving scenes are still there for us
today rendered more beautiful still by the waters of sorrow which have
passed over them and by the rich incrustations of time.
Show us over the drink, says I. Which is which?
That's mine, says Joe, as the devil said to the dead policeman.
And I belong to a race too, says Bloom, that is hated and persecuted.
Also now. This very moment. This very instant.
Gob, he near burnt his fingers with the butt of his old cigar.
Robbed, says he. Plundered. Insulted. Persecuted. Taking what belongs
to us by right. At this very moment, says he, putting up his fist, sold by
auction in Morocco like slaves or cattle.
Are you talking about the new Jerusalem? says the citizen.
I'm talking about injustice, says Bloom.
Right, says John Wyse. Stand up to it then with force like men.
That's an almanac picture for you. Mark for a softnosed bullet. Old
lardyface standing up to the business end of a gun. Gob, he'd adorn a
sweepingbrush, so he would, if he only had a nurse's apron on him. And
then he collapses all of a sudden, twisting around all the opposite, as
limp as a wet rag.
But it's no use, says he. Force, hatred, history, all that. That's not
life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it's
the very opposite of that that is really life.
What? says Alf.
Love, says Bloom. I mean the opposite of hatred. I must go now, says he
to John Wyse. Just round to the court a moment to see if Martin is there.
If he comes just say I'll be back in a second. Just a moment.
Who's hindering you? And off he pops like greased lightning.
A new apostle to the gentiles, says the citizen. Universal love.
Well, says John Wyse. Isn't that what we're told. Love your neighbour.
That chap? says the citizen. Beggar my neighbour is his motto. Love,
moya He's a nice pattern of a Romeo and Juliet.
Love loves to love love. Nurse loves the new chemist. Constable A
loves Mary Kelly. Gerty MacDowell loves the boy that has the bicycle.
M. B. loves a fair gentleman. Li Chi Han lovey up kissy Cha Pu Chow.
Jumbo, the elephant, loves Alice, the elephant. Old Mr Verschoyle with the
ear trumpet loves old Mrs Verschoyle with the turnedin eye. The man in the
brown macintosh loves a lady who is dead. His Majesty the King loves Her
Majesty the Queen. Mrs Norman W. Tupper loves officer Taylor. You love
a certain person. And this person loves that other person because
everybody loves somebody but God loves everybody.
Well, Joe, says I, your very good health and song. More power, citizen.
Hurrah, there, says Joe.
The blessing of God and Mary and Patrick on you, says the citizen.
And he ups with his pint to wet his whistle.
We know those canters, says he, preaching and picking your pocket.
What about sanctimonious Cromwell and his ironsides that put the women
and children of Drogheda to the sword with the bible text GOD IS LOVE
pasted round the mouth of his cannon? The bible Did you read that skit in
the UNITED IRISHMAN today about that Zulu chief that's visiting England?
What's that? says Joe.
So the citizen takes up one of his paraphernalia papers and he starts
reading out
A delegation of the chief cotton magnates of Manchester was presented
yesterday to His Majesty the Alaki of Abeakuta by Gold Stick in Waiting,
Lord Walkup of Walkup on Eggs, to tender to His Majesty the heartfelt
thanks of British traders for the facilities afforded them in his
dominions. The delegation partook of luncheon at the conclusion
of which the dusky potentate, in the course of a happy speech,
freely translated by the British chaplain, the reverend Ananias
Praisegod Barebones, tendered his best thanks to Massa Walkup and
emphasised the cordial relations existing between Abeakuta and the
British empire, stating that he treasured as one of his dearest
possessions an illuminated bible, the volume of the word of God
and the secret of England's greatness, graciously presented to him by
the white chief woman, the great squaw Victoria, with a personal
dedication from the august hand of the Royal Donor. The Alaki then drank a
lovingcup of firstshot usquebaugh to the toast BLACK AND WHITE from the
skull of his immediate predecessor in the dynasty Kakachakachak,
surnamed Forty Warts, after which he visited the chief factory of
Cottonopolis and signed his mark in the visitors' book, subsequently
executing a charming old Abeakutic wardance, in the course of which he
swallowed several knives and forks, amid hilarious applause from the girl
hands.
Widow woman, says Ned. I wouldn't doubt her. Wonder did he put that
bible to the same use as I would.
Same only more so, says Lenehan. And thereafter in that fruitful land
the broadleaved mango flourished exceedingly.
Is that by Griffith? says John Wyse.
No, says the citizen. It's not signed Shanganagh. It's only
initialled P.
And a very good initial too, says Joe.
That's how it's worked, says the citizen. Trade follows the flag.
Well, says J. J., if they're any worse than those Belgians in the Congo
Free State they must be bad. Did you read that report by a man what's this
his name is?
Casement, says the citizen. He's an Irishman.
Yes, that's the man, says J. J. Raping the women and girls and flogging
the natives on the belly to squeeze all the red rubber they can out of
them.
I know where he's gone, says Lenehan, cracking his fingers.
Who? says I.
Bloom, says he. The courthouse is a blind. He had a few bob on
THROWAWAY and he's gone to gather in the shekels.
Is it that whiteeyed kaffir? says the citizen, that never backed a horse
in anger in his life?
That's where he's gone, says Lenehan. I met Bantam Lyons going to back
that horse only I put him off it and he told me Bloom gave him the tip.
Bet you what you like he has a hundred shillings to five on. He's the only
man in Dublin has it. A dark horse.
He's a bloody dark horse himself, says Joe.
Mind, Joe, says I. Show us the entrance out.
There you are, says Terry.
Goodbye Ireland I'm going to Gort. So I just went round the back of
the yard to pumpship and begob hundred shillings to five while I was
letting off my THROWAWAY twenty to letting off my load gob says I to
myself I knew he was uneasy in his two pints off of Joe and one in
Slattery's off in his mind to get off the mark to hundred shillings is
five quid and when they were in the dark horse pisser Burke
was telling me card party and letting on the child was sick gob, must
have done about a gallon flabbyarse of a wife speaking down the tube
SHE'S BETTER or SHE'S ow all a plan so he could vamoose with the
pool if he won or Jesus, full up I was trading without a licence ow
Ireland my nation says he hoik phthook never be up to those
bloody there's the last of it Jerusalem ah cuckoos.
So anyhow when I got back they were at it dingdong, John Wyse
saying it was Bloom gave the ideas for Sinn Fein to Griffith to put in his
paper all kinds of jerrymandering, packed juries and swindling the taxes
off of the government and appointing consuls all over the world to walk
about selling Irish industries. Robbing Peter to pay Paul. Gob, that puts
the bloody kybosh on it if old sloppy eyes is mucking up the show. Give us
a bloody chance. God save Ireland from the likes of that bloody
mouseabout. Mr Bloom with his argol bargol. And his old fellow before him
perpetrating frauds, old Methusalem Bloom, the robbing bagman, that
poisoned himself with the prussic acid after he swamping the country with
his baubles and his penny diamonds. Loans by post on easy terms. Any
amount of money advanced on note of hand. Distance no object. No security.
Gob, he's like Lanty MacHale's goat that'd go a piece of the road with
every one.
Well, it's a fact, says John Wyse. And there's the man now that'll tell
you all about it, Martin Cunningham.
Sure enough the castle car drove up with Martin on it and Jack Power
with him and a fellow named Crofter or Crofton, pensioner out of the
collector general's, an orangeman Blackburn does have on the registration
and he drawing his pay or Crawford gallivanting around the country at the
king's expense.
Our travellers reached the rustic hostelry and alighted from their
palfreys.
Ho, varlet cried he, who by his mien seemed the leader of the party.
Saucy knave To us
So saying he knocked loudly with his swordhilt upon the open lattice.
Mine host came forth at the summons, girding him with his tabard.
Give you good den, my masters, said he with an obsequious bow.
Bestir thyself, sirrah cried he who had knocked. Look to our steeds.
And for ourselves give us of your best for ifaith we need it.
Lackaday, good masters, said the host, my poor house has but a bare
larder. I know not what to offer your lordships.
How now, fellow? cried the second of the party, a man of pleasant
countenance, So servest thou the king's messengers, master Taptun?
An instantaneous change overspread the landlord's visage.
Cry you mercy, gentlemen, he said humbly. An you be the king's
messengers God shield His Majesty you shall not want for aught. The
king's friends God bless His Majesty shall not go afasting in my house
I warrant me.
Then about cried the traveller who had not spoken, a lusty trencherman
by his aspect. Hast aught to give us?
Mine host bowed again as he made answer
What say you, good masters, to a squab pigeon pasty, some collops of
venison, a saddle of veal, widgeon with crisp hog's bacon, a boar's head
with pistachios, a bason of jolly custard, a medlar tansy and a flagon of
old Rhenish?
Gadzooks cried the last speaker. That likes me well. Pistachios
Aha cried he of the pleasant countenance. A poor house and a bare
larder, quotha 'Tis a merry rogue.
So in comes Martin asking where was Bloom.
Where is he? says Lenehan. Defrauding widows and orphans.
Isn't that a fact, says John Wyse, what I was telling the citizen about
Bloom and the Sinn Fein?
That's so, says Martin. Or so they allege.
Who made those allegations? says Alf.
I, says Joe. I'm the alligator.
And after all, says John Wyse, why can't a jew love his country like the
next fellow?
Why not? says J. J., when he's quite sure which country it is.
Is he a jew or a gentile or a holy Roman or a swaddler or what the hell
is he? says Ned. Or who is he? No offence, Crofton.
Who is Junius? says J. J.
We don't want him, says Crofter the Orangeman or presbyterian.
He's a perverted jew, says Martin, from a place in Hungary and it was he
drew up all the plans according to the Hungarian system. We know that in
the castle.
Isn't he a cousin of Bloom the dentist? says Jack Power.
Not at all, says Martin. Only namesakes. His name was Virag, the
father's name that poisoned himself. He changed it by deedpoll, the father
did.
That's the new Messiah for Ireland says the citizen. Island of saints
and sages
Well, they're still waiting for their redeemer, says Martin. For that
matter so are we.
Yes, says J. J., and every male that's born they think it may be their
Messiah. And every jew is in a tall state of excitement, I believe, till
he knows if he's a father or a mother.
Expecting every moment will be his next, says Lenehan.
O, by God, says Ned, you should have seen Bloom before that son of his
that died was born. I met him one day in the south city markets buying a
tin of Neave's food six weeks before the wife was delivered.
EN VENTRE SA MERE, says J. J.
Do you call that a man? says the citizen.
I wonder did he ever put it out of sight, says Joe.
Well, there were two children born anyhow, says Jack Power.
And who does he suspect? says the citizen.
Gob, there's many a true word spoken in jest. One of those mixed
middlings he is. Lying up in the hotel Pisser was telling me once a month
with headache like a totty with her courses. Do you know what I'm telling
you? It'd be an act of God to take a hold of a fellow the like of that and
throw him in the bloody sea. Justifiable homicide, so it would. Then
sloping off with his five quid without putting up a pint of stuff like a
man. Give us your blessing. Not as much as would blind your eye.
Charity to the neighbour, says Martin. But where is he? We can't wait.
A wolf in sheep's clothing, says the citizen. That's what he is. Virag
from Hungary Ahasuerus I call him. Cursed by God.
Have you time for a brief libation, Martin? says Ned.
Only one, says Martin. We must be quick. J. J. and S.
You, Jack? Crofton? Three half ones, Terry.
Saint Patrick would want to land again at Ballykinlar and convert us,
says the citizen, after allowing things like that to contaminate our
shores.
Well, says Martin, rapping for his glass. God bless all here is my
prayer.
Amen, says the citizen.
And I'm sure He will, says Joe.
And at the sound of the sacring bell, headed by a crucifer with acolytes,
thurifers, boatbearers, readers, ostiarii, deacons and subdeacons,
the blessed company drew nigh of mitred abbots and priors and guardians
and monks and friars the monks of Benedict of Spoleto, Carthusians and
Camaldolesi, Cistercians and Olivetans, Oratorians and Vallombrosans,
and the friars of Augustine, Brigittines, Premonstratensians, Servi,
Trinitarians, and the children of Peter Nolasco and therewith from Carmel
mount the children of Elijah prophet led by Albert bishop and by Teresa of
Avila, calced and other and friars, brown and grey, sons of poor Francis,
capuchins, cordeliers, minimes and observants and the daughters of Clara
and the sons of Dominic, the friars preachers, and the sons of Vincent
and the monks of S. Wolstan and Ignatius his children and the
confraternity of the christian brothers led by the reverend brother
Edmund Ignatius Rice. And after came all saints and martyrs,
virgins and confessors S. Cyr and S. Isidore Arator and S. James the
Less and S. Phocas of Sinope and S. Julian Hospitator and S. Felix
de Cantalice and S. Simon Stylites and S. Stephen Protomartyr and
S. John of God and S. Ferreol and S. Leugarde and S. Theodotus and S.
Vulmar and S. Richard and S. Vincent de Paul and S. Martin of Todi
and S. Martin of Tours and S. Alfred and S. Joseph and S.
Denis and S. Cornelius and S. Leopold and S. Bernard and S. Terence and
S. Edward and S. Owen Caniculus and S. Anonymous and S. Eponymous
and S. Pseudonymous and S. Homonymous and S. Paronymous and S.
Synonymous and S. Laurence O'Toole and S. James of Dingle and
Compostella and S. Columcille and S. Columba and S. Celestine and S.
Colman and S. Kevin and S. Brendan and S. Frigidian and S. Senan and S.
Fachtna and S. Columbanus and S. Gall and S. Fursey and S. Fintan and S.
Fiacre and S. John Nepomuc and S. Thomas Aquinas and S. Ives of
Brittany and S. Michan and S. HermanJoseph and the three patrons of
holy youth S. Aloysius Gonzaga and S. Stanislaus Kostka and S. John
Berchmans and the saints Gervasius, Servasius and Bonifacius and S. Bride
and S. Kieran and S. Canice of Kilkenny and S. Jarlath of Tuam and S.
Finbarr and S. Pappin of Ballymun and Brother Aloysius Pacificus and
Brother Louis Bellicosus and the saints Rose of Lima and of Viterbo and S.
Martha of Bethany and S. Mary of Egypt and S. Lucy and S. Brigid and S.
Attracta and S. Dympna and S. Ita and S. Marion Calpensis and the
Blessed Sister Teresa of the Child Jesus and S. Barbara and S. Scholastica
and S. Ursula with eleven thousand virgins. And all came with nimbi and
aureoles and gloriae, bearing palms and harps and swords and olive
crowns, in robes whereon were woven the blessed symbols of their
efficacies, inkhorns, arrows, loaves, cruses, fetters, axes, trees,
bridges, babes in a bathtub, shells, wallets, shears, keys, dragons,
lilies, buckshot, beards, hogs, lamps, bellows, beehives, soupladles,
stars, snakes, anvils, boxes of vaseline, bells, crutches, forceps,
stags' horns, watertight boots, hawks, millstones, eyes on a dish, wax
candles, aspergills, unicorns. And as they wended their way by Nelson's
Pillar, Henry street, Mary street, Capel street, Little Britain street
chanting the introit in EPIPHANIA DOMINI which beginneth SURGE,
ILLUMINARE and thereafter most sweetly the gradual OMNES which saith
DE SABA VENIENT they did divers wonders such as casting out devils,
raising the dead to life, multiplying fishes, healing the halt and the
blind, discovering various articles which had been mislaid, interpreting
and fulfilling the scriptures, blessing and prophesying. And last, beneath
a canopy of cloth of gold came the reverend Father O'Flynn attended by
Malachi and Patrick. And when the good fathers had reached the appointed
place, the house of Bernard Kiernan and Co, limited, ,  and  little
Britain street, wholesale grocers, wine and brandy shippers, licensed for
the sale of beer, wine and spirits for consumption on the premises, the
celebrant blessed the house and censed the mullioned windows and the
groynes and the vaults and the arrises and the capitals and the pediments
and the cornices and the engrailed arches and the spires and the cupolas
and sprinkled the lintels thereof with blessed water and prayed that God
might bless that house as he had blessed the house of Abraham and Isaac
and Jacob and make the angels of His light to inhabit therein. And
entering he blessed the viands and the beverages and the company of all
the blessed answered his prayers.
ADIUTORIUM NOSTRUM IN NOMINE DOMINI.
QUI FECIT COELUM ET TERRAM.
DOMINUS VOBISCUM.
ET CUM SPIRITU TUO.
And he laid his hands upon that he blessed and gave thanks and he
prayed and they all with him prayed
DEUS, CUIUS VERBO SANCTIFICANTUR OMNIA, BENEDICTIONEM TUAM EFFUNDE SUPER
CREATURAS ISTAS ET PRAESTA UT QUISQUIS EIS SECUNDUM LEGEM ET VOLUNTATEM
TUAM CUM GRATIARUM ACTIONE USUS FUERIT PER INVOCATIONEM SANCTISSIMI
NOMINIS TUI CORPORIS SANITATEM ET ANIMAE TUTELAM TE AUCTORE PERCIPIAT PER
CHRISTUM DOMINUM NOSTRUM.
And so say all of us, says Jack.
Thousand a year, Lambert, says Crofton or Crawford.
Right, says Ned, taking up his John Jameson. And butter for fish.
I was just looking around to see who the happy thought would strike
when be damned but in he comes again letting on to be in a hell of a
hurry.
I was just round at the courthouse, says he, looking for you. I hope I'm
not ...
No, says Martin, we're ready.
Courthouse my eye and your pockets hanging down with gold and silver.
Mean bloody scut. Stand us a drink itself. Devil a sweet fear There's
a jew for you All for number one. Cute as a shithouse rat. Hundred to
five.
Don't tell anyone, says the citizen,
Beg your pardon, says he.
Come on boys, says Martin, seeing it was looking blue. Come along now.
Don't tell anyone, says the citizen, letting a bawl out of him. It's a
secret.
And the bloody dog woke up and let a growl.
Bye bye all, says Martin.
And he got them out as quick as he could, Jack Power and Crofton or
whatever you call him and him in the middle of them letting on to be all
at sea and up with them on the bloody jaunting car.
Off with you, says
Martin to the jarvey.
The milkwhite dolphin tossed his mane and, rising in the golden poop
the helmsman spread the bellying sail upon the wind and stood off forward
with all sail set, the spinnaker to larboard. A many comely nymphs drew
nigh to starboard and to larboard and, clinging to the sides of the noble
bark, they linked their shining forms as doth the cunning wheelwright when
he fashions about the heart of his wheel the equidistant rays whereof each
one is sister to another and he binds them all with an outer ring and
giveth speed to the feet of men whenas they ride to a hosting or contend
for the smile of ladies fair. Even so did they come and set them, those
willing nymphs, the undying sisters. And they laughed, sporting in a
circle of their foam and the bark clave the waves.
But begob I was just lowering the heel of the pint when I saw the
citizen getting up to waddle to the door, puffing and blowing with the
dropsy, and he cursing the curse of Cromwell on him, bell, book and candle
in Irish, spitting and spatting out of him and Joe and little Alf round
him like a leprechaun trying to peacify him.
Let me alone, says he.
And begob he got as far as the door and they holding him and he
bawls out of him
Three cheers for Israel
Arrah, sit down on the parliamentary side of your arse for Christ'
sake and don't be making a public exhibition of yourself. Jesus, there's
always some bloody clown or other kicking up a bloody murder about
bloody nothing. Gob, it'd turn the porter sour in your guts, so it would.
And all the ragamuffins and sluts of the nation round the door and Martin
telling the jarvey to drive ahead and the citizen bawling and Alf and
Joe at him to whisht and he on his high horse about the jews and the
loafers calling for a speech and Jack Power trying to get him to sit down
on the car and hold his bloody jaw and a loafer with a patch over his eye
starts singing IF THE MAN IN THE MOON WAS A JEW, JEW, JEW and a slut
shouts out of her
Eh, mister Your fly is open, mister
And says he
Mendelssohn was a jew and Karl Marx and Mercadante and Spinoza.
And the Saviour was a jew and his father was a jew. Your God.
He had no father, says Martin. That'll do now. Drive ahead.
Whose God? says the citizen.
Well, his uncle was a jew, says he. Your God was a jew. Christ was a jew
like me.
Gob, the citizen made a plunge back into the shop.
By Jesus, says he, I'll brain that bloody jewman for using the holy
name.
By Jesus, I'll crucify him so I will. Give us that biscuitbox here.
Stop Stop says Joe.
A large and appreciative gathering of friends and acquaintances from
the metropolis and greater Dublin assembled in their thousands to bid
farewell to Nagyasagos uram Lipoti Virag, late of Messrs Alexander
Thom's, printers to His Majesty, on the occasion of his departure for the
distant clime of SzazharminczbrojugulyasDugulas Meadow of
Murmuring Waters. The ceremony which went off with great ECLAT was
characterised by the most affecting cordiality. An illuminated scroll of
ancient Irish vellum, the work of Irish artists, was presented to the
distinguished phenomenologist on behalf of a large section of the
community and was accompanied by the gift of a silver casket, tastefully
executed in the style of ancient Celtic ornament, a work which reflects
every credit on the makers, Messrs Jacob AGUS Jacob. The departing guest
was the recipient of a hearty ovation, many of those who were present
being visibly moved when the select orchestra of Irish pipes struck up the
wellknown strains of COME BACK TO ERIN, followed immediately by RAKOCZSY'S
MARCH. Tarbarrels and bonfires were lighted along the coastline of the four
seas on the summits of the Hill of Howth, Three Rock Mountain, Sugarloaf,
Bray Head, the mountains of Mourne, the Galtees, the Ox and Donegal and
Sperrin peaks, the Nagles and the Bograghs, the Connemara hills, the reeks
of M Gillicuddy, Slieve Aughty, Slieve Bernagh and Slieve Bloom. Amid
cheers that rent the welkin, responded to by answering cheers from a big
muster of henchmen on the distant Cambrian and Caledonian hills, the
mastodontic pleasureship slowly moved away saluted by a final floral
tribute from the representatives of the fair sex who were present in large
numbers while, as it proceeded down the river, escorted by a flotilla of
barges, the flags of the Ballast office and Custom House were dipped in
salute as were also those of the electrical power station at the
Pigeonhouse and the Poolbeg Light. VISSZONTLATASRA, KEDVES BARATON
VISSZONTLATASRA Gone but not forgotten.
Gob, the devil wouldn't stop him till he got hold of the bloody tin
anyhow and out with him and little Alf hanging on to his elbow and he
shouting like a stuck pig, as good as any bloody play in the Queen's royal
theatre
Where is he till I murder him?
And Ned and J. J. paralysed with the laughing.
Bloody wars, says I, I'll be in for the last gospel.
But as luck would have it the jarvey got the nag's head round the
other way and off with him.
Hold on, citizen, says Joe. Stop
Begob he drew his hand and made a swipe and let fly. Mercy of God the sun
was in his eyes or he'd have left him for dead. Gob, he near sent it
into the county Longford. The bloody nag took fright and the old mongrel
after the car like bloody hell and all the populace shouting and laughing
and the old tinbox clattering along the street.
The catastrophe was terrific and instantaneous in its effect. The
observatory of Dunsink registered in all eleven shocks, all of the fifth
grade of Mercalli's scale, and there is no record extant of a similar
seismic disturbance in our island since the earthquake of , the
year of the rebellion of Silken Thomas. The epicentre appears to have
been that part of the metropolis which constitutes the Inn's Quay
ward and parish of Saint Michan covering a surface of fortyone acres,
two roods and one square pole or perch. All the lordly residences in
the vicinity of the palace of justice were demolished and that noble
edifice itself, in which at the time of the catastrophe important
legal debates were in progress, is literally a mass of ruins beneath
which it is to be feared all the occupants have been buried alive.
From the reports of eyewitnesses it transpires that the seismic waves
were accompanied by a violent atmospheric perturbation of cyclonic
character. An article of headgear since ascertained to belong to the much
respected clerk of the crown and peace Mr George Fottrell and a silk
umbrella with gold handle with the engraved initials, crest, coat of arms
and house number of the erudite and worshipful chairman of quarter
sessions sir Frederick Falkiner, recorder of Dublin, have been discovered
by search parties in remote parts of the island respectively, the former
on the third basaltic ridge of the giant's causeway, the latter embedded
to the extent of one foot three inches in the sandy beach of Holeopen
bay near the old head of Kinsale. Other eyewitnesses depose that they
observed an incandescent object of enormous proportions hurtling through
the atmosphere at a terrifying velocity in a trajectory directed
southwest by west. Messages of condolence and sympathy are being
hourly received from all parts of the different continents and the
sovereign pontiff has been graciously pleased to decree that a
special MISSA PRO DEFUNCTIS shall be celebrated simultaneously by
the ordinaries of each and every cathedral church of all the episcopal
dioceses subject to the spiritual authority of the Holy See in suffrage of
the souls of those faithful departed who have been so unexpectedly called
away from our midst. The work of salvage, removal of DEBRIS, human remains
etc has been entrusted to Messrs Michael Meade and Son,  Great
Brunswick street, and Messrs T. and C. Martin, , ,  and  North
Wall, assisted by the men and officers of the Duke of Cornwall's light
infantry under the general supervision of H. R. H., rear admiral, the
right honourable sir Hercules Hannibal Habeas Corpus Anderson, K. G.,
K. P., K. T., P. C., K. C. B., M. P, J. P., M. B., D. S. O., S. O. D.,
M. F. H., M. R. I. A., B. L., Mus. Doc., P. L. G., F. T. C. D.,
F. R. U. I., F. R. C. P. I. and F. R. C. S. I.
You never saw the like of it in all your born puff. Gob, if he got that
lottery ticket on the side of his poll he'd remember the gold cup,
he would so, but begob the citizen would have been lagged for assault
and battery and Joe for aiding and abetting. The jarvey saved his life
by furious driving as sure as God made Moses. What? O, Jesus, he did.
And he let a volley of oaths after him.
Did I kill him, says he, or what?
And he shouting to the bloody dog
After him, Garry After him, boy
And the last we saw was the bloody car rounding the corner and old
sheepsface on it gesticulating and the bloody mongrel after it with his
lugs back for all he was bloody well worth to tear him limb from limb.
Hundred to five Jesus, he took the value of it out of him, I promise you.
When, lo, there came about them all a great brightness and they
beheld the chariot wherein He stood ascend to heaven. And they beheld
Him in the chariot, clothed upon in the glory of the brightness, having
raiment as of the sun, fair as the moon and terrible that for awe they
durst not look upon Him. And there came a voice out of heaven, calling
ELIJAH ELIJAH And He answered with a main cry ABBA ADONAI And they
beheld Him even Him, ben Bloom Elijah, amid clouds of angels ascend
to the glory of the brightness at an angle of fortyfive degrees over
Donohoe's in Little Green street like a shot off a shovel.
The summer evening had begun to fold the world in its mysterious
embrace. Far away in the west the sun was setting and the last glow of all
too fleeting day lingered lovingly on sea and strand, on the proud
promontory of dear old Howth guarding as ever the waters of the bay, on
the weedgrown rocks along Sandymount shore and, last but not least, on the
quiet church whence there streamed forth at times upon the stillness the
voice of prayer to her who is in her pure radiance a beacon ever to the
stormtossed heart of man, Mary, star of the sea.
The three girl friends were seated on the rocks, enjoying the evening
scene and the air which was fresh but not too chilly. Many a time and oft
were they wont to come there to that favourite nook to have a cosy chat
beside the sparkling waves and discuss matters feminine, Cissy Caffrey and
Edy Boardman with the baby in the pushcar and Tommy and Jacky
Caffrey, two little curlyheaded boys, dressed in sailor suits with caps to
match and the name H.M.S. Belleisle printed on both. For Tommy and
Jacky Caffrey were twins, scarce four years old and very noisy and spoiled
twins sometimes but for all that darling little fellows with bright merry
faces and endearing ways about them. They were dabbling in the sand with
their spades and buckets, building castles as children do, or playing with
their big coloured ball, happy as the day was long. And Edy Boardman was
rocking the chubby baby to and fro in the pushcar while that young
gentleman fairly chuckled with delight. He was but eleven months and nine
days old and, though still a tiny toddler, was just beginning to lisp his
first babyish words. Cissy Caffrey bent over to him to tease his fat
little plucks and the dainty dimple in his chin.
Now, baby, Cissy Caffrey said. Say out big, big. I want a drink of
water.
And baby prattled after her
A jink a jink a jawbo.
Cissy Caffrey cuddled the wee chap for she was awfully fond of children,
so patient with little sufferers and Tommy Caffrey could never be got to
take his castor oil unless it was Cissy Caffrey that held his nose and
promised him the scatty heel of the loaf or brown bread with golden syrup
on. What a persuasive power that girl had But to be sure baby Boardman
was as good as gold, a perfect little dote in his new fancy bib. None of
your spoilt beauties, Flora MacFlimsy sort, was Cissy Caffrey.
A truerhearted lass never drew the breath of life, always with a laugh in
her gipsylike eyes and a frolicsome word on her cherryripe red lips, a
girl lovable in the extreme. And Edy Boardman laughed too at the quaint
language of little brother.
But just then there was a slight altercation between Master Tommy
and Master Jacky. Boys will be boys and our two twins were no exception
to this golden rule. The apple of discord was a certain castle of sand
which Master Jacky had built and Master Tommy would have it right go wrong
that it was to be architecturally improved by a frontdoor like the
Martello tower had. But if Master Tommy was headstrong Master Jacky was
selfwilled too and, true to the maxim that every little Irishman's house
is his castle, he fell upon his hated rival and to such purpose that the
wouldbe assailant came to grief and alas to relate the coveted castle
too. Needless to say the cries of discomfited Master Tommy drew the
attention of the girl friends.
Come here, Tommy, his sister called imperatively. At once And you,
Jacky, for shame to throw poor Tommy in the dirty sand. Wait till I catch
you for that.
His eyes misty with unshed tears Master Tommy came at her call for
their big sister's word was law with the twins. And in a sad plight he was
too after his misadventure. His little mano'war top and unmentionables
were full of sand but Cissy was a past mistress in the art of smoothing
over life's tiny troubles and very quickly not one speck of sand was
to be seen on his smart little suit. Still the blue eyes were glistening
with hot tears that would well up so she kissed away the hurtness and
shook her hand at Master Jacky the culprit and said if she was near
him she wouldn't be far from him, her eyes dancing in admonition.
Nasty bold Jacky she cried.
She put an arm round the little mariner and coaxed winningly
What's your name? Butter and cream?
Tell us who is your sweetheart, spoke Edy Boardman. Is Cissy your
sweetheart?
Nao, tearful Tommy said.
Is Edy Boardman your sweetheart? Cissy queried.
Nao, Tommy said.
I know, Edy Boardman said none too amiably with an arch glance from
her shortsighted eyes. I know who is Tommy's sweetheart. Gerty is
Tommy's sweetheart.
Nao, Tommy said on the verge of tears.
Cissy's quick motherwit guessed what was amiss and she whispered
to Edy Boardman to take him there behind the pushcar where the
gentleman couldn't see and to mind he didn't wet his new tan shoes.
But who was Gerty?
Gerty MacDowell who was seated near her companions, lost in
thought, gazing far away into the distance was, in very truth, as fair a
specimen of winsome Irish girlhood as one could wish to see. She was
pronounced beautiful by all who knew her though, as folks often said, she
was more a Giltrap than a MacDowell. Her figure was slight and graceful,
inclining even to fragility but those iron jelloids she had been taking of
late had done her a world of good much better than the Widow Welch's
female pills and she was much better of those discharges she used to get
and that tired feeling. The waxen pallor of her face was almost spiritual
in its ivorylike purity though her rosebud mouth was a genuine Cupid's
bow, Greekly perfect. Her hands were of finely veined alabaster
with tapering fingers and as white as lemonjuice and queen of ointments
could make them though it was not true that she used to wear kid gloves
in bed or take a milk footbath either. Bertha Supple told that once
to Edy Boardman, a deliberate lie, when she was black out at daggers
drawn with Gerty the girl chums had of course their little tiffs
from time to time like the rest of mortals and she told her not to
let on whatever she did that it was her that told her or she'd never
speak to her again. No. Honour where honour is due. There was an
innate refinement, a languid queenly HAUTEUR about Gerty which
was unmistakably evidenced in her delicate hands and higharched instep.
Had kind fate but willed her to be born a gentlewoman of high degree in
her own right and had she only received the benefit of a good education
Gerty MacDowell might easily have held her own beside any lady in the
land and have seen herself exquisitely gowned with jewels on her brow and
patrician suitors at her feet vying with one another to pay their devoirs
to her. Mayhap it was this, the love that might have been, that lent to
her softlyfeatured face at whiles a look, tense with suppressed meaning,
that imparted a strange yearning tendency to the beautiful eyes, a charm
few could resist. Why have women such eyes of witchery? Gerty's were of
the bluest Irish blue, set off by lustrous lashes and dark expressive
brows. Time was when those brows were not so silkily seductive. It was
Madame Vera Verity, directress of the Woman Beautiful page of the Princess
Novelette, who had first advised her to try eyebrowleine which gave that
haunting expression to the eyes, so becoming in leaders of fashion, and
she had never regretted it. Then there was blushing scientifically cured
and how to be tall increase your height and you have a beautiful face but
your nose? That would suit Mrs Dignam because she had a button one. But
Gerty's crowning glory was her wealth of wonderful hair. It was dark brown
with a natural wave in it. She had cut it that very morning on account
of the new moon and it nestled about her pretty head in a profusion of
luxuriant clusters and pared her nails too, Thursday for wealth. And just
now at Edy's words as a telltale flush, delicate as the faintest
rosebloom, crept into her cheeks she looked so lovely in her sweet girlish
shyness that of a surety God's fair land of Ireland did not hold
her equal.
For an instant she was silent with rather sad downcast eyes. She was
about to retort but something checked the words on her tongue. Inclination
prompted her to speak out dignity told her to be silent. The pretty lips
pouted awhile but then she glanced up and broke out into a joyous little
laugh which had in it all the freshness of a young May morning. She knew
right well, noone better, what made squinty Edy say that because of him
cooling in his attentions when it was simply a lovers' quarrel. As per
usual somebody's nose was out of joint about the boy that had the bicycle
off the London bridge road always riding up and down in front of her
window. Only now his father kept him in in the evenings studying
hard to get an exhibition in the intermediate that was on and he was
going to go to Trinity college to study for a doctor when he left
the high school like his brother W. E. Wylie who was racing in the
bicycle races in Trinity college university. Little recked he perhaps
for what she felt, that dull aching void in her heart sometimes,
piercing to the core. Yet he was young and perchance he might
learn to love her in time. They were protestants in his family
and of course Gerty knew Who came first and after Him the Blessed
Virgin and then Saint Joseph. But he was undeniably handsome with an
exquisite nose and he was what he looked, every inch a gentleman, the
shape of his head too at the back without his cap on that she would know
anywhere something off the common and the way he turned the bicycle at
the lamp with his hands off the bars and also the nice perfume of those
good cigarettes and besides they were both of a size too he and she and
that was why Edy Boardman thought she was so frightfully clever because
he didn't go and ride up and down in front of her bit of a garden.
Gerty was dressed simply but with the instinctive taste of a votary of
Dame Fashion for she felt that there was just a might that he might be
out. A neat blouse of electric blue selftinted by dolly dyes because it
was expected in the LADY'S PICTORIAL that electric blue would be worn
with a smart vee opening down to the division and kerchief pocket
in which she always kept a piece of cottonwool scented with her
favourite perfume because the handkerchief spoiled the sit and a
navy threequarter skirt cut to the stride showed off her slim graceful
figure to perfection. She wore a coquettish little love of a hat of
wideleaved nigger straw contrast trimmed with an underbrim of eggblue
chenille and at the side a butterfly bow of silk to tone. All Tuesday
week afternoon she was hunting to match that chenille but at last
she found what she wanted at Clery's summer sales, the very it, slightly
shopsoiled but you would never notice, seven fingers two and a penny. She
did it up all by herself and what joy was hers when she tried it on then,
smiling at the lovely reflection which the mirror gave back to her
And when she put it on the waterjug to keep the shape she knew that that
would take the shine out of some people she knew. Her shoes were the
newest thing in footwear Edy Boardman prided herself that she was very
PETITE but she never had a foot like Gerty MacDowell, a five, and never
would ash, oak or elm with patent toecaps and just one smart buckle over
her higharched instep. Her wellturned ankle displayed its perfect
proportions beneath her skirt and just the proper amount and no more of
her shapely limbs encased in finespun hose with highspliced heels and wide
garter tops. As for undies they were Gerty's chief care and who that knows
the fluttering hopes and fears of sweet seventeen though Gerty would
never see seventeen again can find it in his heart to blame her? She had
four dinky sets with awfully pretty stitchery, three garments and
nighties extra, and each set slotted with different coloured ribbons,
rosepink, pale blue, mauve and peagreen, and she aired them herself
and blued them when they came home from the wash and ironed them
and she had a brickbat to keep the iron on because she wouldn't trust
those washerwomen as far as she'd see them scorching the things.
She was wearing the blue for luck, hoping against hope, her own
colour and lucky too for a bride to have a bit of blue somewhere
on her because the green she wore that day week brought grief because
his father brought him in to study for the intermediate exhibition
and because she thought perhaps he might be out because when she was
dressing that morning she nearly slipped up the old pair on her inside out
and that was for luck and lovers' meeting if you put those things on
inside out or if they got untied that he was thinking about you so long
as it wasn't of a Friday.
And yet and yet That strained look on her face A gnawing sorrow is
there all the time. Her very soul is in her eyes and she would give worlds
to be in the privacy of her own familiar chamber where, giving way to
tears, she could have a good cry and relieve her pentup feelingsthough not
too much because she knew how to cry nicely before the mirror. You are
lovely, Gerty, it said. The paly light of evening falls upon a face
infinitely sad and wistful. Gerty MacDowell yearns in vain. Yes, she had
known from the very first that her daydream of a marriage has been
arranged and the weddingbells ringing for Mrs Reggy Wylie T. C. D.
because the one who married the elder brother would be Mrs Wylie and in
the fashionable intelligence Mrs Gertrude Wylie was wearing a sumptuous
confection of grey trimmed with expensive blue fox was not to be. He was
too young to understand. He would not believe in love, a woman's
birthright. The night of the party long ago in Stoer's he was still in
short trousers when they were alone and he stole an arm round her waist
she went white to the very lips. He called her little one in a strangely
husky voice and snatched a half kiss the first but it was only the end
of her nose and then he hastened from the room with a remark about
refreshments. Impetuous fellow Strength of character had never been Reggy
Wylie's strong point and he who would woo and win Gerty MacDowell must be
a man among men. But waiting, always waiting to be asked and it was leap
year too and would soon be over. No prince charming is her beau ideal to
lay a rare and wondrous love at her feet but rather a manly man with a
strong quiet face who had not found his ideal, perhaps his hair slightly
flecked with grey, and who would understand, take her in his sheltering
arms, strain her to him in all the strength of his deep passionate nature
and comfort her with a long long kiss. It would be like heaven. For such
a one she yearns this balmy summer eve. With all the heart of her she
longs to be his only, his affianced bride for riches for poor, in sickness
in health, till death us two part, from this to this day forward.
And while Edy Boardman was with little Tommy behind the pushcar she was
just thinking would the day ever come when she could call herself his
little wife to be. Then they could talk about her till they went blue in
the face, Bertha Supple too, and Edy, little spitfire, because she would
be twentytwo in November. She would care for him with creature comforts
too for Gerty was womanly wise and knew that a mere man liked that
feeling of hominess. Her griddlecakes done to a goldenbrown hue and
queen Ann's pudding of delightful creaminess had won golden opinions from
all because she had a lucky hand also for lighting a fire, dredge in the
fine selfraising flour and always stir in the same direction, then cream
the milk and sugar and whisk well the white of eggs though she didn't like
the eating part when there were any people that made her shy and often she
wondered why you couldn't eat something poetical like violets or roses and
they would have a beautifully appointed drawingroom with pictures and
engravings and the photograph of grandpapa Giltrap's lovely dog
Garryowen that almost talked it was so human and chintz covers for the
chairs and that silver toastrack in Clery's summer jumble sales like they
have in rich houses. He would be tall with broad shoulders she had always
admired tall men for a husband with glistening white teeth under his
carefully trimmed sweeping moustache and they would go on the continent
for their honeymoon three wonderful weeks and then, when they settled
down in a nice snug and cosy little homely house, every morning they
would both have brekky, simple but perfectly served, for their own two
selves and before he went out to business he would give his dear little
wifey a good hearty hug and gaze for a moment deep down into her eyes.
Edy Boardman asked Tommy Caffrey was he done and he said yes so
then she buttoned up his little knickerbockers for him and told him to run
off and play with Jacky and to be good now and not to fight. But Tommy
said he wanted the ball and Edy told him no that baby was playing with the
ball and if he took it there'd be wigs on the green but Tommy said it was
his ball and he wanted his ball and he pranced on the ground, if you
please. The temper of him O, he was a man already was little Tommy
Caffrey since he was out of pinnies. Edy told him no, no and to be off now
with him and she told Cissy Caffrey not to give in to him.
You're not my sister, naughty Tommy said. It's my ball.
But Cissy Caffrey told baby Boardman to look up, look up high at her
finger and she snatched the ball quickly and threw it along the sand and
Tommy after it in full career, having won the day.
Anything for a quiet life, laughed Ciss.
And she tickled tiny tot's two cheeks to make him forget and played here's
the lord mayor, here's his two horses, here's his gingerbread carriage
and here he walks in, chinchopper, chinchopper, chinchopper chin. But Edy
got as cross as two sticks about him getting his own way like that from
everyone always petting him.
I'd like to give him something, she said, so I would, where I won't say.
On the beeoteetom, laughed Cissy merrily.
Gerty MacDowell bent down her head and crimsoned at the idea of Cissy
saying an unladylike thing like that out loud she'd be ashamed of her
life to say, flushing a deep rosy red, and Edy Boardman said she was sure
the gentleman opposite heard what she said. But not a pin cared Ciss.
Let him she said with a pert toss of her head and a piquant tilt of her
nose. Give it to him too on the same place as quick as I'd look at him.
Madcap Ciss with her golliwog curls. You had to laugh at her
sometimes. For instance when she asked you would you have some more
Chinese tea and jaspberry ram and when she drew the jugs too and the men's
faces on her nails with red ink make you split your sides or when she
wanted to go where you know she said she wanted to run and pay a visit to
the Miss White. That was just like Cissycums. O, and will you ever forget
her the evening she dressed up in her father's suit and hat and the burned
cork moustache and walked down Tritonville road, smoking a cigarette.
There was none to come up to her for fun. But she was sincerity itself,
one of the bravest and truest hearts heaven ever made, not one of your
twofaced things, too sweet to be wholesome.
And then there came out upon the air the sound of voices and the
pealing anthem of the organ. It was the men's temperance retreat conducted
by the missioner, the reverend John Hughes S. J., rosary, sermon and
benediction of the Most Blessed Sacrament. They were there gathered
together without distinction of social class and a most edifying
spectacle it was to see in that simple fane beside the waves,
after the storms of this weary world, kneeling before the feet of
the immaculate, reciting the litany of Our Lady of Loreto,
beseeching her to intercede for them, the old familiar words,
holy Mary, holy virgin of virgins. How sad to poor Gerty's ears
Had her father only avoided the clutches of the demon drink, by
taking the pledge or those powders the drink habit cured in Pearson's
Weekly, she might now be rolling in her carriage, second to none. Over and
over had she told herself that as she mused by the dying embers in a brown
study without the lamp because she hated two lights or oftentimes gazing
out of the window dreamily by the hour at the rain falling on the rusty
bucket, thinking. But that vile decoction which has ruined so many hearths
and homes had cist its shadow over her childhood days. Nay, she had even
witnessed in the home circle deeds of violence caused by intemperance and
had seen her own father, a prey to the fumes of intoxication, forget
himself completely for if there was one thing of all things that Gerty
knew it was that the man who lifts his hand to a woman save in the way of
kindness, deserves to be branded as the lowest of the low.
And still the voices sang in supplication to the Virgin most powerful,
Virgin most merciful. And Gerty, rapt in thought, scarce saw or heard her
companions or the twins at their boyish gambols or the gentleman off
Sandymount green that Cissy Caffrey called the man that was so like
himself passing along the strand taking a short walk. You never saw him
any way screwed but still and for all that she would not like him for a
father because he was too old or something or on account of his face it
was a palpable case of Doctor Fell or his carbuncly nose with the pimples
on it and his sandy moustache a bit white under his nose. Poor father
With all his faults she loved him still when he sang TELL ME, MARY, HOW TO
WOO THEE or MY LOVE AND COTTAGE NEAR ROCHELLE and they had stewed cockles
and lettuce with Lazenby's salad dressing for supper and when he sang THE
MOON HATH RAISED with Mr Dignam that died suddenly and was buried, God
have mercy on him, from a stroke. Her mother's birthday that was and
Charley was home on his holidays and Tom and Mr Dignam and Mrs and
Patsy and Freddy Dignam and they were to have had a group taken.
Noone would have thought the end was so near. Now he was laid to rest.
And her mother said to him to let that be a warning to him for the rest of
his days and he couldn't even go to the funeral on account of the gout and
she had to go into town to bring him the letters and samples from his
office about Catesby's cork lino, artistic, standard designs, fit for a
palace, gives tiptop wear and always bright and cheery in the home.
A sterling good daughter was Gerty just like a second mother in the house,
a ministering angel too with a little heart worth its weight in gold.
And when her mother had those raging splitting headaches who was it
rubbed the menthol cone on her forehead but Gerty though she didn't like
her mother's taking pinches of snuff and that was the only single thing
they ever had words about, taking snuff. Everyone thought the world of her
for her gentle ways. It was Gerty who turned off the gas at the main every
night and it was Gerty who tacked up on the wall of that place where she
never forgot every fortnight the chlorate of lime Mr Tunney the grocer's
christmas almanac, the picture of halcyon days where a young gentleman in
the costume they used to wear then with a threecornered hat was offering a
bunch of flowers to his ladylove with oldtime chivalry through her lattice
window. You could see there was a story behind it. The colours were done
something lovely. She was in a soft clinging white in a studied attitude
and the gentleman was in chocolate and he looked a thorough aristocrat.
She often looked at them dreamily when she went there for a certain
purpose and felt her own arms that were white and soft just like hers with
the sleeves back and thought about those times because she had found out
in Walker's pronouncing dictionary that belonged to grandpapa Giltrap
about the halcyon days what they meant.
The twins were now playing in the most approved brotherly fashion till at
last Master Jacky who was really as bold as brass there was no getting
behind that deliberately kicked the ball as hard as ever he could down
towards the seaweedy rocks. Needless to say poor Tommy was not slow to
voice his dismay but luckily the gentleman in black who was sitting there
by himself came gallantly to the rescue and intercepted the ball. Our two
champions claimed their plaything with lusty cries and to avoid trouble
Cissy Caffrey called to the gentleman to throw it to her please. The
gentleman aimed the ball once or twice and then threw it up the strand
towards Cissy Caffrey but it rolled down the slope and stopped right under
Gerty's skirt near the little pool by the rock. The twins clamoured again
for it and Cissy told her to kick it away and let them fight for it so
Gerty drew back her foot but she wished their stupid ball hadn't come
rolling down to her and she gave a kick but she missed and Edy and Cissy
laughed.
If you fail try again, Edy Boardman said.
Gerty smiled assent and bit her lip. A delicate pink crept into her
pretty cheek but she was determined to let them see so she just lifted her
skirt a little but just enough and took good aim and gave the ball a jolly
good kick and it went ever so far and the two twins after it down towards
the shingle. Pure jealousy of course it was nothing else to draw attention
on account of the gentleman opposite looking. She felt the warm flush, a
danger signal always with Gerty MacDowell, surging and flaming into her
cheeks. Till then they had only exchanged glances of the most casual but
now under the brim of her new hat she ventured a look at him and the face
that met her gaze there in the twilight, wan and strangely drawn, seemed
to her the saddest she had ever seen.
Through the open window of the church the fragrant incense was wafted and
with it the fragrant names of her who was conceived without stain of
original sin, spiritual vessel, pray for us, honourable vessel, pray for
us, vessel of singular devotion, pray for us, mystical rose. And careworn
hearts were there and toilers for their daily bread and many who had erred
and wandered, their eyes wet with contrition but for all that bright with
hope for the reverend father Father Hughes had told them what the great
saint Bernard said in his famous prayer of Mary, the most pious Virgin's
intercessory power that it was not recorded in any age that those who
implored her powerful protection were ever abandoned by her.
The twins were now playing again right merrily for the troubles of
childhood are but as fleeting summer showers. Cissy Caffrey played with
baby Boardman till he crowed with glee, clapping baby hands in air. Peep
she cried behind the hood of the pushcar and Edy asked where was Cissy
gone and then Cissy popped up her head and cried ah and, my word,
didn't the little chap enjoy that And then she told him to say papa.
Say papa, baby. Say pa pa pa pa pa pa pa.
And baby did his level best to say it for he was very intelligent for
eleven months everyone said and big for his age and the picture of health,
a perfect little bunch of love, and he would certainly turn out to be
something great, they said.
Haja ja ja haja.
Cissy wiped his little mouth with the dribbling bib and wanted him to sit
up properly and say pa pa pa but when she undid the strap she cried out,
holy saint Denis, that he was possing wet and to double the half blanket
the other way under him. Of course his infant majesty was most
obstreperous at such toilet formalities and he let everyone know it
Habaa baaaahabaaa baaaa.
And two great big lovely big tears coursing down his cheeks. It was all no
use soothering him with no, nono, baby, no and telling him about the
geegee and where was the puffpuff but Ciss, always readywitted, gave him
in his mouth the teat of the suckingbottle and the young heathen was
quickly appeased.
Gerty wished to goodness they would take their squalling baby home out of
that and not get on her nerves, no hour to be out, and the little brats
of twins. She gazed out towards the distant sea. It was like the paintings
that man used to do on the pavement with all the coloured chalks and such
a pity too leaving them there to be all blotted out, the evening and the
clouds coming out and the Bailey light on Howth and to hear the music like
that and the perfume of those incense they burned in the church like a
kind of waft. And while she gazed her heart went pitapat. Yes, it was her
he was looking at, and there was meaning in his look. His eyes burned into
her as though they would search her through and through, read her very
soul. Wonderful eyes they were, superbly expressive, but could you trust
them? People were so queer. She could see at once by his dark eyes and his
pale intellectual face that he was a foreigner, the image of the photo she
had of Martin Harvey, the matinee idol, only for the moustache which she
preferred because she wasn't stagestruck like Winny Rippingham that
wanted they two to always dress the same on account of a play but she
could not see whether he had an aquiline nose or a slightly RETROUSSE from
where he was sitting. He was in deep mourning, she could see that, and the
story of a haunting sorrow was written on his face. She would have given
worlds to know what it was. He was looking up so intently, so still, and
he saw her kick the ball and perhaps he could see the bright steel buckles
of her shoes if she swung them like that thoughtfully with the toes down.
She was glad that something told her to put on the transparent stockings
thinking Reggy Wylie might be out but that was far away. Here was that of
which she had so often dreamed. It was he who mattered and there was joy
on her face because she wanted him because she felt instinctively that he
was like noone else. The very heart of the girlwoman went out to him, her
dreamhusband, because she knew on the instant it was him. If he had
suffered, more sinned against than sinning, or even, even, if he had been
himself a sinner, a wicked man, she cared not. Even if he was a protestant
or methodist she could convert him easily if he truly loved her. There
were wounds that wanted healing with heartbalm. She was a womanly woman
not like other flighty girls unfeminine he had known, those cyclists
showing off what they hadn't got and she just yearned to know all, to
forgive all if she could make him fall in love with her, make him forget
the memory of the past. Then mayhap he would embrace her gently, like a
real man, crushing her soft body to him, and love her, his ownest girlie,
for herself alone.
Refuge of sinners. Comfortress of the afflicted. ORA PRO NOBIS. Well
has it been said that whosoever prays to her with faith and constancy can
never be lost or cast away and fitly is she too a haven of refuge for the
afflicted because of the seven dolours which transpierced her own heart.
Gerty could picture the whole scene in the church, the stained glass
windows lighted up, the candles, the flowers and the blue banners of the
blessed Virgin's sodality and Father Conroy was helping Canon O'Hanlon at
the altar, carrying things in and out with his eyes cast down. He looked
almost a saint and his confessionbox was so quiet and clean and dark and
his hands were just like white wax and if ever she became a Dominican nun
in their white habit perhaps he might come to the convent for the novena
of Saint Dominic. He told her that time when she told him about that in
confession, crimsoning up to the roots of her hair for fear he could see,
not to be troubled because that was only the voice of nature and we were
all subject to nature's laws, he said, in this life and that that was no
sin because that came from the nature of woman instituted by God, he said,
and that Our Blessed Lady herself said to the archangel Gabriel be it done
unto me according to Thy Word. He was so kind and holy and often and often
she thought and thought could she work a ruched teacosy with embroidered
floral design for him as a present or a clock but they had a clock she
noticed on the mantelpiece white and gold with a canarybird that came out
of a little house to tell the time the day she went there about the
flowers for the forty hours' adoration because it was hard to know what
sort of a present to give or perhaps an album of illuminated views of
Dublin or some place.
The exasperating little brats of twins began to quarrel again and Jacky
threw the ball out towards the sea and they both ran after it. Little
monkeys common as ditchwater. Someone ought to take them and give them
a good hiding for themselves to keep them in their places, the both of
them. And Cissy and Edy shouted after them to come back because they
were afraid the tide might come in on them and be drowned.
Jacky Tommy
Not they What a great notion they had So Cissy said it was the very
last time she'd ever bring them out. She jumped up and called them and she
ran down the slope past him, tossing her hair behind her which had a good
enough colour if there had been more of it but with all the thingamerry
she was always rubbing into it she couldn't get it to grow long because it
wasn't natural so she could just go and throw her hat at it. She ran
with long gandery strides it was a wonder she didn't rip up her skirt at
the side that was too tight on her because there was a lot of the tomboy
about Cissy Caffrey and she was a forward piece whenever she thought
she had a good opportunity to show and just because she was a good runner
she ran like that so that he could see all the end of her petticoat
running and her skinny shanks up as far as possible. It would have
served her just right if she had tripped up over something accidentally
on purpose with her high crooked French heels on her to make her look
tall and got a fine tumble. TABLEAU That would have been a very charming
expose for a gentleman like that to witness.
Queen of angels, queen of patriarchs, queen of prophets, of all saints,
they prayed, queen of the most holy rosary and then Father Conroy handed
the thurible to Canon O'Hanlon and he put in the incense and censed the
Blessed Sacrament and Cissy Caffrey caught the two twins and she was
itching to give them a ringing good clip on the ear but she didn't because
she thought he might be watching but she never made a bigger mistake in
all her life because Gerty could see without looking that he never
took his eyes off of her and then Canon O'Hanlon handed the thurible
back to Father Conroy and knelt down looking up at the Blessed Sacrament
and the choir began to sing the TANTUM ERGO and she just swung her foot
in and out in time as the music rose and fell to the TANTUMER GOSA
CRAMEN TUM. Three and eleven she paid for those stockings in Sparrow's
of George's street on the Tuesday, no the Monday before Easter and there
wasn't a brack on them and that was what he was looking at, transparent,
and not at her insignificant ones that had neither shape nor form
the cheek of her because he had eyes in his head to see the difference
for himself.
Cissy came up along the strand with the two twins and their ball with
her hat anyhow on her to one side after her run and she did look a streel
tugging the two kids along with the flimsy blouse she bought only a
fortnight before like a rag on her back and a bit of her petticoat hanging
like a caricature. Gerty just took off her hat for a moment to settle her
hair and a prettier, a daintier head of nutbrown tresses was never seen on
a girl's shouldersa radiant little vision, in sooth, almost maddening in
its sweetness. You would have to travel many a long mile before you found
a head of hair the like of that. She could almost see the swift answering
flash of admiration in his eyes that set her tingling in every nerve.
She put on her hat so that she could see from underneath the brim and
swung her buckled shoe faster for her breath caught as she caught the
expression in his eyes. He was eying her as a snake eyes its prey. Her
woman's instinct told her that she had raised the devil in him and at the
thought a burning scarlet swept from throat to brow till the lovely colour
of her face became a glorious rose.
Edy Boardman was noticing it too because she was squinting at Gerty,
half smiling, with her specs like an old maid, pretending to nurse the
baby. Irritable little gnat she was and always would be and that was why
noone could get on with her poking her nose into what was no concern of
hers. And she said to Gerty
A penny for your thoughts.
What? replied Gerty with a smile reinforced by the whitest of teeth.
I was only wondering was it late.
Because she wished to goodness they'd take the snottynosed twins and their
babby home to the mischief out of that so that was why she just gave a
gentle hint about its being late. And when Cissy came up Edy asked her the
time and Miss Cissy, as glib as you like, said it was half past kissing
time, time to kiss again. But Edy wanted to know because they were told to
be in early.
Wait, said Cissy, I'll run ask my uncle Peter over there what's the time
by his conundrum.
So over she went and when he saw her coming she could see him take his
hand out of his pocket, getting nervous, and beginning to play with his
watchchain, looking up at the church. Passionate nature though he was
Gerty could see that he had enormous control over himself. One moment he
had been there, fascinated by a loveliness that made him gaze, and the
next moment it was the quiet gravefaced gentleman, selfcontrol expressed
in every line of his distinguishedlooking figure.
Cissy said to excuse her would he mind please telling her what was the
right time and Gerty could see him taking out his watch, listening to it
and looking up and clearing his throat and he said he was very sorry his
watch was stopped but he thought it must be after eight because the sun
was set. His voice had a cultured ring in it and though he spoke in
measured accents there was a suspicion of a quiver in the mellow tones.
Cissy said thanks and came back with her tongue out and said uncle said
his waterworks were out of order.
Then they sang the second verse of the TANTUM ERGO and Canon
O'Hanlon got up again and censed the Blessed Sacrament and knelt down and
he told Father Conroy that one of the candles was just going to set fire
to the flowers and Father Conroy got up and settled it all right and she
could see the gentleman winding his watch and listening to the works and
she swung her leg more in and out in time. It was getting darker but he
could see and he was looking all the time that he was winding the watch or
whatever he was doing to it and then he put it back and put his hands back
into his pockets. She felt a kind of a sensation rushing all over her and
she knew by the feel of her scalp and that irritation against her stays
that that thing must be coming on because the last time too was when she
clipped her hair on account of the moon. His dark eyes fixed themselves
on her again drinking in her every contour, literally worshipping at her
shrine. If ever there was undisguised admiration in a man's passionate
gaze it was there plain to be seen on that man's face. It is for you,
Gertrude MacDowell, and you know it.
Edy began to get ready to go and it was high time for her and Gerty
noticed that that little hint she gave had had the desired effect because
it was a long way along the strand to where there was the place to push up
the pushcar and Cissy took off the twins' caps and tidied their hair to
make herself attractive of course and Canon O'Hanlon stood up with his
cope poking up at his neck and Father Conroy handed him the card to read
off and he read out PANEM DE COELO PRAESTITISTI EIS and Edy and Cissy were
talking about the time all the time and asking her but Gerty could pay
them back in their own coin and she just answered with scathing politeness
when Edy asked her was she heartbroken about her best boy throwing her
over. Gerty winced sharply. A brief cold blaze shone from her eyes that
spoke volumes of scorn immeasurable. It hurtO yes, it cut deep because
Edy had her own quiet way of saying things like that she knew would wound
like the confounded little cat she was. Gerty's lips parted swiftly to
frame the word but she fought back the sob that rose to her throat,
so slim, so flawless, so beautifully moulded it seemed one an artist
might have dreamed of. She had loved him better than he knew.
Lighthearted deceiver and fickle like all his sex he would never
understand what he had meant to her and for an instant there was
in the blue eyes a quick stinging of tears. Their eyes were
probing her mercilessly but with a brave effort she sparkled back in
sympathy as she glanced at her new conquest for them to see.
O, responded Gerty, quick as lightning, laughing, and the proud head
flashed up. I can throw my cap at who I like because it's leap year.
Her words rang out crystalclear, more musical than the cooing of the
ringdove, but they cut the silence icily. There was that in her young
voice that told that she was not a one to be lightly trifled with.
As for Mr Reggy with his swank and his bit of money she could just
chuck him aside as if he was so much filth and never again would she
cast as much as a second thought on him and tear his silly postcard
into a dozen pieces. And if ever after he dared to presume she
could give him one look of measured scorn that would make him
shrivel up on the spot. Miss puny little Edy's countenance fell to
no slight extent and Gerty could see by her looking as black as
thunder that she was simply in a towering rage though she hid it, the
little kinnatt, because that shaft had struck home for her petty jealousy
and they both knew that she was something aloof, apart, in another sphere,
that she was not of them and never would be and there was somebody else
too that knew it and saw it so they could put that in their pipe
and smoke it.
Edy straightened up baby Boardman to get ready to go and Cissy
tucked in the ball and the spades and buckets and it was high time too
because the sandman was on his way for Master Boardman junior. And
Cissy told him too that billy winks was coming and that baby was to go
deedaw and baby looked just too ducky, laughing up out of his gleeful
eyes, and Cissy poked him like that out of fun in his wee fat tummy and
baby, without as much as by your leave, sent up his compliments to all
and sundry on to his brandnew dribbling bib.
O my Puddeny pie protested Ciss. He has his bib destroyed.
The slight CONTRETEMPS claimed her attention but in two twos she set
that little matter to rights.
Gerty stifled a smothered exclamation and gave a nervous cough and
Edy asked what and she was just going to tell her to catch it while it was
flying but she was ever ladylike in her deportment so she simply passed it
off with consummate tact by saying that that was the benediction because
just then the bell rang out from the steeple over the quiet seashore
because Canon O'Hanlon was up on the altar with the veil that Father
Conroy put round his shoulders giving the benediction with the Blessed
Sacrament in his hands.
How moving the scene there in the gathering twilight, the last glimpse of
Erin, the touching chime of those evening bells and at the same time a bat
flew forth from the ivied belfry through the dusk, hither, thither, with a
tiny lost cry. And she could see far away the lights of the lighthouses so
picturesque she would have loved to do with a box of paints because it was
easier than to make a man and soon the lamplighter would be going his
rounds past the presbyterian church grounds and along by shady
Tritonville avenue where the couples walked and lighting the lamp near her
window where Reggy Wylie used to turn his freewheel like she read in that
book THE LAMPLIGHTER by Miss Cummins, author of MABEL VAUGHAN and
other tales. For Gerty had her dreams that noone knew of. She loved to
read poetry and when she got a keepsake from Bertha Supple of that lovely
confession album with the coralpink cover to write her thoughts in she
laid it in the drawer of her toilettable which, though it did not err
on the side of luxury, was scrupulously neat and clean. It was there
she kept her girlish treasure trove, the tortoiseshell combs, her
child of Mary badge, the whiterose scent, the eyebrowleine, her
alabaster pouncetbox and the ribbons to change when her things came
home from the wash and there were some beautiful thoughts written
in it in violet ink that she bought in Hely's of Dame Street for
she felt that she too could write poetry if she could only express
herself like that poem that appealed to her so deeply that she had
copied out of the newspaper she found one evening round the potherbs. ART
THOU REAL, MY IDEAL? it was called by Louis J Walsh, Magherafelt, and
after there was something about TWILIGHT, WILT THOU EVER? and ofttimes
the beauty of poetry, so sad in its transient loveliness, had misted
her eyes with silent tears for she felt that the years were slipping
by for her, one by one, and but for that one shortcoming she knew she
need fear no competition and that was an accident coming down Dalkey
hill and she always tried to conceal it. But it must end, she felt.
If she saw that magic lure in his eyes there would be no holding
back for her. Love laughs at locksmiths. She would make the great
sacrifice. Her every effort would be to share his thoughts. Dearer than
the whole world would she be to him and gild his days with happiness.
There was the allimportant question and she was dying to know was he a
married man or a widower who had lost his wife or some tragedy like the
nobleman with the foreign name from the land of song had to have her put
into a madhouse, cruel only to be kind. But even ifwhat then? Would it
make a very great difference? From everything in the least indelicate her
finebred nature instinctively recoiled. She loathed that sort of person,
the fallen women off the accommodation walk beside the Dodder that went
with the soldiers and coarse men with no respect for a girl's honour,
degrading the sex and being taken up to the police station. No, no not
that. They would be just good friends like a big brother and sister
without all that other in spite of the conventions of Society with a big
ess. Perhaps it was an old flame he was in mourning for from the days
beyond recall. She thought she understood. She would try to understand
him because men were so different. The old love was waiting, waiting
with little white hands stretched out, with blue appealing eyes. Heart
of mine She would follow, her dream of love, the dictates of her heart
that told her he was her all in all, the only man in all the world
for her for love was the master guide. Nothing else mattered. Come what
might she would be wild, untrammelled, free.
Canon O'Hanlon put the Blessed Sacrament back into the tabernacle
and genuflected and the choir sang LAUDATE DOMINUM OMNES GENTES and
then he locked the tabernacle door because the benediction was over and
Father Conroy handed him his hat to put on and crosscat Edy asked wasn't
she coming but Jacky Caffrey called out
O, look, Cissy
And they all looked was it sheet lightning but Tommy saw it too over
the trees beside the church, blue and then green and purple.
It's fireworks, Cissy Caffrey said.
And they all ran down the strand to see over the houses and the
church, helterskelter, Edy with the pushcar with baby Boardman in it and
Cissy holding Tommy and Jacky by the hand so they wouldn't fall running.
Come on, Gerty, Cissy called. It's the bazaar fireworks.
But Gerty was adamant. She had no intention of being at their beck and
call. If they could run like rossies she could sit so she said she could
see from where she was. The eyes that were fastened upon her set
her pulses tingling. She looked at him a moment, meeting his glance,
and a light broke in upon her. Whitehot passion was in that face, passion
silent as the grave, and it had made her his. At last they were left
alone without the others to pry and pass remarks and she knew he
could be trusted to the death, steadfast, a sterling man, a man of
inflexible honour to his fingertips. His hands and face were working
and a tremour went over her. She leaned back far to look up where
the fireworks were and she caught her knee in her hands so as not
to fall back looking up and there was noone to see only him and
her when she revealed all her graceful beautifully shaped legs like that,
supply soft and delicately rounded, and she seemed to hear the panting
of his heart, his hoarse breathing, because she knew too about the passion
of men like that, hotblooded, because Bertha Supple told her once in dead
secret and made her swear she'd never about the gentleman lodger that was
staying with them out of the Congested Districts Board that had pictures
cut out of papers of those skirtdancers and highkickers and she said he
used to do something not very nice that you could imagine sometimes in
the bed. But this was altogether different from a thing like that
because there was all the difference because she could almost feel
him draw her face to his and the first quick hot touch of his
handsome lips. Besides there was absolution so long as you didn't
do the other thing before being married and there ought to be
women priests that would understand without your telling out and
Cissy Caffrey too sometimes had that dreamy kind of dreamy look
in her eyes so that she too, my dear, and Winny Rippingham so mad
about actors' photographs and besides it was on account of that other
thing coming on the way it did.
And Jacky Caffrey shouted to look, there was another and she leaned back
and the garters were blue to match on account of the transparent and they
all saw it and they all shouted to look, look, there it was and she leaned
back ever so far to see the fireworks and something queer was flying
through the air, a soft thing, to and fro, dark. And she saw a long Roman
candle going up over the trees, up, up, and, in the tense hush,
they were all breathless with excitement as it went higher and higher
and she had to lean back more and more to look up after it, high,
high, almost out of sight, and her face was suffused with a divine,
an entrancing blush from straining back and he could see her other
things too, nainsook knickers, the fabric that caresses the skin,
better than those other pettiwidth, the green, four and eleven,
on account of being white and she let him and she saw that he saw and then
it went so high it went out of sight a moment and she was trembling in
every limb from being bent so far back that he had a full view
high up above her knee where noone ever not even on the swing or wading
and she wasn't ashamed and he wasn't either to look in that immodest way
like that because he couldn't resist the sight of the wondrous revealment
half offered like those skirtdancers behaving so immodest before gentlemen
looking and he kept on looking, looking. She would fain have cried to him
chokingly, held out her snowy slender arms to him to come, to feel his
lips laid on her white brow, the cry of a young girl's love, a little
strangled cry, wrung from her, that cry that has rung through the ages.
And then a rocket sprang and bang shot blind blank and O then the Roman
candle burst and it was like a sigh of O and everyone cried O O in
raptures and it gushed out of it a stream of rain gold hair threads and
they shed and ah they were all greeny dewy stars falling with golden,
O so lovely, O, soft, sweet, soft
Then all melted away dewily in the grey air all was silent. Ah She
glanced at him as she bent forward quickly, a pathetic little glance of
piteous protest, of shy reproach under which he coloured like a girl
He was leaning back against the rock behind. Leopold Bloom for it is he
stands silent, with bowed head before those young guileless eyes. What a
brute he had been At it again? A fair unsullied soul had called to him
and, wretch that he was, how had he answered? An utter cad he had been
He of all men But there was an infinite store of mercy in those eyes,
for him too a word of pardon even though he had erred and sinned and
wandered. Should a girl tell? No, a thousand times no. That was their
secret, only theirs, alone in the hiding twilight and there was none to
know or tell save the little bat that flew so softly through the evening
to and fro and little bats don't tell.
Cissy Caffrey whistled, imitating the boys in the football field to show
what a great person she was and then she cried
Gerty Gerty We're going. Come on. We can see from farther up.
Gerty had an idea, one of love's little ruses. She slipped a hand into
her kerchief pocket and took out the wadding and waved in reply of course
without letting him and then slipped it back. Wonder if he's too far to.
She rose. Was it goodbye? No. She had to go but they would meet again,
there, and she would dream of that till then, tomorrow, of her dream of
yester eve. She drew herself up to her full height. Their souls met in a
last lingering glance and the eyes that reached her heart, full of a
strange shining, hung enraptured on her sweet flowerlike face. She half
smiled at him wanly, a sweet forgiving smile, a smile that verged on
tears, and then they parted.
Slowly, without looking back she went down the uneven strand to
Cissy, to Edy to Jacky and Tommy Caffrey, to little baby Boardman. It was
darker now and there were stones and bits of wood on the strand and slippy
seaweed. She walked with a certain quiet dignity characteristic of her but
with care and very slowly becausebecause Gerty MacDowell was ...
Tight boots? No. She's lame O
Mr Bloom watched her as she limped away. Poor girl That's why she's left
on the shelf and the others did a sprint. Thought something was wrong by
the cut of her jib. Jilted beauty. A defect is ten times worse in a woman.
But makes them polite. Glad I didn't know it when she was on show. Hot
little devil all the same. I wouldn't mind. Curiosity like a nun or a
negress or a girl with glasses. That squinty one is delicate. Near her
monthlies, I expect, makes them feel ticklish. I have such a bad headache
today. Where did I put the letter? Yes, all right. All kinds of crazy
longings. Licking pennies. Girl in Tranquilla convent that nun told
me liked to smell rock oil. Virgins go mad in the end I suppose.
Sister? How many women in Dublin have it today? Martha, she. Something
in the air. That's the moon. But then why don't all women menstruate
at the same time with the same moon, I mean? Depends on the time
they were born I suppose. Or all start scratch then get out of step.
Sometimes Molly and Milly together. Anyhow I got the best of that.
Damned glad I didn't do it in the bath this morning over her silly
I will punish you letter. Made up for that tramdriver this morning.
That gouger M'Coy stopping me to say nothing. And his wife
engagement in the country valise, voice like a pickaxe. Thankful for small
mercies. Cheap too. Yours for the asking. Because they want it themselves.
Their natural craving. Shoals of them every evening poured out of offices.
Reserve better. Don't want it they throw it at you. Catch em alive, O.
Pity they can't see themselves. A dream of wellfilled hose. Where was
that? Ah, yes. Mutoscope pictures in Capel street for men only. Peeping
Tom. Willy's hat and what the girls did with it. Do they snapshot
those girls or is it all a fake? LINGERIE does it. Felt for the
curves inside her DESHABILLE. Excites them also when they're. I'm all
clean come and dirty me. And they like dressing one another for the
sacrifice. Milly delighted with Molly's new blouse. At first.
Put them all on to take them all off. Molly. Why I bought her the violet
garters. Us too the tie he wore, his lovely socks and turnedup trousers.
He wore a pair of gaiters the night that first we met. His lovely
shirt was shining beneath his what? of jet. Say a woman loses a charm with
every pin she takes out. Pinned together. O, Mairy lost the pin of her.
Dressed up to the nines for somebody. Fashion part of their charm. Just
changes when you're on the track of the secret. Except the east Mary,
Martha now as then. No reasonable offer refused. She wasn't in a hurry
either. Always off to a fellow when they are. They never forget an
appointment. Out on spec probably. They believe in chance because like
themselves. And the others inclined to give her an odd dig. Girl friends
at school, arms round each other's necks or with ten fingers locked,
kissing and whispering secrets about nothing in the convent garden. Nuns
with whitewashed faces, cool coifs and their rosaries going up and down,
vindictive too for what they can't get. Barbed wire. Be sure now and write
to me. And I'll write to you. Now won't you? Molly and Josie Powell. Till
Mr Right comes along, then meet once in a blue moon. TABLEAU O, look
who it is for the love of God How are you at all? What have you been
doing with yourself? Kiss and delighted to, kiss, to see you. Picking
holes in each other's appearance. You're looking splendid. Sister souls.
Showing their teeth at one another. How many have you left? Wouldn't lend
each other a pinch of salt.
Ah
Devils they are when that's coming on them. Dark devilish appearance.
Molly often told me feel things a ton weight. Scratch the sole of
my foot. O that way O, that's exquisite Feel it myself too. Good to rest
once in a way. Wonder if it's bad to go with them then. Safe in one way.
Turns milk, makes fiddlestrings snap. Something about withering plants I
read in a garden. Besides they say if the flower withers she wears she's a
flirt. All are. Daresay she felt . When you feel like that you often meet
what you feel. Liked me or what? Dress they look at. Always know a fellow
courting collars and cuffs. Well cocks and lions do the same and stags.
Same time might prefer a tie undone or something. Trousers? Suppose I
when I was? No. Gently does it. Dislike rough and tumble. Kiss in the dark
and never tell. Saw something in me. Wonder what. Sooner have me as I am
than some poet chap with bearsgrease plastery hair, lovelock over his
dexter optic. To aid gentleman in literary. Ought to attend to my
appearance my age. Didn't let her see me in profile. Still, you
never know. Pretty girls and ugly men marrying. Beauty and the
beast. Besides I can't be so if Molly. Took off her hat to show
her hair. Wide brim. Bought to hide her face, meeting someone might
know her, bend down or carry a bunch of flowers to smell. Hair
strong in rut. Ten bob I got for Molly's combings when we were on
the rocks in Holles street. Why not? Suppose he gave her money.
Why not? All a prejudice. She's worth ten, fifteen, more, a pound. What? I
think so. All that for nothing. Bold hand Mrs Marion. Did I forget to
write address on that letter like the postcard I sent to Flynn? And the
day I went to Drimmie's without a necktie. Wrangle with Molly it was put
me off. No, I remember. Richie Goulding he's another. Weighs on his mind.
Funny my watch stopped at half past four. Dust. Shark liver oil they use
to clean. Could do it myself. Save. Was that just when he, she?
O, he did. Into her. She did. Done.
Ah
Mr Bloom with careful hand recomposed his wet shirt. O Lord, that little
limping devil. Begins to feel cold and clammy. Aftereffect not pleasant.
Still you have to get rid of it someway. They don't care. Complimented
perhaps. Go home to nicey bread and milky and say night prayers with the
kiddies. Well, aren't they? See her as she is spoil all. Must have the
stage setting, the rouge, costume, position, music. The name too. AMOURS
of actresses. Nell Gwynn, Mrs Bracegirdle, Maud Branscombe. Curtain up.
Moonlight silver effulgence. Maiden discovered with pensive bosom. Little
sweetheart come and kiss me. Still, I feel. The strength it gives a man.
That's the secret of it. Good job I let off there behind the wall coming
out of Dignam's. Cider that was. Otherwise I couldn't have. Makes you want
to sing after. LACAUS ESANT TARATARA. Suppose I spoke to her. What about?
Bad plan however if you don't know how to end the conversation. Ask them a
question they ask you another. Good idea if you're stuck. Gain time. But
then you're in a cart. Wonderful of course if you say good evening, and
you see she's on for it good evening. O but the dark evening in the
Appian way I nearly spoke to Mrs Clinch O thinking she was. Whew Girl in
Meath street that night. All the dirty things I made her say. All wrong of
course. My arks she called it. It's so hard to find one who. Aho If you
don't answer when they solicit must be horrible for them till they harden.
And kissed my hand when I gave her the extra two shillings. Parrots. Press
the button and the bird will squeak. Wish she hadn't called me sir. O, her
mouth in the dark And you a married man with a single girl That's what
they enjoy. Taking a man from another woman. Or even hear of it.
Different with me. Glad to get away from other chap's wife. Eating off his
cold plate. Chap in the Burton today spitting back gumchewed gristle.
French letter still in my pocketbook. Cause of half the trouble. But might
happen sometime, I don't think. Come in, all is prepared. I dreamt. What?
Worst is beginning. How they change the venue when it's not what they
like. Ask you do you like mushrooms because she once knew a gentleman
who. Or ask you what someone was going to say when he changed his
mind and stopped. Yet if I went the whole hog, say I want to, something
like that. Because I did. She too. Offend her. Then make it up. Pretend to
want something awfully, then cry off for her sake. Flatters them. She must
have been thinking of someone else all the time. What harm? Must since she
came to the use of reason, he, he and he. First kiss does the trick. The
propitious moment. Something inside them goes pop. Mushy like, tell by
their eye, on the sly. First thoughts are best. Remember that till their
dying day. Molly, lieutenant Mulvey that kissed her under the Moorish wall
beside the gardens. Fifteen she told me. But her breasts were developed.
Fell asleep then. After Glencree dinner that was when we drove home.
Featherbed mountain. Gnashing her teeth in sleep. Lord mayor had his eye
on her too. Val Dillon. Apoplectic.
There she is with them down there for the fireworks. My fireworks.
Up like a rocket, down like a stick. And the children, twins they must be,
waiting for something to happen. Want to be grownups. Dressing in
mother's clothes. Time enough, understand all the ways of the world. And
the dark one with the mop head and the nigger mouth. I knew she could
whistle. Mouth made for that. Like Molly. Why that highclass whore in
Jammet's wore her veil only to her nose. Would you mind, please, telling
me the right time? I'll tell you the right time up a dark lane. Say prunes
and prisms forty times every morning, cure for fat lips. Caressing the
little boy too. Onlookers see most of the game. Of course they understand
birds, animals, babies. In their line.
Didn't look back when she was going down the strand. Wouldn't give that
satisfaction. Those girls, those girls, those lovely seaside girls. Fine
eyes she had, clear. It's the white of the eye brings that out not so much
the pupil. Did she know what I? Course. Like a cat sitting beyond a dog's
jump. Women never meet one like that Wilkins in the high school drawing a
picture of Venus with all his belongings on show. Call that innocence?
Poor idiot His wife has her work cut out for her. Never see them sit
on a bench marked WET PAINT. Eyes all over them. Look under the bed
for what's not there. Longing to get the fright of their lives.
Sharp as needles they are. When I said to Molly the man at the corner
of Cuffe street was goodlooking, thought she might like, twigged at
once he had a false arm. Had, too. Where do they get that? Typist
going up Roger Greene's stairs two at a time to show her understandings.
Handed down from father to, mother to daughter, I mean. Bred in the
bone. Milly for example drying her handkerchief on the mirror to
save the ironing. Best place for an ad to catch a woman's eye on a
mirror. And when I sent her for Molly's Paisley shawl to Prescott's
by the way that ad I must, carrying home the change in her stocking
Clever little minx. I never told her. Neat way she carries parcels
too. Attract men, small thing like that. Holding up her hand, shaking it,
to let the blood flow back when it was red. Who did you learn that from?
Nobody. Something the nurse taught me. O, don't they know Three years
old she was in front of Molly's dressingtable, just before we left Lombard
street west. Me have a nice pace. Mullingar. Who knows? Ways of the
world. Young student. Straight on her pins anyway not like the other.
Still she was game. Lord, I am wet. Devil you are. Swell of her calf.
Transparent stockings, stretched to breaking point. Not like that frump
today. A. E. Rumpled stockings. Or the one in Grafton street. White. Wow
Beef to the heel.
A monkey puzzle rocket burst, spluttering in darting crackles. Zrads
and zrads, zrads, zrads. And Cissy and Tommy and Jacky ran out to see
and Edy after with the pushcar and then Gerty beyond the curve of the
rocks. Will she? Watch Watch See Looked round. She smelt an onion.
Darling, I saw, your. I saw all.
Lord
Did me good all the same. Off colour after Kiernan's, Dignam's. For
this relief much thanks. In HAMLET, that is. Lord It was all things
combined. Excitement. When she leaned back, felt an ache at the butt of my
tongue. Your head it simply swirls. He's right. Might have made a worse
fool of myself however. Instead of talking about nothing. Then I will tell
you all. Still it was a kind of language between us. It couldn't be? No,
Gerty they called her. Might be false name however like my name and the
address Dolphin's barn a blind.
HER MAIDEN NAME WAS JEMINA BROWN
AND SHE LIVED WITH HER MOTHER IN IRISHTOWN.
Place made me think of that I suppose. All tarred with the same brush.
Wiping pens in their stockings. But the ball rolled down to her as if it
understood. Every bullet has its billet. Course I never could throw
anything straight at school. Crooked as a ram's horn. Sad however because
it lasts only a few years till they settle down to potwalloping and papa's
pants will soon fit Willy and fuller's earth for the baby when they hold
him out to do ah ah. No soft job. Saves them. Keeps them out of harm's
way. Nature. Washing child, washing corpse. Dignam. Children's hands
always round them. Cocoanut skulls, monkeys, not even closed at first,
sour milk in their swaddles and tainted curds. Oughtn't to have given
that child an empty teat to suck. Fill it up with wind. Mrs Beaufoy,
Purefoy. Must call to the hospital. Wonder is nurse Callan there still.
She used to look over some nights when Molly was in the Coffee Palace.
That young doctor O'Hare I noticed her brushing his coat. And Mrs Breen
and Mrs Dignam once like that too, marriageable. Worst of all at night
Mrs Duggan told me in the City Arms. Husband rolling in drunk, stink of
pub off him like a polecat. Have that in your nose in the dark,
whiff of stale boose. Then ask in the morning was I drunk last
night? Bad policy however to fault the husband. Chickens come
home to roost. They stick by one another like glue. Maybe the
women's fault also. That's where Molly can knock spots off them. It's the
blood of the south. Moorish. Also the form, the figure. Hands felt for the
opulent. Just compare for instance those others. Wife locked up at home,
skeleton in the cupboard. Allow me to introduce my. Then they trot you out
some kind of a nondescript, wouldn't know what to call her. Always see a
fellow's weak point in his wife. Still there's destiny in it, falling in
love. Have their own secrets between them. Chaps that would go to the dogs
if some woman didn't take them in hand. Then little chits of girls,
height of a shilling in coppers, with little hubbies. As God made them he
matched them. Sometimes children turn out well enough. Twice nought makes
one. Or old rich chap of seventy and blushing bride. Marry in May and
repent in December. This wet is very unpleasant. Stuck. Well the foreskin
is not back. Better detach.
Ow
Other hand a sixfooter with a wifey up to his watchpocket. Long and
the short of it. Big he and little she. Very strange about my watch.
Wristwatches are always going wrong. Wonder is there any magnetic
influence between the person because that was about the time he. Yes, I
suppose, at once. Cat's away, the mice will play. I remember looking in
Pill lane. Also that now is magnetism. Back of everything magnetism. Earth
for instance pulling this and being pulled. That causes movement. And
time, well that's the time the movement takes. Then if one thing stopped
the whole ghesabo would stop bit by bit. Because it's all arranged.
Magnetic needle tells you what's going on in the sun, the stars. Little
piece of steel iron. When you hold out the fork. Come. Come. Tip. Woman
and man that is. Fork and steel. Molly, he. Dress up and look and suggest
and let you see and see more and defy you if you're a man to see that and,
like a sneeze coming, legs, look, look and if you have any guts in you.
Tip. Have to let fly.
Wonder how is she feeling in that region. Shame all put on before
third person. More put out about a hole in her stocking. Molly, her
underjaw stuck out, head back, about the farmer in the ridingboots and
spurs at the horse show. And when the painters were in Lombard street
west. Fine voice that fellow had. How Giuglini began. Smell that I did.
Like flowers. It was too. Violets. Came from the turpentine probably in
the paint. Make their own use of everything. Same time doing it scraped
her slipper on the floor so they wouldn't hear. But lots of them can't
kick the beam, I think. Keep that thing up for hours. Kind of a general
all round over me and half down my back.
Wait. Hm. Hm. Yes. That's her perfume. Why she waved her hand. I
leave you this to think of me when I'm far away on the pillow. What is it?
Heliotrope? No. Hyacinth? Hm. Roses, I think. She'd like scent of that
kind. Sweet and cheap soon sour. Why Molly likes opoponax. Suits her,
with a little jessamine mixed. Her high notes and her low notes. At the
dance night she met him, dance of the hours. Heat brought it out. She was
wearing her black and it had the perfume of the time before. Good
conductor, is it? Or bad? Light too. Suppose there's some connection. For
instance if you go into a cellar where it's dark. Mysterious thing too.
Why did I smell it only now? Took its time in coming like herself, slow
but sure. Suppose it's ever so many millions of tiny grains blown across.
Yes, it is. Because those spice islands, Cinghalese this morning, smell
them leagues off. Tell you what it is. It's like a fine fine veil or web
they have all over the skin, fine like what do you call it gossamer, and
they're always spinning it out of them, fine as anything, like rainbow
colours without knowing it. Clings to everything she takes off. Vamp of
her stockings. Warm shoe. Stays. Drawers little kick, taking them off.
Byby till next time. Also the cat likes to sniff in her shift on
the bed. Know her smell in a thousand. Bathwater too. Reminds me of
strawberries and cream. Wonder where it is really. There or the armpits
or under the neck. Because you get it out of all holes and corners.
Hyacinth perfume made of oil of ether or something. Muskrat.
Bag under their tails. One grain pour off odour for years. Dogs at
each other behind. Good evening. Evening. How do you sniff? Hm. Hm.
Very well, thank you. Animals go by that. Yes now, look at it that way.
We're the same. Some women, instance, warn you off when they have their
period. Come near. Then get a hogo you could hang your hat on. Like
what? Potted herrings gone stale or. Boof Please keep off the grass.
Perhaps they get a man smell off us. What though? Cigary gloves long
John had on his desk the other day. Breath? What you eat and drink gives
that. No. Mansmell, I mean. Must be connected with that because priests
that are supposed to be are different. Women buzz round it like flies
round treacle. Railed off the altar get on to it at any cost. The tree
of forbidden priest. O, father, will you? Let me be the first to.
That diffuses itself all through the body, permeates. Source of life.
And it's extremely curious the smell. Celery sauce. Let me.
Mr Bloom inserted his nose. Hm. Into the. Hm. Opening of his
waistcoat. Almonds or. No. Lemons it is. Ah no, that's the soap.
O by the by that lotion. I knew there was something on my mind.
Never went back and the soap not paid. Dislike carrying bottles like that
hag this morning. Hynes might have paid me that three shillings. I could
mention Meagher's just to remind him. Still if he works that paragraph.
Two and nine. Bad opinion of me he'll have. Call tomorrow. How much do
I owe you? Three and nine? Two and nine, sir. Ah. Might stop him giving
credit another time. Lose your customers that way. Pubs do. Fellows run up
a bill on the slate and then slinking around the back streets into
somewhere else.
Here's this nobleman passed before. Blown in from the bay. Just went
as far as turn back. Always at home at dinnertime. Looks mangled out had
a good tuck in. Enjoying nature now. Grace after meals. After supper walk
a mile. Sure he has a small bank balance somewhere, government sit. Walk
after him now make him awkward like those newsboys me today. Still you
learn something. See ourselves as others see us. So long as women don't
mock what matter? That's the way to find out. Ask yourself who is he now.
THE MYSTERY MAN ON THE BEACH, prize titbit story by Mr Leopold Bloom.
Payment at the rate of one guinea per column. And that fellow today at the
graveside in the brown macintosh. Corns on his kismet however. Healthy
perhaps absorb all the. Whistle brings rain they say. Must be some
somewhere. Salt in the Ormond damp. The body feels the atmosphere. Old
Betty's joints are on the rack. Mother Shipton's prophecy that is about
ships around they fly in the twinkling. No. Signs of rain it is. The royal
reader. And distant hills seem coming nigh.
Howth. Bailey light. Two, four, six, eight, nine. See. Has to change or
they might think it a house. Wreckers. Grace Darling. People afraid of the
dark. Also glowworms, cyclists lightingup time. Jewels diamonds flash
better. Women. Light is a kind of reassuring. Not going to hurt you.
Better now of course than long ago. Country roads. Run you through the
small guts for nothing. Still two types there are you bob against.
Scowl or smile. Pardon Not at all. Best time to spray plants too in the
shade after the sun. Some light still. Red rays are longest. Roygbiv
Vance taught us red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet.
A star I see. Venus? Can't tell yet. Two. When three it's night. Were
those nightclouds there all the time? Looks like a phantom ship. No.
Wait. Trees are they? An optical illusion. Mirage. Land of the setting
sun this. Homerule sun setting in the southeast. My native land,
goodnight.
Dew falling. Bad for you, dear, to sit on that stone. Brings on white
fluxions. Never have little baby then less he was big strong fight his way
up through. Might get piles myself. Sticks too like a summer cold, sore on
the mouth. Cut with grass or paper worst. Friction of the position.
Like to be that rock she sat on. O sweet little, you don't know how nice
you looked. I begin to like them at that age. Green apples. Grab at all
that offer. Suppose it's the only time we cross legs, seated. Also the
library today those girl graduates. Happy chairs under them. But it's
the evening influence. They feel all that. Open like flowers, know
their hours, sunflowers, Jerusalem artichokes, in ballrooms, chandeliers,
avenues under the lamps. Nightstock in Mat Dillon's garden where I kissed
her shoulder. Wish I had a full length oilpainting of her then. June
that was too I wooed. The year returns. History repeats itself.
Ye crags and peaks I'm with you once again. Life, love, voyage round
your own little world. And now? Sad about her lame of course but must
be on your guard not to feel too much pity. They take advantage.
All quiet on Howth now. The distant hills seem. Where we. The
rhododendrons. I am a fool perhaps. He gets the plums, and I the
plumstones. Where I come in. All that old hill has seen. Names change
that's all. Lovers yum yum.
Tired I feel now. Will I get up? O wait. Drained all the manhood out
of me, little wretch. She kissed me. Never again. My youth. Only once it
comes. Or hers. Take the train there tomorrow. No. Returning not the
same. Like kids your second visit to a house. The new I want. Nothing new
under the sun. Care of P. O. Dolphin's Barn. Are you not happy in your?
Naughty darling. At Dolphin's barn charades in Luke Doyle's house. Mat
Dillon and his bevy of daughters Tiny, Atty, Floey, Maimy, Louy, Hetty.
Molly too. Eightyseven that was. Year before we. And the old major,
partial to his drop of spirits. Curious she an only child, I an only
child. So it returns. Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest
way round is the shortest way home. And just when he and she. Circus horse
walking in a ring. Rip van Winkle we played. Rip tear in Henny Doyle's
overcoat. Van breadvan delivering. Winkle cockles and periwinkles. Then
I did Rip van Winkle coming back. She leaned on the sideboard watching.
Moorish eyes. Twenty years asleep in Sleepy Hollow. All changed.
Forgotten. The young are old. His gun rusty from the dew.
Ba. What is that flying about? Swallow? Bat probably. Thinks I'm a tree,
so blind. Have birds no smell? Metempsychosis. They believed you could be
changed into a tree from grief. Weeping willow. Ba. There he goes.
Funny little beggar. Wonder where he lives. Belfry up there. Very likely.
Hanging by his heels in the odour of sanctity. Bell scared him out, I
suppose. Mass seems to be over. Could hear them all at it. Pray for us.
And pray for us. And pray for us. Good idea the repetition. Same
thing with ads. Buy from us. And buy from us. Yes, there's the light
in the priest's house. Their frugal meal. Remember about the mistake
in the valuation when I was in Thom's. Twentyeight it is. Two houses
they have. Gabriel Conroy's brother is curate. Ba. Again. Wonder why
they come out at night like mice. They're a mixed breed. Birds are
like hopping mice. What frightens them, light or noise? Better sit still.
All instinct like the bird in drouth got water out of the end of a
jar by throwing in pebbles. Like a little man in a cloak he is with tiny
hands. Weeny bones. Almost see them shimmering, kind of a bluey white.
Colours depend on the light you see. Stare the sun for example
like the eagle then look at a shoe see a blotch blob yellowish. Wants to
stamp his trademark on everything. Instance, that cat this morning on the
staircase. Colour of brown turf. Say you never see them with three
colours. Not true. That half tabbywhite tortoiseshell in the CITY ARMS
with the letter em on her forehead. Body fifty different colours. Howth
a while ago amethyst. Glass flashing. That's how that wise man what's his
name with the burning glass. Then the heather goes on fire. It can't be
tourists' matches. What? Perhaps the sticks dry rub together in the wind
and light. Or broken bottles in the furze act as a burning glass in the
sun. Archimedes. I have it My memory's not so bad.
Ba. Who knows what they're always flying for. Insects? That bee last week
got into the room playing with his shadow on the ceiling. Might be the
one bit me, come back to see. Birds too. Never find out. Or what they say.
Like our small talk. And says she and says he. Nerve they have to fly over
the ocean and back. Lots must be killed in storms, telegraph wires.
Dreadful life sailors have too. Big brutes of oceangoing steamers
floundering along in the dark, lowing out like seacows. FAUGH A BALLAGH
Out of that, bloody curse to you Others in vessels, bit of a handkerchief
sail, pitched about like snuff at a wake when the stormy winds do blow.
Married too. Sometimes away for years at the ends of the earth somewhere.
No ends really because it's round. Wife in every port they say. She has a
good job if she minds it till Johnny comes marching home again. If ever he
does. Smelling the tail end of ports. How can they like the sea? Yet they
do. The anchor's weighed. Off he sails with a scapular or a medal
on him for luck. Well. And the tephilim no what's this they call it poor
papa's father had on his door to touch. That brought us out of the land
of Egypt and into the house of bondage. Something in all those
superstitions because when you go out never know what dangers. Hanging
on to a plank or astride of a beam for grim life, lifebelt round him,
gulping salt water, and that's the last of his nibs till the sharks
catch hold of him. Do fish ever get seasick?
Then you have a beautiful calm without a cloud, smooth sea, placid,
crew and cargo in smithereens, Davy Jones' locker, moon looking down so
peaceful. Not my fault, old cockalorum.
A last lonely candle wandered up the sky from Mirus bazaar in search
of funds for Mercer's hospital and broke, drooping, and shed a cluster of
violet but one white stars. They floated, fell they faded. The shepherd's
hour the hour of folding hour of tryst. From house to house, giving his
everwelcome double knock, went the nine o'clock postman, the
glowworm's lamp at his belt gleaming here and there through the laurel
hedges. And among the five young trees a hoisted lintstock lit the lamp at
Leahy's terrace. By screens of lighted windows, by equal gardens a shrill
voice went crying, wailing EVENING TELEGRAPH, STOP PRESS EDITION RESULT
OF THE GOLD CUP RACE and from the door of Dignam's house a boy ran out
and called. Twittering the bat flew here, flew there. Far out over the
sands the coming surf crept, grey. Howth settled for slumber, tired of
long days, of yumyum rhododendrons he was old and felt gladly the night
breeze lift, ruffle his fell of ferns. He lay but opened a red eye
unsleeping, deep and slowly breathing, slumberous but awake. And far on
Kish bank the anchored lightship twinkled, winked at Mr Bloom.
Life those chaps out there must have, stuck in the same spot. Irish
Lights board. Penance for their sins. Coastguards too. Rocket and breeches
buoy and lifeboat. Day we went out for the pleasure cruise in the Erin's
King, throwing them the sack of old papers. Bears in the zoo. Filthy trip.
Drunkards out to shake up their livers. Puking overboard to feed the
herrings. Nausea. And the women, fear of God in their faces. Milly,
no sign of funk. Her blue scarf loose, laughing. Don't know what death
is at that age. And then their stomachs clean. But being lost they fear.
When we hid behind the tree at Crumlin. I didn't want to. Mamma Mamma
Babes in the wood. Frightening them with masks too. Throwing them up
in the air to catch them. I'll murder you. Is it only half fun?
Or children playing battle. Whole earnest. How can people aim guns at
each other. Sometimes they go off. Poor kids Only troubles wildfire
and nettlerash. Calomel purge I got her for that. After getting better
asleep with Molly. Very same teeth she has. What do they love?
Another themselves? But the morning she chased her with the umbrella.
Perhaps so as not to hurt. I felt her pulse. Ticking. Little hand
it was now big. Dearest Papli. All that the hand says when you
touch. Loved to count my waistcoat buttons. Her first stays I
remember. Made me laugh to see. Little paps to begin with. Left one
is more sensitive, I think. Mine too. Nearer the heart? Padding
themselves out if fat is in fashion. Her growing pains at night, calling,
wakening me. Frightened she was when her nature came on her first.
Poor child Strange moment for the mother too. Brings back her girlhood.
Gibraltar. Looking from Buena Vista. O'Hara's tower. The seabirds
screaming. Old Barbary ape that gobbled all his family. Sundown,
gunfire for the men to cross the lines. Looking out over the sea she
told me. Evening like this, but clear, no clouds. I always thought I'd
marry a lord or a rich gentleman coming with a private yacht. BUENAS
NOCHES, SENORITA. EL HOMBRE AMA LA MUCHACHA HERMOSA. Why me? Because
you were so foreign from the others.
Better not stick here all night like a limpet. This weather makes you
dull. Must be getting on for nine by the light. Go home. Too late for LEAH,
LILY OF KILLARNEY. No. Might be still up. Call to the hospital to see.
Hope she's over. Long day I've had. Martha, the bath, funeral, house of
Keyes, museum with those goddesses, Dedalus' song. Then that bawler in
Barney Kiernan's. Got my own back there. Drunken ranters what I said about
his God made him wince. Mistake to hit back. Or? No. Ought to go home and
laugh at themselves. Always want to be swilling in company. Afraid to be
alone like a child of two. Suppose he hit me. Look at it other way round.
Not so bad then. Perhaps not to hurt he meant. Three cheers for Israel.
Three cheers for the sisterinlaw he hawked about, three fangs in her
mouth. Same style of beauty. Particularly nice old party for a cup of tea.
The sister of the wife of the wild man of Borneo has just come to town.
Imagine that in the early morning at close range. Everyone to his taste as
Morris said when he kissed the cow. But Dignam's put the boots on it.
Houses of mourning so depressing because you never know. Anyhow she
wants the money. Must call to those Scottish Widows as I promised. Strange
name. Takes it for granted we're going to pop off first. That widow
on Monday was it outside Cramer's that looked at me. Buried the poor
husband but progressing favourably on the premium. Her widow's mite.
Well? What do you expect her to do? Must wheedle her way along.
Widower I hate to see. Looks so forlorn. Poor man O'Connor wife and five
children poisoned by mussels here. The sewage. Hopeless. Some good
matronly woman in a porkpie hat to mother him. Take him in tow, platter
face and a large apron. Ladies' grey flannelette bloomers, three shillings
a pair, astonishing bargain. Plain and loved, loved for ever, they say.
Ugly no woman thinks she is. Love, lie and be handsome for tomorrow we
die. See him sometimes walking about trying to find out who played the
trick. U. p up. Fate that is. He, not me. Also a shop often noticed.
Curse seems to dog it. Dreamt last night? Wait. Something confused. She
had red slippers on. Turkish. Wore the breeches. Suppose she does? Would
I like her in pyjamas? Damned hard to answer. Nannetti's gone. Mailboat.
Near Holyhead by now. Must nail that ad of Keyes's. Work Hynes and
Crawford. Petticoats for Molly. She has something to put in them. What's
that? Might be money.
Mr Bloom stooped and turned over a piece of paper on the strand. He
brought it near his eyes and peered. Letter? No. Can't read. Better go.
Better. I'm tired to move. Page of an old copybook. All those holes and
pebbles. Who could count them? Never know what you find. Bottle with
story of a treasure in it, thrown from a wreck. Parcels post. Children
always want to throw things in the sea. Trust? Bread cast on the waters.
What's this? Bit of stick.
O Exhausted that female has me. Not so young now. Will she come
here tomorrow? Wait for her somewhere for ever. Must come back.
Murderers do. Will I?
Mr Bloom with his stick gently vexed the thick sand at his foot. Write
a message for her. Might remain. What?
I.
Some flatfoot tramp on it in the morning. Useless. Washed away. Tide comes
here. Saw a pool near her foot. Bend, see my face there, dark mirror,
breathe on it, stirs. All these rocks with lines and scars and letters. O,
those transparent Besides they don't know. What is the meaning of that
other world. I called you naughty boy because I do not like.
AM. A.
No room. Let it go.
Mr Bloom effaced the letters with his slow boot. Hopeless thing sand.
Nothing grows in it. All fades. No fear of big vessels coming up here.
Except Guinness's barges. Round the Kish in eighty days. Done half by
design.
He flung his wooden pen away. The stick fell in silted sand, stuck.
Now if you were trying to do that for a week on end you couldn't. Chance.
We'll never meet again. But it was lovely. Goodbye, dear. Thanks. Made me
feel so young.
Short snooze now if I had. Must be near nine. Liverpool boat long
gone.. Not even the smoke. And she can do the other. Did too. And Belfast.
I won't go. Race there, race back to Ennis. Let him. Just close my eyes a
moment. Won't sleep, though. Half dream. It never comes the same. Bat
again. No harm in him. Just a few.
O sweety all your little girlwhite up I saw dirty bracegirdle made me
do love sticky we two naughty Grace darling she him half past the bed met
him pike hoses frillies for Raoul de perfume your wife black hair heave
under embon SENORITA young eyes Mulvey plump bubs me breadvan Winkle
red slippers she rusty sleep wander years of dreams return tail end
Agendath swoony lovey showed me her next year in drawers return next in
her next her next.
A bat flew. Here. There. Here. Far in the grey a bell chimed. Mr
Bloom with open mouth, his left boot sanded sideways, leaned, breathed.
Just for a few
CUCKOO
CUCKOO
CUCKOO.
The clock on the mantelpiece in the priest's house cooed where Canon
O'Hanlon and Father Conroy and the reverend John Hughes S. J. were
taking tea and sodabread and butter and fried mutton chops with catsup
and talking about
CUCKOO
CUCKOO
CUCKOO.
Because it was a little canarybird that came out of its little house to
tell the time that Gerty MacDowell noticed the time she was there because
she was as quick as anything about a thing like that, was Gerty MacDowell,
and she noticed at once that that foreign gentleman that was sitting on
the rocks looking was
CUCKOO
CUCKOO
CUCKOO.
Deshil Holles Eamus. Deshil Holles Eamus. Deshil Holles Eamus.
Send us bright one, light one, Horhorn, quickening and wombfruit. Send
us bright one, light one, Horhorn, quickening and wombfruit. Send us
bright one, light one, Horhorn, quickening and wombfruit.
Hoopsa boyaboy hoopsa Hoopsa boyaboy hoopsa Hoopsa boyaboy hoopsa
Universally that person's acumen is esteemed very little perceptive
concerning whatsoever matters are being held as most profitably by mortals
with sapience endowed to be studied who is ignorant of that which the most
in doctrine erudite and certainly by reason of that in them high mind's
ornament deserving of veneration constantly maintain when by general
consent they affirm that other circumstances being equal by no exterior
splendour is the prosperity of a nation more efficaciously asserted than
by the measure of how far forward may have progressed the tribute of its
solicitude for that proliferent continuance which of evils the original if
it be absent when fortunately present constitutes the certain sign of
omnipotent nature's incorrupted benefaction. For who is there who anything
of some significance has apprehended but is conscious that that exterior
splendour may be the surface of a downwardtending lutulent reality or on
the contrary anyone so is there unilluminated as not to perceive that as
no nature's boon can contend against the bounty of increase so it behoves
every most just citizen to become the exhortator and admonisher of his
semblables and to tremble lest what had in the past been by the nation
excellently commenced might be in the future not with similar excellence
accomplished if an inverecund habit shall have gradually traduced the
honourable by ancestors transmitted customs to that thither of profundity
that that one was audacious excessively who would have the hardihood to
rise affirming that no more odious offence can for anyone be than to
oblivious neglect to consign that evangel simultaneously command and
promise which on all mortals with prophecy of abundance or with
diminution's menace that exalted of reiteratedly procreating function ever
irrevocably enjoined?
It is not why therefore we shall wonder if, as the best historians relate,
among the Celts, who nothing that was not in its nature admirable admired,
the art of medicine shall have been highly honoured. Not to speak of
hostels, leperyards, sweating chambers, plaguegraves, their greatest
doctors, the O'Shiels, the O'Hickeys, the O'Lees, have sedulously set down
the divers methods by which the sick and the relapsed found again health
whether the malady had been the trembling withering or loose boyconnell
flux. Certainly in every public work which in it anything of gravity
contains preparation should be with importance commensurate and therefore
a plan was by them adopted whether by having preconsidered or as the
maturation of experience it is difficult in being said which the
discrepant opinions of subsequent inquirers are not up to the present
congrued to render manifest whereby maternity was so far from all
accident possibility removed that whatever care the patient in that
all hardest of woman hour chiefly required and not solely for the
copiously opulent but also for her who not being sufficiently moneyed
scarcely and often not even scarcely could subsist valiantly and for an
inconsiderable emolument was provided.
To her nothing already then and thenceforward was anyway able to be
molestful for this chiefly felt all citizens except with proliferent
mothers prosperity at all not to can be and as they had received eternity
gods mortals generation to befit them her beholding, when the case was so
hoving itself, parturient in vehicle thereward carrying desire immense
among all one another was impelling on of her to be received into that
domicile. O thing of prudent nation not merely in being seen but also
even in being related worthy of being praised that they her by
anticipation went seeing mother, that she by them suddenly to be about to
be cherished had been begun she felt
Before born bliss babe had. Within womb won he worship. Whatever
in that one case done commodiously done was. A couch by midwives
attended with wholesome food reposeful, cleanest swaddles as though
forthbringing were now done and by wise foresight set but to this no less
of what drugs there is need and surgical implements which are pertaining
to her case not omitting aspect of all very distracting spectacles in
various latitudes by our terrestrial orb offered together with images,
divine and human, the cogitation of which by sejunct females is to
tumescence conducive or eases issue in the high sunbright wellbuilt fair
home of mothers when, ostensibly far gone and reproductitive, it is come
by her thereto to lie in, her term up.
Some man that wayfaring was stood by housedoor at night's
oncoming. Of Israel's folk was that man that on earth wandering far had
fared. Stark ruth of man his errand that him lone led till that house.
Of that house A. Horne is lord. Seventy beds keeps he there teeming
mothers are wont that they lie for to thole and bring forth bairns hale so
God's angel to Mary quoth. Watchers tway there walk, white sisters in
ward sleepless. Smarts they still, sickness soothing in twelve moons
thrice an hundred. Truest bedthanes they twain are, for Horne holding
wariest ward.
In ward wary the watcher hearing come that man mildhearted eft
rising with swire ywimpled to him her gate wide undid. Lo, levin leaping
lightens in eyeblink Ireland's westward welkin. Full she drad that God the
Wreaker all mankind would fordo with water for his evil sins. Christ's
rood made she on breastbone and him drew that he would rathe infare under
her thatch. That man her will wotting worthful went in Horne's house.
Loth to irk in Horne's hall hat holding the seeker stood. On her stow
he ere was living with dear wife and lovesome daughter that then over land
and seafloor nine years had long outwandered. Once her in townhithe
meeting he to her bow had not doffed. Her to forgive now he craved with
good ground of her allowed that that of him swiftseen face, hers, so young
then had looked. Light swift her eyes kindled, bloom of blushes his word
winning.
As her eyes then ongot his weeds swart therefor sorrow she feared.
Glad after she was that ere adread was. Her he asked if O'Hare Doctor
tidings sent from far coast and she with grameful sigh him answered that
O'Hare Doctor in heaven was. Sad was the man that word to hear that him
so heavied in bowels ruthful. All she there told him, ruing death for
friend so young, algate sore unwilling God's rightwiseness to withsay. She
said that he had a fair sweet death through God His goodness with
masspriest to be shriven, holy housel and sick men's oil to his limbs. The
man then right earnest asked the nun of which death the dead man was died
and the nun answered him and said that he was died in Mona Island through
bellycrab three year agone come Childermas and she prayed to God the
Allruthful to have his dear soul in his undeathliness. He heard her sad
words, in held hat sad staring. So stood they there both awhile in wanhope
sorrowing one with other.
Therefore, everyman, look to that last end that is thy death and the
dust that gripeth on every man that is born of woman for as he came naked
forth from his mother's womb so naked shall he wend him at the last for to
go as he came.
The man that was come in to the house then spoke to the
nursingwoman and he asked her how it fared with the woman that lay there
in childbed. The nursingwoman answered him and said that that woman
was in throes now full three days and that it would be a hard birth unneth
to bear but that now in a little it would be. She said thereto that she
had seen many births of women but never was none so hard as was that
woman's birth. Then she set it all forth to him for because she knew the
man that time was had lived nigh that house. The man hearkened to her
words for he felt with wonder women's woe in the travail that they have of
motherhood and he wondered to look on her face that was a fair face for
any man to see but yet was she left after long years a handmaid. Nine
twelve bloodflows chiding her childless.
And whiles they spake the door of the castle was opened and there
nighed them a mickle noise as of many that sat there at meat. And there
came against the place as they stood a young learningknight yclept Dixon.
And the traveller Leopold was couth to him sithen it had happed that they
had had ado each with other in the house of misericord where this
learningknight lay by cause the traveller Leopold came there to be healed
for he was sore wounded in his breast by a spear wherewith a horrible and
dreadful dragon was smitten him for which he did do make a salve of
volatile salt and chrism as much as he might suffice. And he said now that
he should go in to that castle for to make merry with them that were
there. And the traveller Leopold said that he should go otherwhither for
he was a man of cautels and a subtile. Also the lady was of his avis and
repreved the learningknight though she trowed well that the traveller had
said thing that was false for his subtility. But the learningknight would
not hear say nay nor do her mandement ne have him in aught contrarious to
his list and he said how it was a marvellous castle. And the traveller
Leopold went into the castle for to rest him for a space being sore of
limb after many marches environing in divers lands and sometime venery.
And in the castle was set a board that was of the birchwood of
Finlandy and it was upheld by four dwarfmen of that country but they
durst not move more for enchantment. And on this board were frightful
swords and knives that are made in a great cavern by swinking demons out
of white flames that they fix then in the horns of buffalos and stags that
there abound marvellously. And there were vessels that are wrought by
magic of Mahound out of seasand and the air by a warlock with his breath
that he blases in to them like to bubbles. And full fair cheer and rich
was on the board that no wight could devise a fuller ne richer. And there
was a vat of silver that was moved by craft to open in the which lay
strange fishes withouten heads though misbelieving men nie that this
be possible thing without they see it natheless they are so. And these
fishes lie in an oily water brought there from Portugal land because
of the fatness that therein is like to the juices of the olivepress.
And also it was a marvel to see in that castle how by magic they make
a compost out of fecund wheatkidneys out of Chaldee that by aid of
certain angry spirits that they do in to it swells up wondrously like
to a vast mountain. And they teach the serpents there to entwine
themselves up on long sticks out of the ground and of the scales of
these serpents they brew out a brewage like to mead.
And the learning knight let pour for childe Leopold a draught and halp
thereto the while all they that were there drank every each. And childe
Leopold did up his beaver for to pleasure him and took apertly somewhat in
amity for he never drank no manner of mead which he then put by and
anon full privily he voided the more part in his neighbour glass and his
neighbour nist not of this wile. And he sat down in that castle with them
for to rest him there awhile. Thanked be Almighty God.
This meanwhile this good sister stood by the door and begged them at
the reverence of Jesu our alther liege Lord to leave their wassailing for
there was above one quick with child, a gentle dame, whose time hied fast.
Sir Leopold heard on the upfloor cry on high and he wondered what cry that
it was whether of child or woman and I marvel, said he, that it be not
come or now. Meseems it dureth overlong. And he was ware and saw a
franklin that hight Lenehan on that side the table that was older than any
of the tother and for that they both were knights virtuous in the one
emprise and eke by cause that he was elder he spoke to him full gently.
But, said he, or it be long too she will bring forth by God His bounty and
have joy of her childing for she hath waited marvellous long. And the
franklin that had drunken said, Expecting each moment to be her next.
Also he took the cup that stood tofore him for him needed never none
asking nor desiring of him to drink and, Now drink, said he, fully
delectably, and he quaffed as far as he might to their both's health
for he was a passing good man of his lustiness. And sir Leopold
that was the goodliest guest that ever sat in scholars' hall and
that was the meekest man and the kindest that ever laid husbandly
hand under hen and that was the very truest knight of the world
one that ever did minion service to lady gentle pledged him courtly in
the cup. Woman's woe with wonder pondering.
Now let us speak of that fellowship that was there to the intent to be
drunken an they might. There was a sort of scholars along either side the
board, that is to wit, Dixon yclept junior of saint Mary Merciable's with
other his fellows Lynch and Madden, scholars of medicine, and the franklin
that hight Lenehan and one from Alba Longa, one Crotthers, and young
Stephen that had mien of a frere that was at head of the board and
Costello that men clepen Punch Costello all long of a mastery of him
erewhile gested and of all them, reserved young Stephen, he was the most
drunken that demanded still of more mead and beside the meek sir
Leopold. But on young Malachi they waited for that he promised to
have come and such as intended to no goodness said how he had broke
his avow. And sir Leopold sat with them for he bore fast friendship
to sir Simon and to this his son young Stephen and for that his languor
becalmed him there after longest wanderings insomuch as they feasted
him for that time in the honourablest manner. Ruth red him, love led
on with will to wander, loth to leave.
For they were right witty scholars. And he heard their aresouns each gen
other as touching birth and righteousness, young Madden maintaining that
put such case it were hard the wife to die for so it had fallen out a
matter of some year agone with a woman of Eblana in Horne's house that
now was trespassed out of this world and the self night next before her
death all leeches and pothecaries had taken counsel of her case. And
they said farther she should live because in the beginning, they said,
the woman should bring forth in pain and wherefore they that were of this
imagination affirmed how young Madden had said truth for he had
conscience to let her die. And not few and of these was young Lynch were
in doubt that the world was now right evil governed as it was never other
howbeit the mean people believed it otherwise but the law nor his judges
did provide no remedy. A redress God grant. This was scant said but all
cried with one acclaim nay, by our Virgin Mother, the wife should live
and the babe to die. In colour whereof they waxed hot upon that head what
with argument and what for their drinking but the franklin Lenehan was
prompt each when to pour them ale so that at the least way mirth might
not lack. Then young Madden showed all the whole affair and said how that
she was dead and how for holy religion sake by rede of palmer and
bedesman and for a vow he had made to Saint Ultan of Arbraccan her
goodman husband would not let her death whereby they were all wondrous
grieved. To whom young Stephen had these words following Murmur, sirs,
is eke oft among lay folk. Both babe and parent now glorify their Maker,
the one in limbo gloom, the other in purgefire. But, gramercy, what of
those Godpossibled souls that we nightly impossibilise, which is the sin
against the Holy Ghost, Very God, Lord and Giver of Life? For, sirs, he
said, our lust is brief. We are means to those small creatures within us
and nature has other ends than we. Then said Dixon junior to Punch
Costello wist he what ends. But he had overmuch drunken and the best word
he could have of him was that he would ever dishonest a woman whoso she
were or wife or maid or leman if it so fortuned him to be delivered of
his spleen of lustihead. Whereat Crotthers of Alba Longa sang young
Malachi's praise of that beast the unicorn how once in the millennium he
cometh by his horn, the other all this while, pricked forward with their
jibes wherewith they did malice him, witnessing all and several by saint
Foutinus his engines that he was able to do any manner of thing that lay
in man to do. Thereat laughed they all right jocundly only young Stephen
and sir Leopold which never durst laugh too open by reason of a strange
humour which he would not bewray and also for that he rued for her that
bare whoso she might be or wheresoever. Then spake young Stephen orgulous
of mother Church that would cast him out of her bosom, of law of canons,
of Lilith, patron of abortions, of bigness wrought by wind of seeds of
brightness or by potency of vampires mouth to mouth or, as Virgilius
saith, by the influence of the occident or by the reek of moonflower or
an she lie with a woman which her man has but lain with, EFFECTU SECUTO,
or peradventure in her bath according to the opinions of Averroes and
Moses Maimonides. He said also how at the end of the second month a human
soul was infused and how in all our holy mother foldeth ever souls for
God's greater glory whereas that earthly mother which was but a dam to
bear beastly should die by canon for so saith he that holdeth the
fisherman's seal, even that blessed Peter on which rock was holy church
for all ages founded. All they bachelors then asked of sir Leopold would
he in like case so jeopard her person as risk life to save life. A
wariness of mind he would answer as fitted all and, laying hand to jaw,
he said dissembling, as his wont was, that as it was informed him, who
had ever loved the art of physic as might a layman, and agreeing also
with his experience of so seldomseen an accident it was good for that
mother Church belike at one blow had birth and death pence and in such
sort deliverly he scaped their questions. That is truth, pardy, said
Dixon, and, or I err, a pregnant word. Which hearing young Stephen was a
marvellous glad man and he averred that he who stealeth from the poor
lendeth to the Lord for he was of a wild manner when he was drunken and
that he was now in that taking it appeared eftsoons.
But sir Leopold was passing grave maugre his word by cause he still had
pity of the terrorcausing shrieking of shrill women in their labour and
as he was minded of his good lady Marion that had borne him an only
manchild which on his eleventh day on live had died and no man of art
could save so dark is destiny. And she was wondrous stricken of heart for
that evil hap and for his burial did him on a fair corselet of lamb's
wool, the flower of the flock, lest he might perish utterly and lie
akeled for it was then about the midst of the winter and now Sir
Leopold that had of his body no manchild for an heir looked upon him his
friend's son and was shut up in sorrow for his forepassed happiness and
as sad as he was that him failed a son of such gentle courage for all
accounted him of real parts so grieved he also in no less measure for
young Stephen for that he lived riotously with those wastrels and
murdered his goods with whores.
About that present time young Stephen filled all cups that stood empty so
as there remained but little mo if the prudenter had not shadowed their
approach from him that still plied it very busily who, praying for the
intentions of the sovereign pontiff, he gave them for a pledge the vicar
of Christ which also as he said is vicar of Bray. Now drink we, quod he,
of this mazer and quaff ye this mead which is not indeed parcel of my
body but my soul's bodiment. Leave ye fraction of bread to them that live
by bread alone. Be not afeard neither for any want for this will comfort
more than the other will dismay. See ye here. And he showed them
glistering coins of the tribute and goldsmith notes the worth of two
pound nineteen shilling that he had, he said, for a song which he writ.
They all admired to see the foresaid riches in such dearth of money as
was herebefore. His words were then these as followeth Know all men, he
said, time's ruins build eternity's mansions. What means this? Desire's
wind blasts the thorntree but after it becomes from a bramblebush to be a
rose upon the rood of time. Mark me now. In woman's womb word is made
flesh but in the spirit of the maker all flesh that passes becomes the
word that shall not pass away. This is the postcreation. OMNIS CARO AD TE
VENIET. No question but her name is puissant who aventried the dear corse
of our Agenbuyer, Healer and Herd, our mighty mother and mother most
venerable and Bernardus saith aptly that She hath an OMNIPOTENTIAM
DEIPARAE SUPPLICEM, that is to wit, an almightiness of petition because
she is the second Eve and she won us, saith Augustine too, whereas that
other, our grandam, which we are linked up with by successive anastomosis
of navelcords sold us all, seed, breed and generation, for a penny
pippin. But here is the matter now. Or she knew him, that second I say,
and was but creature of her creature, VERGINE MADRE, FIGLIA DI TUO
FIGLIO, or she knew him not and then stands she in the one denial or
ignorancy with Peter Piscator who lives in the house that Jack built and
with Joseph the joiner patron of the happy demise of all unhappy
marriages, PARCEQUE M. LEO TAXIL NOUS A DIT QUE QUI L'AVAIT MISE DANS
CETTE FICHUE POSITION C'ETAIT LE SACRE PIGEON, VENTRE DE DIEU ENTWEDER
transubstantiality ODER consubstantiality but in no case
subsubstantiality. And all cried out upon it for a very scurvy word. A
pregnancy without joy, he said, a birth without pangs, a body without
blemish, a belly without bigness. Let the lewd with faith and fervour
worship. With will will we withstand, withsay.
Hereupon Punch Costello dinged with his fist upon the board and would
sing a bawdy catch STABOO STABELLA about a wench that was put in pod of a
jolly swashbuckler in Almany which he did straightways now attack THE
FIRST THREE MONTHS SHE WAS NOT WELL, STABOO, when here nurse Quigley from
the door angerly bid them hist ye should shame you nor was it not meet as
she remembered them being her mind was to have all orderly against lord
Andrew came for because she was jealous that no gasteful turmoil might
shorten the honour of her guard. It was an ancient and a sad matron of a
sedate look and christian walking, in habit dun beseeming her megrims and
wrinkled visage, nor did her hortative want of it effect for
incontinently Punch Costello was of them all embraided and they reclaimed
the churl with civil rudeness some and shaked him with menace of
blandishments others whiles they all chode with him, a murrain seize the
dolt, what a devil he would be at, thou chuff, thou puny, thou got in
peasestraw, thou losel, thou chitterling, thou spawn of a rebel, thou
dykedropt, thou abortion thou, to shut up his drunken drool out of that
like a curse of God ape, the good sir Leopold that had for his cognisance
the flower of quiet, margerain gentle, advising also the time's occasion
as most sacred and most worthy to be most sacred. In Horne's house rest
should reign.
To be short this passage was scarce by when Master Dixon of Mary in
Eccles, goodly grinning, asked young Stephen what was the reason why he
had not cided to take friar's vows and he answered him obedience in the
womb, chastity in the tomb but involuntary poverty all his days. Master
Lenehan at this made return that he had heard of those nefarious deeds
and how, as he heard hereof counted, he had besmirched the lily virtue of
a confiding female which was corruption of minors and they all
intershowed it too, waxing merry and toasting to his fathership. But he
said very entirely it was clean contrary to their suppose for he was the
eternal son and ever virgin. Thereat mirth grew in them the more and they
rehearsed to him his curious rite of wedlock for the disrobing and
deflowering of spouses, as the priests use in Madagascar island, she to
be in guise of white and saffron, her groom in white and grain, with
burning of nard and tapers, on a bridebed while clerks sung kyries and
the anthem UT NOVETUR SEXUS OMNIS CORPORIS MYSTERIUM till she was there
unmaided. He gave them then a much admirable hymen minim by those
delicate poets Master John Fletcher and Master Francis Beaumont that is
in their MAID'S TRAGEDY that was writ for a like twining of lovers TO
BED, TO BED was the burden of it to be played with accompanable concent
upon the virginals. An exquisite dulcet epithalame of most mollificative
suadency for juveniles amatory whom the odoriferous flambeaus of the
paranymphs have escorted to the quadrupedal proscenium of connubial
communion. Well met they were, said Master Dixon, joyed, but, harkee,
young sir, better were they named Beau Mount and Lecher for, by my troth,
of such a mingling much might come. Young Stephen said indeed to his best
remembrance they had but the one doxy between them and she of the stews
to make shift with in delights amorous for life ran very high in those
days and the custom of the country approved with it. Greater love than
this, he said, no man hath that a man lay down his wife for his friend.
Go thou and do likewise. Thus, or words to that effect, saith
Zarathustra, sometime regius professor of French letters to the
university of Oxtail nor breathed there ever that man to whom mankind was
more beholden. Bring a stranger within thy tower it will go hard but thou
wilt have the secondbest bed. ORATE, FRATRES, PRO MEMETIPSO. And all the
people shall say, Amen. Remember, Erin, thy generations and thy days of
old, how thou settedst little by me and by my word and broughtedst in a
stranger to my gates to commit fornication in my sight and to wax fat and
kick like Jeshurum. Therefore hast thou sinned against my light and hast
made me, thy lord, to be the slave of servants. Return, return, Clan
Milly forget me not, O Milesian. Why hast thou done this abomination
before me that thou didst spurn me for a merchant of jalaps and didst
deny me to the Roman and to the Indian of dark speech with whom thy
daughters did lie luxuriously? Look forth now, my people, upon the land
of behest, even from Horeb and from Nebo and from Pisgah and from the
Horns of Hatten unto a land flowing with milk and money. But thou hast
suckled me with a bitter milk my moon and my sun thou hast quenched for
ever. And thou hast left me alone for ever in the dark ways of my
bitterness and with a kiss of ashes hast thou kissed my mouth. This
tenebrosity of the interior, he proceeded to say, hath not been illumined
by the wit of the septuagint nor so much as mentioned for the Orient from
on high Which brake hell's gates visited a darkness that was foraneous.
Assuefaction minorates atrocities as Tully saith of his darling Stoics
and Hamlet his father showeth the prince no blister of combustion. The
adiaphane in the noon of life is an Egypt's plague which in the nights of
prenativity and postmortemity is their most proper UBI and QUOMODO. And
as the ends and ultimates of all things accord in some mean and measure
with their inceptions and originals, that same multiplicit concordance
which leads forth growth from birth accomplishing by a retrogressive
metamorphosis that minishing and ablation towards the final which is
agreeable unto nature so is it with our subsolar being. The aged sisters
draw us into life we wail, batten, sport, clip, clasp, sunder, dwindle,
die over us dead they bend. First, saved from waters of old Nile, among
bulrushes, a bed of fasciated wattles at last the cavity of a mountain,
an occulted sepulchre amid the conclamation of the hillcat and the
ossifrage. And as no man knows the ubicity of his tumulus nor to what
processes we shall thereby be ushered nor whether to Tophet or to
Edenville in the like way is all hidden when we would backward see from
what region of remoteness the whatness of our whoness hath fetched his
whenceness.
Thereto Punch Costello roared out mainly ETIENNE CHANSON but he loudly
bid them, lo, wisdom hath built herself a house, this vast majestic
longstablished vault, the crystal palace of the Creator, all in applepie
order, a penny for him who finds the pea.
BEHOLD THE MANSION REARED BY DEDAL JACK
SEE THE MALT STORED IN MANY A REFLUENT SACK,
IN THE PROUD CIRQUE OF JACKJOHN'S BIVOUAC.
A black crack of noise in the street here, alack, bawled back. Loud on
left Thor thundered in anger awful the hammerhurler. Came now the storm
that hist his heart. And Master Lynch bade him have a care to flout and
witwanton as the god self was angered for his hellprate and paganry. And
he that had erst challenged to be so doughty waxed wan as they might all
mark and shrank together and his pitch that was before so haught uplift
was now of a sudden quite plucked down and his heart shook within the
cage of his breast as he tasted the rumour of that storm. Then did some
mock and some jeer and Punch Costello fell hard again to his yale which
Master Lenehan vowed he would do after and he was indeed but a word and a
blow on any the least colour. But the braggart boaster cried that an old
Nobodaddy was in his cups it was muchwhat indifferent and he would not
lag behind his lead. But this was only to dye his desperation as cowed he
crouched in Horne's hall. He drank indeed at one draught to pluck up a
heart of any grace for it thundered long rumblingly over all the heavens
so that Master Madden, being godly certain whiles, knocked him on his
ribs upon that crack of doom and Master Bloom, at the braggart's side,
spoke to him calming words to slumber his great fear, advertising how it
was no other thing but a hubbub noise that he heard, the discharge of
fluid from the thunderhead, look you, having taken place, and all of the
order of a natural phenomenon.
But was young Boasthard's fear vanquished by Calmer's words? No, for he
had in his bosom a spike named Bitterness which could not by words be
done away. And was he then neither calm like the one nor godly like the
other? He was neither as much as he would have liked to be either. But
could he not have endeavoured to have found again as in his youth the
bottle Holiness that then he lived withal? Indeed no for Grace was not
there to find that bottle. Heard he then in that clap the voice of the
god Bringforth or, what Calmer said, a hubbub of Phenomenon? Heard? Why,
he could not but hear unless he had plugged him up the tube Understanding
which he had not done. For through that tube he saw that he was in the
land of Phenomenon where he must for a certain one day die as he was like
the rest too a passing show. And would he not accept to die like the rest
and pass away? By no means would he though he must nor would he make more
shows according as men do with wives which Phenomenon has commanded them
to do by the book Law. Then wotted he nought of that other land which is
called BelieveonMe, that is the land of promise which behoves to the
king Delightful and shall be for ever where there is no death and no
birth neither wiving nor mothering at which all shall come as many as
believe on it? Yes, Pious had told him of that land and Chaste had
pointed him to the way but the reason was that in the way he fell in with
a certain whore of an eyepleasing exterior whose name, she said, is Bird
intheHand and she beguiled him wrongways from the true path by her
flatteries that she said to him as, Ho, you pretty man, turn aside hither
and I will show you a brave place, and she lay at him so flatteringly
that she had him in her grot which is named TwointheBush or, by some
learned, Carnal Concupiscence.
This was it what all that company that sat there at commons in Manse of
Mothers the most lusted after and if they met with this whore Birdin
theHand which was within all foul plagues, monsters and a wicked devil
they would strain the last but they would make at her and know her. For
regarding BelieveonMe they said it was nought else but notion and they
could conceive no thought of it for, first, TwointheBush whither she
ticed them was the very goodliest grot and in it were four pillows on
which were four tickets with these words printed on them, Pickaback and
Topsyturvy and Shameface and Cheek by Jowl and, second, for that foul
plague Allpox and the monsters they cared not for them for Preservative
had given them a stout shield of oxengut and, third, that they might take
no hurt neither from Offspring that was that wicked devil by virtue of
this same shield which was named Killchild. So were they all in their
blind fancy, Mr Cavil and Mr Sometimes Godly, Mr Ape Swillale, Mr False
Franklin, Mr Dainty Dixon, Young Boasthard and Mr Cautious Calmer.
Wherein, O wretched company, were ye all deceived for that was the voice
of the god that was in a very grievous rage that he would presently lift
his arm up and spill their souls for their abuses and their spillings
done by them contrariwise to his word which forth to bring brenningly
biddeth.
So Thursday sixteenth June Patk. Dignam laid in clay of an apoplexy and
after hard drought, please God, rained, a bargeman coming in by water a
fifty mile or thereabout with turf saying the seed won't sprout, fields
athirst, very sadcoloured and stunk mightily, the quags and tofts too.
Hard to breathe and all the young quicks clean consumed without sprinkle
this long while back as no man remembered to be without. The rosy buds
all gone brown and spread out blobs and on the hills nought but dry flag
and faggots that would catch at first fire. All the world saying, for
aught they knew, the big wind of last February a year that did havoc the
land so pitifully a small thing beside this barrenness. But by and by, as
said, this evening after sundown, the wind sitting in the west, biggish
swollen clouds to be seen as the night increased and the weatherwise
poring up at them and some sheet lightnings at first and after, past ten
of the clock, one great stroke with a long thunder and in a brace of
shakes all scamper pellmell within door for the smoking shower, the men
making shelter for their straws with a clout or kerchief, womenfolk
skipping off with kirtles catched up soon as the pour came. In Ely place,
Baggot street, Duke's lawn, thence through Merrion green up to Holles
street a swash of water flowing that was before bonedry and not one chair
or coach or fiacre seen about but no more crack after that first. Over
against the Rt. Hon. Mr Justice Fitzgibbon's door that is to sit with Mr
Healy the lawyer upon the college lands Mal. Mulligan a gentleman's
gentleman that had but come from Mr Moore's the writer's that was a
papish but is now, folk say, a good Williamite chanced against Alec.
Bannon in a cut bob which are now in with dance cloaks of Kendal green
that was new got to town from Mullingar with the stage where his coz and
Mal M's brother will stay a month yet till Saint Swithin and asks what in
the earth he does there, he bound home and he to Andrew Horne's being
stayed for to crush a cup of wine, so he said, but would tell him of a
skittish heifer, big of her age and beef to the heel, and all this while
poured with rain and so both together on to Horne's. There Leop. Bloom of
Crawford's journal sitting snug with a covey of wags, likely brangling
fellows, Dixon jun., scholar of my lady of Mercy's, Vin. Lynch, a Scots
fellow, Will. Madden, T. Lenehan, very sad about a racer he fancied and
Stephen D. Leop. Bloom there for a languor he had but was now better, be
having dreamed tonight a strange fancy of his dame Mrs Moll with red
slippers on in a pair of Turkey trunks which is thought by those in ken
to be for a change and Mistress Purefoy there, that got in through
pleading her belly, and now on the stools, poor body, two days past her
term, the midwives sore put to it and can't deliver, she queasy for a
bowl of riceslop that is a shrewd drier up of the insides and her breath
very heavy more than good and should be a bullyboy from the knocks, they
say, but God give her soon issue. 'Tis her ninth chick to live, I hear,
and Lady day bit off her last chick's nails that was then a twelvemonth
and with other three all breastfed that died written out in a fair hand
in the king's bible. Her hub fifty odd and a methodist but takes the
sacrament and is to be seen any fair sabbath with a pair of his boys off
Bullock harbour dapping on the sound with a heavybraked reel or in a punt
he has trailing for flounder and pollock and catches a fine bag, I hear.
In sum an infinite great fall of rain and all refreshed and will much
increase the harvest yet those in ken say after wind and water fire shall
come for a prognostication of Malachi's almanac and I hear that Mr
Russell has done a prophetical charm of the same gist out of the
Hindustanish for his farmer's gazette to have three things in all but
this a mere fetch without bottom of reason for old crones and bairns yet
sometimes they are found in the right guess with their queerities no
telling how.
With this came up Lenehan to the feet of the table to say how the letter
was in that night's gazette and he made a show to find it about him for
he swore with an oath that he had been at pains about it but on
Stephen's persuasion he gave over the search and was bidden to sit near
by which he did mighty brisk. He was a kind of sport gentleman that went
for a merryandrew or honest pickle and what belonged of women, horseflesh
or hot scandal he had it pat. To tell the truth he was mean in fortunes
and for the most part hankered about the coffeehouses and low taverns
with crimps, ostlers, bookies, Paul's men, runners, flatcaps,
waistcoateers, ladies of the bagnio and other rogues of the game or with
a chanceable catchpole or a tipstaff often at nights till broad day of
whom he picked up between his sackpossets much loose gossip. He took his
ordinary at a boilingcook's and if he had but gotten into him a mess of
broken victuals or a platter of tripes with a bare tester in his purse he
could always bring himself off with his tongue, some randy quip he had
from a punk or whatnot that every mother's son of them would burst their
sides. The other, Costello that is, hearing this talk asked was it poetry
or a tale. Faith, no, he says, Frank that was his name, 'tis all about
Kerry cows that are to be butchered along of the plague. But they can go
hang, says he with a wink, for me with their bully beef, a pox on it.
There's as good fish in this tin as ever came out of it and very friendly
he offered to take of some salty sprats that stood by which he had eyed
wishly in the meantime and found the place which was indeed the chief
design of his embassy as he was sharpset. MORT AUX VACHES, says Frank
then in the French language that had been indentured to a brandyshipper
that has a winelodge in Bordeaux and he spoke French like a gentleman
too. From a child this Frank had been a donought that his father, a
headborough, who could ill keep him to school to learn his letters and
the use of the globes, matriculated at the university to study the
mechanics but he took the bit between his teeth like a raw colt and was
more familiar with the justiciary and the parish beadle than with his
volumes. One time he would be a playactor, then a sutler or a welsher,
then nought would keep him from the bearpit and the cocking main, then he
was for the ocean sea or to hoof it on the roads with the romany folk,
kidnapping a squire's heir by favour of moonlight or fecking maids' linen
or choking chicken behind a hedge. He had been off as many times as a cat
has lives and back again with naked pockets as many more to his father
the headborough who shed a pint of tears as often as he saw him. What,
says Mr Leopold with his hands across, that was earnest to know the drift
of it, will they slaughter all? I protest I saw them but this day morning
going to the Liverpool boats, says he. I can scarce believe 'tis so bad,
says he. And he had experience of the like brood beasts and of springers,
greasy hoggets and wether wool, having been some years before actuary for
Mr Joseph Cuffe, a worthy salesmaster that drove his trade for live stock
and meadow auctions hard by Mr Gavin Low's yard in Prussia street. I
question with you there, says he. More like 'tis the hoose or the timber
tongue. Mr Stephen, a little moved but very handsomely told him no such
matter and that he had dispatches from the emperor's chief tailtickler
thanking him for the hospitality, that was sending over Doctor
Rinderpest, the bestquoted cowcatcher in all Muscovy, with a bolus or two
of physic to take the bull by the horns. Come, come, says Mr Vincent,
plain dealing. He'll find himself on the horns of a dilemma if he meddles
with a bull that's Irish, says he. Irish by name and irish by nature,
says Mr Stephen, and he sent the ale purling about, an Irish bull in an
English chinashop. I conceive you, says Mr Dixon. It is that same bull
that was sent to our island by farmer Nicholas, the bravest cattlebreeder
of them all, with an emerald ring in his nose. True for you, says Mr
Vincent cross the table, and a bullseye into the bargain, says he, and a
plumper and a portlier bull, says he, never shit on shamrock. He had
horns galore, a coat of cloth of gold and a sweet smoky breath coming out
of his nostrils so that the women of our island, leaving doughballs and
rollingpins, followed after him hanging his bulliness in daisychains.
What for that, says Mr Dixon, but before he came over farmer Nicholas
that was a eunuch had him properly gelded by a college of doctors who
were no better off than himself. So be off now, says he, and do all my
cousin german the lord Harry tells you and take a farmer's blessing, and
with that he slapped his posteriors very soundly. But the slap and the
blessing stood him friend, says Mr Vincent, for to make up he taught him
a trick worth two of the other so that maid, wife, abbess and widow to
this day affirm that they would rather any time of the month whisper in
his ear in the dark of a cowhouse or get a lick on the nape from his long
holy tongue than lie with the finest strapping young ravisher in the four
fields of all Ireland. Another then put in his word And they dressed
him, says he, in a point shift and petticoat with a tippet and girdle and
ruffles on his wrists and clipped his forelock and rubbed him all over
with spermacetic oil and built stables for him at every turn of the road
with a gold manger in each full of the best hay in the market so that he
could doss and dung to his heart's content. By this time the father of
the faithful for so they called him was grown so heavy that he could
scarce walk to pasture. To remedy which our cozening dames and damsels
brought him his fodder in their apronlaps and as soon as his belly was
full he would rear up on his hind uarters to show their ladyships a
mystery and roar and bellow out of him in bulls' language and they all
after him. Ay, says another, and so pampered was he that he would suffer
nought to grow in all the land but green grass for himself for that was
the only colour to his mind and there was a board put up on a hillock in
the middle of the island with a printed notice, saying By the Lord
Harry, Green is the grass that grows on the ground. And, says Mr Dixon,
if ever he got scent of a cattleraider in Roscommon or the wilds of
Connemara or a husbandman in Sligo that was sowing as much as a handful
of mustard or a bag of rapeseed out he'd run amok over half the
countryside rooting up with his horns whatever was planted and all by
lord Harry's orders. There was bad blood between them at first, says Mr
Vincent, and the lord Harry called farmer Nicholas all the old Nicks in
the world and an old whoremaster that kept seven trulls in his house and
I'll meddle in his matters, says he. I'll make that animal smell hell,
says he, with the help of that good pizzle my father left me. But one
evening, says Mr Dixon, when the lord Harry was cleaning his royal pelt
to go to dinner after winning a boatrace he had spade oars for himself
but the first rule of the course was that the others were to row with
pitchforks he discovered in himself a wonderful likeness to a bull and
on picking up a blackthumbed chapbook that he kept in the pantry he found
sure enough that he was a lefthanded descendant of the famous champion
bull of the Romans, BOS BOVUM, which is good bog Latin for boss of the
show. After that, says Mr Vincent, the lord Harry put his head into a
cow's drinkingtrough in the presence of all his courtiers and pulling it
out again told them all his new name. Then, with the water running off
him, he got into an old smock and skirt that had belonged to his
grandmother and bought a grammar of the bulls' language to study but he
could never learn a word of it except the first personal pronoun which he
copied out big and got off by heart and if ever he went out for a walk he
filled his pockets with chalk to write it upon what took his fancy, the
side of a rock or a teahouse table or a bale of cotton or a corkfloat. In
short, he and the bull of Ireland were soon as fast friends as an arse
and a shirt. They were, says Mr Stephen, and the end was that the men of
the island seeing no help was toward, as the ungrate women were all of
one mind, made a wherry raft, loaded themselves and their bundles of
chattels on shipboard, set all masts erect, manned the yards, sprang
their luff, heaved to, spread three sheets in the wind, put her head
between wind and water, weighed anchor, ported her helm, ran up the jolly
Roger, gave three times three, let the bullgine run, pushed off in their
bumboat and put to sea to recover the main of America. Which was the
occasion, says Mr Vincent, of the composing by a boatswain of that
rollicking chanty
POPE PETER'S BUT A PISSABED.
A MAN'S A MAN FOR A' THAT.
Our worthy acquaintance Mr Malachi Mulligan now appeared in the doorway
as the students were finishing their apologue accompanied with a friend
whom he had just rencountered, a young gentleman, his name Alec Bannon,
who had late come to town, it being his intention to buy a colour or a
cornetcy in the fencibles and list for the wars. Mr Mulligan was civil
enough to express some relish of it all the more as it jumped with a
project of his own for the cure of the very evil that had been touched
on. Whereat he handed round to the company a set of pasteboard cards
which he had had printed that day at Mr Quinnell's bearing a legend
printed in fair italics MR MALACHI MULLIGAN. FERTILISER AND INCUBATOR.
LAMBAY ISLAND. His project, as he went on to expound, was to withdraw
from the round of idle pleasures such as form the chief business of sir
Fopling Popinjay and sir Milksop Quidnunc in town and to devote himself
to the noblest task for which our bodily organism has been framed. Well,
let us hear of it, good my friend, said Mr Dixon. I make no doubt it
smacks of wenching. Come, be seated, both. 'Tis as cheap sitting as
standing. Mr Mulligan accepted of the invitation and, expatiating upon
his design, told his hearers that he had been led into this thought by a
consideration of the causes of sterility, both the inhibitory and the
prohibitory, whether the inhibition in its turn were due to conjugal
vexations or to a parsimony of the balance as well as whether the
prohibition proceeded from defects congenital or from proclivities
acquired. It grieved him plaguily, he said, to see the nuptial couch
defrauded of its dearest pledges and to reflect upon so many agreeable
females with rich jointures, a prey to the vilest bonzes, who hide their
flambeau under a bushel in an uncongenial cloister or lose their womanly
bloom in the embraces of some unaccountable muskin when they might
multiply the inlets of happiness, sacrificing the inestimable jewel of
their sex when a hundred pretty fellows were at hand to caress, this, he
assured them, made his heart weep. To curb this inconvenient which he
concluded due to a suppression of latent heat, having advised with
certain counsellors of worth and inspected into this matter, he had
resolved to purchase in fee simple for ever the freehold of Lambay island
from its holder, lord Talbot de Malahide, a Tory gentleman of note much
in favour with our ascendancy party. He proposed to set up there a
national fertilising farm to be named OMPHALOS with an obelisk hewn and
erected after the fashion of Egypt and to offer his dutiful yeoman
services for the fecundation of any female of what grade of life soever
who should there direct to him with the desire of fulfilling the
functions of her natural. Money was no object, he said, nor would he take
a penny for his pains. The poorest kitchenwench no less than the opulent
lady of fashion, if so be their constructions and their tempers were warm
persuaders for their petitions, would find in him their man. For his
nutriment he shewed how he would feed himself exclusively upon a diet of
savoury tubercles and fish and coneys there, the flesh of these latter
prolific rodents being highly recommended for his purpose, both broiled
and stewed with a blade of mace and a pod or two of capsicum chillies.
After this homily which he delivered with much warmth of asseveration Mr
Mulligan in a trice put off from his hat a kerchief with which he had
shielded it. They both, it seems, had been overtaken by the rain and for
all their mending their pace had taken water, as might be observed by Mr
Mulligan's smallclothes of a hodden grey which was now somewhat piebald.
His project meanwhile was very favourably entertained by his auditors and
won hearty eulogies from all though Mr Dixon of Mary's excepted to it,
asking with a finicking air did he purpose also to carry coals to
Newcastle. Mr Mulligan however made court to the scholarly by an apt
quotation from the classics which, as it dwelt upon his memory, seemed to
him a sound and tasteful support of his contention TALIS AC TANTA
DEPRAVATIO HUJUS SECULI, O QUIRITES, UT MATRESFAMILIARUM NOSTRAE LASCIVAS
CUJUSLIBET SEMIVIRI LIBICI TITILLATIONES TESTIBUS PONDEROSIS ATQUE
EXCELSIS ERECTIONIBUS CENTURIONUM ROMANORUM MAGNOPERE ANTEPONUNT, while
for those of ruder wit he drove home his point by analogies of the animal
kingdom more suitable to their stomach, the buck and doe of the forest
glade, the farmyard drake and duck.
Valuing himself not a little upon his elegance, being indeed a proper man
of person, this talkative now applied himself to his dress with
animadversions of some heat upon the sudden whimsy of the atmospherics
while the company lavished their encomiums upon the project he had
advanced. The young gentleman, his friend, overjoyed as he was at a
passage that had late befallen him, could not forbear to tell it his
nearest neighbour. Mr Mulligan, now perceiving the table, asked for whom
were those loaves and fishes and, seeing the stranger, he made him a
civil bow and said, Pray, sir, was you in need of any professional
assistance we could give? Who, upon his offer, thanked him very heartily,
though preserving his proper distance, and replied that he was come there
about a lady, now an inmate of Horne's house, that was in an interesting
condition, poor body, from woman's woe and here he fetched a deep sigh
to know if her happiness had yet taken place. Mr Dixon, to turn the
table, took on to ask of Mr Mulligan himself whether his incipient
ventripotence, upon which he rallied him, betokened an ovoblastic
gestation in the prostatic utricle or male womb or was due, as with the
noted physician, Mr Austin Meldon, to a wolf in the stomach. For answer
Mr Mulligan, in a gale of laughter at his smalls, smote himself bravely
below the diaphragm, exclaiming with an admirable droll mimic of Mother
Grogan the most excellent creature of her sex though 'tis pity she's a
trollop There's a belly that never bore a bastard. This was so happy a
conceit that it renewed the storm of mirth and threw the whole room into
the most violent agitations of delight. The spry rattle had run on in the
same vein of mimicry but for some larum in the antechamber.
Here the listener who was none other than the Scotch student, a little
fume of a fellow, blond as tow, congratulated in the liveliest fashion
with the young gentleman and, interrupting the narrative at a salient
point, having desired his visavis with a polite beck to have the
obligingness to pass him a flagon of cordial waters at the same time by a
questioning poise of the head a whole century of polite breeding had not
achieved so nice a gesture to which was united an equivalent but
contrary balance of the bottle asked the narrator as plainly as was ever
done in words if he might treat him with a cup of it. MAIS BIEN SUR,
noble stranger, said he cheerily, ET MILLE COMPLIMENTS. That you may and
very opportunely. There wanted nothing but this cup to crown my felicity.
But, gracious heaven, was I left with but a crust in my wallet and a
cupful of water from the well, my God, I would accept of them and find it
in my heart to kneel down upon the ground and give thanks to the powers
above for the happiness vouchsafed me by the Giver of good things. With
these words he approached the goblet to his lips, took a complacent
draught of the cordial, slicked his hair and, opening his bosom, out
popped a locket that hung from a silk riband, that very picture which he
had cherished ever since her hand had wrote therein. Gazing upon those
features with a world of tenderness, Ah, Monsieur, he said, had you but
beheld her as I did with these eyes at that affecting instant with her
dainty tucker and her new coquette cap a gift for her feastday as she
told me prettily in such an artless disorder, of so melting a
tenderness, 'pon my conscience, even you, Monsieur, had been impelled by
generous nature to deliver yourself wholly into the hands of such an
enemy or to quit the field for ever. I declare, I was never so touched in
all my life. God, I thank thee, as the Author of my days Thrice happy
will he be whom so amiable a creature will bless with her favours. A sigh
of affection gave eloquence to these words and, having replaced the
locket in his bosom, he wiped his eye and sighed again. Beneficent
Disseminator of blessings to all Thy creatures, how great and universal
must be that sweetest of Thy tyrannies which can hold in thrall the free
and the bond, the simple swain and the polished coxcomb, the lover in the
heyday of reckless passion and the husband of maturer years. But indeed,
sir, I wander from the point. How mingled and imperfect are all our
sublunary joys. Maledicity he exclaimed in anguish. Would to God that
foresight had but remembered me to take my cloak along I could weep to
think of it. Then, though it had poured seven showers, we were neither of
us a penny the worse. But beshrew me, he cried, clapping hand to his
forehead, tomorrow will be a new day and, thousand thunders, I know of a
MARCHAND DE CAPOTES, Monsieur Poyntz, from whom I can have for a livre as
snug a cloak of the French fashion as ever kept a lady from wetting. Tut,
tut cries Le Fecondateur, tripping in, my friend Monsieur Moore, that
most accomplished traveller I have just cracked a half bottle AVEC LUI
in a circle of the best wits of the town, is my authority that in Cape
Horn, VENTRE BICHE, they have a rain that will wet through any, even the
stoutest cloak. A drenching of that violence, he tells me, SANS BLAGUE,
has sent more than one luckless fellow in good earnest posthaste to
another world. Pooh A LIVRE cries Monsieur Lynch. The clumsy things are
dear at a sou. One umbrella, were it no bigger than a fairy mushroom, is
worth ten such stopgaps. No woman of any wit would wear one. My dear
Kitty told me today that she would dance in a deluge before ever she
would starve in such an ark of salvation for, as she reminded me
blushing piquantly and whispering in my ear though there was none to
snap her words but giddy butterflies, dame Nature, by the divine
blessing, has implanted it in our hearts and it has become a household
word that IL Y A DEUX CHOSES for which the innocence of our original
garb, in other circumstances a breach of the proprieties, is the fittest,
nay, the only garment. The first, said she and here my pretty
philosopher, as I handed her to her tilbury, to fix my attention, gently
tipped with her tongue the outer chamber of my ear, the first is a bath
... But at this point a bell tinkling in the hall cut short a discourse
which promised so bravely for the enrichment of our store of knowledge.
Amid the general vacant hilarity of the assembly a bell rang and, while
all were conjecturing what might be the cause, Miss Callan entered and,
having spoken a few words in a low tone to young Mr Dixon, retired with a
profound bow to the company. The presence even for a moment among a party
of debauchees of a woman endued with every quality of modesty and not
less severe than beautiful refrained the humourous sallies even of the
most licentious but her departure was the signal for an outbreak of
ribaldry. Strike me silly, said Costello, a low fellow who was fuddled. A
monstrous fine bit of cowflesh I'll be sworn she has rendezvoused you.
What, you dog? Have you a way with them? Gad's bud, immensely so, said Mr
Lynch. The bedside manner it is that they use in the Mater hospice.
Demme, does not Doctor O'Gargle chuck the nuns there under the chin. As I
look to be saved I had it from my Kitty who has been wardmaid there any
time these seven months. Lawksamercy, doctor, cried the young blood in
the primrose vest, feigning a womanish simper and with immodest
squirmings of his body, how you do tease a body Drat the man Bless me,
I'm all of a wibbly wobbly. Why, you're as bad as dear little Father
Cantekissem, that you are May this pot of four half choke me, cried
Costello, if she aint in the family way. I knows a lady what's got a
white swelling quick as I claps eyes on her. The young surgeon, however,
rose and begged the company to excuse his retreat as the nurse had just
then informed him that he was needed in the ward. Merciful providence had
been pleased to put a period to the sufferings of the lady who was
ENCEINTE which she had borne with a laudable fortitude and she had given
birth to a bouncing boy. I want patience, said he, with those who,
without wit to enliven or learning to instruct, revile an ennobling
profession which, saving the reverence due to the Deity, is the greatest
power for happiness upon the earth. I am positive when I say that if need
were I could produce a cloud of witnesses to the excellence of her noble
exercitations which, so far from being a byword, should be a glorious
incentive in the human breast. I cannot away with them. What? Malign such
an one, the amiable Miss Callan, who is the lustre of her own sex and the
astonishment of ours? And at an instant the most momentous that can
befall a puny child of clay? Perish the thought I shudder to think of
the future of a race where the seeds of such malice have been sown and
where no right reverence is rendered to mother and maid in house of
Horne. Having delivered himself of this rebuke he saluted those present
on the by and repaired to the door. A murmur of approval arose from all
and some were for ejecting the low soaker without more ado, a design
which would have been effected nor would he have received more than his
bare deserts had he not abridged his transgression by affirming with a
horrid imprecation for he swore a round hand that he was as good a son
of the true fold as ever drew breath. Stap my vitals, said he, them was
always the sentiments of honest Frank Costello which I was bred up most
particular to honour thy father and thy mother that had the best hand to
a rolypoly or a hasty pudding as you ever see what I always looks back on
with a loving heart.
To revert to Mr Bloom who, after his first entry, had been conscious of
some impudent mocks which he however had borne with as being the fruits
of that age upon which it is commonly charged that it knows not pity. The
young sparks, it is true, were as full of extravagancies as overgrown
children the words of their tumultuary discussions were difficultly
understood and not often nice their testiness and outrageous MOTS were
such that his intellects resiled from nor were they scrupulously
sensible of the proprieties though their fund of strong animal spirits
spoke in their behalf. But the word of Mr Costello was an unwelcome
language for him for he nauseated the wretch that seemed to him a
cropeared creature of a misshapen gibbosity, born out of wedlock and
thrust like a crookback toothed and feet first into the world, which the
dint of the surgeon's pliers in his skull lent indeed a colour to, so as
to put him in thought of that missing link of creation's chain
desiderated by the late ingenious Mr Darwin. It was now for more than the
middle span of our allotted years that he had passed through the thousand
vicissitudes of existence and, being of a wary ascendancy and self a man
of rare forecast, he had enjoined his heart to repress all motions of a
rising choler and, by intercepting them with the readiest precaution,
foster within his breast that plenitude of sufferance which base minds
jeer at, rash judgers scorn and all find tolerable and but tolerable. To
those who create themselves wits at the cost of feminine delicacy a
habit of mind which he never did hold with to them he would concede
neither to bear the name nor to herit the tradition of a proper breeding
while for such that, having lost all forbearance, can lose no more, there
remained the sharp antidote of experience to cause their insolency to
beat a precipitate and inglorious retreat. Not but what he could feel
with mettlesome youth which, caring nought for the mows of dotards or the
gruntlings of the severe, is ever as the chaste fancy of the Holy Writer
expresses it for eating of the tree forbid it yet not so far forth as to
pretermit humanity upon any condition soever towards a gentlewoman when
she was about her lawful occasions. To conclude, while from the sister's
words he had reckoned upon a speedy delivery he was, however, it must be
owned, not a little alleviated by the intelligence that the issue so
auspicated after an ordeal of such duress now testified once more to the
mercy as well as to the bounty of the Supreme Being.
Accordingly he broke his mind to his neighbour, saying that, to express
his notion of the thing, his opinion who ought not perchance to express
one was that one must have a cold constitution and a frigid genius not
to be rejoiced by this freshest news of the fruition of her confinement
since she had been in such pain through no fault of hers. The dressy
young blade said it was her husband's that put her in that expectation or
at least it ought to be unless she were another Ephesian matron. I must
acquaint you, said Mr Crotthers, clapping on the table so as to evoke a
resonant comment of emphasis, old Glory Allelujurum was round again
today, an elderly man with dundrearies, preferring through his nose a
request to have word of Wilhelmina, my life, as he calls her. I bade him
hold himself in readiness for that the event would burst anon. 'Slife,
I'll be round with you. I cannot but extol the virile potency of the old
bucko that could still knock another child out of her. All fell to
praising of it, each after his own fashion, though the same young blade
held with his former view that another than her conjugial had been the
man in the gap, a clerk in orders, a linkboy virtuous or an itinerant
vendor of articles needed in every household. Singular, communed the
guest with himself, the wonderfully unequal faculty of metempsychosis
possessed by them, that the puerperal dormitory and the dissecting
theatre should be the seminaries of such frivolity, that the mere
acquisition of academic titles should suffice to transform in a pinch of
time these votaries of levity into exemplary practitioners of an art
which most men anywise eminent have esteemed the noblest. But, he further
added, it is mayhap to relieve the pentup feelings that in common oppress
them for I have more than once observed that birds of a feather laugh
together.
But with what fitness, let it be asked of the noble lord, his patron, has
this alien, whom the concession of a gracious prince has admitted to
civic rights, constituted himself the lord paramount of our internal
polity? Where is now that gratitude which loyalty should have counselled?
During the recent war whenever the enemy had a temporary advantage with
his granados did this traitor to his kind not seize that moment to
discharge his piece against the empire of which he is a tenant at will
while he trembled for the security of his four per cents? Has he
forgotten this as he forgets all benefits received? Or is it that from
being a deluder of others he has become at last his own dupe as he is, if
report belie him not, his own and his only enjoyer? Far be it from
candour to violate the bedchamber of a respectable lady, the daughter of
a gallant major, or to cast the most distant reflections upon her virtue
but if he challenges attention there as it was indeed highly his
interest not to have done then be it so. Unhappy woman, she has been too
long and too persistently denied her legitimate prerogative to listen to
his objurgations with any other feeling than the derision of the
desperate. He says this, a censor of morals, a very pelican in his piety,
who did not scruple, oblivious of the ties of nature, to attempt illicit
intercourse with a female domestic drawn from the lowest strata of
society Nay, had the hussy's scouringbrush not been her tutelary angel,
it had gone with her as hard as with Hagar, the Egyptian In the question
of the grazing lands his peevish asperity is notorious and in Mr Cuffe's
hearing brought upon him from an indignant rancher a scathing retort
couched in terms as straightforward as they were bucolic. It ill becomes
him to preach that gospel. Has he not nearer home a seedfield that lies
fallow for the want of the ploughshare? A habit reprehensible at puberty
is second nature and an opprobrium in middle life. If he must dispense
his balm of Gilead in nostrums and apothegms of dubious taste to restore
to health a generation of unfledged profligates let his practice consist
better with the doctrines that now engross him. His marital breast is the
repository of secrets which decorum is reluctant to adduce. The lewd
suggestions of some faded beauty may console him for a consort neglected
and debauched but this new exponent of morals and healer of ills is at
his best an exotic tree which, when rooted in its native orient, throve
and flourished and was abundant in balm but, transplanted to a clime more
temperate, its roots have lost their quondam vigour while the stuff that
comes away from it is stagnant, acid and inoperative.
The news was imparted with a circumspection recalling the ceremonial
usage of the Sublime Porte by the second female infirmarian to the junior
medical officer in residence, who in his turn announced to the delegation
that an heir had been born, When he had betaken himself to the women's
apartment to assist at the prescribed ceremony of the afterbirth in the
presence of the secretary of state for domestic affairs and the members
of the privy council, silent in unanimous exhaustion and approbation the
delegates, chafing under the length and solemnity of their vigil and
hoping that the joyful occurrence would palliate a licence which the
simultaneous absence of abigail and obstetrician rendered the easier,
broke out at once into a strife of tongues. In vain the voice of Mr
Canvasser Bloom was heard endeavouring to urge, to mollify, to refrain.
The moment was too propitious for the display of that discursiveness
which seemed the only bond of union among tempers so divergent. Every
phase of the situation was successively eviscerated the prenatal
repugnance of uterine brothers, the Caesarean section, posthumity with
respect to the father and, that rarer form, with respect to the mother,
the fratricidal case known as the Childs Murder and rendered memorable by
the impassioned plea of Mr Advocate Bushe which secured the acquittal of
the wrongfully accused, the rights of primogeniture and king's bounty
touching twins and triplets, miscarriages and infanticides, simulated or
dissimulated, the acardiac FOETUS IN FOETU and aprosopia due to a
congestion, the agnathia of certain chinless Chinamen cited by Mr
Candidate Mulligan in consequence of defective reunion of the maxillary
knobs along the medial line so that as he said one ear could hear what
the other spoke, the benefits of anesthesia or twilight sleep, the
prolongation of labour pains in advanced gravidancy by reason of pressure
on the vein, the premature relentment of the amniotic fluid as
exemplified in the actual case with consequent peril of sepsis to the
matrix, artificial insemination by means of syringes, involution of the
womb consequent upon the menopause, the problem of the perpetration of
the species in the case of females impregnated by delinquent rape, that
distressing manner of delivery called by the Brandenburghers STURZGEBURT,
the recorded instances of multiseminal, twikindled and monstrous births
conceived during the catamenic period or of consanguineous parentsin a
word all the cases of human nativity which Aristotle has classified in
his masterpiece with chromolithographic illustrations. The gravest
problems of obstetrics and forensic medicine were examined with as much
animation as the most popular beliefs on the state of pregnancy such as
the forbidding to a gravid woman to step over a countrystile lest, by her
movement, the navelcord should strangle her creature and the injunction
upon her in the event of a yearning, ardently and ineffectually
entertained, to place her hand against that part of her person which long
usage has consecrated as the seat of castigation. The abnormalities of
harelip, breastmole, supernumerary digits, negro's inkle, strawberry mark
and portwine stain were alleged by one as a PRIMA FACIE and natural
hypothetical explanation of those swineheaded the case of Madame Grissel
Steevens was not forgotten or doghaired infants occasionally born. The
hypothesis of a plasmic memory, advanced by the Caledonian envoy and
worthy of the metaphysical traditions of the land he stood for, envisaged
in such cases an arrest of embryonic development at some stage antecedent
to the human. An outlandish delegate sustained against both these views,
with such heat as almost carried conviction, the theory of copulation
between women and the males of brutes, his authority being his own
avouchment in support of fables such as that of the Minotaur which the
genius of the elegant Latin poet has handed down to us in the pages of
his Metamorphoses. The impression made by his words was immediate but
shortlived. It was effaced as easily as it had been evoked by an
allocution from Mr Candidate Mulligan in that vein of pleasantry which
none better than he knew how to affect, postulating as the supremest
object of desire a nice clean old man. Contemporaneously, a heated
argument having arisen between Mr Delegate Madden and Mr Candidate Lynch
regarding the juridical and theological dilemma created in the event of
one Siamese twin predeceasing the other, the difficulty by mutual consent
was referred to Mr Canvasser Bloom for instant submittal to Mr Coadjutor
Deacon Dedalus. Hitherto silent, whether the better to show by
preternatural gravity that curious dignity of the garb with which he was
invested or in obedience to an inward voice, he delivered briefly and, as
some thought, perfunctorily the ecclesiastical ordinance forbidding man
to put asunder what God has joined.
But Malachias' tale began to freeze them with horror. He conjured up the
scene before them. The secret panel beside the chimney slid back and in
the recess appeared ... Haines Which of us did not feel his flesh creep
He had a portfolio full of Celtic literature in one hand, in the other a
phial marked POISON. Surprise, horror, loathing were depicted on all
faces while he eyed them with a ghostly grin. I anticipated some such
reception, he began with an eldritch laugh, for which, it seems, history
is to blame. Yes, it is true. I am the murderer of Samuel Childs. And how
I am punished The inferno has no terrors for me. This is the appearance
is on me. Tare and ages, what way would I be resting at all, he muttered
thickly, and I tramping Dublin this while back with my share of songs and
himself after me the like of a soulth or a bullawurrus? My hell, and
Ireland's, is in this life. It is what I tried to obliterate my crime.
Distractions, rookshooting, the Erse language he recited some, laudanum
he raised the phial to his lips, camping out. In vain His spectre
stalks me. Dope is my only hope ... Ah Destruction The black panther
With a cry he suddenly vanished and the panel slid back. An instant later
his head appeared in the door opposite and said Meet me at Westland Row
station at ten past eleven. He was gone. Tears gushed from the eyes of
the dissipated host. The seer raised his hand to heaven, murmuring The
vendetta of Mananaun The sage repeated LEX TALIONIS. The sentimentalist
is he who would enjoy without incurring the immense debtorship for a
thing done. Malachias, overcome by emotion, ceased. The mystery was
unveiled. Haines was the third brother. His real name was Childs. The
black panther was himself the ghost of his own father. He drank drugs to
obliterate. For this relief much thanks. The lonely house by the
graveyard is uninhabited. No soul will live there. The spider pitches her
web in the solitude. The nocturnal rat peers from his hole. A curse is on
it. It is haunted. Murderer's ground.
What is the age of the soul of man? As she hath the virtue of the
chameleon to change her hue at every new approach, to be gay with the
merry and mournful with the downcast, so too is her age changeable as her
mood. No longer is Leopold, as he sits there, ruminating, chewing the cud
of reminiscence, that staid agent of publicity and holder of a modest
substance in the funds. A score of years are blown away. He is young
Leopold. There, as in a retrospective arrangement, a mirror within a
mirror hey, presto, he beholdeth himself. That young figure of then is
seen, precociously manly, walking on a nipping morning from the old house
in Clanbrassil street to the high school, his booksatchel on him
bandolierwise, and in it a goodly hunk of wheaten loaf, a mother's
thought. Or it is the same figure, a year or so gone over, in his first
hard hat ah, that was a day, already on the road, a fullfledged
traveller for the family firm, equipped with an orderbook, a scented
handkerchief not for show only, his case of bright trinketware alas a
thing now of the past and a quiverful of compliant smiles for this or
that halfwon housewife reckoning it out upon her fingertips or for a
budding virgin, shyly acknowledging but the heart? tell me his studied
baisemoins. The scent, the smile, but, more than these, the dark eyes and
oleaginous address, brought home at duskfall many a commission to the
head of the firm, seated with Jacob's pipe after like labours in the
paternal ingle a meal of noodles, you may be sure, is aheating, reading
through round horned spectacles some paper from the Europe of a month
before. But hey, presto, the mirror is breathed on and the young
knighterrant recedes, shrivels, dwindles to a tiny speck within the mist.
Now he is himself paternal and these about him might be his sons. Who can
say? The wise father knows his own child. He thinks of a drizzling night
in Hatch street, hard by the bonded stores there, the first. Together
she is a poor waif, a child of shame, yours and mine and of all for a
bare shilling and her luckpenny, together they hear the heavy tread of
the watch as two raincaped shadows pass the new royal university. Bridie
Bridie Kelly He will never forget the name, ever remember the night
first night, the bridenight. They are entwined in nethermost darkness,
the willer with the willed, and in an instant FIAT light shall flood
the world. Did heart leap to heart? Nay, fair reader. In a breath 'twas
done buthold Back It must not be In terror the poor girl flees away
through the murk. She is the bride of darkness, a daughter of night. She
dare not bear the sunnygolden babe of day. No, Leopold. Name and memory
solace thee not. That youthful illusion of thy strength was taken from
theeand in vain. No son of thy loins is by thee. There is none now to
be for Leopold, what Leopold was for Rudolph.
The voices blend and fuse in clouded silence silence that is the
infinite of space and swiftly, silently the soul is wafted over regions
of cycles of generations that have lived. A region where grey twilight
ever descends, never falls on wide sagegreen pasturefields, shedding her
dusk, scattering a perennial dew of stars. She follows her mother with
ungainly steps, a mare leading her fillyfoal. Twilight phantoms are they,
yet moulded in prophetic grace of structure, slim shapely haunches, a
supple tendonous neck, the meek apprehensive skull. They fade, sad
phantoms all is gone. Agendath is a waste land, a home of screechowls
and the sandblind upupa. Netaim, the golden, is no more. And on the
highway of the clouds they come, muttering thunder of rebellion, the
ghosts of beasts. Huuh Hark Huuh Parallax stalks behind and goads
them, the lancinating lightnings of whose brow are scorpions. Elk and
yak, the bulls of Bashan and of Babylon, mammoth and mastodon, they come
trooping to the sunken sea, LACUS MORTIS. Ominous revengeful zodiacal
host They moan, passing upon the clouds, horned and capricorned, the
trumpeted with the tusked, the lionmaned, the giantantlered, snouter and
crawler, rodent, ruminant and pachyderm, all their moving moaning
multitude, murderers of the sun.
Onward to the dead sea they tramp to drink, unslaked and with horrible
gulpings, the salt somnolent inexhaustible flood. And the equine portent
grows again, magnified in the deserted heavens, nay to heaven's own
magnitude, till it looms, vast, over the house of Virgo. And lo, wonder
of metempsychosis, it is she, the everlasting bride, harbinger of the
daystar, the bride, ever virgin. It is she, Martha, thou lost one,
Millicent, the young, the dear, the radiant. How serene does she now
arise, a queen among the Pleiades, in the penultimate antelucan hour,
shod in sandals of bright gold, coifed with a veil of what do you call it
gossamer. It floats, it flows about her starborn flesh and loose it
streams, emerald, sapphire, mauve and heliotrope, sustained on currents
of the cold interstellar wind, winding, coiling, simply swirling,
writhing in the skies a mysterious writing till, after a myriad
metamorphoses of symbol, it blazes, Alpha, a ruby and triangled sign upon
the forehead of Taurus.
Francis was reminding Stephen of years before when they had been at
school together in Conmee's time. He asked about Glaucon, Alcibiades,
Pisistratus. Where were they now? Neither knew. You have spoken of the
past and its phantoms, Stephen said. Why think of them? If I call them
into life across the waters of Lethe will not the poor ghosts troop to my
call? Who supposes it? I, Bous Stephanoumenos, bullockbefriending bard,
am lord and giver of their life. He encircled his gadding hair with a
coronal of vineleaves, smiling at Vincent. That answer and those leaves,
Vincent said to him, will adorn you more fitly when something more, and
greatly more, than a capful of light odes can call your genius father.
All who wish you well hope this for you. All desire to see you bring
forth the work you meditate, to acclaim you Stephaneforos. I heartily
wish you may not fail them. O no, Vincent Lenehan said, laying a hand on
the shoulder near him. Have no fear. He could not leave his mother an
orphan. The young man's face grew dark. All could see how hard it was for
him to be reminded of his promise and of his recent loss. He would have
withdrawn from the feast had not the noise of voices allayed the smart.
Madden had lost five drachmas on Sceptre for a whim of the rider's name
Lenehan as much more. He told them of the race. The flag fell and, huuh
off, scamper, the mare ran out freshly with O. Madden up. She was leading
the field. All hearts were beating. Even Phyllis could not contain
herself. She waved her scarf and cried Huzzah Sceptre wins But in the
straight on the run home when all were in close order the dark horse
Throwaway drew level, reached, outstripped her. All was lost now. Phyllis
was silent her eyes were sad anemones. Juno, she cried, I am undone. But
her lover consoled her and brought her a bright casket of gold in which
lay some oval sugarplums which she partook. A tear fell one only. A
whacking fine whip, said Lenehan, is W. Lane. Four winners yesterday and
three today. What rider is like him? Mount him on the camel or the
boisterous buffalo the victory in a hack canter is still his. But let us
bear it as was the ancient wont. Mercy on the luckless Poor Sceptre he
said with a light sigh. She is not the filly that she was. Never, by this
hand, shall we behold such another. By gad, sir, a queen of them. Do you
remember her, Vincent? I wish you could have seen my queen today, Vincent
said. How young she was and radiant Lalage were scarce fair beside her
in her yellow shoes and frock of muslin, I do not know the right name of
it. The chestnuts that shaded us were in bloom the air drooped with
their persuasive odour and with pollen floating by us. In the sunny
patches one might easily have cooked on a stone a batch of those buns
with Corinth fruit in them that Periplipomenes sells in his booth near
the bridge. But she had nought for her teeth but the arm with which I
held her and in that she nibbled mischievously when I pressed too close.
A week ago she lay ill, four days on the couch, but today she was free,
blithe, mocked at peril. She is more taking then. Her posies tool Mad
romp that she is, she had pulled her fill as we reclined together. And in
your ear, my friend, you will not think who met us as we left the field.
Conmee himself He was walking by the hedge, reading, I think a brevier
book with, I doubt not, a witty letter in it from Glycera or Chloe to
keep the page. The sweet creature turned all colours in her confusion,
feigning to reprove a slight disorder in her dress a slip of underwood
clung there for the very trees adore her. When Conmee had passed she
glanced at her lovely echo in that little mirror she carries. But he had
been kind. In going by he had blessed us. The gods too are ever kind,
Lenehan said. If I had poor luck with Bass's mare perhaps this draught of
his may serve me more propensely. He was laying his hand upon a winejar
Malachi saw it and withheld his act, pointing to the stranger and to the
scarlet label. Warily, Malachi whispered, preserve a druid silence. His
soul is far away. It is as painful perhaps to be awakened from a vision
as to be born. Any object, intensely regarded, may be a gate of access to
the incorruptible eon of the gods. Do you not think it, Stephen?
Theosophos told me so, Stephen answered, whom in a previous existence
Egyptian priests initiated into the mysteries of karmic law. The lords of
the moon, Theosophos told me, an orangefiery shipload from planet Alpha
of the lunar chain would not assume the etheric doubles and these were
therefore incarnated by the rubycoloured egos from the second
constellation.
However, as a matter of fact though, the preposterous surmise about him
being in some description of a doldrums or other or mesmerised which was.
entirely due to a misconception of the shallowest character, was not the
case at all. The individual whose visual organs while the above was going
on were at this juncture commencing to exhibit symptoms of animation was
as astute if not astuter than any man living and anybody that conjectured
the contrary would have found themselves pretty speedily in the wrong
shop. During the past four minutes or thereabouts he had been staring
hard at a certain amount of number one Bass bottled by Messrs Bass and Co
at BurtononTrent which happened to be situated amongst a lot of others
right opposite to where he was and which was certainly calculated to
attract anyone's remark on account of its scarlet appearance. He was
simply and solely, as it subsequently transpired for reasons best known
to himself, which put quite an altogether different complexion on the
proceedings, after the moment before's observations about boyhood days
and the turf, recollecting two or three private transactions of his own
which the other two were as mutually innocent of as the babe unborn.
Eventually, however, both their eyes met and as soon as it began to dawn
on him that the other was endeavouring to help himself to the thing he
involuntarily determined to help him himself and so he accordingly took
hold of the neck of the mediumsized glass recipient which contained the
fluid sought after and made a capacious hole in it by pouring a lot of it
out with, also at the same time, however, a considerable degree of
attentiveness in order not to upset any of the beer that was in it about
the place.
The debate which ensued was in its scope and progress an epitome of the
course of life. Neither place nor council was lacking in dignity. The
debaters were the keenest in the land, the theme they were engaged on the
loftiest and most vital. The high hall of Horne's house had never beheld
an assembly so representative and so varied nor had the old rafters of
that establishment ever listened to a language so encyclopaedic. A
gallant scene in truth it made. Crotthers was there at the foot of the
table in his striking Highland garb, his face glowing from the briny airs
of the Mull of Galloway. There too, opposite to him, was Lynch whose
countenance bore already the stigmata of early depravity and premature
wisdom. Next the Scotchman was the place assigned to Costello, the
eccentric, while at his side was seated in stolid repose the squat form
of Madden. The chair of the resident indeed stood vacant before the
hearth but on either flank of it the figure of Bannon in explorer's kit
of tweed shorts and salted cowhide brogues contrasted sharply with the
primrose elegance and townbred manners of Malachi Roland St John
Mulligan. Lastly at the head of the board was the young poet who found a
refuge from his labours of pedagogy and metaphysical inquisition in the
convivial atmosphere of Socratic discussion, while to right and left of
him were accommodated the flippant prognosticator, fresh from the
hippodrome, and that vigilant wanderer, soiled by the dust of travel and
combat and stained by the mire of an indelible dishonour, but from whose
steadfast and constant heart no lure or peril or threat or degradation
could ever efface the image of that voluptuous loveliness which the
inspired pencil of Lafayette has limned for ages yet to come.
It had better be stated here and now at the outset that the perverted
transcendentalism to which Mr S. Dedalus' Div. Scep. contentions would
appear to prove him pretty badly addicted runs directly counter to
accepted scientific methods. Science, it cannot be too often repeated,
deals with tangible phenomena. The man of science like the man in the
street has to face hardheaded facts that cannot be blinked and explain
them as best he can. There may be, it is true, some questions which
science cannot answerat presentsuch as the first problem submitted by
Mr L. Bloom Pubb. Canv. regarding the future determination of sex. Must
we accept the view of Empedocles of Trinacria that the right ovary the
postmenstrual period, assert others is responsible for the birth of
males or are the too long neglected spermatozoa or nemasperms the
differentiating factors or is it, as most embryologists incline to opine,
such as Culpepper, Spallanzani, Blumenbach, Lusk, Hertwig, Leopold and
Valenti, a mixture of both? This would be tantamount to a cooperation
one of nature's favourite devices between the NISUS FORMATIVUS of the
nemasperm on the one hand and on the other a happily chosen position,
SUCCUBITUS FELIX of the passive element. The other problem raised by the
same inquirer is scarcely less vital infant mortality. It is interesting
because, as he pertinently remarks, we are all born in the same way but
we all die in different ways. Mr M. Mulligan Hyg. et Eug. Doc. blames
the sanitary conditions in which our greylunged citizens contract
adenoids, pulmonary complaints etc. by inhaling the bacteria which lurk
in dust. These factors, he alleged, and the revolting spectacles offered
by our streets, hideous publicity posters, religious ministers of all
denominations, mutilated soldiers and sailors, exposed scorbutic
cardrivers, the suspended carcases of dead animals, paranoic bachelors
and unfructified duennasthese, he said, were accountable for any and
every fallingoff in the calibre of the race. Kalipedia, he prophesied,
would soon be generally adopted and all the graces of life, genuinely
good music, agreeable literature, light philosophy, instructive pictures,
plastercast reproductions of the classical statues such as Venus and
Apollo, artistic coloured photographs of prize babies, all these little
attentions would enable ladies who were in a particular condition to pass
the intervening months in a most enjoyable manner. Mr J. Crotthers Disc.
Bacc. attributes some of these demises to abdominal trauma in the case
of women workers subjected to heavy labours in the workshop and to
marital discipline in the home but by far the vast majority to neglect,
private or official, culminating in the exposure of newborn infants, the
practice of criminal abortion or in the atrocious crime of infanticide.
Although the former we are thinking of neglect is undoubtedly only too
true the case he cites of nurses forgetting to count the sponges in the
peritoneal cavity is too rare to be normative. In fact when one comes to
look into it the wonder is that so many pregnancies and deliveries go off
so well as they do, all things considered and in spite of our human
shortcomings which often baulk nature in her intentions. An ingenious
suggestion is that thrown out by Mr V. Lynch Bacc. Arith. that both
natality and mortality, as well as all other phenomena of evolution,
tidal movements, lunar phases, blood temperatures, diseases in general,
everything, in fine, in nature's vast workshop from the extinction of
some remote sun to the blossoming of one of the countless flowers which
beautify our public parks is subject to a law of numeration as yet
unascertained. Still the plain straightforward question why a child of
normally healthy parents and seemingly a healthy child and properly
looked after succumbs unaccountably in early childhood though other
children of the same marriage do not must certainly, in the poet's
words, give us pause. Nature, we may rest assured, has her own good and
cogent reasons for whatever she does and in all probability such deaths
are due to some law of anticipation by which organisms in which morbous
germs have taken up their residence modern science has conclusively
shown that only the plasmic substance can be said to be immortal tend to
disappear at an increasingly earlier stage of development, an arrangement
which, though productive of pain to some of our feelings notably the
maternal, is nevertheless, some of us think, in the long run beneficial
to the race in general in securing thereby the survival of the fittest.
Mr S. Dedalus' Div. Scep. remark or should it be called an
interruption? that an omnivorous being which can masticate, deglute,
digest and apparently pass through the ordinary channel with
pluterperfect imperturbability such multifarious aliments as cancrenous
females emaciated by parturition, corpulent professional gentlemen, not
to speak of jaundiced politicians and chlorotic nuns, might possibly find
gastric relief in an innocent collation of staggering bob, reveals as
nought else could and in a very unsavoury light the tendency above
alluded to. For the enlightenment of those who are not so intimately
acquainted with the minutiae of the municipal abattoir as this
morbidminded esthete and embryo philosopher who for all his overweening
bumptiousness in things scientific can scarcely distinguish an acid from
an alkali prides himself on being, it should perhaps be stated that
staggering bob in the vile parlance of our lowerclass licensed
victuallers signifies the cookable and eatable flesh of a calf newly
dropped from its mother. In a recent public controversy with Mr L. Bloom
Pubb. Canv. which took place in the commons' hall of the National
Maternity Hospital, ,  and  Holles street, of which, as is well
known, Dr A. Horne Lic. in Midw., F. K. Q. C. P. I. is the able and
popular master, he is reported by eyewitnesses as having stated that once
a woman has let the cat into the bag an esthete's allusion, presumably,
to one of the most complicated and marvellous of all nature's processes
the act of sexual congress she must let it out again or give it life, as
he phrased it, to save her own. At the risk of her own, was the telling
rejoinder of his interlocutor, none the less effective for the moderate
and measured tone in which it was delivered.
Meanwhile the skill and patience of the physician had brought about a
happy ACCOUCHEMENT. It had been a weary weary while both for patient and
doctor. All that surgical skill could do was done and the brave woman had
manfully helped. She had. She had fought the good fight and now she was
very very happy. Those who have passed on, who have gone before, are
happy too as they gaze down and smile upon the touching scene. Reverently
look at her as she reclines there with the motherlight in her eyes, that
longing hunger for baby fingers a pretty sight it is to see, in the
first bloom of her new motherhood, breathing a silent prayer of
thanksgiving to One above, the Universal Husband. And as her loving eyes
behold her babe she wishes only one blessing more, to have her dear Doady
there with her to share her joy, to lay in his arms that mite of God's
clay, the fruit of their lawful embraces. He is older now you and I may
whisper it and a trifle stooped in the shoulders yet in the whirligig of
years a grave dignity has come to the conscientious second accountant of
the Ulster bank, College Green branch. O Doady, loved one of old,
faithful lifemate now, it may never be again, that faroff time of the
roses With the old shake of her pretty head she recalls those days. God
How beautiful now across the mist of years But their children are
grouped in her imagination about the bedside, hers and his, Charley, Mary
Alice, Frederick Albert if he had lived, Mamy, Budgy Victoria
Frances, Tom, Violet Constance Louisa, darling little Bobsy called
after our famous hero of the South African war, lord Bobs of Waterford
and Candahar and now this last pledge of their union, a Purefoy if ever
there was one, with the true Purefoy nose. Young hopeful will be
christened Mortimer Edward after the influential third cousin of Mr
Purefoy in the Treasury Remembrancer's office, Dublin Castle. And so time
wags on but father Cronion has dealt lightly here. No, let no sigh break
from that bosom, dear gentle Mina. And Doady, knock the ashes from your
pipe, the seasoned briar you still fancy when the curfew rings for you
may it be the distant day and dout the light whereby you read in the
Sacred Book for the oil too has run low, and so with a tranquil heart to
bed, to rest. He knows and will call in His own good time. You too have
fought the good fight and played loyally your man's part. Sir, to you my
hand. Well done, thou good and faithful servant
There are sins or let us call them as the world calls them evil
memories which are hidden away by man in the darkest places of the heart
but they abide there and wait. He may suffer their memory to grow dim,
let them be as though they had not been and all but persuade himself that
they were not or at least were otherwise. Yet a chance word will call
them forth suddenly and they will rise up to confront him in the most
various circumstances, a vision or a dream, or while timbrel and harp
soothe his senses or amid the cool silver tranquility of the evening or
at the feast, at midnight, when he is now filled with wine. Not to insult
over him will the vision come as over one that lies under her wrath, not
for vengeance to cut him off from the living but shrouded in the piteous
vesture of the past, silent, remote, reproachful.
The stranger still regarded on the face before him a slow recession of
that false calm there, imposed, as it seemed, by habit or some studied
trick, upon words so embittered as to accuse in their speaker an
unhealthiness, a FLAIR, for the cruder things of life. A scene disengages
itself in the observer's memory, evoked, it would seem, by a word of so
natural a homeliness as if those days were really present there as some
thought with their immediate pleasures. A shaven space of lawn one soft
May evening, the wellremembered grove of lilacs at Roundtown, purple and
white, fragrant slender spectators of the game but with much real
interest in the pellets as they run slowly forward over the sward or
collide and stop, one by its fellow, with a brief alert shock. And yonder
about that grey urn where the water moves at times in thoughtful
irrigation you saw another as fragrant sisterhood, Floey, Atty, Tiny and
their darker friend with I know not what of arresting in her pose then,
Our Lady of the Cherries, a comely brace of them pendent from an ear,
bringing out the foreign warmth of the skin so daintily against the cool
ardent fruit. A lad of four or five in linseywoolsey blossomtime but
there will be cheer in the kindly hearth when ere long the bowls are
gathered and hutched is standing on the urn secured by that circle of
girlish fond hands. He frowns a little just as this young man does now
with a perhaps too conscious enjoyment of the danger but must needs
glance at whiles towards where his mother watches from the PIAZZETTA
giving upon the flowerclose with a faint shadow of remoteness or of
reproach ALLES VERGANGLICHE in her glad look.
Mark this farther and remember. The end comes suddenly. Enter that
antechamber of birth where the studious are assembled and note their
faces. Nothing, as it seems, there of rash or violent. Quietude of
custody, rather, befitting their station in that house, the vigilant
watch of shepherds and of angels about a crib in Bethlehem of Juda long
ago. But as before the lightning the serried stormclouds, heavy with
preponderant excess of moisture, in swollen masses turgidly distended,
compass earth and sky in one vast slumber, impending above parched field
and drowsy oxen and blighted growth of shrub and verdure till in an
instant a flash rives their centres and with the reverberation of the
thunder the cloudburst pours its torrent, so and not otherwise was the
transformation, violent and instantaneous, upon the utterance of the
word.
Burke's outflings my lord Stephen, giving the cry, and a tag and bobtail
of all them after, cockerel, jackanapes, welsher, pilldoctor, punctual
Bloom at heels with a universal grabbing at headgear, ashplants, bilbos,
Panama hats and scabbards, Zermatt alpenstocks and what not. A dedale of
lusty youth, noble every student there. Nurse Callan taken aback in the
hallway cannot stay them nor smiling surgeon coming downstairs with news
of placentation ended, a full pound if a milligramme. They hark him on.
The door It is open? Ha They are out, tumultuously, off for a minute's
race, all bravely legging it, Burke's of Denzille and Holles their
ulterior goal. Dixon follows giving them sharp language but raps out an
oath, he too, and on. Bloom stays with nurse a thought to send a kind
word to happy mother and nurseling up there. Doctor Diet and Doctor
Quiet. Looks she too not other now? Ward of watching in Horne's house has
told its tale in that washedout pallor. Then all being gone, a glance of
motherwit helping, he whispers close in going Madam, when comes the
storkbird for thee?
The air without is impregnated with raindew moisture, life essence
celestial, glistening on Dublin stone there under starshiny COELUM. God's
air, the Allfather's air, scintillant circumambient cessile air. Breathe
it deep into thee. By heaven, Theodore Purefoy, thou hast done a doughty
deed and no botch Thou art, I vow, the remarkablest progenitor barring
none in this chaffering allincluding most farraginous chronicle.
Astounding In her lay a Godframed Godgiven preformed possibility which
thou hast fructified with thy modicum of man's work. Cleave to her
Serve Toil on, labour like a very bandog and let scholarment and all
Malthusiasts go hang. Thou art all their daddies, Theodore. Art drooping
under thy load, bemoiled with butcher's bills at home and ingots not
thine in the countinghouse? Head up For every newbegotten thou shalt
gather thy homer of ripe wheat. See, thy fleece is drenched. Dost envy
Darby Dullman there with his Joan? A canting jay and a rheumeyed curdog
is all their progeny. Pshaw, I tell thee He is a mule, a dead
gasteropod, without vim or stamina, not worth a cracked kreutzer.
Copulation without population No, say I Herod's slaughter of the
innocents were the truer name. Vegetables, forsooth, and sterile
cohabitation Give her beefsteaks, red, raw, bleeding She is a hoary
pandemonium of ills, enlarged glands, mumps, quinsy, bunions, hayfever,
bedsores, ringworm, floating kidney, Derbyshire neck, warts, bilious
attacks, gallstones, cold feet, varicose veins. A truce to threnes and
trentals and jeremies and all such congenital defunctive music Twenty
years of it, regret them not. With thee it was not as with many that will
and would and wait and neverdo. Thou sawest thy America, thy lifetask,
and didst charge to cover like the transpontine bison. How saith
Zarathustra? DEINE KUH TRUBSAL MELKEST DU. NUN TRINKST DU DIE SUSSE MILCH
DES EUTERS. See it displodes for thee in abundance. Drink, man, an
udderful Mother's milk, Purefoy, the milk of human kin, milk too of
those burgeoning stars overhead rutilant in thin rainvapour, punch milk,
such as those rioters will quaff in their guzzling den, milk of madness,
the honeymilk of Canaan's land. Thy cow's dug was tough, what? Ay, but
her milk is hot and sweet and fattening. No dollop this but thick rich
bonnyclaber. To her, old patriarch Pap PER DEAM PARTULAM ET PERTUNDAM
NUNC EST BIBENDUM
All off for a buster, armstrong, hollering down the street. Bonafides.
Where you slep las nigh? Timothy of the battered naggin. Like ole Billyo.
Any brollies or gumboots in the fambly? Where the Henry Nevil's sawbones
and ole clo? Sorra one o' me knows. Hurrah there, Dix Forward to the
ribbon counter. Where's Punch? All serene. Jay, look at the drunken
minister coming out of the maternity hospal BENEDICAT VOS OMNIPOTENS
DEUS, PATER ET FILIUS. A make, mister. The Denzille lane boys. Hell,
blast ye Scoot. Righto, Isaacs, shove em out of the bleeding limelight.
Yous join uz, dear sir? No hentrusion in life. Lou heap good man. Allee
samee dis bunch. EN AVANT, MES ENFANTS Fire away number one on the gun.
Burke's Burke's Thence they advanced five parasangs. Slattery's mounted
foot. Where's that bleeding awfur? Parson Steve, apostates' creed No,
no, Mulligan Abaft there Shove ahead. Keep a watch on the clock.
Chuckingout time. Mullee What's on you? MA MERE M'A MARIEE. British
Beatitudes RETAMPLATAN DIGIDI BOUMBOUM. Ayes have it. To be printed and
bound at the Druiddrum press by two designing females. Calf covers of
pissedon green. Last word in art shades. Most beautiful book come out of
Ireland my time. SILENTIUM Get a spurt on. Tention. Proceed to nearest
canteen and there annex liquor stores. March Tramp, tramp, tramp, the
boys are atitudes parching. Beer, beef, business, bibles, bulldogs
battleships, buggery and bishops. Whether on the scaffold high. Beer,
beef, trample the bibles. When for Irelandear. Trample the trampellers.
Thunderation Keep the durned millingtary step. We fall. Bishops
boosebox. Halt Heave to. Rugger. Scrum in. No touch kicking. Wow, my
tootsies You hurt? Most amazingly sorry
Query. Who's astanding this here do? Proud possessor of damnall. Declare
misery. Bet to the ropes. Me nantee saltee. Not a red at me this week
gone. Yours? Mead of our fathers for the UBERMENSCH. Dittoh. Five number
ones. You, sir? Ginger cordial. Chase me, the cabby's caudle. Stimulate
the caloric. Winding of his ticker. Stopped short never to go again when
the old. Absinthe for me, savvy? CARAMBA Have an eggnog or a prairie
oyster. Enemy? Avuncular's got my timepiece. Ten to. Obligated awful.
Don't mention it. Got a pectoral trauma, eh, Dix? Pos fact. Got bet be a
boomblebee whenever he wus settin sleepin in hes bit garten. Digs up near
the Mater. Buckled he is. Know his dona? Yup, sartin I do. Full of a
dure. See her in her dishybilly. Peels off a credit. Lovey lovekin. None
of your lean kine, not much. Pull down the blind, love. Two Ardilauns.
Same here. Look slippery. If you fall don't wait to get up. Five, seven,
nine. Fine Got a prime pair of mincepies, no kid. And her take me to
rests and her anker of rum. Must be seen to be believed. Your starving
eyes and allbeplastered neck you stole my heart, O gluepot. Sir? Spud
again the rheumatiz? All poppycock, you'll scuse me saying. For the hoi
polloi. I vear thee beest a gert vool. Well, doc? Back fro Lapland? Your
corporosity sagaciating O K? How's the squaws and papooses? Womanbody
after going on the straw? Stand and deliver. Password. There's hair. Ours
the white death and the ruddy birth. Hi Spit in your own eye, boss
Mummer's wire. Cribbed out of Meredith. Jesified, orchidised, polycimical
jesuit Aunty mine's writing Pa Kinch. Baddybad Stephen lead astray
goodygood Malachi.
Hurroo Collar the leather, youngun. Roun wi the nappy. Here, Jock braw
Hielentman's your barleybree. Lang may your lum reek and your kailpot
boil My tipple. MERCI. Here's to us. How's that? Leg before wicket.
Don't stain my brandnew sitinems. Give's a shake of peppe, you there.
Catch aholt. Caraway seed to carry away. Twig? Shrieks of silence. Every
cove to his gentry mort. Venus Pandemos. LES PETITES FEMMES. Bold bad
girl from the town of Mullingar. Tell her I was axing at her. Hauding
Sara by the wame. On the road to Malahide. Me? If she who seduced me had
left but the name. What do you want for ninepence? Machree, macruiskeen.
Smutty Moll for a mattress jig. And a pull all together. EX
Waiting, guvnor? Most deciduously. Bet your boots on. Stunned like,
seeing as how no shiners is acoming. Underconstumble? He've got the chink
AD LIB. Seed near free poun on un a spell ago a said war hisn. Us come
right in on your invite, see? Up to you, matey. Out with the oof. Two bar
and a wing. You larn that go off of they there Frenchy bilks? Won't wash
here for nuts nohow. Lil chile velly solly. Ise de cutest colour coon
down our side. Gawds teruth, Chawley. We are nae fou. We're nae tha fou.
Au reservoir, mossoo. Tanks you.
'Tis, sure. What say? In the speakeasy. Tight. I shee you, shir. Bantam,
two days teetee. Bowsing nowt but claretwine. Garn Have a glint, do.
Gum, I'm jiggered. And been to barber he have. Too full for words. With a
railway bloke. How come you so? Opera he'd like? Rose of Castile. Rows of
cast. Police Some HO for a gent fainted. Look at Bantam's flowers.
Gemini. He's going to holler. The colleen bawn. My colleen bawn. O,
cheese it Shut his blurry Dutch oven with a firm hand. Had the winner
today till I tipped him a dead cert. The ruffin cly the nab of Stephen
Hand as give me the jady coppaleen. He strike a telegramboy paddock wire
big bug Bass to the depot. Shove him a joey and grahamise. Mare on form
hot order. Guinea to a goosegog. Tell a cram, that. Gospeltrue. Criminal
diversion? I think that yes. Sure thing. Land him in chokeechokee if the
harman beck copped the game. Madden back Madden's a maddening back. O
lust our refuge and our strength. Decamping. Must you go? Off to mammy.
Stand by. Hide my blushes someone. All in if he spots me. Come ahome, our
Bantam. Horryvar, mong vioo. Dinna forget the cowslips for hersel.
Cornfide. Wha gev ye thon colt? Pal to pal. Jannock. Of John Thomas, her
spouse. No fake, old man Leo. S'elp me, honest injun. Shiver my timbers
if I had. There's a great big holy friar. Vyfor you no me tell? Vel, I
ses, if that aint a sheeny nachez, vel, I vil get misha mishinnah.
Through yerd our lord, Amen.
You move a motion? Steve boy, you're going it some. More bluggy
drunkables? Will immensely splendiferous stander permit one stooder of
most extreme poverty and one largesize grandacious thirst to terminate
one expensive inaugurated libation? Give's a breather. Landlord,
landlord, have you good wine, staboo? Hoots, mon, a wee drap to pree. Cut
and come again. Right. Boniface Absinthe the lot. NOS OMNES BIBERIMUS
VIRIDUM TOXICUM DIABOLUS CAPIAT POSTERIORIA NOSTRIA. Closingtime, gents.
Eh? Rome boose for the Bloom toff. I hear you say onions? Bloo? Cadges
ads. Photo's papli, by all that's gorgeous. Play low, pardner. Slide.
BONSOIR LA COMPAGNIE. And snares of the poxfiend. Where's the buck and
Namby Amby? Skunked? Leg bail. Aweel, ye maun e'en gang yer gates.
Checkmate. King to tower. Kind Kristyann wil yu help yung man hoose frend
tuk bungellow kee tu find plais whear tu lay crown of his hed  night.
Crickey, I'm about sprung. Tarnally dog gone my shins if this beent the
bestest puttiest longbreak yet. Item, curate, couple of cookies for this
child. Cot's plood and prandypalls, none Not a pite of sheeses? Thrust
syphilis down to hell and with him those other licensed spirits. Time,
gents Who wander through the world. Health all A LA VOTRE
Golly, whatten tunket's yon guy in the mackintosh? Dusty Rhodes. Peep at
his wearables. By mighty What's he got? Jubilee mutton. Bovril, by
James. Wants it real bad. D'ye ken bare socks? Seedy cuss in the
Richmond? Rawthere Thought he had a deposit of lead in his penis.
Trumpery insanity. Bartle the Bread we calls him. That, sir, was once a
prosperous cit. Man all tattered and torn that married a maiden all
forlorn. Slung her hook, she did. Here see lost love. Walking Mackintosh
of lonely canyon. Tuck and turn in. Schedule time. Nix for the hornies.
Pardon? Seen him today at a runefal? Chum o' yourn passed in his checks?
Ludamassy Pore piccaninnies Thou'll no be telling me thot, Pold veg
Did ums blubble bigsplash crytears cos fren Padney was took off in black
bag? Of all de darkies Massa Pat was verra best. I never see the like
since I was born. TIENS, TIENS, but it is well sad, that, my faith, yes.
O, get, rev on a gradient one in nine. Live axle drives are souped. Lay
you two to one Jenatzy licks him ruddy well hollow. Jappies? High angle
fire, inyah Sunk by war specials. Be worse for him, says he, nor any
Rooshian. Time all. There's eleven of them. Get ye gone. Forward, woozy
wobblers Night. Night. May Allah the Excellent One your soul this night
ever tremendously conserve.
Your attention We're nae tha fou. The Leith police dismisseth us. The
least tholice. Ware hawks for the chap puking. Unwell in his abominable
regions. Yooka. Night. Mona, my true love. Yook. Mona, my own love. Ook.
Hark Shut your obstropolos. Pflaap Pflaap Blaze on. There she goes.
Brigade Bout ship. Mount street way. Cut up Pflaap Tally ho. You not
come? Run, skelter, race. Pflaaaap
Lynch Hey? Sign on long o' me. Denzille lane this way. Change here for
Bawdyhouse. We two, she said, will seek the kips where shady Mary is.
Righto, any old time. LAETABUNTUR IN CUBILIBUS SUIS. You coming long?
Whisper, who the sooty hell's the johnny in the black duds? Hush Sinned
against the light and even now that day is at hand when he shall come to
judge the world by fire. Pflaap UT IMPLERENTUR SCRIPTURAE. Strike up a
ballad. Then outspake medical Dick to his comrade medical Davy.
Christicle, who's this excrement yellow gospeller on the Merrion hall?
Elijah is coming Washed in the blood of the Lamb. Come on you
winefizzling, ginsizzling, booseguzzling existences Come on, you dog
gone, bullnecked, beetlebrowed, hogjowled, peanutbrained, weaseleyed
fourflushers, false alarms and excess baggage Come on, you triple
extract of infamy Alexander J Christ Dowie, that's my name, that's
yanked to glory most half this planet from Frisco beach to Vladivostok.
The Deity aint no nickel dime bumshow. I put it to you that He's on the
square and a corking fine business proposition. He's the grandest thing
yet and don't you forget it. Shout salvation in King Jesus. You'll need
to rise precious early you sinner there, if you want to diddle the
Almighty God. Pflaaaap Not half. He's got a coughmixture with a punch in
it for you, my friend, in his back pocket. Just you try it on.
THE MABBOT STREET ENTRANCE OF NIGHTTOWN, BEFORE WHICH STRETCHES AN
UNCOBBLED TRAMSIDING SET WITH SKELETON TRACKS, RED AND GREEN WILLO'THE
WISPS AND DANGER SIGNALS. ROWS OF GRIMY HOUSES WITH GAPING DOORS. RARE
LAMPS WITH FAINT RAINBOW FINS. ROUND RABAIOTTI'S HALTED ICE GONDOLA
STUNTED MEN AND WOMEN SQUABBLE. THEY GRAB WAFERS BETWEEN WHICH ARE WEDGED
LUMPS OF CORAL AND COPPER SNOW. SUCKING, THEY SCATTER SLOWLY. CHILDREN.
THE SWANCOMB OF THE GONDOLA, HIGHREARED, FORGES ON THROUGH THE MURK,
WHITE AND BLUE UNDER A LIGHTHOUSE. WHISTLES CALL AND ANSWER.
THE CALLS Wait, my love, and I'll be with you.
THE ANSWERS Round behind the stable.
A DEAFMUTE IDIOT WITH GOGGLE EYES, HIS SHAPELESS MOUTH DRIBBLING, JERKS
PAST, SHAKEN IN SAINT VITUS' DANCE. A CHAIN OF CHILDREN 'S HANDS
IMPRISONS HIM.
THE CHILDREN Kithogue Salute
THE IDIOT LIFTS A PALSIED LEFT ARM AND GURGLES Grhahute
THE CHILDREN Where's the great light?
THE IDIOT GOBBING Ghaghahest.
THEY RELEASE HIM. HE JERKS ON. A PIGMY WOMAN SWINGS ON A ROPE SLUNG
BETWEEN TWO RAILINGS, COUNTING. A FORM SPRAWLED AGAINST A DUSTBIN AND
MUFFLED BY ITS ARM AND HAT SNORES, GROANS, GRINDING GROWLING TEETH, AND
SNORES AGAIN. ON A STEP A GNOME TOTTING AMONG A RUBBISHTIP CROUCHES TO
SHOULDER A SACK OF RAGS AND BONES. A CRONE STANDING BY WITH A SMOKY
OILLAMP RAMS HER LAST BOTTLE IN THE MAW OF HIS SACK. HE HEAVES HIS BOOTY,
TUGS ASKEW HIS PEAKED CAP AND HOBBLES OFF MUTELY. THE CRONE MAKES BACK
FOR HER LAIR, SWAYING HER LAMP. A BANDY CHILD, ASQUAT ON THE DOORSTEP
WITH A PAPER SHUTTLECOCK, CRAWLS SIDLING AFTER HER IN SPURTS, CLUTCHES
HER SKIRT, SCRAMBLES UP. A DRUNKEN NAVVY GRIPS WITH BOTH HANDS THE
RAILINGS OF AN AREA, LURCHING HEAVILY. AT A COMER TWO NIGHT WATCH IN
SHOULDERCAPES, THEIR HANDS UPON THEIR STAFFHOLSTERS, LOOM TALL. A PLATE
CRASHES A WOMAN SCREAMS A CHILD WAILS. OATHS OF A MAN ROAR, MUTTER,
CEASE. FIGURES WANDER, LURK, PEER FROM WARRENS. IN A ROOM LIT BY A CANDLE
STUCK IN A BOTTLENECK A SLUT COMBS OUT THE TATTS FROM THE HAIR OF A
SCROFULOUS CHILD. CISSY CAFFREY'S VOICE, STILL YOUNG, SINGS SHRILL FROM A
LANE.
CISSY CAFFREY
I GAVE IT TO MOLLY
BECAUSE SHE WAS JOLLY,
THE LEG OF THE DUCK,
THE LEG OF THE DUCK.
PRIVATE CARR AND PRIVATE COMPTON, SWAGGERSTICKS TIGHT IN THEIR OXTERS,
AS THEY MARCH UNSTEADILY RIGHTABOUTFACE AND BURST TOGETHER FROM THEIR
MOUTHS A VOLLEYED FART. LAUGHTER OF MEN FROM THE LANE. A HOARSE VIRAGO
RETORTS.
THE VIRAGO Signs on you, hairy arse. More power the Cavan girl.
CISSY CAFFREY More luck to me. Cavan, Cootehill and Belturbet. SHE
SINGS
I GAVE IT TO NELLY
TO STICK IN HER BELLY,
THE LEG OF THE DUCK,
THE LEG OF THE DUCK.
PRIVATE CARR AND PRIVATE COMPTON TURN AND COUNTERRETORT, THEIR TUNICS
BLOODBRIGHT IN A LAMPGLOW, BLACK SOCKETS OF CAPS ON THEIR BLOND CROPPED
POLLS. STEPHEN DEDALUS AND LYNCH PASS THROUGH THE CROWD CLOSE TO THE
REDCOATS.
PRIVATE COMPTON JERKS HIS FINGER Way for the parson.
PRIVATE CARR TURNS AND CALLS What ho, parson
CISSY CAFFREY HER VOICE SOARING HIGHER
SHE HAS IT, SHE GOT IT,
WHEREVER SHE PUT IT,
THE LEG OF THE DUCK.
STEPHEN, FLOURISHING THE ASHPLANT IN HIS LEFT HAND, CHANTS WITH JOY THE
INTROIT FOR PASCHAL TIME. LYNCH, HIS JOCKEYCAP LOW ON HIS BROW, ATTENDS
HIM, A SNEER OF DISCONTENT WRINKLING HIS FACE.
STEPHEN VIDI AQUAM EGREDIENTEM DE TEMPLO A LATERE DEXTRO. ALLELUIA.
THE FAMISHED SNAGGLETUSKS OF AN ELDERLY BAWD PROTRUDE FROM A DOORWAY.
THE BAWD HER VOICE WHISPERING HUSKILY Sst Come here till I tell you.
Maidenhead inside. Sst
STEPHEN ALTIUS ALIQUANTULUM ET OMNES AD QUOS PERVENIT AQUA ISTA.
THE BAWD SPITS IN THEIR TRAIL HER JET OF VENOM Trinity medicals.
Fallopian tube. All prick and no pence.
EDY BOARDMAN, SNIFFLING, CROUCHED WITH BERTHA SUPPLE, DRAWS HER SHAWL
ACROSS HER NOSTRILS.
EDY BOARDMAN BICKERING And says the one I seen you up Faithful place
with your squarepusher, the greaser off the railway, in his cometobed
hat. Did you, says I. That's not for you to say, says I. You never seen
me in the mantrap with a married highlander, says I. The likes of her
Stag that one is Stubborn as a mule And her walking with two fellows
the one time, Kilbride, the enginedriver, and lancecorporal Oliphant.
STEPHEN TRIUMPHALITER SALVI FACTI SUNT.
HE FLOURISHES HIS ASHPLANT, SHIVERING THE LAMP IMAGE, SHATTERING LIGHT
OVER THE WORLD. A LIVER AND WHITE SPANIEL ON THE PROWL SLINKS AFTER HIM,
GROWLING. LYNCH SCARES IT WITH A KICK.
LYNCH So that?
STEPHEN LOOKS BEHIND So that gesture, not music not odour, would be a
universal language, the gift of tongues rendering visible not the lay
sense but the first entelechy, the structural rhythm.
LYNCH Pornosophical philotheology. Metaphysics in Mecklenburgh street
STEPHEN We have shrewridden Shakespeare and henpecked Socrates. Even the
allwisest Stagyrite was bitted, bridled and mounted by a light of love.
LYNCH Ba
STEPHEN Anyway, who wants two gestures to illustrate a loaf and a jug?
This movement illustrates the loaf and jug of bread or wine in Omar. Hold
my stick.
LYNCH Damn your yellow stick. Where are we going?
STEPHEN Lecherous lynx, TO LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI, Georgina Johnson,
AD DEAM QUI LAETIFICAT IUVENTUTEM MEAM.
STEPHEN THRUSTS THE ASHPLANT ON HIM AND SLOWLY HOLDS OUT HIS HANDS, HIS
HEAD GOING BACK TILL BOTH HANDS ARE A SPAN FROM HIS BREAST, DOWN TURNED,
IN PLANES INTERSECTING, THE FINGERS ABOUT TO PART, THE LEFT BEING
HIGHER.
LYNCH Which is the jug of bread? It skills not. That or the customhouse.
Illustrate thou. Here take your crutch and walk.
THEY PASS. TOMMY CAFFREY SCRAMBLES TO A GASLAMP AND, CLASPING, CLIMBS IN
SPASMS. FROM THE TOP SPUR HE SLIDES DOWN. JACKY CAFFREY CLASPS TO CLIMB.
THE NAVVY LURCHES AGAINST THE LAMP. THE TWINS SCUTTLE OFF IN THE DARK.
THE NAVVY, SWAYING, PRESSES A FOREFINGER AGAINST A WING OF HIS NOSE AND
EJECTS FROM THE FARTHER NOSTRIL A LONG LIQUID JET OF SNOT. SHOULDERING
THE LAMP HE STAGGERS AWAY THROUGH THE CROWD WITH HIS FLARING CRESSET.
SNAKES OF RIVER FOG CREEP SLOWLY. FROM DRAINS, CLEFTS, CESSPOOLS, MIDDENS
ARISE ON ALL SIDES STAGNANT FUMES. A GLOW LEAPS IN THE SOUTH BEYOND THE
SEAWARD REACHES OF THE RIVER. THE NAVVY, STAGGERING FORWARD, CLEAVES THE
CROWD AND LURCHES TOWARDS THE TRAMSIDING ON THE FARTHER SIDE UNDER THE
RAILWAY BRIDGE BLOOM APPEARS, FLUSHED, PANTING, CRAMMING BREAD AND
CHOCOLATE INTO A SIDEPOCKET. FROM GILLEN'S HAIRDRESSER'S WINDOW A
COMPOSITE PORTRAIT SHOWS HIM GALLANT NELSON'S IMAGE. A CONCAVE MIRROR AT
THE SIDE PRESENTS TO HIM LOVELORN LONGLOST LUGUBRU BOOLOOHOOM. GRAVE
GLADSTONE SEES HIM LEVEL, BLOOM FOR BLOOM. HE PASSES, STRUCK BY THE STARE
OF TRUCULENT WELLINGTON, BUT IN THE CONVEX MIRROR GRIN UNSTRUCK THE
BONHAM EYES AND FATCHUCK CHEEKCHOPS OF JOLLYPOLDY THE RIXDIX DOLDY.
AT ANTONIO PABAIOTTI'S DOOR BLOOM HALTS, SWEATED UNDER THE BRIGHT
ARCLAMP. HE DISAPPEARS. IN A MOMENT HE REAPPEARS AND HURRIES ON.
BLOOM Fish and taters. N. g. Ah
HE DISAPPEARS INTO OLHAUSEN'S, THE PORKBUTCHER'S, UNDER THE DOWNCOMING
ROLLSHUTTER. A FEW MOMENTS LATER HE EMERGES FROM UNDER THE SHUTTER,
PUFFING POLDY, BLOWING BLOOHOOM. IN EACH HAND HE HOLDS A PARCEL, ONE
CONTAINING A LUKEWARM PIG'S CRUBEEN, THE OTHER A COLD SHEEP'S TROTTER,
SPRINKLED WITH WHOLEPEPPER. HE GASPS, STANDING UPRIGHT. THEN BENDING TO
ONE SIDE HE PRESSES A PARCEL AGAINST HIS RIBS AND GROANS.
BLOOM Stitch in my side. Why did I run?
HE TAKES BREATH WITH CARE AND GOES FORWARD SLOWLY TOWARDS THE LAMPSET
SIDING. THE GLOW LEAPS AGAIN.
BLOOM What is that? A flasher? Searchlight.
HE STANDS AT CORMACK'S CORNER, WATCHING
BLOOM AURORA BOREALIS or a steel foundry? Ah, the brigade, of course.
South side anyhow. Big blaze. Might be his house. Beggar's bush. We're
safe. HE HUMS CHEERFULLY London's burning, London's burning On fire,
on fire HE CATCHES SIGHT OF THE NAVVY LURCHING THROUGH THE CROWD AT THE
FARTHER SIDE OF TALBOT STREET I'll miss him. Run. Quick. Better cross
here.
HE DARTS TO CROSS THE ROAD. URCHINS SHOUT.
THE URCHINS Mind out, mister TWO CYCLISTS, WITH LIGHTED PAPER LANTERNS
ASWING, SWIM BY HIM, GRAZING HIM, THEIR BELLS RATTLING
THE BELLS Haltyaltyaltyall.
BLOOM HALTS ERECT, STUNG BY A SPASM Ow
HE LOOKS ROUND, DARTS FORWARD SUDDENLY. THROUGH RISING FOG A DRAGON
SANDSTREWER, TRAVELLING AT CAUTION, SLEWS HEAVILY DOWN UPON HIM, ITS HUGE
RED HEADLIGHT WINKING, ITS TROLLEY HISSING ON THE WIRE. THE MOTORMAN
BANGS HIS FOOTGONG.
THE GONG Bang Bang Bla Bak Blud Bugg Bloo.
THE BRAKE CRACKS VIOLENTLY. BLOOM, RAISING A POLICEMAN'S WHITEGLOVED
HAND, BLUNDERS STIFFLEGGED OUT OF THE TRACK. THE MOTORMAN, THROWN
FORWARD, PUGNOSED, ON THE GUIDEWHEEL, YELLS AS HE SLIDES PAST OVER CHAINS
AND KEYS.
THE MOTORMAN Hey, shitbreeches, are you doing the hat trick?
BLOOM BLOOM TRICKLEAPS TO THE CURBSTONE AND HALTS AGAIN. HE BRUSHES A
MUDFLAKE FROM HIS CHEEK WITH A PARCELLED HAND. No thoroughfare. Close
shave that but cured the stitch. Must take up Sandow's exercises again.
On the hands down. Insure against street accident too. The Providential.
HE FEELS HIS TROUSER POCKET Poor mamma's panacea. Heel easily catch in
track or bootlace in a cog. Day the wheel of the black Maria peeled off
my shoe at Leonard's corner. Third time is the charm. Shoe trick.
Insolent driver. I ought to report him. Tension makes them nervous. Might
be the fellow balked me this morning with that horsey woman. Same style
of beauty. Quick of him all the same. The stiff walk. True word spoken in
jest. That awful cramp in Lad lane. Something poisonous I ate. Emblem of
luck. Why? Probably lost cattle. Mark of the beast. HE CLOSES HIS EYES
AN INSTANT Bit light in the head. Monthly or effect of the other.
Brainfogfag. That tired feeling. Too much for me now. Ow
A SINISTER FIGURE LEANS ON PLAITED LEGS AGAINST O'BEIRNE'S WALL, A
VISAGE UNKNOWN, INJECTED WITH DARK MERCURY. FROM UNDER A WIDELEAVED
SOMBRERO THE FIGURE REGARDS HIM WITH EVIL EYE.
BLOOM BUENAS NOCHES, SENORITA BLANCA. QUE CALLE ES ESTA?
THE FIGURE IMPASSIVE, RAISES A SIGNAL ARM Password. SRAID MABBOT.
BLOOM Haha. MERCI. Esperanto. SLAN LEATH. HE MUTTERS Gaelic league
spy, sent by that fireeater.
HE STEPS FORWARD. A SACKSHOULDERED RAGMAN BARS HIS PATH. HE STEPS LEFT,
RAGSACKMAN LEFT.
BLOOM I beg. HE SWERVES, SIDLES, STEPASIDE, SLIPS PAST AND ON.
BLOOM Keep to the right, right, right. If there is a signpost planted by
the Touring Club at Stepaside who procured that public boon? I who lost
my way and contributed to the columns of the IRISH CYCLIST the letter
headed IN DARKEST STEPASIDE. Keep, keep, keep to the right. Rags and
bones at midnight. A fence more likely. First place murderer makes for.
Wash off his sins of the world.
JACKY CAFFREY, HUNTED BY TOMMY CAFFREY, RUNS FULL TILT AGAINST BLOOM.
BLOOM O
SHOCKED, ON WEAK HAMS, HE HALTS. TOMMY AND JACKY VANISH THERE, THERE.
BLOOM PATS WITH PARCELLED HANDS WATCH FOBPOCKET, BOOKPOCKET, PURSEPOKET,
SWEETS OF SIN, POTATO SOAP.
BLOOM Beware of pickpockets. Old thieves' dodge. Collide. Then snatch
your purse.
THE RETRIEVER APPROACHES SNIFFING, NOSE TO THE GROUND. A SPRAWLED FORM
SNEEZES. A STOOPED BEARDED FIGURE APPEARS GARBED IN THE LONG CAFTAN OF AN
ELDER IN ZION AND A SMOKINGCAP WITH MAGENTA TASSELS. HORNED SPECTACLES
HANG DOWN AT THE WINGS OF THE NOSE. YELLOW POISON STREAKS ARE ON THE
DRAWN FACE.
RUDOLPH Second halfcrown waste money today. I told you not go with
drunken goy ever. So you catch no money.
BLOOM HIDES THE CRUBEEN AND TROTTER BEHIND HIS BACK AND, CRESTFALLEN,
FEELS WARM AND COLD FEETMEAT JA, ICH WEISS, PAPACHI.
RUDOLPH What you making down this place? Have you no soul? WITH FEEBLE
VULTURE TALONS HE FEELS THE SILENT FACE OF BLOOM Are you not my son
Leopold, the grandson of Leopold? Are you not my dear son Leopold who
left the house of his father and left the god of his fathers Abraham and
Jacob?
BLOOM WITH PRECAUTION I suppose so, father. Mosenthal. All that's left
of him.
RUDOLPH SEVERELY One night they bring you home drunk as dog after
spend your good money. What you call them running chaps?
BLOOM IN YOUTH'S SMART BLUE OXFORD SUIT WITH WHITE VESTSLIPS,
NARROWSHOULDERED, IN BROWN ALPINE HAT, WEARING GENT'S STERLING SILVER
WATERBURY KEYLESS WATCH AND DOUBLE CURB ALBERT WITH SEAL ATTACHED, ONE
SIDE OF HIM COATED WITH STIFFENING MUD Harriers, father. Only that once.
RUDOLPH Once Mud head to foot. Cut your hand open. Lockjaw. They make
you kaputt, Leopoldleben. You watch them chaps.
BLOOM WEAKLY They challenged me to a sprint. It was muddy. I slipped.
RUDOLPH WITH CONTEMPT GOIM NACHEZ Nice spectacles for your poor
mother
BLOOM Mamma
ELLEN BLOOM IN PANTOMIME DAME'S STRINGED MOBCAP, WIDOW TWANKEY'S
CRINOLINE AND BUSTLE, BLOUSE WITH MUTTONLEG SLEEVES BUTTONED BEHIND, GREY
MITTENS AND CAMEO BROOCH, HER PLAITED HAIR IN A CRISPINE NET, APPEARS
OVER THE STAIRCASE BANISTERS, A SLANTED CANDLESTICK IN HER HAND, AND
CRIES OUT IN SHRILL ALARM O blessed Redeemer, what have they done to
him My smelling salts SHE HAULS UP A REEF OF SKIRT AND RANSACKS THE
POUCH OF HER STRIPED BLAY PETTICOAT. A PHIAL, AN AGNUS DEI, A SHRIVELLED
POTATO AND A CELLULOID DOLL FALL OUT Sacred Heart of Mary, where were
you at all at all?
BLOOM, MUMBLING, HIS EYES DOWNCAST, BEGINS TO BESTOW HIS PARCELS IN HIS
FILLED POCKETS BUT DESISTS, MUTTERING.
A VOICE SHARPLY Poldy
BLOOM Who? HE DUCKS AND WARDS OFF A BLOW CLUMSILY At your service.
HE LOOKS UP. BESIDE HER MIRAGE OF DATEPALMS A HANDSOME WOMAN IN TURKISH
COSTUME STANDS BEFORE HIM. OPULENT CURVES FILL OUT HER SCARLET TROUSERS
AND JACKET, SLASHED WITH GOLD. A WIDE YELLOW CUMMERBUND GIRDLES HER. A
WHITE YASHMAK, VIOLET IN THE NIGHT, COVERS HER FACE, LEAVING FREE ONLY
HER LARGE DARK EYES AND RAVEN HAIR.
BLOOM Molly
MARION Welly? Mrs Marion from this out, my dear man, when you speak to
me. SATIRICALLY Has poor little hubby cold feet waiting so long?
BLOOM SHIFTS FROM FOOT TO FOOT No, no. Not the least little bit.
HE BREATHES IN DEEP AGITATION, SWALLOWING GULPS OF AIR, QUESTIONS,
HOPES, CRUBEENS FOR HER SUPPER, THINGS TO TELL HER, EXCUSE, DESIRE,
SPELLBOUND. A COIN GLEAMS ON HER FOREHEAD. ON HER FEET ARE JEWELLED
TOERINGS. HER ANKLES ARE LINKED BY A SLENDER FETTERCHAIN. BESIDE HER A
CAMEL, HOODED WITH A TURRETING TURBAN, WAITS. A SILK LADDER OF
INNUMERABLE RUNGS CLIMBS TO HIS BOBBING HOWDAH. HE AMBLES NEAR WITH
DISGRUNTLED HINDQUARTERS. FIERCELY SHE SLAPS HIS HAUNCH, HER GOLDCURB
WRISTBANGLES ANGRILING, SCOLDING HIM IN MOORISH.
MARION Nebrakada Femininum
THE CAMEL, LIFTING A FORELEG, PLUCKS FROM A TREE A LARGE MANGO FRUIT,
OFFERS IT TO HIS MISTRESS, BLINKING, IN HIS CLOVEN HOOF, THEN DROOPS HIS
HEAD AND, GRUNTING, WITH UPLIFTED NECK, FUMBLES TO KNEEL. BLOOM STOOPS
HIS BACK FOR LEAPFROG.
BLOOM I can give you ... I mean as your business menagerer ... Mrs
Marion ... if you ...
MARION So you notice some change? HER HANDS PASSING SLOWLY OVER HER
TRINKETED STOMACHER, A SLOW FRIENDLY MOCKERY IN HER EYES O Poldy, Poldy,
you are a poor old stick in the mud Go and see life. See the wide world.
BLOOM I was just going back for that lotion whitewax, orangeflower
water. Shop closes early on Thursday. But the first thing in the morning.
HE PATS DIVERS POCKETS This moving kidney. Ah
HE POINTS TO THE SOUTH, THEN TO THE EAST. A CAKE OF NEW CLEAN LEMON SOAP
ARISES, DIFFUSING LIGHT AND PERFUME.
THE SOAP
We're a capital couple are Bloom and I.
He brightens the earth. I polish the sky.
THE FRECKLED FACE OF SWENY, THE DRUGGIST, APPEARS IN THE DISC OF THE
SOAPSUN.
SWENY Three and a penny, please.
BLOOM Yes. For my wife. Mrs Marion. Special recipe.
MARION SOFTLY Poldy
BLOOM Yes, ma'am?
MARION TI TREMA UN POCO IL CUORE?
IN DISDAIN SHE SAUNTERS AWAY, PLUMP AS A PAMPERED POUTER PIGEON, HUMMING
THE DUET FROM Don Giovanni.
BLOOM Are you sure about that VOGLIO? I mean the pronunciati ...
HE FOLLOWS, FOLLOWED BY THE SNIFFING TERRIER. THE ELDERLY BAWD SEIZES
HIS SLEEVE, THE BRISTLES OF HER CHINMOLE GLITTERING.
THE BAWD Ten shillings a maidenhead. Fresh thing was never touched.
Fifteen. There's noone in it only her old father that's dead drunk.
SHE POINTS. IN THE GAP OF HER DARK DEN FURTIVE, RAINBEDRAGGLED, BRIDIE
KELLY STANDS.
BRIDIE Hatch street. Any good in your mind?
WITH A SQUEAK SHE FLAPS HER BAT SHAWL AND RUNS. A BURLY ROUGH PURSUES
WITH BOOTED STRIDES. HE STUMBLES ON THE STEPS, RECOVERS, PLUNGES INTO
GLOOM. WEAK SQUEAKS OF LAUGHTER ARE HEARD, WEAKER.
THE BAWD HER WOLFEYES SHINING He's getting his pleasure. You won't get
a virgin in the flash houses. Ten shillings. Don't be all night before
the polis in plain clothes sees us. Sixtyseven is a bitch.
LEERING, GERTY MACDOWELL LIMPS FORWARD. SHE DRAWS FROM BEHIND, OGLING,
AND SHOWS COYLY HER BLOODIED CLOUT.
GERTY With all my worldly goods I thee and thou. SHE MURMURS You did
that. I hate you.
BLOOM I? When? You're dreaming. I never saw you.
THE BAWD Leave the gentleman alone, you cheat. Writing the gentleman
false letters. Streetwalking and soliciting. Better for your mother take
the strap to you at the bedpost, hussy like you.
GERTY TO BLOOM When you saw all the secrets of my bottom drawer. SHE
PAWS HIS SLEEVE, SLOBBERING Dirty married man I love you for doing that
to me.
SHE GLIDES AWAY CROOKEDLY. MRS BREEN IN MAN'S FRIEZE OVERCOAT WITH LOOSE
BELLOWS POCKETS, STANDS IN THE CAUSEWAY, HER ROGUISH EYES WIDEOPEN,
SMILING IN ALL HER HERBIVOROUS BUCKTEETH.
MRS BREEN Mr ...
BLOOM COUGHS GRAVELY Madam, when we last had this pleasure by letter
dated the sixteenth instant ...
MRS BREEN Mr Bloom You down here in the haunts of sin I caught you
nicely Scamp
BLOOM HURRIEDLY Not so loud my name. Whatever do you think of me?
Don't give me away. Walls have ears. How do you do? It's ages since I.
You're looking splendid. Absolutely it. Seasonable weather we are having
this time of year. Black refracts heat. Short cut home here. Interesting
quarter. Rescue of fallen women. Magdalen asylum. I am the secretary ...
MRS BREEN HOLDS UP A FINGER Now, don't tell a big fib I know somebody
won't like that. O just wait till I see Molly SLILY Account for
yourself this very sminute or woe betide you
BLOOM LOOKS BEHIND She often said she'd like to visit. Slumming. The
exotic, you see. Negro servants in livery too if she had money. Othello
black brute. Eugene Stratton. Even the bones and cornerman at the
Livermore christies. Bohee brothers. Sweep for that matter.
TOM AND SAM BOHEE, COLOURED COONS IN WHITE DUCK SUITS, SCARLET SOCKS,
UPSTARCHED SAMBO CHOKERS AND LARGE SCARLET ASTERS IN THEIR BUTTONHOLES,
LEAP OUT. EACH HAS HIS BANJO SLUNG. THEIR PALER SMALLER NEGROID HANDS
JINGLE THE TWINGTWANG WIRES. FLASHING WHITE KAFFIR EYES AND TUSKS THEY
RATTLE THROUGH A BREAKDOWN IN CLUMSY CLOGS, TWINGING, SINGING, BACK TO
BACK, TOE HEEL, HEEL TOE, WITH SMACKFATCLACKING NIGGER LIPS.
TOM AND SAM
There's someone in the house with Dina
There's someone in the house, I know,
There's someone in the house with Dina
Playing on the old banjo.
THEY WHISK BLACK MASKS FROM RAW BABBY FACES THEN, CHUCKLING, CHORTLING,
TRUMMING, TWANGING, THEY DIDDLE DIDDLE CAKEWALK DANCE AWAY.
BLOOM WITH A SOUR TENDERISH SMILE A little frivol, shall we, if you
are so inclined? Would you like me perhaps to embrace you just for a
fraction of a second?
MRS BREEN SCREAMS GAILY O, you ruck You ought to see yourself
BLOOM For old sake' sake. I only meant a square party, a mixed marriage
mingling of our different little conjugials. You know I had a soft corner
for you. GLOOMILY 'Twas I sent you that valentine of the dear gazelle.
MRS BREEN Glory Alice, you do look a holy show Killing simply. SHE
PUTS OUT HER HAND INQUISITIVELY What are you hiding behind your back?
Tell us, there's a dear.
BLOOM SEIZES HER WRIST WITH HIS FREE HAND Josie Powell that was,
prettiest deb in Dublin. How time flies by Do you remember, harking back
in a retrospective arrangement, Old Christmas night, Georgina Simpson's
housewarming while they were playing the Irving Bishop game, finding the
pin blindfold and thoughtreading? Subject, what is in this snuffbox?
MRS BREEN You were the lion of the night with your seriocomic recitation
and you looked the part. You were always a favourite with the ladies.
BLOOM SQUIRE OF DAMES, IN DINNER JACKET WITH WATEREDSILK FACINGS, BLUE
MASONIC BADGE IN HIS BUTTONHOLE, BLACK BOW AND MOTHEROFPEARL STUDS, A
PRISMATIC CHAMPAGNE GLASS TILTED IN HIS HAND Ladies and gentlemen, I
give you Ireland, home and beauty.
MRS BREEN The dear dead days beyond recall. Love's old sweet song.
BLOOM MEANINGFULLY DROPPING HIS VOICE I confess I'm teapot with
curiosity to find out whether some person's something is a little teapot
at present.
MRS BREEN GUSHINGLY Tremendously teapot London's teapot and I'm
simply teapot all over me SHE RUBS SIDES WITH HIM After the parlour
mystery games and the crackers from the tree we sat on the staircase
ottoman. Under the mistletoe. Two is company.
BLOOM WEARING A PURPLE NAPOLEON HAT WITH AN AMBER HALFMOON, HIS FINGERS
AND THUMB PASSING SLOWLY DOWN TO HER SOFT MOIST MEATY PALM WHICH SHE
SURRENDERS GENTLY The witching hour of night. I took the splinter out of
this hand, carefully, slowly. TENDERLY, AS HE SLIPS ON HER FINGER A RUBY
RING LA CI DAREM LA MANO.
MRS BREEN IN A ONEPIECE EVENING FROCK EXECUTED IN MOONLIGHT BLUE, A
TINSEL SYLPH'S DIADEM ON HER BROW WITH HER DANCECARD FALLEN BESIDE HER
MOONBLUE SATIN SLIPPER, CURVES HER PALM SOFTLY, BREATHING QUICKLY VOGLIO
E NON. You're hot You're scalding The left hand nearest the heart.
BLOOM When you made your present choice they said it was beauty and the
beast. I can never forgive you for that. HIS CLENCHED FIST AT HIS BROW
Think what it means. All you meant to me then. HOARSELY Woman, it's
breaking me
DENIS BREEN, WHITETALLHATTED, WITH WISDOM HELY'S SANDWICH BOARDS,
SHUFFLES PAST THEM IN CARPET SLIPPERS, HIS DULL BEARD THRUST OUT,
MUTTERING TO RIGHT AND LEFT. LITTLE ALF BERGAN, CLOAKED IN THE PALL OF
THE ACE OF SPADES, DOGS HIM TO LEFT AND RIGHT, DOUBLED IN LAUGHTER.
ALF BERGAN POINTS JEERING AT THE SANDWICHBOARDS U. p Up.
MRS BREEN TO BLOOM High jinks below stairs. SHE GIVES HIM THE GLAD
EYE Why didn't you kiss the spot to make it well? You wanted to.
BLOOM SHOCKED Molly's best friend Could you?
MRS BREEN HER PULPY TONGUE BETWEEN HER LIPS, OFFERS A PIGEON KISS
Hnhn. The answer is a lemon. Have you a little present for me there?
BLOOM OFFHANDEDLY Kosher. A snack for supper. The home without potted
meat is incomplete. I was at LEAH. Mrs Bandmann Palmer. Trenchant
exponent of Shakespeare. Unfortunately threw away the programme. Rattling
good place round there for pigs' feet. Feel.
RICHIE GOULDING, THREE LADIES' HATS PINNED ON HIS HEAD, APPEARS WEIGHTED
TO ONE SIDE BY THE BLACK LEGAL BAG OF COLLIS AND WARD ON WHICH A SKULL
AND CROSSBONES ARE PAINTED IN WHITE LIMEWASH. HE OPENS IT AND SHOWS IT
FULL OF POLONIES, KIPPERED HERRINGS, FINDON HADDIES AND TIGHTPACKED
PILLS.
RICHIE Best value in Dub.
BALD PAT, BOTHERED BEETLE, STANDS ON THE CURBSTONE, FOLDING HIS NAPKIN,
WAITING TO WAIT.
PAT ADVANCES WITH A TILTED DISH OF SPILLSPILLING GRAVY Steak and
kidney. Bottle of lager. Hee hee hee. Wait till I wait.
RICHIE Goodgod. Inev erate inall ...
WITH HANGING HEAD HE MARCHES DOGGEDLY FORWARD. THE NAVVY, LURCHING BY,
GORES HIM WITH HIS FLAMING PRONGHORN.
RICHIE WITH A CRY OF PAIN, HIS HAND TO HIS BACK Ah Bright's Lights
BLOOM POINTS TO THE NAVVY A spy. Don't attract attention. I hate
stupid crowds. I am not on pleasure bent. I am in a grave predicament.
MRS BREEN Humbugging and deluthering as per usual with your cock and
bull story.
BLOOM I want to tell you a little secret about how I came to be here.
But you must never tell. Not even Molly. I have a most particular reason.
MRS BREEN ALL AGOG O, not for worlds.
BLOOM Let's walk on. Shall us?
MRS BREEN Let's.
THE BAWD MAKES AN UNHEEDED SIGN. BLOOM WALKS ON WITH MRS BREEN. THE
TERRIER FOLLOWS, WHINING PITEOUSLY, WAGGING HIS TAIL.
THE BAWD Jewman's melt
BLOOM IN AN OATMEAL SPORTING SUIT, A SPRIG OF WOODBINE IN THE LAPEL,
TONY BUFF SHIRT, SHEPHERD'S PLAID SAINT ANDREW'S CROSS SCARFTIE, WHITE
SPATS, FAWN DUSTCOAT ON HIS ARM, TAWNY RED BROGUES, FIELDGLASSES IN
BANDOLIER AND A GREY BILLYCOCK HAT Do you remember a long long time,
years and years ago, just after Milly, Marionette we called her, was
weaned when we all went together to Fairyhouse races, was it?
MRS BREEN IN SMART SAXE TAILORMADE, WHITE VELOURS HAT AND SPIDER VEIL
Leopardstown.
BLOOM I mean, Leopardstown. And Molly won seven shillings on a three
year old named Nevertell and coming home along by Foxrock in that old
fiveseater shanderadan of a waggonette you were in your heyday then and
you had on that new hat of white velours with a surround of molefur that
Mrs Hayes advised you to buy because it was marked down to nineteen and
eleven, a bit of wire and an old rag of velveteen, and I'll lay you what
you like she did it on purpose ...
MRS BREEN She did, of course, the cat Don't tell me Nice adviser
BLOOM Because it didn't suit you one quarter as well as the other ducky
little tammy toque with the bird of paradise wing in it that I admired on
you and you honestly looked just too fetching in it though it was a pity
to kill it, you cruel naughty creature, little mite of a thing with a
heart the size of a fullstop.
MRS BREEN SQUEEZES HIS ARM, SIMPERS Naughty cruel I was
BLOOM LOW, SECRETLY, EVER MORE RAPIDLY And Molly was eating a sandwich
of spiced beef out of Mrs Joe Gallaher's lunch basket. Frankly, though
she had her advisers or admirers, I never cared much for her style. She
was ...
MRS BREEN Too ...
BLOOM Yes. And Molly was laughing because Rogers and Maggot O'Reilly
were mimicking a cock as we passed a farmhouse and Marcus Tertius Moses,
the tea merchant, drove past us in a gig with his daughter, Dancer Moses
was her name, and the poodle in her lap bridled up and you asked me if I
ever heard or read or knew or came across ...
MRS BREEN EAGERLY Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
SHE FADES FROM HIS SIDE. FOLLOWED BY THE WHINING DOG HE WALKS ON TOWARDS
HELLSGATES. IN AN ARCHWAY A STANDING WOMAN, BENT FORWARD, HER FEET APART,
PISSES COWILY. OUTSIDE A SHUTTERED PUB A BUNCH OF LOITERERS LISTEN TO A
TALE WHICH THEIR BROKENSNOUTED GAFFER RASPS OUT WITH RAUCOUS HUMOUR. AN
ARMLESS PAIR OF THEM FLOP WRESTLING, GROWLING, IN MAIMED SODDEN
PLAYFIGHT.
THE GAFFER CROUCHES, HIS VOICE TWISTED IN HIS SNOUT And when Cairns
came down from the scaffolding in Beaver street what was he after doing
it into only into the bucket of porter that was there waiting on the
shavings for Derwan's plasterers.
THE LOITERERS GUFFAW WITH CLEFT PALATES O jays
THEIR PAINTSPECKLED HATS WAG. SPATTERED WITH SIZE AND LIME OF THEIR
LODGES THEY FRISK LIMBLESSLY ABOUT HIM.
BLOOM Coincidence too. They think it funny. Anything but that. Broad
daylight. Trying to walk. Lucky no woman.
THE LOITERERS Jays, that's a good one. Glauber salts. O jays, into the
men's porter.
BLOOM PASSES. CHEAP WHORES, SINGLY, COUPLED, SHAWLED, DISHEVELLED, CALL
FROM LANES, DOORS, CORNERS.
THE WHORES
Are you going far, queer fellow?
How's your middle leg?
Got a match on you?
Eh, come here till I stiffen it for you.
HE PLODGES THROUGH THEIR SUMP TOWARDS THE LIGHTED STREET BEYOND. FROM A
BULGE OF WINDOW CURTAINS A GRAMOPHONE REARS A BATTERED BRAZEN TRUNK. IN
THE SHADOW A SHEBEENKEEPER HAGGLES WITH THE NAVVY AND THE TWO REDCOATS.
THE NAVVY BELCHING Where's the bloody house?
THE SHEBEENKEEPER Purdon street. Shilling a bottle of stout. Respectable
woman.
THE NAVVY GRIPPING THE TWO REDCOATS, STAGGERS FORWARD WITH THEM Come
on, you British army
PRIVATE CARR BEHIND HIS BACK He aint half balmy.
PRIVATE COMPTON LAUGHS What ho
PRIVATE CARR TO THE NAVVY Portobello barracks canteen. You ask for
Carr. Just Carr.
THE NAVVY SHOUTS
We are the boys. Of Wexford.
PRIVATE COMPTON Say What price the sergeantmajor?
PRIVATE CARR Bennett? He's my pal. I love old Bennett.
THE NAVVY SHOUTS
The galling chain.
And free our native land.
HE STAGGERS FORWARD, DRAGGING THEM WITH HIM. BLOOM STOPS, AT FAULT. THE
DOG APPROACHES, HIS TONGUE OUTLOLLING, PANTING
BLOOM Wildgoose chase this. Disorderly houses. Lord knows where they are
gone. Drunks cover distance double quick. Nice mixup. Scene at Westland
row. Then jump in first class with third ticket. Then too far. Train with
engine behind. Might have taken me to Malahide or a siding for the night
or collision. Second drink does it. Once is a dose. What am I following
him for? Still, he's the best of that lot. If I hadn't heard about Mrs
Beaufoy Purefoy I wouldn't have gone and wouldn't have met. Kismet. He'll
lose that cash. Relieving office here. Good biz for cheapjacks, organs.
What do ye lack? Soon got, soon gone. Might have lost my life too with
that mangongwheeltracktrolleyglarejuggernaut only for presence of mind.
Can't always save you, though. If I had passed Truelock's window that day
two minutes later would have been shot. Absence of body. Still if bullet
only went through my coat get damages for shock, five hundred pounds.
What was he? Kildare street club toff. God help his gamekeeper.
HE GAZES AHEAD, READING ON THE WALL A SCRAWLED CHALK LEGEND Wet Dream
AND A PHALLIC DESIGN. Odd Molly drawing on the frosted carriagepane at
Kingstown. What's that like? GAUDY DOLLWOMEN LOLL IN THE LIGHTED
DOORWAYS, IN WINDOW EMBRASURES, SMOKING BIRDSEYE CIGARETTES. THE ODOUR OF
THE SICKSWEET WEED FLOATS TOWARDS HIM IN SLOW ROUND OVALLING WREATHS.
THE WREATHS Sweet are the sweets. Sweets of sin.
BLOOM My spine's a bit limp. Go or turn? And this food? Eat it and get
all pigsticky. Absurd I am. Waste of money. One and eightpence too much.
THE RETRIEVER DRIVES A COLD SNIVELLING MUZZLE AGAINST HIS HAND, WAGGING
HIS TAIL. Strange how they take to me. Even that brute today. Better
speak to him first. Like women they like RENCONTRES. Stinks like a
polecat. CHACUN SON GOUT. He might be mad. Dogdays. Uncertain in his
movements. Good fellow Fido Good fellow Garryowen THE WOLFDOG
SPRAWLS ON HIS BACK, WRIGGLING OBSCENELY WITH BEGGING PAWS, HIS LONG
BLACK TONGUE LOLLING OUT. Influence of his surroundings. Give and have
done with it. Provided nobody. CALLING ENCOURAGING WORDS HE SHAMBLES
BACK WITH A FURTIVE POACHER'S TREAD, DOGGED BY THE SETTER INTO A DARK
STALESTUNK CORNER. HE UNROLLS ONE PARCEL AND GOES TO DUMP THE CRUBEEN
SOFTLY BUT HOLDS BACK AND FEELS THE TROTTER. Sizeable for threepence.
But then I have it in my left hand. Calls for more effort. Why? Smaller
from want of use. O, let it slide. Two and six.
WITH REGRET HE LETS THE UNROLLED CRUBEEN AND TROTTER SLIDE. THE MASTIFF
MAULS THE BUNDLE CLUMSILY AND GLUTS HIMSELF WITH GROWLING GREED,
CRUNCHING THE BONES. TWO RAINCAPED WATCH APPROACH, SILENT, VIGILANT. THEY
MURMUR TOGETHER.
THE WATCH Bloom. Of Bloom. For Bloom. Bloom.
EACH LAYS HAND ON BLOOM'S SHOULDER.
FIRST WATCH Caught in the act. Commit no nuisance.
BLOOM STAMMERS I am doing good to others.
A COVEY OF GULLS, STORM PETRELS, RISES HUNGRILY FROM LIFFEY SLIME WITH
BANBURY CAKES IN THEIR BEAKS.
THE GULLS Kaw kave kankury kake.
BLOOM The friend of man. Trained by kindness.
HE POINTS. BOB DORAN, TOPPLING FROM A HIGH BARSTOOL, SWAYS OVER THE
MUNCHING SPANIEL.
BOB DORAN Towser. Give us the paw. Give the paw.
THE BULLDOG GROWLS, HIS SCRUFF STANDING, A GOBBET OF PIG'S KNUCKLE
BETWEEN HIS MOLARS THROUGH WHICH RABID SCUMSPITTLE DRIBBLES. BOB DORAN
FILLS SILENTLY INTO AN AREA.
SECOND WATCH Prevention of cruelty to animals.
BLOOM ENTHUSIASTICALLY A noble work I scolded that tramdriver on
Harold's cross bridge for illusing the poor horse with his harness scab.
Bad French I got for my pains. Of course it was frosty and the last tram.
All tales of circus life are highly demoralising.
SIGNOR MAFFEI, PASSIONPALE, IN LIONTAMER'S COSTUME WITH DIAMOND STUDS IN
HIS SHIRTFRONT, STEPS FORWARD, HOLDING A CIRCUS PAPERHOOP, A CURLING
CARRIAGEWHIP AND A REVOLVER WITH WHICH HE COVERS THE GORGING BOARHOUND.
SIGNOR MAFFEI WITH A SINISTER SMILE Ladies and gentlemen, my educated
greyhound. It was I broke in the bucking broncho Ajax with my patent
spiked saddle for carnivores. Lash under the belly with a knotted thong.
Block tackle and a strangling pulley will bring your lion to heel, no
matter how fractious, even LEO FEROX there, the Libyan maneater. A redhot
crowbar and some liniment rubbing on the burning part produced Fritz of
Amsterdam, the thinking hyena. HE GLARES I possess the Indian sign. The
glint of my eye does it with these breastsparklers. WITH A BEWITCHING
SMILE I now introduce Mademoiselle Ruby, the pride of the ring.
FIRST WATCH Come. Name and address.
BLOOM I have forgotten for the moment. Ah, yes HE TAKES OFF HIS HIGH
GRADE HAT, SALUTING Dr Bloom, Leopold, dental surgeon. You have heard of
von Blum Pasha. Umpteen millions. DONNERWETTER Owns half Austria. Egypt.
Cousin.
FIRST WATCH Proof.
A CARD FALLS FROM INSIDE THE LEATHER HEADBAND OF BLOOM'S HAT.
BLOOM IN RED FEZ, CADI'S DRESS COAT WITH BROAD GREEN SASH, WEARING A
FALSE BADGE OF THE LEGION OF HONOUR, PICKS UP THE CARD HASTILY AND OFFERS
IT Allow me. My club is the Junior Army and Navy. Solicitors Messrs
John Henry Menton,  Bachelor's Walk.
FIRST WATCH READS Henry Flower. No fixed abode. Unlawfully watching
and besetting.
SECOND WATCH An alibi. You are cautioned.
BLOOM PRODUCES FROM HIS HEARTPOCKET A CRUMPLED YELLOW FLOWER This is
the flower in question. It was given me by a man I don't know his name.
PLAUSIBLY You know that old joke, rose of Castile. Bloom. The change of
name. Virag. HE MURMURS PRIVATELY AND CONFIDENTIALLY We are engaged you
see, sergeant. Lady in the case. Love entanglement. HE SHOULDERS THE
SECOND WATCH GENTLY Dash it all. It's a way we gallants have in the
navy. Uniform that does it. HE TURNS GRAVELY TO THE FIRST WATCH Still,
of course, you do get your Waterloo sometimes. Drop in some evening and
have a glass of old Burgundy. TO THE SECOND WATCH GAILY I'll introduce
you, inspector. She's game. Do it in the shake of a lamb's tail.
A DARK MERCURIALISED FACE APPEARS, LEADING A VEILED FIGURE.
THE DARK MERCURY The Castle is looking for him. He was drummed out of
the army.
MARTHA THICKVEILED, A CRIMSON HALTER ROUND HER NECK, A COPY OF THE
Irish Times IN HER HAND, IN TONE OF REPROACH, POINTING Henry Leopold
Lionel, thou lost one Clear my name.
FIRST WATCH STERNLY Come to the station.
BLOOM SCARED, HATS HIMSELF, STEPS BACK, THEN, PLUCKING AT HIS HEART AND
LIFTING HIS RIGHT FOREARM ON THE SQUARE, HE GIVES THE SIGN AND DUEGUARD
OF FELLOWCRAFT No, no, worshipful master, light of love. Mistaken
identity. The Lyons mail. Lesurques and Dubosc. You remember the Childs
fratricide case. We medical men. By striking him dead with a hatchet. I
am wrongfully accused. Better one guilty escape than ninetynine
wrongfully condemned.
MARTHA SOBBING BEHIND HER VEIL Breach of promise. My real name is
Peggy Griffin. He wrote to me that he was miserable. I'll tell my
brother, the Bective rugger fullback, on you, heartless flirt.
BLOOM BEHIND HIS HAND She's drunk. The woman is inebriated. HE
MURMURS VAGUELY THE PASS OF EPHRAIM Shitbroleeth.
SECOND WATCH TEARS IN HIS EYES, TO BLOOM You ought to be thoroughly
well ashamed of yourself.
BLOOM Gentlemen of the jury, let me explain. A pure mare's nest. I am a
man misunderstood. I am being made a scapegoat of. I am a respectable
married man, without a stain on my character. I live in Eccles street. My
wife, I am the daughter of a most distinguished commander, a gallant
upstanding gentleman, what do you call him, Majorgeneral Brian Tweedy,
one of Britain's fighting men who helped to win our battles. Got his
majority for the heroic defence of Rorke's Drift.
FIRST WATCH Regiment.
BLOOM TURNS TO THE GALLERY The royal Dublins, boys, the salt of the
earth, known the world over. I think I see some old comrades in arms up
there among you. The R. D. F., with our own Metropolitan police,
guardians of our homes, the pluckiest lads and the finest body of men, as
physique, in the service of our sovereign.
A VOICE Turncoat Up the Boers Who booed Joe Chamberlain?
BLOOM HIS HAND ON THE SHOULDER OF THE FIRST WATCH My old dad too was a
J. P. I'm as staunch a Britisher as you are, sir. I fought with the
colours for king and country in the absentminded war under general Gough
in the park and was disabled at Spion Kop and Bloemfontein, was mentioned
in dispatches. I did all a white man could. WITH QUIET FEELING Jim
Bludso. Hold her nozzle again the bank.
FIRST WATCH Profession or trade.
BLOOM Well, I follow a literary occupation, authorjournalist. In fact
we are just bringing out a collection of prize stories of which I am the
inventor, something that is an entirely new departure. I am connected
with the British and Irish press. If you ring up ...
MYLES CRAWFORD STRIDES OUT JERKILY, A QUILL BETWEEN HIS TEETH. HIS
SCARLET BEAK BLAZES WITHIN THE AUREOLE OF HIS STRAW HAT. HE DANGLES A
HANK OF SPANISH ONIONS IN ONE HAND AND HOLDS WITH THE OTHER HAND A
TELEPHONE RECEIVER NOZZLE TO HIS EAR.
MYLES CRAWFORD HIS COCK'S WATTLES WAGGING Hello, seventyseven
eightfour. Hello. FREEMAN'S URINAL and WEEKLY ARSEWIPE here. Paralyse
Europe. You which? Bluebags? Who writes? Is it Bloom?
MR PHILIP BEAUFOY, PALEFACED, STANDS IN THE WITNESSBOX, IN ACCURATE
MORNING DRESS, OUTBREAST POCKET WITH PEAK OF HANDKERCHIEF SHOWING,
CREASED LAVENDER TROUSERS AND PATENT BOOTS. HE CARRIES A LARGE PORTFOLIO
LABELLED Matcham's Masterstrokes.
BEAUFOY DRAWLS No, you aren't. Not by a long shot if I know it. I
don't see it that's all. No born gentleman, noone with the most
rudimentary promptings of a gentleman would stoop to such particularly
loathsome conduct. One of those, my lord. A plagiarist. A soapy sneak
masquerading as a litterateur. It's perfectly obvious that with the most
inherent baseness he has cribbed some of my bestselling copy, really
gorgeous stuff, a perfect gem, the love passages in which are beneath
suspicion. The Beaufoy books of love and great possessions, with which
your lordship is doubtless familiar, are a household word throughout the
kingdom.
BLOOM MURMURS WITH HANGDOG MEEKNESS GLUM That bit about the laughing
witch hand in hand I take exception to, if I may ...
BEAUFOY HIS LIP UPCURLED, SMILES SUPERCILIOUSLY ON THE COURT You funny
ass, you You're too beastly awfully weird for words I don't think you
need over excessively disincommodate yourself in that regard. My literary
agent Mr J. B. Pinker is in attendance. I presume, my lord, we shall
receive the usual witnesses' fees, shan't we? We are considerably out of
pocket over this bally pressman johnny, this jackdaw of Rheims, who has
not even been to a university.
BLOOM INDISTINCTLY University of life. Bad art.
BEAUFOY SHOUTS It's a damnably foul lie, showing the moral rottenness
of the man HE EXTENDS HIS PORTFOLIO We have here damning evidence, the
CORPUS DELICTI, my lord, a specimen of my maturer work disfigured by the
hallmark of the beast.
A VOICE FROM THE GALLERY
Moses, Moses, king of the jews,
Wiped his arse in the Daily News.
BLOOM BRAVELY Overdrawn.
BEAUFOY You low cad You ought to be ducked in the horsepond, you
rotter TO THE COURT Why, look at the man's private life Leading a
quadruple existence Street angel and house devil. Not fit to be
mentioned in mixed society The archconspirator of the age
BLOOM TO THE COURT And he, a bachelor, how ...
FIRST WATCH The King versus Bloom. Call the woman Driscoll.
THE CRIER Mary Driscoll, scullerymaid
MARY DRISCOLL, A SLIPSHOD SERVANT GIRL, APPROACHES. SHE HAS A BUCKET ON
THE CROOK OF HER ARM AND A SCOURINGBRUSH IN HER HAND.
SECOND WATCH Another Are you of the unfortunate class?
MARY DRISCOLL INDIGNANTLY I'm not a bad one. I bear a respectable
character and was four months in my last place. I was in a situation, six
pounds a year and my chances with Fridays out and I had to leave owing to
his carryings on.
FIRST WATCH What do you tax him with?
MARY DRISCOLL He made a certain suggestion but I thought more of myself
as poor as I am.
BLOOM IN HOUSEJACKET OF RIPPLECLOTH, FLANNEL TROUSERS, HEELLESS
SLIPPERS, UNSHAVEN, HIS HAIR RUMPLED SOFTLY I treated you white. I gave
you mementos, smart emerald garters far above your station. Incautiously
I took your part when you were accused of pilfering. There's a medium in
all things. Play cricket.
MARY DRISCOLL EXCITEDLY As God is looking down on me this night if
ever I laid a hand to them oysters
FIRST WATCH The offence complained of? Did something happen?
MARY DRISCOLL He surprised me in the rere of the premises, Your honour,
when the missus was out shopping one morning with a request for a safety
pin. He held me and I was discoloured in four places as a result. And he
interfered twict with my clothing.
BLOOM She counterassaulted.
MARY DRISCOLL SCORNFULLY I had more respect for the scouringbrush, so
I had. I remonstrated with him, Your lord, and he remarked keep it
quiet.
GENERAL LAUGHTER.
GEORGE FOTTRELL CLERK OF THE CROWN AND PEACE, RESONANTLY Order in
court The accused will now make a bogus statement.
BLOOM, PLEADING NOT GUILTY AND HOLDING A FULLBLOWN WATERLILY, BEGINS A
LONG UNINTELLIGIBLE SPEECH. THEY WOULD HEAR WHAT COUNSEL HAD TO SAY IN
HIS STIRRING ADDRESS TO THE GRAND JURY. HE WAS DOWN AND OUT BUT, THOUGH
BRANDED AS A BLACK SHEEP, IF HE MIGHT SAY SO, HE MEANT TO REFORM, TO
RETRIEVE THE MEMORY OF THE PAST IN A PURELY SISTERLY WAY AND RETURN TO
NATURE AS A PURELY DOMESTIC ANIMAL. A SEVENMONTHS' CHILD, HE HAD BEEN
CAREFULLY BROUGHT UP AND NURTURED BY AN AGED BEDRIDDEN PARENT. THERE
MIGHT HAVE BEEN LAPSES OF AN ERRING FATHER BUT HE WANTED TO TURN OVER A
NEW LEAF AND NOW, WHEN AT LONG LAST IN SIGHT OF THE WHIPPING POST, TO
LEAD A HOMELY LIFE IN THE EVENING OF HIS DAYS, PERMEATED BY THE
AFFECTIONATE SURROUNDINGS OF THE HEAVING BOSOM OF THE FAMILY. AN
ACCLIMATISED BRITISHER, HE HAD SEEN THAT SUMMER EVE FROM THE FOOTPLATE OF
AN ENGINE CAB OF THE LOOP LINE RAILWAY COMPANY WHILE THE RAIN REFRAINED
FROM FALLING GLIMPSES, AS IT WERE, THROUGH THE WINDOWS OF LOVEFUL
HOUSEHOLDS IN DUBLIN CITY AND URBAN DISTRICT OF SCENES TRULY RURAL OF
HAPPINESS OF THE BETTER LAND WITH DOCKRELL'S WALLPAPER AT ONE AND
NINEPENCE A DOZEN, INNOCENT BRITISHBORN BAIRNS LISPING PRAYERS TO THE
SACRED INFANT, YOUTHFUL SCHOLARS GRAPPLING WITH THEIR PENSUMS OR MODEL
YOUNG LADIES PLAYING ON THE PIANOFORTE OR ANON ALL WITH FERVOUR RECITING
THE FAMILY ROSARY ROUND THE CRACKLING YULELOG WHILE IN THE BOREENS AND
GREEN LANES THE COLLEENS WITH THEIR SWAINS STROLLED WHAT TIMES THE
STRAINS OF THE ORGANTONED MELODEON BRITANNIA METALBOUND WITH FOUR ACTING
STOPS AND TWELVEFOLD BELLOWS, A SACRIFICE, GREATEST BARGAIN EVER...
RENEWED LAUGHTER. HE MUMBLES INCOHERENTLY. REPORTERS COMPLAIN THAT THEY
CANNOT HEAR.
LONGHAND AND SHORTHAND WITHOUT LOOKING UP FROM THEIR NOTEBOOKS Loosen
his boots.
PROFESSOR MACHUGH FROM THE PRESSTABLE, COUGHS AND CALLS Cough it up,
man. Get it out in bits.
THE CROSSEXAMINATION PROCEEDS RE BLOOM AND THE BUCKET. A LARGE BUCKET.
BLOOM HIMSELF. BOWEL TROUBLE. IN BEAVER STREET GRIPE, YES. QUITE BAD. A
PLASTERER'S BUCKET. BY WALKING STIFFLEGGED. SUFFERED UNTOLD MISERY.
DEADLY AGONY. ABOUT NOON. LOVE OR BURGUNDY. YES, SOME SPINACH. CRUCIAL
MOMENT. HE DID NOT LOOK IN THE BUCKET NOBODY. RATHER A MESS. NOT
COMPLETELY. A Titbits BACK NUMBER.
UPROAR AND CATCALLS. BLOOM IN A TORN FROCKCOAT STAINED WITH WHITEWASH,
DINGED SILK HAT SIDEWAYS ON HIS HEAD, A STRIP OF STICKINGPLASTER ACROSS
HIS NOSE, TALKS INAUDIBLY.
J. J. O'MOLLOY IN BARRISTER'S GREY WIG AND STUFFGOWN, SPEAKING WITH A
VOICE OF PAINED PROTEST This is no place for indecent levity at the
expense of an erring mortal disguised in liquor. We are not in a
beargarden nor at an Oxford rag nor is this a travesty of justice. My
client is an infant, a poor foreign immigrant who started scratch as a
stowaway and is now trying to turn an honest penny. The trumped up
misdemeanour was due to a momentary aberration of heredity, brought on by
hallucination, such familiarities as the alleged guilty occurrence being
quite permitted in my client's native place, the land of the Pharaoh.
PRIMA FACIE, I put it to you that there was no attempt at carnally
knowing. Intimacy did not occur and the offence complained of by
Driscoll, that her virtue was solicited, was not repeated. I would deal
in especial with atavism. There have been cases of shipwreck and
somnambulism in my client's family. If the accused could speak he could a
tale unfoldone of the strangest that have ever been narrated between
the covers of a book. He himself, my lord, is a physical wreck from
cobbler's weak chest. His submission is that he is of Mongolian
extraction and irresponsible for his actions. Not all there, in fact.
BLOOM BAREFOOT, PIGEONBREASTED, IN LASCAR'S VEST AND TROUSERS,
APOLOGETIC TOES TURNED IN, OPENS HIS TINY MOLE'S EYES AND LOOKS ABOUT HIM
DAZEDLY, PASSING A SLOW HAND ACROSS HIS FOREHEAD. THEN HE HITCHES HIS
BELT SAILOR FASHION AND WITH A SHRUG OF ORIENTAL OBEISANCE SALUTES THE
COURT, POINTING ONE THUMB HEAVENWARD. Him makee velly muchee fine night.
HE BEGINS TO LILT SIMPLY
Li li poo lil chile
Blingee pigfoot evly night
Payee two shilly ...
HE IS HOWLED DOWN.
J. J. O'MOLLOY HOTLY TO THE POPULACE This is a lonehand fight. By
Hades, I will not have any client of mine gagged and badgered in this
fashion by a pack of curs and laughing hyenas. The Mosaic code has
superseded the law of the jungle. I say it and I say it emphatically,
without wishing for one moment to defeat the ends of justice, accused was
not accessory before the act and prosecutrix has not been tampered with.
The young person was treated by defendant as if she were his very own
daughter. BLOOM TAKES J. J. O'MOLLOY'S HAND AND RAISES IT TO HIS LIPS.
I shall call rebutting evidence to prove up to the hilt that the hidden
hand is again at its old game. When in doubt persecute Bloom. My client,
an innately bashful man, would be the last man in the world to do
anything ungentlemanly which injured modesty could object to or cast a
stone at a girl who took the wrong turning when some dastard, responsible
for her condition, had worked his own sweet will on her. He wants to go
straight. I regard him as the whitest man I know. He is down on his luck
at present owing to the mortgaging of his extensive property at Agendath
Netaim in faraway Asia Minor, slides of which will now be shown. TO
BLOOM I suggest that you will do the handsome thing.
BLOOM A penny in the pound.
THE IMAGE OF THE LAKE OF KINNERETH WITH BLURRED CATTLE CROPPING IN
SILVER HAZE IS PROJECTED ON THE WALL. MOSES DLUGACZ, FERRETEYED ALBINO,
IN BLUE DUNGAREES, STANDS UP IN THE GALLERY, HOLDING IN EACH HAND AN
ORANGE CITRON AND A PORK KIDNEY.
DLUGACZ HOARSELY Bleibtreustrasse, Berlin, W..
J. J. O'MOLLOY STEPS ON TO A LOW PLINTH AND HOLDS THE LAPEL OF HIS COAT
WITH SOLEMNITY. HIS FACE LENGTHENS, GROWS PALE AND BEARDED, WITH SUNKEN
EYES, THE BLOTCHES OF PHTHISIS AND HECTIC CHEEKBONES OF JOHN F. TAYLOR.
HE APPLIES HIS HANDKERCHIEF TO HIS MOUTH AND SCRUTINISES THE GALLOPING
TIDE OF ROSEPINK BLOOD.
J.J.O'MOLLOY ALMOST VOICELESSLY Excuse me. I am suffering from a
severe chill, have recently come from a sickbed. A few wellchosen words.
HE ASSUMES THE AVINE HEAD, FOXY MOUSTACHE AND PROBOSCIDAL ELOQUENCE OF
SEYMOUR BUSHE. When the angel's book comes to be opened if aught that
the pensive bosom has inaugurated of soultransfigured and of
soultransfiguring deserves to live I say accord the prisoner at the bar
the sacred benefit of the doubt. A PAPER WITH SOMETHING WRITTEN ON IT IS
HANDED INTO COURT.
BLOOM IN COURT DRESS Can give best references. Messrs Callan, Coleman.
Mr Wisdom Hely J. P. My old chief Joe Cuffe. Mr V. B. Dillon, ex lord
mayor of Dublin. I have moved in the charmed circle of the highest ...
Queens of Dublin society. CARELESSLY I was just chatting this afternoon
at the viceregal lodge to my old pals, sir Robert and lady Ball,
astronomer royal at the levee. Sir Bob, I said ...
MRS YELVERTON BARRY IN LOWCORSAGED OPAL BALLDRESS AND ELBOWLENGTH IVORY
GLOVES, WEARING A SABLETRIMMED BRICKQUILTED DOLMAN, A COMB OF BRILLIANTS
AND PANACHE OF OSPREY IN HER HAIR Arrest him, constable. He wrote me an
anonymous letter in prentice backhand when my husband was in the North
Riding of Tipperary on the Munster circuit, signed James Lovebirch. He
said that he had seen from the gods my peerless globes as I sat in a box
of the THEATRE ROYAL at a command performance of LA CIGALE. I deeply
inflamed him, he said. He made improper overtures to me to misconduct
myself at half past four p.m. on the following Thursday, Dunsink time. He
offered to send me through the post a work of fiction by Monsieur Paul de
Kock, entitled THE GIRL WITH THE THREE PAIRS OF STAYS.
MRS BELLINGHAM IN CAP AND SEAL CONEY MANTLE, WRAPPED UP TO THE NOSE,
STEPS OUT OF HER BROUGHAM AND SCANS THROUGH TORTOISESHELL QUIZZING
GLASSES WHICH SHE TAKES FROM INSIDE HER HUGE OPOSSUM MUFF Also to me.
Yes, I believe it is the same objectionable person. Because he closed my
carriage door outside sir Thornley Stoker's one sleety day during the
cold snap of February ninetythree when even the grid of the wastepipe and
the ballstop in my bath cistern were frozen. Subsequently he enclosed a
bloom of edelweiss culled on the heights, as he said, in my honour. I had
it examined by a botanical expert and elicited the information that it
was ablossom of the homegrown potato plant purloined from a forcingcase
of the model farm.
MRS YELVERTON BARRY Shame on him
A CROWD OF SLUTS AND RAGAMUFFINS SURGES FORWARD
THE SLUTS AND RAGAMUFFINS SCREAMING Stop thief Hurrah there,
Bluebeard Three cheers for Ikey Mo
SECOND WATCH PRODUCES HANDCUFFS Here are the darbies.
MRS BELLINGHAM He addressed me in several handwritings with fulsome
compliments as a Venus in furs and alleged profound pity for my
frostbound coachman Palmer while in the same breath he expressed himself
as envious of his earflaps and fleecy sheepskins and of his fortunate
proximity to my person, when standing behind my chair wearing my livery
and the armorial bearings of the Bellingham escutcheon garnished sable, a
buck's head couped or. He lauded almost extravagantly my nether
extremities, my swelling calves in silk hose drawn up to the limit, and
eulogised glowingly my other hidden treasures in priceless lace which, he
said, he could conjure up. He urged me stating that he felt it his
mission in life to urge me to defile the marriage bed, to commit
adultery at the earliest possible opportunity.
THE HONOURABLE MRS MERVYN TALBOYS IN AMAZON COSTUME, HARD HAT,
JACKBOOTS COCKSPURRED, VERMILION WAISTCOAT, FAWN MUSKETEER GAUNTLETS WITH
BRAIDED DRUMS, LONG TRAIN HELD UP AND HUNTING CROP WITH WHICH SHE STRIKES
HER WELT CONSTANTLY Also me. Because he saw me on the polo ground of the
Phoenix park at the match All Ireland versus the Rest of Ireland. My
eyes, I know, shone divinely as I watched Captain Slogger Dennehy of the
Inniskillings win the final chukkar on his darling cob CENTAUR. This
plebeian Don Juan observed me from behind a hackney car and sent me in
double envelopes an obscene photograph, such as are sold after dark on
Paris boulevards, insulting to any lady. I have it still. It represents a
partially nude senorita, frail and lovely his wife, as he solemnly
assured me, taken by him from nature, practising illicit intercourse
with a muscular torero, evidently a blackguard. He urged me to do
likewise, to misbehave, to sin with officers of the garrison. He implored
me to soil his letter in an unspeakable manner, to chastise him as he
richly deserves, to bestride and ride him, to give him a most vicious
horsewhipping.
MRS BELLINGHAM Me too.
MRS YELVERTON BARRY Me too.
SEVERAL HIGHLY RESPECTABLE DUBLIN LADIES HOLD UP IMPROPER LETTERS
RECEIVED FROM BLOOM.
THE HONOURABLE MRS MERVYN TALBOYS STAMPS HER JINGLING SPURS IN A SUDDEN
PAROXYSM OF FURY I will, by the God above me. I'll scourge the
pigeonlivered cur as long as I can stand over him. I'll flay him alive.
BLOOM HIS EYES CLOSING, QUAILS EXPECTANTLY Here? HE SQUIRMS Again
HE PANTS CRINGING I love the danger.
THE HONOURABLE MRS MERVYN TALBOYS Very much so I'll make it hot for
you. I'll make you dance Jack Latten for that.
MRS BELLINGHAM Tan his breech well, the upstart Write the stars and
stripes on it
MRS YELVERTON BARRY Disgraceful There's no excuse for him A married
man
BLOOM All these people. I meant only the spanking idea. A warm tingling
glow without effusion. Refined birching to stimulate the circulation.
THE HONOURABLE MRS MERVYN TALBOYS LAUGHS DERISIVELY O, did you, my
fine fellow? Well, by the living God, you'll get the surprise of your
life now, believe me, the most unmerciful hiding a man ever bargained
for. You have lashed the dormant tigress in my nature into fury.
MRS BELLINGHAM SHAKES HER MUFF AND QUIZZINGGLASSES VINDICTIVELY Make
him smart, Hanna dear. Give him ginger. Thrash the mongrel within an inch
of his life. The cato'ninetails. Geld him. Vivisect him.
BLOOM SHUDDERING, SHRINKING, JOINS HIS HANDS WITH HANGDOG MIEN O
cold O shivery It was your ambrosial beauty. Forget, forgive. Kismet.
Let me off this once. HE OFFERS THE OTHER CHEEK
MRS YELVERTON BARRY SEVERELY Don't do so on any account, Mrs Talboys
He should be soundly trounced
THE HONOURABLE MRS MERVYN TALBOYS UNBUTTONING HER GAUNTLET VIOLENTLY
I'll do no such thing. Pigdog and always was ever since he was pupped To
dare address me I'll flog him black and blue in the public streets. I'll
dig my spurs in him up to the rowel. He is a wellknown cuckold. SHE
SWISHES HER HUNTINGCROP SAVAGELY IN THE AIR Take down his trousers
without loss of time. Come here, sir Quick Ready?
BLOOM TREMBLING, BEGINNING TO OBEY The weather has been so warm.
DAVY STEPHENS, RINGLETTED, PASSES WITH A BEVY OF BAREFOOT NEWSBOYS.
DAVY STEPHENS MESSENGER OF THE SACRED HEART and EVENING TELEGRAPH with
Saint Patrick's Day supplement. Containing the new addresses of all the
cuckolds in Dublin.
THE VERY REVEREND CANON O'HANLON IN CLOTH OF GOLD COPE ELEVATES AND
EXPOSES A MARBLE TIMEPIECE. BEFORE HIM FATHER CONROY AND THE REVEREND
JOHN HUGHES S.J. BEND LOW.
THE TIMEPIECE UNPORTALLING
Cuckoo.
Cuckoo.
Cuckoo.
THE BRASS QUOITS OF A BED ARE HEARD TO JINGLE.
THE QUOITS Jigjag. Jigajiga. Jigjag.
A PANEL OF FOG ROLLS BACK RAPIDLY, REVEALING RAPIDLY IN THE JURYBOX THE
FACES OF MARTIN CUNNINGHAM, FOREMAN, SILKHATTED, JACK POWER, SIMON
DEDALUS, TOM KERNAN, NED LAMBERT, JOHN HENRY MENTON MYLES CRAWFORD,
LENEHAN, PADDY LEONARD, NOSEY FLYNN, M'COY AND THE FEATURELESS FACE OF A
NAMELESS ONE.
THE NAMELESS ONE Bareback riding. Weight for age. Gob, he organised her.
THE JURORS ALL THEIR HEADS TURNED TO HIS VOICE Really?
THE NAMELESS ONE SNARLS Arse over tip. Hundred shillings to five.
THE JURORS ALL THEIR HEADS LOWERED IN ASSENT Most of us thought as
much.
FIRST WATCH He is a marked man. Another girl's plait cut. Wanted Jack
the Ripper. A thousand pounds reward.
SECOND WATCH AWED, WHISPERS And in black. A mormon. Anarchist.
THE CRIER LOUDLY Whereas Leopold Bloom of no fixed abode is a
wellknown dynamitard, forger, bigamist, bawd and cuckold and a public
nuisance to the citizens of Dublin and whereas at this commission of
assizes the most honourable ...
HIS HONOUR, SIR FREDERICK FALKINER, RECORDER OF DUBLIN, IN JUDICIAL GARB
OF GREY STONE RISES FROM THE BENCH, STONEBEARDED. HE BEARS IN HIS ARMS AN
UMBRELLA SCEPTRE. FROM HIS FOREHEAD ARISE STARKLY THE MOSAIC RAMSHORNS.
THE RECORDER I will put an end to this white slave traffic and rid
Dublin of this odious pest. Scandalous HE DONS THE BLACK CAP Let him
be taken, Mr Subsheriff, from the dock where he now stands and detained
in custody in Mountjoy prison during His Majesty's pleasure and there be
hanged by the neck until he is dead and therein fail not at your peril or
may the Lord have mercy on your soul. Remove him. A BLACK SKULLCAP
DESCENDS UPON HIS HEAD.
THE SUBSHERIFF LONG JOHN FANNING APPEARS, SMOKING A PUNGENT HENRY CLAY.
LONG JOHN FANNING SCOWLS AND CALLS WITH RICH ROLLING UTTERANCE Who'll
hang Judas Iscariot?
H. RUMBOLD, MASTER BARBER, IN A BLOODCOLOURED JERKIN AND TANNER'S APRON,
A ROPE COILED OVER HIS SHOULDER, MOUNTS THE BLOCK. A LIFE PRESERVER AND A
NAILSTUDDED BLUDGEON ARE STUCK IN HIS BELT. HE RUBS GRIMLY HIS GRAPPLING
HANDS, KNOBBED WITH KNUCKLEDUSTERS.
RUMBOLD TO THE RECORDER WITH SINISTER FAMILIARITY Hanging Harry, your
Majesty, the Mersey terror. Five guineas a jugular. Neck or nothing.
THE BELLS OF GEORGE'S CHURCH TOLL SLOWLY, LOUD DARK IRON.
THE BELLS Heigho Heigho
BLOOM DESPERATELY Wait. Stop. Gulls. Good heart. I saw. Innocence.
Girl in the monkeyhouse. Zoo. Lewd chimpanzee. BREATHLESSLY Pelvic
basin. Her artless blush unmanned me. OVERCOME WITH EMOTION I left the
precincts. HE TURNS TO A FIGURE IN THE CROWD, APPEALING Hynes, may I
speak to you? You know me. That three shillings you can keep. If you want
a little more ...
HYNES COLDLY You are a perfect stranger.
SECOND WATCH POINTS TO THE CORNER The bomb is here.
FIRST WATCH Infernal machine with a time fuse.
BLOOM No, no. Pig's feet. I was at a funeral.
FIRST WATCH DRAWS HIS TRUNCHEON Liar
THE BEAGLE LIFTS HIS SNOUT, SHOWING THE GREY SCORBUTIC FACE OF PADDY
DIGNAM. HE HAS GNAWED ALL. HE EXHALES A PUTRID CARCASEFED BREATH. HE
GROWS TO HUMAN SIZE AND SHAPE. HIS DACHSHUND COAT BECOMES A BROWN
MORTUARY HABIT. HIS GREEN EYE FLASHES BLOODSHOT. HALF OF ONE EAR, ALL THE
NOSE AND BOTH THUMBS ARE GHOULEATEN.
PADDY DIGNAM IN A HOLLOW VOICE It is true. It was my funeral. Doctor
Finucane pronounced life extinct when I succumbed to the disease from
natural causes.
HE LIFTS HIS MUTILATED ASHEN FACE MOONWARDS AND BAYS LUGUBRIOUSLY.
BLOOM IN TRIUMPH You hear?
PADDY DIGNAM Bloom, I am Paddy Dignam's spirit. List, list, O list
BLOOM The voice is the voice of Esau.
SECOND WATCH BLESSES HIMSELF How is that possible?
FIRST WATCH It is not in the penny catechism.
PADDY DIGNAM By metempsychosis. Spooks.
A VOICE O rocks.
PADDY DIGNAM EARNESTLY Once I was in the employ of Mr J. H. Menton,
solicitor, commissioner for oaths and affidavits, of  Bachelor's Walk.
Now I am defunct, the wall of the heart hypertrophied. Hard lines. The
poor wife was awfully cut up. How is she bearing it? Keep her off that
bottle of sherry. HE LOOKS ROUND HIM A lamp. I must satisfy an animal
need. That buttermilk didn't agree with me.
THE PORTLY FIGURE OF JOHN O'CONNELL, CARETAKER, STANDS FORTH, HOLDING A
BUNCH OF KEYS TIED WITH CRAPE. BESIDE HIM STANDS FATHER COFFEY, CHAPLAIN,
TOADBELLIED, WRYNECKED, IN A SURPLICE AND BANDANNA NIGHTCAP, HOLDING
SLEEPILY A STAFF TWISTED POPPIES.
FATHER COFFEY YAWNS, THEN CHANTS WITH A HOARSE CROAK Namine. Jacobs.
Vobiscuits. Amen.
JOHN O'CONNELL FOGHORNS STORMILY THROUGH HIS MEGAPHONE Dignam, Patrick
T, deceased.
PADDY DIGNAM WITH PRICKED UP EARS, WINCES Overtones. HE WRIGGLES
FORWARD AND PLACES AN EAR TO THE GROUND My master's voice
JOHN O'CONNELL Burial docket letter number U. P. eightyfive thousand.
Field seventeen. House of Keys. Plot, one hundred and one.
PADDY DIGNAM LISTENS WITH VISIBLE EFFORT, THINKING, HIS TAIL
STIFFPOINTCD, HIS EARS COCKED.
PADDY DIGNAM Pray for the repose of his soul.
HE WORMS DOWN THROUGH A COALHOLE, HIS BROWN HABIT TRAILING ITS TETHER
OVER RATTLING PEBBLES. AFTER HIM TODDLES AN OBESE GRANDFATHER RAT ON
FUNGUS TURTLE PAWS UNDER A GREY CARAPACE. DIGNAM'S VOICE, MUFFLED, IS
HEARD BAYING UNDER GROUND Dignam's dead and gone below. TOM ROCHFORD,
ROBINREDBREASTED, IN CAP AND BREECHES, JUMPS FROM HIS TWOCOLUMNED
MACHINE.
TOM ROCHFORD A HAND TO HIS BREASTBONE, BOWS Reuben J. A florin I find
him. HE FIXES THE MANHOLE WITH A RESOLUTE STARE My turn now on. Follow
me up to Carlow.
HE EXECUTES A DAREDEVIL SALMON LEAP IN THE AIR AND IS ENGULFED IN THE
COALHOLE. TWO DISCS ON THE COLUMNS WOBBLE, EYES OF NOUGHT. ALL RECEDES.
BLOOM PLODGES FORWARD AGAIN THROUGH THE SUMP. KISSES CHIRP AMID THE RIFTS
OF FOG A PIANO SOUNDS. HE STANDS BEFORE A LIGHTED HOUSE, LISTENING. THE
KISSES, WINGING FROM THEIR BOWERS FLY ABOUT HIM, TWITTERING, WARBLING,
COOING.
THE KISSES WARBLING Leo TWITTERING Icky licky micky sticky for Leo
COOING Coo coocoo Yummyyum, Womwom WARBLING Big comebig Pirouette
Leopopold TWITTERING Leeolee WARBLING O Leo
THEY RUSTLE, FLUTTER UPON HIS GARMENTS, ALIGHT, BRIGHT GIDDY FLECKS,
SILVERY SEQUINS.
BLOOM A man's touch. Sad music. Church music. Perhaps here.
ZOE HIGGINS, A YOUNG WHORE IN A SAPPHIRE SLIP, CLOSED WITH THREE BRONZE
BUCKLES, A SLIM BLACK VELVET FILLET ROUND HER THROAT, NODS, TRIPS DOWN
THE STEPS AND ACCOSTS HIM.
ZOE Are you looking for someone? He's inside with his friend.
BLOOM Is this Mrs Mack's?
ZOE No, eightyone. Mrs Cohen's. You might go farther and fare worse.
Mother Slipperslapper. FAMILIARLY She's on the job herself tonight with
the vet her tipster that gives her all the winners and pays for her son
in Oxford. Working overtime but her luck's turned today. SUSPICIOUSLY
You're not his father, are you?
BLOOM Not I
ZOE You both in black. Has little mousey any tickles tonight?
HIS SKIN, ALERT, FEELS HER FINGERTIPS APPROACH. A HAND GLIDES OVER HIS
LEFT THIGH.
ZOE How's the nuts?
BLOOM Off side. Curiously they are on the right. Heavier, I suppose. One
in a million my tailor, Mesias, says.
ZOE IN SUDDEN ALARM You've a hard chancre.
BLOOM Not likely.
ZOE I feel it.
HER HAND SLIDES INTO HIS LEFT TROUSER POCKET AND BRINGS OUT A HARD BLACK
SHRIVELLED POTATO. SHE REGARDS IT AND BLOOM WITH DUMB MOIST LIPS.
BLOOM A talisman. Heirloom.
ZOE For Zoe? For keeps? For being so nice, eh?
SHE PUTS THE POTATO GREEDILY INTO A POCKET THEN LINKS HIS ARM, CUDDLING
HIM WITH SUPPLE WARMTH. HE SMILES UNEASILY. SLOWLY, NOTE BY NOTE,
ORIENTAL MUSIC IS PLAYED. HE GAZES IN THE TAWNY CRYSTAL OF HER EYES,
RINGED WITH KOHOL. HIS SMILE SOFTENS.
ZOE You'll know me the next time.
BLOOM FORLORNLY I never loved a dear gazelle but it was sure to ...
GAZELLES ARE LEAPING, FEEDING ON THE MOUNTAINS. NEAR ARE LAKES. ROUND
THEIR SHORES FILE SHADOWS BLACK OF CEDARGROVES. AROMA RISES, A STRONG
HAIRGROWTH OF RESIN. IT BURNS, THE ORIENT, A SKY OF SAPPHIRE, CLEFT BY
THE BRONZE FLIGHT OF EAGLES. UNDER IT LIES THE WOMANCITY NUDE, WHITE,
STILL, COOL, IN LUXURY. A FOUNTAIN MURMURS AMONG DAMASK ROSES. MAMMOTH
ROSES MURMUR OF SCARLET WINEGRAPES. A WINE OF SHAME, LUST, BLOOD EXUDES,
STRANGELY MURMURING.
ZOE MURMURING SINGSONG WITH THE MUSIC, HER ODALISK LIPS LUSCIOUSLY
SMEARED WITH SALVE OF SWINEFAT AND ROSEWATER SCHORACH ANI WENOWACH,
BENOITH HIERUSHALOIM.
BLOOM FASCINATED I thought you were of good stock by your accent.
ZOE And you know what thought did?
SHE BITES HIS EAR GENTLY WITH LITTLE GOLDSTOPPED TEETH, SENDING ON HIM A
CLOYING BREATH OF STALE GARLIC. THE ROSES DRAW APART, DISCLOSE A
SEPULCHRE OF THE GOLD OF KINGS AND THEIR MOULDERING BONES.
BLOOM DRAWS BACK, MECHANICALLY CARESSING HER RIGHT BUB WITH A FLAT
AWKWARD HAND Are you a Dublin girl?
ZOE CATCHES A STRAY HAIR DEFTLY AND TWISTS IT TO HER COIL No bloody
fear. I'm English. Have you a swaggerroot?
BLOOM AS BEFORE Rarely smoke, dear. Cigar now and then. Childish
device. LEWDLY The mouth can be better engaged than with a cylinder of
rank weed.
ZOE Go on. Make a stump speech out of it.
BLOOM IN WORKMAN'S CORDUROY OVERALLS, BLACK GANSY WITH RED FLOATING TIE
AND APACHE CAP Mankind is incorrigible. Sir Walter Ralegh brought from
the new world that potato and that weed, the one a killer of pestilence
by absorption, the other a poisoner of the ear, eye, heart, memory, will
understanding, all. That is to say he brought the poison a hundred years
before another person whose name I forget brought the food. Suicide.
Lies. All our habits. Why, look at our public life
MIDNIGHT CHIMES FROM DISTANT STEEPLES.
THE CHIMES Turn again, Leopold Lord mayor of Dublin
BLOOM IN ALDERMAN'S GOWN AND CHAIN Electors of Arran Quay, Inns Quay,
Rotunda, Mountjoy and North Dock, better run a tramline, I say, from the
cattlemarket to the river. That's the music of the future. That's my
programme. CUI BONO? But our bucaneering Vanderdeckens in their phantom
ship of finance ...
AN ELECTOR Three times three for our future chief magistrate
THE AURORA BOREALIS OF THE TORCHLIGHT PROCESSION LEAPS.
THE TORCHBEARERS Hooray
SEVERAL WELLKNOWN BURGESSES, CITY MAGNATES AND FREEMEN OF THE CITY SHAKE
HANDS WITH BLOOM AND CONGRATULATE HIM. TIMOTHY HARRINGTON, LATE THRICE
LORD MAYOR OF DUBLIN, IMPOSING IN MAYORAL SCARLET, GOLD CHAIN AND WHITE
SILK TIE, CONFERS WITH COUNCILLOR LORCAN SHERLOCK, LOCUM TENENS. THEY NOD
VIGOROUSLY IN AGREEMENT.
LATE LORD MAYOR HARRINGTON IN SCARLET ROBE WITH MACE, GOLD MAYORAL
CHAIN AND LARGE WHITE SILK SCARF That alderman sir Leo Bloom's speech be
printed at the expense of the ratepayers. That the house in which he was
born be ornamented with a commemorative tablet and that the thoroughfare
hitherto known as Cow Parlour off Cork street be henceforth designated
Boulevard Bloom.
COUNCILLOR LORCAN SHERLOCK Carried unanimously.
BLOOM IMPASSIONEDLY These flying Dutchmen or lying Dutchmen as they
recline in their upholstered poop, casting dice, what reck they? Machines
is their cry, their chimera, their panacea. Laboursaving apparatuses,
supplanters, bugbears, manufactured monsters for mutual murder, hideous
hobgoblins produced by a horde of capitalistic lusts upon our prostituted
labour. The poor man starves while they are grassing their royal mountain
stags or shooting peasants and phartridges in their purblind pomp of pelf
and power. But their reign is rover for rever and ever and ev ...
PROLONGED APPLAUSE. VENETIAN MASTS, MAYPOLES AND FESTAL ARCHES SPRING
UP. A STREAMER BEARING THE LEGENDS Cead Mile Failte AND Mah Ttob Melek
Israel SPANS THE STREET. ALL THE WINDOWS ARE THRONGED WITH SIGHTSEERS,
CHIEFLY LADIES. ALONG THE ROUTE THE REGIMENTS OF THE ROYAL DUBLIN
FUSILIERS, THE KING'S OWN SCOTTISH BORDERERS, THE CAMERON HIGHLANDERS AND
THE WELSH FUSILIERS STANDING TO ATTENTION, KEEP BACK THE CROWD. BOYS FROM
HIGH SCHOOL ARE PERCHED ON THE LAMPPOSTS, TELEGRAPH POLES, WINDOWSILLS,
CORNICES, GUTTERS, CHIMNEYPOTS, RAILINGS, RAINSPOUTS, WHISTLING AND
CHEERING THE PILLAR OF THE CLOUD APPEARS. A FIFE AND DRUM BAND IS HEARD
IN THE DISTANCE PLAYING THE KOL NIDRE. THE BEATERS APPROACH WITH IMPERIAL
EAGLES HOISTED, TRAILING BANNERS AND WAVING ORIENTAL PALMS. THE
CHRYSELEPHANTINE PAPAL STANDARD RISES HIGH, SURROUNDED BY PENNONS OF THE
CIVIC FLAG. THE VAN OF THE PROCESSION APPEARS HEADED BY JOHN HOWARD
PARNELL, CITY MARSHAL, IN A CHESSBOARD TABARD, THE ATHLONE POURSUIVANT
AND ULSTER KING OF ARMS. THEY ARE FOLLOWED BY THE RIGHT HONOURABLE JOSEPH
HUTCHINSON, LORD MAYOR OF DUBLIN, HIS LORDSHIP THE LORD MAYOR OF CORK,
THEIR WORSHIPS THE MAYORS OF LIMERICK, GALWAY, SLIGO AND WATERFORD,
TWENTYEIGHT IRISH REPRESENTATIVE PEERS, SIRDARS, GRANDEES AND MAHARAJAHS
BEARING THE CLOTH OF ESTATE, THE DUBLIN METROPOLITAN FIRE BRIGADE, THE
CHAPTER OF THE SAINTS OF FINANCE IN THEIR PLUTOCRATIC ORDER OF
PRECEDENCE, THE BISHOP OF DOWN AND CONNOR, HIS EMINENCE MICHAEL CARDINAL
LOGUE, ARCHBISHOP OF ARMAGH, PRIMATE OF ALL IRELAND, HIS GRACE, THE MOST
REVEREND DR WILLIAM ALEXANDER, ARCHBISHOP OF ARMAGH, PRIMATE OF ALL
IRELAND, THE CHIEF RABBI, THE PRESBYTERIAN MODERATOR, THE HEADS OF THE
BAPTIST, ANABAPTIST, METHODIST AND MORAVIAN CHAPELS AND THE HONORARY
SECRETARY OF THE SOCIETY OF FRIENDS. AFTER THEM MARCH THE GUILDS AND
TRADES AND TRAINBANDS WITH FLYING COLOURS COOPERS, BIRD FANCIERS,
MILLWRIGHTS, NEWSPAPER CANVASSERS, LAW SCRIVENERS, MASSEURS, VINTNERS,
TRUSSMAKERS, CHIMNEYSWEEPS, LARD REFINERS, TABINET AND POPLIN WEAVERS,
FARRIERS, ITALIAN WAREHOUSEMEN, CHURCH DECORATORS, BOOTJACK
MANUFACTURERS, UNDERTAKERS, SILK MERCERS, LAPIDARIES, SALESMASTERS,
CORKCUTTERS, ASSESSORS OF FIRE LOSSES, DYERS AND CLEANERS, EXPORT
BOTTLERS, FELLMONGERS, TICKETWRITERS, HERALDIC SEAL ENGRAVERS, HORSE
REPOSITORY HANDS, BULLION BROKERS, CRICKET AND ARCHERY OUTFITTERS,
RIDDLEMAKERS, EGG AND POTATO FACTORS, HOSIERS AND GLOVERS, PLUMBING
CONTRACTORS. AFTER THEM MARCH GENTLEMEN OF THE BEDCHAMBER, BLACK ROD,
DEPUTY GARTER, GOLD STICK, THE MASTER OF HORSE, THE LORD GREAT
CHAMBERLAIN, THE EARL MARSHAL, THE HIGH CONSTABLE CARRYING THE SWORD OF
STATE, SAINT STEPHEN'S IRON CROWN, THE CHALICE AND BIBLE. FOUR BUGLERS ON
FOOT BLOW A SENNET. BEEFEATERS REPLY, WINDING CLARIONS OF WELCOME. UNDER
AN ARCH OF TRIUMPH BLOOM APPEARS, BAREHEADED, IN A CRIMSON VELVET MANTLE
TRIMMED WITH ERMINE, BEARING SAINT EDWARD'S STAFF THE ORB AND SCEPTRE
WITH THE DOVE, THE CURTANA. HE IS SEATED ON A MILKWHITE HORSE WITH LONG
FLOWING CRIMSON TAIL, RICHLY CAPARISONED, WITH GOLDEN HEADSTALL. WILD
EXCITEMENT. THE LADIES FROM THEIR BALCONIES THROW DOWN ROSEPETALS. THE
AIR IS PERFUMED WITH ESSENCES. THE MEN CHEER. BLOOM'S BOYS RUN AMID THE
BYSTANDERS WITH BRANCHES OF HAWTHORN AND WRENBUSHES.
BLOOM'S BOYS
The wren, the wren,
The king of all birds,
Saint Stephen's his day
Was caught in the furze.
A BLACKSMITH MURMURS For the honour of God And is that Bloom? He
scarcely looks thirtyone.
A PAVIOR AND FLAGGER That's the famous Bloom now, the world's greatest
reformer. Hats off
ALL UNCOVER THEIR HEADS. WOMEN WHISPER EAGERLY.
A MILLIONAIRESS RICHLY Isn't he simply wonderful?
A NOBLEWOMAN NOBLY All that man has seen
A FEMINIST MASCULINELY And done
A BELLHANGER A classic face He has the forehead of a thinker.
BLOOM'S WEATHER. A SUNBURST APPEARS IN THE NORTHWEST.
THE BISHOP OF DOWN AND CONNOR I here present your undoubted emperor
president and kingchairman, the most serene and potent and very puissant
ruler of this realm. God save Leopold the First
ALL God save Leopold the First
BLOOM IN DALMATIC AND PURPLE MANTLE, TO THE BISHOP OF DOWN AND CONNOR,
WITH DIGNITY Thanks, somewhat eminent sir.
WILLIAM, ARCHBISHOP OF ARMAGH IN PURPLE STOCK AND SHOVEL HAT Will you
to your power cause law and mercy to be executed in all your judgments in
Ireland and territories thereunto belonging?
BLOOM PLACING HIS RIGHT HAND ON HIS TESTICLES, SWEARS So may the
Creator deal with me. All this I promise to do.
MICHAEL, ARCHBISHOP OF ARMAGH POURS A CRUSE OF HAIROIL OVER BLOOM'S
HEAD GAUDIUM MAGNUM ANNUNTIO VOBIS. HABEMUS CARNEFICEM. Leopold,
Patrick, Andrew, David, George, be thou anointed
BLOOM ASSUMES A MANTLE OF CLOTH OF GOLD AND PUTS ON A RUBY RING. HE
ASCENDS AND STANDS ON THE STONE OF DESTINY. THE REPRESENTATIVE PEERS PUT
ON AT THE SAME TIME THEIR TWENTYEIGHT CROWNS. JOYBELLS RING IN CHRIST
CHURCH, SAINT PATRICK'S, GEORGE'S AND GAY MALAHIDE. MIRUS BAZAAR
FIREWORKS GO UP FROM ALL SIDES WITH SYMBOLICAL PHALLOPYROTECHNIC DESIGNS.
THE PEERS DO HOMAGE, ONE BY ONE, APPROACHING AND GENUFLECTING.
THE PEERS I do become your liege man of life and limb to earthly
worship.
BLOOM HOLDS UP HIS RIGHT HAND ON WHICH SPARKLES THE KOHINOOR DIAMOND.
HIS PALFREY NEIGHS. IMMEDIATE SILENCE. WIRELESS INTERCONTINENTAL AND
INTERPLANETARY TRANSMITTERS ARE SET FOR RECEPTION OF MESSAGE.
BLOOM My subjects We hereby nominate our faithful charger Copula Felix
hereditary Grand Vizier and announce that we have this day repudiated our
former spouse and have bestowed our royal hand upon the princess Selene,
the splendour of night.
THE FORMER MORGANATIC SPOUSE OF BLOOM IS HASTILY REMOVED IN THE BLACK
MARIA. THE PRINCESS SELENE, IN MOONBLUE ROBES, A SILVER CRESCENT ON HER
HEAD, DESCENDS FROM A SEDAN CHAIR, BORNE BY TWO GIANTS. AN OUTBURST OF
CHEERING.
JOHN HOWARD PARNELL RAISES THE ROYAL STANDARD Illustrious Bloom
Successor to my famous brother
BLOOM EMBRACES JOHN HOWARD PARNELL We thank you from our heart, John,
for this right royal welcome to green Erin, the promised land of our
common ancestors.
THE FREEDOM OF THE CITY IS PRESENTED TO HIM EMBODIED IN A CHARTER. THE
KEYS OF DUBLIN, CROSSED ON A CRIMSON CUSHION, ARE GIVEN TO HIM. HE SHOWS
ALL THAT HE IS WEARING GREEN SOCKS.
TOM KERNAN You deserve it, your honour.
BLOOM On this day twenty years ago we overcame the hereditary enemy at
Ladysmith. Our howitzers and camel swivel guns played on his lines with
telling effect. Half a league onward They charge All is lost now Do we
yield? No We drive them headlong Lo We charge Deploying to the left
our light horse swept across the heights of Plevna and, uttering their
warcry BONAFIDE SABAOTH, sabred the Saracen gunners to a man.
THE CHAPEL OF FREEMAN TYPESETTERS Hear Hear
JOHN WYSE NOLAN There's the man that got away James Stephens.
A BLUECOAT SCHOOLBOY Bravo
AN OLD RESIDENT You're a credit to your country, sir, that's what you
are.
AN APPLEWOMAN He's a man like Ireland wants.
BLOOM My beloved subjects, a new era is about to dawn. I, Bloom, tell
you verily it is even now at hand. Yea, on the word of a Bloom, ye shall
ere long enter into the golden city which is to be, the new Bloomusalem
in the Nova Hibernia of the future.
THIRTYTWO WORKMEN, WEARING ROSETTES, FROM ALL THE COUNTIES OF IRELAND,
UNDER THE GUIDANCE OF DERWAN THE BUILDER, CONSTRUCT THE NEW BLOOMUSALEM.
IT IS A COLOSSAL EDIFICE WITH CRYSTAL ROOF, BUILT IN THE SHAPE OF A HUGE
PORK KIDNEY, CONTAINING FORTY THOUSAND ROOMS. IN THE COURSE OF ITS
EXTENSION SEVERAL BUILDINGS AND MONUMENTS ARE DEMOLISHED. GOVERNMENT
OFFICES ARE TEMPORARILY TRANSFERRED TO RAILWAY SHEDS. NUMEROUS HOUSES ARE
RAZED TO THE GROUND. THE INHABITANTS ARE LODGED IN BARRELS AND BOXES, ALL
MARKED IN RED WITH THE LETTERS L. B. SEVERAL PAUPERS FILL FROM A LADDER.
A PART OF THE WALLS OF DUBLIN, CROWDED WITH LOYAL SIGHTSEERS, COLLAPSES.
THE SIGHTSEERS DYING MORITURI TE SALUTANT. THEY DIE
A MAN IN A BROWN MACINTOSH SPRINGS UP THROUGH A TRAPDOOR. HE POINTS AN
ELONGATED FINGER AT BLOOM.
THE MAN IN THE MACINTOSH Don't you believe a word he says. That man is
Leopold M'Intosh, the notorious fireraiser. His real name is Higgins.
BLOOM Shoot him Dog of a christian So much for M'Intosh
A CANNONSHOT. THE MAN IN THE MACINTOSH DISAPPEARS. BLOOM WITH HIS
SCEPTRE STRIKES DOWN POPPIES. THE INSTANTANEOUS DEATHS OF MANY POWERFUL
ENEMIES, GRAZIERS, MEMBERS OF PARLIAMENT, MEMBERS OF STANDING COMMITTEES,
ARE REPORTED. BLOOM'S BODYGUARD DISTRIBUTE MAUNDY MONEY, COMMEMORATION
MEDALS, LOAVES AND FISHES, TEMPERANCE BADGES, EXPENSIVE HENRY CLAY
CIGARS, FREE COWBONES FOR SOUP, RUBBER PRESERVATIVES IN SEALED ENVELOPES
TIED WITH GOLD THREAD, BUTTER SCOTCH, PINEAPPLE ROCK, billets doux IN THE
FORM OF COCKED HATS, READYMADE SUITS, PORRINGERS OF TOAD IN THE HOLE,
BOTTLES OF JEYES' FLUID, PURCHASE STAMPS,  DAYS' INDULGENCES, SPURIOUS
COINS, DAIRYFED PORK SAUSAGES, THEATRE PASSES, SEASON TICKETS AVAILABLE
FOR ALL TRAMLINES, COUPONS OF THE ROYAL AND PRIVILEGED HUNGARIAN LOTTERY,
PENNY DINNER COUNTERS, CHEAP REPRINTS OF THE WORLD'S TWELVE WORST BOOKS
FROGGY AND FRITZ POLITIC, CARE OF THE BABY INFANTILIC,  MEALS FOR
/ CULINIC, WAS JESUS A SUN MYTH? HISTORIC, EXPEL THAT PAIN MEDIC,
INFANT'S COMPENDIUM OF THE UNIVERSE COSMIC, LET'S ALL CHORTLE
HILARIC, CANVASSER'S VADE MECUM JOURNALIC, LOVELETTERS OF MOTHER
ASSISTANT EROTIC, WHO'S WHO IN SPACE ASTRIC, SONGS THAT REACHED OUR
HEART MELODIC, PENNYWISE'S WAY TO WEALTH PARSIMONIC. A GENERAL RUSH
AND SCRAMBLE. WOMEN PRESS FORWARD TO TOUCH THE HEM OF BLOOM'S ROBE. THE
LADY GWENDOLEN DUBEDAT BURSTS THROUGH THE THRONG, LEAPS ON HIS HORSE AND
KISSES HIM ON BOTH CHEEKS AMID GREAT ACCLAMATION. A MAGNESIUM FLASHLIGHT
PHOTOGRAPH IS TAKEN. BABES AND SUCKLINGS ARE HELD UP.
THE WOMEN Little father Little father
THE BABES AND SUCKLINGS
Clap clap hands till Poldy comes home,
Cakes in his pocket for Leo alone.
BLOOM, BENDING DOWN, POKES BABY BOARDMAN GENTLY IN THE STOMACH.
BABY BOARDMAN HICCUPS, CURDLED MILK FLOWING FROM HIS MOUTH Hajajaja.
BLOOM SHAKING HANDS WITH A BLIND STRIPLING My more than Brother
PLACING HIS ARMS ROUND THE SHOULDERS OF AN OLD COUPLE Dear old friends
HE PLAYS PUSSY FOURCORNERS WITH RAGGED BOYS AND GIRLS Peep Bopeep HE
WHEELS TWINS IN A PERAMBULATOR Ticktacktwo wouldyousetashoe? HE
PERFORMS JUGGLER'S TRICKS, DRAWS RED, ORANGE, YELLOW, GREEN, BLUE, INDIGO
AND VIOLET SILK HANDKERCHIEFS FROM HIS MOUTH Roygbiv.  feet per
second. HE CONSOLES A WIDOW Absence makes the heart grow younger. HE
DANCES THE HIGHLAND FLING WITH GROTESQUE ANTICS Leg it, ye devils HE
KISSES THE BEDSORES OF A PALSIED VETERAN Honourable wounds HE TRIPS UP
A FIT POLICEMAN U. p up. U. p up. HE WHISPERS IN THE EAR OF A
BLUSHING WAITRESS AND LAUGHS KINDLY Ah, naughty, naughty HE EATS A RAW
TURNIP OFFERED HIM BY MAURICE BUTTERLY, FARMER Fine Splendid HE
REFUSES TO ACCEPT THREE SHILLINGS OFFERED HIM BY JOSEPH HYNES,
JOURNALIST My dear fellow, not at all HE GIVES HIS COAT TO A BEGGAR
Please accept. HE TAKES PART IN A STOMACH RACE WITH ELDERLY MALE AND
FEMALE CRIPPLES Come on, boys Wriggle it, girls
THE CITIZEN CHOKED WITH EMOTION, BRUSHES ASIDE A TEAR IN HIS EMERALD
MUFFLER May the good God bless him
THE RAMS' HORNS SOUND FOR SILENCE. THE STANDARD OF ZION IS HOISTED.
BLOOM UNCLOAKS IMPRESSIVELY, REVEALING OBESITY, UNROLLS A PAPER AND
READS SOLEMNLY Aleph Beth Ghimel Daleth Hagadah Tephilim Kosher Yom
Kippur Hanukah Roschaschana Beni Brith Bar Mitzvah Mazzoth Askenazim
Meshuggah Talith.
AN OFFICIAL TRANSLATION IS READ BY JIMMY HENRY, ASSISTANT TOWN CLERK.
JIMMY HENRY The Court of Conscience is now open. His Most Catholic
Majesty will now administer open air justice. Free medical and legal
advice, solution of doubles and other problems. All cordially invited.
Given at this our loyal city of Dublin in the year I of the Paradisiacal
Era.
PADDY LEONARD What am I to do about my rates and taxes?
BLOOM Pay them, my friend.
PADDY LEONARD Thank you.
NOSEY FLYNN Can I raise a mortgage on my fire insurance?
BLOOM OBDURATELY Sirs, take notice that by the law of torts you are
bound over in your own recognisances for six months in the sum of five
pounds.
J. J. O'MOLLOY A Daniel did I say? Nay A Peter O'Brien
NOSEY FLYNN Where do I draw the five pounds?
PISSER BURKE For bladder trouble?
BLOOM
ACID. NIT. HYDROCHLOR. DIL.,  minims
TINCT. NUX VOM.,  minims
EXTR. TARAXEL. IIQ.,  minims.
AQ. DIS. TER IN DIE.
CHRIS CALLINAN What is the parallax of the subsolar ecliptic of
Aldebaran?
BLOOM Pleased to hear from you, Chris. K. II.
JOE HYNES Why aren't you in uniform?
BLOOM When my progenitor of sainted memory wore the uniform of the
Austrian despot in a dank prison where was yours?
BEN DOLLARD Pansies?
BLOOM Embellish beautify suburban gardens.
BEN DOLLARD When twins arrive?
BLOOM Father pater, dad starts thinking.
LARRY O'ROURKE An eightday licence for my new premises. You remember me,
sir Leo, when you were in number seven. I'm sending around a dozen of
stout for the missus.
BLOOM COLDLY You have the advantage of me. Lady Bloom accepts no
presents.
CROFTON This is indeed a festivity.
BLOOM SOLEMNLY You call it a festivity. I call it a sacrament.
ALEXANDER KEYES When will we have our own house of keys?
BLOOM I stand for the reform of municipal morals and the plain ten
commandments. New worlds for old. Union of all, jew, moslem and gentile.
Three acres and a cow for all children of nature. Saloon motor hearses.
Compulsory manual labour for all. All parks open to the public day and
night. Electric dishscrubbers. Tuberculosis, lunacy, war and mendicancy
must now cease. General amnesty, weekly carnival with masked licence,
bonuses for all, esperanto the universal language with universal
brotherhood. No more patriotism of barspongers and dropsical impostors.
Free money, free rent, free love and a free lay church in a free lay
state.
O'MADDEN BURKE Free fox in a free henroost.
DAVY BYRNE YAWNING Iiiiiiiiiaaaaaaach
BLOOM Mixed races and mixed marriage.
LENEHAN What about mixed bathing?
BLOOM EXPLAINS TO THOSE NEAR HIM HIS SCHEMES FOR SOCIAL REGENERATION.
ALL AGREE WITH HIM. THE KEEPER OF THE KILDARE STREET MUSEUM APPEARS,
DRAGGING A LORRY ON WHICH ARE THE SHAKING STATUES OF SEVERAL NAKED
GODDESSES, VENUS CALLIPYGE, VENUS PANDEMOS, VENUS METEMPSYCHOSIS, AND
PLASTER FIGURES, ALSO NAKED, REPRESENTING THE NEW NINE MUSES, COMMERCE,
OPERATIC MUSIC, AMOR, PUBLICITY, MANUFACTURE, LIBERTY OF SPEECH, PLURAL
VOTING, GASTRONOMY, PRIVATE HYGIENE, SEASIDE CONCERT ENTERTAINMENTS,
PAINLESS OBSTETRICS AND ASTRONOMY FOR THE PEOPLE.
FATHER FARLEY He is an episcopalian, an agnostic, an anythingarian
seeking to overthrow our holy faith.
MRS RIORDAN TEARS UP HER WILL I'm disappointed in you You bad man
MOTHER GROGAN REMOVES HER BOOT TO THROW IT AT BLOOM You beast You
abominable person
NOSEY FLYNN Give us a tune, Bloom. One of the old sweet songs.
BLOOM WITH ROLLICKING HUMOUR
I vowed that I never would leave her,
She turned out a cruel deceiver.
With my tooraloom tooraloom tooraloom tooraloom.
HOPPY HOLOHAN Good old Bloom There's nobody like him after all.
PADDY LEONARD Stage Irishman
BLOOM What railway opera is like a tramline in Gibraltar? The Rows of
Casteele. LAUGHTER.
LENEHAN Plagiarist Down with Bloom
THE VEILED SIBYL ENTHUSIASTICALLY I'm a Bloomite and I glory in it. I
believe in him in spite of all. I'd give my life for him, the funniest
man on earth.
BLOOM WINKS AT THE BYSTANDERS I bet she's a bonny lassie.
THEODORE PUREFOY IN FISHINGCAP AND OILSKIN JACKET He employs a
mechanical device to frustrate the sacred ends of nature.
THE VEILED SIBYL STABS HERSELF My hero god SHE DIES
MANY MOST ATTRACTIVE AND ENTHUSIASTIC WOMEN ALSO COMMIT SUICIDE BY
STABBING, DROWNING, DRINKING PRUSSIC ACID, ACONITE, ARSENIC, OPENING
THEIR VEINS, REFUSING FOOD, CASTING THEMSELVES UNDER STEAMROLLERS, FROM
THE TOP OF NELSON'S PILLAR, INTO THE GREAT VAT OF GUINNESS'S BREWERY,
ASPHYXIATING THEMSELVES BY PLACING THEIR HEADS IN GASOVENS, HANGING
THEMSELVES IN STYLISH GARTERS, LEAPING FROM WINDOWS OF DIFFERENT
STOREYS.
ALEXANDER J DOWIE VIOLENTLY Fellowchristians and antiBloomites, the
man called Bloom is from the roots of hell, a disgrace to christian men.
A fiendish libertine from his earliest years this stinking goat of Mendes
gave precocious signs of infantile debauchery, recalling the cities of
the plain, with a dissolute granddam. This vile hypocrite, bronzed with
infamy, is the white bull mentioned in the Apocalypse. A worshipper of
the Scarlet Woman, intrigue is the very breath of his nostrils. The stake
faggots and the caldron of boiling oil are for him. Caliban
THE MOB Lynch him Roast him He's as bad as Parnell was. Mr Fox
MOTHER GROGAN THROWS HER BOOT AT BLOOM. SEVERAL SHOPKEEPERS FROM UPPER
AND LOWER DORSET STREET THROW OBJECTS OF LITTLE OR NO COMMERCIAL VALUE,
HAMBONES, CONDENSED MILK TINS, UNSALEABLE CABBAGE, STALE BREAD, SHEEP'S
TAILS, ODD PIECES OF FAT.
BLOOM EXCITEDLY This is midsummer madness, some ghastly joke again. By
heaven, I am guiltless as the unsunned snow It was my brother Henry. He
is my double. He lives in number  Dolphin's Barn. Slander, the viper,
has wrongfully accused me. Fellowcountrymen, SGENL INN BAN BATA COISDE
GAN CAPALL. I call on my old friend, Dr Malachi Mulligan, sex specialist,
to give medical testimony on my behalf.
DR MULLIGAN IN MOTOR JERKIN, GREEN MOTORGOGGLES ON HIS BROW Dr Bloom
is bisexually abnormal. He has recently escaped from Dr Eustace's private
asylum for demented gentlemen. Born out of bedlock hereditary epilepsy is
present, the consequence of unbridled lust. Traces of elephantiasis have
been discovered among his ascendants. There are marked symptoms of
chronic exhibitionism. Ambidexterity is also latent. He is prematurely
bald from selfabuse, perversely idealistic in consequence, a reformed
rake, and has metal teeth. In consequence of a family complex he has
temporarily lost his memory and I believe him to be more sinned against
than sinning. I have made a pervaginal examination and, after application
of the acid test to  anal, axillary, pectoral and pubic hairs, I
declare him to be VIRGO INTACTA.
BLOOM HOLDS HIS HIGH GRADE HAT OVER HIS GENITAL ORGANS.
DR MADDEN Hypsospadia is also marked. In the interest of coming
generations I suggest that the parts affected should be preserved in
spirits of wine in the national teratological museum.
DR CROTTHERS I have examined the patient's urine. It is albuminoid.
Salivation is insufficient, the patellar reflex intermittent.
DR PUNCH COSTELLO The FETOR JUDAICUS is most perceptible.
DR DIXON READS A BILL OF HEALTH Professor Bloom is a finished example
of the new womanly man. His moral nature is simple and lovable. Many have
found him a dear man, a dear person. He is a rather quaint fellow on the
whole, coy though not feebleminded in the medical sense. He has written a
really beautiful letter, a poem in itself, to the court missionary of the
Reformed Priests' Protection Society which clears up everything. He is
practically a total abstainer and I can affirm that he sleeps on a straw
litter and eats the most Spartan food, cold dried grocer's peas. He wears
a hairshirt of pure Irish manufacture winter and summer and scourges
himself every Saturday. He was, I understand, at one time a firstclass
misdemeanant in Glencree reformatory. Another report states that he was a
very posthumous child. I appeal for clemency in the name of the most
sacred word our vocal organs have ever been called upon to speak. He is
about to have a baby.
GENERAL COMMOTION AND COMPASSION. WOMEN FAINT. A WEALTHY AMERICAN MAKES
A STREET COLLECTION FOR BLOOM. GOLD AND SILVER COINS, BLANK CHEQUES,
BANKNOTES, JEWELS, TREASURY BONDS, MATURING BILLS OF EXCHANGE, I. O. U'S,
WEDDING RINGS, WATCHCHAINS, LOCKETS, NECKLACES AND BRACELETS ARE RAPIDLY
COLLECTED.
BLOOM O, I so want to be a mother.
MRS THORNTON IN NURSETENDER'S GOWN Embrace me tight, dear. You'll be
soon over it. Tight, dear.
BLOOM EMBRACES HER TIGHTLY AND BEARS EIGHT MALE YELLOW AND WHITE
CHILDREN. THEY APPEAR ON A REDCARPETED STAIRCASE ADORNED WITH EXPENSIVE
PLANTS. ALL THE OCTUPLETS ARE HANDSOME, WITH VALUABLE METALLIC FACES,
WELLMADE, RESPECTABLY DRESSED AND WELLCONDUCTED, SPEAKING FIVE MODERN
LANGUAGES FLUENTLY AND INTERESTED IN VARIOUS ARTS AND SCIENCES. EACH HAS
HIS NAME PRINTED IN LEGIBLE LETTERS ON HIS SHIRTFRONT NASODORO,
GOLDFINGER, CHRYSOSTOMOS, MAINDOREE, SILVERSMILE, SILBERSELBER,
VIFARGENT, PANARGYROS. THEY ARE IMMEDIATELY APPOINTED TO POSITIONS OF
HIGH PUBLIC TRUST IN SEVERAL DIFFERENT COUNTRIES AS MANAGING DIRECTORS OF
BANKS, TRAFFIC MANAGERS OF RAILWAYS, CHAIRMEN OF LIMITED LIABILITY
COMPANIES, VICECHAIRMEN OF HOTEL SYNDICATES.
A VOICE Bloom, are you the Messiah ben Joseph or ben David?
BLOOM DARKLY You have said it.
BROTHER BUZZ Then perform a miracle like Father Charles.
BANTAM LYONS Prophesy who will win the Saint Leger.
BLOOM WALKS ON A NET, COVERS HIS LEFT EYE WITH HIS LEFT EAR, PASSES
THROUGH SEVERAL WALLS, CLIMBS NELSON'S PILLAR, HANGS FROM THE TOP LEDGE
BY HIS EYELIDS, EATS TWELVE DOZEN OYSTERS SHELLS INCLUDED, HEALS
SEVERAL SUFFERERS FROM KING'S EVIL, CONTRACTS HIS FACE SO AS TO RESEMBLE
MANY HISTORICAL PERSONAGES, LORD BEACONSFIELD, LORD BYRON, WAT TYLER,
MOSES OF EGYPT, MOSES MAIMONIDES, MOSES MENDELSSOHN, HENRY IRVING, RIP
VAN WINKLE, KOSSUTH, JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU, BARON LEOPOLD ROTHSCHILD,
ROBINSON CRUSOE, SHERLOCK HOLMES, PASTEUR, TURNS EACH FOOT SIMULTANEOUSLY
IN DIFFERENT DIRECTIONS, BIDS THE TIDE TURN BACK, ECLIPSES THE SUN BY
EXTENDING HIS LITTLE FINGER.
BRINI, PAPAL NUNCIO IN PAPAL ZOUAVE'S UNIFORM, STEEL CUIRASSES AS
BREASTPLATE, ARMPLATES, THIGHPLATES, LEGPLATES, LARGE PROFANE MOUSTACHES
AND BROWN PAPER MITRE LEOPOLDI AUTEM GENERATIO. Moses begat Noah and
Noah begat Eunuch and Eunuch begat O'Halloran and O'Halloran begat
Guggenheim and Guggenheim begat Agendath and Agendath begat Netaim and
Netaim begat Le Hirsch and Le Hirsch begat Jesurum and Jesurum begat
MacKay and MacKay begat Ostrolopsky and Ostrolopsky begat Smerdoz and
Smerdoz begat Weiss and Weiss begat Schwarz and Schwarz begat Adrianopoli
and Adrianopoli begat Aranjuez and Aranjuez begat Lewy Lawson and Lewy
Lawson begat Ichabudonosor and Ichabudonosor begat O'Donnell Magnus and
O'Donnell Magnus begat Christbaum and Christbaum begat ben Maimun and ben
Maimun begat Dusty Rhodes and Dusty Rhodes begat Benamor and Benamor
begat JonesSmith and JonesSmith begat Savorgnanovich and Savorgnanovich
begat Jasperstone and Jasperstone begat Vingtetunieme and Vingtetunieme
begat Szombathely and Szombathely begat Virag and Virag begat Bloom ET
VOCABITUR NOMEN EIUS EMMANUEL.
A DEADHAND WRITES ON THE WALL Bloom is a cod.
CRAB IN BUSHRANGER'S KIT What did you do in the cattlecreep behind
Kilbarrack?
A FEMALE INFANT SHAKES A RATTLE And under Ballybough bridge?
A HOLLYBUSH And in the devil's glen?
BLOOM BLUSHES FURIOUSLY ALL OVER FROM FRONS TO NATES, THREE TEARS
FILLING FROM HIS LEFT EYE Spare my past.
THE IRISH EVICTED TENANTS IN BODYCOATS, KNEEBREECHES, WITH DONNYBROOK
FAIR SHILLELAGHS Sjambok him
BLOOM WITH ASSES' EARS SEATS HIMSELF IN THE PILLORY WITH CROSSED ARMS,
HIS FEET PROTRUDING. HE WHISTLES Don Giovanni, a cenar teco. ARTANE
ORPHANS, JOINING HANDS, CAPER ROUND HIM. GIRLS OF THE PRISON GATE
MISSION, JOINING HANDS, CAPER ROUND IN THE OPPOSITE DIRECTION.
THE ARTANE ORPHANS
You hig, you hog, you dirty dog
You think the ladies love you
THE PRISON GATE GIRLS
If you see Kay
Tell him he may
See you in tea
Tell him from me.
HORNBLOWER IN EPHOD AND HUNTINGCAP, ANNOUNCES And he shall carry the
sins of the people to Azazel, the spirit which is in the wilderness, and
to Lilith, the nighthag. And they shall stone him and defile him, yea,
all from Agendath Netaim and from Mizraim, the land of Ham.
ALL THE PEOPLE CAST SOFT PANTOMIME STONES AT BLOOM. MANY BONAFIDE
TRAVELLERS AND OWNERLESS DOGS COME NEAR HIM AND DEFILE HIM. MASTIANSKY
AND CITRON APPROACH IN GABERDINES, WEARING LONG EARLOCKS. THEY WAG THEIR
BEARDS AT BLOOM.
MASTIANSKY AND CITRON Belial Laemlein of Istria, the false Messiah
Abulafia Recant
GEORGE R MESIAS, BLOOM'S TAILOR, APPEARS, A TAILOR'S GOOSE UNDER HIS
ARM, PRESENTING A BILL
MESIAS To alteration one pair trousers eleven shillings.
BLOOM RUBS HIS HANDS CHEERFULLY Just like old times. Poor Bloom
REUBEN J DODD, BLACKBEARDED ISCARIOT, BAD SHEPHERD, BEARING ON HIS
SHOULDERS THE DROWNED CORPSE OF HIS SON, APPROACHES THE PILLORY.
REUBEN J WHISPERS HOARSELY The squeak is out. A split is gone for the
flatties. Nip the first rattler.
THE FIRE BRIGADE Pflaap
BROTHER BUZZ INVESTS BLOOM IN A YELLOW HABIT WITH EMBROIDERY OF PAINTED
FLAMES AND HIGH POINTED HAT. HE PLACES A BAG OF GUNPOWDER ROUND HIS NECK
AND HANDS HIM OVER TO THE CIVIL POWER, SAYING Forgive him his
trespasses.
LIEUTENANT MYERS OF THE DUBLIN FIRE BRIGADE BY GENERAL REQUEST SETS FIRE
TO BLOOM. LAMENTATIONS.
THE CITIZEN Thank heaven
BLOOM IN A SEAMLESS GARMENT MARKED I. H. S. STANDS UPRIGHT AMID PHOENIX
FLAMES Weep not for me, O daughters of Erin.
HE EXHIBITS TO DUBLIN REPORTERS TRACES OF BURNING. THE DAUGHTERS OF
ERIN, IN BLACK GARMENTS, WITH LARGE PRAYERBOOKS AND LONG LIGHTED CANDLES
IN THEIR HANDS, KNEEL DOWN AND PRAY.
THE DAUGHTERS OF ERIN
Kidney of Bloom, pray for us
Flower of the Bath, pray for us
Mentor of Menton, pray for us
Canvasser for the Freeman, pray for us
Charitable Mason, pray for us
Wandering Soap, pray for us
Sweets of Sin, pray for us
Music without Words, pray for us
Reprover of the Citizen, pray for us
Friend of all Frillies, pray for us
Midwife Most Merciful, pray for us
Potato Preservative against Plague and Pestilence, pray for us.
A CHOIR OF SIX HUNDRED VOICES, CONDUCTED BY VINCENT O'BRIEN, SINGS THE
CHORUS FROM HANDEL'S MESSIAH ALLELUIA FOR THE LORD GOD OMNIPOTENT
REIGNETH, ACCOMPANIED ON THE ORGAN BY JOSEPH GLYNN. BLOOM BECOMES MUTE,
SHRUNKEN, CARBONISED.
ZOE Talk away till you're black in the face.
BLOOM IN CAUBEEN WITH CLAY PIPE STUCK IN THE BAND, DUSTY BROGUES, AN
EMIGRANT'S RED HANDKERCHIEF BUNDLE IN HIS HAND, LEADING A BLACK BOGOAK
PIG BY A SUGAUN, WITH A SMILE IN HIS EYE Let me be going now, woman of
the house, for by all the goats in Connemara I'm after having the father
and mother of a bating. WITH A TEAR IN HIS EYE All insanity.
Patriotism, sorrow for the dead, music, future of the race. To be or not
to be. Life's dream is o'er. End it peacefully. They can live on. HE
GAZES FAR AWAY MOURNFULLY I am ruined. A few pastilles of aconite. The
blinds drawn. A letter. Then lie back to rest. HE BREATHES SOFTLY No
more. I have lived. Fare. Farewell.
ZOE STIFFLY, HER FINGER IN HER NECKFILLET Honest? Till the next time.
SHE SNEERS Suppose you got up the wrong side of the bed or came too
quick with your best girl. O, I can read your thoughts
BLOOM BITTERLY Man and woman, love, what is it? A cork and bottle. I'm
sick of it. Let everything rip.
ZOE IN SUDDEN SULKS I hate a rotter that's insincere. Give a bleeding
whore a chance.
BLOOM REPENTANTLY I am very disagreeable. You are a necessary evil.
Where are you from? London?
ZOE GLIBLY Hog's Norton where the pigs plays the organs. I'm Yorkshire
born. SHE HOLDS HIS HAND WHICH IS FEELING FOR HER NIPPLE I say, Tommy
Tittlemouse. Stop that and begin worse. Have you cash for a short time?
Ten shillings?
BLOOM SMILES, NODS SLOWLY More, houri, more.
ZOE And more's mother? SHE PATS HIM OFFHANDEDLY WITH VELVET PAWS Are
you coming into the musicroom to see our new pianola? Come and I'll peel
off.
BLOOM FEELING HIS OCCIPUT DUBIOUSLY WITH THE UNPARALLELED EMBARRASSMENT
OF A HARASSED PEDLAR GAUGING THE SYMMETRY OF HER PEELED PEARS Somebody
would be dreadfully jealous if she knew. The greeneyed monster.
EARNESTLY You know how difficult it is. I needn't tell you.
ZOE FLATTERED What the eye can't see the heart can't grieve for. SHE
PATS HIM Come.
BLOOM Laughing witch The hand that rocks the cradle.
ZOE Babby
BLOOM IN BABYLINEN AND PELISSE, BIGHEADED, WITH A CAUL OF DARK HAIR,
FIXES BIG EYES ON HER FLUID SLIP AND COUNTS ITS BRONZE BUCKLES WITH A
CHUBBY FINGER, HIS MOIST TONGUE LOLLING AND LISPING One two tlee tlee
tlwo tlone.
THE BUCKLES Love me. Love me not. Love me.
ZOE Silent means consent. WITH LITTLE PARTED TALONS SHE CAPTURES HIS
HAND, HER FOREFINGER GIVING TO HIS PALM THE PASSTOUCH OF SECRET MONITOR,
LURING HIM TO DOOM. Hot hands cold gizzard.
HE HESITATES AMID SCENTS, MUSIC, TEMPTATIONS. SHE LEADS HIM TOWARDS THE
STEPS, DRAWING HIM BY THE ODOUR OF HER ARMPITS, THE VICE OF HER PAINTED
EYES, THE RUSTLE OF HER SLIP IN WHOSE SINUOUS FOLDS LURKS THE LION REEK
OF ALL THE MALE BRUTES THAT HAVE POSSESSED HER.
THE MALE BRUTES EXHALING SULPHUR OF RUT AND DUNG AND RAMPING IN THEIR
LOOSEBOX, FAINTLY ROARING, THEIR DRUGGED HEADS SWAYING TO AND FRO Good
ZOE AND BLOOM REACH THE DOORWAY WHERE TWO SISTER WHORES ARE SEATED. THEY
EXAMINE HIM CURIOUSLY FROM UNDER THEIR PENCILLED BROWS AND SMILE TO HIS
HASTY BOW. HE TRIPS AWKWARDLY.
ZOE HER LUCKY HAND INSTANTLY SAVING HIM Hoopsa Don't fall upstairs.
BLOOM The just man falls seven times. HE STANDS ASIDE AT THE THRESHOLD
After you is good manners.
ZOE Ladies first, gentlemen after.
SHE CROSSES THE THRESHOLD. HE HESITATES. SHE TURNS AND, HOLDING OUT HER
HANDS, DRAWS HIM OVER. HE HOPS. ON THE ANTLERED RACK OF THE HALL HANG A
MAN 'S HAT AND WATERPROOF. BLOOM UNCOVERS HIMSELF BUT, SEEING THEM,
FROWNS, THEN SMILES, PREOCCUPIED. A DOOR ON THE RETURN LANDING IS FLUNG
OPEN. A MAN IN PURPLE SHIRT AND GREY TROUSERS, BROWNSOCKED, PASSES WITH
AN APE'S GAIT, HIS BALD HEAD AND GOATEE BEARD UPHELD, HUGGING A FULL
WATERJUGJAR, HIS TWOTAILED BLACK BRACES DANGLING AT HEELS. AVERTING HIS
FACE QUICKLY BLOOM BENDS TO EXAMINE ON THE HALLTABLE THE SPANIEL EYES OF
A RUNNING FOX THEN, HIS LIFTED HEAD SNIFFING, FOLLOWS ZOE INTO THE
MUSICROOM. A SHADE OF MAUVE TISSUEPAPER DIMS THE LIGHT OF THE CHANDELIER.
ROUND AND ROUND A MOTH FLIES, COLLIDING, ESCAPING. THE FLOOR IS COVERED
WITH AN OILCLOTH MOSAIC OF JADE AND AZURE AND CINNABAR RHOMBOIDS.
FOOTMARKS ARE STAMPED OVER IT IN ALL SENSES, HEEL TO HEEL, HEEL TO
HOLLOW, TOE TO TOE, FEET LOCKED, A MORRIS OF SHUFFLING FEET WITHOUT BODY
PHANTOMS, ALL IN A SCRIMMAGE HIGGLEDYPIGGLEDY. THE WALLS ARE TAPESTRIED
WITH A PAPER OF YEWFRONDS AND CLEAR GLADES. IN THE GRATE IS SPREAD A
SCREEN OF PEACOCK FEATHERS. LYNCH SQUATS CROSSLEGGED ON THE HEARTHRUG OF
MATTED HAIR, HIS CAP BACK TO THE FRONT. WITH A WAND HE BEATS TIME SLOWLY.
KITTY RICKETTS, A BONY PALLID WHORE IN NAVY COSTUME, DOESKIN GLOVES
ROLLED BACK FROM A CORAL WRISTLET, A CHAIN PURSE IN HER HAND, SITS
PERCHED ON THE EDGE OF THE TABLE SWINGING HER LEG AND GLANCING AT HERSELF
IN THE GILT MIRROR OVER THE MANTELPIECE. A TAG OF HER CORSETLACE HANGS
SLIGHTLY BELOW HER JACKET. LYNCH INDICATES MOCKINGLY THE COUPLE AT THE
PIANO.
KITTY COUGHS BEHIND HER HAND She's a bit imbecillic. SHE SIGNS WITH A
WAGGLING FOREFINGER Blemblem. LYNCH LIFTS UP HER SKIRT AND WHITE
PETTICOAT WITH HIS WAND SHE SETTLES THEM DOWN QUICKLY. Respect yourself.
SHE HICCUPS, THEN BENDS QUICKLY HER SAILOR HAT UNDER WHICH HER HAIR
GLOWS, RED WITH HENNA O, excuse
ZOE More limelight, Charley. SHE GOES TO THE CHANDELIER AND TURNS THE
GAS FULL COCK
KITTY PEERS AT THE GASJET What ails it tonight?
LYNCH DEEPLY Enter a ghost and hobgoblins.
ZOE Clap on the back for Zoe.
THE WAND IN LYNCH'S HAND FLASHES A BRASS POKER. STEPHEN STANDS AT THE
PIANOLA ON WHICH SPRAWL HIS HAT AND ASHPLANT. WITH TWO FINGERS HE REPEATS
ONCE MORE THE SERIES OF EMPTY FIFTHS. FLORRY TALBOT, A BLOND FEEBLE
GOOSEFAT WHORE IN A TATTERDEMALION GOWN OF MILDEWED STRAWBERRY, LOLLS
SPREADEAGLE IN THE SOFACORNER, HER LIMP FOREARM PENDENT OVER THE BOLSTER,
LISTENING. A HEAVY STYE DROOPS OVER HER SLEEPY EYELID.
KITTY HICCUPS AGAIN WITH A KICK OF HER HORSED FOOT O, excuse
ZOE PROMPTLY Your boy's thinking of you. Tie a knot on your shift.
KITTY RICKETTS BENDS HER HEAD. HER BOA UNCOILS, SLIDES, GLIDES OVER HER
SHOULDER, BACK, ARM, CHAIR TO THE GROUND. LYNCH LIFTS THE CURLED
CATERPILLAR ON HIS WAND. SHE SNAKES HER NECK, NESTLING. STEPHEN GLANCES
BEHIND AT THE SQUATTED FIGURE WITH ITS CAP BACK TO THE FRONT.
STEPHEN As a matter of fact it is of no importance whether Benedetto
Marcello found it or made it. The rite is the poet's rest. It may be an
old hymn to Demeter or also illustrate COELA ENARRANT GLORIAM DOMINI. It
is susceptible of nodes or modes as far apart as hyperphrygian and
mixolydian and of texts so divergent as priests haihooping round David's
that is Circe's or what am I saying Ceres' altar and David's tip from the
stable to his chief bassoonist about the alrightness of his almightiness.
MAIS NOM DE NOM, that is another pair of trousers. JETEZ LA GOURME. FAUT
QUE JEUNESSE SE PASSE. HE STOPS, POINTS AT LYNCH'S CAP, SMILES, LAUGHS
Which side is your knowledge bump?
THE CAP WITH SATURNINE SPLEEN Bah It is because it is. Woman's
reason. Jewgreek is greekjew. Extremes meet. Death is the highest form of
life. Bah
STEPHEN You remember fairly accurately all my errors, boasts, mistakes.
How long shall I continue to close my eyes to disloyalty? Whetstone
THE CAP Bah
STEPHEN Here's another for you. HE FROWNS The reason is because the
fundamental and the dominant are separated by the greatest possible
interval which ...
THE CAP Which? Finish. You can't.
STEPHEN WITH AN EFFORT Interval which. Is the greatest possible
ellipse. Consistent with. The ultimate return. The octave. Which.
THE CAP Which?
OUTSIDE THE GRAMOPHONE BEGINS TO BLARE The Holy City.
STEPHEN ABRUPTLY What went forth to the ends of the world to traverse
not itself, God, the sun, Shakespeare, a commercial traveller, having
itself traversed in reality itself becomes that self. Wait a moment. Wait
a second. Damn that fellow's noise in the street. Self which it itself
was ineluctably preconditioned to become. ECCO
LYNCH WITH A MOCKING WHINNY OF LAUGHTER GRINS AT BLOOM AND ZOE HIGGINS
What a learned speech, eh?
ZOE BRISKLY God help your head, he knows more than you have forgotten.
WITH OBESE STUPIDITY FLORRY TALBOT REGARDS STEPHEN.
FLORRY They say the last day is coming this summer.
KITTY No
ZOE EXPLODES IN LAUGHTER Great unjust God
FLORRY OFFENDED Well, it was in the papers about Antichrist. O, my
foot's tickling.
RAGGED BAREFOOT NEWSBOYS, JOGGING A WAGTAIL KITE, PATTER PAST, YELLING.
THE NEWSBOYS Stop press edition. Result of the rockinghorse races. Sea
serpent in the royal canal. Safe arrival of Antichrist.
STEPHEN TURNS AND SEES BLOOM.
STEPHEN A time, times and half a time.
REUBEN I ANTICHRIST, WANDERING JEW, A CLUTCHING HAND OPEN ON HIS SPINE,
STUMPS FORWARD. ACROSS HIS LOINS IS SLUNG A PILGRIM'S WALLET FROM WHICH
PROTRUDE PROMISSORY NOTES AND DISHONOURED BILLS. ALOFT OVER HIS SHOULDER
HE BEARS A LONG BOATPOLE FROM THE HOOK OF WHICH THE SODDEN HUDDLED MASS
OF HIS ONLY SON, SAVED FROM LIFFEY WATERS, HANGS FROM THE SLACK OF ITS
BREECHES. A HOBGOBLIN IN THE IMAGE OF PUNCH COSTELLO, HIPSHOT,
CROOKBACKED, HYDROCEPHALIC, PROGNATHIC WITH RECEDING FOREHEAD AND ALLY
SLOPER NOSE, TUMBLES IN SOMERSAULTS THROUGH THE GATHERING DARKNESS.
ALL What?
THE HOBGOBLIN HIS JAWS CHATTERING, CAPERS TO AND FRO, GOGGLING HIS
EYES, SQUEAKING, KANGAROOHOPPING WITH OUTSTRETCHED CLUTCHING ARMS, THEN
ALL AT ONCE THRUSTS HIS LIPLESS FACE THROUGH THE FORK OF HIS THIGHS IL
VIENT C'EST MOI L'HOMME QUI RIT L'HOMME PRIMIGENE HE WHIRLS ROUND
AND ROUND WITH DERVISH HOWLS SIEURS ET DAMES, FAITES VOS JEUX HE
CROUCHES JUGGLING. TINY ROULETTE PLANETS FLY FROM HIS HANDS. LES JEUX
SONT FAITS THE PLANETS RUSH TOGETHER, UTTERING CREPITANT CRACKS RIEN
VA PLUS THE PLANETS, BUOYANT BALLOONS, SAIL SWOLLEN UP AND AWAY. HE
SPRINGS OFF INTO VACUUM.
FLORRY SINKING INTO TORPOR, CROSSING HERSELF SECRETLY The end of the
world
A FEMALE TEPID EFFLUVIUM LEAKS OUT FROM HER. NEBULOUS OBSCURITY OCCUPIES
SPACE. THROUGH THE DRIFTING FOG WITHOUT THE GRAMOPHONE BLARES OVER COUGHS
AND FEETSHUFFLING.
THE GRAMOPHONE Jerusalem
Open your gates and sing
Hosanna ...
A ROCKET RUSHES UP THE SKY AND BURSTS. A WHITE STAR FILLS FROM IT,
PROCLAIMING THE CONSUMMATION OF ALL THINGS AND SECOND COMING OF ELIJAH.
ALONG AN INFINITE INVISIBLE TIGHTROPE TAUT FROM ZENITH TO NADIR THE END
OF THE WORLD, A TWOHEADED OCTOPUS IN GILLIE'S KILTS, BUSBY AND TARTAN
FILIBEGS, WHIRLS THROUGH THE MURK, HEAD OVER HEELS, IN THE FORM OF THE
THREE LEGS OF MAN.
THE END OF THE WORLD WITH A SCOTCH ACCENT Wha'll dance the keel row,
the keel row, the keel row?
OVER THE POSSING DRIFT AND CHOKING BREATHCOUGHS, ELIJAH'S VOICE, HARSH
AS A CORNCRAKE'S, JARS ON HIGH. PERSPIRING IN A LOOSE LAWN SURPLICE WITH
FUNNEL SLEEVES HE IS SEEN, VERGERFACED, ABOVE A ROSTRUM ABOUT WHICH THE
BANNER OF OLD GLORY IS DRAPED. HE THUMPS THE PARAPET.
ELIJAH No yapping, if you please, in this booth. Jake Crane, Creole Sue,
Dove Campbell, Abe Kirschner, do your coughing with your mouths shut.
Say, I am operating all this trunk line. Boys, do it now. God's time is
.. Tell mother you'll be there. Rush your order and you play a slick
ace. Join on right here. Book through to eternity junction, the nonstop
run. Just one word more. Are you a god or a doggone clod? If the second
advent came to Coney Island are we ready? Florry Christ, Stephen Christ,
Zoe Christ, Bloom Christ, Kitty Christ, Lynch Christ, it's up to you to
sense that cosmic force. Have we cold feet about the cosmos? No. Be on
the side of the angels. Be a prism. You have that something within, the
higher self. You can rub shoulders with a Jesus, a Gautama, an Ingersoll.
Are you all in this vibration? I say you are. You once nobble that,
congregation, and a buck joyride to heaven becomes a back number. You got
me? It's a lifebrightener, sure. The hottest stuff ever was. It's the
whole pie with jam in. It's just the cutest snappiest line out. It is
immense, supersumptuous. It restores. It vibrates. I know and I am some
vibrator. Joking apart and, getting down to bedrock, A. J. Christ Dowie
and the harmonial philosophy, have you got that? O. K. Seventyseven west
sixtyninth street. Got me? That's it. You call me up by sunphone any old
time. Bumboosers, save your stamps. HE SHOUTS Now then our glory song.
All join heartily in the singing. Encore HE SINGS Jeru ...
THE GRAMOPHONE DROWNING HIS VOICE Whorusalaminyourhighhohhhh ... THE
DISC RASPS GRATINGLY AGAINST THE NEEDLE
THE THREE WHORES COVERING THEIR EARS, SQUAWK Ahhkkk
ELIJAH IN ROLLEDUP SHIRTSLEEVES, BLACK IN THE FACE, SHOUTS AT THE TOP
OF HIS VOICE, HIS ARMS UPLIFTED Big Brother up there, Mr President, you
hear what I done just been saying to you. Certainly, I sort of believe
strong in you, Mr President. I certainly am thinking now Miss Higgins and
Miss Ricketts got religion way inside them. Certainly seems to me I don't
never see no wusser scared female than the way you been, Miss Florry,
just now as I done seed you. Mr President, you come long and help me save
our sisters dear. HE WINKS AT HIS AUDIENCE Our Mr President, he twig
the whole lot and he aint saying nothing.
KITTYKATE I forgot myself. In a weak moment I erred and did what I did
on Constitution hill. I was confirmed by the bishop and enrolled in the
brown scapular. My mother's sister married a Montmorency. It was a
working plumber was my ruination when I was pure.
ZOEFANNY I let him larrup it into me for the fun of it.
FLORRYTERESA It was in consequence of a portwine beverage on top of
Hennessy's three star. I was guilty with Whelan when he slipped into the
bed.
STEPHEN In the beginning was the word, in the end the world without end.
Blessed be the eight beatitudes.
THE BEATITUDES, DIXON, MADDEN, CROTTHERS, COSTELLO, LENEHAN, BANNON,
MULLIGAN AND LYNCH IN WHITE SURGICAL STUDENTS' GOWNS, FOUR ABREAST,
GOOSESTEPPING, TRAMP FIST PAST IN NOISY MARCHING
THE BEATITUDES INCOHERENTLY Beer beef battledog buybull businum barnum
buggerum bishop.
LYSTER IN QUAKERGREY KNEEBREECHES AND BROADBRIMMED HAT, SAYS
DISCREETLY He is our friend. I need not mention names. Seek thou the
light.
HE CORANTOS BY. BEST ENTERS IN HAIRDRESSER'S ATTIRE, SHINILY LAUNDERED,
HIS LOCKS IN CURLPAPERS. HE LEADS JOHN EGLINTON WHO WEARS A MANDARIN'S
KIMONO OF NANKEEN YELLOW, LIZARDLETTERED, AND A HIGH PAGODA HAT.
BEST SMILING, LIFTS THE HAT AND DISPLAYS A SHAVEN POLL FROM THE CROWN
OF WHICH BRISTLES A PIGTAIL TOUPEE TIED WITH AN ORANGE TOPKNOT I was
just beautifying him, don't you know. A thing of beauty, don't you know,
Yeats says, or I mean, Keats says.
JOHN EGLINTON PRODUCES A GREENCAPPED DARK LANTERN AND FLASHES IT
TOWARDS A CORNER WITH CARPING ACCENT Esthetics and cosmetics are for
the boudoir. I am out for truth. Plain truth for a plain man. Tanderagee
wants the facts and means to get them.
IN THE CONE OF THE SEARCHLIGHT BEHIND THE COALSCUTTLE, OLLAVE, HOLYEYED,
THE BEARDED FIGURE OF MANANAUN MACLIR BROODS, CHIN ON KNEES. HE RISES
SLOWLY. A COLD SEAWIND BLOWS FROM HIS DRUID MOUTH. ABOUT HIS HEAD WRITHE
EELS AND ELVERS. HE IS ENCRUSTED WITH WEEDS AND SHELLS. HIS RIGHT HAND
HOLDS A BICYCLE PUMP. HIS LEFT HAND GRASPS A HUGE CRAYFISH BY ITS TWO
TALONS.
MANANAUN MACLIR WITH A VOICE OF WAVES Aum Hek Wal Ak Lub Mor Ma
White yoghin of the gods. Occult pimander of Hermes Trismegistos. WITH A
VOICE OF WHISTLING SEAWIND Punarjanam patsypunjaub I won't have my leg
pulled. It has been said by one beware the left, the cult of Shakti.
WITH A CRY OF STORMBIRDS Shakti Shiva, darkhidden Father HE SMITES
WITH HIS BICYCLE PUMP THE CRAYFISH IN HIS LEFT HAND. ON ITS COOPERATIVE
DIAL GLOW THE TWELVE SIGNS OF THE ZODIAC. HE WAILS WITH THE VEHEMENCE OF
THE OCEAN. Aum Baum Pyjaum I am the light of the homestead I am the
dreamery creamery butter.
A SKELETON JUDASHAND STRANGLES THE LIGHT. THE GREEN LIGHT WANES TO
MAUVE. THE GASJET WAILS WHISTLING.
THE GASJET Pooah Pfuiiiiiii
ZOE RUNS TO THE CHANDELIER AND, CROOKING HER LEG, ADJUSTS THE MANTLE.
ZOE Who has a fag as I'm here?
LYNCH TOSSING A CIGARETTE ON TO THE TABLE Here.
ZOE HER HEAD PERCHED ASIDE IN MOCK PRIDE Is that the way to hand the
POT to a lady? SHE STRETCHES UP TO LIGHT THE CIGARETTE OVER THE FLAME,
TWIRLING IT SLOWLY, SHOWING THE BROWN TUFTS OF HER ARMPITS. LYNCH WITH
HIS POKER LIFTS BOLDLY A SIDE OF HER SLIP. BARE FROM HER GARTERS UP HER
FLESH APPEARS UNDER THE SAPPHIRE A NIXIE'S GREEN. SHE PUFFS CALMLY AT HER
CIGARETTE. Can you see the beautyspot of my behind?
LYNCH I'm not looking
ZOE MAKES SHEEP'S EYES No? You wouldn't do a less thing. Would you
suck a lemon?
SQUINTING IN MOCK SHAME SHE GLANCES WITH SIDELONG MEANING AT BLOOM, THEN
TWISTS ROUND TOWARDS HIM, PULLING HER SLIP FREE OF THE POKER. BLUE FLUID
AGAIN FLOWS OVER HER FLESH. BLOOM STANDS, SMILING DESIROUSLY, TWIRLING
HIS THUMBS. KITTY RICKETTS LICKS HER MIDDLE FINGER WITH HER SPITTLE AND,
GAZING IN THE MIRROR, SMOOTHS BOTH EYEBROWS. LIPOTI VIRAG,
BASILICOGRAMMATE, CHUTES RAPIDLY DOWN THROUGH THE CHIMNEYFLUE AND STRUTS
TWO STEPS TO THE LEFT ON GAWKY PINK STILTS. HE IS SAUSAGED INTO SEVERAL
OVERCOATS AND WEARS A BROWN MACINTOSH UNDER WHICH HE HOLDS A ROLL OF
PARCHMENT. IN HIS LEFT EYE FLASHES THE MONOCLE OF CASHEL BOYLE O'CONNOR
FITZMAURICE TISDALL FARRELL. ON HIS HEAD IS PERCHED AN EGYPTIAN PSHENT.
TWO QUILLS PROJECT OVER HIS EARS.
VIRAG HEELS TOGETHER, BOWS My name is Virag Lipoti, of Szombathely.
HE COUGHS THOUGHTFULLY, DRILY Promiscuous nakedness is much in evidence
hereabouts, eh? Inadvertently her backview revealed the fact that she is
not wearing those rather intimate garments of which you are a particular
devotee. The injection mark on the thigh I hope you perceived? Good.
BLOOM Granpapachi. But ...
VIRAG Number two on the other hand, she of the cherry rouge and
coiffeuse white, whose hair owes not a little to our tribal elixir of
gopherwood, is in walking costume and tightly staysed by her sit, I
should opine. Backbone in front, so to say. Correct me but I always
understood that the act so performed by skittish humans with glimpses of
lingerie appealed to you in virtue of its exhibitionististicicity. In a
word. Hippogriff. Am I right?
BLOOM She is rather lean.
VIRAG NOT UNPLEASANTLY Absolutely Well observed and those pannier
pockets of the skirt and slightly pegtop effect are devised to suggest
bunchiness of hip. A new purchase at some monster sale for which a gull
has been mulcted. Meretricious finery to deceive the eye. Observe the
attention to details of dustspecks. Never put on you tomorrow what you
can wear today. Parallax WITH A NERVOUS TWITCH OF HIS HEAD Did you
hear my brain go snap? Pollysyllabax
BLOOM AN ELBOW RESTING IN A HAND, A FOREFINGER AGAINST HIS CHEEK She
seems sad.
VIRAG CYNICALLY, HIS WEASEL TEETH BARED YELLOW, DRAWS DOWN HIS LEFT EYE
WITH A FINGER AND BARKS HOARSELY Hoax Beware of the flapper and bogus
mournful. Lily of the alley. All possess bachelor's button discovered by
Rualdus Columbus. Tumble her. Columble her. Chameleon. MORE GENIALLY
Well then, permit me to draw your attention to item number three. There
is plenty of her visible to the naked eye. Observe the mass of oxygenated
vegetable matter on her skull. What ho, she bumps The ugly duckling of
the party, longcasted and deep in keel.
BLOOM REGRETFULLY When you come out without your gun.
VIRAG We can do you all brands, mild, medium and strong. Pay your money,
take your choice. How happy could you be with either ...
BLOOM With ...?
VIRAG HIS TONGUE UPCURLING Lyum Look. Her beam is broad. She is
coated with quite a considerable layer of fat. Obviously mammal in weight
of bosom you remark that she has in front well to the fore two
protuberances of very respectable dimensions, inclined to fall in the
noonday soupplate, while on her rere lower down are two additional
protuberances, suggestive of potent rectum and tumescent for palpation,
which leave nothing to be desired save compactness. Such fleshy parts are
the product of careful nurture. When coopfattened their livers reach an
elephantine size. Pellets of new bread with fennygreek and gumbenjamin
swamped down by potions of green tea endow them during their brief
existence with natural pincushions of quite colossal blubber. That suits
your book, eh? Fleshhotpots of Egypt to hanker after. Wallow in it.
Lycopodium. HIS THROAT TWITCHES Slapbang There he goes again.
BLOOM The stye I dislike.
VIRAG ARCHES HIS EYEBROWS Contact with a goldring, they say.
ARGUMENTUM AD FEMINAM, as we said in old Rome and ancient Greece in the
consulship of Diplodocus and Ichthyosauros. For the rest Eve's sovereign
remedy. Not for sale. Hire only. Huguenot. HE TWITCHES It is a funny
sound. HE COUGHS ENCOURAGINGLY But possibly it is only a wart. I
presume you shall have remembered what I will have taught you on that
head? Wheatenmeal with honey and nutmeg.
BLOOM REFLECTING Wheatenmeal with lycopodium and syllabax. This
searching ordeal. It has been an unusually fatiguing day, a chapter of
accidents. Wait. I mean, wartsblood spreads warts, you said ...
VIRAG SEVERELY, HIS NOSE HARDHUMPED, HIS SIDE EYE WINKING Stop
twirling your thumbs and have a good old thunk. See, you have forgotten.
Exercise your mnemotechnic. LA CAUSA E SANTA. Tara. Tara. ASIDE He will
surely remember.
BLOOM Rosemary also did I understand you to say or willpower over
parasitic tissues. Then nay no I have an inkling. The touch of a deadhand
cures. Mnemo?
VIRAG EXCITEDLY I say so. I say so. E'en so. Technic. HE TAPS HIS
PARCHMENTROLL ENERGETICALLY This book tells you how to act with all
descriptive particulars. Consult index for agitated fear of aconite,
melancholy of muriatic, priapic pulsatilla. Virag is going to talk about
amputation. Our old friend caustic. They must be starved. Snip off with
horsehair under the denned neck. But, to change the venue to the Bulgar
and the Basque, have you made up your mind whether you like or dislike
women in male habiliments? WITH A DRY SNIGGER You intended to devote an
entire year to the study of the religious problem and the summer months
of  to square the circle and win that million. Pomegranate From the
sublime to the ridiculous is but a step. Pyjamas, let us say? Or
stockingette gussetted knickers, closed? Or, put we the case, those
complicated combinations, camiknickers? HE CROWS DERISIVELY
Keekeereekee
BLOOM SURVEYS UNCERTAINLY THE THREE WHORES THEN GAZES AT THE VEILED
MAUVE LIGHT, HEARING THE EVERFLYING MOTH.
BLOOM I wanted then to have now concluded. Nightdress was never. Hence
this. But tomorrow is a new day will be. Past was is today. What now is
will then morrow as now was be past yester.
VIRAG PROMPTS IN A PIG'S WHISPER Insects of the day spend their brief
existence in reiterated coition, lured by the smell of the inferiorly
pulchritudinous fumale possessing extendified pudendal nerve in dorsal
region. Pretty Poll HIS YELLOW PARROTBEAK GABBLES NASALLY They had a
proverb in the Carpathians in or about the year five thousand five
hundred and fifty of our era. One tablespoonful of honey will attract
friend Bruin more than half a dozen barrels of first choice malt vinegar.
Bear's buzz bothers bees. But of this apart. At another time we may
resume. We were very pleased, we others. HE COUGHS AND, BENDING HIS
BROW, RUBS HIS NOSE THOUGHTFULLY WITH A SCOOPING HAND You shall find
that these night insects follow the light. An illusion for remember their
complex unadjustable eye. For all these knotty points see the seventeenth
book of my Fundamentals of Sexology or the Love Passion which Doctor L.B.
says is the book sensation of the year. Some, to example, there are again
whose movements are automatic. Perceive. That is his appropriate sun.
Nightbird nightsun nighttown. Chase me, Charley he blows into Bloom's
ear Buzz
BLOOM Bee or bluebottle too other day butting shadow on wall dazed self
then me wandered dazed down shirt good job I ...
VIRAG HIS FACE IMPASSIVE, LAUGHS IN A RICH FEMININE KEY Splendid
Spanish fly in his fly or mustard plaster on his dibble. HE GOBBLES
GLUTTONOUSLY WITH TURKEY WATTLES Bubbly jock Bubbly jock Where are we?
Open Sesame Cometh forth HE UNROLLS HIS PARCHMENT RAPIDLY AND READS,
HIS GLOWWORM'S NOSE RUNNING BACKWARDS OVER THE LETTERS WHICH HE CLAWS
Stay, good friend. I bring thee thy answer. Redbank oysters will shortly
be upon us. I'm the best o'cook. Those succulent bivalves may help us and
the truffles of Perigord, tubers dislodged through mister omnivorous
porker, were unsurpassed in cases of nervous debility or viragitis.
Though they stink yet they sting. HE WAGS HIS HEAD WITH CACKLING
RAILLERY Jocular. With my eyeglass in my ocular. HE SNEEZES Amen
BLOOM ABSENTLY Ocularly woman's bivalve case is worse. Always open
sesame. The cloven sex. Why they fear vermin, creeping things. Yet Eve
and the serpent contradicts. Not a historical fact. Obvious analogy to my
idea. Serpents too are gluttons for woman's milk. Wind their way through
miles of omnivorous forest to sucksucculent her breast dry. Like those
bubblyjocular Roman matrons one reads of in Elephantuliasis.
VIRAG HIS MOUTH PROJECTED IN HARD WRINKLES, EYES STONILY FORLORNLY
CLOSED, PSALMS IN OUTLANDISH MONOTONE That the cows with their those
distended udders that they have been the the known ...
BLOOM I am going to scream. I beg your pardon. Ah? So. HE REPEATS
Spontaneously to seek out the saurian's lair in order to entrust their
teats to his avid suction. Ant milks aphis. PROFOUNDLY Instinct rules
the world. In life. In death.
VIRAG HEAD ASKEW, ARCHES HIS BACK AND HUNCHED WINGSHOULDERS, PEERS AT
THE MOTH OUT OF BLEAR BULGED EYES, POINTS A HORNING CLAW AND CRIES Who's
moth moth? Who's dear Gerald? Dear Ger, that you? O dear, he is Gerald.
O, I much fear he shall be most badly burned. Will some pleashe pershon
not now impediment so catastrophics mit agitation of firstclass
tablenumpkin? HE MEWS Puss puss puss puss HE SIGHS, DRAWS BACK AND
STARES SIDEWAYS DOWN WITH DROPPING UNDERJAW Well, well. He doth rest
anon. he snaps his jaws suddenly on the air
THE MOTH
I'm a tiny tiny thing
Ever flying in the spring
Round and round a ringaring.
Long ago I was a king
Now I do this kind of thing
On the wing, on the wing
Bing
HE RUSHES AGAINST THE MAUVE SHADE, FLAPPING NOISILY Pretty pretty
pretty pretty pretty pretty petticoats.
FROM LEFT UPPER ENTRANCE WITH TWO GLIDING STEPS HENRY FLOWER COMES
FORWARD TO LEFT FRONT CENTRE. HE WEARS A DARK MANTLE AND DROOPING PLUMED
SOMBRERO. HE CARRIES A SILVERSTRINGED INLAID DULCIMER AND A LONGSTEMMED
BAMBOO JACOB'S PIPE, ITS CLAY BOWL FASHIONED AS A FEMALE HEAD. HE WEARS
DARK VELVET HOSE AND SILVERBUCKLED PUMPS. HE HAS THE ROMANTIC SAVIOUR'S
FACE WITH FLOWING LOCKS, THIN BEARD AND MOUSTACHE. HIS SPINDLELEGS AND
SPARROW FEET ARE THOSE OF THE TENOR MARIO, PRINCE OF CANDIA. HE SETTLES
DOWN HIS GOFFERED RUFFS AND MOISTENS HIS LIPS WITH A PASSAGE OF HIS
AMOROUS TONGUE.
HENRY IN A LOW DULCET VOICE, TOUCHING THE STRINGS OF HIS GUITAR There
is a flower that bloometh.
VIRAG TRUCULENT, HIS JOWL SET, STARES AT THE LAMP. GRAVE BLOOM REGARDS
ZOE'S NECK. HENRY GALLANT TURNS WITH PENDANT DEWLAP TO THE PIANO.
STEPHEN TO HIMSELF Play with your eyes shut. Imitate pa. Filling my
belly with husks of swine. Too much of this. I will arise and go to my.
Expect this is the. Steve, thou art in a parlous way. Must visit old
Deasy or telegraph. Our interview of this morning has left on me a deep
impression. Though our ages. Will write fully tomorrow. I'm partially
drunk, by the way. HE TOUCHES THE KEYS AGAIN Minor chord comes now.
Yes. Not much however.
ALMIDANO ARTIFONI HOLDS OUT A BATONROLL OF MUSIC WITH VIGOROUS
MOUSTACHEWORK.
ARTIFONI CI RIFLETTA. LEI ROVINA TUTTO.
FLORRY Sing us something. Love's old sweet song.
STEPHEN No voice. I am a most finished artist. Lynch, did I show you the
letter about the lute?
FLORRY SMIRKING The bird that can sing and won't sing.
THE SIAMESE TWINS, PHILIP DRUNK AND PHILIP SOBER, TWO OXFORD DONS WITH
LAWNMOWERS, APPEAR IN THE WINDOW EMBRASURE. BOTH ARE MASKED WITH MATTHEW
ARNOLD'S FACE.
PHILIP SOBER Take a fool's advice. All is not well. Work it out with the
buttend of a pencil, like a good young idiot. Three pounds twelve you
got, two notes, one sovereign, two crowns, if youth but knew. Mooney's en
ville, Mooney's sur mer, the Moira, Larchet's, Holles street hospital,
Burke's. Eh? I am watching you.
PHILIP DRUNK IMPATIENTLY Ah, bosh, man. Go to hell I paid my way. If
I could only find out about octaves. Reduplication of personality. Who
was it told me his name? HIS LAWNMOWER BEGINS TO PURR Aha, yes. ZOE MOU
SAS AGAPO. Have a notion I was here before. When was it not Atkinson his
card I have somewhere. Mac Somebody. Unmack I have it. He told me about,
hold on, Swinburne, was it, no?
FLORRY And the song?
STEPHEN Spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.
FLORRY Are you out of Maynooth? You're like someone I knew once.
STEPHEN Out of it now. TO HIMSELF Clever.
PHILIP DRUNK AND PHILIP SOBER THEIR LAWNMOWERS PURRING WITH A RIGADOON
OF GRASSHALMS Clever ever. Out of it out of it. By the bye have you the
book, the thing, the ashplant? Yes, there it, yes. Cleverever outofitnow.
Keep in condition. Do like us.
ZOE There was a priest down here two nights ago to do his bit of
business with his coat buttoned up. You needn't try to hide, I says to
him. I know you've a Roman collar.
VIRAG Perfectly logical from his standpoint. Fall of man. HARSHLY, HIS
PUPILS WAXING To hell with the pope Nothing new under the sun. I am the
Virag who disclosed the Sex Secrets of Monks and Maidens. Why I left the
church of Rome. Read the Priest, the Woman and the Confessional. Penrose.
Flipperty Jippert. HE WRIGGLES Woman, undoing with sweet pudor her belt
of rushrope, offers her allmoist yoni to man's lingam. Short time after
man presents woman with pieces of jungle meat. Woman shows joy and covers
herself with featherskins. Man loves her yoni fiercely with big lingam,
the stiff one. HE CRIES COACTUS VOLUI. Then giddy woman will run about.
Strong man grapses woman's wrist. Woman squeals, bites, spucks. Man, now
fierce angry, strikes woman's fat yadgana. HE CHASES HIS TAIL Piffpaff
Popo HE STOPS, SNEEZES Pchp HE WORRIES HIS BUTT Prrrrrht
LYNCH I hope you gave the good father a penance. Nine glorias for
shooting a bishop.
ZOE SPOUTS WALRUS SMOKE THROUGH HER NOSTRILS He couldn't get a
connection. Only, you know, sensation. A dry rush.
BLOOM Poor man
ZOE LIGHTLY Only for what happened him.
BLOOM How?
VIRAG A DIABOLIC RICTUS OF BLACK LUMINOSITY CONTRACTING HIS VISAGE,
CRANES HIS SCRAGGY NECK FORWARD. HE LIFTS A MOONCALF NOZZLE AND HOWLS.
VERFLUCHTE GOIM He had a father, forty fathers. He never existed. Pig
God He had two left feet. He was Judas Iacchia, a Libyan eunuch, the
pope's bastard. HE LEANS OUT ON TORTURED FOREPAWS, ELBOWS BENT RIGID,
HIS EYE AGONISING IN HIS FLAT SKULLNECK AND YELPS OVER THE MUTE WORLD A
son of a whore. Apocalypse.
KITTY And Mary Shortall that was in the lock with the pox she got from
Jimmy Pidgeon in the blue caps had a child off him that couldn't swallow
and was smothered with the convulsions in the mattress and we all
subscribed for the funeral.
PHILIP DRUNK GRAVELY QUI VOUS A MIS DANS CETTE FICHUE POSITION,
PHILIPPE?
PHILIP SOBER GAILY C'ETAIT LE SACRE PIGEON, PHILIPPE.
KITTY UNPINS HER HAT AND SETS IT DOWN CALMLY, PATTING HER HENNA HAIR.
AND A PRETTIER, A DAINTIER HEAD OF WINSOME CURLS WAS NEVER SEEN ON A
WHORE'S SHOULDERS. LYNCH PUTS ON HER HAT. SHE WHIPS IT OFF.
LYNCH LAUGHS And to such delights has Metchnikoff inoculated
anthropoid apes.
FLORRY NODS Locomotor ataxy.
ZOE GAILY O, my dictionary.
LYNCH Three wise virgins.
VIRAG AGUESHAKEN, PROFUSE YELLOW SPAWN FOAMING OVER HIS BONY EPILEPTIC
LIPS She sold lovephiltres, whitewax, orangeflower. Panther, the Roman
centurion, polluted her with his genitories. HE STICKS OUT A FLICKERING
PHOSPHORESCENT SCORPION TONGUE, HIS HAND ON HIS FORK Messiah He burst
her tympanum. WITH GIBBERING BABOON'S CRIES HE JERKS HIS HIPS IN THE
CYNICAL SPASM Hik Hek Hak Hok Huk Kok Kuk
BEN JUMBO DOLLARD, RUBICUND, MUSCLEBOUND, HAIRYNOSTRILLED, HUGEBEARDED,
CABBAGEEARED, SHAGGYCHESTED, SHOCKMANED, FAT PAPPED, STANDS FORTH, HIS
LOINS AND GENITALS TIGHTENED INTO A PAIR OF BLACK BATHING BAGSLOPS.
BEN DOLLARD NAKKERING CASTANET BONES IN HIS HUGE PADDED PAWS, YODELS
JOVIALLY IN BASE BARRELTONE When love absorbs my ardent soul.
THE VIRGINS NURSE CALLAN AND NURSE QUIGLEY BURST THROUGH THE RINGKEEPERS
AND THE ROPES AND MOB HIM WITH OPEN ARMS.
THE VIRGINS GUSHINGLY Big Ben Ben my Chree
A VOICE Hold that fellow with the bad breeches.
BEN DOLLARD SMITES HIS THIGH IN ABUNDANT LAUGHTER Hold him now.
HENRY CARESSING ON HIS BREAST A SEVERED FEMALE HEAD, MURMURS Thine
heart, mine love. HE PLUCKS HIS LUTESTRINGS When first I saw ...
VIRAG SLOUGHING HIS SKINS, HIS MULTITUDINOUS PLUMAGE MOULTING Rats
HE YAWNS, SHOWING A COALBLACK THROAT, AND CLOSES HIS JAWS BY AN UPWARD
PUSH OF HIS PARCHMENTROLL After having said which I took my departure.
Farewell. Fare thee well. DRECK
HENRY FLOWER COMBS HIS MOUSTACHE AND BEARD RAPIDLY WITH A POCKETCOMB AND
GIVES A COW'S LICK TO HIS HAIR. STEERED BY HIS RAPIER, HE GLIDES TO THE
DOOR, HIS WILD HARP SLUNG BEHIND HIM. VIRAG REACHES THE DOOR IN TWO
UNGAINLY STILTHOPS, HIS TAIL COCKED, AND DEFTLY CLAPS SIDEWAYS ON THE
WALL A PUSYELLOW FLYBILL, BUTTING IT WITH HIS HEAD.
THE FLYBILL K. II. Post No Bills. Strictly confidential. Dr Hy Franks.
HENRY All is lost now.
VIRAG UNSCREWS HIS HEAD IN A TRICE AND HOLDS IT UNDER HIS ARM.
VIRAG'S HEAD Quack
EXEUNT SEVERALLY.
STEPHEN OVER HIS SHOULDER TO ZOE You would have preferred the fighting
parson who founded the protestant error. But beware Antisthenes, the dog
sage, and the last end of Arius Heresiarchus. The agony in the closet.
LYNCH All one and the same God to her.
STEPHEN DEVOUTLY And sovereign Lord of all things.
FLORRY TO STEPHEN I'm sure you're a spoiled priest. Or a monk.
LYNCH He is. A cardinal's son.
STEPHEN Cardinal sin. Monks of the screw.
HIS EMINENCE SIMON STEPHEN CARDINAL DEDALUS, PRIMATE OF ALL IRELAND,
APPEARS IN THE DOORWAY, DRESSED IN RED SOUTANE, SANDALS AND SOCKS. SEVEN
DWARF SIMIAN ACOLYTES, ALSO IN RED, CARDINAL SINS, UPHOLD HIS TRAIN,
PEEPING UNDER IT. HE WEARS A BATTERED SILK HAT SIDEWAYS ON HIS HEAD. HIS
THUMBS ARE STUCK IN HIS ARMPITS AND HIS PALMS OUTSPREAD. ROUND HIS NECK
HANGS A ROSARY OF CORKS ENDING ON HIS BREAST IN A CORKSCREW CROSS.
RELEASING HIS THUMBS, HE INVOKES GRACE FROM ON HIGH WITH LARGE WAVE
GESTURES AND PROCLAIMS WITH BLOATED POMP
THE CARDINAL
Conservio lies captured
He lies in the lowest dungeon
With manacles and chains around his limbs
Weighing upwards of three tons.
HE LOOKS AT ALL FOR A MOMENT, HIS RIGHT EYE CLOSED TIGHT, HIS LEFT CHEEK
PUFFED OUT. THEN, UNABLE TO REPRESS HIS MERRIMENT, HE ROCKS TO AND FRO,
ARMS AKIMBO, AND SINGS WITH BROAD ROLLICKING HUMOUR
O, the poor little fellow
Hihihihihis legs they were yellow
He was plump, fat and heavy and brisk as a snake
But some bloody savage
To graize his white cabbage
He murdered Nell Flaherty's duckloving drake.
A MULTITUDE OF MIDGES SWARMS WHITE OVER HIS ROBE. HE SCRATCHES HIMSELF
WITH CROSSED ARMS AT HIS RIBS, GRIMACING, AND EXCLAIMS
I'm suffering the agony of the damned. By the hoky fiddle, thanks be to
Jesus those funny little chaps are not unanimous. If they were they'd
walk me off the face of the bloody globe.
HIS HEAD ASLANT HE BLESSES CURTLY WITH FORE AND MIDDLE FINGERS, IMPARTS
THE EASTER KISS AND DOUBLESHUFFLES OFF COMICALLY, SWAYING HIS HAT FROM
SIDE TO SIDE, SHRINKING QUICKLY TO THE SIZE OF HIS TRAINBEARERS. THE
DWARF ACOLYTES, GIGGLING, PEEPING, NUDGING, OGLING, EASTERKISSING, ZIGZAG
BEHIND HIM. HIS VOICE IS HEARD MELLOW FROM AFAR, MERCIFUL MALE,
MELODIOUS
Shall carry my heart to thee,
Shall carry my heart to thee,
And the breath of the balmy night
Shall carry my heart to thee
THE TRICK DOORHANDLE TURNS.
THE DOORHANDLE Theeee
ZOE The devil is in that door.
A MALE FORM PASSES DOWN THE CREAKING STAIRCASE AND IS HEARD TAKING THE
WATERPROOF AND HAT FROM THE RACK. BLOOM STARTS FORWARD INVOLUNTARILY AND,
HALF CLOSING THE DOOR AS HE PASSES, TAKES THE CHOCOLATE FROM HIS POCKET
AND OFFERS IT NERVOUSLY TO ZOE.
ZOE SNIFFS HIS HAIR BRISKLY Hmmm Thank your mother for the rabbits.
I'm very fond of what I like.
BLOOM HEARING A MALE VOICE IN TALK WITH THE WHORES ON THE DOORSTEP,
PRICKS HIS EARS If it were he? After? Or because not? Or the double
event?
ZOE TEARS OPEN THE SILVERFOIL Fingers was made before forks. SHE
BREAKS OFF AND NIBBLES A PIECE GIVES A PIECE TO KITTY RICKETTS AND THEN
TURNS KITTENISHLY TO LYNCH No objection to French lozenges? HE NODS.
SHE TAUNTS HIM. Have it now or wait till you get it? HE OPENS HIS
MOUTH, HIS HEAD COCKED. SHE WHIRLS THE PRIZE IN LEFT CIRCLE. HIS HEAD
FOLLOWS. SHE WHIRLS IT BACK IN RIGHT CIRCLE. HE EYES HER. Catch
SHE TOSSES A PIECE. WITH AN ADROIT SNAP HE CATCHES IT AND BITES IT
THROUGH WITH A CRACK.
KITTY CHEWING The engineer I was with at the bazaar does have lovely
ones. Full of the best liqueurs. And the viceroy was there with his lady.
The gas we had on the Toft's hobbyhorses. I'm giddy still.
BLOOM IN SVENGALI'S FUR OVERCOAT, WITH FOLDED ARMS AND NAPOLEONIC
FORELOCK, FROWNS IN VENTRILOQUIAL EXORCISM WITH PIERCING EAGLE GLANCE
TOWARDS THE DOOR. THEN RIGID WITH LEFT FOOT ADVANCED HE MAKES A SWIFT
PASS WITH IMPELLING FINGERS AND GIVES THE SIGN OF PAST MASTER, DRAWING
HIS RIGHT ARM DOWNWARDS FROM HIS LEFT SHOULDER. Go, go, go, I conjure
you, whoever you are
A MALE COUGH AND TREAD ARE HEARD PASSING THROUGH THE MIST OUTSIDE.
BLOOM'S FEATURES RELAX. HE PLACES A HAND IN HIS WAISTCOAT, POSING CALMLY.
ZOE OFFERS HIM CHOCOLATE.
BLOOM SOLEMNLY Thanks.
ZOE Do as you're bid. Here
A FIRM HEELCLACKING TREAD IS HEARD ON THE STAIRS.
BLOOM TAKES THE CHOCOLATE Aphrodisiac? Tansy and pennyroyal. But I
bought it. Vanilla calms or? Mnemo. Confused light confuses memory. Red
influences lupus. Colours affect women's characters, any they have. This
black makes me sad. Eat and be merry for tomorrow. HE EATS Influence
taste too, mauve. But it is so long since I. Seems new. Aphro. That
priest. Must come. Better late than never. Try truffles at Andrews.
THE DOOR OPENS. BELLA COHEN, A MASSIVE WHOREMISTRESS, ENTERS. SHE IS
DRESSED IN A THREEQUARTER IVORY GOWN, FRINGED ROUND THE HEM WITH
TASSELLED SELVEDGE, AND COOLS HERSELF FLIRTING A BLACK HORN FAN LIKE
MINNIE HAUCK IN Carmen. ON HER LEFT HAND ARE WEDDING AND KEEPER RINGS.
HER EYES ARE DEEPLY CARBONED. SHE HAS A SPROUTING MOUSTACHE. HER OLIVE
FACE IS HEAVY, SLIGHTLY SWEATED AND FULLNOSED WITH ORANGETAINTED
NOSTRILS. SHE HAS LARGE PENDANT BERYL EARDROPS.
BELLA My word I'm all of a mucksweat.
SHE GLANCES ROUND HER AT THE COUPLES. THEN HER EYES REST ON BLOOM WITH
HARD INSISTENCE. HER LARGE FAN WINNOWS WIND TOWARDS HER HEATED FACENECK
AND EMBONPOINT. HER FALCON EYES GLITTER.
THE FAN FLIRTING QUICKLY, THEN SLOWLY Married, I see.
BLOOM Yes. Partly, I have mislaid ...
THE FAN HALF OPENING, THEN CLOSING And the missus is master. Petticoat
government.
BLOOM LOOKS DOWN WITH A SHEEPISH GRIN That is so.
THE FAN FOLDING TOGETHER, RESTS AGAINST HER LEFT EARDROP Have you
forgotten me?
BLOOM Yes. Yo.
THE FAN FOLDED AKIMBO AGAINST HER WAIST Is me her was you dreamed
before? Was then she him you us since knew? Am all them and the same now
we?
BELLA APPROACHES, GENTLY TAPPING WITH THE FAN.
BLOOM WINCING Powerful being. In my eyes read that slumber which women
love.
THE FAN TAPPING We have met. You are mine. It is fate.
BLOOM COWED Exuberant female. Enormously I desiderate your domination.
I am exhausted, abandoned, no more young. I stand, so to speak, with an
unposted letter bearing the extra regulation fee before the too late box
of the general postoffice of human life. The door and window open at a
right angle cause a draught of thirtytwo feet per second according to the
law of falling bodies. I have felt this instant a twinge of sciatica in
my left glutear muscle. It runs in our family. Poor dear papa, a widower,
was a regular barometer from it. He believed in animal heat. A skin of
tabby lined his winter waistcoat. Near the end, remembering king David
and the Sunamite, he shared his bed with Athos, faithful after death. A
dog's spittle as you probably ... HE WINCES Ah
RICHIE GOULDING BAGWEIGHTED, PASSES THE DOOR Mocking is catch. Best
value in Dub. Fit for a prince's. Liver and kidney.
THE FAN TAPPING All things end. Be mine. Now,
BLOOM UNDECIDED All now? I should not have parted with my talisman.
Rain, exposure at dewfall on the searocks, a peccadillo at my time of
life. Every phenomenon has a natural cause.
THE FAN POINTS DOWNWARDS SLOWLY You may.
BLOOM LOOKS DOWNWARDS AND PERCEIVES HER UNFASTENED BOOTLACE We are
observed.
THE FAN POINTS DOWNWARDS QUICKLY You must.
BLOOM WITH DESIRE, WITH RELUCTANCE I can make a true black knot.
Learned when I served my time and worked the mail order line for
Kellett's. Experienced hand. Every knot says a lot. Let me. In courtesy.
I knelt once before today. Ah
BELLA RAISES HER GOWN SLIGHTLY AND, STEADYING HER POSE, LIFTS TO THE
EDGE OF A CHAIR A PLUMP BUSKINED HOOF AND A FULL PASTERN, SILKSOCKED.
BLOOM, STIFFLEGGED, AGING, BENDS OVER HER HOOF AND WITH GENTLE FINGERS
DRAWS OUT AND IN HER LACES.
BLOOM MURMURS LOVINGLY To be a shoefitter in Manfield's was my love's
young dream, the darling joys of sweet buttonhooking, to lace up
crisscrossed to kneelength the dressy kid footwear satinlined, so
incredibly impossibly small, of Clyde Road ladies. Even their wax model
Raymonde I visited daily to admire her cobweb hose and stick of rhubarb
toe, as worn in Paris.
THE HOOF Smell my hot goathide. Feel my royal weight.
BLOOM CROSSLACING Too tight?
THE HOOF If you bungle, Handy Andy, I'll kick your football for you.
BLOOM Not to lace the wrong eyelet as I did the night of the bazaar
dance. Bad luck. Hook in wrong tache of her ... person you mentioned.
That night she met ... Now
HE KNOTS THE LACE. BELLA PLACES HER FOOT ON THE FLOOR. BLOOM RAISES HIS
HEAD. HER HEAVY FACE, HER EYES STRIKE HIM IN MIDBROW. HIS EYES GROW DULL,
DARKER AND POUCHED, HIS NOSE THICKENS.
BLOOM MUMBLES Awaiting your further orders we remain, gentlemen, ...
BELLO WITH A HARD BASILISK STARE, IN A BARITONE VOICE Hound of
dishonour
BLOOM INFATUATED Empress
BELLO HIS HEAVY CHEEKCHOPS SAGGING Adorer of the adulterous rump
BLOOM PLAINTIVELY Hugeness
BELLO Dungdevourer
BLOOM WITH SINEWS SEMIFLEXED Magmagnificence
BELLO Down HE TAPS HER ON THE SHOULDER WITH HIS FAN Incline feet
forward Slide left foot one pace back You will fall. You are falling.
On the hands down
BLOOM HER EYES UPTURNED IN THE SIGN OF ADMIRATION, CLOSING, YAPS
Truffles
WITH A PIERCING EPILEPTIC CRY SHE SINKS ON ALL FOURS, GRUNTING,
SNUFFLING, ROOTING AT HIS FEET THEN LIES, SHAMMING DEAD, WITH EYES SHUT
TIGHT, TREMBLING EYELIDS, BOWED UPON THE GROUND IN THE ATTITUDE OF MOST
EXCELLENT MASTER.
BELLO WITH BOBBED HAIR, PURPLE GILLS, FIT MOUSTACHE RINGS ROUND HIS
SHAVEN MOUTH, IN MOUNTAINEER'S PUTTEES, GREEN SILVERBUTTONED COAT, SPORT
SKIRT AND ALPINE HAT WITH MOORCOCK'S FEATHER, HIS HANDS STUCK DEEP IN HIS
BREECHES POCKETS, PLACES HIS HEEL ON HER NECK AND GRINDS IT IN
Footstool Feel my entire weight. Bow, bondslave, before the throne of
your despot's glorious heels so glistening in their proud erectness.
BLOOM ENTHRALLED, BLEATS I promise never to disobey.
BELLO LAUGHS LOUDLY Holy smoke You little know what's in store for
you. I'm the Tartar to settle your little lot and break you in I'll bet
Kentucky cocktails all round I shame it out of you, old son. Cheek me, I
dare you. If you do tremble in anticipation of heel discipline to be
inflicted in gym costume.
BLOOM CREEPS UNDER THE SOFA AND PEERS OUT THROUGH THE FRINGE.
ZOE WIDENING HER SLIP TO SCREEN HER She's not here.
BLOOM CLOSING HER EYES She's not here.
FLORRY HIDING HER WITH HER GOWN She didn't mean it, Mr Bello. She'll
be good, sir.
KITTY Don't be too hard on her, Mr Bello. Sure you won't, ma'amsir.
BELLO COAXINGLY Come, ducky dear, I want a word with you, darling,
just to administer correction. Just a little heart to heart talk, sweety.
BLOOM PUTS OUT HER TIMID HEAD There's a good girly now. BELLO GRABS
HER HAIR VIOLENTLY AND DRAGS HER FORWARD I only want to correct you for
your own good on a soft safe spot. How's that tender behind? O, ever so
gently, pet. Begin to get ready.
BLOOM FAINTING Don't tear my ...
BELLO SAVAGELY The nosering, the pliers, the bastinado, the hanging
hook, the knout I'll make you kiss while the flutes play like the Nubian
slave of old. You're in for it this time I'll make you remember me for
the balance of your natural life. HIS FOREHEAD VEINS SWOLLEN, HIS FACE
CONGESTED I shall sit on your ottoman saddleback every morning after my
thumping good breakfast of Matterson's fat hamrashers and a bottle of
Guinness's porter. HE BELCHES And suck my thumping good Stock Exchange
cigar while I read the LICENSED VICTUALLER'S GAZETTE. Very possibly I
shall have you slaughtered and skewered in my stables and enjoy a slice
of you with crisp crackling from the baking tin basted and baked like
sucking pig with rice and lemon or currant sauce. It will hurt you. HE
TWISTS HER ARM. BLOOM SQUEALS, TURNING TURTLE.
BLOOM Don't be cruel, nurse Don't
BELLO TWISTING Another
BLOOM SCREAMS O, it's hell itself Every nerve in my body aches like
mad
BELLO SHOUTS Good, by the rumping jumping general That's the best bit
of news I heard these six weeks. Here, don't keep me waiting, damn you
HE SLAPS HER FACE
BLOOM WHIMPERS You're after hitting me. I'll tell ...
BELLO Hold him down, girls, till I squat on him.
ZOE Yes. Walk on him I will.
FLORRY I will. Don't be greedy.
KITTY No, me. Lend him to me.
THE BROTHEL COOK, MRS KEOGH, WRINKLED, GREYBEARDED, IN A GREASY BIB,
MEN'S GREY AND GREEN SOCKS AND BROGUES, FLOURSMEARED, A ROLLINGPIN STUCK
WITH RAW PASTRY IN HER BARE RED ARM AND HAND, APPEARS AT THE DOOR.
MRS KEOGH FEROCIOUSLY Can I help? THEY HOLD AND PINION BLOOM.
BELLO SQUATS WITH A GRUNT ON BLOOM'S UPTURNED FACE, PUFFING CIGARSMOKE,
NURSING A FAT LEG I see Keating Clay is elected vicechairman of the
Richmond asylum and by the by Guinness's preference shares are at sixteen
three quaffers. Curse me for a fool that didn't buy that lot Craig and
Gardner told me about. Just my infernal luck, curse it. And that
Goddamned outsider THROWAWAY at twenty to one. HE QUENCHES HIS CIGAR
ANGRILY ON BLOOM'S EAR Where's that Goddamned cursed ashtray?
BLOOM GOADED, BUTTOCKSMOTHERED O O Monsters Cruel one
BELLO Ask for that every ten minutes. Beg. Pray for it as you never
prayed before. HE THRUSTS OUT A FIGGED FIST AND FOUL CIGAR Here, kiss
that. Both. Kiss. HE THROWS A LEG ASTRIDE AND, PRESSING WITH HORSEMAN'S
KNEES, CALLS IN A HARD VOICE Gee up A cockhorse to Banbury cross. I'll
ride him for the Eclipse stakes. HE BENDS SIDEWAYS AND SQUEEZES HIS
MOUNT'S TESTICLES ROUGHLY, SHOUTING Ho Off we pop I'll nurse you in
proper fashion. HE HORSERIDES COCKHORSE, LEAPING IN THE SADDLE The lady
goes a pace a pace and the coachman goes a trot a trot and the gentleman
goes a gallop a gallop a gallop a gallop.
FLORRY PULLS AT BELLO Let me on him now. You had enough. I asked
before you.
ZOE PULLING AT FLORRY Me. Me. Are you not finished with him yet,
suckeress?
BLOOM STIFLING Can't.
BELLO Well, I'm not. Wait. HE HOLDS IN HIS BREATH Curse it. Here. This
bung's about burst. HE UNCORKS HIMSELF BEHIND THEN, CONTORTING HIS
FEATURES, FARTS LOUDLY Take that HE RECORKS HIMSELF Yes, by Jingo,
sixteen three quarters.
BLOOM A SWEAT BREAKING OUT OVER HIM Not man. HE SNIFFS Woman.
BELLO STANDS UP No more blow hot and cold. What you longed for has
come to pass. Henceforth you are unmanned and mine in earnest, a thing
under the yoke. Now for your punishment frock. You will shed your male
garments, you understand, Ruby Cohen? and don the shot silk luxuriously
rustling over head and shoulders. And quickly too
BLOOM SHRINKS Silk, mistress said O crinkly scrapy Must I tiptouch
it with my nails?
BELLO POINTS TO HIS WHORES As they are now so will you be, wigged,
singed, perfumesprayed, ricepowdered, with smoothshaven armpits. Tape
measurements will be taken next your skin. You will be laced with cruel
force into vicelike corsets of soft dove coutille with whalebone busk to
the diamondtrimmed pelvis, the absolute outside edge, while your figure,
plumper than when at large, will be restrained in nettight frocks, pretty
two ounce petticoats and fringes and things stamped, of course, with my
houseflag, creations of lovely lingerie for Alice and nice scent for
Alice. Alice will feel the pullpull. Martha and Mary will be a little
chilly at first in such delicate thighcasing but the frilly flimsiness of
lace round your bare knees will remind you ...
BLOOM A CHARMING SOUBRETTE WITH DAUBY CHEEKS, MUSTARD HAIR AND LARGE
MALE HANDS AND NOSE, LEERING MOUTH I tried her things on only twice, a
small prank, in Holles street. When we were hard up I washed them to save
the laundry bill. My own shirts I turned. It was the purest thrift.
BELLO JEERS Little jobs that make mother pleased, eh? And showed off
coquettishly in your domino at the mirror behind closedrawn blinds your
unskirted thighs and hegoat's udders in various poses of surrender, eh?
Ho ho I have to laugh That secondhand black operatop shift and short
trunkleg naughties all split up the stitches at her last rape that Mrs
Miriam Dandrade sold you from the Shelbourne hotel, eh?
BLOOM Miriam. Black. Demimondaine.
BELLO GUFFAWS Christ Almighty it's too tickling, this You were a
nicelooking Miriam when you clipped off your backgate hairs and lay
swooning in the thing across the bed as Mrs Dandrade about to be violated
by lieutenant SmytheSmythe, Mr Philip Augustus Blockwell M. P., signor
Laci Daremo, the robust tenor, blueeyed Bert, the liftboy, Henri Fleury
of Gordon Bennett fame, Sheridan, the quadroon Croesus, the varsity
wetbob eight from old Trinity, Ponto, her splendid Newfoundland and Bobs,
dowager duchess of Manorhamilton. HE GUFFAWS AGAIN Christ, wouldn't it
make a Siamese cat laugh?
BLOOM HER HANDS AND FEATURES WORKING It was Gerald converted me to be
a true corsetlover when I was female impersonator in the High School play
VICE VERSA. It was dear Gerald. He got that kink, fascinated by sister's
stays. Now dearest Gerald uses pinky greasepaint and gilds his eyelids.
Cult of the beautiful.
BELLO WITH WICKED GLEE Beautiful Give us a breather When you took
your seat with womanish care, lifting your billowy flounces, on the
smoothworn throne.
BLOOM Science. To compare the various joys we each enjoy. EARNESTLY
And really it's better the position ... because often I used to wet ...
BELLO STERNLY No insubordination The sawdust is there in the corner
for you. I gave you strict instructions, didn't I? Do it standing, sir
I'll teach you to behave like a jinkleman If I catch a trace on your
swaddles. Aha By the ass of the Dorans you'll find I'm a martinet. The
sins of your past are rising against you. Many. Hundreds.
THE SINS OF THE PAST IN A MEDLEY OF VOICES He went through a form of
clandestine marriage with at least one woman in the shadow of the Black
church. Unspeakable messages he telephoned mentally to Miss Dunn at an
address in D'Olier street while he presented himself indecently to the
instrument in the callbox. By word and deed he frankly encouraged a
nocturnal strumpet to deposit fecal and other matter in an unsanitary
outhouse attached to empty premises. In five public conveniences he wrote
pencilled messages offering his nuptial partner to all strongmembered
males. And by the offensively smelling vitriol works did he not pass
night after night by loving courting couples to see if and what and how
much he could see? Did he not lie in bed, the gross boar, gloating over a
nauseous fragment of wellused toilet paper presented to him by a nasty
harlot, stimulated by gingerbread and a postal order?
BELLO WHISTLES LOUDLY Say What was the most revolting piece of
obscenity in all your career of crime? Go the whole hog. Puke it out Be
candid for once.
MUTE INHUMAN FACES THRONG FORWARD, LEERING, VANISHING, GIBBERING,
BOOLOOHOOM. POLDY KOCK, BOOTLACES A PENNY CASSIDY'S HAG, BLIND STRIPLING,
LARRY RHINOCEROS, THE GIRL, THE WOMAN, THE WHORE, THE OTHER, THE ...
BLOOM Don't ask me Our mutual faith. Pleasants street. I only thought
the half of the ... I swear on my sacred oath ...
BELLO PEREMPTORILY Answer. Repugnant wretch I insist on knowing. Tell
me something to amuse me, smut or a bloody good ghoststory or a line of
poetry, quick, quick, quick Where? How? What time? With how many? I give
you just three seconds. One Two Thr ...
BLOOM DOCILE, GURGLES I rererepugnosed in rerererepugnant
BELLO IMPERIOUSLY O, get out, you skunk Hold your tongue Speak when
you're spoken to.
BLOOM BOWS Master Mistress Mantamer
HE LIFTS HIS ARMS. HIS BANGLE BRACELETS FILL.
BELLO SATIRICALLY By day you will souse and bat our smelling
underclothes also when we ladies are unwell, and swab out our latrines
with dress pinned up and a dishclout tied to your tail. Won't that be
nice? HE PLACES A RUBY RING ON HER FINGER And there now With this ring
I thee own. Say, thank you, mistress.
BLOOM Thank you, mistress.
BELLO You will make the beds, get my tub ready, empty the pisspots in
the different rooms, including old Mrs Keogh's the cook's, a sandy one.
Ay, and rinse the seven of them well, mind, or lap it up like champagne.
Drink me piping hot. Hop You will dance attendance or I'll lecture you
on your misdeeds, Miss Ruby, and spank your bare bot right well, miss,
with the hairbrush. You'll be taught the error of your ways. At night
your wellcreamed braceletted hands will wear fortythreebutton gloves
newpowdered with talc and having delicately scented fingertips. For such
favours knights of old laid down their lives. HE CHUCKLES My boys will
be no end charmed to see you so ladylike, the colonel, above all, when
they come here the night before the wedding to fondle my new attraction
in gilded heels. First I'll have a go at you myself. A man I know on the
turf named Charles Alberta Marsh I was in bed with him just now and
another gentleman out of the Hanaper and Petty Bag office is on the
lookout for a maid of all work at a short knock. Swell the bust. Smile.
Droop shoulders. What offers? HE POINTS For that lot. Trained by owner
to fetch and carry, basket in mouth. HE BARES HIS ARM AND PLUNGES IT
ELBOWDEEP IN BLOOM'S VULVA There's fine depth for you What, boys? That
give you a hardon? HE SHOVES HIS ARM IN A BIDDER'S FACE Here wet the
deck and wipe it round
A BIDDER A florin.
DILLON'S LACQUEY RINGS HIS HANDBELL.
THE LACQUEY Barang
A VOICE One and eightpence too much.
CHARLES ALBERTA MARSH Must be virgin. Good breath. Clean.
BELLO GIVES A RAP WITH HIS GAVEL Two bar. Rockbottom figure and cheap
at the price. Fourteen hands high. Touch and examine his points. Handle
him. This downy skin, these soft muscles, this tender flesh. If I had
only my gold piercer here And quite easy to milk. Three newlaid gallons
a day. A pure stockgetter, due to lay within the hour. His sire's milk
record was a thousand gallons of whole milk in forty weeks. Whoa my
jewel Beg up Whoa HE BRANDS HIS INITIAL C ON BLOOM'S CROUP So
Warranted Cohen What advance on two bob, gentlemen?
A DARKVISAGED MAN IN DISGUISED ACCENT Hoondert punt sterlink.
VOICES SUBDUED For the Caliph. Haroun Al Raschid.
BELLO GAILY Right. Let them all come. The scanty, daringly short
skirt, riding up at the knee to show a peep of white pantalette, is a
potent weapon and transparent stockings, emeraldgartered, with the long
straight seam trailing up beyond the knee, appeal to the better instincts
of the BLASE man about town. Learn the smooth mincing walk on four inch
Louis Quinze heels, the Grecian bend with provoking croup, the thighs
fluescent, knees modestly kissing. Bring all your powers of fascination
to bear on them. Pander to their Gomorrahan vices.
BLOOM BENDS HIS BLUSHING FACE INTO HIS ARMPIT AND SIMPERS WITH
FOREFINGER IN MOUTH O, I know what you're hinting at now
BELLO What else are you good for, an impotent thing like you? HE STOOPS
AND, PEERING, POKES WITH HIS FAN RUDELY UNDER THE FAT SUET FOLDS OF
BLOOM'S HAUNCHES Up Up Manx cat What have we here? Where's your curly
teapot gone to or who docked it on you, cockyolly? Sing, birdy, sing.
It's as limp as a boy of six's doing his pooly behind a cart. Buy a
bucket or sell your pump. LOUDLY Can you do a man's job?
BLOOM Eccles street ...
BELLO SARCASTICALLY I wouldn't hurt your feelings for the world but
there's a man of brawn in possession there. The tables are turned, my gay
young fellow He is something like a fullgrown outdoor man. Well for you,
you muff, if you had that weapon with knobs and lumps and warts all over
it. He shot his bolt, I can tell you Foot to foot, knee to knee, belly
to belly, bubs to breast He's no eunuch. A shock of red hair he has
sticking out of him behind like a furzebush Wait for nine months, my
lad Holy ginger, it's kicking and coughing up and down in her guts
already That makes you wild, don't it? Touches the spot? HE SPITS IN
CONTEMPT Spittoon
BLOOM I was indecently treated, I ... Inform the police. Hundred pounds.
Unmentionable. I ...
BELLO Would if you could, lame duck. A downpour we want not your
drizzle.
BLOOM To drive me mad Moll I forgot Forgive Moll ... We ... Still
BELLO RUTHLESSLY No, Leopold Bloom, all is changed by woman's will
since you slept horizontal in Sleepy Hollow your night of twenty years.
Return and see.
OLD SLEEPY HOLLOW CALLS OVER THE WOLD.
SLEEPY HOLLOW Rip van Wink Rip van Winkle
BLOOM IN TATTERED MOCASSINS WITH A RUSTY FOWLINGPIECE, TIPTOEING,
FINGERTIPPING, HIS HAGGARD BONY BEARDED FACE PEERING THROUGH THE DIAMOND
PANES, CRIES OUT I see her It's she The first night at Mat Dillon's
But that dress, the green And her hair is dyed gold and he ...
BELLO LAUGHS MOCKINGLY That's your daughter, you owl, with a Mullingar
student.
MILLY BLOOM, FAIRHAIRED, GREENVESTED, SLIMSANDALLED, HER BLUE SCARF IN
THE SEAWIND SIMPLY SWIRLING, BREAKS FROM THE ARMS OF HER LOVER AND CALLS,
HER YOUNG EYES WONDERWIDE.
MILLY My It's Papli But, O Papli, how old you've grown
BELLO Changed, eh? Our whatnot, our writingtable where we never wrote,
aunt Hegarty's armchair, our classic reprints of old masters. A man and
his menfriends are living there in clover. The CUCKOOS' REST Why not?
How many women had you, eh, following them up dark streets, flatfoot,
exciting them by your smothered grunts, what, you male prostitute?
Blameless dames with parcels of groceries. Turn about. Sauce for the
goose, my gander O.
BLOOM They ... I ...
BELLO CUTTINGLY Their heelmarks will stamp the Brusselette carpet you
bought at Wren's auction. In their horseplay with Moll the romp to find
the buck flea in her breeches they will deface the little statue you
carried home in the rain for art for art' sake. They will violate the
secrets of your bottom drawer. Pages will be torn from your handbook of
astronomy to make them pipespills. And they will spit in your ten
shilling brass fender from Hampton Leedom's.
BLOOM Ten and six. The act of low scoundrels. Let me go. I will return.
I will prove ...
A VOICE Swear
BLOOM CLENCHES HIS FISTS AND CRAWLS FORWARD, A BOWIEKNIFE BETWEEN HIS
TEETH.
BELLO As a paying guest or a kept man? Too late. You have made your
secondbest bed and others must lie in it. Your epitaph is written. You
are down and out and don't you forget it, old bean.
BLOOM Justice All Ireland versus one Has nobody ...? HE BITES HIS
THUMB
BELLO Die and be damned to you if you have any sense of decency or grace
about you. I can give you a rare old wine that'll send you skipping to
hell and back. Sign a will and leave us any coin you have If you have
none see you damn well get it, steal it, rob it We'll bury you in our
shrubbery jakes where you'll be dead and dirty with old Cuck Cohen, my
stepnephew I married, the bloody old gouty procurator and sodomite with a
crick in his neck, and my other ten or eleven husbands, whatever the
buggers' names were, suffocated in the one cesspool. HE EXPLODES IN A
LOUD PHLEGMY LAUGH We'll manure you, Mr Flower HE PIPES SCOFFINGLY
Byby, Poldy Byby, Papli
BLOOM CLASPS HIS HEAD My willpower Memory I have sinned I have suff
HE WEEPS TEARLESSLY
BELLO SNEERS Crybabby Crocodile tears
BLOOM, BROKEN, CLOSELY VEILED FOR THE SACRIFICE, SOBS, HIS FACE TO THE
EARTH. THE PASSING BELL IS HEARD. DARKSHAWLED FIGURES OF THE CIRCUMCISED,
IN SACKCLOTH AND ASHES, STAND BY THE WAILING WALL. M. SHULOMOWITZ, JOSEPH
GOLDWATER, MOSES HERZOG, HARRIS ROSENBERG, M. MOISEL, J. CITRON, MINNIE
WATCHMAN, P. MASTIANSKY, THE REVEREND LEOPOLD ABRAMOVITZ, CHAZEN. WITH
SWAYING ARMS THEY WAIL IN PNEUMA OVER THE RECREANT BLOOM.
THE CIRCUMCISED IN DARK GUTTURAL CHANT AS THEY CAST DEAD SEA FRUIT UPON
HIM, NO FLOWERS SHEMA ISRAEL ADONAI ELOHENU ADONAI ECHAD.
VOICES SIGHING So he's gone. Ah yes. Yes, indeed. Bloom? Never heard
of him. No? Queer kind of chap. There's the widow. That so? Ah, yes.
FROM THE SUTTEE PYRE THE FLAME OF GUM CAMPHIRE ASCENDS. THE PALL OF
INCENSE SMOKE SCREENS AND DISPERSES. OUT OF HER OAKFRAME A NYMPH WITH
HAIR UNBOUND, LIGHTLY CLAD IN TEABROWN ARTCOLOURS, DESCENDS FROM HER
GROTTO AND PASSING UNDER INTERLACING YEWS STANDS OVER BLOOM.
THE YEWS THEIR LEAVES WHISPERING Sister. Our sister. Ssh
THE NYMPH SOFTLY Mortal KINDLY Nay, dost not weepest
BLOOM CRAWLS JELLILY FORWARD UNDER THE BOUGHS, STREAKED BY SUNLIGHT,
WITH DIGNITY This position. I felt it was expected of me. Force of
habit.
THE NYMPH Mortal You found me in evil company, highkickers, coster
picnicmakers, pugilists, popular generals, immoral panto boys in
fleshtights and the nifty shimmy dancers, La Aurora and Karini, musical
act, the hit of the century. I was hidden in cheap pink paper that smelt
of rock oil. I was surrounded by the stale smut of clubmen, stories to
disturb callow youth, ads for transparencies, truedup dice and bustpads,
proprietary articles and why wear a truss with testimonial from ruptured
gentleman. Useful hints to the married.
BLOOM LIFTS A TURTLE HEAD TOWARDS HER LAP We have met before. On
another star.
THE NYMPH SADLY Rubber goods. Neverrip brand as supplied to the
aristocracy. Corsets for men. I cure fits or money refunded. Unsolicited
testimonials for Professor Waldmann's wonderful chest exuber. My bust
developed four inches in three weeks, reports Mrs Gus Rublin with photo.
BLOOM You mean PHOTO BITS?
THE NYMPH I do. You bore me away, framed me in oak and tinsel, set me
above your marriage couch. Unseen, one summer eve, you kissed me in four
places. And with loving pencil you shaded my eyes, my bosom and my shame.
BLOOM HUMBLY KISSES HER LONG HAIR Your classic curves, beautiful
immortal, I was glad to look on you, to praise you, a thing of beauty,
almost to pray.
THE NYMPH During dark nights I heard your praise.
BLOOM QUICKLY Yes, yes. You mean that I ... Sleep reveals the worst
side of everyone, children perhaps excepted. I know I fell out of bed or
rather was pushed. Steel wine is said to cure snoring. For the rest there
is that English invention, pamphlet of which I received some days ago,
incorrectly addressed. It claims to afford a noiseless, inoffensive vent.
HE SIGHS 'Twas ever thus. Frailty, thy name is marriage.
THE NYMPH HER FINGERS IN HER EARS And words. They are not in my
dictionary.
BLOOM You understood them?
THE YEWS Ssh
THE NYMPH COVERS HER FACE WITH HER HANDS What have I not seen in that
chamber? What must my eyes look down on?
BLOOM APOLOGETICALLY I know. Soiled personal linen, wrong side up with
care. The quoits are loose. From Gibraltar by long sea long ago.
THE NYMPH BENDS HER HEAD Worse, worse
BLOOM REFLECTS PRECAUTIOUSLY That antiquated commode. It wasn't her
weight. She scaled just eleven stone nine. She put on nine pounds after
weaning. It was a crack and want of glue. Eh? And that absurd orangekeyed
utensil which has only one handle.
THE SOUND OF A WATERFALL IS HEARD IN BRIGHT CASCADE.
THE WATERFALL
Poulaphouca Poulaphouca
Poulaphouca Poulaphouca.
THE YEWS MINGLING THEIR BOUGHS Listen. Whisper. She is right, our
sister. We grew by Poulaphouca waterfall. We gave shade on languorous
summer days.
JOHN WYSE NOLAN IN THE BACKGROUND, IN IRISH NATIONAL FORESTER'S
UNIFORM, DOFFS HIS PLUMED HAT Prosper Give shade on languorous days,
trees of Ireland
THE YEWS MURMURING Who came to Poulaphouca with the High School
excursion? Who left his nutquesting classmates to seek our shade?
BLOOM SCARED High School of Poula? Mnemo? Not in full possession of
faculties. Concussion. Run over by tram.
THE ECHO Sham
BLOOM PIGEONBREASTED, BOTTLESHOULDERED, PADDED, IN NONDESCRIPT JUVENILE
GREY AND BLACK STRIPED SUIT, TOO SMALL FOR HIM, WHITE TENNIS SHOES,
BORDERED STOCKINGS WITH TURNOVER TOPS AND A RED SCHOOLCAP WITH BADGE I
was in my teens, a growing boy. A little then sufficed, a jolting car,
the mingling odours of the ladies' cloakroom and lavatory, the throng
penned tight on the old Royal stairs for they love crushes, instinct of
the herd, and the dark sexsmelling theatre unbridles vice, even a
pricelist of their hosiery. And then the heat. There were sunspots that
summer. End of school. And tipsycake. Halcyon days.
HALCYON DAYS, HIGH SCHOOL BOYS IN BLUE AND WHITE FOOTBALL JERSEYS AND
SHORTS, MASTER DONALD TURNBULL, MASTER ABRAHAM CHATTERTON, MASTER OWEN
GOLDBERG, MASTER JACK MEREDITH, MASTER PERCY APJOHN, STAND IN A CLEARING
OF THE TREES AND SHOUT TO MASTER LEOPOLD BLOOM.
THE HALCYON DAYS Mackerel Live us again. Hurray THEY CHEER
BLOOM HOBBLEDEHOY, WARMGLOVED, MAMMAMUFFLERED, STARRED WITH SPENT
SNOWBALLS, STRUGGLES TO RISE Again I feel sixteen What a lark Let's
ring all the bells in Montague street. HE CHEERS FEEBLY Hurray for the
High School
THE ECHO Fool
THE YEWS RUSTLING She is right, our sister. Whisper. WHISPERED KISSES
ARE HEARD IN ALL THE WOOD. FACES OF HAMADRYADS PEEP OUT FROM THE BOLES
AND AMONG THE LEAVES AND BREAK, BLOSSOMING INTO BLOOM. Who profaned our
silent shade?
THE NYMPH COYLY, THROUGH PARTING FINGERS There? In the open air?
THE YEWS SWEEPING DOWNWARD Sister, yes. And on our virgin sward.
THE WATERFALL
Poulaphouca Poulaphouca
Phoucaphouca Phoucaphouca.
THE NYMPH WITH WIDE FINGERS O, infamy
BLOOM I was precocious. Youth. The fauna. I sacrificed to the god of the
forest. The flowers that bloom in the spring. It was pairing time.
Capillary attraction is a natural phenomenon. Lotty Clarke, flaxenhaired,
I saw at her night toilette through illclosed curtains with poor papa's
operaglasses The wanton ate grass wildly. She rolled downhill at Rialto
bridge to tempt me with her flow of animal spirits. She climbed their
crooked tree and I ... A saint couldn't resist it. The demon possessed
me. Besides, who saw?
STAGGERING BOB, A WHITEPOLLED CALF, THRUSTS A RUMINATING HEAD WITH HUMID
NOSTRILS THROUGH THE FOLIAGE.
STAGGERING BOB LARGE TEARDROPS ROLLING FROM HIS PROMINENT EYES,
SNIVELS Me. Me see.
BLOOM Simply satisfying a need I ... WITH PATHOS No girl would when I
went girling. Too ugly. They wouldn't play ...
HIGH ON BEN HOWTH THROUGH RHODODENDRONS A NANNYGOAT PASSES,
PLUMPUDDERED, BUTTYTAILED, DROPPING CURRANTS.
THE NANNYGOAT BLEATS Megeggaggegg Nannannanny
BLOOM HATLESS, FLUSHED, COVERED WITH BURRS OF THISTLEDOWN AND
GORSESPINE Regularly engaged. Circumstances alter cases. HE GAZES
INTENTLY DOWNWARDS ON THE WATER Thirtytwo head over heels per second.
Press nightmare. Giddy Elijah. Fall from cliff. Sad end of government
printer's clerk. THROUGH SILVERSILENT SUMMER AIR THE DUMMY OF BLOOM,
ROLLED IN A MUMMY, ROLLS ROTEATINGLY FROM THE LION'S HEAD CLIFF INTO THE
PURPLE WAITING WATERS.
THE DUMMYMUMMY Bbbbblllllblblblblobschbg
FAR OUT IN THE BAY BETWEEN BAILEY AND KISH LIGHTS THE Erin's King SAILS,
SENDING A BROADENING PLUME OF COALSMOKE FROM HER FUNNEL TOWARDS THE
LAND.
COUNCILLOR NANNETII ALONE ON DECK, IN DARK ALPACA, YELLOWKITEFACED, HIS
HAND IN HIS WAISTCOAT OPENING, DECLAIMS When my country takes her place
among the nations of the earth, then, and not till then, let my epitaph
be written. I have ...
BLOOM Done. Prff
THE NYMPH LOFTILY We immortals, as you saw today, have not such a
place and no hair there either. We are stonecold and pure. We eat
electric light. SHE ARCHES HER BODY IN LASCIVIOUS CRISPATION, PLACING
HER FOREFINGER IN HER MOUTH Spoke to me. Heard from behind. How then
could you ...?
BLOOM PAWING THE HEATHER ABJECTLY O, I have been a perfect pig. Enemas
too I have administered. One third of a pint of quassia to which add a
tablespoonful of rocksalt. Up the fundament. With Hamilton Long's
syringe, the ladies' friend.
THE NYMPH In my presence. The powderpuff. SHE BLUSHES AND MAKES A KNEE
And the rest
BLOOM DEJECTED Yes. PECCAVI I have paid homage on that living altar
where the back changes name. WITH SUDDEN FERVOUR For why should the
dainty scented jewelled hand, the hand that rules ...?
FIGURES WIND SERPENTING IN SLOW WOODLAND PATTERN AROUND THE TREESTEMS,
COOEEING
THE VOICE OF KITTY IN THE THICKET Show us one of them cushions.
THE VOICE OF FLORRY Here.
A GROUSE WINGS CLUMSILY THROUGH THE UNDERWOOD.
THE VOICE OF LYNCH IN THE THICKET Whew Piping hot
THE VOICE OF ZOE FROM THE THICKET Came from a hot place.
THE VOICE OF VIRAG A BIRDCHIEF, BLUESTREAKED AND FEATHERED IN WAR
PANOPLY WITH HIS ASSEGAI, STRIDING THROUGH A CRACKLING CANEBRAKE OVER
BEECHMAST AND ACORNS Hot Hot Ware Sitting Bull
BLOOM It overpowers me. The warm impress of her warm form. Even to sit
where a woman has sat, especially with divaricated thighs, as though to
grant the last favours, most especially with previously well uplifted
white sateen coatpans. So womanly, full. It fills me full.
THE WATERFALL
Phillaphulla Poulaphouca
Poulaphouca Poulaphouca.
THE YEWS Ssh Sister, speak
THE NYMPH EYELESS, IN NUN'S WHITE HABIT, COIF AND HUGEWINGED WIMPLE,
SOFTLY, WITH REMOTE EYES Tranquilla convent. Sister Agatha. Mount
Carmel. The apparitions of Knock and Lourdes. No more desire. SHE
RECLINES HER HEAD, SIGHING Only the ethereal. Where dreamy creamy gull
waves o'er the waters dull.
BLOOM HALF RISES. HIS BACK TROUSERBUTTON SNAPS.
THE BUTTON Bip
TWO SLUTS OF THE COOMBE DANCE RAINILY BY, SHAWLED, YELLING FLATLY.
THE SLUTS
O, Leopold lost the pin of his drawers
He didn't know what to do,
To keep it up,
To keep it up.
BLOOM COLDLY You have broken the spell. The last straw. If there were
only ethereal where would you all be, postulants and novices? Shy but
willing like an ass pissing.
THE YEWS THEIR SILVERFOIL OF LEAVES PRECIPITATING, THEIR SKINNY ARMS
AGING AND SWAYING Deciduously
THE NYMPH her features hardening, gropes in the folds of her habit
Sacrilege To attempt my virtue A LARGE MOIST STAIN APPEARS ON HER
ROBE Sully my innocence You are not fit to touch the garment of a pure
woman. SHE CLUTCHES AGAIN IN HER ROBE Wait. Satan, you'll sing no more
lovesongs. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. SHE DRAWS A PONIARD AND, CLAD IN THE
SHEATHMAIL OF AN ELECTED KNIGHT OF NINE, STRIKES AT HIS LOINS Nekum
BLOOM STARTS UP, SEIZES HER HAND Hoy Nebrakada Cat o' nine lives
Fair play, madam. No pruningknife. The fox and the grapes, is it? What do
you lack with your barbed wire? Crucifix not thick enough? HE CLUTCHES
HER VEIL A holy abbot you want or Brophy, the lame gardener, or the
spoutless statue of the watercarrier, or good mother Alphonsus, eh
Reynard?
THE NYMPH WITH A CRY FLEES FROM HIM UNVEILED, HER PLASTER CAST
CRACKING, A CLOUD OF STENCH ESCAPING FROM THE CRACKS Poli ...
BLOOM CALLS AFTER HER As if you didn't get it on the double
yourselves. No jerks and multiple mucosities all over you. I tried it.
Your strength our weakness. What's our studfee? What will you pay on the
nail? You fee mendancers on the Riviera, I read. THE FLEEING NYMPH
RAISES A KEEN Eh? I have sixteen years of black slave labour behind me.
And would a jury give me five shillings alimony tomorrow, eh? Fool
someone else, not me. HE SNIFFS Rut. Onions. Stale. Sulphur. Grease.
THE FIGURE OF BELLA COHEN STANDS BEFORE HIM.
BELLA You'll know me the next time.
BLOOM COMPOSED, REGARDS HER Passee. Mutton dressed as lamb. Long in
the tooth and superfluous hair. A raw onion the last thing at night would
benefit your complexion. And take some double chin drill. Your eyes are
as vapid as the glasseyes of your stuffed fox. They have the dimensions
of your other features, that's all. I'm not a triple screw propeller.
BELLA CONTEMPTUOUSLY You're not game, in fact. HER SOWCUNT BARKS
Fbhracht
BLOOM CONTEMPTUOUSLY Clean your nailless middle finger first, your
bully's cold spunk is dripping from your cockscomb. Take a handful of hay
and wipe yourself.
BELLA I know you, canvasser Dead cod
BLOOM I saw him, kipkeeper Pox and gleet vendor
BELLA TURNS TO THE PIANO Which of you was playing the dead march from
SAUL?
ZOE Me. Mind your cornflowers. SHE DARTS TO THE PIANO AND BANGS CHORDS
ON IT WITH CROSSED ARMS The cat's ramble through the slag. SHE GLANCES
BACK Eh? Who's making love to my sweeties? SHE DARTS BACK TO THE TABLE
What's yours is mine and what's mine is my own.
KITTY, DISCONCERTED, COATS HER TEETH WITH THE SILVER PAPER. BLOOM
APPROACHES ZOE.
BLOOM GENTLY Give me back that potato, will you?
ZOE Forfeits, a fine thing and a superfine thing.
BLOOM WITH FEELING It is nothing, but still, a relic of poor mamma.
ZOE
Give a thing and take it back
God'll ask you where is that
You'll say you don't know
God'll send you down below.
BLOOM There is a memory attached to it. I should like to have it.
STEPHEN To have or not to have that is the question.
ZOE Here. SHE HAULS UP A REEF OF HER SLIP, REVEALING HER BARE THIGH,
AND UNROLLS THE POTATO FROM THE TOP OF HER STOCKING Those that hides
knows where to find.
BELLA FROWNS Here. This isn't a musical peepshow. And don't you smash
that piano. Who's paying here?
SHE GOES TO THE PIANOLA. STEPHEN FUMBLES IN HIS POCKET AND, TAKING OUT A
BANKNOTE BY ITS CORNER, HANDS IT TO HER.
STEPHEN WITH EXAGGERATED POLITENESS This silken purse I made out of
the sow's ear of the public. Madam, excuse me. If you allow me. HE
INDICATES VAGUELY LYNCH AND BLOOM We are all in the same sweepstake,
Kinch and Lynch. DANS CE BORDEL OU TENONS NOSTRE ETAT.
LYNCH CALLS FROM THE HEARTH Dedalus Give her your blessing for me.
STEPHEN HANDS BELLA A COIN Gold. She has it.
BELLA LOOKS AT THE MONEY, THEN AT STEPHEN, THEN AT ZOE, FLORRY AND
KITTY Do you want three girls? It's ten shillings here.
STEPHEN DELIGHTEDLY A hundred thousand apologies. HE FUMBLES AGAIN
AND TAKES OUT AND HANDS HER TWO CROWNS Permit, BREVI MANU, my sight is
somewhat troubled.
BELLA GOES TO THE TABLE TO COUNT THE MONEY WHILE STEPHEN TALKS TO
HIMSELF IN MONOSYLLABLES. ZOE BENDS OVER THE TABLE. KITTY LEANS OVER
ZOE'S NECK. LYNCH GETS UP, RIGHTS HIS CAP AND, CLASPING KITTY'S WAIST,
ADDS HIS HEAD TO THE GROUP.
FLORRY STRIVES HEAVILY TO RISE Ow My foot's asleep. SHE LIMPS OVER
TO THE TABLE. BLOOM APPROACHES.
BELLA, ZOE, KITTY, LYNCH, BLOOM CHATTERING AND SQUABBLING The
gentleman ... ten shillings ... paying for the three ... allow me a
moment ... this gentleman pays separate ... who's touching it? ... ow
... mind who you're pinching ... are you staying the night or a short
time?... who did?... you're a liar, excuse me ... the gentleman paid down
like a gentleman ... drink ... it's long after eleven.
STEPHEN AT THE PIANOLA, MAKING A GESTURE OF ABHORRENCE No bottles
What, eleven? A riddle
ZOE LIFTING UP HER PETTIGOWN AND FOLDING A HALF SOVEREIGN INTO THE TOP
OF HER STOCKING Hard earned on the flat of my back.
LYNCH LIFTING KITTY FROM THE TABLE Come
KITTY Wait. SHE CLUTCHES THE TWO CROWNS
FLORRY And me?
LYNCH Hoopla HE LIFTS HER, CARRIES HER AND BUMPS HER DOWN ON THE
SOFA.
STEPHEN
The fox crew, the cocks flew,
The bells in heaven
Were striking eleven.
'Tis time for her poor soul
To get out of heaven.
BLOOM QUIETLY LAYS A HALF SOVEREIGN ON THE TABLE BETWEEN BELLA AND
FLORRY So. Allow me. HE TAKES UP THE POUNDNOTE Three times ten. We're
square.
BELLA ADMIRINGLY You're such a slyboots, old cocky. I could kiss you.
ZOE POINTS Him? Deep as a drawwell. LYNCH BENDS KITTY BACK OVER THE
SOFA AND KISSES HER. BLOOM GOES WITH THE POUNDNOTE TO STEPHEN.
BLOOM This is yours.
STEPHEN How is that? LES DISTRAIT or absentminded beggar. HE FUMBLES
AGAIN IN HIS POCKET AND DRAWS OUT A HANDFUL OF COINS. AN OBJECT FILLS.
That fell.
BLOOM STOOPING, PICKS UP AND HANDS A BOX OF MATCHES This.
STEPHEN Lucifer. Thanks.
BLOOM QUIETLY You had better hand over that cash to me to take care
of. Why pay more?
STEPHEN HANDS HIM ALL HIS COINS Be just before you are generous.
BLOOM I will but is it wise? HE COUNTS One, seven, eleven, and five.
Six. Eleven. I don't answer for what you may have lost.
STEPHEN Why striking eleven? Proparoxyton. Moment before the next
Lessing says. Thirsty fox. HE LAUGHS LOUDLY Burying his grandmother.
Probably he killed her.
BLOOM That is one pound six and eleven. One pound seven, say.
STEPHEN Doesn't matter a rambling damn.
BLOOM No, but ...
STEPHEN COMES TO THE TABLE Cigarette, please. LYNCH TOSSES A
CIGARETTE FROM THE SOFA TO THE TABLE And so Georgina Johnson is dead and
married. A CIGARETTE APPEARS ON THE TABLE. STEPHEN LOOKS AT IT Wonder.
Parlour magic. Married. Hm. HE STRIKES A MATCH AND PROCEEDS TO LIGHT THE
CIGARETTE WITH ENIGMATIC MELANCHOLY
LYNCH WATCHING HIM You would have a better chance of lighting it if
you held the match nearer.
STEPHEN BRINGS THE MATCH NEAR HIS EYE Lynx eye. Must get glasses.
Broke them yesterday. Sixteen years ago. Distance. The eye sees all flat.
HE DRAWS THE MATCH AWAY. IT GOES OUT. Brain thinks. Near far.
Ineluctable modality of the visible. HE FROWNS MYSTERIOUSLY Hm. Sphinx.
The beast that has twobacks at midnight. Married.
ZOE It was a commercial traveller married her and took her away with
him.
FLORRY NODS Mr Lambe from London.
STEPHEN Lamb of London, who takest away the sins of our world.
LYNCH EMBRACING KITTY ON THE SOFA, CHANTS DEEPLY DONA NOBIS PACEM.
THE CIGARETTE SLIPS FROM STEPHEN 'S FINGERS. BLOOM PICKS IT UP AND
THROWS IT IN THE GRATE.
BLOOM Don't smoke. You ought to eat. Cursed dog I met. TO ZOE You have
nothing?
ZOE Is he hungry?
STEPHEN EXTENDS HIS HAND TO HER SMILING AND CHANTS TO THE AIR OF THE
BLOODOATH IN THE Dusk of the Gods
Hangende Hunger,
Fragende Frau,
Macht uns alle kaputt.
ZOE TRAGICALLY Hamlet, I am thy father's gimlet SHE TAKES HIS HAND
Blue eyes beauty I'll read your hand. SHE POINTS TO HIS FOREHEAD No
wit, no wrinkles. SHE COUNTS Two, three, Mars, that's courage. STEPHEN
SHAKES HIS HEAD No kid.
LYNCH Sheet lightning courage. The youth who could not shiver and shake.
TO ZOE Who taught you palmistry?
ZOE TURNS Ask my ballocks that I haven't got. TO STEPHEN I see it in
your face. The eye, like that. SHE FROWNS WITH LOWERED HEAD
LYNCH LAUGHING, SLAPS KITTY BEHIND TWICE Like that. Pandybat.
TWICE LOUDLY A PANDYBAT CRACKS, THE COFFIN OF THE PIANOLA FLIES OPEN,
THE BALD LITTLE ROUND JACKINTHEBOX HEAD OF FATHER DOLAN SPRINGS UP.
FATHER DOLAN Any boy want flogging? Broke his glasses? Lazy idle little
schemer. See it in your eye.
MILD, BENIGN, RECTORIAL, REPROVING, THE HEAD OF DON JOHN CONMEE RISES
FROM THE PIANOLA COFFIN.
DON JOHN CONMEE Now, Father Dolan Now. I'm sure that Stephen is a very
good little boy
ZOE EXAMINING STEPHEN'S PALM Woman's hand.
STEPHEN MURMURS Continue. Lie. Hold me. Caress. I never could read His
handwriting except His criminal thumbprint on the haddock.
ZOE What day were you born?
STEPHEN Thursday. Today.
ZOE Thursday's child has far to go. SHE TRACES LINES ON HIS HAND Line
of fate. Influential friends.
FLORRY POINTING Imagination.
ZOE Mount of the moon. You'll meet with a ... SHE PEERS AT HIS HANDS
ABRUPTLY I won't tell you what's not good for you. Or do you want to
know?
BLOOM DETACHES HER FINGERS AND OFFERS HIS PALM More harm than good.
Here. Read mine.
BELLA Show. SHE TURNS UP BLOOM'S HAND I thought so. Knobby knuckles
for the women.
ZOE PEERING AT BLOOM'S PALM Gridiron. Travels beyond the sea and marry
money.
BLOOM Wrong.
ZOE QUICKLY O, I see. Short little finger. Henpecked husband. That
wrong?
BLACK LIZ, A HUGE ROOSTER HATCHING IN A CHALKED CIRCLE, RISES, STRETCHES
HER WINGS AND CLUCKS.
BLACK LIZ Gara. Klook. Klook. Klook.
SHE SIDLES FROM HER NEWLAID EGG AND WADDLES OFF
BLOOM POINTS TO HIS HAND That weal there is an accident. Fell and cut
it twentytwo years ago. I was sixteen.
ZOE I see, says the blind man. Tell us news.
STEPHEN See? Moves to one great goal. I am twentytwo. Sixteen years ago
he was twentytwo too. Sixteen years ago I twentytwo tumbled. Twentytwo
years ago he sixteen fell off his hobbyhorse. HE WINCES Hurt my hand
somewhere. Must see a dentist. Money?
ZOE WHISPERS TO FLORRY. THEY GIGGLE. BLOOM RELEASES HIS HAND AND WRITES
IDLY ON THE TABLE IN BACKHAND, PENCILLING SLOW CURVES.
FLORRY What?
A HACKNEYCAR, NUMBER THREE HUNDRED AND TWENTYFOUR, WITH A
GALLANTBUTTOCKED MARE, DRIVEN BY JAMES BARTON, HARMONY AVENUE,
DONNYBROOK, TROTS PAST. BLAZES BOYLAN AND LENEHAN SPRAWL SWAYING ON THE
SIDESEATS. THE ORMOND BOOTS CROUCHES BEHIND ON THE AXLE. SADLY OVER THE
CROSSBLIND LYDIA DOUCE AND MINA KENNEDY GAZE.
THE BOOTS JOGGING, MOCKS THEM WITH THUMB AND WRIGGLING WORMFINGERS Haw
haw have you the horn?
BRONZE BY GOLD THEY WHISPER.
ZOE TO FLORRY Whisper.
THEY WHISPER AGAIN
OVER THE WELL OF THE CAR BLAZES BOYLAN LEANS, HIS BOATER STRAW SET
SIDEWAYS, A RED FLOWER IN HIS MOUTH. LENEHAN IN YACHTSMAN'S CAP AND WHITE
SHOES OFFICIOUSLY DETACHES A LONG HAIR FROM BLAZES BOYLAN'S COAT
SHOULDER.
LENEHAN Ho What do I here behold? Were you brushing the cobwebs off a
few quims?
BOYLAN SEATED, SMILES Plucking a turkey.
LENEHAN A good night's work.
BOYLAN HOLDING UP FOUR THICK BLUNTUNGULATED FINGERS, WINKS Blazes
Kate Up to sample or your money back. HE HOLDS OUT A FOREFINGER Smell
that.
LENEHAN SMELLS GLEEFULLY Ah Lobster and mayonnaise. Ah
ZOE AND FLORRY LAUGH TOGETHER Ha ha ha ha.
BOYLAN JUMPS SURELY FROM THE CAR AND CALLS LOUDLY FOR ALL TO HEAR
Hello, Bloom Mrs Bloom dressed yet?
BLOOM IN FLUNKEY'S PRUNE PLUSH COAT AND KNEEBREECHES, BUFF STOCKINGS
AND POWDERED WIG I'm afraid not, sir. The last articles ...
BOYLAN TOSSES HIM SIXPENCE Here, to buy yourself a gin and splash. HE
HANGS HIS HAT SMARTLY ON A PEG OF BLOOM'S ANTLERED HEAD Show me in. I
have a little private business with your wife, you understand?
BLOOM Thank you, sir. Yes, sir. Madam Tweedy is in her bath, sir.
MARION He ought to feel himself highly honoured. SHE PLOPS SPLASHING
OUT OF THE WATER Raoul darling, come and dry me. I'm in my pelt. Only my
new hat and a carriage sponge.
BOYLAN A MERRY TWINKLE IN HIS EYE Topping
BELLA What? What is it?
ZOE WHISPERS TO HER.
MARION Let him look, the pishogue Pimp And scourge himself I'll write
to a powerful prostitute or Bartholomona, the bearded woman, to raise
weals out on him an inch thick and make him bring me back a signed and
stamped receipt.
BOYLAN clasps himself Here, I can't hold this little lot much longer.
he strides off on stiff cavalry legs
BELLA LAUGHING Ho ho ho ho.
BOYLAN TO BLOOM, OVER HIS SHOULDER You can apply your eye to the
keyhole and play with yourself while I just go through her a few times.
BLOOM Thank you, sir. I will, sir. May I bring two men chums to witness
the deed and take a snapshot? HE HOLDS OUT AN OINTMENT JAR Vaseline,
sir? Orangeflower ...? Lukewarm water ...?
KITTY FROM THE SOFA Tell us, Florry. Tell us. What.
FLORRY WHISPERS TO HER. WHISPERING LOVEWORDS MURMUR, LIPLAPPING LOUDLY,
POPPYSMIC PLOPSLOP.
MINA KENNEDY HER EYES UPTURNED O, it must be like the scent of
geraniums and lovely peaches O, he simply idolises every bit of her
Stuck together Covered with kisses
LYDIA DOUCE HER MOUTH OPENING Yumyum. O, he's carrying her round the
room doing it Ride a cockhorse. You could hear them in Paris and New
York. Like mouthfuls of strawberries and cream.
KITTY LAUGHING Hee hee hee.
BOYLAN'S VOICE SWEETLY, HOARSELY, IN THE PIT OF HIS STOMACH Ah
Gooblazqruk brukarchkrasht
MARION'S VOICE HOARSELY, SWEETLY, RISING TO HER THROAT O
Weeshwashtkissinapooisthnapoohuck?
BLOOM HIS EYES WILDLY DILATED, CLASPS HIMSELF Show Hide Show Plough
her More Shoot
BELLA, ZOE, FLORRY, KITTY Ho ho Ha ha Hee hee
LYNCH POINTS The mirror up to nature. HE LAUGHS Hu hu hu hu hu
STEPHEN AND BLOOM GAZE IN THE MIRROR. THE FACE OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,
BEARDLESS, APPEARS THERE, RIGID IN FACIAL PARALYSIS, CROWNED BY THE
REFLECTION OF THE REINDEER ANTLERED HATRACK IN THE HALL.
SHAKESPEARE IN DIGNIFIED VENTRILOQUY 'Tis the loud laugh bespeaks the
vacant mind. TO BLOOM Thou thoughtest as how thou wastest invisible.
Gaze. HE CROWS WITH A BLACK CAPON'S LAUGH Iagogo How my Oldfellow
chokit his Thursdaymornun. Iagogogo
BLOOM SMILES YELLOWLY AT THE THREE WHORES When will I hear the joke?
ZOE Before you're twice married and once a widower.
BLOOM Lapses are condoned. Even the great Napoleon when measurements
were taken next the skin after his death ...
MRS DIGNAM, WIDOW WOMAN, HER SNUBNOSE AND CHEEKS FLUSHED WITH DEATHTALK,
TEARS AND TUNNEY'S TAWNY SHERRY, HURRIES BY IN HER WEEDS, HER BONNET
AWRY, ROUGING AND POWDERING HER CHEEKS, LIPS AND NOSE, A PEN CHIVVYING
HER BROOD OF CYGNETS. BENEATH HER SKIRT APPEAR HER LATE HUSBAND'S
EVERYDAY TROUSERS AND TURNEDUP BOOTS, LARGE EIGHTS. SHE HOLDS A SCOTTISH
WIDOWS' INSURANCE POLICY AND A LARGE MARQUEE UMBRELLA UNDER WHICH HER
BROOD RUN WITH HER, PATSY HOPPING ON ONE SHOD FOOT, HIS COLLAR LOOSE, A
HANK OF PORKSTEAKS DANGLING, FREDDY WHIMPERING, SUSY WITH A CRYING COD'S
MOUTH, ALICE STRUGGLING WITH THE BABY. SHE CUFFS THEM ON, HER STREAMERS
FLAUNTING ALOFT.
FREDDY Ah, ma, you're dragging me along
SUSY Mamma, the beeftea is fizzing over
SHAKESPEARE WITH PARALYTIC RAGE Weda seca whokilla farst.
THE FACE OF MARTIN CUNNINGHAM, BEARDED, REFEATURES SHAKESPEARE'S
BEARDLESS FACE. THE MARQUEE UMBRELLA SWAYS DRUNKENLY, THE CHILDREN RUN
ASIDE. UNDER THE UMBRELLA APPEARS MRS CUNNINGHAM IN MERRY WIDOW HAT AND
KIMONO GOWN. SHE GLIDES SIDLING AND BOWING, TWIRLING JAPANESILY.
MRS CUNNINGHAM SINGS
And they call me the jewel of Asia
MARTIN CUNNINGHAM GAZES ON HER, IMPASSIVE Immense Most bloody awful
demirep
STEPHEN ET EXALTABUNTUR CORNUA IUSTI. Queens lay with prize bulls.
Remember Pasiphae for whose lust my grandoldgrossfather made the first
confessionbox. Forget not Madam Grissel Steevens nor the suine scions of
the house of Lambert. And Noah was drunk with wine. And his ark was open.
BELLA None of that here. Come to the wrong shop.
LYNCH Let him alone. He's back from Paris.
ZOE RUNS TO STEPHEN AND LINKS HIM O go on Give us some parleyvoo.
STEPHEN CLAPS HAT ON HEAD AND LEAPS OVER TO THE FIREPLACE WHERE HE
STANDS WITH SHRUGGED SHOULDERS, FINNY HANDS OUTSPREAD, A PAINTED SMILE ON
HIS FACE.
LYNCH POMMELLING ON THE SOFA Rmm Rmm Rmm Rrrrrrmmmm.
STEPHEN GABBLES WITH MARIONETTE JERKS Thousand places of entertainment
to expense your evenings with lovely ladies saling gloves and other
things perhaps hers heart beerchops perfect fashionable house very
eccentric where lots cocottes beautiful dressed much about princesses
like are dancing cancan and walking there parisian clowneries extra
foolish for bachelors foreigns the same if talking a poor english how
much smart they are on things love and sensations voluptuous. Misters
very selects for is pleasure must to visit heaven and hell show with
mortuary candles and they tears silver which occur every night. Perfectly
shocking terrific of religion's things mockery seen in universal world.
All chic womans which arrive full of modesty then disrobe and squeal loud
to see vampire man debauch nun very fresh young with DESSOUS TROUBLANTS.
HE CLACKS HIS TONGUE LOUDLY HO, LA LA CE PIF QU'IL A
LYNCH VIVE LE VAMPIRE
THE WHORES Bravo Parleyvoo
STEPHEN GRIMACING WITH HEAD BACK, LAUGHS LOUDLY, CLAPPING HIMSELF
Great success of laughing. Angels much prostitutes like and holy apostles
big damn ruffians. DEMIMONDAINES nicely handsome sparkling of diamonds
very amiable costumed. Or do you are fond better what belongs they
moderns pleasure turpitude of old mans? HE POINTS ABOUT HIM WITH
GROTESQUE GESTURES WHICH LYNCH AND THE WHORES REPLY TO Caoutchouc statue
woman reversible or lifesize tompeeptom of virgins nudities very lesbic
the kiss five ten times. Enter, gentleman, to see in mirror every
positions trapezes all that machine there besides also if desire act
awfully bestial butcher's boy pollutes in warm veal liver or omlet on the
belly PIECE DE SHAKESPEARE.
BELLA CLAPPING HER BELLY SINKS BACK ON THE SOFA, WITH A SHOUT OF
LAUGHTER An omelette on the ... Ho ho ho ho ... omelette on the ...
STEPHEN MINCINGLY I love you, sir darling. Speak you englishman tongue
for DOUBLE ENTENTE CORDIALE. O yes, MON LOUP. How much cost? Waterloo.
Watercloset. HE CEASES SUDDENLY AND HOLDS UP A FOREFINGER
BELLA LAUGHING Omelette ...
THE WHORES LAUGHING Encore Encore
STEPHEN Mark me. I dreamt of a watermelon.
ZOE Go abroad and love a foreign lady.
LYNCH Across the world for a wife.
FLORRY Dreams goes by contraries.
STEPHEN EXTENDS HIS ARMS It was here. Street of harlots. In Serpentine
avenue Beelzebub showed me her, a fubsy widow. Where's the red carpet
spread?
BLOOM APPROACHING STEPHEN Look ...
STEPHEN No, I flew. My foes beneath me. And ever shall be. World without
end. HE CRIES PATER Free
BLOOM I say, look ...
STEPHEN Break my spirit, will he? O MERDE ALORS HE CRIES, HIS VULTURE
TALONS SHARPENED Hola Hillyho
SIMON DEDALUS' VOICE HILLOES IN ANSWER, SOMEWHAT SLEEPY BUT READY.
SIMON That's all right. HE SWOOPS UNCERTAINLY THROUGH THE AIR,
WHEELING, UTTERING CRIES OF HEARTENING, ON STRONG PONDEROUS BUZZARD
WINGS Ho, boy Are you going to win? Hoop Pschatt Stable with those
halfcastes. Wouldn't let them within the bawl of an ass. Head up Keep
our flag flying An eagle gules volant in a field argent displayed.
Ulster king at arms Haihoop HE MAKES THE BEAGLE'S CALL, GIVING TONGUE
Bulbul Burblblburblbl Hai, boy
THE FRONDS AND SPACES OF THE WALLPAPER FILE RAPIDLY ACROSS COUNTRY. A
STOUT FOX, DRAWN FROM COVERT, BRUSH POINTED, HAVING BURIED HIS
GRANDMOTHER, RUNS SWIFT FOR THE OPEN, BRIGHTEYED, SEEKING BADGER EARTH,
UNDER THE LEAVES. THE PACK OF STAGHOUNDS FOLLOWS, NOSE TO THE GROUND,
SNIFFING THEIR QUARRY, BEAGLEBAYING, BURBLBRBLING TO BE BLOODED. WARD
UNION HUNTSMEN AND HUNTSWOMEN LIVE WITH THEM, HOT FOR A KILL. FROM SIX
MILE POINT, FLATHOUSE, NINE MILE STONE FOLLOW THE FOOTPEOPLE WITH KNOTTY
STICKS, HAYFORKS, SALMONGAFFS, LASSOS, FLOCKMASTERS WITH STOCKWHIPS,
BEARBAITERS WITH TOMTOMS, TOREADORS WITH BULLSWORDS, GREYNEGROES WAVING
TORCHES. THE CROWD BAWLS OF DICERS, CROWN AND ANCHOR PLAYERS,
THIMBLERIGGERS, BROADSMEN. CROWS AND TOUTS, HOARSE BOOKIES IN HIGH WIZARD
HATS CLAMOUR DEAFENINGLY.
THE CROWD
Card of the races. Racing card
Ten to one the field
Tommy on the clay here Tommy on the clay
Ten to one bar one Ten to one bar one
Try your luck on Spinning Jenny
Ten to one bar one
Sell the monkey, boys Sell the monkey
I'll give ten to one
Ten to one bar one
A DARK HORSE, RIDERLESS, BOLTS LIKE A PHANTOM PAST THE WINNINGPOST, HIS
MANE MOONFOAMING, HIS EYEBALLS STARS. THE FIELD FOLLOWS, A BUNCH OF
BUCKING MOUNTS. SKELETON HORSES, SCEPTRE, MAXIMUM THE SECOND, ZINFANDEL,
THE DUKE OF WESTMINSTER'S SHOTOVER, REPULSE, THE DUKE OF BEAUFORT'S
CEYLON, PRIX DE PARIS. DWARFS RIDE THEM, RUSTYARMOURED, LEAPING, LEAPING
IN THEIR, IN THEIR SADDLES. LAST IN A DRIZZLE OF RAIN ON A BROKENWINDED
ISABELLE NAG, COCK OF THE NORTH, THE FAVOURITE, HONEY CAP, GREEN JACKET,
ORANGE SLEEVES, GARRETT DEASY UP, GRIPPING THE REINS, A HOCKEYSTICK AT
THE READY. HIS NAG ON SPAVINED WHITEGAITERED FEET JOGS ALONG THE ROCKY
ROAD.
THE ORANGE LODGES JEERING Get down and push, mister. Last lap You'll
be home the night
GARRETT DEASY BOLT UPRIGHT, HIS NAILSCRAPED FACE PLASTERED WITH
POSTAGESTAMPS, BRANDISHES HIS HOCKEYSTICK, HIS BLUE EYES FLASHING IN THE
PRISM OF THE CHANDELIER AS HIS MOUNT LOPES BY AT SCHOOLING GALLOP
PER VIAS RECTAS
A YOKE OF BUCKETS LEOPARDS ALL OVER HIM AND HIS REARING NAG A TORRENT OF
MUTTON BROTH WITH DANCING COINS OF CARROTS, BARLEY, ONIONS, TURNIPS,
POTATOES.
THE GREEN LODGES Soft day, sir John Soft day, your honour
PRIVATE CARR, PRIVATE COMPTON AND CISSY CAFFREY PASS BENEATH THE
WINDOWS, SINGING IN DISCORD.
STEPHEN Hark Our friend noise in the street.
ZOE HOLDS UP HER HAND Stop
PRIVATE CARR, PRIVATE COMPTON AND CISSY CAFFREY
Yet I've a sort a
Yorkshire relish for ...
ZOE That's me. SHE CLAPS HER HANDS Dance Dance SHE RUNS TO THE
PIANOLA Who has twopence?
BLOOM Who'll ...?
LYNCH HANDING HER COINS Here.
STEPHEN CRACKING HIS FINGERS IMPATIENTLY Quick Quick Where's my
augur's rod? HE RUNS TO THE PIANO AND TAKES HIS ASHPLANT, BEATING HIS
FOOT IN TRIPUDIUM
ZOE TURNS THE DRUMHANDLE There.
SHE DROPS TWO PENNIES IN THE SLOT. GOLD, PINK AND VIOLET LIGHTS START
FORTH. THE DRUM TURNS PURRING IN LOW HESITATION WALTZ. PROFESSOR GOODWIN,
IN A BOWKNOTTED PERIWIG, IN COURT DRESS, WEARING A STAINED INVERNESS
CAPE, BENT IN TWO FROM INCREDIBLE AGE, TOTTERS ACROSS THE ROOM, HIS HANDS
FLUTTERING. HE SITS TINILY ON THE PIANOSTOOL AND LIFTS AND BEATS HANDLESS
STICKS OF ARMS ON THE KEYBOARD, NODDING WITH DAMSEL'S GRACE, HIS BOWKNOT
BOBBING
ZOE TWIRLS ROUND HERSELF, HEELTAPPING Dance. Anybody here for there?
Who'll dance? Clear the table.
THE PIANOLA WITH CHANGING LIGHTS PLAYS IN WALTZ TIME THE PRELUDE OF My
Girl's a Yorkshire Girl. STEPHEN THROWS HIS ASHPLANT ON THE TABLE AND
SEIZES ZOE ROUND THE WAIST. FLORRY AND BELLA PUSH THE TABLE TOWARDS THE
FIREPLACE. STEPHEN, ARMING ZOE WITH EXAGGERATED GRACE, BEGINS TO WALTZ
HER ROUND THE ROOM. BLOOM STANDS ASIDE. HER SLEEVE FILLING FROM GRACING
ARMS REVEALS A WHITE FLESHFLOWER OF VACCINATION. BETWEEN THE CURTAINS
PROFESSOR MAGINNI INSERTS A LEG ON THE TOEPOINT OF WHICH SPINS A SILK
HAT. WITH A DEFT KICK HE SENDS IT SPINNING TO HIS CROWN AND JAUNTYHATTED
SKATES IN. HE WEARS A SLATE FROCKCOAT WITH CLARET SILK LAPELS, A GORGET
OF CREAM TULLE, A GREEN LOWCUT WAISTCOAT, STOCK COLLAR WITH WHITE
KERCHIEF, TIGHT LAVENDER TROUSERS, PATENT PUMPS AND CANARY GLOVES. IN HIS
BUTTONHOLE IS AN IMMENSE DAHLIA. HE TWIRLS IN REVERSED DIRECTIONS A
CLOUDED CANE, THEN WEDGES IT TIGHT IN HIS OXTER. HE PLACES A HAND LIGHTLY
ON HIS BREASTBONE, BOWS, AND FONDLES HIS FLOWER AND BUTTONS.
MAGINNI The poetry of motion, art of calisthenics. No connection with
Madam Legget Byrne's or Levenston's. Fancy dress balls arranged.
Deportment. The Katty Lanner step. So. Watch me My terpsichorean
abilities. HE MINUETS FORWARD THREE PACES ON TRIPPING BEE'S FEET TOUT
LE MONDE EN AVANT REVERENCE TOUT LE MONDE EN PLACE
THE PRELUDE CEASES. PROFESSOR GOODWIN, BEATING VAGUE ARMS SHRIVELS,
SINKS, HIS LIVE CAPE FILLING ABOUT THE STOOL. THE AIR IN FIRMER WALTZ
TIME SOUNDS. STEPHEN AND ZOE CIRCLE FREELY. THE LIGHTS CHANGE, GLOW, FIDE
GOLD ROSY VIOLET.
THE PIANOLA
Two young fellows were talking about their girls, girls, girls,
Sweethearts they'd left behind ...
FROM A CORNER THE MORNING HOURS RUN OUT, GOLDHAIRED, SLIMSANDALLED, IN
GIRLISH BLUE, WASPWAISTED, WITH INNOCENT HANDS. NIMBLY THEY DANCE,
TWIRLING THEIR SKIPPING ROPES. THE HOURS OF NOON FOLLOW IN AMBER GOLD.
LAUGHING, LINKED, HIGH HAIRCOMBS FLASHING, THEY CATCH THE SUN IN MOCKING
MIRRORS, LIFTING THEIR ARMS.
MAGINNI CLIPCLAPS GLOVESILENT HANDS CARRE AVANT DEUX Breathe evenly
BALANCE
THE MORNING AND NOON HOURS WALTZ IN THEIR PLACES, TURNING, ADVANCING TO
EACH OTHER, SHAPING THEIR CURVES, BOWING VISAVIS. CAVALIERS BEHIND THEM
ARCH AND SUSPEND THEIR ARMS, WITH HANDS DESCENDING TO, TOUCHING, RISING
FROM THEIR SHOULDERS.
HOURS You may touch my.
CAVALIERS May I touch your?
HOURS O, but lightly
CAVALIERS O, so lightly
THE PIANOLA
My little shy little lass has a waist.
ZOE AND STEPHEN TURN BOLDLY WITH LOOSER SWING. THE TWILIGHT HOURS
ADVANCE FROM LONG LANDSHADOWS, DISPERSED, LAGGING, LANGUIDEYED, THEIR
CHEEKS DELICATE WITH CIPRIA AND FALSE FAINT BLOOM. THEY ARE IN GREY GAUZE
WITH DARK BAT SLEEVES THAT FLUTTER IN THE LAND BREEZE.
MAGINNI AVANT HUIT TRAVERSE SALUT COURS DE MAINS CROISE
THE NIGHT HOURS, ONE BY ONE, STEAL TO THE LAST PLACE. MORNING, NOON AND
TWILIGHT HOURS RETREAT BEFORE THEM. THEY ARE MASKED, WITH DAGGERED HAIR
AND BRACELETS OF DULL BELLS. WEARY THEY CURCHYCURCHY UNDER VEILS.
THE BRACELETS Heigho Heigho
ZOE TWIRLING, HER HAND TO HER BROW O
MAGINNI LES TIROIRS CHAINE DE DAMES LA CORBEILLE DOS A DOS
ARABESQUING WEARILY THEY WEAVE A PATTERN ON THE FLOOR, WEAVING,
UNWEAVING, CURTSEYING, TWIRLING, SIMPLY SWIRLING.
ZOE I'm giddy
SHE FREES HERSELF, DROOPS ON A CHAIR. STEPHEN SEIZES FLORRY AND TURNS
WITH HER.
MAGINNI BOULANGERE LES RONDS LES PONTS CHEVAUX DE BOIS ESCARGOTS
TWINING, RECEDING, WITH INTERCHANGING HANDS THE NIGHT HOURS LINK EACH
EACH WITH ARCHING ARMS IN A MOSAIC OF MOVEMENTS. STEPHEN AND FLORRY TURN
CUMBROUSLY.
MAGINNI DANSEZ AVEC VOS DAMES CHANGEZ DE DAMES DONNEZ LE PETIT BOUQUET
A VOTRE DAME REMERCIEZ
THE PIANOLA
Best, best of all,
Baraabum
KITTY JUMPS UP O, they played that on the hobbyhorses at the Mirus
bazaar
SHE RUNS TO STEPHEN. HE LEAVES FLORRY BRUSQUELY AND SEIZES KITTY. A
SCREAMING BITTERN'S HARSH HIGH WHISTLE SHRIEKS. GROANGROUSEGURGLING
TOFT'S CUMBERSOME WHIRLIGIG TURNS SLOWLY THE ROOM RIGHT ROUNDABOUT THE
ROOM.
THE PIANOLA
My girl's a Yorkshire girl.
ZOE
Yorkshire through and through.
Come on all
SHE SEIZES FLORRY AND WALTZES HER.
STEPHEN PAS SEUL
HE WHEELS KITTY INTO LYNCH'S ARMS, SNATCHES UP HIS ASHPLANT FROM THE
TABLE AND TAKES THE FLOOR. ALL WHEEL WHIRL WALTZ TWIRL. BLOOMBELLA
KITTYLYNCH FLORRYZOE JUJUBY WOMEN. STEPHEN WITH HAT ASHPLANT FROGSPLITS
IN MIDDLE HIGHKICKS WITH SKYKICKING MOUTH SHUT HAND CLASP PART UNDER
THIGH. WITH CLANG TINKLE BOOMHAMMER TALLYHO HORNBLOWER BLUE GREEN YELLOW
FLASHES TOFT'S CUMBERSOME TURNS WITH HOBBYHORSE RIDERS FROM GILDED SNAKES
DANGLED, BOWELS FANDANGO LEAPING SPURN SOIL FOOT AND FALL AGAIN.
THE PIANOLA
Though she's a factory lass
And wears no fancy clothes.
CLOSECLUTCHED SWIFT SWIFTER WITH GLAREBLAREFLARE SCUDDING THEY
SCOOTLOOTSHOOT LUMBERING BY. BARAABUM
TUTTI Encore Bis Bravo Encore
SIMON Think of your mother's people
STEPHEN Dance of death.
BANG FRESH BARANG BANG OF LACQUEY'S BELL, HORSE, NAG, STEER, PIGLINGS,
CONMEE ON CHRISTASS, LAME CRUTCH AND LEG SAILOR IN COCKBOAT ARMFOLDED
ROPEPULLING HITCHING STAMP HORNPIPE THROUGH AND THROUGH. BARAABUM ON
NAGS HOGS BELLHORSES GADARENE SWINE CORNY IN COFFIN STEEL SHARK STONE
ONEHANDLED NELSON TWO TRICKIES FRAUENZIMMER PLUMSTAINED FROM PRAM FILLING
BAWLING GUM HE'S A CHAMPION. FUSEBLUE PEER FROM BARREL REV. EVENSONG LOVE
ON HACKNEY JAUNT BLAZES BLIND CODDOUBLED BICYCLERS DILLY WITH SNOWCAKE NO
FANCY CLOTHES. THEN IN LAST SWITCHBACK LUMBERING UP AND DOWN BUMP MASHTUB
SORT OF VICEROY AND REINE RELISH FOR TUBLUMBER BUMPSHIRE ROSE. BARAABUM
THE COUPLES FALL ASIDE. STEPHEN WHIRLS GIDDILY. ROOM WHIRLS BACK. EYES
CLOSED HE TOTTERS. RED RAILS FLY SPACEWARDS. STARS ALL AROUND SUNS TURN
ROUNDABOUT. BRIGHT MIDGES DANCE ON WALLS. HE STOPS DEAD.
STEPHEN Ho
STEPHEN'S MOTHER, EMACIATED, RISES STARK THROUGH THE FLOOR, IN LEPER
GREY WITH A WREATH OF FADED ORANGEBLOSSOMS AND A TORN BRIDAL VEIL, HER
FACE WORN AND NOSELESS, GREEN WITH GRAVEMOULD. HER HAIR IS SCANT AND
LANK. SHE FIXES HER BLUECIRCLED HOLLOW EYESOCKETS ON STEPHEN AND OPENS
HER TOOTHLESS MOUTH UTTERING A SILENT WORD. A CHOIR OF VIRGINS AND
CONFESSORS SING VOICELESSLY.
THE CHOIR
Liliata rutilantium te confessorum ...
Iubilantium te virginum ...
FROM THE TOP OF A TOWER BUCK MULLIGAN, IN PARTICOLOURED JESTER'S DRESS
OF PUCE AND YELLOW AND CLOWN'S CAP WITH CURLING BELL, STANDS GAPING AT
HER, A SMOKING BUTTERED SPLIT SCONE IN HIS HAND.
BUCK MULLIGAN She's beastly dead. The pity of it Mulligan meets the
afflicted mother. HE UPTURNS HIS EYES Mercurial Malachi
THE MOTHER WITH THE SUBTLE SMILE OF DEATH'S MADNESS I was once the
beautiful May Goulding. I am dead.
STEPHEN HORRORSTRUCK Lemur, who are you? No. What bogeyman's trick is
this?
BUCK MULLIGAN SHAKES HIS CURLING CAPBELL The mockery of it Kinch
dogsbody killed her bitchbody. She kicked the bucket. TEARS OF MOLTEN
BUTTER FALL FROM HIS EYES ON TO THE SCONE Our great sweet mother EPI
OINOPA PONTON.
THE MOTHER COMES NEARER, BREATHING UPON HIM SOFTLY HER BREATH OF WETTED
ASHES All must go through it, Stephen. More women than men in the world.
You too. Time will come.
STEPHEN CHOKING WITH FRIGHT, REMORSE AND HORROR They say I killed you,
mother. He offended your memory. Cancer did it, not I. Destiny.
THE MOTHER A GREEN RILL OF BILE TRICKLING FROM A SIDE OF HER MOUTH You
sang that song to me. LOVE'S BITTER MYSTERY.
STEPHEN EAGERLY Tell me the word, mother, if you know now. The word
known to all men.
THE MOTHER Who saved you the night you jumped into the train at Dalkey
with Paddy Lee? Who had pity for you when you were sad among the
strangers? Prayer is allpowerful. Prayer for the suffering souls in the
Ursuline manual and forty days' indulgence. Repent, Stephen.
STEPHEN The ghoul Hyena
THE MOTHER I pray for you in my other world. Get Dilly to make you that
boiled rice every night after your brainwork. Years and years I loved
you, O, my son, my firstborn, when you lay in my womb.
ZOE FANNING HERSELF WITH THE GRATE FAN I'm melting
FLORRY POINTS TO STEPHEN Look He's white.
BLOOM GOES TO THE WINDOW TO OPEN IT MORE Giddy.
THE MOTHER WITH SMOULDERING EYES Repent O, the fire of hell
STEPHEN PANTING His noncorrosive sublimate The corpsechewer Raw head
and bloody bones.
THE MOTHER HER FACE DRAWING NEAR AND NEARER, SENDING OUT AN ASHEN
BREATH Beware SHE RAISES HER BLACKENED WITHERED RIGHT ARM SLOWLY
TOWARDS STEPHEN'S BREAST WITH OUTSTRETCHED FINGER Beware God's hand A
GREEN CRAB WITH MALIGNANT RED EYES STICKS DEEP ITS GRINNING CLAWS IN
STEPHEN'S HEART.
STEPHEN STRANGLED WITH RAGE Shite HIS FEATURES GROW DRAWN GREY AND
OLD
BLOOM AT THE WINDOW What?
STEPHEN AH NON, PAR EXEMPLE The intellectual imagination With me all
or not at all. NON SERVIAM
FLORRY Give him some cold water. Wait. SHE RUSHES OUT
THE MOTHER WRINGS HER HANDS SLOWLY, MOANING DESPERATELY O Sacred Heart
of Jesus, have mercy on him Save him from hell, O Divine Sacred Heart
STEPHEN No No No Break my spirit, all of you, if you can I'll bring
you all to heel
THE MOTHER IN THE AGONY OF HER DEATHRATTLE Have mercy on Stephen,
Lord, for my sake Inexpressible was my anguish when expiring with love,
grief and agony on Mount Calvary.
STEPHEN NOTHUNG
HE LIFTS HIS ASHPLANT HIGH WITH BOTH HANDS AND SMASHES THE CHANDELIER.
TIME'S LIVID FINAL FLAME LEAPS AND, IN THE FOLLOWING DARKNESS, RUIN OF
ALL SPACE, SHATTERED GLASS AND TOPPLING MASONRY.
THE GASJET Pwfungg
BLOOM Stop
LYNCH RUSHES FORWARD AND SEIZES STEPHEN'S HAND Here Hold on Don't
run amok
BELLA Police
STEPHEN, ABANDONING HIS ASHPLANT, HIS HEAD AND ARMS THROWN BACK STARK,
BEATS THE GROUND AND FLIES FROM THE ROOM, PAST THE WHORES AT THE DOOR.
BELLA SCREAMS After him
THE TWO WHORES RUSH TO THE HALLDOOR. LYNCH AND KITTY AND ZOE STAMPEDE
FROM THE ROOM. THEY TALK EXCITEDLY. BLOOM FOLLOWS, RETURNS.
THE WHORES JAMMED IN THE DOORWAY, POINTING Down there.
ZOE POINTING There. There's something up.
BELLA Who pays for the lamp? SHE SEIZES BLOOM'S COATTAIL Here, you
were with him. The lamp's broken.
BLOOM RUSHES TO THE HALL, RUSHES BACK What lamp, woman?
A WHORE He tore his coat.
BELLA HER EYES HARD WITH ANGER AND CUPIDITY, POINTS Who's to pay for
that? Ten shillings. You're a witness.
BLOOM SNATCHES UP STEPHEN'S ASHPLANT Me? Ten shillings? Haven't you
lifted enough off him? Didn't he ...?
BELLA LOUDLY Here, none of your tall talk. This isn't a brothel. A ten
shilling house.
BLOOM HIS HEAD UNDER THE LAMP, PULLS THE CHAIN. PULING, THE GASJET
LIGHTS UP A CRUSHED MAUVE PURPLE SHADE. HE RAISES THE ASHPLANT. Only the
chimney's broken. Here is all he ...
BELLA SHRINKS BACK AND SCREAMS Jesus Don't
BLOOM WARDING OFF A BLOW To show you how he hit the paper. There's not
sixpenceworth of damage done. Ten shillings
FLORRY WITH A GLASS OF WATER, ENTERS Where is he?
BELLA Do you want me to call the police?
BLOOM O, I know. Bulldog on the premises. But he's a Trinity student.
Patrons of your establishment. Gentlemen that pay the rent. HE MAKES A
MASONIC SIGN Know what I mean? Nephew of the vicechancellor. You don't
want a scandal.
BELLA ANGRILY Trinity. Coming down here ragging after the boatraces
and paying nothing. Are you my commander here or? Where is he? I'll
charge him Disgrace him, I will SHE SHOUTS Zoe Zoe
BLOOM URGENTLY And if it were your own son in Oxford? WARNINGLY I
know.
BELLA ALMOST SPEECHLESS Who are. Incog
ZOE IN THE DOORWAY There's a row on.
BLOOM What? Where? HE THROWS A SHILLING ON THE TABLE AND STARTS That's
for the chimney. Where? I need mountain air.
HE HURRIES OUT THROUGH THE HALL. THE WHORES POINT. FLORRY FOLLOWS,
SPILLING WATER FROM HER TILTED TUMBLER. ON THE DOORSTEP ALL THE WHORES
CLUSTERED TALK VOLUBLY, POINTING TO THE RIGHT WHERE THE FOG HAS CLEARED
OFF. FROM THE LEFT ARRIVES A JINGLING HACKNEY CAR. IT SLOWS TO IN FRONT
OF THE HOUSE. BLOOM AT THE HALLDOOR PERCEIVES CORNY KELLEHER WHO IS ABOUT
TO DISMOUNT FROM THE CAR WITH TWO SILENT LECHERS. HE AVERTS HIS FACE.
BELLA FROM WITHIN THE HALL URGES ON HER WHORES. THEY BLOW ICKYLICKYSTICKY
YUMYUM KISSES. CORNY KELLEHER REPLIES WITH A GHASTLY LEWD SMILE. THE
SILENT LECHERS TURN TO PAY THE JARVEY. ZOE AND KITTY STILL POINT RIGHT.
BLOOM, PARTING THEM SWIFTLY, DRAWS HIS CALIPH'S HOOD AND PONCHO AND
HURRIES DOWN THE STEPS WITH SIDEWAYS FACE. INCOG HAROUN AL RASCHID HE
FLITS BEHIND THE SILENT LECHERS AND HASTENS ON BY THE RAILINGS WITH FLEET
STEP OF A PARD STREWING THE DRAG BEHIND HIM, TORN ENVELOPES DRENCHED IN
ANISEED. THE ASHPLANT MARKS HIS STRIDE. A PACK OF BLOODHOUNDS, LED BY
HORNBLOWER OF TRINITY BRANDISHING A DOGWHIP IN TALLYHO CAP AND AN OLD
PAIR OF GREY TROUSERS, FOLLOW FROM FIR, PICKING UP THE SCENT, NEARER,
BAYING, PANTING, AT FAULT, BREAKING AWAY, THROWING THEIR TONGUES, BITING
HIS HEELS, LEAPING AT HIS TAIL. HE WALKS, RUNS, ZIGZAGS, GALLOPS, LUGS
LAID BACK. HE IS PELTED WITH GRAVEL, CABBAGESTUMPS, BISCUITBOXES, EGGS,
POTATOES, DEAD CODFISH, WOMAN'S SLIPPERSLAPPERS. AFTER HIM FRESHFOUND THE
HUE AND CRY ZIGZAG GALLOPS IN HOT PURSUIT OF FOLLOW MY LEADER  C, 
C, NIGHT WATCH, JOHN HENRY MENTON, WISDOM HELY, V. B. DILLON, COUNCILLOR
NANNETTI, ALEXANDER KEYES, LARRY O'ROURKE, JOE CUFFE MRS O'DOWD, PISSER
BURKE, THE NAMELESS ONE, MRS RIORDAN, THE CITIZEN, GARRYOWEN,
WHODOYOUCALLHIM, STRANGEFACE, FELLOWTHATSOLIKE, SAWHIMBEFORE,
CHAPWITHAWEN, CHRIS CALLINAN, SIR CHARLES CAMERON, BENJAMIN DOLLARD,
LENEHAN, BARTELL D'ARCY, JOE HYNES, RED MURRAY, EDITOR BRAYDEN, T. M.
HEALY, MR JUSTICE FITZGIBBON, JOHN HOWARD PARNELL, THE REVEREND TINNED
SALMON, PROFESSOR JOLY, MRS BREEN, DENIS BREEN, THEODORE PUREFOY, MINA
PUREFOY, THE WESTLAND ROW POSTMISTRESS, C. P. M'COY, FRIEND OF LYONS,
HOPPY HOLOHAN, MANINTHESTREET, OTHERMANINTHESTREET, FOOTBALLBOOTS,
PUGNOSED DRIVER, RICH PROTESTANT LADY, DAVY BYRNE, MRS ELLEN M'GUINNESS,
MRS JOE GALLAHER, GEORGE LIDWELL, JIMMY HENRY ON CORNS, SUPERINTENDENT
LARACY, FATHER COWLEY, CROFTON OUT OF THE COLLECTORGENERAL'S, DAN
DAWSON, DENTAL SURGEON BLOOM WITH TWEEZERS, MRS BOB DORAN, MRS KENNEFICK,
MRS WYSE NOLAN, JOHN WYSE NOLAN,
HANDSOMEMARRIEDWOMANRUBBEDAGAINSTWIDEBEHINDINCLONSKEATRAM, THE BOOKSELLER
OF Sweets Of Sin, MISS DUBEDATANDSHEDIDBEDAD, MESDAMES GERALD AND
STANISLAUS MORAN OF ROEBUCK, THE MANAGING CLERK OF DRIMMIE'S, WETHERUP,
COLONEL HAYES, MASTIANSKY, CITRON, PENROSE, AARON FIGATNER, MOSES HERZOG,
MICHAEL E GERAGHTY, INSPECTOR TROY, MRS GALBRAITH, THE CONSTABLE OFF
ECCLES STREET CORNER, OLD DOCTOR BRADY WITH STETHOSCOPE, THE MYSTERY MAN
ON THE BEACH, A RETRIEVER, MRS MIRIAM DANDRADE AND ALL HER LOVERS.
THE HUE AND CRY HELTERSKELTERPELTERWELTER He's Bloom Stop Bloom
Stopabloom Stopperrobber Hi Hi Stophim on the corner
AT THE CORNER OF BEAVER STREET BENEATH THE SCAFFOLDING BLOOM PANTING
STOPS ON THE FRINGE OF THE NOISY QUARRELLING KNOT, A LOT NOT KNOWING A
JOT WHAT HI HI ROW AND WRANGLE ROUND THE WHOWHAT BRAWLALTOGETHER.
STEPHEN WITH ELABORATE GESTURES, BREATHING DEEPLY AND SLOWLY You are
my guests. Uninvited. By virtue of the fifth of George and seventh of
Edward. History to blame. Fabled by mothers of memory.
PRIVATE CARR TO CISSY CAFFREY Was he insulting you?
STEPHEN Addressed her in vocative feminine. Probably neuter. Ungenitive.
VOICES No, he didn't. I seen him. The girl there. He was in Mrs Cohen's.
What's up? Soldier and civilian.
CISSY CAFFREY I was in company with the soldiers and they left me to
doyou know, and the young man run up behind me. But I'm faithful to the
man that's treating me though I'm only a shilling whore.
STEPHEN CATCHES SIGHT OF LYNCH'S AND KITTY'S HEADS Hail, Sisyphus. HE
POINTS TO HIMSELF AND THE OTHERS Poetic. Uropoetic.
VOICES Shes faithfultheman.
CISSY CAFFREY Yes, to go with him. And me with a soldier friend.
PRIVATE COMPTON He doesn't half want a thick ear, the blighter. Biff him
one, Harry.
PRIVATE CARR TO CISSY Was he insulting you while me and him was having
a piss?
LORD TENNYSON GENTLEMAN POET IN UNION JACK BLAZER AND CRICKET FLANNELS,
BAREHEADED, FLOWINGBEARDED Theirs not to reason why.
PRIVATE COMPTON Biff him, Harry.
STEPHEN TO PRIVATE COMPTON I don't know your name but you are quite
right. Doctor Swift says one man in armour will beat ten men in their
shirts. Shirt is synechdoche. Part for the whole.
CISSY CAFFREY TO THE CROWD No, I was with the privates.
STEPHEN AMIABLY Why not? The bold soldier boy. In my opinion every
lady for example ...
PRIVATE CARR HIS CAP AWRY, ADVANCES TO STEPHEN Say, how would it be,
governor, if I was to bash in your jaw?
STEPHEN LOOKS UP TO THE SKY How? Very unpleasant. Noble art of
selfpretence. Personally, I detest action. HE WAVES HIS HAND Hand hurts
me slightly. ENFIN CE SONT VOS OIGNONS. TO CISSY CAFFREY Some trouble
is on here. What is it precisely?
DOLLY GRAY FROM HER BALCONY WAVES HER HANDKERCHIEF, GIVING THE SIGN OF
THE HEROINE OF JERICHO Rahab. Cook's son, goodbye. Safe home to Dolly.
Dream of the girl you left behind and she will dream of you.
THE SOLDIERS TURN THEIR SWIMMING EYES.
BLOOM ELBOWING THROUGH THE CROWD, PLUCKS STEPHEN'S SLEEVE VIGOROUSLY
Come now, professor, that carman is waiting.
STEPHEN TURNS Eh? HE DISENGAGES HIMSELF Why should I not speak to
him or to any human being who walks upright upon this oblate orange? HE
POINTS HIS FINGER I'm not afraid of what I can talk to if I see his eye.
Retaining the perpendicular.
HE STAGGERS A PACE BACK
BLOOM PROPPING HIM Retain your own.
STEPHEN LAUGHS EMPTILY My centre of gravity is displaced. I have
forgotten the trick. Let us sit down somewhere and discuss. Struggle for
life is the law of existence but but human philirenists, notably the tsar
and the king of England, have invented arbitration. HE TAPS HIS BROW
But in here it is I must kill the priest and the king.
BIDDY THE CLAP Did you hear what the professor said? He's a professor
out of the college.
CUNTY KATE I did. I heard that.
BIDDY THE CLAP He expresses himself with such marked refinement of
phraseology.
CUNTY KATE Indeed, yes. And at the same time with such apposite
trenchancy.
PRIVATE CARR PULLS HIMSELF FREE AND COMES FORWARD What's that you're
saying about my king?
EDWARD THE SEVENTH APPEARS IN AN ARCHWAY. HE WARS A WHITE JERSEY ON
WHICH AN IMAGE OF THE SACRED HEART IS STITCHED WITH THE INSIGNIA OF
GARTER AND THISTLE, GOLDEN FLEECE, ELEPHANT OF DENMARK, SKINNER'S AND
PROBYN'S HORSE, LINCOLN'S INN BENCHER AND ANCIENT AND HONOURABLE
ARTILLERY COMPANY OF MASSACHUSETTS. HE SUCKS A RED JUJUBE. HE IS ROBED AS
A GRAND ELECT PERFECT AND SUBLIME MASON WITH TROWEL AND APRON, MARKED
made in Germany. IN HIS LEFT HAND HE HOLDS A PLASTERER'S BUCKET ON WHICH
IS PRINTED Defense d'uriner. A ROAR OF WELCOME GREETS HIM.
EDWARD THE SEVENTH SLOWLY, SOLEMNLY BUT INDISTINCTLY Peace, perfect
peace. For identification, bucket in my hand. Cheerio, boys. HE TURNS TO
HIS SUBJECTS We have come here to witness a clean straight fight and we
heartily wish both men the best of good luck. Mahak makar a bak.
HE SHAKES HANDS WITH PRIVATE CARR, PRIVATE COMPTON, STEPHEN, BLOOM AND
LYNCH. GENERAL APPLAUSE. EDWARD THE SEVENTH LIFTS HIS BUCKET GRACIOUSLY
IN ACKNOWLEDGMENT.
PRIVATE CARR TO STEPHEN Say it again.
STEPHEN NERVOUS, FRIENDLY, PULLS HIMSELF UP I understand your point of
view though I have no king myself for the moment. This is the age of
patent medicines. A discussion is difficult down here. But this is the
point. You die for your country. Suppose. HE PLACES HIS ARM ON PRIVATE
CARR'S SLEEVE Not that I wish it for you. But I say Let my country die
for me. Up to the present it has done so. I didn't want it to die. Damn
death. Long live life
EDWARD THE SEVENTH LEVITATES OVER HEAPS OF SLAIN, IN THE GARB AND WITH
THE HALO OF JOKING JESUS, A WHITE JUJUBE IN HIS PHOSPHORESCENT FACE
My methods are new and are causing surprise.
To make the blind see I throw dust in their eyes.
STEPHEN Kings and unicorns HE FILLS BACK A PACE Come somewhere and
we'll ... What was that girl saying? ...
PRIVATE COMPTON Eh, Harry, give him a kick in the knackers. Stick one
into Jerry.
BLOOM TO THE PRIVATES, SOFTLY He doesn't know what he's saying. Taken
a little more than is good for him. Absinthe. Greeneyed monster. I know
him. He's a gentleman, a poet. It's all right.
STEPHEN NODS, SMILING AND LAUGHING Gentleman, patriot, scholar and
judge of impostors.
PRIVATE CARR I don't give a bugger who he is.
PRIVATE COMPTON We don't give a bugger who he is.
STEPHEN I seem to annoy them. Green rag to a bull.
KEVIN EGAN OF PARIS IN BLACK SPANISH TASSELLED SHIRT AND PEEPO'DAY
BOY'S HAT SIGNS TO STEPHEN.
KEVIN EGAN H'lo BONJOUR The VIEILLE OGRESSE with the DENTS JAUNES.
PATRICE EGAN PEEPS FROM BEHIND, HIS RABBITFACE NIBBLING A QUINCE LEAF.
PATRICE SOCIALISTE
DON EMILE PATRIZIO FRANZ RUPERT POPE HENNESSY IN MEDIEVAL HAUBERK, TWO
WILD GEESE VOLANT ON HIS HELM, WITH NOBLE INDIGNATION POINTS A MAILED
HAND AGAINST THE PRIVATES Werf those eykes to footboden, big grand
porcos of johnyellows todos covered of gravy
BLOOM TO STEPHEN Come home. You'll get into trouble.
STEPHEN SWAYING I don't avoid it. He provokes my intelligence.
BIDDY THE CLAP One immediately observes that he is of patrician lineage.
THE VIRAGO Green above the red, says he. Wolfe Tone.
THE BAWD The red's as good as the green. And better. Up the soldiers Up
King Edward
A ROUGH LAUGHS Ay Hands up to De Wet.
THE CITIZEN WITH A HUGE EMERALD MUFFLER AND SHILLELAGH, CALLS
May the God above
Send down a dove
With teeth as sharp as razors
To slit the throats
Of the English dogs
That hanged our Irish leaders.
THE CROPPY BOY THE ROPENOOSE ROUND HIS NECK, GRIPES IN HIS ISSUING
BOWELS WITH BOTH HANDS
I bear no hate to a living thing,
But I love my country beyond the king.
RUMBOLD, DEMON BARBER ACCOMPANIED BY TWO BLACKMASKED ASSISTANTS,
ADVANCES WITH GLADSTONE BAG WHICH HE OPENS Ladies and gents, cleaver
purchased by Mrs Pearcy to slay Mogg. Knife with which Voisin dismembered
the wife of a compatriot and hid remains in a sheet in the cellar, the
unfortunate female's throat being cut from ear to ear. Phial containing
arsenic retrieved from body of Miss Barron which sent Seddon to the
gallows.
HE JERKS THE ROPE. THE ASSISTANTS LEAP AT THE VICTIM'S LEGS AND DRAG HIM
DOWNWARD, GRUNTING THE CROPPY BOY'S TONGUE PROTRUDES VIOLENTLY.
THE CROPPY BOY
Horhot ho hray hor hother's hest.
HE GIVES UP THE GHOST. A VIOLENT ERECTION OF THE HANGED SENDS GOUTS OF
SPERM SPOUTING THROUGH HIS DEATHCLOTHES ON TO THE COBBLESTONES. MRS
BELLINGHAM, MRS YELVERTON BARRY AND THE HONOURABLE MRS MERVYN TALBOYS
RUSH FORWARD WITH THEIR HANDKERCHIEFS TO SOP IT UP.
RUMBOLD I'm near it myself. HE UNDOES THE NOOSE Rope which hanged the
awful rebel. Ten shillings a time. As applied to Her Royal Highness. HE
PLUNGES HIS HEAD INTO THE GAPING BELLY OF THE HANGED AND DRAWS OUT HIS
HEAD AGAIN CLOTTED WITH COILED AND SMOKING ENTRAILS My painful duty has
now been done. God save the king
EDWARD THE SEVENTH DANCES SLOWLY, SOLEMNLY, RATTLING HIS BUCKET, AND
SINGS WITH SOFT CONTENTMENT
On coronation day, on coronation day,
O, won't we have a merry time,
Drinking whisky, beer and wine
PRIVATE CARR Here. What are you saying about my king?
STEPHEN THROWS UP HIS HANDS O, this is too monotonous Nothing. He
wants my money and my life, though want must be his master, for some
brutish empire of his. Money I haven't. HE SEARCHES HIS POCKETS VAGUELY
GAVE IT TO SOMEONE.
PRIVATE CARR Who wants your bleeding money?
STEPHEN TRIES TO MOVE OFF Will someone tell me where I am least likely
to meet these necessary evils? CA SE VOIT AUSSI A PARIS. Not that I ...
But, by Saint Patrick ...
THE WOMEN'S HEADS COALESCE. OLD GUMMY GRANNY IN SUGARLOAF HAT APPEARS
SEATED ON A TOADSTOOL, THE DEATHFLOWER OF THE POTATO BLIGHT ON HER
BREAST.
STEPHEN Aha I know you, gammer Hamlet, revenge The old sow that eats
her farrow
OLD GUMMY GRANNY ROCKING TO AND FRO Ireland's sweetheart, the king of
Spain's daughter, alanna. Strangers in my house, bad manners to them
SHE KEENS WITH BANSHEE WOE Ochone Ochone Silk of the kine SHE
WAILS You met with poor old Ireland and how does she stand?
STEPHEN How do I stand you? The hat trick Where's the third person of
the Blessed Trinity? Soggarth Aroon? The reverend Carrion Crow.
CISSY CAFFREY SHRILL Stop them from fighting
A ROUGH Our men retreated.
PRIVATE CARR TUGGING AT HIS BELT I'll wring the neck of any fucker
says a word against my fucking king.
BLOOM TERRIFIED He said nothing. Not a word. A pure misunderstanding.
THE CITIZEN ERIN GO BRAGH
MAJOR TWEEDY AND THE CITIZEN EXHIBIT TO EACH OTHER MEDALS, DECORATIONS,
TROPHIES OF WAR, WOUNDS. BOTH SALUTE WITH FIERCE HOSTILITY.
PRIVATE COMPTON Go it, Harry. Do him one in the eye. He's a proboer.
STEPHEN Did I? When?
BLOOM TO THE REDCOATS We fought for you in South Africa, Irish missile
troops. Isn't that history? Royal Dublin Fusiliers. Honoured by our
monarch.
THE NAVVY STAGGERING PAST O, yes O God, yes O, make the kwawr a
krowawr O Bo
CASQUED HALBERDIERS IN ARMOUR THRUST FORWARD A PENTICE OF GUTTED
SPEARPOINTS. MAJOR TWEEDY, MOUSTACHED LIKE TURKO THE TERRIBLE, IN
BEARSKIN CAP WITH HACKLEPLUME AND ACCOUTREMENTS, WITH EPAULETTES, GILT
CHEVRONS AND SABRETACHES, HIS BREAST BRIGHT WITH MEDALS, TOES THE LINE.
HE GIVES THE PILGRIM WARRIOR'S SIGN OF THE KNIGHTS TEMPLARS.
MAJOR TWEEDY GROWLS GRUFFLY Rorke's Drift Up, guards, and at them
Mahar shalal hashbaz.
PRIVATE CARR I'll do him in.
PRIVATE COMPTON WAVES THE CROWD BACK Fair play, here. Make a bleeding
butcher's shop of the bugger.
MASSED BANDS BLARE Garryowen AND God save the king.
CISSY CAFFREY They're going to fight. For me
CUNTY KATE The brave and the fair.
BIDDY THE CLAP Methinks yon sable knight will joust it with the best.
CUNTY KATE BLUSHING DEEPLY Nay, madam. The gules doublet and merry
saint George for me
STEPHEN
The harlot's cry from street to street
Shall weave Old Ireland's windingsheet.
PRIVATE CARR LOOSENING HIS BELT, SHOUTS I'll wring the neck of any
fucking bastard says a word against my bleeding fucking king.
BLOOM SHAKES CISSY CAFFREY'S SHOULDERS Speak, you Are you struck
dumb? You are the link between nations and generations. Speak, woman,
sacred lifegiver
CISSY CAFFREY ALARMED, SEIZES PRIVATE CARR'S SLEEVE Amn't I with you?
Amn't I your girl? Cissy's your girl. SHE CRIES Police
STEPHEN ECSTATICALLY, TO CISSY CAFFREY
White thy fambles, red thy gan
And thy quarrons dainty is.
VOICES Police
DISTANT VOICES Dublin's burning Dublin's burning On fire, on fire
BRIMSTONE FIRES SPRING UP. DENSE CLOUDS ROLL PAST. HEAVY GATLING GUNS
BOOM. PANDEMONIUM. TROOPS DEPLOY. GALLOP OF HOOFS. ARTILLERY. HOARSE
COMMANDS. BELLS CLANG. BACKERS SHOUT. DRUNKARDS BAWL. WHORES SCREECH.
FOGHORNS HOOT. CRIES OF VALOUR. SHRIEKS OF DYING. PIKES CLASH ON
CUIRASSES. THIEVES ROB THE SLAIN. BIRDS OF PREY, WINGING FROM THE SEA,
RISING FROM MARSHLANDS, SWOOPING FROM EYRIES, HOVER SCREAMING, GANNETS,
CORMORANTS, VULTURES, GOSHAWKS, CLIMBING WOODCOCKS, PEREGRINES, MERLINS,
BLACKGROUSE, SEA EAGLES, GULLS, ALBATROSSES, BARNACLE GEESE. THE MIDNIGHT
SUN IS DARKENED. THE EARTH TREMBLES. THE DEAD OF DUBLIN FROM PROSPECT AND
MOUNT JEROME IN WHITE SHEEPSKIN OVERCOATS AND BLACK GOATFELL CLOAKS ARISE
AND APPEAR TO MANY. A CHASM OPENS WITH A NOISELESS YAWN. TOM ROCHFORD,
WINNER, IN ATHLETE'S SINGLET AND BREECHES, ARRIVES AT THE HEAD OF THE
NATIONAL HURDLE HANDICAP AND LEAPS INTO THE VOID. HE IS FOLLOWED BY A
RACE OF RUNNERS AND LEAPERS. IN WILD ATTITUDES THEY SPRING FROM THE
BRINK. THEIR BODIES PLUNGE. FACTORY LASSES WITH FANCY CLOTHES TOSS REDHOT
YORKSHIRE BARAABOMBS. SOCIETY LADIES LIFT THEIR SKIRTS ABOVE THEIR HEADS
TO PROTECT THEMSELVES. LAUGHING WITCHES IN RED CUTTY SARKS RIDE THROUGH
THE AIR ON BROOMSTICKS. QUAKERLYSTER PLASTERS BLISTERS. IT RAINS DRAGONS'
TEETH. ARMED HEROES SPRING UP FROM FURROWS. THEY EXCHANGE IN AMITY THE
PASS OF KNIGHTS OF THE RED CROSS AND FIGHT DUELS WITH CAVALRY SABRES
WOLFE TONE AGAINST HENRY GRATTAN, SMITH O'BRIEN AGAINST DANIEL O'CONNELL,
MICHAEL DAVITT AGAINST ISAAC BUTT, JUSTIN M'CARTHY AGAINST PARNELL,
ARTHUR GRIFFITH AGAINST JOHN REDMOND, JOHN O'LEARY AGAINST LEAR O'JOHNNY,
LORD EDWARD FITZGERALD AGAINST LORD GERALD FITZEDWARD, THE O'DONOGHUE OF
THE GLENS AGAINST THE GLENS OF THE O'DONOGHUE. ON AN EMINENCE, THE CENTRE
OF THE EARTH, RISES THE FELDALTAR OF SAINT BARBARA. BLACK CANDLES RISE
FROM ITS GOSPEL AND EPISTLE HORNS. FROM THE HIGH BARBACANS OF THE TOWER
TWO SHAFTS OF LIGHT FALL ON THE SMOKEPALLED ALTARSTONE. ON THE ALTARSTONE
MRS MINA PUREFOY, GODDESS OF UNREASON, LIES, NAKED, FETTERED, A CHALICE
RESTING ON HER SWOLLEN BELLY. FATHER MALACHI O'FLYNN IN A LACE PETTICOAT
AND REVERSED CHASUBLE, HIS TWO LEFT FEET BACK TO THE FRONT, CELEBRATES
CAMP MASS. THE REVEREND MR HUGH C HAINES LOVE M. A. IN A PLAIN CASSOCK
AND MORTARBOARD, HIS HEAD AND COLLAR BACK TO THE FRONT, HOLDS OVER THE
CELEBRANT'S HEAD AN OPEN UMBRELLA.
FATHER MALACHI O'FLYNN INTROIBO AD ALTARE DIABOLI.
THE REVEREND MR HAINES LOVE To the devil which hath made glad my young
days.
FATHER MALACHI O'FLYNN TAKES FROM THE CHALICE AND ELEVATES A
BLOODDRIPPING HOST CORPUS MEUM.
THE REVEREND MR HAINES LOVE RAISES HIGH BEHIND THE CELEBRANT'S
PETTICOAT, REVEALING HIS GREY BARE HAIRY BUTTOCKS BETWEEN WHICH A CARROT
IS STUCK My body.
THE VOICE OF ALL THE DAMNED Htengier Tnetopinmo Dog Drol eht rof,
Aiulella
FROM ON HIGH THE VOICE OF ADONAI CALLS.
ADONAI Dooooooooooog
THE VOICE OF ALL THE BLESSED Alleluia, for the Lord God Omnipotent
reigneth
FROM ON HIGH THE VOICE OF ADONAI CALLS.
ADONAI Goooooooooood
IN STRIDENT DISCORD PEASANTS AND TOWNSMEN OF ORANGE AND GREEN FACTIONS
SING Kick the Pope AND Daily, daily sing to Mary.
PRIVATE CARR WITH FEROCIOUS ARTICULATION I'll do him in, so help me
fucking Christ I'll wring the bastard fucker's bleeding blasted fucking
windpipe
OLD GUMMY GRANNY THRUSTS A DAGGER TOWARDS STEPHEN'S HAND Remove him,
acushla. At . a.m. you will be in heaven and Ireland will be free.
SHE PRAYS O good God, take him
THE RETRIEVER, NOSING ON THE FRINGE OF THE CROWD, BARKS NOISILY.
BLOOM RUNS TO LYNCH Can't you get him away?
LYNCH He likes dialectic, the universal language. Kitty TO BLOOM Get
him away, you. He won't listen to me.
HE DRAGS KITTY AWAY.
STEPHEN POINTS EXIT JUDAS. ET LAQUEO SE SUSPENDIT.
BLOOM RUNS TO STEPHEN Come along with me now before worse happens.
Here's your stick.
STEPHEN Stick, no. Reason. This feast of pure reason.
CISSY CAFFREY PULLING PRIVATE CARR Come on, you're boosed. He insulted
me but I forgive him. SHOUTING IN HIS EAR I forgive him for insulting
me.
BLOOM OVER STEPHEN'S SHOULDER Yes, go. You see he's incapable.
PRIVATE CARR BREAKS LOOSE I'll insult him.
HE RUSHES TOWARDS STEPHEN, FIST OUTSTRETCHED, AND STRIKES HIM IN THE
FACE. STEPHEN TOTTERS, COLLAPSES, FALLS, STUNNED. HE LIES PRONE, HIS FACE
TO THE SKY, HIS HAT ROLLING TO THE WALL. BLOOM FOLLOWS AND PICKS IT UP.
MAJOR TWEEDY LOUDLY Carbine in bucket Cease fire Salute
THE RETRIEVER BARKING FURIOUSLY Ute ute ute ute ute ute ute ute.
THE CROWD Let him up Don't strike him when he's down Air Who? The
soldier hit him. He's a professor. Is he hurted? Don't manhandle him
He's fainted
A HAG What call had the redcoat to strike the gentleman and he under the
influence. Let them go and fight the Boers
THE BAWD Listen to who's talking Hasn't the soldier a right to go with
his girl? He gave him the coward's blow.
THEY GRAB AT EACH OTHER'S HAIR, CLAW AT EACH OTHER AND SPIT
THE RETRIEVER BARKING Wow wow wow.
BLOOM SHOVES THEM BACK, LOUDLY Get back, stand back
PRIVATE COMPTON TUGGING HIS COMRADE Here. Bugger off, Harry. Here's
the cops
TWO RAINCAPED WATCH, TALL, STAND IN THE GROUP.
FIRST WATCH What's wrong here?
PRIVATE COMPTON We were with this lady. And he insulted us. And
assaulted my chum. THE RETRIEVER BARKS Who owns the bleeding tyke?
CISSY CAFFREY WITH EXPECTATION Is he bleeding
A MAN RISING FROM HIS KNEES No. Gone off. He'll come to all right.
BLOOM GLANCES SHARPLY AT THE MAN Leave him to me. I can easily ...
SECOND WATCH Who are you? Do you know him?
PRIVATE CARR LURCHES TOWARDS THE WATCH He insulted my lady friend.
BLOOM ANGRILY You hit him without provocation. I'm a witness.
Constable, take his regimental number.
SECOND WATCH I don't want your instructions in the discharge of my duty.
PRIVATE COMPTON PULLING HIS COMRADE Here, bugger off Harry. Or
Bennett'll shove you in the lockup.
PRIVATE CARR STAGGERING AS HE IS PULLED AWAY God fuck old Bennett.
He's a whitearsed bugger. I don't give a shit for him.
FIRST WATCH TAKES OUT HIS NOTEBOOK What's his name?
BLOOM PEERING OVER THE CROWD I just see a car there. If you give me a
hand a second, sergeant ...
FIRST WATCH Name and address.
CORNY KELLEKER, WEEPERS ROUND HIS HAT, A DEATH WREATH IN HIS HAND,
APPEARS AMONG THE BYSTANDERS.
BLOOM QUICKLY O, the very man HE WHISPERS Simon Dedalus' son. A bit
sprung. Get those policemen to move those loafers back.
SECOND WATCH Night, Mr Kelleher.
CORNY KELLEHER TO THE WATCH, WITH DRAWLING EYE That's all right. I
know him. Won a bit on the races. Gold cup. Throwaway. HE LAUGHS Twenty
to one. Do you follow me?
FIRST WATCH TURNS TO THE CROWD Here, what are you all gaping at? Move
on out of that.
THE CROWD DISPERSES SLOWLY, MUTTERING, DOWN THE LANE.
CORNY KELLEHER Leave it to me, sergeant. That'll be all right. HE
LAUGHS, SHAKING HIS HEAD We were often as bad ourselves, ay or worse.
What? Eh, what?
FIRST WATCH LAUGHS I suppose so.
CORNY KELLEHER NUDGES THE SECOND WATCH Come and wipe your name off the
slate. HE LILTS, WAGGING HIS HEAD With my tooraloom tooraloom tooraloom
tooraloom. What, eh, do you follow me?
SECOND WATCH GENIALLY Ah, sure we were too.
CORNY KELLEHER WINKING Boys will be boys. I've a car round there.
SECOND WATCH All right, Mr Kelleher. Good night.
CORNY KELLEHER I'll see to that.
BLOOM SHAKES HANDS WITH BOTH OF THE WATCH IN TURN Thank you very much,
gentlemen. Thank you. HE MUMBLES CONFIDENTIALLY We don't want any
scandal, you understand. Father is a wellknown highly respected citizen.
Just a little wild oats, you understand.
FIRST WATCH O. I understand, sir.
SECOND WATCH That's all right, sir.
FIRST WATCH It was only in case of corporal injuries I'd have to report
it at the station.
BLOOM NODS RAPIDLY Naturally. Quite right. Only your bounden duty.
SECOND WATCH It's our duty.
CORNY KELLEHER Good night, men.
THE WATCH SALUTING TOGETHER Night, gentlemen. THEY MOVE OFF WITH SLOW
HEAVY TREAD
BLOOM BLOWS Providential you came on the scene. You have a car? ...
CORNY KELLEHER LAUGHS, POINTING HIS THUMB OVER HIS RIGHT SHOULDER TO
THE CAR BROUGHT UP AGAINST THE SCAFFOLDING Two commercials that were
standing fizz in Jammet's. Like princes, faith. One of them lost two quid
on the race. Drowning his grief. And were on for a go with the jolly
girls. So I landed them up on Behan's car and down to nighttown.
BLOOM I was just going home by Gardiner street when I happened to ...
CORNY KELLEHER LAUGHS Sure they wanted me to join in with the mots.
No, by God, says I. Not for old stagers like myself and yourself. HE
LAUGHS AGAIN AND LEERS WITH LACKLUSTRE EYE Thanks be to God we have it
in the house, what, eh, do you follow me? Hah, hah, hah
BLOOM TRIES TO LAUGH He, he, he Yes. Matter of fact I was just
visiting an old friend of mine there, Virag, you don't know him poor
fellow, he's laid up for the past week and we had a liquor together and
I was just making my way home ...
THE HORSE NEIGHS.
THE HORSE Hohohohohohoh Hohohohome
CORNY KELLEHER Sure it was Behan our jarvey there that told me after we
left the two commercials in Mrs Cohen's and I told him to pull up and got
off to see. HE LAUGHS Sober hearsedrivers a speciality. Will I give him
a lift home? Where does he hang out? Somewhere in Cabra, what?
BLOOM No, in Sandycove, I believe, from what he let drop.
STEPHEN, PRONE, BREATHES TO THE STARS. CORNY KELLEHER, ASQUINT, DRAWLS
AT THE HORSE. BLOOM, IN GLOOM, LOOMS DOWN.
CORNY KELLEHER SCRATCHES HIS NAPE Sandycove HE BENDS DOWN AND CALLS
TO STEPHEN Eh HE CALLS AGAIN Eh He's covered with shavings anyhow.
Take care they didn't lift anything off him.
BLOOM No, no, no. I have his money and his hat here and stick.
CORNY KELLEHER Ah, well, he'll get over it. No bones broken. Well, I'll
shove along. HE LAUGHS I've a rendezvous in the morning. Burying the
dead. Safe home
THE HORSE NEIGHS Hohohohohome.
BLOOM Good night. I'll just wait and take him along in a few ...
CORNY KELLEHER RETURNS TO THE OUTSIDE CAR AND MOUNTS IT. THE HORSE
HARNESS JINGLES.
CORNY KELLEHER FROM THE CAR, STANDING Night.
BLOOM Night.
THE JARVEY CHUCKS THE REINS AND RAISES HIS WHIP ENCOURAGINGLY. THE CAR
AND HORSE BACK SLOWLY, AWKWARDLY, AND TURN. CORNY KELLEHER ON THE
SIDESEAT SWAYS HIS HEAD TO AND FRO IN SIGN OF MIRTH AT BLOOM'S PLIGHT.
THE JARVEY JOINS IN THE MUTE PANTOMIMIC MERRIMENT NODDING FROM THE
FARTHER SEAT. BLOOM SHAKES HIS HEAD IN MUTE MIRTHFUL REPLY. WITH THUMB
AND PALM CORNY KELLEHER REASSURES THAT THE TWO BOBBIES WILL ALLOW THE
SLEEP TO CONTINUE FOR WHAT ELSE IS TO BE DONE. WITH A SLOW NOD BLOOM
CONVEYS HIS GRATITUDE AS THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT STEPHEN NEEDS. THE CAR
JINGLES TOORALOOM ROUND THE CORNER OF THE TOORALOOM LANE. CORNY KELLEHER
AGAIN REASSURALOOMS WITH HIS HAND. BLOOM WITH HIS HAND ASSURALOOMS CORNY
KELLEHER THAT HE IS REASSURALOOMTAY. THE TINKLING HOOFS AND JINGLING
HARNESS GROW FAINTER WITH THEIR TOORALOOLOO LOOLOO LAY. BLOOM, HOLDING IN
HIS HAND STEPHEN'S HAT, FESTOONED WITH SHAVINGS, AND ASHPLANT, STANDS
IRRESOLUTE. THEN HE BENDS TO HIM AND SHAKES HIM BY THE SHOULDER.
BLOOM Eh Ho THERE IS NO ANSWER HE BENDS AGAIN Mr Dedalus THERE IS
NO ANSWER The name if you call. Somnambulist. HE BENDS AGAIN AND
HESITATING, BRINGS HIS MOUTH NEAR THE FACE OF THE PROSTRATE FORM
Stephen THERE IS NO ANSWER. HE CALLS AGAIN. Stephen
STEPHEN GROANS Who? Black panther. Vampire. HE SIGHS AND STRETCHES
HIMSELF, THEN MURMURS THICKLY WITH PROLONGED VOWELS
Who ... drive... Fergus now
And pierce ... wood's woven shade? ...
HE TURNS ON HIS LEFT SIDE, SIGHING, DOUBLING HIMSELF TOGETHER.
BLOOM Poetry. Well educated. Pity. HE BENDS AGAIN AND UNDOES THE
BUTTONS OF STEPHEN'S WAISTCOAT To breathe. HE BRUSHES THE WOODSHAVINGS
FROM STEPHEN'S CLOTHES WITH LIGHT HAND AND FINGERS One pound seven. Not
hurt anyhow. HE LISTENS What?
STEPHEN MURMURS
... shadows ... the woods
... white breast... dim sea.
HE STRETCHES OUT HIS ARMS, SIGHS AGAIN AND CURLS HIS BODY. BLOOM,
HOLDING THE HAT AND ASHPLANT, STANDS ERECT. A DOG BARKS IN THE DISTANCE.
BLOOM TIGHTENS AND LOOSENS HIS GRIP ON THE ASHPLANT. HE LOOKS DOWN ON
STEPHEN'S FACE AND FORM.
BLOOM COMMUNES WITH THE NIGHT Face reminds me of his poor mother. In
the shady wood. The deep white breast. Ferguson, I think I caught. A
girl. Some girl. Best thing could happen him. HE MURMURS ... swear that
I will always hail, ever conceal, never reveal, any part or parts, art or
arts ... HE MURMURS ... in the rough sands of the sea ... a cabletow's
length from the shore ... where the tide ebbs ... and flows ...
SILENT, THOUGHTFUL, ALERT HE STANDS ON GUARD, HIS FINGERS AT HIS LIPS IN
THE ATTITUDE OF SECRET MASTER. AGAINST THE DARK WALL A FIGURE APPEARS
SLOWLY, A FAIRY BOY OF ELEVEN, A CHANGELING, KIDNAPPED, DRESSED IN AN
ETON SUIT WITH GLASS SHOES AND A LITTLE BRONZE HELMET, HOLDING A BOOK IN
HIS HAND. HE READS FROM RIGHT TO LEFT INAUDIBLY, SMILING, KISSING THE
PAGE.
BLOOM WONDERSTRUCK, CALLS INAUDIBLY Rudy
RUDY GAZES, UNSEEING, INTO BLOOM'S EYES AND GOES ON READING, KISSING,
SMILING. HE HAS A DELICATE MAUVE FACE. ON HIS SUIT HE HAS DIAMOND AND
RUBY BUTTONS. IN HIS FREE LEFT HAND HE HOLDS A SLIM IVORY CANE WITH A
VIOLET BOWKNOT. A WHITE LAMBKIN PEEPS OUT OF HIS WAISTCOAT POCKET.
III 
Preparatory to anything else Mr Bloom brushed off the greater bulk of the
shavings and handed Stephen the hat and ashplant and bucked him up
generally in orthodox Samaritan fashion which he very badly needed. His
Stephen's mind was not exactly what you would call wandering but a bit
unsteady and on his expressed desire for some beverage to drink Mr Bloom
in view of the hour it was and there being no pump of Vartry water
available for their ablutions let alone drinking purposes hit upon an
expedient by suggesting, off the reel, the propriety of the cabman's
shelter, as it was called, hardly a stonesthrow away near Butt bridge
where they might hit upon some drinkables in the shape of a milk and soda
or a mineral. But how to get there was the rub. For the nonce he was
rather nonplussed but inasmuch as the duty plainly devolved upon him to
take some measures on the subject he pondered suitable ways and means
during which Stephen repeatedly yawned. So far as he could see he was
rather pale in the face so that it occurred to him as highly advisable to
get a conveyance of some description which would answer in their then
condition, both of them being e.d.ed, particularly Stephen, always
assuming that there was such a thing to be found. Accordingly after a few
such preliminaries as brushing, in spite of his having forgotten to take
up his rather soapsuddy handkerchief after it had done yeoman service in
the shaving line, they both walked together along Beaver street or, more
properly, lane as far as the farrier's and the distinctly fetid
atmosphere of the livery stables at the corner of Montgomery street where
they made tracks to the left from thence debouching into Amiens street
round by the corner of Dan Bergin's. But as he confidently anticipated
there was not a sign of a Jehu plying for hire anywhere to be seen except
a fourwheeler, probably engaged by some fellows inside on the spree,
outside the North Star hotel and there was no symptom of its budging a
quarter of an inch when Mr Bloom, who was anything but a professional
whistler, endeavoured to hail it by emitting a kind of a whistle, holding
his arms arched over his head, twice.
This was a quandary but, bringing common sense to bear on it, evidently
there was nothing for it but put a good face on the matter and foot it
which they accordingly did. So, bevelling around by Mullett's and the
Signal House which they shortly reached, they proceeded perforce in the
direction of Amiens street railway terminus, Mr Bloom being handicapped
by the circumstance that one of the back buttons of his trousers had, to
vary the timehonoured adage, gone the way of all buttons though, entering
thoroughly into the spirit of the thing, he heroically made light of the
mischance. So as neither of them were particularly pressed for time, as
it happened, and the temperature refreshing since it cleared up after the
recent visitation of Jupiter Pluvius, they dandered along past by where
the empty vehicle was waiting without a fare or a jarvey. As it so
happened a Dublin United Tramways Company's sandstrewer happened to be
returning and the elder man recounted to his companion A PROPOS of the
incident his own truly miraculous escape of some little while back. They
passed the main entrance of the Great Northern railway station, the
starting point for Belfast, where of course all traffic was suspended at
that late hour and passing the backdoor of the morgue a not very
enticing locality, not to say gruesome to a degree, more especially at
night ultimately gained the Dock Tavern and in due course turned into
Store street, famous for its C division police station. Between this
point and the high at present unlit warehouses of Beresford place Stephen
thought to think of Ibsen, associated with Baird's the stonecutter's in
his mind somehow in Talbot place, first turning on the right, while the
other who was acting as his FIDUS ACHATES inhaled with internal
satisfaction the smell of James Rourke's city bakery, situated quite
close to where they were, the very palatable odour indeed of our daily
bread, of all commodities of the public the primary and most
indispensable. Bread, the staff of life, earn your bread, O tell me where
is fancy bread, at Rourke's the baker's it is said.
EN ROUTE to his taciturn and, not to put too fine a point on it, not yet
perfectly sober companion Mr Bloom who at all events was in complete
possession of his faculties, never more so, in fact disgustingly sober,
spoke a word of caution re the dangers of nighttown, women of ill fame
and swell mobsmen, which, barely permissible once in a while though not
as a habitual practice, was of the nature of a regular deathtrap for
young fellows of his age particularly if they had acquired drinking
habits under the influence of liquor unless you knew a little jiujitsu
for every contingency as even a fellow on the broad of his back could
administer a nasty kick if you didn't look out. Highly providential was
the appearance on the scene of Corny Kelleher when Stephen was blissfully
unconscious but for that man in the gap turning up at the eleventh hour
the finis might have been that he might have been a candidate for the
accident ward or, failing that, the bridewell and an appearance in the
court next day before Mr Tobias or, he being the solicitor rather, old
Wall, he meant to say, or Mahony which simply spelt ruin for a chap when
it got bruited about. The reason he mentioned the fact was that a lot of
those policemen, whom he cordially disliked, were admittedly unscrupulous
in the service of the Crown and, as Mr Bloom put it, recalling a case or
two in the A division in Clanbrassil street, prepared to swear a hole
through a ten gallon pot. Never on the spot when wanted but in quiet
parts of the city, Pembroke road for example, the guardians of the law
were well in evidence, the obvious reason being they were paid to protect
the upper classes. Another thing he commented on was equipping soldiers
with firearms or sidearms of any description liable to go off at any time
which was tantamount to inciting them against civilians should by any
chance they fall out over anything. You frittered away your time, he very
sensibly maintained, and health and also character besides which, the
squandermania of the thing, fast women of the DEMIMONDE ran away with a
lot of l.s.d. into the bargain and the greatest danger of all was who you
got drunk with though, touching the much vexed question of stimulants, he
relished a glass of choice old wine in season as both nourishing and
bloodmaking and possessing aperient virtues notably a good burgundy
which he was a staunch believer in still never beyond a certain point
where he invariably drew the line as it simply led to trouble all round
to say nothing of your being at the tender mercy of others practically.
Most of all he commented adversely on the desertion of Stephen by all his
pubhunting CONFRERES but one, a most glaring piece of ratting on the part
of his brother medicos under all the circs.
And that one was Judas, Stephen said, who up to then had said nothing
whatsoever of any kind.
Discussing these and kindred topics they made a beeline across the back
of the Customhouse and passed under the Loop Line bridge where a brazier
of coke burning in front of a sentrybox or something like one attracted
their rather lagging footsteps. Stephen of his own accord stopped for no
special reason to look at the heap of barren cobblestones and by the
light emanating from the brazier he could just make out the darker figure
of the corporation watchman inside the gloom of the sentrybox. He began
to remember that this had happened or had been mentioned as having
happened before but it cost him no small effort before he remembered that
he recognised in the sentry a quondam friend of his father's, Gumley. To
avoid a meeting he drew nearer to the pillars of the railway bridge.
Someone saluted you, Mr Bloom said.
A figure of middle height on the prowl evidently under the arches saluted
again, calling
NIGHT
Stephen of course started rather dizzily and stopped to return the
compliment. Mr Bloom actuated by motives of inherent delicacy inasmuch as
he always believed in minding his own business moved off but nevertheless
remained on the QUI VIVE with just a shade of anxiety though not funkyish
in the least. Though unusual in the Dublin area he knew that it was not
by any means unknown for desperadoes who had next to nothing to live on
to be abroad waylaying and generally terrorising peaceable pedestrians by
placing a pistol at their head in some secluded spot outside the city
proper, famished loiterers of the Thames embankment category they might
be hanging about there or simply marauders ready to decamp with whatever
boodle they could in one fell swoop at a moment's notice, your money or
your life, leaving you there to point a moral, gagged and garrotted.
Stephen, that is when the accosting figure came to close quarters, though
he was not in an over sober state himself recognised Corley's breath
redolent of rotten cornjuice. Lord John Corley some called him and his
genealogy came about in this wise. He was the eldest son of inspector
Corley of the G division, lately deceased, who had married a certain
Katherine Brophy, the daughter of a Louth farmer. His grandfather Patrick
Michael Corley of New Ross had married the widow of a publican there
whose maiden name had been Katherine also Talbot. Rumour had it though
not proved that she descended from the house of the lords Talbot de
Malahide in whose mansion, really an unquestionably fine residence of its
kind and well worth seeing, her mother or aunt or some relative, a woman,
as the tale went, of extreme beauty, had enjoyed the distinction of being
in service in the washkitchen. This therefore was the reason why the
still comparatively young though dissolute man who now addressed Stephen
was spoken of by some with facetious proclivities as Lord John Corley.
Taking Stephen on one side he had the customary doleful ditty to tell.
Not as much as a farthing to purchase a night's lodgings. His friends had
all deserted him. Furthermore he had a row with Lenehan and called him to
Stephen a mean bloody swab with a sprinkling of a number of other
uncalledfor expressions. He was out of a job and implored of Stephen to
tell him where on God's earth he could get something, anything at all, to
do. No, it was the daughter of the mother in the washkitchen that was
fostersister to the heir of the house or else they were connected through
the mother in some way, both occurrences happening at the same time if
the whole thing wasn't a complete fabrication from start to finish.
Anyhow he was all in.
I wouldn't ask you only, pursued he, on my solemn oath and God knows
I'm on the rocks.
There'll be a job tomorrow or next day, Stephen told him, in a boys'
school at Dalkey for a gentleman usher. Mr Garrett Deasy. Try it. You may
mention my name.
Ah, God, Corley replied, sure I couldn't teach in a school, man. I was
never one of your bright ones, he added with a half laugh. I got stuck
twice in the junior at the christian brothers.
I have no place to sleep myself, Stephen informed him.
Corley at the first gooff was inclined to suspect it was something to do
with Stephen being fired out of his digs for bringing in a bloody tart
off the street. There was a dosshouse in Marlborough street, Mrs
Maloney's, but it was only a tanner touch and full of undesirables but
M'Conachie told him you got a decent enough do in the Brazen Head over in
Winetavern street which was distantly suggestive to the person addressed
of friar Bacon for a bob. He was starving too though he hadn't said a
word about it.
Though this sort of thing went on every other night or very near it still
Stephen's feelings got the better of him in a sense though he knew that
Corley's brandnew rigmarole on a par with the others was hardly deserving
of much credence. However HAUD IGNARUS MALORUM MISERIS SUCCURRERE DISCO
etcetera as the Latin poet remarks especially as luck would have it he
got paid his screw after every middle of the month on the sixteenth which
was the date of the month as a matter of fact though a good bit of the
wherewithal was demolished. But the cream of the joke was nothing would
get it out of Corley's head that he was living in affluence and hadn't a
thing to do but hand out the needful. Whereas. He put his hand in a
pocket anyhow not with the idea of finding any food there but thinking he
might lend him anything up to a bob or so in lieu so that he might
endeavour at all events and get sufficient to eat but the result was in
the negative for, to his chagrin, he found his cash missing. A few broken
biscuits were all the result of his investigation. He tried his hardest
to recollect for the moment whether he had lost as well he might have or
left because in that contingency it was not a pleasant lookout, very much
the reverse in fact. He was altogether too fagged out to institute a
thorough search though he tried to recollect. About biscuits he dimly
remembered. Who now exactly gave them he wondered or where was or did he
buy. However in another pocket he came across what he surmised in the
dark were pennies, erroneously however, as it turned out.
Those are halfcrowns, man, Corley corrected him.
And so in point of fact they turned out to be. Stephen anyhow lent him
one of them.
Thanks, Corley answered, you're a gentleman. I'll pay you back one
time. Who's that with you? I saw him a few times in the Bleeding Horse in
Camden street with Boylan, the billsticker. You might put in a good word
for us to get me taken on there. I'd carry a sandwichboard only the girl
in the office told me they're full up for the next three weeks, man. God,
you've to book ahead, man, you'd think it was for the Carl Rosa. I don't
give a shite anyway so long as I get a job, even as a crossing sweeper.
Subsequently being not quite so down in the mouth after the two and six
he got he informed Stephen about a fellow by the name of Bags Comisky
that he said Stephen knew well out of Fullam's, the shipchandler's,
bookkeeper there that used to be often round in Nagle's back with O'Mara
and a little chap with a stutter the name of Tighe. Anyhow he was lagged
the night before last and fined ten bob for a drunk and disorderly and
refusing to go with the constable.
Mr Bloom in the meanwhile kept dodging about in the vicinity of the
cobblestones near the brazier of coke in front of the corporation
watchman's sentrybox who evidently a glutton for work, it struck him, was
having a quiet forty winks for all intents and purposes on his own
private account while Dublin slept. He threw an odd eye at the same time
now and then at Stephen's anything but immaculately attired interlocutor
as if he had seen that nobleman somewhere or other though where he was
not in a position to truthfully state nor had he the remotest idea when.
Being a levelheaded individual who could give points to not a few in
point of shrewd observation he also remarked on his very dilapidated hat
and slouchy wearing apparel generally testifying to a chronic
impecuniosity. Palpably he was one of his hangerson but for the matter of
that it was merely a question of one preying on his nextdoor neighbour
all round, in every deep, so to put it, a deeper depth and for the matter
of that if the man in the street chanced to be in the dock himself penal
servitude with or without the option of a fine would be a very rara avis
altogether. In any case he had a consummate amount of cool assurance
intercepting people at that hour of the night or morning. Pretty thick
that was certainly.
The pair parted company and Stephen rejoined Mr Bloom who, with his
practised eye, was not without perceiving that he had succumbed to the
blandiloquence of the other parasite. Alluding to the encounter he said,
laughingly, Stephen, that is
He is down on his luck. He asked me to ask you to ask somebody named
Boylan, a billsticker, to give him a job as a sandwichman.
At this intelligence, in which he seemingly evinced little interest, Mr
Bloom gazed abstractedly for the space of a half a second or so in the
direction of a bucketdredger, rejoicing in the farfamed name of Eblana,
moored alongside Customhouse quay and quite possibly out of repair,
whereupon he observed evasively
Everybody gets their own ration of luck, they say. Now you mention it
his face was familiar to me. But, leaving that for the moment, how much
did you part with, he queried, if I am not too inquisitive?
Half a crown, Stephen responded. I daresay he needs it to sleep
somewhere.
Needs Mr Bloom ejaculated, professing not the least surprise at the
intelligence, I can quite credit the assertion and I guarantee he
invariably does. Everyone according to his needs or everyone according to
his deeds. But, talking about things in general, where, added he with a
smile, will you sleep yourself? Walking to Sandycove is out of the
question. And even supposing you did you won't get in after what occurred
at Westland Row station. Simply fag out there for nothing. I don't mean
to presume to dictate to you in the slightest degree but why did you
leave your father's house?
To seek misfortune, was Stephen's answer.
I met your respected father on a recent occasion, Mr Bloom
diplomatically returned, today in fact, or to be strictly accurate, on
yesterday. Where does he live at present? I gathered in the course of
conversation that he had moved.
I believe he is in Dublin somewhere, Stephen answered unconcernedly.
Why?
A gifted man, Mr Bloom said of Mr Dedalus senior, in more respects than
one and a born RACONTEUR if ever there was one. He takes great pride,
quite legitimate, out of you. You could go back perhaps, he hasarded,
still thinking of the very unpleasant scene at Westland Row terminus when
it was perfectly evident that the other two, Mulligan, that is, and that
English tourist friend of his, who eventually euchred their third
companion, were patently trying as if the whole bally station belonged to
them to give Stephen the slip in the confusion, which they did.
There was no response forthcoming to the suggestion however, such as it
was, Stephen's mind's eye being too busily engaged in repicturing his
family hearth the last time he saw it with his sister Dilly sitting by
the ingle, her hair hanging down, waiting for some weak Trinidad shell
cocoa that was in the sootcoated kettle to be done so that she and he
could drink it with the oatmealwater for milk after the Friday herrings
they had eaten at two a penny with an egg apiece for Maggy, Boody and
Katey, the cat meanwhile under the mangle devouring a mess of eggshells
and charred fish heads and bones on a square of brown paper, in
accordance with the third precept of the church to fast and abstain on
the days commanded, it being quarter tense or if not, ember days or
something like that.
No, Mr Bloom repeated again, I wouldn't personally repose much trust in
that boon companion of yours who contributes the humorous element, Dr
Mulligan, as a guide, philosopher and friend if I were in your shoes. He
knows which side his bread is buttered on though in all probability he
never realised what it is to be without regular meals. Of course you
didn't notice as much as I did. But it wouldn't occasion me the least
surprise to learn that a pinch of tobacco or some narcotic was put in
your drink for some ulterior object.
He understood however from all he heard that Dr Mulligan was a versatile
allround man, by no means confined to medicine only, who was rapidly
coming to the fore in his line and, if the report was verified, bade fair
to enjoy a flourishing practice in the not too distant future as a tony
medical practitioner drawing a handsome fee for his services in addition
to which professional status his rescue of that man from certain drowning
by artificial respiration and what they call first aid at Skerries, or
Malahide was it?, was, he was bound to admit, an exceedingly plucky deed
which he could not too highly praise, so that frankly he was utterly at a
loss to fathom what earthly reason could be at the back of it except he
put it down to sheer cussedness or jealousy, pure and simple.
Except it simply amounts to one thing and he is what they call picking
your brains, he ventured to throw o.ut.
The guarded glance of half solicitude half curiosity augmented by
friendliness which he gave at Stephen's at present morose expression of
features did not throw a flood of light, none at all in fact on the
problem as to whether he had let himself be badly bamboozled to judge by
two or three lowspirited remarks he let drop or the other way about saw
through the affair and for some reason or other best known to himself
allowed matters to more or less. Grinding poverty did have that effect
and he more than conjectured that, high educational abilities though he
possessed, he experienced no little difficulty in making both ends meet.
Adjacent to the men's public urinal they perceived an icecream car round
which a group of presumably Italians in heated altercation were getting
rid of voluble expressions in their vivacious language in a particularly
animated way, there being some little differences between the parties.
PUTTANA MADONNA, CHE CI DIA I QUATTRINI HO RAGIONE? CULO ROTTO
INTENDIAMOCI. MEZZO SOVRANO PIU ...
DICE LUI, PERO
MEZZO.
FARABUTTO MORTACCI SUI
MA ASCOLTA CINQUE LA TESTA PIU ...
Mr Bloom and Stephen entered the cabman's shelter, an unpretentious
wooden structure, where, prior to then, he had rarely if ever been
before, the former having previously whispered to the latter a few hints
anent the keeper of it said to be the once famous SkintheGoat
Fitzharris, the invincible, though he could not vouch for the actual
facts which quite possibly there was not one vestige of truth in. A few
moments later saw our two noctambules safely seated in a discreet corner
only to be greeted by stares from the decidedly miscellaneous collection
of waifs and strays and other nondescript specimens of the genus HOMO
already there engaged in eating and drinking diversified by conversation
for whom they seemingly formed an object of marked curiosity.
Now touching a cup of coffee, Mr Bloom ventured to plausibly suggest to
break the ice, it occurs to me you ought to sample something in the shape
of solid food, say, a roll of some description.
Accordingly his first act was with characteristic SANGFROID to order
these commodities quietly. The HOI POLLOI of jarvies or stevedores or
whatever they were after a cursory examination turned their eyes
apparently dissatisfied, away though one redbearded bibulous individual
portion of whose hair was greyish, a sailor probably, still stared for
some appreciable time before transferring his rapt attention to the
floor. Mr Bloom, availing himself of the right of free speech, he having
just a bowing acquaintance with the language in dispute, though, to be
sure, rather in a quandary over VOGLIO, remarked to his PROTEGE in an
audible tone of voice A PROPOS of the battle royal in the street which
was still raging fast and furious
A beautiful language. I mean for singing purposes. Why do you not write
your poetry in that language? BELLA POETRIA It is so melodious and full.
BELLADONNA. VOGLIO.
Stephen, who was trying his dead best to yawn if he could, suffering from
lassitude generally, replied
To fill the ear of a cow elephant. They were haggling over money.
Is that so? Mr Bloom asked. Of course, he subjoined pensively, at the
inward reflection of there being more languages to start with than were
absolutely necessary, it may be only the southern glamour that surrounds
it.
The keeper of the shelter in the middle of this TETEATETE put a boiling
swimming cup of a choice concoction labelled coffee on the table and a
rather antediluvian specimen of a bun, or so it seemed. After which he
beat a retreat to his counter, Mr Bloom determining to have a good square
look at him later on so as not to appear to. For which reason he
encouraged Stephen to proceed with his eyes while he did the honours by
surreptitiously pushing the cup of what was temporarily supposed to be
called coffee gradually nearer him.
Sounds are impostures, Stephen said after a pause of some little time,
like names. Cicero, Podmore. Napoleon, Mr Goodbody. Jesus, Mr Doyle.
Shakespeares were as common as Murphies. What's in a name?
Yes, to be sure, Mr Bloom unaffectedly concurred. Of course. Our name
was changed too, he added, pushing the socalled roll across.
The redbearded sailor who had his weather eye on the newcomers boarded
Stephen, whom he had singled out for attention in particular, squarely by
asking
And what might your name be?
Just in the nick of time Mr Bloom touched his companion's boot but
Stephen, apparently disregarding the warm pressure from an unexpected
quarter, answered
Dedalus.
The sailor stared at him heavily from a pair of drowsy baggy eyes, rather
bunged up from excessive use of boose, preferably good old Hollands and
water.
You know Simon Dedalus? he asked at length.
I've heard of him, Stephen said.
Mr Bloom was all at sea for a moment, seeing the others evidently
eavesdropping too.
He's Irish, the seaman bold affirmed, staring still in much the same
way and nodding. All Irish.
All too Irish, Stephen rejoined.
As for Mr Bloom he could neither make head or tail of the whole business
and he was just asking himself what possible connection when the sailor
of his own accord turned to the other occupants of the shelter with the
remark
I seen him shoot two eggs off two bottles at fifty yards over his
shoulder. The lefthand dead shot.
Though he was slightly hampered by an occasional stammer and his gestures
being also clumsy as it was still he did his best to explain.
Bottles out there, say. Fifty yards measured. Eggs on the bottles.
Cocks his gun over his shoulder. Aims.
He turned his body half round, shut up his right eye completely. Then he
screwed his features up someway sideways and glared out into the night
with an unprepossessing cast of countenance.
Pom he then shouted once.
The entire audience waited, anticipating an additional detonation, there
being still a further egg.
Pom he shouted twice.
Egg two evidently demolished, he nodded and winked, adding
bloodthirstily
BUFFALO BILL SHOOTS TO KILL,
NEVER MISSED NOR HE NEVER WILL.
A silence ensued till Mr Bloom for agreeableness' sake just felt like
asking him whether it was for a marksmanship competition like the Bisley.
Beg pardon, the sailor said.
Long ago? Mr Bloom pursued without flinching a hairsbreadth.
Why, the sailor replied, relaxing to a certain extent under the magic
influence of diamond cut diamond, it might be a matter of ten years. He
toured the wide world with Hengler's Royal Circus. I seen him do that in
Stockholm.
Curious coincidence, Mr Bloom confided to Stephen unobtrusively.
Murphy's my name, the sailor continued. D. B. Murphy of Carrigaloe.
Know where that is?
Queenstown harbour, Stephen replied.
That's right, the sailor said. Fort Camden and Fort Carlisle. That's
where I hails from. I belongs there. That's where I hails from. My little
woman's down there. She's waiting for me, I know. FOR ENGLAND, HOME AND
BEAUTY. She's my own true wife I haven't seen for seven years now,
sailing about.
Mr Bloom could easily picture his advent on this scene, the homecoming to
the mariner's roadside shieling after having diddled Davy Jones, a rainy
night with a blind moon. Across the world for a wife. Quite a number of
stories there were on that particular Alice Ben Bolt topic, Enoch Arden
and Rip van Winkle and does anybody hereabouts remember Caoc O'Leary, a
favourite and most trying declamation piece by the way of poor John Casey
and a bit of perfect poetry in its own small way. Never about the runaway
wife coming back, however much devoted to the absentee. The face at the
window Judge of his astonishment when he finally did breast the tape and
the awful truth dawned upon him anent his better half, wrecked in his
affections. You little expected me but I've come to stay and make a fresh
start. There she sits, a grasswidow, at the selfsame fireside. Believes
me dead, rocked in the cradle of the deep. And there sits uncle Chubb or
Tomkin, as the case might be, the publican of the Crown and Anchor, in
shirtsleeves, eating rumpsteak and onions. No chair for father. Broo The
wind Her brandnew arrival is on her knee, POST MORTEM child. With a high
ro and a randy ro and my galloping tearing tandy, O Bow to the
inevitable. Grin and bear it. I remain with much love your brokenhearted
husband D B Murphy.
The sailor, who scarcely seemed to be a Dublin resident, turned to one of
the jarvies with the request
You don't happen to have such a thing as a spare chaw about you?
The jarvey addressed as it happened had not but the keeper took a die of
plug from his good jacket hanging on a nail and the desired object was
passed from hand to hand.
Thank you, the sailor said.
He deposited the quid in his gob and, chewing and with some slow
stammers, proceeded
We come up this morning eleven o'clock. The threemaster ROSEVEAN from
Bridgwater with bricks. I shipped to get over. Paid off this afternoon.
There's my discharge. See? D. B. Murphy. A. B. S.
In confirmation of which statement he extricated from an inside pocket
and handed to his neighbour a not very cleanlooking folded document.
You must have seen a fair share of the world, the keeper remarked,
leaning on the counter.
Why, the sailor answered upon reflection upon it, I've circumnavigated
a bit since I first joined on. I was in the Red Sea. I was in China and
North America and South America. We was chased by pirates one voyage. I
seen icebergs plenty, growlers. I was in Stockholm and the Black Sea, the
Dardanelles under Captain Dalton, the best bloody man that ever scuttled
a ship. I seen Russia. GOSPODI POMILYOU. That's how the Russians prays.
You seen queer sights, don't be talking, put in a jarvey.
Why, the sailor said, shifting his partially chewed plug. I seen queer
things too, ups and downs. I seen a crocodile bite the fluke of an anchor
same as I chew that quid.
He took out of his mouth the pulpy quid and, lodging it between his
teeth, bit ferociously
Khaan Like that. And I seen maneaters in Peru that eats corpses and
the livers of horses. Look here. Here they are. A friend of mine sent me.
He fumbled out a picture postcard from his inside pocket which seemed to
be in its way a species of repository and pushed it along the table. The
printed matter on it stated CHOZA DE INDIOS. BENI, BOLIVIA.
All focussed their attention at the scene exhibited, a group of savage
women in striped loincloths, squatted, blinking, suckling, frowning,
sleeping amid a swarm of infants there must have been quite a score of
them outside some primitive shanties of osier.
Chews coca all day, the communicative tarpaulin added. Stomachs like
breadgraters. Cuts off their diddies when they can't bear no more
children.
See them sitting there stark ballocknaked eating a dead horse's liver
raw.
His postcard proved a centre of attraction for Messrs the greenhorns for
several minutes if not more.
Know how to keep them off? he inquired generally.
Nobody volunteering a statement he winked, saying
Glass. That boggles 'em. Glass.
Mr Bloom, without evincing surprise, unostentatiously turned over the
card to peruse the partially obliterated address and postmark. It ran as
follows TARJETA POSTAL, SENOR A BOUDIN, GALERIA BECCHE, SANTIAGO, CHILE.
There was no message evidently, as he took particular notice. Though not
an implicit believer in the lurid story narrated or the eggsniping
transaction for that matter despite William Tell and the LazarilloDon
Cesar de Bazan incident depicted in MARITANA on which occasion the
former's ball passed through the latter's hat having detected a
discrepancy between his name assuming he was the person he represented
himself to be and not sailing under false colours after having boxed the
compass on the strict q.t. somewhere and the fictitious addressee of the
missive which made him nourish some suspicions of our friend's BONA FIDES
nevertheless it reminded him in a way of a longcherished plan he meant to
one day realise some Wednesday or Saturday of travelling to London via
long sea not to say that he had ever travelled extensively to any great
extent but he was at heart a born adventurer though by a trick of fate he
had consistently remained a landlubber except you call going to Holyhead
which was his longest. Martin Cunningham frequently said he would work a
pass through Egan but some deuced hitch or other eternally cropped up
with the net result that the scheme fell through. But even suppose it did
come to planking down the needful and breaking Boyd's heart it was not so
dear, purse permitting, a few guineas at the outside considering the fare
to Mullingar where he figured on going was five and six, there and back.
The trip would benefit health on account of the bracing ozone and be in
every way thoroughly pleasurable, especially for a chap whose liver was
out of order, seeing the different places along the route, Plymouth,
Falmouth, Southampton and so on culminating in an instructive tour of the
sights of the great metropolis, the spectacle of our modern Babylon where
doubtless he would see the greatest improvement, tower, abbey, wealth of
Park lane to renew acquaintance with. Another thing just struck him as a
by no means bad notion was he might have a gaze around on the spot to see
about trying to make arrangements about a concert tour of summer music
embracing the most prominent pleasure resorts, Margate with mixed bathing
and firstrate hydros and spas, Eastbourne, Scarborough, Margate and so
on, beautiful Bournemouth, the Channel islands and similar bijou spots,
which might prove highly remunerative. Not, of course, with a hole and
corner scratch company or local ladies on the job, witness Mrs C P M'Coy
type lend me your valise and I'll post you the ticket. No, something top
notch, an all star Irish caste, the TweedyFlower grand opera company
with his own legal consort as leading lady as a sort of counterblast to
the Elster Grimes and MoodyManners, perfectly simple matter and he was
quite sanguine of success, providing puffs in the local papers could be
managed by some fellow with a bit of bounce who could pull the
indispensable wires and thus combine business with pleasure. But who?
That was the rub. Also, without being actually positive, it struck him a
great field was to be opened up in the line of opening up new routes to
keep pace with the times APROPOS of the FishguardRosslare route which,
it was mooted, was once more on the TAPIS in the circumlocution
departments with the usual quantity of red tape and dillydallying of
effete fogeydom and dunderheads generally. A great opportunity there
certainly was for push and enterprise to meet the travelling needs of the
public at large, the average man, i.e. Brown, Robinson and Co.
It was a subject of regret and absurd as well on the face of it and no
small blame to our vaunted society that the man in the street, when the
system really needed toning up, for the matter of a couple of paltry
pounds was debarred from seeing more of the world they lived in instead
of being always and ever cooped up since my old stickinthemud took me
for a wife. After all, hang it, they had their eleven and more humdrum
months of it and merited a radical change of VENUE after the grind of
city life in the summertime for choice when dame Nature is at her
spectacular best constituting nothing short of a new lease of life. There
were equally excellent opportunities for vacationists in the home island,
delightful sylvan spots for rejuvenation, offering a plethora of
attractions as well as a bracing tonic for the system in and around
Dublin and its picturesque environs even, Poulaphouca to which there was
a steamtram, but also farther away from the madding crowd in Wicklow,
rightly termed the garden of Ireland, an ideal neighbourhood for elderly
wheelmen so long as it didn't come down, and in the wilds of Donegal
where if report spoke true the COUP D'OEIL was exceedingly grand though
the lastnamed locality was not easily getatable so that the influx of
visitors was not as yet all that it might be considering the signal
benefits to be derived from it while Howth with its historic associations
and otherwise, Silken Thomas, Grace O'Malley, George IV, rhododendrons
several hundred feet above sealevel was a favourite haunt with all sorts
and conditions of men especially in the spring when young men's fancy,
though it had its own toll of deaths by falling off the cliffs by design
or accidentally, usually, by the way, on their left leg, it being only
about three quarters of an hour's run from the pillar. Because of course
uptodate tourist travelling was as yet merely in its infancy, so to
speak, and the accommodation left much to be desired. Interesting to
fathom it seemed to him from a motive of curiosity, pure and simple, was
whether it was the traffic that created the route or viceversa or the two
sides in fact. He turned back the other side of the card, picture, and
passed it along to Stephen.
I seen a Chinese one time, related the doughty narrator, that had
little pills like putty and he put them in the water and they opened and
every pill was something different. One was a ship, another was a house,
another was a flower. Cooks rats in your soup, he appetisingly added, the
chinks does.
Possibly perceiving an expression of dubiosity on their faces the
globetrotter went on, adhering to his adventures.
And I seen a man killed in Trieste by an Italian chap. Knife in his
back. Knife like that.
Whilst speaking he produced a dangerouslooking claspknife quite in
keeping with his character and held it in the striking position.
In a knockingshop it was count of a tryon between two smugglers. Fellow
hid behind a door, come up behind him. Like that. PREPARE TO MEET YOUR
GOD, says he. Chuk It went into his back up to the butt.
His heavy glance drowsily roaming about kind of defied their further
questions even should they by any chance want to.
That's a good bit of steel, repeated he, examining his formidable
STILETTO.
After which harrowing DENOUEMENT sufficient to appal the stoutest he
snapped the blade to and stowed the weapon in question away as before in
his chamber of horrors, otherwise pocket.
They're great for the cold steel, somebody who was evidently quite in
the dark said for the benefit of them all. That was why they thought the
park murders of the invincibles was done by foreigners on account of them
using knives.
At this remark passed obviously in the spirit of WHERE IGNORANCE IS BLISS
Mr B. and Stephen, each in his own particular way, both instinctively
exchanged meaning glances, in a religious silence of the strictly ENTRE
NOUS variety however, towards where SkintheGoat, ALIAS the keeper, not
turning a hair, was drawing spurts of liquid from his boiler affair. His
inscrutable face which was really a work of art, a perfect study in
itself, beggaring description, conveyed the impression that he didn't
understand one jot of what was going on. Funny, very
There ensued a somewhat lengthy pause. One man was reading in fits and
starts a stained by coffee evening journal, another the card with the
natives CHOZA DE, another the seaman's discharge. Mr Bloom, so far as he
was personally concerned, was just pondering in pensive mood. He vividly
recollected when the occurrence alluded to took place as well as
yesterday, roughly some score of years previously in the days of the land
troubles, when it took the civilised world by storm, figuratively
speaking, early in the eighties, eightyone to be correct, when he was
just turned fifteen.
Ay, boss, the sailor broke in. Give us back them papers.
The request being complied with he clawed them up with a scrape.
Have you seen the rock of Gibraltar? Mr Bloom inquired.
The sailor grimaced, chewing, in a way that might be read as yes, ay or
no.
Ah, you've touched there too, Mr Bloom said, Europa point, thinking he
had, in the hope that the rover might possibly by some reminiscences but
he failed to do so, simply letting spirt a jet of spew into the sawdust,
and shook his head with a sort of lazy scorn.
What year would that be about? Mr B interrogated. Can you recall the
boats?
Our SOIDISANT sailor munched heavily awhile hungrily before answering
I'm tired of all them rocks in the sea, he said, and boats and ships.
Salt junk all the time.
Tired seemingly, he ceased. His questioner perceiving that he was not
likely to get a great deal of change out of such a wily old customer,
fell to woolgathering on the enormous dimensions of the water about the
globe, suffice it to say that, as a casual glance at the map revealed, it
covered fully three fourths of it and he fully realised accordingly what
it meant to rule the waves. On more than one occasion, a dozen at the
lowest, near the North Bull at Dollymount he had remarked a superannuated
old salt, evidently derelict, seated habitually near the not particularly
redolent sea on the wall, staring quite obliviously at it and it at him,
dreaming of fresh woods and pastures new as someone somewhere sings. And
it left him wondering why. Possibly he had tried to find out the secret
for himself, floundering up and down the antipodes and all that sort of
thing and over and under, well, not exactly under, tempting the fates.
And the odds were twenty to nil there was really no secret about it at
all. Nevertheless, without going into the MINUTIAE of the business, the
eloquent fact remained that the sea was there in all its glory and in the
natural course of things somebody or other had to sail on it and fly in
the face of providence though it merely went to show how people usually
contrived to load that sort of onus on to the other fellow like the hell
idea and the lottery and insurance which were run on identically the same
lines so that for that very reason if no other lifeboat Sunday was a
highly laudable institution to which the public at large, no matter where
living inland or seaside, as the case might be, having it brought home to
them like that should extend its gratitude also to the harbourmasters and
coastguard service who had to man the rigging and push off and out amid
the elements whatever the season when duty called IRELAND EXPECTS THAT
EVERY MAN and so on and sometimes had a terrible time of it in the
wintertime not forgetting the Irish lights, Kish and others, liable to
capsize at any moment, rounding which he once with his daughter had
experienced some remarkably choppy, not to say stormy, weather.
There was a fellow sailed with me in the Rover, the old seadog, himself
a rover, proceeded, went ashore and took up a soft job as gentleman's
valet at six quid a month. Them are his trousers I've on me and he gave
me an oilskin and that jackknife. I'm game for that job, shaving and
brushup. I hate roaming about. There's my son now, Danny, run off to sea
and his mother got him took in a draper's in Cork where he could be
drawing easy money.
What age is he? queried one hearer who, by the way, seen from the side,
bore a distant resemblance to Henry Campbell, the townclerk, away from
the carking cares of office, unwashed of course and in a seedy getup and
a strong suspicion of nosepaint about the nasal appendage.
Why, the sailor answered with a slow puzzled utterance, my son, Danny?
He'd be about eighteen now, way I figure it.
The Skibbereen father hereupon tore open his grey or unclean anyhow shirt
with his two hands and scratched away at his chest on which was to be
seen an image tattooed in blue Chinese ink intended to represent an
anchor.
There was lice in that bunk in Bridgwater, he remarked, sure as nuts. I
must get a wash tomorrow or next day. It's them black lads I objects to.
I hate those buggers. Suck your blood dry, they does.
Seeing they were all looking at his chest he accommodatingly dragged his
shirt more open so that on top of the timehonoured symbol of the
mariner's hope and rest they had a full view of the figure  and a young
man's sideface looking frowningly rather.
Tattoo, the exhibitor explained. That was done when we were Iying
becalmed off Odessa in the Black Sea under Captain Dalton. Fellow, the
name of Antonio, done that. There he is himself, a Greek.
Did it hurt much doing it? one asked the sailor.
That worthy, however, was busily engaged in collecting round the. Someway
in his. Squeezing or.
See here, he said, showing Antonio. There he is cursing the mate. And
there he is now, he added, the same fellow, pulling the skin with his
fingers, some special knack evidently, and he laughing at a yarn.
And in point of fact the young man named Antonio's livid face did
actually look like forced smiling and the curious effect excited the
unreserved admiration of everybody including SkintheGoat, who this time
stretched over.
Ay, ay, sighed the sailor, looking down on his manly chest. He's gone
too. Ate by sharks after. Ay, ay.
He let go of the skin so that the profile resumed the normal expression
of before.
Neat bit of work, one longshoreman said.
And what's the number for? loafer number two queried.
Eaten alive? a third asked the sailor.
Ay, ay, sighed again the latter personage, more cheerily this time with
some sort of a half smile for a brief duration only in the direction of
the questioner about the number. Ate. A Greek he was.
And then he added with rather gallowsbird humour considering his alleged
end
AS BAD AS OLD ANTONIO,
FOR HE LEFT ME ON MY OWNIO.
The face of a streetwalker glazed and haggard under a black straw hat
peered askew round the door of the shelter palpably reconnoitring on her
own with the object of bringing more grist to her mill. Mr Bloom,
scarcely knowing which way to look, turned away on the moment flusterfied
but outwardly calm, and, picking up from the table the pink sheet of the
Abbey street organ which the jarvey, if such he was, had laid aside, he
picked it up and looked at the pink of the paper though why pink. His
reason for so doing was he recognised on the moment round the door the
same face he had caught a fleeting glimpse of that afternoon on Ormond
quay, the partially idiotic female, namely, of the lane who knew the lady
in the brown costume does be with you Mrs B. and begged the chance of
his washing. Also why washing which seemed rather vague than not, your
washing. Still candour compelled him to admit he had washed his wife's
undergarments when soiled in Holles street and women would and did too a
man's similar garments initialled with Bewley and Draper's marking ink
hers were, that is if they really loved him, that is to say, love me,
love my dirty shirt. Still just then, being on tenterhooks, he desired
the female's room more than her company so it came as a genuine relief
when the keeper made her a rude sign to take herself off. Round the side
of the Evening Telegraph he just caught a fleeting glimpse of her face
round the side of the door with a kind of demented glassy grin showing
that she was not exactly all there, viewing with evident amusement the
group of gazers round skipper Murphy's nautical chest and then there was
no more of her.
The gunboat, the keeper said.
It beats me, Mr Bloom confided to Stephen, medically I am speaking, how
a wretched creature like that from the Lock hospital reeking with disease
can be barefaced enough to solicit or how any man in his sober senses, if
he values his health in the least. Unfortunate creature Of course I
suppose some man is ultimately responsible for her condition. Still no
matter what the cause is from ...
Stephen had not noticed her and shrugged his shoulders, merely remarking
In this country people sell much more than she ever had and do a
roaring trade. Fear not them that sell the body but have not power to buy
the soul. She is a bad merchant. She buys dear and sells cheap.
The elder man, though not by any manner of means an old maid or a prude,
said it was nothing short of a crying scandal that ought to be put a stop
to INSTANTER to say that women of that stamp quite apart from any
oldmaidish squeamishness on the subject, a necessary evil, w ere not
licensed and medically inspected by the proper authorities, a thing, he
could truthfully state, he, as a PATERFAMILIAS, was a stalwart advocate
of from the very first start. Whoever embarked on a policy of the sort,
he said, and ventilated the matter thoroughly would confer a lasting boon
on everybody concerned.
You as a good catholic, he observed, talking of body and soul, believe
in the soul. Or do you mean the intelligence, the brainpower as such, as
distinct from any outside object, the table, let us say, that cup. I
believe in that myself because it has been explained by competent men as
the convolutions of the grey matter. Otherwise we would never have such
inventions as X rays, for instance. Do you?
Thus cornered, Stephen had to make a superhuman effort of memory to try
and concentrate and remember before he could say
They tell me on the best authority it is a simple substance and
therefore incorruptible. It would be immortal, I understand, but for the
possibility of its annihilation by its First Cause Who, from all I can
hear, is quite capable of adding that to the number of His other
practical jokes, CORRUPTIO PER SE and CORRUPTIO PER ACCIDENS both being
excluded by court etiquette.
Mr Bloom thoroughly acquiesced in the general gist of this though the
mystical finesse involved was a bit out of his sublunary depth still he
felt bound to enter a demurrer on the head of simple, promptly rejoining
Simple? I shouldn't think that is the proper word. Of course, I grant
you, to concede a point, you do knock across a simple soul once in a blue
moon. But what I am anxious to arrive at is it is one thing for instance
to invent those rays Rontgen did or the telescope like Edison, though I
believe it was before his time Galileo was the man, I mean, and the same
applies to the laws, for example, of a farreaching natural phenomenon
such as electricity but it's a horse of quite another colour to say you
believe in the existence of a supernatural God.
O that, Stephen expostulated, has been proved conclusively by several
of the bestknown passages in Holy Writ, apart from circumstantial
evidence.
On this knotty point however the views of the pair, poles apart as they
were both in schooling and everything else with the marked difference in
their respective ages, clashed.
Has been? the more experienced of the two objected, sticking to his
original point with a smile of unbelief. I'm not so sure about that.
That's a matter for everyman's opinion and, without dragging in the
sectarian side of the business, I beg to differ with you IN TOTO there.
My belief is, to tell you the candid truth, that those bits were genuine
forgeries all of them put in by monks most probably or it's the big
question of our national poet over again, who precisely wrote them like
HAMLET and Bacon, as, you who know your Shakespeare infinitely better
than I, of course I needn't tell you. Can't you drink that coffee, by the
way? Let me stir it. And take a piece of that bun. It's like one of our
skipper's bricks disguised. Still noone can give what he hasn't got. Try
a bit.
Couldn't, Stephen contrived to get out, his mental organs for the
moment refusing to dictate further.
Faultfinding being a proverbially bad hat Mr Bloom thought well to stir
or try to the clotted sugar from the bottom and reflected with something
approaching acrimony on the Coffee Palace and its temperance and
lucrative work. To be sure it was a legitimate object and beyond yea or
nay did a world of good, shelters such as the present one they were in
run on teetotal lines for vagrants at night, concerts, dramatic evenings
and useful lectures admittance free by qualified men for the lower
orders. On the other hand he had a distinct and painful recollection they
paid his wife, Madam Marion Tweedy who had been prominently associated
with it at one time, a very modest remuneration indeed for her
pianoplaying. The idea, he was strongly inclined to believe, was to do
good and net a profit, there being no competition to speak of. Sulphate
of copper poison SO or something in some dried peas he remembered
reading of in a cheap eatinghouse somewhere but he couldn't remember when
it was or where. Anyhow inspection, medical inspection, of all eatables
seemed to him more than ever necessary which possibly accounted for the
vogue of Dr Tibble's ViCocoa on account of the medical analysis
involved.
Have a shot at it now, he ventured to say of the coffee after being
stirred.
Thus prevailed on to at any rate taste it Stephen lifted the heavy mug
from the brown puddle it clopped out of when taken up by the handle and
took a sip of the offending beverage.
Still it's solid food, his good genius urged, I'm a stickler for solid
food, his one and only reason being not gormandising in the least but
regular meals as the SINE QUA NON for any kind of proper work, mental or
manual. You ought to eat more solid food. You would feel a different man.
Liquids I can eat, Stephen said. But O, oblige me by taking away that
knife. I can't look at the point of it. It reminds me of Roman history.
Mr Bloom promptly did as suggested and removed the incriminated article,
a blunt hornhandled ordinary knife with nothing particularly Roman or
antique about it to the lay eye, observing that the point was the least
conspicuous point about it.
Our mutual friend's stories are like himself, Mr Bloom APROPOS of
knives remarked to his CONFIDANTE SOTTO VOCE. Do you think they are
genuine? He could spin those yarns for hours on end all night long and
lie like old boots. Look at him.
Yet still though his eyes were thick with sleep and sea air life was full
of a host of things and coincidences of a terrible nature and it was
quite within the bounds of possibility that it was not an entire
fabrication though at first blush there was not much inherent probability
in all the spoof he got off his chest being strictly accurate gospel.
He had been meantime taking stock of the individual in front of him and
Sherlockholmesing him up ever since he clapped eyes on him. Though a
wellpreserved man of no little stamina, if a trifle prone to baldness,
there was something spurious in the cut of his jib that suggested a jail
delivery and it required no violent stretch of imagination to associate
such a weirdlooking specimen with the oakum and treadmill fraternity. He
might even have done for his man supposing it was his own case he told,
as people often did about others, namely, that he killed him himself and
had served his four or five goodlooking years in durance vile to say
nothing of the Antonio personage no relation to the dramatic personage
of identical name who sprang from the pen of our national poet who
expiated his crimes in the melodramatic manner above described. On the
other hand he might be only bluffing, a pardonable weakness because
meeting unmistakable mugs, Dublin residents, like those jarvies waiting
news from abroad would tempt any ancient mariner who sailed the ocean
seas to draw the long bow about the schooner HESPERUS and etcetera. And
when all was said and done the lies a fellow told about himself couldn't
probably hold a proverbial candle to the wholesale whoppers other fellows
coined about him.
Mind you, I'm not saying that it's all a pure invention, he resumed.
Analogous scenes are occasionally, if not often, met with. Giants, though
that is rather a far cry, you see once in a way, Marcella the midget
queen. In those waxworks in Henry street I myself saw some Aztecs, as
they are called, sitting bowlegged, they couldn't straighten their legs
if you paid them because the muscles here, you see, he proceeded,
indicating on his companion the brief outline of the sinews or whatever
you like to call them behind the right knee, were utterly powerless from
sitting that way so long cramped up, being adored as gods. There's an
example again of simple souls.
However reverting to friend Sinbad and his horrifying adventures who
reminded him a bit of Ludwig, ALIAS Ledwidge, when he occupied the boards
of the Gaiety when Michael Gunn was identified with the management in the
FLYING DUTCHMAN, a stupendous success, and his host of admirers came in
large numbers, everyone simply flocking to hear him though ships of any
sort, phantom or the reverse, on the stage usually fell a bit flat as
also did trains there was nothing intrinsically incompatible about it,
he conceded. On the contrary that stab in the back touch was quite in
keeping with those italianos though candidly he was none the less free to
admit those icecreamers and friers in the fish way not to mention the
chip potato variety and so forth over in little Italy there near the
Coombe were sober thrifty hardworking fellows except perhaps a bit too
given to pothunting the harmless necessary animal of the feline
persuasion of others at night so as to have a good old succulent tuckin
with garlic DE RIGUEUR off him or her next day on the quiet and, he
added, on the cheap.
Spaniards, for instance, he continued, passionate temperaments like
that, impetuous as Old Nick, are given to taking the law into their own
hands and give you your quietus doublequick with those poignards they
carry in the abdomen. It comes from the great heat, climate generally. My
wife is, so to speak, Spanish, half that is. Point of fact she could
actually claim Spanish nationality if she wanted, having been born in
technically Spain, i.e. Gibraltar. She has the Spanish type. Quite
dark, regular brunette, black. I for one certainly believe climate
accounts for character. That's why I asked you if you wrote your poetry
in Italian.
The temperaments at the door, Stephen interposed with, were very
passionate about ten shillings. ROBERTO RUBA ROBA SUA.
Quite so, Mr Bloom dittoed.
Then, Stephen said staring and rambling on to himself or some unknown
listener somewhere, we have the impetuosity of Dante and the isosceles
triangle miss Portinari he fell in love with and Leonardo and san Tommaso
Mastino.
It's in the blood, Mr Bloom acceded at once. All are washed in the
blood of the sun. Coincidence I just happened to be in the Kildare street
museum today, shortly prior to our meeting if I can so call it, and I
was just looking at those antique statues there. The splendid proportions
of hips, bosom. You simply don't knock against those kind of women here.
An exception here and there. Handsome yes, pretty in a way you find but
what I'm talking about is the female form. Besides they have so little
taste in dress, most of them, which greatly enhances a woman's natural
beauty, no matter what you say. Rumpled stockings, it may be, possibly
is, a foible of mine but still it's a thing I simply hate to see.
Interest, however, was starting to flag somewhat all round and then the
others got on to talking about accidents at sea, ships lost in a fog, goo
collisions with icebergs, all that sort of thing. Shipahoy of course had
his own say to say. He had doubled the cape a few odd times and weathered
a monsoon, a kind of wind, in the China seas and through all those perils
of the deep there was one thing, he declared, stood to him or words to
that effect, a pious medal he had that saved him.
So then after that they drifted on to the wreck off Daunt's rock, wreck
of that illfated Norwegian barque nobody could think of her name for the
moment till the jarvey who had really quite a look of Henry Campbell
remembered it PALME on Booterstown strand. That was the talk of the town
that year Albert William Quill wrote a fine piece of original verse of
distinctive merit on the topic for the Irish TIMES, breakers running
over her and crowds and crowds on the shore in commotion petrified with
horror. Then someone said something about the case of the S. S. LADY
CAIRNS of Swansea run into by the MONA which was on an opposite tack in
rather muggyish weather and lost with all hands on deck. No aid was
given. Her master, the MONA'S, said he was afraid his collision bulkhead
would give way. She had no water, it appears, in her hold.
At this stage an incident happened. It having become necessary for him to
unfurl a reef the sailor vacated his seat.
Let me cross your bows mate, he said to his neighbour who was just
gently dropping off into a peaceful doze.
He made tracks heavily, slowly with a dumpy sort of a gait to the door,
stepped heavily down the one step there was out of the shelter and bore
due left. While he was in the act of getting his bearings Mr Bloom who
noticed when he stood up that he had two flasks of presumably ship's rum
sticking one out of each pocket for the private consumption of his
burning interior, saw him produce a bottle and uncork it or unscrew and,
applying its nozzle to his lips, take a good old delectable swig out of
it with a gurgling noise. The irrepressible Bloom, who also had a shrewd
suspicion that the old stager went out on a manoeuvre after the
counterattraction in the shape of a female who however had disappeared to
all intents and purposes, could by straining just perceive him, when duly
refreshed by his rum puncheon exploit, gaping up at the piers and girders
of the Loop line rather out of his depth as of course it was all
radically altered since his last visit and greatly improved. Some person
or persons invisible directed him to the male urinal erected by the
cleansing committee all over the place for the purpose but after a brief
space of time during which silence reigned supreme the sailor, evidently
giving it a wide berth, eased himself closer at hand, the noise of his
bilgewater some little time subsequently splashing on the ground where it
apparently awoke a horse of the cabrank. A hoof scooped anyway for new
foothold after sleep and harness jingled. Slightly disturbed in his
sentrybox by the brazier of live coke the watcher of the corporation
stones who, though now broken down and fast breaking up, was none other
in stern reality than the Gumley aforesaid, now practically on the parish
rates, given the temporary job by Pat Tobin in all human probability from
dictates of humanity knowing him before shifted about and shuffled in his
box before composing his limbs again in to the arms of Morpheus, a truly
amazing piece of hard lines in its most virulent form on a fellow most
respectably connected and familiarised with decent home comforts all his
life who came in for a cool  pounds a year at one time which of course
the doublebarrelled ass proceeded to make general ducks and drakes of.
And there he was at the end of his tether after having often painted the
town tolerably pink without a beggarly stiver. He drank needless to be
told and it pointed only once more a moral when he might quite easily be
in a large way of business ifa big if, howeverhe had contrived to
cure himself of his particular partiality.
All meantime were loudly lamenting the falling off in Irish shipping,
coastwise and foreign as well, which was all part and parcel of the same
thing. A Palgrave Murphy boat was put off the ways at Alexandra basin,
the only launch that year. Right enough the harbours were there only no
ships ever called.
There were wrecks and wreckers, the keeper said, who was evidently AU
FAIT.
What he wanted to ascertain was why that ship ran bang against the only
rock in Galway bay when the Galway harbour scheme was mooted by a Mr
Worthington or some name like that, eh? Ask the then captain, he advised
them, how much palmoil the British government gave him for that day's
work, Captain John Lever of the Lever Line.
Am I right, skipper? he queried of the sailor, now returning after his
private potation and the rest of his exertions.
That worthy picking up the scent of the fagend of the song or words
growled in wouldbe music but with great vim some kind of chanty or other
in seconds or thirds. Mr Bloom's sharp ears heard him then expectorate
the plug probably which it was, so that he must have lodged it for the
time being in his fist while he did the drinking and making water jobs
and found it a bit sour after the liquid fire in question. Anyhow in he
rolled after his successful libationCUMpotation, introducing an
atmosphere of drink into the SOIREE, boisterously trolling, like a
veritable son of a seacook
THE BISCUITS WAS AS HARD AS BRASS
AND THE BEEF AS SALT AS LOT'S WIFE'S ARSE.
O, JOHNNY LEVER
JOHNNY LEVER, O
After which effusion the redoubtable specimen duly arrived on the scene
and regaining his seat he sank rather than sat heavily on the form
provided. SkintheGoat, assuming he was he, evidently with an axe to
grind, was airing his grievances in a forciblefeeble philippic anent the
natural resources of Ireland or something of that sort which he described
in his lengthy dissertation as the richest country bar none on the face
of God's earth, far and away superior to England, with coal in large
quantities, six million pounds worth of pork exported every year, ten
millions between butter and eggs and all the riches drained out of it by
England levying taxes on the poor people that paid through the nose
always and gobbling up the best meat in the market and a lot more surplus
steam in the same vein. Their conversation accordingly became general and
all agreed that that was a fact. You could grow any mortal thing in Irish
soil, he stated, and there was that colonel Everard down there in Navan
growing tobacco. Where would you find anywhere the like of Irish bacon?
But a day of reckoning, he stated CRESCENDO with no uncertain voice,
thoroughly monopolising all the conversation, was in store for mighty
England, despite her power of pelf on account of her crimes. There would
be a fall and the greatest fall in history. The Germans and the Japs were
going to have their little lookin, he affirmed. The Boers were the
beginning of the end. Brummagem England was toppling already and her
downfall would be Ireland, her Achilles heel, which he explained to them
about the vulnerable point of Achilles, the Greek hero, a point his
auditors at once seized as he completely gripped their attention by
showing the tendon referred to on his boot. His advice to every Irishman
was stay in the land of your birth and work for Ireland and live for
Ireland. Ireland, Parnell said, could not spare a single one of her sons.
Silence all round marked the termination of his FINALE. The impervious
navigator heard these lurid tidings, undismayed.
Take a bit of doing, boss, retaliated that rough diamond palpably a bit
peeved in response to the foregoing truism.
To which cold douche referring to downfall and so on the keeper concurred
but nevertheless held to his main view.
Who's the best troops in the army? the grizzled old veteran irately
interrogated. And the best jumpers and racers? And the best admirals and
generals we've got? Tell me that.
The Irish, for choice, retorted the cabby like Campbell, facial
blemishes apart.
That's right, the old tarpaulin corroborated. The Irish catholic
peasant. He's the backbone of our empire. You know Jem Mullins?
While allowing him his individual opinions as everyman the keeper added
he cared nothing for any empire, ours or his, and considered no Irishman
worthy of his salt that served it. Then they began to have a few
irascible words when it waxed hotter, both, needless to say, appealing to
the listeners who followed the passage of arms with interest so long as
they didn't indulge in recriminations and come to blows.
From inside information extending over a series of years Mr Bloom was
rather inclined to poohpooh the suggestion as egregious balderdash for,
pending that consummation devoutly to be or not to be wished for, he was
fully cognisant of the fact that their neighbours across the channel,
unless they were much bigger fools than he took them for, rather
concealed their strength than the opposite. It was quite on a par with
the quixotic idea in certain quarters that in a hundred million years the
coal seam of the sister island would be played out and if, as time went
on, that turned out to be how the cat jumped all he could personally say
on the matter was that as a host of contingencies, equally relevant to
the issue, might occur ere then it was highly advisable in the interim to
try to make the most of both countries even though poles apart. Another
little interesting point, the amours of whores and chummies, to put it in
common parlance, reminded him Irish soldiers had as often fought for
England as against her, more so, in fact. And now, why? So the scene
between the pair of them, the licensee of the place rumoured to be or
have been Fitzharris, the famous invincible, and the other, obviously
bogus, reminded him forcibly as being on all fours with the confidence
trick, supposing, that is, it was prearranged as the lookeron, a student
of the human soul if anything, the others seeing least of the game. And
as for the lessee or keeper, who probably wasn't the other person at all,
he B. couldn't help feeling and most properly it was better to give
people like that the goby unless you were a blithering idiot altogether
and refuse to have anything to do with them as a golden rule in private
life and their felonsetting, there always being the offchance of a
Dannyman coming forward and turning queen's evidence or king's now like
Denis or Peter Carey, an idea he utterly repudiated. Quite apart from
that he disliked those careers of wrongdoing and crime on principle. Yet,
though such criminal propensities had never been an inmate of his bosom
in any shape or form, he certainly did feel and no denying it while
inwardly remaining what he was a certain kind of admiration for a man
who had actually brandished a knife, cold steel, with the courage of his
political convictions though, personally, he would never be a party to
any such thing, off the same bat as those love vendettas of the south,
have her or swing for her, when the husband frequently, after some words
passed between the two concerning her relations with the other lucky
mortal he having had the pair watched, inflicted fatal injuries on his
adored one as a result of an alternative postnuptial LIAISON by plunging
his knife into her, until it just struck him that Fitz, nicknamed Skin
theGoat, merely drove the car for the actual perpetrators of the outrage
and so was not, if he was reliably informed, actually party to the ambush
which, in point of fact, was the plea some legal luminary saved his skin
on. In any case that was very ancient history by now and as for our
friend, the pseudo Skintheetcetera, he had transparently outlived his
welcome. He ought to have either died naturally or on the scaffold high.
Like actresses, always farewell positively last performance then come up
smiling again. Generous to a fault of course, temperamental, no
economising or any idea of the sort, always snapping at the bone for the
shadow. So similarly he had a very shrewd suspicion that Mr Johnny Lever
got rid of some l s d. in the course of his perambulations round the
docks in the congenial atmosphere of the OLD IRELAND tavern, come back to
Erin and so on. Then as for the other he had heard not so long before the
same identical lingo as he told Stephen how he simply but effectually
silenced the offender.
He took umbrage at something or other, that muchinjured but on the
whole eventempered person declared, I let slip. He called me a jew and in
a heated fashion offensively. So I without deviating from plain facts in
the least told him his God, I mean Christ, was a jew too and all his
family like me though in reality I'm not. That was one for him. A soft
answer turns away wrath. He hadn't a word to say for himself as everyone
saw. Am I not right?
He turned a long you are wrong gaze on Stephen of timorous dark pride at
the soft impeachment with a glance also of entreaty for he seemed to
glean in a kind of a way that it wasn't all exactly.
EX QUIBUS, Stephen mumbled in a noncommittal accent, their two or four
eyes conversing, CHRISTUS or Bloom his name is or after all any other,
SECUNDUM CARNEM.
Of course, Mr B. proceeded to stipulate, you must look at both sides of
the question. It is hard to lay down any hard and fast rules as to right
and wrong but room for improvement all round there certainly is though
every country, they say, our own distressful included, has the government
it deserves. But with a little goodwill all round. It's all very fine to
boast of mutual superiority but what about mutual equality. I resent
violence and intolerance in any shape or form. It never reaches anything
or stops anything. A revolution must come on the due instalments plan.
It's a patent absurdity on the face of it to hate people because they
live round the corner and speak another vernacular, in the next house so
to speak.
Memorable bloody bridge battle and seven minutes' war, Stephen
assented, between Skinner's alley and Ormond market.
Yes, Mr Bloom thoroughly agreed, entirely endorsing the remark, that was
overwhelmingly right. And the whole world was full of that sort of thing.
You just took the words out of my mouth, he said. A hocuspocus of
conflicting evidence that candidly you couldn't remotely ...
All those wretched quarrels, in his humble opinion, stirring up bad
blood, from some bump of combativeness or gland of some kind, erroneously
supposed to be about a punctilio of honour and a flag, were very largely
a question of the money question which was at the back of everything
greed and jealousy, people never knowing when to stop.
They accuse, remarked he audibly.
He turned away from the others who probably and spoke nearer to, so as
the others in case they.
Jews, he softly imparted in an aside in Stephen's ear, are accused of
ruining. Not a vestige of truth in it, I can safely say. History, would
you be surprised to learn, proves up to the hilt Spain decayed when the
inquisition hounded the jews out and England prospered when Cromwell, an
uncommonly able ruffian who in other respects has much to answer for,
imported them. Why? Because they are imbued with the proper spirit. They
are practical and are proved to be so. I don't want to indulge in any
because you know the standard works on the subject and then orthodox as
you are. But in the economic, not touching religion, domain the priest
spells poverty. Spain again, you saw in the war, compared with goahead
America. Turks. It's in the dogma. Because if they didn't believe they'd
go straight to heaven when they die they'd try to live better, at least
so I think. That's the juggle on which the p.p's raise the wind on false
pretences. I'm, he resumed with dramatic force, as good an Irishman as
that rude person I told you about at the outset and I want to see
everyone, concluded he, all creeds and classes PRO RATA having a
comfortable tidysized income, in no niggard fashion either, something in
the neighbourhood of  pounds per annum. That's the vital issue at
stake and it's feasible and would be provocative of friendlier
intercourse between man and man. At least that's my idea for what it's
worth. I call that patriotism. UBI PATRIA, as we learned a smattering of
in our classical days in ALMA MATER, VITA BENE. Where you can live well,
the sense is, if you work.
Over his untastable apology for a cup of coffee, listening to this
synopsis of things in general, Stephen stared at nothing in particular.
He could hear, of course, all kinds of words changing colour like those
crabs about Ringsend in the morning burrowing quickly into all colours of
different sorts of the same sand where they had a home somewhere beneath
or seemed to. Then he looked up and saw the eyes that said or didn't say
the words the voice he heard said, if you work.
Count me out, he managed to remark, meaning work.
The eyes were surprised at this observation because as he, the person who
owned them pro tem. observed or rather his voice speaking did, all must
work, have to, together.
I mean, of course, the other hastened to affirm, work in the widest
possible sense. Also literary labour not merely for the kudos of the
thing. Writing for the newspapers which is the readiest channel nowadays.
That's work too. Important work. After all, from the little I know of
you, after all the money expended on your education you are entitled to
recoup yourself and command your price. You have every bit as much right
to live by your pen in pursuit of your philosophy as the peasant has.
What? You both belong to Ireland, the brain and the brawn. Each is
equally important.
You suspect, Stephen retorted with a sort of a half laugh, that I may
be  important because I belong to the FAUBOURG SAINT PATRICE called
Ireland for short.
I would go a step farther, Mr Bloom insinuated.
But I suspect, Stephen interrupted, that Ireland must be important
because it belongs to me.
What belongs, queried Mr Bloom bending, fancying he was perhaps under
some misapprehension. Excuse me. Unfortunately, I didn't catch the latter
portion. What was it you ...?
Stephen, patently crosstempered, repeated and shoved aside his mug of
coffee or whatever you like to call it none too politely, adding 
We can't change the country. Let us change the subject.
At this pertinent suggestion Mr Bloom, to change the subject, looked down
but in a quandary, as he couldn't tell exactly what construction to put
on belongs to which sounded rather a far cry. The rebuke of some kind was
clearer than the other part. Needless to say the fumes of his recent orgy
spoke then with some asperity in a curious bitter way foreign to his
sober state. Probably the homelife to which Mr B attached the utmost
importance had not been all that was needful or he hadn't been
familiarised with the right sort of people. With a touch of fear for the
young man beside him whom he furtively scrutinised with an air of some
consternation remembering he had just come back from Paris, the eyes more
especially reminding him forcibly of father and sister, failing to throw
much light on the subject, however, he brought to mind instances of
cultured fellows that promised so brilliantly nipped in the bud of
premature decay and nobody to blame but themselves. For instance there
was the case of O'Callaghan, for one, the halfcrazy faddist, respectably
connected though of inadequate means, with his mad vagaries among whose
other gay doings when rotto and making himself a nuisance to everybody
all round he was in the habit of ostentatiously sporting in public a suit
of brown paper a fact. And then the usual DENOUEMENT after the fun had
gone on fast and furious he got  landed into hot water and had to be
spirited away by a few friends, after a strong hint to a blind horse from
John Mallon of Lower Castle Yard, so as not to be made amenable under
section two of the criminal law amendment act, certain names of those
subpoenaed being handed in but not divulged for reasons which will occur
to anyone with a pick of brains. Briefly, putting two and two together,
six sixteen which he pointedly turned a deaf ear to, Antonio and so
forth, jockeys and esthetes and the tattoo which was all the go in the
seventies or thereabouts even in the house of lords because early in life
the occupant of the throne, then heir apparent, the other members of the
upper ten and other high personages simply following in the footsteps of
the head of the state, he reflected about the errors of notorieties and
crowned heads running counter to morality such as the Cornwall case a
number of years before under their veneer in a way scarcely intended by
nature, a thing good Mrs Grundy, as the law stands, was terribly down on
though not for the reason they thought they were probably whatever it was
except women chiefly who were always fiddling more or less at one another
it being largely a matter of dress and all the rest of it. Ladies who
like distinctive underclothing should, and every welltailored man must,
trying to make the gap wider between them by innuendo and give more of a
genuine filip to acts of impropriety between the two, she unbuttoned his
and then he untied her, mind the pin, whereas savages in the cannibal
islands, say, at ninety degrees in the shade not caring a continental.
However, reverting to the original, there were on the other hand others
who had forced their way to the top from the lowest rung by the aid of
their bootstraps. Sheer force of natural genius, that. With brains, sir.
For which and further reasons he felt it was his interest and duty even
to wait on and profit by the unlookedfor occasion though why he could not
exactly tell being as it was already several shillings to the bad having
in fact let himself in for it. Still to cultivate the acquaintance of
someone of no uncommon calibre who could provide food for reflection
would amply repay any small. Intellectual stimulation, as such, was, he
felt, from time to time a firstrate tonic for the mind. Added to which
was the coincidence of meeting, discussion, dance, row, old salt of the
here today and gone tomorrow type, night loafers, the whole galaxy of
events, all went to make up a miniature cameo of the world we live in
especially as the lives of the submerged tenth, viz. coalminers, divers,
scavengers etc., were very much under the microscope lately. To improve
the shining hour he wondered whether he might meet with anything
approaching the same luck as Mr Philip Beaufoy if taken down in writing
suppose he were to pen something out of the common groove as he fully
intended doing at the rate of one guinea per column. MY EXPERIENCES, let
us say, IN A CABMAN'S SHELTER.
The pink edition extra sporting of the TELEGRAPH tell a graphic lie lay,
as luck would have it, beside his elbow and as he was just puzzling
again, far from satisfied, over a country belonging to him and the
preceding rebus the vessel came from Bridgwater and the postcard was
addressed A. Boudin find the captain's age, his eyes went aimlessly over
the respective captions which came under his special province the
allembracing give us this day our daily press. First he got a bit of a
start but it turned out to be only something about somebody named H. du
Boyes, agent for typewriters or something like that. Great battle, Tokio.
Lovemaking in Irish,  pounds damages. Gordon Bennett. Emigration
Swindle. Letter from His Grace. William. Ascot meeting, the Gold Cup.
Victory of outsider THROWAWAY recalls Derby of ' when Capt. Marshall's
dark horse SIR HUGO captured the blue ribband at long odds. New York
disaster. Thousand lives lost. Foot and Mouth. Funeral of the late Mr
Patrick Dignam.
So to change the subject he read about Dignam R. I. P. which, he
reflected, was anything but a gay sendoff. Or a change of address anyway.
THIS MORNING Hynes put it in of course THE REMAINS OF THE LATE MR
PATRICK DIGNAM WERE REMOVED FROM HIS RESIDENCE, NO  NEWBRIDGE AVENUE,
SANDYMOUNT, FOR INTERMENT IN GLASNEVIN. THE DECEASED GENTLEMAN WAS A MOST
POPULAR AND GENIAL PERSONALITY IN CITY LIFE AND HIS DEMISE AFTER A BRIEF
ILLNESS CAME AS A GREAT SHOCK TO CITIZENS OF ALL CLASSES BY WHOM HE IS
DEEPLY REGRETTED. THE OBSEQUIES, AT WHICH MANY FRIENDS OF THE DECEASED
WERE PRESENT, WERE CARRIED OUT certainly Hynes wrote it with a nudge
from Corny BY MESSRS H. J. O'NEILL AND SON,  NORTH STRAND ROAD. THE
MOURNERS INCLUDED PATK. DIGNAM SON, BERNARD CORRIGAN BROTHERINLAW,
JNO. HENRY MENTON, SOLR, MARTIN CUNNINGHAM, JOHN POWER, .EATONDPH /
ADOR DORADOR DOURADORA must be where he called Monks the dayfather about
Keyes's ad THOMAS KERNAN, SIMON DEDALUS, STEPHEN DEDALUS B. ,., EDW. J.
LAMBERT, CORNELIUS T. KELLEHER, JOSEPH M'C HYNES, L. BOOM, CP M'COY,
M'LNTOSH AND SEVERAL OTHERS.
Nettled not a little by L. BOOM as it incorrectly stated and the line
of bitched type but tickled to death simultaneously by C. P. M'Coy and
Stephen Dedalus B. A. who were conspicuous, needless to say, by their
total absence to say nothing of M'Intosh L. Boom pointed it out to his
companion B. A. engaged in stifling another yawn, half nervousness, not
forgetting the usual crop of nonsensical howlers of misprints.
Is that first epistle to the Hebrews, he asked as soon as his bottom
jaw would let him, in? Text open thy mouth and put thy foot in it.
It is. Really, Mr Bloom said though first he fancied he alluded to the
archbishop till he added about foot and mouth with which there could be
no possible connection overjoyed to set his mind at rest and a bit
flabbergasted at Myles Crawford's after all managing to. There.
While the other was reading it on page two Boom to give him for the
nonce his new misnomer whiled away a few odd leisure moments in fits and
starts with the account of the third event at Ascot on page three, his
side. Value  sovs with  sovs in specie added. For entire colts
and fillies. Mr F. Alexander's THROWAWAY, b. h. by RIGHTAWAY,  yrs,  st
 lbs W. Lane , lord Howard de Walden's ZINFANDEL M. Cannon z, Mr W.
Bass's SCEPTRE . Betting  to  on ZINFANDEL,  to  THROWAWAY off.
SCEPTRE a shade heavier,  to  on ZINFANDEL,  to  THROWAWAY off.
THROWAWAY and ZINFANDEL stood close order. It was anybody's race then the
rank outsider drew to the fore, got long lead, beating lord Howard de
Walden's chestnut colt and Mr W. Bass's bay filly SCEPTRE on a  / mile
course. Winner trained by Braime so that Lenehan's version of the
business was all pure buncombe. Secured the verdict cleverly by a length.
 sovs with  in specie. Also ran J de Bremond's French horse
Bantam Lyons was anxiously inquiring after not in yet but expected any
minute MAXIMUM II. Different ways of bringing off a coup. Lovemaking
damages. Though that halfbaked Lyons ran off at a tangent in his
impetuosity to get left. Of course gambling eminently lent itself to that
sort of thing though as the event turned out the poor fool hadn't much
reason to congratulate himself on his pick, the forlorn hope. Guesswork
it reduced itself to eventually.
There was every indication they would arrive at that, he, Bloom, said.
Who? the other, whose hand by the way was hurt, said.
One morning you would open the paper, the cabman affirmed, and read
RETURN OF PARNELL. He bet them what they liked. A Dublin fusilier was in
that shelter one night and said he saw him in South Africa. Pride it was
killed him. He ought to have done away with himself or lain low for a
time after committee room no  until he was his old self again with no
one to point a finger at him. Then they would all to a man have gone down
on their marrowbones to him to come back when he had recovered his
senses. Dead he wasn't. Simply absconded somewhere. The coffin they
brought over was full of stones. He changed his name to De Wet, the Boer
general. He made a mistake to fight the priests. And so forth and so on.
All the same Bloom properly so dubbed was rather surprised at their
memories for in nine cases out of ten it was a case of tarbarrels and not
singly but in their thousands and then complete oblivion because it was
twenty odd years. Highly unlikely of course there was even a shadow of
truth in the stones and, even supposing, he thought a return highly
inadvisable, all things considered. Something evidently riled them in his
death. Either he petered out too tamely of acute pneumonia just when his
various different political arrangements were nearing completion or
whether it transpired he owed his death to his having neglected to change
his boots and clothesafter a wetting when a cold resulted and failing to
consult a specialist he being confined to his room till he eventually
died of it amid widespread regret before a fortnight was at an end or
quite possibly they were distressed to find the job was taken out of
their hands. Of course nobody being acquainted with his movements even
before there was absolutely no clue as to his whereabouts which were
decidedly of the ALICE, WHERE ART THOU order even prior to his starting
to go under several aliases such as Fox and Stewart so the remark which
emanated from friend cabby might be within the bounds of possibility.
Naturally then it would prey on his mind as a born leader of men which
undoubtedly he was and a commanding figure, a sixfooter or at any rate
five feet ten or eleven in his stockinged feet, whereas Messrs So and So
who, though they weren't even a patch on the former man, ruled the roost
after their redeeming features were very few and far between. It
certainly pointed a moral, the idol with feet of clay, and then
seventytwo of his trusty henchmen rounding on him with mutual
mudslinging. And the identical same with murderers. You had to come back.
That haunting sense kind of drew you. To show the understudy in the title
ROLE how to. He saw him once on the auspicious occasion when they broke
up the type in the INSUPPRESSIBLE or was it UNITED IRELAND, a privilege
he keenly appreciated, and, in point of fact, handed him his silk hat
when it was knocked off and he said THANK YOU, excited as he undoubtedly
was under his frigid exterior notwithstanding the little misadventure
mentioned between the cup and the lip what's bred in the bone. Still as
regards return. You were a lucky dog if they didn't set the terrier at
you directly you got back. Then a lot of shillyshally usually followed,
Tom for and Dick and Harry against. And then, number one, you came up
against the man in possession and had to produce your credentials like
the claimant in the Tichborne case, Roger Charles Tichborne, BELLA was
the boat's name to the best of his recollection he, the heir, went down
in as the evidence went to show and there was a tattoo mark too in Indian
ink, lord Bellew was it, as he might very easily have picked up the
details from some pal on board ship and then, when got up to tally with
the description given, introduce himself with EXCUSE ME, MY NAME IS SO
AND SO or some such commonplace remark. A more prudent course, as Bloom
said to the not over effusive, in fact like the distinguished personage
under discussion beside him, would have been to sound the lie of the land
first.
That bitch, that English whore, did for him, the shebeen proprietor
commented. She put the first nail in his coffin.
Fine lump of a woman all the same, the SOIDISANT townclerk Henry
Campbell remarked, and plenty of her. She loosened many a man's thighs. I
seen her picture in a barber's. The husband was a captain or an officer.
Ay, SkintheGoat amusingly added, he was and a cottonball one.
This gratuitous contribution of a humorous character occasioned a fair
amount of laughter among his ENTOURAGE. As regards Bloom he, without the
faintest suspicion of a smile, merely gazed in the direction of the door
and reflected upon the historic story which had aroused extraordinary
interest at the time when the facts, to make matters worse, were made
public with the usual affectionate letters that passed between them full
of sweet nothings. First it was strictly Platonic till nature intervened
and an attachment sprang up between them till bit by bit matters came to
a climax and the matter became the talk of the town till the staggering
blow came as a welcome intelligence to not a few evildisposed, however,
who were resolved upon encompassing his downfall though the thing was
public property all along though not to anything like the sensational
extent that it subsequently blossomed into. Since their names were
coupled, though, since he was her declared favourite, where was the
particular necessity to proclaim it to the rank and file from the
housetops, the fact, namely, that he had shared her bedroom which came
out in the witnessbox on oath when a thrill went through the packed court
literally electrifying everybody in the shape of witnesses swearing to
having witnessed him on such and such a particular date in the act of
scrambling out of an upstairs apartment with the assistance of a ladder
in night apparel, having gained admittance in the same fashion, a fact
the weeklies, addicted to the lubric a little, simply coined shoals of
money out of. Whereas the simple fact of the case was it was simply a
case of the husband not being up to the scratch, with nothing in common
between them beyond the name, and then a real man arriving on the scene,
strong to the verge of weakness, falling a victim to her siren charms and
forgetting home ties, the usual sequel, to bask in the loved one's
smiles. The eternal question of the life connubial, needless to say,
cropped up. Can real love, supposing there happens to be another chap in
the case, exist between married folk? Poser. Though it was no concern of
theirs absolutely if he regarded her with affection, carried away by a
wave of folly. A magnificent specimen of manhood he was truly augmented
obviously by gifts of a high order, as compared with the other military
supernumerary that is who was just the usual everyday FAREWELL, MY
GALLANT CAPTAIN kind of an individual in the light dragoons, the lth
hussars to be accurate and inflammable doubtless the fallen leader,
that is, not the other in his own peculiar way which she of course,
woman, quickly perceived as highly likely to carve his way to fame which
he almost bid fair to do till the priests and ministers of the gospel as
a whole, his erstwhile staunch adherents, and his beloved evicted tenants
for whom he had done yeoman service in the rural parts of the country by
taking up the cudgels on their behalf in a way that exceeded their most
sanguine expectations, very effectually cooked his matrimonial goose,
thereby heaping coals of fire on his head much in the same way as the
fabled ass's kick. Looking back now in a retrospective kind of
arrangement all seemed a kind of dream. And then coming back was the
worst thing you ever did because it went without saying you would feel
out of place as things always moved with the times. Why, as he reflected,
Irishtown strand, a locality he had not been in for quite a number of
years looked different somehow since, as it happened, he went to reside
on the north side. North or south, however, it was just the wellknown
case of hot passion, pure and simple, upsetting the applecart with a
vengeance and just bore out the very thing he was saying as she also was
Spanish or half so, types that wouldn't do things by halves, passionate
abandon of the south, casting every shred of decency to the winds.
Just bears out what I was saying, he, with glowing bosom said to
Stephen, about blood and the sun. And, if I don't greatly mistake she was
Spanish too.
The king of Spain's daughter, Stephen answered, adding something or
other rather muddled about farewell and adieu to you Spanish onions and
the first land called the Deadman and from Ramhead to Scilly was so and
so many.
Was she? Bloom ejaculated, surprised though not astonished by any
means, I never heard that rumour before. Possible, especially there, it
was as she lived there. So, Spain.
Carefully avoiding a book in his pocket SWEETS OF, which reminded him by
the by of that Cap l street library book out of date, he took out his
pocketbook and, turning over the various contents it contained rapidly
finally he.
Do you consider, by the by, he said, thoughtfully selecting a faded
photo which he laid on the table, that a Spanish type?
Stephen, obviously addressed, looked down on the photo showing a large
sized lady with her fleshy charms on evidence in an open fashion as she
was in the full bloom of womanhood in evening dress cut ostentatiously
low for the occasion to give a liberal display of bosom, with more than
vision of breasts, her full lips parted and some perfect teeth, standing
near, ostensibly with gravity, a piano on the rest of which was IN OLD
MADRID, a ballad, pretty in its way, which was then all the vogue. Her
the lady's eyes, dark, large, looked at Stephen, about to smile about
something to be admired, Lafayette of Westmoreland street, Dublin's
premier photographic artist, being responsible for the esthetic
execution.
Mrs Bloom, my wife the PRIMA DONNA Madam Marion Tweedy, Bloom
indicated. Taken a few years since. In or about ninety six. Very like her
then.
Beside the young man he looked also at the photo of the lady now his 
legal wife who, he intimated, was the accomplished daughter of Major
Brian Tweedy and displayed at an early age remarkable proficiency as a
singer having even made her bow to the public when her years numbered
barely sweet sixteen. As for the face it was a speaking likeness in
expression but it did not do justice to her figure which came in for a
lot of notice usually and which did not come out to the best advantage in
that getup. She could without difficulty, he said, have posed for the
ensemble, not to dwell on certain opulent curves of the. He dwelt, being
a bit of an artist in his spare time, on the female form in general
developmentally because, as it so happened, no later than that afternoon
he had seen those Grecian statues,  perfectly developed as works of
art, in the National Museum. Marble could give the original, shoulders,
back, all the symmetry, all the rest. Yes, puritanisme, it does though
Saint Joseph's sovereign thievery alors Bandez Figne toi trop. Whereas
no photo could because it simply wasn't art in a word.
The spirit moving him he would much have liked to follow Jack Tar's good
example and leave the likeness there for a very few minutes to speak for
itself on the plea he so that the other could drink in the beauty for
himself, her stage presence being, frankly, a treat in itself which the
camera could not at all do justice to. But it was scarcely professional
etiquette so. Though it was a warm pleasant sort of a night now yet
wonderfully cool for the season considering, for sunshine after storm.
And he did feel a kind of need there and then to follow suit like a kind
of inward voice and satisfy a possible need by moving a motion.
Nevertheless he sat tight just viewing the slightly soiled photo creased
by opulent curves, none the worse for wear however, and looked away
thoughtfully with the intention of not further increasing the other's
possible embarrassment while gauging her symmetry of heaving EMBONPOINT.
In fact the slight soiling was only an added charm like the case of linen
slightly soiled, good as new, much better in fact with the starch out.
Suppose she was gone when he? I looked for the lamp which she told me
came into his mind but merely as a passing fancy of his because he then
recollected the morning littered bed etcetera and the book about Ruby
with met him pike hoses SIC in it which must have fell down
sufficiently appropriately beside the domestic chamberpot with apologies
to Lindley Murray.
The vicinity of the young man he certainly relished, educated, DISTINGUE
and impulsive into the bargain, far and away the pick of the bunch though
you wouldn't think he had it in him yet you would. Besides he said the
picture was handsome which, say what you like, it was though at the
moment she was distinctly stouter. And why not? An awful lot of
makebelieve went on about that sort of thing involving a lifelong slur
with the usual splash page of gutterpress about the same old matrimonial
tangle alleging misconduct with professional golfer or the newest stage
favourite instead of being honest and aboveboard about the whole
business. How they were fated to meet and an attachment sprang up between
the two so that their names were coupled in the public eye was told in
court with letters containing the habitual mushy and compromising
expressions leaving no loophole to show that they openly cohabited two or
three times a week at some wellknown seaside hotel and relations, when
the thing ran its normal course, became in due course intimate. Then the
decree NISI and the King's proctor tries to show cause why and, he
failing to quash it, NISI was made absolute. But as for that the two
misdemeanants, wrapped up as they largely were in one another, could
safely afford to ignore it as they very largely did till the matter was
put in the hands of a solicitor who filed a petition for the party
wronged in due course. He, B, enjoyed the distinction of being close to
Erin's uncrowned king in the flesh when the thing occurred on the
historic FRACAS when the fallen leader's, who notoriously stuck to his
guns to the last drop even when clothed in the mantle of adultery,
leader's trusty henchmen to the number of ten or a dozen or possibly
even more than that penetrated into the printing works of the
INSUPPRESSIBLE or no it was UNITED IRELAND a by no means by the by
appropriate appellative and broke up the typecases with hammers or
something like that all on account of some scurrilous effusions from the
facile pens of the O'Brienite scribes at the usual mudslinging occupation
reflecting on the erstwhile tribune's private morals. Though palpably a
radically altered man he was still a commanding figure though carelessly
garbed as usual with that look of settled purpose which went a long way
with the shillyshallyers till they discovered to their vast discomfiture
that their idol had feet of clay after placing him upon a pedestal which
she, however, was the first to perceive. As those were particularly hot
times in the general hullaballoo Bloom sustained a minor injury from a
nasty prod of some chap's elbow in the crowd that of course congregated
lodging some place about the pit of the stomach, fortunately not of a
grave character. His hat Parnell's a silk one was inadvertently knocked
off and, as a matter of strict history, Bloom was the man who picked it
up in the crush after witnessing the occurrence meaning to return it to
him and return it to him he did with the utmost celerity who panting
and hatless and whose thoughts were miles away from his hat at the time
all the same being a gentleman born with a stake in the country he, as a
matter of fact, having gone into it more for the kudos of the thing than
anything else, what's bred in the bone instilled into him in infancy at
his mother's knee in the shape of knowing what good form was came out at
once because he turned round to the donor and thanked him with perfect
APLOMB, saying THANK YOU, SIR, though in a very different tone of voice
from the ornament of the legal profession whose headgear Bloom also set
to rights earlier in the course of the day, history repeating itself with
a difference, after the burial of a mutual friend when they had left him
alone in his glory after the grim task of having committed his remains to
the grave.
On the other hand what incensed him more inwardly was the blatant jokes
of the cabman and so on who passed it all off as a jest, laughing 
immoderately, pretending to understand everything, the why and the
wherefore, and in reality not knowing their own minds, it being a case
for the two parties themselves unless it ensued that the legitimate
husband happened to be a party to it owing to some anonymous letter from
the usual boy Jones, who happened to come across them at the crucial
moment in a loving position locked in one another's arms, drawing
attention to their illicit proceedings and leading up to a domestic
rumpus and the erring fair one begging forgiveness of her lord and master
upon her knees and promising to sever the connection and not receive his
visits any more if only the aggrieved husband would overlook the matter
and let bygones be bygones with tears in her eyes though possibly with
her tongue in her fair cheek at the same time as quite possibly there
were several others. He personally, being of a sceptical bias, believed
and didn't make the smallest bones about saying so either that man or men
in the plural were always hanging around on the waiting list about a
lady, even supposing she was the best wife in the world and they got on
fairly well together for the sake of argument, when, neglecting her
duties, she chose to be tired of wedded life and was on for a little
flutter in polite debauchery to press their attentions on her with
improper intent, the upshot being that her affections centred on another,
the cause of many LIAISONS between still attractive married women getting
on for fair and forty and younger men, no doubt as several famous cases
of feminine infatuation proved up to the hilt.
It was a thousand pities a young fellow, blessed with an allowance of
brains as his neighbour obviously was, should waste his valuable time
with profligate women who might present him with a nice dose to last him
his lifetime. In the nature of single blessedness he would one day take
unto himself a wife when Miss Right came on the scene but in the interim
ladies' society was a CONDITIO SINE QUA NON though he had the gravest
possible doubts, not that he wanted in the smallest to pump Stephen about
Miss Ferguson who was very possibly the particular lodestar who brought
him down to Irishtown so early in the morning, as to whether he would
find much satisfaction basking in the boy and girl courtship idea and the
company of smirking misses without a penny to their names bi or triweekly
with the orthodox preliminary canter of complimentplaying and walking out
leading up to fond lovers' ways and flowers and chocs. To think of him
house and homeless, rooked by some landlady worse than any stepmother,
was really too bad at his age. The queer suddenly things he popped out
with attracted the elder man who was several years the other's senior or
like his father but something substantial he certainly ought to eat even
were it only an eggflip made on unadulterated maternal nutriment or,
failing that, the homely Humpty Dumpty boiled.
At what o'clock did you dine? he questioned of the slim form and tired
though unwrinkled face.
Some time yesterday, Stephen said.
Yesterday exclaimed Bloom till he remembered it was already tomorrow
Friday. Ah, you mean it's after twelve
The day before yesterday, Stephen said, improving on himself.
Literally astounded at this piece of intelligence Bloom reflected. Though
they didn't see eye to eye in everything a certain analogy there somehow
was as if both their minds were travelling, so to speak, in the one train
of thought. At his age when dabbling in politics roughly some score of
years previously when he had been a QUASI aspirant to parliamentary
honours in the Buckshot Foster days he too recollected in retrospect
which was a source of keen satisfaction in itself he had a sneaking
regard for those same ultra ideas. For instance when the evicted tenants
question, then at its first inception, bulked largely in people's mind
though, it goes without saying, not contributing a copper or pinning his
faith absolutely to its dictums, some of which wouldn't exactly hold
water, he at the outset in principle at all events was in thorough
sympathy with peasant possession as voicing the trend of modern opinion
a partiality, however, which, realising his mistake, he was subsequently
partially cured of and even was twitted with going a step farther than
Michael Davitt in the striking views he at one time inculcated as a
backtothelander, which was one reason he strongly resented the innuendo
put upon him in so barefaced a fashion by our friend at the gathering of
the clans in Barney Kiernan's so that he, though often considerably
misunderstood and the least pugnacious of mortals, be it repeated,
departed from his customary habit to give him metaphorically one in the
gizzard though, so far as politics themselves were concerned, he was only
too conscious of the casualties invariably resulting from propaganda and
displays of mutual animosity and the misery and suffering it entailed as
a foregone conclusion on fine young fellows, chiefly, destruction of the
fittest, in a word.
Anyhow upon weighing up the pros and cons, getting on for one, as it was,
it was high time to be retiring for the night. The crux was it was a bit
risky to bring him home as eventualities might possibly ensue somebody
having a temper of her own sometimes and spoil the hash altogether as on
the night he misguidedly brought home a dog breed unknown with a lame
paw not that the cases were either identical or the reverse though he
had hurt his hand too to Ontario Terrace as he very distinctly
remembered, having been there, so to speak. On the other hand it was
altogether far and away too late for the Sandymount or Sandycove
suggestion so that he was in some perplexity as to which of the two
alternatives. Everything pointed to the fact that it behoved him to avail
himself to the full of the opportunity, all things considered. His
initial impression was he was a shade standoffish or not over effusive
but it grew on him someway. For one thing he mightn't what you call jump
at the idea, if approached, and what mostly worried him was he didn't
know how to lead up to it or word it exactly, supposing he did entertain
the proposal, as it would afford him very great personal pleasure if he
would allow him to help to put coin in his way or some wardrobe, if found
suitable. At all events he wound up by concluding, eschewing for the
nonce hidebound precedent, a cup of Epps's cocoa and a shakedown for the
night plus the use of a rug or two and overcoat doubled into a pillow at
least he would be in safe hands and as warm as a toast on a trivet he
failed to perceive any very vast amount of harm in that always with the
proviso no rumpus of any sort was kicked up. A move had to be made
because that merry old soul, the grasswidower in question who appeared to
be glued to the spot, didn't appear in any particular hurry to wend his
way home to his dearly beloved Queenstown and it was highly likely some
sponger's bawdyhouse of retired beauties where age was no bar off Sheriff
street lower would be the best clue to that equivocal character's
whereabouts for a few days to come, alternately racking their feelings
the mermaids' with sixchamber revolver anecdotes verging on the
tropical calculated to freeze the marrow of anybody's bones and mauling
their largesized charms betweenwhiles with rough and tumble gusto to the
accompaniment of large potations of potheen and the usual blarney about
himself for as to who he in reality was let x equal my right name and
address, as Mr Algebra remarks PASSIM. At the same time he inwardly
chuckled over his gentle repartee to the blood and ouns champion about
his god being a jew. People could put up with being bitten by a wolf but
what properly riled them was a bite from a sheep. The most vulnerable
point too of tender Achilles. Your god was a jew. Because mostly they
appeared to imagine he came from CarrickonShannon or somewhereabouts in
the county Sligo.
I propose, our hero eventually suggested after mature reflection while
prudently pocketing her photo, as it's rather stuffy here you just come
home with me and talk things over. My diggings are quite close in the
vicinity. You can't drink that stuff. Do you like cocoa? Wait. I'll just
pay this lot.
The best plan clearly being to clear out, the remainder being plain
sailing, he beckoned, while prudently pocketing the photo, to the keeper
of the shanty who didn't seem to.
Yes, that's the best, he assured Stephen to whom for the matter of that
Brazen Head or him or anywhere else was all more or less.
All kinds of Utopian plans were flashing through his B's busy brain,
education the genuine article, literature, journalism, prize titbits,
up to date billing, concert tours in English watering resorts packed with
hydros and seaside theatres, turning money away, duets in Italian with
the accent perfectly true to nature and a quantity of other things, no
necessity, of course, to tell the world and his wife from the housetops
about it, and a slice of luck. An opening was all was wanted. Because he
more than suspected he had his father's voice to bank his hopes on which
it was quite on the cards he had so it would be just as well, by the way
no harm, to trail the conversation in the direction of that particular
red herring just to.
The cabby read out of the paper he had got hold of that the former
viceroy, earl Cadogan, had presided at the cabdrivers' association dinner
in London somewhere. Silence with a yawn or two accompanied this
thrilling announcement. Then the old specimen in the corner who appeared
to have some spark of vitality left read out that sir Anthony MacDonnell
had left Euston for the chief secretary's lodge or words to that effect.
To which absorbing piece of intelligence echo answered why.
Give us a squint at that literature, grandfather, the ancient mariner
put in, manifesting some natural impatience.
And welcome, answered the elderly party thus addressed.
The sailor lugged out from a case he had a pair of greenish goggles which
he very slowly hooked over his nose and both ears.
Are you bad in the eyes? the sympathetic personage like the townclerk
queried.
Why, answered the seafarer with the tartan beard, who seemingly was a
bit of a literary cove in his own small way, staring out of seagreen
portholes as you might well describe them as, I uses goggles reading.
Sand in the Red Sea done that. One time I could read a book in the dark,
manner of speaking. THE ARABIAN NIGHTS ENTERTAINMENT was my favourite and
RED AS A ROSE IS SHE.
Hereupon he pawed the journal open and pored upon Lord only knows what,
found drowned or the exploits of King Willow, Iremonger having made a
hundred and something second wicket not out for Notts, during which time
completely regardless of Ire the keeper was intensely occupied
loosening an apparently new or secondhand boot which manifestly pinched
him as he muttered against whoever it was sold it, all of them who were
sufficiently awake enough to be picked out by their facial expressions,
that is to say, either simply looking on glumly or passing a trivial
remark.
To cut a long story short Bloom, grasping the situation, was the first to
rise from his seat so as not to outstay their welcome having first and
foremost, being as good as his word that he would foot the bill for the
occasion, taken the wise precaution to unobtrusively motion to mine host
as a parting shot a scarcely perceptible sign when the others were not
looking to the effect that the amount due was forthcoming, making a grand
total of fourpence the amount he deposited unobtrusively in four
coppers, literally the last of the Mohicans, he having previously
spotted on the printed pricelist for all who ran to read opposite him in
unmistakable figures, coffee d, confectionery do, and honestly well
worth twice the money once in a way, as Wetherup used to remark.
Come, he counselled to close the SEANCE.
Seeing that the ruse worked and the coast was clear they left the shelter
or shanty together and the ELITE society of oilskin and company whom
nothing short of an earthquake would move out of their DOLCE FAR NIENTE.
Stephen, who confessed to still feeling poorly and fagged out, paused at
the, for a moment, the door.
One thing I never understood, he said to be original on the spur of the
moment. Why they put tables upside down at night, I mean chairs upside
down, on the tables in cafes. To which impromptu the neverfailing Bloom
replied without a moment's hesitation, saying straight off
To sweep the floor in the morning.
So saying he skipped around, nimbly considering, frankly at the same time
apologetic to get on his companion's right, a habit of his, by the bye,
his right side being, in classical idiom, his tender Achilles. The night
air was certainly now a treat to breathe though Stephen was a bit weak on
his pins.
It will the air do you good, Bloom said, meaning also the walk, in a
moment. The only thing is to walk then you'll feel a different man. Come.
It's not far. Lean on me.
Accordingly he passed his left arm in Stephen's right and led him on
accordingly.
Yes, Stephen said uncertainly because he thought he felt a strange kind
of flesh of a different man approach him, sinewless and wobbly and all
that.
Anyhow they passed the sentrybox with stones, brazier etc. where the
municipal supernumerary, ex Gumley, was still to all intents and purposes
wrapped in the arms of Murphy, as the adage has it, dreaming of fresh
fields and pastures new. And APROPOS of coffin of stones the analogy was
not at all bad as it was in fact a stoning to death on the part of
seventytwo out of eighty odd constituencies that ratted at the time of
the split and chiefly the belauded peasant class, probably the selfsame
evicted tenants he had put in their holdings.
So they turned on to chatting about music, a form of art for which Bloom,
as a pure amateur, possessed the greatest love, as they made tracks arm
in arm across Beresford place. Wagnerian music, though confessedly grand
in its way, was a bit too heavy for Bloom and hard to follow at the first
gooff but the music of Mercadante's HUGUENOTS, Meyerbeer's SEVEN LAST
WORDS ON THE CROSS and Mozart's TWELFTH MASS he simply revelled in, the
GLORIA in that being, to his mind, the acme of first class music as such,
literally knocking everything else into a cocked hat. He infinitely
preferred the sacred music of the catholic church to anything the
opposite shop could offer in that line such as those Moody and Sankey
hymns or BID ME TO LIVE AND I WILL LIVE THY PROTESTANT TO BE. He also
yielded to none in his admiration of Rossini's STABAT MATER, a work
simply abounding in immortal numbers, in which his wife, Madam Marion
Tweedy, made a hit, a veritable sensation, he might safely say, greatly
adding to her other laureis and putting the others totally in the shade,
in the jesuit fathers' church in upper Gardiner street, the sacred
edifice being thronged to the doors to hear her with virtuosos, or
VIRTUOSI rather. There was the unanimous opinion that there was none to
come up to her and suffice it to say in a place of worship for music of a
sacred character there was a generally voiced desire for an encore. On
the whole though favouring preferably light opera of the DON GIOVANNI
description and MARTHA, a gem in its line, he had a PENCHANT, though with
only a surface knowledge, for the severe classical school such as
Mendelssohn. And talking of that, taking it for granted he knew all about
the old favourites, he mentioned PAR EXCELLENCE Lionel's air in MARTHA,
M'APPARI, which, curiously enough, he had heard or overheard, to be more
accurate, on yesterday, a privilege he keenly appreciated, from the lips
of Stephen's respected father, sung to perfection, a study of the number,
in fact, which made all the others take a back seat. Stephen, in reply to
a politely put query, said he didn't sing it but launched out into
praises of Shakespeare's songs, at least of in or about that period, the
lutenist Dowland who lived in Fetter lane near Gerard the herbalist, who
ANNO LUDENDO HAUSI, DOULANDUS, an instrument he was contemplating
purchasing from Mr Arnold Dolmetsch, whom B. did not quite recall though
the name certainly sounded familiar, for sixtyfive guineas and Farnaby
and son with their DUX and COMES conceits and Byrd William who played
the virginals, he said, in the Queen's chapel or anywhere else he found
them and one Tomkins who made toys or airs and John Bull.
On the roadway which they were approaching whilst still speaking beyond
the swingchains a horse, dragging a sweeper, paced on the paven ground,
brushing a long swathe of mire up so that with the noise Bloom was not
perfectly certain whether he had caught aright the allusion to sixtyfive
guineas and John Bull. He inquired if it was John Bull the political
celebrity of that ilk, as it struck him, the two identical names, as a
striking coincidence.
By the chains the horse slowly swerved to turn, which perceiving, Bloom,
who was keeping a sharp lookout as usual, plucked the other's sleeve
gently, jocosely remarking
Our lives are in peril tonight. Beware of the steamroller.
They thereupon stopped. Bloom looked at the head of a horse not worth
anything like sixtyfive guineas, suddenly in evidence in the dark quite
near so that it seemed new, a different grouping of bones and even flesh
because palpably it was a fourwalker, a hipshaker, a blackbuttocker, a
taildangler, a headhanger putting his hind foot foremost the while the
lord of his creation sat on the perch, busy with his thoughts. But such a
good poor brute he was sorry he hadn't a lump of sugar but, as he wisely
reflected, you could scarcely be prepared for every emergency that might
crop up. He was just a big nervous foolish noodly kind of a horse,
without a second care in the world. But even a dog, he reflected, take
that mongrel in Barney Kiernan's, of the same size, would be a holy
horror to face. But it was no animal's fault in particular if he was
built that way like the camel, ship of the desert, distilling grapes into
potheen in his hump. Nine tenths of them all could be caged or trained,
nothing beyond the art of man barring the bees. Whale with a harpoon
hairpin, alligator tickle the small of his back and he sees the joke,
chalk a circle for a rooster, tiger my eagle eye. These timely
reflections anent the brutes of the field occupied his mind somewhat
distracted from Stephen's words while the ship of the street was
manoeuvring and Stephen went on about the highly interesting old.
What's this I was saying? Ah, yes My wife, he intimated, plunging IN
MEDIAS RES, would have the greatest of pleasure in making your
acquaintance as she is passionately attached to music of any kind.
He looked sideways in a friendly fashion at the sideface of Stephen,
image of his mother, which was not quite the same as the usual handsome
blackguard type they unquestionably had an insatiable hankering after as
he was perhaps not that way built.
Still, supposing he had his father's gift as he more than suspected, it
opened up new vistas in his mind such as Lady Fingall's Irish industries,
concert on the preceding Monday, and aristocracy in general.
Exquisite variations he was now describing on an air YOUTH HERE HAS END
by Jans Pieter Sweelinck, a Dutchman of Amsterdam where the frows come
from. Even more he liked an old German song of JOHANNES JEEP about the
clear sea and the voices of sirens, sweet murderers of men, which boggled
Bloom a bit
VON DER SIRENEN LISTIGKEIT
TUN DIE POETEN DICHTEN.
These opening bars he sang and translated EXTEMPORE. Bloom, nodding, said
he perfectly understood and begged him to go on by all means which he
did.
A phenomenally beautiful tenor voice like that, the rarest of boons,
which Bloom appreciated at the very first note he got out, could easily,
if properly handled by some recognised authority on voice production such
as Barraclough and being able to read music into the bargain, command its
own price where baritones were ten a penny and procure for its fortunate
possessor in the near future an ENTREE into fashionable houses in the
best residential quarters of financial magnates in a large way of
business and titled people where with his university degree of B. A. a
huge ad in its way and gentlemanly bearing to all the more influence the
good impression he would infallibly score a distinct success, being
blessed with brains which also could be utilised for the purpose and
other requisites, if his clothes were properly attended to so as to the
better worm his way into their good graces as he, a youthful tyro in
society's sartorial niceties, hardly understood how a little thing like
that could militate against you. It was in fact only a matter of months
and he could easily foresee him participating in their musical and
artistic CONVERSAZIONES during the festivities of the Christmas season,
for choice, causing a slight flutter in the dovecotes of the fair sex and
being made a lot of by ladies out for sensation, cases of which, as he
happened to know, were on recordin fact, without giving the show away,
he himself once upon a time, if he cared to, could easily have. Added to
which of course would be the pecuniary emolument by no means to be
sneezed at, going hand in hand with his tuition fees. Not, he
parenthesised, that for the sake of filthy lucre he need necessarily
embrace the lyric platform as a walk in life for any lengthy space of
time. But a step in the required direction it was beyond yea or nay and
both monetarily and mentally it contained no reflection on his dignity in
the smallest and it often turned in uncommonly handy to be handed a
cheque at a muchneeded moment when every little helped. Besides, though
taste latterly had deteriorated to a degree, original music like that,
different from the conventional rut, would rapidly have a great vogue as
it would be a decided novelty for Dublin's musical world after the usual
hackneyed run of catchy tenor solos foisted on a confiding public by Ivan
St Austell and Hilton St Just and their GENUS OMNE. Yes, beyond a shadow
of a doubt he could with all the cards in his hand and he had a capital
opening to make a name for himself and win a high place in the city's
esteem where he could command a stiff figure and, booking ahead, give a
grand concert for the patrons of the King street house, given a backerup,
if one were forthcoming to kick him upstairs, so to speak, a big IF,
however, with some impetus of the goahead sort to obviate the inevitable
procrastination which often tripped up a too much feted prince of good
fellows. And it need not detract from the other by one iota as, being his
own master, he would have heaps of time to practise literature in his
spare moments when desirous of so doing without its clashing with his
vocal career or containing anything derogatory whatsoever as it was a
matter for himself alone. In fact, he had the ball at his feet and that
was the very reason why the other, possessed of a remarkably sharp nose
for smelling a rat of any sort, hung on to him at all.
The horse was just then. And later on at a propitious opportunity he
purposed Bloom did, without anyway prying into his private affairs on
the FOOLS STEP IN WHERE ANGELS principle, advising him to sever his
connection with a certain budding practitioner who, he noticed, was prone
to disparage and even to a slight extent with some hilarious pretext when
not present, deprecate him, or whatever you like to call it which in
Bloom's humble opinion threw a nasty sidelight on that side of a person's
character, no pun intended.
The horse having reached the end of his tether, so to speak, halted and,
rearing high a proud feathering tail, added his quota by letting fall on
the floor which the brush would soon brush up and polish, three smoking
globes of turds. Slowly three times, one after another, from a full
crupper he mired. And humanely his driver waited till he or she had
ended, patient in his scythed car.
Side by side Bloom, profiting by the CONTRETEMPS, with Stephen passed
through the gap of the chains, divided by the upright, and, stepping over
a strand of mire, went across towards Gardiner street lower, Stephen
singing more boldly, but not loudly, the end of the ballad.
UND ALLE SCHIFFE BRUCKEN.
The driver never said a word, good, bad or indifferent, but merely
watched the two figures, as he sat on his lowbacked car, both black, one
full, one lean, walk towards the railway bridge, TO BE MARRIED BY FATHER
MAHER. As they walked they at times stopped and walked again continuing
their TETEATETE which, of course, he was utterly out of about sirens
enemies of man's reason, mingled with a number of other topics of the
same category, usurpers, historical cases of the kind while the man in
the sweeper car or you might as well call it in the sleeper car who in
any case couldn't possibly hear because they were too far simply sat in
his seat near the end of lower Gardiner street AND LOOKED AFTER THEIR
LOWBACKED CAR.
What parallel courses did Bloom and Stephen follow returning?
Starting united both at normal walking pace from Beresford place they
followed in the order named Lower and Middle Gardiner streets and
Mountjoy square, west then, at reduced pace, each bearing left,
Gardiner's place by an inadvertence as far as the farther corner of
Temple street then, at reduced pace with interruptions of halt, bearing
right, Temple street, north, as far as Hardwicke place. Approaching,
disparate, at relaxed walking pace they crossed both the circus before
George's church diametrically, the chord in any circle being less than
the arc which it subtends.
Of what did the duumvirate deliberate during their itinerary?
Music, literature, Ireland, Dublin, Paris, friendship, woman,
prostitution, diet, the influence of gaslight or the light of arc and
glowlamps on the growth of adjoining paraheliotropic trees, exposed
corporation emergency dustbuckets, the Roman catholic church,
ecclesiastical celibacy, the Irish nation, jesuit education, careers, the
study of medicine, the past day, the maleficent influence of the
presabbath, Stephen's collapse.
Did Bloom discover common factors of similarity between their respective
like and unlike reactions to experience?
Both were sensitive to artistic impressions, musical in preference to
plastic or pictorial. Both preferred a continental to an insular manner
of life, a cisatlantic to a transatlantic place of residence. Both
indurated by early domestic training and an inherited tenacity of
heterodox resistance professed their disbelief in many orthodox
religious, national, social and ethical doctrines. Both admitted the
alternately stimulating and obtunding influence of heterosexual
magnetism.
Were their views on some points divergent?
Stephen dissented openly from Bloom's views on the importance of dietary
and civic selfhelp while Bloom dissented tacitly from Stephen's views on
the eternal affirmation of the spirit of man in literature. Bloom
assented covertly to Stephen's rectification of the anachronism involved
in assigning the date of the conversion of the Irish nation to
christianity from druidism by Patrick son of Calpornus, son of Potitus,
son of Odyssus, sent by pope Celestine I in the year  in the reign of
Leary to the year  or thereabouts in the reign of Cormac MacArt died
 A.D., suffocated by imperfect deglutition of aliment at Sletty and
interred at Rossnaree. The collapse which Bloom ascribed to gastric
inanition and certain chemical compounds of varying degrees of
adulteration and alcoholic strength, accelerated by mental exertion and
the velocity of rapid circular motion in a relaxing atmosphere, Stephen
attributed to the reapparition of a matutinal cloud perceived by both
from two different points of observation Sandycove and Dublin at first
no bigger than a woman's hand.
Was there one point on which their views were equal and negative?
The influence of gaslight or electric light on the growth of adjoining
paraheliotropic trees.
Had Bloom discussed similar subjects during nocturnal perambulations in
the past?
In  with Owen Goldberg and Cecil Turnbull at night on public
thoroughfares between Longwood avenue and Leonard's corner and Leonard's
corner and Synge street and Synge street and Bloomfield avenue.
In  with Percy Apjohn in the evenings, reclined against the wall
between Gibraltar villa and Bloomfield house in Crumlin, barony of
Uppercross. In  occasionally with casual acquaintances and
prospective purchasers on doorsteps, in front parlours, in third class
railway carriages of suburban lines. In  frequently with major Brian
Tweedy and his daughter Miss Marion Tweedy, together and separately on
the lounge in Matthew Dillon's house in Roundtown. Once in  and once
in  with Julius Juda Mastiansky, on both occasions in the parlour
of his Bloom's house in Lombard street, west.
What reflection concerning the irregular sequence of dates , ,
, , , ,  did Bloom make before their arrival at their
destination?
He reflected that the progressive extension of the field of individual
development and experience was regressively accompanied by a restriction
of the converse domain of interindividual relations.
As in what ways?
From inexistence to existence he came to many and was as one received
existence with existence he was with any as any with any from existence
to nonexistence gone he would be by all as none perceived.
What act did Bloom make on their arrival at their destination?
At the housesteps of the th Of the equidifferent uneven numbers, number
 Eccles street, he inserted his hand mechanically into the back pocket
of his trousers to obtain his latchkey.
Was it there?
It was in the corresponding pocket of the trousers which he had worn on
the day but one preceding.
Why was he doubly irritated?
Because he had forgotten and because he remembered that he had reminded
himself twice not to forget.
What were then the alternatives before the, premeditatedly respectively
and inadvertently, keyless couple?
To enter or not to enter. To knock or not to knock.
Bloom's decision?
A stratagem. Resting his feet on the dwarf wall, he climbed over the area
railings, compressed his hat on his head, grasped two points at the lower
union of rails and stiles, lowered his body gradually by its length of
five feet nine inches and a half to within two feet ten inches of the
area pavement and allowed his body to move freely in space by separating
himself from the railings and crouching in preparation for the impact of
the fall.
Did he fall?
By his body's known weight of eleven stone and four pounds in avoirdupois
measure, as certified by the graduated machine for periodical
selfweighing in the premises of Francis Froedman, pharmaceutical chemist
of  Frederick street, north, on the last feast of the Ascension, to
wit, the twelfth day of May of the bissextile year one thousand nine
hundred and four of the christian era jewish era five thousand six
hundred and sixtyfour, mohammadan era one thousand three hundred and
twentytwo, golden number , epact , solar cycle , dominical letters C
B, Roman indiction , Julian period , MCMIV.
Did he rise uninjured by concussion?
Regaining new stable equilibrium he rose uninjured though concussed by
the impact, raised the latch of the area door by the exertion of force at
its freely moving flange and by leverage of the first kind applied at its
fulcrum, gained retarded access to the kitchen through the subadjacent
scullery, ignited a lucifer match by friction, set free inflammable coal
gas by turningon the ventcock, lit a high flame which, by regulating, he
reduced to quiescent candescence and lit finally a portable candle.
What discrete succession of images did Stephen meanwhile perceive?
Reclined against the area railings he perceived through the transparent
kitchen panes a man regulating a gasflame of  CP, a man lighting a
candle of  CP, a man removing in turn each of his two boots, a man
leaving the kitchen holding a candle.
Did the man reappear elsewhere?
After a lapse of four minutes the glimmer of his candle was discernible
through the semitransparent semicircular glass fanlight over the
halldoor. The halldoor turned gradually on its hinges. In the open space
of the doorway the man reappeared without his hat, with his candle.
Did Stephen obey his sign?
Yes, entering softly, he helped to close and chain the door and followed
softly along the hallway the man's back and listed feet and lighted
candle past a lighted crevice of doorway on the left and carefully down a
turning staircase of more than five steps into the kitchen of Bloom's
house.
What did Bloom do?
He extinguished the candle by a sharp expiration of breath upon its
flame, drew two spoonseat deal chairs to the hearthstone, one for Stephen
with its back to the area window, the other for himself when necessary,
knelt on one knee, composed in the grate a pyre of crosslaid resintipped
sticks and various coloured papers and irregular polygons of best Abram
coal at twentyone shillings a ton from the yard of Messrs Flower and
M'Donald of  D'Olier street, kindled it at three projecting points of
paper with one ignited lucifer match, thereby releasing the potential
energy contained in the fuel by allowing its carbon and hydrogen elements
to enter into free union with the oxygen of the air.
Of what similar apparitions did Stephen think?
Of others elsewhere in other times who, kneeling on one knee or on two,
had kindled fires for him, of Brother Michael in the infirmary of the
college of the Society of Jesus at Clongowes Wood, Sallins, in the county
of Kildare of his father, Simon Dedalus, in an unfurnished room of his
first residence in Dublin, number thirteen Fitzgibbon street of his
godmother Miss Kate Morkan in the house of her dying sister Miss Julia
Morkan at  Usher's Island of his aunt Sara, wife of Richie Richard
Goulding, in the kitchen of their lodgings at  Clanbrassil street of
his mother Mary, wife of Simon Dedalus, in the kitchen of number twelve
North Richmond street on the morning of the feast of Saint Francis Xavier
 of the dean of studies, Father Butt, in the physics' theatre of
university College,  Stephen's Green, north of his sister Dilly
Delia in his father's house in Cabra.
What did Stephen see on raising his gaze to the height of a yard from the
fire towards the opposite wall?
Under a row of five coiled spring housebells a curvilinear rope,
stretched between two holdfasts athwart across the recess beside the
chimney pier, from which hung four smallsized square handkerchiefs folded
unattached consecutively in adjacent rectangles and one pair of ladies'
grey hose with Lisle suspender tops and feet in their habitual position
clamped by three erect wooden pegs two at their outer extremities and the
third at their point of junction.
What did Bloom see on the range?
On the right smaller hob a blue enamelled saucepan on the left
larger hob a black iron kettle.
What did Bloom do at the range?
He removed the saucepan to the left hob, rose and carried the iron kettle
to the sink in order to tap the current by turning the faucet to let it
flow.
Did it flow?
Yes. From Roundwood reservoir in county Wicklow of a cubic capacity of
 million gallons, percolating through a subterranean aqueduct of
filter mains of single and double pipeage constructed at an initial plant
cost of  pounds per linear yard by way of the Dargle, Rathdown, Glen of
the Downs and Callowhill to the  acre reservoir at Stillorgan, a
distance of  statute miles, and thence, through a system of relieving
tanks, by a gradient of  feet to the city boundary at Eustace bridge,
upper Leeson street, though from prolonged summer drouth and daily supply
of  / million gallons the water had fallen below the sill of the
overflow weir for which reason the borough surveyor and waterworks
engineer, Mr Spencer Harty, C. E., on the instructions of the waterworks
committee had prohibited the use of municipal water for purposes other
than those of consumption envisaging the possibility of recourse being
had to the impotable water of the Grand and Royal canals as in 
particularly as the South Dublin Guardians, notwithstanding their ration
of  gallons per day per pauper supplied through a  inch meter, had
been convicted of a wastage of , gallons per night by a reading of
their meter on the affirmation of the law agent of the corporation, Mr
Ignatius Rice, solicitor, thereby acting to the detriment of another
section of the public, selfsupporting taxpayers, solvent, sound.
What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier,
returning to the range, admire?
Its universality its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in
seeking its own level its vastness in the ocean of Mercator's
projection its unplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific
exceeding  fathoms the restlessness of its waves and surface
particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard the independence
of its units the variability of states of sea its hydrostatic
quiescence in calm its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides
its subsidence after devastation its sterility in the circumpolar
icecaps, arctic and antarctic its climatic and commercial significance
its preponderance of  to  over the dry land of the globe its
indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region
below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn the multisecular stability
of its primeval basin its luteofulvous bed its capacity to dissolve and
hold in solution all soluble substances including millions of tons of the
most precious metals its slow erosions of peninsulas and islands, its
persistent formation of homothetic islands, peninsulas and
downwardtending promontories its alluvial deposits its weight and
volume and density its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns
its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones
its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and
confluent oceanflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic
currents, gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses its violence in
seaquakes, waterspouts, Artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies,
freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers,
cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts its
vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve its secrecy in springs and
latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomantic or hygrometric instruments and
exemplified by the well by the hole in the wall at Ashtown gate,
saturation of air, distillation of dew the simplicity of its
composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part
of oxygen its healing virtues its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead
Sea its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate
dams, leaks on shipboard its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst
and fire, nourishing vegetation its infallibility as paradigm and
paragon its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow,
hail its strength in rigid hydrants its variety of forms in loughs and
bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and
archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and
arms of sea its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes its docility
in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power
stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills its utility in canals,
rivers, if navigable, floating and graving docks its potentiality
derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level to
level its submarine fauna and flora anacoustic, photophobe,
numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe its ubiquity
as constituting  percent of the human body the noxiousness of its
effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater,
stagnant pools in the waning moon.
Having set the halffilled kettle on the now burning coals, why did he
return to the stillflowing tap?
To wash his soiled hands with a partially consumed tablet of Barrington's
lemonflavoured soap, to which paper still adhered, bought thirteen hours
previously for fourpence and still unpaid for, in fresh cold
neverchanging everchanging water and dry them, face and hands, in a long
redbordered holland cloth passed over a wooden revolving roller.
What reason did Stephen give for declining Bloom's offer?
That he was hydrophobe, hating partial contact by immersion or total by
submersion in cold water, his last bath having taken place in the month
of October of the preceding year, disliking the aqueous substances of
glass and crystal, distrusting aquacities of thought and language.
What impeded Bloom from giving Stephen counsels of hygiene and
prophylactic to which should be added suggestions concerning a
preliminary wetting of the head and contraction of the muscles with rapid
splashing of the face and neck and thoracic and epigastric region in case
of sea or river bathing, the parts of the human anatomy most sensitive to
cold being the nape, stomach and thenar or sole of foot?
The incompatibility of aquacity with the erratic originality of genius.
What additional didactic counsels did he similarly repress?
Dietary concerning the respective percentage of protein and caloric
energy in bacon, salt ling and butter, the absence of the former in the
lastnamed and the abundance of the latter in the firstnamed.
Which seemed to the host to be the predominant qualities of his guest?
Confidence in himself, an equal and opposite power of abandonment and
recuperation.
What concomitant phenomenon took place in the vessel of liquid by the
agency of fire?
The phenomenon of ebullition. Fanned by a constant updraught of
ventilation between the kitchen and the chimneyflue, ignition was
communicated from the faggots of precombustible fuel to polyhedral masses
of bituminous coal, containing in compressed mineral form the foliated
fossilised decidua of primeval forests which had in turn derived their
vegetative existence from the sun, primal source of heat radiant,
transmitted through omnipresent luminiferous diathermanous ether. Heat
convected, a mode of motion developed by such combustion, was
constantly and increasingly conveyed from the source of calorification to
the liquid contained in the vessel, being radiated through the uneven
unpolished dark surface of the metal iron, in part reflected, in part
absorbed, in part transmitted, gradually raising the temperature of the
water from normal to boiling point, a rise in temperature expressible as
the result of an expenditure of  thermal units needed to raise  pound
of water from  degrees to  degrees Fahrenheit.
What announced the accomplishment of this rise in temperature?
A double falciform ejection of water vapour from under the kettlelid at
both sides simultaneously.
For what personal purpose could Bloom have applied the water so boiled?
To shave himself.
What advantages attended shaving by night?
A softer beard a softer brush if intentionally allowed to remain from
shave to shave in its agglutinated lather a softer skin if unexpectedly
encountering female acquaintances in remote places at incustomary hours
quiet reflections upon the course of the day a cleaner sensation when
awaking after a fresher sleep since matutinal noises, premonitions and
perturbations, a clattered milkcan, a postman's double knock, a paper
read, reread while lathering, relathering the same spot, a shock, a
shoot, with thought of aught he sought though fraught with nought might
cause a faster rate of shaving and a nick on which incision plaster with
precision cut and humected and applied adhered which was to be done.
Why did absence of light disturb him less than presence of noise?
Because of the surety of the sense of touch in his firm full masculine
feminine passive active hand.
What quality did it his hand possess but with what counteracting
influence?
The operative surgical quality but that he was reluctant to shed human
blood even when the end justified the means, preferring, in their natural
order, heliotherapy, psychophysicotherapeutics, osteopathic surgery.
What lay under exposure on the lower, middle and upper shelves of the
kitchen dresser, opened by Bloom?
On the lower shelf five vertical breakfast plates, six horizontal
breakfast saucers on which rested inverted breakfast cups, a
moustachecup, uninverted, and saucer of Crown Derby, four white
goldrimmed eggcups, an open shammy purse displaying coins, mostly copper,
and a phial of aromatic violet comfits. On the middle shelf a chipped
eggcup containing pepper, a drum of table salt, four conglomerated black
olives in oleaginous paper, an empty pot of Plumtree's potted meat, an
oval wicker basket bedded with fibre and containing one Jersey pear, a
halfempty bottle of William Gilbey and Co's white invalid port, half
disrobed of its swathe of coralpink tissue paper, a packet of Epps's
soluble cocoa, five ounces of Anne Lynch's choice tea at / per lb in a
crinkled leadpaper bag, a cylindrical canister containing the best
crystallised lump sugar, two onions, one, the larger, Spanish, entire,
the other, smaller, Irish, bisected with augmented surface and more
redolent, a jar of Irish Model Dairy's cream, a jug of brown crockery
containing a naggin and a quarter of soured adulterated milk, converted
by heat into water, acidulous serum and semisolidified curds, which added
to the quantity subtracted for Mr Bloom's and Mrs Fleming's breakfasts,
made one imperial pint, the total quantity originally delivered, two
cloves, a halfpenny and a small dish containing a slice of fresh
ribsteak. On the upper shelf a battery of jamjars empty of various
sizes and proveniences.
What attracted his attention lying on the apron of the dresser?
Four polygonal fragments of two lacerated scarlet betting tickets,
numbered  ,  .
What reminiscences temporarily corrugated his brow?
Reminiscences of coincidences, truth stranger than fiction, preindicative
of the result of the Gold Cup flat handicap, the official and definitive
result of which he had read in the EVENING TELEGRAPH, late pink edition,
in the cabman's shelter, at Butt bridge.
Where had previous intimations of the result, effected or projected, been
received by him?
In Bernard Kiernan's licensed premises ,  and  little Britain street
in David Byrne's licensed premises,  Duke street in O'Connell street
lower, outside Graham Lemon's when a dark man had placed in his hand a
throwaway subsequently thrown away, advertising Elijah, restorer of the
church in Zion in Lincoln place outside the premises of F. W. Sweny and
Co Limited, dispensing chemists, when, when Frederick M. Bantam Lyons
had rapidly and successively requested, perused and restituted the copy
of the current issue of the FREEMAN'S JOURNAL AND NATIONAL PRESS which he
had been about to throw away subsequently thrown away, he had proceeded
towards the oriental edifice of the Turkish and Warm Baths,  Leinster
street, with the light of inspiration shining in his countenance and
bearing in his arms the secret of the race, graven in the language of
prediction.
What qualifying considerations allayed his perturbations?
The difficulties of interpretation since the significance of any event
followed its occurrence as variably as the acoustic report followed the
electrical discharge and of counterestimating against an actual loss by
failure to interpret the total sum of possible losses proceeding
originally from a successful interpretation.
His mood?
He had not risked, he did not expect, he had not been disappointed, he
was satisfied.
What satisfied him?
To have sustained no positive loss. To have brought a positive gain to
others. Light to the gentiles.
How did Bloom prepare a collation for a gentile?
He poured into two teacups two level spoonfuls, four in all, of Epps's
soluble cocoa and proceeded according to the directions for use printed
on the label, to each adding after sufficient time for infusion the
prescribed ingredients for diffusion in the manner and in the quantity
prescribed.
What supererogatory marks of special hospitality did the host show his
guest?
Relinquishing his symposiarchal right to the moustache cup of imitation
Crown Derby presented to him by his only daughter, Millicent Milly, he
substituted a cup identical with that of his guest and served
extraordinarily to his guest and, in reduced measure, to himself the
viscous cream ordinarily reserved for the breakfast of his wife Marion
Molly.
Was the guest conscious of and did he acknowledge these marks of
hospitality?
His attention was directed to them by his host jocosely, and he accepted
them seriously as they drank in jocoserious silence Epps's massproduct,
the creature cocoa.
Were there marks of hospitality which he contemplated but suppressed,
reserving them for another and for himself on future occasions to
complete the act begun?
The reparation of a fissure of the length of  / inches in the right
side of his guest's jacket. A gift to his guest of one of the four lady's
handkerchiefs, if and when ascertained to be in a presentable condition.
Who drank more quickly?
Bloom, having the advantage of ten seconds at the initiation and taking,
from the concave surface of a spoon along the handle of which a steady
flow of heat was conducted, three sips to his opponent's one, six to two,
nine to three.
What cerebration accompanied his frequentative act?
Concluding by inspection but erroneously that his silent companion was
engaged in mental composition he reflected on the pleasures derived from
literature of instruction rather than of amusement as he himself had
applied to the works of William Shakespeare more than once for the
solution of difficult problems in imaginary or real life.
Had he found their solution?
In spite of careful and repeated reading of certain classical passages,
aided by a glossary, he had derived imperfect conviction from the text,
the answers not bearing in all points.
What lines concluded his first piece of original verse written by him,
potential poet, at the age of  in  on the occasion of the offering
of three prizes of /, / and / respectively for competition by the
SHAMROCK, a weekly newspaper?
AN AMBITION TO SQUINT
AT MY VERSES IN PRINT
MAKES ME HOPE THAT FOR THESE YOU'LL FIND ROOM.
IF YOU SO CONDESCEND
THEN PLEASE PLACE AT THE END
THE NAME OF YOURS TRULY, L. BLOOM.
Did he find four separating forces between his temporary guest and him?
Name, age, race, creed.
What anagrams had he made on his name in youth?
Leopold Bloom
Ellpodbomool
Molldopeloob
Bollopedoom
Old Ollebo, M. P.
What acrostic upon the abbreviation of his first name had he kinetic
poet sent to Miss Marion Molly Tweedy on the  February ?
POETS OFT HAVE SUNG IN RHYME
OF MUSIC SWEET THEIR PRAISE DIVINE.
LET THEM HYMN IT NINE TIMES NINE.
DEARER FAR THAN SONG OR WINE.
YOU ARE MINE. THE WORLD IS MINE.
What had prevented him from completing a topical song music by R. G.
Johnston on the events of the past, or fixtures for the actual, years,
entitled IF BRIAN BORU COULD BUT COME BACK AND SEE OLD DUBLIN NOW,
commissioned by Michael Gunn, lessee of the Gaiety Theatre, , , ,
 South King street, and to be introduced into the sixth scene, the
valley of diamonds, of the second edition  January  of the grand
annual Christmas pantomime SINBAD THE SAILOR produced by R Shelton 
December , written by Greenleaf Whittier, scenery by George A.
Jackson and Cecil Hicks, costumes by Mrs and Miss Whelan under the
personal supervision of Mrs Michael Gunn, ballets by Jessie Noir,
harlequinade by Thomas Otto and sung by Nelly Bouverist, principal girl?
Firstly, oscillation between events of imperial and of local interest,
the anticipated diamond jubilee of Queen Victoria born , acceded
 and the posticipated opening of the new municipal fish market
secondly, apprehension of opposition from extreme circles on the
questions of the respective visits of Their Royal Highnesses the duke and
duchess of York real and of His Majesty King Brian Boru imaginary
thirdly, a conflict between professional etiquette and professional
emulation concerning the recent erections of the Grand Lyric Hall on
Burgh Quay and the Theatre Royal in Hawkins street fourthly, distraction
resultant from compassion for Nelly Bouverist's nonintellectual, non
political, nontopical expression of countenance and concupiscence caused
by Nelly Bouverist's revelations of white articles of nonintellectual,
nonpolitical, nontopical underclothing while she Nelly Bouverist was
in the articles fifthly, the difficulties of the selection of
appropriate music and humorous allusions from EVERYBODY'S BOOK OF JOKES
 pages and a laugh in every one sixthly, the rhymes, homophonous
and cacophonous, associated with the names of the new lord mayor, Daniel
Tallon, the new high sheriff, Thomas Pile and the new solicitorgeneral,
Dunbar Plunket Barton.
What relation existed between their ages?
 years before in  when Bloom was of Stephen's present age Stephen
was .  years after in  when Stephen would be of Bloom's present
age Bloom would be . In  when Bloom would be  and Stephen 
their ages initially in the ratio of  to  would be as  / to 
/, the proportion increasing and the disparity diminishing according as
arbitrary future years were added, for if the proportion existing in 
had continued immutable, conceiving that to be possible, till then 
when Stephen was  Bloom would be  and in  when Stephen would be
, as Bloom then was, Bloom would be  while in  when Stephen
would have attained the maximum postdiluvian age of  Bloom, being 
years alive having been born in the year , would have surpassed by 
years the maximum antediluvian age, that of Methusalah,  years, while,
if Stephen would continue to live until he would attain that age in the
year  A.D., Bloomwould have been obliged to have been alive ,
years, having been obliged to have been born in the year , B.C.
What events might nullify these calculations?
The cessation of existence of both or either, the inauguration of a new
era or calendar, the annihilation of the world and consequent
extermination of the human species, inevitable but impredictable.
How many previous encounters proved their preexisting acquaintance?
Two. The first in the lilacgarden of Matthew Dillon's house, Medina
Villa, Kimmage road, Roundtown, in , in the company of Stephen's
mother, Stephen being then of the age of  and reluctant to give his hand
in salutation. The second in the coffeeroom of Breslin's hotel on a rainy
Sunday in the January of , in the company of Stephen's father and
Stephen's granduncle, Stephen being then  years older.
Did Bloom accept the invitation to dinner given then by the son and
afterwards seconded by the father?
Very gratefully, with grateful appreciation, with sincere appreciative
gratitude, in appreciatively grateful sincerity of regret, he declined.
Did their conversation on the subject of these reminiscences reveal a
third connecting link between them?
Mrs Riordan Dante, a widow of independent means, had resided in the
house of Stephen's parents from  September  to  December  and
had also resided during the years ,  and  in the City Arms
Hotel owned by Elizabeth O'Dowd of  Prussia street where, during parts
of the years  and , she had been a constant informant of Bloom
who resided also in the same hotel, being at that time a clerk in the
employment of Joseph Cuffe of  Smithfield for the superintendence of
sales in the adjacent Dublin Cattle market on the North Circular road.
Had he performed any special corporal work of mercy for her?
He had sometimes propelled her on warm summer evenings, an infirm widow
of independent, if limited, means, in her convalescent bathchair with
slow revolutions of its wheels as far as the corner of the North Circular
road opposite Mr Gavin Low's place of business where she had remained for
a certain time scanning through his onelensed binocular fieldglasses
unrecognisable citizens on tramcars, roadster bicycles equipped with
inflated pneumatic tyres, hackney carriages, tandems, private and hired
landaus, dogcarts, ponytraps and brakes passing from the city to the
Phoenix Park and vice versa.
Why could he then support that his vigil with the greater equanimity?
Because in middle youth he had often sat observing through a rondel of
bossed glass of a multicoloured pane the spectacle offered with continual
changes of the thoroughfare without, pedestrians, quadrupeds,
velocipedes, vehicles, passing slowly, quickly, evenly, round and round
and round the rim of a round and round precipitous globe.
What distinct different memories had each of her now eight years
deceased?
The older, her bezique cards and counters, her Skye terrier, her
suppositious wealth, her lapses of responsiveness and incipient catarrhal
deafness the younger, her lamp of colza oil before the statue of the
Immaculate Conception, her green and maroon brushes for Charles Stewart
Parnell and for Michael Davitt, her tissue papers.
Were there no means still remaining to him to achieve the rejuvenation
which these reminiscences divulged to a younger companion rendered the
more desirable?
The indoor exercises, formerly intermittently practised, subsequently
abandoned, prescribed in Eugen Sandow's PHYSICAL STRENGTH AND HOW TO
OBTAIN IT which, designed particularly for commercial men engaged in
sedentary occupations, were to be made with mental concentration in front
of a mirror so as to bring into play the various families of muscles and
produce successively a pleasant rigidity, a more pleasant relaxation and
the most pleasant repristination of juvenile agility.
Had any special agility been his in earlier youth?
Though ringweight lifting had been beyond his strength and the full
circle gyration beyond his courage yet as a High school scholar he had
excelled in his stable and protracted execution of the half lever
movement on the parallel bars in consequence of his abnormally developed
abdominal muscles.
Did either openly allude to their racial difference?
Neither.
What, reduced to their simplest reciprocal form, were Bloom's thoughts
about Stephen's thoughts about Bloom and about Stephen's thoughts about
Bloom's thoughts about Stephen?
He thought that he thought that he was a jew whereas he knew that he knew
that he knew that he was not.
What, the enclosures of reticence removed, were their respective
parentages?
Bloom, only born male transubstantial heir of Rudolf Virag subsequently
Rudolph Bloom of Szombathely, Vienna, Budapest, Milan, London and Dublin
and of Ellen Higgins, second daughter of Julius Higgins born Karoly and
Fanny Higgins born Hegarty. Stephen, eldest surviving male
consubstantial heir of Simon Dedalus of Cork and Dublin and of Mary,
daughter of Richard and Christina Goulding born Grier.
Had Bloom and Stephen been baptised, and where and by whom, cleric or
layman?
Bloom three times, by the reverend Mr Gilmer Johnston M. A., alone, in
the protestant church of Saint Nicholas Without, Coombe, by James
O'Connor, Philip Gilligan and James Fitzpatrick, together, under a pump
in the village of Swords, and by the reverend Charles Malone C. C., in
the church of the Three Patrons, Rathgar. Stephen once by the reverend
Charles Malone C. C., alone, in the church of the Three Patrons, Rathgar.
Did they find their educational careers similar?
Substituting Stephen for Bloom Stoom would have passed successively
through a dame's school and the high school. Substituting Bloom for
Stephen Blephen would have passed successively through the preparatory,
junior, middle and senior grades of the intermediate and through the
matriculation, first arts, second arts and arts degree courses of the
royal university.
Why did Bloom refrain from stating that he had frequented the university
of life?
Because of his fluctuating incertitude as to whether this observation had
or had not been already made by him to Stephen or by Stephen to him.
What two temperaments did they individually represent?
The scientific. The artistic.
What proofs did Bloom adduce to prove that his tendency was towards
applied, rather than towards pure, science?
Certain possible inventions of which he had cogitated when reclining in a
state of supine repletion to aid digestion, stimulated by his
appreciation of the importance of inventions now common but once
revolutionary, for example, the aeronautic parachute, the reflecting
telescope, the spiral corkscrew, the safety pin, the mineral water
siphon, the canal lock with winch and sluice, the suction pump.
Were these inventions principally intended for an improved scheme of
kindergarten?
Yes, rendering obsolete popguns, elastic airbladders, games of hazard,
catapults. They comprised astronomical kaleidoscopes exhibiting the
twelve constellations of the zodiac from Aries to Pisces, miniature
mechanical orreries, arithmetical gelatine lozenges, geometrical to
correspond with zoological biscuits, globemap playing balls, historically
costumed dolls.
What also stimulated him in his cogitations?
The financial success achieved by Ephraim Marks and Charles A. James, the
former by his d bazaar at  George's street, south, the latter at his
/d shop and world's fancy fair and waxwork exhibition at  Henry
street, admission d, children d and the infinite possibilities
hitherto unexploited of the modern art of advertisement if condensed in
triliteral monoideal symbols, vertically of maximum visibility divined,
horizontally of maximum legibility deciphered and of magnetising
efficacy to arrest involuntary attention, to interest, to convince, to
decide.
Such as?
K. II. Kino's / Trousers. House of Keys. Alexander J. Keyes.
Such as not?
Look at this long candle. Calculate when it burns out and you receive
gratis  pair of our special noncompo boots, guaranteed  candle power.
Address Barclay and Cook,  Talbot street.
Bacilikil Insect Powder. Veribest Boot Blacking. Uwantit Combined
pocket twoblade penknife with corkscrew, nailfile and pipecleaner.
Such as never?
What is home without Plumtree's Potted Meat?
Incomplete.
With it an abode of bliss.
Manufactured by George Plumtree,  Merchants' quay, Dublin, put up in 
oz pots, and inserted by Councillor Joseph P. Nannetti, M. P., Rotunda
Ward,  Hardwicke street, under the obituary notices and anniversaries
of deceases. The name on the label is Plumtree. A plumtree in a meatpot,
registered trade mark. Beware of imitations. Peatmot. Trumplee. Moutpat.
Plamtroo.
Which example did he adduce to induce Stephen to deduce that originality,
though producing its own reward, does not invariably conduce to success?
His own ideated and rejected project of an illuminated showcart, drawn by
a beast of burden, in which two smartly dressed girls were to be seated
engaged in writing.
What suggested scene was then constructed by Stephen?
Solitary hotel in mountain pass. Autumn. Twilight. Fire lit. In dark
corner young man seated. Young woman enters. Restless. Solitary. She
sits. She goes to window. She stands. She sits. Twilight. She thinks. On
solitary hotel paper she writes. She thinks. She writes. She sighs.
Wheels and hoofs. She hurries out. He comes from his dark corner. He
seizes solitary paper. He holds it towards fire. Twilight. He reads.
Solitary.
What?
In sloping, upright and backhands Queen's Hotel, Queen's Hotel, Queen's
Hotel. Queen's Ho...
What suggested scene was then reconstructed by Bloom?
The Queen's Hotel, Ennis, county Clare, where Rudolph Bloom Rudolf
Virag died on the evening of the  June , at some hour unstated, in
consequence of an overdose of monkshood aconite selfadministered in the
form of a neuralgic liniment composed of  parts of aconite liniment to I
of chloroform liniment purchased by him at . a.m. on the morning of
 June  at the medical hall of Francis Dennehy,  Church street,
Ennis after having, though not in consequence of having, purchased at
. p.m. on the afternoon of  June  a new boater straw hat, extra
smart after having, though not in consequence of having, purchased at
the hour and in the place aforesaid, the toxin aforesaid, at the general
drapery store of James Cullen,  Main street, Ennis.
Did he attribute this homonymity to information or coincidence or
intuition?
Coincidence.
Did he depict the scene verbally for his guest to see?
He preferred himself to see another's face and listen to another's words
by which potential narration was realised and kinetic temperament
relieved.
Did he see only a second coincidence in the second scene narrated to him,
described by the narrator as A PISGAH SIGHT OF PALESTINE OR THE PARABLE
OF THE PLUMS?
It, with the preceding scene and with others unnarrated but existent by
implication, to which add essays on various subjects or moral apothegms
e.g. MY FAVOURITE HERO OR PROCRASTINATION IS THE THIEF OF TIME composed
during schoolyears, seemed to him to contain in itself and in conjunction
with the personal equation certain possibilities of financial, social,
personal and sexual success, whether specially collected and selected as
model pedagogic themes of cent per cent merit for the use of
preparatory and junior grade students or contributed in printed form,
following the precedent of Philip Beaufoy or Doctor Dick or Heblon's
STUDIES IN BLUE, to a publication of certified circulation and solvency
or employed verbally as intellectual stimulation for sympathetic
auditors, tacitly appreciative of successful narrative and confidently
augurative of successful achievement, during the increasingly longer
nights gradually following the summer solstice on the day but three
following, videlicet, Tuesday,  June S. Aloysius Gonzaga, sunrise
. a.m., sunset . p.m.
Which domestic problem as much as, if not more than, any other frequently
engaged his mind?
What to do with our wives.
What had been his hypothetical singular solutions?
Parlour games dominos, halma, tiddledywinks, spilikins, cup and ball,
nap, spoil five, bezique, twentyfive, beggar my neighbour, draughts,
chess or backgammon embroidery, darning or knitting for the policeaided
clothing society musical duets, mandoline and guitar, piano and flute,
guitar and piano legal scrivenery or envelope addressing biweekly
visits to variety entertainments commercial activity as pleasantly
commanding and pleasingly obeyed mistress proprietress in a cool dairy
shop or warm cigar divan the clandestine satisfaction of erotic
irritation in masculine brothels, state inspected and medically
controlled social visits, at regular infrequent prevented intervals and
with regular frequent preventive superintendence, to and from female
acquaintances of recognised respectability in the vicinity courses of
evening instruction specially designed to render liberal instruction
agreeable.
What instances of deficient mental development in his wife inclined him
in favour of the lastmentioned ninth solution?
In disoccupied moments she had more than once covered a sheet of paper
with signs and hieroglyphics which she stated were Greek and Irish and
Hebrew characters. She had interrogated constantly at varying intervals
as to the correct method of writing the capital initial of the name of a
city in Canada, Quebec. She understood little of political complications,
internal, or balance of power, external. In calculating the addenda of
bills she frequently had recourse to digital aid. After completion of
laconic epistolary compositions she abandoned the implement of
calligraphy in the encaustic pigment, exposed to the corrosive action of
copperas, green vitriol and nutgall. Unusual polysyllables of foreign
origin she interpreted phonetically or by false analogy or by both
metempsychosis met him pike hoses, ALIAS a mendacious person mentioned
in sacred scripture.
What compensated in the false balance of her intelligence for these and
such deficiencies of judgment regarding persons, places and things?
The false apparent parallelism of all perpendicular arms of all balances,
proved true by construction. The counterbalance of her proficiency of
judgment regarding one person, proved true by experiment.
How had he attempted to remedy this state of comparative ignorance?
Variously. By leaving in a conspicuous place a certain book open at a
certain page by assuming in her, when alluding explanatorily, latent
knowledge by open ridicule in her presence of some absent other's
ignorant lapse.
With what success had he attempted direct instruction?
She followed not all, a part of the whole, gave attention with interest
comprehended with surprise, with care repeated, with greater difficulty
remembered, forgot with ease, with misgiving reremembered, rerepeated
with error.
What system had proved more effective?
Indirect suggestion implicating selfinterest.
Example?
She disliked umbrella with rain, he liked woman with umbrella, she
disliked new hat with rain, he liked woman with new hat, he bought new
hat with rain, she carried umbrella with new hat.
Accepting the analogy implied in his guest's parable which examples of
postexilic eminence did he adduce?
Three seekers of the pure truth, Moses of Egypt, Moses Maimonides, author
of MORE NEBUKIM Guide of the Perplexed and Moses Mendelssohn of such
eminence that from Moses of Egypt to Moses Mendelssohn there arose
none like Moses Maimonides.
What statement was made, under correction, by Bloom concerning a fourth
seeker of pure truth, by name Aristotle, mentioned, with permission, by
Stephen?
That the seeker mentioned had been a pupil of a rabbinical philosopher,
name uncertain.
Were other anapocryphal illustrious sons of the law and children of a
selected or rejected race mentioned?
Felix Bartholdy Mendelssohn composer, Baruch Spinoza philosopher,
Mendoza pugilist, Ferdinand Lassalle reformer, duellist.
What fragments of verse from the ancient Hebrew and ancient Irish
languages were cited with modulations of voice and translation of texts
by guest to host and by host to guest?
By Stephen SUIL, SUIL, SUIL ARUN, SUIL GO SIOCAIR AGUS SUIL GO CUIN
walk, walk, walk your way, walk in safety, walk with care.
By Bloom KIFELOCH, HARIMON RAKATEJCH M'BAAD L'ZAMATEJCH thy temple amid
thy hair is as a slice of pomegranate.
How was a glyphic comparison of the phonic symbols of both languages made
in substantiation of the oral comparison?
By juxtaposition. On the penultimate blank page of a book of inferior
literary style, entituled SWEETS OF SIN produced by Bloom and so
manipulated that its front cover carne in contact with the surface of the
table with a pencil supplied by Stephen Stephen wrote the Irish
characters for gee, eh, dee, em, simple and modified, and Bloom in turn
wrote the Hebrew characters ghimel, aleph, daleth and in the absence of
mem a substituted qoph, explaining their arithmetical values as ordinal
and cardinal numbers, videlicet , , , and .
Was the knowledge possessed by both of each of these languages, the
extinct and the revived, theoretical or practical?
Theoretical, being confined to certain grammatical rules of accidence and
syntax and practically excluding vocabulary.
What points of contact existed between these languages and between the
peoples who spoke them?
The presence of guttural sounds, diacritic aspirations, epenthetic and
servile letters in both languages their antiquity, both having been
taught on the plain of Shinar  years after the deluge in the seminary
instituted by Fenius Farsaigh, descendant of Noah, progenitor of Israel,
and ascendant of Heber and Heremon, progenitors of Ireland their
archaeological, genealogical, hagiographical, exegetical, homiletic,
toponomastic, historical and religious literatures comprising the works
of rabbis and culdees, Torah, Talmud Mischna and Ghemara, Massor,
Pentateuch, Book of the Dun Cow, Book of Ballymote, Garland of Howth,
Book of Kells their dispersal, persecution, survival and revival the
isolation of their synagogical and ecclesiastical rites in ghetto S.
Mary's Abbey and masshouse Adam and Eve's tavern the proscription of
their national costumes in penal laws and jewish dress acts the
restoration in Chanah David of Zion and the possibility of Irish
political autonomy or devolution.
What anthem did Bloom chant partially in anticipation of that multiple,
ethnically irreducible consummation?
KOLOD BALEJWAW PNIMAH
NEFESCH, JEHUDI, HOMIJAH.
Why was the chant arrested at the conclusion of this first distich?
In consequence of defective mnemotechnic.
How did the chanter compensate for this deficiency?
By a periphrastic version of the general text.
In what common study did their mutual reflections merge?
The increasing simplification traceable from the Egyptian epigraphic
hieroglyphs to the Greek and Roman alphabets and the anticipation of
modern stenography and telegraphic code in the cuneiform inscriptions
Semitic and the virgular quinquecostate ogham writing Celtic. Did the
guest comply with his host's request?
Doubly, by appending his signature in Irish and Roman characters.
What was Stephen's auditive sensation?
He heard in a profound ancient male unfamiliar melody the accumulation of
the past.
What was Bloom's visual sensation?
He saw in a quick young male familiar form the predestination of a future.
What were Stephen's and Bloom's quasisimultaneous volitional
quasisensations of concealed identities?
Visually, Stephen's The traditional figure of hypostasis, depicted by
Johannes Damascenus, Lentulus Romanus and Epiphanius Monachus as
leucodermic, sesquipedalian with winedark hair. Auditively, Bloom's The
traditional accent of the ecstasy of catastrophe.
What future careers had been possible for Bloom in the past and with what
exemplars?
In the church, Roman, Anglican or Nonconformist exemplars, the very
reverend John Conmee S. J., the reverend T. Salmon, D. D., provost of
Trinity college, Dr Alexander J. Dowie. At the bar, English or Irish
exemplars, Seymour Bushe, K. C., Rufus Isaacs, K. C. On the stage modern
or Shakespearean exemplars, Charles Wyndham, high comedian Osmond Tearle
died , exponent of Shakespeare.
Did the host encourage his guest to chant in a modulated voice a strange
legend on an allied theme?
Reassuringly, their place, where none could hear them talk, being
secluded, reassured, the decocted beverages, allowing for subsolid
residual sediment of a mechanical mixture, water plus sugar plus cream
plus cocoa, having been consumed.
Recite the first major part of this chanted legend.
LITTLE HARRY HUGHES AND HIS SCHOOLFELLOWS ALL
WENT OUT FOR TO PLAY BALL.
AND THE VERY FIRST BALL LITTLE HARRY HUGHES PLAYED
HE DROVE IT O'ER THE JEW'S GARDEN WALL.
AND THE VERY SECOND BALL LITTLE HARRY HUGHES PLAYED
HE BROKE THE JEW'S WINDOWS ALL.
How did the son of Rudolph receive this first part?
With unmixed feeling. Smiling, a jew he heard with pleasure and saw the
unbroken kitchen window.
Recite the second part minor of the legend.
THEN OUT THERE CAME THE JEW'S DAUGHTER
AND SHE ALL DRESSED IN GREEN.
"COME BACK, COME BACK, YOU PRETTY LITTLE BOY,
AND PLAY YOUR BALL AGAIN."
"I CAN'T COME BACK AND I WON'T COME BACK
WITHOUT MY SCHOOLFELLOWS ALL.
FOR IF MY MASTER HE DID HEAR
HE'D MAKE IT A SORRY BALL."
SHE TOOK HIM BY THE LILYWHITE HAND
AND LED HIM ALONG THE HALL
UNTIL SHE LED HIM TO A ROOM
WHERE NONE COULD HEAR HIM CALL.
SHE TOOK A PENKNIFE OUT OF HER POCKET
AND CUT OFF HIS LITTLE HEAD.
AND NOW HE'LL PLAY HIS BALL NO MORE
FOR HE LIES AMONG THE DEAD.
How did the father of Millicent receive this second part?
With mixed feelings. Unsmiling, he heard and saw with wonder a jew's
daughter, all dressed in green.
Condense Stephen's commentary.
One of all, the least of all, is the victim predestined. Once by
inadvertence twice by design he challenges his destiny. It comes when he
is abandoned and challenges him reluctant and, as an apparition of hope
and youth, holds him unresisting. It leads him to a strange habitation,
to a secret infidel apartment, and there, implacable, immolates him,
consenting.
Why was the host victim predestined sad?
He wished that a tale of a deed should be told of a deed not by him
should by him not be told.
Why was the host reluctant, unresisting still?
In accordance with the law of the conservation of energy.
Why was the host secret infidel silent?
He weighed the possible evidences for and against ritual murder the
incitations of the hierarchy, the superstition of the populace, the
propagation of rumour in continued fraction of veridicity, the envy of
opulence, the influence of retaliation, the sporadic reappearance of
atavistic delinquency, the mitigating circumstances of fanaticism,
hypnotic suggestion and somnambulism.
From which if any of these mental or physical disorders was he not
totally immune?
From hypnotic suggestion once, waking, he had not recognised his
sleeping apartment more than once, waking, he had been for an indefinite
time incapable of moving or uttering sounds. From somnambulism once,
sleeping, his body had risen, crouched and crawled in the direction of a
heatless fire and, having attained its destination, there, curled,
unheated, in night attire had lain, sleeping.
Had this latter or any cognate phenomenon declared itself in any member
of his family?
Twice, in Holles street and in Ontario terrace, his daughter Millicent
Milly at the ages of  and  years had uttered in sleep an exclamation
of terror and had replied to the interrogations of two figures in night
attire with a vacant mute expression.
What other infantile memories had he of her?
 June . A querulous newborn female infant crying to cause and
lessen congestion. A child renamed Padney Socks she shook with shocks her
moneybox counted his three free moneypenny buttons, one, tloo, tlee a
doll, a boy, a sailor she cast away blond, born of two dark, she had
blond ancestry, remote, a violation, Herr Hauptmann Hainau, Austrian
army, proximate, a hallucination, lieutenant Mulvey, British navy.
What endemic characteristics were present?
Conversely the nasal and frontal formation was derived in a direct line
of lineage which, though interrupted, would continue at distant intervals
to more distant intervals to its most distant intervals.
What memories had he of her adolescence?
She relegated her hoop and skippingrope to a recess. On the duke's lawn,
entreated by an English visitor, she declined to permit him to make and
take away her photographic image objection not stated. On the South
Circular road in the company of Elsa Potter, followed by an individual of
sinister aspect, she went half way down Stamer street and turned abruptly
back reason of change not stated. On the vigil of the th anniversary
of her birth she wrote a letter from Mullingar, county Westmeath, making
a brief allusion to a local student faculty and year not stated.
Did that first division, portending a second division, afflict him?
Less than he had imagined, more than he had hoped.
What second departure was contemporaneously perceived by him similarly,
if differently?
A temporary departure of his cat.
Why similarly, why differently?
Similarly, because actuated by a secret purpose the quest of a new male
Mullingar student or of a healing herb valerian. Differently, because
of different possible returns to the inhabitants or to the habitation.
In other respects were their differences similar?
In passivity, in economy, in the instinct of tradition, in
unexpectedness.
As?
Inasmuch as leaning she sustained her blond hair for him to ribbon it for
her cf neckarching cat. Moreover, on the free surface of the lake in
Stephen's green amid inverted reflections of trees her uncommented spit,
describing concentric circles of waterrings, indicated by the constancy
of its permanence the locus of a somnolent prostrate fish cf
mousewatching cat.
Again, in order to remember the date, combatants, issue and consequences
of a famous military engagement she pulled a plait of her hair cf
earwashing cat. Furthermore, silly Milly, she dreamed of having had an
unspoken unremembered conversation with a horse whose name had been
Joseph to whom which she had offered a tumblerful of lemonade which it
he had appeared to have accepted cf hearthdreaming cat. Hence, in
passivity, in economy, in the instinct of tradition, in unexpectedness,
their differences were similar.
In what way had he utilised gifts  an owl,  a clock, given as
matrimonial auguries, to interest and to instruct her?
As object lessons to explain  the nature and habits of oviparous
animals, the possibility of aerial flight, certain abnormalities of
vision, the secular process of imbalsamation  the principle of the
pendulum, exemplified in bob, wheelgear and regulator, the translation in
terms of human or social regulation of the various positions of clockwise
moveable indicators on an unmoving dial, the exactitude of the recurrence
per hour of an instant in each hour when the longer and the shorter
indicator were at the same angle of inclination, VIDELICET,  /
minutes past each hour per hour in arithmetical progression.
In what manners did she reciprocate?
She remembered on the th anniversary of his birth she presented to him
a breakfast moustachecup of imitation Crown Derby porcelain ware. She
provided at quarter day or thereabouts if or when purchases had been
made by him not for her she showed herself attentive to his necessities,
anticipating his desires. She admired a natural phenomenon having been
explained by him to her she expressed the immediate desire to possess
without gradual acquisition a fraction of his science, the moiety, the
quarter, a thousandth part.
What proposal did Bloom, diambulist, father of Milly, somnambulist, make
to Stephen, noctambulist?
To pass in repose the hours intervening between Thursday proper and
Friday normal on an extemporised cubicle in the apartment immediately
above the kitchen and immediately adjacent to the sleeping apartment of
his host and hostess.
What various advantages would or might have resulted from a prolongation
of such an extemporisation?
For the guest security of domicile and seclusion of study. For the host
rejuvenation of intelligence, vicarious satisfaction. For the hostess
disintegration of obsession, acquisition of correct Italian
pronunciation.
Why might these several provisional contingencies between a guest and a
hostess not necessarily preclude or be precluded by a permanent
eventuality of reconciliatory union between a schoolfellow and a jew's
daughter?
Because the way to daughter led through mother, the way to mother through
daughter.
To what inconsequent polysyllabic question of his host did the guest
return a monosyllabic negative answer?
If he had known the late Mrs Emily Sinico, accidentally killed at Sydney
Parade railway station,  October .
What inchoate corollary statement was consequently suppressed by the
host?
A statement explanatory of his absence on the occasion of the interment
of Mrs Mary Dedalus born Goulding,  June , vigil of the
anniversary of the decease of Rudolph Bloom born Virag.
Was the proposal of asylum accepted?
Promptly, inexplicably, with amicability, gratefully it was declined.
What exchange of money took place between host and guest?
The former returned to the latter, without interest, a sum of money
, one pound seven shillings sterling, advanced by the latter to
the former.
What counterproposals were alternately advanced, accepted, modified,
declined, restated in other terms, reaccepted, ratified, reconfirmed?
To inaugurate a prearranged course of Italian instruction, place the
residence of the instructed. To inaugurate a course of vocal instruction,
place the residence of the instructress. To inaugurate a series of static
semistatic and peripatetic intellectual dialogues, places the residence
of both speakers if both speakers were resident in the same place, the
Ship hotel and tavern,  Lower Abbey street W. and E. Connery,
proprietors, the National Library of Ireland,  Kildare street, the
National Maternity Hospital, ,  and  Holles street, a public
garden, the vicinity of a place of worship, a conjunction of two or more
public thoroughfares, the point of bisection of a right line drawn
between their residences if both speakers were resident in different
places.
What rendered problematic for Bloom the realisation of these mutually
selfexcluding propositions?
The irreparability of the past once at a performance of Albert Hengler's
circus in the Rotunda, Rutland square, Dublin, an intuitive particoloured
clown in quest of paternity had penetrated from the ring to a place in
the auditorium where Bloom, solitary, was seated and had publicly
declared to an exhilarated audience that he Bloom was his the clown's
papa. The imprevidibility of the future once in the summer of  he
Bloom had marked a florin / with three notches on the milled edge
and tendered it m payment of an account due to and received by J. and T.
Davy, family grocers,  Charlemont Mall, Grand Canal, for circulation on
the waters of civic finance, for possible, circuitous or direct, return.
Was the clown Bloom's son?
No.
Had Bloom's coin returned?
Never.
Why would a recurrent frustration the more depress him?
Because at the critical turningpoint of human existence he desired to
amend many social conditions, the product of inequality and avarice and
international animosity.
He believed then that human life was infinitely perfectible, eliminating
these conditions?
There remained the generic conditions imposed by natural, as distinct
from human law, as integral parts of the human whole the necessity of
destruction to procure alimentary sustenance the painful character of
the ultimate functions of separate existence, the agonies of birth and
death the monotonous menstruation of simian and particularly human
females extending from the age of puberty to the menopause inevitable
accidents at sea, in mines and factories certain very painful maladies
and their resultant surgical operations, innate lunacy and congenital
criminality, decimating epidemics catastrophic cataclysms which make
terror the basis of human mentality seismic upheavals the epicentres of
which are located in densely populated regions the fact of vital growth,
through convulsions of metamorphosis, from infancy through maturity to
decay.
Why did he desist from speculation?
Because it was a task for a superior intelligence to substitute other
more acceptable phenomena in the place of the less acceptable phenomena
to be removed.
Did Stephen participate in his dejection?
He affirmed his significance as a conscious rational animal proceeding
syllogistically from the known to the unknown and a conscious rational
reagent between a micro and a macrocosm ineluctably constructed upon the
incertitude of the void.
Was this affirmation apprehended by Bloom?
Not verbally. Substantially.
What comforted his misapprehension?
That as a competent keyless citizen he had proceeded energetically from
the unknown to the known through the incertitude of the void.
In what order of precedence, with what attendant ceremony was the exodus
from the house of bondage to the wilderness of inhabitation effected?
Lighted Candle in Stick borne by
BLOOM
Diaconal Hat on Ashplant borne by
STEPHEN
With what intonation secreto of what commemorative psalm?
The th, MODUS PEREGRINUS IN EXITU ISRAEL DE EGYPTO DOMUS JACOB DE
POPULO BARBARO.
What did each do at the door of egress?
Bloom set the candlestick on the floor. Stephen put the hat on his head.
For what creature was the door of egress a door of ingress?
For a cat.
What spectacle confronted them when they, first the host, then the guest,
emerged silently, doubly dark, from obscurity by a passage from the rere
of the house into the penumbra of the garden?
The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.
With what meditations did Bloom accompany his demonstration to his
companion of various constellations?
Meditations of evolution increasingly vaster of the moon invisible in
incipient lunation, approaching perigee of the infinite lattiginous
scintillating uncondensed milky way, discernible by daylight by an
observer placed at the lower end of a cylindrical vertical shaft  ft
deep sunk from the surface towards the centre of the earth of Sirius
alpha in Canis Maior  lightyears ,,,, miles distant
and in volume  times the dimension of our planet of Arcturus of the
precession of equinoxes of Orion with belt and sextuple sun theta and
nebula in which  of our solar systems could be contained of moribund
and of nascent new stars such as Nova in  of our system plunging
towards the constellation of Hercules of the parallax or parallactic
drift of socalled fixed stars, in reality evermoving wanderers from
immeasurably remote eons to infinitely remote futures in comparison with
which the years, threescore and ten, of allotted human life formed a
parenthesis of infinitesimal brevity.
Were there obverse meditations of involution increasingly less vast?
Of the eons of geological periods recorded in the stratifications of the
earth of the myriad minute entomological organic existences concealed in
cavities of the earth, beneath removable stones, in hives and mounds, of
microbes, germs, bacteria, bacilli, spermatozoa of the incalculable
trillions of billions of millions of imperceptible molecules contained by
cohesion of molecular affinity in a single pinhead of the universe of
human serum constellated with red and white bodies, themselves universes
of void space constellated with other bodies, each, in continuity, its
universe of divisible component bodies of which each was again divisible
in divisions of redivisible component bodies, dividends and divisors ever
diminishing without actual division till, if the progress were carried
far enough, nought nowhere was never reached.
Why did he not elaborate these calculations to a more precise result?
Because some years previously in  when occupied with the problem of
the quadrature of the circle he had learned of .the existence of a number
computed to a relative degree of accuracy to be of such magnitude and of
so many places, e.g., the th power of the th power of , that, the
result having been obtained,  closely printed volumes of  pages
each of innumerable quires and reams of India paper would have to be
requisitioned in order to contain the complete tale of its printed
integers of units, tens, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds
of thousands, millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions, billions,
the nucleus of the nebula of every digit of every series containing
succinctly the potentiality of being raised to the utmost kinetic
elaboration of any power of any of its powers.
Did he find the problems of the inhabitability of the planets and their
satellites by a race, given in species, and of the possible social and
moral redemption of said race by a redeemer, easier of solution?
Of a different order of difficulty. Conscious that the human organism,
normally capable of sustaining an atmospheric pressure of  tons, when
elevated to a considerable altitude in the terrestrial atmosphere
suffered with arithmetical progression of intensity, according as the
line of demarcation between troposphere and stratosphere was approximated
from nasal hemorrhage, impeded respiration and vertigo, when proposing
this problem for solution, he had conjectured as a working hypothesis
which could not be proved impossible that a more adaptable and
differently anatomically constructed race of beings might subsist
otherwise under Martian, Mercurial, Veneral, Jovian, Saturnian, Neptunian
or Uranian sufficient and equivalent conditions, though an apogean
humanity of beings created in varying forms with finite differences
resulting similar to the whole and to one another would probably there as
here remain inalterably and inalienably attached to vanities, to vanities
of vanities and to all that is vanity.
And the problem of possible redemption?
The minor was proved by the major.
Which various features of the constellations were in turn considered?
The various colours significant of various degrees of vitality white,
yellow, crimson, vermilion, cinnabar their degrees of brilliancy their
magnitudes revealed up to and including the th their positions the
waggoner's star Walsingham way the chariot of David the annular
cinctures of Saturn the condensation of spiral nebulae into suns the
interdependent gyrations of double suns the independent synchronous
discoveries of Galileo, Simon Marius, Piazzi, Le Verrier, Herschel,
Galle the systematisations attempted by Bode and Kepler of cubes of
distances and squares of times of revolution the almost infinite
compressibility of hirsute comets and their vast elliptical egressive and
reentrant orbits from perihelion to aphelion the sidereal origin of
meteoric stones the Libyan floods on Mars about the period of the birth
of the younger astroscopist the annual recurrence of meteoric showers
about the period of the feast of S. Lawrence martyr, lo August the
monthly recurrence known as the new moon with the old moon in her arms
the posited influence of celestial on human bodies the appearance of a
star st magnitude of exceeding brilliancy dominating by night and day
a new luminous sun generated by the collision and amalgamation in
incandescence of two nonluminous exsuns about the period of the birth of
William Shakespeare over delta in the recumbent neversetting
constellation of Cassiopeia and of a star nd magnitude of similar
origin but of lesser brilliancy which had appeared in and disappeared
from the constellation of the Corona Septentrionalis about the period of
the birth of Leopold Bloom and of other stars of presumably similar
origin which had effectively or presumably appeared in and disappeared
from the constellation of Andromeda about the period of the birth of
Stephen Dedalus, and in and from the constellation of Auriga some years
after the birth and death of Rudolph Bloom, junior, and in and from other
constellations some years before or after the birth or death of other
persons the attendant phenomena of eclipses, solar and lunar, from
immersion to emersion, abatement of wind, transit of shadow, taciturnity
of winged creatures, emergence of nocturnal or crepuscular animals,
persistence of infernal light, obscurity of terrestrial waters, pallor of
human beings.
His Bloom's logical conclusion, having weighed the matter and allowing
for possible error?
That it was not a heaventree, not a heavengrot, not a heavenbeast, not a
heavenman. That it was a Utopia, there being no known method from the
known to the unknown an infinity renderable equally finite by the
suppositious apposition of one or more bodies equally of the same and of
different magnitudes a mobility of illusory forms immobilised in space,
remobilised in air a past which possibly had ceased to exist as a
present before its probable spectators had entered actual present
existence.
Was he more convinced of the esthetic value of the spectacle?
Indubitably in consequence of the reiterated examples of poets in the
delirium of the frenzy of attachment or in the abasement of rejection
invoking ardent sympathetic constellations or the frigidity of the
satellite of their planet.
Did he then accept as an article of belief the theory of astrological
influences upon sublunary disasters?
It seemed to him as possible of proof as of confutation and the
nomenclature employed in its selenographical charts as attributable to
verifiable intuition as to fallacious analogy the lake of dreams, the
sea of rains, the gulf of dews, the ocean of fecundity.
What special affinities appeared to him to exist between the moon and
woman?
Her antiquity in preceding and surviving successive tellurian
generations her nocturnal predominance her satellitic dependence her
luminary reflection her constancy under all her phases, rising and
setting by her appointed times, waxing and waning the forced
invariability of her aspect her indeterminate response to inaffirmative
interrogation her potency over effluent and refluent waters her power
to enamour, to mortify, to invest with beauty, to render insane, to
incite to and aid delinquency the tranquil inscrutability of her visage
the terribility of her isolated dominant implacable resplendent
propinquity her omens of tempest and of calm the stimulation of her
light, her motion and her presence the admonition of her craters, her
arid seas, her silence her splendour, when visible her attraction, when
invisible.
What visible luminous sign attracted Bloom's, who attracted Stephen's,
gaze?
In the second storey rere of his Bloom's house the light of a
paraffin oil lamp with oblique shade projected on a screen of roller
blind supplied by Frank O'Hara, window blind, curtain pole and revolving
shutter manufacturer,  Aungier street.
How did he elucidate the mystery of an invisible attractive person, his
wife Marion Molly Bloom, denoted by a visible splendid sign, a lamp?
With indirect and direct verbal allusions or affirmations with subdued
affection and admiration with description with impediment with
suggestion.
Both then were silent?
Silent, each contemplating the other in both mirrors of the reciprocal
flesh of theirhisnothis fellowfaces.
Were they indefinitely inactive?
At Stephen's suggestion, at Bloom's instigation both, first Stephen, then
Bloom, in penumbra urinated, their sides contiguous, their organs of
micturition reciprocally rendered invisible by manual circumposition,
their gazes, first Bloom's, then Stephen's, elevated to the projected
luminous and semiluminous shadow.
Similarly?
The trajectories of their, first sequent, then simultaneous, urinations
were dissimilar Bloom's longer, less irruent, in the incomplete form of
the bifurcated penultimate alphabetical letter, who in his ultimate year
at High School  had been capable of attaining the point of greatest
altitude against the whole concurrent strength of the institution, 
scholars Stephen's higher, more sibilant, who in the ultimate hours of
the previous day had augmented by diuretic consumption an insistent
vesical pressure.
What different problems presented themselves to each concerning the
invisible audible collateral organ of the other?
To Bloom the problems of irritability, tumescence, rigidity, reactivity,
dimension, sanitariness, pilosity.
To Stephen the problem of the sacerdotal integrity of Jesus circumcised
I January, holiday of obligation to hear mass and abstain from
unnecessary servile work and the problem as to whether the divine
prepuce, the carnal bridal ring of the holy Roman catholic apostolic
church, conserved in Calcata, were deserving of simple hyperduly or of
the fourth degree of latria accorded to the abscission of such divine
excrescences as hair and toenails.
What celestial sign was by both simultaneously observed?
A star precipitated with great apparent velocity across the firmament
from Vega in the Lyre above the zenith beyond the stargroup of the Tress
of Berenice towards the zodiacal sign of Leo.
How did the centripetal remainer afford egress to the centrifugal
departer?
By inserting the barrel of an arruginated male key in the hole of an
unstable female lock, obtaining a purchase on the bow of the key and
turning its wards from right to left, withdrawing a bolt from its staple,
pulling inward spasmodically an obsolescent unhinged door and revealing
an aperture for free egress and free ingress.
How did they take leave, one of the other, in separation?
Standing perpendicular at the same door and on different sides of its
base, the lines of their valedictory arms, meeting at any point and
forming any angle less than the sum of two right angles.
What sound accompanied the union of their tangent, the disunion of their
respectively centrifugal and centripetal hands?
The sound of the peal of the hour of the night by the chime of the bells
in the church of Saint George.
What echoes of that sound were by both and each heard?
By Stephen
LILIATA RUTILANTIUM. TURMA CIRCUMDET.
IUBILANTIUM TE VIRGINUM. CHORUS EXCIPIAT.
By Bloom
HEIGHO, HEIGHO,
HEIGHO, HEIGHO.
Where were the several members of the company which with Bloom that day
at the bidding of that peal had travelled from Sandymount in the south to
Glasnevin in the north?
Martin Cunningham in bed, Jack Power in bed, Simon Dedalus in bed,
Ned Lambert in bed, Tom Kernan in bed, Joe Hynes in bed, John Henry
Menton in bed, Bernard Corrigan in bed, Patsy Dignam in bed, Paddy
Dignam in the grave.
Alone, what did Bloom hear?
The double reverberation of retreating feet on the heavenborn earth, the
double vibration of a jew's harp in the resonant lane.
Alone, what did Bloom feel?
The cold of interstellar space, thousands of degrees below freezing point
or the absolute zero of Fahrenheit, Centigrade or Reaumur the incipient
intimations of proximate dawn.
Of what did bellchime and handtouch and footstep and lonechill remind
him?
Of companions now in various manners in different places defunct Percy
Apjohn killed in action, Modder River, Philip Gilligan phthisis,
Jervis Street hospital, Matthew F. Kane accidental drowning, Dublin
Bay, Philip Moisel pyemia, Heytesbury street, Michael Hart phthisis,
Mater Misericordiae hospital, Patrick Dignam apoplexy, Sandymount.
What prospect of what phenomena inclined him to remain?
The disparition of three final stars, the diffusion of daybreak, the
apparition of a new solar disk.
Had he ever been a spectator of those phenomena?
Once, in , after a protracted performance of charades in the house of
Luke Doyle, Kimmage, he had awaited with patience the apparition of the
diurnal phenomenon, seated on a wall, his gaze turned in the direction of
Mizrach, the east.
He remembered the initial paraphenomena?
More active air, a matutinal distant cock, ecclesiastical clocks at
various points, avine music, the isolated tread of an early wayfarer, the
visible diffusion of the light of an invisible luminous body, the first
golden limb of the resurgent sun perceptible low on the horizon.
Did he remain?
With deep inspiration he returned, retraversing the garden, reentering
the passage, reclosing the door. With brief suspiration he reassumed the
candle, reascended the stairs, reapproached the door of the front room,
hallfloor, and reentered.
What suddenly arrested his ingress?
The right temporal lobe of the hollow sphere of his cranium came into
contact with a solid timber angle where, an infinitesimal but sensible
fraction of a second later, a painful sensation was located in
consequence of antecedent sensations transmitted and registered.
Describe the alterations effected in the disposition of the articles of
furniture.
A sofa upholstered in prune plush had been translocated from opposite the
door to the ingleside near the compactly furled Union Jack an alteration
which he had frequently intended to execute the blue and white checker
inlaid majolicatopped table had been placed opposite the door in the
place vacated by the prune plush sofa the walnut sideboard a projecting
angle of which had momentarily arrested his ingress had been moved from
its position beside the door to a more advantageous but more perilous
position in front of the door two chairs had been moved from right and
left of the ingleside to the position originally occupied by the blue and
white checker inlaid majolicatopped table.
Describe them.
One a squat stuffed easychair, with stout arms extended and back slanted
to the rere, which, repelled in recoil, had then upturned an irregular
fringe of a rectangular rug and now displayed on its amply upholstered
seat a centralised diffusing and diminishing discolouration. The other a
slender splayfoot chair of glossy cane curves, placed directly opposite
the former, its frame from top to seat and from seat to base being
varnished dark brown, its seat being a bright circle of white plaited
rush.
What significances attached to these two chairs?
Significances of similitude, of posture, of symbolism, of circumstantial
evidence, of testimonial supermanence.
What occupied the position originally occupied by the sideboard?
A vertical piano Cadby with exposed keyboard, its closed coffin
supporting a pair of long yellow ladies' gloves and an emerald ashtray
containing four consumed matches, a partly consumed cigarette and two
discoloured ends of cigarettes, its musicrest supporting the music in the
key of G natural for voice and piano of LOVE'S OLD SWEET SONG words by
G. Clifton Bingham, composed by J. L. Molloy, sung by Madam Antoinette
Sterling open at the last page with the final indications AD LIBITUM,
FORTE, pedal, ANIMATO, sustained pedal, RITIRANDO, close.
With what sensations did Bloom contemplate in rotation these objects?
With strain, elevating a candlestick with pain, feeling on his right
temple a contused tumescence with attention, focussing his gaze on a
large dull passive and a slender bright active with solicitation,
bending and downturning the upturned rugfringe with amusement,
remembering Dr Malachi Mulligan's scheme of colour containing the
gradation of green with pleasure, repeating the words and antecedent act
and perceiving through various channels of internal sensibility the
consequent and concomitant tepid pleasant diffusion of gradual
discolouration.
His next proceeding?
From an open box on the majolicatopped table he extracted a black
diminutive cone, one inch in height, placed it on its circular base on a
small tin plate, placed his candlestick on the right corner of the
mantelpiece, produced from his waistcoat a folded page of prospectus
illustrated entitled Agendath Netaim, unfolded the same, examined it
superficially, rolled it into a thin cylinder, ignited it in the
candleflame, applied it when ignited to the apex of the cone till the
latter reached the stage of rutilance, placed the cylinder in the basin
of the candlestick disposing its unconsumed part in such a manner as to
facilitate total combustion.
What followed this operation?
The truncated conical crater summit of the diminutive volcano emitted a
vertical and serpentine fume redolent of aromatic oriental incense.
What homothetic objects, other than the candlestick, stood on the
mantelpiece?
A timepiece of striated Connemara marble, stopped at the hour of .
a.m. on the  March , matrimonial gift of Matthew Dillon a dwarf
tree of glacial arborescence under a transparent bellshade, matrimonial
gift of Luke and Caroline Doyle an embalmed owl, matrimonial gift of
Alderman John Hooper.
What interchanges of looks took place between these three objects and
Bloom?
In the mirror of the giltbordered pierglass the undecorated back of the
dwarf tree regarded the upright back of the embalmed owl. Before the
mirror the matrimonial gift of Alderman John Hooper with a clear
melancholy wise bright motionless compassionate gaze regarded Bloom while
Bloom with obscure tranquil profound motionless compassionated gaze
regarded the matrimonial gift of Luke and Caroline Doyle.
What composite asymmetrical image in the mirror then attracted his
attention?
The image of a solitary ipsorelative mutable aliorelative man.
Why solitary ipsorelative?
BROTHERS AND SISTERS HAD HE NONE.
YET THAT MAN'S FATHER WAS HIS GRANDFATHER'S SON.
Why mutable aliorelative?
From infancy to maturity he had resembled his maternal procreatrix. From
maturity to senility he would increasingly resemble his paternal
procreator.
What final visual impression was communicated to him by the mirror?
The optical reflection of several inverted volumes improperly arranged
and not in the order of their common letters with scintillating titles on
the two bookshelves opposite.
Catalogue these books.
THOM'S DUBLIN POST OFFICE DIRECTORY, .
Denis Florence M'Carthy's POETICAL WORKS copper beechleaf bookmark
at p. .
Shakespeare's WORKS dark crimson morocco, goldtooled.
THE USEFUL READY RECKONER brown cloth.
THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE COURT OF CHARLES II red cloth, tooled
binding.
THE CHILD'S GUIDE blue cloth.
The Beauties of Killarney wrappers.
WHEN WE WERE BOYS by William O'Brien M. P. green cloth, slightly faded,
envelope bookmark at p. .
THOUGHTS FROM SPINOZA maroon leather.
THE STORY OF THE HEAVENS by Sir Robert Ball blue cloth.
Ellis's THREE TRIPS TO MADAGASCAR brown cloth, title obliterated.
THE STARKMUNRO LETTERS by A. Conan Doyle, property of the City of
Dublin Public Library,  Capel street, lent  May Whitsun Eve
, due  June ,  days overdue black cloth binding, bearing
white letternumber ticket.
VOYAGES IN CHINA by "Viator" recovered with brown paper, red ink title.
PHILOSOPHY OF THE TALMUD sewn pamphlet.
Lockhart's LIFE OF NAPOLEON cover wanting, marginal annotations,
minimising victories, aggrandising defeats of the protagonist.
SOLL UND HABEN by Gustav Freytag black boards, Gothic characters,
cigarette coupon bookmark at p. .
Hozier's HISTORY OF THE RUSSOTURKISH WAR brown cloth, a volumes, with
gummed label, Garrison Library, Governor's Parade, Gibraltar, on verso
of cover.
LAURENCE BLOOMFIELD IN IRELAND by William Allingham second edition,
green cloth, gilt trefoil design, previous owner's name on recto of
flyleaf erased.
A HANDBOOK OF ASTRONOMY cover, brown leather, detached, S plates,
antique letterpress long primer, author's footnotes nonpareil, marginal
clues brevier, captions small pica.
THE HIDDEN LIFE OF CHRIST black boards.
IN THE TRACK OF THE SUN yellow cloth, titlepage missing, recurrent title
intestation.
PHYSICAL STRENGTH AND HOW TO OBTAIN IT by Eugen Sandow red cloth.
SHORT BUT YET PLAIN ELEMENTS OF GEOMETRY written in French by F. Ignat.
Pardies and rendered into English by John Harris D. D. London,
printed for R. Knaplock at the Bifhop's Head, MDCCXI, with dedicatory
epiftle to his worthy friend Charles Cox, efquire, Member of
Parliament for the burgh of Southwark and having ink calligraphed
statement on the flyleaf certifying that the book was the property of
Michael Gallagher, dated this th day of May  and requefting the
perfon who should find it, if the book should be loft or go aftray,
to reftore it to Michael Gallagher, carpenter, Dufery Gate,
Ennifcorthy, county Wicklow, the fineft place in the world.
What reflections occupied his mind during the process of reversion of the
inverted volumes?
The necessity of order, a place for everything and everything in its
place the deficient appreciation of literature possessed by females the
incongruity of an apple incuneated in a tumbler and of an umbrella
inclined in a closestool the insecurity of hiding any secret document
behind, beneath or between the pages of a book.
Which volume was the largest in bulk?
Hozier's HISTORY OF THE RUSSOTURKISH WAR.
What among other data did the second volume of the work in question
contain?
The name of a decisive battle forgotten, frequently remembered by a
decisive officer, major Brian Cooper Tweedy remembered.
Why, firstly and secondly, did he not consult the work in question?
Firstly, in order to exercise mnemotechnic secondly, because after an
interval of amnesia, when, seated at the central table, about to consult
the work in question, he remembered by mnemotechnic the name of the
military engagement, Plevna.
What caused him consolation in his sitting posture?
The candour, nudity, pose, tranquility, youth, grace, sex, counsel of a
statue erect in the centre of the table, an image of Narcissus purchased
by auction from P. A. Wren,  Bachelor's Walk.
What caused him irritation in his sitting posture? Inhibitory pressure of
collar size  and waistcoat  buttons, two articles of clothing
superfluous in the costume of mature males and inelastic to alterations
of mass by expansion.
How was the irritation allayed?
He removed his collar, with contained black necktie and collapsible stud,
from his neck to a position on the left of the table. He unbuttoned
successively in reversed direction waistcoat, trousers, shirt and vest
along the medial line of irregular incrispated black hairs extending in
triangular convergence from the pelvic basin over the circumference of
the abdomen and umbilicular fossicle along the medial line of nodes to
the intersection of the sixth pectoral vertebrae, thence produced both
ways at right angles and terminating in circles described about two
equidistant points, right and left, on the summits of the mammary
prominences. He unbraced successively each of six minus one braced
trouser buttons, arranged in pairs, of which one incomplete.
What involuntary actions followed?
He compressed between  fingers the flesh circumjacent to a cicatrice in
the left infracostal region below the diaphragm resulting from a sting
inflicted  weeks and  days previously  May  by a bee. He
scratched imprecisely with his right hand, though insensible of
prurition, various points and surfaces of his partly exposed, wholly
abluted skin. He inserted his left hand into the left lower pocket of his
waistcoat and extracted and replaced a silver coin I shilling, placed
there presumably on the occasion  October  of the interment of
Mrs Emily Sinico, Sydney Parade.
Compile the budget for  June .
DEBIT CREDIT
Lsd Lsd
 Pork kidney  Cash in Hand 
 Copy FREEMAN'S JOURNAL  Commission recd FREEMAN'S JOURNAL 
 Bath And Gratification  Loan Stephen Dedalus 
Tramfare 
 In Memoriam
Patrick Dignam 
 Banbury cakes 
 Lunch 
 Renewal fee for book 
 Packet Notepaper
and Envelopes 
 Dinner
and Gratification 
I Postal Order
and Stamp 
Tramfare 
 Pig's Foot 
 Sheep's Trotter 
 Cake Fry's
Plain Chocolate 
 Square Soda Bread 
 Coffee and Bun 
Loan Stephen Dedalus
refunded 
BALANCE 
Did the process of divestiture continue?
Sensible of a benignant persistent ache in his footsoles he extended his
foot to one side and observed the creases, protuberances and salient
points caused by foot pressure in the course of walking repeatedly in
several different directions, then, inclined, he disnoded the laceknots,
unhooked and loosened the laces, took off each of his two boots for the
second time, detached the partially moistened right sock through the fore
part of which the nail of his great toe had again effracted, raised his
right foot and, having unhooked a purple elastic sock suspender, took off
his right sock, placed his unclothed right foot on the margin of the seat
of his chair, picked at and gently lacerated the protruding part of the
great toenail, raised the part lacerated to his nostrils and inhaled the
odour of the quick, then, with satisfaction, threw away the lacerated
ungual fragment.
Why with satisfaction?
Because the odour inhaled corresponded to other odours inhaled of other
ungual fragments, picked and lacerated by Master Bloom, pupil of Mrs
Ellis's juvenile school, patiently each night in the act of brief
genuflection and nocturnal prayer and ambitious meditation.
In what ultimate ambition had all concurrent and consecutive ambitions
now coalesced?
Not to inherit by right of primogeniture, gavelkind or borough English,
or possess in perpetuity an extensive demesne of a sufficient number of
acres, roods and perches, statute land measure valuation  pounds, of
grazing turbary surrounding a baronial hall with gatelodge and carriage
drive nor, on the other hand, a terracehouse or semidetached villa,
described as RUS IN URBE or QUI SI SANA, but to purchase by private
treaty in fee simple a thatched bungalowshaped  storey dwellinghouse of
southerly aspect, surmounted by vane and lightning conductor, connected
with the earth, with porch covered by parasitic plants ivy or Virginia
creeper, halldoor, olive green, with smart carriage finish and neat
doorbrasses, stucco front with gilt tracery at eaves and gable, rising,
if possible, upon a gentle eminence with agreeable prospect from balcony
with stone pillar parapet over unoccupied and unoccupyable interjacent
pastures and standing in  or  acres of its own ground, at such a
distance from the nearest public thoroughfare as to render its
houselights visible at night above and through a quickset hornbeam hedge
of topiary cutting, situate at a given point not less than  statute mile
from the periphery of the metropolis, within a time limit of not more
than  minutes from tram or train line e.g., Dundrum, south, or Sutton,
north, both localities equally reported by trial to resemble the
terrestrial poles in being favourable climates for phthisical subjects,
the premises to be held under feefarm grant, lease  years, the
messuage to consist of  drawingroom with baywindow  lancets,
thermometer affixed,  sittingroom,  bedrooms,  servants' rooms, tiled
kitchen with close range and scullery, lounge hall fitted with linen
wallpresses, fumed oak sectional bookcase containing the Encyclopaedia
Britannica and New Century Dictionary, transverse obsolete medieval and
oriental weapons, dinner gong, alabaster lamp, bowl pendant, vulcanite
automatic telephone receiver with adjacent directory, handtufted
Axminster carpet with cream ground and trellis border, loo table with
pillar and claw legs, hearth with massive firebrasses and ormolu mantel
chronometer clock, guaranteed timekeeper with cathedral chime, barometer
with hygrographic chart, comfortable lounge settees and corner fitments,
upholstered in ruby plush with good springing and sunk centre, three
banner Japanese screen and cuspidors club style, rich winecoloured
leather, gloss renewable with a minimum of labour by use of linseed oil
and vinegar and pyramidically prismatic central chandelier lustre,
bentwood perch with fingertame parrot expurgated language, embossed
mural paper at / per dozen with transverse swags of carmine floral
design and top crown frieze, staircase, three continuous flights at
successive right angles, of varnished cleargrained oak, treads and
risers, newel, balusters and handrail, with steppedup panel dado, dressed
with camphorated wax bathroom, hot and cold supply, reclining and
shower water closet on mezzanine provided with opaque singlepane oblong
window, tipup seat, bracket lamp, brass tierod and brace, armrests,
footstool and artistic oleograph on inner face of door ditto, plain
servants' apartments with separate sanitary and hygienic necessaries for
cook, general and betweenmaid salary, rising by biennial unearned
increments of  pounds, with comprehensive fidelity insurance, annual
bonus  pound and retiring allowance based on the  system after 
years' service, pantry, buttery, larder, refrigerator, outoffices, coal
and wood cellarage with winebin still and sparkling vintages for
distinguished guests, if entertained to dinner evening dress, carbon
monoxide gas supply throughout.
What additional attractions might the grounds contain?
As addenda, a tennis and fives court, a shrubbery, a glass summerhouse
with tropical palms, equipped in the best botanical manner, a rockery
with waterspray, a beehive arranged on humane principles, oval flowerbeds
in rectangular grassplots set with eccentric ellipses of scarlet and
chrome tulips, blue scillas, crocuses, polyanthus, sweet William, sweet
pea, lily of the valley bulbs obtainable from sir James W. Mackey
Limited wholesale and retail seed and bulb merchants and nurserymen,
agents for chemical manures,  Sackville street, upper, an orchard,
kitchen garden and vinery protected against illegal trespassers by
glasstopped mural enclosures, a lumbershed with padlock for various
inventoried implements.
As?
Eeltraps, lobsterpots, fishingrods, hatchet, steelyard, grindstone,
clodcrusher, swatheturner, carriagesack, telescope ladder,  tooth rake,
washing clogs, haytedder, tumbling rake, billhook, paintpot, brush, hoe
and so on.
What improvements might be subsequently introduced?
A rabbitry and fowlrun, a dovecote, a botanical conservatory,  hammocks
lady's and gentleman's, a sundial shaded and sheltered by laburnum or
lilac trees, an exotically harmonically accorded Japanese tinkle gatebell
affixed to left lateral gatepost, a capacious waterbutt, a lawnmower with
side delivery and grassbox, a lawnsprinkler with hydraulic hose.
What facilities of transit were desirable?
When citybound frequent connection by train or tram from their respective
intermediate station or terminal. When countrybound velocipedes, a
chainless freewheel roadster cycle with side basketcar attached, or
draught conveyance, a donkey with wicker trap or smart phaeton with good
working solidungular cob roan gelding,  h.
What might be the name of this erigible or erected residence?
Bloom Cottage. Saint Leopold's. Flowerville.
Could Bloom of  Eccles street foresee Bloom of Flowerville?
In loose allwool garments with Harris tweed cap, price /, and useful
garden boots with elastic gussets and wateringcan, planting aligned young
firtrees, syringing, pruning, staking, sowing hayseed, trundling a
weedladen wheelbarrow without excessive fatigue at sunset amid the scent
of newmown hay, ameliorating the soil, multiplying wisdom, achieving
longevity.
What syllabus of intellectual pursuits was simultaneously possible?
Snapshot photography, comparative study of religions, folklore relative
to various amatory and superstitious practices, contemplation of the
celestial constellations.
What lighter recreations?
Outdoor garden and fieldwork, cycling on level macadamised causeways
ascents of moderately high hills, natation in secluded fresh water and
unmolested river boating in secure wherry or light curricle with kedge
anchor on reaches free from weirs and rapids period of estivation,
vespertinal perambulation or equestrian circumprocession with inspection
of sterile landscape and contrastingly agreeable cottagers' fires of
smoking peat turves period of hibernation. Indoor discussion in tepid
security of unsolved historical and criminal problems lecture of
unexpurgated exotic erotic masterpieces house carpentry with toolbox
containing hammer, awl nails, screws, tintacks, gimlet, tweezers,
bullnose plane and turnscrew. Might he become a gentleman farmer of field
produce and live stock?
Not impossibly, with  or  stripper cows,  pike of upland hay and
requisite farming implements, e.g., an endtoend churn, a turnip pulper
etc.
What would be his civic functions and social status among the county
families and landed gentry?
Arranged successively in ascending powers of hierarchical order, that of
gardener, groundsman, cultivator, breeder, and at the zenith of his
career, resident magistrate or justice of the peace with a family crest
and coat of arms and appropriate classical motto SEMPER PARATUS, duly
recorded in the court directory Bloom, Leopold P., M. P., P. C., K. P.,
L. L. D. HONORIS CAUSA, Bloomville, Dundrum and mentioned in court and
fashionable intelligence Mr and Mrs Leopold Bloom have left Kingstown
for England.
What course of action did he outline for himself in such capacity?
A course that lay between undue clemency and excessive rigour the
dispensation in a heterogeneous society of arbitrary classes, incessantly
rearranged in terms of greater and lesser social inequality, of unbiassed
homogeneous indisputable justice, tempered with mitigants of the widest
possible latitude but exactable to the uttermost farthing with
confiscation of estate, real and personal, to the crown. Loyal to the
highest constituted power in the land, actuated by an innate love of
rectitude his aims would be the strict maintenance of public order, the
repression of many abuses though not of all simultaneously every measure
of reform or retrenchment being a preliminary solution to be contained by
fluxion in the final solution, the upholding of the letter of the law
common, statute and law merchant against all traversers in covin and
trespassers acting in contravention of bylaws and regulations, all
resuscitators by trespass and petty larceny of kindlings of venville
rights, obsolete by desuetude, all orotund instigators of international
persecution, all perpetuators of international animosities, all menial
molestors of domestic conviviality, all recalcitrant violators of
domestic connubiality.
Prove that he had loved rectitude from his earliest youth.
To Master Percy Apjohn at High School in  he had divulged his
disbelief in the tenets of the Irish protestant church to which his
father Rudolf Virag later Rudolph Bloom had been converted from the
Israelitic faith and communion in  by the Society for promoting
Christianity among the jews subsequently abjured by him in favour of
Roman catholicism at the epoch of and with a view to his matrimony in
. To Daniel Magrane and Francis Wade in  during a juvenile
friendship terminated by the premature emigration of the former he had
advocated during nocturnal perambulations the political theory of
colonial e.g. Canadian expansion and the evolutionary theories of
Charles Darwin, expounded in THE DESCENT OF MAN and THE ORIGIN OF
SPECIES. In  he had publicly expressed his adherence to the
collective and national economic programme advocated by James Fintan
Lalor, John Fisher Murray, John Mitchel, J. F. X. O'Brien and others, the
agrarian policy of Michael Davitt, the constitutional agitation of
Charles Stewart Parnell M. P. for Cork City, the programme of peace,
retrenchment and reform of William Ewart Gladstone M. P. for Midlothian,
N. B. and, in support of his political convictions, had climbed up into
a secure position amid the ramifications of a tree on Northumberland road
to see the entrance  February  into the capital of a demonstrative
torchlight procession of , torchbearers, divided into  trade
corporations, bearing  torches in escort of the marquess of Ripon and
honest John Morley.
How much and how did he propose to pay for this country residence?
As per prospectus of the Industrious Foreign Acclimatised Nationalised
Friendly Stateaided Building Society incorporated , a maximum of 
pounds per annum, being / of an assured income, derived from giltedged
securities, representing at  percent simple interest on capital of 
pounds estimate of price at  years' purchase, of which to be paid
on acquisition and the balance in the form of annual rent, viz. 
pounds plus  / percent interest on the same, repayable quarterly in
equal annual instalments until extinction by amortisation of loan
advanced for purchase within a period of  years, amounting to an annual
rental of  pounds, headrent included, the titledeeds to remain in
possession of the lender or lenders with a saving clause envisaging
forced sale, foreclosure and mutual compensation in the event of
protracted failure to pay the terms assigned, otherwise the messuage to
become the absolute property of the tenant occupier upon expiry of the
period of years stipulated.
What rapid but insecure means to opulence might facilitate immediate
purchase?
A private wireless telegraph which would transmit by dot and dash system
the result of a national equine handicap flat or steeplechase of I or
more miles and furlongs won by an outsider at odds of  to  at  hr  m
p.m. at Ascot Greenwich time, the message being received and available
for betting purposes in Dublin at . p.m. Dunsink time. The
unexpected discovery of an object of great monetary value precious
stone, valuable adhesive or impressed postage stamps  schilling, mauve,
imperforate, Hamburg,   pence, rose, blue paper, perforate, Great
Britain,   franc, stone, official, rouletted, diagonal surcharge,
Luxemburg, , antique dynastical ring, unique relic in unusual
repositories or by unusual means from the air dropped by an eagle in
flight, by fire amid the carbonised remains of an incendiated edifice,
in the sea amid flotsam, jetsam, lagan and derelict, on earth in the
gizzard of a comestible fowl. A Spanish prisoner's donation of a distant
treasure of valuables or specie or bullion lodged with a solvent banking
corporation loo years previously at  percent compound interest of the
collective worth of ,, pounds stg five million pounds sterling.
A contract with an inconsiderate contractee for the delivery of 
consignments of some given commodity in consideration of cash payment on
delivery per delivery at the initial rate of /d to be increased
constantly in the geometrical progression of  /d, /d, d, d, d,
d, s d, s d to  terms. A prepared scheme based on a study of the
laws of probability to break the bank at Monte Carlo. A solution of the
secular problem of the quadrature of the circle, government premium
,, pounds sterling.
Was vast wealth acquirable through industrial channels?
The reclamation of dunams of waste arenary soil, proposed in the
prospectus of Agendath Netaim, Bleibtreustrasse, Berlin, W. , by the
cultivation of orange plantations and melonfields and reafforestation.
The utilisation of waste paper, fells of sewer rodents, human excrement
possessing chemical properties, in view of the vast production of the
first, vast number of the second and immense quantity of the third, every
normal human being of average vitality and appetite producing annually,
cancelling byproducts of water, a sum total of  lbs. mixed animal and
vegetable diet, to be multiplied by ,,, the total population of
Ireland according to census returns of .
Were there schemes of wider scope?
A scheme to be formulated and submitted for approval to the harbour
commissioners for the exploitation of white coal hydraulic power,
obtained by hydroelectric plant at peak of tide at Dublin bar or at head
of water at Poulaphouca or Powerscourt or catchment basins of main
streams for the economic production of , W. H. P. of electricity. A
scheme to enclose the peninsular delta of the North Bull at Dollymount
and erect on the space of the foreland, used for golf links and rifle
ranges, an asphalted esplanade with casinos, booths, shooting galleries,
hotels, boardinghouses, readingrooms, establishments for mixed bathing. A
scheme for the use of dogvans and goatvans for the delivery of early
morning milk. A scheme for the development of Irish tourist traffic in
and around Dublin by means of petrolpropelled riverboats, plying in the
fluvial fairway between Island bridge and Ringsend, charabancs, narrow
gauge local railways, and pleasure steamers for coastwise navigation
/ per person per day, guide trilingual included. A scheme for the
repristination of passenger and goods traffics over Irish waterways, when
freed from weedbeds. A scheme to connect by tramline the Cattle Market
North Circular road and Prussia street with the quays Sheriff street,
lower, and East Wall, parallel with the Link line railway laid in
conjunction with the Great Southern and Western railway line between the
cattle park, Liffey junction, and terminus of Midland Great Western
Railway  to  North Wall, in proximity to the terminal stations or
Dublin branches of Great Central Railway, Midland Railway of England,
City of Dublin Steam Packet Company, Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway
Company, Dublin and Glasgow Steam Packet Company, Glasgow, Dublin and
Londonderry Steam Packet Company Laird line, British and Irish Steam
Packet Company, Dublin and Morecambe Steamers, London and North Western
Railway Company, Dublin Port and Docks Board Landing Sheds and transit
sheds of Palgrave, Murphy and Company, steamship owners, agents for
steamers from Mediterranean, Spain, Portugal, France, Belgium and Holland
and for Liverpool Underwriters' Association, the cost of acquired rolling
stock for animal transport and of additional mileage operated by the
Dublin United Tramways Company, limited, to be covered by graziers' fees.
Positing what protasis would the contraction for such several schemes
become a natural and necessary apodosis?
Given a guarantee equal to the sum sought, the support, by deed of gift
and transfer vouchers during donor's lifetime or by bequest after donor's
painless extinction, of eminent financiers Blum Pasha, Rothschild
Guggenheim, Hirsch, Montefiore, Morgan, Rockefeller possessing fortunes
in  figures, amassed during a successful life, and joining capital with
opportunity the thing required was done.
What eventuality would render him independent of such wealth?
The independent discovery of a goldseam of inexhaustible ore.
For what reason did he meditate on schemes so difficult of realisation?
It was one of his axioms that similar meditations or the automatic
relation to himself of a narrative concerning himself or tranquil
recollection of the past when practised habitually before retiring for
the night alleviated fatigue and produced as a result sound repose and
renovated vitality.
His justifications?
As a physicist he had learned that of the  years of complete human life
at least /, viz.  years are passed in sleep. As a philosopher he knew
that at the termination of any allotted life only an infinitesimal part
of any person's desires has been realised. As a physiologist he believed
in the artificial placation of malignant agencies chiefly operative
during somnolence.
What did he fear?
The committal of homicide or suicide during sleep by an aberration of the
light of reason, the incommensurable categorical intelligence situated in
the cerebral convolutions.
What were habitually his final meditations?
Of some one sole unique advertisement to cause passers to stop in wonder,
a poster novelty, with all extraneous accretions excluded, reduced to its
simplest and most efficient terms not exceeding the span of casual vision
and congruous with the velocity of modern life.
What did the first drawer unlocked contain?
A Vere Foster's handwriting copybook, property of Milly Millicent
Bloom, certain pages of which bore diagram drawings, marked PAPLI, which
showed a large globular head with  hairs erect,  eyes in profile, the
trunk full front with  large buttons,  triangular foot  fading
photographs of queen Alexandra of England and of Maud Branscombe, actress
and professional beauty a Yuletide card, bearing on it a pictorial
representation of a parasitic plant, the legend MIZPAH, the date Xmas
, the name of the senders from Mr  Mrs M. Comerford, the versicle
MAY THIS YULETIDE BRING TO THEE, JOY AND PEACE AND WELCOME GLEE a butt
of red partly liquefied sealing wax, obtained from the stores department
of Messrs Hely's, Ltd., , , and  Dame street a box containing the
remainder of a gross of gilt "J" pennibs, obtained from same department
of same firm an old sandglass which rolled containing sand which rolled
a sealed prophecy never unsealed written by Leopold Bloom in 
concerning the consequences of the passing into law of William Ewart
Gladstone's Home Rule bill of  never passed into law a bazaar
ticket, no , of S. Kevin's Charity Fair, price d,  prizes an
infantile epistle, dated, small em monday, reading capital pee Papli
comma capital aitch How are you note of interrogation capital eye I am
very well full stop new paragraph signature with flourishes capital em
Milly no stop a cameo brooch, property of Ellen Bloom born Higgins,
deceased a cameo scarfpin, property of Rudolph Bloom born Virag,
deceased  typewritten letters, addressee, Henry Flower, c/o. P. O.
Westland Row, addresser, Martha Clifford, c/o. P. O. Dolphin's Barn the
transliterated name and address of the addresser of the  letters in
reversed alphabetic boustrophedonic punctated quadrilinear cryptogram
vowels suppressed N. IGS./WI. UU. OX/W. OKS. MH/Y. IM a press cutting
from an English weekly periodical MODERN SOCIETY, subject corporal
chastisement in girls' schools a pink ribbon which had festooned an
Easter egg in the year  two partly uncoiled rubber preservatives
with reserve pockets, purchased by post from Box , P. O., Charing
Cross, London, W. C.  pack of  dozen creamlaid envelopes and
feintruled notepaper, watermarked, now reduced by  some assorted
AustrianHungarian coins  coupons of the Royal and Privileged Hungarian
Lottery a lowpower magnifying glass  erotic photocards showing a
buccal coition between nude senorita rere presentation, superior
position and nude torero fore presentation, inferior position b anal
violation by male religious fully clothed, eyes abject of female
religious partly clothed, eyes direct, purchased by post from Box ,
P. O., Charing Cross, London, W. C. a press cutting of recipe for
renovation of old tan boots a Id adhesive stamp, lavender, of the reign
of Queen Victoria a chart of the measurements of Leopold Bloom compiled
before, during and after  months' consecutive use of SandowWhiteley's
pulley exerciser men's /, athlete's / viz. chest  in and  /
in, biceps  in and  in, forearm  / in and  in, thigh  in and 
in, calf  in and  in  prospectus of The Wonderworker, the world's
greatest remedy for rectal complaints, direct from Wonderworker, Coventry
House, South Place, London E C, addressed erroneously to Mrs L. Bloom
with brief accompanying note commencing erroneously Dear Madam.
Quote the textual terms in which the prospectus claimed advantages for
this thaumaturgic remedy.
It heals and soothes while you sleep, in case of trouble in breaking
wind, assists nature in the most formidable way, insuring instant relief
in discharge of gases, keeping parts clean and free natural action, an
initial outlay of / making a new man of you and life worth living.
Ladies find Wonderworker especially useful, a pleasant surprise when they
note delightful result like a cool drink of fresh spring water on a
sultry summer's day. Recommend it to your lady and gentlemen friends,
lasts a lifetime. Insert long round end. Wonderworker.
Were there testimonials?
Numerous. From clergyman, British naval officer, wellknown author, city
man, hospital nurse, lady, mother of five, absentminded beggar.
How did absentminded beggar's concluding testimonial conclude?
What a pity the government did not supply our men with wonderworkers
during the South African campaign What a relief it would have been
What object did Bloom add to this collection of objects?
A th typewritten letter received by Henry Flower let H. F. be L. B.
from Martha Clifford find M. C..
What pleasant reflection accompanied this action?
The reflection that, apart from the letter in question, his magnetic
face, form and address had been favourably received during the course of
the preceding day by a wife Mrs Josephine Breen, born Josie Powell, a
nurse, Miss Callan Christian name unknown, a maid, Gertrude Gerty,
family name unknown.
What possibility suggested itself?
The possibility of exercising virile power of fascination in the not
immediate future after an expensive repast in a private apartment in the
company of an elegant courtesan, of corporal beauty, moderately
mercenary, variously instructed, a lady by origin.
What did the nd drawer contain?
Documents the birth certificate of Leopold Paula Bloom an endowment
assurance policy of  pounds in the Scottish Widows' Assurance Society,
intestated Millicent Milly Bloom, coming into force at  years as with
profit policy of  pounds, // and  pounds at  years or
death,  years or death and death, respectively, or with profit policy
paidup of // together with cash payment of //, at option a
bank passbook issued by the Ulster Bank, College Green branch showing
statement of a/c for halfyear ending  December , balance in
depositor's favour // eighteen pounds, fourteen shillings and
sixpence, sterling, net personalty certificate of possession of 
pounds, Canadian  percent inscribed government stock free of stamp
duty dockets of the Catholic Cemeteries' Glasnevin Committee,
relative to a graveplot purchased a local press cutting concerning
change of name by deedpoll.
Quote the textual terms of this notice.
I, Rudolph Virag, now resident at no  Clanbrassil street, Dublin,
formerly of Szombathely in the kingdom of Hungary, hereby give notice
that I have assumed and intend henceforth upon all occasions and at all
times to be known by the name of Rudolph Bloom.
What other objects relative to Rudolph Bloom born Virag were in the nd
drawer?
An indistinct daguerreotype of Rudolf Virag and his father Leopold Virag
executed in the year  in the portrait atelier of their respectively
st and nd cousin, Stefan Virag of Szesfehervar, Hungary. An ancient
haggadah book in which a pair of hornrimmed convex spectacles inserted
marked the passage of thanksgiving in the ritual prayers for Pessach
Passover a photocard of the Queen's Hotel, Ennis, proprietor, Rudolph
Bloom an envelope addressed TO MY DEAR SON LEOPOLD.
What fractions of phrases did the lecture of those five whole words
evoke?
Tomorrow will be a week that I received... it is no use Leopold to be ...
with your dear mother ... that is not more to stand ... to her ... all
for me is out ... be kind to Athos, Leopold ... my dear son ... always
... of me ... DAS HERZ ... GOTT ... DEIN ...
What reminiscences of a human subject suffering from progressive
melancholia did these objects evoke in Bloom?
An old man, widower, unkempt of hair, in bed, with head covered, sighing
an infirm dog, Athos aconite, resorted to by increasing doses of grains
and scruples as a palliative of recrudescent neuralgia the face in death
of a septuagenarian, suicide by poison.
Why did Bloom experience a sentiment of remorse?
Because in immature impatience he had treated with disrespect certain
beliefs and practices.
As?
The prohibition of the use of fleshmeat and milk at one meal the
hebdomadary symposium of incoordinately abstract, perfervidly concrete
mercantile coexreligionist excompatriots the circumcision of male
infants the supernatural character of Judaic scripture the ineffability
of the tetragrammaton the sanctity of the sabbath.
How did these beliefs and practices now appear to him?
Not more rational than they had then appeared, not less rational than
other beliefs and practices now appeared.
What first reminiscence had he of Rudolph Bloom deceased?
Rudolph Bloom deceased narrated to his son Leopold Bloom aged  a
retrospective arrangement of migrations and settlements in and between
Dublin, London, Florence, Milan, Vienna, Budapest, Szombathely with
statements of satisfaction his grandfather having seen Maria Theresia,
empress of Austria, queen of Hungary, with commercial advice having
taken care of pence, the pounds having taken care of themselves. Leopold
Bloom aged  had accompanied these narrations by constant consultation
of a geographical map of Europe political and by suggestions for the
establishment of affiliated business premises in the various centres
mentioned.
Had time equally but differently obliterated the memory of these
migrations in narrator and listener?
In narrator by the access of years and in consequence of the use of
narcotic toxin in listener by the access of years and in consequence of
the action of distraction upon vicarious experiences.
What idiosyncracies of the narrator were concomitant products of amnesia?
Occasionally he ate without having previously removed his hat.
Occasionally he drank voraciously the juice of gooseberry fool from an
inclined plate. Occasionally he removed from his lips the traces of food
by means of a lacerated envelope or other accessible fragment of paper.
What two phenomena of senescence were more frequent?
The myopic digital calculation of coins, eructation consequent upon
repletion.
What object offered partial consolation for these reminiscences?
The endowment policy, the bank passbook, the certificate of the
possession of scrip.
Reduce Bloom by cross multiplication of reverses of fortune, from which
these supports protected him, and by elimination of all positive values
to a negligible negative irrational unreal quantity.
Successively, in descending helotic order Poverty that of the outdoor
hawker of imitation jewellery, the dun for the recovery of bad and
doubtful debts, the poor rate and deputy cess collector. Mendicancy that
of the fraudulent bankrupt with negligible assets paying s. d. in the
pound, sandwichman, distributor of throwaways, nocturnal vagrant,
insinuating sycophant, maimed sailor, blind stripling, superannuated
bailiffs man, marfeast, lickplate, spoilsport, pickthank, eccentric
public laughingstock seated on bench of public park under discarded
perforated umbrella. Destitution the inmate of Old Man's House Royal
Hospital Kilmainham, the inmate of Simpson's Hospital for reduced but
respectable men permanently disabled by gout or want of sight. Nadir of
misery the aged impotent disfranchised ratesupported moribund lunatic
pauper.
With which attendant indignities?
The unsympathetic indifference of previously amiable females, the
contempt of muscular males, the acceptance of fragments of bread, the
simulated ignorance of casual acquaintances, the latration of
illegitimate unlicensed vagabond dogs, the infantile discharge of
decomposed vegetable missiles, worth little or nothing, nothing or less
than nothing.
By what could such a situation be precluded?
By decease change of state by departure change of place.
Which preferably?
The latter, by the line of least resistance.
What considerations rendered departure not entirely undesirable?
Constant cohabitation impeding mutual toleration of personal defects. The
habit of independent purchase increasingly cultivated. The necessity to
counteract by impermanent sojourn the permanence of arrest.
What considerations rendered departure not irrational?
The parties concerned, uniting, had increased and multiplied, which being
done, offspring produced and educed to maturity, the parties, if not
disunited were obliged to reunite for increase and multiplication, which
was absurd, to form by reunion the original couple of uniting parties,
which was impossible.
What considerations rendered departure desirable?
The attractive character of certain localities in Ireland and abroad, as
represented in general geographical maps of polychrome design or in
special ordnance survey charts by employment of scale numerals and
hachures.
In Ireland?
The cliffs of Moher, the windy wilds of Connemara, lough Neagh with
submerged petrified city, the Giant's Causeway, Fort Camden and Fort
Carlisle, the Golden Vale of Tipperary, the islands of Aran, the pastures
of royal Meath, Brigid's elm in Kildare, the Queen's Island shipyard in
Belfast, the Salmon Leap, the lakes of Killarney.
Abroad?
Ceylon with spicegardens supplying tea to Thomas Kernan, agent for
Pulbrook, Robertson and Co,  Mincing Lane, London, E. C.,  Dame street,
Dublin, Jerusalem, the holy city with mosque of Omar and gate of
Damascus, goal of aspiration, the straits of Gibraltar the unique
birthplace of Marion Tweedy, the Parthenon containing statues of nude
Grecian divinities, the Wall street money market which controlled
international finance, the Plaza de Toros at La Linea, Spain where
O'Hara of the Camerons had slain the bull, Niagara over which no human
being had passed with impunity, the land of the Eskimos eaters of
soap, the forbidden country of Thibet from which no traveller returns,
the bay of Naples to see which was to die, the Dead Sea.
Under what guidance, following what signs?
At sea, septentrional, by night the polestar, located at the point of
intersection of the right line from beta to alpha in Ursa Maior produced
and divided externally at omega and the hypotenuse of the rightangled
triangle formed by the line alpha omega so produced and the line alpha
delta of Ursa Maior. On land, meridional, a bispherical moon, revealed in
imperfect varying phases of lunation through the posterior interstice of
the imperfectly occluded skirt of a carnose negligent perambulating
female, a pillar of the cloud by day.
What public advertisement would divulge the occultation of the departed?
 pounds reward, lost, stolen or strayed from his residence  Eccles
street, missing gent about , answering to the name of Bloom, Leopold
Poldy, height  ft  / inches, full build, olive complexion, may have
since grown a beard, when last seen was wearing a black suit. Above sum
will be paid for information leading to his discovery.
What universal binomial denominations would be his as entity and
nonentity?
Assumed by any or known to none. Everyman or Noman.
What tributes his?
Honour and gifts of strangers, the friends of Everyman. A nymph immortal,
beauty, the bride of Noman.
Would the departed never nowhere nohow reappear?
Ever he would wander, selfcompelled, to the extreme limit of his cometary
orbit, beyond the fixed stars and variable suns and telescopic planets,
astronomical waifs and strays, to the extreme boundary of space, passing
from land to land, among peoples, amid events. Somewhere imperceptibly he
would hear and somehow reluctantly, suncompelled, obey the summons of
recall. Whence, disappearing from the constellation of the Northern Crown
he would somehow reappear reborn above delta in the constellation of
Cassiopeia and after incalculable eons of peregrination return an
estranged avenger, a wreaker of justice on malefactors, a dark crusader,
a sleeper awakened, with financial resources by supposition surpassing
those of Rothschild or the silver king.
What would render such return irrational?
An unsatisfactory equation between an exodus and return in time through
reversible space and an exodus and return in space through irreversible
time.
What play of forces, inducing inertia, rendered departure undesirable?
The lateness of the hour, rendering procrastinatory the obscurity of the
night, rendering invisible the uncertainty of thoroughfares, rendering
perilous the necessity for repose, obviating movement the proximity of
an occupied bed, obviating research the anticipation of warmth human
tempered with coolness linen, obviating desire and rendering desirable
the statue of Narcissus, sound without echo, desired desire.
What advantages were possessed by an occupied, as distinct from an
unoccupied bed?
The removal of nocturnal solitude, the superior quality of human mature
female to inhuman hotwaterjar calefaction, the stimulation of
matutinal contact, the economy of mangling done on the premises in the
case of trousers accurately folded and placed lengthwise between the
spring mattress striped and the woollen mattress biscuit section.
What past consecutive causes, before rising preapprehended, of
accumulated fatigue did Bloom, before rising, silently recapitulate?
The preparation of breakfast burnt offering intestinal congestion and
premeditative defecation holy of holies the bath rite of John the
funeral rite of Samuel the advertisement of Alexander Keyes Urim and
Thummim the unsubstantial lunch rite of Melchisedek the visit to
museum and national library holy place the bookhunt along Bedford row,
Merchants' Arch, Wellington Quay Simchath Torah the music in the
Ormond Hotel Shira Shirim the altercation with a truculent troglodyte
in Bernard Kiernan's premises holocaust a blank period of time
including a cardrive, a visit to a house of mourning, a leavetaking
wilderness the eroticism produced by feminine exhibitionism rite of
Onan the prolonged delivery of Mrs Mina Purefoy heave offering the
visit to the disorderly house of Mrs Bella Cohen,  Tyrone street, lower
and subsequent brawl and chance medley in Beaver street Armageddon
nocturnal perambulation to and from the cabman's shelter, Butt Bridge
atonement.
What selfimposed enigma did Bloom about to rise in order to go so as to
conclude lest he should not conclude involuntarily apprehend?
The cause of a brief sharp unforeseen heard loud lone crack emitted by
the insentient material of a strainveined timber table.
What selfinvolved enigma did Bloom risen, going, gathering multicoloured
multiform multitudinous garments, voluntarily apprehending, not
comprehend?
Who was M'Intosh?
What selfevident enigma pondered with desultory constancy during  years
did Bloom now, having effected natural obscurity by the extinction of
artificial light, silently suddenly comprehend?
Where was Moses when the candle went out?
What imperfections in a perfect day did Bloom, walking, charged with
collected articles of recently disvested male wearing apparel, silently,
successively, enumerate?
A provisional failure to obtain renewal of an advertisement to obtain a
certain quantity of tea from Thomas Kernan agent for Pulbrook, Robertson
and Co,  Dame Street, Dublin, and  Mincing Lane, London E. C. to
certify the presence or absence of posterior rectal orifice in the case
of Hellenic female divinities to obtain admission gratuitous or paid
to the performance of Leah by Mrs Bandmann Palmer at the Gaiety Theatre,
, , ,  South King street.
What impression of an absent face did Bloom, arrested, silently recall?
The face of her father, the late Major Brian Cooper Tweedy, Royal Dublin
Fusiliers, of Gibraltar and Rehoboth, Dolphin's Barn.
What recurrent impressions of the same were possible by hypothesis?
Retreating, at the terminus of the Great Northern Railway, Amiens street,
with constant uniform acceleration, along parallel lines meeting at
infinity, if produced along parallel lines, reproduced from infinity,
with constant uniform retardation, at the terminus of the Great Northern
Railway, Amiens street, returning.
What miscellaneous effects of female personal wearing apparel were
perceived by him?
A pair of new inodorous halfsilk black ladies' hose, a pair of new violet
garters, a pair of outsize ladies' drawers of India mull, cut on generous
lines, redolent of opoponax, jessamine and Muratti's Turkish cigarettes
and containing a long bright steel safety pin, folded curvilinear, a
camisole of batiste with thin lace border, an accordion underskirt of
blue silk moirette, all these objects being disposed irregularly on the
top of a rectangular trunk, quadruple battened, having capped corners,
with multicoloured labels, initialled on its fore side in white lettering
B. C. T. Brian Cooper Tweedy.
What impersonal objects were perceived?
A commode, one leg fractured, totally covered by square cretonne cutting,
apple design, on which rested a lady's black straw hat. Orangekeyed ware,
bought of Henry Price, basket, fancy goods, chinaware and ironmongery
manufacturer, , ,  Moore street, disposed irregularly on the
washstand and floor and consisting of basin, soapdish and brushtray on
the washstand, together, pitcher and night article on the floor,
separate.
Bloom's acts?
He deposited the articles of clothing on a chair, removed his remaining
articles of clothing, took from beneath the bolster at the head of the
bed a folded long white nightshirt, inserted his head and arms into the
proper apertures of the nightshirt, removed a pillow from the head to the
foot of the bed, prepared the bedlinen accordingly and entered the bed.
How?
With circumspection, as invariably when entering an abode his own or not
his own with solicitude, the snakespiral springs of the mattress being
old, the brass quoits and pendent viper radii loose and tremulous under
stress and strain prudently, as entering a lair or ambush of lust or
adders lightly, the less to disturb reverently, the bed of conception
and of birth, of consummation of marriage and of breach of marriage, of
sleep and of death.
What did his limbs, when gradually extended, encounter?
New clean bedlinen, additional odours, the presence of a human form,
female, hers, the imprint of a human form, male, not his, some crumbs,
some flakes of potted meat, recooked, which he removed.
If he had smiled why would he have smiled?
To reflect that each one who enters imagines himself to be the first to
enter whereas he is always the last term of a preceding series even if
the first term of a succeeding one, each imagining himself to be first,
last, only and alone whereas he is neither first nor last nor only nor
alone in a series originating in and repeated to infinity.
What preceding series?
Assuming Mulvey to be the first term of his series, Penrose, Bartell
d'Arcy, professor Goodwin, Julius Mastiansky, John Henry Menton, Father
Bernard Corrigan, a farmer at the Royal Dublin Society's Horse Show,
Maggot O'Reilly, Matthew Dillon, Valentine Blake Dillon Lord Mayor of
Dublin, Christopher Callinan, Lenehan, an Italian organgrinder, an
unknown gentleman in the Gaiety Theatre, Benjamin Dollard, Simon Dedalus,
Andrew Pisser Burke, Joseph Cuffe, Wisdom Hely, Alderman John Hooper,
Dr Francis Brady, Father Sebastian of Mount Argus, a bootblack at the
General Post Office, Hugh E. Blazes Boylan and so each and so on to no
last term.
What were his reflections concerning the last member of this series and
late occupant of the bed?
Reflections on his vigour a bounder, corporal proportion a
billsticker, commercial ability a bester, impressionability a
boaster.
Why for the observer impressionability in addition to vigour, corporal
proportion and commercial ability?
Because he had observed with augmenting frequency in the preceding
members of the same series the same concupiscence, inflammably
transmitted, first with alarm, then with understanding, then with desire,
finally with fatigue, with alternating symptoms of epicene comprehension
and apprehension.
With what antagonistic sentiments were his subsequent reflections
affected?
Envy, jealousy, abnegation, equanimity.
Envy?
Of a bodily and mental male organism specially adapted for the
superincumbent posture of energetic human copulation and energetic piston
and cylinder movement necessary for the complete satisfaction of a
constant but not acute concupiscence resident in a bodily and mental
female organism, passive but not obtuse.
Jealousy?
Because a nature full and volatile in its free state, was alternately the
agent and reagent of attraction. Because attraction between agents and
reagents at all instants varied, with inverse proportion of increase
and decrease, with incessant circular extension and radial reentrance.
Because the controlled contemplation of the fluctuation of attraction
produced, if desired, a fluctuation of pleasure.
Abnegation?
In virtue of a acquaintance initiated in September  in the
establishment of George Mesias, merchant tailor and outfitter,  Eden
Quay, b hospitality extended and received in kind, reciprocated and
reappropriated in person, c comparative youth subject to impulses of
ambition and magnanimity, colleagual altruism and amorous egoism, d
extraracial attraction, intraracial inhibition, supraracial prerogative,
e an imminent provincial musical tour, common current expenses, net
proceeds divided.
Equanimity?
As as natural as any and every natural act of a nature expressed or
understood executed in natured nature by natural creatures in accordance
with his, her and their natured natures, of dissimilar similarity. As not
so calamitous as a cataclysmic annihilation of the planet in consequence
of a collision with a dark sun. As less reprehensible than theft, highway
robbery, cruelty to children and animals, obtaining money under false
pretences, forgery, embezzlement, misappropriation of public money,
betrayal of public trust, malingering, mayhem, corruption of minors,
criminal libel, blackmail, contempt of court, arson, treason, felony,
mutiny on the high seas, trespass, burglary, jailbreaking, practice of
unnatural vice, desertion from armed forces in the field, perjury,
poaching, usury, intelligence with the king's enemies, impersonation,
criminal assault, manslaughter, wilful and premeditated murder. As not
more abnormal than all other parallel processes of adaptation to altered
conditions of existence, resulting in a reciprocal equilibrium between
the bodily organism and its attendant circumstances, foods, beverages,
acquired habits, indulged inclinations, significant disease. As more than
inevitable, irreparable.
Why more abnegation than jealousy, less envy than equanimity?
From outrage matrimony to outrage adultery there arose nought but
outrage copulation yet the matrimonial violator of the matrimonially
violated had not been outraged by the adulterous violator of the
adulterously violated.
What retribution, if any?
Assassination, never, as two wrongs did not make one right. Duel by
combat, no. Divorce, not now. Exposure by mechanical artifice automatic
bed or individual testimony concealed ocular witnesses, not yet. Suit
for damages by legal influence or simulation of assault with evidence of
injuries sustained selfinflicted, not impossibly. Hushmoney by moral
influence possibly. If any, positively, connivance, introduction of
emulation material, a prosperous rival agency of publicity moral, a
successful rival agent of intimacy, depreciation, alienation,
humiliation, separation protecting the one separated from the other,
protecting the separator from both.
By what reflections did he, a conscious reactor against the void of
incertitude, justify to himself his sentiments?
The preordained frangibility of the hymen the presupposed intangibility
of the thing in itself the incongruity and disproportion between the
selfprolonging tension of the thing proposed to be done and the
selfabbreviating relaxation of the thing done the fallaciously inferred
debility of the female the muscularity of the male the variations of
ethical codes the natural grammatical transition by inversion involving
no alteration of sense of an aorist preterite proposition parsed as
masculine subject, monosyllabic onomatopoeic transitive verb with direct
feminine object from the active voice into its correlative aorist
preterite proposition parsed as feminine subject, auxiliary verb and
quasimonosyllabic onomatopoeic past participle with complementary
masculine agent in the passive voice the continued product of
seminators by generation the continual production of semen by
distillation the futility of triumph or protest or vindication the
inanity of extolled virtue the lethargy of nescient matter the apathy
of the stars.
In what final satisfaction did these antagonistic sentiments and
reflections, reduced to their simplest forms, converge?
Satisfaction at the ubiquity in eastern and western terrestrial
hemispheres, in all habitable lands and islands explored or unexplored
the land of the midnight sun, the islands of the blessed, the isles of
Greece, the land of promise, of adipose anterior and posterior female
hemispheres, redolent of milk and honey and of excretory sanguine and
seminal warmth, reminiscent of secular families of curves of amplitude,
insusceptible of moods of impression or of contrarieties of expression,
expressive of mute immutable mature animality.
The visible signs of antesatisfaction?
An approximate erection a solicitous adversion a gradual elevation a
tentative revelation a silent contemplation.
Then?
He kissed the plump mellow yellow smellow melons of her rump, on each
plump melonous hemisphere, in their mellow yellow furrow, with obscure
prolonged provocative melonsmellonous osculation.
The visible signs of postsatisfaction?
A silent contemplation a tentative velation a gradual abasement a
solicitous aversion a proximate erection.
What followed this silent action?
Somnolent invocation, less somnolent recognition, incipient excitation,
catechetical interrogation.
With what modifications did the narrator reply to this interrogation?
Negative he omitted to mention the clandestine correspondence between
Martha Clifford and Henry Flower, the public altercation at, in and in
the vicinity of the licensed premises of Bernard Kiernan and Co, Limited,
,  and  Little Britain street, the erotic provocation and response
thereto caused by the exhibitionism of Gertrude Gerty, surname unknown.
Positive he included mention of a performance by Mrs Bandmann Palmer of
LEAH at the Gaiety Theatre, , , ,  South King street, an
invitation to supper at Wynn's Murphy's Hotel, ,  and  Lower
Abbey street, a volume of peccaminous pornographical tendency entituled
SWEETS OF SIN, anonymous author a gentleman of fashion, a temporary
concussion caused by a falsely calculated movement in the course of a
postcenal gymnastic display, the victim since completely recovered
being Stephen Dedalus, professor and author, eldest surviving son of
Simon Dedalus, of no fixed occupation, an aeronautical feat executed by
him narrator in the presence of a witness, the professor and author
aforesaid, with promptitude of decision and gymnastic flexibility.
Was the narration otherwise unaltered by modifications?
Absolutely.
Which event or person emerged as the salient point of his narration?
Stephen Dedalus, professor and author.
What limitations of activity and inhibitions of conjugal rights were
perceived by listener and narrator concerning themselves during the
course of this intermittent and increasingly more laconic narration?
By the listener a limitation of fertility inasmuch as marriage had been
celebrated  calendar month after the th anniversary of her birth 
September , viz.  October, and consummated on the same date with
female issue born  June , having been anticipatorily consummated on
the lo September of the same year and complete carnal intercourse, with
ejaculation of semen within the natural female organ, having last taken
place  weeks previous, viz.  November , to the birth on 
December  of second and only male issue, deceased  January ,
aged  days, there remained a period of  years,  months and  days
during which carnal intercourse had been incomplete, without ejaculation
of semen within the natural female organ. By the narrator a limitation of
activity, mental and corporal, inasmuch as complete mental intercourse
between himself and the listener had not taken place since the
consummation of puberty, indicated by catamenic hemorrhage, of the female
issue of narrator and listener,  September , there remained a
period of  months and  day during which, in consequence of a
preestablished natural comprehension in incomprehension between the
consummated females listener and issue, complete corporal liberty of
action had been circumscribed.
How?
By various reiterated feminine interrogation concerning the masculine
destination whither, the place where, the time at which, the duration for
which, the object with which in the case of temporary absences, projected
or effected.
What moved visibly above the listener's and the narrator's invisible
thoughts?
The upcast reflection of a lamp and shade, an inconstant series of
concentric circles of varying gradations of light and shadow.
In what directions did listener and narrator lie?
Listener, S. E. by E. Narrator, N. W. by W. on the rd parallel of
latitude, N., and th meridian of longitude, W. at an angle of 
degrees to the terrestrial equator.
In what state of rest or motion?
At rest relatively to themselves and to each other. In motion being each
and both carried westward, forward and rereward respectively, by the
proper perpetual motion of the earth through everchanging tracks of
neverchanging space.
In what posture?
Listener reclined semilaterally, left, left hand under head, right leg
extended in a straight line and resting on left leg, flexed, in the
attitude of GeaTellus, fulfilled, recumbent, big with seed. Narrator
reclined laterally, left, with right and left legs flexed, the index
finger and thumb of the right hand resting on the bridge of the nose, in
the attitude depicted in a snapshot photograph made by Percy Apjohn, the
childman weary, the manchild in the womb.
Womb? Weary?
He rests. He has travelled.
With?
Sinbad the Sailor and Tinbad the Tailor and Jinbad the Jailer and Whinbad
the Whaler and Ninbad the Nailer and Finbad the Failer and Binbad the
Bailer and Pinbad the Pailer and Minbad the Mailer and Hinbad the Hailer
and Rinbad the Railer and Dinbad the Kailer and Vinbad the Quailer and
Linbad the Yailer and Xinbad the Phthailer.
When?
Going to dark bed there was a square round Sinbad the Sailor roc's auk's
egg in the night of the bed of all the auks of the rocs of Darkinbad the
Brightdayler.
Where?
Yes because he never did a thing like that before as ask to get his
breakfast in bed with a couple of eggs since the CITY ARMS hotel when he
used to be pretending to be laid up with a sick voice doing his highness
to make himself interesting for that old faggot Mrs Riordan that he
thought he had a great leg of and she never left us a farthing all for
masses for herself and her soul greatest miser ever was actually afraid
to lay out d for her methylated spirit telling me all her ailments she
had too much old chat in her about politics and earthquakes and the end
of the world let us have a bit of fun first God help the world if all the
women were her sort down on bathingsuits and lownecks of course nobody
wanted her to wear them I suppose she was pious because no man would look
at her twice I hope Ill never be like her a wonder she didnt want us to
cover our faces but she was a welleducated woman certainly and her gabby
talk about Mr Riordan here and Mr Riordan there I suppose he was glad to
get shut of her and her dog smelling my fur and always edging to get up
under my petticoats especially then still I like that in him polite to
old women like that and waiters and beggars too hes not proud out of
nothing but not always if ever he got anything really serious the matter
with him its much better for them to go into a hospital where everything
is clean but I suppose Id have to dring it into him for a month yes and
then wed have a hospital nurse next thing on the carpet have him staying
there till they throw him out or a nun maybe like the smutty photo he has
shes as much a nun as Im not yes because theyre so weak and puling when
theyre sick they want a woman to get well if his nose bleeds youd think
it was O tragic and that dyinglooking one off the south circular when he
sprained his foot at the choir party at the sugarloaf Mountain the day I
wore that dress Miss Stack bringing him flowers the worst old ones she
could find at the bottom of the basket anything at all to get into a mans
bedroom with her old maids voice trying to imagine he was dying on
account of her to never see thy face again though he looked more like a
man with his beard a bit grown in the bed father was the same besides I
hate bandaging and dosing when he cut his toe with the razor paring his
corns afraid hed get bloodpoisoning but if it was a thing I was sick then
wed see what attention only of course the woman hides it not to give all
the trouble they do yes he came somewhere Im sure by his appetite anyway
love its not or hed be off his feed thinking of her so either it was one
of those night women if it was down there he was really and the hotel
story he made up a pack of lies to hide it planning it Hynes kept me who
did I meet ah yes I met do you remember Menton and who else who let me
see that big babbyface I saw him and he not long married flirting with a
young girl at Pooles Myriorama and turned my back on him when he slinked
out looking quite conscious what harm but he had the impudence to make up
to me one time well done to him mouth almighty and his boiled eyes of all
the big stupoes I ever met and thats called a solicitor only for I hate
having a long wrangle in bed or else if its not that its some little
bitch or other he got in with somewhere or picked up on the sly if they
only knew him as well as I do yes because the day before yesterday he was
scribbling something a letter when I came into the front room to show him
Dignams death in the paper as if something told me and he covered it up
with the blottingpaper pretending to be thinking about business so very
probably that was it to somebody who thinks she has a softy in him
because all men get a bit like that at his age especially getting on to
forty he is now so as to wheedle any money she can out of him no fool
like an old fool and then the usual kissing my bottom was to hide it not
that I care two straws now who he does it with or knew before that way
though Id like to find out so long as I dont have the two of them under
my nose all the time like that slut that Mary we had in Ontario terrace
padding out her false bottom to excite him bad enough to get the smell of
those painted women off him once or twice I had a suspicion by getting
him to come near me when I found the long hair on his coat without that
one when I went into the kitchen pretending he was drinking water  woman
is not enough for them it was all his fault of course ruining servants
then proposing that she could eat at our table on Christmas day if you
please O no thank you not in my house stealing my potatoes and the
oysters / per doz going out to see her aunt if you please common
robbery so it was but I was sure he had something on with that one it
takes me to find out a thing like that he said you have no proof it was
her proof O yes her aunt was very fond of oysters but I told her what I
thought of her suggesting me to go out to be alone with her I wouldnt
lower myself to spy on them the garters I found in her room the Friday
she was out that was enough for me a little bit too much her face swelled
up on her with temper when I gave her her weeks notice I saw to that
better do without them altogether do out the rooms myself quicker only
for the damn cooking and throwing out the dirt I gave it to him anyhow
either she or me leaves the house I couldnt even touch him if I thought
he was with a dirty barefaced liar and sloven like that one denying it up
to my face and singing about the place in the W C too because she knew
she was too well off yes because he couldnt possibly do without it that
long so he must do it somewhere and the last time he came on my bottom
when was it the night Boylan gave my hand a great squeeze going along by
the Tolka in my hand there steals another I just pressed the back of his
like that with my thumb to squeeze back singing the young May moon shes
beaming love because he has an idea about him and me hes not such a fool
he said Im dining out and going to the Gaiety though Im not going to give
him the satisfaction in any case God knows hes a change in a way not to
be always and ever wearing the same old hat unless I paid some
nicelooking boy to do it since I cant do it myself a young boy would like
me Id confuse him a little alone with him if we were Id let him see my
garters the new ones and make him turn red looking at him seduce him I
know what boys feel with that down on their cheek doing that frigging
drawing out the thing by the hour question and answer would you do this
that and the other with the coalman yes with a bishop yes I would because
I told him about some dean or bishop was sitting beside me in the jews
temples gardens when I was knitting that woollen thing a stranger to
Dublin what place was it and so on about the monuments and he tired me
out with statues encouraging him making him worse than he is who is in
your mind now tell me who are you thinking of who is it tell me his name
who tell me who the german Emperor is it yes imagine Im him think of him
can you feel him trying to make a whore of me what he never will he ought
to give it up now at this age of his life simply ruination for any woman
and no satisfaction in it pretending to like it till he comes and then
finish it off myself anyway and it makes your lips pale anyhow its done
now once and for all with all the talk of the world about it people make
its only the first time after that its just the ordinary do it and think
no more about it why cant you kiss a man without going and marrying him
first you sometimes love to wildly when you feel that way so nice all
over you you cant help yourself I wish some man or other would take me
sometime when hes there and kiss me in his arms theres nothing like a
kiss long and hot down to your soul almost paralyses you then I hate that
confession when I used to go to Father Corrigan he touched me father and
what harm if he did where and I said on the canal bank like a fool but
whereabouts on your person my child on the leg behind high up was it yes
rather high up was it where you sit down yes O Lord couldnt he say bottom
right out and have done with it what has that got to do with it and did
you whatever way he put it I forget no father and I always think of the
real father what did he want to know for when I already confessed it to
God he had a nice fat hand the palm moist always I wouldnt mind feeling
it neither would he Id say by the bullneck in his horsecollar I wonder
did he know me in the box I could see his face he couldnt see mine of
course hed never turn or let on still his eyes were red when his father
died theyre lost for a woman of course must be terrible when a man cries
let alone them Id like to be embraced by one in his vestments and the
smell of incense off him like the pope besides theres no danger with a
priest if youre married hes too careful about himself then give something
to H H the pope for a penance I wonder was he satisfied with me one thing
I didnt like his slapping me behind going away so familiarly in the hall
though I laughed Im not a horse or an ass am I I suppose he was thinking
of his fathers I wonder is he awake thinking of me or dreaming am I in it
who gave him that flower he said he bought he smelt of some kind of drink
not whisky or stout or perhaps the sweety kind of paste they stick their
bills up with some liqueur Id like to sip those richlooking green and
yellow expensive drinks those stagedoor johnnies drink with the opera
hats I tasted once with my finger dipped out of that American that had
the squirrel talking stamps with father he had all he could do to keep
himself from falling asleep after the last time after we took the port
and potted meat it had a fine salty taste yes because I felt lovely and
tired myself and fell asleep as sound as a top the moment I popped
straight into bed till that thunder woke me up God be merciful to us I
thought the heavens were coming down about us to punish us when I blessed
myself and said a Hail Mary like those awful thunderbolts in Gibraltar as
if the world was coming to an end and then they come and tell you theres
no God what could you do if it was running and rushing about nothing only
make an act of contrition the candle I lit that evening in Whitefriars
street chapel for the month of May see it brought its luck though hed
scoff if he heard because he never goes to church mass or meeting he says
your soul you have no soul inside only grey matter because he doesnt know
what it is to have one yes when I lit the lamp because he must have come
 or  times with that tremendous big red brute of a thing he has I
thought the vein or whatever the dickens they call it was going to burst
though his nose is not so big after I took off all my things with the
blinds down after my hours dressing and perfuming and combing it like
iron or some kind of a thick crowbar standing all the time he must have
eaten oysters I think a few dozen he was in great singing voice no I
never in all my life felt anyone had one the size of that to make you
feel full up he must have eaten a whole sheep after whats the idea making
us like that with a big hole in the middle of us or like a Stallion
driving it up into you because thats all they want out of you with that
determined vicious look in his eye I had to halfshut my eyes still he
hasnt such a tremendous amount of spunk in him when I made him pull out
and do it on me considering how big it is so much the better in case any
of it wasnt washed out properly the last time I let him finish it in me
nice invention they made for women for him to get all the pleasure but if
someone gave them a touch of it themselves theyd know what I went through
with Milly nobody would believe cutting her teeth too and Mina Purefoys
husband give us a swing out of your whiskers filling her up with a child
or twins once a year as regular as the clock always with a smell of
children off her the one they called budgers or something like a nigger
with a shock of hair on it Jesusjack the child is a black the last time I
was there a squad of them falling over one another and bawling you
couldnt hear your ears supposed to be healthy not satisfied till they
have us swollen out like elephants or I dont know what supposing I risked
having another not off him though still if he was married Im sure hed
have a fine strong child but I dont know Poldy has more spunk in him yes
thatd be awfully jolly I suppose it was meeting Josie Powell and the
funeral and thinking about me and Boylan set him off well he can think
what he likes now if thatll do him any good I know they were spooning a
bit when I came on the scene he was dancing and sitting out with her the
night of Georgina Simpsons housewarming and then he wanted to ram it down
my neck it was on account of not liking to see her a wallflower that was
why we had the standup row over politics he began it not me when he said
about Our Lord being a carpenter at last he made me cry of course a woman
is so sensitive about everything I was fuming with myself after for
giving in only for I knew he was gone on me and the first socialist he
said He was he annoyed me so much I couldnt put him into a temper still
he knows a lot of mixedup things especially about the body and the inside
I often wanted to study up that myself what we have inside us in that
family physician I could always hear his voice talking when the room was
crowded and watch him after that I pretended I had a coolness on with her
over him because he used to be a bit on the jealous side whenever he
asked who are you going to and I said over to Floey and he made me the
present of Byron's poems and the three pairs of gloves so that finished
that I could quite easily get him to make it up any time I know how Id
even supposing he got in with her again and was going out to see her
somewhere Id know if he refused to eat the onions I know plenty of ways
ask him to tuck down the collar of my blouse or touch him with my veil
and gloves on going out I kiss then would send them all spinning however
alright well see then let him go to her she of course would only be too
delighted to pretend shes mad in love with him that I wouldnt so much
mind Id just go to her and ask her do you love him and look her square in
the eyes she couldnt fool me but he might imagine he was and make a
declaration to her with his plabbery kind of a manner like he did to me
though I had the devils own job to get it out of him though I liked him
for that it showed he could hold in and wasnt to be got for the asking he
was on the pop of asking me too the night in the kitchen I was rolling
the potato cake theres something I want to say to you only for I put him
off letting on I was in a temper with my hands and arms full of pasty
flour in any case I let out too much the night before talking of dreams
so I didnt want to let him know more than was good for him she used to be
always embracing me Josie whenever he was there meaning him of course
glauming me over and when I said I washed up and down as far as possible
asking me and did you wash possible the women are always egging on to
that putting it on thick when hes there they know by his sly eye blinking
a bit putting on the indifferent when they come out with something the
kind he is what spoils him I dont wonder in the least because he was very
handsome at that time trying to look like Lord Byron I said I liked
though he was too beautiful for a man and he was a little before we got
engaged afterwards though she didnt like it so much the day I was in fits
of laughing with the giggles I couldnt stop about all my hairpins falling
out one after another with the mass of hair I had youre always in great
humour she said yes because it grigged her because she knew what it meant
because I used to tell her a good bit of what went on between us not all
but just enough to make her mouth water but that wasnt my fault she didnt
darken the door much after we were married I wonder what shes got like
now after living with that dotty husband of hers she had her face
beginning to look drawn and run down the last time I saw her she must
have been just after a row with him because I saw on the moment she was
edging to draw down a conversation about husbands and talk about him to
run him down what was it she told me O yes that sometimes he used to go
to bed with his muddy boots on when the maggot takes him just imagine
having to get into bed with a thing like that that might murder you any
moment what a man well its not the one way everyone goes mad Poldy anyhow
whatever he does always wipes his feet on the mat when he comes in wet or
shine and always blacks his own boots too and he always takes off his hat
when he comes up in the street like then and now hes going about in his
slippers to look for  pounds for a postcard U p up O sweetheart May
wouldnt a thing like that simply bore you stiff to extinction actually
too stupid even to take his boots off now what could you make of a man
like that Id rather die  times over than marry another of their sex of
course hed never find another woman like me to put up with him the way I
do know me come sleep with me yes and he knows that too at the bottom of
his heart take that Mrs Maybrick that poisoned her husband for what I
wonder in love with some other man yes it was found out on her wasnt she
the downright villain to go and do a thing like that of course some men
can be dreadfully aggravating drive you mad and always the worst word in
the world what do they ask us to marry them for if were so bad as all
that comes to yes because they cant get on without us white Arsenic she
put in his tea off flypaper wasnt it I wonder why they call it that if I
asked him hed say its from the Greek leave us as wise as we were before
she must have been madly in love with the other fellow to run the chance
of being hanged O she didnt care if that was her nature what could she do
besides theyre not brutes enough to go and hang a woman surely are they
theyre all so different Boylan talking about the shape of my foot he
noticed at once even before he was introduced when I was in the D B C
with Poldy laughing and trying to listen I was waggling my foot we both
ordered  teas and plain bread and butter I saw him looking with his two
old maids of sisters when I stood up and asked the girl where it was what
do I care with it dropping out of me and that black closed breeches he
made me buy takes you half an hour to let them down wetting all myself
always with some brandnew fad every other week such a long one I did I
forgot my suede gloves on the seat behind that I never got after some
robber of a woman and he wanted me to put it in the Irish times lost in
the ladies lavatory D B C Dame street finder return to Mrs Marion Bloom
and I saw his eyes on my feet going out through the turning door he was
looking when I looked back and I went there for tea  days after in the
hope but he wasnt now how did that excite him because I was crossing them
when we were in the other room first he meant the shoes that are too
tight to walk in my hand is nice like that if I only had a ring with the
stone for my month a nice aquamarine Ill stick him for one and a gold
bracelet I dont like my foot so much still I made him spend once with my
foot the night after Goodwins botchup of a concert so cold and windy it
was well we had that rum in the house to mull and the fire wasnt black
out when he asked to take off my stockings lying on the hearthrug in
Lombard street west and another time it was my muddy boots hed like me to
walk in all the horses dung I could find but of course hes not natural
like the rest of the world that I what did he say I could give  points
in  to Katty Lanner and beat her what does that mean I asked him I
forget what he said because the stoppress edition just passed and the man
with the curly hair in the Lucan dairy thats so polite I think I saw his
face before somewhere I noticed him when I was tasting the butter so I
took my time Bartell dArcy too that he used to make fun of when he
commenced kissing me on the choir stairs after I sang Gounods AVE MARIA
what are we waiting for O my heart kiss me straight on the brow and part
which is my brown part he was pretty hot for all his tinny voice too my
low notes he was always raving about if you can believe him I liked the
way he used his mouth singing then he said wasnt it terrible to do that
there in a place like that I dont see anything so terrible about it Ill
tell him about that some day not now and surprise him ay and Ill take him
there and show him the very place too we did it so now there you are like
it or lump it he thinks nothing can happen without him knowing he hadnt
an idea about my mother till we were engaged otherwise hed never have got
me so cheap as he did he was  times worse himself anyhow begging me to
give him a tiny bit cut off my drawers that was the evening coming along
Kenilworth square he kissed me in the eye of my glove and I had to take
it off asking me questions is it permitted to enquire the shape of my
bedroom so I let him keep it as if I forgot it to think of me when I saw
him slip it into his pocket of course hes mad on the subject of drawers
thats plain to be seen always skeezing at those brazenfaced things on the
bicycles with their skirts blowing up to their navels even when Milly and
I were out with him at the open air fete that one in the cream muslin
standing right against the sun so he could see every atom she had on when
he saw me from behind following in the rain I saw him before he saw me
however standing at the corner of the Harolds cross road with a new
raincoat on him with the muffler in the Zingari colours to show off his
complexion and the brown hat looking slyboots as usual what was he doing
there where hed no business they can go and get whatever they like from
anything at all with a skirt on it and were not to ask any questions but
they want to know where were you where are you going I could feel him
coming along skulking after me his eyes on my neck he had been keeping
away from the house he felt it was getting too warm for him so I
halfturned and stopped then he pestered me to say yes till I took off my
glove slowly watching him he said my openwork sleeves were too cold for
the rain anything for an excuse to put his hand anear me drawers drawers
the whole blessed time till I promised to give him the pair off my doll
to carry about in his waistcoat pocket O MARIA SANTISIMA he did look a
big fool dreeping in the rain splendid set of teeth he had made me hungry
to look at them and beseeched of me to lift the orange petticoat I had on
with the sunray pleats that there was nobody he said hed kneel down in
the wet if I didnt so persevering he would too and ruin his new raincoat
you never know what freak theyd take alone with you theyre so savage for
it if anyone was passing so I lifted them a bit and touched his trousers
outside the way I used to Gardner after with my ring hand to keep him
from doing worse where it was too public I was dying to find out was he
circumcised he was shaking like a jelly all over they want to do
everything too quick take all the pleasure out of it and father waiting
all the time for his dinner he told me to say I left my purse in the
butchers and had to go back for it what a Deceiver then he wrote me that
letter with all those words in it how could he have the face to any woman
after his company manners making it so awkward after when we met asking
me have I offended you with my eyelids down of course he saw I wasnt he
had a few brains not like that other fool Henny Doyle he was always
breaking or tearing something in the charades I hate an unlucky man and
if I knew what it meant of course I had to say no for form sake dont
understand you I said and wasnt it natural so it is of course it used to
be written up with a picture of a womans on that wall in Gibraltar with
that word I couldnt find anywhere only for children seeing it too young
then writing every morning a letter sometimes twice a day I liked the way
he made love then he knew the way to take a woman when he sent me the 
big poppies because mine was the th then I wrote the night he kissed my
heart at Dolphins barn I couldnt describe it simply it makes you feel
like nothing on earth but he never knew how to embrace well like Gardner
I hope hell come on Monday as he said at the same time four I hate people
who come at all hours answer the door you think its the vegetables then
its somebody and you all undressed or the door of the filthy sloppy
kitchen blows open the day old frostyface Goodwin called about the
concert in Lombard street and I just after dinner all flushed and tossed
with boiling old stew dont look at me professor I had to say Im a fright
yes but he was a real old gent in his way it was impossible to be more
respectful nobody to say youre out you have to peep out through the blind
like the messengerboy today I thought it was a putoff first him sending
the port and the peaches first and I was just beginning to yawn with
nerves thinking he was trying to make a fool of me when I knew his
tattarrattat at the door he must have been a bit late because it was l/
after  when I saw the  Dedalus girls coming from school I never know
the time even that watch he gave me never seems to go properly Id want to
get it looked after when I threw the penny to that lame sailor for
England home and beauty when I was whistling there is a charming girl I
love and I hadnt even put on my clean shift or powdered myself or a thing
then this day week were to go to Belfast just as well he has to go to
Ennis his fathers anniversary the th it wouldnt be pleasant if he did
suppose our rooms at the hotel were beside each other and any fooling
went on in the new bed I couldnt tell him to stop and not bother me with
him in the next room or perhaps some protestant clergyman with a cough
knocking on the wall then hed never believe the next day we didnt do
something its all very well a husband but you cant fool a lover after me
telling him we never did anything of course he didnt believe me no its
better hes going where he is besides something always happens with him
the time going to the Mallow concert at Maryborough ordering boiling soup
for the two of us then the bell rang out he walks down the platform with
the soup splashing about taking spoonfuls of it hadnt he the nerve and
the waiter after him making a holy show of us screeching and confusion
for the engine to start but he wouldnt pay till he finished it the two
gentlemen in the rd class carriage said he was quite right so he was too
hes so pigheaded sometimes when he gets a thing into his head a good job
he was able to open the carriage door with his knife or theyd have taken
us on to Cork I suppose that was done out of revenge on him O I love
jaunting in a train or a car with lovely soft cushions I wonder will he
take a st class for me he might want to do it in the train by tipping
the guard well O I suppose therell be the usual idiots of men gaping at
us with their eyes as stupid as ever they can possibly be that was an
exceptional man that common workman that left us alone in the carriage
that day going to Howth Id like to find out something about him l or 
tunnels perhaps then you have to look out of the window all the nicer
then coming back suppose I never came back what would they say eloped
with him that gets you on on the stage the last concert I sang at where
its over a year ago when was it St Teresas hall Clarendon St little chits
of missies they have now singing Kathleen Kearney and her like on account
of father being in the army and my singing the absentminded beggar and
wearing a brooch for Lord Roberts when I had the map of it all and Poldy
not Irish enough was it him managed it this time I wouldnt put it past
him like he got me on to sing in the STABAT MATER by going around saying
he was putting Lead Kindly Light to music I put him up to that till the
jesuits found out he was a freemason thumping the piano lead Thou me on
copied from some old opera yes and he was going about with some of them
Sinner Fein lately or whatever they call themselves talking his usual
trash and nonsense he says that little man he showed me without the neck
is very intelligent the coming man Griffiths is he well he doesnt look it
thats all I can say still it must have been him he knew there was a
boycott I hate the mention of their politics after the war that Pretoria
and Ladysmith and Bloemfontein where Gardner lieut Stanley G th Bn nd
East Lancs Rgt of enteric fever he was a lovely fellow in khaki and just
the right height over me Im sure he was brave too he said I was lovely
the evening we kissed goodbye at the canal lock my Irish beauty he was
pale with excitement about going away or wed be seen from the road he
couldnt stand properly and I so hot as I never felt they could have made
their peace in the beginning or old oom Paul and the rest of the other
old Krugers go and fight it out between them instead of dragging on for
years killing any finelooking men there were with their fever if he was
even decently shot it wouldnt have been so bad I love to see a regiment
pass in review the first time I saw the Spanish cavalry at La Roque it
was lovely after looking across the bay from Algeciras all the lights of
the rock like fireflies or those sham battles on the  acres the Black
Watch with their kilts in time at the march past the th hussars the
prince of Wales own or the lancers O the lancers theyre grand or the
Dublins that won Tugela his father made his money over selling the horses
for the cavalry well he could buy me a nice present up in Belfast after
what I gave him theyve lovely linen up there or one of those nice kimono
things I must buy a mothball like I had before to keep in the drawer with
them it would be exciting going round with him shopping buying those
things in a new city better leave this ring behind want to keep turning
and turning to get it over the knuckle there or they might bell it round
the town in their papers or tell the police on me but theyd think were
married O let them all go and smother themselves for the fat lot I care
he has plenty of money and hes not a marrying man so somebody better get
it out of him if I could find out whether he likes me I looked a bit
washy of course when I looked close in the handglass powdering a mirror
never gives you the expression besides scrooching down on me like that
all the time with his big hipbones hes heavy too with his hairy chest for
this heat always having to lie down for them better for him put it into
me from behind the way Mrs Mastiansky told me her husband made her like
the dogs do it and stick out her tongue as far as ever she could and he
so quiet and mild with his tingating cither can you ever be up to men the
way it takes them lovely stuff in that blue suit he had on and stylish
tie and socks with the skyblue silk things on them hes certainly well off
I know by the cut his clothes have and his heavy watch but he was like a
perfect devil for a few minutes after he came back with the stoppress
tearing up the tickets and swearing blazes because he lost  quid he
said he lost over that outsider that won and half he put on for me on
account of Lenehans tip cursing him to the lowest pits that sponger he
was making free with me after the Glencree dinner coming back that long
joult over the featherbed mountain after the lord Mayor looking at me
with his dirty eyes Val Dillon that big heathen I first noticed him at
dessert when I was cracking the nuts with my teeth I wished I could have
picked every morsel of that chicken out of my fingers it was so tasty and
browned and as tender as anything only for I didnt want to eat everything
on my plate those forks and fishslicers were hallmarked silver too I wish
I had some I could easily have slipped a couple into my muff when I was
playing with them then always hanging out of them for money in a
restaurant for the bit you put down your throat we have to be thankful
for our mangy cup of tea itself as a great compliment to be noticed the
way the world is divided in any case if its going to go on I want at
least two other good chemises for one thing and but I dont know what kind
of drawers he likes none at all I think didnt he say yes and half the
girls in Gibraltar never wore them either naked as God made them that
Andalusian singing her Manola she didnt make much secret of what she
hadnt yes and the second pair of silkette stockings is laddered after one
days wear I could have brought them back to Lewers this morning and
kicked up a row and made that one change them only not to upset myself
and run the risk of walking into him and ruining the whole thing and one
of those kidfitting corsets Id want advertised cheap in the Gentlewoman
with elastic gores on the hips he saved the one I have but thats no good
what did they say they give a delightful figure line / obviating that
unsightly broad appearance across the lower back to reduce flesh my belly
is a bit too big Ill have to knock off the stout at dinner or am I
getting too fond of it the last they sent from ORourkes was as flat as a
pancake he makes his money easy Larry they call him the old mangy parcel
he sent at Xmas a cottage cake and a bottle of hogwash he tried to palm
off as claret that he couldnt get anyone to drink God spare his spit for
fear hed die of the drouth or I must do a few breathing exercises I
wonder is that antifat any good might overdo it the thin ones are not so
much the fashion now garters that much I have the violet pair I wore
today thats all he bought me out of the cheque he got on the first O no
there was the face lotion I finished the last of yesterday that made my
skin like new I told him over and over again get that made up in the same
place and dont forget it God only knows whether he did after all I said
to him Ill know by the bottle anyway if not I suppose Ill only have to
wash in my piss like beeftea or chickensoup with some of that opoponax
and violet I thought it was beginning to look coarse or old a bit the
skin underneath is much finer where it peeled off there on my finger
after the burn its a pity it isnt all like that and the four paltry
handkerchiefs about / in all sure you cant get on in this world without
style all going in food and rent when I get it Ill lash it around I tell
you in fine style I always want to throw a handful of tea into the pot
measuring and mincing if I buy a pair of old brogues itself do you like
those new shoes yes how much were they Ive no clothes at all the brown
costume and the skirt and jacket and the one at the cleaners  whats that
for any woman cutting up this old hat and patching up the other the men
wont look at you and women try to walk on you because they know youve no
man then with all the things getting dearer every day for the  years
more I have of life up to  no Im what am I at all Ill be  in
September will I what O well look at that Mrs Galbraith shes much older
than me I saw her when I was out last week her beautys on the wane she
was a lovely woman magnificent head of hair on her down to her waist
tossing it back like that like Kitty OShea in Grantham street st thing I
did every morning to look across see her combing it as if she loved it
and was full of it pity I only got to know her the day before we left and
that Mrs Langtry the jersey lily the prince of Wales was in love with I
suppose hes like the first man going the roads only for the name of a
king theyre all made the one way only a black mans Id like to try a
beauty up to what was she  there was some funny story about the jealous
old husband what was it at all and an oyster knife he went no he made her
wear a kind of a tin thing round her and the prince of Wales yes he had
the oyster knife cant be true a thing like that like some of those books
he brings me the works of Master Francois Somebody supposed to be a
priest about a child born out of her ear because her bumgut fell out a
nice word for any priest to write and her ae as if any fool wouldnt
know what that meant I hate that pretending of all things with that old
blackguards face on him anybody can see its not true and that Ruby and
Fair Tyrants he brought me that twice I remember when I came to page 
the part about where she hangs him up out of a hook with a cord
flagellate sure theres nothing for a woman in that all invention made up
about he drinking the champagne out of her slipper after the ball was
over like the infant Jesus in the crib at Inchicore in the Blessed
Virgins arms sure no woman could have a child that big taken out of her
and I thought first it came out of her side because how could she go to
the chamber when she wanted to and she a rich lady of course she felt
honoured H R H he was in Gibraltar the year I was born I bet he found
lilies there too where he planted the tree he planted more than that in
his time he might have planted me too if hed come a bit sooner then I
wouldnt be here as I am he ought to chuck that Freeman with the paltry
few shillings he knocks out of it and go into an office or something
where hed get regular pay or a bank where they could put him up on a
throne to count the money all the day of course he prefers plottering
about the house so you cant stir with him any side whats your programme
today I wish hed even smoke a pipe like father to get the smell of a man
or pretending to be mooching about for advertisements when he could have
been in Mr Cuffes still only for what he did then sending me to try and
patch it up I could have got him promoted there to be the manager he gave
me a great mirada once or twice first he was as stiff as the mischief
really and truly Mrs Bloom only I felt rotten simply with the old
rubbishy dress that I lost the leads out of the tails with no cut in it
but theyre coming into fashion again I bought it simply to please him I
knew it was no good by the finish pity I changed my mind of going to Todd
and Bums as I said and not Lees it was just like the shop itself rummage
sale a lot of trash I hate those rich shops get on your nerves nothing
kills me altogether only he thinks he knows a great lot about a womans
dress and cooking mathering everything he can scour off the shelves into
it if I went by his advices every blessed hat I put on does that suit me
yes take that thats alright the one like a weddingcake standing up miles
off my head he said suited me or the dishcover one coming down on my
backside on pins and needles about the shopgirl in that place in Grafton
street I had the misfortune to bring him into and she as insolent as ever
she could be with her smirk saying Im afraid were giving you too much
trouble what shes there for but I stared it out of her yes he was awfully
stiff and no wonder but he changed the second time he looked Poldy
pigheaded as usual like the soup but I could see him looking very hard at
my chest when he stood up to open the door for me it was nice of him to
show me out in any case Im extremely sorry Mrs Bloom believe me without
making it too marked the first time after him being insulted and me being
supposed to be his wife I just half smiled I know my chest was out that
way at the door when he said Im extremely sorry and Im sure you were
yes I think he made them a bit firmer sucking them like that so long he
made me thirsty titties he calls them I had to laugh yes this one anyhow
stiff the nipple gets for the least thing Ill get him to keep that up and
Ill take those eggs beaten up with marsala fatten them out for him what
are all those veins and things curious the way its made  the same in
case of twins theyre supposed to represent beauty placed up there like
those statues in the museum one of them pretending to hide it with her
hand are they so beautiful of course compared with what a man looks like
with his two bags full and his other thing hanging down out of him or
sticking up at you like a hatrack no wonder they hide it with a
cabbageleaf that disgusting Cameron highlander behind the meat market or
that other wretch with the red head behind the tree where the statue of
the fish used to be when I was passing pretending he was pissing standing
out for me to see it with his babyclothes up to one side the Queens own
they were a nice lot its well the Surreys relieved them theyre always
trying to show it to you every time nearly I passed outside the mens
greenhouse near the Harcourt street station just to try some fellow or
other trying to catch my eye as if it was I of the  wonders of the world
O and the stink of those rotten places the night coming home with Poldy
after the Comerfords party oranges and lemonade to make you feel nice and
watery I went into r of them it was so biting cold I couldnt keep it when
was that  the canal was frozen yes it was a few months after a pity a
couple of the Camerons werent there to see me squatting in the mens place
meadero I tried to draw a picture of it before I tore it up like a
sausage or something I wonder theyre not afraid going about of getting a
kick or a bang of something there the woman is beauty of course thats
admitted when he said I could pose for a picture naked to some rich
fellow in Holles street when he lost the job in Helys and I was selling
the clothes and strumming in the coffee palace would I be like that bath
of the nymph with my hair down yes only shes younger or Im a little like
that dirty bitch in that Spanish photo he has nymphs used they go about
like that I asked him about her and that word met something with hoses in
it and he came out with some jawbreakers about the incarnation he never
can explain a thing simply the way a body can understand then he goes and
burns the bottom out of the pan all for his Kidney this one not so much
theres the mark of his teeth still where he tried to bite the nipple I
had to scream out arent they fearful trying to hurt you I had a great
breast of milk with Milly enough for two what was the reason of that he
said I could have got a pound a week as a wet nurse all swelled out the
morning that delicate looking student that stopped in no  with the
Citrons Penrose nearly caught me washing through the window only for I
snapped up the towel to my face that was his studenting hurt me they used
to weaning her till he got doctor Brady to give me the belladonna
prescription I had to get him to suck them they were so hard he said it
was sweeter and thicker than cows then he wanted to milk me into the tea
well hes beyond everything I declare somebody ought to put him in the
budget if I only could remember the I half of the things and write a book
out of it the works of Master Poldy yes and its so much smoother the skin
much an hour he was at them Im sure by the clock like some kind of a big
infant I had at me they want everything in their mouth all the pleasure
those men get out of a woman I can feel his mouth O Lord I must stretch
myself I wished he was here or somebody to let myself go with and come
again like that I feel all fire inside me or if I could dream it when he
made me spend the nd time tickling me behind with his finger I was
coming for about  minutes with my legs round him I had to hug him after
O Lord I wanted to shout out all sorts of things fuck or shit or anything
at all only not to look ugly or those lines from the strain who knows the
way hed take it you want to feel your way with a man theyre not all like
him thank God some of them want you to be so nice about it I noticed the
contrast he does it and doesnt talk I gave my eyes that look with my hair
a bit loose from the tumbling and my tongue between my lips up to him the
savage brute Thursday Friday one Saturday two Sunday three O Lord I cant
wait till Monday
frseeeeeeeefronnnng train somewhere whistling the strength those engines
have in them like big giants and the water rolling all over and out of
them all sides like the end of Loves old sweeeetsonnnng the poor men that
have to be out all the night from their wives and families in those
roasting engines stifling it was today Im glad I burned the half of those
old Freemans and Photo Bits leaving things like that lying about hes
getting very careless and threw the rest of them up in the W C Ill get
him to cut them tomorrow for me instead of having them there for the next
year to get a few pence for them have him asking wheres last Januarys
paper and all those old overcoats I bundled out of the hall making the
place hotter than it is that rain was lovely and refreshing just after my
beauty sleep I thought it was going to get like Gibraltar my goodness the
heat there before the levanter came on black as night and the glare of
the rock standing up in it like a big giant compared with their  Rock
mountain they think is so great with the red sentries here and there the
poplars and they all whitehot and the smell of the rainwater in those
tanks watching the sun all the time weltering down on you faded all that
lovely frock fathers friend Mrs Stanhope sent me from the B Marche paris
what a shame my dearest Doggerina she wrote on it she was very nice whats
this her other name was just a p c to tell you I sent the little present
have just had a jolly warm bath and feel a very clean dog now enjoyed it
wogger she called him wogger wd give anything to be back in Gib and hear
you sing Waiting and in old Madrid Concone is the name of those exercises
he bought me one of those new some word I couldnt make out shawls amusing
things but tear for the least thing still there lovely I think dont you
will always think of the lovely teas we had together scrumptious currant
scones and raspberry wafers I adore well now dearest Doggerina be sure
and write soon kind she left out regards to your father also captain
Grove with love yrs affly Hester x x x x x she didnt look a bit married
just like a girl he was years older than her wogger he was awfully fond
of me when he held down the wire with his foot for me to step over at the
bullfight at La Linea when that matador Gomez was given the bulls ear
these clothes we have to wear whoever invented them expecting you to walk
up Killiney hill then for example at that picnic all staysed up you cant
do a blessed thing in them in a crowd run or jump out of the way thats
why I was afraid when that other ferocious old Bull began to charge the
banderilleros with the sashes and the  things in their hats and the
brutes of men shouting bravo toro sure the women were as bad in their
nice white mantillas ripping all the whole insides out of those poor
horses I never heard of such a thing in all my life yes he used to break
his heart at me taking off the dog barking in bell lane poor brute and it
sick what became of them ever I suppose theyre dead long ago the  of
them its like all through a mist makes you feel so old I made the scones
of course I had everything all to myself then a girl Hester we used to
compare our hair mine was thicker than hers she showed me how to settle
it at the back when I put it up and whats this else how to make a knot on
a thread with the one hand we were like cousins what age was I then the
night of the storm I slept in her bed she had her arms round me then we
were fighting in the morning with the pillow what fun he was watching me
whenever he got an opportunity at the band on the Alameda esplanade when
I was with father and captain Grove I looked up at the church first and
then at the windows then down and our eyes met I felt something go
through me like all needles my eyes were dancing I remember after when I
looked at myself in the glass hardly recognised myself the change he was
attractive to a girl in spite of his being a little bald intelligent
looking disappointed and gay at the same time he was like Thomas in the
shadow of Ashlydyat I had a splendid skin from the sun and the excitement
like a rose I didnt get a wink of sleep it wouldnt have been nice on
account of her but I could have stopped it in time she gave me the
Moonstone to read that was the first I read of Wilkie Collins East Lynne
I read and the shadow of Ashlydyat Mrs Henry Wood Henry Dunbar by that
other woman I lent him afterwards with Mulveys photo in it so as he see I
wasnt without and Lord Lytton Eugene Aram Molly bawn she gave me by Mrs
Hungerford on account of the name I dont like books with a Molly in them
like that one he brought me about the one from Flanders a whore always
shoplifting anything she could cloth and stuff and yards of it O this
blanket is too heavy on me thats better I havent even one decent
nightdress this thing gets all rolled under me besides him and his
fooling thats better I used to be weltering then in the heat my shift
drenched with the sweat stuck in the cheeks of my bottom on the chair
when I stood up they were so fattish and firm when I got up on the sofa
cushions to see with my clothes up and the bugs tons of them at night and
the mosquito nets I couldnt read a line Lord how long ago it seems
centuries of course they never came back and she didnt put her address
right on it either she may have noticed her wogger people were always
going away and we never I remember that day with the waves and the boats
with their high heads rocking and the smell of ship those Officers
uniforms on shore leave made me seasick he didnt say anything he was very
serious I had the high buttoned boots on and my skirt was blowing she
kissed me six or seven times didnt I cry yes I believe I did or near it
my lips were taittering when I said goodbye she had a Gorgeous wrap of
some special kind of blue colour on her for the voyage made very
peculiarly to one side like and it was extremely pretty it got as dull as
the devil after they went I was almost planning to run away mad out of it
somewhere were never easy where we are father or aunt or marriage waiting
always waiting to guiiiide him toooo me waiting nor speeeed his flying
feet their damn guns bursting and booming all over the shop especially
the Queens birthday and throwing everything down in all directions if you
didnt open the windows when general Ulysses Grant whoever he was or did
supposed to be some great fellow landed off the ship and old Sprague the
consul that was there from before the flood dressed up poor man and he in
mourning for the son then the same old bugles for reveille in the morning
and drums rolling and the unfortunate poor devils of soldiers walking
about with messtins smelling the place more than the old longbearded jews
in their jellibees and levites assembly and sound clear and gunfire for
the men to cross the lines and the warden marching with his keys to lock
the gates and the bagpipes and only captain Groves and father talking
about Rorkes drift and Plevna and sir Garnet Wolseley and Gordon at
Khartoum lighting their pipes for them everytime they went out drunken
old devil with his grog on the windowsill catch him leaving any of it
picking his nose trying to think of some other dirty story to tell up in
a corner but he never forgot himself when I was there sending me out of
the room on some blind excuse paying his compliments the Bushmills whisky
talking of course but hed do the same to the next woman that came along I
suppose he died of galloping drink ages ago the days like years not a
letter from a living soul except the odd few I posted to myself with bits
of paper in them so bored sometimes I could fight with my nails listening
to that old Arab with the one eye and his heass of an instrument singing
his heah heah aheah all my compriments on your hotchapotch of your heass
as bad as now with the hands hanging off me looking out of the window if
there was a nice fellow even in the opposite house that medical in Holles
street the nurse was after when I put on my gloves and hat at the window
to show I was going out not a notion what I meant arent they thick never
understand what you say even youd want to print it up on a big poster for
them not even if you shake hands twice with the left he didnt recognise
me either when I half frowned at him outside Westland row chapel where
does their great intelligence come in Id like to know grey matter they
have it all in their tail if you ask me those country gougers up in the
City Arms intelligence they had a damn sight less than the bulls and cows
they were selling the meat and the coalmans bell that noisy bugger trying
to swindle me with the wrong bill he took out of his hat what a pair of
paws and pots and pans and kettles to mend any broken bottles for a poor
man today and no visitors or post ever except his cheques or some
advertisement like that wonderworker they sent him addressed dear Madam
only his letter and the card from Milly this morning see she wrote a
letter to him who did I get the last letter from O Mrs Dwenn now what
possessed her to write from Canada after so many years to know the recipe
I had for pisto madrileno Floey Dillon since she wrote to say she was
married to a very rich architect if Im to believe all I hear with a villa
and eight rooms her father was an awfully nice man he was near seventy
always goodhumoured well now Miss Tweedy or Miss Gillespie theres the
piannyer that was a solid silver coffee service he had too on the
mahogany sideboard then dying so far away I hate people that have always
their poor story to tell everybody has their own troubles that poor Nancy
Blake died a month ago of acute neumonia well I didnt know her so well as
all that she was Floeys friend more than mine poor Nancy its a bother
having to answer he always tells me the wrong things and no stops to say
like making a speech your sad bereavement symphathy I always make that
mistake and newphew with  double yous in I hope hell write me a longer
letter the next time if its a thing he really likes me O thanks be to the
great God I got somebody to give me what I badly wanted to put some heart
up into me youve no chances at all in this place like you used long ago I
wish somebody would write me a loveletter his wasnt much and I told him
he could write what he liked yours ever Hugh Boylan in old Madrid stuff
silly women believe love is sighing I am dying still if he wrote it I
suppose thered be some truth in it true or no it fills up your whole day
and life always something to think about every moment and see it all
round you like a new world I could write the answer in bed to let him
imagine me short just a few words not those long crossed letters Atty
Dillon used to write to the fellow that was something in the four courts
that jilted her after out of the ladies letterwriter when I told her to
say a few simple words he could twist how he liked not acting with
precipat precip itancy with equal candour the greatest earthly happiness
answer to a gentlemans proposal affirmatively my goodness theres nothing
else its all very fine for them but as for being a woman as soon as youre
old they might as well throw you out in the bottom of the ashpit.
Mulveys was the first when I was in bed that morning and Mrs Rubio
brought it in with the coffee she stood there standing when I asked her
to hand me and I pointing at them I couldnt think of the word a hairpin
to open it with ah horquilla disobliging old thing and it staring her in
the face with her switch of false hair on her and vain about her
appearance ugly as she was near  or a  her face a mass of wrinkles
with all her religion domineering because she never could get over the
Atlantic fleet coming in half the ships of the world and the Union Jack
flying with all her carabineros because  drunken English sailors took
all the rock from them and because I didnt run into mass often enough in
Santa Maria to please her with her shawl up on her except when there was
a marriage on with all her miracles of the saints and her black blessed
virgin with the silver dress and the sun dancing  times on Easter Sunday
morning and when the priest was going by with the bell bringing the
vatican to the dying blessing herself for his Majestad an admirer he
signed it I near jumped out of my skin I wanted to pick him up when I saw
him following me along the Calle Real in the shop window then he tipped
me just in passing but I never thought hed write making an appointment I
had it inside my petticoat bodice all day reading it up in every hole and
corner while father was up at the drill instructing to find out by the
handwriting or the language of stamps singing I remember shall I wear a
white rose and I wanted to put on the old stupid clock to near the time
he was the first man kissed me under the Moorish wall my sweetheart when
a boy it never entered my head what kissing meant till he put his tongue
in my mouth his mouth was sweetlike young I put my knee up to him a few
times to learn the way what did I tell him I was engaged for for fun to
the son of a Spanish nobleman named Don Miguel de la Flora and he
believed me that I was to be married to him in  years time theres many a
true word spoken in jest there is a flower that bloometh a few things I
told him true about myself just for him to be imagining the Spanish girls
he didnt like I suppose one of them wouldnt have him I got him excited he
crushed all the flowers on my bosom he brought me he couldnt count the
pesetas and the perragordas till I taught him Cappoquin he came from he
said on the black water but it was too short then the day before he left
May yes it was May when the infant king of Spain was born Im always like
that in the spring Id like a new fellow every year up on the tiptop under
the rockgun near OHaras tower I told him it was struck by lightning and
all about the old Barbary apes they sent to Clapham without a tail
careering all over the show on each others back Mrs Rubio said she was a
regular old rock scorpion robbing the chickens out of Inces farm and
throw stones at you if you went anear he was looking at me I had that
white blouse on open in the front to encourage him as much as I could
without too openly they were just beginning to be plump I said I was
tired we lay over the firtree cove a wild place I suppose it must be the
highest rock in existence the galleries and casemates and those frightful
rocks and Saint Michaels cave with the icicles or whatever they call them
hanging down and ladders all the mud plotching my boots Im sure thats the
way down the monkeys go under the sea to Africa when they die the ships
out far like chips that was the Malta boat passing yes the sea and the
sky you could do what you liked lie there for ever he caressed them
outside they love doing that its the roundness there I was leaning over
him with my white ricestraw hat to take the newness out of it the left
side of my face the best my blouse open for his last day transparent kind
of shirt he had I could see his chest pink he wanted to touch mine with
his for a moment but I wouldnt lee him he was awfully put out first for
fear you never know consumption or leave me with a child embarazada that
old servant Ines told me that one drop even if it got into you at all
after I tried with the Banana but I was afraid it might break and get
lost up in me somewhere because they once took something down out of a
woman that was up there for years covered with limesalts theyre all mad
to get in there where they come out of youd think they could never go far
enough up and then theyre done with you in a way till the next time yes
because theres a wonderful feeling there so tender all the time how did
we finish it off yes O yes I pulled him off into my handkerchief
pretending not to be excited but I opened my legs I wouldnt let him touch
me inside my petticoat because I had a skirt opening up the side I
tormented the life out of him first tickling him I loved rousing that dog
in the hotel rrrsssstt awokwokawok his eyes shut and a bird flying below
us he was shy all the same I liked him like that moaning I made him blush
a little when I got over him that way when I unbuttoned him and took his
out and drew back the skin it had a kind of eye in it theyre all Buttons
men down the middle on the wrong side of them Molly darling he called me
what was his name Jack Joe Harry Mulvey was it yes I think a lieutenant
he was rather fair he had a laughing kind of a voice so I went round to
the whatyoucallit everything was whatyoucallit moustache had he he said
hed come back Lord its just like yesterday to me and if I was married hed
do it to me and I promised him yes faithfully Id let him block me now
flying perhaps hes dead or killed or a captain or admiral its nearly 
years if I said firtree cove he would if he came up behind me and put his
hands over my eyes to guess who I might recognise him hes young still
about  perhaps hes married some girl on the black water and is quite
changed they all do they havent half the character a woman has she little
knows what I did with her beloved husband before he ever dreamt of her in
broad daylight too in the sight of the whole world you might say they
could have put an article about it in the Chronicle I was a bit wild
after when I blew out the old bag the biscuits were in from Benady Bros
and exploded it Lord what a bang all the woodcocks and pigeons screaming
coming back the same way that we went over middle hill round by the old
guardhouse and the jews burialplace pretending to read out the Hebrew on
them I wanted to fire his pistol he said he hadnt one he didnt know what
to make of me with his peak cap on that he always wore crooked as often
as I settled it straight H M S Calypso swinging my hat that old Bishop
that spoke off the altar his long preach about womans higher functions
about girls now riding the bicycle and wearing peak caps and the new
woman bloomers God send him sense and me more money I suppose theyre
called after him I never thought that would be my name Bloom when I used
to write it in print to see how it looked on a visiting card or
practising for the butcher and oblige M Bloom youre looking blooming
Josie used to say after I married him well its better than Breen or
Briggs does brig or those awful names with bottom in them Mrs Ramsbottom
or some other kind of a bottom Mulvey I wouldnt go mad about either or
suppose I divorced him Mrs Boylan my mother whoever she was might have
given me a nicer name the Lord knows after the lovely one she had Lunita
Laredo the fun we had running along Williss road to Europa point twisting
in and out all round the other side of Jersey they were shaking and
dancing about in my blouse like Millys little ones now when she runs up
the stairs I loved looking down at them I was jumping up at the pepper
trees and the white poplars pulling the leaves off and throwing them at
him he went to India he was to write the voyages those men have to make
to the ends of the world and back its the least they might get a squeeze
or two at a woman while they can going out to be drowned or blown up
somewhere I went up Windmill hill to the flats that Sunday morning with
captain Rubios that was dead spyglass like the sentry had he said hed
have one or two from on board I wore that frock from the B Marche paris
and the coral necklace the straits shining I could see over to Morocco
almost the bay of Tangier white and the Atlas mountain with snow on it
and the straits like a river so clear Harry Molly darling I was thinking
of him on the sea all the time after at mass when my petticoat began to
slip down at the elevation weeks and weeks I kept the handkerchief under
my pillow for the smell of him there was no decent perfume to be got in
that Gibraltar only that cheap peau despagne that faded and left a stink
on you more than anything else I wanted to give him a memento he gave me
that clumsy Claddagh ring for luck that I gave Gardner going to south
Africa where those Boers killed him with their war and fever but they
were well beaten all the same as if it brought its bad luck with it like
an opal or pearl still it must have been pure  carrot gold because it
was very heavy but what could you get in a place like that the sandfrog
shower from Africa and that derelict ship that came up to the harbour
Marie the Marie whatyoucallit no he hadnt a moustache that was Gardner
yes I can see his face cleanshaven Frseeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeefrong that
train again weeping tone once in the dear deaead days beyondre call close
my eyes breath my lips forward kiss sad look eyes open piano ere oer the
world the mists began I hate that istsbeg comes loves sweet
sooooooooooong Ill let that out full when I get in front of the
footlights again Kathleen Kearney and her lot of squealers Miss This Miss
That Miss Theother lot of sparrowfarts skitting around talking about
politics they know as much about as my backside anything in the world to
make themselves someway interesting Irish homemade beauties soldiers
daughter am I ay and whose are you bootmakers and publicans I beg your
pardon coach I thought you were a wheelbarrow theyd die down dead off
their feet if ever they got a chance of walking down the Alameda on an
officers arm like me on the bandnight my eyes flash my bust that they
havent passion God help their poor head I knew more about men and life
when I was I S than theyll all know at  they dont know how to sing a
song like that Gardner said no man could look at my mouth and teeth
smiling like that and not think of it I was afraid he mightnt like my
accent first he so English all father left me in spite of his stamps Ive
my mothers eyes and figure anyhow he always said theyre so snotty about
themselves some of those cads he wasnt a bit like that he was dead gone
on my lips let them get a husband first thats fit to be looked at and a
daughter like mine or see if they can excite a swell with money that can
pick and choose whoever he wants like Boylan to do it  or  times locked
in each others arms or the voice either I could have been a prima donna
only I married him comes looooves old deep down chin back not too much
make it double My Ladys Bower is too long for an encore about the moated
grange at twilight and vaunted rooms yes Ill sing Winds that blow from
the south that he gave after the choirstairs performance Ill change that
lace on my black dress to show off my bubs and Ill yes by God Ill get
that big fan mended make them burst with envy my hole is itching me
always when I think of him I feel I want to I feel some wind in me better
go easy not wake him have him at it again slobbering after washing every
bit of myself back belly and sides if we had even a bath itself or my own
room anyway I wish hed sleep in some bed by himself with his cold feet on
me give us room even to let a fart God or do the least thing better yes
hold them like that a bit on my side piano quietly sweeeee theres that
train far away pianissimo eeeee one more song
that was a relief wherever you be let your wind go free who knows if that
pork chop I took with my cup of tea after was quite good with the heat I
couldnt smell anything off it Im sure that queerlooking man in the
porkbutchers is a great rogue I hope that lamp is not smoking fill my
nose up with smuts better than having him leaving the gas on all night I
couldnt rest easy in my bed in Gibraltar even getting up to see why am I
so damned nervous about that though I like it in the winter its more
company O Lord it was rotten cold too that winter when I was only about
ten was I yes I had the big doll with all the funny clothes dressing her
up and undressing that icy wind skeeting across from those mountains the
something Nevada sierra nevada standing at the fire with the little bit
of a short shift I had up to heat myself I loved dancing about in it then
make a race back into bed Im sure that fellow opposite used to be there
the whole time watching with the lights out in the summer and I in my
skin hopping around I used to love myself then stripped at the washstand
dabbing and creaming only when it came to the chamber performance I put
out the light too so then there were  of us goodbye to my sleep for this
night anyhow I hope hes not going to get in with those medicals leading
him astray to imagine hes young again coming in at  in the morning it
must be if not more still he had the manners not to wake me what do they
find to gabber about all night squandering money and getting drunker and
drunker couldnt they drink water then he starts giving us his orders for
eggs and tea and Findon haddy and hot buttered toast I suppose well have
him sitting up like the king of the country pumping the wrong end of the
spoon up and down in his egg wherever he learned that from and I love to
hear him falling up the stairs of a morning with the cups rattling on the
tray and then play with the cat she rubs up against you for her own sake
I wonder has she fleas shes as bad as a woman always licking and lecking
but I hate their claws I wonder do they see anything that we cant staring
like that when she sits at the top of the stairs so long and listening as
I wait always what a robber too that lovely fresh place I bought I think
Ill get a bit of fish tomorrow or today is it Friday yes I will with some
blancmange with black currant jam like long ago not those  lb pots of
mixed plum and apple from the London and Newcastle Williams and Woods
goes twice as far only for the bones I hate those eels cod yes Ill get a
nice piece of cod Im always getting enough for  forgetting anyway Im
sick of that everlasting butchers meat from Buckleys loin chops and leg
beef and rib steak and scrag of mutton and calfs pluck the very name is
enough or a picnic suppose we all gave / each and or let him pay it and
invite some other woman for him who Mrs Fleming and drove out to the
furry glen or the strawberry beds wed have him examining all the horses
toenails first like he does with the letters no not with Boylan there yes
with some cold veal and ham mixed sandwiches there are little houses down
at the bottom of the banks there on purpose but its as hot as blazes he
says not a bank holiday anyhow I hate those ruck of Mary Ann coalboxes
out for the day Whit Monday is a cursed day too no wonder that bee bit
him better the seaside but Id never again in this life get into a boat
with him after him at Bray telling the boatman he knew how to row if
anyone asked could he ride the steeplechase for the gold cup hed say yes
then it came on to get rough the old thing crookeding about and the
weight all down my side telling me pull the right reins now pull the left
and the tide all swamping in floods in through the bottom and his oar
slipping out of the stirrup its a mercy we werent all drowned he can swim
of course me no theres no danger whatsoever keep yourself calm in his
flannel trousers Id like to have tattered them down off him before all
the people and give him what that one calls flagellate till he was black
and blue do him all the good in the world only for that longnosed chap I
dont know who he is with that other beauty Burke out of the City Arms
hotel was there spying around as usual on the slip always where he wasnt
wanted if there was a row on youd vomit a better face there was no love
lost between us thats  consolation I wonder what kind is that book he
brought me Sweets of Sin by a gentleman of fashion some other Mr de Kock
I suppose the people gave him that nickname going about with his tube
from one woman to another I couldnt even change my new white shoes all
ruined with the saltwater and the hat I had with that feather all blowy
and tossed on me how annoying and provoking because the smell of the sea
excited me of course the sardines and the bream in Catalan bay round the
back of the rock they were fine all silver in the fishermens baskets old
Luigi near a hundred they said came from Genoa and the tall old chap with
the earrings I dont like a man you have to climb up to to get at I
suppose theyre all dead and rotten long ago besides I dont like being
alone in this big barracks of a place at night I suppose Ill have to put
up with it I never brought a bit of salt in even when we moved in the
confusion musical academy he was going to make on the first floor
drawingroom with a brassplate or Blooms private hotel he suggested go and
ruin himself altogether the way his father did down in Ennis like all the
things he told father he was going to do and me but I saw through him
telling me all the lovely places we could go for the honeymoon Venice by
moonlight with the gondolas and the lake of Como he had a picture cut out
of some paper of and mandolines and lanterns O how nice I said whatever I
liked he was going to do immediately if not sooner will you be my man
will you carry my can he ought to get a leather medal with a putty rim
for all the plans he invents then leaving us here all day youd never know
what old beggar at the door for a crust with his long story might be a
tramp and put his foot in the way to prevent me shutting it like that
picture of that hardened criminal he was called in Lloyds Weekly news 
years in jail then he comes out and murders an old woman for her money
imagine his poor wife or mother or whoever she is such a face youd run
miles away from I couldnt rest easy till I bolted all the doors and
windows to make sure but its worse again being locked up like in a prison
or a madhouse they ought to be all shot or the cat of nine tails a big
brute like that that would attack a poor old woman to murder her in her
bed Id cut them off him so I would not that hed be much use still better
than nothing the night I was sure I heard burglars in the kitchen and he
went down in his shirt with a candle and a poker as if he was looking for
a mouse as white as a sheet frightened out of his wits making as much
noise as he possibly could for the burglars benefit there isnt much to
steal indeed the Lord knows still its the feeling especially now with
Milly away such an idea for him to send the girl down there to learn to
take photographs on account of his grandfather instead of sending her to
Skerrys academy where shed have to learn not like me getting all IS at
school only hed do a thing like that all the same on account of me and
Boylan thats why he did it Im certain the way he plots and plans
everything out I couldnt turn round with her in the place lately unless I
bolted the door first gave me the fidgets coming in without knocking
first when I put the chair against the door just as I was washing myself
there below with the glove get on your nerves then doing the loglady all
day put her in a glasscase with two at a time to look at her if he knew
she broke off the hand off that little gimcrack statue with her roughness
and carelessness before she left that I got that little Italian boy to
mend so that you cant see the join for  shillings wouldnt even teem the
potatoes for you of course shes right not to ruin her hands I noticed he
was always talking to her lately at the table explaining things in the
paper and she pretending to understand sly of course that comes from his
side of the house he cant say I pretend things can he Im too honest as a
matter of fact and helping her into her coat but if there was anything
wrong with her its me shed tell not him I suppose he thinks Im finished
out and laid on the shelf well Im not no nor anything like it well see
well see now shes well on for flirting too with Tom Devans two sons
imitating me whistling with those romps of Murray girls calling for her
can Milly come out please shes in great demand to pick what they can out
of her round in Nelson street riding Harry Devans bicycle at night its as
well he sent her where she is she was just getting out of bounds wanting
to go on the skatingrink and smoking their cigarettes through their nose
I smelt it off her dress when I was biting off the thread of the button I
sewed on to the bottom of her jacket she couldnt hide much from me I tell
you only I oughtnt to have stitched it and it on her it brings a parting
and the last plumpudding too split in  halves see it comes out no matter
what they say her tongue is a bit too long for my taste your blouse is
open too low she says to me the pan calling the kettle blackbottom and I
had to tell her not to cock her legs up like that on show on the
windowsill before all the people passing they all look at her like me
when I was her age of course any old rag looks well on you then a great
touchmenot too in her own way at the Only Way in the Theatre royal take
your foot away out of that I hate people touching me afraid of her life
Id crush her skirt with the pleats a lot of that touching must go on in
theatres in the crush in the dark theyre always trying to wiggle up to
you that fellow in the pit at the Gaiety for Beerbohm Tree in Trilby the
last time Ill ever go there to be squashed like that for any Trilby or
her barebum every two minutes tipping me there and looking away hes a bit
daft I think I saw him after trying to get near two stylishdressed ladies
outside Switzers window at the same little game I recognised him on the
moment the face and everything but he didnt remember me yes and she didnt
even want me to kiss her at the Broadstone going away well I hope shell
get someone to dance attendance on her the way I did when she was down
with the mumps and her glands swollen wheres this and wheres that of
course she cant feel anything deep yet I never came properly till I was
what  or so it went into the wrong place always only the usual girls
nonsense and giggling that Conny Connolly writing to her in white ink on
black paper sealed with sealingwax though she clapped when the curtain
came down because he looked so handsome then we had Martin Harvey for
breakfast dinner and supper I thought to myself afterwards it must be
real love if a man gives up his life for her that way for nothing I
suppose there are a few men like that left its hard to believe in it
though unless it really happened to me the majority of them with not a
particle of love in their natures to find two people like that nowadays
full up of each other that would feel the same way as you do theyre
usually a bit foolish in the head his father must have been a bit queer
to go and poison himself after her still poor old man I suppose he felt
lost shes always making love to my things too the few old rags I have
wanting to put her hair up at I S my powder too only ruin her skin on her
shes time enough for that all her life after of course shes restless
knowing shes pretty with her lips so red a pity they wont stay that way I
was too but theres no use going to the fair with the thing answering me
like a fishwoman when I asked to go for a half a stone of potatoes the
day we met Mrs Joe Gallaher at the trottingmatches and she pretended not
to see us in her trap with Friery the solicitor we werent grand enough
till I gave her  damn fine cracks across the ear for herself take that
now for answering me like that and that for your impudence she had me
that exasperated of course contradicting I was badtempered too because
how was it there was a weed in the tea or I didnt sleep the night before
cheese I ate was it and I told her over and over again not to leave
knives crossed like that because she has nobody to command her as she
said herself well if he doesnt correct her faith I will that was the last
time she turned on the teartap I was just like that myself they darent
order me about the place its his fault of course having the two of us
slaving here instead of getting in a woman long ago am I ever going to
have a proper servant again of course then shed see him coming Id have to
let her know or shed revenge it arent they a nuisance that old Mrs
Fleming you have to be walking round after her putting the things into
her hands sneezing and farting into the pots well of course shes old she
cant help it a good job I found that rotten old smelly dishcloth that got
lost behind the dresser I knew there was something and opened the area
window to let out the smell bringing in his friends to entertain them
like the night he walked home with a dog if you please that might have
been mad especially Simon Dedalus son his father such a criticiser with
his glasses up with his tall hat on him at the cricket match and a great
big hole in his sock one thing laughing at the other and his son that got
all those prizes for whatever he won them in the intermediate imagine
climbing over the railings if anybody saw him that knew us I wonder he
didnt tear a big hole in his grand funeral trousers as if the one nature
gave wasnt enough for anybody hawking him down into the dirty old kitchen
now is he right in his head I ask pity it wasnt washing day my old pair
of drawers might have been hanging up too on the line on exhibition for
all hed ever care with the ironmould mark the stupid old bundle burned on
them he might think was something else and she never even rendered down
the fat I told her and now shes going such as she was on account of her
paralysed husband getting worse theres always something wrong with them
disease or they have to go under an operation or if its not that its
drink and he beats her Ill have to hunt around again for someone every
day I get up theres some new thing on sweet God sweet God well when Im
stretched out dead in my grave I suppose Ill have some peace I want to
get up a minute if Im let wait O Jesus wait yes that thing has come on me
yes now wouldnt that afflict you of course all the poking and rooting and
ploughing he had up in me now what am I to do Friday Saturday Sunday
wouldnt that pester the soul out of a body unless he likes it some men do
God knows theres always something wrong with us  days every  or  weeks
usual monthly auction isnt it simply sickening that night it came on me
like that the one and only time we were in a box that Michael Gunn gave
him to see Mrs Kendal and her husband at the Gaiety something he did
about insurance for him in Drimmies I was fit to be tied though I wouldnt
give in with that gentleman of fashion staring down at me with his
glasses and him the other side of me talking about Spinoza and his soul
thats dead I suppose millions of years ago I smiled the best I could all
in a swamp leaning forward as if I was interested having to sit it out
then to the last tag I wont forget that wife of Scarli in a hurry
supposed to be a fast play about adultery that idiot in the gallery
hissing the woman adulteress he shouted I suppose he went and had a woman
in the next lane running round all the back ways after to make up for it
I wish he had what I had then hed boo I bet the cat itself is better off
than us have we too much blood up in us or what O patience above its
pouring out of me like the sea anyhow he didnt make me pregnant as big as
he is I dont want to ruin the clean sheets I just put on I suppose the
clean linen I wore brought it on too damn it damn it and they always want
to see a stain on the bed to know youre a virgin for them all thats
troubling them theyre such fools too you could be a widow or divorced 
times over a daub of red ink would do or blackberry juice no thats too
purply O Jamesy let me up out of this pooh sweets of sin whoever
suggested that business for women what between clothes and cooking and
children this damned old bed too jingling like the dickens I suppose they
could hear us away over the other side of the park till I suggested to
put the quilt on the floor with the pillow under my bottom I wonder is it
nicer in the day I think it is easy I think Ill cut all this hair off me
there scalding me I might look like a young girl wouldnt he get the great
suckin the next time he turned up my clothes on me Id give anything to
see his face wheres the chamber gone easy Ive a holy horror of its
breaking under me after that old commode I wonder was I too heavy sitting
on his knee I made him sit on the easychair purposely when I took off
only my blouse and skirt first in the other room he was so busy where he
oughtnt to be he never felt me I hope my breath was sweet after those
kissing comfits easy God I remember one time I could scout it out
straight whistling like a man almost easy O Lord how noisy I hope theyre
bubbles on it for a wad of money from some fellow Ill have to perfume it
in the morning dont forget I bet he never saw a better pair of thighs
than that look how white they are the smoothest place is right there
between this bit here how soft like a peach easy God I wouldnt mind being
a man and get up on a lovely woman O Lord what a row youre making like
the jersey lily easy easy O how the waters come down at Lahore
who knows is there anything the matter with my insides or have I
something growing in me getting that thing like that every week when was
it last I Whit Monday yes its only about  weeks I ought to go to the
doctor only it would be like before I married him when I had that white
thing coming from me and Floey made me go to that dry old stick Dr
Collins for womens diseases on Pembroke road your vagina he called it I
suppose thats how he got all the gilt mirrors and carpets getting round
those rich ones off Stephens green running up to him for every little
fiddlefaddle her vagina and her cochinchina theyve money of course so
theyre all right I wouldnt marry him not if he was the last man in the
world besides theres something queer about their children always smelling
around those filthy bitches all sides asking me if what I did had an
offensive odour what did he want me to do but the one thing gold maybe
what a question if I smathered it all over his wrinkly old face for him
with all my compriments I suppose hed know then and could you pass it
easily pass what I thought he was talking about the rock of Gibraltar the
way he put it thats a very nice invention too by the way only I like
letting myself down after in the hole as far as I can squeeze and pull
the chain then to flush it nice cool pins and needles still theres
something in it I suppose I always used to know by Millys when she was a
child whether she had worms or not still all the same paying him for that
how much is that doctor one guinea please and asking me had I frequent
omissions where do those old fellows get all the words they have
omissions with his shortsighted eyes on me cocked sideways I wouldnt
trust him too far to give me chloroform or God knows what else still I
liked him when he sat down to write the thing out frowning so severe his
nose intelligent like that you be damned you lying strap O anything no
matter who except an idiot he was clever enough to spot that of course
that was all thinking of him and his mad crazy letters my Precious one
everything connected with your glorious Body everything underlined that
comes from it is a thing of beauty and of joy for ever something he got
out of some nonsensical book that he had me always at myself  and 
times a day sometimes and I said I hadnt are you sure O yes I said I am
quite sure in a way that shut him up I knew what was coming next only
natural weakness it was he excited me I dont know how the first night
ever we met when I was living in Rehoboth terrace we stood staring at one
another for about  minutes as if we met somewhere I suppose on account
of my being jewess looking after my mother he used to amuse me the things
he said with the half sloothering smile on him and all the Doyles said he
was going to stand for a member of Parliament O wasnt I the born fool to
believe all his blather about home rule and the land league sending me
that long strool of a song out of the Huguenots to sing in French to be
more classy O beau pays de la Touraine that I never even sang once
explaining and rigmaroling about religion and persecution he wont let you
enjoy anything naturally then might he as a great favour the very st
opportunity he got a chance in Brighton square running into my bedroom
pretending the ink got on his hands to wash it off with the Albion milk
and sulphur soap I used to use and the gelatine still round it O I
laughed myself sick at him that day I better not make an alnight sitting
on this affair they ought to make chambers a natural size so that a woman
could sit on it properly he kneels down to do it I suppose there isnt in
all creation another man with the habits he has look at the way hes
sleeping at the foot of the bed how can he without a hard bolster its
well he doesnt kick or he might knock out all my teeth breathing with his
hand on his nose like that Indian god he took me to show one wet Sunday
in the museum in Kildare street all yellow in a pinafore lying on his
side on his hand with his ten toes sticking out that he said was a bigger
religion than the jews and Our Lords both put together all over Asia
imitating him as hes always imitating everybody I suppose he used to
sleep at the foot of the bed too with his big square feet up in his wifes
mouth damn this stinking thing anyway wheres this those napkins are ah
yes I know I hope the old press doesnt creak ah I knew it would hes
sleeping hard had a good time somewhere still she must have given him
great value for his money of course he has to pay for it from her O this
nuisance of a thing I hope theyll have something better for us in the
other world tying ourselves up God help us thats all right for tonight
now the lumpy old jingly bed always reminds me of old Cohen I suppose he
scratched himself in it often enough and he thinks father bought it from
Lord Napier that I used to admire when I was a little girl because I told
him easy piano O I like my bed God here we are as bad as ever after 
years how many houses were we in at all Raymond terrace and Ontario
terrace and Lombard street and Holles street and he goes about whistling
every time were on the run again his huguenots or the frogs march
pretending to help the men with our  sticks of furniture and then the
City Arms hotel worse and worse says Warden Daly that charming place on
the landing always somebody inside praying then leaving all their stinks
after them always know who was in there last every time were just getting
on right something happens or he puts his big foot in it Thoms and Helys
and Mr Cuffes and Drimmies either hes going to be run into prison over
his old lottery tickets that was to be all our salvations or he goes and
gives impudence well have him coming home with the sack soon out of the
Freeman too like the rest on account of those Sinner Fein or the
freemasons then well see if the little man he showed me dribbling along
in the wet all by himself round by Coadys lane will give him much
consolation that he says is so capable and sincerely Irish he is indeed
judging by the sincerity of the trousers I saw on him wait theres Georges
church bells wait  quarters the hour l wait  oclock well thats a nice
hour of the night for him to be coming home at to anybody climbing down
into the area if anybody saw him Ill knock him off that little habit
tomorrow first Ill look at his shirt to see or Ill see if he has that
French letter still in his pocketbook I suppose he thinks I dont know
deceitful men all their  pockets arent enough for their lies then why
should we tell them even if its the truth they dont believe you then
tucked up in bed like those babies in the Aristocrats Masterpiece he
brought me another time as if we hadnt enough of that in real life
without some old Aristocrat or whatever his name is disgusting you more
with those rotten pictures children with two heads and no legs thats the
kind of villainy theyre always dreaming about with not another thing in
their empty heads they ought to get slow poison the half of them then tea
and toast for him buttered on both sides and newlaid eggs I suppose Im
nothing any more when I wouldnt let him lick me in Holles street one
night man man tyrant as ever for the one thing he slept on the floor half
the night naked the way the jews used when somebody dies belonged to them
and wouldnt eat any breakfast or speak a word wanting to be petted so I
thought I stood out enough for one time and let him he does it all wrong
too thinking only of his own pleasure his tongue is too flat or I dont
know what he forgets that wethen I dont Ill make him do it again if he
doesnt mind himself and lock him down to sleep in the coalcellar with the
blackbeetles I wonder was it her Josie off her head with my castoffs hes
such a born liar too no hed never have the courage with a married woman
thats why he wants me and Boylan though as for her Denis as she calls him
that forlornlooking spectacle you couldnt call him a husband yes its some
little bitch hes got in with even when I was with him with Milly at the
College races that Hornblower with the childs bonnet on the top of his
nob let us into by the back way he was throwing his sheeps eyes at those
two doing skirt duty up and down I tried to wink at him first no use of
course and thats the way his money goes this is the fruits of Mr Paddy
Dignam yes they were all in great style at the grand funeral in the paper
Boylan brought in if they saw a real officers funeral thatd be something
reversed arms muffled drums the poor horse walking behind in black L Boom
and Tom Kernan that drunken little barrelly man that bit his tongue off
falling down the mens W C drunk in some place or other and Martin
Cunningham and the two Dedaluses and Fanny MCoys husband white head of
cabbage skinny thing with a turn in her eye trying to sing my songs shed
want to be born all over again and her old green dress with the lowneck
as she cant attract them any other way like dabbling on a rainy day I see
it all now plainly and they call that friendship killing and then burying
one another and they all with their wives and families at home more
especially Jack Power keeping that barmaid he does of course his wife is
always sick or going to be sick or just getting better of it and hes a
goodlooking man still though hes getting a bit grey over the ears theyre
a nice lot all of them well theyre not going to get my husband again into
their clutches if I can help it making fun of him then behind his back I
know well when he goes on with his idiotics because he has sense enough
not to squander every penny piece he earns down their gullets and looks
after his wife and family goodfornothings poor Paddy Dignam all the same
Im sorry in a way for him what are his wife and  children going to do
unless he was insured comical little teetotum always stuck up in some pub
corner and her or her son waiting Bill Bailey wont you please come home
her widows weeds wont improve her appearance theyre awfully becoming
though if youre goodlooking what men wasnt he yes he was at the Glencree
dinner and Ben Dollard base barreltone the night he borrowed the
swallowtail to sing out of in Holles street squeezed and squashed into
them and grinning all over his big Dolly face like a wellwhipped childs
botty didnt he look a balmy ballocks sure enough that must have been a
spectacle on the stage imagine paying / in the preserved seats for that
to see him trotting off in his trowlers and Simon Dedalus too he was
always turning up half screwed singing the second verse first the old
love is the new was one of his so sweetly sang the maiden on the hawthorn
bough he was always on for flirtyfying too when I sang Maritana with him
at Freddy Mayers private opera he had a delicious glorious voice Phoebe
dearest goodbye sweetheart SWEETheart he always sang it not like Bartell
Darcy sweet tart goodbye of course he had the gift of the voice so there
was no art in it all over you like a warm showerbath O Maritana wildwood
flower we sang splendidly though it was a bit too high for my register
even transposed and he was married at the time to May Goulding but then
hed say or do something to knock the good out of it hes a widower now I
wonder what sort is his son he says hes an author and going to be a
university professor of Italian and Im to take lessons what is he driving
at now showing him my photo its not good of me I ought to have got it
taken in drapery that never looks out of fashion still I look young in it
I wonder he didnt make him a present of it altogether and me too after
all why not I saw him driving down to the Kingsbridge station with his
father and mother I was in mourning thats  years ago now yes hed be 
though what was the good in going into mourning for what was neither one
thing nor the other the first cry was enough for me I heard the
deathwatch too ticking in the wall of course he insisted hed go into
mourning for the cat I suppose hes a man now by this time he was an
innocent boy then and a darling little fellow in his lord Fauntleroy suit
and curly hair like a prince on the stage when I saw him at Mat Dillons
he liked me too I remember they all do wait by God yes wait yes hold on
he was on the cards this morning when I laid out the deck union with a
young stranger neither dark nor fair you met before I thought it meant
him but hes no chicken nor a stranger either besides my face was turned
the other way what was the th card after that the  of spades for a
journey by land then there was a letter on its way and scandals too the 
queens and the  of diamonds for a rise in society yes wait it all came
out and  red s for new garments look at that and didnt I dream
something too yes there was something about poetry in it I hope he hasnt
long greasy hair hanging into his eyes or standing up like a red Indian
what do they go about like that for only getting themselves and their
poetry laughed at I always liked poetry when I was a girl first I thought
he was a poet like lord Byron and not an ounce of it in his composition I
thought he was quite different I wonder is he too young hes about wait 
I was married  Milly is  yesterday  what age was he then at Dillons
 or  about  I suppose hes  or more Im not too old for him if hes 
or  I hope hes not that stuckup university student sort no otherwise he
wouldnt go sitting down in the old kitchen with him taking Eppss cocoa
and talking of course he pretended to understand it all probably he told
him he was out of Trinity college hes very young to be a professor I hope
hes not a professor like Goodwin was he was a potent professor of John
Jameson they all write about some woman in their poetry well I suppose he
wont find many like me where softly sighs of love the light guitar where
poetry is in the air the blue sea and the moon shining so beautifully
coming back on the nightboat from Tarifa the lighthouse at Europa point
the guitar that fellow played was so expressive will I ever go back there
again all new faces two glancing eyes a lattice hid Ill sing that for him
theyre my eyes if hes anything of a poet two eyes as darkly bright as
loves own star arent those beautiful words as loves young star itll be a
change the Lord knows to have an intelligent person to talk to about
yourself not always listening to him and Billy Prescotts ad and Keyess ad
and Tom the Devils ad then if anything goes wrong in their business we
have to suffer Im sure hes very distinguished Id like to meet a man like
that God not those other ruck besides hes young those fine young men I
could see down in Margate strand bathingplace from the side of the rock
standing up in the sun naked like a God or something and then plunging
into the sea with them why arent all men like that thered be some
consolation for a woman like that lovely little statue he bought I could
look at him all day long curly head and his shoulders his finger up for
you to listen theres real beauty and poetry for you I often felt I wanted
to kiss him all over also his lovely young cock there so simple I wouldnt
mind taking him in my mouth if nobody was looking as if it was asking you
to suck it so clean and white he looks with his boyish face I would too
in / a minute even if some of it went down what its only like gruel or
the dew theres no danger besides hed be so clean compared with those pigs
of men I suppose never dream of washing it from I years end to the other
the most of them only thats what gives the women the moustaches Im sure
itll be grand if I can only get in with a handsome young poet at my age
Ill throw them the st thing in the morning till I see if the wishcard
comes out or Ill try pairing the lady herself and see if he comes out Ill
read and study all I can find or learn a bit off by heart if I knew who
he likes so he wont think me stupid if he thinks all women are the same
and I can teach him the other part Ill make him feel all over him till he
half faints under me then hell write about me lover and mistress publicly
too with our  photographs in all the papers when he becomes famous O but
then what am I going to do about him though
no thats no way for him has he no manners nor no refinement nor no
nothing in his nature slapping us behind like that on my bottom because I
didnt call him Hugh the ignoramus that doesnt know poetry from a cabbage
thats what you get for not keeping them in their proper place pulling off
his shoes and trousers there on the chair before me so barefaced without
even asking permission and standing out that vulgar way in the half of a
shirt they wear to be admired like a priest or a butcher or those old
hypocrites in the time of Julius Caesar of course hes right enough in his
way to pass the time as a joke sure you might as well be in bed with what
with a lion God Im sure hed have something better to say for himself an
old Lion would O well I suppose its because they were so plump and
tempting in my short petticoat he couldnt resist they excite myself
sometimes its well for men all the amount of pleasure they get off a
womans body were so round and white for them always I wished I was one
myself for a change just to try with that thing they have swelling up on
you so hard and at the same time so soft when you touch it my uncle John
has a thing long I heard those cornerboys saying passing the comer of
Marrowbone lane my aunt Mary has a thing hairy because it was dark and
they knew a girl was passing it didnt make me blush why should it either
its only nature and he puts his thing long into my aunt Marys hairy
etcetera and turns out to be you put the handle in a sweepingbrush men
again all over they can pick and choose what they please a married woman
or a fast widow or a girl for their different tastes like those houses
round behind Irish street no but were to be always chained up theyre not
going to be chaining me up no damn fear once I start I tell you for their
stupid husbands jealousy why cant we all remain friends over it instead
of quarrelling her husband found it out what they did together well
naturally and if he did can he undo it hes coronado anyway whatever he
does and then he going to the other mad extreme about the wife in Fair
Tyrants of course the man never even casts a nd thought on the husband
or wife either its the woman he wants and he gets her what else were we
given all those desires for Id like to know I cant help it if Im young
still can I its a wonder Im not an old shrivelled hag before my time
living with him so cold never embracing me except sometimes when hes
asleep the wrong end of me not knowing I suppose who he has any man thatd
kiss a womans bottom Id throw my hat at him after that hed kiss anything
unnatural where we havent I atom of any kind of expression in us all of
us the same  lumps of lard before ever Id do that to a man pfooh the
dirty brutes the mere thought is enough I kiss the feet of you senorita
theres some sense in that didnt he kiss our halldoor yes he did what a
madman nobody understands his cracked ideas but me still of course a
woman wants to be embraced  times a day almost to make her look young
no matter by who so long as to be in love or loved by somebody if the
fellow you want isnt there sometimes by the Lord God I was thinking would
I go around by the quays there some dark evening where nobodyd know me
and pick up a sailor off the sea thatd be hot on for it and not care a
pin whose I was only do it off up in a gate somewhere or one of those
wildlooking gipsies in Rathfarnham had their camp pitched near the
Bloomfield laundry to try and steal our things if they could I only sent
mine there a few times for the name model laundry sending me back over
and over some old ones odd stockings that blackguardlooking fellow with
the fine eyes peeling a switch attack me in the dark and ride me up
against the wall without a word or a murderer anybody what they do
themselves the fine gentlemen in their silk hats that K C lives up
somewhere this way coming out of Hardwicke lane the night he gave us the
fish supper on account of winning over the boxing match of course it was
for me he gave it I knew him by his gaiters and the walk and when I
turned round a minute after just to see there was a woman after coming
out of it too some filthy prostitute then he goes home to his wife after
that only I suppose the half of those sailors are rotten again with
disease O move over your big carcass out of that for the love of Mike
listen to him the winds that waft my sighs to thee so well he may sleep
and sigh the great Suggester Don Poldo de la Flora if he knew how he came
out on the cards this morning hed have something to sigh for a dark man
in some perplexity between  s too in prison for Lord knows what he does
that I dont know and Im to be slooching around down in the kitchen to get
his lordship his breakfast while hes rolled up like a mummy will I indeed
did you ever see me running Id just like to see myself at it show them
attention and they treat you like dirt I dont care what anybody says itd
be much better for the world to be governed by the women in it you
wouldnt see women going and killing one another and slaughtering when do
you ever see women rolling around drunk like they do or gambling every
penny they have and losing it on horses yes because a woman whatever she
does she knows where to stop sure they wouldnt be in the world at all
only for us they dont know what it is to be a woman and a mother how
could they where would they all of them be if they hadnt all a mother to
look after them what I never had thats why I suppose hes running wild now
out at night away from his books and studies and not living at home on
account of the usual rowy house I suppose well its a poor case that those
that have a fine son like that theyre not satisfied and I none was he not
able to make one it wasnt my fault we came together when I was watching
the two dogs up in her behind in the middle of the naked street that
disheartened me altogether I suppose I oughtnt to have buried him in that
little woolly jacket I knitted crying as I was but give it to some poor
child but I knew well Id never have another our st death too it was we
were never the same since O Im not going to think myself into the glooms
about that any more I wonder why he wouldnt stay the night I felt all the
time it was somebody strange he brought in instead of roving around the
city meeting God knows who nightwalkers and pickpockets his poor mother
wouldnt like that if she was alive ruining himself for life perhaps still
its a lovely hour so silent I used to love coming home after dances the
air of the night they have friends they can talk to weve none either he
wants what he wont get or its some woman ready to stick her knife in you
I hate that in women no wonder they treat us the way they do we are a
dreadful lot of bitches I suppose its all the troubles we have makes us
so snappy Im not like that he could easy have slept in there on the sofa
in the other room I suppose he was as shy as a boy he being so young
hardly  of me in the next room hed have heard me on the chamber arrah
what harm Dedalus I wonder its like those names in Gibraltar Delapaz
Delagracia they had the devils queer names there father Vilaplana of
Santa Maria that gave me the rosary Rosales y OReilly in the Calle las
Siete Revueltas and Pisimbo and Mrs Opisso in Governor street O what a
name Id go and drown myself in the first river if I had a name like her O
my and all the bits of streets Paradise ramp and Bedlam ramp and Rodgers
ramp and Crutchetts ramp and the devils gap steps well small blame to me
if I am a harumscarum I know I am a bit I declare to God I dont feel a
day older than then I wonder could I get my tongue round any of the
Spanish como esta usted muy bien gracias y usted see I havent forgotten
it all I thought I had only for the grammar a noun is the name of any
person place or thing pity I never tried to read that novel cantankerous
Mrs Rubio lent me by Valera with the questions in it all upside down the
two ways I always knew wed go away in the end I can tell him the Spanish
and he tell me the Italian then hell see Im not so ignorant what a pity
he didnt stay Im sure the poor fellow was dead tired and wanted a good
sleep badly I could have brought him in his breakfast in bed with a bit
of toast so long as I didnt do it on the knife for bad luck or if the
woman was going her rounds with the watercress and something nice and
tasty there are a few olives in the kitchen he might like I never could
bear the look of them in Abrines I could do the criada the room looks all
right since I changed it the other way you see something was telling me
all the time Id have to introduce myself not knowing me from Adam very
funny wouldnt it Im his wife or pretend we were in Spain with him half
awake without a Gods notion where he is dos huevos estrellados senor Lord
the cracked things come into my head sometimes itd be great fun supposing
he stayed with us why not theres the room upstairs empty and Millys bed
in the back room he could do his writing and studies at the table in
there for all the scribbling he does at it and if he wants to read in bed
in the morning like me as hes making the breakfast for I he can make it
for  Im sure Im not going to take in lodgers off the street for him if
he takes a gesabo of a house like this Id love to have a long talk with
an intelligent welleducated person Id have to get a nice pair of red
slippers like those Turks with the fez used to sell or yellow and a nice
semitransparent morning gown that I badly want or a peachblossom dressing
jacket like the one long ago in Walpoles only / or / Ill just give
him one more chance Ill get up early in the morning Im sick of Cohens old
bed in any case I might go over to the markets to see all the vegetables
and cabbages and tomatoes and carrots and all kinds of splendid fruits
all coming in lovely and fresh who knows whod be the st man Id meet
theyre out looking for it in the morning Mamy Dillon used to say they are
and the night too that was her massgoing Id love a big juicy pear now to
melt in your mouth like when I used to be in the longing way then Ill
throw him up his eggs and tea in the moustachecup she gave him to make
his mouth bigger I suppose hed like my nice cream too I know what Ill do
Ill go about rather gay not too much singing a bit now and then mi fa
pieta Masetto then Ill start dressing myself to go out presto non son piu
forte Ill put on my best shift and drawers let him have a good eyeful out
of that to make his micky stand for him Ill let him know if thats what he
wanted that his wife is I s l o fucked yes and damn well fucked too up to
my neck nearly not by him  or  times handrunning theres the mark of his
spunk on the clean sheet I wouldnt bother to even iron it out that ought
to satisfy him if you dont believe me feel my belly unless I made him
stand there and put him into me Ive a mind to tell him every scrap and
make him do it out in front of me serve him right its all his own fault
if I am an adulteress as the thing in the gallery said O much about it if
thats all the harm ever we did in this vale of tears God knows its not
much doesnt everybody only they hide it I suppose thats what a woman is
supposed to be there for or He wouldnt have made us the way He did so
attractive to men then if he wants to kiss my bottom Ill drag open my
drawers and bulge it right out in his face as large as life he can stick
his tongue  miles up my hole as hes there my brown part then Ill tell
him I want LI or perhaps / Ill tell him I want to buy underclothes
then if he gives me that well he wont be too bad I dont want to soak it
all out of him like other women do I could often have written out a fine
cheque for myself and write his name on it for a couple of pounds a few
times he forgot to lock it up besides he wont spend it Ill let him do it
off on me behind provided he doesnt smear all my good drawers O I suppose
that cant be helped Ill do the indifferent l or  questions Ill know by
the answers when hes like that he cant keep a thing back I know every
turn in him Ill tighten my bottom well and let out a few smutty words
smellrump or lick my shit or the first mad thing comes into my head then
Ill suggest about yes O wait now sonny my turn is coming Ill be quite gay
and friendly over it O but I was forgetting this bloody pest of a thing
pfooh you wouldnt know which to laugh or cry were such a mixture of plum
and apple no Ill have to wear the old things so much the better itll be
more pointed hell never know whether he did it or not there thats good
enough for you any old thing at all then Ill wipe him off me just like a
business his omission then Ill go out Ill have him eying up at the
ceiling where is she gone now make him want me thats the only way a
quarter after what an unearthly hour I suppose theyre just getting up in
China now combing out their pigtails for the day well soon have the nuns
ringing the angelus theyve nobody coming in to spoil their sleep except
an odd priest or two for his night office or the alarmclock next door at
cockshout clattering the brains out of itself let me see if I can doze
off      what kind of flowers are those they invented like the stars
the wallpaper in Lombard street was much nicer the apron he gave me was
like that something only I only wore it twice better lower this lamp and
try again so as I can get up early Ill go to Lambes there beside
Findlaters and get them to send us some flowers to put about the place in
case he brings him home tomorrow today I mean no no Fridays an unlucky
day first I want to do the place up someway the dust grows in it I think
while Im asleep then we can have music and cigarettes I can accompany him
first I must clean the keys of the piano with milk whatll I wear shall I
wear a white rose or those fairy cakes in Liptons I love the smell of a
rich big shop at  /d a lb or the other ones with the cherries in them
and the pinky sugar d a couple of lbs of those a nice plant for the
middle of the table Id get that cheaper in wait wheres this I saw them
not long ago I love flowers Id love to have the whole place swimming in
roses God of heaven theres nothing like nature the wild mountains then
the sea and the waves rushing then the beautiful country with the fields
of oats and wheat and all kinds of things and all the fine cattle going
about that would do your heart good to see rivers and lakes and flowers
all sorts of shapes and smells and colours springing up even out of the
ditches primroses and violets nature it is as for them saying theres no
God I wouldnt give a snap of my two fingers for all their learning why
dont they go and create something I often asked him atheists or whatever
they call themselves go and wash the cobbles off themselves first then
they go howling for the priest and they dying and why why because theyre
afraid of hell on account of their bad conscience ah yes I know them well
who was the first person in the universe before there was anybody that
made it all who ah that they dont know neither do I so there you are they
might as well try to stop the sun from rising tomorrow the sun shines for
you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head
in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to
me yes first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth and it was
leapyear like now yes  years ago my God after that long kiss I near
lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes so we are
flowers all a womans body yes that was one true thing he said in his life
and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I liked him because I
saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get
round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he
asked me to say yes and I wouldnt answer first only looked out over the
sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didnt know of Mulvey
and Mr Stanhope and Hester and father and old captain Groves and the
sailors playing all birds fly and I say stoop and washing up dishes they
called it on the pier and the sentry in front of the governors house with
the thing round his white helmet poor devil half roasted and the Spanish
girls laughing in their shawls and their tall combs and the auctions in
the morning the Greeks and the jews and the Arabs and the devil knows who
else from all the ends of Europe and Duke street and the fowl market all
clucking outside Larby Sharons and the poor donkeys slipping half asleep
and the vague fellows in the cloaks asleep in the shade on the steps and
the big wheels of the carts of the bulls and the old castle thousands of
years old yes and those handsome Moors all in white and turbans like
kings asking you to sit down in their little bit of a shop and Ronda with
the old windows of the posadas  glancing eyes a lattice hid for her
lover to kiss the iron and the wineshops half open at night and the
castanets and the night we missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman
going about serene with his lamp and O that awful deepdown torrent O and
the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and
the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets
and the pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the
jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was
a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the
Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me
under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then
I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I
yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes
and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and
his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.
TriesteZurichParis
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WALDEN  ON THE DUTY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE
Contents
WALDEN
. Economy
. Where I Lived, and What I Lived For
. Reading
. Sounds
. Solitude
. Visitors
. The BeanField
. The Village
. The Ponds
. Baker Farm
. Higher Laws
. Brute Neighbors
. HouseWarming
. Inhabitants and Winter Visitors
. Winter Animals
. The Pond in Winter
. Spring
. Conclusion
On the Duty of Civil Disobedience 
Economy
When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I
lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house
which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord,
Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only.
I lived there two years and two months. At present I am a sojourner
in civilized life again.
I should not obtrude my affairs so much on the notice of my
readers if very particular inquiries had not been made by my
townsmen concerning my mode of life, which some would call
impertinent, though they do not appear to me at all impertinent,
but, considering the circumstances, very natural and pertinent.
Some have asked what I got to eat if I did not feel lonesome if I
was not afraid and the like. Others have been curious to learn
what portion of my income I devoted to charitable purposes and
some, who have large families, how many poor children I maintained.
I will therefore ask those of my readers who feel no particular
interest in me to pardon me if I undertake to answer some of these
questions in this book. In most books, the I, or first person, is
omitted in this it will be retained that, in respect to egotism,
is the main difference. We commonly do not remember that it is,
after all, always the first person that is speaking. I should not
talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as
well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness
of my experience. Moreover, I, on my side, require of every writer,
first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not
merely what he has heard of other men's lives some such account as
he would send to his kindred from a distant land for if he has
lived sincerely, it must have been in a distant land to me. Perhaps
these pages are more particularly addressed to poor students. As
for the rest of my readers, they will accept such portions as apply
to them. I trust that none will stretch the seams in putting on the
coat, for it may do good service to him whom it fits.
I would fain say something, not so much concerning the Chinese
and Sandwich Islanders as you who read these pages, who are said to
live in New England something about your condition, especially your
outward condition or circumstances in this world, in this town, what
it is, whether it is necessary that it be as bad as it is, whether
it cannot be improved as well as not. I have travelled a good deal
in Concord and everywhere, in shops, and offices, and fields, the
inhabitants have appeared to me to be doing penance in a thousand
remarkable ways. What I have heard of Bramins sitting exposed to
four fires and looking in the face of the sun or hanging suspended,
with their heads downward, over flames or looking at the heavens
over their shoulders "until it becomes impossible for them to resume
their natural position, while from the twist of the neck nothing but
liquids can pass into the stomach" or dwelling, chained for life,
at the foot of a tree or measuring with their bodies, like
caterpillars, the breadth of vast empires or standing on one leg on
the tops of pillars  even these forms of conscious penance are
hardly more incredible and astonishing than the scenes which I daily
witness. The twelve labors of Hercules were trifling in comparison
with those which my neighbors have undertaken for they were only
twelve, and had an end but I could never see that these men slew or
captured any monster or finished any labor. They have no friend
Iolaus to burn with a hot iron the root of the hydra's head, but as
soon as one head is crushed, two spring up.
I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have
inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools for these
are more easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been
born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have
seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in. Who
made them serfs of the soil? Why should they eat their sixty acres,
when man is condemned to eat only his peck of dirt? Why should they
begin digging their graves as soon as they are born? They have got
to live a man's life, pushing all these things before them, and get
on as well as they can. How many a poor immortal soul have I met
wellnigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the
road of life, pushing before it a barn seventyfive feet by forty,
its Augean stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land,
tillage, mowing, pasture, and woodlot The portionless, who
struggle with no such unnecessary inherited encumbrances, find it
labor enough to subdue and cultivate a few cubic feet of flesh.
But men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is
soon plowed into the soil for compost. By a seeming fate, commonly
called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book,
laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves
break through and steal. It is a fool's life, as they will find
when they get to the end of it, if not before. It is said that
Deucalion and Pyrrha created men by throwing stones over their heads
behind them
Inde genus durum sumus, experiensque laborum,
Et documenta damus qua simus origine nati.
Or, as Raleigh rhymes it in his sonorous way,
"From thence our kind hardhearted is, enduring pain and care,
Approving that our bodies of a stony nature are."
So much for a blind obedience to a blundering oracle, throwing the
stones over their heads behind them, and not seeing where they fell.
Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere
ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and
superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be
plucked by them. Their fingers, from excessive toil, are too clumsy
and tremble too much for that. Actually, the laboring man has not
leisure for a true integrity day by day he cannot afford to sustain
the manliest relations to men his labor would be depreciated in the
market. He has no time to be anything but a machine. How can he
remember well his ignorance  which his growth requires  who has
so often to use his knowledge? We should feed and clothe him
gratuitously sometimes, and recruit him with our cordials, before we
judge of him. The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on
fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet we
do not treat ourselves nor one another thus tenderly.
Some of you, we all know, are poor, find it hard to live, are
sometimes, as it were, gasping for breath. I have no doubt that
some of you who read this book are unable to pay for all the dinners
which you have actually eaten, or for the coats and shoes which are
fast wearing or are already worn out, and have come to this page to
spend borrowed or stolen time, robbing your creditors of an hour.
It is very evident what mean and sneaking lives many of you live,
for my sight has been whetted by experience always on the limits,
trying to get into business and trying to get out of debt, a very
ancient slough, called by the Latins aes alienum, another's brass,
for some of their coins were made of brass still living, and dying,
and buried by this other's brass always promising to pay, promising
to pay, tomorrow, and dying today, insolvent seeking to curry
favor, to get custom, by how many modes, only not stateprison
offenses lying, flattering, voting, contracting yourselves into a
nutshell of civility or dilating into an atmosphere of thin and
vaporous generosity, that you may persuade your neighbor to let you
make his shoes, or his hat, or his coat, or his carriage, or import
his groceries for him making yourselves sick, that you may lay up
something against a sick day, something to be tucked away in an old
chest, or in a stocking behind the plastering, or, more safely, in
the brick bank no matter where, no matter how much or how little.
I sometimes wonder that we can be so frivolous, I may almost
say, as to attend to the gross but somewhat foreign form of
servitude called Negro Slavery, there are so many keen and subtle
masters that enslave both North and South. It is hard to have a
Southern overseer it is worse to have a Northern one but worst of
all when you are the slavedriver of yourself. Talk of a divinity
in man Look at the teamster on the highway, wending to market by
day or night does any divinity stir within him? His highest duty
to fodder and water his horses What is his destiny to him compared
with the shipping interests? Does not he drive for Squire
Makeastir? How godlike, how immortal, is he? See how he cowers
and sneaks, how vaguely all the day he fears, not being immortal nor
divine, but the slave and prisoner of his own opinion of himself, a
fame won by his own deeds. Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared
with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it
is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.
Selfemancipation even in the West Indian provinces of the fancy and
imagination  what Wilberforce is there to bring that about?
Think, also, of the ladies of the land weaving toilet cushions
against the last day, not to betray too green an interest in their
fates As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called
resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you
go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the
bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious
despair is concealed even under what are called the games and
amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes
after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do
desperate things.
When we consider what, to use the words of the catechism, is the
chief end of man, and what are the true necessaries and means of
life, it appears as if men had deliberately chosen the common mode
of living because they preferred it to any other. Yet they honestly
think there is no choice left. But alert and healthy natures
remember that the sun rose clear. It is never too late to give up
our prejudices. No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can
be trusted without proof. What everybody echoes or in silence
passes by as true today may turn out to be falsehood tomorrow,
mere smoke of opinion, which some had trusted for a cloud that would
sprinkle fertilizing rain on their fields. What old people say you
cannot do, you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people,
and new deeds for new. Old people did not know enough once,
perchance, to fetch fresh fuel to keep the fire agoing new people
put a little dry wood under a pot, and are whirled round the globe
with the speed of birds, in a way to kill old people, as the phrase
is. Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor
as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost. One may
almost doubt if the wisest man has learned anything of absolute
value by living. Practically, the old have no very important advice
to give the young, their own experience has been so partial, and
their lives have been such miserable failures, for private reasons,
as they must believe and it may be that they have some faith left
which belies that experience, and they are only less young than they
were. I have lived some thirty years on this planet, and I have yet
to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from
my seniors. They have told me nothing, and probably cannot tell me
anything to the purpose. Here is life, an experiment to a great
extent untried by me but it does not avail me that they have tried
it. If I have any experience which I think valuable, I am sure to
reflect that this my Mentors said nothing about.
One farmer says to me, "You cannot live on vegetable food
solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bones with" and so he
religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying his system with
the raw material of bones walking all the while he talks behind his
oxen, which, with vegetablemade bones, jerk him and his lumbering
plow along in spite of every obstacle. Some things are really
necessaries of life in some circles, the most helpless and diseased,
which in others are luxuries merely, and in others still are
entirely unknown.
The whole ground of human life seems to some to have been gone
over by their predecessors, both the heights and the valleys, and
all things to have been cared for. According to Evelyn, "the wise
Solomon prescribed ordinances for the very distances of trees and
the Roman praetors have decided how often you may go into your
neighbor's land to gather the acorns which fall on it without
trespass, and what share belongs to that neighbor." Hippocrates has
even left directions how we should cut our nails that is, even with
the ends of the fingers, neither shorter nor longer. Undoubtedly
the very tedium and ennui which presume to have exhausted the
variety and the joys of life are as old as Adam. But man's
capacities have never been measured nor are we to judge of what he
can do by any precedents, so little has been tried. Whatever have
been thy failures hitherto, "be not afflicted, my child, for who
shall assign to thee what thou hast left undone?"
We might try our lives by a thousand simple tests as, for
instance, that the same sun which ripens my beans illumines at once
a system of earths like ours. If I had remembered this it would
have prevented some mistakes. This was not the light in which I
hoed them. The stars are the apexes of what wonderful triangles
What distant and different beings in the various mansions of the
universe are contemplating the same one at the same moment Nature
and human life are as various as our several constitutions. Who
shall say what prospect life offers to another? Could a greater
miracle take place than for us to look through each other's eyes for
an instant? We should live in all the ages of the world in an hour
ay, in all the worlds of the ages. History, Poetry, Mythology  I
know of no reading of another's experience so startling and
informing as this would be.
The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my
soul to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be
my good behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well?
You may say the wisest thing you can, old man  you who have lived
seventy years, not without honor of a kind  I hear an irresistible
voice which invites me away from all that. One generation abandons
the enterprises of another like stranded vessels.
I think that we may safely trust a good deal more than we do.
We may waive just so much care of ourselves as we honestly bestow
elsewhere. Nature is as well adapted to our weakness as to our
strength. The incessant anxiety and strain of some is a wellnigh
incurable form of disease. We are made to exaggerate the importance
of what work we do and yet how much is not done by us or, what if
we had been taken sick? How vigilant we are determined not to live
by faith if we can avoid it all the day long on the alert, at night
we unwillingly say our prayers and commit ourselves to
uncertainties. So thoroughly and sincerely are we compelled to
live, reverencing our life, and denying the possibility of change.
This is the only way, we say but there are as many ways as there
can be drawn radii from one centre. All change is a miracle to
contemplate but it is a miracle which is taking place every
instant. Confucius said, "To know that we know what we know, and
that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge."
When one man has reduced a fact of the imagination to be a fact to
his understanding, I foresee that all men at length establish their
lives on that basis.
Let us consider for a moment what most of the trouble and
anxiety which I have referred to is about, and how much it is
necessary that we be troubled, or at least careful. It would be
some advantage to live a primitive and frontier life, though in the
midst of an outward civilization, if only to learn what are the
gross necessaries of life and what methods have been taken to obtain
them or even to look over the old daybooks of the merchants, to
see what it was that men most commonly bought at the stores, what
they stored, that is, what are the grossest groceries. For the
improvements of ages have had but little influence on the essential
laws of man's existence as our skeletons, probably, are not to be
distinguished from those of our ancestors.
By the words, necessary of life, I mean whatever, of all that
man obtains by his own exertions, has been from the first, or from
long use has become, so important to human life that few, if any,
whether from savageness, or poverty, or philosophy, ever attempt to
do without it. To many creatures there is in this sense but one
necessary of life, Food. To the bison of the prairie it is a few
inches of palatable grass, with water to drink unless he seeks the
Shelter of the forest or the mountain's shadow. None of the brute
creation requires more than Food and Shelter. The necessaries of
life for man in this climate may, accurately enough, be distributed
under the several heads of Food, Shelter, Clothing, and Fuel for
not till we have secured these are we prepared to entertain the true
problems of life with freedom and a prospect of success. Man has
invented, not only houses, but clothes and cooked food and possibly
from the accidental discovery of the warmth of fire, and the
consequent use of it, at first a luxury, arose the present necessity
to sit by it. We observe cats and dogs acquiring the same second
nature. By proper Shelter and Clothing we legitimately retain our
own internal heat but with an excess of these, or of Fuel, that is,
with an external heat greater than our own internal, may not cookery
properly be said to begin? Darwin, the naturalist, says of the
inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego, that while his own party, who were
well clothed and sitting close to a fire, were far from too warm,
these naked savages, who were farther off, were observed, to his
great surprise, "to be streaming with perspiration at undergoing
such a roasting." So, we are told, the New Hollander goes naked
with impunity, while the European shivers in his clothes. Is it
impossible to combine the hardiness of these savages with the
intellectualness of the civilized man? According to Liebig, man's
body is a stove, and food the fuel which keeps up the internal
combustion in the lungs. In cold weather we eat more, in warm less.
The animal heat is the result of a slow combustion, and disease and
death take place when this is too rapid or for want of fuel, or
from some defect in the draught, the fire goes out. Of course the
vital heat is not to be confounded with fire but so much for
analogy. It appears, therefore, from the above list, that the
expression, animal life, is nearly synonymous with the expression,
animal heat for while Food may be regarded as the Fuel which keeps
up the fire within us  and Fuel serves only to prepare that Food
or to increase the warmth of our bodies by addition from without 
Shelter and Clothing also serve only to retain the heat thus
generated and absorbed.
The grand necessity, then, for our bodies, is to keep warm, to
keep the vital heat in us. What pains we accordingly take, not only
with our Food, and Clothing, and Shelter, but with our beds, which
are our nightclothes, robbing the nests and breasts of birds to
prepare this shelter within a shelter, as the mole has its bed of
grass and leaves at the end of its burrow The poor man is wont to
complain that this is a cold world and to cold, no less physical
than social, we refer directly a great part of our ails. The
summer, in some climates, makes possible to man a sort of Elysian
life. Fuel, except to cook his Food, is then unnecessary the sun
is his fire, and many of the fruits are sufficiently cooked by its
rays while Food generally is more various, and more easily
obtained, and Clothing and Shelter are wholly or half unnecessary.
At the present day, and in this country, as I find by my own
experience, a few implements, a knife, an axe, a spade, a
wheelbarrow, etc., and for the studious, lamplight, stationery, and
access to a few books, rank next to necessaries, and can all be
obtained at a trifling cost. Yet some, not wise, go to the other
side of the globe, to barbarous and unhealthy regions, and devote
themselves to trade for ten or twenty years, in order that they may
live  that is, keep comfortably warm  and die in New England at
last. The luxuriously rich are not simply kept comfortably warm,
but unnaturally hot as I implied before, they are cooked, of course
a la mode.
Most of the luxuries, and many of the socalled comforts of
life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the
elevation of mankind. With respect to luxuries and comforts, the
wisest have ever lived a more simple and meagre life than the poor.
The ancient philosophers, Chinese, Hindoo, Persian, and Greek, were
a class than which none has been poorer in outward riches, none so
rich in inward. We know not much about them. It is remarkable that
we know so much of them as we do. The same is true of the more
modern reformers and benefactors of their race. None can be an
impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground
of what we should call voluntary poverty. Of a life of luxury the
fruit is luxury, whether in agriculture, or commerce, or literature,
or art. There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not
philosophers. Yet it is admirable to profess because it was once
admirable to live. To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle
thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to
live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence,
magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of
life, not only theoretically, but practically. The success of great
scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtierlike success, not
kingly, not manly. They make shift to live merely by conformity,
practically as their fathers did, and are in no sense the
progenitors of a noble race of men. But why do men degenerate ever?
What makes families run out? What is the nature of the luxury which
enervates and destroys nations? Are we sure that there is none of
it in our own lives? The philosopher is in advance of his age even
in the outward form of his life. He is not fed, sheltered, clothed,
warmed, like his contemporaries. How can a man be a philosopher and
not maintain his vital heat by better methods than other men?
When a man is warmed by the several modes which I have
described, what does he want next? Surely not more warmth of the
same kind, as more and richer food, larger and more splendid houses,
finer and more abundant clothing, more numerous, incessant, and
hotter fires, and the like. When he has obtained those things which
are necessary to life, there is another alternative than to obtain
the superfluities and that is, to adventure on life now, his
vacation from humbler toil having commenced. The soil, it appears,
is suited to the seed, for it has sent its radicle downward, and it
may now send its shoot upward also with confidence. Why has man
rooted himself thus firmly in the earth, but that he may rise in the
same proportion into the heavens above?  for the nobler plants are
valued for the fruit they bear at last in the air and light, far
from the ground, and are not treated like the humbler esculents,
which, though they may be biennials, are cultivated only till they
have perfected their root, and often cut down at top for this
purpose, so that most would not know them in their flowering season.
I do not mean to prescribe rules to strong and valiant natures,
who will mind their own affairs whether in heaven or hell, and
perchance build more magnificently and spend more lavishly than the
richest, without ever impoverishing themselves, not knowing how they
live  if, indeed, there are any such, as has been dreamed nor to
those who find their encouragement and inspiration in precisely the
present condition of things, and cherish it with the fondness and
enthusiasm of lovers  and, to some extent, I reckon myself in this
number I do not speak to those who are well employed, in whatever
circumstances, and they know whether they are well employed or not
but mainly to the mass of men who are discontented, and idly
complaining of the hardness of their lot or of the times, when they
might improve them. There are some who complain most energetically
and inconsolably of any, because they are, as they say, doing their
duty. I also have in my mind that seemingly wealthy, but most
terribly impoverished class of all, who have accumulated dross, but
know not how to use it, or get rid of it, and thus have forged their
own golden or silver fetters.
If I should attempt to tell how I have desired to spend my life
in years past, it would probably surprise those of my readers who
are somewhat acquainted with its actual history it would certainly
astonish those who know nothing about it. I will only hint at some
of the enterprises which I have cherished.
In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been
anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too
to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future,
which is precisely the present moment to toe that line. You will
pardon some obscurities, for there are more secrets in my trade than
in most men's, and yet not voluntarily kept, but inseparable from
its very nature. I would gladly tell all that I know about it, and
never paint "No Admittance" on my gate.
I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle dove, and am
still on their trail. Many are the travellers I have spoken
concerning them, describing their tracks and what calls they
answered to. I have met one or two who had heard the hound, and the
tramp of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear behind a cloud,
and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lost them
themselves.
To anticipate, not the sunrise and the dawn merely, but, if
possible, Nature herself How many mornings, summer and winter,
before yet any neighbor was stirring about his business, have I been
about mine No doubt, many of my townsmen have met me returning
from this enterprise, farmers starting for Boston in the twilight,
or woodchoppers going to their work. It is true, I never assisted
the sun materially in his rising, but, doubt not, it was of the last
importance only to be present at it.
So many autumn, ay, and winter days, spent outside the town,
trying to hear what was in the wind, to hear and carry it express
I wellnigh sunk all my capital in it, and lost my own breath into
the bargain, running in the face of it. If it had concerned either
of the political parties, depend upon it, it would have appeared in
the Gazette with the earliest intelligence. At other times watching
from the observatory of some cliff or tree, to telegraph any new
arrival or waiting at evening on the hilltops for the sky to fall,
that I might catch something, though I never caught much, and that,
mannawise, would dissolve again in the sun.
For a long time I was reporter to a journal, of no very wide
circulation, whose editor has never yet seen fit to print the bulk
of my contributions, and, as is too common with writers, I got only
my labor for my pains. However, in this case my pains were their
own reward.
For many years I was selfappointed inspector of snowstorms and
rainstorms, and did my duty faithfully surveyor, if not of
highways, then of forest paths and all acrosslot routes, keeping
them open, and ravines bridged and passable at all seasons, where
the public heel had testified to their utility.
I have looked after the wild stock of the town, which give a
faithful herdsman a good deal of trouble by leaping fences and I
have had an eye to the unfrequented nooks and corners of the farm
though I did not always know whether Jonas or Solomon worked in a
particular field today that was none of my business. I have
watered the red huckleberry, the sand cherry and the nettletree,
the red pine and the black ash, the white grape and the yellow
violet, which might have withered else in dry seasons.
In short, I went on thus for a long time I may say it without
boasting, faithfully minding my business, till it became more and
more evident that my townsmen would not after all admit me into the
list of town officers, nor make my place a sinecure with a moderate
allowance. My accounts, which I can swear to have kept faithfully,
I have, indeed, never got audited, still less accepted, still less
paid and settled. However, I have not set my heart on that.
Not long since, a strolling Indian went to sell baskets at the
house of a wellknown lawyer in my neighborhood. "Do you wish to
buy any baskets?" he asked. "No, we do not want any," was the
reply. "What" exclaimed the Indian as he went out the gate, "do
you mean to starve us?" Having seen his industrious white neighbors
so well off  that the lawyer had only to weave arguments, and, by
some magic, wealth and standing followed  he had said to himself
I will go into business I will weave baskets it is a thing which I
can do. Thinking that when he had made the baskets he would have
done his part, and then it would be the white man's to buy them. He
had not discovered that it was necessary for him to make it worth
the other's while to buy them, or at least make him think that it
was so, or to make something else which it would be worth his while
to buy. I too had woven a kind of basket of a delicate texture, but
I had not made it worth any one's while to buy them. Yet not the
less, in my case, did I think it worth my while to weave them, and
instead of studying how to make it worth men's while to buy my
baskets, I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling
them. The life which men praise and regard as successful is but one
kind. Why should we exaggerate any one kind at the expense of the
others?
Finding that my fellowcitizens were not likely to offer me any
room in the court house, or any curacy or living anywhere else, but
I must shift for myself, I turned my face more exclusively than ever
to the woods, where I was better known. I determined to go into
business at once, and not wait to acquire the usual capital, using
such slender means as I had already got. My purpose in going to
Walden Pond was not to live cheaply nor to live dearly there, but to
transact some private business with the fewest obstacles to be
hindered from accomplishing which for want of a little common sense,
a little enterprise and business talent, appeared not so sad as
foolish.
I have always endeavored to acquire strict business habits they
are indispensable to every man. If your trade is with the Celestial
Empire, then some small counting house on the coast, in some Salem
harbor, will be fixture enough. You will export such articles as
the country affords, purely native products, much ice and pine
timber and a little granite, always in native bottoms. These will
be good ventures. To oversee all the details yourself in person to
be at once pilot and captain, and owner and underwriter to buy and
sell and keep the accounts to read every letter received, and write
or read every letter sent to superintend the discharge of imports
night and day to be upon many parts of the coast almost at the same
time  often the richest freight will be discharged upon a Jersey
shore  to be your own telegraph, unweariedly sweeping the
horizon, speaking all passing vessels bound coastwise to keep up a
steady despatch of commodities, for the supply of such a distant and
exorbitant market to keep yourself informed of the state of the
markets, prospects of war and peace everywhere, and anticipate the
tendencies of trade and civilization  taking advantage of the
results of all exploring expeditions, using new passages and all
improvements in navigation  charts to be studied, the position of
reefs and new lights and buoys to be ascertained, and ever, and
ever, the logarithmic tables to be corrected, for by the error of
some calculator the vessel often splits upon a rock that should have
reached a friendly pier  there is the untold fate of La Prouse
universal science to be kept pace with, studying the lives of all
great discoverers and navigators, great adventurers and merchants,
from Hanno and the Phoenicians down to our day in fine, account of
stock to be taken from time to time, to know how you stand. It is a
labor to task the faculties of a man  such problems of profit and
loss, of interest, of tare and tret, and gauging of all kinds in it,
as demand a universal knowledge.
I have thought that Walden Pond would be a good place for
business, not solely on account of the railroad and the ice trade
it offers advantages which it may not be good policy to divulge it
is a good port and a good foundation. No Neva marshes to be filled
though you must everywhere build on piles of your own driving. It
is said that a floodtide, with a westerly wind, and ice in the
Neva, would sweep St. Petersburg from the face of the earth.
As this business was to be entered into without the usual
capital, it may not be easy to conjecture where those means, that
will still be indispensable to every such undertaking, were to be
obtained. As for Clothing, to come at once to the practical part of
the question, perhaps we are led oftener by the love of novelty and
a regard for the opinions of men, in procuring it, than by a true
utility. Let him who has work to do recollect that the object of
clothing is, first, to retain the vital heat, and secondly, in this
state of society, to cover nakedness, and he may judge how much of
any necessary or important work may be accomplished without adding
to his wardrobe. Kings and queens who wear a suit but once, though
made by some tailor or dressmaker to their majesties, cannot know
the comfort of wearing a suit that fits. They are no better than
wooden horses to hang the clean clothes on. Every day our garments
become more assimilated to ourselves, receiving the impress of the
wearer's character, until we hesitate to lay them aside without such
delay and medical appliances and some such solemnity even as our
bodies. No man ever stood the lower in my estimation for having a
patch in his clothes yet I am sure that there is greater anxiety,
commonly, to have fashionable, or at least clean and unpatched
clothes, than to have a sound conscience. But even if the rent is
not mended, perhaps the worst vice betrayed is improvidence. I
sometimes try my acquaintances by such tests as this  Who could
wear a patch, or two extra seams only, over the knee? Most behave
as if they believed that their prospects for life would be ruined if
they should do it. It would be easier for them to hobble to town
with a broken leg than with a broken pantaloon. Often if an
accident happens to a gentleman's legs, they can be mended but if a
similar accident happens to the legs of his pantaloons, there is no
help for it for he considers, not what is truly respectable, but
what is respected. We know but few men, a great many coats and
breeches. Dress a scarecrow in your last shift, you standing
shiftless by, who would not soonest salute the scarecrow? Passing a
cornfield the other day, close by a hat and coat on a stake, I
recognized the owner of the farm. He was only a little more
weatherbeaten than when I saw him last. I have heard of a dog that
barked at every stranger who approached his master's premises with
clothes on, but was easily quieted by a naked thief. It is an
interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank if
they were divested of their clothes. Could you, in such a case,
tell surely of any company of civilized men which belonged to the
most respected class? When Madam Pfeiffer, in her adventurous
travels round the world, from east to west, had got so near home as
Asiatic Russia, she says that she felt the necessity of wearing
other than a travelling dress, when she went to meet the
authorities, for she "was now in a civilized country, where ...
people are judged of by their clothes." Even in our democratic New
England towns the accidental possession of wealth, and its
manifestation in dress and equipage alone, obtain for the possessor
almost universal respect. But they yield such respect, numerous as
they are, are so far heathen, and need to have a missionary sent to
them. Beside, clothes introduced sewing, a kind of work which you
may call endless a woman's dress, at least, is never done.
A man who has at length found something to do will not need to
get a new suit to do it in for him the old will do, that has lain
dusty in the garret for an indeterminate period. Old shoes will
serve a hero longer than they have served his valet  if a hero
ever has a valet  bare feet are older than shoes, and he can make
them do. Only they who go to soires and legislative balls must
have new coats, coats to change as often as the man changes in them.
But if my jacket and trousers, my hat and shoes, are fit to worship
God in, they will do will they not? Who ever saw his old clothes
his old coat, actually worn out, resolved into its primitive
elements, so that it was not a deed of charity to bestow it on some
poor boy, by him perchance to be bestowed on some poorer still, or
shall we say richer, who could do with less? I say, beware of all
enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of
clothes. If there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be made
to fit? If you have any enterprise before you, try it in your old
clothes. All men want, not something to do with, but something to
do, or rather something to be. Perhaps we should never procure a
new suit, however ragged or dirty the old, until we have so
conducted, so enterprised or sailed in some way, that we feel like
new men in the old, and that to retain it would be like keeping new
wine in old bottles. Our moulting season, like that of the fowls,
must be a crisis in our lives. The loon retires to solitary ponds
to spend it. Thus also the snake casts its slough, and the
caterpillar its wormy coat, by an internal industry and expansion
for clothes are but our outmost cuticle and mortal coil. Otherwise
we shall be found sailing under false colors, and be inevitably
cashiered at last by our own opinion, as well as that of mankind.
We don garment after garment, as if we grew like exogenous
plants by addition without. Our outside and often thin and fanciful
clothes are our epidermis, or false skin, which partakes not of our
life, and may be stripped off here and there without fatal injury
our thicker garments, constantly worn, are our cellular integument,
or cortex but our shirts are our liber, or true bark, which cannot
be removed without girdling and so destroying the man. I believe
that all races at some seasons wear something equivalent to the
shirt. It is desirable that a man be clad so simply that he can lay
his hands on himself in the dark, and that he live in all respects
so compactly and preparedly that, if an enemy take the town, he can,
like the old philosopher, walk out the gate emptyhanded without
anxiety. While one thick garment is, for most purposes, as good as
three thin ones, and cheap clothing can be obtained at prices really
to suit customers while a thick coat can be bought for five
dollars, which will last as many years, thick pantaloons for two
dollars, cowhide boots for a dollar and a half a pair, a summer hat
for a quarter of a dollar, and a winter cap for sixtytwo and a half
cents, or a better be made at home at a nominal cost, where is he so
poor that, clad in such a suit, of his own earning, there will not
be found wise men to do him reverence?
When I ask for a garment of a particular form, my tailoress
tells me gravely, "They do not make them so now," not emphasizing
the "They" at all, as if she quoted an authority as impersonal as
the Fates, and I find it difficult to get made what I want, simply
because she cannot believe that I mean what I say, that I am so
rash. When I hear this oracular sentence, I am for a moment
absorbed in thought, emphasizing to myself each word separately that
I may come at the meaning of it, that I may find out by what degree
of consanguinity They are related to me, and what authority they
may have in an affair which affects me so nearly and, finally, I am
inclined to answer her with equal mystery, and without any more
emphasis of the "they"  "It is true, they did not make them so
recently, but they do now." Of what use this measuring of me if she
does not measure my character, but only the breadth of my shoulders,
as it were a peg to bang the coat on? We worship not the Graces,
nor the Parcae, but Fashion. She spins and weaves and cuts with
full authority. The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveller's cap,
and all the monkeys in America do the same. I sometimes despair of
getting anything quite simple and honest done in this world by the
help of men. They would have to be passed through a powerful press
first, to squeeze their old notions out of them, so that they would
not soon get upon their legs again and then there would be some one
in the company with a maggot in his head, hatched from an egg
deposited there nobody knows when, for not even fire kills these
things, and you would have lost your labor. Nevertheless, we will
not forget that some Egyptian wheat was handed down to us by a
mummy.
On the whole, I think that it cannot be maintained that dressing
has in this or any country risen to the dignity of an art. At
present men make shift to wear what they can get. Like shipwrecked
sailors, they put on what they can find on the beach, and at a
little distance, whether of space or time, laugh at each other's
masquerade. Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but
follows religiously the new. We are amused at beholding the costume
of Henry VIII, or Queen Elizabeth, as much as if it was that of the
King and Queen of the Cannibal Islands. All costume off a man is
pitiful or grotesque. It is only the serious eye peering from and
the sincere life passed within it which restrain laughter and
consecrate the costume of any people. Let Harlequin be taken with a
fit of the colic and his trappings will have to serve that mood too.
When the soldier is hit by a cannonball, rags are as becoming as
purple.
The childish and savage taste of men and women for new patterns
keeps how many shaking and squinting through kaleidoscopes that they
may discover the particular figure which this generation requires
today. The manufacturers have learned that this taste is merely
whimsical. Of two patterns which differ only by a few threads more
or less of a particular color, the one will be sold readily, the
other lie on the shelf, though it frequently happens that after the
lapse of a season the latter becomes the most fashionable.
Comparatively, tattooing is not the hideous custom which it is
called. It is not barbarous merely because the printing is
skindeep and unalterable.
I cannot believe that our factory system is the best mode by
which men may get clothing. The condition of the operatives is
becoming every day more like that of the English and it cannot be
wondered at, since, as far as I have heard or observed, the
principal object is, not that mankind may be well and honestly clad,
but, unquestionably, that corporations may be enriched. In the long
run men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, though they should
fail immediately, they had better aim at something high.
As for a Shelter, I will not deny that this is now a necessary
of life, though there are instances of men having done without it
for long periods in colder countries than this. Samuel Laing says
that "the Laplander in his skin dress, and in a skin bag which he
puts over his head and shoulders, will sleep night after night on
the snow ... in a degree of cold which would extinguish the life of
one exposed to it in any woollen clothing." He had seen them asleep
thus. Yet he adds, "They are not hardier than other people." But,
probably, man did not live long on the earth without discovering the
convenience which there is in a house, the domestic comforts, which
phrase may have originally signified the satisfactions of the house
more than of the family though these must be extremely partial and
occasional in those climates where the house is associated in our
thoughts with winter or the rainy season chiefly, and two thirds of
the year, except for a parasol, is unnecessary. In our climate, in
the summer, it was formerly almost solely a covering at night. In
the Indian gazettes a wigwam was the symbol of a day's march, and a
row of them cut or painted on the bark of a tree signified that so
many times they had camped. Man was not made so large limbed and
robust but that he must seek to narrow his world and wall in a space
such as fitted him. He was at first bare and out of doors but
though this was pleasant enough in serene and warm weather, by
daylight, the rainy season and the winter, to say nothing of the
torrid sun, would perhaps have nipped his race in the bud if he had
not made haste to clothe himself with the shelter of a house. Adam
and Eve, according to the fable, wore the bower before other
clothes. Man wanted a home, a place of warmth, or comfort, first of
warmth, then the warmth of the affections.
We may imagine a time when, in the infancy of the human race,
some enterprising mortal crept into a hollow in a rock for shelter.
Every child begins the world again, to some extent, and loves to
stay outdoors, even in wet and cold. It plays house, as well as
horse, having an instinct for it. Who does not remember the
interest with which, when young, he looked at shelving rocks, or any
approach to a cave? It was the natural yearning of that portion,
any portion of our most primitive ancestor which still survived in
us. From the cave we have advanced to roofs of palm leaves, of bark
and boughs, of linen woven and stretched, of grass and straw, of
boards and shingles, of stones and tiles. At last, we know not what
it is to live in the open air, and our lives are domestic in more
senses than we think. From the hearth the field is a great
distance. It would be well, perhaps, if we were to spend more of
our days and nights without any obstruction between us and the
celestial bodies, if the poet did not speak so much from under a
roof, or the saint dwell there so long. Birds do not sing in caves,
nor do doves cherish their innocence in dovecots.
However, if one designs to construct a dwellinghouse, it
behooves him to exercise a little Yankee shrewdness, lest after all
he find himself in a workhouse, a labyrinth without a clue, a
museum, an almshouse, a prison, or a splendid mausoleum instead.
Consider first how slight a shelter is absolutely necessary. I have
seen Penobscot Indians, in this town, living in tents of thin cotton
cloth, while the snow was nearly a foot deep around them, and I
thought that they would be glad to have it deeper to keep out the
wind. Formerly, when how to get my living honestly, with freedom
left for my proper pursuits, was a question which vexed me even more
than it does now, for unfortunately I am become somewhat callous, I
used to see a large box by the railroad, six feet long by three
wide, in which the laborers locked up their tools at night and it
suggested to me that every man who was hard pushed might get such a
one for a dollar, and, having bored a few auger holes in it, to
admit the air at least, get into it when it rained and at night, and
hook down the lid, and so have freedom in his love, and in his soul
be free. This did not appear the worst, nor by any means a
despicable alternative. You could sit up as late as you pleased,
and, whenever you got up, go abroad without any landlord or
houselord dogging you for rent. Many a man is harassed to death to
pay the rent of a larger and more luxurious box who would not have
frozen to death in such a box as this. I am far from jesting.
Economy is a subject which admits of being treated with levity, but
it cannot so be disposed of. A comfortable house for a rude and
hardy race, that lived mostly out of doors, was once made here
almost entirely of such materials as Nature furnished ready to their
hands. Gookin, who was superintendent of the Indians subject to the
Massachusetts Colony, writing in , says, "The best of their
houses are covered very neatly, tight and warm, with barks of trees,
slipped from their bodies at those seasons when the sap is up, and
made into great flakes, with pressure of weighty timber, when they
are green.... The meaner sort are covered with mats which they make
of a kind of bulrush, and are also indifferently tight and warm, but
not so good as the former.... Some I have seen, sixty or a hundred
feet long and thirty feet broad.... I have often lodged in their
wigwams, and found them as warm as the best English houses." He
adds that they were commonly carpeted and lined within with
wellwrought embroidered mats, and were furnished with various
utensils. The Indians had advanced so far as to regulate the effect
of the wind by a mat suspended over the hole in the roof and moved
by a string. Such a lodge was in the first instance constructed in
a day or two at most, and taken down and put up in a few hours and
every family owned one, or its apartment in one.
In the savage state every family owns a shelter as good as the
best, and sufficient for its coarser and simpler wants but I think
that I speak within bounds when I say that, though the birds of the
air have their nests, and the foxes their holes, and the savages
their wigwams, in modern civilized society not more than one half
the families own a shelter. In the large towns and cities, where
civilization especially prevails, the number of those who own a
shelter is a very small fraction of the whole. The rest pay an
annual tax for this outside garment of all, become indispensable
summer and winter, which would buy a village of Indian wigwams, but
now helps to keep them poor as long as they live. I do not mean to
insist here on the disadvantage of hiring compared with owning, but
it is evident that the savage owns his shelter because it costs so
little, while the civilized man hires his commonly because he cannot
afford to own it nor can he, in the long run, any better afford to
hire. But, answers one, by merely paying this tax, the poor
civilized man secures an abode which is a palace compared with the
savage's. An annual rent of from twentyfive to a hundred dollars
these are the country rates entitles him to the benefit of the
improvements of centuries, spacious apartments, clean paint and
paper, Rumford fireplace, back plastering, Venetian blinds, copper
pump, spring lock, a commodious cellar, and many other things. But
how happens it that he who is said to enjoy these things is so
commonly a poor civilized man, while the savage, who has them not,
is rich as a savage? If it is asserted that civilization is a real
advance in the condition of man  and I think that it is, though
only the wise improve their advantages  it must be shown that it
has produced better dwellings without making them more costly and
the cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is
required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run. An
average house in this neighborhood costs perhaps eight hundred
dollars, and to lay up this sum will take from ten to fifteen years
of the laborer's life, even if he is not encumbered with a family 
estimating the pecuniary value of every man's labor at one dollar a
day, for if some receive more, others receive less  so that he
must have spent more than half his life commonly before his wigwam
will be earned. If we suppose him to pay a rent instead, this is
but a doubtful choice of evils. Would the savage have been wise to
exchange his wigwam for a palace on these terms?
It may be guessed that I reduce almost the whole advantage of
holding this superfluous property as a fund in store against the
future, so far as the individual is concerned, mainly to the
defraying of funeral expenses. But perhaps a man is not required to
bury himself. Nevertheless this points to an important distinction
between the civilized man and the savage and, no doubt, they have
designs on us for our benefit, in making the life of a civilized
people an institution, in which the life of the individual is to a
great extent absorbed, in order to preserve and perfect that of the
race. But I wish to show at what a sacrifice this advantage is at
present obtained, and to suggest that we may possibly so live as to
secure all the advantage without suffering any of the disadvantage.
What mean ye by saying that the poor ye have always with you, or
that the fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth
are set on edge?
"As I live, saith the Lord God, ye shall not have occasion any
more to use this proverb in Israel.
"Behold all souls are mine as the soul of the father, so also
the soul of the son is mine the soul that sinneth, it shall die."
When I consider my neighbors, the farmers of Concord, who are at
least as well off as the other classes, I find that for the most
part they have been toiling twenty, thirty, or forty years, that
they may become the real owners of their farms, which commonly they
have inherited with encumbrances, or else bought with hired money 
and we may regard one third of that toil as the cost of their houses
but commonly they have not paid for them yet. It is true, the
encumbrances sometimes outweigh the value of the farm, so that the
farm itself becomes one great encumbrance, and still a man is found
to inherit it, being well acquainted with it, as he says. On
applying to the assessors, I am surprised to learn that they cannot
at once name a dozen in the town who own their farms free and clear.
If you would know the history of these homesteads, inquire at the
bank where they are mortgaged. The man who has actually paid for
his farm with labor on it is so rare that every neighbor can point
to him. I doubt if there are three such men in Concord. What has
been said of the merchants, that a very large majority, even
ninetyseven in a hundred, are sure to fail, is equally true of the
farmers. With regard to the merchants, however, one of them says
pertinently that a great part of their failures are not genuine
pecuniary failures, but merely failures to fulfil their engagements,
because it is inconvenient that is, it is the moral character that
breaks down. But this puts an infinitely worse face on the matter,
and suggests, beside, that probably not even the other three succeed
in saving their souls, but are perchance bankrupt in a worse sense
than they who fail honestly. Bankruptcy and repudiation are the
springboards from which much of our civilization vaults and turns
its somersets, but the savage stands on the unelastic plank of
famine. Yet the Middlesex Cattle Show goes off here with eclat
annually, as if all the joints of the agricultural machine were
suent.
The farmer is endeavoring to solve the problem of a livelihood
by a formula more complicated than the problem itself. To get his
shoestrings he speculates in herds of cattle. With consummate skill
he has set his trap with a hair spring to catch comfort and
independence, and then, as he turned away, got his own leg into it.
This is the reason he is poor and for a similar reason we are all
poor in respect to a thousand savage comforts, though surrounded by
luxuries. As Chapman sings,
"The false society of men 
for earthly greatness
All heavenly comforts rarefies to air."
And when the farmer has got his house, he may not be the richer
but the poorer for it, and it be the house that has got him. As I
understand it, that was a valid objection urged by Momus against the
house which Minerva made, that she "had not made it movable, by
which means a bad neighborhood might be avoided" and it may still
be urged, for our houses are such unwieldy property that we are
often imprisoned rather than housed in them and the bad
neighborhood to be avoided is our own scurvy selves. I know one or
two families, at least, in this town, who, for nearly a generation,
have been wishing to sell their houses in the outskirts and move
into the village, but have not been able to accomplish it, and only
death will set them free.
Granted that the majority are able at last either to own or hire
the modern house with all its improvements. While civilization has
been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who
are to inhabit them. It has created palaces, but it was not so easy
to create noblemen and kings. And if the civilized man's pursuits
are no worthier than the savage's, if he is employed the greater
part of his life in obtaining gross necessaries and comforts merely,
why should he have a better dwelling than the former?
But how do the poor minority fare? Perhaps it will be found
that just in proportion as some have been placed in outward
circumstances above the savage, others have been degraded below him.
The luxury of one class is counterbalanced by the indigence of
another. On the one side is the palace, on the other are the
almshouse and "silent poor." The myriads who built the pyramids to
be the tombs of the Pharaohs were fed on garlic, and it may be were
not decently buried themselves. The mason who finishes the cornice
of the palace returns at night perchance to a hut not so good as a
wigwam. It is a mistake to suppose that, in a country where the
usual evidences of civilization exist, the condition of a very large
body of the inhabitants may not be as degraded as that of savages.
I refer to the degraded poor, not now to the degraded rich. To know
this I should not need to look farther than to the shanties which
everywhere border our railroads, that last improvement in
civilization where I see in my daily walks human beings living in
sties, and all winter with an open door, for the sake of light,
without any visible, often imaginable, woodpile, and the forms of
both old and young are permanently contracted by the long habit of
shrinking from cold and misery, and the development of all their
limbs and faculties is checked. It certainly is fair to look at
that class by whose labor the works which distinguish this
generation are accomplished. Such too, to a greater or less extent,
is the condition of the operatives of every denomination in England,
which is the great workhouse of the world. Or I could refer you to
Ireland, which is marked as one of the white or enlightened spots on
the map. Contrast the physical condition of the Irish with that of
the North American Indian, or the South Sea Islander, or any other
savage race before it was degraded by contact with the civilized
man. Yet I have no doubt that that people's rulers are as wise as
the average of civilized rulers. Their condition only proves what
squalidness may consist with civilization. I hardly need refer now
to the laborers in our Southern States who produce the staple
exports of this country, and are themselves a staple production of
the South. But to confine myself to those who are said to be in
moderate circumstances.
Most men appear never to have considered what a house is, and
are actually though needlessly poor all their lives because they
think that they must have such a one as their neighbors have. As if
one were to wear any sort of coat which the tailor might cut out for
him, or, gradually leaving off palmleaf hat or cap of woodchuck
skin, complain of hard times because he could not afford to buy him
a crown It is possible to invent a house still more convenient and
luxurious than we have, which yet all would admit that man could not
afford to pay for. Shall we always study to obtain more of these
things, and not sometimes to be content with less? Shall the
respectable citizen thus gravely teach, by precept and example, the
necessity of the young man's providing a certain number of
superfluous glowshoes, and umbrellas, and empty guest chambers for
empty guests, before he dies? Why should not our furniture be as
simple as the Arab's or the Indian's? When I think of the
benefactors of the race, whom we have apotheosized as messengers
from heaven, bearers of divine gifts to man, I do not see in my mind
any retinue at their heels, any carload of fashionable furniture.
Or what if I were to allow  would it not be a singular allowance?
that our furniture should be more complex than the Arab's, in
proportion as we are morally and intellectually his superiors At
present our houses are cluttered and defiled with it, and a good
housewife would sweep out the greater part into the dust hole, and
not leave her morning's work undone. Morning work By the blushes
of Aurora and the music of Memnon, what should be man's morning work
in this world? I had three pieces of limestone on my desk, but I
was terrified to find that they required to be dusted daily, when
the furniture of my mind was all undusted still, and threw them out
the window in disgust. How, then, could I have a furnished house?
I would rather sit in the open air, for no dust gathers on the
grass, unless where man has broken ground.
It is the luxurious and dissipated who set the fashions which
the herd so diligently follow. The traveller who stops at the best
houses, so called, soon discovers this, for the publicans presume
him to be a Sardanapalus, and if he resigned himself to their tender
mercies he would soon be completely emasculated. I think that in
the railroad car we are inclined to spend more on luxury than on
safety and convenience, and it threatens without attaining these to
become no better than a modern drawingroom, with its divans, and
ottomans, and sunshades, and a hundred other oriental things, which
we are taking west with us, invented for the ladies of the harem and
the effeminate natives of the Celestial Empire, which Jonathan
should be ashamed to know the names of. I would rather sit on a
pumpkin and have it all to myself than be crowded on a velvet
cushion. I would rather ride on earth in an ox cart, with a free
circulation, than go to heaven in the fancy car of an excursion
train and breathe a malaria all the way.
The very simplicity and nakedness of man's life in the primitive
ages imply this advantage, at least, that they left him still but a
sojourner in nature. When he was refreshed with food and sleep, he
contemplated his journey again. He dwelt, as it were, in a tent in
this world, and was either threading the valleys, or crossing the
plains, or climbing the mountaintops. But lo men have become the
tools of their tools. The man who independently plucked the fruits
when he was hungry is become a farmer and he who stood under a tree
for shelter, a housekeeper. We now no longer camp as for a night,
but have settled down on earth and forgotten heaven. We have
adopted Christianity merely as an improved method of agriculture.
We have built for this world a family mansion, and for the next a
family tomb. The best works of art are the expression of man's
struggle to free himself from this condition, but the effect of our
art is merely to make this low state comfortable and that higher
state to be forgotten. There is actually no place in this village
for a work of fine art, if any had come down to us, to stand, for
our lives, our houses and streets, furnish no proper pedestal for
it. There is not a nail to hang a picture on, nor a shelf to
receive the bust of a hero or a saint. When I consider how our
houses are built and paid for, or not paid for, and their internal
economy managed and sustained, I wonder that the floor does not give
way under the visitor while he is admiring the gewgaws upon the
mantelpiece, and let him through into the cellar, to some solid and
honest though earthy foundation. I cannot but perceive that this
socalled rich and refined life is a thing jumped at, and I do not
get on in the enjoyment of the fine arts which adorn it, my
attention being wholly occupied with the jump for I remember that
the greatest genuine leap, due to human muscles alone, on record, is
that of certain wandering Arabs, who are said to have cleared
twentyfive feet on level ground. Without factitious support, man
is sure to come to earth again beyond that distance. The first
question which I am tempted to put to the proprietor of such great
impropriety is, Who bolsters you? Are you one of the ninetyseven
who fail, or the three who succeed? Answer me these questions, and
then perhaps I may look at your bawbles and find them ornamental.
The cart before the horse is neither beautiful nor useful. Before
we can adorn our houses with beautiful objects the walls must be
stripped, and our lives must be stripped, and beautiful housekeeping
and beautiful living be laid for a foundation now, a taste for the
beautiful is most cultivated out of doors, where there is no house
and no housekeeper.
Old Johnson, in his "WonderWorking Providence," speaking of the
first settlers of this town, with whom he was contemporary, tells us
that "they burrow themselves in the earth for their first shelter
under some hillside, and, casting the soil aloft upon timber, they
make a smoky fire against the earth, at the highest side." They did
not "provide them houses," says he, "till the earth, by the Lord's
blessing, brought forth bread to feed them," and the first year's
crop was so light that "they were forced to cut their bread very
thin for a long season." The secretary of the Province of New
Netherland, writing in Dutch, in , for the information of those
who wished to take up land there, states more particularly that
"those in New Netherland, and especially in New England, who have no
means to build farmhouses at first according to their wishes, dig a
square pit in the ground, cellar fashion, six or seven feet deep, as
long and as broad as they think proper, case the earth inside with
wood all round the wall, and line the wood with the bark of trees or
something else to prevent the caving in of the earth floor this
cellar with plank, and wainscot it overhead for a ceiling, raise a
roof of spars clear up, and cover the spars with bark or green sods,
so that they can live dry and warm in these houses with their entire
families for two, three, and four years, it being understood that
partitions are run through those cellars which are adapted to the
size of the family. The wealthy and principal men in New England,
in the beginning of the colonies, commenced their first
dwellinghouses in this fashion for two reasons firstly, in order
not to waste time in building, and not to want food the next season
secondly, in order not to discourage poor laboring people whom they
brought over in numbers from Fatherland. In the course of three or
four years, when the country became adapted to agriculture, they
built themselves handsome houses, spending on them several
thousands."
In this course which our ancestors took there was a show of
prudence at least, as if their principle were to satisfy the more
pressing wants first. But are the more pressing wants satisfied
now? When I think of acquiring for myself one of our luxurious
dwellings, I am deterred, for, so to speak, the country is not yet
adapted to human culture, and we are still forced to cut our
spiritual bread far thinner than our forefathers did their wheaten.
Not that all architectural ornament is to be neglected even in the
rudest periods but let our houses first be lined with beauty, where
they come in contact with our lives, like the tenement of the
shellfish, and not overlaid with it. But, alas I have been inside
one or two of them, and know what they are lined with.
Though we are not so degenerate but that we might possibly live
in a cave or a wigwam or wear skins today, it certainly is better to
accept the advantages, though so dearly bought, which the invention
and industry of mankind offer. In such a neighborhood as this,
boards and shingles, lime and bricks, are cheaper and more easily
obtained than suitable caves, or whole logs, or bark in sufficient
quantities, or even welltempered clay or flat stones. I speak
understandingly on this subject, for I have made myself acquainted
with it both theoretically and practically. With a little more wit
we might use these materials so as to become richer than the richest
now are, and make our civilization a blessing. The civilized man is
a more experienced and wiser savage. But to make haste to my own
experiment.
Near the end of March, , I borrowed an axe and went down to
the woods by Walden Pond, nearest to where I intended to build my
house, and began to cut down some tall, arrowy white pines, still in
their youth, for timber. It is difficult to begin without
borrowing, but perhaps it is the most generous course thus to permit
your fellowmen to have an interest in your enterprise. The owner
of the axe, as he released his hold on it, said that it was the
apple of his eye but I returned it sharper than I received it. It
was a pleasant hillside where I worked, covered with pine woods,
through which I looked out on the pond, and a small open field in
the woods where pines and hickories were springing up. The ice in
the pond was not yet dissolved, though there were some open spaces,
and it was all darkcolored and saturated with water. There were
some slight flurries of snow during the days that I worked there
but for the most part when I came out on to the railroad, on my way
home, its yellow sand heap stretched away gleaming in the hazy
atmosphere, and the rails shone in the spring sun, and I heard the
lark and pewee and other birds already come to commence another year
with us. They were pleasant spring days, in which the winter of
man's discontent was thawing as well as the earth, and the life that
had lain torpid began to stretch itself. One day, when my axe had
come off and I had cut a green hickory for a wedge, driving it with
a stone, and had placed the whole to soak in a pondhole in order to
swell the wood, I saw a striped snake run into the water, and he lay
on the bottom, apparently without inconvenience, as long as I stayed
there, or more than a quarter of an hour perhaps because he had not
yet fairly come out of the torpid state. It appeared to me that for
a like reason men remain in their present low and primitive
condition but if they should feel the influence of the spring of
springs arousing them, they would of necessity rise to a higher and
more ethereal life. I had previously seen the snakes in frosty
mornings in my path with portions of their bodies still numb and
inflexible, waiting for the sun to thaw them. On the st of April
it rained and melted the ice, and in the early part of the day,
which was very foggy, I heard a stray goose groping about over the
pond and cackling as if lost, or like the spirit of the fog.
So I went on for some days cutting and hewing timber, and also
studs and rafters, all with my narrow axe, not having many
communicable or scholarlike thoughts, singing to myself, 
Men say they know many things
But lo they have taken wings 
The arts and sciences,
And a thousand appliances
The wind that blows
Is all that any body knows.
I hewed the main timbers six inches square, most of the studs on
two sides only, and the rafters and floor timbers on one side,
leaving the rest of the bark on, so that they were just as straight
and much stronger than sawed ones. Each stick was carefully
mortised or tenoned by its stump, for I had borrowed other tools by
this time. My days in the woods were not very long ones yet I
usually carried my dinner of bread and butter, and read the
newspaper in which it was wrapped, at noon, sitting amid the green
pine boughs which I had cut off, and to my bread was imparted some
of their fragrance, for my hands were covered with a thick coat of
pitch. Before I had done I was more the friend than the foe of the
pine tree, though I had cut down some of them, having become better
acquainted with it. Sometimes a rambler in the wood was attracted
by the sound of my axe, and we chatted pleasantly over the chips
which I had made.
By the middle of April, for I made no haste in my work, but
rather made the most of it, my house was framed and ready for the
raising. I had already bought the shanty of James Collins, an
Irishman who worked on the Fitchburg Railroad, for boards. James
Collins' shanty was considered an uncommonly fine one. When I
called to see it he was not at home. I walked about the outside, at
first unobserved from within, the window was so deep and high. It
was of small dimensions, with a peaked cottage roof, and not much
else to be seen, the dirt being raised five feet all around as if it
were a compost heap. The roof was the soundest part, though a good
deal warped and made brittle by the sun. Doorsill there was none,
but a perennial passage for the hens under the door board. Mrs. C.
came to the door and asked me to view it from the inside. The hens
were driven in by my approach. It was dark, and had a dirt floor
for the most part, dank, clammy, and aguish, only here a board and
there a board which would not bear removal. She lighted a lamp to
show me the inside of the roof and the walls, and also that the
board floor extended under the bed, warning me not to step into the
cellar, a sort of dust hole two feet deep. In her own words, they
were "good boards overhead, good boards all around, and a good
window"  of two whole squares originally, only the cat had passed
out that way lately. There was a stove, a bed, and a place to sit,
an infant in the house where it was born, a silk parasol,
giltframed lookingglass, and a patent new coffeemill nailed to an
oak sapling, all told. The bargain was soon concluded, for James
had in the meanwhile returned. I to pay four dollars and
twentyfive cents tonight, he to vacate at five tomorrow morning,
selling to nobody else meanwhile I to take possession at six. It
were well, he said, to be there early, and anticipate certain
indistinct but wholly unjust claims on the score of ground rent and
fuel. This he assured me was the only encumbrance. At six I passed
him and his family on the road. One large bundle held their all 
bed, coffeemill, lookingglass, hens  all but the cat she took
to the woods and became a wild cat, and, as I learned afterward,
trod in a trap set for woodchucks, and so became a dead cat at last.
I took down this dwelling the same morning, drawing the nails,
and removed it to the pondside by small cartloads, spreading the
boards on the grass there to bleach and warp back again in the sun.
One early thrush gave me a note or two as I drove along the woodland
path. I was informed treacherously by a young Patrick that neighbor
Seeley, an Irishman, in the intervals of the carting, transferred
the still tolerable, straight, and drivable nails, staples, and
spikes to his pocket, and then stood when I came back to pass the
time of day, and look freshly up, unconcerned, with spring thoughts,
at the devastation there being a dearth of work, as he said. He
was there to represent spectatordom, and help make this seemingly
insignificant event one with the removal of the gods of Troy.
I dug my cellar in the side of a hill sloping to the south,
where a woodchuck had formerly dug his burrow, down through sumach
and blackberry roots, and the lowest stain of vegetation, six feet
square by seven deep, to a fine sand where potatoes would not freeze
in any winter. The sides were left shelving, and not stoned but
the sun having never shone on them, the sand still keeps its place.
It was but two hours' work. I took particular pleasure in this
breaking of ground, for in almost all latitudes men dig into the
earth for an equable temperature. Under the most splendid house in
the city is still to be found the cellar where they store their
roots as of old, and long after the superstructure has disappeared
posterity remark its dent in the earth. The house is still but a
sort of porch at the entrance of a burrow.
At length, in the beginning of May, with the help of some of my
acquaintances, rather to improve so good an occasion for
neighborliness than from any necessity, I set up the frame of my
house. No man was ever more honored in the character of his raisers
than I. They are destined, I trust, to assist at the raising of
loftier structures one day. I began to occupy my house on the th
of July, as soon as it was boarded and roofed, for the boards were
carefully featheredged and lapped, so that it was perfectly
impervious to rain, but before boarding I laid the foundation of a
chimney at one end, bringing two cartloads of stones up the hill
from the pond in my arms. I built the chimney after my hoeing in
the fall, before a fire became necessary for warmth, doing my
cooking in the meanwhile out of doors on the ground, early in the
morning which mode I still think is in some respects more
convenient and agreeable than the usual one. When it stormed before
my bread was baked, I fixed a few boards over the fire, and sat
under them to watch my loaf, and passed some pleasant hours in that
way. In those days, when my hands were much employed, I read but
little, but the least scraps of paper which lay on the ground, my
holder, or tablecloth, afforded me as much entertainment, in fact
answered the same purpose as the Iliad.
It would be worth the while to build still more deliberately
than I did, considering, for instance, what foundation a door, a
window, a cellar, a garret, have in the nature of man, and perchance
never raising any superstructure until we found a better reason for
it than our temporal necessities even. There is some of the same
fitness in a man's building his own house that there is in a bird's
building its own nest. Who knows but if men constructed their
dwellings with their own hands, and provided food for themselves and
families simply and honestly enough, the poetic faculty would be
universally developed, as birds universally sing when they are so
engaged? But alas we do like cowbirds and cuckoos, which lay their
eggs in nests which other birds have built, and cheer no traveller
with their chattering and unmusical notes. Shall we forever resign
the pleasure of construction to the carpenter? What does
architecture amount to in the experience of the mass of men? I
never in all my walks came across a man engaged in so simple and
natural an occupation as building his house. We belong to the
community. It is not the tailor alone who is the ninth part of a
man it is as much the preacher, and the merchant, and the farmer.
Where is this division of labor to end? and what object does it
finally serve? No doubt another may also think for me but it is
not therefore desirable that he should do so to the exclusion of my
thinking for myself.
True, there are architects so called in this country, and I have
heard of one at least possessed with the idea of making
architectural ornaments have a core of truth, a necessity, and hence
a beauty, as if it were a revelation to him. All very well perhaps
from his point of view, but only a little better than the common
dilettantism. A sentimental reformer in architecture, he began at
the cornice, not at the foundation. It was only how to put a core
of truth within the ornaments, that every sugarplum, in fact, might
have an almond or caraway seed in it  though I hold that almonds
are most wholesome without the sugar  and not how the inhabitant,
the indweller, might build truly within and without, and let the
ornaments take care of themselves. What reasonable man ever
supposed that ornaments were something outward and in the skin
merely  that the tortoise got his spotted shell, or the shellfish
its mothero'pearl tints, by such a contract as the inhabitants of
Broadway their Trinity Church? But a man has no more to do with the
style of architecture of his house than a tortoise with that of its
shell nor need the soldier be so idle as to try to paint the
precise color of his virtue on his standard. The enemy will find it
out. He may turn pale when the trial comes. This man seemed to me
to lean over the cornice, and timidly whisper his half truth to the
rude occupants who really knew it better than he. What of
architectural beauty I now see, I know has gradually grown from
within outward, out of the necessities and character of the
indweller, who is the only builder  out of some unconscious
truthfulness, and nobleness, without ever a thought for the
appearance and whatever additional beauty of this kind is destined
to be produced will be preceded by a like unconscious beauty of
life. The most interesting dwellings in this country, as the
painter knows, are the most unpretending, humble log huts and
cottages of the poor commonly it is the life of the inhabitants
whose shells they are, and not any peculiarity in their surfaces
merely, which makes them picturesque and equally interesting will
be the citizen's suburban box, when his life shall be as simple and
as agreeable to the imagination, and there is as little straining
after effect in the style of his dwelling. A great proportion of
architectural ornaments are literally hollow, and a September gale
would strip them off, like borrowed plumes, without injury to the
substantials. They can do without architecture who have no olives
nor wines in the cellar. What if an equal ado were made about the
ornaments of style in literature, and the architects of our bibles
spent as much time about their cornices as the architects of our
churches do? So are made the belleslettres and the beauxarts and
their professors. Much it concerns a man, forsooth, how a few
sticks are slanted over him or under him, and what colors are daubed
upon his box. It would signify somewhat, if, in any earnest sense,
he slanted them and daubed it but the spirit having departed out of
the tenant, it is of a piece with constructing his own coffin  the
architecture of the grave  and "carpenter" is but another name for
"coffinmaker." One man says, in his despair or indifference to
life, take up a handful of the earth at your feet, and paint your
house that color. Is he thinking of his last and narrow house?
Toss up a copper for it as well. What an abundance of leisure be
must have Why do you take up a handful of dirt? Better paint your
house your own complexion let it turn pale or blush for you. An
enterprise to improve the style of cottage architecture When you
have got my ornaments ready, I will wear them.
Before winter I built a chimney, and shingled the sides of my
house, which were already impervious to rain, with imperfect and
sappy shingles made of the first slice of the log, whose edges I was
obliged to straighten with a plane.
I have thus a tight shingled and plastered house, ten feet wide
by fifteen long, and eightfeet posts, with a garret and a closet, a
large window on each side, two trap doors, one door at the end, and
a brick fireplace opposite. The exact cost of my house, paying the
usual price for such materials as I used, but not counting the work,
all of which was done by myself, was as follows and I give the
details because very few are able to tell exactly what their houses
cost, and fewer still, if any, the separate cost of the various
materials which compose them
Boards ..........................  ., mostly shanty boards.
Refuse shingles for roof sides ... .
Laths ............................ .
Two secondhand windows
with glass .................... .
One thousand old brick ........... .
Two casks of lime ................ . That was high.
Hair ............................. . More than I needed.
Mantletree iron ................. .
Nails ............................ .
Hinges and screws ................ .
Latch ............................ .
Chalk ............................ .
Transportation ................... . I carried a good part
on my back.
In all ...................... .
These are all the materials, excepting the timber, stones, and
sand, which I claimed by squatter's right. I have also a small
woodshed adjoining, made chiefly of the stuff which was left after
building the house.
I intend to build me a house which will surpass any on the main
street in Concord in grandeur and luxury, as soon as it pleases me
as much and will cost me no more than my present one.
I thus found that the student who wishes for a shelter can
obtain one for a lifetime at an expense not greater than the rent
which he now pays annually. If I seem to boast more than is
becoming, my excuse is that I brag for humanity rather than for
myself and my shortcomings and inconsistencies do not affect the
truth of my statement. Notwithstanding much cant and hypocrisy 
chaff which I find it difficult to separate from my wheat, but for
which I am as sorry as any man  I will breathe freely and stretch
myself in this respect, it is such a relief to both the moral and
physical system and I am resolved that I will not through humility
become the devil's attorney. I will endeavor to speak a good word
for the truth. At Cambridge College the mere rent of a student's
room, which is only a little larger than my own, is thirty dollars
each year, though the corporation had the advantage of building
thirtytwo side by side and under one roof, and the occupant suffers
the inconvenience of many and noisy neighbors, and perhaps a
residence in the fourth story. I cannot but think that if we had
more true wisdom in these respects, not only less education would be
needed, because, forsooth, more would already have been acquired,
but the pecuniary expense of getting an education would in a great
measure vanish. Those conveniences which the student requires at
Cambridge or elsewhere cost him or somebody else ten times as great
a sacrifice of life as they would with proper management on both
sides. Those things for which the most money is demanded are never
the things which the student most wants. Tuition, for instance, is
an important item in the term bill, while for the far more valuable
education which he gets by associating with the most cultivated of
his contemporaries no charge is made. The mode of founding a
college is, commonly, to get up a subscription of dollars and cents,
and then, following blindly the principles of a division of labor to
its extreme  a principle which should never be followed but with
circumspection  to call in a contractor who makes this a subject
of speculation, and he employs Irishmen or other operatives actually
to lay the foundations, while the students that are to be are said
to be fitting themselves for it and for these oversights successive
generations have to pay. I think that it would be better than this,
for the students, or those who desire to be benefited by it, even to
lay the foundation themselves. The student who secures his coveted
leisure and retirement by systematically shirking any labor
necessary to man obtains but an ignoble and unprofitable leisure,
defrauding himself of the experience which alone can make leisure
fruitful. "But," says one, "you do not mean that the students
should go to work with their hands instead of their heads?" I do
not mean that exactly, but I mean something which he might think a
good deal like that I mean that they should not play life, or study
it merely, while the community supports them at this expensive game,
but earnestly live it from beginning to end. How could youths
better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of
living? Methinks this would exercise their minds as much as
mathematics. If I wished a boy to know something about the arts and
sciences, for instance, I would not pursue the common course, which
is merely to send him into the neighborhood of some professor, where
anything is professed and practised but the art of life  to
survey the world through a telescope or a microscope, and never with
his natural eye to study chemistry, and not learn how his bread is
made, or mechanics, and not learn how it is earned to discover new
satellites to Neptune, and not detect the motes in his eyes, or to
what vagabond he is a satellite himself or to be devoured by the
monsters that swarm all around him, while contemplating the monsters
in a drop of vinegar. Which would have advanced the most at the end
of a month  the boy who had made his own jackknife from the ore
which he had dug and smelted, reading as much as would be necessary
for this  or the boy who had attended the lectures on metallurgy
at the Institute in the meanwhile, and had received a Rodgers'
penknife from his father? Which would be most likely to cut his
fingers?... To my astonishment I was informed on leaving college
that I had studied navigation  why, if I had taken one turn down
the harbor I should have known more about it. Even the poor student
studies and is taught only political economy, while that economy of
living which is synonymous with philosophy is not even sincerely
professed in our colleges. The consequence is, that while he is
reading Adam Smith, Ricardo, and Say, he runs his father in debt
irretrievably.
As with our colleges, so with a hundred "modern improvements"
there is an illusion about them there is not always a positive
advance. The devil goes on exacting compound interest to the last
for his early share and numerous succeeding investments in them.
Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our
attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an
unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive
at as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste
to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas but Maine and
Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. Either is
in such a predicament as the man who was earnest to be introduced to
a distinguished deaf woman, but when he was presented, and one end
of her ear trumpet was put into his hand, had nothing to say. As if
the main object were to talk fast and not to talk sensibly. We are
eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some
weeks nearer to the New but perchance the first news that will leak
through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the
Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough. After all, the man whose
horse trots a mile in a minute does not carry the most important
messages he is not an evangelist, nor does he come round eating
locusts and wild honey. I doubt if Flying Childers ever carried a
peck of corn to mill.
One says to me, "I wonder that you do not lay up money you love
to travel you might take the cars and go to Fitchburg today and see
the country." But I am wiser than that. I have learned that the
swiftest traveller is he that goes afoot. I say to my friend,
Suppose we try who will get there first. The distance is thirty
miles the fare ninety cents. That is almost a day's wages. I
remember when wages were sixty cents a day for laborers on this very
road. Well, I start now on foot, and get there before night I have
travelled at that rate by the week together. You will in the
meanwhile have earned your fare, and arrive there some time
tomorrow, or possibly this evening, if you are lucky enough to get a
job in season. Instead of going to Fitchburg, you will be working
here the greater part of the day. And so, if the railroad reached
round the world, I think that I should keep ahead of you and as for
seeing the country and getting experience of that kind, I should
have to cut your acquaintance altogether.
Such is the universal law, which no man can ever outwit, and
with regard to the railroad even we may say it is as broad as it is
long. To make a railroad round the world available to all mankind
is equivalent to grading the whole surface of the planet. Men have
an indistinct notion that if they keep up this activity of joint
stocks and spades long enough all will at length ride somewhere, in
next to no time, and for nothing but though a crowd rushes to the
depot, and the conductor shouts "All aboard" when the smoke is
blown away and the vapor condensed, it will be perceived that a few
are riding, but the rest are run over  and it will be called, and
will be, "A melancholy accident." No doubt they can ride at last
who shall have earned their fare, that is, if they survive so long,
but they will probably have lost their elasticity and desire to
travel by that time. This spending of the best part of one's life
earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the
least valuable part of it reminds me of the Englishman who went to
India to make a fortune first, in order that he might return to
England and live the life of a poet. He should have gone up garret
at once. "What" exclaim a million Irishmen starting up from all
the shanties in the land, "is not this railroad which we have built
a good thing?" Yes, I answer, comparatively good, that is, you
might have done worse but I wish, as you are brothers of mine, that
you could have spent your time better than digging in this dirt.
Before I finished my house, wishing to earn ten or twelve
dollars by some honest and agreeable method, in order to meet my
unusual expenses, I planted about two acres and a half of light and
sandy soil near it chiefly with beans, but also a small part with
potatoes, corn, peas, and turnips. The whole lot contains eleven
acres, mostly growing up to pines and hickories, and was sold the
preceding season for eight dollars and eight cents an acre. One
farmer said that it was "good for nothing but to raise cheeping
squirrels on." I put no manure whatever on this land, not being the
owner, but merely a squatter, and not expecting to cultivate so much
again, and I did not quite hoe it all once. I got out several cords
of stumps in plowing, which supplied me with fuel for a long time,
and left small circles of virgin mould, easily distinguishable
through the summer by the greater luxuriance of the beans there.
The dead and for the most part unmerchantable wood behind my house,
and the driftwood from the pond, have supplied the remainder of my
fuel. I was obliged to hire a team and a man for the plowing,
though I held the plow myself. My farm outgoes for the first season
were, for implements, seed, work, etc., .. The seed corn was
given me. This never costs anything to speak of, unless you plant
more than enough. I got twelve bushels of beans, and eighteen
bushels of potatoes, beside some peas and sweet corn. The yellow
corn and turnips were too late to come to anything. My whole income
from the farm was
Deducting the outgoes ............ .
There are left ..................  .
beside produce consumed and on hand at the time this estimate was
made of the value of .  the amount on hand much more than
balancing a little grass which I did not raise. All things
considered, that is, considering the importance of a man's soul and
of today, notwithstanding the short time occupied by my experiment,
nay, partly even because of its transient character, I believe that
that was doing better than any farmer in Concord did that year.
The next year I did better still, for I spaded up all the land
which I required, about a third of an acre, and I learned from the
experience of both years, not being in the least awed by many
celebrated works on husbandry, Arthur Young among the rest, that if
one would live simply and eat only the crop which he raised, and
raise no more than he ate, and not exchange it for an insufficient
quantity of more luxurious and expensive things, he would need to
cultivate only a few rods of ground, and that it would be cheaper to
spade up that than to use oxen to plow it, and to select a fresh
spot from time to time than to manure the old, and he could do all
his necessary farm work as it were with his left hand at odd hours
in the summer and thus he would not be tied to an ox, or horse, or
cow, or pig, as at present. I desire to speak impartially on this
point, and as one not interested in the success or failure of the
present economical and social arrangements. I was more independent
than any farmer in Concord, for I was not anchored to a house or
farm, but could follow the bent of my genius, which is a very
crooked one, every moment. Beside being better off than they
already, if my house had been burned or my crops had failed, I
should have been nearly as well off as before.
I am wont to think that men are not so much the keepers of herds
as herds are the keepers of men, the former are so much the freer.
Men and oxen exchange work but if we consider necessary work only,
the oxen will be seen to have greatly the advantage, their farm is
so much the larger. Man does some of his part of the exchange work
in his six weeks of haying, and it is no boy's play. Certainly no
nation that lived simply in all respects, that is, no nation of
philosophers, would commit so great a blunder as to use the labor of
animals. True, there never was and is not likely soon to be a
nation of philosophers, nor am I certain it is desirable that there
should be. However, I should never have broken a horse or bull and
taken him to board for any work he might do for me, for fear I
should become a horseman or a herdsman merely and if society seems
to be the gainer by so doing, are we certain that what is one man's
gain is not another's loss, and that the stableboy has equal cause
with his master to be satisfied? Granted that some public works
would not have been constructed without this aid, and let man share
the glory of such with the ox and horse does it follow that he
could not have accomplished works yet more worthy of himself in that
case? When men begin to do, not merely unnecessary or artistic, but
luxurious and idle work, with their assistance, it is inevitable
that a few do all the exchange work with the oxen, or, in other
words, become the slaves of the strongest. Man thus not only works
for the animal within him, but, for a symbol of this, he works for
the animal without him. Though we have many substantial houses of
brick or stone, the prosperity of the farmer is still measured by
the degree to which the barn overshadows the house. This town is
said to have the largest houses for oxen, cows, and horses
hereabouts, and it is not behindhand in its public buildings but
there are very few halls for free worship or free speech in this
county. It should not be by their architecture, but why not even by
their power of abstract thought, that nations should seek to
commemorate themselves? How much more admirable the BhagvatGeeta
than all the ruins of the East Towers and temples are the luxury
of princes. A simple and independent mind does not toil at the
bidding of any prince. Genius is not a retainer to any emperor, nor
is its material silver, or gold, or marble, except to a trifling
extent. To what end, pray, is so much stone hammered? In Arcadia,
when I was there, I did not see any hammering stone. Nations are
possessed with an insane ambition to perpetuate the memory of
themselves by the amount of hammered stone they leave. What if
equal pains were taken to smooth and polish their manners? One
piece of good sense would be more memorable than a monument as high
as the moon. I love better to see stones in place. The grandeur of
Thebes was a vulgar grandeur. More sensible is a rod of stone wall
that bounds an honest man's field than a hundredgated Thebes that
has wandered farther from the true end of life. The religion and
civilization which are barbaric and heathenish build splendid
temples but what you might call Christianity does not. Most of the
stone a nation hammers goes toward its tomb only. It buries itself
alive. As for the Pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them
so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough
to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby,
whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the
Nile, and then given his body to the dogs. I might possibly invent
some excuse for them and him, but I have no time for it. As for the
religion and love of art of the builders, it is much the same all
the world over, whether the building be an Egyptian temple or the
United States Bank. It costs more than it comes to. The mainspring
is vanity, assisted by the love of garlic and bread and butter. Mr.
Balcom, a promising young architect, designs it on the back of his
Vitruvius, with hard pencil and ruler, and the job is let out to
Dobson  Sons, stonecutters. When the thirty centuries begin to
look down on it, mankind begin to look up at it. As for your high
towers and monuments, there was a crazy fellow once in this town who
undertook to dig through to China, and he got so far that, as he
said, he heard the Chinese pots and kettles rattle but I think that
I shall not go out of my way to admire the hole which he made. Many
are concerned about the monuments of the West and the East  to
know who built them. For my part, I should like to know who in
those days did not build them  who were above such trifling. But
to proceed with my statistics.
By surveying, carpentry, and daylabor of various other kinds in
the village in the meanwhile, for I have as many trades as fingers,
I had earned .. The expense of food for eight months, namely,
from July th to March st, the time when these estimates were made,
though I lived there more than two years  not counting potatoes, a
little green corn, and some peas, which I had raised, nor
considering the value of what was on hand at the last date  was
Rice ....................  . /
Molasses ................. . Cheapest form of the
saccharine.
Rye meal ................. . /
Indian meal .............. . / Cheaper than rye.
Pork ..................... .
All experiments which failed
Flour .................... . Costs more than Indian meal,
both money and trouble.
Sugar .................... .
Lard ..................... .
Apples ................... .
Dried apple .............. .
Sweet potatoes ........... .
One pumpkin .............. .
One watermelon ........... .
Salt ..................... .
Yes, I did eat ., all told but I should not thus unblushingly
publish my guilt, if I did not know that most of my readers were
equally guilty with myself, and that their deeds would look no
better in print. The next year I sometimes caught a mess of fish
for my dinner, and once I went so far as to slaughter a woodchuck
which ravaged my beanfield  effect his transmigration, as a
Tartar would say  and devour him, partly for experiment's sake
but though it afforded me a momentary enjoyment, notwithstanding a
musky flavor, I saw that the longest use would not make that a good
practice, however it might seem to have your woodchucks ready
dressed by the village butcher.
Clothing and some incidental expenses within the same dates,
though little can be inferred from this item, amounted to
Oil and some household utensils ........ .
So that all the pecuniary outgoes, excepting for washing and
mending, which for the most part were done out of the house, and
their bills have not yet been received  and these are all and more
than all the ways by which money necessarily goes out in this part
of the world  were
House .................................  .
Farm one year ........................... .
Food eight months ....................... .
Clothing, etc., eight months ............ ./
Oil, etc., eight months ................. .
In all ............................  ./
I address myself now to those of my readers who have a living to
get. And to meet this I have for farm produce sold
Earned by daylabor .................... .
In all ............................  .,
which subtracted from the sum of the outgoes leaves a balance of
. / on the one side  this being very nearly the means with
which I started, and the measure of expenses to be incurred  and
on the other, beside the leisure and independence and health thus
secured, a comfortable house for me as long as I choose to occupy
it.
These statistics, however accidental and therefore uninstructive
they may appear, as they have a certain completeness, have a certain
value also. Nothing was given me of which I have not rendered some
account. It appears from the above estimate, that my food alone
cost me in money about twentyseven cents a week. It was, for
nearly two years after this, rye and Indian meal without yeast,
potatoes, rice, a very little salt pork, molasses, and salt and my
drink, water. It was fit that I should live on rice, mainly, who
love so well the philosophy of India. To meet the objections of
some inveterate cavillers, I may as well state, that if I dined out
occasionally, as I always had done, and I trust shall have
opportunities to do again, it was frequently to the detriment of my
domestic arrangements. But the dining out, being, as I have stated,
a constant element, does not in the least affect a comparative
statement like this.
I learned from my two years' experience that it would cost
incredibly little trouble to obtain one's necessary food, even in
this latitude that a man may use as simple a diet as the animals,
and yet retain health and strength. I have made a satisfactory
dinner, satisfactory on several accounts, simply off a dish of
purslane Portulaca oleracea which I gathered in my cornfield,
boiled and salted. I give the Latin on account of the savoriness of
the trivial name. And pray what more can a reasonable man desire,
in peaceful times, in ordinary noons, than a sufficient number of
ears of green sweet corn boiled, with the addition of salt? Even
the little variety which I used was a yielding to the demands of
appetite, and not of health. Yet men have come to such a pass that
they frequently starve, not for want of necessaries, but for want of
luxuries and I know a good woman who thinks that her son lost his
life because he took to drinking water only.
The reader will perceive that I am treating the subject rather
from an economic than a dietetic point of view, and he will not
venture to put my abstemiousness to the test unless he has a
wellstocked larder.
Bread I at first made of pure Indian meal and salt, genuine
hoecakes, which I baked before my fire out of doors on a shingle or
the end of a stick of timber sawed off in building my house but it
was wont to get smoked and to have a piny flavor, I tried flour
also but have at last found a mixture of rye and Indian meal most
convenient and agreeable. In cold weather it was no little
amusement to bake several small loaves of this in succession,
tending and turning them as carefully as an Egyptian his hatching
eggs. They were a real cereal fruit which I ripened, and they had
to my senses a fragrance like that of other noble fruits, which I
kept in as long as possible by wrapping them in cloths. I made a
study of the ancient and indispensable art of breadmaking,
consulting such authorities as offered, going back to the primitive
days and first invention of the unleavened kind, when from the
wildness of nuts and meats men first reached the mildness and
refinement of this diet, and travelling gradually down in my studies
through that accidental souring of the dough which, it is supposed,
taught the leavening process, and through the various fermentations
thereafter, till I came to "good, sweet, wholesome bread," the staff
of life. Leaven, which some deem the soul of bread, the spiritus
which fills its cellular tissue, which is religiously preserved like
the vestal fire  some precious bottleful, I suppose, first brought
over in the Mayflower, did the business for America, and its
influence is still rising, swelling, spreading, in cerealian billows
over the land  this seed I regularly and faithfully procured from
the village, till at length one morning I forgot the rules, and
scalded my yeast by which accident I discovered that even this was
not indispensable  for my discoveries were not by the synthetic
but analytic process  and I have gladly omitted it since, though
most housewives earnestly assured me that safe and wholesome bread
without yeast might not be, and elderly people prophesied a speedy
decay of the vital forces. Yet I find it not to be an essential
ingredient, and after going without it for a year am still in the
land of the living and I am glad to escape the trivialness of
carrying a bottleful in my pocket, which would sometimes pop and
discharge its contents to my discomfiture. It is simpler and more
respectable to omit it. Man is an animal who more than any other
can adapt himself to all climates and circumstances. Neither did I
put any salsoda, or other acid or alkali, into my bread. It would
seem that I made it according to the recipe which Marcus Porcius
Cato gave about two centuries before Christ. "Panem depsticium sic
facito. Manus mortariumque bene lavato. Farinam in mortarium
indito, aquae paulatim addito, subigitoque pulchre. Ubi bene
subegeris, defingito, coquitoque sub testu." Which I take to mean,
"Make kneaded bread thus. Wash your hands and trough well. Put
the meal into the trough, add water gradually, and knead it
thoroughly. When you have kneaded it well, mould it, and bake it
under a cover," that is, in a baking kettle. Not a word about
leaven. But I did not always use this staff of life. At one time,
owing to the emptiness of my purse, I saw none of it for more than a
month.
Every New Englander might easily raise all his own breadstuffs
in this land of rye and Indian corn, and not depend on distant and
fluctuating markets for them. Yet so far are we from simplicity and
independence that, in Concord, fresh and sweet meal is rarely sold
in the shops, and hominy and corn in a still coarser form are hardly
used by any. For the most part the farmer gives to his cattle and
hogs the grain of his own producing, and buys flour, which is at
least no more wholesome, at a greater cost, at the store. I saw
that I could easily raise my bushel or two of rye and Indian corn,
for the former will grow on the poorest land, and the latter does
not require the best, and grind them in a handmill, and so do
without rice and pork and if I must have some concentrated sweet, I
found by experiment that I could make a very good molasses either of
pumpkins or beets, and I knew that I needed only to set out a few
maples to obtain it more easily still, and while these were growing
I could use various substitutes beside those which I have named.
"For," as the Forefathers sang,
"we can make liquor to sweeten our lips
Of pumpkins and parsnips and walnuttree chips."
Finally, as for salt, that grossest of groceries, to obtain this
might be a fit occasion for a visit to the seashore, or, if I did
without it altogether, I should probably drink the less water. I do
not learn that the Indians ever troubled themselves to go after it.
Thus I could avoid all trade and barter, so far as my food was
concerned, and having a shelter already, it would only remain to get
clothing and fuel. The pantaloons which I now wear were woven in a
farmer's family  thank Heaven there is so much virtue still in
man for I think the fall from the farmer to the operative as great
and memorable as that from the man to the farmer  and in a new
country, fuel is an encumbrance. As for a habitat, if I were not
permitted still to squat, I might purchase one acre at the same
price for which the land I cultivated was sold  namely, eight
dollars and eight cents. But as it was, I considered that I
enhanced the value of the land by squatting on it.
There is a certain class of unbelievers who sometimes ask me
such questions as, if I think that I can live on vegetable food
alone and to strike at the root of the matter at once  for the
root is faith  I am accustomed to answer such, that I can live on
board nails. If they cannot understand that, they cannot understand
much that I have to say. For my part, I am glad to bear of
experiments of this kind being tried as that a young man tried for
a fortnight to live on hard, raw corn on the ear, using his teeth
for all mortar. The squirrel tribe tried the same and succeeded.
The human race is interested in these experiments, though a few old
women who are incapacitated for them, or who own their thirds in
mills, may be alarmed.
My furniture, part of which I made myself  and the rest cost
me nothing of which I have not rendered an account  consisted of a
bed, a table, a desk, three chairs, a lookingglass three inches in
diameter, a pair of tongs and andirons, a kettle, a skillet, and a
fryingpan, a dipper, a washbowl, two knives and forks, three
plates, one cup, one spoon, a jug for oil, a jug for molasses, and a
japanned lamp. None is so poor that he need sit on a pumpkin. That
is shiftlessness. There is a plenty of such chairs as I like best
in the village garrets to be had for taking them away. Furniture
Thank God, I can sit and I can stand without the aid of a furniture
warehouse. What man but a philosopher would not be ashamed to see
his furniture packed in a cart and going up country exposed to the
light of heaven and the eyes of men, a beggarly account of empty
boxes? That is Spaulding's furniture. I could never tell from
inspecting such a load whether it belonged to a socalled rich man
or a poor one the owner always seemed povertystricken. Indeed,
the more you have of such things the poorer you are. Each load
looks as if it contained the contents of a dozen shanties and if
one shanty is poor, this is a dozen times as poor. Pray, for what
do we move ever but to get rid of our furniture, our exuvioe at
last to go from this world to another newly furnished, and leave
this to be burned? It is the same as if all these traps were
buckled to a man's belt, and he could not move over the rough
country where our lines are cast without dragging them  dragging
his trap. He was a lucky fox that left his tail in the trap. The
muskrat will gnaw his third leg off to be free. No wonder man has
lost his elasticity. How often he is at a dead set "Sir, if I may
be so bold, what do you mean by a dead set?" If you are a seer,
whenever you meet a man you will see all that he owns, ay, and much
that he pretends to disown, behind him, even to his kitchen
furniture and all the trumpery which he saves and will not burn, and
he will appear to be harnessed to it and making what headway he can.
I think that the man is at a dead set who has got through a
knothole or gateway where his sledge load of furniture cannot
follow him. I cannot but feel compassion when I hear some trig,
compactlooking man, seemingly free, all girded and ready, speak of
his "furniture," as whether it is insured or not. "But what shall I
do with my furniture?"  My gay butterfly is entangled in a
spider's web then. Even those who seem for a long while not to have
any, if you inquire more narrowly you will find have some stored in
somebody's barn. I look upon England today as an old gentleman who
is travelling with a great deal of baggage, trumpery which has
accumulated from long housekeeping, which he has not the courage to
burn great trunk, little trunk, bandbox, and bundle. Throw away
the first three at least. It would surpass the powers of a well man
nowadays to take up his bed and walk, and I should certainly advise
a sick one to lay down his bed and run. When I have met an
immigrant tottering under a bundle which contained his all 
looking like an enormous wen which had grown out of the nape of his
neck  I have pitied him, not because that was his all, but because
he had all that to carry. If I have got to drag my trap, I will
take care that it be a light one and do not nip me in a vital part.
But perchance it would be wisest never to put one's paw into it.
I would observe, by the way, that it costs me nothing for
curtains, for I have no gazers to shut out but the sun and moon, and
I am willing that they should look in. The moon will not sour milk
nor taint meat of mine, nor will the sun injure my furniture or fade
my carpet and if he is sometimes too warm a friend, I find it still
better economy to retreat behind some curtain which nature has
provided, than to add a single item to the details of housekeeping.
A lady once offered me a mat, but as I had no room to spare within
the house, nor time to spare within or without to shake it, I
declined it, preferring to wipe my feet on the sod before my door.
It is best to avoid the beginnings of evil.
Not long since I was present at the auction of a deacon's
effects, for his life had not been ineffectual
"The evil that men do lives after them."
As usual, a great proportion was trumpery which had begun to
accumulate in his father's day. Among the rest was a dried
tapeworm. And now, after lying half a century in his garret and
other dust holes, these things were not burned instead of a
bonfire, or purifying destruction of them, there was an auction, or
increasing of them. The neighbors eagerly collected to view them,
bought them all, and carefully transported them to their garrets and
dust holes, to lie there till their estates are settled, when they
will start again. When a man dies he kicks the dust.
The customs of some savage nations might, perchance, be
profitably imitated by us, for they at least go through the
semblance of casting their slough annually they have the idea of
the thing, whether they have the reality or not. Would it not be
well if we were to celebrate such a "busk," or "feast of first
fruits," as Bartram describes to have been the custom of the
Mucclasse Indians? "When a town celebrates the busk," says he,
"having previously provided themselves with new clothes, new pots,
pans, and other household utensils and furniture, they collect all
their worn out clothes and other despicable things, sweep and
cleanse their houses, squares, and the whole town of their filth,
which with all the remaining grain and other old provisions they
cast together into one common heap, and consume it with fire. After
having taken medicine, and fasted for three days, all the fire in
the town is extinguished. During this fast they abstain from the
gratification of every appetite and passion whatever. A general
amnesty is proclaimed all malefactors may return to their town."
"On the fourth morning, the high priest, by rubbing dry wood
together, produces new fire in the public square, from whence every
habitation in the town is supplied with the new and pure flame."
They then feast on the new corn and fruits, and dance and sing
for three days, "and the four following days they receive visits and
rejoice with their friends from neighboring towns who have in like
manner purified and prepared themselves."
The Mexicans also practised a similar purification at the end of
every fiftytwo years, in the belief that it was time for the world
to come to an end.
I have scarcely heard of a truer sacrament, that is, as the
dictionary defines it, "outward and visible sign of an inward and
spiritual grace," than this, and I have no doubt that they were
originally inspired directly from Heaven to do thus, though they
have no Biblical record of the revelation.
For more than five years I maintained myself thus solely by the
labor of my hands, and I found that, by working about six weeks in a
year, I could meet all the expenses of living. The whole of my
winters, as well as most of my summers, I had free and clear for
study. I have thoroughly tried schoolkeeping, and found that my
expenses were in proportion, or rather out of proportion, to my
income, for I was obliged to dress and train, not to say think and
believe, accordingly, and I lost my time into the bargain. As I did
not teach for the good of my fellowmen, but simply for a
livelihood, this was a failure. I have tried trade but I found that
it would take ten years to get under way in that, and that then I
should probably be on my way to the devil. I was actually afraid
that I might by that time be doing what is called a good business.
When formerly I was looking about to see what I could do for a
living, some sad experience in conforming to the wishes of friends
being fresh in my mind to tax my ingenuity, I thought often and
seriously of picking huckleberries that surely I could do, and its
small profits might suffice  for my greatest skill has been to
want but little  so little capital it required, so little
distraction from my wonted moods, I foolishly thought. While my
acquaintances went unhesitatingly into trade or the professions, I
contemplated this occupation as most like theirs ranging the hills
all summer to pick the berries which came in my way, and thereafter
carelessly dispose of them so, to keep the flocks of Admetus. I
also dreamed that I might gather the wild herbs, or carry evergreens
to such villagers as loved to be reminded of the woods, even to the
city, by haycart loads. But I have since learned that trade curses
everything it handles and though you trade in messages from heaven,
the whole curse of trade attaches to the business.
As I preferred some things to others, and especially valued my
freedom, as I could fare hard and yet succeed well, I did not wish
to spend my time in earning rich carpets or other fine furniture, or
delicate cookery, or a house in the Grecian or the Gothic style just
yet. If there are any to whom it is no interruption to acquire
these things, and who know how to use them when acquired, I
relinquish to them the pursuit. Some are "industrious," and appear
to love labor for its own sake, or perhaps because it keeps them out
of worse mischief to such I have at present nothing to say. Those
who would not know what to do with more leisure than they now enjoy,
I might advise to work twice as hard as they do  work till they
pay for themselves, and get their free papers. For myself I found
that the occupation of a daylaborer was the most independent of
any, especially as it required only thirty or forty days in a year
to support one. The laborer's day ends with the going down of the
sun, and he is then free to devote himself to his chosen pursuit,
independent of his labor but his employer, who speculates from
month to month, has no respite from one end of the year to the
other.
In short, I am convinced, both by faith and experience, that to
maintain one's self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime,
if we will live simply and wisely as the pursuits of the simpler
nations are still the sports of the more artificial. It is not
necessary that a man should earn his living by the sweat of his
brow, unless he sweats easier than I do.
One young man of my acquaintance, who has inherited some acres,
told me that he thought he should live as I did, if he had the
means. I would not have any one adopt my mode of living on any
account for, beside that before he has fairly learned it I may have
found out another for myself, I desire that there may be as many
different persons in the world as possible but I would have each
one be very careful to find out and pursue his own way, and not his
father's or his mother's or his neighbor's instead. The youth may
build or plant or sail, only let him not be hindered from doing that
which he tells me he would like to do. It is by a mathematical
point only that we are wise, as the sailor or the fugitive slave
keeps the polestar in his eye but that is sufficient guidance for
all our life. We may not arrive at our port within a calculable
period, but we would preserve the true course.
Undoubtedly, in this case, what is true for one is truer still
for a thousand, as a large house is not proportionally more
expensive than a small one, since one roof may cover, one cellar
underlie, and one wall separate several apartments. But for my
part, I preferred the solitary dwelling. Moreover, it will commonly
be cheaper to build the whole yourself than to convince another of
the advantage of the common wall and when you have done this, the
common partition, to be much cheaper, must be a thin one, and that
other may prove a bad neighbor, and also not keep his side in
repair. The only cooperation which is commonly possible is
exceedingly partial and superficial and what little true
cooperation there is, is as if it were not, being a harmony
inaudible to men. If a man has faith, he will cooperate with equal
faith everywhere if he has not faith, he will continue to live like
the rest of the world, whatever company he is joined to. To
cooperate in the highest as well as the lowest sense, means to get
our living together. I heard it proposed lately that two young men
should travel together over the world, the one without money,
earning his means as he went, before the mast and behind the plow,
the other carrying a bill of exchange in his pocket. It was easy to
see that they could not long be companions or cooperate, since one
would not operate at all. They would part at the first interesting
crisis in their adventures. Above all, as I have implied, the man
who goes alone can start today but he who travels with another must
wait till that other is ready, and it may be a long time before they
get off.
But all this is very selfish, I have heard some of my townsmen
say. I confess that I have hitherto indulged very little in
philanthropic enterprises. I have made some sacrifices to a sense
of duty, and among others have sacrificed this pleasure also. There
are those who have used all their arts to persuade me to undertake
the support of some poor family in the town and if I had nothing to
do  for the devil finds employment for the idle  I might try my
hand at some such pastime as that. However, when I have thought to
indulge myself in this respect, and lay their Heaven under an
obligation by maintaining certain poor persons in all respects as
comfortably as I maintain myself, and have even ventured so far as
to make them the offer, they have one and all unhesitatingly
preferred to remain poor. While my townsmen and women are devoted
in so many ways to the good of their fellows, I trust that one at
least may be spared to other and less humane pursuits. You must
have a genius for charity as well as for anything else. As for
Doinggood, that is one of the professions which are full.
Moreover, I have tried it fairly, and, strange as it may seem, am
satisfied that it does not agree with my constitution. Probably I
should not consciously and deliberately forsake my particular
calling to do the good which society demands of me, to save the
universe from annihilation and I believe that a like but infinitely
greater steadfastness elsewhere is all that now preserves it. But I
would not stand between any man and his genius and to him who does
this work, which I decline, with his whole heart and soul and life,
I would say, Persevere, even if the world call it doing evil, as it
is most likely they will.
I am far from supposing that my case is a peculiar one no doubt
many of my readers would make a similar defence. At doing something
I will not engage that my neighbors shall pronounce it good  I
do not hesitate to say that I should be a capital fellow to hire
but what that is, it is for my employer to find out. What good I
do, in the common sense of that word, must be aside from my main
path, and for the most part wholly unintended. Men say,
practically, Begin where you are and such as you are, without aiming
mainly to become of more worth, and with kindness aforethought go
about doing good. If I were to preach at all in this strain, I
should say rather, Set about being good. As if the sun should stop
when he had kindled his fires up to the splendor of a moon or a star
of the sixth magnitude, and go about like a Robin Goodfellow,
peeping in at every cottage window, inspiring lunatics, and tainting
meats, and making darkness visible, instead of steadily increasing
his genial heat and beneficence till he is of such brightness that
no mortal can look him in the face, and then, and in the meanwhile
too, going about the world in his own orbit, doing it good, or
rather, as a truer philosophy has discovered, the world going about
him getting good. When Phaeton, wishing to prove his heavenly birth
by his beneficence, had the sun's chariot but one day, and drove out
of the beaten track, he burned several blocks of houses in the lower
streets of heaven, and scorched the surface of the earth, and dried
up every spring, and made the great desert of Sahara, till at length
Jupiter hurled him headlong to the earth with a thunderbolt, and the
sun, through grief at his death, did not shine for a year.
There is no odor so bad as that which arises from goodness
tainted. It is human, it is divine, carrion. If I knew for a
certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious
design of doing me good, I should run for my life, as from that dry
and parching wind of the African deserts called the simoom, which
fills the mouth and nose and ears and eyes with dust till you are
suffocated, for fear that I should get some of his good done to me
some of its virus mingled with my blood. No  in this case I
would rather suffer evil the natural way. A man is not a good man
to me because he will feed me if I should be starving, or warm me if
I should be freezing, or pull me out of a ditch if I should ever
fall into one. I can find you a Newfoundland dog that will do as
much. Philanthropy is not love for one's fellowman in the broadest
sense. Howard was no doubt an exceedingly kind and worthy man in
his way, and has his reward but, comparatively speaking, what are a
hundred Howards to us, if their philanthropy do not help us in our
best estate, when we are most worthy to be helped? I never heard of
a philanthropic meeting in which it was sincerely proposed to do any
good to me, or the like of me.
The Jesuits were quite balked by those Indians who, being burned
at the stake, suggested new modes of torture to their tormentors.
Being superior to physical suffering, it sometimes chanced that they
were superior to any consolation which the missionaries could offer
and the law to do as you would be done by fell with less
persuasiveness on the ears of those who, for their part, did not
care how they were done by, who loved their enemies after a new
fashion, and came very near freely forgiving them all they did.
Be sure that you give the poor the aid they most need, though it
be your example which leaves them far behind. If you give money,
spend yourself with it, and do not merely abandon it to them. We
make curious mistakes sometimes. Often the poor man is not so cold
and hungry as he is dirty and ragged and gross. It is partly his
taste, and not merely his misfortune. If you give him money, he
will perhaps buy more rags with it. I was wont to pity the clumsy
Irish laborers who cut ice on the pond, in such mean and ragged
clothes, while I shivered in my more tidy and somewhat more
fashionable garments, till, one bitter cold day, one who had slipped
into the water came to my house to warm him, and I saw him strip off
three pairs of pants and two pairs of stockings ere he got down to
the skin, though they were dirty and ragged enough, it is true, and
that he could afford to refuse the extra garments which I offered
him, he had so many intra ones. This ducking was the very thing he
needed. Then I began to pity myself, and I saw that it would be a
greater charity to bestow on me a flannel shirt than a whole
slopshop on him. There are a thousand hacking at the branches of
evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who
bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing
the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives
in vain to relieve. It is the pious slavebreeder devoting the
proceeds of every tenth slave to buy a Sunday's liberty for the
rest. Some show their kindness to the poor by employing them in
their kitchens. Would they not be kinder if they employed
themselves there? You boast of spending a tenth part of your income
in charity maybe you should spend the nine tenths so, and done with
it. Society recovers only a tenth part of the property then. Is
this owing to the generosity of him in whose possession it is found,
or to the remissness of the officers of justice?
Philanthropy is almost the only virtue which is sufficiently
appreciated by mankind. Nay, it is greatly overrated and it is our
selfishness which overrates it. A robust poor man, one sunny day
here in Concord, praised a fellowtownsman to me, because, as he
said, he was kind to the poor meaning himself. The kind uncles and
aunts of the race are more esteemed than its true spiritual fathers
and mothers. I once heard a reverend lecturer on England, a man of
learning and intelligence, after enumerating her scientific,
literary, and political worthies, Shakespeare, Bacon, Cromwell,
Milton, Newton, and others, speak next of her Christian heroes,
whom, as if his profession required it of him, he elevated to a
place far above all the rest, as the greatest of the great. They
were Penn, Howard, and Mrs. Fry. Every one must feel the falsehood
and cant of this. The last were not England's best men and women
only, perhaps, her best philanthropists.
I would not subtract anything from the praise that is due to
philanthropy, but merely demand justice for all who by their lives
and works are a blessing to mankind. I do not value chiefly a man's
uprightness and benevolence, which are, as it were, his stem and
leaves. Those plants of whose greenness withered we make herb tea
for the sick serve but a humble use, and are most employed by
quacks. I want the flower and fruit of a man that some fragrance
be wafted over from him to me, and some ripeness flavor our
intercourse. His goodness must not be a partial and transitory act,
but a constant superfluity, which costs him nothing and of which he
is unconscious. This is a charity that hides a multitude of sins.
The philanthropist too often surrounds mankind with the remembrance
of his own castoff griefs as an atmosphere, and calls it sympathy.
We should impart our courage, and not our despair, our health and
ease, and not our disease, and take care that this does not spread
by contagion. From what southern plains comes up the voice of
wailing? Under what latitudes reside the heathen to whom we would
send light? Who is that intemperate and brutal man whom we would
redeem? If anything ail a man, so that he does not perform his
functions, if he have a pain in his bowels even  for that is the
seat of sympathy  he forthwith sets about reforming  the world.
Being a microcosm himself, he discovers  and it is a true
discovery, and he is the man to make it  that the world has been
eating green apples to his eyes, in fact, the globe itself is a
great green apple, which there is danger awful to think of that the
children of men will nibble before it is ripe and straightway his
drastic philanthropy seeks out the Esquimau and the Patagonian, and
embraces the populous Indian and Chinese villages and thus, by a
few years of philanthropic activity, the powers in the meanwhile
using him for their own ends, no doubt, he cures himself of his
dyspepsia, the globe acquires a faint blush on one or both of its
cheeks, as if it were beginning to be ripe, and life loses its
crudity and is once more sweet and wholesome to live. I never
dreamed of any enormity greater than I have committed. I never
knew, and never shall know, a worse man than myself.
I believe that what so saddens the reformer is not his sympathy
with his fellows in distress, but, though he be the holiest son of
God, is his private ail. Let this be righted, let the spring come
to him, the morning rise over his couch, and he will forsake his
generous companions without apology. My excuse for not lecturing
against the use of tobacco is, that I never chewed it, that is a
penalty which reformed tobaccochewers have to pay though there are
things enough I have chewed which I could lecture against. If you
should ever be betrayed into any of these philanthropies, do not let
your left hand know what your right hand does, for it is not worth
knowing. Rescue the drowning and tie your shoestrings. Take your
time, and set about some free labor.
Our manners have been corrupted by communication with the
saints. Our hymnbooks resound with a melodious cursing of God and
enduring Him forever. One would say that even the prophets and
redeemers had rather consoled the fears than confirmed the hopes of
man. There is nowhere recorded a simple and irrepressible
satisfaction with the gift of life, any memorable praise of God.
All health and success does me good, however far off and withdrawn
it may appear all disease and failure helps to make me sad and does
me evil, however much sympathy it may have with me or I with it.
If, then, we would indeed restore mankind by truly Indian, botanic,
magnetic, or natural means, let us first be as simple and well as
Nature ourselves, dispel the clouds which hang over our own brows,
and take up a little life into our pores. Do not stay to be an
overseer of the poor, but endeavor to become one of the worthies of
the world.
I read in the Gulistan, or Flower Garden, of Sheik Sadi of
Shiraz, that "they asked a wise man, saying Of the many celebrated
trees which the Most High God has created lofty and umbrageous, they
call none azad, or free, excepting the cypress, which bears no
fruit what mystery is there in this? He replied, Each has its
appropriate produce, and appointed season, during the continuance of
which it is fresh and blooming, and during their absence dry and
withered to neither of which states is the cypress exposed, being
always flourishing and of this nature are the azads, or religious
independents.  Fix not thy heart on that which is transitory for
the Dijlah, or Tigris, will continue to flow through Bagdad after
the race of caliphs is extinct if thy hand has plenty, be liberal
as the date tree but if it affords nothing to give away, be an
azad, or free man, like the cypress."
COMPLEMENTAL VERSES
The Pretensions of Poverty
Thou dost presume too much, poor needy wretch,
To claim a station in the firmament
Because thy humble cottage, or thy tub,
Nurses some lazy or pedantic virtue
In the cheap sunshine or by shady springs,
With roots and potherbs where thy right hand,
Tearing those humane passions from the mind,
Upon whose stocks fair blooming virtues flourish,
Degradeth nature, and benumbeth sense,
And, Gorgonlike, turns active men to stone.
We not require the dull society
Of your necessitated temperance,
Or that unnatural stupidity
That knows nor joy nor sorrow nor your forc'd
Falsely exalted passive fortitude
Above the active. This low abject brood,
That fix their seats in mediocrity,
Become your servile minds but we advance
Such virtues only as admit excess,
Brave, bounteous acts, regal magnificence,
Allseeing prudence, magnanimity
That knows no bound, and that heroic virtue
For which antiquity hath left no name,
But patterns only, such as Hercules,
Achilles, Theseus. Back to thy loath'd cell
And when thou seest the new enlightened sphere,
Study to know but what those worthies were.
T. CAREW
Where I Lived, and What I Lived For
At a certain season of our life we are accustomed to consider
every spot as the possible site of a house. I have thus surveyed
the country on every side within a dozen miles of where I live. In
imagination I have bought all the farms in succession, for all were
to be bought, and I knew their price. I walked over each farmer's
premises, tasted his wild apples, discoursed on husbandry with him,
took his farm at his price, at any price, mortgaging it to him in my
mind even put a higher price on it  took everything but a deed of
it  took his word for his deed, for I dearly love to talk 
cultivated it, and him too to some extent, I trust, and withdrew
when I had enjoyed it long enough, leaving him to carry it on. This
experience entitled me to be regarded as a sort of realestate
broker by my friends. Wherever I sat, there I might live, and the
landscape radiated from me accordingly. What is a house but a
sedes, a seat?  better if a country seat. I discovered many a
site for a house not likely to be soon improved, which some might
have thought too far from the village, but to my eyes the village
was too far from it. Well, there I might live, I said and there I
did live, for an hour, a summer and a winter life saw how I could
let the years run off, buffet the winter through, and see the spring
come in. The future inhabitants of this region, wherever they may
place their houses, may be sure that they have been anticipated. An
afternoon sufficed to lay out the land into orchard, woodlot, and
pasture, and to decide what fine oaks or pines should be left to
stand before the door, and whence each blasted tree could be seen to
the best advantage and then I let it lie, fallow, perchance, for a
man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can
afford to let alone.
My imagination carried me so far that I even had the refusal of
several farms  the refusal was all I wanted  but I never got my
fingers burned by actual possession. The nearest that I came to
actual possession was when I bought the Hollowell place, and had
begun to sort my seeds, and collected materials with which to make a
wheelbarrow to carry it on or off with but before the owner gave me
a deed of it, his wife  every man has such a wife  changed her
mind and wished to keep it, and he offered me ten dollars to release
him. Now, to speak the truth, I had but ten cents in the world, and
it surpassed my arithmetic to tell, if I was that man who had ten
cents, or who had a farm, or ten dollars, or all together. However,
I let him keep the ten dollars and the farm too, for I had carried
it far enough or rather, to be generous, I sold him the farm for
just what I gave for it, and, as he was not a rich man, made him a
present of ten dollars, and still had my ten cents, and seeds, and
materials for a wheelbarrow left. I found thus that I had been a
rich man without any damage to my poverty. But I retained the
landscape, and I have since annually carried off what it yielded
without a wheelbarrow. With respect to landscapes,
"I am monarch of all I survey,
My right there is none to dispute."
I have frequently seen a poet withdraw, having enjoyed the most
valuable part of a farm, while the crusty farmer supposed that he
had got a few wild apples only. Why, the owner does not know it for
many years when a poet has put his farm in rhyme, the most admirable
kind of invisible fence, has fairly impounded it, milked it, skimmed
it, and got all the cream, and left the farmer only the skimmed
milk.
The real attractions of the Hollowell farm, to me, were its
complete retirement, being, about two miles from the village, half a
mile from the nearest neighbor, and separated from the highway by a
broad field its bounding on the river, which the owner said
protected it by its fogs from frosts in the spring, though that was
nothing to me the gray color and ruinous state of the house and
barn, and the dilapidated fences, which put such an interval between
me and the last occupant the hollow and lichencovered apple trees,
nawed by rabbits, showing what kind of neighbors I should have but
above all, the recollection I had of it from my earliest voyages up
the river, when the house was concealed behind a dense grove of red
maples, through which I heard the housedog bark. I was in haste to
buy it, before the proprietor finished getting out some rocks,
cutting down the hollow apple trees, and grubbing up some young
birches which had sprung up in the pasture, or, in short, had made
any more of his improvements. To enjoy these advantages I was ready
to carry it on like Atlas, to take the world on my shoulders  I
never heard what compensation he received for that  and do all
those things which had no other motive or excuse but that I might
pay for it and be unmolested in my possession of it for I knew all
the while that it would yield the most abundant crop of the kind I
wanted, if I could only afford to let it alone. But it turned out
as I have said.
All that I could say, then, with respect to farming on a large
scale  I have always cultivated a garden  was, that I had had my
seeds ready. Many think that seeds improve with age. I have no
doubt that time discriminates between the good and the bad and when
at last I shall plant, I shall be less likely to be disappointed.
But I would say to my fellows, once for all, As long as possible
live free and uncommitted. It makes but little difference whether
you are committed to a farm or the county jail.
Old Cato, whose "De Re Rustica" is my "Cultivator," says  and
the only translation I have seen makes sheer nonsense of the passage
"When you think of getting a farm turn it thus in your mind, not
to buy greedily nor spare your pains to look at it, and do not
think it enough to go round it once. The oftener you go there the
more it will please you, if it is good." I think I shall not buy
greedily, but go round and round it as long as I live, and be buried
in it first, that it may please me the more at last.
The present was my next experiment of this kind, which I purpose
to describe more at length, for convenience putting the experience
of two years into one. As I have said, I do not propose to write an
ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the
morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up.
When first I took up my abode in the woods, that is, began to
spend my nights as well as days there, which, by accident, was on
Independence Day, or the Fourth of July, , my house was not
finished for winter, but was merely a defence against the rain,
without plastering or chimney, the walls being of rough,
weatherstained boards, with wide chinks, which made it cool at
night. The upright white hewn studs and freshly planed door and
window casings gave it a clean and airy look, especially in the
morning, when its timbers were saturated with dew, so that I fancied
that by noon some sweet gum would exude from them. To my
imagination it retained throughout the day more or less of this
auroral character, reminding me of a certain house on a mountain
which I had visited a year before. This was an airy and unplastered
cabin, fit to entertain a travelling god, and where a goddess might
trail her garments. The winds which passed over my dwelling were
such as sweep over the ridges of mountains, bearing the broken
strains, or celestial parts only, of terrestrial music. The morning
wind forever blows, the poem of creation is uninterrupted but few
are the ears that hear it. Olympus is but the outside of the earth
everywhere.
The only house I had been the owner of before, if I except a
boat, was a tent, which I used occasionally when making excursions
in the summer, and this is still rolled up in my garret but the
boat, after passing from hand to hand, has gone down the stream of
time. With this more substantial shelter about me, I had made some
progress toward settling in the world. This frame, so slightly
clad, was a sort of crystallization around me, and reacted on the
builder. It was suggestive somewhat as a picture in outlines. I
did not need to go outdoors to take the air, for the atmosphere
within had lost none of its freshness. It was not so much within
doors as behind a door where I sat, even in the rainiest weather.
The Harivansa says, "An abode without birds is like a meat without
seasoning." Such was not my abode, for I found myself suddenly
neighbor to the birds not by having imprisoned one, but having
caged myself near them. I was not only nearer to some of those
which commonly frequent the garden and the orchard, but to those
smaller and more thrilling songsters of the forest which never, or
rarely, serenade a villager  the wood thrush, the veery, the
scarlet tanager, the field sparrow, the whippoorwill, and many
others.
I was seated by the shore of a small pond, about a mile and a
half south of the village of Concord and somewhat higher than it, in
the midst of an extensive wood between that town and Lincoln, and
about two miles south of that our only field known to fame, Concord
Battle Ground but I was so low in the woods that the opposite
shore, half a mile off, like the rest, covered with wood, was my
most distant horizon. For the first week, whenever I looked out on
the pond it impressed me like a tarn high up on the side of a
mountain, its bottom far above the surface of other lakes, and, as
the sun arose, I saw it throwing off its nightly clothing of mist,
and here and there, by degrees, its soft ripples or its smooth
reflecting surface was revealed, while the mists, like ghosts, were
stealthily withdrawing in every direction into the woods, as at the
breaking up of some nocturnal conventicle. The very dew seemed to
hang upon the trees later into the day than usual, as on the sides
of mountains.
This small lake was of most value as a neighbor in the intervals
of a gentle rainstorm in August, when, both air and water being
perfectly still, but the sky overcast, midafternoon had all the
serenity of evening, and the wood thrush sang around, and was heard
from shore to shore. A lake like this is never smoother than at
such a time and the clear portion of the air above it being,
shallow and darkened by clouds, the water, full of light and
reflections, becomes a lower heaven itself so much the more
important. From a hilltop near by, where the wood had been
recently cut off, there was a pleasing vista southward across the
pond, through a wide indentation in the hills which form the shore
there, where their opposite sides sloping toward each other
suggested a stream flowing out in that direction through a wooded
valley, but stream there was none. That way I looked between and
over the near green hills to some distant and higher ones in the
horizon, tinged with blue. Indeed, by standing on tiptoe I could
catch a glimpse of some of the peaks of the still bluer and more
distant mountain ranges in the northwest, those trueblue coins from
heaven's own mint, and also of some portion of the village. But in
other directions, even from this point, I could not see over or
beyond the woods which surrounded me. It is well to have some water
in your neighborhood, to give buoyancy to and float the earth. One
value even of the smallest well is, that when you look into it you
see that earth is not continent but insular. This is as important
as that it keeps butter cool. When I looked across the pond from
this peak toward the Sudbury meadows, which in time of flood I
distinguished elevated perhaps by a mirage in their seething valley,
like a coin in a basin, all the earth beyond the pond appeared like
a thin crust insulated and floated even by this small sheet of
interverting water, and I was reminded that this on which I dwelt
was but dry land.
Though the view from my door was still more contracted, I did
not feel crowded or confined in the least. There was pasture enough
for my imagination. The low shrub oak plateau to which the opposite
shore arose stretched away toward the prairies of the West and the
steppes of Tartary, affording ample room for all the roving families
of men. "There are none happy in the world but beings who enjoy
freely a vast horizon"  said Damodara, when his herds required new
and larger pastures.
Both place and time were changed, and I dwelt nearer to those
parts of the universe and to those eras in history which had most
attracted me. Where I lived was as far off as many a region viewed
nightly by astronomers. We are wont to imagine rare and delectable
places in some remote and more celestial corner of the system,
behind the constellation of Cassiopeia's Chair, far from noise and
disturbance. I discovered that my house actually had its site in
such a withdrawn, but forever new and unprofaned, part of the
universe. If it were worth the while to settle in those parts near
to the Pleiades or the Hyades, to Aldebaran or Altair, then I was
really there, or at an equal remoteness from the life which I had
left behind, dwindled and twinkling with as fine a ray to my nearest
neighbor, and to be seen only in moonless nights by him. Such was
that part of creation where I had squatted
"There was a shepherd that did live,
And held his thoughts as high
As were the mounts whereon his flocks
Did hourly feed him by."
What should we think of the shepherd's life if his flocks always
wandered to higher pastures than his thoughts?
Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal
simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself. I have
been as sincere a worshipper of Aurora as the Greeks. I got up
early and bathed in the pond that was a religious exercise, and one
of the best things which I did. They say that characters were
engraven on the bathing tub of King Tchingthang to this effect
"Renew thyself completely each day do it again, and again, and
forever again." I can understand that. Morning brings back the
heroic ages. I was as much affected by the faint hum of a mosquito
making its invisible and unimaginable tour through my apartment at
earliest dawn, when I was sitting with door and windows open, as I
could be by any trumpet that ever sang of fame. It was Homer's
requiem itself an Iliad and Odyssey in the air, singing its own
wrath and wanderings. There was something cosmical about it a
standing advertisement, till forbidden, of the everlasting vigor and
fertility of the world. The morning, which is the most memorable
season of the day, is the awakening hour. Then there is least
somnolence in us and for an hour, at least, some part of us awakes
which slumbers all the rest of the day and night. Little is to be
expected of that day, if it can be called a day, to which we are not
awakened by our Genius, but by the mechanical nudgings of some
servitor, are not awakened by our own newly acquired force and
aspirations from within, accompanied by the undulations of celestial
music, instead of factory bells, and a fragrance filling the air 
to a higher life than we fell asleep from and thus the darkness
bear its fruit, and prove itself to be good, no less than the light.
That man who does not believe that each day contains an earlier,
more sacred, and auroral hour than he has yet profaned, has
despaired of life, and is pursuing a descending and darkening way.
After a partial cessation of his sensuous life, the soul of man, or
its organs rather, are reinvigorated each day, and his Genius tries
again what noble life it can make. All memorable events, I should
say, transpire in morning time and in a morning atmosphere. The
Vedas say, "All intelligences awake with the morning." Poetry and
art, and the fairest and most memorable of the actions of men, date
from such an hour. All poets and heroes, like Memnon, are the
children of Aurora, and emit their music at sunrise. To him whose
elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is a
perpetual morning. It matters not what the clocks say or the
attitudes and labors of men. Morning is when I am awake and there
is a dawn in me. Moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep.
Why is it that men give so poor an account of their day if they have
not been slumbering? They are not such poor calculators. If they
had not been overcome with drowsiness, they would have performed
something. The millions are awake enough for physical labor but
only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual
exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life.
To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was
quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?
We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by
mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which
does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. I know of no more
encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate
his life by a conscious endeavor. It is something to be able to
paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a
few objects beautiful but it is far more glorious to carve and
paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which
morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the
highest of arts. Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its
details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and
critical hour. If we refused, or rather used up, such paltry
information as we get, the oracles would distinctly inform us how
this might be done.
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to
front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn
what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I
had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is
so dear nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite
necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of
life, to live so sturdily and Spartanlike as to put to rout all
that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive
life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it
proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of
it, and publish its meanness to the world or if it were sublime, to
know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in
my next excursion. For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange
uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God, and have
somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to
"glorify God and enjoy him forever."
Still we live meanly, like ants though the fable tells us that
we were long ago changed into men like pygmies we fight with
cranes it is error upon error, and clout upon clout, and our best
virtue has for its occasion a superfluous and evitable wretchedness.
Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need
to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add
his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity,
simplicity I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a
hundred or a thousand instead of a million count half a dozen, and
keep your accounts on your thumbnail. In the midst of this
chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and
quicksands and thousandandone items to be allowed for, that a man
has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not
make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great
calculator indeed who succeeds. Simplify, simplify. Instead of
three meals a day, if it be necessary eat but one instead of a
hundred dishes, five and reduce other things in proportion. Our
life is like a German Confederacy, made up of petty states, with its
boundary forever fluctuating, so that even a German cannot tell you
how it is bounded at any moment. The nation itself, with all its
socalled internal improvements, which, by the way are all external
and superficial, is just such an unwieldy and overgrown
establishment, cluttered with furniture and tripped up by its own
traps, ruined by luxury and heedless expense, by want of calculation
and a worthy aim, as the million households in the land and the
only cure for it, as for them, is in a rigid economy, a stern and
more than Spartan simplicity of life and elevation of purpose. It
lives too fast. Men think that it is essential that the Nation have
commerce, and export ice, and talk through a telegraph, and ride
thirty miles an hour, without a doubt, whether they do or not but
whether we should live like baboons or like men, is a little
uncertain. If we do not get out sleepers, and forge rails, and
devote days and nights to the work, but go to tinkering upon our
lives to improve them, who will build railroads? And if railroads
are not built, how shall we get to heaven in season? But if we stay
at home and mind our business, who will want railroads? We do not
ride on the railroad it rides upon us. Did you ever think what
those sleepers are that underlie the railroad? Each one is a man,
an Irishman, or a Yankee man. The rails are laid on them, and they
are covered with sand, and the cars run smoothly over them. They
are sound sleepers, I assure you. And every few years a new lot is
laid down and run over so that, if some have the pleasure of riding
on a rail, others have the misfortune to be ridden upon. And when
they run over a man that is walking in his sleep, a supernumerary
sleeper in the wrong position, and wake him up, they suddenly stop
the cars, and make a hue and cry about it, as if this were an
exception. I am glad to know that it takes a gang of men for every
five miles to keep the sleepers down and level in their beds as it
is, for this is a sign that they may sometime get up again.
Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life? We are
determined to be starved before we are hungry. Men say that a
stitch in time saves nine, and so they take a thousand stitches
today to save nine tomorrow. As for work, we haven't any of any
consequence. We have the Saint Vitus' dance, and cannot possibly
keep our heads still. If I should only give a few pulls at the
parish bellrope, as for a fire, that is, without setting the bell,
there is hardly a man on his farm in the outskirts of Concord,
notwithstanding that press of engagements which was his excuse so
many times this morning, nor a boy, nor a woman, I might almost say,
but would forsake all and follow that sound, not mainly to save
property from the flames, but, if we will confess the truth, much
more to see it burn, since burn it must, and we, be it known, did
not set it on fire  or to see it put out, and have a hand in it,
if that is done as handsomely yes, even if it were the parish
church itself. Hardly a man takes a halfhour's nap after dinner,
but when he wakes he holds up his head and asks, "What's the news?"
as if the rest of mankind had stood his sentinels. Some give
directions to be waked every halfhour, doubtless for no other
purpose and then, to pay for it, they tell what they have dreamed.
After a night's sleep the news is as indispensable as the breakfast.
"Pray tell me anything new that has happened to a man anywhere on
this globe"  and he reads it over his coffee and rolls, that a man
has had his eyes gouged out this morning on the Wachito River never
dreaming the while that he lives in the dark unfathomed mammoth cave
of this world, and has but the rudiment of an eye himself.
For my part, I could easily do without the postoffice. I think
that there are very few important communications made through it.
To speak critically, I never received more than one or two letters
in my life  I wrote this some years ago  that were worth the
postage. The pennypost is, commonly, an institution through which
you seriously offer a man that penny for his thoughts which is so
often safely offered in jest. And I am sure that I never read any
memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or
murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel
wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the
Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers
in the winter  we never need read of another. One is enough. If
you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad
instances and applications? To a philosopher all news, as it is
called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over
their tea. Yet not a few are greedy after this gossip. There was
such a rush, as I hear, the other day at one of the offices to learn
the foreign news by the last arrival, that several large squares of
plate glass belonging to the establishment were broken by the
pressure  news which I seriously think a ready wit might write a
twelvemonth, or twelve years, beforehand with sufficient accuracy.
As for Spain, for instance, if you know how to throw in Don Carlos
and the Infanta, and Don Pedro and Seville and Granada, from time to
time in the right proportions  they may have changed the names a
little since I saw the papers  and serve up a bullfight when
other entertainments fail, it will be true to the letter, and give
us as good an idea of the exact state or ruin of things in Spain as
the most succinct and lucid reports under this head in the
newspapers and as for England, almost the last significant scrap of
news from that quarter was the revolution of  and if you have
learned the history of her crops for an average year, you never need
attend to that thing again, unless your speculations are of a merely
pecuniary character. If one may judge who rarely looks into the
newspapers, nothing new does ever happen in foreign parts, a French
revolution not excepted.
What news how much more important to know what that is which
was never old "Kieouheyu great dignitary of the state of Wei
sent a man to Khoungtseu to know his news. Khoungtseu caused the
messenger to be seated near him, and questioned him in these terms
What is your master doing? The messenger answered with respect My
master desires to diminish the number of his faults, but he cannot
come to the end of them. The messenger being gone, the philosopher
remarked What a worthy messenger What a worthy messenger" The
preacher, instead of vexing the ears of drowsy farmers on their day
of rest at the end of the week  for Sunday is the fit conclusion
of an illspent week, and not the fresh and brave beginning of a new
one  with this one other draggletail of a sermon, should shout
with thundering voice, "Pause Avast Why so seeming fast, but
deadly slow?"
Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while
reality is fabulous. If men would steadily observe realities only,
and not allow themselves to be deluded, life, to compare it with
such things as we know, would be like a fairy tale and the Arabian
Nights' Entertainments. If we respected only what is inevitable and
has a right to be, music and poetry would resound along the streets.
When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and
worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence, that petty
fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality. This
is always exhilarating and sublime. By closing the eyes and
slumbering, and consenting to be deceived by shows, men establish
and confirm their daily life of routine and habit everywhere, which
still is built on purely illusory foundations. Children, who play
life, discern its true law and relations more clearly than men, who
fail to live it worthily, but who think that they are wiser by
experience, that is, by failure. I have read in a Hindoo book, that
"there was a king's son, who, being expelled in infancy from his
native city, was brought up by a forester, and, growing up to
maturity in that state, imagined himself to belong to the barbarous
race with which he lived. One of his father's ministers having
discovered him, revealed to him what he was, and the misconception
of his character was removed, and he knew himself to be a prince.
So soul," continues the Hindoo philosopher, "from the circumstances
in which it is placed, mistakes its own character, until the truth
is revealed to it by some holy teacher, and then it knows itself to
be Brahme." I perceive that we inhabitants of New England live this
mean life that we do because our vision does not penetrate the
surface of things. We think that that is which appears to be. If a
man should walk through this town and see only the reality, where,
think you, would the "Milldam" go to? If he should give us an
account of the realities he beheld there, we should not recognize
the place in his description. Look at a meetinghouse, or a
courthouse, or a jail, or a shop, or a dwellinghouse, and say what
that thing really is before a true gaze, and they would all go to
pieces in your account of them. Men esteem truth remote, in the
outskirts of the system, behind the farthest star, before Adam and
after the last man. In eternity there is indeed something true and
sublime. But all these times and places and occasions are now and
here. God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never
be more divine in the lapse of all the ages. And we are enabled to
apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual
instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us. The
universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions
whether we travel fast or slow, the track is laid for us. Let us
spend our lives in conceiving then. The poet or the artist never
yet had so fair and noble a design but some of his posterity at
least could accomplish it.
Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be
thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito's wing that
falls on the rails. Let us rise early and fast, or break fast,
gently and without perturbation let company come and let company
go, let the bells ring and the children cry  determined to make a
day of it. Why should we knock under and go with the stream? Let
us not be upset and overwhelmed in that terrible rapid and whirlpool
called a dinner, situated in the meridian shallows. Weather this
danger and you are safe, for the rest of the way is down hill. With
unrelaxed nerves, with morning vigor, sail by it, looking another
way, tied to the mast like Ulysses. If the engine whistles, let it
whistle till it is hoarse for its pains. If the bell rings, why
should we run? We will consider what kind of music they are like.
Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward
through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition,
and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe,
through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord,
through Church and State, through poetry and philosophy and
religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we
can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake and then begin,
having a point d'appui, below freshet and frost and fire, a place
where you might found a wall or a state, or set a lamppost safely,
or perhaps a gauge, not a Nilometer, but a Realometer, that future
ages might know how deep a freshet of shams and appearances had
gathered from time to time. If you stand right fronting and face to
face to a fact, you will see the sun glimmer on both its surfaces,
as if it were a cimeter, and feel its sweet edge dividing you
through the heart and marrow, and so you will happily conclude your
mortal career. Be it life or death, we crave only reality. If we
are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel
cold in the extremities if we are alive, let us go about our
business.
Time is but the stream I go afishing in. I drink at it but
while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is.
Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink
deeper fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. I
cannot count one. I know not the first letter of the alphabet. I
have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was
born. The intellect is a cleaver it discerns and rifts its way
into the secret of things. I do not wish to be any more busy with
my hands than is necessary. My head is hands and feet. I feel all
my best faculties concentrated in it. My instinct tells me that my
head is an organ for burrowing, as some creatures use their snout
and fore paws, and with it I would mine and burrow my way through
these hills. I think that the richest vein is somewhere hereabouts
so by the diviningrod and thin rising vapors I judge and here I
will begin to mine.
Reading
With a little more deliberation in the choice of their pursuits,
all men would perhaps become essentially students and observers, for
certainly their nature and destiny are interesting to all alike. In
accumulating property for ourselves or our posterity, in founding a
family or a state, or acquiring fame even, we are mortal but in
dealing with truth we are immortal, and need fear no change nor
accident. The oldest Egyptian or Hindoo philosopher raised a corner
of the veil from the statue of the divinity and still the trembling
robe remains raised, and I gaze upon as fresh a glory as he did,
since it was I in him that was then so bold, and it is he in me that
now reviews the vision. No dust has settled on that robe no time
has elapsed since that divinity was revealed. That time which we
really improve, or which is improvable, is neither past, present,
nor future.
My residence was more favorable, not only to thought, but to
serious reading, than a university and though I was beyond the
range of the ordinary circulating library, I had more than ever come
within the influence of those books which circulate round the world,
whose sentences were first written on bark, and are now merely
copied from time to time on to linen paper. Says the poet Mr
Udd, "Being seated, to run through the region of the
spiritual world I have had this advantage in books. To be
intoxicated by a single glass of wine I have experienced this
pleasure when I have drunk the liquor of the esoteric doctrines." I
kept Homer's Iliad on my table through the summer, though I looked
at his page only now and then. Incessant labor with my hands, at
first, for I had my house to finish and my beans to hoe at the same
time, made more study impossible. Yet I sustained myself by the
prospect of such reading in future. I read one or two shallow books
of travel in the intervals of my work, till that employment made me
ashamed of myself, and I asked where it was then that I lived.
The student may read Homer or AEschylus in the Greek without
danger of dissipation or luxuriousness, for it implies that he in
some measure emulate their heroes, and consecrate morning hours to
their pages. The heroic books, even if printed in the character of
our mother tongue, will always be in a language dead to degenerate
times and we must laboriously seek the meaning of each word and
line, conjecturing a larger sense than common use permits out of
what wisdom and valor and generosity we have. The modern cheap and
fertile press, with all its translations, has done little to bring
us nearer to the heroic writers of antiquity. They seem as
solitary, and the letter in which they are printed as rare and
curious, as ever. It is worth the expense of youthful days and
costly hours, if you learn only some words of an ancient language,
which are raised out of the trivialness of the street, to be
perpetual suggestions and provocations. It is not in vain that the
farmer remembers and repeats the few Latin words which he has heard.
Men sometimes speak as if the study of the classics would at length
make way for more modern and practical studies but the adventurous
student will always study classics, in whatever language they may be
written and however ancient they may be. For what are the classics
but the noblest recorded thoughts of man? They are the only oracles
which are not decayed, and there are such answers to the most modern
inquiry in them as Delphi and Dodona never gave. We might as well
omit to study Nature because she is old. To read well, that is, to
read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that
will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the
day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent,
the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object. Books
must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.
It is not enough even to be able to speak the language of that
nation by which they are written, for there is a memorable interval
between the spoken and the written language, the language heard and
the language read. The one is commonly transitory, a sound, a
tongue, a dialect merely, almost brutish, and we learn it
unconsciously, like the brutes, of our mothers. The other is the
maturity and experience of that if that is our mother tongue, this
is our father tongue, a reserved and select expression, too
significant to be heard by the ear, which we must be born again in
order to speak. The crowds of men who merely spoke the Greek and
Latin tongues in the Middle Ages were not entitled by the accident
of birth to read the works of genius written in those languages for
these were not written in that Greek or Latin which they knew, but
in the select language of literature. They had not learned the
nobler dialects of Greece and Rome, but the very materials on which
they were written were waste paper to them, and they prized instead
a cheap contemporary literature. But when the several nations of
Europe had acquired distinct though rude written languages of their
own, sufficient for the purposes of their rising literatures, then
first learning revived, and scholars were enabled to discern from
that remoteness the treasures of antiquity. What the Roman and
Grecian multitude could not hear, after the lapse of ages a few
scholars read, and a few scholars only are still reading it.
However much we may admire the orator's occasional bursts of
eloquence, the noblest written words are commonly as far behind or
above the fleeting spoken language as the firmament with its stars
is behind the clouds. There are the stars, and they who can may
read them. The astronomers forever comment on and observe them.
They are not exhalations like our daily colloquies and vaporous
breath. What is called eloquence in the forum is commonly found to
be rhetoric in the study. The orator yields to the inspiration of a
transient occasion, and speaks to the mob before him, to those who
can hear him but the writer, whose more equable life is his
occasion, and who would be distracted by the event and the crowd
which inspire the orator, speaks to the intellect and health of
mankind, to all in any age who can understand him.
No wonder that Alexander carried the Iliad with him on his
expeditions in a precious casket. A written word is the choicest of
relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more
universal than any other work of art. It is the work of art nearest
to life itself. It may be translated into every language, and not
only be read but actually breathed from all human lips  not be
represented on canvas or in marble only, but be carved out of the
breath of life itself. The symbol of an ancient man's thought
becomes a modern man's speech. Two thousand summers have imparted
to the monuments of Grecian literature, as to her marbles, only a
maturer golden and autumnal tint, for they have carried their own
serene and celestial atmosphere into all lands to protect them
against the corrosion of time. Books are the treasured wealth of
the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.
Books, the oldest and the best, stand naturally and rightfully on
the shelves of every cottage. They have no cause of their own to
plead, but while they enlighten and sustain the reader his common
sense will not refuse them. Their authors are a natural and
irresistible aristocracy in every society, and, more than kings or
emperors, exert an influence on mankind. When the illiterate and
perhaps scornful trader has earned by enterprise and industry his
coveted leisure and independence, and is admitted to the circles of
wealth and fashion, he turns inevitably at last to those still
higher but yet inaccessible circles of intellect and genius, and is
sensible only of the imperfection of his culture and the vanity and
insufficiency of all his riches, and further proves his good sense
by the pains which be takes to secure for his children that
intellectual culture whose want he so keenly feels and thus it is
that he becomes the founder of a family.
Those who have not learned to read the ancient classics in the
language in which they were written must have a very imperfect
knowledge of the history of the human race for it is remarkable
that no transcript of them has ever been made into any modern
tongue, unless our civilization itself may be regarded as such a
transcript. Homer has never yet been printed in English, nor
AEschylus, nor Virgil even  works as refined, as solidly done, and
as beautiful almost as the morning itself for later writers, say
what we will of their genius, have rarely, if ever, equalled the
elaborate beauty and finish and the lifelong and heroic literary
labors of the ancients. They only talk of forgetting them who never
knew them. It will be soon enough to forget them when we have the
learning and the genius which will enable us to attend to and
appreciate them. That age will be rich indeed when those relics
which we call Classics, and the still older and more than classic
but even less known Scriptures of the nations, shall have still
further accumulated, when the Vaticans shall be filled with Vedas
and Zendavestas and Bibles, with Homers and Dantes and Shakespeares,
and all the centuries to come shall have successively deposited
their trophies in the forum of the world. By such a pile we may
hope to scale heaven at last.
The works of the great poets have never yet been read by
mankind, for only great poets can read them. They have only been
read as the multitude read the stars, at most astrologically, not
astronomically. Most men have learned to read to serve a paltry
convenience, as they have learned to cipher in order to keep
accounts and not be cheated in trade but of reading as a noble
intellectual exercise they know little or nothing yet this only is
reading, in a high sense, not that which lulls us as a luxury and
suffers the nobler faculties to sleep the while, but what we have to
stand on tiptoe to read and devote our most alert and wakeful hours
to.
I think that having learned our letters we should read the best
that is in literature, and not be forever repeating our ababs, and
words of one syllable, in the fourth or fifth classes, sitting on
the lowest and foremost form all our lives. Most men are satisfied
if they read or hear read, and perchance have been convicted by the
wisdom of one good book, the Bible, and for the rest of their lives
vegetate and dissipate their faculties in what is called easy
reading. There is a work in several volumes in our Circulating
Library entitled "Little Reading," which I thought referred to a
town of that name which I had not been to. There are those who,
like cormorants and ostriches, can digest all sorts of this, even
after the fullest dinner of meats and vegetables, for they suffer
nothing to be wasted. If others are the machines to provide this
provender, they are the machines to read it. They read the nine
thousandth tale about Zebulon and Sophronia, and how they loved as
none had ever loved before, and neither did the course of their true
love run smooth  at any rate, how it did run and stumble, and get
up again and go on how some poor unfortunate got up on to a
steeple, who had better never have gone up as far as the belfry and
then, having needlessly got him up there, the happy novelist rings
the bell for all the world to come together and hear, O dear how he
did get down again For my part, I think that they had better
metamorphose all such aspiring heroes of universal noveldom into man
weathercocks, as they used to put heroes among the constellations,
and let them swing round there till they are rusty, and not come
down at all to bother honest men with their pranks. The next time
the novelist rings the bell I will not stir though the meetinghouse
burn down. "The Skip of the TipToeHop, a Romance of the Middle
Ages, by the celebrated author of "TittleTolTan,' to appear in
monthly parts a great rush don't all come together." All this
they read with saucer eyes, and erect and primitive curiosity, and
with unwearied gizzard, whose corrugations even yet need no
sharpening, just as some little fouryearold bencher his twocent
giltcovered edition of Cinderella  without any improvement, that
I can see, in the pronunciation, or accent, or emphasis, or any more
skill in extracting or inserting the moral. The result is dulness
of sight, a stagnation of the vital circulations, and a general
deliquium and sloughing off of all the intellectual faculties. This
sort of gingerbread is baked daily and more sedulously than pure
wheat or ryeandIndian in almost every oven, and finds a surer
market.
The best books are not read even by those who are called good
readers. What does our Concord culture amount to? There is in this
town, with a very few exceptions, no taste for the best or for very
good books even in English literature, whose words all can read and
spell. Even the collegebred and socalled liberally educated men
here and elsewhere have really little or no acquaintance with the
English classics and as for the recorded wisdom of mankind, the
ancient classics and Bibles, which are accessible to all who will
know of them, there are the feeblest efforts anywhere made to become
acquainted with them. I know a woodchopper, of middle age, who
takes a French paper, not for news as he says, for he is above that,
but to "keep himself in practice," he being a Canadian by birth and
when I ask him what he considers the best thing he can do in this
world, he says, beside this, to keep up and add to his English.
This is about as much as the collegebred generally do or aspire to
do, and they take an English paper for the purpose. One who has
just come from reading perhaps one of the best English books will
find how many with whom he can converse about it? Or suppose he
comes from reading a Greek or Latin classic in the original, whose
praises are familiar even to the socalled illiterate he will find
nobody at all to speak to, but must keep silence about it. Indeed,
there is hardly the professor in our colleges, who, if he has
mastered the difficulties of the language, has proportionally
mastered the difficulties of the wit and poetry of a Greek poet, and
has any sympathy to impart to the alert and heroic reader and as
for the sacred Scriptures, or Bibles of mankind, who in this town
can tell me even their titles? Most men do not know that any nation
but the Hebrews have had a scripture. A man, any man, will go
considerably out of his way to pick up a silver dollar but here are
golden words, which the wisest men of antiquity have uttered, and
whose worth the wise of every succeeding age have assured us of 
and yet we learn to read only as far as Easy Reading, the primers
and classbooks, and when we leave school, the "Little Reading," and
storybooks, which are for boys and beginners and our reading, our
conversation and thinking, are all on a very low level, worthy only
of pygmies and manikins.
I aspire to be acquainted with wiser men than this our Concord
soil has produced, whose names are hardly known here. Or shall I
hear the name of Plato and never read his book? As if Plato were my
townsman and I never saw him  my next neighbor and I never heard
him speak or attended to the wisdom of his words. But how actually
is it? His Dialogues, which contain what was immortal in him, lie
on the next shelf, and yet I never read them. We are underbred and
lowlived and illiterate and in this respect I confess I do not
make any very broad distinction between the illiterateness of my
townsman who cannot read at all and the illiterateness of him who
has learned to read only what is for children and feeble intellects.
We should be as good as the worthies of antiquity, but partly by
first knowing how good they were. We are a race of titmen, and
soar but little higher in our intellectual flights than the columns
of the daily paper.
It is not all books that are as dull as their readers. There
are probably words addressed to our condition exactly, which, if we
could really hear and understand, would be more salutary than the
morning or the spring to our lives, and possibly put a new aspect on
the face of things for us. How many a man has dated a new era in
his life from the reading of a book The book exists for us,
perchance, which will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. The
at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered. These
same questions that disturb and puzzle and confound us have in their
turn occurred to all the wise men not one has been omitted and
each has answered them, according to his ability, by his words and
his life. Moreover, with wisdom we shall learn liberality. The
solitary hired man on a farm in the outskirts of Concord, who has
had his second birth and peculiar religious experience, and is
driven as he believes into the silent gravity and exclusiveness by
his faith, may think it is not true but Zoroaster, thousands of
years ago, travelled the same road and had the same experience but
he, being wise, knew it to be universal, and treated his neighbors
accordingly, and is even said to have invented and established
worship among men. Let him humbly commune with Zoroaster then, and
through the liberalizing influence of all the worthies, with Jesus
Christ himself, and let "our church" go by the board.
We boast that we belong to the Nineteenth Century and are making
the most rapid strides of any nation. But consider how little this
village does for its own culture. I do not wish to flatter my
townsmen, nor to be flattered by them, for that will not advance
either of us. We need to be provoked  goaded like oxen, as we
are, into a trot. We have a comparatively decent system of common
schools, schools for infants only but excepting the halfstarved
Lyceum in the winter, and latterly the puny beginning of a library
suggested by the State, no school for ourselves. We spend more on
almost any article of bodily aliment or ailment than on our mental
aliment. It is time that we had uncommon schools, that we did not
leave off our education when we begin to be men and women. It is
time that villages were universities, and their elder inhabitants
the fellows of universities, with leisure  if they are, indeed, so
well off  to pursue liberal studies the rest of their lives.
Shall the world be confined to one Paris or one Oxford forever?
Cannot students be boarded here and get a liberal education under
the skies of Concord? Can we not hire some Abelard to lecture to
us? Alas what with foddering the cattle and tending the store, we
are kept from school too long, and our education is sadly neglected.
In this country, the village should in some respects take the place
of the nobleman of Europe. It should be the patron of the fine
arts. It is rich enough. It wants only the magnanimity and
refinement. It can spend money enough on such things as farmers and
traders value, but it is thought Utopian to propose spending money
for things which more intelligent men know to be of far more worth.
This town has spent seventeen thousand dollars on a townhouse,
thank fortune or politics, but probably it will not spend so much on
living wit, the true meat to put into that shell, in a hundred
years. The one hundred and twentyfive dollars annually subscribed
for a Lyceum in the winter is better spent than any other equal sum
raised in the town. If we live in the Nineteenth Century, why
should we not enjoy the advantages which the Nineteenth Century
offers? Why should our life be in any respect provincial? If we
will read newspapers, why not skip the gossip of Boston and take the
best newspaper in the world at once?  not be sucking the pap of
"neutral family" papers, or browsing "Olive Branches" here in New
England. Let the reports of all the learned societies come to us,
and we will see if they know anything. Why should we leave it to
Harper  Brothers and Redding  Co. to select our reading? As the
nobleman of cultivated taste surrounds himself with whatever
conduces to his culture  genius  learning  wit  books 
paintings  statuary  music  philosophical instruments, and the
like so let the village do  not stop short at a pedagogue, a
parson, a sexton, a parish library, and three selectmen, because our
Pilgrim forefathers got through a cold winter once on a bleak rock
with these. To act collectively is according to the spirit of our
institutions and I am confident that, as our circumstances are more
flourishing, our means are greater than the nobleman's. New England
can hire all the wise men in the world to come and teach her, and
board them round the while, and not be provincial at all. That is
the uncommon school we want. Instead of noblemen, let us have noble
villages of men. If it is necessary, omit one bridge over the
river, go round a little there, and throw one arch at least over the
darker gulf of ignorance which surrounds us.
Sounds
But while we are confined to books, though the most select and
classic, and read only particular written languages, which are
themselves but dialects and provincial, we are in danger of
forgetting the language which all things and events speak without
metaphor, which alone is copious and standard. Much is published,
but little printed. The rays which stream through the shutter will
be no longer remembered when the shutter is wholly removed. No
method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever
on the alert. What is a course of history or philosophy, or poetry,
no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most
admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking
always at what is to be seen? Will you be a reader, a student
merely, or a seer? Read your fate, see what is before you, and walk
on into futurity.
I did not read books the first summer I hoed beans. Nay, I
often did better than this. There were times when I could not
afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work,
whether of the head or hands. I love a broad margin to my life.
Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I
sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery,
amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude
and stillness, while the birds sing around or flitted noiseless
through the house, until by the sun falling in at my west window, or
the noise of some traveller's wagon on the distant highway, I was
reminded of the lapse of time. I grew in those seasons like corn in
the night, and they were far better than any work of the hands would
have been. They were not time subtracted from my life, but so much
over and above my usual allowance. I realized what the Orientals
mean by contemplation and the forsaking of works. For the most
part, I minded not how the hours went. The day advanced as if to
light some work of mine it was morning, and lo, now it is evening,
and nothing memorable is accomplished. Instead of singing like the
birds, I silently smiled at my incessant good fortune. As the
sparrow had its trill, sitting on the hickory before my door, so had
I my chuckle or suppressed warble which he might hear out of my
nest. My days were not days of the week, bearing the stamp of any
heathen deity, nor were they minced into hours and fretted by the
ticking of a clock for I lived like the Puri Indians, of whom it is
said that "for yesterday, today, and tomorrow they have only one
word, and they express the variety of meaning by pointing backward
for yesterday forward for tomorrow, and overhead for the passing
day." This was sheer idleness to my fellowtownsmen, no doubt but
if the birds and flowers had tried me by their standard, I should
not have been found wanting. A man must find his occasions in
himself, it is true. The natural day is very calm, and will hardly
reprove his indolence.
I had this advantage, at least, in my mode of life, over those
who were obliged to look abroad for amusement, to society and the
theatre, that my life itself was become my amusement and never
ceased to be novel. It was a drama of many scenes and without an
end. If we were always, indeed, getting our living, and regulating
our lives according to the last and best mode we had learned, we
should never be troubled with ennui. Follow your genius closely
enough, and it will not fail to show you a fresh prospect every
hour. Housework was a pleasant pastime. When my floor was dirty, I
rose early, and, setting all my furniture out of doors on the grass,
bed and bedstead making but one budget, dashed water on the floor,
and sprinkled white sand from the pond on it, and then with a broom
scrubbed it clean and white and by the time the villagers had
broken their fast the morning sun had dried my house sufficiently to
allow me to move in again, and my meditations were almost
uninterupted. It was pleasant to see my whole household effects out
on the grass, making a little pile like a gypsy's pack, and my
threelegged table, from which I did not remove the books and pen
and ink, standing amid the pines and hickories. They seemed glad to
get out themselves, and as if unwilling to be brought in. I was
sometimes tempted to stretch an awning over them and take my seat
there. It was worth the while to see the sun shine on these things,
and hear the free wind blow on them so much more interesting most
familiar objects look out of doors than in the house. A bird sits
on the next bough, lifeeverlasting grows under the table, and
blackberry vines run round its legs pine cones, chestnut burs, and
strawberry leaves are strewn about. It looked as if this was the
way these forms came to be transferred to our furniture, to tables,
chairs, and bedsteads  because they once stood in their midst.
My house was on the side of a hill, immediately on the edge of
the larger wood, in the midst of a young forest of pitch pines and
hickories, and half a dozen rods from the pond, to which a narrow
footpath led down the hill. In my front yard grew the strawberry,
blackberry, and lifeeverlasting, johnswort and goldenrod, shrub
oaks and sand cherry, blueberry and groundnut. Near the end of May,
the sand cherry Cerasus pumila adorned the sides of the path with
its delicate flowers arranged in umbels cylindrically about its
short stems, which last, in the fall, weighed down with goodsized
and handsome cherries, fell over in wreaths like rays on every side.
I tasted them out of compliment to Nature, though they were scarcely
palatable. The sumach Rhus glabra grew luxuriantly about the
house, pushing up through the embankment which I had made, and
growing five or six feet the first season. Its broad pinnate
tropical leaf was pleasant though strange to look on. The large
buds, suddenly pushing out late in the spring from dry sticks which
had seemed to be dead, developed themselves as by magic into
graceful green and tender boughs, an inch in diameter and
sometimes, as I sat at my window, so heedlessly did they grow and
tax their weak joints, I heard a fresh and tender bough suddenly
fall like a fan to the ground, when there was not a breath of air
stirring, broken off by its own weight. In August, the large masses
of berries, which, when in flower, had attracted many wild bees,
gradually assumed their bright velvety crimson hue, and by their
weight again bent down and broke the tender limbs.
As I sit at my window this summer afternoon, hawks are circling
about my clearing the tantivy of wild pigeons, flying by two and
threes athwart my view, or perching restless on the white pine
boughs behind my house, gives a voice to the air a fish hawk
dimples the glassy surface of the pond and brings up a fish a mink
steals out of the marsh before my door and seizes a frog by the
shore the sedge is bending under the weight of the reedbirds
flitting hither and thither and for the last halfhour I have heard
the rattle of railroad cars, now dying away and then reviving like
the beat of a partridge, conveying travellers from Boston to the
country. For I did not live so out of the world as that boy who, as
I hear, was put out to a farmer in the east part of the town, but
ere long ran away and came home again, quite down at the heel and
homesick. He had never seen such a dull and outoftheway place
the folks were all gone off why, you couldn't even hear the
whistle I doubt if there is such a place in Massachusetts now
"In truth, our village has become a butt
For one of those fleet railroad shafts, and o'er
Our peaceful plain its soothing sound is  Concord."
The Fitchburg Railroad touches the pond about a hundred rods
south of where I dwell. I usually go to the village along its
causeway, and am, as it were, related to society by this link. The
men on the freight trains, who go over the whole length of the road,
bow to me as to an old acquaintance, they pass me so often, and
apparently they take me for an employee and so I am. I too would
fain be a trackrepairer somewhere in the orbit of the earth.
The whistle of the locomotive penetrates my woods summer and
winter, sounding like the scream of a hawk sailing over some
farmer's yard, informing me that many restless city merchants are
arriving within the circle of the town, or adventurous country
traders from the other side. As they come under one horizon, they
shout their warning to get off the track to the other, heard
sometimes through the circles of two towns. Here come your
groceries, country your rations, countrymen Nor is there any man
so independent on his farm that he can say them nay. And here's
your pay for them screams the countryman's whistle timber like
long batteringrams going twenty miles an hour against the city's
walls, and chairs enough to seat all the weary and heavyladen that
dwell within them. With such huge and lumbering civility the
country hands a chair to the city. All the Indian huckleberry hills
are stripped, all the cranberry meadows are raked into the city. Up
comes the cotton, down goes the woven cloth up comes the silk, down
goes the woollen up come the books, but down goes the wit that
writes them.
When I meet the engine with its train of cars moving off with
planetary motion  or, rather, like a comet, for the beholder knows
not if with that velocity and with that direction it will ever
revisit this system, since its orbit does not look like a returning
curve  with its steam cloud like a banner streaming behind in
golden and silver wreaths, like many a downy cloud which I have
seen, high in the heavens, unfolding its masses to the light  as
if this traveling demigod, this cloudcompeller, would ere long take
the sunset sky for the livery of his train when I hear the iron
horse make the hills echo with his snort like thunder, shaking the
earth with his feet, and breathing fire and smoke from his nostrils
what kind of winged horse or fiery dragon they will put into the
new Mythology I don't know, it seems as if the earth had got a race
now worthy to inhabit it. If all were as it seems, and men made the
elements their servants for noble ends If the cloud that hangs
over the engine were the perspiration of heroic deeds, or as
beneficent as that which floats over the farmer's fields, then the
elements and Nature herself would cheerfully accompany men on their
errands and be their escort.
I watch the passage of the morning cars with the same feeling
that I do the rising of the sun, which is hardly more regular.
Their train of clouds stretching far behind and rising higher and
higher, going to heaven while the cars are going to Boston, conceals
the sun for a minute and casts my distant field into the shade, a
celestial train beside which the petty train of cars which hugs the
earth is but the barb of the spear. The stabler of the iron horse
was up early this winter morning by the light of the stars amid the
mountains, to fodder and harness his steed. Fire, too, was awakened
thus early to put the vital heat in him and get him off. If the
enterprise were as innocent as it is early If the snow lies deep,
they strap on his snowshoes, and, with the giant plow, plow a furrow
from the mountains to the seaboard, in which the cars, like a
following drillbarrow, sprinkle all the restless men and floating
merchandise in the country for seed. All day the firesteed flies
over the country, stopping only that his master may rest, and I am
awakened by his tramp and defiant snort at midnight, when in some
remote glen in the woods he fronts the elements incased in ice and
snow and he will reach his stall only with the morning star, to
start once more on his travels without rest or slumber. Or
perchance, at evening, I hear him in his stable blowing off the
superfluous energy of the day, that he may calm his nerves and cool
his liver and brain for a few hours of iron slumber. If the
enterprise were as heroic and commanding as it is protracted and
unwearied
Far through unfrequented woods on the confines of towns, where
once only the hunter penetrated by day, in the darkest night dart
these bright saloons without the knowledge of their inhabitants
this moment stopping at some brilliant stationhouse in town or
city, where a social crowd is gathered, the next in the Dismal
Swamp, scaring the owl and fox. The startings and arrivals of the
cars are now the epochs in the village day. They go and come with
such regularity and precision, and their whistle can be heard so
far, that the farmers set their clocks by them, and thus one
wellconducted institution regulates a whole country. Have not men
improved somewhat in punctuality since the railroad was invented?
Do they not talk and think faster in the depot than they did in the
stageoffice? There is something electrifying in the atmosphere of
the former place. I have been astonished at the miracles it has
wrought that some of my neighbors, who, I should have prophesied,
once for all, would never get to Boston by so prompt a conveyance,
are on hand when the bell rings. To do things "railroad fashion" is
now the byword and it is worth the while to be warned so often and
so sincerely by any power to get off its track. There is no
stopping to read the riot act, no firing over the heads of the mob,
in this case. We have constructed a fate, an Atropos, that never
turns aside. Let that be the name of your engine. Men are
advertised that at a certain hour and minute these bolts will be
shot toward particular points of the compass yet it interferes with
no man's business, and the children go to school on the other track.
We live the steadier for it. We are all educated thus to be sons of
Tell. The air is full of invisible bolts. Every path but your own
is the path of fate. Keep on your own track, then.
What recommends commerce to me is its enterprise and bravery.
It does not clasp its hands and pray to Jupiter. I see these men
every day go about their business with more or less courage and
content, doing more even than they suspect, and perchance better
employed than they could have consciously devised. I am less
affected by their heroism who stood up for half an hour in the front
line at Buena Vista, than by the steady and cheerful valor of the
men who inhabit the snowplow for their winter quarters who have not
merely the threeo'clockinthemorning courage, which Bonaparte
thought was the rarest, but whose courage does not go to rest so
early, who go to sleep only when the storm sleeps or the sinews of
their iron steed are frozen. On this morning of the Great Snow,
perchance, which is still raging and chilling men's blood, I bear
the muffled tone of their engine bell from out the fog bank of their
chilled breath, which announces that the cars are coming, without
long delay, notwithstanding the veto of a New England northeast
snowstorm, and I behold the plowmen covered with snow and rime,
their heads peering, above the mouldboard which is turning down
other than daisies and the nests of field mice, like bowlders of the
Sierra Nevada, that occupy an outside place in the universe.
Commerce is unexpectedly confident and serene, alert,
adventurous, and unwearied. It is very natural in its methods
withal, far more so than many fantastic enterprises and sentimental
experiments, and hence its singular success. I am refreshed and
expanded when the freight train rattles past me, and I smell the
stores which go dispensing their odors all the way from Long Wharf
to Lake Champlain, reminding me of foreign parts, of coral reefs,
and Indian oceans, and tropical climes, and the extent of the globe.
I feel more like a citizen of the world at the sight of the
palmleaf which will cover so many flaxen New England heads the next
summer, the Manilla hemp and cocoanut husks, the old junk, gunny
bags, scrap iron, and rusty nails. This carload of torn sails is
more legible and interesting now than if they should be wrought into
paper and printed books. Who can write so graphically the history
of the storms they have weathered as these rents have done? They
are proofsheets which need no correction. Here goes lumber from
the Maine woods, which did not go out to sea in the last freshet,
risen four dollars on the thousand because of what did go out or was
split up pine, spruce, cedar  first, second, third, and fourth
qualities, so lately all of one quality, to wave over the bear, and
moose, and caribou. Next rolls Thomaston lime, a prime lot, which
will get far among the hills before it gets slacked. These rags in
bales, of all hues and qualities, the lowest condition to which
cotton and linen descend, the final result of dress  of patterns
which are now no longer cried up, unless it be in Milwaukee, as
those splendid articles, English, French, or American prints,
ginghams, muslins, etc., gathered from all quarters both of fashion
and poverty, going to become paper of one color or a few shades
only, on which, forsooth, will be written tales of real life, high
and low, and founded on fact This closed car smells of salt fish,
the strong New England and commercial scent, reminding me of the
Grand Banks and the fisheries. Who has not seen a salt fish,
thoroughly cured for this world, so that nothing can spoil it, and
putting, the perseverance of the saints to the blush? with which you
may sweep or pave the streets, and split your kindlings, and the
teamster shelter himself and his lading against sun, wind, and rain
behind it  and the trader, as a Concord trader once did, hang it
up by his door for a sign when he commences business, until at last
his oldest customer cannot tell surely whether it be animal,
vegetable, or mineral, and yet it shall be as pure as a snowflake,
and if it be put into a pot and boiled, will come out an excellent
dunfish for a Saturday's dinner. Next Spanish hides, with the
tails still preserving their twist and the angle of elevation they
had when the oxen that wore them were careering over the pampas of
the Spanish Main  a type of all obstinacy, and evincing how almost
hopeless and incurable are all constitutional vices. I confess,
that practically speaking, when I have learned a man's real
disposition, I have no hopes of changing it for the better or worse
in this state of existence. As the Orientals say, "A cur's tail may
be warmed, and pressed, and bound round with ligatures, and after a
twelve years' labor bestowed upon it, still it will retain its
natural form." The only effectual cure for such inveteracies as
these tails exhibit is to make glue of them, which I believe is what
is usually done with them, and then they will stay put and stick.
Here is a hogshead of molasses or of brandy directed to John Smith,
Cuttingsville, Vermont, some trader among the Green Mountains, who
imports for the farmers near his clearing, and now perchance stands
over his bulkhead and thinks of the last arrivals on the coast, how
they may affect the price for him, telling his customers this
moment, as he has told them twenty times before this morning, that
he expects some by the next train of prime quality. It is
advertised in the Cuttingsville Times.
While these things go up other things come down. Warned by the
whizzing sound, I look up from my book and see some tall pine, hewn
on far northern hills, which has winged its way over the Green
Mountains and the Connecticut, shot like an arrow through the
township within ten minutes, and scarce another eye beholds it
going
"to be the mast
Of some great ammiral."
And hark here comes the cattletrain bearing the cattle of a
thousand hills, sheepcots, stables, and cowyards in the air,
drovers with their sticks, and shepherd boys in the midst of their
flocks, all but the mountain pastures, whirled along like leaves
blown from the mountains by the September gales. The air is filled
with the bleating of calves and sheep, and the hustling of oxen, as
if a pastoral valley were going by. When the old bellwether at the
head rattles his bell, the mountains do indeed skip like rams and
the little hills like lambs. A carload of drovers, too, in the
midst, on a level with their droves now, their vocation gone, but
still clinging to their useless sticks as their badge of office.
But their dogs, where are they? It is a stampede to them they are
quite thrown out they have lost the scent. Methinks I hear them
barking behind the Peterboro' Hills, or panting up the western slope
of the Green Mountains. They will not be in at the death. Their
vocation, too, is gone. Their fidelity and sagacity are below par
now. They will slink back to their kennels in disgrace, or
perchance run wild and strike a league with the wolf and the fox.
So is your pastoral life whirled past and away. But the bell rings,
and I must get off the track and let the cars go by
What's the railroad to me?
I never go to see
Where it ends.
It fills a few hollows,
And makes banks for the swallows,
It sets the sand ablowing,
And the blackberries agrowing,
but I cross it like a cartpath in the woods. I will not have my
eyes put out and my ears spoiled by its smoke and steam and hissing.
Now that the cars are gone by and all the restless world with
them, and the fishes in the pond no longer feel their rumbling, I am
more alone than ever. For the rest of the long afternoon, perhaps,
my meditations are interrupted only by the faint rattle of a
carriage or team along the distant highway.
Sometimes, on Sundays, I heard the bells, the Lincoln, Acton,
Bedford, or Concord bell, when the wind was favorable, a faint,
sweet, and, as it were, natural melody, worth importing into the
wilderness. At a sufficient distance over the woods this sound
acquires a certain vibratory hum, as if the pine needles in the
horizon were the strings of a harp which it swept. All sound heard
at the greatest possible distance produces one and the same effect,
a vibration of the universal lyre, just as the intervening
atmosphere makes a distant ridge of earth interesting to our eyes by
the azure tint it imparts to it. There came to me in this case a
melody which the air had strained, and which had conversed with
every leaf and needle of the wood, that portion of the sound which
the elements had taken up and modulated and echoed from vale to
vale. The echo is, to some extent, an original sound, and therein
is the magic and charm of it. It is not merely a repetition of what
was worth repeating in the bell, but partly the voice of the wood
the same trivial words and notes sung by a woodnymph.
At evening, the distant lowing of some cow in the horizon beyond
the woods sounded sweet and melodious, and at first I would mistake
it for the voices of certain minstrels by whom I was sometimes
serenaded, who might be straying over hill and dale but soon I was
not unpleasantly disappointed when it was prolonged into the cheap
and natural music of the cow. I do not mean to be satirical, but to
express my appreciation of those youths' singing, when I state that
I perceived clearly that it was akin to the music of the cow, and
they were at length one articulation of Nature.
Regularly at halfpast seven, in one part of the summer, after
the evening train had gone by, the whippoorwills chanted their
vespers for half an hour, sitting on a stump by my door, or upon the
ridgepole of the house. They would begin to sing almost with as
much precision as a clock, within five minutes of a particular time,
referred to the setting of the sun, every evening. I had a rare
opportunity to become acquainted with their habits. Sometimes I
heard four or five at once in different parts of the wood, by
accident one a bar behind another, and so near me that I
distinguished not only the cluck after each note, but often that
singular buzzing sound like a fly in a spider's web, only
proportionally louder. Sometimes one would circle round and round
me in the woods a few feet distant as if tethered by a string, when
probably I was near its eggs. They sang at intervals throughout the
night, and were again as musical as ever just before and about dawn.
When other birds are still, the screech owls take up the strain,
like mourning women their ancient ululu. Their dismal scream is
truly Ben Jonsonian. Wise midnight hags It is no honest and blunt
tuwhit tuwho of the poets, but, without jesting, a most solemn
graveyard ditty, the mutual consolations of suicide lovers
remembering the pangs and the delights of supernal love in the
infernal groves. Yet I love to hear their wailing, their doleful
responses, trilled along the woodside reminding me sometimes of
music and singing birds as if it were the dark and tearful side of
music, the regrets and sighs that would fain be sung. They are the
spirits, the low spirits and melancholy forebodings, of fallen souls
that once in human shape nightwalked the earth and did the deeds of
darkness, now expiating their sins with their wailing hymns or
threnodies in the scenery of their transgressions. They give me a
new sense of the variety and capacity of that nature which is our
common dwelling. Ohoooo that I never had been borrrrn
sighs one on this side of the pond, and circles with the
restlessness of despair to some new perch on the gray oaks. Then 
that I never had been borrrrn echoes another on the farther
side with tremulous sincerity, and  borrrrn comes faintly
from far in the Lincoln woods.
I was also serenaded by a hooting owl. Near at hand you could
fancy it the most melancholy sound in Nature, as if she meant by
this to stereotype and make permanent in her choir the dying moans
of a human being  some poor weak relic of mortality who has left
hope behind, and howls like an animal, yet with human sobs, on
entering the dark valley, made more awful by a certain gurgling
melodiousness  I find myself beginning with the letters gl when I
try to imitate it  expressive of a mind which has reached the
gelatinous, mildewy stage in the mortification of all healthy and
courageous thought. It reminded me of ghouls and idiots and insane
howlings. But now one answers from far woods in a strain made
really melodious by distance  Hoo hoo hoo, hoorer hoo and indeed
for the most part it suggested only pleasing associations, whether
heard by day or night, summer or winter.
I rejoice that there are owls. Let them do the idiotic and
maniacal hooting for men. It is a sound admirably suited to swamps
and twilight woods which no day illustrates, suggesting a vast and
undeveloped nature which men have not recognized. They represent
the stark twilight and unsatisfied thoughts which all have. All day
the sun has shone on the surface of some savage swamp, where the
single spruce stands hung with usnea lichens, and small hawks
circulate above, and the chickadee lisps amid the evergreens, and
the partridge and rabbit skulk beneath but now a more dismal and
fitting day dawns, and a different race of creatures awakes to
express the meaning of Nature there.
Late in the evening I heard the distant rumbling of wagons over
bridges  a sound heard farther than almost any other at night 
the baying of dogs, and sometimes again the lowing of some
disconsolate cow in a distant barnyard. In the meanwhile all the
shore rang with the trump of bullfrogs, the sturdy spirits of
ancient winebibbers and wassailers, still unrepentant, trying to
sing a catch in their Stygian lake  if the Walden nymphs will
pardon the comparison, for though there are almost no weeds, there
are frogs there  who would fain keep up the hilarious rules of
their old festal tables, though their voices have waxed hoarse and
solemnly grave, mocking at mirth, and the wine has lost its flavor,
and become only liquor to distend their paunches, and sweet
intoxication never comes to drown the memory of the past, but mere
saturation and waterloggedness and distention. The most aldermanic,
with his chin upon a heartleaf, which serves for a napkin to his
drooling chaps, under this northern shore quaffs a deep draught of
the once scorned water, and passes round the cup with the
ejaculation trrroonk, trrroonk, trrroonk and straightway
comes over the water from some distant cove the same password
repeated, where the next in seniority and girth has gulped down to
his mark and when this observance has made the circuit of the
shores, then ejaculates the master of ceremonies, with satisfaction,
trrroonk and each in his turn repeats the same down to the least
distended, leakiest, and flabbiest paunched, that there be no
mistake and then the howl goes round again and again, until the sun
disperses the morning mist, and only the patriarch is not under the
pond, but vainly bellowing troonk from time to time, and pausing for
a reply.
I am not sure that I ever heard the sound of cockcrowing from
my clearing, and I thought that it might be worth the while to keep
a cockerel for his music merely, as a singing bird. The note of
this once wild Indian pheasant is certainly the most remarkable of
any bird's, and if they could be naturalized without being
domesticated, it would soon become the most famous sound in our
woods, surpassing the clangor of the goose and the hooting of the
owl and then imagine the cackling of the hens to fill the pauses
when their lords' clarions rested No wonder that man added this
bird to his tame stock  to say nothing of the eggs and drumsticks.
To walk in a winter morning in a wood where these birds abounded,
their native woods, and hear the wild cockerels crow on the trees,
clear and shrill for miles over the resounding earth, drowning the
feebler notes of other birds  think of it It would put nations
on the alert. Who would not be early to rise, and rise earlier and
earlier every successive day of his life, till he became unspeakably
healthy, wealthy, and wise? This foreign bird's note is celebrated
by the poets of all countries along with the notes of their native
songsters. All climates agree with brave Chanticleer. He is more
indigenous even than the natives. His health is ever good, his
lungs are sound, his spirits never flag. Even the sailor on the
Atlantic and Pacific is awakened by his voice but its shrill sound
never roused me from my slumbers. I kept neither dog, cat, cow,
pig, nor hens, so that you would have said there was a deficiency of
domestic sounds neither the churn, nor the spinningwheel, nor even
the singing of the kettle, nor the hissing of the urn, nor children
crying, to comfort one. An oldfashioned man would have lost his
senses or died of ennui before this. Not even rats in the wall, for
they were starved out, or rather were never baited in  only
squirrels on the roof and under the floor, a whippoorwill on the
ridgepole, a blue jay screaming beneath the window, a hare or
woodchuck under the house, a screech owl or a cat owl behind it, a
flock of wild geese or a laughing loon on the pond, and a fox to
bark in the night. Not even a lark or an oriole, those mild
plantation birds, ever visited my clearing. No cockerels to crow
nor hens to cackle in the yard. No yard but unfenced nature
reaching up to your very sills. A young forest growing up under
your meadows, and wild sumachs and blackberry vines breaking through
into your cellar sturdy pitch pines rubbing and creaking against
the shingles for want of room, their roots reaching quite under the
house. Instead of a scuttle or a blind blown off in the gale  a
pine tree snapped off or torn up by the roots behind your house for
fuel. Instead of no path to the frontyard gate in the Great Snow
no gate  no frontyard  and no path to the civilized world.
Solitude
This is a delicious evening, when the whole body is one sense,
and imbibes delight through every pore. I go and come with a
strange liberty in Nature, a part of herself. As I walk along the
stony shore of the pond in my shirtsleeves, though it is cool as
well as cloudy and windy, and I see nothing special to attract me,
all the elements are unusually congenial to me. The bullfrogs trump
to usher in the night, and the note of the whippoorwill is borne
on the rippling wind from over the water. Sympathy with the
fluttering alder and poplar leaves almost takes away my breath yet,
like the lake, my serenity is rippled but not ruffled. These small
waves raised by the evening wind are as remote from storm as the
smooth reflecting surface. Though it is now dark, the wind still
blows and roars in the wood, the waves still dash, and some
creatures lull the rest with their notes. The repose is never
complete. The wildest animals do not repose, but seek their prey
now the fox, and skunk, and rabbit, now roam the fields and woods
without fear. They are Nature's watchmen  links which connect the
days of animated life.
When I return to my house I find that visitors have been there
and left their cards, either a bunch of flowers, or a wreath of
evergreen, or a name in pencil on a yellow walnut leaf or a chip.
They who come rarely to the woods take some little piece of the
forest into their hands to play with by the way, which they leave,
either intentionally or accidentally. One has peeled a willow wand,
woven it into a ring, and dropped it on my table. I could always
tell if visitors had called in my absence, either by the bended
twigs or grass, or the print of their shoes, and generally of what
sex or age or quality they were by some slight trace left, as a
flower dropped, or a bunch of grass plucked and thrown away, even as
far off as the railroad, half a mile distant, or by the lingering
odor of a cigar or pipe. Nay, I was frequently notified of the
passage of a traveller along the highway sixty rods off by the scent
of his pipe.
There is commonly sufficient space about us. Our horizon is
never quite at our elbows. The thick wood is not just at our door,
nor the pond, but somewhat is always clearing, familiar and worn by
us, appropriated and fenced in some way, and reclaimed from Nature.
For what reason have I this vast range and circuit, some square
miles of unfrequented forest, for my privacy, abandoned to me by
men? My nearest neighbor is a mile distant, and no house is visible
from any place but the hilltops within half a mile of my own. I
have my horizon bounded by woods all to myself a distant view of
the railroad where it touches the pond on the one hand, and of the
fence which skirts the woodland road on the other. But for the most
part it is as solitary where I live as on the prairies. It is as
much Asia or Africa as New England. I have, as it were, my own sun
and moon and stars, and a little world all to myself. At night
there was never a traveller passed my house, or knocked at my door,
more than if I were the first or last man unless it were in the
spring, when at long intervals some came from the village to fish
for pouts  they plainly fished much more in the Walden Pond of
their own natures, and baited their hooks with darkness  but they
soon retreated, usually with light baskets, and left "the world to
darkness and to me," and the black kernel of the night was never
profaned by any human neighborhood. I believe that men are
generally still a little afraid of the dark, though the witches are
all hung, and Christianity and candles have been introduced.
Yet I experienced sometimes that the most sweet and tender, the
most innocent and encouraging society may be found in any natural
object, even for the poor misanthrope and most melancholy man.
There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst
of Nature and has his senses still. There was never yet such a
storm but it was AEolian music to a healthy and innocent ear.
Nothing can rightly compel a simple and brave man to a vulgar
sadness. While I enjoy the friendship of the seasons I trust that
nothing can make life a burden to me. The gentle rain which waters
my beans and keeps me in the house today is not drear and
melancholy, but good for me too. Though it prevents my hoeing them,
it is of far more worth than my hoeing. If it should continue so
long as to cause the seeds to rot in the ground and destroy the
potatoes in the low lands, it would still be good for the grass on
the uplands, and, being good for the grass, it would be good for me.
Sometimes, when I compare myself with other men, it seems as if I
were more favored by the gods than they, beyond any deserts that I
am conscious of as if I had a warrant and surety at their hands
which my fellows have not, and were especially guided and guarded.
I do not flatter myself, but if it be possible they flatter me. I
have never felt lonesome, or in the least oppressed by a sense of
solitude, but once, and that was a few weeks after I came to the
woods, when, for an hour, I doubted if the near neighborhood of man
was not essential to a serene and healthy life. To be alone was
something unpleasant. But I was at the same time conscious of a
slight insanity in my mood, and seemed to foresee my recovery. In
the midst of a gentle rain while these thoughts prevailed, I was
suddenly sensible of such sweet and beneficent society in Nature, in
the very pattering of the drops, and in every sound and sight around
my house, an infinite and unaccountable friendliness all at once
like an atmosphere sustaining me, as made the fancied advantages of
human neighborhood insignificant, and I have never thought of them
since. Every little pine needle expanded and swelled with sympathy
and befriended me. I was so distinctly made aware of the presence
of something kindred to me, even in scenes which we are accustomed
to call wild and dreary, and also that the nearest of blood to me
and humanest was not a person nor a villager, that I thought no
place could ever be strange to me again.
"Mourning untimely consumes the sad
Few are their days in the land of the living,
Beautiful daughter of Toscar."
Some of my pleasantest hours were during the long rainstorms in
the spring or fall, which confined me to the house for the afternoon
as well as the forenoon, soothed by their ceaseless roar and
pelting when an early twilight ushered in a long evening in which
many thoughts had time to take root and unfold themselves. In those
driving northeast rains which tried the village houses so, when the
maids stood ready with mop and pail in front entries to keep the
deluge out, I sat behind my door in my little house, which was all
entry, and thoroughly enjoyed its protection. In one heavy
thundershower the lightning struck a large pitch pine across the
pond, making a very conspicuous and perfectly regular spiral groove
from top to bottom, an inch or more deep, and four or five inches
wide, as you would groove a walkingstick. I passed it again the
other day, and was struck with awe on looking up and beholding that
mark, now more distinct than ever, where a terrific and resistless
bolt came down out of the harmless sky eight years ago. Men
frequently say to me, "I should think you would feel lonesome down
there, and want to be nearer to folks, rainy and snowy days and
nights especially." I am tempted to reply to such  This whole
earth which we inhabit is but a point in space. How far apart,
think you, dwell the two most distant inhabitants of yonder star,
the breadth of whose disk cannot be appreciated by our instruments?
Why should I feel lonely? is not our planet in the Milky Way? This
which you put seems to me not to be the most important question.
What sort of space is that which separates a man from his fellows
and makes him solitary? I have found that no exertion of the legs
can bring two minds much nearer to one another. What do we want
most to dwell near to? Not to many men surely, the depot, the
postoffice, the barroom, the meetinghouse, the schoolhouse, the
grocery, Beacon Hill, or the Five Points, where men most congregate,
but to the perennial source of our life, whence in all our
experience we have found that to issue, as the willow stands near
the water and sends out its roots in that direction. This will vary
with different natures, but this is the place where a wise man will
dig his cellar.... I one evening overtook one of my townsmen, who
has accumulated what is called "a handsome property"  though I
never got a fair view of it  on the Walden road, driving a pair of
cattle to market, who inquired of me how I could bring my mind to
give up so many of the comforts of life. I answered that I was very
sure I liked it passably well I was not joking. And so I went home
to my bed, and left him to pick his way through the darkness and the
mud to Brighton  or Brighttown  which place he would reach some
time in the morning.
Any prospect of awakening or coming to life to a dead man makes
indifferent all times and places. The place where that may occur is
always the same, and indescribably pleasant to all our senses. For
the most part we allow only outlying and transient circumstances to
make our occasions. They are, in fact, the cause of our
distraction. Nearest to all things is that power which fashions
their being. Next to us the grandest laws are continually being
executed. Next to us is not the workman whom we have hired, with
whom we love so well to talk, but the workman whose work we are.
"How vast and profound is the influence of the subtile powers of
Heaven and of Earth"
"We seek to perceive them, and we do not see them we seek to
hear them, and we do not hear them identified with the substance of
things, they cannot be separated from them."
"They cause that in all the universe men purify and sanctify
their hearts, and clothe themselves in their holiday garments to
offer sacrifices and oblations to their ancestors. It is an ocean
of subtile intelligences. They are everywhere, above us, on our
left, on our right they environ us on all sides."
We are the subjects of an experiment which is not a little
interesting to me. Can we not do without the society of our gossips
a little while under these circumstances  have our own thoughts to
cheer us? Confucius says truly, "Virtue does not remain as an
abandoned orphan it must of necessity have neighbors."
With thinking we may be beside ourselves in a sane sense. By a
conscious effort of the mind we can stand aloof from actions and
their consequences and all things, good and bad, go by us like a
torrent. We are not wholly involved in Nature. I may be either the
driftwood in the stream, or Indra in the sky looking down on it. I
may be affected by a theatrical exhibition on the other hand, I may
not be affected by an actual event which appears to concern me much
more. I only know myself as a human entity the scene, so to speak,
of thoughts and affections and am sensible of a certain doubleness
by which I can stand as remote from myself as from another. However
intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism
of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but
spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is
no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of
life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction,
a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned. This
doubleness may easily make us poor neighbors and friends sometimes.
I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time.
To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and
dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that
was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more
lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our
chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be
where he will. Solitude is not measured by the miles of space that
intervene between a man and his fellows. The really diligent
student in one of the crowded hives of Cambridge College is as
solitary as a dervish in the desert. The farmer can work alone in
the field or the woods all day, hoeing or chopping, and not feel
lonesome, because he is employed but when he comes home at night he
cannot sit down in a room alone, at the mercy of his thoughts, but
must be where he can "see the folks," and recreate, and, as he
thinks, remunerate himself for his day's solitude and hence he
wonders how the student can sit alone in the house all night and
most of the day without ennui and "the blues" but he does not
realize that the student, though in the house, is still at work in
his field, and chopping in his woods, as the farmer in his, and in
turn seeks the same recreation and society that the latter does,
though it may be a more condensed form of it.
Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals,
not having had time to acquire any new value for each other. We
meet at meals three times a day, and give each other a new taste of
that old musty cheese that we are. We have had to agree on a
certain set of rules, called etiquette and politeness, to make this
frequent meeting tolerable and that we need not come to open war.
We meet at the postoffice, and at the sociable, and about the
fireside every night we live thick and are in each other's way, and
stumble over one another, and I think that we thus lose some respect
for one another. Certainly less frequency would suffice for all
important and hearty communications. Consider the girls in a
factory  never alone, hardly in their dreams. It would be better
if there were but one inhabitant to a square mile, as where I live.
The value of a man is not in his skin, that we should touch him.
I have heard of a man lost in the woods and dying of famine and
exhaustion at the foot of a tree, whose loneliness was relieved by
the grotesque visions with which, owing to bodily weakness, his
diseased imagination surrounded him, and which he believed to be
real. So also, owing to bodily and mental health and strength, we
may be continually cheered by a like but more normal and natural
society, and come to know that we are never alone.
I have a great deal of company in my house especially in the
morning, when nobody calls. Let me suggest a few comparisons, that
some one may convey an idea of my situation. I am no more lonely
than the loon in the pond that laughs so loud, or than Walden Pond
itself. What company has that lonely lake, I pray? And yet it has
not the blue devils, but the blue angels in it, in the azure tint of
its waters. The sun is alone, except in thick weather, when there
sometimes appear to be two, but one is a mock sun. God is alone 
but the devil, he is far from being alone he sees a great deal of
company he is legion. I am no more lonely than a single mullein or
dandelion in a pasture, or a bean leaf, or sorrel, or a horsefly,
or a bumblebee. I am no more lonely than the Mill Brook, or a
weathercock, or the north star, or the south wind, or an April
shower, or a January thaw, or the first spider in a new house.
I have occasional visits in the long winter evenings, when the
snow falls fast and the wind howls in the wood, from an old settler
and original proprietor, who is reported to have dug Walden Pond,
and stoned it, and fringed it with pine woods who tells me stories
of old time and of new eternity and between us we manage to pass a
cheerful evening with social mirth and pleasant views of things,
even without apples or cider  a most wise and humorous friend,
whom I love much, who keeps himself more secret than ever did Goffe
or Whalley and though he is thought to be dead, none can show where
he is buried. An elderly dame, too, dwells in my neighborhood,
invisible to most persons, in whose odorous herb garden I love to
stroll sometimes, gathering simples and listening to her fables for
she has a genius of unequalled fertility, and her memory runs back
farther than mythology, and she can tell me the original of every
fable, and on what fact every one is founded, for the incidents
occurred when she was young. A ruddy and lusty old dame, who
delights in all weathers and seasons, and is likely to outlive all
her children yet.
The indescribable innocence and beneficence of Nature  of sun
and wind and rain, of summer and winter  such health, such cheer,
they afford forever and such sympathy have they ever with our race,
that all Nature would be affected, and the sun's brightness fade,
and the winds would sigh humanely, and the clouds rain tears, and
the woods shed their leaves and put on mourning in midsummer, if any
man should ever for a just cause grieve. Shall I not have
intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable
mould myself?
What is the pill which will keep us well, serene, contented?
Not my or thy greatgrandfather's, but our greatgrandmother
Nature's universal, vegetable, botanic medicines, by which she has
kept herself young always, outlived so many old Parrs in her day,
and fed her health with their decaying fatness. For my panacea,
instead of one of those quack vials of a mixture dipped from Acheron
and the Dead Sea, which come out of those long shallow
blackschooner looking wagons which we sometimes see made to carry
bottles, let me have a draught of undiluted morning air. Morning
air If men will not drink of this at the fountainhead of the day,
why, then, we must even bottle up some and sell it in the shops, for
the benefit of those who have lost their subscription ticket to
morning time in this world. But remember, it will not keep quite
till noonday even in the coolest cellar, but drive out the stopples
long ere that and follow westward the steps of Aurora. I am no
worshipper of Hygeia, who was the daughter of that old herbdoctor
AEsculapius, and who is represented on monuments holding a serpent
in one hand, and in the other a cup out of which the serpent
sometimes drinks but rather of Hebe, cupbearer to Jupiter, who was
the daughter of Juno and wild lettuce, and who had the power of
restoring gods and men to the vigor of youth. She was probably the
only thoroughly soundconditioned, healthy, and robust young lady
that ever walked the globe, and wherever she came it was spring.
Visitors
I think that I love society as much as most, and am ready enough
to fasten myself like a bloodsucker for the time to any fullblooded
man that comes in my way. I am naturally no hermit, but might
possibly sit out the sturdiest frequenter of the barroom, if my
business called me thither.
I had three chairs in my house one for solitude, two for
friendship, three for society. When visitors came in larger and
unexpected numbers there was but the third chair for them all, but
they generally economized the room by standing up. It is surprising
how many great men and women a small house will contain. I have had
twentyfive or thirty souls, with their bodies, at once under my
roof, and yet we often parted without being aware that we had come
very near to one another. Many of our houses, both public and
private, with their almost innumerable apartments, their huge halls
and their cellars for the storage of wines and other munitions of
peace, appear to be extravagantly large for their inhabitants. They
are so vast and magnificent that the latter seem to be only vermin
which infest them. I am surprised when the herald blows his summons
before some Tremont or Astor or Middlesex House, to see come
creeping out over the piazza for all inhabitants a ridiculous mouse,
which soon again slinks into some hole in the pavement.
One inconvenience I sometimes experienced in so small a house,
the difficulty of getting to a sufficient distance from my guest
when we began to utter the big thoughts in big words. You want room
for your thoughts to get into sailing trim and run a course or two
before they make their port. The bullet of your thought must have
overcome its lateral and ricochet motion and fallen into its last
and steady course before it reaches the ear of the hearer, else it
may plow out again through the side of his head. Also, our
sentences wanted room to unfold and form their columns in the
interval. Individuals, like nations, must have suitable broad and
natural boundaries, even a considerable neutral ground, between
them. I have found it a singular luxury to talk across the pond to
a companion on the opposite side. In my house we were so near that
we could not begin to hear  we could not speak low enough to be
heard as when you throw two stones into calm water so near that
they break each other's undulations. If we are merely loquacious
and loud talkers, then we can afford to stand very near together,
cheek by jowl, and feel each other's breath but if we speak
reservedly and thoughtfully, we want to be farther apart, that all
animal heat and moisture may have a chance to evaporate. If we
would enjoy the most intimate society with that in each of us which
is without, or above, being spoken to, we must not only be silent,
but commonly so far apart bodily that we cannot possibly hear each
other's voice in any case. Referred to this standard, speech is for
the convenience of those who are hard of hearing but there are many
fine things which we cannot say if we have to shout. As the
conversation began to assume a loftier and grander tone, we
gradually shoved our chairs farther apart till they touched the wall
in opposite corners, and then commonly there was not room enough.
My "best" room, however, my withdrawing room, always ready for
company, on whose carpet the sun rarely fell, was the pine wood
behind my house. Thither in summer days, when distinguished guests
came, I took them, and a priceless domestic swept the floor and
dusted the furniture and kept the things in order.
If one guest came he sometimes partook of my frugal meal, and it
was no interruption to conversation to be stirring a hastypudding,
or watching the rising and maturing of a loaf of bread in the ashes,
in the meanwhile. But if twenty came and sat in my house there was
nothing said about dinner, though there might be bread enough for
two, more than if eating were a forsaken habit but we naturally
practised abstinence and this was never felt to be an offence
against hospitality, but the most proper and considerate course.
The waste and decay of physical life, which so often needs repair,
seemed miraculously retarded in such a case, and the vital vigor
stood its ground. I could entertain thus a thousand as well as
twenty and if any ever went away disappointed or hungry from my
house when they found me at home, they may depend upon it that I
sympathized with them at least. So easy is it, though many
housekeepers doubt it, to establish new and better customs in the
place of the old. You need not rest your reputation on the dinners
you give. For my own part, I was never so effectually deterred from
frequenting a man's house, by any kind of Cerberus whatever, as by
the parade one made about dining me, which I took to be a very
polite and roundabout hint never to trouble him so again. I think I
shall never revisit those scenes. I should be proud to have for the
motto of my cabin those lines of Spenser which one of my visitors
inscribed on a yellow walnut leaf for a card
"Arrived there, the little house they fill,
Ne looke for entertainment where none was
Rest is their feast, and all things at their will
The noblest mind the best contentment has."
When Winslow, afterward governor of the Plymouth Colony, went
with a companion on a visit of ceremony to Massasoit on foot through
the woods, and arrived tired and hungry at his lodge, they were well
received by the king, but nothing was said about eating that day.
When the night arrived, to quote their own words  "He laid us on
the bed with himself and his wife, they at the one end and we at the
other, it being only planks laid a foot from the ground and a thin
mat upon them. Two more of his chief men, for want of room, pressed
by and upon us so that we were worse weary of our lodging than of
our journey." At one o'clock the next day Massasoit "brought two
fishes that he had shot," about thrice as big as a bream. "These
being boiled, there were at least forty looked for a share in them
the most eat of them. This meal only we had in two nights and a
day and had not one of us bought a partridge, we had taken our
journey fasting." Fearing that they would be lightheaded for want
of food and also sleep, owing to "the savages' barbarous singing,
for they use to sing themselves asleep," and that they might get
home while they had strength to travel, they departed. As for
lodging, it is true they were but poorly entertained, though what
they found an inconvenience was no doubt intended for an honor but
as far as eating was concerned, I do not see how the Indians could
have done better. They had nothing to eat themselves, and they were
wiser than to think that apologies could supply the place of food to
their guests so they drew their belts tighter and said nothing
about it. Another time when Winslow visited them, it being a season
of plenty with them, there was no deficiency in this respect.
As for men, they will hardly fail one anywhere. I had more
visitors while I lived in the woods than at any other period in my
life I mean that I had some. I met several there under more
favorable circumstances than I could anywhere else. But fewer came
to see me on trivial business. In this respect, my company was
winnowed by my mere distance from town. I had withdrawn so far
within the great ocean of solitude, into which the rivers of society
empty, that for the most part, so far as my needs were concerned,
only the finest sediment was deposited around me. Beside, there
were wafted to me evidences of unexplored and uncultivated
continents on the other side.
Who should come to my lodge this morning but a true Homeric or
Paphlagonian man  he had so suitable and poetic a name that I am
sorry I cannot print it here  a Canadian, a woodchopper and
postmaker, who can hole fifty posts in a day, who made his last
supper on a woodchuck which his dog caught. He, too, has heard of
Homer, and, "if it were not for books," would "not know what to do
rainy days," though perhaps he has not read one wholly through for
many rainy seasons. Some priest who could pronounce the Greek
itself taught him to read his verse in the Testament in his native
parish far away and now I must translate to him, while he holds the
book, Achilles' reproof to Patroclus for his sad countenance. 
"Why are you in tears, Patroclus, like a young girl?"
"Or have you alone heard some news from Phthia?
They say that Menoetius lives yet, son of Actor,
And Peleus lives, son of AEacus, among the Myrmidons,
Either of whom having died, we should greatly grieve."
He says, "That's good." He has a great bundle of white oak bark
under his arm for a sick man, gathered this Sunday morning. "I
suppose there's no harm in going after such a thing today," says
he. To him Homer was a great writer, though what his writing was
about he did not know. A more simple and natural man it would be
hard to find. Vice and disease, which cast such a sombre moral hue
over the world, seemed to have hardly any existance for him. He was
about twentyeight years old, and had left Canada and his father's
house a dozen years before to work in the States, and earn money to
buy a farm with at last, perhaps in his native country. He was cast
in the coarsest mould a stout but sluggish body, yet gracefully
carried, with a thick sunburnt neck, dark bushy hair, and dull
sleepy blue eyes, which were occasionally lit up with expression.
He wore a flat gray cloth cap, a dingy woolcolored greatcoat, and
cowhide boots. He was a great consumer of meat, usually carrying
his dinner to his work a couple of miles past my house  for he
chopped all summer  in a tin pail cold meats, often cold
woodchucks, and coffee in a stone bottle which dangled by a string
from his belt and sometimes he offered me a drink. He came along
early, crossing my beanfield, though without anxiety or haste to
get to his work, such as Yankees exhibit. He wasn't agoing to hurt
himself. He didn't care if he only earned his board. Frequently he
would leave his dinner in the bushes, when his dog had caught a
woodchuck by the way, and go back a mile and a half to dress it and
leave it in the cellar of the house where he boarded, after
deliberating first for half an hour whether he could not sink it in
the pond safely till nightfall  loving to dwell long upon these
themes. He would say, as he went by in the morning, "How thick the
pigeons are If working every day were not my trade, I could get
all the meat I should want by huntingpigeons, woodchucks, rabbits,
partridges  by gosh I could get all I should want for a week in
one day."
He was a skilful chopper, and indulged in some flourishes and
ornaments in his art. He cut his trees level and close to the
ground, that the sprouts which came up afterward might be more
vigorous and a sled might slide over the stumps and instead of
leaving a whole tree to support his corded wood, he would pare it
away to a slender stake or splinter which you could break off with
your hand at last.
He interested me because he was so quiet and solitary and so
happy withal a well of good humor and contentment which overflowed
at his eyes. His mirth was without alloy. Sometimes I saw him at
his work in the woods, felling trees, and he would greet me with a
laugh of inexpressible satisfaction, and a salutation in Canadian
French, though he spoke English as well. When I approached him he
would suspend his work, and with halfsuppressed mirth lie along the
trunk of a pine which he had felled, and, peeling off the inner
bark, roll it up into a ball and chew it while he laughed and
talked. Such an exuberance of animal spirits had he that he
sometimes tumbled down and rolled on the ground with laughter at
anything which made him think and tickled him. Looking round upon
the trees he would exclaim  "By George I can enjoy myself well
enough here chopping I want no better sport." Sometimes, when at
leisure, he amused himself all day in the woods with a pocket
pistol, firing salutes to himself at regular intervals as he walked.
In the winter he had a fire by which at noon he warmed his coffee in
a kettle and as he sat on a log to eat his dinner the chickadees
would sometimes come round and alight on his arm and peck at the
potato in his fingers and he said that he "liked to have the little
fellers about him."
In him the animal man chiefly was developed. In physical
endurance and contentment he was cousin to the pine and the rock. I
asked him once if he was not sometimes tired at night, after working
all day and he answered, with a sincere and serious look,
"Gorrappit, I never was tired in my life." But the intellectual and
what is called spiritual man in him were slumbering as in an infant.
He had been instructed only in that innocent and ineffectual way in
which the Catholic priests teach the aborigines, by which the pupil
is never educated to the degree of consciousness, but only to the
degree of trust and reverence, and a child is not made a man, but
kept a child. When Nature made him, she gave him a strong body and
contentment for his portion, and propped him on every side with
reverence and reliance, that he might live out his threescore years
and ten a child. He was so genuine and unsophisticated that no
introduction would serve to introduce him, more than if you
introduced a woodchuck to your neighbor. He had got to find him out
as you did. He would not play any part. Men paid him wages for
work, and so helped to feed and clothe him but he never exchanged
opinions with them. He was so simply and naturally humble  if he
can be called humble who never aspires  that humility was no
distinct quality in him, nor could he conceive of it. Wiser men
were demigods to him. If you told him that such a one was coming,
he did as if he thought that anything so grand would expect nothing
of himself, but take all the responsibility on itself, and let him
be forgotten still. He never heard the sound of praise. He
particularly reverenced the writer and the preacher. Their
performances were miracles. When I told him that I wrote
considerably, he thought for a long time that it was merely the
handwriting which I meant, for he could write a remarkably good hand
himself. I sometimes found the name of his native parish handsomely
written in the snow by the highway, with the proper French accent,
and knew that he had passed. I asked him if he ever wished to write
his thoughts. He said that he had read and written letters for
those who could not, but he never tried to write thoughts  no, he
could not, he could not tell what to put first, it would kill him,
and then there was spelling to be attended to at the same time
I heard that a distinguished wise man and reformer asked him if
he did not want the world to be changed but he answered with a
chuckle of surprise in his Canadian accent, not knowing that the
question had ever been entertained before, "No, I like it well
enough." It would have suggested many things to a philosopher to
have dealings with him. To a stranger he appeared to know nothing
of things in general yet I sometimes saw in him a man whom I had
not seen before, and I did not know whether he was as wise as
Shakespeare or as simply ignorant as a child, whether to suspect him
of a fine poetic consciousness or of stupidity. A townsman told me
that when he met him sauntering through the village in his small
closefitting cap, and whistling to himself, he reminded him of a
prince in disguise.
His only books were an almanac and an arithmetic, in which last
he was considerably expert. The former was a sort of cyclopaedia to
him, which he supposed to contain an abstract of human knowledge, as
indeed it does to a considerable extent. I loved to sound him on
the various reforms of the day, and he never failed to look at them
in the most simple and practical light. He had never heard of such
things before. Could he do without factories? I asked. He had
worn the homemade Vermont gray, he said, and that was good. Could
he dispense with tea and coffee? Did this country afford any
beverage beside water? He had soaked hemlock leaves in water and
drank it, and thought that was better than water in warm weather.
When I asked him if he could do without money, he showed the
convenience of money in such a way as to suggest and coincide with
the most philosophical accounts of the origin of this institution,
and the very derivation of the word pecunia. If an ox were his
property, and he wished to get needles and thread at the store, he
thought it would be inconvenient and impossible soon to go on
mortgaging some portion of the creature each time to that amount.
He could defend many institutions better than any philosopher,
because, in describing them as they concerned him, he gave the true
reason for their prevalence, and speculation had not suggested to
him any other. At another time, hearing Plato's definition of a man
a biped without feathers  and that one exhibited a cock plucked
and called it Plato's man, he thought it an important difference
that the knees bent the wrong way. He would sometimes exclaim, "How
I love to talk By George, I could talk all day" I asked him
once, when I had not seen him for many months, if he had got a new
idea this summer. "Good Lord"  said he, "a man that has to work
as I do, if he does not forget the ideas he has had, he will do
well. May be the man you hoe with is inclined to race then, by
gorry, your mind must be there you think of weeds." He would
sometimes ask me first on such occasions, if I had made any
improvement. One winter day I asked him if he was always satisfied
with himself, wishing to suggest a substitute within him for the
priest without, and some higher motive for living. "Satisfied"
said he "some men are satisfied with one thing, and some with
another. One man, perhaps, if he has got enough, will be satisfied
to sit all day with his back to the fire and his belly to the table,
by George" Yet I never, by any manoeuvring, could get him to take
the spiritual view of things the highest that he appeared to
conceive of was a simple expediency, such as you might expect an
animal to appreciate and this, practically, is true of most men.
If I suggested any improvement in his mode of life, he merely
answered, without expressing any regret, that it was too late. Yet
he thoroughly believed in honesty and the like virtues.
There was a certain positive originality, however slight, to be
detected in him, and I occasionally observed that he was thinking
for himself and expressing his own opinion, a phenomenon so rare
that I would any day walk ten miles to observe it, and it amounted
to the reorigination of many of the institutions of society.
Though he hesitated, and perhaps failed to express himself
distinctly, he always had a presentable thought behind. Yet his
thinking was so primitive and immersed in his animal life, that,
though more promising than a merely learned man's, it rarely ripened
to anything which can be reported. He suggested that there might be
men of genius in the lowest grades of life, however permanently
humble and illiterate, who take their own view always, or do not
pretend to see at all who are as bottomless even as Walden Pond was
thought to be, though they may be dark and muddy.
Many a traveller came out of his way to see me and the inside of
my house, and, as an excuse for calling, asked for a glass of water.
I told them that I drank at the pond, and pointed thither, offering
to lend them a dipper. Far off as I lived, I was not exempted from
the annual visitation which occurs, methinks, about the first of
April, when everybody is on the move and I had my share of good
luck, though there were some curious specimens among my visitors.
Halfwitted men from the almshouse and elsewhere came to see me but
I endeavored to make them exercise all the wit they had, and make
their confessions to me in such cases making wit the theme of our
conversation and so was compensated. Indeed, I found some of them
to be wiser than the socalled overseers of the poor and selectmen
of the town, and thought it was time that the tables were turned.
With respect to wit, I learned that there was not much difference
between the half and the whole. One day, in particular, an
inoffensive, simpleminded pauper, whom with others I had often seen
used as fencing stuff, standing or sitting on a bushel in the fields
to keep cattle and himself from straying, visited me, and expressed
a wish to live as I did. He told me, with the utmost simplicity and
truth, quite superior, or rather inferior, to anything that is
called humility, that he was "deficient in intellect." These were
his words. The Lord had made him so, yet he supposed the Lord cared
as much for him as for another. "I have always been so," said he,
"from my childhood I never had much mind I was not like other
children I am weak in the head. It was the Lord's will, I
suppose." And there he was to prove the truth of his words. He was
a metaphysical puzzle to me. I have rarely met a fellowman on such
promising ground  it was so simple and sincere and so true all
that he said. And, true enough, in proportion as he appeared to
humble himself was he exalted. I did not know at first but it was
the result of a wise policy. It seemed that from such a basis of
truth and frankness as the poor weakheaded pauper had laid, our
intercourse might go forward to something better than the
intercourse of sages.
I had some guests from those not reckoned commonly among the
town's poor, but who should be who are among the world's poor, at
any rate guests who appeal, not to your hospitality, but to your
hospitalality who earnestly wish to be helped, and preface their
appeal with the information that they are resolved, for one thing,
never to help themselves. I require of a visitor that he be not
actually starving, though he may have the very best appetite in the
world, however he got it. Objects of charity are not guests. Men
who did not know when their visit had terminated, though I went
about my business again, answering them from greater and greater
remoteness. Men of almost every degree of wit called on me in the
migrating season. Some who had more wits than they knew what to do
with runaway slaves with plantation manners, who listened from time
to time, like the fox in the fable, as if they heard the hounds
abaying on their track, and looked at me beseechingly, as much as
to say, 
"O Christian, will you send me back?
One real runaway slave, among the rest, whom I helped to forward
toward the north star. Men of one idea, like a hen with one
chicken, and that a duckling men of a thousand ideas, and unkempt
heads, like those hens which are made to take charge of a hundred
chickens, all in pursuit of one bug, a score of them lost in every
morning's dew  and become frizzled and mangy in consequence men
of ideas instead of legs, a sort of intellectual centipede that made
you crawl all over. One man proposed a book in which visitors
should write their names, as at the White Mountains but, alas I
have too good a memory to make that necessary.
I could not but notice some of the peculiarities of my visitors.
Girls and boys and young women generally seemed glad to be in the
woods. They looked in the pond and at the flowers, and improved
their time. Men of business, even farmers, thought only of solitude
and employment, and of the great distance at which I dwelt from
something or other and though they said that they loved a ramble in
the woods occasionally, it was obvious that they did not. Restless
committed men, whose time was an taken up in getting a living or
keeping it ministers who spoke of God as if they enjoyed a monopoly
of the subject, who could not bear all kinds of opinions doctors,
lawyers, uneasy housekeepers who pried into my cupboard and bed when
I was out  how came Mrs.  to know that my sheets were not as
clean as hers?  young men who had ceased to be young, and had
concluded that it was safest to follow the beaten track of the
professions  all these generally said that it was not possible to
do so much good in my position. Ay there was the rub. The old and
infirm and the timid, of whatever age or sex, thought most of
sickness, and sudden accident and death to them life seemed full of
danger  what danger is there if you don't think of any?  and
they thought that a prudent man would carefully select the safest
position, where Dr. B. might be on hand at a moment's warning. To
them the village was literally a community, a league for mutual
defence, and you would suppose that they would not go
ahuckleberrying without a medicine chest. The amount of it is, if
a man is alive, there is always danger that he may die, though the
danger must be allowed to be less in proportion as he is
deadandalive to begin with. A man sits as many risks as he runs.
Finally, there were the selfstyled reformers, the greatest bores of
all, who thought that I was forever singing,
This is the house that I built
This is the man that lives in the house that I built
but they did not know that the third line was,
These are the folks that worry the man
That lives in the house that I built.
I did not fear the henharriers, for I kept no chickens but I
feared the menharriers rather.
I had more cheering visitors than the last. Children come
aberrying, railroad men taking a Sunday morning walk in clean
shirts, fishermen and hunters, poets and philosophers in short, all
honest pilgrims, who came out to the woods for freedom's sake, and
really left the village behind, I was ready to greet with 
"Welcome, Englishmen welcome, Englishmen" for I had had
communication with that race.
The BeanField
Meanwhile my beans, the length of whose rows, added together,
was seven miles already planted, were impatient to be hoed, for the
earliest had grown considerably before the latest were in the
ground indeed they were not easily to be put off. What was the
meaning of this so steady and selfrespecting, this small Herculean
labor, I knew not. I came to love my rows, my beans, though so many
more than I wanted. They attached me to the earth, and so I got
strength like Antaeus. But why should I raise them? Only Heaven
knows. This was my curious labor all summer  to make this portion
of the earth's surface, which had yielded only cinquefoil,
blackberries, johnswort, and the like, before, sweet wild fruits and
pleasant flowers, produce instead this pulse. What shall I learn of
beans or beans of me? I cherish them, I hoe them, early and late I
have an eye to them and this is my day's work. It is a fine broad
leaf to look on. My auxiliaries are the dews and rains which water
this dry soil, and what fertility is in the soil itself, which for
the most part is lean and effete. My enemies are worms, cool days,
and most of all woodchucks. The last have nibbled for me a quarter
of an acre clean. But what right had I to oust johnswort and the
rest, and break up their ancient herb garden? Soon, however, the
remaining beans will be too tough for them, and go forward to meet
new foes.
When I was four years old, as I well remember, I was brought
from Boston to this my native town, through these very woods and
this field, to the pond. It is one of the oldest scenes stamped on
my memory. And now tonight my flute has waked the echoes over that
very water. The pines still stand here older than I or, if some
have fallen, I have cooked my supper with their stumps, and a new
growth is rising all around, preparing another aspect for new infant
eyes. Almost the same johnswort springs from the same perennial
root in this pasture, and even I have at length helped to clothe
that fabulous landscape of my infant dreams, and one of the results
of my presence and influence is seen in these bean leaves, corn
blades, and potato vines.
I planted about two acres and a half of upland and as it was
only about fifteen years since the land was cleared, and I myself
had got out two or three cords of stumps, I did not give it any
manure but in the course of the summer it appeared by the
arrowheads which I turned up in hoeing, that an extinct nation had
anciently dwelt here and planted corn and beans ere white men came
to clear the land, and so, to some extent, had exhausted the soil
for this very crop.
Before yet any woodchuck or squirrel had run across the road, or
the sun had got above the shrub oaks, while all the dew was on,
though the farmers warned me against it  I would advise you to do
all your work if possible while the dew is on  I began to level
the ranks of haughty weeds in my beanfield and throw dust upon
their heads. Early in the morning I worked barefooted, dabbling
like a plastic artist in the dewy and crumbling sand, but later in
the day the sun blistered my feet. There the sun lighted me to hoe
beans, pacing slowly backward and forward over that yellow gravelly
upland, between the long green rows, fifteen rods, the one end
terminating in a shrub oak copse where I could rest in the shade,
the other in a blackberry field where the green berries deepened
their tints by the time I had made another bout. Removing the
weeds, putting fresh soil about the bean stems, and encouraging this
weed which I had sown, making the yellow soil express its summer
thought in bean leaves and blossoms rather than in wormwood and
piper and millet grass, making the earth say beans instead of grass
this was my daily work. As I had little aid from horses or
cattle, or hired men or boys, or improved implements of husbandry, I
was much slower, and became much more intimate with my beans than
usual. But labor of the hands, even when pursued to the verge of
drudgery, is perhaps never the worst form of idleness. It has a
constant and imperishable moral, and to the scholar it yields a
classic result. A very agricola laboriosus was I to travellers
bound westward through Lincoln and Wayland to nobody knows where
they sitting at their ease in gigs, with elbows on knees, and reins
loosely hanging in festoons I the homestaying, laborious native of
the soil. But soon my homestead was out of their sight and thought.
It was the only open and cultivated field for a great distance on
either side of the road, so they made the most of it and sometimes
the man in the field heard more of travellers' gossip and comment
than was meant for his ear "Beans so late peas so late"  for I
continued to plant when others had begun to hoe  the ministerial
husbandman had not suspected it. "Corn, my boy, for fodder corn
for fodder." "Does he live there?" asks the black bonnet of the
gray coat and the hardfeatured farmer reins up his grateful dobbin
to inquire what you are doing where he sees no manure in the furrow,
and recommends a little chip dirt, or any little waste stuff, or it
may be ashes or plaster. But here were two acres and a half of
furrows, and only a hoe for cart and two hands to draw it  there
being an aversion to other carts and horses  and chip dirt far
away. Fellowtravellers as they rattled by compared it aloud with
the fields which they had passed, so that I came to know how I stood
in the agricultural world. This was one field not in Mr. Coleman's
report. And, by the way, who estimates the value of the crop which
nature yields in the still wilder fields unimproved by man? The
crop of English hay is carefully weighed, the moisture calculated,
the silicates and the potash but in all dells and pondholes in the
woods and pastures and swamps grows a rich and various crop only
unreaped by man. Mine was, as it were, the connecting link between
wild and cultivated fields as some states are civilized, and others
halfcivilized, and others savage or barbarous, so my field was,
though not in a bad sense, a halfcultivated field. They were beans
cheerfully returning to their wild and primitive state that I
cultivated, and my hoe played the Rans des Vaches for them.
Near at hand, upon the topmost spray of a birch, sings the brown
thrasher  or red mavis, as some love to call him  all the
morning, glad of your society, that would find out another farmer's
field if yours were not here. While you are planting the seed, he
cries  "Drop it, drop it  cover it up, cover it up  pull it
up, pull it up, pull it up." But this was not corn, and so it was
safe from such enemies as he. You may wonder what his rigmarole,
his amateur Paganini performances on one string or on twenty, have
to do with your planting, and yet prefer it to leached ashes or
plaster. It was a cheap sort of top dressing in which I had entire
faith.
As I drew a still fresher soil about the rows with my hoe, I
disturbed the ashes of unchronicled nations who in primeval years
lived under these heavens, and their small implements of war and
hunting were brought to the light of this modern day. They lay
mingled with other natural stones, some of which bore the marks of
having been burned by Indian fires, and some by the sun, and also
bits of pottery and glass brought hither by the recent cultivators
of the soil. When my hoe tinkled against the stones, that music
echoed to the woods and the sky, and was an accompaniment to my
labor which yielded an instant and immeasurable crop. It was no
longer beans that I hoed, nor I that hoed beans and I remembered
with as much pity as pride, if I remembered at all, my acquaintances
who had gone to the city to attend the oratorios. The nighthawk
circled overhead in the sunny afternoons  for I sometimes made a
day of it  like a mote in the eye, or in heaven's eye, falling
from time to time with a swoop and a sound as if the heavens were
rent, torn at last to very rags and tatters, and yet a seamless cope
remained small imps that fill the air and lay their eggs on the
ground on bare sand or rocks on the tops of hills, where few have
found them graceful and slender like ripples caught up from the
pond, as leaves are raised by the wind to float in the heavens such
kindredship is in nature. The hawk is aerial brother of the wave
which he sails over and surveys, those his perfect airinflated
wings answering to the elemental unfledged pinions of the sea. Or
sometimes I watched a pair of henhawks circling high in the sky,
alternately soaring and descending, approaching, and leaving one
another, as if they were the embodiment of my own thoughts. Or I
was attracted by the passage of wild pigeons from this wood to that,
with a slight quivering winnowing sound and carrier haste or from
under a rotten stump my hoe turned up a sluggish portentous and
outlandish spotted salamander, a trace of Egypt and the Nile, yet
our contemporary. When I paused to lean on my hoe, these sounds and
sights I heard and saw anywhere in the row, a part of the
inexhaustible entertainment which the country offers.
On gala days the town fires its great guns, which echo like
popguns to these woods, and some waifs of martial music occasionally
penetrate thus far. To me, away there in my beanfield at the other
end of the town, the big guns sounded as if a puffball had burst
and when there was a military turnout of which I was ignorant, I
have sometimes had a vague sense all the day of some sort of itching
and disease in the horizon, as if some eruption would break out
there soon, either scarlatina or cankerrash, until at length some
more favorable puff of wind, making haste over the fields and up the
Wayland road, brought me information of the "trainers." It seemed
by the distant hum as if somebody's bees had swarmed, and that the
neighbors, according to Virgil's advice, by a faint tintinnabulum
upon the most sonorous of their domestic utensils, were endeavoring
to call them down into the hive again. And when the sound died
quite away, and the hum had ceased, and the most favorable breezes
told no tale, I knew that they had got the last drone of them all
safely into the Middlesex hive, and that now their minds were bent
on the honey with which it was smeared.
I felt proud to know that the liberties of Massachusetts and of
our fatherland were in such safe keeping and as I turned to my
hoeing again I was filled with an inexpressible confidence, and
pursued my labor cheerfully with a calm trust in the future.
When there were several bands of musicians, it sounded as if all
the village was a vast bellows and all the buildings expanded and
collapsed alternately with a din. But sometimes it was a really
noble and inspiring strain that reached these woods, and the trumpet
that sings of fame, and I felt as if I could spit a Mexican with a
good relish  for why should we always stand for trifles?  and
looked round for a woodchuck or a skunk to exercise my chivalry
upon. These martial strains seemed as far away as Palestine, and
reminded me of a march of crusaders in the horizon, with a slight
tantivy and tremulous motion of the elm tree tops which overhang the
village. This was one of the great days though the sky had from my
clearing only the same everlastingly great look that it wears daily,
and I saw no difference in it.
It was a singular experience that long acquaintance which I
cultivated with beans, what with planting, and hoeing, and
harvesting, and threshing, and picking over and selling them  the
last was the hardest of all  I might add eating, for I did taste.
I was determined to know beans. When they were growing, I used to
hoe from five o'clock in the morning till noon, and commonly spent
the rest of the day about other affairs. Consider the intimate and
curious acquaintance one makes with various kinds of weeds  it
will bear some iteration in the account, for there was no little
iteration in the labor  disturbing their delicate organizations so
ruthlessly, and making such invidious distinctions with his hoe,
levelling whole ranks of one species, and sedulously cultivating
another. That's Roman wormwood  that's pigweed  that's sorrel
that's pipergrass  have at him, chop him up, turn his roots
upward to the sun, don't let him have a fibre in the shade, if you
do he'll turn himself t' other side up and be as green as a leek in
two days. A long war, not with cranes, but with weeds, those
Trojans who had sun and rain and dews on their side. Daily the
beans saw me come to their rescue armed with a hoe, and thin the
ranks of their enemies, filling up the trenches with weedy dead.
Many a lusty crest  waving Hector, that towered a whole foot above
his crowding comrades, fell before my weapon and rolled in the dust.
Those summer days which some of my contemporaries devoted to the
fine arts in Boston or Rome, and others to contemplation in India,
and others to trade in London or New York, I thus, with the other
farmers of New England, devoted to husbandry. Not that I wanted
beans to eat, for I am by nature a Pythagorean, so far as beans are
concerned, whether they mean porridge or voting, and exchanged them
for rice but, perchance, as some must work in fields if only for
the sake of tropes and expression, to serve a parablemaker one day.
It was on the whole a rare amusement, which, continued too long,
might have become a dissipation. Though I gave them no manure, and
did not hoe them all once, I hoed them unusualy well as far as I
went, and was paid for it in the end, "there being in truth," as
Evelyn says, "no compost or laetation whatsoever comparable to this
continual motion, repastination, and turning of the mould with the
spade." "The earth," he adds elsewhere, "especially if fresh, has a
certain magnetism in it, by which it attracts the salt, power, or
virtue call it either which gives it life, and is the logic of all
the labor and stir we keep about it, to sustain us all dungings and
other sordid temperings being but the vicars succedaneous to this
improvement." Moreover, this being one of those "wornout and
exhausted lay fields which enjoy their sabbath," had perchance, as
Sir Kenelm Digby thinks likely, attracted "vital spirits" from the
air. I harvested twelve bushels of beans.
But to be more particular, for it is complained that Mr. Coleman
has reported chiefly the expensive experiments of gentlemen farmers,
my outgoes were,
For a hoe ...................................  .
Plowing, harrowing, and furrowing ............ . Too much.
Beans for seed ............................... .
Potatoes for seed ............................ .
Peas for seed ................................ .
Turnip seed .................................. .
White line for crow fence .................... .
Horse cultivator and boy three hours ......... .
Horse and cart to get crop ................... .
In all .................................. .
My income was patrem familias vendacem, non emacem esse
oportet, from
Nine bushels and twelve quarts of beans sold .. .
Five " large potatoes ..................... .
Nine " small .............................. .
Grass ........................................... .
Stalks .......................................... .
In all .................................... .
Leaving a pecuniary profit,
as I have elsewhere said, of ..............  .
This is the result of my experience in raising beans Plant the
common small white bush bean about the first of June, in rows three
feet by eighteen inches apart, being careful to select fresh round
and unmixed seed. First look out for worms, and supply vacancies by
planting anew. Then look out for woodchucks, if it is an exposed
place, for they will nibble off the earliest tender leaves almost
clean as they go and again, when the young tendrils make their
appearance, they have notice of it, and will shear them off with
both buds and young pods, sitting erect like a squirrel. But above
all harvest as early as possible, if you would escape frosts and
have a fair and salable crop you may save much loss by this means.
This further experience also I gained I said to myself, I will
not plant beans and corn with so much industry another summer, but
such seeds, if the seed is not lost, as sincerity, truth,
simplicity, faith, innocence, and the like, and see if they will not
grow in this soil, even with less toil and manurance, and sustain
me, for surely it has not been exhausted for these crops. Alas I
said this to myself but now another summer is gone, and another,
and another, and I am obliged to say to you, Reader, that the seeds
which I planted, if indeed they were the seeds of those virtues,
were wormeaten or had lost their vitality, and so did not come up.
Commonly men will only be brave as their fathers were brave, or
timid. This generation is very sure to plant corn and beans each
new year precisely as the Indians did centuries ago and taught the
first settlers to do, as if there were a fate in it. I saw an old
man the other day, to my astonishment, making the holes with a hoe
for the seventieth time at least, and not for himself to lie down
in But why should not the New Englander try new adventures, and
not lay so much stress on his grain, his potato and grass crop, and
his orchards  raise other crops than these? Why concern ourselves
so much about our beans for seed, and not be concerned at all about
a new generation of men? We should really be fed and cheered if
when we met a man we were sure to see that some of the qualities
which I have named, which we all prize more than those other
productions, but which are for the most part broadcast and floating
in the air, had taken root and grown in him. Here comes such a
subtile and ineffable quality, for instance, as truth or justice,
though the slightest amount or new variety of it, along the road.
Our ambassadors should be instructed to send home such seeds as
these, and Congress help to distribute them over all the land. We
should never stand upon ceremony with sincerity. We should never
cheat and insult and banish one another by our meanness, if there
were present the kernel of worth and friendliness. We should not
meet thus in haste. Most men I do not meet at all, for they seem
not to have time they are busy about their beans. We would not
deal with a man thus plodding ever, leaning on a hoe or a spade as a
staff between his work, not as a mushroom, but partially risen out
of the earth, something more than erect, like swallows alighted and
walking on the ground
"And as he spake, his wings would now and then
Spread, as he meant to fly, then close again "
so that we should suspect that we might be conversing with an angel.
Bread may not always nourish us but it always does us good, it even
takes stiffness out of our joints, and makes us supple and buoyant,
when we knew not what ailed us, to recognize any generosity in man
or Nature, to share any unmixed and heroic joy.
Ancient poetry and mythology suggest, at least, that husbandry
was once a sacred art but it is pursued with irreverent haste and
heedlessness by us, our object being to have large farms and large
crops merely. We have no festival, nor procession, nor ceremony,
not excepting our cattleshows and socalled Thanksgivings, by which
the farmer expresses a sense of the sacredness of his calling, or is
reminded of its sacred origin. It is the premium and the feast
which tempt him. He sacrifices not to Ceres and the Terrestrial
Jove, but to the infernal Plutus rather. By avarice and
selfishness, and a grovelling habit, from which none of us is free,
of regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring
property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded
with us, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives. He knows Nature
but as a robber. Cato says that the profits of agriculture are
particularly pious or just maximeque pius quaestus, and according
to Varro the old Romans "called the same earth Mother and Ceres, and
thought that they who cultivated it led a pious and useful life, and
that they alone were left of the race of King Saturn."
We are wont to forget that the sun looks on our cultivated
fields and on the prairies and forests without distinction. They
all reflect and absorb his rays alike, and the former make but a
small part of the glorious picture which he beholds in his daily
course. In his view the earth is all equally cultivated like a
garden. Therefore we should receive the benefit of his light and
heat with a corresponding trust and magnanimity. What though I
value the seed of these beans, and harvest that in the fall of the
year? This broad field which I have looked at so long looks not to
me as the principal cultivator, but away from me to influences more
genial to it, which water and make it green. These beans have
results which are not harvested by me. Do they not grow for
woodchucks partly? The ear of wheat in Latin spica, obsoletely
speca, from spe, hope should not be the only hope of the
husbandman its kernel or grain granum from gerendo, bearing is
not all that it bears. How, then, can our harvest fail? Shall I
not rejoice also at the abundance of the weeds whose seeds are the
granary of the birds? It matters little comparatively whether the
fields fill the farmer's barns. The true husbandman will cease from
anxiety, as the squirrels manifest no concern whether the woods will
bear chestnuts this year or not, and finish his labor with every
day, relinquishing all claim to the produce of his fields, and
sacrificing in his mind not only his first but his last fruits also.
The Village
After hoeing, or perhaps reading and writing, in the forenoon, I
usually bathed again in the pond, swimming across one of its coves
for a stint, and washed the dust of labor from my person, or
smoothed out the last wrinkle which study had made, and for the
afternoon was absolutely free. Every day or two I strolled to the
village to hear some of the gossip which is incessantly going on
there, circulating either from mouth to mouth, or from newspaper to
newspaper, and which, taken in homoeopathic doses, was really as
refreshing in its way as the rustle of leaves and the peeping of
frogs. As I walked in the woods to see the birds and squirrels, so
I walked in the village to see the men and boys instead of the wind
among the pines I heard the carts rattle. In one direction from my
house there was a colony of muskrats in the river meadows under the
grove of elms and buttonwoods in the other horizon was a village of
busy men, as curious to me as if they had been prairiedogs, each
sitting at the mouth of its burrow, or running over to a neighbor's
to gossip. I went there frequently to observe their habits. The
village appeared to me a great news room and on one side, to
support it, as once at Redding  Company's on State Street, they
kept nuts and raisins, or salt and meal and other groceries. Some
have such a vast appetite for the former commodity, that is, the
news, and such sound digestive organs, that they can sit forever in
public avenues without stirring, and let it simmer and whisper
through them like the Etesian winds, or as if inhaling ether, it
only producing numbness and insensibility to pain  otherwise it
would often be painful to bear  without affecting the
consciousness. I hardly ever failed, when I rambled through the
village, to see a row of such worthies, either sitting on a ladder
sunning themselves, with their bodies inclined forward and their
eyes glancing along the line this way and that, from time to time,
with a voluptuous expression, or else leaning against a barn with
their hands in their pockets, like caryatides, as if to prop it up.
They, being commonly out of doors, heard whatever was in the wind.
These are the coarsest mills, in which all gossip is first rudely
digested or cracked up before it is emptied into finer and more
delicate hoppers within doors. I observed that the vitals of the
village were the grocery, the barroom, the postoffice, and the
bank and, as a necessary part of the machinery, they kept a bell, a
big gun, and a fireengine, at convenient places and the houses
were so arranged as to make the most of mankind, in lanes and
fronting one another, so that every traveller had to run the
gauntlet, and every man, woman, and child might get a lick at him.
Of course, those who were stationed nearest to the head of the line,
where they could most see and be seen, and have the first blow at
him, paid the highest prices for their places and the few
straggling inhabitants in the outskirts, where long gaps in the line
began to occur, and the traveller could get over walls or turn aside
into cowpaths, and so escape, paid a very slight ground or window
tax. Signs were hung out on all sides to allure him some to catch
him by the appetite, as the tavern and victualling cellar some by
the fancy, as the dry goods store and the jeweller's and others by
the hair or the feet or the skirts, as the barber, the shoemaker,
or the tailor. Besides, there was a still more terrible standing
invitation to call at every one of these houses, and company
expected about these times. For the most part I escaped wonderfully
from these dangers, either by proceeding at once boldly and without
deliberation to the goal, as is recommended to those who run the
gauntlet, or by keeping my thoughts on high things, like Orpheus,
who, "loudly singing the praises of the gods to his lyre, drowned
the voices of the Sirens, and kept out of danger." Sometimes I
bolted suddenly, and nobody could tell my whereabouts, for I did not
stand much about gracefulness, and never hesitated at a gap in a
fence. I was even accustomed to make an irruption into some houses,
where I was well entertained, and after learning the kernels and
very last sieveful of news  what had subsided, the prospects of
war and peace, and whether the world was likely to hold together
much longer  I was let out through the rear avenues, and so
escaped to the woods again.
It was very pleasant, when I stayed late in town, to launch
myself into the night, especially if it was dark and tempestuous,
and set sail from some bright village parlor or lecture room, with a
bag of rye or Indian meal upon my shoulder, for my snug harbor in
the woods, having made all tight without and withdrawn under hatches
with a merry crew of thoughts, leaving only my outer man at the
helm, or even tying up the helm when it was plain sailing. I had
many a genial thought by the cabin fire "as I sailed." I was never
cast away nor distressed in any weather, though I encountered some
severe storms. It is darker in the woods, even in common nights,
than most suppose. I frequently had to look up at the opening
between the trees above the path in order to learn my route, and,
where there was no cartpath, to feel with my feet the faint track
which I had worn, or steer by the known relation of particular trees
which I felt with my hands, passing between two pines for instance,
not more than eighteen inches apart, in the midst of the woods,
invariably, in the darkest night. Sometimes, after coming home thus
late in a dark and muggy night, when my feet felt the path which my
eyes could not see, dreaming and absentminded all the way, until I
was aroused by having to raise my hand to lift the latch, I have not
been able to recall a single step of my walk, and I have thought
that perhaps my body would find its way home if its master should
forsake it, as the hand finds its way to the mouth without
assistance. Several times, when a visitor chanced to stay into
evening, and it proved a dark night, I was obliged to conduct him to
the cartpath in the rear of the house, and then point out to him
the direction he was to pursue, and in keeping which he was to be
guided rather by his feet than his eyes. One very dark night I
directed thus on their way two young men who had been fishing in the
pond. They lived about a mile off through the woods, and were quite
used to the route. A day or two after one of them told me that they
wandered about the greater part of the night, close by their own
premises, and did not get home till toward morning, by which time,
as there had been several heavy showers in the meanwhile, and the
leaves were very wet, they were drenched to their skins. I have
heard of many going astray even in the village streets, when the
darkness was so thick that you could cut it with a knife, as the
saying is. Some who live in the outskirts, having come to town
ashopping in their wagons, have been obliged to put up for the
night and gentlemen and ladies making a call have gone half a mile
out of their way, feeling the sidewalk only with their feet, and not
knowing when they turned. It is a surprising and memorable, as well
as valuable experience, to be lost in the woods any time. Often in
a snowstorm, even by day, one will come out upon a wellknown road
and yet find it impossible to tell which way leads to the village.
Though he knows that he has travelled it a thousand times, he cannot
recognize a feature in it, but it is as strange to him as if it were
a road in Siberia. By night, of course, the perplexity is
infinitely greater. In our most trivial walks, we are constantly,
though unconsciously, steering like pilots by certain wellknown
beacons and headlands, and if we go beyond our usual course we still
carry in our minds the bearing of some neighboring cape and not
till we are completely lost, or turned round  for a man needs only
to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost
do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of nature. Every
man has to learn the points of compass again as often as be awakes,
whether from sleep or any abstraction. Not till we are lost, in
other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find
ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our
relations.
One afternoon, near the end of the first summer, when I went to
the village to get a shoe from the cobbler's, I was seized and put
into jail, because, as I have elsewhere related, I did not pay a tax
to, or recognize the authority of, the State which buys and sells
men, women, and children, like cattle, at the door of its
senatehouse. I had gone down to the woods for other purposes.
But, wherever a man goes, men will pursue and paw him with their
dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to
their desperate oddfellow society. It is true, I might have
resisted forcibly with more or less effect, might have run "amok"
against society but I preferred that society should run "amok"
against me, it being the desperate party. However, I was released
the next day, obtained my mended shoe, and returned to the woods in
season to get my dinner of huckleberries on Fair Haven Hill. I was
never molested by any person but those who represented the State. I
had no lock nor bolt but for the desk which held my papers, not even
a nail to put over my latch or windows. I never fastened my door
night or day, though I was to be absent several days not even when
the next fall I spent a fortnight in the woods of Maine. And yet my
house was more respected than if it had been surrounded by a file of
soldiers. The tired rambler could rest and warm himself by my fire,
the literary amuse himself with the few books on my table, or the
curious, by opening my closet door, see what was left of my dinner,
and what prospect I had of a supper. Yet, though many people of
every class came this way to the pond, I suffered no serious
inconvenience from these sources, and I never missed anything but
one small book, a volume of Homer, which perhaps was improperly
gilded, and this I trust a soldier of our camp has found by this
time. I am convinced, that if all men were to live as simply as I
then did, thieving and robbery would be unknown. These take place
only in communities where some have got more than is sufficient
while others have not enough. The Pope's Homers would soon get
properly distributed.
"Nec bella fuerunt,
Faginus astabat dum scyphus ante dapes."
"Nor wars did men molest,
When only beechen bowls were in request."
"You who govern public affairs, what need have you to employ
punishments? Love virtue, and the people will be virtuous. The
virtues of a superior man are like the wind the virtues of a common
man are like the grass  I the grass, when the wind passes over it,
bends."
The Ponds
Sometimes, having had a surfeit of human society and gossip, and
worn out all my village friends, I rambled still farther westward
than I habitually dwell, into yet more unfrequented parts of the
town, "to fresh woods and pastures new," or, while the sun was
setting, made my supper of huckleberries and blueberries on Fair
Haven Hill, and laid up a store for several days. The fruits do not
yield their true flavor to the purchaser of them, nor to him who
raises them for the market. There is but one way to obtain it, yet
few take that way. If you would know the flavor of huckleberries,
ask the cowboy or the partridge. It is a vulgar error to suppose
that you have tasted huckleberries who never plucked them. A
huckleberry never reaches Boston they have not been known there
since they grew on her three hills. The ambrosial and essential
part of the fruit is lost with the bloom which is rubbed off in the
market cart, and they become mere provender. As long as Eternal
Justice reigns, not one innocent huckleberry can be transported
thither from the country's hills.
Occasionally, after my hoeing was done for the day, I joined
some impatient companion who had been fishing on the pond since
morning, as silent and motionless as a duck or a floating leaf, and,
after practising various kinds of philosophy, had concluded
commonly, by the time I arrived, that he belonged to the ancient
sect of Coenobites. There was one older man, an excellent fisher
and skilled in all kinds of woodcraft, who was pleased to look upon
my house as a building erected for the convenience of fishermen and
I was equally pleased when he sat in my doorway to arrange his
lines. Once in a while we sat together on the pond, he at one end
of the boat, and I at the other but not many words passed between
us, for he had grown deaf in his later years, but he occasionally
hummed a psalm, which harmonized well enough with my philosophy.
Our intercourse was thus altogether one of unbroken harmony, far
more pleasing to remember than if it had been carried on by speech.
When, as was commonly the case, I had none to commune with, I used
to raise the echoes by striking with a paddle on the side of my
boat, filling the surrounding woods with circling and dilating
sound, stirring them up as the keeper of a menagerie his wild
beasts, until I elicited a growl from every wooded vale and
hillside.
In warm evenings I frequently sat in the boat playing the flute,
and saw the perch, which I seem to have charmed, hovering around me,
and the moon travelling over the ribbed bottom, which was strewed
with the wrecks of the forest. Formerly I had come to this pond
adventurously, from time to time, in dark summer nights, with a
companion, and, making a fire close to the water's edge, which we
thought attracted the fishes, we caught pouts with a bunch of worms
strung on a thread, and when we had done, far in the night, threw
the burning brands high into the air like skyrockets, which, coming
down into the pond, were quenched with a loud hissing, and we were
suddenly groping in total darkness. Through this, whistling a tune,
we took our way to the haunts of men again. But now I had made my
home by the shore.
Sometimes, after staying in a village parlor till the family had
all retired, I have returned to the woods, and, partly with a view
to the next day's dinner, spent the hours of midnight fishing from a
boat by moonlight, serenaded by owls and foxes, and hearing, from
time to time, the creaking note of some unknown bird close at hand.
These experiences were very memorable and valuable to me  anchored
in forty feet of water, and twenty or thirty rods from the shore,
surrounded sometimes by thousands of small perch and shiners,
dimpling the surface with their tails in the moonlight, and
communicating by a long flaxen line with mysterious nocturnal fishes
which had their dwelling forty feet below, or sometimes dragging
sixty feet of line about the pond as I drifted in the gentle night
breeze, now and then feeling a slight vibration along it, indicative
of some life prowling about its extremity, of dull uncertain
blundering purpose there, and slow to make up its mind. At length
you slowly raise, pulling hand over hand, some horned pout squeaking
and squirming to the upper air. It was very queer, especially in
dark nights, when your thoughts had wandered to vast and cosmogonal
themes in other spheres, to feel this faint jerk, which came to
interrupt your dreams and link you to Nature again. It seemed as if
I might next cast my line upward into the air, as well as downward
into this element, which was scarcely more dense. Thus I caught two
fishes as it were with one hook.
The scenery of Walden is on a humble scale, and, though very
beautiful, does not approach to grandeur, nor can it much concern
one who has not long frequented it or lived by its shore yet this
pond is so remarkable for its depth and purity as to merit a
particular description. It is a clear and deep green well, half a
mile long and a mile and three quarters in circumference, and
contains about sixtyone and a half acres a perennial spring in the
midst of pine and oak woods, without any visible inlet or outlet
except by the clouds and evaporation. The surrounding hills rise
abruptly from the water to the height of forty to eighty feet,
though on the southeast and east they attain to about one hundred
and one hundred and fifty feet respectively, within a quarter and a
third of a mile. They are exclusively woodland. All our Concord
waters have two colors at least one when viewed at a distance, and
another, more proper, close at hand. The first depends more on the
light, and follows the sky. In clear weather, in summer, they
appear blue at a little distance, especially if agitated, and at a
great distance all appear alike. In stormy weather they are
sometimes of a dark slatecolor. The sea, however, is said to be
blue one day and green another without any perceptible change in the
atmosphere. I have seen our river, when, the landscape being
covered with snow, both water and ice were almost as green as grass.
Some consider blue "to be the color of pure water, whether liquid or
solid." But, looking directly down into our waters from a boat,
they are seen to be of very different colors. Walden is blue at one
time and green at another, even from the same point of view. Lying
between the earth and the heavens, it partakes of the color of both.
Viewed from a hilltop it reflects the color of the sky but near at
hand it is of a yellowish tint next the shore where you can see the
sand, then a light green, which gradually deepens to a uniform dark
green in the body of the pond. In some lights, viewed even from a
hilltop, it is of a vivid green next the shore. Some have referred
this to the reflection of the verdure but it is equally green there
against the railroad sandbank, and in the spring, before the leaves
are expanded, and it may be simply the result of the prevailing blue
mixed with the yellow of the sand. Such is the color of its iris.
This is that portion, also, where in the spring, the ice being
warmed by the heat of the sun reflected from the bottom, and also
transmitted through the earth, melts first and forms a narrow canal
about the still frozen middle. Like the rest of our waters, when
much agitated, in clear weather, so that the surface of the waves
may reflect the sky at the right angle, or because there is more
light mixed with it, it appears at a little distance of a darker
blue than the sky itself and at such a time, being on its surface,
and looking with divided vision, so as to see the reflection, I have
discerned a matchless and indescribable light blue, such as watered
or changeable silks and sword blades suggest, more cerulean than the
sky itself, alternating with the original dark green on the opposite
sides of the waves, which last appeared but muddy in comparison. It
is a vitreous greenish blue, as I remember it, like those patches of
the winter sky seen through cloud vistas in the west before sundown.
Yet a single glass of its water held up to the light is as colorless
as an equal quantity of air. It is well known that a large plate of
glass will have a green tint, owing, as the makers say, to its
"body," but a small piece of the same will be colorless. How large
a body of Walden water would be required to reflect a green tint I
have never proved. The water of our river is black or a very dark
brown to one looking directly down on it, and, like that of most
ponds, imparts to the body of one bathing in it a yellowish tinge
but this water is of such crystalline purity that the body of the
bather appears of an alabaster whiteness, still more unnatural,
which, as the limbs are magnified and distorted withal, produces a
monstrous effect, making fit studies for a Michael Angelo.
The water is so transparent that the bottom can easily be
discerned at the depth of twentyfive or thirty feet. Paddling over
it, you may see, many feet beneath the surface, the schools of perch
and shiners, perhaps only an inch long, yet the former easily
distinguished by their transverse bars, and you think that they must
be ascetic fish that find a subsistence there. Once, in the winter,
many years ago, when I had been cutting holes through the ice in
order to catch pickerel, as I stepped ashore I tossed my axe back on
to the ice, but, as if some evil genius had directed it, it slid
four or five rods directly into one of the holes, where the water
was twentyfive feet deep. Out of curiosity, I lay down on the ice
and looked through the hole, until I saw the axe a little on one
side, standing on its head, with its helve erect and gently swaying
to and fro with the pulse of the pond and there it might have stood
erect and swaying till in the course of time the handle rotted off,
if I had not disturbed it. Making another hole directly over it
with an ice chisel which I had, and cutting down the longest birch
which I could find in the neighborhood with my knife, I made a
slipnoose, which I attached to its end, and, letting it down
carefully, passed it over the knob of the handle, and drew it by a
line along the birch, and so pulled the axe out again.
The shore is composed of a belt of smooth rounded white stones
like pavingstones, excepting one or two short sand beaches, and is
so steep that in many places a single leap will carry you into water
over your head and were it not for its remarkable transparency,
that would be the last to be seen of its bottom till it rose on the
opposite side. Some think it is bottomless. It is nowhere muddy,
and a casual observer would say that there were no weeds at all in
it and of noticeable plants, except in the little meadows recently
overflowed, which do not properly belong to it, a closer scrutiny
does not detect a flag nor a bulrush, nor even a lily, yellow or
white, but only a few small heartleaves and potamogetons, and
perhaps a watertarget or two all which however a bather might not
perceive and these plants are clean and bright like the element
they grow in. The stones extend a rod or two into the water, and
then the bottom is pure sand, except in the deepest parts, where
there is usually a little sediment, probably from the decay of the
leaves which have been wafted on to it so many successive falls, and
a bright green weed is brought up on anchors even in midwinter.
We have one other pond just like this, White Pond, in Nine Acre
Corner, about two and a half miles westerly but, though I am
acquainted with most of the ponds within a dozen miles of this
centre I do not know a third of this pure and welllike character.
Successive nations perchance have drank at, admired, and fathomed
it, and passed away, and still its water is green and pellucid as
ever. Not an intermitting spring Perhaps on that spring morning
when Adam and Eve were driven out of Eden Walden Pond was already in
existence, and even then breaking up in a gentle spring rain
accompanied with mist and a southerly wind, and covered with myriads
of ducks and geese, which had not heard of the fall, when still such
pure lakes sufficed them. Even then it had commenced to rise and
fall, and had clarified its waters and colored them of the hue they
now wear, and obtained a patent of Heaven to be the only Walden Pond
in the world and distiller of celestial dews. Who knows in how many
unremembered nations' literatures this has been the Castalian
Fountain? or what nymphs presided over it in the Golden Age? It is
a gem of the first water which Concord wears in her coronet.
Yet perchance the first who came to this well have left some
trace of their footsteps. I have been surprised to detect
encircling the pond, even where a thick wood has just been cut down
on the shore, a narrow shelflike path in the steep hillside,
alternately rising and falling, approaching and receding from the
water's edge, as old probably as the race of man here, worn by the
feet of aboriginal hunters, and still from time to time unwittingly
trodden by the present occupants of the land. This is particularly
distinct to one standing on the middle of the pond in winter, just
after a light snow has fallen, appearing as a clear undulating white
line, unobscured by weeds and twigs, and very obvious a quarter of a
mile off in many places where in summer it is hardly distinguishable
close at hand. The snow reprints it, as it were, in clear white
type altorelievo. The ornamented grounds of villas which will one
day be built here may still preserve some trace of this.
The pond rises and falls, but whether regularly or not, and
within what period, nobody knows, though, as usual, many pretend to
know. It is commonly higher in the winter and lower in the summer,
though not corresponding to the general wet and dryness. I can
remember when it was a foot or two lower, and also when it was at
least five feet higher, than when I lived by it. There is a narrow
sandbar running into it, with very deep water on one side, on which
I helped boil a kettle of chowder, some six rods from the main
shore, about the year , which it has not been possible to do for
twentyfive years and, on the other hand, my friends used to listen
with incredulity when I told them, that a few years later I was
accustomed to fish from a boat in a secluded cove in the woods,
fifteen rods from the only shore they knew, which place was long
since converted into a meadow. But the pond has risen steadily for
two years, and now, in the summer of ', is just five feet higher
than when I lived there, or as high as it was thirty years ago, and
fishing goes on again in the meadow. This makes a difference of
level, at the outside, of six or seven feet and yet the water shed
by the surrounding hills is insignificant in amount, and this
overflow must be referred to causes which affect the deep springs.
This same summer the pond has begun to fall again. It is remarkable
that this fluctuation, whether periodical or not, appears thus to
require many years for its accomplishment. I have observed one rise
and a part of two falls, and I expect that a dozen or fifteen years
hence the water will again be as low as I have ever known it.
Flint's Pond, a mile eastward, allowing for the disturbance
occasioned by its inlets and outlets, and the smaller intermediate
ponds also, sympathize with Walden, and recently attained their
greatest height at the same time with the latter. The same is true,
as far as my observation goes, of White Pond.
This rise and fall of Walden at long intervals serves this use
at least the water standing at this great height for a year or
more, though it makes it difficult to walk round it, kills the
shrubs and trees which have sprung up about its edge since the last
rise  pitch pines, birches, alders, aspens, and others  and,
falling again, leaves an unobstructed shore for, unlike many ponds
and all waters which are subject to a daily tide, its shore is
cleanest when the water is lowest. On the side of the pond next my
house a row of pitch pines, fifteen feet high, has been killed and
tipped over as if by a lever, and thus a stop put to their
encroachments and their size indicates how many years have elapsed
since the last rise to this height. By this fluctuation the pond
asserts its title to a shore, and thus the shore is shorn, and the
trees cannot hold it by right of possession. These are the lips of
the lake, on which no beard grows. It licks its chaps from time to
time. When the water is at its height, the alders, willows, and
maples send forth a mass of fibrous red roots several feet long from
all sides of their stems in the water, and to the height of three or
four feet from the ground, in the effort to maintain themselves and
I have known the high blueberry bushes about the shore, which
commonly produce no fruit, bear an abundant crop under these
circumstances.
Some have been puzzled to tell how the shore became so regularly
paved. My townsmen have all heard the tradition  the oldest
people tell me that they heard it in their youth  that anciently
the Indians were holding a powwow upon a hill here, which rose as
high into the heavens as the pond now sinks deep into the earth, and
they used much profanity, as the story goes, though this vice is one
of which the Indians were never guilty, and while they were thus
engaged the hill shook and suddenly sank, and only one old squaw,
named Walden, escaped, and from her the pond was named. It has been
conjectured that when the hill shook these stones rolled down its
side and became the present shore. It is very certain, at any rate,
that once there was no pond here, and now there is one and this
Indian fable does not in any respect conflict with the account of
that ancient settler whom I have mentioned, who remembers so well
when he first came here with his diviningrod, saw a thin vapor
rising from the sward, and the hazel pointed steadily downward, and
he concluded to dig a well here. As for the stones, many still
think that they are hardly to be accounted for by the action of the
waves on these hills but I observe that the surrounding hills are
remarkably full of the same kind of stones, so that they have been
obliged to pile them up in walls on both sides of the railroad cut
nearest the pond and, moreover, there are most stones where the
shore is most abrupt so that, unfortunately, it is no longer a
mystery to me. I detect the paver. If the name was not derived
from that of some English locality  Saffron Walden, for instance
one might suppose that it was called originally Walledin Pond.
The pond was my well ready dug. For four months in the year its
water is as cold as it is pure at all times and I think that it is
then as good as any, if not the best, in the town. In the winter,
all water which is exposed to the air is colder than springs and
wells which are protected from it. The temperature of the pond
water which had stood in the room where I sat from five o'clock in
the afternoon till noon the next day, the sixth of March, , the
thermometer having been up to x or x some of the time, owing
partly to the sun on the roof, was x, or one degree colder than
the water of one of the coldest wells in the village just drawn.
The temperature of the Boiling Spring the same day was x, or the
warmest of any water tried, though it is the coldest that I know of
in summer, when, beside, shallow and stagnant surface water is not
mingled with it. Moreover, in summer, Walden never becomes so warm
as most water which is exposed to the sun, on account of its depth.
In the warmest weather I usually placed a pailful in my cellar,
where it became cool in the night, and remained so during the day
though I also resorted to a spring in the neighborhood. It was as
good when a week old as the day it was dipped, and had no taste of
the pump. Whoever camps for a week in summer by the shore of a
pond, needs only bury a pail of water a few feet deep in the shade
of his camp to be independent of the luxury of ice.
There have been caught in Walden pickerel, one weighing seven
pounds  to say nothing of another which carried off a reel with
great velocity, which the fisherman safely set down at eight pounds
because he did not see him  perch and pouts, some of each weighing
over two pounds, shiners, chivins or roach Leuciscus pulchellus, a
very few breams, and a couple of eels, one weighing four pounds  I
am thus particular because the weight of a fish is commonly its only
title to fame, and these are the only eels I have heard of here 
also, I have a faint recollection of a little fish some five inches
long, with silvery sides and a greenish back, somewhat dacelike in
its character, which I mention here chiefly to link my facts to
fable. Nevertheless, this pond is not very fertile in fish. Its
pickerel, though not abundant, are its chief boast. I have seen at
one time lying on the ice pickerel of at least three different
kinds a long and shallow one, steelcolored, most like those caught
in the river a bright golden kind, with greenish reflections and
remarkably deep, which is the most common here and another,
goldencolored, and shaped like the last, but peppered on the sides
with small dark brown or black spots, intermixed with a few faint
bloodred ones, very much like a trout. The specific name
reticulatus would not apply to this it should be guttatus rather.
These are all very firm fish, and weigh more than their size
promises. The shiners, pouts, and perch also, and indeed all the
fishes which inhabit this pond, are much cleaner, handsomer, and
firmerfleshed than those in the river and most other ponds, as the
water is purer, and they can easily be distinguished from them.
Probably many ichthyologists would make new varieties of some of
them. There are also a clean race of frogs and tortoises, and a few
mussels in it muskrats and minks leave their traces about it, and
occasionally a travelling mudturtle visits it. Sometimes, when I
pushed off my boat in the morning, I disturbed a great mudturtle
which had secreted himself under the boat in the night. Ducks and
geese frequent it in the spring and fall, the whitebellied swallows
Hirundo bicolor skim over it, and the peetweets Totanus
macularius "teeter" along its stony shores all summer. I have
sometimes disturbed a fish hawk sitting on a white pine over the
water but I doubt if it is ever profaned by the wind of a gull,
like Fair Haven. At most, it tolerates one annual loon. These are
all the animals of consequence which frequent it now.
You may see from a boat, in calm weather, near the sandy
eastern shore, where the water is eight or ten feet deep, and also
in some other parts of the pond, some circular heaps half a dozen
feet in diameter by a foot in height, consisting of small stones
less than a hen's egg in size, where all around is bare sand. At
first you wonder if the Indians could have formed them on the ice
for any purpose, and so, when the ice melted, they sank to the
bottom but they are too regular and some of them plainly too fresh
for that. They are similar to those found in rivers but as there
are no suckers nor lampreys here, I know not by what fish they could
be made. Perhaps they are the nests of the chivin. These lend a
pleasing mystery to the bottom.
The shore is irregular enough not to be monotonous. I have in
my mind's eye the western, indented with deep bays, the bolder
northern, and the beautifully scalloped southern shore, where
successive capes overlap each other and suggest unexplored coves
between. The forest has never so good a setting, nor is so
distinctly beautiful, as when seen from the middle of a small lake
amid hills which rise from the water's edge for the water in which
it is reflected not only makes the best foreground in such a case,
but, with its winding shore, the most natural and agreeable boundary
to it. There is no rawness nor imperfection in its edge there, as
where the axe has cleared a part, or a cultivated field abuts on it.
The trees have ample room to expand on the water side, and each
sends forth its most vigorous branch in that direction. There
Nature has woven a natural selvage, and the eye rises by just
gradations from the low shrubs of the shore to the highest trees.
There are few traces of man's hand to be seen. The water laves the
shore as it did a thousand years ago.
A lake is the landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature.
It is earth's eye looking into which the beholder measures the
depth of his own nature. The fluviatile trees next the shore are
the slender eyelashes which fringe it, and the wooded hills and
cliffs around are its overhanging brows.
Standing on the smooth sandy beach at the east end of the pond,
in a calm September afternoon, when a slight haze makes the opposite
shoreline indistinct, I have seen whence came the expression, "the
glassy surface of a lake." When you invert your head, it looks like
a thread of finest gossamer stretched across the valley, and
gleaming against the distant pine woods, separating one stratum of
the atmosphere from another. You would think that you could walk
dry under it to the opposite hills, and that the swallows which skim
over might perch on it. Indeed, they sometimes dive below this
line, as it were by mistake, and are undeceived. As you look over
the pond westward you are obliged to employ both your hands to
defend your eyes against the reflected as well as the true sun, for
they are equally bright and if, between the two, you survey its
surface critically, it is literally as smooth as glass, except where
the skater insects, at equal intervals scattered over its whole
extent, by their motions in the sun produce the finest imaginable
sparkle on it, or, perchance, a duck plumes itself, or, as I have
said, a swallow skims so low as to touch it. It may be that in the
distance a fish describes an arc of three or four feet in the air,
and there is one bright flash where it emerges, and another where it
strikes the water sometimes the whole silvery arc is revealed or
here and there, perhaps, is a thistledown floating on its surface,
which the fishes dart at and so dimple it again. It is like molten
glass cooled but not congealed, and the few motes in it are pure and
beautiful like the imperfections in glass. You may often detect a
yet smoother and darker water, separated from the rest as if by an
invisible cobweb, boom of the water nymphs, resting on it. From a
hilltop you can see a fish leap in almost any part for not a
pickerel or shiner picks an insect from this smooth surface but it
manifestly disturbs the equilibrium of the whole lake. It is
wonderful with what elaborateness this simple fact is advertised 
this piscine murder will out  and from my distant perch I
distinguish the circling undulations when they are half a dozen rods
in diameter. You can even detect a waterbug Gyrinus ceaselessly
progressing over the smooth surface a quarter of a mile off for
they furrow the water slightly, making a conspicuous ripple bounded
by two diverging lines, but the skaters glide over it without
rippling it perceptibly. When the surface is considerably agitated
there are no skaters nor waterbugs on it, but apparently, in calm
days, they leave their havens and adventurously glide forth from the
shore by short impulses till they completely cover it. It is a
soothing employment, on one of those fine days in the fall when all
the warmth of the sun is fully appreciated, to sit on a stump on
such a height as this, overlooking the pond, and study the dimpling
circles which are incessantly inscribed on its otherwise invisible
surface amid the reflected skies and trees. Over this great expanse
there is no disturbance but it is thus at once gently smoothed away
and assuaged, as, when a vase of water is jarred, the trembling
circles seek the shore and all is smooth again. Not a fish can leap
or an insect fall on the pond but it is thus reported in circling
dimples, in lines of beauty, as it were the constant welling up of
its fountain, the gentle pulsing of its life, the heaving of its
breast. The thrills of joy and thrills of pain are
undistinguishable. How peaceful the phenomena of the lake Again
the works of man shine as in the spring. Ay, every leaf and twig
and stone and cobweb sparkles now at midafternoon as when covered
with dew in a spring morning. Every motion of an oar or an insect
produces a flash of light and if an oar falls, how sweet the echo
In such a day, in September or October, Walden is a perfect
forest mirror, set round with stones as precious to my eye as if
fewer or rarer. Nothing so fair, so pure, and at the same time so
large, as a lake, perchance, lies on the surface of the earth. Sky
water. It needs no fence. Nations come and go without defiling it.
It is a mirror which no stone can crack, whose quicksilver will
never wear off, whose gilding Nature continually repairs no storms,
no dust, can dim its surface ever fresh  a mirror in which all
impurity presented to it sinks, swept and dusted by the sun's hazy
brush  this the light dustcloth  which retains no breath that
is breathed on it, but sends its own to float as clouds high above
its surface, and be reflected in its bosom still.
A field of water betrays the spirit that is in the air. It is
continually receiving new life and motion from above. It is
intermediate in its nature between land and sky. On land only the
grass and trees wave, but the water itself is rippled by the wind.
I see where the breeze dashes across it by the streaks or flakes of
light. It is remarkable that we can look down on its surface. We
shall, perhaps, look down thus on the surface of air at length, and
mark where a still subtler spirit sweeps over it.
The skaters and waterbugs finally disappear in the latter part
of October, when the severe frosts have come and then and in
November, usually, in a calm day, there is absolutely nothing to
ripple the surface. One November afternoon, in the calm at the end
of a rainstorm of several days' duration, when the sky was still
completely overcast and the air was full of mist, I observed that
the pond was remarkably smooth, so that it was difficult to
distinguish its surface though it no longer reflected the bright
tints of October, but the sombre November colors of the surrounding
hills. Though I passed over it as gently as possible, the slight
undulations produced by my boat extended almost as far as I could
see, and gave a ribbed appearance to the reflections. But, as I was
looking over the surface, I saw here and there at a distance a faint
glimmer, as if some skater insects which had escaped the frosts
might be collected there, or, perchance, the surface, being so
smooth, betrayed where a spring welled up from the bottom. Paddling
gently to one of these places, I was surprised to find myself
surrounded by myriads of small perch, about five inches long, of a
rich bronze color in the green water, sporting there, and constantly
rising to the surface and dimpling it, sometimes leaving bubbles on
it. In such transparent and seemingly bottomless water, reflecting
the clouds, I seemed to be floating through the air as in a balloon,
and their swimming impressed me as a kind of flight or hovering, as
if they were a compact flock of birds passing just beneath my level
on the right or left, their fins, like sails, set all around them.
There were many such schools in the pond, apparently improving the
short season before winter would draw an icy shutter over their
broad skylight, sometimes giving to the surface an appearance as if
a slight breeze struck it, or a few raindrops fell there. When I
approached carelessly and alarmed them, they made a sudden splash
and rippling with their tails, as if one had struck the water with a
brushy bough, and instantly took refuge in the depths. At length
the wind rose, the mist increased, and the waves began to run, and
the perch leaped much higher than before, half out of water, a
hundred black points, three inches long, at once above the surface.
Even as late as the fifth of December, one year, I saw some dimples
on the surface, and thinking it was going to rain hard immediately,
the air being fun of mist, I made haste to take my place at the oars
and row homeward already the rain seemed rapidly increasing, though
I felt none on my cheek, and I anticipated a thorough soaking. But
suddenly the dimples ceased, for they were produced by the perch,
which the noise of my oars had seared into the depths, and I saw
their schools dimly disappearing so I spent a dry afternoon after
all.
An old man who used to frequent this pond nearly sixty years
ago, when it was dark with surrounding forests, tells me that in
those days he sometimes saw it all alive with ducks and other
waterfowl, and that there were many eagles about it. He came here
afishing, and used an old log canoe which he found on the shore.
It was made of two white pine logs dug out and pinned together, and
was cut off square at the ends. It was very clumsy, but lasted a
great many years before it became waterlogged and perhaps sank to
the bottom. He did not know whose it was it belonged to the pond.
He used to make a cable for his anchor of strips of hickory bark
tied together. An old man, a potter, who lived by the pond before
the Revolution, told him once that there was an iron chest at the
bottom, and that he had seen it. Sometimes it would come floating
up to the shore but when you went toward it, it would go back into
deep water and disappear. I was pleased to hear of the old log
canoe, which took the place of an Indian one of the same material
but more graceful construction, which perchance had first been a
tree on the bank, and then, as it were, fell into the water, to
float there for a generation, the most proper vessel for the lake.
I remember that when I first looked into these depths there were
many large trunks to be seen indistinctly lying on the bottom, which
had either been blown over formerly, or left on the ice at the last
cutting, when wood was cheaper but now they have mostly
disappeared.
When I first paddled a boat on Walden, it was completely
surrounded by thick and lofty pine and oak woods, and in some of its
coves grapevines had run over the trees next the water and formed
bowers under which a boat could pass. The hills which form its
shores are so steep, and the woods on them were then so high, that,
as you looked down from the west end, it had the appearance of an
amphitheatre for some land of sylvan spectacle. I have spent many
an hour, when I was younger, floating over its surface as the zephyr
willed, having paddled my boat to the middle, and lying on my back
across the seats, in a summer forenoon, dreaming awake, until I was
aroused by the boat touching the sand, and I arose to see what shore
my fates had impelled me to days when idleness was the most
attractive and productive industry. Many a forenoon have I stolen
away, preferring to spend thus the most valued part of the day for
I was rich, if not in money, in sunny hours and summer days, and
spent them lavishly nor do I regret that I did not waste more of
them in the workshop or the teacher's desk. But since I left those
shores the woodchoppers have still further laid them waste, and now
for many a year there will be no more rambling through the aisles of
the wood, with occasional vistas through which you see the water.
My Muse may be excused if she is silent henceforth. How can you
expect the birds to sing when their groves are cut down?
Now the trunks of trees on the bottom, and the old log canoe,
and the dark surrounding woods, are gone, and the villagers, who
scarcely know where it lies, instead of going to the pond to bathe
or drink, are thinking to bring its water, which should be as sacred
as the Ganges at least, to the village in a pipe, to wash their
dishes with  to earn their Walden by the turning of a cock or
drawing of a plug That devilish Iron Horse, whose earrending
neigh is heard throughout the town, has muddied the Boiling Spring
with his foot, and he it is that has browsed off all the woods on
Walden shore, that Trojan horse, with a thousand men in his belly,
introduced by mercenary Greeks Where is the country's champion,
the Moore of Moore Hill, to meet him at the Deep Cut and thrust an
avenging lance between the ribs of the bloated pest?
Nevertheless, of all the characters I have known, perhaps Walden
wears best, and best preserves its purity. Many men have been
likened to it, but few deserve that honor. Though the woodchoppers
have laid bare first this shore and then that, and the Irish have
built their sties by it, and the railroad has infringed on its
border, and the icemen have skimmed it once, it is itself
unchanged, the same water which my youthful eyes fell on all the
change is in me. It has not acquired one permanent wrinkle after
all its ripples. It is perennially young, and I may stand and see a
swallow dip apparently to pick an insect from its surface as of
yore. It struck me again tonight, as if I had not seen it almost
daily for more than twenty years  Why, here is Walden, the same
woodland lake that I discovered so many years ago where a forest
was cut down last winter another is springing up by its shore as
lustily as ever the same thought is welling up to its surface that
was then it is the same liquid joy and happiness to itself and its
Maker, ay, and it may be to me. It is the work of a brave man
surely, in whom there was no guile He rounded this water with his
hand, deepened and clarified it in his thought, and in his will
bequeathed it to Concord. I see by its face that it is visited by
the same reflection and I can almost say, Walden, is it you?
It is no dream of mine,
To ornament a line
I cannot come nearer to God and Heaven
Than I live to Walden even.
I am its stony shore,
And the breeze that passes o'er
In the hollow of my hand
Are its water and its sand,
And its deepest resort
Lies high in my thought.
The cars never pause to look at it yet I fancy that the
engineers and firemen and brakemen, and those passengers who have a
season ticket and see it often, are better men for the sight. The
engineer does not forget at night, or his nature does not, that he
has beheld this vision of serenity and purity once at least during
the day. Though seen but once, it helps to wash out State Street
and the engine's soot. One proposes that it be called "God's Drop."
I have said that Walden has no visible inlet nor outlet, but it
is on the one hand distantly and indirectly related to Flint's Pond,
which is more elevated, by a chain of small ponds coming from that
quarter, and on the other directly and manifestly to Concord River,
which is lower, by a similar chain of ponds through which in some
other geological period it may have flowed, and by a little digging,
which God forbid, it can be made to flow thither again. If by
living thus reserved and austere, like a hermit in the woods, so
long, it has acquired such wonderful purity, who would not regret
that the comparatively impure waters of Flint's Pond should be
mingled with it, or itself should ever go to waste its sweetness in
the ocean wave?
Flint's, or Sandy Pond, in Lincoln, our greatest lake and inland
sea, lies about a mile east of Walden. It is much larger, being
said to contain one hundred and ninetyseven acres, and is more
fertile in fish but it is comparatively shallow, and not remarkably
pure. A walk through the woods thither was often my recreation. It
was worth the while, if only to feel the wind blow on your cheek
freely, and see the waves run, and remember the life of mariners. I
went achestnutting there in the fall, on windy days, when the nuts
were dropping into the water and were washed to my feet and one
day, as I crept along its sedgy shore, the fresh spray blowing in my
face, I came upon the mouldering wreck of a boat, the sides gone,
and hardly more than the impression of its flat bottom left amid the
rushes yet its model was sharply defined, as if it were a large
decayed pad, with its veins. It was as impressive a wreck as one
could imagine on the seashore, and had as good a moral. It is by
this time mere vegetable mould and undistinguishable pond shore,
through which rushes and flags have pushed up. I used to admire the
ripple marks on the sandy bottom, at the north end of this pond,
made firm and hard to the feet of the wader by the pressure of the
water, and the rushes which grew in Indian file, in waving lines,
corresponding to these marks, rank behind rank, as if the waves had
planted them. There also I have found, in considerable quantities,
curious balls, composed apparently of fine grass or roots, of
pipewort perhaps, from half an inch to four inches in diameter, and
perfectly spherical. These wash back and forth in shallow water on
a sandy bottom, and are sometimes cast on the shore. They are
either solid grass, or have a little sand in the middle. At first
you would say that they were formed by the action of the waves, like
a pebble yet the smallest are made of equally coarse materials,
half an inch long, and they are produced only at one season of the
year. Moreover, the waves, I suspect, do not so much construct as
wear down a material which has already acquired consistency. They
preserve their form when dry for an indefinite period.
Flint's Pond Such is the poverty of our nomenclature. What
right had the unclean and stupid farmer, whose farm abutted on this
sky water, whose shores he has ruthlessly laid bare, to give his
name to it? Some skinflint, who loved better the reflecting
surface of a dollar, or a bright cent, in which he could see his own
brazen face who regarded even the wild ducks which settled in it as
trespassers his fingers grown into crooked and bony talons from the
long habit of grasping harpylike  so it is not named for me. I
go not there to see him nor to hear of him who never saw it, who
never bathed in it, who never loved it, who never protected it, who
never spoke a good word for it, nor thanked God that He had made it.
Rather let it be named from the fishes that swim in it, the wild
fowl or quadrupeds which frequent it, the wild flowers which grow by
its shores, or some wild man or child the thread of whose history is
interwoven with its own not from him who could show no title to it
but the deed which a likeminded neighbor or legislature gave him 
him who thought only of its money value whose presence perchance
cursed all the shores who exhausted the land around it, and would
fain have exhausted the waters within it who regretted only that it
was not English hay or cranberry meadow  there was nothing to
redeem it, forsooth, in his eyes  and would have drained and sold
it for the mud at its bottom. It did not turn his mill, and it was
no privilege to him to behold it. I respect not his labors, his
farm where everything has its price, who would carry the landscape,
who would carry his God, to market, if he could get anything for
him who goes to market for his god as it is on whose farm nothing
grows free, whose fields bear no crops, whose meadows no flowers,
whose trees no fruits, but dollars who loves not the beauty of his
fruits, whose fruits are not ripe for him till they are turned to
dollars. Give me the poverty that enjoys true wealth. Farmers are
respectable and interesting to me in proportion as they are poor 
poor farmers. A model farm where the house stands like a fungus in
a muckheap, chambers for men horses, oxen, and swine, cleansed and
uncleansed, all contiguous to one another Stocked with men A
great greasespot, redolent of manures and buttermilk Under a high
state of cultivation, being manured with the hearts and brains of
men As if you were to raise your potatoes in the churchyard Such
is a model farm.
No, no if the fairest features of the landscape are to be named
after men, let them be the noblest and worthiest men alone. Let our
lakes receive as true names at least as the Icarian Sea, where
"still the shore" a "brave attempt resounds."
Goose Pond, of small extent, is on my way to Flint's Fair
Haven, an expansion of Concord River, said to contain some seventy
acres, is a mile southwest and White Pond, of about forty acres, is
a mile and a half beyond Fair Haven. This is my lake country.
These, with Concord River, are my water privileges and night and
day, year in year out, they grind such grist as I carry to them.
Since the woodcutters, and the railroad, and I myself have
profaned Walden, perhaps the most attractive, if not the most
beautiful, of all our lakes, the gem of the woods, is White Pond 
a poor name from its commonness, whether derived from the remarkable
purity of its waters or the color of its sands. In these as in
other respects, however, it is a lesser twin of Walden. They are so
much alike that you would say they must be connected under ground.
It has the same stony shore, and its waters are of the same hue. As
at Walden, in sultry dogday weather, looking down through the woods
on some of its bays which are not so deep but that the reflection
from the bottom tinges them, its waters are of a misty bluishgreen
or glaucous color. Many years since I used to go there to collect
the sand by cartloads, to make sandpaper with, and I have continued
to visit it ever since. One who frequents it proposes to call it
Virid Lake. Perhaps it might be called Yellow Pine Lake, from the
following circumstance. About fifteen years ago you could see the
top of a pitch pine, of the kind called yellow pine hereabouts,
though it is not a distinct species, projecting above the surface in
deep water, many rods from the shore. It was even supposed by some
that the pond had sunk, and this was one of the primitive forest
that formerly stood there. I find that even so long ago as , in
a "Topographical Description of the Town of Concord," by one of its
citizens, in the Collections of the Massachusetts Historical
Society, the author, after speaking of Walden and White Ponds, adds,
"In the middle of the latter may be seen, when the water is very
low, a tree which appears as if it grew in the place where it now
stands, although the roots are fifty feet below the surface of the
water the top of this tree is broken off, and at that place
measures fourteen inches in diameter." In the spring of ' I
talked with the man who lives nearest the pond in Sudbury, who told
me that it was he who got out this tree ten or fifteen years before.
As near as he could remember, it stood twelve or fifteen rods from
the shore, where the water was thirty or forty feet deep. It was in
the winter, and he had been getting out ice in the forenoon, and had
resolved that in the afternoon, with the aid of his neighbors, he
would take out the old yellow pine. He sawed a channel in the ice
toward the shore, and hauled it over and along and out on to the ice
with oxen but, before he had gone far in his work, he was surprised
to find that it was wrong end upward, with the stumps of the
branches pointing down, and the small end firmly fastened in the
sandy bottom. It was about a foot in diameter at the big end, and
he had expected to get a good sawlog, but it was so rotten as to be
fit only for fuel, if for that. He had some of it in his shed then.
There were marks of an axe and of woodpeckers on the butt. He
thought that it might have been a dead tree on the shore, but was
finally blown over into the pond, and after the top had become
waterlogged, while the buttend was still dry and light, had
drifted out and sunk wrong end up. His father, eighty years old,
could not remember when it was not there. Several pretty large logs
may still be seen lying on the bottom, where, owing to the
undulation of the surface, they look like huge water snakes in
motion.
This pond has rarely been profaned by a boat, for there is
little in it to tempt a fisherman. Instead of the white lily, which
requires mud, or the common sweet flag, the blue flag Iris
versicolor grows thinly in the pure water, rising from the stony
bottom all around the shore, where it is visited by hummingbirds in
June and the color both of its bluish blades and its flowers and
especially their reflections, is in singular harmony with the
glaucous water.
White Pond and Walden are great crystals on the surface of the
earth, Lakes of Light. If they were permanently congealed, and
small enough to be clutched, they would, perchance, be carried off
by slaves, like precious stones, to adorn the heads of emperors but
being liquid, and ample, and secured to us and our successors
forever, we disregard them, and run after the diamond of Kohinoor.
They are too pure to have a market value they contain no muck. How
much more beautiful than our lives, how much more transparent than
our characters, are they We never learned meanness of them. How
much fairer than the pool before the farmers door, in which his
ducks swim Hither the clean wild ducks come. Nature has no human
inhabitant who appreciates her. The birds with their plumage and
their notes are in harmony with the flowers, but what youth or
maiden conspires with the wild luxuriant beauty of Nature? She
flourishes most alone, far from the towns where they reside. Talk
of heaven ye disgrace earth.
Baker Farm
Sometimes I rambled to pine groves, standing like temples, or
like fleets at sea, fullrigged, with wavy boughs, and rippling with
light, so soft and green and shady that the Druids would have
forsaken their oaks to worship in them or to the cedar wood beyond
Flint's Pond, where the trees, covered with hoary blue berries,
spiring higher and higher, are fit to stand before Valhalla, and the
creeping juniper covers the ground with wreaths full of fruit or to
swamps where the usnea lichen hangs in festoons from the white
spruce trees, and toadstools, round tables of the swamp gods, cover
the ground, and more beautiful fungi adorn the stumps, like
butterflies or shells, vegetable winkles where the swamppink and
dogwood grow, the red alderberry glows like eyes of imps, the
waxwork grooves and crushes the hardest woods in its folds, and the
wild holly berries make the beholder forget his home with their
beauty, and he is dazzled and tempted by nameless other wild
forbidden fruits, too fair for mortal taste. Instead of calling on
some scholar, I paid many a visit to particular trees, of kinds
which are rare in this neighborhood, standing far away in the middle
of some pasture, or in the depths of a wood or swamp, or on a
hilltop such as the black birch, of which we have some handsome
specimens two feet in diameter its cousin, the yellow birch, with
its loose golden vest, perfumed like the first the beech, which has
so neat a bole and beautifully lichenpainted, perfect in all its
details, of which, excepting scattered specimens, I know but one
small grove of sizable trees left in the township, supposed by some
to have been planted by the pigeons that were once baited with
beechnuts near by it is worth the while to see the silver grain
sparkle when you split this wood the bass the hornbeam the Celtis
occidentalis, or false elm, of which we have but one wellgrown
some taller mast of a pine, a shingle tree, or a more perfect
hemlock than usual, standing like a pagoda in the midst of the
woods and many others I could mention. These were the shrines I
visited both summer and winter.
Once it chanced that I stood in the very abutment of a rainbow's
arch, which filled the lower stratum of the atmosphere, tinging the
grass and leaves around, and dazzling me as if I looked through
colored crystal. It was a lake of rainbow light, in which, for a
short while, I lived like a dolphin. If it had lasted longer it
might have tinged my employments and life. As I walked on the
railroad causeway, I used to wonder at the halo of light around my
shadow, and would fain fancy myself one of the elect. One who
visited me declared that the shadows of some Irishmen before him had
no halo about them, that it was only natives that were so
distinguished. Benvenuto Cellini tells us in his memoirs, that,
after a certain terrible dream or vision which he had during his
confinement in the castle of St. Angelo a resplendent light appeared
over the shadow of his head at morning and evening, whether he was
in Italy or France, and it was particularly conspicuous when the
grass was moist with dew. This was probably the same phenomenon to
which I have referred, which is especially observed in the morning,
but also at other times, and even by moonlight. Though a constant
one, it is not commonly noticed, and, in the case of an excitable
imagination like Cellini's, it would be basis enough for
superstition. Beside, he tells us that he showed it to very few.
But are they not indeed distinguished who are conscious that they
are regarded at all?
I set out one afternoon to go afishing to Fair Haven, through
the woods, to eke out my scanty fare of vegetables. My way led
through Pleasant Meadow, an adjunct of the Baker Farm, that retreat
of which a poet has since sung, beginning,
"Thy entry is a pleasant field,
Which some mossy fruit trees yield
Partly to a ruddy brook,
By gliding musquash undertook,
And mercurial trout,
Darting about."
I thought of living there before I went to Walden. I "hooked" the
apples, leaped the brook, and scared the musquash and the trout. It
was one of those afternoons which seem indefinitely long before one,
in which many events may happen, a large portion of our natural
life, though it was already half spent when I started. By the way
there came up a shower, which compelled me to stand half an hour
under a pine, piling boughs over my head, and wearing my
handkerchief for a shed and when at length I had made one cast over
the pickerelweed, standing up to my middle in water, I found myself
suddenly in the shadow of a cloud, and the thunder began to rumble
with such emphasis that I could do no more than listen to it. The
gods must be proud, thought I, with such forked flashes to rout a
poor unarmed fisherman. So I made haste for shelter to the nearest
hut, which stood half a mile from any road, but so much the nearer
to the pond, and had long been uninhabited
"And here a poet builded,
In the completed years,
For behold a trivial cabin
That to destruction steers."
So the Muse fables. But therein, as I found, dwelt now John Field,
an Irishman, and his wife, and several children, from the
broadfaced boy who assisted his father at his work, and now came
running by his side from the bog to escape the rain, to the
wrinkled, sibyllike, coneheaded infant that sat upon its father's
knee as in the palaces of nobles, and looked out from its home in
the midst of wet and hunger inquisitively upon the stranger, with
the privilege of infancy, not knowing but it was the last of a noble
line, and the hope and cynosure of the world, instead of John
Field's poor starveling brat. There we sat together under that part
of the roof which leaked the least, while it showered and thundered
without. I had sat there many times of old before the ship was
built that floated his family to America. An honest, hardworking,
but shiftless man plainly was John Field and his wife, she too was
brave to cook so many successive dinners in the recesses of that
lofty stove with round greasy face and bare breast, still thinking
to improve her condition one day with the never absent mop in one
hand, and yet no effects of it visible anywhere. The chickens,
which had also taken shelter here from the rain, stalked about the
room like members of the family, too humanized, methought, to roast
well. They stood and looked in my eye or pecked at my shoe
significantly. Meanwhile my host told me his story, how hard he
worked "bogging" for a neighboring farmer, turning up a meadow with
a spade or bog hoe at the rate of ten dollars an acre and the use of
the land with manure for one year, and his little broadfaced son
worked cheerfully at his father's side the while, not knowing how
poor a bargain the latter had made. I tried to help him with my
experience, telling him that he was one of my nearest neighbors, and
that I too, who came afishing here, and looked like a loafer, was
getting my living like himself that I lived in a tight, light, and
clean house, which hardly cost more than the annual rent of such a
ruin as his commonly amounts to and how, if he chose, he might in a
month or two build himself a palace of his own that I did not use
tea, nor coffee, nor butter, nor milk, nor fresh meat, and so did
not have to work to get them again, as I did not work hard, I did
not have to eat hard, and it cost me but a trifle for my food but
as he began with tea, and coffee, and butter, and milk, and beef, he
had to work hard to pay for them, and when he had worked hard he had
to eat hard again to repair the waste of his system  and so it was
as broad as it was long, indeed it was broader than it was long, for
he was discontented and wasted his life into the bargain and yet he
had rated it as a gain in coming to America, that here you could get
tea, and coffee, and meat every day. But the only true America is
that country where you are at liberty to pursue such a mode of life
as may enable you to do without these, and where the state does not
endeavor to compel you to sustain the slavery and war and other
superfluous expenses which directly or indirectly result from the
use of such things. For I purposely talked to him as if he were a
philosopher, or desired to be one. I should be glad if all the
meadows on the earth were left in a wild state, if that were the
consequence of men's beginning to redeem themselves. A man will not
need to study history to find out what is best for his own culture.
But alas the culture of an Irishman is an enterprise to be
undertaken with a sort of moral bog hoe. I told him, that as he
worked so hard at bogging, he required thick boots and stout
clothing, which yet were soon soiled and worn out, but I wore light
shoes and thin clothing, which cost not half so much, though he
might think that I was dressed like a gentleman which, however, was
not the case, and in an hour or two, without labor, but as a
recreation, I could, if I wished, catch as many fish as I should
want for two days, or earn enough money to support me a week. If he
and his family would live simply, they might all go ahuckleberrying
in the summer for their amusement. John heaved a sigh at this, and
his wife stared with arms akimbo, and both appeared to be wondering
if they had capital enough to begin such a course with, or
arithmetic enough to carry it through. It was sailing by dead
reckoning to them, and they saw not clearly how to make their port
so therefore I suppose they still take life bravely, after their
fashion, face to face, giving it tooth and nail, not having skill to
split its massive columns with any fine entering wedge, and rout it
in detail  thinking to deal with it roughly, as one should handle
a thistle. But they fight at an overwhelming disadvantage 
living, John Field, alas without arithmetic, and failing so.
"Do you ever fish?" I asked. "Oh yes, I catch a mess now and
then when I am lying by good perch I catch.  "What's your bait?"
"I catch shiners with fishworms, and bait the perch with them."
"You'd better go now, John," said his wife, with glistening and
hopeful face but John demurred.
The shower was now over, and a rainbow above the eastern woods
promised a fair evening so I took my departure. When I had got
without I asked for a drink, hoping to get a sight of the well
bottom, to complete my survey of the premises but there, alas are
shallows and quicksands, and rope broken withal, and bucket
irrecoverable. Meanwhile the right culinary vessel was selected,
water was seemingly distilled, and after consultation and long delay
passed out to the thirsty one  not yet suffered to cool, not yet
to settle. Such gruel sustains life here, I thought so, shutting
my eyes, and excluding the motes by a skilfully directed
undercurrent, I drank to genuine hospitality the heartiest draught I
could. I am not squeamish in such cases when manners are concerned.
As I was leaving the Irishman's roof after the rain, bending my
steps again to the pond, my haste to catch pickerel, wading in
retired meadows, in sloughs and bogholes, in forlorn and savage
places, appeared for an instant trivial to me who had been sent to
school and college but as I ran down the hill toward the reddening
west, with the rainbow over my shoulder, and some faint tinkling
sounds borne to my ear through the cleansed air, from I know not
what quarter, my Good Genius seemed to say  Go fish and hunt far
and wide day by day  farther and wider  and rest thee by many
brooks and hearthsides without misgiving. Remember thy Creator in
the days of thy youth. Rise free from care before the dawn, and
seek adventures. Let the noon find thee by other lakes, and the
night overtake thee everywhere at home. There are no larger fields
than these, no worthier games than may here be played. Grow wild
according to thy nature, like these sedges and brakes, which will
never become English bay. Let the thunder rumble what if it
threaten ruin to farmers' crops? That is not its errand to thee.
Take shelter under the cloud, while they flee to carts and sheds.
Let not to get a living be thy trade, but thy sport. Enjoy the
land, but own it not. Through want of enterprise and faith men are
where they are, buying and selling, and spending their lives like
serfs.
O Baker Farm
"Landscape where the richest element
Is a little sunshine innocent." ...
"No one runs to revel
On thy railfenced lea." ...
"Debate with no man hast thou,
With questions art never perplexed,
As tame at the first sight as now,
In thy plain russet gabardine dressed." ...
"Come ye who love,
And ye who hate,
Children of the Holy Dove,
And Guy Faux of the state,
And hang conspiracies
From the tough rafters of the trees"
Men come tamely home at night only from the next field or
street, where their household echoes haunt, and their life pines
because it breathes its own breath over again their shadows,
morning and evening, reach farther than their daily steps. We
should come home from far, from adventures, and perils, and
discoveries every day, with new experience and character.
Before I had reached the pond some fresh impulse had brought out
John Field, with altered mind, letting go "bogging" ere this sunset.
But he, poor man, disturbed only a couple of fins while I was
catching a fair string, and he said it was his luck but when we
changed seats in the boat luck changed seats too. Poor John Field
I trust he does not read this, unless he will improve by it 
thinking to live by some derivative oldcountry mode in this
primitive new country  to catch perch with shiners. It is good
bait sometimes, I allow. With his horizon all his own, yet he a
poor man, born to be poor, with his inherited Irish poverty or poor
life, his Adam's grandmother and boggy ways, not to rise in this
world, he nor his posterity, till their wading webbed bogtrotting
feet get talaria to their heels.
Higher Laws
As I came home through the woods with my string of fish,
trailing my pole, it being now quite dark, I caught a glimpse of a
woodchuck stealing across my path, and felt a strange thrill of
savage delight, and was strongly tempted to seize and devour him
raw not that I was hungry then, except for that wildness which he
represented. Once or twice, however, while I lived at the pond, I
found myself ranging the woods, like a halfstarved hound, with a
strange abandonment, seeking some kind of venison which I might
devour, and no morsel could have been too savage for me. The
wildest scenes had become unaccountably familiar. I found in
myself, and still find, an instinct toward a higher, or, as it is
named, spiritual life, as do most men, and another toward a
primitive rank and savage one, and I reverence them both. I love
the wild not less than the good. The wildness and adventure that
are in fishing still recommended it to me. I like sometimes to take
rank hold on life and spend my day more as the animals do. Perhaps
I have owed to this employment and to hunting, when quite young, my
closest acquaintance with Nature. They early introduce us to and
detain us in scenery with which otherwise, at that age, we should
have little acquaintance. Fishermen, hunters, woodchoppers, and
others, spending their lives in the fields and woods, in a peculiar
sense a part of Nature themselves, are often in a more favorable
mood for observing her, in the intervals of their pursuits, than
philosophers or poets even, who approach her with expectation. She
is not afraid to exhibit herself to them. The traveller on the
prairie is naturally a hunter, on the head waters of the Missouri
and Columbia a trapper, and at the Falls of St. Mary a fisherman.
He who is only a traveller learns things at secondhand and by the
halves, and is poor authority. We are most interested when science
reports what those men already know practically or instinctively,
for that alone is a true humanity, or account of human experience.
They mistake who assert that the Yankee has few amusements,
because he has not so many public holidays, and men and boys do not
play so many games as they do in England, for here the more
primitive but solitary amusements of hunting, fishing, and the like
have not yet given place to the former. Almost every New England
boy among my contemporaries shouldered a fowlingpiece between the
ages of ten and fourteen and his hunting and fishing grounds were
not limited, like the preserves of an English nobleman, but were
more boundless even than those of a savage. No wonder, then, that
he did not oftener stay to play on the common. But already a change
is taking place, owing, not to an increased humanity, but to an
increased scarcity of game, for perhaps the hunter is the greatest
friend of the animals hunted, not excepting the Humane Society.
Moreover, when at the pond, I wished sometimes to add fish to my
fare for variety. I have actually fished from the same kind of
necessity that the first fishers did. Whatever humanity I might
conjure up against it was all factitious, and concerned my
philosophy more than my feelings. I speak of fishing only now, for
I had long felt differently about fowling, and sold my gun before I
went to the woods. Not that I am less humane than others, but I did
not perceive that my feelings were much affected. I did not pity
the fishes nor the worms. This was habit. As for fowling, during
the last years that I carried a gun my excuse was that I was
studying ornithology, and sought only new or rare birds. But I
confess that I am now inclined to think that there is a finer way of
studying ornithology than this. It requires so much closer
attention to the habits of the birds, that, if for that reason only,
I have been willing to omit the gun. Yet notwithstanding the
objection on the score of humanity, I am compelled to doubt if
equally valuable sports are ever substituted for these and when
some of my friends have asked me anxiously about their boys, whether
they should let them hunt, I have answered, yes  remembering that
it was one of the best parts of my education  make them hunters,
though sportsmen only at first, if possible, mighty hunters at last,
so that they shall not find game large enough for them in this or
any vegetable wilderness  hunters as well as fishers of men. Thus
far I am of the opinion of Chaucer's nun, who
"yave not of the text a pulled hen
That saith that hunters ben not holy men."
There is a period in the history of the individual, as of the race,
when the hunters are the "best men," as the Algonquins called them.
We cannot but pity the boy who has never fired a gun he is no more
humane, while his education has been sadly neglected. This was my
answer with respect to those youths who were bent on this pursuit,
trusting that they would soon outgrow it. No humane being, past the
thoughtless age of boyhood, will wantonly murder any creature which
holds its life by the same tenure that he does. The hare in its
extremity cries like a child. I warn you, mothers, that my
sympathies do not always make the usual philanthropic distinctions.
Such is oftenest the young man's introduction to the forest, and
the most original part of himself. He goes thither at first as a
hunter and fisher, until at last, if he has the seeds of a better
life in him, he distinguishes his proper objects, as a poet or
naturalist it may be, and leaves the gun and fishpole behind. The
mass of men are still and always young in this respect. In some
countries a hunting parson is no uncommon sight. Such a one might
make a good shepherd's dog, but is far from being the Good Shepherd.
I have been surprised to consider that the only obvious employment,
except woodchopping, icecutting, or the like business, which ever
to my knowledge detained at Walden Pond for a whole halfday any of
my fellowcitizens, whether fathers or children of the town, with
just one exception, was fishing. Commonly they did not think that
they were lucky, or well paid for their time, unless they got a long
string of fish, though they had the opportunity of seeing the pond
all the while. They might go there a thousand times before the
sediment of fishing would sink to the bottom and leave their purpose
pure but no doubt such a clarifying process would be going on all
the while. The Governor and his Council faintly remember the pond,
for they went afishing there when they were boys but now they are
too old and dignified to go afishing, and so they know it no more
forever. Yet even they expect to go to heaven at last. If the
legislature regards it, it is chiefly to regulate the number of
hooks to be used there but they know nothing about the hook of
hooks with which to angle for the pond itself, impaling the
legislature for a bait. Thus, even in civilized communities, the
embryo man passes through the hunter stage of development.
I have found repeatedly, of late years, that I cannot fish
without falling a little in selfrespect. I have tried it again and
again. I have skill at it, and, like many of my fellows, a certain
instinct for it, which revives from time to time, but always when I
have done I feel that it would have been better if I had not fished.
I think that I do not mistake. It is a faint intimation, yet so are
the first streaks of morning. There is unquestionably this instinct
in me which belongs to the lower orders of creation yet with every
year I am less a fisherman, though without more humanity or even
wisdom at present I am no fisherman at all. But I see that if I
were to live in a wilderness I should again be tempted to become a
fisher and hunter in earnest. Beside, there is something
essentially unclean about this diet and all flesh, and I began to
see where housework commences, and whence the endeavor, which costs
so much, to wear a tidy and respectable appearance each day, to keep
the house sweet and free from all ill odors and sights. Having been
my own butcher and scullion and cook, as well as the gentleman for
whom the dishes were served up, I can speak from an unusually
complete experience. The practical objection to animal food in my
case was its uncleanness and besides, when I had caught and cleaned
and cooked and eaten my fish, they seemed not to have fed me
essentially. It was insignificant and unnecessary, and cost more
than it came to. A little bread or a few potatoes would have done
as well, with less trouble and filth. Like many of my
contemporaries, I had rarely for many years used animal food, or
tea, or coffee, etc. not so much because of any ill effects which I
had traced to them, as because they were not agreeable to my
imagination. The repugnance to animal food is not the effect of
experience, but is an instinct. It appeared more beautiful to live
low and fare hard in many respects and though I never did so, I
went far enough to please my imagination. I believe that every man
who has ever been earnest to preserve his higher or poetic faculties
in the best condition has been particularly inclined to abstain from
animal food, and from much food of any kind. It is a significant
fact, stated by entomologists  I find it in Kirby and Spence 
that "some insects in their perfect state, though furnished with
organs of feeding, make no use of them" and they lay it down as "a
general rule, that almost all insects in this state eat much less
than in that of larvae. The voracious caterpillar when transformed
into a butterfly ... and the gluttonous maggot when become a fly"
content themselves with a drop or two of honey or some other sweet
liquid. The abdomen under the wings of the butterfly still
represents the larva. This is the tidbit which tempts his
insectivorous fate. The gross feeder is a man in the larva state
and there are whole nations in that condition, nations without fancy
or imagination, whose vast abdomens betray them.
It is hard to provide and cook so simple and clean a diet as
will not offend the imagination but this, I think, is to be fed
when we feed the body they should both sit down at the same table.
Yet perhaps this may be done. The fruits eaten temperately need not
make us ashamed of our appetites, nor interrupt the worthiest
pursuits. But put an extra condiment into your dish, and it will
poison you. It is not worth the while to live by rich cookery.
Most men would feel shame if caught preparing with their own hands
precisely such a dinner, whether of animal or vegetable food, as is
every day prepared for them by others. Yet till this is otherwise
we are not civilized, and, if gentlemen and ladies, are not true men
and women. This certainly suggests what change is to be made. It
may be vain to ask why the imagination will not be reconciled to
flesh and fat. I am satisfied that it is not. Is it not a reproach
that man is a carnivorous animal? True, he can and does live, in a
great measure, by preying on other animals but this is a miserable
way  as any one who will go to snaring rabbits, or slaughtering
lambs, may learn  and he will be regarded as a benefactor of his
race who shall teach man to confine himself to a more innocent and
wholesome diet. Whatever my own practice may be, I have no doubt
that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual
improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage
tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact
with the more civilized.
If one listens to the faintest but constant suggestions of his
genius, which are certainly true, he sees not to what extremes, or
even insanity, it may lead him and yet that way, as he grows more
resolute and faithful, his road lies. The faintest assured
objection which one healthy man feels will at length prevail over
the arguments and customs of mankind. No man ever followed his
genius till it misled him. Though the result were bodily weakness,
yet perhaps no one can say that the consequences were to be
regretted, for these were a life in conformity to higher principles.
If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and
life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweetscented herbs, is more
elastic, more starry, more immortal  that is your success. All
nature is your congratulation, and you have cause momentarily to
bless yourself. The greatest gains and values are farthest from
being appreciated. We easily come to doubt if they exist. We soon
forget them. They are the highest reality. Perhaps the facts most
astounding and most real are never communicated by man to man. The
true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and
indescribable as the tints of morning or evening. It is a little
stardust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched.
Yet, for my part, I was never unusually squeamish I could
sometimes eat a fried rat with a good relish, if it were necessary.
I am glad to have drunk water so long, for the same reason that I
prefer the natural sky to an opiumeater's heaven. I would fain
keep sober always and there are infinite degrees of drunkenness. I
believe that water is the only drink for a wise man wine is not so
noble a liquor and think of dashing the hopes of a morning with a
cup of warm coffee, or of an evening with a dish of tea Ah, how
low I fall when I am tempted by them Even music may be
intoxicating. Such apparently slight causes destroyed Greece and
Rome, and will destroy England and America. Of all ebriosity, who
does not prefer to be intoxicated by the air he breathes? I have
found it to be the most serious objection to coarse labors long
continued, that they compelled me to eat and drink coarsely also.
But to tell the truth, I find myself at present somewhat less
particular in these respects. I carry less religion to the table,
ask no blessing not because I am wiser than I was, but, I am
obliged to confess, because, however much it is to be regretted,
with years I have grown more coarse and indifferent. Perhaps these
questions are entertained only in youth, as most believe of poetry.
My practice is "nowhere," my opinion is here. Nevertheless I am far
from regarding myself as one of those privileged ones to whom the
Ved refers when it says, that "he who has true faith in the
Omnipresent Supreme Being may eat all that exists," that is, is not
bound to inquire what is his food, or who prepares it and even in
their case it is to be observed, as a Hindoo commentator has
remarked, that the Vedant limits this privilege to "the time of
distress."
Who has not sometimes derived an inexpressible satisfaction from
his food in which appetite had no share? I have been thrilled to
think that I owed a mental perception to the commonly gross sense of
taste, that I have been inspired through the palate, that some
berries which I had eaten on a hillside had fed my genius. "The
soul not being mistress of herself," says Thsengtseu, "one looks,
and one does not see one listens, and one does not hear one eats,
and one does not know the savor of food." He who distinguishes the
true savor of his food can never be a glutton he who does not
cannot be otherwise. A puritan may go to his brownbread crust with
as gross an appetite as ever an alderman to his turtle. Not that
food which entereth into the mouth defileth a man, but the appetite
with which it is eaten. It is neither the quality nor the quantity,
but the devotion to sensual savors when that which is eaten is not
a viand to sustain our animal, or inspire our spiritual life, but
food for the worms that possess us. If the hunter has a taste for
mudturtles, muskrats, and other such savage tidbits, the fine lady
indulges a taste for jelly made of a calf's foot, or for sardines
from over the sea, and they are even. He goes to the millpond, she
to her preservepot. The wonder is how they, how you and I, can
live this slimy, beastly life, eating and drinking.
Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an
instant's truce between virtue and vice. Goodness is the only
investment that never fails. In the music of the harp which
trembles round the world it is the insisting on this which thrills
us. The harp is the travelling patterer for the Universe's
Insurance Company, recommending its laws, and our little goodness is
all the assessment that we pay. Though the youth at last grows
indifferent, the laws of the universe are not indifferent, but are
forever on the side of the most sensitive. Listen to every zephyr
for some reproof, for it is surely there, and he is unfortunate who
does not hear it. We cannot touch a string or move a stop but the
charming moral transfixes us. Many an irksome noise, go a long way
off, is heard as music, a proud, sweet satire on the meanness of our
lives.
We are conscious of an animal in us, which awakens in proportion
as our higher nature slumbers. It is reptile and sensual, and
perhaps cannot be wholly expelled like the worms which, even in
life and health, occupy our bodies. Possibly we may withdraw from
it, but never change its nature. I fear that it may enjoy a certain
health of its own that we may be well, yet not pure. The other day
I picked up the lower jaw of a hog, with white and sound teeth and
tusks, which suggested that there was an animal health and vigor
distinct from the spiritual. This creature succeeded by other means
than temperance and purity. "That in which men differ from brute
beasts," says Mencius, "is a thing very inconsiderable the common
herd lose it very soon superior men preserve it carefully." Who
knows what sort of life would result if we had attained to purity?
If I knew so wise a man as could teach me purity I would go to seek
him forthwith. "A command over our passions, and over the external
senses of the body, and good acts, are declared by the Ved to be
indispensable in the mind's approximation to God." Yet the spirit
can for the time pervade and control every member and function of
the body, and transmute what in form is the grossest sensuality
into purity and devotion. The generative energy, which, when we are
loose, dissipates and makes us unclean, when we are continent
invigorates and inspires us. Chastity is the flowering of man and
what are called Genius, Heroism, Holiness, and the like, are but
various fruits which succeed it. Man flows at once to God when the
channel of purity is open. By turns our purity inspires and our
impurity casts us down. He is blessed who is assured that the
animal is dying out in him day by day, and the divine being
established. Perhaps there is none but has cause for shame on
account of the inferior and brutish nature to which he is allied. I
fear that we are such gods or demigods only as fauns and satyrs, the
divine allied to beasts, the creatures of appetite, and that, to
some extent, our very life is our disgrace.
"How happy's he who hath due place assigned
To his beasts and disafforested his mind
Can use this horse, goat, wolf, and ev'ry beast,
And is not ass himself to all the rest
Else man not only is the herd of swine,
But he's those devils too which did incline
Them to a headlong rage, and made them worse."
All sensuality is one, though it takes many forms all purity is
one. It is the same whether a man eat, or drink, or cohabit, or
sleep sensually. They are but one appetite, and we only need to see
a person do any one of these things to know how great a sensualist
he is. The impure can neither stand nor sit with purity. When the
reptile is attacked at one mouth of his burrow, he shows himself at
another. If you would be chaste, you must be temperate. What is
chastity? How shall a man know if he is chaste? He shall not know
it. We have heard of this virtue, but we know not what it is. We
speak conformably to the rumor which we have heard. From exertion
come wisdom and purity from sloth ignorance and sensuality. In the
student sensuality is a sluggish habit of mind. An unclean person
is universally a slothful one, one who sits by a stove, whom the sun
shines on prostrate, who reposes without being fatigued. If you
would avoid uncleanness, and all the sins, work earnestly, though it
be at cleaning a stable. Nature is hard to be overcome, but she
must be overcome. What avails it that you are Christian, if you are
not purer than the heathen, if you deny yourself no more, if you are
not more religious? I know of many systems of religion esteemed
heathenish whose precepts fill the reader with shame, and provoke
him to new endeavors, though it be to the performance of rites
merely.
I hesitate to say these things, but it is not because of the
subject  I care not how obscene my words are  but because I
cannot speak of them without betraying my impurity. We discourse
freely without shame of one form of sensuality, and are silent about
another. We are so degraded that we cannot speak simply of the
necessary functions of human nature. In earlier ages, in some
countries, every function was reverently spoken of and regulated by
law. Nothing was too trivial for the Hindoo lawgiver, however
offensive it may be to modern taste. He teaches how to eat, drink,
cohabit, void excrement and urine, and the like, elevating what is
mean, and does not falsely excuse himself by calling these things
trifles.
Every man is the builder of a temple, called his body, to the
god he worships, after a style purely his own, nor can he get off by
hammering marble instead. We are all sculptors and painters, and
our material is our own flesh and blood and bones. Any nobleness
begins at once to refine a man's features, any meanness or
sensuality to imbrute them.
John Farmer sat at his door one September evening, after a hard
day's work, his mind still running on his labor more or less.
Having bathed, he sat down to recreate his intellectual man. It
was a rather cool evening, and some of his neighbors were
apprehending a frost. He had not attended to the train of his
thoughts long when he heard some one playing on a flute, and that
sound harmonized with his mood. Still he thought of his work but
the burden of his thought was, that though this kept running in his
head, and he found himself planning and contriving it against his
will, yet it concerned him very little. It was no more than the
scurf of his skin, which was constantly shuffled off. But the notes
of the flute came home to his ears out of a different sphere from
that he worked in, and suggested work for certain faculties which
slumbered in him. They gently did away with the street, and the
village, and the state in which he lived. A voice said to him 
Why do you stay here and live this mean moiling life, when a
glorious existence is possible for you? Those same stars twinkle
over other fields than these.  But how to come out of this
condition and actually migrate thither? All that he could think of
was to practise some new austerity, to let his mind descend into his
body and redeem it, and treat himself with ever increasing respect.
Brute Neighbors
Sometimes I had a companion in my fishing, who came through the
village to my house from the other side of the town, and the
catching of the dinner was as much a social exercise as the eating
of it.
Hermit. I wonder what the world is doing now. I have not heard
so much as a locust over the sweetfern these three hours. The
pigeons are all asleep upon their roosts  no flutter from them.
Was that a farmer's noon horn which sounded from beyond the woods
just now? The hands are coming in to boiled salt beef and cider and
Indian bread. Why will men worry themselves so? He that does not
eat need not work. I wonder how much they have reaped. Who would
live there where a body can never think for the barking of Bose?
And oh, the housekeeping to keep bright the devil's doorknobs, and
scour his tubs this bright day Better not keep a house. Say, some
hollow tree and then for morning calls and dinnerparties Only a
woodpecker tapping. Oh, they swarm the sun is too warm there they
are born too far into life for me. I have water from the spring,
and a loaf of brown bread on the shelf.  Hark I hear a rustling
of the leaves. Is it some illfed village hound yielding to the
instinct of the chase? or the lost pig which is said to be in these
woods, whose tracks I saw after the rain? It comes on apace my
sumachs and sweetbriers tremble.  Eh, Mr. Poet, is it you? How do
you like the world today?
Poet. See those clouds how they hang That's the greatest
thing I have seen today. There's nothing like it in old paintings,
nothing like it in foreign lands  unless when we were off the
coast of Spain. That's a true Mediterranean sky. I thought, as I
have my living to get, and have not eaten today, that I might go
afishing. That's the true industry for poets. It is the only
trade I have learned. Come, let's along.
Hermit. I cannot resist. My brown bread will soon be gone. I
will go with you gladly soon, but I am just concluding a serious
meditation. I think that I am near the end of it. Leave me alone,
then, for a while. But that we may not be delayed, you shall be
digging the bait meanwhile. Angleworms are rarely to be met with in
these parts, where the soil was never fattened with manure the race
is nearly extinct. The sport of digging the bait is nearly equal to
that of catching the fish, when one's appetite is not too keen and
this you may have all to yourself today. I would advise you to set
in the spade down yonder among the groundnuts, where you see the
johnswort waving. I think that I may warrant you one worm to every
three sods you turn up, if you look well in among the roots of the
grass, as if you were weeding. Or, if you choose to go farther, it
will not be unwise, for I have found the increase of fair bait to be
very nearly as the squares of the distances.
Hermit alone. Let me see where was I? Methinks I was nearly
in this frame of mind the world lay about at this angle. Shall I
go to heaven or afishing? If I should soon bring this meditation
to an end, would another so sweet occasion be likely to offer? I
was as near being resolved into the essence of things as ever I was
in my life. I fear my thoughts will not come back to me. If it
would do any good, I would whistle for them. When they make us an
offer, is it wise to say, We will think of it? My thoughts have
left no track, and I cannot find the path again. What was it that I
was thinking of? It was a very hazy day. I will just try these
three sentences of Confutsee they may fetch that state about again.
I know not whether it was the dumps or a budding ecstasy. Mem.
There never is but one opportunity of a kind.
Poet. How now, Hermit, is it too soon? I have got just
thirteen whole ones, beside several which are imperfect or
undersized but they will do for the smaller fry they do not cover
up the hook so much. Those village worms are quite too large a
shiner may make a meal off one without finding the skewer.
Hermit. Well, then, let's be off. Shall we to the Concord?
There's good sport there if the water be not too high.
Why do precisely these objects which we behold make a world?
Why has man just these species of animals for his neighbors as if
nothing but a mouse could have filled this crevice? I suspect that
Pilpay  Co. have put animals to their best use, for they are all
beasts of burden, in a sense, made to carry some portion of our
thoughts.
The mice which haunted my house were not the common ones, which
are said to have been introduced into the country, but a wild native
kind not found in the village. I sent one to a distinguished
naturalist, and it interested him much. When I was building, one of
these had its nest underneath the house, and before I had laid the
second floor, and swept out the shavings, would come out regularly
at lunch time and pick up the crumbs at my feet. It probably had
never seen a man before and it soon became quite familiar, and
would run over my shoes and up my clothes. It could readily ascend
the sides of the room by short impulses, like a squirrel, which it
resembled in its motions. At length, as I leaned with my elbow on
the bench one day, it ran up my clothes, and along my sleeve, and
round and round the paper which held my dinner, while I kept the
latter close, and dodged and played at bopeep with it and when at
last I held still a piece of cheese between my thumb and finger, it
came and nibbled it, sitting in my hand, and afterward cleaned its
face and paws, like a fly, and walked away.
A phoebe soon built in my shed, and a robin for protection in a
pine which grew against the house. In June the partridge Tetrao
umbellus, which is so shy a bird, led her brood past my windows,
from the woods in the rear to the front of my house, clucking and
calling to them like a hen, and in all her behavior proving herself
the hen of the woods. The young suddenly disperse on your approach,
at a signal from the mother, as if a whirlwind had swept them away,
and they so exactly resemble the dried leaves and twigs that many a
traveler has placed his foot in the midst of a brood, and heard the
whir of the old bird as she flew off, and her anxious calls and
mewing, or seen her trail her wings to attract his attention,
without suspecting their neighborhood. The parent will sometimes
roll and spin round before you in such a dishabille, that you
cannot, for a few moments, detect what kind of creature it is. The
young squat still and flat, often running their heads under a leaf,
and mind only their mother's directions given from a distance, nor
will your approach make them run again and betray themselves. You
may even tread on them, or have your eyes on them for a minute,
without discovering them. I have held them in my open hand at such
a time, and still their only care, obedient to their mother and
their instinct, was to squat there without fear or trembling. So
perfect is this instinct, that once, when I had laid them on the
leaves again, and one accidentally fell on its side, it was found
with the rest in exactly the same position ten minutes afterward.
They are not callow like the young of most birds, but more perfectly
developed and precocious even than chickens. The remarkably adult
yet innocent expression of their open and serene eyes is very
memorable. All intelligence seems reflected in them. They suggest
not merely the purity of infancy, but a wisdom clarified by
experience. Such an eye was not born when the bird was, but is
coeval with the sky it reflects. The woods do not yield another
such a gem. The traveller does not often look into such a limpid
well. The ignorant or reckless sportsman often shoots the parent at
such a time, and leaves these innocents to fall a prey to some
prowling beast or bird, or gradually mingle with the decaying leaves
which they so much resemble. It is said that when hatched by a hen
they will directly disperse on some alarm, and so are lost, for they
never hear the mother's call which gathers them again. These were
my hens and chickens.
It is remarkable how many creatures live wild and free though
secret in the woods, and still sustain themselves in the
neighborhood of towns, suspected by hunters only. How retired the
otter manages to live here He grows to be four feet long, as big
as a small boy, perhaps without any human being getting a glimpse of
him. I formerly saw the raccoon in the woods behind where my house
is built, and probably still heard their whinnering at night.
Commonly I rested an hour or two in the shade at noon, after
planting, and ate my lunch, and read a little by a spring which was
the source of a swamp and of a brook, oozing from under Brister's
Hill, half a mile from my field. The approach to this was through a
succession of descending grassy hollows, full of young pitch pines,
into a larger wood about the swamp. There, in a very secluded and
shaded spot, under a spreading white pine, there was yet a clean,
firm sward to sit on. I had dug out the spring and made a well of
clear gray water, where I could dip up a pailful without roiling it,
and thither I went for this purpose almost every day in midsummer,
when the pond was warmest. Thither, too, the woodcock led her
brood, to probe the mud for worms, flying but a foot above them down
the bank, while they ran in a troop beneath but at last, spying me,
she would leave her young and circle round and round me, nearer and
nearer till within four or five feet, pretending broken wings and
legs, to attract my attention, and get off her young, who would
already have taken up their march, with faint, wiry peep, single
file through the swamp, as she directed. Or I heard the peep of the
young when I could not see the parent bird. There too the turtle
doves sat over the spring, or fluttered from bough to bough of the
soft white pines over my head or the red squirrel, coursing down
the nearest bough, was particularly familiar and inquisitive. You
only need sit still long enough in some attractive spot in the woods
that all its inhabitants may exhibit themselves to you by turns.
I was witness to events of a less peaceful character. One day
when I went out to my woodpile, or rather my pile of stumps, I
observed two large ants, the one red, the other much larger, nearly
half an inch long, and black, fiercely contending with one another.
Having once got hold they never let go, but struggled and wrestled
and rolled on the chips incessantly. Looking farther, I was
surprised to find that the chips were covered with such combatants,
that it was not a duellum, but a bellum, a war between two races of
ants, the red always pitted against the black, and frequently two
red ones to one black. The legions of these Myrmidons covered all
the hills and vales in my woodyard, and the ground was already
strewn with the dead and dying, both red and black. It was the only
battle which I have ever witnessed, the only battlefield I ever
trod while the battle was raging internecine war the red
republicans on the one hand, and the black imperialists on the
other. On every side they were engaged in deadly combat, yet
without any noise that I could hear, and human soldiers never fought
so resolutely. I watched a couple that were fast locked in each
other's embraces, in a little sunny valley amid the chips, now at
noonday prepared to fight till the sun went down, or life went out.
The smaller red champion had fastened himself like a vice to his
adversary's front, and through all the tumblings on that field never
for an instant ceased to gnaw at one of his feelers near the root,
having already caused the other to go by the board while the
stronger black one dashed him from side to side, and, as I saw on
looking nearer, had already divested him of several of his members.
They fought with more pertinacity than bulldogs. Neither manifested
the least disposition to retreat. It was evident that their
battlecry was "Conquer or die." In the meanwhile there came along
a single red ant on the hillside of this valley, evidently full of
excitement, who either had despatched his foe, or had not yet taken
part in the battle probably the latter, for he had lost none of his
limbs whose mother had charged him to return with his shield or
upon it. Or perchance he was some Achilles, who had nourished his
wrath apart, and had now come to avenge or rescue his Patroclus. He
saw this unequal combat from afar  for the blacks were nearly
twice the size of the red  he drew near with rapid pace till be
stood on his guard within half an inch of the combatants then,
watching his opportunity, he sprang upon the black warrior, and
commenced his operations near the root of his right fore leg,
leaving the foe to select among his own members and so there were
three united for life, as if a new kind of attraction had been
invented which put all other locks and cements to shame. I should
not have wondered by this time to find that they had their
respective musical bands stationed on some eminent chip, and playing
their national airs the while, to excite the slow and cheer the
dying combatants. I was myself excited somewhat even as if they had
been men. The more you think of it, the less the difference. And
certainly there is not the fight recorded in Concord history, at
least, if in the history of America, that will bear a moment's
comparison with this, whether for the numbers engaged in it, or for
the patriotism and heroism displayed. For numbers and for carnage
it was an Austerlitz or Dresden. Concord Fight Two killed on the
patriots' side, and Luther Blanchard wounded Why here every ant
was a Buttrick  "Fire for God's sake fire"  and thousands
shared the fate of Davis and Hosmer. There was not one hireling
there. I have no doubt that it was a principle they fought for, as
much as our ancestors, and not to avoid a threepenny tax on their
tea and the results of this battle will be as important and
memorable to those whom it concerns as those of the battle of Bunker
Hill, at least.
I took up the chip on which the three I have particularly
described were struggling, carried it into my house, and placed it
under a tumbler on my windowsill, in order to see the issue.
Holding a microscope to the firstmentioned red ant, I saw that,
though he was assiduously gnawing at the near fore leg of his enemy,
having severed his remaining feeler, his own breast was all torn
away, exposing what vitals he had there to the jaws of the black
warrior, whose breastplate was apparently too thick for him to
pierce and the dark carbuncles of the sufferer's eyes shone with
ferocity such as war only could excite. They struggled half an hour
longer under the tumbler, and when I looked again the black soldier
had severed the heads of his foes from their bodies, and the still
living heads were hanging on either side of him like ghastly
trophies at his saddlebow, still apparently as firmly fastened as
ever, and he was endeavoring with feeble struggles, being without
feelers and with only the remnant of a leg, and I know not how many
other wounds, to divest himself of them which at length, after half
an hour more, he accomplished. I raised the glass, and he went off
over the windowsill in that crippled state. Whether he finally
survived that combat, and spent the remainder of his days in some
Hotel des Invalides, I do not know but I thought that his industry
would not be worth much thereafter. I never learned which party was
victorious, nor the cause of the war but I felt for the rest of
that day as if I had had my feelings excited and harrowed by
witnessing the struggle, the ferocity and carnage, of a human battle
before my door.
Kirby and Spence tell us that the battles of ants have long been
celebrated and the date of them recorded, though they say that Huber
is the only modern author who appears to have witnessed them.
"AEneas Sylvius," say they, "after giving a very circumstantial
account of one contested with great obstinacy by a great and small
species on the trunk of a pear tree," adds that "this action was
fought in the pontificate of Eugenius the Fourth, in the presence of
Nicholas Pistoriensis, an eminent lawyer, who related the whole,
history of the battle with the greatest fidelity." A similar
engagement between great and small ants is recorded by Olaus Magnus,
in which the small ones, being victorious, are said to have buried
the bodies of their own soldiers, but left those of their giant
enemies a prey to the birds. This event happened previous to the
expulsion of the tyrant Christiern the Second from Sweden." The
battle which I witnessed took place in the Presidency of Polk, five
years before the passage of Webster's FugitiveSlave Bill.
Many a village Bose, fit only to course a mudturtle in a
victualling cellar, sported his heavy quarters in the woods, without
the knowledge of his master, and ineffectually smelled at old fox
burrows and woodchucks' holes led perchance by some slight cur
which nimbly threaded the wood, and might still inspire a natural
terror in its denizens  now far behind his guide, barking like a
canine bull toward some small squirrel which had treed itself for
scrutiny, then, cantering off, bending the bushes with his weight,
imagining that he is on the track of some stray member of the
jerbilla family. Once I was surprised to see a cat walking along
the stony shore of the pond, for they rarely wander so far from
home. The surprise was mutual. Nevertheless the most domestic cat,
which has lain on a rug all her days, appears quite at home in the
woods, and, by her sly and stealthy behavior, proves herself more
native there than the regular inhabitants. Once, when berrying, I
met with a cat with young kittens in the woods, quite wild, and they
all, like their mother, had their backs up and were fiercely
spitting at me. A few years before I lived in the woods there was
what was called a "winged cat" in one of the farmhouses in Lincoln
nearest the pond, Mr. Gilian Baker's. When I called to see her in
June, , she was gone ahunting in the woods, as was her wont I
am not sure whether it was a male or female, and so use the more
common pronoun, but her mistress told me that she came into the
neighborhood a little more than a year before, in April, and was
finally taken into their house that she was of a dark brownishgray
color, with a white spot on her throat, and white feet, and had a
large bushy tail like a fox that in the winter the fur grew thick
and flatted out along her sides, forming stripes ten or twelve
inches long by two and a half wide, and under her chin like a muff,
the upper side loose, the under matted like felt, and in the spring
these appendages dropped off. They gave me a pair of her "wings,"
which I keep still. There is no appearance of a membrane about
them. Some thought it was part flying squirrel or some other wild
animal, which is not impossible, for, according to naturalists,
prolific hybrids have been produced by the union of the marten and
domestic cat. This would have been the right kind of cat for me to
keep, if I had kept any for why should not a poet's cat be winged
as well as his horse?
In the fall the loon Colymbus glacialis came, as usual, to
moult and bathe in the pond, making the woods ring with his wild
laughter before I had risen. At rumor of his arrival all the
Milldam sportsmen are on the alert, in gigs and on foot, two by two
and three by three, with patent rifles and conical balls and
spyglasses. They come rustling through the woods like autumn
leaves, at least ten men to one loon. Some station themselves on
this side of the pond, some on that, for the poor bird cannot be
omnipresent if he dive here he must come up there. But now the
kind October wind rises, rustling the leaves and rippling the
surface of the water, so that no loon can be heard or seen, though
his foes sweep the pond with spyglasses, and make the woods resound
with their discharges. The waves generously rise and dash angrily,
taking sides with all waterfowl, and our sportsmen must beat a
retreat to town and shop and unfinished jobs. But they were too
often successful. When I went to get a pail of water early in the
morning I frequently saw this stately bird sailing out of my cove
within a few rods. If I endeavored to overtake him in a boat, in
order to see how he would manoeuvre, he would dive and be completely
lost, so that I did not discover him again, sometimes, till the
latter part of the day. But I was more than a match for him on the
surface. He commonly went off in a rain.
As I was paddling along the north shore one very calm October
afternoon, for such days especially they settle on to the lakes,
like the milkweed down, having looked in vain over the pond for a
loon, suddenly one, sailing out from the shore toward the middle a
few rods in front of me, set up his wild laugh and betrayed himself.
I pursued with a paddle and he dived, but when he came up I was
nearer than before. He dived again, but I miscalculated the
direction he would take, and we were fifty rods apart when he came
to the surface this time, for I had helped to widen the interval
and again he laughed long and loud, and with more reason than
before. He manoeuvred so cunningly that I could not get within half
a dozen rods of him. Each time, when he came to the surface,
turning his head this way and that, he cooly surveyed the water and
the land, and apparently chose his course so that he might come up
where there was the widest expanse of water and at the greatest
distance from the boat. It was surprising how quickly he made up
his mind and put his resolve into execution. He led me at once to
the widest part of the pond, and could not be driven from it. While
he was thinking one thing in his brain, I was endeavoring to divine
his thought in mine. It was a pretty game, played on the smooth
surface of the pond, a man against a loon. Suddenly your
adversary's checker disappears beneath the board, and the problem is
to place yours nearest to where his will appear again. Sometimes he
would come up unexpectedly on the opposite side of me, having
apparently passed directly under the boat. So longwinded was he
and so unweariable, that when he had swum farthest he would
immediately plunge again, nevertheless and then no wit could divine
where in the deep pond, beneath the smooth surface, he might be
speeding his way like a fish, for he had time and ability to visit
the bottom of the pond in its deepest part. It is said that loons
have been caught in the New York lakes eighty feet beneath the
surface, with hooks set for trout  though Walden is deeper than
that. How surprised must the fishes be to see this ungainly visitor
from another sphere speeding his way amid their schools Yet he
appeared to know his course as surely under water as on the surface,
and swam much faster there. Once or twice I saw a ripple where he
approached the surface, just put his head out to reconnoitre, and
instantly dived again. I found that it was as well for me to rest
on my oars and wait his reappearing as to endeavor to calculate
where he would rise for again and again, when I was straining my
eyes over the surface one way, I would suddenly be startled by his
unearthly laugh behind me. But why, after displaying so much
cunning, did he invariably betray himself the moment he came up by
that loud laugh? Did not his white breast enough betray him? He
was indeed a silly loon, I thought. I could commonly hear the
splash of the water when he came up, and so also detected him. But
after an hour he seemed as fresh as ever, dived as willingly, and
swam yet farther than at first. It was surprising to see how
serenely he sailed off with unruffled breast when he came to the
surface, doing all the work with his webbed feet beneath. His usual
note was this demoniac laughter, yet somewhat like that of a
waterfowl but occasionally, when he had balked me most
successfully and come up a long way off, he uttered a longdrawn
unearthly howl, probably more like that of a wolf than any bird as
when a beast puts his muzzle to the ground and deliberately howls.
This was his looning  perhaps the wildest sound that is ever heard
here, making the woods ring far and wide. I concluded that he
laughed in derision of my efforts, confident of his own resources.
Though the sky was by this time overcast, the pond was so smooth
that I could see where he broke the surface when I did not hear him.
His white breast, the stillness of the air, and the smoothness of
the water were all against him. At length having come up fifty rods
off, he uttered one of those prolonged howls, as if calling on the
god of loons to aid him, and immediately there came a wind from the
east and rippled the surface, and filled the whole air with misty
rain, and I was impressed as if it were the prayer of the loon
answered, and his god was angry with me and so I left him
disappearing far away on the tumultuous surface.
For hours, in fall days, I watched the ducks cunningly tack and
veer and hold the middle of the pond, far from the sportsman tricks
which they will have less need to practise in Louisiana bayous.
When compelled to rise they would sometimes circle round and round
and over the pond at a considerable height, from which they could
easily see to other ponds and the river, like black motes in the
sky and, when I thought they had gone off thither long since, they
would settle down by a slanting flight of a quarter of a mile on to
a distant part which was left free but what beside safety they got
by sailing in the middle of Walden I do not know, unless they love
its water for the same reason that I do.
HouseWarming
In October I went agraping to the river meadows, and loaded
myself with clusters more precious for their beauty and fragrance
than for food. There, too, I admired, though I did not gather, the
cranberries, small waxen gems, pendants of the meadow grass, pearly
and red, which the farmer plucks with an ugly rake, leaving the
smooth meadow in a snarl, heedlessly measuring them by the bushel
and the dollar only, and sells the spoils of the meads to Boston and
New York destined to be jammed, to satisfy the tastes of lovers of
Nature there. So butchers rake the tongues of bison out of the
prairie grass, regardless of the torn and drooping plant. The
barberry's brilliant fruit was likewise food for my eyes merely but
I collected a small store of wild apples for coddling, which the
proprietor and travellers had overlooked. When chestnuts were ripe
I laid up half a bushel for winter. It was very exciting at that
season to roam the then boundless chestnut woods of Lincoln  they
now sleep their long sleep under the railroad  with a bag on my
shoulder, and a stick to open burs with in my hand, for I did not
always wait for the frost, amid the rustling of leaves and the loud
reproofs of the red squirrels and the jays, whose halfconsumed nuts
I sometimes stole, for the burs which they had selected were sure to
contain sound ones. Occasionally I climbed and shook the trees.
They grew also behind my house, and one large tree, which almost
overshadowed it, was, when in flower, a bouquet which scented the
whole neighborhood, but the squirrels and the jays got most of its
fruit the last coming in flocks early in the morning and picking
the nuts out of the burs before they fell, I relinquished these
trees to them and visited the more distant woods composed wholly of
chestnut. These nuts, as far as they went, were a good substitute
for bread. Many other substitutes might, perhaps, be found.
Digging one day for fishworms, I discovered the groundnut Apios
tuberosa on its string, the potato of the aborigines, a sort of
fabulous fruit, which I had begun to doubt if I had ever dug and
eaten in childhood, as I had told, and had not dreamed it. I had
often since seen its crumpled red velvety blossom supported by the
stems of other plants without knowing it to be the same.
Cultivation has wellnigh exterminated it. It has a sweetish taste,
much like that of a frostbitten potato, and I found it better
boiled than roasted. This tuber seemed like a faint promise of
Nature to rear her own children and feed them simply here at some
future period. In these days of fatted cattle and waving
grainfields this humble root, which was once the totem of an Indian
tribe, is quite forgotten, or known only by its flowering vine but
let wild Nature reign here once more, and the tender and luxurious
English grains will probably disappear before a myriad of foes, and
without the care of man the crow may carry back even the last seed
of corn to the great cornfield of the Indian's God in the southwest,
whence he is said to have brought it but the now almost
exterminated groundnut will perhaps revive and flourish in spite of
frosts and wildness, prove itself indigenous, and resume its ancient
importance and dignity as the diet of the hunter tribe. Some Indian
Ceres or Minerva must have been the inventor and bestower of it and
when the reign of poetry commences here, its leaves and string of
nuts may be represented on our works of art.
Already, by the first of September, I had seen two or three
small maples turned scarlet across the pond, beneath where the white
stems of three aspens diverged, at the point of a promontory, next
the water. Ah, many a tale their color told And gradually from
week to week the character of each tree came out, and it admired
itself reflected in the smooth mirror of the lake. Each morning the
manager of this gallery substituted some new picture, distinguished
by more brilliant or harmonious coloring, for the old upon the
walls.
The wasps came by thousands to my lodge in October, as to winter
quarters, and settled on my windows within and on the walls
overhead, sometimes deterring visitors from entering. Each morning,
when they were numbed with cold, I swept some of them out, but I did
not trouble myself much to get rid of them I even felt complimented
by their regarding my house as a desirable shelter. They never
molested me seriously, though they bedded with me and they
gradually disappeared, into what crevices I do not know, avoiding
winter and unspeakable cold.
Like the wasps, before I finally went into winter quarters in
November, I used to resort to the northeast side of Walden, which
the sun, reflected from the pitch pine woods and the stony shore,
made the fireside of the pond it is so much pleasanter and
wholesomer to be warmed by the sun while you can be, than by an
artificial fire. I thus warmed myself by the still glowing embers
which the summer, like a departed hunter, had left.
When I came to build my chimney I studied masonry. My bricks,
being secondhand ones, required to be cleaned with a trowel, so
that I learned more than usual of the qualities of bricks and
trowels. The mortar on them was fifty years old, and was said to be
still growing harder but this is one of those sayings which men
love to repeat whether they are true or not. Such sayings
themselves grow harder and adhere more firmly with age, and it would
take many blows with a trowel to clean an old wiseacre of them.
Many of the villages of Mesopotamia are built of secondhand bricks
of a very good quality, obtained from the ruins of Babylon, and the
cement on them is older and probably harder still. However that may
be, I was struck by the peculiar toughness of the steel which bore
so many violent blows without being worn out. As my bricks had been
in a chimney before, though I did not read the name of
Nebuchadnezzar on them, I picked out its many fireplace bricks as I
could find, to save work and waste, and I filled the spaces between
the bricks about the fireplace with stones from the pond shore, and
also made my mortar with the white sand from the same place. I
lingered most about the fireplace, as the most vital part of the
house. Indeed, I worked so deliberately, that though I commenced at
the ground in the morning, a course of bricks raised a few inches
above the floor served for my pillow at night yet I did not get a
stiff neck for it that I remember my stiff neck is of older date.
I took a poet to board for a fortnight about those times, which
caused me to be put to it for room. He brought his own knife,
though I had two, and we used to scour them by thrusting them into
the earth. He shared with me the labors of cooking. I was pleased
to see my work rising so square and solid by degrees, and reflected,
that, if it proceeded slowly, it was calculated to endure a long
time. The chimney is to some extent an independent structure,
standing on the ground, and rising through the house to the heavens
even after the house is burned it still stands sometimes, and its
importance and independence are apparent. This was toward the end
of summer. It was now November.
The north wind had already begun to cool the pond, though it
took many weeks of steady blowing to accomplish it, it is so deep.
When I began to have a fire at evening, before I plastered my house,
the chimney carried smoke particularly well, because of the numerous
chinks between the boards. Yet I passed some cheerful evenings in
that cool and airy apartment, surrounded by the rough brown boards
full of knots, and rafters with the bark on high overhead. My house
never pleased my eye so much after it was plastered, though I was
obliged to confess that it was more comfortable. Should not every
apartment in which man dwells be lofty enough to create some
obscurity overhead, where flickering shadows may play at evening
about the rafters? These forms are more agreeable to the fancy and
imagination than fresco paintings or other the most expensive
furniture. I now first began to inhabit my house, I may say, when I
began to use it for warmth as well as shelter. I had got a couple
of old firedogs to keep the wood from the hearth, and it did me
good to see the soot form on the back of the chimney which I had
built, and I poked the fire with more right and more satisfaction
than usual. My dwelling was small, and I could hardly entertain an
echo in it but it seemed larger for being a single apartment and
remote from neighbors. All the attractions of a house were
concentrated in one room it was kitchen, chamber, parlor, and
keepingroom and whatever satisfaction parent or child, master or
servant, derive from living in a house, I enjoyed it all. Cato
says, the master of a family patremfamilias must have in his
rustic villa "cellam oleariam, vinariam, dolia multa, uti lubeat
caritatem expectare, et rei, et virtuti, et gloriae erit," that is,
"an oil and wine cellar, many casks, so that it may be pleasant to
expect hard times it will be for his advantage, and virtue, and
glory." I had in my cellar a firkin of potatoes, about two quarts
of peas with the weevil in them, and on my shelf a little rice, a
jug of molasses, and of rye and Indian meal a peck each.
I sometimes dream of a larger and more populous house, standing
in a golden age, of enduring materials, and without gingerbread
work, which shall still consist of only one room, a vast, rude,
substantial, primitive hall, without ceiling or plastering, with
bare rafters and purlins supporting a sort of lower heaven over
one's head  useful to keep off rain and snow, where the king and
queen posts stand out to receive your homage, when you have done
reverence to the prostrate Saturn of an older dynasty on stepping
over the sill a cavernous house, wherein you must reach up a torch
upon a pole to see the roof where some may live in the fireplace,
some in the recess of a window, and some on settles, some at one end
of the hall, some at another, and some aloft on rafters with the
spiders, if they choose a house which you have got into when you
have opened the outside door, and the ceremony is over where the
weary traveller may wash, and eat, and converse, and sleep, without
further journey such a shelter as you would be glad to reach in a
tempestuous night, containing all the essentials of a house, and
nothing for housekeeping where you can see all the treasures of
the house at one view, and everything hangs upon its peg, that a man
should use at once kitchen, pantry, parlor, chamber, storehouse,
and garret where you can see so necessary a thing, as a barrel or a
ladder, so convenient a thing as a cupboard, and hear the pot boil,
and pay your respects to the fire that cooks your dinner, and the
oven that bakes your bread, and the necessary furniture and utensils
are the chief ornaments where the washing is not put out, nor the
fire, nor the mistress, and perhaps you are sometimes requested to
move from off the trapdoor, when the cook would descend into the
cellar, and so learn whether the ground is solid or hollow beneath
you without stamping. A house whose inside is as open and manifest
as a bird's nest, and you cannot go in at the front door and out at
the back without seeing some of its inhabitants where to be a guest
is to be presented with the freedom of the house, and not to be
carefully excluded from seven eighths of it, shut up in a particular
cell, and told to make yourself at home there  in solitary
confinement. Nowadays the host does not admit you to his hearth,
but has got the mason to build one for yourself somewhere in his
alley, and hospitality is the art of keeping you at the greatest
distance. There is as much secrecy about the cooking as if he had a
design to poison you. I am aware that I have been on many a man's
premises, and might have been legally ordered off, but I am not
aware that I have been in many men's houses. I might visit in my
old clothes a king and queen who lived simply in such a house as I
have described, if I were going their way but backing out of a
modern palace will be all that I shall desire to learn, if ever I am
caught in one.
It would seem as if the very language of our parlors would lose
all its nerve and degenerate into palaver wholly, our lives pass at
such remoteness from its symbols, and its metaphors and tropes are
necessarily so far fetched, through slides and dumbwaiters, as it
were in other words, the parlor is so far from the kitchen and
workshop. The dinner even is only the parable of a dinner,
commonly. As if only the savage dwelt near enough to Nature and
Truth to borrow a trope from them. How can the scholar, who dwells
away in the North West Territory or the Isle of Man, tell what is
parliamentary in the kitchen?
However, only one or two of my guests were ever bold enough to
stay and eat a hastypudding with me but when they saw that crisis
approaching they beat a hasty retreat rather, as if it would shake
the house to its foundations. Nevertheless, it stood through a
great many hastypuddings.
I did not plaster till it was freezing weather. I brought over
some whiter and cleaner sand for this purpose from the opposite
shore of the pond in a boat, a sort of conveyance which would have
tempted me to go much farther if necessary. My house had in the
meanwhile been shingled down to the ground on every side. In
lathing I was pleased to be able to send home each nail with a
single blow of the hammer, and it was my ambition to transfer the
plaster from the board to the wall neatly and rapidly. I remembered
the story of a conceited fellow, who, in fine clothes, was wont to
lounge about the village once, giving advice to workmen. Venturing
one day to substitute deeds for words, he turned up his cuffs,
seized a plasterer's board, and having loaded his trowel without
mishap, with a complacent look toward the lathing overhead, made a
bold gesture thitherward and straightway, to his complete
discomfiture, received the whole contents in his ruffled bosom. I
admired anew the economy and convenience of plastering, which so
effectually shuts out the cold and takes a handsome finish, and I
learned the various casualties to which the plasterer is liable. I
was surprised to see how thirsty the bricks were which drank up all
the moisture in my plaster before I had smoothed it, and how many
pailfuls of water it takes to christen a new hearth. I had the
previous winter made a small quantity of lime by burning the shells
of the Unio fluviatilis, which our river affords, for the sake of
the experiment so that I knew where my materials came from. I
might have got good limestone within a mile or two and burned it
myself, if I had cared to do so.
The pond had in the meanwhile skimmed over in the shadiest and
shallowest coves, some days or even weeks before the general
freezing. The first ice is especially interesting and perfect,
being hard, dark, and transparent, and affords the best opportunity
that ever offers for examining the bottom where it is shallow for
you can lie at your length on ice only an inch thick, like a skater
insect on the surface of the water, and study the bottom at your
leisure, only two or three inches distant, like a picture behind a
glass, and the water is necessarily always smooth then. There are
many furrows in the sand where some creature has travelled about and
doubled on its tracks and, for wrecks, it is strewn with the cases
of caddisworms made of minute grains of white quartz. Perhaps
these have creased it, for you find some of their cases in the
furrows, though they are deep and broad for them to make. But the
ice itself is the object of most interest, though you must improve
the earliest opportunity to study it. If you examine it closely the
morning after it freezes, you find that the greater part of the
bubbles, which at first appeared to be within it, are against its
under surface, and that more are continually rising from the bottom
while the ice is as yet comparatively solid and dark, that is, you
see the water through it. These bubbles are from an eightieth to an
eighth of an inch in diameter, very clear and beautiful, and you see
your face reflected in them through the ice. There may be thirty or
forty of them to a square inch. There are also already within the
ice narrow oblong perpendicular bubbles about half an inch long,
sharp cones with the apex upward or oftener, if the ice is quite
fresh, minute spherical bubbles one directly above another, like a
string of beads. But these within the ice are not so numerous nor
obvious as those beneath. I sometimes used to cast on stones to try
the strength of the ice, and those which broke through carried in
air with them, which formed very large and conspicuous white bubbles
beneath. One day when I came to the same place fortyeight hours
afterward, I found that those large bubbles were still perfect,
though an inch more of ice had formed, as I could see distinctly by
the seam in the edge of a cake. But as the last two days had been
very warm, like an Indian summer, the ice was not now transparent,
showing the dark green color of the water, and the bottom, but
opaque and whitish or gray, and though twice as thick was hardly
stronger than before, for the air bubbles had greatly expanded under
this heat and run together, and lost their regularity they were no
longer one directly over another, but often like silvery coins
poured from a bag, one overlapping another, or in thin flakes, as if
occupying slight cleavages. The beauty of the ice was gone, and it
was too late to study the bottom. Being curious to know what
position my great bubbles occupied with regard to the new ice, I
broke out a cake containing a middling sized one, and turned it
bottom upward. The new ice had formed around and under the bubble,
so that it was included between the two ices. It was wholly in the
lower ice, but close against the upper, and was flattish, or perhaps
slightly lenticular, with a rounded edge, a quarter of an inch deep
by four inches in diameter and I was surprised to find that
directly under the bubble the ice was melted with great regularity
in the form of a saucer reversed, to the height of five eighths of
an inch in the middle, leaving a thin partition there between the
water and the bubble, hardly an eighth of an inch thick and in many
places the small bubbles in this partition had burst out downward,
and probably there was no ice at all under the largest bubbles,
which were a foot in diameter. I inferred that the infinite number
of minute bubbles which I had first seen against the under surface
of the ice were now frozen in likewise, and that each, in its
degree, had operated like a burningglass on the ice beneath to melt
and rot it. These are the little airguns which contribute to make
the ice crack and whoop.
At length the winter set in good earnest, just as I had finished
plastering, and the wind began to howl around the house as if it had
not had permission to do so till then. Night after night the geese
came lumbering in the dark with a clangor and a whistling of wings,
even after the ground was covered with snow, some to alight in
Walden, and some flying low over the woods toward Fair Haven, bound
for Mexico. Several times, when returning from the village at ten
or eleven o'clock at night, I heard the tread of a flock of geese,
or else ducks, on the dry leaves in the woods by a pondhole behind
my dwelling, where they had come up to feed, and the faint honk or
quack of their leader as they hurried off. In  Walden froze
entirely over for the first time on the night of the d of
December, Flint's and other shallower ponds and the river having
been frozen ten days or more in ', the th in ', about the
st and in ', about the th of December in ', the th of
January in ', the st of December. The snow had already covered
the ground since the th of November, and surrounded me suddenly
with the scenery of winter. I withdrew yet farther into my shell,
and endeavored to keep a bright fire both within my house and within
my breast. My employment out of doors now was to collect the dead
wood in the forest, bringing it in my hands or on my shoulders, or
sometimes trailing a dead pine tree under each arm to my shed. An
old forest fence which had seen its best days was a great haul for
me. I sacrificed it to Vulcan, for it was past serving the god
Terminus. How much more interesting an event is that man's supper
who has just been forth in the snow to hunt, nay, you might say,
steal, the fuel to cook it with His bread and meat are sweet.
There are enough fagots and waste wood of all kinds in the forests
of most of our towns to support many fires, but which at present
warm none, and, some think, hinder the growth of the young wood.
There was also the driftwood of the pond. In the course of the
summer I had discovered a raft of pitch pine logs with the bark on,
pinned together by the Irish when the railroad was built. This I
hauled up partly on the shore. After soaking two years and then
lying high six months it was perfectly sound, though waterlogged
past drying. I amused myself one winter day with sliding this
piecemeal across the pond, nearly half a mile, skating behind with
one end of a log fifteen feet long on my shoulder, and the other on
the ice or I tied several logs together with a birch withe, and
then, with a longer birch or alder which had a book at the end,
dragged them across. Though completely waterlogged and almost as
heavy as lead, they not only burned long, but made a very hot fire
nay, I thought that they burned better for the soaking, as if the
pitch, being confined by the water, burned longer, as in a lamp.
Gilpin, in his account of the forest borderers of England, says
that "the encroachments of trespassers, and the houses and fences
thus raised on the borders of the forest," were "considered as great
nuisances by the old forest law, and were severely punished under
the name of purprestures, as tending ad terrorem ferarum  ad
nocumentum forestae, etc.," to the frightening of the game and the
detriment of the forest. But I was interested in the preservation
of the venison and the vert more than the hunters or woodchoppers,
and as much as though I had been the Lord Warden himself and if any
part was burned, though I burned it myself by accident, I grieved
with a grief that lasted longer and was more inconsolable than that
of the proprietors nay, I grieved when it was cut down by the
proprietors themselves. I would that our farmers when they cut down
a forest felt some of that awe which the old Romans did when they
came to thin, or let in the light to, a consecrated grove lucum
conlucare, that is, would believe that it is sacred to some god.
The Roman made an expiatory offering, and prayed, Whatever god or
goddess thou art to whom this grove is sacred, be propitious to me,
my family, and children, etc.
It is remarkable what a value is still put upon wood even in
this age and in this new country, a value more permanent and
universal than that of gold. After all our discoveries and
inventions no man will go by a pile of wood. It is as precious to
us as it was to our Saxon and Norman ancestors. If they made their
bows of it, we make our gunstocks of it. Michaux, more than thirty
years ago, says that the price of wood for fuel in New York and
Philadelphia "nearly equals, and sometimes exceeds, that of the best
wood in Paris, though this immense capital annually requires more
than three hundred thousand cords, and is surrounded to the distance
of three hundred miles by cultivated plains." In this town the
price of wood rises almost steadily, and the only question is, how
much higher it is to be this year than it was the last. Mechanics
and tradesmen who come in person to the forest on no other errand,
are sure to attend the wood auction, and even pay a high price for
the privilege of gleaning after the woodchopper. It is now many
years that men have resorted to the forest for fuel and the
materials of the arts the New Englander and the New Hollander, the
Parisian and the Celt, the farmer and Robin Hood, Goody Blake and
Harry Gill in most parts of the world the prince and the peasant,
the scholar and the savage, equally require still a few sticks from
the forest to warm them and cook their food. Neither could I do
without them.
Every man looks at his woodpile with a kind of affection. I
love to have mine before my window, and the more chips the better to
remind me of my pleasing work. I had an old axe which nobody
claimed, with which by spells in winter days, on the sunny side of
the house, I played about the stumps which I had got out of my
beanfield. As my driver prophesied when I was plowing, they warmed
me twice  once while I was splitting them, and again when they
were on the fire, so that no fuel could give out more heat. As for
the axe, I was advised to get the village blacksmith to "jump" it
but I jumped him, and, putting a hickory helve from the woods into
it, made it do. If it was dull, it was at least hung true.
A few pieces of fat pine were a great treasure. It is
interesting to remember how much of this food for fire is still
concealed in the bowels of the earth. In previous years I had often
gone prospecting over some bare hillside, where a pitch pine wood
had formerly stood, and got out the fat pine roots. They are almost
indestructible. Stumps thirty or forty years old, at least, will
still be sound at the core, though the sapwood has all become
vegetable mould, as appears by the scales of the thick bark forming
a ring level with the earth four or five inches distant from the
heart. With axe and shovel you explore this mine, and follow the
marrowy store, yellow as beef tallow, or as if you had struck on a
vein of gold, deep into the earth. But commonly I kindled my fire
with the dry leaves of the forest, which I had stored up in my shed
before the snow came. Green hickory finely split makes the
woodchopper's kindlings, when he has a camp in the woods. Once in a
while I got a little of this. When the villagers were lighting
their fires beyond the horizon, I too gave notice to the various
wild inhabitants of Walden vale, by a smoky streamer from my
chimney, that I was awake.
Lightwinged Smoke, Icarian bird,
Melting thy pinions in thy upward flight,
Lark without song, and messenger of dawn,
Circling above the hamlets as thy nest
Or else, departing dream, and shadowy form
Of midnight vision, gathering up thy skirts
By night starveiling, and by day
Darkening the light and blotting out the sun
Go thou my incense upward from this hearth,
And ask the gods to pardon this clear flame.
Hard green wood just cut, though I used but little of that,
answered my purpose better than any other. I sometimes left a good
fire when I went to take a walk in a winter afternoon and when I
returned, three or four hours afterward, it would be still alive and
glowing. My house was not empty though I was gone. It was as if I
had left a cheerful housekeeper behind. It was I and Fire that
lived there and commonly my housekeeper proved trustworthy. One
day, however, as I was splitting wood, I thought that I would just
look in at the window and see if the house was not on fire it was
the only time I remember to have been particularly anxious on this
score so I looked and saw that a spark had caught my bed, and I
went in and extinguished it when it had burned a place as big as my
hand. But my house occupied so sunny and sheltered a position, and
its roof was so low, that I could afford to let the fire go out in
the middle of almost any winter day.
The moles nested in my cellar, nibbling every third potato, and
making a snug bed even there of some hair left after plastering and
of brown paper for even the wildest animals love comfort and warmth
as well as man, and they survive the winter only because they are so
careful to secure them. Some of my friends spoke as if I was coming
to the woods on purpose to freeze myself. The animal merely makes a
bed, which he warms with his body, in a sheltered place but man,
having discovered fire, boxes up some air in a spacious apartment,
and warms that, instead of robbing himself, makes that his bed, in
which he can move about divested of more cumbrous clothing, maintain
a kind of summer in the midst of winter, and by means of windows
even admit the light, and with a lamp lengthen out the day. Thus he
goes a step or two beyond instinct, and saves a little time for the
fine arts. Though, when I had been exposed to the rudest blasts a
long time, my whole body began to grow torpid, when I reached the
genial atmosphere of my house I soon recovered my faculties and
prolonged my life. But the most luxuriously housed has little to
boast of in this respect, nor need we trouble ourselves to speculate
how the human race may be at last destroyed. It would be easy to
cut their threads any time with a little sharper blast from the
north. We go on dating from Cold Fridays and Great Snows but a
little colder Friday, or greater snow would put a period to man's
existence on the globe.
The next winter I used a small cookingstove for economy, since
I did not own the forest but it did not keep fire so well as the
open fireplace. Cooking was then, for the most part, no longer a
poetic, but merely a chemic process. It will soon be forgotten, in
these days of stoves, that we used to roast potatoes in the ashes,
after the Indian fashion. The stove not only took up room and
scented the house, but it concealed the fire, and I felt as if I had
lost a companion. You can always see a face in the fire. The
laborer, looking into it at evening, purifies his thoughts of the
dross and earthiness which they have accumulated during the day.
But I could no longer sit and look into the fire, and the pertinent
words of a poet recurred to me with new force.
"Never, bright flame, may be denied to me
Thy dear, life imaging, close sympathy.
What but my hopes shot upward e'er so bright?
What but my fortunes sunk so low in night?
Why art thou banished from our hearth and hall,
Thou who art welcomed and beloved by all?
Was thy existence then too fanciful
For our life's common light, who are so dull?
Did thy bright gleam mysterious converse hold
With our congenial souls? secrets too bold?
Well, we are safe and strong, for now we sit
Beside a hearth where no dim shadows flit,
Where nothing cheers nor saddens, but a fire
Warms feet and hands  nor does to more aspire
By whose compact utilitarian heap
The present may sit down and go to sleep,
Nor fear the ghosts who from the dim past walked,
And with us by the unequal light of the old wood fire talked."
Former Inhabitants and Winter Visitors
I weathered some merry snowstorms, and spent some cheerful
winter evenings by my fireside, while the snow whirled wildly
without, and even the hooting of the owl was hushed. For many weeks
I met no one in my walks but those who came occasionally to cut wood
and sled it to the village. The elements, however, abetted me in
making a path through the deepest snow in the woods, for when I had
once gone through the wind blew the oak leaves into my tracks, where
they lodged, and by absorbing the rays of the sun melted the snow,
and so not only made a my bed for my feet, but in the night their
dark line was my guide. For human society I was obliged to conjure
up the former occupants of these woods. Within the memory of many
of my townsmen the road near which my house stands resounded with
the laugh and gossip of inhabitants, and the woods which border it
were notched and dotted here and there with their little gardens and
dwellings, though it was then much more shut in by the forest than
now. In some places, within my own remembrance, the pines would
scrape both sides of a chaise at once, and women and children who
were compelled to go this way to Lincoln alone and on foot did it
with fear, and often ran a good part of the distance. Though mainly
but a humble route to neighboring villages, or for the woodman's
team, it once amused the traveller more than now by its variety, and
lingered longer in his memory. Where now firm open fields stretch
from the village to the woods, it then ran through a maple swamp on
a foundation of logs, the remnants of which, doubtless, still
underlie the present dusty highway, from the Stratton, now the
AlmsHouse Farm, to Brister's Hill.
East of my beanfield, across the road, lived Cato Ingraham,
slave of Duncan Ingraham, Esquire, gentleman, of Concord village,
who built his slave a house, and gave him permission to live in
Walden Woods  Cato, not Uticensis, but Concordiensis. Some say
that he was a Guinea Negro. There are a few who remember his little
patch among the walnuts, which he let grow up till he should be old
and need them but a younger and whiter speculator got them at last.
He too, however, occupies an equally narrow house at present.
Cato's halfobliterated cellarhole still remains, though known to
few, being concealed from the traveller by a fringe of pines. It is
now filled with the smooth sumach Rhus glabra, and one of the
earliest species of goldenrod Solidago stricta grows there
luxuriantly.
Here, by the very corner of my field, still nearer to town,
Zilpha, a colored woman, had her little house, where she spun linen
for the townsfolk, making the Walden Woods ring with her shrill
singing, for she had a loud and notable voice. At length, in the
war of , her dwelling was set on fire by English soldiers,
prisoners on parole, when she was away, and her cat and dog and hens
were all burned up together. She led a hard life, and somewhat
inhumane. One old frequenter of these woods remembers, that as he
passed her house one noon he heard her muttering to herself over her
gurgling pot  "Ye are all bones, bones" I have seen bricks amid
the oak copse there.
Down the road, on the right hand, on Brister's Hill, lived
Brister Freeman, "a handy Negro," slave of Squire Cummings once 
there where grow still the apple trees which Brister planted and
tended large old trees now, but their fruit still wild and ciderish
to my taste. Not long since I read his epitaph in the old Lincoln
buryingground, a little on one side, near the unmarked graves of
some British grenadiers who fell in the retreat from Concord 
where he is styled "Sippio Brister"  Scipio Africanus he had some
title to be called  "a man of color," as if he were discolored.
It also told me, with staring emphasis, when he died which was but
an indirect way of informing me that he ever lived. With him dwelt
Fenda, his hospitable wife, who told fortunes, yet pleasantly 
large, round, and black, blacker than any of the children of night,
such a dusky orb as never rose on Concord before or since.
Farther down the hill, on the left, on the old road in the
woods, are marks of some homestead of the Stratton family whose
orchard once covered all the slope of Brister's Hill, but was long
since killed out by pitch pines, excepting a few stumps, whose old
roots furnish still the wild stocks of many a thrifty village tree.
Nearer yet to town, you come to Breed's location, on the other
side of the way, just on the edge of the wood ground famous for the
pranks of a demon not distinctly named in old mythology, who has
acted a prominent and astounding part in our New England life, and
deserves, as much as any mythological character, to have his
biography written one day who first comes in the guise of a friend
or hired man, and then robs and murders the whole family 
NewEngland Rum. But history must not yet tell the tragedies
enacted here let time intervene in some measure to assuage and lend
an azure tint to them. Here the most indistinct and dubious
tradition says that once a tavern stood the well the same, which
tempered the traveller's beverage and refreshed his steed. Here
then men saluted one another, and heard and told the news, and went
their ways again.
Breed's hut was standing only a dozen years ago, though it had
long been unoccupied. It was about the size of mine. It was set on
fire by mischievous boys, one Election night, if I do not mistake.
I lived on the edge of the village then, and had just lost myself
over Davenant's "Gondibert," that winter that I labored with a
lethargy  which, by the way, I never knew whether to regard as a
family complaint, having an uncle who goes to sleep shaving himself,
and is obliged to sprout potatoes in a cellar Sundays, in order to
keep awake and keep the Sabbath, or as the consequence of my attempt
to read Chalmers' collection of English poetry without skipping. It
fairly overcame my Nervii. I had just sunk my head on this when the
bells rung fire, and in hot haste the engines rolled that way, led
by a straggling troop of men and boys, and I among the foremost, for
I had leaped the brook. We thought it was far south over the woods
we who had run to fires before  barn, shop, or dwellinghouse,
or all together. "It's Baker's barn," cried one. "It is the Codman
place," affirmed another. And then fresh sparks went up above the
wood, as if the roof fell in, and we all shouted "Concord to the
rescue" Wagons shot past with furious speed and crushing loads,
bearing, perchance, among the rest, the agent of the Insurance
Company, who was bound to go however far and ever and anon the
engine bell tinkled behind, more slow and sure and rearmost of all,
as it was afterward whispered, came they who set the fire and gave
the alarm. Thus we kept on like true idealists, rejecting the
evidence of our senses, until at a turn in the road we heard the
crackling and actually felt the heat of the fire from over the wall,
and realized, alas that we were there. The very nearness of the
fire but cooled our ardor. At first we thought to throw a frogpond
on to it but concluded to let it burn, it was so far gone and so
worthless. So we stood round our engine, jostled one another,
expressed our sentiments through speakingtrumpets, or in lower tone
referred to the great conflagrations which the world has witnessed,
including Bascom's shop, and, between ourselves, we thought that,
were we there in season with our "tub," and a full frogpond by, we
could turn that threatened last and universal one into another
flood. We finally retreated without doing any mischief  returned
to sleep and "Gondibert." But as for "Gondibert," I would except
that passage in the preface about wit being the soul's powder 
"but most of mankind are strangers to wit, as Indians are to
powder."
It chanced that I walked that way across the fields the
following night, about the same hour, and hearing a low moaning at
this spot, I drew near in the dark, and discovered the only survivor
of the family that I know, the heir of both its virtues and its
vices, who alone was interested in this burning, lying on his
stomach and looking over the cellar wall at the still smouldering
cinders beneath, muttering to himself, as is his wont. He had been
working far off in the river meadows all day, and had improved the
first moments that he could call his own to visit the home of his
fathers and his youth. He gazed into the cellar from all sides and
points of view by turns, always lying down to it, as if there was
some treasure, which he remembered, concealed between the stones,
where there was absolutely nothing but a heap of bricks and ashes.
The house being gone, he looked at what there was left. He was
soothed by the sympathy which my mere presence, implied, and showed
me, as well as the darkness permitted, where the well was covered
up which, thank Heaven, could never be burned and he groped long
about the wall to find the wellsweep which his father had cut and
mounted, feeling for the iron hook or staple by which a burden had
been fastened to the heavy end  all that he could now cling to 
to convince me that it was no common "rider." I felt it, and still
remark it almost daily in my walks, for by it hangs the history of a
family.
Once more, on the left, where are seen the well and lilac bushes
by the wall, in the now open field, lived Nutting and Le Grosse.
But to return toward Lincoln.
Farther in the woods than any of these, where the road
approaches nearest to the pond, Wyman the potter squatted, and
furnished his townsmen with earthenware, and left descendants to
succeed him. Neither were they rich in worldly goods, holding the
land by sufferance while they lived and there often the sheriff
came in vain to collect the taxes, and "attached a chip," for form's
sake, as I have read in his accounts, there being nothing else that
he could lay his hands on. One day in midsummer, when I was hoeing,
a man who was carrying a load of pottery to market stopped his horse
against my field and inquired concerning Wyman the younger. He had
long ago bought a potter's wheel of him, and wished to know what had
become of him. I had read of the potter's clay and wheel in
Scripture, but it had never occurred to me that the pots we use were
not such as had come down unbroken from those days, or grown on
trees like gourds somewhere, and I was pleased to hear that so
fictile an art was ever practiced in my neighborhood.
The last inhabitant of these woods before me was an Irishman,
Hugh Quoil if I have spelt his name with coil enough, who occupied
Wyman's tenement  Col. Quoil, he was called. Rumor said that he
had been a soldier at Waterloo. If he had lived I should have made
him fight his battles over again. His trade here was that of a
ditcher. Napoleon went to St. Helena Quoil came to Walden Woods.
All I know of him is tragic. He was a man of manners, like one who
had seen the world, and was capable of more civil speech than you
could well attend to. He wore a greatcoat in midsummer, being
affected with the trembling delirium, and his face was the color of
carmine. He died in the road at the foot of Brister's Hill shortly
after I came to the woods, so that I have not remembered him as a
neighbor. Before his house was pulled down, when his comrades
avoided it as "an unlucky castle," I visited it. There lay his old
clothes curled up by use, as if they were himself, upon his raised
plank bed. His pipe lay broken on the hearth, instead of a bowl
broken at the fountain. The last could never have been the symbol
of his death, for he confessed to me that, though he had heard of
Brister's Spring, he had never seen it and soiled cards, kings of
diamonds, spades, and hearts, were scattered over the floor. One
black chicken which the administrator could not catch, black as
night and as silent, not even croaking, awaiting Reynard, still went
to roost in the next apartment. In the rear there was the dim
outline of a garden, which had been planted but had never received
its first hoeing, owing to those terrible shaking fits, though it
was now harvest time. It was overrun with Roman wormwood and
beggarticks, which last stuck to my clothes for all fruit. The
skin of a woodchuck was freshly stretched upon the back of the
house, a trophy of his last Waterloo but no warm cap or mittens
would he want more.
Now only a dent in the earth marks the site of these dwellings,
with buried cellar stones, and strawberries, raspberries,
thimbleberries, hazelbushes, and sumachs growing in the sunny
sward there some pitch pine or gnarled oak occupies what was the
chimney nook, and a sweetscented black birch, perhaps, waves where
the doorstone was. Sometimes the well dent is visible, where once
a spring oozed now dry and tearless grass or it was covered deep
not to be discovered till some late day  with a flat stone
under the sod, when the last of the race departed. What a sorrowful
act must that be  the covering up of wells coincident with the
opening of wells of tears. These cellar dents, like deserted fox
burrows, old holes, are all that is left where once were the stir
and bustle of human life, and "fate, free will, foreknowledge
absolute," in some form and dialect or other were by turns
discussed. But all I can learn of their conclusions amounts to just
this, that "Cato and Brister pulled wool" which is about as
edifying as the history of more famous schools of philosophy.
Still grows the vivacious lilac a generation after the door and
lintel and the sill are gone, unfolding its sweetscented flowers
each spring, to be plucked by the musing traveller planted and
tended once by children's hands, in frontyard plots  now standing
by wallsides in retired pastures, and giving place to newrising
forests  the last of that stirp, sole survivor of that family.
Little did the dusky children think that the puny slip with its two
eyes only, which they stuck in the ground in the shadow of the house
and daily watered, would root itself so, and outlive them, and house
itself in the rear that shaded it, and grown man's garden and
orchard, and tell their story faintly to the lone wanderer a
halfcentury after they had grown up and died  blossoming as fair,
and smelling as sweet, as in that first spring. I mark its still
tender, civil, cheerful lilac colors.
But this small village, germ of something more, why did it fail
while Concord keeps its ground? Were there no natural advantages 
no water privileges, forsooth? Ay, the deep Walden Pond and cool
Brister's Spring  privilege to drink long and healthy draughts at
these, all unimproved by these men but to dilute their glass. They
were universally a thirsty race. Might not the basket,
stablebroom, matmaking, cornparching, linenspinning, and pottery
business have thrived here, making the wilderness to blossom like
the rose, and a numerous posterity have inherited the land of their
fathers? The sterile soil would at least have been proof against a
lowland degeneracy. Alas how little does the memory of these
human inhabitants enhance the beauty of the landscape Again,
perhaps, Nature will try, with me for a first settler, and my house
raised last spring to be the oldest in the hamlet.
I am not aware that any man has ever built on the spot which I
occupy. Deliver me from a city built on the site of a more ancient
city, whose materials are ruins, whose gardens cemeteries. The soil
is blanched and accursed there, and before that becomes necessary
the earth itself will be destroyed. With such reminiscences I
repeopled the woods and lulled myself asleep.
At this season I seldom had a visitor. When the snow lay
deepest no wanderer ventured near my house for a week or fortnight
at a time, but there I lived as snug as a meadow mouse, or as cattle
and poultry which are said to have survived for a long time buried
in drifts, even without food or like that early settler's family in
the town of Sutton, in this State, whose cottage was completely
covered by the great snow of  when he was absent, and an Indian
found it only by the hole which the chimney's breath made in the
drift, and so relieved the family. But no friendly Indian concerned
himself about me nor needed he, for the master of the house was at
home. The Great Snow How cheerful it is to hear of When the
farmers could not get to the woods and swamps with their teams, and
were obliged to cut down the shade trees before their houses, and,
when the crust was harder, cut off the trees in the swamps, ten feet
from the ground, as it appeared the next spring.
In the deepest snows, the path which I used from the highway to
my house, about half a mile long, might have been represented by a
meandering dotted line, with wide intervals between the dots. For a
week of even weather I took exactly the same number of steps, and of
the same length, coming and going, stepping deliberately and with
the precision of a pair of dividers in my own deep tracks  to such
routine the winter reduces us  yet often they were filled with
heaven's own blue. But no weather interfered fatally with my walks,
or rather my going abroad, for I frequently tramped eight or ten
miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beech
tree, or a yellow birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines
when the ice and snow causing their limbs to droop, and so
sharpening their tops, had changed the pines into fir trees wading
to the tops of the highest hills when the show was nearly two feet
deep on a level, and shaking down another snowstorm on my head at
every step or sometimes creeping and floundering thither on my
hands and knees, when the hunters had gone into winter quarters.
One afternoon I amused myself by watching a barred owl Strix
nebulosa sitting on one of the lower dead limbs of a white pine,
close to the trunk, in broad daylight, I standing within a rod of
him. He could hear me when I moved and cronched the snow with my
feet, but could not plainly see me. When I made most noise he would
stretch out his neck, and erect his neck feathers, and open his eyes
wide but their lids soon fell again, and he began to nod. I too
felt a slumberous influence after watching him half an hour, as he
sat thus with his eyes half open, like a cat, winged brother of the
cat. There was only a narrow slit left between their lids, by which
be preserved a pennisular relation to me thus, with halfshut eyes,
looking out from the land of dreams, and endeavoring to realize me,
vague object or mote that interrupted his visions. At length, on
some louder noise or my nearer approach, he would grow uneasy and
sluggishly turn about on his perch, as if impatient at having his
dreams disturbed and when he launched himself off and flapped
through the pines, spreading his wings to unexpected breadth, I
could not hear the slightest sound from them. Thus, guided amid the
pine boughs rather by a delicate sense of their neighborhood than by
sight, feeling his twilight way, as it were, with his sensitive
pinions, he found a new perch, where he might in peace await the
dawning of his day.
As I walked over the long causeway made for the railroad through
the meadows, I encountered many a blustering and nipping wind, for
nowhere has it freer play and when the frost had smitten me on one
cheek, heathen as I was, I turned to it the other also. Nor was it
much better by the carriage road from Brister's Hill. For I came to
town still, like a friendly Indian, when the contents of the broad
open fields were all piled up between the walls of the Walden road,
and half an hour sufficed to obliterate the tracks of the last
traveller. And when I returned new drifts would have formed,
through which I floundered, where the busy northwest wind had been
depositing the powdery snow round a sharp angle in the road, and not
a rabbit's track, nor even the fine print, the small type, of a
meadow mouse was to be seen. Yet I rarely failed to find, even in
midwinter, some warm and springly swamp where the grass and the
skunkcabbage still put forth with perennial verdure, and some
hardier bird occasionally awaited the return of spring.
Sometimes, notwithstanding the snow, when I returned from my
walk at evening I crossed the deep tracks of a woodchopper leading
from my door, and found his pile of whittlings on the hearth, and my
house filled with the odor of his pipe. Or on a Sunday afternoon,
if I chanced to be at home, I heard the cronching of the snow made
by the step of a longheaded farmer, who from far through the woods
sought my house, to have a social "crack" one of the few of his
vocation who are "men on their farms" who donned a frock instead of
a professor's gown, and is as ready to extract the moral out of
church or state as to haul a load of manure from his barnyard. We
talked of rude and simple times, when men sat about large fires in
cold, bracing weather, with clear heads and when other dessert
failed, we tried our teeth on many a nut which wise squirrels have
long since abandoned, for those which have the thickest shells are
commonly empty.
The one who came from farthest to my lodge, through deepest
snows and most dismal tempests, was a poet. A farmer, a hunter, a
soldier, a reporter, even a philosopher, may be daunted but nothing
can deter a poet, for he is actuated by pure love. Who can predict
his comings and goings? His business calls him out at all hours,
even when doctors sleep. We made that small house ring with
boisterous mirth and resound with the murmur of much sober talk,
making amends then to Walden vale for the long silences. Broadway
was still and deserted in comparison. At suitable intervals there
were regular salutes of laughter, which might have been referred
indifferently to the lastuttered or the forthcoming jest. We made
many a "bran new" theory of life over a thin dish of gruel, which
combined the advantages of conviviality with the clearheadedness
which philosophy requires.
I should not forget that during my last winter at the pond there
was another welcome visitor, who at one time came through the
village, through snow and rain and darkness, till he saw my lamp
through the trees, and shared with me some long winter evenings.
One of the last of the philosophers  Connecticut gave him to the
world  he peddled first her wares, afterwards, as he declares, his
brains. These he peddles still, prompting God and disgracing man,
bearing for fruit his brain only, like the nut its kernel. I think
that he must be the man of the most faith of any alive. His words
and attitude always suppose a better state of things than other men
are acquainted with, and he will be the last man to be disappointed
as the ages revolve. He has no venture in the present. But though
comparatively disregarded now, when his day comes, laws unsuspected
by most will take effect, and masters of families and rulers will
come to him for advice.
"How blind that cannot see serenity"
A true friend of man almost the only friend of human progress. An
Old Mortality, say rather an Immortality, with unwearied patience
and faith making plain the image engraven in men's bodies, the God
of whom they are but defaced and leaning monuments. With his
hospitable intellect he embraces children, beggars, insane, and
scholars, and entertains the thought of all, adding to it commonly
some breadth and elegance. I think that he should keep a
caravansary on the world's highway, where philosophers of all
nations might put up, and on his sign should be printed,
"Entertainment for man, but not for his beast. Enter ye that have
leisure and a quiet mind, who earnestly seek the right road." He is
perhaps the sanest man and has the fewest crotchets of any I chance
to know the same yesterday and tomorrow. Of yore we had sauntered
and talked, and effectually put the world behind us for he was
pledged to no institution in it, freeborn, ingenuus. Whichever way
we turned, it seemed that the heavens and the earth had met
together, since he enhanced the beauty of the landscape. A
bluerobed man, whose fittest roof is the overarching sky which
reflects his serenity. I do not see how he can ever die Nature
cannot spare him.
Having each some shingles of thought well dried, we sat and
whittled them, trying our knives, and admiring the clear yellowish
grain of the pumpkin pine. We waded so gently and reverently, or we
pulled together so smoothly, that the fishes of thought were not
scared from the stream, nor feared any angler on the bank, but came
and went grandly, like the clouds which float through the western
sky, and the mothero'pearl flocks which sometimes form and
dissolve there. There we worked, revising mythology, rounding a
fable here and there, and building castles in the air for which
earth offered no worthy foundation. Great Looker Great Expecter
to converse with whom was a New England Night's Entertainment. Ah
such discourse we had, hermit and philosopher, and the old settler I
have spoken of  we three  it expanded and racked my little
house I should not dare to say how many pounds' weight there was
above the atmospheric pressure on every circular inch it opened its
seams so that they had to be calked with much dulness thereafter to
stop the consequent leak  but I had enough of that kind of oakum
already picked.
There was one other with whom I had "solid seasons," long to be
remembered, at his house in the village, and who looked in upon me
from time to time but I had no more for society there.
There too, as everywhere, I sometimes expected the Visitor who
never comes. The Vishnu Purana says, "The householder is to remain
at eventide in his courtyard as long as it takes to milk a cow, or
longer if he pleases, to await the arrival of a guest." I often
performed this duty of hospitality, waited long enough to milk a
whole herd of cows, but did not see the man approaching from the
town.
Winter Animals
When the ponds were firmly frozen, they afforded not only new
and shorter routes to many points, but new views from their surfaces
of the familiar landscape around them. When I crossed Flint's Pond,
after it was covered with snow, though I had often paddled about and
skated over it, it was so unexpectedly wide and so strange that I
could think of nothing but Baffin's Bay. The Lincoln hills rose up
around me at the extremity of a snowy plain, in which I did not
remember to have stood before and the fishermen, at an
indeterminable distance over the ice, moving slowly about with their
wolfish dogs, passed for sealers, or Esquimaux, or in misty weather
loomed like fabulous creatures, and I did not know whether they were
giants or pygmies. I took this course when I went to lecture in
Lincoln in the evening, travelling in no road and passing no house
between my own hut and the lecture room. In Goose Pond, which lay
in my way, a colony of muskrats dwelt, and raised their cabins high
above the ice, though none could be seen abroad when I crossed it.
Walden, being like the rest usually bare of snow, or with only
shallow and interrupted drifts on it, was my yard where I could walk
freely when the snow was nearly two feet deep on a level elsewhere
and the villagers were confined to their streets. There, far from
the village street, and except at very long intervals, from the
jingle of sleighbells, I slid and skated, as in a vast mooseyard
well trodden, overhung by oak woods and solemn pines bent down with
snow or bristling with icicles.
For sounds in winter nights, and often in winter days, I heard
the forlorn but melodious note of a hooting owl indefinitely far
such a sound as the frozen earth would yield if struck with a
suitable plectrum, the very lingua vernacula of Walden Wood, and
quite familiar to me at last, though I never saw the bird while it
was making it. I seldom opened my door in a winter evening without
hearing it Hoo hoo hoo, hoorer, hoo, sounded sonorously, and the
first three syllables accented somewhat like how der do or
sometimes hoo, hoo only. One night in the beginning of winter,
before the pond froze over, about nine o'clock, I was startled by
the loud honking of a goose, and, stepping to the door, heard the
sound of their wings like a tempest in the woods as they flew low
over my house. They passed over the pond toward Fair Haven,
seemingly deterred from settling by my light, their commodore
honking all the while with a regular beat. Suddenly an unmistakable
catowl from very near me, with the most harsh and tremendous voice
I ever heard from any inhabitant of the woods, responded at regular
intervals to the goose, as if determined to expose and disgrace this
intruder from Hudson's Bay by exhibiting a greater compass and
volume of voice in a native, and boohoo him out of Concord horizon.
What do you mean by alarming the citadel at this time of night
consecrated to me? Do you think I am ever caught napping at such an
hour, and that I have not got lungs and a larynx as well as
yourself? Boohoo, boohoo, boohoo It was one of the most
thrilling discords I ever heard. And yet, if you had a
discriminating ear, there were in it the elements of a concord such
as these plains never saw nor heard.
I also heard the whooping of the ice in the pond, my great
bedfellow in that part of Concord, as if it were restless in its
bed and would fain turn over, were troubled with flatulency and had
dreams or I was waked by the cracking of the ground by the frost,
as if some one had driven a team against my door, and in the morning
would find a crack in the earth a quarter of a mile long and a third
of an inch wide.
Sometimes I heard the foxes as they ranged over the snowcrust,
in moonlight nights, in search of a partridge or other game, barking
raggedly and demoniacally like forest dogs, as if laboring with some
anxiety, or seeking expression, struggling for light and to be dogs
outright and run freely in the streets for if we take the ages into
our account, may there not be a civilization going on among brutes
as well as men? They seemed to me to be rudimental, burrowing men,
still standing on their defence, awaiting their transformation.
Sometimes one came near to my window, attracted by my light, barked
a vulpine curse at me, and then retreated.
Usually the red squirrel Sciurus Hudsonius waked me in the
dawn, coursing over the roof and up and down the sides of the house,
as if sent out of the woods for this purpose. In the course of the
winter I threw out half a bushel of ears of sweet corn, which had
not got ripe, on to the snowcrust by my door, and was amused by
watching the motions of the various animals which were baited by it.
In the twilight and the night the rabbits came regularly and made a
hearty meal. All day long the red squirrels came and went, and
afforded me much entertainment by their manoeuvres. One would
approach at first warily through the shrub oaks, running over the
snowcrust by fits and starts like a leaf blown by the wind, now a
few paces this way, with wonderful speed and waste of energy, making
inconceivable haste with his "trotters," as if it were for a wager,
and now as many paces that way, but never getting on more than half
a rod at a time and then suddenly pausing with a ludicrous
expression and a gratuitous somerset, as if all the eyes in the
universe were eyed on him  for all the motions of a squirrel, even
in the most solitary recesses of the forest, imply spectators as
much as those of a dancing girl  wasting more time in delay and
circumspection than would have sufficed to walk the whole distance
I never saw one walk  and then suddenly, before you could say
Jack Robinson, he would be in the top of a young pitch pine, winding
up his clock and chiding all imaginary spectators, soliloquizing and
talking to all the universe at the same time  for no reason that I
could ever detect, or he himself was aware of, I suspect. At length
he would reach the corn, and selecting a suitable ear, frisk about
in the same uncertain trigonometrical way to the topmost stick of my
woodpile, before my window, where he looked me in the face, and
there sit for hours, supplying himself with a new ear from time to
time, nibbling at first voraciously and throwing the halfnaked cobs
about till at length he grew more dainty still and played with his
food, tasting only the inside of the kernel, and the ear, which was
held balanced over the stick by one paw, slipped from his careless
grasp and fell to the ground, when he would look over at it with a
ludicrous expression of uncertainty, as if suspecting that it had
life, with a mind not made up whether to get it again, or a new one,
or be off now thinking of corn, then listening to hear what was in
the wind. So the little impudent fellow would waste many an ear in
a forenoon till at last, seizing some longer and plumper one,
considerably bigger than himself, and skilfully balancing it, he
would set out with it to the woods, like a tiger with a buffalo, by
the same zigzag course and frequent pauses, scratching along with
it as if it were too heavy for him and falling all the while, making
its fall a diagonal between a perpendicular and horizontal, being
determined to put it through at any rate  a singularly frivolous
and whimsical fellow  and so he would get off with it to where he
lived, perhaps carry it to the top of a pine tree forty or fifty
rods distant, and I would afterwards find the cobs strewn about the
woods in various directions.
At length the jays arrive, whose discordant screams were heard
long before, as they were warily making their approach an eighth of
a mile off, and in a stealthy and sneaking manner they flit from
tree to tree, nearer and nearer, and pick up the kernels which the
squirrels have dropped. Then, sitting on a pitch pine bough, they
attempt to swallow in their haste a kernel which is too big for
their throats and chokes them and after great labor they disgorge
it, and spend an hour in the endeavor to crack it by repeated blows
with their bills. They were manifestly thieves, and I had not much
respect for them but the squirrels, though at first shy, went to
work as if they were taking what was their own.
Meanwhile also came the chickadees in flocks, which, picking up
the crumbs the squirrels had dropped, flew to the nearest twig and,
placing them under their claws, hammered away at them with their
little bills, as if it were an insect in the bark, till they were
sufficiently reduced for their slender throats. A little flock of
these titmice came daily to pick a dinner out of my woodpile, or the
crumbs at my door, with faint flitting lisping notes, like the
tinkling of icicles in the grass, or else with sprightly day day
day, or more rarely, in springlike days, a wiry summery phebe
from the woodside. They were so familiar that at length one
alighted on an armful of wood which I was carrying in, and pecked at
the sticks without fear. I once had a sparrow alight upon my
shoulder for a moment while I was hoeing in a village garden, and I
felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance than I
should have been by any epaulet I could have worn. The squirrels
also grew at last to be quite familiar, and occasionally stepped
upon my shoe, when that was the nearest way.
When the ground was not yet quite covered, and again near the
end of winter, when the snow was melted on my south hillside and
about my woodpile, the partridges came out of the woods morning and
evening to feed there. Whichever side you walk in the woods the
partridge bursts away on whirring wings, jarring the snow from the
dry leaves and twigs on high, which comes sifting down in the
sunbeams like golden dust, for this brave bird is not to be scared
by winter. It is frequently covered up by drifts, and, it is said,
"sometimes plunges from on wing into the soft snow, where it remains
concealed for a day or two." I used to start them in the open land
also, where they had come out of the woods at sunset to "bud" the
wild apple trees. They will come regularly every evening to
particular trees, where the cunning sportsman lies in wait for them,
and the distant orchards next the woods suffer thus not a little. I
am glad that the partridge gets fed, at any rate. It is Nature's
own bird which lives on buds and diet drink.
In dark winter mornings, or in short winter afternoons, I
sometimes heard a pack of hounds threading all the woods with
hounding cry and yelp, unable to resist the instinct of the chase,
and the note of the huntinghorn at intervals, proving that man was
in the rear. The woods ring again, and yet no fox bursts forth on
to the open level of the pond, nor following pack pursuing their
Actaeon. And perhaps at evening I see the hunters returning with a
single brush trailing from their sleigh for a trophy, seeking their
inn. They tell me that if the fox would remain in the bosom of the
frozen earth he would be safe, or if be would run in a straight line
away no foxhound could overtake him but, having left his pursuers
far behind, he stops to rest and listen till they come up, and when
he runs he circles round to his old haunts, where the hunters await
him. Sometimes, however, he will run upon a wall many rods, and
then leap off far to one side, and he appears to know that water
will not retain his scent. A hunter told me that he once saw a fox
pursued by hounds burst out on to Walden when the ice was covered
with shallow puddles, run part way across, and then return to the
same shore. Ere long the hounds arrived, but here they lost the
scent. Sometimes a pack hunting by themselves would pass my door,
and circle round my house, and yelp and hound without regarding me,
as if afflicted by a species of madness, so that nothing could
divert them from the pursuit. Thus they circle until they fall upon
the recent trail of a fox, for a wise hound will forsake everything
else for this. One day a man came to my hut from Lexington to
inquire after his hound that made a large track, and had been
hunting for a week by himself. But I fear that he was not the wiser
for all I told him, for every time I attempted to answer his
questions he interrupted me by asking, "What do you do here?" He
had lost a dog, but found a man.
One old hunter who has a dry tongue, who used to come to bathe
in Walden once every year when the water was warmest, and at such
times looked in upon me, told me that many years ago he took his gun
one afternoon and went out for a cruise in Walden Wood and as he
walked the Wayland road he heard the cry of hounds approaching, and
ere long a fox leaped the wall into the road, and as quick as
thought leaped the other wall out of the road, and his swift bullet
had not touched him. Some way behind came an old hound and her
three pups in full pursuit, hunting on their own account, and
disappeared again in the woods. Late in the afternoon, as he was
resting in the thick woods south of Walden, he heard the voice of
the hounds far over toward Fair Haven still pursuing the fox and on
they came, their hounding cry which made all the woods ring sounding
nearer and nearer, now from Well Meadow, now from the Baker Farm.
For a long time he stood still and listened to their music, so sweet
to a hunter's ear, when suddenly the fox appeared, threading the
solemn aisles with an easy coursing pace, whose sound was concealed
by a sympathetic rustle of the leaves, swift and still, keeping the
round, leaving his pursuers far behind and, leaping upon a rock
amid the woods, he sat erect and listening, with his back to the
hunter. For a moment compassion restrained the latter's arm but
that was a shortlived mood, and as quick as thought can follow
thought his piece was levelled, and whang  the fox, rolling over
the rock, lay dead on the ground. The hunter still kept his place
and listened to the hounds. Still on they came, and now the near
woods resounded through all their aisles with their demoniac cry.
At length the old hound burst into view with muzzle to the ground,
and snapping the air as if possessed, and ran directly to the rock
but, spying the dead fox, she suddenly ceased her hounding as if
struck dumb with amazement, and walked round and round him in
silence and one by one her pups arrived, and, like their mother,
were sobered into silence by the mystery. Then the hunter came
forward and stood in their midst, and the mystery was solved. They
waited in silence while he skinned the fox, then followed the brush
a while, and at length turned off into the woods again. That
evening a Weston squire came to the Concord hunter's cottage to
inquire for his hounds, and told how for a week they had been
hunting on their own account from Weston woods. The Concord hunter
told him what he knew and offered him the skin but the other
declined it and departed. He did not find his hounds that night,
but the next day learned that they had crossed the river and put up
at a farmhouse for the night, whence, having been well fed, they
took their departure early in the morning.
The hunter who told me this could remember one Sam Nutting, who
used to hunt bears on Fair Haven Ledges, and exchange their skins
for rum in Concord village who told him, even, that he had seen a
moose there. Nutting had a famous foxhound named Burgoyne  he
pronounced it Bugine  which my informant used to borrow. In the
"Wast Book" of an old trader of this town, who was also a captain,
townclerk, and representative, I find the following entry. Jan.
th, , "John Melven Cr. by  Grey Fox " they are not
now found here and in his ledger, Feb, th, , Hezekiah Stratton
has credit "by / a Catt skin " of course, a wildcat, for
Stratton was a sergeant in the old French war, and would not have
got credit for hunting less noble game. Credit is given for
deerskins also, and they were daily sold. One man still preserves
the horns of the last deer that was killed in this vicinity, and
another has told me the particulars of the hunt in which his uncle
was engaged. The hunters were formerly a numerous and merry crew
here. I remember well one gaunt Nimrod who would catch up a leaf by
the roadside and play a strain on it wilder and more melodious, if
my memory serves me, than any huntinghorn.
At midnight, when there was a moon, I sometimes met with hounds
in my path prowling about the woods, which would skulk out of my
way, as if afraid, and stand silent amid the bushes till I had
passed.
Squirrels and wild mice disputed for my store of nuts. There
were scores of pitch pines around my house, from one to four inches
in diameter, which had been gnawed by mice the previous winter  a
Norwegian winter for them, for the snow lay long and deep, and they
were obliged to mix a large proportion of pine bark with their other
diet. These trees were alive and apparently flourishing at
midsummer, and many of them had grown a foot, though completely
girdled but after another winter such were without exception dead.
It is remarkable that a single mouse should thus be allowed a whole
pine tree for its dinner, gnawing round instead of up and down it
but perhaps it is necessary in order to thin these trees, which are
wont to grow up densely.
The hares Lepus Americanus were very familiar. One had her
form under my house all winter, separated from me only by the
flooring, and she startled me each morning by her hasty departure
when I began to stir  thump, thump, thump, striking her head
against the floor timbers in her hurry. They used to come round my
door at dusk to nibble the potato parings which I had thrown out,
and were so nearly the color of the ground that they could hardly be
distinguished when still. Sometimes in the twilight I alternately
lost and recovered sight of one sitting motionless under my window.
When I opened my door in the evening, off they would go with a
squeak and a bounce. Near at hand they only excited my pity. One
evening one sat by my door two paces from me, at first trembling
with fear, yet unwilling to move a poor wee thing, lean and bony,
with ragged ears and sharp nose, scant tail and slender paws. It
looked as if Nature no longer contained the breed of nobler bloods,
but stood on her last toes. Its large eyes appeared young and
unhealthy, almost dropsical. I took a step, and lo, away it scud
with an elastic spring over the snowcrust, straightening its body
and its limbs into graceful length, and soon put the forest between
me and itself  the wild free venison, asserting its vigor and the
dignity of Nature. Not without reason was its slenderness. Such
then was its nature. Lepus, levipes, lightfoot, some think.
What is a country without rabbits and partridges? They are
among the most simple and indigenous animal products ancient and
venerable families known to antiquity as to modern times of the
very hue and substance of Nature, nearest allied to leaves and to
the ground  and to one another it is either winged or it is
legged. It is hardly as if you had seen a wild creature when a
rabbit or a partridge bursts away, only a natural one, as much to be
expected as rustling leaves. The partridge and the rabbit are still
sure to thrive, like true natives of the soil, whatever revolutions
occur. If the forest is cut off, the sprouts and bushes which
spring up afford them concealment, and they become more numerous
than ever. That must be a poor country indeed that does not support
a hare. Our woods teem with them both, and around every swamp may
be seen the partridge or rabbit walk, beset with twiggy fences and
horsehair snares, which some cowboy tends.
The Pond in Winter
After a still winter night I awoke with the impression that some
question had been put to me, which I had been endeavoring in vain to
answer in my sleep, as what  how  when  where? But there was
dawning Nature, in whom all creatures live, looking in at my broad
windows with serene and satisfied face, and no question on her lips.
I awoke to an answered question, to Nature and daylight. The snow
lying deep on the earth dotted with young pines, and the very slope
of the hill on which my house is placed, seemed to say, Forward
Nature puts no question and answers none which we mortals ask. She
has long ago taken her resolution. "O Prince, our eyes contemplate
with admiration and transmit to the soul the wonderful and varied
spectacle of this universe. The night veils without doubt a part of
this glorious creation but day comes to reveal to us this great
work, which extends from earth even into the plains of the ether."
Then to my morning work. First I take an axe and pail and go in
search of water, if that be not a dream. After a cold and snowy
night it needed a diviningrod to find it. Every winter the liquid
and trembling surface of the pond, which was so sensitive to every
breath, and reflected every light and shadow, becomes solid to the
depth of a foot or a foot and a half, so that it will support the
heaviest teams, and perchance the snow covers it to an equal depth,
and it is not to be distinguished from any level field. Like the
marmots in the surrounding hills, it closes its eyelids and becomes
dormant for three months or more. Standing on the snowcovered
plain, as if in a pasture amid the hills, I cut my way first through
a foot of snow, and then a foot of ice, and open a window under my
feet, where, kneeling to drink, I look down into the quiet parlor of
the fishes, pervaded by a softened light as through a window of
ground glass, with its bright sanded floor the same as in summer
there a perennial waveless serenity reigns as in the amber twilight
sky, corresponding to the cool and even temperament of the
inhabitants. Heaven is under our feet is well as over our heads.
Early in the morning, while all things are crisp with frost, men
come with fishingreels and slender lunch, and let down their fine
lines through the snowy field to take pickerel and perch wild men,
who instinctively follow other fashions and trust other authorities
than their townsmen, and by their goings and comings stitch towns
together in parts where else they would be ripped. They sit and eat
their luncheon in stout fearnaughts on the dry oak leaves on the
shore, as wise in natural lore as the citizen is in artificial.
They never consulted with books, and know and can tell much less
than they have done. The things which they practice are said not
yet to be known. Here is one fishing for pickerel with grown perch
for bait. You look into his pail with wonder as into a summer pond,
as if he kept summer locked up at home, or knew where she had
retreated. How, pray, did he get these in midwinter? Oh, he got
worms out of rotten logs since the ground froze, and so he caught
them. His life itself passes deeper in nature than the studies of
the naturalist penetrate himself a subject for the naturalist. The
latter raises the moss and bark gently with his knife in search of
insects the former lays open logs to their core with his axe, and
moss and bark fly far and wide. He gets his living by barking
trees. Such a man has some right to fish, and I love to see nature
carried out in him. The perch swallows the grubworm, the pickerel
swallows the perch, and the fisherman swallows the pickerel and so
all the chinks in the scale of being are filled.
When I strolled around the pond in misty weather I was sometimes
amused by the primitive mode which some ruder fisherman had adopted.
He would perhaps have placed alder branches over the narrow holes in
the ice, which were four or five rods apart and an equal distance
from the shore, and having fastened the end of the line to a stick
to prevent its being pulled through, have passed the slack line over
a twig of the alder, a foot or more above the ice, and tied a dry
oak leaf to it, which, being pulled down, would show when he had a
bite. These alders loomed through the mist at regular intervals as
you walked half way round the pond.
Ah, the pickerel of Walden when I see them lying on the ice, or
in the well which the fisherman cuts in the ice, making a little
hole to admit the water, I am always surprised by their rare beauty,
as if they were fabulous fishes, they are so foreign to the streets,
even to the woods, foreign as Arabia to our Concord life. They
possess a quite dazzling and transcendent beauty which separates
them by a wide interval from the cadaverous cod and haddock whose
fame is trumpeted in our streets. They are not green like the
pines, nor gray like the stones, nor blue like the sky but they
have, to my eyes, if possible, yet rarer colors, like flowers and
precious stones, as if they were the pearls, the animalized nuclei
or crystals of the Walden water. They, of course, are Walden all
over and all through are themselves small Waldens in the animal
kingdom, Waldenses. It is surprising that they are caught here 
that in this deep and capacious spring, far beneath the rattling
teams and chaises and tinkling sleighs that travel the Walden road,
this great gold and emerald fish swims. I never chanced to see its
kind in any market it would be the cynosure of all eyes there.
Easily, with a few convulsive quirks, they give up their watery
ghosts, like a mortal translated before his time to the thin air of
heaven.
As I was desirous to recover the long lost bottom of Walden
Pond, I surveyed it carefully, before the ice broke up, early in
', with compass and chain and sounding line. There have been many
stories told about the bottom, or rather no bottom, of this pond,
which certainly had no foundation for themselves. It is remarkable
how long men will believe in the bottomlessness of a pond without
taking the trouble to sound it. I have visited two such Bottomless
Ponds in one walk in this neighborhood. Many have believed that
Walden reached quite through to the other side of the globe. Some
who have lain flat on the ice for a long time, looking down through
the illusive medium, perchance with watery eyes into the bargain,
and driven to hasty conclusions by the fear of catching cold in
their breasts, have seen vast holes "into which a load of hay might
be driven," if there were anybody to drive it, the undoubted source
of the Styx and entrance to the Infernal Regions from these parts.
Others have gone down from the village with a "fiftysix" and a
wagon load of inch rope, but yet have failed to find any bottom for
while the "fiftysix" was resting by the way, they were paying out
the rope in the vain attempt to fathom their truly immeasurable
capacity for marvellousness. But I can assure my readers that
Walden has a reasonably tight bottom at a not unreasonable, though
at an unusual, depth. I fathomed it easily with a codline and a
stone weighing about a pound and a half, and could tell accurately
when the stone left the bottom, by having to pull so much harder
before the water got underneath to help me. The greatest depth was
exactly one hundred and two feet to which may be added the five
feet which it has risen since, making one hundred and seven. This
is a remarkable depth for so small an area yet not an inch of it
can be spared by the imagination. What if all ponds were shallow?
Would it not react on the minds of men? I am thankful that this
pond was made deep and pure for a symbol. While men believe in the
infinite some ponds will be thought to be bottomless.
A factoryowner, hearing what depth I had found, thought that it
could not be true, for, judging from his acquaintance with dams,
sand would not lie at so steep an angle. But the deepest ponds are
not so deep in proportion to their area as most suppose, and, if
drained, would not leave very remarkable valleys. They are not like
cups between the hills for this one, which is so unusually deep for
its area, appears in a vertical section through its centre not
deeper than a shallow plate. Most ponds, emptied, would leave a
meadow no more hollow than we frequently see. William Gilpin, who
is so admirable in all that relates to landscapes, and usually so
correct, standing at the head of Loch Fyne, in Scotland, which he
describes as "a bay of salt water, sixty or seventy fathoms deep,
four miles in breadth," and about fifty miles long, surrounded by
mountains, observes, "If we could have seen it immediately after the
diluvian crash, or whatever convulsion of nature occasioned it,
before the waters gushed in, what a horrid chasm must it have
appeared
"So high as heaved the tumid hills, so low
Down sunk a hollow bottom broad and deep,
Capacious bed of waters."
But if, using the shortest diameter of Loch Fyne, we apply these
proportions to Walden, which, as we have seen, appears already in a
vertical section only like a shallow plate, it will appear four
times as shallow. So much for the increased horrors of the chasm of
Loch Fyne when emptied. No doubt many a smiling valley with its
stretching cornfields occupies exactly such a "horrid chasm," from
which the waters have receded, though it requires the insight and
the far sight of the geologist to convince the unsuspecting
inhabitants of this fact. Often an inquisitive eye may detect the
shores of a primitive lake in the low horizon hills, and no
subsequent elevation of the plain have been necessary to conceal
their history. But it is easiest, as they who work on the highways
know, to find the hollows by the puddles after a shower. The amount
of it is, the imagination give it the least license, dives deeper
and soars higher than Nature goes. So, probably, the depth of the
ocean will be found to be very inconsiderable compared with its
breadth.
As I sounded through the ice I could determine the shape of the
bottom with greater accuracy than is possible in surveying harbors
which do not freeze over, and I was surprised at its general
regularity. In the deepest part there are several acres more level
than almost any field which is exposed to the sun, wind, and plow.
In one instance, on a line arbitrarily chosen, the depth did not
vary more than one foot in thirty rods and generally, near the
middle, I could calculate the variation for each one hundred feet in
any direction beforehand within three or four inches. Some are
accustomed to speak of deep and dangerous holes even in quiet sandy
ponds like this, but the effect of water under these circumstances
is to level all inequalities. The regularity of the bottom and its
conformity to the shores and the range of the neighboring hills were
so perfect that a distant promontory betrayed itself in the
soundings quite across the pond, and its direction could be
determined by observing the opposite shore. Cape becomes bar, and
plain shoal, and valley and gorge deep water and channel.
When I had mapped the pond by the scale of ten rods to an inch,
and put down the soundings, more than a hundred in all, I observed
this remarkable coincidence. Having noticed that the number
indicating the greatest depth was apparently in the centre of the
map, I laid a rule on the map lengthwise, and then breadthwise, and
found, to my surprise, that the line of greatest length intersected
the line of greatest breadth exactly at the point of greatest depth,
notwithstanding that the middle is so nearly level, the outline of
the pond far from regular, and the extreme length and breadth were
got by measuring into the coves and I said to myself, Who knows but
this hint would conduct to the deepest part of the ocean as well as
of a pond or puddle? Is not this the rule also for the height of
mountains, regarded as the opposite of valleys? We know that a hill
is not highest at its narrowest part.
Of five coves, three, or all which had been sounded, were
observed to have a bar quite across their mouths and deeper water
within, so that the bay tended to be an expansion of water within
the land not only horizontally but vertically, and to form a basin
or independent pond, the direction of the two capes showing the
course of the bar. Every harbor on the seacoast, also, has its bar
at its entrance. In proportion as the mouth of the cove was wider
compared with its length, the water over the bar was deeper compared
with that in the basin. Given, then, the length and breadth of the
cove, and the character of the surrounding shore, and you have
almost elements enough to make out a formula for all cases.
In order to see how nearly I could guess, with this experience,
at the deepest point in a pond, by observing the outlines of a
surface and the character of its shores alone, I made a plan of
White Pond, which contains about fortyone acres, and, like this,
has no island in it, nor any visible inlet or outlet and as the
line of greatest breadth fell very near the line of least breadth,
where two opposite capes approached each other and two opposite bays
receded, I ventured to mark a point a short distance from the latter
line, but still on the line of greatest length, as the deepest. The
deepest part was found to be within one hundred feet of this, still
farther in the direction to which I had inclined, and was only one
foot deeper, namely, sixty feet. Of course, a stream running
through, or an island in the pond, would make the problem much more
complicated.
If we knew all the laws of Nature, we should need only one fact,
or the description of one actual phenomenon, to infer all the
particular results at that point. Now we know only a few laws, and
our result is vitiated, not, of course, by any confusion or
irregularity in Nature, but by our ignorance of essential elements
in the calculation. Our notions of law and harmony are commonly
confined to those instances which we detect but the harmony which
results from a far greater number of seemingly conflicting, but
really concurring, laws, which we have not detected, is still more
wonderful. The particular laws are as our points of view, as, to
the traveller, a mountain outline varies with every step, and it has
an infinite number of profiles, though absolutely but one form.
Even when cleft or bored through it is not comprehended in its
entireness.
What I have observed of the pond is no less true in ethics. It
is the law of average. Such a rule of the two diameters not only
guides us toward the sun in the system and the heart in man, but
draws lines through the length and breadth of the aggregate of a
man's particular daily behaviors and waves of life into his coves
and inlets, and where they intersect will be the height or depth of
his character. Perhaps we need only to know how his shores trend
and his adjacent country or circumstances, to infer his depth and
concealed bottom. If he is surrounded by mountainous circumstances,
an Achillean shore, whose peaks overshadow and are reflected in his
bosom, they suggest a corresponding depth in him. But a low and
smooth shore proves him shallow on that side. In our bodies, a bold
projecting brow falls off to and indicates a corresponding depth of
thought. Also there is a bar across the entrance of our every cove,
or particular inclination each is our harbor for a season, in which
we are detained and partially landlocked. These inclinations are
not whimsical usually, but their form, size, and direction are
determined by the promontories of the shore, the ancient axes of
elevation. When this bar is gradually increased by storms, tides,
or currents, or there is a subsidence of the waters, so that it
reaches to the surface, that which was at first but an inclination
in the shore in which a thought was harbored becomes an individual
lake, cut off from the ocean, wherein the thought secures its own
conditions  changes, perhaps, from salt to fresh, becomes a sweet
sea, dead sea, or a marsh. At the advent of each individual into
this life, may we not suppose that such a bar has risen to the
surface somewhere? It is true, we are such poor navigators that our
thoughts, for the most part, stand off and on upon a harborless
coast, are conversant only with the bights of the bays of poesy, or
steer for the public ports of entry, and go into the dry docks of
science, where they merely refit for this world, and no natural
currents concur to individualize them.
As for the inlet or outlet of Walden, I have not discovered any
but rain and snow and evaporation, though perhaps, with a
thermometer and a line, such places may be found, for where the
water flows into the pond it will probably be coldest in summer and
warmest in winter. When the icemen were at work here in ', the
cakes sent to the shore were one day rejected by those who were
stacking them up there, not being thick enough to lie side by side
with the rest and the cutters thus discovered that the ice over a
small space was two or three inches thinner than elsewhere, which
made them think that there was an inlet there. They also showed me
in another place what they thought was a "leachhole," through which
the pond leaked out under a hill into a neighboring meadow, pushing
me out on a cake of ice to see it. It was a small cavity under ten
feet of water but I think that I can warrant the pond not to need
soldering till they find a worse leak than that. One has suggested,
that if such a "leachhole" should be found, its connection with the
meadow, if any existed, might be proved by conveying some, colored
powder or sawdust to the mouth of the hole, and then putting a
strainer over the spring in the meadow, which would catch some of
the particles carried through by the current.
While I was surveying, the ice, which was sixteen inches thick,
undulated under a slight wind like water. It is well known that a
level cannot be used on ice. At one rod from the shore its greatest
fluctuation, when observed by means of a level on land directed
toward a graduated staff on the ice, was three quarters of an inch,
though the ice appeared firmly attached to the shore. It was
probably greater in the middle. Who knows but if our instruments
were delicate enough we might detect an undulation in the crust of
the earth? When two legs of my level were on the shore and the
third on the ice, and the sights were directed over the latter, a
rise or fall of the ice of an almost infinitesimal amount made a
difference of several feet on a tree across the pond. When I began
to cut holes for sounding there were three or four inches of water
on the ice under a deep snow which had sunk it thus far but the
water began immediately to run into these holes, and continued to
run for two days in deep streams, which wore away the ice on every
side, and contributed essentially, if not mainly, to dry the surface
of the pond for, as the water ran in, it raised and floated the
ice. This was somewhat like cutting a hole in the bottom of a ship
to let the water out. When such holes freeze, and a rain succeeds,
and finally a new freezing forms a fresh smooth ice over all, it is
beautifully mottled internally by dark figures, shaped somewhat like
a spider's web, what you may call ice rosettes, produced by the
channels worn by the water flowing from all sides to a centre.
Sometimes, also, when the ice was covered with shallow puddles, I
saw a double shadow of myself, one standing on the head of the
other, one on the ice, the other on the trees or hillside.
While yet it is cold January, and snow and ice are thick and
solid, the prudent landlord comes from the village to get ice to
cool his summer drink impressively, even pathetically, wise, to
foresee the heat and thirst of July now in January  wearing a
thick coat and mittens when so many things are not provided for.
It may be that he lays up no treasures in this world which will cool
his summer drink in the next. He cuts and saws the solid pond,
unroofs the house of fishes, and carts off their very element and
air, held fast by chains and stakes like corded wood, through the
favoring winter air, to wintry cellars, to underlie the summer
there. It looks like solidified azure, as, far off, it is drawn
through the streets. These icecutters are a merry race, full of
jest and sport, and when I went among them they were wont to invite
me to saw pitfashion with them, I standing underneath.
In the winter of ' there came a hundred men of Hyperborean
extraction swoop down on to our pond one morning, with many carloads
of ungainlylooking farming tools  sleds, plows, drillbarrows,
turfknives, spades, saws, rakes, and each man was armed with a
doublepointed pikestaff, such as is not described in the
NewEngland Farmer or the Cultivator. I did not know whether they
had come to sow a crop of winter rye, or some other kind of grain
recently introduced from Iceland. As I saw no manure, I judged that
they meant to skim the land, as I had done, thinking the soil was
deep and had lain fallow long enough. They said that a gentleman
farmer, who was behind the scenes, wanted to double his money,
which, as I understood, amounted to half a million already but in
order to cover each one of his dollars with another, he took off the
only coat, ay, the skin itself, of Walden Pond in the midst of a
hard winter. They went to work at once, plowing, barrowing,
rolling, furrowing, in admirable order, as if they were bent on
making this a model farm but when I was looking sharp to see what
kind of seed they dropped into the furrow, a gang of fellows by my
side suddenly began to hook up the virgin mould itself, with a
peculiar jerk, clean down to the sand, or rather the water  for it
was a very springy soil  indeed all the terra firma there was 
and haul it away on sleds, and then I guessed that they must be
cutting peat in a bog. So they came and went every day, with a
peculiar shriek from the locomotive, from and to some point of the
polar regions, as it seemed to me, like a flock of arctic
snowbirds. But sometimes Squaw Walden had her revenge, and a hired
man, walking behind his team, slipped through a crack in the ground
down toward Tartarus, and he who was so brave before suddenly became
but the ninth part of a man, almost gave up his animal heat, and was
glad to take refuge in my house, and acknowledged that there was
some virtue in a stove or sometimes the frozen soil took a piece of
steel out of a plowshare, or a plow got set in the furrow and had to
be cut out.
To speak literally, a hundred Irishmen, with Yankee overseers,
came from Cambridge every day to get out the ice. They divided it
into cakes by methods too well known to require description, and
these, being sledded to the shore, were rapidly hauled off on to an
ice platform, and raised by grappling irons and block and tackle,
worked by horses, on to a stack, as surely as so many barrels of
flour, and there placed evenly side by side, and row upon row, as if
they formed the solid base of an obelisk designed to pierce the
clouds. They told me that in a good day they could get out a
thousand tons, which was the yield of about one acre. Deep ruts and
"cradleholes" were worn in the ice, as on terra firma, by the
passage of the sleds over the same track, and the horses invariably
ate their oats out of cakes of ice hollowed out like buckets. They
stacked up the cakes thus in the open air in a pile thirtyfive feet
high on one side and six or seven rods square, putting hay between
the outside layers to exclude the air for when the wind, though
never so cold, finds a passage through, it will wear large cavities,
leaving slight supports or studs only here and there, and finally
topple it down. At first it looked like a vast blue fort or
Valhalla but when they began to tuck the coarse meadow hay into the
crevices, and this became covered with rime and icicles, it looked
like a venerable mossgrown and hoary ruin, built of azuretinted
marble, the abode of Winter, that old man we see in the almanac 
his shanty, as if he had a design to estivate with us. They
calculated that not twentyfive per cent of this would reach its
destination, and that two or three per cent would be wasted in the
cars. However, a still greater part of this heap had a different
destiny from what was intended for, either because the ice was
found not to keep so well as was expected, containing more air than
usual, or for some other reason, it never got to market. This heap,
made in the winter of ' and estimated to contain ten thousand
tons, was finally covered with hay and boards and though it was
unroofed the following July, and a part of it carried off, the rest
remaining exposed to the sun, it stood over that summer and the next
winter, and was not quite melted till September, . Thus the
pond recovered the greater part.
Like the water, the Walden ice, seen near at hand, has a green
tint, but at a distance is beautifully blue, and you can easily tell
it from the white ice of the river, or the merely greenish ice of
some ponds, a quarter of a mile off. Sometimes one of those great
cakes slips from the iceman's sled into the village street, and
lies there for a week like a great emerald, an object of interest to
all passers. I have noticed that a portion of Walden which in the
state of water was green will often, when frozen, appear from the
same point of view blue. So the hollows about this pond will,
sometimes, in the winter, be filled with a greenish water somewhat
like its own, but the next day will have frozen blue. Perhaps the
blue color of water and ice is due to the light and air they
contain, and the most transparent is the bluest. Ice is an
interesting subject for contemplation. They told me that they had
some in the icehouses at Fresh Pond five years old which was as
good as ever. Why is it that a bucket of water soon becomes putrid,
but frozen remains sweet forever? It is commonly said that this is
the difference between the affections and the intellect.
Thus for sixteen days I saw from my window a hundred men at work
like busy husbandmen, with teams and horses and apparently all the
implements of farming, such a picture as we see on the first page of
the almanac and as often as I looked out I was reminded of the
fable of the lark and the reapers, or the parable of the sower, and
the like and now they are all gone, and in thirty days more,
probably, I shall look from the same window on the pure seagreen
Walden water there, reflecting the clouds and the trees, and sending
up its evaporations in solitude, and no traces will appear that a
man has ever stood there. Perhaps I shall hear a solitary loon
laugh as he dives and plumes himself, or shall see a lonely fisher
in his boat, like a floating leaf, beholding his form reflected in
the waves, where lately a hundred men securely labored.
Thus it appears that the sweltering inhabitants of Charleston
and New Orleans, of Madras and Bombay and Calcutta, drink at my
well. In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and
cosmogonal philosophy of the BhagvatGeeta, since whose composition
years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our
modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial and I doubt
if that philosophy is not to be referred to a previous state of
existence, so remote is its sublimity from our conceptions. I lay
down the book and go to my well for water, and lo there I meet the
servant of the Bramin, priest of Brahma and Vishnu and Indra, who
still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells
at the root of a tree with his crust and water jug. I meet his
servant come to draw water for his master, and our buckets as it
were grate together in the same well. The pure Walden water is
mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges. With favoring winds it
is wafted past the site of the fabulous islands of Atlantis and the
Hesperides, makes the periplus of Hanno, and, floating by Ternate
and Tidore and the mouth of the Persian Gulf, melts in the tropic
gales of the Indian seas, and is landed in ports of which Alexander
only heard the names.
Spring
The opening of large tracts by the icecutters commonly causes a
pond to break up earlier for the water, agitated by the wind, even
in cold weather, wears away the surrounding ice. But such was not
the effect on Walden that year, for she had soon got a thick new
garment to take the place of the old. This pond never breaks up so
soon as the others in this neighborhood, on account both of its
greater depth and its having no stream passing through it to melt or
wear away the ice. I never knew it to open in the course of a
winter, not excepting that of ', which gave the ponds so severe
a trial. It commonly opens about the first of April, a week or ten
days later than Flint's Pond and Fair Haven, beginning to melt on
the north side and in the shallower parts where it began to freeze.
It indicates better than any water hereabouts the absolute progress
of the season, being least affected by transient changes of
temperature. A severe cold of a few days duration in March may very
much retard the opening of the former ponds, while the temperature
of Walden increases almost uninterruptedly. A thermometer thrust
into the middle of Walden on the th of March, , stood at x,
or freezing point near the shore at x in the middle of Flint's
Pond, the same day, at x at a dozen rods from the shore, in
shallow water, under ice a foot thick, at x. This difference of
three and a half degrees between the temperature of the deep water
and the shallow in the latter pond, and the fact that a great
proportion of it is comparatively shallow, show why it should break
up so much sooner than Walden. The ice in the shallowest part was
at this time several inches thinner than in the middle. In
midwinter the middle had been the warmest and the ice thinnest
there. So, also, every one who has waded about the shores of the
pond in summer must have perceived how much warmer the water is
close to the shore, where only three or four inches deep, than a
little distance out, and on the surface where it is deep, than near
the bottom. In spring the sun not only exerts an influence through
the increased temperature of the air and earth, but its heat passes
through ice a foot or more thick, and is reflected from the bottom
in shallow water, and so also warms the water and melts the under
side of the ice, at the same time that it is melting it more
directly above, making it uneven, and causing the air bubbles which
it contains to extend themselves upward and downward until it is
completely honeycombed, and at last disappears suddenly in a single
spring rain. Ice has its grain as well as wood, and when a cake
begins to rot or "comb," that is, assume the appearance of
honeycomb, whatever may be its position, the air cells are at right
angles with what was the water surface. Where there is a rock or a
log rising near to the surface the ice over it is much thinner, and
is frequently quite dissolved by this reflected heat and I have
been told that in the experiment at Cambridge to freeze water in a
shallow wooden pond, though the cold air circulated underneath, and
so had access to both sides, the reflection of the sun from the
bottom more than counterbalanced this advantage. When a warm rain
in the middle of the winter melts off the snowice from Walden, and
leaves a hard dark or transparent ice on the middle, there will be a
strip of rotten though thicker white ice, a rod or more wide, about
the shores, created by this reflected heat. Also, as I have said,
the bubbles themselves within the ice operate as burningglasses to
melt the ice beneath.
The phenomena of the year take place every day in a pond on a
small scale. Every morning, generally speaking, the shallow water
is being warmed more rapidly than the deep, though it may not be
made so warm after all, and every evening it is being cooled more
rapidly until the morning. The day is an epitome of the year. The
night is the winter, the morning and evening are the spring and
fall, and the noon is the summer. The cracking and booming of the
ice indicate a change of temperature. One pleasant morning after a
cold night, February th, , having gone to Flint's Pond to
spend the day, I noticed with surprise, that when I struck the ice
with the head of my axe, it resounded like a gong for many rods
around, or as if I had struck on a tight drumhead. The pond began
to boom about an hour after sunrise, when it felt the influence of
the sun's rays slanted upon it from over the hills it stretched
itself and yawned like a waking man with a gradually increasing
tumult, which was kept up three or four hours. It took a short
siesta at noon, and boomed once more toward night, as the sun was
withdrawing his influence. In the right stage of the weather a pond
fires its evening gun with great regularity. But in the middle of
the day, being full of cracks, and the air also being less elastic,
it had completely lost its resonance, and probably fishes and
muskrats could not then have been stunned by a blow on it. The
fishermen say that the "thundering of the pond" scares the fishes
and prevents their biting. The pond does not thunder every evening,
and I cannot tell surely when to expect its thundering but though I
may perceive no difference in the weather, it does. Who would have
suspected so large and cold and thickskinned a thing to be so
sensitive? Yet it has its law to which it thunders obedience when
it should as surely as the buds expand in the spring. The earth is
all alive and covered with papillae. The largest pond is as
sensitive to atmospheric changes as the globule of mercury in its
tube.
One attraction in coming to the woods to live was that I should
have leisure and opportunity to see the Spring come in. The ice in
the pond at length begins to be honeycombed, and I can set my heel
in it as I walk. Fogs and rains and warmer suns are gradually
melting the snow the days have grown sensibly longer and I see how
I shall get through the winter without adding to my woodpile, for
large fires are no longer necessary. I am on the alert for the
first signs of spring, to hear the chance note of some arriving
bird, or the striped squirrel's chirp, for his stores must be now
nearly exhausted, or see the woodchuck venture out of his winter
quarters. On the th of March, after I had heard the bluebird,
song sparrow, and redwing, the ice was still nearly a foot thick.
As the weather grew warmer it was not sensibly worn away by the
water, nor broken up and floated off as in rivers, but, though it
was completely melted for half a rod in width about the shore, the
middle was merely honeycombed and saturated with water, so that you
could put your foot through it when six inches thick but by the
next day evening, perhaps, after a warm rain followed by fog, it
would have wholly disappeared, all gone off with the fog, spirited
away. One year I went across the middle only five days before it
disappeared entirely. In  Walden was first completely open on
the st of April in ', the th of March in ', the th of
April in ', the th of March in ', the th of April in ',
the d of March in ', about the th of April.
Every incident connected with the breaking up of the rivers and
ponds and the settling of the weather is particularly interesting to
us who live in a climate of so great extremes. When the warmer days
come, they who dwell near the river hear the ice crack at night with
a startling whoop as loud as artillery, as if its icy fetters were
rent from end to end, and within a few days see it rapidly going
out. So the alligator comes out of the mud with quakings of the
earth. One old man, who has been a close observer of Nature, and
seems as thoroughly wise in regard to all her operations as if she
had been put upon the stocks when he was a boy, and he had helped to
lay her keel  who has come to his growth, and can hardly acquire
more of natural lore if he should live to the age of Methuselah 
told me  and I was surprised to hear him express wonder at any of
Nature's operations, for I thought that there were no secrets
between them  that one spring day he took his gun and boat, and
thought that he would have a little sport with the ducks. There was
ice still on the meadows, but it was all gone out of the river, and
he dropped down without obstruction from Sudbury, where he lived, to
Fair Haven Pond, which he found, unexpectedly, covered for the most
part with a firm field of ice. It was a warm day, and he was
surprised to see so great a body of ice remaining. Not seeing any
ducks, he hid his boat on the north or back side of an island in the
pond, and then concealed himself in the bushes on the south side, to
await them. The ice was melted for three or four rods from the
shore, and there was a smooth and warm sheet of water, with a muddy
bottom, such as the ducks love, within, and he thought it likely
that some would be along pretty soon. After he had lain still there
about an hour he heard a low and seemingly very distant sound, but
singularly grand and impressive, unlike anything he had ever heard,
gradually swelling and increasing as if it would have a universal
and memorable ending, a sullen rush and roar, which seemed to him
all at once like the sound of a vast body of fowl coming in to
settle there, and, seizing his gun, he started up in haste and
excited but he found, to his surprise, that the whole body of the
ice had started while he lay there, and drifted in to the shore, and
the sound he had heard was made by its edge grating on the shore 
at first gently nibbled and crumbled off, but at length heaving up
and scattering its wrecks along the island to a considerable height
before it came to a standstill.
At length the sun's rays have attained the right angle, and warm
winds blow up mist and rain and melt the snowbanks, and the sun,
dispersing the mist, smiles on a checkered landscape of russet and
white smoking with incense, through which the traveller picks his
way from islet to islet, cheered by the music of a thousand tinkling
rills and rivulets whose veins are filled with the blood of winter
which they are bearing off.
Few phenomena gave me more delight than to observe the forms
which thawing sand and clay assume in flowing down the sides of a
deep cut on the railroad through which I passed on my way to the
village, a phenomenon not very common on so large a scale, though
the number of freshly exposed banks of the right material must have
been greatly multiplied since railroads were invented. The material
was sand of every degree of fineness and of various rich colors,
commonly mixed with a little clay. When the frost comes out in the
spring, and even in a thawing day in the winter, the sand begins to
flow down the slopes like lava, sometimes bursting out through the
snow and overflowing it where no sand was to be seen before.
Innumerable little streams overlap and interlace one with another,
exhibiting a sort of hybrid product, which obeys half way the law of
currents, and half way that of vegetation. As it flows it takes the
forms of sappy leaves or vines, making heaps of pulpy sprays a foot
or more in depth, and resembling, as you look down on them, the
laciniated, lobed, and imbricated thalluses of some lichens or you
are reminded of coral, of leopard's paws or birds' feet, of brains
or lungs or bowels, and excrements of all kinds. It is a truly
grotesque vegetation, whose forms and color we see imitated in
bronze, a sort of architectural foliage more ancient and typical
than acanthus, chiccory, ivy, vine, or any vegetable leaves
destined perhaps, under some circumstances, to become a puzzle to
future geologists. The whole cut impressed me as if it were a cave
with its stalactites laid open to the light. The various shades of
the sand are singularly rich and agreeable, embracing the different
iron colors, brown, gray, yellowish, and reddish. When the flowing
mass reaches the drain at the foot of the bank it spreads out
flatter into strands, the separate streams losing their
semicylindrical form and gradually becoming more flat and broad,
running together as they are more moist, till they form an almost
flat sand, still variously and beautifully shaded, but in which you
can trace the original forms of vegetation till at length, in the
water itself, they are converted into banks, like those formed off
the mouths of rivers, and the forms of vegetation are lost in the
ripple marks on the bottom.
The whole bank, which is from twenty to forty feet high, is
sometimes overlaid with a mass of this kind of foliage, or sandy
rupture, for a quarter of a mile on one or both sides, the produce
of one spring day. What makes this sand foliage remarkable is its
springing into existence thus suddenly. When I see on the one side
the inert bank  for the sun acts on one side first  and on the
other this luxuriant foliage, the creation of an hour, I am affected
as if in a peculiar sense I stood in the laboratory of the Artist
who made the world and me  had come to where he was still at work,
sporting on this bank, and with excess of energy strewing his fresh
designs about. I feel as if I were nearer to the vitals of the
globe, for this sandy overflow is something such a foliaceous mass
as the vitals of the animal body. You find thus in the very sands
an anticipation of the vegetable leaf. No wonder that the earth
expresses itself outwardly in leaves, it so labors with the idea
inwardly. The atoms have already learned this law, and are pregnant
by it. The overhanging leaf sees here its prototype. Internally,
whether in the globe or animal body, it is a moist thick lobe, a
word especially applicable to the liver and lungs and the leaves of
fat jnai, labor, lapsus, to flow or slip downward, a lapsing
jiais, globus, lobe, globe also lap, flap, and many other words
externally a dry thin leaf, even as the f and v are a pressed and
dried b. The radicals of lobe are lb, the soft mass of the b
single lobed, or B, double lobed, with the liquid l behind it
pressing it forward. In globe, glb, the guttural g adds to the
meaning the capacity of the throat. The feathers and wings of birds
are still drier and thinner leaves. Thus, also, you pass from the
lumpish grub in the earth to the airy and fluttering butterfly. The
very globe continually transcends and translates itself, and becomes
winged in its orbit. Even ice begins with delicate crystal leaves,
as if it had flowed into moulds which the fronds of waterplants have
impressed on the watery mirror. The whole tree itself is but one
leaf, and rivers are still vaster leaves whose pulp is intervening
earth, and towns and cities are the ova of insects in their axils.
When the sun withdraws the sand ceases to flow, but in the
morning the streams will start once more and branch and branch again
into a myriad of others. You here see perchance how bloodvessels
are formed. If you look closely you observe that first there pushes
forward from the thawing mass a stream of softened sand with a
droplike point, like the ball of the finger, feeling its way slowly
and blindly downward, until at last with more heat and moisture, as
the sun gets higher, the most fluid portion, in its effort to obey
the law to which the most inert also yields, separates from the
latter and forms for itself a meandering channel or artery within
that, in which is seen a little silvery stream glancing like
lightning from one stage of pulpy leaves or branches to another, and
ever and anon swallowed up in the sand. It is wonderful how rapidly
yet perfectly the sand organizes itself as it flows, using the best
material its mass affords to form the sharp edges of its channel.
Such are the sources of rivers. In the silicious matter which the
water deposits is perhaps the bony system, and in the still finer
soil and organic matter the fleshy fibre or cellular tissue. What
is man but a mass of thawing clay? The ball of the human finger is
but a drop congealed. The fingers and toes flow to their extent
from the thawing mass of the body. Who knows what the human body
would expand and flow out to under a more genial heaven? Is not the
hand a spreading palm leaf with its lobes and veins? The ear may be
regarded, fancifully, as a lichen, umbilicaria, on the side of the
head, with its lobe or drop. The lip  labium, from labor ? 
laps or lapses from the sides of the cavernous mouth. The nose is a
manifest congealed drop or stalactite. The chin is a still larger
drop, the confluent dripping of the face. The cheeks are a slide
from the brows into the valley of the face, opposed and diffused by
the cheek bones. Each rounded lobe of the vegetable leaf, too, is a
thick and now loitering drop, larger or smaller the lobes are the
fingers of the leaf and as many lobes as it has, in so many
directions it tends to flow, and more heat or other genial
influences would have caused it to flow yet farther.
Thus it seemed that this one hillside illustrated the principle
of all the operations of Nature. The Maker of this earth but
patented a leaf. What Champollion will decipher this hieroglyphic
for us, that we may turn over a new leaf at last? This phenomenon
is more exhilarating to me than the luxuriance and fertility of
vineyards. True, it is somewhat excrementitious in its character,
and there is no end to the heaps of liver, lights, and bowels, as if
the globe were turned wrong side outward but this suggests at least
that Nature has some bowels, and there again is mother of humanity.
This is the frost coming out of the ground this is Spring. It
precedes the green and flowery spring, as mythology precedes regular
poetry. I know of nothing more purgative of winter fumes and
indigestions. It convinces me that Earth is still in her
swaddlingclothes, and stretches forth baby fingers on every side.
Fresh curls spring from the baldest brow. There is nothing
inorganic. These foliaceous heaps lie along the bank like the slag
of a furnace, showing that Nature is "in full blast" within. The
earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum
like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and
antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree,
which precede flowers and fruit  not a fossil earth, but a living
earth compared with whose great central life all animal and
vegetable life is merely parasitic. Its throes will heave our
exuviae from their graves. You may melt your metals and cast them
into the most beautiful moulds you can they will never excite me
like the forms which this molten earth flows out into. And not only
it, but the institutions upon it are plastic like clay in the hands
of the potter.
Ere long, not only on these banks, but on every hill and plain
and in every hollow, the frost comes out of the ground like a
dormant quadruped from its burrow, and seeks the sea with music, or
migrates to other climes in clouds. Thaw with his gentle persuasion
is more powerful than Thor with his hammer. The one melts, the
other but breaks in pieces.
When the ground was partially bare of snow, and a few warm days
had dried its surface somewhat, it was pleasant to compare the first
tender signs of the infant year just peeping forth with the stately
beauty of the withered vegetation which had withstood the
winter  lifeeverlasting, goldenrods, pinweeds, and graceful wild
grasses, more obvious and interesting frequently than in summer
even, as if their beauty was not ripe till then even cottongrass,
cattails, mulleins, johnswort, hardhack, meadowsweet, and other
strongstemmed plants, those unexhausted granaries which entertain
the earliest birds  decent weeds, at least, which widowed Nature
wears. I am particularly attracted by the arching and sheaflike
top of the woolgrass it brings back the summer to our winter
memories, and is among the forms which art loves to copy, and which,
in the vegetable kingdom, have the same relation to types already in
the mind of man that astronomy has. It is an antique style, older
than Greek or Egyptian. Many of the phenomena of Winter are
suggestive of an inexpressible tenderness and fragile delicacy. We
are accustomed to hear this king described as a rude and boisterous
tyrant but with the gentleness of a lover he adorns the tresses of
Summer.
At the approach of spring the red squirrels got under my house,
two at a time, directly under my feet as I sat reading or writing,
and kept up the queerest chuckling and chirruping and vocal
pirouetting and gurgling sounds that ever were heard and when I
stamped they only chirruped the louder, as if past all fear and
respect in their mad pranks, defying humanity to stop them. No, you
don't  chickaree  chickaree. They were wholly deaf to my
arguments, or failed to perceive their force, and fell into a strain
of invective that was irresistible.
The first sparrow of spring The year beginning with younger
hope than ever The faint silvery warblings heard over the
partially bare and moist fields from the bluebird, the song sparrow,
and the redwing, as if the last flakes of winter tinkled as they
fell What at such a time are histories, chronologies, traditions,
and all written revelations? The brooks sing carols and glees to
the spring. The marsh hawk, sailing low over the meadow, is already
seeking the first slimy life that awakes. The sinking sound of
melting snow is heard in all dells, and the ice dissolves apace in
the ponds. The grass flames up on the hillsides like a spring fire
"et primitus oritur herba imbribus primoribus evocata"  as if
the earth sent forth an inward heat to greet the returning sun not
yellow but green is the color of its flame  the symbol of
perpetual youth, the grassblade, like a long green ribbon, streams
from the sod into the summer, checked indeed by the frost, but anon
pushing on again, lifting its spear of last year's hay with the
fresh life below. It grows as steadily as the rill oozes out of the
ground. It is almost identical with that, for in the growing days
of June, when the rills are dry, the grassblades are their
channels, and from year to year the herds drink at this perennial
green stream, and the mower draws from it betimes their winter
supply. So our human life but dies down to its root, and still puts
forth its green blade to eternity.
Walden is melting apace. There is a canal two rods wide along
the northerly and westerly sides, and wider still at the east end.
A great field of ice has cracked off from the main body. I hear a
song sparrow singing from the bushes on the shore  olit, olit,
olit  chip, chip, chip, che char  che wiss, wiss, wiss. He too
is helping to crack it. How handsome the great sweeping curves in
the edge of the ice, answering somewhat to those of the shore, but
more regular It is unusually hard, owing to the recent severe but
transient cold, and all watered or waved like a palace floor. But
the wind slides eastward over its opaque surface in vain, till it
reaches the living surface beyond. It is glorious to behold this
ribbon of water sparkling in the sun, the bare face of the pond full
of glee and youth, as if it spoke the joy of the fishes within it,
and of the sands on its shore  a silvery sheen as from the scales
of a leuciscus, as it were all one active fish. Such is the
contrast between winter and spring. Walden was dead and is alive
again. But this spring it broke up more steadily, as I have said.
The change from storm and winter to serene and mild weather,
from dark and sluggish hours to bright and elastic ones, is a
memorable crisis which all things proclaim. It is seemingly
instantaneous at last. Suddenly an influx of light filled my house,
though the evening was at hand, and the clouds of winter still
overhung it, and the eaves were dripping with sleety rain. I looked
out the window, and lo where yesterday was cold gray ice there lay
the transparent pond already calm and full of hope as in a summer
evening, reflecting a summer evening sky in its bosom, though none
was visible overhead, as if it had intelligence with some remote
horizon. I heard a robin in the distance, the first I had heard for
many a thousand years, methought, whose note I shall not forget for
many a thousand more  the same sweet and powerful song as of yore.
O the evening robin, at the end of a New England summer day If I
could ever find the twig he sits upon I mean he I mean the twig.
This at least is not the Turdus migratorius. The pitch pines and
shrub oaks about my house, which had so long drooped, suddenly
resumed their several characters, looked brighter, greener, and more
erect and alive, as if effectually cleansed and restored by the
rain. I knew that it would not rain any more. You may tell by
looking at any twig of the forest, ay, at your very woodpile,
whether its winter is past or not. As it grew darker, I was
startled by the honking of geese flying low over the woods, like
weary travellers getting in late from Southern lakes, and indulging
at last in unrestrained complaint and mutual consolation. Standing
at my door, I could bear the rush of their wings when, driving
toward my house, they suddenly spied my light, and with hushed
clamor wheeled and settled in the pond. So I came in, and shut the
door, and passed my first spring night in the woods.
In the morning I watched the geese from the door through the
mist, sailing in the middle of the pond, fifty rods off, so large
and tumultuous that Walden appeared like an artificial pond for
their amusement. But when I stood on the shore they at once rose up
with a great flapping of wings at the signal of their commander, and
when they had got into rank circled about over my head, twentynine
of them, and then steered straight to Canada, with a regular honk
from the leader at intervals, trusting to break their fast in
muddier pools. A "plump" of ducks rose at the same time and took
the route to the north in the wake of their noisier cousins.
For a week I heard the circling, groping clangor of some
solitary goose in the foggy mornings, seeking its companion, and
still peopling the woods with the sound of a larger life than they
could sustain. In April the pigeons were seen again flying express
in small flocks, and in due time I heard the martins twittering over
my clearing, though it had not seemed that the township contained so
many that it could afford me any, and I fancied that they were
peculiarly of the ancient race that dwelt in hollow trees ere white
men came. In almost all climes the tortoise and the frog are among
the precursors and heralds of this season, and birds fly with song
and glancing plumage, and plants spring and bloom, and winds blow,
to correct this slight oscillation of the poles and preserve the
equilibrium of nature.
As every season seems best to us in its turn, so the coming in
of spring is like the creation of Cosmos out of Chaos and the
realization of the Golden Age.
"Eurus ad Auroram Nabathaeaque regna recessit,
Persidaque, et radiis juga subdita matutinis."
"The EastWind withdrew to Aurora and the Nabathean kingdom,
And the Persian, and the ridges placed under the morning rays.
Man was born. Whether that Artificer of things,
The origin of a better world, made him from the divine seed
Or the earth, being recent and lately sundered from the high
Ether, retained some seeds of cognate heaven."
A single gentle rain makes the grass many shades greener. So
our prospects brighten on the influx of better thoughts. We should
be blessed if we lived in the present always, and took advantage of
every accident that befell us, like the grass which confesses the
influence of the slightest dew that falls on it and did not spend
our time in atoning for the neglect of past opportunities, which we
call doing our duty. We loiter in winter while it is already
spring. In a pleasant spring morning all men's sins are forgiven.
Such a day is a truce to vice. While such a sun holds out to burn,
the vilest sinner may return. Through our own recovered innocence
we discern the innocence of our neighbors. You may have known your
neighbor yesterday for a thief, a drunkard, or a sensualist, and
merely pitied or despised him, and despaired of the world but the
sun shines bright and warm this first spring morning, recreating the
world, and you meet him at some serene work, and see how it is
exhausted and debauched veins expand with still joy and bless the
new day, feel the spring influence with the innocence of infancy,
and all his faults are forgotten. There is not only an atmosphere
of good will about him, but even a savor of holiness groping for
expression, blindly and ineffectually perhaps, like a newborn
instinct, and for a short hour the south hillside echoes to no
vulgar jest. You see some innocent fair shoots preparing to burst
from his gnarled rind and try another year's life, tender and fresh
as the youngest plant. Even he has entered into the joy of his
Lord. Why the jailer does not leave open his prison doors  why
the judge does not dismis his case  why the preacher does not
dismiss his congregation It is because they do not obey the hint
which God gives them, nor accept the pardon which he freely offers
to all.
"A return to goodness produced each day in the tranquil and
beneficent breath of the morning, causes that in respect to the love
of virtue and the hatred of vice, one approaches a little the
primitive nature of man, as the sprouts of the forest which has been
felled. In like manner the evil which one does in the interval of a
day prevents the germs of virtues which began to spring up again
from developing themselves and destroys them.
"After the germs of virtue have thus been prevented many times
from developing themselves, then the beneficent breath of evening
does not suffice to preserve them. As soon as the breath of evening
does not suffice longer to preserve them, then the nature of man
does not differ much from that of the brute. Men seeing the nature
of this man like that of the brute, think that he has never
possessed the innate faculty of reason. Are those the true and
natural sentiments of man?"
"The Golden Age was first created, which without any avenger
Spontaneously without law cherished fidelity and rectitude.
Punishment and fear were not nor were threatening words read
On suspended brass nor did the suppliant crowd fear
The words of their judge but were safe without an avenger.
Not yet the pine felled on its mountains had descended
To the liquid waves that it might see a foreign world,
And mortals knew no shores but their own.
There was eternal spring, and placid zephyrs with warm
Blasts soothed the flowers born without seed."
On the th of April, as I was fishing from the bank of the
river near the NineAcreCorner bridge, standing on the quaking
grass and willow roots, where the muskrats lurk, I heard a singular
rattling sound, somewhat like that of the sticks which boys play
with their fingers, when, looking up, I observed a very slight and
graceful hawk, like a nighthawk, alternately soaring like a ripple
and tumbling a rod or two over and over, showing the under side of
its wings, which gleamed like a satin ribbon in the sun, or like the
pearly inside of a shell. This sight reminded me of falconry and
what nobleness and poetry are associated with that sport. The
Merlin it seemed to me it might be called but I care not for its
name. It was the most ethereal flight I had ever witnessed. It did
not simply flutter like a butterfly, nor soar like the larger hawks,
but it sported with proud reliance in the fields of air mounting
again and again with its strange chuckle, it repeated its free and
beautiful fall, turning over and over like a kite, and then
recovering from its lofty tumbling, as if it had never set its foot
on terra firma. It appeared to have no companion in the universe 
sporting there alone  and to need none but the morning and the
ether with which it played. It was not lonely, but made all the
earth lonely beneath it. Where was the parent which hatched it, its
kindred, and its father in the heavens? The tenant of the air, it
seemed related to the earth but by an egg hatched some time in the
crevice of a crag  or was its native nest made in the angle of a
cloud, woven of the rainbow's trimmings and the sunset sky, and
lined with some soft midsummer haze caught up from earth? Its eyry
now some cliffy cloud.
Beside this I got a rare mess of golden and silver and bright
cupreous fishes, which looked like a string of jewels. Ah I have
penetrated to those meadows on the morning of many a first spring
day, jumping from hummock to hummock, from willow root to willow
root, when the wild river valley and the woods were bathed in so
pure and bright a light as would have waked the dead, if they had
been slumbering in their graves, as some suppose. There needs no
stronger proof of immortality. All things must live in such a
light. O Death, where was thy sting? O Grave, where was thy
victory, then?
Our village life would stagnate if it were not for the
unexplored forests and meadows which surround it. We need the tonic
of wildness  to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and
the meadowhen lurk, and hear the booming of the snipe to smell the
whispering sedge where only some wilder and more solitary fowl
builds her nest, and the mink crawls with its belly close to the
ground. At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn
all things, we require that all things be mysterious and
unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and
unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of
nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor,
vast and titanic features, the seacoast with its wrecks, the
wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the
thundercloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces
freshets. We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some
life pasturing freely where we never wander. We are cheered when we
observe the vulture feeding on the carrion which disgusts and
disheartens us, and deriving health and strength from the repast.
There was a dead horse in the hollow by the path to my house, which
compelled me sometimes to go out of my way, especially in the night
when the air was heavy, but the assurance it gave me of the strong
appetite and inviolable health of Nature was my compensation for
this. I love to see that Nature is so rife with life that myriads
can be afforded to be sacrificed and suffered to prey on one
another that tender organizations can be so serenely squashed out
of existence like pulp  tadpoles which herons gobble up, and
tortoises and toads run over in the road and that sometimes it has
rained flesh and blood With the liability to accident, we must see
how little account is to be made of it. The impression made on a
wise man is that of universal innocence. Poison is not poisonous
after all, nor are any wounds fatal. Compassion is a very untenable
ground. It must be expeditious. Its pleadings will not bear to be
stereotyped.
Early in May, the oaks, hickories, maples, and other trees, just
putting out amidst the pine woods around the pond, imparted a
brightness like sunshine to the landscape, especially in cloudy
days, as if the sun were breaking through mists and shining faintly
on the hillsides here and there. On the third or fourth of May I
saw a loon in the pond, and during the first week of the month I
heard the whippoorwill, the brown thrasher, the veery, the wood
pewee, the chewink, and other birds. I had heard the wood thrush
long before. The phoebe had already come once more and looked in at
my door and window, to see if my house was cavernlike enough for
her, sustaining herself on humming wings with clinched talons, as if
she held by the air, while she surveyed the premises. The
sulphurlike pollen of the pitch pine soon covered the pond and the
stones and rotten wood along the shore, so that you could have
collected a barrelful. This is the "sulphur showers" we bear of.
Even in Calidas' drama of Sacontala, we read of "rills dyed yellow
with the golden dust of the lotus." And so the seasons went rolling
on into summer, as one rambles into higher and higher grass.
Thus was my first year's life in the woods completed and the
second year was similar to it. I finally left Walden September th,
Conclusion
To the sick the doctors wisely recommend a change of air and
scenery. Thank Heaven, here is not all the world. The buckeye does
not grow in New England, and the mockingbird is rarely heard here.
The wild goose is more of a cosmopolite than we he breaks his fast
in Canada, takes a luncheon in the Ohio, and plumes himself for the
night in a southern bayou. Even the bison, to some extent, keeps
pace with the seasons cropping the pastures of the Colorado only
till a greener and sweeter grass awaits him by the Yellowstone. Yet
we think that if rail fences are pulled down, and stone walls piled
up on our farms, bounds are henceforth set to our lives and our
fates decided. If you are chosen town clerk, forsooth, you cannot
go to Tierra del Fuego this summer but you may go to the land of
infernal fire nevertheless. The universe is wider than our views of
it.
Yet we should oftener look over the tafferel of our craft, like
curious passengers, and not make the voyage like stupid sailors
picking oakum. The other side of the globe is but the home of our
correspondent. Our voyaging is only greatcircle sailing, and the
doctors prescribe for diseases of the skin merely. One hastens to
southern Africa to chase the giraffe but surely that is not the
game he would be after. How long, pray, would a man hunt giraffes
if he could? Snipes and woodcocks also may afford rare sport but I
trust it would be nobler game to shoot one's self.
"Direct your eye right inward, and you'll find
A thousand regions in your mind
Yet undiscovered. Travel them, and be
Expert in homecosmography."
What does Africa  what does the West stand for? Is not our own
interior white on the chart? black though it may prove, like the
coast, when discovered. Is it the source of the Nile, or the Niger,
or the Mississippi, or a Northwest Passage around this continent,
that we would find? Are these the problems which most concern
mankind? Is Franklin the only man who is lost, that his wife should
be so earnest to find him? Does Mr. Grinnell know where he himself
is? Be rather the Mungo Park, the Lewis and Clark and Frobisher, of
your own streams and oceans explore your own higher latitudes 
with shiploads of preserved meats to support you, if they be
necessary and pile the empty cans skyhigh for a sign. Were
preserved meats invented to preserve meat merely? Nay, be a
Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new
channels, not of trade, but of thought. Every man is the lord of a
realm beside which the earthly empire of the Czar is but a petty
state, a hummock left by the ice. Yet some can be patriotic who
have no selfrespect, and sacrifice the greater to the less. They
love the soil which makes their graves, but have no sympathy with
the spirit which may still animate their clay. Patriotism is a
maggot in their heads. What was the meaning of that SouthSea
Exploring Expedition, with all its parade and expense, but an
indirect recognition of the fact that there are continents and seas
in the moral world to which every man is an isthmus or an inlet, yet
unexplored by him, but that it is easier to sail many thousand miles
through cold and storm and cannibals, in a government ship, with
five hundred men and boys to assist one, than it is to explore the
private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one's being alone.
"Erret, et extremos alter scrutetur Iberos.
Plus habet hic vitae, plus habet ille viae."
Let them wander and scrutinize the outlandish Australians.
I have more of God, they more of the road.
It is not worth the while to go round the world to count the cats in
Zanzibar. Yet do this even till you can do better, and you may
perhaps find some "Symmes' Hole" by which to get at the inside at
last. England and France, Spain and Portugal, Gold Coast and Slave
Coast, all front on this private sea but no bark from them has
ventured out of sight of land, though it is without doubt the direct
way to India. If you would learn to speak all tongues and conform
to the customs of all nations, if you would travel farther than all
travellers, be naturalized in all climes, and cause the Sphinx to
dash her head against a stone, even obey the precept of the old
philosopher, and Explore thyself. Herein are demanded the eye and
the nerve. Only the defeated and deserters go to the wars, cowards
that run away and enlist. Start now on that farthest western way,
which does not pause at the Mississippi or the Pacific, nor conduct
toward a wornout China or Japan, but leads on direct, a tangent to
this sphere, summer and winter, day and night, sun down, moon down,
and at last earth down too.
It is said that Mirabeau took to highway robbery "to ascertain
what degree of resolution was necessary in order to place one's self
in formal opposition to the most sacred laws of society." He
declared that "a soldier who fights in the ranks does not require
half so much courage as a footpad"  "that honor and religion have
never stood in the way of a wellconsidered and a firm resolve."
This was manly, as the world goes and yet it was idle, if not
desperate. A saner man would have found himself often enough "in
formal opposition" to what are deemed "the most sacred laws of
society," through obedience to yet more sacred laws, and so have
tested his resolution without going out of his way. It is not for a
man to put himself in such an attitude to society, but to maintain
himself in whatever attitude he find himself through obedience to
the laws of his being, which will never be one of opposition to a
just government, if he should chance to meet with such.
I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps
it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not
spare any more time for that one. It is remarkable how easily and
insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track
for ourselves. I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a
path from my door to the pondside and though it is five or six
years since I trod it, it is still quite distinct. It is true, I
fear, that others may have fallen into it, and so helped to keep it
open. The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet
of men and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and
dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of
tradition and conformity I did not wish to take a cabin passage,
but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for
there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not
wish to go below now.
I learned this, at least, by my experiment that if one advances
confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live
the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success
unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will
pass an invisible boundary new, universal, and more liberal laws
will begin to establish themselves around and within him or the old
laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal
sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of
beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the
universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be
solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have
built castles in the air, your work need not be lost that is where
they should be. Now put the foundations under them.
It is a ridiculous demand which England and America make, that
you shall speak so that they can understand you. Neither men nor
toadstools grow so. As if that were important, and there were not
enough to understand you without them. As if Nature could support
but one order of understandings, could not sustain birds as well as
quadrupeds, flying as well as creeping things, and hush and whoa,
which Bright can understand, were the best English. As if there
were safety in stupidity alone. I fear chiefly lest my expression
may not be extravagant enough, may not wander far enough beyond the
narrow limits of my daily experience, so as to be adequate to the
truth of which I have been convinced. Extra vagance it depends on
how you are yarded. The migrating buffalo, which seeks new pastures
in another latitude, is not extravagant like the cow which kicks
over the pail, leaps the cowyard fence, and runs after her calf, in
milking time. I desire to speak somewhere without bounds like a
man in a waking moment, to men in their waking moments for I am
convinced that I cannot exaggerate enough even to lay the foundation
of a true expression. Who that has heard a strain of music feared
then lest he should speak extravagantly any more forever? In view
of the future or possible, we should live quite laxly and undefined
in front, our outlines dim and misty on that side as our shadows
reveal an insensible perspiration toward the sun. The volatile
truth of our words should continually betray the inadequacy of the
residual statement. Their truth is instantly translated its
literal monument alone remains. The words which express our faith
and piety are not definite yet they are significant and fragrant
like frankincense to superior natures.
Why level downward to our dullest perception always, and praise
that as common sense? The commonest sense is the sense of men
asleep, which they express by snoring. Sometimes we are inclined to
class those who are onceandahalfwitted with the halfwitted,
because we appreciate only a third part of their wit. Some would
find fault with the morning red, if they ever got up early enough.
"They pretend," as I hear, "that the verses of Kabir have four
different senses illusion, spirit, intellect, and the exoteric
doctrine of the Vedas" but in this part of the world it is
considered a ground for complaint if a man's writings admit of more
than one interpretation. While England endeavors to cure the
potatorot, will not any endeavor to cure the brainrot, which
prevails so much more widely and fatally?
I do not suppose that I have attained to obscurity, but I should
be proud if no more fatal fault were found with my pages on this
score than was found with the Walden ice. Southern customers
objected to its blue color, which is the evidence of its purity, as
if it were muddy, and preferred the Cambridge ice, which is white,
but tastes of weeds. The purity men love is like the mists which
envelop the earth, and not like the azure ether beyond.
Some are dinning in our ears that we Americans, and moderns
generally, are intellectual dwarfs compared with the ancients, or
even the Elizabethan men. But what is that to the purpose? A
living dog is better than a dead lion. Shall a man go and hang
himself because he belongs to the race of pygmies, and not be the
biggest pygmy that he can? Let every one mind his own business, and
endeavor to be what he was made.
Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such
desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his
companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let
him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.
It is not important that he should mature as soon as an apple tree
or an oak. Shall he turn his spring into summer? If the condition
of things which we were made for is not yet, what were any reality
which we can substitute? We will not be shipwrecked on a vain
reality. Shall we with pains erect a heaven of blue glass over
ourselves, though when it is done we shall be sure to gaze still at
the true ethereal heaven far above, as if the former were not?
There was an artist in the city of Kouroo who was disposed to
strive after perfection. One day it came into his mind to make a
staff. Having considered that in an imperfect work time is an
ingredient, but into a perfect work time does not enter, he said to
himself, It shall be perfect in all respects, though I should do
nothing else in my life. He proceeded instantly to the forest for
wood, being resolved that it should not be made of unsuitable
material and as he searched for and rejected stick after stick, his
friends gradually deserted him, for they grew old in their works and
died, but he grew not older by a moment. His singleness of purpose
and resolution, and his elevated piety, endowed him, without his
knowledge, with perennial youth. As he made no compromise with
Time, Time kept out of his way, and only sighed at a distance
because he could not overcome him. Before he had found a stock in
all respects suitable the city of Kouroo was a hoary ruin, and he
sat on one of its mounds to peel the stick. Before he had given it
the proper shape the dynasty of the Candahars was at an end, and
with the point of the stick he wrote the name of the last of that
race in the sand, and then resumed his work. By the time he had
smoothed and polished the staff Kalpa was no longer the polestar
and ere he had put on the ferule and the head adorned with precious
stones, Brahma had awoke and slumbered many times. But why do I
stay to mention these things? When the finishing stroke was put to
his work, it suddenly expanded before the eyes of the astonished
artist into the fairest of all the creations of Brahma. He had made
a new system in making a staff, a world with full and fair
proportions in which, though the old cities and dynasties had
passed away, fairer and more glorious ones had taken their places.
And now he saw by the heap of shavings still fresh at his feet,
that, for him and his work, the former lapse of time had been an
illusion, and that no more time had elapsed than is required for a
single scintillation from the brain of Brahma to fall on and inflame
the tinder of a mortal brain. The material was pure, and his art
was pure how could the result be other than wonderful?
No face which we can give to a matter will stead us so well at
last as the truth. This alone wears well. For the most part, we
are not where we are, but in a false position. Through an infinity
of our natures, we suppose a case, and put ourselves into it, and
hence are in two cases at the same time, and it is doubly difficult
to get out. In sane moments we regard only the facts, the case that
is. Say what you have to say, not what you ought. Any truth is
better than makebelieve. Tom Hyde, the tinker, standing on the
gallows, was asked if he had anything to say. "Tell the tailors,"
said he, "to remember to make a knot in their thread before they
take the first stitch." His companion's prayer is forgotten.
However mean your life is, meet it and live it do not shun it
and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks
poorest when you are richest. The faultfinder will find faults
even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps
have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poorhouse.
The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the almshouse as
brightly as from the rich man's abode the snow melts before its
door as early in the spring. I do not see but a quiet mind may live
as contentedly there, and have as cheering thoughts, as in a palace.
The town's poor seem to me often to live the most independent lives
of any. Maybe they are simply great enough to receive without
misgiving. Most think that they are above being supported by the
town but it oftener happens that they are not above supporting
themselves by dishonest means, which should be more disreputable.
Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble
yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Turn
the old return to them. Things do not change we change. Sell
your clothes and keep your thoughts. God will see that you do not
want society. If I were confined to a corner of a garret all my
days, like a spider, the world would be just as large to me while I
had my thoughts about me. The philosopher said "From an army of
three divisions one can take away its general, and put it in
disorder from the man the most abject and vulgar one cannot take
away his thought." Do not seek so anxiously to be developed, to
subject yourself to many influences to be played on it is all
dissipation. Humility like darkness reveals the heavenly lights.
The shadows of poverty and meanness gather around us, "and lo
creation widens to our view." We are often reminded that if there
were bestowed on us the wealth of Croesus, our aims must still be
the same, and our means essentially the same. Moreover, if you are
restricted in your range by poverty, if you cannot buy books and
newspapers, for instance, you are but confined to the most
significant and vital experiences you are compelled to deal with
the material which yields the most sugar and the most starch. It is
life near the bone where it is sweetest. You are defended from
being a trifler. No man loses ever on a lower level by magnanimity
on a higher. Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only. Money
is not required to buy one necessary of the soul.
I live in the angle of a leaden wall, into whose composition was
poured a little alloy of bellmetal. Often, in the repose of my
midday, there reaches my ears a confused tintinnabulum from
without. It is the noise of my contemporaries. My neighbors tell
me of their adventures with famous gentlemen and ladies, what
notabilities they met at the dinnertable but I am no more
interested in such things than in the contents of the Daily Times.
The interest and the conversation are about costume and manners
chiefly but a goose is a goose still, dress it as you will. They
tell me of California and Texas, of England and the Indies, of the
Hon. Mr.  of Georgia or of Massachusetts, all transient and
fleeting phenomena, till I am ready to leap from their courtyard
like the Mameluke bey. I delight to come to my bearings  not walk
in procession with pomp and parade, in a conspicuous place, but to
walk even with the Builder of the universe, if I may  not to live
in this restless, nervous, bustling, trivial Nineteenth Century, but
stand or sit thoughtfully while it goes by. What are men
celebrating? They are all on a committee of arrangements, and
hourly expect a speech from somebody. God is only the president of
the day, and Webster is his orator. I love to weigh, to settle, to
gravitate toward that which most strongly and rightfully attracts
me  not hang by the beam of the scale and try to weigh less  not
suppose a case, but take the case that is to travel the only path I
can, and that on which no power can resist me. It affords me no
satisfaction to commerce to spring an arch before I have got a solid
foundation. Let us not play at kittlybenders. There is a solid
bottom everywhere. We read that the traveller asked the boy if the
swamp before him had a hard bottom. The boy replied that it had.
But presently the traveller's horse sank in up to the girths, and he
observed to the boy, "I thought you said that this bog had a hard
bottom." "So it has," answered the latter, "but you have not got
half way to it yet." So it is with the bogs and quicksands of
society but he is an old boy that knows it. Only what is thought,
said, or done at a certain rare coincidence is good. I would not be
one of those who will foolishly drive a nail into mere lath and
plastering such a deed would keep me awake nights. Give me a
hammer, and let me feel for the furring. Do not depend on the
putty. Drive a nail home and clinch it so faithfully that you can
wake up in the night and think of your work with satisfaction  a
work at which you would not be ashamed to invoke the Muse. So will
help you God, and so only. Every nail driven should be as another
rivet in the machine of the universe, you carrying on the work.
Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth. I sat
at a table where were rich food and wine in abundance, and
obsequious attendance, but sincerity and truth were not and I went
away hungry from the inhospitable board. The hospitality was as
cold as the ices. I thought that there was no need of ice to freeze
them. They talked to me of the age of the wine and the fame of the
vintage but I thought of an older, a newer, and purer wine, of a
more glorious vintage, which they had not got, and could not buy.
The style, the house and grounds and "entertainment" pass for
nothing with me. I called on the king, but he made me wait in his
hall, and conducted like a man incapacitated for hospitality. There
was a man in my neighborhood who lived in a hollow tree. His
manners were truly regal. I should have done better had I called on
him.
How long shall we sit in our porticoes practising idle and musty
virtues, which any work would make impertinent? As if one were to
begin the day with longsuffering, and hire a man to hoe his
potatoes and in the afternoon go forth to practise Christian
meekness and charity with goodness aforethought Consider the China
pride and stagnant selfcomplacency of mankind. This generation
inclines a little to congratulate itself on being the last of an
illustrious line and in Boston and London and Paris and Rome,
thinking of its long descent, it speaks of its progress in art and
science and literature with satisfaction. There are the Records of
the Philosophical Societies, and the public Eulogies of Great Men
It is the good Adam contemplating his own virtue. "Yes, we have
done great deeds, and sung divine songs, which shall never die" 
that is, as long as we can remember them. The learned societies and
great men of Assyria  where are they? What youthful philosophers
and experimentalists we are There is not one of my readers who has
yet lived a whole human life. These may be but the spring months in
the life of the race. If we have had the sevenyears' itch, we have
not seen the seventeenyear locust yet in Concord. We are
acquainted with a mere pellicle of the globe on which we live. Most
have not delved six feet beneath the surface, nor leaped as many
above it. We know not where we are. Beside, we are sound asleep
nearly half our time. Yet we esteem ourselves wise, and have an
established order on the surface. Truly, we are deep thinkers, we
are ambitious spirits As I stand over the insect crawling amid the
pine needles on the forest floor, and endeavoring to conceal itself
from my sight, and ask myself why it will cherish those humble
thoughts, and bide its head from me who might, perhaps, be its
benefactor, and impart to its race some cheering information, I am
reminded of the greater Benefactor and Intelligence that stands over
me the human insect.
There is an incessant influx of novelty into the world, and yet
we tolerate incredible dulness. I need only suggest what kind of
sermons are still listened to in the most enlightened countries.
There are such words as joy and sorrow, but they are only the burden
of a psalm, sung with a nasal twang, while we believe in the
ordinary and mean. We think that we can change our clothes only.
It is said that the British Empire is very large and respectable,
and that the United States are a firstrate power. We do not
believe that a tide rises and falls behind every man which can float
the British Empire like a chip, if he should ever harbor it in his
mind. Who knows what sort of seventeenyear locust will next come
out of the ground? The government of the world I live in was not
framed, like that of Britain, in afterdinner conversations over the
wine.
The life in us is like the water in the river. It may rise this
year higher than man has ever known it, and flood the parched
uplands even this may be the eventful year, which will drown out
all our muskrats. It was not always dry land where we dwell. I see
far inland the banks which the stream anciently washed, before
science began to record its freshets. Every one has heard the story
which has gone the rounds of New England, of a strong and beautiful
bug which came out of the dry leaf of an old table of appletree
wood, which had stood in a farmer's kitchen for sixty years, first
in Connecticut, and afterward in Massachusetts  from an egg
deposited in the living tree many years earlier still, as appeared
by counting the annual layers beyond it which was heard gnawing out
for several weeks, hatched perchance by the heat of an urn. Who
does not feel his faith in a resurrection and immortality
strengthened by hearing of this? Who knows what beautiful and
winged life, whose egg has been buried for ages under many
concentric layers of woodenness in the dead dry life of society,
deposited at first in the alburnum of the green and living tree,
which has been gradually converted into the semblance of its
wellseasoned tomb  heard perchance gnawing out now for years by
the astonished family of man, as they sat round the festive board 
may unexpectedly come forth from amidst society's most trivial and
handselled furniture, to enjoy its perfect summer life at last
I do not say that John or Jonathan will realize all this but
such is the character of that morrow which mere lapse of time can
never make to dawn. The light which puts out our eyes is darkness
to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more
day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.
ON THE DUTY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE
I heartily accept the motto,  "That government is best which
governs least" and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly
and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which
also I believe,  "That government is best which governs not at
all" and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of
government which they will have. Government is at best but an
expedient but most governments are usually, and all governments are
sometimes, inexpedient. The objections which have been brought
against a standing army, and they are many and weighty, and deserve
to prevail, may also at last be brought against a standing
government. The standing army is only an arm of the standing
government. The government itself, which is only the mode which the
people have chosen to execute their will, is equally liable to be
abused and perverted before the people can act through it. Witness
the present Mexican war, the work of comparatively a few individuals
using the standing government as their tool for, in the outset, the
people would not have consented to this measure.
This American government  what is it but a tradition, though a
recent one, endeavoring to transmit itself unimpaired to posterity,
but each instant losing some of its integrity? It has not the
vitality and force of a single living man for a single man can bend
it to his will. It is a sort of wooden gun to the people
themselves. But it is not the less necessary for this for the
people must have some complicated machinery or other, and hear its
din, to satisfy that idea of government which they have.
Governments show thus how successfully men can be imposed on, even
impose on themselves, for their own advantage. It is excellent, we
must all allow. Yet this government never of itself furthered any
enterprise, but by the alacrity with which it got out of its way.
It does not keep the country free. It does not settle the West. It
does not educate. The character inherent in the American people has
done all that has been accomplished and it would have done somewhat
more, if the government had not sometimes got in its way. For
government is an expedient by which men would fain succeed in
letting one another alone and, as has been said, when it is most
expedient, the governed are most let alone by it. Trade and
commerce, if they were not made of India rubber, would never manage
to bounce over the obstacles which legislators are continually
putting in their way and, if one were to judge these men wholly by
the effects of their actions, and not partly by their intentions,
they would deserve to be classed and punished with those mischievous
persons who put obstructions on the railroads.
But, to speak practically and as a citizen, unlike those who
call themselves nogovernment men, I ask for, not at once no
government, but at once a better government. Let every man make
known what kind of government would command his respect, and that
will be one step toward obtaining it.
After all, the practical reason why, when the power is once in
the hands of the people, a majority are permitted, and for a long
period continue, to rule, is not because they are most likely to be
in the right, nor because this seems fairest to the minority, but
because they are physically the strongest. But a government in
which the majority rule in all cases cannot be based on justice,
even as far as men understand it. Can there not be a government in
which majorities do not virtually decide right and wrong, but
conscience?  in which majorities decide only those questions to
which the rule of expediency is applicable? Must the citizen ever
for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the
legislator? Why has every man a conscience, then? I think that we
should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to
cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only
obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what
I think right. It is truly enough said that a corporation has no
conscience but a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation
with a conscience. Law never made men a whit more just and, by
means of their respect for it, even the welldisposed are daily made
the agents of injustice. A common and natural result of an undue
respect for law is, that you may see a file of soldiers, colonel,
captain, corporal, privates, powdermonkeys, and all, marching in
admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills,
ay, against their common sense and consciences, which makes it very
steep marching indeed, and produces a palpitation of the heart.
They have no doubt that it is a damnable business in which they are
concerned they are all peaceably inclined. Now, what are they?
Men at all? or small movable forts and magazines, at the service of
some unscrupulous man in power? Visit the Navy Yard, and behold a
marine, such a man as an American government can make, or such as it
can make a man with its black arts  a mere shadow and reminiscence
of humanity, a man laid out alive and standing, and already, as one
may say, buried under arms with funeral accompaniments, though it
may be
"Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note,
As his corse to the rampart we hurried
Not a soldier discharged his farewell shot
O'er the grave where our hero we buried."
The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as
machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the
militia, jailers, constables, posse comitatus, etc. In most cases
there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral
sense but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and
stones and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve
the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw
or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses
and dogs. Yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good
citizens. Others, as most legislators, politicians, lawyers,
ministers, and officeholders, serve the state chiefly with their
heads and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as
likely to serve the devil, without intending it, as God. A very
few, as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and
men, serve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily
resist it for the most part and they are commonly treated as
enemies by it. A wise man will only be useful as a man, and will
not submit to be "clay," and "stop a hole to keep the wind away,"
but leave that office to his dust at least
"I am too highborn to be propertied,
To be a secondary at control,
Or useful servingman and instrument
To any sovereign state throughout the world."
He who gives himself entirely to his fellowmen appears to them
useless and selfish but he who gives himself partially to them is
pronounced a benefactor and philanthropist.
How does it become a man to behave toward this American
government today? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be
associated with it. I cannot for an instant recognize that
political organization as my government which is the slave's
government also.
All men recognize the right of revolution that is, the right to
refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when its
tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable. But almost
all say that such is not the case now. But such was the case, they
think, in the Revolution of '. If one were to tell me that this
was a bad government because it taxed certain foreign commodities
brought to its ports, it is most probable that I should not make an
ado about it, for I can do without them. All machines have their
friction and possibly this does enough good to counterbalance the
evil. At any rate, it is a great evil to make a stir about it. But
when the friction comes to have its machine, and oppression and
robbery are organized, I say, let us not have such a machine any
longer. In other words, when a sixth of the population of a nation
which has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty are slaves, and a
whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army,
and subjected to military law, I think that it is not too soon for
honest men to rebel and revolutionize. What makes this duty the
more urgent is the fact that the country so overrun is not our own,
but ours is the invading army.
Paley, a common authority with many on moral questions, in his
chapter on the "Duty of Submission to Civil Government," resolves
all civil obligation into expediency and he proceeds to say that
"so long as the interest of the whole society requires it, that is,
so long as the established government cannot be resisted or changed
without public inconveniency, it is the will of God... that the
established government be obeyed, and no longer.... This principle
being admitted, the justice of every particular case of resistance
is reduced to a computation of the quantity of the danger and
grievance on the one side, and of the probability and expense of
redressing it on the other." Of this, he says, every man shall
judge for himself. But Paley appears never to have contemplated
those cases to which the rule of expediency does not apply, in which
a people, as well as an individual, must do justice, cost what it
may. If I have unjustly wrested a plank from a drowning man, I must
restore it to him though I drown myself. This, according to Paley,
would be inconvenient. But he that would save his life, in such a
case, shall lose it. This people must cease to hold slaves, and to
make war on Mexico, though it cost them their existence as a people.
In their practice, nations agree with Paley but does any one
think that Massachusetts does exactly what is right at the present
crisis?
"A drab of state, a clotho'silver slut,
To have her train borne up, and her soul trail in the dirt."
Practically speaking, the opponents to a reform in Massachusetts are
not a hundred thousand politicians at the South, but a hundred
thousand merchants and farmers here, who are more interested in
commerce and agriculture than they are in humanity, and are not
prepared to do justice to the slave and to Mexico, cost what it may.
I quarrel not with faroff foes, but with those who, near at home,
cooperate with, and do the bidding of those far away, and without
whom the latter would be harmless. We are accustomed to say, that
the mass of men are unprepared but improvement is slow, because the
few are not materially wiser or better than the many. It is not so
important that many should be as good as you, as that there be some
absolute goodness somewhere for that will leaven the whole lump.
There are thousands who are in opinion opposed to slavery and to the
war, who yet in effect do nothing to put an end to them who,
esteeming themselves children of Washington and Franklin, sit down
with their hands in their pockets, and say that they know not what
to do, and do nothing who even postpone the question of freedom to
the question of freetrade, and quietly read the pricescurrent
along with the latest advices from Mexico, after dinner, and, it may
be, fall asleep over them both. What is the pricecurrent of an
honest man and patriot today? They hesitate, and they regret, and
sometimes they petition but they do nothing in earnest and with
effect. They will wait, well disposed, for others to remedy the
evil, that they may no longer have it to regret. At most, they give
only a cheap vote, and a feeble countenance and Godspeed, to the
right, as it goes by them. There are nine hundred and ninetynine
patrons of virtue to one virtuous man but it is easier to deal
with the real possessor of a thing than with the temporary guardian
of it.
All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon,
with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong,
with moral questions and betting naturally accompanies it. The
character of the voters is not staked. I cast my vote, perchance,
as I think right but I am not vitally concerned that that right
should prevail. I am willing to leave it to the majority. Its
obligation, therefore, never exceeds that of expediency. Even
voting for the right is doing nothing for it. It is only expressing
to men feebly your desire that it should prevail. A wise man will
not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail
through the power of the majority. There is but little virtue in
the action of masses of men. When the majority shall at length vote
for the abolition of slavery, it will be because they are
indifferent to slavery, or because there is but little slavery left
to be abolished by their vote. They will then be the only slaves.
Only his vote can hasten the abolition of slavery who asserts his
own freedom by his vote.
I hear of a convention to be held at Baltimore, or elsewhere,
for the selection of a candidate for the Presidency, made up chiefly
of editors, and men who are politicians by profession but I think,
what is it to any independent, intelligent, and respectable man what
decision they may come to? Shall we not have the advantage of his
wisdom and honesty, nevertheless? Can we not count upon some
independent votes? Are there not many individuals in the country
who do not attend conventions? But no I find that the respectable
man, so called, has immediately drifted from his position, and
despairs of his country, when his country has more reason to despair
of him. He forthwith adopts one of the candidates thus selected as
the only available one, thus proving that he is himself available
for any purposes of the demagogue. His vote is of no more worth
than that of any unprincipled foreigner or hireling native, who may
have been bought. Oh for a man who is a man, and, as my neighbor
says, has a bone in his back which you cannot pass your hand
through Our statistics are at fault the population has been
returned too large. How many men are there to a square thousand
miles in this country? Hardly one. Does not America offer any
inducement for men to settle here? The American has dwindled into
an Odd Fellow  one who may be known by the development of his
organ of gregariousness, and a manifest lack of intellect and
cheerful selfreliance whose first and chief concern, on coming
into the world, is to see that the almshouses are in good repair
and, before yet he has lawfully donned the virile garb, to collect a
fund for the support of the widows and orphans that may be who, in
short ventures to live only by the aid of the Mutual Insurance
company, which has promised to bury him decently.
It is not a man's duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself
to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong he may
still properly have other concerns to engage him but it is his
duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no
thought longer, not to give it practically his support. If I devote
myself to other pursuits and contemplations, I must first see, at
least, that I do not pursue them sitting upon another man's
shoulders. I must get off him first, that he may pursue his
contemplations too. See what gross inconsistency is tolerated. I
have heard some of my townsmen say, "I should like to have them
order me out to help put down an insurrection of the slaves, or to
march to Mexico  see if I would go" and yet these very men have
each, directly by their allegiance, and so indirectly, at least, by
their money, furnished a substitute. The soldier is applauded who
refuses to serve in an unjust war by those who do not refuse to
sustain the unjust government which makes the war is applauded by
those whose own act and authority he disregards and sets at naught
as if the state were penitent to that degree that it hired one to
scourge it while it sinned, but not to that degree that it left off
sinning for a moment. Thus, under the name of Order and Civil
Government, we are all made at last to pay homage to and support our
own meanness. After the first blush of sin comes its indifference
and from immoral it becomes, as it were, unmoral, and not quite
unnecessary to that life which we have made.
The broadest and most prevalent error requires the most
disinterested virtue to sustain it. The slight reproach to which
the virtue of patriotism is commonly liable, the noble are most
likely to incur. Those who, while they disapprove of the character
and measures of a government, yield to it their allegiance and
support are undoubtedly its most conscientious supporters, and so
frequently the most serious obstacles to reform. Some are
petitioning the State to dissolve the Union, to disregard the
requisitions of the President. Why do they not dissolve it
themselves  the union between themselves and the State  and
refuse to pay their quota into its treasury? Do not they stand in
the same relation to the State, that the State does to the Union?
And have not the same reasons prevented the State from resisting the
Union, which have prevented them from resisting the State?
How can a man be satisfied to entertain an opinion merely, and
enjoy it? Is there any enjoyment in it, if his opinion is that he
is aggrieved? If you are cheated out of a single dollar by your
neighbor, you do not rest satisfied with knowing that you are
cheated, or with saying that you are cheated, or even with
petitioning him to pay you your due but you take effectual steps at
once to obtain the full amount, and see that you are never cheated
again. Action from principle  the perception and the performance
of right  changes things and relations it is essentially
revolutionary, and does not consist wholly with anything which was.
It not only divides states and churches, it divides families ay, it
divides the individual, separating the diabolical in him from the
divine.
Unjust laws exist shall we be content to obey them, or shall we
endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or
shall we transgress them at once? Men generally, under such a
government as this, think that they ought to wait until they have
persuaded the majority to alter them. They think that, if they
should resist, the remedy would be worse than the evil. But it is
the fault of the government itself that the remedy is worse than the
evil. It makes it worse. Why is it not more apt to anticipate and
provide for reform? Why does it not cherish its wise minority? Why
does it cry and resist before it is hurt? Why does it not encourage
its citizens to be on the alert to point out its faults, and do
better than it would have them? Why does it always crucify Christ,
and excommunicate Copernicus and Luther, and pronounce Washington
and Franklin rebels?
One would think, that a deliberate and practical denial of its
authority was the only offence never contemplated by government
else, why has it not assigned its definite, its suitable and
proportionate, penalty? If a man who has no property refuses but
once to earn nine shillings for the State, he is put in prison for a
period unlimited by any law that I know, and determined only by the
discretion of those who placed him there but if he should steal
ninety times nine shillings from the State, he is soon permitted to
go at large again.
If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the
machine of government, let it go, let it go perchance it will wear
smooth  certainly the machine will wear out. If the injustice has
a spring, or a pulley, or a rope, or a crank, exclusively for
itself, then perhaps you may consider whether the remedy will not be
worse than the evil but if it is of such a nature that it requires
you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the
law. Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine. What
I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to
the wrong which I condemn.
As for adopting the ways which the State has provided for
remedying the evil, I know not of such ways. They take too much
time, and a man's life will be gone. I have other affairs to attend
to. I came into this world, not chiefly to make this a good place
to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad. A man has not
everything to do, but something and because he cannot do
everything, it is not necessary that he should do something wrong.
It is not my business to be petitioning the Governor or the
Legislature any more than it is theirs to petition me and if they
should not hear my petition, what should I do then? But in this
case the State has provided no way its very Constitution is the
evil. This may seem to be harsh and stubborn and unconciliatory
but it is to treat with the utmost kindness and consideration the
only spirit that can appreciate or deserves it. So is an change for
the better, like birth and death which convulse the body.
I do not hesitate to say, that those who call themselves
Abolitionists should at once effectually withdraw their support,
both in person and property, from the government of Massachusetts,
and not wait till they constitute a majority of one, before they
suffer the right to prevail through them. I think that it is enough
if they have God on their side, without waiting for that other one.
Moreover, any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a
majority of one already.
I meet this American government, or its representative, the
State government, directly, and face to face, once a year  no more
in the person of its taxgatherer this is the only mode in which
a man situated as I am necessarily meets it and it then says
distinctly, Recognize me and the simplest, the most effectual, and,
in the present posture of affairs, the indispensablest mode of
treating with it on this head, of expressing your little
satisfaction with and love for it, is to deny it then. My civil
neighbor, the taxgatherer, is the very man I have to deal with 
for it is, after all, with men and not with parchment that I quarrel
and he has voluntarily chosen to be an agent of the government.
How shall he ever know well what he is and does as an officer of the
government, or as a man, until he is obliged to consider whether he
shall treat me, his neighbor, for whom he has respect, as a neighbor
and welldisposed man, or as a maniac and disturber of the peace,
and see if he can get over this obstruction to his neighborliness
without a ruder and more impetuous thought or speech corresponding
with his action? I know this well, that if one thousand, if one
hundred, if ten men whom I could name  if ten honest men only 
ay, if one HONEST man, in this State of Massachusetts, ceasing to
hold slaves, were actually to withdraw from this copartnership, and
be locked up in the county jail therefor, it would be the abolition
of slavery in America. For it matters not how small the beginning
may seem to be what is once well done is done forever. But we love
better to talk about it that we say is our mission. Reform keeps
many scores of newspapers in its service, but not one man. If my
esteemed neighbor, the State's ambassador, who will devote his days
to the settlement of the question of human rights in the Council
Chamber, instead of being threatened with the prisons of Carolina,
were to sit down the prisoner of Massachusetts, that State which is
so anxious to foist the sin of slavery upon her sister  though at
present she can discover only an act of inhospitality to be the
ground of a quarrel with her  the Legislature would not wholly
waive the subject the following winter.
Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place
for a just man is also a prison. The proper place today, the only
place which Massachusetts has provided for her freer and less
desponding spirits, is in her prisons, to be put out and locked out
of the State by her own act, as they have already put themselves out
by their principles. It is there that the fugitive slave, and the
Mexican prisoner on parole, and the Indian come to plead the wrongs
of his race, should find them on that separate, but more free and
honorable ground, where the State places those who are not with
her, but against her  the only house in a slave State in which a
free man can abide with honor. If any think that their influence
would be lost there, and their voices no longer afflict the ear of
the State, that they would not be as an enemy within its walls, they
do not know by how much truth is stronger than error, nor how much
more eloquently and effectively he can combat injustice who has
experienced a little in his own person. Cast your whole vote, not a
strip of paper merely, but your whole influence. A minority is
powerless while it conforms to the majority it is not even a
minority then but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole
weight. If the alternative is to keep all just men in prison, or
give up war and slavery, the State will not hesitate which to
choose. If a thousand men were not to pay their taxbills this
year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be
to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed
innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable
revolution, if any such is possible. If the taxgatherer, or any
other public officer, asks me, as one has done, "But what shall I
do?" my answer is, "If you really wish to do anything, resign your
office." When the subject has refused allegiance, and the officer
has resigned his office, then the revolution is accomplished. But
even suppose blood should flow. Is there not a sort of blood shed
when the conscience is wounded? Through this wound a man's real
manhood and immortality flow out, and he bleeds to an everlasting
death. I see this blood flowing now.
I have contemplated the imprisonment of the offender, rather
than the seizure of his goods  though both will serve the same
purpose  because they who assert the purest right, and
consequently are most dangerous to a corrupt State, commonly have
not spent much time in accumulating property. To such the State
renders comparatively small service, and a slight tax is wont to
appear exorbitant, particularly if they are obliged to earn it by
special labor with their hands. If there were one who lived wholly
without the use of money, the State itself would hesitate to demand
it of him. But the rich man  not to make any invidious comparison
is always sold to the institution which makes him rich.
Absolutely speaking, the more money, the less virtue for money
comes between a man and his objects, and obtains them for him and
it was certainly no great virtue to obtain it. It puts to rest many
questions which he would otherwise be taxed to answer while the
only new question which it puts is the hard but superfluous one, how
to spend it. Thus his moral ground is taken from under his feet.
The opportunities of living are diminished in proportion as what are
called the "means" are increased. The best thing a man can do for
his culture when he is rich is to endeavor to carry out those
schemes which he entertained when he was poor. Christ answered the
Herodians according to their condition. "Show me the
tributemoney," said he  and one took a penny out of his pocket
if you use money which has the image of Caesar on it, and which
he has made current and valuable, that is, if you are men of the
State, and gladly enjoy the advantages of Caesar's government, then
pay him back some of his own when he demands it "Render therefore
to Caesar that which is Caesar's, and to God those things which are
God's"  leaving them no wiser than before as to which was which
for they did not wish to know.
When I converse with the freest of my neighbors, I perceive
that, whatever they may say about the magnitude and seriousness of
the question, and their regard for the public tranquillity, the long
and the short of the matter is, that they cannot spare the
protection of the existing government, and they dread the
consequences to their property and families of disobedience to it.
For my own part, I should not like to think that I ever rely on the
protection of the State. But, if I deny the authority of the State
when it presents its taxbill, it will soon take and waste all my
property, and so harass me and my children without end. This is
hard. This makes it impossible for a man to live honestly, and at
the same time comfortably in outward respects. It will not be worth
the while to accumulate property that would be sure to go again.
You must hire or squat somewhere, and raise but a small crop, and
eat that soon. You must live within yourself, and depend upon
yourself always tucked up and ready for a start, and not have many
affairs. A man may grow rich in Turkey even, if he will be in all
respects a good subject of the Turkish government. Confucius said,
"If a state is governed by the principles of reason, poverty and
misery are subjects of shame if a state is not governed by the
principles of reason, riches and honors are the subjects of shame."
No until I want the protection of Massachusetts to be extended to
me in some distant Southern port, where my liberty is endangered, or
until I am bent solely on building up an estate at home by peaceful
enterprise, I can afford to refuse allegiance to Massachusetts, and
her right to my property and life. It costs me less in every sense
to incur the penalty of disobedience to the State than it would to
obey. I should feel as if I were worth less in that case.
Some years ago, the State met me in behalf of the Church, and
commanded me to pay a certain sum toward the support of a clergyman
whose preaching my father attended, but never I myself. "Pay," it
said, "or be locked up in the jail." I declined to pay. But,
unfortunately, another man saw fit to pay it. I did not see why the
schoolmaster should be taxed to support the priest, and not the
priest the schoolmaster for I was not the State's schoolmaster, but
I supported myself by voluntary subscription. I did not see why the
lyceum should not present its taxbill, and have the State to back
its demand, as well as the Church. However, at the request of the
selectmen, I condescended to make some such statement as this in
writing "Know all men by these presents, that I, Henry Thoreau,
do not wish to be regarded as a member of any incorporated society
which I have not joined." This I gave to the town clerk and he has
it. The State, having thus learned that I did not wish to be
regarded as a member of that church, has never made a like demand on
me since though it said that it must adhere to its original
presumption that time. If I had known how to name them, I should
then have signed off in detail from all the societies which I never
signed on to but I did not know where to find a complete list.
I have paid no polltax for six years. I was put into a jail
once on this account, for one night and, as I stood considering the
walls of solid stone, two or three feet thick, the door of wood and
iron, a foot thick, and the iron grating which strained the light, I
could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution
which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be
locked up. I wondered that it should have concluded at length that
this was the best use it could put me to, and had never thought to
avail itself of my services in some way. I saw that, if there was a
wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more
difficult one to climb or break through, before they could get to be
as free as I was. I did not for a moment feel confined, and the
walls seemed a great waste of stone and mortar. I felt as if I
alone of all my townsmen had paid my tax. They plainly did not know
how to treat me, but behaved like persons who are underbred. In
every threat and in every compliment there was a blunder for they
thought that my chief desire was to stand the other side of that
stone wall. I could not but smile to see how industriously they
locked the door on my meditations, which followed them out again
without let or hindrance, and they were really all that was
dangerous. As they could not reach me, they had resolved to punish
my body just as boys, if they cannot come at some person against
whom they have a spite, will abuse his dog. I saw that the State
was halfwitted, that it was timid as a lone woman with her silver
spoons, and that it did not know its friends from its foes, and I
lost all my remaining respect for it, and pitied it.
Thus the State never intentionally confronts a man's sense,
intellectual or moral, but only his body, his senses. It is not
armed with superior wit or honesty, but with superior physical
strength. I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own
fashion. Let us see who is the strongest. What force has a
multitude? They only can force me who obey a higher law than I.
They force me to become like themselves. I do not hear of men being
forced to have this way or that by masses of men. What sort of life
were that to live? When I meet a government which says to me, "Your
money or your life," why should I be in haste to give it my money?
It may be in a great strait, and not know what to do I cannot help
that. It must help itself do as I do. It is not worth the while
to snivel about it. I am not responsible for the successful working
of the machinery of society. I am not the son of the engineer. I
perceive that, when an acorn and a chestnut fall side by side, the
one does not remain inert to make way for the other, but both obey
their own laws, and spring and grow and flourish as best they can,
till one, perchance, overshadows and destroys the other. If a plant
cannot live according to its nature, it dies and so a man.
The night in prison was novel and interesting enough. The
prisoners in their shirtsleeves were enjoying a chat and the
evening air in the doorway, when I entered. But the jailer said,
"Come, boys, it is time to lock up" and so they dispersed, and I
heard the sound of their steps returning into the hollow apartments.
My roommate was introduced to me by the jailer as "a firstrate
fellow and a clever man." When the door was locked, he showed me
where to hang my hat, and how he managed matters there. The rooms
were whitewashed once a month and this one, at least, was the
whitest, most simply furnished, and probably the neatest apartment
in the town. He naturally wanted to know where I came from, and
what brought me there and, when I had told him, I asked him in my
turn how he came there, presuming him to be an honest man, of
course and, as the world goes, I believe he was. "Why," said he,
"they accuse me of burning a barn but I never did it." As near as
I could discover, he had probably gone to bed in a barn when drunk,
and smoked his pipe there and so a barn was burnt. He had the
reputation of being a clever man, had been there some three months
waiting for his trial to come on, and would have to wait as much
longer but he was quite domesticated and contented, since he got
his board for nothing, and thought that he was well treated.
He occupied one window, and I the other and I saw that if one
stayed there long, his principal business would be to look out the
window. I had soon read all the tracts that were left there, and
examined where former prisoners had broken out, and where a grate
had been sawed off, and heard the history of the various occupants
of that room for I found that even here there was a history and a
gossip which never circulated beyond the walls of the jail.
Probably this is the only house in the town where verses are
composed, which are afterward printed in a circular form, but not
published. I was shown quite a long list of verses which were
composed by some young men who had been detected in an attempt to
escape, who avenged themselves by singing them.
I pumped my fellowprisoner as dry as I could, for fear I should
never see him again but at length he showed me which was my bed,
and left me to blow out the lamp.
It was like travelling into a far country, such as I had never
expected to behold, to lie there for one night. It seemed to me
that I never had heard the townclock strike before, nor the evening
sounds of the village for we slept with the windows open, which
were inside the grating. It was to see my native village in the
light of the Middle Ages, and our Concord was turned into a Rhine
stream, and visions of knights and castles passed before me. They
were the voices of old burghers that I heard in the streets. I was
an involuntary spectator and auditor of whatever was done and said
in the kitchen of the adjacent villageinn  a wholly new and rare
experience to me. It was a closer view of my native town. I was
fairly inside of it. I never had seen its institutions before.
This is one of its peculiar institutions for it is a shire town. I
began to comprehend what its inhabitants were about.
In the morning, our breakfasts were put through the hole in the
door, in small oblongsquare tin pans, made to fit, and holding a
pint of chocolate, with brown bread, and an iron spoon. When they
called for the vessels again, I was green enough to return what
bread I had left but my comrade seized it, and said that I should
lay that up for lunch or dinner. Soon after he was let out to work
at haying in a neighboring field, whither he went every day, and
would not be back till noon so he bade me goodday, saying that he
doubted if he should see me again.
When I came out of prison  for some one interfered, and paid
that tax  I did not perceive that great changes had taken place on
the common, such as he observed who went in a youth and emerged a
tottering and grayheaded man and yet a change had to my eyes come
over the scene  the town, and State, and country  greater than
any that mere time could effect. I saw yet more distinctly the
State in which I lived. I saw to what extent the people among whom
I lived could be trusted as good neighbors and friends that their
friendship was for summer weather only that they did not greatly
propose to do right that they were a distinct race from me by their
prejudices and superstitions, as the Chinamen and Malays are that
in their sacrifices to humanity, they ran no risks, not even to
their property that after all they were not so noble but they
treated the thief as he had treated them, and hoped, by a certain
outward observance and a few prayers, and by walking in a particular
straight though useless path from time to time, to save their souls.
This may be to judge my neighbors harshly for I believe that many
of them are not aware that they have such an institution as the jail
in their village.
It was formerly the custom in our village, when a poor debtor
came out of jail, for his acquaintances to salute him, looking
through their fingers, which were crossed to represent the grating
of a jail window, "How do ye do?" My neighbors did not thus salute
me, but first looked at me, and then at one another, as if I had
returned from a long journey. I was put into jail as I was going to
the shoemaker's to get a shoe which was mended. When I was let out
the next morning, I proceeded to finish my errand, and, having put
on my mended shoe, joined a huckleberry party, who were impatient to
put themselves under my conduct and in half an hour  for the
horse was soon tackled  was in the midst of a huckleberry field,
on one of our highest hills, two miles off, and then the State was
nowhere to be seen.
This is the whole history of "My Prisons."
I have never declined paying the highway tax, because I am as
desirous of being a good neighbor as I am of being a bad subject
and as for supporting schools, I am doing my part to educate my
fellowcountrymen now. It is for no particular item in the taxbill
that I refuse to pay it. I simply wish to refuse allegiance to the
State, to withdraw and stand aloof from it effectually. I do not
care to trace the course of my dollar, if I could, till it buys a
man or a musket to shoot one with  the dollar is innocent  but I
am concerned to trace the effects of my allegiance. In fact, I
quietly declare war with the State, after my fashion, though I will
still make what use and get what advantage of her I can, as is usual
in such cases.
If others pay the tax which is demanded of me, from a sympathy
with the State, they do but what they have already done in their own
case, or rather they abet injustice to a greater extent than the
State requires. If they pay the tax from a mistaken interest in the
individual taxed, to save his property, or prevent his going to
jail, it is because they have not considered wisely how far they let
their private feelings interfere with the public good.
This, then, is my position at present. But one cannot be too
much on his guard in such a case, lest his action be biased by
obstinacy or an undue regard for the opinions of men. Let him see
that he does only what belongs to himself and to the hour.
I think sometimes, Why, this people mean well they are only
ignorant they would do better if they knew how why give your
neighbors this pain to treat you as they are not inclined to? But I
think, again, This is no reason why I should do as they do, or
permit others to suffer much greater pain of a different kind.
Again, I sometimes say to myself, When many millions of men, without
heat, without illwill, without personal feeling of any kind, demand
of you a few shillings only, without the possibility, such is their
constitution, of retracting or altering their present demand, and
without the possibility, on your side, of appeal to any other
millions, why expose yourself to this overwhelming brute force? You
do not resist cold and hunger, the winds and the waves, thus
obstinately you quietly submit to a thousand similar necessities.
You do not put your head into the fire. But just in proportion as I
regard this as not wholly a brute force, but partly a human force,
and consider that I have relations to those millions as to so many
millions of men, and not of mere brute or inanimate things, I see
that appeal is possible, first and instantaneously, from them to the
Maker of them, and, secondly, from them to themselves. But, if I
put my head deliberately into the fire, there is no appeal to fire
or to the Maker of fire, and I have only myself to blame. If I
could convince myself that I have any right to be satisfied with men
as they are, and to treat them accordingly, and not according, in
some respects, to my requisitions and expectations of what they and
I ought to be, then, like a good Mussulman and fatalist, I should
endeavor to be satisfied with things as they are, and say it is the
will of God. And, above all, there is this difference between
resisting this and a purely brute or natural force, that I can
resist this with some effect but I cannot expect, like Orpheus, to
change the nature of the rocks and trees and beasts.
I do not wish to quarrel with any man or nation. I do not wish
to split hairs, to make fine distinctions, or set myself up as
better than my neighbors. I seek rather, I may say, even an excuse
for conforming to the laws of the land. I am but too ready to
conform to them. Indeed, I have reason to suspect myself on this
head and each year, as the taxgatherer comes round, I find myself
disposed to review the acts and position of the general and State
governments, and the spirit of the people, to discover a pretext for
conformity.
"We must affect our country as our parents,
And if at any time we alienate
Our love or industry from doing it honor,
We must respect effects and teach the soul
Matter of conscience and religion,
And not desire of rule or benefit."
I believe that the State will soon be able to take all my work
of this sort out of my hands, and then I shall be no better a
patriot than my fellowcountrymen. Seen from a lower point of view,
the Constitution, with all its faults, is very good the law and the
courts are very respectable even this State and this American
government are, in many respects, very admirable and rare things,
to be thankful for, such as a great many have described them but
seen from a point of view a little higher, they are what I have
described them seen from a higher still, and the highest, who shall
say what they are, or that they are worth looking at or thinking of
at all?
However, the government does not concern me much, and I shall
bestow the fewest possible thoughts on it. It is not many moments
that I live under a government, even in this world. If a man is
thoughtfree, fancyfree, imaginationfree, that which is not never
for a long time appearing to be to him, unwise rulers or reformers
cannot fatally interrupt him.
I know that most men think differently from myself but those
whose lives are by profession devoted to the study of these or
kindred subjects, content me as little as any. Statesmen and
legislators, standing so completely within the institution, never
distinctly and nakedly behold it. They speak of moving society, but
have no restingplace without it. They may be men of a certain
experience and discrimination, and have no doubt invented ingenious
and even useful systems, for which we sincerely thank them but all
their wit and usefulness lie within certain not very wide limits.
They are wont to forget that the world is not governed by policy and
expediency. Webster never goes behind government, and so cannot
speak with authority about it. His words are wisdom to those
legislators who contemplate no essential reform in the existing
government but for thinkers, and those who legislate for all time,
he never once glances at the subject. I know of those whose serene
and wise speculations on this theme would soon reveal the limits of
his mind's range and hospitality. Yet, compared with the cheap
professions of most reformers, and the still cheaper wisdom and
eloquence of politicians in general, his are almost the only
sensible and valuable words, and we thank Heaven for him.
Comparatively, he is always strong, original, and, above all,
practical. Still, his quality is not wisdom, but prudence. The
lawyer's truth is not truth, but consistency or a consistent
expediency. Truth is always in harmony with herself, and is not
concerned chiefly to reveal the justice that may consist with
wrongdoing. He well deserves to be called, as he has been called,
the Defender of the Constitution. There are really no blows to be
given by him but defensive ones. He is not a leader, but a
follower. His leaders are the men of '. "I have never made an
effort," he says, "and never propose to make an effort I have never
countenanced an effort, and never mean to countenance an effort, to
disturb the arrangement as originally made, by which the various
States came into the Union." Still thinking of the sanction which
the Constitution gives to slavery, he says, "Because it was a part
of the original compact  let it stand." Notwithstanding his
special acuteness and ability, he is unable to take a fact out of
its merely political relations, and behold it as it lies absolutely
to be disposed of by the intellect  what, for instance, it
behooves a man to do here in America today with regard to slavery,
but ventures, or is driven, to make some such desperate answer as
the following, while professing to speak absolutely, and as a
private man  from which what new and singular code of social
duties might be inferred? "The manner," says he, "in which the
governments of those States where slavery exists are to regulate it
is for their own consideration, under their responsibility to their
constituents, to the general laws of propriety, humanity, and
justice, and to God. Associations formed elsewhere, springing from
a feeling of humanity, or any other cause, have nothing whatever to
do with it. They have never received any encouragement from me, and
they never will."
They who know of no purer sources of truth, who have traced up
its stream no higher, stand, and wisely stand, by the Bible and the
Constitution, and drink at it there with reverence and humility but
they who behold where it comes trickling into this lake or that
pool, gird up their loins once more, and continue their pilgrimage
toward its fountainhead.
No man with a genius for legislation has appeared in America.
They are rare in the history of the world. There are orators,
politicians, and eloquent men, by the thousand but the speaker has
not yet opened his mouth to speak who is capable of settling the
muchvexed questions of the day. We love eloquence for its own
sake, and not for any truth which it may utter, or any heroism it
may inspire. Our legislators have not yet learned the comparative
value of freetrade and of freedom, of union, and of rectitude, to a
nation. They have no genius or talent for comparatively humble
questions of taxation and finance, commerce and manufacturers and
agriculture. If we were left solely to the wordy wit of legislators
in Congress for our guidance, uncorrected by the seasonable
experience and the effectual complaints of the people, America would
not long retain her rank among the nations. For eighteen hundred
years, though perchance I have no right to say it, the New Testament
has been written yet where is the legislator who has wisdom and
practical talent enough to avail himself of the light which it sheds
on the science of legislation?
The authority of government, even such as I am willing to submit
to  for I will cheerfully obey those who know and can do better
than I, and in many things even those who neither know nor can do so
well  is still an impure one to be strictly just, it must have
the sanction and consent of the governed. It can have no pure right
over my person and property but what I concede to it. The progress
from an absolute to a limited monarchy, from a limited monarchy to a
democracy, is a progress toward a true respect for the individual.
Even the Chinese philosopher was wise enough to regard the
individual as the basis of the empire. Is a democracy, such as we
know it, the last improvement possible in government? Is it not
possible to take a step further towards recognizing and organizing
the rights of man? There will never be a really free and
enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual
as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and
authority are derived, and treats him accordingly. I please myself
with imagining a State at least which can afford to be just to all
men, and to treat the individual with respect as a neighbor which
even would not think it inconsistent with its own repose if a few
were to live aloof from it, not meddling with it, nor embraced by
it, who fulfilled all the duties of neighbors and fellowmen. A
State which bore this kind of fruit, and suffered it to drop off as
fast as it ripened, would prepare the way for a still more perfect
and glorious State, which also I have imagined, but not yet anywhere
seen.